The COVID Bailout of State and Local Governments Was Unnecessary

Inflation Won't Go Away Until Congress Gets the Deficit Under Control

California's $20 Minimum Wage Will Hurt the Fast Food Workers It's Meant to Help

Here's What the Hamas Attack Tells Us About U.S. Immigration Policy: Nothing

RFK Jr. Dumps Democrats, Libertarian Party Blasts RFK Jr.'s Stance on Israel

Jim Jordan's House Speaker Bid Draws Scathing Rebuke from Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton's Cult 'Deprogramming' Comments Spark MAGA Outrage

How Ranked Choice Voting Would Sort the Republican Primary Field

An Iowa Man Published Body Camera Footage From His Arrest. The Cops Are Suing Him for Defamation.&nbsp;

MAGA Republicans outplayed Kevin McCarthy and Democrats on Ukraine aid

Cornel West to run for president as independent, leaving Green Party

Nothing Defines America’s Social Divide Like a College Education

Jordan Peterson Calls Joe Rogan 'Most Powerful Journalist Who's Ever Lived'

Jordan Peterson Calls Andrew Tate 'Reprehensible' in Piers Morgan Interview

Idaho Man Sued For Defamation After Speaking Out Against Local Airstrip

California State Guidelines Discourage Schools From Offering Advanced Middle School Math&nbsp;

Why Obama’s “Car Czar” Thinks Biden Should Stay Out of the U.A.W. Strike

Thomas Massie: 'The Next Speaker Is Going To Go Back to the Old Testament'

Inside Bari Weiss’s Salon for LA’s Power Cognoscenti and Disenfranchised Liberals

From monoculture to counterculture: why I am leaving Birkbeck for Buckingham

From Monoculture to Counterculture: Why I Am Leaving Birkbeck for Buckingham

Alabama Cops Who Arrested Mechanic for Not Giving Them His ID Denied Qualified Immunity

This tiny European nation could collapse without U.S. aid — to Ukraine

Amicus Brief: Parents Defending Education v. Olentangy Local School District Board of Education

Jordan Peterson Compares Justin Trudeau to Disney Character in Viral Post

A peace deal between the Saudis and Israelis could change everything

Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie Call Out Trump for Adding to Federal Debt

No, Mike Pence, We Should Not Make It Easier To Execute Mass Shooters

Florida Is Giving Foster Children Powerful Psychotropic Drugs Without Proper Records, Audit Finds&nbsp;

The contested meaning of American freedom, with Jefferson Cowie&nbsp;

Welfare Cuts Are Inevitable Because Congress Won't Touch Social Security

Bjorn Lomborg: Why Do We Fixate on Climate Rather Helping the World's Poor?

Lina Khan’s Amazon lawsuit is nothing like her famous law article

Biden Is Pandering to the 1 Percent: Union Manufacturing Workers

Donald Trump's truth: why liars might sometimes be considered honest – new research

Jordan Peterson Urges Burger King Boycott After Russell Brand Move

Heather Cox Richardson, queen of Substack, delivers more bingeable history

If Politicians Are Either Stainless or Shameless, Guess Which One Senator Menendez Is

Bob Menendez Never Should Have Been Senator This Long in the First Place

Houston Police Arrested an Animal Rights Protester and Detained Him for 16 Hours, Lawsuit Says

Kansas City Made a Barbie-Themed Streetcar. It Cost Taxpayers $25,000.

Taxpayers Will Pay at Least $600 Million for Tampa Bay's New Baseball Stadium

Sikh Separatism and the Brewing Conflict Between Canada and India

America’s Growing Electrification Has Electrified the UAW Strike

Amicus Brief: Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School District

How the U.S. Lifted Children Out of Poverty and Then Threw Them Back Into It

YouTube Has Demonetized Russell Brand Over Anonymous #MeToo Allegations

Ashland Professor Allegedly Ousted for Allowing 'Too Much Investigative Journalism'

Campus Rape Story Was 'Bulletproof' Except for the Hoax, Says Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner

The Left’s Electoral Strategy Is Working. Let’s Keep Building It.

The Kim-Putin summit highlights Biden’s failed North Korea policy

Morgan Bettinger's Accuser Has a Deal With Dove. That's No Reason To Boycott.

Jordan Peterson Lashes Out at Justin Trudeau Amid Risk of Losing License

Vice President Harris says showing up in Asia is important, but not enough

Cornel West's Candidacy Could Push Joe Biden To Be More Progressive | Opinion

Democrat Who Left Party Over Ignored Groping Claims Backs Cornel West

Jordan Peterson Gives Oliver Anthony Advice on How to Handle Fame, Fans

Ukrainians are determined to persevere, but they worry that their allies aren’t

Biden Aims To Give Federal Workers Largest Pay Increase in 40 Years

Inside Jordan Peterson, Wife Tammy's Private Struggles—Rehab, Cancer

The Big Squeeze: How Biden’s Environmental Justice Agenda Hurts the Economy and the Environment

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Can You Afford Tariffs on Tin Cans?

Why isn’t it possible to sum up the death toll from different risk factors?

Two-Thirds of College Students Think Shouting Down A Public Speaker Can Be Acceptable

The Supreme Court’s Next Target: Government Coercion on Social Media

How do researchers estimate the death toll caused by each risk factor, whether it’s smoking, obesity, or air pollution?

Risk ratios, odds ratios, risk differences: How do researchers calculate the risk from a risk factor?

Jordan Peterson Weighs in on Bill Maher's Controversial Remark on Joe Rogan

The University of Michigan Will Force Students With COVID To Leave Campus

It's Not Surprising That Federal Funding Didn't Stop Pandemic Learning Loss

That School Is Still Treading on Jaiden Rodriguez's Free Speech Rights

Trump's Tariffs Didn't Reduce the Trade Deficit. Why Would They Work Now?

Proud Boys Leader Sentenced to 17 Years in Prison Over January 6 Riot

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: The 'Chicken Tax' That Makes Pickup Trucks More Expensive

Raimondo’s China trip proves that just engaging Beijing isn’t enough

12-Year-Old Boy Removed From School Over 'Don't Tread on Me' Patch

The century-long war for American conservatism, with Matthew Continetti

Edward Snowden Must Fight for Russia in Ukraine if Asked, Under New Plan

Vivek Ramaswamy Is Very Annoying. It’s Why He’s Surging in the Polls.

Hospital Threatens Defamation Suit Over a 15-Year-Old's Change.org Petition&nbsp;

America's Alcohol Czar Wants Stricter Federal Guidelines for Drinking

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Ballots

Being tough on China is popular in the GOP. But some plans don’t make sense.

Vivek Ramaswamy: 'The Only War I Will Declare…Is on the Administrative State'

Nikki Haley Burned Trump and Her Fellow Republicans for Blowing Up the Debt. She's Right.

Trump Floats Tariff Plan That Will Make Everything More Expensive

Court Rules in Favor of Pro-Life Protesters Arrested for Chalk Messages

China's Industrial Policy Is Failing. Will American Politicians Take Notice?

Janet Yellen Accidentally Ate Chinese Magic Mushrooms but Swears She Didn't Get High

Warren Buffett Selling $8 Billion Worth of Stock Raises Economy Crash Fears

Jordan Peterson Calls Out Disney After 'Sound of Freedom' Breaks New Record

The Lab Leak Theory Still Counts as Misinformation in a New Study of COVID-19 Claims

Hillary Clinton Laughs As Trump Indictment Breaks During Live TV Show

By Trying To 'Move On,' DeSantis Admits His Fight With Disney Was a Political Stunt All Along

Millions of Students Went 'Missing' From Classrooms During the Pandemic. Many Haven't Returned.

Lina Khan’s FTC wants to transform antitrust. Is there a better way?

At a College Targeted by DeSantis, Gender Studies Is Out, Jocks Are In

Larry Summers was Biden’s biggest inflation critic. Was he wrong?

Idaho Keeps Scheduling This Inmate's Execution Even Though It Lacks the Means To Kill Him

Biden's New 'Prevailing Wage' Rule Will Cost Taxpayers, Benefit Unions, and Hike Inflation

Perceptions Are Not Reality: What Americans Get Wrong About Police Violence

Indiana Law Lets Cops Push Bystanders Back 25 Feet. A New Lawsuit Says It's Unconstitutional.

Texas Attorney General Blocks Injunction, Will Keep Enforcing Anti-Abortion Law

Alabama Woman Jailed for 2 Months for Using CBD Oil While Pregnant

Introducing the Reason Crossword, a Weekly Puzzle for Libertarians

America survived the ‘China Shock.’ There’s still the Trump shock.

Anti-Abortion Republicans Don’t Want You to Notice Ohio’s Issue 1

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: The Great Baby Formula Shortage of 2022

UVA Dean of Students 'Purposefully Tampered' With Investigations Into Student's Speech, Lawsuit Claims

U.S. Credit Rating Downgrade Is a Sign of Government Dysfunction

Biden's New Student Loan Payment Plan Has Arrived. Here's What That Means.

The Glenn Show: John McWhorter and Peter Arcidiacono – The Economics of SFFA v. Harvard

Trump Indicted for Attempting To Overturn 2020 Presidential Election

Police Watched as a Man Drowned and Discouraged Bystanders From Helping, Lawsuit Claims

FBI Made 'Inappropriate Use' of Foreign Surveillance Program To Spy on Americans

FDA Commissioner: No One 'Envisioned' the Consequences of New Sesame Seed Labeling Rule

A Professor Criticized a Public Official. Then Her University Suspended Her.

The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics

Matt Taibbi: How the Left Lost Its Mind and Legacy Media Its Audience

Getting Cozy With the Too Online 'New Right' Hasn't Worked Out for DeSantis

Jordan Peterson Mocked for Responding to Satirical 'Snow White' Story

He Spent 10 Years Behind Bars Without Being Convicted. He'll Have To Wait Longer To Have the Case Resolved.

A Contentious Encounter With the Architect of the Right’s Attack on ‘Critical Race Theory’

Cornel West's Presidential Run Could Cost Biden Election in These States

Killing the SAT To Help Underprivileged Students Actually Benefits Rich Kids

Police 'Body Slammed' Him. Now, He's Getting a $500,000 Settlement.

Biden Administration Considering New Tariffs That Will Hike Prices for Canned Goods

Why Is Tracy Chapman at the Center of a Country-Music Controversy?

Research: A Little Nature in the Office Boosts Morale and Productivity

74 Percent of College Students Support Snitching on Professors Who Make 'Offensive' Statements

China’s missing foreign minister exposes Beijing’s secrecy under Xi

He Caught a Burglar in the Act. But When Police Came, He Says They Tased Him Instead of the Intruder.

Rebalancing capitalism: an exercise in definite optimism (part 3)

Tennessee Public School Sued After Suspending A Student Over Instagram Memes

Mike Pence wants to update Reagan’s foreign policy for Trump’s GOP

DeSantis Unironically Frets About 'Criminalizing Political Differences'

Biden to Netanyahu: Please Stop Trying to Rush Through Your Judicial Overhaul. Build a Consensus First.

RIP Anchor Steam, the San Francisco Brew That Saved Craft Beer in America

Return to Forecasting – ‘Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe’

The next level of rich: An exercise in definite optimism (Part 2)

Texas A&M's Treatment of Journalism Director Raises Academic Freedom Concerns

We Still Don't Know the Full Extent of the Government's Warrantless Electronic Spying Program

The Future of Online Speech Shouldn’t Belong to One Trump-Appointed Judge in Louisiana

‘Elon Musk Is Doing for Zuckerberg What Trump Did for George W. Bush’

Massachusetts' Wealth Tax Encouraged NBA's Grant Williams To Sign With Dallas

Biden's Changes to Income-Based Student Loan Repayment Could Cost Billions

'Mamas for DeSantis' Is Proof: The DeSantis Campaign Is Too Online

Declaring war on Mexican cartels is popular. That doesn’t mean it’s smart.

Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Is Threatening To Veto His Own School Voucher Plan

Federal Judge to Biden Administration: Stop Telling Social Media Sites To Limit Free Speech

Journalists Outraged That a Judge Would Dare Limit Biden's Censorship Powers

UCLA Declined To Hire a Professor After Students Denounced His Mild DEI Criticism

Despite SCOTUS Smackdown, Biden Will Still Extract Billions From Taxpayers for Student Loans

Supreme Court to Biden: You Can't Just Forgive $400 Billion in Student Loan Debt Without Asking Congress

Ilya Shapiro Reacts to This Morning’s Supreme Court Decisions on Wedding Website, Student Loans

The Supreme Court Overturns Fifty Years of Precedent on Affirmative Action

Curtailing Affirmative Action Is a Blow Against a Rising Generation

Supreme Court on Affirmative Action: 'Eliminating Racial Discrimination Means Eliminating All of It'

Of Course Legacy Admissions Should Follow Affirmative Action to the Grave

CBO Projects Huge Deficits, $116 Trillion in New Borrowing Over the Next 30 Years

Prison Ministry Group Sues Indiana Jail for Banning Amazon Books

Forward Thinking on bringing the joy to economics with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Alabama Isn't Ready To Kill Inmates By Nitrogen Hypoxia. It Wants To Try Anyway.

Supreme Court Confirms That State Legislatures Can't Ignore the Constitution When Writing Election Rules

Atlanta Plans To Blow $230 Million on 2-Mile Extension of Useless Streetcar

Police Let Their K-9 Maul on the Wrong Guy. They Arrested Him Anyway.

Environmental, ethical concerns facing jewelry industry examined at summit

America’s Asian allies are quietly joining forces to confront China

New Test Data Show That COVID School Closures Rapidly Accelerated U.S. Learning Losses

It Takes 6 Clicks To Cancel Amazon Prime and the FTC's New Lawsuit Says That's Too Many

Can a Florida School District Ban a Children's Book About Gay Penguins?

Another Georgia Probe Finds No Evidence of Conspiracy To Steal 2020 Election

What Justice John Paul Stevens’s Papers Reveal About Affirmative Action

Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder on Fighting Illiberalism, Right and Left

RIP Daniel Ellsberg, Who Told the World the Truth About the Vietnam War

The Oakland Athletics Just Showed Why They Don't Need Taxpayers To Buy Their New Stadium

COVID-19's 'Patients Zero' May Have Been Wuhan Lab Scientists, Report Finds

Congress Had Questions About the CDC Stifling Dissent. Rochelle Walensky Refused To Answer.

A Civil Rights Attorney Started Filming a Traffic Stop. Then Police Arrested Her.

Louisiana Gov. Said He Opposed the Death Penalty. Then Almost Every Death Row Inmate Applied for Clemency.

'I Did Everything Right and They Indicted Me,' Says Defiant Trump in Post-Arraignment Speech

In Debate Over Railway Safety Bill, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Are Leaning to the Left

In CNN Town Hall, Chris Christie Says Neither Joe Biden Nor Donald Trump Should Ever Be President Again

I Studied Five Countries’ Health Care Systems. We Need to Get More Creative With Ours.

Just When You Thought There Was Nothing New to Learn About Donald Trump

Did NYC Schools Retaliate Against Parents Who Asked Too Many Questions?

Trump's Own Attorney General Says Indictment Is 'Very, Very Damning'

The SPLC Is Massively Overcounting 'Hate' Groups—and It's Not Just Moms for Liberty

Supreme Court Sides With Jack Daniel's Against Doggy Chew Toy Company

A City Banned Pride Month–Themed Library Displays. Then, It Threatened Employees Who Criticized the Decision.

Trump's New York Indictment Was Just the Beginning of His Legal Woes

Police Almost Beat Him To Death. After His Conviction Was Dismissed, Prosecutors Are Recharging Him.

China isn’t acting like it wants to improve relations with the U.S.

NYC's Child Protection Agency Lobbying To Weaken Parents' Rights Bill

YouTube Abandons Election Misinformation Policy That Censored Political Speech

He Spent a Decade in Jail Without Being Convicted. Now His Lawyer Says His Case Should Be Dismissed.

The United States can no longer assume that the rest of the world is on its side

CBO: Debt Ceiling Deal Means 78,000 More Able-Bodied, Childless Adults Could Get Food Stamps

Conservatives Rage Against Debt Ceiling Bill: 'Not One Republican Should Vote for This'

DOJ Says That Cops Who Killed Autistic Teenager May Have Violated His Civil Rights

A Georgia Woman Died After Falling Out of a Moving Patrol Car. Now, Her Family Is Suing the Cops Responsible.

U.S.’s political madness takes place against a backdrop of astonishing strength

Jail Officials Refused To Give Him His Heart Transplant Medication. Days Later, He Was Dead.

Biden shouldn’t allow Arab leaders to rehabilitate Bashar al-Assad

New Federal Report: Half of Public School Students Are Now Performing Below Grade Level

How Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk Will Change the Section 230 Debate

DeSantis Announces Too-Online Campaign in Most Online Way Imaginable

There Is No Evidence Strong Enough to End the Pandemic-Origins Debate

The FTC Is Investigating Anti-Competitive Baby Formula Contracts. Bad Federal Policy Is To Blame.

The Surgeon General Exaggerates the Threat Social Media Poses to Kids

Randi Weingarten Only Taught for 3 Years. She's Getting 15 Years of Public Pension Anyway.

Josh Hawley Wants the Debt Ceiling Deal To Include a Massive Tax Hike on Americans

Gorsuch Condemns 'Breathtaking' COVID Emergency Powers That Crushed Civil Liberties

Alabama Schedules First Execution After Monthslong Moratorium and 'Sham' Investigation

Trump on Ukraine: 'I Don't Think in Terms of Winning and Losing—I Think in Terms of Getting It Settled'

Lawsuit: It's Time To Start Paying Off Those Student Loans Again

The Buffalo Bills Cut Matt Araiza Over a Rape Accusation, but Key Evidence Vindicates Him

Biden Falsely Bragged About Lowering the Budget Deficit. Now, It Is Predictably Rising Again.

No, the Average College Grad Wasn't Making $100,000 in the 1980s

Rochelle Walensky Leaves a CDC That's Far More Powerful Than When She Entered It

'Reprehensible and Plainly Unconstitutional': Child Welfare Agents Took Their Kids. Now They're Suing.

Lawsuit: Police Officer Broke a 61-Year-Old Woman's Leg, Then Bragged He 'Man-Dropped' Her

U.S. Finally Ends Federal COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Travelers, Employees, Head Start

Biden’s economic diplomacy push with China is high-risk, low reward

We should be fighting for our cognitive liberty, says ethics expert

Fighting in a burning house: The media environment vs. democracy

Harold James on the Ukraine war, inflation, globalization, and more

Dealing with legacy of slavery must include voices of descendants

Chinese police stations in NYC are part of a vast influence operation

Deval Patrick, Juliette Kayyem recount Marathon bombing, lessons learned

The most shocking intel leak reveals new Chinese military advances

Murtaza Hussain on How Immigrant and Minority Voters are Misunderstood

Taiwan’s president tries to tell us how to save democracy. Beijing gaslights.

The Big News for Democracy Today Will Be in Wisconsin—Not New York

Matthew Goodwin on Why the Last Decade of Politics Has Been So Bizarre

The Biden administration barely pretends to care about Syria anymore

The truly revealing TikTok hearing was the one that featured Uyghurs

The dollar is our superpower, and Russia and China are threatening it

The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case

The Museum Director Who Stayed Behind to Defend Ukrainian Literature

Margaret Atwood dishes on new story collection, trials of censorship

How Russian Journalists in Exile Are Covering the War in Ukraine

If You Read the G.O.P.’s Anti-Trans Policies, You’ll See What It Really Wants

How does Ukraine war end? Experts say 2023 could prove decisive, dangerous

Opportunity to vote for Board of Overseers, HAA elected directors

‘They Didn’t Understand Anything, but Just Spoiled People’s Lives’

Friday's Surprisingly Positive Jobs Report Does Not Mean Fed Should Keep Raising Rates

Around the halls: Brookings experts on Biden’s performance in the Middle East

Forward Thinking on how to get remote working right with Nicholas Bloom

The end of the Moroccan “model”: How Islamists lost despite winning

Scientists Tried to Break Cuddling. Instead, They Broke 30 Years of Research.

Washington Won’t Let Go of Its Wrong-Headed Obsession with Corporate Stock Buybacks

Yes, everyone has classified documents. The system is out of control.

Prince Harry Is Right, and It’s Not Just a Matter of Royal Gossip

They can think, feel pain, love. Isn’t it time animals had rights?

What the Tech and Media Layoffs Are Really Telling Us About the Economy

Two Years Later, Neither Trump Nor Worst Actors in Congress Have Been Held to Account for Jan 6. Insurrection

Inflation Reduction Act: Discussion About the Mixed Effect on Costs for Drugs with Amitabh Chandra and Craig Burton

2023 could be the year that exposes populism for the sham that it is

As Congress Reconvenes, It Should Take Steps to Ensure Its Own Continuity

Did a Libertarian Cost Trump the Election? A Q&A with Jonathan Cervas

Blue States Want Red States to Face Consequences, but Travel Bans Are Harmful

The Big News Is Not the DOJ Referrals But the Overwhelming Evidence of Trump's Crimes

Exuberant response after Harvard names Claudine Gay 30th president

The Most Important Strike in Higher Education You Might Not Even Know About

The Respect for Marriage Act Is Also a Victory for Same-Sex-Marriage Opponents

American protectionism could imperil a golden era of Western unity

Yam Karkai’s Illustrations Made Her an N.F.T. Sensation. Now What?

The Ruling Class Broke the Railway Strike—Because That's What It Means to Be the Ruling Class

Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson Don’t Understand the First Amendment

A Conservative’s Take on the Chaotic State of the Republican Party

J. Edgar Hoover Tried to Destroy the Left — and Liberals Enabled Him

Good Riddance to Crypto, or How Everything is Related to Everything Else

Democrats May Have Won More Suburban Votes in the Midterms. That Doesn’t Bode Well.

Trump won’t magically disappear. Republicans will have to purge him.

The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's controversial idea explained

‘It will be a paradigm shift’: Daphne Koller on machine learning in drug discovery

The Biden-Xi meeting shows that U.S.-China relations will get worse, not better

Nouriel Roubini on stagflation, debt distress, financial innovation, and more

The House Race That Shows Why Republicans Collapsed in the Midterms

The International Community Must Prioritize COVID Treatment and Test Access

Democrats’ Senate Victory Hands Biden a Critical Guardrail Against the G.O.P.

I Have Not "Called For Chinese-Style Censorship of the Internet"

I Don’t Quite Buy the DeSantis Narrative, and Other Midterm Thoughts

Democrats Might Have Pulled Off the Biggest Midterm Shock in Decades

Study – For Lowering Cholesterol, Statins Work, Supplements Don’t

Worries About Inflation Didn't Stop Voters From Approving Minimum Wage Increases

The GOP Is Terrified of You, Because Democracy Scares the Hell Out of Them

Is the global decline in democracy linked to social media? We combed through the evidence to find out

Affirmative Action and the Supreme Court’s Troubled Treatment of Asian Americans

As Corporatists Angle for Election-Day Disaster, Do Your Duty: Vote!

Economy Added 261,000 Jobs in October as Wage Growth Settles at 3.9 Percent

Author Talks: What poker pro Annie Duke can teach you about quitting on time

The United States is no longer the world’s friendliest country to migrants

A Powerful Theory of Why the Far Right Is Thriving Across the Globe

Affirmative action in college admissions doesn’t work — but it could

Sam Harris on Whether Religion Really Does Make Everything Worse

Siddhartha Mukherjee: ‘I don’t like writing as if I don’t exist’

It Is Bizarre—and Very Alarming—That the GOP Could Win This Thing

Xi’s totalitarian power grab bodes poorly for U.S.-China relations

How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe

To Understand Today’s G.O.P., You Have to Understand Trump’s Enablers

Adding the COVID-19 Vaccine to the Childhood Immunization Schedule Is a Mistake

Labor Department's independent contracting proposal endangers both freedom and prosperity

Chomsky and Pollin: Pushing a Viable Climate Project Around COP27

The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane’

There’s Been a ‘Regime Change’ in How Democrats Think About Elections

Author Talks: Global business is coming home, says Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar

Entrepreneurs are more altruistic than ever – but how can we help them make good on their ambitions?

Florida Corrections Officers Paralyzed A Man, Then Left Him in Solitary Confinement

How the ‘Black Death’ Left Its Genetic Mark on Future Generations

YA star John Green seeks co-authors for climate story that averts disaster

A North Carolina Man Was Jailed for Refusing To Wear a Mask in Court

A Legendary World Builder on Multiverses, Revolution and the ‘Souls’ of Cities

Valuing the Deep State Part V: Controlling the Administrative State

Legendary Battle of Himera was triumph of Greek heroism, kind of

There’s Only One Group to Blame for How Republicans Flocked to Trump

The Criminal Case Against Donald J. Trump Has Been Established, But Will the Garland Act?

The Electric Hummer Is a Mix Between an Ambulance and a Race Car

12 Readers on What the Rest of the World Does Better Than the U.S.

The Antidote to the GOP's Trickle-Down Scam Is a Bottom-Up Economy

Biden Says He's Pardoning 'All' Federal Weed Possession Offenders. He Isn't.

PayPal Says It Won't Fine Users $2,500 for Misinformation, but It Will Fine Them for 'Intolerance'

The Spiritual Lessons of a Christian Nationalist Military Defeat

The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas review – why it pays to talk in a polarised world

Why the Corporate Media's Coverage of the Latest Jobs Report Is So Awful

The Stunning Neglect and Racist Politics Behind Alabama’s Prison Strike

A California Law Designed To Protect Children's Digital Privacy Could Lead to Invasive Age Verification

‘Hope matters’: Ukrainian and international authors on why literature is important in times of conflict

Millions of PPP Loans Were Flagged as Potentially Fraudulent. Many Were Never Investigated.

New York Times makes up its own climate science to attack Florida

Alex Jones Wrote a Book and Somehow I Have Forced Myself to Read It

Orthodox thinking won't cut it: why Mathias Cormann's leadership of the OECD has economists worried

Trump’s origins in a New York world of con men, mobsters and hustlers

Left-Wing Journalist Katie Halper Has Been Fired for Calling Israel an Apartheid State

Trickle-down Truss is carrying on the dirty work of Thatcher, Blair and Osborne | Yanis Varoufakis

The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea

Honestly? The Link Between Climate Change and Hurricanes Is Complicated

Chomsky: US Must Join Global Call for Negotiations as Russia Escalates Actions

“I’m a Woman, I’m a Mother, I’m Christian”: How Giorgia Meloni Took Control in the Italian Election

IRS Sent $1.1 Billion in Child Welfare Payments to the Wrong People

Forward Thinking on talent, state capacity, and being hopeful with Tyler Cowen

Edward Snowden Grateful After Vladimir Putin Grants Him Russian Citizenship

Biden's Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Plan Now Estimated To Cost $400 Billion

D.C.'s Preschool Teacher Education Requirement Won't Help Working Families

Subreddit Gets Users To Call Texas Gov. Greg Abbott a 'Little Piss Baby' To Defy Content Moderation Law

Journalist Will Saletan Claims CitiBank Is Locking Some Customers Out Of Accounts Forever

'Flagrantly Illegal': Law Firm Files Lawsuit To Stop Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness

Long COVID Has Forced a Reckoning for One of Medicine’s Most Neglected Diseases

A Rapid Green Energy Transition to Save $12 Trillion and Avoid Catastrophic Tipping Points

Chomsky: The US and Israel Are Standing in the Way of Iran Nuclear Agreement

Animated Chart of the Day: Recorded Music Sales by Format Share, 1973 to 2022

The Education Department Asked for Public Comments on Sex Discrimination. It Got an Earful About Trans Athletes Instead.

Why Ron DeSantis Thinks Weaponizing Asylum Seekers Is a Winning Strategy

US politicians tweet far more misinformation than those in the UK and Germany – new research

Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin: Humanity’s Fate Isn’t Sealed — If We Act Now

Candidates Who Deny Election Results Should Be Barred From Public Office

Putin’s war in Ukraine: A conversation with Fiona Hill and Angela Stent

Spending Down $12 Million in Pandemic Relief Money on an Immigration Stunt Isn't 'Responsible Fiscal Policy'

What do we owe future generations? And what can we do to make their world a better place?

How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step

Robert Kagan on America’s Future, Foreign Policy Realism, and the War in Ukraine

Elections and Demography: Democrats’ Continued Slide Among Hispanics

Captiongate: How a Single Zoom Call Propelled Canada’s Greens Into Pronoun Meltdown

There’s Terrific News About the New Covid Boosters, but Few Are Hearing It

Incarcerated Children in Texas Left Without Bathroom Access for 22 Hours

How Government Officials Bully Social Media Companies Into Censorship

As Inflation Soars, Biden Hosts Cringey Concert Celebrating the Inflation Reduction Act

Can We Drop the Silly Idea That America Is “Heading For a Civil War”?

An Oklahoma Teacher Fought the Book-Banning Right and Lost Her Job

The Tories were once the party of the monarchy. Now they have other priorities  | David Edgerton

We don’t know what Queen Elizabeth thought of Trump or Obama. That’s the point.

This Alabama Woman Was Jailed for 3 Months Because She Smoked Pot While Pregnant

Almost 40 Percent of College Students Feel Uncomfortable Sharing a Controversial Opinion in Class

Seattle Public School Teachers on Strike, Since 6-Figure Pay Isn't Good Enough

Why Are Democrats Dragging Their Feet on the Electoral Count Reform Act?

Lawmakers Press Biden to Track U.S. Aid Tied to Civilian Harm in Yemen

Gorbachev Couldn’t Reform the Soviet System — but a Better Socialism Is Possible

Astronomer plans $1.5M expedition to recover possible alien technology in ocean

Democracy is under attack – and reporting that isn’t ‘violating journalistic standards’ | Robert Reich

A Birthday Appreciation for Trade Economist Henry George — He Wrote Milton Friedman’s Favorite Book on International Trade

This Is the First True Trumpism Election, and Trumpism Is Losing

Did the 1970s New Politics Movement Fail to Transform the Democratic Party?

We Cannot Let New Pentagon Rules Sanitize or Legitimize Brutality of Endless War

The Biden Administration Is Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich

Guardrails of Democracy, Extended: Comparing Notes On The Team Libertarian Report

Virginia Can't Force Bookstores To Card Kids for Books on Gender and Sexuality

The Battle to Protect American Democracy Is the Most Important Battle of Our Lifetimes

‘The Biggest Thing to Happen in International Climate Diplomacy in Decades’

California Tries To Make It Illegal for Doctors To Spread COVID-19 'Misinformation'

Chinese companies are leaving U.S. stock exchanges. Good riddance.

Artificial Intelligence Helps French Tax Authorities Find Thousands of Untaxed Swimming Pools

A Psychiatric Facility Punishes Residents With Painful Electric Shocks. Now It's Trying To Sue Its Critics.

J.K. Rowling’s New Novel Shows Why Having an Editor is Important 

The GOP's Second-Largest Big Lie: They Care About Working Class People

A Grammy-Nominated Singer Performs and Explores Music’s Deep Power Over Us

The Fed keeps raising interest rates. Working people are getting hammered by it

Does Liberalism Have a Future? A Conversation with Francis Fukuyama

If You’re Suffering After Being Sick With Covid, It’s Not Just in Your Head

Gavin Newsom Vetoes Bill Legalizing 'Safe Consumption Sites' in 3 California Cities

Biden Reportedly Set To Forgive $10K Student Debt for Americans Earning Over Six Figures

Anthony Fauci Will Still Get $350,000 a Year From the Government After He Retires

The Biden Comeback. The Mar-a-Lago Blowback. The Cheney Takedown. Where Do We Start?

Ben Shapiro Thinks “Marxism Can’t Work in America.” He’s Very Confused.

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Lawrence Freedman: ‘Autocracies tend to make catastrophic decisions. That’s the case with Putin’

How Slaughterhouse-Five Became a Repeated Target of Book Burners

America used to regulate business. Now government subsidises it | Robert Reich

Who Is Sam Harris? Writer Admits to Ignoring Hunter Biden Laptop

Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing Should Remind Us That Free Speech Is a Nonnegotiable Progressive Value

Democrats: Use Labor Day as an Action Day to Highlight Workers Rights

Judges Who Sent Kids to Detention Centers for Financial Kickbacks Ordered To Pay Over $200 Million

COVID-19 Gutted College Attendance. Now, a Solid Labor Market Is Convincing More High School Grads To Skip It.

A Year After the U.S. Withdrawal, Getting Out of Afghanistan Was Still the Right Call

Dick Cheney Was a Way More Effective “Threat to Our Republic” Than Donald Trump

CDC No Longer Recommends Social Distancing, Masks in Schools Unless Spread Is High

Could the Gender Pay Gap Actually Be A Sign That Women Prioritize Socially Valuable Careers?

Michigan GOP Attorney General Candidate Under Investigation by His Opponent for 2020 Voting Machine Scheme

The Body Keeps the Score: how a bestselling book helps us understand trauma – but inflates the definition of it

The Inflation Reduction Act Won't Meaningfully Address the Budget Deficit

Three Years After His Žižek Debate, Jordan Peterson Somehow Knows Even Less About Marx

The skeptics are wrong: The U.S. can confront both China and Russia

Is It All About ‘Fealty to Trump’s Delusions’? Three Writers Talk About Where the G.O.P. Is Headed

The Democratic Establishment Teamed Up With Trump To Oust Peter Meijer

The Most Dangerous Looming Supreme Court Decision You Never Heard Of

Fed Prepares Another Rate Increase as Wall Street Wonders What’s Next

Anthony Fauci Says If We Could Do It Again, COVID-19 Restrictions Would Be 'Much, Much More Stringent'

Francis Fukuyama Is Right: Socialism Is the Only Alternative to Liberalism

Why Do Travelers to the U.S. Have To Wait an Average of 247 Days for Their Visa Interviews?

China’s ‘zero covid’ policy has been a nightmare for U.S. diplomats

Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls for windfall profits tax in Australia

Who is Emmanuel Macron? Cracking the riddle of France’s divisive president

A California Bill Wants To Punish Social Media Companies for 'Addicting' Children

The God Gap Helps Explain a 'Seismic Shift' in American Politics

5 Questions for Michael Strain on Inflation, Recession, and the Labor Market

Biden's Policies Have Increased, Not Reduced, Future Budget Deficits

US job market provides hopeful signs against recession and inflation, but other data are worrisome

The End of Moore’s Law and the Future of Computers: My Long-Read Q&A with Neil Thompson

Bernie Sanders Wants To Force Airlines To Refund Passengers for Flights Delayed Over 1 Hour

When the Supreme Court Takes Away a Long-Held Constitutional Right

Why The Ukraine Crisis  Will Make Little Difference to Dollar Supremacy

Wealth of nations: Why some are rich, others are poor – and what it means for future prosperity

The Supreme Court Is Coming Dangerously Close to Complete Illegitimacy

The Historical Cherry-Picking at the Heart of the Supreme Court’s Gun-Rights Expansion

Federal COVID Aid to States and Localities Cost $855,000 Per Job Saved

Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine | Slavoj Zizek

The Defense Production Act Has Become a License for Central Planning

This Political Dissident Faces Death Threats if He Goes Back to Nicaragua. Why Was His Asylum Claim Denied?

Inflation Expected to Remain High Even as Economy Slows and Layoffs Rise

Republicans Want to ‘Harden’ Schools. That’s an Awful Euphemism.

Hack Global, Buy Local: The Inefficiencies of the Zero-Day Exploit Market

Ilya Shapiro Quits Georgetown’s Law School Amid Free Speech Fight

Today Marks 80 Years Since Congress Last Bothered To Declare a War

A Public Request for More Civic Engagement by Billionaire Nick Hanauer

Chomsky: We Must Insist That Nuclear Warfare Is an Unthinkable Policy

Gun Violence Is Like What Segregation Was. An Unaddressed Moral Stain.

How long are Americans sad and angry about mass shootings? Four days.

Every Day, We’re Told to Use New Lingo. What Does That Really Accomplish?

We must stop letting Russia define the terms of the Ukraine crisis | Slavoj Žižek

Walter Mosley Brilliantly Depicted Black English — and Black Thought

Is a Better World Possible Without American Power? A Debate With Daniel Bessner

What economic lessons about health care costs can we learn from the competitive market for aesthetic plastic surgery?

Europe’s handling of war on its doorstep breaks a decade-long streak of fumbled crises

Whole-genome sequencing of newborn babies presents ethical quandaries

Exonerations in America have risen, and their pattern is revealing

In California, the world’s largest legal weed market is going up in smoke

Britain’s security deals with Finland and Sweden shine a light on Boris Johnson

India is likely to be the world’s fastest-growing big economy this year

The war in Ukraine is spurring transatlantic co-operation in tech

A report on Native American boarding schools shows their horrors

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When will Vladimir Putin realise it is time to cut his losses in Ukraine?

Noam Chomsky Says Ukraine Desire for Heavy Weapons Is 'Western Propaganda'

What happened when Biden met Uyghur Americans persecuted by China

I Think It’s Fine to Say ‘I Feel Like.’ I Reckon Others Do, Too.

What the U.S. should do about Tunisia sliding into authoritarianism

A Critique of Tim Keller Reveals the Moral Devolution of the New Christian Right

Some health apps are able not just to diagnose diseases, but also to treat them

Apps interpreting data from wearable devices are helping people to live better

Data from wearable devices are changing disease surveillance and medical research

Another Ferdinand Marcos is set to become president of the Philippines

Europe’s hard-hit east is pushing the toughest response in Ukraine

India begins the privatisation of its huge life-insurance company

Remote Learning Was Even More Harmful Than Previously Thought, Research Shows

Evan McMullin’s run against extremism in Utah is working, so far

The war on disinformation is a political project, not a simple matter of truth and lies

Blackness and Standard English Can Coexist. Professors, Take Note.

Pennsylvania’s primaries point to the future of American politics

Two law-enforcement officials reflect on a Brazilian corruption scandal

Slow pain or fast pain? The implications of low investment yields

Vast amounts of money have gone missing from pandemic stimulus programmes

Hawaii’s oil-dependent economy is being battered by Russia’s war

Nationalists are set for a historic win in Northern Ireland's vote

Darwin Was Wrong: Your Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Your Emotions

Turkey is making a big diplomatic and corporate push into Africa

Why the Federal Reserve has made a historic mistake on inflation

Nate Silver Shares His Thoughts on Dropping Mask Mandates on Planes

Why Hong Kong’s prisoners of conscience deserve the Nobel Peace Prize

The Right Likes Book Bans. That Fuels the Left’s Cancel Culture.

Florida Judge Declares CDC's Federal Travel Mask Mandate 'Unlawful' and Vacates It

What happens if America’s Supreme Court overturns women’s right to abortion

Israel’s government is being tested by a spate of terror attacks

Donald Trump Began to 'Resemble Putin' As President: Ex-Adviser Fiona Hill

Extending the Mask Mandate for Air Travel 'Absolutely on the Table' Says White House COVID-19 Czar

Biden needs to start going after large corporations if he wants to win again | Robert Reich

Amazon has its first union, but lots more are unlikely to follow

Ketanji Brown Jackson has the votes to be America’s 116th justice

HDFC Bank’s merger with its housing-finance cousin marks a milestone for India

Under COVID Lockdown, Shanghai's People Are Running Out of Food and Meds While Pets Get Killed in the Streets

Ketanji Brown Jackson Has an ‘African’ Name. I Wish We Knew More About It.

Bruno Tertrais says French foreign policy is gaining more attention than usual in the campaign

Warsaw’s mayor explains how his city is coping with a 17% increase in its population

Colonel Patrick Sullivan explains why Russia’s army commits atrocities

US Policy Toward Russia Is Blocking Paths to De-escalation in Ukraine

Elon Musk Buys 9.2% of Twitter, Mysteriously Polls Users About State of Free Speech

Do Democratic Politicians Understand That Fossil Fuels Have to Go?

Brazil’s presidential election in October will be about the economy

Hungary’s opposition struggles to beat Viktor Orban’s stealth autocracy

Under unprecedented sanctions, how is the Russian economy faring?

Will dollar dominance give way to a multipolar system of currencies?

Biden administration panned for sidestepping advisory panel to allow fourth COVID shot

Donald Trump, John Eastman, and the Silence of the Justice Department

Will Smith Reminds Us Why Words Should Not Be Equivalent to Violence

Getting ‘More Christians Into Politics’ Is the Wrong Christian Goal

Amid Disgraceful Questions for Judge Jackson Not One About Corporate Power

Anti-infection measures kept British prisoners safe during the pandemic

The transition to clean energy will mint new commodity superpowers

Britain’s next nuclear plant will be identical to one under construction

How narcissistic youth might help struggling Chinese booksellers

Istanbul has become a refuge for thousands of Russians escaping Putin

Plastic surgeons make a bundle despite Lebanon’s economic crisis

To appreciate the SNP’s dominance, look at what it has done to the Tories

‘BIPOC’ Is Jargon. That’s OK, and Normal People Don’t Have to Say It.

How activists and charities embed contested ideologies on campus

Democracies Need Open Networks to Counter China’s 5G Big Brother

Daniel Yergin Thinks Russia’s Days as an Energy Superpower Might Be Over

Is Russian Brutality Toward Civilians Actually Unique? ❧ Current Affairs

The Underlying Problem Isn't Inflation—It's Corporate Power and Greed

Making the SAT and ACT Optional Is the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

Popular Health Claims, Such as a Woman's Fertility Dropping at Age 30, Are Wildly Overblown

Harry Truman Helped Make Our World Order, for Better and for Worse

Authoritarianism is the reason for Russia’s struggles in Ukraine

Critical Education: Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)

US gained surprising number of jobs in February but wage growth was nearly flat

Capitalizing ‘Black’ Isn’t Wrong. But It Isn’t That Helpful, Either.

Yes, Some Musicals Are Unwoke. That’s Not a Writ to Rewrite Them.

Don’t Assume Ilya Shapiro’s ‘Lesser Black Woman’ Tweet Was Racist

What’s Happening on the Left Is No Excuse for What’s Happening on the Right

NIH unearth more grant violations by Wuhan lab collaborator EcoHealth Alliance

Steven Pinker Q&A: “I’m still alive because I’m a serial series binger”

Life after COVID: most people don't want a return to normal – they want a fairer, more sustainable future

To Curb Facebook's Political Power, Take Away Its Section 230 Protection

Pentagon Spending on Military Contractors May Reach $407 Billion in 2022

Who Is E.O. Wilson? 'Darwin's Natural Heir,' Renowned Biologist Dies at 92

Investing in science to fuel economic prosperity: My long-read Q&A with Benjamin Jones

E.O. Wilson's lifelong passion for ants helped him teach humans about how to live sustainably with nature

In spite of Omicron, Britain’s schools must remain open | Devi Sridhar

CNN's Leana Wen: 'Cloth Masks Are Little More Than Facial Decorations'

Putin wants us to negotiate over the heads of our allies. Washington shouldn’t fall for it.

If Harvard Cared About Equality, It Would Abolish Legacy Admissions, Not ACT and SAT Requirements

The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science

Fund Science on the Basis of Scientists‘ Work, Not Their Identity

The Mississippi Abortion Case and the Fragile Legitimacy of the Supreme Court

Once Shunned in Antarctica, Female Scientists Are Now Doing Crucial Polar Research

Princeton Marxists Protest Campus Appearance by ‘Trans Epidemic’ Speaker

Scott Galloway Wants to Be “the Most Influential Thought Leader in the History of Business”

Back to the Bard: what Boris Johnson could learn from Shakespeare

Marginalized Workers Facing Labor Market Discrimination See Largest Jobs Gains

US met forecasts for job growth in 2021 amid unexpected high labor demand and low labor supply

School Districts Are Using Their COVID-19 Relief Money on Vape Detectors, Tennis Courts

Does Brazil Proposal Hold Key to Ending Big Pharma's Stranglehold on Covid-19 Vaccines?

There is no doubt anymore: the US supreme court is run by ‘partisan hacks’ | Robert Reich

How America Can Become a “Can Do” Country Again, with Philip Zelikow

Leftists Are Making Global Culture War Alliances, And So Should The Right

Socialist Students Want Arizona State University To Expel 'Racist Murderer' Kyle Rittenhouse

Pandemic Restrictions May Harm Infants' Cognitive Development, New Study Finds

Global Pandemic Will Rage Until WTO Approves Vaccine Patent Waiver

Controversial Researcher Driven from Campus at Old Dominion University

The Best Philosophy Books of 2021, recommended by Nigel Warburton

Chris Cuomo Violated Journalism Norms To Help His Brother and Should Resign From CNN

Space Force General: China and Russia attacking U.S. space assets ‘every day’

Chevron deference at stake in fight over payments for hospital drugs

Are the FDA’s VRBPAC and the CDC’s ACIP hopelessly compromised by conflicts of interest over COVID-19 vaccines?

Q&A with Garry Kasparov: How foreign dissidents can help renew U.S. democracy

‘The goal was to silence people’: historian Joanne Freeman on congressional violence

Trump stoked Covid in red states – but there are blue anti-vaxxers too | Robert Reich

How bad will the Omicron Covid variant be in Britain? Three things will tell us 

Republicans Have a Golden Opportunity. They Will Probably Blow It.

UK public debt stands at almost 100 per cent of GDP. History shows how to respond

The Lawfare Podcast: Rational Security's The 'Nothing To Be Thankful For' Edition

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Lauded the Success of China's 'Really Strict' Lockdowns

Giving thanks for the magic of the marketplace, the invisible hand of strangers, and no turkey czars

Black Friday’s carnival of consumerism feels increasingly untethered from reality

Black Feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali Raises The Alarm Over Importing Muslim Migrants To The West

Weekly Roundup and a Legal Scholar's Response to the Rittenhouse Trial

A historian of white power reacts to the Rittenhouse verdict: ‘a bonanza for the far-right’

Corporate Democrats Quiet as Military Budget Far Exceeds Cost of Biden’s Agenda

Top Medical News Site Lies About Doctors Who Noticed Lockdowns Didn’t Work

A tale of two pandemics: the true cost of Covid in the global south | Kwame Anthony Appiah

Should we bring back woolly mammoths? My long-read Q&A with Beth Shapiro

Chomsky and Pollin: Protests Outside of COP26 Offered More Hope Than the Summit

Have we been thinking about the pandemic wrong? The effect of population structure on transmission

Inflation has risen much more in the US than the euro area despite similar pandemic experiences

Social Media Is Probably Harming Girls, and That’s Enough to Act

The ACLU Thinks Kyle Rittenhouse's Civil Liberties Got Too Much Protection

What has Annapolis to do with Austin? My conversation with Pano Kanelos

Jordan Peterson Repeatedly Makes Air Quotes While Saying the Word 'Racism' During Debate

Noam Chomsky: Ending Climate Change “Has to Come From Mass Popular Action,” Not Politicians

It Will Take Much More Than Electric Cars to Fix the Climate Crisis

Teach and Write about Cybersecurity Law and Policy at the University of Texas, with the Strauss Center!

Despite concerns about inflation, the real cost (and ‘time cost’) of Thanksgiving dinner this year is among the most affordable in history

5 questions for John Logsdon on the commercialization and exploration of space

Why Many Americans Underestimate Who Is Most Concerned About The Environment

The American Medical Association Would Like Doctors To Use Woke Jargon

Looking back on the Space Race: My long-read Q&A with John Logsdon

OSHA Halts Enforcement of Biden Vaccine Mandate, Pending Litigation

What the UK can learn from South Korea’s Covid response | Devi Sridhar

There Is Nothing for You Here by Fiona Hill review – more than a White House memoir

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser Will Finally Relax D.C.'s Stubborn Mask Mandate

How the Greek Revolution of 1821 Led to the Global System of Nation-States

The Influence of Gingrich, the Triumph of Trump, and the Legacy of Conservative Court Appointments, with Jackie Calmes

Why White Voters With Racist Views Often Still Support Black Republicans

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere by Stuart Jeffries review – how we became postmodern

A Biography of E.O. Wilson, the Scientist Who Foresaw Our Troubles

An Astronomer Cancels His Own Research—Because the Results Weren’t Popular

Wagner and Weitzman’s Asymmetric Treatment of Non-Carbon Energies

If It’s Not Critical Race Theory, It’s Critical Race Theory-lite

Sean Wilentz Reviews Noah Feldman's New Lincoln Book, "The Broken Constitution"

You Can’t Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary

True grit – we measured it and found it protected doctors from career burnout

It’s the tech giants, not socialist politicians, who are coming for our liberty

Many scientists are atheists, but that doesn't mean they are anti-religious

Jeremy Farrar: Sage scientist quits over ‘concerning’ UK Covid picture – reports

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: ‘Wokeism’, Not White Supremacy, Threatens America

America’s labor shortage and the ‘Great Resignation’: My long-read Q&A with Michael Strain

Academic Freedom Alliance Letter on the University of Florida Situation

Supreme Court Rebuffs Attempt To Open Up Access to Classified FISA Court Reports

Ross Douthat, Conservative Pundit, Is Actually Exactly What the Chronic Lyme “Debate” Needs

Chomsky and Pollin: COP26 Pledges Will Fail Unless Pushed by Mass Organizing

Rich Nations Have Received 16 Times More Vaccine Doses Per Person Than Poor

How long does the Covid vaccine last – and is natural immunity better?

US economy slows in third quarter as spending and business investment growth sag

IPCC, You've Made Your Point: Humans Are a Primary Cause of Climate Change

Ross Douthat’s New Book Details His Personal Battle With A Mystery Illness

TV tonight: Prof Brian Cox’s thrilling exploration of the cosmos

The Lessons of Evolution: A Review of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century” by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

Does America need more planning? My long-read Q&A with Neil Chilson

The Renew America Movement: A Center-Right Third Party Taking Shape

Is Biden’s entire agenda about to shrink into nothingness? | Robert Reich

Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. It’s been lawless for years

John McWhorter Argues That Antiracism Has Become a Religion of the Left

How we got here with political and health misinformation: The case of “Hacker X” and Mike Adams

Universe: Brian Cox’s OTT space odyssey is no match for Attenborough

Garry Kasparov: From Communism's Last Chess Champion to Freedom Fighter

Yuval Noah Harari: ‘I wish I had come out when I was 16 or 17, and not 21’

5 questions for Jamie Beard on the potential of geothermal energy

Details in BLS report suggest that the ‘gender earnings gap’ can be explained by age, marital status, children, hours worked, etc.

OnlySubs: Toxic Femininity and Wokeness as a Filtering Mechanism

The drone revolution is already here – but we need the right rules to take full advantage

Britain must control Covid now – or face a winter lockdown | Devi Sridhar

Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything audiobook review – easygoing education

The horse bit and bridle kicked off ancient empires – a new giant dataset tracks the societal factors that drove military technology

Guantanamo, the Courts, and the Shrinking Scope of U.S. Military Detention Authority

Can geothermal energy replace oil and gas? My long-read Q&A with Jamie Beard

Without Marc Warner “thousands would be dead”: the physicist who averted Britain’s herd immunity disaster

Dr. Gottlieb: U.S. Should Remain Vigilant Regarding Future Pandemics

Kathleen Stock and Sussex University: the war over academic freedom

People Love Big Spending Packages. Until They Have to Pay for Them.

Any Democrat Who Stands Against Lower Drug Prices Should Be Primaried in 2022

Even in a pandemic, bait-and-switch acupuncture studies still get published in Nature

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – have we got our ancestors wrong?

An update on my efforts to challenge Title VI and Title IX violations in higher education despite new resistance from Biden’s Office for Civil Rights

Breastfeeding is tough: new research shows how to make it more manageable

“Striketober” Roars as Nearly 100,000 Workers Authorize Work Stoppages

The High-Paid Media Types Are Unhappy Workers Are Demanding Fair Wages

Understanding Snowflakery: The Difference Between the Free Expression of Ideas and Harassment and Intimidation.

How Can You Talk Effectively to Anti-Vaxxers, Flat Earthers, and Climate Deniers?

The future of remote work: Highlights from my conversation with Nicholas Bloom

Harvard’s Lieberman says Americans can learn from hunter-gatherers

Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for the 12th straight year and outnumber men in grad school 148 to 100

Chomsky, Pollin and Lapavitsas: Are We Witnessing the Demise of Neoliberalism?

We should be optimistic about the malaria vaccine – but not necessarily for the reason you think

Data from Federal Scientists Raise Questions About J.&J. Booster Shots

A Senate Report Shows How Close American Democracy Came to Disaster

Was My Black Colleague Right to Skip Our Firm’s Recruitment Event?

Looking back at the remarkable history of the Nobel Prize from 1901-2021 using maps, charts, and tables

Ninth Circuit: Oakland Can’t Sue Wells Fargo Over Risky Mortgages

Robert Reich: American Workers Are on Strike Over 'Low-Wage S*** Jobs'

Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, take 6: Incompetence and fraud everywhere!

The Preventable Horrors of the Pandemic and the Short Case for Open Research

Worsening global digital divide as the US and China continue zero-sum competitions

This Isn't a Labor Shortage—It's a Strike by Workers Kicked in the Face by Low Wages for Too Long

US job growth slowed in September, but openings still outnumber job seekers

September job growth was worse than expected but better than it looked

COVID-19 could nudge minds and societies towards authoritarianism

We Ask the Experts: What Really Happened During the U.S. Moon Landing?

Andrew Yang His Ditched the Democrats. Can His 'Forward Party' Take Off?

5 questions for Adrian Wooldridge on whether meritocracy should be preserved

Beyond reasonable doubt: climate science and the limits of appropriate scepticism

Facebook's own internal documents offer a blueprint for making social media safer for teens

Democrats Will Have No Excuse If They Blow Chance to End Child Poverty

The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry is intellectual escapism

Is the United States really meritocratic? My long-read Q&A with Adrian Wooldridge

Climate change: convincing people to pay to tackle it is hard – treating it like a pension could help

Stewarding the Cultural Evolution of Complex Systems: The Case of Regenerative Agriculture

Why You Should Always Switch: The Monty Hall Problem (Finally) Explained

Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Powerful Anti-Racist Book. So Why Doesn’t the Left Love It?

UCLA lecturer Gordon Klein fights back against higher education’s ‘diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) industrial complex’ and crybully activism

The real ‘tax gap’ is the one between progressive spending dreams and economic reality

How to confront the growing threat to American democracy, with Tom Nichols

China’s “digital natives”: How the post-’90s generation is transforming the country

The legacy of the Moon landing: My long-read Q&A with Charles Fishman

&#127911; Elizabeth Bruenig on Religion, Liberalism, and Wokeness

The Birth of Identity Marxism as Critical Theory’s New Proletariat

Chinese communists have no choice but to veer away from free enterprise. But we do.

Five Takeaways from Our Conversation with Richard Thaler about the Past, Present, and Future of Nudge

AOC reveals the economic truth that many Dems wish to avoid: Their spending dreams require tax hikes on everybody

Explaining US income inequality by household demographics, 2020 update

Will accelerating technology end the great stagnation? My long-read Q&A with Azeem Azhar

Sorry, a Coronavirus Infection Might Not Be Enough to Protect You

Are the deep fundamentals of the US economy actually pretty strong?

The future of the American city: My long-read Q&A with Ed Glaeser

‘The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality‘—A Review

The next attack on the Affordable Care Act may cost you free preventive health care

Exposure of faked dishonesty study makes me proud to be a behavioural scientist

‘When My Satire Becomes Popular, I Must Ask, What Is the Problem?’

What to Know About Boosters if You Got the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol

Natan Sachs, Suzanne Maloney, Samantha Gross, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Jeffrey Feltman, Bruce Riedel, Stephanie T. Williams, Reva Dhingra, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Marsin Alshamary, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Daniel L. Byman, Madiha Afzal, Michael E. O'Hanlon, Steven Heydemann, Sharan Grewal, Jeannie Sowers, Shadi Hamid, Shibley Telhami, Amos Harel, Itamar Rabinovich

Eric Muraille, Biologiste, Immunologiste. Directeur de recherches au FNRS, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

Chris Fleming, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University

Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol, and Honorary Professor of Psychology, The University of Western Australia

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Michael Noetel, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Australian Catholic University

Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne

Virginie Martin, Docteure sciences politiques, HDR sciences de gestion, Kedge Business School

Amitrajeet A. Batabyal, Distinguished Professor and Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics, Rochester Institute of Technology

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First Things RSS Feed - Web Exclusives | Daily Writings From Our Top Writers | First Things

Leor Zmigrod, Research Fellow in the Psychology of Ideologies, University of Cambridge

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2028 Election
Are The Democrats Screwed In The Senate After 2024?
No, but the party faces an uphill battle.

By Nate Silver

Dec. 8, 2022, at 11:05 AM	

Samuel Corum / Getty Images

I’m not that impressed by long-term projections of Democratic doom in the Senate. Mostly that’s because I’m not that impressed by long-term political projections in general. Political coalitions change; not many people would have had it on their bingo card that Democrats would obtain a Senate majority in 2020 by winning two runoffs in Georgia, and then would actually expand on that majority in 2022 following another runoff in Georgia despite their party controlling the White House.
With that said, while I don’t think we can say very much about what politics will look like 10 or 20 years from now, a medium-term look-ahead is possible. Do Democrats have a reasonable hope of regaining a trifecta — control of the House, Senate and presidency — at any point in the near future (2024, 2026 or 2028)? And how long will they hold onto control of the Senate and the presidency, allowing them to appoint Supreme Court justices without Republican help?
My colleague Geoffrey Skelley already took an initial look at the 2024 Senate map, which is bad for Democrats, but I wanted to dig slightly deeper and also consider 2026 and 2028. Like Geoffrey, I’ll be focused on the Senate, because that’s the weakest link in Democrats’ effort to win back the trifecta. Despite some disadvantages in the Electoral College, Democrats obviously have no trouble winning the presidency. And they nearly held onto the House this year despite losing the popular vote for the House. The current House map doesn’t have much — if any — of a Republican skew, and Democrats should be able to win back the House if the national political environment is reasonably good for them.
So let’s look at the 2024, 2026 and 2028 Senate maps (yes, 2028 features the same map as the midterm we just finished; I just can’t let go, I guess). We’ll classify races into bronze, silver, gold and platinum “tiers” in terms of how feasible they are as pickup opportunities. I’m deliberately using this goofy metallurgical theme as opposed to the categories FiveThirtyEight typically uses (e.g., “toss-up,” “lean Republican”) so you’ll recognize these as being back-of-the-envelope suppositions rather than any sort of official race ratings. 
In general, these ratings lean heavily on looking at how close a race was the last time it was contested, with some subjective adjustments for candidate quality. I’m also considering how the electoral environment has shifted within the state — Florida has gotten redder since Rick Scott was elected in 2018, for instance — although it is definitely not always safe to assume a state will continue trending in the same direction.
2024
Republican pickup opportunities
Platinum tier: West Virginia (Manchin), Montana (Tester), Ohio (Brown), 
Gold tier: Arizona (Sinema), Nevada (Rosen)
Silver tier: Wisconsin (Baldwin), Michigan (Stabenow), Pennsylvania (Casey)
Bronze tier: New Jersey (Menendez), Virginia (Kaine)
As Geoffrey noted, the platinum-tier states listed here are the Democrats’ main problem. They have three senators up for reelection in states that Donald Trump carried by 8 (Ohio), 16 (Montana) and 39 (West Virginia!) percentage points in 2020. Each of those Democratic senators won reelection in 2018, of course, but that was a strong Democratic year, and there’s been further movement of white voters without college degrees — a key part of the electorate in these states — toward Republicans since then. 
I don’t want to focus too much on any one individual race, but it’s probably safe to assume that Joe Manchin has the toughest reelection campaign of all. Meanwhile, maybe Sherrod Brown can feel a bit more comfortable following Tim Ryan’s relatively good performance in Ohio this year, but Ryan did lose, and Brown may face a tougher opponent than Ryan did in J.D. Vance. Democrats also run the risk of retirements here; neither Manchin nor Jon Tester has officially yet announced they will seek reelection.
Beyond the platinum tier, Democrats face some other risks. Kyrsten Sinema is likely to face a serious primary challenge. Democrats keep winning close races for Congress in Nevada but it’s a very purple state. Tammy Baldwin, Debbie Stabenow and Bob Casey won by fairly comfortable margins in 2018 and will likely be fine in the event of a decent-to-good Democratic year, but if 2024 turns into a good Republican year, they could be in trouble.
Democratic pickup opportunities
Platinum tier: None
Gold tier: None
Silver tier: Texas (Cruz), Florida (Scott)
Bronze tier: None
Conversely, it’s very slim pickings for Democrats. On paper, you’d think that Texas might be close — Ted Cruz won by less than 3 percentage points there in 2018 and Texas is more competitive than it once was — but the erosion of the Democratic vote in South Texas has prevented Texas from turning truly purple. And although Scott won by only 0.12 percentage points in 2018, Republicans did so well in Florida in 2020 and 2022 that I was tempted to demote his race all the way to the bronze tier. Plus, there’s a good chance that the GOP’s 2024 nominee will be either Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or Florida resident Donald Trump, which could help drive Republican turnout.
Beyond that, any other races look like an extreme stretch for Democrats. Maybe Josh Hawley in Missouri could be vulnerable in a 2018-type environment, but that’s less likely in a presidential year and Hawley’s approval rating isn’t that bad. Put him in the “honorable mention” tier, I guess.
Given all this, I’d imagine the modal outcome from 2024 is something like Republicans picking up about three Senate seats. There’s uncertainty around that; it’s surely within the realm of possibility that Democrats hold the Senate, but it’s also possible that Republicans could wind up with 54 or 55 seats. And of course, all of these races are correlated. If the GOP is doing well enough to win the presidency in 2024, they should have no trouble also winning the Senate.9
2026
Republican pickup opportunities 
Gold tier: Georgia (Ossoff), Michigan (Peters)
Silver tier: New Hampshire (Shaheen)
Bronze tier: Minnesota (Smith), Virginia (Warner)
The 2026 map is more balanced. Democrats undoubtedly feel pretty good about how they’ve performed in Georgia and Michigan in the past two cycles, but Jon Ossoff and Gary Peters won by extremely narrow margins in 2020 and it would be a mistake to assume they’re safe. It’s not a particularly deep set of pickup opportunities for Republicans, though if Democrats retain the presidency in 2024, you’d expect Republicans to have good midterms in 2026, and New Hampshire and perhaps even Minnesota and Virginia could potentially be in play. 
Democratic pickup opportunities 
Gold tier: Maine (Collins), North Carolina (Tillis)
Silver tier: Alaska (Sullivan)
Bronze tier: Texas (Cornyn), Iowa (Ernst)
Meanwhile, Democrats will try again in the two states that were most disappointing to them in 2020: Maine and North Carolina. Given all the focus on Georgia, I wonder if North Carolina hasn’t become underrated as a place where Democrats could gain ground in the future; the states are fairly similar demographically and it wouldn’t take that much of a shift for Democrats to go from narrowly losing races in North Carolina to narrowly winning them. Susan Collins will be 74 years old in 2026, meanwhile, an age at which there’s typically some chance of retirement.
Democrats also have a below-the-radar pickup opportunity in Alaska, where Mary Peltola was elected to a full term in the U.S. House10 last month by a 10-point margin after ranked-choice votes were tabulated. GOP incumbent Dan Sullivan has a mediocre approval rating and a Peltola-Sullivan race would potentially be competitive.
Suppose, though, that Democrats win the presidency but lose the Senate in 2024. It’s really not as crazy as it sounds. If every state votes identically to how it did in the 2020 presidential election — and every Senate race follows the presidential vote — then Democrats would come out of 2024 with the presidency but only 48 Senate seats after losing West Virginia, Montana and Ohio. Could Democrats pick up two Senate seats from the GOP in the 2026 midterm while controlling the presidency? Unlikely — but then again, Democrats gaining Senate seats this year seemed unlikely and they did it.
2028
Gold tier: Nevada (Cortez Masto), Pennsylvania (Fetterman), Arizona (Kelly), Georgia (Warnock) 
Silver tier: New Hampshire (Hassan)
Bronze tier: Oregon (Wyden)
All right, now we’re literally coming full circle to consider the races that were just contested in last month’s midterm. So we’ll keep it pretty brief. Yes, Democrats have to feel pretty good about their wins in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia — especially given that the overall political environment wasn’t that great for Democrats this year. But they were narrow wins, and (with the possible exception of Nevada) they came against a mediocre set of GOP opponents. Maybe some of these races are toward the silver end of the gold tier, but more likely than not they’ll be competitive again.
And since we’re projecting a full six years out, I’m going to be a little bit more creative about considering long-shot opportunities in the bronze tier. Although the Senate races in Washington and Colorado received attention this year (Republicans spent a lot of money on both, only to lose by double digits), they wound up coming just as close in Oregon with a QAnon candidate as part of a comparatively strong year for the GOP in the Beaver State. Could a more mainstream GOP nominee have made it a race? Oregon is quite white, it has fewer people with college degrees than the “Portlandia” stereotype might make you assume, and Democratic incumbent Ron Wyden will be 79 years old in 2028 …
Gold tier: Wisconsin (Johnson), North Carolina (Budd)
Silver tier: Vance (Ohio)
Bronze tier: Alaska (Murkowski), Florida (Rubio), Utah (Lee), Iowa (Grassley)
Again, we’re mostly just rehashing this year’s map. Ron Johnson, who originally hadn’t planned on running in 2020, is another retirement threat in 2026 — and he barely won reelection anyway. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown could seek to return to the Senate if he loses in 2024 by challenging J.D. Vance. And 2028 is far enough from now that I wouldn’t want to rule out Democrats being competitive in states as far-flung as Utah, where independent Evan McMullin ran a fairly competitive race against Mike Lee this year.

Even with an additional senator going into 2023, the 2024 map is still so bad for Democrats that keeping the Senate for years to come will be a fairly tough order. The party’s prospects might rest more upon limiting the damage in 2024 so that it has a chance to regain the Senate in 2026 or 2028. But a bad 2024 could make it very difficult for Democrats to regain the Senate before 2030 or 2032.
That bleak picture may shape the next few years of political maneuvering. When Vox’s Dylan Matthews suggested on Twitter that liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor (age 68) and Elena Kagan (age 62) should retire while Democrats have their Senate majority and be replaced by younger justices, it didn’t go over well. But it’s a perfectly rational suggestion if Democrats don’t feel like gambling with their judicial future. (Consider how consequential Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s decision not to retire has been for liberals.) Democrats have a narrow path to Senate control after 2024, but it’s narrow indeed, and one that might require the GOP continuing to nominate bad candidates — and a fair share of luck.

We are told before every party conference that the leader will be making perhaps their “most important speech yet”. In reality, unless they are going into the conference with the word “beleaguered” regularly appearing in front of their name, they’ll almost certainly be fine. For struggling leaders a bad speech might sink them, but if they are 20 points ahead in the polls, and coming off a huge by-election win, then they are unlikely to be derailed.It’s even less likely to be a problem if your opponents are noisily falling apart. I wasn’t at the Tory conference but all of the several dozen journalists, politicians and business people I spoke to who had, were unanimous that it was even more shambolic than it appeared on TV. Even hacks from right-wing papers were shaking their heads at the sheer incoherence of it all. It’s hard to be a client journalist when your political masters can’t figure out what they want you to say.You can see how the Tories got into such a mess. There is no record to run on and Sunak doesn’t want to take the blame for the failures of his predecessors. It is, though, always going to be extremely hard to run a “change” message as the governing party. Boris Johnson managed it in 2019 by promising to spend a lot of money and attaching his personal brand to Brexit. But Sunak doesn’t want to spend money and any hope associated with leaving the EU has faded. He has nothing else. A rag-bag of random policy announcements about A-levels and smoking certainly won’t cut it.Even worse than the confusion of the official platform was the circus around it. There was a general consensus, amongst attendees, that it felt more like the conference a party has after it’s lost an election rather than the one before, with all the focus on leadership jockeying and indulging in ideological fantasies.So the lobby arrived at the Labour conference – which I did go to – primed to write positively about the contrast. As long as Starmer and team could look vaguely professional and serious, then they were going to get good coverage. The narrative is in their favour and that makes politics a lot easier. Announcements that would get ripped to pieces if the lobby were moving in for a kill get left unscrutinised. Dull speeches are lauded as triumphs. You’ve got to enjoy it while it lasts.   I don’t want to be churlish about this. Seeming professional and serious might not seem like a high bar but it’s one plenty of Labour conferences have failed to meet in the past. We shouldn’t begrudge weary Labour folk their raptures at a leadership that can tie their own shoelaces. Starmer’s team are competent, well organised, extremely thorough in their voter research and message design, and ruthless when it comes to keeping the hard left out. As a Jew I was highly conscious of how different the conference would have felt last week with the old guard in charge, and don’t underestimate what it took to achieve that transformation.But Labour still haven’t begun to resolve, or even acknowledge, the fundamental contradiction in their current position.Let’s be clear as to what the problem is. It’s not that Starmer “doesn’t have a vision” or “doesn’t stand for anything”. Labour’s “missions” might be a poor campaigning tool (as predicted) but if you bother to read them they’re entirely clear about the country they want to build. And that country is Denmark. Literally in the case of the “opportunity mission” which cites Danish social mobility as the (implausible) goal. Starmer and his team are soft left Labour and want a high-growth, social democratic country with better worker rights, more state direction, and less inequality. They want us to be Scandinavian. Which as visions go seems reasonable enough.Nor is the problem that “they don’t have any policies”. They have far too many fiddly policies. No one who doesn’t spend their time reading policy documents and going to conferences will have heard of them. Did you know Labour is planning a £2.4k retention bonus for teachers completing the early years framework? I doubt it. Their bigger pledges on housebuilding, planning, and electricity infrastructure are substantive and important, albeit lacking in detail. But that will always be true of opposition parties, who have limited resources. The civil service is much maligned but you do need them to do the work on these complex policies.No, the problem is very specific. They have no substantive policies that would involve having to spend any taxpayer money. Starmer’s holding position that he wishes to run “a reforming state, not a cheque-book state” is transparent nonsense, an example of what Duncan Robinson at the Economist calls “Reform Fairy” thinking:“Both main parties agree that although the British state requires a total overhaul, it does not need much more cash. In its bid to move away from the Magic Money Tree, British politics has fallen under the spell of another mythical being: the Reform Fairy. The Magic Money Tree could generate cash at will; the Reform Fairy can apparently improve public services without spending political or financial capital.”I am always surprised at politicians’ capacity to believe things that happen to be convenient for them at any given time, but I just don’t buy they really believe in the Reform Fairy. For a start when it comes to health, welfare and education – the three departments that account for 60% of all spending – they have no proposals for significant reform. I watched a succession of junior shadow ministers struggle through fringe events on each of these issues, acknowledging the terrible state of things right now, promising a decade of transformation, but unable to fill in any of the steps that might get us there.    The reasons for this are obvious. They are absolutely determined to stop the Tories running a “same old Labour” campaign, or at least not one that seems credible. From an electoral point of view it will work because neither the Tories nor the right-wing press are going to attack them for not pledging to spend enough money. Plus the power of the narrative will protect them from scrutiny. On top of that, it’s now so clear they’re going to win that every media outlet, business, trade union and sector lobbying group wants to be on good terms.It is, though, going to make those first few years in government much harder because they can’t do any serious thinking about reform that goes beyond the very conceptual stage, without getting into costings.That doesn’t mean I left the conference without hope. The first big positive was that Rachel Reeves’ team are doing an extremely canny job at shouting loudly about fiscal discipline while ensuring they keep their room for manoeuvre open post-election. There were hints that investment spending could be excluded from Labour’s headline rule on debt reduction (as it was in Boris Johnson’s first two years as Prime Minister). Reeves may have an “iron-clad commitment” to sticking to fiscal rules but there is still definitional space about what exactly they would be. She also managed to get through conference without ruling out any other tax cuts. My biggest worry for Labour is that at some point over the next year their poll lead dips, the narrative shifts a bit (as journalists get bored) and they get panicked into reducing their fiscal space to zero.My second positive is that Labour adjacent wonks, who have plausible deniability, are starting to think through some ways through these problems. The centre-left think-tank IPPR published a report that was subtitled, in a direct response to Duncan Robinson’s challenge, “Between the Reform Fairy and the Magic Money Tree”. It acknowledges that spending will be needed, and the short-termist scorecard approach taken by the Treasury is a major impediment to a well-functioning state. Also that the standard “new public management” model of public service reform – with its focus entirely on targets and extrinsic incentives – has run out of road with no obvious alternative offering itself.I don’t agree with all their solutions. For instance, they propose creating a new category of “prevention investment expenditure” to ensure money designed for long-term preventative interventions on, say public health or reducing reoffending, is better protected. I get the objective but the fuzziness of the line over what counts as prevention worries me. I do, though, like their idea of treating priority social policy objectives in the same way as fiscal ones, with independent measurement as to whether, for example, the government is reducing waiting lists or building more houses. Tying the Treasury into those metrics could help balance the obsession with the spending scorecard. It is also good to see Labour engaging with these ideas. So there are positive signs, but not yet quite the sense of urgency I’d like to see. While, of course, Labour are aware the country is in a bad way, I’m not sure they yet appreciate quite how much of a challenge it’s going to be. Just in the last few weeks we’ve heard that dozens of councils are approaching bankruptcy; that prisons are now full with those convicted of serious crimes unable to be incarcerated; and that hospitals are already declaring critical incidents before we get to winter. There is still a sense they are over-estimating how far being nicer and more competent that Tory ministers will get them. Its good to know, for instance,  that they won’t go ahead with the Rwanda deportations, as this will save time and money. But it’s not going to be nearly enough.The biggest panel event I spoke at was an online one organised by Citizens’ Advice on the cost of living crisis. Their stats, on foodbank use, homelessness and so on, are all dire. I was most struck, though, by the story of Sanna. A young woman living in a council flat who was already behind on her bills and then lost just under a third of her Universal Credit for a month, because she missed a job centre appointment and was sanctioned. This will push her further into debt. She is already struggling with anxiety and depression, which will now be exacerbated, making it harder to find work. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up joining the ballooning list of people classified as unable to work due to mental health problems. It was such a clear example of how our current approach to our biggest spending policy area is utterly broken – ruining lives and costing taxpayer money – with no party close to offering a solution. We need that sense of urgency for Sanna’s sake.Comment is Freed is a reader supported publication. A monthly subscription is £3.50 and an annual one £35. It includes at least four subscriber only posts a month.This post is public so please share if you found it helpful.Share

Walter Olson  Voters will go to the polls soon in states and municipalities to decide ballot issues of significance for individual liberty, limited government, and sound public administration. Some highlights (via Ballotpedia and Bolts):  If Ohio voters approve Issue 2 to legalize and regulate pot sales, more than half the U.S. population will live in states that have legalized recreational marijuana. Issue 1 in the same state would establish a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions,” including decisions about abortion, contraception, fertility treatment, miscarriage care, and continuing pregnancy, while allowing the state to restrict abortion after fetal viability, except when “necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.”  Maine Question 3 would create a state utility authorized to take over Maine’s privately owned electric utilities and transmission operations. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑VT) and the Sierra Club are among its backers on the left, but even some progressives have doubts and the utility workers’ union outright opposes the takeover. Ironically, one of the state’s two investor‐​owned utilities, serving areas in the north and east of the state, is itself owned by Calgary, Alberta’s municipal electric utility.  On public finance, Colorado Proposition HH is being promoted as a reduction in property tax rates but is so drafted as to enable an end run around key provisions of the Colorado Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), enacted by voters in 1992, which has worked to limit the growth of government. Texas Proposition 3, a constitutional amendment, would prohibit the legislature from enacting a tax on wealth or on net worth in the future. It is one of more than a dozen constitutional amendments on the Texas ballot with fiscal or tax implications. Maine Question 1 would require voter approval of many bond issuances above $1 billion, and was advanced by opponents of Maine Question 3, the above‐​mentioned measure authorizing a state takeover of electric utilities, which would presumably be funded by such bond issuances.  Ranked choice voting in municipal elections, an idea I’ve written about favorably, will be on the ballot in three mid‐​sized Michigan communities, Kalamazoo, East Lansing, and Royal Oak; the state would still have to give its approval. In Minnetonka, Minn., where voters approved RCV in 2020, opponents of the voting method have placed on the ballot a measure that would reverse that decision. Earlier this year voters in Redondo Beach, Calif., and Burlington, Vt., approved RCV, the latest in a streak of local wins for the method, which is also employed statewide in Maine and Alaska.  In Louisiana, which follows its own election schedule, voters will decide tomorrow whether to ban foundations and nonprofits from making private grants to election administrators, as about half the states have lately done. I’ve argued that there are legitimate reasons states might want to scrutinize and in some cases restrict such grants. A new paper by Apoorva Lal and Daniel M. Thompson estimates that the receipt of a 2020 grant had a probable low‐​but‐​positive effect on turnout and on Democratic vote share, which works to confirm Republican political misgivings; at the same time they find (as has every other piece of serious research I know) that the effects were likely too small to have changed the outcome of that year’s presidential election.  

Let no one say that Donald Trump has lost his edge. His speech Wednesday evening, amid the roiling violence in the Gaza Strip, shows he’s still got it, whatever it is.In Florida, the former president and GOP presidential front-runner blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a supposed disagreement over a 2020 U.S. missile strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. “I’ll never forget,” Trump said. “I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing.” He went on to praise Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that is allied with Hamas and Iran. “You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart.”[Andrew Exum: Iran loses its indispensable man]Trump understood that the comments would be buzzy and predicted that the press would freak out, but the more notable blowback came from other quarters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of Trump’s top rivals, attacked him. “Now is not the time to be attacking our ally,” he said. “Trump puts himself first.” Other conservative leaders also reacted with disgust. Trump’s campaign, feeling the heat, put out a statement yesterday insisting, “There was no better friend or ally of Israel than President Donald J. Trump,” and another an hour later outlining pro-Israel moves he’d made during his time in office.But trying to assess Trump as either pro-Israel or anti-Israel—or, for that matter holding any other coherent policy stance—misses the point. Trump has no true allies or ideological commitments. He is reactive, driven by personal grievance, knee-jerk contrarianism, and admiration for strength and violence. In this case, that means bearing an old grudge against Netanyahu, opposing whatever Joe Biden is doing, and being impressed by the ruthlessness of Hamas’s attacks.The result is a series of dizzying reversals. Biden and Netanyahu, who have been at odds throughout Biden’s presidency, are suddenly marching in lockstep. The president delivered a vigorous, fiery pro-Israel speech that drew praise even from some of his usual critics on the pro-Israel right. Meanwhile, Trump and Netanyahu, close pals during Trump’s term, are feuding. (Rolling Stone reports that Trump even wants Netanyahu “impeached,” which makes as little sense as you think it does.) DeSantis and the White House are now tag-teaming to criticize Trump.[Read: Trump isn’t the president Netanyahu was hoping for]The contrast here is not that Netanyahu is good or that Biden’s policy is necessarily wise. It’s that Biden’s reaction is driven by a coherent and consistent worldview and approach to policy and Trump’s is driven by pettiness.Trump is not, in any practical sense, a supporter or friend of Hezbollah or Hamas. (It’s a good bet he’d be hard-pressed to really describe their motivations other than a hatred of Israel and of Jews.) This is in part because what impresses him is belligerence and force, which is why he has previously praised North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, among others.It is also in part because friendship is irrelevant to Trump. This applies just as much to his relationship with Israel as it does to normal interpersonal relationships. He saw supporting the country as politically advantageous, just as he did brokering the Abraham Accords. Trump’s relationship with the Jewish people is similarly transactional. He’s made years of anti-Semitic remarks, and on Rosh Hashanah last month, he raged at American Jews for not supporting him for election after all he’d done for Israel. (He also is unable to recognize any distinction between Jews and the Israeli government.)Trump’s anger at Netanyahu seems to stem from the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Netanyahu congratulated Biden for his victory. In recent days, Netanyahu has praised and thanked Biden for his steadfast support. Trump demands personal loyalty even though he doesn’t give it, and he acts out of transactionalism but is horrified when other politicians do the same.[Franklin Foer: Biden will be guided by his Zionism]Netanyahu’s actions here are obviously prudent. Netanyahu has clashed with Biden and with Barack Obama before him over policy questions, but for any Israeli leader to be too frosty to the president of the United States, Israel’s most important ally, would be statecraft malpractice. That’s especially true at a time of war, such as now. But Trump seems to want Netanyahu to spurn Biden, the actual president, in favor of himself, a private citizen with real legal troubles and a history of electoral struggles.No country can formulate a careful long-term policy when a future president could do an about-face at any point in his term just because he feels personally slighted. The equivocation alienates allies, who hesitate to commit to any course that could change abruptly, and who don’t enjoy being harangued by the most powerful leader in the world. It gives aid and comfort to enemies such as Hezbollah, even if Trump reviles them personally and doesn’t materially aid their causes. As Trump’s first term in office demonstrated, this petty reactivity is a bad way to govern, and it is the only way he knows.

       Two years after Congress authorized a hugely expensive bailout of state and local governments as part of a COVID-era emergency spending bill, most of the money still hadn't been spent. Perhaps the bailout wasn't even needed in the first place? In a new report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that states (including Washington, D.C.) had spent just 45 percent of the funding they had received through the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program, a $350 billion line item within the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which passed in March 2021. Local governments had reported spending just 38 percent of their funds received through the same program. Those figures are based on mandatory reports filed quarterly with the Treasury and reflect spending through the end of March 2023, two years after the bailout was approved by Congress. "The new GAO study confirms that the ARPA spending was not needed," Chris Edwards, chair of fiscal studies at the Cato Institute, tells Reason. "By the fall of 2020, it was clear that the states were in good fiscal shape and not facing Armageddon as many policymakers were claiming. They did not need federal handouts." Edwards had argued against the bailout of state and local governments during the pandemic, and he wasn't alone. Before the American Rescue Plan passed, there was widespread skepticism about the proposed bailout, in part because three other pandemic-era spending bills had already sent about $360 billion in aid to states and localities. The effectiveness of that spending has been repeatedly called into question. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in June 2022, a trio of researchers found that pandemic-era aid distributed to state and local governments had cost taxpayers about $855,000 per job saved. The stimulus spending had only "a modest impact on government employment and has not translated into detectable gains for private businesses or for states' overall economic recoveries," concluded University of California, San Diego economists Jeffrey Clemens and Philip Hoxie and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Stan Veuger, the paper's three authors. "Even the unstated assumption behind these handouts—that Washington should step in if there are dips in state revenue—is badly flawed," wrote David Ditch and Richard Stern, policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation, in a report last month that highlighted the state and local bailout among other wasteful COVID-era programs. "Many states are fiscally mismanaged, and federal bailouts enable them to avoid much-needed discipline." Indeed, as Reason has reported, a good chunk of the state and local bailout funds were put to questionable use, including subsidizing money-losing, government-owned golf courses. Lots of other governments used the stimulus cash to pad the paychecks of public employees. Iowa spent $12.5 million of its $4.5 billion cut of the federal bailout on a new baseball stadium near the Field of Dreams movie set. Because that's an essential public health issue, of course. The new GAO report adds to that list of seemingly frivolous spending. It points out that Michigan "reported spending $25.6 million on a travel marketing and promotional campaign," allegedly to "respond to the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism." Louisiana, meanwhile, reported spending $115 million to construct roads and bridges. Tourism is nice and roads are in some ways an essential government function, but the emergency COVID spending was meant to help states address an immediate public health crisis—or to offset the costs of it. It's not at all clear how highway construction was a victim of the pandemic, and "travel marketing" is something that shouldn't be funded with taxpayer dollars no matter where they come from. If there ever was a need for emergency aid to states and localities, it has obviously long since passed. Edwards points out that state and local tax revenue in the first quarter of 2023 was up 25 percent over the first quarter of 2020—which immediately preceded the onset of the pandemic. "The states have full treasuries, and so they should give any remaining bailout funds back to Washington," he recommends. Whether that happens remains to be seen. It's probably more likely that, with so much pandemic-era emergency cash still waiting to be spent, state and local governments will find more silly ways to blow through piles of taxpayer money they never should have gotten their hands on in the first place.The post The COVID Bailout of State and Local Governments Was Unnecessary appeared first on Reason.com.

       Israel tells one million people to flee Gaza: Overnight, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned the more than a million residents of Gaza to flee the entirety of the north. Two major refugee camps and all of Gaza City are included in the zone that the IDF plans to attack in retribution for the 1,300 Israelis who have been killed by Hamas' October 7 invasion and the fighting that has followed in the days since. Hamas has "dismissed [Israel's warning] as a ploy and called on people to stay in their homes," per the Associated Press. Some are staying put, but others are joining the roughly 400,000 who have already fled their homes. "We cannot evacuate hospitals and leave the wounded and sick to die," Gazan Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra told the A.P. The United Nations agency that's ministering to refugees in the north says that it will not evacuate the schools where displaced Palestinians are staying. In Gaza, people are desperate: More than 1,500 have been killed and the country's main power plant has run out of fuel. Generators that power the main hospital, Al-Shifa, only have a few days' worth of fuel left before they go dark. The road out of the north is jammed, and many people do not have functioning cars, let alone fuel. "Israel said it needed to target Hamas' military infrastructure, much of which is buried deep underground," per the A.P. An IDF spokesman says residents will be permitted to return once the war is over, but it's not clear what will be left if the Israeli military successfully carries out its plans. U.S. inflation update: "The Federal Reserve's higher interest rates were supposed to trigger changes to fiscal policy," writes Reason's Eric Boehm. "So far, that hasn't happened." Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new inflation data, which shows prices up 3.7 percent over the last year but "core inflation" (which exempts food and gas) at 4.1 percent. Rents and hotel costs, meanwhile, are up 7.2 percent, reports Boehm. (Paul Krugman, of course, claims we "won" the war on inflation at "very little cost," which is patently absurd.) For 11 consecutive meetings, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates (before halting in July, keeping the base rate at 5.5 percent). Inflation has cooled as a result, but "the federal government's $33 trillion national debt and rising budget deficits are creating inflationary pressure in ways that remain underappreciated," argues Boehm. "The big problem is that, while higher interest rates are helping curb inflation, they are worsening the federal government's deficit." Macroaggressions: "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence," read one representative statement from Harvard student groups. Similar ones were issued at Stanford, Columbia, George Washington, and elsewhere. At Yale, religious studies professor Zareena Grewal tweeted: "Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard" and that Israel is a "murderous, genocidal settler state." It hasn't all been paraglider poster art and simplistic decolonizer narratives (all free speech that I personally find vile, but important to permit), though: At Columbia, an Israeli student was reportedly assaulted by another student. Since roughly 2013—the start of the modern-day campus social justice movement—college administrators have been offering safe spaces replete with coloring books, bubbles, and Play-Doh for students who might find their emotional health threatened by hearing words they disagree with from on-campus speakers (if even platformed at all). They've been providing guidance on which Halloween costumes might hurt feelings or lean too far into stereotypes (at, for example, Yale, where Grewal teaches). Students have been routinely sorted into affinity groups and privilege hierarchies, in what looked (to the uninitiated) like a benign effort to help them understand how other people's plights differ from their own. To some of us, these practices seemed hollow, infantilizing, or downright wrong from the start. But for many others, this moment we're in now has smashed whatever vestigial support for campus wokeness remained. Turns out, when people reveal themselves to be Hamas apologists, it is hard to take seriously their requests for microaggression sensitivity.  Scenes from New York:  In my opinion, it's times like these when in-person worship is most essential. The post-COVID pivot-to-Zoom when under threats of violence or contagion feels soul-corroding.  This is NEW YORK  "New York State officials are starting to suggest synagogues consider closing Friday out of an abundance of caution and making Erev Shabbat services virtual." https://t.co/FxEg6hIiBd — Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) October 12, 2023  QUICK HITS  In France, pro-Palestine protests and rallies were banned. Authorities say this is because they need to protect "public order," but cracking down on speech in this manner is a flagrant civil liberties violation. Yesterday, Zach Weissmueller and I interviewed terrorism expert Max Abrahms on the situation in Israel and Gaza. Watch it here. "At every stop since Saturday's massacres, Americans and Israelis have compared Hamas to the radical Islamists of ISIS," writes Reason's Matt Welch. "Therein lies cause for even more sobriety when it comes to hostages." Rep. Steve Scalise (R–La.) drops out of House speaker race. It is not clear to me why an "Ebony Alert" is needed in order to alert Californians to missing black women and children. Do Amber Alerts not work? Israel eases gun restrictions, and tells its citizens to arm themselves. The post 1 Million Told To Flee appeared first on Reason.com.

       Inflation has fallen from the shocking highs that were reached last year, but the Federal Reserve's efforts have not successfully returned the beast to its cage. If rising prices are to be fully tamed, it increasingly looks like Congress will have to get the deficit under control first. Prices are up 3.7 percent over the past year, according to new inflation data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday morning. But so-called "core inflation," which filters out the more volatile categories like food and fuel prices, rang in at 4.1 percent in the newest report. Some smaller categories have seen considerably faster price hikes over the past 12 months—shelter prices, which include rents and hotel costs, are up 7.2 percent. In an attempt to control inflation, the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates at 11 consecutive meetings starting in March of last year. Since July, the central bank has left interest rates unchanged—the Fed's current base rate is 5.5 percent, up from 3.25 percent a year ago. Higher interest rates seem to have brought inflation down, but prices are still rising nearly twice as fast as the Federal Reserve's target of 2 percent annually. It's possible that we've reached the limit of what the Federal Reserve can accomplish in terms of taming inflation through monetary policy. The federal government's $33 trillion national debt and rising budget deficits are creating inflationary pressure in ways that remain underappreciated. The big problem is that, while higher interest rates are helping curb inflation, they are worsening the federal government's deficit. Writing at CNBC, Kelly Evans gets at the heart of this conundrum: "If we don't quickly close the gap between spending and revenues, the debt load will keep growing, and interest costs will keep on rising, and the deficit will thus stay elevated, which grows the debt load even more." So what does that have to do with inflation? As Reason contributor Veronique de Rugy, an economist at George Mason University, explains at National Review, there is an assumption built into monetary theory that says fiscal contraction—that is, smaller deficits—will necessarily follow a monetary contraction like the rising interest rates of the past year. In other words, when central banks make it more expensive to borrow, they assume the politicians in charge of fiscal policy will respond by borrowing less. But that hasn't happened, and there is little indication that it will in the near future. The federal budget deficit nearly doubled in the fiscal year that ended on September 30, and bigger deficits are expected in the next few years—in significant part because of the feedback loop between higher interest rates and rising debt costs. To fully get inflation under control, de Rugy says the country must experience a period of negative wealth effects—that is, a decline in demand driven by consumers choosing to rein in spending due to declining wealth. That's hardly something worth cheering for, but it might be the only way to truly tame inflation—and it probably won't happen until Congress curbs spending too. "The only way to get a reduction of total demand, which will ultimately rein in inflation, is for the fiscal authority to implement fiscal consolidation, hence creating a negative wealth effect," writes de Rugy. "Absent that fiscal contraction, inflation will rise." Changes to monetary policy have brought inflation down from last year's near-record highs, but the monetary theory upon which that policy is built assumes that fiscal policy will finish the job by reducing deficits. Congress, so far, doesn't seem interested in cooperating—so expect prices to keep rising at an annoyingly fast rate.The post Inflation Won't Go Away Until Congress Gets the Deficit Under Control appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden’s core foreign-policy argument has been that his steady engagement with international allies can produce better results for America than the impulsive unilateralism of his predecessor Donald Trump. The eruption of violence in Israel is testing that proposition under the most difficult circumstances.The initial reactions of Biden and Trump to the attack have produced exactly the kind of personal contrast Biden supporters want to project. On Tuesday, Biden delivered a powerful speech that was impassioned but measured in denouncing the Hamas terror attacks and declaring unshakable U.S. support for Israel. Last night, in a rambling address in Florida, Trump praised the skill of Israel’s enemies, criticized Israel’s intelligence and defense capabilities, and complained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to claim credit for a U.S. operation that killed a top Iranian general while Trump was president.At this somber moment, Trump delivered exactly the sort of erratic, self-absorbed performance that his critics have said make him unreliable in a crisis. Trump’s remarks seemed designed to validate what Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that focuses on the Middle East, had told me in an interview a few hours before the former president’s speech. “This is the most delicate moment in the Middle East in decades,” Murphy said. “The path forward to negotiate this hostage crisis, while also preventing other fronts from opening up against Israel, necessitates A-plus-level diplomacy. And you obviously never saw C-plus-level diplomacy from Trump.”[Franklin Foer: Biden will be guided by his Zionism]The crisis is highlighting more than the distance in personal demeanor between the two men. Two lines in Biden’s speech on Tuesday point toward the policy debate that could be ahead in a potential 2024 rematch over how to best promote international stability and advance America’s interests in the world.Biden emphasized his efforts to coordinate support for Israel from U.S. allies within and beyond the region. And although Biden did not directly urge Israel to exercise “restraint” in its ongoing military operations against Hamas, he did call for caution. Referring to his conversation with Netanyahu, Biden said, “We also discussed how democracies like Israel and the United States are stronger and more secure when we act according to the rule of law.” White House officials acknowledged this as a subtle warning that the U.S. was not giving Israel carte blanche to ignore civilian casualties as it pursues its military objectives in Gaza.Both of Biden’s comments point to crucial distinctions between his view and Trump’s of the U.S. role in the world. Whereas Trump relentlessly disparaged U.S. alliances, Biden has viewed them as an important mechanism for multiplying America’s influence and impact—by organizing the broad international assistance to Ukraine, for instance. And whereas Trump repeatedly moved to withdraw the U.S. from international institutions and agreements, Biden continues to assert that preserving a rules-based international order will enhance security for America and its allies.Even more than in 2016, Trump in his 2024 campaign is putting forward a vision of a fortress America. In almost all of his foreign-policy proposals, he promises to reduce American reliance on the outside world. He has promised to make the U.S. energy independent and to “implement a four-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods and gain total independence from China.” Like several of his rivals for the 2024 GOP nomination, Trump has threatened to launch military operations against drug cartels in Mexico without approval from the Mexican government. John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers in the White House, has said he believes that the former president would seek to withdraw from NATO in a second term. Walls, literal and metaphorical, remain central to Trump’s vision: He says that, if reelected, he’ll finish his wall across the Southwest border, and last weekend he suggested that the Hamas attack was justification to restore his ban on travel to the U.S. from several Muslim-majority nations.Biden, by contrast, maintains that America can best protect its interests by building bridges. He’s focused on reviving traditional alliances, including extending them into new priorities such as “friend-shoring.” He has also sought to engage diplomatically even with rival or adversarial regimes, for instance, by attempting to find common ground with China over climate change.These differences in approach likely will be muted in the early stages of Israel’s conflict with Hamas. Striking at Islamic terrorists is one form of international engagement that still attracts broad support from Republican leaders. And in the Middle East, Biden has not diverged from Trump’s strategy as dramatically as in other parts of the world. After Trump severely limited contact with the Palestinian Authority, Biden has restored some U.S. engagement, but the president hasn’t pushed Israel to engage in full-fledged peace negotiations, as did his two most recent Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Instead, Biden has continued Trump’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and surrounding Sunni nations around their common interest in countering Shiite Iran. (Hamas’s brutal attack may have been intended partly to derail the ongoing negotiations among the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia that represent the crucial next stage of that project.) Since the attack last weekend, Trump has claimed that Hamas would not have dared to launch the incursion if he were still president, but he has not offered any substantive alternative to Biden’s response.Yet the difference between how Biden and Trump approach international challenges is likely to resurface before this crisis ends. Even while trying to construct alliances to constrain Iran, Biden has also sought to engage the regime through negotiations on both its nuclear program and the release of American prisoners. Republicans have denounced each of those efforts; Trump and other GOP leaders have argued, without evidence, that Biden’s agreement to allow Iran to access $6 billion in its oil revenue held abroad provided the mullahs with more leeway to fund terrorist groups like Hamas. And although both parties are now stressing Israel’s right to defend itself, if Israel does invade Gaza, Biden will likely eventually pressure Netanyahu to stop the fighting and limit civilian losses well before Trump or any other influential Republican does.Murphy points toward another distinction: Biden has put more emphasis than Trump on fostering dialogue with a broad range of nations across the region. Trump’s style “was to pick sides, and that meant making enemies and adversaries unnecessarily; that is very different from Biden’s” approach, Murphy told me. “We don’t know whether anyone in the region right now can talk sense into Hamas,” Murphy said, “but this president has been very careful to keep lines of communication open in the region, and that’s because he knows through experience that moments can come, like this, where you need all hands on deck and where you need open lines to all the major players.”[Read: ‘The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades’]In multiple national polls, Republican and Democratic voters now express almost mirror-image views on whether and how the U.S. should interact with the world. For the first time in its annual polling since 1974, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs this year found that a majority of Republicans said the U.S. would be best served “if we stay out of world affairs,” according to upcoming results shared exclusively with The Atlantic. By contrast, seven in 10 Democrats said that the U.S. “should take an active part in world affairs.”Not only do fewer Republicans than Democrats support an active role for the U.S. in world affairs, but less of the GOP wants the U.S. to compromise with allies when it does engage. In national polling earlier this year by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, about eight in 10 Democrats said America should take its allies’ interests into account when dealing with major international issues. Again in sharp contrast, nearly three-fifths of GOP partisans said the U.S. instead “should follow its own interests.”As president, Trump both reflected and reinforced these views among Republican voters. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Paris climate accord, and the nuclear deal with Iran that Obama negotiated, while also terminating Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks. Biden effectively reversed all of those decisions. He rejoined both the Paris Agreement and the WHO on his first days in office, and he brought the U.S. back into the Human Rights Council later in 2021. Although Biden did not resuscitate the TPP specifically, he has advanced a successor agreement among nations across the region called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Biden has also sought to restart negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, though with little success.Peter Feaver, a public-policy and political-science professor at Duke University, told me he believes that Trump wasn’t alone among U.S. presidents in complaining that allies were not fully pulling their weight. What makes Trump unique, Feaver said, is that he didn’t see the other side of the ledger. “Most other presidents recognized, notwithstanding our [frustrations], it is still better to work with allies and that the U.S. capacity to mobilize a stronger, more action-focused coalition of allies than our adversaries could was a central part of our strength,” said Feaver, who served as a special adviser on the National Security Council for George W. Bush. “That’s the thing that Trump never really understood: He got the downsides of allies, but not the upsides. And he did not realize you do not get any benefits from allies if you approach them in the hyper-transactional style that he would do.”Biden, Feaver believes, was assured an enthusiastic reception from U.S. allies because he followed the belligerent Trump. But Biden’s commitment to restoring alliances, Feaver maintains, has delivered results. “There’s no question in my mind that Biden got better results from the NATO alliance [on Ukraine] in the first six months than the Trump team would have done,” Feaver said.As the Middle East erupts again, the biggest diplomatic hurdle for Biden won’t be marshaling international support for Israel while it begins military operations; it will be sustaining focus on what happens when they end, James Steinberg, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me. “The challenge here is how do you both reassure Israel and send an unmistakably tough message to Hamas and Iran without leading to an escalation in this crisis,” said Steinberg, who served as deputy secretary of state for Obama and deputy national security adviser for Clinton. “That’s where the real skill will come: Without undercutting the strong message of deterrence and support for Israel, can they figure out a way to defuse the crisis? Because it could just get worse, and it could widen.”In a 2024 rematch, the challenge for Biden would be convincing most Americans that his bridges can keep them safer than Trump’s walls. In a recent Gallup Poll, Americans gave Republicans a 22-percentage-point advantage when asked which party could keep the nation safe from “international terrorism and military threats.” Republicans usually lead on that measure, but the current advantage was one of the GOP’s widest since Gallup began asking the question, in 2002.This new crisis will test Biden on exceedingly arduous terrain. Like Clinton and Obama, Biden has had a contentious relationship with Netanyahu, who has grounded his governing coalition in the far-right extremes of Israeli politics and openly identified over the years with the GOP in American politics. In this uneasy partnership with Netanyahu, Biden must now juggle many goals: supporting the Israeli prime minister, but also potentially restraining him, while avoiding a wider war and preserving his long-term goal of a Saudi-Israeli détente that would reshape the region. It is exactly the sort of complex international puzzle that Biden has promised he can manage better than Trump. This terrible crucible is providing the president with another opportunity to prove it.

       Ground invasion looking likely: "Every Hamas member is a dead man," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech yesterday, accompanied by his newly formed wartime cabinet, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and opposition leader Benny Gantz. "Hamas is ISIS, and we will crush and eliminate it just as the world crushed and eliminated ISIS." "Israel is in one of its darkest hours ever," said Gantz. Following this past weekend's massacre of Israelis by Hamas, the military is sending troops to the Gaza border, which signals the increasing likelihood of a ground invasion. Israeli airline El Al will, for the first time since the 1980s, fly on Shabbat, carrying army reservists back from around the world. Hamas has abducted more than 150 people total—almost all civilians—and "threatened to execute them one by one and videotape the killings each time an Israeli airstrike hits Gazans in their homes," per The New York Times. Some of the hostages are confirmed to be Americans, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on the ground in Israel now. (The total American death toll went up to 25 overnight.) Meanwhile, power has gone out in Gaza after Israel blockaded the strip, cutting off access to fuel that's used for the region's only power plant. Generators are powering the main hospital, Al-Shifa, but authorities in Palestine say they only have three days' worth of fuel, max, left. "It feels like the world is collapsing," one Gazan told reporters. Pentagon abortion policy? If you read Roundup yesterday, you'll note that I mentioned that the U.S. currently has no ambassador to Israel. The reason why? Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R–Ala.) is protesting a controversial Pentagon policy that facilitates service members traveling to get abortions by reimbursing their travel expenses and allowing them up to three weeks of paid leave for this purpose. As part of this protest, Tuberville is holding up the confirmations of not only the ambassador to Israel but also two nominees for Joint Chiefs and tons of high-up military promotions. "Tuberville's blockade is unique because it affects hundreds of military nominations and promotions," reports the Associated Press. "Democratic leaders would have to hold roll call votes on every one to get around the hold, an unwieldy and time-consuming process in a chamber that already struggles to finish its basic business." For people with deeply held moral objections to abortion—like myself—the fact that so many workplaces (Meta, Airbnb, KPMG, JP Morgan, Tesla, Disney, Amazon, Netflix) now offer "abortion benefits" in the wake of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision is disturbing. But more practically, it creates problems when those issuing such benefits are divided on their prudence and morality; Tuberville and many of his Republican colleagues clearly stand in opposition to the federal government providing such lenience for abortion-seekers, which has now resulted in the bizarre ambassador holdup as war breaks out in the Middle East. "Partisan antics have gotten in the way of key nominations and military promotions for too long," Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.) said recently. Coons unfortunately seems oblivious to the idea that it's actually partisan antics on both sides that have led to this situation. Congressional kerfuffles: Representatives in the House remain unsure who they want to elect as speaker following the historic ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) last week. After meeting privately yesterday, Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R–La.) seems like the narrow favorite. He "won the GOP conference's nomination for speaker by a 113-99 vote, but he needs 217 votes to become speaker and thus can only afford to lose around four Republican votes on the House floor," reports Axios. That said, "if Republicans aren't able to line up behind either of the two leading contenders to be speaker of the House—Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio—there is a third possibility that a bloc of Republicans favors: the former speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy," reports The New York Times. We will be living through Groundhog Day, forevermore.  Scenes from New York:  New York's new short-term rental regulations have the most predictable consequences ever:   NYC tried to regulate away AirBnB and a peer to peer platform popped up Life, uh, finds a way pic.twitter.com/VpPRvSpAuc — jack miller ♧ e/acc (@john_iller) October 11, 2023  As one property owner told me last month, "The city is treating our private property as the city's housing stock."  QUICK HITS  One could also have chosen to renounce DSA membership because of the bloody record of socialism in Venezuela, Cuba, and pretty much everywhere else it's been tried, but I guess I'll take this too. Better late than never:   I renounce my membership in the DSA pic.twitter.com/rtpxStKW2Q — Congressman Shri Thanedar (@RepShriThanedar) October 11, 2023   This:    For 4 years we've been infantalized with a highly commercial ethical binary demanding we forget all we know about the complexity of human affairs and believe that everything is either "racist" or "antiracist." This worldview's adherents are falling apart in the face of reality. https://t.co/VLtIfoEGGe — Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) October 11, 2023   Sussing out which reports from the Israel-Hamas war are false. Tune into Reason's YouTube channel to watch Zach Weissmueller and me interview terrorism expert Max Abrahms at 1 p.m. ET today. "A federal judge cleared the way Wednesday for enforcement of a public health order that suspends the right to carry guns at public parks and playgrounds in New Mexico's largest metro area," reports the Associated Press. It's stunning to me that this can be deemed public health. "Country Garden, the largest Chinese developer by contracted sales last year, warned Tuesday that it doesn't expect to be able to repay all its U.S. dollar bonds and other offshore debts—after missing a 470 million Hong Kong dollar loan repayment, equivalent to around $60 million," reports the Wall Street Journal. An extremely weak piece from The New York Times that sugarcoats the antisemitism on display in Times Square over the weekend. How is Google's AI chatbot doing? Inside the human rights abuses in China's fishing industry. "[Michael] Lewis likes to write about figures who survey the informational landscape, weigh the probabilities, and, under conditions of uncertainty, take expensive gambles—which is exactly what Lewis himself has done," writes Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker on the author's new Sam Bankman-Fried book. The post Darkest Hours appeared first on Reason.com.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Reality TV is not generally known for its wholesome content. An exception might be a new show called The Golden Bachelor. A variation on the popular original, in which a single young man is courted by several attractive, eligible women, The Golden Bachelor features a retired restaurateur named Gerry Turner, who is considering marriage to one of 22 aspiring women 60 or over (he is an athletic, tanned 72, and hasn’t lost a single hair). The show creates a spectacle because, despite the fact that more Americans are getting married later in life, this potential match is much older than what is typical.But this raises a question I commonly hear from my 20-something students, as well as from anxious parents (closer to my age) of single adult children: What is the ideal age to wed, in order to achieve happiness and marital success? Philosophers have weighed in on this. In his Politics, for example, Aristotle offered this advice: “It is fitting for the women to be married at about the age of eighteen and the men at thirty-seven or a little before.” Social scientists see it differently. A researcher at the Institute for Family Studies offered a more social-scientific estimate of the optimal age for getting hitched: 28 to 32 for both partners. This is the “sweet spot,” where divorce within the first five years of marriage is lowest.[From the October 2023 issue: George Eliot’s subversive vision of marriage]Naturally, this finding might provoke angst among those who would like to be married but have passed the “ideal” window. But it shouldn’t. By looking at why the 28-to-32 bracket appears to work best, we might be able to re-create those conditions for almost any age—even 72.The average age of marriage in the United States has been rising for years. In 1980, the average meant that a man married at 25, a woman at 22. Today, those numbers are 30 and 28, respectively. There are still outliers on the low end—two of my kids married in their early 20s—but I meet many more young people on the other side of today’s averages, who say they have no plans to marry before their mid-30s or even later.Is this aging trend good or bad for marital happiness? The raw data are not very encouraging: Marital satisfaction is falling as marriage age rises, according to statistics collected over the past half century by the General Social Survey that I analyzed. Following a gradual but significant downward trajectory, the percentage of married Americans who say they’re “very happy” with their union has fallen from more than 67 percent in the early 1970s to about 60 percent today.But the analysis of data from the National Survey of Family Growth that examine age at marriage and likelihood of divorce reveals a more complicated story: The failure rate falls as people marry later in their 20s, but then it starts to rise again. After the 28-to-32 sweet spot, the odds of divorce increase by 5 percent each year. (In case you are wondering, the IFS researcher’s excellent analysis of data from 2011 to 2013 controls for demographic variables such as education, religion, and sexual history.) The average age of marriage happens to be optimal, although this almost certainly won’t remain the case as the average age continues to rise.[Read: Seven books that explore how marriage really works]Surprisingly little research has looked at exactly why marriages tend to struggle when they start earlier or later, so I looked at indirectly associated studies to find clues. One helpful line of research comes, believe it or not, from the success rate for different kinds of business formation.Consider start-ups. According to a study published in 2006 in the journal Strategic Organization, one factor predictive of success is the level of experience—a feature of maturity—of the founders. Having taught social entrepreneurship and worked with nonprofit start-ups for many years, I can confirm that when founders are green, they are enthusiastic but tend to make errors that people with a little more experience would probably avoid.So it is with marriages, I suspect: A bit of experience with life and relationships may increase the chances of success for the co-founders of a marriage start-up. (Notably, such experience might not include cohabitation before marriage: The sociologists Lyman Stone and W. Bradford Wilcox have shown that living together actually predicts longer-term lower marital success in the United States.)On the other side of the age sweet spot, we find adults who might have a little too much experience, or who are entrenched in the ways of single life, making a shared life difficult. This risk sounds quite similar to the problems seen with a different kind of corporate arrangement: mergers, which usually seem logical but are rarely successful. A 2011 article in Harvard Business Review reported that 70 to 90 percent of mergers and acquisitions failed to live up to financial expectations.[Read: The case for dating a friend]This was because long-standing corporate cultures are very hard to integrate, with the result that productivity and morale fall off after a merger. One company might have a warm, convivial culture, whereas the other is formal and hierarchical, for example. Mixing them can be difficult to impossible. This could be analogous to two independent 30-somethings—with established habits, tastes, beliefs, and careers—trying to become a single married unit.The sweet spot for a durable romantic partnership, then, is a new venture between two mature co-founders who are not so set in their ways that they act like entrenched corporations. Although this typically implies a particular age band, it doesn’t have to. Even people who have passed the 28-to-32 window can benefit by resisting the characteristics of a merger. Here are three practices they might keep in mind.1. Bank on the partnership. In a corporate merger, there must be financial integration. The same goes for a marriage: Maintaining separate finances lowers the chances of success. Keeping money apart might seem sensible in order to avoid unnecessary disagreements, especially when both partners are established earners. But research shows that when couples pool their funds and learn to work together on saving and spending, they have higher relationship satisfaction and are less likely to split up. Even if you don’t start out this way and have to move gradually, financial integration should be your objective.2. Forget 50–50. A merger—as opposed to a takeover—suggests a “50–50” relationship between the companies. But this is rarely the case, because the partner firms have different strengths and weaknesses. The same is true for relationship partners. I have heard older couples say that they plan to split responsibilities and financial obligations equally; this might sound good in theory, but it’s not a realistic aspiration. Worse, splitting things equally militates against one of the most important elements of love: generosity—a willingness to give more than your share in a spirit of abundance, because giving to someone you care for is pleasurable in itself. Researchers have found that men and women who show the highest generosity toward their partner are most likely to say that they’re “very happy” in their marriage.Of course, generosity can’t be a one-way street. Even the most bountiful, free-giving spouse will come to resent someone who is a taker; a “100–0” marriage is surely even worse than the “50–50” one. The solution is to defy math: Make it 100–100.3. Take a risk. A common insurance policy in merger marriages is the prenuptial agreement—a contract to protect one or both parties’ assets in the case of divorce. It’s a popular measure: The percentage of couples with a “prenup” has increased fivefold since 2010.[Arthur C. Brooks: The type of love that makes people happiest]A prenup might sound like simple prudence, but it is worth considering the asymmetric economic power dynamic that it can wire into the marriage. As one divorce attorney noted in a 2012 interview, “a prenup is an important thing for the ‘monied’ future spouse if a marriage dissolves.” Some scholars have argued that this bodes ill for the partnership’s success, much as asymmetric economic power between two companies makes a merger difficult.To have a successful romantic partnership at any age, the trick is to act like a mature start-up, not like a merger. Being a business-school professor, I did consider some other corporate models as I thought about other ways to succeed in love. In truth, though, I couldn’t find any that seemed promising.Acquisition? That sounds weirdly transactional. And I have never had someone tell me, “I lured my spouse with money, and we lived happily ever after.” Hostile takeover? I haven’t found reliable data on the success of marriages that start out as extramarital affairs, but the premise seems pretty improbable. Whether you are 22 or 72, the best approach to a successful love start-up is one in which co-founders see each other as equals and walk confidently into the future together in a spirit of generous, golden collaboration.

I’ve written about capitalism’s global triumph, first displacing traditional agrarianism and then surviving the socialist alternative. And I’ve described the resulting dispensation as a global capitalist “monoculture” to highlight the novel circumstances in which we now find ourselves: for the first time in centuries, we live in a world with no real competition among rival social systems. As I explained in an earlier essay, that means an unprecedented and ever-increasing homogenization of the social landscape:  As it has spread around the planet, capitalism has been reducing the external sources of the cultural and institutional variety out of which it emerged. Yes, the system’s growing complexity of specialization and exchange has produced astonishing internal variety — in the number of different occupations, different organizations producing goods and services, different goods and services available for sale, and different subcultures and “consumption communities.” But this is variety within a particular kind of social order. And that particular kind of social order is now the only game in town. Since the fall of communism 30 years ago, capitalism for the first time in its existence lacks any competition from a rival system. Yes, the capitalist system currently comes in many flavors: democratic and authoritarian, advanced and underdeveloped, inclusive and extractive, with public sectors ranging from lean to expansive. But in broader historical context, these differences are much less striking than the unprecedented degree of world-spanning uniformity. Virtually the entire inhabitable surface of the globe has been claimed by territorially exclusive states using the same basic forms of governance. Some two-thirds of working-age people worldwide work for money income, most as wage employees of private business enterprises. The majority of people now live in cities constructed from the same building materials and shaped by the same architectural styles. Everywhere you can find people wearing the same kinds of clothing, eating the same food, driving the same cars, watching the same movies, and obsessing about the same media celebrities.  Since America is the birthplace of the modern mass production economy, we tend to see capitalism’s homogenizing influence as making the rest of the world more like us – we used to call it “Westernization.” And indeed, the most dramatic recent episodes of institutional and cultural convergence – the collapse of communism, and the explosion of capitalist growth in the less developed world since that collapse – have occurred in faraway locales. But in this essay, I want to focus on the advance of the capitalist monoculture here at home. When I was a kid, there were still extensive spaces in American social life relatively free from commercialization, guided by values and goals other than maximizing economic competitiveness and profit-taking. But those holdovers from a traditional, pre-capitalist past have been steadily weakened and then eliminated. And as a result, notwithstanding the post-1960s celebration of diversity and the subsequent explosion of subcultural variety, in the crucial realm of motives we are becoming increasingly uniform. I was born two years after FDA approval of the birth control pill and one year before the publication of The Feminine Mystique. So I’m old enough to remember the last days of the traditional sexual division of labor, based on the idea of a woman’s world separate and apart from man’s – and in particular, that a woman’s place is in the home. Female participation in the paid labor force had been rising gradually over the course of the 20th century, but still the expectation was that a woman’s primary social role was mother and homemaker. Accordingly, while it was increasingly common for young women to work, they typically left the work force after marrying and having kids. And women who remained on the job were generally shoved into “pink collar” ghettos like teaching, nursing, and secretarial work; the most prestigious and well-paying occupations were almost all reserved for men. Things are very different now. Since my birth year of 1962, women’s labor force participation has surged from around 38 percent to nearly 58 percent, while men’s has fallen from 82 percent down to 68 percent. One male bastion after another has fallen: female cops, firefighters, surgeons, pilots, astronauts, CEOs, and members of Congress are no longer novelties. And even though complaints about pay gaps and “glass ceilings” persist, often for good reason, female competitiveness in school and on the job has progressed to the point that we’re now starting to worry about boys and men falling behind. I’m also old enough to remember when Sunday was still set apart, shielded by law and custom from the full brunt of commercial hustle and bustle. In the 1960s, Sunday closing laws had survived major Supreme Court challenges and were still in place in a majority of the states. And where laws were absent or laxly enforced, traditions of churchgoing and Sabbath observance were still strong enough to exert their own restraining influence. But with ongoing court challenges at the state and federal level and popular agitation for an extra weekend shopping day, laws were gradually repealed or hollowed out with exceptions, and customary inhibitions relaxed as well. Over the course of the 70s and 80s, Sundays lost most of their distinctiveness. Just as the day of rest once stood apart, so did certain ways of making a living. Medicine and law became known as “learned professions” in medieval times, and practitioners developed special codes of ethics that were supposed to orient their work toward public service rather than commercial gain. In particular, the professional ideal dictated that the welfare of the patient or client was paramount, and “conflicts of interest” that gave professionals incentives to prioritize their own economic gain were actively discouraged. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw major initiatives to institutionalize that professional ideal through the establishment of new professional schools, new standards for education, and licensing regimes that subjected practitioners to detailed regulatory codes. Of course, in reality, members of the professions were always adept at padding their own nests, and their ethic of public service did not interfere with their being among the wealthiest members of their communities. Still, within the context of solo or small group practices paid directly by their patients and clients, something within shouting distance of the professional ideal was a living reality. The special educational and licensing regimes are still in place, but under conditions of mass affluence, floods of money have done much to undermine the distinction between the professions and ordinary commerce. In medicine, third-party payments by private insurers and then Medicare and Medicaid resulted in a huge and ongoing surge in healthcare spending. Now giant regional hospital networks, with hundreds of hospitals pulling in tens of billions of dollars every year, dominate the medical marketplace. In law, the deregulation of finance in the 1970s and the stock market boom that began in the 80s created enormous fees and catalyzed the growth of huge, increasingly international law firms. Now, it’s obvious enough that law and medicine are big business, and the main effect of their regulatory structures is to restrict supply and thereby further boost incomes. Another medieval institution that survived into the modern world, the university, also stood apart. American universities were originally dedicated to molding the character of the future elite through humanistic education. Beginning in the late 19th century, under German influence they shifted toward a greater emphasis on scholarly research. But whether they focused on teaching the liberal arts or advancing the frontiers of scientific knowledge, universities were clearly governed by a distinct ethos that prioritized the “life of the mind” over the practical business of getting and spending. Here again, mass affluence brought transformational change. The shift to an increasingly white-collar workforce created demand for mass postsecondary education: the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a college degree quadrupled between 1940 and 1980, from 6 to 24 percent. Meanwhile, Cold War imperatives led the federal government to flood the universities with research dollars. Universities were now assuming a new role, more directly integrated into the larger business of society: “knowledge factories” for the new information age. Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system and an important figure in this transition, put it this way in his 1963 book The Uses of the University: “The university and segments of industry are becoming more alike. As the university becomes tied into the world of work, the professor – at least in the natural and some of the social sciences – takes on the characteristics of an entrepreneur…. The two worlds are merging physically and psychologically.” The dramatically enlarged student body had different expectations of what an undergraduate education would provide: instead of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, students were more interested in practical skills, the equivalent of vocational training for knowledge workers. By 1970, business and education degrees accounted for over 36 percent of all college diplomas awarded. Even so, inertia served to preserve something of the old sense of the cloistered ivory tower. In 1970, over 17 percent of students still graduated with degrees in English, history, foreign languages, or philosophy, and I imagine the percentage was considerably higher among the nation’s most selective colleges. Meanwhile, course requirements for “Western Civ” and other broad surveys ensured a decent exposure to the humanities while on campus. But the dominant trend was clearly toward increasing vocationalism, and that trend has only accelerated in recent decades. After a big spike in the college wage premium during the 1980s, college came to be seen as the only reliable ticket to the middle class. As the influential 2010 book by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz put it, prospects for upward social mobility and a more inclusive society hinged on “the race between education and technology”: because of information technology’s bias in favor of more highly skilled workers, only a relentless push toward increasing educational attainment – in other words, expanding the ranks of college graduates – could keep income inequality at bay. With college now the nearly-exclusive gatekeeper for the meritocracy, the further commercialization of the campus experience proved irresistible. By 2020, history, English, foreign languages, and philosophy majors accounted for less than 5 percent of degrees conferred. Course requirements were scaled back or eliminated altogether; outside of the more rigorous STEM fields, college became a “buffet” of random specialized electives. Students started to be thought of as “customers”; climbing walls and lazy rivers proliferated. The corruption of the old humanistic ideal reached its grim terminus in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal of 2019. An F.B.I investigation revealed that, over a number of years, 33 parents, including some celebrities, paid more than $25 million to a college admissions consultant to secure slots for their kids at a number of different universities. The consultant bribed admissions officials, inflated test scores, and fabricated athletic and other accomplishments to earn his hefty fees. Here was the ultimate commoditization of the undergraduate degree: just another bauble for the rich to buy. Although less important than changes in the classroom, changes on college playing fields followed the same trend. Beginning in the late 19th century, college football captured the nation’s imagination with its spirited school rivalries and the romance of the amateur athlete. Eventually, though, television turned college football into a big business. And as more and more money poured through university athletic departments, keeping it coming came to dominate all other considerations. Postseason bowl games multiplied and started naming themselves after corporate sponsors; I recall the 1990 Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl as an early and especially absurd instance of this shameless money-grabbing. Money flowed under the table to get and keep star athletes; college recruiting scandals became a staple of the sports pages. More recently, the breakdown of the established athletic conferences and the associated abandonment of traditional rivalry games, the decision to allow “student-athletes” to earn money for use of their name, image, and likeness, and the rise of the transfer portal and its frictionless free agency have succeeded in removing whatever fig leaf still obscured the fact that college football is and has long been a professional sports league. And in professional sports, as TV executive Roone Arledge once said, “The answer to all your questions is money.” The class structure that governed American life as the country entered mass affluence was another pre-modern holdover: a quasi-hereditary ruling class, the last gasp of the old aristocratic ideal. I’m speaking here of the old WASP upper class, sustained by inherited wealth, raised to value “good breeding” and despise grasping parvenus, and guided (quite inconsistently!) by an ethos of noblesse oblige to place a high value on public service. Then came the mid-century meritocratic turn, paced by elite colleges’ decision to shift their admissions policies to favor smart kids of whatever background, which gradually reconstituted the American elite and in the process reoriented it. The new elite, now open to women and ethnic minorities, owes its position entirely to competitive success – and thus is vulnerable to downward mobility should its competitiveness falter. This vulnerability induces a deep and abiding insecurity, which we see in the feverish efforts of upper-middle-class “helicopter” parents to ensure that their kids come out on top. We see it as well in the rich’s increasingly brazen sense of entitlement (see “Varsity Blues,” above): now commonly seeing themselves as “wealth creators,” they too often equate their net worth with their contribution to society and so imagine themselves great benefactors even while, all too often, their fortunes came at our expense. Finally, let me discuss the oldest of the pre-modern institutions that have shaped American life: the church. It’s hard to overstate the degree to which the teachings of Jesus diverge from the materialist striving of capitalist life: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Of course Protestantism ingeniously succeeded in reconciling the two, yet even so Christian religiosity did exert some kind of moderating influence – at the very least by reserving the Sabbath as a day of rest. I’ve written already about the decline of organized religion, so I can be brief here: the fading of Christianity has badly weakened another source of pushback against the monoculture. Let me add just a couple of quick points. First, the victory of the monoculture can be seen in the transformation of the Christmas season into a massive, global, months-long shopping binge: Black Friday is now observed more dutifully than Good Friday. Second, it’s noteworthy that the one branch of American Christianity that has actually seen growth since the 1960s is evangelical Protestantism – and especially the Pentecostal and charismatic strains in which the “prosperity Gospel” is now so popular. God, it seems, can only maintain market share by merging with Mammon. Just as rivers can carve deep canyons into stone, so have the torrents of money produced by capitalist wealth-creation gradually eroded and effaced all cultural and institutional resistance to the logic of commerce. In the end, liquidity conquers all. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not nostalgic for the “good old days.” The old sexual division of labor squandered talents and thwarted dreams on a massive scale. The professionalization movement that tried to buffer law and medicine from commercial pressures turned out to be the origin story for a good chunk of today’s “captured economy.” Expanding educational opportunities outside the old-money elite was a triumph of mass uplift. The self-toppling of the old ruling caste in favor of a “career open to talents” must be seen as the WASPs’ finest hour: nothing in their reign became them like the leaving it. And as a religious nonbeliever myself, it’s hard for me to criticize others for coming to agree with me. I feel about the passing of the pre-modern holdovers in American life much as I do about the passing of the industrial working class. I don’t mourn either’s exit, but I do lament what has followed. Blue-collar life was physically debilitating and intellectually stunted; we cannot wish for the return of filthy smokestacks and soul-deadening assembly lines. Even so, when we look out at the atomization and anomie so prevalent today outside the elite, we are hard pressed to deny that, in important ways, the quality of life for ordinary people has declined. In similar fashion, I’m no reactionary who wants to live in a world of invidiously restricted opportunity. On the contrary, I celebrate the fact that women and minorities are no longer excluded from the economic mainstream, society’s juiciest plums are no longer reserved for an inbred old boys’ network, and serious academic study is no longer available only to a cossetted few. The demolition of the old institutions and social structures was a necessary step in social progress, clearing the landscape for new and better social forms. But we have bulldozed away the old, only to leave the social landscape flattened and denuded. Our failure to build anything new – to move past deconstruction and on to reconstruction – strikes me as a kind of regress. We have been reduced to a grim, economistic tunnel vision: all means other than competition, all ends other than profit, have been shunted to the margins of life. Some recent poll results are illustrative. In a survey of people ages 18 to 40, 75 percent said that making a good living was necessary for a fulfilling life, while only 32 percent said the same thing about marriage. Meanwhile, when parents were asked what they consider most important for their children, 88 percent said financial independence, and the same percentage said a job they enjoy; only 21 percent said marriage, while a mere 20 percent said children. It is appropriate, I believe, to associate increasing riches with increasing variety. Increased wealth isn’t simply a matter of enjoying more and more and more of the same; it allows us to expand our horizons and enjoy new and different things. For example, consider progress within the capitalist system. The first great strides of material progress enabled by industrialization took the form of fungible, mass-produced goods that were generally lower in quality than artisanal products, but which were so cheap that they were now affordable to ordinary people. The tradeoff involved – reduced quality and variety in exchange for dramatically improved affordability – led to withering critiques of mid-century capitalism: it was churning out cookie-cutter products for cookie-cutter people living cookie-cutter lives of stifling conformism. But those complaints died down in the ensuing decades, as capitalism made the turn toward product differentiation and mass customization, triggering in the process a dizzying proliferation of subcultures organized as “consumption communities.” These days, the critiques of options under capitalism tend to run in the opposite direction: the overwhelming surfeit of different products on the shelves supposedly amounts to a stress-inducing “tyranny of choice.” Yet outside the capitalist system of competition and maximization, our increasing riches have brought only increasing simplification and sameness. We are rich enough now that many of us no longer need to prioritize maximizing competitiveness and pecuniary gains. There are so many other important values to pursue: most obviously, love and friendship, community engagement, and the pursuit of outside interests and hobbies. It is perverse, then, that instead of using our greater wealth to develop all kinds of different and attractive ways of life, we are all crowding into one, hyper-competitive rut. It seems to me that the advance of the capitalist monoculture, in which all of us are reduced to playing the same game, constitutes a serious waste of our wealth and powers. What a dreary failure of imagination, when so many different and interesting games are possible. We want more, that’s for sure. As I discussed in The Age of Abundance and have mentioned repeatedly in these essays, mass affluence triggered a cultural shift in values: with existential security now assured, we are free to focus more on the higher values of belonging and meaning and self-realization. And thus most of us who are doing okay financially worry about our “work-life balance,” and many of us take affirmative steps to improve it by pulling back from a full commitment to economic maximization. (For my part, I long ago traded away the greater pecuniary income from lawyering for the greater psychic income from a more intellectually rewarding life as a think tank scholar.) Yet we are hampered in our ability to achieve the wanted balance because our present conception of it is purely individualistic rather than social. The balancing act is something each of us must attempt personally, but while living and operating in a larger system that itself is badly out of balance – that is, a system that actively encourages us, as both producers and consumers, to choose economic gain and material comfort over our deep-seated psychic needs for connection and belonging. Rising to the challenge of the permanent problem requires us to move past the monoculture: to erect on its foundations a new, reconstituted pluralism. We’ve already seen the mass customization of capitalist goods and services, and that constituted real progress. Now we need mass customization of ways of life, and enabling households, neighborhoods, and communities to provide more for themselves can create the social space within which such customization can occur. Seeing progress in greater pluralism is counterintuitive for us. Our instinct is to regard pluralism as backward and benighted, because the pre-modern world from which we’ve emerged was itself so highly pluralistic. And in the great historical struggles to liberate ourselves from those traditional structures, those on the other side were the ones who denounced progress and defended the old ways. We thus tend to associate progress with rationalization: in particular, with the substitution of the vast impersonal “extended order” of state-regulated markets for the dense undergrowth of traditional social arrangements, and the pursuit of legal, political, and social equality within the new order. But as Jacob Levy reminds us, in a free society the forces of rationalism and those of pluralism are always in tension. Push things too far out of balance one way or the other, and freedom is undermined. To reinvigorate our freedom, to liberate our agency and initiative from the suffocating weight of our top-heavy elite’s “immense and tutelary power,” we need to push back against the excesses of rationalization. To bring capitalism back into balance, to bring richness and variety and depth back to social life, we need more than subcultures of consumption. We need subcultures of independent production as well.The post The advance of the monoculture first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post The advance of the monoculture appeared first on Niskanen Center.

       Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has announced plans to expand sanctions against Iran in Florida, following reports that the nation aided in Hamas' devastating attacks on Israeli civilians this weekend.  "As a state and a nation, we must stand with Israel following the heinous attacks over the weekend," said Governor Ron DeSantis on Tuesday. "With Iran helping plot the barbaric attack against Israel, I want to make it abundantly clear: Florida supports the State of Israel against the Iranian terror state." Since early May, Florida has banned Iranian citizens, as well as citizens from six other nations, including China, Russia, and North Korea, from buying land in much of the state. Under this legislation, Florida government organizations were also prohibited from contracting many businesses located in these "countries of concern." According to DeSantis, this newest set of proposed sanctions is in direct reaction to reports that the Iranian regime helped plan Hamas' deadly terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. While the extent of Iran's involvement in the planning of Hamas violence this weekend has not yet been fully confirmed, it has long been acknowledged that the Iranian government provides significant cash and weapons aid to the terrorist organization.  According to a one-pager on the proposed legislation, Florida's state and local governments would be prohibited from doing business with any part of the Iranian "financial, construction, manufacturing, textile, technology, mining, metals, shipping, shipbuilding, and port sectors." The additional sanctions would not be removed until "both the President and United States Congress…certify that Iran has stopped supporting international terrorism and acquiring weapons of mass destruction," and the federal government lifts all sanctions against Iran. "These will be by far the strongest Iran sanctions that any state has enacted of all 50 states throughout this county," DeSantis said during his announcement of the proposal on Tuesday. While expansive, it's unclear how this set of proposed sanctions, if passed, would act as much more than a symbolic gesture—like most political sanctions, it's unlikely they will actually affect the decisions of the foreign government they're targeting. "While political sanctions are justifiable in principle, they're tough to justify in practice," University of Richmond philosophy professor Jessica Flanigan and William & Mary professor Christopher Freiman wrote in Reason in March 2022. "For one, public officials are not generally reliable in determining whether and how to effectively impose sanctions against unjust regimes. According to a recent analysis of political sanctions, they're generally unlikely to achieve major policy changes, regime change, or military impairment."The post Ron DeSantis Announces Intentions to Sanction Iran in Florida appeared first on Reason.com.

This might be Nikki Haley’s moment.Not her moment to become the Republican presidential front-runner. (Don’t be silly.) Not even her moment to nip at Donald Trump’s heels. But it could be her chance to consolidate the anti-Trump support in the GOP, and to make a solid play for the silver medal and maybe a good speaking slot at the RNC in Milwaukee next summer.The former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador has risen, slightly, in recent polls, and is now third in RealClearPolitics’ average of national polls, after Trump and Ron DeSantis. She is consistently coming in second in polling in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire, having pulled ahead of DeSantis there. This week, she picked up the endorsement of former Representative Will Hurd when he dropped out of the Republican race. She’s appearing at two major donor conferences this month. Her boomlet is a long way from the big candidate bubbles of the 2012 and 2016 GOP primaries, but it’s the most notable surge in the race right now.Haley has brought this about in part with strong performances at debates, where she’s managed to come off as an adult (sorry, Vivek), a lively presence (sorry, Mike and Tim), and an actual alternative to Trump without letting that define her (sorry, Chris). But more than anything, she has benefited from the dramatic flameout of DeSantis.[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]Nearly a year of campaigning has revealed a huge gap between “Ron DeSantis,” the candidate conservative elites thought they were getting when they coalesced behind him last fall, and Ron DeSantis, the actual man Americans have seen on the trail. Influential conservatives imagined a charismatic, crusading figure who could marry the belligerent rhetoric of Trump to a more traditional conservative platform and effective, low-drama governance. Plus he was a winner: Unlike Trump, who led Republicans to defeat or underperformance in 2018, 2020, and 2022, DeSantis had romped in Florida in the 2022 midterms. (Democrats also feared he was a formidable contender.)This combination enthralled old-school Republicans who had not either surrendered to Trumpism or abandoned the party. National Review practically became a DeSantis fanzine. Rupert Murdoch’s influential empire excitedly covered him, with the New York Post labeling him “DeFUTURE.”Instead, they’ve gotten DeFlation. Just as my colleague Mark Leibovich predicted last November, the more people get to know DeSantis, the less they like him. He delivers his lines like, well, he’s delivering lines. He seems incapable of talking to people like he’s a human being. His election-fraud squad and anti-Disney onslaught petered out. His vaunted campaign meme farm turns out to have had a thing for Nazi imagery. His flop reboot showed that the only boots that give him any lift are Cuban heels. Most lethally, from the standpoint of his bandwagon backers, he has failed to come close to challenging Trump’s dominance in the race, which was his whole appeal. (Though some backers simply refuse to believe it.) Donors have fled. A super PAC backing DeSantis has cut spending and lost staff. Murdoch has quickly gotten over DeSantis, like just another romantic partner.Thus the Haley buzz right now. Hurd’s support won’t do much for Haley on its own—if he had many followers, he wouldn’t be dropping out—but it bespeaks the concern of anti-Trump Republicans that they must consolidate to defeat Trump, and that DeSantis is simply not capable of doing that.But although it’s true that DeSantis looks like a terrible candidate, his ultimate problem was not that he’s a terrible candidate but rather that GOP primary voters don’t want someone other than Trump. The premise of the Haley boomlet, insofar as it exists, is that Republicans would choose another candidate if only the right one presented him- or herself. But Trump is consistently polling above 50 percent among GOP voters nationally. This isn’t a replay of 2016, where he managed to squeak past a splintered field but never achieved more than plurality support until he’d clinched the nomination.[David A. Graham: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]Trump-chilly Republican elites still haven’t accepted the reality that rank-and-file Republican voters have a different ideology than they do. What’s surprising is that even after failing to stop Trump in 2016 and seven years of eulogies for the Republican establishment, party elites still don’t get that. Speaking to a conference of his former donors yesterday, Mitt Romney said, “I want to put responsibility on your shoulders as the people who are financing campaigns to have some say as to when it’s time for the person you support to say, ‘Okay, I’m getting behind someone else.’”The donors, who presumably didn’t come into their piles of money by being bad at math, can run the numbers easily enough and see the flaws in this argument: Even if every Republican candidate except Trump dropped out and backed Haley, she’d still be trailing Trump. (That’s obviously not going to happen, especially given how bad the vibes are between Haley and Ramaswamy.) This makes Haley’s rise intellectually interesting, but it also means it will likely just be a footnote to Trump’s renomination.

       Last month, Gavin Newsom signed into law a California bill that will raise the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour starting in 2024. While the law has been hailed as a victory for low-wage Californians, the reality is much more complicated.  When states force industries to massively increase wages, the result isn't that the same number of employees start making more money. Instead, enacting a climbing minimum wage often results in higher unemployment and higher prices. The law, originally Assembly Bill 1228 was passed as a compromise measure. Last September, Newsom signed the Fast Food Accountability and Standards (FAST) Recovery Act, which would have increased the minimum wage for fast workers to up to $22 an hour. In response, a campaign to get a measure to repeal the law on the 2024 ballot quickly sprang up. Ultimately, restaurant groups gathered enough signatures for the referendum.  Rather than face a ballot referendum over the law, Assembly Bill 1228 was crafted to repeal the FAST Act and replace it with a less extreme alternative following negotiations with restaurant and labor groups. The new law applies to employees working for fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationally, with an exception for businesses that bake their own bread. However, even though a $20 minimum wage is less extreme than a $22 minimum, California's new fast food minimum wage will surpass the highest basic minimum wage in all other states—Washington DC's $17 minimum wage is the closest to California's new minimum for fast food workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California fast food workers currently make $16.60 an hour on average, the third highest in the nation. While ensuring that fast food workers get better pay may sound like a victory for the working class, there are major downsides to such high minimum wages. While things might be better for those workers who manage to keep their jobs—many business owners will likely be forced to lay off employees in order to keep the lights on or raise prices for consumers. "The economic literature on minimum wage increases has become murkier in recent years, but the overwhelming majority of economists agree that large minimum wage increases in excess of productivity gains means that employers will operate at a loss as far as the affected workers go," wrote Michael D. Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute following the passage of the FAST act. "Given that the average profit margin in the fast food industry is just 6–9 percent, those costs are almost certain to be passed along in terms of higher prices or lost jobs." Another side effect of California's new minimum wage law could be the acceleration in fast food companies' turn towards automation in an attempt to save on labor costs. "Over the last few years, many Americans, myself included, have been to McDonald's and used touch screens to place our own orders instead of interacting with cashiers," wrote Brad Polumbo in the Washington Examiner this week. "Well, the more arbitrarily expensive you make human labor, the more companies are incentivized to hurry up and embrace automation." Mandating higher and higher minimum wages for low-skilled jobs—like other government attempts to engineer labor market outcomes—ultimately rarely has its intended effect. Rather than making life better for Californians working in fast food, a new $20 minimum wage will likely cause many to lose their jobs.The post California's $20 Minimum Wage Will Hurt the Fast Food Workers It's Meant to Help appeared first on Reason.com.

       Rising death toll: Overnight, the number of deaths in Israel and Gaza rose to roughly 2,200, following Hamas' surprise attack on southern Israel this past weekend that resulted in the massacre of civilians. In addition, more than 150 foreign nationals who had been traveling or living in Israel are dead or missing.  This includes at least 40 Americans (20 dead, more than 20 missing), 29 Thais (18 dead, 11 missing), 17 missing or dead Brits, 10 missing or dead Nepalese, 22 missing or dead Argentines, 17 missing or dead French, two missing or dead Ukrainians, three missing or dead Austrians, and four missing or dead Canadians. Several Germans, French, Argentines, and Americans have been taken hostage but exact numbers are hard to come by. In the weeds: More information has come out about how Hamas carried out this past weekend's attack, which caught Israeli forces off guard. On Saturday, Hamas "appeared to destroy communications towers close to the Gaza border key to Israel's defense," reports The New York Times. Israel is now being hit from all sides. While this has all been happening on the southern front, the northern front also erupted: yesterday, missiles were launched from Syria and Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah have taken responsibility. Missiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome, Israel's air defense system. Israel has responded by bombing Hezbollah, and is continuing to bomb the Gaza Strip. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says a ground offensive will be launched in Gaza, and authorities there say a "humanitarian crisis" is imminent, as the power plant reportedly ran out of fuel around 2 p.m. local time, several hours ago. Doctors Without Borders has said that Al-Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza, only has about three days' worth of fuel, and that antibiotics, surgical equipment, and other supplies are close to being exhausted. At least 250,000 Gazans have been displaced. Israeli forces have started warning whole neighborhoods—not just individual buildings—when an attack is coming, and entire sections of Gaza City have been razed. American chaos: Not only do we currently have no speaker of the House, but we also do not have an ambassador to Israel. President Joe Biden's nominee, Jack Lew, must be hastily pushed through the Senate confirmation process, which will most likely happen next week. Lew, who served under President Bill Clinton as the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), developed "the memorandum of understanding at OMB on multiyear funding for Israel and worked to sustain it during the Obama administration." And, per an unnamed White House official, he also "worked to provide 'crucial funding' for Israeli missile defense systems to protect citizens from attacks," per NBC News. "The American ambassador to NATO said on Tuesday that U.S. military assistance to Israel after the weekend attacks by Hamas assailants would not come at Ukraine's expense," reports The New York Times. (Instead, it will come at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.) American insanity: Black Lives Matter's Chicago affiliate used Hamas paragliders—the ones who slaughtered 260-plus teens and young adults at a music festival—in their poster art expressing that they "stand with Palestine." Black Lives Matter's Los Angeles chapter proclaims that "when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense."  These groups are grafting their understanding of domestic race relations and colonizer/colonized narratives onto Israel and Palestine, which simply does not work. Celebrating the murderous paragliders of Hamas—a terrorist group that keeps Gazans entrenched in deep poverty, by the way—isn't the same as communicating opposition to the state of Israel. There are no easy answers here, but it is actually quite easy to avoid using barbaric killers as your graphic design motif. "When a political group is dogmatic to the extreme, there is no limit to the horrors they will condone and justify for their cause—no ability to depart from those they consider on their team, no matter what it is their teammates are doing: kidnapping children, killing kids in front of their parents, massacring hundreds at a concert, whatever," writes Tim Urban on Twitter.   Scenes from New York:  The folksy "hi y'all" and the candy corn and the "spooky" lettering, it's really all too insane, you'd think it was a parody:  The elected student president of the NYU Law School Bar Association just sent out a message refusing to condemn Hamas's mass slaughter and effectively cheerleading it. pic.twitter.com/mtn3ZUP4Li — Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) October 10, 2023  The person seemingly responsible for sending out this statement ended up getting their big law job offer from Winston & Strawn LLP revoked. I tend to oppose cancel culture wherever it strikes (but support the rights of private employers to decide who they want to hire and fire), so my rough take is that law firms should probably vet people more aggressively during the hiring process if they're sensitive to campus-activist drivel. But there's also a question of whether a junior hire's thoughts on Hamas have any bearing on their ability to do their job well; we ostensibly work with plenty of people who believe wrong or immoral things but have the good sense to keep them quiet in a professional environment. Nor was this person a public figure whose words would have any sort of lasting impact or great influence—instead, these public statements from college students, DSA groups, and BLM come together to form a tour d'horizon of where the far left is going, and how simplistic American race relations narratives fall embarrassingly short. (A related cancel culture take—this one on the porn star Mia Khalifa—here, from Reason's Robby Soave.)  QUICK HITS  "The founder of the anti-trafficking group OUR has been sued by several accusers, who say he used their faith and visions from a psychic to sexually coerce them," reports Vice's Anna Merlan. Wearing a scarlet letter—as Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) did, in reference to criticism she received for her vote to oust the speaker of the House—doesn't really make sense. Did Rep. George Santos (R–N.Y.) commit credit card fraud? Twitter has been full of profoundly insane takes from Extremely Online leftists. Oliver Traldi's tweet nicely sums it up:   not much surprises me but i've been taken aback by the almost literal bullet-biting of "if a Native American wanted to murder me i would just have to say 'well played' and die" people have been doing on here — Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) October 9, 2023   More than 4,000 autoworkers at three General Motors plants in Canada went on strike yesterday, citing issues with pay and benefits in contract negotiations. More than 9,000 GM workers are currently on strike in the U.S. over similar negotiation disputes. "Within the first 15 minutes of her testimony, Ms. Ellison repeatedly blamed Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, for crimes that led to FTX's implosion," reports The New York Times. Incredible account of a 62-year-old grandfather who fought off Hamas, rescuing a bunch of people—including his own family, who was in hiding. In Ohio, pro-lifers and pro-choicers are anxiously watching the fate of an abortion referendum, which could be a "bellwether for 2024," says Politico. (For more on Ohio's referendum, see Elizabeth Nolan Brown's coverage here. For more on abortion and libertarianism, go here.) A sailor in the U.S. Navy was "arrested on national security charges pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring with a Chinese intelligence officer and receiving a bribe," Axios reports. The post Israel Hit From All Sides appeared first on Reason.com.

Just in time for Halloween, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and its Canadian counterpart (CASCA) have declared that skeletons, both male and female, can be scary. They can even cause harm! They were not referring to any supernatural shenanigans, however, but phantasms of their own creation.Earlier this year, Kathleen Lowrey, Carole Hooven, Elizabeth Weiss, Silvia Carrasco, Kathleen Richardson, and Michèle Sirois proposed a session for the 2023 annual AAA/CASCA meeting, entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.” The proposed session was accepted on 13 July, after having been reviewed by the AAA Section Program Chairs and CASCA’s Scientific Committee.Elizabeth Weiss provided a detailed abstract of her own talk, entitled, “No bones about it: Skeletons are binary; people may not be,” which sets out the scientific issues at stake:Sex identification—whether an individual was male or female – using the skeleton is one of the most fundamental components in bioarchaeology and forensic anthropology. Anthropologists have improved their ability to determine sex since their initial studies on skeletal remains, which depended on subjective assessment of skeletal robusticity to say whether someone was male or female. An understanding of physical diﬀerences in the pelvis related to childbirth, hormonal impacts on bones, and extensive comparative studies have provided anthropologists with an array of traits, such as those in the Phenice Method, to determine sex using just bones. The use of DNA to identify sex in skeletons by their 23rd chromosomes enables anthropologists to say whether infants are male or female for use in both criminal abuse cases and archaeological cases, such as in recognizing infanticide practices. Anthropologists’ ability to determine whether a skeleton is male or female is not dependent on time or culture; the same traits can be used to make a sex estimate in a forensic case in Canada, or to estimate sex in a Paleoindian dated around 11,500 years ago in Brazil. As anthropologists study more remains from more cultures and time periods, sex identiﬁcation has improved, because sex diﬀerences are biologically determined. In forensics, however, anthropologists should be (and are) working on ways to ensure that skeletal ﬁnds are identiﬁed by both biological sex and their gender identity, which is essential due to the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.The session was organized by the feminist Kathleen Lowrey, who has spoken out about the importance of distinguishing between biological sex and gender and is concerned about the ways in which current gender ideology promotes the “erasure” of women, as she calls it. However, Lowery’s is not the only viewpoint the panel would have presented. The six scholars involved span a range of diverse perspectives on this topic. As described in an open letter the panelists later sent to the AAA:Spanish anthropologist Silvia Carrasco planned to present data that looked at “sex-based oppression, violence and exploitation” and the difficulty of addressing these issues when biological sex is disavowed. UK anthropologist Kathleen Richardson’s abstract highlighted issues surrounding material disparities between the sexes in the tech industry that are being erased by counting men who identify as trans as women rather than by having more women enter the field. Francophone Canadian anthropologist Michèle Sirois was to offer an ethnographic account of the ways “in which Quebec feminists have organized to document, clarify and oppose the exploitative surrogacy industry that hides under the guise of ‘equity’ and ‘inclusion,’” and in which surrogacy policies which exploit poor women are cynically framed as liberatory.Moreover, though the panel did not include any males, it did encompass significant intellectual and national diversity: covering three fields of anthropology, with scholars from four countries, speaking three languages.How the Science Wars Ruined the Mother of AnthropologySydney. London. Toronto.QuilletteMatthew BlackwellGiven the selection of speakers and topics, one might have imagined that this session would have been a hot ticket at the AAA annual meeting. However, as Elizabeth Weiss informed me, the AAA had scheduled the session at such an unpopular time that she had originally feared that the six speakers would end up alone in a room, arguing with each other.This was not to be, however. Far from welcoming an open debate on a topic sure to provoke lively discussion and attract the attention of delegates, the AAA and CASCA—in an unprecedented move, and without informing the speakers in advance—summarily cancelled the session. The participants first learned about this in a 25 September letter from the presidents of the AAA and CASCA:Dear panelists,We write to inform you that at the request of numerous members the respective executive boards of AAA and CASCA reviewed the panel submission “Let's Talk about Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology” and reached a decision to remove the session from the AAA/CASCA 2023 conference program(me). This decision was based on extensive consultation and was reached in the spirit of respect for our values, the safety and dignity of our members, and the scientific integrity of the program(me). The reason the session deserved further scrutiny was that the ideas were advanced in such a way as to cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.While there were those who disagree with this decision, we would hope they know their voice was heard and was very much a part of the conversation. It is our hope that we continue to work together so that we become stronger and more unified within each of our associations. Going forward, we will undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings and will include our leadership in that discussion.This letter itself is remarkably anti-scholarly. To suggest that a spirited discussion of the importance of sex and gender in the context of archeology threatened the “scientific integrity of the program” is to misunderstand the nature of science, which depends upon a healthy dialectic in order to make progress. Equally worrisome is the inference that somehow a discussion about sex and gender could “cause harm” to trans and LGBTQI members. This implies that free and open discussion of ideas in an academic setting can be harmful. This is not only anathema to science and scholarship itself, but it also presupposes that the delegates attending this academic conference have the sensibilities of schoolchildren.Why Is the Society for American Archaeology Promoting Indigenous Creationism?Sydney. London. Toronto.QuilletteElizabeth Weiss and James W. SpringerThis letter on its own would have been bad enough, but the leadership of the AAA and CASCA felt it was necessary to supplement it with a public statement with the loaded title: “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session pulled from Annual Meeting program.”This is their central argument:The ﬁrst ethical principle in AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility is to “Do no harm.” The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community. It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.This reveals a distorted understanding of science and misrepresents the content of the proposed session. As a scholarly organization, the AAA’s first ethical principle should be “Seek the truth and follow the evidence.” It is also misleading to suggest that the proposed panel would go against “settled science.” On the contrary, the existence of binary sex differences in many species, including humans, has long been a foundational part of our understanding of biology. The AAA argue that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classiﬁcation.” By this, they are presumably alluding to the facts that not all humans have either XX or XY chromosomes, and that there are extremely rare genetic abnormalities that produce individuals who may present physical characteristics that do not reflect their underlying biological sex.But this is a red herring. Firstly, as Elizabeth Weiss emphasized to me, when I spoke to her about the AAA episode, many of these individuals are infertile, suggesting that this phenomenon is a bug, rather than a feature, in humans. Secondly, such cases are an example of the exception proving the rule. Some humans are born with missing limbs, or without some working organs, and remain viable, and grow into adulthood. However, these abnormal cases do not contradict the fact that a reasonable working description of human anatomy involves two arms, two legs, two lungs, two kidneys etc. Human reproduction is binary and involves two vastly different gametes: ova and sperm. Generically, females produce larger gametes (ova), and males produce smaller gametes (sperm).There is nothing transphobic about these statements. They imply nothing about gender dysphoria—and many if not most trans individuals are not genetically intersex in any case. Beyond acknowledging these biological fundamentals, nothing in the cancelled session suggested that gender (as opposed to sex) is binary at all. In fact, several of the discussions make the distinction between sex and gender explicit and seem to have been designed to examine this very distinction.Thankfully, Heterodox Academy will now be hosting the panel on 8 November. You can find more details here.The damage has been done, however. The leadership of the AAA and CASCA are demeaning anthropology as a field of social science and acting in opposition to the fundamental principles of academic progress, which is impossible without discussion and debate. Perhaps the most worrisome sentence in their letter is this statement of intent: “It is our hope that we continue to work together so that we become stronger and more unified within each of our associations.” Unity is nothing to be celebrated in science. Diversity, especially diversity of opinion, must be cherished and fostered. It is only through free and open debate that science and scholarship can hope to flourish.

       Mia Khalifa is a former pornographic actress who now works as a commentator and content creator for the adult magazine Playboy. Well, that gig is over for her: Playboy announced that it had fired Khalifa over pro-Hamas comments she made on social media. "Over the past few days, Mia has made disgusting and reprehensible comments celebrating Hamas' attacks on Israel and the murder of innocent men, women and children," wrote the magazine in a statement. "At Playboy, we encourage free expression and constructive political debate, but we have a zero tolerance policy for hate speech." Khalifa's comments were indeed vile. On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, she called on Hamas militants to "flip their phones" horizontally in order to capture better footage of the atrocities they were committing, and she referred to a photo of the terrorists as a "Renaissance painting." (She subsequently deleted that tweet.) Moreover, Playboy is a private company and has no special First Amendment obligation to platform speech it detests. But, of course, many people—myself included—have objected in the past when provocative individuals are sanctioned, punished, expelled, or fired for making controversial and offensive remarks. Sometimes, these individuals are described as victims of cancel culture, even though their underlying behavior was quite obnoxious: Roseanne Barr, Kathy Griffin, Will Wilkinson. (Barr was defended by many on the right, Griffin was defended by many on the left, Wilkinson was defended by…basically just me.) Playboy has said that it values "free speech" but has a "zero tolerance policy for hate speech." The magazine does, in fact, have a long history of fighting on behalf of the First Amendment: It has won important court battles—including before the Supreme Court—and works with other civil liberties organizations to protect free speech. This admirable track record cannot and should not be overlooked, which is why it's a bit troubling to see the organization committing a classic mistake with respect to the erroneous free speech/hate speech distinction. What constitutes hate speech is in the eyes of the beholder; it is not some carefully defined category of expression that is separate from free speech, despite frequent assertions to the contrary. And it's not as if the magazine had no idea what it was getting when it hired Khalifa, whose intensely anti-Israel views have been well-known for some time. Playboy hailed Khalifa as a "thought-provoking" addition to their roster of content creators when she was hired, noting that "freedom of expression" is one of the organization's cornerstone values. Again, no publication owes Khalifa a platform. Her speech rights vis-à-vis her employer are not subject to the protection of the First Amendment. She is in a different situation than the pro-Palestinian students at Harvard University, whose ignorant statements assigning all blame for the Hamas attacks to the "Israeli regime" are protected via the university's stated commitment to honor the free expression rights of students and faculty members.The post Mia Khalifa, a Victim of Cancel Culture? appeared first on Reason.com.

After learning she had won the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday, Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor in the subject, publicly thanked her students for pushing her to “the frontiers of knowledge every day.” Many of her former students who have gone on to become colleagues rejoiced at the news of an honor they say is well-deserved, and perhaps even overdue. Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse ’86, Ph.D. ’92, said she is “absolutely thrilled” by Goldin’s selection. A former adviser to Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Rouse chaired the Council of Economic Advisers to President Biden until April. “What they recognized was a body of work, which piece by piece has helped us to fill in a portrait and understand the role of women in the economy over centuries. She has helped us to understand the wage structure over the 20th century. She’s done work on education, and she does so with intention; she does so creatively,” Rouse said of Goldin, who was her doctoral thesis adviser at Harvard.  “Claudia marched in to document the changing roles of women in society at a time when many male economists just didn’t care.” — Betsey Stevenson, Ph.D. ’01  Goldin is only the third woman to win the prize and the first to do so solo. She was also the first woman to receive tenure in Harvard’s Economics Department in 1989. “Claudia marched in to document the changing roles of women in society at a time when many male economists just didn’t care,” said Betsey Stevenson, Ph.D. ’01, who counts Goldin as a mentor and is now a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. “Claudia understood that work and life were intertwined.” Goldin’s Nobel recognition “means so much for the evolution of economics” given her important work and “the army of economists” she has trained over the years, she said. The prize “reflects her vision to be able to see how women’s expectations for their lives were being reshaped over time, as opportunities shifted, as social costs and benefits shifted, as financial costs and benefits shifted, and her tireless work as a data detective to factually document them,” Stevenson said. “This also played out in the classroom and in her office as she understood that her students were wrestling with these very choices.” Physician-economist Marcella Alsan ’99, M.P.H. ’05, Ph.D. ’12 can attest to that. She recalled bumping into Goldin and her husband, Lawrence Katz, the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics, in the department’s kitchen when she was a graduate student. Alsan had recently given birth — “which was unusual” for grad students back then — and was feeling disheveled and stressed. Alsan assumed they didn’t know who she was, so she quietly headed for the door, hoping to slip out. Goldin “stopped me and asked me to sit down, and she called me by my name, which was revolutionary for a grad student,” said Alsan, who now runs the Health Inequality Lab at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. “She first asked me, how was my young family? She recognized that I had been pregnant and that I had another child at home. And then she asked me, what was I working on?”  “She saw my duality as both a mother and a scholar, and she embraced both of them. And I don’t think I was special. I think she did that for so many women, and for so many men, as well.” — Marcella Alsan ’99, M.P.H. ’05, Ph.D. ’12  Alsan replied that she was researching the tsetse fly and its long-term effects on the trajectory of poverty in Africa as a possible dissertation topic. “She was so enthusiastic and said, ‘You have to study that! You have to talk to this person and that person, and we’ll get you in touch with these people!’” said Alsan, who was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2021. “It just changed the trajectory of my career.” More important, Alsan said, was Goldin’s recognition and appreciation for the complexity of her life at that time. “She saw my duality as both a mother and a scholar, and she embraced both of them,” said Alsan. “And I don’t think I was special. I think she did that for so many women, and for so many men, as well.” In 2000, Goldin and Rouse wrote a landmark paper on how “blind” auditions done behind identity-obscuring screens improved the probability of a woman being hired or promoted in a symphony orchestra. Its origin, Rouse said, is emblematic of Goldin’s creativity and her self-described detective-like approach. “It started when I was a graduate student. I was at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and I was playing [the flute] in the graduate student orchestra. Claudia said, ‘What do you know about blind auditions?’ I said, ‘I know nothing. Why?’ And she said, ‘Because a student had a throw-away line in a paper where she said, ‘And, of course, the use of blind auditions increases the presence of women in symphony orchestras.’” Rouse soon found herself putting aside her dissertation and contacting musicians, including her own flute teacher, surveying orchestras across the country, digging into their archives, and sitting in on auditions trying to piece together the necessary data. “Economic historians don’t have big data sets [as] economists who do empirical work today readily have,” said Rouse. “If there were data sets, they may be in a file drawer somewhere. She has been creative at finding those pieces and stitching together what happened. “I still describe it as the most fun paper that I’ve ever written,” said Rouse, “in no small part because of working with Claudia, but also because of the process of uncovering and learning and putting the pieces together.” Goldin’s relentless “rigor” in approaching problems, dogged pursuit of data and facts, and her application of theoretical thinking to the analysis of diverse facts “has been incredibly influential in the field,” said Carola Frydman, M.A. ’04, Ph.D. ’06, a former teaching assistant to Goldin who came from Argentina to get a doctorate in economics at Harvard “because of her.” “She’s incredibly curious, and not only about things that she works on,” said Frydman. “She’s not an accommodating mentor. She pushes you; she wants you to work hard, and to think deeply and to try to get things right,” but is also “incredibly welcoming” and treats everyone as a peer. Goldin has frequently made clear that her scholarship does not include developing policy solutions. Nevertheless, her work on discrimination, women in the labor force, and education has opened new areas of inquiry and spurred related research and policymaking for others.  “She’s not an accommodating mentor. She pushes you; she wants you to work hard, and to think deeply and to try to get things right.” — Carola Frydman, M.A. ’04, Ph.D. ’06  “Claudia’s work is incredibly important because it brings key, historical perspectives to economics research that have sometimes been overlooked. Her work on gender and labor markets, which has changed the way we view the gender gap in earnings, is a great example,” said Maya Sen ’00, A.M. ’11, Ph.D. ’12, a professor of public policy and director of the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at the Kennedy School, where Goldin has advised students and worked with faculty affiliates for more than a decade. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Claudia basically paved the path for economists, and social scientists more generally, to study things like gender and race in the economy from a quantitative perspective,” which has helped the broader study of inequality to flourish, Sen said in an email. Goldin’s work on discrimination and women in the labor force, especially the “blind auditions” paper, was “absolutely instrumental” in advancing scholarship on women and public policy efforts on gender equity, said Iris Bohnet, co-founder of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School. “It became such an important example of discrimination, of showing how discrimination happens, but also of starting to open up the possibility that we could overcome discrimination by what I call ‘behavioral design’ — redesigning how we do our work, how we evaluate people, particularly in this case, how we promote,” Bohnet said. “It really shaped my whole thinking on not just the measuring of discrimination, but also the overcoming of discrimination,” she said. “That instead of fixing people, we needed to fix the system, and rethink how we do things.”

       In the middle of his statement responding to last weekend's barbaric attacks in Israel, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis veered sideways into a non-sequitur about American immigration policy. In a post to X (formerly known as Twitter), DeSantis said President Joe Biden ought to freeze all foreign aid flowing to Hamas, the terrorist group responsible for Saturday's attacks that left more than 1,000 people dead, and freeze money "made available to Iran." Then, DeSantis added, Biden must "immediately shut down America's wide-open southern border to ensure we are in a position to better protect Americans here at home from these real threats." That is…quite the jump. Yes, it's true that Saturday's attack on Israel involved people crossing a border, and that immigrants coming to the U.S. also cross a border as part of that process. That's literally the only similarity. To be clear: Immigrants seeking to come to the U.S. to live and work are absolutely not terrorists conducting a paramilitary operation. Mexico and the U.S. are not Israel and Palestine. And, as Saturday's attack makes obviously clear, even the most extreme measures designed to "shut down" a border can be defeated. Conflating these issues only serves to make the debate over U.S. immigration policy more toxic and stupid than it already is. Unfortunately, DeSantis is not the only one doing this. Former President Donald Trump, never one to care much about accurately describing the status of U.S. immigration policy, claimed in a TruthSocial post on Monday that "the same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers." Meanwhile, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley—who has at times seemed like the metaphorical adult in the room during this GOP presidential primary contest—made a similar claim during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday. "We have to remember that what happened to Israel could happen here in America," Haley said. "We have an open border. People are coming through; they're not being vetted." There is no internal logic whatsoever to these comparisons. Let's start with the most acute problem. There are not many borders in the world more heavily militarized than the one between Israel and the Gaza Strip. It should stand in stark contrast to how these Republican politicians are describing America's southern border. In fact, the Gaza border wall went far beyond anything that would be feasible or affordable for the U.S./Mexico border. As Amir Tibon, a journalist who survived Saturday's attack in Israel, described to The Atlantic on Monday, the structure included an "underground wall" meant to prevent Hamas from digging tunnels. And guess what? The wall didn't work. "This was a major infrastructure project for the state of Israel. And that project allowed us to sleep at night, because you can deal with rockets falling over your head if you have a safe room in your house, but if terrorists are infiltrating underground and they can walk into your community, that's a game changer," Tibon told The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg as part of a harrowing, must-read interview. "And in the morning hours of Saturday, October 7, when we heard the gunfire outside our window, we realized that this project is an utter and complete failure," he added. Journalists should ask DeSantis (and Trump, and Haley, and others making this nonsensical comparison) what exactly he'd like to see done on the U.S./Mexico border. Are they asking for a level of militarization that exceeds what Israel has done on its border with Gaza? Because that's what this comparison implies, and even then Saturday's incursion should cause some rethinking about how useful walls on borders can be. But even thinking about this comparison at that level seems absurd, given how many other problems there are with making the Israel-is-to-Gaza as the United-States-is-to-Mexico comparison. Thankfully, the U.S. has not been in a decades-long, slow-simmering conflict with our neighbor to the south—though some Republicans now seem eager to start one. There is no terrorist organization in Mexico motivated by centuries-old religious and cultural hatred that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the American state or the rights of the people who live in it. Most importantly, there is little evidence that any terrorists seeking to harm Americans are passing through the southern border. Conservatives often point to the fact that individuals named on various terror watch lists are occasionally apprehended while trying to cross the border—and use those incidents to extrapolate a massive but unseen threat to America. In reality, that reflects how overly broad America's terror watch lists have become. They include well over 1 million names, including many individuals who have never planned or attempted to attack America. As the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh has pointed out, "zero people have been killed or injured in attacks on U.S. soil committed by terrorists who illegally crossed the Southwest border." Indeed, the best way to focus on whatever actual threats might exist would be to allow more immigrants into the country legally—leaving only those who cannot clear background checks to be sneaking over the fence illegally. That's the opposite of shutting down the border. Immigration policy and anti-terrorism policies are both core functions of the federal government and right now both have deep flaws. We deserve leaders who take these issues seriously, but this sort of flippant and obviously faulty conflation of the two doesn't accomplish anything productive. If a politician can't tell the difference between migrants coming to the U.S. for jobs and terrorists hell-bent on murder and mayhem, they shouldn't be trusted with making federal policy in either arena.The post Here's What the Hamas Attack Tells Us About U.S. Immigration Policy: Nothing appeared first on Reason.com.

The selfless billionaire is a rare creature indeed. Chuck Feeney, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of them. He is “my hero and Bill Gates’ hero,” Warren Buffett once remarked. “He should be everybody’s hero.” Indeed, Feeney was an inspiration for the Giving Pledge that Buffett and the Gateses launched in 2010, whose 241 megawealthy signatories have promised to dedicate a majority of their fortunes toward charitable pursuits. Feeney did a lot better than a “majority.” By the time the pledge was announced, he was reluctant to join because he was no longer a billionaire. He’d long since heeded Andrew Carnegie’s advice that a rich man should distribute his fortune for the public good during his lifetime—else “die disgraced.” In 2016, Feeney’s charitable foun­dation pledged the last remaining sliver of his staggering wealth to Cornell, cap­ping an epic three-decade giving streak. All told, starting in the early 1980s, Feeney had doled out $8.6 billion, setting aside a scant $2 million for himself and his second wife, Helga, to live on in their old age. For every $100,000 Feeney gave away, he kept about $25. Feeney grew up in a working-class family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, during the Great Depression. He was entrepreneurial from the get-go according to Conor O’Clery’s 2007 biography of Feeney, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t. After serving a noncombat stint in the Air Force, he was admitted to the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell on the GI Bill, earn­ing extra cash by selling homemade sandwiches at night on frater­nity row. “He famously said, ‘I don’t need more than one pair of shoes. I can only wear one pair at a time.’” He later hustled his way into a graduate program in France, where he teamed up with a former Cornell classmate, Robert Miller, to sell tax-free liquor, and later cars, to American troops overseas. Their partnership would evolve into a business decidedly more lucra­tive. Feeney, Miller, and their friends basically invented the duty-free industry, those stores that sell tax-free liquor and perfume and ciga­rettes and accessories in airports and tourist destinations worldwide. “They were making literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” says attorney Harvey Dale, another Cornell alum, whom the part­ners brought on as their counsel. “Because of the structure that I had helped put in place, almost none of that was being taxed.” For a time, Feeney and his French wife, Danielle, lived the high life in Hong Kong. They had an apartment in New York City and homes in Connecticut, Hawaii, Cap Ferret on the coast of France, and just outside Paris. They had a luxury car and a driver and threw fancy parties. Miller went so far as to host bird hunts at his own 32,000-acre Gunnerside Estate in North Yorkshire— “the holy grail of grouse moors”—and two of his daughters married actual princes. But over time, Feeney, who viewed wealth primarily as a scorecard of his business prowess, grew increasingly uncomfortable with its trappings. He dis­cussed his reservations with Dale, by then a close friend, who intro­duced him to Carnegie’s writings. Feeney was particularly smitten with Carnegie’s famous 1889 essay, Wealth, later retitled The Gospel of Wealth. He began to eschew the material extravagances, dressing plainly, driving a normal car, and wearing a $15 watch. He traveled constantly, carried whatever he’d been reading in a plastic tote, and could have afforded a fleet of private jets but insisted on flying coach instead. “He famously said, ‘I don’t need more than one pair of shoes. I can only wear one pair at a time,’” Dale told me. Feeney hatched a plan to give all his money. Duty Free Shoppers, as the business was called, was obsessed with secrecy. Its profitability depended on governments and business rivals undervaluing the company’s right to sell tax-free concessions, so the partners held their cards close. Feeney, who didn’t want people hounding him for money or charities viewing him as their ATM, applied the same ethos to his philanthropy. His stake in DFS and other businesses was consolidated into a holding company called Gen­eral Atlantic Group, incorporated in Danielle’s name to sidestep US taxes and to keep Feeney’s name off the paperwork. Even photograph­ing him was verboten. Oechsli worked at General Atlantic almost two years before realizing it was all a philanthropic venture: “We operated on a need-to-know basis.”  One day in 1984, without telling even his business part­ners, he transferred ownership of General Atlantic Group over to the Atlantic Foundation, a charitable entity he’d set up in Bermuda with Dale as president and CEO. He and Dale also created an intermedi­ary firm to manage charitable gifts and interview would-be grant­ees. Those beneficiaries, who were forbidden from acknowledging their gifts publicly, had no idea where the money was coming from. Chris Oechsli, Chuck and Helga’s personal attorney and until recently the CEO of At­lantic Philanthropies (the now-defunct umbrella entity that included Feeney’s Atlantic Foundation), told me that when he first interviewed for a position at Gen­eral Atlantic in 1990, he was unaware who Feeney was or the role he played in the organization. Before meeting his future boss, Oechsli was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. He worked at General Atlantic Group almost two years before realizing the whole thing was a philanthropic venture. “We operated on a need-to-know basis,” Dale explains. Feeney, who was Irish-American, used his riches over the years to broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, finance a public health system in Vietnam, ex­pand access to AIDS drugs in Southern Africa, and support young leaders around the world—the Atlantic Fellows—who are working to improve their societies. He bankrolled Ireland’s public university system and donated billions to American universities—including about $1 billion to Cornell—never allowing the schools to affix his name, or Atlantic’s, to the buildings he paid for. He lobbied, too, to keep himself off the Forbes list, and managed to dispense with huge sums before the New York Times finally outed him in 1997. His stealthy ex­ploits earned him a nickname: “the James Bond of philanthropy.” The word “philanthropy” comes from the Greek philanthrōpos, an amalgam of phil (love) and anthrōpos (human). Loosely translated, it means “humane,” or “kindly.” Given the right incentives and motiva­tions, philanthropy can be exactly that. When the public learned of his generosity, Feeney was hailed, feted, and awarded honorary de­grees. O’Clery’s book was a best-seller. And Dale told me he’s been advising several “very wealthy people” who plan to fol­low in Feeney’s footsteps. I met Feeney in September 2020 at General Atlantic Group’s San Francisco offices. It was a momentous occasion: the signing of his foundation’s dissolu­tion papers. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a personal note to mark the occasion, and just before I arrived, Feeney, whose pandemic ensemble included a navy blue mask, had watched a laudatory video from former governor Jerry Brown, with another one from Gates on deck. Feeney, who had suffered health setbacks and could no longer speak, nonetheless appeared to be alert and taking it in this celebration of a life well lived.  The existence of billionaires has been called a policy failure, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Hitting the three-comma mark is next to impossible in the absence of tax codes that offer the affluent extraordinary workarounds and favor passive investment profits over actual work. In Feeney’s case, the international nature of the company allowed him and his part­ners to largely avoid US taxes altogether. But he did give it all back in the end, which really is something—the only Giving Pledger I know of who is even on track to match that feat is MacKenzie Scott, who has been thoughtfully shoveling her former husband Jeff Bezos’ fortune out the door as fast as she can. So you can think of Feeney what you will. Just don’t call him self-serving. Adapted from Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms us all, copyright 2021 by Michael Mechanic, reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster. 

There was little pressure on Keir Starmer to perform in his speech today. The past three days at the Labour conference have been controversy-free. Message discipline has been tight. Most voters are focused on the conflict in Israel. The chaos at the Conservative conference in Manchester last week set the bar low. But this is Starmer’s Labour Party and people wanted to hear him speak. Queues ran down both sides of the exhibition hall and out the room beforehand. Stewards herded the pliant crowd as if we were hurriedly boarding a cruise – or a lifeboat. Phone signal crashed. As we waited, Keir’s university friend told us he was a “regular” guy on the rectangular screen overhead. A photo album followed: Keir and Bridget Phillipson at the seaside; the shadow cabinet walking in suits; Keir saying happy birthday to the NHS; Keir with Rupert on his farm in Solihull; Keir in Scotland; several former Tory voters saying that they now like Keir. This was a party leader who has spent three years bedding in; little could break his focus now. When he walked on stage, a protester sprang upon him with a handful of green glitter before being swiftly tackled to the ground by security. “If he thinks that bothers me, he doesn’t know me,” Starmer quipped. He did not look bothered. He took off his now sparkly jacket, rolled up his sleeves and ploughed on. His party loved him for it. But his job was not to convince them. He needed to speak to those voters watching the news at 2pm on a Tuesday, those curious about voting for Labour. He wants to convert Tory voters turned off by the party’s rightwards trajectory and Rishi Sunak’s predecessors. He is defining himself through working-class patriotism. This is a party that has gone some way to shedding its indulgence of the extremes of social liberalism. Instead, Starmer offered a “party that conserves. That fights for our union. Our environment. The rule of law. Family life. The careful bond between this generation and the next.” Starmer’s Labour Party wants to “take our streets back”. In many ways, this was a conservative speech. But he combined it with a shuffle to the left on economics. His main theme was “rebuilding the future” through infrastructure, planning reform and 1.5 million new homes. He wants to build another generation of “new towns” like Clement Attlee before him. He spoke of investment not as a burden on the national debt, but as an opportunity to save money, crowd in private finance and create jobs. Underpinning it all was an ease with talking about himself. He can tell a story about the cost of living and his background that Sunak’s technocratic focus on the abstract term “inflation” precludes. Starmer won over his party. His message has been refined. Now is the time to win over the country. [See also: Labour’s future will be conservative]

       Overnight developments in Gaza: Earlier today, Israel regained control of the towns near Gaza that had been invaded by Hamas, in addition to full control of the Gaza fence. This past weekend, the Palestinian militant group Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel and breached the border wall, catching the Israeli army off guard on a holiday. Hamas massacred, raped, and tortured hundreds of civilians, in many cases recording the killings and posting them on social media. At least 11 Americans have been killed over the last few days by Hamas, in addition to at least 900 Israelis, most of them civilians. More than 260 were killed when Hamas invaded a music festival, and 100-plus hostages have been taken, including children and the elderly.  In response, Israel ordered a "complete siege" of Gaza, cutting off their access to electricity, food, water, and fuel from Israel. A blockade has already been in place for 16 years, enforced by both Israel and Egypt. "The blockade restricts the import of goods, including electronic and computer equipment, that could be used to make weapons and prevents most people from leaving the territory," reports The New York Times. Hamas says that, with each air strike that Israel rains down without warning, they will slaughter a hostage in retribution. The Israeli military claims to conduct "precision strikes" only, attempting to take out Hamas commanders and critical sites, not civilians. The military also frequently warns Gazans when offensives are coming. "Palestinians say that strikes on heavily populated areas amount to a collective punishment and that civilians have been targeted," per The New York Times.  In Gaza, roughly 2 million people—so the entire population—live in squalor. Half of adult Gazans are unemployed. The median age there is 18, compared to 28 worldwide (the Gazan fertility rate is extremely high; Hamas pressures women to have lots of children allegedly so they can have a larger army). Up until now, Israel had offered work permits, allowing many Gazans to flow across the border in search of jobs in agriculture, construction, and auto repair. Now, that lifeline is gone, and conditions have gotten a lot worse for inhabitants of the Strip, which includes almost a million children (or about half the population). By the numbers: More than 150 Israeli hostages are currently being held in Gaza though Hamas doesn't seem certain as to the number. The total death toll for the conflict tops 1,500 with nearly 6,000 reported wounded. Israel is working to mobilize 300,000 army reservists, with those who had been traveling or living abroad getting priority flights home via El Al. The United Nations reports that 180,000 Gazans have been internally displaced due to the fighting. A senior defense official in the U.S. says the military is "surging support" to Israel, including air defenses and munitions. "Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Sunday that he has ordered American military ships, including an aircraft carrier and additional aircraft, to move closer to the eastern Mediterranean in response to Hamas' unprecedented, multi-fronted attack on Israel," per CBS News. Israel has been "the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II," according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, receiving $104.5 billion in military aid from the U.S. since 1947.  "Under discussion among some national-security hawks this weekend was a potential legislative package that lumps Israel aid in with a big Ukraine package that Congress is still trying to pass," reports Punchbowl News. Under no circumstances do you have to hand it to Hamas: Many American leftists, from Harvard student groups to members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), seem to be gravitating toward disturbingly simplistic narratives that minimize the atrocities—massacres, rapes, and kidnappings, with many deaths livestreamed to Facebook pages and uploaded to TikTok—committed by Hamas. "We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence," reads a recent statement issued by more than 50 Harvard student groups. "The apartheid regime is the only one to blame," they say. "It's the easiest thing in the world to criticize Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, and to view the occupation of the West Bank and the isolation of Gaza (the result of a combination of Israeli policy, Egyptian policy, and the fact that Hamas rules Gaza) as fundamentally unjust, while also condemning the murder of civilians," writes Jesse Singal, criticizing the recent DSA rallies and statements. "If basic moral principles aren't enough to sway groups like DSA toward decency, they should consider the impact their disgraceful performance will have on their ability to accomplish their own goals," adds Singal.  Scenes from New York:  At JFK Airport in Queens, the El Al counter is busy with Israeli army reservists checking in for flights back home to fight against Hamas. Some Brooklynites are tending to fellow Jews by providing food and donated supplies for those who must return to Israel.  QUICK HITS  Simplistic colonizer narratives don't make sense here:   I think this is very poorly understood outside of Israel: something around half the population is full or part mizrahi. This is neither pure American-style settler colonialism, nor the British Raj. A lot of folks have mental models of Israel that are still stuck in the 1970s. https://t.co/Pfy6uo2Pbd — Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) October 9, 2023   No, Elon isn't the real Hamas:   well i'm glad they finally found the man responsible for all of this pic.twitter.com/7YfuIFID6q — Mike Solana (@micsolana) October 10, 2023   "Facing one of the most sophisticated surveillance states on the planet, Hamas simply went dark," write Peter Martin, Katrina Manson, and Henry Meyer for Bloomberg. Are we experiencing a century of bad art? "To pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow Ferris wheel, cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around." "Imagine trusting your life savings to a group of strangers you know only via WhatsApp," writes Lulu Yilun Chen at Bloomberg. "Some affluent Chinese people are willing to make that gamble to get part of their wealth out of the mainland." A beautiful immigration story from former Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.). Groundhog Day in the House of Representatives? Heartwarming: the worst people you know are all fighting (RFK Jr. vs. the nouveau L.P.). How performing charity is a First Amendment right. The post Complete Siege appeared first on Reason.com.

I have a theory that the secret to a brilliant speech is to speak through the applause. Waiting for the clapping to die out deflates the room; driving on builds momentum. That is what Barack Obama did to great effect during his speech at the 2004 Democratic Party conference. That speech made many in his party start to believe he could be the next Democratic presidential nominee. Rachel Reeves used the same trick yesterday. Her performance increased the likelihood that she succeeds Keir Starmer as Labour leader. This was the best speech of her career so far (assuming her presentations at the Bank of England and HBOS bank lacked panache). She spoke with a seriousness and conviction incomparable to any single paragraph uttered at Conservative Party conference. There was little new substantive policy: a commitment to crowding-in private investment; a reduction in the government’s use of consultants; a new team to claw back the money fraudsters stole during the pandemic. A few million here or there is not going to change the purpose of the state. But it still matters politically. As one pollster pointed out to me last night (9 October), Covid fraud still riles voters. Partygate itself continues to resonate. It epitomises the sense that the Tories looked after themselves during the pandemic. Don’t forget it was also the reason that Boris Johnson’s polling supremacy fell away (alongside the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal). This is an excellent attack line with which to berate the government and connect Rishi Sunak with the past. Reeves’s key objective is reassuring voters that Labour won’t crash the economy, and that the Tories will. Her speech was filled with campaign-ready lines to that effect: “You cannot trust the Tories with our economy ever again”; Liz Truss “is still leading the Conservative Party”; “the biggest risk to Britain’s economy is five more years of the Conservative Party”; “Labour is ready to serve, ready to lead and ready to rebuild Britain.” These lines should frame Labour messaging going forward, drilled ad nauseam. But we shouldn’t put Reeves’s decision to avoid appearing radical on economic issues completely down to politics. This is a policy choice as well. Her speech was followed by a short, pre-recorded endorsement from Mark Carney, the George Osborne-appointed former Bank of England governor. Some have interpreted this as Carney’s defection from the Conservatives to Labour. I think it reflects Reeves’s closeness to the economic orthodoxy that Carney represents. For instance, Reeves double-downed on her commitment to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) that she would create a “Charter for Budget Responsibility, a new fiscal lock… guaranteeing in law that any government making significant and permanent tax and spending changes will be subject to an independent forecast from the OBR”. On the face of it, this is not a major departure from the current role of the OBR, which already produces forecasts alongside budgets and fiscal events. The difference is leaders would be prevented from trying to depart from the assumptions the OBR uses to produce the forecast by not having one. Truss did so, infamously. But as Ben Riley-Smith’s new book The Right to Rule reveals, Johnson’s No 10 also considered scrapping the OBR forecast to move beyond austerity. Reeves’s decision would shift power away from the politicians and towards independent bodies. It reflects a strain of legalism within Labour that we also saw in Gordon Brown’s report on the constitution, which advocated creating social and environmental “rights” instead of simply creating the policy that those rights were trying to achieve. Taking what should be debated and scrutinised and turning them into rights narrows the political realm. “Tax and spending changes” should be at the heart of democratic debate. Not something taken for granted. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; subscribe to it on Substack here. [See also: Lisa Nandy puts a positive spin on demotion]

       The counterfeit condoms were imported into Puerto Rico from China. iStock by Getty Images   Safer sex means less promiscuity, not more   Debra Soh  October 10, 06:00 AM October 10, 06:00 AM  Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced newly drafted guidelines regarding the use of an antibiotic, doxycycline, as a post-exposure preventive treatment for bacterial sexually transmitted infections, including chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhea.  The CDC will finalize its recommendations after a 45-day public comment period for physicians and public health officials. STIs have been steadily rising in the United States, something the CDC referred to as an "epidemic" in its proposal, and it seeks to improve the health of gay and bisexual men and transgender women who are at an increased risk of these STIs.  ANTONY BLINKEN SAYS US 'WORKING OVERTIME' TO VERIFY REPORTS OF AMERICANS DEAD IN ISRAEL  Public health interventions can be both powerful and effective, but let’s not forget the amount of relevance and sway that cultural messaging also holds. The proposal mentions the importance of discussing risk reduction strategies, but I question, in today’s day and age, how many healthcare practitioners would feel comfortable advising their patients to have sex with fewer people.  In the realm of sexuality, it has become frowned upon to suggest that anyone should curtail promiscuity, particularly if he or she belongs to a minority group. But all sexual activity is associated with some degree of risk to one’s health, regardless of whether a person is a minority or not. Becoming involved with one partner translates to being exposed to all of his or her previous partners and all of their previous partners, and on it goes. Indiscriminate sex shouldn’t be considered a default behavior for which negative outcomes are inevitable.  Since some STIs, such as syphilis, can be spread through skin-to-skin contact, including the mouth, the risk of transmission is particularly high. Other factors that increase the riskiness of sex include having multiple partners, including those who use drugs intravenously or are involved in prostitution, as well as drug and alcohol use, which hampers good decision-making around safer sex practices, such as using a condom and knowing a partner’s previous sexual history and sexual health status.  These decisions have implications for women’s health, too, considering that many men who have sex with men also have sex with women — and may or may not tell their female partner about this, even in the context of a long-term relationship. Women are at a higher risk of contracting an STI during unprotected sex due to the anatomy of their bodies. We must also consider the long-term effects of antibiotic use, including antibiotic resistance, should application in STI prevention become widespread and readily available.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER  Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.  © 2023 Washington Examiner   

How could Israel let this happen? As footage of Gazan motorbikes pelting through holes in Israel’s “smart” border fence started to circulate, of paragliders descending on a desert rave, of entire families being kidnapped or butchered in their homes, that was the question on every Western analyst’s lips: how could Israel let this happen? The more important question, however, is this: what will the West itself do now? Launched from land, sea and air, the attack was unprecedented in both scale and barbarity. It was a display of Isis-like savagery. But it was also the culmination of a sophisticated military operation, probably months in the planning and aided by at least one foreign power. As a result, more than 800 Israelis have been slaughtered, and no doubt more will follow in the days and weeks to come. Again: how could Israel, with its vast intelligence apparatus and decades of experience, let this happen? The obvious answer — at least the one doing the rounds of the think tanks in Europe and America — is that Israel was distracted. And when facing such determined enemies as Hamas and Iran, who are always on the lookout for the perfect moment to strike, distraction amounts to suicide. There is certainly some truth to this. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. Israel, riven by internal discord over Netanyahu’s attempted reform of its supreme court, has been hamstrung for months. Instead of looking outwards to the existential threats on and within its borders, politicians have been infighting over judicial reform. And when the leadership of a civilian-led democracy becomes obsessed with such a complex issue, who leads the military? What good can tomorrow’s justices do for today’s victims of terrorism?  Yet the danger of distraction is not merely an Israeli one. It is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the US-led Western world. In recent years, old fronts have opened in the clash of civilisations (Samuel Huntington is proved more correct by the day). America is now involved indirectly in battles against Putin’s Russia and Iran-backed Hamas, while China is watching closely, perhaps eyeing up Taiwan. Between Khamenei, Putin and Xi, the new anti-Western Axis looks increasingly threatening. And how do we respond? We can be partly grateful that both the UK and US have pledged to support Israel, as they pledged support for Ukraine against Putin. But these are not difficult decisions to make. A few words here; a press conference there. This is no substitute for strategy which, at present, is sorely missing. In the UK, the two major political parties are busying themselves with the circus that is conference season, doing their best to emerge with some semblance of respectability. (Judging by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the Labour Conference yesterday, Keir Starmer has his work cut out.) In the US, the situation inspires even less confidence. While the Democrats see the return of Trump to the White House as a threat to democracy itself and the Republicans view 2024 as a test of election integrity, America’s enemies continue to circle, looking for an opening. The House of Representatives lacks a Speaker. A government shutdown seems inevitable. We are distracted, and they know it. In my view, it was as much the distraction of the West as the distraction of Israel’s politicians that emboldened Hamas and its backers to launch their war of terror. Suggested readingIsrael and the rise of a new world orderBy David Patrikarakos None of this is to say that the issues that dominate the media cycle and political discourse are not important: immigration, crime, the climate. But are they existential? Certainly not when compared with the threat posed to Israel by its malevolent neighbours; and certainly not when compared with the threat of an emboldened Middle East to a West that has grown complacent about the threat of terrorism. In a well-functioning democracy, there would be clarity about the need to support Israel with more than fine words. We would not ramp up the rhetoric to the apocalyptic; we would not distract ourselves with internecine infighting. Just look at how the West has attempted — and failed — to process the carnage in Israel. Caught in a Manichean trap that prioritises moral certainty over reality, anti-Israel activists have succeeded in distracting us further. They distort reality by pretending Israel is simply paying the price for its aggression; that it must, as former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn put it, end its “occupation” of Gaza. (Ironically, these very same people tend to be the ones warning Israel not to launch an invasion of Gaza — is it occupied or not?) Further distraction follows: in the form of protests outside Israeli embassies, in those contortions that enable activists to justify attacks on Jewish shops and restaurants. Suggested readingIs Israel prepared for war?By Gregg Calstrom As a result, many people are unable to agree on the few facts in this interminable conflict that are clear: that Hamas is driven more by its hatred of Jewish people than its love for the Palestinians; that Hamas routinely kills, tortures and persecutes Palestinians who seek peace with Israel; that, well before Hamas paraded the dead bodies of Israeli women down its streets, it used Palestinian children as human shields. And now, there is the fact that Iran, Russia and China are looking on with glee. They see anarchy in Israel and a weeping wound in the Western alliance. The palaces of Tehran, Moscow and Beijing are all looking West, and what do they see? Activists in Time Square calling another intifada, Jewish schoolchildren being told not to wear their uniform, national broadcasters giving airtime to Hamas apologists. Our weakness is plain for the world to see. So the West must decide. Do we degenerate into quarrelling factions or do we reassert our enduring values and highest ideals on the global stage? Do we stand with Israel in action as in word or do we fall into a chasm of distraction and division? This might just be the most important choice our generation makes. view comments

       Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president as an independent, he announced on Monday. "I'm here to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States," Kennedy told supporters at a rally in Philadelphia. "I'm here to join you in making a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation." Kennedy had previously challenged President Joe Biden from within the Democratic Party; his exit means that Marianne Williamson is now Biden's sole primary Democratic contender. RFK Jr.'s declaration is notable for another reason: It ends speculation that he might seek the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination. Kennedy is not a libertarian and historically has held positions on a variety of issues that are fairly anathema to libertarianism, including his views on environmental regulation, affirmative action, and until recently, gun control. But he is an outspoken opponent of COVID-19 mandates—as well as the COVID-19 vaccines—and a critic of American foreign policy with respect to the Ukraine-Russia war. These last two stances have endeared him to some in the Libertarian Party (L.P.), who hoped that he was moving in a libertarian direction on a variety of issues. RFK Jr. attended both PorcFest and FreedomFest, two yearly libertarian festivals, and seemed to be sincerely courting independent voters of both populist and libertarian bents. He also fielded questions from Reason and others about his evolving views.  Back in June, I asked L.P. Chair Angela McArdle about RFK Jr.'s candidacy. She told me that it was exciting to see him reconsidering some of his previous views. "The lockdowns and mandates seem to have stirred an awakening within him, causing him to reconsider many of his other political stances," she said at the time. Kennedy's announcement of an independent run was received cordially by the L.P.; his declaration of support for unlimited aid to Israel, not so much. Following the horrific attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians over the weekend, RFK Jr. said the U.S. should provide Israel with"whatever it needs to defend itself."  This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state's right to self-defense. We must provide Israel with whatever it needs to defend itself — now. As President, I'll make sure that our policy… — Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 7, 2023  This political position was rightly criticized by McArdle and the L.P. as profoundly un-libertarian: U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to pay for the defenses of other countries.  We are the only ones who are actually anti-war in every context.  Not just when it's convenient.  All of the disenfranchised anti-war supporters of @RobertKennedyJr are welcome in the Libertarian Party. https://t.co/h4YVAnvE4q — Libertarian Party (@LPNational) October 7, 2023  Unfortunately, RFK Jr. is hardly the only political figure to make such a declaration; both Democratic and Republican leaders have committed to providing military aid to Israel, and the Pentagon is already deploying warships to the area. Many Americans are understandably moved by images and videos of appalling violence being committed against Israeli civilians. But there is little reason to think that providing even more money and weapons to the government of Israel will help create peaceful living conditions for either the Israelis or the Palestinians. We can have compassion for people who are suffering around the world, but we must also have humility about U.S. foreign policy and the likely results of interventionism. If RFK Jr. hasn't quite learned that yet—despite some encouraging signs—the Libertarian Party probably isn't the right home for him at present.The post RFK Jr. Dumps Democrats, Libertarian Party Blasts RFK Jr.'s Stance on Israel appeared first on Reason.com.

The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them.In Ukraine, Russia has once again used artillery, cruise missiles, and drones, including Iranian drones, to hit an even wider range of civilian targets: houses, apartment buildings, churches, restaurants, ports, grain silos. Just last week, Russian missiles hit a shop and café in the small village of Horza, killing more than 50 people. This kind of strike had no conventional military justification. The point is to create pain, cause civilian deaths, and sow disruption—nothing else. Russian propagandists praise the destruction and call for more: “We should wait for the right moment and cause a migration crisis for Europe with a new influx of Ukrainians,” one of them told a television talk show.Hamas is not a sovereign state, but it has the full backing of Iran, a sovereign state, and funding from Qatar, a sovereign state. Since 2006, Hamas has also been the de facto ruling party in Gaza, a self-governing territory since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. Nevertheless Hamas does not see itself as part of any kind of order. On Saturday, Hamas launched what appears to have been a well-planned, well-organized attack, designed to spread civilian terror and create chaos. Hamas deployed missiles and drones, including kamikaze drones of the kind used now in Russia and Ukraine, as well as teams of men with guns. Although they hit a few military outposts, they also murdered more than 200 people at a music festival, chased down children and the elderly, and in some towns went from house to house looking for people to murder. They abducted young women, beat them unconscious, and dragged them across the border, a war crime that is as old as Homer’s Iliad.The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.To explain why one permanent member of the UN Security Council and one quasi-state have adopted this kind of behavior, it is best to start with the nature of their own totalitarian regimes. But there is plenty more blame to go around, because the rules-based order, always pretty tenuous, has actually been dying for a long time. Autocracies, led by China, have been seeking to undermine or remove language about human rights and the rule of law from international forums for years, replacing it with the language of “sovereignty.” Not that this is just a matter of language: The Chinese have carried out atrocities against their Uyghur minority for years, so far with impunity, and openly conducted a successful assault on the rights of the population of Hong Kong. They, and others, have also indulged in deliberately provocative behavior, designed to mock the rule of law outside their own borders. Belarus got away with forcing an Irish-owned airplane to land in Minsk and then kidnapping one of its citizens who was onboard. Russia has organized murders of its citizens in London, Washington, and Berlin.Democracies, led by the United States, bear a lot of the blame too, either for refusing to enforce anything resembling order when they could, or for violating the rules themselves. George W. Bush condoned interrogation black sites and torture during the War on Terror. Barack Obama accused the Syrians of using chemical weapons, then failed to do anything to stop them. Donald Trump went out of his way to pardon American war criminals and continues to advocate extrajudicial murders, among other things implying that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has notably indulged the most extreme voices in Israeli politics, including political figures who explicitly seek to undermine Israel’s independent judiciary and Israeli rule of law, and parties whose members openly advocate for the mass expulsion of Arabs from the country. One member of his own party, Likud, repeated that same call on Sunday. By pointing this out, or by noting that the Israelis have also killed Palestinian civilians with impunity and will now do so again, I am not excusing what happened on Saturday, just describing Israel’s contribution to the deterioration of whatever norms remain. Add to that a United Nations that now seems preprogrammed to appoint weak leaders and a European Union that still doesn’t have a clear security policy, and you begin to see the bigger picture: We are heading into an era when there is no order, rules-based or otherwise, at all.  During its lifetime, the aspirational rules-based world order and the international community that supported it were frequently mocked, and rightly so. The crocodile tears of the statesmen who expressed “profound concern” when their unenforced rules were broken were often unbearable. Their hypocrisy, as they opined on distant conflicts, was intolerable. On Saturday, Russia’s deputy defense minister parodied this kind of talk when he called for “peace” between Israel and Hamas based on “recognized agreements,” as if Russia accepted any “recognized agreements” as a basis for “peace” in Ukraine.But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.  

The clown show on display in the U.S. House of Representatives this past month would be laughable if it did not have such serious implications for geopolitics and American leadership worldwide. A small group of right-wing extremists in the Republican Party—numbering less than a dozen legislators out of 435—has been holding the country’s budget processes hostage. They are doing this not for any achievable purpose, but simply to attract media attention and prove that they could be obstructive. The consequence of this is the canceling of further U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, and the bolstering of Vladimir Putin’s long-term efforts to dominate that country and Eurasia as a whole.The Republican Party has triggered shutdowns of the U.S. government in the past, under Newt Gingrich in the 1990s and Ted Cruz in the 2010s. They were in effect holding a gun to the country’s collective head, threatening to pull the trigger if they didn’t get their way on certain budget priorities like the canceling of Obamacare. Neither of these prior efforts were successful, and they hurt the standing of the Republican Party in subsequent elections.___STEADY_PAYWALL___This time around, the threatened shutdown was not so much a contest between Republicans and Democrats as one between this small coterie of extremists and the rest of the Republican Party. The latter, following its poor showing in the 2022 midterms, holds a bare five-vote majority in the House, while the Democrats continue to control the Senate and the presidency. Even if the Republicans acted as a unified bloc, they could not get their preferences enacted into law. They face a choice of working with Democrats or stopping the system from passing a budget altogether.But the party is not unified. Not only does the small MAGA wing hold a veto over the budget process, but it holds a veto over the party as a whole. The arithmetic of their narrow majority is what led to 15 successive votes within the party caucus last January to elect as Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who in the process agreed that any single member could undermine his position and call for a motion to vacate the Speaker’s chair. After McCarthy agreed to a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government open with the help of Democrats on September 29, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida pulled the trigger on McCarthy, leaving the lower house leaderless and unable to act on anything. The CR, which kicks the can down the road only until November, could get sufficient Republican votes only by stripping out aid to Ukraine.America has become a vetocracy, or rule by veto. Its political system spreads power out very broadly, in ways that give many individual players the power to stop things. By contrast it provides few mechanisms to force collective decisions reflecting the will of the majority. When combined with the extreme degree of polarization in the underlying society, this leads to total gridlock where basic functions of government like deliberating on and passing yearly budgets become nearly impossible.The ability of a single extremist member of the House to topple the Speaker and shut down Congress’ ability to legislate is not the only manifestation of vetocracy on display in 2023. The Senate has a rule that gives any individual Senator the right to in effect block any Executive Branch appointment for any reason. Alabama’s junior Senator Tommy Tuberville has been using this privilege to block all military promotions. Other Senators are blocking other appointments in different cabinet departments.Cloture rules are precisely the kind of mechanisms designed to force decisions by cutting off debate and holding votes. For some years now, the Senate has required a supermajority of 60 votes to call the question, making routine legislating very difficult.It is very bad that the Republican Party is coalescing around opposition to further support for Ukraine. What is particularly distressing is that recent poll data indicates that a majority of Americans continue to support such aid. After I drafted this piece last week, Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel that has already killed hundreds of Israelis. This calls for strong U.S. support, but Congress cannot act on anything without a Speaker. In the U.S. system as currently configured, minorities routinely seek to use their veto power to extort concessions for which there is no majority support, and are willing to burn the whole house down if they don’t get their way. These internal divisions exacerbated by our vetocratic political system are America’s greatest source of weakness in its ability to act on the world stage today.

       Massacre in Israel: Over the weekend, the Palestinian militant group Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel and breached the border wall, catching Israeli forces off guard on a holiday. Video has circulated on social media of atrocities committed by the invaders, including several of Hamas going door-to-door in southern Israel, entering people's homes, and slaughtering innocent people, including children, as family members are forced to watch. One viral video shows a 25-year-old Israeli woman, Noa Argamani, who was kidnapped by Hamas while attending a music festival.  At that same music festival—Nova, at Kibbutz Re'im in southern Israel—rockets began appearing in the sky around 6:30 a.m., prompting a mass evacuation. But then "four pickup trucks filled with armed militants and gunmen on motorcycles encircled the road leading out of the event venue, which was bottlenecked with cars attempting to flee the area," per The New Yorker's Ruth Margalit. "These were executions," one source who was in attendance told Margalit. "We were like ducks in a firing range." More than 260 people were killed at the music festival massacre, with many more abducted, according to ZAKA, an Israeli organization conducting search and rescue. One man, named Shoam Gueta, said he escaped the festival "with a group of 20 people and hid in the bushes for nearly six hours as the onslaught unfolded around them," per NBC. "He used his mandatory military training experience to stay camouflaged and urged everyone in the group to remain silent and not to run away even when militants came within several feet." (More eyewitness accounts here.) More than 700 Israelis have died so far. Israel has responded by striking Gaza—including hospitals, and residential buildings that the military claims are occupied by members of Hamas—killing almost 500 Palestinians. (Background on Gaza here.) "We are at war," said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an address, declaring that the army would be mobilized and reservists called up. Schools will close, and most international airlines that service Tel Aviv have ceased operations there for now.  BREAKING: IDF spokesperson confirms there will be an incursion into Gaza utilizing 100,000 Israeli troops with the goal of dismantling all Hamas military capabilities. — Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) October 8, 2023  "The Pentagon on Sunday announced it was sending additional munitions to Israel and moving more Navy warships, including an aircraft carrier, and combat aircraft closer to Israel in a show of support," according to The New York Times.  New this morning: At least 9 Americans were killed in Israel, an NSC spox tells @CBSNews @BoKnowsNews. — Weijia Jiang (@weijia) October 9, 2023  The invasion started on Simchat Torah, a normally joyful Jewish holiday that follows Sukkot and marks the end of a cycle of Torah readings. It also happened 50 years and one day after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, another conflict in which Israel was attacked on a holiday.  One likely reason for the attack: the negotiations between the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, which had been getting close to "full diplomatic normalization of Israeli-Saudi diplomatic relations," writes Responsible Statecraft's Paul R. Pillar. "From the general Palestinian perspective, any such three-way diplomatic deal would be a step backwards for Palestinian self-determination, because an Israeli objective is to enjoy such fruit without making peace with the Palestinians," notes Pillar. "From Hamas's perspective, it sees the rival Palestinian Authority taking a remarkably complacent posture toward the prospect of upgraded Saudi-Israeli ties, seemingly content to remain in its role of an auxiliary to the Israeli occupation. That leaves it to Hamas to actively oppose this backward step." Another possible reason: The ongoing expansion of the Israeli settlements, marked by "vigilante" attacks on Palestinians, has led many observers to fear another intifada would soon break out in the West Bank. Hamas, which has long been at odds with other Palestinian factions, may have wanted to seize the initiative, thus positioning itself in front of the movement. While much of the reaction to this weekend's violence has been thoughtful and informative, there have also been two other categories. Extremely Online insanity…  what did y'all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers. — Najma Sharif (@overdramatique) October 7, 2023   …and vapid warmongering:  This will not be a fleeting conflict in the Israeli-Palestinian saga. This looks like it will be the war to end all wars. It's different this time, and it needs to be clear to Hamas and the Iranian Ayatollah - and all their other proxies - that this was a severe miscalculation.… — Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) October 8, 2023  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Iran helped plot the attacks, though this has sparked some skepticism; we'll see what more comes out. Eli Lake asks whether "the bulldozer that Hamas used to demolish a border fence between Israel and Gaza" was "paid for in part with U.S. development aid" here. The Associated Press offers photos that "show fear, death and destruction in battle scenes from Israel and the Gaza Strip" here. Michael Eisenberg has a Twitter thread discussing the on-the-ground organizing in Israel that's happening outside of government.  Scenes from New York:   Today at the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) rally people cheered when a speaker spoke approvingly of Hamas killing and kidnapping "hipsters" at a rave. They cheered this at Times Square. Believe them. Progressive New Yorkers need to stop voting for these people. https://t.co/UI0Avj1L6A — Peter Moskos (@PeterMoskos) October 9, 2023   QUICK HITS  Though still on strike, the "United Auto Workers won a landmark concession from General Motors Co. to bring battery plant workers into the union's fold," which sets the stage for unionized electric vehicle plants. Watch Reason's Matt Welch on Real Time with Bill Maher if you know what's good for you. Pivot to…LinkedIn? Fascinating voter demographic changes:   so in 2022, 40% of native americans voted republican - a number that's been increasing since 2018. this makes them the most conservative voting group among U.S. people of color - even more than latinos, whose rightward shift has gained much attentionhttps://t.co/ARH5M9GD7m — spencer sunshine (@transform6789) October 5, 2023   Against safetyism, tech edition:   By obstructing technological progress, safetyism has an extremely high civilizational opportunity cost. If there would have been a moratorium and ethics committee for every emerging technology, we most likely would have killed any progress in its larval stage. pic.twitter.com/XzRTlnjxZw — Pirate Wires (@PirateWires) April 17, 2023   Such a dumb strain of anti-AI sentiment (of course image generators can be used to make things you find offensive):   We also asked @NintendoAmerica if it knew Bing is generating images of Kirby doing 9/11. https://t.co/fk5JkBButs pic.twitter.com/LQgldZrfQL — Emanuel Maiberg (@emanuelmaiberg) October 4, 2023   Amazon goes to space. "Any retaliation against Tehran—amid reports that it helped to plan the [Hamas] attacks—could endanger the passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital conduit that transports much of the world's crude [oil] and which the Iranian government previously has threatened to close," reports Bloomberg. "Iran denied on Monday that it was involved in the assault." How does the Iron Dome work? The post Death Toll Passes 1,100 appeared first on Reason.com.

The conflict in Israel is overshadowing everything at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. At a Tony Blair Institute event yesterday, David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, was clear that Hamas was a terrorist organisation and the attacks should be condemned. He was also clear that Israel’s response should be proportionate and remain within international law. There was a risk that Jeremy Corbyn – who refused to condemn Hamas – would become the story. But the former party leader is not a feature of this year’s conference. He does not even have a pass to the secure zone. His influence has been subdued. He is not the equivalent to that other former party leader, Liz Truss, who paraded her ideology unopposed in Manchester last week. The difference is that Corbyn cannot attract a scrum of supporters at a rally within the secure conference zone castigating the leadership at the same time that a cabinet minister is speaking across the road. Factionalism defines the Conservatives’ present and future in a way it does not for Labour. Squint and you can distinguish between the “soft left” and the “Blairites” (How many are even Blairites now? Aren’t some too communitarian, too sceptical of globalisation to be defined by Tony Blair? That needs interrogating) but in reality, this is Keir Starmer’s party. The victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election last week has buoyed the party’s electoral hopes. “Labour is back in Scotland,” an enthusiastic Jackie Baillie, deputy leader of the Scottish party, proclaimed in the main conference hall yesterday. But, as one senior Labour source put it to me at the New Statesman’s reception last night, the national picture remains uncertain and voters remain volatile. Labour’s strategy does not. It is long in the making. In June an aide to Starmer described Labour’s five missions for government to me as a funnel: the plan was to start with the broad ambitions and gradually condense them into pithy, retail policies by the time of the next election. Expect Starmer to make some progress in doing so with his speech on Tuesday. Don’t expect major policy announcements over the next three days that reconfigure Labour’s plan for government. Global warming policy will still be sold in terms of jobs and energy security. The key to Labour’s fiscal policy remains economic growth. Unlike the Conservatives, Labour does not need to change course. The mantra here is one of consolidation, explanation and driving the message home. Politically, there are risks. Starmer’s statement yesterday that he would scrap the Rwanda deportation policy even if the number of migrants crossing the Channel in small boats was reduced gave the Conservatives a lifeline. It could create some problems for Labour if planes filled with people seeking asylum do take off before the next election. But, generally, the fundamental politics of the next election are unlikely to change by the time the Westminster circus heads back to parliament on Wednesday. Rishi Sunak’s reset remains mired in incoherence, communicated in a way that is distant from voters’ priorities. The big question is whether Labour will rethink its approach to public finances, reorienting forecasts towards the long term, towards those habits analogous with a business (invest to grow) and not a household (spend what you earn). Rachel Reeves’s speech in an hour could illuminate the answer. [See also: Gaza’s attack changes everything]

Perhaps the Conservative Party Conference would better have been cancelled: after all, no one in the country, not least those on stage making pronouncements about the party’s future policies, has the slightest belief that any of those policies will ever be enacted. It was all a provincial pantomime, where the Conservatives pretended to be radical rightwing insurgents, and their adversaries, pretending to be aghast, enjoyed booing them. But even if the Tories possessed a record of passing legislation in, rather than directly against their own interests, the party has a vanishingly small prospect of winning the next election. The Conservatives turned a blitzkrieg electoral victory into a grinding war of attrition through their own incompetence, so that the enemy, whose capture of vast swathes of the country now looks fated, has already won the war by default. There are no electoral wunderwaffen on the horizon, as the leadership moves phantom armies across the map: but we must all endure a final grim winter of this ill-fated campaign before Labour’s red flag is planted on our ruinous parliament building. Wartime analogies are not inapt: it is an odd characteristic of the national temperament that the best British novels of Second World War, and the immediate postwar period looking back to it, concern unsatisfying jobs in Whitehall, and frustrated engagement with the dysfunctional engine of the British state. Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the wartime sections of Powell’s Dance To the Music of Time sequence, the despondently cuckolded civil servants of both Greene’s End of the Affair and Nigel Balchin’s Darkness Falls From the Air, even the disenchanted civil servant of Nineteen-Eighty-Four: all convey a certain repulsion at British governance borne of sudden experience of how the sausage is actually made. For those outside the Westminster bubble, but away from the front, Europe’s great and bloody convulsion was experienced primarily as something akin to Houellebecq’s accurate prediction of the world after Covid: “the same, just a bit worse.” There is something of our moment, also, in the writer Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, set in the grim midwar winter of 1943. For its spinster protagonist Miss Roach, the war is encountered “in its character of petty pilferer” first of all, making long accustomed goods increasingly unobtainable “while at the same time… gradually removing means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room from the trains.” For Miss Roach, “it was, actually, the gradualness and unobtrusiveness of this process which served to make it so hateful. The war, which had begun by making dramatic and drastic demands, which had held up the public in style like a highwayman, had now developed into a petty pilferer, incessantly pilfering. You never knew where you were with it, and you could not look round without finding something else gone or going.” Suggested readingWill Dominic Cummings destroy Westminster?By Aris Roussinos Miss Roach is condemned to live in the shabby-genteel oppressiveness of a provincial boarding house, the Rosamund Tea Rooms, “this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town.” As the biographer Michael Holroyd observes, Hamilton’s “macabre imagination” and bitter lived experience converts the boarding house  “into something between an asylum and a torture chamber”. Beset by petty rules, the arbitrary dictatorship of the elderly and its debilitating “orgy of ennui”, the Rosamund Tea Rooms could be a stand in for modern Britain, and the downwardly mobile Miss Roach a British millennial: “She was only thirty-nine, but she might have been taken for forty-five. She had given up ‘hope’ years ago. She had never actually had any ‘hope’. Like so many of her kind — the hopeless — she was too amiable and tried too hard in company and conversation, and so sometimes gave an air, untrue to her character, of being genteel.” It is surprising in our era of housing crisis, that the boarding house has not yet returned. Perhaps it will, or perhaps the HMO, its successor for today’s era of pinched and straitened middle-class circumstances, has taken up its purgatorial role. The HMO has not yet made its literary mark, but if material conditions as well as ideological currents influence our culture, perhaps it already shapes our times. Like our plummeting birthrates, could the inquisitorial suspicion, the nosy backbiting that defines millennial culture (around which an entire culture war has developed) derive as much from the enforced proximity gifted by inadequate housing as from indoctrination by progressive teachers? But it would not be in Conservative interests to highlight another of their own failures if so. Yet our current oppressive cultural atmosphere, characterised by dissident rightists as the culture of the “longhouse,” could just as well be termed, in Britain, the politics of the boarding house. We are all trapped together, by circumstances beyond our control and among people from whom we are increasingly estranged, in a stifling ennui seemingly impossible to shift. Our state, after all, looks increasingly like Hamilton’s penny-pinching landlady, Mrs. Payne, “who had put a stop to electricity on the landings simply by taking all the bulbs out – thus succouring her hard-pressed country, the spirit of the black-out generally, and her own pecuniary resources.” Our political discourse, increasingly repellant in almost every aspect, is stuck at the level of the elderly tyrants, the pub bores and tiresome pontificators who dominate the shared living quarters in Hamilton’s fiction like “the president in Hell”: like poor Miss Roach, we are doomed to listen to their vapid self-regarding pronouncements every single day. With the simple pleasures of life vanishing, and puritanical new restrictions enforced, our public realm increasingly reflects Hamilton’s “endless snubbing and nagging of war, its lecturing and admonitions.” But then Hamilton’s literary intentions, for all that he aimed to capture the lived experience of his class, were always directed towards a portrait of the British state and character, parodied in his little-read 1939 satire Moribundia as a “stagnant society, one that is lacking vitality and possibly nearing its end,” ruled by the static ideology of “Unchange,” with “a deathly fear and hatred of innovation, of an overturning of their system, behind all their nauseatingly idealistic postures and utterances.” There is something depressingly current in Hamilton’s depiction of his era, when world historical events, the rise and fall of empires, were experienced first and foremost as sharply declining living standards, a gnawing atmosphere of privation and neglect, and of being increasingly nagged by petty, seemingly arbitrary rules. We areourselves doomed to live in history: the 2008 financial crash, Covid, the war in Ukraine were each epoch-defining global events that beset us in short order, each of which demanded a grand response by the British state which either never came, or instead came in the most self-defeating and immiserating way. Suggested readingThe Age of the Museum is overBy Aris Roussinos By choosing austerity over investment, the Cameron government weakened the British state ahead of the crises to come; when Covid came, Johnson promised the sacrifices demanded for the greater good necessitated a wartime response, which in the end came only in petty restrictions, growing debt and some expensive meal vouchers; the economic effects of the war in Ukraine, similarly, have sharply driven down living standards, without any meaningful government strategy or investment to alleviate them, let alone transmute crisis into opportunity. And there is more to come: both the international situation and Britain’s social and economic prospects are worsening. We are asked to endure ever more, without a path or plan to victory. New privations are announced like grand national projects, while grand national projects are cancelled, as unaffordable or simply beyond the nation’s capacity. The only laws the government can pass are for censorship; its only remaining talking points are to condemn the future rationing proposals, fictional or otherwise, of their successors. Promised a humming war economy, we got rationing and restrictions, with neither guns nor butter at the end. How will this end? What was new about this year’s Conservative conference is the perception that none of it matters, at all. It was merely a ruling party unconvincingly going through the motions of governance, in a country going through the motions of democracy: all a provincial purgatory of sorts, the turbid backwash of world-historical events outside our control.  The Labour Party will enter government with a mandate for total change, and the future stability of the British political system will depend on its capacity to deliver it. On housing, Labour’s bold announced housebuilding commitments begin to address the scale of the problem, offering hope of major reform. Yet Starmer’s timid jettisoning of the grander prospects for reform risks settling for mere tinkering around the edges of dysfunction, and new petty rules with new state functionaries to enforce them. No longer the engine of grand national projects, much the same disenchantment could be applied to Parliament itself, whose restoration costs will apparently total £22bn: is it worth saving? Perhaps it would be better to let it crumble into the Thames, the breeding ground of crows, as a romantic monument to a lost civilisation. For any other purpose, without a bold commitment to reform, its time is running out. As polling for Onward shows, “six in ten Gen Z’ers support the idea of running the UK with a ‘strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections’, compared to only 29 per cent of over-55s. Focus groups suggest this is borne out of apathy: ‘what has democracy done for us?’, they ask with a shrug.” It is difficult to see that the events in store for us, or the state’s response to them, will re-enchant British voters with their decrepit political system. No wonder that for the young, the talk is no longer of reform but escape. For the fictional Miss Roach, release from her purgatory came through an unexpected inheritance, allowing her to return to Blitz-ravaged London, where for all the risk, “You had to square up to the war. The horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms resided in just the fact that it was not squaring up to it [but was] in its petty boarding-house lassitude almost insensible of it.” The miserable conditions of ration Britain were likewise dispelled by the postwar economic boom, but without a concerted effort, without reformist ambition and grandeur, there will be no such unexpected prosperity in our future. Today’s historic shift of global wealth and power will require a titanic effort to maintain our current lacklustre level of prosperity, let alone achieve the far greater wealth Britain should aspire to. As the rival parties’ regional pantomimes show, there is still no squaring up to reality in our grim national boarding house. view comments

A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.[Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem]With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.“Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.Such places have continued to break sharply toward Democrats in other elections this year that revolved around abortion, particularly the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election won by the liberal candidate in a landslide this spring, and an Ohio ballot initiative carried comfortably by abortion-rights forces in August. In special state legislative elections around the country this year, Democrats have also consistently run ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the same districts.“There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.“Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master. And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters. “That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”[Jerusalem Demsas: The abortion policy most Americans want]Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.

They say that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client. So, perhaps, does a person who represents Donald Trump.To most people, attacking someone with influence over one’s freedom and fortunes is self-evidently unwise, but that is precisely what Trump has been up to. This week, the former president attended a civil trial in Manhattan to determine what damages he might have to pay in a case about his company committing a massive, yearslong fraud. Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge in the case, has already ruled that fraud did occur, and Trump is furious about it.“This is a judge that should be disbarred,” he said outside of the court on Monday. “This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing. He’s interfering with an election.”[David A. Graham: A guide to the cases against Trump]The next day, Trump’s campaign issued a lengthy statement portraying Engoron as a Democratic operative, and Trump attacked Engoron’s law clerk on his social-media site, Truth Social. Engoron then placed a gag order on the former president, barring him from attacking the clerk. (Trump’s message was later deleted.) These incidents follow earlier broadsides against Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the case against him in Washington, D.C., for trying to steal the 2020 election. Trump called her “a fraud dressed up as a judge,” “a radical Obama hack,” and a “biased, Trump-hating judge.” (He has also insulted prosecutors in bracingly personal terms, but then again they are already literally out to get him.)“It’s like being a football player and every time you go back to your position, you kick the ref in the shins,” Ty Cobb, an attorney who served as special counsel in the White House during the Robert Mueller probe, told me. “You gradually sacrifice the benefit of the doubt, or you put a lot of strain on someone who’s supposed to be evenhanded.” Ken White, a criminal-defense attorney and writer, was even blunter, telling me, “He is who he is. It’s crazy, and I’m sure his lawyers are horrified.”And yet things could be going much worse. With the exception of this week’s narrow gag order, Trump has not been punished directly by judges, who could instruct him not to comment on cases and even imprison him if he doesn’t comply. Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith asked Chutkan for a partial gag order, which Trump promptly misrepresented publicly; she has scheduled a hearing on the question for October 16. Courts seem slow to sanction Trump because they are wary of being seen as infringing on a major political figure’s speech, and because setting a rule would require enforcing it—and Trump is possibly too big to jail.“He knows the judges are less likely to do something to him, because they’re kind of backed into a corner. He’ll say, They’re taking it so personally; they’re being biased. They hate me because I exercise my free speech,” Titus Nichols, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who represented the whistleblower Reality Winner, told me. “A regular defendant would have been locked up a long time ago.”That doesn’t mean that the outbursts have no downside. The fraud trial is being heard by Engoron with no jury. (He says that Trump’s lawyers declined to request a jury.) Although Engoron is ultimately bound by the law, a trial includes many opportunities for a judge to make dozens of minor, discretionary choices.“When it comes down to individual rulings, you really want the judge to be as open-minded as possible. But if you’ve spent all this time saying, The judge is stupid, the judge is a disgrace, what do you think’s going to happen when you get to those rulings?” Nichols told me. “And that’s why it’s a bad strategy to insult the judge, because while the judge might not directly reprimand you, there’s so much judicial discretion.”Attorneys I spoke with told me they advise defendants to keep a low profile ahead of a trial and to stay off social media. In addition to the danger of alienating a judge, anything they say could be brought up during proceedings. “You tell stories about how publicity can harm you, how it doesn’t land the way you think it’s landing, how your friends and cronies will love it, but the judge and probably jury will hate it,” White told me. A lawyer might even choose a prominent example from the news to illustrate the danger: “If you’re anyone but Donald Trump, you point at Donald Trump.”[From the October 2023 issue: The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump]It’s possible to construct a theory under which Trump’s outbursts at judges aren’t all that disastrous. Trump often seems to prioritize his political fortunes—fervor among his base, fundraising, press coverage—over his apparent best interest. But if you presume that losses in both the fraud and election-subversion cases are already foregone conclusions, then his strategy makes some sense. Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud, and the facts in the election case are damning. (Cobb told me he expects a conviction in the federal election case: “If you’re a juror in a case like that, you come back pretty fast.”) Any conviction (or damages, in the civil cases against him) will likely be appealed, but at the trial level, Trump may have already accepted he is likely to lose, and thus may stand to gain the most by wrapping himself in a lost cause.But even if the self-inflicted wounds in any individual case are incidental, his tendency to create unnecessary nightmares for defense teams (along with his history of stiffing contractors) means that he is less able to attract high-quality representation. Top-tier lawyers have repeatedly declined to work for him, and among those who have taken the job, many don’t stay for long. Over time, that could deepen his risk in all of the cases against him.“If you go to 30,000 feet, what his defense lacks is a general—someone who has stature, experience, and knowledge to manage all these trial teams,” Cobb told me. “It’s a leaderless defense, which de facto makes Trump the leader of the defense.”In other words, Trump is acting as his own chief attorney—and we know what people say about a man who represents himself.

A young woman is pulled by the hair and shoved into the backseat of a truck. Her trousers, where she has been sitting, are soaked with blood. She has been captured by Hamas Islamists who have launched a war on the state of Israel. She is just one of many who have been taken hostage. On the 7th October, on a day that will live in infamy, Israelis suffered a surprise attack from Hamas militants. A hailstorm of 2000 rockets rained down from the Gaza strip. Militants poured through the border and began stalking cities in the Southern part of Israel.Reports out of Southern Israel and videos on social media have shown militants riding in Jeeps and 4 wheel-drives attacking civilians. One video captured the execution of elderly citizens at a bus stop. Another showed a young woman in the back of a truck, her unclothed body twisted and lifeless. A music festival was attacked. Held near a kibbutz close to the Gaza strip, unverified videos on social media appear to show Hamas militants paragliding into the event. Other videos show attendees fleeing the scene as gunshots ring out. The New York Times has reported that 500 attendees still remain unaccounted for. As of this writing, at least 300 Israelis have been confirmed dead, and 1500 have been wounded. The death toll will no doubt increase. Hamas militants are still holding an undisclosed number of Israelis hostage.Observers have noted that the attacks have been unusually sophisticated for Hamas, indicating support from either Russia or Iran (or both). Experts have also described the attack as one of the worst failures in Israeli intelligence in history. Quillette will have more on this over the coming days.Naturally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared war on Hamas. "We are at war," he said in a televised address, and “we will win,” he assured his people. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, wrote “As the barbarity of today’s atrocities becomes clearer, we stand unequivocally with Israel,” words that were echoed by Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese:Australia stands with our friend Israel in this time.We condemn the indiscriminate and abhorrent attacks by Hamas on Israel, its cities and civilians.We recognise Israel’s right to defend itself.— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) October 7, 2023 All the team at Quillette are thinking of our friends in Israel at this moment. We love you. We support you. And we stand in solidarity with you.בהצלחה—ClaireHoward MenPrince Jones, Carlton Jones, and the evasions of Ta-Nehisi Coates.QuilletteAdam GussowKing of the GothsIn the third instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ podcaster Herbert Bushman describes the rise of Alaric I, whose Gothic armies roamed Greece and the Balkans before marching on Rome itself.QuilletteHerbert BushmanSculpture and StoryNarrative art has been deeply unfashionable for about a century. But aren’t art and stories inextricable?QuilletteAidan HarteThe Insidious Lie That We Can’t Understand Each OtherAnd a guide for how to productively push back against the identity trap.QuilletteYascha MounkTowards a Brave New WorldHuxley’s dystopian novel was a warning, but we are systematically moving in the direction he indicated.QuilletteTomasz WitkowskiThe Disaster ArtistWas Liz Truss Britain’s first affirmative-action prime minister?QuilletteLaurie WastellMan Out of TimeA look back at the career of Avery Corman, who found popular success with ‘Kramer versus Kramer’ before running afoul of feminism.QuilletteKevin MimsPodcastPodcast #224: Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans-Identified ChildrenQuillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to psychotherapist and book author Stella O’Malley, and parent “Josie A.,” about the need to heed parents’ voices before “affirming” a child’s desire for gender-transition therapies.QuilletteQuilletteQuillette Cetera Episode 19: The Elephant Man in an Era of Cancel CultureCrowds love the irreverence of The Marvellous Elephant Man Musical, but activists want it boycotted.QuilletteZoe BoothYouTubeSocialsQuillette Social London | HumanitixQuillette Social London, Hosted at Old Queen Street Cafe, 6 Old Queen St, London SW1H 9HP, UK, Fri 3rd Nov 2023, 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm GMT. Tickets are between £97-£350. Only on HumanitixHumanitixFrom Around the WebYoung and old, female and male, Israel’s civilians are the prime victims of Hamas war . Click to read ⬇️ https://t.co/72ByifrZop— The Times of Israel (@TimesofIsrael) October 8, 2023 

Updated at 11:45 a.m. ET on October 7, 2023Living online means never quite understanding what’s happening to you at a given moment. Why these search results? Why this product recommendation? There is a feeling—often warranted, sometimes conspiracy-minded—that we are constantly manipulated by platforms and websites.So-called dark patterns, deceptive bits of web design that can trick people into certain choices online, make it harder to unsubscribe from a scammy or unwanted newsletter; they nudge us into purchases. Algorithms optimized for engagement shape what we see on social media and can goad us into participation by showing us things that are likely to provoke strong emotional responses. But although we know that all of this is happening in aggregate, it’s hard to know specifically how large technology companies exert their influence over our lives.This week, Wired published a story by the former FTC attorney Megan Gray that illustrates the dynamic in a nutshell. The op-ed argued that Google alters user searches to include more lucrative keywords. For example, Google is said to surreptitiously replace a query for “children’s clothing” with “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear” on the back end in order to direct users to lucrative shopping links on the results page. It’s an alarming allegation, and Ned Adriance, a spokesperson for Google, told me that it’s “flat-out false.” Gray, who is also a former vice president of the Google Search competitor DuckDuckGo, had seemingly misinterpreted a chart that was briefly presented during the company’s ongoing U.S. et al v. Google trial, in which the company is defending itself against charges that it violated federal antitrust law. (That chart, according to Adriance, represents a “phrase match” feature that the company uses for its ads product; “Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems,” he said.)Gray told me, “I stand by my larger point—the Google Search team and Google ad team worked together to secretly boost commercial queries, which triggered more ads and thus revenue. Google isn’t contesting this, as far as I know.” In a statement, Chelsea Russo, another Google spokesperson, reiterated that the company’s products do not work this way and cited testimony from Google VP Jerry Dischler that “the organic team does not take data from the ads team in order to affect its ranking and affect its result.” Wired did not respond to a request for comment. Last night, the publication removed the story from its website, noting that it does not meet Wired’s editorial standards.It’s hard to know what to make of these competing statements. Gray’s specific facts may be wrong, but the broader concerns about Google’s business—that it makes monetization decisions that could lead the product to feel less useful or enjoyable—form the heart of the government’s case against the company. None of this is easy to untangle in plain English—in fact, that’s the whole point of the trial. For most of us, evidence about Big Tech’s products tends to be anecdotal or fuzzy—more vibes-based than factual. Google may not be altering billions of queries in the manner that the Wired story suggests, but the company is constantly tweaking and ranking what we see, while injecting ads and proprietary widgets into our feed, thereby altering our experience. And so we end up saying that Google Search is less useful now or that shopping on Amazon has gotten worse. These tools are so embedded in our lives that we feel acutely that something is off, even if we can’t put our finger on the technical problem.[Read: What happened to Wirecutter?]That’s changing. In the past month, thanks to a series of antitrust actions on behalf of the federal government, hard evidence of the ways that Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are wielding their influence is trickling out. Google’s trial is under way, and while the tech giant is trying to keep testimony locked down, the past four weeks have helped illustrate—via internal company documents and slide decks like the one cited by Wired—how Google has used its war chest to broker deals and dominate the search market. Perhaps the specifics of Gray’s essay were off, but we have learned, for instance, how company executives considered adjusting Google’s products to lead to more “monetizable queries.” And just last week, the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon alleging anticompetitive practices. (Amazon has called the suit “misguided.”)Filings related to that suit have delivered a staggering revelation concerning a secretive Amazon algorithm code-named Project Nessie. The particulars of Nessie were heavily redacted in the public complaint, but this week The Wall Street Journal revealed details of the program. According to the unredacted complaint, a copy of which I have also viewed, Nessie—which is no longer in use—monitored industry prices of specific goods to determine whether competitors were algorithmically matching Amazon’s prices. In the event that competitors were, Nessie would exploit this by systematically raising prices on goods across Amazon, encouraging its competitors to follow suit. Amazon, via the algorithm, knew that it would be able to charge more on its own site, because it didn’t have to worry about being undercut elsewhere, thereby making the broader online shopping experience worse for everyone. An Amazon spokesperson told the Journal that the FTC is mischaracterizing the tool, and suggested that Nessie was a way to monitor competitor pricing and keep price-matching algorithms from dropping prices to unsustainable levels (the company did not respond to my request for comment).In the FTC’s telling, Project Nessie demonstrates the sheer scope of Amazon’s power in online markets. The project arguably amounted to a form of unilateral price fixing, where Amazon essentially goaded its competitors into acting like cartel members without even knowing they’d done so—all while raising prices on consumers. It’s an astonishing form of influence, powered by behind-the-scenes technology.The government will need to prove whether this type of algorithmic influence is illegal. But even putting legality aside, Project Nessie is a sterling example of the way that Big Tech has supercharged capitalistic tendencies and manipulated markets in unnatural and opaque ways. It demonstrates the muscle that a company can throw around when it has consolidated its position in a given sector. The complaint alleges that Amazon’s reach and logistics capabilities force third-party sellers to offer products on Amazon and for lower prices than other retailers. Once it captured a significant share of the retail market, Amazon was allegedly able to use algorithmic tools such as Nessie to drive prices up for specific products, boosting revenues and manipulating competitors.[Read: The tragedy of Google Search]Reading about Project Nessie, I was surprised to feel a sense of relief. In recent years, customer-satisfaction ratings have dipped among Amazon shoppers who have cited delivery disruptions, an explosion of third-party sellers, and poor-quality products as reasons for frustration. In my own life and among friends and relatives, there has been a growing feeling that shopping on the platform has become a slog, with fewer deals and far more junk to sift through. Again, these feelings tend to occupy vibe territory: Amazon’s bigness seems stifling or grating in ways that aren’t always easy to explain. But Nessie offers a partial explanation for this frustration, as do revelations about Google’s various product adjustments. We have the sense that we’re being manipulated because, well, we are. It’s a bit like feeling vaguely sick, going to the doctor, and receiving a blood-test result confirming that, yes, the malaise you experienced is actually an iron deficiency. It is the catharsis of, at long last, receiving a diagnosis.This is the true power of the surge in anti-monopoly litigation. (According to experts in the field, September was “the most extraordinary month they have ever seen in antitrust.”) Whether or not any of these lawsuits results in corporate breakups or lasting change, they are, effectively, an MRI of our sprawling digital economy—a forensic look at what these larger-than-life technology companies are really doing, and how they are exerting their influence and causing damage. It is confirmation that what so many of us have felt—that the platforms dictating our online experiences are behaving unnaturally and manipulatively—is not merely a paranoid delusion, but the effect of an asymmetrical relationship between the giants of scale and us, the users.In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.

The darkest force in today’s politics isn’t extremism. It isn’t populism, socialism, or MAGA. It’s celebrity. And South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on Tuesday, can’t resist it. If that’s come as a disappointment to some conservatives, it’s because they couldn’t resist Mace. But her outsize appeal really should have been the first red flag.

Mace was a hypnotic package. The first woman to graduate from the Citadel, she exudes showbiz charisma, and comes off as a balanced medley of Trumpy conviction and intriguing heresies. She squarely blames Donald Trump for January 6, for example, favors marijuana legalization, opposes offshore drilling, and occasionally dissents from her party on abortion. And she’s a proven winner who beat a Democrat incumbent and then held onto her seat in a tough election.

But she’s also incorrigibly unserious, a social-media peacock, and a political exhibitionist. In July, appearing at Senator Tim Scott’s annual South Carolina prayer breakfast, she explained to attendees: “When I woke up this morning at seven, Patrick, my fiancé, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed and I was like ‘no baby we don’t got time for that this morning, I’ve gotta get to the prayer breakfast.’ He can wait, I’ll see him later tonight.” A U.S. representative. At a prayer breakfast.

It wasn’t offensive. It was embarrassing, like watching one of Madonna’s recent bids for erotic relevance. It’s hard to witness someone so severely starved for attention.

One effect of politicians pursuing celebrity is that they damage the causes to which they’re attached. Last month, during the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, Mace labeled the Democrats’ defense of Biden “complete and total bulls–t.” Because using profanity during a public government hearing is marginally good for her brand, no matter that it’s bad for Republicans who are trying to pursue a serious matter.

Another effect is extremism itself. Hunger for celebrity drives political histrionics and incentivizes maximalist positions. It’s how you break out of the pack. The Squad wouldn’t be the Squad without socialism and anti-Semitism. If you can’t sing or act, you have to scare people into noticing you. So Mace, who’s previous gambits fell just short of outrageous, took the opportunity to join seven other Republicans and eject the Republican speaker of the House. She’s now an A-lister.

Her “unexpected” vote has earned her a good deal of opprobrium. Politico reports that her decision to oust McCarthy “is now clouding her future in the GOP, not to mention imperiling the status of her relatively competitive seat next year, as scores of angry Republicans mull possible retribution.” That would be a problem for Mace if she were interested in the work of politics. But when celebrity is your goal, contempt is capital. Just look at Vivek Ramaswamy, the man with the billion-dollar smirk. A year ago, we never heard of him. Now, we’ll never be done with him. And we’ll probably never be done with Mace.

She can bank the scorn coming her way like so many donations. In fact, she’s already doing just that. Mace is on a victim tour, claiming McCarthy lied to her and others threatened her, and would you please donate what you can to help out a poor, independent-minded public servant. She may or may not see a flood of small donations. But either way, she’ll be just fine. Politics has already served its purpose in her life. It brought her celebrity. And she’ll hold on to that one way or another, win or lose.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat do you think America will be like in 2050?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteThe coronavirus pandemic led to a dramatic increase in the number of people who work from home, followed by more recent attempts by many firms to get their employees back into the office.What does the future hold?The economist Alex Tabarrok argues that work-from-home appears to be a permanent and beneficial change in how work is structured, and that it won’t reduce productivity in the long run: It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home. But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work from home (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits. We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home … shifting from input metrics––do you show up?––to output metrics–did the work get done? … Workers value the option to work from home and many firms now advertise the options for hybrid work as a benefit … Work from home appears to have stabilized at around 25% of work days overall and stunningly, nearly 40% of work days for college educated workers! What Is “Solarpunk”?Brink Lindsey points us to a definition: Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and wild, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Lindsey expounds on that definition: The “solar” part of the name is clear enough: the movement envisions a future built around clean energy … But what about “punk”—what’s that supposed to mean? It suggests an oppositional, countercultural stance: egalitarian and anti-hierarchical, frequently anti-capitalist, or at least anti-consumerist throwaway culture. Though the solarpunk idea is still too new and amorphous to have any rigorous ideological framework, it definitely gives off a left-wing vibe. You can see a clear solarpunk sensibility in the works of some prominent left-leaning sci fi writers: just mentioning books I’ve read, I’d include Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson and Makers and Walkaway by Cory Doctorow. And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, during a recent live Q&A session on Instagram, spoke out against climate doomerism and called herself a big believer in the optimism of solarpunk. Unsurprisingly, the hostility to capitalism doesn’t appeal to people on the right, nor does the endorsement of self-proclaimed democratic socialists like AOC. Lindsey is a fan of capitalism, yet urges those who agree with him to refrain from rejecting solarpunk: These days I’m a “lumper,” not a “splitter,” actively seeking ways to combine and synthesize apparently incongruous ideas … So let’s look at the core of the solarpunk vision, stripped of the ideological baggage that some people attracted to that vision have brought with them. At the heart of solarpunk is the idea of an environmentally sustainable high-tech future—and that’s the right idea! And it’s the right idea not just because we don’t want to wreck the planet, but because we don’t want to wreck technological dynamism, either. The only way to put the anti-Promethean backlash behind us is to develop technologies that allow humanity and the natural world to prosper together, thereby undermining the indiscriminate cultural hostility to technological progress that currently bogs us down. This is the future that solarpunk envisions. To get to that future, we need as many people as possible to find it attractive enough to work toward, and to fill out those numbers we need people from all ideological starting points. Beyond this core commitment to clean energy abundance, solarpunk also clearly embraces a countercultural sensibility—an opposition to business-as-usual consumerism. And that’s the right idea, too! But both solarpunk proponents who embrace it as a new species of anti-capitalism, and supporters of technocratic capitalist innovation who reject solarpunk for the same reason, are misunderstanding what is the optimal relationship between solarpunk and capitalism: not either-or, but both-and. A Slippage Into Social PsychologyIn a bygone newsletter, I highlighted Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic essay “I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up,” where he argued: “​​Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness … contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it.”How was his essay received?In a podcast interview with the economist Glenn Loury, Harper shared that his article was mostly well received, while the closest he got to negative feedback was from readers who complained that although he might not want to talk about race all the time, a number of people do. “Some of my Black friends want to talk about it a lot,” they told Harper. “Others of my Black friends don’t seem to.”His response: My response is, you’ve got to treat them like people. So much of the anxiety around interracial social etiquette is that white people feel a profound and overwhelming guilt and sense of powerlessness, but also complicity at what they see as American history and ongoing problems around police brutality, or whatever. And they just want someone to tell them what to do. They want a fixed set of rules so they can do the thing they’re supposed to do to make them not racist. I’m a big fan of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and he had this great line where he wrote, “Neurosis has the structure of a question.” What he means is that people who are neurotic experience their whole world as anxiety about who they are and their place within the social order. What do authorities want from me? What does my boss want from me? What am I supposed to do? And they’re constantly anxious about who they are and what to do. And here comes anti-racism and DEI and [it] says: Here’s the fixed set of rules you can follow that will mean you’re not racist––and that also signals to everyone else that you’re not racist. So the main pushback I’ve gotten is, Some Black people do want me to talk about race; other people don’t. How am I supposed to know? And I think this expresses an anxiety about an absence of rules. If we pulled back from this particular kind of interpersonal anti-racism, people would have to exercise judgments and take cues from Black folks about when they do and do not want to talk about race. The point I’ve made is, Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, and I’ll let you know when I do. But I think that makes people deeply uncomfortable because they would have to exercise judgment. Loury responded with a question. You reject color-blindness in public policy while advocating for a de-emphasis on race in social intercourse, he told his guest. “Can you really have it both ways?” Loury asked. “Aren’t those things symbiotically intertwined with one another? If we do policy in terms of race, don’t we perforce invite personal relations in terms of race?”Harper responded by noting that history affords examples of laws that were ostensibly race-neutral yet had racially unequal effects, justifying some skepticism of color-blindness in public policy.“That’s a really different argument from saying that interpersonally, between two friends or colleagues around the water cooler, it’s racist not to acknowledge racial difference and that professing not to see color is a dog whistle,” Harper said. “On this last point, Coleman Hughes has been really good. He points out that there’s this case of terminal literalism a lot of people get where they say, Obviously you see color. You have two eyes in your head. The brain picks up race within milliseconds. And that’s not what anyone means when they say “I don’t see color.” They mean I try to treat everyone the same … There’s a huge difference between that and saying that we shouldn’t aspire to treat everyone the same in our interpersonal interactions. I don’t deny that there are examples, particularly in workplaces, where that can be a very difficult line to straddle. Nonetheless I think we used to straddle it more than we do now … There’s been this metastasis of critiques of color-blindness that’s gone from a political claim about how certain race-neutral laws aren’t race neutral to color-blindness as such is bad. And it’s this slippage from politics to social psychology that I find both bizarre and a kind of mismatch.”Provocation of the WeekIn an appearance at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C., the novelist and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discussed censoriousness, self-censorship, and their effects on artistic creation.Some excerpts of her words: Ayad Akhtar, who’s this writer I really admire, says that there’s a moral stridency in the way that we respond to speech, and that there’s something punitive about it. I think it’s true. I think people are afraid and self-censor. The single story—they then impose it on themselves. You have people who now increasingly think that you cannot write about experiences that you have not personally had. And I think that’s terrible for literature and for the idea of an imagination that is allowed to grow and soar. I don’t think that there’s any human endeavor that requires freedom as much as creativity does. I worry that what we’re looking at is the end of curiosity, the end of creativity, the end of learning, even … It seems to me that there is a massive decline today in compassion and in moral courage. And I think that, in some ways, both are connected. On social media, there’s an expectation that you will not get compassion: You tweet something, and then people are coming at you, even your friends. I think it makes people hold back. And then, of course, the moral-courage part of it is that there are people who could speak up, and they don’t. I think what’s happening now—the books that are not being published; you open the newspapers and often there’s someone who’s been dropped from something—it’s often not because those in positions of authority really believe that what has been said was bad. It’s because they’re afraid of themselves being attacked. With this kind of social censure hanging over people, it’s so much more difficult, I think, to create, to write … Even in the small space of a workshop—I constantly have to say to people, It’s okay. You can actually write that. Because you can see that they’re very worried about what the people in the workshop are going to think. I wish people would read more, and particularly read more imaginative writing. I think maybe it would make us a bit more compassionate … What are we saying to ourselves about the self-censorship that we are promoting? There’s a sense in which on the left, it’s so easy to fall short of expectations. You’re supposed to know everything, right? And you’re supposed to know the right language to use. You’re not expected to ask questions. I think if more of us decided that we were going to, for example, be less vicious, a bit more compassionate, you know, maybe be more charitable when somebody says something, then maybe the tone on social media would change a bit … Maybe the literature we produce will be a bit less narrow. You know, I don’t really find contemporary fiction very interesting … I’m constantly buying books … especially first novels. But I almost never finish them. I remember recently reading this book, and I thought, My God, everybody is good in this book. And that’s a lie. Literature should show us all sides of ourselves. And I read this book, and everyone was ideologically correct. Everyone had all the right opinions. I mean, I love this expression from H. G. Wells, that literature should be about the jolly coarseness of life … Just the coarseness of life will do. Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

A good rule of thumb in any scandal involving Donald Trump is that no matter how bad it seems—which is often very bad—it will get worse.If you thought it was bad that the former president hoarded classified presidential records at Mar-a-Lago, it got worse when we learned that Trump had shown off military plans to writers interviewing him. It got worse again when Special Counsel Jack Smith produced photographs showing that Trump had stored those documents haphazardly on a ballroom stage, documented a lengthy alleged scheme to lie to the government about them, and suggested his lawyers hide them.Now it’s worse still: According to new reports yesterday, Trump in April 2021 shared national secrets about U.S. nuclear submarines with an Australian billionaire who is a member at Mar-a-Lago. The magnate, Anthony Pratt, has reportedly told federal investigators that Trump told him the “supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry, and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a Russian submarine without being detected,” per ABC News.[Graeme Wood: Not even the president can declassify nuclear secrets]Few things are more sensitive and more closely held than nuclear secrets. Trump has defended himself in the classified-documents case by claiming (without proof, and against other evidence) that he declassified the material before leaving office, using a power of declassification granted to presidents. But as my colleague Graeme Wood reported last year, nuclear secrets are considered so sensitive that not even the president can declassify them.As if sharing these secrets with a foreign national was not bad enough, events after show that Pratt was even looser-lipped than Trump. “In emails and conversations after meeting with Trump, Pratt described Trump’s remarks to at least 45 others, including six journalists, 11 of his company’s employees, 10 Australian officials, and three former Australian prime ministers,” ABC News reported.Does anyone think this is the only time that Trump shared extremely sensitive secrets? Get your wagers to the betting window now, or whenever; there will always be another chance.[David A. Graham: Trump’s scandals are never done]This development risks being lost in the shuffle of a presidential campaign and an imploded House GOP majority and a long list of legal troubles for Trump. If Barack Obama or George W. Bush was sharing secrets like this it would have been a massive scandal, yet for Trump willy-nilly sharing of classified material is old hat. But the report of Trump’s disclosures to Pratt is important not merely because it involves national security. It also points to a fundamental flaw in Trump’s conception of the presidency, the office that he is now working to reclaim.Politicians are not held in especially high esteem these days, often for good reason, but most of them still understand that in theory their role is to administer the government on behalf of the American people. We call them public servants, after all. Yet although Trump speaks the language of populism fluently, he has no real regard for the public’s interest and feels no responsibility to uphold it.Many observers, including me, have argued that he takes his theory of governance from Louis XIV: “L’etat, c’est moi.” But that’s not quite right. His approach is all moi and no etat. Trump ran for president because he seemed to think it would be fun to get the adulation of the office and to be able to know all the secrets that the president knows. Once elected, he loved to talk about military parades but manifestly hated the actual governing parts of the job.Trump imported this approach from his business career. The Trump Organization is a privately held company, which makes sense, as he could never fulfill any requirement to act as a fiduciary on behalf of shareholders. The company was his to run as he saw fit—or to run into the ground, as he nearly did a few times. So was any property that came to him. When he purchased the landmark Bonwit Teller building in New York, he promised to preserve artwork before demolishing it. Then he promptly destroyed the art. It was his, right?[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: a guide]This is boorish and dishonest and says a great deal about Trump’s character, but was basically his legal right. Government cannot and does not work that way, but Trump never grasped that, even once he became president. He continued to act like the CEO of a privately held company: If he wanted to share classified material with foreign officials visiting his office, who cared? If he wanted to use the power of the U.S. government to extort political aid from Ukraine, who was to stop him? What was the point of knowing secrets if you couldn’t share them? How dare co-equal branches of government stymie him?Since grudgingly leaving office, Trump has continued to act this way. Perhaps that’s because he believes that he really won the election (though he has privately acknowledged limitations on his powers post-presidency), or perhaps it’s because he feels that once things are his, whether presidential records or classified secrets, they’re his to keep or share forever.At the heart of the American project is the idea that politicians hold the government in trust for the American people, then turn it over to other elected representatives. Trump has shown yet again that he is unworthy of that trust.

In decades past, most Americans married, and similar majorities of American children were raised within two-parent families. But now marriage rates have fallen; 40% of American children are born outside of wedlock, and approximately a quarter live in single-parent homes. The United States has by far the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households — more than three times the global average.  Melissa Kearney, who is an economics professor at the University of Maryland and Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, investigates the reasons for this sea change in American family formation and its consequences in her important new book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Kearney finds overwhelming evidence that children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. And she also finds that since college-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise children in two-parent homes, the move away from marriage and two-parent families is worsening inequality and widening the class divide between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans.   In this podcast discussion, Kearney analyzes the reasons for the decline of marriage and the rise of single parenthood, along with the significant variance in two-parent households among different ethnic and racial groups. She also talks about why academics have been reluctant to publicly discuss the impact of single parenthood on kids’ outcomes, the reasons why both the political left and right have criticized her analysis, and some potential policy solutions to the social dynamics that are “disadvantaging children and will perpetuate across generations if we don’t immediately do something about it.”  Transcript Melissa Kearney: Outside the college-educated class, the share of kids growing up in a married or two-parent home has really fallen. And that’s why this now is such an important part of our story in this country about inequality and eroded social mobility. Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And it’s a real honor to be joined today by Melissa S. Kearney. Among her many distinctions, she is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. She is the first female director of the Hamilton Group and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is also the author of numerous pathbreaking studies related to poverty, inequality, and the economics of families. And she is the author of a just-released book which has already become one of the most talked-about works of social science in years: The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Welcome, Melissa! Melissa Kearney: Thanks for having me. Geoff Kabaservice: And congratulations again on the publication of The Two-Parent Privilege. Melissa Kearney: Thank you so much. Geoff Kabaservice: This is such an excellent book that has struck such a social nerve and really sparked a national conversation. I know you are dealing with a lot of media obligations at the moment, so I’m especially grateful to you for taking time to talk to me today. Melissa Kearney: Thanks for having me. You’re right that it has hit a media nerve, but I swear the first thing I said when I talked to my publisher was, “I don’t want to write a hot-take book.” Geoff Kabaservice: And it is not that. So let me lead off with a vivid set of statistics from your book. In 1960, only 5% of babies in the United States were born to unmarried parents. Today, that number is 40%, and for Black babies it is 70%. And yet this is a social sea change in the country that is almost never discussed — and certainly not as a problem — in academic social science literature and conferences. As Annie Lowrey recently wrote in The Atlantic, “The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year” — that is to say, your book, Melissa — “makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids. I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege… And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty.” As that passage suggests, the significance of your book, I think, lies in both the power of its argument and also in the ways that it violates a taboo that has prevailed for decades in academia and on the left about even talking openly about these issues. Melissa Kearney: Yeah. It’s not that there’s not a lot of academic research on the topic. That there is. But then academics are understandably reluctant to bring up what we know about the impact of single parenthood on kids’ outcomes, or the differences in parenting across different socioeconomic classes, when we’re then asked to comment on new policy or poverty solutions. And there’s a foregone conclusion that, “Well, this is something we can’t really do anything about. So then let’s just keep talking about the need to improve schools or the need to expand the safety net.” And so that’s why I finally decided to write the book. Because in the book, I’m not really putting forward any statistics or evidence that scholars who study inequality or the economics of family don’t already know. It’s more that I’m taking it out of the academic journals and saying, “Hey, let’s be honest about this. Let’s put this out there into the public discussion and just really be honest about the fact that we have to do something about this if we’re going to make real progress on closing socioeconomic gaps in kids’ childhood experiences and opportunities and outcomes, close racial gaps in kids’ educational performance.” It just started to feel dishonest and counterproductive that this wasn’t a centerpiece of our policy conversations about inequality, social mobility, and child well-being in America. Geoff Kabaservice: We will definitely get to the reception of your book. But I will just reinforce one of the points you made, which is that this book is based on an incredible array of social science studies, many of which you authored yourself, and yet it’s also a very accessible book — and short. I should also add that it’s not a huge tome. Melissa Kearney: That’s right. Good, I’m glad you found it accessible and a pretty quick read. Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely! So let me take a first cut at articulating what seem to me to be three broad components of the argument of your book. First, marriage rates have fallen in the United States for several decades, albeit not everywhere and not continuously. And over the past forty years, there has been a dramatic decrease in the share of children living with married parents, to the point that the United States has by far the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households. And in fact, according to a Pew Research Center study, nearly a quarter of U.S. children under age 18 live with one parent and no adults, which is more than three times the global average of 7%; I think it’s 23% to be exact. Second, as you wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed, “This is not a positive development.” I think most people would share Annie Lowrey’s intuitive sense that one-parent families have fewer resources to invest in children, not just in terms of money but also time and emotional bandwidth. And you continue, in that New York Times op-ed, “The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education, and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble in school or with the law.” And one could add that girls from single-parent homes are much more likely to become single mothers themselves, and also that Black boys seem to be particularly disadvantaged by the absence of fathers — or to put it the other way, are particularly advantaged by the presence of fathers. Melissa Kearney: Right. Geoff Kabaservice: You cited a 2019 study authored by Raj Chetty and his colleagues that showed that the presence of more dads in a neighborhood is one of the strongest predictors of upward mobility for Black boys. And then, third, the move away from marriage and two-parent families is both a reflection of the class divide between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans and a compounding factor in worsening class inequality. College-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise children in two-parent homes. But while in 1980, 83% of children whose mothers had a high school degree or some college lived with married parents, now only 60% do, which is a huge 23-percentage-point drop. And for children whose mothers didn’t finish high school, the share living with married parents fell from 80% in 1980 to 57% in 2019, which is likewise a 23-percentage-point gap. Melissa Kearney: Right. Geoff Kabaservice: And you write that “The result is less economic security for affected households and even wider inequality across households and childhood environments than economic changes would have wrought alone.” So that’s an extremely broad outline of your book’s argument. Melissa Kearney: That was a pretty good synthesis of a lot of the main points and themes, though. I appreciate it.  Geoff Kabaservice:What else would you like to add? Melissa Kearney: The first part of the book is really meant to just lay out the facts, because there’s a lot of misconceptions. And when you hear that there’s been a decline in marriage, or one in five kids in the U.S. now lives outside a married-parent home or lives in a one-parent home, there’s a lot of different misconceptions that people have about what that means. I tried very hard to just be clear about what is driving this and what is not driving this, and that matters for how we think about it. So first, let’s consider the point that, yes, more kids in the U.S. live in a one-parent home than in any other country for which there’s data on this kind of thing. One immediate response to that might be, “Yes, because we’re richer in America and women can afford to set up their own households.” I think it’s really important to point out that it’s not the most economically successful women in America who are doing this. Quite the contrary: college-educated women are very rarely doing this by themselves. This is what’s really quite shocking: only 12% of kids whose mom has a four-year college degree are living with just their mother, as compared to 30% of kids whose mother has a high school degree and some college but not a four-year degree, or less than high school. And so this affects how we feel about this trend, or how we view this trend in terms of child and mother well-being. It’s moms who are less likely to be economically very successful on their own who are finding themselves in the position of raising kids in their own household. So this really isn’t an economic success story of women — with the important caveat (that I suspect we’ll come back to at some point during the hour) that in many ways women’s economic liberation and their opportunities over the past forty years have allowed this to happen in some sense outside the college-educated class. I want to be clear: On the one hand, it’s not the most economically successful or highly educated women who are doing the job of parenting in a household by themselves. On the other hand, there has been great progress made by women in the economic sphere, such that women no longer need to be financially dependent on a male who might be a crappy partner or worse. I would never lament the economic success and liberation of women. But on the one hand, it’s not the most economically successful. On the other hand, outside the college-educated class, many women are doing better economically than men, and that’s part of what’s driving this. But we’ll come back to that. The other thing that’s important… Part of the data story that I lay out is that this is not about high rates of births among unmarried women or teenage women or women with lower levels of education. All of those rates are down. Teen births are down tremendously in the U.S. They’re down over 70% from the ‘90s. Unmarried women are having fewer babies than they used to — because actually all women under the age of thirty are having fewer babies than they used to. Births are down in the U.S. And I think it’s important to point that out because, again, another reaction I get when I talk about this challenge is, “Yeah, well, we just need better access to birth control,” or “We need to fight teen childbearing,” or “It’s all these teen moms.” That may have been true in the ‘80s, but that’s not what we’re dealing with now. Births are down. Births are down among teens, births are down among young women. What’s happened is the share of births that are outside of a marital union has increased for everybody. The largest increase has basically been for let’s just call them middle socioeconomic groups. So non-marital childbearing… The share of births to college-educated women that are outside of marriage has increased, but it’s still only 11%. Whereas now actually a small majority — more than 50% — 52% of births to women outside the college-educated class are outside of marriage. Births to white women and Hispanic women in particular, the share of births that are outside marriage have increased over the past forty years. And so the story here is really the decline in marriage and the de-bundling of having and raising kids from the institution of marriage and living together with your partner and your co-parent. That’s really what’s happened. And so that’s why the book focuses on the decline in marriage as opposed to what’s been going on — I spend a whole chapter explaining that what’s going on with births would’ve pushed all of this in the opposite direction. So just laying out those facts, I think, is really important. And then again, there are level differences across race and ethnic groups in the U.S. Those were present in the early ‘80s. People wrote about them. What’s happened over the past forty years — which is a major theme of my book — is this emergence of a wide education gap that was not present in 1980. So what’s happened in the past forty years that’s quite startling is that college-educated parents continue to have their children and raise their children in married-parent homes, at largely similar rates as in the early ‘80s. But outside the college-educated class, the share of kids growing up in a married or two-parent home has really fallen. And that’s why this now is such an important part of our story in this country about inequality and eroded social mobility. And so that’s the new story now, as compared to people who might have studied this based on data and things being written about what was happening in the ‘80s. Geoff Kabaservice: So you go through this question of why there is this decline in marriage and why there has been this rise in single-parent families. You go through it rather like a detective. You put forward one hypothesis, you consider it, you knock it down, and go to the next. So as you had said earlier, it’s not that rich women now have the ability to have children outside of marriage because they don’t need men. That’s not really what’s driving the phenomenon. Since you mentioned that it’s also not teen pregnancy, I can’t resist mentioning that you and your frequent collaborator, Phil Levine, studied the impact of the MTV reality series 16 and Pregnant. Melissa Kearney: It’s true. A lot of the research I’ve drawn on in the book is co-authored work with Phil. We had written a number of papers about teen childbearing in the U.S., both the cause and effect of teen childbearing. And then one year, the rate of teen childbearing just went down like 7.5%, as compared to 2.5% that had been declining. And we were getting a bunch of calls from journalists: “What is it?” And we were, “We’re not sure, but it’s not abstinence education, it’s not sex education, it’s not the unemployment rate. We know none of those things matter this much.” Actually, I’m going to give credit where credit’s due… I was talking to Sarah Brown, who was the head of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and she said, “We think it’s the MTV effect.” I asked, “What are you talking about?” She goes, “That new reality show.” And of course, Phil and I were like, “Oh, come on.” But we were intrigued by this idea, and so we started watching a couple episodes, and we’re like, “Oh gosh, this really does make it clear that being a teen mom is hard.” And so we went and purchased the ratings data of how many teens were watching the show in different markets. We came up with an instrumental-variable strategy looking at the MTV penetration in the pre-period. The punchline is that when that show came on the air in communities where MTV viewership was higher in the pre-period — so you have a bunch of teens watching MTV, and all of a sudden this show comes on — in those places, you saw an especially large drop in teen childbearing. And so then the idea was like, “Gosh, did they watch this show and take it as a real cautionary tale?” We got access to Google and Twitter data and confirmed that when episodes aired, you could see spikes in Google searching for how to get birth control. And you saw spikes in the number of tweets that both mentioned 16 and Pregnant and birth control, which is just suggestive evidence that this show was changing hearts and minds in ways that led teenagers to behave differently. This book isn’t about teen childbearing per se, but I do think the lessons of that study and other studies that other scholars have written showing that there’s a causal influence on media content, on outcomes, even outcomes as complicated as whether people get married or have kids — it is relevant to this whole discussion. Because if we’re thinking about what shapes behaviors, a lot of the story I tell in the book, unsurprisingly, is economic. But social norms and attitudes matter a lot. And as an economist, I don’t have very many economic policy levers to pull to change social attitudes. But media images is one thing that we know — from a bunch of research, not just our MTV paper — media images matter. Geoff Kabaservice: That is fascinating. And yes, that would be part of a further discussion. At the risk of engaging in gendered stereotypes, let me put forward a few more straw men. This decline in marriage and rise and single-parent families, is it being driven by divorce? Melissa Kearney: No. Good, I’m glad you asked that. So that is another important fact I put out in the paper. Actually, women today who are unpartnered mothers are more likely to have gotten there through never being married than being divorced. In the 1980s, a majority of unpartnered mothers were divorced. Now a small majority of unpartnered mothers have never been married. And so again, this is really important because it’s not that women are more likely now to leave bad marriages to their children’s father. It’s that those parents were never married in the first place. But here there’s an interesting socioeconomic or education class divide, which is that college-educated mothers who are unpartnered are more likely to be divorced than never married. And this tells us where things are happening, what’s the mechanical driver of this, and it’s really about people just having kids outside marriage rather than getting divorced after they have kids. But the class divide is actually important here too when we think about what it means for kids’ outcomes, because kids whose parents are divorced are more likely to have had their second parent in the home for some of their childhood. They’re more likely to have had the resources of the second parent in their home. And they’re more likely to be in a home, even after the divorce, where there’s income support from the second parent — almost always the dad — and they’re more likely to have contact with the dad. And so divorced, unpartnered mothers in the data look different — and their kids’ outcomes look different — than kids whose parents have never been married. And the way I think about that is if kids who live with two parents through their whole childhood have sustained access to the resources of two parents, and kids whose parents were never married are more likely to have missed out on all of the parental resources from the second parent, kids of divorce are somewhere in the middle. Geoff Kabaservice: One can tell you’ve had this question a lot from super-defensive divorced dads  Melissa Kearney: I definitely get the question of, “Well, if we’re still involved in our kid’s life, and paying support and seeing them, are our kids at a disadvantage?” And by the way, there’s a lot to unpack just in the fact that I get that question a lot, because it’s no secret that everybody wants the best for their kids and cares about this and really thinks that what they do as a parent matters. And then somehow — and I’m starting to get, I’ll be honest, increasingly impatient with this line of pushback — somehow when we talk about it for other kids, it’s like, “Hey, don’t talk about that. You know what? Just give them more of a tax credit.” As if all these things these men are doing as fathers could be replaced with an additional $300 from the government each month! I hear a little bit of a “Let them eat cake” when I hear them say that. You’re doing a lot as dads and you really care about your kids’ outcomes. My view is that millions of other kids also deserve and would benefit from having a second parent showering their love and attention and resources on them. But okay, back to the point of if parents can make up for the gaps. It’s also really instructive when we think about the fact that if non-resident parents were sort of fully making up for what kids who have two parents in the household have access to — so whether that be divorced parents or never-married parents — if they were still really engaged in the life of the child, and somehow the single mother was making up for the deficits that come from not having a second parent with other sources of income or other role models or other people who supervise their kids, then we wouldn’t see the gaps in kids’ outcomes. So both in terms of mechanisms and outcomes, we see in the data that kids who live with one parent have less parental resources at their disposal, and then we see that their outcomes are different. And so basically, outside the two-parent home, the gaps aren’t being fully made up for, which is actually the point. Geoff Kabaservice: Right. You relate that often you will be in discussion with friends, and you’ll tell them something about this question of the decline in marriage. And they will say something to the effect that, “Well, this is just people in the United States adopting a more European lifestyle. They’re raising children in long-term, stable, committed, cohabitating partnerships that amount to marriages in all but name.” And you then say, “Actually…” Melissa Kearney: “Actually, they’re not. And your good friends who are doing that, or the very famous economist couple that we all know is doing that — they’re the exceptions to the rule.” In fact, cohabitation among parents in the U.S., though it’s risen over the past four decades, is not nearly as high as you might think — though I guess I don’t know what people think it is. But only 8% of kids in the cross-section of the Census are living with one of their biological parents and another father or mother figure. And that’s a very generous term because basically in the Census, a partner of the parent is considered the father or mother figure even if they don’t actually adopt that kind of role at all. So when we say 8% of kids are living with cohabiting parents, we need to realize that that doesn’t mean they’re living with their unmarried biological parents. Between a quarter and 40% of the second partner in the household is not a child’s second biological parent. So even that 8% overstates the case of how many kids are just living with unmarried parents. And having boyfriends or girlfriends in the house is actually a very complicated family structure for kids. I don’t delve too deeply into this in the book… You went back to the fact it was short; I tried very hard to stay on main points and there were a lot of tangents I could have gone off on. But I will say that there is a lot of work in child development psychology and sociology looking at the effect of different relationships on kids’ outcomes. And even though I’m really focused on having more resources in the household, an unmarried boyfriend or girlfriend is not necessarily a good thing for the kids, let’s say that. Geoff Kabaservice: Are generous welfare benefits encouraging single motherhood, he naively asks? Melissa Kearney: This is a point of contention. In a sense, this is what more social conservatives or conservatives don’t like about the book. There’s something for everybody across the political spectrum to dislike in my book. Geoff Kabaservice: You’re an equal-opportunity offender. Melissa Kearney: Exactly. So my read of that is a pretty clear no. And I say that for a few reasons. One, just as a practical matter, cash welfare in this country is not at all generous. There’s actually very little by way of income support to low-income parents. Now, I will concede that Medicaid is very generous, and 70% of single mothers are on Medicaid. But the evidence on how welfare benefits affect rates of family formation suggest to me — and there are dozens of studies of this, some of which I worked on too… There are dozens of studies that show, yes, when welfare is more generous, you see an increase in single-parent homes. I’m not denying that you could get a positive coefficient, and in some studies it might be statistically significant. But the magnitudes are quite small. Furthermore, since welfare reform in the mid-‘90s, it has been a lot harder to get cash welfare, and welfare has become less generous. So the fact that welfare has become less generous and single motherhood rates are still incredibly high suggests that that’s not a primary driver. But again, there’s a bit of a nuanced story here. Had we not had welfare reform and had we kept increasing the generosity of welfare benefits, might rates of single parenthood be even higher today? Perhaps. So I’m not dismissing the potential impact of welfare reform on curtailing the rise of single-parent households. But when we look at the share of single-parent households today, when we look at the fact that one in five kids in the U.S. is living with an unpartnered parent, it is not because our welfare benefits are super high. And in fact, if you look at other countries that have much stronger welfare states and much more generous welfare benefits, the rates of single parenthood are lower. So even just on a cross-sectional comparison, that line of pushing doesn’t really hold up. Geoff Kabaservice: Is the rise of single parenthood related to the increase in non-heterosexual couplings? Melissa Kearney: In my book, I treat two-parent households or married-parent households — I just count the number of adults or see if they’re married. And so I put same-sex couples with married-parent or two-parent households. And without being dismissive of how important that group is as a demographic group, it’s not a large share of kids’ parents. And so as, again, a very practical matter, how we categorize them on the data doesn’t affect any of the trends I’m talking about. Geoff Kabaservice: One more qualification here… There does seem to be a significant variance in two-parent households among different ethnic and racial groups. Melissa Kearney: Yes, huge differences. 77% of white kids are growing up in married-parent homes, 62% of Hispanic kids, 38% of Black kids, and 88% of Asian kids. So again, it’s really hard to talk about race and ethnic differences in, let’s say, student outcomes in school and not reflect on the fact that the supports these kids are getting at home (in terms of how many parents are there to help them or supervise them or take care of them) is wildly different across these groups. This doesn’t just reflect differences in educational attainment among parents across race and ethnic groups. As I show very clearly in the book, if you look within race and ethnic groups, there are differences in the share of kids living in two-parent homes by whether the mom has a college degree. Let’s take Black kids, because they have the highest rate of living outside of a married-parent or two-parent home. 60% of children who live with a college-educated Black mother live with married parents, as compared to 30% of children of Black mothers who don’t have a college degree. So there’s both a much lower level of two-parent homes among Black families, and then also within that racial group, there’s this big college divide. I will point out we do not see this education gradient among the children of ethnically Asian parents in the U.S. For me, not studying Asian-American culture, that was a quite stark and surprising finding that I saw in the data. Basically more than 80% of kids in all Asian households live with married parents, even among the least educated, and it doesn’t seem like economics can explain that. It doesn’t seem like, from my look in the data, non-college-educated Asian men did much better than non-college-educated white, Black, or Hispanic men over this time period. But even given what happened to their economic position, those families continue to have and raise their kids in married-parent homes. By the way, one thing to clarify: I keep going back and forth between saying married-parent and two-parent homes. Just to be clear, this is related to the conversation we were having about cohabitation. Whether a child’s parents are married in the U.S., more so than in Europe, is highly determinant of whether they have two parents in the home. And so that’s why I keep going back and forth. Geoff Kabaservice: Point taken. One more clarification… This distinction between college-educated and non-college-educated is really a crude proxy for class. But it does seem, from what you’ve said here and elsewhere, that the phenomenon of single-parent households is increasingly a middle-class phenomenon. Melissa Kearney: Yes, and there’s a lot to even just unpack in that. The college-educated class has become much larger over the past forty years, so now it’s something like 30% of moms have a college degree as compared to 11% in the early ‘80s. So the fact that this is so much more of a heterogeneous group and a wider group, and in a lot of ways we could say less selective or less elite — the fact that the share of kids in married-parent homes among college-educated class has not fallen further is a bit striking. Because this is an advantaged group, but it’s a much larger group than it used to be. As you said, the fact that this has really become an issue now in let’s just call it the middle class — again, crude, thinking of people who have a high school degree — this is why this is now really an issue about economic security and income inequality beyond just what’s happening in the most disadvantaged groups. Scholars were writing about this phenomenon in the ‘80s — and in fact, of course, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed this out in the late ‘60s. But those studies were really focused on the most disadvantaged groups, like adults without a high school degree, teen parents. But now this phenomenon or this trend of having one-parent households has really moved up the socioeconomic distribution. And the fact that high school-educated moms are substantially more likely now than twenty years ago to be running their own household, and basically be the sole financial provider of their household, has made the economic security of that group, the high school-educated Americans — it’s really undermined their economic security. And I show this very clearly in the data. If you look at what happened to household earnings over this time period, we know that college-educated workers have continued to do really well. Their earnings have gone up over forty years. They’ve continued to marry (often to each other), and so household income has gone up over this period. If you look at what has happened to high school-educated moms, their own wages went up. High school-educated men’s wages either went up a little bit or stagnated, depending on how you want to look at the data; people argue about that. But let’s just say the wages went up a little bit. When you look at household earnings and you don’t condition on how many adults are in the household, you see household earnings for that class of American adults actually went down. Again, the reason is because now they’re 20 percentage points more likely to be headed by one adult rather than two. And that’s just a matter of simple math. If you only have one adult bringing earnings into the household, the total household earnings are going to be lower than if there’s two adults. Geoff Kabaservice: Exactly so. I always ask the people to come on this podcast to tell me something about their background and education, but my sense is that for this discussion those factors actually explain a lot about how you came to the subject of your book. Melissa Kearney: Everyone wants to know what your angle is and what your lived experience is, so I’m very forthright in saying I had the privilege of growing up in a two-parent household. My children have the privilege of growing up with two parents. That certainly affects the way I feel about the subject to the extent that, for me, marriage has not been a terrible prison as it is for some people. I think it would be much harder for someone who themselves was in a terrible relationship to say, “You know what? We actually need to think about increasing rates of two-parent households.” I think at a visceral, personal level, my view is, “Oh my gosh, I can’t imagine doing this by myself.” It would be so much harder. It would be so much lonelier. It would be so much less fun. That’s why I call the book The Two-Parent Privilege, in the sense that not only do I see it in the data that this is good for kids, but in my own life I’m very aware that I’m in a privileged situation of having a committed co-parent to do this with. I see the abundance of parental resources we’re throwing at our kids, right? If I’m too tired or I’m too stressed or I’m occupied and I have to be at work, there’s another parent there to pick up the slack. And so I’m writing this recognizing my own privilege in it. But also — and I know this is an easy thing to say, but I very much mean it and I hope it comes through in the tone with which I write the book — I’m writing this from a position of empathy. I’m not blaming single moms. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, your job is so hard that you have to do this by yourselves.” And I’m asking the question of why is it that millions of moms in this country — again, mostly those without high levels of education or high earnings themselves — why are they finding themselves having to do this themselves? That is a really hard position to be in. So I think that’s how my own experience comes at this. I hope this is also abundantly clear in the writing of the book. I’m not suggesting that all of these women are just deciding this would be awesome to do on their own. And I’m trying to get at root causes. What are the structural issues that are making it such that so many women — again, outside the college-educated class — are finding themselves in a position of having to do this by themselves? Geoff Kabaservice: Writing about your upbringing, you say that “My family’s trajectory of upward mobility would be almost impossible today.” What do you mean by that? Melissa Kearney: My parents grew up in very low-income circumstances. They described themselves as poor kids, and by all accounts they were poor kids in the Bronx. But they had two parents. Both of them had two parents in the house. They get married at twenty-one, they leave New York and move to the Jersey suburbs, set up a middle-class existence, send four daughters to public school. Their daughters all wind up going to Ivy League schools on the East Coast on financial aid. It’s almost preposterous to think about how lucky we were, and my dad credits it all to luck. But my mom too, she’ll see all of the things we do for our kids and all of their activities and she’s like, “We could have never afforded that for you guys when you were kids.” And so we just see very clearly in the data how the college-educated class are pulling away from everyone else. They’re spending inordinate amounts of money on their kids. They’re spending inordinate amounts of time on their kids. Their kids’ childhoods just look so different from what a lower-middle-class family could provide to their kids. And also just if you looked at the data, my parents — I’m not saying anything about my parents in their own marriage, but just as a statistical matter — if you were projecting, they’d be much less likely to be married or stay married today. Geoff Kabaservice: Just to clarify, did your parents go to college? Melissa Kearney: Yes. My mom went to college after I did. She graduated high school and became a secretary when she was eighteen — that was sort of what was available to her — and then she raised her four daughters, was a very involved mom, and did part-time secretarial work. And it’s funny, actually, because I remember her doing work at the kitchen table while she was making spaghetti sauce, which she called “gravy.” But it’s also sort of funny because I was like, “Wow, she brought work home long before that was a thing.” But then after her daughters were older, she went to our local community college and became an elementary school teacher. Geoff Kabaservice: The mention of “gravy” suggests you were from a New Jersey Italian-American family. Melissa Kearney: That’s right, exactly. My dad still comes over on Sundays and expects me to have gravy cooking for him. And then my dad also went to a local college. He was also in the National Guard. There’s some talk about how much of his work my mom actually did, but, yes, he also went to a local school. Geoff Kabaservice: So you went to Princeton and you studied with Sara McLanahan, who is well known as a teacher of the sociology of poverty and launched the Fragile Families & Child Wellbeing Study. And your senior thesis advisor was Anne Case, who together with her husband Angus Deaton wrote the highly influential 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Can you tell me something about your experiences with them and other teachers? Melissa Kearney: How amazing was that to get to study with both of them? They’re both phenomenal. I want to give credit to all of the women who got me here. I actually showed up at Princeton and thought maybe I wanted to be a comparative literature major, and then I thought maybe I wanted to go to the public policy school. And I happened to have the very good fortune of randomly getting assigned to Beth Bogan as my academic advisor. She was a lecturer — she just retired last year — and she looked at my transcript and was like, “You have really high math scores. Can you take economics?” And I was like, “I don’t know what economics is.” She’s like, “Just try it. If you like social studies and math, I think you’ll like economics.” And so she’s the one who got me interested in the discipline. But I was really interested in a lot of social problems. I took sociology classes and had the great fortune of studying with Sara McLanahan. She taught a “Sociology of Poverty” class. She taught her work on family structure, what she was finding in the Fragile Family Survey. She was really a pioneer in this field in many ways. Without overly flattering myself, I hope she would think that this book did her work justice. I feel like what I’ve done in this book has continued a lot of the themes that she worked on and pushed forward in her career. Then I was an RA in the Industrial Relations section. I did RA work for David Card, who was there before he went to Berkeley. And I took econometrics with Hank Farber and Orley Ashenfelter. And then it was time to write my senior thesis. I remember going to them and saying, “I want to write something about the economic lives of poor women.” And they were like, “Why don’t you talk to Anne Case?” So I went over and I talked to Anne Case — I was a junior — and she was amazing. Even now when I advise students, I have to remind myself when students come to me and are like, “I want to write about inequality,” you have to say, “Okay, that’s a lot to parse.” She was such a wonderful mentor in saying, “Okay, let’s try to get a specific question out of your interest in the economic lives of low-income women.” And so the thesis I wound up writing my senior year in college was on the economic determinants of when women initiated childbearing — which is actually sort of amazing because here I am thirty years later still writing about the same topic. But she was fantastic. It’s embarrassing how many awesome professors I had both as an undergrad and a Ph.D. student. Geoff Kabaservice: That is a very impressive lineup. The economics field is now and was then pretty heavily male-dominated. And just parenthetically, I’m wondering if the relative paucity of economic studies of family formation has something to do with this gender imbalance. Melissa Kearney: NBER has a program on children and the economies of children, and you find a lot more women there than in any of the other NBER groups. There are plenty of men who also study this, but it is sort of striking when you think about the fact that children are the future of our economy, and households and families are the fundamental economic unit. For too long, many men in the profession would write this off as too much like sociology or not serious or not hardheaded. And so this is one of the ways in which I think we see that having a more diverse group of people studying economics brings more attention to certain questions than others. This applies broadly. This is why it’s important to have women studying economics. This is why it’s important to have more people from racial and ethnic minority groups studying economics. This is why it’s important to have people from different backgrounds and parts of the country studying economics. People look around them and see the world in different ways and ask different questions. And I happen to think questions about the family and how kids are being raised are really important to economics. And because I am so enamored with the methods — both theoretical modeling and econometric techniques — in economics, I think this issue deserves the attention of those very rigorous methods. But let’s be clear, this whole niche field in economics was brought to the fore and sort of elevated as a serious topic by Gary Becker. Geoff Kabaservice: True. I was fascinated to note that you did junior-year work in Bridgeport, Connecticut with poor women, given that my mom was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  Melissa Kearney: No way! Oh, wow! Geoff Kabaservice: So I’ve always known about Bridgeport and its travails as well. Melissa Kearney: Okay, let’s pause on that for a minute, because that summer really was so instrumental in getting me started on this line of research. The Princeton Class of ’55, as their gift back to the university, basically paid for students to have summer internships in organizations that worked for structural change. What’s so amazing about that is that if there wasn’t a group paying for kids to do internships, basically, with nonprofits who didn’t have money to pay us, I would’ve spent the entire summer (rather than just half the summer) waitressing at the Jersey Shore — which by the way is its own awesome experience. But it was nice to be able to spend half of the summer at an internship that I was paid for, even though the nonprofit wouldn’t have had money to pay me. So hats off to Princeton Project from the Class of ‘55. And so what that was… I went and worked at Jobs First. It was a welfare-to-work center in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was part of welfare reform. At that time, the state of Connecticut was operating under one of these waivers, or maybe… I can’t remember if it was an AFDC waiver or new TANF rules at that time. But whatever it was, at the time women in the state of Connecticut, in order to maintain their welfare benefits, had to be either employed or moving to employment.  Geoff Kabaservice: This is a post-Clinton-welfare-reform development? Melissa Kearney: During Clinton, yes. It was like ‘95, so during the Clinton administration. These women were all young moms who were on welfare, who weren’t yet employed but were at this training program. I taught business math classes and word processing, and we worked on resumés. It was really eye-opening, one of those amazing experiences. And that’s probably why I went back to Princeton and was like, “I want to write about this.” It was pretty striking. You’re twenty, working with other twenty-year-olds, and they have kids. I’m nowhere near expecting to have kids right now. And so this is really what got me to write my senior thesis, or ask the question of what is it about the economic determinants — in the way one’s growing up, the economic environment that they’re living in — that determines whether or not they initiate childbearing? Geoff Kabaservice: Terrific. To shift gears a bit, Megan McArdle in her Washington Post column on your book, cited a poll by Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies showing that only 30% of college-educated liberals agree that it’s important for children to have two married parents. And I myself have found that when I’ve laid out the thesis of your book to some of my liberal friends, their reaction is sort of like so many cobras flaring their hoods. What’s involved with this sensitivity on the left? Melissa Kearney: I am going to be generous and say that I think it’s a very well-intentioned desire not to sound like you’re judging somebody else’s choices. And so they don’t want to say that what they’re doing — which by the way is almost all raising their kids in two-parent married homes — is better than what someone else is doing. But I actually think not only is it just on average not true in the data that they’re not loading their kids up with tons of resources. I don’t think it’s as generous as a position as they sort of like to think it is. I mean, when I look at it, I ask why do those millions of moms have to do this by themselves? That’s really freaking hard. What are the structural barriers or the structural conditions such that they’re doing it by themselves? And to just pretend that it’s a lifestyle choice I think, frankly, is just not productive and a bit divorced from reality. I think also a lot of these people are thinking of their own friends who are 41-year-old women who make a lot of money, maybe have an MBA or a law degree, didn’t find their life partner and so are choosing to become a single mom by themselves. That is a very, very, very different scenario from the modal single mother in this country. Geoff Kabaservice: You had mentioned the Moynihan Report… Just to go back to the historical background of that, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 was an assistant secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration. And he wrote what was supposed to be an internal memorandum entitled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” I think fewer than 100 copies of it were printed. But it was leaked to the press, and then all hell broke loose. And Moynihan wrote essentially, if I’m remembering this correctly, that the rise in Black single-mother families was driven by dynamics that were not solely economic and that would hinder the progress of African-Americans toward economic and political equality — which he devoutly desired. But activists and writers on the left, and some though not all civil rights leaders, declared that this was Moynihan “blaming the victim,” that his conclusions were racist and sexist, that he was shaming single mothers of color, and he was diverting responsibility for poverty from social-structural factors to the behaviors and cultural patterns of the poor. And one official within the Johnson administration soon announced that “I have been reliably informed that no such person as Daniel Patrick Moynihan exists.” Now, you can’t say that he was canceled exactly, because he did go onto a modicum of fame in other areas… Melissa Kearney: That’s right. Geoff Kabaservice: But I think that, long ago as that was, that really handed the issue of family formation to the conservatives, to the right. And liberals, I think, have really avoided it almost ever since. Melissa Kearney: There was sort of a resurgence of writing on the topic in the ‘80s. William Julius Wilson, the prominent sociologist at Harvard, wrote a book which had a similar emphasis on the economic situation hindering Black men. That was a big part of the Moynihan memo. But as you said, there’s also a lot of other language that I think would make most of us quite uncomfortable, sounding like it’s putting the blame on norms among Black women and Black moms. But what Wilson wrote in the ‘80s was about the decline in what he called the marriageable men, and he created this marriageable men index. And basically the argument he put forward was that the Black-white gap in marriage and single-parent households — which is also what Moynihan had been focusing on — is reflective of the fact that there are fewer marriageable Black men, because Black men were more likely to be out of work and incarcerated. Again, this raises all sorts of issues about structural problems, about discrimination, about mass incarceration; it’s not blaming the victim. I think that characterization has really made it difficult to talk about this issue. What he says is, “Look, there are fewer marriageable Black men around, and that’s a driver of this racial gap in family structure.” And now what I’m doing is I’m taking that marriageable men idea, as other scholars have done in academic writing, and applying it to education class differences, not just race — because again, that’s the gap we’ve really seen open up over the past forty years. So whereas the concept that Wilson wrote about (and to some extent before him Moynihan wrote about) is, “Let’s look at the employability of these men and recognize that when men are out of work, they’re less attractive marriage partners, they’re less reliable fathers” — now let’s look at how that’s happened outside the college-educated class. And in the book, I push on that as one of the key drivers of why marriage rates have decreased and single parenthood has increased outside the college-educated class, which is because of the economic changes that have hurt (in both an absolute and relative sense) non-college-educated men of all races and ethnicities. Geoff Kabaservice: One more point about the reception of your book… I think people on the center-right and center-left have kind of the same experiences when they will come forward with findings that get used by the extremes. So in your case, the right will say, “Why, even the liberal Melissa Kearney now agrees with the conservative position on the importance of two parent-families, though of course her prescriptions are wrong.” While the left will say, “Well, Melissa Kearney’s tract supporting the Republican position on families shows that neoliberals inevitably carry water for the far right.” Melissa Kearney: I think yesterday I was scooped in as part of a “Republican propagandist movement.” That was a first for me. Geoff Kabaservice: That was relating to Brent Staples’ comment on Rebecca Traister’s piece in The Cut. And a lot of this is guilt by association, right? “Here are these social scientists talking about the importance of marriage at the same time that the far right is trying to recenter hetero marriage by reversing the progress that has enabled women to have lives outside of marriage,” and so forth. Melissa Kearney: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. I think I went in with my eyes wide open. But I also am ex-post realizing that there was a little part of me that I guess held out hope that maybe if I was rational and data-based enough that maybe we could all just agree on the facts and agree that this is an issue that should be an urgent policy priority. I think my sense is most people who are bristling the strongest actually haven’t read the book or engaged with all of the data and evidence that I’m putting forward, but just have this expected knee-jerk reaction to the topic. Which of course is unfortunate, but that’s, again, the unfortunate world we live in. Everyone has to have their quick take in twenty-four hours. Geoff Kabaservice: I said that your book is at the center of our national conversation, but I didn’t say that that national conversation was good. Melissa Kearney: Right, or well informed. Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. So you write, like I said, very excellently about the problems that have been caused by the decline of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. So what is to be done? Melissa Kearney: I think it’s fair to say that, like most books that lay out a problem, I spend more time trying to convince you there’s a problem than I do articulating a detailed five-point plan about how to move forward. That said, I do have ideas about what needs to be done at a large structural level, and then of course there are huge agendas under both of those. We need to double down on all of our efforts to improve the economic security and position of people outside the college-educated class, and in particular men — so all of the policy conversations we have about expanding access to family-supporting wages and jobs, and increasing skills, increasing employment among primary-age, non-college-educated men. All of that takes on heightened importance when we realize how much that is trickling down into families and disadvantaging children and will perpetuate across generations if we don’t immediately do something about it. Along with that — and this is where plenty of people will disagree with me — but I think we need to reestablish a social norm acknowledging that two-parent families are beneficial. This gets back to your poll that 30% of college-educated liberals reject that proposition. You can’t honestly reject that proposition based on data. And so we need to reestablish that and be honest about it. And of course the trick — which some people say is unachievable, but I don’t think it is — is we should be able to do that without going back to the time where single moms and their kids were so stigmatized that moms were banished from the communities or felt like they couldn’t escape abusive relationships. We should be able to acknowledge that two-parent families are beneficial, and make strengthening families a policy priority, and still love and embrace single moms who are doing all of this heroic work on their own. Okay, now let’s just think about direct programming. There’s no immediate economic policy lever that we could pull that’s going to reverse this. But at very low-hanging fruit, let’s get rid of the marriage disincentives which are all over our tax code and transfer policies. That’s an obvious thing. I think that will matter at the margin; I don’t think that’s going to dramatically turn things around. But that is a very immediate, direct thing we should be doing. Also, an immediate and direct thing we should be doing… Once we’re willing to recognize that families are important — this radical idea that Annie Lowrey associated me with — once we recognize that families are important, we should be pumping as much money and research effort and innovation into experimenting with programs designed to strengthen families — not programs telling people to get married, but programs that are meeting families where they are and saying, “Okay, let’s use this trauma-based research education curriculum. How can you co-parent better? How can you engage with your child and your child’s parent more effectively? How can you navigate having a parent in prison or returning from prison?” Why are we not doubling down on these programs aimed at strengthening families? I’m all for spending more money on Head Start and childcare subsidies, but investing in the family actually needs to be one of our funding and policy priorities as well. Geoff Kabaservice: You do actually offer a very wide array of potential solutions, or at least contributors toward a solution. And one of them is just bolstering federal support to community colleges. I was reminded of the paper you had done with Bill Evans about ways that mentoring and emergency financial assistance can actually help improve throughput at community colleges, which do serve so much of the college population. Melissa Kearney: It always feels ungratifying to people when they’re like, “Wait, you tell me about this major problem and then you tell me to mentor community colleges or have relationship education classes for low-income unmarried parents?” But we have to chip away at these things in a whole bunch of little ways, and eventually they all add up and they make a big difference.  Geoff Kabaservice: But there was the unsettling finding in another paper you wrote on the fracking boom of the first decade of the 2000s. There had been a somewhat similar boom and bust in Appalachia for coal, which had led to an increase in births among married couples. But that was not what you found with the fracking boom data. Melissa Kearney: Yes. This is a study that contradicted my priors. I went into that study very much thinking about, “Let’s look at the reverse marriageable male possibility.” In the fracking boom, those were localized positive economic shocks that affected communities, increased jobs — not just in fracking industry jobs, but also it was good for the local communities. You had an increase in jobs and an increase in earnings, especially among non-college-educated men. So I thought this was great, because we have all these studies showing that when communities get hit with manufacturing shocks or the adoption of industrial robots, men lose their jobs, their earnings decrease, the share of kids living in single-parent homes increases. What I expected to find here was a positive shock: the earnings and employment of non-college-educated men go up. And so did the non-marital birth share fall, did marriage increase? And the answer was no. But as you said, when there was a very similar shock in the ‘70s and ‘80s in coal-producing Appalachian counties, you actually saw that marriage increased. Actually, you saw that marriage increased and the non-marital birth share fell. And so this was a sobering finding to me because it made me realize the way I thought about it and interpreted it was: We’re now in a new social paradigm where the convention of having kids in a married-parent home, and raising kids in a married-parent home, has essentially been broken in many communities. And so now when there’s a positive income shock, you do see that people have more kids. But they have more kids whether they’re married or not, and there’s no change in the share of kids born to married parents. So that was part of what led me to ultimately conclude, as I do in the book, that economic changes alone aren’t going to be enough, social changes alone aren’t going to be enough. We need them both to happen together. Geoff Kabaservice: And you are admirably honest, I think, in acknowledging that social change will be very difficult to achieve. Melissa Kearney: Exactly. Geoff Kabaservice: And maybe that goes back to the point you made about even the impact of education and other kinds of messages that come from the society that people receive. Melissa Kearney: Even at a causal level, we know that what community leaders, what mentors, what role models, what celebrities, what they all say matters. And so people who are influencers in their various spheres should take to heart that what they’re saying actually matters, and the way they’re living their lives matters. And here’s one thing where the social conservatives don’t think I do enough of in the book, which is blame the elites — whoever the heck the elites are. But I do think messaging matters. And that’s something that you hear anecdotally: that a lot of pastors or preachers don’t want to talk about this. They don’t want to take up the topic because they’ll alienate their congregation. But again, I think that dishonesty is ultimately counterproductive.  Geoff Kabaservice: As a final observation, there are obvious affinities between your work and that of your former Brookings colleague Richard Reeves, who I interviewed on this podcast after his book Of Boys and Men was published. And I did want to just do a PSA that Richard is now president of the new American Institute for Boys and Men, and I wish him a lot of luck. But I also wanted to comment that there are also some similarities between your work and that of your Brookings colleague Isabel Sawhill. She is well known for having written, with Ron Haskins, a book on “the success sequence,” which involves the three steps of getting at least a high school education, working full time, and only then marrying before having children. And I wondered, just as a last question, do you see some similarities with her work and yours, and how do you relate to that? Melissa Kearney: Belle and Ron have been really instrumental in this space and quite consistent in putting across the message over the past 20-30 years that family structure matters for kids. Responsible parenthood is something they talk about a lot with their success sequence. Belle has also written a book arguing that we need to change the default on pregnancy, as she says: expand LARCs and other contraceptive technologies and access to long-acting reversible contraception, so that people who, if they’re not being super-careful about avoiding pregnancy, the default is that they are contracepting, as opposed to having to take action in the moment. And so her view is that is all part of the line of emphasis and argument that both Ron and Belle have made: that people shouldn’t just drift into parenthood, but it’s something that people should do deliberately and responsibly. Of course, Belle I think would consider herself left-of-center, and Ron is right-of-center. One of the things that was always so admirable about them is that they would come together with their different political ideological leanings and agree on this topic. I consider them both mentors to me professionally. I don’t want to say that they would agree with everything I’ve written, but I am writing in a line of discourse that the two of them have been instrumental in pushing forward. Geoff Kabaservice: You have reminded me that at one point in your book, you define marriage as “a long-term contract between two individuals to combine resources and share the responsibilities of keeping a household and raising children.” It’s not terribly romantic, but it does point to the economic importance of marriage as an institution. Melissa Kearney: Yeah! Doesn’t everyone think about their marriage that way? Geoff Kabaservice: Well spoken. Well, Melissa Kearney, thank you so much for being so generous with your time, and congratulations again on the publication of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Melissa Kearney: Thanks for having me on your show. Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform, and if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact at niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.The post The two-parent privilege, with Melissa Kearney first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post The two-parent privilege, with Melissa Kearney appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Hillary Clinton expressed opposition to Republican Representative Jim Jordan's bid for House speaker this week after the House of Representatives voted to oust Kevin McCarthy from this position.

During an interview with CNN on Thursday, Clinton was asked about Jordan running for House speaker and her experiences with the Ohio representative in the past.

"I don't know him well, I watched him and stared at him for 11 hours while he made stuff up about me. So, I don't know him, but I've seen him in action," Clinton said, alluding to the 2015 Benghazi hearings.

During the hearings, Jordan questioned Clinton about the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi which occurred while she was serving as Secretary of State in former President Barack Obama's administration.

"[Jordan] is one of the principal ringleaders of the circus that's been created in the Republican Party for the last several years...when you look at the extremists in the House they certainly don't represent a majority of the country and somebody has to stand up and say 'enough,'" Clinton said.

Rep. Jim Jordan speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on September 19, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Hillary Clinton spoke about Jordan potentially becoming House speaker. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Newsweek reached out to Jordan's office via email for comment.

Earlier this week, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz motioned to have House Speaker McCarthy removed from his seat, which resulted in a successful vote with seven other Republican representatives siding with Gaetz and House Democrats.

"The one thing that the White House, House Democrats, and many of us on the conservative side of the Republican caucus would argue is that the thing we have in common is Kevin McCarthy said something to all of us at one point or another that he didn't really mean and never intended to live up to," Gaetz said in a speech on the House floor following his motion to vacate.

Shortly after McCarthy was ousted, there were rumblings of other potential choices, with some Republicans looking at former President Donald Trump and others, including Gaetz, calling for Jordan to run.

Jordan later announced his decision to run for House speaker in a letter to his colleagues writing, "We are at a critical crossroad in our nation's history. Now is the time for our Republican conference to come together to keep our promises to Americans. The problems we face are challenging, but they are not insurmountable. We can focus on the changes that improve the country and unite us in offering real solutions. But no matter what we do, we must do it together as a conference. I respectfully ask for your support for Speaker of the House of Representatives."

Despite the opposition from Clinton, Trump announced his endorsement of Jordan as House speaker on Friday morning.

"He is STRONG on Crime, Borders, our Military/Vets, & 2nd Amendment. Jim, his wife, Polly, & family are outstanding - He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!" Trump wrote in a post on TruthSocial.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement are criticizing Hillary Clinton for comments she made during a Thursday interview.

While speaking negatively about Trump on CNN, Clinton addressed "MAGA extremists" and said "maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members."

Clinton, the first lady during her husband Bill Clinton's presidential administration as well as a secretary of state under former President Barack Obama, has continued to be a vocal critic of Trump after she was defeated by him during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump has also made Clinton a frequent target of his verbal attacks, and he and one of his lawyers were hit with nearly $1 million in sanctions earlier this year for filing a since-dismissed lawsuit that claimed Clinton and others tried to rig the 2016 election against him.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is seen in Washington, D.C., on September 26. Inset, a campaign button for former President Donald Trump. Clinton has upset supporters of Trump by saying “MAGA extremists” may need a “deprogramming.” Photos by MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Peter Dazeley/Getty Images

Clinton's comments to CNN's Christiane Amanpour didn't sit well with some people who have ties to Trump, including Kayleigh McEnany.

"Deplorable Moment times 10!" McEnany, who served as a White House press secretary under Trump, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) of Clinton's remarks on Thursday evening.

Newsweek reached out to an adviser for Clinton via email for comment.

Karoline Leavitt, the spokesperson for Make America Great Again Inc.—the super PAC allied with Trump's 2024 presidential campaign—promised a Trump reelection while speaking out against Clinton's message.

"President Trump has said countless times that they are only coming after him, because he stands in their way from coming after you—and Hillary Clinton just confirmed that to be true," Leavitt wrote on X. "Tens of millions of Americans will reject the Democrat Party's re-education camp agenda in November 2024 when we make Donald Trump the 47th President of the United States."

Monica Crowley, who worked in the Trump administration as a deputy national security adviser before holding a position in his Treasury Department, also took exception with Clinton's statement.

"Mrs. Clinton out here calling for the 'formal deprogramming of the cult members,' ie Trump supporters," Crowley wrote on X. "Her open call for tyranny coincides with the FBI's open admission that it's targeting Trump supporters. None of this is a coincidence. Get it yet?"

Robby Starbuck, a conservative filmmaker and former GOP congressional candidate, said "a line was just crossed that can't be walked back" in a post on X.

"This rhetoric will increase and the Democrats will try to convince their voters that supporting gulags is the virtuous thing to do for the community," Starbuck wrote in part. "In a sane country every single elected Democrat would be asked about this statement tomorrow and condemn it or be run out of political life for agreeing with the forced re-education of citizens."

Meanwhile, the "Hodgetwins"—a stand-up comedy and conservative political commentary duo consisting of identical twin brothers Keith and Kevin Hodge—addressed the controversy on X by writing: "Tyrants love re-education camps."

Not everyone on X denounced Clinton's comments, with some supporting her suggestion.

A science writer who works under the pseudonym of GrrlScientist quoted Clinton about the "formal deprogramming" and added: "preferably before they vote & as a condition of being allowed to vote & own guns, hey?"

George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.

Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.

His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

Since the Nobel committee is supposed to rise above all that and stand on principle, it’s time for it to recognize the freedom fighters in these influential nations, along with a hero like Mohammadi (there can be more than one winner).

Loujain al-Hathloul of Saudi Arabia, who says she was tortured and imprisoned after being effectively kidnapped from the United Arab Emirates in 2018, was then placed under a travel ban and heavy restrictions, with the threat of more jail and torture hanging over her. Her “crimes” range from campaigning for women’s right to drive and asking for a reform of the oppressive male guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia, which restrict women from many activities unless a male guardian is present or permits the activity.

The “crimes” of Samar Badawi, who has been arrested multiple times in Saudi Arabia over the past decade, include trying to register to vote, calling for a reform of the oppressive male guardianship requirements and advocating the right to drive. Little has been heard from her after her release from a three-year prison stint in 2021; like many Saudi female activists, she is most likely barred from leaving the country and threatened with more jail time if she continues to speak up.

Nouf Abdulaziz was imprisoned for years and released on the condition of ceasing her activism. Her “crime” was campaigning for women’s rights. While in prison, she was subjected to torture, according to ALQST, a human rights organization.

The list of brave Saudi women who deserve recognition is long, but there are women in other countries, too, that the committee could have recognized.

       Despite the persistent wish-casting from anti-Trump Republicans, there's no mechanism by which the party could force underperforming presidential candidates to exit the primary. But what if there were? What if the field could be narrowed so that only four, or three, or one challenger was taking on former President Donald Trump? Well, Trump would still be the runaway favorite. But the process of winnowing away the weaker candidates reveals something interesting about the Republican field: It's not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who seemingly has the best chance of consolidating the anti-Trump vote. It's former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. That's the main takeaway from a unique poll of the primary field released Friday by FairVote, a nonprofit that advocates for the adoption of ranked choice voting. The survey included about 800 Republican primary voters and operated under the principles of ranked choice voting: each participant was asked to rank the GOP field from first to last, and the candidate who finished in last place in each round of vote-counting was eliminated, with their votes reassigned elsewhere depending on the respondents' preferences. Ranked choice voting sounds a bit complicated, but, as Reason has explained before in more detail, it does a better job of translating the median voters' will into election results than the more widely used first-past-the-post system. Without ranked choice voting, a fractured field can result in a candidate winning despite getting far less than majority support—as was the case for Trump in most of the key primary states in 2016. The best way to explain ranked choice voting is ultimately to see it in action, which is why this FairVote poll is so interesting. It includes 11 of the current Republican candidates as well as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, whom some Republicans would reportedly like to see get into the race, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who dropped out in August. Trump starts out with 47.6 percent of the vote in the first round, and he enjoys a robust lead of 34.9 percent over his closest rival, DeSantis. (Source: FairVote (https://fairvote.org/new-ranked-choice-poll-examines-the-republican-presidential-field-after-second-debate/)) Because the low-ranked candidates eliminated in the first few rounds have such a tiny sliver of the overall vote, there is little change in the top-line candidates until round seven. But look at how Trump's tally changes—or, rather, doesn't change—over those first several rounds. Their gains are marginal, but Trump's top six challengers all pick up a larger share of the redistributed vote than the former president does. In other words, they were ranked higher than Trump on the vast majority of the ballots that favored the bottom-feeding candidates. Things get really interesting after former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is eliminated in round nine. The bulk of his support flows to Haley, who surges into second place with 20.3 percent of the total. At that point, Haley had gained 12.6 percentage points from voters who chose eliminated candidates ahead of her. Meanwhile, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy has gained 3.2 percentage points and DeSantis has gained 2.5 percentage points. Trump has gained just 1.1 percentage points and still sits below the 50 percent threshold. In short, for Republican voters who did not list Trump first on the ballots, the former president is mostly ranked below the likes of Haley, Ramaswamy, and DeSantis. Trump finally gains some significant votes—more than enough to hold off Haley—once DeSantis and Ramaswamy are eliminated, though Haley also gains a sizable share from each of them. The Republican presidential primary is not, of course, a single electoral contest and is not decided via ranked choice voting. It's a monthslong series of separate, mostly first-past-the-post elections in each of the 50 states (plus the territories and Washington, D.C.), and the results in some places bear only indirect consequences on what might happen elsewhere. The field will certainly contract at some point, but when and how that will happen are unpredictable. At first blush, the poll suggests that a sudden contraction of the Republican field might leave open the possibility that another candidate can consolidate enough support to take on Trump one-on-one. The New York Times' Ross Douthat wrote last week about a similar outcome from the long-shot possibility of a Haley-DeSantis alliance: "If Haley or (less plausibly) Scott comes in second and DeSantis falls to third, the Florida governor should drop out and endorse the winner. If DeSantis wins but Haley is leading in New Hampshire, then he should offer a place on his ticket, and she should accept." But a closer look at the FairVote poll indicates even that highly unlikely outcome probably wouldn't stop Trump. For all his difficulty in attracting support from voters who prefer the also-rans at the bottom of the field, Trump remains the most popular "second choice" for voters who have DeSantis and Ramaswamy as their favorites. (Source: FairVote (https://fairvote.org/new-ranked-choice-poll-examines-the-republican-presidential-field-after-second-debate/)) Any significant consolidation along the lines of what Douthat suggests would require that Ramaswamy drop out, at a minimum. It might require that DeSantis bails too. And no matter how stirring of an endorsement speech the Florida governor might be able to muster, it seems unlikely that the bulk of his voters would swing to Haley over Trump. There's a long way to go and many things can still change, of course. National polls are largely meaningless anyway. But the FairVote poll does a novel job of describing the conundrum facing the Republican Party: Trump will only lose the nomination if his supporters abandon him, no matter how unpopular he remains with the rest of the party. Indeed, even when using a vote-counting technique that's meant to make it more difficult for unpopular candidates to win elections, Trump is winning bigly.The post How Ranked Choice Voting Would Sort the Republican Primary Field appeared first on Reason.com.

       An Iowa man published body camera footage of his arrest at the hands of two Newton, Iowa, police officers last year. Now, he's being sued for defamation.  In August 2022, 19-year-old Tayvin Galanakis was driving in Newton just after midnight when he was pulled over by police officers Nathan Winters and Christopher Wing.  "How much have you had to drink tonight?" Winters asks Galanakis in body camera footage from the incident. "None," Galanakis responds. Winters incredulously asks, "What do you mean none?" Galanakis said, "Great, let's do a test then." The footage then shows Galanakis undergoing a series of field sobriety tests. After Winters claims Galanakis failed them, he administered a Breathalyzer test, which showed that Galanakis had a blood-alcohol level of 0.00. Almost immediately after proving his sobriety, body camera footage shows Winters asking Galanakis about how much marijuana he had consumed. "Despite previously claiming he could smell alcohol on Tayvin, Officer Winters now claimed he believed Tayvin was intoxicated due to his use of marijuana," reads a legal complaint later filed by Galanakis. "Tayvin continuously told the officers that he did not use marijuana and that his placement on the William Penn [University] football team renders him unable to use marijuana because of his weekly drug tests." "I've had no weed tonight," body camera footage shows Galanakis telling officers. "Why do you think it's tonight? I blew a zero, so now you're trying to say I smoked weed. That's what's going on. You can't do that, man. You really can't do that." "Absolutely I can," one of the officers responded. According to Galanakis' suit, the officers arrested Galanakis and took him to the Newton Police Station, where he agreed to undergo drug tests, which came back negative. Eventually, he was released. Less than a week after his arrest, Galanakis published body camera footage from his arrest to YouTube, where it eventually gained over 2 million views. According to the Newton Daily News, viewers flooded the Newton Police Department with hundreds of calls expressing outrage over the arrest. Galanakis filed a lawsuit against Winters and Wing in February 2023, alleging that the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights, wrongfully arrested him, and caused "humiliation, degradation, public ridicule, loss of personal reputation, and emotional distress." Soon after Winters and Wing filed a counterclaim against Galanakis, arguing that he had defamed them by publishing the footage and making derogatory comments about the officers on social media. In several posts, Galanakis made statements such as "basically I got kidnapped then raped by the NPD all night," "they didn't show the clip of Nathan sexually harassing me," and stated falsely that Winters had been convicted of domestic abuse. In May, a federal judge dismissed most of Winters and Wing's defamation claims. "Galanakis made extensive video footage from his encounter with Winters available on YouTube and TikTok," wrote Judge Stephen H. Lochner. "Viewers therefore had the opportunity to see for themselves what Winters said and did. With this context in mind, it would be even harder for a listener to interpret Galanakis's statements as anything other than his opinion or 'rhetorical hyperbole' about what happened during the encounter." However, Lochner also ruled that several of Galanakis' statements—namely, his claims that Winters was convicted of domestic abuse or had abused an ex-girlfriend—were possibly defamatory, and thus the defamation suit could move forward in part. This isn't the first time Newton police have lashed out against a disgruntled citizen. Last year, they arrested Noah Petersen, then 22, and charged him with disorderly conduct after he claimed during a City Council meeting regarding Galanakis' arrest that the police department was employing a "domestic abuser," in reference to Winters.  Petersen was found not guilty, and the city ordinance allowing his arrest was overturned for violating the First Amendment. "What's the First Amendment for if not criticizing the government?" Petersen told the local TV station KCCI last October. "I think government can handle three minutes of criticism."The post An Iowa Man Published Body Camera Footage From His Arrest. The Cops Are Suing Him for Defamation.  appeared first on Reason.com.

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Amid the chaos of another Republican meltdown in Washington, the party’s deficit hawks correctly point to a serious underlying issue: the federal debt. Total debt is now more than $33 trillion, the deficit is over 7 percent of gross domestic product, and this year’s net interest payment on the debt will probably be over $650 billion — which is not far off from defense spending. For almost a generation, policymakers have been able to avoid seriously confronting deficits because interest rates were so low and financing debt was easy. But with interest rates where they are now, the party might be over.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution staring us in the face — however, both parties refuse to accept it: Adopt a national sales tax, like every other advanced economy in the world. (Most countries call it a value-added tax, or VAT, because it is collected at each stage along the chain of production, rather than just once at the point of final sale.) According to the Congressional Budget Office, a broad 5 percent tax of this kind could raise $3 trillion over the next decade, massively reducing the United States’ fiscal hole. On average, European Union countries get roughly 20 percent of their tax revenue from a VAT; the United States is getting zero.

What are the other options? Republicans’ proposals to cut spending are a joke. The cuts they propose would not touch entitlements — Social Security and Medicare — nor defense spending, nor veterans’ benefits. If you add interest payments on the debt, the “untouchable” parts of the federal budget make up more than 75 percent of it. It’s all well and good to rant about cutting foreign aid, but it makes up less than 1 percent of federal spending.

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Democrats are less wild-eyed but similarly unrealistic. They mostly talk about raising taxes on the rich. The problem is that such proposals would not yield very much; the very wealthy already pay a disproportionate part of U.S. tax revenue (see below).

Democrats generally oppose a VAT tax because they see it as regressive, burdening what they believe is an already regressive, old-line tax code. But they are wrong.

Follow this author Fareed Zakaria 's opinions Follow

America has the most progressive tax system of any advanced economy, largely because we raise far more of our tax revenue through income taxes rather than sales taxes — which are paid at the same rate by everyone, whether they earn $45,000 a year or $4.5 million. Daniel Bunn of the Tax Foundation notes that “one reason that we have the most progressive system is because we tax middle-income workers less. … The top U.S. income tax rate applies at 8.5 times the average wage, while the top rate in Germany applies at just 5.3 times the average wage.”

Here are the numbers: The top 10 percent of earners in the United States contribute a staggering 74 percent of federal income tax revenue — even though they generate just about 50 percent of all income, according to the Tax Foundation. In Denmark and Sweden, the top 10 percent pay about 25 percent of income taxes; the average for rich countries is 32 percent. In the United States, the top 1 percent — 1.3 million households in a country of over 330 million people — generate 22 percent of the income but pay almost twice that, 42 percent of federal taxes. And the code has become substantially more progressive over the past decades. The net contribution of the top 20 percent of income earners in the United States has risen by more than 200 percent since the 1980s.

When you add state and local taxes, America’s top earners’ tax rate often tops out at more than 50 percent of their marginal income. If one of them moved from New York or California or Illinois to London, Berlin or Singapore, they would get a big tax cut — particularly in Singapore, where the top tax rate is 24 percent. (And in all those cases, by the way, they would get universal health care and high-quality public education from kindergarten to universities.) In New York City, as Mayor Eric Adams has pointed out, the top 2 percent of residents pay half the city’s income taxes.

It has become a bipartisan article of faith in the United States that most of the federal budget cannot be cut and that the taxes of 98 percent of income earners cannot be raised. This is why we are on an unsustainable path. We need to both cut some spending and raise some taxes, and future tax increases cannot come from the one source from which most new revenue has come in the past few decades — high-income earners. It distorts the economic and political system and makes people feel that they have less of an investment in the federal government. Social Security and Medicare are so broadly supported because all Americans believe that they contribute to the programs and then benefit from them.

       Biden's revisionist history: This week, President Joe Biden announced he would cancel an additional $9 billion in student loan debt. This consists of "$5.2 billion in additional debt relief for 53,000 borrowers under Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs," per a White House statement, "$2.8 billion in new debt relief for nearly 51,000 borrowers through fixes to income-driven repayment," and "$1.2 billion for nearly 22,000 borrowers who have a total or permanent disability." In June, the Supreme Court struck down his earlier plan to void $400 billion worth of student debt for some 43 million borrowers: $10,000 in debt (or $20,000 in debt for those who received Pell grants) for individuals making under $125,000 and households making under $250,000. "The money was literally about to go out the door, but Republican elected officials and special interests stepped up and sued us," Biden commented Wednesday. "The Supreme Court sided with them, snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars in student debt relief that was about to change their lives." This is some wild revisionist history (special interests?) that attempts to obscure the unconstitutionality of his actions. The Supreme Court ruled that Biden's attempt to push student loan forgiveness through via the HEROES Act—which gave the Education Department the power to modify repayments of loans for people who "suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military operation or national emergency"—was not legal; citing COVID-19 as the qualifying "national emergency" did not fly, and such loan forgiveness would need to be passed through Congress, not unilaterally carried out by the executive. "While higher education—and particularly graduate school—is too expensive for many students, loan forgiveness does nothing to address the root cause of inflated college tuition," wrote Reason's Emma Camp at the time. "Instead, Biden's plan would have primarily benefited wealthier Americans, and it would have resulted in outstanding student loan debt returning to current levels by 2028." Any additional plans Biden attempts to pass continue to disregard the root of the problem and serve as a blatant ploy to curry favor with voters, fiscal consequences be damned. Trump goes for Jordan: After this week's historic ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, some House Republicans looked like they were jockeying to possibly get former President Donald Trump on board with a speaker run, noting that you do not technically have to be a member of Congress in order to seek election. Trump came to Washington, and speculation ensued. Early this morning, Trump disabused them of that notion. "Congressman Jim Jordan has been a STAR long before making his very successful journey to Washington, D.C.," Trump wrote via Truth Social at 12:13 a.m. on Friday. "He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!" Jim Jordan, who represents Ohio's 4th district, "also picked up an important G.O.P. backer and cleared a potential challenger from the field with the endorsement of Representative Byron Donalds of Florida," reports The New York Times.  Scenes from New York:  (Liz Wolfe) I was walking through Herbert Von King Park in Bed-Stuy the other day and stumbled across this memorial for social justice activist Ryan Carson, who was murdered at around 4 a.m. on Monday morning at a bus stop in the neighborhood while coming back from a wedding on Long Island. Since Carson advocated for policies many on right-wing Twitter abhor (including lots of ACAB—"all cops are bastards"—rhetoric), plenty of big accounts have mocked his death or implied he had it coming. This is wrong, and our politics should allow us to mourn the innocent dead, even as we reject their ideologies. Some interesting discourse about crime and "luxury beliefs" has emerged from this. "In response to elite opinion in 2020, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, and many other major cities in the U.S. reduced police spending," writes The Free Press's Rob Henderson. "Most people didn't want to defund the police, but the most affluent sector of society did. And so it was implemented." Though I'm sympathetic to parts of Henderson's hypothesis (and think fully defunding or abolishing the police is a terrible idea), it is worth noting that the reduction in spending on police has been marginal in most of these cities, and it's not like they're operating with skeletal budgets now (NYPD certainly isn't, for example).  QUICK HITS  "Criticizing school choice opponents for sending their own children to private schools is not an ad hominem attack as I've seen some people argue," writes Chris Freiman on Twitter/X. "That someone sends their own children to a private school rather than a public school is evidence that they believe that private school is, or at least can be, the better option for some students." Ozempic nation is hurting Walmart's bottom line. God bless the engineers:   Lol it's so over pic.twitter.com/3Imto23JNt — anton (@abacaj) October 5, 2023   Smells a bit like propaganda: "Russian President Vladimir Putin said pieces of grenade were found in the bodies of Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin and other mercenary leaders who died in a plane crash, as he hinted that the man who led an armed revolt against the Kremlin's military leadership had been a drug user." This too, frankly:   Guess what? It also grows the economy. Benefits everybody. Hurts nobody. https://t.co/0WsCAHKyMg — The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 5, 2023   AI gets passive-aggressive:   lmfao i asked it to do a passive aggressive review pic.twitter.com/qZmLkm9LB8 — Aella (@Aella_Girl) October 2, 2023  (For more Aella, check out yesterday's Reason Livestream.)  We're in "a zero-sum rhetorical hellscape in which marriage is one of two things," writes Kat Rosenfield for Unherd. "For its supporters, it is the last, best hope of a society on the brink of decline and disaster. For its detractors, it is an insidious ploy by reactionary dinosaurs to catapult us back to a less enlightened paradigm, just as we were nearing the utopian promise of a brave new world." Rep. Nancy Mace's (R–S.C.) "chameleonic career." NYC Mayor Eric Adams will travel south to…give would-be migrants a stern talking-to OK. "Is Jesus supposed to be Trump's co-defendant or his attorney?" Hard-hitting questions from The Intelligencer on the (admittedly bonkers) courtroom sketch that the former president reposted to Truth Social. The post Forgive Us Our…Loans? appeared first on Reason.com.

Many in Washington were surprised when Congress failed to approve continued vital support to Ukraine last weekend. But for the far-right MAGA lawmakers fighting to kill the aid, this was the culmination of months of hard work. Now, Ukraine’s backers face a steep uphill climb to restore the funding. If they fail, the result will be more Ukrainians killed and a longer, costlier war.

As the competition heats up to replace Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House speaker, support for Ukraine has become politicized. McCarthy’s departure has made passing any new Ukraine aid through the House extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible. On Tuesday, speaker candidate Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters he would not bring Ukraine funding to the House floor if he gets the gavel. His main competitor, Steve Scalise (R-La.), is also said to be less than enthusiastic about funding Ukraine’s fight.

Those Republicans who still support Ukraine are sounding the alarm.

“The Ukrainians are fighting not only for their survival but for the liberty and security of Europe and democracies around the world. Providing them support is in our national security interests and not something that should be a wedge issue or political football,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) told me. “If war criminal [Vladimir] Putin takes over Ukraine, it’s going to be far worse than the fallout of the failed withdrawal of Afghanistan.”

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These arguments make a lot of sense. The cost of helping Ukraine fight off Russia’s brutal invasion amounts to less than 5 percent of the U.S. defense budget. Much of that money goes back to U.S. companies to replenish stocks of old weapons that were sitting idle anyway. Weakening the Russian military makes Europe safer. And China is watching to see whether the West has the stomach to defend democracies from aggression.

The problem is that none of those arguments matter to the far-right Republicans who see opposing Ukraine aid as good politics. The House GOP leadership has all but endorsed the MAGA movement’s retreat from defending democracy, House Armed Services Committee member Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) told me.

“The origination point of all of this goes back to the beginnings of the MAGA movement,” he said. “Trump introduced this virus of MAGA isolationism into the Republican caucus and it has spread.”

Part of the problem is that supporters of Ukraine aid were overconfident. Despite some Republican lawmakers’ public warnings that support inside the GOP caucus was crumbling, the Biden administration fully expected Congress would include billions in Ukraine aid as part of the most recent bill to keep the government running.

Worse, everyone underestimated the MAGA members’ capacity for maneuver. Many assumed that the Republican leadership had far-right members such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) under control. In fact, the House GOP leadership was quietly working with the hard-liners to separate the aid from other spending legislation. When McCarthy removed $6.1 billion in aid Ukraine aid from the temporary government funding bill last Saturday, it was meant to appease the hard-liners. Three days later, he was removed as speaker by the same MAGA members he had been trying to placate.

Gaetz and his crew are pledging to oppose any new funding for Ukraine. If the next speaker won’t bring a Ukraine funding bill to the floor, House Democrats could force a vote on it through what’s called a discharge petition, and pass it with a minority of GOP votes. It’s a messy process, which is why it would only be possible once. That means such a bill would need to have enough funding to get Ukraine through the next year. That number is between $60 billion and $100 billion, depending on who you talk to. The GOP is sure to demand concurrent border-related funds in return.

Meanwhile, Washington’s confusion and dysfunction are undermining America’s leadership and credibility at the worst time, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), who is on his way to Europe this week to attend a conference of parliamentarians from every NATO country, told me.

“This is a bad look for the United States of America,” he said. “Our allies are already worried about 2024 and what may be coming soon. This will only increase their worry about the stability of the United States and our leadership.”

More urgently, the funding mess has a real — if hard to calculate — impact on the Ukrainian war effort itself. The White House says current funding could last for another “couple of weeks” or a “couple of months.” Neither scenario is terribly reassuring, even if Ukrainian officials are expressing confidence that the United States won’t abandon them in the middle of the fight.

“By the end of November, Congress could potentially be making a decision as to whether Kyiv is a Ukrainian city or a Russian city,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me.

But he also said he felt confident the money will come through in the end, because the stakes are just too high.

       Imagine a country that denies fundamental rights to many of its citizens. The disempowered are deprived of economic opportunities, lack adequate shelter, and may not participate in the political process. It's long past time for international human rights organizations to turn their attention to Barbieland, the setting of this summer's smash hit movie Barbie. (Spoilers follow.) As envisioned by director/co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig, Barbieland is a paradise for the various Barbies, including the film's protagonist, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie). The president is a Barbie, as are all the Supreme Court justices; every meaningful job is held by Barbies, who live in mansions. In contrast, life is deeply unfulfilling for Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) and his fellow Kens. Barbie withholds housing, realistic employment, political representation, and romantic love. Supporters of U.S. interventionism might expect the Kens to greet us as liberators. Indeed, Barbie and Ken do eventually go to the real world—Los Angeles, specifically—and hilarity ensues as they discover what it's like when men hold positions of authority. While Barbie is investigating existential dread, Ken returns to Barbieland and seizes power (the Barbies, exhausted from running things, overwhelmingly approve), forcing Stereotypical Barbie to save the day. And where does Ken end up? Right back where he started, as the Barbies cruelly vote to return the Kens to their previous second-class status. The Kens ultimately ask if they can have a single Supreme Court seat. The Barbies say no. The authoritarian reaction to the Revolutions of 1848 was less vicious than this. It's unclear whether the movie is actually endorsing this arrangement (Stereotypical Barbie opts instead to return to the real world); indeed, Barbie's broader message is a muddled one. Despite these problems, the film is colorful and entertaining. Now if only we could arm the moderate Kens.The post Review: The Authoritarianism of Barbieland appeared first on Reason.com.

Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence. He’s also dealing with a civil suit in New York that could force drastic changes to his business empire, including closing down its operations in his home state. Meanwhile, he is the leading Republican candidate in the race to become the next president. If the court cases unfold with any reasonable timeliness, he could be in the heat of the campaign trail at the same time that his legal fate is being decided.[David A. Graham: The end of Trump Inc.]Here’s a summary of the major legal cases against Trump, including key dates, an assessment of the gravity of the charges, and expectations about how they could turn out.New York State: FraudIn fall 2022, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil suit against Trump, his adult sons, and his former aide Allen Weisselberg, alleging a yearslong scheme in which Trump fraudulently reported the value of properties in order to either lower his tax bill or improve the terms of his loans, all with an eye toward inflating his net worth.When? A judge ruled against Trump and his co-defendants late last month, concluding that many of the defendants’ claims were “clearly” fraudulent—so clearly that he didn’t need a trial to hear them. (He also sanctioned Trump’s lawyers for making repeated frivolous arguments.) A trial to determine the amount of damages Trump owes began Monday in Manhattan, and could stretch for weeks or even months.How grave is the allegation?  Fraud is fraud, and in this case, the sum of the fraud stretched into the millions—but compared with some of the other legal matters in which Trump is embroiled, this is pretty pedestrian. The case is civil rather than criminal, and though it could end with Trump’s famed company barred from business in New York, the loss of several key properties, and millions of dollars of fines, the stakes are lower, both for Trump and for the nation, than in the other cases against him.How plausible is a guilty verdict? Justice Arthur Engoron has already ruled that Trump committed fraud. The outstanding questions are what damages he might have to pay and what exactly Engoron’s ruling means for Trump’s business and properties in New York.Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual AssaultAlthough these other cases are all brought by government entities, Trump is also involved in an ongoing defamation case with the writer E. Jean Carroll, who said that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department-store dressing room in the 1990s. When he denied it, she sued him for defamation and later added a battery claim.When?  In May 2023, a jury concluded that Trump had sexually assaulted and defamed Carroll, and awarded her $5 million. A second defamation claim remains under consideration.How grave is the allegation?  Although this case doesn’t directly connect to the same fundamental issues of rule of law and democratic governance that some of the criminal cases do, it is a serious matter, and a judge’s blunt statement that Trump raped Carroll has been underappreciated.How plausible is a guilty verdict?  Trump has already been found liable for defamation and sexual assault, and a further finding of defamation is possible and perhaps likely.Manhattan: Hush MoneyIn March 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring felony charges against Trump, alleging that the former president falsified business records as part of a scheme to pay hush money to women who said they had had sexual relationships with Trump.When?  The case is set to go to trial on March 25, 2024. In September, the judge overseeing the case signaled that he is open to changing that date, given the various other court cases that Trump is juggling, but he also said he didn’t think it was worth discussing until February.How grave is the allegation?  Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad. But many people have analogized this case to Al Capone’s conviction on tax evasion: It’s not that he didn’t deserve it, but it wasn’t really why he was an infamous villain. That this case alleges behavior that didn’t undermine democracy or put national secrets at risk makes it feel more minor—though those other cases have set a grossly high standard for what constitutes gravity.How plausible is a guilty verdict?  Bragg’s case faces hurdles including the statute of limitations, a questionable key witness in the former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, and some untested legal theories. In short, the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest criminal case. Some Trump critics were dismayed that Bragg was the first to bring criminal charges against the former president.Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago DocumentsJack Smith, a special counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, has charged Trump with 37 felonies in connection with his removal of documents from the White House when he left office. The charges include willful retention of national-security information, obstruction of justice, withholding of documents, and false statements. Trump took boxes of documents to properties where they were stored haphazardly, but the indictment centers on his refusal to give them back to the government despite repeated requests.[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]When?  Smith filed charges in June 2023. Judge Aileen Cannon has set a trial date of May 20, 2024. Smith faces a de facto deadline of January 20, 2025, at which point Trump or any Republican president would likely shut down a case.How grave is the allegation?  These are, I have written, the stupidest crimes imaginable, but they are nevertheless quite serious. Protecting the nation’s secrets is one of the greatest responsibilities of any public official with classified clearance, and not only did Trump put these documents at risk, but he also (allegedly) refused to comply with a subpoena, tried to hide them, and lied to the government through his attorneys.How plausible is a guilty verdict? This may be the most open-and-shut case, and the facts and legal theory here are pretty straightforward. But Smith is believed to have drawn a short straw when he was randomly assigned Cannon, a Trump appointee who has sometimes ruled favorably for Trump on procedural matters.Fulton County: Election SubversionIn Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, District Attorney Fani Willis brought a huge racketeering case against Trump and 18 others, alleging a conspiracy that spread across weeks and states with the aim of stealing the 2020 election.When?  Willis obtained the indictment in August. The number of defendants makes the case unwieldy and difficult to track. In late September, one defendant who breached election equipment struck a plea deal. Two more, Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, are scheduled to stand trial starting on October 23, and a judge says it could take three to five months. No date has been set for the other defendants’ trial, but it likely won’t come until 2024.How grave is the allegation?  More than any other case, this one attempts to reckon with the full scale of the assault on democracy following the 2020 election.How plausible is a guilty verdict?  Expert views differ. This is a huge case for a local prosecutor, even in a county as large as Fulton, to bring. The racketeering law allows Willis to sweep in a great deal of material, and she has some strong evidence—like a call in which Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” some 11,000 votes—but getting a jury to convict Trump will still be a challenge.Department of Justice: Election SubversionSpecial Counsel Smith has also charged Trump with four federal felonies in connection with his attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election. This case is in court in Washington, D.C.When?  A grand jury indicted Trump on August 1. A trial is scheduled for March 4, 2024. As with the other DOJ case, Smith needs to move quickly, before Trump or any other Republican president could shut down a case upon taking office in January 2025.[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead serious attack on American democracy]How grave is the allegation?  This case rivals the Fulton County one in importance. It is narrower, focusing just on Trump and a few key elements of the paperwork coup, but the symbolic weight of the U.S. Justice Department prosecuting the attempt to subvert the American election system is heavy.How plausible is a guilty verdict?  It’s very hard to say. Smith avoided some of the more unconventional potential charges, including aiding insurrection, and everyone watched much of the alleged crime unfold in public in real time, but no precedent exists for a case like this, with a defendant like this.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The 1999 film The Matrix is famous for coining the metaphor of the “red pill.” In the imaginary world of the movie, people live largely in a state of illusion, experiencing a completely managed simulation of real life that keeps them passive. The protagonist, Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), is offered the choice by the rebel leader Morpheus of staying in the simulation by taking a blue pill or breaking into reality by taking a red pill. This is not an easy decision: choose reality, with its difficult truths, or live in the numb oblivion of the Matrix?The “red pill” entered the lexicon as a choice we can make in life. Lately, this sometimes refers to political radicalization, but since before that and more benignly, it has meant the choice we make in life to either numb ourselves or face reality. On the one hand, the proposition runs, we can accept the narcotic distractions of modern life, be they drugs or social media or smartphones. On the other hand, we can face the sometimes harsh reality—of our relationships, our work, our prospects—including the truth about ourselves that we might prefer not to confront.[Michael Owen: I found myself in The Matrix]With the blue pill, we are perfect the way we are: We are lovable; our opinions are right; we never sin. The red pill shows us our imperfect selves: flawed, maybe hard to love, blameworthy, ignorant, arrogant.That red pill that allows us to see ourselves as we truly are has an extant, nonmetaphorical form: It’s called humility. It isn’t always easy medicine, and it comes in more than one dose. But if we are willing to take that pill again and again, amazing rewards await us.Humility—modesty about one’s own importance or expertise—can refer to an act (for example, giving up a good seat for another), a condition (living in an unflashy way), or a trait (avoiding the assumption that you are always right). It can be practiced intellectually—a concept called “epistemic humility,” seen in discussions of, for example, religion or politics—and socially, in our relationships with others, which can involve refraining from behaviors such as boasting, for instance.The word itself comes from the Latin humilis, meaning “from the earth,” or grounded. This leads some thinkers to regard humility as simply the most honest way of approaching life. In many traditions, though, humility is considered a positive virtue—as in Jesus’s teaching that the meek shall inherit the earth, and that the kingdom of heaven awaits the poor in spirit.Other philosophers have rejected this: For example, Friedrich Nietzsche saw humility as a barrier to human progress, a form of self-protection for the weak and the mediocre. In his view, humility is twisted into a virtue as a defense mechanism against strong and hardworking people. The philosopher and linguist Norvin Richards, however, flatly rebuts this premise, saying, “There are no splendid human beings.”[Arthur C. Brooks: Eight ways to banish misery]Perhaps the most fruitful way of viewing humility lies in the advice offered by the 11th-century mystic Bernard of Clairvaux: “If you examine yourself inwardly by the light of truth,” he wrote, “you will be humbled in your own eyes.” Humility, in other words, is pure realism—the red pill.This does not mean we must embrace some metaphysical theory of our own total depravity. Rather, we should recognize the empirical fact that, left to their own devices, people tend to overestimate their strengths and underestimate their weaknesses. Humility is the full acceptance of the truth about ourselves.The reason we don’t readily take this red pill is that, well, it is hard to swallow. Psychologists have found, for example, that people who hold their intellectual and religious views with greater existential humility—simply acknowledging, in effect, that one “may be wrong”—suffer more from certain kinds of anxiety than those who score lower in humility. But this isn’t an argument against taking the humility pill. A better approach is to see humility as being like a physical-fitness program: Exercising requires a realistic assessment of our physical limitations and a willingness to embrace some pain—a vigorous workout feels unnatural at first and even hurts. But when the positive health results appear when you have a checkup, you realize it was worth it.Similarly, the initial pain of humility yields benefits. Scholars have found that the red pill of truth offers improvements in almost every corner of life. For example, research has shown that when people face negative events, humility can buffer the pain and stress that they cause, perhaps because humble people are less likely to think that they shouldn’t encounter problems.[Read: Where Pope Francis learned humility]Humble people are also more attractive to romantic partners. Dating research finds that most people find humble potential partners more appealing than those who are arrogant; the humble ones also tended to have more successful long-distance relationships. When people are prompted to think about humility in experiments, they show greater self-control. (No doubt this is why people who score higher on measures of humility are less likely to abuse drugs compared with those who are less humble.) Humility also can make you more generous with others, and more effective as a leader.Some humility advice is obvious, such as “talk less about yourself” and “argue less, listen more.” But for those who like the exercise analogy for humility, here are three ideas that have worked well for me.1. Research your weaknesses. Many self-improvement programs recommend that you understand your strengths so that you can develop and make full use of them. But far fewer programs help you grasp your weaknesses—not just to help you address them, but so that you aren’t tempted to think you’re too splendid. You don’t have to invent a new psychometric instrument to do so. For example, I have used one such instrument from Gallup. I’ve found that this system, which ranks personal strengths in 34 categories, reveals my weaknesses with an uncanny accuracy that is extremely useful for personal growth. But you can use many other tools to achieve the same result.2. Ask a friend to make sure you take the pill. We all know it is easier to see the mote in someone else’s eye than the beam in our own, and researchers have noticed that humility is hard to observe accurately in ourselves but fairly easy to spot in others. An obvious example is humblebragging, or pretending to be humble but actually puffing ourselves up, like a billionaire posting on social media, “I don’t deserve to have this private jet.” Scholars find that other people see humblebrags for what they are, and think even less of them than if they’d been out-and-out bragging.So ask a friend to hold you accountable to be authentically humble, and call you on it when you fall short. This is the mark of a real friend, by the way, who will know that pointing out your puffery won’t always make you happy with them, but also know that it’s good for you to hear it.3. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. The red pill doesn’t have to be completely bitter. Rather than seeing yourself as smaller in order to be humble, you can also recognize how other things are greater than a me-me-me focus. Researchers in 2018 showed in experiments that when people were exposed to awe-inspiring phenomena such as beauty in nature, their levels of humility automatically increased. They had a more balanced view of their strengths and weaknesses, and were more likely to acknowledge the contribution of outside forces in their personal accomplishments. Next time you are tempted to say something boastful to a friend or on social media, take a moment: Instead of bigging yourself up, gaze at an amazing landscape photo or spend a moment of contemplation on the life of a truly virtuous or holy person.[David Brooks: Truly humbled to be the author of this article]I wrote above about the many benefits of practicing humility found in studies, but I’d point to one more that I have never seen studied systematically but that might just be the greatest of all. Humility—not as self-hating, but as self-knowledge and acceptance—allows you to take off your mask. Pretension and image maintenance are extremely taxing work and demand a lot of energy. Truthfully saying “I don’t know,” not competing for first place in every social arena, and just being your imperfect self can be a huge load lifted from your shoulders. As one well-known actor told me, he craves time in far-away countries, because in a place where people don’t recognize him on the street, he can be his true self and “just another dude.”Many people take pills to help them relax. The red pill of humility might, in fact, be the most effective medicine. No prescription required.

Read the “Network North” section of the government’s briefing document on the scrapping of HS2 and I suspect there is little that you would condemn. There are plans to deliver the West Yorkshire mass transit system, a new line and station for Bradford and funding for the Midlands rail hub. The problem is that these necessary investments have come at the cost of HS2 – something successive governments have promised to build. The decision is depressing for business. Cross-party consensus delivers the certainty upon which investment decisions can be made. Why can’t politicians, one fund manager said to me this week, stick to a plan for 20 or 30 years? That’s democracy. Politically, Rishi Sunak is trying to break down consensus in the hope that he can define his premiership against what has come before. His party’s reputation is too bad to defend. As I wrote yesterday, this is the right strategy. The key problem for the Prime Minister is that these decisions don’t reflect the immediate priorities of voters. Nor can Sunak escape the impression that he is scaling back rather than building the future. There is another, perhaps more interesting, consequence of Sunak’s decision to question the HS2 and net zero consensus. Agreement over them meant that two of the largest policy programmes in the country were not subject to day-to-day political debate. Now, Labour is forced to respond. Is Sunak creating a new consensus that Labour will follow? Or will Labour define itself in opposition to the decisions? That will largely depend on whether Labour wants to find the money to fund both HS2 and “Network North”. Rachel Reeves’s fiscal conservatism places her much closer to Sunak than some in Labour would like to admit. (Such an approach may not survive contact with the reality of government. As John Gray writes, “A further spike in oil prices or escalating geopolitical conflicts in Ukraine, Kosovo or Taiwan will test it to destruction.”) Labour’s response to the changes will be one of the best signs yet of whether it will rethink the country’s approach to public finances or stick to the orthodoxy of the past few years. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; subscribe to it on Substack here. [See also: The return of the two Germanys]

Tax was one of the dominant themes of the Conservative conference (along with chaos, conspiracism, and rail cancellations). 33 Tory MPs – mostly Truss supporters - signed a pledge not to support “any new taxes that increase the tax burden”. It’s fair to say these are not people overly troubled by shame or introspection.In practice this is a largely symbolic pledge. The government is already committed to some of the biggest tax increases we’ve ever seen but is unlikely to push for any more pre-election, or at least not unless they are accompanied by offsetting tax cuts.The question of what cuts might be possible, probably in the spring budget, also continues to preoccupy the right-wing press, with hints at inheritance or income tax reductions. But for now Jeremy Hunt has refused to commit to anything. Again, in reality, any cut, and I do think there will be at least one, will not come close to matching the extent of already planned increases.There are two things driving higher taxes. First sluggish economic growth over the past 15 years has meant they are needed to support the rising costs of the state. From 2010-2016 the government more or less managed higher healthcare and pensions costs by cutting other spending. But that couldn’t ever be a permanent strategy and spending on other things, like policing and local government, has had to start rising again too.Secondly, we borrowed a lot of money to get through covid, on top of an already growing debt pile, and the interest that needs to be paid on that debt has increased a lot. We are due to spend around £100 billion on debt interest this year. Which is 8% or so of all spending.Last week, in part one of my guide to the public finances, I set out why it will be very hard for the next government to cut spending, and why, in fact, it will almost certainly have to rise well above existing projections for 2025-2028.This week we’re going to look at the other side of the ledger. How might a future government pay for more spending? (Assuming that they want to stay within their “fiscal rules”, which constrains the amount of borrowing they can do). I’m going to use the same format as last week. First the big picture – how much do we get from where? Then the major conclusions that arise from the big picture. Then what it means for the next government.   Read more  

Now that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been tossed aside, one possible choice to replace him is Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who once reportedly described himself as “David Duke without the baggage.” Scalise is an archconservative who in 2002 spoke to a white supremacist organization founded by Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The congressman is also, thus far, the closest thing Republicans have to an establishment candidate. He “understands what people in moderate districts need,” Anthony D’Esposito, a Long Island Republican who represents a district that voted for Joe Biden by more than 14 points, told Politico.

Other potential speakers include Jim Jordan, known for his pit bull defense of Donald Trump, as well as for accusations that as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, he turned a blind eye to the rampant sexual abuse of student athletes by a team doctor. (Jordan insists he knew nothing of the doctor’s predation.) Then, of course, there’s Trump himself, who, according to Politico, is considering a visit to the Capitol next week, “where he is open to pitching himself as a speaker candidate.” If elected, he could preside over a Biden impeachment in between his own court hearings.

However the race shakes out, we can be fairly sure that the House will be a mess for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to see how, amid all this turmoil, the chamber passes more Ukraine aid, a red line for some on the right, or keeps the government open when the funding bill that led to McCarthy’s overthrow runs out shortly before Thanksgiving. That is, unless a handful of so-called moderate Republicans decide to show a bit of statesmanship and team up with Democrats to elect a unity candidate.

I understand that this sounds like an absurd fantasy, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen. But it is no more a fantasy, surely, than the idea that Democrats would rescue McCarthy’s speakership in exchange for exactly nothing. As Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman reported shortly before the speaker was voted out, “McCarthy’s allies say they will not negotiate with Democrats. Even as some House Dems privately say they want to help the California Republican.”

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Cornel West, a liberal activist who launched a presidential bid in June, announced Thursday that he will leave the Green Party and run as an independent instead. In a campaign statement, the long-shot candidate and left-wing academic said he was making the switch to ensure “true democracy.” Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays. ArrowRight “Democracy means more choices, not backroom deals; it means freedom to vote your conscience without being shamed or bullied,” his campaign stated. “As Dr. West’s campaign for president grows, he believes the best way to challenge the entrenched system is by focusing 100 percent on the people, not on the intricacies of internal party dynamics.”

This is the second time West has changed his mind about how he will approach his campaign. When he launched his effort, West said he would run for the People’s Party nomination, then abandoned that strategy to focus on the Green Party, which already had greater ballot access.

As an independent candidate, West will have to do the work to get on the ballot in the District of Columbia and the 17 states where the Green Party now claims to have ballot access for 2024. But it also means he will not have to participate in the internal Green Party nominating process, which West had become concerned would distract from his efforts to take his message to voters.

“The two parties who have a monopoly on American politics because state legislatures make the rules have created an onerous and what they want to be impossible process,” West campaign manager Peter Daou said in an interview Thursday. “From our perspective, one of the fundamental focus points of this campaign is to actually embrace true democracy. True democracy is choices.”

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West held a fundraiser this week in Washington, where he made no mention of his impending decision to leave the Green Party. Some in attendance at the fundraiser wore Green Party items, so it is unclear whether his supporters were aware he was considering a switch to running as an independent.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is mounting a long-shot challenge to President Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary, has suggested that he is considering a pivot to a third-party campaign. Self-help guru Marianne Williamson also is running as a Democrat.

Despite some trepidation over Biden’s strength as a candidate, Democrats have largely coalesced around his reelection campaign, and many have criticized candidates including Kennedy, Williamson and West for possibly siphoning votes away from Biden and ultimately allowing the Republican nominee to win.

“There is no third-party candidate that will win this election. That has never happened in the history of this, and it ain’t going to start in 2024,” Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in July. “And so, we’ve got to stay focused on the fight that we have ahead, and at the threat that we see to American democracy — and that’s the extremists coming out of the Republican Party.”

On the Republican side, former president Donald Trump is leading a large field of candidates seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

       In the wake of the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.), President Joe Biden called on lawmakers Wednesday to fix the "poisonous atmosphere in Washington" and get their act together. "We cannot and should not again be faced with an 11th-hour decision or brinkmanship that threatens to shut down the government." But the "poisonous atmosphere" existed in Washington long before this week's events. And given that one of the central reasons for the McCarthy drama—other than long-brewing animus toward McCarthy, who struggled to get elected speaker in the first place—was a faction of Republicans being concerned about runaway spending and the looming threat of a debt crisis, the ouster may actually be a welcome sign. Still: Before any such spending cuts can be addressed, members of the House must elect a new speaker. House Democrats intend to nominate New York's Hakeem Jeffries, but that is unlikely to go anywhere, given the Republican majority. On the Republican side, Louisiana's Steve Scalise and Ohio's Jim Jordan have announced that they are running. Republicans will reportedly hold a session on October 11 where they discuss, internally, who they intend to put forth. Some have offered former President Donald Trump as a possibility, citing the fact that one does not actually have to be a sitting member of the House to serve as speaker. Trump has expressed some interest in the idea.  JUST IN: Donald Trump confirms from the New York courthouse that he has been asked about becoming the House Speaker, says he would do it. That would be epic ???? "All I can say is we'll do whatever's best for the country and for the Republican Party." "A lot of people have asked… pic.twitter.com/fx3AKlhS17 — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 4, 2023  Some libertarians will cheer the fact that the House is effectively on pause until these leadership decisions get sorted out. But the stopgap funding bill runs out roughly a month from now, and this distraction makes it more likely that legislators will again pass an omnibus at the last possible minute—if they manage to meet their deadline at all. Bear in mind that government shutdowns don't actually really save much money, and—frustratingly—don't even really shut down much of the government. So it's not clear that this gridlock would help on those fronts. Meanwhile, "the yields on U.S. Treasury bonds are now hitting levels not seen in decades," writes Reason's Eric Boehm, and "much of the U.S. government's debt is tied up in short-term bonds which periodically 'roll over' into new bonds with updated interest rates. As a result, higher interest rates mean higher interest payments—and those funds come directly out of the federal budget, leaving less revenue for everything else the government might aspire to do." In a better Washington, with a less "poisonous atmosphere," the impending debt crisis would be considered a gigantic problem. In the one we have, it's unlikely to be fixed. Let's hope the next speaker of the House sees it as a priority. Sam Bankman-Fried goes to trial: The trial of former FTX crypto exchange boss Sam Bankman-Fried started yesterday. Bankman-Fried faces seven criminal counts, including money laundering, securities fraud, and wire fraud; the trial is expected to last roughly six weeks. Prosecutors are arguing, in The New York Times' words, that Bankman-Fried "effectively looted billions of dollars in customer money to buy lavish properties, donate to political campaigns and invest in other companies."  One key component of the case will be Bankman-Fried's intentions—whether he was deliberately defrauding those he worked with or whether he acted "in good faith," as his lawyer claims. No more right-to-shelter rule in NYC? Mayor Eric Adams has asked a judge to let him suspend New York City's right-to-shelter mandate (also called the Callahan consent decree) under an influx of migrants. Adams is arguing that the spike in migrants expecting public services constitutes an emergency, which warrants suspending the policy. "With more than 122,700 asylum seekers having come through our intake system since the spring of 2022, and projected costs of over $12 billion for three years, it is abundantly clear that the status quo cannot continue," Adams declared in a statement. "With approximately 10,000 asylum seekers still arriving each month, the city estimates this mounting crisis will cost taxpayers $12 billion over three fiscal years—an amount that will continue to grow without federal and state intervention and support," Adams argued last month. "Because the city has been forced to bear most costs of the asylum seeker humanitarian crisis at a time when revenue growth is slowing and COVID-19 stimulus funding is sunsetting, the city faces substantial fiscal disruption if circumstances do not change." This was predictable. New York City actually achieved a balanced budget in fiscal year 2024 (due mostly to better-than-projected revenue), but it expects a $5.1 billion budget shortfall by fiscal year 2025. It's essential for the city to keep its finances under control. Expedited work authorization for asylum seekers who have come to the city would be one way out of this mess; Adams started prioritizing this in mid-September, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has announced a similar initiative within the last few days. Still, that's mostly in the hands of federal immigration authorities, who ought to be more permissive in letting people work. The best way out of this is to move migrants away from dependence on social services and toward gainful employment.   Scenes from New York:  This week, Manhattan finally got its very first beach. But you can't swim there. "The idea for a Manhattan beach has been decades in the making. Former governor George Pataki promised a beach at Gansevoort, previously the site of a Department of Sanitation building," reports Curbed's Clio Chang. "But it wasn't until 2019 that the Hudson River Park Trust announced that it had selected [an] architecture firm…to turn the concrete square into a beach. The city put over $70 million into the 5.5-acre park, which also features a launch point for kayakers, a sports field, a boardwalk, picnic tables, and 20 million oysters seeded in the surrounding waters to help restore the habitat." Holy cow, $70 million? Why couldn't this have been privately funded? You can't even surf there.  QUICK HITS  Today at 1 p.m. Eastern, Zach Weissmueller and I will be interviewing Aella, a well-known sex worker, rationalist, and data scientist. We plan to talk about porn age-verification laws, whether the sexual revolution was a mistake, and whether there's too much porn in the world. Bring your (non-R-rated) questions for our guest. Check out our past livestreams too. A tech conference meant for women was overrun by men who got in by claiming to be nonbinary. Down with gerontocracy, please, I am begging you:   Only 3% of U.S. adults say it's best for a president to be in their 70s or older. Roughly half of Americans (49%) say the ideal age for a president is their 50s, while another 24% say it's best for a chief executive to be in their 60s. https://t.co/gKXOfmaY6Z pic.twitter.com/GvbTMM0vTR — Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 4, 2023   Britain's prime minister says the smoking age should start at 18 and rise by one year, every year, up until nobody can buy them. (Alternative proposal: We trust adults to make their own choices without the intervention of the state.) Get this man some eye bleach!   I need eye bleach after reading about SBFs and Caroline's dueling memos about their relationship — nic ???? carter (@nic__carter) October 3, 2023   For real, ew:    pic.twitter.com/B8YpncquZY — nic ???? carter (@nic__carter) October 3, 2023   Arnold Schwarzenegger for speaker?   I actually am coming around to the idea that Democrats should nominate @Schwarzenegger for Speaker of the House. A few reasons… 1) He's likely the most popular Republican politician in America 2) I think it is very unlikely he actually does it---why give up a sweet life of… pic.twitter.com/FBnaHuH8R7 — Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) October 4, 2023 The post Poisonous Atmosphere appeared first on Reason.com.

Hey,

So, we spiked my Los Angeles Times column for The Dispatch this week because events moved so fast—Kevin McCarthy’s out as speaker, in case you haven’t heard—that there was no time to update it.

But let me start where I left off. I think it’s a useful exercise to ask how things would have gone yesterday if the vote on the motion to vacate (MTV)—i.e. fire McCarthy—was done via secret ballot. (That’s how they did it for the half-century after 1789.)

I assume Gaetz would still have wanted his MTV and would have gotten his vote because of the stupid decision made last January to lower the threshold for the maneuver to a single member. McCarthy’s decision to use Democratic votes to prevent a government shutdown would trigger a Gaetzian attack no matter what. And I suspect he could have gotten most of the eight votes to remove McCarthy. Heck, it’s possible the GOP vote tally for removal could have been much larger (would Elise Stefanik vote to keep McCarthy on the island if no one knew how she voted?). But I suspect the Democratic tally to keep McCarthy in office would be larger than zero. That’s not because many—or any—Democrats like McCarthy all that much (I don’t mean personally, he’s a great schmoozer). But I think a good number of them hate Gaetz more and don’t want to reward his schtick. The problem for moderate Democrats is that they’re almost as afraid of their zealots as moderate Republicans are afraid of theirs. Publicly voting for McCarthy to remain speaker is a surefire way to get primaried by a Squad type.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked readers to opine on whether Democrats should stick with Joe Biden in 2024 or replace him with a younger nominee. As always, your responses were wonderfully diverse, but I want to begin with one form of common response and then offer a brief rejoinder to it.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Here’s Susan, though I could have chosen other examples of the same basic take. She wrote: Please stop asking the question about Democrats supporting Biden!! The question itself inserts unnecessary doubts about him and his ability to do his job. He has ALREADY DEMONSTRATED through landmark legislation his ability to GET THINGS DONE! If you care about this country, which I believe The Atlantic does, stop giving opportunities to the Republicans who care only about their power and their donors and their jobs even if it brings our democracy down!!! Instead, focus on the damage the Republicans have done and are doing not only to this country but internationally!!! They are gaining in making attempts to create autocracy. I revere and thank the Fourth Estate. It is our greatest hope in saving democracy. Thank you for all your fine journalism. I want to be clear about two things.(1) Though members of the press do sometimes inject questions into public discourse that wouldn’t otherwise be prominent, for better or worse, this is not one of those times. In an opinion poll conducted last month, Democratic primary voters were asked, “Would you like a Democratic candidate to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2024?” Fifty-nine percent answered “yes” and 36 percent answered “no.” When a sample of all voters was asked about Joe Biden’s age, 74 percent said that they have major or moderate concerns that he does not have the mental or physical health to be president for a second term. TJ wrote in: “The Republican front-runner, former president Donald Trump, is just a few years younger. No one seems to be asking your question about his candidacy … It’s almost as if the media are trying to gin up rumor and rancor. Do better. PLEASE.” In fact, pollsters asked the same question about Donald Trump. Just 47 percent of respondents had major or moderate concerns about his age. Like it or not (I don’t), millions of Americans are more worried about Biden’s age. It isn’t the fault of the press when you disagree with aspects of public opinion.(2) Regardless of public opinion, I think of my job as informing you as best I can. What separates journalists from activists and propagandists is that journalists use truth, not results, as their lodestar––and if journalism is to retain any influence, that approach must be conserved.Now on with your thoughts. John supports the incumbent on the merits: I did not have high expectations for Joe Biden, but supported him to get rid of Donald Trump. He has exceeded my expectations in every way. We’ve needed another FDR ever since the Reagan disaster, and finally we seem to be close. Listening to the so-called liberal press ignore his accomplishments, denigrate him, and repeat every right-wing talking point in the interest of “balance” has been discouraging, but some of the progressives waiting in the wings give me hope. Still, it is too early to replace him. Let him get the good work done. Marilyn is even rosier on Biden: This should not even be a question: of course they should support Biden. In the first two years of his presidency, he helped solar and wind investments, got the infrastructure bill, CHIPS, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed. Concerns about his age should be superseded by the years of experience and relationships he brings to the job and his still-apparent vigor; anything else is ageism. It feels as though the GOP efforts to ruin his reputation have infiltrated the thinking of Democrats who should be trumpeting his successes loudly, early, and often. But Judy thinks old age is a drag on the Democratic ticket at a moment when the party needs to win at all costs: I don’t want to waste space listing the obvious reasons why President Biden’s age should preclude him from running again. Most people understand that 80 (and 77) are just too old to maintain the general good health, energy, vigor, and resilience required for the job of president of the United States. It’s time for the older generation (I’m [a member] myself) to hand over leadership to younger people, while still able to provide guidance and wisdom. I have the utmost respect for Joe Biden as president and as a person. He’s an honorable, intelligent, empathetic man who works hard, understands complex policy matters, respects the rule of law, and cares about people. If he were even 70 I’d support a second term. However, 2024 is an election year with enormous implications for the future, and the Democrats need to eliminate all obvious obstacles to winning. Poll after poll tell us that a majority of voters think Biden’s age is a deterrent to a second term. If Biden were to announce his retirement now, explaining that he loves his job but wants to put country first and hand over leadership to a younger person, we could celebrate his service and properly honor him. It would be an opportunity to outline his successes and he would leave with a fine legacy as a long-serving senator, a two-term vice president, and a one-term president who saved us from a disastrous alternative. He could offer valuable guidance and support to a new candidate to carry on his agenda. That seems like a no-brainer, win-win situation. So why are the clear preferences of the (Democratic) public being ignored? Are the Democratic Party leaders convinced that there is something shameful or embarrassing in voluntarily stepping aside after one term? Do they really believe that there are no viable candidates available, but that some will magically appear by 2028 (actually 2025, when the next cycle will really begin)? I certainly don’t want to see a chaotic, nasty primary battle. We have no time for that sideshow. My wishful thinking is for the Democrats to organize so that just three or four people run in a primary. No candidate over 62. No don’t-have-a-chance-but-love attention-pols. No self-funded-billionaire vanity candidates. Yes, this part is fantasy, but one can dream. Jaleelah makes a pragmatic progressive’s case for retaining Biden: Clearly, Biden does not plan to step aside. That fact is very important to this question. Pundits like to dream of a field of new candidates energizing American voters to deliver a landslide Democratic victory. I have no problem with these dreams. But I do strongly doubt that a challenger would improve the party’s chances of success. My opinions on Biden have changed: He now has an objectively good track record in office. He passed the IRA and CHIPS. That’s quite a departure from the previous bipartisan consensus that climate change should be fought with big speeches and empty international agreements. He has avoided slip-ups and health scares much more successfully than his Republican opponents. Importantly, he now presides over a much more prosperous country than the one he took over. The labour market is stronger. Jobs that previously paid minimum wage now pay much more. Inflation has chilled out. The argument against Biden claims to stand on two legs: polls and age. I do not think it stands at all. Polls show that a narrow majority disapproves of Biden. I believe this is because people have much more black-and-white views of politicians than they did in the past. Biden certainly upholds policies that I see as objectively evil. If you asked me the binary question of whether I approved or disapproved, I would probably choose the latter. But I still believe he has performed better than at least 3/5 of the men who came before him, and took office in the midst of a much more challenging situation than most of his recent predecessors. I suspect that years of constantly being bombarded with Important Bad News conditioned a lot of Americans who previously looked at presidents holistically to share my outlook. I don’t think that's necessarily a bad thing. It just makes “approve/disapprove” polls a bad metric for deciding whether a president is electable. Then there’s his age. I generally accept that age and mental fitness are meaningful. I do not accept that the mental difference between a 78-year-old and an 82-year-old is unfathomably large. People have spoken at length about Biden’s age, but none of their promised aneurysms and embarrassing international incidents have come to fruition. Biden seems a lot more mentally fit than the younger, fresher Republican candidates promising to dismantle the entire government. He seems a lot less embarrassing than Ron DeSantis. It is noticeable and under-reported that American progressives have largely stopped calling for challengers. The reason is simply: Biden has listened to and implemented the “new ideas” they pushed for. Most calls for challengers no longer want those challengers to bring never-before-tried proposals to the table; they want younger challengers who will return the party to its centrist recent past. (The choice of “centrist” over “conservative” is intentionally charitable.) But their arguments about Biden’s electability do not hold water, and their certainty that a super moderate candidate can win in America is misplaced. The Democrats will not face a moderate, they will face a demagogue. They need their young, passionate base more than ever. Returning to tradition (what a silly way to describe ousting an incumbent president) is the wrong move. Maureen has no doubts: What no one has talked or written about in the media is the reality that Biden has surrounded himself with people who are competent. I suspect that the president does have some mental weaknesses but I believe the people around him will continue to steer the ship in a good direction. And, I would vote for a Biden administration over that other guy even if Biden had a stroke! Henrietta urges Democrats to heed past performance: Joe Biden is a big-time winner and never was defeated in a national government election. He won his first election for the Senate in 1972 and went on to win his Senate seat six more times. He won as Obama’s vice president two times. Then he won his primary in 2020 and went on to win about a million more votes than his opponent. And this opponent is likely to be his adversary in 2024. Sure, people think he’s old and he is. But is he too old? It’s political suicide to think of replacing a candidate with his history. The vice president should take one for the team and for the American people. She should find a good reason to make an honorable decline of the nomination in 2024. The outcome of this election is too risky to take a chance on someone with such low poll ratings. Find a personable, well-qualified governor or someone on that level and nominate him or her as Joe Biden’s vice president. That’s the way to make Joe Biden’s age a no-problem. As long as people know that if, God forbid, Biden should have a time when he won’t be able to fulfill his duties, there will be a strong Democrat ready to take over immediately, Biden will be able to ignore any questions about his age. Multiple other readers suggested that Biden should run for reelection while replacing Kamala Harris as VP. Some cast that impulse as racist. Here’s Lucretia: Of course Democrats should stick with Biden! Who else would they vote for? I suspect most of the fuss about Biden’s age is because if he died, a Black woman would become president. Horrors! Ed warns that Biden is overstaying his welcome but is fine with a Kamala Harris 2024 run: Human history is littered with good leaders who stayed too long. Why do you think we have the saying “quit while you’re ahead”? Biden did what we wanted: He beat Don the Con. Now is the “time to pass the torch.” The best plan would be for Biden to step down now and let Kamala Harris run as an incumbent against whoever the Republicans might nominate. Although Kamala is not my first choice to be president, she certainly is capable and qualified, and has the necessary experience as vice president. And Errol, after my own heart, is glad to be out of Afghanistan and wants four more years of a low-drama White House: Democrats should stick with Biden for this reason: He did what I thought was impossible and made politics boring again. I can kick up my feet and enjoy my days and nights without being inundated with Biden’s latest speech or attention-grabbing hot take. He’s careful not to come out and refute or endorse whatever wacky things the left or right have to say at any given moment. Biden is old, yes, but guess what? Jimmy Carter’s still alive. And I don’t care if he flubs a line or two on some occasions––if people on the inside say he’s doing just fine handling the main duties of the presidency, that’s good enough for me. He got us out of Afghanistan. It was messy and awful, but it was done when so many before had just hand-waved and procrastinated. Unemployment is low, we have the respect of other Western nations again, and, I can’t stress this enough, I’m so glad that I can ignore the president. Let him run again and give me four more years of not waking up in the morning wondering what the president said. I, too, love ignoring the president (save for the Corn Pop speech).

Most people don’t know who their state legislators are, much less what they are up to. So how do voters hold them accountable to public views? Steven Rogers finds that voters don’t know enough about state politicians and most legislators are not facing competitive elections. Electoral mechanisms are not enough to keep them from diverging from the people they represent. But Chris Warshaw finds that state policy has grown more representative of state publics and more responsive to changes in opinion, only partly because elections change who is in power. State officials also follow public opinion in between elections and out of fear of electoral threat. Niskanen Center – The Science of Politics · Can state politicians be held accountable to the public? Guests: Steven Rogers, St. Louis University; Chris Warshaw, George Washington UniversityStudies: Accountability in State Legislatures; Dynamic Democracy Transcript Matt Grossmann: Can state politicians be held accountable to the public, this week on The Science of Politics. For The Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Despite nationalized politics and media, a lot of policy is still made in state legislatures. Elections may not provide much of a mechanism for keeping state politicians in line with voters’ views. After all, most people don’t know what their state leaders are up to, and most of their elections are not competitive. Does that leave them free to pursue extreme and unrepresented goals? If not, what else keeps them accountable? This week, I talked to Steven Rogers of St. Louis University about his new Chicago book, Accountability in State Legislatures. He finds that voters don’t know enough about state politicians to hold them accountable, in part due to the decline of state media, and electoral mechanisms are not enough to keep them from diverging from the people they represent. But I also talked to Chris Warshaw of George Washington University about his Chicago book with Devin Caughey, Dynamic Democracy. He finds that state policy has grown more representative of state publics and more responsive to changes in opinion only partly because elections change who’s in power. State officials also follow public opinion in between elections and out of fear of electoral threat. This episode will let you experience the real renaissance of state politics research where we talk comprehensively about the state of American democracy with new data and perspective. First, the bad news from Rogers. What were the main findings and takeaways from Accountability in State Legislatures? Steven Rogers: The main findings and takeaways from Accountability in State Legislatures is that legislators probably do not have much electoral incentive to act in their constituents’ interest. Here Accountability in State Legislatures doesn’t find that there’s no accountability, but it finds that there’s just not very much of it. Then here the story behind this is we can probably easily think, well, maybe voters don’t know all that much about the state legislature. But here, a story of it that it’s both elites and voters responsible for this lack of accountability. Some of the key findings within it are like in state legislative elections in the general elections, when you look at single-member districts over the last 20 years, over a third of state legislators win reelection without either a primary or general election challenger. Otherwise stated, what this is saying is that one third of state legislators just win reelection just by signing up. Here, it’s hard to have accountability or a voter to hold a state legislator accountable if they have no one else to vote for. Here in the book I try to illustrate, not only with challengers, but also with the media and then how districts are drawn, there’s a lot of things in the system that are stacking the deck against accountability. Then additionally, there is some responsibility on the voter side in which most voters don’t know who their state legislator is, yet on what they’re doing from day to day. Then here to hold a state legislator accountable, you may think that a voter’s going to probably need to know did my legislator act in my interest, did they do a good job, did they even do constituency service for me? But I generally find that they don’t really know that much about what their state legislators have done. Here, for example, fundamentally only about 11% of voters can recall the name of their state representative. Then additionally, when I ask in an open-ended question on a survey, “Can you tell me anything that your state legislator has done,” 75% responded no or don’t know. That leaves 25%. But then actually, in my own concession, I don’t know even what they told me was true. Then in this, they may be often confusing who their federal legislators are, who their state legislators. Overall, the punchline of the book is that we think that these elections are supposed to be incentivizing say state legislators to act in our interest, but in terms of how much they’re held accountable or how much electoral incentive legislators have, it ain’t all that much. Matt Grossmann: That is one of the striking findings is how little voters know about state legislators and state legislatures. What do they know and why don’t they know more? Is it a consequence of declining media coverage or is there some other source? Steven Rogers: Yeah, here I do think you’re right on track on that in terms of state voters don’t know that much about their state legislature or their state government in general. I would attribute a lot of this to the media, but it also can be just general lack of interest. Here, just go through the first part in terms of what voters know about their state legislature. Some statistics I just said in which only 11% of voters can recall their state legislator’s name. Oftentimes, when they’re asked to recall their state legislator’s name, I found they confused it for say their US House rep. This happened about 13% of the time. A different survey where I only look at Tennessee voters, Vanderbilt University and The Center for Democratic Institutions very generously let me put some questions on their poll, only 22% of Tennessee voters could identify their state legislator’s name from a list. Then here in this list, what I did is I put the names of four different state legislators. One of them was their own state legislator. Then another was just a name of a political scientist, like Donald Stokes. Then here, in terms of a guy choosing this, only 22% could identify their state legislator’s name. This was 16% fewer than could identify their US House member’s name. There is this difference between say federal and state level knowledge. Expanding on this difference, this is a lesson in the book but in a piece that’s coming out in State Politics & Policy Quarterly, I also asked, “What do you know about say the differences between federal and state government?” Then here, for example, fewer than 60% of Americans knew if their state had background checks for guns, this survey was in 2018, whether they had legalized abortion or higher tax rates thing than they did previously. Additionally, they don’t really know all that much about their governor’s powers. In this, people didn’t know their governor could issue an executive order or pardons. Meanwhile, they knew that the president could do this. There is a lack of knowledge within state politics or people’s awareness. What’s something that’s troublesome is that state legislators themselves seem to know this. Here in very nice studies that have been done by Nick Carnes, David Brockman, Chris Skovron, and Melody Crowder-Meyer, they had the National Candidate Study. In here, what they did is they asked state legislative candidates and state legislators different questions. When asking this, only 49% of state legislators thought voters knew which party controlled their state Senate. Here I find that generally about 60% of voters know which party controls their state Senate or state House. But here about half of state legislators seem to be cognizant that voters don’t know all that much about even who controls the legislature. Maybe even more troublesome, in the same survey, Carnes and others found only 15% of state legislators thought voters knew who to blame for policies they did not like. Here, 85%, the state legislature is saying 85% of voters just don’t know who to blame. This is troubling because we want legislators to maybe be scared, but a legislator’s not going to be scared if voters don’t know all that much when they realize they don’t know all that much. The second part in which it’s like, why are we here? Then here, I would say first there is a problem in terms of media coverage. Since the turn of the century, going back to 2000, there’s been a decline of over a third fewer state House reporters covering state government. Right now, for example, there’s more reporters that are credentialed to cover a single Super Bowl than necessarily all state governments combined. Here, I love football. I have four fantasy football teams. I am into it sort of thing. I’m very sad that Nick Chubb got hurt this week. But in this, I’m really into football, but here voters, themselves, aren’t as into say state legislatures as well. When I even look at what, in the book I conduct this analysis, or I just look at Google trends in which Google very nicely lets you search for or identify how much are people searching for different things. Then here I find that voters overwhelmingly search for things about federal politics. They, at times, search a little bit more for gubernatorial politics. Particularly we saw this around the pandemic, there was a healthy spike in the amount of people Googling their governor, but they’re not Googling about their state legislator. This is a combined aspect in which there’s less media coverage of state legislatures and in general voters that just aren’t all that interested. Matt Grossmann: The main mechanism for accountability is supposed to be elections. Give us the lay of the land for how many state legislators get competition at all in their primary and general election, and then how many are actually threatened or lose those elections? Steven Rogers: Then here, this is a really important part of the story because, again, voters cannot necessarily vote a state legislator out of office if they have no one else to vote for. Even if the state legislator did a horrible job, they can win reelection if no one else is running against them. Here what I’m just going to be looking at is single-member districts from 2001 to 2020, that’s where these statistics are going to be coming from. Then here, about 83% of state legislators did not face a primary challenger. Then 45% did not face a general election challenger. Then if I take these two statistics and combine them a little bit, together about 35% of state legislators did not face a challenger in either the primary or general election. When we’re thinking about accountability, pretty much we’re only thinking about two thirds of races to start. We have a third of the races off the table. By comparison, about 90% of US House incumbents face at least a major party challenger. There’s a pretty healthy gap between the state of federal and state levels. In this, in terms of how much these legislators actually lose, typically over this 20-year period, only about 2% of state legislators lose their primary election. Then here it’s going to range between say 6% to 10% of state legislative incumbents will lose their general election. Overall, there is probably a little bit less turnover in these state legislators, but I think the real punchline is that there’s this lack of competition in which state legislators can just win reelection without much effort or any competition. In the book, for example, I have an example of a state legislator from Louisiana who went pretty much about say 15 to 16 years without facing either a primary or a general election challenger. He then decided to resign early so his son could run for the seat. His son then lost the special election. Then in the general election, his other son lost the general election. This one legislator’s family sort of thing, had the seat forever just because they, well not just because I can say, but largely because they didn’t have any challengers. But then once there was a little competition, they threw the family out. Matt Grossmann: You also look at ideology. You find that voters in general elections do have a slight punishment for ideological extremists, but that doesn’t really add up to actually threatening those extremists because they, of course, have to compete in primary elections as well as general. Is it that primary voters favor extremists or just that they make their way through the primary and then aren’t threatened in the general? Steven Rogers: Here, I think it is both in which the primary voters … In my analysis, I find that when a legislator has more extreme ideology, and in this I’m measuring this by their say roll call ideal point. They have a higher ideal point if they’re a Republican, a lower ideal point if they’re a Democrat. If they have a more extreme ideology or if they’re more loyal to their party, they vote more often with their party, then both Democrats and Republicans in the primary election are expected to do better. Here there is an electoral incentive, at least from the data that I have, for legislators to provide this extreme representation. However, I do find also, optimistically, that legislators who do provide say worse representation or this more extreme representation, do worse in the general election. There is, as we can think theoretically, oh, I want to cater to the extreme voters in the primary and the more moderate voters in the general. That seems to be occurring. But in this, one of the things that is a problem in state legislatures that we haven’t talked about yet is that districts are becoming more and more extreme. Here, just for example, if we just do a little bit going back in the last 20 years, if I were to define say a close district as a district where the incumbent party’s presidential vote was between 45% and 55%, I’m going to say that’s a more competitive district, back in 2000, there were about 25% of state legislative districts met these criteria. Now in 2022-2023, only about 15% do. And so then here there’s been a growth in these more partisan districts on both sides of the aisle. And so then here with these more partisan districts, that can make the primary a little bit more important for some of these legislators. And so then legislators in these more partisan districts, particularly districts… The analysis that I conduct is I define a partisan district as one where it’s like 60% of the partisan vote or more. Then I find that legislators are going to get this reward even more for being extreme than necessarily being punished in the general election. So what I do is I trace a legislator from when they run for reelection, and then my final outcome variable is going to be do they return to office? And so in that pathway, what it’s doing is it’s kind of encompassing both the outcome of the primary election and the outcome of the general election. And then what I find is that in these districts that are more partisan, legislators do have a little bit more incentive to be extreme. Meanwhile, in the more moderate district, 60% or less, they do have a little bit more incentive to be moderate, which theoretically matches up with what we’d probably think. If I’m in a partisan district, I’m probably be guaranteed my general election outcome. And so let’s cater to the more extreme, but this is troublesome because we have increasing polarization within state legislatures. And then in this, I can’t necessarily go from A to B to C to link all this, but what I do find is that in some of these districts, which is a lot of the districts now it’s about like 67% of the districts, these more extreme districts, they have an incentive to be extreme. Matt Grossmann: So you have some evidence that these state legislative elections are becoming more nationalized and that there’s less of a local incumbency effect compared to a national partisan effect. But you also have this graph that is actually the first graph I show to our people in our candidate training program, which who might want to run for state legislature, which shows the very long history of the similarity in the national congressional vote and the national state legislative votes, which suggests that maybe this is actually a pretty long-term pattern that state legislative elections are partisan elections that people are voting kind of on a national partisan basis. So how much of it is how it’s always been and how much of it has changed? Steven Rogers: So I love that graph as well. And so to describe the graph, I’m kind of looking at the change in seats for the Democratic Party in US House and State House elections over time. And then the correlation, at least to me, is very striking. It’s 0.96. And so here what we’re basically having is that we see the same things at the national level as we do to state level. And then here, I would say in my data, so I took a seat change over time, but in terms of accountability and presidential approval and different national measures, I can only really go back to the 1940s sort of thing. So I can’t say back in the times of the 1800s, is this also happening? We don’t have survey data from there, but if someone knows about it on this podcast at listener, send it my way. I’d love it. But here I do think there’s kind of an aspect to it, that this is the way it’s always kind of been. So for example, this isn’t in the book, but in other work that I have, I actually look at New Jersey elections over time. And then in this analysis I kind of reading about the history. So it was in the 1940s that New Jersey switched their state elections to be in the off year. So for less familiar readers, or not readers. Listeners, most state legislative elections occur at the same time as US House election in even numbered years. But in states like New Jersey and Virginia, they’re in off election years. And then here at the time when he was advocating for off election years in New Jersey, the Governor Alfred Driscoll said, “The election for governor and assemblymen should not coincide with a presidential election. The importance of a [inaudible 00:18:10] election merits an election that will not be overshadowed by a national contest for the presidency.” And so here, this is coming from the Constitutional Convention of 1947 in New Jersey, but in this, I’m going back now almost 70 years or more than 70 years, where they’re recognizing this. We have these states elections that are kind of being overshadowed by the national context. And so I find this largely to be the case when I look at, say, changes in the economy and then seat changes over time. And so this seems to be the norm, but there has been a little bit of variation over time, at least in terms of nationalization. And then here I do recommend reading Dan Hopkins very appropriately titled book, The Increasingly United States, because this book kind of goes a little lot more into maybe different reasons for why we have this nationalization. But one reason I do think is that we do have a changing media environment. And so for example, when Madison and Hamilton were creating a lot of these, like the system of federalism, they were not expecting that, oh, a little piece of news or a tweet can go all across the world almost instantaneously. Instead its got to be filtered through newspapers very slowly. And they thought, oh, these local newspapers, we’ll have more attachment to our local politics a little bit more. But as media and just technology has evolved, the nation itself has become more nationalized. And so I’ve already kind of mentioned how there’s been fewer State House reporters, but we also can think about work in terms of there’s media companies that are consolidating sort of thing. And so if we think about, say, [inaudible 00:19:49] news and stuff like that, in which it’s like, well, they’re going to need news stories that can cover multiple markets. And then here it’s like, well, it’s cheaper to just do one story on more national politics than necessarily do a story about every local issue. And so this is something I do think is concerning, like the decline of State House reporters, fewer newspapers. And so I think at least that’s one reason why it may be a little bit more intensely nationalized now than it’s been in the past. Matt Grossmann: Since we are coming up on a few elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Louisiana, Mississippi, what is the evidence on differences in the off-year? I know they’re often looked at as predictive of the next election. Are they more separated from national partisan factors? Steven Rogers: Again, this part’s not in the book, but it’s in another paper that I have. And then here, one thing that I did do, so in terms of the answer, I think they may be slightly more separated but not extremely so. And so here, if I conduct many of the analysis that I look at, like say with on-year states, the patterns are very similar. And then referencing, for example, that New Jersey example. And so here I really want to thank the people at the Eagleton Poll at Rutgers University because they have been polling on state politics going back to the 1970s. And so here one thing that they’ve done, it’s not in every survey in every election year, but what they did is they did poll about say presidential approval, gubernatorial approval, and state legislative approval. And then they also asked voters their vote choice in these elections. And so then here what I’m able to do is I’m able to look at survey data going back over time where our expectation’s going to be that if a voter becomes more approving of their legislature, they would then vote for the party that’s kind of in control of that legislature. And occasionally I do find that, but then what I consistently find returning this topic of nationalization is that the best predictor after someone’s party ID is going to be their approval of the president. And so then presidential approval, at least in these surveys going back to the 1970s, which is the oldest survey data I can find that has State House vote choice along with different approval measures, I do find that no, national politics is largely dominating state legislative elections. Here more recently, we kind of see that there’s a decent amount of competition in Virginia and New Jersey, and there’s a lot of it attention there, but overall the pattern is relatively the same. Matt Grossmann: So as you know, I’m also interviewing Chris Warsaw, and they have a different set of findings and a different research method than you do, but in some ways it is more optimistic. They say that state legislatures are able to follow public opinion in part due to elections and in part due to just directly taking on public opinion. And I guess one way of putting it is that we used to have more states that were kind of out of step with their public, and now most conservative public are governed by conservative legislatures and vice versa. And when there have been real moves, they’ve eventually, in public opinion, they’ve eventually been recognized or represented in state legislature. So how would you compare that set of findings to yours? Steven Rogers: No. Yeah. So here first I encourage all listeners to go by Chris and Devin’s book. It is an excellent analysis of representation in the American states. It was a phenomenal data collection effort and methodologically extremely sound. And so I really encourage listeners to go purchase that book or check out the book from your library. And in here, so their book is titled Dynamic Democracy, and the central focus of that is on representation. And so here they do discuss elections, but here they really are illustrating as Matt you said that it’s like, no, look, policies are becoming more representative overtime. In contrast with my book is mainly focused on is this idea of accountability in which is our legislators being held accountable or responsible for the policies that they enact. And then in here I do touch on representation a little kind of showing a little at least some legislators are out step of their district. And in here, Chris and Devin are finding that policy is generally in step with what the state wants, but there are still some policies that are out of step. And so then here, and hopefully I’m characterizing it correctly, is that Dynamic Democracy is largely going to make the argument that policy is responsive to public opinion, but it is a slow process. And so here they kind of find that there’s policies that may be incongruent, but over time they will become more congruent. And in this though, I would argue a little bit that the reason why they may be finding, say a little bit of congruence or not as much congruence as they want is that because legislators actually aren’t being held accountable. Now, why they do find the congruence that they do, I would probably respond saying it’s like, well, legislators very well may fear being held accountable in which there may be the threat of accountability. But what accountability in state legislatures would argue is that that threat isn’t that real. And so we can kind of think about it maybe going outside of the world of politics. Many of us maybe drive our cars and we may kind of know where a speed trap is. And so in this, what we basically have is that it’s like, well, maybe I’m really running late for a meeting. I don’t encourage any listener to speed, but in this, you’re late for a meeting, you may go 10 to 15 over in order just to cut off a little bit of time if you know there’s not a speed trap. But if there’s a speed trap or if there’s someone there to hold you accountable, whether you’re late to the meeting or not, you are probably going to be going a little bit slower. And so what my fear is a little bit is that as politics kind of become more nationalized and legislators are recognizing how nationalized politics are becoming, and as state legislators may realize for example what they do themselves doesn’t have that much implications for their own elections, they then may become more likely to produce unrepresented policies. And this may be already the case, why we don’t see say as representative policies as we may want. And then here we may also think that, so for example, in their study of congruence, they find that policy match public opinion about 59% of the time. And then each decade, that congruence increased by about 3%. And then in that this is going to be a normative take. And I’ve talked to Chris and Devin about this. We’ve had an excellent authors meets critics panel together at APSA. And this is a question that we all struggled with in terms of what is enough? Is this enough representation? In my book, is this enough accountability? Because here we’re all doctors of political science, but I can’t tell you whether or not what’s 98.6 degrees in terms of a healthy amount of representation or a healthy amount of democracy. It’s going to be a little bit more normative. And so from coming from Steve Rogers’ perspective, I think we’re falling a little bit short. Are we absolutely failing? No. Is there zero accountability in state legislatures? No. However, I do think that this is not probably what we normatively would want out of a more democratic system of government. Matt Grossmann: Rogers is concerned about the state of democracy in the American states, but you can hear some openness to the more optimistic view that comes from Warsaw’s analysis. It turns out that if you’re not as beholden to elections as the key mechanism, you can find more responsiveness. Let’s now turn to Warsaw’s view. So your recent book, Dynamic Democracy, takes a big-picture look at state policymaking and representation. What were the main findings and takeaways? Chris Warshaw: I think some of the main findings and takeaways are that we find that over the long term state policy is responsive to shifts in public opinion. The public moves to the left, state policy will eventually move to the left, and if the public moves to the right, state policy will follow. But sometimes this takes a long time. What we find is that the policymaking process is only incrementally responsive to changes in public opinion. So it can take a while for public policy to catch up to what the public wants it to do. And we found is that one explanation for that is just an extremely large status quo bias in politics. This will shift, if there’s a conservative policy, it takes a really long time for states to shift that to a liberal policy, and conversely if you start with a liberal one. And I think there’s a lot of reasons for that, but some of the reasons are that there’s only so many things that policymakers can do in any given legislative session or any given year. They also face a myriad of veto points along the way that make it hard to push policy changes through. Matt Grossmann: So you also do a big picture look at public opinion in the United States across states, and I was struck that it’s been mostly national. You do show some regional differences, but overall it’s been bumpy on economic policy moving back and forth leftward and rightward, but we’ve had this big leftward shift on racial issues over decades and then a recent pretty big leftward shift on other social and cultural issues. So given this picture you’re painting of representation, there might be some people that would think, “Well, if economic policy is awash and these racial and cultural issues are moving leftward, shouldn’t this have been an era of Democratic dominance or of big gains by the party of the left?” So why not?  Chris Warshaw: I think the first thing I’d say is that by and large policymaking has shifted to the left in response, particularly on social issues, on gay rights and on LGBTQ+ rights more generally. The policymaking environment has really shifted quite substantially to the left over the last 20 years. I think the story is more mixed than other social issues, but even on other social issues, generally policies move to the left. And as far as the electoral process, I think that we don’t directly examine in the book why… I don’t think we directly examine this question in the book, but I think my two responses are that elections are a function of many things, and what we find in the book is that state elections are only, in a very tenuous way, responsive to changes in the ideology of the electorate. And that’s partly because we think that state parties are shifting in response to changes in the electorate. So to the extent that voters shift to the left, both parties will generally shift to the left. Going back to your question, I think one of the reasons that Democrats haven’t seen larger gains because of the public shifting to the left on social issues, it’s because their platforms have shifted to the left with the public. So if Democrats still have the same platform they had 10 years ago, they may not have made the policymaking advances that they’ve made, but they probably would be more successful electorally. And I think to some extent that’s always a trade-off for parties. Matt Grossmann: So you also find that policymaking has moved leftward over time, including on economic policies, but it’s also started to vary more across red and blue states. So one interpretation of that is just that red states are just moving slower in this leftward direction, but I think a lot of people see the current environment as maybe a point more of stasis, where maybe we had a leftward shift over time, but now we’re really getting states moving in opposite directions. How would you interpret that? Chris Warshaw: I think we’re maybe seeing early hints of that, especially on abortion. I think that for most of the time period we looked at in our book, the overwhelming… I think what you’re describing was largely true, that the policymaking environment was shifting to the left, Democrats were advancing more… And not just Democrats, but states more generally were largely advancing more liberal policies. So conservative victories were largely stopping that shift to the left in their state. And you’d see when Republicans took control of the state, they’d stop these leftward shifts. I do think in recent years we’re seeing more rightward shifts as well, and that’s true on abortion, it’s true on gun control and gun rights. I think on economic issues it’s not quite as clear. One thing I’ll say is that… Going back to our conversation about your first question about some of the overall findings of the book, and I think this ties into this question as well, the Medicaid expansion I think really highlights some of the findings in our book really well, which is that the Medicaid expansion was extremely controversial when it passed, and liberals thought it was terrible that only a handful of states adopted it initially. But over time what we’ve seen is that the Medicaid expansion has gotten more popular across the board, but actually particularly in red states, it’s gotten more popular. And over time, more and more states have adopted it, in some cases through the political process through the legislature, in other cases through the initiative process. And I think that illustrates both that generally speaking of the policy environment is shifting to the left, that you have this big expansion of who’s on Medicaid, but it also really, really, I think… It’s a great example of policy being responsive to what the public wants. It doesn’t happen as fast as many advocates wanted it to happen, and I think that if your expectation is that in a democracy policy is going to instantly respond to public opinion, that’s not the way democracy… That’s not the way governments work. But over the long term government does tend to eventually do what people want it to do. Matt Grossmann: So you find that states have become more representative of public opinion and still responsive to public opinion shifts, so of course we do know that some more conservative states were governed by Democrats and liberal governments and vice versa. So we’ve matched that process. But I was just visiting the University of Texas at Austin, which is a mostly blue audience in a red state, and they really felt that calling their state government representative was a stretch. So that just made me think that maybe we could have more responsiveness to the median voter in a state, but because red and blue politics have become so distinct, have more people who really feel themselves completely off kilter with their state government. What do you think? Chris Warshaw: Yeah, I think that’s right. The public has gotten more polarized, which has clearly happened over the last 30 years. And I think there’s academic debates on whether the public is polarized, more or less than elected officials, and probably the public is polarized at least somewhat less than elected officials. But certainly the public is more polarized. So in Texas there’s a lot of liberals. Just like in California, there’s a lot of conservatives. And they are surely going to feel left out of the policy process as their state government, state policies maybe drift toward the other party’s preferences. Matt Grossmann: So one of the mechanisms for responsiveness is electoral. I know it’s not the only mechanism, but more liberal states are going to elect more Democrats and that’s going to move policy in a liberal direction. But each one of those two steps isn’t one to one. So how strong are these relationships where liberal public opinion elects Democrats and democratic elections move policy leftward, and where does that break down? Chris Warshaw: So we clearly find is that both of those connections are true. So on the one hand you get… When Republicans win an election, they’re going to shift state policy to the right. When Democrats win governorships or state legislatures, they’re going to shift policy to the left. We find that those effects have increased dramatically over time, but they’re still relatively small in absolute terms. It’s not that if Democrats… One of the things we talk about in our book is if Democrats win control of Idaho, they’re not going to turn it into Vermont instantly. So too if Republicans win control in Massachusetts, as they have in the governorship there in the recent past, their ability to make dramatic changes is pretty limited. Party control, just like public opinion, tends to have incremental effects. But we also find that as far as party control of government is actually not a big mechanism for how shifts in public opinion affect the policy process, because shifts in the public opinion don’t have huge effects on elections, at least on state elections, because politicians tend to shift with the public. So what we find is that within party responsiveness really is an important mechanism of democracy in the states. And as an example for that, a number of states have adopted the Medicaid expansion even without a changeover in party control of government. And in the book we talk about Virginia, where in 2017 Democrats failed to win control of the state legislature, but nonetheless Virginia still adopted the Medicaid expansion because it was viewed by state legislators that Democrats had made gains in the state legislature, and I think that was viewed as a signal that the public in Virginia was shifting to the left. And there was certainly polling showing the Medicaid expansion being more popular. So in the wake of that, Virginia adopted the Medicaid expansion even though Republicans continued to control the government. And we’re seeing the same thing in North Carolina. Earlier in the 2000, in the 2010s, Indiana adopted the Medicaid expansion, though Republicans controlled the government. So we see many examples of a party adopting popular policies that maybe don’t fit their party’s preferences when they see clear signals that the public overwhelmingly supports it. Matt Grossmann: So yeah, it may surprise people that a lot of the responsiveness is really coming in between elections and within parties controlling the same state. So what are the mechanisms of that beyond just electoral threat. At least a couple of the examples you just mentioned, it wasn’t elections themselves, but maybe the threat of losing. But it seems like your data is also showing that in Idaho, if there’s a shift, even if there’s not really any threat that the Democrats are going to take control, you’re going to expect responsiveness. So is that true and why? Chris Warshaw: Well, I think it’s not that there’s no electoral threat. I mean elections still matter, but it’s the threat of being vulnerable in an election. One of the things we find in the book is that when partisan gerrymandering really dampens the threat of losing elections or losing control of the government, then that can dampen the policy change and can really reduce the congruence between state policies and public opinion. So I do think there needs to be that electoral threat to facilitate this within party responsiveness, but it doesn’t necessarily have to happen via party turnover, via voting out one party and voting in another party. Matt Grossmann: So you said that the responsiveness is incremental. So explain that a little bit. And it may surprise people because some of the salient examples often look like a new party comes to power and starts trying to do everything at once. I’m living in the state capital of Michigan where the Democrats are certainly acting like they should do as much as they can in the next two years after 40 years out of full control of state government. So is there possibility that that’s changing or are we just viewing it wrong in terms of the responsiveness? Chris Warshaw: Well, I think there’s a couple parts to unpack that question. One is that party control of government, as I said, is not totally unrelated to shifts in the mass public’s ideology or issue preference, but it’s mostly unrelated, right? Michigan didn’t shift to a democratic control, mostly because Michigan people got more liberal. It’s mostly because of 2020 was 2020 and to some extent 2022, were decent years for Democrats, particularly in the Upper Midwest. And I think another factor in Michigan is that Michigan had these really gerrymandered state legislature maps before 2022. So there was a long period where the state legislature maybe was less responsive to the public than we might expect because of those gerrymandered maps. I think the last point on Michigan is that Michigan is a little bit of an outlier, maybe because of the latter factor of the long period that they had gerrymandered maps that reduced the responsiveness to the legislature. But I think that we haven’t calculated it yet, but my guess is the policy change that we’re going to see over a two-year period in Michigan is probably one of the largest in history, if not the largest in history. So this is not a typical … the amount of the degree of policy change we’re seeing in Michigan is extremely atypical. I think that normally it’s much more common for policy change to be slow and incremental, where you see a state legislature adopt one or two or three major policy changes in every year. And I think one way to think about this is that if you look at the larger policy, I know it doesn’t feel this way as we’re all living through the daily news cycle, but generally speaking, if you look at the, I don’t know, state statute book or the federal register, one way to think about this is what percentage of the laws are changed in any two-year period? And it’s an extremely small percentage. And that’s true at the federal level. When Trump took control, liberals were sort of extremely frightened, scared that he was going to change all this stuff. And certainly they changed some important policies. I’m not saying that nothing changed, but as a percentage of the edifice of federal policy, it was a pretty small percentage of the overall federal policies. Now, if Republicans had kept unified control of government for 15 or 20 years and then incrementally, they would’ve accumulated and there would’ve been eventually been very large changes in federal policy, but it really takes this incremental accumulation, I think, putting Michigan aside, it usually takes this sort of gradual accumulation. Matt Grossmann: So, Steve Rogers is the other interview for this episode, and he has written a book on accountability and state legislatures, and I know you all were on a panel together and have been in contact. He focuses on the electoral dimension, but really has some findings that would seem to make some of your findings harder to explain just that state legislators are often unknown. Some people don’t know even who controls their state government. They have a lot of trouble holding incumbents accountable for their actions given they don’t even know who they are, much less what they’re doing. So how would you guess reconcile his findings with yours? And his interpretation I think was that it’s mostly about setting the bar for accountability. That is how accountable, congruent or responsive does policy have to be for us to think accountability is occurring. So do you agree with that? And if so, how do we set that bar? Chris Warshaw: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. So here’s what I would say is that first of all, accountability … Steve finds that accountability is pretty low in state legislatures. We also looked at this and found that it’s relatively low but not zero. If you’re an extremist in state legislatures, then you pay a one or two or three point percentage point penalty in general elections. And I think that’s generally consistent with what Steve finds. Now, Steve’s take on that is that that’s a really low level of accountability. And my take on that is a little more nuanced. And the reason for that is, first of all, it’s not that different from Congress. The penalty people have found the penalty for extremism in Congress is maybe three or four percentage points at most for being an extremist. So if you have a one or two-point panel in leading state legislatures, that’s in the ballpark what we see in Congress. So it’s not an order of magnitude smaller. Another piece is that we find Devon and I fund much more accountability for governors. And you see that in recent elections, where Democrats won a contested governor’s election in Kansas when there was sort of an extremist that had been the governor of Kansas. On the other side of the country in Vermont, there was sort of a very liberal democratic governor of Vermont, got voted out of office in favor of a moderate Republican. So you see much more accountability for extremism, I think in gubernatorial elections. And governors are really important. They’re understudied, I think by academics because we like legislature, we like studying legislatures for a variety of reasons, but governors are really important and they really drive a big part of the policy process. And then putting all that together, I think that we just don’t … It’s not obvious theoretically how to say how much accountability is enough to drive legislators to be responsive to the public. You need more than zero, but you don’t need to have legislators lose 100% of the time for being extremists in order for them to worry that there might be a penalty. And arguably, I think one could reconcile these by saying that what us and Steve find is that there is some accountability and that might be enough to drive the kind of incremental response in this that Devin and I find because remember Devin and I don’t find that state policy is instantly responsive to changes in public opinion or that elections are. We find that this responsiveness is relatively … it’s slow, it’s incremental, and it really takes a long time. And I think that could be partly because citizens are only modestly holding their elected officials accountable. Matt Grossmann: So we also know that state legislative elections are nationalized and have become more nationally focused. And there’s an interesting, I guess, two sets of findings that I talked to Steve about that I wanted to get your take. On the one hand, we do have more people voting the same way across different levels of government. We have more consistent candidate behavior and policy across levels of government. So we have nationalized politics. On the other hand, you can look at a near 150-year trend and see that nationally, state legislative elections have gone the same way as congressional elections for the whole time. So how should we think about how much has changed in our capacity for responsiveness and everything else, given that politics are now very nationalized, but they always have taken place in this national partisan context. Chris Warshaw: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s interesting what Dan Hopkins shows is that on the one hand that elections are getting more nationalized. And that’s certainly true when you look at all kinds of different electoral data. But on the other hand, what Steve shows is that state legislatures have always been really tightly tied or at least shifts in the two-party state. Legislative seats have always been really tied to shifts in their fortunes in federal elections. And the correlation is extremely high between shifts in state legislative seats and shifts in US house seats. I do think that nationalization certainly is growing to some degree, and it does seem like it’s really ticked upwards substantially in the last four to six years, really, 2018. If you look at electoral data, 2018 seems like a big inflection point for nationalization. Now we don’t know if that’s going to continue upward forever. I think if it did continue upward forever and there was 100% tie between federal elections and state and local elections, then we wouldn’t see much, if any, responsiveness of state policy to shifts in state level opinion. It would be entirely about people’s general political attitudes and shifts in party control. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I do worry that the increasing nationalization sort of breaks down some of these mechanisms for responsiveness. Matt Grossmann:So, we’ve also talked to Jake Grumbach about his book labeling states as engines of Democratic backsliding with a lot of institutional change that might have enabled that. You also look at a bunch of institutions and reforms, but I think you have what I saw as a more optimistic take. Number one, you can have institutions that disrupt this process of public opinion impacting public policy, but in a lot of ways, those institutions are changing to improve the responsiveness between public opinion and policy. So how would you reconcile those two findings? Chris Warshaw: One of the things we tried to do in our book is to take a very long-term perspective. And over the very long-term, we think that American democracy is stronger now than it’s ever been before. That’s certainly true at the state level, and it’s probably true at the federal level. There’s some unique threats related to election subversion and some candidates that are maybe don’t totally believe in democracy. But in terms of the structures we have, institutional structures, we think that democracy is stronger now than before. And I think that’s pretty clear when you look at how anti-democratic American government was in the not so distant past. We had Jim Crow laws that excluded vast numbers of Americans from the political process. We had malapportionment that weighted some people’s votes like a hundred times the weight of other people’s votes. And we don’t talk about this in the book, but you also had pretty clear evidence that elections were getting stolen and the not so distant past for important offices. So I think that most of those problems have been fixed today. Moreover, it’s much easier to vote today in basically every state in the country than it was 30 years ago, let alone 50 or 60 years ago. And as a result, voter participation is way up over the past 50 years. So we think that over the very long term, democracy is stronger than it was. But we continue to face some important threats. And this is where I agree with Jake that in partisan gerrymandering especially, and if you look at Jake’s, especially his APSR article, part of the core of his data comes down to the fact that partisan gerrymandering got worse between 2000 and 2018, whatever the coverage of his study was. And that was largely due to Republican states enacting more extreme gerrymanders, not entirely, but largely due to that. And that sort of led to, I think, some of a lot of his findings. While it’s true that over the long term, I think it’s gotten easier to vote and voter participation is up, I do worry about new restrictions being passed. And I think one of the things that Devin and I say in the conclusion of our book is that it’s sort of on all of us to continue to make democracy work better and to resist democratic backsliding, as Jake would say. So I think I certainly worry about democratic backsliding happening while at the same time finding that over the long term, our democracy is stronger than it’s been before. Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available biweekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. Are red and blue states making red and blue policies? Do Democrats and Republicans get different results? Is democracy declining in the American states? Does nationalized media mean the death of local politics, and Are divided governments the cause of delays in shutdowns? Thanks to Steven Rogers and Chris Warshaw for joining me. Please check out accountability and state legislatures and dynamic democracy, and then listen in next time.The post Can state politicians be held accountable to the public? first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Can state politicians be held accountable to the public? appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Updated at 5:17 p.m. ET on October 4, 2023Inequality is one of the great constants. But what sets those at the top of society apart from those at the bottom has varied greatly. In some times and places, it was race; in others, “noble” birth. In some, physical strength; in others, manual dexterity. In America today, most of these factors still matter. The country is racially unequal. Some people inherit great wealth; others become celebrities through sporting prowess.But much of America’s transformation in recent decades—including many of the country’s problems—can be ascribed to the ascendancy of a different marker of distinction: education. Whether or not you have graduated from college is especially important. This single social marker now determines much more than it did in the past what sort of economic opportunities you are likely to have and even how likely you are to get married.Educational status doesn’t only influence how Americans live, though. As a new set of papers from the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton shows, educational status has now overtaken other metrics, including race, in predicting one of the most important socioeconomic outcomes you can imagine: how long you get to live.The rise of educational attainment as an indicator of social differentiation can be traced all the way back to the origins of modern democracy. The chief architects of the French Revolution were highly preoccupied with the obstacles to social mobility that had defined the ancien régime, a system in which prominent positions were reserved for members of the aristocracy and public offices such as judgeships were openly purchased. The French republicans founded public schools and universities that selected their students on the basis of competitive examinations, and furnished the upper echelons of French society with engineers, architects, civil servants, and other luminaries. Reflecting on his life from exile in St. Helena, Napoleon claimed that the revolutionary maxim of a “career open to the talent” had always guided him.The Founders of the American republic worried about education for another reason: They saw an educated populace as a prerequisite for political stability. It would be a particular priority to attend to “the education of the common people,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, for “on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.”[Read: Poor Americans really are in despair]Although democracy and education have always been closely intertwined, the degree to which formal educational qualifications are a prerequisite for political or societal influence is relatively new. In the past, many people could—and did—rise to the pinnacles of politics and society without graduating from college. Neither Harry Truman nor Winston Churchill, for example, had any formal qualifications beyond high school. In the year after World War II, almost half of U.S. congressmen and a quarter of U.S. senators did not have a bachelor’s or graduate degree; today, this holds true for only 6 percent of congressmen and a single senator. In all but exceptional circumstances, an undergraduate degree, preferably from a famous school, has become a necessary passport to the upper echelons of American life. As a result, educational status is now one of the strongest predictors of lifetime earnings, outstripping race or gender.The “college bonus” refers to the wage advantage enjoyed by those who have a higher degree. In the 1970s, this bonus was very slight: Comparing a worker over the age of 25 who did have a college degree with an otherwise similar worker who did not have a college degree, the former enjoyed an income advantage of about 10 percent. Four decades later, that small gap had grown to a wide chasm. By the mid-2010s, a worker with a bachelor’s degree could expect to outearn an otherwise similar worker without a bachelor’s degree by about 70 percent. (Other studies find the same effect even if its magnitude varies: The college wage bonus has kept growing.)Since 1980, differences in educational attainment have started to predict even the most personal outcomes. Americans without a bachelor’s degree are now much more likely to experience extreme mental distress. They are much more likely to suffer from physical pain. And they are much more likely to report that they are lonely or have difficulty socializing.Even the chances of sustaining a successful relationship now strongly depend on educational status. Beginning in 1980, “the likelihood of divorce among college-educated Americans plummeted,” as Eli J. Finkel wrote in The Atlantic. Americans without college degrees, by contrast, are now far more likely to get divorced—and far less likely to get married in the first place. As a result, college-educated Americans are much more likely to be in a stable marriage than their compatriots who did not go to college.All of these findings have convinced me that the gap between the educational haves and have-nots is now a defining cleavage in American life. Even so, I was genuinely shocked by Case and Deaton’s latest research, which demonstrates how far this difference now goes, explaining why Americans die so much younger than the inhabitants of other affluent countries.Case and Deaton made headlines nearly a decade ago by uncovering the startling fact that adult life expectancy in the United States had started to decline—the first time in the country’s history that this had occurred for reasons other than war or pestilence. Much of this trend was driven by what Case and Deaton named “deaths of despair.” These included the hundreds of thousands of Americans felled by the opioid epidemic that has ravaged the country since the late 1990s. Other deaths of despair involve the consequences of alcoholism and a very high rate of gun suicide.[Read: Is economic despair what’s killing middle-aged white Americans?]The increase of this type of mortality makes America an extreme outlier. It is now virtually the only rich nation in the world where adult life expectancy began to fall well before the coronavirus pandemic (Scotland being the other exception).The more closely Case and Deaton looked at the data for the U.S., the more struck they were by who was, and who wasn’t, suffering a premature death. Nearly all of the victims of deaths of despair did not have a bachelor’s degree; those who did were practically immune.The trend held true when Case and Deaton expanded their search beyond deaths of despair. As they show in a new paper presented last week at the Brookings Institution, the chances of an American dying prematurely from a range of other diseases not obviously related to “despair,” including most forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease, also depend heavily on educational status.These correlations help explain what underpinned Case and Deaton’s original finding about the divergence between the U.S. and other rich democracies. Until the pandemic, longevity for Americans with degrees continued to increase in step with the world’s wealthiest countries; even after COVID-19 increased mortality in rich countries, this demographic group suffered only a modest decrease in adult life expectancy. But Americans without a bachelor’s degree had a starkly different trajectory. They had already begun to suffer serious declines in longevity before the pandemic; when COVID hit, their adult life expectancy plummeted. (Case and Deaton mostly use a metric of adult life expectancy, which shows how many years people can expect to live once they have reached their 25th birthday.)Today, the adult life expectancy of Americans with a college degree is comparable to that for residents of any other successful country. The adult life expectancy of Americans without a college degree, by contrast, is much lower. The gap between the two groups is now so large that Americans without a college degree have an adult life expectancy closer to that for residents of many developing countries than to the Japanese or Swiss. The highly educated and the “poorly educated,” as Donald Trump famously called them, now practically live in two different countries.Case and Deaton’s findings also suggest that, at least in one crucial respect, America’s educational divide now surpasses the gap that has historically been most significant: race. As recently as 1990, race still trumped educational status as a determinant of life span in the United States. White Americans without a four-year college degree could expect to live longer than Black Americans with one.This has changed. The adult life expectancy of Black Americans with a bachelor’s degree has increased markedly over the past three decades. As a result, they can now expect to live much longer than whites without a bachelor’s degree: “Black men and women with a BA, who used to have fewer expected years from 25 to 75 than White people without a BA, now have more expected years,” Case and Deaton write. “As a result, Black people with a BA are currently closer to White people with a BA than to Black people without a BA, in sharp contrast to the situation in 1990.” (For this set of calculations, Case and Deaton use a specific metric for adult life expectancy that calculates the number of years that people can expect to live between their 25th and their 75th birthdays.)Racial disparities do persist. But the difference in adult life expectancy between Americans with and without a bachelor’s degree is now starker than that between white and Black Americans. In 1992, an average white American could expect to live six years longer than an average Black American, a gap that fell to three years by 2018. But over the same period, the gap in adult life expectancy among Americans with different educational credentials has widened at the exact same pace. In 1992, an average college graduate could expect to live three years longer than an average non–college graduate, a difference that increased to six years by 2018.A natural question to ask about these findings is what drives this dramatic divergence in the outcomes between the most educated Americans and everybody else. According to one theory, Americans who go to college acquire skills that allow them to excel in a range of professions; the rewards of a degree might reflect their greater ability to contribute to public life and our collective prosperity. According to another theory, important traits such as the capacity to avoid self-destructive behaviors have a strong bearing both on whether somebody gains a college degree and on whether they’re able to live a healthy and successful life. In this case, the difference between these two groups might be mostly “compositional” in nature, simply reflecting the fact that different kinds of people are likely to end up in each group.[Read: Is it better to be poor in Bangladesh or the Mississippi Delta?]Case and Deaton, who prefer describing trends to explaining their causes, caution that scholars have yet to come up with a definitive answer to this question. But they mistrust explanations that rationalize the chasm between Americans with and Americans without a college degree as an accurate reflection of each group’s respective choices or skill sets. “We have increasingly come to believe,” they conclude in their new paper, that a college degree “works through often arbitrary assignation of status, so that jobs are allocated, not by matching necessary or useful skills, but by the use of the BA as screen.” In an email to me, Deaton was more blunt: Both he and Case believe that the college degree is most important as “a route to social standing.”Regardless of the reasons for this divide, in a just society, holding a college degree should not be nearly so predictive of one’s life trajectory as it now is in the United States. “If some Nero or Domitian was to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives,” the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill pointed out, that race would not be any more just because “the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape.” The same, Mill pointed out, is true in societies that award a more humane existence to those who outcompete others: “To assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune.”This article originally misidentified a graph showing life expectancy for people with and without a college degree, by race. The data depicted incorporate all Americans, not just men.

Last night was the night a lot of bills came due for Kevin McCarthy.The bill came due for pandering to his party’s extremes, for desperate deals and broken promises. Most of all, the bill came due for the House Republicans’ failure in the elections of 2022.Republicans have had a lot of bad elections since Donald Trump took over the party. They lost the popular vote for president in 2016, they lost the House in 2018, they lost the presidency in 2020, and they lost the Senate in 2021.The 2022 election cycle was supposed to break the Trump curse. It was supposed to be the year of the red wave that would sweep away Joe Biden’s woke mob in Congress. Instead, Republicans posted net losses of one seat in the U.S. Senate, two governorships, and four state legislative chambers. Amid all of the defeats, there was one piece of good news: They reclaimed the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.But that seeming victory proved deceptive. Democrats had lost the majority, but Republicans had not won a functioning majority of their own.They tried to act otherwise. They tried to advance a big agenda, even tried to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. To propel that agenda required their tiny majority to march in unison, each member subordinating his or her own wishes to the collective will.[Read: Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end]Predictably, that did not happen.Which left Plan B: Accept reality; acknowledge that the GOP had not won a functioning majority; and reach across the aisle, make deals, and do your business that way.That’s what McCarthy did in May with the debt-ceiling deal and tried to do again with the budget this past weekend. The first foray wounded him. The second finished him.The rules of contemporary Republican politics make it hard to accept reality. Reality is just too awkward.In reality, Trump has been a big vote loser for Republicans. He fluked into the presidency with a Dukakis-like share of the vote in 2016, then lost his party its majority in the House in 2018. Trump got decisively booted from the presidency in 2020; rampaged illegally on January 6, 2021; and then cost his party its Senate majority in the January 2021 runoff elections. His election-denier message damaged his party further in the elections of 2022. His demand for a Biden investigation and impeachment in 2023 is producing an embarrassing fiasco. But no Republican leader dares say these things out loud.Most taboo of all is working with Democrats, on any terms other than total, one-sided domination: We win, you lose. So McCarthy just had to press ahead, acting as if he commanded a majority when he did not; insulting and demeaning the minority, even though he had to know that he might need their help at any minute.That minute came. McCarthy sought Democratic votes to save him from his own refractory members, and in return he offered nothing. Not even politeness.That proposition did not produce the desired results, and so here we are.[Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved]Where we are is a country with a solid anti-Trump majority confronting a pro-Trump minority that believes it has a right to rule without concession or compromise.The only way to produce a stable majority in the House is for the next Republican leader to reach a working agreement with the Democrats to bypass the nihilists in the GOP caucus. But that agreement will have to be unspoken and even denied—because making agreements that show any respect for the other side will be seen by Republican partisans as betrayal. The price of GOP leadership is delivering delusions and fantasies: the delusion and fantasy that Trump won in 2020, the delusion and fantasy that the Republicans did not lose in 2022.The Republican so-called majority in the House survives by perpetual self-hostage-taking. McCarthy secured his speakership in January by allowing any one member to trigger a vote to get rid of him. He stopped a default in May by agreeing to face a government shutdown in October. He avoided a shutdown with a 47-day extension, and by wrecking his own leadership.The next leader will have to manage another set of delusions and fantasies—those being trafficked via the Biden impeachment inquiry. The reality is: Republicans have made a lot of angry accusations, but they have scant evidence that the president is guilty of anything other than fathering a troubled son. The fantasy is: They’ll discover proof of a huge criminal scheme that implicates President Biden.For seven years, Republicans have protected and enabled Trump, the most corrupt and lawless president in American history. They crave to believe that Biden is as bad or worse, and they won’t be denied that craving by pesky details such as its crazy untruth. The next ringmaster will have to deliver a more exciting act to the most frenzied fans in the circus seats.For the rest of the country, all of this threatens more crisis, more drama, more misgovernment, until one of two things happens. Either Republicans will overcome their taboo against reality and find some way to strike deals with their opponents, or voters in November 2024 will replace this dysfunctional majority that lives by lies with a functional majority that can work with facts.

Jordan Peterson called Joe Rogan "the most powerful journalist who's ever lived" as he defended the popular podcaster from criticism.

The Canadian psychologist and conservative commentator made the comments during a remote appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Tuesday. During the interview, Morgan asked Peterson about California Governor Gavin Newsom's recent remarks about Peterson and The Joe Rogan Experience host.

During an interview with Bloomberg last month, Democrat Newsom expressed his concern over Artificial Intelligence and its role in spreading misinformation online. He also said that it helps fuel "micro cults" of people who follow the likes of Peterson, Rogan and social media influencer Andrew Tate, who has been accused of sexual assault (Tate denies the allegations).

"My son is asking me about Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson. And then immediately he's talking about Joe Rogan," Newsom said. "And I'm like; here it is, the pathway."

Calling Newsom's statement "unconsciously comical," Peterson told Morgan on Tuesday that "anybody who talks about misinformation and disinformation that other people are spreading, they immediately invalidate themselves as a serious observer in my viewpoint because they're basically arbitrary censors."

"The micro cult comment, that's just ridiculously funny because if you are daft enough to think that Joe Rogan is a micro cult, you live in 1995," Peterson said. "Joe Rogan is the most powerful journalist who's ever lived by an order of magnitude. And if you don't know that, you're just not in the modern world.

"Young people are in the modern world, and they know that Joe Rogan isn't a micro cult. Gavin Newsom might not know that, but that just means that he's anachronistic enough to be deluded.

"Maybe if Newsom had a clue he'd be curious about why his own children are interested in these micro cults and exactly what it is about Tate and Rogan and I that are grouped together, even though it's a strange grouping," he said.

Rogan started his podcast on YouTube in 2009. By 2015, The Joe Rogan Experience had grown to become one of the world's most popular podcasts, regularly pulling in millions of views.

In December 2020, Rogan signed a licensing deal with Spotify for the platform's exclusive rights to broadcast the show. The deal was widely reported at the time to be worth $100 million, although The New York Times reported in February 2022 that the true number for the three-and-a-half-year deal was "at least" $200 million.

While Peterson had high praise for Rogan, he had less-than-flattering words for Tate, whom he has criticized in the past.

"I'm not particularly happy to be grouped with Andrew Tate because I think there's some elements about what he does that are quite reprehensible," Peterson told Morgan on Tuesday.

Tate is facing charges of rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women in Romania. Four women in the United Kingdom are also pursuing legal action against him over accusations of violence, sexual assault and coercive control. Tate has denied all allegations.

"The allegations are malicious and disputed," Tate said in response to the women's lawyers read, adding that "allegations are brought as part of an opportunistic press campaign to exploit my present difficulties in Romania, and to mirror some of the allegations made against me in Romania in an effort to extract money from me."

Jordan Peterson pictured left on November 2, 2018, in Cambridge, England. Joe Rogan pictured right on April 9, 2022, in Jacksonville, Florida. Peterson called Rogan "the most powerful journalist who's ever lived." Chris Williamson/Getty Images;/James Gilbert/Getty Images

Earlier this year, media personality Peterson, who has been a guest on Rogan's podcast on a number of occasions, sought to explain the recipe for the broadcaster's success in a video that went viral on social media.

"So one of the reasons Joe Rogan is so successful, by the way, is that that's what Joe does—he just asks questions," Peterson said in the clip. "He isn't trying to get something from his guests. He's not trying to become more famous. He doesn't need any more money.

"There's no instrumental utilization of language in his discourse. He's just a humble lunkhead, in the most profound sense, who would like to know more than he knows, and who asks all the stupid questions he can think up.

"And it turns out that he's actually very, very smart and very well educated now after talking to hundreds and hundreds of people and listening," Peterson said.

"And so the stupid questions he asks aren't stupid, and they're questions that are shared by virtually everyone who's listening. And he takes his listeners along on this process of exploratory endeavor, and it's the pathway to success."

State capture is a clean, formal phrase that describes a messy, ugly process. A political party or clique typically consolidates control over a state’s institutions only after years of bad legislation, concentrated propaganda, and many different forms of corruption. In some cases, constitutions have to be broken. Occasionally violence is required. Whole swaths of the public have to be persuaded, bribed, or frightened into going along.In Poland, this process has been under way for eight years. After the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, known as PiS, legitimately won a parliamentary election in 2015, it began with an assault on the highest courts. Then it set out to dominate everything else: the national and local civil administration, regulators of all kinds, even seemingly apolitical institutions such as the forestry service. Now Poland is just days away from another parliamentary election, on October 15—an election that feels as if it were taking place in a completely different country. Some of the candidates are the same as in 2015. But the rules are different, the rhetoric is different, and the stakes are different. Inflation, migration, and women’s rights are under discussion. But in truth, only one issue is really on the ballot: Do you want PiS to complete its capture of state institutions, or do you want those institutions to belong once again to the entire country?Before I continue, here is a very emphatic declaration of personal interest. I am married to a Polish politician, Radek Sikorski, a former foreign minister who is a member of Civic Platform, the largest opposition party. He is not a candidate in this election, but he is a member of the European Parliament, and he is campaigning on behalf of others. If that bothers you, then stop reading here. But do remember that some stories are clearer from the inside. As soon as this article is published, both my husband and I could once again be the focus of orchestrated online attacks from PiS trolling operations, more slander on state-run and state-controlled media, and maybe even more antagonism from the state institutions that use the security services to harass political opponents, including us, by orchestrating bogus financial or criminal investigations. Those same institutions have put spyware on the phones of our colleagues and friends. As in the Communist era, people in Polish politics now sometimes go outside or leave their phone in a different room when they want to speak. That’s just the price, nowadays, of being in the democratic opposition.In this sense, the Polish political system has already diverged from other democracies. In the United States, people who watch Fox News and follow Truth Social believe in a false version of reality, one in which the 2020 election was stolen. Now imagine what would happen if an American politician could promote that lie, not just on social media but with hundreds of millions of dollars of federal-government money—your money, in other words, that you paid in your taxes—in order to hold power indefinitely. In Poland, that once unimaginable scenario has become reality.PiS’s most important tool is state media—a couple of dozen state-owned television channels, national and local, as well as radio stations and websites—that have no American equivalent. Although Poland does have one fully independent satellite news station—TVN24, owned by Warner Bros.—subscribing to it costs money. State television is free, and for millions of people it remains the only source of political information. PiS has added 2 billion zlotys to the annual state-media budget since 2015 (some $450 million, which goes a long way in Poland). For that money, the state can produce some of the most virulent, aggressive television propaganda anywhere in the democratic world.State media work by targeting particular people, running repetitive, angry stories about them. The main news program repeatedly describes the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk as dishonest, treasonous, and above all, German. Tusk, who was previously the president of the European Council, once addressed a meeting of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union online during the pandemic. His brief remarks to the political party ended with a generic expression, in German, of good wishes “for Germany and for Europe.” The sentence was cut to one phrase—für Deutschland—and has been repeated scores of times on Polish state television.Although legally obligated to be politically neutral, state television also picks themes designed to help the ruling party, especially during campaigns. In the run-up to parliamentary elections in 2019, state television ran a documentary called Invasion, about the sinister “aims, methods, and money” of the LGBTQ community. During presidential elections in 2020, the taxpayer-funded broadcaster described the opposition candidate as “serving Jewish interests.”State media also hide or downplay genuine scandals. PiS has been telling Poles for years now that they face an existential threat from migrants coming from the Middle East. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the PiS party leader, once said that Syrians carry “parasites and protozoa,” words that had a clear echo in Poland, where in 1941, Nazi occupiers put up posters warning that Jews cause typhus. Alongside the parliamentary ballot, PiS has also organized a referendum of dubious legality. It consists of four tendentious questions, including this one: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced-relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”The wording is a lie: No European bureaucracy has imposed any forced-relocation mechanism. But the larger, more extraordinary lie is the implication that PiS actually cares about stopping migrants from “the Middle East and Africa.” In truth, this government has allowed tens of thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa, Central and South Asia to enter Poland, which now has more immigrants than at any other time in modern history. In Warsaw, I have randomly met Tajiks, Mongols, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis who are delivering packages, driving taxis, working on construction sites. Their presence has nothing to do with European bureaucracy. Instead, media reports estimate that as many as 250,000 non-European migrants have recently entered the country, many after purchasing visas from corrupt PiS officials or intermediaries.The details of this swindle, recently leaked to Polish independent media, are astonishing. One foreign-ministry official described a booth set up outside a Polish consulate in Africa, where people lined up to hand over cash. Another scandal involved a group of Indians, described falsely as a Bollywood-film team, who purchased hard-to-get EU visas from a Polish consulate in India for up to 40,000 euros apiece, intending to use them to travel to Mexico. From there, they hoped to cross the U.S. border. If you want to know how a would-be migrant might get from Mumbai to the Rio Grande, this is one answer.Several officials, including the deputy foreign minister, have been sacked for selling visas. German and EU officials want explanations, particularly because one former PiS minister has said he believes that the government was deliberately admitting migrants who it knew would head for Germany. The Germans have set up temporary controls on Poland’s western border. But the foreign-policy implications are less significant than the breathtaking hypocrisy of PiS officials: Even their racism turned out to be less powerful than their greed.[Read: Poland is not ready to accept a new McCarthyism]And what will the audience of state television learn about this story? Almost nothing. Even this week, many days after the scandal broke, the evening news is still telling them that Donald Tusk and Civic Platform want to bring more migrants to Poland, and still telling them that only PiS can protect Poland from this deluge.But media directly owned by the state are only part of the story. State-owned and state-controlled companies are also major contributors to PiS propaganda. The Polish state gas and oil company, PKN Orlen, directly owns 20 out of 24 Polish regional daily newspapers as well as 120 weekly magazines (just as Gazprom, the Kremlin-controlled gas company, owns media properties in Russia), and uses them to attack the opposition and support the government. State companies lavishly fund foundations and other nongovernmental organizations that spread pro-government messaging. Utility companies have sent messages to voters directly on their monthly bills, praising government policies and attacking the European Union. Orlen appears to have artificially lowered gas prices in advance of the election (which the company denies).Individually, the highly paid executives of these state enterprises, who are supposed to be working on behalf of the country, not the ruling party, are also helping fund the government’s campaign, including a massive, targeted online advertising campaign of unprecedented scale. Normally there would be limits on contributions, but because of the referendum, those limits have been removed. No opposition party can raise the money to compete, particularly because many Polish businessmen know that helping the opposition means they could lose licenses and contracts with state institutions—or even become targets of trumped-up tax or corruption investigations. Some will even donate to the ruling party, just to stay out of jail.[Read: Can Poland roll back authoritarian populism]The tactics that Americans call gerrymandering and voter suppression play a big role in Poland too. District maps that were due to be redrawn years ago have not been changed, meaning that urban areas, which are more likely to vote for the opposition, will be underrepresented. Hundreds of thousands of Poles working abroad—also more likely to vote for the opposition—have to vote in person at a limited number of sites, which means many won’t be able to vote at all. By contrast, hundreds of additional polling stations have been added in rural Poland, so that people more likely to support PiS can vote more easily. New rules will also slow down the vote-counting process, while at the same time discounting any results not received in 24 hours. Overburdened polling stations in big cities, in Poland or abroad, may not make the cutoff.The opposition can in theory still win, and indeed should win: Together, the three parties that would return Poland to a fully functioning democracy easily outpoll PiS. But the three-way division of the anti-authoritarian vote could yield fewer seats than a single opposition party would receive—a situation that will be made far worse if one of the parties fails to get enough votes to enter Parliament at all. The peculiarities of the voting system make the final outcome hard to predict. A few percentage points’ swing for or against one of the smaller parties could radically shift the final result.This particular quirk of Polish politics helps explain another aspect of the election campaign that has surprised outsiders. There is a fifth party, Konfederacja, which models itself after the pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian far-right parties that are gaining prominence elsewhere in Europe. One of its slogans is “No welfare payments for Ukrainians.” The language it uses was unacceptable in Polish politics just a few years ago, as was its anti-Semitism; now, thanks to state television, xenophobes sit happily in mainstream Polish politics, and PiS wants to win their votes. Also, thanks either to corruption or the incompetence of the PiS government, Ukrainian grain that was supposed to transit across Poland in recent months was allowed to fill Polish grain silos instead. Prices fell, angering the farmers whose votes PiS needs to win.These two factors help explain Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s now frequent public outbursts against Ukraine, as well as his declaration that Poland will cease sending weapons to the country—a statement that appears not even to be true. From the outside, this eruption of ill will might be hard to understand. Yet the damage it did was incalculable, destroying the genuine transatlantic unity that is absolutely necessary for Ukraine to win the war, and self-destructive as well: If the war is prolonged because the Kremlin thinks allied support for Ukraine is faltering, that’s very bad for Poland indeed.But the ruling party’s political concerns override the national interest. Why? Because electoral loss would be a personal catastrophe for PiS members, their relatives, and their friends. Before 2015, Poland had an imperfect but mostly apolitical public service. Now Poland has replaced its apolitical civil servants with a system of patronage, comparable to the one that existed in 19th-century America. Whole areas of public life have been politicized, from the judiciary and the prosecutors to the national and local public administration, right down to the level of small towns and villages. Thousands of civil servants were fired for their perceived political affiliations, as were military leaders and diplomats. When my husband and some local political leaders were campaigning at a public event a few days ago, members of a local fire brigade told them that they were very sorry, but they could not be photographed with opposition politicians, because they might be fired too.[Anne Applebaum: The disturbing campaign against Polish judges]In that sense, Poland already resembles an autocracy. I say that even though a loud, energetic election campaign is unfolding across the country, and even though hundreds of thousands of people joined an opposition march on Sunday, possibly the largest demonstration in the history of Warsaw. But if the central feature of modern kleptocracy is a ruling party that has claimed control of state institutions, both to enrich itself and to remain in power, Poland already matches that description. Whatever social or economic reasons led people to vote for PiS back in 2015 are now of little significance, given how dramatically these captured state institutions have changed the country.I’ve heard several people in recent weeks describe the Polish political system, like the Turkish and Hungarian systems, as “free but not fair.” This is a deep misunderstanding: Long before anyone starts counting votes, this election will already have been severely distorted. This campaign is neither free nor fair, and also offers a lesson to other democracies, including the U.S., about the high price they will pay if they elect autocratic leaders who openly seek to capture the state. Victory for the opposition in this election is the only chance Poland has to prevent this system from becoming permanent. That’s why PiS will sacrifice anything—Poland’s economy, Poland’s alliances, Poland’s physical safety—in order to win.

Rishi Sunak will not rescue the Conservatives from defeat by his retreat from net-zero policies and his rhetoric about stopping the small boats crossing the Channel. Even so, the upshot of the general election is more uncertain than it has been for a long time. In a warning to Labour, the rough beast of politics is slouching back into town. Sunak has been accused of pandering to populism, but those who level the charge should ask themselves what it means. Populism is, among other things, the repoliticisation of causes judged to be so sacrosanct that they must be insulated from public debate and democratic choice. Conventional green agendas belong in that category, and so does immigration. From Blair to Cameron, the de-politicisation of key areas of policy was secured under the aegis of technocratic pragmatism. Ideology no longer mattered, we were assured, only competence in delivering what the middle ground in society wanted. The actual outcome was the dominance of a single ideology – post-Cold War capitalist realism. The centre was a triangulation of positions within that neoliberal consensus, rather than a reflection of the needs and values of any British majority. Now technocratic government’s smartest operator is signalling that it has had its day. After Boris Johnson’s buffoonish interregnum and Liz Truss’s kamikaze dive, Sunak has become the first serious exemplar of a new era. What angry liberals denounce as the exploitation of wedge issues is in reality the return of politics. As sniping at the Conservative conference in Manchester has confirmed, Sunak’s party has collapsed into warring factions, and he may well wobble; but a sea-change is under way. [See also: Liz Truss shows she’s going nowhere] As usual, Labour is fixated on the past. In opposition Keir Starmer has tracked the Conservatives wherever there might be electoral risk in doing otherwise. Some have concluded that he has no beliefs, but lately he has revealed the face beneath the blank managerial mask – an unwise move. In government, he tells us, Labour would not diverge from the EU’s regulatory framework. In chorus, Rachel Reeves has announced that public spending will be subject to the scrutiny and potential veto of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Reeves’s budgetary framework will be short-lived. Another banking crisis, a further spike in oil prices or escalating geopolitical conflicts in Ukraine, Kosovo or Taiwan will test it to destruction. At home, with the public sector starved of resources, strikes will rumble on. Either Labour will surrender to the demands of the unions, undermining its economic credibility, or it will cling to an orthodoxy history has passed by. Reeves seems destined to replay the tragic-comic role of Philip Snowden, Labour’s first chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 and the last of the Gladstonian liberals. Just as Snowden’s creed of balanced budgets and free trade succumbed to the convulsions of the Thirties, Reeves’s fiscal conservatism will crumble under the pressure of events. [See also: Suella Braverman’s luxury hostilities] Rule by technocrats is the willed suspension of politics in the service of what are believed to be reasonable and pragmatic objectives. In practice, technocratic pragmatism never works for long and is often not much more than irrational groupthink. As even Tony Blair has pointed out, net zero in Britain is pointless while China is pumping out huge quantities of carbon; it is also unsustainable because of the costs it imposes on many voters. The Green New Deal is dead in the water, and Labour cannot repair Britain’s infrastructure while continuing Tory austerity. When Starmer dabbles in the old-fashioned politics of the left – as in the proposal to impose VAT on private school fees, which alienates the careerist bourgeoisie that is now Labour’s class base – the exercise backfires. Labour will go into the general election with a pervasive mood of weary disgust for the Tories as its only solid asset. For generations, progress for the left meant infusing politics with its values. For today’s progressives, the goal is to secure their values against political contestation. Motivated by fear, it is a self-defeating project that fuels the forces it dreads. The counter-productive effects of anti-political progressivism are visible in American “lawfare”. Support for Donald Trump is rising not despite but because of the barrage of lawsuits directed against him. Republicans are retaliating with legal action targeting a purported corrupt business relationship between Joe Biden and his errant son Hunter. But if Trump wins a second term, one reason will be that the Democrats have chosen to fight in the courts whereas he relies on mastery of the political arts. In his poem “The Second Coming”, published in 1920, WB Yeats wrote that the centre cannot hold. Today, Rishi Sunak is demolishing the centre he once embodied. In the progressive mind as it presents itself today, government is a struggle between reason and dark popular forces of instinct and emotion. In fact, scepticism and common sense survive chiefly among the masses. It is elites that are full of passionate intensity. Coming to power representing a defunct consensus, Labour will be confronted by a resurgence of politics in its most virulent form. And the next Conservative leader is not going to be a managerial pragmatist. The end result of excluding crucial issues from politics is a populist Tory party. 

Should we tackle shoplifters?

A call for civic action obscures state irresponsibility

See someone stealing from a shop? It’s time to step in, argues Chris Philp, Minister of State for Crime, Policing and Fire. “The wider public do have the power of citizen’s arrest,” Mr Philp said at the Conservative Party Conference:

… and, where it’s safe to do so, I would encourage that to be used because if you do just let people walk in, take stuff and walk out without proper challenge, including potentially a physical challenge, then again it will just escalate.

Isn’t that the job of the police? Well, yes. But… “While I want the faster and better police response,” Mr Philp added, “The police can’t be everywhere all the time.”

Stepping in to prevent shoplifting is of course a noble and courageous thing to do. Shoplifting, after all, is not a victimless crime. The loss of inventory ends up being felt in terms of the loss of jobs and services. It also inspires such depressing measures as products being locked up and fitted with security tags — not just single malt whiskey but steak, coffee and cheese.

Still, there are a few things to say to qualify Mr Philp’s recommendation.

First, it would be easier to accept the point about the police if they were actually preventing and solving serious crimes instead of arresting people for praying outside abortion clinics, posting edgy jokes online, calling people lesbians et cetera. Granted, a lot of police officers are preventing and solving serious crimes. But they should be stopped from doing the other stuff before we hear about how overstretched they are.

It doesn’t help that half of police forces in England and Wales have fewer officers than they did when the Conservatives came to power. More police officers doesn’t necessarily mean fewer crimes — it might just mean more people being harassed over edgy jokes — but used properly they could make a valuable difference.

Second, it is impossible to know if it is “safe” to stop someone. How should we know if they have a knife or not? How should we know if they will resort to physical force? An usually clear-eyed article in the Guardian reported on a modest supermarket in Leeds where the manager and his staff had been threatened with “razors, knives, screwdrivers, needles and hammers”. Sometimes, shoplifters are little kids and feeble addicts. Sometimes, they are hardened criminals.

It’s not irrelevant, too, that people with enough of a sense of civic purpose to intervene are often old and frail. A 76-year-old man broke his ankle a couple of years ago trying to stop a young shoplifter fleeing a perfume store.

And how safe is one from legal repercussions? Officially, the law entitles one to use reasonable force. But in the smartphone age there is a serious risk of any incident going viral, and pressure being imposed on the authorities to hold people to account for using gratuitous — and quite possibly bigoted — violence in response to youthful hijinks.

Thirdly, it is true that shoplifting is on the rise — but whose fault is that? No doubt it is driven by inflation — not because shoplifters are in general starving mums desperate to steal a loaf of bread to feed their children but because it makes it more attractive to buy products from people who steal products and then sell them on.

Shoplifters know they tend to face minimal repercussions. The government has been considering jail sentences for serial shoplifters — but some criminals have been known to commit the same offence up to fifty times before being put behind bars.

Admirable as it is to stop shoplifters, then, it would be outrageous if the state tried to lean on private citizens instead of doing its job. To intervene is to risk your life and your freedom. It’s easier to appreciate the value of this risk if you know that the cops are doing all they can and that the courts will do their part. Not so much if the police are out there arresting football fans for posting disrespectful memes and the thief will get off with a light tap on the wrist.

All change. That’s the message Rishi Sunak wanted voters to take away from his Conservative conference speech today. He has recognised that the baggage of the past 13 years is a key reason that he looks set to be ejected from office. Instead of asking voters to “let me finish the job”, the Prime Minister understands that the discontinuity in government since 2019 requires him to offer something new. This is the right strategy. But Sunak did not go far enough. He criticised policymaking over the past 30 years but did little to develop his argument. Wary of the disunity within the party and the influential factions surrounding Liz Truss and Suella Braverman – ever present over the past three days – Sunak avoided explicitly criticising the chaos of the Truss and Johnson years, the inertia of Theresa May and the poor policymaking of David Cameron. This was his opportunity to have done so. It was a sign of his weakness that he could not. The policies that Sunak announced reflected his own personal interests – in long-term policymaking, fiscal conservatism and education – rather than voters’ key concerns. The cost-of-living crisis and the NHS are set to dominate the next election. They are top of voters’ priorities. Instead, the Prime Minister announced that HS2 beyond Birmingham has been scrapped. In its place, a series of road and rail improvements are promised. The announcement invites the question raised by Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester: why must the north choose between great local and national infrastructure when London gets both? The details of “Network North” will now be scrutinised. The politics will depend on Labour’s response. On education, Sunak announced a new “Advanced British Standard” which will combine A-levels and their vocational cousin, T-levels. Is he effectively scrapping T-levels then? The lack of teachers in the system – Sunak hopes to stem the exodus with bonus payments – will make implementing the policy before the next election difficult. Students will also study some form of maths and English until the age of 18. The problem for Sunak is that few voters round the country were desperate for a new curriculum. Likewise, his decision to ban cigarettes for the younger generation – channelling his inner Jacinda Ardern – was not what voters are clamouring for. The focus on the long term is a wise response to the political chaos of recent years – as Keir Starmer’s team knows – but Sunak does not yet have the policy message to support it. This speech was progress, a move away from the short-termism of his first year in office. But the risk is that it reflected Sunak’s own convictions and not those of voters. [See also: Rishi Sunak can’t campaign]

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their mRNA work which lead to the rapid development of vaccines against the COVID-19 pandemic. There is no mistaking the intent of the Nobel committee in this award to specifically recognize the contribution of mRNA vaccines. They open their press release with a discussion of vaccines and the pandemic.

The Science

Messenger RNA (mRNA) was discovered in 1961 at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. It was known that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) contains the genetic information of inheritance, which consists of genes that code for specific proteins. The DNA resides inside the nucleus of each cell, and yet protein is manufactured outside the nucleus. mRNA was discovered as the messenger – an mRNA molecule is made as a copy of a DNA gene (transcription), travels to outside the nucleus and then directs the assembly of a specific sequence of amino acids into a protein (translation). This process is known as the central dogma of molecular biology.

In the 1980s it was discovered how to manufacture mRNA outside of living cells – in vitro. This created the potential for using mRNA as a therapeutic tool. However, in vitro mRNA was not very stable and caused inflammatory reactions when injected into mammals. For this reason many researchers thought its therapeutic potential would be limited, even a dead end.

This is where Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman come in. They began a collaboration into figuring out what was different between natural (in vivo) mRNA and in vitro mRNA. They discovered that in vivo mRNA has chemically modified bases compared to the in vitro version. Apparently a step was missing in the creation of in vitro mRNA.

RNA has four bases like DNA, but slightly different. DNA has the famous ATGC bases – adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. They form the four-letter genetic code of DNA. RNA, rather has an AUGC code – with uracil replacing thymine. These bases are molecules that can be chemically modified.

The breakthrough for Karikó and Weissman came from research they did with various modifications of the RNA bases. They focused on the inflammatory reaction that in vitro RNA was provoking, which seemed to occur through stimulation of dendritic cells in the immune system. They found that a particular modification of the mRNA bases essentially shut down the inflammatory response of the dendritic cells. Their results were published in 2005.

They further found that the modified mRNA was more stable and significantly increased the translation into proteins. The modified bases, they found, also shut down a regulatory enzyme that decreased protein translation. These later findings were published in 2008 and 2010.

Their work revived interest in mRNA as a potential therapeutic tool. Moderna, one of the companies who eventually manufactured an mRNA vaccine, was founded in 2010, to capitalize on the work of Karikó and Weissman.

mRNA Vaccines

The science of in vitro mRNA is certainly important and impactful work, opening up a powerful new therapeutic tool for modern medicine. But it seems clear that Karikó and Weissman also partly owe their Nobels to the fact that the technology their research created met the moment with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The timing was perfect. Their research lead to the development of mRNA vaccine technology, initially working on Zika and MERS-CoV. But when the pandemic hit, the mRNA vaccine technology was ready, and was able to show its true potential.

mRNA vaccine work by injecting the code for a spike protein from the COVID virus (SARS-CoV-2) into the subject. The mRNA is taken up by the muscle cells where it is translated into the spike protein and released into the blood. This provokes an immune response against the protein, priming the body for later exposure to the full live virus.

One big advantage of this approach is that nothing has to be cultured. Vaccines made from modified or inactivated viruses require culturing of the virus in cells, which is a slow process. Meanwhile, we have the ability to mass produce in vitro mRNA once we know the genetic sequence, which is something we can now also do very quickly.

In vitro mRNA for these reasons is a fantastic vaccine platform. We encountered a novel virus, rapidly sequenced its genetic code, manufactured mRNA for its proteins, which were then modified and packaged in a delivery system. The pandemic hit in early 2020, and by December we had approval for two mRNA-based vaccines, which were rapidly mass-produced and distributed. Vaccines based on other platforms were also developed, but the mRNA vaccines were quicker and appear to be more effective. This is the kind of rapid-response technology we need for future pandemics.

The technology is also not done. Researchers are working on self-replicating mRNA, which I wrote about recently. This allows for the injection of a much smaller amount of mRNA which then replicates itself, providing a longer stimulation of the immune system and potentially greater immunity or reduced need for booster shots. This technology is still in development but showing promise.

There are also potential applications for mRNA technology beyond vaccines including immunotherapies, protein replacement therapies, and genome engineering.

The work of Karikó and Weissman was a critical fulcrum between the development of in vitro mRNA and therapeutic applications.

As a child, Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t celebrate his birthday, or Hanukkah or Christmas. He and his family didn’t see the point. If Sam wanted something, he only had to ask for it and he’d receive it: after all it made no sense that his parents should be expected to guess what he might like as a gift. There are lots of things that Bankman-Fried doesn’t see the point of, Michael Lewis writes in Going Infinite, a biography astutely timed to coincide with the crypto billionaire’s fraud trial, which began in New York on 3 October. Bankman-Fried doesn’t see the point of art, or religion, or caring about other people’s feelings, or facial expressions – though he eventually taught himself to smile when people spoke to him. It doesn’t seem coincidental that he has struggled for most of his life with a depression that manifests as anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. “My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be,” Bankman-Fried wrote in a diary. The son of two Stanford law professors, Bankman-Fried was raised a utilitarian, someone who thinks moral decision-making shouldn’t be primarily driven by instinct or by rules but by calculation. A utilitarian tries to maximise well-being. He became an effective altruist (EA), pledging more than a billion dollars to the neo-utilitarian movement, which over the past decade has taken root in Silicon Valley and elite universities in the US and UK. EAs pride themselves on choosing charitable causes in the manner of a crypto trader: they trust the numbers over their hearts and aim for maximal returns on their donations. They have grown increasingly preoccupied with averting the apocalypse. Bankman-Fried believes his isolation makes it easier for him to act on behalf of humanity. “Not being super-close to that many particular people made it more natural to care not about anyone in particular but about everyone,” he told Lewis. [See also: Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion] In a tribal world, it’s fortunate that some people think this way. But utilitarians are wrong to present their philosophy as a universal moral principle. The utilitarian world-view can be dehumanising: it suggests that to live a moral life we should set aside our attachments and obligations to particular people. A utilitarian might calculate that you shouldn’t donate to your friend’s GoFundMe for last-ditch cancer treatment when your money would have more impact elsewhere – but is that a code you want to live by, or indeed that you would want others to live by? Our relationships, after all, make us who we are. We are not fungible tokens or even discrete entities, reducible to a number in a spreadsheet – we are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, siblings, cousins, friends, inherently social beings embedded in complex networks, unable to define ourselves except in relation to others. Bankman-Fried may be a maths genius, but he’s too arrogant to recognise the limits of his intelligence. He tells Lewis that he doesn’t struggle to read other people, his problem is that others can’t read him – an assertion the biographer doesn’t question, perhaps because it enhances his subject’s mystique. But surely Bankman-Fried is simply suffering from the common tendency to assume that everyone else is less complex than you are. The crypto king isn’t even very good at reading himself. When he describes himself to his former girlfriend and colleague Caroline Ellison as someone who “doesn’t really have a soul” – a thinking machine rather than a feeling one – he forgets that automatons don’t suffer from depression. The idea that thinking and feeling are separate functions is undermined by modern neuroscience: we think because we feel. Yet Bankman-Fried seems tragically disconnected from his own emotions. Where Lewis sees a wunderkind, I see a confused boy. This matters because these delusions are not unique to Bankman-Fried, but rather reflect the prevailing culture of Silicon Valley and the tech billionaires bankrolling effective altruism, people who also wield extraordinary power over how we work and relate to one another. They have grandiose ambitions for humanity and yet show little concern for individuals. They are lonely kids who struggled to connect with others, and yet now design the products and platforms that are becoming our primary source of connection. They value rationality and intelligence above all else and are building the world in their image. They are designing the AI they believe may overpower us. [See also: “The biggest Ponzi of all time”: why Ben McKenzie became a crypto critic] And they know that most of us will eventually buy into their vision, because we’ll do almost anything in the name of speed, efficiency and convenience, which is what Silicon Valley sells us. We’ll hand over our data and memories to be sold, we’ll take our social lives online and we’ll almost always opt for interacting with a machine over a stranger. The self-checkout doesn’t need you to say good morning; a delivery app doesn’t require you to smile. But perhaps we all need more inefficiency, more interpersonal friction in our lives. Presents are the epitome of ineffective altruism. You might get given a book you’ve already read or a scented candle you don’t need, but what a delight it is to receive an unexpected, thoughtful gift, or to give someone something they didn’t even know they wanted. What a joy it is to throw a party, to stay up far too late with old friends, or to find new ones. And what a sad thing it would be to live without frivolity, to be so obsessed with living a rational life that you must convince yourself that you actually feel nothing at all. 

The Prime Minister must inject coherence into this incoherent Conservative Party conference. He must set out a vision for the next five to ten years that goes beyond diluting current ambitions. Despite the speeches against the civil service, migrants, wokists and those on welfare from cabinet ministers at the conference so far, sources insist the emphasis remains on the long term. Rishi Sunak will have to distance himself from the past 13 years to present himself as a fresh choice, in the way Boris Johnson did in 2019. “Change, change, change,” was how one senior source described the strategy to me last night. Sunak will find that strategy difficult to carry out because he is constrained by his party. The atmosphere here is not funereal, as many keep saying. It is not a wake. It is a christening. There is an energy and vitality among the various factions. Suella Braverman’s speech yesterday (3 October) was a well-put-together deride against those middle-class progressives insulated from the consequences of their “luxury beliefs”. The crowd cooed over Braverman. The direction in which she would take the party is increasingly clear. She has pitched herself as a straight-talking, provocative, woke-buster who defends the country against a “hurricane” of migration. Her position on the cost-of-living crisis, regional development and economic growth is less clear. Braverman’s ode to free speech was undermined when security removed the Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff from the hall. I was stood next to him. He barely muttered, let alone heckled the speaker. For some reason, the police took it upon themselves to eject him. While he was bundled out of the hall, the Home Secretary was calling for the police to focus on solving real crime. This was only one reason why the atmosphere at conference became slightly uncontrolled yesterday. The hardcore language about immigration or wokery is not new. But the co-option of the language of conspiracy theories is. Nigel Farage hangs over the party. Mark Harper, the Transport Secretary, decried the imposition of 15-minute cities and “the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops”. Danny Kruger MP spoke yesterday about resisting “a world government”. The flirtation with conspiracy theories reveals the extent to which parts of the Conservative Party have been infiltrated by ideas that were until recently consigned to its fringe. One minister I spoke to was genuinely considering joining Labour, so disappointed were they with the party’s direction. Frustration is growing. All eyes will be on Andy Street’s reaction to the Prime Minister’s reported plans to scrap HS2. But, unless Labour decides to fight an election on this issue, expect it to fade away. Whatever happens to HS2, Rishi Sunak today faces one of the most important moments of his political career so far. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; subscribe to it on Substack here. [See also: Nigel Farage is the real star of the Tory conference]

The weekend of September 30 marked an ominous turning point in international support for Ukraine—not just in Washington, D.C., but in two of the beleaguered country’s once-staunch supporters in Eastern Europe.On the 30th, the now former U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made an eleventh-hour budget deal to avoid a government shutdown, conditional on zeroing out U.S. support for Ukraine. The same day, halfway around the world, voters in Slovakia handed a major electoral victory to the party of the corrupt, pro-Russian conspiracy theorist Robert Fico, who campaigned on the rousing slogan “Not a single round”—meaning, no more ammunition from Slovakia for Ukraine.[Tom Nichols: Why the GOP extremists oppose Ukraine]Slovakia, though small, was one of the first NATO countries to provide armed assistance to Ukraine and has been a bulwark of logistical support. And yet, as the European Commission’s digital-affairs czar explained at a press conference in late September, “Slovakia has been chosen [by Russia] as the country where there is fertile soil for success of the Russian pro-Kremlin, pro-war narratives.” Fico—known for resigning as prime minister in disgrace in 2018, after the assassination of a journalist who was investigating his associates—has repeatedly blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion, parroting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists.” The weekend’s vote was deeply divided: Fico’s party won just 23 percent. But Slovakia’s president has tapped him to lead the country’s coalition government, which will likely seek to divest from Ukraine and push Slovakia into Putin’s waiting embrace.Across Slovakia’s northern border, Poland, led by the right-wing Law and Justice party, has been Ukraine’s most important, strategically placed backer in the European Union these past 18 months. The government pledged its support to Ukraine in high-minded terms last year. But this year has been defined instead by populist electioneering, in which the ruling party has made fear of migrants a central theme. Middle Eastern refugees are the primary targets of this campaign, but Polish solidarity with Ukraine, too, has been dying a slow death, and preexisting xenophobia and historical memory of past ethnic violence have made ready fodder for Law and Justice propaganda.In a radio interview this past summer, Polish Deputy Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński called the Ukrainian killings of Poles during World War II “even worse than the German genocides.” Local officials from the ruling party have published anti-Ukrainian screeds on their social-media accounts, and the far-right Confederation, with which Law and Justice sometimes cooperates, has openly called for sending Ukrainians back to Ukraine. But perhaps most troubling is the across-the-board ebbing of grassroots solidarity with Ukrainians as anti-migrant rhetoric grows in electoral appeal.That Poland’s xenophobia is gathering momentum and, with it, an ever-expanding circle of targets is one of the messages of The Green Border, a new film by Agnieszka Holland that has been critically acclaimed but publicly condemned by Poland’s president and a host of government ministers. On its surface, the film is about the Polish mistreatment of Syrian refugees crossing over from Belarus in 2021, but the director explained in a September interview that she understands Ukrainians to be part of the same story: “From the beginning I knew that, as soon as helping Ukraine ceased to pay off for this government, it would start playing a different game. I do not believe that they are guided by humanitarian or Christian considerations. This is the most cynical politics there is. It ends and begins with electoral efficacy.”A pair of influential Polish sociologists noted a year ago that Polish support for Ukraine did not mean Polish support for Ukrainians: In other words, a pro-Ukrainian foreign policy could go hand in hand with anti-Ukrainian feeling at home, and carry an expiration date to boot. We are now arriving at this expiration date. In July, Poland led a regional coalition of EU member states seeking an indefinite embargo on Ukrainian grain; most of the neighbors have since negotiated separate deals with Ukraine, but Law and Justice has stubbornly held out, nominally to protect the interests of grain-producing Polish farmers who fear Ukrainian competition. In his September speech before the United Nations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called out neighboring states for making a show of solidarity while essentially playing into Moscow’s hands. Law and Justice government ministers hit back; their social-media accounts exploded with tirades against perceived Ukrainian ingratitude.[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]Law and Justice will likely win reelection, but even if it doesn’t, the rift between Poland and Ukraine is deepening—and the trend for Ukraine is worrying. Stalwarts on whom the embattled country has relied for the past year and a half seem to be falling away. Zelensky’s travels to the UN, the United States, and Canada were meant to shore up flagging transatlantic support for Ukraine after the lackluster summer counteroffensive. But little went as planned. In the Canadian Parliament, Zelensky unwittingly became part of a standing ovation for a 98-year-old Ukrainian-born Canadian invited as a guest of the House speaker. The man was later unmasked as a former Waffen SS fighter—terrible optics for Zelensky, given Putin’s persistent attempts to tarnish Ukraine as a Nazi successor. In the U.S. Congress, Zelensky met with McCarthy and Mitch McConnell mere weeks before McCarthy caved to the House Republicans demanding an end to U.S. aid for Ukraine.Support for Ukraine is drying up both in the country’s own backyard and across the Atlantic, at a time when Kyiv still desperately needs the world’s backing. Whether the initiative now comes from anti-migrant Poland, pro-Putin Slovakia, or perhaps the EU’s long-standing Eastern European laboratory of illiberalism—Viktor Orbán’s Hungary—matters less than the bottom line: Ukraine’s days of international solidarity are numbered.

       Doctor, patient and holding hands for empathy, trust and hope in consulting, support and healthcare insurance. Kindness, counseling and therapy from medical worker, psychology help and mental health PeopleImages/Getty Images/iStockphoto   Doctors shouldn't have to fear transgender patient interactions   Debra Soh  October 04, 06:00 AM October 04, 06:00 AM  A new study published in the Annals of Family Medicine discusses transgender patients’ experiences with clinicians in the United States and Canada. Thirty transgender adults were interviewed. Their responses reflected themes of how medical professionals are frequently insensitive toward patients — asking questions deemed invasive, irrelevant, or stigmatizing, "misgendering" them (including calling patients "he" or "she" if they identify as "non-binary" or "agender"), and providing poor care.  In this political climate, new studies about gender have been enlightening. In this case, I learned some new vocabulary, including "Xicanx" (which is a woker version of "Chicano"), "apogender" (which means that someone doesn’t feel the concept of gender applies to them), and "ontological oppression" (which refers to the stigma experienced because a person doesn’t fit into pre-defined categories of gender).  SUPREME COURT’S NEW TERM TO ENCOMPASS GUNS, ABORTION, AND FRESH SOCIAL MEDIA CHALLENGES  I, of course, wasn’t in the room when any of the reported clinician-patient exchanges occurred, so it’s possible that the healthcare professionals in question were indeed insensitive, inappropriate, or demeaning. At the same time, some health-related questions that may initially come across as intrusive or irrelevant, such as those related to biological sex or hormones and surgery during a medical visit that isn’t centered on transition-related care, may have a purpose that patients aren’t aware of. Potential ones include medication interactions, implications for dosage, or future complications.  Additional concerns cited by participants in the paper include that gynecology and obstetrics are binary and carry the assumption that patients are women. Furthermore, one "non-binary" person (who, perplexingly, also identified as a woman) questioned why someone taking exogenous estrogen would need to tell clinicians this, considering that natal women have estrogen in their bodies. Another participant identified as someone who "does not believe in gender," which begs the question as to how a person can self-identify as both transgender and neither gender.  The study supported a cultural shift in medicine, including a revision of curriculum, paperwork, and policies to be more inclusive and less "violent." Considering that so many clinicians are already terrified of doing or saying something that could lead to being labeled hateful or "transphobic," the last thing we should want is to inject more fear and intimidation into working, in any capacity, with patients experiencing gender dysphoria. This will only lead to a further attrition of objective practitioners treating this population and activist-minded ones taking their place.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA  Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.  © 2023 Washington Examiner   

Donald Trump caught academics off guard. Historians and social scientists had long studied the American right, amassing a vast library on its relationship to race, gender, sex, the media, the Cold War, religion, and big and small business. Less explored was the role of the Constitution, which has always been more friend than foe to the American way of repression. This gap in the literature left the field wide open for experts in authoritarianism abroad and scholars of authoritarianism past.

The most important contribution to this genre was “How Democracies Die,” by the Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Studying how democracy was undermined elsewhere, Levitsky and Ziblatt defined the threat of Trumpism as an attack on the Constitution, the rule of law, and institutions. They also claimed that these pillars were less sturdy than people supposed. The Constitution was riddled with holes. Restrictions on Presidential prerogatives were not written down. Institutions designed to check extremists, whether specified in the text (a bicameral legislature) or not (political parties), were vulnerable to extremists.

Most worrisome of all, the ligaments joining these parts, what Levitsky and Ziblatt called “norms,” were frayed. Two norms in particular—tolerance of one’s opponents and forbearance in the exercise of power—were foundational to constitutional democracy. But since 1965, 1994, or 2010 (Levitsky and Ziblatt never settled on a date), those norms had been eroding. Traditionally, élite “gatekeepers” had been the custodians of norms, exercising “peer review” over norm eroders such as Charles Lindbergh and George Wallace. But, in the wake of reforms initiated by the Democrats after 1968 (another date), and later copied by the Republicans, ordinary voters, rather than insider élites, were empowered to choose the Presidential ticket of each party. For a while, the establishment held the line against outsiders. Then came 2016, when Republican leaders failed to stop Trump and rallied behind him.

Within a month of its publication, in January, 2018, “How Democracies Die” hit the Times best-seller list. It’s easy to see why. The book gave voice to liberals who felt betrayed not by their country but by its voters, the gate-crashers who put Trump into power. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s readers believed in norms, trusted élites, and valued institutions, particularly the Supreme Court. They revered the Constitution. The problem was the half of the country that didn’t.

But spring came, as it does, and a new wind began to blow on the left. After the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, progressives started seeing the Court less as a counter to Trumpism than as its conduit. “Defend institutions” may have made sense at the beginning of Trump’s reign. By the end, it sounded like a call to protect the Electoral College and other struts of the right. In 2018, Levitsky and Ziblatt had recommended building coalitions with “red-state Republicans,” abandoning abortion as a litmus test for candidates, and making unnamed but “tough” concessions to moderate voters. Now liberals were ready to play hardball: abolish the filibuster, pack the Court, admit new states to increase Democratic votes in the Senate, and stop all coöperation with the G.O.P.

None of this agenda has been enacted, but its pressures are felt throughout “Tyranny of the Minority,” Levitsky and Ziblatt’s follow-up to “How Democracies Die.” There’s little talk of norms in the new volume. Instead, Levitsky and Ziblatt reaffirm the call to end the filibuster and remake the Court, norm-eroding measures they previously cautioned against. More surprising is their revised view of democracy itself. The primary threat to the system is no longer demagogues; it’s the very institutions that Levitsky and Ziblatt once rallied readers to protect. If the United States is to remain—really, become—a democracy, Americans must stop treating its founding text “as if it were a sacred document.” The Constitution, the deepest norm in American politics, must be eroded.

In 1857, the British historian and statesman Thomas Macaulay set out a grim forecast for the United States. In Britain, political power was safely tucked away in the pockets of élites, who were “deeply interested in the security of property.” America had foolishly handed power to the “discontented” masses. For now, there was land for them to settle in the West. But, when that safety valve failed, the working classes, “none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner,” would vote to strip the minority of their wealth. The Constitution wouldn’t stop them. It was “all sail and no anchor.”

For much of American history, it’s been the reverse: all anchor, no sail. The most influential authors of the Constitution were terrified of democratic majorities. They devised a government with a sluice of filters—at least six, which Levitsky and Ziblatt note is “an unusually large number”—to push majorities to the side. More than two centuries later, we still have this “uniquely counter-majoritarian democracy,” which is hardly a democracy at all.

Congress has two of the filters. A bicameral legislature is one; the Senate is the other. Many countries have learned that, in a real democracy, upper chambers either don’t exist or have highly limited powers. The U.S. Senate doesn’t just have power equal to (and, in some cases, greater than) the House; it also represents states rather than individuals. Wyoming, with a population of about five hundred and eighty thousand, has as many votes as California, which has nearly forty million people. There’s a reason that most democracies don’t operate in this way: it’s undemocratic. This has been apparent for centuries. All of the antislavery bills that passed the House between 1800 and 1860 were killed by the minoritarian Senate.

If the House and the Senate agree on a bill, they still need the approval of the President, who’s elected not by the voters but by the Electoral College. That’s the third filter. With a bias toward smaller states and a winner-take-all structure, the Electoral College can send the loser of the popular vote to the White House. In this century alone, that’s happened twice.

Even if the elected branches agree on a bill, the Supreme Court can strike it down. Justices are put on the bench by the Senate and the President, so we can have a Supreme Court majority, like the one we have now, created by a combination of Presidents who lost the popular vote and senators who represent a minority of the voters. That’s the fourth filter, a creature of the preceding three.

Meanwhile, another course runs parallel to the national one. Our federal system, the fifth filter, grants states tremendous power, including the right to design electoral rules—how district lines are drawn, who can access the ballot, how elections are conducted, and so on—that privilege minorities over majorities. Between 1968 and 2016, the party with fewer votes has won a state house a hundred and twenty-one times and a state senate a hundred and forty-six times. Those legislatures, in turn, can gerrymander federal election districts, turning the putatively majoritarian House into another counter-majoritarian chamber. They also can pass laws, such as bans on abortion, that abridge the most basic freedoms of the people.

Many nations entered the twentieth century saddled with the yoke of counter-majoritarianism. They got rid of it. We haven’t, thanks to our mega-counter-majoritarian requirement for constitutional change, which is the sixth and most important filter. Two-thirds of both houses in Congress propose an amendment, and three-fourths of the states must then ratify it. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, a political scientist has devised something called the Index of Difficulty to measure how hard it is to change a country’s constitution. Ours tops the list, by a wide margin.

This news comes at a bad time. Today’s Republicans—many of them white and living in rural areas—hold fast to the Constitution for protection against Democratic majorities. Those majorities increasingly live in large cities, where the jobs are, and many of those cities are in highly populated, Democratic states. The combination of these factors leaves blue voters vulnerable to malapportionment in the states, where they needlessly pile up their votes in cities, and in the Senate and Electoral College. A minority of voters can now inflict a legislative wallop of racism, sexism, nativism, homophobia, transphobia, and economic misery on the rest of us—and never have to pay for it at the polls.

This is the “tyranny of the minority” that Levitsky and Ziblatt rightly fear. No lawless strongman or populist autocracy, it’s a product of the very Constitution that we have been taught to admire.

Once we set aside the compass of the Constitution, where should we look for our North Star? Levitsky and Ziblatt point to “multiracial democracy.” Either we become a multiracial democracy or we cease to “be a democracy at all.” The battle, in other words, is existential.

Yet Levitsky and Ziblatt aren’t equipped for war. Like many analysts, they believe that today’s right is driven by a primitive fear. Conservative voters fear the simple fact of demographic change. As immigrants, people of color, women, and sexual and gender minorities assume greater visibility, dominant groups—straight, white, cis, native-born men—fear a loss of status. That fear of erasure fuels the G.O.P.’s “turn to authoritarianism.” Holding on to government power is an “existential” imperative for the Party and the groups it represents.

This argument, now ubiquitous on the left, has come to seem like a natural law of the political universe, describing our most elemental drives of identity and anxiety. It makes sense that conservatives would believe it, as they’ve been pushing it since the French Revolution. But it poses a problem for the left, and for Levitsky and Ziblatt, in particular.

Jordan Peterson has distanced himself from Andrew Tate saying he did not want to be associated with the controversial influencer.

The Canadian psychologist was being interviewed on Piers Morgan's Talk TV show on Tuesday when the topic of Tate came up.

Morgan quizzed Peterson on recent comments made about him by California governor Gavin Newsom.

"My son is asking me about Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson. And then immediately he's talking about Joe Rogan. And I'm like; here it is, the pathway," Newsom said in an interview with Bloomberg.

From left, Jordan Peterson arrives at Perth Airport in Australia on November 28, 2022, and Andrew Tate talks to media in Bucharest, Romania, on January 25, 2023. Peterson has slammed Tate saying that some of the things he does are "reprehensible." Faith Moran/Mihai Barbu/AFP via Getty Images

Peterson started by slamming Newsom's concept of "micro-cults" and argued Rogan was "the most powerful journalist in the world."

"I mean, I'm not particularly happy to be grouped with Andrew Tate because I think that there's some elements about what he does that are quite reprehensible, but that we could certainly talk about that," Peterson began, adding "there should be some curiosity on Newsom's front, trying to figure out why it is that this degree of popularity exists."

Newsweek contacted Tate's representatives by email for comment.

"I'm not particularly happy to be grouped with Andrew Tate."

Jordan Peterson talks about perceived 'micro-cults' based on the likes of Tate and Joe Rogan.@jordanbpeterson | @joerogan | @Cobratate | @piersmorgan pic.twitter.com/zmWcXx2p6M — Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) October 3, 2023

Tate is facing charges of rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women in Romania. Four women in the U.K. are also pursuing legal action against him over accusations of violence, sexual assault and coercive control. Tate has denied all allegations.

"The allegations are malicious and disputed," a response to the women's lawyers read, and claimed "allegations are brought as part of an opportunistic press campaign to exploit my present difficulties in Romania, and to mirror some of the allegations made against me in Romania in an effort to extract money from me."

He rose to prominence as a professional kickboxer and then as a controversial contestant on the U.K. reality series, Big Brother, where he became infamous for his misogynistic comments.

Peterson has long been a critic of Tate, previously describing him as "the lowest form of life."

"Pimps Electronic and otherwise Are the lowest form of life," Peterson tweeted in July after Tate appeared on Fox News in an interview with Tucker Carlson.

On another occasion, Peterson spoke about "why Andrew Tate is wrong about women," explaining how some women can easily fall for "narcissistic psychopaths."

"You can't blame women. If all women don't like you, it's you… and so you have to grow up," he said during a public lecture. "That's the thing, don't be a fool. Turn yourself into someone who's worth being around, and then developing social skills."

The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary.Of all the accusations that could be leveled against McCarthy, the notion that he was insufficiently committed to battling Democrats would not seem high on the list. As the GOP minority leader in the previous Congress, McCarthy voted to reject the 2020 election results in two key states and tried to impede the House committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. Then, as speaker this year, he backed the GOP vote last summer to censure Democratic Representative Adam Schiff over his role in investigating former President Donald Trump while Democrats held the majority; empowered hard-line Republican conservatives to undertake sweeping investigations of President Joe Biden’s administration as well as his son Hunter; and even launched, on his own authority, an impeachment inquiry into the president without any hard evidence of wrongdoing.[Read: Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end]Yet on two occasions this year, McCarthy refused to risk chaos in the domestic and global economy, choosing instead to accept bipartisan deals with Democrats, first to avoid default on the federal debt and then to keep the federal government open when it faced a possible shutdown last weekend. And that was simply too much collaboration for the eight hard-line conservative Republicans who voted to remove him today, making him the first speaker ever forced out by a motion to vacate the position.The proximate cause of McCarthy’s fall was his decision, during his agonizing 15-ballot ascent to the speakership in January, to accept a change in House rules that allowed a single member to file a motion to remove him. That let Representative Matt Gaetz trigger the process that doomed McCarthy, even though the majority of the GOP conference voted to maintain him as their leader.Yet McCarthy’s removal also underscored how the incentives in the modern GOP coalition now almost entirely push in one direction: toward greater conflict with Democrats and the embrace of polarizing policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the GOP base. It’s no coincidence that critics accused McCarthy of not fighting hard enough for conservative demands at the same moment that Trump and the other 2024 GOP presidential contestants are advancing militant ideas once considered politically radioactive, such as deploying the U.S. military into Mexico to attack drug cartels, ending birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants, ripping up civil-service protections for government workers, and dispatching the National Guard into blue cities to fight crime.“Certainly if you step back at 30,000 feet, whatever the particular causes or idiosyncrasies of this decision, it will be part of a general sense of the party going further and further in this hard-line direction,” Bill Kristol, a conservative strategist, told me.In one respect, McCarthy’s demise continues a cycle among House Republicans that now traces back nearly half a century. From the late 1970s through the ’80s, a coterie of combative young House members led by Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber rose to prominence by founding a group, called the Conservative Opportunity Society, that accused Republican congressional leaders—and, at times, even then-President Ronald Reagan—of negotiating too many deals with Democrats.Gingrich’s pugnacious rejection of cooperation carried him to the speakership when Republicans recaptured the chamber in 1994, after four decades in the minority. But within a few years, Gingrich faced his own rebellion on the right from critics who thought he was too quick to cooperate with then-President Bill Clinton. Gingrich eventually resigned from the speakership under pressure after the GOP suffered unexpected House losses in the 1998 midterm election, following its move to impeach Clinton over his affair with a White House intern.The pattern resurfaced after Republicans won a sweeping House majority in 2010. Representative John Boehner, an old-school Republican who ascended to the speakership, faced an unending barrage of criticism from conservatives rooted in the new Tea Party movement over his attempts to reach agreements with Democratic President Barack Obama to avoid a debt default or government shutdown. Boehner resigned from the speakership and Congress itself in 2015, one step ahead of conservative critics in his conference determined to remove him. The same dynamic unfolded under Boehner’s successor as speaker, Representative Paul Ryan, who lasted only two tumultuous terms before deciding to leave Congress and not seek reelection in 2018.McCarthy found himself caught in the same undertow as Boehner and Ryan, with a portion of his conference immovably convinced that he was conceding too much ground to Democrats. “We saw it with Boehner and saw it with Ryan, and now this is, of course, the epitome of it,” former Democratic Representative David Price, a political scientist who has written several books on Congress, told me.In the first speech from critics during the debate over McCarthy’s removal, Republican Representative Bob Good of Virginia echoed the arguments that the right had raised against Boehner and Ryan. After arriving in Congress in 2021, Good declared, he was frustrated that Republicans “had not used every tool at our disposal to fight against the harmful, radical Democrat agenda that is destroying the country.” McCarthy had promised something different, Good insisted, but had failed to take the fight to Democrats hard enough. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, other than just staying or becoming speaker,” Good said.The key difference from those earlier episodes is that the attack on McCarthy came even though he conceded far more to his critics on the right than Boehner or Ryan did. McCarthy’s strategy as speaker generally was to give the right almost everything it demanded and to expect the members from more competitive districts (including the 18 in districts that voted for Biden in 2020 and another 16 in seats that only narrowly preferred Trump) to eventually support him. By and large, they did so. And today, the members from that competitive terrain stood indivisibly beside McCarthy, perhaps fearful that whoever comes next would create even more problems for them. The Republicans from more competitive seats “are very much at risk in 2024, and yet I don’t know what their limits might be,” Price said. “They haven’t revealed that yet. And so all the attention is on the far right.”[Read: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right]As today’s vote demonstrated, most House Republicans were comfortable with McCarthy’s leadership. Yet the fact that a rump group of conservatives still rejected him after all his concessions to the right captures the seemingly boundless sense of urgency and threat that now animates the GOP coalition. For years, Trump and other party leaders have told their voters that the Democratic agenda represents an effort to erase and uproot America as these voters understand it; in his last public rally before the January 6 insurrection, Trump declared that if Democrats won control of the Senate, “America as you know it will be over, and it will never—I believe—be able to come back again.”As Trump’s commanding lead in the GOP presidential race demonstrates, there’s enormous receptivity in the party for that apocalyptic message. And it’s those fears of being displaced in a changing America that have created the cycle in which the pressure on Republican congressional leaders perpetually pushes them toward harsher tactics and more aggressive policies. Former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, notes that the hard-liners who deposed McCarthy are accurately reflecting the views of their own voters. “It’s frustration and anger at Washington, and we are going to throw sand in the wheels at whatever they are going to do there,” Davis told me a few hours before McCarthy’s fall. “That’s the level of anger out there in these districts. Blame it on members, but voters elected these folks.”The January 6 attack on the Capitol provided one grim measure of how that anger bubbling through large swaths of the Republican base can trigger tumultuous and destabilizing events. McCarthy’s removal today showed another. It’s not likely that either was the last.

       When Gary Gadwa spoke out against a permit for a proposed airstrip in his rural Idaho community, he didn't realize that his comments would result in a defamation lawsuit soon to appear before the Idaho Supreme Court. In 2021, Michael Boren—co-founder of software company Clearwater Analytics—filed a permit to designate a portion of his Stanley, Idaho property as an airstrip. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit organization providing Gadwa's legal defense, Gadwa decided to publicly oppose the permit after Boren claimed the airstrip could aid in search and rescue missions in the area. Gadwa, who had worked in search and rescue operations in the nearby Sawtooth National Recreation Area for nearly four decades, wrote an op-ed opposing the airstrip and spoke in a county commission meeting about his concerns. Primarily, Gadwa was worried that the airstrip could hurt local wildlife and that it wouldn't actually be helpful in rescue situations. "As members of the general public who treasure time spent hiking, horseback riding, and hunting and fishing in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and advocates for outdoor businesses in Idaho, we're heartened that there is an important chance to halt this dangerous precedent, which threatens one of the most beloved wilderness areas in our state," wrote Gadwa along with Andy Munter, a member of the Idaho Outdoor Business Council, in an opinion article for the Post Register, a local newspaper. While the airstrip was approved anyway, Boren decided to retaliate against Gadwa and a handful of other critics by filing defamation lawsuits against them. Last year, a state court dismissed Boren's lawsuit against Gadwa, stating that Gadwa and his several co-defendants had a First Amendment right to criticize the airstrip designation. "In this case, there is the potential for a great chilling effect on constitutional rights not just for these named defendants but for all the members of the public who spoke on this issue, which was undoubtedly a matter of public concern in which they were entitled to involvement," wrote Judge Stevan H. Thompson in his ruling on the case, adding that the suit "appears to be a SLAPP suit brought to violate the constitutional rights." While most states have laws designed to make it easier to dismiss strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP) lawsuits, Idaho doesn't have an anti-SLAPP law. SLAPP suits are meritless legal claims filed to intimate or financially cripple an individual's critics into silence. Despite defeat, Boren filed an appeal to the Idaho Supreme Court in March. FIRE has since filed a joint brief, written along with other lawyers working on the suit, to the state Supreme Court, urging them to affirm the lower court's ruling.  "The district court was right," reads the joint brief "The freedoms to speak on public issues and to urge public officials to act are essential for effective self-government. That is why the First Amendment and the Idaho Constitution guarantee freedom of speech and the right to petition. And to uphold those guarantees, courts serve as gatekeepers when lawsuits like Boren's threaten free expression on public matters." As Boren has already found out—and is likely to find out again at the Idaho Supreme Court—other people have the right to criticize you. While filing expensive defamation lawsuits is a popular technique to silence your political enemies, those you target have the right to fight back. "I've dedicated my life to two things: protecting my community and protecting the Sawtooth Mountains," said Gadwa in a Monday press release. "I'll never stop speaking my mind, no matter who tries to silence me."The post Idaho Man Sued For Defamation After Speaking Out Against Local Airstrip appeared first on Reason.com.

       Writing at Vox in June 2016, liberal commentator Matt Yglesias argued that low-interest rates meant governments were practically obligated to borrow more and run bigger deficits. "The right course of action is really pretty obvious: If the international financial community wants to lend money this cheaply, governments should borrow money and put it to good use," he wrote. "Good use" could mean different things to different political factions, he acknowledged. Yglesias favored more infrastructure spending, but he also suggested that taking on more debt could be used to finance a broad-based tax cut. The specifics might differ from place to place, but as long as there was cheap money to be had on the international bond markets, loading up on debt was a means to a positive end. "While it lasts everyone could be enjoying a better life instead of pointless austerity," he concluded. I don't point this out to pick on Yglesias. He was—as he often has throughout a successful and productive career—serving as a sort of avatar for the liberal political consensus on an important issue. With deficits falling and interest rates at all-time lows, borrowing seemed to make both fiscal and monetary sense on the political left—which was frustrated by the political constraints (that's what Yglesias meant by "pointless austerity") Republicans had placed on then-President Barack Obama's second term. Sure, the economy was doing pretty great in the mid-2010s, but cheap borrowing meant it could be doing even better.  Conservatives didn't share this rhetorical perspective in 2016, but soon enough they would reveal that they more-or-less agreed. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised, unbelievably, to pay off the entire national debt within eight years. Once in office, however, he set about adding to it—with the gleeful agreement of Republicans in Congress, who hiked spending, cut taxes, and let additional borrowing fill the gap. During Trump's four years in office, the national debt grew by nearly $8 trillion, and you can only blame the COVID-19 pandemic's emergency spending for about the last $3 trillion of that total. "One of the reasons I do feel comfortable with us spending all this money is because interest rates are very low," then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in 2020. "And we're taking advantage of long-term rates." A year later, President Joe Biden took over and cranked the spending spigot open even wider, requiring even more borrowing. When Yglesias wrote that column for Vox in 2016, the federal government owed about $19 trillion. Today, it owes more than $33 trillion, and we just added another $2 trillion in a fiscal year with no major national emergencies. In short, the federal government followed Yglesias' advice. But it might be more accurate to say it went along with what was clearly a bipartisan consensus formed in the mid-2010s: that borrowing was cheap, debt was easy to afford, and deficit spending allowed everyone to enjoy "a better life" with none of the downsides of austerity. Unfortunately, the downsides have arrived. The yields on U.S. Treasury bonds are now hitting levels not seen in decades. The 10-year Treasury bond is nearing 5 percent, while the 20-year bond has already crossed that threshold—and some analysts expect higher yields to be coming, CNBC reported Tuesday. Why does that matter? "We took out a mortgage thinking we'd be paying 2%, but now we're paying 5%," Marc Goldwein, director of policy at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Tuesday. Unlike most mortgages, which have fixed interest rates, much of the U.S. government's debt is tied up in short-term bonds which periodically "roll over" into new bonds with updated interest rates. As a result, higher interest rates mean higher interest payments—and those funds come directly out of the federal budget, leaving less revenue for everything else the government might aspire to do, whether funding welfare programs or buying more fighter jets. "That debt, borrowed at low rates, is now being rolled over into Treasuries paying interest rates between 4.5 and 5.6 percent," the CRFB explained last month. "Though borrowing seemed cheap during those periods, policymakers failed to account for rollover risk, and we are now facing the cost." Interest payments on the debt will be the fastest-growing part of the federal budget over the next three decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projections. In the shorter term, interest payments are set to triple by 2033, when they will cost an estimated $1.4 trillion—a total that will only grow higher if more unplanned borrowing takes place before then, or if interest rates rise higher than the CBO expects. That's a huge bill for future taxpayers, and it's one that won't get them anything for their money in 2033. It's simply paying for the things the government did in the past. Among other things, the CBO warns that paying for all that debt will "slow economic growth" and "elevate the risk of a fiscal crisis." In other words, all that borrowing didn't ensure that people could enjoy "a better life." It meant that things could be temporarily better, but that the bill would eventually come due. As it always does. There was available evidence that rampant borrowing would not be costless—and even that growing deficits might push interest rates higher, creating the exact mess in which we now find ourselves. In a 2014 paper, the CBO economist warned that higher debt loads, even when borrowed at low-interest rates, would result in "lower [economic] output and lower national saving lead to a lower standard of living." Another CBO working paper published in 2019 found that every one-percentage-point increase in debt as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) would add more than 2 points to interest rates. Those potential consequences were ignored by the political class. Two months after Ygelsias argued for more borrowing in Vox, Paul Krugman made essentially the same point in The New York Times, writing that "these are the best of times for the world's most ravenous borrower, the United States of America." Yes, the best of times. And now, the worst.The post The Debt Crisis Is Getting Real appeared first on Reason.com.

       A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds. "Detracking" is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path. In San Francisco, public schools have eliminated accelerated math courses in middle and high school since 2014, and several Seattle schools had rolled out detracking efforts by 2016. Earlier this year, a Detroit-area school district eliminated middle school honors math classes, while schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began phasing out advanced middle school math in 2017—though the district announced it would reverse course in August. Outrage erupted in February when one Los Angeles–area school eliminated honors English courses for ninth- and 10th-grade students. "I was born in Cuba," one parent told The Wall Street Journal, "and it doesn't sound good when people are trying to achieve equal outcomes for everyone." This week, Brian Conrad, a mathematics professor and the director of undergraduate mathematics studies at Standford University, wrote in The Atlantic about this trend and the support for these policies voiced in new curriculum guidelines in California. California's State Board of Education published a draft of the Math Framework (CMF) in 2021. The curriculum guideline promoted a series of radical changes to how the state teaches math. A revised version of the CMF was formally accepted this summer. Under the CMF, Conrad wrote, California schools are encouraged, but not required, to delay Algebra I until ninth grade—meaning that students would be unable to take Calculus as seniors without doubling up on math classes or taking extra classes during the summer. The document also encourages schools to offer additional math options, including courses like "data science," as an alternative to taking Algebra II. But Conrad argues that this course, as described in the 2021 CMF, doesn't actually teach students math and instead more closely resembles a data literacy course.  "Steering sophomores and juniors away from Algebra II forecloses the possibility of careers in certain fast-growing quantitative fields—which would seem to do the opposite of promoting equity," Conrad wrote, noting that the state "is notably skeptical of efforts to group students in math class according to ability, out of a fear that disadvantaged students will be placed in low-expectation tracks that they can never escape. But for some reason, shunting them away from advanced math is portrayed as progress." Conrad also points to a new working paper studying math detracking in San Francisco. The paper suggests that the policy has had the opposite effect as intended, reducing the percentage of black and Hispanic students enrolled in advanced math and making it harder for students to take calculus in high school. He noted how "later CMF drafts quietly removed the mention of the [San Francisco Unified School District] policy while still generally endorsing the ideas behind it." It shouldn't come as a surprise that removing academic options doesn't magically reduce gaps between demographic groups. When schools reduce advanced courses, the students hurt most are poor, academically gifted children. While students with wealthy parents can enroll in private schools, hire tutors, or move districts to get the academic resources they need, kids whose parents don't have those resources will end up stuck in schools that force them to take lower-level courses. And for students who are falling behind, detracking can make it harder for them to get specialized help. "Armed with trendy buzzwords and false promises of greater equity," Conrad wrote, "California is promoting an approach to math instruction that's likely to reduce opportunities for disadvantaged students—in the state and wherever else educators follow the state's lead."The post California State Guidelines Discourage Schools From Offering Advanced Middle School Math  appeared first on Reason.com.

This kind of challenge isn’t unique to the United States; in Britain, for instance, it helps explain why Tory politicians can’t push through the big building campaigns they like to promise — because their prosperous and aging voters are invested in a low-growth but high-property-value status quo. But in America, the most important action (or inaction, rather) centers on Medicare and Social Security, and the transition from Paul Ryan’s G.O.P to Donald Trump’s, and now Matt Gaetz’s, shows the working out of gerontocratic logic.

Ryan was a true limited-government man, devoted to blueprinting ambitious entitlement reforms and pushing his colleagues, against their natural inclinations, to endorse them. He was also an ambitious politician, and you could see him struggling to reconcile his fiscal vision with the interests and demands of his party’s base. This struggle never quite resolved itself, in part because his quest for a mandate (as Mitt Romney’s running mate) was defeated and in part because his careful positioning was overrun by Trump, who simply tossed all those blueprints away and promised profligacy instead.

The irony is that in that moment Trump was mostly right on the merits: Neither 2012 nor 2016 was an ideal time for fiscal retrenchment, given the sluggish comeback from the Great Recession and the resilience of low interest rates. But as a matter of practical politics, the Ryan version of the G.O.P., with its libertarian leadership and prosperous suburban supporters, was probably the last iteration equipped to at least attempt serious fiscal reform, entitlement reform especially. Whereas after Trump’s remaking of the party, the task looks nearly impossible: Gerontocracy is now too advanced, the Republican base is now more working class and therefore more likely to depend on retirement programs, and the Democrats have entrenched themselves further to the left.

And unfortunately now is when we actually need some kind of fiscal adjustment. Even if the inflation generated by Covid superspending and pandemic disruptions is gradually abating, higher interest rates have dramatically altered our spending trajectory. After a long period in which low interest rates enabled the government to borrow trillions without adding much in annual debt servicing, last week the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury bond reached 4.5 percent — threatening a future, according to the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl, in which debt payments cost roughly the equivalent of a second Defense Department every year.

A novel ideology is haunting America. Over a stunningly brief span of time, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does—and should—play in society has taken on astonishing power.These ideas have quickly become widespread in universities. They have transformed the animating ideas and the prevailing norms of left-leaning institutions, from activist spaces to nonprofit organizations. And increasingly, they have real purchase in terrain that was historically inhospitable to radical ideas, such as corporations or religious communities.In my new book, The Identity Trap, I trace where this ideology originated and how it became so powerful. While I have fundamental disagreements with the thinkers whose work helped to inspire this tradition, I found their concerns to be reasonable and their work to be serious. But then their ideas entered the mainstream in the most viral—and, often, the most vulgar—possible form.The insights of Michel Foucault inspired the bromides of Robin DiAngelo. The concerns of Derrick Bell turned into the Manichean slogans of Ibram X. Kendi.Even at their best, these ideas are a trap. While they promise to eradicate injustices and create a better world, they make it more difficult to realize the traditional aspirations of the left. The adoption of these ideas has made it harder for progressive organizations to fulfill their missions. It has led to the adoption of public policies that actively harmed the poor and marginalized people it was supposed to serve. And far from being the most effective bulwark against the danger from the far-right, their ascendancy is a key reason why Donald Trump is now running head-to-head with Joe Biden in polls for the 2024 election. Theoretically speaking, right-wing populism and the identity trap may be adversaries; in practical and political terms, one is the yin to the other’s yang.The corrosive influence of the identity trap can now be felt in many areas of our public and political life. The popularized version of this novel ideology is putting healthy forms of cultural exchange under a general pall of suspicion. It is responsible for dangerous attacks on the norms sustaining a genuine culture of free speech. It has helped to inspire the practice of “progressive separatism,” leading influential institutions from elementary schools to nonprofit organizations to create racially segregated “affinity groups.” And it is behind the rise and rise of the idea of equity, which mandates positive discrimination to eradicate all disparities in outcomes between different groups, pitting different ethnic groups against each other in a zero-sum competition for resources.Each of these applications is important in its own right; indeed, I respond to all four in my new book. But a fifth, though more abstract and philosophical, is even more foundational: the claim, originally inspired by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, that somebody who stands at one intersection of identities cannot understand somebody who stands at another intersection of identities—and should, especially if the latter comes from a more oppressed group, defer to their political judgment.Why So Many Now Believe that We Just Can’t Understand Each OtherFor centuries, the political left cherished a humanist tradition that emphasized the ability of different people to understand each other. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, a character in a much-quoted play by the ancient Roman playwright Terence said: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”But of late, a big part of the left—and, increasingly, much of the mainstream—has turned on universalism. Invocations of Terrence have gradually been supplanted by an emphasis on the way in which the members of privileged groups, like straight white men, are incapable of understanding the experiences of oppressed groups.In corporate diversity trainings, the focus has shifted from celebrating cultural differences to claims that it is impossible to overcome implicit bias or the ingrained racism of white people. In the workshops of the country’s most prestigious MFA programs, professors advise aspiring novelists to “write what you know.” In Hollywood, actors from Tom Hanks to Eddie Redmayne to Kristen Bell have apologized for portraying characters whose sexual orientation, gender identity, or ethnic origin they did not share. Alison Brie has even publicly atoned for voicing an Asian American character on BoJack Horseman, an animated series whose protagonists largely consist of speaking animals.In progressive political circles that are deeply steeped in the popularized form of what I call the “identity synthesis,” the emphasis on the impossibility of mutual comprehension goes even further. The core claim is that a member of a privileged group will never be able to understand a member of an oppressed group, however hard they may try to do so. As Janetta Johnson, a prominent black activist in San Francisco, put it in a debate about how white allies can help to fight for racial justice, “Don’t come to me, because you will never understand my perspective.” A number of viral articles and bestselling books go so far as to suggest that it is pointless for members of minority groups to share their experiences with members of the majority. “Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening,” the British-Nigerian author Reni Eddo-Lodge claimed in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. “It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears.”This newfound emphasis on the impossibility of mutual comprehension is no mere cultural lament; increasingly, it justifies an explicitly political upshot. Because it is supposedly impossible for members of different groups to understand each other, those who are “more privileged” are asked to defer to those who are less so. The job of a loyal ally is to “listen,” to “affirm the beliefs of the less privileged,” and to “amplify their demands.”The basic intuition behind the broader tradition of so-called “standpoint epistemology” is compelling. Think of three simple examples: A black man on his way to work is stopped and searched by the police. A young woman is sexually harassed on the subway. An immigrant who speaks imperfect English is mocked by a government bureaucrat.Clearly, our social identity shapes the experiences we are likely to have. Someone who has never had to worry about being arbitrarily stopped by cops is less likely to empathize with the apprehension that a police uniform evokes in some black men. Someone who has little reason to worry for their physical safety is less likely to understand how scary it is to be approached on the subway. And someone who fluently speaks the language of the country in which they live is less likely to be aware of the fear some immigrants feel before having to engage in mundane social interactions. In its more modest versions, standpoint epistemology thus reminds us of an important and intuitive insight. And yet those philosophers and social theorists who have thought hardest about standpoint epistemology tend to reject the core claims of its popularized version, which goes far beyond that plausible intuition.Writers and activists, the prominent feminist philosopher Susan Harding notes, have increasingly embraced what she calls a “folk” version of standpoint epistemology: a simplified—and more radical—set of ideas about the impossibility of mutual comprehension that quickly became highly influential outside academia. As Lidal Dror, an African American philosopher at Princeton University, puts it, “In everyday conversation, political debates, activist circles, and even philosophical settings, speakers will at times appeal to their social location as epistemic support for a claim. We have all heard someone say something to the effect of, ‘as a Black person I know . . . ,’ ‘as a woman I know . . . ,’ ‘as a minority [of some type], I know . . . ,’ before making a claim about society, group relations, or justice.”There is significant variation in the exact nature of these views. But four interlocking claims are particularly central to the forms of standpoint theory that now routinely influence public debate:1. There is a set of significant experiences that (virtually) all members of (particular) oppressed groups share.2. These experiences give members of the group special insight into the nature of their oppression and other socially relevant facts.3. Members of the group cannot fully or satisfactorily communicate these experiences to outsiders, even insofar as they have important political implications.4. When an oppressed group makes political demands based on the identity its members share, outsiders should defer to them.Do these claims hold water?Why Standpoint Theory Is Philosophically WrongThe first core claim of standpoint theory runs into trouble because it is extremely hard to identify meaningful experiences that all members of a socially relevant group share. Feminist philosophers originally tried to ground the special perspective of women in the fact that they have historically been expected to be in charge of rearing children, for example. But other feminist philosophers such as Elizabeth Spelman soon pointed out that there have, all through history, been many women who never had children. In a similar vein, men may be less likely to raise children on their own than women, but it is not clear why any particular single dad should have less insight into the burden of caregiving than any particular single mom. As Rachel Fraser, an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University who herself defends a more moderate form of standpoint epistemology, told me on the Persuasion podcast, “You’re going to have to abandon the simple idea that there’s some kind of experiential core that all and only women have.”The second core claim of standpoint theory has also been called into doubt. Even insofar as many members of a relevant group do have common experiences, it is not clear that these bestow an overall advantage in understanding the world. Especially in deeply stratified societies, members of privileged groups may—unjustly and perversely—have some important forms of knowledge that are inaccessible to those who belong to marginalized groups. They may, for example, have better educational opportunities because members of the marginalized minority are excluded from quality schools and universities. They are also likely to have better access to the spaces in which unjust decisions are made and oppression is perpetuated. “Though an exploited factory worker has informative experiences about class oppression,” Dror points out, “the factory owner—who uses their wealth and bargaining advantage to cut health benefits and pay less than a living wage—will also have experiences that provide insights into how class oppression operates.” (Think Friedrich Engels.) While the marginalized will have an epistemic advantage with respect to some important aspects of their oppression, the privileged may well have an epistemic advantage with respect to other pertinent aspects of the social world; effective action against injustice would ideally draw on both sets of insights.The third core claim of standpoint theory is misleading in a somewhat more subtle way. It is true that it is impossible to know exactly what certain kinds of experiences, such as sexual harassment or police profiling, feel like if you haven’t been subjected to them. This gives a certain plausibility to the widespread intuition that the experience of being oppressed or marginalized can’t fully be shared. Rendered in philosophical language, there are, even when it comes to relatively simple things, real limits to the extent to which “experiential” knowledge is communicable. To know what it feels like to eat a blueberry, you need to have tasted a blueberry.But the same does not apply to what philosophers call “propositional” knowledge. Such knowledge is typically thought to consist of statements that are true or false; to know that blueberries are in the genus Vaccinium, for example, you need never have eaten or even laid eyes upon a blueberry. The key question, then, is whether the most important insights drawn from experiential knowledge can—especially insofar as they are relevant to social and political debates—be shared in the form of propositional knowledge. Thankfully, there is good reason to believe that the answer is yes.Fraser gives a striking example of how this distinction between experiential and propositional knowledge becomes relevant in debates about public policy. Many feminists favor restrictions on the sale of sexual services but worry that laws which criminalize sex workers will stigmatize them in dangerous ways. For that reason, they favor the so-called Nordic model, which makes it legal for sex workers to offer their services but illegal for clients to buy them. This seems like an elegant solution, discouraging sex work without marginalizing the vulnerable women who engage in it.But of late, Juno Mac and Molly Smith have put forward strong arguments against the Nordic model. Based on their own experiences as sex workers, they claim that these laws are likely to do significant harm. Where sex work is outlawed, potential clients have a strong reason to solicit prostitutes in hidden or remote places. They are also in a stronger negotiating position because the fear of being punished drives down the number of potential customers. Due to these mechanisms, which most feminists had overlooked, the Nordic model, according to this argument, puts sex workers at greater risk of harm.Fraser points out that Mac and Smith would have been unlikely to come up with these insights if they had never been sex workers. But she also insists that the politically relevant implications of those insights can easily be grasped by people who do not share Mac and Smith’s experiences. Though you or I may not share their experiential knowledge, we are able to understand and act on the propositional knowledge they derived from it. “The role of experience in politics,” Fraser concludes, “should not be overstated.” Who we are will shape what we learn about the world, but it need not constrain our ability to communicate those insights to others.All of this is good reason to doubt the first three claims of standpoint theory. “While the oppressed may often have a contingent epistemic advantage deriving from their tendency to have more informative experiences of the workings of social marginalization,” Dror concludes his consideration of the subject, “there are only extremely limited grounds for thinking that they have an epistemic advantage derived in principle from being oppressed.” Fraser is even more skeptical about the way in which standpoint-flavored claims are now commonly made in public. People, she points out, “often want to say that the fruits of oppression are a kind of virtue, a kind of admirable illness. I think that’s just not there in the intellectual tradition. There’s a kind of naïveté to that perspective that is very difficult to actually find in the academic work.”There are compelling philosophical reasons to be skeptical about the first three core elements of standpoint theory. But we are yet to consider the fourth claim: that the comparatively privileged should defer to the claims of the comparatively marginalized. This claim requires a different kind of analysis because it is fundamentally political rather than philosophical in nature. And as it happens, the political reasons against standpoint theory weigh even more heavily than the philosophical ones: put simply, standpoint theory just isn’t a realistic guide for how members of different identity groups can make common cause with each other.Why Standpoint Theory Is Politically MisguidedAddressing progressive activists at Netroots, Ayanna Pressley, a politician from Massachusetts who entered the House of Representatives in the blue wave of 2018, encouraged them to speak in the name of their identity groups:If you’re not prepared to . . . represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers who don’t want to be a queer voice.Pressley’s speech embraced a political vision that puts identity groups at the very heart of representative democracy. In her view, African Americans should get to decide the most important questions concerning their community, Asian Americans those that are of special relevance to them, and so on. Those who are not members of these groups should, in keeping with the dictates of standpoint theory, largely defer to their demands.But even as Pressley advocated for this vision, she implicitly acknowledged the biggest problems it struggles to resolve. Clearly, she believes that some black or brown or Muslim or queer politicians don’t represent the interests of their groups in an adequate manner; in her language, these politicians don’t want to be a black (or brown or Muslim or queer) voice. But this of course raises a crucial follow-up question: Who gets to decide whether a black politician does or does not represent the “authentic” black voice?Pressley, a member of the informal group of far-left congresspeople popularly known as the Squad, has one set of views about what it looks like for a politician to represent the authentic black experience. Democratic members of Congress such as Jim Clyburn and the late John Lewis, who hold considerably more moderate positions, take a different view. Black conservatives such as Congressman Byron Daniels and Senator Tim Scott take an even more starkly different view. The key problem with Pressley’s position consists of the difficulty of determining who can call themselves a legitimate spokesperson for a particular group.That might seem like an abstract concern. But in practice, the determination of who is a legitimate representative of a group is almost always made by people who are comparatively privileged. The rapid adoption of the term “Latinx” is a canonical example for this phenomenon in the United States. Most activist groups that claim to represent Hispanics have quickly adopted the term. So have the (mostly non-Hispanic) leaders of many mainstream institutions, from the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School to the president of the United States. But according to opinion polls, only about 2 percent of “Latinx” people prefer the new locution to older designations like “Hispanic.”In societies with significant inequalities of power and status, it is the affluent and well connected who are in the best position to determine who gets to speak on behalf of various identity groups. And so, “the black voice” or “the brown voice” is, in the end, likely to be picked by some combination of powerful members within and outside a particular identity group. As the legendary civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote, “The notion of the undifferentiated black community is the intellectual creation of both whites . . . and of certain small groups of blacks who illegitimately claim to speak for the majority.”This is related to another serious worry about the effects that standpoint theory is likely to have in the real world: Its view of collective action gives short shrift to what true political solidarity entails. When members of other groups call on you to be their ally, you should, according to standpoint theory, say something along the following lines: “I don’t understand your experiences and I am in no position to evaluate your demands. But since I recognize that you are more oppressed than me, I will endeavor to be a good ally and support what you ask for.”But such a thin model of political solidarity is unlikely to be effective. Most people simply won’t be willing to delegate their judgment about what actions or policies they should support to a representative of a different group. They are especially unlikely to do so when they can’t understand the reasons for the demand or disagree with it based on their own moral or religious views. For the most part, admonitions to defer to the views of the oppressed are likely to go ignored.There may be a few exceptions. A small number of people who are deeply immersed in the identity synthesis might insist that they really do defer to members of other groups. But they will still face the problem of having to determine whom they consider a “true” black or brown or Muslim or queer voice—and will almost certainly anoint spokespeople whose political prescriptions happen to dovetail with their own. In practice, demands to defer to an oppressed group succeed, at most, in encouraging activists to point at someone with whom they already agree and pretend that this ends the argument.Only Hard-Won Empathy Can Ground Real SolidarityStandpoint theory sounds enticing. It proffers the prospect of a society in which we do what we can to listen to the experiences of the oppressed, constantly foregrounding their demands. At first glance, this seems like a promising recipe for building a more just society.And yet the version of standpoint theory that is so often voiced in popular discourse today is likely to prove counterproductive. It wrongly claims that people from different groups are incapable of empathizing with each other’s experiences of injustice—and that it would be better for them to stop trying. In embracing a vision of political solidarity based on thoughtless deference rather than hard-won empathy, it makes it harder to bring about real political progress. Thankfully, we can do better. Far from resigning ourselves to the idea that we either can’t or shouldn’t relate to members of different identity groups, we need to embrace a more ambitious form of political solidarity as one of the foundational values of a thriving democracy.Building this kind of political solidarity—and this is the misdirected insight that lends standpoint theory its intuitive appeal—will require all of us to be humble. We do not, as a matter of course, see or know the obstacles faced by most of our fellow citizens. In important ways, our experience of the world really is mediated by our identity. This gives all of us a moral obligation to listen to each other with full attention and an open mind. But the point of this hard work is communication, not deference. As long as we put in the work, we can come to understand each other’s experiences.How to Argue Against the Identity TrapThe question of whether or not we can understand each other across identity groups is fundamental; anyone who wrongly concludes that we can’t will be tempted by a vision of politics that is forever based on an uneasy truce—or, more likely, frequent bouts of dangerous conflict—between identitarian tribes. Any argument for a more liberal politics must start with the case for a more ambitious form of political solidarity.But I hope that this case can also serve as a model for how to push back in other realms of American life that have, of late, been transformed by the uncritical adoption of the identity synthesis.A trap has three key attributes. It usually contains some kind of lure. It is usually capable of ensnaring people even if they are smart and their ideas are noble. And it usually subverts the goals of those who get caught up in it, making it impossible for them to accomplish what they set out to do. The new ideas about identity share all three attributes. They are so alluring because they promise to fight injustice. They ensnare smart people who are full of good intentions. And yet, they are likely to make the world a worse place.So, whether it comes to free speech or to cultural appropriation, to progressive separatism in our educational institutions or to race-sensitive public policies, a winning response has to entail three steps:It must take the concerns which have lured so many people into accepting this novel ideology seriously.It must show why the norms and practices inspired by this ideology will fail to remedy these problems.It must suggest a better path forward, one grounded in the most noble principles of the liberal tradition and the most ardent aspirations for how we can build a better future.Excerpted with permission from The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, by Yascha Mounk. Copyright © 2023 by Yascha Mounk, and published by Penguin Press. All rights reserved.

       My guest today is Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk, the founder of the online magazine Persuasion and the author of the important new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.  The Identity Trap explains how identity politics and social justice discourse have come to dominate contemporary discussions of just about everything, analyzes their negative influence on society, and shows how to confront and defeat them in the name of liberal values of free expression and open inquiry. Yascha was a prime mover behind the 2020 open letter on "justice and open debate" in Harper's magazine and is one of the most powerful defenders of free speech and the marketplace of ideas at work today.  This interview took place at the Reason Speakeasy, a live, unscripted monthly conversation held in New York City with outspoken defenders of free speech and heterodox thinking. Go here for information about upcoming events.  Today's sponsor:  BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. The post Yascha Mounk: Avoiding The Identity Trap appeared first on Reason.com.

Last Tuesday, President Biden joined members of the United Auto Workers on a picket line in Belleville, Michigan, as part of the union’s strike against Detroit’s big three automakers: General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, which owns Chrysler. Biden was the first American President to ever appear on a picket line, a signal that the Democratic Party, under his Administration, is increasingly willing to embrace labor unions, which in the past several years have reached their highest levels of popularity in more than half a century. (The next day, former President Donald Trump also travelled to Michigan, and gave a speech castigating the Biden Administration at a non-union manufacturing shop.)

Biden’s support for unions, especially compared with other recent Presidents, has not been met with universal approval within the Democratic Party. Steve Rattner, a former economics journalist and investor who became the “car czar” in the Obama Administration, criticized the move, telling NBC News, “For [Biden] to be going to a picket line is outrageous.” I recently spoke by phone with Rattner, who is currently the chairman and C.E.O. of Willett Advisors, LLC, which manages the personal and philanthropic assets of Michael Bloomberg. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his worries about the strike, why C.E.O. pay has grown so rapidly, and his critique of the Biden Administration.

In a recent Times op-ed, you wrote, “I’m all for the auto workers getting paid more–they have legitimate concerns.” What do you see as their legitimate concerns?

The legitimate concerns are that the auto workers in general and the workers at the Detroit Three in particular have seen declines in their after-inflation wages in recent years as a combination of relatively modest nominal wage increases combined with high inflation.

Yes, you wrote, “When I headed President Barack Obama’s auto task force in 2009, we restructured General Motors and Chrysler (now Stellantis) and asked the U.A.W. to make significant sacrifices, including to their generous benefits packages. The U.A.W. agreed. Since then, the automakers have seen their fortunes rebound, yet average real wages for workers have been flat more than three decades.”

Right. Correct.

I was curious about this because a decade ago you made comments that indicated that workers should have actually been asked to take more of a pay cut during the auto-industry bailout.

Look, these are difficult balancing acts, and the yin and the yang of this is that there's some degree of trade-off between wages and jobs. We can certainly pay the workers more, but you’re going to then see more jobs going to non-unionized manufacturers in the South or to Mexico or to other parts of the world. It’s a tough situation. There is a fundamental difference between the service-sector industries, which today comprise the vast, vast majority of our jobs, and manufacturing jobs or other jobs where there can be global competition. You have to think about the market for workers in what we call a tradable industry as being a global market. If wages in one place are too high, then workers in other places with more modest wages will end up getting more work and vice versa. That’s very fundamentally different from something like UPS drivers or L.A. hotel workers or whatever. Those jobs really can’t move, and so there’s more leeway to pay those people more. It comes out in a bit more inflation, a bit lower profits, but that’s all fine. There is not nearly the same trade-off as with manufacturing.

A good portion, in my opinion, of the reason wages in the auto sector in general and in manufacturing in particular have been flat to declining on a real basis for a while now is because of this phenomenon of global competition. The only way U.S. companies in many cases have been competitive is by holding down wages. It’s a very different picture if you look at what’s happened to wages in the manufacturing sectors versus wages in the service sector.

Right, in 2011, you told the Detroit Economic Club, essentially, “We should have asked the U.A.W. to do more. We did not ask any U.A.W. members to take a cut in their pay.” Now you’re saying, given that their wages have been declining in real terms for three decades, that in fact they do have some grievance about how much they’ve been making?

They have very legitimate grievances about what’s happened to their after-inflation wages. Unfortunately, it is not completely within the power of the companies to solve those problems, for the competitive reasons that I discussed. We did not ask the workers to take a cut in their actual cash pay, but by holding their wage increases down, in effect, they took a pay cut because of inflation.

You say in the Times op-ed that wages are not a huge part of the budgets of these companies. I think that wages are actually under five per cent of total expenses, right?

It depends how you count because there are wages that are incurred by their suppliers and other parts of their supply chain and so forth. It is absolutely a relatively small number, but I think it’s hard to pin it down precisely. Their profit margins are also quite thin. And again, sure, could they afford to pay these workers more and not go bankrupt? Yeah, they could afford to pay them more and not go bankrupt. But there are two issues, one that I’ve already discussed, which is the fact that these jobs will move, and the other is that at some point, if you cut into the profits of these companies enough, they won’t have the capital or see the rate of return they need to invest in E.V.s and other products of the future, and then they’re going to be right back where they were, potentially, in 2008.

At the end of your piece, you write, “The U.A.W. and its allies also argue with considerable justification that the gap between workers’ pay and that of senior executives has widened to appalling levels. That, however, has much to do with exploding top level compensation (a phenomenon that has occurred, of course, across virtually all corporate America). From $975,000 in 1978, roughly 60 times the auto industry’s average pay at the time, the compensation package of the chief executive officer of General Motors rose to $29 million last year, more than 400 times the average autoworker’s annual pay.” Just because it’s happened in all kinds of industries across corporate America is not really an answer to a striking worker who’s making less than they think they should, right? Or do you see it differently?

Well, one of the very justifiable grievances that workers in many companies and many industries have is how big the differential has gotten between pay in the so-called C-suites and pay at the factory-shop level. And I get that. That problem can arise for two reasons. One potential reason is because workers are paid too little, and the other is because C.E.O.s are paid too much. All I’m trying to point out is that C.E.O. pay, generally speaking across corporate America, has gone up at an astronomical rate for several decades now, and that is why you see these enormous disparities.

Do you think it’s a sign that workers aren’t paid enough or that C.E.O.s are paid too much, or both?

(Klaus Vedfelt via Getty Images.)Today, we’re publishing an excerpt from Yascha’s newest book, The Identity Trap. All members of the Persuasion community are invited to join us this Sunday, October 8th, at 4pm Eastern for a talk about the book with Yascha, in conversation with our senior editor Luke Hallam. The talk will kick off the month-long Persuasion Festival. Please RSVP here.A novel ideology is haunting America. Over a stunningly brief span of time, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does—and should—play in society has taken on astonishing power.These ideas have quickly become widespread in universities. They have transformed the animating ideas and the prevailing norms of left-leaning institutions, from activist spaces to nonprofit organizations. And increasingly, they have real purchase in terrain that was historically inhospitable to radical ideas, such as corporations or religious communities.In my new book, The Identity Trap, I trace where this ideology originated and how it became so powerful. While I have fundamental disagreements with the thinkers whose work helped to inspire this tradition, I found their concerns to be reasonable and their work to be serious. But then their ideas entered the mainstream in the most viral—and, often, the most vulgar—possible form.The insights of Michel Foucault inspired the bromides of Robin DiAngelo. The concerns of Derrick Bell turned into the Manichean slogans of Ibram X. Kendi.Even at their best, these ideas are a trap. While they promise to eradicate injustices and create a better world, they make it more difficult to realize the traditional aspirations of the left. The adoption of these ideas has made it harder for progressive organizations to fulfill their missions. It has led to the adoption of public policies that actively harmed the poor and marginalized people it was supposed to serve. And far from being the most effective bulwark against the danger from the far-right, their ascendancy is a key reason why Donald Trump is now running head-to-head with Joe Biden in polls for the 2024 election. Theoretically speaking, right-wing populism and the identity trap may be adversaries; in practical and political terms, one is the yin to the other’s yang.The corrosive influence of the identity trap can now be felt in many areas of our public and political life. The popularized version of this novel ideology is putting healthy forms of cultural exchange under a general pall of suspicion. It is responsible for dangerous attacks on the norms sustaining a genuine culture of free speech. It has helped to inspire the practice of “progressive separatism,” leading influential institutions from elementary schools to nonprofit organizations to create racially segregated “affinity groups.” And it is behind the rise and rise of the idea of equity, which mandates positive discrimination to eradicate all disparities in outcomes between different groups, pitting different ethnic groups against each other in a zero-sum competition for resources.Each of these applications is important in its own right; indeed, I respond to all four in my new book. But a fifth, though more abstract and philosophical, is even more foundational: the claim, originally inspired by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, that somebody who stands at one intersection of identities cannot understand somebody who stands at another intersection of identities—and should, especially if the latter comes from a more oppressed group, defer to their political judgment.Why So Many Now Believe that We Just Can’t Understand Each OtherFor centuries, the political left cherished a humanist tradition that emphasized the ability of different people to understand each other. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, a character in a much-quoted play by the ancient Roman playwright Terence said: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”But of late, a big part of the left—and, increasingly, much of the mainstream—has turned on universalism. Invocations of Terrence have gradually been supplanted by an emphasis on the way in which the members of privileged groups, like straight white men, are incapable of understanding the experiences of oppressed groups.In corporate diversity trainings, the focus has shifted from celebrating cultural differences to claims that it is impossible to overcome implicit bias or the ingrained racism of white people. In the workshops of the country’s most prestigious MFA programs, professors advise aspiring novelists to “write what you know.” In Hollywood, actors from Tom Hanks to Eddie Redmayne to Kristen Bell have apologized for portraying characters whose sexual orientation, gender identity, or ethnic origin they did not share. Alison Brie has even publicly atoned for voicing an Asian American character on BoJack Horseman, an animated series whose protagonists largely consist of speaking animals.In progressive political circles that are deeply steeped in the popularized form of what I call the “identity synthesis,” the emphasis on the impossibility of mutual comprehension goes even further. The core claim is that a member of a privileged group will never be able to understand a member of an oppressed group, however hard they may try to do so. As Janetta Johnson, a prominent black activist in San Francisco, put it in a debate about how white allies can help to fight for racial justice, “Don’t come to me, because you will never understand my perspective.” A number of viral articles and bestselling books go so far as to suggest that it is pointless for members of minority groups to share their experiences with members of the majority. “Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening,” the British-Nigerian author Reni Eddo-Lodge claimed in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. “It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears.”This newfound emphasis on the impossibility of mutual comprehension is no mere cultural lament; increasingly, it justifies an explicitly political upshot. Because it is supposedly impossible for members of different groups to understand each other, those who are “more privileged” are asked to defer to those who are less so. The job of a loyal ally is to “listen,” to “affirm the beliefs of the less privileged,” and to “amplify their demands.”The basic intuition behind the broader tradition of so-called “standpoint epistemology” is compelling. Think of three simple examples: A black man on his way to work is stopped and searched by the police. A young woman is sexually harassed on the subway. An immigrant who speaks imperfect English is mocked by a government bureaucrat.Clearly, our social identity shapes the experiences we are likely to have. Someone who has never had to worry about being arbitrarily stopped by cops is less likely to empathize with the apprehension that a police uniform evokes in some black men. Someone who has little reason to worry for their physical safety is less likely to understand how scary it is to be approached on the subway. And someone who fluently speaks the language of the country in which they live is less likely to be aware of the fear some immigrants feel before having to engage in mundane social interactions. In its more modest versions, standpoint epistemology thus reminds us of an important and intuitive insight. And yet those philosophers and social theorists who have thought hardest about standpoint epistemology tend to reject the core claims of its popularized version, which goes far beyond that plausible intuition.Writers and activists, the prominent feminist philosopher Susan Harding notes, have increasingly embraced what she calls a “folk” version of standpoint epistemology: a simplified—and more radical—set of ideas about the impossibility of mutual comprehension that quickly became highly influential outside academia. As Lidal Dror, an African American philosopher at Princeton University, puts it, “In everyday conversation, political debates, activist circles, and even philosophical settings, speakers will at times appeal to their social location as epistemic support for a claim. We have all heard someone say something to the effect of, ‘as a Black person I know . . . ,’ ‘as a woman I know . . . ,’ ‘as a minority [of some type], I know . . . ,’ before making a claim about society, group relations, or justice.”There is significant variation in the exact nature of these views. But four interlocking claims are particularly central to the forms of standpoint theory that now routinely influence public debate:1. There is a set of significant experiences that (virtually) all members of (particular) oppressed groups share.2. These experiences give members of the group special insight into the nature of their oppression and other socially relevant facts.3. Members of the group cannot fully or satisfactorily communicate these experiences to outsiders, even insofar as they have important political implications.4. When an oppressed group makes political demands based on the identity its members share, outsiders should defer to them.Do these claims hold water?Why Standpoint Theory Is Philosophically WrongThe first core claim of standpoint theory runs into trouble because it is extremely hard to identify meaningful experiences that all members of a socially relevant group share. Feminist philosophers originally tried to ground the special perspective of women in the fact that they have historically been expected to be in charge of rearing children, for example. But other feminist philosophers such as Elizabeth Spelman soon pointed out that there have, all through history, been many women who never had children. In a similar vein, men may be less likely to raise children on their own than women, but it is not clear why any particular single dad should have less insight into the burden of caregiving than any particular single mom. As Rachel Fraser, an associate professor of philosophy at Oxford University who herself defends a more moderate form of standpoint epistemology, told me on the Persuasion podcast, “You’re going to have to abandon the simple idea that there’s some kind of experiential core that all and only women have.”The second core claim of standpoint theory has also been called into doubt. Even insofar as many members of a relevant group do have common experiences, it is not clear that these bestow an overall advantage in understanding the world. Especially in deeply stratified societies, members of privileged groups may—unjustly and perversely—have some important forms of knowledge that are inaccessible to those who belong to marginalized groups. They may, for example, have better educational opportunities because members of the marginalized minority are excluded from quality schools and universities. They are also likely to have better access to the spaces in which unjust decisions are made and oppression is perpetuated. “Though an exploited factory worker has informative experiences about class oppression,” Dror points out, “the factory owner—who uses their wealth and bargaining advantage to cut health benefits and pay less than a living wage—will also have experiences that provide insights into how class oppression operates.” (Think Friedrich Engels.) While the marginalized will have an epistemic advantage with respect to some important aspects of their oppression, the privileged may well have an epistemic advantage with respect to other pertinent aspects of the social world; effective action against injustice would ideally draw on both sets of insights.The third core claim of standpoint theory is misleading in a somewhat more subtle way. It is true that it is impossible to know exactly what certain kinds of experiences, such as sexual harassment or police profiling, feel like if you haven’t been subjected to them. This gives a certain plausibility to the widespread intuition that the experience of being oppressed or marginalized can’t fully be shared. Rendered in philosophical language, there are, even when it comes to relatively simple things, real limits to the extent to which “experiential” knowledge is communicable. To know what it feels like to eat a blueberry, you need to have tasted a blueberry.But the same does not apply to what philosophers call “propositional” knowledge. Such knowledge is typically thought to consist of statements that are true or false; to know that blueberries are in the genus Vaccinium, for example, you need never have eaten or even laid eyes upon a blueberry. The key question, then, is whether the most important insights drawn from experiential knowledge can—especially insofar as they are relevant to social and political debates—be shared in the form of propositional knowledge. Thankfully, there is good reason to believe that the answer is yes.Fraser gives a striking example of how this distinction between experiential and propositional knowledge becomes relevant in debates about public policy. Many feminists favor restrictions on the sale of sexual services but worry that laws which criminalize sex workers will stigmatize them in dangerous ways. For that reason, they favor the so-called Nordic model, which makes it legal for sex workers to offer their services but illegal for clients to buy them. This seems like an elegant solution, discouraging sex work without marginalizing the vulnerable women who engage in it.But of late, Juno Mac and Molly Smith have put forward strong arguments against the Nordic model. Based on their own experiences as sex workers, they claim that these laws are likely to do significant harm. Where sex work is outlawed, potential clients have a strong reason to solicit prostitutes in hidden or remote places. They are also in a stronger negotiating position because the fear of being punished drives down the number of potential customers. Due to these mechanisms, which most feminists had overlooked, the Nordic model, according to this argument, puts sex workers at greater risk of harm.Fraser points out that Mac and Smith would have been unlikely to come up with these insights if they had never been sex workers. But she also insists that the politically relevant implications of those insights can easily be grasped by people who do not share Mac and Smith’s experiences. Though you or I may not share their experiential knowledge, we are able to understand and act on the propositional knowledge they derived from it. “The role of experience in politics,” Fraser concludes, “should not be overstated.” Who we are will shape what we learn about the world, but it need not constrain our ability to communicate those insights to others.All of this is good reason to doubt the first three claims of standpoint theory. “While the oppressed may often have a contingent epistemic advantage deriving from their tendency to have more informative experiences of the workings of social marginalization,” Dror concludes his consideration of the subject, “there are only extremely limited grounds for thinking that they have an epistemic advantage derived in principle from being oppressed.” Fraser is even more skeptical about the way in which standpoint-flavored claims are now commonly made in public. People, she points out, “often want to say that the fruits of oppression are a kind of virtue, a kind of admirable illness. I think that’s just not there in the intellectual tradition. There’s a kind of naïveté to that perspective that is very difficult to actually find in the academic work.”There are compelling philosophical reasons to be skeptical about the first three core elements of standpoint theory. But we are yet to consider the fourth claim: that the comparatively privileged should defer to the claims of the comparatively marginalized. This claim requires a different kind of analysis because it is fundamentally political rather than philosophical in nature. And as it happens, the political reasons against standpoint theory weigh even more heavily than the philosophical ones: put simply, standpoint theory just isn’t a realistic guide for how members of different identity groups can make common cause with each other.Why Standpoint Theory Is Politically MisguidedAddressing progressive activists at Netroots, Ayanna Pressley, a politician from Massachusetts who entered the House of Representatives in the blue wave of 2018, encouraged them to speak in the name of their identity groups:If you’re not prepared to . . . represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need Black faces that don’t want to be a Black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers who don’t want to be a queer voice.Pressley’s speech embraced a political vision that puts identity groups at the very heart of representative democracy. In her view, African Americans should get to decide the most important questions concerning their community, Asian Americans those that are of special relevance to them, and so on. Those who are not members of these groups should, in keeping with the dictates of standpoint theory, largely defer to their demands.But even as Pressley advocated for this vision, she implicitly acknowledged the biggest problems it struggles to resolve. Clearly, she believes that some black or brown or Muslim or queer politicians don’t represent the interests of their groups in an adequate manner; in her language, these politicians don’t want to be a black (or brown or Muslim or queer) voice. But this of course raises a crucial follow-up question: Who gets to decide whether a black politician does or does not represent the “authentic” black voice?Pressley, a member of the informal group of far-left congresspeople popularly known as the Squad, has one set of views about what it looks like for a politician to represent the authentic black experience. Democratic members of Congress such as Jim Clyburn and the late John Lewis, who hold considerably more moderate positions, take a different view. Black conservatives such as Congressman Byron Daniels and Senator Tim Scott take an even more starkly different view. The key problem with Pressley’s position consists of the difficulty of determining who can call themselves a legitimate spokesperson for a particular group.That might seem like an abstract concern. But in practice, the determination of who is a legitimate representative of a group is almost always made by people who are comparatively privileged. The rapid adoption of the term “Latinx” is a canonical example for this phenomenon in the United States. Most activist groups that claim to represent Hispanics have quickly adopted the term. So have the (mostly non-Hispanic) leaders of many mainstream institutions, from the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School to the president of the United States. But according to opinion polls, only about 2 percent of “Latinx” people prefer the new locution to older designations like “Hispanic.”In societies with significant inequalities of power and status, it is the affluent and well connected who are in the best position to determine who gets to speak on behalf of various identity groups. And so, “the black voice” or “the brown voice” is, in the end, likely to be picked by some combination of powerful members within and outside a particular identity group. As the legendary civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote, “The notion of the undifferentiated black community is the intellectual creation of both whites . . . and of certain small groups of blacks who illegitimately claim to speak for the majority.”This is related to another serious worry about the effects that standpoint theory is likely to have in the real world: Its view of collective action gives short shrift to what true political solidarity entails. When members of other groups call on you to be their ally, you should, according to standpoint theory, say something along the following lines: “I don’t understand your experiences and I am in no position to evaluate your demands. But since I recognize that you are more oppressed than me, I will endeavor to be a good ally and support what you ask for.”But such a thin model of political solidarity is unlikely to be effective. Most people simply won’t be willing to delegate their judgment about what actions or policies they should support to a representative of a different group. They are especially unlikely to do so when they can’t understand the reasons for the demand or disagree with it based on their own moral or religious views. For the most part, admonitions to defer to the views of the oppressed are likely to go ignored.There may be a few exceptions. A small number of people who are deeply immersed in the identity synthesis might insist that they really do defer to members of other groups. But they will still face the problem of having to determine whom they consider a “true” black or brown or Muslim or queer voice—and will almost certainly anoint spokespeople whose political prescriptions happen to dovetail with their own. In practice, demands to defer to an oppressed group succeed, at most, in encouraging activists to point at someone with whom they already agree and pretend that this ends the argument.Only Hard-Won Empathy Can Ground Real SolidarityStandpoint theory sounds enticing. It proffers the prospect of a society in which we do what we can to listen to the experiences of the oppressed, constantly foregrounding their demands. At first glance, this seems like a promising recipe for building a more just society.And yet the version of standpoint theory that is so often voiced in popular discourse today is likely to prove counterproductive. It wrongly claims that people from different groups are incapable of empathizing with each other’s experiences of injustice—and that it would be better for them to stop trying. In embracing a vision of political solidarity based on thoughtless deference rather than hard-won empathy, it makes it harder to bring about real political progress. Thankfully, we can do better. Far from resigning ourselves to the idea that we either can’t or shouldn’t relate to members of different identity groups, we need to embrace a more ambitious form of political solidarity as one of the foundational values of a thriving democracy.Building this kind of political solidarity—and this is the misdirected insight that lends standpoint theory its intuitive appeal—will require all of us to be humble. We do not, as a matter of course, see or know the obstacles faced by most of our fellow citizens. In important ways, our experience of the world really is mediated by our identity. This gives all of us a moral obligation to listen to each other with full attention and an open mind. But the point of this hard work is communication, not deference. As long as we put in the work, we can come to understand each other’s experiences.How to Argue Against the Identity TrapThe question of whether or not we can understand each other across identity groups is fundamental; anyone who wrongly concludes that we can’t will be tempted by a vision of politics that is forever based on an uneasy truce—or, more likely, frequent bouts of dangerous conflict—between identitarian tribes. Any argument for a more liberal politics must start with the case for a more ambitious form of political solidarity.But I hope that this case can also serve as a model for how to push back in other realms of American life that have, of late, been transformed by the uncritical adoption of the identity synthesis. A trap has three key attributes. It usually contains some kind of lure. It is usually capable of ensnaring people even if they are smart and their ideas are noble. And it usually subverts the goals of those who get caught up in it, making it impossible for them to accomplish what they set out to do. The new ideas about identity share all three attributes. They are so alluring because they promise to fight injustice. They ensnare smart people who are full of good intentions. And yet, they are likely to make the world a worse place. So, whether it comes to free speech or to cultural appropriation, to progressive separatism in our educational institutions or to race-sensitive public policies, a winning response has to entail three steps:It must take the concerns which have lured so many people into accepting this novel ideology seriously.It must show why the norms and practices inspired by this ideology will fail to remedy these problems.It must suggest a better path forward, one grounded in the most noble principles of the liberal tradition and the most ardent aspirations for how we can build a better future.Yascha Mounk is the founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion. His latest book is The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power In Our Time. Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

It isn’t hard to spot the inconsistency in our country’s two foremost challenges. The first challenge is that the free and democratic United States is fast becoming a low-trust nation that sometimes seems on the brink of dissolution. The second is that the U.S. is being overrun by a record number of illegal immigrants risking their lives to get in.

If the country is so badly off, why are people around the world flocking to it in unprecedented multitudes?

According to critics on the right, we’re a banana republic with a deep state bent on crushing dissent. Why take such a treacherous journey just to go from one banana republic to another? According to the left, we’re a racist, imperialist enterprise poised to turn white-nationalist or fascist once and for all should Donald Trump win reelection. Shouldn’t Latinos and Africans and Asians be risking their lives to avoid a place like that?

Apparently not. Last month, 181,000 people crossed the southern border illegally, the majority of them from Latin America. This beats the previous high, which was set in 2019—when Trump was president. Illegal immigrants aren’t nearly so hung up on partisan politics as American citizens are.

They’re coming here in numbers we can’t handle because America—uncertain, distrustful, and divided as it is—is the greatest country in the world.

As a free-market, federalist-minded people, Americans should understand better than anyone that where human beings with options choose to go is the most valuable measure of desirability. Gavin Newsom can call California the country’s true “free state” all he likes. But Americans are flocking to Florida and Texas for a reason. And immigrant hopefuls from around the globe are dying to come to the U.S., no matter how much we or anyone else complain about the state of our politics.

The flood of illegal immigration rightly grabs the headlines because it’s a massive law-enforcement failure that’s stretching the resources of every state. But legal-immigration statistics tell a similar story about America’s popularity, with the number of permanent U.S. visas issued to people applying outside of the country back at pre-pandemic levels. Today, as ever, the U.S. is the top immigrant destination by a huge margin.

The difference between Americans and would-be Americans in how they view the U.S. comes down to a difference in time scales. We assess the health of the country at the every-day level of the news cycle or the policy change. At the most, we see it in four-year chunks after presidential elections. By virtue of their distance from quotidian American life, they see the country on an enduring historic scale. From where they stand, the United States offers the same hope of freedom and prosperity that it always did.

Where we see a country-ending crisis, they see a blip. Where we see a deep-state despot or a xenophobic strongman, they see another president who was elected by the people they want to join. Where we lose trust in an institution or leader, they retain hope in the larger historic experiment.

It’s not that everyone coming here is deliriously enamored of the Founding. Many may not even be very familiar with the nation’s origins altogether. But they don’t have to be (until they take a citizenship test). American cultural dominance has long stretched to every continent, and it continues to leave people with a sense of the opportunities conferred by our system.

Naturally, among such people, there are those ready to sneak in, exploit our freedoms, and do us harm. That is a real crisis, but it’s not existential. Resolving it requires the every-day work of crafting policy, allocating resources, and enforcing the law.

Our trust crisis, on the hand, could be existential for the very reason that there is no policy fix. It thrives on the shared devaluation of our national self-image. Reversing it, then, surely entails keeping the country open to legal immigrants who take the long view of the American dream. And it wouldn’t hurt if we tried harder to see the nation as they do.

In the closing days of the Trump administration, the White House issued Executive Order 13957 creating a “Schedule F” category of federal employees. Schedule F workers could be fired at will, and federal agencies were ordered to move large numbers of employees into this category.The Biden Administration immediately rescinded Schedule F upon taking office. But James Sherk, one of the Trump officials responsible for Schedule F, has been hard at work at the Heritage Foundation defending the initiative, and laying plans for re-introducing it should the Republicans reclaim the White House in 2024. He has published a number of pieces defending at-will removals, arguing that procedural protections for bureaucrats are far too strong, allowing them to act with impunity. One of his recent blog posts details cases in which career bureaucrats defied the wishes of Trump administration bosses to protect their own favored policies. Sherk and other conservatives believe that the federal bureaucracy has a distinct liberal bias that seeks to stymie conservative policies.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Getting bureaucrats to implement decisions by political principals is an age-old problem. China, the civilization that invented bureaucracy, gave political authority to the emperor, but countless emperors found themselves stymied by powerful bureaucrats. They resorted to reliance on a household corps of eunuchs to control the bureaucrats, but then the eunuchs themselves began acting independently, which required the creation of a “eunuch rectification bureau.” We see modern versions of bureaucratic resistance in the behavior of Humphrey, the senior British bureaucrat in the classic BBC series “Yes Minister,” who has his minister wrapped around his little finger. There is a huge cumulative record of bureaucrats slow-walking, failing to inform superiors of ongoing initiatives, and at times forthrightly defying political mandates. Sherk’s examples are for the most part pretty trivial, like staff lawyers at an agency failing to write timely briefs and—horrors—forcing their new bosses to do the work themselves.In conventional democratic theory, there is a clear hierarchical authority relationship between elected politicians and bureaucrats. The former, reflecting the will of the people, act as principals who issue mandates, and the bureaucrats are their agents whose duty is to carry those mandates out. Normative theory says that bureaucrats should not impose their own wishes in place of those of their political bosses, and should be accountable for bad behavior.In the real world, however, things have never been that simple. Authority often travels in the opposite direction, from the agents to the principals. Sometimes this happens for bad reasons, with bureaucrats trying to protect themselves at the expense of the public interest, and in some cases covering up incompetence, corruption, or criminal behavior. But in other situations bureaucratic resistance is more justified and, in extraordinary circumstances, necessary for the survival of the political community.One important reason why political bosses often need to defer to bureaucrats is that the latter simply know more than they do. Political appointees regularly come into office with high hopes of effecting big policy changes without understanding the complexities of implementation, political constraints, or unintended consequences flowing from their policies. At times, they may not recognize that what they want to do is illegal, as when the Trump administration early on sought to ban immigration from Muslim-majority countries.Bureaucracies are notoriously self-protective, but sometimes that self-protection serves an important purpose in preserving state capacity. An example of this took place during the Trump administration, when the President appointed Michael Pack to be the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). USAGM oversees media groups like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Pack immediately fired all of the directors of USAGM’s media networks, replacing them with political loyalists whose mission favored promoting the Trump agenda internationally.The experienced journalists at USAGM understood that their effectiveness depended on their credibility with non-American audiences, and not with how their messages played in Texas or Tennessee. That credibility, in turn, rested on their not seeming like the propaganda arm of a particular U.S. administration. This institutional independence from politics was, after all, what made the BBC a widely trusted source of information. In one fell swoop, Pack was threatening to destroy the credibility that these journalists had built up over the decades. It is safe to say that many staff members, often emigrés in exile from the countries they were covering, were not eager to promote the Trump message. Many quit as a result.So yes, there was a lot of resistance to Trump administration policies on the part of federal agencies. The destruction of USAGM’s credibility was, in the end, a relatively small matter compared to other acts of resistance. Take the behavior of General Mark Milley, who recently retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As detailed by Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic recently, Milley clashed with Trump on numerous occasions, especially after Trump tried to enlist his support for a violent crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters in Lafayette Square. He tried to dissuade Trump from pardoning Eddie Gallagher, the former U.S. Navy Seal convicted of war crimes, but discovered that the former President did not believe in the possibility of a war crime.Gen. Mark MilleyMilley became very particularly worried in the period after the January 6 insurrection that President Trump would do something crazy involving the U.S. military in his quest to stay in office. He conferred with Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense, and other senior officials, and made two calls to his Chinese counterpart to reassure him that the United States would not be initiating hostilities toward China. After Trump fired Esper and tried to insert his loyalist Kash Patel into the Defense Department, Milley warned his new nominal boss that he would see the world “from behind bars” if he tried to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.For this revelation, President Trump asserted on Truth Social that Milley had committed an act of treason, “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.”This case illustrates the limits of the conventional framework within which we think about bureaucratic subordination. Principal-agent theory breaks down in the case of a Mad King. As Milley himself explained, he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and not an oath of personal fealty to Donald Trump. After January 6, it was the legitimately elected chief executive who had become the chief threat to that constitutional order.The extraordinary events that unfolded from January 6 onwards required extraordinary responses. Subordinates can never be required to commit criminal acts; the U.S. military teaches its officers and enlisted men that they are not obligated to blindly follow orders from their commanders. But short of criminal acts, what others kinds of orders can be legitimately resisted? If a political leader acting out of pure ignorance states that a drug with dangerous side effects is an effective remedy, or incorrectly asserts that a hurricane is about to strike a particular region, are bureaucrats required to salute and support their boss? Do public officials have to cooperate in the undermining of their own agencies?The existing rules regarding bureaucratic authority were meant to cover routine situations. Clearly, government would not function if subordinates typically took it on themselves to defy orders from legitimate superiors. And yet, there is a general case to be made for the virtues of bureaucratic conservatism that make agencies resistant to dramatic change. That conservatism makes rules and regulations stable and predictable. It is also what protects expertise and state capacity. This is not to say that bureaucrats should be protected across the board. Greater flexibility in removals à la Schedule F could actually be useful in disciplining poorly performing officials when used by a leader who genuinely wanted to make the government more effective. I find it utterly horrifying that there is a real prospect of re-electing a king who has proven himself utterly mad and unfit to rule, and would use his power instead to destroy the very government he led.

Conferences gather the nation’s political press, senior politicians and corporate elite in a small, fenced-in zone. The Conservative Party’s atmosphere – its gripes, insecurities and factionalism – is therefore magnified. It can lead to narratives about unity and forward momentum (see Labour conference last year). Or it can catalyse a sense that the leadership is caving in (see Conservative conference last year). This year, there is an impression that the Tory party and its leader are not on the same page. You can walk around conference and feel as if you have been transported from one party conference to another, and then another. Rishi Sunak has become the absentee landlord of the Conservative Party. What might reassure Tory strategists in CCHQ is that few members of the public take notice of such events. There is also optimism among some in CCHQ and in the cabinet that Sunak’s recalculation on net zero targets has led to a bounce in support. Similarly, with so few here, the angst of 200 MPs staring at the polls worried about losing their jobs adds an impetus to conference that is otherwise absent. Nonetheless, the conference’s incoherence is holding the party back. The Chancellor’s speech yesterday was overshadowed by Liz Truss’s Trumpian Growth Rally across the road in the Midland Hotel. He announced a freeze on civil service hiring and a desire to increase sanctions for those on welfare. It was unclear how his speech cohered with the broader strategy to keep the government in power. Are the Tories fighting the election on welfare now? Hunt praises the uplift to economic growth at the same time that the Prime Minister fuels economic uncertainty through net zero announcements and reportedly scrapping the high-speed rail connection between Birmingham and Manchester. Although not officially confirmed, this would be one of the largest changes to infrastructure policy in decades. The decision speaks to the policy merry-go-round of recent years and the failure of the British state to complete large projects. The political damage will partly depend on Labour’s response. The latter will have to decide whether it wants to double-down on levelling up or whether it wants to use the money to fund policies that Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules have previously shelved. Does it want to create a dividing line with the government – a route that would play into Keir Starmer’s “sticking-plaster politics” narrative – or pocket the cash to meet its fiscal rules? It is hard to see how the opposition would choose to find the billions needed to deliver the project before the next election. Consensus between the two parties could see the issue eventually laid to rest. Whatever Labour does, Sunak is already facing criticism from his own side. Five hours after Truss’s rally, Andy Street, the West Midlands’ Conservative metro mayor, surrounded by a huddle of journalists and grasping a card with some hastily scrawled notes, bombarded the government for betraying the north and levelling up. He said: “Gripping this situation means re-examining it, it does not mean giving up, admitting defeat you could say, or even, you could say, cancelling the future.” It was a powerful intervention. Some sneer at the little power that metro mayors have. But they provide an important counter-balance to the Westminster system. They are free from the control of the party whips and can stand up to their leadership in a way that MPs can’t. The intervention from Street, alongside concern among some MPs, makes it even more important for Sunak to tell a story in his speech tomorrow that ties his divided and increasingly incoherent party together. This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; subscribe to it on Substack here. [See also: Where does Labour stand on HS2?]

For some 50 years, American policy toward Taiwan has been based on the assertion that people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits believe that they are part of the same country and merely dispute who should run it and precisely how and when the island and the continent should be reunified. It is a falsehood so widely stated and so often repeated that officials sometimes forget that it is simply untrue. Indeed, they—and other members of the foreign-policy establishment—get anxious if you call it a lie.It may have been a necessary lie when the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China, although it is more likely that the United States got snookered by Chinese diplomats in the mid-1970s, when they needed us far more than we needed them. It may even be necessary now, but a lie it remains. Acknowledging this fact is not merely a matter of intellectual hygiene but an imperative if we are to prevent China from attempting to gobble up this island nation of 24 million, thereby unhinging the international order in Asia and beyond.On a recent visit to Taiwan, I had the chance to talk with the president, the candidates to replace her, senior ministers, academic experts, diplomats, and soldiers. Those conversations brought home to me just how pernicious the falsehood has been. Taiwan is an independent country. Its people have (on the evidence of repeated polling) little interest in becoming part of the mainland, and by substantial majorities consider themselves more Taiwanese than Chinese. It has its own currency, a thriving economy, lively democratic politics, sizable armed forces, a more and more desperate foreign policy—everything that makes a country independent.[From the January/February 2023 issue: I went to Taiwan to say goodbye]The reflexive reaction of American officials and experts today when one mentions Taiwan is, as in the past, a red-faced insistence that they better not go for independence. Those officials rarely produce evidence that the Taiwanese are about to declare independence. They do not even seem to realize that Taiwan already is independent in every meaningful sense. They are just conditioned to fulminate, grimly or histrionically depending on their nature.This finger-wagging is a pompous assertion of hegemony over a protectorate that we have yet to say unambiguously we will protect. When President Joe Biden repeatedly lets slip that we would do so with force, his aides, in a bureaucratic reflex created by years of unthinking habit, insist that the president does not mean it. As a result, once again Americans have set up a minor ally for failure, and then blamed them for our shortsightedness.In this case, 50 years of being told, in effect, to sit in a corner and not disturb the grown-ups has made Taiwan more difficult for the United States to defend, and less able to defend itself. Because of Taiwan’s military isolation, its armed forces are literally insular, inexperienced, and deprived of all the benefits that countries like South Korea or Japan get from regular, routine training and operation with the U.S. armed forces. Because the United States, in a superfluity of cleverness and caution, continues to refuse to say whether it would fight for Taiwan, the Taiwanese themselves are not sure that they would adopt the New Hampshire motto “Live free or die.” And honestly, who can blame them?Lie follows lie. A president of Taiwan cannot visit the United States—rather, they are “in transit” somewhere else, usually one of the few Caribbean countries (St. Kitts, for example) that China has not yet coerced into cutting diplomatic recognition. The United States has an “American Institute in Taiwan,” not an embassy. The deputy assistant secretaries of state responsible for Taiwan (and the same goes for those in the Defense Department, of course) cannot visit the country. The handful of American service personnel there cannot go about in uniform. The U.S. does not openly conduct exercises with the forces with which it would—maybe—fight side by side. All this when Washington needs, more than ever, intimate connections with Taiwan.It is a comfortable lie, which the government is unwilling to acknowledge as such, let alone confront, because the United States has allowed China’s Communist rulers to shape how we understand this part of the world. And while China prepares its forces for a bloody invasion of the island, its real strategy is more that of the constant squeeze, in multiple dimensions simultaneously—bribing countries to drop their recognition of Taiwan, pushing it out of international forums, seducing and suborning Taiwanese surrogates and likely collaborators, and an intense ramping up of military operations around the island to unnerve its population and exhaust its defenders. In the past, the Chinese armed forces rarely crossed the “median line” between the island and the mainland—now they do so routinely. China periodically fires missiles near the island. It has violated the Taiwanese air-defense interception zone so far this year several times more frequently than it did in 2020. And, of course, it maintains a drumbeat of threats directed as much against the United States as against Taipei.[From the December 2022 issue: Taiwan prepares to be invaded]The Chinese are masters at the art of incremental and psychological pressure, which suggests the counter—namely, doing the same to them. Why not let American military personnel operate on the island in uniform? Why not let senior diplomats and defense officials visit? Why not conduct open training? Why not, come to think of it, maintain a knowing silence the next time President Biden slips and says that we would defend the island? The Chinese would react—but then again, American inaction over Chinese base-building in the South China Sea merely encouraged more such activity. Passivity is the greater danger here.And the United States should be prepared to fight for Taiwan. Should the island fall to China, America’s most potent geopolitical rival will have gained the world’s 21st-largest economy, roughly equivalent to Switzerland’s or Poland’s. China would also gain a dense clot of advanced technology, particularly in the area of computer chips. A key piece of the so-called first island chain in the Pacific would be in hostile hands, endangering the sea lanes of our closest Pacific allies, particularly Japan. American credibility would take a brutal blow, and our allies would have to wonder whether they should accommodate China or resort to the development of their own nuclear arsenals to substitute for the guarantees of an unreliable superpower.And not least important: Another liberal democratic state would be snuffed out, in a world in which free government, liberty, and rule of law are already under pressure.Eighty-five years ago, the leader of the world’s greatest global power shrugged off interest in a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” There are those who would say the same today of Ukraine. Neville Chamberlain’s foolish words were seared in the memory of an earlier generation, who learned the hard way that the stakes in such places can be far larger and far graver than domestically obsessed politicians might imagine.It is now generally acknowledged that history is very far from being at an end and that, pressing as they are, issues of transnational significance such as climate change and environmental degradation are not the only urgent ones. We are back in a world of great-power politics, and to deal with it, those who make policy need to do the simplest, if sometimes the hardest, thing: start with the truth, and take prudent but firm steps to undo the effects of falsehood.

       Ahead of what could be a dramatic afternoon in the House of Representatives, Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) occupies an unusual and possibly unique position. Massie is the closest thing to a libertarian that you'll find in the House and a frequent ally of the right-wing Freedom Caucus—some members of which are aiming to topple Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a vote that could come this afternoon. But in an interview with Reason on Tuesday morning, Massie offered a defense of McCarthy's speakership, and he warned that the Republican rebels might not understand the damage they would do by firing him. "In many ways, this is a referendum on whether the House is going to try regular order or not, because the next speaker—if Kevin is deposed today—is not going to say 'oh, if only we had tried more regular order, this could have worked out,'" Massie told Reason. "The next speaker is going to go back to the Old Testament…and we're going to devolve to the former method, which was an omnibus bill every year and gang warfare to try and get your thing in the omnibus bill." For Massie—and for anyone who wants to see Congress budget more responsibly— regular order is a big deal. Effectively, that means that Congress should bring each of its 12 annual spending bills to the floor via the process that everyone learns in civics class: with committees voting on what to include in each, then amendments, and debate on the House floor before a final vote. Congress hasn't correctly completed that process on time since 1996. As part of the compromise McCarthy reached with the House Freedom Caucus in January, he agreed to go back to that system. He's been criticized for failing to follow through. While there are certainly personal issues involved in Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R–Fla.) attempt to dump McCarthy from the speakership, some of Gaetz's criticism is focused on McCarthy's unwillingness to send single-subject bills to the House floor. Gaetz filed the motion to vacate—a rarely used procedural tool that allows the full House to vote to remove a speaker—after McCarthy suspended the rules to bring a continuing resolution to the House floor on Sunday to prevent the government from shutting down. The bill passed with support from Democrats and against the objections of the Freedom Caucus. Massie voted against the continuing resolution but said Tuesday it was "the least worst of a bunch of bad options." If the House bill hadn't passed, he said, it's likely that a Senate-drafted continuing resolution including a higher level of spending—mostly because of added military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, which was left out of the House measure—would have become law. McCarthy's defenders argue that he's working to reform the budget process and needs more time to see it through. Massie points out that McCarthy has allowed two Freedom Caucus members—Reps. Chip Roy (R–Texas) and Ralph Norman (R–S.C.)—onto the Rules Committee. Together with Massie, that's a voting block that can effectively control what bills reach the House floor, something that Massie says would have been unthinkable under previous Republican speakers. "They have been listening to us and we have been guiding the process," he says. Norman has also voiced support for keeping McCarthy in charge of the House. "I have been profoundly disappointed in several elements of Speaker McCarthy's leadership, but now is not the time to pursue a Motion to Vacate," he wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Tuesday morning. If McCarthy survives today's vote, does that mean regular order will prevail and Congress will pass all 12 budget bills before the new continuing resolution expires in mid-November? Massie says there's "a good chance" that will happen. On the other hand, "if Kevin fails today, we're going to get the Schumer-McConnell special," he says, referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), who Massie believes will have the upper hand in any dealings with a leaderless House GOP caucus. "And it's going to be an omnibus," Massie added, "and it's not going to be pretty."The post Thomas Massie: 'The Next Speaker Is Going To Go Back to the Old Testament' appeared first on Reason.com.

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Toward the end of Michael Lewis’s seductive new book, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon,” about the epic collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its enigmatic founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF, as he’s known), Lewis describes flying in 2022 from California to D.C. As the plane descended, Bankman-Fried, who was then one of the wealthiest people on the planet and a massive donor to political campaigns, told Lewis that he had explored whether it would be legally possible to pay Donald Trump to not run for president in 2024. Through an unknown channel, Bankman-Fried’s team unearthed, Lewis writes, “the not terribly earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5 billion.” Lewis, who at this point had spent a great deal of time with Bankman-Fried and his colleagues, does not appear to have found this extraordinary claim worth looking into further.

It was not the only moment in the book that leaves the reader wanting to know more — more about whether Bankman-Fried truly believed he was capable of bringing Trump down, more about what actually happened at FTX. At moments Lewis seems so willing to let Bankman-Fried off the hook, even after Bankman-Fried was charged with fraud and money-laundering, for which he is on trial this week.

There was a time, especially in 2020 and 2021, with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies skyrocketing in price, when you could make the most bullish crypto claim without challenge. But since the spectacular tumble of FTX, many a bearish claim will be accepted without challenge. The most common narrative now is: How didn’t you know from the get-go that cryptocurrency was a scam? Intriguingly, Lewis’s book began life in the before times, and arguably ends there, too. That is, he met Bankman-Fried in late 2021, at the apex of his wealth and influence, and got sucked in: “His ambition was grandiose, but he wasn’t,” Lewis writes. “I was totally sold.” Once the indictments thundered down, Lewis scrambled to rewrite. Since his access to Bankman-Fried was already orders of magnitude greater than any other writer had, he automatically got a richer portrait.

Lewis is known for giving readers such deep, emotionally driven stories that they often end up as Hollywood films, such as “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side.” Plenty of that is on display in “Going Infinite”; through Lewis’s vivid portrayal, readers get a thorough look at Bankman-Fried’s brainy but detached childhood. He had no real friends and struggles to list any for Lewis by name. When Bankman-Fried was 8, his mother said “she had given up on the idea that his wants and needs would be anything like other children’s.” She recounts a time she took him to an amusement park. “Are you having fun, Mom?” he asked after several supposed amusements, “by which he meant, Is this really your or anyone’s idea of fun?”

Bankman-Fried’s lack of connection to his peers and unusual interests as a child was of little more than individual concern as he moved into his 20s, but then he stumbled into the world of crypto trading, in part because of his interest in utilitarianism and the movement known as effective altruism (EA), which posits that any person’s worth should be measured by how much net good they accomplish in their lives. Bankman-Fried’s interpretation of this philosophy, he has said, was to maximize his earnings so he could donate gobs of money to charitable causes that would save lives. He did this by founding Alameda Research, a trading firm that exploited discrepancies between the prices of crypto in different markets.

In the wake of FTX’s implosion, it has become fashionable to dismiss EA as a pretext for the company’s alleged fraud. But Lewis persuasively portrays FTX and Alameda Research as heavily influenced by EA, especially in its earliest days. Bankman-Fried recruited key employees from EA circles, in part because they were the closest personal connections he’d ever made, but also because they were bound to be more loyal than the average financial executive working for an obscure company that moved from Berkeley to Hong Kong to the Bahamas in a few short years.

If anything, Lewis paints EA as a borderline cult. And that may have been part of FTX’s problem: If your team truly believes that they’re helping the world by amassing piles of money, they may not pay much attention to how poorly the company is being run. There was no conventional board of directors. There was no chief financial officer. Even the org chart was a well-kept secret; Lewis writes that it was handed to him “with a whisper that might accompany the transfer of a classified document.” In the early days, the funding came from EA investor loans that were charging 50 percent interest; Lewis notes that “in their financial dealings with each other, the effective altruists were more ruthless than Russian oligarchs.”

Some might argue that a crypto exchange is inherently dodgy because cryptocurrency is largely imaginary, but even if the criminal charges had never emerged, the lack of any financial controls at FTX should have sent employees to the door. And in 2018, they did. Alameda Research was making money by arbitrage trades on the cryptocurrency Ripple. When it was discovered that $4 million in Ripple was missing, and Bankman-Fried had neither explanation or concern, the entire management team and half the employees left. Bizarrely, they later found the missing Ripple; it had been inadvertently locked up in other crypto exchanges.

You can’t read Lewis’s book without thinking that, on some level, Bankman-Fried thinks the “missing” $8 billion that led to FTX’s bankruptcy will be found, too. It’s the most likely explanation for why Bankman-Fried insisted on going to trial, rather than taking a plea (as his colleagues did), even when Lewis notes that less than half of 1 percent of those charged with a crime by the U.S. government in 2022 were acquitted. At times Lewis seems so deeply enmeshed in Bankman-Fried’s corner that he, too, believes that the money will turn up. He spends much of the end of the book second-guessing the choices and interpretations made by John Ray, the CEO appointed to run FTX after it went bankrupt, rather than drill down into the company’s fraud (admittedly, no easy task). Bankman-Fried has argued, and Lewis at times echoes, that the company was never technically insolvent. That could be true, but it hardly matters now — Bankman-Fried is not on trial for going bankrupt, he’s on trial for fraud and money laundering.

A more nuanced breakdown about what went wrong — or any big-picture argument about crypto — would have bolstered Lewis’s book, which ends up focusing mostly on Bankman-Fried’s story and personality, and lacks some of the finer-grained financial analysis of Lewis’s previous books, like “Liar’s Poker” and “The Big Short.” Readers looking for that might instead turn to Zeke Faux’s “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall” (Crown Currency, $29), in which Bankman-Fried makes several dramatic appearances, including one where he all but confesses his role in the crimes with which he’s charged. It’s one of the better choices in the fertile crop of crypto books, which also includes “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud” (Abrams Press, $28) by “The O.C.” actor-turned-writer Ben McKenzie and journalist Jacob Silverman. Both “Easy Money” and “Number Go Up” take the opposite approach of Lewis, positioning themselves as “I-told-you-so” narratives.

You can skip “Easy Money,” which is pretentious and factually sloppy, but Faux’s boisterous, masterfully written book is worth a read. An extension of a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story that he published in 2021, it focuses largely on the meteoric rise of the “stablecoin” Tether, which he convincingly portrays as a license to create digital money out of nothing, and went on to prop up the price and infrastructure around bitcoin to this day. Tether, which has had numerous clashes with regulators, was the brainchild of Brock Pierce (and two others), an improbable character who was a child actor in “The Mighty Ducks.” Faux’s cast of misfits and con artists never fails to entertain.

None of these books grapple meaningfully with the stubborn reality that cryptocurrency, for all the fraud it has engendered, is not going away. Faux argues that his Visa card makes cryptocurrency unnecessary; even if he is right, tens of millions of people across the globe own it, and even more still want to. A speculative gamble, fear of inflation, dissatisfaction with government-controlled money and the fees that traditional banks attach to simple transactions (such as making cross-border payments) will continue to drive demand for crypto. In the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world watched as millions of dollars in crypto-aid zapped instantly to help. The tales in these books certainly make a powerful case for desperately needed smarter regulation of crypto, but it’s a high-tech genie that won’t be forced back into its blockchain bottle.

James Ledbetter is the editor and publisher of the Substack newsletter FIN.

Going Infinite

The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

By Michael Lewis

Ever since learning that in 1947, Walter Lippmann popularized the term “Cold War” to define the emerging conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, I thought it would be cool to be able to name a historical epoch. Now that the post-Cold War has expired, the post-post-Cold War that we’ve entered is just begging to be named. So here goes: It’s the age of “That Was Not the Plan.”

I know, I know, that doesn’t trip off the tongue — and I don’t expect it to stick — but boy is it accurate. I stumbled across it on a recent trip to Ukraine. I was speaking with a Ukrainian mother who explained that since the war started, her social life had been reduced to occasional dinners with friends, kids’ birthday parties “and funerals.” After typing her quote into my column, I added my own comment: “That was not the plan.” Before last year, young Ukrainians had been enjoying easier access to the E.U., embarking on tech start-ups, thinking about where to go to college and wondering whether to vacation in Italy or Spain. And then, like a meteor, comes this Russian invasion that turns their lives upside down overnight.

She is not alone. A lot of people’s plans — and a lot of countries’ plans — have gone completely haywire lately. We’ve entered a post-post-Cold War era that promises little of the prosperity, predictability and new possibilities of the post-Cold War epoch of the past 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

There are many reasons for this, but none are more important than the work of four key leaders who have one thing in common: They each believe that their leadership is indispensable and are ready to go to extreme lengths to hold on to power as long as they can.

A TV interviewer once asked an astronomer whether he thought there was life elsewhere in the universe. “Look,” replied the astronomer, “somewhere in the universe at this very moment, someone looking very much like you is asking that question of someone looking very much like me.” So it isn’t so much a question of “Are we alone?” as “Are you alone?” If there is an infinity of universes, as some scientists speculate, the cosmos may contain an infinite number of Russell Brands. It follows that if there is a God, he must surely be a malevolent one. There is, however, an upside to this nightmare. Several million of these Brands are at this very moment being torn limb from limb on various women-governed planets, while several million others are being hung upside down from lamp-posts. Doubling has its comic aspects. If a monstrously fat man in pink tights and a sombrero crosses a stage, and a moment later another monstrously fat, similarly dressed man does the same, the audience are likely to laugh. In Freudian terms, they can avoid the mental labour of coping with difference, and by economising on psychical energy in this way they can release it in the form of laughter. Most humour involves a sense of incongruity, and in this case, ironically, it is sameness which is incongruous in the sense of out of step with the way things usually are. If this were to happen in real life, however, it would probably be more eerie than funny. I was once on a flight to Sydney, waiting for the aircraft to take off, when an enormously tall Japanese man, not a common sight, entered the plane. He was followed almost immediately by another Japanese man well over six foot tall, and he by another, and so on until fifteen or so of them had lumbered down the aisle. This was pretty spooky until I discovered that it was the Japanese basketball team en route to the Australian Olympics. Pure repetition is unnerving. Exact identities don’t happen in everyday life, which is why Nietzsche thought that words such as “leaf” were fictional because they implied that all leaves are the same. It’s also why identical twins have a sacred status in some cultures, “sacred” meaning both blessed and cursed. The fact that the alien children in John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos all look the same is part of what makes them so sinister. We are speaking of the uncanny, which means something both strange and familiar — familiar because it’s exactly like something else we know, but strange because this repetition is creepy. One reason we enjoy rhythms and rhymes is that they combine difference and repetition, thus avoiding a monotonous thud on the one hand and a disorientating diversity on the other. “Baa baa black sheep” is fine, but “Baa baa black bull” has a surfeit of sameness. Pure identity is tedious, while pure difference would be unintelligible. Hell is traditionally thought to be less agonising than boring. It has the eternal sameness of shit. It’s much the same with aliens, who are never very alien. They may have weird eyes, but at least they have eyes. If they were entirely different from us it’s hard to know how we could be aware of them. Perhaps a couple of them are sitting in your lap right now. Aliens may be tiny and greenish and stink of sulphur, but otherwise they look much like Jonathan Ross. More to the point, they bear a remarkable resemblance to both William Hague and Dominic Cummings. In fact, there are people for whom aliens, who touch down on Earth occasionally, are the only acceptable kind of immigrants, given that they presumably don’t intend to take our jobs, houses, primary school places or PhDs. More from this author Beware the new leviathansBy Terry Eagleton  An interplay of sameness and difference can be found everywhere you look these days, and its technical name is narcissism. To be besotted with yourself is clearly an example of sameness or self-identity, but it also involves treating yourself as though you were someone else, and thus a degree of difference or self-alienation. You treat yourself and your body with exquisite care, as though you were carrying a precious but sickeningly fragile vase in your hands. Putting items in this brittle container, an activity traditionally known as eating, is a particularly fraught affair. There has probably been no civilisation for which food was simply food, but it’s rare to find one like our own where it’s scarcely food at all but invasion, potential poison, crime against non-humanity (eating meat), moral blackmail, emotional manipulation or a slavish surrender to patriarchal demands. The opposite of treating yourself as Other is treating the Other as oneself. In ancient Greek tragedy, the ultimate other is the monster, some deformed creature which civilisation needs to shut out in order to preserve its sanity and stability. The monster in Sophocles’s plays about Oedipus seems to be the Sphinx, but in the end it turns out to be the blinded, incestuous, parricidal Oedipus himself, the king who is driven out of society and reduced to a homeless beggar. Shakespeare’s Lear is a later version of this tragedy. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, it is the hideous Furies who threaten to subvert social order, while in Euripides’s Bacchae it is the god of orgies and erotic love, Dionysus. In all these cases, society can only survive if it has the courage to recognise something of itself in the monstrous Other which confronts it. It must acknowledge this thing of darkness as its own, as part of the unspeakable truth about itself, and integrate it into the community. If it can do so, a great power for good will be released. The social order must recognise that its stability rests on the violent repression of these life-giving, death-dealing forces; only then can it be truly secure. When you meet your double, so legend has it, you die; but it might also be the occasion for a transformed existence. Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is about her double Naomi Wolf, about whom it is not exactly complimentary; and if Wolf reads the work, as of course she will, and runs into Klein with a knife conveniently to hand, one fears that the legend might turn out to be true. Klein is a Left-wing scourge of corporate capitalism, while Wolf was once a liberal feminist and darling of the Democrats who groomed Al Gore in how to give a convincing imitation of a human being.  She is now a conspiracy theorist who has a cavalier way with the facts, has compared Barack Obama to Hitler and thinks that people who are vaccinated against Covid don’t really feel human. She appears regularly on podcasts with Steve Bannon, who is said to have expressed disapproval of his children going to school with Jews (Wolf is Jewish). One of the two Naomis, then, embraces a paranoid form of politics, while the other does not. As Samuel Beckett remarked of one of the two thieves on Calvary being saved, it’s a reasonable percentage. Nobody’s afraid of Naomi Wolf, but what she stands for these days is deeply alarming. The real Naomi, i.e. Klein, is regularly confused with the unreal Naomi, i.e. Wolf, and her book is among other things an exorcising of this embarrassment. A similar situation used to exist in Britain, where there was a real Stuart Hall, a Left-wing cultural theorist from Jamaica, and an unreal Stuart Hall, a slick TV performer and fawner on royalty who ended up in prison. Why do so many conspiracy theories originate in the United States? One answer lies in the vast size of the place. This means that Americans are accustomed to a fair amount of personal space, and are particularly sensitive about that space being “invaded”. An American might say “Excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the citizens of Beijing. Smoking is taboo not only because it can kill you, but because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one hygienically sealed body and another. The model of human contact is infection. Rather as smoke becomes invisible but remains all-pervasive, these apparently separate bodies are caught up in some terrifying web of secret powers, and thus by no means as free and autonomous as they think. Conspiracy theorists, for whom (like the paranoid) nothing happens by accident, are out to give a name to this system, whether you call it the political state or the work of a bunch of paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy. In doing so, you have the satisfaction of ascribing what seem to be random, anonymous forces (the market, for example) to a purposeful agent, so that the world makes some sense, however sinister, and you have someone to blame. More from this author How the truth fell into disreputeBy Terry Eagleton  You can also combat the sealed-off bodies syndrome with new forms of bonding and brotherhood like the Proud Boys. When a pandemic breaks out in this situation, it isn’t the virus which a lot of citizens regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipresent, but the state which seeks to protect them from it. At a time when bodies need to be hygienically sealed off from each other in order to survive, they cast off their masks, demand liberty or death and sometimes end up with both. They insist on the right to breathe together, which is the literal meaning of the word “conspiracy”. In Dostoevesky’s chilling tale The Double, a timorous clerk called Golaydkin is persecuted by a smirking, malicious doppelganger whom he finally kisses in a despairing attempt at reconciliation. In doing so, however, he merely seals his doom, as he is driven away in a coach by a fearful coachman who is no less than Death itself. The real Golyadkin is destroyed by his phantom double. No observer of the current American scene can doubt that this may happen there too. The Left, after all, is accustomed to defeat: our adversaries have more tanks than we do, not to speak of a lot more money and control of the means by which they can propagate their lies. What the big bad Wolf represents may trump what the real Naomi stands for in every sense of the word. But Klein has one monumental advantage: what she says, give or take a bit, is true. So you must either prove her wrong or create a world in which truth doesn’t matter anyway. That project is already far advanced. view comments

We live in traumatised times. Over the past few years, our social media channels, reality TV shows, and even playgrounds have become saturated with therapy speak. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, people now feel “triggered”; listening to a friend is now “holding space”; ex-partners are labelled as “gaslighting narcissists” on TikTok. And we are all encouraged to examine our “trauma” — even if we’re not actually sure what that might be. This marks a strange moment in our cultural relationship with mental health. After decades of stigma, we are finally sharing our vulnerabilities. Yet we may be talking ourselves into a new problem. Trauma has become something of a cultural fixation — one of the most overused concepts in our daily lives. But what exactly is trauma? And why has it come to dominate the therapeutic and cultural discourse? In an attempt to get to the bottom of this new psychology, I’ve been speaking to the world’s leading trauma experts. And I have discovered something unexpected: a powerful contradiction at the heart of psychology that explains why trauma has become one of the most divisive political issues in America. The problem is that no one can agree on a definition of trauma, let alone how it should be treated. Progressives and conservatives don’t see eye to eye: either you are a Lefty snowflake with self-diagnosed trauma, or else you are getting on with life’s difficulties without complaining about it. Psychologists are split down similar lines. When clinicians talk about trauma, they tend to distinguish between two distinct but related kinds of human experience. The first is the type researched by Dr George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, who has been investigating grief and PTSD for more than two decades. He explains that in the DSM, the key diagnostic manual used by psychiatrists in the US, trauma has a very specific definition: “It’s a violent or life-threatening event that is outside the range of normal experience.” This might include a car crash, sexual assault or a period spent in combat. However, Bonanno says, “even the term [‘traumatic experience’] is a misnomer, because even those events don’t always cause trauma reactions… I use the phrase in my research ‘potentially traumatic events’, as no event is inherently traumatic”. Suggested readingFoucault foresaw our identity crisisBy Matt Feeney In his book, The End of Trauma, Bonanno points out that most people who endure extreme events — or trauma — tend not to suffer from PTSD. But those who do tend to experience a range of symptoms, such as flashbacks and panic attacks, which usually decline over time. So rather than being slaves to our trauma, Bonanno argues that humans are defined more by our inherent resilience than by our fragility. Others disagree. Many clinicians would argue there is another kind of trauma that isn’t yet included in the DSM, but which is increasingly seen as a fundamental cause of mental illness. It it caused by experiences that aren’t explicitly violent but which affect us deeply, such as an emotionally abusive relationship in adulthood, or severe emotional neglect in childhood. The psychotherapist Alex Howard, author of It’s Not Your Fault, distinguishes between overt trauma, as described by Bonanno, and covert trauma, this less tangible, nevertheless traumatic experience. Most of the clinicians I’ve interviewed agree that while we’re relatively good at treating overt trauma when it manifests as PTSD, covert trauma and the resulting “complex PTSD” is harder to deal with as it’s transdiagnostic, encompassing various disorders, and so affects almost every aspect of someone’s life. But this covert trauma, for an increasing number of clinicians, explains why we are the way we are. And through this interpretation, we are moving our conception of mental health away from “what’s wrong with you” and toward “what happened to you?” Suggested readingThe grubby truth about mental health memoirsBy Freddie deBoer  It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this shift in our politics and culture. The degree to which our actions today are shaped by previous traumatic experiences has fundamental implications for criminal justice, social welfare, and healthcare policy. It also marks a dividing line between conservatives, who tend to value self-reliance in the face of adversity, and progressives, who believe we are defined by systems and forces beyond our control. The new narrative around trauma gives weight to the latter, to the ire of conservatives. However, this new way of thinking about the mind is compelling for the public. Look at the extraordinary success of psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, which spent more than 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Van der Kolk has argued powerfully for greater recognition of the effects of childhood trauma on adult mental health, and has lobbied for “Developmental Trauma Disorder” — a new construct that would take into account “covert trauma” — to be included in the DSM manual. The most radical aspect of van der Kolk’s thesis is that past trauma is preserved within the body. While your mind might have dissociated from a traumatic experience, your body “keeps the score” and holds onto it. This means that, until we can fully process our original trauma, it continues to haunt us physically. The implication is that trauma is mysterious and hidden, but also vitally important to find. It dictates our lives and holds the key to our salvation. These are the perfect ingredients to drive a cultural obsession, with the end of suffering always just beyond our reach. This concept of trauma is hugely popular in what some call the Trauma Industrial Complex: the inevitable industry that has sprung up to offer retreats, therapies, coaching programmes and courses to help people find and move through their trauma. When run by licensed therapists, some of these programmes can be helpful — but they also feed our “trauma-chasing” culture, keeping us chained to it. Suggested readingDon't punish Kanye WestBy Hadley Freeman Among clinicians, though, van der Kolk’s theories remain contentious. Bonanno is unequivocal in his critique. “There isn’t someplace we can hide memories away,” he tells me, “and there is no anatomical or neuroscience mechanism to explain how you have a trauma hidden in your body.” When I put this to van der Kolk, he listed a series of examples showing that humans could, in fact, repress traumatic memories. For instance, people in road accidents can experience anterograde amnesia, and there’s extensive literature on Holocaust survivors having no memory of their experiences, or of remembering them at a later date. At first, I was confused that two world experts could disagree about something as fundamental as whether we can forget bad memories. But as it turned out, I’d inadvertently stumbled upon one of the deepest tensions in psychology. This abiding rift over memory stems in part from a controversy in the field that took place three decades ago. In 1990, a university student called Holly Ramona started therapy for her depression and bulimia. Her therapist, Marche Isabella, told Holly and her mother that bulimia was usually caused by incest, and that 70% of her bulimia patients had been sexually abused as children. Through the course of therapy, Isabella worked with Holly until she seemed to uncover memories of being sexually abused by her father. Her father vehemently denied this, but would go on to lose his job, his marriage, and his family. He became the first person to successfully sue a therapist over implanted memories. Suggested readingWestern society is built on stigmaBy Lionel Shriver There were hundreds of similar cases involving “recovered memories” of childhood sexual abuse in the Eighties and Nineties, with therapists pushing their patients towards memories they didn’t have. It is a complicated moment in the history of psychology, because childhood sexual abuse is devastating and disturbingly common, and cases of false memories need to be carefully parsed out from real recollections. Some studies have also shown that traumatised people are more likely to have false memories, and Elizabeth Loftus, arguably the most influential researcher in this area, has shown convincingly how suggestible we can be to forming new memories. And even though there was no scientific support for the approach, a cohort of therapists were convinced that memories of abuse could only be unlocked through treatment. But many patients would later recant their “recovered memories”, and a host of lawsuits followed. For more medicalised psychologists, this episode was proof that psychoanalysis was vague, unscientific hokum. This had lasting consequences for the field of psychology, leaving practitioners stuck between two reductionist positions: that either traumatic memories are entirely real, or that they are entirely manufactured. Neither position seems convincing when we consider the complexity of the mind and the prevalence of childhood abuse. But it partly explains why Bonanno and van der Kolk are at such odds. It feels like clinicians such as van der Kolk are making the same mistakes as their Eighties predecessors as they encourage millions of people to “find their trauma”.  While there are benefits to destigmatising trauma, there are dangers too. Rachel Yehuda, Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, cautions that “if you attribute everything that happens in the world that you don’t like or that you didn’t expect [to trauma]… that can take a concept that could have been very useful and change it quite drastically”. Suggested readingChildren can't be experts on themselvesBy Lionel Shriver Just look at the rise of “trigger warnings”. A 2020 study on trauma survivors found that these warnings may in fact worsen anxiety by increasing the “narrative centrality” of trauma among survivors. “Narrative centrality” refers to the degree to which someone identifies with their trauma, and how central it is in how they understand their own life. By increasing narrative centrality, you risk keeping people stuck in their trauma. This points to the double-edged sword of increased cultural awareness of trauma. On one edge, it opens up more honest and vulnerable conversations about emotional suffering and mental health. On the other, it increases the narrative centrality of trauma throughout society. As a result, therapists and psychologists are filling the role left by the clergy in providing guidance for how to live. As the Memory Wars show, psychoanalysis has the right DNA to fill that void. It is mystical, insofar as it deals with the unseen realms beyond our awareness. It is confessional. It is revelatory, revealing to us why we do what we do. In the absence of a metaphysical framework that can help us understand why we suffer, trauma is becoming a creed that can explain all. And if the rise of therapy-speak is frustrating, it is also understandable. We need some way to make sense of suffering and redemption. It’s a problem, though, when we focus too much on our fragility and forget our resilience, a critique often levelled at progressives by conservatives. Likewise, if we ignore our vulnerability entirely, we create repressive societies — as liberals are fond of pointing out. With its focus on emotional safety and the deterministic qualities of trauma, psychology often coincides neatly with social justice ideologies. Yet what works in the therapy room doesn’t necessarily work in the real world. Take the example of emotional validation: the idea of a therapist acknowledging and connecting with the emotional reality of a client. When this becomes a value in society, we can quickly fall into a moral relativism that gives undue value to people’s emotional reality. But a healthy society should be sophisticated enough to know that humans are both fragile and resilient at different times and in different contexts. A healthy perspective requires us taking our “emotional reality” with a pinch of salt. Knowing when to focus on trauma and when to let it go requires a kind of wisdom that we won’t find on social media feeds and university safe spaces — but in the grit and contradiction of the human experience. view comments

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Republicans averted the self-inflicted wound of a government shutdown this weekend. The main casualty of the process was aid for Ukraine, but foreign aid was always a fig leaf—for both GOP dysfunction and the determination of a small group of Republicans to help Russia.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: California’s math misadventure is about to go national. Artists are losing the war against AI. What Emily Wilson’s Iliad misses It’s Not About the MoneyThe Republicans in Congress have delayed a shutdown for another 45 days while they continue their family food fight. They are all very angry with one another, and they seem to agree on only one issue: They hate Matt Gaetz. But don’t blame Gaetz, who is clearly having the time of his life being famous. The Republicans, as the economist Michael Strain noted, have for weeks been careening toward a Seinfeld Shutdown, a budget impasse about … nothing.Some $6 billion of aid to Ukraine, however, was removed from the budget, a temporary casualty of the near shutdown. (I say “temporary” because I have confidence that sensible members of Congress will act to restore the funds.) Republicans are trying to cloak their opposition to military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine in a lot of codswallop about oversight and budget discipline. But the opposition to aid for Ukraine among Republican extremists on the Hill is not about money.Most congressional Republicans are in favor of helping Ukraine. The extremists, however, warned Joe Biden last month that they would oppose additional assistance to Kyiv. The list of signatories to a September 21 letter to the Office of Management and Budget is a roster of shame, including the new America Firsters in the Senate (J. D. Vance, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Tommy Tuberville among them) and the grotesque caucus-within-a-caucus of some of the most unhinged and weirdest members of the House, including Clay Higgins, Harriet Hageman, Andy Biggs, Anna Paulina Luna, and that titan of probity and prudence, Paul Gosar.The drumbeat of propaganda from these members and their “amen” chorus in the right-wing media is having an effect: An Economist/YouGov poll released last week found a slight uptick among all voters for reducing military aid to Ukraine, but for the first time found that a majority of Republicans now support such reductions. Fortunately, Americans overall—even many voters in the GOP—are still holding firm in their support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian imperialism.Nevertheless, GOP hostility to Ukraine on the Hill and among its rank-and-file voters is growing for several reasons—none of them principled.First, foreign aid is always an easy hot button for the know-nothing right to push. Most Americans have no idea how much the United States spends on foreign aid, and they grossly overestimate how much goes to such programs. (Most Americans think it’s about 25 percent of the U.S. budget and want it reduced to about 10 percent. Their wish is already granted: It’s actually about 1 percent.) Worse, so many years after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine (in Crimea), some two-thirds of Americans still don’t even know where Ukraine is.They also do not understand that most foreign assistance is not a cash handout: Money is spent to buy weapons, food, and other products made in America, which we then ship to other nations. Instead, many Americans think of assistance—mistakenly—as bags of untraceable money handed to foreigners to do with as they will, which is why opportunists such as Ron DeSantis (who once supported aid to Ukraine) try to exploit provocative terms such as blank check to describe helping Ukraine. DeSantis knows better; so do other Republican leaders.But the Trumpist right has a more specific beef with Ukraine because of the role Ukraine played in Donald Trump’s impeachment and eventual electoral downfall. Interestingly, Vance has tried to make the opposite argument: “Sorry, this needs to be said,” he tweeted on Saturday, while clearly being not sorry. “A lot of the anti-Russia obsession on the left has nothing to do with Ukraine. It’s a revenge fantasy over 2016. They blame Russia for Donald Trump’s election and they’ll bleed Ukraine dry for payback.”As is so often the case with modern Republicans, every accusation is a confession, and every assertion is projection. The majority of the country—not “the left”—is supporting Ukraine because it’s the right thing to do, not because they hate Russia for electing Trump. Rather, it’s the other way around: The MAGA Republicans are opposing Ukraine because they hate Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for their role in the impeachment drama.Unlike Vance and his isolationist colleagues, most Americans recognize the immense threat that Russia’s war of conquest poses to our allies, to global peace, and to the security of the United States itself. Republicans once stood at the forefront of opposition to Kremlin aggression—Ronald Reagan’s steadfast opposition to Moscow was one of the reasons I was a young GOP voter in the 1980s—but now the party is saddled with a group of shortsighted appeasers, buttressed by a squad of right-wing cranks, who would doom tens of millions of innocent people to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s butchery just to own the libs.Also, we should not look away from a nauseating truth about the extremist caucus within the GOP: Some of them genuinely admire Putin and what he has created in Russia. Tucker Carlson, after all, didn’t get taken off the air for supporting Putin in ways that would have made Cold War Soviet propagandists blush; he got canned after a defamation lawsuit from an election-machine company. These GOP extremists have swallowed the gargantuan lie that Putin is a godly defender of white Christian Europe against the decadent West and its legions of militant drag queens. (They believe this, in part, because they know less than nothing about conditions in Russia or its demography.)Finally, some Republicans oppose aid to Ukraine because of the more general and bizarre countercultural obsession that has seized the American right: Whatever most of their fellow citizens approve of, they must oppose, or else they risk losing their precious claims to being an embattled minority. If they were to support aid to Ukraine, how would they be different from everyone else, and especially from Biden? How would they mark their tribal loyalty if they crossed party lines to oppose a dictator—while supporting a wannabe dictator of their own?Some Republican opponents of assistance to Ukraine are merely cynical manipulators who care little about national or international security. Many genuinely admire Putin and hope for Ukraine’s defeat. Others are merely ignorant. But all of them are bound together by the reflexive urge to reject whatever it is that most other Americans accept. As a commenter on social media said to me today, if liberals were opposing aiding the Ukrainian war effort, “the GOP would shut down the government to ensure aid and you’d see Ukrainian flags waving on the back of pickups.”To adopt a line from Senator Vance: Sorry, but it has to be said.Related: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right. The emptiness of the Ramaswamy doctrine Today’s News The civil fraud trial brought against Donald Trump by Attorney General Letitia James began in New York. Representative Matt Gaetz vowed to present a resolution to oust Kevin McCarthy after the House speaker worked with Democrats to avert a government shutdown. Laphonza Butler, the first Black woman to lead the abortion-rights group Emily’s List, will succeed the late Senator Dianne Feinstein in California. Evening Read Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Cooper Neill / Getty; Jeff Kravitz / Getty; David Eulitt / Getty. Taylor Swift Is Too Famous for ThisBy Devin Gordon Has Taylor Swift ever been more popular, more all-powerful, more white Beyoncé than she is right now? She’s in the middle of an era-defining tour that is literally called the Eras Tour. A concert-film version of the show is about to arrive in theaters nationwide—she dropped the news a few weeks ago, and within hours, Hollywood studios were scrambling to get their movies out of her way. The bracelets are everywhere. And now, to her vast dominion, she has added untold millions of football-loving (mostly) men, thanks to her escalating flirtations with the Kansas City Chiefs’ sexy goofus tight end, Travis Kelce … Maybe they’ll fall in love. Maybe they’ll have babies and co-host Saturday Night Live and grow old together. No, this is going to end badly. Sorry to be a party pooper. But this isn’t really about Travis and Taylor at all. It’s about a sports-media cycle that simply cannot coexist with the gossip-manufacturing industry—two unruly mobs smacking together like 300-pound linemen. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic How financial strength weakened American feminism Daniel Clowes is ready to face the truth. New York City is not built for this. Culture Break Photograph by Laura El-Tantawy Read. “Love Is Not Always Song, but the Swelling,” a new poem by Athena Nassar:“You are waist deep, wading / in what mauls you and also / what loves you.”Listen. Senior editor Jenisha Watts narrates her October cover story, “I Never Called Her Momma.”Play our daily crossword.P.S.Well, after weeks of being excited about coming to The Atlantic Festival—where I was going to share a stage with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen—I threw out  my back and couldn’t attend. (I couldn’t even stand up for a few days. Back spasms are no joke.) I’m on the mend thanks to my wife, my cat, and modern chemistry, but I had to pass up a terrific festival.If you missed it live, as I had to, you can join me in watching some of the events here. (And don’t miss this interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) In the meantime, I’m going to start working out so I can be in shape—okay, at least standing upright—for next year’s festival.— TomWhen you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Heated debate, Republican primary 2023 (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)A reminder to our paid subscribers that details of tonight's drinks event with Yascha and members of the Persuasion team in NYC may be found in This Week at Persuasion.Which side are you on? That is a question we are asked every day, many times a day, as consumers of news and opinion. Which side are you on in the abortion debate? The gun control debate? The debate over gender youth medicine? Over the teaching of our racial history in schools? Are you for or against regulations? Green energy? Anthony Fauci?But what if that's the wrong question? What if it hinges on the wrong word, that word that's so ubiquitous, that comes so naturally, that we don't even notice it? I mean “side.” “Side” carries with it an entire worldview; it tells us how to think and feel. As soon as you say “side,” you're saying there are only two: the right one and the wrong one, us versus them, good versus evil.Which means that anyone who isn't on your side must be on the other, the hated other, and therefore must be demonized and suppressed. Anyone, for instance, who raises doubts about the wisdom of “affirmative care” for children with gender dysphoria (like J.K. Rowling, who's been called a fascist) or who questioned the value of school closures during the pandemic (like Jennifer Sey, who lost her job as Global Brand President of Levi Strauss).But are there really only two sides to every question? Consider the abortion debate. While we speak of pro-choice and pro-life, there are actually many places to stand on the issue. But “side” pushes people to extremes, to single principles and simple emotions. Pro-lifers say that life is sacred; the pro-choice camp, that a woman has a right to control her own body—two absolute beliefs that almost no one believes absolutely. Very few would claim that the life of the fetus trumps all other considerations, and nobody thinks that the right to end a pregnancy should extend to the moment of delivery. Nearly everyone feels the tug of competing claims and conflicting feelings and ends up somewhere in the middle: six weeks; twelve weeks; second trimester; heartbeat; viability; exceptions only for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. These are not sides. This is a spectrum.Instead of sides, we need to speak, and think, in terms of positions. On any given issue, there are almost always more than two. But adopting a position is very different than choosing a side. It takes thought; it takes investigation; it takes a willingness to consider alternatives. Sides are intellectually easy and emotionally satisfying. Positions are intellectually challenging and emotionally complex. Once you know which side you're on—in the culture war, or the political war—you can let your friends, or your podcasts, do your thinking for you. But “positions” requires you not only to think things through for yourself, but to think each issue through on its own terms, from the ground up.One of the problems, for example, with the way that the debate about Covid policy took shape during the first year or two of the pandemic was that many issues got lumped together, because all of them were hostage to the logic of “sides.” Masks, mask mandates, the lab leak hypothesis, school closure policy, lockdowns, the masking of children, the vaccination of children and young adults—all of these raised separate questions, with separate considerations, and separate (and evolving) bodies of evidence. But we all knew, based on which side we were on—Team Trump or Team Fauci—what we were supposed, in each case, to believe. Which made it impossible to have a rational conversation about any of them.“Positions” involves a very different set of practices than “sides.” “Sides” goes with debates, where each party tries to “win,” to show that they are “right,” by bashing away at the other. At best you might decide the truth lies somewhere “in the middle.” “Positions” goes with conversations. You listen; you acknowledge doubt; you think out loud; you learn. You both learn. You discover things together neither of you would have come to on your own. You might meet in the middle, but you're as likely to decide that the truth, or at least your next best approximation of the truth, lies somewhere else altogether—in a different direction, or another dimension. And you can do all this because the stakes aren't existential anymore. Your identity—as a member of your “side”—is no longer riding on the outcome. You can breathe. You can think.Moving from “sides” to “positions” would let a lot of air into the national discourse. We could consider points of view that lie outside the usual binaries and therefore don't get much of a hearing. The position, for instance, of J.K. Rowling and many other informed parties, on gender youth medicine: that medical transition is appropriate in a small percentage of cases but that the best approach in most is watchful waiting. We could have a national discourse, a sober consideration of issues, rather than a national shouting match.“Sides” is for partisans. “Positions” is for citizens. Yes, there are powerful forces pushing us toward the first: cable news, social media, the two-party system itself. No, it wasn't this bad in the past, when the parties were less homogenous (conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans), when congressional Republicans still wanted to accomplish things, which meant compromising with the other side, a circumstance that was in turn reflected in the larger discourse, when we all shared the same few sources of news and therefore, more or less, the same picture of reality. But we aren't going to eliminate those powerful forces, and we aren't going back to the past. What we can do is take a step forward, toward restoring the health of our democracy, by changing the way we talk about the things we care about: the media can, and we can as individuals. Next time someone asks you for your “side,” explain your position instead. It'll take a little longer, but it's worth it.William Deresiewicz is an essayist and critic. He is the author of five books including Excellent Sheep, The Death of the Artist, and The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

I am a pothole—an ordinary road hazard and a bane to all who drive. Messing with you and your vehicles is my vocation; it’s what I do.

My genealogy is compelling enough. I come from a common road-built with dirt, six to twelve inches of #2 gravel and #57 gravel with lime dust—which is compacted at each stage. Then, add an inch or two of asphalt base, before a layer of finishing asphalt to complete the work.

But over time, roads wear out. If the road is not well-constructed, trouble comes quicker. Without inspections, developers have an incentive to skimp on long-term road quality—and may succumb to this temptation. Even with the best roads, the ground can shift, especially if built on sand, and the weight of traffic inevitably takes a toll. But most of us potholes start with moisture, especially ice. Road salt is a mixed blessing: it’s tough on the roads, but it reduces the damage to roads from moisture and ice.

One vulnerable area is the asphalt seam or “crown”—the peak of the road that allows water to drain off. Sometimes, the edge of a road lacks a solid foundation. And the driving lanes of a road receive the most weight. So, I can show up anywhere. Street departments try to prevent me through road maintenance—for example, “crack sealing” using hot rubberized asphalt and polymers. Those stripes may not look pretty, but they prevent me from showing up.

“Because I’m small and local, I seem simple to fix, but I’m not. Given this, imagine how difficult it is to fix large, national, complex problems.”

All that said, at the end of the day, I’m only a hole in the ground. The more fascinating story is about the efforts to fix me and my friends. It is more of a mystery than you might expect. Sadly, people overlook this—and then, miss the larger lesson: Because I’m small and local, I seem simple to fix, but I’m not. Given this, imagine how difficult it is to fix large, national, complex problems. Me and my story may seem mundane. But as the clever and wise G. K. Chesterton once observed, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”

I, Pothole, simple as I may appear, merit your wonder and awe—a claim I will explain. In fact, if you can understand me and efforts to fix me—no, that’s too grand to ask—if you can become aware of the miracles that this represents, you will have less faith in the efficacy of government activism and be able to promote the freedom and prosperity that are under attack today.

I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than a pencil or a missile, an elementary school or antitrust enforcement, because fixing me is seemingly so simple. It may be simple, but no single person on earth knows how to do it. This sounds incredible, especially when you realize how many potholes are fixed every year.

As you know from the popular parable of the now-prominent pencil, innumerable people are involved with fixing a pothole. Consider just one aspect of the remedy: my family tree includes asphalt—the production of which requires hundreds of people in an average company. Now contemplate what efforts went into making the places where they work, the clothes they wear, the coffee they drink, the tools, machines, and computers they use. Think of all the cars they drive to get there and of course—don’t overlook the avenues with their potholes. (They also use roads to receive the inputs they use and to transport their final product!) As with the pencil, it’s obvious that no single person knows how to do all the things required to fix a simple problem like me.

But let’s take this discussion down a different road. How does a pothole get fixed? Imagine that you run the relevant department for the local government and are in charge of maintaining the city streets.

The first problem is identifying the location of the potholes. How do you get this information? The most common method is for your workers—and other government workers in the public (e.g., sanitation workers)—to report what they find. You’d love to have more input from your friends and neighbors. But they probably figure that someone else will report a problem. You have a website and a phone number for citizens to report their concerns. (And it’s important for us to keep a good paper trail—to show that you’ve done your due diligence to prevent tort claims!) But the point is clear: finding all the potholes is easier said than done.

Second, you need to prioritize which potholes to fix first. How many people are affected by the pothole? What is the severity of the damage and danger caused by each pothole? Your top priority is preventing car damage (and avoiding lawsuits). So, more severe potholes are highest on the list. But it’s also important to deal with higher traffic areas where potholes can get worse more quickly. For lower-priority jobs, it’s first come, first serve.

Another complication is “pothole season.” In the late winter, you have many more potholes, making those decisions even more challenging. And ironically, potholes are more difficult to fix in the winter, since you need the ground to be above freezing. You can use a “cold patch,” which can be done even when it’s freezing or wet, but it’s a costlier option. You can also use a propane torch to dry out and warm up a pothole, but that’s costly too.

When you’re not in pothole season, you can use more time and resources for road maintenance. And if there aren’t enough potholes to fix on a given day, it may not be cost-effective in terms of asphalt, machine usage, machine rental, and so on. It’s important that you achieve economies of scale to be relatively efficient.

When should you fix them—with implications for disrupting traffic and imposing on workers: during the day or at night, on weekdays or weekends? For example, it’s not smart to fix potholes in front of the courthouse during the week. It’s better to do this at night or on the weekends.

Third, to fix the potholes, which skills are required (or at least useful) in your employees? The skill level of workers may seem unimpressive, but you need them to be able to do many jobs, since your work varies throughout the year. Your workers may do three or four different types of jobs in a day and you cross-train them to be effective at a handful of tasks. So, you want them to be able to learn quickly and to be self-motivated. Beyond that, not just any worker will do. For safety reasons, they must be diligent and detail-oriented. Since some manual labor is involved, they must be willing to get their hands dirty—and ideally, they’re good with tools and machines.

How many workers do you need? A small “cold patch” is a one-worker job—pouring the mix into the hole and smoothing it out. But most jobs are for two (or more) workers. At the least, you usually need one (or more) to fix me and one to deal with traffic. Larger jobs could still be done by one person, but safety concerns and greater accountability usually mean that it’s better to have two on the job.

Fourth, what materials will you use to fix the potholes? What sort of machines and tools would be helpful? What is the rate of depreciation, maintenance, and breakage in those tools and machines? For tools, you need trucks and “hot boxes” (small trailers to keep the asphalt within a certain temperature range), tampers (hand and gas), asphalt rakes, shovels, heavy brooms, blowers, an air compressor (to dry out narrow fissures), Rosebud heating nozzles, propane torches, skid steers (e.g., Bobcats), rollers with a milling head attachment.

For materials, you need asphalt and “binder” (which binds the new asphalt to the existing road materials). When temperature is an issue or you need a quick fix, you also have “hot patch” and “cold patch” options. (It’s perhaps surprising that it’s easier to have a more effective fix for deeper potholes, since there’s more surface area for the binder to attach.)

All of this assumes a modest pothole. If there is a problem with the foundation of the road, you’ll need to remove the asphalt and the flawed foundation, cutting and replacing the section as necessary—to deal with the root causes. In this, you’re a lot like a dentist. (And don’t forget: if you’re going deeper, be careful not to hit a gas main, electrical wires, or a water pipe!)

Fifth, what are the prices of the inputs to production: the labor of various skills, the capital of various types, and other inputs? How do you balance your budget, trying to maximize social well-being within the revenues you have been granted by the government? There are so many factors to weigh as you maximize road quality while watching costs.

Sixth, how are the above answers changed by differences in climate? (Arizona is not the same as Vermont.) Not much, except for differences in temperature and precipitation, variance in the quality of road construction, and various state regulations. What about weather? Aside from cold patches and hot patches, potholes can’t be fixed when the ground is wet or freezing. Underlying road conditions are relevant. And as we’ve seen, there are some important trade-offs between short-run fixes, long-run fixes, and cost.

Seventh, when can the private sector provide better quality and/or lower cost? Maybe you shouldn’t be fixing potholes at all—or maybe you should fix some types of potholes and outsource the others. You’re likely to privatize bigger jobs for paving, potholes, striping, engineering services. You simply cannot achieve the economies of scale to be as efficient. Sometimes, you can handle the job, but it doesn’t make sense for some smaller cities to own paving machines. Renting is smarter given that the work is seasonal and the machine is expensive and high maintenance.

And finally, what role does technological advance and changing market conditions have in changing all of the above? Even if I understand the world of potholes perfectly today, my understanding will become increasingly obsolete, soon enough.

Although millions of people have a hand in fixing me, none of them know more than a small bit of what is required. This “knowledge problem” is a key facet in the field of Austrian Economics. In the context of markets, we have innumerable, subjective, and diffuse bits of information embedded in the preferences of consumers (often modeled as demand curves). We have the wide array of variables that face producers—the prices of output and inputs, technology, incentivizing workers, etc. (often modeled as supply curves). And these two cooperate in markets through the challenges (and transaction costs) of communication and transport.

To credit Leonard Read’s classic example, “I, Pencil,” it’s amazing that there are usually about the right number of yellow #2 pencils in boxes of ten on the shelf of the local box retailer in February and in August.

Thankfully, the person running the Street Department can be successful because the pothole problem is relatively simple in terms of the knowledge required. While the list of questions above is daunting, it is manageable for someone who gains expertise in such things. It may not be done well, but it can be done well—with sufficient experience, managerial skill, wisdom, and knowledge.

What about more complicated matters—for example, a national health care system. What do government bureaucrats need to know to effectively run everything from allergy shots to cancer, from routine check-ups to Medicare, from cheap prescriptions to innovative research, from the rural poverty of Appalachia to the elites on the coasts? Well, we don’t have nearly enough time to get into all of that. But the point is clear enough: the “knowledge problem” is staggering for more complex matters and as we extend from local to state to federal governance.

Another concern is the question of motives and how they play out in different contexts. In the context of the market for asphalt, it’s astounding that few of those involved—the worker in the oil field and the person who produces the coffee he drinks, the salesperson and the clerical staff, the CEO and the janitor—perform their tasks to please people per se. Their motivations are mixed—from putting food on their table to buying a boat, from sleeping well at night to impressing their friends. A competitive market harnesses these motives to get people to serve customers (and society) effectively.

In political markets, these concerns are generally greater. It’s certainly possible that the primary aim of the bureaucrat is maximizing social well-being. Even if not, it’s possible that political pressures will curtail deviations from the ideal. But it’s also possible that we’ll see cronyism and graft, inefficiency and red tape, budget-maximization and over-spending. Of course, these worries are exacerbated by the high level of monopoly power in most government endeavors.

The lesson I have to teach is this: Even when government is a constitutional, ethical, and practical means to some end—on paper—be wary of the knowledge problem and the motives question for politicians and bureaucrats. In contrast to the foibles of political markets, have more faith that free people will respond favorably to the Invisible Hand of economic markets. I, Pothole—though seemingly simple—offer the miracle of my maintenance as testimony that this is a practical faith—as practical as the sun, the rain, and the roads.

Sixty years ago, the Public Choice Society was founded by Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, nearly coincident with the publication of their jointly authored book, The Calculus of Consent. A decade ago on the 50th occasion I was tasked with discussing the “Past, Present, and Future of Virginia Political Economy.” That paper (co-authored with Alain Marciano) was subsequently published in Public Choice. In it, Alain and I stressed the original impetus for the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy. We tell the story of Buchanan’s journey from the University of Virginia to Virginia Tech to George Mason University, his Nobel Prize and post-Nobel career. Buchanan’s efforts were met first with ideological resistance, then with methodological resistance, until finally finding a hospitable home. Buchanan and his colleagues between 1958-1968 are focused on contributing to the grand tradition of political economy as practiced in its finest hours from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, but with the sharpened intellectual tools of modern price theory as refined by the early neoclassical economists and culminating with Frank Knight. Still, critics outside of economics sought to discredit and delegitimize the work of the center as “ideological”.

Buchanan joined forces with Gordon Tullock at Virginia Tech, they narrowed their focus to the economics of politics—the persistent and consistent application of neoclassical economics to the analysis of political decision making. The public choice research program matured and was operationalized during the period from 1969-1982. But Buchanan also grew impatient with many aspects of that research program. If you carefully read his 1963 essay “What Should Economists Do?” he was already presenting his research program as distinct from a narrow rendering of neoclassical maximization and equilibrium theorizing. As Richard E. Wagner perceptively points out in Rethinking Public Choice (2022), neoclassical economic theory at this time came in two varieties: formal models of maximization and equilibrium (demonstrative reasoning), and an intuitive understanding of market theory and the functioning of the price system (plausible reasoning). Different public choice scholars followed either one or the other approach, with social choice theory the exemplar of the formal theory approach, and the Virginia School of Political Economy the exemplar of the price theoretic approach.

The work of the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech during the 1970s could be reasonably described as drawing out the implications of the economics of politics, rather than the more expansive program of political economy. Nevertheless, and despite the narrowed focus, the scholarly work of the Center for Study of Public Choice came under attack from within the economics department for methodological reasons. Buchanan, and his colleagues, were simply viewed as out of step with the modern science of economics; a criticism levelled by colleagues with much less impressive publication records than Buchanan. It clearly was the victory of mediocrity over excellence in academia, as Buchanan would note in a parting essay entitled “Dishwater of the Orthodoxy.”

Thus, it was time to move again, and dare to be Different. In many ways what the move to George Mason University permitted Buchanan et al to return to the vision of the original Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy, but with the hard-earned knowledge that the previous two decades of scientific struggle had taught. Alain and I conclude that the future of Virginia Political Economy will reside with those who continue to embrace this aspect of Buchanan’s project.

What has happened in the decade since the paper I wrote with Alain Marciano? Outside of economics and political economy there has been the rise of critical works on neoliberalism that seek to engage in the sort of broad-brush indictment of the public choice program such as Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, or Naomi Orekes and Erik Conway’s The Big Myth. To counter these sorts of interpretations, I have done extensive work in Buchanan’s archives. In these efforts to recapture the true purpose of the initiative, I stress the methodological and analytical discomfort with the rise of Samuelsonian neoclassical synthesis (see Paul Samuelson), the Knightian concern with practicing social science from the inside-out versus from the outside-in, and the implications for a functioning modern democratic society. So many subtle points in the Buchanan effort are lost when critics focus exclusively on the ideological and social philosophic position that Buchanan himself articulated in his writings. For one, they too often fail to see his position is an outcome of his analysis, not a hard prior. For another, they too often fail to understand the terms; Buchanan’s commitment to a free society is not some code for a libertarian paradise, but an invoking of the ancient notion of a society of the choosing of its citizens.

Many are keenly aware of this ongoing critical dialogue concerning neoliberalism and public choice, and many probably deem it a waste of time and energy. It is hard to persuade those who refuse to be persuaded by logic and evidence, because the narrative they paint is too convenient for their intellectual comfort. I personally think the crusade is worth the intellectual effort—though not to nudge those who view public choice as the work of an “evil genius” or part of a “neoliberal thought collective.” Rather, younger scholars in the social sciences and humanities should be able to judge us by how we reason, what arguments and evidence we marshal to our cause, and how we conduct ourselves in the wake of not just unfounded criticisms of public choice, but unfair character assassinations of the scholars who initiated the research program. But I will agree this is definitely not the most important development in the late decade.

“There are positive trends presenting opportunities for scholars in public choice if they stick to their knitting as found in those original meetings of sixty plus years ago.”

There are positive trends presenting opportunities for scholars in public choice if they stick to their knitting as found in those original meetings of sixty plus years ago.

First, I want to stress the great opportunity that the focus on Institutional Analysis in the work of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson presents for public choice scholars. They have put at the center of modern political economy the puzzle of predation, and the countervailing powers required to both empower the productive and protective state while constraining the predatory state.

Second, I want to stress the issue of “ideation” in historical political economy that Deirdre McCloskey and Joel Mokyr have put forward in their grand sweeping histories of modern economic growth. Public choice theory must come to a solid reckoning with the power of ideas and the role that ideology plays in the world. This is a topic that Robert Higgs raised in Crisis and Leviathan (1987), and Michael Munger developed in his book with Melvin Hinich, Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice (1996), and more recently in Dani Rodrik’s “When Ideas Trump Interests,” JEP (2014). Ideas in these presentations are not just a cover for interests, but a force in the world independent of interests and institutions, but which interacts with interests and institutions to shape the world we find ourselves occupying. It is, after all, ideas that inform us as to what it is that is in our interest to pursue.

Third, it is this interaction of ideas, interests, and institutions that must be a focal point of our studies in political economy. Many years ago, Chris Coyne, Peter Leeson, and I sought to develop this idea about “institutional stickiness” and how it relates to the transplanting of institutions in the development process. (See Boettke, Coyne and Leeson 2008) More recently, Stefan Voigt and others have been studying the question of constitutional compliance. Compliance has an obvious incentive component when we focus on enforcement, but it also has an epistemic dimension when we focus on acceptance and legitimacy. Voigt himself very early in his career had identified the intimate connection between norms, beliefs, and the acceptability or non-acceptability of the formal institutions in the transition economies. (See Voigt 1993)

Acemoglu and Robinson open the intellectual space for a focus on the constitutional project that follows from the paradox of government. They are not alone, I would point to Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast on constitutions, federalism, the violence trap and development, and liberty. As Weingast argues, serious research on this topic all but disappeared from economics and political science, yet it was a major theme in political economy as practiced in its finest hours. The “narrow corridor” in Acemoglu and Robinson is this pathway to the establishment of a functioning system of liberty and prosperity. The balance in their system is the tension between the state and society; these both must be empowered to check-mate the abuses of the other, but also empowered to provide the needed protection and basic public goods for human flourishing. We want a regime of liberty both for the protection of universal human rights and the mass flourishing that such regimes have historically been able to deliver for their citizens.

The fundamental question remains, how do we detail the path from a state that discriminates and dominates its citizens, or the absence of a functioning state, to a social arrangement that exhibits neither relationships of domination nor engages in discriminatory politics? As Rosolino Candela and I point out in “Productive Specialization, Peaceful Cooperation, and the Problem of the Predatory State” (2019), in addressing this issue we must be careful not to confuse descriptions of initial conditions with explanations of the evolutionary path. Too much of Acemoglu and Robinson is baked into those initial conditions, and too little explanation is provided of the mechanisms that get you inside the narrow corridor in the first instance and how to progress inside that corridor to be able to achieve a constitutional order that shackles Leviathan. How does a Myanmar of today become a Denmark of tomorrow? We cannot be content with saying that Myanmar is Myanmar because it is Myanmar, any more than we can be content with saying Denmark is Denmark because it is Denmark. There is no explanation there, only description.

The public choice and constitutional political economy tradition as developed by Buchanan and Tullock, but also by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom does postulate paths out of the Hobbesian jungle. Situations of conflict can be transformed into opportunities for peaceful social cooperation by changes in the structural rules under which we interact with one another. Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty (1975), Tullock’s Social Dilemma, Vincent Ostrom’s The Meaning of Democracy (1997), and Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) all postulate development paths in the political economy of rule-making. There is the possibility of freedom through constitutional contract. The Ostroms individually as well as jointly tackle the question of the construction of the common knowledge required to play cooperative social games in the first place.

When we confuse descriptions for explanations in political economy, we end up doing what Elinor Ostrom identified as institution-free institutional analysis. Genuine institutional analysis, on the other hand, must recognize the devil is always in the institutional details and explicate the dynamics of the mechanism(s) set in motion by those details. We seek to explain the variation in the pattern of outcomes we see in the world by variation in the institutions that individuals find themselves operating within. “Theories” that postulate that differences in people determine the differences in outcomes we observe are not really theories. We don’t need elaborate theory, as F. A. Hayek pointed out in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) if the claim is good people do good things and bad people do bad things. What requires our theoretical skill is to tease out how “bad people”, i.e., self-interested agents, can produce publicly desirable outcomes, and how “good people”, i.e., other regarding agents, can produce publicly undesirable outcomes. We need theory to articulate the invisible hand of the market, as well as how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Only when outcomes diverge from preferences do we need an explanation of the mechanisms at work that either give us an outcome greater than the sum of its parts, or less than that sum. It is the machinations of politics (or law or society) that shapes and directs human behavior. We need the discipline of the rational actor model, because it prevents us from postulating that some actors are ignorant and others are enlightened, but we also need only a very thin model of the rational actor that recognizes that in our striving we stumble, we have cognitive limitations and face transactional difficulties, and must cope with our ignorance as we engage in decision making under deep uncertainty.

This research program on endogenous rules still has theoretical legs, as well as practical significance in the field of development economics, and in political economy more generally. I hope to see more work along the lines of the individuals I mentioned above populate the pages of Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and more. There are talented scholars prepared to carry this research forward and are doing so in the field of historical political economy. It is not, and must not, just be about state capacity. It can and should be about self-governance in its great diversity of manifestations across time and place.

I mproving standards of living are something that we have mostly taken for granted in modern America. In fact, failing to produce sufficient increases in national income is one of the surest ways for a President to lose reelection (even if they have little control over it in the short run). But how much are living standards and income improving? Has growth slowed down in recent decades? Are we worse off than a generation ago? Both regular Americans and economic researchers have been asking these questions a lot lately. The debate often slips into dueling anecdotes or—even worse—wonky discussions of income measures and inflation adjustments. What’s the best way to look at this data and answer those questions? I’ll try to give you a guide to the data, without getting too much into the weeds. Well, maybe a little bit. To give you a preview of the conclusion: while the prices of many categories of goods and services have risen rapidly, Americans have continued to see their standard of living rise in recent decades, properly measured. Now, let’s talk about measurement.

The Long-Run View There isn’t much disagreement that in the really long-run, say 200-300 years, standards of living have improved significantly. By almost any measure—income, health, education, freedom—people today are better off in 2023 than they were in 1823. I really like a summary of the global data for six measures that Max Roser wrote for Our World in Data. You could do a similar analysis of the United States over our entire history. For example, life expectancy at birth in the United States was around 40 years in the early nineteenth century. Today, it’s approaching 80 years (though the pandemic along with the surge in opioid overdoses have set us back a bit). Measuring the increase in income is more challenging than measuring life expectancy, but many economic historians have dug into the available data and given us some useful estimates. For example, Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson report that average compensation of production workers (non-supervisory manufacturing laborers) was about 4 cents per hour in 1800. Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson also estimate that Gross Domestic Product per capita was about 90 dollars per year in 1800. GDP is a widely used, sometimes criticized, and sometimes misunderstood measure of average incomes, but it is one that we are able to approximately estimate for very long-past periods. But those numbers from 1800 are a bit unsatisfying. How do they compare to wages and incomes today? We know that a dollar doesn’t buy as much “stuff” today as it did in the past. But how much less “stuff” does the dollar buy? This is where the familiar, but also often misunderstood, concept of “inflation adjustment” comes in. If your income triples, but prices also double, you are better off, but you are not three times better off. Inflation adjusting is a way to answer the “how much?” question of improvements in income over time. Economic historians have developed long-run measures of consumer prices for purposes of inflation adjustment. The most common measure is a backwards extension of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, which officially only goes back to 1913, but once again, Officer and Williamson have combined all the best historical estimates to extend it back to 1774. The CPI also has some adjustments for the improvement in quality of products, even if this is not perfectly captured—stay tuned for much more on quality improvements later on in this essay. For the latest data in 2022, we see that consumer prices are about 24 times higher, on average, than they were in 1800. That’s a lot of inflation! But when we look at average incomes, as measured by GDP, it is an astonishing 842 times higher than in 1800. Putting these two together, we can say that real, or inflation-adjusted, GDP per person in the United States is about 38 times higher in 2022 than it was in 1800. Economic historians still might debate the exact figure—is it actually 40 or 50 times, or maybe a little less than 38?—but no one debates the direction of improvement. It’s also useful to point out that the past 200-300 years have been unusual in human history. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey likes to call this the “hockey stick” of human history, as a very long-run chart of economic growth looks a long stick with a sharp blade at the end.

The Medium-Run View of Income Growth While there is little dispute about the long-run, there has much debate about the prospects of Americans in recent decades. How has the last generation fared economically? It depends on what data you look at. And here’s where it gets interesting. Measures such as Gross Domestic Product show continued progress. Adjusted for inflation, GDP per capita roughly doubled between 1982 and 2022. That’s pretty good growth. Other measures of economic well-being have shown improvement as well, though not quite as much as GDP. For example, real median family income has grown by about 40 percent over the past 40 years. Not all of the data paints as rosy a picture. If we look at average hourly earnings for private sector, non-supervisory workers and adjust for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, we see the shocking fact that there has been essentially no net growth since 1973. That’s 50 years of stagnation! That’s not because nothing was happening. By this measure, real wages were falling from about 1973 until the mid-1990s, after which they rose again to roughly equal their 1973 levels recently. Here’s where things get a little technical and confusing. The Consumer Price Index is a good measure of prices over time, but it fails to take into account a number of important factors, such as that consumers will change their behavior when prices of particular goods rise by buying other, cheaper goods. Combined with some other biases, the Boskin Commission (established by the U.S. Senate to study this issue in the 1990s) found that the CPI tends to overstate inflation by about 1 percentage point per year. This may sound small, but when inflation is only about 2-3 percent per year, if 1 percentage point of that is an overstatement, it really adds up over time. How much does it add up? We can make the comparison by looking at an alternative price index, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index. The PCE corrects for some of the biases in the CPI. And it makes a big difference, as Michael Strain has explained in more detail. Here’s the cumulative effect: while CPI-adjusted wages are essentially flat (no increase!) since 1973, PCE-adjusted wages have increased about 30 percent. That’s not as much as GDP per capita or median incomes, but it’s very different from the pessimistic CPI-adjusted picture.

Beyond Inflation Adjustments: The Cost of Thriving Index A new analysis of incomes in recent decades has challenged these results on a number of fronts. In 2020, Oren Cass published the first edition of his “Cost of Thriving Index,” which was updated in 2023 and published by his American Compass think tank. Cass’s COTI is much more pessimistic about how American families are doing, suggesting that it is much harder for a family with one earner to purchase the necessities of life today than in 1985. How much harder? COTI tells us that in 1985, the median male earner could pay for five basic necessities for his family (groceries, a car, a home, health insurance, and a college education) with about 40 weeks of work. By 2022, COTI tells us that it would take about 62 weeks of work to pay for these same necessities. That’s not a typo; it’s not 52 weeks. According to COTI, it takes more than a full year of work for a man to purchase these goods and services. That means that men must take on second jobs, women must work outside the home, or a family must go without some of these goods and services or go into deep debt to buy them. None of these seems to be an ideal situation, especially if the family would prefer the wife to stay at home. How does Cass arrive at this conclusion? The first important step is that he says inflation adjustments are misleading. Yes, the quality of, say, minivans has improved. But the CPI treats these quality improvements in a curious way: it says the goods haven’t gotten more expensive. They have gotten more expensive, which is bad, but they are also nicer, which is good. But for a family struggling to make ends meet, perhaps they would prefer a lower quality minivan, but you can’t just say, “Hold the airbag and anti-lock brakes, please.” (Cars in 1984 didn’t have these features, nor air conditioning in many cases). In short, Cass looks at the actual costs of goods and services, rather than a quality-adjusted cost. But he also gets many of the costs wrong. In a recent report published by the American Enterprise Institute, Scott Winship and I analyze Cass’s COTI in detail and find many errors. Some of the errors and omissions are so significant as to almost completely eliminate the apparent increase of 22 weeks of work that Oren Cass claims are necessary to maintain a lifestyle like that of 1985. For example, while health insurance costs have surely risen significantly in recent years, Cass dramatically overstates the cost of health insurance to a family by including the employer share of health insurance. Workers are not paying this share out of their wages—it may indeed lower their wages, but Cass’s method is double counting (or double subtracting, if you will). Other errors show up for most of the five spending categories. A major omission is to consider the effect of income taxes, which definitely do come out of a worker’s wages. Cass includes no provision for income taxes. But while incomes taxes do reduce take-home pay, thus requiring even more hours work, what’s important for this analysis is the change in income-tax liability for a median-income family from 1985 to 2022. Due to a number of changes in tax law, the biggest being the Child Tax Credit, families today will pay a significantly smaller share of their income in federal income taxes, falling from about 16 percent to just 6 percent of their annual income. These tax changes significantly reduce the number of weeks per year needed to pay the bills. Winship and I make a few other improvements to the analysis. Importantly, we consider not just men over 25, but both women and men. We also include workers under the age of 25, so long as they are working full-time. Cass does have a separate analysis just for women, but we instead include all workers together in one version of our analysis. “Families are 15 percent better off, rather than 36 percent worse off, as Cass’s analysis suggests. And keep in mind this doesn’t include quality improvements to goods and services, which have been substantial since 1985.” Including the improvements to the costs of goods and services, the inclusion of federal taxes, and broadening the workers we consider (to all full-time workers 16 and older), we find dramatically different results than Cass. Families are 15 percent better off, rather than 36 percent worse off, as Cass’s analysis suggests. And keep in mind this doesn’t include quality improvements to goods and services, which have been substantial since 1985. Forget about air bags in minivans for a moment, and think about how much better healthcare is in 2023. Many of the procedures, drugs, and technologies that we use today weren’t even available in 1985—at any cost. By including these quality improvements, we finally conclude that the median family—even if they only chose to have one spouse working—is about 53 percent better off than 1985. This still falls short of the roughly doubling of GDP per capita during this time period, but it’s still a huge improvement in our standard of living. For more on these topics, see “Jeremy Horpedahl on The Real Cost of Thriving Index.” Podcast episode with host Juliette Sellgren. AdamSmithWorks, September 15, 2023.

“What would Adam Smith think about ‘vocations’? Part 2,” by Janet Bufton and Christy Lynn. AdamSmithWorks, undated.

Standards of Living and Modern Economic Growth, by John V.C. Nye. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. The American family continues to thrive, despite many headwinds in recent years such as growing government, the rampant inflation of the past few years, and two major recessions in the past fifteen years.

Footnotes [1] Max Roser, “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it”. Available online at Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions [2] Available online at Measuring Worth: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/uswage/ [3] Available online at Measuring Worth: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/ [4] Available online from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI [5] Michael R. Strain, “Have Wages Stagnated for Decades in the US?” Available online from the American Enterprise Institute at https://www.aei.org/articles/have-wages-stagnated-for-decades-in-the-us/ [6] The Cost of Thriving Index is available online from American Compass at https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/ [7] Scott Winship and Jeremy Horpedahl, “The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost-of-Thriving Index.” Available online from the American Enterprise Institute at https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-cost-of-thriving-has-fallen-correcting-and-rejecting-the-american-compass-cost-of-thriving-index/

The line outside the old ’20s gothic theater slinked around the corner off Broadway. Not that off Broadway. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, at the newly redone Ace Hotel, which, on this night in mid-September, sold out all 1,600 seats. No big musician was performing inside. No television show or movie was premiering (there aren’t any in LA, or anywhere, right now).

The crowds were filing in to watch four women debate whether the sexual revolution has failed. The event, styled as an old-fashioned boxing match—“CLASH OF THE FEMALE TITANS,” the program read. “FIGHT 7pm”—was put on and moderated by Bari Weiss and her new media company, the Free Press, and is the first in a series of such events. The prompt was to be answered by the panel—made up of the singer and Elon Musk ex Grimes and ex-Muslim podcaster Sarah Haider on one side and one half of Red Scare Anna Khachiyan and author Louise Perry on the other—but the very fact that four accomplished women were selling out an evening hosted by a lesbian new media titan (and by the fact that, well, how could you even really argue in the affirmative?) was answered before it started. But the question wasn’t the draw.

The room was filled with throngs of Red Scare girlies and Boomer men in blazers with their bespectacled wives and bros with incel haircuts and, inexplicably, a group of extremely handsome priests, or handsome men dressed like priests, a Fleabag fever dream come to life. Amanda Fortini, Elon Gold, Aella, Dasha Nekrasova, Coleman Hughes, Alex Lee Moyer, Buck Angel, Jessica Reed Kraus. A lot of people whose only unifying descriptor could be “looks like they listen to podcasts.” “This is the Met Gala! For ideas!” one blond in a red blouse declared as she greeted her friend. It could have more likely existed in Bushwick, really. But here they were, in Hollywood, filling red velvet seats, fitted with their own Free Press branded totes (tickets cost up to $165 a piece, merch was sold by the door) as Notorious B.I.G. blasted. Comedian Tim Dillon opened the evening by poking fun at homeless people in Los Angeles, moved into how bored he was by the war in Ukraine, and noted that this is the first generation of kids who will be gifted “cocks and pussies” by their parents. The crowd purred. The room was electrified.

The marquee at The Theater at the Ace Hotel on Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2023, in Los Angeles, CA. By Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images.

What played out in that theater was the change of guard amongst some of the city’s most esteemed culture players—the land of the elite, Hollywood liberal shape-shifting into a post–#MeToo believe-nothing mindset. In major cities, the upper classes are coalescing around a sense of their own disenfranchisement—a flip of the 2016 script—and a number of self-identifying (or formerly self-identifying liberals) fear that the culture has come for them, with millennial mobs lurking around every corner, like little woke assassins. They feel suddenly afraid to say what they think at a dinner party, never mind on social media or at the office. For all of the hand-wringing about people on the coasts missing what was happening in the middle of the country leading up to Trump’s election, there’s the notion now that people on the coasts aren’t paying attention to this shift within the coasts—an ideological power shift that could shift culture and politics and what’s “safe” to say and who it’s “safe” to say it to. And so a room like the one Weiss pulled together was meant to be a relief. It is the 2023 version of the Wing for the exact opposite kinds of people who would have wished for the Wing. Everyone just waiting to exhale.

This is Weiss’s premise, and business has blossomed. The Free Press has 450,000 subscribers (free and paid combined) to the work of about 25 staffers in offices in both New York and Los Angeles, ostensibly. She’s recorded around 150 episodes of her own podcast, Honestly, on which she has interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu and Kim Kardashian, Eric Adams and Rick Rubin, Bill Barr and Emily Oster, and a handful of 2024 presidential hopefuls. Her network also produced the much-hyped “Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” published an account of a pediatric clinic treating trans kids, and, without hesitation, dove headfirst into the center of every culture war. She and her wife, Nellie Bowles, who also cut her teeth at The New York Times before each of them ultimately quit after what Weiss felt was constant bullying from people who disagreed with them, moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2020, and have, in many ways, become toasts of the town. They are intellectuals in a place not known for thinkers. Rooms stand still when they talk. (“We have been at dinners here that never in my wildest…” Weiss joked when I brought this up. “We feel like interlopers. But somehow we get invited [because] we are girls with glasses in LA.”)

The novelty of people like Weiss and Bowles in LA—people who outwardly push boundaries as they do, whose very presence makes those who are too afraid of what they’d call Wrongthink bullying feel at ease and enlivened—has allowed them to build roots and wings for the Free Press. “I don’t think we could have built this in New York even for a day,” Bowles told me the morning of the debate. (Not that there aren’t independent outlets in New York, of course. But perhaps legacy media casts a shorter shadow in LA.) “We’d be surrounded by the negative media world day in and day out and we’d be reactive to that. In LA, politics are relevant but they’re not the core of everyone’s life. It allowed us to build something that’s positive and open and bigger, and let it be a happier experience. There’s truth to the idea that it’s a place that’s really good to build a new thing.”

After two decades, I have decided to relinquish my full professorship in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London for the University of Buckingham.

Why leave such a cozy sinecure?

Birkbeck’s uncertain financial position played a role, but my departure came at the end of a 5-year period of steady hostility from radical staff and students inside and outside the university. By 2018 I had begun to voice my views more forthrightly, in the press, in social media, and in my new book on populism, Whiteshift, published by Penguin. I became publicly involved in the government’s Academic Freedom Bill, which was granted royal assent this year. Throughout, I was unsparing in my criticism of wokeness, which I define as the sacralisation of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups.

This public profile placed me in the crosshairs of a well-organised network of radical students and academics

This public profile placed me in the crosshairs of a well-organised network of radical students and academics inside and outside the university who took it upon themselves to police the boundaries of acceptable debate on campus. Accordingly, I was the target of a number of Twitter pile-ons organised by student activists based in the Student Union and their online allies, calling for my ouster. An open letter denouncing me circulated online, calling on the university to fire me. In a story that made the higher education press, a young academic ideologue in my department wrote a long resignation essay, claiming I had created a hostile environment for her while suggesting that my emotionally traumatic writings forced her out of academia (in fact she had taken a job next door at SOAS).

These internal activists came together to issue several formal complaints, which, due to the nature of British universities’ policies and procedures, tends to almost always lead to internal investigations. Until you have received an email informing you that you are under investigation and must attend a tribunal, you cannot understand the psychological impact of this tactic. The spectre of unspecified penalties sets the mind racing toward the possibility of termination — this in a collegiate profession where there are hundreds of applications for each post and gossip travels fast. Once out, getting back in is near-impossible. The process is the punishment.

Most academic colleagues I had known for years remained civil in the midst of it all. The top levels of the university were pragmatic and non-ideological. However, there is no question that these campaigns helped create a cloud of radioactivity around me. Others knew what had been written about me, I knew they knew it, and they knew I knew they knew it. This rendered ordinary interactions more awkward. When the left outnumbers the right 9 to 1 among British social science academics and a third wouldn’t hire a Brexit supporter, there is also a reflexive sympathy for those who don the mantle of anti-racism, anti-transphobia or anti-conservatism. Some suggested that my social media activity was damaging morale and even recruitment, a statistical nonsense. A number of students gave me bad teaching reviews in the year the publicity hit, though this effect disappeared the following year.

When the university experienced financial difficulties, our department was amalgamated with less rigorous, more activist, units where I had more detractors. More seriously, I worried that activists in the new super-department could derail my research in the future by blocking it in the Ethics Committee, one of the most illiberal features of the modern academy. Though my research only uses commercial survey platforms and thus should not by any standard be delayed or blocked, these committees have become increasingly interventionist and moralistic, a soft underbelly where woke censors can police research boundaries. I knew firsthand of several colleagues whose work was blocked this way, for ideological reasons. I was willing to be a recluse and exist in my own networks — this is how dissenters such as gender critical feminists manage to survive in the modern university. But I could not accept having my research censored.

On a more positive note, I had also become aware of the University of Buckingham as a potential “safe space” for free enquiry. A free speech university like the University of Austin, but one that is already established and merely needs to be enhanced and developed, it was founded by Margaret Thatcher in 1976 and has been led by a series of conservative or classical liberal Vice-Chancellors. Thatcher herself served as Chancellor in the 90s. Though most of its staff and students probably still lean left — this is a university after all — it scored top spot in the country for freedom of speech on the National Student Survey (the question was only introduced this year). It also has an active student free speech society and several conservative, classical liberal or centrist staff in the humanities and social sciences.

Its new Vice-Chancellor, James Tooley, is a strong proponent of academic freedom. For instance, in 2022, the university awarded an honorary doctorate to Tony Sewell, author of the pathbreaking Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) Report — after Nottingham University withdrew its offer of an honorary doctorate to Sewell. It also helped sponsor the important Battle of Ideas festival in London. The vision is not to create a conservative alternative, but rather a balanced free space.

This month, I join Buckingham as a Professor of Politics. I believe it can be a beachhead for academic freedom and viewpoint diversity, the only point of light in an increasingly monocultural higher education ecosystem. Mine is a path trod by Roger Scruton, who also taught at Birkbeck for over 20 years before taking up a post at Buckingham later in life, which he described in 2019 as “a unique institution, probably the least politically correct university in Europe.”

In January 2024, I am launching a new low-cost online course open to the global public on Woke: the Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology (People can express interest using this link). This is an ideology that is reshaping western society and politics, yet there isn’t a single course on it that I am aware of in any university in the world. Most academics are more interested in criticising those who resist woke than putting their institutional belief system under the microscope.

At the same time, I will establish the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, whose mission will be to pursue countercultural social science and humanities research. While the US has some 150 non-leftist research centres, nothing of the kind exists in Britain.

Progressive conformity and cancel culture are distorting the teaching and research mission of universities. Between the extremely controversial (ethics of paedophilia, race and IQ) and the progressive-controlled monoculture of academia is a vast and growing zone of unspoken truth. The system raises high bars to work that challenges leftist narratives (i.e. that race or gender income gaps might not be caused by discrimination, or that the connection between LGBT identity and poor mental health may not be due to prejudice). Yet without studies that can give us a more accurate picture of social problems, we cannot hope to resolve them. Simply sticking ‘prejudice and discrimination’ on a problem will not address it if these are not its root causes.

My aim is to teach and research on topics, or from perspectives, that are difficult or hazardous in the contemporary university. This can begin to elevate truth rather than identity leftism as the highest value of the university, rebalancing academia’s lost viewpoint diversity and helping it to regain the trust it is losing among many in the public.

In my last two essays, I looked first rightward and then leftward for insights into the challenges we face and how best to surmount them. Now I’ll look back at my old intellectual home, libertarianism. Although its relevance to contemporary problems has been in decline so far in the 21st century, when I look toward the longer term, I get the sense that at least some of my old libertarian instincts will prove to be vitally important in steering us away from catastrophe and toward a flourishing future. It usually begins with Ayn Rand – so wrote Jerome Tuccille in his 1971 book by that name about the early days of the libertarian movement. Well, that’s how it was for me. In the summer of 1978, between sophomore and junior years in high school, I read Atlas Shrugged at the recommendation of my parents. I was immediately hooked: I soon gobbled up everything she had written and started thinking of myself as a “student of Objectivism.” So why did I respond so positively to Rand? Looking back, it seems overdetermined. On the purely personal level, I had spent much of my middle school years getting picked on for being the smart kid, so a revenge fantasy in which the smart kids grew up, went on strike, and brought the world crashing down around them was pretty irresistible. More broadly, the one thing everybody agreed on in the 70s was that things were falling apart; the euphoric bender of the 60s had been followed by a crushing hangover. For me the contrast was especially vivid: in my boyhood we walked on the moon and planned to settle the solar system, while by my teenage years we were told there were too many people and not enough energy and the future would be one of limits and shortages and retreat. So reading Rand’s account of how the principles behind communism – which I had been raised to see as pure evil – were spreading around the world and robbing us of our future, I now had a compelling answer as to what had gone wrong. Instead of gloomily looking out on a mysteriously broken world, it now seemed to me that I had been born in the midst of a great, world-historical struggle. And I wanted to spend my life in the fight. My Ayn Rand phase lasted through college. Interestingly, it was an encounter with Edmund Burke that marked the beginning of the end. I was a history major at Princeton, and I did my senior thesis on the political philosophy of Thomas Paine. (The puzzle I was trying to solve: how could someone who came across so fiercely libertarian end up as one of the early advocates of the modern welfare state? Needless to say, this seems less puzzling to me now.) I remember diving into Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (to which Paine famously responded with The Rights of Man), eagerly anticipating collecting a trove of howlers that Paine would blow out of the sky. But I was stunned to find, not some obscurantist rejection of reason and celebration of blind faith, but rather a surgical use of reason to dissect and expose the limits of reason in remaking society from scratch. (To be fair, I did find some howlers as well, like his maudlin tribute to Marie Antoinette.) The next fall, starting law school at Harvard, at the urging of my classmate David Frum I read F.A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. I had taken a look at Hayek in college, but as a red-hot Randian still I found him far too “wet” for my taste. Now, with Burke having softened me up, reading Hayek was an electric experience. Here was a case for the free society on philosophical grounds almost diametrically opposed to those I had been occupying. According to Rand, starting with self-evident axioms we can deduce our way with rock-solid certainty to the moral superiority of laissez faire capitalism. Hayek, by contrast, argued for freedom on the basis of our ignorance: the workings of society are far too complex and far too dependent on trial-and-error evolution for any blueprints for total social reconstruction to be trusted. Seeing that case laid out, it immediately struck me that Hayek’s critical anti-utopianism made a much firmer foundation for my political ideals than Rand’s swaggering certainty. Over the course of law school, I read virtually everything he had written as well as many of the authors he cited (Hume, Tocqueville, Acton, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, Michael Oakeshott, etc.). By my mid-20s, then, I had assumed the political identity I would hold for the next two decades: a Hayekian “classical liberal.” I had never been tempted by anarcho-capitalism (it always just seemed wacky to me), and now I dropped the insistence that government be confined to the “minimal state” of courts, police, and national defense forces. Seeing some ground for light regulation and a modest safety net, I nonetheless considered the contemporary welfare state to be a run-amok Leviathan in need of dramatic downsizing. In my mind, the central political challenge of our time was devising workable restraints that could keep the state from overwhelming society. Out of law school I went into private practice and wandered into the field of international trade regulation, defending foreign exporters from complaints of “unfair trade” under the U.S. antidumping and countervailing duty laws. It was a great fit personally: I got paid well for following my free-trade convictions, plus I got to travel all over East Asia meeting with clients. (I ended up doing more work in Thailand than anywhere else. That’s how I came to fall in love with the country and launch the chain of circuitous events that led me decades later to move here.) But I never had any intention to stay in private practice for my whole career. I didn’t know what I wanted to do – work on Capitol Hill, or on campaigns, or in a think tank – but I knew I wanted to be in the fray. As soon as I got out of law school, I started writing op-eds and magazine articles and book reviews for conservative and libertarian publications, getting rejected regularly but eventually building up a nice portfolio of published writing. On the strength of those efforts I got a job at my favorite think tank, the Cato Institute – first helping Bill Niskanen to edit Regulation magazine; then later, after a few years back at my old law firm (it’s a long story – I decided I hadn’t fully scratched the lawyer itch), as the director of Cato’s new Center for Trade Policy Studies. As my interests and organizational responsibilities broadened, I became Cato’s vice president for research. Over the course of the new century, though, my libertarianism gradually unraveled. Becoming familiar with the shocking extent of mass incarceration and the outlier status of the U.S. in this regard led me to a broader appreciation of the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow – and ultimately to a clean break with the libertarian insistence that only government coercion (and not cultural norms) can create unfreedom. Around the same time, the increasing prominence of the debate over income and wealth inequality forced me to recognize that a rising tide wasn’t lifting all boats in the way that I expected. And my growing disgust with the incompetence of the George W. Bush administration – especially due to my tardy but eventual recognition that the Iraq War had been a dreadful mistake – and the increasingly illiberal anti-intellectualism of conservatism caused me to stop seeing myself as located on the political right. I was born in the Deep South and my parents had been fervent Goldwater supporters: my very first memory is being teased by cousins for wearing an “AuH20” (for “gold” and “water”) cowboy hat after he had lost. My first independent political opinion was breaking with my parents, who dutifully supported Ford, and rooting for Reagan in the 1976 nomination fight – I didn’t want to give back the Panama Canal! I cast my first vote for Reagan for president as an 18 year-old freshman in 1980, and from then through the 2004 election I don’t believe I ever voted for a Democrat (and I don’t think I’ve voted for a Republican since). Yes I was a libertarian, but I was also a Cold War hawk (as was Rand, in contrast to most libertarians), so while I never cottoned to social conservatism I so strongly favored the GOP on economics and foreign policy that I was able to overlook what generally seemed to me to be lip service to the religious right. Especially after my belated opposition to the Iraq War, that calculus changed as my larger foreign policy position shifted away from hawkish conservatism. At around the same time, the collapse of Bush’s plans to partially privatize Social Security convinced me that a major overhaul of middle class entitlements was politically hopeless – and that the GOP wasn’t up to pulling it off even if the votes were there. The limited-government agenda had basically shriveled down to rote support for cutting taxes – and I came to see that what was called “starving the beast” actually encouraged higher spending by reducing the marginal cost of government. So my attachment to conservatism’s economic agenda weakened substantially. Meanwhile, the FoxNewsification of the GOP base was now well underway, and it seemed like all the energy on the right had shifted toward anti-intellectual and illiberal populism: the turn against immigration, the embrace of torture, the obsession with gay marriage, the Terri Schiavo debacle, and on and on. Honestly it all seems so quaint and tame now compared to how things have degenerated, but by 2006 I saw populism taking over the right and I knew I wanted no part of it. Having intellectually disconnected from the right, it was now vividly apparent to me how much the libertarian movement – which styled itself as beyond left and right – had been shaped and indeed deformed by its long cohabitation with conservatism. And so, without fully realizing what I was doing at the time, I started wandering away from my intellectual home of the past twenty years in search of something new. My first foray into heterodoxy was a piece I wrote for The New Republic at the end of 2006 that a clever, anonymous headline writer titled “Liberaltarians.” This idea for a new intellectual synthesis – “a movement that, at the philosophical level, seeks some kind of reconciliation between Hayek and Rawls,” as I put it in that piece – started me down the path that leads to where I am today. Tensions between me and Cato’s senior leadership grew to the point that I left in 2010 for the Kauffman Foundation. A board coup at Kauffman, though, ousted the president who hired me and left me without a future there, so by 2012 I was back at Cato, where I tried to stay out of trouble by focusing on the 21st century slowdown in economic growth. My search for a liberaltarian approach to the problem led ultimately to my teaming up with Steve Teles to write The Captured Economy. Then came Trump, and my deep discomfort with the extent to which some Cato scholars and lots of Cato donors went happily along for the ride. In the wake of the election, the Niskanen Center – founded by my long-time Cato colleague and friend Jerry Taylor – decided to start an “Open Society Project” to counter the rise of authoritarian populism here and abroad. Jerry asked me to direct it, so in the summer of 2017 I moved to Niskanen. I still thought of myself as some kind of modified libertarian when I got there, but it wasn’t too long before I decided the label no longer really fit. In retrospect, my own intellectual journey synced up quite nicely with that of the larger world. Assigning beginning and end dates to historical periods is always an exercise in false precision, but it can’t be too far off to say that the neoliberal era began in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and ended 30 years later with the global financial crisis. My own personal libertarian era also began in 1978, and by 2008 I was already running with the liberaltarian heresy that would eventually carry me away from libertarianism altogether. The upshot is that I spent the bulk of my professional life trying to advance a creed I no longer hold. How do I make sense of that now? My take is that libertarianism is in possession of some important partial truths – in particular, that competitive markets are an astonishingly useful social technology, entrepreneurial trial-and-error is essential to driving economic innovation, governments can fail badly even when backed by the best of intentions, and state power can use the cover of good intentions to commit horrors. The fundamental error of libertarianism is mistaking these partial truths for the full truth. (For my more detailed thoughts on where the libertarian movement went wrong, check out this trio of essays.) When libertarianism burst onto the scene and rose to prominence during the 1960s and 70s, the partial truths championed by libertarians had become highly underrated. One-third of humanity lived under regimes dedicated to the proposition that private property and markets had no role in economic life, enormous welfare states and regulatory edifices had been constructed in the advanced democracies, and the smart set spied a future where East and West would converge as the communist bloc gradually democratized and the capitalist bloc gradually socialized. In these circumstances, the growing prominence of libertarian ideas was at the very least a useful thermostatic corrective. By the dawn of the 21st century, though, the alignment between the partial truths of libertarianism and the challenges of the day had slipped considerably. Climate change, a deepening class divide, a slowdown in economic dynamism in part due to declining public investment in R&D: although there are certainly particular libertarian-friendly policies that are part of an effective response to all these difficulties, in broad brush it’s difficult to look at the world’s major problems today and see “make government smaller” as a plausible summary of what needs to be done. Libertarian ideas are sometimes useful tools for improving the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state, but there are lots of other important tools that need to be in the box as well. So that’s the story of how libertarian ideas changed my life, and how I gradually wandered away from the faith. But here’s the twist: as I look out into the farther future and try to make sense of the fundamental, long-term challenges that confront us, I see one of libertarianism’s partial truths growing in relevance. Indeed, I think that it may well end up assuming decisive importance, ultimately defining the difference between “living wisely and agreeably and well” and slipping into dystopia. This partial truth is the one I take to be the ur-libertarian idea, the fundamental impulse behind the entire ideological construction. Here is its most famous formulation: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Contemporary libertarians focus their suspicion of centralized power exclusively on the state and its coercive powers, and I agree that is where the most acute danger lies. But as I wrote recently, the unhealthiest concentrations of power in contemporary democracies are not those of political power within the state, but those of broader social power within the professional and managerial elite that controls both public and private sectors. In our post-industrial information economies, talent and resources and initiative and influence have become heavily concentrated within the top 20 percent or so of society – and the elite itself is as top-heavy as the overall society.  This isn’t the kind of power imbalance that contemporary libertarians have eyes to see, but Tocqueville’s description of the soft despotism possible under democracy is hauntingly apt. Such a despotism doesn’t “torment,” but rather “degrades”; it “does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see the malaise gripping the United States and other advanced democracies in the 21st century as the discontents of mass learned helplessness under an “immense and tutelary power” – in which the capacity to control one’s own life and shape one’s own community has been gradually drained away by outsourcing to the market and the state. I fear that the inertia of contemporary trends threatens to carry us toward worse forms of despotism, with a central authority that torments as well as degrades. On the one hand, it seems likelier than not that the ongoing progress of AI and automation will work to further marginalize ordinary workers, and that consequently their dependence on government for income support – perhaps in the form of wage subsidies, or a universal basic income – will grow. Meanwhile, that same progress in AI and automation is giving new, expanded powers to governments to monitor and manipulate not only people’s actions but their thoughts and feelings as well. And both of those trends are playing out in the advanced democracies against a backdrop of ongoing social disintegration. With the center driven by an imperative to bring everything under expert managerial control and a periphery plagued by demoralization and dysfunction, the temptation of central authorities to use a firmer hand to push back against the chaos of social breakdown may prove difficult to resist. Meanwhile, in the larger world there is ample reason to worry that the current global democratic recession will be long-lasting. I can think of no stouter defense against such dismal possibilities than a successful “economic independence” movement along the lines I have been advocating on this blog. As I put it in an earlier essay:  A successful economic independence movement, by contrast, offers a path to a more inclusive society in a way that reduces exposure to domination from all sources. Greater self-sufficiency at the household and local levels creates a measure of freedom from the system as a whole — that is, from both the market and the state. And I would argue that, for any society with a sizeable percentage of the population enjoying such material independence, the prospects for maintaining freedom for everyone in that society would be brightened considerably. Independent sources of income and wealth translate into independent social power, and therefore political power with which to check the expansion of government control.  When I first introduced this idea of an economic independence movement, I presented it as a response to capitalism’s crisis of inclusion. The labor market is failing to provide a path to flourishing for most people, as the importance of ordinary workers’ economic contributions has been marginalized by automation and globalization. Meanwhile, the personal connections to family, faith, and community that are so essential to flourishing are weakening as well – in large part because these face-to-face relationships have been drained of their functional significance by outsourcing to the market and state. In response to these ills, I’ve proposed giving people an alternative pathway to flourishing outside the labor market by making it possible for households, neighborhoods, and communities to provide more for themselves – and in the process revitalize their personal relationships by reconnecting them to practical functions. When presented this way, the idea of an economic independence movement comes across as a communitarian initiative, and indeed that’s a fair characterization. Yet at the same time, the dramatic decentralization of economic and social life made possible by such a movement can be seen as libertarian: a society in which domination from the center has been significantly rolled back is a freer society. Here it’s useful to introduce libertarian political theorist (and Niskanen senior fellow) Jacob Levy’s distinction between rationalist and pluralist liberalism – a distinction that runs throughout the greater house of liberalism, including the libertarian wing. In his book Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, Levy argues that the larger liberal tradition comprises two conflicting strains: rationalism, or the belief that rights are best protected by a common set of rules applicable to all; and pluralism, or the belief that the defense of liberty depends primarily on the existence of robust intermediate groups (families, churches, unions, community organizations) that interpose themselves between individuals and the central authority. According to Levy, these two contending strains are ultimately irreconcilable: the more robust the rights of free association in intermediate groups, the less possible it is to guarantee equal treatment for all. The greater powers you give the central authority to combat unfreedom from below in the form of oppressive smaller groups, the greater the vulnerability to unfreedom from above in the form of the central authority’s abuse of its expanded powers. We can never achieve a full and stable synthesis; the best we can do is maintain some kind of uneasy shifting balance. Another libertarian political theorist, Chandran Kukathas, has fleshed out the rationalist and pluralist variants of the radical libertarian ideal in a fascinating essay titled “Two Constructions of Libertarianism.” For the former, he posits an ideal polity known as the “Union of Liberty”; for the latter, the “Federation of Liberty.” Both polities are founded on the libertarian principle that no person may use or threaten physical violence against the person or property of others. They differ markedly, though, in how they deal with the people in their society who don’t accept libertarian principles. In the Federation of Liberty, they are allowed to form communities and live as they wish, provided they do not aggress against others outside their community. Within their communities, they may have any rules they want, including even practicing slavery. When people in such illiberal communities have their rights violated, they can leave if they’re able, but there is no general right to defend the rights of others. Within the overall federation, then, there may be a great deal of unfreedom within communities, but between them “free trade with all, but entanglements with none” is the rule. In the Union of Liberty, on the other hand, no one is free to violate the principles of libertarianism. If you don’t accept them, you are of course free to waive your rights in conjunction with others’ waiving theirs, so voluntary associations that deviate widely from libertarian principles are possible. But no one can sell himself into slavery, so people are free to break their contracts and pay appropriate compensation when they no longer wish to belong to any association. Of course, since this is a society of human beings, rights violations occur regularly, and so a strong central authority has been established to determine when rights are violated and what responses are appropriate. And once a strong central authority exists, it’s vulnerable to being captured by the most powerful groups within society – at which point the guarantor of freedom can be used to extinguish it instead. Kukathas declares his preference for the Federation of Liberty – in the end, because he worries more about creeping unfreedom from above than even widespread unfreedom from below. “The case for the Federalist position is grounded in a conviction that power ought not to be entrenched,” he argues. “No power should be established as the final court of appeal from which no dissent is possible. Indeed, if anything is fundamental to libertarianism, it is the conviction that dissenters are tolerated or allowed to go their own way – free to exit from arrangements they find intolerable themselves.” (For those interested, Kukathas develops his pluralist conception of a free society at book length in The Liberal Archipelago.) When I first read this paper a decade or more ago, I strongly preferred the Union of Liberty – or a watered-down version of it, at any rate. Now, however, I see that rationalist ideal as neither viable nor desirable. My grounds for rejection, though, are the opposite of Kukathas’: he worries that the Union will lose its pure libertarian character, while I no longer see the Union (or a slightly lower-proof version of it) as a worthy goal at all. Under the conditions of modern society, there are far too many external effects and other collective action problems for a barebones state to be able to provide the regulatory structure and public goods on which prosperity depend. Beyond that, there is the additional obvious and insuperable obstacle: the vast majority of people aren’t libertarian and would never support such a radical overhaul of society. While the rationalist ideal of the Union has lost its luster for me, the pluralist project of moving toward something like a Federation of Liberty now holds real appeal. Not, to be sure, the full-on radical version that Kukathas endorses: if a minimal state is unworkable under modern conditions, the lack of any central authority at all is preposterous. But a devolution of substantial rulemaking authority to local communities fits together well with a movement toward greater local economic independence. As I wrote in an earlier essay:  Think of a 21st century version of the Homestead Act, giving people the resources they need to build new and better lives on their own. An extensive list of technological missions relevant to achieving human-scale abundance could be developed, and people seeking to found new communities could apply for support with plans for advancing this or that mission…. For a 21st century Homestead Act to realize its full potential, it will need to provide not only resources and financial support, but also the necessary legal and regulatory flexibility to try out new technologies, building and production methods, and social arrangements. In other words, it should follow the example of the charter cities movement and allow the experimentation conducted in pioneer communities to extend to governance.  A successful economic independence movement, with a growing archipelago of tight-knit communities featuring a high degree of material and legal independence, would greatly alleviate the alienating, enervating top-heaviness of contemporary society. It would, furthermore, act as a powerful bulwark against top-down overreaching by the state. But more than providing remedies and insurance against bad outcomes, the decentralization of society achieved by an economic independence movement would significantly enhance our chances of learning to “live wisely and agreeably and well.” As the political philosopher Robert Nozick observed in the closing section of his libertarian classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, taking the idea of utopia, or the “best of all possible worlds,” seriously requires us to reckon with the fact that there is widespread and enduring disagreement about what such a world would look like. “The conclusion to draw,” he wrote:  is that there will not be one kind of community existing and one kind of life in utopia. Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions. Some communities will be more attractive to most than others; communities will wax and wane. People will leave some for others or spend their whole lives in one. Utopia is a framework for utopias, a place where people are at liberty to join together voluntarily to pursue and attempt to realize their own vision of the good life in the ideal community but where no one can impose his own utopian vision upon others.  The word “utopia” makes me uncomfortable, as it is usually associated with a one-size-fits-all vision whose combination of uniformity and changelessness is in my view antithetical to human flourishing. But Nozick’s “utopia of utopias” is a different beast altogether: it is, I believe, an important elaboration on what it means to “live wisely and agreeably and well.” The key point is that there is no one kind of society that could live up to that standard by everyone’s lights. “But if there is a diverse range of communities,” Nozick wrote, “… more people will be able to come closer to how they wish to live, than if there is only one kind of community.” It’s clear enough that a “utopia of utopias” doesn’t live up to anybody’s idea of an ideal society. With a more robust commitment to pluralism, it will be virtually guaranteed that, from almost everybody’s perspective, there will be lots and lots to disapprove of. But a society that is ideal by everybody’s lights isn’t on the table: it doesn’t exist because it can’t. What is possible, though, is keeping dystopia at bay while preserving the possibility that, over time, more and more people can come to find their own version of the good life. To succeed in that ambitious but realistic objective, I believe that our best bet lies in a greater commitment to pluralism. And my confidence in that judgment – in believing that a new synthesis of capitalism balanced by economic independence is worth pursuing – is bolstered by the fact that what at first blush looks like a communitarian idea can be supported on libertarian grounds as well.The post Libertarian roots revisited first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Libertarian roots revisited appeared first on Niskanen Center.

It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when and where they work, including the location of their homes. It’s not surprising, therefore, that with little time for either the workers or the firms to adjust and with few options to choose how much to work from home, productivity fell when COVID sent workers home.  But, with more time to plan and more options for hybrid but extensive work from home (e.g. work from home Mondays and Fridays), work from home has large benefits. We are also seeing management redesign to take advantage of work from home in the same way we saw factory redesign to take advantage of electricity. Management, for example, is shifting from input metrics–do you show up?–to output metrics–did the work get done? Designing and validating new metrics takes time, but these changes are helping to increase the benefits of work from home. Nick Bloom reviews the evidence (slides here). Looking at micro economic studies on working from home productivity, the classic is “The Stanford Study” I helped oversee in 2010-2012. We randomized 250 employees in a large multinational firm into those who would work from home and those who would report to the office. The expectation, of course, was that home-based employees would goof-off, sleeping or watching TV rather than working. So, we were shocked to find a massive 13 percent increase in productivity. The productivity boost came from two sources. First, remote employees worked 9 percent more in minutes per day. They were rarely late to work, spent less time gossiping and chatting with colleagues, and took shorter lunch breaks and fewer sick days. Remote employees also had 4 percent more output per minute. They told us it’s quieter at home. The office was so noisy many of them struggled to concentrate. The macro evidence also suggests or at least is consistent with work from home working: In the five years before the pandemic, U.S. labor productivity growth was 1.2 percent; since 2020, this picked up to 1.5 percent. Given the state of the world, that acceleration was miraculous. What could have caused this? Perhaps rising government expenditure and easy monetary policy? Possibly, but greater government activity traditionally is associated with lower, not higher, productivity growth. Perhaps an acceleration in technology and computerization? Possibly, but the pandemic did not witness any pickup in technological progress. Perhaps the five-fold surge in working from home post-pandemic. Maybe cutting billions of commuting hours, replacing millions of business trips with Zoom meetings, increasing the labor supply of Americans with disabilities or child-care commitments, and saving millions of square feet of office space increased productivity? It is honestly hard to say. Revealed preference is the most telling piece of evidence. Workers value the option to work from home and many firms now advertise the options for hybrid work as a benefit: …millions of firms around the world are adopting hybrid and remote work, there has to be something there. I have spoken to many hundreds of managers and firms over the last three years and I repeatedly hear they use home working as a key part of their recruitment and retention strategy. Indeed, another recent experiment on 1600 employees found hybrid reduced employee quit rates by 35 percent. \ Despite a rocky start, work from home appears to have stabilized at around 25% of work days overall and stunningly, nearly 40% of work days for college educated workers! Work from home thus appears to be a permanent and beneficial change in how work is structured.  The post Work From Home Works appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

A debate between Seth Ackerman and Aaron Benanav on the prognosis for capitalism: Is it experiencing the kind of long-run stagnation that many Marxists have long regarded as its destiny? And what does the answer mean for socialist political strategy today?     A steel mill in Pennsylvania during the 1970s, the decade when some thinkers believe capitalist growth began to stagnate. (Bettmann via Getty Images)   For the last couple of decades, New Left Review (NLR) has been publishing articles diagnosing the capitalist system as suffering from long-term stagnation, chronic overcapacity, declining profitability, and sluggish growth. The emphasis began with a 1998 paper by the historian Robert Brenner, “The economics of global turbulence,” an article that impressed and influenced many. Brenner focused on the decline in manufacturing in particular. As Europe and Japan finally caught up to the United States, he argued, capitalist competition became something of a zero-sum game that seemed to produce mostly losers (even if a string of negatives doesn’t usually add up to zero). Other NLR contributors have continued writing variations on this theme, among them the sociologist Aaron Benanav. In a recent article for Jacobin, Seth Ackerman filed a vigorous dissent from the line; Benanav responded shortly afterward. In what follows, Benanav and Ackerman debate the question, with me moderating. You can find an audio version of the discussion on my program, Behind the News. (Subscribe to Jacobin Radio to keep up with it.)    Doug Henwood Let’s start with you, Aaron. I’ve been struck, reading your stuff, that the point of comparison is typically with the 1950­–73 period, the thirty or twenty-three “glorious years,” as the French say. But it really was an anomaly in the history of capitalism following fifteen years of depression and war. US growth rates now aren’t all that different from the last third of the nineteenth century. If we look at the employment- population ratio for the United States now, adjusted for population aging, it’s just a hair below its all-time high, in April 2000. Employers have been moaning about tight labor markets. I just don’t see this all as the stuff of crisis. It’s not a golden age; we live in a fallen world. It also doesn’t seem like a form of chronic illness. So really, how sick is capitalism by historical standards?    Aaron Benanav That’s a great question. And it’s certainly true that when you compare the growth rate over the last forty years or something to the growth rate from 1870 to 1910, it’s not that different in most of the rich countries. I think there are two issues with that comparison. One is that, as I said in my book on automation, I think the last three decades of the nineteenth century were a period of really intense class struggle. It was a period of major conflict, the rise of socialism, endemic poverty, and unemployment. And, you know, it was a very turbulent time. And I think that all of the reform efforts that gave rise to the golden age, as exceptional as it was, were reactions to the difficulties that capitalism experienced in that period. Normal capitalism for a lot of people is a crisis, and in the past normal capitalism has generated a pretty intense social struggle. So I think if you want to call it normal capitalism, that’s totally fine. But then you should recognize that normal capitalism for a lot of people is a crisis, and that in the past that level of normal capitalism has generated a pretty intense social struggle. Now, of course, we haven’t seen intense social struggle over the last forty years. We’ve really seen the opposite. But I think things have started to change in the last ten years. Theories like Robert Brenner’s, or mine, are attempts to explain why that’s happening.    Doug Henwood Seth, you have an argument in your piece about how this view of stagnation, overcapacity, the sense of pervasive crisis is really politically essential in driving the difference between reformists and revolutionaries. Could you lay out that argument?    Seth Ackerman Well, this is an argument that goes back to the “revisionist controversy” within Marxism in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s. Aaron makes a good point when he says normal capitalism has often involved a really intense degree of class struggle and apocalyptic perceptions of capitalism’s development. But that was precisely what happened with the outbreak of the revisionist controversy in the 1890s, which started when Eduard Bernstein, who was an important figure in the in the German and European socialist movements, a protege of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels, came out with a sort of rethinking, where he advocated for a reformist path to socialism. He based a lot of that case on economic trends, and specifically the idea that crises were becoming less and less apocalyptic, the system was stabilizing, and the ups and downs were becoming less catastrophic. When you read the texts from the revisionist controversy from today’s perspective, you might be expecting arguments about the nature of the state or something. And there was a lot of that. But really the bulk of it was people arguing about whether capitalism was headed for the kinds of massive turbulence again that it had experienced in the 1870s and 1880s. Bernstein’s point was that by the time you get to the 1890s and the 1900s, you can see this kind of restabilization happening where growth rates increased a bit during the pre-World War I Belle Epoque era. The premise was that if capitalism reached a certain degree of stability — it didn’t have to necessarily be nirvana — then that fundamentally altered the argument about revolutionary politics. That premise was basically accepted by all sides. And the argument then was about the facts. Has capitalism, in fact, stabilized in the way that Bernstein claimed? Robert Brenner very much stands in the tradition of that kind of argument within Marxist crisis theory. He’s argued quite clearly, along with a lot of those who follow him, that if you buy into his global stagnation thesis, that has strong implications for socialist politics. It’s unclear to me how exactly Brenner separates the reformist from the revolutionary approach in practical terms, and I guess that’s a hard question to answer in general. But clearly, Brenner believes his theory grounds the revolutionary position.    Doug Henwood Of course, we had a socialist revolution in 1917. Britain had a depression in the 1920s. The United States and the rest of the world had one in the 1930. So capitalism wasn’t exactly stable or hunky-dory a few decades after Bernstein was writing.    Seth Ackerman When World War I and then the Depression happened, that was taken by the more orthodox Marxists as proof that Bernstein had spoken too soon. But of course, the notion that those catastrophic events disproved Bernstein’s claims depended on an expectation that the travails of capitalism would lead to the triumph of socialism. And obviously, in the long run, it didn’t work out quite that way.    Doug Henwood Aaron, the notion that, as you put it in your most recent piece in New Left Review, “capitalism is running out of steam” — how essential is that to your politics? Is what Seth is pointing to relevant to your worldview? If capitalism is not running out of steam, what does that do for us?    Aaron Benanav Well, here I’d like to respond to some more specific points and kind of build on the question you raised about the aftermath of the revisionist controversy and the fact that it was followed by not a stabilization of the system, but two world wars and the Depression. If you look at Robert Brenner’s work and try to situate it with respect to the Marxist tradition, I would just say that Seth gets the genealogy wrong here in a really important way, because in my view, Brenner is part of a group of postwar Marxists who were maybe something more like neo-Schumpeterians. The whole point was that they were theorizing those long waves that we’re talking about. They’re theorizing this alternation between periods of capitalist high growth — with the capacity to accept reforms and for working-class organizations to win gains through class-collaboration type strategies — and periods of capitalist slow growth, which hide competition and conflict, and change the character of working-class politics and how it can achieve success. And we can definitely talk about that more. I just want to point out that among the long-wave theorists, what distinguishes Brenner is that he discovered secular stagnation in the course of his work. But I think it’s very important to say that he arrived at that view through a confrontation with the length and persistence of the downturn. But that comes out of this larger tradition that he’s a part of, which I think of as a kind of neo-Schumpeterian Marxism. You can also just think of it as long-wave theory. All the long-wave theories, of which Brenner’s is a part, are trying to place us with respect to those longer cycles.    Doug Henwood How essential is crisis to your politics?    Aaron Benanav Stagnation is essential. That idea of living in a trough of a wave has implications for politics — that’s just something that we can recognize around us right now. Look what’s happening with the United Auto Workers (UAW), right? We’ve lived through forty years of long-term, working-class defeat. That defeat hasn’t only been at the hands of an onslaught of capitalists, though I think it’s well-noted. And a big part of that is the observation, which I don’t think Seth talks about at all in his piece, that a big feature of the last forty years has been a major rise in the capital share of income and the decline of the labor share of income, and that working-class unions and social democratic parties all around the world have organized that defeat. They haven’t fought against it — they’ve organized and participated in it. That has a lot to do with the loss of legitimacy of those organs. A big feature of the last forty years has been a major rise in the capital share of income and the decline of the labor share of income. It also explains why in the contemporary period, we’re seeing not only a rising curve of social unrest, but also efforts on the part of political groups and groups of workers to break free of those preexisting organs and try to find new forms of organization that would be more combative. I think it’s hard to understand both the fight for democratic unionism in the UAW — and its success and the fact that it immediately issued a much more combative stance on the part of the autoworkers — without placing it within this long-wave perspective. I’m not a long-wave theorist. I have an idea about why this wave is more of a secular stagnation type wave than the long-wave theorists imagined it would be. But I do think that these perspectives are pretty essential for understanding not just my politics, but the politics of the moment.    Doug Henwood Seth, a response?    Seth Ackerman First of all, I agree — and I think it’s true that this is not an aspect that I talked about a lot in my piece — that there is this Schumpeterian long-wave aspect of Brenner’s work, and it does relate to the politics of it. And this is an idea that one hears a lot — not just on the Left, actually, but often from a mainstream perspective — that periods of strong growth, a booming economy, “golden-age” type conditions are conducive for, or at least more permissive for reform, social democratic, egalitarian types of politics; and in periods with slower growth or more economic turbulence that’s less the case. I don’t want to put words in Brenner’s mouth on this point, but I think anybody who’s been on the Left especially since 2008, knows that in the ambient discourse of the Left, there is a familiar stock pattern of argument that basically stops any discussion of whatever types of reforms you want to discuss with the idea that we live in an era of stagnation or of crisis or whatever you want to call it, and that rules out reforms. The system can’t give these reforms that you want — that sort of argument. Which, in my view, just doesn’t really describe the nature of the problem that we’re facing.    Doug Henwood I never quite understood that argument, because can’t you prod the system into doing it? That’s what the state, at least in theory, has the potential to do.    Seth Ackerman The conceptualization of capitalism in that view is one where anything that happens is at the pleasure of or ultimately at the decision of capital. And capital is more open-handed when growth rates are high and when profits are high. Therefore, any reforms that we have gotten are because they were ultimately acceptable to capital, but they’re not acceptable now. I think that really misreads how we got the reforms that we did get. There’s a lot of talk about growth without making an important distinction. Growth in GDP can be divided into two parts: the growth of employment on the one hand and the growth of productivity, in other words output per worker, on the other. And that’s a really important distinction because if growth, let’s say, slows, and the slowdown is due to a slowdown in employment growth and the result is that there’s a lot of people who need jobs, want jobs, but can’t find them, then that, first of all, is just pure waste. And that indicates a clear failure of the system and a failure of public policy. There’s no justification for a system that allows a lot of people to be idle when they don’t want to be, when they could be contributing to society. And in addition to that, it has tremendous effects on the tone of politics, and class politics in particular. Obviously, in periods of mass unemployment, the working class is on the defensive, whereas it has a much stronger position in periods of boom. And in that respect, this suggests sort of the opposite conclusion from the idea that periods of strong growth and high profits are periods when the ruling class is more willing to give. It’s actually sort of the opposite: periods of strong growth are periods when the competitive nature of the system means that capitalists are much more dependent on the working class in the sense of being always short of workers, short of labor, and that gives workers a greater ability to extract concessions that capitalists would not otherwise be willing to grant. But if the slowdown in growth is not about a slowdown in employment, if it’s not about rising unemployment, mass unemployment, people being idle, weak labor markets — if it’s instead a slowdown in the rate of productivity growth, and especially productivity growth in the richest countries, the countries where the level of productivity is already the highest in the world, I think the meaning of that, politically and economically, is completely different and a little bit ambiguous. Right now, as Doug noted, the level of employment in the United States is very, very high. The employment rate is about as high as it’s ever been. To the extent that there is a slowdown in growth, it’s because the average worker is producing a quantity of output that’s growing at a slower rate than it did, in, let’s say, the postwar era, but starting from a level that’s far, far higher. So, at the peak of the golden age, in the early 1960s, the level of per capita income in the United States was like a third of what it is now in real terms. Now, let’s take the forecasts of Robert J. Gordon, a source Aaron has mentioned a bunch of times in his writings, a very mainstream macroeconomist with a sort of gloomy interpretation of economic growth and its prospects, given the technological realities and the profile of productivity. He had a paper recently where he forecast what he thought the most likely path of labor productivity growth in the United States in the long-term future. And he cast this forecast as a very pessimistic view. It was, I think, 1.2 percent per year. So 1.2 percent per year means that the level of productivity and per capita income doubles in like sixty years — starting from a level that’s already three times as high as it was at the peak of the postwar era. The level of productivity and per capita income doubles in like sixty years — starting from a level that’s already three times as high as it was at the peak of the postwar era. It’s one thing to talk about productivity in poor countries where there’s a need to catch up. But the idea that the economy doubling in sixty years, instead of, say, tripling, in the countries where it’s already at its highest level — to me, that seems like one of the least important aspects of where capitalism is failing.    Doug Henwood Yeah, we should all have such problems. Aaron, a response to that?    Aaron Benanav I’m very glad Seth brought that up, because I do think that gets to the nub of the issue. And just to state my views concisely, I think the point is that the decline in the profit rate that Brenner identified in the 1970s and 1980s, his whole profit rate analysis, was about saying that the reasons for this decline in profitability came from a decline in capital productivity: a decrease in the additions you can get to income for each additional unit of capital you bring in, not a rise in the wage share of income or the labor share of income. It wasn’t the success of workers fighting. But this other thing, the falling capital productivity, that was an issue. And Brenner made the argument about the ’70s that he thought this was due to overcapacity. Once he made that argument, he said that because he thought that countries like Germany and Japan had so much further to go, they hadn’t caught up to the United States in productivity terms. So that’s why he said he couldn’t attribute this to a kind of exhaustion or arrival of the technological frontier. My account is that he put too much emphasis on that argument because over time, and here again I’m agreeing with Robert J. Gordon, although more with Dietrich Vollrath, saying it’s less about product innovations and process innovations, it’s more about deindustrialization and the rise of the service sector than about some general technological exhaustion. But the point is that over the long run, the reason for that decline in capital productivity is more to do with declining labor productivity, and that’s something we can observe directly. We don’t need to try to make an argument based on profit rates. And I also think that that’s why most secular stagnationists like Gordon or Vollrath don’t make their argument by reference to profit rates, but they are talking about a vanishing of investment opportunity in that sense. It’s just one that we can observe directly this way. Now, why is that a problem? If all we were talking about were a system oscillating between 3 percent growth and 1 percent growth and averaging out to 2 percent over time, then I don’t see why there would be any reason to complain. I think that’s not an unreasonable argument. But I don’t think it captures the reality. And I think that that’s where this issue of the rise in the capital share really becomes important. And I think it’s something that Seth doesn’t pay enough attention to, because the whole point here is that capitalists responded to a decline in their own incomes in the 1970s, with falling profit rates, by starting to make this really intense battle on working-class living standards. And they were obviously more successful in some places than others. But the effect has been to radically transform our institutions, the welfare state, the character of workers’ insecurity. I mean, certainly we live in a period of high employment right now, but I’m not alone in thinking that that might be a temporary condition. And certainly it’s not the record of the last forty years. It would be a very strange analysis of the period since the ’70s to just say, well, everything continued more or less as it was. It was just that the rate of growth of incomes slowed. And so I think that the issue that we’re facing now is whether we can, through stimulus, raise the productivity growth rate, because a lot of these kinds of more radical Keynesian solutions depend on accumulations of debt having the effect of raising the growth rate. And I think those things are in question. Right now, one of the big discussions around these issues is that for the past forty years, efforts to stimulate the economy have generated less and less investment and have just lined elite pockets through stock buybacks — and other strategies that privilege increasing the wealth of the elite, their personal wealth and their personal spending, over investment in building out the infrastructure that society constructed. If we’re only going to grow at 1 percent, a rational society might say, let’s use this to make sure we have enough hospitals in case there’s a pandemic. That isn’t what happens. And I think that it gets at this exact point, which is that struggles under these conditions of low productivity growth in a class-based society are really intense struggles over what happens with that small surplus. And so far it’s been very hard, even for the Biden administration, for anyone, to really imagine a hard enough struggle that would shift the terms of the class character of society away from elite income and consumption and towards actually investing in the things that we need in order to improve our lives.    Doug Henwood Let’s talk a bit about, as they say around New Left Review, the current conjuncture. We’ve seen recent inflation — quite a surprising inflation to most people. It’s ebbing now, but it’s not gone. It was caused by the opposite of overcapacity. It showed a productive system that was really stretched to its limit with just-in-time inventories outsourcing halfway around the globe. Add to that the “stimmy” checks and enforced leisure, which meant that people weren’t spending money on restaurants, but instead were spending it on durable goods. We saw profit rates rise, which contradicted the falling rate of profit stories. So it didn’t look anything like this image of chronic stagnation. Was this just some weird — to quote a line from Wallace Stevens — “blaze of summer straw in winter’s nick”?  Was it just some weird moment that’s going to go away? Or is there something that this tells us about more structural issues? If we’re only going to grow at 1 percent, a rational society might say, let’s use this to make sure we have enough hospitals in case there’s a pandemic. That isn’t what happens.    Aaron Benanav I can’t predict the future — I mean, in the current moment, there’s a lot of talk about what kind of stimulus the economy can bear and where it should be directed. But I do think that the dislocations of the COVID era were due to the COVID era. I don’t think anyone believes that the breakdown of supply chains and the inability of people to import all these things that are being produced abroad were the sign of a long-term transformation in the capacities of the system. It was a crisis moment, and it called for intense and combative measures. I think a really sad feature of the present is obviously that most of the welfare measures that were implemented at that time have been rolled back. I don’t think we’ve made any kind of permanent advances through this temporary increase in the generousness of the welfare state. I think there’s something to the concern that this might end up being a temporary situation and that the long-term productivity growth rate of the economy probably isn’t changing because of the investments in manufacturing — which are great for the United States’ military conflicts and chest-beating about trade wars and whatever other kind of wars with China. Manufacturing just isn’t such a big part of the economy anymore, and even a major stimulus to that sector isn’t going to have a huge effect on our productivity growth rates or the economy as a whole. So I think that the idea that stagnation might come back is warranted as a thesis. I think the fact that it’s such a mainstream view and it’s influencing a lot of policymakers and efforts to think about what the future might look like is also something that we ignore at our peril. Trying to attribute this view to Robert Brenner is like going into a burning house and trying to find the candle and turn it back over. I mean, these are very widespread mainstream views about the limitations of the future. And I’m not saying that we on the Left should feel ourselves limited by them, I think that’s a longer and more complex story. But these are serious issues to think about.    Doug Henwood Seth, any thoughts on this?    Seth Ackerman Well, I think there’s a real slippage in Aaron’s argument when he goes from pointing out the concerns of people like Larry Summers or Robert J. Gordon or Olivier Blanchard about growth rates, and the revival of secular stagnation theory — and I always thought Larry Summers was quite sensible about this, that he was right about it — and then pointing to that as an indication that what Robert Brenner’s saying can’t be so crazy, because look at all these very levelheaded people making the same argument. It’s not at all the same argument. The whole point of Larry Summers’s reintroduction of secular stagnation theory was to say that there has been inadequate fiscal stimulus. Whether you agree with him or not, his argument is that there’s been inadequate fiscal stimulus over the last thirty or forty years because population growth trends and other long-term structural factors have reduced the natural demand for investment, for private investment, and this has pushed the burden of adjustment entirely onto monetary policy, so it forced interest rates down further and further until they eventually got to zero. That’s the argument. And his upshot is the government needs to spend lots more money, and when it spends lots more money, it should probably focus on investment — things that will actually increase the productive capacity of the economy — and if we do that, that’ll work. You can make what you will of that argument, but that’s 180 degrees the opposite of what Brenner has always been hammering away at, which is the idea that the so-called stagnation that we’ve been experiencing is something that cannot be addressed by the government spending more money. Those are two separate arguments that are important to keep separate. On the inflation that we saw in the last few years, my view is that it was almost certainly temporary and it’s going away and it will go away. There are arguments from sensible people like Charles Goodhart, who has pointed to long-term demographic trends and made the argument that the forces that made for secular stagnation in the last few decades are slowly going into reverse and that you’re going to start seeing an upswing in the sort of natural rate of demand for investment over time. And that’s going to lead to demand pressures, and you’re going to start getting inflation being a problem again. You know, maybe that’s true. I don’t really know. I haven’t looked into it. But all of this is an important reminder that a big part of the story — and for me, the central part of the story of what happened since the 1970s — was about money, wages, and inflation. The workers’ movement in the postwar era became very strong. There was full employment. And there is a natural incompatibility — not necessarily an absolute incompatibility, but it is difficult to reconcile full employment and stable money. And the crisis that happened in the ’70s around the value of money and inflation ended up causing a whole series of huge institutional reorganizations, most clearly observable in Europe, but in different ways all over the world. That had a huge effect on all of the issues we’re talking about, including and especially the issue of the disempowerment of the working class in the last few decades. Because it became a matter of public policy day in and day out in the central banks to make sure that the rate of job growth didn’t get too low, but also didn’t get too high. In recent years that has become less of a focus because of secular stagnation, the zero lower bound on interest rates that made them get increasingly worried about employment growth being too slow. But, you know, for most of the last several decades, we have had a deliberate policy objective on the part of the most powerful policy institutions of the rich country governments, the central banks, to target rates of unemployment that were higher certainly than what was otherwise achievable. And I think without seeing the centrality of that, you can’t really understand how we got into a situation with the working class so disempowered and growth rates unusually low.    Doug Henwood Aaron, Seth raised the point in his piece, which also occurred to me as I was reading your stuff: How can you have chronic overcapacity and chronic underinvestment at the same time? Wouldn’t the excess capacity just rot away with time?    Aaron Benanav This is a good opportunity to reply to something else Seth said about secular stagnation. My explanation of this is just that it does make sense once you realize that we’re talking about deindustrialization. We’re not talking about what industry looked like in the nineteenth century or even in the 1950s. We’re not talking about a period of industrialization or a rising industry share of GDP. We’re talking about a sector of the economy that’s seeing its share of GDP fall, and that limits the extent to which income-growth issues and an increase in the size of the market in industry and across all of these different fields has resulted in a situation of a slow and persistent exit. That, to me, isn’t that different from what happened in agriculture, if you take a really bird’s eye view. Of course, in actual fact it’s much more complicated, in part because the fate of industry has such huge geopolitical implications that governments intervened in all kinds of ways to try to modify and transform the deindustrialization pathway and also to push the consequences it had on other countries by moving currency values around or by other forms of state investment or protection. If you think like Brenner, that this is a story about the economy as a whole, then it is hard to explain it in terms of overcapacity. But if you think about it in the context of deindustrialization, like deagrarianization, then it’s pretty easy to understand how this can happen. If you think like Brenner, that this is a story about the economy as a whole, then it is hard to explain it in terms of overcapacity. But if you think about it in the context of deindustrialization, then it’s pretty easy to understand how this can happen. And that’s why, again, what I said is that my view is that the Brenner story about overcapacity does apply in the 1970s and ’80s, but increasingly over time, the reason for low capital productivity is just low labor productivity. And that’s where the story converges in my account — more with William Baumol and Vollrath than with Gordon. But it’s the same basic idea that since the ’70s, the growth potential of the economy as given by productivity growth rates has fallen, and the period of the major increase in women’s labor force participation rates and the continued effects of the baby boom to some extent hid this by increasing total hours, or the rate of growth of hours. So even if productivity wasn’t growing as quickly, working hours were. But now we’re at the end of that phase, and the transition to services has become much more extreme over time. I mean, countries like Germany and Japan have achieved economy-wide productivity growth rates on the order of less than 1 percent per year for the last twenty years. And these are countries that are now going into population decline. So these are the reasons why I think that there’s a long-term problem. And I don’t know what Larry Summers thinks today, but I don’t think the explanation that this is just too high of a savings problem and not a lack of investment opportunities problem makes sense. I mean, the very idea that we need public investment suggests that there’s some problem in translating savings into investment that should be interrogated more closely and I think leads pretty directly into these Gordon/Vollrath­–type explanations of why that’s the case. So I think that that sets the tone for thinking about the future. And obviously saying that doesn’t mean that we should resign ourselves to a situation of working-class income stagnation and elite rapaciousness and fail to make an adequate transition to the Green New Deal. And that’s also why in my work, I’ve really paid attention to the radicalization of Keynesians and the claim all of the sudden, after seventy years, that the solution to these problems is not to stimulate consumption — which over the last seventy years is mostly issued in elite income growth instead of more investment — but rather through a coordinated campaign of public investment. And that’s why in the book I’m writing now I talk about the dangers of technocracy and why we should be supportive of a transition to a public economy while also being skeptical of the capacities of Keynesians to actually turn that economy in a humane direction. The worries about saber-rattling are not irrelevant here as well.    Doug Henwood [John Maynard] Keynes did have that bit at the end of The General Theory when he talked about the somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment. He was very vague in what he meant by that, but it seemed like it meant elite people like him should take over investment and take it away from the capitalists. But that control of investment angle got lost in all the attention to regulating the business cycle and boosting consumption.    Aaron Benanav Yeah, and that was a very reasonable response, I think, to what happened during the great boom. I think you can’t really talk about that without talking about the defeat of working-class activity in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the kind of shunting from any relevance of more radical Keynesians, which also happened very quickly. The whole point of this is that that version of Keynesianism made Keynesianism really ill-equipped to handle the crises of the ’70s, and the battles for a more radical public economy were lost at that time. And that’s how we got where we are today. I mean, it’s a class story, right? In the end, the story Seth was telling about higher unemployment rates since the 1970s and the movements of the central banks, that is a story about class conflict, right?    Doug Henwood Seth, in your piece you argue that because we mismeasure depreciation — specifically, the US authorities mismeasure depreciation — the capital stock is actually lower than it is, which makes the profit rate higher. So all these stories of a declining rate of profit are the product of misleading statistics. But if that’s true, if the profit rate really is higher than we think it is, why aren’t investment rates higher than they are?    Seth Ackerman I think there’s a pretty straightforward answer to that question. There was a great paper recently, and I’ll probably write something about it soon, by a couple of economists at the University of Chicago. “Corporate Discount Rates” was the boring title of the paper, but it was on a subject dear to your heart, Doug, thinking about your book, Wall Street. Here, I think that there’s a real disjunction with the view that says that to the extent there’s been a growth slowdown, it’s because firms see fewer investment opportunities. So what these economists did is they went through thousands of transcripts of earnings calls where executives explain to investors, shareholders, and asset managers what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. And very often in these calls, the CEOs will explain what they currently use as their hurdle rate of investment, which for some reason the economists who wrote this paper call the “discount rate”: what rate of return they require, when they’re considering which investment projects to undertake or not undertake, to convince them to go ahead with the project. These economists were not the first people to notice that hurdle rates for a corporate investment have experienced this very peculiar trajectory. Because supposedly, according to textbook economics, a corporation ought to invest in any kind of project that prospectively offers a rate of return that’s higher than what the company or its shareholders could get elsewhere. There are different ways of estimating what your alternative rate of return is — whether that’s the S&P 500 average rate of return, or it could be the risk-free interest rate plus adding some risk factor or whatever. But the point is that as capital becomes cheaper, which it absolutely has in financial terms over the last thirty, forty years, for exactly these secular stagnation kinds of reasons, interest rates have fallen massively and real interest rates have also fallen, not just nominal. So you should see a decline in the hurdle rate that corporations use. They should say, well, if the average rate of return in the economy is 5 or 6 percent instead of 9 or 10 percent, then that means we should be willing to invest in projects that have a little bit lower prospective rates of return. What you have is a situation in which increasingly corporations are rejecting more and more prospectively profitable projects. But that hasn’t happened. There have been surveys of chief financial officers — Duke University has been doing such a survey for many, many years — asking them what their hurdle rate is. And the hurdle rate has not moved at all. It’s been completely insensitive to the massive decline in interest rates. So what you have is a situation in which increasingly corporations are rejecting more and more prospectively profitable projects. And what these economists did is they went through the transcripts of these earnings calls, and they made a database of what the hurdle rates of these companies were. They traced them over time. And what they found, first of all, is that, yes, there’s been a much less than proportional decline in hurdle rate, so that as capital has gotten cheaper, corporations have not been proportionally more willing to invest. So they asked the question — why? And they’re a little bit vague about answering that, but they’re very clear that from the transcripts, it’s obvious that CFOs believe that shareholders and asset managers like it when they abstain from investing in projects that are profitable but not profitable enough. They like it because it’s a signal. It signals that these executives are not empire-building, wasting money on grandiose projects. They’re returning funds to the corporation’s owners, the shareholders — all this kind of ideology that’s suffused the financial markets since the 1980s. Doug wrote about it extensively in Wall Street. And along with the revolution in macroeconomic policy, this revolution in corporate finance and the managerial ideology that’s embedded in the institutional structures of corporations — I think those two things probably jointly can explain most of the shifts that we’ve seen, including the decline in aggregate growth rates. Now, that’s a big statement to make. But these are big trends that have happened. So this, I think, is another example of the important role of money and finance. There’s a long tradition in Marxism of sort of denigrating the importance of money and finance; there’s also an alternative tradition of emphasizing that it’s important. But the idea that these are superficial features of the economy, and that the real reality underneath is the abode of production, can often distract us from how centrally important this kind of financial stuff is. That would be my best guess about why investment has been slower than what you would expect.    Doug Henwood So let me ask one final question of both of you. Whenever I talk about growth, I get emails from people who say growth is killing us, we need to degrow. I’m not necessarily in agreement with that, but that is a question these days. So why should we worry about growth? Is it something we should try to get beyond?    Aaron Benanav My idea of a kind of convergence between long-wave Marxist theories and secular stagnation theories definitely leads me to have a view that I think the most radical of the radical Keynesians held and I think the best of the Marxists also held, which is that the goal isn’t just to unfetter the forces of production and imagine that due to some kink in the way that capitalists make investment decisions, a socialist society will just be able to achieve unheard-of growth rates and sail towards the stars. I think if you ask Keynes or William Beveridge what the goal of this whole thing is, the better Marxist there would have said we should do one big last buildout and it should have a real public purpose. You know, like Beveridge said, just like the war really inspired people who were recently unemployed and depressed to get up every morning and do something to defend their families, we could organize public projects — not to make war on foreign people, but rather to make war on disease, ignorance, squalor, and poverty. We could organize public projects — not to make war on foreign people, but rather to make war on disease, ignorance, squalor, and poverty. And that big public project of building out the fixed equipment, the equipment and machines that humanity needs today, looks like building hospitals and schools and all the rest of the things that Beveridge also imagined, with which many, many people in the world are massively underequipped. But in our time, it also means a big green transition, some huge effort to get us off fossil fuels. And I think, however we do that would have to be in line with science. And I’m not a scientist. I have no ability to judge what the proper pathway to an actually sustainable economy is. And I’d rather hear people who do know about that — hear them debate it out, and for people to decide on that basis. But I agree with Keynes and Marx and W. E. B. Du Bois and the International Workers of the World (IWW) and everyone else that the long-term goal is to reduce the savings rate, reduce investment, increase working class consumption, and actually get to a world where there’s a much lower expectation of growth for the future. But that doesn’t mean a world without dynamism, real human dynamism and innovation across the wider spectrum of human possibilities and not only the economy. So I think that that is a kind of rational version of a degrowth future, but one that requires one last effort to raise the living standards of humanity in line with what’s sustainable. I think that that should be the goal that we’re fighting for.    Doug Henwood Seth, a word for the degrowthers?    Seth Ackerman Well, that makes a lot of sense to me. It also occurred to me how there is an overlap between this discussion and the degrowth discussion, which has also been going on at the same time in the sense that the nature of what we’re talking about depends heavily on this construct, the statistical construct of GDP. Whenever we’re talking about stagnation or not-stagnation — there’s no way to talk about that in a coherent way without using some kind of statistical aggregation, because obviously when the economy produces stuff, it produces lots of different kinds of things, lots of different products. And how can you say if we were producing more today than we were last year without aggregating them in some way? And that means you have to add up all the monetary values, but then you have to figure out how much inflation there’s been. And all of this stuff leads to, by necessity, a massive amount of guesswork about qualitative issues regarding products and services and to what extent they should be counted as indicating quantitative growth. It’s one thing when you talk about a poor country, but when you’re talking about countries at the frontier of productivity, I get the sense that increasingly you get to a point when growth rates of productivity depend on the judgments of statisticians at government agencies — who do the best job they can, and they do good work. But ultimately, more and more, the question of whether we’re producing more, whether output is expanding and by how much — I suspect that if we’re judging that by the kind of human criteria that all three of us think are important, the official statistics matter less and less, so it becomes less and less crucial to achieve any particular growth rate in countries where the level is already as high as it is in the rich countries.    Doug Henwood But the problem is that capitalism doesn’t systemically live well with low growth rates necessarily. Or does it?    Seth Ackerman Well, I don’t know. If you go back to like 1970, a lot of people were saying that growth rates have been really high and this has led to a revolution of rising expectations and overcrowding in cities, generating revolutionary possibilities. Certainly if investment grinds to a halt and there’s no profits then something’s going to break. But that’s really not happening. What’s happening is that these things are increasing at a somewhat slower rate.    Doug Henwood Any comment on that, Aaron?    Aaron Benanav That’s my point: capitalism does have a big problem with slow growth that has to do with the class character of the society. The hope for humanity is the hope for a transition to a public investment economy that does the green transition, that measures its success in these concrete terms, — not abstract growth terms but the real battle to improve the multiple conditions of social life. But I think that’s going to be a big struggle. It’s going to involve really breaking away from the organizations that have for a long time organized working-class defeat in the face of a capitalist onslaught. And that, again, helps us situate ourselves in the present moment and understand the character of the struggles that are going on and have been increasing in the last ten years.   

The principle that economics can shape politics in beneficial ways is also behind the UK government’s vision for Global Britain in the post-Brexit era.

Some people have suggested that the UK’s pivot towards the Indo-Pacific has diluted its traditional security role it has hitherto played in the Euro-Atlantic region. But the fact of the matter is that this tilt is more about establishing new trading relationships and reinvigorating old ones, than growing any significant military presence in the Far East.

Indeed, one of the reasons put forward by free-traders wanting to leave the EU was to extricate the UK from the protectionist stranglehold of the single market which was stifling its economic prospects, and redirecting its focus onto trading with some of the fastest growing economies in the Indo-Pacific region, in particular, emerging nations who are bound together by the common thread of freedom & democracy whilst pursuing the mission of improving the lot of their people.

In keeping with their vision for Global Britain, the governing elite have made it absolutely clear that the UK is an outward-looking country and a leading advocate of free trade. They want to see it trading freely with countries beyond the EU so that it can pay its way in the world, whilst spreading prosperity at home. This ambition requires the UK to become an export powerhouse again, just like the days of old, which means that the goods and services it produces will have to be much more competitive in the global market. The furious pace at which the government has signed up trade deals with individual countries and its recent membership of the trade bloc Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, is proof enough of its determination to get the UK exporting.

Consider the deployment of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth to the Indo-Pacific region in 2021, accompanied by a fleet of naval ships from a host of European and NATO countries. It was planned and executed precisely to achieve this objective. This carrier battlegroup not only undertook freedom of navigation voyages along some of the busiest trade routes to ensure they remain free, but also visited several friends and allies to assure them of the UK’s enduring commitment to making sure that these sea lanes remain unimpeded to the flow of goods and services – which is central to their economic viability.

Next consider this government’s plan (now shelved due to affordability considerations), to procure a trade ship to deliver on its mission of boosting exports. This ship was earmarked to host trade shows at exotic locations around the world to showcase the best of British engineering and serve as a floating embassy, to promote the UK’s diplomatic & trading interests by hosting high level negotiations, diplomatic talks and sundowner functions. It was intended to be a symbol of all that is good about Britain, but in the absence of a dedicated trade ship, this role has been foisted upon a warship, HMS Queen Elizabeth – which incidentally, is due to return to the Indo-Pacific region in 2025.

The buying and selling of goods and services across national boundaries is a good thing because it builds trust & goodwill and promotes understanding between peoples of different nationalities, via an intimate buyer/seller relationship. Accordingly, it is less likely that they will adopt an aggressive war-like posture that might undermine peace and security among trading partners, near and far.

@JagPatel3

       A federal court has sided with Roland Edger, an Alabama man who says he was wrongfully arrested after he declined to give police officers his driver's license in 2019. While a lower court had granted qualified immunity to the officers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned that decision, ruling that the officers clearly violated Edger's Fourth Amendment rights and that Edger's suit against them may go forward. In June 2019, Edger, a mechanic in Huntsville, Alabama, received a call from a customer, who told him that his wife's car had broken down and asked him to come out to repair it. The car was in the parking lot of a local church, where the customer's wife worked. The customer told Edger he could pick up her keys at the church's front desk. When he arrived at the church on June 10, a few days after the customer had called, Edger retrieved the keys from the church and began inspecting the car. According to the ruling, Edger says he believed something was wrong with the car's steering or tires and that he'd need to return with the necessary tools to fix the vehicle. When he returned that evening, joined by his stepson, the church's security guard called 911, telling dispatchers "I have two Hispanic males, messing with an employee's car that was left on the lot." Police arrived around 30 minutes later and began questioning Edger. Officer Krista McCabe asked Edger what he was doing; Edger replied that he was working on a customer's car. "All right. Take a break for me real fast," McCabe said, according to body camera footage of the incident. "Do y'all have driver's license or IDs on you?" "I ain't going to submit to no ID," Edger replied. "Listen, you call the lady right now. Listen I don't have time for this. I don't mean to be rude, or ugly, but—" he was cut off by McCabe, who insisted that he needed to provide an ID. "I'm telling you that if you will call this lady that owns this car," Edger began to reply, when another officer, Cameron Perillat, grabbed Edger from behind and handcuffed him, saying "We don't have time for this." Despite Edger repeatedly offering his driver's license upon being handcuffed, the officers arrested him anyway and charged him with "obstructing governmental operations" for failing to provide his ID. The charges were later dropped.  Edger filed a lawsuit, claiming that the officers violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The officers argued that Edger had violated an Alabama law that requires individuals to tell officers their name, address, and "an explanation of his actions," if there is a reasonable suspicion of a crime. However, the statute does not compel individuals to show a diver's license or ID card. The suit was originally dismissed when the District Court for the Northern District of Alabama granted the officers qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil rights lawsuits unless they violated a "clearly established" law. But last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reversed that decision, holding that "the plain text of the Alabama statute is so clear that no reasonable officer could have believed they could arrest Mr. Edger for failing to produce his 'ID' or 'driver's license.'" "The Alabama statute is clear. It lists only three things that the police may ask about," wrote Judge Charles R. Wilson in the court's unanimous opinion. "This is not an issue of 'magic words' that must be uttered. There is a difference between asking for specific information: 'What is your name? Where do you live?' and demanding a physical license or ID. The information contained in a driver's license goes beyond the information required to be revealed under" Alabama state law. While Alabama police can require individuals to identify themselves in some circumstances, they're not entitled to get a formal ID card, and they're not entitled to get answers beyond the narrow questions the law requires. "It has been clearly established for decades prior to Mr. Edger's arrest that the police are free to ask questions, and the public is free to ignore them," wrote Wilson. "Any legal obligation to speak to the police and answer their questions arises as a matter of state law."The post Alabama Cops Who Arrested Mechanic for Not Giving Them His ID Denied Qualified Immunity appeared first on Reason.com.

Those who want to pull U.S. aid from Ukraine fail to understand the devastating impact that such a move would have on many other countries — and especially those in Vladimir Putin’s sights. For the small Eastern European nation of Moldova, international support for its neighbor Ukraine is the linchpin of its own security. Pulling it now would doom the region and set a terrible precedent around the world.

That was the main message of Moldovan Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu, whom I interviewed in New York last week on the sidelines of U.N. General Assembly meetings. “What happens in Ukraine does not stay in Ukraine,” Popescu told me. “What happens in Eastern Europe does not stay in Eastern Europe. It has global repercussions.”

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Moldova, which is not a member of NATO or the European Union (although it seeks to join the latter) and has just a small army, has dealt with energy disruption, massive inflation, trade disruption and thousands of refugees, all while managing tense relations with its breakaway province of Transnistria, where about 1,500 Russian troops are stationed.

“This war had a negative impact on every country in the world. … But the closer you get to it, the more impacted you are,” he said.

And while Moscow has sought to control Moldova through widespread political interference for decades, Putin has stooped to unprecedented levels to harass and undermine the current Western-leaning government there. Even though no Russian missiles have landed in Moldova, Russia is waging war on the country nonetheless in a variety of nonmilitary ways, Popescu told me.

It’s remarkable, given that onslaught, that Moldova is so (relatively) stable. But the costs of mitigating the consequences of the Ukraine war while fighting off Moscow’s interference have forced Moldova to divert resources meant for infrastructure, investment and development, the foreign minister said.

Nevertheless, Moldova is not asking U.S. taxpayers to send it money, having already received commitments for about $300 million of assistance in past Ukraine aid bills. Rather, Moldovan leaders are urging the United States not to significantly cut its economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, as more and more Republican members of Congress (and GOP presidential candidates) are pledging to do.

The Biden administration is requesting about $24 billion in additional military, economic and humanitarian aid to respond to Russia’s invasion and aid Ukraine’s resistance, as well as to address the effects the war is having around the region. That last part — the regional dynamic — is what often gets lost in the broad-brush debate.

“Every single piece of help given to Ukraine, military, economic, financial, energy, is also an investment in Moldova’s security, peace and stability,” Popescu said. “Moldova is peaceful, thanks to the capacity of Ukraine to resist the Russian army and to keep the Russian army far away from our borders.”

In other words, if some Republicans are successful in drastically reducing U.S. aid to Ukraine, Moldova’s fragile situation could collapse and Moscow-inspired violence could spread. Popescu also makes the case that abandoning Ukraine would embolden aggressors in other regions to attack their smaller, weaker democratic neighbors.

“That is why what happens in Ukraine already has and will continue to have massive direct implications and effects for U.S. global presence, for U.S. global exposure, for U.S. credibility, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in the Asia-Pacific region,” he said.

House Republicans stripped Ukraine aid from the 45-day stopgap spending bill Congress passed Saturday, ignoring appeals from top administration national security officials. The Senate had proposed $6.1 billion in Ukraine funding, enough to continue assistance to Kyiv for 45 days. But as a government shutdown loomed Saturday, the Senate acquiesced to the House position and passed the funding bill without any Ukraine aid.

Senate leaders have pledged vote on stand-alone Ukraine aid legislation soon. But House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) won’t promise to bring that bill to the House floor — leaving the fate of the aid uncertain.

Even if it does squeak through this time, support for Ukraine aid in the GOP is cratering fast. That’s a problem, because there’s a good chance the war will go on for a long time. Popescu said U.S. and European leaders must prepare for a longer war, moving now, not later, to take measures such as increasing military production capacity, rerouting food supply chains and building new energy resilience.

“Unfortunately, the likely end of this war is not around the corner,” he said. “But the Ukrainians have this amazing and tremendous capacity to resist. They will not give up. But the more support they have, the more likely it is that the length of this war will be shorter.”

You know, I have this tiny hope that the New Hampshire Republican voters will exercise a little independence and give her the top primary vote and an early lift. But kinda worried Christie will be in there, too, dividing the sanity caucus.

Bret: A great point. Christie should get out now and throw his support behind Haley. The only reason he got in the race in the first place was to chuck spears at Trump. It hit the wrong Donald — Duck, not Trump — and now all Christie is doing is dividing the anti-Trump field. I also wish Mike Pence would recognize reality and tuck back into bed with his wife of 38 years. That would give Haley a fighting chance to further destroy Vivek Ramaswamy and replace DeSantis as the most plausible Republican alternative to Trump. But I have to admit, my hopes of Trump not being the nominee are dwindling fast.

Gail: OK, New Hampshire Republicans, are you listening? Counting on you for a primary miracle.

Bret: Speaking of Trump crushing his opponents, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw that Washington Post/ABC News poll last week, giving Trump a 10-point lead over Joe Biden in a head-to-head matchup. I realize it might be an outlier, but I don’t understand why no serious Democrat is willing to challenge Biden for the nomination. Help me out here.

Gail: The poll, if accurate, is a cry of crankiness from middle-of-the-roaders who wanted a more exciting candidate. Still, the only reason for a loyal Democrat to oppose Biden’s nomination is that he’s too old. I think he’s been a darned good president. And while I do wish he had stepped aside, I’m certainly not going to have any trouble whatsoever arguing he’s the better option.

This is when I get to point out that Trump is 77 and in worse physical condition than Biden. And has been saying some very weird things lately — even for him.

The Olentangy Local School District in the Columbus, Ohio, area maintains three overlapping speech policies that punish students for expressing sincerely held beliefs about sex and gender and force them to affirm beliefs they do not hold. By the district’s own admission, the three policies require students to use classmates’ “preferred pronouns” and to otherwise refer to peers based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex. The policies likewise prohibit students from using language that is “based upon [another’s] transgender identity” and that others find “insulting,” “dehumanizing,” “unwanted,” “discomfort[ing]” or “offensive.” These speech restrictions apply both on and off campus—even to social media statements posted from a student’s bedroom.

Parents Defending Education (PDE) filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief alleging violation of students’ First Amendment rights and parents’ Fourteenth Amendment rights. The district court found that PDE had standing but ruled for the school district on the merits. Now on appeal before the Sixth Circuit, the Manhattan Institute has joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on an amicus brief supporting the parents and defending student speech. We focus on the broad right to engage in nondisruptive speech that students enjoy under Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) and the prohibition on compelled speech in West Virginia v. Barnette (1943). Nor can schools issue speech codes to prevent harassment under the standards the Supreme Court set out in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), which defines harassment as pervasive conduct, not speech.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

Tim Rosenberger is a legal fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Photo by BjelicaS / iStock

L.M. is a student at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, where school officials regularly engage in expression supporting the view that a person’s identity, not biology, determines whether the person is male, female, both, neither, or something else. Officials also encourage students to engage in their own expression on this subject by inviting them to wear “your Pride gear to celebrate Pride Month.” L.M. disagrees with the school-endorsed view and wore a t-shirt to school that said, “There are only two genders.” The shirt caused no disruption. Nevertheless, school officials took L.M. out of his first class and told him that he must remove the shirt or be sent home. He was unwilling to remove the shirt, so his father picked him up from school.

L.M.’s attorney sent a letter to the school informing officials that their restrictions on L.M.’s speech were unconstitutional. The school’s counsel admitted that the school discriminates on the basis of viewpoint. To protest the school’s censorship, L.M. covered the words “only two” with a piece of tape that said “censored,” and wore that shirt to school. Although the shirt did not cause any disruption—the main justification for school regulation of student conduct—school officials immediately told L.M. that he could not wear that shirt either.

L.M. sought a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction, which the district court denied, and then with the parties’ consent converted into a final judgment. L.M. has appealed to the First Circuit. The Manhattan Institute joined the Mountain States Legal Foundation on a brief that focuses on the “harm to others” exception to student speech rights. At base, L.M.'s speech may not be censored by government officials because it constitutes pure speech expressing foundational principles that have been repeatedly reaffirmed by the Supreme Court.

Photo by VisualArtStudio / iStock

Jordan Peterson has compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Gaston from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

The Canadian psychologist is a vocal critic of Trudeau and likened him to the narcissistic macho character from Disney's 1991 animated film.

Peterson reposted a scathing attack on Trudeau by The Free Press X account, formerly Twitter.

"In the span of five days, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has managed to alienate the government of the largest democracy on Earth; anger key allies from Washington, D.C. to Canberra; and outrage Jews around the world," read the original post.

Peterson added to his repost, "I'm Number One! Sincerely, @JustinTrudeau," along with the photo of Gaston looking at himself lovingly in the mirror. The post has had more than 133,000 views at the time of writing.

The original post refers to the disastrous past few months for Trudeau's prime ministership. It this week culminated in members of the Canadian parliament applauding an Ukrainian man accused of fighting for a Nazi unit in World War II.

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, was invited to attend parliament to coincide with a state visit by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Anthony Rota, the speaker of Canada's House of Commons, resigned over the incident and apologized to the country's Jewish communities.

From left: Jordan Peterson arrives at Perth Airport in Australia on November 28, 2022; and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is seen during a press conference at the G20 summit on November 16, 2022 in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. The clinical psychologist compared the Canadian leader to a Disney character after a series of political missteps. Faith Moran/Leon Neal/Getty Images

"It's extremely upsetting that this happened," Trudeau told reporters on Monday. "The speaker has acknowledged his mistake and has apologized.

"This is something that is deeply embarrassing to the parliament of Canada and, by extension, to all Canadians."

The political gaffe fueled Russia's justification for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine to "demilitarize and denazify" the country. Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine's administration and Zelensky of being neo-Nazis, even though the latter is Jewish.

The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies said that Hunka served during World War II as a member of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the First Ukrainian Division. It was a voluntary unit mostly made up of ethnic Ukrainians and commanded by Nazis including Heinrich Himmler, who formed the group.

Relations between Canada and India also remain frosty over the assassination of fugitive Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian Sikh separatist leader who called for an independent Sikh state called Khalistan in the Punjab region of India.

Trudeau told parliament in September that "Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India" and Nijjar's killing on Canadian soil. Trudeau labeled any such involvement as "unacceptable."

India rejected the claims as "absurd," leading to a tense meeting between Trudeau and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G20 summit in New Delhi in September and the suspension of trade talks between the two nations. Both countries expelled the other's top diplomats, and India issued an travel warning to its citizens heading to Canada. It urged them to "exercise utmost caution" when traveling to Canada because "growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate-crimes."

India also said that certain Canadian politicians and authorities might be indirectly supporting separatist groups that aim to create the state of Khalistan. Trudeau told reporters in July that his country was merely upholding freedom of expression.

"We have an extremely diverse country, and freedom of expression is something that we have," Trudeau said.

The Canadian leader publicly blamed India for the crisis and said in the House of Commons that any involvement by the Indian government in Nijjar's death would be unacceptable.

If claims of Indian involvement were true, said Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, it would be a "grave violation of our sovereignty."

Allies of both countries, the U.S. and Australia, publicly expressed their concern over the ongoing feud.

       In 2022, fears erupted over "rainbow fentanyl," brightly colored fentanyl pills that were said to be designed by drug traffickers to lure innocent children into taking opioids. Parents were warned to be on the watch for the pills—especially in their children's Halloween candy stash. A warning from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) released last August warned that the increasing presence of brightly colored pills "appears to be a new method used by drug cartels to sell highly addictive and potentially deadly fentanyl made to look like candy to children and young people." "Rainbow fentanyl—fentanyl pills and powder that come in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes—is a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults," added DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. However, it was startlingly easy to debunk panic over rainbow fentanyl. As it turns out, drug dealers have plenty of willing adult customers. So why would these they try to lure children, a customer base with no money of their own? And why would dealers give away valuable stock to do so?  "I'm skeptical that [dealers] would try to target children where there is not an existing market," Sally Satel, an addiction psychiatrist and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Reason's Lenore Skenazy in 2022. Considering the high risk of overdose in children, Satel added that "few would survive and come back for more." Just as there are adult reasons for vape companies to sell flavored vape pods, which were the subject of another panic, there are adult reasons for dealers to color their fentanyl—namely, to "brand [their] stuff." But this hasn't kept fears over rainbow fentanyl from gaining momentum again as Halloween nears. Last week, police in Tulalip, Washington, warned parents after finding pastel-colored fentanyl pills at a local casino. "This is a deliberate effort by the drug cartels to lure young users into using this addictive and deadly street drug," Tulalip Police Chief Chris Sutter said in a press release. "With Halloween coming up, children will be receiving and sharing candy, it is important that our Community know if rainbow pills are found, they are deadly, and to call the police." Earlier this month, more "rainbow fentanyl" pills were also seized near Charlotte, North Carolina. "Camel used Joe Camel, and it was a cartoon character. The reason they did that was to market to younger people who were more interested or swayed by the presence of a cartoon character," Charles Odell, the CEO of a local rehab center, told Queen City News, saying that rainbow fentanyl is a similar effort to attract kids. It should be obvious that unscrupulous drug kingpins are trying to attract paying adults, not kids, with brightly colored fentanyl pills. Law enforcement has nonetheless remained eager to peddle this myth—and foment unnecessary panic. The post Despite Debunking, Rainbow Fentanyl Myths Continue appeared first on Reason.com.

       Asked last week about the possibility that the federal government could shut down, Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh described it as "the worst thing that could happen." Coming from a flack for the part of the government that is supposed to plan for what to do in the event of a nuclear war, that description seems just a little hyperbolic. Well, there's some good news for Singh: The federal government won't shut down after all. At least not until November 15. With the scheduled shutdown just hours away, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) pushed a 45-day continuing resolution through the House of Representatives on Saturday afternoon despite the opposition of 90 fellow Republicans (and one Democrat). The Senate passed the same bill in an 88-9 vote on Saturday night, and President Joe Biden has indicated he will sign it. The continuing resolution keeps overall spending levels at 2023 levels, though it does not resolve the impasse over whether Congress will continue supplying military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. That funding was left out of the final bill, but House Democrats released a statement Saturday saying they expected McCarthy to hold an up-or-down vote soon on a separate bill to fund the Ukrainian efforts. In remarks to the media after the House vote, McCarthy criticized the group of Republicans who had blocked various attempts to pass spending bills. "If you have members in your conference who won't let you vote for appropriations bills…and will not vote for a stop-gap measure so the only option is to shut down and not pay our troops—I don't want to be a part of that team," McCarthy said. Others were less diplomatic. "We're tired of fucking around with these whack jobs," Rep. Don Bacon (R–Neb.) told Politico.  While governing 45 days at a time is pretty silly, the last-minute passage of the short-term continuing resolution was probably the least stupid way for this drama to end—for now. It prevents the theatrics of a shutdown from distracting from the actual issue: the cost of the federal budget and the unsustainability of the government's borrowing. But it's also a short enough time period that it can keep those issues front and center in Washington. For various reasons, a shutdown was not a particularly attractive option for meaningfully reducing the size or cost of government. As Reason's Liz Wolfe explained earlier this week, most of the government would actually have continued operating even without a budget bill or continuing resolution. And we know from history that shutdowns don't really save money. After the record 35-day shutdown that ended in January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office found that about $18 billion in federal spending was delayed—less than half of one percent of the $4.4 trillion spent that year. The actual savings were even less, since half of that total was the result of not paying federal employees for five weeks, which means they were immediately wiped out when the government reopened and those workers got their back pay. The Republican holdouts were hoping to use the threat of a shutdown to force some reductions in discretionary spending. But there was little indication from any side that the threat of a shutdown was going to address the entitlement costs that are driving the growing federal budget deficit. "This crisis was the fault of House Republican leadership, who stalled on bringing up a passable package until today, forcing a last-minute scramble just hours before a potential shutdown. Such recklessness is no way to govern," Steve Ellis, president of Taxpayer for Common Sense, a fiscal conservative nonprofit, said in a statement. "The question now is whether legislators can put aside their differences to pass comprehensive spending bills in a timely manner." If the government had shut down on Sunday morning, it wouldn't have been the dramatically disruptive event that so many in the media and bureaucracy wanted to portray it as. But it wouldn't have been a step toward solving America's fiscal problems  either. What happens between now and November will be crucial.The post The Government Won't Shut Down appeared first on Reason.com.

As democracies around the world grow increasingly divided with the rise of various anti-democratic forces and nationalist-populist movements, a group of Harvard scholars gathered Friday morning to assess the state of democracy in the U.S. and propose ways to revitalize it to ensure it best serves 21st-century America. The event, titled “Revitalizing Democracy,” was one of six academic symposia that took place Friday across the University as part of President Claudine Gay’s inaugural celebration. Gay, a political scientist, has called “faltering” democracies one of the most pressing challenges the world faces. She said that seeking ways Harvard can join with the global community to find solutions is a priority for the University. During a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School led by moderator Guy-Uriel Charles, Charles Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, faculty panelists identified some of the difficulties American democracy faces today. Among the issues that panelists cited are an outdated reliance on institutions like the Electoral College, the U.S. Senate, and the filibuster that permit a minority to thwart the will of the majority, and foreign actors and nation-states targeting the American electorate with threats and false information designed to widen political and cultural divisions and weaken consensus on democratic principles. Many of the problems have been gradually emerging over time amid changes in population through immigration, shifts to a global economy, and the rise of digital technology. Danielle Allen at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor, and director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, said passage of immigration laws in the 1960s, the emergence of social media and structural reforms to both political parties in the 1950s have resulted in “unintended consequences” that affect our democracy today. Some of the panelists noted that the country has only been a true multicultural democracy since the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, while the Constitution, written by and for a white minority eligible to vote, has remained largely untouched since the Civil Rights era. The “outsized” and very different experience that communities of color often have with policing compared to white communities fuels misperceptions about the state and crime and hardens fear-driven partisanship, said Yanilda González, assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. The panel offered ideas for how the Harvard community, particularly faculty and students, can start to dismantle these barriers and strengthen democracy so that it more fairly and equitably serves the changing America populace. Archon Fung, Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS, said research has shown that frequent face-to-face interactions between people with very different political views reduces polarization and will foster a “culture of democracy” in which disagreement is welcome and partisanship is not, so focusing more effort on bridging political gaps at the local or state level is critical. Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and Harvard College Professor, suggested an amendment to the Constitution that would impose term limits on Supreme Court justices at some future, mutually agreed upon date, could be an effective way to eliminate lifetime appointments, which partisans on both sides agree in principle runs counter to democratic practice, and to demonstrate that changes to the Constitution are necessary and possible. Academic institutions, like Harvard, ought to begin working now to identify the models that can best move U.S. political institutions forward so that they truly support our multicultural democracy, said Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University and director of the Center for European Studies. “The ideas are already there,” Ziblatt said. They just require time and attention to refine them so they’re ready to be implemented when the time comes, much like was done following World War II to establish institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. “If we just sort of hold off until the moment is ‘realistic,’ then we won’t be ready when the moment comes.” “Innovating for Impact: Science for the Mind and Body in the 21st Century” Another panel, moderated by Amy Wagers, the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the co-chair of the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, discussed Harvard’s biomedical research and the field’s untapped potential in improving health outcomes for billions around the world. “I really wanted to highlight the many facets of innovation that are needed to realize the full potential of biological discoveries, spanning from the first arc of an idea to the experiments in their early days to the discoveries — and ultimately their application — in the real world,” Wagers said. And the first step, all agreed, was to be unafraid to take leaps. “We need to take big risks to solve hard problems,” said Kara McKinley, one of the panelists and an assistant professor at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. McKinley leads a lab that seeks to advance regenerative medicine by studying a repair mechanism in the uterus that may offer insights into how we can harness natural processes to heal wounds. “Because in the end, this is really the goal, to create cures and to do science that is in service to humankind,” she said.       Moderator Amy Wagers (at podium) introduces panelists Kara McKinley (from left), Nadine Gaab, Irene Faravelli, Arlene Sharpe, and Amitabh Chandra at “Innovating for Impact: Science for the Mind and Body in the 21st Century.”  Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer       During the event, panelists engaged with the attendees, asking questions and encouraging them to discuss ideas with the people seated next to them. Arlene Sharpe is the Kolokotrones University Professor and chair of the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. Her lab focuses on whether we can train our own immune cells to better fight infection and cancer. Sharpe played a video of T cells delivering “the kiss of death” to cancer cells. She turned to the audience and said, “I could watch this all day,” eliciting chuckles around the room. “One of the most exciting things about being at Harvard is the collaboration,” said Sharpe, who is also a member of the Broad Institute and the leader of the Cancer Immunology Program at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. “One of the things that kept me here all these years is the ability to work with people. Wherever my science takes me, there are wonderful collaborations that develop that enable us to work together.” Other panelists included Nadine Gaab, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education who specializes in developmental cognitive neuroscience as it relates to learning disabilities; Irene Faravelli, a neurologist and postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology; and Amitabh Chandra, an economist and the Henry and Allison McCance Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. During the Q&A portion of the event, all panelists agreed that more investment in the broader science community is needed if we want to address some of the world’s most pressing health issues — and not just a greater commitment of dollars, but human investment. “The impediment to missing innovations is no longer capital,” said Chandra, who is also the Ethel Zimmerman Wiener Professor of Public Policy and Director of Health Policy Research at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “[B]ut the people who are capable of discovering them are not entering the life sciences.” Some of them, he noted, never make it to an institution of higher education because they lack the necessary economic and educational opportunities. Harvard, according to Chandra, produces nearly 4 percent of the world’s basic science. As a significant producer of research, the University has a role to play in equipping current and future generations of scientists to further advance the boundaries of knowledge, especially scientists from historically underrepresented backgrounds. “There is really an urgent need to increase the diversity of people who do science to make science look like the people that our science seeks to serve,” said McKinley.          During the “Challenging Inequality in the US” panel discussion, Peter Blair shared his research on expanding labor market mobility for Americans who don’t have bachelor’s degrees. Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer       “Challenging Inequality in the US: New Ideas and Approaches” Panelists who took part in an academic symposium on inequality in the U.S. urged the audience to fight inequality from their own trenches, in schools, neighborhoods, and their local associations. Scholars can do research, compile and analyze data, and come up with theories about inequality. But, they noted, their work needs to be accompanied by the efforts of the community. “Ideas matter for advancing real-world change,” said Sara Bleich, professor of public health policy at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who was the event’s moderator. “But this work requires collaboration.” The key, said Crystal Yang, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is to look outside research institutions and go into the real world, and commit to work following truth and science. Panelists shared with the audience how they became interested in studying inequality and, in some cases, how their personal life stories influenced their paths. They also talked about the policies and the practices they would like to see to advance their research. Peter Blair, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, studies labor market discrimination, and the ways in which education can help workers who lack degrees achieve upper mobility. Blair spoke about his work with other researchers and policymakers to expand labor market mobility for the 70 million Americans who don’t have bachelor’s degrees. “Research matters,” said Blair. “The way that we see people matters. The lens of thinking about who’s not in the room matters also. One of the phenomenal things about being at Harvard and specifically at the Ed School is that we value the basic research policy and its impact on practice.” Robert Sampson, the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor, who studies crime, criminal justice, and urban inequality, spoke about the role of universities in research to promote social changes by including the voices of community members and understanding their lived experiences. Imani Perry, who studies the history of Black thought, art, and imagination created in resistance to slavery and oppression, made a special plea to the audience. “Identify an issue of injustice or inequality … [and devote the next two years] to spending some time on a regular basis on this issue,” said Perry, Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies, and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute. “Even if it’s just those of us who are in this room, that would have a remarkably transformative effect. What we learn when we do scholarly research is that it’s the slow work that is the most transformative work. The same is true for social movement.” * * *                   “Confronting the Impact of Climate Change: Building Resilience and New Solutions” featured panelist Steven Wofsy (from left), Karen Thornber, Laura Schifter, Tamarra James-Todd, and Stephen Ansolabehere. Panelist Claire Leibowicz shared her insights on “Harnessing Generative Artificial Intelligence for Learning, Teaching, and Working.” Photos by Jon Chase and Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographers       There were three other panels marking the inauguration of Gay. Stephen Ansolabehere, Tamarra James-Todd, Laura Schifter, Karen Thornber, and Steven Wofsy discussed how leaders and communities can confront the far-reaching effects of climate change; Amanda Claybaugh, Isaac Kohane, Karim Lakhani, and Claire Leibowicz examined the potential for generative AI to transform labor and education; and Durba Mitra, Megan Panzano, Matthew Potts, and Louis Menand traded ideas about the role of academia in the face of new tech and global challenges.          Robin Kelsey (from left), Matthew Potts, and Durba Mitra listen to an audience member’s question at the discussion, “Looking Ahead: The Future of the Academy.” Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer      

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Barry Manilow is an American institution. It’s okay if you think so too: I won’t tell anyone.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Mark Leibovich on a lesson of Dianne Feinstein’s career Have Republicans learned nothing from the War on Terror? One big benefit of remote work Good luck getting into the club. You Know the WordsHer name was Lola. She was a showgirl.Come on. You know the rest. Everyone does.And so did the crowd at the Barry Manilow concert I attended in Las Vegas last week, on the night that he broke Elvis Presley’s record for the most shows at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino.Oh, I know. Roll your eyes. We’re all too cool for Manilow, the Brooklyn kid who became a schmaltz superstar, the guy whose music for almost five decades has practically been the definition of unhip, shamelessly sentimental “adult contemporary.” We smirk—yet we know every word.Think of the scene in the 1995 movie Tommy Boy—and if you haven’t seen it, it’s better than you’d think—where Chris Farley and David Spade are on a road trip and “Superstar,” by the Carpenters, comes on the radio. Neither of them changes the station. “Talk about lame,” Spade sneers. “I can live with it if you can,” Farley says. A minute later, both of them are singing along and crying.So, kind of like that.But how is it possible that even those of us who aren’t dedicated fans know Manilow’s songs so well? In the days of vinyl, I never bought a Barry Manilow album. And yet, reviewing my old iTunes list, somehow, over the years, I have managed to accumulate something like 15 of his songs, and even more on Spotify. Who could have put those on there? I have every Steely Dan record; a full trove of the Beatles; classics from Squeeze, The Alan Parsons Project, the Clash, and … This One’s for You?Barry Manilow is woven into my music collection because he is a cornerstone of the late-20th-century American soundtrack. He’s not going to appear in the canonical music histories, especially because some of his hits were written by others. His musical structures are not going to be analyzed; his lyrics are not going to be pondered. (He is, however, an aging white male, so he might pass muster with Jann Wenner, a co-founder and the former publisher of Rolling Stone.)You may not realize it, but if you’re of a certain age—really, of almost any age beyond childhood—Manilow has likely been a part of the musical backdrop of your life. He certainly was part of mine.I can admit this now that I’m approaching the phase of life that scientists call “geezer.” If you had told me when I was in high school, back in the 1970s, that one day I’d drop a chunk of cash on a Manilow concert, I’d have snorted in disgust. It’s not that we didn’t appreciate Barry back then, but if you were trying to be a virile young fellow, you were only supposed to tolerate him, and only around girls.And yet, despite my ostensible indifference to him at the height of his fame, there was always some Barry in the background, especially where early romances were concerned. I had a big high-school breakup with a girl across town just as “Even Now” came out; thank heavens I was too darn manly to admit that the song put a lump in my throat (and still does). I fell for a young lady who lived far away from me during a too-brief summer stay in Boston, and of course we had a lovely “Weekend in New England,” and … well, if all this sounds corny, of course it was. To be dramatic and corny about love—about everything, really—is one of the great privileges of youth.By the time I was heading off to college at the end of the ’70s, I was a typical mainstream-rock consumer: Boston, Bob Seger, Meat Loaf, the Cars. (I also had Partners in Crime, by Rupert Holmes. I stand by this choice.) Once in college, I immersed myself in new wave, synth-pop, the “second British invasion,” and the roster of glittery superstars and one-hit wonders created by a new thing called MTV. Clearly, I had outgrown Barry Manilow.Except I hadn’t. I first heard “Ships” in my 20s—an Ian Hunter song popularized by Manilow—and to this day, it reminds me of my difficult relationship with my own father. “Copacabana” is always going to remind me of dancing with friends right into my 40s. In my 50s, with a first marriage behind me, I called up a nice divorcée I had been dating and told her, with a bit of warbling Manilow in my voice, that I was “ready to take a chance again.”So was she. And that’s how both of us, years later, ended up in Las Vegas, watching an 80-year-old Barry Manilow belt out his greatest hits at the Westgate.I am not a professional music critic, but it’s a great show. Other aging stars have had to dial down the pitch and bring in backup singers, but Manilow did some justified showing off, his voice climbing his trademark modulations. I suppose when you’ve done more than 600 shows in a row, you’ve got it down to a science, but somehow, Manilow came across as if it were one of his first appearances and he was just amazed that so many people showed up. (I didn’t realize, until seeing him in person, how intensely his fans, the self-dubbed “Fanilows,” love him. He clearly loves them back.) Most of all, it was just fun.Sure, I’ll admit that some of Manilow’s stuff gives me hives. He is famously the composer of some well-known commercial jingles, including for State Farm and Band-Aid, so some of the songs I’ve always disliked, such as “Can’t Smile Without You,” always sound to me like an annoying commercial earworm. Manilow himself admits that Andrew Lloyd Webber hated Manilow’s version of “Memory.” So do I. (Don’t tell Sir Andrew, but I hate the song no matter who does it; Manilow’s rendition is just especially treacly.) And it might earn me the enmity of the Fanilows, but I never liked Barry’s first big hit, “Mandy.”But Manilow and the songs he sings are critic-proof. Even Manilow gets it: During the show last week, he admitted that his music is a standard on elevators and in dentists’ offices. “As long as there are teeth,” he quipped, “my music will never die.” It’s not great art, but then, neither were the Carpenters, another beloved ’70s act. (“We’ve Only Just Begun” was written by Paul Williams for a bank commercial, by the way.) Manilow’s voice—much like Karen Carpenter’s, come to think of it—has always just been there as part of my life, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t like it back then or that I don’t like it now.You don’t have to admit that you agree with me. I understand. Let’s just say that I can live with it if you can—and that neither of us is going to change the station.Related: Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser. Surrender to Steely Dan. Today’s News Senator Dianne Feinstein died last night at the age of 90. House Republicans failed to advance a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown this weekend, in a major blow to Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A state of emergency has been declared across New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley due to severe flooding. Dispatches The Books Briefing: A new book looks at the “underground historians” of China resurfacing moments from the past that authorities would prefer be forgotten, Gal Beckerman writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers whether Democrats should stick with Joe Biden, and discusses controversy over a talk about racial color blindness. Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read  Courtesy of The National Zoo Basil the Opossum Has One Eye, a Big Heart, and a Job to DoBy Elaine Godfrey This week was a bittersweet one at the zoo. Visitors to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, with their panda-patterned hats and panda umbrellas, flooded in to say farewell to the zoo’s three giant pandas, who will soon be on their way back to China. To honor their departure, zoo staff are hosting a multiday Panda Palooza, with panda-themed movie screenings, kids’ activities, and cake for the bears. After all, the pandas have been D.C. icons since the first generation arrived more than 50 years ago. Today, zoo-adjacent restaurants sell panda pancakes and panda cake pops. The D.C. metro system sells panda tote bags, and the Washington Mystics women’s basketball team adopted Pax the Panda as its mascot.  But I went to the zoo last week to see a very different animal. I arrived at the Small Mammal House, walked past the South American prehensile-tailed porcupines and a pair of Australian brush-tailed bettongs, and found Basil the opossum asleep, his fuzzy body curled into a ball, his chest rising and falling. When Mimi Nowlin, a Small Mammal House keeper, climbed through a door into the back of his enclosure carrying a plastic tub of capelin, the creature’s eye—he has only one—fluttered open. He stood up on tiny legs. And as Nowlin held out a chunk of fish with a pair of silver tongs, Basil waddled forward, opened his toothy mouth, and chomped. A few minutes later, after the tub was empty, Basil shoved his head in and licked the sides. He had bewitched me, body and soul!  Read the full article.More From The Atlantic The science of consciousness is having a rumble. Iran’s influence operation pays off. Culture Break  Boy walking home on Ross Street in the historic district of Chinatown in San Francisco in 1966 (Vincent Maggiora / San Francisco Chronicle / Getty) Read. Orphan Bachelors, a new book by Fae Myenne Ng, is an exemplar of the historical memoir.Watch. In The Royal Hotel, two young women take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash (in theaters next Friday). It’s one of our critics’ 22 most exciting films to watch this season.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I knew when I wrote this nostalgic reminiscence about Barry Manilow that some of my friends in the office (especially among the younger generations) might, shall we say, harbor a dissenting view. So I’m handing over the postscript today to my colleague Sam Fentress, an assistant editor here at The Atlantic. Sam turned 27 today—happy birthday, Sam!—and he raises an admittedly uncomfortable point about a big part of Barry’s oeuvre.  — Tom Cheers to Barry Manilow; may he live to grace us with another 637 Vegas nights. I love “Copacabana”—a perfect karaoke song—but if I could permanently excise one trauma from American cultural memory, it would be the three (3) Christmas albums he recorded from 1990 to 2007 (the third was retail-exclusive to Hallmark stores, which I believe is what they call a “red flag”). I can’t think of a sonic experience more prone to induce apoplexy than the first 30 seconds of his medley rendition—he loves a medley, bless him—of “Carol of the Bells” and “Jingle Bells.” Brace yourself, and your loved ones around you, as he struggles to meet the unforgiving tempo in that Cheez Whiz drone. Never have I felt more inconsolable in a CVS checkout line.         — Sam Due to a technical error, yesterday’s newsletter included a past version of the Culture Break section. You can find the updated section here.Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A thirty-five-year war reignited last week. Hundreds of people died. Tens of thousands may have been displaced. The world, focussed on the United Nations General Assembly and the war in Ukraine, barely noticed. On September 19th, Azerbaijan started shelling towns and military bases in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave that had long fought for independence. In less than a day, the self-proclaimed republic was effectively disarmed and forced to capitulate. Russian forces, ostensibly there to prevent just this kind of outcome, offered little or no resistance. The most generous reading of the situation is that they were caught unawares. The least generous is that Russia had given its approval to the attack, perhaps in exchange for maintaining a military presence in the region.

The Karabakh conflict dates back to 1988. It prefigured a dozen others that would erupt in what was then the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Nagorno-Karabakh was, legally, an autonomous region within Azerbaijan, a constituent republic of the U.S.S.R. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s government loosened political restrictions, Karabakh Armenians demanded the right, which they argued was guaranteed to them by the Soviet constitution, to secede from Azerbaijan and join Armenia, also a Soviet constituent republic. Moscow rejected the demand. Meanwhile, shoot-outs between ethnic Armenians and ethnic Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh sparked violence elsewhere. In February, 1988, anti-Armenian pogroms in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait left dozens dead. Two years later, a week of anti-Armenian violence in Baku, Azerbaijan’s historically multiethnic capital, killed dozens more. Thousands of ethnic Armenians fled Azerbaijan, where their families had lived for generations. Some left on a plane chartered by the chess champion Garry Kasparov, probably the best-known Azerbaijani Armenian, who was also leaving his motherland forever.

In 1991, the Soviet Union broke apart and each of its fifteen constituent republics became a sovereign state. For Karabakh Armenians, this meant that any legal basis for their secessionist aspirations had vanished. Nagorno-Karabakh became one of several ethnic enclaves in the post-Soviet space that was fighting for independence from the newly independent country of which they were a part—South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to break free from Georgia, the Transnistria Region fought to separate from Moldova, Chechnya wanted out of Russia. In the early nineteen-nineties, each of these conflicts became a hot war. In every case outside its own borders, Russia supported the separatist movements—and, in most cases, used the conflicts to station its own troops in the region. Two decades later, Russia used the same playbook to foment armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh lasted until 1994. Both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing: the deliberate displacement and killing of people based on their ethnicity. Moscow secretly supported Azerbaijan in the conflict. The war ended with a de-facto victory for the Armenians, who were able to establish self-rule on a large part of the territory they claimed, even though not a single country—not even Armenia—officially recognized the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. Whether it was because the Armenians won, or because the conflict ended when Russia had been destabilized by its own bloody constitutional crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh was the only conflict region in the former empire where Russia did not station its troops.

For the next three decades, the political paths of Armenia and Azerbaijan, two neighbors inextricably linked by blood and war, diverged. Azerbaijan transitioned from Soviet totalitarianism to post-Soviet dictatorship, with a ruling dynasty, censorship, and widespread political repression. One of the world’s original oil powers, Azerbaijan also grew comparatively wealthy. It nurtured diplomatic, economic, and military ties with neighboring Turkey and with Israel, which views Azerbaijan as an ally in any confrontation with Azerbaijan’s next-door neighbor Iran. Armenia, at least formally, undertook a transition to democracy. That transition hit a dead end in October, 1999, when a group of gunmen burst into the parliament and assassinated nine people, including all the leaders of one of the two ruling parties. The leader of the surviving party, Robert Kocharyan, led the country for another decade, and his clan remained in power until 2018, when a peaceful revolution seemed to start a new era. The new leader of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan, is a former journalist.

In both countries, Nagorno-Karabakh remained the focus of political life. For Azerbaijan, the pain and humiliation of the 1994 defeat formed the centerpiece of the national narrative. “Azerbaijan got its independence in parallel with the war, so Nagorno-Karabakh has played a major role in shaping Azerbaijani national identity,” Shujaat Ahmadzada, an independent Azerbaijani political scientist, told me. “There was the memory, the images of internally displaced people, adding to the narrative of having suffered injustices. And conflict is important to keeping and solidifying power.”

In Armenia, what became known as the Karabakh Clan has held power for most of the post-Soviet period. Kocharyan is a former leader of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Armen Martirosyan, an Armenian publisher and longtime political activist, told me that, in 2018, he had hoped that Nikol Pashinyan would finally represent a “party of peace.” But even Pashinyan, who was born in 1975, was compelled to claim that he had got his political start in Nagorno-Karabakh. “Seven out of eight of our political parties are parties of war,” Martirosyan said.

Both sides continued to arm themselves. The self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic formed its own armed forces, aided and supplied by Armenia. Azerbaijan imported arms from Israel. “It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that an oil-rich country with an authoritarian regime can put together a well-trained, cohesive army,” Alexander Cherkasov, a Russian researcher in exile who has been documenting ethnic conflicts in the region for thirty-five years, said. In 2020, Azerbaijan attacked Nagorno-Karabakh. Fighting lasted forty-four days. Thousands of people died. Azerbaijan reëstablished control over much of the self-proclaimed republic and adjacent territories. In the end, Moscow brokered a ceasefire that rested on the presence of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh. The status of the self-proclaimed republic remained undecided but, for the time being, it seemed that a shrunken Nagorno-Karabakh would continue to be self-governed.

Less than fifteen months later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing political persecution, the draft, and Western economic sanctions flooded into Armenia. Security guarantees offered to Armenia by Russia began to seem less reliable, and the price of these guarantees seemed to rise. According to Arman Grigoryan, an Armenian-born political scientist at Lehigh University, Pashinyan launched a “grandiose project of pulling Armenia out of Russia’s orbit.” Apparently counting on Russia’s waning influence in the world and weakening interest in the region, Pashinyan dragged his feet on signing a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, at least one that involved having Russia at the table. He also did not deliver on one of the obligations Armenia had accepted as part of the 2020 ceasefire agreement: to provide Azerbaijan with an overland corridor to Nakhchivan, the country’s exclave on the other side of the Armenian border, three hundred miles from Baku. Such a corridor would, under the terms of the ceasefire agreement, be controlled by the Russian security services. Pashinyan’s reluctance was understandable, but his hope that Western support would allow him to stall indefinitely proved unfounded. Pashinyan also took a number of diplomatic—or, rather, undiplomatic—steps that galled Russia. Most recently, he asked the Armenian parliament to ratify the Rome Statute, the founding document of the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Vladimir Putin for war crimes allegedly committed against Ukraine. (Russia, like the United States, has not ratified the Rome Statute.)

Late last year, Azerbaijan started ratcheting up pressure on Nagorno-Karabakh. In December, a blockade was imposed, apparently aimed at cutting off the only supply route to the enclave. People found some ways to circumvent it, but over time the situation grew dire. Thomas de Waal, a London-based senior fellow with the Carnegie Europe Endowment for International Peace, who has been documenting the Karabakh conflict for nearly thirty years, told me that “thousands of people were without gas and there was bread rationing, down to two hundred grams a day. This and having to walk everywhere for miles, for anything. And then, out of nowhere, getting shelled.”

The opportunistic assault on GB News

This is an attempt to shut down the competition

A long, long time ago, last week, British politicians and commentators were fulminating about the many sins of Russell Brand. One of the more infamous was the time when he and Jonathan Ross called up Andrew Sachs of Fawlty Towers fame on BBC Radio 2 to gloat about how Brand had slept with his granddaughter. This was embarrassing for Mr Sachs, of course, but it was doubly embarrassing for Georgina Baillie — a young woman who had her sex life exposed to the public just so two assholes could have a laugh on air.

It was a scandal, but the consequences were limited. Mr Ross was suspended but not fired in the aftermath of the incident. Mr Brand resigned but ended up with some nice gigs in Hollywood. Aside from Charles Moore, who refused to pay his license fee, no one was calling for the BBC to get defunded. In fact, left-wing columnists like Marina Hyde made fun of Ms Baillie for complaining about the incident (“they were total scumbags, but it’s over. O-V-A-H”). Hyde apologised last month, but said she had been opposing opportunistic attacks on the BBC.

Say what you like about Laurence Fox’s unpleasant sexual comments towards the left-wing journalist Ava Evans on GB News, but they were not half as obnoxious as Brand’s and Ross’s towards Andrew Sachs. Brand and Ross dwelled at length on embarrassing Sachs and Baillie over real life incidents, while Fox delivered offhandedly unpleasant comments about a fictional scenario. Both are nasty, yes, but there’s really no comparison. If Fox said that about your daughter you might want to slap him but if Brand and Ross said that to your dad about your daughter you’d want to hunt them down Taken style.

So, why was Sachsgate just an embarrassing blip on BBC programming while Foxgate is cause, according to various journalists and politicians, for GB News to get shut down? Sky’s Adam Boulton and Caroline Nokes MP of the Conservatives have been vociferously agreeing on BBC Newsnight that GB News should get “taken off air” — a claim that would have seemed unthinkably ridiculous in 2008.

Back then, Charlie Brooker — the Guardian columnist who went on to create Black Mirror — complained that the hysterical response to “an ill-advised bit of juvenalia” might lead to “an increase in BBC jumpiness”. Returning to the subject in his next column, he lamented the “kneejerk Ofcom clocking” that could lead to the “overall toning down of any and all potentially “offensive” TV material, which in turn could deprive us of authentic gems in the future”. Hm, fair point.

Mr Brooker said that people “who retrospectively complain to Ofcom about material they’ve only read about second-hand are, in essence, a bunch of sanctimonious crybabies indulging in a wretched form of masturbation.” Intriguing argument. You aren’t going to hear it when it comes to GB News.

… the scale of this controversy has not been the result of Mr Fox’s comments as much as politics

But that’s because the scale of this controversy has not been the result of Mr Fox’s comments as much as politics. Mainstream liberal and left-wing commentators don’t like GB News and have seized upon a chance to get it taken off air. Seeking an “overall toning down” is the point — but not just of intrusive sexual remarks but political incorrectness as a whole.

Adam Boulton said something revealing. “I think there is a delicate and important broadcast ecology in this country,” he said, “I think GB News is trying to bust that ecology, and frankly, what Ofcom should do is shut it down.”

What a racket! You couldn’t find a more explicit assertion of the view that the establishment doesn’t like uncontrollable competition and wants to get it squelched. What has this “broadcast ecology” done that its preservation is so essential? I don’t think the British media does that good a job. Do you?

Still, with Ofcom being crammed with various sympathetic luvvies, Mr Boulton and his peers have a decent chance. Melanie Dawes, its Chief Executive, was Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (and what a fine job they do) and was Civil Service Gender Champion and Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Champion. I’m sure that GB News will get a fair hearing from her.

I’ve written about how GB News should make changes to its product to be more effective. Still, if it is to continue to exist in any kind of oppositional form, it cannot sink into a defensive posture. It must appreciate that the people who seek its closure are not doing so in the name of Ava Evans but in the name of Britain’s weed-strewn “broadcast ecology” — trying to kill off any chance it has of being successful like a plant releasing chemicals into the soil.

Meanwhile, Conservative MPs who appear on the platform should not mumble apologies — how many Labour politicians stopped appearing on the BBC in 2008? — but should think about what role Ofcom might play when Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in government. If you don’t believe that it could be his voluntary attack dog, I’ve got a media start-up to sell you.

The word that probably best describes the Biden administration’s efforts in public policy is “ambitious.” Most of its initiatives — from infrastructure funding to support for green transformation to aiding Ukraine — are big and bold. Make sense of the news fast with Opinions' daily newsletter ArrowRight Now, the White House is trying to put together another major effort that, if successful, will be a game changer: the Saudi-Israel normalization. There are many complications that could derail the negotiations. But if a deal comes together, the Middle East’s strongest military and most technologically advanced power (Israel) will be allied to the region’s strongest economic power (Saudi Arabia) — which is still the swing supplier of the world’s oil — under a U.S. security architecture. That would be a major win for Washington.

For more than a decade, the United States has been searching for a role in the Middle East that is not the old quasi-imperial one and yet secures U.S. interests in this crucial region, allowing Washington to focus on the larger challenges posed by Russia and China. By organizing a soft alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, President Biden can rely on these two countries to anchor the region economically and militarily.

There is a price, of course, and it is substantial. Saudi Arabia wants a U.S. security guarantee and U.S. technology to build a nuclear energy industry. That includes the domestic enrichment of uranium, which the United States has never facilitated in another country. (Of course, many countries with home-grown nuclear industries enrich their own uranium, from India to France.) My understanding, based on sources in the U.S. government, is that the two sides are close to agreement on the nuclear issue — which will likely involve a U.S.-controlled enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia.

The security umbrella is reportedly not going to contain a version of NATO’s Article 5 guarantee, but rather a softer commitment to respond and take action if Saudi Arabia is attacked. This will require careful language to ensure that the clause is not invoked if Saudi Arabia precipitates a crisis, as it has in recent years. It would have to include some assurances that the Saudis will accommodate U.S. interests on the price of oil, exclude Chinese military facilities from its territory and keep denominating its oil in dollars. Assuming these issues can be overcome, Washington should open up its security umbrella to Saudi Arabia.

The truth is that, ever since the Carter Doctrine of 1980 (which declared the Persian Gulf an area of “vital” interest to the United States), Washington has recognized that intervention in the gulf region by a hostile power would threaten the economic lifeblood of the industrial world. And when such an attack took place against Kuwait in 1990, directly threatening Saudi Arabia, the United States did in fact come to the rescue of Riyadh.

The largest challenge is with Israel. This deal would be concluded with the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history, one that is trying to alter the constitutional makeup of the country and moving to make a Palestinian state an impossibility. But Saudi Arabia and the United States have a lot of leverage: Israel needs this deal more than they do — and, in particular, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces mass protests, an ongoing trial and a restless coalition of extremists. If Washington and Riyadh work together, they might be able to pull off a new U.S.-Saudi-Israel alliance that could make greater progress on Palestinian rights than has taken place in decades.

Both Riyadh and Washington should make clear to Netanyahu that he has to take hard steps to keep open the path for a two-state solution. That means a freeze on expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, an end to the legalization of illegal outposts and the opening up of areas currently under Israeli control to allow Palestinians to expand their towns in the West Bank.

This would enrage Netanyahu’s most extreme coalition partners, who want to annex all of the West Bank. But there is a way out of the impasse. As Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told me: “Biden should present Bibi with a strategic grand bargain that includes significant action on the Palestinian issue. Let Bibi figure out how to manage his coalition or how to break it and form a new one. What Biden is proposing is good for the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Extremists in Netanyahu’s government should not be allowed to veto it.”

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

carlos lozada

We’re talking presidents today, but I’m wondering, does anyone have a favorite fictional president?

ross douthat

What’s the name of the president in “Dr. Strangelove?”

michelle cottle

Oh, yeah. That’s good. I’ll go with that one.

Dimitri. I’m as upset as you are.

There’s no fighting in the war room.

I mean, the unironic choice is Bill Pullman in “Independence Day,” but.

Ooh! We will not go quietly into the night.

We will not go gently into the night.

We will not vanish without a fight!

I’ve never seen that movie, and now I never will.

Oh, you must!

Never.

What?

No, no.

How can you not —

Why don’t you guys just reenact it for me?

I could!

I mean, we can.

I could!

We can and we will.

Ross and I could do — I think we could do dialogue verbatim from that movie. Yes.

Uh, Mr. President, that’s not entirely accurate.

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

lydia polgreen

And I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is Matter of Opinion, where thoughts are aloud. I just don’t want anyone to forget the slogan.

Oh, my God. [MUSIC PLAYING]

So, today, we’re going to talk about the presidency and the re-election prospects of Joe Biden. Scranton Joe. Amtrak Joe. Whatever you want to call him. We’re going to look at how things are going for Biden heading into the re-election campaign. The short answer is that so far, not great. In recent national polls, Biden is either neck and neck or possibly trailing in a rematch with Donald Trump. That’s the twice impeached, four-times indicted Donald Trump. Biden’s approval rating is 41 percent compared to a 56 percent disapproval, which is what political types call being underwater. Oh, and it doesn’t help that 6 in 10 Democrats would like some other candidate to challenge Biden for the nomination. Not anyone in particular, just someone else.

Anyone, whoever.

Michelle, you’re our politics guru. Looking at 2024 in particular, what’s going on with Joe Biden?

Ooh, there are so many challenges, some of which aren’t really his fault and some of which he needs to take the lion’s share of the blame for. If we just look at the kind of top line ones, one, it’s not his fault, but the country is still and basically a sour, anxious mood post-pandemic. If you are president of the United States, you’re going to take a hit for that. And then, whether fair or not, everybody thinks he’s too old. Now, it’s not just that he is old. He seems old. He seems old, and he seems frail, which is what matters in politics. You can have a Bernie Sanders. You can have an Elizabeth Warren. You can have a Donald Trump, who is almost as old as Biden. But instead of seeming frail, Trump always seems to be a toddler whose head is about to explode.

Full of vim and vigor.

Exactly.

Although I mean, he does seem to be having some screws loose. I mean, there’s like videos that I see of him where he’s just like rambling in crazy ways. So I do wonder whether his —

As opposed to?

I know he’s always done that, but it does seem to get worse.

Oh, I agree. I think there’s a kind of losing a step, a little bit of — I don’t even know how to politely put it. But there’s a potential slippage there with Trump. But he just seems crazy. Crazy is different than frail.

So Michelle, how much of that is precisely attitude?

Joe? Oh, a lot of it is.

I mean, is it —

But a lot of it’s not.

Is it just the contrast to the hyped up lunacy of the Trump years that Joe seems kind of staid and boring, or do you think people are worried that he actually looks like he’s not up to the job physically?

I think it’s a bit of both. I mean, the staid, reasonable, balanced worked in his favor last time around. People wanted a departure from a complete lunatic. But four years in this job ages everybody. I mean, whether you start out young like a Bill Clinton or you already have a jump on maturity. You’re going to come out of that first term worn down. And he moves differently than he used to. When he speaks, it’s a little bit different than it used to be. So I do think that there are specific concerns about whether or not he is just going to have a hard time doing four more years.

Well, I think also, I’ve had a lot of conversations lately with both Democratic lawmakers who’ve spent time with the president lately and also big Democratic donors. And the thing that they tell me is that he seems super old, super slow, and in some ways, they kind of don’t even look forward to spending time with the president, which is like a weird thing. Like, usually, it’s like a real big deal to spend time with the president because he’s just kind of rambling. And so if the people who are in your party and serving for office and also the people who are writing checks to keep you in office are like, I don’t really want to hang out with this guy because he’s a bit of a bummer, can we really blame the voters?

That’s striking that you don’t even have from prominent Democrats the whole line of like, oh, he’s so much better in small groups, right? That is sort of the classic thing that gets said about candidates who don’t seem to be doing well on the trail. I think where Democrats should be panicked is about campaigning because, yes, in 2020, voters liked Biden’s relative steadiness and discipline. They also didn’t see anything of him because it was the middle of a pandemic, and he was literally campaigning from his home. And now he’s four years older, and it’s going to be a much more, presumably, let’s hope, a much more normal campaign season, where it’s normal for candidates to get out of Washington, get out of the White House, do events all over the country, gladhand, all the rest. Unless Trump suffers some debilitating setback, he’s going to be out there or another Republican nominee.

Debilitating imprisonment, perhaps?

Well, you’re right. No, no, that’s right. I’m leaving a side —

Does that count incarceration?

It could be that —

That does keep you from hitting the campaign trail.

God help us.

Yes.

It keeps you from hitting the campaign trail. So actually, that —

It does not keep you from becoming president.

Yeah, right now, I think the Democrats’ problem of Biden being president again, it’s eclipsed by the problem of him running for president again in this condition.

The thing I’ll say on age, and then we can move on, I took a little dip into the archives to see what people were saying about Reagan’s prospects for re-election in the ‘80s, and I found this great story in the Washington Post from September ‘82. A majority of Americans thought Reagan should not run for re-election.

It was like 6 in 10, right? And yeah.

Yes, 6 in 10, but that included half of independents and a third of Republicans. And especially getting to Ross’s point, when the debates came around, people started really worrying about his age. He seemed kind of lackluster. Like, he couldn’t hack it in the debates. And of course, we know what happened in ‘84. Absolute annihilation of a poor Walter Mondale. Reagan won every state, except Minnesota, except Mondale’s Minnesota.

We support our own in Minnesota.

So I know Biden’s not Reagan. 2024 isn’t 1984, but it’s just a little reminder that it’s early, that a lot can happen, that what is conventional wisdom at one moment can dissipate in another.

My general read is that when you look at the national polling, you’re like, oh, my God, how could they be tied again? But not that much has changed. I mean, they’re the same two men. There have been various and sundry things the government actually can’t do very much. And there’s been some global affairs and things like that, but the sort of political dynamic hasn’t really changed. So I’m not that surprised by the national numbers, but I took a peek at some of the state by state numbers, and they’re patchy. We don’t have them for every state. But I don’t actually see a sort of catastrophic collapse for Biden. I see a frozen race in the states where things matter. So I guess I’m just not sure.

But isn’t I mean, to speak for panicked liberals everywhere, I mean, OK, it’s a frozen race. But one, some things have changed since 2020. Number one, Donald Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. I’m not someone who uses the phrase “insurrection” to describe the riot of January 6, but a lot of people do. And a lot of people think and assumed at the time that that would disqualify Trump with not the core Republican base, but some subset of swing voters forever. So that hasn’t happened. Trump has been indicted, as mentioned, four times. That has coincided not only with him consolidating control of the Republican primary, but with his poll numbers nationally improving. And finally, yes, Biden, if you go back and look at the 2020 polls, they did not show a 46, 46, 47, 47 race. They showed Biden well ahead. So from that perspective, Trump’s position looks better than it did in 2020. Now, there are reasons for that. And again, it’s not predictive definitively of the result. We’re too far out for that. But it’s not where you want to be.

Oh, sure, but I do think the too far out of that from the election counts for a lot in this situation because what’s different from last time also is Biden is the president, which means everybody’s funky mood and everybody’s dissatisfaction will focus on him vaguely at this point. As you get closer to time for the election, the mind focuses, and we’ll get a better sense of things, especially in those swing states. But I do think this far out, I mean, this far out, people were thinking that Biden wouldn’t win the primary.

There was a time when Biden called himself a transition candidate, a bridge to a new generation of Democratic leadership. What happened to that?

He won.

Well, I mean, he won. But I do think that having a president who’s at the end of his career, frankly, and —

You can say it.

Actuarially speaking not far from the end of his life. I mean, again, just actuarially speaking, it does create a kind of space and energy, in a way, for younger figures. It’s just that they’ve only been able to emerge as his presidency has unfolded. I mean, I think there are a lot of people who are obviously very excited about Gretchen Whitmer or people who are excited about Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, who I think has gotten a lot of very positive attention, Raphael Warnock, the reverend who is a surprise winner of a Senate seat in Georgia. I think that these figures, these younger figures who I think have been racking up some real political wins as Democrats actually really benefit from having a super old president because the contrast is very, very clear. So, yeah, I’m not sure that he hasn’t served as a transitional figure.

It’s clear implication, though, was that he was going to do a one and done. Now, that’s crazy. Once you get in there, you dig in, and there’s no way you’re going to let go, especially for someone like Biden, who has been running for this office since God was a boy.

His whole life.

I mean, seriously.

Well, isn’t the whole issue here, though, just that you can’t transition to a new generation of leadership unless you have a vice president who you feel comfortable handing the baton to, right? I agree with Lydia. The Democrats have a pretty decent bench at this point of some people who are elected under Biden, some people like Gavin Newsom hanging around, looking for his chance. So that bench exists. But I think the natural thing for Biden, for him to be one and done, you had to be able to say, I’m stepping back. And obviously, the person who I selected as my vice president is my natural successor. And because he can’t do that, there’s sort of no — there’s no natural way out. I mean, I’m sure Biden is clinging — wants to be president again, in some way. I do think, though, his decline is sufficiently advanced that I would imagine that he could be talked into stepping back and not running again if there were an easy political way to do it where it seemed like the person he was stepping back for was more likely to beat Trump.

Do you really?

But —

Like genuinely.

I mean, I guess what I’m —

‘Cause I’ve never seen anything from anybody who gets to this position where they behave rationally and as though they are not the exception to every rule.

I think that’s true. I guess I’m just maybe I’m reading too much into the qualities that Lydia described Democrats seeing in conversation with him. I don’t think he’s in the place that sort of the normal, very old politician is, where they don’t want to let go. I think he is in a more vulnerable and persuadable place, just based on my reading of his behavior in public. But I could be wrong.

Well, we’ve been having this conversation as if it were absolute certainty that Trump is going to be the opponent. I’m curious, does the very what seems like the remote possibility that he will face a younger opponent change the way that any of you think about this?

If you were a Democrat looking for another opportunity to pressure Biden not to run, if they had gotten rid of Trump early on, on the Republican side, Biden has used that as his rationalization for why he needs to run again. He’s beaten him once. Trump is so dangerous that you can’t risk an unknown quantity. Biden needs to do it again. If you take Trump out of that equation, if you’ve done it in an early enough point, then that would have given Democrats another good pressure point for Joe. It’s like, OK, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Just take your legacy and go home. But with Trump in the race, it makes it all the more complicated.

If you look at his opening campaign videos for the 2020 race and for the 2024 race, the messages are the same. It’s about protecting freedom and democracy from Donald Trump and his supporters. 2020 was the backdrop of Charlottesville. The 2024 video was the backdrop of January 6. So that’s a great point, Michelle, because the question is, like, if it’s not Trump, then that impetus is diminished. But also, from another point of view, if it’s not clear that Biden is going to beat Trump, right, if he’s kind of like tied in polls, then what’s the point of his candidacy? In 2020, it was like, I’m the guy who can beat him, not Bernie. That’s why you all have to line up behind me. If it’s not clear that he’s the guy that can take down Trump necessarily, then what’s the justification for his campaign?

Well, in Biden’s defense, he ran the anti-Trump campaign twice. He ran it in 2020, and he ran it in 2022. And in 2022, it was, in certain ways, more successful at outperforming expectations. The Democrats ran a January 6 campaign in 2022 against a bunch of candidates who were endorsing Trump’s election fraud narrative, and they dramatically outperformed expectations. And so from the Biden perspective, sure, the polls aren’t great now, but Democrats are doing well in special elections. Trump will probably be campaigning from prison, will run in 2022 all over again. And it will work.

Ross is extremely optimistic about that prison scenario.

Well, no, now you guys have talked — I was leaving it out. And so now I’m including it because you guys reminded me of its importance.

I mean, one thing we — this hasn’t come up yet, but one wild card is the sort of Hunter Biden, if at all. I think that there is Amtrak Joe, a very clear picture of Biden as a certain kind of politician. And boy, is his son a huge fly in the ointment of that. Whatever ultimately these investigations find or what have you, it is puzzling to me that Biden has not found a way to more fully isolate himself from his clearly toxic son. And to me, the most worrying sign was him being at the state dinner with Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, right after he was in the headlines.

That is an argument against the thesis I just offered, that Biden is persuadable and could have been induced not to run again. That, yes, the way he has behaved, the sort of truculent, the refusal to acknowledge the obvious about his son, joined to, yeah, things like the state dinner, suggest a deep and abiding stubbornness that has obviously always been part of Biden’s character. But I feel like even with Hunter Biden, important as that is, we’re talking a little bit around the central question of the next election, which will be about the Biden record, right?

Yes, I do want to talk about the Biden record, but first, let’s take a quick break. When we come back, let’s talk about Biden, and let’s talk about what we want out of our presidents in the first place. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, we’re back. We have picked apart Biden’s potential challenges and pitfalls, from age to Hunter and the rest for 2024, but let’s talk about Biden as president now. How would you describe his presidency? What grade do you give him?

I think he’s been productive. He’s not done everything that progressives wanted, but let’s be clear, progressives always want more by definition. And if you talk to the political anthropologists who look at these things over the sweep of history, they point out that Democrats tend to suffer from presidential savior complex, which is that they always think the president should be able to fix all of their problems. And he can’t, so then they turn on him. So you see this lots. And I think with the climate change, gun reform, all of the infrastructure money, he’s done a fair amount that he is not going to get credit for. And that’s just kind of the way this works in some cases.

Yeah, I mean, I think given the Congress that he’s dealing with and the other issues that he’s had to manage, we didn’t have letter grades at my college, so —

Respect.

— I always forget what —

A smiley face and two unicorns?

Yeah.

[laughs]

No, I mean, I think that we could look at this as a pretty significant record of achievement. I mean, I think on the domestic front and the economy, I mean, the economy, of course, people are unhappy with it, and there’s inflation, but the economy is actually doing very well. We’re basically at full employment. Wages have been rising, and that’s, I think, been good for people.

Why does he get such lousy marks on the economy then?

Wages have been rising relative to the low place that they fell to, but they have not — I mean, there’s a bunch of different arguments about the right way to measure things. But my view is that wages are not back on track yet.

And you can’t convince people that the economy is better than they feel that it is, no matter what number.

100 percent.

You just never can.

I mean, Lydia’s right. We have a low unemployment economy, and that’s a very good thing. But the fact that the average American can feel confident that if they lose their job, they’ll get another one pretty quickly, is not nearly enough to compensate for the sense that their own wages have gone down.

It also doesn’t help that the Biden administration tried to sell people on the idea that the rules had changed somehow with inflation, and that you could jumpstart the economy and throw all this money in, and it wouldn’t wind up with inflation.

Well, I mean, here, I will defend, to some degree, the Biden White House, which is that the rules had changed in the sense that we had spent a long time under Obama, and then Trump, running deficits without yielding any inflation. And we went through the entire Trump COVID period, where we threw absurd sums of money into the economy and also didn’t generate inflation. So I understand why they thought they could do what they did, but it did —

But the rules haven’t changed.

But the rules had not — the rules had changed, but not completely.

Not enough.

Well, and but then also, inflation is coming down, right? I mean, it’s —

Well, yeah, but —

It has been transitory, but transiting over a longer period of time.

Inflation —

Oh, Carlos wants to speak.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is not —

Let the economist speak.

I swear, like every episode, you use the fact that I worked for the Fed for two years in the ‘90s. You —

Well, the ‘90s were a good time, Carlos.

Yeah, we were —

You were responsible.

Yeah, thank me for it. We just didn’t see it all coming.

Come on in, Carlos. Tell us.

No, no, no. I mean, what I was going to say about him, first of all, I have lived through hyperinflation. It just wasn’t here.

Same, yes.

The 1980s in Peru, oh, my God. We had to change the currency multiple times just to lop zeros off it, so it could be workable. Anyway, the thing about inflation is that we say inflation is coming down, which is true. That doesn’t mean prices are coming down, right? Inflation is a rate of increase of prices. So if you have a big jump in inflation, right, that mean prices go from here to up here. Then you say, oh, inflation is coming down. True, but all that means is that the rate of increase of prices is slowing. So it’s not like prices come back down to where you felt comfortable with them. So they’re completely right, the Biden people, when they say, look, inflation is much, much lower. That doesn’t mean prices are dropping.

But I think that sort of circles back to the question of what do we actually expect of the president, right? I mean, these are — I mean, what did Donald Trump achieve as president? His lasting, lasting, lasting legacy, without any doubt, other than like totally putting our democracy in the shitter, is going to be the three seats that he got on the Supreme Court. I mean, his imprint on American history and the legacy and direction of America over all of our lifetimes, I think, will largely derive from him having been able to do that. And what that tells you, I think, is that presidents, he was just lucky, right? We just happened to have that number of vacancies during his brief presidency.

And we had Mitch McConnell helping with that, so.

And we had Mitch McConnell helping him, of course, but that’s my question, right? Like, if basically, it is almost impossible to get Congress to do anything with you, and we’re essentially governing through reconciliation and everything needs to be stuffed into one big bill, other than these little tiny boutique things that you can get agreement on, what’s the presidency good for? What can we really hold the president accountable for and expect from him, and hopefully someday, her? And let’s dream — they/them?

Sorry, I was full of things to say, and you —

You’ve just thrown Ross off his game entirely.

You gender nonconformed me into silence. I mean, one, to Biden’s credit, Biden has proven that that pessimistic vision of the presidency was maybe too pessimistic because he has gotten some things done, even with bipartisan support, that Trump wasn’t able to do. I think if you just sketched out for me Biden’s legislative achievements and foreign policy decisions and so on, and sort of held those up, independent of economic circumstances, I would expect him to be more popular than he is. But I think voters expect the president to preside over economic growth. And obviously, there’s some unreasonably there. The president does not wave a magic wand and control the economy. But it is the loose heuristic that democracy has always followed that if you get growth, people will vote for you. If you get peace and plenty, you will get support, whether you deserve it or not. And if you don’t, you won’t. And I don’t think there’s any getting away from that reality in an election year. We can talk long-term and say, well, this president who seemed to be a political failure actually had these important effects because of his Supreme Court appointments or some foreign policy moves he made. George HW Bush’s reputation has been rehabilitated, deservedly, because of the way the Cold War ended, but still, he lost, right? Because people weren’t happy —

Because of the recession.

Because there was a recession.

Because of a brief recession.

Which people are still arguing about whether we’ve got another one coming on the horizon.

Maybe that’s one reason to not call it Bidenomics.

You’re going to beat that dead horse again, aren’t you?

No, I’ve seen a number of people on Twitter pick up on this — pick up on that point.

Well, you also have to, as a president, it’s a salesman’s job. You have to convey energy and confidence, and you have to get out there and sell what you’ve done, which is one of the things they said that the Obama administration wasn’t that great at. But when you’ve got a president who, again, is not conveying vim and vigor, you automatically are at a disadvantage with whatever you have achieved. And I do agree that, obviously, he has achieved quite a bit, especially in these times, when you do have the parties just determined to kneecap each other’s agendas all the time.

You’re talking like strategists, you know? Like, you have to sell this and project that.

Well, that’s not strategy. That is the American presidency.

What qualities do you want in your president? Like, what do you —

Nobody cares, Carlos —

Oh, come on.

— about what we really like.

No, no, no, I don’t mean like personality. I mean like what —

What image they convey is what people care about.

No, I think that, clearly, there is something about the sort of steady sobriety of Joe Biden that is appealing, right, and his experience, his — I think —

Not to young voters, it’s not. No, I’m not so sure.

I don’t think Biden conveys steady — I think Biden conveys steadiness and sobriety only relative to Donald Trump. I think Biden —

What?

— has always been — he’s always been — he was a loud mouth and a jerk as a younger man. And now he’s doddering and unsteady. I see neither steadiness nor sobriety, again, except relative to the Trump phenomenon. And I think people who think that he conveys those things are totally kidding themselves. The charm of Biden is that he’s a gaffe machine. He’s referred to himself that way. He says things like lying, dog-faced pony soldier and puts his foot in his mouth. What? I mean, what’s steady and sober about this guy?

I mean, compared — I agree.

Compared to Trump.

In comparison to Trump. Compared to Trump, yes. But I also think, again, I do think that — and I guess, this is more what I meant when I talked about sober and steady — I think that there is something about — and this cuts both ways, obviously, with the Hunter Biden stuff. I think there is something about Joe Biden’s devotion to his family and the seriousness with which he takes family, as a comparison to Donald Trump, that people relate to and feels like a tremendous relief. And I think that’s always been true of him. And —

Well, and to walk back my intemperate comments, what Biden has going for him is that he surrounds himself with normal seeming —

Sensible people!

Not always sensible. He hired way too many Warren people.

Non grifters?

But they are normal seeming Democratic types. And that, again, contrasts —

That’s his whole shtick —

The thing with Trump is not —

— return to sanity.

Yeah, it’s not just who Trump is, but who he surrounds himself with and who he will surround himself with in his forthcoming second term.

Stop that.

I do like — I mean, I understand, Lydia, where you’re coming from, in the way he’s like a family man and all those things. And when I think of all the things I want out of a president, just go down the list of presidents. I want the wisdom of Abe Lincoln, and I want the moral compass of Jimmy Carter and the ambition of FDR, the inspiration of Reagan and of Obama, you know? Madison’s genius. I want all of those things. I want the courage of George Washington. But you don’t get to build your president out of the spare parts of others. And so when it comes down to it, I want ambition and restraint. I want someone who is ambitious enough to tackle the things that matter and restrained enough to not abuse the enormous powers we are granting the presidency. I mean, Ross has brought this up in past episodes of the podcast, right? Essentially, what you’re doing is you’re entrusting a person with life and death powers, with a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. And so who do you trust with that, right? On that score, Biden does all right.

Here’s what I want in a president. I want a president who sees it as his political — I agree with everything you said, Carlos, in a way, but —

No, no, just stop there. You agree with everything I said.

Who sees —

That’s a wrap.

Who sees it as his political goal and makes policy with an eye towards being a president for 55 percent to 60 percent of the country, instead of 49 percent to 51 percent of the country. And I think almost all of our most successful presidents have been dividers who divided the country, but took by far the bigger half, right? Franklin Roosevelt was incredibly divisive. He just took 60 percent of the vote while he did so. Ronald Reagan, polarizing figure. My parents in 1984 hated him. My earliest memory politically is my mom going to cast her vote for Walter Mondale. But most of the country loved Reagan. And I think the Biden folks, any strategy or sales pitch he comes up with, is going to have to define himself more overtly than they’re comfortable with against the left of the party. I think a different version of the Biden presidency could have been more successful on the terms that I see as key to a president’s success.

My wife has this — her preferred slogan for the Biden campaign 2024 would be, “Reelect Biden. He’s fine.” And I can see that being a way that you don’t sell it, but a way that people end up thinking about it. All right, we’ll have to leave it there. When we come back, let’s get hot and cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] And finally, it is time for Hot, Cold. I’ve always wanted Christopher Walken to do the intro and say like, I’ve got a fever. It’s time for Hot, Cold. Anyway, all right, so whose temperature are we taking today?

Mine, and I’m going to be predictably fusty and conservative and say I’m hot, which is to say glad that the Senate is formalizing a dress code requiring business attire. And this came after Chuck Schumer had signaled a relaxation of what I gather was the then informal dress code in the Senate, a move that I was very cold on, which seemed to be mostly aimed at accommodating Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who had a desire to wear shorts and sweatshirts and hoodies on the Senate floor. Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute and frequent contributor to The Times has made this argument that one of the features of our current era is that far too many people see important institutions not as places that shape them and that they conform themselves to, but as platforms in which to appear and use to build a brand. And a lot of the, let’s say, Republican congressmen that liberals love to hate fall into that category, the people who drive Kevin McCarthy crazy because they’re just there in the House of Representatives to make themselves famous. And I think something that as arbitrary seeming as it is as a dress code, a way of appearing in an important body, is a way of conforming people to the institution, rather than making the institution about them. And relaxing that kind of code, especially for the sake of one senator’s sort of personal blue collar hero, pseudo populist brand, just seemed to me like a small but real further signifier, I guess, of institutional decline.

I would say the most important symptom of the institutional decline is what Mitch McConnell did to the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland and other subsequent Supreme Court issues, but I do very strongly agree with you, Ross. I think that John Fetterman should put on a suit and dress like a grown-up. And also, the thing that I would add is that dressing up is nice. Last week was the UN General Assembly. And we had a number of very powerful important visitors who came into The New York Times. And so I wore a suit every day last week, basically. And you know what? It felt great, the sort of post-pandemic putting on proper clothes, wearing hard pants. And the whole thing —

Hard pants. I like that term.

Right?

Going to get me some hard pants.

The whole thing is actually just kind of wonderful.

We can’t expect everybody to hold that kind of high personal standard, though.

We can’t, no. Not everyone can live up to the Lydia Polgreen standard, except when they’re a United States senator. That is my —

That is true.

That is my informed position.

Look, many businesses as industries have dress codes. I think it is especially important for Congress because, as Ross alluded to, right now, dignity and decorum are in the basement, and the whole thing is more like a joke in a carnival sideshow. So you could at least restore some visual sense of propriety to what has become a freak show.

What is certainly true is that this is not the most important signifier of American decline. But one way that you get continuing decline is that at every step along the way, people shrug and say, well, this isn’t that important. And the next thing you know, it’s 476 AD and the last emperor of Rome — no.

Oh, my God. No.

I’ll show myself.

And you need to not do that today.

OK.

Guys, I’m sorry.

We’ve got to end this.

But I gotta go.

With that, Lydia’s leaving.

All right, we are cold on the Roman Empire.

And shorts on grown men.

Yeah, flip-flops. Flip-flops. That’s where we can come together. All right, folks. Good talking to you.

Bye, guys.

Always a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s been a tough 10 days for Elton John. First, it was revealed that our Rocket Man is having to part ways with his beloved condo in Atlanta (on the market for a cool $5 million). Then, as if that weren’t stressful enough, Elton was forced to take on the entire British Government, leading the charge against the alleged homophobia unleashed by its Home Secretary. Was Suella Braverman’s speech on Tuesday so outrageous? Was her suggestion that “many” asylum seekers pretend to be gay “homophobic”, or “dog-whistling”, or an “insult to refugees”? Did it have echoes of Enoch Powell? Not really. For anyone who’s been paying attention to Europe’s immigration crisis, the only surprising thing about her speech was that it has taken so long for a politician to air the unsavoury truth about the mess in which we now find ourselves, and how we can possibly fix it. Braverman wasn’t making a political point when she observed how Britain’s broken asylum system creates huge incentives for uncontrolled illegal migration, which, inevitably, has a serious “impact on social cohesion”. She was merely stating the truth. Once upon a time, this was an argument acknowledged by the Left. I’m old enough to remember when the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argued that “both our immigration and asylum systems make people destitute by design and need urgent reform”. It was this July.  What might that reform look like? Braverman made two recommendations that, seen in the clear light of day, don’t seem particularly radical. The first was that Britain should consider removing itself from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), an unaccountable legal factory housed in Strasbourg which issues more than 4,000 judgements a year. Given Britain’s recent and historical aversion to being ruled by unelected European institutions, withdrawing from the ECHR would hardly be out of character. The same can be said of Braverman’s suggestion that the United Nations’ Refugee Convention, which came into force in 1951, might merit a rethink. And yet, after the speech, the deluge. Sir Elton issued a stern statement that he was “very concerned” by what she said about gay migrants, believing it would legitimise “hate and violence against them”. Many on the Left denounced what they saw as Braverman’s betrayal of her background as the daughter of immigrants. Even a number of her fellow Conservative MPs criticised her “alarmist” rhetoric. Yet perhaps more surprising is the support she received. Many in her party concede that Braverman has a point. Even The Times, not known for its xenophobic bigotry, admitted in its leader column that “she is right to ask the questions that need asking”. For many, this is simply a matter of history. The world, after all, has changed since the Cold War era in which the Convention was conceived. Mass immigration is no longer defined by those fleeing from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, but those fleeing from less stable countries whose cultural norms clash with modern Western values. Trust me: I would know. More from this authorAffirmative action's fatal flawBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali It is hard to exaggerate the intensity of despair felt by those who reside in failed and failing states ravaged by conflict, poverty, natural disasters and the disorder that accompanies political corruption. Consider the tragedies that unfolded this month in Morocco and Libya; the never-ending civil strife in the Congo and Eritrea; the breakdown of Syria; the regression of Afghanistan into Taliban rule. Every man, woman and child who risks their lives to escape the place they call home deserves all the support and sanctuary they can get. It is pointless to wrangle about whether the despair driving people out of their homes is, as stated in the Convention, caused by political persecution or social discrimination or even a bleak economic outlook. There is nothing progressive about that. Yet none of this is an excuse for ignoring the very concrete problems raised by mass immigration. The most obvious is one of scale: the sheer volume of people determined to flee their homelands and relocate permanently to Europe and America. The figure of 780 million people mentioned by Braverman may even be on the small side: surely reason enough to doubt the usefulness of the Convention. The net effect has been to increase human suffering by empowering networks of people smugglers who con vulnerable populations into paying them thousands of pounds. Far from being empowered by reaching the promised land, too many migrants find themselves dehumanised even further. Consider the scenes in Lampedusa this month, where more than 2,000 migrants arrived by dinghy in a single day; or the streets of southern Europe, where starving migrants beg for food. If this is the utopia built by the ECHR and the Convention, is it one worth maintaining? More from this authorBiden's false border victoryBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali This is the question Britain and Europe face. And in answering it, perhaps surprisingly, it becomes clear how, far from being an extremist, Braverman isn’t extreme enough. For if we accept the reality she describes, the solution isn’t “reform” of the Convention — but “withdrawal”. Just as with the ECHR, the Convention is evidently unfit for purpose. And just as with the ECHR, the Convention cannot be fixed by elected politicians. Yes, British representatives can make suggestions and seek to work with other signatories on changes favourable to all. But they don’t have the power to revise, review or reform those treaties. What they do have, though, is the option to leave if it doesn’t work for them, to shift power away from supranational institutions to the British state. As Lord Sumption wrote this week, Britain faces a simple question: “How we should make law for our society? And does this particular way of making law have any democratic legitimacy?” The answer, I suspect, depends on where one falls on the political divide of our time: do you favour the inhumane reality of our fractured world — or the power of democratic rule to change it? view comments

In my last essay, I discussed some currents of opinion on the contemporary political right that offer important insights into the nature of our present predicament. Now I’ll turn my gaze leftward and look at some socialist writers whom I regard, notwithstanding my deep disagreements with them on fundamental issues, as helping to shed light on where we should go from here. In my lifetime, the political left’s attitude toward technological progress has been decisively shaped by the anti-Promethean backlash. The environmental consciousness that exploded onto the scene in the 1960s, with its strong anti-capitalist animus and romantic embrace of the primitive, quickly took hold of the post-mass-affluence New Left and from there proceeded to become progressive orthodoxy. As I’ve tried to explain it, the advent of mass prosperity shifted the egalitarian focus of the left from economic have-nots, whose plight outside of isolated pockets of poverty no longer seemed as pressing in the go-go 1960s, toward social and cultural “belong-nots” – historically marginalized groups that now sought acceptance in a new, more inclusive mainstream. Solicitude for the ultimate “other” – non-human life – slotted easily into the new commitment to wider moral horizons. (Ayn Rand had a less charitable interpretation, which I’ve always suspected played some role as well: By the 60s and 70s, it had become undeniably clear that capitalism was massively outperforming actually existing socialism when it came to material betterment for ordinary people. Accordingly, it was an especially convenient time for people hanging onto the socialist dream to call sour grapes on materialism.) Of course, the Old Left wore its materialism proudly. As Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor, put it, “We do want more, and when it becomes more, we shall still want more.” Or recall Harry Truman’s line: “If you want to live like a Republican, you’ve got to vote for a Democrat.” As to the socialism of the radical left, materialism was of course central to the thought of that creed’s greatest prophet. It is striking how Marx and Engels’ rhapsodic recitation of the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary accomplishments in The Communist Manifesto offers a more stirring tribute than capitalism’s most ardent defenders have ever managed. Here’s just a taste:  The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?  In the Marxist vision, the bourgeoisie’s fatal flaw wasn’t their Promethean ambition. On the contrary, it was that their attachment to private property and the resulting “anarchy of production” stifled the full release of productive forces that would be possible under the conscious planning of economic life. Under the pressure of dramatically changed circumstances, the center-left is now in the midst of a wrenching reappraisal of its knee-jerk antipathy toward moving atoms around at large scale. The gathering climate crisis, along with deepening problems of housing affordability plaguing metro areas across the United States and other advanced democracies, have revealed the pressing need for (in Ezra Klein’s words) “a liberalism that builds.” The inertia of older attitudes, though, remains formidable: yard signs proclaiming “in this house, we welcome all people” in neighborhoods zoned to exclude all but the rich have become a running joke, while environmental groups can regularly be found among the opponents of badly needed new clean energy projects. In my day job at the Niskanen Center, I am proud to be involved in the effort to fight this inertia and advance a transpartisan “abundance agenda” that both progressives and conservatives can embrace on their own terms. Here, though, I’m interested in exploring more radical ideas on the left: those of a small circle of contemporary socialist writers who seek to reclaim and reimagine the left’s Promethean heritage. I’ll look in particular at three books from the past few years: Four Futures by Peter Frase; Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani; and The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. Frase’s book plays things closest to the vest, offering vignettes of four possible futures that might result from the intersection of two major contemporary developments: climate change and AI-driven automation. For purposes of creating his scenarios, Frase assumes that we are heading toward a highly automated future in which most work now done by people is handled by computers and robots, and that this will end capitalism as we know it. So what comes next? To create his four scenarios, Frase throws in a pair of variables: climate change and the politics of inequality. Will we achieve rapid decarbonization and enjoy the benefits of clean, abundant energy for all, or will collective action fall short and leave us in a world hemmed in by scarcity and environmental ruin? And secondly, will we devise rules that ensure that the productivity gains unlocked by widespread automation are widely shared, or will we see another upward spiral of inequality as a plutocratic elite manages to siphon off most of the benefits for itself? Frase draws up a two-by-two matrix, with abundance versus scarcity as one dimension, and equality versus hierarchy as the other. The four resulting possibilities he labels as “communism” (abundance and equality), “rentism” (abundance and hierarchy), “socialism” (scarcity and equality), and “exterminism” (scarcity and hierarchy). It’s clear enough from the label that exterminism is a hellscape of mass suffering that no person with any humanitarian leanings would knowingly choose, and it’s equally clear that any book authored by a member of the Jacobin editorial board is going to favor equality over hierarchy. What’s distinctive about this book, though, at least in our present era, is that Frase distinguishes between socialist shared scarcity and communist shared abundance and unequivocally favors the latter. Following the Marxist conception of communist abundance as a “realm of freedom” liberated from the need to work for extrinsic rewards, Frase agrees with Marx’s dictum that “the shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.” Much of Frase’s discussion is devoted to simply making the case that this is a worthy ideal – that paid work is not necessary to a flourishing life. (Yes, the unemployed in capitalist societies are miserable, but that is because work is the norm; retired people who aren’t expected to work are happy enough.) Establishing the long-term goal then sets the agenda for intermediate reforms: partially “decommoditizing” labor through universal basic income and expanded public services.   In the delightfully titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani goes into considerably more detail in fleshing out the vision of a post-scarcity egalitarian utopia and the path from here to there. With exuberant techno-optimism, he sketches out the prospects for breakthroughs that can radically reduce the cost of living in sector after sector: automation and robotics that can do much of what humans now do but much more cheaply and effectively; clean energy that can carry us past the dangers of climate change to the expanded possibilities of cheap energy abundance (though he curiously neglects to mention either nuclear or geothermal options); asteroid mining, made possible by plummeting launch costs, that can render scarcity of key mineral resources a distant memory; gene editing, anti-aging therapies, and AI diagnostics that can greatly extend lifespans while reorienting medicine toward relatively cheaper prevention and cures and away from the expensive management of chronic conditions; and cultured meat to ensure that feeding ourselves no longer threatens the rest of life on this planet with loss of habitat. Bastani refers to this dazzling set of possibilities as the “Third Disruption” (the invention of agriculture was the first, industrialization the second). Its defining characteristic is a “tendency to extreme supply”: given the dramatic and ongoing fall in the cost of information, and the centrality of information to all technological and organizational innovation (which consists of new recipes for rearranging matter and combining the work of people), the effect is to render not only new knowledge but also labor, energy, and material resources ever cheaper to produce. These disruptions, meanwhile, are occurring at the same time that capitalism is undergoing a series of crises: climate change; broader problems of environmental degradation and resource depletion; falling birth rates and an aging population; a growing “unnecessariat” of marginalized workers; and the looming prospect of mass technological unemployment. Bastani sees this juxtaposition of events as the birth pangs of a new social order emerging out of the wreckage of the old. The new order, fully automated luxury communism, is the world Marx dreamed of: a post-work world of plenty where the distinction between labor and leisure has all but dissolved. “Amid the changes of the Third Disruption the ‘fact’ of scarcity is moving from one of inevitable scarcity to political imposition.” To midwife the transition to the realm of freedom, Bastani proposes a three-part program: re-localizing production through municipal investment and protectionism; socializing finance through local and regional investment banks; and free state provision of housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information as universal basic services. (Bastiani prefers UBS to UBI, which he sees as vulnerable to being perverted into an excuse for rolling back public provision elsewhere.) “While automation will eliminate as much work as possible,” Bastani explains, “those jobs which remain … will increasingly be performed by worker-owned businesses, completely transforming how we relate to society, work, and one another.” The third book I want to discuss here is The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski. Phillips, a well-known science writer and ardent techno-optimist, is the author of Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff; for shorter samples of his work and worldview, check out this celebration of the human population reaching 8 billion, this argument that an ideal society would not ban private jets but instead provide them for everybody, and this fun interview with conservative techno-optimist Jim Pethokoukis. Here, though, Phillips and his co-author resurrect and reexamine the century-old “economic calculation debate” over the feasibility of socialist central planning. The book’s argument is that Marx’s vision of a planned economy was ahead of its time: a bold imaginative leap into the future that was simply unrealizable given the still-primitive state of overall technological development. According to Phillips and Rozworski, the world has now caught up with Marx’s genius, as evidenced by corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon, which use advanced computer technology to centrally plan sprawling production and distribution operations whose size and complexity rival that of national economies. Whatever one makes of the merits of their thesis, along the way the authors offer lucid and entertaining discussions of the original calculation debate, the logistical complexities of Walmart’s and Amazon’s business operations, the development of linear programming as a Soviet planning tool, the crucial role of the Pentagon in promoting postwar U.S. innovation, the abortive Project Cybersyn under Salvador Allende in 1970s Chile, and much more. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I have my differences with these authors, but let me start with what I think they get right. First and foremost is their recovery of Promethean ambition: they understand that scientific and technological progress is essential to ongoing human flourishing, and they embrace with gusto the potential of new technologies now under development to catapult humanity to a higher level of well-being. The most basic criterion for judging members of any social movement is whether they seek to move in the right direction. With their understanding of the inextricable connection between technological and social progress, these socialist radicals score better on that test than many conventional progressives and conservatives. More specifically, I believe that Frase and Bastani in particular are correct in focusing on moving toward a post-work world – or at least a world in which lives and livelihoods are much more independent from the labor market than they are today. Their “communism” bears more than a passing resemblance to my “economic independence.” As I have written about extensively, for most of its participants the mass labor market no longer functions reliably as a vehicle for human flourishing and is unlikely to regain that function. My search for an alternative pathway for flourishing outside the workaday world has led me to focus on the possibility of creating largely self-sufficient local communities whose advanced technology allows them to achieve abundance at human scale. There are important overlaps between this idea and the communist dream of ending the distinction between labor and leisure. Like Frase and Bastani, I see progress toward a post-mass-labor-market world as driven by both push and pull factors. On the one hand, the widespread failure of labor market participation to guarantee access to a rewarding and fulfilling life pushes us to look for alternative arrangements; at the same time, though, emerging technologies’ “tendency to extreme supply” holds out the prospects for dramatically reduced costs of living – and therefore a reduced need to sell labor services to cover those costs. And I agree further that the technologies of the “Third Disruption” cannot by themselves guarantee widespread abundance and flourishing. New tools can create potential for progress, but whether that potential is realized depends on politics and the resulting rules that structure how the benefits from innovation are shared. And Frase zeroes in on what I regard as one of the decisive arenas of conflict: setting the rules for intellectual property. I haven’t yet written about the subject on this blog, but I’ve written plenty for my day job – see here, here, and here. Bundling the temporary monopoly privileges of patents and copyrights into the concept of “intellectual property” has to be regarded as one of the great lobbying triumphs of all time, allowing patent and copyright interests to argue that they’re only trying to stop “theft” and “piracy.” But as I’ve written, so-called intellectual property rights and rights in physical property are fundamentally dissimilar: the latter serve to allocate natural scarcity by assigning exclusive rights to rivalrous physical objects (rivalrous in that consumption by one person or group precludes consumption by anybody else), whereas the former create artificial scarcity by giving patent and copyright holders the power to stop others from using nonrivalrous ideas without their permission.   There is a reasonable idea behind this creation of artificial scarcity – namely, that it is needed to address a market failure arising out of the nonrivalrous nature of ideal objects (in other words, the fact that one person’s use of an idea in no way limits anyone else’s use). If some invention is very costly to develop in the first place but easy to copy, the original inventor may be unable to recoup his investment before imitators swoop in and swamp the market. Extending temporary monopoly privileges to inventors and artists by raising the return they earn from developing new ideas thus promises to increase the overall stock of useful ideas. The reasoning is valid to a point, but it’s important to recognize that patents and copyrights correct market failures only to the extent that they allow original investments to be covered: beyond that point, they are generating windfall rents. Given the massive expansion in patent and copyright protections over the past several decades, intellectual property law is now creating rents on a massive scale. It has degenerated into a vehicle for upward redistribution of wealth and income that actually worsens the climate for innovation by making protected ideas less accessible to downstream innovators. Intellectual property law already causes serious economic distortions, but the situation could get far worse. As ideas continue to displace land and capital as the economy’s most important assets, whether those assets are broadly or narrowly held will have increasingly large implications for the overall structure of the economy. In a future where AI and robots have automated a great deal of the work people now do, whether that future is one of mass prosperity or mass pauperization will turn to a considerable extent on whether the ideas that underlie the technology have been set free or privatized. Frase sees things in similar fashion. In his two-by-two matrix of possible futures, the distinction between post-work abundance and “rentism” (abundance and hierarchy) turns on intellectual property rules:  “Who owns the robots,” says Harvard University labor economist Richard Freeman, “owns the world.” Hence the alternative to the communist society of our last chapter is one where the techniques to produce abundance are monopolized by a small elite…. When we talk about “owning the robots,” we’re not just talking about having control over a physical bundle of metal and wires. Rather, the phrase metaphorically describes control over things like computer software, algorithms, blueprints, and other kinds of information that are needed to produce and reproduce the world we live in. In order to maintain control over the economy, then, the rich increasingly need to control that information, and not just physical objects.  Finally, I agree with Phillips and Rozworski that certain forms of government planning are needed to reach a brighter future, and the need is probably increasing over time. The coauthors make and remake this basic point repeatedly in their book: “What is profitable is not always useful, and what is useful is not always profitable.” It is an important point, and its relative importance is edging steadily upward. When the world was poor, and most people were scrambling just to cover their basic material needs, the overlap between profitable and useful was considerably higher than today. Now, absent efforts by government to push forward scientific knowledge and technological capacity, thereby opening up new spaces for entrepreneurial exploration and commercialization, capitalist profit-seeking tends to settle disproportionately into the comfortable and relatively unproductive ruts of real estate development and financial speculation. A further point: if, as looks likely, we are facing a future with both declining populations and gradually falling labor force participation, governments will need to compensate by appropriating relatively larger shares of the economic pie to fund ongoing innovation. While I hope for a future where large numbers of people live in considerable independence from the capitalist system, the other side of that coin is likely to be an organized capitalist system that relies more heavily on public investment. That said, Phillips and Rozworski are utterly misguided in trying to revive the socialist idea of replacing the entire price system with central planning. The fact that computer technology has made enormous strides since Soviet days is completely irrelevant. Advocates of central planning imagine that the fundamental challenge in guiding economic production is one of computation, and therefore that much faster computers and much bigger databases make the problem more tractable. But in fact, the real fundamental challenge is one of discovering information not known already – how producers will react to changes in input prices, how consumers will react to changes in the price or quality or product features, and whether new products are useful and desirable. There is simply no way to incentivize this ongoing, incessant, massive-scale discovery process without actually playing the specialization and exchange game with real money. Of course, from the standpoint of the overlap between economic efficiency and human well-being, it’s important to recognize two important shortcomings of the private property and price system: (1) the market takes account of consumer preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars, and thus overprioritizes the preferences of the rich; and (2) the existence of external costs and benefits not accounted for by market actors further reduces the overlap between the useful and the profitable. Both of these market failures, though, are remediable: redistribution can make producers more responsive to people with lower market incomes, while regulation or pricing of externalities can better align profit-seeking with advancing well-being. Modifying the price system in this way isn’t easy to get right, but it’s doable; replacing the price system altogether, on the other hand, is a will-o’-the-wisp. Phillips and Rozworski make a game effort, but there’s no hiding the gaping holes in their argument. Yes, companies like Walmart and Amazon do a lot of central planning – within the larger context of a market order in which every “make or buy” decision is informed by external market data. And yes, governments do play an important role in planning the economic future by opening up new spaces for economic activity – but the job of exploring, settling, and commercializing those spaces is then managed by profit-seeking private businesses. Capitalism may need rebalancing, but it remains indispensable for both current prosperity and future progress. Frase and Bastani steer clear of the central planning distraction and instead see paths to post-work abundance in a universal basic income or universal basic services, respectively. Although I think a UBI is worth experimenting with (I can see some grounds for expansion of direct public provision of particular services, but an aggressive move in that direction seems unlikely to end well), the prospect of mass societies with the bulk of the population dependent on state provision of basic needs – whether by cutting a check or actually delivering services – fills me with foreboding. As I wrote about earlier, that state of deep dependence is fundamentally inconsistent with the classical republican conception of human freedom as non-domination – a conception I now see as indispensable to a proper understanding of what makes a free society. True freedom in this sense requires not just freedom from interference, but sufficient independence to confer immunity from interference. People dependent on the central power for their daily bread may have benevolent masters, but the essential point is that they have masters. And in a world where AI is giving states ever greater powers to track, control, and manipulate their populations, keeping the masters benevolent over the long run strikes me as a dicey proposition for humanity as a whole (even if particular polities can pull it off). Ironically, then, the new school of techno-optimistic socialists errs not only by being too radical, but by being not radical enough. First, they seek to replace capitalism in toto with a new economic order of post-work abundance, but large-scale, market-mediated specialization and exchange (appropriately regulated) will remain an irreplaceable social technology at least until Star Trek-style replicators come online. Second, they focus their radicalism on achieving freedom from the market, when the radical change that is really needed is greater freedom from the system as a whole – not just from the market, but from the state as well.The post Thoughts on techno-optimistic socialism first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Thoughts on techno-optimistic socialism appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Here is one solution:

In order to implement AI for society, society must be governed by a rigid set of rules that has not yet been developed for the USA. China will have an easier time implementing future AI because it lives under the CCP which has a strict doctrine of behavior for social and economic institutions and individuals.

US society is too politically polarized and anarchical to implement a set of pro-social AI rules that all Americans are prone to accept. So, the first step is to define a popular, almost religious, set of rules that supersedes the current polarization and anarchic inter-institutional competitions in America and defines what is right and what is wrong in a formal system that can be popularly implemented. Reminds me of Murphy's Law that "Whatever it is that you want to do, you must do something else first".

The formal definition of an American system that can be defined in a manner that guides AI implementation cannot be subjected to the divisiveness of the current Republican - Democrat conflict so must be based on a centrist concept accepted by both Republicans and Democrats.

The immediate task is to define that set of centrist guidelines and then develop a political methodology for implementing those guidelines as rules with which future AI implementations must comply.

We have a start in The Centrist Party of America that has a well-defined agenda with policies and platforms, but it has no political candidates and is not recognized as a formal political party whose candidates can be placed on election ballots and elected. First, Centrism must be recognized as a valid political philosophy and then well-developed enough to formulate the rules to which future AI must conform.

The New Centrist Dialectic and the Centrist Party:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-bC4LxYNglkIugqlsXdsfwHWxRNm0jLh/view?usp=sharing

The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on World Politics:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rkyzoqfssPAhGyiH7SBEJRVbcJFr3a-g/view?usp=sharing

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.To achieve greater well-being, you have two tasks. The first is to increase your level of happiness; the second is to manage your unhappiness. To know which side of the ledger to start on, some self-evaluation can be useful. One tool to help with that is known as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) test, which rates your natural levels of happy and unhappy affect—or, in lay terms, mood—compared with those of other people. In my teaching and writing, I have found PANAS to be one of the most useful and reliable tests for self-understanding, because it separates your total well-being into discrete emotional channels.Even without a PANAS test, you might have a pretty good idea of whether happiness or unhappiness presents the greater challenge in your life. One person who certainly did was the eminent 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, who was not only a philosopher, mathematician, and logician but also a Nobel laureate in literature.[Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life]“Throughout my childhood,” he wrote in his 1960s autobiography, “I had an increasing sense of loneliness, and of despair of ever meeting anyone with whom I could talk.” Russell’s misery proved to be the mother of invention, though: His greatest accomplishment was to help found the field of analytic philosophy, by which he intended to take the discipline beyond academic chin-scratching and into the practical realm of solving life problems—including his own unhappiness—by breaking them down into manageable pieces. If unhappiness is your biggest challenge, Russell’s approach might be just what you have been looking for.Russell’s self-cure for unhappiness started with a very strong hypothesis, written in his aptly titled The Conquest of Happiness: Our misery comes from errors. “I believe … unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life,” he wrote. These mistakes destroy the “zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends.” From there, he broke down the problem into eight categories of common errors. The solution to unnecessary unhappiness, he proposed, was rectifying each one.Error 1: Fashionable pessimism Russell believed that people who considered themselves enlightened tended to be negative and pessimistic, and were actually proud of it. They were very focused on all that was wrong in the world, and believed “that there is nothing left to live for.” This wasn’t a new sentiment—indeed, as Clark Lawlor, a scholar of 18th-century literature writes, “Melancholy was frothily fashionable” in that period for “anyone who desired to seem in the slightest bit sensitive or clever.”Russell mocks this pose as a pathetic conceit that should be abandoned. In case you worry that this means abandoning realism about the truth, researchers have shown that pessimism can distort one’s perception of reality.Error 2: Social comparison Russell rails against competition, noting that what most people fear is not falling into destitution but “that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” The problem here is not that we are competitive per se, but that we assess our worth on the basis of what others have and do. As the old expression (sometimes attributed to Theodore Roosevelt) goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” As the psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues have demonstrated in experiments, social comparison is associated with increased unhappiness.Beside deriding this tendency to base one’s self-evaluation on comparison, Russell implies a solution: Instead of looking at what your neighbor has and feeling resentful, focus on what you have and feel grateful. Failure to do so leads to the next error.[From the March 2022 issue: How to want less]Error 3: Envy Envy describes the condition of being unhappy not because you have little but because someone else has more. This is a huge source of misery, as I’ve written previously here. Envy is entirely human but, left unchecked, is associated with depression, hostility, and shame. It is also ridiculous, especially when it is directed toward those whose achievements we admire.And therein lies Russell’s remedy: “Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration.” In other words, look for people who excel in ways you would like to, and crowd out resentment with frank appreciation.Error 4: Evading boredom “We are less bored than our ancestors were,” Russell wrote, “but we are more afraid of boredom,” which leads us to pursue more and more sources of distraction. He wrote these words in 1930—imagine if he lived in the present time, musing thus on X (formerly Twitter) while waiting for a light to change. If he lived in our time, of course, he might also note that researchers have found a significant increase in boredom among adolescents from 2008 to 2017—during the explosion of devices and social-media use.The solution we can infer from Russell lies not in more distraction but in less. We need to stop fearing boredom and be comfortable with what is going on around us, whether it’s exciting or not. This is an argument made eloquently by my colleague Ellen Langer, who defines mindfulness as the practice of actively noticing new things. You can do that only when you are not distracting yourself.Error 5: Coping with fear Clinical anxiety is one of the most common mental disorders today; according to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults experienced an anxiety disorder in the past year. Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of “some danger which we are unwilling to face.” Our understanding of the disorder today tends to be more biological than this; research shows that anxiety is associated with involuntary physical stress symptoms such as hyperarousal.Whether we emphasize the biological or the psychological aspects of anxiety, Russell’s cure for it is that we name our fear and “think about it rationally and calmly, but with great concentration, until it has been completely familiar.” If we can succeed in doing this, then “in the end familiarity will blunt its terrors.” Another way of expressing this would be to recommend exposure therapy, which coaches patients to confront the source of their fears openly so that they start to feel less threatened.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.Error 6: Senseless guilt Russell was an avowed atheist who rarely missed a chance to point out what he saw as religion’s weaknesses—principal among them the sense of sin and unworthiness. “In consciousness certain kinds of acts are labeled Sin for no reason visible to introspection,” he wrote, arguing that this mislabeling of normal behaviors leads to unhappiness.Whether or not you agree that religion is to blame (personally, I don’t), the more general point about guilt is a good one: It’s something we tend to experience when we feel undue privilege compared with others—a sort of inverse envy, you might say. One version of this is “survivor’s guilt,” which people experience when a misfortune that befalls others passes them by.Implicitly, Russell urges us to set aside the stigma of unnecessary guilt. A good remedy for that is simple gratitude. Study after study has shown that gratitude can be practiced even when not felt, and reliably chases away the blues. This is also an effective response to the next error.[Arthur C. Brooks: Seven habits that lead to happiness in old age]Error 7: Virtuous victimhood Russell was critical of what he called “persecution mania,” in which one is “perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery.” One version of this is what some researchers have called “virtuous victimhood,” which they describe as claims of unjust treatment paired with assertions of moral standing. The point is not to deny that some people truly are the victims of abuse, but to suggest the risk of internalizing that harm in a defining way: When victimhood is fundamentally how you see yourself, Russell argues, that compounds unhappiness. Research supports this notion, showing that self-pity can stimulate anger and depression. To recognize injustice is right and proper, but resisting self-identifying for too long as a victim can be healthy.Error 8: Fear of public opinion A senior citizen I know recently told me that she was much happier since getting older, for one big reason: She finally didn’t care what others thought of her. Russell put it another way: “One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.” Easier said than done, of course—research shows that our pain over social exclusion affects us physically. For example, an episode of social rejection can stimulate the anterior cingulate cortex in much the same way that stubbing your toe does.Russell’s implication that using reason is the right way to correct the problem now has research to back it up. That same study showed that the right ventral prefrontal cortex—a brain region used in conscious reasoning—also becomes active when social pain is encountered, and moderates our distress. Just as you can reason with yourself that a stubbed toe won’t kill you, you can also decide to disregard what others think.One of the most valuable aspects of Bertrand Russell’s logic is that he doesn’t suggest misery is in itself bad. No doubt he would have acknowledged that unhappiness is an appropriate response to many situations in life. As regular readers of this column will have heard from me before, negative feelings keep us alive and safe, and even enable us to learn and grow. What Russell is saying is that by correcting errors in our thinking, we can avoid unnecessary suffering.[Arthur C. Brooks: Ben Franklin’s radical theory of happiness]As I hope I’ve shown, Russell’s philosophical assertions stand up well to social-scientific scrutiny—which underlines what an excellent strategy they make for all of us. One way to apply his eight insights into common mistaken conceptions is to turn them into a set of affirmations to start the day. 1. Pessimism won’t make me cool or smart—just wrong and unhappy. I choose to be an optimistic realist. 2. My self-worth cannot and will not be measured by what others have. 3. I will look for people to admire, and my admiration will overcome my envy. 4. Boredom is nothing to fear. I will not distract myself with mindless diversions from the business of living. 5. I will name my fears. I will face them with courage and resolve. 6. When good things happen, I won’t feel guilty. I will enjoy them and be grateful. 7. Injustice is inevitable, but I will reject a permanent identity of the victim and resist grievance. 8. The opinions of others—especially those of strangers, and especially about me—are meaningless, and I will disregard them. I don’t know whether Bertrand Russell himself managed to live according to these affirmations—philosophers are not always known for taking their own advice. But we can certainly govern our unhappiness and live better by following his ideas.

Peter Daou, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, recently announced that he had become the campaign manager for Cornel West, the radical socialist professor and public intellectual, who is seeking the Presidential nomination from the Green Party. It was the culmination of a fascinating arc for Daou, who was a legendary figure in the early liberal blogosphere, where he became known for his criticisms of the Bush Administration before joining John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential campaign. Four years later, he ran Clinton’s digital operation, and became known as one of her most high-profile and vocal online supporters. Then, in 2016, for Clinton’s second Presidential run, Daou ran the platform Shareblue, a partisan news site that attacked mainstream coverage of the race and fanatically defended Clinton. By 2020, he had endorsed Bernie Sanders; he subsequently left the Democratic Party. (Before joining West’s campaign, he briefly ran Marianne Williamson’s.) Daou now says his career as a fanatical Democratic partisan was misguided, and that the entire political system needs to be uprooted; he believes West’s campaign is the best vehicle for such a change.

I recently spoke by phone with Daou. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how his political outlook shifted, his feelings about Donald Trump, and why he believes the Democratic Party also engages in election interference.

Who has changed: You or the Democratic Party?

I think I have changed more than the Democratic Party has changed. I’ve evolved and grown and thought through my role in the Party.

Most people would say that Joe Biden is to the left of where Hillary Clinton was in 2008, or indeed where Joe Biden was in 2008. Do you think that’s an accurate diagnosis?

I don’t think so. Having done more research and digging, thinking about leftism, liberalism, progressivism, neoliberalism, getting a little bit deeper into how this terminology is used, I just think back to the support from the Democratic Party for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and war on terror, which are based on lies. I don’t really see it in terms of movement to the left or to the right. Honestly, Isaac, I look at it systemically. I always looked at it as red and blue, and finally when I quit the Party, in 2020, I started looking at it as the system, and the Democratic Party comprises half of that system. Or maybe more, you know what I’m saying?

This is what made me quit the Party. I thought, O.K., Peter, it’s twenty-two years of your life, and the same problems, the same pain, the same misery, the same suffering is out there. There’s got to be something deeper than the binary, the binary box.

Would the Iraq War and the war on terror be a good example of what I meant? You have a President now who’s pulled us out of the war in Afghanistan, who’s drastically reduced drone strikes, who’s tried to tamp down the war on terror, whereas, in the Bush era, even if the majority of congressional Democrats voted against the Iraq War, many voted for it, and both parties supported the war on terror.

I don’t see it that way, but I know a lot of Democrats do. I see Joe Biden and the people around him, some of the neocons he’s getting advice from, as sabre-rattling warmongers who are actually making the world a more dangerous place. Now, I’ve always said that I don’t support, as a leftist myself, any imperialist invasion, and that includes the invasion of Ukraine. I believe the war is a criminal imperial invasion of another country. However, having said that, this Administration has rattled and provoked and escalated the rhetoric from Day One. From my standpoint, I look at this Administration as bigger warmongers than what you’re talking about in the period prior to 2008.

I see. So even compared with Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who supported the Iraq War and a huge range of American military interventions, you think that the Biden Administration is more warmongering?

Well, I just gave you an example. More or less, it’s difficult to assess. This is why I keep coming back to Dr. West’s position of dismantling the empire.

As recently as 2020, you were opposed to a third-party candidate because of the urgent need to beat Donald Trump. What changed between early 2020 and now?

Yeah, it’s a very fundamental change in perspective. It’s almost like I took a different set of glasses or lenses and I put them on, and that lens is the systemic lens. During the years I worked as a Democrat, I bought into the general thinking that Democrats are better and therefore we need Democrats to stop the fascist domination of Republicans. If you go back ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, it’s the same argument: Oh, my God, if you let them get elected, the world’s going to end. This is a very standard duopoly technique.

Now when I finally took off that lens, the binary red-blue, blue-is-better-than-red lens, and I took responsibility for wearing that lens or looking through that lens, then my lens became, O.K., look at the entire system. Let’s say this cycle we also say the same thing, which is, Oh, my God, we have to stop Donald Trump or we have to stop whoever the Republican might be. And this happens the next cycle and the next cycle and the next cycle. Where is the so-called democracy that we’re supposedly protecting or saving? What we’re doing is we’re crushing third parties.

We are stifling democracy itself, Isaac. This is the problem. From my standpoint, there are things that Biden has done that made the world more dangerous than Trump, and there are things Trump did that made the world more dangerous than Biden, and both of them go back and forth. You see what I’m saying?

I maybe need a different pair of lenses to totally see it.

You have to look at it through a systemic lens—the entire system, the structure of the system itself versus a binary view of which party is better and which one is going to be more dangerous. It’s a completely different way of looking at the picture.

It’s almost like “The Matrix,” where you’re either in it or you’re not, you know?

Correct. No, that’s a great way of looking at it. Exactly. When you’re inside the matrix, you go along with whatever structure is built around you, and you just see things that way. You remember the scene where it’s all the bodies being fed through their neck to their brain, and you suddenly are like, Wait a minute.That’s what this election is about. This election is about how we’re just not going to buy this framing anymore.

When it came to the idea of John McCain or Mitt Romney being elected President, in 2008 and 2012, I certainly remember Democrats saying, Oh, this would be bad. And maybe the extreme partisans would say, If Mitt Romney gets elected, the world’s going to end. But I don’t think that was the overwhelming idea. With Trump, it’s a little different, in part because he actually tried to steal a democratic election.

I have been one of the most vocal opponents of Donald Trump. In 2020, I was creating so many anti-Trump viral hashtags and videos. I was out there fighting this guy from Day One.

You recently wrote that “Trump’s two impeachments and four indictments are largely smokescreens,” correct?

Yeah. Well, the reason I say that is because he wasn’t impeached or indicted on the worst things he’s done, because the worst things he’s done, Democrats do, too.

January 6th? That seems high up there.

January 6th, that, too. But take a look at what Democrats are currently doing. See, this is when you start comparing good and bad.

You said he was indicted and impeached for things that Democrats did. He was impeached for two things: soliciting a foreign power to harm the candidacy of his opponent in the 2020 Presidential election and “incitement of insurrection” against the United States on January 6th. I don’t think Democrats have really done those things, no?

Let me just clarify. What I said is that he was impeached. I pushed very hard when Nancy Pelosi said he’s not worth impeaching. I was out there vocally with a lot of leftist activists saying, you have to impeach him, and she refused.

But then she did impeach him, twice, and now you seem grumpy that she did so. No?

No. What I complained about is that she impeached him for maybe five per cent of his most egregious offenses.

Contra Braverman’s critics

Liberals and leftists wring their hands while avoiding the real issues

Now the dust has settled following Suella Braverman’s multiculturalism-critical speech to the American Enterprise Institute in the United States, it’s worth looking at some of the claims of her critics. Such is their tone of moral opprobrium and intellectual haughtiness that they must have torn the Home Secretary limb from rhetorical limb — no?

We can skip over the likes of Mehdi Hasan, who can’t get their heads around the fact that a child of immigrants might be critical of immigration. I thought it was us villainous right-wingers who were meant to believe that individuals should be defined solely by their ethnic heritage, but apparently it’s nice progressives. Ah well. You live and learn.

Easily the dumbest responses come from people who deny that there are problems at all. “What is the basis for the claim that many arrivals live a separate existence in a parallel society?” Gavin Barwell chirrups. “I live in one of the most diverse parts of the country. You’re talking about my friends and neighbours. It is untrue and deeply offensive to suggest they’re not part of our society.”

Barwell is either dim or disingenuous in attempting to refute a claim about many arrivals with reference to some of his acquaintances. Lord Barwell, if I say that many people have brown hair that doesn’t mean that others are not blonde.

Still, what is more offensive about Barwell’s huffing is its blatant obscurantism. The claim that he expostulates about is undeniable. Let’s run through some evidence from the past couple of years. There was the jihadi stabbing of Sir David Amess. There was the pursuit of a Yorkshire teacher into hiding for showing his students a drawing of Muhammad. There was the attempted bombing of a hospital in Liverpool. There were clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester. There was the intimidation of Yorkshire schoolboys for scuffing a Quran. There were anti-Asian, ethnic separatist protests in Peckham. The existence of Lord Barwell’s friends and neighbours — fine people though I’m absolutely sure they are — does not mean that none of this is happening.

At least Barwell tried to deal with the substance of Mrs Braverman’s claims rather than just wringing his hands about her language. Matthew D’Ancona is appalled that Braverman described uncontrolled migration to Europe as an “existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West”. “This is way beyond the normal language of border management,” he gasps.

That might sound “shocking”, as Mr D’Ancona writes, but it is what it is

Much as I appreciate that Mr D’Ancona wants to spend his career writing very normal op-eds about very normal things, the fact remains that thousands upon thousands of migrants travelling from a much bigger, much poorer continent to Europe, without any end in sight, is not a normal situation, and fuels the potential for the sort of rapid and unmanageable change that could threaten the legitimacy and functionality of political and cultural institutions. That might sound “shocking”, as Mr D’Ancona writes, but it is what it is.

Some of the more subtle reactions have emanated from people who want to resurrect old arguments about multiculturalism versus assimilation. Should we engage new migrants in the terms of their own heritage, seeking to form a harmonious cultural patchwork, or attempt to inspire their embrace of our own?

An interesting debate. Leftists are not wholly wrong about the right-wing critique of that form of multiculturalism which, in Braverman’s words, “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate”. To be sure, we should resist the diminution of our rights in the name of appeasing hot sensitivities, and the empowerment of self-appointed “community leaders”, but it would be folly to pretend that this would be a panacea. French laïceté — which has made the state more hostile to public displays of Islam, for example — has not prevented more sensational acts of terrorism and minority unrest than even Britain has experienced.

The plain fact is that there are no smoothly effective means of integrating immigrants on the scale that they have entered Western European nations — and, contra Braverman, one cannot draw a clear distinction between legal and illegal immigration here. Combine a lot of different ingredients together in one dish, in great quantities, and your cooking methods become less than wholly relevant. This is not to denigrate immigration, still less immigrants (full disclosure: I am one). It is a question of numbers, and our chin-stroking, forehead-rubbing discourse in the normal language of border management is not up to the job. Braverman at least appreciates the nature of the problem — even if, after decades of Conservative promises, words sound a lot cheaper than they should.

Rishi Sunak clearly shouldn’t be allowed to go on holiday. He’s come back from his summer break spewing out a whole load of announcements and briefings: scrapping environmental targets, probably delaying HS2, proposing a British baccalaureate to replace A-levels, a £10 fine for missing a GP appointment that would likely cost more to administer than it would raise, and so on.There’s always a temptation to try and identify the clever strategy behind the apparent incoherence. There isn’t one. This is what happens when a Prime Minister tries to take every decision themselves without proper advice, or time to do any of them justice, while also going to G20 meetings and organising an AI summit. You can get away with centralising decision-making as Chancellor because you have more space and less to focus on. But not as Prime Minister. This isn’t three dimensional chess, it’s a bad hand of solitaire.The campaign and comms team around the Prime Minister have, of course, done their best to give all this the appearance of a cunning plan. They’ve briefed that saving money on things like HS2 will create space for tax cuts and pointed out various new dividing lines with Labour, as if creating a point of disagreement was itself an achievement. It’s all, though, rather forlorn and desperate.Indeed framing this list of random announcements as “long-term decisions for a brighter future” (the Tory conference slogan) is testing the credulity of even the friendliest client journalists. It seems unlikely to help the Tories increasingly desperate political position. No doubt they will cough up some tax cuts at some point, with inheritance tax the current favourite. But it’s hard to see the electorate feeling confident about a government so obviously flailing around, even if they’re not following the details.Of course, one reason why Sunak has ended up such an odd mix of policies is the underlying financial position. Needing to stick within fiscal rules means no policy announcements that cost any money, so the focus is on scrapping stuff or tangential low-priority ideas like new school qualifications. As discussed before Labour have the same (self-imposed) problem, and will continue to do so after any election victory. Every other domestic policy issue is dwarfed by the “2025 spending review problem”, and how on earth to make the numbers add up, given they are currently based on unrealistic cuts to spending across multiple departments.Given that, and given I’m going to be writing about it a lot over the next 12-18 months, I thought it would be useful to do a series of posts setting out the basics of how the public finances work and the key issues that flow from that. This information is scattered across multiple sources and often expressed using impenetrable jargon, so I’m going to do my best to keep it simple, with further reading at the end if you want to get into more detail.I’m going to start with a breakdown of what the government spends all our money on, and what that means for the next spending review. In post two I’m going to do the same on the income side and breakdown tax (and other revenue). In post three I’m going to pull it altogether into a menu of options for an incoming Chancellor.   Read more  

       During Wednesday's Republican debate, there was one thing that just about every candidate could agree on: School choice is a great policy, and more school choice will help pull American schoolchildren out of their post-COVID test score slump. "We need to make sure that we have school choice so there's competition," said former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. "We need to move all the programs from the federal government down to the states, and let states decide what education looks like." When asked about his record on education in New Jersey, former Gov. Chris Christie bragged about creating "more charter schools and more Renaissance schools and more public school choice." "We didn't just talk about universal school choice," boasted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. "We enacted universal school choice." Except no one defined what school choice is. While it's a good sign that school choice is getting so much airtime, it risks becoming just another political buzzword if Republicans don't explain what it actually means and which school choice policies they support. School choice can be used to describe just about any policy that makes it easier for parents to send their children to schools other than their local zoned public schools. School choice can range from conservative proposals like open-enrollment policies, in which parents can enroll their children in other school districts if those districts have extra seats, to expansive measures in Florida's law, which lets all families who opt out of public schools get a cut of the funds that would have gone to local schools to use toward private school tuition. Forty-three states have open enrollment, though some make it prohibitively difficult for parents to participate. Forty-five states allow charter schools (publicly funded and tuition-free schools that are privately run), and 15 states have private school vouchers, though most programs are means-tested. Poor and middle-class families should have a chance to do what wealthy families have always done: choose where their children go to school. And when you force public schools to compete with other options, it pushes them to improve their offerings and better serve their students. Since pandemic-era school closures, that sell has been even easier to make. Not only has homeschooling increased by 30 percent immediately following the pandemic (with private schools experiencing more modest gains), but high-profile efforts to enact generous voucher programs have been successful in Florida and Arizona. As a result, national support for the concept of "school choice" is high. Recent polling by the American Federation for Children found that 71 percent of Americans support the concept of school choice, including 66 percent of Democrats. While supporting school choice is clearly a winning strategy for Republicans—and Democrats—going beyond vague platitudes will help more Americans take their positive view of the concept out of the abstract and into statehouses.The post School Choice Gets Lip Service at Republican Debate appeared first on Reason.com.

       At the first Republican presidential primary debate last month, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley stood out for quickly calling out former President Donald Trump for adding nearly $8 trillion to the national debt during his four years in office. A few of her competitors for the nomination took notice. Within the first 10 minutes of Wednesday's second GOP debate, both former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pointedly criticized Trump for adding to the national debt—and for declining to show up Wednesday to defend his record. In response to a question about whom voters ought to blame in the event of a government shutdown, Christie said everyone in D.C. for the past few years deserves scorn. "And let's be honest about this with the voters: During the Trump administration they added $7 trillion in national debt. And now the Biden administration has put another $5 trillion and counting," Christie said. "None of them are willing to take on the difficult issues. They just want to keep kicking the can down the road." Moments later, DeSantis jumped in to make the same point. "Donald Trump is missing in action. He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record where they added $7.8 trillion to the debt that set the stage for the inflation that we have," DeSantis said. "As your president, when they send me a bloating [sic] spending bill that's going to cause your prices to go up, I'm going to take out this veto pen, and I'm going to send it right back to them." It seems obvious that both candidates noticed how Haley got a significant bump in the polls following her strong performance in the first debate and decided to borrow from her highlight reel. It's a clean hit on Trump, the GOP frontrunner. During Trump's four years in office, the national debt climbed from about $20 trillion to nearly $28 trillion. Today, it stands at $33.1 trillion—incredibly, that's roughly $400 billion higher than it was during the first Republican debate held just 35 days ago. The bills racked up by Biden and Trump (and former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, for that matter) are now coming due. Much of that borrowing occurred when interest rates were significantly lower than they are today, but rising interest rates have compounded the annual payments on the debt. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, interest costs will exceed military spending within the next two years, under current interest rates, and will become "the single largest government program in just two decades." That looming crisis perhaps explains the increasing willingness of the Republican field to call out Trump's record—and the record of Republican lawmakers in Congress, most of whom voted for those spending increases and the borrowing they require. It's a significant development, if only because talking about the threat that reckless federal borrowing poses to the country is a necessary first step toward getting the deficit under control. Of course, we should not be naive enough to confuse campaign trail talk—to say nothing of debate stage bluster—for an actual commitment to dealing with the debt. And, as it was for Haley a month ago, this is a convenient way for candidates like DeSantis and Christie to draw a distinction between themselves and their rivals who have played a role in passing recent federal budgets. The Republican Party has a lot of work to do to reclaim its place as the party of fiscal responsibility. But if the GOP's would-be leaders keep talking like this, it might eventually get there.The post Ron DeSantis and Chris Christie Call Out Trump for Adding to Federal Debt appeared first on Reason.com.

       During last night's Republican presidential debate, former Vice President Mike Pence had a startling answer to a question about what he would do to reduce gun violence. "I am sick and tired of these mass shootings happening in the United States of America," said Pence. "And if I'm president of the United States, I'm going to go to the Congress of the United States, and we're going to pass a federal expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting so that they will meet their fate in months, not years. It is unconscionable that the Parkland shooter…is actually going to spend the rest of his life behind bars in Florida. That's not justice. We have to mete out justice and send a message to these would-be killers that you are not going to live out your days behind bars. You're going to meet justice." This plan is not just unlikely to reduce mass shootings; it would leave lots of accused criminals without important procedural protections. While "mass shooting" doesn't have a set legal definition, one common definition puts it as any shooting with at least four victims, including people who were injured rather than killed. By that metric, over 3,500 mass shootings occurred from 2015 to 2022. Roughly 95 percent of these shootings resulted in fewer than four deaths, according to Everytown for Gun Safety's data. That includes a lot of crimes that do not look like Parkland—crimes in which there could be serious doubts about whether the accused is in fact guilty. Pence is presumably thinking of those who commit the worst deliberate mass shootings But trying to exact even harsher punishments for the very few who commit such terrible violence will primarily end up affecting those accused of, say, drive-by shootings where the perpetrator isn't obvious. For this reason, expediting the execution process would massively increase the risk that the state executes a wrongfully convicted person. Pence complained that it takes decades to actually execute someone after a conviction, but that time is typically spent exhausting legal appeal or clemency options. Sometimes, these decades of legal appeals help overturn wrongful convictions, such as in 192 cases of death-row exonerations recorded by the Death Penalty Information Center. In total, one 2014 study estimated that as many as 4 percent of those sentenced to death in America are innocent.  In addition to the increased risk of wrongful execution, making it easier to execute someone sentenced to death would likely not affect the number of people killed by gun violence—or even the number of people killed by mass shootings. There's considerable debate over whether harsher sentences can deter crime in some circumstances. However, it's difficult to see how a swifter death penalty will deter those who plan to commit the worst and rarest mass shootings, considering just how often these shootings end in suicide or the shooter being killed by police or bystanders. So while Pence and one other Republican presidential candidate are all too excited to make it easier for the state to execute people, expediting the death penalty would be anything but just.The post No, Mike Pence, We Should Not Make It Easier To Execute Mass Shooters appeared first on Reason.com.

       An audit conducted this summer revealed that children in Florida's foster care system are being prescribed powerful psychotropic medications at alarmingly high rates. In many cases, state child welfare officials are failing to properly document prescriptions, resulting in children taking powerful medications with scant medical records available to justify them. Over 2,200 children that are currently in Florida's foster care system—around one in 10—are prescribed psychotropic medications, reported the Tampa Bay Times. For foster children over the age of 13, more than one in three are on this kind of medication, which includes treatments for conditions like ADHD, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. According to state rules, "the physician or psychiatric nurse recommending the psychotropic medication is required to complete and sign a medical report," and each prescription "is required to be documented on a medication log. The case manager must obtain the medication logs at each home visit and include the medication logs in the child's case file" with the Florida Safe Families Network (FSFN), the state's child welfare agency. Yet a state audit released in July found "no records of the psychotropic medications prescribed in the case file in the state's primary case management system," according to the Tampa Bay Times. "Logs that record the frequency and dosage of psychotropic medication were missing from 66% of case files reviewed, and authorization records were not found in more than one-third of the case files." Even more troubling, the audit found that the state welfare agency did not document prescriptions in 57 out of the 60 cases of children prescribed opioid medication that were reviewed.  "These documentation deficiencies occurred because the State agency did not have adequate controls to ensure the [child protective investigators] and case managers maintained the children's case files in FSFN in accordance with State requirements," the audit reads. "Without adequate controls in place, the State agency could not ensure that children in foster care received the necessary monitoring and care. As a result, the children's quality of care and health and safety may have been at risk." This lack of documentation has had severe effects on many children in Florida's foster care system. Without proper documentation, children can end up taking unnecessary medications or not getting the prescriptions they actually need. In one case where the state did not properly maintain medication logs for one 16-year-old, Medicaid claim data revealed that "the child was prescribed five different psychotropic medications during [calendar years] 2019 and 2020 and up to four different psychotropic medications during the same month."  One foster parent who spoke to the Tampa Bay Times said that her 5-year-old foster child had been rendered almost "catatonic" from an anti-seizure drug. The boy didn't seem to have epilepsy (he only had seizures when running a fever), and there were no records showing that a judge or the boy's biological mother had approved the medication, yet he was given the drug anyway. But Florida isn't alone in overmedicating children in foster care. Investigations from several other states also revealed negligence from state child protection agencies when it came to managing prescriptions for these drugs. In April, a district judge sharply criticized Texas' Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) for mishandling psychotropic prescriptions for children in state custody.  "I need a plan. They are not getting medications. They are overmedicated," Judge Janis Graham Jack told DFPS Commissioner Stephanie Muth. "They don't have adequate diagnosis or reasons for these drugs. Just because your placements don't know how to handle children doesn't mean they should be drugged like this to the point the monitors said some of them are almost catatonic."The post Florida Is Giving Foster Children Powerful Psychotropic Drugs Without Proper Records, Audit Finds  appeared first on Reason.com.

       When America's largest ticket retailer announced plans to adjust its pricing structure, President Joe Biden was quick to claim credit. But concertgoers really should thank Taylor Swift and her fans. In June, Ticketmaster, the massive ticket-selling​ arm of global concert promoter Live Nation, said its website would start displaying full prices upfront on each event page. Those prices include venue fees and processing costs that used to be added later in the purchasing process (but still well before customers paid). The company had been under pressure from Swifties after a series of mishaps involving ticket sales for Swift's much-in-​demand Eras Tour. Although those problems were not caused by the supposedly hidden fees, the latter also became a target of customer outrage. The promised price transparency is nice, of course, and smart marketing. But according to Biden, Ticketmaster's decision validates his ongoing war on the "junk fees" charged by a wide range of businesses, including airlines, hotels, and banks. Biden claims the changes he wants would "bring down costs for working Americans" and create "space for competition." The president is wrong on both scores. Ticketmaster, artists like Swift, and the venues that host concerts will not choose to make less money, and forcing companies to bundle costs will undermine competition in other parts of the market. In this year's State of the Union address, for example, Biden said he wanted to prevent airlines from charging travelers fees to choose specific seats. "Making airlines show you the full ticket price upfront," he averred, will make it easier for Americans to "afford that family trip." But the kind of transparency Biden is demanding does not reduce costs. Consider the budget airlines that currently offer low fares but charge additional fees for picking seats, bringing bags (sometimes even carry-on luggage), and getting in-flight snacks. If those airlines have to bundle all those costs together for every flyer, passengers who want to travel light, are willing to sit anywhere, and can go 90 minutes without a snack will have to pay more so that other travelers can avoid paying for those things à la carte. The second group won't pay less; they'll just pay it all upfront. Meanwhile, a low-cost option will disappear for the first group. Instead of being able to evaluate tradeoffs—should I save money even if that means I don't get to sit with my traveling companions?—consumers would face a market with fewer choices. Biden's scheme also would leave airlines less space to compete with each other. Southwest, for example, loudly advertises that "bags fly free" on its planes. Ban baggage fees, and that market advantage vanishes. Biden's war on fees is a version of what libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok has termed the "Happy Meal Fallacy." Imagine a typical fast-food joint with combo meals—fries and sodas alongside burgers—that also allows consumers to buy individual items from the menu. Some might choose the combo, while others might want or be able to afford just fries or a burger. Now imagine an enterprising politician getting involved. "A burger alone is not sufficient," he argues, introducing a bill mandating that all burgers come with fries and a drink. The burger chain would still have to make money, so it would not start charging for a combo meal what it once charged for a single à la carte item. Customers who could afford only a burger would thus be priced out of the market. This simple principle is easy to understand when applied to low-cost items like burgers but can be applied to more complex scenarios too. The Biden administration is pushing this misguided goal in a variety of ways. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are cracking down on overdraft fees that banks charge in order to offer services like free checking accounts. The CFPB also has proposed a cap on the fees credit card companies can charge for unpaid bills, which is likely to result in higher interest rates for all credit card users. And the FTC is drafting new rules that would target "unnecessary charges for worthless, free, or fake products or services" even though it already has the authority to go after businesses engaged in outright fraud. It should be consumers, not bureaucrats, who decide whether they are getting enough value for their money. If not, they can choose to spend differently. As economists know all too well, mandatory all-in-one pricing might save some consumers a little frustration, but with hidden costs for others who are forced to buy products or services they don't want or need.The post Taylor Swift, Junk Fees, and the 'Happy Meal Fallacy' appeared first on Reason.com.

To understand the historical trauma Slovakia has endured in the past half-century alone, speak to Zita. When I asked her about the country’s forthcoming election, she told me about growing up under communism and of the infamous Soviet invasion in 1968. And she remembered the introduction of democracy to the country and entering the European Union, a symbol of overturning that regime. Now, Slovakia faces a similar crossroads, split over the Ukraine war, and forced to choose between supporting the EU-Nato alliance or Putin’s invasion. It is a decision that has split Zita’s family. She tells me, through muffled tears, how her sister backs the Russians while she volunteers to support refugees from Bakhmut in her town. Her distress personifies the growing tension across her country ahead of an election that could have global ramifications. A Nato member, little Slovakia is, at present, among Kyiv’s staunchest supporters, rushing to supply air-defence missiles and fighter jets at the beginning of the invasion. But as the war has progressed, the country has become a test-bed for Kremlin disinformation. The polls remain tight, with the progressives taking a narrow lead yesterday, but many still anticipate the election of a pro-Russian populist. And whichever way the result falls, this contest represents a major challenge to the European consensus on the Ukraine war — and a further inroad for the continent’s rampant radical-Right. Robert Fico, leader of the Slovakian Social Democracy (Smer) party, is the moving force behind all this, and a politician who stretches pragmatism to its limit. He was born in Topoľčany, trained as a lawyer and joined the Communists. But, after leaving their successor party, Fico posed as a “Third Way” progressive centrist in the vein of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair at a time when Slovakia, led by an autocrat with connections to organised crime, was seen as Europe’s democratic laggard. This ushered him into power as prime minister and he ran the country for a decade. Then his second government collapsed in 2018, after mass protests following the murder of Ján Kuciak — a journalist investigating state corruption and government ties to the Italian mafia — and his fiancé Martina Kušnírová shook the capital. Suggested reading Is this the end of the Soros empire?By Thomas Fazi  Five years on, Fico has shrugged off attempts to tie him to the contract killing and stands on the threshold of power, having reinvented himself as an ultra-populist. After blaming George Soros for his downfall, he then exploited the struggles of his successors to cope with the pandemic, inflation and soaring energy prices. Today, he rails against green measures and migrants, rants about the threat of LGBT “ideology” and regurgitates Putin’s propaganda. “The war in Ukraine didn’t start yesterday or last year. It began in 2014 when the Ukrainian Nazis and fascists started to murder Russian citizens in Donbas and Luhansk,” he told a cheering crowd in Topoľčany last month. Fico’s platform opposes EU sanctions on Moscow, seeks to end Slovakia’s military aid for Ukraine and stop Kyiv from joining Nato, and pushes for a peace deal that would let Putin keep occupied land. One former defence minister calls him a “Trojan horse” for the Kremlin. Others suggest he is being aided by Viktor Orbán in neighbouring Hungary, and Fico has been heavily promoted on state media there, to be watched by Slovakia’s sizeable Hungarian minority. Many Slovaks are concerned the Smer leader might follow the same path as the pugnacious Hungarian populist. And he certainly admires Orbán, according to Aneta Vilagi, a political scientist at Comenius University. “They are good political friends who understand they can help each other out,” she told me. “It would be useful for Orbán to have a similar voice with the same policies in the EU and Nato, while for Fico this shows you can be a member of the EU without being a cheerleader for the West.” The day after I arrived in Bratislava there was a vivid demonstration of the passions aroused in this election. Igor Matovič, another former prime minister, drove up to a Smer campaign event in a pick-up truck emblazoned with the slogan “we will not hand you over to the mafia”. His protest was aimed at Fico’s ally Robert Kalinak, a central figure in the 2018 scandal. Matovič, an anti-graft campaigner who won the subsequent election but proved ill-suited to government, shouted that the ex-interior minister was a mafioso as the pair traded punches and kicks. “They’ve dragged Slovak politics to a new low,” despaired one prominent liberal politician. This unruly confrontation was the perfect illustration of the intense feelings Fico stirs up. “I have never voted for Fico and never will vote for him — he robbed the state,” said Lucas, 39, a travel agent I met in Bratislava’s Old Town. “I’m even thinking of moving out of Slovakia because the politics is terrible, the corruption is terrible, the government is terrible.” Another woman told me she did not want to have children under his leadership. “I feel very sad he is coming back,” said Katerina, 35, a former flight attendant. “Everything he says is a lie or just populism, picking on topics of no importance for our people. I worry about democracy and freedom. I think it is going to go worse than Hungary.” It is common to hear cynicism about politicians and see divisions in democratic societies. In this post-Communist country, these have been compounded by the turnover of four prime ministers in four years, with one poll indicating fewer than half the population now view liberal democracy as good for the nation. “I don’t know who to vote for because I don’t think anyone in the election deserves to represent our country,” said one resident in Topoľčany. Another voter there put it more bluntly: “They’re all dickheads who don’t think about the country at all.”  But some voters regard Fico as the solution. A few grudgingly told me they would back him because he was more competent than his successors, despite the corruption. “I will not support him directly but will back another party that will be in coalition since there has been so much going wrong over the last few years,” said Peter, a driver, before adding ruefully that there seemed to be “a lot of sudden animosity among our people”. The only person I spoke to who sounded enthusiastic was Lubonir, 60, a member of Fico’s party. “I see problems everywhere. We need to build it back up.” When pressed, the warehouse worker echoed Fico, claiming that the war was not a European conflict since it was really being fought between Russia and the United States. “I support helping Ukraine but not with weapons,” he added. It might seem strange to find this approach in a country that was invaded by Moscow within living memory (even if Putin did say helpfully earlier this month that “it was a mistake” to send tanks into Czechoslovakia). Lurking in the background, however, is the dark shadow of Russian disinformation, which began targeting Slovakia after the 2014 theft of Crimea and assault on Donbas. “We saw the aim: to manipulate public opinion,” said Dominika Hajdu, policy director at the Centre for Democracy and Resilience at a Bratislava-based research group. “It started with Ukraine but developed to divide society over democracy, the West, Nato or the migration crisis. Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has again become the central and polarising issue.” Hajdu said they had seen an eruption of online sites recycling Kremlin propaganda. Entrepreneurial locals saw an opportunity, whether paid directly by Moscow or from advertising revenues, which were thought to be worth up to €71,500 a month for the most popular sites. One contributor to a prominent channel was caught on camera being paid by a Russian defence attaché, who said: “I told Moscow you are a good guy, that you have many friends, the Slovak mafia.” Another contributor to the site who wrote under a Slovakian name was found to be Russian. In Crimea, a prominent Russian news outlet set up a Slovak-language site. And beyond the Soviet Union, there is a lingering sentimental attachment to Moscow dating back to a 19th-century pan-Slavic movement. One Globsec study in 2018 found that Slovaks were more likely than Czechs, Hungarians or Poles to look back favourably at the Soviet Union. Another revealed that half of them see the US as a security risk, a figure that has risen sharply in recent years. A poll taken across Eastern and Central Europe this year found only 40% of Slovaks blame Putin for the war, with one in four of them retaining a positive view of Russia’s despot, while half think either Ukraine or the West are “primarily responsible”. “Slovakia is a big success for Russian propaganda with the Slovak audience very susceptible to its disinformation,” said Tomáš Strážay, director of the Slovak Foreign Policy Association. “They see Slovakia as a weak spot in Nato and Europe. Even in Hungary there is stronger support for Nato. Russia is using this opportunity.” Yet Strazay also blames domestic politicians for failing to promote liberal European values in a nation still building its statehood, saying that they simply see Brussels as “a cash machine” providing eight in every 10 euros of their public spending. More from this author My night out with the Proud BoysBy Ian Birrell  The toxicity of debate has already led Slovakia’s first female president to opt out of re-election next year. Zuzana Čaputová, an environmental activist, strong supporter of Ukraine and the most trusted politician in the country, won the post in wake of the 2018 post-assassination protests. It is largely ceremonial but appoints top judges, oversees the armed forces and can veto laws passed by parliament. Three months ago, Čaputová said she would not run again after receiving death threats and worrying about her family. Last week she declared that she was suing Fico over his false claims that she is an “American agent” and Soros stooge. “Making someone a target with hateful lies has cost people’s lives already in Slovakia,” she said. The schism over Ukraine is deep, but there are widely shared concerns over issues such as education, globalisation, governance and inequality that Fico exploits with skill. He is part of a continent-wide tide of anti-establishment populism on Left and Right that last year attracted almost one-in-three voters participating in elections. Yet he has provoked intense speculation among Western diplomats over his real aims. One predicted he would be “a thorn in the side for Nato”, joining “the awkward squad with Orbán”. This envoy added that there had been a belief in the West that Eastern and Central Europe were “safe and democratic” although the rule of law was still taking root in some nations. “Russia has seen this and knows they are in play.” If he wins, Fico may well re-adopt his strategy of strong rhetoric against Brussels and Washington at home while soothing allies abroad. But the world has greatly changed from when he was last in office in 2018. Before leaving Bratislava, I meet Meseznikov, the Russian-born and Jewish analyst who runs the Institute for Public Affairs. “Just look around us here in this square and you see a Western nation,” he said with a sweep of his arm. “We are in the happiest time in our history in our region. We live in free societies, the borders are open, we can travel, there is freedom, we are members of Nato and the EU. There is a stable life in an area that has seen so many battles, ethnic cleansing, really bad social conditions. Sure, there are problems, some groups of people do not enjoy such good lives, voters have seen chaotic government — but these are the best of times. Sadly, now we face Putin with his crazy and destructive ideas — and the ugly politics of Fico.” But the question to be answered on Saturday is: does Slovakia agree? view comments

Hi,

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong,” Henry Thoreau observed, “as when you find a trout in the milk.”

That line came to mind when I heard about the Robert Menendez allegations. You can come up with all sorts of explanations—maybe even some plausible ones—for why he had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed in various jacket pockets in his closets. Where else would you keep walking around money? But those gold bars are not just literally but also figuratively, gold. When comedy writers really hit paydirt—a term from goldmining no less!—we say that’s gold! Well, having gold bars whose serial numbers indicated they’d been registered to one of his co-consprirators, well, ain’t dross. I’ve been trying to come up with more hilariously damning—albeit circumstantial!—evidence and the only thing I’ve been able to come up with is if he had a thick sheaf of German-bearer bonds stolen from the Nakatomi tower or maybe an envelope with the words, “Bribe money” on it.

I am enjoying watching Republicans insist that the—now suddenly legitimate—legal process be allowed to play out while Democrats insist that Menendez needs to resign immediately. Still, shorn of partisan and political motivations—which there are plenty of—both positions have significant merit. Of course, people deserve their day in court. The problem with all the familiar arguments on that front for Republicans is that it is taken as a given that Donald Trump shouldn’t even have to appear in court because the Department of Justice—which just indicted a prominent Democrat—is hopelessly partisan. Some of the usual suspects even contend that the DOJ is prosecuting Menendez solely “to create the appearance of impartiality so that they can continue their jihad against Donald Trump.”

What do we mean when we talk about freedom? Jefferson Cowie, a professor of history at Vanderbilt University, addressed this question in his monumental work Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for History. The book focuses on Southern white resistance to federal authority — in the name of freedom — over two centuries in Barbour County in southeastern Alabama (particularly in its largest town, Eufaula).  The tale begins in the early nineteenth century with the efforts by whites to illegally seize and settle lands retained by the Muscogee Creek Nation — a conflict that, ironically, forced the Creeks to rely for protection on federal forces sent by President Andrew Jackson, despite his notorious hostility toward Native Americans. In the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, Barbour County whites resisted federal efforts to impose a biracial democracy, culminating in an 1874 massacre of African-American citizens attempting to vote.  Jim Crow segregation prevailed in Barbour County for the better part of the following century. Elite rule and white supremacy were enforced not just through sharecropping and disenfranchisement but also through the brutal actions of convict leasing and lynching. Finally, with the coming of the civil rights era of the 1950s and ‘60s, Alabama Governor George Wallace – a Barbour County native – fought federal integration efforts and vowed to uphold “segregation forever!” Wallace’s successes in Democratic presidential primaries — well beyond the South — in 1968 and 1972 showed the populist potency of combining racial resentment with opposition to federal power.  In all of these episodes, Cowie demonstrates that white Alabamians defined freedom, not just in terms of individual liberty and civic participation, but also of their freedom to enslave and dominate. This latter conception of freedom frequently pitted local and state authorities against federal authority.  In this podcast discussion, Cowie acknowledges that federal authority frequently fell far short of its stated aims and principles. Nevertheless, it was the only hope for those who sought political rights and equality before the law. Although the successes of the civil rights struggle in the American South have been uneven and partial, Cowie emphasizes that “you do everybody a disservice if you call a mixed bag a failure.”  Transcript Jefferson Cowie: This question of federalism, this question of freedom within federalism, are all central to the American experience. The state is really conflicted in at least three ways: local, state, and federal levels. And we really need to be thinking more about the conflict within the federal structure as a central question of American history. Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted and honored to be joined today by Jefferson Cowie, one of the nation’s really great historians. He is the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He has also been a fellow and faculty member at Stanford University, Cornell University, and UC San Diego. His most recent book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for History. He’s also the author of several other terrific histories, including 2016’s The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics, as well as the 2010 book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. Welcome, Jeff! Jefferson Cowie: I’m happy to be here. Geoff Kabaservice: And congratulations on the Pulitzer, of course, but also for all the truly excellent historical craftsmanship that went into Freedom’s Dominion. I actually thought that it got fewer reviews in popular media than it deserved. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that such outlets noted its length, its scholarly depth, and concluded that maybe the reviews were left best to the academic journal side of things. But in fact, it’s really an enthralling, moving, beautifully written book that emphatically deserves a wide audience. And I hope that after the Pulitzer it will get one. Jefferson Cowie: You and me both. I think the other problem with it was the launch date. It was two days before Thanksgiving, which was just a disastrous time to set a book out. It’s the holidays, it’s the end of the year, so it’s not making lists, and it’s going to be another month before anybody’s actually reading anything. I sort of attribute it to that. Geoff Kabaservice: The book, if I may describe it in exceedingly general terms, is a retelling of almost two centuries of Southern white resistance to federal authority in the name of freedom, told from the standpoint of Barbour County, Alabama and its main town, Eufaula. It probably won’t be surprising if many listeners haven’t heard of those places. Barbour County, in the southeastern corner of the state, has only 25,000 citizens. And the principal claim to fame of Eufaula, which is located on the Chattahoochee River across from Georgia, is as the self-proclaimed “Big Bass Capital of the World.” But Barbour County nonetheless was home to eight governors of Alabama, more than any other county in the state. And the most well-known of these, of course, was George Wallace, who was governor effectively from 1963 to 1987. And you begin your book with Wallace’s January 1963 inauguration speech at which he infamously declared: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” — words actually written by his speechwriter, Asa Carter, who was the founder of a local Ku Klux Klan organization. But you very perceptively observed that those were almost the only mentions of the word “segregation” in Wallace’s address. “In contrast,” you write, “he invoked ‘freedom’ twenty-five times in the speech — more than Martin Luther King Jr. would use the term later that year in his ‘I Have a Dream’ address at the March on Washington.” And this is significant, you continue, because while “It is easy to ignore or dismiss Wallace’s call for freedom as little more than ideological window-dressing for his racism,” in fact a close reading of the history of Wallace’s native Barbour County reveals what you call “the largest and most central conflict in American political history: that over the meaning of American freedom.” So, Jeff, tell me about the genesis of Freedom’s Dominion and how it came to be focused on the particular place of Barbour County and the particular issue of the contested meaning of American freedom. Jefferson Cowie: Well, I’d like to tell you I did a scientific survey of all possible counties in America to find the quintessential county that represented these questions. But in fact, we were just driving down to the Gulf Coast with my family on a particularly cold winter day. This is when I taught at Cornell University and it was 20 degrees below zero, and we decided we needed to get out for a little while. So we drove down to the Gulf Coast, and we drove through this town. I had been thinking about this question of freedom and the things that bothered me about freedom, the questions I had about it, the complexities, the sort of reflexive nature of freedom. And I’d been thinking about some sort of expression of it: some outlet, a place, a person. I didn’t want to do a national kind of narrative. I felt that was a little too easy. I wanted to hold myself accountable to something a little narrower. So I hit this place, and we’re driving through, and it had these beautiful mansions on either side of the road and these gorgeous arcing trees, and then this other side of town that was rather dilapidated. And I was like: “This could be it. This could be it.” And the funny thing was I went back to my study at Cornell and I started doing research from the beginning, and I didn’t find out that George Wallace was from Barbour County until probably six months into the project. And that’s when it became fate, because so much of my work has revolved around George Wallace, especially the ‘70s book, Stayin’ Alive. Geoff Kabaservice: Let me guess: you were on your way to Panama City Beach, maybe? Jefferson Cowie: Somewhere down there, yep. Geoff Kabaservice: I was trying to think how would you end up going through Eufaula. I’ve been to Dothan, Alabama, which where you get if you keep following the road down. But Eufaula is really not on one of the main roads that go through the South. It’s also worth pointing out that your book has a lot of obvious relevance to the nation’s post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the populist presidency of Donald Trump. But you began work on this book long before either of those phenomena had occurred. Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, I wouldn’t say long before Trump, but substantially before Trump. I started it about 18 months before Trump was elected. And there’s a couple of things I like about that fact. One is that it’s not seen through the prism of Trump. I don’t really feel like the questions I was asking were being asked, as so many questions are being asked right now, through that prism. But also the kinds of enduring questions that I’m interested in are sort of… I think this book works even without Trump ever being elected, in that this question of federalism, this question of freedom within federalism, are all central to the American experience. And when we talk about the state, we talk about it in these blanket terms. And the state is really conflicted in at least three ways: local, state, and federal levels. And we really need to be thinking more about the conflict within the federal structure as a central question of American history. Geoff Kabaservice: You refer at several points to Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson’s definition of freedom as a kind of chord with three particular notes. Can you explain a little more about that? Jefferson Cowie: This goes back to a longstanding read that I’ve had of Orlando Patterson’s enormous book on freedom in the Western world. He basically goes all the way back to ancient societies and says that the only reason we understand freedom is because there was slavery; that you need that dyad in order to make sense of it, that kinship and belonging and community were actually more important than freedom or liberty until you actually have slavery. He follows this through all of Western history and comes up with this formula. As you say, he says freedom is a chord with three notes. The first one is the one we all cherish, I think, as Americans, and that is individual liberty: the freedom from coercion from the state, from other people — the types of things that are protected in the Bill of Rights. The second one is something that we don’t cherish enough, and that is the freedom to participate in the making of your political community and the governing of your political community. And then the third is the note that I’m exploring this book: the freedom to dominate other people, the freedom to oppress. And this is the most controversial dimension, and this is the theme that’s sort of below the surface that I’m trying to push back up. The irony of the three notes, as it turned out in this place in southeastern Alabama, in Barbour County, is that the first two notes were mobilized most effectively in pursuit of the third. That is, individual rights and the political community got very worked up when the third note — that is, the freedom to oppress, the freedom to dominate, the freedom to enslave — was threatened. Geoff Kabaservice: You play out your saga over two centuries in essentially four extended episodes of conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government. The first begins in the early nineteenth century with the efforts by white settlers to seize and settle the lands retained by the Muscogee Creek Nation under the terms of the 1832 Treaty of Cusseta between the Creeks and the U.S. government under President Andrew Jackson. The second is the resistance to the post-Civil War Reconstruction of the 1860s and ‘70s that ended with the blood soaked so-called “redemption.” The third was the reassertion of white supremacy and Jim Crow over the better part of the next century, extending past the New Deal era into the ‘50s. And then the fourth was the reaction by George Wallace and others against the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and ‘60s. And this book is really full of surprises, even to people who are familiar with the broad outlines of American and Southern history. For example, President Andrew Jackson is probably best remembered today for his atrocious actions against Native Americans, including the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. But I was surprised to see you portray him as a comparative moderating force relative to the local whites in eastern Alabama in the 1830s. Jefferson Cowie: That’s exactly right. I had to reread the sources multiple times to get that, because it cuts against the grain of what we understand as historians to be the essence of Andrew Jackson. Let me lead with the fact that it’s not that he didn’t want the Creek people to leave — he did. But he had set up this treaty and he was prepared to honor it. And so Barbour County, and Eufaula in particular, really begin as a white settlement when these intruders come in across the Chattahoochee River and begin to colonize this area against the treaty rights that Jackson has set up with the Muscogee Creek people, in what was known then as the Creek Nation, this area the size of New Jersey along the Chattahoochee River. And he sent in federal marshals, and later federal troops, to remove white settlers from Native American lands. It’s the reverse of what we expect of Andrew Jackson, and so it’s rather shocking. What’s really interesting about that fact is one, this place is born as a white settlement in opposition to federal power. Federal power comes in and basically removes it: burns key buildings, destroys others, kicks people out. And it’s not just any federal government, it is possibly the most sympathetic federal government to their interests ever. And in fact, Jackson won every county in Alabama. But many counties turn against him after this act. So yeah, it’s a little bit of a different interpretation, I think, of Jackson. But in no way does it deny the fact that he basically delivered the better part of three states from indigenous hands to American hands. Geoff Kabaservice: Again, one of the resonances with the present era and our current politics is that as much as Jackson was on the side of these white settlers, any federal action really seemed to stir them into the proverbial hornet’s-nest kind of rage and conspiracy theories and beliefs that they were going to be enslaved. There was an episode where federal troops killed this scoundrel, Hardiman Owens, who tried to dynamite them all, and he then becomes a martyr. He’s like the Ashli Babbitt of the 1830s. So this is a dynamic that we can see very deeply ingrained in American history. Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, it is. And the killing of Hardiman Owens is such an amazing story, especially the aftermath of it, where he does in fact become a martyr for his rather insane resistance to federal troops. Like you say, he tries to blow them up with a keg of gunpowder, and he tries to do these other tricks that don’t really work, until finally a trooper shoots him. And then it becomes a sort of regional, even national scandal. But here again is the same story played out in which the federal government is taking away local whites’ freedoms to basically dominate land — and freedom is land under Jacksonian and Jeffersonian logic. That’s the central element to how white Americans thought about freedom at that point. And so to deny that was to deny the essence of freedom. And that’s what federal troops are doing, and that’s why people like Hardiman Owens could become these martyrs — at least until another character shows up, of course, in another improbable twist, which is Francis Scott Key. Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. Just talk briefly about the role that Key played in this. Of course, people will know him as the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but he plays a much less illustrious role here. Jefferson Cowie: He comes across in my book as a bit marshmallowy, a bit foppish. Having become a Jackson man, Jackson sends him out to deal with this mess that Jackson’s stirred up by promising Indians one thing and promising, in broad brush strokes, white settlers everything. And so he sends Francis Scott Key out there, and he basically makes a bit of a hash of the whole thing. He sells the whole project out — sells out the indigenous people and sets up what becomes known as the Second Creek War, where finally the Creek people realize they have no allies left. And they launch basically a guerilla war against the settlers, which triggers the federal government — on the settler’s side this time — and they don’t stand a chance. Geoff Kabaservice: The Creeks would have known about Jackson as well, and would have had no reason whatsoever to trust him or the federal government of which he was the head. And yet they did — because they had to, I guess. Jefferson Cowie: They had to. That’s exactly right, Geoff. Where are they going to turn? And this plays out throughout the book: indigenous people, freedmen, and later on civil rights workers all look toward federal citizenship while whites look toward local and state citizenship. And that’s the rub, because they know they’re going to get a raw deal on the local and state level. And the way that Jackson could wash his hands of this whole thing and say, “Oh, you know what? You’re really state citizens, not federal citizens. You’re not covered by us.” And that essentially meant Alabama could strip them of fishing rights, hunting rights, land rights, citizenship rights, rights to appear in court, everything. So that’s why… It’s not that they love Jackson. It’s just that the federal authority is all they had. Geoff Kabaservice: So the term you use for this white resistance to federal authority — when necessary, because of course they call in the feds to help them after the Creeks declare war — you call this “racialized anti-statism.” Can you explain what you mean by that? Jefferson Cowie: That’s a clunky term. I’m not super fond of it, but I certainly use it a lot. The idea is that this push for freedom from federal power is really, at its basis, highly racialized. But it’s not just some idea of race; t’s actually land, it’s labor power, it’s political control. It’s not some loose idea of race. Their resistance to federal power is directly connected to whites’ capacity to control the land and labor of other people — and those other people are generally non-white. So that’s why I call this version of freedom “racialized anti-statism.” As you say, though, the trick element of this is that they’re not afraid of using the state when it’s theirs. That’s the sort of hypocrisy at work. So we see them using federal power — demanding federal power — when the Second Creek War happens. And this story goes on all the way through the New Deal and other things. So they’re not just anti-statist. It’s an anti-statism of a certain convenience. Geoff Kabaservice: Use of the state for me but not for thee, as it were. Jefferson Cowie: Indeed. Geoff Kabaservice: Does it seem to you that this kind of racialized anti-statism is peculiar to the South for most of American history, or is it perhaps a more virulent version of a broader national ideology? Jefferson Cowie: Well, that was the question, right? Because, real quickly, going back to our previous thoughts there — the state for me, not for thee — is that in general, the state works for the vast majority of white people in America. It’s what it has done. It’s done its service. The question is when it betrays that. That’s the friction. When the federal government comes in and challenges white authority on the local level, that’s when things get sticky. So the question of how does this work on the national level… That’s why the Wallace dimension is so interesting. By the mid-twentieth century, he is a voracious reader of Barbour County history. He loves everything about Barbour County. And he’s raised on Reconstruction mythology and all this sort of stuff. But in that same speech that we started our conversation with, the 1963 gubernatorial inaugural, he scans the entire nation and says, “You rock-ribbed New Englanders, and you Westerners who feel the flame of liberty, and you tough-talking Midwesterners — you’re all Southern. You’re all Southern.” And partially because of the great migrations — the white great migrations — they are. But there is this thing… And when he takes his campaign national, as you know, he begins to win primaries: in ‘68 and ‘72. Well, in ‘68 he is an independent, but in ‘72 he begins to win primaries and is making inroads right into the belly of the beast, in the United Auto Workers and other liberal institutions. It was his gamble that yes, this would work nationally. And I think it does. Geoff Kabaservice: So let’s step back for a second from the book. Can you tell me something about yourself? Where did you grow up? Where did you study? Who were some of your principal influences? Jefferson Cowie: I grew up in the Midwest, outside of Chicago. My dad was a custodian at the local high school. And as quickly as I could, I left that Midwestern town as soon as I graduated from high school. And in this sort of Whitman, Kerouac, Springsteen-esque kind of “On the Road” ideal, I headed to the West Coast. I ended up at Berkeley and worked for a number of years in the building trades, and then eventually went to the University of California. This was at the tail end of the California Master Plan, where education was excellent and very cheap. I paid $700 a semester; I tell my students that every year, that there is another way. And there, I would say probably the biggest intellectual influence up to that time was Leon Litwack, who wrote a great deal about the late nineteeth century and the course of freedmen. Been in the Storm So Long was one of those enormous books of that era, both in impact and scale. Geoff Kabaservice: Which also won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for History, if I recall correctly. Jefferson Cowie: That’s impressive. I knew it won one, but I didn’t know… If you can pull the year out, more power to you. For somebody who didn’t really understand how race worked, what the history was, being in his class was a revelation, an absolute revelation. And then later on I decided I was going to be a labor historian, because I was interested in how economic inequality worked in America. I thought that the question of economic inequality was more interesting in some ways, and how do you run a democracy in the midst of a stratified class system? I ended up studying labor history But this book is sort of an elliptical return to some of those early questions about race and the national experience. I think there’s a lot of thinking about your own intellectual past where you work, and I appreciate that very much. I really like the reflection. So for me, I think the same sort of reflection is I actually thought that you could subsume questions of race into questions of class. And I began to feel, in the last 15 years, that that’s probably not the case. Race is so powerful, a kind of organizational arc throughout history, that it was inescapable as its own dimension. Geoff Kabaservice: When we met up in 2018 at the Miller Center for that conference on America First and isolationism, I got onto you about my disagreement with your characterization of punk rock in your book Stayin’ Alive. And your response was, “Oh yeah, you’re one of those.” I actually found it quite touching that one of your readers made a mixtape for you of punk rock to try to change your mind about the music. Jefferson Cowie: It was great. I was giving a talk at Temple University, invited by Bryant Simon, on the book. And somebody raised their hand and asked that same question and said, “Do you stand by this?” And I was like, “Well, it’s complicated, blah, blah, blah.” And he came up and plopped a mixtape right on me, and he said, “Listen to this.” And it was the best sort of reader response I think I’ve ever received. Geoff Kabaservice: But what was already pretty notable in Stayin’ Alive was that, relative to the run of most labor historians that I knew, you had much broader interests. And it seemed to me that you actually had to explore a lot of new intellectual/academic ground to write Freedom’s Dominion as well. Jefferson Cowie: Yeah. The problem with academic life and especially tenure is you have the freedom to do the same thing over and over again if you want. And where’s the fun in that? It should be a license to explore, a license to keep pushing the boundaries of what you think you understand and how you understand the world. And so I think each one of my books sort of changes the lens rather substantially. And Stayin’ Alive, yeah… I’m not a pop culture scholar or a movie scholar. I just watch the movies and listen to music — and got some things wrong, apparently, about punk, even though I was stage diving at Dead Kennedy shows in the early ’80s. I just want you to know, Geoff, I have some cred. Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely! So here’s a question for you then… How much time had you spent in the South prior to getting into the subject of Eufaula? Jefferson Cowie: Well, I live here now. Geoff Kabaservice: You do live in Nashville, that’s right. Whether Nashville is still part of the South is an open question. Jefferson Cowie: Right, right. We have a very commodified version of the South here in Nashville with the pedal taverns and bridal parties going down to Broadway and listening to a very sterile version of country music. But my mother’s side of the family is from Greensboro, North Carolina. A lot of them worked in the mills, mostly as secretarial/administrative staff; all that stuff had been mechanized by then. So I had that influence. My mom used to joke that I was named after Jefferson Davis, which is not the case — it’s Thomas Jefferson. And then I went to grad school at UNC, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which at the time was just an amazing place to do social history. And Southern history was really exploding under Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and my advisor Leon Fink and other folks. So, coming back here, coming back to Vanderbilt… I was at Cornell for nineteen years, I guess. And then we moved back here before Trump was elected because we wanted to get out of the bubble and I wanted to sort of reconnect with the country. Little did I know the country was going to reconnect with me in a rather dramatic way after the election of Trump. So that’s sort of my connection with the South. And I’ll tell you, intellectually, I took a seminar on the Old South in graduate school under Harry Watson. And we read a book by Mills Thornton called Politics and Power in a Slave Society, about Alabama. And when I started thinking about this project, I went back and I looked at that book and I had — this was in the ‘90s — and I went back and I looked at this book while I was working on Freedom’s Dominion, and I had circled every use of “liberty” and “freedom.” And Mills Thornton had figured out the whole question that I was working on already. I was honored that he was willing to read the manuscript for me. So anyway, I’ve been kind of struggling on and off with these questions of the South, and the South’s relationship to the North, and George Wallace, and freedom — on and off for quite a while. Geoff Kabaservice: Should any of you American-spelling j-Jeffs want to avoid the racial overtones of Jefferson Davis or even Thomas Jefferson, we g-Geoffs would welcome you over here. So I did notice a point in this book, Freedom’s Dominion, where I saw some references to some of your previous work, because you write that Eufaula was subject to “the resource curse.” Can you explain what you mean by that? Jefferson Cowie: This is the idea that societies that develop around a specific resource — oil, diamonds, cotton, whatever it’s going to be, whatever commodity an area is rich in — it will twist development around that in a sort of monocultural way. And that kind of monoculture breeds all sorts of developmental problems. If your answer to every problem is more cotton or more oil or more whatever it is, then you’re not getting the type of economic diversity that a rich capitalist development depends upon. And then when that commodity goes, obviously you’ve got nothing left. And there are several characters throughout the book who are like, “We’ve really got to stop this. We’ve got to move on and try some other crops or do some other things, or at least get some textile mills in here.” Breaking out of that resource curse is a long struggle. Geoff Kabaservice: And you say that this actually affects the character, I guess, of the white labor force as well? Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, absolutely. And even smallholders begin to bend towards… Even if maybe they might be better doing subsistence agriculture or a little bit for the market, they’re going to try and inch the cotton production more and more into their arable land, even if it’s not great land. So they’re affected by it. White sharecroppers are an enormous part of the Deep South by the early twentieth century, especially after Black people moved during the first Great Migration. And the biggest hope they have, actually, is working in a textile mill, which I discuss in one of the chapters. Geoff Kabaservice: So the second act of your book picks up with the Reconstruction era, and particularly the Radical Reconstruction that followed Ulysses Grant’s election as president in 1868 and the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments. And in thinking about you and Reconstruction, you said you were a student of Leon Litwack… He was a student of Kenneth Stampp at Berkeley… Jefferson Cowie: That’s right. Geoff Kabaservice: And Stampp was, I think, the single most important historian moving the discipline’s interpretation of Reconstruction away from the so-called Dunning School, which essentially took the slavemasters’ point of view of slavery as a benign institution and Reconstruction as this corrupt and undemocratic imposition on the South. And Stampp’s first book, The Peculiar Institution, only came out in 1956. Stampp himself was with us until 2009. Litwack just died in 2021. This is a relatively recent reinterpretation, I think, all things considered in the grand scheme of things. Jefferson Cowie: The degree of ideological blinders on the Dunning School was staggering: to be able to go in and look at what was going on and just say, “Oh, obviously these benighted Black people just cannot possibly handle democracy, and everything’s out of control, and it’s a whole Birth of a Nation film sort of experience…” Because as soon as you actually read the documents, it’s absolutely crystal clear what’s going on. And in the case of Eufaula and northern Barbour County, whites felt subjugated by federal authority when Radical Reconstruction government and troops came in and said, “This is going to be a biracial democracy,” and they did it at bayonet point. And the white locals tried all sorts of shenanigans to get out from underneath this — quite dramatic stories — until finally they gave up and just decided in November 1874 to open fire on voters in the streets, Black voters who are lined up to vote. And this was essentially not just a riot. The Dunning School would’ve said, “This is crazy Black people acting crazy.” Liberals would’ve said, “Oh, look at this unfortunate riot.” But in fact, this was a coup d’etat. And in fact, federal marshals who were on the ground said, “This is a coup.” And the problem there was that in fact federal troops were told to stand down. And that was ultimately the tragedy of that moment: that the federal government did not live up to its job there. And I’ve said that the federal government is a hero of the book, but it’s a terrible hero, very ineffective. Geoff Kabaservice: It’s at the very least a hero with feet of clay, that’s for sure. Jefferson Cowie: Feet of clay, weak knees, the whole thing, right. Geoff Kabaservice: One of the satisfactions of being a historian is, at least in some tiny measure, trying to set the record straight. The Eufaula newspapers portrayed the 1874 Election Day Massacre in exactly the terms that you mentioned that the Dunning School would say. But you have what I thought was a very illuminating quote from a local planter, Eli Shorter, which is: “If you don’t come with us, we will exterminate you as we did the poor Indians.” That somewhat seems to give the game away. And you also commented on the “galling, detailed, and unrestrained mendacity” of the accounts in the local newspapers. That’s the kind of thing you do encounter in other branches of study when you look at Nazi and Soviet news reports too. Jefferson Cowie: Right. And this opens up the question that some people have asked: Is this a herrenvolk democracy? Is this a master race democracy? It’s a question I skirted just because some of that stuff’s so loaded that it’s not necessary, because the story’s so powerful and rich on its own that you don’t need to necessarily supercharge it with rhetoric. I try not to use a lot of terms, actually. I don’t use “whiteness” very often. I don’t use “herrenvolk,” I don’t use “white supremacy” even unless my actors are using it. I try to let the sources speak in that regard. But yeah, the degree to which they lied through their teeth is just amazing. Because they, in an organized fashion, hid weapons all over downtown. And when somebody said, “Go!,” they shot people. 80 people were shot in downtown Eufaula… Geoff Kabaservice: Maybe more, for all we know, right? Jefferson Cowie: Yeah, that’s right. Geoff Kabaservice: I had talked with Jeremi Suri, a professor at the University of Texas, about his book Civil War by Other Means, which is about Reconstruction and really the tragedy of American history that Reconstruction was not allowed to go forward and reshape the South. You provide some interesting glimpses of life under Reconstruction, which included the election of James T. Rapier as the first and last time Barbour County.. Jefferson Cowie: First and last. Geoff Kabaservice: …ever sent an African-American to represent them in Congress… Jefferson Cowie: That’s right. Geoff Kabaservice: …in 1872. Yet there also is this question of… If you are the federal government, or if you’re relying on the federal government to safeguard your rights, really the outcome depends on the willingness of the government to provide resources, to maintain troops in an occupied territory for that long, and then also just individual commanders. It seems in this case that the African Americans of Eufaula were really sold out by a weak-kneed Union commander. Jefferson Cowie: That’s right. This cuts multiple ways. I think that’s really insightful. Because on the one hand, I walked away from this book by the time I was done — and I can tell you a great civil rights-era story on this — convinced that the one thing federal authority should be doing is the one thing it doesn’t do, and that is to be the enforcer of political rights. The rest will take care of itself. If you guarantee the right to vote to everybody and you back it up, the rest of the questions of politics and political economy will be much easier, I think. That includes all the questions we’re fighting with right now, whether it’s gerrymandering or convict voting or whatever it’s going to be. But the fact that these people, whether they’re the Muskogee Creek people or the freedmen, are dependent upon federal power — it’s just a fact of life. I don’t know a way around it. Nobody likes the federal government; that’s why Wallace got so far railing against it. But this is the only mechanism I can see, short of armed resistance, armed defense — which of course is tried by the Native Americans, tried by Black people, but it tends to engender so much tyranny-of-the-majority problem that it’s a no-win situation. So it really does require, I think, the use of the federal government. Geoff Kabaservice: What follows the withdrawal of the federal military presence after Reconstruction is a chamber of horrors, really. You called what followed “the neo-slavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping, and the official disenfranchisement of African Americans under Jim Crow.” I think while listeners are likely to know something about lynching and disenfranchisement, they are unlikely to know the full horror of convict leasing. Can you tell us something about that? Jefferson Cowie: That chamber of horrors, as you so aptly put, emerges as the federal government is in retreat — “in repose,” as I put it. So you have this period, after the mid-1870s all the way up really until the New Deal, where the federal government is pretty much hands-off. One of the first things that happens is they try to reconstitute a certain kind of neo-slavery within the coal mines outside of Birmingham. One of the key players in this is a Barbour County bigwig, J. W. Comer, whose brother B. B. Comer became governor. The idea is they would go around and buy up convicts from the local jails, buy up their terms and send them off to work in the mines. This work is horrible because, honestly, at least if you were a slave they were invested in keeping you alive. In this case, it was, essentially, they would just get another convict; it was very easy. It also prevented people from participating politically, because if you stuck your neck out they were going to throw you in jail, and if they threw you in jail you’re going to go to the mines. So it became also a political disciplining agent. It also provided money for the state coffers, and it basically paid for the entire state prison system plus. So it’s a bit of a silver bullet for white power in Alabama after Reconstruction, in a dark and evil way. Geoff Kabaservice: You also added that from the elite Bourbons’ perspective, this also had the benefit of keeping unions free of white labor — keeping white labor unions out of the mines, rather. Jefferson Cowie: Right, because you can divide the workforce. That’s your best shot at keeping unions out. Geoff Kabaservice: You made a relatively brief reference to the Eufaula white populist Reuben F. Kolb, whose efforts to make an impact on politics really resulted in the Democratic Party stealing the elections throughout the 1890s. I used to run across a lot of grad students who were enthralled by this idea that there could be a biracial populism, using class against the masters. You seem to put less emphasis here than one might have expected. I wondered if this reflects any change in perspective. Jefferson Cowie: As I said, I’m sort of recovering from that idea that you could easily have a sense of class solidarity triumphing over these types of adversities. But what we see here is… Reuben Kolb was a good guy, a populist. He wanted to break out of the resource curse by growing melons. He had a famous melon, “Kolb’s Gem,” that he wanted people to grow. He really tried to overthrow the Bourbon elite and democratize the Democratic Party, connecting in various ways with the Democratic Party. He runs a number of times and there’s different shifting alliances that would just bore your listeners probably. But what happens after that challenge, that really was never very interracial… If they just tolerated the idea of equality, even in a Jim Crow sense, they paid the cost. It was too big of a stumbling block for organizing. But the very threat of this ends up in the 1901 Constitution that essentially disenfranchises Blacks — and actually a lot of poor whites as well. Geoff Kabaservice: You mentioned that in the end the 1901 Constitution, which was a Progressive measure, ended up disenfranchising more poor whites than Blacks. Jefferson Cowie: That’s right, in the long run. Not immediately, but over the course of a couple of decades later, in net terms. So Progressivism in the South was essentially all about disenfranchisement, and that was a big, bold measure for what people thought was good and progressive. What do I call that chapter? I think it’s “White Oligarchy as Jeffersonian Democracy.” That idea that a white oligarchy — i.e., what we would call the Bourbon elite — could rule so effectively by championing the small-state government concepts that they inherited from Jefferson, I thought, was particularly interesting. That was the hardest chapter to write, actually, to wrap my brain around what was happening on the political dimensions of how this was unfolding. And in fact, what they’d done is taken this Jackson and Jefferson thread of smallholder, anti-government yeoman-like politics for themselves, the elite, and disenfranchised the rest. It was a pretty brilliant move. Geoff Kabaservice: So skipping ahead to George Wallace… When he runs for governor the first time, I guess in 1958, he runs as a comparative moderate, particularly on the racial issue. When he loses to a more robust segregationist, he vows not to get out-segged again, although that wasn’t the word he used… Jefferson Cowie: A very polite word you have selected… Geoff Kabaservice: This does suggest that Wallace and maybe quite a few of the other populists weren’t really sincere in their racism, that it was just opportunistic in the long run. Jefferson Cowie: So, Wallace… There was a growing move — a very slow, very incremental move —toward some tolerances for a more progressive view of race relations in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It wasn’t great. Let’s remember, this is the era of the Dixiecrats. As soon as the Democrats put a civil rights plank in the platform, the Dixiecrats bolt and go to Birmingham. I’m not trying to paint some rosy picture. But you have a whole series of candidates and leaders who are, “Hey, let’s build roads. Let’s build trade schools and hospitals. And let’s not just give Black people the absolute dregs of society.” It’s not visionary by any sense of the imagination, but it’s not this dark, most vicious version of racism that will come. What happens — and here’s a sort of irony to my state story — is Brown v. Board of Education. So Brown happens, the federal government comes in and says, “We’re going to integrate schools.” And then comes the bus boycott right up the road in Montgomery. That’s when the white population really digs in, in a reactionary position on federal power. That’s where Wallace is sort of in transition. Black lawyers found him very, very respectful of them when they appeared before him when he was a judge. They’re like, “Oh, this guy’s all right. We can’t get lunch anywhere in town — he brings lunch in. And he calls us ‘Sir.’” But then he sees the writing on the wall —between Brown v. Board and being beat by a very racist candidate — and he comes out swinging. But the genius of George Wallace — and I do think he was a political genius of sorts — is that he didn’t just run on race. That’s where we come full circle to the opening story, to the 1963 inaugural. Race was there at all times, but he really ran against federal power. That’s where the rubber met the road. That meant he wasn’t just going to get the snarling racists, but he was going to get… He’s got a coalition now. He’s not just race-baiting to the one extreme end of the electorate, but now anti-tax people, anti-regulation people, white working-class people who don’t want Blacks moving into their neighborhood, things like this. Now you’re getting a bigger group of people — and who doesn’t have a beef against the federal government? Geoff Kabaservice: So to what extent do you think that modern conservatism is George Wallaceism writ large? Jefferson Cowie: That’s an interesting question. Kevin Phillips famously said that the Wallace voters were moving between a Democratic past and a Republican future. To a certain extent, that’s true. The weird thing is that Wallace remained a Democrat throughout his entire life. He never left the party except when he was running as an independent in ’68 for the presidency. He wasn’t a Strom Thurman who joined the Republican Party or somebody like that. So there’s that. But that type of anti-statist energy, I think, is really important for understanding Wallace and this trajectory of modern conservatism. I’ll be curious what you think of this, but what it dawned on me was in ‘64 when Goldwater runs, he’s not winning a lot of states. He’s winning the Deep South, which he’s ambivalent about. He wants to be the party of freedom from government, not the party of racism. But he’s winning because of his opposition to civil rights and the Civil Rights Act. He’s winning the Deep South. Wallace sends an envoy out to tell Goldwater, “Hey, you and me, we team up and together we’ve got the one-two punch.” I call this the double helix of American conservatism. Racism on its own only gets you so far, and anti-statism — “Oh, we’re going to free you from the government” — only gets you so far. You start twirling those two things around each other and you have a pretty powerful formula. I think that is, in many ways, the future. Geoff Kabaservice: I think it’s a powerful mix, I agree with you. But it’s a mix that has appeal in certain places and contexts and not in others. The only point on which I really disagreed with you, from a factual standpoint I’d say, was when you said that in 1964, “The racial conscience of the Republican Party… all but died at the San Francisco convention.” Well, you know, I wrote a book about the persistence of racial liberals in the Republican Party. You could say that, in the long run, your prediction came true.   Jefferson Cowie: Was that a quote, or did I say that? Geoff Kabaservice: I think that’s your quote. Jefferson Cowie: Okay. I’m just wondering whether I was quoting somebody else. But yeah, okay, I totally stand corrected on that if that’s the case. Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a question of emphasis. But I think the bigger question is to what extent do politicians succeed when they appeal to the worst angels of the public rather than the better? Jefferson Cowie: Well, that’s why I think Nixon’s so good. He can do it by taking the sharp edges off, right? Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. Jefferson Cowie: And Reagan is even way better than Nixon. Geoff Kabaservice: There’s a vignette you have in there about George Wallace going in to meet LBJ, and LBJ giving him “the treatment.” Here are two Southern populists, but LBJ ultimately is better at it. And in some sense it was by aspiring to the good nature and the better angels of Wallace that he knew were in there: “Do you want your monument to say: ‘George Wallace — he hated’ or ‘George Wallace — he built’?” Jefferson Cowie: Right. Geoff Kabaservice: That was still a time, I think, when those Southern populists wanted to build things. I’m just not sure that’s the case anymore. Jefferson Cowie: I agree. I couldn’t agree more. And the crisis of the Democratic Party — not the Republican but the Democratic Party — is how to function without the South. It’s the one thing nobody ever talks about in all this stuff, which is that the segregationist conservative wing of the Democratic Party was central to the success of the New Deal, central to the success of the postwar era politically. And without that, the Democratic Party is a coastal party with the occasional wins sprinkled out in the center. And that’s been a problem really since the ‘80s and the ‘90s. Geoff Kabaservice: I mean, I know it’s too pat of a question… But do you, as someone on the left, see any chance of the Democratic Party winning back the white working class that you’ve written so much about and so well? Jefferson Cowie: Oh, God. I was going to say, that’s a question back from the Stayin’ Alive book tour. Gosh, I would like to think that at some point somebody’s going to look at these burned-out towns where the factory left and have opioid addictions and guns and whatever and say, “What we really need here is a boost to the economic structure.” But I’m not sure the Democrats are prepared to go there. And I’m not sure that if they were that they would get a positive response, because the cultural dimensions of politics run so deep. It’s hard to be optimistic. I think that one of the problems that we don’t talk about is the capture of the Democratic Party by a sort of — God help me, I’m going to use the term — liberal elite. And that is the kind of development and NIMBY-ism and other stuff that doesn’t always serve blue-collar people. But I essentially answered your question in The Great Exception, which is that the time in which the working class had institutional position embeddedness and was loosely unified under a single party, the Democratic Party, was a one-off. Geoff Kabaservice: I agree that’s an important book, although I think that’s a very pessimistic conclusion. I want to, at the end, turn to two of the criticisms that have come up about the book. One of them was by David Beito, who’s an emeritus professor at the University of Alabama, in Reason, where he basically accused you of using wordplay around this term “freedom.” And he wrote that “even if most white Southerners genuinely believed they were champions of ‘freedom,’ that doesn’t make it true, any more than it would be truthful to conclude that Stalinists were legitimately advancing their purported principles of ‘democracy’ and ‘justice’ when they defended the purge trials of the 1930s.” How would you respond? Jefferson Cowie: I’ve thought about this a lot. So let’s take your Stalinist example. Communism is what communism does. And the actual workings of communism, as was known in the twentieth century, was a hellscape, right? And I’m not going to sit around and say, “Yeah, but what Marx really said, what Lenin really said…” I can make that argument, but I’m not going to make that argument about the Soviet Union, beyond maybe Bukharin or some other hidden possibility of the Soviet revolution. Freedom is as it is practiced. So there’s just a hint of the linguistic turn in this, nested in what I’d like to think is still a political economy. And that basically says that if this is what people say freedom is, then that’s what freedom is. And this is what annoyed me about… So I went in and read all — not all, but a chunk — of the political theory on liberty and freedom, and the differences between liberty and freedom in this Anglo-American philosophy. And I was like, this is not what people are saying. This is not how they’re using it. And so I’m enough of a pragmatist to say that what they’re saying, and what they’re doing defines freedom. Geoff Kabaservice: So let me raise the other question, which in a way was more of a meta-critique from George Packer, writing in The Atlantic. He calls your book “a gem of the new fatalism.” Now, what does he mean by “the new fatalism”? Jefferson Cowie: That’s the name of my new rock band, by the way. Geoff Kabaservice: I like it. He writes that “American culture — movies and museums, fiction and journalism — is consumed with the most terrible subjects of the country’s history… This mode of analysis doesn’t just revise our understanding of American history, illuminating the areas of darkness that most people don’t know and perhaps would rather not. It also draws a straight line from past to present. … Cruelty, inequity, and oppression endure in the American character not only as elements of a complex whole but as its very essence. Any more ambiguous view — one that sees the United States as a flawed experiment marked by slow, fitful progress — is an illusion, and a dangerous one.” Again, your reaction? Jefferson Cowie: I am so happy you brought up the Packer review. I was looking forward to George’s review and I was very disappointed in it, not because I didn’t think he had something to say, not that I didn’t think that was a decent argument for a great deal of work that’s out there. But I think he got me confused with other people. I actually think that that is a valid argument, but not necessarily for Freedom’s Dominion. Because the four sections all work quite differently. I think freedom operates differently and there’s a lot of change over time. There’s a lot of tension. It’s not just “America is this hegemonic, racist block of imperialism.” It’s there for sure. But this is actually, I think, more hopeful than some of the other books I’ve written because I have an answer. And the answer came when I was looking at the civil rights section of this book, when Hosea Williams, who’s the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s sort of lieutenant in running the campaign for voter registration after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he’s looking at everything. He can’t figure out why some counties have good voter registration drives and others don’t. He’s like, “This one has good leadership, but it has low numbers. And this one is just a really oppressive place, but it has good voter registration numbers. What’s going on?” And finally he figures out that the ones that have good voter registration numbers are the ones that have federal registrars. Under the Voting Rights Act, they got the federal registrars. So organizing matters, and leadership matters, and whether you’re with SNCC or SCLC and all that matter. But what really, really matters is whether there’s federal authority on the ground. And that shapes values and practices and all sorts of things. So my critique of Packer is: I don’t think you’re quite taking my argument as seriously as you should, and you were looking for a nail to hit with your particular hammer. Geoff Kabaservice: Part of the problem that Packer has with historical works in this “new fatalism” is that some of them do posit that nothing has changed. I remember when I was a grad student in the ‘90s and I would sit around in classes and people would say, “Brown v. Board of Education had no effect. African Americans are worse off today than they were in the early 1950s.” Jefferson Cowie: “Women are worse off,” yeah. Geoff Kabaservice: And I would just sit there thinking to myself, “I’m not going to get a job in this profession.” But you clearly go out of your way to say that that is not the case, that there has been progress. Jefferson Cowie: Absolutely. Geoff Kabaservice: And one of the reasons that your work really resonated with me personally is that a few years ago I took several months out, almost as a kind of exercise, to write a history of women in the single town of Corning, New York, in upstate New York. Jefferson Cowie: Why Corning? Geoff Kabaservice: Amo Houghton, who had been sort of the resident head of the Corning Glass Works as well as a moderate Republican congressman for nine terms, really wanted there to be a history of this kind. And I had to write it in four months. So let’s not say that this is an exercise on anything like the level of your work. But I found it fascinating because if you just dip that proverbial bucket into the sea of stories, you come up with all kinds of things. So I found out about the Iroquois Queen Catherine Montour, who was a great leader; Jemima Wilkinson, who was this sort of genderless prophet known as the Public Universal Friend… There was Suckerville Mandy, the local equivalent of Calamity Jane, but also Margaret Sanger, the champion of birth control, Katharine Hepburn, the actress, and her suffragette mother and aunts… Jefferson Cowie: That whole central New York strip is full of figures, both civil rights and women’s rights figures, from Seneca Falls down to Corning. Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. It’s what Whitney Cross called The Burned-Over District, with all of these kinds of nineteenth-century radicalisms of various political and religious kinds. And I really found that by digging down into this local history, you would come through the sedimentary layers of American history that you would find in many other places: women active around prohibition, around suffrage, social organizations of all kinds, a gradual movement toward equality of condition and opportunity with men. And a passage that really struck me from your book was where you said that “The untold dirt-level fights that never became part of history in the civil rights movement — in unfamous, unfilmed, unknown places like Barbour County — are where the majority of people experienced, or failed to experience, the Black freedom struggle.” And the optimism in your book is contained in those unsung fights for civil rights, some of which succeeded at least partially, not just in Barbour County but all over the Southern Black Belt. And that does give hope for the future. Jefferson Cowie: And you do everybody a disservice if you call a mixed bag a failure. And that’s what the people in your grad seminar were doing, right? And I’ve got to get up in the morning, man, and I can’t just get up in the morning and not believe that this place has some redemptive capacity. So yeah, I’m definitely of the… But I’ll tell you, times are hard, and I was seriously challenged emotionally. I wrote a chapter called “Lynching as an Act of Freedom.” I mean, wrap your head around that. And I write from a position of tremendous privilege as an endowed chair and a fellow at Stanford and blah, blah, blah. But my God, it was such a daily gut punch to look at that stuff and to read that stuff. Geoff Kabaservice:You mentioned the Eufaula Daily Times editor William Dorsey Jelks, who was writing pro-lynching editorials… Jefferson Cowie: Yes. Geoff Kabaservice: And this guy becomes governor. Jefferson Cowie: He becomes governor. One of the many. Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. Well, as kind of a concluding note, you did give a shout-out in your acknowledgments to the Drive-by Truckers, and they have that song “The Three Great Alabama Icons” about George Wallace along with Alabama football coach Bear Bryant and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant. And it concludes that George Wallace is actually in Hell despite having done something to try to redeem himself with Black voters. But fortunately for him, the Devil is also a Southerner. Jefferson Cowie: Yeah. “The Devil has a George Wallace bumper sticker…” Geoff Kabaservice: So I just really want to congratulate you, Jefferson Cowie, on your book Freedom’s Dominion. Congratulations on winning the Pulitzer Prize, and good luck with your next project, which I will eagerly await. Jefferson Cowie: Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me on. It was a good time, as usual. Geoff Kabaservice: It’s been a pleasure. And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.The post The contested meaning of American freedom, with Jefferson Cowie  first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post The contested meaning of American freedom, with Jefferson Cowie  appeared first on Niskanen Center.

       In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore. Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank that applies cost-benefit analysis to problems facing the global poor and works with Nobel laureates, policymakers, philanthropists, and researchers to develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food.  His new book is called Best Things First and it presents what Lomborg says are "the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest people." He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the U.S. spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies could save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year. I caught up with Lomborg in New York City during the latest meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. We talked about Best Things First, his view of the current environmentalist movement, and why politicians and the media continue to fixate on the possibility of a future climate apocalypse rather than helping the global poor in the here and now.The post Bjorn Lomborg: How Our Climate Fixation Hurts the World's Poor appeared first on Reason.com.

       Amid the fractious debate over the federal budget, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) has outlined plans for cutting several prominent welfare programs in order to save about $150 billion annually. According to The Washington Post, those cuts would affect a wide range of federal safety net programs including some—like food stamps and Meals on Wheels—that help feed needy families. Other cuts would affect Federal Pell Grants for low-income college students, grants that help families afford housing, and a program that helps offset high heating bills. Regardless of whether you think the federal government should be in the business of funding any of those things in the first place, there's no denying the fact that sudden cuts to existing welfare programs can be disruptive to the individuals and families that have come to rely upon them. It's also true that, as Reason's Liz Wolfe points out in this morning's newsletter, the proposed cuts reflect the reality of a government that has been living beyond its means for too long. "It's not exactly a winning PR move to slash the programs that serve needy toddlers and first-generation college kids, but there's an important fundamental truth at the heart of the fiscal hawks' concerns: government spending simply cannot continue at current levels with no consequences," Wolfe writes. That's true. But here's an element of this debate that doesn't get talked about enough: Cutting welfare programs for needy families is necessary because Congress insists that relatively wealthy senior citizens get paid first. Budgeting is always, at its core, an exercise in priority-setting. That's especially true when your budget is wildly out of whack and you've been borrowing at an unsustainable rate, as Congress has done for years. When there's no longer enough money to go around, you're faced with a difficult proposition: Who gets paid first, and who has to wait at the back of the line? In the federal budget, seniors get paid first. Everyone else has to wait. McCarthy and his fellow Republicans are not proposing any cuts or changes to Social Security and Medicaid, the Post notes. That's despite the fact that it's actually the two major entitlement programs that are driving most of the federal government's long-term deficit. Over the next decade, discretionary spending—which includes those welfare programs the GOP is aiming to cut—is projected to decline relative to the size of the U.S. economy, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projections. Meanwhile, Social Security and Medicare are growing, fast. By 2030, the CBO expects so-called "mandatory spending" on entitlement programs to consume more than 60 percent of the federal budget. (Source: Congressional Budget Office (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59159)) Of course, because those programs are funded with a separate revenue stream—payroll taxes—it would be complicated for Congress to cut spending on Social Security to offset cuts on welfare programs. Even so, the ongoing refusal of either major party to consider any long-term changes to the two major entitlement programs tells you all you need to know about the priorities in Washington. There is no shortage of alternative ideas out there. Congress could fiddle with the specifics of Social Security to make the program less expensive over the long term—raising the retirement age, for example, or changing how contributions and disbursements work. It could (and should) allow younger Americans to opt out of the system retirement. It could means-test Social Security benefits to restrict payouts to wealthier retirees, in much the same way that welfare programs already do. That wouldn't save much money in the grand scheme of the federal budget, but it would reflect the economic reality that older Americans are generally wealthier. It makes little sense for the federal government to continue transferring cash from younger, working-age Americans to wealthy retirees—and it makes even less sense when there's a budget crunch. Until some of these ideas are considered, however, the old-age entitlement programs will continue to be the primary drivers of the federal government's fiscal problems. As the entitlement programs grow more expensive over the next decade, they will continue to squeeze other parts of the federal budget. We'll be back in this same spot next year and the year after that—at least until the early 2030s, when Social Security will hit insolvency and more significant decisions will have to be made. It is unlikely that any member of Congress will admit as much, but voting for a budget that cuts welfare programs while maintaining the status quo for Social Security and Medicare is a policy choice. It means that some struggling families won't get food stamps, but 70-year-olds with million-dollar nest eggs and vacation homes will keep getting monthly checks from the government. Until those priorities change, everything else will be on the chopping block.The post Welfare Cuts Are Inevitable Because Congress Won't Touch Social Security appeared first on Reason.com.

“That is a fantasy world, not the real world.”So wrote Arthur Engoron, a New York State judge, in an unexpected ruling late yesterday that threatens the heart of Donald Trump’s business empire. Engoron was referring in particular to arguments offered by the former president’s attorneys in the case, but his words describe many of the details of the case—such as the valuations of Trump’s properties and even the square footage he claimed they contained, both of which the court found were “clearly” fraudulent. Much of the reputation Trump cultivated as a business mogul was built on lies.The surprise is not that Trump and his co-defendants, including his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, committed fraud. What is surprising is that he could finally be punished for it—and quite harshly. The scheme that New York Attorney General Letitia James alleged last year was simple. When Trump wanted to lower his taxes, he’d claim a low valuation for a property. When he wanted to get cheap loans, he would inflate the valuation. This allowed him to inflate his claimed net worth each year, which let him obtain loans on better terms by personally guaranteeing them. Evidence of this pattern had already turned up in reporting, especially by WNYC and ProPublica, and James’s case offered much more.[David A. Graham: It’s just fraud all the way down]Trump’s lawyers argued, in effect, that because there was no harm, there was no foul: The banks that loaned Trump money ended up making a profit (in part because they could charge higher fees to a customer whose companies had repeatedly gone bankrupt). To Engoron’s fury, Trump’s lawyers kept offering the same defenses even after they’d been thrown out in court. “Defendants’ conduct in reiterating these frivolous arguments is egregious,” he wrote, and fined the attorneys.More consequentially, he also granted the attorney general’s request to cancel business certificates for Trump and his family. If the ruling stands, Trump could lose control of some of his marquee properties—including Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street, a prized downtown-Manhattan building. “The decision seeks to nationalize one of the most successful corporate empires in the United States and seize control of private property,” Trump’s attorney Christopher M. Kise complained. The ruling doesn’t actually amount to expropriation, as Trump would still own the buildings; he just couldn’t make financial decisions about them. The ruling also wouldn’t spell the end of Trump’s business, but it could force it to stop operating in New York State. (Trump’s properties sprawl across a range of different entities.)Engoron’s ruling does not close the case out. Instead, it resolves some of the issues and narrows the questions for an upcoming trial, which will determine whether Trump has to pay a fine for overvaluing the properties. James has sought $250 million. This is a very large sum, though easily within Trump’s means if he is the billionaire he says he is.[David A. Graham: This is not great news for Donald Trump]The greatest blow to Trump may be reputational and psychological. He has claimed that the case against him is political persecution, and some of his supporters will find that compelling, but being found to be a fraud is no more an advantage than being indicted is. Because Trump has gotten away with this way of operating for decades, his fantasy world came to seem almost real. The idea that a judge might actually punish him seemed remote—both to Trump and to his detractors.Though the civil case in New York has no direct connection to Trump’s other legal troubles, Engoron’s ruling suggests that the courts are now catching up to a man who has long behaved as though there would never be any consequences for his deceptions. Trump has tried to convince Americans that he won more votes than Joe Biden, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that he had every right to abscond with classified documents and obstruct the federal government from recovering them, and that he was the greatest president in American history. This is a fantasy world, but the real world has ways of intruding on it.

       In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist. The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore. Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus, a think tank that applies cost-benefit analysis to problems facing the global poor and works with Nobel laureates, policymakers, philanthropists, and researchers to develop pragmatic, relatively low-cost solutions to issues such as tuberculosis, malaria, lack of education, and access to food.  His new book is called Best Things First and it presents what Lomborg says are "the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest people." He argues that for about $35 billion a year—a little more than half of what the US spends annually on humanitarian aid—these policies would save 4.2 million lives and generate an extra $1.1 trillion in value every year. Nick Gillespie caught up with Lomborg in New York City during the latest meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. We talked about Best Things First, his view of the current environmentalist movement, and why politicians and the media continue to fixate on the possibility of future climate apocalypse rather than helping the global poor in the here and now.   Photo Credits: World Travel & Tourism Council, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Mark Reinstein/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; James Colburn—Pool via CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated; Dominika Zarzycka/Sipa USA/Newscom; elmar/Newscom; U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Gabriel R. Piper, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Basil D Soufi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Tyler Anderson/Naitonal Post/ZUMApress/Newscom; New America, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; JOHN ANGELILLO/UPI/Newscom; Karla Ann Cote/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; BONNIE CASH/UPI/Newscom; Chris Kleponis/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Gerardo Romo/Newscom; Jeremy Miller/AusAID, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Christian M. Mericle, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Carlos Sanchez/Polaris/Newscom; imageBROKER/alimdi / Arterra/Newscom; Dstringer71, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Music Credits: "Let's Get Itm" by Captain Joe via Artlist. The post Bjorn Lomborg: Why Do We Fixate on Climate Rather Helping the World's Poor? appeared first on Reason.com.

I have to admit, I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to phrases like “food is medicine” because of how much this concept has been abused within the alternative medicine sphere. The concept, for example, of “neutraceuticals” – using vitamins and supplements as if they were drugs – is misleading. Alternative practitioners also often behave as if every medical problem is nutritional, and directly lobby to blur the lines between nutrition and medicine. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act ( DSHEA ) of 1994 did this explicitly, regulating herbal products, which are drugs, as if they were food.

But the “Food Is Medicine” (FIM) movement is not this. “Medicine” in this term does not refer to concepts like “neutraceuticals” but rather to the health effects of nutrition. “Medicine” is sort-of a metaphor – meaning that nutrition can be a proper medical intervention, not that it should be thought of like a drug. And they are clear – they are talking about the health effects of good and bad nutrition.

A recent report (two US-based case studies) produced by the FIM group at Tufts University is a good example of the kinds of interventions they are talking about, and what they mean by “medicine”. They studied the potential impact of programs that fall into two basic groups – medically tailored meals (MTMs) and nutritional support. The ultimate point of the data is that public spending on these types of programs is cost effective. They will save more money than the programs cost. They note:

The economic costs of suboptimal diets due to health care spending and lost productivity are estimated at $1.1 trillion each year.

This is partly due to lack of nutrition, but also due to poor diets in general. This counts obesity and diabetes, for example, as chronic conditions impacted by diet. What kinds of interventions are they talking about? Three types of programs address tailoring food to specific chronic illnesses – medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, and produce prescription programs. One intervention addresses poor nutrition – nutrition security programs. And then they include population-level interventions dealing with food policies and programs.

Addressing nutrition as part of dealing with a chronic illness is nothing new. What is new about such programs is taking such interventions to the next level – treating it as a prescribed medical intervention (a literal prescription), one that would be covered by insurance and supported by specific programs.

This concept is not entirely new either. It is possible, for example, for physicians to document that a patient has a medical condition that warrants something, like air conditioning, that might otherwise be deemed a luxury. For certain diseases, air conditioning is not a luxury, it is a medical necessity. Often there are state programs or even regulations that force companies to provide services to customers if they are medically necessary. The FIM movement essentially wants to formalize a similar approach to nutrition.

It is pointless to consider whether the government “should” be paying for such things. The government is already paying for health care, which is the largest part of most government’s spending (even the US), and rising. The real question is – are such programs cost effective? These two case studies show that they potentially are.

The first study looks at a national medically tailored meal program. They estimate this will save $38.7 billion in direct healthcare costs, with a net savings of $13.6 billion. Even when just considering direct healthcare costs, such a program would more than pay for itself. This does not even consider the secondary savings from avoiding lost productivity and other government support programs that come along with that. For a net savings, this would also improve the health and quality of life for millions of people.

The second study looked at produce prescription programs. They estimated the total cost of the program at $44.3 billion with direct healthcare savings of $39.6 billion and productivity savings of $4.8 billion. Even though this does not net positive in direct healthcare costs, it is essentially neutral when adding lost productivity. Without adding in lost productivity, it is still a highly cost-effective program, when considering the health outcomes per dollar spent.

Of course, these are estimates. For the first study:

For this case study, a population-level, cohort policy simulation model was created based on nationally representative samples from the 2019 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).

These are standard methods and are validated, but they are still estimates based on models. The next step is to actually implement such programs and measure outcomes. In the US the healthcare system is setup to easily allow for 50 experimental regions – the states. Such programs are implemented at the state level in any case, even if they receive federal funding. This allows for easy experimentation, to see which programs work best and then to replicate them on a national level. At the very least these studies show the potential of such programs – if implemented well, they are likely to be highly cost effective, and even net positive.

The broader concept here, that I think is legitimate, is that there are many potential interventions that have a huge impact on health that are not traditional medical interventions. Many of these we already take for granted, like poison control, public safety, and sanitation (the latter being arguably the greatest health intervention in human history). We should add to this list things like optimal nutrition, gun safety, and addressing health misinformation. And as always, such interventions need to be as evidence and science-based as possible.

GB News must save itself from itself

The channel can do important work if it gets out of its own way

If you’re on the right, GB News is a marvellous opportunity. It’s an independent news platform bankrolled by the ample funds of a simpatico multi-millionaire. All the right people hate it and it’s doing pretty well when it comes to viewers.

What’s not to like?

A lot of its output has been superb. Charlie Peters’ documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame was essential viewing. Homegrown hosts like Patrick Christys have been very likeable. It’s been good to see the great comedian Simon Evans on British TV screens regularly. I’m not a natural viewer of Farage but there’s no denying the ratings.

So, it’s sad to see the platform stumbling into avoidable PR disasters. There’s nothing wrong with PR disasters. In a time with such a broken moral compass, you’d have to be doing something wrong to earn the approval of the mainstream. But the phrase you know you’re over the target when you start catching flak is incorrect. It can mean your foe is attacking you at your weakest.

Laurence Fox’s tirade about the shaggability of a left-wing journalist is not being criticised because it’s a daring assault on fashionable pieties but because it’s such an obviously dumb and boorish thing to say. It’s a good point to attack because it is so manifestly indefensible — being unfunny as well as rude.

But Mr Fox is being attacked enough. What were GB News doing talking about a random left-wing journalist in the first place? Why was the average viewer meant to be interested in the thoughts of “Ava Santina”? She was a bit obnoxious talking about men’s mental health on a different channel. Say what you like about Mr Fox’s comments but you have to accept that it must have been difficult to make that segment interesting.

There’s so much for a right-wing channel to be covering

Why were they scrambling for subjects? There’s so much for a right-wing channel to be covering. There is unconstrained mass immigration to Europe (the Home Secretary was being loudly condemned for criticising open borders even as Fox was speaking). There is violent crime. There are left-wing fraudsters. There are councils being crippled by equal pay claims. There is racial separatism. There are a lot of other issues, relevant to everyone whatever their beliefs — the NHS, the economy et cetera — but I mention these because drawing attention to them hits our leftist cousins where they hurt (metaphorically, of course). I’m not asking the channel to avoid contentious topics, in other words. I’m wondering why it squeezed contentiousness out of something so mundane.

Hell, GB News presenters can even talk about COVID vaccines if they want. Sure, I’m not convinced that they have spread myocarditis through the land like compost being spread across the surface of a field. But I’m often wrong and I could be wrong here.

Just cover things that count. Not the facial expressions of Ava Santina.

Of course, news is entertainment more than anything. If you showed straight reportage — never mind political philosophising — without comedic spice, no one would tune in. But you can make entertainment out of what is serious. Tucker Carlson, like him or loathe him, showed that you can have rhetorical bombast and attention to substantive issues. Dan Wootton — who was presenting when Fox made his comments — would happily talk about Harry and Meghan from 6am to 10pm, only pausing to wedge a spot of lunch down his maw.

Now, I know most of the people howling about Fox and GB News want the worst for the channel. It disturbs them that a platform so often ignores their finger-wagging. If it was up to them, the most right-wing our media would get would be Matthew D’Ancona writing ponderous columns about “the missing centre”.

But I don’t want GB News to fail. I want it to succeed — not just to be a thorn in the side of the establishment but a devastating liver kick. It can do it. But it has to have more focus and more ingenuity — not to chase RTs with aimless chit chat about something on the Twitter timeline, or to mistake bottom-tier pub banter for Swiftian satire.

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The war in Ukraine and rising tensions with China are reshaping many U.S. relationships, and Pakistan is no exception. Pakistan’s caretaker prime minister told me that his country is focusing on its own interests and does not want to choose sides in the great power competition. But the lack of real attention to the U.S.-Pakistan relationship threatens to drive Pakistan further into China’s orbit.

Anwar ul-Haq Kakar became temporary leader of the government in Islamabad in August. His main mission is to help ensure that Pakistan holds new elections, which have been tentatively scheduled for January. (This being Pakistan, the military is always suspected to have the final say.) Kakar was in New York last week to address the U.N. General Assembly. In an interview, he told me that Pakistan is charting a path designed to avoid getting caught up in the competition between the West and Russia and China.

Pakistan intends to stay “neutral” on Russia’s war with Ukraine and sees China as its “all-weather friend” and “strategic partner,” he said. To Washington ears, that sounds an awful lot like choosing sides, especially since Pakistan is technically a major non-NATO U.S. ally and has been America’s military partner dating back decades. But Pakistan has no intention of committing to either camp in the growing U.S.-China rivalry, he said.

“Every nation for itself,” said Kakar. “Why should we be worried about this competition? It's between two great powers, two great civilizations, and the implications [affect] 150-plus countries. And Pakistan is just one of them.”

On the U.S. side, there is certainly some bipartisan criticism in Congress for Pakistan’s growing closeness to China, which includes deepening economic, military and diplomatic ties. But Kakar said countries such as Pakistan have no reason to apologize for resisting the West’s efforts to contain China.

“It’s not a Cold War. There is no Iron Curtain here. It’s not that opaque. Everybody sees what is happening,” the prime minister said. He says that the West is “over-obsessed” with efforts to contain China.

Similarly, Pakistan’s “neutral” stance on Ukraine (at least in public) reflects the country’s overall desire to keep its options open, he said. For example, Pakistan is taking advantage of Europe’s move away from Russian gas and oil to import cheaper energy. These new trading relations with Russia will last long after the current crisis is over.

“So this crisis is creating challenges and at the same time it is creating opportunities also within the region, and we are looking at it both ways,” he said.

Meanwhile, there is frustration in Washington that Pakistan appears to be moving backward democratically. The Biden administration has mostly remained silent while the Pakistani military has cracked down on political opposition, the media and public dissent after the removal and jailing of Imran Khan, the former prime minister. Human rights groups have criticized Pakistan’s use of military courts for civilians, escalating violence against minority groups and the disappearing of journalists.

Kakar defended the arrests and denied the alleged abuses. He compared Pakistan’s actions to the arrests in the United States of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Arrests are being made for unlawful actions, somebody who’s involved in arson or vandalism,” he said. “This is not the kind of behavior which is promoted or vindicated by any liberal democracy. So why is it being even expected of Pakistan that we should condone such behaviors?”

He said there is no bar on any political party exercising free speech or criticizing the government or military. But Human Rights Watch reported that Pakistani police arrested more than 4,000 protesters over the summer and detained several members of the political opposition. One American citizen, Khadijah Shah, has been held in prison for more than 100 days without bail. The prime minister said she and all the others would receive due process.

Some speculate that the U.S. government is looking the other way because Pakistan is alleged to be covertly supplying badly needed munitions to the Ukrainian army. The Intercept, for example, claims to have documents proving that the Biden administration pushed a recent six-month loan for Islamabad from the International Monetary Fund after the Pakistani military secretly agreed to move large amounts of munitions to Ukraine. Other outlets have reported that Britain has facilitated transfers to Ukraine of Pakistani arms sold to third countries.

Kakar flatly denied these allegations. The fact that Pakistani munitions have been found on the battlefield in Ukraine was attributable to the black market, he told me.

“We have not gone for any sale which was directly intended for the Ukraine, not any sort of transactions,” even through a third party, he said.

Of course, if the arms arrangement were a secret, that’s exactly what Kakar would say. It certainly wouldn’t be the first secret U.S.-Pakistan arms deal. And other countries (see South Korea) are also playing coy while increasing their indirect munitions exports to Ukraine.

In Islamabad, there is frustration that Pakistan is always viewed in the United States as a subordinate factor in more urgent foreign policy issues. By siding with the West against the Soviets and again after 9/11, Pakistan paid a high price and didn’t get proper credit, Kakar said. “Pakistan in the last 30 years has been treated unfairly by the West,” he told me.

Unfortunately, this dysfunctional dynamic between the United States and Pakistan, in which each nation blames the other for the downturn in ties, seems more entrenched than ever. Policymakers in Washington should redouble their efforts to engage Pakistan’s leaders and make good on old promises to care more about Pakistan’s democratic and economic development.

Absent such outreach, Pakistan will see no choice but to edge closer to Beijing’s authoritarian model. But such an outcome is not entirely inevitable. In the end, leaders in Islamabad know that being wholly dependent on China is not in Pakistan’s interest, either.

The First Amendment rights to free speech and association are foundational to American freedom. Cases from the McCarthy and Civil Rights eras made it clear that compelled disclosure of speakers’ associations must survive exacting scrutiny.

Just three years ago, in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court applied this standard and held that California’s request for donor information violates the First Amendment because the state failed to show a compelling reason for that request. The compelled disclosure of nonprofit-donor information to the IRS, through a federal tax form known as Schedule B, similarly infringes on these rights, so the Ohio-based Buckeye Institute sued to block that disclosure and moved for summary judgment. The Manhattan Institute has now joined 70 organizations on a brief supporting that lawsuit.

Despite its protestations, the IRS fails to demonstrate any need for the compelled up-front disclosure of Schedule B’s donor information to further its interest in revenue collection. Because the compelled disclosure is both under- and overinclusive in furthering any such interest, and cannot be justified based on administrative convenience, it fails exacting scrutiny. And just as California failed to ensure the confidentiality of donor information, the IRS’s history of mishandling confidential taxpayer information threatens to chill the speech and association rights of 501(c)(3) organizations and their donors.

Photo: silvermanmediaservices/iStock

Why are we seeing the craziness on college campuses, with speakers shouted down, professors afraid of students, and certain subjects off-limits from public discussion? Is there a generational change, with Gen Z just that much more radical even than millennials?

Truth be told, what’s different now from when I was in college 25 years ago isn’t so much that faculties, or students, have shifted Left. This is not the decades-old conservative complaint about the liberal takeover of the academy. Instead, it’s that the illiberal Left now drives campus culture. University officials placate, facilitate, and even foment social justice mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down so as not to be caught in the cancellation crossfire. And this is largely the result of growing higher education bureaucracies.

The statistics on the growth of these Left-skewed non-teaching staff are mind-boggling. In the 25 years ending in 2012, the number of professional university employees who don’t teach grew at about twice the rate of students. In the same period, tuition at four-year public colleges more than tripled. Curiously, uniform statistics for the decade-plus since then are hard to come by, as the big surveyors stopped separating administrators and faculty or stopped collecting information entirely. The Department of Education has contributed to this obfuscation, changing methodologies year-to-year if not failing to collect or disclose the relevant data.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the Washington Examiner

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Six years ago, a law student named Lina Khan wrote a Yale Law Journal article that held up Amazon as an example of how U.S. antitrust law was broken. Decades of narrow focus on high prices as the main indicator of monopoly power, she argued, had left the legal and policy world blind to the ways that online platforms were gaining chokeholds on the digital economy. For Amazon, low prices were actually a weapon with which to strangle rivals and small retailers while it gained a chokehold on the e-commerce industry. The paper made Khan the face of a movement to take on Big Tech by radically rethinking competition policy.

On Tuesday, Khan’s Federal Trade Commission filed a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that it has abused its power to stifle competition in e-commerce. But the lawsuit, signed onto by 17 state attorneys general, follows a very different logic from her now-famous paper.

Its embrace of conventional antitrust concerns, including high prices for shoppers, and its avoidance of rhetoric about breaking up the company show how the 34-year-old Khan has evolved as a regulator — trading in her academic idealism for a more pragmatic approach as she embarks on what could be the signature case of her career.

In her 2017 law review article, titled “Amazon’s antitrust paradox,” Khan’s target wasn’t just Amazon. It was the “consumer welfare standard,” which holds that big, powerful corporations aren’t a problem as long as they don’t jack up their prices. That laissez-faire approach had dominated antitrust jurisprudence since at least the 1970s, allowing waves of corporate consolidation. Khan argued it was outdated in the digital age.

“We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output,” she wrote. Instead, regulators should look at how companies like Amazon used low prices to undercut rivals on their way to controlling the critical infrastructure of the digital economy — a position from which they could fend off competitors and give their own products an unfair advantage over everyone else’s.

Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. The Post’s interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.

Once out of law school, Khan set to work trying to turn her vision of an antitrust revolution into reality.

In 2019, she joined the staff of the House antitrust subcommittee to help draft legislation that would overhaul the country’s antitrust laws, potentially forcing some of the largest tech companies to split off parts of their business. But the tech giants mounted a lobbying blitz against the package, and it petered out in Congress.

Meanwhile, President Biden tapped Khan in 2021 to chair the FTC, with an implicit mandate to rein in Big Tech. She jumped right in, refiling a lawsuit that aimed to break up Facebook parent company Meta and suing to block acquisitions by Meta and Microsoft. But judges overruled the FTC’s objections to both mergers, smacking down some of Khan’s legal theories in the process. Elsewhere, an antitrust suit against Apple lodged by Epic Games that drew on similar ideas ended up going mostly Apple’s way.

Now comes the Amazon lawsuit, years in the making — the case Khan was born to make. And the way she’s making it suggests she’s willing to make concessions to the status quo to avoid another defeat.

The 172-page lawsuit repeatedly seeks to tie Amazon’s aggressive business practices to higher prices and a degraded experience for customers, putting it largely within the “consumer welfare” tradition Khan once critiqued. Khan’s rhetoric Tuesday was even more explicitly consumer-focused, portraying the fees that Amazon charges sellers as an “Amazon tax” that is ultimately passed on to the buyer.

The suit spends relatively little time exploring Khan’s theories about “two-sided markets,” in which a company like Amazon (or Google, Apple or Meta) acts as an intermediary connecting sellers with consumers. Instead, it targets a set of specific business practices by Amazon that it argues are anticompetitive, such as discouraging sellers from offering lower prices on other sites and punishing sellers who don’t use Amazon’s own fulfillment services to deliver their products.

Notably, the lawsuit does not explicitly call for Amazon to be broken up, instead seeking a “permanent injunction” to bar it from those particular business practices. And Khan’s stated goals for the case had nothing to do with dismembering Amazon, let alone reimagining the antitrust paradigm.

“If we succeed,” Khan told reporters, “competition will be restored, and people will benefit from lower prices, greater quality, greater selection as a result.” Radical stuff indeed.

While there are some unconventional aspects to the case, the general categories of violations it alleges “would have been cognizable for the last 40 years of antitrust,” said Joseph Coniglio, director of antitrust policy for the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, which receives funding from tech companies including Amazon. (Still, he said he believes the FTC will face “an uphill battle” in the courts, because the fact remains, “It’s hard to show consumer harm when there are low prices.”)

The difference between Khan’s paper and the FTC’s lawsuit, he said, is “the difference between the academic theory and what she actually needs to put before a court.”

Barry Lynn, Khan’s onetime boss at the anti-monopoly Open Markets Institute, probably doesn’t agree with Coniglio on much. But he also saw pragmatism at work in the case’s reliance on some established categories of antitrust allegations, alongside some more envelope-pushing arguments, particularly around the alleged harms to sellers and suppliers.

“I think they’re hedging their bets, which is wise,” Lynn said. Focusing on harms to consumers rather than novel legal theories “helps them sell the case to the public,” he added. And by arguing that Amazon is failing its customers, “They’re going at the heart of Amazon’s defense.”

Lynn said he doesn’t think Khan has abandoned her ideals. She’s just learning that you can’t pursue them all at once if you want to win cases.

“You’re also protecting yourself,” he said. “You don’t know what kind of judge you’re going to get.”

Nearly three quarters of a century after Nato’s founding, Britain has slid down its league table of political and military power: from a near-peer ally of the United States to more or less open vassalage. To witness the conquered mindset of the British establishment, one need only read a recent article deliberating on what is to be done with the British Army, plummeting in numbers, capability and international esteem. It proposes to reshape our land forces as a collection of Special Forces units at America’s disposal: “we are likely to fight as part of a coalition in future, so why not be the sharpened tip of the American spear?” On the one hand, the very idea of formalising Britain’s role as Washington’s most loyal and reckless auxiliary, without even the hint that Britain may have vital strategic interests of its own, strikes the reader as a shameful metric of national decline. Yet on the other, it is merely a frank acceptance of Britain’s true role in the world. Just as the Five Eyes alliance, promoted as a valuable forum to share secret intelligence, can be more accurately viewed as a means to ensure the Anglophone intelligence establishment orientate themselves towards serving US foreign policy goals, the Nato alliance is as much a Cold War means of organising satellite states to serve imperial interests as was the Warsaw Pact. The distinction between Moscow’s loyal network of European generals, securocrats and pet politicians and those of present-day Washington is barely perceptible. Yet, in recent years, the value of the Nato alliance has declined markedly, both to Washington insiders increasingly disgruntled that the United States finds itself subsidising the defence of rich but feckless European states, and to some European leaders such as Macron, who famously termed the Cold War relic “brain dead”. The alliance’s most recent adventures, in Afghanistan and Libya, were disasters both to the countries fated to host its intervention, and to the European states who suddenly found themselves hosting the unwanted human floods that followed.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then, came as a godsend to the faltering alliance. Once again, Nato could focus on its core purpose: the American-led defence of Europe from an aggressive Moscow. Summarising an emergent  strand of thought on both the Left and Right of European politics, Wolfgang Streeck, writing in Natopolitanism, Verso’s collection of essays from the New Left Review, remarks that by “restoring the West, the war neutralised the various fault lines where the EU was crumbling… while catapulting the United States into a position of renewed hegemony over Western Europe, including its regional organisation, the European Union”. This precise critique, that a war-revived “Turbo-America” has consolidated its wavering hold on our home continent, grasping us ever more suffocatingly to the imperial bosom, is now commonplace in discussions of geopolitics following the Ukraine war: but is it true? The authors in Natopolitanism robustly make the case that, as the writer Thomas Meaney observes, “in practice, Nato is above all a political arrangement that guarantees US primacy in determining answers to European questions“ and “administers US power in Eurasia, as a regional satrapy and launchpad for excursions elsewhere”. In essays spanning decades, which aim to “stand in contrast to the pieties and propaganda that saturate the Natopolitan scene”, the writers outline Washington’s strategy of “convincing potential competitors” such as Europe “that they need not aspire to a greater role”, while accounting “sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership”. As Europe’s leadership shows, this plan was entirely successful, so that “what was once presumed to be an artefact of the Cold War order sits so comfortably at the heart of the Western system that it is frequently mistaken for a natural feature in the geopolitical landscape”. More from this author Boomer Europe is dyingBy Aris Roussinos  The book reminds us of the fearful warnings of US defence establishment giants such as William J. Burns that the decision to expand Nato eastwards, enfolding the Baltic and Central European states while leaving Ukraine and Georgia in their current, fateful ante-room to membership, was an act of monumental hubris which. It would, he wrote, “cross the brightest of Russia’s red lines” by “indulging the Ukrainians and Georgians in hopes of Nato membership on which we were unlikely to deliver, while reinforcing Putin’s sense that we were determined to pursue a course he saw as an existential threat”. Indeed, Natopolitanism’s essential thrust — and the limitations of its analysis — can be summarised by the title of Realist theorist John Mearsheimer’s contribution: “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin.” It captures a strain of thinking common to European strategic autonomists who regret that the alliance has kept the continent subordinate to Washington, Left-wing anti-imperialists keen to highlight the hypocrisy of the alliance’s newfound commitment to the inviolability of national borders, and to the American anti-interventionists whose stance is, at least in liberal interventionist eyes, now indistinguishable from “IR Realism” Outlining viewpoints mocked by American neoconservative broadsheet columnists and boisterous cartoon dogs on Twitter alike, the collection is perhaps the most sustained and articulate critique so far of Washington’s hubristic attitudes towards Russia. And yet, much of its argument can be refuted by observation of the Ukraine war’s progress until now. The purported “last chance for peace” lamented by contributors, Russia’s eve-of-invasion request to rule out the alliance’s further eastward expansion, also included a demand to withdraw Nato infrastructure from the Central European and Baltic countries welcomed into the alliance a generation ago: a politically absurd demand made in the full knowledge it was impossible to grant. Far from the United States forcing European states into a stance of radical and self-defeating hostility to Russia, it is European states that have consistently pushed a reluctant Biden administration into delivering ever-more deadly and sophisticated weapons systems to Kyiv. The pattern of hawkish European states browbeating their cautious and reluctant overlord into greater escalation echoes the dynamic of the Libya intervention, where the bright-eyed and idealistic Cameron and Sarkozy pairing cajoled Obama’s intervention in what he later termed the Libyan “shitshow” against his better judgment. If anything, Nato displays the European tail wagging the American dog: instead of keeping Europe subordinate, weak but ambitious European states use the Nato alliance to advance their own foreign policy ends — that these ends would, in Libya, prove disastrous is a European failing rather than an American one. Suggested reading The Russian invasion was a rational actBy John Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato No wonder that American defence thinkers, such as the Realist strategist Elbridge Colby, dispassionately debate the idea of cutting the Baltic countries loose as a strategic burden a declining US can no longer afford. Yet the sceptical attitude to the alliance displayed by the American Right, and particularly Trump, points to another potential outcome from the war. While Streeck asserts that “the war also seems to have dealt a death blow to the French dream of turning the liberal empire of the European Union into a strategically sovereign global force, credibly rivalling both a rising China and a declining United States”, dwindling American political support for a war in which the EU has fully committed itself leaves Europe forced to assume a position of power, almost against its own will. Ultimately, Europe’s future defence strategy will be written in the straits and islets of the Western Pacific: either the US will be forced to concentrate on the threat from China, forcing Europe to finally take up the burden of its own defence, or Washington will abandon its role as global hegemon, taking Europe tighter into its embrace as a rich and easily assimilable core empire. Either outcome is possible, and the decision will only come at the time of China’s choosing. But if the first eventuality comes to pass, with a giant and hostile neighbour to its east, and an imperial sponsor distracted from by its own great challenge on the other side of the world, Europe will be forced to extract itself from the position of helpless dependence its role in the Nato alliance has fostered. For Left-wing writers such as Meaney, such an autonomous Europe is hardly a more appealing outcome than subordinate membership in the American alliance: “considering what the European Union is today, if it ever did succeed in taking a more militarised form, this would hardly be a rosy prospect,” he writes. “A competent EU army patrolling the Mediterranean littoral for migrants, enforcing an elaborate repatriation system, and forcing regimes in Africa and Asia to serve in perpetuity as extraction points for its resources and receptacles of its trash would only clinch the status of ‘Fortress Europe’.” European conservatives, accustomed by habit if not self-interest to look longingly for Washington’s approval, may yet come to welcome this new dispensation. Certainly, the most recent iteration of Nato as a heavily armed liberal NGO would not survive this shift. As noted in Natopolitanism, Poland’s hawkish attitude to the Ukraine war has led Washington to forget its until-recently-held doubts about the strength of the country’s democratic institutions, just as concerns over Meloni’s purported fascism evaporated once she committed herself to the war. So, Streeck warns, controversies over the “‘rule of law’ will become increasingly obsolete as cultural conflicts between “liberal” and “illiberal” democracy will be eclipsed by the geostrategic objectives of Nato and the United States,” while “a shift in political power inside the EU may be imminent in favour of the Union’s eastern front states”. Poland’s massive programme of rearmament, plus the planned incorporation within the EU of whatever iteration of the Ukrainian state follows the war, already promises a shift in Europe’s gravity from the post-national liberalism of the continent’s northwest to the resurgent, militarised nationalisms of the eastern frontier. As long as the new Europe’s defence posture alleviates the burden on the United States, Washington voices which once promoted Nato as an engine for liberal idealism will no more protest Europe’s Rightward political experimentation than their equivalents of past decades did the pliant authoritarian regimes of member states Portugal, Greece and Turkey. More from this author Britain is Europe's liberal outcastBy Aris Roussinos  Far from ensuring Europe’s political and economic subordination, America’s retrenchment towards simultaneously managing both a great struggle with China and its own internal political conflict is very likely to leave Europe functionally autonomous. American voters and politicians may already be tiring of what will be a long and bloody war: Ukraine has, it seems, already reached the high-watermark of Pentagon support. Yet committed as Europe now is, with expanding Russian armies on its doorstep, disengagement is a luxury European leaders cannot afford. Perhaps things might have been otherwise, if different decisions had been made at the zenith of American power: but there is no rewriting history, no going back, and we are forced to make the best we can of the cards our masters dealt us. In all this, the Sixth Form Third Worldist anti-imperialism of Nato sceptics such as Corbyn has been superseded by events. The idea that Corbyn could ever have extracted Britain from Nato was fanciful. As Meaney observes of Central Europe, “were any political leadership in Poland, Romania, Hungary, or any other Eastern European state to become intolerable for Washington, it would have an open, exploitable channel to that country’s military, greased by years of mutual exchanges, including stints at Nato headquarters, bevies of Nato conferences, retreats, and ceremonies, as well as wars fought together in the Middle East”. Precisely the same is true, with the inclusion of securocrats and wonks as loyal devotees, for us Western European countries. As the desperate wheedling for an American pat on their head from Britain’s defence establishment makes clear, the idea of Britain pursuing strategic ends distinct from those of its imperial master is literally incomprehensible to our governing class. Updating this strategic calculus is more likely to result from a sudden external shock than dispassionate consideration of Britain’s interests. Yet Macron’s sudden pivot from Nato-scepticism towards a full-throated commitment to the alliance’s eastward expansion reminds us that other outcomes are possible. In our current turbulent period of interregnum between American supremacy and retreat from global hegemony, the Nato alliance may provide the framework within which a future, sovereign Europe can establish itself, through the creation of a notionally subordinate European defence pillar ready to take up the burden of the continent’s security from its faltering sponsor. There is no political utility in railing against Nato, given the unshakeable attachment of European elites to their sinecures as loyal auxiliaries. Yet by working within Nato structures, to establish Europe as an equal partner within the alliance rather than a collection of weak and disunited supplicants, our home continent may still quietly prepare itself for the withdrawal of America’s protective shield, and the contested multipolar order already bloodily dawning on its borders. Just as Rome’s successor states, once the legions left, still proudly wore imperial titles, Nato’s ghostly form may yet outlast the empire itself. view comments

       New polling from The Washington Post shows that contrary to stereotypes, homeschooling families are more diverse and less religious than ever. The new data indicate that parents have a wide range of reasons for deciding to homeschool their children and that COVID-era school closures played a major role in inspiring many parents to pull their children out of the traditional educational system. "Everything was up in the air," during the pandemic, one parent told the Post. "We were like, let's just try to home-school, and we've been doing it ever since." According to the poll, which was conducted by the Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, three-quarters of homeschooling parents said that they chose to homeschool due to "concern about the school environment." Around two-thirds also agreed that providing "moral instruction" as well as "dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools" also motivated their departure from traditional schooling. While 31 percent of parents said they chose to homeschool their child in part because COVID policies at local public schools were too strict, a similar proportion—27 percent—said part of their decision to homeschool was because local public schools' COVID policies were too lax. According to research from the Urban Institute, homeschooling increased by 30 percent between the 2019–20 and 2021–22 school years. Nationally, over 5 percent of school-age children are now estimated to be homeschooled. "Interviews with new home-school parents suggest many were intrigued by home schooling before the pandemic but wouldn't have tried it absent the abrupt school closures in March 2020," notes the Post. "While many parents were anxious to get their children back into school, some found they liked having their kids at home." The uptick in homeschooling has also led to more racial diversity in the homeschooling space. Prior to the pandemic, about 70 percent of homeschoolers were white. Now, that number has decreased to just under 50 percent, driven primarily—according to the Post's poll—by a rise in Hispanic families choosing to homeschool. Homeschool families are also less focused on religion than they were before the pandemic. In 2012, 64 percent of homeschool parents said they did so in order to provide religious instruction. By 2023, that number had dropped to just 34 percent.  "Families," Robert Kunzman, a professor at Indiana University's School of Education and director of the International Center for Home Education Research, told the Post, "who choose home schooling less for ideological reasons and more for matters of circumstance and what meets the needs of their child in the present moment will help change our conception of what it means to be a home-schooler." Since waves of COVID school closures in 2020 and 2021 sent parents scrambling, more and more families have realized just how poorly local schools were serving their children. Instead of putting up with the status quo, an increasing portion of them are deciding to take their children's education into their own hands.The post The Lockdowns Made Homeschooling More Diverse appeared first on Reason.com.

       President Joe Biden plans to travel to Michigan on Tuesday, where he will speak in support of striking autoworkers and become the first American president to walk a picket line. It's too soon to tell whether Biden's support will have much of an effect on the impasse between the so-called Big Three automakers (Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, the international conglomerate that owns the remnants of Chrysler) and the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union that called the strike earlier this month. Politically, however, the White House is framing the event as the ultimate show of solidarity from the pro-union president. You might also think about it as something else: Joe Biden's stand for the 1 percent. That's roughly the percentage of the American workforce that is unionized and employed in manufacturing. Far from being a broad-based signal of support for blue-collar Americans, Biden's advocacy on behalf of the UAW this week will be performative shilling for a mere sliver of the country's workers. In fact, it's actually less than 1 percent, as Middlebury College political science professor Gary Winslett pointed out on Twitter last week. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, about 7.8 percent of American workers are employed in manufacturing jobs, and about 8 percent of manufacturing workers are members of a union. Put those figures together, and the result is that only about 0.62 percent (or roughly 842,000) of America's 135 million workers fit into both categories. "If the American labor force were visualized as 500 workers, only 3 of them fit this image," Winslett helpfully explains. That's a useful way of illustrating one of the biggest disconnects between reality and our political rhetoric—which continues to equate the interests of unions with the interests of working-class Americans, even though unionization rates have been falling for decades. These days, there are roughly seven times as many unionized workers in the public sector as there are in manufacturing jobs. That means unions are far more likely to represent the interests of bureaucrats and public school teachers than grunts on the assembly line. To some extent, that reflects the overall decline in manufacturing jobs since the labor unions' heyday of the mid-20th century, of course. But that's not all. It also demonstrates how manufacturing work has shifted toward places with low rates of unionization. South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama have become America's new hotbed for auto manufacturing, but most of those workers aren't part of the UAW—though there is one auto plant in Alabama that's part of the current strike. There is no indication that the working public wants more union representation. When asked, most workers indicate they have little interest in joining a union. In a Gallup poll published last year, just 11 percent of nonunion workers said they were "extremely interested" in getting organized. Meanwhile, 58 percent said they were "not interested at all" in joining a union. But that same poll also indicates why Biden—and, for that matter, former President Donald Trump, who is also making public displays of affection towards the UAW—is rushing to join the striking autoworkers in Michigan. According to Gallup, 71 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of labor unions, the highest rating since 1965. It's a bit of a political conundrum. Only a sliver of blue-collar workers are members of unions, most workers have little interest in joining unions, and so it should be no surprise that most new manufacturing jobs are in nonunion shops. Yet even as unions have dwindled as an economic force in America's manufacturing sector, they've enjoyed a surge in political support from voters who at least like the idea of labor unions even if they've got little interest in actually joining one. We've effectively romanticized the idea of what a labor union is. It's similar in some ways to how the public has nostalgic and generally positive views regarding train travel, even though only 22 million people (well less than 10 percent of the country) rode Amtrak last year. Most of us wouldn't choose to join a labor union or travel by train, but we like the idea of both things existing. And as long as unions are giving off good political vibes, politicians with abysmal approval ratings will be falling over one another to be associated with those romantic notions. Biden's (and Trump's) appearance in Michigan this week is more like a religious pilgrimage than a serious commentary on the state of organized labor in the American economy. And even though Biden has a First Amendment right to say and do whatever he'd like in this situation, it's pretty unseemly to have the country's chief executive picking sides in what is ultimately a private dispute between the automakers and their workers. There's a good reason why presidents have never done this sort of thing before. Biden and his political advisers are surely convinced that the show of solidarity is important for his reelection campaign. "The president's plans come as some Democrats have begun to question his response to the strike, recognizing that he needs the full backing of union workers in his presidential reelection bid," is how Politico described the machinations last week. That may very well be true, but this is a moment where political truth might bear little resemblance to reality. Unionized manufacturing workers are a tiny sliver of the American economy, but it seems that pandering to their demands is more politically important than ever.The post Biden Is Pandering to the 1 Percent: Union Manufacturing Workers appeared first on Reason.com.

Russia’s focus currently is on its western front, in Ukraine and neighboring countries. There is, however, another front that concerns Russia: its southern border, which runs along and through the Caucasus Mountains. South of the mountains lie Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

The mountains protect a strategic area of Russia. The area northwest of the mountains leads to the Sea of Azov and the Ukrainian border near Donbas, which has been heavily contested over the years. To the northeast is the Volga River and the historical city of Stalingrad, now called Volgograd. The land north of the mountains is flat, and from Astrakhan to Crimea is about 550 miles (885 kilometers). An attack on Russia from the south would have a decided effect on Russia’s ability to execute the war in Ukraine and, in the long run, could sever critical rivers such as the Volga and the Don. Therefore, protecting the Caucasus from penetration by any hostile force is vital.

(click to enlarge)

For Russia, it is imperative that it penetrate the North Caucasus. It is almost as important as Ukraine. From the mid-1990s to the 2000s, Russia and Chechnya fought an intense war, which was an element in the rise of Vladimir Putin. Russia’s victory helped shape Putin’s thinking about borderlands. Russia also fought a war with Georgia, which had received U.S. military support.

Recently, Azerbaijan sent forces to occupy an area between itself and Armenia. Armenia is relatively poor, while Azerbaijan is rich in oil. The two countries have been hostile toward one another since independence, with tensions focused on Nagorno-Karabakh, a small region with an ethnic-Armenian population but officially part of Azerbaijan. The strategic interests are unclear, but the political issue is intense.

Historically, Russia has supported Armenia, even when trying to mediate. This has shifted. The Americans entered the region – first by supporting Georgia, and then by maintaining a careful (on both sides) relationship with Azerbaijan, but always keeping distance from Armenia. However, a new Armenian government was elected a few years ago that was cautious about the Russians. In the course of the war in Ukraine, the U.S. decided to enter into much closer relations with Armenia, which welcomed the Americans as a counterweight against Azerbaijan. But with Russia no longer a threat, and the United States lacking sufficient military force in the region, Azerbaijan occupied Nagorno-Karabakh.

This does not change the reality on the ground, but it does indicate that a level of tension and even conflict is emerging. The Russians have a substantial peacekeeping force in the region that has been quiet but could conceivably act against Armenia or, with reinforcements, revive the Georgian war. Armenia has little choice other than to negotiate a deal with the Russians or turn to the Americans. Neither choice would comfort it.

The United States wants to continue holding some capability in the area to threaten to penetrate the North Caucacus, which would be a dangerous and unlikely maneuver. The Russians are not dismissing the Americans’ willingness to do the dangerous and unlikely. A war is raging in Ukraine, and the U.S. could use another card in negotiations with the Russians. On paper it is an excellent idea, but quite insane in reality. So, the question now is whether Georgia is prepared to pull closer to the United States in return for military aid, and whether Azerbaijan is willing for the same reason. But since Azerbaijan and Russia seem suddenly linked, that’s not going to happen. Russia seems to have secured the Caucasus and turned the unlikely into the unthinkable. The U.S. has Armenia, which does not give it much credibility. Therefore, Russia has sealed, for now, its southern border.

Hopefully, Democratic leaders in the Senate will do the right thing, and this column will be obsolete by the time you read it. I would have written it earlier, but I thought that at any moment, the dam would break and Robert Menendez, the recently indicted senator from New Jersey accused of spectacular acts of treachery and corruption, would be pushed out. Yet here we are, four days after the Department of Justice gave us all a look at Menendez’s cash-stuffed jacket and one-kilo gold bars, and a united front of condemnation has yet to materialize. As I write this, more than a dozen Democratic senators have called on him to step down. Every other Democratic senator — especially the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer — should join them.

It’s true, of course, that an indictment is not a conviction. (Menendez knows this as well as anyone, having been charged with corruption once before but spared by a hung jury.) While he is entitled to another fair trial, he is not entitled to a seat in the United States Senate. As chairman, until recently, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he is accused not just of accepting lavish bribes but also, more seriously, of passing sensitive information to an Egyptian businessman with ties to Egypt’s government. This is wrongdoing on a whole other level from what he was previously accused of.

At a defiant news conference on Monday, Menendez insisted he’s staying in the Senate and offered a preposterous excuse for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that F.B.I. agents found at his house. He said he kept it for emergencies, “because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” Apparently, Menendez, who was born in New York, wants us to believe that, because of intergenerational trauma, he feels the need to hedge against Communist revolution in America. (Ironically, his family now, indeed, faces government confiscation.) He also claimed to be the victim of racist persecution by those who “simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator” — a deployment of identity politics so audaciously cynical, it belongs in a caustic TV farce, some deranged mash-up of “Veep” and “The Sopranos.”

His refusal to resign is a problem for Democrats both substantively and politically. At the most basic level, it’s hard to see how, given what Menendez has been accused of, he can be trusted to do his job. His continued tenure in the Senate is an embarrassment to the institution and to the Democratic Party, an embarrassment that will only grow more acute as his prosecution proceeds. Republicans, of course, understand that his presence in the Senate works to their advantage, which is why the right-wing senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas declared that Menendez should stay put.

How many animals get slaughtered every day? Hundreds of millions of animals get killed for meat every day. Cite this article Reuse our work freely

The scale of humanity’s meat consumption is enormous. 360 million tonnes of meat every year.

This number is so large that I find it impossible to comprehend. What helps me to make these numbers more relatable is to turn them from the weight of meat to the number of animals and from the yearly total to the daily number. This is what I have done in the graphic below. It shows how many animals are slaughtered on any average day.

About 900,000 cows are slaughtered every day. If every cow was 2 meters long, and they all walked right behind each other, this line of cows would stretch for 1800 kilometers.1 This represents the number of cows slaughtered every day.

For chickens, the daily count is extremely large – 202 million chickens every day. To comprehend the scale, it is better to bring it down to the average minute: 140,000 chickens are slaughtered every minute.

The number of fish killed every day is very uncertain. I discuss this in some detail at the end of this article. But while the uncertainties are large, it is clear that the number of fish killed is large: certainly, hundreds of millions of fish are killed every day.

If you believe that the slaughter of animals causes them to suffer and attribute even a small measure of ethical significance to their suffering, then the moral scale of this reality is immense.

How many animals get slaughtered for meat every day?2

From the perspective of animal suffering, it is the absolute numbers of animals that matter, but if you want to explore this data in per capita terms, you can do so in our Food Explorer.

It’s not just about how many farm animals are killed but also the suffering they endured while they were raised. The majority of the world’s farm animals are raised in dismal conditions. Pigs are held in cramped, stressful conditions, living a life in chronic discomfort and distress. Cows get their calves taken away to produce milk for human consumption, a practice under which both the mother and the calf suffer. Many animals are castrated without anesthetic. Chickens are often debeaked to stop them from fighting with other chickens out of discomfort and pain; many cannot turn around their entire lives.

What would be the benefits of reducing our meat consumption?

Meat production has a number of large negative impacts on the environment, wildlife, and our health.

See also our page on the environmental impacts of food production.

Viewed from the other side, this means that the benefits of reducing meat consumption are large. What would some of these benefits be?

Less land use for agriculture and more biodiversity: The use of land for agriculture is the main driver of biodiversity loss.3 Today, almost half of the world’s ice- and desert-free land is used for agriculture, and most of this land is used by livestock. The total global land use for meat and dairy production sums up to 37 million square kilometers, an area as large as the entirety of the Americas — from Alaska in the North to Cape Horn in the South.

For the data, see our page on land use.

As my colleague Hannah Ritchie showed, if we didn’t eat meat, it would be possible to reduce agricultural land from 4 to 1 billion hectares. Changes towards less meat consumption would have large benefits for animals around the world as wilderness could regrow to provide habitats for wildlife.4

Benefits for the world’s climate: Reducing global meat consumption would also help to address climate change: it would reduce direct emissions from burping cows and nitrous oxide from manure, but also reduce emissions from deforestation and land use change.

Less antibiotic resistance: Reducing the world's meat consumption would decrease the use of antibiotics in livestock farming, a practice that contributes to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This reduction could preserve the efficacy of existing antibiotics and the health of people around the world.

Lower risk of pandemics: Many infectious diseases originate in other animals. The high-density conditions in many meat production facilities create ideal environments for the mutation and spread of pathogens. Reducing global meat consumption would reduce the risk of zoonotic diseases and the risks of suffering another pandemic.

Less animal suffering: Coming back to the starting point of this short text, less meat consumption would mean less suffering for animals.

I think this future is possible. I can imagine a future in which our grandchildren look back at our time and find it hard to believe that we today are living in a world in which we kill hundreds of millions of fish, 900,000 cows, 1.4 million goats, 1.7 million sheep, 3.8 million pigs, 11.8 million ducks, and more than 200 million chicken every day.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, Fiona Spooner, Bastian Herre, and Edouard Mathieu for their helpful comments on this essay and visualization.

Explore more research and data on Our World in Data: Have a look at our Food Data Explorer; one insight from it is that meat consumption is now falling in a number of countries.

My colleagues Hannah Ritchie and Edouard Mathieu wrote an article that asks What share of people say they are vegetarian, vegan, or flexitarian?

Appendix: What about fish?

The visualization in the article above gives estimates for the daily death count of several land animals.

The reason that the estimate for fish is presented in less certain terms than for other animals is that there is little good data on how many fish are killed every year. Most data refers to the tonnage of aquatic animals killed, and estimates of the number of fish killed are much more uncertain than for land animals.

The Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN only publishes data on tonnage, but not on animals killed The tonnage (weight) of fish available for human consumption sums up to 157 million tonnes per year, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN. Total production (which includes non-food uses such as fishmeal and fish oil) is estimated at 177.8 million tonnes of fish. These numbers include animals from wild catch and aquaculture and refer to estimates for 2020 (the main article above discusses data for 2021, but there is no data on fish production available for that year yet). This includes all aquatic animals except aquatic mammals, crocodiles, alligators, and caimans. These estimates can be found in FAO (2022) — The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022. Towards Blue Transformation. Rome, FAO. https://doi.org/10.4060/cc0461en Available estimates for the number of fish killed Unfortunately, the FAO only publishes data on fish in tonnage and not as a count of the number of individual animals. Other organizations attempt to estimate the number of individual animals, at least the number of farmed fish. The published estimates for the number of farmed fish come with very large uncertainties but give some indication of the scale: For farmed fish in 2019, the Sentience Institute gives a midpoint estimate of 77 billion. The range around this midpoint is large, from 29 to 149 billion animals per year.

The study by Mood, Lara, Boyland, and Brooke (2023) estimates the total number of killed farmed finfish to be 124 billion per year. See Mood, A., Lara, E., Boyland, N., & Brooke, P. (2023). Estimating global numbers of farmed fishes killed for food annually from 1990 to 2019. In Animal Welfare. Only considering farmed fish and relying on the midpoint estimate published by the Sentience Institute, the number of killed fish on any average day would be 211 million. (77,000,000,000/365 = 210,958,904 million) This would mean that the number of killed farmed fish is similar to the number of killed chickens. However, if the estimate by Mood et al. is correct, then the daily death count is almost twice as high. These estimates refer to the number of farmed fish only; they do not include wild aquatic animals that are caught and killed for human consumption. We can, however, get some sense of the magnitude of the total number of fish killed from the available FAO data on the weight of fish from aquacultures and wild catches. This data is available in our chart here: Seafood production: wild fish catch vs. aquaculture. In 2020, the weight of fish from aquaculture was 122.6 million tonnes, and the weight of fish from wild catches was 91 million tonnes. Overall, it seems clear that at least hundreds of millions of fish are killed every day, but as emphasized throughout this article, the uncertainty is very large. Understanding how many animals are killed by humans and closing these gaps in our statistical understanding of the world would be important. Show more

Cite this work Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as: Max Roser (2023) - "How many animals get slaughtered every day?". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day' [Online Resource] BibTeX citation @article{owid-how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day, author = {Max Roser}, title = {How many animals get slaughtered every day?}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day} }

       Late last month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent warning letters to three different baby formula companies expressing concern over the manufacturers' practices for handling contamination in their products.  "You did not establish a system of process controls covering all stages of processing that was designed to ensure that infant formula does not become adulterated due to the presence of microorganisms in the formula or in the processing environment," the FDA wrote in its letters to ByHeart Inc., Reckitt/Mead Johnson Nutrition, and Perrigo Wisconsin. The FDA also requires the companies to respond within 15 days with "the specific steps you have taken to correct the stated violations, including an explanation of each step being taken to identify violations and make corrections to ensure that similar violations will not recur." These letters indicate that another formula crisis should soon be underway. Just four companies—including Mead Johnson and Perrigo—comprise 90 percent of the U.S. baby formula market, meaning that if just one factory is forced to stop production due to safety concerns, it could send a massive shock to the U.S. formula supply, creating a repeat of last year's baby formula shortage. But there is a way to prevent such a disastrous outcome: ditching the 27 percent tariff on foreign formula imports. "Any time you add a tax of approximately 25 percent, some of that's gonna get passed onto consumers, and domestic prices will adjust upward to match the import prices," Scott Lincicome, director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, told Reason last December. "And the second thing is, any time you add a tax of that level, you're gonna get less supply. Consumers and importers, retailers in the rest of the United States will try to avoid importing more formula if they can because there's gonna be less demand for it, cause it's gonna be expensive." Last July, during the depths of the shortage, Congress passed a bill that temporarily waived formula tariffs. While this measure directly helped to ease the supply crunch, the tariffs returned at the end of the year—which unsurprisingly led formula imports to decrease and out-of-stock rates to rise. On the bright side, the FDA also announced in July 2022 that it would permanently ease draconian regulations that made it nearly impossible for foreign formulas to gain approval to be sold in the United States. However, high tariffs have still kept formula imports low. In June, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Formula 3.0 Act, which would permanently remove high tariffs on baby formula imports. "Due to high tariffs and other protectionist obstacles preventing high-quality infant formula imports from the global market, parents with small children were left scrambling to find affordable alternatives," said Rep. Don Beyer, (D–Va.) said in a June press release. "This bill would permanently eliminate trade barriers to encourage the import of FDA-compliant infant formula, bringing prices down for parents in the near term and staving off a potential future crisis." Removing tariffs wouldn't just help prevent a shortage. Many American families rely on specialized European baby formula to treat children with allergies or other sensitivities. FDA regulations and high tariffs have often forced these parents to illegally import the perfectly safe formula they need to feed their babies. However, the Formula 3.0 Act has languished in Congress—all while another devastating baby formula shortage seems increasingly likely to occur in the near future. While the causes of last year's baby formula shortage are clear, the government hasn't learned much from it.The post Could Another Baby Formula Shortage Be on the Horizon? appeared first on Reason.com.

According to fact checkers, Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency. That’s around 20 a day. But, according to several opinion polls during his presidency, around 75% of Republican voters still considered Trump to be honest.  It seems incredible that a serial liar – whose biggest lie about the 2020 election results led to a violent insurrection and nearly brought American democracy to its knees – is still considered honest by so many people. We began to tackle this question in a recent article that examined the political discussions of all members of the US Congress on Twitter between 2011 and 2022. To do this, we analysed nearly 4 million tweets. Our approach was based on the idea that people’s understanding of “honesty” involves two distinct components. One component can be referred to as “fact-speaking”. This form of speech relies on evidence and emphasises veracity and seeks to communicate the actual state of the world. Most of us probably consider this an important aspect of honesty. By this criterion, Donald Trump cannot be considered honest. The other component can be referred to as “belief-speaking”. This focuses on the communicator’s apparent sincerity, but pays little attention to factual accuracy. So when Trump claimed that the crowds at his inauguration were the largest ever (they were not), his followers may have considered this claim to be honest because Trump seemed to sincerely believe the claim he was making. Healthy political debate involves both fact-speaking and belief-speaking. Political ideas often cannot be contested based on facts alone, but also require beliefs and values to be taken into account.  But democratic debate can be derailed if it is entirely based on the expression of belief irrespective of factual accuracy.  One of Trump’s senior advisers, then US counsellor to the president, Kellyanne Conway, coined the phrase “alternative facts” in order to back her boss by persisting with the falsehood about the largest inauguration crowd. This allowed viewers to choose whose “facts” to accept. Within two years Trump’s senior lawyer and adviser Rudy Giuliani was insisting on national TV that “truth isn’t truth”. He was defending Trump’s feet-dragging over submitting to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller and the likelihood that Trump’s testimony would conflict with sworn testimony offered by another witness.   ‘Truth isn’t truth’: Rudy Giuliani beggars belief, August 2018.  These are examples of an extreme form of belief-speaking that goes beyond the bounds of conventional democratic debate. Whose ‘truth’ are we talking about? We wanted to know the extent to which either belief-speaking or fact-speaking have become more prevalent in political speech, in this case in Twitter posts by Republican and Democrat members of the US Congress since 2011. To do this we set up and validated two “dictionaries” that captured those two components of honesty. To capture belief-speaking, we used words such as “feel”, “guess”, “seem”. To capture fact-speaking we used words such as “determine”, “evidence”, “examine”. Using advanced mathematical analysis, we were able to measure the extent to which each tweet represented belief-speaking and fact-speaking, and how the two trended over time. The figure below illustrates the results of our analysis with examples of tweets that involve a lot of belief-speaking (top) and fact-speaking (bottom), separately for members of the two parties, red being Republican and blue Democrat. Our analysis first considered the long-term trend of belief-speaking and fact-speaking. We found that for both parties, both belief-speaking and fact-speaking increased considerably after Trump’s election in 2016. This may reflect the fact that topics concerning misinformation and “fake news” became particularly prominent after 2016 and may have resulted in opposing claims and corrections – involving belief-speaking and fact-speaking, respectively. When we related the content of tweets to the quality of news sources they linked to, we found a striking asymmetry between the two parties and the honesty components. We used the news ratings agency NewsGuard to ascertain the quality of a domain being shared in a tweet. NewsGuard rates the trustworthiness of news domains on a 100-point scale based on established journalistic criteria, such as differentiating between news and opinion, regularly publishing corrections, and so on, without fact-checking individual items of content. We find that for both parties, the more a tweet expresses fact-speaking, the more likely it is to point to a trustworthy domain. By contrast, for belief-speaking we observed little effect on the trustworthiness of sources in tweets by Democratic members of Congress. There was, however, a striking association between belief-speaking and low trustworthiness of sources for Republicans: A 10% increase in belief-speaking was associated with a 12.8-point decrease in the quality of cited sources. The findings illustrate that misinformation can be linked to a unique conception of honesty that emphasises sincerity over accuracy, and which appears to be used by Republicans – but not Democrats – as a gateway to sharing low-quality information. Why does this happen? Another aspect of our results hints at an answer. We found that belief-speaking is particularly associated with negative emotions. So if Republican politicians want to use negative emotional language to criticise Democrats, this goal might be more readily achieved by sharing low-quality information because high-quality domains tend to be less derogatory of the main parties. Finally, we also found that the voting patterns during the 2020 presidential election in their home state were not associated with the quality of news being shared by members of Congress. One interpretation of this result is that politicians do not pay a price at the ballot box for misleading the public. This may be linked to their convincing use of belief-speaking, which large segments of the public consider to be a marker of honesty. Stephan Lewandowsky acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 101020961 PRODEMINFO), the Humboldt Foundation through a research award, the Volkswagen Foundation (grant "Reclaiming individual autonomy and democratic discourse online: How to rebalance human and algorithmic decision making"), and the European Commission (Horizon 2020 grants 964728 JITSUVAX and 101094752 SoMe4Dem). He also receives funding from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google) and from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN, and from EU Horizon replacement funding grant number 10049415). He also interacts frequently with the European Commission's Join Research Centre in an advisory capacity and though scientific collaborations.Jana Lasser receives funding from the European Commission, Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 101026507.

Jordan Peterson has taken aim at Burger King for pulling its ads from video platform Rumble after one of its prominent users, Russell Brand, was accused of rape.

Rumble hosts the podcasts of the British comedian but has refused to follow in the footsteps of its rival, YouTube, which demonetized Brand's channel following the allegations.

While the fast-food chain has not revealed the exact reasons behind the move, many linked it to the accusations against Brand. Other companies to also pull advertising from Rumble include online clothing retailer ASOS and Hello Fresh.

But Peterson was not impressed with the move and shared his thoughts on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Jordan Peterson addresses students at The Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, on November 2, 2018. He has slammed Burger King for pulling its advertising from Rumble after Russell Brand was accused of rape. Chris Williamson/Getty Images Europe

"That includes@BurgerKing. For those of you who care to know. Maybe eat at the other place. For a while," he wrote on a retweet of an article about businesses pulling their ads from Rumble.

The psychologist previously weighed in on the allegations against Brand, taking particular aim at U.K public broadcaster the BBC, where Brand previously worked, which said it was launching an "urgent" investigation into the allegations.

"It's a bit late for 'Urgently' But it sure is Convenient," he wrote on Twitter, pointing out some of the accusations date back to 2006.

As part of a joint-investigation, the Dispatches program on the U.K's Channel 4 and newspapers, The Times and The Sunday Times spoke to four women who accused of Brand of various crimes including rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse between 2006 and 2013.

Brand made a video about the claims before the program went to air saying his relationships have been "always consensual" and that he strongly denies "these very serious criminal allegations."

The comedian went on to blame the "mainstream media," which he claimed was making a coordinated attack on him.

"These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies, and as I've written about extensively in my books I was very, very promiscuous," Brand said in the video posted to his social media.

One of the women interviewed for the investigation said she was 16 years old and still in school when Brand began a relationship with her when he was in his early 30s.

The victim alleged Brand was emotionally abusive and controlling, and even referred to her as "the child" during their roughly three-month relationship. She also described an incident where she had been forced into a sexual act and was asked to sit in a bath for hours until he came home, even though the water had turned cold.

I made my first visit to Central Asia this summer, spending a week in Almaty, Kazakhstan to teach one of our Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) programs. LAD is a program I started with Roger Leeds while still at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) some thirteen years ago. We do one-week training sessions aimed at mid-career professionals, mostly drawn from the public sector but often including private sector and civil society participants. The original focus was on private sector development, but we’ve broadened our offerings in recent years to include programs on infrastructure development, strategic management, and case writing and teaching. The programs last five intensive days, and are built around a mixture of cases and lectures; the participants do a lot of group work and a final project in which they propose solutions to particular public policy problems.Over the years I had been asked repeatedly to visit Central Asia and teach a LAD program but have been reluctant to do so up until now. LAD is intended to improve the capacity of public officials to perform their tasks more effectively, and I wasn’t that eager to help authoritarian leaders like Nursultan Nazarbayev or Islam Karimov. But the situation is somewhat different now. Their successors Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Shavkat Mirziyoyev are in no way democrats, but they are more technocratic than their Soviet-schooled predecessors. More importantly, the geopolitical situation has changed: with Russia bogged down in Ukraine, all countries around its periphery have more room for maneuver, and Tokayev in particular has shown some independence of Moscow despite the latter’s intervention on his behalf during the protests of January 2022. There is also a budding rivalry between Russia and China in the region that bears watching. By contrast, Americans know very little about this region and need to build better ties and awareness with the people there.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Inside the Green Market in Almaty. (photo by author)Our LAD program was supported by a former Drapers Hills (now Fisher Family) Summer Fellow, Aida Aidarkulova, who created a new NGO called CAPS Unlock (CAPS standing for Central Asia Policy Studies) after having previously led the Soros Open Society branch in Central Asia. We were also backed by the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) which has done substantial work in the region. Our program in Almaty was really extraordinary: participants were drawn from all five Central Asia countries, and each had a lot to contribute. Kazakhstan in particular has had a program in recent years that has sent thousands of its young people abroad for higher educations, something that was evident in the quality of our participants.The first thing to say about Almaty is how modern and prosperous it seems. This is perhaps not surprising; gas and oil have enriched the country and given it upper-middle income status with a per capita GDP of over $20,000. The city is full of skyscrapers and modern office buildings, with what looks like a bustling middle class. It does not have the kind of oppressive police state atmosphere that one would encounter in today’s Russia or China, with pervasive surveillance and punishment for anyone stepping slightly out of line.The other notable thing was the lack of public religiosity. There were very few mosques and we never heard a call to prayer. We saw no women wearing hijabs except for visitors from the Middle East. Our Kazakh associates said that things were different in the countryside, but the country has not had to deal with a serious radical Islamist movement.The degree of personal freedom is however very limited. In the policy projects we asked our participants to do, the biggest obstacle to completing them, regardless of country, was the state: the government dictated the terms of every initiative, and was not open to public input or participation.The attitude of Kazakhs to Russia has been changing. I would compare the situation in the first three decades of the country’s existence to that of India after independence. Educated Kazakhs all speak Russian, and communicate with other Central Asians in Russian because their languages were not necessarily mutually intelligible. As in India, there was a tendency for elites to look up to the colonial power as a more sophisticated civilization, but again as in India there has been a rethinking of the relationship. I was told that young Kazakhs increasingly wanted to speak Kazakh rather than Russian, a tendency that accelerated notably after the invasion of Ukraine. A few used the term “decolonization” to describe the cultural agenda they faced.  There is a palpable threat to Kazakhstan’s sovereignty; Putin has suggested in the past that much of norther Kazakhstan is Russian territory, and that the ethnic Russian minority in the country faces discrimination and needs to be protected just like the Russian-speakers in Ukraine allegedly did. It seems to me pretty clear that if Moscow had succeeded in toppling Zelenskyy early in the war and turned Ukraine into a vassal state, Kazakhstan might well have been next on the chopping block. Conversely, the weaker Russia gets as a result of continuing losses in Ukraine, the more independence Kazakhstan can assert. The situation is apparently different in Uzbekistan, because that country does not share a border with Russia.We taught a couple of case studies of Chinese Belt and Road investments in other parts of the world. It was interesting that there was very little sympathy for China evident among our participants, unlike the reactions we got in, say, Ethiopia. The Kazakhs seem to regard China as a very foreign culture with self-interested motives. The original concept of Belt and Road had rail lines originating in Western China and passing through Central Asia on their way to Europe and the Middle East. Apparently very little of that has materialized because of differences between the five countries in the region. They all have border controls and customs duties that require trains to stop for border inspections; moreover, they, like the Ukrainians, use the old Soviet 1520mm wide gauge rail standard rather than the 1435mm standard gauge track that China and virtually everyone else in the world uses.I returned from this trip feeling that LAD should definitely return to the region. There is little chance of any of the five countries becoming stable democracies in the near future. But Kazakhstan at least has a well-educated younger elite, which generational turnover will eventually bring to power. Mongolia, after all, is another country wedged between Russia and China that has nonetheless been able to remain a democracy and retain some independence. The whole region needs to have stronger connections beyond these two authoritarian great powers, and stronger solidarity with one another.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Top image: Soviet-era memorial in Almaty, Kazakhstan. (Photo by author)

Late Friday night, the former president of the United States—and a leading candidate to be the next president—insinuated that America’s top general deserves to be put to death.That extraordinary sentence would be unthinkable in any other rich democracy. But Donald Trump, on his social-media network, Truth Social, wrote that Mark Milley’s phone call to reassure China in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” (The phone call was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.) Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic’s publication of a profile of Milley, by this magazine’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who detailed the ways in which Milley attempted to protect the Constitution from Trump.And yet, none of the nation’s front pages blared “Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution” or “Former President Accuses General of Treason.” Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability, but he knows exactly what he’s doing. If a mob boss were to say, “In times gone by, people like you would have had their legs broken,” nobody would mistake that for a historical observation. The suggestion is clear, and it comes from a man who has one of America’s loudest megaphones—one that is directed squarely at millions of extremists who are well armed, who insist that the government is illegitimate, and who believe that people like Milley are part of a “deep state” plot against the country.Academics have a formal term for exactly this type of incitement: stochastic terrorism. An influential figure with a large following demonizes a person or a group of people. The likelihood is strong that some small number of followers will take those words literally—when Trump implies that Milley deserves to be put to death, some of his disciples might take it as a marching order. The number of those who take action does not have to be large for the result to be horrific.Already, one of Trump’s minions in Congress has echoed the incitement to violence. The Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona wrote—in his taxpayer-funded newsletter, no less—that “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The meaning is not ambiguous: Gosar is explicitly saying that killing Milley would be desirable.[From the November 2023 Issue: The Patriot]As a political scientist who studies political violence across the globe, I would chalk up the lack of high-profile assassinations in the United States during the Trump and post-Trump era to dumb luck. Already in 2018, one deranged Trump follower, Cesar Sayoc, sent pipe bombs to public figures (and a media organization) who just so happened to be among those whom Trump most often attacked in his Twitter feed. Thankfully, nobody died—not because the dangers of Trump’s rhetoric were overstated but because Sayoc was bad at building bombs.Heading toward one of the most consequential, divisive elections in American history, every ingredient in the deadly recipe for political violence is already in the mix: high-stakes, winner-take-all politics; widespread conspiratorial delusions that detach followers from objective realities; a suggestion that one’s political opponents aren’t “real Americans”; a large supply of violent extremists with easy access to deadly weaponry; and a movement whose leader takes every opportunity to praise those who have already participated in a deadly attack on the government.Eventually, all luck runs out. Political violence is notoriously difficult to forecast with precision, but would anyone really be surprised if Trump’s violent rhetoric led to real-world attacks in the run-up to the 2024 election—or in its aftermath, if he loses?For all of these reasons, Trump’s recent unhinged rant about Milley should be a wake-up call. But in today’s political climate, the incident barely registers. Trump scandals have become predictably banal. And American journalists have become golden retrievers watching a tennis-ball launcher. Every time they start to chase one ball, a fresh one immediately explodes into view, prompting a new chase.Eventually, chasing tennis balls gets old. We become more alive to virtually any distraction: The media fixate on John Fetterman’s hoodie instead of on stories about the relentless but predictable risk of Trump-inspired political violence.Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.

The turmoil at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, which recently laid off more than half its staff, has been a schadenfreude bonanza for the right. Kendi, who argues that there’s no such thing as racial neutrality, that all ideas and policies are either racist or antiracist, was perhaps the biggest intellectual star to emerge from the febrile, quasi-revolutionary moment following the murder of George Floyd. The Center for Antiracist Research launched in 2020 with a grandiose vision, seeking to “understand, explain and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.” Money poured in; it ultimately raised nearly $55 million.

Three years later, there are considerable questions about what’s been accomplished with all that money. Major initiatives, including plans to develop degree programs in antiracism, have been shelved. Little original research has been produced. People who worked at the center have alleged a longstanding pattern of severe mismanagement, with administrators amassing grants with little commitment to doing the work proposed in them. Boston University has begun an inquiry into how the center has been run.

Conservatives who see Kendi as the living embodiment of the style of social justice activism they deride as “wokeness” are, naturally, gleeful. Jeffrey Blehar wrote in National Review that he “cannot emphasize enough” how much the Kendi affair “fills me with delight.” Many on the right see the center’s apparent implosion as proof that the antiracist politics that flourished three years ago were always and only a con. “The point was always to line grifters’ pockets off of the white guilt of liberals and the major corporations they run,” said a Washington Examiner column.

It’s almost hard to blame right-wingers for their delight; Kendi’s mistakes played right into their hands. But for the rest of us, it’s important to understand that the center’s apparent implosion is more the result of a failed funding model than a failed ideology. It exemplifies the lamentable tendency among left-leaning donors to chase fads and celebrities rather than build sustainable institutions.

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“Look at me! I’m reading the Economist! Did you know Indonesia is ‘at a crossroads’?” Ever since Homer Simpson developed a split-second interest in Indonesia in 2004, the “crossroads” conceit seems to have been banished from jet-set magazines. Just as well. The image, which suggests that a nation’s history is as legible and linear as a road map, has long lacked explanatory power. And yet the crossroads is back — and it’s where America, of all places, finds itself in Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.” Hey, Homer: “America is at a crossroads.”

Richardson is a professor of 19th-century history at Boston College and the author of five highly regarded academic books, many of them about the evolution of Republican ideology. She is also the writer of Substack’s most successful — by far — newsletter: By one estimate, Richardson’s daily newsletter, “Letters From an American , ” rakes in $5 million per year. It could even be called cult-y, if cults had several million adherents who yearned for literate, principled and clearheaded analysis of the day’s news.

If anyone can be trusted with the crossroads cliché, then, it’s Richardson. And in “Democracy Awakening,” “the crossroads” serves less as a philosophical crux than as a crime in a detective novel, its discovery kicking off Richardson’s investigation. Her focus is the current anxious era, when, during a presidential campaign with a familiar cast of characters, we’re borne back ceaselessly into the past, assessing the disturbing period in American history that started with the presidential election on Nov. 8, 2016, and crescendoed with the violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. With any luck, we’re in the denouement now, when mysteries are cleared up — and arrests made. If so, Richardson is our ideal Miss Marple.

She has an intriguing origin point for today’s afflictions: the New Deal. The first third of the book, which hurtles toward Donald Trump’s election, is as bingeable as anything on Netflix. “Democracy Awakening” starts in the 1930s, when Americans who’d been wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash were not about to let the rich demolish the economy again. New Deal programs designed to benefit ordinary people and prevent future crises were so popular that by 1960 candidates of both parties were advised to simply “nail together” coalitions and promise them federal funding. From 1946 to 1964, the liberal consensus — with its commitments to equality, the separation of church and state, and the freedoms of speech, press and religion — held sway.

But Republican businessmen, who had caused the crash, despised the consensus. Richardson’s account of how right-wingers appropriated the word “socialism” from the unrelated international movement is astute. When invoked to malign all government investment, “socialism” served to recruit segregationist Democrats, who could be convinced that the word meant Black people would take their money, and Western Democrats, who resented government protections on land and water. This new Republican Party created an ideology that coalesced around White Christianity and free markets.

But winning voters without serving their interests is always a tall order. So in the early ’70s, in Richardson’s telling, Republicans began to harbor doubts about democracy itself. They developed nasty backup plans for when elections didn’t go their way, including gerrymandering, cheating and packing the judiciary with right-wing ideologues. The elections of Richard Nixon in 1972 and George W. Bush in 2000 exposed forms of electoral gameplay that didn’t require delivering anything of value to voters.

And then a boom-bust businessman famous for allegations of racial bias and sexual misconduct won the presidency as a Republican with no coherent policy platform at all. Some of Nixon’s marquee tricksters even rode sidecar in Trump’s victory. “In 2016,” Richardson writes, “the Republicans would ride the themes of the past forty years to their logical conclusion.”

This is the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard. It’s magisterial. In my experience hosting the podcast “Trumpcast,” Trumpologists are typically aberrationists or continuists. Aberrationists believe that Trump is a black swan. Continuists, whose numbers include intellectuals such as Ezra Klein and Max Boot, see Trump on a continuum with Republicans of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Richardson is in this second camp — and, for my money, she gives the continuity thesis its best hearing.

The second two-thirds of “Democracy Awakening” contains material that is simultaneously too familiar and too fresh to submit entirely to a historian’s dispassionate analysis. The slides come fast. “The Apprentice” turns washed-up Trump into an authority figure. He descends the escalator. There are social media dark arts, Russian coordination, racist shock-jock stuff, “lock her up.” American carnage. The stomach-churning tales of James Comey’s 2016 news conference reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton, and later Trump’s admonition to white-nationalist terrorists: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

In Richardson’s telling, nearly every move Trump makes in his benighted term in office is anti-democratic — and documented. The Russia probe reveals interference in the 2016 election. The first impeachment reveals interference in the 2020 election. The second impeachment reveals efforts to overturn the 2020 election and incite an insurrection. It’s impossible to review all these attempts by a U.S. president to avoid doing actual public service and not ask, again, of Trump: Why didn’t you just try governing?

Having once described herself as a Lincoln Republican, Richardson never takes her eye off the party’s terrible metamorphosis. After the 2016 election, some Republicans had buyer’s remorse. Though “they wanted an end to business regulation and social services,” Richardson writes, “they did not want an apocalypse.” Later, as Trump was “delivering their wishlist,” the apocalypse became a risk they were willing to take. Finally, by August 2020, “the Republican Party, which had formed to stand against the enslavers … and restore democracy, was now on board with Trump’s dictatorship.” Ultimately, Trump’s “subversion of constitutional government made Watergate look quaint.”

But really, nothing in “Democracy Awakening” looks quaint. When Trump times get especially bleak, Richardson reaches for analogies past the New Deal, past the Gilded Age, to the Civil War period, her field of scholarship. Here Richardson unearths Southern arguments for slavery that include both white-supremacist dogma and a flat-out rejection (as “fundamentally wrong”) of the founders’ idea that all men are created equal. When Trump ran on what some heard as racist whoops and then executed policies like the Muslim ban, he openly set himself against America’s primary purpose. It was a small step to conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy against civil rights — just two of the 91 felonies Trump is now charged with.

Across her work, Richardson frequently cites a familiar quotation: “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.” It would make sense for a poet to plug sonic association — rhyme — over repetition, reason or causality. But why would a historian? “Democracy Awakening” sometimes seems like a rhetorical exercise in making events from different periods illuminate one another by dint of mere juxtaposition. Richardson is deft, and often I can find the rhyme she hears, but just as often I wondered about historical and cultural contingencies that she might be leaving out in the effort to create such an aerodynamic story.

One of the reasons for the enormous appeal of Richardson’s journalism is her bedrock faith that the liberal consensus abides, whatever the attempts of the rich or bigoted minority to shatter it. I’m entirely convinced. It’s a hardy meme, that one about how we’re all created equal. Toward the end of the book, Richardson quotes Jimmy Carter: “We are all Americans together, and we must not forget that the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.” For those to whom this is common sense, “Democracy Awakening” will be a homecoming.

Virginia Heffernan writes about tech, politics and culture for Wired Magazine.

Democracy Awakening

Notes on the State of America

By Heather Cox Richardson

All this is good for the Democrats, who would have had to block any House budget that decimated critical services like health care. As things stand now, if we go into October without a national budget in place, all the ensuing crises will be blamed on the Republicans.

Not saying I want that to happen, but if it does, glad the shame will go in the right direction.

Bret: House Republicans have become a circular firing squad, and I really have to wonder whether McCarthy will last another month as speaker, let alone to the end of this Congress. Although whenever I think the Republicans are harming themselves, I turn to the Democrats. Granting almost 500,000 Venezuelans temporary protected status is the right thing to do, but the administration’s failure to get control of the border means it’s only a matter of time before grants at this scale happen as a matter of course. I just don’t understand how this is good policy or wise politics. Please explain it to me.

Gail: Don’t think anybody feels the current border policies are anything close to perfect, but it’s a question of what else to do. Eager to hear any suggestions that don’t involve a stupid, embarrassing wall.

Bret: Which I continue to favor — along with wide and welcoming gates — but OK. There’s also something called a smart fence that has excellent sensors to detect border crossings but is less ugly, less expensive and more environmentally sensitive than a wall. But it would have to be staffed continuously by armed patrols. We can also immediately return people arriving here illegally rather than let them stay in the United States while awaiting a court hearing, unless they are from countries where they are at mortal risk from their own governments. Barack Obama did that pretty robustly, and I don’t remember any of my liberal friends claiming it was an assault on human rights. And we need to enormously expand consular facilities throughout Latin America so people’s immigration claims can be processed abroad, not after they’ve crossed the border.

Gail: Voting with you on greatly expanded consular services.

Bret: It would be a start. And I’m saying all this as someone who believes deeply in the overall benefits of immigration. But a de facto open border doesn’t advance the cause of a liberal immigration policy. It undermines it. And it could take down a lot of the Democratic Party in the process.

If you’ve found Persuasion after reading The Identity Trap or listening to a book talk or podcast: first, welcome! For the great experiment of diverse liberal democracies to succeed, its proponents need to defend their vision against threats from illiberalism across the political spectrum:Against the populist and authoritarian right, liberal democrats must defend the principles and institutions that hold demagogues and would-be autocrats in check, rejecting an ethnonationalism that seeks to destroy the very possibility of diverse societies. At the same time, liberals must reject a cynical reading of history that sees the many failures of liberal democracies as proof that the promise of liberal democracy itself is hollow, or that we will inevitably be divided along the lines of immutable identity characteristics. For decades, liberalism has offered answers to these challenges. At precisely the moment that liberalism is most needed, however, it seems to be suffering a crisis of confidence and ideas. Its defenders have gotten complacent about explaining why it offers a compelling positive vision. As a result, many of us who grew up with a devotion to the vision of equality that liberalism offers now feel somewhat disoriented, committed to the defense of its core principles but without institutions to call home.I founded Persuasion to be a home for revitalizing philosophical liberalism. Our ethos is simple: to be a place for people open to changing their minds, not their values.In part, we’re a digital magazine. In our pages and podcasts, we’re responding forcefully to authoritarian extremes on the right and to a simplistic understanding of identity on the left. But we’re also committed to offering a viable alternative, sketching the contours of what a positive vision of liberalism for the 21st century can offer. In addition to the publication, Persuasion is a nascent community—nearly 50,000 strong—of committed philosophical liberals from a range of backgrounds, and from across the world. At our in-person global meetups, weekly virtual happy hours and biweekly virtual conversation clubs, we’re working to build an esprit de corps that emboldens each of us to stand up for liberal values in our own communities.If this sounds like something you’d value, please join us! You can sign up for free below to receive an article three times a week and our flagship podcast, The Good Fight, on Saturdays. As a nonprofit, we’re committed to keeping all of our articles and podcasts free to everyone. If you’re able to support us financially by becoming a paid member, you’ll receive all our content and also invitations to members-only live meetups like our upcoming happy hours in London, New York, and Washington, DC. Most importantly, though, you’ll be an integral part of allowing us to continue to keep Persuasion available to all.— YaschaSubscribe nowP.S. To learn more about the vision for the community, you can read our manifesto, “The Purpose of Persuasion,” here.

Thanks to subscribers for sending us another batch of great questions. As ever we haven’t been able to answer everything but hopefully have picked a good mix. Lawrence answers on topics including:What a Trump win might mean for UkraineDrones vs tanksAre Ukraine’s war aims achievable?Putin and North KoreaRealists Chances of a Russian collapseWhat makes a good leaderSam answers on topics including:Priority setting for a new governmentPolicies for growthWill the Tories leave the ECHRWhat taxes will go upStandout Labour candidatesStarmer and the EUPR and why Labour aren’t interestedQuestions to LawrenceDG: Does a Trump victory necessarily hasten a Ukraine loss? Or what other realistic dynamics/scenarios could play out in the event of a withdrawal of US support that do not necessarily lead to Ukraine being left stranded?Putin is hoping for a Trump victory. If this happens this will have enormous consequences well beyond Ukraine, with consternation among US allies and potential chaos in the US. Trump is very unpredictable and will act according to how he thinks it makes him look. Much will depend on the state of the war. Also Trump’s priorities. Will he concentrate on unravelling his legal problems and pardoning his friends? What will happen to Congress in elections? Whatever happens the Senate will remain hostile to Russia. Who does he get into key jobs in State, Pentagon, and NSC?As far Russia/Ukraine is concerned Trump has claimed that he will end the conflict ‘in a day’, which he can’t. He will wish to talk with Putin (hard to see where given that he is under ICC indictment). Putin may expect Trump to dump Zelensky completely and push his luck. Ukraine will lobby hard. I could imagine scenarios in which Trump tries to see if there is a deal and then blames whoever he feels is being most difficult. So while it is hard to see how a Trump victory will be good for Ukraine we can’t assume any consequences.As interesting a question is what happens if Biden wins again because that may force Putin to reappraise his strategy.Ben Reynolds: Tanks, aircraft carriers, and military planes have become assets too valuable to risk in actual combat (e.g., F-35 at $80 million each). Drones are astonishingly cheaper and harder to find/track/kill. How do you think the role of the expensive assets will change in the next two decades?This is not a new issue. Fifty years ago after October 73 Arab-Israel War the vulnerability of tanks to accurate anti-tank weapons and aircraft to anti-aircraft missiles was noted. The problem is that if you are moving vehicles in battlefield capable of attacking enemy positions then they are best armoured and they look like tanks. The issue is a very transparent battlefield that makes it harder to hide which means that movement is unwise unless defences have been suppressed, which the Ukrainians have found difficult because of limited air power. I think there is a case for relying on more smaller systems than a few big ones. The main shifts will be tactical I suspect, plus more emphasis on electronic warfare techniques to neutralise drones.   Read more  

Welcome to this week's digest. In our book reviews section, Hannah Gal discusses Thomas Sowell's "Social Justice Fallacies," Sohale Mortazavi tackles Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris' "Nobody's Fool," Oliver Traldi delves into Richard Hanania's "The Origins of Woke," and Lawrence Krauss revisits Charles Darwin's early writings. In essays, John Lloyd takes on the immigration challenges facing rich democracies, while Jon Kay reports on a Canadian protest against teaching gender ideology in schools. Lastly, Herbert Bushman explores the Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire in our series on the Dark Ages. If you have questions or feedback, contact Zoe at members@quillette.com. See you next week! —ClaireThe So Called Dark AgesHuns to the North. Romans to the SouthIn the second instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ podcaster Herbert Bushman describes the events that sparked the fateful Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire.QuilletteHerbert BushmanReviewInescapable DisparitiesThomas Sowell’s new book reminds us that the world has never been a level playing field and we will not be able to engineer one.QuilletteHannah GalIn an Age of Scams, Self-Help Falls ShortAn individualistic focus only goes so far in preventing scams and frauds.QuilletteSohale MortazaviCharles Darwin: The Best Scientist-Writer of All TimeThe Voyage of the Beagle is a literary masterpiece, as well as a scientific one.QuilletteLawrence M. KraussCivil Rights and WrongsHanania’s new book is a welcome entry to the conversation about wokeness, but his power-based perspective is incomplete.QuilletteOliver TraldiStrange New Sci FiIf truth is the first casualty of war, then perhaps good fiction is the first tragedy of culture war.QuilletteJohnny Schmidt‘Augie March’ Turns 70An Interview with Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader.QuilletteRiley MooreWorld AffairsThe Immigration ConundrumMigration from the developing world to the West will continue until and unless international development can improve the societies people are leaving.QuilletteJohn LloydChina’s Manufactured Fukushima PanicThe CCP has not missed an opportunity to inflame fears about its Japanese neighbor.QuilletteAaron SarinCultureSaving Liberalism from ‘The Identity Trap’: An Interview with Yascha MounkIn an acclaimed new book, the German-American political scientist traces the rise of illiberal intellectual movements among modern progressives.QuilletteJonathan KayCanadian Parents (Finally) Push Back Against Gender CultismMany of us are simply tired of living in a society that gaslights citizens with officially sanctioned lies like ‘trans women are women‘QuilletteJonathan KayWhere Does ‘Wokeness’ Come From?Opponents of wokeness sometimes say that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But the federal judiciary does.QuilletteRichard HananiaAre We Dating the Same Guy?Women create whisper networks to keep themselves safe from antisocial male behaviour. But unfortunately, such networks can be highjacked by our antisocial female peers.QuilletteAmy Eileen HammQuillette CeteraQuillette Cetera Episode 17: Too Gay for the Christian Church, Too Problematic for the Woke ChurchAn interview with “anti-woke” artist Melody Rachel.QuilletteZoe BoothQuillette Cetera Episode 18: The Kiss Overreaction and Why We Don’t Have White GuiltTwo recent controversies remind us that there’s always the option to see yourself as a victor, not a victim.QuilletteZoe BoothSocialsQuillette Social London | HumanitixQuillette Social London, Hosted at Old Queen Street Cafe, 6 Old Queen St, London SW1H 9HP, UK, Fri 3rd Nov 2023, 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm GMT. Tickets are between £97-£350. Only on HumanitixHumanitixQuillette Social Melbourne | HumanitixQuillette Social Melbourne, Hosted at Bridge Hotel, 642 Bridge Rd, Richmond VIC 3121, Australia, Fri 29th Sep 2023, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm AEST. Tickets are between $60-$250. Only on HumanitixHumanitixClaire's Comment of the WeekDeep Turning on Huns to the North. Romans to the SouthOMG this reads like the earlier chapters of Gibbon.I had forgotten what a disaster the battle of Adrianople was for the Romans. The long borders and distances were never really overcome in the later empire and proved a daunting factor in keeping it all together. I think someone estimated that the equivalent would be ruling the world, deploying a land army, not a navy, across a planet 40,000 miles in circumference.It would be good to integrate this with the chronology of the later Roman emperors starting with Constantine.From Around the WebSam Harris | #335 - A Postmortem on My Response to CovidJoin neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores some of the most pressing and controversial questions of our time.Sam HarrisThe long-awaited GenCost 'sunk cost' explainer. Starring @CSIRO, @simonahac and @Bowenchris. Cameos from @AEMO_energy, @clairlemon, and @DavidOsmond8. Also featuring a side-note on subs, at least one lame joke, and a dash of doom-music.Enjoy. https://t.co/JxDtceCvlt— Aidan Morrison (@QuixoticQuant) September 24, 2023 

In recent weeks there has been a lot of discussion about Joe Biden’s age. He’s old. But you know what comes with age besides a slower gait and forgetting words? Wisdom — in particular how to handle a high-stakes diplomatic encounter without blowing things up (or blowing things up before you want them to blow up). And that’s what I think I saw at the face-to-face meeting between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Wednesday in New York.

A lot of Israeli reporters and people I know were left depressed by the meeting, because Netanyahu came out and told everyone how warm and friendly it was. And Biden spoke about the unbreakable bonds between America and the Jewish state. Many Israelis so detest Netanyahu that they wanted Biden to publicly rebuke him over the judicial coup that Bibi has mounted — and when that didn’t happen they thought the meeting was a huge missed opportunity.

I get it, I get it, I told them. But didn’t you see it, I asked?

See what, they responded?

While Biden was publicly putting his right arm around Netanyahu’s shoulder — precisely to defuse any attacks from Republicans for being too tough on Israel — I hear the president was, SO TO SPEAK, using his left hand to privately slip a homework assignment into Bibi’s pocket. It was like a magician at work; you’d need to find the instant replay in double slow-motion to see it.

And do you know what that homework assignment said? My reporting suggests that it was broadly along these lines:

“Bibi, you want this deal that would normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. I want it too. But to get this deal, I’m going to have to do something really hard — forge a mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia and maybe agree to some kind of civil nuclear program for the Kingdom under strict controls. The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is going to have to do something really hard — normalize relations between the home of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina — with the Jewish state. And now you’re going to have to do something hard too.

On Wednesday the Biden administration announced that it will offer work permits and deportation protections to over 400,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States since 2021. On paper this is a humanitarian gesture, a recognition of the miseries of life under the Maduro dictatorship. In political practice it’s a flailing attempt to respond to a sudden rise in anti-immigration sentiment in blue cities, particularly New York, as the surge of migrants overwhelms social services and shelters.

I say flailing because the fundamental problem facing the Biden administration is on the southern border, where every attempt to get ahead of the extraordinary numbers trying to cross or claim asylum has been overwhelmed.

In Eagle Pass, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reports that in a week, an estimated 10,000 migrants have entered the city, whose entire population is less than 30,000. The subsequent movement of migrants to places like New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., has been encouraged by red-state governors, but under any circumstances such crowds in Eagle Pass would eventually mean rising numbers in big cities. And policies that make it easier to work in those cities, like the Biden move, are likely to encourage more migration until the border is more stable and secure.

The liberal confusion over this situation, the spectacle of Democratic politicians like Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul sounding like Fox News hosts, is a foretaste of the difficult future facing liberals across the Western world.

At long last, the rigid and outdated dress code in Congress has been sent down the river of bad ideas, along with the Segway and natural childbirth.Americans have been going through a sea change regarding work, with many of us experiencing not less but more productivity when we started working from home during the pandemic. Among the young, the change is even deeper. They are vocal about their disdain for jobs that might not end at 5 o’clock and bosses who police employee behavior, right down to what they wear. They are rightly disaffected by the workings of a government where a gerontocracy rules and things never seem to get better. The elimination of the dress code could be one small step toward making Congress more relevant to them; it will make the institution seem less formal, less impenetrable.Changing the dress code is, however, a half measure, because there is no way of getting around the problem of the Capitol itself. With its Latin inscriptions, marble staircases, and graven images of slaveholding presidents, the building—and the ideas of American greatness and exceptionalism it represents—is hardly consistent with our current interests. Its power to suppress self-expression—personal and political—is obvious. It may be time to reexamine not just Congress’s dress code, but its office space.No legal document absolutely requires the legislative branch to conduct business in the Capitol, so the possibilities are endless. Consider, for example, moving Congress from the Mall to a mall, specifically, its food court.A mall would offer our legislators drivability, endless parking, and a casual atmosphere that would help them work smarter, not harder. Gone would be those fusty chamber desks that make the members look like Longfellow scratching out a poem with an old nib. Food courts’ abundant seating would get rid of the hierarchical arrangements in the chambers. Of course, everyone will want to sit next to Orange Julius, but it won’t take five reelections and membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution to do it. In true democratic fashion, the best seat can go to the newest and youngest—all he or she has to do is floor it on the Beltway and get there first.Imagine a new senator, riddled with anxiety about his first vote, asking his tablemate to hold his seat while he gets up, stretches his legs, and pours himself a refreshing half gallon of Hi-C. His blood sugar raised, his body uncramped, he can vote to invade Mexico with confidence. Busy working parents could end their day by grabbing a delicious meal to take home. Kids love two things: bicameral legislation and Baja Fresh. And imagine the sergeant at arms (in a Snuggie and shower slides) calling the (food) court to order as he announces the arrival of the president to give the State of the Union address. Innovative, fun, casual. Or picture the Ways and Means Committee conducting its important work in a Foot Locker. That makes more sense than anywhere with a transom window.Chuck Schumer’s decision to change the rules was apparently prompted by the situation of Senator John Fetterman, who does the people’s business in a mall-appropriate hoodie and gym shorts, and has therefore sometimes been forced to yell votes in from doorways. But when announcing the reform, Schumer revealed the cowing nature of long-held and empty traditions: “Senators are able to choose what they wear on the Senate floor. I will continue to wear a suit.”Usually the people chafing against dress codes are women and girls. But all it took here were the whims of two cisgender, straight white men. Still, shopping malls can impose a mediating force on all that privilege. Despite the sports bars and Best Buys, American malls were originally designed for suburban women, who were newly stranded away from the commerce of urban centers, and malls have been meeting their needs ever since. In a mall, the thundering pronouncements of male legislators—traditionally booming upward into the Capitol’s great dome (on which George Washington himself is depicted being borne straight to heaven)—would quickly get dialed down to the inside voices of small boys politely asking their mothers for quarters to play in the arcade.A lot of people are losing their mind over the dress-code situation, mostly conservatives who are appealing to the kind of propriety, decency, and correctness that they can no longer claim for themselves. There was a time—very much in living memory—when the hallmark of a conservative was his forbearance, his unwillingness to match the crude language and outrageousness of the radicalized left, and his almost religious belief in the power of dressing quietly.Think of Richard Nixon in the East Room welcoming the Ray Conniff Singers to the stage. “If the music is square, it’s because I like it square,” he says, with a twinkle in his eye. The singers—very young women in pale-blue gowns and very young men in navy-blue blazers—file in, but before they begin one of the girls unrolls a scroll that reads Stop the killing, and says, in a calm, certain voice: “President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals, and vegetation.” She then goes on to explain that although he “pray[s] to Jesus Christ,” his faith is hollow.Did the humiliated president match incivility with incivility, in the way of modern conservatives? No, he took it like a man and worked through his feelings by planning the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam.But many of today’s elected conservatives are no longer interested in public restraint, which they consider a sucker’s game. They feel that their own politeness and even temperament allowed liberal savagery to mow them down, and they’re not taking it anymore.Marjorie Taylor Greene called Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” on the House floor, and Tim Burchett said he thought that was cool because he’s a “professional-wrestling fan” down with the idea of the women someday having a fistfight: “I kind of dig that.”Lindsey Graham went on Fox News (blue blazer, no tie) to explain—regarding immigration—that Donald Trump “scared the shit out of Mexico.”One night in July, some congressional pages were commemorating their last week in the program by taking pictures of the awe-inspiring Capitol dome, lying down on the floor to get a shot that encompassed its sweep. When newly elected Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin encountered them, he yelled, “Wake the fuck up, you little shits,” according to one of the pages. He told them to “get the fuck out of here,” called them “jackasses,” and then—God love him—told them that they were “defiling the space.”Now, what kind of talk is this? Is it “Here, Sir, the people govern” talk? Hell no. It’s mall talk! These people will fit right in. Lauren Boebert doesn’t want to spend one more lunch hour eating a bowl of bilious navy-bean soup. No, she wants to get a Jamba and check out the sale at Forever 21.The best aspect of this modest proposal is that shopping malls are a failing enterprise. Scores of them sit empty, abandoned temples to a forgotten god. The good ice no longer rattles into paper cups, Santa has left the building, and even the most star-crossed teenagers no longer want to wander, pinkie fingers linked, through the runway-size halls.We’ve moved on. We’re tired of malls, although we take their existence for granted. If there weren’t a Sharper Image, no grandfather would ever get a Christmas present. Of course the mall exists; we just don’t go there anymore.

As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.Her hospital isn’t alone in this trend. For decades, demographers have documented a lift in American births in late summer, and a trough in the spring. I see it myself in my own corner of the world: In the past several weeks, the hospital across the street from me has become a revolving door of new parents and infants. When David Lam, an economist at the University of Michigan who helped pioneer several early U.S. studies on seasonal patterns of fertility, first analyzed his data decades ago, “we were kind of surprised how big it was,” he told me. Compare the peak of some years to their nadir, he said, and it was almost like looking at the Baby Boom squished down into 12 months.Birth seasonality has been documented since the 1820s, if not earlier. But despite generations of study, we still don’t fully understand the reasons it exists, or why it differs so drastically among even neighboring countries. Teasing apart the contributions of biology and behavior to seasonality is messy because of the many factors involved, says Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, who has been studying seasonality for years. And even while researchers try to track it, the calendar of human fertility has been changing. As our species has grown more industrialized, claimed more agency over reproduction, and reshaped the climate we are living in, seasonality, in many places, is shifting or weakening.[Read: The pregnancy risk that doctors won’t mention]There is no doubt that a big part of human birth seasonality is behavioral. People have more sex when they have more free time; they have less sex when they’re overworked or overheated or stressed. Certain holidays have long been known to carry this effect: In parts of the Western world with a heavy Christian presence, baby boomlets fall roughly nine months after Christmas; the same patterns have been spotted with Spring Festival and Lunar New Year in certain Chinese communities. (Why these holidays strike such a note, and not others, isn’t entirely clear, experts told me.)In addition to free time, family-focused celebrations probably help set the mood, Luis Rocha, a systems scientist at Binghamton University, told me. Cold weather might help people get snuggly around Christmastime, too, but it’s not necessary; Rocha’s studies and others have shown the so-called Christmas effect in southern-hemisphere countries as well. No matter whether Christmas falls in the winter or summer, around the end of December, Google searches for sex skyrocket and people report more sexual activity on health-tracking apps. In a few countries, including the U.S., condom sales rise too.But cultural norms have never been able to explain everything about the Homo sapiens birth calendar. “It’s pretty common for mammals to have a specific breeding season” dictated by all sorts of environmental cues, Martinez told me. Deer, for instance, mate in the fall, triggered by the shortening length of daylight, effectively scheduling their fawns to be born in the spring; horses, whose gestations are longer, breed as the days lengthen in the spring and into summer, so they can foal the following year.Humans, of course, aren’t horses or deer. Our closest relatives among primates “are much more flexible” about when they mate, Élise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montpellier, in France, told me. But those apes are not immune to their surroundings, and neither are we. All sorts of hormones in the human body, including reproductive ones, wax and wane with the seasons. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that couples hoping to conceive via in vitro fertilization have a higher chance of success if the eggs are retrieved during the summer. At the same time, summer conceptions appear to be less common, or less successfully carried to term, in some countries, a trend that sharpens at lower latitudes and, Lam told me, during hotter years. The subsequent spring lulls may be explained in part by heat waves dissuading people from sex. But Alan Barreca, an economist at UCLA, suspects that ultrahigh temperatures may also physiologically compromise fertility, potentially by affecting factors such as sperm quantity and quality, ovulation success, or the likelihood of early fetal loss.[Read: Life can’t get much hotter than this]No matter its exact drivers, seasonality is clearly weakening in many countries, Martinez told me; in some parts of the world, it may be entirely gone. The change isn’t uniform or entirely understood, but it’s probably to some extent a product of just how much human lifestyles have changed. In many communities that have historically planted and harvested their own food, people may have been more disinclined to, and less physically able to, conceive a child when labor demands were high or when crops were scarce—trends that are still prominent in certain countries today. People in industrial and high-income areas of the modern world, though, are more shielded from those stressors and others, in ways that may even out the annual birth schedule, Kathryn Grace, a geographer at the University of Minnesota, told me. The heat-driven dip in America’s spring births, for instance, has softened substantially in recent decades, likely due in part to increased access to air-conditioning, Lam said. And as certain populations get more relaxed about religion, the cultural drivers of birth times may be easing up, too, several experts told me. Sweden, for example, appears to have lost the “Christmas effect” of December sex boosting September births.Advances in contraception and fertility treatments have also put much more of fertility under personal control. People in well-resourced parts of the world can now, to a decent degree, realize their preferences for when they want their babies to be born. In Sweden, parents seem to avoid November and December deliveries because that would make their child among the youngest in their grade (which carries a stereotype of potentially having major impacts on their behavioral health, social skills, academics, and athletic success). In the U.S., people have reported preferring to give birth in the spring; there’s also a tax incentive to deliver early-winter babies before January 1, says Neel Shah, the chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a women’s health and fertility clinic in New York.Humans aren’t yet, and never will be, completely divorced from the influences of our surroundings. We are also constantly altering the environment in which we reproduce—which could, in turn, change the implications of being born during a particular season. Births are not only more common at certain times of the year; they can also be riskier, because of the seasonal perils posed to fetuses and newborns, Mary-Alice Doyle, a social-policy researcher at the London School of Economics, told me. Babies born during summer may be at higher risk of asthma, for instance—a trend that’s likely to get only stronger as heat waves, wildfires, and air pollution become more routine during the year’s hottest months.The way we manage infectious disease matters too. Being born shortly after the peak of flu season—typically winter, in temperate parts of the world—can also be dangerous: Infections during pregnancy have been linked to lower birth weight, preterm delivery, even an increased likelihood of the baby developing certain mental-health issues later on. Comparable concerns exist in the tropics, where mosquitoes, carrying birth-defect-causing viruses such as dengue or Zika, can wax and wane with the rainy season. The more humans allow pathogens to spill over from wildlife and spread, the bigger these effects are likely to be.[Read: One more COVID summer?]Children born in the spring—in many countries, a more sparsely populated group—tend to be healthier on several metrics, Barreca told me. It’s possible that they’re able to “thread the needle,” he said, between the perils of flu in winter and extreme heat in summer. But these infants might also thrive because they are born to families with more socioeconomic privilege, who could afford to beat the heat that might have compromised other conceptions. As heat waves become more intense and frequent, people without access to air-conditioning might have an even harder time getting pregnant in the summer.The point of all this isn’t that there is a right or wrong time of year to be born, Grace told me. If seasonality will continue to have any sway over when we conceive and give birth, health-care systems and public-health experts might be able to use that knowledge to improve outcomes, shuttling resources to maternity wards and childhood-vaccination clinics, for instance, during the months they might be in highest demand.Humans may never have had as strict a breeding season as horses and deer. But the fact that so many people can now deliver safely throughout the year is a testament to our ingenuity—and to our sometimes-inadvertent power to reshape the world we live in. We have, without always meaning to, altered a fundamental aspect of human reproduction. And we’re still not done changing it.

In a court of law, defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence. In the court of public opinion, Senator Bob Menendez enjoys no such indulgence.The Democrat from New Jersey was indicted today—along with his wife, Nadine, and three others—on three counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors say the group accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to assist the Egyptian government. Among other allegations, they say Menendez gave sensitive U.S.-government information to the Egyptians and tried to shield two of the defendants from prosecution.This isn’t the first federal corruption case against Menendez, and his continued representation of his state in the Senate and as head of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee (at least up until today: Menendez stepped down from the chairmanship after his indictment) are a testament to the pusillanimity of Democrats. The news also shows how the heated partisanship of the current era can keep bad politicians in office for fear of helping the other party.The indictment includes claims that New York accurately characterizes as “cartoonish.” In Menendez’s closet, FBI agents found envelopes full of cash in the pockets of jackets that had Menendez’s name sewn on them. They also turned up more than $100,000 worth of gold bars, like in some sort of harebrained Yosemite Sam scheme. (For good measure, the bars are stamped Swiss Bank Corporation.) Prosecutors also cite texts from Nadine to Bob Menendez complaining that a co-defendant, Wael Hana, had not paid the bribes he’d promised. And prosecutors allege the senator agreed to derail a prosecution in exchange for a Mercedes C-300 convertible. The document is, perhaps needless to say, a compelling read.If corruption allegations against Bob Menendez sound familiar, that’s not just because you’re familiar with the recent history of other Democratic senators from New Jersey. In 2015, Menendez was indicted by federal prosecutors for a sweeping bribery scheme, alongside a doctor named Salomon Melgen.The evidence against Menendez seemed compelling, but he got a lucky break: In the midst of his trial, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a corruption conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, a decision that, Matt Ford wrote, “fundamentally changed the standard for bribery.” The jury hung, the Justice Department dismissed charges, and Menendez got off with a severe admonition from the Senate Ethics Committee. (Melgen was later convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison for Medicare fraud. Donald Trump commuted his sentence in one of his last acts as president, crediting Melgen’s “generosity in treating all patients especially those unable to pay or unable to afford health-care insurance”—on your dime.)By then, as the journalist Dick Polman wrote in The Atlantic, Menendez had “escaped more scrapes than Houdini,” and his name was “synonymous with ethical lapses.” The moment would have seemed right for Democrats to be rid of Menendez. Not only was he an ethical liability in his own right, but his presence also undercut the corruption accusations the party was lodging against Trump. But they didn’t want to expel him from the Senate, because New Jersey’s governor at the time, Chris Christie, is a Republican, and could have appointed a Republican to the seat. So Menendez stayed, and in 2018 was reelected to the Senate.Some people might lay low for a while after a fortuitous escape from the law, but prosecutors say Menendez promptly went back to doing corruption in spring 2018, around the time of his censure. The scheme was helped by the fact that in February 2018, just after charges were dropped, Menendez became the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Three years later, when Democrats retook the Senate, he became the chair. That gave him a perfect position to use his power to benefit Egypt.Menendez says he’s innocent, and released a scorching statement this morning. “For years, forces behind the scenes have repeatedly attempted to silence my voice and dig my political grave,” he said. “Since this investigation was leaked nearly a year ago, there has been an active smear campaign of anonymous sources and innuendos to create an air of impropriety where none exists. The excesses of these prosecutors is apparent.”He added: “Those behind this campaign ... see me as an obstacle in the way of their broader political goals.” That sounds a lot like Trump’s “I’m being indicted for you,” and his claims that he’s the target of retribution by the “deep state.” Menendez’s protests are hard to take seriously given that New Jersey is run by Democrats and the president is a Democrat (though Menendez is not a close pal of Biden’s), but voicing these arguments could help validate Trump’s defense against his own indictments, just as Menendez’s presence undermined the political case against Trump in 2018. But Democrats may have only delayed their headache, because Menendez is up for reelection in 2024. His travails could give Republicans a chance at taking his seat.Menendez’s survival has left New Jerseyans, and Americans, with an ethically compromised senator, because Democrats were afraid that getting rid of him would produce a Republican senator—something they viewed as even worse. Today’s politics is suffused with what political scientists call negative partisanship—the phenomenon where partisans are more motivated by fear and loathing of the other party than affection or affinity for their own. In this way, Menendez’s indictment echoes the 2024 presidential election too, in which each party is poised to nominate a candidate based on the belief that he’s the one best positioned to defeat the other side—not for his own talents or character. Are there worse things than losing an election? The Menendez prosecution might offer one answer to that question.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekEarlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.The driving was safe and efficient. But at the end of the ride, the car stopped in the middle lane of a three-lane street, forcing us to cross a lane of traffic to reach safety on the sidewalk.So … not yet ready for prime time, but pretty close.Are driverless cars the future? Should cities allow them to be tested on the street now? Even in your neighborhood? What about the multiton driverless trucks that the Teamsters want to ban? (I am pro-innovation, but when sober, I also like driving. I hope I’m never forced to give it up.)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteLaughs, Lies, and Fabulist HateLast week, Clare Malone published an article in The New Yorker revealing that the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who came of age as a practicing Muslim in post-9/11 America, made up various stories he has told about bigots engaging in prejudicial or abusive behavior toward him.For example, in a 2022 Netflix special, he speaks about the reaction to his talk show, Patriot Act. Malone describes the scene from the special: The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ” Powerful stuff. But it didn’t happen, Malone reports: The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time. During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj. The article describes other similar instances of fabulism, and Minhaj’s explanation for them: The stories are based on “emotional truths” and “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”The revelations have prompted a lot of journalistic reactions. Few have defended the falsehoods. Yet as Kat Rosenfield put it at UnHerd, “It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves.” So many observers have had a hard time describing why Minhaj crossed the line, even though most of them are committed to the proposition that something is amiss.In fact, I’ve yet to see anyone pinpoint what I see as the strongest case against Minhaj’s style. But before I tip my hand, here’s a quick rundown of some alternative indictments. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman argues, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.”For Nitish Pahwa at Slate, the problem was something to akin to stolen valor: There are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith … The people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes … Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans. My own take?Hate crimes carry an additional legal penalty. And there’s a strong argument in favor of hate-crime enhancements: Robbing or assaulting or murdering someone because they are Muslim or Black or gay sows fear in whole communities, harming many beyond the primary victim. When a person fabricates a hate crime or adjacent acts of bigotry, they do similar second-order harm. The gang-rape hoax that Rolling Stone published in 2014 scared many women on college campuses. Chicagoans who believed Jussie Smollett were frightened at the prospect of MAGA zealots beating Black pedestrians. Obviously, gang rapes and street assaults do happen; nevertheless, fabulist accounts of such incidents cause many to erroneously believe they are a bigger threat, or a different one, than they had previously judged.Imagine the ripples of fear an Islamophobic bigot would cause––to Muslim Americans, and to Muslim public figures and their families especially––by mailing mysterious white powder to the house of a prominent Muslim comic. Imagine how such an act might chill the speech of some Muslims. The ripples of fear such a bigot would cause are the same ripples that Minhaj himself caused! And that, in my estimation, is the strongest case against Minhaj’s “emotional truths.”A Debt UnpaidIn The Atlantic, Adam Harris flags an attempt to quantify a particular kind of racial discrimination: On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars … the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions. He goes on to note “the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated.”For example: If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie. “There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades,” he concludes. “The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.”Wonder Wall At Wisdom of Crowds, Damir Marusic makes a claim about an aspect of aging: I found myself outside of a bar with a friend. As we stood outside on the sidewalk, we remarked how funny it is to see all the people out, walking around, going to one place after another, clearly anticipating a great night ahead. “I remember what that used to be like—that excitement,” I said. “Sure, it was just a bar or a club we were heading to, but it represented a kind of energy.” I personally never went out to bars to meet new people, just to meet up with my people. So that feeling wasn’t so much a sense of possibility at serendipitous encounters with strangers as it was being surrounded by an electric charge. Drinking in loud crowded places amplifies the inherent buzz of alcohol. And for whatever reason, the novelty of that amplified buzz felt like it would never wear off. But wear off it did. I don’t drink much these days, as it makes me slow the next day. And as I grow older, I don’t want to squander days on useless things like recovery. Beyond being more gun-shy, however, is a more banal truth: it got repetitive. All senses, if overstimulated, dull out. Looking at all the happy buzzing people out on 14th street that night, it struck me that what separated me from them is a sense of wonder. When you’re younger, you have more capacity for it. You don’t recognize patterns quite so well, so you believe that things are more mutable than they are. As you discover the world, it seems limitless, and limitlessly astonishing. But as you experience more and more of it, you start to figure out how things work. Not in the sense of gaining ultimate and total knowledge—that’s hubris. Hard-won wisdom is the opposite: figuring out what is unknowable, and appreciating how chance works. Still, as the patterns become a little more recognizable, the world becomes a little less enchanted. How the First Amendment WorksIn Politico, Adam Cancryn reports, “Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online.” To which National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responds, the suit has limited the Biden administration’s speech-policing “as opposed to what?”He writes: The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of “misinformation” is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society. In the United States, it is the authorities, not the citizens, who are cabined by the law. The Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government with which it might legitimately police lies, and, as if to make the matter as clear as possible, the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits such policing. In totalitarian nations, the state is permitted to determine what it considers to be authoritatively true, to disseminate its resolutions across the country, and to punish anyone who dissents. Here, the state must allow individuals to speak irrespective of the contempt in which it holds their opinions. Remarkably, this applies even when the president is a Democrat and the topic is vaccines. The frame that both the Biden administration and Politico have adopted is thus defective. The White House has not “felt handcuffed”; it is handcuffed. The limits on its power are not the consequence of “a Republican lawsuit”; the Republican lawsuit is meant to uphold the constitutional limits on its power. Biden’s compliance with the ruling has not given those whom he disdains “more space to promote their views”; that space existed beforehand and was being temporarily invaded by the executive branch. Throughout, Politico implies that those who have benefited from the verdict are not really exercising their rights: The lack of force, the outlet sneers, has allowed them to “tout themselves as free speech warriors.” But there’s no “tout themselves” about it. They are free-speech warriors. They’re engaged in “free speech,” which, in America, includes misinformation, and they’re “warriors” because the government is trying to shut them up. That the content of their speech is often preposterous is no more important to the case than it would be if it were “hateful.” There are no classes of expression in the First Amendment. Provocation of the WeekIn The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes: Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts. It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments. DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket … Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading “Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust.” (The owners described this as “extortion.”) Read the rest for some harrowing scenes of animal abuse by factory farms and an interesting exploration of what drives radical activism even when, as here, it may be ineffective or even counterproductive.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

Jordan Peterson mocked California Governor Gavin Newsom before sending him a cryptic warning.

The Canadian psychologist, who is facing losing his license in his home country over his social media posts, poked fun at Newsom on X, formerly Twitter.

The Democrat governor expressed his concern over Artificial Intelligence and its role in spreading "misinformation" online, which helps fuel "micro-cults" of people who follow the likes of controversial public figures such as Peterson and podcaster Joe Rogan.

(L) Gavin Newsom attends The Berggruen Prize Gala on May 04, 2022 in Beverly Hills, California. (R) Jordan Peterson arrives at Perth Airport on November 28, 2022, in Perth, Australia. Peterson mocked Newsom on X, formerly Twitter. Jon Kopaloff/Faith Moran/GC Images

"My son is asking me about Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson. And then immediately he's talking about Joe Rogan. And I'm like; here it is, the pathway," Newsom said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this month.

The interview mainly flew under the radar until YouTube creator Timcast made an episode about it, which Peterson shared to his X account alongside a picture of Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam.

In a follow-up post, Peterson wrote an ominous warning to Newsom, seemingly mocking his "micro-cult" comment.

"We're coming for your children@GavinNewsom. We plan to turn Your boys Into men And girls Into women Within the dark Pathways Of our micro cult @joerogan," he wrote.

He also added two black and white photos to the tweet, including a photo of man from the 1950s and model Helen Williams from the same era. Williams was one of the first Black models to feature in mainstream media and to work for major brands such as Sears and Budweiser.

Newsweek contacted Newsom's office for comment.

Peterson is facing losing his license to practice psychology in Canada, unless he undergoes social media training, after people complained about his social media presence.

The College of Psychologists of Ontario mandated he complete the training after complaints about his controversial comments on social media and YouTube.

"The right of the College to do so has now been upheld by a provincial court, despite their apparent admission that it could infringe on my fundamental rights," he wrote after trying to appeal the college's ruling.

"Every single opinion was a political or psychological statement; every one devoid of genuinely documentable 'harm'—except perhaps to the tender sensibility of certain Canadian moralists in whose mouths butter wouldn't melt, in a country of fatal niceness and complacency."

In the same column, Peterson blamed Canadian leader Justin Trudeau for his current professional situation and creating "Canada's increasingly censorial state."

"Justin Trudeau's insistence that Canada has no central identity has allowed the ideologically possessed fools who know nothing of the great British Common Law tradition and who have contempt for the Western tradition to make their postmodern ideas the central axis around which this once-reliable country now by law is required to rotate," he wrote.

The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids.I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege, released this week. And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty.[Melissa Kearney: A driver of inequality not enough people are talking about]“The high incidence of single motherhood has spread to what we might think of as the middle class,” Kearney told me. “It has undermined the economic security of a much wider swath of the population.”Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, has amassed reams of evidence on the rise of single parenthood and the way it has put lower-income children at an even greater disadvantage to their high-income peers over the past four decades. Her book shows that marriage itself matters; it is not just a correlate of other factors, such as wealth and education.So far, many readers on the left have concurred that this is a problem they should have been paying more attention to, while those on the right have had a simpler response: Duh. “Happy to welcome Melissa Kearney to the club of folks who understand more kids would be better off if we had more two-parent married families,” quipped the American Enterprise Institute’s Naomi Schaefer Riley, one of many scholars from the prominent conservative think tank who have lauded the book.But it is worth asking: What good comes of pointing out that many people could use a cohabiting partner and that many kids could use a second involved parent? Kearney has written an important, careful book on a topic that is an “elephant in the room,” as she puts it. Still, I am not sure anyone has any idea what to do with that elephant.Kearney’s three teenagers benefit from living in a two-parent home, she told me; she herself benefited from growing up in one. Kearney’s father worked odd jobs and ran a printing business; her mother was a secretary and schoolteacher. There wasn’t a ton of money to go around. But Kearney became an intergenerational success story, going to Princeton before getting her Ph.D. at MIT and gaining prominence as an academic. “Wanting to know the answer is different than knowing the answer; she wants to know the answer,” Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College and a frequent co-author of Kearney’s, told me. “The greatest compliment you can give to an academic, I think, is to credit their intellectual curiosity.”Much of Kearney’s work is about family planning and family structures. Did the rollout of the MTV show 16 and Pregnant reduce or increase teen pregnancies? (It reduced them.) Why is the American birth rate falling? (There isn’t a simple answer, but women’s “shifting priorities” seem to have something to do with it.) If men suddenly earn more, do they become more likely to marry their partner? (No.) Do increasing housing costs change fertility rates? (Yes.)Kearney’s own research and the research of other scholars convinced her that the rise of single parenthood was an important and overlooked social phenomenon—a key to understanding the country’s low rates of mobility and high rates of poverty. Since the 1980s, marriage rates have fallen for everyone, particularly for folks without a college degree. Over the past 40 years, among kids whose mother had a bachelor’s degree, the share living in a two-parent home dropped from 90 percent to 84 percent. Among kids whose mom did not have a high-school diploma, the share went from 80 percent to 57 percent.A single-parent home is typically a lower-income home. One parent means one income. Two parents means two incomes, or at least the potential of two incomes. And most single parents are nowhere near the top of the earnings distribution. According to census data, single mothers make an average of $32,586 a year; roughly 29 percent of single parents fall below the country’s very low poverty line. Married couples take home an average of $101,560. If you’re trying to understand why such a wealthy country has such high rates of child poverty, single parenthood is a big cause.Kearney told me that she often heard from her peers—“economists who are inclined to downplay the importance of marriage”—that what she was describing was really an income issue, not a marriage issue. Kids with two parents earning a cumulative $55,000 a year have not-dissimilar outcomes to kids with one parent earning $55,000 a year, after all. But the kid with one parent would economically benefit from having a second parent in the household, Kearney told me, sighing in frustration. And nobody is suggesting that the government grant single parents tens of thousands of dollars a year to make up for the lack of a second earner in the home.Household finances are not the only issue. Single parents have fewer hours to read, talk, and play with their kids than co-parents do. And they tend to be stretched thinner. This is not to stigmatize single parents or argue that they are not doing a stellar job with their kids, Kearney was at pains to tell me. Many kids raised by single parents succeed (two of the past three Democratic presidents among them). It is just to say that parenting is hard. Doing it alone is harder. And that difficulty shows up in the aggregate statistics.Particularly for boys. “Girls internalize their struggles more,” Kearney told me. “I don’t know if it is that girls aren’t struggling as much. But boys are certainly struggling in ways that manifest themselves such that it impedes their educational performance, progress, and ultimately their economic life outcomes.” All in all, kids growing up with only one involved parent are less likely to obtain a college degree than their peers. They earn less. They are more likely to fall below the poverty line. And they are less likely to get married and more likely to become single parents themselves.Why has marriage declined so much? Hard-to-quantify cultural factors are surely at work, but so are easy-to-quantify economic factors. Earnings for men without a college degree have not just stagnated, but fallen in real terms. At the same time, women have become more likely than men to go to college or graduate school, and their incomes have risen regardless of educational attainment. The economist Na’ama Shenhav has shown that a 10 percent increase in women’s wages relative to men’s wages produces a three-percentage-point increase in the share of never-married women and a two-percentage-point increase in the share of divorced women.Women are going it alone—not because they want to, but because they feel that they have no choice. In straight couplings, women tend to like to date men who earn more than them and men tend to like to date women who earn less; thus, women’s thriving and men’s flailing have left a “marriageability gap.” In surveys, women overwhelmingly say that they want to get married. (That includes young people: In one poll released this week by the Knot Worldwide, just 8 percent of Gen Zers described marriage as “outdated.”) But they report struggling to find someone with a steady job, someone to match their sensibility and ambition. So they have kids on their own.[Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox: Now political polarization comes for marriage prospects]Those kids, on aggregate, are worse off than many of their peers: That’s Kearney’s elephant. It’s a big one and an awkward one. How a family works “is really no one else’s business,” she writes. “I am not blaming single mothers. I am not diminishing the pernicious effects of racial bias in the United States. I am not saying everyone should get married. I am not dismissing nonresident fathers as absent from their children’s lives or uninterested in being good dads. I am not promoting a norm of a stay-at-home wife and a breadwinner husband.”What to do, then? Conservative scholars, of course, have a boatload of policy and social prescriptions. Parents should get married, they argue. Nonresident fathers should step up. Families with a breadwinner dad and stay-at-home mom tend to be good for kids. Couples should try to work it out instead of divorcing. Traditional values often result in happy children.“One of the reasons there’s a class divide in America today is that more educated young adults are more likely to move slowly into their relationships, and make better decisions about friendship and mating,” Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project and the author of the forthcoming book Get Married, told me. “If our leading institutions clearly articulated the standard that marriage matters, it would be helpful in rearranging how people approach entering into marriage and entering parenthood.”Liberals seem more stuck. The idea of the government pressing for marriage feels icky. Plus, marriage rates are heavily stratified not just by income and educational attainment but by race; Democrats, like Republicans, have a long history of supporting and implementing brutal, paternalistic policies that break Black families in the name of “fixing” them. And many policies aimed at raising marriage rates or encouraging co-parenting just don’t work. George W. Bush’s “marriage cure”—federally financed classes and outreach programs promoting wedlock—was ineffective. Responsible-fatherhood programs? A randomized controlled trial showed that they do not lead to more in-person contact between dads and kids or increased financial support from fathers to their children.Kearney supports figuring out better interventions for parents and couples, and implementing them. “How many high-income couples pay for high-priced couple’s therapy to keep their relationship alive?” she said to me. “There’s a skittishness around the idea that the government would provide funding to programs that provide relationship education to low-income couples.”She advocates for improving men’s economic situation. She champions strong anti-poverty policies to support low-income kids and low-income families, including the expanded child tax credit. Yet “no government check—even one much larger than what’s politically feasible in the U.S. today—is going to make up for the absence of a supportive, loving, employed second parent,” she has argued. To that end, Kearney also proposes working “to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes with children.”Yet that norm already exists, something Kearney acknowledged when we talked. Few single mothers want to be single mothers, especially not the low-income ones. They just can’t find anyone to stay with them, or anyone worth staying with. Polls do show some erosion in the idea that marriage is important for couples with kids. But this seems as much an effect of the rise of single parenthood as a cause of it.The real elephant in the room, I think, is that the United States doesn’t want to contemplate, let alone create, a policy infrastructure that supports single parenthood. It doesn’t want to make sure that kids thrive with a single earner in the home. It won’t do this even though it seems obvious that a large share of children are going to grow up with one parent going forward, and even though we aren’t realistically going to increase the marriage rate among lower-income Americans. We don’t want to build a society where children are seen as a collective gift and a collective responsibility. It’s not single parenthood that’s failing these kids. We all are.

What is Google Search in 2023? A site that started 25 years ago as a list of blue links has mutated beyond recognition. Today, Google isn’t just an index to help sort through the endless libraries of online information—it’s a reference guide for the physical world too, having mapped most corners of the Earth and cataloged its contents. It is part encyclopedia and part predictive engine, guessing what you might be typing or thinking, serving information based on what others before you typed. It is Moviefone and the stock ticker, a well-trained chatbot, an image repository, a shopping mall.It is also, like the modern web, creaking under the weight of its enormous size and an infinitely renewable supply of content, both human- and AI-generated. Unlike its streamlined, efficient former self, Google Search is now bloated and overmonetized. It’s harder now to find answers that feel authoritative or uncompromised; a search for healthy toddler snacks is overloaded with sponsored product placement, prompts to engage with “more questions” (How do you fill a hungry toddler? “Meat and Seafood. Bring on the meat!”), and endless, keyword-engorged content. Using Google once felt like magic, and now it’s more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers.It’s fitting, then, that as the shine has worn off, Google has also found itself in an unusual moment of vulnerability. The company is on trial and scrambling internally to maintain relevance in the generative-AI era. Over the next several weeks, the Justice Department and a group of states will argue that the company violated antitrust laws by striking deals to protect its monopoly position in the online-search business. It all feels less like a midlife crisis than an existential one.At the heart of the case against Google is a simple question: Does the company command 90 percent of the U.S. search-engine market because its technology is superior and users genuinely prefer it, or because it paid massive sums to companies like Apple to be used as a default service over competitors such as Bing? In its opening days, the trial has hinged on arguments about the importance of data. The DOJ has argued that having access to user data such as web history and past searches (the kind that are easier to collect when you’re the default browser on millions of phones) is like “oxygen for a search engine”; Google plans to argue that, although user data can improve search quality, “there are diminishing returns to scale.”That defense is ridiculous. Scale means everything to Silicon Valley and the venture-capital firms that fuel its start-ups—including Google, in its early years. The laws of network effects state that users beget more users, that those users shed data that are helpful in personalizing and streamlining the user experience. Google thrives because it indexes unfathomable amounts of information across the web and processes several billion queries a day—queries that are aided in part by what the company describes as “aggregated and anonymized interaction data” from its users.[Read: The open secret of Google Search]The company has long bragged about the scope of its work. “There isn’t anything that has operated at our scale before,” Bill Coughran, Google’s then–senior vice president of engineering, told Forbes in 2011. Google’s mission statement—to “organize the world’s information”—is a project that is defined by scale, one that requires the company to wrap its arms around an ever-evolving internet, process that information, and return the relevant bits to an infinite queue of hungry searchers. To suggest that there are “diminishing returns to scale” is to deny the very model that makes Google Search effective. Internal Google emails submitted as evidence by the DOJ attempt to show that the company’s engineers and executives know this. One email shows Udi Manber, a senior engineer, directly contradicting the argument. “It’s absolutely not true that scale is not important,” Manber wrote. “We make very good use of everything we get.”And yet, Google’s lawyers might be right about the diminishing returns of its size—just not in the way they intended. In recent years, ex-Googlers have written lengthy blog posts saying that the company has lost its way and is coasting on its own success, which has made it “conservative,” “arrogant,” and lacking a mission and a sense of urgency. Noam Bardin, the longtime CEO of Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, has lamented having to navigate Google’s stifling, labyrinthian corporate bureaucracy.Google’s stagnation has trickled down to its products. Search has grown bloated with advertisements and widgets that prioritize its own services, such as Shopping, Finance, and Maps, over organic results. Although the company constantly updates and tweaks its algorithms, which are powered by natural-language-processing AI tools, there is a creeping sense—among frustrated programmers, searchers, and even journalists—that the site is no longer as useful or intuitive as it once was. One reason for this feeling may be that Google’s algorithms have been successfully gamed by low-quality websites and search-engine-optimization companies that help their clickbaity clients show up in the first page of Google Search results. An SEO expert named Marie Haynes suggested to me last year that Google’s algorithms are getting better but that the website is going through a transitional period—the engine is still working out the kinks. In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Google said, in part, “We make thousands of quality improvements every year to ensure we’re delivering the most helpful results, and we’ve developed entirely new ways to search, which is why people around the world continue to use and love Search.”Still, there are indicators that the product might continue to struggle to deliver high-quality search results on an internet soon to be flooded with AI-generated photos, videos, and text. Just this week, 404 Media reported that the top Google result on a search for the Tiananmen Square “tank man” was, for a period of time, an AI-generated image of the man taking a selfie. Last fall, the former Googler and ex–Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer offered a charitable explanation as to why Google Search feels worse, arguing that the search engine is merely a reflection of the internet as a whole, which has become more complex and laden with fraudsters and garbage. The explanation lets Google off the hook a bit: The company’s chief purpose is to navigate the sprawling morass of information, after all. Ultimately, it’s a tacit admission that Google has tried and failed to tame the web.[Read: How Google ran out of ideas]Search’s devolution is a familiar story in an economy that demands untenable growth. The trajectory always looks like this: Invent a world-changing technology, scale it up, monetize it, print money, and take it public. Then, of course, there is the pressure to expand even more to appease investors. In Google’s case, organizing the world’s information meant conquering the web, books, images, inboxes, and geography. But with every success, there is more pressure to scale further, this time into moon-shot territory — self-driving cars and even a project to “cure death.” It becomes easier to acquire companies with the war chest than to build products from scratch, and to ink exclusivity deals in order to keep competitors at bay.Google Search is arguably the most important innovation of the commercial internet—a modern marvel that has forever changed how billions of people access information. Its success, especially early on, felt like a small miracle. But Google Search is also a tragedy: The democratization of information demanded the invention of a behemoth that could successfully handle the abundance of the web. But chasing scale is a dangerous, unwinnable game. Perhaps the real lesson of Google’s story is that you can try to iterate, but ultimately, no company or product can grow alongside the internet forever without, eventually, being swallowed up.

       Animal rights activists Daraius Dubash and Faraz Harsini were peacefully demonstrating in a Houston, Texas, public park when park employees demanded they leave. When Dubash insisted that the pair had a First Amendment right to protest, officials called the police, who arrested Dubash and charged him with criminal trespass.  While Dubash's charge was eventually dismissed, the pair have now filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the city, arguing that city police clearly violated their Constitutional rights. "No one should be handcuffed and detained for exercising his First Amendment rights," said JT Morris, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit group. "We're suing because public parks belong to all Americans and their expressive rights, not the personal views of a few."  From April to July 2022, Dubash and Harsini demonstrated several times in Discovery Green, a Houston public park. According to their lawsuit, the pair—keeping in practice with Anonymous for the Voiceless, the animal-rights activist group the two pertained to—wore Guy Fawkes masks while playing clips from Dominion, a documentary showing the gruesome mistreatment of animals in factory farms.  On three separate occasions, park employees asked the pair to leave the park, claiming that the park was private property. (Discovery Green is public property, though it is managed by a private company.) According to the complaint, the pair complied, fearing retaliation. On July 23, 2022, Dubash and Harsini were approached again. This time, they refused to leave, and Dubash calmly told park employees that he had a right to demonstrate peacefully. However, a park security guard told Dubash that protests were allowed on a "case by case" basis, adding that his "manager is going to come and come look at it." According to the lawsuit, when the manager, Floyd Willis, arrived, Dubash informed him that, while the park was managed by a private conservancy, the park was still public property, meaning that the First Amendment applied. "I, we're good with like, if you want to talk to people but, we're not comfortable with the TVs…the content on those," Willis told them. When Dubash responded that "you still have to abide by the First Amendment because [the park] is publicly owned," Willis responded by saying, "Right. But we also choose, we don't feel the content is appropriate." Several hours later, park employees returned, this time accompanied by two police officers. Even after Dubash presented the officers with property records showing that Discovery Green was a public park, the officers insisted that because the park was privately managed, the park employees could still decide what speech was allowed on the grounds. "If you are showing offensive material he [i.e., Discovery Green management] does not like, you can't be here," one officer told Dubash, adding, "Someone stabbing a goat or cow in the neck to kill them. That seems offensive." Shortly thereafter, the lawsuit states that Willis told the pair, "We're officially asking you to leave. And as such, if you don't, then it will be a trespass."  "You're the police officer. I've been trained to listen to police officers," Dubash told the officers. "If you ask me to leave, I will leave; I do not want to be arrested. But if you're gonna say I'm fine to be here, I will be here." One of the officers responded it was up to park management to decide.  At that point, Willis announced that "private park security has determined that this is now a criminal trespass," leading the officers to arrest Dubash—even as Dubash told the officers that he would leave immediately rather than face arrest. The suit states that, after being handcuffed, Dubash was taken to the park's offices, where he was detained for "two to three hours." Eventually, Dubash was taken to a nearby detention facility, where he was held for more than 16 hours before being released, according to the suit. Police charged Dubash with criminal trespass, though the charge was dismissed less than a week later. "There is a real and substantial threat of an arrest if they engage in their protected advocacy in Discovery Green based on Mr. Dubash's prior arrest and Discovery Green Conservancy's threat to again exclude them from the park if they display content that management disagrees with," the pair's lawsuit reads. "As a result, Dr. Harsini and Mr. Dubash have suffered and are continuing to suffer irreparable harm to their expressive rights." Dubash and Harsini's protest is obviously protected by the First Amendment. Even if park patrons—or park staff—are uncomfortable with videos depicting conditions inside factory farms, that doesn't make their speech any less protected. "Nothing is more powerful than being honest and open with people," said Harsini in a Thursday press release. "And we're standing up for our First Amendment rights that give us that voice."The post Houston Police Arrested an Animal Rights Protester and Detained Him for 16 Hours, Lawsuit Says appeared first on Reason.com.

       Kansas City, Missouri, unveiled a Barbie-themed streetcar, dubbed the "Dream Streetcar" earlier this month. The streetcar is decked out in familiar bubblegum-pink wrapping and even rewrites the city's name as "Kensas City." A lucky passenger can even choose a seat decked out to resemble characters from the recent Barbie film, like "Stereotypical Barbie, President Barbie, Cowboy Ken, and even Allan." Oh, and the whole thing cost taxpayers $25,000.  According to records obtained by KCUR, Kansas City's NPR affiliate, the hefty public spending is due to the fact that the Dream Streetcar is not actually a sponsored ad for the blockbuster Barbie movie that premiered in July. Instead, it's a project by the Kansas City Streetcar Authority (KCSA) to increase ridership, even though the streetcar is free to ride.  The streetcar is funded by a special tax levied on property owners in a "Transportation Development District" near the streetcar's path, as well as a 1 percent sales tax on purchases made in the area.  The KCSA denies that the Dream Streetcar is explicitly Barbie-themed. "The Dream Streetcar does not utilize any Barbie or Mattel branding or images. It does not even display the Barbie name," Donna Mandelbaum, the KCSA's communications and marketing director tells Reason. "This streetcar wrap was not intended to promote a movie or a brand but it is intended to bring a positive experience for our riders, our community, and to downtown KC." However, it's difficult to view the Dream Streetcar as anything but Barbie-themed, especially considering multiple references to the film in the press release announcing the decorated car.  I got to ride the Barbie streetcar tonight pic.twitter.com/YJUCuo7MqL — Activisty Tim (@Beertheist) September 5, 2023  "KC Streetcar marketing efforts have goals to increase streetcar ridership, promote the Ride KC Streetcar brand…and showcase that public transit can be both essential and fun," Mandelbaum tells Reason. "We have a marketing budget to do such things." According to KCUR, ridership did tick up in the days following the Barbie streetcar's debut, although those days coincided with Labor Day weekend and a popular summer festival in Kansas City. After Labor Day weekend, streetcar ridership returned to average levels. Besides that the Dream Streetcar hasn't so far achieved its stated goals, the streetcar system itself is also incredibly expensive and inefficient. For starters, the streetcar just isn't a very useful piece of public transportation. "The streetcar project has all the appearances in Kansas City of a theme park–style development," Patrick Ishmael, the director of government accountability at the Show-Me Institute in St. Louis, tells Reason. "The capacity, the speed, the purpose of the project is hardly different than what you'd see at Disney World. And…it's actually oftentimes faster to walk than to use the streetcar." The project has also been incredibly expensive for taxpayers—according to the streetcar's own website, the two-mile-long line cost over $100 million to design and build.  Further, the free streetcar isn't even directly responsible for economic growth along the streetcar line. "It is not the streetcar that is driving economic development," Patrick Tuohey, the co-founder and policy director of the Better Cities Project, which researches economic development and transportation policy, tells Reason. "It is all the economic development subsidies along the streetcar line that encourage people to develop along that spot." So not only is the streetcar not very good at actually getting people where they need to go, it unsurprisingly isn't directly helping local businesses either. Plus, those local businesses now face higher taxes to pay for the streetcar's construction and operating costs. "Most of the time in successful urban environments, hotels and entertainment districts… and transit—like streetcars—are a sign of a thriving economy,"  Touhey adds. "Rather than understanding that development is a sign of a healthy economy, they think if they subsidize development, it will result in a healthy economy, so they get it exactly backward. And so the streetcar…[is] a very thin veneer wrapped around the city that creates the illusion of economic success."The post Kansas City Made a <em>Barbie</em>-Themed Streetcar. It Cost Taxpayers $25,000. appeared first on Reason.com.

       Despite being one of the most dynamic and competitive major league teams for the past 15 years, one thing has quite literally hung over the Tampa Bay Rays: Tropicana Field, the team's ugly and often mostly empty ballpark. But that shouldn't justify asking taxpayers to foot half the bill for a new home. Yet it looks like that's what will happen, now that Rays' owner Stuart Sternberg and local government officials have announced an agreement for a new, $1.3 billion stadium where the Rays hope to begin playing by 2028. Though the financial details of the deal remain a bit thin for now, the Tampa Bay Times reports that taxpayers in the city of St. Petersburg and those in Pinellas County (which includes the city) will split the $600 million public contribution to the project. As Field of Schemes blogger Neil deMause notes, there are still a ton of questions to be answered—including the possibilities of backdoor subsidies like property tax breaks—which won't be fully addressed until the fine print of the deal is made public. For now, here's what we do know: Plans for the new ballpark call for a fixed dome roof—similar to the one the Rays currently play home games under, though likely without the pesky catwalks that can cause havoc for fielders. Instead of a retractable roof, the stadium will include openable walls and windows that "bring the outside in," the team says. That's a prudent decision that likely keeps the overall cost of the project down. Still, this is an exorbitantly expensive price tag—one that is likely to increase as it moves along—for a stadium that will seat only about 30,000 people when finished, making it the smallest in Major League Baseball. Ballpark Digest, a blog focused on baseball stadiums, describes the proposal as looking "more like a large arena than a traditional ballpark." That's perhaps an acknowledgment of the Rays' real problem, which isn't the lack of a shiny new ballpark but an indifferent fan base that's never really embraced the team, despite its remarkable run of low-budget success. The team consistently ranks at or near the bottom of the American League in attendance. Only three times since its inaugural season of 1999 have the Rays drawn an average of over 20,000 fans per game. Will a new ballpark change that? The Rays shouldn't have to look far for the answer. Their cross-state rivals, the Miami Marlins, similarly struggled with awful attendance figures for most of their first two decades as a major league franchise—despite winning two World Series in that span. The team's owners blamed their ugly, football-first ballpark for the low figures and eventually got a brand-new, baseball-only stadium funded with over $500 million in public cash. Nothing has changed. Miami drew an average of 27,000 fans in their first season at Marlins Park but has ranked dead last in the National League for attendance in every season since then. In Tampa, one of the oft-repeated reasons for the Rays' attendance struggles has been the location of Tropicana Field. "Most knowledgeable Tampa Bay residents and baseball fans know Tropicana Field is too far from the population center and the gridlock too tangled for enough fans to see the Rays on a daily basis," Michael Lortz wrote for FanGraphs, a sports blog, in 2017. The Rays' solution to this problem is a head-scratching one: The new stadium will be built directly adjacent to the team's current home field. Sports economist Daniel R. Epstein suggests that the Rays' strategy will be to price out fans who want to sit in the cheap seats. "By decreasing the number of seats in the stadium and keeping the park in the same general location, the Rays aren't trying to sell more tickets than they currently do—so they'll make up the difference by increasing the price," he writes in Forbes. "Improving the fan experience in and around the ballpark sounds great—for those who can afford it—but if they aren't interested in packing more fans into the park, they'll surely pursue wealthier ones instead." So the Rays will trade a difficult-to-access, domed stadium for another difficult-to-access, domed stadium. Taxpayers will be out $600 million (and maybe more), fans who still want to see the team play in person will face higher ticket prices, and the team's attendance woes are likely to continue. Other than all that, it sounds like a great deal.The post Taxpayers Will Pay at Least $600 Million for Tampa Bay's New Baseball Stadium appeared first on Reason.com.

The Biden administration has pursued a new and ambitious economic agenda, premised on the notion that the prevailing orthodoxy of the past few decades — specifically, the imperative to embrace free markets and free trade — was inadequate to the needs of the U.S. economy. That approach, according to the critics, gave priority to efficiency at the cost of inequality, a hollowing out of manufacturing and an overreliance on countries like China. President Biden, by contrast, has put together the largest program of public investment in the American economy in many decades, most of it designed to encourage a revival in manufacturing (specifically targeting the chip-making industry) and to transition the energy sector to renewables.

Initial data from the Treasury Department suggests these policies have succeeded. Spending on the construction of manufacturing facilities has doubled since the end of 2021, mostly for computers, electronics and electrical goods. Nonresidential construction spending in general is up roughly 15 percent since the passage of Biden’s big infrastructure bill, and private sector spending is up by almost three times as much as public sector.

In other words, the government’s policies and expenditures have been a catalyst for the private sector. Other advanced economies are not showing such large increases in manufacturing construction; they are happening mostly in the United States.

These are impressive results. But the real test of these massive federal expenditures will become clear in the long run. In the short term, government spending and tax incentives create a boom, and the private sector will naturally jump in, eager not to miss out on the action. But does this create a sustainable set of companies and industries over time? What happens when the government money runs out (as it inevitably will)?

This is where the United Auto Workers strike becomes an important test case of Bidenomics. On the one hand, autoworkers deserve raises; car companies are doing well and management (of course) has given itself hefty bonuses. But a key component of Biden’s economic plan is to make the United States a leader in the electric vehicle industry, which it sees as the future of automobiles. To help make that happen, the federal government is showering the industry with benefits — from a huge (up to $7,500) tax credit for buyers of an EV to a slew of subsidies for batteries, minerals and charging stations.

All these supports make it possible for automakers to take on higher costs. Already, the Big Three spend far more on labor per hour than Tesla. U.S. factories pay their workers on average almost six times more than factories in Mexico and even 25 percent more than those in Japan.

But the real challenge will come from China, which is taking the EV market by storm. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s EVs are made in China. BYD, the biggest of Chinese companies, topped Tesla this year to become the world’s No. 1 seller of EVs.

American carmakers are shielded from Chinese competition. Donald Trump imposed a 27.5 percent tariff that American consumers must pay if they want to buy cars from China — building on protectionist policies that have meant higher costs and fewer jobs in America. But in the long run, tariffs keep American car companies in their high-cost bubble, shielded from the market. Chinese cars will soon dominate in large parts of the world, even in Europe, where tariffs are only 10 percent (so far).

As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip has pointed out, the real story of American manufacturing is that productivity has been stagnant, with output per hour having grown only an average of 0.2 percent a year since 2009, well below Taiwan’s average of 4 percent a year but also well behind Britain, Germany, South Korea, France and Italy. Productivity in the auto sector has crashed, down 32 percent from 2012 through last year, though Ip notes this probably includes pandemic-related disruptions.

Biden’s economic team has hit many home runs. The massive increase in infrastructure spending was long overdue. Funding for research is now increasing in some areas (though it remains too low by historical standards). Helping computer chips, a critical industry, makes good sense.

But the broader effort to revive manufacturing will be a challenge. Countries such as Japan, Germany and France have all made such efforts and yet, over the past several decades, manufacturing as a percentage of gross domestic product has declined at a steady rate in all of them. In the United States, it is down to 11 percent of GDP and about 8 percent of employment.

Of course, the story of Christian Smalls, the worker who unionized the Amazon warehouse in New York City, an incredibly inspiring story — you know, who doesn’t love a David that goes after a Goliath?

Goliath.

Yeah, the Philistines were very anti-David.

That’s true, Goliath does not — yeah, they were not into it.

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Carlos Lozada.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” So this has been a summer of strikes, and it’s going to be an autumn of strikes as well, it looks like. It seems like everybody’s striking, from Hollywood writers and actors to nurses, to coal miners, and now, maybe the most politically significant strike is the United Auto Workers. And we’re all journalists, and journalism, of course, has its own labor issues. So before we dive into the general subject, I wanted to ask, have any of you guys ever been on a picket line?

No, I have not.

I have not.

No. I mean, I think that’s probably generational, right? I mean, we’re all kind of roughly in that cohort, where I feel like there was something of a detente, particularly in our profession. We’re all too young to have experienced the big newspaper strike that gave birth to “The New York Review of Books” and other things, but we’re kind of too old and too fancy to be involved in the current one in any big way.

I don’t know about fancy, but I’m definitely too old.

I’ll go further. I’ve never been part of a union. Wherever I’ve worked has either been not unionized, or I’ve been a manager or in some exempt category. So it was never even an option.

Yeah, I’ve been on both sides, both a member of the union here at The New York Times, and then I’ve been a big bad boss at various media companies on the other side of the bargaining table. So —

Yes, that was —

I’ve seen it from all angles.

My other question was, have you ever hired Pinkerton detectives to put an end to labor unrest, Lydia Polgreen?

Ugh, you know, life is long.

There’s still time. Yeah. So just from the personal to the political, I want to talk more about this uptick of union organizing and strikes and what’s behind it. So why do we think there’s so much labor activity and unrest right now? Carlos? You’re an economist. You can go first.

I wish you would stop saying that. I mean, OK, so there are, probably, some basic economic reasons. The labor markets are tight. Unemployment is low. Companies need workers and are still having some trouble filling positions, so that gives a little more power and leverage to labor. You know, like, if you need motives for unionizing or for striking, you have a moment when profits are very strong for, say, the auto companies or for UPS, which narrowly averted a strike recently. Wages for the top 1 percent of wage earners are growing so much faster than for everybody else. Just, like, maybe 50 years ago, CEOs made 20 times what workers did, and now, it’s closer to 400. So inequality creates clear incentives for organizing. Inflation, right? You’re coming out of a period of high inflation. It makes sense that people would want cost-of-living adjustment clauses in their contracts — and also the pandemic, right? The pandemic made clear how workers in different sectors enjoy very different kinds of benefits and opportunities and wages, and that sense of rediscovered insecurity, I think, is probably nudging people to organize as well. Now, none of that explains why, precisely, now, like what is happening this year that is making labor have its moment.

I mean, it’s probably a matter of timing. I mean, contracts that are coming up and things like that. I think there’s also a lot of emotional valence to this as well. I mean, I, as I was saying earlier, have been on the kind of management side of the table for a number of union negotiations, and particularly first contracts for media workers who unionized both at HuffPost and at Gimlet, which is a podcast studio part of Spotify that I used to run. And clearly, the kind of lunch-bucket issues of pay and benefits were important. But you know, what I really sensed was, a desire to wrest more control over the conditions of their work, the products of their intellectual creativity, and things like that were just as, if not more, important. So I think that there’s this interesting and sort of complex moment where a lot of people are evaluating the relationship with work in general and how they feel they’re being rewarded in a very broad sense. For example, issues of diversity were to often come up at the bargaining table, which are just not the kind of lunch-bucket issues that we associate with collective bargaining, but they were extremely important to these bargaining units. So I think these issues are — they’re all kind of snowballing in a variety of ways coming in the post-COVID era.

OK, so we’re having these strikes. But do we really think this is like a new era for unions, or do we just think it’s like a — they’re not asleep anymore, but it’s not going to pan out to be all that?

That’s a great — I mean, unionization rates are still very low.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, 10 percent to 11 percent of the workforce is unionized, which is about 1/2 what it was, like, in the ‘80s. I mean, so there are different ways to gauge, kind of, the power of unions.

Wait, did something happen in the ‘80s, Carlos, involving unions that might have had an impact on that?

I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I can take an airline back to the ‘80s to tell me. Yeah, I mean, Reagan cracked down on the air traffic controllers’ union, and that was part of a downward spiral of unionization in America.

I mean, I do think that, independent of labor per se, something seemed to shift in the American economy somewhere in the mid-2010s, where the big story of the post-1970s economy that you referenced, Carlos, of increasing inequality wage stagnation at the bottom — that story shifted. And starting at the end of the Obama presidency, the start of the Trump presidency, you started to see lower-wage workers capturing a little more of the economic pie, and a little more stagnation sometimes for people in managerial positions. And there’s sort of interesting debates about why this is, that maybe sort of white-collar professionals became more vulnerable to outsourcing, and not — you can’t outsource your service economy in the same way. But either way, that trend, interestingly, has continued, even through inflation and some of the economic disappointments of the last few years, where the bottom 10 percent, 20 percent of American workers are still seeing better percentage gains than the professional class. So in that sense, the return of strikes, the renewed interest in unions, is sort of pushing with this 5-to-10-year economic trend that’s been better for low-wage workers than the prior trend had been.

Well, I think there’s also — there was a terrific episode of “The Daily” this week about this sort of rethinking about the value of college, that there was this kind of grand bargain that if you get a four-year degree, you get that college wage premium, and you’re kind of set up for a life that is largely non-precarious. And I think that there’s been a real rethinking of that bargain. So I think you’re seeing this kind of trend of unionization, particularly among white-collar workers or white-collar-adjacent workers. You talk to young people, for example, like the podcast producers who worked for me at Gimlet, and they felt like having a college degree in a highly specialized set of skills was no guarantee that they were going to have a secure economic future. So I think that there are a bunch of different trends that are coming together there. And I think all of us are thinking about, like, have the bargains that we signed up for paid off? And I think a lot of folks are saying, like, no, no, they haven’t paid off. - I do think there’s a lot to your generational point. I mean, I think millennials and Gen-Zers have very different expectations, especially in the white-collar realm. If you’re going into certain fields, whether or not you should be able to expect job security or a certain level of compensation or whatever, whereas, like, a lot of folks where I grew up, if you were worried about that, you picked a more stable field. I mean, you just did. You didn’t become a musician or a journalist. So I do think that there has been a shift in expectations, even beyond the question of labor.

Yeah. I mean, I think — and I’m curious what you guys think about this — there’s also a sense in which because labor has been so weak for so long, a lot of people have ceased to have some of the negative associations with it that a lot of Americans had, let’s say, in the 1970s.

You mean, with unions, Russ?

With unions.

Yeah, sorry.

That there was, at a certain point in the American economy, this sense that a heavily unionized workforce, let’s say, in the auto industry was associated with stagnation, with Japan outcompeting us. And then, also, there was just the reality of union corruption, the ties between unions and the mafia that — somewhat famous in the Jimmy Hoffa era. And all of that is now so distant. Just as young people had never experienced inflation until a few years ago — I could barely remember when inflation was a major issue — the idea of unions being sort of strong and potentially corrupt, which was, again, a powerful aspect of American political debate in the Reagan years, is just completely off the table.

Also, one other quick thing that I would often remind my young colleagues was that unions played a really crucial role in segregating professions and keeping people of color out of certain kinds of jobs. So whenever this would come up in the context of collective bargaining, it would always just note the irony that they were important targets of the Civil Rights movement, because they were extremely segregated.

I mean, the notion of corrupt unions is not some sort of historical artifact. Two recent former UAW presidents were convicted of embezzling union funds and went to prison, you know. Like, that was not long ago. In fact, the only reason Shawn Fain is president of the UAW is because they changed the way the union bosses were elected. They actually made it a direct election from members, from workers, as opposed to backdoor delegates picking in a convention with a lot of influence from leadership. I’ve never been in a union, and so I speak out of ignorance, but I’ve always been a little skeptical of them. It’s nothing to do with politics. It’s to do — you accuse me of being an economist, so I’ll own it for a microsecond, and I’ll say it’s the economics of it, right? Like, there’s that idea in economics, the principal-agent problem. The idea is that you have to sometimes rely on a third party, on someone else, to act on your behalf, but your interests are not aligned with that of the third party. So like, you hire a lawyer to resolve a dispute, but the lawyer just wants to bill more hours, so the dispute drags on. What union leadership wants and what workers want, that stuff doesn’t always align, right? It can be blatant, like in the case of the UAW bosses who went to jail for embezzling union dues. But it can be kind of benign. Like, say I’m a younger worker, but union leadership might be incentivized to look out for the needs of older workers who make up more of the membership. That kind of stuff happens. And so that said, like, as skeptical as I am of the unions because of that issue, because of the misaligned incentives, I’m more skeptical of management. So like, I’m among those who are now thinking that it’s a good idea that unions are, sort of, gaining more power, in a relative sense, versus the managerial or ownership class.

I think that’s right. But I think that it’s really important to separate the sort of long-established unions that, clearly, are much less powerful than they were but still are big powerful institutions, and think a little bit about what the more, kind of, newer and modern unions look like. I think most young people are not joining a union like the United Auto Workers. They’re joining something more like the unions that are trying to unionize Starbucks or REI or these other supposedly progressive liberal companies, and are facing really, really creative, but also quite brutal union-busting tactics that don’t look like the union-busting of old.

Yeah. I mean, this gets very complicated very quickly. There are public sector unions and private sector unions and white-collar and blue-collar unions. And one of the things that I wonder about is, like, if you have this kind of outpouring of just kind of blanket enthusiasm for union organizing, that overlooks things like Carlos is talking about, where in some cases, what they’re asking for is extremely problematic. Like, the UAW head is known for, basically, pitching the idea that he’s going to bring back the glory days. I mean, we’re talking about defined benefit pension plans again, which strikes me as —

Old-school.

— total madness. But that is kind of what they’re doing. They’re kind of working to promote this cause mentality, and we’re going back to the glory days, and it’s all going to be great again. And these things are very, very problematic on some level.

I think there’s an interesting dynamic here, where I found, Carlos, your explanation of the trends creating this general sort of union moment to be very compelling. In the case of the highest-profile strikes, though, both the UAW strike and the Hollywood strike, the strike of writers and actors in Hollywood — there, the dynamic is a little different. You have, in both cases, this sort of big technological shift happening. You have electric cars in the auto industry, which are changing the incentives for auto companies, and the UAW and workers are worried that they’re losing out in this transition. And in Hollywood, you have the streaming situation, where Hollywood made this huge bet on streaming, it created this economic model that appears to be both exploitative of writers, and also unsustainable. And in these cases —

Geniuses of management.

Right. And in both cases, I have a fundamental sympathy with the strikers, but I’m also concerned that they are asking for more at a moment when their industries — or part of their industry, in the case of workers, who work on gasoline-powered cars — are just not actually in the best shape to give them what they want.

They know what’s coming, right? And so better do it now than in three to five years.

Yes, no, no, I think it — I think it makes sense. But it’s different from the labor action as a function of abundance.

Yeah.

Abundant job options, versus labor action trying to get out ahead of a potential crisis.

And not to get all political on it, but it does make the situation very complicated, especially for Democrats. Because on the one hand, you have their green energy, EV goals, and on the other hand, you have their pro-labor goals. And there’s a tension there.

Yes.

And Republicans are happy to exploit it. I was just talking to Senator JD Vance, and he had just written a piece blaming a lot of this labor uncertainty on the shift toward EV, which, of course, he puts at the feet of the Biden administration, which is overly simplistic. But it is a tension that the President is having to deal with.

In defense of Senator JD Vance, I mean, it is the Biden policy to try and rapidly transition —

Oh, sure, but it’s transitioning that way anyway.

Well, and I think trying to transition in a way that prioritizes American labor, right? I mean, there are a variety of ways in which, through policy and law, the Biden administration is trying to make sure that this transition is happening in a context of high-quality American jobs, rather than just buying things from China. But I mean, just to channel Ross, I mean, I think that there is this kind of cyclical nature to these things, where there’s overreach, and then there’s retrenchment. And if you have Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, interviewed on television, saying, well, look, all of my compensation is stock, I’m just being paid for making the company successful, but you also know that we have an economy where making a stock successful is not so much about delivering real value but doing gimmicky things like stock buybacks, people have become very cynical about that. And so I think that the sort of fundamental desire for some sort of recalibration of the scales to make them a little bit more even — I think that both parties are sensing that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with. This has traditionally, obviously, been the kind of Democratic party issue, but I think everyone knows that the current situation is just unsustainable, and that the old answers about the free market, rah, rah, rah, being paid for performance, just don’t wash anymore.

Yeah. I think that as long as you’re in an economy like the one we’re in right now, people are going to be looking for some kind of countervailing power, whether it’s unions or something else — government something — to, basically, try and direct more money to workers. Whether that continues, we’ll see, but yeah, I don’t think this debate is going away. But I think neither is the question that hangs over not just autoworkers and Hollywood screenwriters, but all of us, which is, what do we think the future of work will be? What should it be? That’s what we’re going to talk about when we come back after this break. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. And now, I want us to get a little more, shall we say, existential. Because in the background of all these labor disputes is the larger question about what role should work play in our society and in our lives. And there’s always been this promise that technological change is going to radically shorten everybody’s workweek. John Maynard Keynes predicted 100 years ago that we’d have 15-hour workweek someday. And it hasn’t really worked out that way. American life is characterized by what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has called “workism,” which is this use of work as a substitute for religion or family or community. But the pandemic has changed things. Maybe AI is about to change things. The United Auto Workers aren’t asking for a 15-hour workweek, but they are asking for a four-day, 32-hour workweek. So I mean, what do we think is the future of our working lives? How little work should The New York Times pay us to do?

Look, I’m trying to train ChatGPT to churn out one of my pieces as accurately as possible as quickly as possible.

I have had very limited success with that, thank goodness, and I think our jobs are probably safe for now. Are you guys familiar with this meme on yield internet? “What’s your dream job?” “I don’t dream of labor.” It’s a thing that kind of popped up in the pandemic, and it’s a thing that my wife often says to me, although she, strangely, decided to go back to full-time work during the pandemic. But I think it really does speak to the final nail in the coffin for what felt like this crazy hustle culture that marked our lives from, I would say, the 2010s to the pandemic. And it’s funny. Like, that’s the same period when I moved from the developing world, having spent a lot of time in Asia and Africa, back to the United States. And one of the things that I noticed was the way that technology had, basically, like, turned what employment was, kind of, upside-down. And it looked a lot like the informal economies that India and sub-Saharan African countries were desperate to get out of. You know, you had people with tenuous employment agreements that were, essentially, independent contractors to these apps. They didn’t have benefits. And just after years of covering economies where the IMF and the World Bank and others would be like, you need to formalize your economy, formalize the economy, to move back to the United States and find that there was this rapid deformalization happening, that people were actively participating in, and that this work of shifting the risk away from the corporation and the employer onto the employee and the customer was something that was just happening so fast. And so I do think that there’s just this, like, huge roiling set of things that have happened that have been enabled by technology that, rather than making us have more leisure time, actually has commodified and made it possible for us to, quote unquote, “work” in lots of different ways and squeeze work into lots of nooks and crannies of our lives that were not work-associated before.

Yeah. I mean, I think that whatever you think of it, that pattern extends beyond the gig economy, right? Like, a huge part of white-collar professional life is the professionalization, in bits and pieces, of leisure time, where you’re never formally off the clock. You’re always supposed to be accessible and available. But then, it is a trade, right? Where you don’t have to be in the office, or you can be with your children while checking texts from, let’s say, hypothetically, your podcast producer or something, right? Like, that’s sort of the bargain with the internet age that I think a lot of Americans have made.

Because we haven’t made it, may want it, right? You’re seeing that push for flexibility move toward more, quote unquote, “frontline workers,” where it’s been captured by sort of managerial-class workers.

Yeah. I mean, it’s been interesting to follow. There was a nursing strike here in New York City, and I have a lot of nurses in my family, so it’s a topic that I’ve followed very closely. And one of the things that’s really striking is that the economic incentives for nurses are basically very well aligned to taking these short-term gig jobs. You can make way, way, way more money going and working in a place that needs you for two weeks, rather than being a pediatric nurse at a local primary care clinic, for example. And Lord knows, we need pediatric nurses, but the economics of our health care system are aligned in such a way that these big hospital — whether they’re corporations or nonprofits — their incentive is to try and keep staffing levels low, keep wages low. And those very same forces are pushing teaching nurses into different modes of working that work better with their lives. And so I think that misalignment speaks to both the economic issues, but also, I think, to the control that people want over their lives, you know? And this notion that the company that you work for owns you and is entitled to x, y, z from you at any particular time — I think a lot of this unionization comes down to wanting to reassert some control.

I mean, it’s interesting that we’re talking about it like that. Because the idea of a company man died years and years ago. So it’s not one company that you’re basically selling your soul to, in a lot of cases. It’s like half a dozen gigs, or people work multiple jobs. And my first career — kind of, vaguely career-track job — was working for a management consultant 100 years ago. And I remember it was based in Silicon Valley, and I remember there was a lot of discussion back then about all the tech companies offering workers all these great lifestyle things. You could get childcare and a yoga class and a restaurant and a gym, and they were all at your office, and everybody was like, oh, that’s great. But the whole point was people originally figured out that they were doing that, so they could keep you with the office all the time. They just, they expected you never to go home. And so what we’re seeing now is a shift from that to everybody is going to work from home. But when you work from home, again, you’re never off the clock. So there’s always going to be something that needs to be managed, with each new iteration of work. And so yes, there’s this new thing, but you’re going to have the downsides that you have to deal with, just like the last new thing.

That’s a trade that I would take, though. That’s a trade that I would take.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I have.

Well, should our bosses be suspicious of that trade then? I mean, because there’s a lot of argument in not just Silicon Valley but everywhere, right? About, what does work from home do for productivity? Do you need to get people back into the office?

I think it’s very job-specific, though. I do think a lot of it depends on what you do.

Yeah.

Do people need to work?

Yes.

Because I feel like — OK, good, we settled that. I mean, I feel like we went through a period, maybe more pre-pandemic, in debates where the Left, especially, sort of revived the idea that in an age of abundance, people just shouldn’t have to work that much. And this was sort of the whole idea of a universal basic —

Universal basic income? Yeah.

And in a way, we did a sort of pseudo version of that in the pandemic. We paid a lot of people not to work, effectively. We created a very temporary UBI under certain conditions. And my impression is that — curious if you guys disagree, but even what we talked about with union organizing and demands for higher wages and so on suggests that people prefer the work model to the non-work model.

I mean, I guess — I mean, I think — yeah, I think that feels to me like a bit of a false choice. I mean, we do not have a robust welfare state in this country, right? And the minute that these child credits were withdrawn, thanks to Joe Manchin, we saw child poverty double, for example. So there are lots of things that were sort of UBI-like that produced, I think, really, really great outcomes, made it easier for people to be home with their children and care for them, and care for their families and so on. So I definitely think that a UBI floor that protects people from the most naked ravages of our winner-take-all capitalism would be a wonderful thing and would engender all kinds of positive things for our society that we can all agree on. But I think people need meaning in their life, right? I mean, I think that people need to spend their time doing things that are meaningful. Sometimes those things are paid work, sometimes it’s caring for the people that you love, but I think that we’re also seeing that people do want to work. What they don’t want is for such a huge swath of the fruits of their labor to be accruing to the very top 10 percent. And that seems to me to be like a reasonable thing to be really, really mad about.

Yeah, it’s time to smack down the top 10 percent.

Well, I mean —

— the top 1 percent.

— the trends of the last 10 years have not been so great for the — I mean, nobody’s going to cry for the top 1 percent, but professionals and managers have had a tougher time in the last 10 years.

Yeah, but it’s like a tiny, tiny, tiny shift, right? I mean, we’re not talking about a massive redistribution.

Well, there’s still professionals and managers. Right. They still hold the higher-paying jobs. But in terms of wage growth and what people expect, their gains have been weaker than lower-wage workers. I mean, I have — I’m pretty anti-UBI. I guess I have a sort of — I have a certain patriotic affection, in an odd way, for the American model, even though we do seem to work too hard in many ways. There seems like, in the developed world, you have countries like South Korea that seem so afflicted by crazy workism that people are like, well, I work much too hard to ever get married and have children. Like, South Korea — literally, the birth rate is not just below replacement. It’s below one child for per two South Koreans. And a lot of that does seem to have to do with an insane culture of work and competition. But then, you look at Europe, which famously has a much more relaxed siesta-based attitude towards work, and they’re dealing with economic stagnation, slipping way behind the US and so on. So there are ways in which I feel like American work culture gets a lot of grief, but maybe we’re actually in a kind of happy medium between East Asian and European models.

I don’t know. I do think that there’s a lot of tweaking that needs to be done. For instance, they need to make it easier for paid family and medical leave. I think there’s a lot of room to make family obligations more manageable, if you are also expecting people to work.

Yes. No, I agree with that.

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, when I was in my 20s and, kind of, trying to make my bones as a journalist, I thought nothing about leaving my wife behind at our home base in Dakar and going to Sudan for six weeks. And that was a thing that I wanted to spend my life doing. But life changes, and you get older, and you want to do different things. And I think — I guess my wish is that everyone had the kind of flexibility and opportunity that I’ve had to be able to model my work to my appetite for it, for the stage of life that I’m in, the needs of my family and so on. I think that’s the dream, is to have meaningful work and to also be able to have a meaningful life outside of that work.

Yeah, I totally agree that the flexibility is key. My children are now out of the nest, but over the years, when they were home, I would pick jobs that had more flexibility than compensation. And I was super lucky to be able to make these choices, because that’s what mattered most to me. Of course, now that they’re gone, I’m just — it’s just party all the time at our house. I think I’m —

Well, yeah, this is what Carlos and I want to know. What happens after they’re gone? Because I mean, to me —

Well, I cover — I cover national politics. I’ll be in Iowa.

Oh, well, OK. I take it — take it back. I don’t want to know.

Ross, how about you? What’s your ideal work life?

Well, I think you have the self that you imagine, and then the self that you actually have. And the reality is that I like to work, and I like to be busy, generally, more than I necessarily anticipated in life. I don’t really — again —

You get real twitchy, don’t you?

Yeah, this is the American disease, right? That we don’t know how to do nothing. But —

I don’t do well underemployed.

I was someone who was really good at doing nothing as a kid, and I aspire to recapture that someday, but not yet. All right. And on that note, like good laborers, happy, happy “New York Times” employees, let’s leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll get hot or cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we are back. And it’s that time of week when one of us rants or raves about something that we’re hot or cold on. So who has something, and what’s it going to be? Tundra or tropical? Equatorial or polar? Let’s go.

Enough. Someone stop him.

Someone had their go-go juice this morning.

I’ve got The Hot Cold today. And I just realized, whenever I do The Hot Cold, you can just call it The Cold. I always hate something.

You’re never hot on anything.

Oh, Carlos. Go on, [INAUDIBLE].

I promise, I will be hot on something soon. But what am cold on is Bidenomics. And I don’t mean it in a wonky way. I’m not talking about the actual economic policies that the administration is pushing. I mean the formulation itself. I do not like the idea of using the president’s name as shorthand, as a branding technique, for a set of policies or a governing philosophy. I know it’s something that opponents sort of put on him first, like they did with Obama and Obamacare. But then, they embrace it. And I just want to be like Admiral Akbar and be like, don’t do it! It’s a trap! Stop! Do not — but no one listens to me, right? So now, when presidents put their name or embrace the notion of calling a governing philosophy or a policy package by their name, they automatically forever make that issue a partisan issue. Remember how “Obamacare,” quote unquote, was far less popular than the Affordable Care Act, even though they were the same thing? Calling it Obamacare linked it even more closely with the president, and it made it not about how you felt about health care and made it about your opposition or your loyalty to the president. I remember Pete Buttigieg, when he was running for president, was always very smart about this. He would never call it Obamacare. He wouldn’t even call it the Affordable Care Act. He would always say the ACA — very, very kind of bureaucratic but neutral. Presidents already get way too much credit or blame for the state of the economy. But now, Biden, with Bidenomics, better hope that this thing does not go south because his name is on it. Now, it’s him.

But isn’t — but isn’t that just because his last name ends with an N and it’s sort of —

So back to Reaganomics.

Reaganomics —

Reaganomics, Bidenomics. Nobody said —

Nobody said Obamanomics.

— Bushenomics. I’m sure I used Obamanomics in a terrible column a long time ago. And the reason Buttigieg isn’t into it is because, come on, Buttigiegenomics? I mean, it’s never going to fly!

So many bad directions that could go in. I mean, look, the high water mark of this kind of branding shift was from Hoovervilles to the New Deal. Like, the New Deal! Who doesn’t like a New Deal?

Who could be against it?

We do this all the time, right? We do — but historically, you’re right. Wilsonianism, the Truman Doctrine —

I think “doctrine” adds a certain flair.

Oh —

I just want everything to be a doctrine.

No, no, presidents and foreign policy advisors want doctrines.

I’m Catholic. I like — I like doctrines. Sorry.

No, you’re just doctrinaire.

Dogmas. Dogmas are even better. The Biden Dogma.

The Douthat Dogma.

Well, that’s not — I’m not claiming that.

The Great Society, the New Frontier — those aren’t perfect — America First. Right? But it gets us past this great-man view of history toward actually discussing the ideas and the principles.

I don’t think Great Society or New Frontier elevate debate, but I agree with you, Carlos, that it’s politically smarter to have a neutral, aspirational term for your agenda than to name it after yourself.

Do you know, the one that has worked well historically is the Marshall Plan? Because everyone wants, like, a Marshall Plan for whatever. You know?

But he wasn’t a politician.

Maybe it works if you’re not president.

But that was going to — Truman rejected calling it the Truman Plan, because he thought it would piss off Republicans. So very smart, that Harry Truman.

Smart guy.

And instead, it became the Marshall Plan, and everyone loved it.

All right. Well, we’ll be back next week to talk about the Lozada Plan for American renewal. But until then, we’re going to leave it there, wrap things up. See you guys next week for some more labor in the vineyards of The New York Times.

See you guys.

Bye, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Imagine that a philosophy professor is invited onto a podcast. The hosts ask him to describe a thought experiment he finds interesting or provoking. He decides to pick a scenario in which an adult male has sex with a “willing” 12-year-old girl, before saying that the man in his example would not necessarily be at fault. It would, he says, depend on whatever accompanying harm was caused to the child, but there are some situations in which the sexual activity would be harmless. Would the professor’s proffering of such a thought experiment be morally wrong? It seems a lot of people think so — for of course this particular case isn’t just hypothetical. In January last year, Professor Stephen Kershnar was invited on to the podcast Brain In A Vat to discuss the topic of “Sexual Taboos”. After his choice of thought experiment was excerpted and tweeted out by Libs of TikTok, things escalated quickly. Conservative websites pounced. A student at Kershnar’s university, SUNY Fredonia, started a petition demanding he be fired. The university president directed police to search Kershnar’s computer, took him out of teaching on the grounds of student protection, and put him under investigation. Though he kept his paycheck, he has since been barred from teaching. According to the New York Times this week, he is now suing his employer. In truth, Kershnar hardly offered a thought experiment at all. Compared with the most elaborate of philosophers’ constructions — see Judith Jarvis Thomson’s baroque image, offered in defence of abortion, of waking up to find yourself non-consensually hooked up to an unconscious violinist, physically dependent on your circulatory system to recover from a poisoning — it was barely more than a sketch. But failure to meet the normal standards of thought experiments is not what people objected to here. One typical insinuation of Kershnar’s critics seemed to be that, by offering such an argument, he must have been indulging in a case of special pleading. The assumption was that, by his choice of example, and, indeed, by the book he wrote beforehand partly defending the same sort of  conclusions, he inadvertently betrayed his own paedophilic sexual predilections, thereby removing any claim to intellectual authority. (He strongly denies this.) More from this author Should women learn to love pain?By Kathleen Stock  But other explanations are also available, embedded within the peculiar culture of academic philosophy. There is, for instance, an established tradition within applied ethics of coming up with counterintuitive conclusions. After all, there’s no fun or kudos in saying the same thing as everyone else. One approach is to demonstrate to readers that, given ethical principles or values to which they are already committed, surprising and perhaps even shocking consequences seem to follow. Some dispassionate types just find this sort of thing cool and edgy, independent of the emotional impact generated for others. Kershnar himself seems to be a big fan of the tactic. His published work includes moral defences of torture, slavery, violent sexual fantasies, anti-immigration policies, faking orgasms, only dating Asians, and discounting women’s applications for jobs in philosophy departments. Occasionally in philosophy, some famous ethicist or other is criticised for failing to live up to his own favoured principles in private life. In this particular case, you rather hope Kershnar doesn’t try too hard. Looking at the evidence available, though, it seems mostly likely that he’s just a professional contrarian. In the legal case against his university, his lawyers quote a student as saying of the professor “it was almost impossible to tell what he actually believed and what he didn’t”. I forced myself to read one of his background articles about paedophilia, and found the relentless tone-deaf logic-chopping almost unbearable in the context of the prurient subject matter. Still, for all I know, the interest is entirely academic. Philosophers are, after all, quite strange. As the not-particularly-popular saying goes: “one person’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens”. That is: when faced with an apparently intolerable conclusion stemming from an apparently sound argument, you can either accept the conclusion, or work harder to find out what was wrong with your premises in the first place. Some thinkers fight much harder than Kershnar to reject the disturbing conclusions that seem to follow from relatively unexceptionable premises. Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, for instance, devoted an enormous amount of energy trying to avoid what he called “The Repugnant Conclusion” in population ethics. This says, roughly, that the existence of a very large population with very low average happiness per person is preferable to that of a small population with very high average happiness. In the end though, by his own admission, Parfit couldn’t dislodge it — thereby handing a gold-plated excuse to leaders of large countries with failing economies to increase the birth-rate.  Others just go with the rational flow, coming to fully endorse value judgements that nearly everyone else rejects. For instance, as is well-known, Peter Singer holds that in certain circumstances, killing disabled babies would be preferable to killing animals. Elizabeth Barnes thinks there would be “nothing intrinsically wrong” with “a mechanism that allows non-disabled people to become disabled if they wish”. Julian Savulescu and others argue that there are “equity-based reasons” to use drugs to keep “non-binary adults” in a permanent pre-pubertal state, so that the development of secondary sex characteristics is permanently prevented. Whatever the ultimate success or failure of these arguments, there is probably not a single grotesque behaviour in history that couldn’t be justified by some philosopher somewhere, playing around with a highly unlikely-but-still-possible scenario in which the behaviour is present, but where “harm” is magically subtracted and “consent” or “benefit” added. The most basic use of a thought experiment in ethics presents us with a particular hypothetical case and asks us what our “pre-theoretical intuitions” tell us about it — which might sound pleasingly technical to the uninitiated, but could just as well be reframed as asking what feelings you are now getting in your water. Confronted with this scenario, it asks: do you feel such-and-such would be right / wrong / good / bad / fair / unfair? Whatever you say in response to the imaginary version, it’s assumed you would also say the same towards the equivalent real one. Then, depending on the case, something more complex might be attempted: for instance, an analogy might be made with some other more mundane and everyday case, to suggest your intuitions should be the same there too. This is effectively what Thomson’s violinist experiment does. If your intuitions tell you that it would not be wrong to detach yourself from an unwanted violinist in the circumstances she outlines, even if this resulted in the violinist’s death, then — since the situations are supposed to be relevantly similar — you ultimately should conclude the same in the case of an unwanted foetus. (Thomson has a further explanation of what the common factor allegedly is.) Yet if I were suddenly plunged, for real, into a situation involving an unconscious violinist being plumbed into my or someone else’s circulatory system, I’d be in a very different sort of world from this one — quite possibly, a world directed by David Cronenberg. Who knows what other weird stuff would be going on there? And who knows how I’d react to it, if so? The question arises of why I should take my responses to this crazy tale to be indicative of anything at all. More from this author The Centrist Dads won't save BritainBy Kathleen Stock  Kershnar’s thought experiment is different because it describes a scenario that nearly everyone would intuitively reject as wrong. Still, when you look at his published background reasoning about the supposed permissibility of hypothetical instances of “adult-child sex”, it also involves appealing to intuitions about totally anachronistic scenarios. For instance, he discusses a situation where there exist children who are “precocious and fully grasp the different dimensions of sex like some precocious children can grasp the different dimensions of music and mathematics” (and moreover where, presumably. we could somehow reliably test for this understanding). The relevance to the actual world, where children are not actually precocious in this way and sex is nothing relevantly like mathematics or music, is totally obscure. In any case, real-life events — unlike thought experiments — aren’t just stripped-down stories, pruned of distracting ephemera to get to the bits the philosopher really wants you to notice. They come thicketed with endless detail to be noticed even years afterwards. And with moral reactions, it’s the details that matter. Not just details about who did what to whom; but also why, and how much did it hurt, and who did it help, and what did all parties think was going on, and what exculpatory factors existed beforehand, and what happened afterwards; and how did all these factors interact in this particular case?  The dry fictional constructs of bloodless academics can’t give you any of that. Novels can do it much better. Lolita can tell you what is wrong with paedophilia much more powerfully than any dry fictional construct from a bloodless academic. None of this is to suggest that Kershnar should have been punished as he was. Distasteful as his general approach is, arguing for the permissibility of doing something is not the same thing as doing that thing yourself. In a society that values freedom of thought, we have to fight hard to maintain this distinction, or else the whole enterprise of arguing about ethics collapses completely. Still, perhaps ironically, what happened to Kershnar’s podcast once the internet got hold of a small part of it tells us something instructive about the problem with ethical thought experiments in general. A snapshot was taken of a multifaceted situation; any relevant or complicating context or background was removed; and it was flung like red meat towards readers for a satisfyingly outraged moral reaction. If we want to understand complex real-world ethical issues, we should probably try to avoid this sort of thing. view comments

Amid all the hysteria, technological wreckage and gallons of spilt ink, artificial intelligence’s most potent legacy is yet to be discerned. As we enter the fourth industrial revolution, everyone from the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab to 61% of Americans believe that AI poses a serious threat to humanity’s future. Such charged rhetoric, however, masks a more serious shift: the way in which it will accelerate the feudalisation of the West, concentrating power in the few large firms that seem destined to dominate the field. AI’s problems start at the top. Unlike the internet, which spawned a number of independent companies (including Google and Microsoft), AI seems to be controlled by existing tech giants, which are investing heavily in these new firms. ARM, for instance, the British-based chip designer whose IPO last week set Wall Street aflutter, is garnering huge investments from other Big Tech firms, including Nvidia, Intel, AMD and Apple. Elsewhere, Open AI’s largest investor is Microsoft, while DeepMind was acquired by Google in 2014. This pattern of collaboration between giants and upstarts suggests that the next tech revolution seems poised to empower the existing hierarchy. It also threatens the prospects of the classes below. Big Tech and venture capital executives such as Reid Hoffman promise that AI will serve the cause of “elevating humanity”, despite potentially wiping out hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide. Indeed, according to McKinsey, at least 12 million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. In other words, AI looks destined to warp our class structure in a similar way to feudalism, turning what has been a collection of Roman citizens into serfs. But is this the entire story? Historically, humans have performed analytical tasks manually. They may have created tools, such as spreadsheets and surveys, to help them. But the tasks of optimising businesses have largely lain in the hands of human analysts who spend their days collecting data on the performance of businesses and markets. In the last phase of technological development, jobs for these “symbolic analysts” exploded: in the US, the number of workers in occupations requiring average to above-average education, training and experience increased from 49 million in 1980 to 83 million in 2015. Yet these tasks are now running into a buzzsaw with AI, whose underlying premise is that machines can learn to detect patterns and changes better than human beings. More from this authorThe greatest generational conflictBy Joel Kotkin  In his bestselling book AI Superpowers, Kai Fu Lee, a former Google and Microsoft boss who now runs one of the world’s most prolific AI venture funds, proposed a two-dimensional view of the future of work. His key thesis: that the social nature of a job and the discretionary nature of a job will be the key factors underlying AI’s impact. If, for instance, a job is highly formulaic and has few discretionary decisions, and people perform their tasks with little social interaction, AI is likely to displace it. So, while the CEO of an insurance company might be safe from being displaced by AI, one of his analysts is not. And this is where the nuance is often lost. According to the US Labor Department, AI and automation could impact as many as many as 90 million American workers, with warehouse workers among the most prominent losers. What will really alter class relations, however, is the impact on more professional jobs. They have been the ascendent class for the last two generations, growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% since 2001 — well above the 0.4% annual rise for total employment. But whereas the computer revolution was a boon to those working as programmers and market researchers, AI does the job for them, often with more speed and accuracy. As Rony Abovitz, one of the pioneers of virtual reality and AI, has observed: “It’s the end of the white-collar knowledge work.” In such a world, it is not hard to envisage a new kind of class conflict that extends beyond the traditional Marxist conflict between low-wage workers and better-educated owners. More than 82% of millennials fear AI will reduce their pay, and they are right to be worried. “We may be at the peak of the need for knowledge workers,” Atif Rafiq, a former chief digital officer at McDonald’s and Volvo, recently warned. “We just need fewer people to do the same thing.” As if to illustrate his point, tech firms such as Meta and Lyft have already announced major cutbacks in their white-collar workforce, while IBM has paused hiring to assess how many mid-level jobs can be replaced by AI.  What this means more broadly isn’t tricky to discern: a once-rising class that often embraced the oligarchy’s ideas now faces the same kind of marginalisation experienced by less-educated workers for generations. And it is not unreasonable to conclude this could eventually divide the current political alliance between progressively minded professionals and the AI-enhanced elite. Perhaps the most visible example of this is the writers and actors strike — drawn from a class traditionally aligned with the oligarchs — currently underway in America, where AI threatens to make the manufacturing of entertainment largely redundant. Indeed, tech executives are already planning for the emergence of a vast, unproductive class made largely redundant by AI and robotics. After interviewing 147 digital company founders, the technology journalist Gregory Ferenstein has concluded that an “increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people”, while everyone else comes to rely on gig work and government aid. This is reflected in support for universal basic income by a number of leading tech oligarchs — Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick (former head of Uber), and AI guru Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI). Of course, many might wonder what is wrong with this. Already, roughly half of all Americans support the idea of a guaranteed basic income of about $2,000 a month if robots put them out of work. UBI enjoys even stronger support in most European countries, particularly among younger people. Further east, the popular Japanese Marxist philosopher Kohei Sato sees re-distribution as a way to as achieve the green goals of “degrowth” and “net zero” without devastating the masses. Yet if history is our guide, such intellectual circles are surely plagued by a certain naiveté. In every stage of capitalism, the ruling class has offered promises of welfare and support. And in every stage of capitalism, they have only done so with the intention of strengthening their own position. What is different this time, though, is that there is one class of worker who remains capable of opposing this neo-feudal structure: those with hands-on yet skilled jobs, such as the engineers refusing to work at Intel’s new semiconductor facility in Ohio. After all, even the infrastructure for AI requires tactile skills, and, as a result, technically capable blue-collar workers still have leverage and can shut down the whole infrastructure. This same class of skilled artisans were at the vanguard of the rise of democratic capitalism. Two centuries later, they may be our best hope for resisting a very different revolution. view comments

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.In The Atlantic’s next cover story, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg profiled General Mark Milley, who served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last 16 months of Donald Trump’s presidency. What Milley saw as the nation’s highest-ranking officer is a graphic warning of the existential danger America will be in should Trump return to office.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: The American face of authoritarian propaganda Airlines are just banks now. Millennials have lost their grip on fashion. A Patriot and His DutyThe chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking military position in the United States, designated by law as the principal military adviser to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council. It is a post of vital national importance, but most Americans probably have no idea who serves in it at any given time.And yet, for almost two years, the safety of the United States and the sanctity of its Constitution may well have depended more than any American could have known on Mark Milley, a career Army officer who became the 20th chairman in late 2019. Milley’s experiences in the waning days of the Trump administration should appall and alarm every sensible American.Milley served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the most fraught period of civil-military dysfunction in U.S. history. As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes in our next cover story, Milley faced an unprecedented situation in which the president—a man, Jeff notes, horrendously addled by “cognitive unfitness and moral derangement”—was himself the greatest threat to the Constitution.If that sounds dramatic, consider what Milley’s senior colleagues—career military men who served in the Trump White House—told Jeff about the nightmare facing the chairman. “Mark Milley had to contain the impulses of people who wanted to use the United States military in very dangerous ways,” according to retired Marine General John Kelly, who served as Trump’s second chief of staff. (Milley, for his part, was worried that Trump would try to overcome his electoral loss by creating a “Reichstag moment,” perhaps by sparking a foreign war or by using the military against civilians.)Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, who served as one of Trump’s many hired-and-fired national security advisers, commented on the immensity of the challenge facing Milley by posing a terrifying hypothetical to Jeff: “As chairman, you swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, but what if the commander in chief is undermining the Constitution?” (We might add to this an even more unsettling question: What if millions of Americans don’t seem to care?)Even those who may think they’ve fully grasped Trump’s depravity will be shocked by some of the events that Jeff reports.For example, at the ceremony welcoming him as the new chairman, Milley invited Captain Luis Avila to sing “God Bless America.” Avila had completed five combat tours, lost a leg in an IED attack in Afghanistan, and suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Jeff writes: After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley. “Milley’s family,” Jeff continues,“venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.”But Trump did respect some military personnel, especially Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL who was court-martialed on multiple charges and whose own comrades testified to his bloodthirsty and reckless behavior. (Gallagher was acquitted of all charges except for posing with a slain enemy’s corpse.) Trump intervened in the question of whether Gallagher, despite his acquittals, should keep his SEAL pin—a decision traditionally made by fellow SEALs.Milley tried to stop Trump from interfering with this important tradition. Trump, according to Jeff, “called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.”“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.It’s a war crime, Milley protested, to no avail. Trump refused to see what the “big deal” was all about. “You guys”—and here he meant combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”Gallagher got to keep his pin.If Trump’s ideal military is one in which Eddie Gallagher is celebrated as a hero and Luis Avila is warehoused out of sight, what does that suggest about who might lead the military if Trump returns to office? Who would have the fortitude to turn back the unlawful orders of a vicious and cowardly commander in chief to kill prisoners, to act as a praetorian guard around the White House, or even to use nuclear arms?When Trump lost the election, and especially after the January 6 insurrection, Milley was apparently growing concerned about Trump’s emotional stability. The chairman called all of America’s top nuclear officers to a meeting, in which he said, “If anything weird or crazy happens, just make sure we all know.” He then asked each officer to affirm that he understood the proper procedures for the release of nuclear weapons. He also called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that America was not in the kind of chaos that could lead to war.Milley’s critics raged that the chairman was undermining the president’s authority, and, as Jeff notes, they wanted to see the general in leg-irons—or worse. These charges were partisan nonsense. What should be more concerning to every citizen of the United States is that Mark Milley, and many others around him, felt it was important to reassure the Chinese, and to keep the lines of communication around America’s nuclear command structure clear and open. In normal times, no one would think to do such things, but, as Jeff notes, Milley’s months serving under Trump “were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve.”Reading Jeff’s article, I kept thinking of the 1965 novel Night of Camp David, by Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote Seven Days in May, about a military coup in the United States). It’s not a great book, but the premise is scary enough: A young American senator, after a long evening alone with the president at his famous retreat, realizes that the commander in chief has descended into madness and is brewing grandiose plans for conquest that will ignite World War III. In the light of day, the president seems like a reasonable man, so no one but the senator knows that he’s gone completely bonkers.Milley faced the opposite and more difficult problem: Everyone knew Trump was unhinged. It wasn’t even remotely a secret. General James Mattis even told friends and colleagues that Trump was “more dangerous than anyone could imagine.” But again, nobody had to imagine it; anyone who was ever in the same room as Trump knew it. And yet, few acted to stop him. (Mike Pence’s one day of courage on January 6 is an honorable and important exception.) Many others did not do their duty—including the Republican members of the United States Congress, whose lives Trump endangered.Milley, unlike so many in Washington, continued to honor his oath to the Constitution. The next time, we will not be so lucky. The next time, Trump will not make the same mistake twice: He will ensure that no one like Mark Milley will be in the National Security Council, or at the Pentagon— or guarding America’s nuclear forces at Strategic Command. The next time, when Trump’s narcissism and cruelty tell him that he must exact revenge on the country, perhaps even on the world, no one will be there to stop him.Related: Trump could still start a last-ditch war with Iran. (From 2020) Trump: Americans who died in war are “losers” and “suckers.” (From 2020) Today’s News The U.S. temporarily granted expanded access to work permits and deportation relief to about half a million Venezuelans who are already in the country.    House Republicans failed to advance an appropriations bill for the Defense Department in a setback for Speaker Kevin McCarthy as a potential government shutdown looms. Poland will stop providing weapons to Ukraine. The two countries continue to disagree about a temporary ban on Ukrainian grain imports. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: David McNew / Getty; Haldeman Papers. Elon Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving GrandfatherBy Joshua Benton In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.” But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa … What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But another factor was at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic I don’t like dogs. The microwave makes no sense. Feeling burned out? Here’s what to do. Culture Break Courtesy of Bill Griffith 2023 / Abrams ComicArts* Read. Nancy, Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running newspaper comic strip, helped establish the way we think visually.Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin sits down with senior editor Jenisha Watts to discuss her October cover story about growing up in a crack house.Play our daily crossword.Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On Monday, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, accused India’s government of having a role in the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen and Sikh separatist who was gunned down in Surrey, British Columbia, in June. Sikhs make up less than two per cent of the population of India, but are a majority in the northwestern state of Punjab. During the past half century, the struggle for a Sikh homeland—usually referred to as the Khalistan movement—has occasionally turned violent, and has been met by an equally violent response from the Indian authorities. But an assassination on foreign soil would constitute a serious escalation of the campaign against Sikh separatists.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has denied having anything to do with the murder, but also said that Canada’s approach to terrorism, which it characterized as laissez-faire, would “continue to threaten India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Trudeau’s allegations coincide with an attempt by Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister, to portray the country as an increasingly important player on the global stage; this era, in his words, marks “the first time the world has come to know that India can take a stand for herself.” The allegations also coincide with a general willingness by the Biden Administration to overlook India’s worsening human-rights record during Modi’s nearly decade-long premiership, in part because the U.S. values India’s role as a counterweight to China.

To talk about the history of Sikh separatism and the Indian government’s response to it, I recently spoke by phone with Gurharpal Singh, an emeritus professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the author of many books on the subcontinent, including “Sikh Nationalism: From a Dominant Minority to an Ethno-Religious Diaspora.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the Indian government is so concerned about Sikh separatism, the development of Sikh political identity in the West, and whether Western governments are doing enough to protect their own citizens.

How did there come to be large Sikh communities in countries such as Canada?

Sikhs have been migrating overseas in significant numbers since the late nineteenth century. As part of the imperial expansion of Britain, they were principally involved in the armed services and later in the security forces as policemen. So, wherever the Empire expanded, especially in the Far East—China, Singapore, Fiji, and Malaysia—and East Africa, that’s where the Sikhs went. They started arriving in North America, and particularly the Pacific Coast, following Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, in 1887. Citizens of the Empire technically had the right to travel and settle throughout it. And since then there have been significant settlements of the Sikh community in British Columbia, California, and, of course, Britain, where they have been permanently settled since the nineteen-twenties in large numbers, and more since the Second World War.

At the same time that Sikhs are migrating to different areas of the world, there is a huge Sikh community in the Indian state of Punjab, which was one of the two states split in half during Partition. There is a movement there for some sort of independent Sikh homeland. Can you talk about how that movement got started and what its role was in Indian politics after Partition?

At Partition, the Sikh community saw itself as being very vulnerable. It was a small community in the united British Punjab—less than about fourteen per cent of the population. Sikhs tried to come up with various schemes to keep the community together, to keep Punjab together, but unfortunately that did not come to pass, as the British wanted to exit India and Punjab quickly. Thereafter, Indian states or provinces were organized along linguistic lines. One way the Sikh leadership thought that it could protect the community’s rights and identity was to campaign for a Punjabi-speaking state. This led to a great deal of bitterness and resentment among the Punjabi-speaking Hindu community, who opted for Hindi as a way of opposing that demand. They thought that a Punjabi-speaking state would largely be a Sikh-dominated state.

After about two decades of campaigning, that demand was conceded in 1966, but reluctantly. There was another campaign, between 1973 and 1984, for greater economic and political autonomy for Punjab. And that eventually culminated with the Indian Army entering the Golden Temple, in Operation Blue Star, in 1984. That was a traumatic period, which then was followed by a decade-long troubles.

Can you talk more about that event, which was followed by the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, also in 1984, and more broadly about how the push for Sikh autonomy became in some cases more violent?

There was a prolonged period of negotiation between Sikh moderate leaders and Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party in Delhi between 1980 and 1982. However, the two sides were unable to reach an agreement on the demands, and gradually the militant element within the Sikh leadership outmaneuvered the more moderate members, leading to polarization between the Indian government and the militants. That eventually climaxed in Operation Blue Star, an operation to remove Sikh militants from the Golden Temple, the most sacred site in Sikhism, which was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi in October, 1984, and the killing of almost three thousand Sikhs in Delhi in the backlash that followed. That led to almost a decade of Sikh militancy and counterinsurgency operations, conducted by the Indian Armed Forces, which cost, on conservative estimates, around thirty thousand lives. These events cast a long shadow on the Punjab problem, which has continued to haunt all governments in Delhi since then.

When did the Indian government begin to get so concerned about Sikhs on foreign soil advocating for Sikh issues in India?

It has been monitoring the activities of overseas Indians on a regular basis. The first time it specifically started noting the activities of Sikh militants was in the early seventies, when Jagjit Singh Chohan, a Sikh political leader who left India, and who’s often referred to as a father of Khalistan, started a quixotic campaign for a Sikh state. More specifically, it was in the early eighties, 1980 to 1984, when the government of India and the Congress Party in particular was very, very focussed on monitoring the activities of Sikh militants.

Before we started the interview, you mentioned that you were interested in comparing Sikhs to the Jewish community. What did you mean by that?

Well, you’ll see that the comparison comes in the sense that Sikhs are small, they’re religious, and they’re roughly the same size as the Jewish community. [Worldwide, there are about twenty-five million Sikhs and fifteen million Jews.] They’re both a diaspora and a nation and an ethnicity and can be read as such. They are a complex minority, which are often seen in terms of religion only, but seeing them just as a kind of dedicated religious community overlooks the more complex dimensions of the community. They have fought for autonomy and the right to govern themselves, and as a minority to have their identity rights safeguarded in the West. For example, Sikhs and Jews in Britain were the only two communities in England who were recognized as ethnic groups in legal proceedings following the Race Relations Act of 1976.

How important is the push for a Sikh homeland to Sikh identity in many of the Western Sikh communities you study?

The multi-trillion-dollar and multi-decade decarbonization of the American economy is kind of a big deal. And US transportation will be a big part of that big deal given that 30 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions come from that sector. President Biden’s goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by no later than 2050 will mean America must transition from a country with very few electric cars and trucks to one with almost all electric cars and trucks. It’s within this historic economic context that the current United Auto Workers strike against GM, Ford, and Stellantis is taking place. So it should surprise no one if this labor action turns out to be an unusually lengthy one given the stakes as both sides see them. The Big Three legacy automakers argue that they are facing a massive, uncertain, and expensive challenge due to the need to build out their electric vehicle production capacity—while also meeting the competitive challenge from low-cost Tesla. Meanwhile, the autoworkers have noted that EVs require fewer assembly hours and their production is often in non-union plants. As such, the transition could mean fewer UAW jobs overall. Both sides view the dispute as creating existential risk for them. Other factors also argue for a lengthy dispute, including a) the UAW’s unprecedented, staggered strike strategy, targeting just a few plants at a time, which will allow the union to get more bang for the buck out of its strike fund, and b) its new leadership, which no doubt wants a victory right out of the gate. As for the economic impact, here is how Goldman Sachs calculates the damage (bold by me): . . . we estimate that lower auto production from a potential UAW strike would reduce quarterly annualized growth by 0.05-0.10pp for each week it lasted if it impacts all three companies currently undergoing contract negotiations. . . . Those three companies—Ford, GM, and Stellantis—produce almost half of domestically-assembled cars. Auto production would likely fall sharply—we assume to roughly zero—at any company impacted by a strike. In both the case of a government shutdown and the case of a UAW strike, growth would rise by the same amount it declined in the quarter following their end. Whether you think that damage is significant probably stems from your belief about the current direction of the US economy, whether headed toward a (perhaps very) soft landing or something worse. Learn more: Please, Gen Z Aren’t “Doomed to be the First Generation of Americans Who Will Grow Up with a Lower Standard of Living Than Their Parents” | Medicare Drug Negotiation and the Risk to Innovation | Shutting Down the Government Is a Choice of Theater over Substance | Is Paid Leave a Pro-Growth Policy? The post America’s Growing Electrification Has Electrified the UAW Strike appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

“Axis Sally” was the generic name for women with husky voices and good English who read German and Italian propaganda on the radio during World War II. Like the Japanese women who became collectively known as “Tokyo Rose,” they were trying to reach American soldiers, hoping to demoralize them by telling them their casualties were high, their commanders were bad, and their cause was lost. “A lousy night it sure is,” Axis Sally said on one 1944 broadcast: “You poor, silly, dumb lambs, well on your way to be slaughtered.”Tucker Carlson, who also repeats the propaganda of foreign dictators while speaking English, doesn’t have anything like the historical significance of Axis Sally or Tokyo Rose, though his level of credibility is similar. This is a man who famously wrote texts about his loathing of Donald Trump, even while praising the then-president in public; recently, the former Fox News host kept a straight face while interviewing a convicted fraudster who claimed to have smoked crack and had sex with Barack Obama. But when Carlson speaks on behalf of Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, his words are repeated in Hungary and Russia, where they do have resonance: Look, a prominent American journalist supports us. I don’t know what Carlson’s motivation is—he did not respond to a request for comment—but his words also circulate in the far-right American echo chamber, where they are sometimes repeated by Republican presidential candidates, so unfortunately they require some explanation.[Read: Tucker Carlson’s manufactured America]Carlson’s hatred of American institutions, and of many Americans, is the starting point for many of his diatribes. Recently, for instance, he appeared at an event in Budapest, organized by a Hungarian-government-funded organization, where he called the U.S. ambassador to that nation a “creep,” said he was “embarrassed that I share a country of birth with a villain like this,” and apologized for American foreign policy in Hungary.But what is American foreign policy in Hungary? I asked the ambassador, David Pressman, to describe it to me. Pressman, who is gay, told me that when he first arrived in Budapest, his counterparts smirked at him during their meetings and asked if he wanted to talk about gay rights or other progressive causes. No, he told them. He wanted to talk about Russian and Chinese espionage and influence operations in Hungary, which are considerable.Some examples: The most important Russian investment in Hungary is a nuclear-power plant whose financing is kept secret by law, presumably because the ruling party doesn’t want to reveal who is benefiting. Chinese interests are also financing a distinctly untransparent railway project in Hungary, have made an opaque investment in an environmentally unfriendly battery-manufacturing plant, and, a couple of years ago, with the help of the Hungarian government, tried to open a university in Budapest too. In 2019, Hungarian government officials also arranged for the Russian-controlled International Investment Bank, an institution set up in 1970 by the Soviet Union and its satellite states, to move its headquarters to Budapest, even throwing in a 10-million-euro subsidy as encouragement. The Hungarian government, which rejoined the bank in 2015 (having left it after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.), owned about a quarter of the shares of the IIB; the Hungarian deal with the “Russian spy bank,” as it is known in Budapest (it was once described by a group of U.S. senators as “an arm of the Russian secret service”), also freed the bank from Hungarian financial supervision, exempted it from taxes, and allowed bank employees to have diplomatic status and immunity in Hungary, an arrangement that could in theory help Russian spies enter the country and from there the rest of the European Union.   The bank was dodgy enough to raise American concerns even during the Trump administration, which was otherwise more indulgent of Hungary’s autocratic ruling party. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, the Biden administration told the Hungarians, who remain NATO allies, that the bank was a major problem for the alliance. Orbán resisted this pressure until April of this year, when Pressman announced sanctions against the bank and three of its executives, two Russians and one Hungarian. “We are concerned about Hungarian leaders seeking ever-closer ties with Russia, despite its brutal aggression,” he told Hungarian journalists. A few days later, Orbán caved, and withdrew Hungary’s investment. The bank announced that it would leave Budapest.This was unsurprising. Although Orbán likes to portray himself as a leader who cannot be influenced, a man tough and immovable, in fact he often gives in at the last minute—he is famous in the European Union for doing so. But he needs to tell a different story to his voters about what happened. The invitation to the disgraced former Fox News pundit does that: While in Budapest, Carlson channeled Orbán’s anger and dislike of the United States and its ambassador, while studiously avoiding the real reasons for what is indeed an extremely poor moment for American-Hungarian relations.  During his comments, and during his interview with Orbán, both broadcast on his social media, Carlson stayed well away from banks and Russian spies. He didn’t mention Hungary’s refusal to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership, or Hungary’s repeated vetoes of European sanctions against Russia. Instead, he denounced the United States for “the imposition of boutique sexual politics” on Hungary. Officials in the Biden administration, Carlson claimed, “hate Hungary not because of what it’s done but because of what it is. It’s a Christian country, and they hate that.” He made what sounded like several references to trans-rights activism, praised the Hungarians for their resistance to the degenerate West, and won applause.This rant was based on a false premise, for there is no U.S. war on Christianity in Hungary. If American officials are angry at Hungary, that’s not because of what it is, but because of what it’s done. Once again: The conflict between Washington and Budapest over the past several years is about Hungarian corruption, especially corruption in the ruling Fidesz party, and Hungary’s deep ties to other autocracies. (These are, of course, related issues: A major purpose of the deep ties with autocracies is for Fidesz to make money off them.) But Orbán doesn’t want his voters to pay attention to his corrupt links or his autocratic friendships, and he doesn’t want Americans or Europeans to know about them either. And so he hides them behind the veil of a culture war. Carlson is useful to Orbán because his words can help hide Orbán’s agenda at home—look, a prominent American journalist supports us—and abroad. By pretending that this is a culture war rather than a conflict over money and espionage, Carlson helps Orbán escape the consequences of his actions.Orbán is hardly the first autocrat to use propaganda this way. Vladimir Putin has been directing his citizens away from reality and toward imaginary culture wars for more than a decade. In September 2022, when the Russian president held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he did not speak of the people he is torturing or holding in concentration camps, the children he has kidnapped and deported to Russia, or even the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who have died in his unnecessary war. Instead, he used the occasion to talk about the “satanic” West, claim he was defending Russia from “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction,” and again replace the real war, in which real people are killing and being killed, with a fictional culture war that exists in his head.Carlson frequently uses Russian propaganda lines too, promoting fake stories (Ukrainian “bio-labs”), repeating Russian justifications for the war, and calling the Ukrainian president a “dictator.” He began doing this when he was still at Fox News, and now he does it in the videos he promotes on social media. Clips of these performances are frequently shown on Russian television, both when he attacks the U.S. and when he amplifies Russian propaganda about Ukraine or about the war. But many of these stories are nevertheless told as part of a larger one: the fake battle between a weak, degenerate America and healthy autocracies with “traditional values.”   None of this might matter very much, except that, again, a large part of the American far right has learned this rhetorical trick from Putin, from Orbán, from Carlson, and from other propagandists. Ignoring the real world in order to fight the culture war is now common practice. Although Trump was wholly ignorant of economics and foreign policy, his supporters didn’t care, because he got them excited about owning the libs. Ron DeSantis still seems to believe that a “war on woke” is more likely than a comprehensive health-care plan to help him get elected president, and he might be right. A wide range of senators who should know better—including Ted Cruz, J. D. Vance, and Josh Hawley, who used to talk a lot about real issues—have now abandoned policy debates in order to fight the culture wars and attack “elites,” despite their own Ivy League pedigrees.[Read: What does Tucker Carlson believe?]You can see why. The real world is full of difficult, hard-to-explain problems; even the best solutions might require difficult trade-offs. Once, Americans did have at least a few politicians who nevertheless sought to find these solutions, and our political system seemed to allow us to have arguments about them. Authoritarians, by contrast, seek power in order to hide the problems, steal money, arrange favors for their friends, and manipulate the political system so that they can’t ever lose power. That’s what Putin did, and that’s what Orbán does too. Carlson is simply the American face, and the English-speaking voice, of that confidence trick.

President Joe Biden’s administration moved boldly yesterday to solve his most immediate immigration problem at the risk of creating a new target for Republicans who accuse him of surrendering control of the border.Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security extended legal protections under a federal program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that will allow as many as 472,000 migrants from Venezuela to live and work legally in the United States for at least the next 18 months.With that decision, the administration aligned with the consensus among almost all the key players in the Democratic coalition about the most important thing Biden could do to help big Democratic-leaning cities facing an unprecedented flow of undocumented migrants, many of whom are from Venezuela.[Jerusalem Demsas: How deterrence policies create border chaos]In a series of public statements over the past few months, Democratic mayors in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other major cities; Democrats in the House and Senate; organized labor leaders; and immigrant advocacy and civil-rights groups all urged Biden to take the step that the administration announced yesterday.Extending TPS protections to more migrants from Venezuela “is the strongest tool in the toolbox for the administration, and the most effective way of meeting the needs of both recently arrived immigrants and the concerns of state and local officials,” Angela Kelley, a former senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, told me immediately after the decision was announced.Despite the panoramic pressure from across the Democratic coalition, the administration had been hesitant to pursue this approach. Inside the administration, as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post first reported, some feared that providing legal protection to more Venezuelans already here would simply encourage others from the country to come. With polls showing widespread disapproval of Biden’s handling of border security, and Republicans rallying behind an array of hard-line immigration policies, the president has also appeared deeply uncomfortable focusing any attention on these issues.But immigrant advocates watching the internal debate believe that the argument tipped because of changing conditions on the ground. The tide of migrants into Democratic-run cities has produced wrenching scenes of new arrivals sleeping in streets, homeless shelters, or police stations, and loud complaints about the impact on local budgets, especially from New York City Mayor Eric Adams. And that has created a situation where not acting to relieve the strain on these cities has become an even a greater political risk to Biden than acting.“No matter what, Republicans will accuse the administration of being for open borders,” Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist working with immigrant-advocacy groups, told me. “That is going to happen anyway. So why not get the political benefit of a good policy that so many of our leaders are clamoring for and need for their cities?”Still, it was revealing that the administration paired the announcement about protecting more Venezuelan migrants through TPS with a variety of new proposals to toughen enforcement against undocumented migrants. That reflects the administration’s sensitivity to the relentless Republican accusation—which polls show has resonated with many voters—that Biden has lost control of the southern border.Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a conservative group that advocates for reduced immigration, offered a preview of the likely attacks ahead he told me in an email: “Continued use of TPS only creates fresh incentives for people to flock to our borders. There is nothing temporary about TPS, and these designations call into question whether Congress intended for one Secretary to have broad power to allow hundreds of thousands of people to continue to remain in the country and work while doing so.”As Biden’s administration tries to set immigration policy, it has been forced to pick through a minefield of demands from its allies, attacks from Republicans, and lawsuits from all sides.Compounding all of these domestic challenges is a mass migration of millions of people fleeing crime, poverty, and political and social disorder in troubled countries throughout the Americas. In Venezuela alone, political and social chaos has driven more than 7 million residents to seek new homes elsewhere in the Americas, according to a United Nations estimate. “Venezuela is a displacement crisis approximately the size of Syria and Ukraine, but it gets, like, one one-thousandth of the attention,” Todd Schulte, the president and executive director of FWD.us, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It’s a huge situation.”Most of these displaced people from nations across Central and South America have sought to settle in neighboring countries, but enough have come to the U.S. to overwhelm the nation’s already strained asylum system. The system is so backlogged that experts say it typically takes four to six years for asylum seekers to have their cases adjudicated. If the time required to resolve an asylum case “slips into years, it does become a magnet,” encouraging migrants to come to the border because the law allows them to stay and work in the U.S. while their claims are adjudicated, says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a center-left think tank.Former President Donald Trump dealt with this pressure by severely restricting access to asylum. He adopted policies that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases were decided; that barred anyone from claiming asylum if they did not first seek it from countries between their homeland and the U.S. border; and, in the case of the pandemic-era Title 42 rule, that turned away virtually all undocumented migrants as threats to public health.Fitfully, Biden has undone most of Trump’s approach. (The Migration Policy Institute calculates that the Biden administration has taken 109 separate administrative actions to reverse Trump policies.) And Biden and Mayorkas, with little fanfare, have implemented a robust suite of policies to expand routes for legal immigration, while announcing stiff penalties for those who try to enter the country illegally. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States, and to impose tougher consequences on those who choose not to use those pathways,” Mayorkas said when he announced the end of Trump’s Title 42 policy.Immigration advocates generally express confidence that over time this carrot-and-stick approach will stabilize the southern border, at least somewhat. But it hasn’t yet stanched the flow of new arrivals claiming asylum. Some of those asylum seekers have made their way on their own to cities beyond the border. At least 20,000 more have been bused to such places by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, hoping to produce exactly the sort of tensions in Democratic circles that have erupted in recent weeks.[Ronald Brownstein: The GOP’s lurch toward extremism comes for the border]However they have arrived, this surge of asylum seekers has created enormous logistical and fiscal challenges in several of these cities. Adams has been the most insistent in demanding more help from the federal government. But he’s far from the only Democratic mayor who has been frustrated by the growing numbers and impatient for the Biden administration to provide more help.The top demand from mayors and other Democratic interests has been for Biden to use executive authority to allow more of the new arrivals to work. “There is one solution to this problem: It’s not green cards; it’s not citizenship. It’s work permits,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney told me earlier this week. “All these people need work. They wouldn’t be in [a] hotel, they wouldn’t be lying on streets, if they can go to work.”That answer seems especially obvious, Kenney continued, because “we have so many industries and so many areas of our commerce that need workers: hotels, restaurants. Let them go to work. [Then] they will get their own apartments, they will take care of their own kids.”The obstacle to this solution is that under federal law, asylum seekers cannot apply for authorization to work until 150 days after they filed their asylum claim, and the government cannot approve their request for at least another 30 days. In practice, it usually takes several months longer than that to receive approval. The Biden administration is working with cities to encourage asylum seekers to quickly file work applications, but the process cannot be streamlined much, immigration experts say. Work authorization through the asylum process “is just not designed to get people a work permit,” Todd Schulte said. “They are technically eligible, but the process is way too hard.”The inability to generate work permits for large numbers of people through the asylum process has spurred Democratic interest in using the Temporary Protected Status program as an alternative. It allows the federal government to authorize immigrants from countries facing natural disasters, civil war, or other kinds of political and social disorder to legally remain and work in the U.S. for up to 18 months at a time, and to renew those protections indefinitely. That status isn’t provided to everyone who has arrived from a particular country; it’s available only to people living in the U.S. as of the date the federal government grants the TPS designation. For instance, the TPS protection to legally stay in the U.S. is available to people from El Salvador only if they were here by February 2001, after two major earthquakes there.The program was not nearly as controversial as other elements of immigration law, at least until Trump took office. As part of his overall offensive against immigration, Trump sought to rescind TPS status for six countries, including Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador. But Trump was mostly blocked by lawsuits and Biden has reversed all those decisions. Biden has also granted TPS status to migrants from several additional countries, including about 200,000 people who had arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela as of March 2021.The demand from Democrats has been that Biden extend that protection, in a move called “redesignation,” to migrants who have arrived from Venezuela since then. Many Democrats have urged him to also update the protections for people from Nicaragua and other countries: A coalition of big-city mayors wrote Biden this summer asking him to extend existing TPS protections or create new ones for 11 countries.Following all of Biden’s actions, more immigrants than ever are covered under TPS. But the administration never appeared likely to agree to anything as sweeping as the mayors requested. Yesterday, the administration agreed to extend TPS status only to migrants from Venezuela who had arrived in the U.S. as of July 31. It did not expand TPS protections for any other countries. Angela Kelley, now the chief policy adviser for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that providing more TPS coverage to any country beyond Venezuela would be “a bigger piece to chew than the administration is able to swallow now.”But advocates considered the decision to cover more Venezuelans under TPS the most important action the administration could take to stabilize the situation in New York and other cities. The reason is that so many of the latest arrivals come from there; one recent survey found that two-thirds of the migrants in New York City shelters arrived from that country. Even including this huge migrant population in TPS won’t allow them to instantly work. The administration will also need to streamline regulations that slow work authorization, experts say. But eventually, Kelley says, allowing more Venezuelans to legally work through TPS would “alleviate a lot of the pressure in New York” and other cities.Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the Immigration Hub, an advocacy group, points out the TPS program is actually a better fit for Venezuelans, because the regular asylum process requires applicants to demonstrate that they fear persecution because of their race, religion, or political opinion, which is not the fundamental problem in Venezuela. “Most of them do not have good cases for asylum,” she said of the new arrivals from Venezuela. “They need TPS, because that’s what TPS is designed for: Their country is not functional.”Biden’s authority to expand TPS to more Venezuelans is likely to stand up in court against the nearly inevitable legal challenges from Republicans. But extending legal protection to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans still presents a tempting political target for the GOP. Conservatives such as Elizabeth Jacobs, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, have argued that providing work authorizations for more undocumented migrants would only exacerbate the long-term problem by encouraging more to follow them, in the hope of obtaining such permission as well.Immigration advocates note that multiple academic studies show that TPS protections have not in fact inspired a surge of further migrants from the affected countries. Some in the administration remain uncertain about this, but any worries about possibly creating more long-term problems at the border were clearly outweighed by more immediate challenges in New York and other cities.If Biden did nothing, he faced the prospect of escalating criticism from Adams and maybe other Democratic mayors and governors that would likely make its way next year into Republican ads denouncing the president’s record on immigration. That risk, many of those watching the debate believe, helped persuade the administration to accept the demands from so many of Biden’s allies to extend TPS to more undocumented migrants, at least from Venezuela. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be happy about this or any of the other difficult choices he faces at the border.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Updated at 9:00 a.m. ET on September 21, 2023In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the novel’s central protagonist, asks his father for permission to join a monastery, where he seeks to purify his soul and sanctify his work. Cynical and half-drunk, Alyosha’s father makes a prediction about what monastic life will do to the saintly youngster: “You will burn and you will burn out.”Not until nearly a century after the novel’s 1880 appearance did social science come up with a definition of what that phrase, burn out, meant. In 1974, the German American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger supplied a definition of the noun burn-out as the state of being “exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources” from one’s job, which would cause one to become ineffective in achieving “all intents and purposes.”If you are feeling burned out in your work, you are far from alone. In 2015, 51 percent of American corporate workers surveyed said that they had experienced burnout more than once in their current job, according to the consulting firm Deloitte. The coronavirus pandemic made this worse: Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2021 reported that 89 percent of their survey respondents said that their work life was getting worse during the pandemic. More than three in five admitted to “struggling to manage their workloads” and said they’d experienced burnout “often” or “extremely often” in the previous three months.[From the March 1948 issue: The Brothers Karamazov]When you are feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being, everything seems like an insurmountable task. Ordinary work is extraordinarily taxing; it is hard to see how you can ever make things better, and you want to just give up—to quit, to run away. But you don’t have to be overwhelmed. If you understand how the burnout cycle works, you can disrupt and reverse it with a few simple changes.Psychologists studying workplace burnout find that it tends to manifest through three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and a negative view of personal effectiveness. When you are burned out, you feel a weariness about being able to face work demands (sometimes bleeding into a sense of actual physical exhaustion). You lose enthusiasm for your work or its quality, and start to doubt your own ability and competence. If you think this syndrome might be affecting you, many self-evaluation surveys are available online, such as this one from the magazine Psychology Today.Burnout is not merely a problem of the mind; it also affects the brain and body. For example, being burned out is associated with a high degree of fragmented sleep, and with dysfunction of the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, which relates to an overproduction of the hormone cortisol. In lay terms, you feel stressed out. Because of this physiological effect, sustained burnout can lead to systemic inflammation, immunosuppression, metabolic syndrome (and its relative obesity), cardiovascular disease, and even premature death.[Simone Stoltzoff: The moral case for working less]Certain job characteristics tend to cause burnout. Surveying the scientific literature in 2022, Spanish researchers identified work overload, “emotional labor” (which includes having to control or hide negative emotions), a lack of autonomy, ambiguity or conflict about one’s role, inadequate supervision, lack of social support, and working hours that impinge on personal life. In other words, people burn out when their employers work them into the ground and don’t support them, and when the employees have no say in the matter.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.Certain workplaces and industries are more liable than others to burn out their workers. Last year, Gallup polled employees across the economy and found that the highest burnout levels occurred in K–12 education, universities, professional services, and government or public-policy jobs. Significantly lower levels were found in manufacturing, utilities, and construction. This helps make sense of another finding from a large survey of workers conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, which showed that one of the most glaring sources of burnout is meeting fatigue. The occupations that typically suffer the worst burnout rates are the ones that function as meeting factories, something I’ve seen firsthand.Burnout is an especially obdurate happiness problem to solve because once you are in the dreaded vortex of exhaustion, cynicism, and self-criticism, even what would once have made you happy at work now makes you unhappy. This was the conclusion of research published in The Journal of Psychology in 2016. The authors found that employees who were engaged and not burned out met their personal needs and stayed happy when they did their core work, met clients, and interacted with colleagues. This was in contrast, the researchers found, to their very burned-out colleagues, who reported that these same activities made things worse. The finding explains how two people doing the same job can have such different happiness experiences.For employers, my advice to avoid burnout happening in your workplace is straightforward. First, don’t ask people to sacrifice all of their time and their relationships for their job. Let people say what they feel at work within rational limits, and give them control. Also, make sure they know what their job is and feel supported. And finally, for God’s sake, get rid of as many meetings as possible.My advice to employees is more challenging to put into practice: It is more abstract and depends on the feedback loop that causes even normal work to burn you out, which in turn lowers your ability to engage in the normal work. The key is to disrupt this loop—by creating more “space” between your life and your job so that they don’t drag each other down and there is a chance to reverse the cycle. As the Dalai Lama advises, “If you feel ‘burnout’ setting in, if you feel demoralized and exhausted, it is best, for the sake of everyone, to withdraw and restore yourself.”[Arthur C. Brooks: The hidden link between workaholism and mental health]The easiest way to achieve this is to work only in defined hours. With the spread of mobile technologies, for many people, work can creep into almost every waking moment, from when you receive your first text of the day at 5 a.m. to the last email you send at 10:30 p.m. Working like this doesn’t just occupy your time; it also hijacks your thoughts, so that you get virtually no relief from professional concerns. One associate of mine told me that as devices have facilitated the sprawl of his work across his life, he thinks less about friends, family, and hobbies, and finds himself even dreaming about work.Set times when you resolve not to write or check work email. If necessary, you might consider getting a personal phone so that you can leave your work devices behind when you exercise, sleep, and spend time with family and friends. You might even make a rule with loved ones not to talk about work during certain hours and days, or while on vacation. These breaks are like little sabbaths, which can be very effective in helping you refresh and renew your engagement with work. And lest you worry that this habit will hurt your productivity, research has shown that people who use this technique can maintain, and even improve, their productivity and work quality.[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: What managers can do about burnout]Separation of life and work has been a particular problem throughout the pandemic for people who work from home. Burnout is extremely high for remote workers. According to 2022 survey data from the recruiting firm Zippia, 86 percent of fully remote workers experience some degree of burnout in their job, as opposed to 81 percent among hybrid workers, and a 70 percent rate for those working fully in person. Of course, this finding does not account for the fact that some jobs—notably, the ones that Gallup found to be low in burnout—can be performed only in person, so we don’t yet know how much of this discrepancy is attributable to remote working per se. But what the data do suggest is that moving to remote work is by no means a solution to burnout—to work from home is the antithesis of creating space between life and work.For many people, sorting work from life might seem nigh impossible—without its being the fault of their boss or company. These people are burning themselves out through their own need to work more, accomplish more, and achieve more success.If that is you, the monastery that Alyosha’s father maligned might actually hold the key to your recovery. One writer researching a 2022 book on work burnout asked a group of Benedictine monks about how they avoid the problem. He found that, following Saint Benedict’s nearly 1,500-year-old rules, the monks limited working at chores to three or four hours a day, and never let their labors infringe on their time for prayer. The writer asked what they did if that wasn’t enough time to finish their tasks. “You get over it,” they said.If you are a burned-out workaholic, a little Benedictine spirit might be just what you need. Stop working, get over it, and say a prayer instead.

Liz Truss’s attempted comeback earlier this week was almost as painful to watch as her premiership. Whoever is advising her obviously forgot to mention “humility” or that it might be an idea to try and acknowledge reality.But she is right about one thing. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday she said: “I was pushing against a system and against an orthodoxy that was gradually moving to the Left.” She blames her own party for not challenging the New Labour legacy and, somewhat bizarrely, Greta Thunberg. Presumably even Truss has figured out it’s not a good idea to blame the public directly. They must have been brainwashed into socialism by a Swedish teen and George Osborne.It's certainly true, though, that the public have moved left on a whole range of measures. Today sees the publication of the 40th British Social Attitudes survey which has been running an annual gold standard survey of public opinion since 1983, allowing us to observe trends over time.Since 1986 they’ve produced a left-right scaled score based on a composite mix of statements about inequality and the role of government in reducing it (I’ve listed the statements at the end of the post). A score of zero would be maximally left-wing and 100 maximally right. Under New Labour the country drifted rightwards peaking at 42 in 2004, presumably because there was a notable reduction in poverty and an increase in public spending. In recent years it has dropped to 33, the lowest so far.Left-Right Score 1986-2022The great thing about BSA is that it gives us a huge amount of detail to help us understand what sits behind this overall trend. And this year’s survey tells us there have been particularly big jumps in the public mood on the role of government in solving social problems and on poverty/welfare. It also raises some intriguing questions about the very substantial age gap in voting behaviour.The Role of GovernmentBSA has periodically asked people whether they think government should be responsible for a range of different issues. On things like providing healthcare and help for the elderly support has remained consistently high across the years. There is a strong consensus that hospitals and pensions should be funded. But in the most recent survey there has been a big jump in more disputed areas. For instance, the percentage saying government should “definitely” reduce the income differences between rich and poor has gone from 25% in 2006 to 53% in 2022. Provide a decent standard of living for the unemployed has gone from 10% “definitely” in 2006 to 38% in 2022.Of particular note is that these shifts have been as strong amongst Conservative voters, albeit from a lower base. The chart below shows the mean score of all the government responsibility questions combined. Labour supporters are roughly back to where they were in the mid-1980s, whereas Tory voters are more in favour of state intervention than at any previous point. This is not a phenomenon that can be explained by lefty woke Thunberg fans. It seems more likely to be a function of important government interventions on covid and energy bills that made a difference to peoples’ ability to weather those storms, as well as the general sense of decay. A small state seems a better idea when times are good.  Mean government responsibility score among Conservative and Labour identifiers – 1985-2022From the start BSA have asked an annual question on whether people want to reduce the tax burden and spend less on health, education and social benefits; keep it the same; or increase taxes and spending. Over forty years reducing taxes has never got a double digit score. People are profoundly risk averse, and while not unhappy with the idea of paying less tax are not prepared to lose access to current state-funded services or benefits to do so. This is where the Trussites are fighting against the strongest headwind.Moreover, there has been a notable shift in recent years from “keep it the same” to “increase taxes and spending”. At the peak of the New Labour spending splurge, and the financial crisis, in 2010, “increase” dropped to 31% but by 2017, with the impact of austerity becoming clearer, it reached 60%. It’s still at 55% despite the rising tax burden and cost of living pressures. This is one reason why I think Labour will have space to pivot on tax and spend post-election if they want to – though they will also have to show it is being directed towards genuine priorities. One thing this question doesn’t pick up is the strong public belief, found in other polling, that much government money is wasted.WelfarePerhaps the most profound shift over recent years has been around welfare recipients. From 2001 right up to the mid-2010s there was a general belief that benefits were too generous. More respondents than not during this period felt that many people who got benefits didn’t really deserve them. This was the background for the Coalition cuts to welfare. But by 2022 just 19% agreed with that statement.Agreement that many people who get social security don’t really deserve any help 1987-2022Again this is not about “woke lefties” but a trend that we can see is even stronger amongst Conservative than Labour supporters. As the authors of the BSA report say:“This is particularly surprising because the composition of Labour supporters changed with the tumultuous politics of the 2010s; Labour supporters from 2015 were on average less authoritarian than before (with highly-educated, young, socially liberal voters being more likely to support Labour after Brexit and Corbyn), which should, if anything, have made the gap in attitudes between Labour and Conservative Party supporters even larger.”Agreement that many people who get social security don’t really deserve any help, by political party support, 1987-2019It’s true that when asked if people would be willing for benefits to be higher even if meant higher taxes the Labour trend line has risen more than the Tory one. But, nevertheless, the change in Conservative voters attitudes is striking and, I suspect, for many readers counter-intuitive.Nor can it be explained by a fall in readership of those right-wing tabloids that attack benefits claimants most aggressively. Those still reading the Mail, Express, or Sun have become more favourable at more or less the same rate as the rest of the population. One explanation is something I’ve touched on before:“There has also been a shift away from simplistic media portrayals of poverty. Both ITV and the BBC have, during the current cost of living crisis, done a good job of telling peoples’ stories. Even right wing newspapers who have been happy, in the past, to run endless stories about “scroungers” and benefits fraud, have done so less in recent years. This is partly because some people with experience of scarcity have managed to infiltrate the media world (see this by Catlin Moran in The Times for instance).”But I agree with the authors that the biggest factor is simply that there has been a real and visible increase in poverty. The percentage who think poverty has risen in the last decade has risen from 32% to 78% since 2006. For the first time over half of respondents reported living in poverty themselves at times during their life.Changing perceptions of poverty in Britain, 1986-2022We can also see a change in attitude over what people consider poverty to be – with a sharp increase in the softer definition “if you can’t afford things most take for granted” as opposed to not being able to eat properly or live without debt. This is what Truss gets most wrong in imagining the leftwards shift is the responsibility of North London champagne socialists or the BBC. The shifts in media/political “orthodoxy” are a consequence of real world changes. Moreover, people are observing what’s happening around them – as they did in the mid-90s – independently of media. And they don’t like what they see. Even if someone is relatively affluent it’s hard to avoid seeing, for instance, that almost 80% of state schools now run some kind of foodbank or food parcel service for parents, and will often be asking better off families to donate.The Generation GapOne of the most striking trends of recent years has been the huge age gap that has opened up in voting preference. Older people have always trended more towards the Conservatives but the size of the gap has shot up since 2010.The age gap in party support, 1983-2022One might think this is a function of younger people rapidly shifting left or older people right. But, surprisingly, there has historically been little variation between the young and old when it comes to their position on the BSA left-right spectrum. It’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen any divergence (as per the chart below), which is after we saw the shift in voting behaviour, and in any case is fairly minor. One explanation is that older Labour votes have, until very recently, been more left-wing than younger ones on inequality and government intervention.Mean scores on the left-right scale by age group, 1986-2022Nor can the large age gap in voting behaviour be explained by changes on the liberal/authoritarian spectrum. Young people have always been more liberal and, while the gap has grown somewhat, it’s nowhere near enough to explain the divergence.Even more counter-intuitively older people are more likely to support higher taxes and higher spending than younger ones and that gap has gone in the other direction to the voting behaviour one would expect.Support for increased taxation and spending by age group, 1983-2023So what’s going on here? The report authors note that Brexit contributed to the age gap growth – though it started before then. But also that the gap hasn’t shrunk despite the EU referendum becoming a less potent issue. It seems more likely that Brexit played into a wider perception that the Tory party has no interest in young people, and it’s this, rather an ideological shift leftwards, that has driven the generation gap.This would also explain why younger people are less keen on tax rises: they think, probably correctly, it would be them paying, whereas much of the increased spending would benefit older people in need of pensions and healthcare. I’ve written before about changing conceptions of fairness and aspiration, and the growing belief amongst younger people than they can’t succeed just by working hard, a view the government have reinforced.If all this is correct it has quite profound consequences because it means there is a route for the Conservatives to win back young people by focusing more on their economic interests. It is not a generation lost to them for ever – on either economics or culture. A key question for the next decade of British politics is whether they can signal this without changing position on Brexit – which is such a totemic issue.The barometerCommentators often incorrectly assume that because voters typically have minimal interest in Westminster politics – speeches, white papers, parliamentary debates and so – that they are easily misled. Both left and right argue media bias against them leads to misconceptions and false consciousness. This is, essentially, Truss’s argument.But the BSA data over 40 years shows that voters are well aware of what’s going on around them and respond to real world changes, leading to something of a countercyclical trend in views. As government spending falls, services decline, and poverty increases there is shift leftwards: people want more spending, and more government intervention. As things improve they shift back rightwards.That doesn’t mean media/institutional behaviour doesn’t matter. For instance, a shift in tone towards benefits claimants may have contributed to public opinion softening amongst Tory voters. But there is only so much media outlets can do to shield their readers or viewers from reality. The Daily Mail cannot hide the growing number of families visibly struggling. Nor would the BBC be able to convince people the NHS was doing well, even if it tried.As the report authors say:“The public first began to look to government rather more in the wake of the financial crash of 2008-9, though in the event that mood appears eventually to have dissipated. However, the same cannot be said, so far at least, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expectations of government in the wake of that public health crisis have never been higher. The public shows no sign so far of wanting to row back on the increased taxation and spending that has been part of the legacy of the pandemic, not least perhaps because of their dissatisfaction with the state of the health service. Meanwhile, there are now also record levels of support for more defence spending. So far as the public are concerned at least, the era of smaller government that Margaret Thatcher aimed to promulgate – and which Liz Truss briefly tried to restore in the autumn of 2022 with her ill-fated ‘dash for growth’ – now seems a world away.”Ultimately any political party that wants to survive has to respect these trends and work within them. Public opinion may well swing back in the other direction in the future, but for now anyone who thinks the Truss programme is one voters will buy is entirely delusional.Comment is Freed is a reader supported publication + posts like this take a lot of work! A monthly subscription is £3.50 and an annual one £35. It includes at least four subscriber only posts a month.This post is public so please share if you found it interesting and help us build our audience.ShareTechnical note:These are the statements BSA use for their left/right composite.Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off. Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers. Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth. There is one law for the rich and one for the poor. Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance. 

Guilt, innocence and suspicion

The presumption of innocence cannot only have a strict legal meaning

A lot of the arguments that have followed the horrendous accusations of rape and sexual assault against Russell Brand — all of which he denies — have surrounded the presumption of innocence. Brand has not been taken to court, some have argued, let alone found guilty, so we should behave as if he is innocent.

Ah, say others, but the presumption of innocence is a legal matter. The police are required to behave as if he’s innocent — and, in other words, not to imprison him — but that doesn’t mean that private citizens can’t form their own judgements.

There’s something to that. You can’t necessarily express those judgements — you might get sued— but it would be nonsense to maintain that we should act as if anyone accused yet not convicted of crimes is innocent in every case. An extreme example: if your teenage child came home announcing that they had begun a romantic relationship with someone multiply accused of being a sex offender, would you have no problems? Don’t lie to me now.

Well, why have the accusers not gone to the police? In a better world they would. But I think it would be terribly unfair to assume that not going to the police makes accusers inherently illegitimate. Someone who has been assaulted may well be traumatised. Add to this that the police have a notorious propensity for ballsing up investigations (the case of Ian Watkins is an instructive example here). Accusers should go to the police but you can understand why they wouldn’t want to.

Still, I’m reminded of the most annoying response to people who defend free speech when people are excluded from private platforms: freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences!

But most of us understand that there has to be a limit to these “consequences”

Sure — it can be true. If you kept banging on about how tall male opinion columnists called Ben are arseholes I wouldn’t be denying you freedom of speech if I decided not to be your friend. But most of us understand that there has to be a limit to these “consequences”. If I protested against your right to make a livelihood, access private businesses, maintain a social life et cetera I could hardly maintain that I accept your right to free speech.

There are two kinds of free speech: the formal legal kind (which, of course, is also heavily circumscribed) and the informal social kind. I think the same has to be true with the “presumption of innocence”.

We are not just talking about people’s private individual judgements, after all. Mr Brand has been dropped by his agents, his shows are being cancelled, and YouTube has said that he is blocked from making money on the platform.

You can understand the potential reasoning. YouTube makes, and dispenses, money through its adverts. Having someone accused of rape and sexual assault making money off their platform could be bad for business. Yet when the chair of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee is allegedly sending letters to media platforms trying to talk them into demonetising Brand — as claimed by Rumble, a sort of younger, rowdier cousin of YouTube — we might not be talking about cold business decisions but state power bypassing the legal process to pursue the sanctioning of people who have never been convicted. If that doesn’t smell off to you then your odour receptors might have been fried.

There has to be a limit here. To what extent do people accused of crimes enjoy the presumption of innocence if they can’t make a living? (Sure, Brand is probably rich enough that he could live for four lifetimes without bothering to work again. But it seems unprincipled to suggest that your treatment, in a moral matter, should hinge on your personal wealth.)

Perhaps the police will pull us out of this ethical ditch by launching an investigation. Brand could also attempt to clear his name with a libel case. If he is innocent I hope he will. After all, this is not — as some people have suggested — only an example of “she said, he said”. It is at least claimed that there is material evidence (texted admissions of guilt, though non-specific, and medical records from a rape crisis centre). There is, in other words, a lot to be analysed rather than just assertions to be flung back and forth.

But how should we behave in lieu of legal proceedings? This feels dreadful to say as an opinion columnist — the general attitude of our kind being one of Godlike confidence — but I’m not entirely sure. I only know we have to draw a line somewhere and it cannot be in front of a prison’s gates. Perhaps the most eccentric anti-Brand intervention came from former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Nadine Dorries, who attacked Brand’s wife for standing by him. If even your marriage is expected to collapse, what exactly does the presumption of innocence offer you except the freedom to open a door?

Yes, a lot of the people who are banging on about the presumption of innocence have in fact assumed that Brand is innocent — the sort of people whose admiration for his vaccine-bashing, Bill Gates-trashing shtick have led them to call him a hero and announce their support. I don’t have time for that (which, granted, is easy to say when I always thought he was an oleaginous aspiring cult leader).

Yet to maintain the presumption of innocence to the extent that you won’t actively call someone guilty but will behave in every sense as if they are guilty seems like cowardice. When you delete someone’s entire back catalogue — to erase any sign of their existence — you’re not expressing a private suspicion. You’re making a very public statement about them as a human being. To pretend that you have any doubts, in such circumstances, is like pretending to be an agnostic as you do a line of coke off the Bible.

One hopes that some form of official investigation will begin soon, that the truth will prevail, and that justice will triumph.

In Wolff’s telling, Murdoch is a sort of hapless Frankenstein, abominating the monster he set loose on the world but unsure how to fight him. This waffling, however, is a product of the same venality that has always undergirded Murdoch’s old-fashioned right-wing politics. In his farewell letter, Murdoch, the Oxford-educated son of a wealthy Australian media executive, poses as a populist, decrying a media that’s in “cahoots” with elites, “peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.” This is pure projection: Fox exists to peddle self-serving political narratives, deceiving its audience under the guise of respecting it. In “The Fall” — a book that isn’t for anyone who doesn’t want to encounter casual slurs — Murdoch says of the celebrity anchor Sean Hannity, “He’s retarded, like most Americans.” The last thing Murdoch wants to do is risk lower ratings by leveling with the audience he looks down on.

Yes, Trump was briefly banished from Fox’s airwaves, and Murdoch championed Trump’s putative rival, Ron DeSantis. But with DeSantis’s star falling, Fox has slavishly defended Trump each time he’s been indicted, while ignoring or minimizing news putting Trump in a bad light. As of May 4, the liberal group Media Matters found, Fox had devoted a mere 13 minutes of airtime to Trump’s civil trial on charges of sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. “It was clear how much antipathy Murdoch had personally built up toward Trump,” writes Wolff. “But at the same time there was no change in his expectations as the owner of the country’s ratings-leading news channel.”

Though “The Fall” is peppered with references to HBO’s “Succession,” Murdoch comes off as the anti-Logan Roy, desperate for the approval of his mostly liberal children, with the hateful Fox News standing between them. “He just wants his kids to love him,” Roger Ailes is quoted saying. “And they don’t.” In a chapter set in the winter of 2022, Wolff describes Murdoch fantasizing about giving up Fox, which his friends urge him to do. They emphasize “how much better his relationship with his children would be without the curse of Fox News.”

But breaking that curse would have meant turning Fox over to his son James, who feels the stain of Fox especially acutely and longs to remake it into a “force for good,” a phrase Wolff repeats with contempt. “James had become the avenging Murdoch — avenging what his family had wrought,” writes Wolff. “It was not enough to save himself and his family and the Murdoch brand from Fox. He had to save the nation.” Wolff sneers at James’s grandiosity, but if Rupert Murdoch truly wanted a redemptive final act, his younger son was probably the only one who could have given it to him.

Instead, Murdoch has done the predictable thing and handed Fox to his son Lachlan, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, widely seen as the only true conservative among the Murdoch heirs. Wolff challenges the common perception of Lachlan as a right-wing ideologue, painting him instead as essentially apolitical and mostly interested in spear fishing. Nevertheless, of the Murdoch children, Lachlan is the one most likely to let Fox continue in its current groove. The network may keep boosting Trump’s Republican primary opponents, but once the primaries are over, we can expect it to once again be the lucrative propaganda arm of Trump’s presidential campaign.

A group of parents challenged the Fairfax County, Virginia school board’s revamping of admissions policies at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) as racially discriminatory against Asian-American applicants. TJ specializes in advanced math and science education and for years has been ranked the number one public high school in the country. In Fall 2020, the board voted to overhaul TJ’s admissions process, notably abolishing standardized testing and introducing a rule that approximately 450 seats in each class would go to the top-rated 1.5% students from each county middle school. In allocating the remaining 100 seats, students from underrepresented middle schools would receive an admissions boost.

Because Asian-American students are disproportionately concentrated in Fairfax County middle schools that have specialized offerings for gifted children, these changes reduced their numbers significantly. This was not unintentional: deliberations about revamping the admissions procedures were infected with talk of racial balancing from the start. The Coalition for TJ won summary judgment in the district court, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (where MI filed a brief last year) reversed. The Coalition has now petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case and MI has joined the American Civil Rights Project and Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute on a brief supporting that effort.

We argue that the Fourth Circuit misread the record under the wrong legal standard to reverse the district court’s finding of discriminatory intent, that it applied the wrong substantive standard to allow the school board to evade strict scrutiny, and that TJ’s experience under the board’s admissions policy reflects no educational gains from enhanced “diversity” as the board construes that term. Particularly after its decision in the Harvard and UNC affirmative-action cases last term, the Supreme Court ought to take up this case and prevent unconstitutional race-balancing through facially race-neutral methods.

Photo by DNY59/iStock

       When then-President Donald Trump imposed huge new tariffs on a wide range of imports from China in 2018, it was entrepreneurs like Deena Ghazarian who paid the price. "To be clear, I'm the one who paid the tariffs. China did not," Ghazarian, the founder and CEO of Austere, a consumer tech accessories company, told the House Energy and Commerce Committee during a hearing on Wednesday. "I had to absorb these costs of the tariffs to avoid pricing my products out of the competitive accessories landscape." Ghazarian had launched Austere just months before the tariffs hit. Her company specializes in selling high-end HDMI and audio cables, along with other components for home theaters and surround-sound audio systems. It is an American-owned and operated company, but one that relies on equipment and parts shipped from China. That meant she was collateral damage in the Trump administration's trade war, which included tariffs of up to 25 percent on consumer goods and electronic components imported from China. At the time the tariffs were imposed, Trump and his top trade advisers argued that Chinese firms would bear the brunt of the costs. "China producers pay for these tariffs in the language of economics, they bear the burden of the tariffs through lower prices, lower exports, lower profits," Peter Navarro, then the head of the White House's Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, told Fox Business in 2019. That's not what actually happened. As Ghazarian said on Wednesday, it was (and still is) American companies that have paid for the tariffs, a fact that even the federal government now acknowledges. In a study published in March, the U.S. International Trade Commission concluded that American companies and consumers "bore nearly the full cost of these tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs." The accumulation of academic and anecdotal evidence hasn't done much to change policy in Washington, however. Neither has the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. President Joe Biden was correct in 2019 when he said "Trump doesn't get the basics. He thinks his tariffs are paid for by China. Any beginning econ student at Iowa or Iowa State could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs." Alas, the Biden administration has kept those tariffs in place. For entrepreneurs like Ghazarian, that has meant a scramble to find alternative sources for some products—a process, she added, that is neither inexpensive nor easy. In other cases, she's had no choice but to absorb the added cost of those import taxes. An attempt to navigate what she called the "arcane, nontransparent, and highly uncertain" tariff exclusion process run by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) ended in frustration. Her appeals to be exempted from the tariffs were denied, and the USTR never responded to her follow-up requests asking why the denial was issued. That's a fairly typical experience. As Reason has reported, the tariff exclusion process is effectively a bureaucratic black box with no due process for those whose claims are denied. The experience, Ghazarian said, left her feeling like she was the government's adversary, "rather than a United States–headquartered company employing Americans." For years, CEOs and entrepreneurs from a wide range of industries have been sitting in front of Congress to deliver this same message: Trump's tariffs hit Americans square in the face (and the wallet). The Biden administration has acknowledged that tariffs are adding to inflation too. So far, none of that has made much of a difference. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Austere was one of hundreds of American companies that took advantage of the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program to stay afloat. Looking back on that ordeal now, Ghazarian told the committee that her loans through that program effectively served to offset the tariff payments that she was still obligated to make throughout the pandemic. "It would have been more efficient to repeal the tariffs entirely," she said, stifling an ironic laugh, "which would have lessened the need for companies to seek government resources…to stay alive."The post CEO: 'I'm the One Who Paid the Tariffs. China Did Not.' appeared first on Reason.com.

As Washington turns its focus toward the 2024 presidential campaign, U.S. aid to Ukraine is becoming increasingly vulnerable to partisan politics and the culture wars. When the next tranche comes up for a vote in Congress, the number of Republicans voting no will be high. If the Biden administration wants to preserve the flow of support to Kyiv, it will need to mount a more robust, more honest case about the expected costs and length of the war effort to lawmakers and the American people.

Since the full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, the United States has committed $113 billion to military, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine and other countries impacted by the war. The Biden administration is set to ask Congress to approve an additional $24 billion. With Congress already in chaos amid a looming shutdown of the federal government, aid for Ukraine is likely to be considered separately, at least in the House. This means it can no longer expect a free ride on a separate piece of must-pass legislation.

The number of Republicans to vote against more aid, unless Biden meets a list of GOP conditions, will be “at least half,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told me during a panel discussion I moderated on Monday at the Concordia Annual Summit on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. Waltz laid out those conditions in an op-ed published under the headline “The era of Ukraine’s blank check from Congress is over.”

Waltz says he wants the Biden administration to provide better accounting of the aid and to spell out exactly how it plans to help bring the war to an end. He also wants to see new financial commitments from European partners. Otherwise, he says he’ll vote no.

“I think it’s absolutely in America’s interest to stop [Vladimir] Putin cold. … However, the era of blank checks for aid, at least coming from Congress, is over,” he said. “Without those conditions … I don’t think I can get to yes’ anymore.”

In May 2022, 149 Republicans voted for Ukraine aid, with 57 voting against. In the Senate, only 11 Republicans voted against the funding. If Waltz’s rough estimate is correct, those opposed to additional funding could double this time around. Senate GOP aides tell me that the number of Republicans prepared to vote against the aid in that chamber will rise significantly.

Biden officials often tell journalists that the GOP opposition to helping Ukraine is limited to a small group of far-right MAGA members — and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) can keep his caucus in line. But even some Democratic lawmakers are now sounding the alarm, saying that more must be done to defend the aid in public and private.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) said during our panel that the tide is turning inside the GOP in ways advocates for Ukraine aid have not properly acknowledged. He said more must be done to make the case to the American people that the aid is not only crucial to Kyiv but delivers a high return on investment for U.S. security as well.

“A significant percentage of the Republican caucus is no longer supportive of this,” Ryan said. “The very extreme right has hijacked the Republican Party and lost this bipartisan consensus we had that we are for democracy and for freedom.”

Waltz and Ryan are both decorated military veterans who sit on the Armed Services Committee. They both agree that the United States has an interest in stopping Putin’s aggression now, lest he succeed and then attack more countries. Where they diverge is on whether the American public is still committed to giving Ukraine what it needs to win.

To be sure, Waltz’s concerns about aid oversight have merit and his call for more clarity on U.S. objectives in Ukraine is valid. In fact, the European countries currently provide more overall aid than the United States. But by playing into the idea that the United States must choose between solving problems at home and fighting aggression abroad, Republicans are prepping the ground for what could amount to abandoning the Ukrainians at the worst possible moment.

“That would dramatically undercut the foundational support of the Ukrainians right at the time that they are showing some real momentum in the counteroffensive,” said Ryan. “The signaling and the message that sends, for us to back away in this critical time, not only resonates in Europe but resonates in the Asia-Pacific as well.”

This is the message Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brings to Washington this week as he meets with senators after speaking on Tuesday at the United Nations in New York. In contrast to the warm welcome he received on Capitol Hill last December, he was not invited to speak to a joint session of Congress during this trip. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he has “questions” for Zelensky about accountability and the future of the war.

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion fad is on the ropes. Multitudes of state lawmakers are attempting to limit or ban DEI training at state-funded institutions. And in at least six states, anti-DEI bills have been signed into law. At the same time, conservative legal groups are increasingly taking aim at corporate diversity programs. Amazon and Starbucks both face discrimination lawsuits over their diversity initiatives. Comcast has already settled a suit of its own.

With DEI in ever-worse odor, a psychologist and a sociologist, both of whom specialize in bias and diversity, have taken to the Wall Street Journal to explain what DEI training gets wrong and how to fix it. Mahzarin Banaji and Frank Dobbin write that DEI programs fail because they tend to “shame trainees for holding stereotypes” and “seek to solve the problem of bias by invoking the law to scare people.” As a result, they say, “people often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups.”

So the authors recommend a different approach. First, DEI trainers should introduce their ideas with humility. Second, they should “give managers a way to counter biases—namely, training in strategies for cultural inclusion.” With these fixes in place, they say, “implicit-bias education can alert students to the fact that people committed to equality nonetheless hold biases.”

Perhaps Banaji and Dobbin should consider this: No implicit-bias training will ever work because free adults rightfully resent being “trained” by academics in how to treat other human beings. People leave DEI sessions feeling angry because the very notion of wise and good consultants trying to improve your character at the workplace is infuriating.

Think about the premise of it. Until the office trainers get ahold of you, you’re assumed to be morally defective, unfit for mixed company. (Never mind that the classroom trainers have already had a crack at you.) It’s a sweeping insult. Your parents, your faith, your spouse, your friends, your education, your own introspection and personal exploration—all failures. You need the folks with the quizzes and pamphlets and roleplaying sessions to sort you out and make you a good person.

It would be bad enough if DEI training was aimed strictly at altering your superficial behavior. But, as we see above, the key concept here is “implicit bias.” The trainers are there to introduce you to your inner bigot and show you how to tame him.

Besides the very real possibility that you might not have an inner bigot, what business is it of anyone’s if you do? There’s no law against thinking cruel and stupid thoughts. There are laws against acts of discrimination, and they should be invoked wherever applicable. It’s not for no reason that fighting “pre-crime” is the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What stays in your head is yours to do with as you please. Period.

If people leave DEI training with “greater animosity toward other groups,” maybe that’s because they had managed to keep the darkest parts of their subconscious healthily buried until someone with a human-resources-related degree tried to drag it out into their conscious awareness.

DEI is failing and under legal attack because it’s a bad idea. Not because real DEI has never been tried. I don’t doubt that many of its champions mean well. But, as with cruel ideas, compassionate ones don’t count until they’re executed. DEI is now doing real-world harm. And there are laws against that.

Last year, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau, child poverty in America more than doubled. This steep increase, which was accompanied by a general rise in poverty among all age groups, was preceded by two years of declining poverty rates, which were largely attributed to support offered by the federal government during the pandemic. In the case of child poverty, the most important driver of the 2022 jump was the expiration of the expanded child tax credit, which the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats were unable to renew last year, thanks to the opposition of Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin.

To talk about the report, I recently spoke by phone with Christopher Wimer, the director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the child tax credit has been so successful at reducing poverty, whether states can fill the gap left by the federal government, and what lessons should be drawn from pandemic-era expansions of the social safety net.

What did this report tell us, and how did it reach its conclusions about the child poverty rate in the past year?

It showed what a lot of people were expecting—namely, that using the supplemental poverty measure, which is a more robust measure of income poverty than the United States’ official measure, and counts a lot of the income that the official measure ignores, such as tax credits and in-kind benefits, showed a major rise in poverty from 2021 to 2022. As I said, that was widely expected given that we knew a lot of the pandemic-era policy support to people’s incomes had expired by 2022. For children, the major thing that expired was the 2021 expansion to the child tax credit.That wasn’t the only thing driving the increase in child poverty, and poverty over all from 2021 to 2022, but for children it was a major part of the story.

Do we have some sense of how much a part of the story it was?

Yeah, the child poverty rate was 5.2 per cent in 2021, and that increased to 12.4 per cent in 2022, so it more than doubled. We put out a piece last week where we showed that if an expanded child tax credit had still been in place in 2022, the child poverty rate would have been about 8.1 per cent, so much less than the 12.4 per cent that the census saw. Poverty still would have gone up for children. But there were other parts to the story. In 2021, we had the third round of stimulus payments, or “economic impact payments,” as they’re called. There was also the continuation of some other expansions to the safety net such as emergency allotments in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

So, from what we can tell, slightly more than half the increase in child poverty was due to the expiration of the credit.

Correct.

Your center wrote a report in the beginning of 2022, looking at just the jump from December, 2021, to January, 2022, after the expiration of the expanded credit, and you found an even bigger increase in child poverty than the recent census report showed. Could this have been even worse?

I think it’s important to understand that the numbers we released in 2022 came from our estimation of monthly poverty rates. So it’s a method that we developed to try to understand the poverty rates in the population in advance of the annual statistics that come out each year from the Census Bureau. One important and key difference between the two measures is that our monthly series is really trying to capture the inflow of income in a given month compared with the poverty rate in a given month, whereas an annual poverty measure is aggregating income across the calendar year.

Our monthly series would ask how much the monthly payment in July, for example, reduced the child poverty rate in July, whereas the census numbers that came out last week are asking how all the income pooled across the calendar compared with an annual poverty measure. But, despite the differences, both show that the expiration of the expanded child tax credit threw a lot more children into poverty after keeping a lot of children out of poverty while those payments were in place.

Can you talk a little bit about how the child tax credit works and why you think it has been so successful?

The child tax credit has been around for about twenty-six years and historically has operated as part of people’s tax filing and tax refunds. It’s been what the I.R.S. calls partially refundable so that, for upper-income families, the credit can reduce the amount of taxes that people owe at tax time. And then, for lower- and more moderate-income families, they can get a partial credit as a refund at tax time. Before the 2021 expansion, the maximum credit that one could be eligible for was two thousand dollars per child. And not everyone got that. The maximum that people could get as a refund, for example, was only fourteen hundred dollars per child.

There’s an earnings floor, essentially, before you get anything. And then the credit would phase in as earnings increase. Our research at the center has shown that in the pre-expansion form of the credit, a lot of children were left out or left behind by that credit structure, particularly the children in the lowest-income families. A lot of people got only a partial credit, and some families with children got no credit at all. You needed substantial levels of earnings to get the full credit that was available to middle- and upper-middle-class families.

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan expanded the credit for that year and basically made three big changes. One change was that it increased the maximum size of the benefit levels, from two thousand to three thousand dollars per child for older children, six and above, and thirty-six hundred dollars per child for younger children, ages zero to five. The second major change is that it made the credit fully refundable and available to all families with children at the lower end of the income distribution and no longer tied to the earnings levels of their parents. The third major change was that the credit was delivered monthly in the last six months of 2021. So half of the credit was delivered to most families in July through December, in the middle of the month, and then the second half of the credit was delivered when families filed their taxes in early 2022. Those are the three major changes. They were in existence only for that year. And, as of 2022, the law reverted to its pre-pandemic form.

This year, after we found out that the federal expansion was not going to be permanent, a number of states have stepped in and tried to increase their own child tax credits. What do we know about those efforts, and is it too early to see what effect they might be having? How much hope do you have that, if the federal government doesn’t step in, some of the uptick in poverty rates that we’ve seen can be mitigated?

Americans spend more on healthcare than other similar countries. This fact is not in dispute – but the causes of this disparity are often debated. It is common to use this fact to support whatever narrative you want to tell about American healthcare. It is often used to imply that Americans are sicker, or that the healthcare we deliver is less effective. But there is likely a simpler explanation.

First let’s look at the numbers. In 2021 the US spent 17.8% of GDP on healthcare, $10,687 per person. The next closest country was Germany who spent 12.8% and $6,524 per person. At the low end, South Korea spent 8.8% and $2,874 per person. The US is clearly an outlier for industrialized nations.

Of note, US citizens do not have the highest out-of-pocket healthcare expenses ($1,225 per household). That would be Switzerland at $1,577. South Korea, who has the lowest total cost, has one of the highest out-of-pocket costs at $1,040. The countries with the lowest household cost were those with socialized medicine, in the $500-$800 range.

There are a number of hypotheses to explain the US outlier effect. Americans may be more unhealthy, requiring more healthcare. American healthcare may rely more on expensive advanced technology. We may deliver unnecessarily more healthcare with diminishing returns. The delivery and payment for healthcare may be less efficient. Or, Americans may be simply paying more for essentially the same healthcare. All of these things may be true to some extent at the same time.

While there are important demographic differences between US citizens and other industrialized nations, the gap in conditions like obesity and diabetes is closing and does not explain the cost difference. What the research primarily shows is that Americans pay more for the same healthcare services.

A 2018 study published in JAMA found that social spending and healthcare utilization were not substantially different between the US and other similar countries. Rather, the main difference that explains the higher costs is that the same healthcare goods and services simply cost more in the US.

Part of the issue is administrative costs, which are estimated to be between 15% and 30% of all healthcare costs in the US. This is partly due to the fact that the US system is more complex than most other similar nations. The primarily problem, however, is not the complexity itself but the lack of standardization. Our patchwork system has no standardized forms or rules. There are entire occupations, such as coding and billing specialists, that don’t even exist in other countries. This is an area where thoughtful regulation could impose standardization on the industry to reduce costs and administrative waste.

Drug prices are another outlier. About 9% of total healthcare costs, and 12% of personal costs, were due to prescription drugs. Total drug costs were estimated to be 2.5 times higher than similar industrialized nations. That alone can account for a significant portion of higher US healthcare costs. For some individual drugs, they can cost 10 times as much in the US than other nations. This is entirely due to the fact that the US does not regulate drug prices while other countries do, therefore the pharmaceutical industry will simply make the bulk of its profit in the US where it can charge as much as the market will allow.

Hospital care is perhaps the single biggest contributor to US healthcare costs, amounting to 31% of total healthcare expenses. Again, in the US the same hospital services can cost 2-3 times as much as identical services in other countries. US hospitals charge more for everything from MRI scans to knee surgery.

Meanwhile, utilization of hospital services is not dramatically different in the US vs similar countries. The US is average to slightly above average in terms if ordering MRI scans and performing knee surgery.

What all this means is that if we are going to address the extremely high and rising healthcare costs in the US we will need to follow the evidence. Reducing hospital stays and healthcare utilization will have only a negligible impact. There are some marginal gains to be made when it comes to practicing cost-effective medicine. You don’t really need to prescribe that new expensive drug when and older cheaper drug is essentially equivalent. We definitely need to keep an eye on the overall efficiency of healthcare delivery and practice. But when it comes to overall costs, such measures are just nibbling around the edges.

The dominant factor in increased US healthcare costs is that we pay more for the same goods and services. This is due to the regulatory and market environment in the US. A large piece of this is also our increased administrative costs, which is likely the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to reducing healthcare costs. Standardizing and streamlining healthcare administration is a no-brainer. Allowing Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate for drug prices is another measure with broad expert support. Drug prices should be more equitably distributed among industrialized nations (while subsidizing poorer nations). Hospital costs need to be brought in line with more international standards as well.

The good news is – these are all straightforward regulatory issues which can be informed by many examples in other nations. We can dramatically reduce US healthcare costs, and bring them in line with international averages, without having to wrestle with complex demographic or biomedical issues that don’t have clear solutions.

To prevent catastrophic climate change and accelerate the global transition to a net-zero economy, policymakers and asset owners urgently need to rethink how we channel capital at scale. The key is to develop new financial instruments that are profitable, liquid, and easily accessible to savers and investors globally.

NEW YORK – As we move from UN Climate Week to COP28 in Dubai later this year, we must stop the “greenwishing” and “greenwashing” and start thinking about the instruments that will enable the private sector and private investors to channel more capital toward climate resilience and sustainable development. While the public sector has an important role to play in this respect, scalable solutions require significant commitments of private-sector resources. With climate change already wreaking havoc on poor and rich countries alike, unlocking this largely untapped pool of capital has become an urgent priority.

Yet as matters stand, many investors associate climate-centric investments with “social impact” and reduced profitability. While sophisticated investors have the means to deploy their capital profitably toward decarbonization, the energy transition, and other climate-related sectors, such investments tend to be illiquid. They remain tightly wound up in private-equity funds, and thus inaccessible to the ordinary investors and savers who are most exposed to climate-driven food, water, and energy insecurity.

The solution is to create climate investments that are profitable, liquid, and accessible to all. COP28 offers an opportunity to rethink how we deliver such market solutions, and how we can harness digital innovation to scale up promising models. To mobilize capital at scale, we must draw on the global savings of individual investors as well as institutions such as pension funds, insurers, and sovereign funds. Risk diversification can be achieved through retail-friendly, liquid, easily accessible instruments such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The sensible way to construct a profitable, long-term, climate-aligned, widely accessible investment strategy is to develop a diversified portfolio of assets that directly or indirectly support climate financing. For investors with a long-term horizon, a portfolio that meets these requirements should be composed of three main asset types.

The first is climate-resilient real estate and infrastructure – meaning assets in weather-proof, stable geographies that have low climate exposure. Real-estate and infrastructure valuations in such regions are poised to appreciate significantly on the back of population shifts from high-risk areas across the Southern Hemisphere to more resilient communities in North America, Northern Eurasia, and select geographies in the Global South.

Carefully selected Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and exposure to greenfield developments through ETFs are two ways to secure reliable returns from climate-adaptation efforts. And as an added bonus, such investments offer broader economic and societal benefits, including productivity growth, job creation, and the provision of employment and housing for migrating populations.

The second component is green commodities. An orderly transition to a more resilient future requires massive investments not only in energy, food, and water assets, but also in the metals and critical minerals used in renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs). These include commodities such as soy, wheat, copper, rare-earth elements, cobalt, lithium, and so forth. To avoid “greenflation” (inflation caused by decarbonization efforts) and supply bottlenecks, we urgently need to boost production and lower the cost of securing these commodities.

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Finally, a sensible climate-aligned portfolio should include assets that provide a hedge against inflation and geo-economic risks, such as short-term and inflation-indexed sovereign bonds and gold. Not only does the negative correlation between these assets and other climate-related investments offer extra ballast, but it also provides liquidity and low volatility to meet the needs of many individual investors, pensioners, and savers. And again, there is an added bonus: greater investments in inflation-proof sovereign assets will allow governments to do more to finance the green transition.

To achieve maximum impact, these climate-investment instruments must be made available to the average investor on liquid, low-cost terms. While ETFs can help, not everyone has a brokerage account, or even a bank account. We tend to overlook the unbanked populations of the Global South, as well as the younger generations for whom digital assets may be more appealing. According to the World Bank, 1.4 billion adults are unbanked globally, and the share of the unbanked population exceeds 50% in several Middle Eastern, Asian, and African countries with larger youth (“digital native”) populations.

Owing to these factors, we will need to come up with a digital, tokenized representation of all the aforementioned climate-investment solutions, both to achieve global scale and to protect those most at risk of climate change and fiat currency debasement. But digital assets can offer a viable solution only if they are backed by real-world physical and financial assets. Mitigating speculation risks and preserving liquidity during crises is crucial to ensure that these do not become yet another form of fundamentally worthless crypto vaporware.

To build climate-resilient communities, encourage cross-border public-private partnerships, secure critical green supplies, and accommodate climate-driven population shifts around the world, policymakers and asset owners urgently need to rethink how we channel capital at scale. With climate-driven costs escalating rapidly, innovation (both technological and financial) remains the most powerful tool at our disposal. With COP28 approaching, there is no more time for temporizing and empty green-wishing.

       It's not totally unprecedented to see the federal budget deficit double from one year to the next, as it seems to have done this year. But those occasions, at least in the past 50 years, have always corresponded with bad stuff happening to the national economy. Deficits surged in the late 1970s and early 1980s thanks to high inflation and a series of recessions. The budget deficit doubled between 2002 and 2003 thanks to a recession and as the War on Terror kicked off. And it skyrocketed again during the crises that bookended the 2010s: the mortgage crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. This year will likely be added to that list. The Congressional Budget Office last week projected that the federal government will post a deficit of $2 trillion when the current fiscal year ends on September 30. At first blush, that might not appear to double last year's budget deficit of about $1.4 trillion, but keep in mind that last year's total included roughly $400 billion for President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan—funds that were never spent because the Supreme Court struck down the proposal, as the CBO notes. Compared to those other historical examples, however, this year seems like an outlier. Unemployment is low, the economy has been growing steadily, and inflation has significantly abated. America does not seem to be in a crisis at the moment, but the government's balance sheet certainly is. And it is that way, in large part, because of the government's own programs—as opposed to, say, an external event like a pandemic or a mortgage crisis. The drivers of this year's rising deficit are four-fold, and three of them are the result of decades of poor policymaking: rising interest costs on the $33 trillion national debt, higher Social Security outlays, and more Medicare spending. As Axios points out, those three categories added more than $390 billion to the deficit relative to last year—a tremendous jump in a single year. The fourth category is falling federal income tax revenue, which is responsible for about $171 billion of the added deficit this year versus last. That's likely a blip and not a long-term problem—federal tax revenue was unexpectedly high a year ago, and bigger swings in annual revenue tallies seem to be becoming more common, as The Wall Street Journal explained in May. That's not the case for the other three categories driving this year's deficit, all of which are going to keep getting worse for the foreseeable future. The two big federal entitlement programs are both on a trajectory toward insolvency. Lawmakers have known that for a long time, and have chosen to do nothing about it. They've also known that as the country ages and, in particular, as the Baby Boomer generation grows old, those programs would be strained. Again, they've done nothing about that looming problem. The rising cost to service the national debt, meanwhile, is a feedback loop created by the other poor decisions and compounded by higher interest rates. Over the next decade, the federal government will spend $10.6 trillion just to pay the interest on borrowing that's already occurred or is planned—and that total could go up if the federal government has to respond to an unexpected crisis or if lawmakers vote for higher levels of borrowing in future budgets. The current pace of borrowing is staggering. The federal government has borrowed $1 trillion since June 15. "We are becoming numb to these huge numbers, but it doesn't make them any less dangerous," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in a statement last week. The big difference, then, between this year and 2002 (or 1977 or any of the few other times in recent history when the deficit has doubled) is that the drivers of this year's shocking deficit growth are not temporary problems. They are structural problems—either as so-called "mandatory spending" or as a function of the borrowing the government has already done—that will continue to mount until they are meaningfully addressed.The post How the Federal Budget Deficit Doubled in a Single Year appeared first on Reason.com.

This month, Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, alleging that its denunciation of X—the A.D.L. had accused the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter of amplifying antisemitism—has cost Musk’s company a fortune in advertising revenue. The Anti-Defamation League, in turn, asserted that Musk’s threat was “dangerous and deeply irresponsible.” This week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to California to meet with Musk to discuss artificial intelligence, but their other much-anticipated topic was antisemitism. Netanyahu asked Musk to “stop antisemitism as best you can.” Musk, alluding to SpaceX and his hope for a mission to Mars, responded that he favors anything that “ultimately leads us to become a spacefaring civilization,” and, since hate hinders that mission, “obviously, I’m against antisemitism.”

This all unfolded amid the release of Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk. Musk’s family history has a bearing on the dispute, but, in the book, as I pointed out in a review, Isaacson only glancingly discusses Musk’s grandfather J. N. Haldeman, whom he presents as a risk-taking adventurer and whose politics he dismisses as “quirky.” In fact, Haldeman was a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who blamed much of what bothered him about the world on Jewish financiers.

Elon Musk is not responsible for the political opinions of his grandfather, who died when Musk was three years old. But Haldeman’s legacy casts light on what social media does: the reason that most people don’t know about Musk’s grandfather’s political writings is that in his lifetime social media did not exist, and the writings of people like him were not, therefore, amplified by it. Indeed, they were very unlikely to circulate widely, and are now quite rare. Still, they’re not hard to find, which makes it unfortunate that Isaacson neither quotes from nor mentions them.

Musk has said that he bought Twitter to halt the advance of a “woke mind virus” spreading online. His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”

Haldeman was born in Minnesota in 1902 but grew up mostly in Saskatchewan, Canada. A daredevil aviator and sometime cowboy, he also trained and worked as a chiropractor. In the nineteen-thirties, he joined the quasi-fascistic Technocracy movement, whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule. He became a leader of the movement in Canada, and, when it was briefly outlawed, he was jailed, after which he became the national chairman of what was then a notoriously antisemitic party called Social Credit. In the nineteen-forties, he ran for office under its banner, and lost. In 1950, two years after South Africa instituted apartheid, he moved his family to Pretoria, where he became an impassioned defender of the regime.

Before the age of the Internet, the writings of political extremists tended to be privately published, in quite small numbers. An angry man typing out memos about an invisible world government might make a few mimeographs or carbon copies, but the chance that any ended up in a library, catalogued and preserved, is slight. Presumably, most of Haldeman’s papers remain in family hands, if they have not been destroyed. But some of his writing survives, including in the Michigan State University library’s extraordinary Radicalism Collection.

In 2017, the collection acquired two of Haldeman’s tracts, as part of a trove from an anonymous donor which has now grown to nineteen thousand pieces of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy literature. One of the Haldeman tracts, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa,” is dated May, 1960. The timing is significant. In February, 1960, Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister, delivered his famous “Wind of Change” speech to the South African Parliament, discountenancing apartheid and urging acceptance of independence movements: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” In March, South African police opened fire on a crowd of thousands of Black South Africans protesting outside the Sharpeville police station, killing sixty-nine people, including children, and wounding nearly two hundred. The killings were captured on television and the coverage reached around the world. In the ensuing protests and state of emergency, Nelson Mandela was among eighteen thousand people arrested and jailed. Haldeman’s tracts defended white rule against an “international conspiracy” that opposed it.

“Every day the brain-washers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe,” Haldeman warned in his forty-two-page May, 1960, tract. “As examples ‘The Natives are ill-treated,’ ‘underpaid,’ ‘underprivileged,’ ‘separate development is wrong,’ ‘apartheid is un-Christian.’ Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters, bioscopes, din this into the conscious and subconscious minds of the public.” (“Bioscopes,” here, means motion pictures.) “People who know it is 99% untrue repeat these lies emphatically and emotionally,” Haldeman wrote.

Haldeman railed against many dark forces that he believed to be propagating these ideas: Jewish bankers, Jewish intellectuals, philanthropic foundations run by Jews, communists, Black leaders, and anyone who supported the overthrow of colonial rule in Africa. “The facts of history show that the White man has always developed the country he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned,” he wrote, peddling stock apartheid propaganda, and “The Black people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization from the earliest times but, on their own, built nothing and discovered nothing, not even the wheel.”

In the second tract that M.S.U. holds, “The International Conspiracy in Health,” Haldeman blamed the “collectivist-internationalist” conspiracy—“from Kennedy to Kenyatta”—for “centralized health schemes” that include national health insurance and various pharmaceuticals (including fluoride in the water, another conspiracy), all of which he considered “anti-Christian infringements on human liberties.” If some people were not alarmed by all of this, he wrote, it was because of mind control. “When a Christian subscribes to this, it is the result of the concentrated, intentional brain-washing done by the International Conspiracy.” Submitting to national health care was one way the conspirators were allowing “Black or Coloured political puppets” to take “control of responsible White people.” The Conspiracy, he warned, controls universities, medical schools, and even textbooks. “The Conspiracy feels that any medical intervention, so long as it is in mass, is a desirable procedure.” Above all, “The promoters of World Government have always been behind mass vaccination programmes.”

Aside from these two tracts, a rare-books dealer earlier this month sold an issue, No. 5, of a newsletter called Survival (“For Adults Only”) that he attributes to Haldeman. (The author’s name, the dealer reports, appears on the back page.) In the issue, published sometime after January, 1962, the writer represented the growing independence movements across African nations as a “WORLD GONE MAD.” “Throughout the so-called African Independent States there is complete chaos,” he wrote. “The population is reduced to starvation and cannibalism approaching what it was before the arrival of the White man.” He described the Mau Mau as engaging in a rite that required an initiate “to suck the dismembered penis of some other unfortunate victim of Mau Mau.” He denounced Israel, for having “consistently voted against South Africa in the United Nations.” But, in any case, he explained, the U.N. was riddled with communist spies.

Haldeman typed his tracts, presumably on his own typewriter. He might have made dozens of copies, or maybe hundreds, but not likely many more. He might have sent them out by mail or handed them out at political gatherings or church meetings or men’s groups. They were read, in any event, by a handful of South Africans in and near Pretoria, and possibly also by like-minded people farther afield. And then they very nearly disappeared. But if Haldeman were writing today, he’d likely be distributing his ideas on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Reddit and 4chan and more. Algorithms would deliver them to thousands and possibly millions of people. He would find an audience. He would become bolder. He would find a bigger audience. He would become bolder still. Elon Musk’s grandfather’s political views are not Musk’s responsibility. But what would happen to those rantings, if they were posted on X today, really does lie at his doorstep. ♦

Can a dissident operate openly within the system he wishes to destroy? For revolutionary-turned-Substacker Dominic Cummings, wrestling with whether or not The Startup Party he has floated on his Substack blog is a mission worth pursuing, the auguries are surely grim. As he correctly notes, Brexit “was a once-in-decades opportunity — election victory on the biggest issue in politics for decades, the biggest government crisis since 1945, clear mandate and need for huge change in economy and government… This combination is highly unlikely to recur ‘naturally’ for many decades.” Yet the opportunity was squandered, and Cummings must share some of the blame: the chosen vehicle, Johnsonian populism, was manifestly unfit for the task, and Cummings’s own political downfall was largely self-inflicted. It is, in truth, too early to say whether or not Brexit was a net good or evil for British politics: its real effects will not be known for some decades as they work their way through the system, and will be revealed in the state’s reactions to future crises as yet visible only in their barest outlines. Yet it is hard for its supporters not to intuit, already, that it was a Pyrrhic victory on a minor front of what will be a long and gruelling war of attrition. Like Trump’s election, rather than overturn a collapsing system, it allowed the system to consolidate itself in a more ruthless and vigorous form, merely a vaccine allowing the exhausted establishment to eke out another few years of feeble life. The political ferment that followed the Brexit vote has already birthed a handful of insurgent conservative-populist parties, none of which display the slightest possibility of gaining power. Whatever reformist energy Brexit unleashed has long since dissipated itself in draining and tiresome battles between the legions of culture war grifters it spawned. If anything, Brexit proved that the British state cannot reform itself: its decay may be too advanced to permit functioning governance, but the broader SW1 system is still just strong enough to see off any challengers to its rule. For Cummings, rationalising the failure of his project, the “Insider SW1 network that lives on Twitter” and “revealed a powerful global conspiracy that invented a parallel world and conned voters into believing it” is a natural target. Yet the hard reality he must face is that it all worked: like the parallel Russia collusion fantasy in America, none of its elaborate parallel world-building needed to be true or even plausible to rally anxious liberals to the defence of their threatened hegemonic status, yet it established the still-thriving climate of hysteria which eventually led to his downfall. Ironically, his self-mythologising over the power of data and tech was not markedly different to that of the Cambridge Analytica hoaxers grifting on behalf of the opposition. If Brexit was the result of longstanding mass disenchantment with the country’s downward trajectory, Cummings’s hyping of his own dark data voodoo was just the flip side of Carole Cadwalladr’s elaborate fantasies, just as analytically dubious and ultimately just as politically deadening. Indeed, Cummings is hampered by being part of the same SW1 bubble he rails against, an insider whose outsider status is only perceptible from a vantage point within the system. Is it true, as he claims, that “it became high status to believe in Cadwalladr?” One would fear for his reading of Britain’s social dynamics if he genuinely believes so. Cummings proposes to campaign against the ECHR to turn the power of the anti-Brexit Twitter commentariat, judo-like, against itself, so that “the pro-ECHR campaign would be the Insider-left-NPC Twitter network and they’d be working really hard for the anti-ECHR campaign every day,” but this itself is a dangerous case of Twitter Brain, and a policy proposal not helped by the unfortunate fact that his chosen adversary is precisely the same force that soundly defeated him last time round. It is difficult to see how a second Cummings-led project will fare any better against the same enemy. More from this authorWhy is Britain so depressed?By Aris Roussinos There lies Cummings’s tragedy, and our own: these people, our establishment, are manifestly incompetent, credulous, of middling intellectual capacity at their very best — he didn’t even try to disguise his contempt for them while he was working with them, as Laura Kuenssberg’s new documentary series shows — and yet they beat him. No wonder he wants a second try; and no wonder we should be sceptical. Reading Cummings’s long-teased pitch for party funding, the most striking thing is how modest and quietly conservative his vision is. He wants a functioning state, more receptive to voter demands, tough on crime, strong on growth: but so do we all. Yet the times have changed, the mood has darkened further, and the prospect of reform looks ever dimmer. Back in the 2010s, when history had ended, Cummings looked like a maverick visionary revealing the heretical truths that the British state was so inefficient as to barely function, and would fare disastrously when faced with a serious crisis. Yet these opinions are now so widely held as to be commonplace, and the warning lights are flashing red. As a recent poll revealed, barely half of British voters now believe that democracy is superior to the alternatives, and nearly a quarter would welcome military rule (perhaps this figure would be higher if the British defence establishment were more competent). It is doubly unfortunate for a Cummings-led reform project that much of his target audience is now enraptured by elaborate conspiracy theories of their own, largely revolving around Covid, in which he was a hawkish voice for locking down longer and harder than anyone else in the party he now wishes to destroy. In the near-decade following Brexit, the general malaise has deepened, the level of political debate has if anything worsened, and the prospect of saving the British political system from its own dysfunction seems less achievable than ever before. Trust in the system has almost completely evaporated. Perhaps, beyond Cummings’s rage at the “Twitter NPCs” who wrecked his project, this is a problem shared by all late-stage democracies whose political discourse is driven by social media: yet no obvious solution is apparent to lead us away from disaster.  So the stakes are even higher now, while the rot is approaching terminal. Cummings, probably correctly, assumes that a Labour government will be at best no more disastrous than the Conservatives, with the result that “the next two years will see a hideous election showcasing the rot of the old parties” so that “Somebody will seize this huge opportunity, for good or ill”. One cannot fault his diagnosis, while remaining sceptical that he is the remedy. Eager to refight the battles of Britain’s past, Cummings is difficult to place within today’s political context. It can be argued that there are now two strands within the nascent post-Brexit British Right. On the one hand, we have a reformist tendency that encompasses Yimby neoliberals, the online dissident Right who, whether you like it or not, will shape conservatism in the decades to come, and the quasi-Gaullist state-capacity builders who partly overlap with the National Conservative wing. On the other, we have a blackpilled defeatism most coherently expressed by Peter Hitchens, in which Britain is doomed by the compounding errors of previous decades and any attempt to wrest control of the levers of the state is a futile effort: collapse is certain, and only escape is possible. In his proposal for a new party, Cummings bridges both tendencies: perhaps, as he suggests, a data-driven, Midlands-based coalition of small business owners, “NHS heroes” and local headmasters can arrest the rot, or at the very least destroy the Conservative Party in the process; or perhaps it is already too late, and, as he states, “more likely than adaptation is slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, and disintegration à la Austro-Hungarian Empire”. If there is any probability in the latter outcome, then the question arises: why is it worth trying to reform the SW1 system in the first place? Cummings is, unfortunately, probably correct in his perception that “SW1 thinks our political system is very resilient but it isn’t… It’s even more brittle now than a decade ago and [the] dangers are worse.” So why not let his opponents drink the dregs of their own policies? If the SW1 system is so resistant to reform, why bother with a new Westminster vehicle at all? The political beneficiaries of the Habsburg collapse were not found within the Ringstrasse after all: if the crisis is as dangerous as he warns, his solutions seem strangely timid; yet if his proposals are enough to stave off disaster, the danger cannot be as bad as he asserts. More from this authorThe Age of the Museum is overBy Aris Roussinos What is striking, then, given all the partly self-inflicted opprobrium Cummings won as a dangerous radical seeking to overturn the system, is his fear that in the “short-term this [project] is unlikely to succeed… But somebody will do something like this. And if it happens in response to the next set of crises — when the financial system melts down, when we have large scale violence because of racial/immigration/terror conflicts, whatever — it will be ugly.” This is, perhaps, an unexpectedly small-c conservative vision from a man often framed as an accelerationist: that our current path is a dangerous one, and that enough of value remains within the Westminster system to make a last-ditch effort at reform worth attempting. For all Cummings made himself a scapegoat for liberals frustrated at Brexit, his project reveals him as less a revolutionary than a reformist, attempting to save an ailing system from itself: a Kerensky rather than a Lenin. As he states, “the reason I tried so hard 2015-16 and 2019-20 was a feeling of doom about the current system. *I* don’t need to do this. But *SOMEBODY* needs to get us off the track we’re on.” In this, Cummings is entirely correct, and his goal of destroying the Conservative Party is entirely worthy of support. Whether or not the Westminster system can or should be reformed is an unanswerable question at this point; to live in a peaceable, orderly, prosperous, functional society ought to be a modest and easily achievable goal, yet our current political system somehow cannot achieve it. It would be reassuring to think that Cummings can succeed, but it would sadly be prudent to assume that he will not. Perhaps disaster can be averted; we can hope newer, more destructive actors are not waiting in our future. But however the current crisis resolves itself, future historians may interpret Cummings not as the system’s wrecking-ball, but as its last desperate defender. view 1 comments

Even as U.S. politics became more contentious and polarized over the past quarter century, a few pockets of the government remained comparatively above the fray, including the courts, which sought to position themselves apart from politics, and state capitols, where pragmatism trumped partisanship.But those redoubts have fallen in recent years. The Supreme Court has become more ideologically aligned with the Republican Party, and state legislatures host pitched ideological battles. Now institutions that sit at their intersection—state courts, especially state supreme courts—have emerged as a site of bitter fights.This fall, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature are mulling plans to impeach Janet Protasiewicz, a recently elected liberal justice on the state supreme court, before she has even heard a case—by all appearances for the crime of having been elected as an outspoken liberal. In North Carolina, Anita Earls, a liberal justice on the state supreme court, has sued the state’s Judicial Standards Commission over an investigation it began into fairly anodyne comments she made about implicit racial bias in a press interview.These two examples are only the latest in a trend of punishing judges for their rulings or simply for their politics. In 2018, a Pennsylvania Republican sought unsuccessfully to impeach four of the five Democrats on the state’s highest court. In 2022, Ohio Republicans wanted to impeach state-supreme-court chief justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican and former lieutenant governor, over rulings about redistricting. In Montana, a bill seeks to make the state’s Judicial Standards Commission more partisan and give it more power to levy consequences on judges.[David A. Graham: First night at the Republican National Convention]“There seems to be a growing recognition that if you can’t win at the ballot box or change the way the judges are selected in your state, then judicial-ethics mechanisms in the state may be another tool for exerting political pressure on judges,” Douglas Keith, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me.One glaring similarity of these cases is that Republicans are behind all of them. Both parties have participated in turning up the partisan heat in state courts. I have cited Protasiewicz’s campaign, which focused on red-meat progressive issues and was heavily funded by out-of-state liberal groups, as a cautionary example of turning everything into politics. Yet GOP lawmakers are going further by attempting to punish their opponents outside of elections. The Brennan Center tracks bills to undermine state courts, and all but one in the most recent survey was in a GOP-led state. (New York is the blue outlier.) Kentucky Republicans passed a law this year allowing cases to be moved away from a court in Frankfort, the capital, essentially to bypass a single judge who has often struck down their moves. In Arizona and Georgia, recent Republican administrations have packed the state supreme courts.Both the Wisconsin and North Carolina cases fit the trend, but they carry their own peculiar wrinkles. The Wisconsin case is the sort of political train wreck that is common today: foreseeable from a long distance, and yet no one seems able to stop it. Even before Protasiewicz’s April election, Republicans floated the possibility of an impeachment. Now the GOP, which holds gerrymander-bolstered majorities in both houses of the legislature, is poised to follow through. (The governor, Tony Evers, is a Democrat, and the state narrowly backed Joe Biden in 2020, after narrowly going for Donald Trump in 2016.)Historically, and in very broad terms, candidates for elected judgeships have tended to say little about their specific views, letting their surrogates and—in states with partisan elections—party affiliation speak for them. (Wisconsin judicial elections are nominally nonpartisan.) Protasiewicz and her conservative opponent, Daniel Kelly, jettisoned that, all but running on partisan platforms and signaling their views on redistricting and abortion while drawing national funding. Protasiewicz won the vitriolic campaign by a comfortable 11-point margin.She was sworn in last month and still hasn’t heard a case, but Wisconsin legislators are now openly discussing impeachment. Conspicuously missing from all of this discussion is the putative justification—and that’s because they’re still searching for one. They’ve argued that her statements violated ethical guidelines, but the state’s judicial-ethics commission rejected that in a letter that Protasiewicz released. They’ve accused her of prejudging cases that might come before her, but none has yet. They’ve also mulled using her acceptance of donations from the state Democratic Party, but the fact is that all but one sitting justice have taken such funds.Whether or not Protasiewicz’s campaign approach was politically prudent, Republicans have failed to come up with a decent rationale for removing her, which makes clear what the real reason is: A liberal supreme court is an existential threat to conservative politics in the state. If the court throws out the current maps, as expected, it would eliminate the durable, gerrymandered GOP majority in the legislature. It could also loosen restrictions on abortion. Impeachment of state-court judges is relatively rare in the U.S., and it has historically been used in cases of clear misconduct. Using it to punish politics would be a shift, and one that would endanger the court’s ability to act as a check on the legislative and executive branches.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the house, did not reply to a request for comment. If Protasiewicz were impeached, she would be suspended pending a senate trial, but Devin LeMahieu, the GOP leader in the senate, has said the body wouldn’t take up impeachment. That has led to speculation that Protasiewicz might be left in limbo—unable to rule, but neither convicted nor cleared—and the court with a 3–3 partisan deadlock, in clear contravention of voters’ wishes.[David A. Graham: North Carolina’s deliberate disenfranchisement of Black voters]What is happening in North Carolina is stranger, if not quite so dramatic. Some history is helpful: Battles over voting, including maps and election laws, have been the defining theme of North Carolina politics for the past decade and a half, since Republicans took control of the legislature. Earls, a Black woman, for years led the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a major legal opponent of Republican moves on voting laws. In 2018, she was elected to the supreme court, running as a Democrat in a partisan race. It was the first time since 2004 that supreme-court elections were partisan, owing to a change made by the GOP-led government.Following the 2020 census, North Carolina Republicans enacted maps that were likely to give 10 of 14 U.S. House seats to the GOP, even though the two parties tend to garner similar portions of the aggregate vote. The state supreme court, then dominated by Democrats, rejected the maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in spring 2022. Republicans then recaptured control of the supreme court in the fall, and reversed the decision. (The legislature, meanwhile, had appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court under the so-called independent state legislature theory; the justices rejected their argument.) The new Republican chief justice also overhauled many other procedures at the court.An atmosphere of acrimony has come to pervade the court. But although partisanship is par for the course today, employing ethics complaints as a partisan weapon is not. The state’s Judicial Standards Commission, which is chaired by a Republican judge and includes judges from both parties as well as attorneys, received an anonymous complaint accusing Earls of improperly commenting on a case. After an investigation, the commission dismissed the complaint. Then, in June, Earls gave an interview to Law360 discussing race and diversity in the courts. The commission informed Earls that it was reopening its investigation “based on an interview … in which you appear to allege that your Supreme Court colleagues are acting out of racial, gender, and/or political bias in some of their decision making.”I read the interview with interest, curious to see what the inflammatory comments were, but emerged baffled. In one passage, Earls said her newly elected colleagues “very much see themselves as a conservative bloc. They talk about themselves as ‘the conservatives.’ Their allegiance is to their ideology, not to the institution.” In another, she said implicit bias was in play in the very white and male group of lawyers who argue before the court. “I’m not suggesting that any of this is conscious, intentional, racial animus,” Earls said. “But I do think that our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.”Although it’s easy to imagine conservatives disliking and disagreeing with this argument, the concept of implicit bias is by now so established and common as to be nearly banal. Beyond that, ruling such comments out of bounds seems absurd given that justices are partisan officeholders elected in political campaigns. The commission does not appear to have issued sanctions for similar instances—most of its rulings involve clear misconduct—and Earls’s lawsuit argues other states don’t offer relevant precedents either. In an emailed statement, the Judicial Standards Commission’s executive director noted, “The Commission is statutorily obligated to investigate all instances of alleged judicial misconduct and cannot comment on pending investigations.”The experts I spoke with couldn’t imagine any serious sanction emerging from the investigation—certainly not removal or suspension, which are within the commission’s ambit. Even so, Earls decided to sue the commission, alleging “a series of months-long intrusive investigations” that infringe on her First Amendment rights and asking a court to block the investigation. Why bother, I asked her attorney, Press Millen, if punishment was unlikely?[Quinta Jurecic: The Court eviscerates the independent state legislature theory]“She can’t keep doing this forever,” he told me, citing the time and effort involved in responding to the investigation. And he said the specter had already led her to turn down invitations to write an article for a national magazine and to a symposium on state courts because she doesn’t know what speech the commission might or might not abide. “Normally when you hear people talk about chilling of free speech it’s always in an abstract and hypothetical way. Not here.”Bob Orr, a former Republican justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, told me that the judicial-standards process is “fundamentally broken.” Orr clashed with the commission as a judge, and as an attorney has defended judges involved in investigations. (Orr left the Republican Party over its Trump-era changes.) “I’ve known a lot of members on the panels over the years. They’re good people. They’re trying to do what’s right,” he said. But he said the commission’s structure is opaque, unclear, and unfair to accused judges, who don’t know who filed a complaint, how an investigation was initiated, or how it’s conducted, and have little recourse at the end.Such a black box lends itself to abuse—and certainly to the perception of abuse—along political lines. “If I were a certain kind of political opponent of hers, she would be a manifestation of one of the most terrifying things imaginable to me: an extremely capable and accomplished African American woman,” Millen told me. The circumstances of the complaint into Earls, similar to the other assaults on state courts elsewhere, make that appear to be the most likely motivation.

Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu has disappeared. Some reports say he was meeting with Vietnamese officials when he was escorted away, but according to other reliable reports, he was detained before the meeting and thus had to cancel it. Chinese sources report that he is under investigation for corruption. In addition to leading the Ministry of Defense, Li is one of China’s five state councilors, which makes him an extremely important figure outranking other ministers.

This follows the disappearance in June of Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who was later replaced by Wang Yi. His removal is still unexplained, but his strong anti-American rhetoric did not sit well with China’s need to mend relations with the U.S. and secure foreign capital. In addition, several senior economic and banking figures have been dismissed recently, although not with the calculated drama obviously intended to raise questions.

These incidents call to mind the removal of former Chinese President Hu Jintao from the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party last October. Hu’s removal was aired on television, while Li’s came at the last minute before a planned meeting with dignitaries from a country that China is trying to woo. China knew the impact these removals would have. Li and Qin were the two figures most responsible for Chinese foreign affairs – the former for national defense and the latter for politics. The world was startled. The Vietnamese are going to wonder whether a nation that treats its defense minister this way is stable enough to rely on. There are subtler ways to retire or arrest someone, but Beijing did not choose them. Clearly, China wanted both incidents to be noticed.

In a sense, a massive shakeup of the Chinese government is overdue, particularly if President Xi Jinping plans to keep his job. Xi took office in 2013, when the Chinese economy was surging and China’s strategic position was strengthening. There was in some circles a sense that China would surpass the United States in economic and military power. In the decade since, the Chinese economy has weakened dramatically, to the point that economic well-being at all levels of society has declined, without Xi taking effective steps to reverse the dip.

Related to this problem was the idea that China could surge its international and strategic power. Xi was obsessed with the United States, as many countries are for various reasons. He sought to create linkages to block the United States with programs like the Belt and Road Initiative, an economic plan in which economics was subordinate to national security. Xi positioned Belt and Road as the foundation of a fundamental shift in the balance of power, which failed. Simultaneously, China was challenging American naval power in the South China Sea, particularly around Taiwan.

Xi did not understand the degree to which China depended on the United States for its economic system. The United States was China’s number one source of exports, while U.S. investments and technology transfers anchored and drove China’s economic growth. Xi had positioned the United States as China’s main adversary for domestic and foreign reasons. Given past performance and ignoring the dynamic that was critical to China’s growth, China achieved its goal of being seen as the likely successor to the United States.

The problem that Xi had was that the United States took him seriously as well. Xi did not understand that the U.S. was built around economic cycles. As down cycles occurred, China would be affected, and as U.S. fear of China surged, a range of measures were implemented against China. Though the U.S. actions were not China’s primary problem, they were a significant complication. At the same time, China overestimated its naval development and technical capacity while seeming to underestimate U.S. capacities. The recent deepening of U.S. alliances with the Philippines and Papua New Guinea completed a line blocking China from the Aleutians to Australia, weakening Beijing’s strategic position significantly.

China is and will continue to be a significant country, but it is far from being able to challenge the United States. Xi miscalculated the importance of U.S. markets and capital and the willingness of the U.S. to deploy major force against China.

All this happened on Xi’s watch. He was superb at claiming premature victories in the domestic economy and global relations. He convinced the Chinese people of what he wanted them to believe. In such circumstances, a change of government would be inevitable and routine. But Xi is unable or unwilling to step aside. There may be conspiracies against him, and there are far more haunting his mind. He is hard-pressed to show that he knows their secrets and wields vast power, demonstrated by the arrest of high-ranking officials as publicly as possible. He is repeating the mistake that he made with the United States, convincing the Americans of China’s might and triggering a response that left China off balance to say the least. Xi’s enemies may well believe that he sees all and has the power to stop them, but that simply motivates them to be more effective. Xi can’t resign or admit failure. So ministers must disappear, and former presidents must be removed from meetings in sight of the world.

       Columbus, Ohio, authorities are investigating two police officers who casually discussed charging an 11-year-old girl with manufacturing child porn. The girl in question had allegedly sent inappropriate photos of herself to a much older man, prompting her father to call the police. "Sexual Assault Unit detectives were immediately notified of the incident and have since initiated an investigation," said the Columbus Department of the Inspector General in a statement, according to The Columbus Dispatch. The interaction between the police officers and the girl's father was captured by a doorbell camera and posted to TikTok. The account that posted the video on TikTok did not respond to a request for comment. In the video, the police arrive at the girl's house at about midnight, according to the father, who complains that he called them many hours earlier. The father steps outside the door and explains the situation: His 11-year-old daughter sent pictures of herself to an adult man. He suggests that he wanted the police to convey the seriousness of the situation to her, though she has already gone to bed. "I just want her to realize what this was," says the father. "I mean, reality is not much I probably can do about it, is there?" One of the police officers responds: "I mean, she can probably get charged with child porn." The father is taken aback, and clarifies that he believes his daughter is the victim, not the perpetrator. "Doesn't matter," says the officer. "She's still making porn." At that point, the father—quite wisely—tells the officers to have a good night and shuts the door in their faces. The viral video created understandable outrage on social media, which has prompted the authorities to investigate their own response. Most people do not think an 11-year-old girl who has produced pornographic images of herself should be arrested for it. An adult male coercing a child into sending sexual images is absolutely engaging in criminal activity, and if that's what happened here, it should be dealt with. It's not at all encouraging that the police seemed to have the situation backward. Nevertheless, state laws criminalizing child pornography often fail to make this important distinction. Indeed, underage teenagers are often charged for consensually swapping sexts. Overzealous police have a habit of making things worse rather than better.The post Police Threaten To Arrest 11-Year-Old Victim of Child Porn appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the shortest column I’ve ever written — because it doesn’t take long to get things in focus:

President Biden, you are meeting Wednesday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, for the first time since he returned to office in December. He’s formed the most extreme government in Israel’s history and yet your administration is considering forging a complex partnership with his coalition and Saudi Arabia. There are enormous potential benefits and risks for the United States. I hope you won’t proceed without getting satisfactory answers from Netanyahu on three key questions — so we know just what Israel, and just which Bibi, we’re dealing with:

1. Prime Minister Netanyahu, your government’s coalition agreement is the first in Israel’s history to define the annexation of the West Bank as one of its goals — or, as it says, applying Israeli “sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” But you earlier supported the Trump Middle East peace plan that proposed dividing the West Bank, with Israel controlling roughly 30 percent and the Palestinian state getting roughly 70 percent, albeit with tight security guarantees and no contiguity. Do you intend to annex the West Bank, or will you negotiate its future disposition with the Palestinians? Yes or no? We need to know. Because if you intend to annex, all your normalization agreements with Arab states will collapse, and we will not be able to defend you in the United Nations from charges of building an apartheid state.

2. Bibi, you told your first cabinet meeting last December that your top priorities include stopping Iran’s nuclear program, as well as expanding Israel’s growing relations with the Arab world. But we saw you decide instead to prioritize a judicial coup to strip the Israeli Supreme Court of its ability to hold your government accountable. That, in turn, distracted your military leadership, fractured your air force and elite fighting units, bitterly divided your society and weakened your diplomatic alliances from Washington to Europe. Iran, meanwhile, moved in with a diplomatic offensive, patching up its ties with all your Arab neighbors and eating your lunch. Why should we make confronting Iran’s nuclear program our priority when you haven’t?

3. Prime Minister, the Saudis are ready to do something hard — normalize relations with Israel. We are doing something hard to help facilitate that — forging a mutual defense treaty with Saudi Arabia. What hard things are you ready to do vis-à-vis the Palestinians to complete the deal? It feels to us that you don’t want to take any political risks — that you want everyone to do something hard except you.

Bibi, you’re out of focus for the American people. We need to know: Who are you now?

       Russell Brand is a comedian, actor, and podcaster with a considerable following on social media platforms, including Rumble and YouTube. Once firmly on the political left, his contrarian views on COVID-19 and other subjects have earned him a substantial following among independents and conservatives, in the vein of figures like Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald. Last week, the London Sunday Times accused Brand of sexually assaulting multiple women during the time period from 2006 and 2013. One of the alleged victims claims that Brand raped her at his home in Los Angeles and that she visited a rape crisis center; The Sunday Times reported that medical records support her story. Another alleged victim claims she was 16 when she began a relationship with Brand, who was then 31. The age of consent is 16 in the U.K., but the woman says that Brand was "emotionally abusive and controlling" and also forced her to perform oral sex on him. All four women in the joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times, and Channel 4 Dispatches spoke under conditions of anonymity. Brand has denied the allegations, but the consequences have been swift. His talent agency dropped him the same day the story was published, and now YouTube has demonetized his channel, meaning that he can't make money from advertisements. The reporting in The Sunday Times is very detailed, and the story does offer some corroborating details, like the medical records. Brand has admitted in the past to struggling with drug abuse and sex addiction and engaging in lewd behavior—which doesn't mean he's guilty of rape but does put the accusations in context. It's fair, of course, to scrutinize the motivations of the accusers as well: The Sunday Times notes that the women wanted to talk to reporters because of "Brand's newfound prominence as an online wellness influencer, with millions of followers on YouTube and other sites." Brand's supporters may see this admission as evidence that he is being targeted specifically because of his recently established animosity toward mainstream media and institutions. Regardless of how one feels about this situation, YouTube's actions should raise eyebrows. The platform has not punished Brand for something he said—for some piece of video content he created. YouTube is punishing Brand for conduct that took place entirely off the platform and does not involve speech at all. As a private company, YouTube has the right, of course, to platform and deplatform anyone it wishes. It is not obligated to obey the First Amendment, extend due process to content creators, or enforce internally consistent rules. The company is free to do whatever it wants—and users are free to complain. And this seems like something worth complaining about. YouTube's guidelines do require creators to remain "responsible" both on and off the platform, and the company specifically prohibits "abuse or violence, demonstrating cruelty, or participating in fraudulent or deceptive behavior that leads to real-world harm." But let's keep in mind that Brand has not been convicted of any crime. His accusers remain anonymous. Will any prominent figure accused of sexual misconduct anonymously face similar sanction, prior to any criminal action taking place? Due process, the presumption of innocence, the burden of the proof—these things are not legally required in a situation like this, but wholly jettisoning them is morally, practically, and philosophically unsound. It's unwise for YouTube to put itself in the position of litigating extremely contentious off-site personal behavior. This sets a very dangerous, quasi-dystopian precedent.The post YouTube Has Demonetized Russell Brand Over Anonymous #MeToo Allegations appeared first on Reason.com.

       In August, Ted Daniels lost his job teaching journalism at Ashland University in Ohio. Why? According to a university official, he was encouraging student journalists to be "overly persistent." The university's paper also reported that officials told Daniels he was allowing the paper to do "too much investigative journalism." Soon after refusing to renew Daniels' contract, administrators began demanding that students submit issues of The Collegian, the student-run outlet Daniels had advised, for prior review. However, university officials claimed this "decision was predicated on some recent, rather glaring grammatical errors."   Earlier this month, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, wrote a letter to the university, reminding officials that, while Ashland University is a private institution free to construct its own rules around student speech, it has also consistently promised students and faculty free expression rights. "As a private institution that explicitly guarantees students and faculty the right to freedom of expression, Ashland may not violate academic freedom or chill student journalism by dismissing a journalism instructor for encouraging students to gather the news," FIRE attorney Lindsie Rank wrote in a September 8 letter to the university. "There can be no question that administrative actions against student media in response to what they report or based on disagreement with their newsgathering practices violate any notion of free expression." Last week, the university's president responded to FIRE's letter, insisting that the university protects and supports student journalism while also defending its required prior review of the student paper. The letter also stated that "Mr. Daniels' transition did not result from the Collegian's reporting." However, FIRE says the timing of Daniels' ouster suggests his firing was directly related to student press activities, contrary to university officials' statements. The group says that Daniels' ouster was directly related to student press activities, contrary to university officials' statements. "Administrators first suggested nonrenewal mere hours after a meeting between Collegian editors and Ashland Provost Amiel Jarstfer. In the meeting, Jarstfer reportedly criticized the newspaper for its headlines and for not being 'respectful' of 'confidential meetings,' apparently referencing Collegian reporters' attendance at a campus town hall last spring," Rank wrote in a Monday press release. "Daniels' dismissal also came within days of Collegian editor Katelyn Meeks' unsuccessful month-long effort to schedule a back-to-school interview with Campo," the university president.  Even though Ashland University is a private college, there's still good reason to think it has violated student rights. "Essentially, when a [private] institution has those kinds of policies, courts have found that those kinds of policies create a binding legal contract and that those institutions are then required by law to stick to those commitments of ensuring expressive freedom," Rank told Reason. "Ashland, for example, has been out in the media, touting themselves as this really fantastic place for expressive freedom….Well, it's really dishonest of them to make those kinds of claims and hold themselves out as this bastion of free expression if they're not going to back that up with action."The post Ashland Professor Allegedly Ousted for Allowing 'Too Much Investigative Journalism' appeared first on Reason.com.

       The head of the Chicago Teachers Union who has described school choice as "the choice of racists" sends her son to a private school.  Stacy Davis Gates, who was elected as president of the Chicago Teachers Union in 2022, has long derided school choice—a wide range of policies that make it easier for parents to send their children to schools other than their local public school, often by getting back some of the government funding that would have followed their child to public school—as inherently racist. "*School choice* was actually the choice of racists," Gates tweeted in August 2022. "It was created to avoid integrating schools with Black children. Now it's the civil rights struggle of our generation?" In a letter she wrote earlier this month, Gates explained her decision to enroll her son in a private school while her other two children remained in Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Chicago classrooms are "struggling to recover from waves of school closings and disinvestment under previous mayors. Public and charter high schools in our Black and Brown neighborhoods are living and breathing examples of inequality," she wrote. "For my husband and me, it forced us to send our son, after years of attending a public school, to a private high school so he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs." This excuse misses key context. While Gates is right that school systems across the nation, including in Chicago, are still reeling from pandemic-era setbacks, she herself led the charge to keep Chicago Public Schools closed sporadically as late as early 2022. When CPS announced a two-week shutdown in January 2022, Gates told The New York Times that the closure was necessary for schools to "get themselves together." Gates also frames CPS as underfunded, describing "decades of systemic underinvestment in marginalized communities." However, over the past five academic years, CPS' operating budget has actually skyrocketed—increasing from $5.92 billion to $8.49 billion, despite enrollment dropping by nearly 40,000 students over the same period.  Further, in consistently framing school choice advocates as racist, Gates also ignores the fact that minority parents are often the strongest supporters of school choice. According to a RealClear Opinion Research poll from earlier this summer, 73 percent of black respondents supported school choice, the highest of any demographic group. At least 70 percent of other demographic groups also support school choice policies. But Gates is correct about a core part of her justification for sending her child to a private school: CPS is failing to serve families and students. Despite spending an eye-popping $29,000 per pupil, three-quarters of CPS students failed to meet state standards in a reading test this year. Over 80 percent failed to meet state standards in math. "You are making a choice because perhaps, I assume, you can afford to do that, that a lot of Chicago parents don't because they can't afford it," CNN Primetime host Abby Phillip told Gates during an interview last week. "Proponents of school choice say the state should have a role in helping those families who can't afford it make the same choice that you did for your family." "The school choice movement was a cudgel for integration in this country, that is a fact," Gates responded. Gates understandably wants her son to have the opportunity to attend the best school for him to, as she put it, "live out his dream." But she doesn't seem to see a problem with denying other parents that same choice—or framing them as collaborating with racists for doing so.The post Chicago Teachers Union Boss Sends Son to Private School appeared first on Reason.com.

When I first met the leader of the Proud Boys, he was relaxing over a burger and chicken wings in an Irish bar, wearing his trademark mirror shades and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Democrats eat and fuck children.” His protective vest lay on the ground beside his seat, a reminder that this notorious rabble-rouser was recovering from a stab to the stomach, received during a brawl near the White House in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral defeat. Enrique Tarrio spoke softly, talked freely and was not drinking alcohol as he was teetotal — despite insisting that his men-only group was little more than a laddish drinking club. Such claims seemed less convincing, however, as that night in November 2020 wore on. It began with amiable chat in a Washington bar — but it ended with the beating of a black woman by his band of far-Right thugs. Yet it was easy to see why even Tarrio’s foes called him charismatic, with his ready smile and relaxed style. At one point, as we talked, I told him that his group reminded me of the hooligans that used to plague British football with their tribal violence in my childhood. He was intrigued. He fired off questions to me about their activities, listening intently as I explained how gangs of thugs in the Seventies and Eighties would attack fans supporting rival teams in the stands and streets surrounding stadiums after games. Tarrio nodded. “Yeah, I think that’s what we are,” he said, flashing his big smile. Suggested readingWill Georgia survive Storm Trump?By Matthew Teague Now, this leader of a gang of political hooligans has been given 22 years in prison for playing a central role in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol building, which took place just a few weeks after our meeting. His is so far the longest sentence related to the lethal attack that has seen more than 1,100 people charged. Despite being in Baltimore on that fateful day, barred from Washington due to an earlier arrest, Tarrio was deemed to be a “general” organising the assault, which took place as legislators were certifying President Biden’s election victory. He was convicted most seriously of seditious conspiracy, a little-used charge from the Civil War era, with the judge calling him the “ultimate leader of that conspiracy” and a man “motivated by revolutionary zeal”. In court, Tarrio cut a pathetic figure in his orange prison jumpsuit as he pleaded for leniency, bleated about “the temperature rising” after Trump’s false claims about a stolen election, and apologised for the riot. “I am not a political zealot,” he declared. But on the day we met at The Dubliner, a pub offering “hearty Hibernian fare” in America’s capital, he revelled in his infamy and gang leadership. Surrounded by boisterous lieutenants from across the country, he had come to Washington with 300 of his followers for the so-called “Million MAGA March” to protest the results of the presidential election. The convicted thief, former jailbird and “prolific” FBI informant had taken over the Proud Boys two years earlier. Then his profile soared after Trump was pushed to condemn white supremacists in a presidential debate, and responded by saying: “Proud Boys — stand back and stand by.” Suggested readingThe naked persecution of Donald TrumpBy David Mamet Several of his henchmen, drinking and munching burgers, also wore provocative T-shirts bearing slogans such as “I’d rather get Covid-19 than Biden-20” or claiming that General Pinochet — a military dictator whose death squads killed thousands of political opponents in Chile — “did nothing wrong”. Others were clad in the distinctive black Fred Perry shirts with yellow-edged collars, adopted by the group to the horror of the British company, which stopped selling them in the US and Canada. A couple displayed “RWDS” patches — standing for “Right Wing Death Squads” — as reportedly worn by an extremist who shot dead eight people in a Texas mall earlier this year. Tarrio sold such incendiary paraphernalia from his Florida base. Yet he insisted the Proud Boys — widely seen as a bunch of racist and violent misogynists — were simply mischief makers. He argued the Left had lost its sense of humour as he told us how his group’s culture supposedly revolved around having fun, delighting in mockery of themselves and everyone else. The Afro-Cuban agitator denied they were racist, spoke of social justice, talked about his political ambitions and — after bragging about how Trump boosted their support — began outlining plans for a Proud Girls chapter. This sounded interesting, given the group’s roots in rampant misogyny under his predecessor. He was the clear leader of their pack, demonstrated by the deference of his sidekicks. But just at that point a tall, bald, bearded and rather menacing man rushed up to our table and interrupted him, telling Tarrio that some Proud Boys were trapped in a restaurant by Antifa activists from the Left “throwing fucking explosives”. Suggested readingThe betrayal of white working-class menBy Irvine Welsh This character — who wore one of those RWDS patches — was Jeremy Bertino, vice president of the Proud Boys chapter in South Carolina. Later, he became the pivotal figure in securing Tarrio’s prosecution after turning on his former comrades in the hope of winning a softer sentence. After making some calls to check out the situation, including one to a police officer later arrested for aiding the group’s activities, Tarrio polished off his burger and joked to Bertino that while he wanted a shower and some sleep, “you want to party”. The police officer told Tarrio he was heading over to the restaurant at the centre of the confrontation, urging him “to make sure things don’t escalate”. This did not deter the Proud Boys leader. Instead, his group of about 18 men pulled on body armour, donned helmets and set off along the Washington streets ready for battle — joined by a beefy, pony-tailed Swedish bystander, who had bumped into them in the bar. The men laughed and joked as they strolled along the streets, declaring that they were going to “beat shit out of Communists”. Even in this strongly liberal city, some people applauded them while others asked Tarrio to pose for selfies with them. After some minor skirmishes, the “prisoners” were freed. So as darkness fell, the group of extremists — fuelled on alcohol and pumping adrenaline — went searching for their foes in Antifa, yelling out intimidatory chants such as “Whose streets? Our streets”. Suggested readingIs Donald Trump a werewolf?By John Michael Greer Their numbers swelled as they marched toward a square near the White House. Trump supporters in red “Make America Great Again” hats thanked them profusely for their efforts. “We’re here to protect you,” responded a pompous Proud Boy. Yet there were also growing crowds protesting against them. One brave woman asked them to justify claims of a stolen election as she filmed their responses on a phone stuck in their faces, a mission that ended with a predictable torrent of abuse. Tarrio had disappeared but just as some Proud Boys were starting to ask what had happened to their leader, he appeared on a silver scooter to give them a pep talk, urging them to stay calm and focused. “Hasta la vista, antifascista!” he shouted at another point. The scenes were chaotic. There was pushing, shoving, and shouting from both sides. Teams of police blocked off side streets as the mood grew tense. “Let us do your job for you,” the Proud Boys told the cops, alluding to their supposed shared foes in Antifa. Then the fights broke out. People ran, punches were thrown. There were shouts, screams and nasty-sounding thuds. The police cleared the crowd to reveal a middle-aged black woman lying on the ground with blood on her face. Beside her were a smashed phone and braided hair that had been ripped from her head. It was a grim sight. Officers helped the shaken-looking Antifa activist to her feet, protecting her from the mob. One man beside me, his face twisted in fury and loathing, was screaming: “Now you can see what it is like, you bitch. You fucking bitch. How does it feel, bitch?” Suggested readingAmerica is now a zombie stateBy Jacob Howland This sort of uncontrolled tribal hostility felt wearingly familiar in the aftermath of that election, which stirred up deep divisions that were then inflamed by Trump’s narcissistic challenging of the result. The pro-Trump protest that day had been peaceful with thousands strolling in the sun under a sea of colourful flags and banners. Yet still I had watched amazed as an affable white-haired old woman suddenly unleashed a torrent of abuse when she spied a trio of Antifa activists, hiding for safety behind the police they sought to stop funding. Reporting on that election, I spoke to many voters across the American divide. Most were friendly, open, and often eloquent when discussing their perspective — yet for all the familiarity of the chain stores and fast-food restaurants in the streets, it frequently felt like visiting different nations when these people talked about politics. Two days before the protest, I was in Richmond, Virginia, as rival militia brandishing sub-machine guns met an armoured car driven by the conspiracy theorists of InfoWars at a “Stop the Steal” rally. People spoke openly about the threat of civil war. So will a second bout between Biden and Trump further rip apart the bonds of this society? The last I saw of Tarrio was when he headed home after meeting his men by the Washington Monument, clutching a bottle of water. One Proud Boy in a Pinochet T-shirt had a badly bruised face. Police later reported a stabbing and several arrests amid the melee. No one was laughing as the self-styled pranksters of the ultra-Right dispersed into the night.  Tarrio gave me an unsettling insight into a violent, hate-filled sub-culture bubbling away in the heart of American democracy. He was friendly and smart, someone who could have contributed much to society, yet took a delight in stirring up the hooligans, misogynists and racists that followed him and fell for his stunts. Ultimately, he was a provocateur who used his charisma and flair for publicity to stir tensions. He played with fire, fuelled an explosion — and now this 39-year-old man will spend many years behind bars reflecting on his foolishness. “I was my own worst enemy,” he admitted to the court in his bid for a softer sentence. Tarrio was right on this count. Yet as one defence lawyer stated, the ultimate architect of those toxic events that stained American democracy is running again for the presidency. view comments

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The United States of America is facing a threat from a sometimes violent cult while a nuclear armed power wages war on the border of our closest allies. And yet, many Americans sleepwalk as if they are living in normal times instead of in an ongoing crisis.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: Airbnb really is different now. The bizarre story behind Shinzo Abe’s assassination An intellectual and a moral failure Rory Stewart: What to do when your political party loses its mind The Fragility of FreedomAmericans have become accustomed to so much in public life that they would have once found shocking. But many of these events are not only shameful; they are a warning, a kind of static energy filling the air just before a lightning strike. America is in a state of emergency, yet few of its citizens seem to realize it.For example, a single senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has been holding up hundreds of military promotions for months, endangering the national security of the United States. The acting chief of naval operations says it will take years for the Navy to recover from the damage. (Welcome news, no doubt, in Beijing.) Few people outside of America’s senior military leadership seem particularly concerned.Meanwhile, the House of Representatives is going to open an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Why? Well, why not? Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised the extremists in his party that if they made him speaker, he would do what he was told. And so he has; the People’s House is now effectively being run by members such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fringe figures who in better times might never have been elected, and in a sensible House would have been relegated to the backbenches so far away from the rostrum that their seats would be in a different time zone. (And let us not even speak of Lauren Boebert.)Elsewhere, the governor of Florida and his vaccine-skeptic surgeon general are telling people under 65 not to get boosted against COVID. He apparently thinks that anti-science extremism will help him wrest the Republican presidential nomination away from Donald Trump, and so he is resorting to a deeply cynical ploy that could cost lives.And then there is Trump himself, the wellspring of all this chaos. In a country that understood the fragility of its own freedoms, we would see him for what he is: the leader of a dangerous cult who has admitted to his attempts to subvert American democracy.Last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed a request for a gag order on Trump to stop him from making more public attacks on prosecutors, witnesses, and potential jurors. As they say on social media, let that sink in:A federal prosecutor has asked a judge to stop the former president of the United States from threatening lawyers and witnesses in his case, and intimidating potential jurors.As I wrote recently, this is not a normal election. (We haven’t had one of those in almost a decade now.) The GOP is not a normal political organization; the party withdrew into itself years ago and has now emerged from its rotting chrysalis as a nihilistic, seditionist movement in thrall to Trump. And Trump is not a normal candidate in any way: He regularly expresses his intention to continue his attacks on the American system and has made so many threats in so many different directions that we’ve lost track of them. Yet millions of Americans simply accept such behavior as Trump being Trump, much as they did in 2016.Trump has shown his willingness to endanger anyone who gets in his way—as Smith’s recent motion shows—and so we might at least expect the media to report on Trump not merely as a candidate but as if they were following the developments around a dangerous conspiracy or the ongoing trial of the leader of a major crime syndicate.Instead, we have Kristen Welker inaugurating the reboot of Meet the Press by leaning forward with focused sincerity and asking Trump, “Tell me—Mr. President, tell me what you see when you look at your mug shot?” That wasn’t even the worst of it. Like Kaitlan Collins in her disastrous town hall with Trump on CNN this past spring, Welker lost control of the interview, because she, too, insisted on treating Trump like an ordinary political candidate instead of the seditious menace he’s become.Many of my colleagues in the media have already dissected Welker’s failure, and I won’t pile on, because I agree with my friend Jonathan Last at The Bulwark, who wrote this morning, “I’m being hard on Kristen Welker, but this isn’t really about Kristen Welker. It’s about the mainstream broadcast media. All of them. In 2016 broadcast media was totally inadequate to the job of covering an aspiring authoritarian … Today—even after witnessing an insurrection—they still don’t seem to understand the situation and their complicity in it.”Democrats and their liberal allies claim to be in full mobilization mode to stop Trump and defang his threat to the constitutional order. But are they? How much more hand-wringing will they do over Biden’s age, over whether he’s doing enough for climate change or to forgive student loans? Do we really need Biden to visit the UAW picket lines (as some have suggested)? How many more times will Trump’s opponents in the pro-democracy coalition internalize the right’s criticisms—about inflation, about spending, about gasoline—and respond to them as if Republicans care one whit about policy?Yes, gas is expensive. So is food. These are real issues, and people deserve to hear how their government will assist them. The solution to these problems, however, is not to normalize an authoritarian and thus pretend that one party, dysfunctional as it can be, is the same as a reactionary, anti-constitutional, and sometimes violent movement.We don’t have to live in panic. Americans need not walk around all day with their hair on fire, talking about nothing else but the gathering dangers. In times of crisis, whether World War II or 9/11, we married and divorced, we carped about prices, we partied, we took vacations. (Heck, I’m off to Las Vegas myself shortly.) We did all the things normal people do in the course of a normal life.But we don’t have to live this way, either, with voters and institutions—and especially the media—pretending that all is well while charlatans, aspiring theocrats, and would-be authoritarians set fire to American democracy.Related: CNN went full Jerry Springer. American democracy perseveres—for now. Today’s News Five Americans who were imprisoned in Iran were freed today as part of a prisoner-swap deal between Washington and Tehran. Hunter Biden has sued the Internal Revenue Service, alleging that agency investigators violated his privacy rights in testimony and public comments. The IRS has declined to comment on the suit, and the agents have said that they made their disclosures legally. China flew 103 warplanes near Taiwan in a 24-hour period, a notable escalation of a near-daily practice. Evening Read Sally Anscombe / Gallery Stock A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking AboutBy Melissa Kearney Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable. “What about family structure?” he asked. “Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?” The scholar to whom the question was directed looked annoyed and struggled to formulate an answer. The panelists shifted in their seats. The moderator stepped in, quickly pointing out that poverty makes it harder for people to form stable marriages. She promptly called on someone else. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic What I most regret about my decades of legal activism The agony of the school car line COVID drugs are a miracle cure for cats. Culture Break Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic Read. Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel presents an unsentimental story of gentrification.Listen. Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, which our staff writer Annie Lowrey loves.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I mentioned that I’m going off to Vegas for the rest of the week. In my pursuit of the perfect American cultural experience, I am going to see Barry Manilow. (Yes, I will write about it when I get back.)Last night, however, I came across Spenser: For Hire, the television adaptation of Robert B. Parker’s series of novels about a tough but cultured Boston private eye. The series, starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks, was fine, especially within the limits of network programming in the mid-1980s. But my recommendation is to read the books—and read them in order. They are a lovely time capsule (especially of Boston) from the early ’70s through the ’80s.The books are funny yet dark; I won’t tell you that they’re great literature, but they do raise issues about honor, manhood, friendship, loyalty, and love, all while unraveling some excellent private-eye plots. In later years, Parker lost a step (he died in 2010), and I am not a fan of the series’ continuations by other authors, but if you start with God Save the Child (written in 1974 and one of the best books in the series, especially if you remember the ’70s) and make your way through to A Catskill Eagle (1985), I think you’ll enjoy the ride.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

It was the best of deals, it was the worst of deals. On Monday, Iran allowed five American prisoners to leave the country in return for $6 billion in unfrozen oil revenues and the release of five Iranians who had been charged with violating American sanctions. It was the best deal because there’s no arguing with the glory of seeing long-suffering Americans set free. And it was the worst deal because their freedom came at a massive price—like incentivizing the taking of American prisoners.

At the New York Times, Michael Crowley and Adam Goldman wrote: “The event underscored the transactional approach to foreign policy of a president who has shown little patience for abstract ideals like alliances and stability and appears motivated instead by tangible results like arms sales and concessions like the release of imprisoned Americans. It also left some security experts concerned that the president’s focus on hostage cases might inspire foreign adversaries to capture more Americans.” Only they wrote that in August 2020, when six Americans who were freed with the help of the Trump administration attended a White House ceremony.

Today, in the Times’ write-up of Joe Biden’s prisoner exchange, Michael D. Shear and Farnaz Fassihi make no mention of impatience for ideals or alliances, but their piece does make a swap of its own, substituting “Republicans” for “experts” as the current source of skepticism: “The terms of the deal have generated intense criticism from Republicans, who accused Mr. Biden of helping to finance Iran’s terrorist activities around the world.” Republicans pounce where experts fear to tread.

But whether from sage experts or pouncing Republicans, concerns about rewarding terrorist states for grabbing Americans is legitimate. And Iran is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism.

Despite there being five people on both sides of the current equation, there’s no parity here. The U.S. charges foreign suspects for alleged crimes. Iran abducts American citizens for money and leverage. Among the Iranians that the U.S. just released, for example, is one Mehrdad Ansari. In 2021, Ansari was convicted and sentenced to more than five years in prison for illegally exporting to Iran military items that could be used in a nuclear program. Among the Americans released by Iran, on the other hand, is Morad Tahbaz, a conservationist and founder of the nonprofit Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, who was arrested for “contacts with the U.S. government.”

Then there’s the $6 billion. The Biden administration claimed that Iran can only use the funds for humanitarian purposes. But Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi immediately refuted this, telling NBC News’ Lester Holt that the money will go “wherever we need it.” A Biden official then countered that the $6 billion will be held in a Qatari bank and the U.S. will monitor each transaction to ensure that the money isn’t used for proscribed activities.

What the Biden administration certainly understands, and hopes that you don’t, is that money is fungible. Even if Iran spends a $6 billion windfall in U.S.-approved sectors of its economy, it suddenly frees up $6 billion from those sectors that can be re-allocated and spent anywhere. And Iran is not known for its humanitarian largess. That money is going to weapons and terrorism.

Which is why Iran takes American hostages to begin with. The U.S. unfroze billions of dollars to release Americans from Iran in 1980. It brought a miraculous end to a horrible crisis. But it meant that Iran would eventually return to taking hostages.

The best American response is also the most coldblooded: no rewarding hostage-takers. Instead, apply pressure and be vigilant about the regime’s provocations. But, unlike Iran, we’re too humanitarian to forgo indefinitely the chance at freeing one of our own. Combine that with the wrongheaded enthusiasm for rehabilitating Iran evinced by the Biden administration, and today’s deal was inevitable. Which means, Iran won’t stop. It’s a trap. And it’s easiest to be coldblooded about it once we’ve fallen into it yet again. Experts and Republicans are right to be skeptical.

Fall semester began last week and thousands of students attended their first class.“There’s always a sense of energy and excitement that comes with the first week of class,” said Nancy E. Hill, Charles Bigelow Professor of Education. “There’s so much enthusiasm about what the year ahead holds, hopes and dreams that students have about their new year. As a faculty member I think about it as well — what do I hope to accomplish in the year ahead?”Hill is teaching “#Adulting: Social Science Perspectives on the Transition to Adulthood,” a first-year seminar about what it means to be an adult, how society defines adulthood, and how those markers may look different for different adolescents.“It’s a fun class to teach because the students are in the middle of it,” Hill said. “It’s just a fun way to think about that first year in College and it gives them an opportunity to learn about theories and research, but also do self-reflection.”       Kelly Miller, a senior lecturer in Applied Physics, gets the semester started in “The Physics of Sports.” The students won’t be sitting for long.  Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer                Benjamin Zeisberg ’23 jumps and generates a readout of his muscle movement and energy expenditure.  Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer    In Miaki Ishii’s first-year seminar, “Earth Science Goes to the Movies,” students will watch natural-disaster movies, learn the science behind the disasters portrayed, and use math and physics concepts to calculate how realistic the portrayal is.Ishii, a professor of earth and planetary sciences, started with a brain-teasing icebreaker to get the students collaborating. She wrote the students’ names on the board in a nonalphabetic but nonrandom order, and had students do a scientific investigation using the info that they wrote on their own seminar application forms to figure out how they were categorized.“They have to communicate with one another, get data, and try to recreate the order,” Ishii said. “The first class is really geared toward how to get students comfortable with one another so that we can talk.”          Jakob Frates ’26 attends “Social Inequality” in William James Hall.  Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer                     Christina Cross, assistant professor of Sociology, lectures on sources of inequity in America. Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer              Mykalyster Homberg ’24 (left) and Luis Fernando Esteva Sueiro ’24 get acquainted with some of the tools they will be learning about in “Celestial Navigation.” The 108-year-old course teaches students to find their way on sea, land, and air.  Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer                     F.W. Wright Senior Lecturer in Astronomy Philip Sadler takes the helm at the chalkboard; Ellie Powell ’25 demonstrates a navigation technique. Photos by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer                     Melinda Modisette ’25 (left) paints a “shoe portrait” as an introductory activity for the class “Thinking With Your Hand: Intermediate Painting.” Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer              Instructor Judith Belzer displays the students’ work during the activity.  Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer                     Amy E. Clark, assistant professor of Anthropology, and Matthew Liebmann, Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology, team up to teach “Archaeological Method and Theory” in the Peabody Museum.  Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer              The class covers archaeological methods and theory, emphasizing the 1950s onward. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer                     A student takes notes as Christina Ciocca Eller, assistant professor of sociology and social studies, teaches “Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality” inside William James Hall. Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer                     Mattheus Carpenter ’24 (left) directs a question at Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Oreskes teaches “Burning Books, Fighting Facts” inside Harvard Hall. Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer              Paul J. Kosmin, Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History, shows slides in “Introduction to the Ancient Greek World.”  Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer                     Frances Campos ’26 and classmates take in Kosmin’s lecture. Photos by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer      

I did a lot of traveling this summer. Since June, I’ve been to the Oslo Freedom Forum; to a conference on digital regulation in the global south at the Rockefeller conference center in Bellagio; to Cartagena, Colombia for a business forum; to Almaty, Kazakhstan to deliver one of our Leadership Academy for Development programs; and finally, to Kyiv for the annual YES (Yalta European Strategy) conference. (I was also supposed to give a speech in Hong Kong, but discovered that the authorities there would not give me a visa because I was on the board of two sanctioned organizations, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy.) I’ll write about Central Asia in a subsequent post, but for now I want to talk about the situation in Ukraine.I hadn’t been to Ukraine since late 2019, and it’s become a lot harder to get to. You have to fly to Warsaw, then take a four-hour bus ride to a town on the Polish-Ukrainian border, and then an overnight train to Kyiv. We stayed at the Intercontinental where I’ve been many times before, near St. Michael’s and the Foreign Ministry. This time, however, they had a display of destroyed Russian armored vehicles on display.The YES conference is hosted annually by the oligarch Viktor Pinchuk; I decided to go this year to show solidarity during the war. There were no missile or drone attacks while we were there, but the city was hit again just after we left. Kyiv doesn’t look like a city at war, except for the large numbers of soldiers in the streets and the tank traps on the Khreschatyk; the restaurants are trendy as ever and full of people. Zelenskyy spoke at the conference, along with the new defense minister (and friend) Rustem Umerov, Dmytro Kuleba the foreign minister, presidential chief of staff Andrii Yermak, and the military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov, and a whole host of other dignitaries.The most important piece of information was one that no one could talk too openly about at the conference, which was the state of the counter-offensive launched in early June. Everything depends on the outcome of this battle. There was a lot of confidence expressed that Ukraine would win, and absolutely no willingness to accept an outcome less than a victory that pushed Russia back to Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Any estimate of the current situation has to be gleaned from other sources.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Up until the beginning of September, there were a number of annoying backgrounders and insinuations coming (apparently) from U.S. administration sources suggesting that the counter-offensive had bogged down and that the Ukrainians were making a variety of mistakes: they were not employing proper NATO combined arms doctrine, or failed to concentrate their forces adequately on a single objective. The former assertion is absurd: proper combined arms doctrine would have dictated that Ukraine employ superior airpower to gain air superiority over the whole theater. This was done by the United States and its partners during the two Gulf wars; in the former, the U.S. Air Force spent about 40 days reducing Iraq air defenses to rubble before the land invasion began. However, the United States has refused until recently to give Ukraine the F-16s and ATACMs that would be useful in such a campaign. After having tried and failed to breach the first Russian defensive line in the south in early June and suffering significant casualties, the Ukrainians reverted to tactics that brought success in Kharkiv and Kherson last year: using drones and accurate counter-battery fire to eliminate Russian artillery, ammo dumps, and command-and-control centers. If they had adequate airpower, this could have been done more quickly and effectively, but it is Washington that denied them this capability.Nonetheless, the Ukrainians have been able to slowly but surely penetrate the first defensive line in the south. This is an important achievement; the second and third lines are apparently much less heavily fortified. The single most important obstacle are the incredibly dense minefields that the Russians have laid in previous months. There is no magic technology that allows the attackers to penetrate these barriers; they must be cleared of mines by sappers who are subject to attack by drones, helicopters, and artillery. This is slow and costly work, paid for by the blood and limbs of ordinary soldiers.The other big development in the war has been the increasing tempo of Ukrainian attacks on Russian military and industrial assets in Crimea and Russia proper. The most spectacular of these was a drone or missile attack on the big naval port of Sebastopol on Sept. 13 shortly after I left, which apparently damaged or destroyed a Kilo-class diesel electric submarine and a large landing ship in dry dock. They also destroyed a major S-400 anti-aircraft site and recaptured a couple of oil platforms in the Black Sea. If it is true that the Biden administration has finally agreed to provide Ukraine with ATACMs, this could be the beginning of a serious campaign to force the Russians out of Crimea.The common assumption that the counter-offensive has bogged down and that Ukraine inevitably faces a long war is simply wrong. Once the Ukrainians penetrate the third defensive line, the whole Russian position in southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts will become untenable, just as the city of Kherson and the right bank of the Dnipro became untenable last summer. And when that happens, Crimea becomes extremely vulnerable with all of its supply lines interdicted. The Russians have been asserting that Crimea is somehow sacrosanct and that an assault on the peninsula will trigger nuclear escalation; both people in the White House and grand strategists like Elon Musk apparently believe versions of this narrative. But the Ukrainians have been attacking Crimea for months with no Russian nuclear response.The war has evolved in many ways since February of last year, not all of them to be benefit of Ukraine. The systems that seemed so devastating early on like Javelin anti-tank missiles and Bayraktar TB2 drones have been less useful recently as ranges have increased and Russian air defenses have improved. Small, disposable drones have become central to the fight on both sides, making the whole battlespace transparent in unprecedented ways. There has been a steady arms race in drone electronic warfare capabilities, and some new Russian models like the Lancet kamikaze drone have been effective against Ukrainian armor.Apart from the war in the south, there are other big challenges ahead. Everyone in Ukraine assumes that the Russians will resume their attacks on the country’s electrical grid when the winter sets in. The Russians have done a lot of damage to Ukraine’s Danube ports that became the main export channel for agricultural products once Moscow pulled out of the grain deal this past summer. While the Russians have been running low on missiles and ammunition, they will be able to ramp up production in the long run, with help from countries like North Korea.The Ukrainians are understandably growing tired after more than a year and a half of war. But there is no organized opposition to the government, no candidate running against Zelenskyy like General McClellan did against Lincoln in 1864 calling for negotiations. At the YES conference there were no Ukrainian voices suggesting anything other than the total expulsion of Russian forces from the whole of the occupied territories. If the United States can finally provide the weaponry to really force a showdown in Crimea, the Ukrainians could achieve something that looks like victory; let’s hope that the Biden administration finally comes to understand this and acts accordingly.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: Destroyed Russian equipment in front of the Kyiv Intercontinental Hotel (photo by author)

Conservative influencer Jordan Peterson has called out the BBC's investigation into allegations concerning Russell Brand and labeled it "convenient."

Comedian Brand has come under fire after the sister newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times, as well as Channel 4's Dispatches, released a collaborative expose over the weekend in Britain. It accused the 48-year-old of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse by four women between 2006 and 2013 in the U.K. and U.S.

In a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, Brand said his relationships have been "always consensual" and that he strongly denies "these very serious criminal allegations."

Portrait of Jordan Peterson at The Cambridge Union in November in Cambridge, England. Peterson has shared his thoughts on the recent allegations against comedian Russell Brand and has called the BBC's investigation into the matter "convenient" and not so "urgent." Chris Williamson/Getty Images

Brand added that he has been transparent about his previous relationships being consensual and wants to continue being transparent. He continued his response by also suggesting the two "mainstream media outlets are making a coordinated attack" against him.

"These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies, and as I've written about extensively in my books I was very, very promiscuous," Brand said.

Peterson, known for his outspokenness, has shared a CTV news article on X and captioned it: "It's a bit late for 'Urgently' But it sure is Convenient." The article's headline read: "BBC is 'urgently looking' into issues raised by Brand report." Peterson noted the timeliness of the broadcaster's investigation, seeing as the Channel 4 documentary lists events from as early as 2006.

The program in question, Russell Brand: In Plain Sight: Dispatches, described one instance where Brand assaulted a 16-year-old who was still in school while the comedian was in his early 30s.

Brand's comments about mainstream media outlets making a coordinated attack against him were echoed by similar statements from Peterson's followers.

One replied to his post and wrote: "I'm sure they are being Urgent about it, trying to dig up any dirt they can to stay in business."

Another shared: "They should substitute urgently with frantic. Frantic describes media coverage over issues more accurately, or what they induce in their readers/viewers."

One social-media user hit back at Peterson and posted: "I thought you were all about freedom of speech-which includes journalistic/media freedom."

Several celebrities have shared support for Brand, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, social-media influencer Andrew Tate, and X owner Elon Musk.

This is not the first time that the clinical psychologist Peterson has shared his controversial opinions.

He was among the many notable figures encouraging people to boycott the beer brand Bud Light over its collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Peterson also criticized Disney CEO Bob Iger and the company's range of LGBTQ+ Pride and transgender flags.

Peterson also misgendered YouTube star Jazz Jennings online when sharing an article about the star.

As we stumble toward another existential election, panic is setting in among some progressive groups because the donors who buoyed them throughout the Trump years are disengaging. “Donations to progressive organizations are way down in 2023 across the board,” said a recent memo from Billy Wimsatt, executive director of the Movement Voter Project, an organization founded in 2016 that channels funds to community organizers, mostly in swing states, who engage and galvanize voters. He added, “Groups need money to make sure we have a good outcome next November. But. People. Are. Not. Donating.”

As both big and small donors pull back, there have been layoffs across the progressive ecosystem, from behemoths like the Sierra Club to insurgent outfits like Justice Democrats, the group that first recruited Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to challenge the Democratic incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018. According to a July analysis by Middle Seat, a Democratic strategy and consulting firm, in the first half of this year, grass-roots donations to Democratic House and Senate campaigns were down almost 50 percent compared to the same point in 2021. Wimsatt, who had to lay off 15 people from a 55-person staff in June, told me, “I haven’t experienced a situation like this before when there’s been such a sense of scarcity.”

This isn’t just about political operatives losing their jobs: It means that organizations that should be building up their turnout operations for next year are instead having to downsize. And it speaks to a mood of liberal apathy and disenchantment that Democrats can’t afford ahead of another grueling election. “To the degree that there isn’t enough organic enthusiasm, we have to generate it,” Wimsatt said. That’s hard to do when you’re broke.

It was probably inevitable that left-leaning fund-raising would fall once the immediate crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency ended. Activism, like electoral politics, is often thermostatic: There’s more energy on the right when Democrats are in power, and more on the left during Republican administrations. After a pandemic, an insurrection, and innumerable climate disasters and mass shootings, people are burned out and maybe even, as Ana Marie Cox argues in the New Republic, traumatized, a state that can lead to hypervigilance but also avoidance. And, of course, there’s inflation, a big part of the reason that charitable giving is down overall.

       Jann Wenner—founder of the music and pop culture magazine Rolling Stone—is still defending an infamously inaccurate article that appeared in his publication nearly a decade ago. "The University of Virginia story was not a failure of intent, or an attempt to be loose with the facts," Wenner told The New York Times last week. "You get beyond the factual errors that sank that story, and it was really about the issue of rape and how it affects women on campus, their lack of rights. Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof." (Emphasis mine.) "A Rape on Campus" was published on November 19, 2014. Its author, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, claimed that a University of Virginia student named "Jackie" had been viciously raped by a group of male students at a fraternity party as some kind of initiation ritual. Jackie's account was intended as a representative story—an example of the kind of routine sexual violence faced by young women on college campuses. But the underlying crime never took place. Days after the story's initial publication, it came under attack from journalists who were skeptical of the details. I came to suspect the whole thing might be an elaborate hoax, mostly because I had a hard time believing the perpetrators could have possibly expected to get away with it. Most campus sexual assaults involve incapacitation with drugs and alcohol; the idea that not one, but multiple assailants—including a man whose identity was known the victim—would attack a fully conscious woman without any fear she would go to the police seemed fanciful. It eventually emerged that Jackie had made the whole thing up. The person she accused did not exist, though she had impersonated him in texts to her friends. Had Rolling Stone followed standard journalistic protocols, Jackie's fraud would have been exposed prior to publication, but fact-checkers at the magazine never pressed Erdely to contact either Jackie's friends or the alleged perpetrator. Rolling Stone ultimately settled three defamation lawsuits, brought by the fraternity in question, several of its members, and a dean wrongly portrayed as unsympathetic. So when Wenner says that "the rest of the story was bulletproof," he's essentially saying, Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? This was not the only eyebrow-raising line in the Times interview. Wenner also admitted to allowing the famous subjects of his own interviews—including John Lennon, Bono, and others—to edit articles about them before publication: [Lennon] went through, and he made changes here and there. Basically, it's interview subjects clarifying what they want to say, making it more precise. Because it's a long stream of yap and verbiage and you sometimes don't think through every word. I want them to have the opportunity to say precisely what they meant. With journalistic standards like these, it's easier to see how Rolling Stone's rape story came into being in the first place.The post Campus Rape Story Was 'Bulletproof' Except for the Hoax, Says <em>Rolling Stone</em> Founder Jann Wenner appeared first on Reason.com.

Several years ago, the editors of an online science blog asked me who I considered the greater scientist: Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein.Much to the surprise of my interlocutors, I voted for Charles Darwin. My argument was simple. Both Darwin and Einstein revolutionized their respective fields of biology and physics. Both made scientific discoveries that radically changed our perspective on humanity’s place in the cosmos and had broad societal impacts. But only Darwin combined the best characteristics of an observer and a theorist. His theory of evolution through natural selection was both indebted to his own comprehensive and meticulous observations and provided a beautiful theoretical understanding of the evolution of the vast diversity of life on Earth.I have since discovered that I did Darwin a disservice by focusing only on the scientific basis of his brilliant breakthrough. In anticipation of my Origins Project Foundation’s upcoming Galapagos trip, I recently read large parts of Darwin’s first work, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), and listened to the full recording of the abridged version, narrated by my friend and colleague Richard Dawkins. I could sense the delight in Richard’s voice as he recounted Darwin’s travels, and I found the convergence of the two men’s writing and speaking styles almost uncanny.Quillette Podcast #191: Richard Dawkins on the Wonders of FlightQuillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with renowned evolutionary biologistRichard Dawkins about his new book on the science and mythology of life in theair—from puffins and flying squirrels to fairies and angels. Sample book illustrations, by Jana Lenzová[https://www.deviantart.com/janalenz…QuilletteQuilletteThe book astonished me. I had expected arcane and dated descriptions of Darwin’s observations. I had not realized that his book is a literary masterpiece, as well as a scientific one. It is, on the one hand, a page-turner of an adventure story, relating frequent life-threatening encounters on land and sea, and on the other hand an awe-inspiring account of nature’s wonders. It is one of the most remarkable and uplifting stories of its type I have ever read. Time and again as I listened, I was overcome with admiration for Darwin as a writer, as well as a scientist.Here is his description of his first encounter with the Brazilian rainforest:Delight … is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled me with admiration. A most paradoxical mixture of sound and silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud, that it may be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore; yet within the recesses of the forest a universal silence appears to reign. To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again.And here is his rumination on the soul-destroying brutality of slavery and the way in which the custom could quash the ethical integrity of even an otherwise moral man:While staying at this estate, I was very nearly being an eye-witness to one of those atrocious acts which can only take place in a slave country. Owing to a quarrel and a lawsuit, the owner was on the point of taking all the women and children from the male slaves, and selling them separately at the public auction at Rio. Interest, and not any feeling of compassion, prevented this act. Indeed, I do not believe the inhumanity of separating thirty families, who had lived together for many years, even occurred to the owner. Yet I will pledge myself, that in humanity and good feeling he was superior to the common run of men. It may be said there exists no limit to the blindness of interest and selfish habit.His enthusiasm is infectious, and his fascination with biological minutiae and patient willingness to experiment are unparalleled—even when he is studying slugs:During the remainder of my stay at Rio, I resided in a cottage at Botafogo Bay. It was impossible to wish for anything more delightful than thus to spend some weeks in so magnificent a country. In England any person fond of natural history enjoys in his walks a great advantage, by always having something to attract his attention; but in these fertile climates, teeming with life, the attractions are so numerous, that he is scarcely able to walk at all.The few observations which I was enabled to make were almost exclusively confined to the invertebrate animals. The existence of a division of the genus Planaria, which inhabits the dry land, interested me much. These animals are of so simple a structure, that Cuvier has arranged them with the intestinal worms, though never found within the bodies of other animals. Numerous species inhabit both salt and fresh water; but those to which I allude were found, even in the drier parts of the forest, beneath logs of rotten wood, on which I believe they feed. In general form they resemble little slugs, but are very much narrower in proportion, and several of the species are beautifully coloured with longitudinal stripes. Their structure is very simple: near the middle of the under or crawling surface there are two small transverse slits, from the anterior one of which a funnel-shaped and highly irritable mouth can be protruded. For some time after the rest of the animal was completely dead from the effects of salt water or any other cause, this organ still retained its vitality.I found no less than twelve different species of terrestrial Planariae in different parts of the southern hemisphere. Some specimens which I obtained at Van Dieman's Land, I kept alive for nearly two months, feeding them on rotten wood. Having cut one of them transversely into two nearly equal parts, in the course of a fortnight both had the shape of perfect animals. I had, however, so divided the body, that one of the halves contained both the inferior orifices, and the other, in consequence, none. In the course of twenty-five days from the operation, the more perfect half could not have been distinguished from any other specimen. The other had increased much in size; and towards its posterior end, a clear space was formed in the parenchymatous mass, in which a rudimentary cup-shaped mouth could clearly be distinguished; on the under surface, however, no corresponding slit was yet open. If the increased heat of the weather, as we approached the equator, had not destroyed all the individuals, there can be no doubt that this last step would have completed its structure. Although so well-known an experiment, it was interesting to watch the gradual production of every essential organ, out of the simple extremity of another animal. It is extremely difficult to preserve these Planariae; as soon as the cessation of life allows the ordinary laws of change to act, their entire bodies become soft and fluid, with a rapidity which I have never seen equalled.I was especially eager to read his account of the Beagle’s arrival at the Galapagos archipelago—which is one of the most coveted naturalist destinations in the world today because Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection arose, in large part, from observations he made of the flora and fauna of those isolated islands.If you have ever been to the Galapagos Islands, you will know that their geological features are perhaps even more striking than their wealth of flora and fauna. Darwin’s interest and expertise as a geologist are evident throughout The Voyage. It was the geology of the Galapagos that first sparked his interest:This archipelago consists of ten principal islands, of which five exceed the others in size. They are situated under the Equator, and between five and six hundred miles westward of the coast of America. They are all formed of volcanic rocks; a few fragments of granite curiously glazed and altered by the heat, can hardly be considered as an exception. Some of the craters, surmounting the larger islands, are of immense size, and they rise to a height of between three and four thousand feet. Their flanks are studded by innumerable smaller orifices. I scarcely hesitate to affirm, that there must be in the whole archipelago at least two thousand craters. These consist either of lava or scoriae, or of finely-stratified, sandstone-like tuff. Most of the latter are beautifully symmetrical; they owe their origin to eruptions of volcanic mud without any lava: it is a remarkable circumstance that every one of the twenty-eight tuff-craters which were examined, had their southern sides either much lower than the other sides, or quite broken down and removed. As all these craters apparently have been formed when standing in the sea, and as the waves from the trade wind and the swell from the open Pacific here unite their forces on the southern coasts of all the islands, this singular uniformity in the broken state of the craters, composed of the soft and yielding tuff, is easily explained.It is impossible not to see in this section the germination of one of the most important biological scientific developments in human history: Darwin’s theory of evolution. The spark that lit his intellectual fire leaps off the page when he first muses about the surprising biological history of the islands:The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.It would not remain a mystery for long, thanks to Darwin.David Gelernter is Wrong About Ditching DarwinSydney. London. Toronto.QuilletteJerry A. CoyneThe heroic and beautiful tale of his travels as a young man, before his fame was secured, is mature, painstaking, and lyrical, all at the same time. I previously regarded Galileo Galilei as the prototypical great scientist/writer. His 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems is a wonder of logic, simplicity, and humor laced with sarcasm. I have always required that my introductory physics students read his work, reasoning that if they can slog through James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Dialogues should be a breeze—and they are every bit as good a work of literature. But Darwin’s writing surpasses even Galileo’s. My admiration for him is unbounded.I will return to the Galapagos for the third time next year, and this time I will go with my eyes opened to new wonders. One of the reasons I became a theoretical physicist is that I have a poor eye for detail, especially biological and geological detail. Part of this is due, I suspect, to my color blindness, which makes differentiating such details difficult. But part of it is caused by my general unwillingness to slow down and take the time to make the kinds of observations that turn the seemingly mundane into the profound. Inspired by Darwin’s account, I plan to focus on everything I see with a new intensity, and to try and share his sense of fascination. In so doing, I hope to be inspired anew by both the wonder of the natural world, and the intellectual contributions of the man who ended one of the most important scientific books ever written with one of the most memorable closing passages I have ever read:Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Democratic socialists have made their most significant electoral inroads in years by operating as a left-wing faction in the Democratic Party. Chris Maisano argues that we should own that strategy, and push it further.   Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) take questions at the US Capitol on July 15, 2019. (Alex Wroblewski / Getty Images)   I welcome Nick French’s critical response to my recent piece on the Left, the Democratic Party, and electoral strategy. It shows that the US left is moving beyond the most sterile versions of these debates and has gotten over the notion that definitively futile efforts like the Green Party or the People’s Party are worth anyone’s time.Still, French’s article reflects how the Democratic Party remains a source of vexation on the Left. I disagree with the thrust of French’s argument, yet I found myself agreeing with some of his specific points and propositions: the need to elect democratic socialists to office through Democratic Party primary elections; the usefulness of “party surrogate”–style organizations like Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); the often undemocratic nature of official Democratic Party institutions like state or local committees; and the need for the socialist left to maintain its own political identity. None of this is in question here, yet we find ourselves disagreeing with each other. Why?  Party in the USA The primary source of disagreement, in my view, has to do with the nature and purpose of US-style political parties. These are very odd contraptions quite unlike their counterparts in comparable countries, which is why attempts to emulate the labor and left-wing parties that are commonplace elsewhere have repeatedly failed here.US-style political parties are less civil society organizations than they are creatures of the state. As Adam Hilton observes in his seminal article in the 2018 Socialist Register, “American parties are products of state actors, invented for the purposes of facilitating officeholders’ legitimacy to advance their preferred agenda and cultivating a base for reelection.” They are, in many respects, “akin to organs of the state itself, straddling a semi-private, semi-public boundary that renders them more similar to ‘public utilities’ than civil society organizations.”US-style political parties are less civil society organizations than they are creatures of the state.This quality comes through most clearly in the case of primary elections. Primary elections are used to nominate the parties’ candidates for general elections, but these are run by state government agencies — not the party organizations themselves. Whomever wins the primary election is the party’s official candidate in the general election, whether the party organization likes that or not.The ambiguous quality of US-style political parties is precisely what makes them so flexible and penetrable. As Hilton reminds us, “the terrain of American parties — beset by competing group demands, factional conflict, and no shortage of palace intrigue — has been a flood land of insurgent movements.” This is why the meaning of the “Democratic” and “Republican” party labels have been subject to so much contestation and change over the last 160 years. It’s why they’ve been so durable, and why even the biggest working-class upsurges in our country’s history didn’t generate a new labor party to supplant them.“Given the present insurmountable odds facing any third party project in the US,” Hilton concludes, the Left should “divorce the twin tasks traditionally assigned to the working-class party, separating the organization of the proletariat into a class from the imperative to win governmental power.” He proposes a network of chapter-based organizations “oriented toward building a base within working-class communities and labor unions that can also act as an effective independent pressure group on the Democratic Party.”That’s precisely what DSA chapters, in their best moments, aspire to achieve. While it would retain its own organizational capacity and political identity, an organization of this type would not attempt to constitute itself as its own party with its own ballot line. It is “precisely because this effort is not premised on exiting the Democratic Party to launch a third-party alternative,” Hilton insists, that it “would avoid the pitfalls experienced by the 1990s Labor Party project of expending precious resources in negotiating state ballot access and the spoiler problem that can result in Republican victories.”The “party surrogate” idea pragmatically accepts the fundamental unviability of new parties in the US electoral system. It’s meant to reconcile the maintenance of left-wing political and organizational independence with electoral action through the Democratic Party. Yet French recasts a party surrogate as the “groundwork for a potential new party,” thereby maintaining the unhelpful conflation of “political independence” with “new party.”One might say there’s no harm in keeping the new party torch burning, so long as this desire is kept in perspective. But I don’t think this is cost-free. By keeping one eye on the exit door, French becomes prone, in my view, to misreading the landscape of US politics to vindicate his positions. A failure to fully apprehend the nature of US-style political parties is one example of this. Another is his questionable assessment of the Democrats’ party “brand” and the strategic conclusions he draws from it.  Wishcasting as Analysis French insists that in “publicly identifying as Democrats, socialists are associating themselves with decades of neoliberal rule and a brand that is toxic to millions of voters — including, increasingly, working-class voters of all races. . . . Breaking free of the Democratic Party label may ultimately be necessary for appealing to the working class more broadly.This is where, in my view, itching for the exit door has its biggest cost. If the Democratic brand were really that toxic, how does one explain, for example, the fact that the youngest voters — who are also, on average, the most left-wing voters in the electorate — are becoming an increasingly reliable Democratic voting bloc?According to the progressive data firm Catalist, “65% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats” in the 2022 midterm elections, “cementing their role as a key part of a winning coalition for the party.” Such lopsided support for Democrats among young voters is a recent development, not a long-standing historical phenomenon. “While young voters were historically evenly split between the parties,” Catalist notes, “they are increasingly voting for Democrats. Many young voters who showed up in 2018 and 2020 to elect Democrats continued to do the same in 2022.”One could argue this is a vote against Republicans, not a vote for Democrats. But while a fear of MAGA extremism is certainly playing a role here, it doesn’t explain everything. The Left’s recent turn toward Democratic Party electoral politics — from Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns, to the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad to Congress, to the election of left-wing Democrats at the state and local levels — has started changing the meaning of the Democratic label and highlighted different kinds of Democrats in the party’s coalition.What about “class dealignment,” or the ostensible movement of working-class voters from the Democratic to the Republican Party? This idea has become a staple of electoral commentary in Jacobin, and French takes it up in his article. But as I have written here and elsewhere, it is by no means clear that this is actually happening the way its advocates claim it is. What is happening in electoral politics, in my view, is not class dealignment so much as class fragmentation.It is true, as the political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm have shown in their important research, that “the core constituencies of left and right parties have changed, and the old core groups have become cross-pressured groups” open to switching their votes from election to election. What class dealignment arguments often overlook, however, is that today’s working class is quite heterogeneous, and that the proportion of blue-collar manual workers (the old core group) has declined dramatically while the share of workers in healthcare, education, and other service occupations (the new core group), many of whom have college degrees, has exploded.Lower-income voters in the United States, Kitschelt and Rehm observe, have tended to diverge along educational lines. Workers with higher educational attainment levels are growing as a share of the electorate and tend to vote Democratic, while workers with lower levels of educational attainment, blue-collar manual workers in particular, have become a swing group.But it’s not just highly educated but relatively low-income workers who disproportionately support Democrats. A recent study from the Jacobin-affiliated Center for Working Class politics finds that “non-credentialed service workers are particularly amenable to progressive economic and social appeals,” and that “available voters” in this group had a higher level of support for Joe Biden in 2020 (roughly 60 percent) than any other in its survey pool.Today’s working class is a highly variegated formation that is not trending in any one political direction.Today’s working class is a highly variegated formation that is not trending in any one political direction. In French’s article, the class dealignment perspective is adopted to reach a desired political conclusion, not to serve a rigorous analysis of the US political landscape.  All Else is the Sea In my original article, I argued that realignment did indeed happen in the mid-to-late twentieth century. The Dixiecrats became Republicans, and the two main parties became more polarized and internally coherent than they were before. Because of this, I argued further, the Left needs to decide whether its goal should be to push the Democrats’ realignment even more to the left so that it becomes the functional equivalent of a labor or social democratic party, with the Left and its allies in a leading position in the party’s coalition. If this isn’t possible, then the only realistic option remaining is to act as a minority faction in the Democratic coalition and work to leverage that position to the fullest possible extent.I also argued that either approach would entail heightening direct conflict with the Democratic establishment “through primary challenges and the advancement of a strongly left-wing legislative agenda.” I did not advocate a headlong dive into state and local Democratic Party committees and other party organizations. The hollowing out of party organizations that accompanied realignment means that working to capture them may not be the best use of the Left’s time. It seems more fruitful to keep strengthening groups like DSA and democratic socialist legislative factions.The practical steps that French suggests in his article are entirely compatible with this approach. It simply does not require distancing from the Democratic Party label, and in practice often benefits from an association with it. Here in New York, for example, DSA members in the state legislature participate in a “socialists in office” committee that is small but punches above its weight. This is precisely because there are Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature, which these socialists are part of because they have been elected to office as Democrats. The supermajority gives socialists an opportunity to win enough legislative support to pass left-wing priorities like the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) and other important bills.These DSA members in the state legislature vote with the rest of the Democrats most of the time. Some of the time, they can organize enough Democrats to pass left-wing priorities the Democratic establishment opposes, like BPRA (they also got a healthy assist from the congressional Democrats who pressured governor Kathy Hochul to sign it). They dissent from the Democratic majority on other occasions, such as their bloc vote against this year’s state budget. In short, they are operating as a left-wing faction within the state legislature’s Democratic supermajority, and they have achieved some notable victories in a short amount of time. Why not own this successful strategy and keep pushing it further instead of looking for the exit so quickly?French raises the specter of establishment Democrats changing party rules to ban socialists from running in primaries as justification for doing so. I am not sure whether this is legally possible since primary elections are run by state governments, not party organizations. But if it is, wouldn’t this bolster the case for pragmatic participation in party organizations to prevent it from happening in the first place? Exclusion from Democratic Party primaries would be a devastating blow to the socialist left, because of the extreme difficulty of electing independents and third-party candidates in general elections. The same goes for losing access to important campaign tools like NGP VAN software, which the socialist left probably could not build a fully-fledged alternative to.Exclusion from Democratic Party primaries would be a devastating blow to the socialist left.If these eventualities could be prevented through participation in party organizations, shouldn’t we seriously consider doing so? Ensuring the fairest possible playing field among party factions may be the strongest argument for participation in bodies like state and local committees. We should not discount the possibility, however, that some such organizations might be more amenable to meaningful socialist participation — and maybe even leadership — than others. This should be treated as a tactical question subject to local conditions, not a matter of principle.French recently published an interview in Jacobin with Michigan Democratic state representative Joey Andrews. In 2022, the state’s Democrats won a “trifecta” for the first time since the 1980s. As Andrews recounts in the interview, with unified control of state government Michigan Democrats quickly moved to repeal the state’s so-called “right-to-work” law, reinstated the prevailing wage, and restored teachers’ bargaining rights and automatic union dues deduction. He has a bill to repeal the state’s “Death Star” preemption law, which bars localities from raising wages or implementing paid sick leave, ready to go for the next legislative session. He also expresses the hope that Michigan Democrats can go beyond undoing Republican damage by codifying the right to bargain in state law, ending the misclassification of workers, and implementing some degree of workplace codetermination.None of this would be conceivable without the Democratic trifecta, which included an influx of young left-labor representatives like Andrews, Darrin Camilleri, and Dylan Wegela, who was a leader of the 2018 Arizona public schools strike. Andrews is right to caution that Michigan’s Democratic Party is far from perfect. But these are conditions, as imperfect as they are, under which the Left can help to undo Republican damage while beginning to make positive gains for working people.In Michigan, New York, and elsewhere, there is still a long way to go. The Left continues to face, as it always has, an uphill battle to bring more democracy, justice, and freedom to this country. We have learned many things since the watershed years of 2016–2017, including what for me has been the biggest lesson: if democratic socialists want to be effective, they need to act, for the purposes of electoral politics, as a left-wing faction in the Democratic Party. All else is the sea. 

Once upon a time, presidential impeachment was a rare event. But with four of the five inquiries in U.S. history coming in the past 25 years, people seeking to understand and explain the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, launched Tuesday, have looked to the 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump as an analogy. Both center on allegations of using elected office for personal gain, and both have been divided sharply along partisan lines.The comparison is understandable, especially because some Republicans have explicitly framed their inquiry as a response to Trump’s impeachment, as Jonathan Chait writes. But the more useful comparison is to the House investigation into Benghazi from 2014 to 2016. Both inquiries are based far more on vibes and political machinations than they are on hard evidence. Kevin McCarthy’s longstanding ambition to be speaker of the House sit at the center of both. And the fate of the Benghazi investigation offers some indications about how this one could turn out.[Read: Kevin McCarthy is a hostage]Like the current impeachment inquiry, the Benghazi story began with U.S. involvement in a foreign country—in this case, Libya, where the Obama administration was reluctantly drawn into the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi. On September 11, 2012, Islamist attacks on two U.S. facilities in the city of Benghazi killed the U.S. ambassador, a Foreign Service officer, and two CIA contractors. Republicans blamed Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, for failing to prevent or respond quickly to the attack. Then-Speaker John Boehner initially resisted calls for a special committee to investigate the attack but eventually agreed.The point of the Benghazi committee was to hurt Clinton’s chances at winning the presidency in 2016. We know this because Republicans were not subtle. As McCarthy, then the House majority leader, said in a September 2015 TV interview: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”That frank confession that a congressional inquiry had been used as a tool of partisan warfare helped cost McCarthy the speakership. The same month, Boehner announced his retirement. McCarthy had been the clear favorite, but amid fallout from the interview, he suddenly dropped out, saying he couldn’t unite the caucus. He eventually got the gavel in January of this year, but now his speakership is once again on the line. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote Tuesday, McCarthy is a hostage of the far-right flank of his party, which forced him into announcing the impeachment inquiry. McCarthy’s ability to manage the process will in part determine whether he keeps his job.The basis for the first Trump impeachment was clear from the start. A whistleblower alleged that Trump had tried to extort an investigation into (wait for it) Hunter and Joe Biden over dealings in Ukraine, using funds appropriated by Congress as leverage. The White House released a transcript of the call the same day that Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry. The rest of the inquiry turned up lots of new information about Trump’s attempt to use Ukraine as a pawn in his reelection campaign, but the basic allegation was clear from the start, and the question was not whether Trump had done it but whether it was a “perfect” call, as he insisted, or a serious breach of his oath of office.In both Benghazi and the Biden impeachment, by contrast, it isn’t entirely clear what precisely the misconduct is. In the Benghazi investigation, everyone agreed that something bad had happened—Americans died. But Republicans had no clear theory of why that was Clinton’s fault. In the Biden case, a consensus has emerged that Hunter Biden engaged in brazenly unethical behavior (separate from his legal woes in the United States), but that doesn’t amount to wrongdoing on his father’s part. McCarthy’s stated rationales for the impeachment inquiry are flimsy, unproven, and incorrect, as the journalists Philip Bump and Luke Broadwater have explained.Nonetheless, Republicans seem absolutely certain that Biden is wildly corrupt, and they would prove it if only they could get all the pieces of the investigation to come together, and if only they could find their witnesses, and if only those witnesses weren’t facing federal charges, and so on. This is a view propounded not just by the far right in Congress, but also by prominent voices in the supposedly sober and serious conservative press. Well, perhaps: Evidence of serious misconduct by Joe Biden might still turn up, but for the time being, the exercise looks like a transparent attempt to hurt Biden’s chances at reelection.[Sarah Chayes: Not illegal, but clearly wrong]Much like Benghazi. For a time, the Benghazi committee looked like nothing more than a big fishing expedition. Despite more than two years of work, the committee did not find any wrongdoing by Clinton. Her own testimony before the committee, an 11-hour slog, was widely viewed as a victory for her, because she was in command of the facts and Republican committee members didn’t land any real blows on her. By the time the election rolled around, “Benghazi” was more of a punch line—against Republicans—than a live campaign issue. The whole thing was an embarrassment for the GOP, or so it seemed.One can easily imagine the Biden impeachment following that path. James Comer, the House Oversight Committee chair, who has been leading investigations into Hunter Biden, has appeared bumbling and ineffective. So far, no evidence suggests offenses that reach the historical threshold for impeachment. Moderate House Republicans show little appetite for impeachment, and getting a full House vote—much less a successful impeachment—looks very challenging for McCarthy. Should that work, there’s essentially no chance that the Democratic Senate would convict Biden.But the Benghazi experience points to another possibility, too. Although the Benghazi committee couldn’t nail Clinton, one byproduct of the investigation was the revelation of Clinton’s private email server, which turned out to be a defining issue in the 2016 presidential election, and arguably cost her the presidency. Just because an investigation fails in its putative goal doesn’t mean it will fail in its actual goal.*Lead image: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Alex Wong / Getty; Bashar Shglila / Getty; Bastiaan Slabbers / NurPhoto / Getty; Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty.

The thunder of war in Ukraine drowns out a lot of other news from Russia. A few days ago, however, the Russian foreign intelligence service quietly did something rather odd. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR (the Russian version of the CIA), unveiled a statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police.At first sight, this seems another sign of President Vladimir Putin’s nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet repression, when an aspiring young secret policeman could live a comfortable life by intimidating his neighbors and tormenting his fellow citizens. But the reappearance of a monument to this hated figure in Soviet history might be related more to Russia’s elite politics than to Putin’s nostalgia.Before we get into the modern Kremlinology, let’s look back at the early days of the Soviet intelligence services.Dzerzhinsky was a Polish national with a long history of revolutionary activity. He joined the Russian Bolsheviks, and shortly after the 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin put him in charge of creating a secret-police organization. (The czars had one, of course; the Bolsheviks wanted their own.) He became the director of the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, known by the Russian initials VChK, soon abbreviated to its last two letters, pronounced “che” and “ka,” which is why the secret police were called “the Cheka.” To this day, Russia’s spooks proudly call themselves “Chekists”—as do their enemies, pejoratively.[Read: How to repurpose a bad statue]Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 after gaining a reputation as a ruthless, incorruptible fanatic and setting the tone for his successors in the secret police. Over the years, the Cheka mutated into various Soviet government entities, some of them famous in Cold War lore (such as the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or the dreaded NKVD). For a time, Joseph Stalin split the foreign and domestic intelligence agencies into two ministries. As with many countries’ intelligence organizations, something of a rivalry existed between the cops who did internal security and the secret agents who operated against the Soviet Union’s enemies abroad. The Soviet military, too, had its own spy service, the coldly brutal GRU, which still exists today. To put this in American terms, think of the traditional tensions among the FBI, the CIA, and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (minus any democratic oversight).In 1954, the Soviets decided to combine all of these organizations into a giant interagency group called the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, or KGB—an acronym well known to Americans during the Cold War and the organization that Putin joined in 1975. The foreign spies and the domestic goons were in different departments, and worked in different buildings, but they were all under one director.After the fall of the U.S.S.R., in 1991, the new (and short-lived) Russian democracy decided to weaken the Soviet-era police-state monolith by once again splitting up the foreign and domestic services. The foreign spy agency became the SVR and remained in its modernist digs out in the southern reaches of the Russian capital, in Moscow’s Yasenevo neighborhood. The domestic service—the thugs whom Russians fear on a daily basis—became the Federal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, and it stayed in the old KGB building in central Moscow.[Read: Is Stalin making a comeback in Russia?]Here’s where the story of the new statue gets interesting. The original monument—at 15 tons, a hunk of metal so large that Muscovites attached Derzhinsky’s nickname, “Iron Feliks,” to the statue itself—was erected in front of the downtown KGB headquarters in 1958. (The imposing building in Lubyanka Square was also across the way from a big Soviet toy store called Child World, and Soviet citizens would joke darkly that someone in trouble with the authorities had “gone to Child World.”) After the 1991 coup attempt against the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, the statue was torn down on the demand of Moscow’s citizens.So when I read the first reports that a new statue was being raised, I thought it was an aggressive message from Putin to the people of the capital. In 2021, the Moscow city government had scheduled a vote on whether to bring Iron Feliks back to the downtown location or to erect a new statue in its place of the 13th-century Russian saint and hero Alexander Nevsky. The city’s mayor, citing “deep divisions,” canceled the popular poll. To return Iron Feliks to his place of honor in front of Moscow’s most notorious stronghold of repression would have been heavy-handed symbolism even from Putin.But Feliks isn’t back in his old neighborhood; he’s out in Yasenevo. (He’s also not as tall or as heavy as he used to be; the new statue is a replica of the original, but smaller.) So what’s going on? And who is this stunt’s intended audience?One clue might be found in the remarks that the SVR’s director, Sergey Naryshkin, made at the unveiling. Instead of celebrating Dzerzhinsky’s harsh legacy, Naryshkin praised his honesty and dedication, and gushed that Dzerzhinsky “remained faithful to his ideals to the end—the ideals of goodness and justice.” He then noted that the statue was facing toward the NATO members neighboring Russia—Poland and the Baltic states—which he identified as the source of foreign threats:The erected monument is an exact, somewhat scaled-down copy of the famous monument of an outstanding Soviet sculptor, and that’s why we simply didn’t have the right to change the direction of the view of the monument’s hero. And the fact is that threats remain to our country, to our citizens, from the northwest—yes, this is obvious.Dzerzhinsky is a progenitor of sorts of the foreign intelligence agency, but this bit of theater is strange—something akin to the CIA erecting a statue of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in front of its headquarters and extolling Hoover’s noble struggles against the Soviet enemy. (In case you’re wondering, a statue already stands outside the agency’s Langley front door—of America’s first spy, Nathan Hale, from the Revolutionary War era.) You could argue, I suppose, that Hoover did his part by setting the bureau’s agents on Soviet spies in America, but looking east and facing down the Reds is not really how we remember him.[Read or listen: How Putin thinks]Without getting too in the weeds, other clues about what’s going on may lie in recent machinations within the Russian government.In a February 2020 meeting just days before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin humiliated Naryshkin on national television when the SVR chief seemed caught off guard by Putin’s questions during an audience with the president. The FSB, at that moment, was riding high; its spies were supposed to have paved the way for the collapse of Kyiv that Putin expected in the first days of the war.We all know how that went, and Putin turned his fury on the incompetent agents in Lubyanka Square who had promised much and delivered nothing. Possibly, then, Naryshkin is now making a play for the SVR to eclipse the FSB as Russia’s premier intelligence service. Or he might be signaling his agency’s commitment to opposing NATO as part of fighting the war in Ukraine. Or maybe he’s just reminding everyone that he hasn’t forgotten that his job, regardless of the Ukraine war, is to combat Western spies. Either way, Naryshkin may be doing a bit of “managing up.”Who knows, though? Perhaps the SVR had a spare copy of the Iron Feliks statue sitting in the basement and just decided to make a day of it. (Or perhaps Dzerzhinsky’s admirers hope it’s less likely to be vandalized out in Yasenevo.)One thing is certain: Neither Naryshkin nor Putin—nor indeed the FSB’s chief, Alexander Bortnikov, who remains close to Putin despite his agency’s colossal screwup over Ukraine—risked putting Iron Feliks up in central Moscow. Putin’s power is not limitless, and he would have nothing to gain by antagonizing citizens in the capital with a statue few of them would want. And perhaps not even the president wants to see Iron Feliks through his limo window and be reminded of better days, when the Soviet Union still existed, the KGB was nearly omnipotent, and Vladimir Putin wasn’t one of the most hated people in Russia.

The big question in Westminster is the extent to which the Labour party will pivot away, after the election, from super-cautious stances on tax and spending, Europe, and social issues, towards a more radical agenda.The issue is not that Labour lacks vision. If you take their “missions” literally their pledges are far more ambitious than any other opposition party in recent history. It’s not even that they currently lack the specific policies to achieve these missions. Oppositions rarely work up detailed plans as they don’t have the resources, and in a few areas, like planning and labour relations, they do have some genuinely bold proposals. The problem is that self-imposed constraints, particularly on fiscal policy, make it impossible to see how the missions, or indeed much less ambitious goals for improving public services or reducing child poverty, could be achieved. This is even more concerning when one considers the state of the public finances, as per last week’s post, and that just to stand still any government would likely have to make substantial cuts and/or raise taxes and/or increase borrowing.Earlier in the summer Jonn Elledge wrote a piece for the New Statesman on how the political dynamics would change dramatically after a Labour election win, giving them space to shift from their current risk aversion:“The commenting classes are not remotely prepared for what it’d mean if the next election result looks even slightly like the polls suggest. A lot of things everyone ‘knows’ about politics right now will simply no longer hold true.”For instance: Labour would be in charge of the Treasury and the economic rules they use; the (confused) obsession with the “red wall” would dissipate, with those seats turning red again, and other voter groups would take priority; voices that currently seem important because they have the ear of the government would cease to matter; the media would need access to the new government, and so on.Jonn got a lot of unfair criticism from people, mostly on the Labour left, claiming he was being hopelessly naïve in thinking Starmer and Reeves would want to pivot. But all he argued was that there would be space to shift if they wanted to:“That doesn’t mean the party will actually use this political space, of course: it must be at least possible that the cynics are right, this isn’t an electoral strategy and Starmer’s Labour is exactly as gutless and unambitious as it seems.”It’s impossible to second guess exactly what Labour’s leadership is thinking right now. I suspect even they don’t know how they’d react to this kind of space opening up. Partly because they’re so focused on winning the election and partly because, however much you prepare, government is just so completely different to opposition that it’s hard to imagine. Politics is highly dependent on context and circumstance. And politicians, however powerful, operate with constraints. Whatever Starmer might personally want to do he has to take into account party management, the behaviour of the markets, the capacity of civil servants, legal challenges, and all sorts of other factors.But what we can do is look in more detail at the political space Jonn talks about, the ways in which Starmer and Reeves could choose to use it if they wanted to, and how they might end up being forced to use it even if they don’t. So let’s assume Labour win next year with a decent majority of 50-100. What happens to the political dynamics? And how fast?   Read more  

No figure is more associated with the ideological revolution that shook elite American institutions in the Trump era than Ibram X. Kendi, the scholar of racism and the definer of “antiracism” as a worldview unto itself. So there’s a symbolic weight to the news that Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, funded by a lavish gift from the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey back in 2020, will be laying off 15 or 20 staff members — confirming the sense (among many liberals, especially) that “peak woke” is behind us, and the revolution has run its course.

Has it? By some definitions, yes. The wave of cancellations and resignations and public-monument removals has receded. The attempts to use “woke capital” to effect progressive change have met strong resistance, and corporations are losing enthusiasm for a vanguard role.

Meanwhile, there is more intellectual and political energy in anti-wokeness now, evident not just in backlash in red states but in this autumn’s roster of new books, which includes critiques of social justice ideology from the socialist left, the center left and the right. The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action has created new legal roadblocks for Kendi-style progressivism. The mood in elite journalism is less ideologically committed and more skeptical and critical.

But any rollback is also unevenly distributed. I’ve written before about why progressive orthodoxies seem stronger in academia than in the media, but anyone who wants to understand that dynamic should read my colleague Michael Powell’s recent report on so-called diversity statements in higher education. These exemplify a different aftermath for “peak woke” — not the ideology’s retreat, but its consolidation and entrenchment.

Democratic strategist James Carville told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday that he’s overjoyed about House Republicans’ impeachment effort against President Joe Biden. “I so want them to do this, I can’t tell you how much I want them to do this,” he said. “This is a very stupid idea.” Carville called GOP Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan “borderline stupid” for pursuing a “vapid and useless” investigation. “How could we get so lucky?” he asked. “I want to let the American public see how thin, or how nonexistent their case is.”

Now, it’s certainly possible that the impeachment inquiry will work out the way Carville imagines. Trump-era Republicans tend to overplay their hand and go a little crazy. But if Carville still thinks the case against Biden is thin or nonexistent, he’s the one who’s out of touch with the American public.

The Biden family affair stinks, and Americans have picked up the scent. According to a CNN/SSRS poll, 61 percent of Americans “think that Biden had at least some involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings.” Fifty-five percent say that “the president has acted inappropriately regarding the investigation into Hunter Biden over potential crimes.” And a new Reuters poll shows that a 41 percent plurality of Americans support the impeachment probe, with 35 percent opposing it.

The sordid tale of Joe and Hunter Biden has, astoundingly, slipped the bonds of right-wing media and broken through to the mainstream. And it happened so fast that James Carville missed it.

As things stand, Americans are open to a full airing of the facts around Biden’s potential involvement in his son’s business. Why, exactly, would this be good for the president? Perhaps if everything that Comer and other Republicans have asserted so far had gone uncorroborated or been disproven, Joe Biden might be on the way to clearing his name. But the precise opposite has happened, from the reported discovery of Hunter Biden’s damning laptop to allegations that Joe Biden ran a disinformation campaign around the laptop to the first hint of whistleblowers claiming Justice Department malfeasance to word of a buried FBI document to Hunter’s ludicrous immunity deal to an uncovered tangle of Biden family shell companies to witnesses putting Biden at meetings he had denied attending to allegations of pseudonymous emails between the then-vice president and his son exchanged contemporaneously with Biden the elder’s visit to Ukraine. All of these details have been established beyond a doubt.

None of it proves that Joe Biden committed a crime. Not at this stage. But if this is a “thin” or “nonexistent” case, then words have lost their meaning entirely. The case is strong. And the House Oversight Committee’s record up to this point is impressive.

If I were in the president’s corner, I wouldn’t be so sanguine about what comes next. Might we see the contents of those pseudonymous emails? Might more witnesses be subpoenaed to further undo Joe Biden’s claims of innocence? These hardly seem like long shots at the moment.

And even if it all comes to an inconclusive end, will Biden really be cleared in the mind of the public? After all the dirt and deceit see the full light of day? With Hunter Biden simultaneously on trial for gun charges? Don’t bet on it. Most Americans already suspect the president of inappropriate conduct. Expect that 55 percent to grow as this all plays out.

The impeachment inquiry is nothing but a source of distress for Biden. That’s why the White House recently issued an emergency memo to friendly media instructing them to attack it. But the case has gotten too big to downplay or discredit with a spate of tendentious stories in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Thinking otherwise is “borderline stupid.”

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams told a roomful of people that the recent influx of migrants “will destroy New York City.” More than a hundred and ten thousand have arrived in the city in recent months, and more than half are currently staying at shelters and other emergency sites. Although some of the most high-profile arrivals have been sent on buses by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, as part of a Republican plan to shift the burden of migrant crossings onto blue states, nearly ninety per cent of the migrants who have come to New York since last spring have arrived in other ways. Meanwhile, Adams has denounced the Biden Administration for not providing enough resources for the city to resolve what he describes as a dire crisis. (According to Adams, it will cost twelve billion dollars to house the migrants over the next three years.)

I recently spoke by phone with Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, and an expert on how immigration policies at the federal, state, and local levels intersect. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why so many migrants have chosen to come to New York City specifically, why the Biden Administration cannot necessarily fulfill the Mayor’s requests, and how congressional inaction on immigration policy has exacerbated the problems that immigration hawks say they care about most.

How exactly has New York reached a point where the Mayor is framing the arrival of these migrants as something that could “destroy” the city? What factors contributed to it?

In many ways, the natural question most people are asking—and certainly most New Yorkers who have a basic pro-immigrant instinct are asking—is, Why are we freaking out? How is this chapter different from any other chapter in the long, welcoming history of New York City? We have been taking in immigrants for centuries. Economists of all stripes have generally concluded that immigrants are a net benefit to the country, to the city, to the state. That’s mostly because the government is out of their way. Strangely, the magic of capitalism and the magic of free enterprise work very well in the immigration analysis: People come, they contribute their labor or their talent or their expertise, there are willing employers who may not pay them as much they should but pay them enough to get by, and they go up the ladders of our economy and society, and their position improves over time, and it is basically all benefit and no cost.

The huge fundamental difference in this is that it became a direct fiscal cost for the city of New York and for other municipalities which have had to deal with this, such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and, to a lesser extent, Boston and Philadelphia. It’s a very strange quirk of politics and law. A hundred thousand people in a city of eight million is not a big number. If they had come organically, gradually, you and I would not have been having this conversation. What made it different, first of all, was its visibility, with Governor Abbott obviously making a very potent political statement: “I’m going to bus people. I’m going to teach you what we face in the border states, so you get a taste of it.” And guess what? Initially all the politicians, certainly on the left and most immigrant advocates, were calling out Abbott’s cruelty. Initially, the Mayor went and welcomed them personally at Port Authority.

We have a right to shelter in our state constitution. But why do people not go to Sullivan County or any upstate county? In the late nineteen-seventies, housing advocates brought a lawsuit that got a settlement in which New York City agreed to provide housing for every man who seeks it, which was subsequently extended to women and families with children. That was a legal directive based on a reading of the state constitution, but it applied only to the city. To do the same thing today in Sullivan County, someone would have to file a lawsuit against Sullivan County.

New immigrants had not used this settlement before at this magnitude. Most people involved in that litigation never thought it would apply to people who have been in the country for three days. But advocates quickly realized that if you are coming to New York, the city must provide you shelter.

Why wasn’t the law used this way in the past?

It was just not how it was used in practice. It was understood that immigrants would come, and they would meet with their families or village connections, or employers, or whatever networks they had. It was never conceived that that particular legal settlement would apply to foreign nationals. Just as a point of both information and straight equity, all the advocates who are saying that the migrants have a right to get shelter and work authorization should think about this claim in the context of the eleven million unauthorized people in the country. Many of them have been here for decades—certainly years—many of them with deep roots, and very few of them have claimed shelter. But this new group suddenly became visible because it was used as a political weapon by Abbott, and the Mayor walked into it. He received them openly because he was trying to be the anti-Abbott. He thought it was very good for the Mayor of New York to look like “We are the welcoming Statue-of-Liberty city.”

Are you saying he should have done something differently?

It’s hard to say in retrospect. In the early stages, we should probably not have actively encouraged shelter. News of the welcome mat certainly spread among immigrant circles through social media very quickly. The idea was: If you get to the border, tell people you want to take a bus to New York City. We should have just kept the old practice that people will just find their own way when they come to the city. Most people would have found some family. Instead, there was an incentive for people to choose to come to New York, even though it was started with a punitive impulse by Abbott.

The federal government plays no role except to admit or expel people. The only exception to this are refugees; the federal government initially provides them with financial assistance and helps with their employment and getting access to schools and all that. But we choose the refugees we take before they come to the country, and then we decide where to send them. In addition to being reunited with other family members, they get sent to where it’s easy to resettle, given housing costs and job opportunities. Nebraska is typically high on the list, and Kentucky is high on the list. Other than for refugees, the U.S. government never directly spent taxpayer money to provide housing to recent immigrants, so this is a first.

What is Adams specifically asking of the federal government, and do you think it’s something the federal government can give?

The general two asks are, first, that you should compensate us for what we are spending on these people. The Mayor first started saying a billion dollars, then he suddenly changed it to four billion, and now it is twelve billion. There should be some transparency about numbers, but he wants the federal government to compensate him for that. Governor Kathy Hochul also wants compensation, for both the state and the city. On that, I think they’re united. They’re probably united with other governors and mayors.

The second thing they’re asking is that the federal government should quickly grant all these people work authorization. Their argument is that, if they get work authorization, they would not be likely to stay in shelters. They will join the formal sector of the economy and be employed and be on their way.

How feasible is speeding up the work authorization?

There are statutory limits to work authorization, and there are regulatory limits. Of course, regulatory is more administrative, but even to change a regulation takes time. The governor of Massachusetts made a big statement that the federal government should issue a regulation changing the timeline for work authorization. But changing the regulation takes longer than granting work authorization. This just gets completely lost in the picture.

The United Automobile Workers’ strike against the Big Three manufacturers that began earlier today is exacerbating the most significant political vulnerability of President Joe Biden’s drive to build a clean-energy economy.A trio of bills Biden passed through Congress during his first two years in the Oval Office has generated a torrent of private-sector investment into clean-energy projects. But so far most of that green investment and the jobs it will create are flowing into red-leaning communities that are generally hostile to both the Democratic Party and labor unions.Congressional Democrats provided all the votes for the legislation that is catalyzing the rapid growth of the new green economy. But with so many of the new energy projects benefiting red places, many people in progressive circles worry that this historic transformation will fail to generate either sufficient political rewards for the president and congressional Democrats, or as many good-paying, blue-collar jobs as Biden has repeatedly promised.[Steven Greenhouse: Biden’s labor-climate dilemma]Fear that the shift to electric vehicles will reduce the number of quality jobs in the auto industry is the backdrop for the strike the UAW launched at midnight today. In both public and private, union officials have made clear their belief that the auto industry is using the technological transition to mask a second, economic, transition. They worry that the companies are using the shift from internal-combustion engines to carbon-free electric vehicles to simultaneously shift more of their operations from high-paying union jobs mostly in northern states to lower-paying, nonunion jobs mostly in southern states.Moreover, the union and its allies worry that the massive federal subsidies Biden’s agenda is providing the companies for the EV transition is inadvertently underwriting that transition toward lower-wage and nonunion plants. As Shawn Fain, the UAW’s new president, put it earlier this week: “There’s a lot with the EV transition that has to happen, and there’s … hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars that are helping fund this, and workers cannot continue to be left behind in that equation.”As the strike approached, the Biden administration took conspicuous steps to respond to those concerns by announcing a suite of multibillion-dollar Department of Energy loans and grants designed to  incentivize the auto companies to convert existing, unionized plants to EV production.“The president’s policy position is absolutely clear: He’s pro-union,” one senior White House official, who asked not to be identified while describing internal discussions, told me. “He thinks that companies that are receiving the benefits should respect the right to organize, should not interfere with workers’ ability to exercise that right, and he wants to see these jobs be good union jobs. From a policy perspective there is no daylight between the president’s policy preferences and where the UAW is, or the other unions are.”The challenge for the Biden administration in delivering on that pledge is the decisions that the auto companies and other industries are making in response to the bills he signed to promote more domestic investment: the bipartisan infrastructure law, a measure to encourage more U.S. production of semiconductors, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains federal assistance for the domestic manufacture and deployment of low-carbon energy sources.The tax subsidies and federal grants and loans in those bills have triggered a towering wave of new domestic investments across a broad range of industries producing clean energy. The big auto manufacturers alone have announced nearly $90 billion in spending on manufacturing facilities to produce EVs in just the past two years, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a nonpartisan Michigan-based think tank. Suppliers to the companies, including firms producing semiconductors for automotive use, are investing billions more in the EV transition. Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated that total private-sector investment in EV manufacturing under Biden has reached nearly $140 billion. This building surge dwarfs the typical amount of annual investment in the auto industry over the past quarter century, but still likely represents only a down payment on what’s ahead. “There’s a lot of innovation that is going to happen over the next 20 years, in terms of product, process, technology,” Alan Amici, the center’s president and CEO, told me.For Democrats, the rub is how much of this capital is flowing into red places hostile to unions and represented by House and Senate Republicans who voted against the legislation that triggered the investments. (Every House Republican this spring also voted to repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for clean-energy production.) The biggest recipients of the new investments include more red states than blue ones, Brookings has determined.Red states are receiving so many of the new projects partly because they have lower tax rates and electricity costs. But most analysts agree that companies have also channeled so much of their new investments toward red states because most of them have “right to work” laws that make it more difficult for unions to organize.In the auto industry, this preference for states resistant to unions has translated into a surge of investment in the South. Brookings Metro calculated that the South has attracted 55 percent of the total private investment in electric vehicles and batteries under Biden. That’s more than double the portion of the new clean-vehicle investment that has flowed into the Midwest, whose existing auto plants are largely unionized. That torrent of new money includes plans to build EVs or their batteries by Hyundai and Rivian in Georgia, Toyota in North Carolina, Tesla in Texas, BMW in South Carolina, Mercedes-Benz in Alabama, General Motors in Tennessee, and Ford in Tennessee and Kentucky.The EV investments announced so far are projected to generate at least 65,000 jobs across the region, Stan Cross, the electric-transportation-policy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me. Far more job growth is virtually certain in the years ahead, Cross said, largely because such investment patterns are self-reinforcing: Companies that provide parts for the big manufacturers are already locating around their new southern plants, such as the $1 billion in investment announced by suppliers near Hyundai’s Georgia facility.This southern EV boom is reinforcing a long-term shift in the auto industry’s center of gravity that has weakened the UAW’s position. Heavily unionized, Democratic-leaning Michigan still employs many more people in the industry than any other state. But starting in the mid-1990s in plants by Mercedes in Alabama and BMW in South Carolina, the industry’s employment has steadily shifted to the South. Since the early ’90s, the South’s share of total auto-industry employment has roughly doubled from 15 to about 30 percent, while the Midwest’s share has fallen, from 60 to about 45 percent, Karl Kuykendall, a regional economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told me. Kuykendall said he “would not be surprised” if the pace of this regional transition accelerates as the companies move deeper into the technological transition to electric vehicles.Hardly any of the auto plants in the South are unionized. And wages even for manufacturing workers are much lower in the region and in other red states than in the Midwest, as Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, has calculated. The disparity between largely union and nonunion regions across the U.S. creates an enormous challenge for the UAW. In the strike that began this morning, it is seeking a raise of about 40 percent over the next four years, and the restoration of automatic pay increases for inflation, as well as health and retirement benefits that it surrendered when the companies faced bankruptcy amid the 2008 financial crisis. But even if the union succeeds at winning a favorable contract, that could just increase the incentive for the auto industry to shift more jobs to nonunion plants across the South.While foreign automakers have invested heavily in the South, the fabled Big Three domestic auto manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis) still mostly rely on facilities across the industrial Midwest. But the announcements by Ford and GM that they plan to build battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee may signal a shift in that strategy. As important to the UAW, Ford, GM, and Stellantis are structuring their EV-battery plants, in the North and the South, as joint ventures with foreign partners that are not subject to the national labor agreement the companies are now negotiating. The union has to negotiate separate contracts with those plants—where the companies are offering much lower wages than in their unionized facilities.“From all evidence, automakers appear to be utilizing the shift to electric vehicles to do everything in their power to lower job quality for the very workers they are relying on to make this transition happen,” Jason Walsh, an executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmentalists, told me. Those concerns have prompted the UAW to demand in the contract talks that the auto companies guarantee that workers now building internal-combustion-engine vehicles will be assured jobs as the companies switch toward manufacturing more EVs.Early on, the Biden administration appeared somewhat obtuse to these concerns, even though Biden has sympathized more overtly with organized labor than any other Democratic president in decades. Speaking before a Silicon Valley industry group in early June, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm turned heads among labor leaders when she said the administration was “agnostic” about where companies choose to site their clean-energy investments.Her department, perhaps reflecting that perspective, a few weeks later approved more than $9 billion in federal loan guarantees to Ford and a Korean partner to build their EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee, two right-to-work states. Fain, the union president, immediately issued a statement condemning the loan guarantees and declaring that the administration was “actively funding” a “race to the bottom” in wages and benefits “with billions in public money.”Fain’s message appears to have been received. The administration’s tone was different in late August, when the Energy Department announced that it was making available $2 billion in grants and $10 billion in loan guarantees under the Inflation Reduction Act (as well as another $3.5 billion in grants under the infrastructure bill) to subsidize the conversion of existing plants to make electric vehicles and their batteries. “We are going to focus on financing projects that are in long-standing automaking communities, that keep folks already working on the payroll, projects that advance collective bargaining agreements, that create high-paying, long-lasting jobs,” Granholm told reporters at the time.That message reflected Biden’s own priorities, the senior White House official told me this week: “All I would say is, the president is not ‘agnostic’” about where the clean-energy investments are flowing. “He’s the president for all of America. But all of America ought to respect the right to organize. He is trying to move the system toward good-paying jobs and more union density.”Labor allies agree the administration is now focusing more on the potential challenges for workers in the EV transition than it did earlier in Biden’s presidency. The late-August Energy Department announcement “is a very clear indication that the Biden administration is hearing what union workers are saying and is trying their best to be responsive to that,” Walsh said.The problem for the administration is that it has limited tools to shape how the auto companies make their investments. Generally, under the kind of federal loan and grant programs that Granholm made available in August, the administration can encourage companies to preserve existing plants and also to remain neutral in labor organizing campaigns when the firms open new clean-vehicle facilities. All indications point to Biden using that leverage more aggressively than he did earlier in his presidency. Over time, the senior White House official said, the administration “has strengthened its negotiating posture” to demand “stronger community benefits” from companies seeking the loans or grants.But the Inflation Reduction Act’s biggest incentives for building electric vehicles are generous tax credits for both producers and consumers. And those credits are available to companies that build and source a specified share of their materials for EVs domestically whether or not they use union labor. When the House passed its version of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2021, it included another $4,500 tax credit to consumers for EVs built largely with union labor, but Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, insisted on the removal of that provision as one price for his vote that allowed the overall package to pass the Senate.[Andrew Moseman: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]That now looks like an extraordinarily consequential concession. “This is happening because Joe Manchin pulled the union requirements out of the IRA and that really opened the door to this perverse situation where, by law, the administration has constraints about how far it can push to ensure that there are going to be good quality jobs in this transition,” says Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economist Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.Looming over all these maneuvers is former President Donald Trump’s relentless attack on Biden’s clean-energy agenda. In speeches, Trump has repeatedly declared that Biden’s intertwined proposals to promote EVs will “kill countless union autoworker jobs forever, especially in Michigan and the Midwest.” Trump, and some of the other 2024 GOP candidates, have pledged to repeal the IRA’s clean-energy incentives as well as Biden’s proposed fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, which would require the companies to massively shift their sales toward EVs over the next decade. In effect, Trump is presenting the transition to EVs as another example in his broader claim that the left is seeking to uproot and transform America as his supporters know and understand it.While many labor leaders have endorsed Biden for a second term, Fain has pointedly withheld the UAW’s endorsement. And Fain has publicly warned that Trump’s denunciation of the EV transition could find a receptive audience among his members if the union can’t win a generous contract and strong guarantees of job security. Given the importance of the industrial Midwest to the president’s reelection hopes, Biden may have nearly as much at stake as Fain in the outcome of this strike.

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When President Barack Obama welcomed President-elect Donald Trump to the Oval Office in November 2016, he recommended that Trump make the North Korea nuclear threat his top priority. Trump actually took Obama’s advice — but then went on to bungle the diplomacy. President Biden has chosen to ignore Obama’s warning altogether, giving the cold shoulder to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. So how’s that working out?

In return, Kim got something even more important from Putin: He essentially announced the end of the multilateral military technology sanctions regime that Russia had supported (at least rhetorically) for decades. In April, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev publicly warned the South Korean government that any military support for Ukraine could result in Russia giving North Korea advanced weapons. Now Putin is making good on that threat.

Russia’s transfer of satellite and rocket technology could make the Kim regime’s sizable nuclear arsenal even more dangerous. The U.S. and South Korean governments both promised this week that such actions would result in repercussions. But neither Putin nor Kim seems especially worried.

Jenny Town, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told me the Biden administration’s lack of any diplomatic initiative toward North Korea has contributed to the current impasse. Over the past two years, Biden officials have repeatedly stated that they are open to negotiations with Pyongyang over its nuclear program with no preconditions. But they must know that’s a nonstarter for Kim.

“It’s been a nonpolicy. Just saying we are open to diplomacy is the most passive way of doing things,” Town said. “There’s an arms race going on in East Asia. Why would the North Koreans talk to us about denuclearization now?”

The Biden team has pursued very active diplomacy with East Asian allies such as Japan and South Korea, aimed at intensifying military cooperation and strengthening deterrence. That’s wise — but not enough on its own. There’s no visible effort to restart talks with Pyongyang. The State Department’s special representative for North Korea, Sung Kim, also has a full-time job as ambassador to Indonesia — which doesn’t exactly signal any serious intent to the North Koreans.

With any further sanctions blocked by Russia and China, the only way to persuade Pyongyang to talk is to put something it wants on the table. This need not be a concession on the military or nuclear front. Kim faces economic troubles, food insecurity and public health needs, all of which the United States could help alleviate.

“We are trying to convince an insecure country that it doesn’t need nuclear weapons by threatening it,” Town said. “We haven’t provided any incentives for North Korea to see us as a viable option.”

Privately, Biden officials often say that there’s no sign the North Koreans are interested in talking to the United States. The long-used communication channel that runs through Pyongyang’s United Nations mission in New York remains in place, but it has gone largely silent. Official statements coming out of North Korea’s propaganda ministry range from the insulting to the absurd.

U.S. officials also note that the South Koreans have little interest in pursuing negotiations with the North, following the failure of the previous administration in Seoul. The administration’s North Korea-watchers also argue that Trump’s erratic and incoherent diplomatic gambit undermined any trust Kim had in the United States.

To be sure, any Biden administration effort to reengage with North Korea would be very difficult; the chance of success would be low. There’s also a high likelihood it would prove a political loser for Biden, especially as he prepares to run for reelection. Engaging with North Korea requires both leadership and political capital.

But it is precisely because Trump’s diplomacy was a such a mess that Biden should try again. Kim could be in power for several decades. Shouldn’t at least one serious attempt to engage him be mounted? What will happen if Trump comes back to office? That could mean four more years of erratic threats and love letters.

       University of Virginia (UVA) student activist Zyahna Bryant is back in the news again, after facing backlash over a partnership with Dove. The 22-year-old announced in August that she was working with the soap company to promote "fat liberation." Following coverage from the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and even a comment from Elon Musk, calls to boycott the company have been growing, and "#BoycottDove" was trending on Twitter as of Friday afternoon. It's not surprising that Bryant would be an online target. As Reason revealed in an April investigation, she made serious accusations that ruined a young woman's life without sufficient evidence. But canceling her is still both wrong and unhelpful—as are nearly all instances of cancel culture in action. In 2020, Bryant publicly accused fellow student Morgan Bettinger of telling a group of Black Lives Matter protesters that they would "make good speedbumps"—sparking a social media firestorm that resulted in widespread calls for the university to expel Bettinger. For her own part, Bettinger has consistently claimed that she never spoke to protestors, instead saying that a truck driver who had been sent to block the road during the protest had begun a casual conversation with her, during which she quipped something to the effect of "it's a good thing that you are here, because otherwise, these people would have been speed bumps." A university investigation later found "insufficient evidence" for Byrant's claims, even concluding that it was "more likely than not" that Byrant never even heard Bettinger make a "speed bumps" remark at all. Despite the inquiry's results, the university allowed Bettinger to be punished anyway, holding to the results of an earlier student-run tribunal which expelled Bettinger in abeyance and forced her to complete a litany of other sanctions. The previous student tribunal found Bettinger guilty of "threatening" UVA students, despite appearing to agree with Bettinger's facially nonthreatening version of events. Last month, Bettinger filed a formal lawsuit against the university, claiming that school officials violated her First Amendment rights and that administrators "purposefully tampered" with the numerous investigations into Bettinger's conduct to ensure she would be punished for obviously protected speech. "Despite their personal knowledge that multiple University investigators had concluded that Morgan was innocent of the charges against her," the lawsuit reads, "[University officials] persecuted, prosecuted, and punished Morgan Bettinger." Now that Bryant has received a Dove sponsorship, those outraged by her baseless accusations against Bettinger have been fomenting an internet firestorm by attempting a Bud Light–style boycott of the company's products. Reason has consistently argued that internet mobs are a terrible way to find the truth and get justice for those who have been wronged. What's happening here is blatant cancel culture—a concerted effort to destroy someone's personal and professional prospects over a single past incident or comment without any capacity for forgiveness. Witnessing how an internet pile-on utterly shredded a young woman's life and reputation offers little evidence that these kinds of outrage campaigns can do any good. If anything, this mob will only leave Bryant feeling justifiably aggrieved. While Bryant did far more than mere political wrongthink—she actively lobbied for another student's expulsion and displayed little remorse once the reality of the situation emerged—viciously attacking her (or mounting a boycott of a soap company) won't help Bettinger repair her tarnished reputation.  In fact, if attempts to boycott Dove work, they will distract from what actually happened to Bettinger. They turn her story into a culture-war meltdown and lump her in with online trolls who consider attacking someone's physical appearance a key component of political discourse.  Yes, Zyahna Bryant thoughtlessly ruined Morgan Bettinger's life by slinging baseless allegations in the public square. But getting to the truth of what happened that day in July 2020—and getting justice for Bettinger—won't be accomplished by a nasty, tribalistic internet mob. The post Morgan Bettinger's Accuser Has a Deal With Dove. That's No Reason To Boycott. appeared first on Reason.com.

       It's a tale probably as old as labor markets: An influx of cheaper, foreign labor displaces some established workers, who seek protection from the government in the form of new restrictions on the immigrants they blame for taking their jobs. The cycle is repeating itself right now in South Korea, with one new wrinkle: None of the workers are humans. Executives—human ones—at some South Korean robot manufacturing firms tell the Financial Times that imported robots are starting to steal jobs from good ol' domestic androids. "We are worried that cheap Chinese robots are dominating our market as it is difficult to compete with them on prices," one unnamed executive from "a leading local distributor of domestic robots" tells the publication. Another says that the Chinese robots are technologically less advanced than the robots South Korean firms are producing, but that the robo-immigrants are "more cost-competitive." The robot industry is big business in South Korea, where server robots in restaurants are now fairly common and logistics firms have adopted robot workers in a variety of ways. Those changes have allowed the human workers in those industries to become much more efficient, while also offsetting a severe worker shortage in the country, Nikkei Asia reported last year. The South Korean government has encouraged the transition of low-level, manual labor from robots to humans. The Financial Times notes that government subsidies intended to speed that transition do not differentiate between Korean-made robots and those imported from elsewhere—and when you read between the lines, that's what is actually upsetting the robot manufacturers. Whether those subsidies make sense is probably a good question for the South Korean government to ask itself. But if they are going to exist, it makes sense for them to apply to all robots regardless of where they are made. Handing out subsidies with one hand while embracing trade protectionism with the other only ensures that one policy will constantly undermine the other. In the meantime, the situation where lower-skilled imported robots are outcompeting the more expensive domestic robo-workers is a nearly perfect parallel of America's immigration situations. In both scenarios, the answer is not to fence off immigration (or imports) but to allow businesses to freely choose which workers to employ—whether flesh and blood or buckets of bolts, regardless of their place of birth or construction. The evolution toward more robots taking over back-breaking, low-skilled labor is reaching America too. Unfortunately, South Korea's example suggests that it won't put an end to old debates over foreign vs. domestic labor.The post In South Korea, Robots Are Taking Robots' Jobs appeared first on Reason.com.

The Democrats are confronting a crisis that could cripple their chances at the polls at the national, state and local level. I’m talking about immigration. It’s happening not only because Republicans are taking advantage of the problem but also because Democrats are unwilling to accept that their policy ideas on the issue are wrong and grossly inadequate to the challenge at hand.

The Biden administration’s various efforts have amounted to Band-Aids on a massive, open wound. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said repeatedly that the asylum system is broken. But if that’s true, we need a drastic, dramatic overhaul of the system, and neither he nor President Biden is proposing anything like that.

To understand how to think of this issue, let’s go back to basics. After World War II, the United States developed pathways for people who faced extreme persecution because of their race, religion or beliefs to take refuge in America.

But there are two realities that are critical to turning this idealistic impulse into a workable system. First, there are surely tens of millions of people around the world who could plausibly claim that they face persecution, and the United States cannot possibly take them all in. More important, the United States cannot be forced to give priority to people who break the law and enter the country illegally — and then claim asylum status to legitimize their entry — as opposed to those who follow the rules, apply from their home countries and wait their turn. But that is what is happening every day at the southern border.

Second, these asylum cases must be special and distinct from the cases of people from all over the world who are trying to immigrate to the United States because they are fleeing poverty, disease or violence. People who fall into this category face a complex and elaborate process that entails several mechanisms for obtaining various kinds of visas and work permits, some of which can eventually translate into a green card and eventually citizenship.

But instead of going through that arduous, lengthy process, many seem to have decided that it would be simpler to pay cartels to help them cross the border illegally, present themselves as asylum seekers, and slip into the country while their cases are being adjudicated. In a 17-month period between March 2021 and August 2022, the federal government released more than 1 million migrants into the United States and lost track of over 177,000 of them who had failed to give an address or had provided an invalid one. When the system of due process collapses, as it has, it is most unfair to those who have legitimate claims to asylum or legal immigrant status.

There is only one solution to this crisis, as Nolan Rappaport, a longtime congressional expert on the issue, has suggested: The president must use the power he has in existing law to suspend entirely the admission of asylum seekers while the system digests the millions of immigration cases already pending. The British government has passed a law to this effect.

Other Western countries will undoubtedly follow. The world has changed. There are more than 40 million refugees and asylum seekers globally. We need new laws, standards, courts and systems so that asylum can be granted through some orderly, rational process — rather than just leaving it up to officials in countries that are overwhelmed by illegal entrants at their borders.

The migrant crisis is exposing Democratic policy weakness at every level, from an administration that is scared to take on its progressive wing and take bold action to states such as New York and Massachusetts, which have “right to shelter” rules that are utterly unworkable in the face of this onslaught. Unless Democrats seize control of the issue, the politics of it will end up having the same effect as in other Western countries — rocket fuel for the populist right.

“What Ukraine is doing has the potential to be so transformative for the region as a whole — for all the countries trying to consolidate democracy,” Anastasia Radina, 39, chair of the anti-corruption committee in the Ukraine Parliament, told me. Putin is watching closely, she added, even denouncing anti-corruption institutions in Ukraine before the war. “He could not stand Ukraine being a success story of breaking with the Soviet legacy and with Russia,” because “we are right on his doorstep. It would stand as an example of success of another civilizational model contrary to Putin’s.”

Which is why, as much as I value NATO as a security alliance, I have never lost sight of how the European Union — which Americans tend to know little about — has managed to quietly build itself into its own kind of United States of Europe, another great center of free markets, free people democracy and the rule of law. To be sure, the E.U. has plenty of its own problems managing day to day. But considering Europe’s long history of fratricide, the E.U. is a quiet, boring miracle. Adding Ukraine to it would make it only stronger.

Indeed, as I’ve thought about what could be the most meaningful and painful punishment for Putin and his war crimes, I decided it would be for him to be sentenced to sit in the Kremlin for the rest of his life, hiding from coup plotters and having to look out at a Ukraine that is a secure and flourishing member of the single largest democratic, free market/free travel zone in the world — the E.U — while Putin’s citizens would be left with the freedom to vacation and invest in North Korea and Iran.

That would be Vladimir Putin’s nightmare. Our job is to help make it come true.

By pure accident, I was reminded of just how important this could be on my trip home. As I sat at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport, I watched German Lufthansa planes land on Polish tarmacs. I saw three Hasidic Jews saunter by in their distinctive black coats and hats, the fringes of their prayer shawls dangling from their white shirts. With Poland now in the E.U., I could overhear chatter in several languages, some of which I couldn’t identify, in the 360 degrees around me.

In 1939, the arrival of a German plane in Warsaw meant death and mayhem would soon follow, especially for my ancestors. Now, it’s just a fast way to Frankfurt.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers, “Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why?”Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Judith sees distrust as a sign of cultural maturity: I believe that the widespread loss of trust in institutions is a combination of two equally strong forces. The first is our culture’s maturing beyond facile acceptance of what we are told by those institutions into a more confident posture of questioning what we are told based on what we know and believe. The second force is the universal availability of information about every topic of interest in every country and every culture on Earth. The second force feeds the first, and vice versa, leading to a noisier and more active populace. The more naive an individual, the more trusting; the more knowledgeable the individual, the less trusting. As our society has matured over time, and as knowledge has spread exponentially, as a culture we have come to understand that institutional malfeasance is nothing new. The mature within a society will naturally question institutional dominance and more responsibly and openly hold those institutions to higher standards of trustworthiness. Today more people are more knowledgeable than in all of history, and institutions have not quite caught up to that reality. M. argues that “it is not the institutions that people distrust, rather it is the individuals who represent, work for, or act in the name of those institutions who have lost the public’s respect and trust.”For example: So many of our leaders across business, politics, religion, and social organizations see a leadership role as a way to enrich themselves or their families in the short term, regardless of the long-term cost to their organizations. It is much more difficult than in the past to do so without getting caught. Additionally, incremental changes that bring long-term gain are no longer considered success. We have to get everything we want immediately or we have failed, as reflected in short-term-ism for quarterly results in business and passing legislation only when you hold the White House and both houses of Congress in politics. That results in people cutting corners or working in the gray to get theirs while they can––and a decrease of trust in the institution, which is an innocent victim. NK is “unbearably horrified with what has been happening to academia,” and explains: I call it social-justice fundamentalism, or SJF. The pursuit of truth has been replaced with the pursuit of one faction’s preferred power dynamics. While this tendency has metastasized throughout our society (an example being that if I signed this email using my full name, I would undoubtedly lose my high-paying job due to the “harm” I cause to my peers with it), the battle over it should start and end in academia. The experiment done by Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay where they managed to get bogus papers into prestigious journals, combined with the DEI litmus tests that weed out social-justice fundamentalism’s critics, mean that academia cannot be trusted. Gary perceives double standards and urges procedural fairness: Americans love the idea of fairness. Institutions lose trust because they are viewed as playing favorites. Institutions that want trust from the nation need to rise above the political fray and latest social-media frenzy. Well-publicized standards and transparent execution of processes are essential to trust. We seem to be lacking all of that currently. Errol is disappointed in public-health officials and media outlets: TKTKTK William says the question doesn’t quite apply to him: I guess I don’t really think about trust; I try to analyze a shifting web of facts, policies, and motivations and try to understand why things happen. Then if something happens that I don’t like, I don’t necessarily feel betrayed but more resigned. Peggy shares her professional background: I have trust in institutions because I was once part of the most trusted: the military. I spent 35 years in the Army. I understand the training and the values that we embrace when taking on the mission. These things inculcate trust. The idea that suddenly people aren’t to be trusted is a fantasy––a willful, petulant, childish fantasy wrought by people who have everything. Journalists go to J-school to learn standards and their editors, supervisors, and fact-checkers hold them to account. Judges and lawyers go to law school where the Constitution, the laws, and their peers hold them to account. Officers and noncommissioned officers go to military-leadership schools designed to maintain readiness, and that includes diversity training because experts in readiness say it’s important to understand each other if we are to fight and win wars. And then our Uniform Code of Military Justice holds us to account. The broadcast media, the internet, social media, and other permission structures have led the masses to distrust institutions. Our billion-dollar outrage machines pander to intellectual toddlers in order to make money. What don’t those things have? Standards and accountability. WJM has similar frustrations: Yes, I have a lot of trust in governmental institutions. What I don’t trust is the people that make it their mission to erode this trust by weakening those institutions to make them seem ineffective and counter to popular will, thus making a self-fulfilling prophecy of their decline. Andrew is pessimistic about the future: My faith in American institutions has never been lower. Like the printing press before, the communication revolution of social media has continued to chip away at the old paradigm where information was disseminated from leaders down to their constituents. Now misinformation spreads like wildfire across platforms and leaders are forced to indulge the passions of the mob. The printing press ignited a century of warfare in Europe and I fear that social media will continue to have a similar destabilizing effect in our current era. Gordon, however, is optimistic: I have about the same trust in our institutions as 10 years ago. Our nation has gone through a great test these past six years. And it has withstood all challenges. Today our nation better realizes that the voters are the ones in charge. Also, due to those recent challenges, office holders, bureaucrats, and people serving in the military are all more aware of the oaths they took: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I think by the end of next year, after the election results are in, this nation will be more unified and its positive feelings about institutions will be even stronger. RS felt cynical about institutions for a long time, but two things changed that: First, air travel. It’s gotten safer and safer year after year. When you reflect on how incredible air travel is—from planes to flight systems to air-traffic control to flight administration to FAA safety regulations—it’s an astonishing achievement. And if you think along these lines, you realize that a lot of institutions work really well. Next: I’ve come to realize that so much of the mistrust we experience is because it serves political interests to make us feel bad all the time. Rage and fear fuel mistrust, which is used to propel us into action. Once you realize that, the mistrust begins to fade and you realize that a lot of things do in fact work, especially on the ground level. Criminals get caught. Doctors aren’t always beholden to drug companies. Deciding NOT to get manipulated into feeling bad helps one to see the things that do work, which are a lot. John is down on SCOTUS: I’m in my mid-70s and have experienced quite a number of events that could lead one to mistrust our national institutions, but until Mitch McConnell denied President Obama the ability to put a Supreme Court nominee before the full Senate for an up-or-down vote, I had felt that our federal justice system was trustworthy. During their confirmation hearings, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, when asked about Roe v. Wade, answered [ambiguously] and then when the first opportunity came to overturn it, they did. I will not trust there will be a good-faith constitutional ruling from this Court as long as those three and Alito and Thomas (who should be impeached) are on the bench. I expect Congress and the president to be political, not the Supreme Court. Ben is down on business: I’ve become a lot more politically engaged in the last eight years, and I’m much more apt to be suspicious of American institutions based on how they act, rather than just trusting or distrusting them writ large. For example, I tend to get frustrated with “mainstream” news outlets for the way they cover the news sometimes, but that’s quite a bit different than mistrusting say, Fox News, when they were cheerfully spreading 2020 election misinformation. I tend to view government agencies like the DOD, FBI, and CIA favorably regardless of who sits in the White House, because they’re staffed by career professionals. But when they misbehave, I feel they should be held to account. By contrast, the DHS, which is a post-9/11 creature, has not in my view maintained the same standards of lawfulness and professionalism as its peer agencies. But if there’s one American institution whose trust has “bottomed out” with me, that would be our business community. The movie Erin Brockovich came out 23 years ago, detailing a story about a California utility company that willfully poisoned a huge number of innocent Americans. In the decades that followed, it seems to me that American corporations have become more unaccountable, not less. Oil companies lying about climate change, tech companies lying about privacy and social harms, food manufacturers squeezing out safety precautions and devastating the farmers who rely on them—the list goes on. The behavior of America’s 21st-century business community calls to mind the behavior of big monopolies in the early 20th century. It took some huge steps from labor activists and eventually the federal government to rein them in, and decades of deregulation, Borkian antitrust policy, lax campaign-finance laws, and overall consolidation seems to have returned us to the dynamics of that miserable era. I feel extremely firmly that this is the biggest systemic issue facing our country, and breaking up a very large number of these huge conglomerates would do an incalculable amount of good. Ryan muses on living in interesting times: The institutions held, just barely, in the face of Trump’s incompetent attempt to be an autocrat. That’s a point for trust. And yet the institution (or system) of our two parties is failing. A point against trust. While no one beyond the age of 10 years old could ever trust either party, both always spinning for their advantage, we now have a fully anti-democracy party that cannot help but degrade all other institutions, some more than others. One thing we can say with certainty is that things change. Are these the growing pains of a young democracy (which actually begins in practice with the end of Jim Crow)? Are these backlashes against institutions part of a cycle that exposes systemic racism and the vilification of poor people by (mostly) those who are trying to destroy our institutions? Is this anti-democracy party in its slow death throes, leading to an era where genuine common ground can be reached? The easy answer to the question you pose is obviously “less trust.” But have we not seen our current administration use institutions very effectively to create new laws that will actually help many people who need it and change the way we use energy (Inflation Reduction Act)? So the answer is my trust is more fragile than 10 years ago, not less or more, because I can see very easily how our institutions could be completely destroyed in a matter of months, and yet I can also see how our institutions might be strengthened by enduring this period of great stress, and emerging with two (mostly) pro-democracy parties. I mean, the Cold War 2.0 has already begun. I wish there was a better motivating force (like saving the planet, ending needless suffering), but that very well might be what aligns people’s interests and shores up institutions in the near(ish) future.   And Robin harkens back to the first viral video of police misconduct: There used to be an adage that “seeing is believing.”  The day that notion died was March 3, 1991, over 32 years ago, when the LAPD were videoed beating up Rodney King … yet a subsequent jury found them not guilty. Since then there have been numerous examples of the public being disappointed and let down by institutions that they had always trusted: widespread sexual abuse throughout the Catholic Church, abuse within school systems, fraud on Wall Street and in the mismanagement of insurance and pension funds. I could go on, but, since 2016 and his arrival on the political scene, Donald Trump (and his many lies) has accelerated American delusion with just about everything, including the Supreme Court. It’s fortunate that somebody filmed George Floyd being beaten up and justice was served. But the damage was done over 30 years ago and nothing has been the same since. Back in 2014, I published “Video Killed Trust in Police Officers,” a thesis that held up well in ensuing years.

The Centrists are back, baby, and this time they are bringing with them the solution for our polarised times. Such seems to be the theme of the past week, what with former MP and would-be Prime Minister Rory Stewart talking about his new book and how to fix the system, and George Osborne and Ed Balls announcing a new podcast, “Political Currency”. It is billed as two formerly bitter rivals now talking in civilised fashion about the economy, and drawing upon the great reserves of expertise shared between them.With a straight face, the multi-millionaire architect of Tory austerity under Cameron tells us that new podcast will “expose how the powerful become powerless when faced with economic forces they can’t control”. Meanwhile, Balls has been filmed drumming in a band called Centrist Dad, performing a Sex Pistols number alongside ITV’s Robert Peston. Who ever said that middle-aged technocrats don’t have a sense of humour?Certainly, in terms of exhibiting the traditional technocratic vice of advertising expertise as a way of consolidating personal power, the pair seem off to a flying start. Their podcast has already been glowingly endorsed by influential cronies. David Cameron has tweeted that the podcasters “really know their stuff”.  Michael Gove has remarked — perhaps with the sort of sincerity he has become renowned for — that these are “two of the sharpest minds I know”.Stewart, meanwhile, already has a very popular podcast with Alastair Campbell called “The Rest is Politics”. Like the Osborne and Balls roadshow, this too is framed as bringing sensible, well-informed discussion to the masses from rather different political perspectives, modelling reasonable disagreement along the way. In reality, though, it’s a chummy love-in between two liberals with similarly middle-of-the-road instincts. In a recent episode, the pair spent a lot of time talking about which of them looked better in a kilt at Stewart’s birthday party, and how nice it was to see Theresa May and “Willie Dalrymple” on the dancefloor there too. Vidal versus Buckley this is not.Though their schtick suggests otherwise, a typical discussion between Stewart and Campbell tends to be quite superficial — citing a few facts gleaned from the broadsheets, a sprinkling of views from this “really, really interesting guy” or that “amazing professor”, but hardly venturing to explain to any sceptics listening what exactly makes their views so interesting and amazing. (In an episode last month, a listener asked which literary character each presenter would most like to be. Stewart chose Prince Myshkin from War and Peace; Campbell chose Faust. When pressed by Stewart to justify his choice, Campbell answered: “I think that would be really interesting, yeah.”)But for me, the most irritating thing about “The Rest Is Politics” is that it has pretensions to de-escalate and depolarise, and yet still patronises the life out of a huge number of voters: namely the supposedly weak-minded fools who voted for Johnson or Trump. “Populist” leaders are habitually presented as an obvious enemy, and the most charitable explanation Stewart and Campbell can muster for anyone voting for them inevitably involves susceptibility to manipulation, either by a corrupt media or by the politicians directly. Perhaps they assume that it is more palatable for grown adults to be called gullible than iniquitous, but I’m not so sure.Stewart’s new book, meanwhile, is basically a plea for more intelligence in politics. He first entered parliament with a lively, inquisitive mind, a strong sense of duty, and a frankly astonishing CV that included tutoring Prince William, acting as governor of an Iraqi province under occupation, and running a NGO in Afghanistan. Yet once an MP, every aspect of the Tory party system seemed to conspire to subdue his native wit and initiative.He soon discovered that the only acceptable activities for a newbie were toadying up to leaders and slavishly following orders. If you asked a searching question about an incoming piece of legislation, you were mocked. If you knew more than the average person about a particular policy area, this would be treated as a positive reason to keep you away from it. Phones pinged constantly with the latest messaging to be memorised, and the whips were ruthless in crushing free thought and free movement. Working for Liz Truss at Defra, she advised Stewart to “never be interesting”, though he didn’t listen.Little by little, Stewart started to feel that parliament “reduced” him. Soon after giving a maiden speech comparing himself to Scott of the Antarctic, he found himself hiding in the toilets rather than voting as directed by the whips. A funny speech of his went viral — in which he talks Latin about hedgehogs — but few of his carefully prepared, serious interventions made a dent. Once he started to get slightly bigger political jobs, the list of people who wouldn’t listen to his good ideas grew longer by the year. Civil servants, ministers and prime ministers, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, and world leaders all remained stubbornly oblivious. Eventually he got a job as prisons minister, and was for the first time allowed the autonomy and resources to make a tangible positive difference.More from this author The four thinkers who took on the mobBy Kathleen Stock His story certainly illustrates a pressing issue. Running a country these days involves oversight of hundreds of highly complex systems and sub-systems — economic, technological, judicial, diplomatic — directed at whatever goals currently judged socially desirable by voters or their representatives. Yet as Stewart said in an interview this week: The truth is… politicians don’t really know what’s going on. And yet we pretend to the public that we do.”One suggestion in the book is that those destined for ministerial portfolios should be recruited from relevant specialist backgrounds, and then given enough time to see their initiatives through to the end. He bemoans the fact that “fluent Chinese speakers, decorated colonels, physicians, lawyers and many successful businessmen” were left on the backbenches by Cameron and May. New ministers are “amateur outsiders on very short tours, whose successors could introduce completely different agendas”.Stewart clearly dreams of a system in which brilliant MPs of the right vision and experience are left to get on with innovation at the operational level, unhampered by the gloomy obstructions of The Blob and the reshuffling whims of their leaders. He is less clear about why the experts he wants in the system have to be MPs; why could they not, say, be members of a reformed, more collegiate, and less obstructive civil service? The implied answer seems to be: because that way, Stewart wouldn’t get to run things.Still, few could disagree with his general sentiment. The cost of the Tories’ phobia of details are vividly sketched. At their most surreal, Stewart’s recollected exchanges with those in charge of the country read like the darkest of Evelyn Waugh satires. As Secretary of State for Defra, Liz Truss tells him: “I don’t believe in rural affairs, Rory. I think there is no relevant difference between rural and urban populations.” As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson asks him to “sort out Libya”, describing it as a “bite-sized problem”. When Stewart demurs that the UK has no embassy there and so no real diplomatic influence, Johnson tells him to be more optimistic: he just has to motivate people.The obvious dangers of technocracy include corruption and voter disenfranchisement. Stewart seems to think the antidote is a more participatory politics, involving things such as citizens’ assemblies to “build consensus”. If there had been a citizens’ assembly on Brexit, he thinks, “you would have ended up with a customs union”. This is a common enough technocratic fantasy, floated many times before by those such as Obama and Clinton: that if people with adequate intelligence are given access to the right sort of detailed information and time to think about it, their conclusions about practical decision-making will converge.More from this authorWhat does Caitlin Moran know about men?By Kathleen StockBut to me, this just further betrays the extent to which, for all his talk of avoiding polarisation, Stewart is still mired in the classic patrician attitude of the educated liberal who equates “clever” with “good” with “what me and my friends think”. His fantasy just isn’t true. Even when people agree about all the relevant facts in some domain, their radically different values will affect how they each respectively order and prioritise those facts, and what outcomes they then favour. And this does not necessarily make one side or other stupid.Arguably, to genuinely lessen political polarisation, what the public needs is to witness robust, reasoned disagreement between people who differ radically on both facts and values, and yet who don’t resort to lazily dismissing each other’s characters or intellects in the process. But this is not what they get from “The Rest Is Politics”, and I suspect it won’t be what we get from “Political Currency” either. In the latter case, I predict many casual references to really really interesting guys, quite a lot of unconvincing football banter, and a bit of ribbing about Keble versus Magdalen. It seems we have no shortage of former politicians who think they are clever and interesting. We may even have some actually clever ones, like Stewart. But what we really could do with is a few wiser ones.***In the latest episode of These Times, Tom McTague sits down with Rory Stewart. Listen here.view comments

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Our excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney has many people talking about the Utah senator’s principles and character, but we should be deeply alarmed by Romney’s warning about the Republican Party.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: “The only productivity hack that works on me”  The truth about Hunter Biden’s indictment America just hit the lithium jackpot. Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men. The End of PretensesMy colleague McKay Coppins has spent two years talking with Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former Massachusetts governor, and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. An excerpt from McKay’s forthcoming book confirmed the news that Romney has had enough of the hypocrisy and weakness of the Republican Party and will be leaving the Senate when his term expires; other stunning moments from their conversations include multiple profiles in pusillanimity among Romney’s fellow Republicans. (I am pleased to know that Senator Romney holds as low an opinion of J. D. Vance as I do; “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more,” he told McKay.)But I want to move away from the discussion about Romney himself and focus on something he said that too many people have overlooked.“Some nights he vented,” Coppins wrote of their conversations; “other nights he dished.” And then came a quiet acknowledgement that should still be shocking, even after seven years of unhinged right-wing American populism:“A very large portion of my party,” [Romney] told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?I think every decent Republican has wondered the same thing. (The indecent ones have also wondered about it, but as Romney now accepts, people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have figured out that playing to the rot in the GOP base is a core skill set that helps them stay in Washington and far away from their constituents back home.)Simon & SchusterBut enough about the hollow men of the GOP. Think about what Romney is saying:Millions of American citizens no longer believe in the Constitution of the United States of America.This is not some pedestrian political observation, some throwaway line about partisan division. Leave aside for the moment that Romney is talking about Republicans and the hangers-on in the Trump movement; they are also your fellow Americans, citizens of a nation that was, until recently, one of the most durable democracies on Earth. And they no longer care about the fundamental document that governs our lives as Americans.If Republicans no longer care about the Constitution, then they no longer care about the rule of law, secular tolerance, fair elections, or the protection of basic human rights. They have no interest in the stewardship of American democracy, nor will they preserve our constitutional legacy for their children. Instead, they seek to commandeer the ship of state, pillage the hold, and then crash us all onto the rocks.It would be a relief to find out that some of this is about policy, but for many of the enemies of the Constitution among the new right, policy is irrelevant. (One exception, I suspect, might be the people who, if faced with a choice between a total ban on abortion and the survival of the Constitution, would choose theocracy over democracy; we’d all be better off if they would just admit it.)The people Romney is worried about are not policy wonks. They’re opportunists, rage-junkies, and nihilists who couldn’t care less about policy. (Romney describes one woman in Utah bellowing at him, red-faced and lost in a mist of fury while her child stood nearby, to the point where he asked her, “Aren’t you embarrassed?” She was not.) What they want is to win, to enjoy the spoils and trappings of power, and to anger and punish people they hate.There is no way to contend, in a rational or civic way, with this combination of white-hot resentment and ice-cold cynicism. Romney describes multiple incidents in which his colleagues came to him and said, You’re right, Mitt. I wish I could say what you say. I wish we could stop this nightmare. And then all of them belly right back up to the table in the Senate Dining Room and go on pandering to people who—it bears repeating—no longer care about the Constitution.This is the seedbed of authoritarianism, and it is already full of fresh green shoots. And yes, at some point, if someone is clever enough to forge a strong and organized party out of this disjointed movement, it can become a new fascism. So far, we should be grateful that Donald Trump and those who surround him have all been too selfish and too incompetent to turn their avarice into a coherent mass movement.If you’ve ever served in the military or as a civilian in the U.S. government, you’ve taken the oath that requires you, above all—so help you God—to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Romney is warning us that many of his Republican colleagues and much of their base will do no such thing. They would rather turn their personal misery and resentment into mindless political destruction—even to the point of shredding one of humanity’s greatest political documents.I have written before that we can no longer indulge Republicans and their various media enablers in the fantasies that Trump is a normal candidate, that we are heading into a normal election, that the Republican Party is a normal party (or, indeed, a political party at all). How we each defend the Constitution is an individual choice, but let us at least have no pretenses, even in our daily discussions, that we live in normal times and that 2024 is just another political horse race. Everything we believe in as Americans is at stake now, and no matter what anyone thinks of Mitt Romney, we owe him a debt for saying out loud what so many Republican “leaders” fear even to whisper.Related: What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate This is the case.Today’s News Donald Trump will not be tried next month in the Georgia-election-interference case after a state judge rejected a request by prosecutors to try all 19 co-defendants together. Hunter Biden has been indicted on felony gun charges after a plea agreement that would have allowed him to avoid prosecution fell apart in July. A lawyer for Biden said that the new charges were unwarranted. The Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer is under investigation after his body camera captured him appearing to joke about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a graduate student who was hit and killed by another officer’s vehicle in January.Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks: Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago?Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening ReadMartin Parr / MagnumThe Curious Personality Changes of Older AgeBy Faith HillYou’ve probably heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” An awful phrase, I know, but it speaks to a common belief about older adulthood: that it’s a time of stagnation. A time when we’ve become so set in our ways that, whether we’re proud of them or not, we’re not likely to budge.Psychologists used to follow the same line of thinking: After young adulthood, people tend to settle into themselves, and personality, though not immutable, usually becomes stabler as people age. And that’s true—until a certain point. More recent studies suggest that something unexpected happens to many people as they reach and pass their 60s: Their personality starts changing again.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Cover Story: I never called her Momma. Alabama Republicans think the Supreme Court is full of partisan hacks. Biden’s labor-climate dilemmaCulture BreakUnited Archives GmbH / AlamyRead. A Garfield comic or two. For well over 40 years, a fat orange cat has been a linchpin of American culture, and it’s time to accept that.Listen. How do we overcome the awkwardness that keeps us from starting a conversation? In the latest episode of How to Talk to People, host Julie Beck dissects small talk.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I mentioned Red Oaks the other day, the sweet coming-of-age series set in the mid-1980s (available for streaming on Prime Video), and it occurred to me that for some readers, the MTV video music era is now lost in the mists of time. Videos (and I am thinking about this because one of the characters in Red Oaks works in a studio that makes them) were a unique art form, and a lot of them were quite good. So, now and then, I’ll use this addendum here in the Daily to recommend some of these lost mini-movies.I have a special interest in Cold War–themed videos, so today, let me recommend one I alluded to when I recommended Red Oaks. In late 1983, Roger Hodgson left the group Supertramp and embarked on a solo career. He had a modest hit the next year with the song “Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy).” The video is kind of freaky, but the clips of Soviet and American marching bands and huge explosions make clear that it was a cry of anxiety about nuclear war. (“Had a dream / It was war / And they couldn’t tell me what it was for.”)It’s overly arty but still a cool time capsule —and watch for the split-second, almost-subliminal scare cut at 2:58, where Hodgson’s face becomes a skull. (It’s a gimmick William Friedkin used in The Exorcist too, and a version of it shows up in another classic early-’80s video, “Only the Lonely.” You can spot it here at 2:12.)— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekDo you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why? Feel free to respond generally or to focus on one particular institution, or more, in your emails.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteIn the New York Post, Gerard Baker, the writer, columnist, and former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, previews his new book, American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence. The problem as he sees it:Congress, the presidency, the FBI, the judiciary, the media, colleges and universities, big business, churches, scientists, technology companies, labor unions, public health leaders. What do all these institutions have in common?Answer: Americans don’t trust them any more.In the last 30 years, we have witnessed something unprecedented and perilous to the very survival of American democracy—a collapse in public trust in the nation’s leaders and institutions.If there is one phenomenon that captures better than anything else what’s gone wrong with America in the last few years it is this: we live in a culture of mistrust.All the major institutions that have defined and shaped American democracy have witnessed a dramatic decline in the faith and credit Americans place in them in the space of a generation.Is it any wonder, given how they have behaved? …This plummeting social trust is doing irreparable damage to the bonds that tie Americans together.More Than a Literary InspirationIn The Atlantic, Clint Smith has a fascinating piece about the life of Josiah Henson, who was cited by Harriet Beecher Stowe as the inspiration for the titular character of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.Smith argues that being so remembered doesn’t do justice to the man:I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.A Case for a New VeepIn Very Serious, Josh Barro argues that Kamala Harris has too little political upside as vice-president to justify her being on the Democratic Party ticket in 2024:When he is renominated as the Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden will need to choose a running mate. The polls are close and the stakes are high, so he needs a partner who will do as much as possible to help him win re-election. Given widespread public concern about his age, it is even more important than usual that his running mate be someone that a majority of the voting public is comfortable envisioning succeeding to the presidency. And his pick should be someone who is credible as the future leader of the Democratic Party …Kamala Harris, unfortunately, is not an excellent candidate for the vice presidency. There are better options available and he should pick one of them—specifically, as I’ll discuss below, he should pick Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer …As Nate Silver noted last week, Harris has run worse than Biden in every national poll conducted since the midterms that asked respondents about both Biden-Trump and Harris-Trump head-to-head contests. On average, she’s put up a margin four points worse than his, which is a lot—in each of the last three presidential elections, a four-point shift in the margin would have been enough to mean the difference between winning and losing. Even despite all the (very real!) voter concern about Biden’s age and stamina, she is a much worse national candidate than he is.This shouldn’t be surprising, because there is little in Harris’s pre-vice presidential career to suggest that she would be a strong national candidate.She has never run a race by herself in a politically competitive jurisdiction. Well, that’s unless you count California—in 2010, she very nearly managed to lose a statewide race in California to a Republican, when she was elected attorney general by a margin of less than one point. And her 2020 presidential campaign, famously, flamed out before she entered any of the nominating contests.Usually, the case for Harris’s electoral appeal is built around her race and gender: That as a black woman, she improves the Democratic ticket’s appeal to black voters and to women. But Harris’s role as a draw for black voters is more theoretical than demonstrated. She has never had a core political base among black voters because she has never been elected in a jurisdiction with a large black population—she held office in San Francisco (which is 6% black) and California (7% black). A key reason her 2020 campaign stalled was that she failed to demonstrate an especially strong appeal to black voters, who tended to prefer her (white) eventual running mate, Biden, even after she accused him of being a segregationist. I’d also note that the Democratic Party has lost substantial ground in recent years among non-white voters without bachelors degrees, including black voters without bachelors degrees, and Harris’s presence in the second-most-prominent position in Democratic politics doesn’t seem to have done anything to stop that. When Harris talks publicly about race, she does so in the voguish style that is popular with the highly educated staffs of Democratic officeholders and progressive organizations, rather than in a style with demonstrated success in appealing to an educationally broad electoral coalition. So while I am open to the idea that nominating more non-white candidates might help the party appeal to more non-white voters, I am doubtful that Harris, with her equity memes, has been helpful in this regard.To Dress Better, Learn to Thread the NeedleIn The Atlantic, Ann Friedman argues that more people should learn to sew:Learning to sew will not only help you avoid the environmental horrors of modern retail; it will show you the thrill of wearing clothes that actually fit. This is not an argument for a cottage-core lifestyle in which you hand-make every raw-linen garment that touches your body. I’m more for an incremental approach: Acquiring a few basic sewing skills, little by little, will change how you get dressed. Even if you never make a whole garment from scratch, knowing how to adjust a seam will make secondhand shopping easier and more accessible. And when you’re looking for new clothes, knowing your measurements will help you order only items that are likely to fit. The goal is not to become a master tailor. It’s to become fluent in how clothes fit your body.When you sew for yourself, you really learn your body. You also relearn how to think about your body. Even a beginner-level sewing project makes clear that it is impossible to reduce your complex contours and spans to a single number or letter on a tag. And you learn how you like things to fit you: where you prefer your waistband to hit on your belly, what inseam works for a crop length versus ankle, how low you like a neckline to go. Once you know these things, you will never acquire clothes the same way again.Sewing skills open up the possibilities of secondhand shopping. Instead of hoping to strike gold with the perfect fit, you can see garments for their possibilities. That dress would be perfect if I took off the sleeves, you’ll catch yourself thinking. Or, I could hem those trousers in about five minutes. And the same goes for your own rarely worn items. The ritual of a closet clean-out takes on a new twist when you can alter things to match your current shape and style. I’ve transformed a shift dress into a skirt and boxy top, turned an old bedsheet into the backing material for a quilt, and cropped too many T-shirts to count. Instead of ending up in the trash or a giveaway pile, these items have gotten a second spin through my wardrobe.Provocation of the WeekWriting at Substack under a pseudonym, a psychotherapist who works with young people in distress over their gender identity argues that the best approach is to neither affirm nor deny their self-characterizations:Therapists are sometimes confronted with an unshakable belief that one is trans, rather than that one identifies as trans in a way that acknowledges the reality of sex, or the insistence that long-term, life-changing decisions can be made when the faculties and experience to make such decisions are absent. We cannot—and should not—attempt to change this belief, but rather to work on creating and sustaining a relationship that facilitates the development of internal scaffolding, of a capacity to think and feel as fully as possible without collapse.My work with gender-distressed and trans-identified youth is not any different from my work with anyone else. That is to say that there is a specificity and singularity to every relationship I have with my patients. Deep and lasting change happens over time through the relationship more so than by any particular thing that is said or discrete insight that is discovered. My task is to attend to what the patient says and does not say, how she relates to me, how I relate to her, what thoughts, feelings, sensations, associations are stirred in my patient, in me, and between the two of us, and what we can learn through these experiences. I do my best to attune to my patient’s needs, desires, and limits; to change tack when I see fit; to survive frustration and anger directed at me without retaliation; to show sincere curiosity about their lives, what they’re thinking about, how they’re feeling, what interests them, why do they like this but not that, what are they yearning for, expecting, fearing; what makes them laugh, cry, scream, want to run away, come close? I can only think about one’s gender identity in the larger, nuanced, and complex landscape of my patients’ particular lives. Through collaborative exploration, we learn about ourselves; through a relationship that is co-created, we learn to experience ourselves and others in new ways. Through this process, some of my patients have desisted from identifying as trans. Some haven’t. Some may still, some may not. I do my best to invite and participate in sense-making, curiosity, engagement, contact, a sense of belonging and aliveness. What happens as a result is beyond my control.They claim that this approach puts them on the margins of the profession:When I have expressed my concerns about the gender-affirmative model, i.e., immediate affirmation and a quick push onto the medical pathway, under my own name, I have been accused—in print, on listservs, and in conversations—by those both inside and outside of my field of of being close-minded, bigoted, anti-trans, transphobic, threatened by gender non-conformity, and/or engaged in conversion therapy. I have been interrogated for organizing clinical training presentations by professionals in my field who have pointed out the potential harms of unquestioned affirmation followed by medicalization, discussed alternative ways of thinking about what we call gender dysphoria and how to treat it, and provided information about the state of the evidence base for social transition, puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. I have also received statements of private support from many within my field who share my concerns but are afraid to express them for fear of encountering the difficulties described above. I am hardly alone in my experience. Most, if not all, of my like-minded colleagues who have publicly shared views that reject the dogmas of gender ideology and that point to the weak evidence base for medical interventions have received a combination of public vituperation and private support.All of this is to say that I am acutely conscious of the enormous social and institutional pressure being placed on clinicians who resist the culture-wide push of the gender-affirmative model of care. I am pressed to the margins of my profession and constrained in my ability to make the case for what I believe to be best for my patients and for others with similar complexities involving sex and gender. My work goes on in the shadows amidst a carefully vetted network of parents and clinicians while the exponents of the affirmative model proselytize proudly and loudly.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

There is much to be learned about power and the press from the fact that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once evaded a reporter’s tough questions by hiding in an industrial fridge.The reporter, Jonathan Swain of Good Morning Britain, ambushed Johnson at Modern Milkman dairy, where he was stopping for a folksy photo shoot in December 2019. For months, Johnson, a former journalist himself, had refused to be interviewed on prime-time breakfast television. If Johnson wouldn’t go to Good Morning Britain, then Good Morning Britain would go to him. Swain, broadcasting live to a national audience, surprised Johnson and asked him if he’d be willing to spare a few moments for an interview right then and there.“I’ll be with you in a second,” Johnson said, hoping Swain would go away.“I have an earpiece in my hands, ready to go,” Swain offered.Johnson then proceeded into an industrial refrigerator to wait it out.“He’s gone into the fridge,” the host Piers Morgan helpfully noted as Johnson hunkered down behind an enormous metal door.[Kathryn Cramer Brownell: The problem with Fox News goes way, way back]It was political theater at its finest. But it was also indicative of the adversarial spirit of Britain’s television media, which show little deference to authority. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss was toppled after just 49 days in power, a demise accelerated because she was humiliated in a series of “car crash” interviews, a standard term in British politics for when a politician is taken to task live on air. In one of the most memorable Boris Johnson interviews, the journalist Eddie Mair set the stage with objective facts about Johnson’s past misdeeds, then asked him the following question: “Making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted: You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” Johnson sputtered and tried to change the subject, but the damage was done.In the United States, by contrast, our leaders have plenty to answer for, but with few exceptions, American TV-news hosts lob softball questions at politicians rather than play hardball. When the politician is evasive, the interviewer too often moves on, letting the politician slither away. Ron DeSantis managed, for nearly three years, to evade giving a straight answer to the simple question as to who won the 2020 presidential election: He finally acknowledged, only last month, that Donald Trump lost. Unlike Boris Johnson, Trump has never had to hide in a fridge.Last week, however, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan did something unusual in American TV news. In a now-viral interview with the slick Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, Hasan decided to just keep asking the same questions until he got an answer. Ramaswamy was caught off guard, no doubt because the style of questioning was so different from what he had previously experienced on the campaign trail.I’ve lived in Britain for 12 years, and in that time, I’ve come to realize that there is an enormous gulf between British and American broadcast political interviews. British journalism tends to approach broadcast interviews from a skeptical premise of, to quote the late British journalist Louis Heren, “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”By contrast, American broadcast political interviewing too often defers to power, is allergic to aggressive pushback, fails to follow up, and treats questions that expose a politician’s ignorance of basic facts as though they were a violation of social norms. Why, for example, has no American television interviewer ever asked Trump to locate Afghanistan on a map? A decade ago in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf lamented the breezy questions from 60 Minutes to President Barack Obama. But the issue became even more obvious in the face of Trump’s firehose of lies, whose output frequently went undisputed, particularly on fawning right-wing media outlets. Maria Bartiromo, a pro-Trump sycophant on Fox News, grilled Trump in May 2020 by asking him, “I’ve never seen anybody take a punch and then get right back up and keep punching. I mean, where does this resilience come from?” In a similarly “tough” 2020 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump was asked to name any of his priorities for a second term. When he failed to name even a single one, Hannity just moved on.But even outside the propaganda of the pro-Trump mediaverse, journalists in the mainstream American TV press can be ineffective at holding power to account on air. In one high-profile case from 2019, Chuck Todd, then the host of Meet the Press, faced significant criticism for letting President Trump spend much of the interview repeating blatant lies and falsehoods mostly unchallenged.  Consider the interview that drew the most political blood during the Trump era. It was conducted by Jonathan Swan (not to be confused with Jonathan Swain of Boris Johnson–fridge fame). Swan, an Australian journalist who was working for Axios, interviewed Trump during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. What Swan did—which few have done so successfully before or since with Trump—was follow up, counter with facts, and refuse to move on after Trump’s throwaway lines.“There are those who say you can test [for COVID] too much,” Trump claimed.“Who says that?” Swan asked.“Just read the manuals, read the books.”“Manuals? What books?” Swan asked, perplexed.“When I took over, we didn’t even have a [COVID] test,” Trump later boasted.“Why would you have a test? The virus didn’t exist.”Swan’s interview went viral because it broke from the standard American interview script—a script that Trump has mastered. Swan didn’t just ask Trump for his opinions but instead followed up with facts when Trump trotted out vapid, meaningless lines. As Swan’s face showed his complete puzzlement, his interview captured what many of those watching were thinking: What in the world is Trump talking about? (Swan’s expressions quickly became a popular internet meme.)But Swan is, notably, not American, and had cut his teeth as a reporter in Canberra, not Washington. In fact, two of the most effective adversarial journalists in contemporary American media are CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and MSNBC’s Hasan, both of whom are British. Amanpour worked her way up within CNN, but Hasan trained in Britain’s aggressive press culture, and both established their career far outside the D.C. Beltway.As Rob Burley explains in his new book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me?, British political interviewing wasn’t always so adversarial, and politicians didn’t always lie or deflect. They had no need to: Up through the late 1950s, British media interviews were little more than broadcast press releases, and accountability was regarded as a job for Parliament, not the press. Prime Minister’s Questions, a bizarre spectacle that takes place every Wednesday when Parliament is in session, is a televised political jousting match, where elected officials challenge, debate, and make fun of one another, and try to score political points by cutting their rivals down to size, in many cases set to that very British soundtrack of jeers and harrumphing. (It’s an extraordinary contrast to American governance by C-SPAN, in which American elected officials are usually delivering their speeches to cameras but in a completely empty chamber.)[David A. Graham: C-SPAN isn’t all good]The British journalist Robin Day changed the culture of British political broadcast interviewing in 1958 when he broke from journalistic convention to ask the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, polite but pointed questions. The norm of reporters’ deferring to powerful men shattered, and politicians in Westminster began to accept being grilled not just in Parliament but also on the airwaves.Then, in 1997, Jeremy Paxman, at the time the host of BBC Newsnight, set a new standard for combative interviews. Paxman has long been a household name in Britain, known for an attack-dog style of journalism that struck fear into every politician he ever interviewed. In the 1997 interview, the politician Michael Howard refused to answer Paxman’s yes-or-no question about whether he had threatened a senior civil servant, but Paxman refused to back down. He asked the question 12 times in a row, spanning a minute and a half of deliciously uncomfortable television as Howard squirmed, hoping that Paxman would do what most interviewers do: move on. Paxman didn’t, and the result is now regarded as perhaps the most famous British political interview of all time.British political media have produced a pantheon of adversarial legends—Paxman, Brian Walden, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr, Emily Maitlis, and Beth Rigby, to name a few—figures who are renowned for dissecting their political guests, exposing lies and hypocrisy with surgical precision. (The Maitlis interview with Prince Andrew, in 2019, sealed the royal’s fate as a modern pariah).The Today program on BBC Radio 4 sets the British political agenda more than any comparable American show—and its “10 past eight” interview slot is often a ritual morning dressing-down of whichever government minister dares to go on it. Why would politicians subject themselves to this? Surely few relish the thought of being interrupted, cajoled, and contradicted live on air. But politicians who hope to rise have to meet the public, and the BBC stations dominate news coverage: From 2010 to 2020, 57 to 65 percent of Britons got their TV news from BBC One. Likewise, BBC radio stations have six times the news-market share of their nearest competitor.“There is nowhere for politicians to hide,” Justin Webb, one of the main hosts of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, told me. “They can’t just go to a place where they talk to their own people.” Webb, who worked for the BBC in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush, noted that the dynamics are completely different in the United States, where Republicans gravitate toward Fox News and Democrats more frequently appear on MSNBC. This way, some can just avoid tough questions altogether.  In Washington, politicians can penalize outlets that are too harsh by refusing to appear on their networks again—hence the concern about “access journalism,” in which interviewers avoid crossing invisible lines of deference to maintain cordial relationships with politicians whose presence raises their network’s ratings and revenue. In one instance, the head of CNN even directly intervened to remove references to a sexual-abuse case Trump had lost in court from the chyron banner scrolling underneath the live video feed, lest it would upset Trump before he appeared on the network.[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]In Britain, by contrast, politicians who won’t subject themselves to cross-examination from a hostile press can be subjected to ridicule. Boris Johnson skipped a debate about climate change, so the TV channel hosting the discussion kept his lectern in place but put a melting block of ice on it to represent his absence. When he skipped a preelection interview on the BBC, they broadcast a monologue with the host, Andrew Neil, about the importance of answering questions—next to a conspicuously empty chair for the truant Johnson. When Trump skipped the first GOP debate last month, there was no empty lectern to highlight his absence.The BBC, unlike most American broadcast-news networks, is nonprofit and does not break for commercials the way American news programs do. Reporters therefore have more time and space to follow up and press for answers, Webb said. Hasan of MSNBC acknowledges that added constraint on American cable news: “There’s definitely a pressure with ad breaks to keep interviews tight,” he told me. Prerecording interviews can help get around this problem, but doing so is not always viable. Still, Hasan suggests that the time constraints can become an excuse for pulling punches: “The number of times I’ve seen an interviewer have someone on the ropes and then say, ‘That’s all we have time for,’ or, ‘Moving on’—the phrase moving on is poison to me. It’s poison to a TV interview.”But before Americans rush to import Jeremy Paxman and Emily Maitlis, be warned: Relentless adversarial journalism can have undesirable consequences. Politicians become cagey, always trying to sniff out an ulterior motive to even the most innocuous line of questioning. Even worse, to survive in British politics, government ministers must undergo rigorous media training, in which they learn how to be suitably slippery, never to become entangled in a gotcha moment by Webb or his colleagues. Tough questions sometimes yield few answers. Paxman’s notorious interview is a case in point: Even after 12 tries, his political prey still didn’t answer the question. Plenty of heat, yes, but how much light?Politics may even suffer a chilling effect, as the more the field becomes defined by dangerous jousting matches between reporters and politicians, the fewer normal people will want to enter it. The profession could continue to appeal to the graduates of the Oxford Union debating societies, where adversarial witticisms are the currency of elite social capital, but turn off ordinary people who can think of more pleasant ways to enact change without risking national mortification. (Of course, even without the threat of constant adversarial interviews, most Americans find the prospect of entering politics repulsive, and few U.S. politicians give straight answers.)Nonetheless, American broadcast interviewing needs more well-prepared follow-ups, more challenges from journalists who have done their homework, and, yes, more gotcha questions and fewer “what do you think of” opinion questions. We used to be able to take for granted that politicians knew basic facts about the world they were trying to help govern. That’s no longer the case. So, when politicians don’t know basic facts, exposing a dangerous ignorance is in the public interest. Doing so is not rude; it’s journalism. When Vivek Ramaswamy says that he would subject young voters to a civics test before allowing them to vote, for example, why not ask him some questions live on air to see if he could pass a civics test himself?The Trump era made clear that the American model of broadcast political interviewing isn’t fit for purpose. It could benefit from a few British-style upgrades. And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if, every so often, our most evasive American politicians had to cower in a freezer if they wanted to escape a journalist who’s willing to hound them until they actually answer the question.

Jordan Peterson has lashed out at Apple over its new commercial, calling it "beyond parody."

The ad was shared to X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, by Apple CEO Tim Cook. The five-minute clip shows actor Octavia Spencer discussing the company's climate-change goals with a team of employees.

"At Apple, we believe that climate change is one of the world's most urgent priorities and we are deeply committed to doing our part," the 62-year-old businessman wrote alongside the post.

"Today we had a special guest—a real force of nature—stop by to check on our progress."

Jordan Peterson in 2018. The clinical psychologist's views on climate change have caused controversy online. Chris Williamson/Getty Images News

Since being shared, the post has received 2.9 million views so far and divided opinions among Cook's followers. While some users applauded Apple for its attempts to fight climate change, others accused the company of going "woke"—including Peterson.

"This is truly beyond parody," the 61-year-old clinical psychologist wrote, tagging Cook in the post.

Since rising to fame in 2016, Peterson has caused controversy online several times with his views on everything from transgender rights to Skittles' packaging. His opinions on global warming are also divisive, with the professor of psychology claiming in 2022 that current climate models are ineffective, angering many climate scientists.

Throughout 2023, Peterson has uploaded a range of videos on the subject to YouTube, with titles including, "The World is not Ending" and "The Great Climate Con."

Concerning the latter, Peterson claims that the increase in greenhouse gases is a positive for plant life, which climate scientists say ignores the damage that rising CO2 levels have on the ecosystem as whole, leading to less nutritious crops.

This is truly

Beyond parody@tim_cook https://t.co/qblvYS2kCa — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) September 13, 2023

According to DeSmog—an organization founded in 2006 to fight climate change misinformation—fringe theories such as these are receiving a surge in views thanks to the academic, who has more than 7 million subscribers on YouTube and targets primarily young males.

Peterson's followers joined him in slamming the Apple ad, with Howard Zhao writing: "Going Woke At speed of thought."

"I wish they'd stop preaching and focus on their product," said Operam Dare.

"Apple is doomed. No innovation, no product development. Only woke," agreed Ran.

"I watched earlier this morning. It felt gross," wrote TapForNerd.

Some users called for a boycott of Apple products, with mbm writing: "You just lost my business."

"This may be Apple's Bud Light moment!" commented Eternity Planner, referencing the boycott of the beer over its collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April.

"I've made lots of money on the stock, love the products, but I am ashamed of Tim Cook and Apple's politics," said Jee Kirty. "Going down the path of Disney and Bud Light..........be careful, your stock will drop big time because valuations are at the thigh end."

However, other users applauded Apple for its efforts, with many doubting that a boycott of the brand's products would ever happen.

"It's fine by me if they use recycled stuff and green energy," said Marian S.

"This is cute and harmless, but look at all the right-wing blue checks in the replies losing their minds," commented Elizabeth Spiers. "I'd like to see them boycott woke Apple tho. They might give up Bud Light for five minutes ,but they ain't getting rid of their iPhones."

Newsweek has reached out to Peterson and Apple for comment.

Peckham, protests and “parasitic merchants”

Demonstrations have exposed the tribal underbelly of modern Britain

The late Tom Wolfe appears to have been scripting reality in London this week, and it has been morbidly fascinating.

The facts seem to be these: a black woman entered a cosmetics shop in Peckham, asking for a refund. Denied one, she took some products and began to leave. The Asian shopkeeper physically restrained her and the violence escalated. The woman swung over her shoulder at him with her basket and he briefly grabbed her by the throat before trapping her behind the arms. Once he let go, the woman began to hit him around the head with a strap-shaped implement.

An ugly scene. Certainly one for the police to investigate. In modern Britain, though, it was also an opportunity for protests. Demonstrators gathered round the shop, holding signs that read “keep your hands off black women” and chanting “you touch one, you touch all”.

these demonstrations are both reflecting and fostering communitarian divides

What the media has not reported is the extent to which these demonstrations are both reflecting and fostering communitarian divides. Zoom in on the signs that have been stuck to the shutters of Peckham Cosmetics and you can find messages like “PARASITIC MERCHANTS OUT OF OUR COMMUNITY” and “RACIST ASIANS GO TO HELL PATEL”. The same journalists who are always very sensitive to, say, the blowback on peaceful Muslims after terrorist events don’t think that this is worth a mention.

The rhetoric of the protestors is curious as well. “We need to get a new ecosystem,” announced one protester over a megaphone, “Our own ecosystem where we spend money in our stores. They cannot treat us this way. These are our streets.” One assumes that by “our” he means black people. Does “they” mean Asian people or just anyone else?

Either way, one pauses to imagine the response if white people declared particular communities to represent “our streets” (in fact, this was one of the chants of marchers at Charlottesville). It would not be pretty. If this sort of racial collectivism has taken root in a country that prides itself on its supposed liberal cosmopolitanism it’s worth thinking about the implications. Not according to mainstream media outlets though. It hasn’t got a reference there.

LBC has reported that the “Forever Family Force” were in attendance, informing readers:

The FF Force, a black-uniformed group who say they are “against racism, injustice & inequality” were at the Peckham event there to make sure protesters were “all in check” and “all in order”, [one of the organisers] said.

What a generous thing to do! The Forever Family Force often pop up at these demonstrations, but their anti-racist credentials deserve scepticism. Leading figure “Raspect” was at the Peckham demonstrations, telling MSN that the woman had been “investing” in the shop for years (I think he means buying things, which is not “investing”). As the excellent “SW1 Forum” blog has reported:

A profile … revealed that Raspect had a very active social media life, which included anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, claiming Bill Gates created coronavirus, and alleging that slavery was “the original holocaust” while Jews own the banking system via the “Rothschild bloodline”.

Just the sort of chaps you want keeping order.

You might think that mainstream institutions which are often hyper-sensitive around the potential for “backlash” would avoid provoking such inflammatory tribalism. Well, you might if you didn’t know about its selectivity. The Runnymede Trust tweeted:

We’re absolutely horrified by the recent incident at Peckham Hair & Cosmetics.

We must work to root out the violence against Black women which is so normalised in our society.

If there is evidence that the colour of the woman’s skin played a role in her treatment by the shopkeeper then it has not been presented. What “normalised” means in this context? Well, your guess is as good as mine.

One hopes that the police will thoroughly investigate the incident that took place in the shop. What followed, though, is of greater interest to the rest of us — exposing, as in Leicester in 2022, a defiant tribalism which is flourishing beneath the polished liberal surface of British life.

With the climate crisis escalating fast, calls for more authoritarian decision-making structures – widely viewed as more efficient – are increasing. But the notion that any version of an authoritarian system would be free of “special interests,” and run by neutral, rational technocrats, is implausible.

BUDAPEST – This summer – with its record temperatures, deadly floods, and raging wildfires, which in Canada alone destroyed the equivalent of all the trees in Germany – might have felt like a final warning: without urgent and drastic action, the current climate emergency will become an inescapable climate disaster. Some might be tempted to think that we have reached a point when our only chance of mounting a sufficiently rapid and potent response to the threat is to embrace decisive state authority, even outright authoritarianism. But the notion that ecologically minded authoritarians will outperform democratic leaders on climate is a dangerous fantasy.

Concerns about democracies’ capacity to act swiftly and efficiently are nothing new. Government that allows all to participate (in theory, if not always in practice) makes for an imperfect and slow-moving system. Influential players can often veto actions that the majority supports. On the other hand, the view that irrational masses wield too much power – long expressed sotto voce – has become entirely salonfähig in the age of Donald Trump. For example, voters tend to punish politicians for taking measures to prevent catastrophes, and reward them for appearing heroic during a disaster, even though disaster relief is far more expensive than prevention.

In addition to well-known prejudices – many as old as Plato’s writings – one can argue that some of democracy’s benefits do not count for much in the climate emergency. Democracies pride themselves on the fact that every decision can be revisited – that policies can be updated and improved, and that the losers in one election can become winners in the next (and thus have reason to keep playing the democratic game). But climate-related decisions have major, irreversible consequences, so even if bad choices – such as doing too little – are revisited later, serious damage will have been done.

Other contemporary criticisms are blunter. Democracies are based on compromise, but bargains often turn out to be incoherent, especially in multi-party systems, because too many different political players want to get their way. Germany’s current governing coalition would appear to be a case in point. Correcting such incoherence takes time, which democracies might have under normal circumstances, but certainly do not have when the planet is becoming hotter and more apocalyptic practically by the day.

Another key concern stems from the de facto dominance of business interests in capitalist democracies. Given that climate action will inevitably harm at least some capitalists’ interests, these interests seem likely to prevent the necessary steps from being taken in time – or perhaps ever.

Now, with the climate crisis escalating fast, unabashed calls for more authoritarian decision-making are increasing. Some advocate a more technocratic approach, and hold up China as a shining example. (The irony that China is the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter is apparently lost on them.) Others – notably, the Swedish thinker Andreas Malm – envision a novel form of Leninism-cum-War Communism.

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These proposals raise obvious questions, which their proponents never quite address. If, for the sake of climate action, power is concentrated in the hands of a state that does not answer to the people, what would prevent abuses of that power? Why, in the absence of any mechanisms of accountability, would an authoritarian regime actually tackle climate change at all? Does one really expect the powerful interests that are currently impeding climate action not to be just as powerful, if not more so, under a climate-autocracy?

Authoritarian regimes are notoriously corrupt. So, the notion that such a system would be free of “special interests,” and run by neutral, rational technocrats, is implausible. In fact, far from bolstering climate action, a shift toward authoritarian-style decision-making would likely make things worse.

Climate authoritarianism might also backfire in less obvious ways. In a polity with any amount of freedom, opposition is inevitable. If the authorities deem new restrictions necessary to quell criticism or resistance, they may well end up eroding other basic freedoms, including the freedom to produce and exchange potentially transformative ideas.

Imagine this. A group of climate scientists decry the climate dictator’s policies as insufficient and try to mobilize others to demand stronger action. In an attempt to restore “order,” the dictator imposes measures that curtail academic freedom and freedom of association. Now, not only are experts less able to influence the state’s climate response; they might not have opportunities to develop or share ideas and innovations that could enhance our collective ability to meet the climate challenge.

True, none of this necessarily means that democratic systems are particularly well-equipped to advance climate action. Instead, one might conclude that there are no good political instruments at all. But this neglects a key point: the obstacles to effective climate action in today’s democracies are not inherent. On the contrary, they are inconsistent with democratic ideals, and in a well-functioning democracy, should be removed.

The fossil-fuel industry’s disproportionate influence on the political process, for example, is not only damaging to the environment; it is also fundamentally undemocratic. Even without the urgent need to address the climate emergency, citizens would have good reason to demand change. The conclusion is clear: if we do not get serious about the climate emergency, we will not save democracy, and if we do not take democratic ideals seriously, we will not save the climate.

Many Americans say they are unhappier now than they were a decade ago, before the explosion of social media, the physical and social isolation brought about by COVID, and the political polarization that’s bled into our personal lives and relationships.Actually, says Arthur C. Brooks, a Harvard professor who studies happiness, all of those issues aren’t what’s really preventing people from being happy. The problem is how we think about happiness — what it is and how to achieve it.Brooks was joined by TV star and media executive Oprah Winfrey to discuss their new book, “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, where Brooks is a contributing writer. Harvard President Claudine Gay was on hand to offer a brief introduction.“Happiness is not a destination; it is a direction” to follow in your daily life, said Brooks, the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.Too often, people think they’ll be happier once they overcome some obstacle or accumulate a certain amount of money or fame or career accomplishments or accolades.“The biggest mistake that a lot of people make who are very successful and very hard working, is [they think] if they get these worldly goals then they’ll get the happiness. That’s exactly wrong. Get the happiness, and you get success; you get enough success,” said Brooks, who teaches an HBS course for MBAs on leadership and happiness.        Winfrey was inspired to collaborate with Brooks on what they call “an owner’s manual for your emotions” after reading Brooks’ writing and books about happiness during the pandemic. Her long-running talk show was driven by a similar desire to help find what makes people happy and live their best lives.Family, friends, work, and faith are the four pillars that form the basis of happiness for everyone, the scientific literature shows, said Brooks. And if you can find enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning in your life, that’s when you’ll be at your happiest.“Happiness is not an absence of unhappiness, nor vice versa,” said Brooks. We need to experience both positivity and negativity in order to learn and live a full life.Learning to identify and experience the full range of emotions, and then taking a step back to manage your response to those feelings so they aren’t dictating your actions and choices will help lead to greater happiness, Brooks and Winfrey say. “Feel the feel, then take the wheel,” they write in the book.Winfrey was asked what young people can do to start finding greater happiness as many feel overwhelmed by the complexity of their lives and the global pressures facing their generation.Winfrey urged the room packed with students to begin by reflecting on what they did to get to Harvard and to take satisfaction in all they’ve accomplished so far. Then, she said, think about not only what they want to get out of Harvard, but how they intend to use what they gain here to be of service and lift other people up. “Think about why you’re doing all this work,” she said.“Your legacy is every life you touch,” Winfrey added. “And you are building your legacy here and now. So everything that you do going forward, every life that you encounter and experience and the way you treat yourself and the way you treat other people, is building a legacy.”

If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale. ~Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire History has moved to the front line of social conflict, but rarely has it been so poorly understood and sketchily taught. After decades of declining interest, only 13 percent of eighth graders achieve proficiency in the subject today. The New York Times reports that “about 40 percent of eighth graders scored ‘below basic’ in U.S. history last year, compared with 34 percent in 2018 and 29 percent in 2014.” This phenomenon can be seen across the West. The study of and interest in the past, noted the Economist in 2019, has largely disappeared in the UK. Study of the 19th century, meanwhile, seems to be vanishing from European classrooms. “We are in danger of mass amnesia, being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history,” noted the late Jane Jacobs in her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead. When I show my students a picture of Lenin, barely one-in-ten of them recognize it. Universities should be beacons of dispassionate learning, so it is particularly unfortunate that they have also been increasingly complicit in obliterating much that is valuable to historical instruction and understanding. In a 2013 article for the Guardian, Ashley Thorne lamented that university curricula were largely ignoring the literary classics. At many US colleges, Thorne noted, books written before 1990 are considered “inaccessible” to students. This breaks a vital link with the past that allows students to identify with their ancestors as part of an ongoing human story, rather than simply dismissing their thoughts and actions as alien, unintelligible, or even intrinsically evil.The problem is further exacerbated by the much-discussed decline in academic viewpoint diversity, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. The history profession was once famously disputatious, but over the last generation or so, a diminishing number of conservative or even centrist historians has produced monocultural groupthink. A national survey of faculty members from 183 four-year colleges and universities, conducted in 2005, found that liberals were already seven times more numerous across history departments than conservatives. Without the cut-and-thrust of lively historical debate, history risks becoming an ideological discipline, as was the case in the Soviet Union or China today, taught by rote and incapable of generating excitement and interest.The consequent decline in historical understanding suggests that generations of students will leave higher education ill-prepared to engage or even bother with the past. The 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment found that 86 percent of 15-year-olds are unable to tell the difference between opinion and fact. This lack of preparation empowers propagandists, who often know little about history to start with, to twist the past to suit their own ideological purposes for an equally ignorant audience. Less remarked upon is the impact that this ignorance can have on how we understand our present and future. An understanding of the past that dwells exclusively on our crimes, mistakes, and failures at the expense of our achievements produces a distorted picture of human potential and an unwarranted sense of despair. This is particularly evident in the pessimism with which younger generations approach issues like race relations, climate change, and the continuing viability of liberal democracy. For if there is no hope to be found in the past, what possible hope can there be for the future?Race RelationsCritics of traditional history instruction on matters related to race do sometimes raise valid points. Past school curricula distorted history in its own ways, particularly by ignoring the contributions of Asians and Hispanics as well as indigenous groups like Native Americans and Africans. A controversial claim made by one historian in the Washington Post (specifically, that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill opposed Nazism for its commitment to racial supremacy) may have provoked outrage from right-wing pundits, but the point was not entirely misplaced. Ignorance and the willful politicization of historical debate, however, have also led to some outright fabulism. Vice President Kamala Harris inflamed the dispute over Florida’s history guidelines by falsely alleging that they mandate an outrageously revisionist account of American slavery. The Telegraph recently reported that, at Cambridge, students are being taught that “Anglo Saxons aren’t real” due to the term’s allegedly problematic ethnic connotations. Indigenous leaders in the Commonwealth have recently demanded that King Charles apologize for crimes committed long before he was born. And of course, there are ongoing efforts to redefine July 4th as a moment for national shame and atonement rather than celebration. Nothing better epitomizes the rise of a new politicized history than the New York Times’ heavily promoted and notoriously tendentious 1619 project. That journalistic endeavor holds that the American War of Independence was largely fought to preserve the colonies’ slave economy. It has since been widely debunked by historians on both the Left and Right. The British, critics point out, did not abolish slavery for a generation after the War of Independence, and the South was no match for the North’s growing industrial economy. The 1619 Project’s premise, as one observer noted, “metamorphosed into a despairing view of the US that has essentially erased the entire abolitionist movement,” not to mention the sacrifices made by hundreds of thousands of union soldiers, both black and white.None of that prevented the Times from capturing a Pulitzer for its effort. The project’s lead author and curator, Nicole Hannah-Jones, now teaches at the University of North Carolina and has become an iconic figure on college campuses, earning over half-a-million dollars in speaking fees over the past few years. More importantly, an estimated 4,500 schools have since adopted curricula materials related to the Project in the classroom.Forgetting vs. Overcoming: Abuses of History and the 1619 ProjectThe 1619 Project is, strangely, a history project that encourages forgetting as much as it remembers.QuilletteRobert C. ThornettMisinforming young people about the past in the name of national denigration is bad enough for its own sake. But historical misinformation is also being transformed into a kind of currency in a contemporary grievance economy—a way of tallying up compensation for past historical wrongs. In the US, this approach is particularly evident in the push for monetary compensation for the descendants of slaves. Last month, California’s Reparations Task Force recommended $800 billion in payments to descendants of slaves resident in the state. Since California was never a slave state, these numbers are based on estimations of discrimination in jobs and housing that occurred more recently. If adopted across the country, the cost of national reparations could top $14 trillion according to advocates.Besides the financial cost, the notion that history can justify payments to people for crimes committed more than a century ago is both counterproductive and self-defeating. This whole notion of racial justice fails to acknowledge the complex factors that determine how and why the fortunes of groups and individuals fluctuate across time. During the Victorian era, who would have predicted the extraordinary achievements of Asian immigrants across the West? In the worldview of racial radicals, however, everything is the fault of colonialism and European oppression, and as such, constitutes only an outstanding debt.But the urge to place a dollar price on racial redress is fundamentally flawed. Other considerations such as the decline of the stable family in American life generally, and particularly among blacks, are not allowed to interfere with the preferred narrative of systematic oppression. The call for reparations ignores “socially mediated behavioral issues” in the here and now, notes economist Glenn Loury, and denies people the personal responsibility central to dignity and self-respect. Worst of all, it lays a paternalistic burden of minority salvation on whites, notwithstanding the endemic racism of which they frequently stand accused.John McWhorter has long argued that other forms of compensation, such as the preferential policies euphemized as “affirmative action,” encourage “therapeutic alienation” among black people and other minorities, leading some of them to adopt a mentality of “anger and scapegoating” instead of doing “the work needed for success.” It is the notion of overcoming, he argues, not dependence, that has led to almost all ethnic progress, whether it has been among Irish, Italians, Jews, Hispanics, West Indians, Asians, or today’s African immigrants. The Case for Black OptimismSydney. London. Toronto.QuilletteColeman HughesRather than exploit history as a means to drain public funds, we can instead learn from the past successes of previous generations who fought for progress in the face of often tremendous odds. It is delusional to deny the enormous expansion of human rights over the past half-century and the gains experienced by most ethnic groups as a result. Reading the ahistorical grievance narrative promoted by progressive activists, one would never know that American blacks now have the lowest unemployment and highest job numbers in their history or that these promising developments may be durable.History is more than the story of remorseless white oppression—it is a shifting narrative of rising and falling power and changing contingencies. Cruelty has never been the province of one people or civilization. The African monarchs, the Chinese emperors, the Mongol warlords, and the Native American tribes all practiced brutality and mass enslavement of their enemies. At one time or another in their histories, most cultures have had the chance to dominate or have been made to experience domination. As Herodotus, the father of history, noted: “Human prosperity never abides long in one place.”Uncomfortable HistoryGrappling with Western misdeeds does not require us turn indigenous tribes into pious exemplars of moral instruction.QuilletteChristopher J. FergusonClimate ChangeWidespread concern about the warming of the planet and its potential dangers also needs to be understood in its proper historical context if we are to avoid the existential despair that currently pervades the topic. In his recent book The Earth Transformed, environmental historian Peter Frankopan notes that contemporary warming is “modest in the grand scheme of climate change” and the conditions with which humans have previously had to contend. Human history’s emergence dates from the passing of the aridity of the Ice Age, when some of our forebears may have hibernated through the long brutal winters. The long warming period that followed, notes historian Edward Barbier, ushered in the agricultural revolution at the heart of civilization.Many factors played a role in shifting climate conditions, including volcanic eruptions, deforestation, and overgrazing, Frankopan notes. Sea level rises and extreme tsunamis have recurred over the centuries as well. Humanity’s best times have generally been when the weather was warm and wet. The Roman warm period, notes Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome, defined the empire’s remarkable and durable rise. “The climate,” he writes, “was the enabling background of the Roman miracle.” Similarly, empires in the East, such as the Tibetans, rose with favorable weather and declined when things turned drier and cooler.By 536 BCE, the chronicler Procopius noted that “the sun gave its light without brightness.” This period of cooling helped usher in the Dark Ages, and played a role in the collapse of the Han dynasty as well as political collapses in India and Mesoamerica. The cold weather undermined farming, weakened trade, and made the world’s population more vulnerable to epidemics. Cold weather, dry conditions, and plague, which appeared numerous times in this epoch, created what Frankopan calls a “cocktail of catastrophe.”But weather patterns change, sometimes for the better. The shift to the medieval warm period in the early years of the new millennium helped to bring about the Renaissance, when populations and agricultural production rose around the world. In contrast, during the ensuing Little Ice Age—traceable to factors like volcanic activity and low sunspot cycles—harvests failed, disease spread, and populations fell. This climate disaster ushered in a particularly bleak and bloody period, which led to starvation and political mayhem in India, Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Europe’s population dropped precipitously, by as much as 30 percent. In A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman writes:In 1315, after rains so incessant that they were compared to the Biblical flood, crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horseman of the Apocalypse, became familiar to all. The previous rise in population had already exceeded agricultural production leaving people undernourished and more vulnerable to hunger and disease. Reports spread of people eating their own children, of the poor in Poland feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet.Yet even in those difficult times, many societies adapted to the changing conditions. Frankopan notes that Chinese farmers developed new technologies to boost yields in the dry northwest, while the importation of hardier plants like potatoes and maize allowed Europeans and Asians to deal with cooling temperatures. Reduced populations spurred high wages and innovations in the more efficient use of horses and plows. Other innovations—from the development of the fur trade and hard liquors—helped people cope with tough conditions.Similarly, during periods of warming, other measures were needed, particularly to deal with flooding in low-lying areas. In the 13th century, the Dutch responded to rising sea levels by building dikes to hold back rising water. In Volume 3 of his The Perspective of the World series, French historian Fernand Braudel notes that this adaptation to natural challenges created a bountiful agriculture critical to the country’s remarkable global rise. Not surprisingly, the Dutch today are reinforcing their dykes in anticipation of further climate change.The Dutch example indicates the importance of technology to addressing the challenges we face now. During the Little Ice Age, which started around 1200 and lasted to the 19th century, humans began to find ways to develop new energy, largely derived from coal, and new technologies that allowed them to adapt to unfamiliar climatic conditions. This period saw the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Naturalis and the introduction of the scientific method, which the British philosopher A.C. Grayling has called “the birth of the modern mind.”Carbon-based energy—which is still the overwhelming source of all energy used—allowed societies to flourish in cold climates. In Das Kapital, Karl Marx wrote that the steam engine was “the prime mover, whose power was entirely under man’s control.” Humans achieved carbon combustion that would set the stage for exponential growth. As manpower was replaced by machine power, slavery was systemically abolished during the next century.Slavery and SteamThe dangers of forfeiting societal sustainability.QuilletteDavid FosterThese lessons from history are fascinating in their own right, but they also offer hope for how human innovation can be harnessed to mitigate risks and solve problems caused by our warming planet today. In 1900, Galveston, Texas, recovered from a devastating hurricane by building a seawall to keep the coastal city safe through numerous major storms over the decades. Now that climate challenges could become more severe, Texas is considering building an even bigger seawall called the Ike Dyke to withstand future storms.But instead of taking practical steps like these derived from past experience, an ahistorical approach to environmental activism is leaning into fearful catastrophism and lurid predictions of mass starvation and imminent apocalypse. Rather than campaigning to abolish air travel and fight capitalism, activists’ time could be better spent exploring how we might adapt to our changing environment. Given that rising emissions in places like India and China make “net zero” highly unlikely for the foreseeable future, the rational alternative to imposing destructive austerity is learning to reduce emissions while also accommodating changing conditions with innovation.Defending DemocracyA decay in the teaching of history and civics may help to explain why Millennials, despite their higher rates of university education, are far more likely than previous generations to be dismissive of basic constitutional and civil rights. Many, as I indicated above, tend to know little to nothing about the Soviet Union or the history of totalitarian communism. Some 40 percent of Millennials, notes the Pew Research Center, favor suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities—well above the 27 percent among Gen-Xers, 24 percent among Baby Boomers, and only 12 percent among the oldest cohorts, many of whom remember the fascist and communist regimes of the past. Nearly 30 percent of people under 30 even think it’s okay to have cameras in every home.Similarly, European Millennials, like their counterparts elsewhere, display far less faith in democracy and fewer objections to autocratic government than previous generations, according to a 2020 University of Cambridge report. Confidence in basic institutions, science, and capitalism in particular are at historical low levels both in the US and in the UK. History helps to provide us with a sense of perspective and a reminder of the value of liberal democracy and of the freedoms and protections it enshrines. It can also provide us with cautionary tales about its fragility. The West’s understandable excitement after the fall of the Soviet Union led many to embrace the idea that an “arc of history” was curving toward a permanent global ascendancy of liberal economic and cultural attitudes embraced by the Right and Left. In our enthusiasm, however, we may have been too dismissive of the role of historical memory. Distinguished commentators like Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman, and Kenichi Ohmae all wrote books in which they envisioned an era where even countries like Russia and China would shift in a democratic direction. But Ohmae’s 20-year-old notion of the Triad—a world controlled by a concert of enlightened governments in North America, Europe, and Japan—has not exactly come to pass. Fukuyama’s celebration of “the good news” of democracy’s inevitable spread, and his insistence that tech growth favors “a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism” now look dated to many realists and progressives.Perhaps more accurate was the vision laid out in Samuel Huntington’s 2011 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington predicted the Ukrainian conflict as well the resurgence, at the expense of the West, of many cultures—Indian, Chinese, Arab, Turkish—that had suffered a steep decline during the period of European predominance. Power, Huntington predicted, would shift from Western to non-Western countries. Rather than a world shaped by the logic of markets and the rule of law, we are now seeing the ascendency of autocrats and intensifying tribalization. In other parts of the world, primitivist religious urges have reasserted themselves.Of course, the final resolution of the current global crisis may yet prove the optimists correct. Some, including Fukuyama, suggest that the stronger-than-anticipated Western support for Ukraine demonstrates the global vitality of liberal democracy. The “arc of history,” he maintains, still bends towards liberal democracy. Yet the ghost of Huntington looms large, as much of the developing world, including emerging superpowers like India, eschew the anti-Russian crusade while building up a Hindu-led quasi-religious state. What is certain is that the defense of democracy at home and abroad depends upon an historical understanding of its value despite its manifest flaws, and upon an appreciation of how much worse the theocratic and authoritarian alternatives have proved to be, despite the idealism of their rhetoric.History’s Call: For Reason and ModerationThe ignorance and political instrumentalization of history has helped to turn a discipline intended as a method of discovery into another front in the ideological struggle between progressives and conservatives. As we can see in Florida and elsewhere, the Right can prove as censorious as the Left. There is also a gulf between older liberals, who still believe in America’s system and its capacity for reform, and younger progressives, who see the whole national project as rotten in the core. The old liberals, and their generally less doctrinaire view of history, seem to be on their way out.“The most effective way to destroy people,” noted George Orwell, “is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” This was particularly evident in the Soviet Union, where proletarian writers called on the state, as one put it, “to destroy the museums, crush the flowers of art.” Even late Soviet textbooks insisted that South Korea and the US, not Kim Il Sung, started the Korean war. In today’s Russia, history continues to be misrepresented in order to foreground the growing emphasis on Orthodoxy and traditional imperialism required by the current regime. This approach also characterized education under National Socialism. As historian Klaus Fischer notes in his book Nazi Germany: A New History, German history was “blatantly distorted to fit the National Socialist mold.”Today, we are faced with our own catastrophic cocktail of general ignorance and a drive for indoctrination. Maybe we won’t quite see a reprise of the early Middle Ages, when “the very mind of man was going through degeneration,” as Henri Pirenne once put it. But we could be creating what Roderick Seidenberg called “post-historic man,” cut off from the traditions and values of our civilizational pastA restoration of history, in all its complexity, is critical to escaping the polarized, rigid, and often insane political environment we now inhabit. The past provides warnings but also the inspiration needed to fend off despair. We have overcome challenges in the past and we can do so again, no matter how daunting things may seem. This hope is in desperately short supply among a distressed and anxious new generation. Historical knowledge is fundamental to achieving a better future. The Renaissance provides a clear precedent for this. The efflorescence of that period emerged in large part from the rediscovery of classical civilization. Humanism, which shaped our modern world, challenged the prevailing religious dogmas. This rediscovery of the classical past, notes the late historian Paul Johnson, was critical to the ascendancy of first Venice then Amsterdam, followed by London and New York. It provided the springboard for our own often chaotic but nevertheless tangible progress over the past 500 years.Rediscovering our history of achievement and seeking to improve upon it are critical if that history is to inform new generations, just as it did in Italy nearly a millennium ago. Recovering and embracing the past in all its complexity is our special gift to posterity.

Rolling out the announcement that he won’t run for re-election, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah has framed it as a passing of the torch. “At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s,” he said in a video statement. “Frankly it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.” He clearly means this as a rebuke to the 80-year-old Joe Biden and the 77-year-old Donald Trump, neither of whom, he said, “are leading their party” to confront the major issues facing our country. “The next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership.”

The problem with this argument is that Romney despises the next generation of Republican leaders. He’s watched the transformation of Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio into a Trump lackey with disgust. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance,” he told McKay Coppins, author of a forthcoming Romney biography. He’s similarly contemptuous of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri for indulging the lies that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. I doubt he’s a fan of the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz or the hucksterish presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.

Besides, as Coppins reveals in an Atlantic excerpt from his book, Romney himself thought of running a third-party campaign for president in 2024, deciding against it only out of fear that it would throw the election to Trump. So as much as I believe that America is stagnating under the death grip of the gerontocracy, I don’t think that’s why Romney is bowing out. Rather, he’s given up on a second Senate term because his brand of stolid, upstanding conservatism has become obsolete, replaced with a conspiratorial, histrionic and sometimes violent authoritarianism. His reluctance to say so clearly, at the cost of breaking with his party definitively, is evidence of something tragic in his character.

We know what Romney really thinks because of the access he offered Coppins, with whom he met weekly, giving him diaries, private papers and emails. “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” Romney told him.

Exercise’s health benefits are clear — it lowers the risk of everything from cardiovascular disease to cancer, obesity to depression. But even for those aware of all this, getting off the couch and out the door can be a challenge.Enter CrimsonZip, a new effort debuting this fall to get Harvard moving with the help of a mobile phone app and a new website. It is designed especially for the University community and encourages all kinds of physical activity, from rigorous endeavors like running, swimming, lifting, and exercise classes to just going for a walk or a leisurely bike ride.“We’re not looking to turn everyone into long-distance runners, but if we can get 10 percent to 20 percent more activity from people — and then they stick with it — the implications for their lives will be substantial,” said Richard Lee, professor of medicine and stem cell and regenerative biology, and co-chair of the CrimsonZip program.A key to making it all work involves another healthful pursuit: maintaining strong social circles. CrimsonZip tries to marry the benefits of exercise and social connection with features that make it easy to not only learn about activities on campus — like a run with Harvard on the Move, intramural games, or signups for the upcoming Jimmy Fund Walk — but also to connect with others who are interested in those events.Harvard’s many subcommunities already offer a wealth of physical activity programs, but it’s not always easy to know what’s out there. CrimsonZip addresses this directly by putting the information in one place. It also promotes connectedness for more casual activities, allowing users to check whether any other users in the library, a dorm, or a House feel like taking a walk for a study break. “We bring people to places like Harvard, and we teach them that to be successful you have to sit down and listen to lectures, and then sit down and study … we wanted to fight back against that.” — Richard Lee, professor of medicine and stem cell and regenerative biology“What we anticipate is that folks who are physically active with other people will be more likely to continue doing that because they’re getting a social benefit in addition to a physical benefit,” said project co-chair Giang Nguyen, executive director of Harvard University Health Services, associate provost for campus health and well-being, and the Henry K. Oliver Chair of Hygiene. “There is a lot of research that points to the mental health benefits of exercise, and there is a lot of research to point toward the mental health benefits of social connectedness. Just as with the We’re All Human campaign and other efforts to create a culture that embraces the importance of wellbeing and mental health, CrimsonZip is trying simultaneously to take advantage of both physical activity and social connectedness while supporting mental well-being.”A 2022 study by researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health showed that social connections protect against both depression and anxiety. In addition, the decades-long Harvard Study of Adult Development showed that strong social connections provide lifelong physical health benefits: Those who were most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were also those who were healthiest at age 80.So that makes CrimsonZip a twofer for health, and here is how it works. The app creates a calendar of activities that have a physical component, large or small, taking place anywhere on campus. It will be available to students, faculty, and staff, and let them connect with others — whether an established friend group, an impromptu tennis partner, or a one-time cycling companion.“We bring people to places like Harvard, and we teach them that to be successful you have to sit down and listen to lectures, and then sit down and study,” said Lee. “To be successful in our society, we’re telling you that you have to live unhealthfully, so we wanted to fight back against that.”The mobile app’s initial rollout is focused on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard College. The ultimate goal, however, is to expand to all of Harvard’s campuses, and even beyond the University, according to Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of the Biological Sciences and another of the program co-chairs. One of the project’s goals is to release the app under a permissive software license so others can use it and adapt it to their own community’s needs.“If it works here, everybody else on the planet can download this app and use it for themselves and their own institutions,” Lieberman said. “We’re going to make it available to everybody.”         The app creates a calendar of physical activities. It allows students, faculty, and staff to connect with others — whether an established friend group, an impromptu tennis partner, or a one-time cycling companion.    The program grew out of a desire to encourage physical activity in the Harvard community, Lieberman said. Though people sometimes think of college students as universally fit, studies have shown that many aren’t physically active, Lieberman said.“To help people to be physically active, you have to make it either necessary or rewarding. If you make it neither, guess what, people tend to avoid it, which is a totally natural instinct,” Lieberman said. “For that reason, it used to be that every university in the country required some kind of physical education — Harvard was no exception. Harvard, along with a lot of other universities, dropped that requirement in 1970. Since then, Harvard has made some efforts to make exercise rewarding, but what we have done so far doesn’t work for everybody. Our idea is to create a socially based program to promote physical activity for everybody, not just the people who get it already.”In 2021, Lieberman wrote “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding,” in which he discusses — among other topics — why getting people to exercise is so difficult. Shortly after the book’s publication, he came into contact with a Harvard alumnus, Jeff Tarr ’66. Tarr read “Exercised,” wanted to do something to help get Harvard students moving, and provided significant funding for the effort.The project itself had some trouble getting moving. Lieberman, Lee, and Nguyen approached Harvard’s then-President Larry Bacow to discuss the idea in 2020, just a few weeks before COVID-19 ground campus life to a halt.But as the pandemic’s emergency phase faded, plans accelerated. Nguyen, Lee, and Lieberman co-chaired a committee of faculty and administrators from an array of related fields, including David Laibson, the Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics; Ben Friedman, the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy; Latanya Sweeney, the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology; I-Min Lee, professor of medicine and of epidemiology; Erin McDermott, the John D. Nichols ’53 Family Director of Athletics; former HUHS Director Paul Barreira; and Maria Francesconi, HUHS’ senior director of nursing and health promotion. Program managers William Goodman, a postdoctoral fellow in Lieberman’s lab, and Morgan Redman, a health educator with HUHS, provided day-to-day oversight. “To help people to be physically active, you have to make it either necessary or rewarding. If you make it neither, guess what, people tend to avoid it, which is a totally natural instinct.” — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologistGoodman and Redman said their efforts focused on creating an app that not only pulls information from across campus into one place and allows users to connect with each other but is also intuitive and easy to use.“One of the concerns with any application development is you roll out the application, the user downloads it, and if they find it too complicated or too hard to use, 30 seconds later they’ll say, ‘It’s not for me,’ and never touch it again,” Goodman said. “We spent a lot of time making it as intuitive and natural as possible. Success for us will be establishing a user base, and when we move into next year, we’ll do a harder push, have a full feature set that has run through active users, and get some metrics on how much they are using it.”An advantage the project team has over other app developers is that they’re creating something for a single community rather than a broad, national audience. That will let them adjust to feedback fairly rapidly, should analytics, user comments, or other inputs indicate a feature isn’t popular or is confusing.“There are lots of competing priorities, especially for first-year students who’ve just stepped on campus,” Redman said. “As we introduce the resource to them, we’re trying to help them think about, ‘How do I have my Harvard experience and also maintain my health and well-being?’ This is a resource to help you do that.”After the rollout new features will be added, and it will be offered to other Harvard Schools as time goes on. Next year, organizers hope to begin using the app to collect anonymized data to gauge its effectiveness.“It’s frustrating that we’re teaching people to take on lifestyles that aren’t healthy. That’s not the right message,” Lee said. “The habits you develop when you’re young are important predictors of the habits that you have later.”

Presidential aides were in a state of nervous anticipation in the weeks leading up to the publication of Franklin Foer’s new book, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future. The book is the first insider account of President Joe Biden’s first two years in office, based on nearly 300 deep background interviews. Politico Playbook reported that “In Washington, the book will be a test for how a generally leak-proof White House grapples with the first detailed excavation of its successes and failures from the Inaugural through the midterms,” and added that “In recent days Biden aides have been scrambling to secure a password-protected PDF of the book.”Franklin Foer is a longtime Washington, D.C. journalist and staff writer at The Atlantic magazine. He was for many years a staff writer at The New Republic, along with briefer stints at Slate and New York magazine, and twice served as editor of The New Republic. He is the author of several books, including How Soccer Explains the World and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.In this podcast episode, Foer discusses why he thinks Biden “is inherently more interesting than the public or pundits assume he is,” how he came to write the book, and why he chose to focus on episodes from the early Biden presidency including the administration’s response to the ongoing COVID pandemic, the disastrous military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the struggle to pass critical legislation, particularly the Build Back Better bill that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act. Foer also talks about why Biden is a difficult boss who nonetheless inspires fierce loyalty from his closest circle of aides, the tradeoffs involved with Biden’s age, the question of whether Biden can accurately be described as a moderate or centrist, and why Biden has struggled with public perceptions of his presidency.TranscriptFranklin Foer: Biden is somebody who’s always had this maxim that good politics is good policy; that in order to make policy sustainable over the long run, you need to build a public constituency for it. You need to get out there and you need to be the used car salesman. And he’s not been very good at doing that.Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m delighted and honored to be joined today by Franklin Foer. He’s a staff writer at the Atlantic Magazine and was previously the editor of The New Republic — twice — as well as a staff writer at Slate and New York magazine. He’s the author or editor of five books, from 2004’s widely beloved How Soccer Explains the World to, most recently, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, which will be released on September 5th. Welcome, Frank!Franklin Foer: Pleasure to be here.Geoff Kabaservice: And huge congratulations on The Last Politician. This podcast won’t appear until after September 5th, Frank, but you and I are speaking before the release date and already it has stirred massive (indeed transatlantic) publicity and controversy. On August 29th, Politico Playbook described The Last Politician as “an eagerly anticipated” tome that would be “The first insider account of President Joe Biden’s first two years in office,” based on nearly 300 interviews you conducted from November 2020 to February 2023. They reported that “In Washington, the book will be a test for how a generally leak-proof White House grapples with the first detailed excavation of its successes and failures from the Inaugural through the midterms.” Politico added that “In recent days Biden aides have been scrambling to secure a password-protected PDF of the book.”I personally don’t know enough about the Biden White House to know how they will receive it. But as an interested reader of books like this, I can say that The Last Politician is really terrific. It’s just a wonderfully written account. It’s obviously based on superb inside intel as well as your long experience as a reporter in Washington. And it has actually a propulsive narrative thrust that I found both exciting and rather unexpected. Congratulations again.Franklin Foer: Thank you. I feel like part of the challenge of writing this book was that Joe Biden is a figure who’s generally not regarded as exciting, interesting, sexy — the subject of propulsive narrative. The thing that I tried to work with as an author was both the fact that Biden is inherently more interesting than the public or pundits assume he is; that he’s a guy who’s got an array of insecurities, status anxieties, but also somebody who’s got very unique theories of the world that grow from his experience. He thinks about the world in a way that is much more unconventional than you’d think from a person who is seen as so conventional. The second thing that I worked with narratively was just that there were all these crises over the last two years, beginning with January 6th, which happened to be the peak of the pandemic and also a moment when the country was teetering on economic collapse. This was existential.As a historian, you’ll know the Arthur Schlesinger books about the Roosevelt administration. And there’s really not a parallel between those two administrations exactly, but there are elements. When I started to read the Schlesinger books as a young man, I loved the way that he just created this sense of peril and went from there. That was what I used as my model. When I would get stuck writing this book, that was where I would go to just draw some inspiration.Geoff Kabaservice: Well, you succeeded brilliantly. I have to admit that I initially thought that, given Biden’s reputation for being boring, when I picked up the book I might use it as a soporific to help me sleep at night. Instead, I stayed up all night reading the book, so it cost me a night of sleep. Like I said, it’s a big spotlight that’s being cast on this book because it is the first insider account to come out about the presidency and it joins a kind of a select group of books that can be said to kick off that first draft of history in that sense.To take a metaphorical helicopter ride over the building before we set foot in the front door, can you tell me something about how your original intention to write about Biden’s first 100 days in office broadened into an account of Biden’s first two years in office up until the 2022 midterm elections?Franklin Foer: This book wasn’t initially my own idea. My publisher came to me just after Joe Biden had won the Democratic nomination, or had had his nominating convention and it seemed possible that he might become president. She proposed this idea to me and I hesitated for all the reasons that I think we’ve just discussed. I wasn’t sure. Joe Biden wasn’t a figure who I’d ever gravitated to, he wasn’t somebody that I felt any kinship with, and he’d run his campaign from his basement. He was this blank canvas for me in recent memory. And then there was the fact that I’ve never actually done a book like this per se, which is an insider account. There are a set of skills that are required to be able to pull a book like this off, and I wasn’t sure that I possessed them.I started out very nervously and was convinced that I was going to end up with not enough to fill out a book. Because part of the problem with doing a book like this, just as a matter of tradecraft, is that when people arrive in administration, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re all scared about leaking because they’re new to their jobs. The idea of collaborating on a work of history — even a first draft — is something that is at the back of their minds and they can only see the downside risk from collaboration. I started, and I started to make a little bit of progress here and there. I was a little bit saved by the fact that Biden, on his 100th day in office, proposed two big pieces of legislation which were originally known as the American Family Plan and the American Jobs Plan, which would become the infrastructure bill and then the Build Back Better bill, the thing that ultimately was culled down by Joe Manchin to become the Inflation Reduction Act. I was like, “Okay, he actually has a chance of becoming a transformational president.” Initially I thought the story was about dealing with the crisis of the pandemic and dealing with inheriting the destroyed institutions of government left by Trump. And then there was this other story that intruded and I thought, “Okay, well, this makes my book so much better, to have this legislative saga.” But the problem with that legislative saga was that I kept telling my publisher, “All right, Build Back Better is probably going to pass in October.” “Okay, Build Back Better is probably going to pass by the end of the first year.” “Okay, Build Back Better is never going to pass. What the hell is the terminus for my book?”I had a very wise publisher who just said, “Keep going. There will be an end date. You will discover it. But really you’ve got to let the piece of marble speak to you. You can’t sit there and chisel out a sculpture from a plan that you’ve got sitting on your desk.” That turned out to be very wise advice. And patience is not a journalistic virtue that I’m accustomed to practicing, but it was one that I had to learn.Geoff Kabaservice: Since you mentioned Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt, I noticed that in your source notes you paid tribute to the 1992 book What it Takes by the late Richard Ben Cramer, which was an account of the campaigns of the Republican and Democratic contenders for the 1988 presidential election, including Joe Biden. For listeners who might not be familiar with this book, can you tell us something about why you found it so important?Franklin Foer: It’s just a magnificent group biography of the presidential contenders from the 1988 election. What was so great about it, as it relates to Biden, is that Biden gave Richard Ben Cramer all this access. He let him trail him around. And there are just incredibly memorable scenes of Biden walking around this white elephant house that he’d bought in Delaware, and all of the class anxieties that went into this property that he was spending all this money on and fixing up by himself.Biden was a guy who wore his insecurities on his sleeve, which made him faintly ridiculous but also in his way endearing. Biden’s aged since then, he has had all sorts of experiences — his son has died, he’s become vice president — but people don’t change fundamentally over time. There’s enough of the core character that carries over from the decades.I began with this assumption that the Joe Biden who was there in that book still exists and would manifest himself as president. That Joe Biden was a great historical character and a great literary character. Once I accepted that fact, the book became much more pleasurable to work on.Geoff Kabaservice: I definitely see the echoes of Cramer’s work in yours as well. Anyone looking for the biographical details of Joe Biden will find most of them in your book: the death of his wife and child in a car accident just before he got into the Senate, the death of Beau Biden, his long years in the Senate and the way in which that institution really became a balm to him in the wake of the tragedies that he’d suffered. But I noticed that you did really launch the reader right into the action with Biden’s Inauguration on January 20th, 2021. And then you proceeded in a largely straightforward chronological march through the critical events of his first two years, including Biden’s attempt to undo the work of Trump before him, to respond to the ongoing COVID pandemic, to pass the critical legislation you mentioned including what became the Inflation Reduction Act, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, eventually Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the 2022 midterms.Your portrait of the president is based mostly on the experiences and perceptions of the people around him without the biographical flashbacks and historical scene-setting that’s I think more typical of books in this genre. Can you tell me something about how you decided on your approach to the subject?Franklin Foer: Initially, the start date for my book was March 2020, and I wanted to begin with the planning for the transition to power and to cover the transition in more depth. But then I decided, for a whole variety of reasons having to do with narrative tautness and the size of the book, to start on Inauguration Day, because that is the absolute beginning of an administration and it just seemed like the most sensible start date. You know, as an editor, I always felt like chronology was the reader’s best friend, and there’s just an overcooking that happens when you flash back constantly. I had enough material that I could craft everything in a reasonably taut sort of way. I tried to include some of the ideological, policy, and intellectual context for characters. That was one thing that was really important to me. A lot of times, this genre of presidential journalism skips over policy or treats policy purely as a matter of drama. But there were things like the way in which the economic consensus of the Democratic Party was shifting, or the way that China policy was shifting, that I wanted to include in the book because it felt important to me.But my goal as I started to mess around with the writing and to come up with a style was just to keep things moving, keep things taut in order to recreate that sense of perpetual crisis that was the actual reality of the White House.Geoff Kabaservice: There are some segments of the book where you’re actually slowing down the chronology and going day-by-day, including the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the blowup of Build Back Better, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine as well. I found those really amazing, and your ability to sustain the tension over that period was tremendous.Franklin Foer: Thank you. You look back on yourself and you look at books… This is a very, very strange source of inspiration, but there was a great history of World War I written by a Swedish historian, Peter Englund, that was just like a day-by-day account of World War I as experienced by a constellation of characters. I found it such a great read and such an utterly conventional device for structuring narrative, but ultimately so important because you can create the sense of how this is, to use the phrase, a “lived experience.” And governing is a lived experience, where you can see on any given day that you’d go through this cycle of despair and hope. Just to pause, one thing I felt very torn about is I’m talking about a group of elites who are running things. And definitely, the genre of this type of presidential history leans heavily on psychology and on personal relations. I tried to deepen it in the way that I could by focusing on some of the policy content and some of the background for how beliefs evolve over time. I was somewhat ambivalent about it, but the more that I reported and the more I thought about the contingency of history and the ways in which… There’s just no resisting the fact that if Joe Manchin had a different temperament, then there could have been this massive expansion of the social safety net, and it could have happened in the first year of the Biden presidency. Or if he’d had a different temperament, maybe he would’ve walked away from the Democratic Party altogether and there would’ve been no Inflation Reduction Act in the end. I think it’s a style of history that academic political scientists won’t especially enjoy, given their tendency to focus on structures. But it’s how politics works, it’s how politics is experienced. To write personality out of history, I think, is to simplify history.Geoff Kabaservice: I’m sure you could have written an 800-page book with the greatest of ease, as opposed to the 400-and-change-page book that you wrote. Was there anything that was particularly painful to give up?Franklin Foer: Like I was saying, some of the stories about the presidential transition were really painful for me to give up, because I’d spent so much time reporting them. I had like 40,000 words that I’d spent months and months reporting. There were some great stories about the various machinations to work with, for lack of a better word, the “deep state” in order to secure democracy. And there were some good characters that I had come across. One of Joe Biden’s best friends is his former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, who was briefly the senator from Delaware and just a really interesting guy. He actually happened to be one of the world’s leading experts on presidential transitions, kind of bizarrely, because Biden had asked him to go work on the Obama transition in 2008. He watched that up close and he saw all the irrational, inefficient ways in which a presidency is built. Then when he became a senator just after that, he introduced legislation to reform the presidential transition process. The legislation governing presidential transitions is actually named after Ted Kaufman, who was running Joe Biden’s transition. He had a whole counterintuitive plan about how to go about building a government. I was very sad to lose old Ted Kaufman from my story, but such is the price of narrative tautness.Geoff Kabaservice: Such indeed. I understand that most of your interviews were conducted on record but on deep background, which means that your sources shared information that you were free to use but with the caveat that you shouldn’t attribute that information to a specific or named person. I won’t ask you who your principal sources were at the White House. But I will ask what gave you confidence that your sources were conveying information that was accurate and relatively devoid of spin?Franklin Foer: Well, I assume most things come with a little bit of spin. You do your best to check against the recollections of other participants, and then you cull things that seem like they’re overwrought. It is a peril of reporting that any reporting that you do, any history that’s written, you’re relying on sources. And sources are imperfect. Memory is imperfect. People’s minds work in a way, even when they’re not trying to spin you outwardly, that they’re telling stories in a self-serving way because that’s what we’re made of. I can do what I can do, and I think there’s even benefit knowing that my book contains probably some stories that are self-serving and that’ll be corrected at some later date by a historian. It’s like the nature of that cliché, “the first draft of history” — it’s just a draft. But I think that the value of getting that behind-the-curtains peek in something close to real time is true. For an electorate that has to make up its mind about whether to reelect a guy or not, it’s important to get as much of that story now, with whatever the inherent faults of the genre. I guess what I’m saying is I began this process with a lot of questions and qualms about the whole genre. As I went about it, I guess my respect for the genre increased. I realized that I had been a bit smug about some of the faults in some of these other books, knowing now how difficult they are to pull together.Geoff Kabaservice: Well, terrific. Frank, as you know, I typically ask the people I talk to in these podcasts to tell us something about your personal background. Where did you grow up, where did you go to school, and what were some of your principal influences?Franklin Foer: Well, those are also the questions that are probably somewhat relevant to this book. I had a colleague at The New Republic, where I was editor for a long time, who would always say that you need to interrogate the subconscious reasons why you’re attracted to a subject. And once you understand that, then you can better unlock your reasons for doing it.I grew up in Washington, D.C. My father was — is — a lawyer who practiced antitrust law, but who worked in the Carter administration in the Federal Trade Commission and then had a sojourn in small business, because my grandfather had run a chain of jewelry stores in the Washington, D.C. area. My grandfather was getting old, and my dad was in the Reagan administration, and the Reagan administration had no place for a passionate antitrust advocate. So he did the thing that antitrust celebrates, which is small business, and he was a small businessman for a couple years. And then he returned to antitrust and started a think tank called the American Antitrust Institute in the 1990s, and kept alive the flame of antitrust during the dark periods. My mother was in public relations in the Washington area and set up the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue here, which is a major venue for literary events and Jewish events.I think that as that relates to my book… Coming out of the Trump era where Trump caused so many people (probably including myself) to become psychologically destabilized, to lose our minds, to not practice the type of reasoned thinking that we pride ourselves on, and was such a traumatic experience — I think I was drawn to the idea of writing about technocrats. Because I’d grown up in a world where I knew technocrats. My friends’ parents were technocrats. I grew up in a world where politicians were admired. I think on some level I wanted to be able to tell a story that saw the possibility of the redeeming features of the world that I came from. That’s how I’d stitch it together.Geoff Kabaservice: That makes a lot of sense. I don’t usually refer in these interviews to family connections, because they are they and you are you. But I did notice that you dedicated your book to your younger brothers. Your book actually does seem to me to have some of the love of words of your novelist brother Jonathan, and also the world-class noticing abilities of your Atlas Obscura co-founding brother Josh.Franklin Foer: Well, that’s very flattering of you to say. I’m extremely close to my two brothers. I dedicated my first book to my wife, and I dedicated another book to my daughters, and I dedicated another book to my father, and I’d really wanted to dedicate a book to my brothers. So this was my chance to do it.Geoff Kabaservice: Glad you were able to do that. If memory serves, you and I first spoke in early 2000, when you were writing for The New Republic about Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society of which both Presidents Bush were members. You must’ve been all of, what, 25 at that time?Franklin Foer: Yeah, something like that.Geoff Kabaservice: Half a lifetime ago…Franklin Foer: Well, it’s interesting… I think we could probably thematically connect some of the stuff from that conversation to this book. Because I think among the reasons that I was interested in speaking to you was that you had this interest in the American elite. That’s always been an abiding interest of mine. The sociology of the elites is really one of the great historical-journalistic subjects.Joe Biden interestingly, is somebody who prides himself on having gone to a state school. He has a very complicated relationship with elites. On the one hand, he seeks their approval. On the other hand, he’s acutely aware of the fact that they will never fully accept him because he talks differently, he thinks differently, he doesn’t have some of their cultural traits. That class anxiety, the class resentment, is just a thing that constantly propels him. The fact of two guys who had a conversation about Skull and Bones for The New Republic would probably amuse him and maybe even a little bit piss him off.Geoff Kabaservice: Fair enough. I wish we had time to talk about your time at The New Republic, speaking of elites, and my much more occasional participation in the magazine. You were a staff writer there for much of the first two decades of this century and then editor, first from 2006 to 2010 and then again from 2012 to 2014. You wrote about that latter stint as editor, during the time when the magazine was owned by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, in your 2017 book World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.The New Republic still exists, and I think Michael Tomasky has improved it since he took over as editor, from its low point. But it was my feeling, during the years that the magazine was owned by Marty Peretz and you were editor, that there would be no replacement for its distinctive mix of insider politics and serious treatment of culture if it disappeared. And I think there hasn’t been any such replacement.Franklin Foer: I would agree with that. I feel like there’s a void in the cultural landscape. The thing about a magazine like The New Republic, with that alchemy that you’ve just described that was both political insider material and then also high cultural criticism — it was just an anomalous combination of content, to use a word that probably doesn’t fit. So who would go about recreating something quite like that?Geoff Kabaservice: I think you said that the people who actually fit that description could have fit comfortably into the University of Mississippi football stadium.Franklin Foer: Yes. Yeah… That was a detail in a history of the 1960s that I had read once, which was exactly this, that the entire readership of The New Republic would’ve comfortably fit within the University of Mississippi football stadium. That’s just an image that can’t help but stick with you.Geoff Kabaservice: A few years after we spoke, I ended up working for David Bradley at the Advisory Board Company. I was around when David Bradley then acquired The Atlantic and was facing the same question of: Who is the readership there? How would you compare your experience working at The Atlantic to the old New Republic?Franklin Foer: I love working at The Atlantic. I think that it aims for a broader audience than the New Republic audience, and it’s achieved a far broader audience than the New Republic audience. We’re on the cusp of getting a million subscribers at The Atlantic, which is several University of Mississippi football stadiums stacked on top of one another.It has, in certain ways, higher journalistic aspirations than The New Republic had. I would say that one of the differences is that The New Republic had the energy in the vitality (at its best) of a weekly, even as we were forced by economic conditions to expand into a biweekly format and to adapt to the web. I think that weekly sensibility is kind of necessary for covering politics well. And it also was very British in its way. The New Republic was inspired initially by The Spectator and the New Statesman, these great British magazines. Michael Kinsley, when he edited the magazine in the 1980s and ’90s, was a relentless Anglophile, very much influenced by the heyday of little magazines in London. What’s great about that is that there’s this quality of British hackishness, which is that you move quickly. It’s cleverness, but there’s also … Even as you’re trying to write very stylish pose, you’re still doing it on deadline. The Atlantic is a monthly. It has more of the DNA of a ruminative publication with its roots in Boston and the mid-19th century in the abolitionist movement, and its connection to Emerson and Thoreau. It’s got a different metabolism and aims in a different direction. I think that persists even into the present with all of these changes. With long-form journalism, there’s a little bit more of a deliberate slowness to it in the way that it’s produced and the sense that you’re writing something that will have this much longer shelf life. I don’t know if that makes sense to you as a reader.Geoff Kabaservice: It makes a lot of sense, yeah. I’m trying to remember if your colleague at The Atlantic, George Packer, was on The New Republic once upon a time…Franklin Foer: He never was, no.Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. Well, in 2013, I think it was, he wrote extensively about Joe Biden as senator and vice president in his book The Unwinding. I can’t cite chapter and verse of George’s book, but the Biden of his portrayal was on the whole kind of an unpleasant figure: emblematic of Washington’s capture by the money power, prone to ignoring or even humiliating the people who worked for him outside of a charmed circle of insiders. Since you mentioned Ted Kaufman, he said in effect, “Biden disappoints everyone. He’s an equal-opportunity disappointer.” And this is coming from Biden’s best friend! But that doesn’t at all seem to describe Biden as president in the perceptions of the people who spoke to you for your book.Franklin Foer: Well, I think there are rough edges that Biden has in my account. He can embrace a mentality of victimhood when things aren’t going his way. He has a temper. I’d say there are a couple things that maybe would account for the contrast between those two accounts. The first is he lost his son in those intervening years, which I think had a real… it was the walloping experience of his life, or maybe the second walloping experience of his life. I think that aging, for better and for worse, has kind of mellowed him. I think achieving this thing that he sought for so long — the presidency — took the edge off of some of his insecurities. But look, he is a tough boss. He’s somebody who is just not an easy person to work for. I think it’s part of the Joe Biden that people don’t get to see, which is that for an old guy he’s so deep into the weeds of governing. He governs with this small circle around him, which is kind of his clan. They’ve stuck with him for decades and decades. I don’t think he could be the Joe Biden who always disappoints and also have this band of talented loyalists who’ve been attached to him for that long a period of time. Ted Kaufman may have said that to George but he’s also, in a way, Joe Biden’s most devoted aide, most devoted friend. You have to be able to square that sentiment with the loyalty. And you do that, you get the rounded picture of the guy.Geoff Kabaservice: That makes sense. I’m also interested in what you’re talking about in terms of a tradeoff with Biden’s age. I suspect that the aides who were trying to find that password-protected PDF were worried that there was going to be dreadful revelations about Biden’s aging. There really aren’t in your book. Biden says that he gets tired. Well, that’s not an admission against interest. I get tired; I feel tired.But you do point out that there are benefits of age. You conclude, I think, calling him “a man for his age” and in a way “the West’s father figure” — a calming presence. He has strategic clarity. Frankly, he has wisdom at this point, which I think serves him in good stead.Franklin Foer: Yeah. I think that I don’t quite know how to approach the age question going into this election, because I could describe what Joe Biden is like now. The Joe Biden who exists now I think is totally up to — cognitively, mentally — up to the task of being president. I think, for the most part, his age has probably made him a much better president than he would’ve been 10, 15 years ago, for some of the reasons that I’ve already described, with him being a bit more mellow than before — and also having witnessed everything before.I’m struck by some of the moments of crisis even in the last couple of months where you have the debt ceiling negotiation, you have the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Well, these are things that he participated in, versions of things he participated in when he was vice president. There was a banking crisis. There was a debt ceiling crisis. He knew how to execute in a very no-drama, painless sort of way where we didn’t end up going to the brink. I think that’s the benefit of age. I think with Ukraine, one of the things that I’m struck by… I would ask aides constantly, “Well, what’s the question that Joe Biden asks in meetings about Ukraine?” The answer was, “He’ll ask: ‘If I give this weapon system to the Ukrainians, how does that increase the risks of nuclear war?’” He’s somebody who grew up in the Cold War era. He’s from the Silent Generation. He understands that nuclear war is the thing to be avoided at all costs. It may be emotionally fulfilling to give the Ukrainians every arms system that they ask for, but it may not be the path of wisdom. I’m grateful to have somebody who has that historical experience to draw on.Interestingly, he’s gone in this different direction economically than you would’ve expected him to go in. He’s become the post-neoliberal, for lack of a better word, president. That’s based on instinct, and also there’s a willingness to break with orthodoxy that I think also comes from his own experiences, where he saw the impact of the financial crisis and how it left long-term unemployment. He was willing to accept some short-term inflation, I think, in order to reap the rewards of long-term unemployment. He so feared the scarring effect of having people without jobs for extended periods of time that he erred on the side of overreacting to the instability of the financial situation, unemployment, all of the pandemic economic problems that we faced.Geoff Kabaservice: When Biden was running for the nomination, there was a widespread perception that he was the moderate or centrist candidate. I wonder in what ways it seems to you accurate or inaccurate to think of him in those terms?Franklin Foer: I think culturally he’s managed to bridge some of the progressive, “woke,” whatever-you-want-to-call-it energies of the moment, but then also filter them through his political brain. And just being an old white guy, he doesn’t project radicalism. I think that his focus on persuasion has meant that he tries to avoid culture war in its most aggressive forms.On economics, I think that he still is relatively moderate. I don’t think that he’s… What’s interesting about the economics that have emerged as we head to the end of this first term is that there’s no economic redistribution attached to it. There’s not a grand expansion of anti-poverty programs. What he’s embraced are elements of New Deal liberalism that fell out of fashion, in the form of industrial policy, in the form of aggressive antitrust enforcement, in the form of more rigorous support for trade unions.It’s not even that novel. He’s kind of calling on the economics of his youth. I think it is a very 1950s sensibility to the way that Joe Biden thinks about the economy. His dream is that corporations behave like DuPont did in 1960. That’s his expectation for what’ll happen at the other end of this: that companies that had been very globally directed will be more rooted in American communities and therefore better American citizens. It’s a little bit naïve, but it’s a more optimistic version of post-neoliberal economics than some of its alternatives.Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a complicated but I think accurate description. It’s interesting… If you hadn’t kept the story of Biden’s first two years going up until the midterms, if you’d cut off maybe even just in the springtime of 2022, it would’ve seemed largely a portrait of failure after the initial successes around the vaccine rollout and the passage of the American Rescue Plan.You have excerpted in The Atlantic a description of the Afghanistan withdrawal and all of the disasters there. To what extent do you think history will blame Biden for the debacle around the Afghan withdrawal? How do you think the verdict of history 10, 20, 25 years in the future might be for that particular episode?Franklin Foer: I think it’s important to ask the question: What do we condemn Biden for with Afghanistan? I think there are a couple things. One is just the chaos of the operation. You had a couple days in the middle of August where we’d completely lost control over a situation that should have theoretically been eminently predictable. The cost of that moment, specifically at the time, seemed to be a loss of American credibility — that we’d looked callous, that we’d looked like a waning superpower. Two years later, I think you could say that some of that doesn’t hold up. We are still a behemoth in the world. We still have allies who trust us. We were able to orchestrate the alliance against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We’re pretty successfully orchestrating new alliances in the Asia-Pacific region. So that I don’t think holds up.I think that there’s a moral problem, a moral sin, which was that there were lots of people who thought they could depend on the United States, and they were left high and dry at the moment that they needed the United States most. That’s an issue that I think will stick to Biden in history. Then there’s this other part of the story, which is that they did successfully orchestrate the evacuation of 124,000 Afghans who might otherwise have been vulnerable when the Taliban came back to power.My feeling is that the return of the Taliban was basically inevitable as soon as the United States left the country. It was our military support and our military that was propping up the Afghan government. In the year leading up to withdrawal, after Trump had agreed to withdrawal, the Taliban just kept getting stronger and stronger. So there was no stopping that. It was just a question of how we would manage the transition to the Taliban.Negotiating a transfer of power to the Taliban would’ve been a very politically risky thing to do, and I’m not sure any administration would’ve had the ability to pull that off. We were very, very close — this is one of the tragedies — we were very, very close to negotiating a unity government that would’ve essentially included the Taliban, or maybe even been run by the Taliban. Ghani would’ve resigned from power and that unity government, or that Taliban government, would’ve peacefully assumed control over the country. It might have been possible with that to have better negotiated the withdrawal of our allies from the country.Geoff Kabaservice: I did find it interesting that there wasn’t anyone really, at any level of government or even in the military, who was predicting this rapid collapse of the Ghani regime. It wasn’t like Biden had this mistaken perception and everyone was counseling him against it. It was really very widespread.Franklin Foer: Yeah, I think that that’s true. I think people could see the collapse of the Afghan government happening in the distance, but nobody saw it happening as quickly as it actually happened. That’s the distinction.Geoff Kabaservice: At one point you say that the problems that Biden has encountered that are self-made don’t stem from age or a lack of acuity. They really come from his own indiscipline and imprecision. And those are lifelong qualities.Franklin Foer: Yes. He’s somebody who was always known as a gaffe machine. I remember when, during the Democratic primary in 2008, he called Barack Obama “articulate”…Geoff Kabaservice: And “clean.”Franklin Foer: …and “clean” and got flamed for that — rightfully so. Then in 1987, he had this plagiarism scandal where he was accused of taking Neil Kinnock’s, the Scottish Labour politician’s, life story and then making it his own in a speech. There are lots of examples of this from Joe Biden’s past. It’s part of who he is that he is an Irish-American politician who has his share — I’m using the crudest cultural cliches — of blarney. He’s a flaneur. He’s somebody who loves to tell a story and can’t help but make the story better in the retelling.He’s an emotional guy who sometimes gets carried away by the moment, as he did when he was in Warsaw and gave that famous speech where he improvised the line that “this man” — Vladimir Putin — “cannot remain in power.” He knew better. He’s somebody who preaches restraint, yet he couldn’t help himself in the moment.Geoff Kabaservice: Some of the other sources of problems and failures in the Biden administration seem to come from the structure of the Democratic Party itself. I found myself in unexpected sympathy with Anita Dunn, who witnessed the slow-motion collapse of the voting rights effort that Democrats (and activists more generally) put a lot of money and time and energy and political capital behind. I found it very interesting that she had actually urged her colleagues to craft their own approach to voting rights, so they weren’t just blindly following progressive groups who were fundraising off the issue. But it didn’t happen. The White House Domestic Policy Council on this issue alone didn’t conduct a rigorous review of the administration’s options. “Biden just accepted the claim that the bills were necessary for the political survival of the Democratic Party,” you write, “because that’s what activists and Nancy Pelosi told him.” Yet then he still went ahead and gave that speech in Atlanta where he essentially compared disagreeing with the stance on HR1 to that of Bull Connor against the Civil rights movement. You write that it was “an entirely foreseeable debacle” in behalf of these bills that never did pass. Yet the whole process still seems a little mysterious to me, except that sometimes the progressive activist tail does wag the Democratic dog.Franklin Foer: Yeah. Well, I think the other crucial piece of context there is that speech about Bull Connor and the approach that they took to voting rights — which was kamikaze — happened in the aftermath of the collapse of Build Back Better. They were getting nowhere with their domestic agenda, they had totally let down the left wing of the Democratic Party with that failure, and so they felt like they needed to do something to keep them on board. They were, to some extent, boxed in there in their own minds about their political options. They needed to prove themselves. I think what was interesting about that episode is how out of character it is really for Biden to engage in that adversarial rhetoric where he makes that overheated political comparison — because it really is. He would do that for Donald Trump, but it’s antithetical to his character to do that to Mitch McConnell or to Joe Manchin. An in the aftermath of that moment, he went to the Senate… He was in the Capitol to speak to the Senate Democrats. He thought he would just go knock on Mitch McConnell’s door to personally apologize. McConnell wasn’t there, so he was left wondering the halls of the Senate. It was a very pathetic moment.Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, absolutely. Yet then the corner was turned. You paint the story very well that Joe Manchin needed to be apologized to by people including Ron Klain…Franklin Foer: Yes.Geoff Kabaservice: And then he came aboard and actually, it seems from your description, improved what had been a fairly incoherent bill into a smaller but still transformational Inflation Reduction Act. But how, in your opinion, did Biden actually manage to bring on so many Republicans in the Senate for the CHIPS and Science Act, where I think 17 Republicans came on, and the infrastructure bill, where I think he got 19 Republicans?Franklin Foer: A couple of things need to be said about that. One is that you had a group of moderates in the Senate, moderate Republicans in the Senate, who were alienated from the Trump wing of their own party and who had been on the outs. They greeted the Biden presidency as this chance to reassert themselves. They thought that Biden would be the return of “the vital center,” to use a term. I think that Biden did a successful enough job of negotiating with them in good faith that he’s able to keep bringing them along. Susan Collins was a genuine friend of his. He would just keep calling her out of the blue to keep that conversation going. It’s part of the personal part of politics that does matter on some level.Also you have Biden lowering the temperature in general. He’s very reluctant to attack the Republican Party as a whole. His slogan is that he attacks “the ultra-MAGA” wing of the Republican Party — intentionally he does that in order to avoid alienating this group of Republicans that he thinks he can work with. He’s tried to calibrate the politics to be anti-Trumpist, but to leave the possibility for legislative compromise.Geoff Kabaservice: That makes sense. I was horrified to be reminded that the “CHIPS” in the CHIPS and Science Act is an acronym for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors.” Franklin Foer: Oh, God. Geoff Kabaservice: That’s just terrible.Franklin Foer: Can I say one other thing that’s underrated about the CHIPS Act? The CHIPS Act gives all of these subsidies to the semiconductor industry so they can build foundries and plants in the United States. But they’re also investments in AI and hard science and research institutes. Much like the Cold War created context for investments in research and development in universities, the rise of tensions with China similarly creates those sorts of possibilities.That money exists in the CHIPS Bill. It’s one of those things that won’t pay off in the short run, but there’s a likelihood that we’ll look back a couple decades from now and say, “Oh, the reason we developed this piece of technology, the reason we mastered this field in AI, is because we created these research centers. We created this academic funding for this research project.” And that’s there too, but way under the radar.Geoff Kabaservice: I share Ezra Klein’s concerns about the capacity of the state to execute on some of these laws that have been passed. But I think that’s definitely in the to-be-determined category. I think there were some truly important things in both the infrastructure bill and especially the CHIPS and Science Act.Franklin Foer: I’d love to read more robust debate about industrial policy and its pros and cons. What has surprised me about industrial policy as executed thus far is that there was this investment that was waiting on the sidelines, and just needed a little bit of a nudge to get in. Maybe it’s not the most effective public dollars that could be spent. But what I think what we’re seeing happening is that this investment provides what’s called a “coordinating event,” where you have these supply chains that are very intricate and fragile. They needed everything to fall into place simultaneously in order for business to have the confidence that it could make these kinds of investments. And that’s happening. The administration privately talks about something called “the Battery Belt,” which has popped up in the American South. You have companies that need to be located in relatively close proximity in order to make the supply chain actually happen and to operate in concert. And they’re happening.The level of initial investment spurred by the CHIPS and the IRA is really astonishing. On the level of just bringing private investment to bear, the acts are an unimpeachable success. Whether over the long run it’s efficient spending, whether government micromanages these things so that they’re less effective or maybe not effective at all, that is the to-be-determined question.Geoff Kabaservice: One of the advantages of Biden’s age is that as a member of the Silent Generation, he belongs to the last generation that believed in bipartisanship in a meaningful way. What do you think is the status of Biden’s current belief in bipartisanship, if you had to probe his brain?Franklin Foer: I think it’s pretty discouraging that the House is run by a set of Republicans who are basically indebted to the most radical Trumpist wing of their party. He sees that clearly, and that’s an issue. Yet he was able to cut a deal with Kevin McCarthy over the debt that involved a lot of face-to-face negotiations. To me, it was a classic illustration of “the Last Politician” I depict in the book, even though it comes outside of the timeline of my book.Because he brought McCarthy in. He didn’t know McCarthy well. He sized him up. He was able to suss out very quickly what McCarthy’s bottom line was and the places that he would be willing to give. And then, instead of exerting himself in the process, he let McCarthy be the one who would walk down the driveway to talk to the banks of the cameras. For weeks, it felt like the Republicans were winning. In public, McCarthy was able to take credit for a lot of stuff. Then once the details were actually published, it was clear that Biden had taken McCarthy to the cleaners — that he let him win the short-term war of public opinion in order to negotiate things that kept all of his priorities, Biden’s priorities, in place, and then even extended certain benefits in directions that he was able to get McCarthy to give.Geoff Kabaservice: But this question of public perception is an important theme in your book. You have this very interesting vignette of Ron Klain seeing this national outpouring of joy over the reopening after COVID, and yet the public seemed to think that Biden had nothing to do with it. You wrote about how the public would get upset about a problem — whether it would be the lack of COVID tests or a shortage of baby formula, container ships not being able to unload in ports — and the administration and Biden personally would apply all kinds of time and resources into solving these problems. It would solve them, and then the public would just move on to the next problem. You wrote that “There was no glory in technocratic troubleshooting,” which is a little ironic given that you got into writing this book partly because of your affection for effective technocrats.Franklin Foer: Also, I think it’s a strange paradox of the Biden administration that Biden is somebody who’s always had this maxim that good policy is good politics, good politics is good policy; that in order to make policy sustainable over the long run, you need to build a public constituency for it. You need to get out there and you need to be the used car salesman pimping your wares. And he’s not been very good at doing that. There are probably a couple of reasons why that’s so. I think with age, he’s probably become a little bit more of a limited communicator. He doesn’t have the energy that he once did to go out and hit the road. I think that he doesn’t love the media. He doesn’t give interviews. I don’t want to buy into Green Lanternism, which is this theory that presidents have infinite power if they only exploited the bully pulpit more; they are the equivalent of rhetorical superheroes who can bend the country to their will. It is a polarized country. People don’t have access to a media ecosystem where they can be persuaded about certain things. And people are polarized. Even on the left, there’s this sense of inflated expectations for what a president should be able to do or deliver. Whatever Biden has delivered is never going to be enough for that group. Still, we can fairly critique him for not doing a better job of making the public aware of his own accomplishments.Geoff Kabaservice: We don’t unfortunately have time to get into the tensions between Biden and Zelenskyy, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the head of Ukraine. But there were some interesting moments where you pointed out that part of the problem is that in Biden’s moral code, you have to be grateful for aid received — and Zelensky didn’t seem to be grateful. If anything, he seemed to be dismissive and just demanding more.I wonder if this is not a wisdom about the older model of politics that we’ve forgotten. One of the things I think historians are going to puzzle over about the present moment is how America cut child poverty in half with the expanded Child Tax Credit, and then it went away and no one seemed to care. Maybe this is because politics in some level has become too impersonal and you aren’t grateful for some bureaucratic adjustment. What you’re grateful to is the ward boss who gives you a job or gives you a check or gives you a sack full of Thanksgiving dinner. I wonder if there actually is not some wisdom in Biden’s approach that you have to make people feel grateful, and they have to show gratitude for things, if you want a coalition to be effectively kept together.Franklin Foer: I like that insight. I think that there is wisdom in that for sure.Geoff Kabaservice: As a last question… We cannot foresee the future. Neither of us has a crystal ball. But how do you feel, based on the work you’ve done in putting together this great book, about how Biden regards his own performance to this point and what he would like to do if he had the chance in a second term?Franklin Foer: Well, I mean, everything I know about Joe Biden is that he has high self-regard. His insecurities propel him to overstate his own achievements, even in this case where I think he’s got real good reason to crow. I would say that a second Biden term is unlikely to be a happy one, just for the reason that we’re going to have divided government. There are some lingering possibilities for bipartisan consensus, but it’s hard. If Democrats were able to take back the House, say, and Republicans maintain control over the Senate, I could see something happening with early childhood education that would be bipartisan because there’s interest there.I think he’s somebody who would relish being a foreign policy president, full-time, in a second term. I think the work of continuing to build and extend the alliance against China would be a primary occupation of his, and ending the war in Ukraine. He’s somebody who is a reluctant convert to the administrative state. As a senator, he was very skeptical of executive fiat and daydreamed about maybe going up to the Hill and holding office hours there. But so much of American politics now, with the country so evenly divided, comes down to which party does a better job of manipulating the powers of the federal government for their own ends. There’s a lot that can be done in that regard, whether it’s fighting climate change or having to deal with issues of racial justice, that I’m sure there are people cooking up plans to deploy.Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Frank Foer, thank you so much for joining me at this moment of relative calm before all of the thousands of klieg lights of international media descend upon you. And congratulations again for having written The Last Politician, which is available September 5th.Franklin Foer: Thanks for such a fun interview.Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.The post Joe Biden as “The Last Politician,” with Franklin Foer first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Joe Biden as “The Last Politician,” with Franklin Foer appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Paul Offit is not an anti-vaxxer. His résumé alone would tell you that: A pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine for infants that has been credited with saving “hundreds of lives every day”; he is the author of roughly a dozen books on immunization that repeatedly debunk anti-vaccine claims. And from the earliest days of COVID-19 vaccines, he’s stressed the importance of getting the shots. At least, up to a certain point.Like most of his public-health colleagues, Offit strongly advocates annual COVID shots for those at highest risk. But regularly reimmunizing young and healthy Americans is a waste of resources, he told me, and invites unnecessary exposure to the shots’ rare but nontrivial side effects. If they’ve already received two or three doses of a COVID vaccine, as is the case for most, they can stop—and should be told as much.His view cuts directly against the CDC’s new COVID-vaccine guidelines, announced Tuesday following an advisory committee’s 13–1 vote: Every American six months or older should get at least one dose of this autumn’s updated shot. For his less-than-full-throated support for annual vaccination, Offit has become a lightning rod. Peers in medicine and public health have called his opinions “preposterous.” He’s also been made into an unlikely star in anti-vaccine circles. Public figures with prominently shot-skeptical stances have approvingly parroted his quotes. Right-leaning news outlets that have featured vaccine misinformation have called him up for quotes and sound bites—a sign, he told me, that as a public-health expert “you screwed up somehow.”Offit stands by his opinion, the core of which is certainly scientifically sound: Some sectors of the population are at much higher risk for COVID than the rest of us. But the crux of the controversy around his view is not about facts alone. At this point in the pandemic, in a country where seasonal vaccine uptake is worryingly low and direly inequitable, where health care is privatized and piecemeal, where anti-vaccine activists will pull at any single loose thread, many experts now argue that policies riddled with ifs, ands, or buts—factually sound though they may be—are not the path toward maximizing uptake. “The nuanced, totally correct way can also be the garbled-message way,” Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me.For the past two years, the United States’ biggest COVID-vaccine problem hasn’t been that too many young and healthy people are clamoring for shots and crowding out more vulnerable groups. It’s been that no one, really—including those who most need additional doses—is opting for additional injections at all. America’s vaccination pipeline is already so riddled with obstacles that plenty of public-health experts have become deeply hesitant to add more. They’re opting instead for a simple, proactive message—one that is broadly inclusive—in the hope that a concerted push for all will nudge at least some fraction of the public to actually get a shot this year.  Listen to Katherine J.Wu on Radio Atlantic:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsOn several key vaccination points, experts do largely agree. The people who bear a disproportionate share of COVID’s risk should receive a disproportionate share of immunization outreach, says Saad Omer, the dean of UT Southwestern’s O’Donnell School of Public Health.Choosing which groups to prioritize, however, is tricky. Offit told me he sees four groups as being at highest risk: people who are pregnant, immunocompromised, over the age of 70, or dealing with multiple chronic health conditions. Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease specialist and epidemiologist at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, who mostly aligns with Offit’s stance, would add other groups based on exposure risk: people living in shelters, jails, or other group settings, for instance, and potentially people who work in health care. (Both Gounder and Offit also emphasize that unvaccinated people, especially infants, should get their shots this year, period.) But there are other vulnerable groups to consider. Risk of severe COVID still stratifies by factors such as socioeconomic status and race, concentrating among groups who are already disproportionately disconnected from health care.That’s a potentially lengthy list—and messy messaging has hampered pandemic responses before. As Gretchen Chapman, a vaccine-behavior expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told me last month, a key part of improving uptake is “making it easy, making it convenient, making it the automatic thing.” Fauci agrees. Offit, had he been at the CDC’s helm, would have strongly recommended the vaccine for only his four high-risk groups, and merely allowed everyone else to get it if they wanted to—drawing a stark line between those who should and those who may. Fauci, meanwhile, approves of the CDC’s decision. If it were entirely up to him, “I would recommend it for everyone” for the sheer sake of clarity, he told me.[Read: Fall’s vaccine routine didn’t have to be this hard]The benefit-risk ratio for the young and healthy, Fauci told me, is lower than it is for older or sicker people, but “it’s not zero.” Anyone can end up developing a severe case of COVID. That means that shoring up immunity, especially with a shot that targets a recent coronavirus variant, will still bolster protection against the worst outcomes. Secondarily, the doses will lower the likelihood of infection and transmission for at least several weeks. Amid the current rise in cases, that protection could soften short-term symptoms and reduce people’s chances of developing long COVID; it could minimize absences from workplaces and classrooms; it could curb spread within highly immunized communities. For Fauci, those perks are all enough to tip the scales.Offit did tell me that he’s frustrated at the way his views have frequently been framed. Some people, for instance, are inaccurately portraying him as actively dissuading people from signing up for shots. “I’m not opposed to offering the vaccine for anyone who wants it,” he told me. In the case of the young and healthy, “I just don’t think they need another dose.” He often uses himself as an example: At 72 years old, Offit didn’t get the bivalent shot last fall, because he says he’s in good health; he also won’t be getting this year’s XBB.1-targeting brew. Three original-recipe shots, plus a bout of COVID, are protection enough for him. He gave similar advice to his two adult children, he told me, and he’d say the same to a healthy thrice-dosed teen: More vaccine is “low risk, low reward.”The vax-for-all guideline isn’t incompatible, exactly, with a more targeted approach. Even with a universal recommendation in place, government resources could be funneled toward promoting higher uptake among essential-to-protect groups. But in a country where people, especially adults, are already disinclined to vaccinate, other experts argue that the slight difference between these two tactics could compound into a chasm between public-health outcomes. A strong recommendation for all, followed by targeted implementation, they argue, is more likely to result in higher vaccination rates all around, including in more vulnerable populations. Narrow recommendations, meanwhile, could inadvertently exclude people who really need the shot, while inviting scrutiny over a vaccine’s downsides—cratering uptake in high- and low-risk groups alike. Among Americans, avoiding a strong recommendation for certain populations could be functionally synonymous with explicitly discouraging those people from getting a shot at all.Offit pointed out to me that several other countries, including the United Kingdom, have issued recommendations that target COVID vaccines to high-risk groups, as he’d hoped the U.S. would. “What I’ve said is really nothing that other countries haven’t said,” Offit told me. But the situation in the U.S. is arguably different. Our health care is privatized and far more difficult to access and navigate. People who are unable to, or decide not to, access a shot have a weaker, more porous safety net—especially if they lack insurance. (Plus, in the U.K., cost was reportedly a major policy impetus.) A broad recommendation cuts against these forces, especially because it makes it harder for insurance companies to deny coverage.[Read: The big COVID question for hospitals this fall]A weaker call for COVID shots would also make that recommendation incongruous with the CDC’s message on flu shots—another universal call for all Americans six months and older to dose up each year. Offit actually does endorse annual shots for the flu: Immunity to flu viruses erodes faster, he argues, and flu vaccines are “safer” than COVID ones.It’s true that COVID and the flu aren’t identical—not least because SARS-CoV-2 continues to kill and chronically sicken more people each year. But other experts noted that the cadence of vaccination isn’t just about immunity. Recent studies suggest that, at least for now, the coronavirus is shape-shifting far faster than seasonal flu viruses are—a point in favor of immunizing more regularly, says Vijay Dhanasekaran, a viral-evolution researcher at the University of Hong Kong. The coronavirus is also, for now, simply around for more of the year, which makes infections more likely and frequent—and regular vaccination perhaps more prudent. Besides, scientifically and logistically, “flu is the closest template we have,” Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. Syncing the two shots’ schedules could have its own rewards: The regularity and predictability of flu vaccination, which is typically higher among the elderly, could buoy uptake of COVID shots—especially if manufacturers are able to bundle the immunizations into the same syringe.Flu’s touchstone may be especially important this fall. With the newly updated shots arriving late in the season, and COVID deaths still at a relative low, experts are predicting that uptake may be worse than it was last year, when less than 20 percent of people opted in to the bivalent dose. A recommendation from the CDC “is just the beginning” of reversing that trend, Omer, of UT Southwestern, told me. Getting the shots also needs to be straightforward and routine. That could mean actively promoting them in health-care settings, making it easier for providers to check if their patients are up to date, guaranteeing availability for the uninsured, and conducting outreach to the broader community—especially to vulnerable groups.Offit hasn’t changed his mind on who most needs these new COVID vaccines. But he is rethinking how he talks about it: “I will stop putting myself in a position where I’m going to be misinterpreted,” he told me. After the past week, he more clearly sees the merits of focusing on who should be signing up rather than who doesn’t need another dose. Better to emphasize the importance of the shot for the people he worries most about and recommend it to them, without reservation, to whatever extent we can.

Since rising to fame on YouTube in 2016, clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has amassed millions of followers.

However, the 61-year-old's controversial views on everything from transgender rights to feminism and white privilege have also made him plenty of enemies—including some famous faces.

Jordan Peterson in November 2018. Peterson has feuded with a number of public figures over the years. Chris Williamson/Getty Images News

Here is the full list of celebrities that the Canadian psychology professor has feuded with, from Hollywood A-listers to the Pope.

Elliot Page

Peterson was suspended from X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, in 2022 due to a post about transgender actor Elliot Page.

Tweeting during Pride month, the academic deadnamed the 36-year-old Umbrella Academy star, writing: "Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician."

Elliot Page in September 2023. Peterson was suspended from X, formerly Twitter, in 2022 after posting a tweet about transgender actor Elliot Page. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images Entertainment

Despite the ban, Peterson said he would "rather die" than remove the post, sharing a 15-minute Instagram video where he analyzed the social network's rules and complained that X did not "do me the favor of actually specifying my crime."

Olivia Wilde

Last year, Wilde described Peterson as a "pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community" in a discussion with Interview magazine. The 39-year-old actor was referencing "involuntarily celebrate" men, who are hostile towards to women due to their romantic failures, according to anti-hate organization ADL.

When asked about the Don't Worry Darling director's comments during a TV interview with Piers Morgan, Peterson said it was another example of people coming after him for "speaking to disaffected young men."

Olivia Wilde in September 2023. The actor and director called Peterson a "pseudo-intellectual hero to the incel community." James Devaney/GC Images

"I thought the marginalized were supposed to have a voice?" he said, becoming teary-eyed, before defending "incels."

"Demand high standards from your man. Fair enough," he said. "But all these men who are alienated, they're lonesome and they don't know what to do, and everyone piles abuse on them."

Pope Francis

In March 2023, Peterson criticized Pope Francis on X, after the 86-year-old posted about social justice on the platform.

"#socialjustice demands that we fight against the causes of poverty: inequality and the lack of labour, land, and lodging; against those who deny social and labour rights; and against the culture that leads to taking away the dignity of others," the head of the Catholic church wrote.

Pope Francis in September 2023. Peterson was criticized for bashing the pontiff earlier this year. Franco Origlia/Getty Images News

However, Peterson seemed to disagree with the sentiment, writing: "There is nothing Christian about #socialjustice. Redemptive salvation is a matter of the individual soul."

Peterson received angry responses from social media users of all faiths, with one user commenting: "I don't know what's funnier, you trying to lecture the Pope on what Christianity is, or that you're loudly proclaiming that acting like Jesus is wrong."

Cathy Newman

While visiting the U.K. to promote his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos in 2018, Peterson was interviewed by English journalist Cathy Newman for Channel 4 News.

English journalist Cathy Newman in 2017. Peterson and Newman had an ugly confrontation on Channel 4 News in 2018. Mike Marsland/Getty Images Entertainment

After the 44-year-old presenter challenged Peterson on the gender pay gap, the discussion became ugly, with both sides becoming confrontational. The 30-minute footage has since received over 46 million views on YouTube. While Peterson was praised by the right-wing media for his performance, Newman was inundated with abuse—including death threats—online as a result of the interview. Channel 4 subsequently brought in security experts to protect her.

In 2019, Newman said she was still receiving abuse over the interview—despite Peterson telling his followers to leave the journalist alone.

Yumi Nu

In May 2022, Peterson declared plans to leave X, then Twitter, after receiving an "endless flood" of insults. It was speculated that the backlash was in response to his comments about Yumi Nu, 26, the first plus-size Asian-American model to front Sports Illustrated, who he'd insulted in a post earlier that day.

Yumi Nu in 2022. Peterson called Yumi Nu's "Sports Illustrated" cover "not beautiful." Mike Coppola/Getty Images Entertainment

"Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that," he said in the tweet, which he later deleted. However, he hung around the site for a bit longer, posting further messages and retweeting anti-LGBTQ+ account "Libs of TikTok."

Jim Jefferies

In 2018, Australian comedian Jim Jefferies became known as the man who got Peterson to admit he was wrong. In an interview for the Jim Jefferies Show, the 46-year-old asked Peterson if people should be expected to bake cakes for an LGBTQ+ wedding if it is against their beliefs. The TV star was referencing the 2012 case of Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

"I don't think that's a very good idea," Peterson said. In response, Jefferies asked if bakers should be allowed to refuse to make a cake for a black couple if they "don't like black people."

Jim Jefferies in 2017. The Australian comedian interviewed Peterson for his show in 2018. Jesse Grant/Stringer/Getty Images Entertainment

"Allowed to? Probably," Peterson said. "That doesn't mean it's right."

Jefferies then asked Peterson about the Civil Rights Movement, and whether he'd argue that ordering business owners to serve black customers was wrong.

"No, that was right," Peterson said, to which Jefferson responded: "Why is that different?"

"Maybe it's not," Peterson replied. "Maybe I was wrong about that."

“The Permanent Problem” is an ongoing series of essays about the challenges of capitalist mass affluence as well as the solutions to them. You can access the full collection here, or subscribe to brinklindsey.substack.com to get them straight to your inbox. I have written already about contemporary trends that increase the risk of a descent into tyranny. Given the ongoing marginalization of ordinary workers in the labor market, it is reasonable to assume that their dependence on government for income support will deepen over time. Meanwhile, governments’ ability to track their citizens’ movements, purchases, social connections, and even thoughts and emotions is rapidly improving thanks to the internet, smart phones, and developing AI technologies. Put these two things together – a population dependent upon government as never before, and more legible to and manipulable by government than ever before – and the possibilities for abuse are obvious.Here I want to explore another source of vulnerability to despotism, one noted by conservatives from Burke onwards. And that is the risk of runaway centralizing rationalism. When traditional authorities are toppled and ancient arrangements are swept away, and all the intermediate social structures that grew up over centuries are dismantled, the structure of society radically simplifies: what once was a complicated, often convoluted amalgam of overlapping and competing hierarchies and authorities and loyalties resolves into an undifferentiated mass of subjects under a single, rationalizing central authority.In his classic work The Quest for Community, the conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet summarizes the Burkean critique: “Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.” And from there it is an easy step to “omnipotent political power arising from the disorganization of social institutions.”Burke’s prescient warning of the dangers of utopian rationalism (he wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France three years before the Terror) launched the intellectual movement of modern conservatism. Over the course of the 19th century, though, the triumphs of liberal modernity – both the wealth explosion triggered by industrialization and the ongoing extension of personal freedoms and political rights – revealed the serious blind spots and limitations of that movement. As Thomas Paine summed up his answer to Burke in The Rights of Man: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” Excess solicitude for ancient ways and established hierarchies blinds conservatives to the real suffering and injustice that exist under established institutions – and to the possibilities of genuinely liberating progressive reform.However incomplete its vision, conservatism does possess important partial truths. And in the 20th century, the old Burkean suspicion of centralizing utopianism once again proved illuminating – in particular, by revealing the supposed ideological opposites of communism and fascism as the products of a common totalitarian impulse. That impulse was seen as a response to “mass society,” the social order created by industrialization: a gigantic system of superhuman scale, directing and coordinating the efforts of millions of anonymous strangers, most of them serving as interchangeable cogs in a mechanism they neither controlled nor understood. Such social conditions, as Nisbet put it, inspired a “quest for community” – a desperate search for coherence and structure and belonging in the wake of industrialization’s wrecking ball. For many dangerous decades during the 20th century, it was totalitarianism of one stripe or another that seemed most responsive to the needs of those questers:The almost eager acceptance of the fantastic doctrines of the Nazis by millions of otherwise intelligent Germans would be inexplicable were it not for the accompanying proffer of moral community to the disenchanted and alienated German worker, peasant, and intellectual…Marxism as a mass movement is no different… To a large number of human beings Marxism offers status, belonging, membership, and a coherent moral perspective. Of what matter and relevance are the empirical and logical refutations made by a host of critics as against the spiritual properties that Marxism offers to millions…The greatest appeal of the totalitarian party, Marxist or otherwise, lies in its capacity to provide a sense of moral coherence and communal membership to those who have become, to one degree or another, victims of the sense of exclusion from the ordinary channels of belonging in society.Conservative fears of “mass man” (in Ortega y Gasset’s phrase) abated in the closing decades of the 20th century, first with the reviving fortunes of the political right and then with the collapse of Soviet communism. In the “end of history” 90s, there was considerable confidence that America, as an inherently “center-right nation,” would lead a world now disabused of utopian fantasies into a sunny new century of expanding freedom and prosperity.Two decades and counting into the dispiriting 21st century, however, the old conservative fears about the breakdown of established social structures look newly relevant. At the root of the malaise gripping the United States and other advanced democracies is the fact that these societies are disintegrating. Family and household sizes are shrinking, while church attendance and community service are down. Civil society organizations have been hollowed out, as mass-membership organizations with active local chapters have been shunted aside by elite-dominated nonprofits whose “members,” if they have any, are simply people who write checks. Private sector union membership has collapsed in the United States, and unions are in decline almost everywhere. Stable, decades-long employment at a big, established company is no longer a realistic expectation, and labor force participation has slipped considerably. Mass participation in politics has withered due to professionalization and the growing focus on the political theater of relative status contests. Partisanship grows inflamed and radicalized as political parties lose their ability to control candidate selection and shape debate. The ability of elites more generally to maintain control over information flows and thereby manufacture consensus has been badly degraded by the new, wide-open media environment, and the legitimacy of democratic governance and established institutions more broadly is ebbing badly.In short, virtually all the intermediate institutions that lend structure and coherence and solidarity and workable consensus to the superhuman scale of contemporary mass society are in decline. You can see it in the steadily dropping numbers for public trust in most major social institutions. The result is progressive atomization, as people’s connections to anything other than the market and state loosen and fray. Under these circumstances, as the bottom-up structures of mass society disintegrate, the only thing holding the social order together is top-down control. And as power concentrates in the center, the risk of a slide toward authoritarianism steadily mounts.We can already see the risk clearly enough: we are in the midst of a widely acknowledged global “democratic recession” in which a number of democracies have succumbed to authoritarian rule and others, including our own, are under serious stress. The immediate threat, of course, is coming from the populist right. Yet there has also been a surge in illiberal and authoritarian tendencies on the left, and there is at least some justification in seeing the populist uprising of recent years as a backlash against that surge.Let me refer now to a trio of writers whom I consider to be among the most thoughtful and insightful observers on the political right today: Tanner Greer, Matthew Crawford, and N.S. Lyons. Crawford is far and away the best known of the three: a research fellow at the University of Virginia and sometime motorcycle repairman, he is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, two superb books that both made a big impression on me. He now writes regularly on Substack at “Archedelia.” Greer is an independent researcher and writer who publishes on his website “The Scholar’s Stage”; Lyons is the pen name of a foreign policy professional who writes on Substack at “The Upheaval.”If you enjoy my writing, I suggest you check out all three authors and browse around for essays of interest. For present purposes, let me point you to the following pieces in particular: “Thoughts on Post Liberalism,” “On Cultures That Build,” and “Lessons from the 19th Century” by Tanner Greer; “What is vitalism?”, “The rise of antihumanism” (published in First Things), and “Minoritarian moralism” by Matthew Crawford; and “The China Convergence,” “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism,” and “Upheaval Interview: Matthew B. Crawford” by N.S. Lyons.I’ll start with Tanner Greer, whose analysis is the most modulated of the three. Unlike the “post-liberals” now so prominent on the intellectual right (with whom Crawford is at least a sympathizer and Lyons is fully aligned), Greer does not identify our current predicament as rooted in the allegedly fundamental errors of Enlightenment liberalism. “Post liberalism faults the wrong fall,” Greer writes. “Neither stripping our culture of the ideas of Ms. magazine or the ideas of James Madison could end the despair and anomie of American life. The problem is bigger than political philosophy.”Greer instead locates the fall in the complexification of economic life ushered in by industrialization – and with it the rise of management and bureaucracy to cope with all the complexity. As economic life – and then, consequently, political life – assumed superhuman scale, the result was a dramatic increase in the degree to which life was organized and directed from afar. And as the new organization- and expertise-intensive system came to displace older ways of doing things, people gradually lost their habits of spontaneous local organizing and problem-solving. Which brings us to the present state of affairs: “In the 21st century,” Greer writes, “the main question in American social life is not ‘how do we make that happen?’ but ‘how do we get management to take our side?’”Here’s a long passage that fleshes out this argument:To understand this point, consider the situation faced by the median 19th century American in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lives as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager. If he had settled near the frontier, he would have been involved in creating and manning the government bodies that regulated aspects of communal life – the school board, the township, the sheriff’s department, and so forth. Even if he was not a frontiersman, he was a regular attendee at the town, city, county, and even state government meetings most relevant to his family’s concerns. Between his wife and him, his family participated in a half dozen committees, chapters, societies, associations, councils, and congregations… To these formal institutions might be added dozens of informal task-based gatherings…This would change between the 1880s and the 1940s. Over those decades the median American transitioned from a life of autonomy and self-government to a life of dependence or domination. Now gainful employment meant working for a wage under the eye of an overseer. Eventually, the commands of the foreman were augmented by the gentler web of routines, rules, and procedures decided in faraway boardrooms. Specialists and executives – specialists and executives our median American had never met, and never would – were now deciding the patterns of daily life for millions of their countrymen…As went the working world, so went the political. A political culture once focused on affairs close to home – where interventions by individual citizens might matter – was superseded by a vast federal apparatus. Its regulations were baroque and confusing; its regulators lived at imperial distance from lives they regulated. With each passing decade another domain of knowledge – law, industry, science, commerce, and even culture – would be taken out of the hands of the every man and walled off as the preserve of credentialized expertise…It is no accident that the culture wars exploded only after the first generation born under bureaucracy came of age. The New Left was a rebellion against life under management. But the rebels had no experience with practical problem solving, strategy, or other skills of self-government… The New Leftists (and their counterculture foils, the boomer generation of touchy feely evangelicals) sunk their quest for meaning into the only place open to them: the existential exploration of identity and the loud expression of their individual values. Thus the selfish egoism of the boomers was less a result of wayward heresies whispered in the 1970s – much less the 1670s – than it was the obvious end game of bureaucratized life. There are no villains in Greer’s narrative, only the unfolding logic of radically changed circumstances. The centralizing rationalism that is the agent of the Fall in this story is not that of Enlightenment epistemology or political philosophy, but rather of capitalist industrialization. With expertise and initiative increasingly concentrated within a professional and managerial elite, personal agency – and with it, the internal locus of control that is so central to human flourishing – has leached away from the rest of society.Matthew Crawford’s analysis starts with bureaucratization and the rise of the professional-managerial class, but then moves on to focus on ideological developments within that class. It is virtually inevitable that people in control will seek to expand the borders of their empire, and so it has been with the PMC. It is thus eminently convenient that the worldview that now dominates contemporary society’s elites is one that focuses on humanity’s infirmity – that is, its profound dependence on expert oversight and control:There is a tacit picture of the human being that guides our institutions, and a shared intellectual DNA for the governing classes. It has various elements, but the common thread is a low regard for human beings, whether on the basis of their fragility, their cognitive limitations, their latent tendency to “hate,” or their imminent obsolescence with the arrival of imagined technological possibilities. Each of these premises carries an important but partial truth, and each provides the master supposition for some project of social control.In Crawford’s view, this anti-humanist worldview and the managerial imperative it inspires have not only drained agency and vitality out of ordinary life, but in so doing have fundamentally undermined the democratic nature of the polity. In Greer’s account, we see only the vacuum created by the over-managed loss of agency; with Crawford, we get an account of how the vacuum is filled by increasingly despotic overreaching:We are watching an ongoing transformation of our political regime, in which sovereignty (that is, the authority to decide) has gradually been relocated from its constitutionally prescribed setting, which granted a presumptive deference to the majority, to a set of mutually supporting technical and moral clerisies. These staff a state-like entity that expands its dominion on two fronts: the “woke” revolution and the colonization of ordinary life by technical expertise.These appear unrelated, but share an underlying logic. Both displace and delegitimize vernacular practices, as well as the understandings that support them. On both fronts, the legitimacy of the ruling entity rests on an anthropology that posits a particular kind of self—a vulnerable one, which the governing entity then positions itself to protect. Both developments expand the reach of managerial authority, generate new bureaucratic constituencies, and disqualify common sense as a guide to reality. On both fronts, the entity expands through claims of special knowledge.The net result is that, instead of a separation of powers, initiative and discretion are concentrated in what I will call the Humanitarian Party. It encompasses the diverse organs of a sprawling parastate that includes corporations, foundations, media, universities, and NGOs, and gathers these to a shared political vision. It identifies classes of people needing special protection (sexual and racial minorities, the immunocompromised, “climate refugees”), adopts them as clients, and conspicuously puts these before us in idealized form.Thus presented, recognition clients serve as mascots for various programs of social control that are powered by an ideal of compassion. However compassionate, such programs transfer power to a new class of social managers and political rent-seekers.Crawford is sympathetic to the post-liberal view that these developments are an inevitable consequence of centuries-old philosophical errors, but he pulls up short of declaring radical disaffection from the modern world. (In his interview with Lyons, he says that “I would be happy enough if we could just go back to, say, 1985.”)There’s no hedging with Lyons: he goes all the way with post-liberal radicalism. Like Greer and Crawford, he identifies the “managerial revolution” (citing James Burnham) as a critical turning point in social development. The complexification of economic life, and the attendant rise of management and bureaucracy, gave rise to a new managerial elite, which in turn developed its own justifying ideology: “While this managerial ideology, in its various flavors, presents itself in the lofty language of moral values, philosophical principles, and social goods, it just so happens to rationalize and justify the continual expansion of managerial control into all areas of state, economy, and culture, while elevating the managerial class to a position of not only utilitarian but moral superiority over the rest of society – and in particular over the middle and working classes.”Lyons describes the reigning managerial ideology (at least in its Western variants) as comprising the following elements: (1) “technocratic scientism” (“The belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood through scientific and technical means”); (2) “utopianism” (“The belief that a perfect society is possible – in this case through the perfect application of perfect scientific and technical knowledge”); (3) “meliorism” (“The belief that all the flaws and conflicts of human society, and of human beings themselves, are problems that can and should be directly ameliorated by sufficient managerial technique”); (4) “liberationism” (“The belief that individuals and societies are held back from progress by the rules, restraints, relational bonds, historical communities, inherited traditions, and limiting institutions from the past”); (5) “hedonistic materialism” (“The belief that complete human happiness and well-being consists of and is achievable through the fulfillment of a certain number of material needs and psychological desires”); (6) “homogenizing cosmopolitan universalism” (“The belief that … the systematic ‘best practices’ discovered by scientific management are universally applicable in all places and for all people in all times”); and (7) “abstraction and dematerialization” (“The belief, or more often the instinct, that abstract and virtual things are better than physical things, because the less tied to the messy physical world humans and their activities are, the more liberated and capable of pure intellectual rationality and uninhibited morality they will become”).Lyons distinguishes the “soft managerial regime” of the advanced democracies from the “hard” variety of China-style authoritarianism, but he argues that these share important common elements and indeed are in the process of converging – with China moving toward subtler forms of control and the democracies trending toward more naked coercion. In any form, the managerial regime as Lyons conceives it is inimical to both individual autonomy and popular self-government:It swiftly broke down traditional informal bonds of stable, resilient communities that had for centuries helped to shelter individuals, and tore up moral norms that had helped them structure and discipline their lives without the aid of the state. So liberated, the self-expressive individual was made a king in name, but left far more isolated, alone, and vulnerable in actuality. Such an atomized individual proved far easier pickings for the mass corporation, which swooped in to offer all manner of ready-to-purchase replacements for what was once the social commons, and for the state, which acted on demand to guarantee the sovereignty of these liberated selves and protect them from their own choices. Their capacity for self-governance thus degraded, and encouraged to think of themselves as reliant on the state for their freedom, the public’s demands for management by a higher authority then only increased relentlessly.In a fascinating disquisition on the anti-technocratic Christian vision of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Lyons traces the origins of technocracy and its totalitarian itch to a gnostic revolt against God and the goodness of creation – including, most importantly, the goodness of normal human life. I don’t have the space to share his analysis here, much of which I consider to be genuinely insightful, but it’s clear that he has come to regard Enlightenment rationalism and liberal modernity as essentially demonic projects, destined from their outset to hatch various totalitarian plots for the “abolition of man.”I reject this post-liberal position completely and unreservedly. It is of course true that there are totalitarian tendencies in modernity – we saw them come to full flower in the great tyrannies of the 20th century. But the dominant tendencies have surely been liberating and humanitarian: a colossal increase in the number of human beings coinciding with a dramatic uplift in material living standards; an explosion in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities coinciding with mass literacy and schooling; the emergence of governments subject to popular control and the rule of law coinciding with the stigmatization of war and widespread embrace of an ideal of universal human dignity. I find it genuinely hard to understand how thinkers who accuse their opponents (with some justification) of anti-humanism can fail to recognize the profoundly anti-human implications of their ideas. How does one profess love for God’s creation and then hold the view that the vast majority of people alive today are here only because of some dreadful mistake?With that important and fundamental difference noted (which, to repeat, does not apply to Tanner Greer), I will say that I find much to agree with in this critique from the right. These three men’s account of how complexification and bureaucratization have brought about mass learned helplessness jibes with thoughts I expressed in “The need for a counterculture.” The connection they draw between expressive individualism and ongoing atomization mirrors my analysis in “The loss of faith” and “Saying yes.” Their disdain for identity politics aligns with my own, as expressed in “The performative turn.” Greer’s discussion of the generally enervating effects of “life under management” has important overlap with points I made in “Loss aversion (by any other name) and the decline of dynamism.” The worries I expressed in “The retreat from reality” and “Choosing the experience machine” line up with Lyons’s points about abstraction and dematerialization. And Lyons’s depiction of a developing global managerial monoculture complements points I made in “The absence of systemic competition.”But while I agree that contemporary society’s concentration of social power and initiative within the PMC elite carries real potential for despotic abuse, I find the efforts of Crawford and Lyons – and other post-liberals – to portray the United States today as an emerging progressive tyranny to be overwrought and unconvincing. Yes, I bemoan the censorious turn of social justice radicalism over the past decade or so, and the degree to which that ideology has swept first through academia and then government, K-12 schools, and corporate America. Genuine injustices have occurred, and the stifling of free expression has been real. And the focus of contemporary radicalism on identifying and rooting out wrongthink of various kinds does carry a whiff of the totalitarian. Nonetheless, it takes a serious lack of perspective to see in all this a more serious threat than authoritarian populism, which actually succeeded in mounting an insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power. Crawford and Lyons also lean heavily on the pandemic experience in making the charge that managerialism has now assumed a harder and more coercive edge. The less said about this argumentative strategy, the better: at one point Lyons refers to the novel coronavirus, which likely killed more than 20 million people, as “relatively mild.” It hardly needs to be said that I don’t believe that trying to protect people from a deadly infectious disease outbreak constitutes mindless “safetyism.”Crawford and Lyons also overstate the degree to which managerialism’s spread to every nook and cranny of society reflects any kind of conscious ideological project. The reach of the “therapeutic state” and the influence of the “helping professions” have certainly expanded greatly since the advent of mass affluence, but much of that expansion has simply been in reaction to the totally nonideological operations of information age capitalism as determined by untold millions of totally nonideological consumer decisions. (Lyons is actually quite clear in recognizing this fact, but he unpersuasively tries to lump all business and consumer behavior into a larger and monolithic “managerial regime.”)But one needn’t see contemporary America as a partisan tyranny, or the product of one overarching and anti-humanist ideological vision, to reach the conclusion that contemporary society does contain elements of a kind of soft despotism. Here the still-relevant authority is Alexis de Tocqueville, and specifically his speculations near the end of Democracy in America on “what sort of despotisms democracies have to fear.” His prophetic warnings anticipated much of what has been discussed here. Writing when industrialization was still in its preliminary stages, he somehow intuited how conditions of democratic equality could steamroll over traditional structures and arrangements, leaving a flattened social landscape populated by solitary, isolated individuals and overseen by “an immense and tutelary power.” Here’s a portion of that famous passage:Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood….The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.I see the writings of Greer, Crawford, and Lyons as an updating of de Tocqueville’s analysis – and, with all the exceptions taken and caveats noted, I believe that their critique of contemporary society carries real weight. It is not out of bounds to spy the shadows of despotism in our current top-heavy social structure: there is too much power concentrated in elites, there is too little capacity for self-direction and initiative outside the elite, and as a result human potential is being squandered on a massive scale.But the enormous question looms: what is to be done? None of the three critics whose works I’ve been discussing here really faces up to the indispensability of high levels of organization and bureaucracy. It is only by the grace of the managerial revolution that we now have the luxury to even imagine the possibility of building societies with widespread flourishing. And to achieve the technological breakthroughs in energy and agriculture needed to safeguard our civilization from catastrophe over the longer term, we need large-scale impersonal markets and bureaucracies to continue functioning at high efficiency.The argument I am trying to advance on this blog is that there is a way out of our impasse. It is to be found in the fact that, while large-scale impersonal social institutions remain irreplaceable, their operation no longer requires mass mobilization of the population within those mass institutions. To rise to the challenge of the permanent problem, global capitalism must continue, but the global capitalist monoculture is something we can and should outgrow.A full, radical break with modern organization at superhuman scale is madness: it would entail billions of deaths and will never happen absent catastrophe. On the other hand, a partial, semi-radical withdrawal from organization at superhuman scale – in pursuit of abundance within face-to-face communities – is already technologically feasible and sustainable and can become much more so. And I believe that this hybrid solution would make the organization-intensive sector of the economy more sociologically sustainable as well – by narrowing its responsibilities, delimiting its boundaries, and providing a clear and attractive exit. In exploring this possibility, conservatives like Greer, Crawford, and Lyons and techno-optimists seeking the next level of social development may be able to meet on common ground.The post Life under “an immense and tutelary power” first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Life under “an immense and tutelary power” appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Controversial social media personality Jordan Peterson has taken aim at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as his career hangs in the balance.

The Canadian psychologist has been ordered to undergo social media training or risk losing his license to practice after people complained about his social media presence.

Peterson lashed out at the College of Psychologists of Ontario after he was mandated to complete the training.

He also blamed the prime minister for his situation, claiming it was the fault of "Canada's increasingly censorial state," in a column for British newspaper The Telegraph.

Jordan Peterson at The Cambridge Union on November 2, 2018, in Cambridge, England. He has once again lashed out at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (Photo by Chris Williamson/Getty Images) Chris Williamson/Getty Images

Peterson wrote the article this month, then this week lashed out at Trudeau on X, formerly Twitter. He joked about Trudeau's recent trip to India, where a mechanical snag with his plane saw him stuck there for an extra two days after the G20 Summit.

"Crunchy Crunchy Bugs It's all I ate While grounded Like a fool In India Sincerely, Great Leader@JustinTrudeau," Peterson wrote.

In another post he said: "But I like Disastrous trips To India Sincerely,@JustinTrudeau."

And finally, added a post about health care: "We like to take Our emergencies Slow Here in @JustinTrudeau Canada."

This month, Peterson complained about the training and called Trudeau a clown prince. He claimed that a small number of people complained to the College of Psychologists that the opinions he has expressed on social media have caused them harm.

The tweets in question criticized Trudeau's former chief of staff, questioned economic policies made around the climate change emergency, comments about a transgender anti-transgender content and critiquing a plus-size model.

"Every single opinion was a political or psychological statement; every one devoid of genuinely documentable "harm"—except perhaps to the tender sensibility of certain Canadian moralists in whose mouths butter wouldn't melt, in a country of fatal niceness and complacency," Peterson wrote.

Peterson then criticized Trudeau for saying that "there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada." Peterson argued that it has allowed the "domination by the fractionated ideas that will fight necessarily for central place."

"Justin Trudeau's insistence that Canada has no central identity has allowed the ideologically possessed fools who know nothing of the great British Common Law tradition and who have contempt for the Western tradition to make their postmodern ideas the central axis around which this once-reliable country now by law is required to rotate," he said.

"In principle, Canadians enjoy the right to free speech, but the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is severely and fatally limited by the notwithstanding clause, and leaves our rights endangered."

Peterson is no stranger to lashing out at Trudeau.

He previously called him a narcissist and in May 2022, blamed the prime minister for his dad not flying to California for his daughter's wedding. At the time, there were still travel restrictions in place to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Foreign nationals wanting to enter Canada were required to show proof of vaccination against COVID-19 and citizens were permitted to enter the country as long as they were not showing any COVID symptoms.

Despite Canada's restrictions, those traveling out of the country had to follow the rules of their destination, which in the case of California would be U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Expressing disgust to his 2.7 million followers, Peterson wrote: "I'm at my daughter's wedding in California. I will never forget [sic] @justintrudeau that my father is not here because of your utterly unconscionable, unconstitutional and vindictive travel ban."

Mobilizing the investment needed to complete the net-zero transition will require broad public backing and participation. Given that people living in poverty are less likely to support climate action, simultaneous efforts to improve living standards are essential.

MILAN – With the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week NYC about to begin, and the next UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) approaching fast, it is imperative that the world clarify the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. Far from being mutually exclusive, the former is a prerequisite for the latter: economic dynamism and improvements in living standards are vital both to finance climate action and to ensure adequate public support for it.

Fortunately, this is now widely understood. In June, leaders of some of the world’s largest economies – including Brazil, the European Union, the United States, Japan, and South Africa – issued a joint statement describing poverty reduction and protection of the planet as “converging” objectives. Similarly, the declaration released after the just-concluded G20 summit in New Delhi affirmed that “no country should have to choose between fighting poverty and fighting for our planet.”

Recent research by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) attaches figures to these twin objectives, with sobering results. Begin with the cost of action to protect the planet. The cumulative additional spending on low-emissions technologies and infrastructure that is needed to close the net-zero investment gap by 2030 would cost $41 trillion, or the equivalent of 4% of global GDP annually.

Fulfilling these investment needs and achieving the net-zero transition will require broad public support and participation. Because people living in poverty are less likely to support climate action, especially if they feel that their needs are being given lower priority, simultaneous efforts to improve living standards are essential.

This is not a matter merely of lifting more households above the World Bank’s extreme poverty line ($2.15 per day at purchasing power parity). To achieve sustainable development, we must clear a higher bar, which MGI characterizes as the “empowerment line.”

The precise placement of the empowerment line varies by country, reflecting cost-of-living differences. But the meaning is always the same. It is the threshold beyond which households have sufficient means to meet all of their basic needs – such as nutrition, decent housing, health care, and quality education – and to work toward economic security. Without the ability to save, households cannot build a buffer against shocks, including those created by climate change.

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Globally, about 4.7 billion people do not qualify as fully economically empowered, with about 40% of this population residing in India and Sub-Saharan Africa, though India’s high growth, if sustained, is likely to reduce this figure. Moreover, many in middle- and higher-income countries who seem to have achieved “middle class” lifestyles lack an adequate buffer against emergencies and shocks, and struggle to afford housing and health care. While they might not formally qualify as “poor,” they are unable to realize their full potential and may be at risk of slipping into poverty.

Closing the “empowerment gap” by 2030 would require the world to boost cumulative consumption by these 4.7 billion people by $37 trillion – about 4% of GDP annually. (The specifics vary considerably by region.) Together with the $41 trillion to close the net-zero investment gap, we are talking about 8% of GDP each year until 2030.

The scale of the challenge is daunting, but this should not lead to paralysis. On the contrary, there is good news embedded in our research that should galvanize all stakeholders: we estimate that accelerated growth, business-led innovation, and technological advances could get the world halfway to the combined goals.

Current momentum will not be enough. We must actively protect baseline growth from headwinds and commit to increasing productivity through investment in technology, new businesses, and skills development. Relevant opportunities are plentiful: innovations in artificial intelligence, financial technology, biomedical science, materials science, and more can contribute to productivity gains, inclusive growth, and the energy transition.

If accelerated growth creates better-paying jobs, and employers ensure that workers have the skills to fill them, almost two-thirds of the global empowerment gap could be eliminated, with just over two billion people crossing the empowerment line, and 600 million more escaping poverty. Meanwhile, almost $10 trillion of low-emissions spending could become viable for private actors by 2030. Economic growth, together with technological advances, could reduce the net-zero investment gap by some 40%.

What can be done to close both gaps? On the empowerment side, options include more investment in affordable housing, health care, and education, as well as direct support to vulnerable households. On the net-zero side, stronger public support and bolder policies could mobilize an even larger amount of private capital, further driving down the costs of low-emissions technologies. Overall, societal commitments averaging 2% of global GDP annually – $20 trillion cumulatively – could close both gaps by 2030, though these commitments risk adversely affecting the baseline economy.

In any case, creative financing mechanisms will be essential. Multilateral institutions, in particular, must devise new facilities for developing economies – an effort that would be bolstered by increased capitalization of these institutions and new risk-intermediation platforms to help crowd in private capital. Other innovative solutions – say, channeling surpluses from rising energy prices toward green investments – will also be needed. For this, the global financial system must find innovative ways to accommodate large cross-border flows.

Progress will be difficult, and the price tag large. But investments in closing the empowerment and net-zero investment gaps today would lead to a more prosperous, stable world. There is perhaps no more valuable payoff.

Researching human embryo development is difficult for several reasons, technical and ethical. There is the question of where to source the embryos, and ethical questions around how long to let them develop. Most countries follow the standard that human embryos can only be allowed to develop until day 14.

This line of research is also extremely useful, as much of the early anatomical organization is happening during this period. Researchers want to understand what can and does go wrong in this early stage of development to help develop methods of preventing problems. This research is particularly relevant to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) – success rate is 55% for women under 35 and decreases from there.

Researchers, however, have been working on an alternative to harvested human embryos – developing embryo models from stem cells. An embryo model functions substantially like a normal embryo, but lacks the ability to develop to a live birth. Laws limiting embryo research may therefore not applies to such models, yet they can teach us a great deal about normal embryo development.

Creating embryo models from stem cells has already been achieved in mice, and a recently published study now extends this to humans – Complete human day 14 post-implantation embryo models from naïve ES cells. “ES” cells refers to embryonic stem cells. To review some stem cell nomenclature, a stem cell is a kind of immature cell that can develop into other types of mature cells. A multipotent stem cell can develop into multiple cell types. A pluripotent stem cell can develop into any mature cell type in an organism. A totipotent stem cells can develop into any cell type in the organism or outside the organism, such as the placenta and yolk sac. Embryonic stem cells are totipotent stem cells harvested from embryos.

What does it mean that these ES cells are “naïve”? Apparently a specific operational definition is difficult, but it essentially means that the genetics of the ES cells have not yet differentiated in any way. Rudolf Jaenisch, a stem cell researchers, states:

“The naive ESC state that we have defined is, based on gene expression, DNA methylation and X chromosome inactivation, very close to that of the human cleavage stage embryo.”

There are also induced stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) and to some extent induced totipotent stem cells. The current study did not use induces stem cells, but natural embryonic stem cells. Research into how equivalent induced and harvested stem cells are is ongoing. At this point it look like they are pretty close, but perhaps not yet fully equivalent. This study bypasses that question by using embryonic stem cells.

What the researchers did was take those naïve ES cells and then treat them chemically in order to coax them into developing in to the four basic stem cell types that make up a developing embryo – epiblasts, which become the embryo itself; trophoblasts, which become the placenta; hypoblasts, which become the yolk sac; and extraembryonic mesoderm cells. The trick was mixing these four cell types together in the proper ratio.

Starting with 120 cells, the cells spontaneously organized themselves into the basic configuration of an embryo. That is one of the features necessary to be a proper embryo model. The other is that the structure then needs to develop through normal developmental milestones. It can’t just sit there, it has to grow like an embryo. Their model demonstrated both these features, and so can be considered an embryo model. They allowed it to develop for 14 days, complying with the standards of human embryo research even though it may not have been strictly legally necessary.

However, only 1% of their cell mixtures formed an embryo model. This is an important proof of concept, but the researchers still have a long way to go to perfect this technique. But already they have demonstrated some key features of such models. For example, the placental trophoblasts should form a complete layer surrounding the other cell types. If this layer does not fully development, then an embryo will not form. Meanwhile, the epiblasts formed a typical bilayer, beginning the organism necessary to form a human.

This model can potentially provide a critical window into early human development. Right now we rely heavily on other animals, such as mice or chickens, but there are important differences with humans which limit what we can conclude from this research. A human embryo model can potentially answer a lot of questions. But researchers agree the methods need to be improved with a much higher success rate.

It is important to note that this embryo model cannot develop into a fetus. It is already passed the stage of implantation, and so would not serve as a method of IVF. But still researchers seem to be entering a murky ethical area. How long can such embryo models be allowed to develop before they look too much like a fetus? It’s one thing to experiment on a clump of cells, and another to experiment on something that looks like a developing human. Even if the difference is mainly emotional, such research is likely to generate a lot of attention and controversy. That is why it was probably wise for the researchers to stop at day 14, to minimize potential controversy for now. But it is likely to come.

It will also be interested to see if such embryo models can be successfully created from induced stem cells, rather than embryonic stem cells. For now, probably not, but this could serve as an important marker for when induced stem cells achieve equivalence to embryonic stem cells. This research has been advancing incrementally but steadily for the last two decades, and will likely continue to do so.

This milestone is one more reminder that we are increasingly gaining control over the fundamental aspects of life – cellular machinery and genetics. The implications are likely to be profound.

The sad side of “smokefree”

Let’s not pretend that there are no benefits to smoking

Nostalgia is an indulgence best consumed in moderation, but it can be pleasurable. A lot of my happier memories are perceptible through a haze of smoke.

I’m one of few people who has actively enjoyed the smoking ban in bars and restaurants. Popping outside for a cigarette makes a change. It’s an opportunity to mingle with strangers. You can tell the jokes and stories you couldn’t tell inside. People it puts off smoking didn’t enjoy it enough to be doing it in the first place.

My best friend and I began to speak while smoking cigarettes outside a shisha bar. I got talking to my last two girlfriends while smoking outside pubs. Say what you like about the habit — and there is a lot to say — but it brings people together.

Now they want to ban this merry little luxury

Now they want to ban this merry little luxury. “Councillors at more than a dozen authorities have demanded the clampdown in a bid to help people quit smoking,” reports The Mirror, after a “Government-commissioned review last year recommended a ban on smoking outside any premises that sell food and drink”. This is all part of an attempt for England to “reach its target of being smokefree by 2030”.

Is that your target? I’m afraid it is now. People online have been debating whether the smell and “second-hand smoke” produced by people lighting up outside Britain’s bars and restaurants mean that it is not a matter of individual choice — but the goal is to prohibit individual choice. In that “Government-commissioned review”, Dr Javed Khan declares that “to truly achieve a smokefree society in this great country of ours, smoking should be obsolete”. Of course smoking would be obsolete in a smokefree society — but he means that this must be made the case.

Look — there’s no point shimmying around the blunt facts. Smoking is a very addictive and physically destructive habit. It’s killed millions of people years before they would have otherwise expired. I’m a fortunate man to have remained a social smoker and not felt compelled to let cigarettes seep throughout my life.

It’s no bad thing if smoking becomes rarer in society as people choose to step away from its consequences. The top-down drive for its eradication is not just obnoxious in the abstract terms of liberalism, though, but in its disruptive impact on people’s social existence. They are not transitioning into a different set of habits but just having habits swiped from them. Many young people have decided to smoke vapes instead, but it looks like these are going to end up being banned as well.

There’s an old phrase about babies and bathwater. Britain has embarked upon a decades-long campaign to make pubs more expensive and sanitised. Now, they are closing in their hundreds. That might not be bad news for livers and lungs, but how many friendships aren’t coming to be? How many relationships aren’t being inspired? In an ideal world, the sort of enthusiasm and intimacy that unites people would be created by healthier means. Is that our world (yet at least)? We can’t assume that when a social ritual is eliminated another will seamlessly emerge to replace it.

Where is the review into the effects of making hospitality “smokefree” on hospitality? Where is the review into the effects of the decline of British pubs, restaurants and cafes on people’s social lives and mental health? The irony is that some politicians who freeze people out of public spaces will then lament the fact that they are hooked on screens.

Again, I’m not trying to engage in the Hitchensian idealisation of smoking. (It probably killed Hitchens and Martin Amis after all.) But as the means of interaction and intimacy it counts for something. Health is wealth, for sure, but while I’m having fun with cliches I will add that money can’t buy you happiness. The romance of social life is being gradually drained from Britain, and it’s no good being fitter but bored and alone.

In the bottom of the 10th inning of the sixth game of the 1986 World Series, with the Boston Red Sox leading the New York Mets 5-3, Red Sox manager John McNamara sent Bill Buckner — a great hitter dealing with terrible leg problems that made him gimp his way around first base — back out to play the infield instead of putting in Dave Stapleton, Buckner’s defensive replacement. A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears.

Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Meaning that if you place a player where he shouldn’t be, or try to disguise a player’s incapacity by shifting him away from the likely action, or give a player you love a chance to stay on the field too long for sentimental reasons, the risk you take will eventually catch up to you, probably at the worst possible moment.

Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. Consider the dreadful-for-liberals denouement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s career, where nobody could tell a lifetime-tenured Supreme Court justice who had survived cancer that it was time to step aside and Democrats were left to talk hopefully about her workout regimen as she tried to outlast Donald Trump. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.

Or consider the Trump presidency itself, in which voters handed a manifestly unfit leader the powers of the presidency and for his entire term, various Republicans tried to manage him and position him and keep him out of trouble, while Dave Stapleton — I mean, Mike Pence — warmed the bench.

Has the Raj returned to roost? After the press captured Rishi Sunak offering a prayer inside New Delhi’s Akshardham temple on Sunday, that was the implication for many. A Hindu man leads Britain; to the north, the First Minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, is a Muslim man of Pakistani origin, another scion of British India; to the west in Ireland, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s doctor father grew up in coastal Maharashtra, south of Mumbai.If the early 20th-century racial theorists of white supremacy were still alive, they would be mortified that the “tides of colour” had truly “risen”. One might also expect the Left, if it weren’t for Sunak’s conservatism, to make much of this racial inversion. But scratch below the surface, and the true story here transcends reductive categories of race — if anything, it is a reflection of both premodern and globalised realities of class and caste. Consider Sunak, who once admitted that he did not have working-class friends as a young man, and who, like Varadkar, has a parent who is a physician, placing both of their proximate origins firmly in the professional upper-middle class. Yousaf’s father, meanwhile, was an accountant, perhaps more modest in origins than his peers to the south and east, but nevertheless still solidly middle-class.Despite today’s focus on race, class and status have always formed the bulwark of India’s elite ideology. As David Cannadine observed in Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, this explains Queen Victoria’s repeated habit of adopting and fostering children of African and Asian royals, inculcating them with Christianity. Separated from her white subjects by a chasm of class and origin, this practice was aimed at forming a ruling elite informed by 19th-century Victorian sensibilities of race, but also transcending them, harkening back to an older ideology where the rulers were a fundamentally different species from the peasants and shopkeepers they ruled.This class element in imperial life is clear even from the perspective of Indians; it was as much a British as an Indian ideology. Mohandas K. Gandhi’s initial activism in South Africa was motivated by his offence, as an upper-caste Indian, at being categorised with black Africans. Gandhi dressed like an Indian holy man later in life, a return to indigeneity, but in South Africa he initially exhibited the sartorial affect of an English-trained barrister. A vegetarian Hindu who had married a woman from his own caste at a young age, Gandhi was still in his early years one of Macaulay’s men: “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”Two hundred years later, the rise of Sunak and Yousaf illustrates how such class dynamics still hold the British nation in thrall. Both are ethnic Punjabis, but of a variety very distinct from the dominant element in British life, the Mirpuris. The Mirpuris, who hail from Pakistani Kashmir and its environs, form about 70% of the Pakistani population in Britain. These rural villagers eventually went to work in the mills of the English north, and have created their own Pakistani but essentially British working-class culture. Sunak and Yousaf’s family are ethnically related to the Mirpuris, but are more conventional Punjabis from further south: Sunak’s paternal lineage is rooted in modern Pakistani Punjab, as were Yousaf’s ancestors. But more salient than their Punjabi ethnicity is that Sunak and Yousaf both have connections to Africa. The mother and father of Britain’s Prime Minister were born in British Tanganyika and Kenya, respectively. Yousaf’s mother, though ethnically Punjabi, was born and raised in British Kenya.Suggested reading Vivek Ramaswamy and the rise of Indian AmericaBy Razib KhanSubcontinental people of East African provenance have been prominent in British life for decades: in 2011, more than 10% of those of Indian ethnicity in the UK were born in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania (this does not include those born of African Indians in Britain). And Sunak is hardly the only prominent African Indian in Conservative politics. Both the current and former home secretary, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, have African connections: Braverman’s father being Indian Kenyan and mother Mauritian, while Patel’s family are part of the Ugandan Indian diaspora. The Ugandan Indians, expelled in the Seventies from Idi Amin’s regime with £55 on their person, have re-established themselves as entrepreneurs and professionals in the UK, part of the reason that Indian Britons are a relatively affluent minority.These Indians, then, are a global people for a global nation. A simple racial calculus sees in Sunak a brown-skinned Indian, but the vast majority of subcontinental people do not have connections to Africa or the influential slice of South Asians who catalysed trade and travel along the shores of the Indian Ocean. This elite diaspora was always made up of enterprising individuals from commercial castes; self-selected for the personalities and peoples who ventured across the kala pani (“black water”). Sunak’s devout Hinduism and orthodox vegetarianism reflect his indubitably Indian cultural background. But the fact that he married not only outside of his caste but his ethnicity, with his wife being a South Indian heiress of one of India’s largest fortunes, simply confirms his membership of the global elite. Sunak may be of a nation, but he is truly not of any nation. After all, he filed US tax returns while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.Like Yousaf in Scotland, Varadkar in Ireland, and even Ramaswamy in the USA, Sunak is therefore hardly a representative son of the subcontinent. More than one billion South Asians live just as their ancestors have for thousands of years, tilling the land, speaking the tongues of their forefathers and venerating the landscapes of their ancestor gods and saints. But amid this population are an enterprising sliver whose skills, aptitudes and inclinations have injected them into the bloodstream of the quasi-post-national global world. These are children born to globalisation, cultures within the subcontinent who have operated inter-regionally and even internationally for centuries. Globalisation is part of their tradition, etched into their bones. Rishi Sunak was born in England, his father in Kenya, and his grandfather in Indian Punjab. But they were always of the world, their opportunities painted upon a canvas without a border.view comments

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.I have heard this statement from thousands of people in my career of teaching and researching happiness. I have said it myself many times; you probably have too. As the philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine declared in 426 C.E., feeling no need to offer proof, “There is no one who does not wish to be happy.”But what do we actually mean when we say we just want to be happy? Usually, that we want to achieve and keep certain feelings—of joy or simple cheerfulness—but that some obstacle prevents this. “I just want to be happy” is almost always followed by naming a source of unhappiness, such as money problems, relationship problems, health problems—or real tragedies. (As I write these words, the Maui wildfires have killed dozens, displaced thousands, and caused suffering that has affected us all.) From small problems to major catastrophes, life seems to conspire to make our wished-for happiness fleeting at best, inaccessible at worst. What a cruel paradox: We are wired to desire happiness yet seemingly doomed to a life of struggle that makes it unattainable.
This column draws on ideas from his new book, co-written with Oprah Winfrey, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is out today.
But what if this paradox was based on a misunderstanding of happiness itself? In fact, much of the most common and popular wisdom about happiness relies on a series of myths. As Oprah Winfrey and I are working together to show in our new book, Build the Life You Want, anyone can make true progress in building a better life for themselves and others if they can get past these myths, even amid a life that contains no small amount of suffering.Myth 1: Happiness is a feeling.
We all know what happiness feels like: It involves clear emotions such as joy, love, and interest—much as unhappiness involves emotions such as fear, sadness, disgust, and anger. But calling happiness itself—or unhappiness—a “feeling” is a mistake. That is like asserting that your job and your money are the same thing. You need your job to pay you, and how much you earn may be evidence of your professional effectiveness. But to reduce your work to money would be inaccurate and depressing.In a similar way, your emotional states both derive from and help deliver well-being, but they’re not identical to that well-being. Happiness is more than a series of neurological signals evolved to help keep you alive, safe, and able to reproduce. I prefer to think of it as a combination of three much less ephemeral components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.[Arthur C. Brooks: How to get the most happiness from your social life]Enjoyment starts with simple pleasure and then adds the company of other people, which calls on  our higher consciousness by requiring the executive capacity of our brain to exercise social skills. So a way to think of enjoyment, then, is: pleasure plus the company of others plus memory. Enjoyment raises happiness, as pleasure alone does not. That’s one reason, for example, ads for food and drink usually show people together, sharing a meaningful time in their lives, instead of consuming alone. The advertisers want to associate the product with long-term enjoyment (and thus happiness), not just momentary pleasure.Satisfaction is the joy you get from accomplishing something you’ve worked for. It’s that feeling you experience when you get an A in school after studying hard; it’s the glow from a well-earned promotion at work. Satisfied is how you feel when you do something difficult, even painful, that meets what you see as your life’s purpose.Psychologists have defined meaning as a combination of coherence (things happen for a reason), purpose (direction in life), and significance (your life matters). We can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even with little satisfaction. But if we lack meaning—which takes a lot of effort and sacrifice to find—we are utterly lost. Without it, we can’t navigate life’s inevitable challenges and crises. When we do have a sense of meaning, we can face life with hope and inner peace.Myth 2: Your problems are the problem.
You might have noticed in the preceding definition of happiness something that seems strange, possibly unsettling: All three of happiness’s elements call for some degree of effort, discomfort, or suffering, even for some unhappiness.[Helen Lewis: Harry and Meghan are playing a whole different game]Enjoyment demands the investment of time and effort. It means forgoing easy, effortless thrills. It can mean saying no to cravings and temptations. It can require taming the appetite for pleasure and living according to the rules of personal conduct on which you decide—such as staying faithful to your partner. Satisfaction, too, entails some work and hardship. If you don’t suffer for something, at least a little, it’s unlikely to satisfy you much.The common strategy of trying to eliminate problems from life to get happier is futile and mistaken. We must instead look for the “why” of life to make our problems an opportunity for learning and growth. And unsurprisingly, that last component of meaning involves the most suffering of all. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life,” the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning.Myth 3: Your goal is happiness.
In truth, you can’t be happy. You can, however, be happier.Searching for happiness is like questing for El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold. When we look for happiness, we might get glimpses of what it feels like, but it doesn’t last. Some people talk about happiness as if they possess it, but no one does. And all too often, the very people society thinks should be completely happy—the rich, the beautiful, the famous, the powerful—wind up in the news for their bankruptcies, personal scandals, and family troubles.[Read: Queen Sugar is the most luxurious show on earth]If the secret to pure happiness existed, we all would have found it by now. If happiness were simply a commodity in that way, it would be big business, sold on the internet, taught in schools, and provided by the government. But it’s not. The one thing every human has ever wanted since Homo sapiens first appeared about 300,000 years ago in Africa has remained elusive. We’ve figured out how to make fire, the wheel, the lunar lander, and TikTok videos, but despite all that human ingenuity, we have mastered neither the art nor the science of getting and keeping the one thing we really want. Some people manage to have more happiness than others, but no one can maintain it consistently.That’s because happiness is not a destination but a direction. We won’t reach a place of complete happiness in this life. But wherever we are in our journey of life, and however satisfied or dissatisfied we naturally tend to be, we all can be happier with self-knowledge, good habits, and a commitment to improve.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.If the message that happiness requires effort, involves unhappiness, and is largely unattainable strikes you as bad news, it shouldn’t. It should set you free. What it tells you is that your feelings can’t dictate your well-being, that your problems can’t stop you from getting happier, and that you can finally leave off looking for a lost city of gold that doesn’t exist. Here are four ways to apply this information to your life.Truth 1: Check whether you’re getting your happiness nourishment.
If you go to a nutritionist because you feel that your diet needs improvement, they’re bound to analyze your macronutrient profile—the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat you eat—to see where it’s out of balance and make adjustments. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning are the macronutrients in your happiness diet. So this is a good place to start as you assess your happiness and how it could be higher.Ask yourself whether you’re settling for mere pleasure or doing the work you need for real enjoyment. Are you making the sacrifices necessary to accomplish satisfying things? Do you have a secure sense of your life’s coherence, purpose, and significance? The answers you come up with for these questions can help you see where you should apply more effort, and where you can make the most progress toward getting happier.[Rebecca Rashid and Arthur C. Brooks: How to know that you know nothing]Truth 2: Stop trying to eradicate your unhappiness.
The Woodstock hippie motto was “If it feels good, do it!” This is plenty-bad advice—not least because it suggests settling for pleasure over enjoyment. But just as bad is a more contemporary moral imperative: “If it feels bad, make it stop.” A major reason people fail to get happier is that they spend so much of their time and energy trying to eradicate unhappiness from their life.You need negative emotions and experiences to achieve enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning in your life. We’re talking about not medical issues, such as anxiety and depression, but the ordinary suffering that befalls everyone at one time or another. You don’t need to seek out this suffering; it will find you. The key is not to fight it—with denial or palliatives—when it does find you but to accept it, learn from it, and grow as a person.Start each day remembering that every experience you have—positive and negative—is part of being fully alive. If you have been expending a lot of effort trying to avoid normal conflict, shielding yourself from rejection and disappointment and running away from sadness and fear, turn around and say, “Bring it on.” That will take some practice, but in time, you will be amazed at how much this can improve your quality of life.Truth 3: Remember the progress principle.
One of the great paradoxes of happiness is that what brings joy is not attaining a desired goal but making progress toward it. Some aims—chasing money, power, or fame—are misguided and harmful, but taking steps toward personal growth, skill acquisition, and connection with others is strongly correlated with enhanced well-being.This principle of progress was well understood at America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence did not guarantee happiness—a utopian promise beyond anyone’s capacity to realize. Rather, our “unalienable right” was the pursuit of happiness. Because happiness is a direction and not a destination, its pursuit makes that utopian promise as near self-fulfilling as we can hope for.[Arthur C. Brooks: The path to happiness is easy but narrow]How to pursue happiness, then? Not by valuing happiness highly—that is too vague, and overvaluing happiness as a goal can even lead away from well-being, just as saying, “I want more money” not only won’t make you richer but will make you feel more acutely that you don’t have enough. Instead, the right approach is to make noticeable progress in the habits that add up to making you happier.Truth 4: Adopt the four happiness habits.
It is easy to imagine that the habits that bring happiness to you are very personal and unique. After all, we are all different in our tastes. But looking at the research, we can identify some broad patterns in the consistent practices of the happiest people. They develop and abide by a faith or philosophy of life; they maintain a strong connection to family; they stay close to friends; and they strive to serve others through their work. Understanding exactly what these things mean and how they are made manifest in your life requires reflection and discernment. However, the broad categories of these habits are common to all.Perhaps these myths and the better-informed truths all make perfect sense to you. Even so, they can be devilishly hard to remember and practice as you go about your complicated life. So here is one more item, designed to cement the rest into your thinking and daily routines.Instructors sometimes use a technique known as “plastic-platypus learning” to teach people how to communicate newly gained knowledge by explaining it to an inanimate object—such as a plastic platypus. The research on this technique shows that if you can give a coherent account of recently acquired information, you will absorb and remember it better. A plastic platypus works just fine, but even better is a real person—a lot of research indicates that teaching a subject is one of the most reliable ways to learn it deeply yourself.You might ask how you can teach someone else to get happier when you still have so far to go yourself. That is precisely when and why you are the most effective teacher. The best happiness instructors are those who have had to work to gain the knowledge they offer, not the lucky ones who fall out of bed most days in a great mood. The lucky few are like the fitness influencers on Instagram who have superior genetics, can eat whatever they want, and have no idea what the challenges are for the rest of us.Don’t hide your own struggles; use them to help others understand that they’re not alone and that getting happier is possible. Your effort and pain give you credibility; your progress makes you an inspiration. And sharing the experience with others adds to that progress, making it a truly happy win-win.

It has been 22 years since the 9/11 attack that destroyed the World Trade Center buildings and a wing of the Pentagon and launched a string of American actions that were both inevitable and ultimately ineffective.

The attack was brilliant in conception. At its core were al-Qaida members who were prepared to go to their certain deaths. They entered the country through legal means about a year before the attack and received a flow of money for their operation. The most important part of the operation was the seizure of airliners that would serve as bombs, with the impact of the aircraft and the ignition of jet fuel serving as the agents of destruction.

Their mission required each of the four aircraft to have at least one pilot, but none of the plotters knew how to fly a plane. Apparently, the training could not take place in the Middle East because, considering the number of trainees, they might be detected. The plan therefore was to obtain flight training in the U.S., where private flying schools are common and where the hijackers would be hidden amid the large number of trainees. The men assigned to the mission had only to fly and navigate planes already airborne. They did not need to know how to take off or land. This oddity might have triggered concern, but the threat was inconceivable at the time.

The planes they chose to hijack seemed to have been thoughtfully selected. The hijackers wanted the aircraft to hit their targets as close to the same time as possible. If there was a wide gap, air defenses would be alerted and scrambled. Since radio contact would not be allowed or the voice would have had a foreign accent, the attackers needed to select planes that could hit their targets before interceptors could take off. When you look at the type of aircraft selected, they were all single-aisle planes, except the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. Taking control of the planes was fairly easy, since the attackers had weapons. (Pre-baggage check screening started after 9/11.) Once the pilots were incapacitated, the attackers took the controls and began changing course to the target. The danger at that point was that passengers, realizing what was happening, would surge toward the cockpit. Given the small number of attackers on board they could be overwhelmed, but a single-aisle plane allowed them to hold back their potential adversaries more easily than a dual-aisle plane. This was likely a deliberate choice.

Their targets were chosen because they were well known, not only in America but especially in the Middle East. Their intention in striking the U.S. was not to paralyze it, since that couldn’t happen anyway. The attack was directed toward the Muslim world, and therefore the significance of the targets had to be widely recognized. The World Trade Center, the Pentagon and another unconfirmed location were chosen. There has been much discussion of what was the target of the fourth plane. My guess, based on the fact that they picked large, visible targets, would be the Capitol, but whatever it was it seems the hijacking failed after the attackers were overwhelmed by the passengers.

As I said, the intent of the attack was to influence Muslims in the Middle East. Al-Qaida saw many of the governments in the region as betraying Islamic principles. It wanted to trigger uprisings against them. In their view, the populations agreed with their loathing of the regimes but were paralyzed by the view that American power was supporting these regimes. If al-Qaida could demonstrate that American power was an illusion and that Islamic bravery could attack the most important U.S. buildings, these populations might conclude that their own regimes – backed, they believed, by U.S. force – could be overthrown. In other words, the 9/11 attack used the U.S. as a platform to demonstrate American weakness to the Muslim world.

But 9/11 did not bring down the American regime. It did trigger U.S. overt and covert operations that in retrospect had more impact on the region than 9/11 had, garnering criticism from many. But these criticisms must be put in perspective. First, the idea that the U.S. would not act against al-Qaida was impossible. Passive speechmaking wouldn’t have been enough of a response politically. The idea that the U.S. could not protect itself had to be countered, even if true. The rage, and fear, of Americans at that moment had to be considered. This was a fundamental reality.

Second, anyone who wasn’t frightened in the wake of 9/11 was not in touch with reality. U.S. intelligence on al-Qaida was clearly inadequate, and this meant that we had no reason not to believe that they had far more deadly weapons, perhaps poison gas or even nuclear weapons. A repeat of the 9/11 attack was possible – even likely – in the minds of some analysts. Given that al-Qaida was hoping that the Americans would attack to prove their hostility to the masses, the U.S. leadership was in one of the most complex positions imaginable. The fear in the United States was palpable and rational. I recall being in Washington three days after 9/11 and staying in the Army and Navy Club, about a couple of blocks from the White House. I was unable to sleep and trying to imagine whether I would feel a nuclear strike or my consciousness would simply disappear. It was a time when the worst-case scenario was the only reasonable consideration.

The 9/11 operation was superb. Men who knew they were going to die mapped out and implemented a major covert operation on selected targets while remaining unnoticed by an excellent security system. But operationally impressive work did not result in the political results they dreamed of. There was no uprising, and regimes came and went in the normal cadence. There was no upheaval and no end to history.

It’s been a while since we did an update and there are a few things to let you know about.But first a quick introduction for new subscribers who might be wondering exactly what they’ve signed up to:You can find out more about what we do, and who we are, on our about page. But the quick version is that this is a father and son substack. Lawrence (the father) is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London, and author of many books on strategy and military history. He focuses on conflicts around the world and particularly Ukraine.Sam is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government, and former government adviser. He writes about UK policy and politics. We tend to alternate, though when a big story breaks in either field, one of us may write more than the other for a bit.We also have a monthly guest post – which this month was an interview with the Russia analyst Mike Kofman. Paid subscribers get access to 4-6 paywalled posts a month; full access to an archive of almost 200 posts; the ability to comment; and the opportunity to ask us questions. We have over 37,000 subscribers now (both free and paid) from 163 countries. A special hello to our one subscriber in Papua New Guinea.Subscribe nowSend us your questionsEvery couple of months we run a Q+A with paying subscribers. So please do send us your questions in the comments below, or by email, and we’ll do a post with as many responses as possible next week. They can be for either (or both) of us, on any topic. You can read the last set of questions and answers here.Other updatesLawrence’s latest book “Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine” is now out in paperback in the UK. It will be out in the US on the 1st December. It featured in numerous “Books of the Year” lists for 2023 and had glowing reviews across the UK and US press.A couple of other of recent pieces by Lawrence that may be of interest: on Prigozhin’s death in the New Statesman; and on how Putin is running out of options for Foreign Affairs.There was great family excitement when Lawrence’s article on strategy and the Barbie movie featured in the “Popbitch” newsletter. Not a sentence we ever imagined writing.  Meanwhile Sam wrote a feature for Prospect magazine on Starmer’s inheritance. You can read his monthly column for Prospect here. He also wrote a piece for the IPPR think-tank on how to assess public opinion about climate change (in which he tried to apply the principles from this post on how to read issue polling).  Sam also did a podcast series, with the brilliant Ayesha Hazarika of Times Radio, called the Power Test, with ten episodes looking at different policy areas and whether Labour is ready for power or not. There were some great guests including Alistair Campbell, Jim O’Neil, Alan Johnson, David Blunkett, and many others. We also had Darren Jones and Liz Kendall, both of whom got promoted to the shadow cabinet in Starmer’s recent reshuffle, so it’s obviously a career boost. A second series is coming soon.Finally, we’ve written before that the decline of twitter is making the substack network more and more important in helping us grow. We’re hugely grateful to the 167 other substacks that recommend us, as well as to all of you who share pieces on social media and via email. Substack have now introduced a way for us to say thank you to those who spread the word:When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.Refer a friendWhen your friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll automatically receive extra months subscription for free.Get 1 month free for 5 referralsGet 3 month free for 10 referralsGet 6 month free for 25 referralsThere’s even a leaderboard To learn more, check out Substack’s FAQ.

       Google's trial begins today. The Department of Justice has sued the tech giant for cornering more than 90 percent of the search engine market. The government argues that this dominance reflects anticompetitive practices, while Google counters that its search engine is simply a preferred service. "It's the government's first major monopoly case to make it to trial in decades and the first in the age of the modern internet," notes NPR. "The Justice Department's case hinges on claims that Google illegally orchestrated its business dealings, so that it's the first search engine people see when they turn on their phones and web browsers. The government says Google's goal was to stomp out competition."  The DOJ is beginning its antitrust trial against $GOOGL and it's being billed as the biggest antitrust case in 20 years. @EamonJavers has the details: pic.twitter.com/fn03V9OHlP — Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) September 12, 2023  At issue are the deals in place between Google and cell phone manufacturers like Apple, Samsung, and Verizon. Google pays billions of dollars to these companies to ensure that its search engine is the default on their phones. The federal government claims these arrangements are illegal and unfair to smaller search engines, like DuckDuckGo. Google has countered that its search engine is more popular by far—in fact, if it was not the default search engine on most cell phones, there is little doubt that the overwhelming majority of customers would choose it anyway. As The Wall Street Journal points out, Windows computers do not come preloaded with Google, but most users swiftly download Google anyway. The suit was first brought by the Trump administration. Former Attorney General William Barr said the lawsuit "strikes at the heart of Google's grip over the internet for millions of American consumers, advertisers, small businesses and entrepreneurs beholden to an unlawful monopolist." There is little doubt that Google commands a significant market share and that its deals with cell phone manufacturers come at the expense of rival search engines. But the relevant question is whether this hurts consumers. For most people, Google is the entrance point to the internet. If they wanted a different way to search, there are plenty available. DOJ's suit implicitly argues that the federal government knows us better than we know ourselves—even though our revealed preferences suggest that we like Google perfectly fine. Foes of government overreach should be rooting for another big loss. The Google trial is set to last for three months. Judge Amit P. Mehta, an Obama appointee, will decide the case.  FREE MINDS Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) wants the government to investigate Elon Musk following news that he prevented Ukraine from accessing Starlink when the country tried to attack a Russian warship. According to Bloomberg:  "The Congress needs to investigate what's happened here and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire," the Massachusetts Democrat said Monday at the Capitol. Musk, the chief executive officer of SpaceX, is expected to be among the technology industry chiefs to attend a closed-door summit with senators at the Capitol on Wednesday. Warren, a member of the Armed Services Committee, said she also wants the Defense Department to look into its contractual relationship with the company.  Perhaps Warren could investigate why Congress has outsourced its war-making powers to the executive branch. Technically, it's Warren and her colleagues who are supposed to be responsible for such foreign policy decisions.  FREE MARKETS The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved an updated coronavirus vaccine, which is designed to counter the XBB.1.5 strain of omicron. That strain is no longer dominant, though the FDA believes the new vaccine will still offer significant cross-protection. "Like earlier versions, they're expected to be most protective against COVID-19's worst consequences rather than mild infection," reports the Associated Press. That admission, however, is a good reminder that many of the vaccine mandates were premised on the idea vaccination would significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19 by preventing transmission to other people. People were encouraged—and in many cases, forced—to get vaccinated, not just for their own sakes, but also in the service of public health. The federal government should continue to rapidly approve new COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics so that anyone who wants them is free to take them. But it must never again go down the dark path of denying this choice to millions of Americans.  QUICK HITS  The Biden administration has reached a prisoner exchange deal with Iran. Will student loan repayments resume as part of the debt ceiling deal? Devastating earthquakes in Morocco have killed more than 2,800 people. North Korean President Kim Jong Un is meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The post The Trial Begins: DOJ Sues Google Over Search Engine Dominance appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s Ukraine visit and President Biden’s trip to India and Vietnam dominated international news. But Vice President Harris’s overlooked visit to Indonesia might turn out to be even more important in the long term. The front line of the great-power competition with China runs through Southeast Asia.

In Jakarta, Harris represented the United States (in Biden’s absence) at a meeting with nine of the 10 governments from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, known as ASEAN. (Myanmar, where the military junta is crushing its own citizens, was not invited.) She also attended the East Asia Summit, which includes China, India, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. She met with several regional leaders; she has established personal relationships with many of them. This was Harris’s fourth trip to Asia since she became vice president and her third to Southeast Asia.

Cabinet officials’ trips to China generate intense coverage but scant results. Conversely, Harris’s substantive work to advance alliances in Southeast Asia has gone largely unnoticed. This is partly because of Washington’s chronic neglect of this important but low-profile region. Those fighting international fires tend to draw attention more than those carefully tending the diplomatic gardens of the future.

“If you just look down the path of the next couple decades and think about what’s going to be important right now to do, strengthening relationships in this part of the world is going to be a big part of that,” Harris told me during an interview in Jakarta. “Showing up is very important … but it’s not enough.”

Harris is also dogged by a false narrative that she’s not up to the job on foreign policy — one undoubtedly amplified by misogyny and racism on the far right. This portrayal typically focuses on her one imperfect interview in Guatemala two years ago or the time she accidentally described North Korea as a U.S. ally during a visit to the demilitarized zone. In fact, since 2021, Harris has met with dozens of Asian leaders, including the heads of all five U.S. treaty allies in the region (Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and Thailand), many of them multiple times — patiently reinforcing ties that are crucial to U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.

Harris has also met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and briefly met with Chinese Premier Li Qiang last week in Jakarta. But she isn’t focused on China; she took on the Southeast Asia portfolio because it offered her an opportunity to step up and be useful.

“She’s serving in the same role for Biden that Biden did for President Obama on foreign policy, just in a different region,” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel told me. “She went to a major international forum in Asia and she took care of the business. It’s that simple. And that means a lot.”

She met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and they discussed a limited free-trade deal that could help the United States reduce its dependence on China for nickel and other minerals needed to produce the technologies of tomorrow. She has taken on crucial but low-publicity issues such as supply chains, clean-energy infrastructure and tensions in the South China Sea.

This is often not a glamorous assignment. For example, Harris boarded a Philippine Coast Guard ship last November and visited the remote island of Palawan, where she promised the United States would stand against “illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing,” which China is pushing to unprecedented levels, with devastating ecological and economic consequences. Although she was mocked by Fox News for visiting fishermen on Palawan, Harris told me it is important to convince people in these countries that America cares about their situation.

“You’ve got to know the history of the country, what’s their experience with this issue, what did their grandmother tell them when they were growing up about what this issue means to their family and their identity and their nation,” she told me.

ASEAN countries have more than 600 million people and a combined GDP of $3.2 trillion. And as China’s economic growth slows, Southeast Asia’s is set to accelerate; if ASEAN were a single nation, its economy would be the fourth-largest in the world by 2050. U.S. businesses already recognize the region’s potential. ASEAN countries have received more than $350 billion in U.S. foreign direct investment, which is more than American investment in China, India, Japan and South Korea combined, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The region’s stability is vital to the success of the U.S. and global economies. About one-third of all global maritime shipping traverses the South China Sea. That’s why China is building military bases there on contested islands and artificial features, while brazenly expanding its territorial claims, including as recently as this month.

Harris told me her experience as a former prosecutor informs her focus on enforcing the rule of law and international norms in the region. This plays well in Southeast Asia, where many governments shy away from grandiose talk about democracy vs. autocracy and want to avoid direct confrontation with Beijing.

“Prosecutors have to understand that you get your case as it is. You don’t [get to] make it up,” she told me.

That might be Harris’s way of acknowledging that the Biden administration’s strategy in Southeast Asia has gaps. Despite a long list of regional initiatives, the administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, which is meant to be the economic plank of the strategy, does not contain enough substance to be taken seriously in the region. Although U.S. trade with ASEAN countries rose to $520 billion last year, the administration rarely talks about the issue.

Southeast Asian countries have various relationships with Beijing, but none want to be forced to choose between the two superpowers. At the same time, China’s increasing economic aggression and military expansion are making regional leaders’ lives harder. Almost all want more U.S. engagement.

“There’s a variation in terms of their reluctancy or their ability to speak publicly about their concerns,” Harris told me. “The one thing that is pretty consistent is that they don’t ask us to stop talking about it.”

The most interesting moment in Harris’s trip came at Wednesday night’s gala dinner, when Harris invited Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to chat and then released a statement about their joint position on the South China Sea. That encounter was aimed at sending a message about growing alliances to confront China’s aggression without saying as much out loud.

Harris is careful when talking about China, not wanting to increase tensions in an already nervous region. I asked her whether the United States and China were in a Cold War. She said, “No” but quickly added, “There shouldn’t be a conflation between that point and what we are willing to do to compete and how clear-eyed we are about where there is a divergence of values and priorities.”

To be sure, Harris has been learning foreign policy on the job, as all diplomats must. But rather than assuming she already knew everything, she did the legwork to learn about this region from the people on the ground. Her conclusion, which is correct, is that the United States ought to listen to them more.

“We cannot have any credibility if we don’t have some level of profound and sincere interest and therefore knowledge about what is happening in other countries,” she told me.

Interest began accruing on federal student loans this month, with payments set to begin in October—roughly three and a half years since they were initially paused by the Trump administration in March 2020. While the pause was hailed as a necessary measure to help supposedly struggling student loan borrowers during the pandemic, not only did the pause extend far longer than its original justification would entail—it left both taxpayers and student loan borrowers worse off. The repayment pause on federal student loans was first introduced just days into the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Over the next several years, the pause was extended eight separate times. While Education Department officials attempted to justify the extensions with legal arguments for the first two extensions, the department offered no legal justification at all for the final six. Twice, officials renewed supposedly "final" extensions to the pause. However, June's debt ceiling deal mandated that the pause finally come to an end. As part of that plan, interest began occurring on federal student loans at the beginning of the month, with the first payment deadline coming in October. Over the past three years, pausing repayment on federal student loans was a disastrous policy. In total, the pause will have cost taxpayers an estimated $200 billion in lost revenue. And for all this money, there isn't much to show for it. According to a June paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, borrowers now have more debt than they started with before the pause began, not less. Adding to the high economic cost of the pause, another expensive program is about to dominate the federal student loan system. More than 4 million borrowers have now enrolled in the SAVE plan, a modified version of the most popular income-driven repayment (IDR) plan for student loan borrowers that was introduced along with Biden's now-defeated forgiveness proposal. Under the old system, borrowers could enroll in a program that would fix their monthly loan payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income (calculated at income over 150 percent of the federal poverty level) with loans typically forgiven after 20 or 25 years.  But under the new plan, borrowers pay far less. Monthly payments are fixed at just 5 percent of discretionary income (which is now calculated as earning above 225 percent of the poverty rate), with repayment occurring in 10 years if the borrower's balance is less than $12,000. And unlike in the previous plan, incomplete or late payments will still count towards the borrower's 10 years of required payments. The plan alone has been estimated to cost taxpayers $475 billion over the next decade.  The plan is so generous, and allows borrowers to pay back such a small amount of their loans before forgiveness in many cases, that some critics have described it as essentially turning student loans into de facto grants—a move that will incentivize students to take out more student loans, not fewer. "The changes mean that most undergraduate borrowers will expect to only repay a fraction of the amount they borrow, turning student loans partially into grants," wrote Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, last year. "It's a plan to reduce the cost of college, not by reducing tuition paid, but by offering students loans and then allowing them not to pay them back." While restarting federal student loan payments is an important step forward, the damages wrought by the pause—and other Biden administration student loan policies—will continue to do damage to taxpayers and do little to actually address the factors that lead individuals to take on too much student loan debt.The post The Federal Student Loan Pause Is Finally Ending appeared first on Reason.com.

Under Section 1052(c) of the Lanham Act, the federal trademark law, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) denies registration of marks containing the name of a living person without that person's consent. That presents a First Amendment problem when the mark criticizes a politician or other public figure, because the government is, in effect, denying a benefit based on the viewpoint a speaker is taking.

In this case, Steve Elster sought to register the trademark TRUMP TOO SMALL—intended as irreverent political criticism of the former president—for use on T-shirts. The PTO rejected registration of that mark, even though dozens of trademarks using the former president’s name favorably have been registered (with his consent). This isn’t political bias—a similar dynamic is in play with President Obama’s name—just a disfavoring of speech critical of someone. Indeed, favoring positive rather than negative messages about a named person is Section 1052(c)’s only meaningful function. Other parts of the Lanham Act independently ensure that trademarks creating a false association with a named person or deception as to a product’s source cannot be registered. All that Section 1052(c) does is equip named persons with the unilateral power to veto the registration of trademarks that they dislike.

After the Federal Circuit ruled for Elster, the government appealed to the Supreme Court, which took the case. MI joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on an amicus brief supporting Elster. We argue, in an entertaining brief by rising appellate star Chris Michel, that (1) the First Amendment prohibits viewpoint discrimination in law and in fact; (2) Section 1052(c)’s consent requirement causes de facto viewpoint discrimination because it disfavors critical trademarks; and (3) Section 1052(c)’s viewpoint discrimination creates serious First Amendment harms.

Photo: blackdovfx/iStock

Joe Biden's poll numbers are worrying for Democrats. Head-to-head polls show him tied with Trump, or even narrowly behind him. When the Electoral College is factored in, the situation may be even worse.

And then there's Cornel West. West, a leading public intellectual and democratic socialist, is running as a Green Party candidate, and he has Democratic insiders very worried. They worry that in a close race, West might peel away some Left-leaning voters who would otherwise vote for Biden, dooming the President's reelection chances. At least one poll has suggested that's exactly what could happen, with Biden winning a head-to-head matchup against Trump but losing when West is offered as a third option.

The threat West poses to Biden is real. Democrats who fear a Trump comeback are right to be worried, because even a small number of West votes in key states could make a major difference. But the serious question is: What can they do about it? West is running whether they like it or not.

Of course, there will be the usual efforts to restrict ballot access and keep him out of the debates. But how about this for a better solution: Biden should win over potential West voters by doing things that make those voters more inclined to re-elect the President.

After all, voters who defect to West are probably disappointed with Biden's performance. Maybe they're among those frustrated he hasn't done more to follow through on his promise to decriminalize marijuana. Or those who wish he'd be more aggressive in protecting abortion rights. Maybe they're climate activists who can't understand why Biden is continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects. Or maybe they're people who feel betrayed that Biden continued some of Donald Trump's harshest immigration policies.

Potential West voters might be tempted by West's long history of staunch opposition to militarism and economic inequality. They might be pleased that West promises to fight "against the escalating ecological catastrophe by targeting the corporate greed of fossil fuel companies and resurrecting the Green New Deal" or by his support for Medicare For All (which Joe Biden said he'd veto, even if it passed).

Cornel West on February 21, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Peter Daou, the former Democratic advisor to Hillary Clinton, has joined third-party candidate West's 2024 presidential campaign as his new campaign manager. Getty Images/Win McNamee

If Biden wants to win these voters over, he's going to need to prove to progressives that he's actually carrying out his promises and delivering for the American people. Clearly, they're not currently persuaded.

This means that the pressure from West might force Biden to be more progressive than he otherwise would have been. The more it looks like West imperils Biden's reelection, the more Biden may have to shore up his left flank with new actions on student debt, labor rights, abortion, immigration, and climate change. Without reaching high numbers in the polls, West could exert quite a bit of influence on Biden's next year in office, since Biden will have to appeal to potential West voters if he wants to get re-elected. Already, we see new Biden actions that seem to indicate administration knows it has an enthusiasm problem, such as extending overtime pay, reversing course on oil drilling, and making it easier for workers to form unions. The more he fears a third-party candidacy, the more pressure he'll be under to do more of this stuff.

Of course, anyone who supports West's agenda should fear the return of Donald Trump, who will utterly crush labor unions and wreck the planet. Using a third-party bid to pressure Biden from the Left might be effective, but it's also something like a very dangerous game of "chicken," because if West pulls away too many Biden supporters, Trump will get back into office and all of the gains will be wiped away.

If I were Joe Biden, here's what I'd be doing right now: I'd be calling up Cornel West, inviting him to the White House, and asking him what three executive orders he'd like in exchange for dropping out, or at least imploring swing state voters to vote Biden. Democrats often display a resentful attitude toward third party voters, seeing them as dangerous fools. But treating people with contempt is a bad way to win their support.

Instead of trashing West and his voters, I'd suggest Biden try to win them over.

West is actually in a position of considerable power that he wouldn't have been if he'd run in the Democratic primary, as some have recommended he do. He could offer to leave the race in return for some concrete policies and extract concessions from the President. Or he can stay in the race, and the President may make concessions anyway in order to stay in office.

Personally, I'm very worried by the risk of a second Trump presidency, which would be a disaster for labor, the environment, immigrants, and pretty much everything else. But I also understand that politicians like Biden often only take certain actions when there is political pressure on them. And West's campaign certainly keeps Biden under pressure.

Nathan J. Robinson is the editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine and the author of Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

One evening in September 2022, a group of Ukrainian sea drones sped out into the Black Sea, heading for Russian-occupied Crimea. Their designers—engineers who had been doing other things until the current war began—had carefully targeted the fast, remote-controlled, explosive-packed vessels to hit ships anchored in Sebastopol, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. But the drones ran into a problem: Starlink, the satellite-communications system that Ukraine had been using since Russia invaded early last year, unexpectedly wasn’t working. This was a surprise to the engineers. Several people, in Ukraine and elsewhere, frantically called and texted Elon Musk, the owner of Starlink, to persuade him to enable the system.Musk, in turn, called Walter Isaacson, his biographer, and told him there was a “non-trivial possibility” that the sea-drone attack could lead to a nuclear war. According to Isaacson, Musk had recently spoken with Russia’s ambassador in Washington, who had warned him explicitly that any attack on Crimea would lead to nuclear conflict. Musk implied to several other people (though he later denied it) that he had been speaking with President Vladimir Putin around that time as well.[Read: Demon mode activated]These are details that you may have already heard. Many of them were first reported in May, by Oliver Carroll at The Economist. Since then, The New Yorker has also described how Ukrainian soldiers abruptly lost their access to Starlink on the battlefield during a different set of land operations. Isaacson’s version of the maritime story implies that all of the drones in the operation washed ashore that evening. But recently in Ukraine, I met some of the engineers who helped design the unmanned sea vehicles, including an engineer who was involved in the first attempt to hit Russian ships in Sebastopol. They told me that not all of the drones involved were lost. Some returned back to base, undamaged.Here is the part you might not have heard, or not registered: The same team launched a similar attack again a few weeks later. On October 29, a fleet of guided sea drones packed with explosives did reach Sebastopol harbor, using a different communications system. They did hit their targets. They put one Russian frigate, the Admiral Makarov, out of commission. The team believes that they damaged at least one submarine and at least two other boats as well.And then? Nuclear war did not follow. Despite Musk’s fears, in other words—fears put into his head by the Russian ambassador, or perhaps by Putin himself—World War III did not erupt as a result of this successful attack on a Crimean port. Instead, the Russian naval commanders were spooked by the attack, so much so that they stuck close to Sebastopol harbor over the following weeks.For their own security, I am choosing not to publish the names of the engineers. I was introduced to them by a tech executive I met on a previous trip to Ukraine, when I was writing about drone operations more broadly. This team has shown off its unmanned boats before, so I am not revealing secrets when I write that they are small, black, and hard to see on the water, and have a very long range—now more than 650 miles, the engineers told me. The drones are constantly reinvented and redesigned. Some of those I saw were described as the “fifth generation.” I was given remote control of one on a distant body of water; directing it felt remarkably like playing a video game.Like the more famous air drones, sea drones are a central important part of Ukraine’s idiosyncratic way of waging war. Unable to compete plane for plane or ship for ship against the much larger Russian military, Ukraine is using tiny, high-tech, custom-designed, and relatively cheap devices that can take large, expensive artillery, tanks, and ships out of the game. Many of these devices are built by groups that are not quite part of the military, but not exactly private either. This networked, grassroots, asymmetric response is part of how the Ukrainians hope to win the war. “This is Ukraine. We are hybrid,” one of the engineers told me.He also told me that although his drones didn’t destroy the whole Black Sea fleet, they have had an impact on the war. Russian military ships became more cautious. Instead of physically blocking Ukrainian grain transports, as some observers expected them to do, they have stayed in port. “We made them scared,” he told me. They were happy to confirm that if a Russian warship does try to block a cargo ship carrying Ukrainian grain, they will hit it.Musk was wrong, in other words. Instead of inspiring World War III, the sea-drone attack helped reduce violence, protected commerce, boosted Ukrainian farmers, and maybe even ensured that some people outside Ukraine didn’t go hungry. If not for Musk’s hubris, those effects might have been felt earlier. Maybe the first attack could have eliminated more of the ships whose missiles have been killing civilians in Ukrainian cities. Maybe fewer people would have died as a result. And maybe the war, which will be over when Ukraine takes back its own territory, and ends the torment of its own citizens on that territory, would be closer to its end.This is a cautionary tale about the arrogance of a billionaire who has come to play a mercurial role in U.S. foreign policy. But it’s also a story about fear, seeded and promoted by the Russians, deliberately designed to shape broader Western perceptions of this war. Musk is not alone: Many people in Washington, and in Berlin, Brussels, and other European capitals, including people who support Ukrainian sovereignty and who want Ukraine to win the war, have also been cowed by conversations with Russian ambassadors, by threats issued by Russian leaders, and by the pictures of nuclear explosions shown on Russian state television. Long before he spoke with any real Russians, Musk likely encountered that same propaganda in the Russian-influenced far-right echo chambers that he frequents. In 2016, Donald Trump probably got the idea to accuse Hillary Clinton of wanting to start World War III in that same social-media milieu.The Russians do this for a reason: Fear of escalation is designed to create self-deterrence—and it works. In 2014, Western leaders, fearing escalation, advised Ukraine not to fight back when Russia invaded Crimea. This advice led to misery for the people arrested, imprisoned, and chased away from the peninsula. It also persuaded the Russians to continue their invasion of eastern Ukraine. They stopped only when the Ukrainians fought back.From 2014 to 2022, the United States and European nations, fearing they might provoke Russia attack, limited or banned weapons sales to Ukraine. This, too, proved to be a terrible, consequential mistake: Had the Russians actually been afraid of the Ukrainian army, they might never have launched the full-scale invasion at all.[Read: The war on Ukraine is testing the myth of Elon Musk]Even when the full-scale invasion began last year, amorphous fear of Russian reaction again persuaded Americans and Europeans to hold back on long-range weapons to Ukraine, partly because we feared what could happen if they were used to hit Russian targets. But then the Ukrainians used their own weapons to hit Russian targets, first in the border region, then in Moscow, Pskov, and other cities. Nuclear war did not break out then either.I could repeat the same story for just about every significant class of weapons. Fear of escalation meant that some nations, notably Germany and the United States, did not give Ukraine the tanks that it needed to go on the offensive and take back its territory. Fear of escalation also meant that Ukrainians did not receive F-16s in time to help with this summer’s counteroffensive. Fear of escalation meant that we have refused to give the Ukrainians a long-range ballistic-missile system known as ATACMS. Now the tanks are on the ground, the F-16 pilot training has begun, and the Biden administration reportedly may be planning to give Ukraine ATACMS.  Each of the delays wasted time. And time has cost lives—maybe tens of thousands of lives. I was in Ukraine exactly a year ago, on the weekend that Ukrainian troops took back the northern cities of Izyum and Kupiansk. A few weeks later, the Ukrainians took back the city of Kherson. At the time, they had momentum. A year later, the euphoria is gone, and no wonder: That momentum was lost. After taking Kherson, Ukrainian forces did not have the weaponry to move farther forward. They did not try to advance again until June of this year. By that time, Russians had created hundreds of kilometers of minefields, some of the most extensive minefields any army has ever tried to cross, as well as a system of tank traps and trenches that has slowed Ukraine’s counteroffensive and, again, led to the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.Think about what the world might look like if Putin’s nuclear threats had not influenced our imaginations so profoundly. If Musk had not been spooked by Russian propaganda, then some of Russia’s fleet might have been disabled a month earlier. If Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin had not been spooked by Russian propaganda, then the Ukrainians might have expelled the Russians earlier, and the war might be over. Death, horror, and terror have been the result every time outsiders hesitated to aid Ukraine.There is always a “non-trivial possibility,” to borrow Musk’s term, that the Russians will use nuclear weapons; there was also a nonzero possibility that Robert Oppenheimer’s nuclear-bomb test would blow up the planet. But if we want to deter the Russians from using their nuclear weapons, we have other ways to do it. Our own nuclear weapons, and our own superior conventional forces, are powerful deterrents: Most analysts think they explain why Russia has not deliberately hit any targets on NATO territory. Heavy hints from China and India that nuclear escalation would be a terrible mistake, as well as statements about the unacceptability of nuclear war from the G20, the United Nations, and others help, too.Ukrainian attacks—especially unexpected, asymmetric attacks, like those from sea drones—are also a form of deterrence. So is our continued commitment to Ukraine. Every time we announce another weapons shipment, or the European Union makes another financial pledge, or President Joe Biden makes another statement of support, then the Russians know that the price of occupation, and of any escalation, is growing higher. Resistance doesn’t provoke Putin; weakness does.

“The Permanent Problem” is an ongoing series of essay about the challenges of capitalist mass affluence as well as the solutions to them. You can access the full collection here, or subscribe to brinklindsey.substack.com to get them straight to your inbox. 
In my recent essay on our growing predilection for virtual experience over the real thing, I ended with a question. The problem, I said, isn’t our interest in experiencing virtual worlds; it’s our lack of a sufficient anchor in the physical world. But, I asked, how do we rebuild ours?
What we need is no less than a major cultural shift, a change in the way we view our relationship with the world around us. We need to recover our sense of ambition and see the physical world once again as exciting and challenging – an arena for great deeds and historic accomplishments. We need to reawaken our desire to leave the indelible mark of our civilization upon it, for all later generations to behold and admire.
Thinking this way used to be second nature, especially for Americans, but we have lost the knack. For the past half-century or so, the dominant attitudes in our culture regarding our relationship to the physical world are shame and guilt – shame over the harms we have inflicted in constructing our built environment, guilt over all the rights violated along the way. Our retreat from reality has been driven by pangs of conscience.
I have already written about the anti-Promethean backlash, the reaction against technological progress precipitated by recognition of the terrible environmental damage inflicted by industrial civilization. Instead of seeing that damage as a technological problem to be solved by new and cleaner technologies, leaders of the new environmental movement generally put the blame on human arrogance – our presumption to dare to manipulate nature to serve our purposes – and urged us to call off our toxic assaults and learn to live within appropriate “limits to growth.” In taking this line, the environmental movement maintained the old, industrial-era assumption of a zero-sum, adversarial relationship between man and nature; its innovation was simply to root for the other side.
The anti-Promethean backlash dates back to the dramatic surge in environmental awareness during the 1960s and 70s. At around the same time, another backlash was brewing – this one spurred by a newly critical posture towards America’s past and a special focus on the victims of the American experience. The ensuing “history wars” have continued to this day, as evidenced by the 1619 Project and likeminded initiatives on the one hand, and flailing, often illiberal attempts by conservatives to push back in the other direction. But regardless of the political fireworks, those quarters of society with the greatest cultural influence are now firmly in the camp committed to emphasizing the dark side of American history.
I have already written on the general problem of progressive loss of faith in the most progressive nation in history. Here I want to focus on one particular aspect of this broader phenomenon: the complete reversal in attitudes about America’s westward expansion. Prior to the 1960s, this was the great heroic adventure at the heart of the American story. Exhibiting the restless energy and yearning for new horizons that are the signal virtues of a free people, settlers left behind everything they knew in search of something better. And with perseverance, ingenuity, community spirit, and can-do pragmatism, they overcame all obstacles and hardships to transform a largely unpopulated wilderness into the richest and most powerful country that has ever existed. Repeated to the point of triteness, it was said that Americans “tamed a continent.” How things have changed: When Donald Trump used this well-worn turn of phrase in a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy in 2018, he was roundly excoriated in progressive circles for his racial insensitivity and mangling of history. 
In the revised understanding of American history that is now orthodoxy among the country’s cultural elite, the story of the expansion of the United States to continental dimensions is first and foremost a story of great crimes: the mass murder and expropriation of American Indians; an unconscionable, aggressive war of conquest against Mexico; and heedless, rapacious environmental destruction. In view of that dismal record, taking pride in this chapter of American history is considered morally obtuse at best. The recently fashionable practice of making “land acknowledgments” – i.e., noting at the beginning of some event that the proceedings are taking place on stolen land – is indicative of the dutiful contrition we should display instead.
Here’s the thing: All those crimes really happened. It’s undeniably true that American history is replete with oppression, abuses of power, broken promises, and betrayals of principle. But here’s another thing: Everybody’s history is like that, in all places at all times, including for the Indians who lived here before Europeans arrived. Any story involving large numbers of human beings is going to be jam-packed with sin – welcome to life after Eden! But focusing on the crimes of the past and ignoring its glories distorts our understanding of history, and ourselves, every bit as much as whitewashing does. 
It’s simply impossible to develop any kind of rounded understanding of the past without recognizing that it is a record of human nature in all its wide range. When we face up to the complexity of human nature and thus the inevitable moral complexity of human history, we are in a position to turn the study of the past to its fullest effect: We can gain inspiration from heroes great and small, we can hone our senses of empathy and justice by learning of the suffering of some and the misdeeds of others, and we can develop that kind of ironic detachment so essential to true wisdom by tracing how often history’s twists and turns confound the intentions of history’s actors. 
As to the history of the American West, the old triumphant stories of indomitable pioneer courage omitted important and inconvenient truths – but they contained important truths as well. The settling of the continent constituted a truly astonishing mobilization and channeling of human energies, and its success was owed to the cultivation of active virtues on a colossal scale. When we think of the qualities that defined what were traditionally thought to be the best elements of the American character – physical courage, willingness to take risks, openness to adventure, curiosity about the unknown, no-nonsense practical-mindedness, ingenuity in the face of problems, fortitude in the face of setbacks – we see that all of them were forged and refined in the crucible of frontier life. As Frederick Jackson Turner put it in his famous essay:

Thus American development has exhibited not merely an advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.

From the perspective of the 21st century, where despite all our resources and organizational skills it so often seems beyond our capacity to act swiftly, boldly, and decisively, where accomplishing anything at scale in the physical world requires running a punishing gauntlet of veto points, what is so striking about looking back at our pioneering past – when we adopt a frame a mind that allows us to look there for positive examples – is the astonishing personal and organizational dynamism on display. Consider just one, quintessentially American episode: the Mormon migration to Utah. After the murder of Joseph Smith in Illinois, Latter-day Saints under the leadership of Brigham Young made the radical decision in 1846 to relocate far away, beyond the current boundaries of the United States, in some location that nobody else was interested in. The first wagon train to the Salt Lake Valley departed in 1847, and by the end of that year some 2,000 Mormons had already arrived. Over the next 20 years until the coming of the transcontinental railroad, wagon trains were the primary means of reaching “Zion”: All told, some 70,000 Americans made the journey. And of course, the organization and execution of that colossal relocation were only the first part of this amazing story; what the Mormons did when they got there was just as impressive. By the time Utah became a state in 1896, nearly 250,000 Mormons lived there in thriving communities, building novel social institutions that, although changing substantially over time to clash less with the American mainstream, still make Utah distinctive for its relatively high levels of social capital and wellbeing. 
Of course it should be pointed out that the Mormons were fleeing persecution, and such hardship encourages bold action. America was much, much poorer back then as well, and poor people have less to lose and therefore are willing to take bigger risks. In our own day, we still see people facing persecution in poor countries who take incredible risks and endure great hardships for a chance to get to the United States or Europe. The Mormon migration, however, was so much more than a desperate fight-or-flight response: In the face of the threats that confronted them, Mormons responded by organizing meticulously, cooperating deeply, and building a whole new society from scratch together.
I’m afraid that the cultural heritage bequeathed by America’s pioneering past and exemplified by the Mormon exodus has all but totally vanished. In part, of course, because our circumstances have changed so much, but in part because we have expressly disowned our inheritance. Between the anti-Promethean backlash’s hostility to technological progress and the new revisionist history’s stigmatization of the frontier, our culture no longer prizes the capacity to bend nature to human purposes – an atrophying of national character exacerbated by enervating loss aversion and the frictionless distractions of living virtually. 
In the retreat from reality spurred by this cultural turn, we imagined that our backtracking amounted to progress. We saw ourselves as leaving behind belching smokestacks for the air-conditioned cleanliness of the service economy and the information age; we have moved on from pouring concrete and bending metal to manipulating bits and engineering financing. We declared our economies “developed” and came to see our cities as fully built, erecting more and more barriers to new construction and pursuing historical preservation with ever-looser criteria. 
But although we decided we were too rich and advanced to care much about physical reality anymore, it turns out that reality didn’t stop caring about us. In the 21st century, we discovered that just ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away. After the eradication of smallpox, we came to think that the age-old scourge of infectious disease was behind us, but HIV and Covid-19 have each claimed tens of millions of lives – and there is good reason to believe that our current globalized, factory-farming lifestyle creates ideal conditions for more and worse outbreaks. After we closed off our most productive cities to new construction, we discovered that people didn’t stop wanting to move to them – and so we now face a rash of affordability crises at the local level and a hobbling of economic growth and social mobility nationwide. And after congratulating ourselves on strangling the nuclear power industry in its crib, we are now scrambling to make up for lost time in transitioning to clean energy as the harms inflicted by climate change steadily mount. 
These recent and current crises – the return of reality, with a vengeance – create a pressing need for the recovery of old, lost habits: a reorientation toward the real and a recultivation of the active virtues needed to reshape and heal our society and our world. The good news is that we are beginning to see a real policy response, and just the push to confront these problems will serve to reorient society to a degree. Moving in the right policy direction will spur a big boom in construction and installation jobs as well as attracting more top talent to STEM fields. 
But although encouraging, these policy initiatives are relatively narrow efforts, directed by technocratic elites and attempting to push action through the molasses of an indifferent-to-hostile culture. We need a more broad-based change in attitudes to develop the social momentum necessary to carry us all the way to the next level of technological development. 
This is where I believe that a successful economic independence movement could make a decisive difference. Let me refer back to my original inspiration for this idea: a 2017 article in National Affairs by my friend Adam Garfinkle titled “A New Pioneer Act.” This was the piece that first planted the seed in my mind of seeing a move toward local self-sufficiency as the master strategy for stabilizing and revitalizing capitalist society. 
Here is Adam’s basic pitch:

America once excelled at basic craftsmanship and useful invention, and in many ways it still does. But too many of our people have forgotten how to work with their hands, losing skills that nurture mind and soul alike, that produce more than the social sum of their parts when joined in democratic communities of craftsmen, artisans, and their families. The ultimate purpose of a New Pioneer Act, therefore, is not just economic or even political — although it certainly is both. It is fully social as a byproduct, so to speak: It envisions a post-Fordist society in which life and work assemble to create fulfilled personalities, one that strives toward goals that are priceless instead of toiling to produce machines and disposable products costing such and so many dollars.

By allowing some lands now owned by the federal government to become new communities conceived as experiments in both new modes of self-government and new modes of agriculture, the New Pioneer Act could be a way to try out 21st-century solutions to some of our key problems, and to do it by taking those problems seriously while recognizing that we are short on real solutions now. It is an approach that draws on the best of the American tradition in an effort to revive America’s lost faith in the future.
The focus in Adam’s proposal is on establishing a limited number of model communities, while the vision that I have developed is more wide-ranging – in particular, in aiming to promote greater local self-sufficiency in existing communities, including urban environments. But my hopes for a truly transformative movement hinge on pushing forward in the way Adam suggests: building new communities designed to showcase technological and organizational innovations. 
If the project of building new places committed to new ways of doing things were to really take off, our culture can recover what it has lost: We can revive exploring and settling the physical world as ongoing and valued aspects of the human experience. We can reopen the frontier, and in so doing remind ourselves that the physical world – all of it, every remote corner – is our home; it is the arena in which our highest qualities are developed and put to the test. We can rebuild our anchor in the world and learn to resist the siren song of the experience machine. 
But didn’t we learn from Turner that the frontier was officially declared closed in 1890? How do we reopen it? Yes, there is no longer any unowned, unclaimed land: All of the Earth’s six inhabited continents are now at least nominally subject to the jurisdiction of an organized state. But urbanized areas make up only a couple percent of the world’s total land area; meanwhile, 70 percent of the Earth is covered with water, most of which is not subject to any national authority. There are still plenty of wide open spaces.
Once the environmental movement began raising our awareness of the damage humans have inflicted on nature, the proper response wasn’t to demonize technology and give up on progress. Rather, it was to see environmental degradation as a technological problem and then to start looking for technological solutions. In the same way, the proper response to our raised awareness of the dark side of American history is not to demonize the pioneer spirit. Rather, it is to revive that spirit and imbue it with humanitarianism and environmental consciousness. 
Such a spirit would impel human beings to rise to the challenge of living in all kinds of places – to appreciate and take care of the natural beauty around them while establishing a flourishing human presence. A pioneer communities program could encourage this kind of adventurous self-sufficiency by devoting a certain fraction of its resources to supporting pioneer outposts in remote, exotic, and spectacularly beautiful settings – deserts, mountains, canyons, on the sea, under the sea. For all these outposts, part of the community’s mission would be environmental stewardship of some kind – part-time park rangers and citizen scientists in place. And the design mission for all of them would be to create beautiful and sustainable built environments that harmonize with and complement the natural surroundings.
In reviving the appeal of exploring and settling, we can recover humanity’s signature move, a major source of our dynamism as a species – namely, breaking off from the crowd with a like-minded group and striking out on your own. After the breakout from Africa roughly 70,000 years ago, this is how Homo sapiens ended up blanketing the planet in only a few dozen millennia. No doubt these wanderings were frequently pushed by climate change and the exhaustion of game, but it seems that some people will head off on their own just because they can. A more recent example of this that I marvel about regularly is the peopling of Polynesia: What conflicts at home, what injunctions from strange gods, what deep, essential restlessness drove people to cross thousands of miles of trackless seas in double-hulled canoes? Whatever happens to spur it, that wandering, questing spirit is the fountainhead of so much of human greatness. 
And it is, I believe, the key to the fulfillment of humanity’s highest destiny. As I wrote in my last essay, I don’t see how humanity can truly flourish over the long term if it remains confined to its planet of origin. We will have to restrain our population, we will have to avoid high-energy breakthroughs that are too dangerous to deploy, and so the roads of physical progress will all eventually be blocked. If we don’t sink into a general stagnation, it will only be because we turned inward – into the virtual – and found our escape by succumbing to the experience machine. Unless, then, we can establish a permanent presence off-world and then begin the long, great adventure of cosmic expansion, I’m afraid that the human story will peter out prematurely in one dead end or another. 
It’s worth noting here that, at the dawn of the Space Age, when the idea of extending the human presence beyond our home world first became a practical possibility, the cultural memory of America’s pioneer past was still very much alive. Indeed, the imagination of a space-based future was firmly rooted in America’s pioneer experience. Recall that Star Trek was set in the “final frontier” and was originally pitched to studio executives as “Wagon Train to the Stars.” 
After a decades-long hiatus in the progress of rocket science, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has now revolutionized the launch industry with its commitment to reusability. In terms of cost per kilogram of payload, the price of accessing space has already dropped some 90 percent. If the development of the mammoth new Starship proceeds successfully, another 90 percent drop may be in the cards. 
Accordingly, the technical feasibility of large off-world human populations is now coming into view. The cultural feasibility, however, has fallen into considerable doubt. How will we get people to live on Mars if we can’t even get them to live in the Plains states? If we can’t convince them that watching a dazzling sunset from 30,000 feet in the air is better than squinting at the latest Marvel dreck on your phone? 
For all those serious about establishing a spacefaring civilization, let me suggest that the first priority must be to reestablish an Earthfaring one – a civilization that recognizes exploration and the extension of the human presence to new places as vital avenues of human flourishing.The post Revalorizing the frontier first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Revalorizing the frontier appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Peter Daou, the former Democratic advisor to Hillary Clinton, has joined third-party candidate Cornel West's 2024 presidential campaign as his new campaign manager.

In a Sunday statement announcing the move, Daou called West "a man of deep personal integrity, great accomplishment, and far-reaching vision."

"His presence in the 2024 race gives voters an exceptional choice for truth and justice beyond the corrupt and corrosive duopoly," Daou said. "Democracy means choice, it means options for voters, not coronations and vote-shaming. It is long past time to practice democracy rather than just pay it lip service."

Running as a Green Party candidate, West has emerged as a potential problem for President Joe Biden and his re-election chances, threatening to split up liberal votes that could hand the Republican Party the presidency. His candidacy comes amid Biden's low approval ratings and growing interest from young voters and unlikely voters, which is estimated to represent roughly 80 million people, for a third-party candidate.

Newsweek reached out to West's campaign for comment.

Daou had a brief stint as the campaign manager for Marianne Williamson's presidential bid earlier this year but left about a month into the job. Williamson is a long-shot candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Although he worked on Williamson's campaign, Daou left the Democratic Party in 2020, citing its willingness to "dismiss sexual assault allegations" and lack of a "moral compass."

"I'M QUITTING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY," Daou announced on April 28, 2020, on X, formerly Twitter. "A party that can so easily dismiss sexual assault allegations and the groping of girls. A party that caged kids BEFORE Trump. A party that rehabilitated Bush, a war criminal. ...is a party without a moral compass that cannot defeat the GOP."

"I just turned 55. I don't know how many years I have left on this earth," he said at the time. "I don't want to belong to a party whose leadership continually caves and compromises with fascists and white supremacists. I want to seek justice with clarity and conviction."

Daou has worked for several Democratic presidential campaigns, including Clinton's 2008 campaign and John Kerry in 2005. He was one of Clinton's vocal supporters in 2016, and then one of Bernie Sanders' in the 2020 primaries. West is also a prominent Sanders supporter, having endorsed him in both 2016 and 2020.

Daou is also a staunch Trump critic. In the statement announcing his leave from the Democratic Party, he criticized top Democrats like Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for "los[ing] ground to rightwing extremists," in a reference to the former president.

"I WANT TRUMP AND HIS GANG OF CROOKS OUT OF POWER," he said. "And I'll continue to do everything I can to defeat them."

One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal. “Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places,” they wrote.

Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”

What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”

“Tyranny of the Minority” is their attempt to make sense of how American democracy eroded so fast. “Societal diversity, cultural backlash and extreme-right parties are ubiquitous across established Western democracies,” they write. But in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.

The voyage of discovery that science offers can take us furthest when it is open to the best and brightest, regardless of who they are and where they come from. Great scientific minds often emerge from unexpected backgrounds. Many scientific disciplines remained effectively closed to ethnic minorities and to women for far too long. But over the past 50 years at least, science has opened up and a host of affirmative action programs have been created to encourage women and minorities to consider careers in the field.For some activists, however, these efforts have not gone far enough. In response, universities, industries, and research institutions have instituted a vast bureaucracy designed to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: a behemoth that is growing at a rate far exceeding that of investment in new faculty and facilities.This has resulted in some disturbing new trends in academia and scientific institutions more broadly. In a desire to include women and minorities, white males are often excluded, and too often women and members of minority groups are tokenized by being promoted primarily for their gender or skin color.This tokenism has affected the most prestigious institutions. It was a bone of a contention at this year’s Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting. Citing fellow laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who has questioned the use of gender quotas in STEM and warned against “discrimination against men,” Nobel prizewinner Kurt Wüthrich commented that he felt discriminated against “in the climate that this meeting is being held.” He was particularly dismayed by the fact that the female laureates were placed in the front row of a group photo—an example, he felt, of insulting tokenism. “I would feel horrible if presented in this way,” he said. “It was ridiculous, fully ridiculous.” As a result of voicing these views, Wüthrich was accused of violating the meeting’s code of conduct.That may have been a minor issue of optics, but his more general point is valid. Look at almost any online photo promoting science and you will find this kind of tokenism.Here are several examples.The first is from a recent article in Science, the official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.Source: Science. Scientific societies should encourage all young people to consider a career in scientific discovery. Science nevertheless seems to feel the need to present a patronizing advertising image, featuring three women and two men of color.In an email encouraging young people to embark on scientific careers, the American Physical Society presents an image of five women and a black man. The omissions—presumably done in the name of diversity—are obvious and embarrassing.Source: Substack.In advertisements for their annual general meeting, which attracts over 10,000 scientists from all over the world, the APS shows three women and one male of color.Source: APS websiteFor hundreds of years, white men in lab coats were presented as the face of science. It is time to change that picture. But we should do without losing touch with reality or becoming overtly patronizing.This trend of prioritizing women and minorities is not restricted to advertising and public relations but is affecting faculty appointments at every level.Anti-Male Bias at the NHMRCImposing gender quotas for research funding is counterproductive and sets a dangerous new precedent.QuilletteLawrence M. KraussLet’s start at the top. Six of the eight Ivy League universities—Harvard, Brown, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Columbia—now have female presidents, as do UC Berkeley and MIT.MIT is a particularly striking case. Despite comprising many traditionally male-dominated STEM disciplines, its upper management team is largely female. The head of the MIT Corporation, the President, the Director of Research, the Provost, the Chancellor, and the Dean of Science are all women. The Institute’s core discipline, the School of Engineering, consists of eight departments, five of which are led by women. This is clearly not a coincidence, nor is it likely, given the demographics of the place, that this is simply the result of choosing the best people for those jobs. Were the situation reversed—if most of the faculty were female, but the leading administrators were all male—there would be an outcry.It is still the case that most full professors, in most STEM disciplines, are male. But the reasons for this are often misunderstood. It generally takes decades to attain this rank, and many full professors have been in their current positions for over 30 years. Even if the hiring system were now biased in favor of women, they would not yet have achieved parity at the senior level.And the hiring system may well be biased. Thanks to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion infrastructure that dominates almost every major US university today, affirmative action initiatives have affected the hiring of junior faculty across the board.It is difficult to obtain national statistics on this, but in 2015, before DEI initiatives reached current heights, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed a two to one preference for female candidates for tenure track positions in STEM.New faculty announcements suggest a similar bias. For example, in 2021, UCLA announced the following new appointments in the physical sciences: Abigail Doyle (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Alvine Kamaha (Physics and Astronomy), Courtney Shelly (Statistics/Mathematics), Qianhui Shi (Physics and Astronomy), and Hong Wang (Mathematics). It did not appoint any new male faculty. Similar examples abound.We can detect comparable trends further up the tenure ladder, too. For example, MIT has just announced the election of six new Fellows to the American Physical Society. This represents a significant career milestone for the successful candidates. I was happy to see that they include my well-deserving former graduate student, Hong Liu, but that aside, the trend seems clear.Source: MIT News  Affirmative action is not the only explanation for the increasing paucity of white males in such positions. The American Physical Society offers a plethora of programs designed to assist pre-tenure female (and sometimes male minority) faculty in physics. There are conferences, leadership programs, internships, grants, workshops, networks, site visits, guidelines, scholarships, fellowships, and prizes. There are no similar programs for young white male scientists, although many of them face similar career challenges.In US academia in general, women now receive more doctoral degrees than men.Source: Cory Clark and Bo Winegard for QuilletteWomen also occupy most faculty positions in post-secondary institutions.Source: Cory Clark and Bo Winegard for QuilletteWhile it is heartening that the climate for women in academia has been improving, these figures suggest that the laser focus on recruiting, retaining, spotlighting, and promoting women in STEM may have become superfluous.Sex and the AcademyThe inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?QuilletteCory ClarkAs April Bleske-Rechek and Michael Bernstein have shown, while men still occupy three quarters of STEM positions (despite the fact that the percentage of women in STEM has more than doubled since 1980), the situation is precisely reversed in the fields of health, education, administration, and literacy. While massive efforts are underway to correct the imbalance between men and women in STEM, there have been no concomitant efforts to increase the numbers of men in female-dominated professions. People do not seem to perceive the latter imbalance as a problem. In a recent survey of over 800 recent college students, Bleske-Rechek and Bernstein found that the students were overwhelmingly more concerned about male overrepresentation in certain high status professional positions than about female overrepresentation in others.Responses to the question "Do you agree that the gender gap is problematic?" Source: Unsafe Science. This was the case even though the female-dominated disciplines were not considered lower status than the male-dominated ones.Responses to the question "Do you agree that the job is high in status?" Source: Unsafe Science.Other data in the study suggest that gender gaps in male-dominated disciplines are significantly more likely to be attributed to sexism or discrimination than they are in female-dominated disciplines. Responses to the question “How much of the gender gap is due to sexism/discrimination?” Source: Unsafe ScienceThese results align with recent work by Matt Grawitch et al., summarized here. Grawitch and his colleagues found that both male and female respondents were more likely to judge that an interaction between a banker and a client had been sexist when the banker was male and the client female than the reverse. We are far more likely to attribute sexism to disparities that favor men than disparities that favor women.Male Underachievement and the Gender Turf WarsSydney. London. Toronto.QuilletteAri David BlaffThe impression that universities are primarily concerned with hiring, supporting, and promoting women may be contributing to the fact that, at entry levels, young men are leaving higher education in their droves.We can see the results of this in the California State universities: the undergraduate student body at Cal State Los Angeles is 59 percent female, and 67 percent of its graduate students are female; Sonoma State is 63 percent female; San Diego State is 57 percent female; Humboldt State is 58 percent female; Cal State East Bay is 61 percent female. Nationwide, around 60 percent of students are female. And the gender gap is growing. Recent data show a significant downward trend in male college enrollments, which has coincided with the increasing prevalence of DEI programs.Source: Brookings InstitutionThe reduction in male undergraduate numbers is partly caused by the fact that young women are graduating from high school in higher numbers than their male counterparts. In fact, women now graduate at higher rates than men at all educational levels.Source: Brookings InstitutionSimilar trends are emerging at pre-university level. Consider this announcement of the finalists and winners of the 3M Young Scientist Challenge.Source: 3M News Center It is no surprise to see a high prevalence of Indian and Chinese students among this group, as East and South Asians have been outperforming white students for some time. What is perhaps more surprising is that the finalists included only one young Caucasian male.Perhaps this is partly due to way such programs recruit applicants. Consider this advertisement for the Regeneron Science Talent Search.Source: Society for Science Is the nearly complete absence of white males in these images the result of a decision to highlight women and minorities—or are fewer white men getting involved in such programs than ever before?We may be moving towards a future in which women will be significantly better educated than men and will occupy far more of the jobs that require professional qualifications and skills. The societal impacts of this are unknown.We must continue to ensure that higher education and scientific training remain open to people from all demographics. But we should not encourage diversity at the cost of driving away talented people. Our fixation on raising the profile of women and minorities in science by minimizing the role and status of men in general, and white men in particular, is misplaced.After more than 40 years of intense affirmative action efforts, it may be time to take our thumbs off the scale and let a natural balance emerge. Young males—and white males in particular—should not be discouraged from pursuing higher education in science, or from engaging in any other field of intellectual activity.

The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion.In the early legal skirmishing over this agenda, opponents including the federal Justice Department have won a surprising number of decisions, mostly in federal courts, blocking states from implementing the new laws.But eventually most of these issues are likely to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court’s six-member Republican-appointed majority has generally ruled in ways that favor the conservative social-policy priorities reflected in the red-state actions. That inclination was most dramatically demonstrated in last year’s Dobbs decision, when the Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion.In the coming years, the Court will face a series of decisions on the new red-state agenda that may determine whether the U.S. maintains a strong baseline of civil rights available in all states or reverts back toward a pre-1960s world where people’s rights varied much more depending on where they lived.“The idea of the Bill of Rights was that we would have a floor of civil rights and civil liberties that the states could not go below,” David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me. “But for that floor to be meaningful, it has to be enforced by the Supreme Court ultimately.“In our history, the courts have sometimes done that courageously and bravely, and other times they have fallen down on the job,” Cole continued. “And when they have fallen down on the job, you get a two-tier system in this country.”Since President Joe Biden’s election, the 22 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and the state legislature have moved with remarkable speed to create a two-tier system on issues including abortion, classroom censorship, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. “The fact that all of this is happening on so many different fronts simultaneously is unprecedented,” Donald Kettl, a former dean and professor emeritus of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.This broad red-state push to retrench rights, as I’ve written, is reversing the general trend since the 1960s of nationalizing more rights, a process often called “the rights revolution.”Civil-rights advocates have limited options for reversing this tide of red-state legislation. So long as the Senate filibuster exists, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing national legislation to override the red-state actions on issues such as abortion and voting rights, even if the party regains unified control of the federal government after the 2024 elections.[Read: Why Biden just can’t shake Trump in the polls]In some states, opponents can try to rescind these measures directly through ballot initiatives, like the Ohio referendum that, if passed in November, would overturn the state’s six-week abortion ban. But not all states permit such referendums, and even in those that do, ballot measures to reverse many of the key red-state restrictions would face an uncertain fate given the underlying conservative lean of their electorates.Opponents are challenging some of the new statutes in state courts. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that supports legal abortion, has cases pending in six states, including Ohio, Wyoming, Iowa, and Florida, arguing that abortion restrictions adopted since the Dobbs decision violate provisions in those states’ constitutions. But recent rulings by state supreme courts—in South Carolina, upholding the state’s six-week abortion ban, and in Texas, dismissing an injunction against the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors—show the limitations of relying on red-state courts to undo the work of red-state political leaders.“Sometimes the state courts provide a sympathetic venue,” Cole said. “But oftentimes in the red states, precisely because the courts have been appointed by red-state governors and legislatures, they are not especially open to challenges to their legislature’s laws.”That leaves federal courts as the principal arena for those hoping to overturn the restrictive red-state laws.These federal cases raise a range of legal arguments. Mostly they revolve around the claim that the state laws violate the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech in the First Amendment and the due process and equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. As courts consider these claims, the key early federal rulings have covered cases involving a variety of issues.Freedom of speech: In a striking victory for critics, a federal district judge in Florida issued two decisions blocking enforcement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s signature Stop WOKE Act, which restricts how private employers and college and university professors talk about racial inequity. In one ruling, Judge Mark Walker called the law “positively dystopian.” He wrote: “The powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”  The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has denied DeSantis’s request to lift Walker’s injunction against the law while the case proceeds.Federal courts have also blocked enforcement of the Florida law DeSantis signed increasing the penalties for public protest. But another federal judge has twice dismissed a case attempting to block DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law restricting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in K–12 classrooms. (Opponents of the law are appealing that decision.)Litigation against the multiple red-state measures making it easier for critics to ban books in school libraries has not advanced as far. But in May, PEN America, a free-speech group, together with Penguin Random House and several authors filed a suit against Florida’s Escambia County school district over the removal of titles about people of color and LGBTQ people that could become the bellwether case.Abortion: Though the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision preempted any frontal federal legal challenge to the state laws restricting or banning the procedure, abortion-rights supporters continue to fight elements of the new statutes.In late July, a federal district judge blocked guidance from Raúl Labrador, the Republican attorney general of Idaho, a state that has banned abortion, warning doctors that they could be prosecuted for helping patients travel out of state to obtain the procedure. A separate federal lawsuit filed in July is challenging Idaho’s law imposing criminal penalties on adults who transport a minor out of state to obtain an abortion. The Justice Department won an injunction last year preventing Idaho from enforcing another portion of its abortion ban on the grounds that it violates federal law requiring treatment of people needing emergency care in hospitals.“Dobbs overturned 50 years of precedent and got rid of the fundamental liberty right to abortion, but it definitely didn’t answer every question,” Amy Myrick, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me. “And federal courts are now being faced with a public-health crisis of enormous magnitude, so at some point they will have to decide whether a ban becomes irrational if it forces patients to get sick or even die based on what a state says.”Immigration: Another front in the red-state offensive is an increasing effort to seize control of immigration policy from the federal government. The Biden administration last week won a federal-district-court decision requiring Texas to remove a flotilla of buoys it has placed in the Rio Grande River to repel undocumented migrants (though the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put that ruling on hold just one day later). A coalition of civil-rights groups is suing Florida in federal court over a DeSantis law making it a crime to transport an undocumented migrant in the state.Voting: As with abortion, critics have found a legal basis to challenge only provisions at the periphery of the voting restrictions approved in most red states since 2021. Last month, the Justice Department won a federal court ruling blocking a measure that Texas had passed making it easier for officials to reject absentee ballots. In July, a federal-district-court judge upheld key components of Georgia’s 2021 law making voting more difficult, but did partially overturn that law’s most controversial element: a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote.LGBTQ rights: Federal litigation has probably progressed most against the intertwined red-state moves to impose new restrictions on transgender people. The Biden Justice Department has joined cases seeking to overturn the red-state actions on each of the major issues.Two federal appellate courts have blocked policies requiring transgender students to use the bathroom (or locker room) of their gender assigned at birth, while the Eleventh Circuit late last year upheld such a law in Florida. Two federal circuit courts have also blocked the enforcement of laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring transgender girls from participating on female sports teams in high school, though a lower federal court has subsequently upheld the West Virginia law.Of all the issues affecting transgender people, litigation against the statutes passed in 22 Republican-controlled states barring gender-affirming care for minor children, even with their parents’ approval, may reach the Supreme Court first. In a flurry of decisions made mostly this summer, multiple federal district courts have issued injunctions blocking the implementation of such laws in several states. One federal appellate court has upheld such an injunction, but two others recently overturned lower-court rulings and allowed Tennessee and Alabama to put their laws into effect. (After those decisions, a federal district court last week also allowed Georgia to enforce its ban.) Such a split among circuit courts could encourage the Supreme Court to step in, as do the momentous and timely stakes for families facing choices about medical care. “For families who have adolescents who need this care, some of whom have been receiving this care, it’s a matter of family urgency,” Jennifer Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a group that advocates for LGBTQ rights, told me.Although liberal groups and the Biden administration have been heartened by many of these early rulings, they recognize that the most significant legal fights are all rolling toward the same foreboding terminus: the Supreme Court.Over recent years, the Court has restricted the ability of blue states to impinge on rights that conservatives prize while mostly allowing red states to constrain rights that liberals prioritize. The Court has displayed the former instinct in its rulings striking down gun-control laws in blue jurisdictions, allowing religious-freedom exemptions to state civil-rights statutes, and barring public universities from using affirmative action. Conversely, the Court has loosened restrictions on red states with the Dobbs decision and the 2013 Shelby County ruling effectively revoking the Justice Department’s authority to preemptively block changes in state voting laws.Those who see this past as prologue believe that the current Supreme Court majority may provide the red states great leeway to establish a legal regime that defines rights much more narrowly than in the rest of the country. At various points in American history, the Supreme Court has certainly done that before, most notoriously in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, when the justices approved the system of “separate but equal” Jim Crow segregation across the South that persisted for nearly the next 70 years.But several legal experts I spoke with said it was premature to assume that these recent rulings ensure that the Supreme Court will reflexively uphold the contemporary wave of red-state measures. Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, told me that the Court’s decisions in recent years have advanced “what’s been the conservative Republican agenda for decades: Overrule Roe v. Wade; eliminate affirmative action; protect gun rights.” It’s less clear, Chemerinsky believes, what the Court will do with this “new conservative agenda” rising from the red states. Although the six Republican-appointed justices are clearly sympathetic to conservative goals, he said, “some of what the [states] are doing is so radical, I don’t know that the Supreme Court will go along.”The ACLU’s Cole notes that the Court appeared to move more cautiously in the term that ended in June than it did in the 2021–22 session, which concluded with the cannon shot overruling Roe. With a few prominent exceptions headlined by the decision banning affirmative action in higher education, “civil rights and civil liberties did pretty well in the Supreme Court this term,” Cole maintained. “Much is still to be determined, but I think this term showed us that you can’t just assume that this Court is going to impose right-wing results regardless of precedent.”Conservatives remain confident that this Supreme Court majority will not reject many of these new red-state laws. They see an early signal of how some of these fights may play out in the August decision by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals allowing Alabama to enforce its law banning gender-affirming care for minors.Written by Barbara Lagoa, who was appointed by Donald Trump, that ruling specifically cited the Supreme Court’s logic in the Dobbs case to argue that Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors would likely survive legal scrutiny. In Dobbs, the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito said the Fourteenth Amendment did not encompass the right to abortion because there was no evidence that such a right was “deeply rooted” in American history. Likewise, Lagoa wrote of gender-affirming care that “the use of these medications in general—let alone for children—almost certainly is not ‘deeply rooted’ in our nation’s history and tradition.”Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, predicted that such logic would ultimately persuade the conservative Supreme Court majority. “What we are seeing now is the use of the Dobbs framework in actual action,” she told me. “I think the Supreme Court quite frankly is going to be very wary of expanding Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence to rubber-stamp an experimental new treatment, especially when minor children are involved.”The one point both sides can agree on is that the Supreme Court’s rulings on the red-state measures will represent a crossroads for the country. One path preserves the broadly consistent floor of civil rights across state lines that Americans have known since the 1960s; the other leads to a widening divergence reminiscent of earlier periods of intense separation among the states.Kettl believes that if the Supreme Court doesn’t constrain the red states, they almost certainly will push much further in undoing the rights revolution. “We haven’t seen what the boundary of that effort will be yet,” he told me, pointing to the ordinances some Texas localities have passed attempting to bar women from driving through them to obtain an abortion out of state.If the Supreme Court allows the red states a largely free hand to continue devising their own system of civil rights and liberties, Chemerinsky said, it will present Americans with a “profound” question:“Will the country accept being two different countries with regard to so many of these important things, as it did with regard to other important things such as slavery and civil rights?” he said. “Or will there be a point that people will say, ‘What divides us as a country is much greater than what unites us.’ And will we start hearing the first serious calls to rethink the United States?”

After the quietest summer in Westminster since 2014 politics is back. We’ve already had two reshuffles and a crisis, with the government getting into all kinds of a mess over “crumbly concrete” in schools.Alongside the daily circus, though, it’s important to keep the longer view in mind. Over the summer the IFS published an analysis of public finances and the tax system, which contained this extremely grim graph.Based on Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) analysis of economic trends and demographics it estimates that by the mid-2040s government will need to spend over 45% of national income on public services, benefits and debt repayments. By the 2070s it will be over 55%. This is mainly due to rising health, social care and pensions costs caused by an aging population and increasingly expensive medical treatments, as well as the cost of government Net Zero policies.Note this takes the current government spending plans as a baseline, and they are a complete fantasy. That little drop in the dark blue dash line between 2025 and 2028 is never going to happen, even though all the parties are pretending it will until the election is over. It also doesn’t assume any increase in spending designed to improve the state of public services, or, say, increase benefits payments to reduce child poverty. It’s just what it would take to maintain the current standard. So it very likely underplays the extent of the problem.It is, of course, just a projection. There are plenty of variables here that could mean things turn out differently. For instance if interest rates fall faster than expected that would reduce debt repayments. Most importantly if the economy grows faster that would help cover the costs. But equally things could get even worse. We’ve not been short of unexpected crises in recent years and the OBR have a historical tendency towards optimism.The rising cost of the state – particularly for health and welfare – is not a new issue. In many ways the history of British politics over the last forty years is of governments trying every trick in the book to avoid taxpayers having to cover the bill. Thatcher and Major did it by using north sea oil money and returns from privatising utilities. Blair and Brown used PFI to keep infrastructure spending off balance sheet. These governments also benefitted from the “peace dividend” following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and were able to cut defence spending heavily (until the late 1970s we spent less on health than defence, now we spend four times as much.) Cameron and Osborne tried to hold costs down by cutting all spending other than health and pensions, while using quantitative easing to keep the economy afloat. But that strategy could only ever be a short-term one given other services can’t absorb annual cuts on a permanent basis. From 2017 onwards the government has had to start putting money back into schools, police, courts and so on to avoid everything falling over completely. On top of that Brexit, Covid and Ukraine have forced up borrowing and debt repayments.All of which means whoever forms the next government has no escape routes left. There are no more utilities to privatise. PFI is now on balance sheet. There is nothing left to cut and, as the government’s school building troubles show, plenty of damage from the last round of austerity still to undo. Health costs rises are inevitable – another IFS analysis shows the recently published “NHS workforce plan” implies 3.6% additional spending a year beyond inflation (or £50 billion a year extra in today’s money by the mid-2030s). As are social care and pensions costs. Better than expected economic growth might improve things somewhat but the much heralded “difficult choices” are coming. And they really will be difficult this time.So what are the choices available to the next government? In the rest of this post I’ll look at the main options and also what I suspect (fear) will end up happening.

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The economy is better than in Obama’s first term, inflation is ebbing, and the feared recession hasn’t materialized. The woke wars and Covid battles that disadvantaged Democrats are no longer central, and the post-Roe culture wars seem like friendlier terrain. Biden’s foreign policy team has defended Ukraine without (so far) a dangerous escalation with the Russians, and Biden has even delivered legislative bipartisanship, co-opting Trumpian promises about industrial policy along the way.

This has created mystification among Democratic partisans as to why all this isn’t enough to give the president a decent polling lead. I don’t share that mystification. But I do think there’s real uncertainty about which of the forces dragging on Biden’s approval ratings matter most.

Start with the theory that Biden’s troubles are mostly still about inflation — that people just hate rising prices and he isn’t credited with avoiding a recession because wage increases have been eaten up by inflation until recently.

If this is the master issue, then the White House doesn’t have many options beyond patience. The administration’s original inflationary sin, the overspending in the American Rescue Plan Act, isn’t going to be repeated, and apart from the possibility of an armistice in Ukraine relieving some pressure on gas prices, there aren’t a lot of policy levers to pull. The hope has to be that inflation continues to drift down, real wages rise consistently and in November 2024, Biden gets the economic credit he isn’t getting now.

But maybe it’s not just the economy. Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters, continuing a Trump-era trend. This raises the possibility that there’s a social-issues undertow for Democrats, in which even when wokeness isn’t front and center, the fact that the party’s activist core is so far left gradually pushes culturally conservative African Americans and Hispanics toward the G.O.P. — much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960s and the 2000s.

Because I am so careful about what I eat, my weight has not yet led to any other health consequences. But I know what could happen if I stop being mindful. My father was morbidly obese. It led to a lower quality of life and mental health issues and probably contributed to his death a few years ago.

Despite all the advances in science, we don’t know why some people, even when they try desperately, can’t seem to lose weight. Because of that, we often assume it must be a lack of willpower. I begged my father, who was also a physician, to lose weight, and he never could. In the back of my mind, I, like many others, blamed him for his failures and considered it a lack of resolve.

I blamed myself, too. I became so disheartened at my inability to affect my weight that it harmed my mental health. I felt like a failure, which led to self-hatred and anger.

Five weeks ago, I went on a walk with a friend who had just lost a younger brother to heart disease. It was a reminder that time is limited and I should make use of it more wisely. I asked my doctor to write me a prescription for one of the new injectable obesity drugs. He warned me that it was approved at this time only for people with diabetes, and since I didn’t suffer from that, this would be off-label use and wouldn’t be covered by insurance. These drugs are expensive, but I was determined to see what would happen if I took one.

It is hard to explain what life is like on this medication to people who don’t have trouble controlling their weight. I’m not hungry all the time. I’m not thinking about food incessantly. I’m not obsessing about what I wish I could eat and what I can’t. My mental health, and even my temperament, improved so much that my whole family rejoiced.

Since his song "Rich Men North of Richmond" went viral a month ago, country singer Oliver Anthony has turned into an overnight sensation, particularly among conservatives.

However, the country singer has also become a controversial figure. Away from his army of fans, the Farmville, Virginia, resident has also been accused of promoting antisemitic 9/11 conspiracy theories on his YouTube channel and fatphobia with his lyrics.

But Jordan Peterson—the Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology known for his own divisive views—was on hand to offer Anthony advice on fame and fandom. The academic sat down with the former factory worker for an episode of The. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, where the pair talked politics, music and mental health.

From left: Oliver Anthony plays the guitar in August 2023; and Jordan Peterson gestures with his hands in November 2018. The country singer went on the academic's podcast. Samuel Corum/Chris Williamson/Getty Images News

Discussing meet-and-greets with his fans, Peterson shared tips with Anthony for putting people at ease.

"One of the things I've learned, for example, is that when people approach you and put out their hand to shake your hand, is that you can match your tempo to theirs," the 61-year-old said.

"Like a dance, you move towards them about as quickly as they move towards you," he added.

Peterson also recommended that Anthony ask people their name, as "even if they're nervous, most people can remember their name." This made the singer chuckle.

Peterson added that he enjoys the post-event meet-and-greets that his team organizes, as it personalizes his audience.

Oliver Anthony talking to fans after making a surprise appearance at the Rock the Block street festival on August 26, 2023 in Farmville, Virginia. Controversial academic Jordan Peterson offered the country singer advice on managing his newfound fame. Samuel Corum/Getty Images News

"It differentiates the audience back into individuals, and you should always be communicating with individuals," Peterson said.

"As soon as you start talking to the crowd, you're immediately lying. You need to be talking to the individuals in the crowd."

Peterson also warned Anthony not to "get up on his high horse" or develop a large ego.

"When you're at the center of that much attention, [your ego] can get puffed up," he said while gesturing at his head.

In response, Anthony said he never wants to be in a position where he feels "I'm better than anyone I'm singing to."

"I don't like that ego that you see come with people that are in celebrity status," Anthony added. "It's a tragedy. The person changes into something completely different than what people fell in love with them for."

Jordan Peterson sat in a chair, November 2018. The Canadian psychologist and author is no stranger to controversy. Chris Williamson/Getty Images News

Posting to Instagram on September 1, Anthony said he has had enough of talking about his political views.

"I am scheduling one final podcast after Rogan, that can deep dive into the nitty gritty it seems people are so desperately trying to understand," Anthony wrote alongside a snap of him and podcaster Joe Rogan.

"I'm simultaneously being labeled a far right extremist and a liberal by the powers at be. I love it. They are doing everything they can to cause division," Anthony added.

Peterson's political opinions have also caused controversy online. In July, the author was criticized for mocking non-binary singer Demi Lovato's pronoun change, while, in August, he called for a boycott of the sweet Skittles over its LGBTQ+-friendly packaging.

In Poland, next month’s parliamentary elections may be the opposition’s last, best chance to stop the country’s slide into autocracy. Along with Hungary, Poland once counted as a paradigmatic success story for a postcommunist transition to democracy. But also like Hungary, that reputation started to sour when far-right populists surged to power in the 2010s.What happens in Poland is the more consequential because it is by far the largest Central or Eastern European country in the European Union. Its location—bordering Ukraine, Belarus, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and the Baltic Sea—gives it immense geopolitical importance. It has a more powerful military than neighboring Germany. And according to some projections, its GDP per capita is even set to overtake Britain’s by the end of the decade.The populist Law and Justice party secured a majority in Poland’s parliament, and won the largely ceremonial presidency, in 2015. Soon after, Jarosław Kaczyński, the party’s leader, who is widely understood to exercise the real power in the land, held a long meeting with Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán—and promptly went to work implementing hisplaybook.A decade ago, most political scientists thought of Hungary as a consolidated democracy, a country whose economic prosperity and political institutions were sufficiently robust to weather almost any challenge. In the country today, few independent media outlets remain, key political institutions are under the control of partisan hacks, and Orbán exerts tremendous sway over social and cultural life.Following suit, Law and Justice has eroded the independence of the country’s judicial system. First, the party forced several sitting justices on the Supreme Court into retirement, replacing them with loyalists who then commanded a majority (an EU court later found the government’s new retirement rule unlawful). It also increased government officials’ ability to determine which judge would hear what case. Finally, it packed a reformed Constitutional Tribunal, the body charged with judicial review in Poland, with political appointees who have the power to suspend judges who displease the government.[Yascha Mounk: Poland’s imperiled democracy]The government also undermined the independence of the media. Public broadcasting channels turned into propaganda networks that dropped any pretense of neutrality. The coverage of senior officials borders on the hagiographic. Meanwhile, opposition figures are routinely smeared as lapdogs of Germany or Russia (or, somehow, both)—or as criminals, perverts, and pedophiles.This makes the next weeks an especially perilous time for Polish democracy. If Law and Justice somehow manages to win reelection, further democratic backsliding seems almost inevitable.Both the abuse of the rule of law and the demonization of the opposition have gone into overdrive this year. Prominent businessmen who have criticized the government or otherwise thwarted it are languishing in pretrial detention on dubious charges. “The standards for detaining people have been lowered tragically,” Przemysław Rosati, the president of Poland’s bar council, told the Financial Times last month. “People are spending a long time in prison without taking into account their basic rights, including the presumption of innocence.”In another move designed to hamper the opposition, Parliament voted to open a commission to investigate Russian influence in Polish politics earlier this year—a move widely seen as aimed at discrediting Civic Platform, the country’s largest opposition party. The commission’s makeup is wholly partisan, and its bylaws do not grant the accused even basic procedural rights. Widespread public outrage forced the government to walk back some of the commission’s most blatantly antidemocratic prerogatives, such as the power to exclude anyone found guilty from public office for up to 10 years, but it remains a powerful means of maligning opposition leaders.Although the rule of law and the opposition’s ability to compete in elections are deeply compromised, the fight for Polish democracy is far from over. In Hungary, where democratic decline is more advanced, the opposition is reduced to a demoralized rump, and Orbán controls the airwaves. In Poland, independent television stations still draw millions of viewers. A lively set of newspapers and periodicals scrutinize the government’s actions. The opposition retains significant influence in the country’s upper chamber, dominates city halls throughout the country, and leads many regional governments, especially in western Poland.All of this raises the stakes for the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 15. If the Law and Justice party succeeds in winning a third mandate, the worrying trends of the past eight years are likely to accelerate. By the time of the next election, in 2027, the country’s political system might look like a carbon copy of Hungary’s. If, however, the opposition does well enough to form the next government, one of the most powerful countries in Europe could be back on track toward sustaining a genuine democracy. But can democratic forces manage to oust authoritarian populists from power through the ballot box, as they did in the United States in 2020 and in Brazil in 2022?After Donald Tusk became prime minister in 2007, Civic Platform seemed to become Poland’s natural governing party: It pursued moderate social and economic policies, deepened the country’s ties to the EU and the United States, and sustained rapid economic growth. But the party also failed to expand its support beyond its traditional strongholds in major cities and the more affluent parts of western Poland. In 2015, Law and Justice surged to power, thanks to the support of the less urban, less affluent part of the electorate.Civic Platform’s years in the wilderness left it looking disoriented. Tusk, who became president of the European Council at the end of 2014, was away in Brussels. Despite running a spirited campaign, Civic Platform failed to defeat the government in 2019. By 2021, its support sank to a record low of 16 percent. Many party loyalists grew convinced that only Tusk’s return could repair its fortunes.[Anne Applebaum: The disturbing new hybrid of democracy and autocracy]Tusk resumed leadership of Civic Platform two years ago, and the party quickly started to recover. But its support, which rose to a healthier 26 percent, has since stalled, and, according to the latest polls, it still trails Law and Justice by five to 10 percentage points. If elections were held today, neither party would be predicted to win an outright majority. Such an outcome might put Poland’s fate in the hands of an upstart movement: Confederation.So called because it originated in a merger between a libertarian and a far-right party, Confederation has struck a chord with voters—particularly young male voters—who are frustrated with the political establishment. In an election that pits a former two-term prime minister against an incumbent two-term government, the party’s promise of a radical break with the past has proved resonant.Part of Confederation’s appeal is economic. In 2015, Law and Justice won over swing voters by pretending to have moderated on social issues and promising to increase spending in favor of ordinary families. To win back those voters, Civic Platform has moved left on economic issues, voting with the government to expand child benefits and other welfare measures. This has given Confederation an opportunity to campaign on lower taxes and benefits.But Confederation’s core appeal consists in its harsh rhetoric about ethnic and religious minorities—rhetoric that outbids even Law and Justice’s frequent resort to bigotry. In a speech in 2019, a Confederation leader named Sławomir Mentzen summed up the movement’s program in five pithy points: “We don’t want Jews, homosexuals, abortion, taxes, and the European Union.” In another video that recently emerged, Witold Tumanowicz, the party’s campaign chief, pledged a national register of gay people.If neither Law and Justice nor Civic Platform wins a majority, the outcome may hinge on Confederation. Would its leaders enter into a marriage of convenience with Civic Platform? And would Civic Platform be willing to tolerate Confederation’s extremism to protect the country’s democratic institutions from an increasingly authoritarian government? There is no way of knowing.Another vagary stems from the uncertain performance of smaller opposition movements. Poland’s electoral system is mostly proportional, but a relatively high electoral threshold makes predicting which parties and coalitions will be represented in Parliament difficult. If the country’s decimated left or a new centrist coalition does not clear the bar, votes will be redistributed among the parties that do. Such a scenario could, as happened in 2015 and 2019, help Law and Justice win a majority in Parliament without winning a majority of the popular vote.A final uncertainty is whether the ruling party would accept the result if it lost, allowing a peaceful transfer of power despite its hold over the country’s institutions. During the campaign, Law and Justice has used all the levers at its disposal to gain unfair advantage. When Polish citizens go to vote, their ballot will include referendum questions tendentiously worded to insinuate that the opposition would sell off state assets to foreign entities, increase the retirement age, and flood the country with illegal immigrants. Such illicit tactics also raise the specter that the government might use its hold over the nation’s electoral commission to cheat if the opposition somehow prevails at the polls.[Michael Ignatieff: Why the populist right hates universities]After the Soviet Union disintegrated and lost its hold over vassal states in Central Europe, the fates of countries that were formerly under Moscow’s control diverged. Some, such as Belarus, became brutal dictatorships. Others, including both Poland and Hungary, seemed to be on a path to sustaining genuinely free societies.Three decades later, those assumptions look unduly optimistic. The dream of a successful transition from communism to democracy remains alive in Warsaw, and elsewhere in Central Europe, but whether these countries can withstand the trend toward authoritarianism is now, tragically, very much in doubt.

KYIV — The overnight train ride from Poland to Ukraine is a reminder of why this land has been so hotly contested over the last century: Ukraine’s soil is among the most fertile on the planet. We passed vast fields of wheat and other crops dotted with small farmhouses; in some places farmers were still using horses to plow the fields. As we approached Kyiv, the landscape quickly shifted to urban.

Despite the war, Ukraine’s railways continue to be clean, comfortable and efficient. My train rolled into Kyiv right on time. That says a lot about Ukraine. Despite the war, Kyiv feels almost normal. A year into the invasion, roughly half of Kyiv’s population had fled, but many people have since returned. The city had about 3.9 million residents in 2021, before the fighting started, and it’s back to around 3.6 million today (local sources tell me.)

The Yalta European Strategy annual meeting is also still being held as it has been for nearly 20 years (located originally in the Crimean city of Yalta and then, after the 2014 occupation of Crimea, in Kyiv). “The struggle for Ukraine is the most important struggle in the world right now, and we need to keep the world’s attention focused on it,” Viktor Pinchuk, the organizer, told me.

Stores and cafes in the city are bustling. Air raid sirens went off while I was having dinner at a friend’s place, and no one even stopped eating. But there are constant reminders of the conflict. Billboards scattered around the city mourn Ukraine’s lost “heroes,” as the fallen soldiers are often called. Sandbags and roadblocks are common.

Everyone is exhausted and sober. Ukraine’s losses have been terrible, measured both in cities destroyed and soldiers and civilians killed. As a German friend who has lived in Kyiv for years put it to me, “There is growing understanding of loss as part of normalcy. People are adjusting to the reality of knowing more and more people who have been killed or wounded. It’s a tough, sad condition.”

But exhaustion does not equal surrender. No one I spoke with believed that Ukraine should stop fighting to get back its territories. They were disappointed that the counteroffensive is not going better, but its difficulties only remind them that this will be a long struggle. Were they to make a premature peace, many said to me, this would only be a temporary pause. The Russians would come back, and they would have simply pushed the burdens of war onto the next generation.

When you speak with people at greater length, their views are more nuanced. “No surrender” is the mantra, but some said it was possible to imagine a cease-fire — with Ukraine never legally endorsing the legitimacy of Russian rule over parts of Donbas and Crimea — in exchange for real security guarantees. As one Ukrainian politician (who wished to stay unnamed) told me, “It’s easy for all of us who have not been in the fighting to refuse to compromise. The real question is what are the attitudes of the soldiers in the field and those who have returned. They might have more nuanced positions. But they will have to articulate them.”

The dominant worry in Kyiv is not about Russia but the West. Ukrainians have reason to be worried. Support for their fight is waning in some European countries. An election in Slovakia later this month could bring into power a populist prime minister who is distinctly pro-Russian, which would give Hungary’s Viktor Orban a useful ally in trying to change Europe’s policies. Support for Ukraine is also slipping in the United States. Many observers believe that the Russians are determined to stay the course until the 2024 elections in the hope that Donald Trump would be elected and that he would quickly hang the Ukrainians out to dry as he searched for a deal with Vladimir Putin. That would be a disaster, legitimizing naked aggression and emboldening dictators such as Putin and China’s Xi Jinping who want to disregard norms and rewrite the rules of the international system. “The jungle,” as Robert Kagan calls it, would return to international life.

The West has often fought wars alongside allies who were not deeply committed to their own cause, let alone the larger cause of freedom — from Afghans and Iraqis to the South Vietnamese and even the South Koreans (who were defending a nasty dictatorship during the Korean War). The Ukrainians are different — utterly committed to their independence but also to the values the West holds most deeply.

The monthslong debate over raising the debt limit is barely in the rearview mirror, and already it's time for another round of brinksmanship over the federal government's fiscal future. This time the stakes are a possible government shutdown at the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. That will happen unless Congress and President Joe Biden agree on a budget before then—which is highly unlikely—or agree to pass a short-term continuing resolution, which is how these fights are usually resolved. The complicating factor is that some Republican members of the House are threatening to use a possible shutdown as leverage to push a variety of their preferred policies. Some of those demands reflect important concerns about the fiscal state of the government and the growing budget deficit. The House Freedom Caucus wants to revisit the debt limit deal made by Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) earlier this year, in the hopes of lowering spending levels for future years. Members are also demanding an end to what they call a "blank check" of military aid and funding for Ukraine. But the group's demands also include more funding for a wall on the border with Mexico, new limits on which immigrants can be granted asylum, and a crackdown on the FBI. Some members of the group are attaching even-less-related issues to the budget negotiations: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, told constituents last week that she would not vote to fund the federal government unless the House opens impeachment proceedings against Biden, CNBC reported. Whether or not Biden deserves to be the subject of an impeachment inquiry, making these sorts of but-wait-there's-more demands only serve to distract from the essential debate here: the one over the federal government's unsustainable fiscal trajectory. And unsustainable it is. The national debt is now larger than the American economy, something that's never happened outside of a few brief years during World War II. The budget deficit for the first 10 months of this fiscal year added another $1.6 trillion to the debt, and the short-term nature of most government borrowing means higher interest rates are adding fuel to this fiscal fire. By the end of the decade, interest costs on the national debt will exceed the size of the military budget and will only keep growing. And then there's the Social Security crisis looming in the early 2030s. It's unfortunate that the only group of lawmakers trying to slam the brakes on federal spending is constantly being distracted by other, less important issues. Because, when it comes to the country's fiscal status, the Freedom Caucus is pretty much right. "[People] say, 'The Freedom Caucus is a danger,'" Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told Axios earlier this week. "No, the danger is the status quo." As Axios also notes, Paul is not the only senator who seems sympathetic to the Freedom Caucus' maneuvers, though the majority in the upper chamber seems unwilling to consider a government shutdown. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) has indicated that the Freedom Caucus is essentially McCarthy's problem to solve. While we wait to see what happens next, it's worth considering how this new fight over a possible government shutdown reveals the foolishness of governing from crisis to crisis. Biden and McCarthy had an opportunity to head off some of the federal government's major fiscal problems earlier this year but instead settled for a debt ceiling deal that largely maintained the status quo—the new limits on discretionary spending do virtually nothing to solve the deficit, spending, or entitlement issues facing the country. This year's federal budget deadline presents an even better opportunity for beginning the difficult process of solving those problems. At the very least, lawmakers should ask why federal spending has ballooned from $4.8 trillion to more than $6.2 trillion between 2018 and 2022, and how that increase in spending is driving deficits higher. Punting on those tough questions doesn't make any of them go away. Instead, it will only create another crisis in a few months, and another opportunity for groups like the House Freedom Caucus to leverage the debate. This is no way for a serious country to govern itself. It's fine to worry about the consequences of a government shutdown, but at some point Congress has to start worrying about the consequences of keeping the government open if doing so requires ongoing borrowing at unsustainable rates.The post Is a Government Shutdown Better Than More Reckless Borrowing? appeared first on Reason.com.

Federal employees are set to receive the largest pay increase in four decades, courtesy of President Joe Biden. In a letter sent to Congress last week, Biden called for a 5.2 percent overall pay increase for federal workers—the same increase that he'd included in his budget plan that was sent to Congress earlier this year. Biden said the huge pay increase was necessary so the federal government could "attract, recruit, and retain a skilled workforce with fair compensation in order to keep our government running, deliver services, and meet our nation's challenges today and tomorrow." Technically, the pay increase will be divided into two separate categories. Federal workers would receive a 4.7 percent across-the-board pay raise, combined with a 0.5 percent bump in so-called locality pay. Because the amount of a federal employee's locality pay varies from place to place based on the cost of living, the actual pay increases might not be the same for all workers. It would be the biggest increase since federal workers received a 9.1 percent pay raise in 1980 during the waning days of the Carter administration, according to Government Executive, a trade publication for federal employees. As Government Executive notes, some members of Congress have been pushing for an even larger increase in federal employee compensation: A group of Democrats introduced a bill earlier this year to boost federal workers' wages by 8.7 percent. In fairness, private-sector wages have been rising steadily in recent months too—wages were up 4.6 percent for the 12 months ending in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In recent months, pay increases have even started to outpace inflation, which has cooled after running at rates not seen since the 1980s. Still, Biden's decision to push for higher federal wages is a bit awkward at the current moment. One obvious reason is that the federal government ran a budget deficit of more than $1.6 trillion during the first 10 months of the current fiscal year. The deficit is already significantly larger than last year, and is on pace to keep growing. There probably aren't many businesses that would be handing out pay raises during a year where they were that deep in the red—but, hey, it's a lot easier to do that when you're dealing with other people's money. For that matter, how many private-sector workers would get an automatic pay increase for not even bothering to show up? As of March, the Government Accountability Office found daily office occupancy rates of less than 25 percent across 17 federal agencies. Certainly, some federal workers (like many in the private sector) can do their jobs remotely, but it's becoming clear that many are overusing the privilege. Last month, Biden's chief of staff called on top federal officials to "aggressively execute" plans to get federal workers back into the office, Axios reported at the time. Many federal workers don't seem to be taking the directives well. Jesus Soriano, a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), told NPR this week that a new mandate requiring NSF workers to spend at least eight days per month in the office was "heartbreaking." Soriano says forcing federal workers back into the office will limit which experts agencies like the NSF can recruit. That seems fine. If workers can earn better pay and more flexibility in the private sector, then they should put their talents to use doing something other than working for the government. And for federal workers who are upset about having to shuffle into the office a few more times each month, at least there will be even fatter paychecks to ease the blow. The post Biden Aims To Give Federal Workers Largest Pay Increase in 40 Years appeared first on Reason.com.

The pretext for impeaching Protasiewicz is that she won’t agree to recuse herself from redistricting cases, given her campaign comments about the state’s unfair maps, and the $10 million that the Democratic Party put into her race. This is, to put it mildly, a flimsy rationale. Wisconsin’s Judicial Commission has already dismissed a complaint that she violated court strictures by weighing in on contentious issues that might come before her as a judge. And the conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court adopted a rule in 2009 that justices did not need to recuse themselves from hearing cases involving their campaign donors.

If Republicans move ahead with this impeachment, it will be for one reason only: because they think they can. “Republicans feel deeply entitled to their gerrymandered majority,” said Charlie Sykes, once a powerful right-wing radio host in Wisconsin and now a founder of the Never Trump conservative publication The Bulwark. “For them, this is an existential issue.”

Impeachment, which requires only a simple majority of the Assembly, may be easier for Republicans than removal, which requires a two-thirds vote in the State Senate. (Given the size of their Senate majority, they couldn’t afford to lose a single vote.) But some observers think that even if Republicans impeach Protasiewicz, they have no intention of actually holding a Senate trial. Once impeached, a justice is suspended from hearing cases while the process plays out. But since the state Constitution is silent on a timeline for that process, Republicans could impeach Protasiewicz and then leave her in legal oblivion indefinitely.

In that case, the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, would never be able to appoint a replacement, and the court would be deadlocked, unable to do anything about either the gerrymandering or the abortion ban.

“Senate Republicans in Wisconsin are basically saying, ‘Yeah, we’re not going to have a trial. We won’t do anything,’” said Sykes, whose ex-wife is a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. “So in other words, she would never get to due process. And she would sit in limbo, theoretically, forever. So they just wipe away the election.”

Reflecting on the subject of pain in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein concluded that the grammar of the concept had an essential relation to publicly recognisable forms of “pain-behaviour”: wincing, saying “ow”, yelping, crying, and so on. He thought that it was possible to know that another person was in pain simply by looking at their behaviour, as reliably as you could know that you yourself were. “Just try — in a real case — to doubt someone else’s fear or pain,” he wrote, doubtless fuelled by memories of serving as a forward artillery observer in the First World War. He’s probably right. Still, it’s a pity he never met American ultra-runner Courtney Dauwalter.
On Saturday, Dauwalter won the women’s Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a 106-mile race around Mont Blanc involving a total of 32,700ft of climb plus accompanying brutal descents.  In the past 10 years this astonishing athlete has won 20 ultra marathons, the shortest of which was 100km and the longest 240 miles. In the past 10 weeks alone, she has won three races of 100 miles each, with little time for recovery in between. The UTMB was her latest; she completed it in under 24 hours. In an interview the day afterwards, she pronounced her legs “completely destroyed”, and I believe her.
During her youth, Dauwalter honed her tolerance to suffering by competing in cross-country skiing in Alaska, putting duct-tape on her face to avoid getting frostbite. In races these days, past a certain point of exertion she tends to vomit every couple of miles. According to one extended profile of the runner, if she’s competing for more than 24 hours, now and again she will permit herself a one-minute power nap at the side of the trail. She often hallucinates: for instance, that bears are hugging in a circle in front of her, or that flying eels are attacking her. Hallucinations have now become part of her brand: she has a merchandise line that makes graphics out of them and puts them on T-shirts.
During one long race, she refused to change her running gait despite a huge blister migrating from her little toe to the top of her foot. In another, she developed temporary blindness but still ran on. Tripping on a tree root, and unable to see the blood leaking from her face after the fall, she dismissed it as “just sweat”. As her husband said in a documentary about her: “Something that Courtney has learnt and has got really good at, is that when you think your body is telling you to stop, maybe you don’t need to stop”.
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Of course, sometimes when your body is telling you to stop, it’s a good idea to listen. My own version of this is to take a breather halfway up a local hill to enjoy the view. Dauwalter’s version is to attempt a 486-mile course record across the Rockies, stopping only for acute bronchitis at mile number 309. It’s not that she doesn’t feel pain at all. It’s rather that she mentally approaches it in a very deliberate way, originally learnt from her high school skiing coach.
To cope, she visualises in great detail a “pain cave”: a dark underground space full of tunnels, whose outer edges she pictures herself chiselling away at with every agonising step. In classically puritan vein, she tells herself at the beginning at every race that she is about to step into the cave and that “we’re going to get better from visiting it”. Early on in her career, she used to picture herself shying away from the cave’s mouth; or else sitting on a chair near the entrance, just “surviving it”. Nowadays, pain and the mental chiselling it prompts are conceived of as industrious and productive: “Each time I’ve raced, and hurt a little more, and dug a little deeper, I’m actually making a bigger cave with different tunnels.” She imagines herself in a hard-hat “going to town, trying to make it a dust pile while I am in there”.
The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius might have urged us not to struggle against pain but to accept it as neither good nor bad. This runner-philosopher goes one better, advising us to give pain a meaning, then love it. Reading about Dauwalter this week — and having just finished my own bout of bronchitis — I decided to try out her technique by going for a run.
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After about three minutes of heaving myself up the road, I mentally donned a high-vis vest and headlamp and tentatively entered my cave. Staring blankly about me, I ineffectively chiselled a bit here and there, but soon got distracted by the dragging pain in my legs and hammering in my chest. As my discomfort increased, I made some more desultory marks on the walls — for some reason, these looked a bit like the scratches made by the victims of serial killers — and then put down my tools and lit an imaginary fag. I don’t think I have the right work ethic for this job. Personally, I see nothing wrong with a pain cave on the snug side.
Womanhood and pain is a naturally occurring combination. The pains of childbirth for most, menstrual pain for nearly all, and fluctuating hormones which increase the intensity of already painful conditions are the female lot without access to medication. Women report pain more frequently than men and are more susceptible to chronic pain conditions, for complex reasons that are probably both biological and social. Some studies even suggest that female pain intensity is higher too. Women also apparently buy the most over-the-counter analgesics — though it remains unclear whether some of these are purchased for their husbands.
There are also sexed differences in dealing with pain. One overview suggests that while men distract themselves with other tasks and use “problem-focused tactics”, women tend to try “positive self-statements and emotion-focused techniques”. Indeed, I can attest to this, having once done a hypnobirthing course, full of 30 and 40-something expectant mothers trying very hard to convince themselves they weren’t going to have a caesarean at the end of it. Here, too, there was a geological visualisation — except this time it was called the “cove of confidence”, and you were supposed to retreat into its soothing depths whenever you needed a break from the agony of what the instructor euphemistically renamed as “surges”. (Without wanting to discourage any pregnant readers, let’s just say that, at the very least, the cove of confidence empowers you to scream all the louder for an epidural during the surges).
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Women are also apparently more prone to what psychologists “pain catastrophising” — worrying and ruminating excessively, mentally magnifying threats and anticipating the worst, feeling helpless, and so on — which in turn exacerbates pain intensity and general distress. This degree of anxiety starts seeming more rational when supplemented with the knowledge that, when women go to the doctor, their pain apparently tends to be underestimated relative to identical behavioural manifestations by men (yet another data point unanticipated by Wittgenstein).
Indeed, there’s a danger that simply stating in public that women experience more pain than men partly due to biological factors — as I am doing here — might encourage a dismissive attitude towards women’s pain by health care providers. That is, this knowledge might induce hearers to confuse what is the case naturally, with what ought to be the case, producing a knock-on social penalty as well. Yet if the modern-day medical attitude to “natural” pain is that it should be medicated away — and clearly it is — then there’s no fair reason to extend this attitude to one sex but not the other.
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But maybe we don’t always have to opt for anaesthesia. With pain an inevitability in life, and particularly for women, it makes sense that some people make it part of an identity. Choose pain deliberately before it chooses you! Contrary to appearances, this is not always the same as masochism. Masochism, whether sexual or emotional, involves unconsciously leaning into passivity, helplessness, victimisation, and the familiarity of suffering. This seems to me the precise opposite of what someone like Dauwalter is doing. She is emphatically winning at life, not stagnating in the comforts of defeat. She has no coach, follows no set training regime but just runs how she feels on the day, and rewards herself afterwards with nachos and beer. According to one journalist: “Sometimes around 3 a.m., she is so amped, in awe of the mountains surrounding her, that she’ll squeal: “This is awesome!” Even controlling for being an American (or, at least, not being British), this still sounds pretty far from the masochistic mindset.
Indeed, one common explanation sometimes offered for masochism positions it as a negative response to a highly competitive environment — you revel in feelings of pain, failure, and inferiority as an inadequate psychic proxy for power and control. Dauwalter, in contrast, seems obviously in touch with her inner competitive beast, and approaches every race with explicitly positive goals in mind. Pain is conceptualised as a necessary means to the ends of beating rivals, smashing course records and personal bests, and — of course — winning that coveted first place in the “World’s Most Voluminous Pain Cave” competition. “My goal with every race is to make it hurt and get everything out of myself that I can,” she says.
Hardly any of us can be as positive as this about what is essentially an unpleasant experience, and in some cases overwhelmingly so. Pain hurts, sometimes terribly. The clue is in the concept. Still, in a world where so many of us seem to be keen to escape pain in all its forms, whether physical or emotional, Dauwalter serves as a fascinating exemplar of how it is possible to go the other way, and rush towards it, grinning ecstatically.
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China’s economy, the world’s second largest, is facing its most serious setback in a generation. During the past two years, economic growth appears to have been cut nearly in half. After emerging from the “zero COVID” policies that Xi Jinping, China’s leader, ordered early in the pandemic, the country now faces a real-estate crisis and faltering confidence from both its own citizens and overseas businesses. The problems have sparked debate among economists about whether Xi’s increasingly autocratic regime is to blame, and what a major slowdown could mean for the rest of the world.

To talk about China’s economy and the possible causes of its malaise, I recently spoke by phone with the economist Eswar Prasad: a professor at Cornell University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an expert on the Chinese economy, and the author of “The Future of Money.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Xi may be hesitant to implement significant economic reforms, how serious a threat a crashing Chinese economy is to the rest of the world, and the lasting impact of China’s pandemic policies.

What do you think has gone wrong with China’s economy, and why has it manifested itself so clearly now?

The Chinese economy has been beset by a combination of short-term problems as well as longer-term structural challenges, all of which seem to be coming to a head at the same time. It has long been powered by investment, and investment certainly sounds like a good thing, because if you invest more, the economy can grow faster. But China has had relatively inefficient investment. A lot of it has been undertaken by state-owned enterprises that are not necessarily investing in the most productive way. China has in particular relied a great deal on investment in the real-estate sector, so the property market is now beginning to unravel a little bit because there was a lot of speculative activity in that market.

Then there is the problem that some parts of the economy, including local governments, have a lot of debt, a lot of fiscal pressures. There is also a longer-term challenge: China has an aging population and a labor force that is already beginning to shrink. If there isn’t a path to higher growth via investment, and if the labor force is shrinking, the only way you can generate growth is through more productivity, and they’re not able to do that.

On top of that, global demand for China is weak, so it’s not able to export as much to support its economy. China took away its “zero COVID” policy, but consumers and businesses seem quite nervous about the country’s economic prospects. Businesses—private businesses in particular—aren’t investing and consumers are not spending that much. All of this is now leading to another problem, which is deflation, or falling prices.

In an economy with these types of problems, what are the solutions that a government would normally try to implement?

It can use fiscal policy. In other words, the government can go out and spend more. It can give people money, it can spend more on investment and on buying things, and that can stimulate economic activity. It could also do things like cut taxes, which leaves more money in the pockets of people, in the hope that they will go out and spend. Then, the central bank can make money cheaper, essentially—by cutting interest rates and flooding the economy with money, they can make money cheaper for both businesses and consumers and also reduce the cost of that money.

The difficulty that China faces right now is somewhat larger in scope, because even if you give people money to spend, if you make it cheaper to borrow, if you give them government handouts, people need to be confident about their future economic prospects so that they go out and spend rather than save. Right now, China could use its traditional policy tools, but I think the fundamental problem that the Chinese economy is beset by is really a lack of confidence, and we’ve seen this in a variety of measures. Private investment has essentially collapsed during the last year, although a lot of that is attributable to the real-estate sector. Retail sales, especially of big-ticket items, such as cars, have gone down a bit. The real problem seems to be that businesses and consumers don’t quite have confidence in the government’s ability to turn things around.

There’s been a big debate going on with a number of very prominent economists about the degree to which China’s current problems and difficulty finding solutions really stem from its authoritarianism. China’s obviously been an authoritarian country for a long time, but it’s got significantly more authoritarian in the last decade under Xi Jinping. How do you think about the contours of this debate, and why is this debate important?

It is certainly the case that the command-and-control mentality of the Chinese government has made it somewhat harder for them to recognize problems as they arise and to tackle them in a frontal way. Additionally, state-owned enterprises, which still comprise a significant share of economic activity, are under the direct control of the government, as is much of the financial system, especially the state-owned banks. The government seems to believe that it can manage its way out of any problem.

What I think is the real problem for China is that they’re stuck halfway. I’m not saying that a fully command-and-control model would be ideal, but what China wants to do is let the markets work to some extent, and that is a bit of a problem. It’s very challenging to have markets work when you don’t have the necessary institutional reforms. What that means in plain language is that you need the rule of law. You need good corporate and government transparency. You need good auditing and accounting procedures. Without those attributes, which China doesn’t have, the market cannot really function well, so we’ve seen a lot of volatility in stock markets, in land prices, and so on.

The other problem is that when things are not going well in the part of the economy led by the private sector, the government steps in and tries to set things right directly. Now we have a situation where people think the government will step in, but they’re not quite sure, so this creates even more volatility and uncertainty.

The case that Chinese authoritarianism is causing problems goes beyond just the factors you have cited. There have been reports in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that Xi is for ideological reasons unwilling to orient the economy toward more consumer spending. There’s been concern that Xi’s crackdowns on foreign business have sorely hurt international confidence in China.

There is certainly a sense that Xi tolerates private enterprise but sees state-owned enterprises as the bulwark of the economy. During the last year and a half, especially, that tightening has been very apparent. We have seen high-flying tech companies get cut down to size. We have also seen crackdowns on private funds in the medical and educational sectors. There is a very clear sense that, while the government is willing to tolerate private enterprise, it doesn’t want private entrepreneurs to become so successful or have their firms become so big that it makes it difficult for the government to control them.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Updated at 2:00 p.m. ET on September 7, 2023Mike Tyson is one of the greatest boxers of all time. Over his career, “Iron Mike” had 50 wins, including 44 knockouts, and only six losses. Coming from a difficult childhood, during which he was surrounded by crime and poverty, he escaped his circumstances through a laserlike focus on his dream of athletic greatness. And he realized that dream by becoming the world heavyweight champion at the age of 20, in 1986.Despite his success and fame, Tyson was dogged by crises, failed relationships, and legal troubles, including allegations of domestic violence and nearly three years in prison in the 1990s after he was convicted on a charge of rape. He achieved all his ambitions of riches and renown, but a happy life seemed to elude him.[Read: Five reasons boxing might go mainstream again (and five reasons it won’t)]This might seem ironic or contradictory to some. To Tyson, however, it was neither. “You almost have to give your happiness up to accomplish your goals,” he reflected in a 2020 interview.That is what we might call the Tyson Paradox. Building a good life requires us to have goals that keep us focused, enthusiastic, and out of trouble. But actually attaining those goals might not give us the payoff we imagined, and could in fact bring us misery. Although most of us will never see the highs and lows that Mike Tyson experienced, we can all easily fall into our own version of the same trap.To have an ambitious goal in life is a good thing, as psychologists since the 1970s have shown. It provides structure and meaning, and leads to higher satisfaction, as long as you can make progress toward your goal. As a result, the notion that “attaining this goal should also have a positive effect,” as the psychologist Bettina S. Wiese writes, has gone largely unquestioned.Yet most of us can think of many little counterexamples of our own. If you have ever tried to lose weight and succeeded, you know the satisfaction that comes from seeing the scale fall—it makes the sacrifices in what you eat feel worthwhile. But after that, what’s the reward for hitting your target weight? Not eating what you love ever again, just to keep it there. The sacrifice no longer delivers that sweet progress; it devolves into avoiding the chagrin of seeing the scale go back up. This effect may help explain why one review of diet research found that roughly 35 percent of dieters seem to develop pathological dieting behaviors, and 20 to 25 percent of those people end up with partial or full eating disorders.The problem behind the Tyson Paradox is called the “arrival fallacy”: the assumption that once we hit a goal or reach a destination, the bliss we get will last. This is impossible because of our evolved inability to maintain any strong emotional state: We move back to our emotional equilibrium quickly (a tendency called homeostasis) to be ready to process whatever new circumstances we face. The problem is less that we “can’t get no satisfaction,” pace the Rolling Stones, and more that we can’t keep no satisfaction.[Uri Friedman: 7 ways to find meaning at work]Researchers have demonstrated the arrival fallacy in various creative ways. In the past, I have written about how athletes encounter this goal-attainment problem. In a field of endeavor that is closer to my professorly heart, my colleague Dan Gilbert and several co-authors surveyed young university professors on how happy they expected to be if they attained tenure—a huge goal for every aspiring academic—compared with how happy they actually were when they got it. The professors systematically overestimate their happiness, by about 13 percent. (I remember this, in fact: The day in 2004 that I was granted tenure at Syracuse University, my wife and I went out to dinner to celebrate, and spent the evening fretting over the fact that one of our children had bitten another kid at preschool that day.) On the bright side, those denied tenure are 27 percent less unhappy than they expect to be.For some people, the trouble with goal attainment goes beyond simple disappointment. For those with bipolar disorder, goal attainment can provoke a mental-health crisis. Scholars writing in 2000 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that the attainment of a life goal can trigger a manic episode. Although most people coast after they realize a goal—commonly experiencing some sense of anticlimax—manic individuals may spiral into intensified goal-seeking behavior. One possible explanation for this finding, based on recent research, is that dopamine, a chemical found in the brain that governs the anticipation of reward, seems to be higher in people with mania; the system of anticipation and reward may simply get stuck on.Reading all of this, you might conclude that the solution to the Tyson Paradox is to give up on your life goals. They’re all anticipation and no payoff, right? Not quite. There is a way to defeat the paradox. It just requires setting the right type of goals.A clue as to how comes from research on job satisfaction published in a 2005 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology. Scholars collected data on hundreds of individuals who were asked whether their professional goals were extrinsic (involving material rewards, such as pay and prestige) or intrinsic (intangibles, such as fun and enjoyment, especially when shared with other people). The people who concentrated on intrinsic professional goals were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than those who didn’t.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.This finding is consistent with other research showing that, in general, relationship goals bring greater well-being than achievement goals. People who have an ambition to foster deeper friendships, a better marriage, and closer connections with their children and their parents tend to be happier than people working for worldly rewards.Even within achievement goals themselves, we can see a reinforcing pattern. Psychologists showed in 2017 that there are two kinds of achievement: mastery (excelling at your job) and performance (obtaining objective results, such as earning more money than others). Performance goals brought happiness only when participants were compared favorably with others. This suggests that in the times when, inevitably, such favorable comparisons are not available, the goals will make you unhappy. In contrast, mastery goals can raise your satisfaction regardless of comparison with others.[Arthur C. Brooks: The triumph of coming in third]In short, the goals most likely to defeat the Tyson Paradox are social and relational, about giving and getting love. Achievement goals are more likely to lead to the arrival fallacy, especially if they involve peer juxtaposition. This is, of course, at odds with most self-improvement literature, which promises to teach you how to be rich and powerful.If you are a hard-charging striver, all of this might make you feel uncomfortable about your decisions—as though I’m saying something absurd like “trying to be 5 percent richer than your neighbor might not be a good reason to neglect your kids.” If this is the case, and you feel that uneasiness, that may be because you are a “success addict,” someone who has put being special before being happy. I have seen this in hundreds of cases in my research. I strongly suspect that this was true of Iron Mike himself—and that is what he means in saying that your goals can be at odds with your well-being. Greater awareness of this conflict can enable you to adjust your priorities in life.I have one last lesson to offer about goals; it comes from an old Zen Buddhist proverb concerning a junior monk whose monotonous job in the monastery was summarized in four words: chop wood, carry water. He dreamed of achieving the sort of enlightenment the older monks possessed. One day, he asked his master, a senior monk with a “Buddha nature,” to tell him how his life would change when he was finally enlightened as well. The senior monk contemplated the question, and answered matter-of-factly, “Chop wood, carry water.”An American version of that proverb might be: Remember that the reward for winning a pie-eating contest is usually more pie.This is probably the most important insight we can all use to defeat the Tyson Paradox. Having goals in life is human and healthy. To provide direction and purpose, a journey requires a destination. But the journey, not the destination, is what gives us the satisfaction and meaning we truly need.

Outspoken clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson is well known for his controversial comments on everything from transgender rights to Disney's live-action Snow White remake. However, his wife Tammy Peterson keeps a much lower profile.

Peterson, 61, and the former massage therapist, 58, have been married for 34 years and have two children—Mikhalia Fuller, 31, and Julian Peterson, 28. However, the couple have had their ups and downs over the years, including a cancer scare and a stint in rehab.

Jordan Peterson (right) and his wife Tammy Peterson (left) in November 2022. The couple have been married for 34 years after meeting as children in Fairview, Alberta, Canada. Faith Moran/GC Images

How Did Jordan Peterson Meet His Wife Tammy Peterson?

The couple first bonded as children and began dating in high school, marrying in 1989.

In a post to Instagram in February 2019, Jordan Peterson recounted his first meeting with his future wife—then Tammy Roberts—who lived across the street from his childhood home in Fairview, Alberta.

"I was about seven at the time (that's 48 years ago)," he wrote. "You can imagine what an awful lot of memories we share."

Tammy Peterson ran her own massage therapy business for three decades before leaving her career behind to support her husband with his research, acting as an advisor. She also has her own podcast—The Tammy Peterson Podcast—where she analyzes ancient scripture in relation to modern life.

While providing relationship advice on social media, the professor of psychology often references his own relationship. In a post shared in October 2022, he stated the importance of making time for intimacy in a marriage.

"It's really easy for the intimate part of your marriage, the sexual part, to drop," he wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of him and his wife.

"That's a very bad long-term strategy. You have to—especially once you are married and you have children—you have to consciously attend to the maintenance of romantic intimacy."

The couple also released a limited series together, called Jordan Peterson on Marriage, offering tips on how to "strengthen your relationship with your spouse, and achieve the ultimate goal: the perfect date that repeats endlessly."

Tammy Peterson Recently Battled Terminal Cancer

In a July 2019 interview with The Times, Jordan Peterson shared that his wife was battling a rare form of kidney cancer

"My wife is very ill," he told the publication. "She's had two surgeries in the last two months and is suffering from severe complications from the last one."

Tammy Peterson was diagnosed with a Bellini tumor, a type of renal cancer with an extremely high mortality rate. Doctors initially believed she had a less aggressive form of cancer, but surgery to remove part of her kidney revealed the severity of the condition.

The cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, but the second surgery successfully removed the tumor.

In an interview with the "Freedom Pact" YouTube channel in 2022, Tammy Peterson said that her spirituality helped her fight the disease.

"I had a better insight into why people will go through heroic measures to save their own lives," she told host Lewis Edward.

"I realized this isn't to save my life, not for me necessarily, [but] that part of me that is in service to ourselves and the rest of our community."

The Stress Led Jordan Peterson to Check Into Rehab

Later that year, Mikhalia Peterson confirmed that her father had checked into a rehab facility in New York.

Posting a video to YouTube, the influencer explained that the author, then 57, was suffering from "horrific" discontinuation symptoms from the medication Clonazepam. The drug is used to manage seizures and muscle spasms, as well as to treat mental health conditions such as OCD and panic disorder.

Jordan Peterson has previously discussed his battle with depression and was prescribed the benzodiazepine after his wife's cancer diagnosis in April 2019. Jordan Peterson also put the tour for his book—2 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos on hold—and postponed his following title, Beyond Order.

After Tammy Peterson's condition appeared to improve, he decided to wean himself off Clonazepam. However, the process did not go as planned, with Mikhalia Peterson describing her father as "like a lost puppy."

"I've never seen my dad like this," she said in the video. "He's having a miserable time of it. It breaks my heart."

Jordan Peterson Was Placed In a Medically-Induced Coma

In February 2020, the academic admitted himself into an "emergency" detox center in Moscow, after difficulty weaning himself off Clonazepam.

Mikhalia Peterson reported that her father suffered from a "severe case of pneumonia" during his time at the facility, and was placed into a medically-induced coma for eight days to help him recover.

"He's had to spend four weeks in the ICU in terrible shape, but, with the help of some extremely competent and courageous doctors, he survived," she said in an online clip.

"The uncertainty around his recovery has been one of the most difficult and scary experiences we've ever had."

Jordan Peterson in November 2018. Peterson has since returned to work after a stay in rehab and an emergency detox center. Chris Williamson/Getty Images News

Jordan Peterson Claims He's Being Canceled

After his health scare, Peterson took a brief hiatus from the public eye. He has since returned to his career, continuing to cause controversy.

In August, he lashed out at Disney CEO Bob Iger on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, after photos taken at Disney World Resort, Florida, appeared to show men dressed as female characters.

On September 4, Peterson was mocked by critics after supposedly referencing a scene from Sky Fall (2012). Peterson appeared to quote the "Rat King" speech from the James Bond movie, originally performed by Javier Bardem's villainous Raoul Silva.

Peterson also recently called for a boycott of Skittles candy due to its "woke" LGBTQ+ packaging, and on September 5, published an essay in The New York Post titled "I'm being professionally canceled for my moral stance on trans butchery," explaining that he is likely to lose his license for his comments on trans issues.

New data from the Guttmacher Institute indicate that U.S. abortions have increased after the fall of Roe v. Wade, not decreased.  While the reproductive health policy group estimated that around 465,000 abortions occurred during the first six months of 2020, they estimated that about 511,000 occurred during the same period in 2023. The group's data only include legal abortions. The change seems counterintuitive, especially considering that 15 states have outright banned abortion (though Indiana's ban was not in effect during the period studied) in the 14 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. However, there are a few possible explanations for the unexpected uptick in abortions. According to The Washington Post, in the year following the Supreme Court's decision overturning the national right to an abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 16 new abortion clinics opened in states where the procedure remained legal. Not only did this help pro-choice states bordering pro-life states absorb traveling patients, but it likely also allowed for additional abortions—such as those from women who live in a state where abortion is legal but had previously lived too far away from an abortion clinic to travel for the procedure.  Access to medication abortion—abortions that are performed in early pregnancy, typically by a woman taking a prescribed medication at home or in a doctor's office—also expanded following the fall of Roe. Following the Food and Drug Administration's 2021 decision to permanently allow abortion medication to be prescribed via telemedicine, it became much easier for women—especially those living far away from an abortion clinic or doctor's office—to obtain abortion medications. COVID restrictions were likely not a factor in the increase between 2020 and 2023, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded roughly the same number of procedures during 2020 and 2019. (The Guttmacher Institute does not have 2019 data). While the Guttmacher Institute did not provide 2023 estimates for 14 states that had banned the procedure, abortions unsurprisingly declined in states where it was banned or restricted. And not all women who would have obtained an abortion before Dobbs ended up traveling elsewhere. According to a recent study from Johns Hopkins researchers, Texas' six-week "heartbeat" ban resulted in nearly 10,000 more live births in the state over an eight-month period. Notably, the Guttmacher Institute's data also estimates far more abortions than those calculated by the CDC's abortion surveillance studies, which recorded just 620,327 abortions during all of 2020. The Guttmacher Institute estimated 930,160, around 50 percent more. However, the CDC's data doesn't include California, Maryland, and New Hampshire, which—according to Guttmacher Institute data—performed almost 187,000 abortions in 2020, which would account for around 60 percent of the gap in estimated abortions. The rest of the difference is likely due to the data-gathering method. While the Guttmacher Institute individually contacts all facilities known to have provided abortions to ask for their number of procedures, the CDC aggregates state-level data. For pro-life advocates, this new data indicates an uncomfortable truth about post-Roe America. While access to abortion has plummeted in some states, it's also gotten much easier to obtain one in others, primarily as a direct reaction to state-level bans. This trend seems to have effectively canceled out the impact of recent statewide abortion bans, showing that, as long as abortion remains legal in a significant part of the county, it will be incredibly difficult to prevent women from obtaining one.The post Over a Year After <i>Dobbs</i>, Abortions Have Increased Nationwide appeared first on Reason.com.

The White House agenda diverts focus and money from federal programs and undermines traditional environmental goals

New York, NY – This summer the Inflation Reduction Act celebrated its first anniversary. Along with boosting subsidies for green infrastructure, President Biden’s signature law put significant funding behind the administration’s commitment to the elusive concept of “environmental justice.” In a new Manhattan Institute report, senior fellow James Meigs offers a systematic analysis of the environmental justice paradigm, and details why its negative consequences promise to outweigh any modest positive contributions.

The environmental justice (EJ) movement began as the demand that minority communities are entitled to equal enforcement of environmental laws. Meigs documents how that reasonable stance evolved into the more radical philosophy now embraced by the Biden administration. The White House says it wants to put vaguely defined EJ goals “at the center of the federal government’s work.” It demands that 40 percent of the benefits from environmentally oriented programs must flow to specific disadvantaged communities where they can help solve an array of social ills. And it includes more than $3 billion in block grants to local activist groups, funding that some congressmembers fear could become a "slush fund for far-left organizations."

Chronicling key policies, agencies, and figures, Meigs identifies four core problems with Biden’s EJ Agenda:

It shifts resources away from traditional environmental goals: Expecting environmental programs to simultaneously address poverty, housing shortages, and other social ills undermines the ability to pursue traditional goals like clean air and water by introducing competing priorities.

Expecting environmental programs to simultaneously address poverty, housing shortages, and other social ills undermines the ability to pursue traditional goals like clean air and water by introducing competing priorities. It hampers government functions across the board: Grading all federal agencies on an Environmental Justice Scorecard creates new workload burdens for agency officials attempting to demonstrate compliance with vaguely specified requirements.

Grading all federal agencies on an Environmental Justice Scorecard creates new workload burdens for agency officials attempting to demonstrate compliance with vaguely specified requirements. It undermines both environmental and economic progress: The proliferation of new offices, rules, and requirements creates bureaucratic hurdles for government and private action.

The proliferation of new offices, rules, and requirements creates bureaucratic hurdles for government and private action. It embeds a far-left worldview within federal agencies: While most Americans agree with practical measures to protect the environment, the EJ movement’s more radical activists seek the overturning of free markets and other foundations of American society.

Read the full report here.

Executive Summary

From its first week in office, the Biden administration has described “environmental justice” as one its top priorities. The environmental justice (EJ) movement began in the 1980s as an effort to make sure environmental rules were fairly enforced in poor and minority communities. But Biden’s EJ agenda goes far beyond that reasonable approach.

The administration asserts that certain communities are unfairly burdened by pollution and “on the frontlines of the climate crisis” based mostly on socioeconomic factors. In response, the White House has launched the “Justice40 Initiative,” a policy mandating that 40% of the benefits from climate and environmentally oriented programs must flow to these “EJ communities.”

The amount of spending that is subject to Biden’s 40% rule is enormous: For example, roughly half of the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill is earmarked for projects that are arguably environment- or climate-related.

In a series of sweeping executive orders, the White House describes its EJ agenda as an “all-of government” reform that will change the focus of virtually every federal agency. But details about how the program will be implemented—in particular, what constitutes a “benefit” and how to satisfy the 40% rule—remain vague. Nonetheless, it is possible to anticipate the following problems:

Biden’s EJ agenda diverts spending and administrative resources away from traditional environmental priorities—such as reducing air and water pollution and lowering greenhouse gas emissions—and directs them toward amorphous social goals.

The EJ agenda also makes government programs less focused and less effective across the board.

Ironically, the inefficiencies imposed by EJ policies will be particularly burdensome for environmental and infrastructure projects.

Introduction

On January 27, 2021, his seventh full day in office, President Joseph Biden signed Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.”[1] The order committed his administration to an array of policies aimed at pushing the U.S. toward economy-wide, “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The document also created a new guideline, known as the “Justice40 Initiative,” specifying that 40% of the benefits from climate and environmentally oriented programs must flow to specific disadvantaged communities known as “environmental justice communities.” Biden’s order states: “It is therefore the policy of my Administration to secure environmental justice and spur economic opportunity for disadvantaged communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution and underinvestment in housing, transportation, water and wastewater infrastructure, and health care.”[2]

To help implement this agenda, the order created the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, consisting largely of representatives from community-based activist groups, and elevated an existing interagency working group to become the Environmental Justice Interagency Council, which includes more than a dozen Cabinet secretaries, along with other key administration officials. Together with seven additional executive orders[3] and related announcements, Biden’s EO 14008 represents a profound realignment of federal programs and spending priorities, all set in motion without congressional approval and with almost no public debate.

For most Americans, the general notion of “environmental justice” sounds reasonable. If communities are unfairly burdened with pollution due to discrimination, it seems appropriate for the government to intervene. Like other calls for “equity” and “fairness,” Biden’s environmental justice (EJ) agenda receives little pushback or scrutiny in the media. Yet the policies launched with EO 14008 require virtually all federal agencies to embrace a new set of priorities that reshuffle—and, in some cases, undermine—the goals that those agencies were established to pursue. Not surprisingly, these sweeping policies are already spreading confusion and inefficiency throughout the federal bureaucracy. Moreover, while they employ the language of environmentalism, Biden’s EJ policies attempt to replace traditional environmental objectives—such as saving habitats or reducing greenhouse gas emissions—with a much broader set of progressive social goals.

The administration’s EJ initiatives build on a philosophical and legal movement that dates back to the 1980s. The movement’s pioneers—positing that minority communities were more likely to be chosen as sites for toxic-waste repositories and subjected to higher levels of air and water pollution—developed the concept of environmental racism[4] to explain the disparity. These arguments informed President Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order 12898,[5] and they have since been marshaled in efforts to implement EJ principles at the state level in roughly two dozen states.[6]

But the Biden administration’s policies go significantly further, and they have less basis in the existing scholarly literature. While there is at least some scientific research to suggest that pollution disproportionately affects minorities and the poor, the White House’s new “climate justice” agenda is premised on the claim that these same communities are invariably “on the frontlines of climate change”—which can be supported only by tendentious interpretations of spotty evidence.

In addition to adopting a broader conception of the EJ mission, the current administration also has vastly more money to spend on these initiatives. Under Biden, liberals in Congress have had spectacular success in passing major spending bills. Roughly half of the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill is earmarked for projects that are arguably environment- or climate-related.[7] At the time the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that bill’s climate and energy provisions would cost $392 billion over 10 years. But a recent report from Goldman Sachs estimates that IRA’s various green subsidies will cost as much as $1.2 trillion over that period, due to uncapped tax credits for electric vehicles, green energy manufacturing, and other green technologies.[8] Assuming that this and future administrations execute these policies in accordance with Justice40 guidelines, that would mean that hundreds of billions in future federal spending will be subject to the 40% rule.

Biden’s EJ policies have generally rolled out more slowly than the administration initially promised. But as his presidency enters the final third of its current term, several EJ milestones have been passed: In May 2021, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council[9] (WHEJAC) issued its initial recommendations,[10] which range from pragmatic (reducing urban air pollution; replacing lead pipes for drinking water) to wildly unrealistic (“100% renewable electricity by 2030”). The following year, the White House launched a Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST),[11] which designates 37% of U.S. census tracts as “disadvantaged communities.” The White House also promised a periodically updated Environmental Justice Scorecard to keep track of how federal agencies are complying with the Justice40 mandates. After several delays, the EJ Scorecard[12] was unveiled on April 21, 2023, alongside a new Executive Order titled “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All.”[13] That most recent order established a new White House Office of Environmental Justice and placed further demands on federal agencies to meet EJ goals.“ Environmental justice will be the mission of the entire government woven directly into how we work with state, local, tribal and territorial governments,” the president said.[14]

According to the White House, the Justice40 Initiative “seeks to address the intersectionality of underinvestment, environmental injustice, and the climate crisis.”[15] But crucial details about this revolutionary, government-wide policy shift remain vague. For example, the executive order mandates that 40% of the “benefits” of federal environmental programs must flow to designated communities. But the concept of benefits is only loosely defined. In one major sticking point, would nationwide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions satisfy the requirement? Or would EJ rules imply that 40% of the money allocated to mitigating pollution should be spent within the designated districts? The latest executive order and the recently unveiled EJ Scorecard aim to hold federal agencies accountable for complying with the 40% requirement. But the metrics used to evaluate the agencies’ performance remain fuzzy, as do the mechanisms by which compliance will be enforced.

Judging by its executive orders and public statements, the White House envisions environmental justice as a sweeping reform that will change the focus of virtually every federal agency. As of today, however, Biden’s EJ agenda exists mostly in three forms: concrete spending plans included in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill; a set of general instructions to federal agencies laid out in a series of executive orders; and various notional goals articulated by White House staffers and EJ advisors. Only a few of the administration’s EJ initiatives currently exist as ongoing programs with measurable results.

One policy area that is changing rapidly is EPA’s program awarding grants to not-for-profit community groups for local environmental initiatives such as air-quality monitoring and green jobs training. That process has been put on steroids. EPA’s budget has quadrupled since fiscal year 2021,[16] and the eventual sum earmarked for nonprofits is enormous. The Inflation Reduction Act[17] alone sets aside $3 billion for “environmental and climate justice block grants.” What standards are being used to select these grassroots organizations? What sorts of oversight will be in place to guard against fraud, abuse, or simply the inefficient use of funds? Republicans in Congress recently raised concerns that EPA grants programs might become a “slush fund for far-left organizations.”[18]

It is true that some of Biden’s EJ policies will bring tangible benefits to poor and neglected communities. For example, the administration frequently cites programs to cap toxic leaks from abandoned mines in rural and tribal regions and to replace lead drinking-water pipes in communities, including Flint, Michigan. But those and similar programs could easily exist without sweeping executive orders—in fact, they do. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill allocates $50 billion to upgrading drinking-water systems around the U.S., including $15 billion dedicated to replacing lead pipes.[19] That bill also earmarks $11 billion for cleaning up abandoned mines.[20] Those programs can move forward as Congress has mandated, whether or not they are described as part of an EJ agenda.

If other similar problems exist, they, too, can be addressed by Congress. In short, one can easily accept that certain communities have suffered disproportionate environmental harms without concluding that the only solution is to reorganize the entire government around a poorly defined goal of “environmental equity.”

At the same time, advocates for an across-the-board EJ agenda tend to discount the burdens that these policies will impose. In addition to the costs that it places on taxpayers, the EJ project threatens to damage the economic prospects of poor communities and undermine some key environmental goals that EJ supporters claim to support. Overall, Biden’s EJ agenda will potentially have negative impacts that far exceed any modest benefits. Even as many details of the policy remain loosely defined, it is possible to anticipate the following problems:

Biden’s EJ agenda diverts spending and administrative resources away from straightforward environmental goals, such as reducing air and water pollution and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Under the mandate that 40% of program “benefits” must specifically help marginalized communities, agencies will be forced to prioritize programs in those districts even if the favored projects are only loosely connected with traditional environmental priorities.

The EJ agenda also makes government programs less focused and less effective across the board. Even the Department of Defense and other agencies involved in national security are now required to “embed environmental justice into all aspects of their work.” This process requires diverting staff, resources, and executive focus away from critical missions and toward “stakeholder consultation,” “report[ing] data on the benefits directed to disadvantaged communities,” and similar tasks.[21]

Ironically, the inefficiencies imposed by EJ policies will be particularly burdensome for environmental and infrastructure projects. New recordkeeping requirements and greater public engagement are adding layers of bureaucracy and red tape to existing programs. Obtaining permits for infrastructure projects will become even more time-consuming. Moreover, EJ policies restrict where projects can be located and include myriad cost-boosting demands, such as incentives that favor union workers. These provisions will make clean energy and other projects more expensive and delay their completion. At a time when this administration insists that the world is in a “climate emergency,” its own EJ policies will slow down progress toward meeting emissions objectives. EJ policies will also raise new hurdles to private industry, restricting job opportunities, particularly in poor communities.

In assessing this agenda as a whole, it is important to note that today’s EJ movement has two wings. On one side is what we might call “practical EJ.” This group focuses on tangible disparities in environmental harm: higher levels of particulate pollution in poor neighborhoods, say, or pesticide exposure among low-income farmworkers. They tend to favor pragmatic solutions. The other group could be characterized as “extreme EJ.” These activists have their roots in an older far-left worldview, one that aims for radical social change and regards the traditional environmental movement with skepticism. These activists see pollution and climate change as manifestations of a racist, exploitative society. In its more extreme form, the EJ movement embodies a set of progressive beliefs, including the claim that “systemic racism” continues to shape all aspects of American society, that the “lived experiences” of marginalized people are a better guide to policy than scientific data, and that capitalism is at the root of most social and environmental problems. As a result, they tend to be less interested in incremental environmental improvements. Instead,

they aim to fundamentally change our underlying political and economic systems. These changes would include shutting down what they call the “extractive economy,” and launching a “just transition”[22] to a kind of postcapitalist society in which energy and food are produced locally and businesses are communally owned.

The two wings of the movement overlap considerably, and both are part of Biden’s EJ coalition. While the most extreme forms of EJ are fully embraced by only the most progressive flank of Biden’s coalition, his EJ policies give these advocates for radical change more power both inside and outside the government, including on WHEJAC. Through its EJ grant program, the administration is also in the process of handing out billions in funding that is likely to go to community nonprofits involved in political advocacy, in addition to local environmental projects. Most Americans support broad environmental goals.[23] But under the anodyne banner of “environmental justice,” some radical activists hope to remake U.S. society along a collectivist model that few Americans support. Nonetheless, the Biden administration has invited many of these activists to play a central role in shaping U.S. policy.

This report will outline the history and philosophy of the EJ movement in both its practical and extreme forms. It will document the high costs and risks of organizing U.S. environmental, energy, and infrastructure policies on the EJ model. And it will argue that environmental and climate issues are best addressed through pragmatic, results-oriented policies, not a vague and politically driven EJ framework.

The Birth of a New Environmental Paradigm

The environmental justice movement first came to national attention in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982. State officials, grappling with the cleanup of PCB-laden soils, had chosen the poor, black-majority district as the location for a toxic-waste landfill. NAACP and other civil rights groups joined local residents in protesting the facility. Over a period of six weeks, more than 500 people were arrested trying to stop trucks from unloading their materials at the site.[24]

The protests didn’t stop the landfill, but they helped bring the concept of “environmental racism” into mainstream discourse. Activists, academics, and policymakers began taking seriously the claim that the impact of toxic wastes, air pollution, and other environmental harms falls disproportionately on poor, minority communities. The Warren County activists’ immediate claims were vindicated when state engineers later determined that the landfill threatened to contaminate groundwater and would itself need to be remediated.[25]

More broadly, Warren County’s travails with toxic waste came to be seen as paradigmatic. The protests spurred a wave of studies examining the relationship between the siting of toxic-waste facilities and the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the surrounding communities. In 1983, in response to a request by Walter E. Fauntroy, a black pastor who was Washington, DC’s nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, the General Accounting Office studied the demographics of the areas surrounding four Southern toxic-waste sites, finding that blacks made up the majority of the population near three of the four sites studied.[26] This was followed by a national study from the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which found, based on zip codes, significantly higher percentages of minority residents in communities with commercial hazardous-waste facilities.[27]

Another milestone was sociologist Robert D. Bullard’s 1990 publication of Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, which studied the overrepresentation of environmental hazards in minority communities.[28] Considered the “father of environmental justice,” Bullard has published dozens of books on the topic and won many awards for his activism.[29] He is a member of WHEJAC. In 2021, he told Houston Public Media that he hopes that Biden’s policies “do not just make environmental justice a footnote, but make it a headline.”[30]

In response to concerns about environmental inequities, President George H. W. Bush established the Environmental Equity Working Group in 1992. Two years later, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12898, “Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations,” which required every federal agency to “make achieving environmental justice part of its mission” by promoting more equitable enforcement of statutes, improving public participation, and conducting research.[31]

Studies over the past two decades have produced a more nuanced picture of the relationship between poverty, race, and pollution. But on the whole, they confirm that levels of pollution are higher in disadvantaged communities. For example, one 2018 study looked at fine-particulate pollution and found that poor people were more exposed in general: “Blacks, specifically, had 1.54 times higher burden than did the overall population.”[32] But the causes for these patterns are less well understood.

In a 2019 paper, economists from Georgia State University, the University of Kentucky, and Duke University reviewed a wide swath of EJ research examining possible causal mechanisms. The authors identified four:[33]

“Disproportionate siting on the firm side”: Firms decide to site their noxious activity in poor/minority neighborhoods from a disregard or malevolence toward the group, a desire for inexpensive land or to be near low-wage laborers or transportation networks that are also characteristic of these neighborhoods, or because they are steered there through government incentives.

“‘Coming to the nuisance’ on the household side”: Lower-income households can’t afford housing in cleaner environments and end up near polluted sites. Conversely, when such sites are cleaned up, housing prices rise, leading to so-called environmental gentrification.

“Market-like coordination of the two”: This model assumes a process of Coasean bargaining[34] between firms and disadvantaged communities, in which residents are willing to put up with some amount of pollution and not assert environmental rights—for example, the right to clean air—in return for compensation from the polluter, in the form of “cash transfers, . . . local jobs, investments in parks and community centers, and so forth.”

“Discriminatory politics and/or enforcement”: The authors cite a number of studies showing that government action against polluters is most strongly associated with the “political power of local communities” but not necessarily with income or race.

The authors conclude, in other words, that the cause of disparities in pollution exposure is multivariate. “Which came first,” the authors ask, “the siting of facilities in a poor, non-white neighborhood, or the sorting of such households near pollution? . . . [T]his problem has proven difficult to unscramble.” Simplistic policy solutions based on preconceived notions of blame for environmental problems are somewhat beside the point. Assuming that antidiscrimination laws are being enforced, racialized explanations—whether involving individual bias or systemic racism—might be empowering for activists, but they do little to address the underlying problems.

A more straightforward approach is to track pollution levels more closely, and then focus enforcement and remediation on the areas at highest risk. This is an approach that some states and cities have used to detect high levels of lead exposure among children.[35] One such project in New York City’s Williamsburg neighborhood, for example, identified lead hot spots affecting the city’s Hasidic Jewish community, among others.[36] If the EJ paradigm is correct, such monitoring will detect higher pollution levels in poor and minority communities, and those problems can be promptly addressed. If the relationship between pollution and population distribution is more nuanced, a monitoring-based approach will allow scarce remediation resources to be targeted more accurately. It is not clear that most EJ activists would endorse this approach, however. As we will see below, many activists see environmental funding as a form of economic and political empowerment for their communities; reducing levels of specific pollutants is only one among many goals.

A 1998 book by Brookings Institution senior fellow Christopher H. Foreman, The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, offered a compelling case, from a mainstream liberal perspective, that “environmental justice” may be more harmful than helpful to community goals. Foreman brings a unique perspective to the issue. As a black Harvard Ph.D. specializing in public health, Foreman is sympathetic to the goal of protecting health in minority communities. He observes that, for many activists, EJ claims “are mostly about accountability and political power rather than the more technical issue of environmental risks facing communities.”[37] “Empirical support for claims of disproportionate pollution impacts and discriminatory regulatory enforcement is actually much weaker than environmental justice advocates usually admit,”[38] he writes. As a result, Foreman concludes: “Environmental justice advocacy probably directs community attention away from those problems posing the greatest risks and may therefore have the ironic effect of undermining public health in precisely the communities it endeavors to help.”[39]

Twenty-five years later, Foreman’s analysis still rings true. While the EJ literature includes many examples of rigorous research, many of the movement’s leading activists tend to focus more on compelling narratives of environmental victimization. These narratives endure even when their factual foundations are shaky. For example, discussions of the impact of highway construction on minority communities invariably mention New York’s “Power Broker,” Robert Moses. In a 2020 interview with Democracy Now!, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described the Cross Bronx Expressway as “a notorious project of racism by Robert Moses.”[40] Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg described the bridges on Long Island parkways designed by Moses as being too low to accommodate buses “carrying mostly black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach,” which “obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”[41]

Yet both stories about New York’s highways are myths. The population of the South Bronx was two-thirds non-Hispanic white in 1950, just before Moses began work on the Cross Bronx Expressway;[42] and there were bus and other public transportation routes to Jones Beach and other Moses-built beaches.[43] Other urban highway design choices, such as Interstate 375 in Detroit, may have been influenced by racist decision-making;[44] but the fact that leaders continue to cite environmental racism where none existed shows how compelling the narrative remains. Both stories reinforce the moral dimension of the EJ paradigm: the claim that pollution exposure isn’t merely an artifact of living in a poor neighborhood but a “targeted,” deliberate, racist imposition.[45]

After Clinton’s Executive Order 12898, federal EJ policy initially leaned toward the practical side, focusing on cases where discriminatory policies led to the siting of pollution sources in minority communities or on lax enforcement of environmental rules. This commonsense approach to EJ had bipartisan support. But the policy shifted during Clinton’s second term, when EPA adopted a new rule applying a “disparate impact” standard to the environmental permitting process. As Reason magazine stated in 1998, under the previous standard, in order to prove that a permit had been granted in violation of federal civil rights law, litigants would have to show that the decision to locate a facility in a minority community was done deliberately and with “discriminatory intent.” Now, it was enough to show that a facility would have a “disparate impact” on minorities.

As Reason pointed out, the rule gave “fringe activist groups a potential veto over any future or existing industrial future or existing industrial facility that needs federal permitting. ‘All it takes is a postcard,’ ” one critic of the policy said.[46]

The EPA move empowered activist groups to oppose a host of projects on EJ grounds, including some that might have provided jobs and opportunity—with minimal environmental costs—in minority communities. The Reason report documented how a proposed chemical plant in impoverished Romeville, Louisiana—one that met all emissions requirements and promised to hire local workers—ran afoul of EPA’s new rule. “The EPA has blocked Shintech from building its plant in poor and black Romeville because Romeville is … poor and black,” the magazine concluded.[47]

Over the next two decades, advocates for a more radical EJ approach gained ground ideologically, especially at the grassroots. Boosted by the Occupy Wall Street movement and further elevated during Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, progressive ideas gained traction through the aughts and teens. At the same time, concerns about climate change were growing. Many left-leaning activists—including Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg[48] and Canadian writer Naomi Klein[49]—argued that capitalism and economic growth were the main culprits. Grassroots activists wove those threads together, launching regional and national groups that combined calls for tackling climate and environmental issues with demands for social and economic “justice.” These groups included Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (or T.E.J.A.S.), the Just Transition Alliance, the Climate Justice Alliance, and many more. Many of these organizations combine projects fighting local pollution with expansive progressive goals. In their literature, the term “environmental justice” serves to describe a much broader agenda. As the Brookings Institution’s Foreman noted, the EJ paradigm “provides a rubric under which to reiterate familiar economic redistributive claims and to propose new avenues of redress.”[50] The Climate Justice Alliance, for example, describes its mission as working for “regenerative economic solutions and ecological justice—under a framework that challenges capitalism and both white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy.”[51] Among that group’s top priorities is the fight against what opponents call “Cop City,” a planned Atlanta, Georgia, law-enforcement training center that became a magnet for Antifa and other violent, far-left protesters in 2023.[52]

When it came time to seek advice on implementing its EJ policy, the Biden administration reached out to this network of established organizations. WHEJAC’s list of members reads like a Who’s Who of longtime EJ activists, including leaders of the three groups mentioned above.[53] The committee includes an admirable diversity of ethnic, tribal, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and many of its members are highly credentialed leaders in the field. But the White House seemingly made no attempt to seek ideological diversity in recruiting advisors: the group includes no economists, no members of mainstream labor organizations, no for-profit business leaders, and certainly no skeptics of EJ policies in general.

Despite this outreach, not all the Biden administration’s moves have pleased the EJ activist community. One of the White House’s thorniest problems has been defining which Americans—and which communities—qualify as “disadvantaged.” While EJ activists have long focused on race as the paradigmatic focus of environmental injustice, the administration’s CEJST[54] took a non-race-based approach. (The decision to avoid using race as a CEJST metric was likely made in expectation that the Supreme Court would overturn affirmative action in the Students for Fair Admissions case, which it did in June 2023.[55] While that case concerned college admissions, legal experts believe that the ruling will make other race-based policies more vulnerable to legal challenges.)[56]

The screening tool—which was finally released in February 2022 and revised in November of that year—applies dozens of criteria to each of the country’s 74,000-plus census tracts (as delineated in the 2010 census) to determine whether a tract qualifies as disadvantaged.[57] These include proximity to hazardous-waste facilities; exposure to airborne particulates; traffic volume; income and education levels; rates of asthma, diabetes, and heart disease; and whether a community appeared on “redlining” maps from the 1930s. The tool puts significant portions of most U.S. cities in the disadvantaged category, as well huge swaths of rural America, including most of Oregon and West Virginia. (Federally recognized tribal lands are automatically designated disadvantaged.) In all, 37% of census tracts and 33.2% of residents—109 million Americans in all—fall under the screening tool’s “disadvantaged” banner.[58]

According to an analysis by the climate-advocacy site Grist, CEJST metrics do function as a rough proxy for race: the higher the percentage of nonwhite residents in a tract, the more likely it is to be identified as disadvantaged.[59] Nonetheless, many EJ activists were displeased that the screening tool does not focus explicitly on race. Movement icon Bullard told the New York Times: “When you look at the most powerful predictor of where the most industrial pollution is, race is the most potent predictor…. Not income, not property values, but race. If you’re leaving race out, how are you going to fix this?”[60] Bullard and others worry about the racial composition of the designated tracts, as detailed by Grist: “While tracts with a higher percentage of nonwhite residents are more likely to be flagged by the tool, the system also flags about 3,500 tracts where 20 percent or fewer residents identify as non-white. Likewise, the tool leaves out more than 2,200 tracts where 80 percent or more of the population identify as non-white.”[61]

The decision to exclude race from the screening tool dismayed members of WHEJAC. After reviewing a prepublication draft of the report, 10 members of the group wrote to the White House, asking, “Will this skew results away from, for example, African Americans?” “We need to get assurances,” WHEJAC member Elizabeth Yeampierre, cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance in New York, told a Greenwire reporter: “We continued to have concerns about the lack of transparency. Our communities have to be more than poster children to an agenda.”[62]

In April 2023, the administration released the first phase of the Environmental Justice Scorecard, presenting results from 24 agencies—which range from heavy hitters such as EPA and the Departments of Agriculture and Transportation to small-budget entities, including the Denali Commission and the Appalachian Regional Commission. The Scorecard is intended “to provide transparency for the public, and to increase accountability for federal agencies.”[63] In truth, it provides, at best, a fuzzy picture of how EJ priorities are affecting various agencies’ programs. The agencies’ reports included a mix of tangible metrics, such as budget numbers, and amorphous jargon. If it is true that this administration is putting environmental justice “at the center of the federal government’s work,” as the White House said in 2022,[64] it is high time that policy analysts, members of Congress, and the public take a harder look at what that means in practice.

The Case Against Environmental Justice Policies

The philosophical weakness of the EJ cause is not obvious at first. As noted above, there is legitimate evidence that poor and minority groups are exposed to higher levels of many pollutants.[65] The movement’s initial focus—ensuring that pollution regulations are enforced as aggressively in minority communities as they are in mostly white regions—was straightforward and in keeping with American legal tradition: when it comes to laws regarding pollution, all citizens should be treated equally.

Over the decades, however, the focus of the EJ movement evolved. The evolution can be seen clearly in EPA’s adoption, in the late 1990s, of a “disparate impact” standard for challenging new projects, described above. The rule meshed with a growing sense among EJ advocates that all pollution exposure in minority communities should be presumed to be the result of racism. Under this paradigm, it isn’t necessary to look as closely at pollution levels or health impacts, or to weigh the complex factors that contribute to pollution exposure. Pollution is simply defined as a form of racism. And—since racism is ubiquitous in American society, as this view maintains—we can assume that, as a rule, minorities suffer unfair exposure to pollution. Therefore, the modern EJ framework concludes, minority communities are entitled to targeted benefits as a matter of course.

Biden’s EJ policies take this worldview a step further, in claiming that certain communities are “on the front lines of climate change” and are therefore entitled to special programs and funding meant to address that claimed disparity. But unlike the earlier era of EJ policies, which had some scientific backing, these claims have little empirical support.

Climate activists make a reasonable claim that some of the world’s poorest people—residents of low-lying Bangladesh, or farmers in sub-Saharan Africa—are more vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels. The same case might be made for Alaska’s tribal populations. But extrapolating similar claims to America’s poor and minority communities in general remains mostly conjecture. These arguments also typically involve generous cherry-picking of examples. For example, activists often point out that many of Houston’s minority neighborhoods are built on low-lying terrain that is more vulnerable to flooding.[66] They are less likely to mention that some of America’s most expensive real estate—including estates in the Hamptons, Florida condos, and Malibu beach houses—also sits in potential flood zones.

Only a handful of studies have examined how those same communities might be affected by climate change. A 2021 EPA study looked at “social vulnerability” in the event of a 2°C increase in global temperature. It found that, on average, minorities are less likely than nonminorities to suffer property damage from either inland or coastal flooding. The most dramatic disparity broken out in the report’s executive summary was merely that “minorities are 41% more likely than nonminorities to currently live in areas with the highest projected increases in traffic delays from high-tide flooding.”[67]

In truth, much talk of “climate impacts” today is a mix of speculative long-range predictions and present-day exaggeration intended to rally support for climate-friendly policies. While the media and green activists—and even some scientists—tend to blame all hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and similar phenomena on climate change, the evidence connecting today’s extreme weather events to global warming remains in contention.[68]

There is reason to believe that continued warming will lead to bigger storms in the future, and it may be contributing to heavier rainfall events today. But tornadoes, wildfires, and hurricanes caused havoc long before today’s focus on climate. People living in substandard housing or in former wetlands have always been at greater risk from tornadoes or flooding. The urban poor living without air conditioning have always been at risk from heat waves. These are principally problems of poverty or poor development planning. Extreme weather events may worsen over coming decades; but for the past century, deaths from weather disasters have actually fallen dramatically.[69]

Predictably, the Biden administration treats the claim of climate vulnerability as a foundational truth, one that doesn’t require scientific support or nuanced policy discussions about how best to address the problem. Prior to issuing Executive Order 14008, the administration held no public meetings on the issue. It empaneled no fact-finding commission. It shared no research identifying the areas where pollution can be clearly correlated with racial or other forms of bias or determining the most effective solutions to those inequities. Biden’s EO 14008 and subsequent EJ policies simply take the foundational claims of the EJ movement as axiomatic—and have made them the foundation not only for policies related to air and water pollution, but also for climate policy. As a result, the administration’s EJ agenda is less scientifically based and more a leap of green faith.

The lack of a serious effort to back up these claims is not surprising because EJ activists typically do not focus on highly technical climate predictions or debates over energy infrastructure; they tend to see warming in political, rather than scientific, terms. Many describe climate change less as a global atmospheric phenomenon and more as a form of economic exploitation. Yeampierre, cochair of the Climate Justice Alliance, expresses this view forthrightly: “Climate change is the result of a legacy of extraction, of colonialism, of slavery,” she told Yale Environment 360.[70] Under this framework, almost any form of economic inequity or social hardship can be redefined as an impact of climate change.

In short, the EJ movement has evolved from one that sought to protect minority communities from environmental discrimination into one that asserts that the government must discriminate in favor of these communities on the basis of vague, unsubstantiated claims. As Christopher Foreman noted in the 1990s: “A major reason why one simply cannot accept advocacy claims of risk at face value is that they are often anchored, ultimately, not in the dangers posed by a site or substance ostensibly at issue, but rather in a desire for transformed power relationships to be achieved on behalf of politically energized and engaged communities.”[71]

It is important to acknowledge that these energized and engaged communities—and the groups that advocate for them—have achieved real victories in improving environmental conditions. Many issues that activists have raised—from water quality in Flint, Michigan, to chemical exposure among farmworkers—deserve attention. At the same time, Foreman recognized that the EJ movement could effectively harness environmental issues to achieve what activists believe are even more important objectives: gaining political power and resources for their communities.[72] It is hard to fault activist groups for using any tool available to help their communities. But it is up to policymakers to develop programs that are based on concrete data and aim for measurable results. The modern EJ paradigm, especially in its extreme form, makes that increasingly difficult.

In reality, pollution levels and racial discrimination have both been significantly reduced since the early days of the EJ movement. According to EPA, between 1970 and 2020, the combined emissions of six key air pollutants (fine and coarse particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, and lead) have fallen by 78%.[73] Meanwhile, the assertion that poor and minority communities are uniquely exposed to climate risks remains poorly supported. Nonetheless, the Biden administration is attempting to base the nation’s entire environmental and infrastructure policy on the claim that pollution and climate impacts are severe and that both must be fundamentally understood as examples of racism and injustice.

As we’ve seen, the EJ paradigm is a flawed foundation for environmental policy. But the problems with the EJ agenda are not just ideological. They also introduce a host of pragmatic problems—greater costs, delays, and bureaucratic hurdles—that interfere with the smooth functioning of both government and the private sector. The policies threaten to be especially harmful in four main areas.

Justice40 shifts resources away from traditional environmental goals.

Since the 1960s, U.S. environmental policy has focused on clear-cut goals: preserving open space and habitat; reducing pollution (for the benefit of both humans and wildlife); and—especially in recent decades—cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. In other words, environmental policies centered on the environment. But the modern environmental justice movement—and this administration’s EJ policies—broaden that agenda to include a sweeping array of social and economic priorities. President Biden’s Executive Order 14008 states:

To secure an equitable economic future, the United States must ensure that environmental and economic justice are key considerations in how we govern. That means investing and building a clean energy economy that creates well-paying union jobs, turning disadvantaged communities—historically marginalized and overburdened—into healthy, thriving communities…. It is therefore the policy of my Administration to secure environmental justice and spur economic opportunity for disadvantaged communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened by pollution and underinvestment in housing, transportation, water and wastewater infrastructure, and health care.[74]

The executive order makes clear that securing clean air, clean water, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions are not the administration’s only—and perhaps not even its primary—goals. Instead, the White House says that it intends to use these programs as tools to bolster unions, build “healthy, thriving communities,” and fix problems with housing, transportation, and health care. It is not the purpose of this report to argue that those social welfare goals are illegitimate. But the Biden EJ plan redefines social problems as examples of environmental injustice and maintains, in turn, that equitable environmental programs will simultaneously address poverty, housing shortages, and other social ills. In other words, the plan asserts—without evidence—that a single policy can solve both environmental and social problems.

That claim, in turn, rests on a large, but only vaguely articulated, assumption: that costly programs to address pollution and climate change will also spur a social and economic revival in marginalized communities. John Podesta, longtime advisor to Presidents Clinton and Obama, serves as this administration’s Senior Advisor to the President for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation. After passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, his team produced a report titled Building a Clean Energy Economy.[75] In a cover letter to that report, Podesta writes that IRA’s goal is to “create good-paying, high-quality jobs and shared economic growth,” adding that “Congress and President Biden designed these programs to benefit working families and parts of the United States that are too often overlooked and underserved.”[76]

In fact, the economic benefits of transitioning from a fossil-fuel-based energy system to one that relies mostly on clean energy are very much in dispute. California, Massachusetts, and some other states making aggressive transitions to renewable energy[77] also have some of the country’s highest electricity prices,[78] creating burdens on businesses and consumers. (Over the past three years, California has lost 500,000 residents as its citizens leave for other, less expensive, states.)[79]

President Biden maintains that phasing out fossil-fuel vehicles in favor of EVs will generate “one million new jobs in the American automobile industry.”[80] Industry analysts disagree. EVs contain fewer parts and take less labor to build than internal combustion vehicles. One study suggests that, globally, some 80,000 jobs in auto manufacturing and supply chains have already been lost in the transition to EVs.[81] Another study predicts that the switch to EVs could cost the U.S. 75,000 automotive jobs by 2030.[82]

In short, claims that the administration’s policies will simultaneously boost economic opportunities while slashing emissions are far from proven. The “Clean Energy Economy” that the White House touts will bring an unpredictable mix of costs and benefits, with no guarantees that they will revitalize poor and minority neighborhoods. If the predicted benefits from clean energy investments don’t naturally flow to the designated communities, future administrations will be pressed to enforce EO 14008’s 40% commitment more aggressively. The IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill already have prevailing wage and domestic content incentives intended to raise the wages of U.S. blue-collar workers. Biden’s executive orders also instruct agencies to locate more projects within EJ communities and to take similar steps to ensure that any economic windfalls reach marginalized groups. In every federal environmental or infrastructure program, the environmental benefits of a project—such as how many tons of CO 2 it will displace—will need to be balanced against EJ goals. The entire thrust of Biden’s Justice40 agenda is to ensure that federal agencies tilt that balance toward social and economic benefits. But when those goals are in conflict, environmental objectives will suffer.

The Justice40 initiative will also force conservation-oriented agencies to juggle competing agendas. For example, the Department of the Interior has a host of programs designed to protect endangered species, preserve wild habitats, and support outdoor recreation. Many of these programs already overlap with EJ goals. For example, the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership promotes recreation projects in economically underserved areas, while other programs support initiatives in tribal regions.[83] But other programs, such as the Bureau of Land Management’s Land and Water Conservation Fund, protect many remote habitats far from population centers.[84] Under the Justice40 rule, future conservation projects of this sort may struggle to prove that 40% of their benefits flow to EJ communities.

More broadly, Justice40 requires environmental policy in general to shift its ethical focus. Traditionally, American environmental policy has put a value on wildlife and wilderness that transcends their economic utility to humans. But Justice40 demands that environmental initiatives must not only show concrete benefits to humans but also help “secure an equitable future,” as EO 14008 puts it.[85] How will efforts to save the endangered sage grouse, for example, or to protect a pristine river, pass muster under such a requirement?

The White House has one powerful tool to ensure that federal resources flow directly to designated EJ communities: issuing grants to local nonprofit organizations. After the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022, EPA administrator Michael Regan told reporters: “We’re going from tens of thousands of dollars to developing and designing a program that will distribute billions.”[86] IRA includes $2.8 billion in grant money that must specifically target disadvantaged communities. It also sets aside $200 million for “technical assistance” related to the grants. The eligible recipients are limited to community-based nonprofit organizations, partnerships of the same, or partnerships between such organizations and “an Indian tribe, a local government, or an institution of higher education.”[87]

This combined $3 billion is an extraordinary amount of money to funnel through nonprofit groups accustomed to operating on relatively tiny budgets. Moreover, there is a time limit: IRA designates that the funds will be available only until September 30, 2026, making it imperative for these agencies to get grants out the door. EPA has devised two programs to expedite the awarding of grants.

First, it has designated 16 entities to serve as Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (EJ TCTACs), each of which will be responsible for assisting eligible organizations to navigate the federal grant application process for both EPA and Department of Transportation grants.[88] These institutions, which include universities, such as the University of Connecticut and University of Arizona, and nonprofits, such as West Harlem Environmental Action and Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, will each receive $10 million (with a few receiving $12 or $13 million) over five years for their roles in expediting the grant process.[89]

Second, in order to distribute so-called small grants (those up to several hundred thousand dollars), EPA has devised an EJ Thriving Communities Grantmaking program for groups to receive government money without undergoing the cumbersome federal grant application process. The program will select up to 11 “Grantmakers”—eligible organizations and partnerships (with a preference for Minority Serving Institutions)—that will themselves be empowered to award such subgrants, up to a total of $550 million. Each Grantmaker is charged with designing its own outreach, application, project management and support, and evaluation processes for its grants.[90]

The grant language in IRA is extraordinarily general. Under “eligible activities,” it includes “community-led air and other pollution monitoring, prevention, and remediation, and investments in low- and zero-emissions and resilient technologies and related infrastructure and workforce development that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other air pollutants.”[91] EPA gives little sense as to how activities such as “pollution monitoring” or “workforce development” might fit into nationwide goals or plans. Quite the contrary: the administration has repeatedly insisted that local groups know better than the federal government how to address environmental problems in their communities.

There are several problems with this grant-making approach to environmental problems.

First, it is likely to have a scattershot impact, at best. The grant model assumes, or at least professes to assume, that the nation’s climate goals can be advanced by funding the relatively small goals and projects of local groups. Many in the Biden administration have embraced this “wisdom lies in the community” philosophy. Vice President Kamala Harris said in September 2022, when EPA established its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights: “The establishment of a new office dedicated to advancing environmental justice and civil rights at EPA will ensure the lived experiences of underserved communities are central to our decision-making while supporting community-driven solutions.”[92] Of course, many EJ activists say that the most important benefit of such projects is building political and economic power in their communities. Some even describe direct funding of community projects as a form of reparations.

Second, the grant model lacks accountability. Under the current program, many organizations new to the federal grant process will need to apply for and collectively spend up to $2.8 billion in grant money before the end of September 2026. How is EPA to monitor whether the money has been spent as intended—never mind whether it has achieved the intended results? This question was raised in a well-publicized February 2023 letter from James Comer, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, to EPA administrator Michael Regan. Comer first noted the uncertain results in four programs highlighted in EPA’s own document, “Case Studies from the Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Program,”[93] and then stated:

Along with ill-defined issuance metrics for grant programs, the sheer volume of money flowing through the EPA prompts review of the agency’s ability to properly manage its rapidly inflated budget. The EPA’s total budgetary resources in FY2021 were approximately $17.2 billion, skyrocketing to $76.5 billion in FY2022. The agency must account for its ability to effectively prevent waste, fraud, and abuse of funding that has more than quadrupled within the span of a year.[94]

Third, the model sends the wrong message about EPA’s responsibility and mission. Is EPA’s mission to “protect human health and the environment”—and especially the health and environment for the most vulnerable among us—best achieved through the inefficient process of issuing grants? For example, many environmental nonprofits receive EPA grants to conduct programs to monitor air quality in their neighborhoods.[95] Sending quickly trained workers into the streets with air-monitoring equipment might be helpful in raising awareness about air-quality issues. But do these collected samples contribute scientifically useful data? One recent $498,401 grant was awarded to the Atlanta-based Center for Sustainable Communities for “deploy[ing] air sensors in 11 minority communities, located in the region of South Atlanta, Georgia, where there is concern over potential health impacts due to the proximity of these neighborhoods to heavily traveled transportation corridors, and for which there is no existing air quality monitoring capability.”[96]

Shouldn’t EPA upgrade its own air-quality monitoring instead? If the federal government wants to reassure EJ communities that their interests are its top priority, why ask a community to monitor its own air quality? Cynically, one might ask whether these programs are intended not to solve problems but to give the appearance of solving problems while appeasing community groups clamoring for funding.

Justice40 will hamper government functions across the board.

The Biden administration’s EJ agenda does more than reshuffle the priorities of environmental programs. If the administration’s rhetoric is to be believed, it hopes to implement “fundamental and sweeping reforms to the ways in which the Federal government operates.” What these sweeping reforms will actually mean, however, is vague. In particular, the concept of a “benefit”—the heart of the Justice40 program—remains virtually undefined.

In July 2021, the Office of Management and Budget, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the National Climate Advisors issued interim implementation guidance for the Justice40 initiative. The document did little to clear up confusion as to the meaning of key terms. “The determination of what constitutes a ‘benefit’ will vary by covered program,” the document stated. Each agency was tasked with developing its own “metrics … to measure covered program benefits.” But first, agencies would have to hold public meetings to ensure that “community stakeholders are meaningfully involved in [defining] what constitutes the ‘benefits’ of a program.” The letter describes an open-ended, never-ending process of community engagement that will be repeated for each new program. In some cases, the requirement to engage with the public will not even be limited to the community in which the project in question is located. Presumably, if an emissions-reduction project in an affluent area will lower pollution levels in a distressed neighborhood downwind, “the disadvantaged community should be consulted” before the project’s benefits can be assessed.[97]

In short, every agency—indeed, every program administered by those agencies—will employ its own unique definition of what constitutes a benefit, and those definitions will vary from community to community. Yet all these mercurial benefits will somehow be subject to the administration’s strict 40% requirement. And every project must be delayed until the requisite “stakeholder consultations” have occurred. Agencies are also urged to incorporate recommendations from WHEJAC and admonished to follow provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Rehabilitation Act, “other relevant law, regulation, or guidance,” and, of course, “the Paperwork Reduction Act.”[98]

The Environmental Justice Scorecard is intended to be “the first-ever government-wide assessment of what the federal government is doing to advance environmental justice.” But it is also a snapshot of how much time and money federal agencies are being forced to spend on priorities other than their primary missions. Overall, 18 federal agencies provided specific monetary amounts to the Scorecard (six did not report numbers). Those added up to a not inconsiderable $92 billion in claimed expenditures that arguably meet the administration’s malleable conception of an EJ benefit. In a phone interview, the Manhattan Institute asked Matthew Tejada, director of EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice,[99] how his agency defines the term. “We are struggling with that, too,” he said. “Justice40 is looking at hundreds, if not thousands, of existing programs, and it’s not just talking about 40% of the revenue from those programs or the funds of those programs; it’s talking about the benefits of those programs,” Tejada continued. “So that takes it into a much weedier, more detailed, nuanced conversation and understanding about what the policy implementation actually looks like.”

In producing their Scorecard reports, many agencies appear to reframe routine procedures as constituting a benefit to EJ communities. Under “Phase One Scorecard metrics and highlights,” the Department of Defense included: “The Navy selected multiple transportation options for the Pearl Harbor dry dock to help manage traffic, which minimizes impacts on historically overburdened communities.”[100] The fact that the Navy’s effort to reduce Honolulu traffic can’t be numerically quantified does not mean that it has no value. But it does highlight the absurdity of trying to measure every such accommodation by the administration’s 40% metric.

The Scorecard’s tortured language also reveals the necessity for federal agencies to demonstrate fluency in EJ jargon. The Department of Health and Human Services, for example, spends a paragraph describing a single workshop bringing together “regional and local community leaders involved in environmental justice advocacy networks to discuss best practices for community engagement when addressing racism as a public health issue through the lens of environmental health disparities and environmental justice.”[101] Overall, the Scorecard documents the way the Justice40 initiative creates new workload burdens for agency officials attempting to demonstrate compliance with vaguely specified requirements.

EJ policies will undermine both environmental and economic progress.

Ironically, Biden’s EJ agenda is a particular threat to the very priorities that EJ advocates claim to value most: fighting climate change and alleviating poverty. The flaw of the administration’s approach is an example of what New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has called “everything-bagel liberalism.” The key to a perfect bagel, he writes, is to add just the right amount of extra ingredients. But liberal policymakers too often can’t stop adding new ingredients to their programs. Klein continues:

You might assume that when faced with a problem of overriding public importance, government would use its awesome might to sweep away the obstacles that stand in its way. But too often, it does the opposite. It adds goals—many of them laudable—and in doing so, adds obstacles, expenses and delays…. [I]t tries to accomplish so much within a single project or policy that it ends up failing to accomplish anything at all.[102]

This administration’s EJ agenda is a perfect example of this trap. Biden has repeatedly said that “climate change is an emergency.”[103] And the White House describes environmental inequities as a problem so severe that it requires an “all-of-government” solution. But the administration’s EJ agenda is so smothered in rules, requirements, and competing goals that it will be unlikely to achieve many of its objectives. In fact, it is likely to slow progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In his letter celebrating the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, White House advisor John Podesta wrote that IRA will “accelerate the deployment of clean energy, clean vehicles, clean buildings, and clean manufacturing.” And the bill will favor “projects that are located in low-income communities or energy communities, pay prevailing wages and use registered apprentices, or meet certain domestic content requirements—all with the goal of creating good-paying, high-quality jobs and shared economic growth.”[104]

Podesta’s framing implies that these goals can all be achieved as happy complements to the administration’s ambitious climate and environmental policies. In truth, of course, many of these objectives are antagonistic to one another. For example, clean energy projects receiving enhanced IRA tax credits will be required to pay the “prevailing wage,” a floor on wages and benefits that is calculated for given regions and that typically mirrors union pay, benefits, and work rules. Studies differ on how much prevailing wage rules increase infrastructure costs. The left-leaning Center for American Progress maintains that the rules “produce good value for taxpayers.”[105] But various studies find that prevailing wage requirements boost infrastructure costs. The New York think tank Empire Center for Public Policy has calculated that that state’s prevailing wage requirements drive public works construction costs up by 13%–25%, depending on the region.[106] In this case, the goal of raising worker wages is clearly at odds with Biden’s ambitious climate targets. If a wind farm being developed with IRA subsidies faces 20% higher labor costs due to the prevailing wage requirement, the result will be fewer wind turbines. But the White House tends to ignore this issue. Indeed, the administration maintains the fiction that EJ and clean energy goals can both be achieved without trade-offs.

Ironically, it is not even clear that the administration’s prevailing wage requirements will actually help the presumed beneficiaries of EJ policies: minority workers. “Historically, prevailing wage legislation has been a disaster for minority construction workers,” writes David Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, in a 2017 survey of research on the racial impact of prevailing wage laws. Until recently, “construction labor unions have been among the most vociferously exclusionary entities in the United States,” the author notes. While labor unions are less openly discriminatory today, he writes, minorities remain underrepresented in many unions. “Given that prevailing wage laws tend to operate to exclude nonunion labor in favor of union labor,” Bernstein concludes, “this works to the detriment of minority workers who are subject to union discrimination.”[107]

This proliferation of new offices, rules, and reporting requirements not only creates bureaucratic hurdles for federal and state agencies; it also burdens the private sector. Biden’s ambitious climate plans aim to incentivize massive public and private investments in transmission lines, renewable energy, and other infrastructure. Policy experts who support the White House plan say that executing this huge construction campaign will require relaxing the onerous National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process.[108] But rather than streamlining project approvals, the latest EO requires that NEPA reviews are carried out with even stricter attention to the “direct, indirect, and cumulative effects of Federal actions on communities with environmental justice concerns.” The order also ratchets up the requirements for “early and meaningful” community involvement.[109]

In addition, Biden’s order introduces a subtle but potentially consequential change in official language. Clinton’s EO 12898 required agencies to address “disproportionately high and adverse” environmental impacts.[110] Biden’s order swaps in the simpler but broader phrase “disproportionate and adverse.” As the National Law Review notes, “this change could effectively lower the bar for what stakeholders or federal agencies consider significant impacts.”[111] In other words, at a time when the White House promised voters an unprecedented clean energy building spree, it is adding new hurdles and delays to the already-tortuous NEPA process.

Justice40 embeds a far-left worldview within federal agencies.

In a 2021 op-ed in The Hill, WHEJAC cochair Richard Moore explained how his career in activism—which started as a member of the New Mexico Black Berets, who were modeled on the Black Panthers[112]—gradually evolved to include environmental problems.[113] “For us, environmental issues were—and are—inseparable from the larger struggle for social justice,” he wrote. In a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Center for American Progress and hosted by John Podesta, Moore gave a vivid account of what he believes he and his fellow activists are up against. “When we look at our sisters and brothers, not only throughout this country, but in Puerto Rico and Alaska, and other locations, we very clearly are experiencing the impact of not only cumulative impact, but climate injustice, environmental racism, and environmental genocide.”[114]

When the EJ movement’s most respected leaders see environmental issues in such apocalyptic terms, it’s easy to understand why they believe that the true problem is much bigger than particulate levels or lead pipes. Many EJ activists see racism and capitalism as the intertwined root causes of all environmental woes. “Systematic racism and social injustice are at the root of the environmental problems we are trying to address,” Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen told Politico. Attacking those problems “is mission critical.”[115] While the fight to reduce pollution is important, these activists believe, it must be seen as a means to that greater end.

As an alternative to today’s market economy, many EJ activists embrace what they call a “Just Transition,” a pivot away from “extractive industries” (such as fossil fuels) and toward a more communally based economy. The Climate Justice Alliance advocates for a “Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies. We believe that the process of transition must place race, gender and class at the center of the solutions equation.” The solution to environmental oppression, the group argues, requires “collective worker and community control of land, water, and food resources.”[116]

Just Transition advocates describe urban neighborhoods transformed into neo-pastoral collectives in which food is grown via “regenerative agriculture” in community gardens, energy is produced in locally controlled, renewable power grids, and wealth is somehow spontaneously generated and equitably shared. While the extreme form of this idea might seem a socialist fantasy, anyone who enjoys shopping at farmers’ markets can appreciate the emotional appeal of this general vision. As the Brookings Institution’s Foreman wrote a quarter-century ago, the environmental justice movement’s “ultimate roots lie in the eternal yearning for a more democratic and egalitarian society composed of livable communities.”[117]

These communitarian ideals are not just hazy visions of the future. For many EJ activists, these notions of a “postcapitalist economy” help shape which environmental policies (and technologies) they embrace or reject today. WHEJAC submitted its initial list of recommendations in May 2021. The document provides an eye-opening summary of the kinds of fundamental transformations that these EJ activists believe to be possible and desirable. A cover letter, written by Moore and cochair Peggy M. Shepard, demands: “Justice40 must include taking bold action to sunset investment by 2030 in fossil fuels, plastics, dangerous chemicals and nuclear energy and to set requirements for 100% renewable electricity by 2030.”[118]

WHEJAC recommendations include a long list of technologies, policies, and infrastructure projects that these White House advisors oppose. (Much of the list is copied directly from New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal bill.) Under “Examples of the types of projects that will not benefit a community,” the memo predictably includes existing transportation and energy sources, recommending against “Road improvements or automobile infrastructure,” “Fossil fuel procurement, development, [or] infrastructure repair,” and investments in transmission lines that might carry electricity produced by fossil fuels. But the document also inveighs against many technologies and policies advocated by leading climate advocates, including carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, systems that would directly capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and carbon markets (including cap and trade programs). For good measure, the list also warns against “research and development.”[119]

By the standards of traditional environmentalism, WHEJAC’s list of unacceptable climate remedies is stunningly ideological. It suggests that the memo’s authors don’t believe that the fight against climate change is as important as their battles against our high-tech, market-based economy. On the other hand, the group uncritically embraces all manner of communitarian solutions: subsidies for local food cooperatives and community gardens; grants and training programs for “Black organic & regenerative farmers”; “comprehensive wage replacement” for dislocated workers; free broadband; plans to forgive unpaid utility bills; and more.

WHEJAC does, however, embrace some new technology when it calls for locally based solar power. The WHEJAC report recommends that the departments of Energy and Housing and Urban Development “deploy at least 3 gigawatts of local solar on HUD assisted housing by 2025.” The report also calls for funding “rooftop/on-site/localized solar and battery energy storage systems,” rewiring urban power systems into community “microgrids,” and the “decentralization of grid ownership.” The idea of community-controlled microgrids is popular among progressive activists. The concept is based on microgrid systems in Texas and elsewhere that combine power production and distribution in small regions that can be made independent from the larger power grid in the event of a blackout. This approach can be useful for some specialized applications, such as college campuses.[120] But the operation of microgrids entirely on renewable power and battery storage remains in the early research phase and far from economic feasibility.[121]

For activists, however, the concept of locally produced and distributed power meshes with Just Transition philosophy: it promises community control and independence from presumably exploitative corporations. NAACP, for example, supports initiatives “aimed at improving solar energy access to marginalized communities.” Jacqueline Patterson, director of that group’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, told Scientific American that clean energy “is just another dimension of social justice.” Local renewable power, she added, “puts us in control of our energy.”[122] The activists’ goals are clear: they want local empowerment, control, and funding. In their view, if the federal government is subsidizing grid-scale solar farms in the countryside, those solar panels should go on low-income rooftops instead.

These EJ goals are in conflict with efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible. The Biden administration has set a target to have the U.S. electric grid be entirely carbon-free by 2035.[123] Yet studies indicate that utility-scale solar panel systems generate power at a much lower cost than do residential rooftop panels: about one-third lower, according to a study of first-quarter 2022 prices by a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.[124] In other words, federal policies focused on promoting residential rooftop solar would conceivably spend about 50% more to produce a given level of electricity. Even in an era of trillion-dollar federal programs, money is not infinite. The Inflation Reduction Act contains a number of tax credits and incentives that can be applied to distributed energy resources (DERs) and microgrids.[125] Continued research into the concept could yield improved grid reliability in the future. But in the near term, a focus on distributed power is likely to delay, rather than facilitate, the goal of rapid decarbonization.

The Biden administration has muddied the waters on this policy question. Is the ultimate goal achieving a net-zero power grid? Or is it empowering marginalized communities and hiring workers to install solar panels on public housing? By encouraging the fiction that economic equity and emissions reductions go hand in hand, the Justice40 framework makes it difficult to weigh these conflicting goals. But clearly, when the federal government is investing hundreds of billions in clean energy, determining the efficiency of different approaches is paramount. For WHEJAC and other EJ activists, of course, efficiency of federal programs is a footnote, at best. To EJ activists, success will be measured by ideological metrics—as well as by how much money and influence flows to their communities—not emission reductions. And, as they continually stress, the activists’ goals go far beyond reducing pollution; they want environmental programs to spin off benefits in the realms of housing, employment, and other objectives. In a sense, therefore, the activist community favors projects that are as inefficient as possible: from their perspective, the best projects are not the ones that most effectively reduce emissions but those that spend the most money and hire the most workers in EJ communities.

The WHEJAC committee has no official or permanent role in setting U.S. policy. Quite possibly, its more extreme recommendations will be politely ignored by administration officials. (The White House has not moderated its strong support for nuclear power, for example.) But it is more than plausible that the extreme EJ worldview that WHEJAC espouses will filter into the federal bureaucracy and quietly influence the implementation of federal programs. The administration’s EJ grant program also seems likely to prioritize funding of highly ideological local groups. The White House has already recruited several groups espousing an extreme EJ agenda to advise grant applicants and distribute grants. Many of the local groups likely to receive grants do useful projects. But money is fungible. Skeptics of the program have a right to ask what political activities these groups are also engaged in. In their letter to EPA administrator Regan, Congressmen James Comer and Pat Fallon asked whether EPA’s EJ grant program might become “a slush fund for far-left organizations.” That language might raise hackles, but the question is valid.

White House officials often repeat a platitude used by EJ activists: residents of marginalized communities know better than the federal government how to address environmental problems in their neighborhoods. On one level, respect for the voices of people in poor communities is a good thing; no one wants the federal government running roughshod over the concerns of residents. But living in a poor region does not confer automatic expertise in which technologies most effectively reduce emissions, or how best to run the power grid. Such decisions require technical know-how and should be either relegated to markets (which typically do a better job of allocating resources) or made by qualified policymakers implementing clear policies that reward concrete results.

Justice40 is anything but a clear policy. By muddling the contradiction between environmental and social welfare priorities, it gives activists more flexibility to favor their progressive goals, even at the cost of undermining the administration’s stated green agenda.

The Manhattan Institute asked the EPA’s Tejada about how EJ concerns might force a trade-off between green projects that provide more benefits to marginalized communities and those that deliver faster reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. He answered candidly:

I’ve heard folks talk about this a lot, “We’ve got to solve climate change; all this equity and justice stuff isn’t going to matter if we don’t solve climate change,” and we in the EJ movement say, “We don’t care if you all solve it if we get left behind again, right?” So you have to understand what our needs are. You have to understand that maybe the thing that I’m most focused on is helping my community not burn up every summer and, you know, all of our vulnerable folks just perish in their hot apartments and homes because they can’t pay for AC all summer. And that’s not going to immediately help your CO 2 issue, but that’s what we need to see happen right now.

In a world of finite federal resources, there is an inescapable conflict between the economic needs of poor and minority communities and the goals of reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The Justice40 initiative attempts to obscure that conflict behind the fiction that the same programs can seamlessly address both concerns. Tejada is refreshingly honest in acknowledging that meeting EJ goals might require delaying the administration’s net-zero targets.

The public deserves an honest debate about how to strike a balance between social welfare and environmental concerns. The Justice40 initiative obscures the stark trade-offs involved in environmental policy. Instead, by muddling the distinctions between environmental and social programs, it gives progressive activists leeway to divert funding away from concrete environmental goals and shift it to vaguely defined social objectives. If the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wants to make the case that the country needs to massively expand social welfare programs, it is free to make that case to voters. But converting environmental and infrastructure programs into stealth wealth-transfer campaigns is undemocratic. It is also poor social policy, in that it attempts to empower poor communities through wildly roundabout and scattershot methods.

Biden’s muddled EJ agenda will make every environmental project more expensive and less effective. By miring infrastructure projects in endless permitting delays, it will thwart his administration’s aggressive emissions goals. And by making it harder for private industry to expand, it will limit job growth. All too predictably, those setbacks in economic opportunity will hit poor and minority communities the hardest. The next administration should roll back Biden’s ill-considered executive orders. The best way to fight local environmental problems is to measure where pollution is most severe and to focus on those regions first. The best way to fight climate change is to remove barriers to developing nuclear and other forms of clean energy infrastructure. An “everything-bagel” approach that attempts to solve all problems at once will wind up solving none of them.

About the Author

James B. Meigs is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the former editor of Popular Mechanics, where he helped reposition that century-old brand to become a major voice on technological issues of the day. He currently cohosts the How Do We Fix It? podcast and writes the Tech Commentary column for Commentary magazine. His coverage of energy, environmental policy, culture, and other topics has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from Dartmouth College.

Endnotes

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You probably don't think much about tin cans, even when you're buying one. It's the product inside the can—soup, beans, maybe hairspray or sunscreen—that seems to matter. But the humble tin can is both a crucial component of modern, globe-spanning supply chains and a product of them: About half of the metal used to make tin cans in the U.S. is imported from abroad. And that's why tin cans—more specifically, tinplate steel, the type of metal used to make those cans—are at the center of a behind-the-scenes fight over tariffs that illustrates so many of the problems with protectionist policies. On one side of that fight is Cleveland-Cliffs, one of just two companies in the U.S. that produces tinplate steel. In a recent petition to the Commerce Department, Cleveland-Cliffs asked for tariffs of up to 300 percent against imported tinplate steel—the products that account for over half of the supply of tinplate in the American economy. Those tariffs will translate into reduced supply and higher prices, says Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply chain and logistics for the Consumer Brands Association. "When the tariffs go into effect, they raise the cost of steel, they raise the cost of the packaging," says Madrecki. The can itself is often the most expensive element of a canned food item, so those prices quickly cause the overall price tag to rise. "You [will] see food prices go up 19 to 30 percent. That translates to 36 to 58 cents per can," he says. And while new tariffs might protect some tinplate-making jobs at Cleveland-Cliffs, research suggests the higher prices will cause far greater losses throughout the rest of the economy. The Trade Partnership, a think tank, estimates that the proposed tariffs could cause up to 40,000 jobs to be lost in downstream industries, including blue-collar jobs like can-making and food production. If the steel in their tin cans is suddenly more expensive, food production companies might simply purchase finished—and less-highly-tariffed—cans overseas. "You're going to go to the grocery store one day…and you're going to look at the receipt in disbelief and say, 'How did this happen?'" says Gerard Scimeca, vice president at Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free market group that opposes the tariff proposal. "Well, this is how that happened: You had a company trying to take advantage of our trade policy for personal gain." And here's the real kicker: As a rule, the Department of Commerce doesn't even consider the potential (and often obvious) consequences of these decisions. The tariff petition process is one-sided and skewed heavily in favor of companies seeking protectionism at the expense of consumers and workers throughout the economy. Government policy, no surprise, is one of the big reasons why we can't have nice things. Further reading for this week's episode: "Biden Administration Considering New Tariffs That Will Hike Prices for Canned Goods," by Eric Boehm, Reason. "U.S. Plans New Tariffs on Food-Can Metal From China, Germany, and Canada," by Yuka Hayashi, The Wall Street Journal "Tinplate Steel Tariffs Will Harm American Consumers and Manufacturing Jobs," by the Consumer Brands Association "Four Areas for Congress To Exercise Trade Policy Oversight," by Tori Smith, American Action Forum Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact-checking by Katherine Sypher.The post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: Can You Afford Tariffs on Tin Cans? appeared first on Reason.com.

The end of affirmative action in university admissions has been prophesied since 2003, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Grutter v. Bollinger. In the majority opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that "25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." That reckoning has now arrived, and five years earlier than predicted: In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that public universities must stop favoring certain applicants, and disfavoring others, based on their race or ethnicity. "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," Chief Justice John Roberts declared, writing for the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. "In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race." For everyone who values fairness, individuality, and nondiscrimination, this decision could not have come soon enough. The perniciousness of the admissions system was on full display, thanks to the details of the case. The plaintiff—an advocacy organization that filed suits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC)—persuasively demonstrated that race-based admissions schemes systematically disadvantaged Asian-American students. UNC, for instance, admitted more than 80 percent of its black applicants but less than 70 percent of its white and Asian applicants. (Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine, submitted an amicus brief in support of the plaintiff.) At Harvard, discriminatory practices were overt and began with recruitment. Admissions officials would send letters of interest to black and Hispanic high schoolers who received a score of 1100 or more on the SAT. Asian Americans were ignored unless they received at least a 1350. During the actual admissions process, students were sorted into "deciles"—10 levels of academic performance. Asian Americans in the top decile were less likely to get in than black students in the fourth decile. The plaintiff also submitted evidence that Harvard admissions officers tended to give Asian Americans negative scores on the personality rating, a wholly subjective criterion. Favoritism also extended to white applicants from what Harvard describes as "sparse country": rural states with historically low enrollment numbers. The result was that applicants were judged not solely on the merits of their individual achievements but on immutable characteristics like their race and place of origin. These schemes, according to the Supreme Court, violated federal law and, in UNC's case, the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. "Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin," wrote Roberts. "This Nation's constitutional history does not tolerate that choice." Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits entities that receive federal funding from practicing racial discrimination. But affirmative action—a scheme to benefit racial minorities in hiring, contracting, and school admissions—was viewed as an exception; the idea was to practice discrimination on behalf of historically marginalized groups in order to make amends for past wrongs. In 2003, a pair of Supreme Court rulings involving the University of Michigan—Gratz v. Bollinger and the aforementioned Grutter—upended that justification. In Gratz, the Court held 6–3 that Michigan's undergraduate admissions program went too far in its consideration of race. The university used a point system, with 100 points guaranteeing admission; belonging to an underrepresented minority group was worth 20 points, while a perfect SAT score was worth only 12 points. In Grutter, however, the Court permitted Michigan's law school to consider race as one factor among many in admissions decisions, on the grounds that a racially diverse student body was a "compelling interest" of the state. While the decision preserved affirmative action in some form—for perhaps 25 years, per O'Connor's time limit—it forced higher education administrators to change their reasoning: Henceforth, they would have to defend race-based admissions as diversity enhancement programs. Whether affirmative action actually promotes diversity is up for debate, of course. Schools that engage in racial gerrymandering may succeed in making their campuses more diverse in the most superficial sense without doing anything to improve intellectual, political, socioeconomic, or geographic diversity. No one in a position to defend Harvard's admissions system ever argued that the school needed more conservative or libertarian representation; in practice, the institution's position was simply that it needed fewer Asians. At a time when the Supreme Court is often accused of being out of touch and counter-majoritarian, it's worth mentioning that Students for Fair Admissions undeniably reflects the will of the people. Race-based admissions systems are opposed by 69 percent of poll respondents, including 58 percent of Democrats, according to The New York Times. Voters in California, a deep-blue state, banned affirmative action twice—in 1996 and again, for good measure, in 2020. Faced with this reality, many defenders of affirmative action are trying to change the subject. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), for instance, complained that the Supreme Court had ignored a more serious example of unfairness in higher education. "If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous 'colorblindness' claims," she wrote on Twitter, "they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged." Other progressive Democrats, such as Reps. Cori Bush (D–Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.), made similar observations. It should go without saying, but the justices declined to adjudicate legacy admissions because this issue was not before them. That said, legislators do not need to wait for the Court; they can and should abolish the practice within public institutions. The widespread practice of granting preferential treatment to the scions of alumni is unfair and has no place at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities. The fact that legacy admissions still exist is not a reason to maintain affirmative action; eliminating explicit racial discrimination is a noble goal in and of itself. But to any naysayers who disdain the Supreme Court's ruling because they think legacy admissions should face the same fate: Your terms are acceptable.The post How Affirmative Action Lost at the Supreme Court appeared first on Reason.com.

Daddy, what did you do during the woke war?

I wrote sternly worded columns.

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” OK, guys. I’ve got to say, I’m sad the summer is basically over. Are everybody’s kids getting settled back into school?

Yep. Back-to-school night coming up.

Back-to-school night. Oh, Ross.

Our three-year-old has entered school for the first time.

Ooh, congratulations.

Oh!

Our 12-year-old is entering middle school for the first time.

I’m so sorry.

And have nothing to say about either.

It’s a real good news, scary news.

It’s a lot of change. And I’m against change as a conservative. So it’s a rough period.

You’re anti-change? I respect that with children. Mine are old now, so I have reached that point where you just want to shrink them. But anyway, as the kids head back to school this seems like a good time for the question of what they’re learning, whether we’re talking about history, race, gender, sexuality, and how all that has somehow become the battleground for our latest political culture war. That’s right, folks. We are deep, deep in the woke wars.

Or are we?

Or are we? Yes, because there are some signs that the woke wars might not be such a winning political strategy anymore. I mean, it barely came up at the first Republican primary debate. Before we get to that, can we talk first about whether it even makes sense that these issues are being politicized in schools?

I mean, I think schools have always been a battleground of fights of how we tell the story of who we are as humans. I mean, there’s this ahistorical way in which every time this comes up it seems like the first time. But the so-called culture wars have played out in numerous episodes in American history. I mean, I remember a few years ago reading the great Rick Perlstein book about Barry Goldwater and American conservatism. And huge swaths of that book are about school board elections in Southern California and things like that.

Yeah.

These are issues that come up again and again. And the question of what young people learn, the things that we emphasize in our history, the way in which we talk about who we are, that’s the basic stuff of human experience and building identity. So to me, it’s not surprising at all. It’s just taken on a tenor and a ferocity, and, I think, a great deal of political opportunism that I think catches us by surprise every time.

I’m old enough to remember the ‘90s when Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition were taking over school boards so that they could build their ground level army.

Whatever happened to that? We’re living in a theocracy now, right? That was what I was told back then.

They overreached, as these things often do. I mean, I tend to think these things go in cycles. So I’m trying to figure out if people think this looks appreciably different or if it’s just now we’re where you can tweet all this stuff out every 15 seconds, so.

I mean, I think the story here is relatively simple. Somewhere in Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals, who control most of the nation’s education, schools, and are responsible for most of the new ideas that find their way into circulation in the more elite and important reaches of American education, became really, really pessimistic about America and particularly about race relations. And this pessimism was accelerated by the election of Donald Trump. And out of this you had a turn towards a bunch of big, curricular changes that can be distilled into the ideas of figures like Ibram Kendi, who basically made intense arguments about the deep, structural racism of American society. This then in turn yielded all kinds of exciting new attempts at bringing students deeper in touch with their white privilege or their racial identity and then yielded the backlash that I guess we’re calling the war on wokeness. And that in turn yielded its own set of overreaches and conflicts, and so on. And I do think it’s possible that we’ve passed, for this phase of conflict at least, both peak woke and peak backlash, that the backlash blunted the advance of certain kinds of ideas and in blunting it made the backlash look a bit extreme, thereby blunting the appeal of the backlash. And people started to move on to some other issues. But that’s — if you want a story.

And Lydia’s laughing.

Yes. Good, good.

No, no, no. I think I’m laughing because of the — I lost track of which lash was lashing me and in what direction. I mean, I think the question of how we couch and describe the history of this country is a contested one. And it’s rightly contested. And I think that this question of pessimism, I think, grew out of the fact that so much of the way in which we think about the history of our country has been massaged, and shaped, and molded by forces that don’t really want to reckon with a lot of the hard truths about our history. And is there overreach? Are there places where things have gone too far? Perhaps. And that’s a debate that you can have.

OK, I want to add a wrinkle to Ross’s position on why this became such an issue. I think these things cycle through. They pop up. They die down. There’s a group on each side that just goes all in on culture war no matter what the topic. They’re just raring for a fight. But I do think because of the pandemic, you were able to get the attention of legions of middle-of-the-road suburbanites whose kids were out of school, struggling to deal with the pandemic, virtual learning. I can’t tell you how many, just personally, moms I knew whose kids melted down. The stories are tragic. And the Democrats did not respond properly when people would voice these concerns. I mean, most famously in Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin in the 2021 governor’s race ran on a platform of parents’ rights, which swept in everything from CRT to mask mandates. The Democrats — Terry McAuliffe, who was running against Youngkin — didn’t take that fury nearly seriously enough. And Glenn Youngkin quite rightly shoved it down his throat. And by having that as a wedge, you could then go in there and pick off people, and get people really fired up about critical race theory, which no one had ever even heard. The idea that this was rampant in the schools in Virginia was absurd. But because of the pandemic, you could expand who you could have this resonate with.

Michelle, that was the theory. Show me the results. I feel like we’re fighting the same war over and over again, and we’re overlearning the, quote unquote, “lesson of Virginia.” Has there been another example of a state that has turned on this question?

What I’m saying is people are back in school.

Yes.

And suburban Republicans, and centrists, and moderates have lost their desire to fight out the critical race theory things and the trans issues. And so you saw a lot of losing in the 2022 primary. It was not the popular issue that they thought it was going to be. And thus going into 2024, everybody thought that the presidential race was going to hinge on this. And Trump and DeSantis went all in early on. But then by the time we came to the debate the other night, nobody was really talking about the war on wokeness in schools. They were talking about a return to things like smacking teachers’ unions and devolving power to the states. Carlos, is there something that you want to throw into this mix before I drag this into the sewer of big P politics?

I think you’re going to regret asking that. I just —

Oh. Hit me.

No, like —

No regrets.

I mean — OK, so I don’t want to derail us.

Oh, please do.

Derail.

Feel free.

I would feel dishonest if I didn’t — before we get too deep into that, I have to make a confession. I mean, not a confession in the sense of a sin I must atone for. It’s more of an admission.

It’s more that you’ve scrutinized your privilege as a columnist.

Oh, daily.

And you’re coming to terms.

No. It’s that for the last couple of days I’ve had this deep dread and despair weighing on me, knowing we were going to talk about this. The discussions over woke, and anti-woke, and culture wars are soul sucking to me. I think it’s good to have specific debates over affirmative action in college admissions, the problems with boys, the way we teach history. I mean, that’s terrific. And we’ve had that on this podcast, and we should continue to have it. But when we talk about the culture war, that’s not about debating issues. The culture war is about joining a side. It is about picking a team. And the problem with picking a team in the culture wars is that you inevitably end up with lunatics on your team. And the craziest ones are often the captains of the team. And they may want to go much further than you might want to go. But you’re on the team, and you don’t want the other side to win. So you end up supporting what the team is defending. So you end up fighting vociferously over things you may not know a lot about. You end up policing language and dogma with the zeal of the convert. And you end up speaking not just for yourself, but for this amorphous community that never necessarily granted you the rights to speak for it. There’s so many great writers and thinkers who get baited into this, and then they have difficulty writing about anything else because they’re no longer making an argument or exploring an issue. They are defending turf. The irony of the culture war is that the purpose of the war is not to win it. It is to continue to wage it. You are never going to hear a culture war activist saying, you know what? The cause is won. The fight is over. Let’s close up shop. I don’t need any more funding. It’s like a business lobbyist saying, our profits are pretty healthy. I don’t need more loopholes in the tax code. That’s not a thing that happens in a culture war. The fight is never over. The stakes are always rising. There’s a new front, a new trench you have to dig, a new hill you have to die on. And it becomes a reason for being. It becomes your emotional, and your financial, and your intellectual sustenance. And that’s why I limit the amount of time I write about this or think about this because it is incredibly frustrating to me.

I share a lot of your frustrations. I don’t think of myself as having any sort of combatant role in any kind of culture war. It’s not a topic of great interest to me.

I’m excluding the participants of this podcast, obviously.

Of course. No, sure. But I think that what’s really striking to me in a lot of the reading that I was doing and thinking that I was doing, knowing that we were going to talk about this topic — and this is something that I have written about — is that I feel like the culture war is struggling to sign up sufficient conscripts. If you just look at the polling and — talking about politics often feels like a way to cheapen a conversation. But in this case, I feel like the message that’s coming across from the voting public that is participating in these polls is like, actually, we don’t want to be combatants in this war either. These issues don’t seem to be lighting even the Republican electorate on fire. There’s this thing in politics called wedge issues. And they’re called wedge issues because they’re things that you can use to try and peel off lightly committed or uncommitted voters from their side over to your side. And these wedge issues are often cultural issues. And you have your target for that wedge issue, whether it’s suburban soccer moms worried about crime or whatever. And what’s really striking to me is that a lot of these issues that seem to be designed to be wedge issues, whether it’s over transgender kids or critical race theory in schools and so on, they seem to be just completely ineffective as wedge issues and maybe not even that effective within the Republican electorate. So I actually think that there is a really interesting pacifist slash non-combatant movement that is starting that is maybe, frankly like you, Carlos, really fed up with the culture war.

Right. I’ve got to work my way back because I disagree with all of you here. So let’s start with the last point, which is why wokeness, or critical race theory, or any of these things are not looming as large in the Republican primary as maybe was expected. And I think the answer there is pretty simple, that basically Republican politicians made a set of moves against the teaching of critical race theory in schools, a set of moves to assert political authority over public education with Ron DeSantis being the primary example. But Glenn Youngkin and other figures like this, those moves are perceived by Republican voters at having been successful in arresting what had in 2020 seemed like a rolling, statue toppling, prominent people firing cultural revolution. And as is often the case, once you are perceived to be winning, then that’s less of a motivation for you to vote. So if Republicans felt like they were just losing the culture war the way they did feel — I can assure you they did feel this in 2020 — then Ron DeSantis promising to fight the woke on the beaches and fight them in the streets and so on would be a more appealing battle cry. That’s to your last point. On the larger point though, of course I agree with you, Carlos, that these things are brain breaking. They put people on the side of the looniest activists of left and right, and you can get trapped in endless cycles of pointless recrimination. That is true. At the same time, the reason that these issues recur in this way is that they’re actually really important. And people really care about them, like who we are as Americans, the stories we tell about our national history, what we think about the Civil War, the statues that we put up, what we think about religion in schools and prayer in schools, and so on. If you look back at the sweep of American history, we remember the culture war battles much more than we remember a lot of arguments about tariffs, and trade, and economic policy. Everyone remembers the great culture war over alcohol. Everyone remembers prohibition. Many fewer people remember Warren G. Harding’s economic policy. And that’s because these things are legitimately important. And it’s not just a sort of, oh, no, the schools are getting politicized. What should politics be about if not the schools that are run by the government that teach the children who will be future Americans? So I’m an apologist. I am an apologist for —

I want to jump in here and —

— political debates about education.

I agree 100 percent. No, no. I’m going to do the thing they did in the Republican debate where it’s like, he mentioned me, so I get to respond.

Yes, you get to go. You get to go.

Yeah.

Mr. Ramaswamy.

Yeah, so — oh!

Low blow. Low blow.

Damn. OK. I agree. I agree 100 percent that these things are incredibly important. I think I ended up writing quite a bit for the Times about how we think and talk about history. For example, what I was trying to articulate and apparently not well is that I feel that sometimes these all become coalesced. And depending on what team you’re on, there is a position to have on how you teach history in school. There is a position to have on affirmative action. There is a position to have on gender identity. There’s a position to have — And you get pushed. You get nudged into flying the flag that your team flies. Whether or not you actually happen — as sentient humans, we can have different views across an array of subjects. I think the least interesting people that I’ve ever spoken to are people whose views are entirely predictable given their political identity. And my concern is that the culture wars force a lot of people into corners that they may not deep down actually want to inhabit, but because they’re opposed to X over on the other side that that’s where they end up having to stand for things that they haven’t even thought about. Can I ask you something, Ross?

Yeah.

My thought is that — I mean, I wonder if we’re drawing too much from the fact that the word “woke” wasn’t uttered too often at the debate. I have no knowledge of the future, but I imagine that if Trump, or DeSantis, or Ramaswamy is the nominee, my guess is you’re going to hear a lot about woke in the general election. Woke will ride back in on top of a border caravan next to a transgender swimmer crossing the Rio Grande. It’s going to be —

Well, there’s a campaign poster.

It feels to me that that’s something that will be relied on heavily.

I mean, I think there’s going to be a narrative from Republicans that says it’s basically trying to do a version of what Michelle said happened. And I think this is right with pandemic-era closures and so on, saying the wokeness is part of the weakness. They’re woke, and that’s why they can’t control the southern border. They closed your schools, and they changed the curriculum at the same time, like trying to link a practical set of issues to progressive activist ideology.

The woke military rhetoric fits into that.

The military — if we lost a war, if China invaded Taiwan and we lost, every Republican would be running on how the woke military led us to defeat.

Yeah, they would blame the transgender soldiers.

But my sense, guys, is that even the polls suggest that this is not what parents care about. So there are better issues even for Republicans to talk about. I do think teachers’ unions are going to be a big one. What’s your sense about others?

I think, though, there’s been a shift here that is also a consequence of this, where a lot of Republican states in the aftermath of 2020 and those school closures have gone a lot further in terms of letting parents opt out of the public school system. I think one of the effects of the pandemic was that a lot of centrist and conservative parents got a look at the curriculum that their kids were following in public schools and didn’t like it — sometimes had political objections, sometimes had practical objections. And you’ve ended up having a lot more opting out and exiting from the public school system. And that’s not a political story. Again, that’s not a national-level political issue where you’re like, I’m going to vote for DeSantis or Trump because that way I can leave my local public school system. On that point, Carlos, about being trapped on a partisan side with people who you feel like you have to be on their team, I think one fascinating dynamic to me as a conservative with many liberal friends in the last few years has been the phenomenon of the center-left parent who would never publicly be caught dead endorsing Ron DeSantis or Moms for Liberty, but is privately happy that there are these wild Republicans out there doing pushback against progressivism. Because the liberal parent would like there to be pushback, doesn’t want to commit themselves to the pushback personally, and is happy —

Or publicly.

Or publicly, but is like, well, I don’t want Moms for Liberty in charge of my school, but I’m glad somebody is out there.

But I’m glad they’re there.

This is why I think it’s actually really useful to look at polling. I mean, polling is incredibly — it’s imprecise. But one issue that I follow really closely is the way that the issues around LGBTQ people are seen and perceived in this country and how it plays out in politics. And I think the signal-to-noise ratio is really, really hard to know. But on the issue of transgender kids, one thing that seems really clear is that a lot of people are really, really uncomfortable with the pace of change around gender identity. And all of these questions are scary and unfamiliar. And there’s — I think the latest — I don’t remember if it was Pew or Gallup polling, saying it’s just not possible — a majority saying it’s just not possible for someone’s gender to change, which is — you wouldn’t think that, that the majority would think that based on what we see in the culture more broadly. But I think that there is a mistaken leap that a lot of people make from that, which is that harsh anti-trans treatment legislation is what’s called for, whereas I think most people are more comfortable with the idea of families, and their doctors, and religious counselors, and therapists, and things like that working things out in a private setting, which is the way that family decisions usually get made in America. And so I think that there is this sort of like, oh my god, everyone’s freaked out about this that shows up in polling. But when you drill down and think about what do people actually want the government to do about it, the answer will be quite different. So I just think it’s worth thinking about the way that people’s actual lived experience and beliefs relate to their politics.

There’s a definite pattern in every culture war debate where the side that is perceived to be on the offensive and especially employing government power, that side alienates a lot of people very quickly. And this is part of why you get these pendulum swings, where it’s like, well, if it’s the Obama administration forcing local schools to change their bathroom rules, then people are going to be against that. But if it’s the Trump administration forcing a different kind of change or a red state government banning certain medical procedures, then people may swing back against that. That’s a persistent feature of these debates.

And here again you get back to the pandemic, where people lost faith in the education system as a whole. They got the feeling that decisions were being made not because of children, but because of teachers’ unions or politicians. And so that was an opening to make people uneasy in general about what was going on in their schools with the curriculum, with the gender identity discussions. It just had a whole different layer to it. And I do think now that the pandemic is over, it is going to fade somewhat. Let’s take a quick break with this. And when we come back, we’ll talk about how we escape the woke war. And we’re back. So how do we get schools back to normal? What does belong in the classrooms? I assume somebody has a thought. Ross, do you have notes?

I mean, I have a detailed curriculum —

Oh, tell.

— Michelle, under my desk —

Item one.

— ready to go.

Subset A.

I mean, I think that one way to look at this is to take a figure like my former Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose work was, I think, a really instigating force for new thinking about racial history. A lot of what we think of as late-2010’s progressivism, anti-racism, and so on kicks off when Coates writes his essays calling for reparations for slavery and other things in that zone. And to me, part of what he became famous for was this excavation of the depths of African American suffering under not just slavery, but segregation — the depths and severity of the wound, how long subjugation and violence endured against Black people in American life. And I think there’s a chunk of what Coatesian progressivism wants to talk about that should be integrated into whatever kind of curriculum we’re offering to kids. The problem is that it’s laced with this incredibly deep pessimism about America and the possibility of racial equality and racial improvement, and so on that runs through the big, subsequent progressive, anti-racist authors. The question is for public schools teaching kids about America, people are going to want and, I think, are reasonable in wanting a historical narrative that tries to instill love of country, optimism about the country, hope for the country’s future, including around issues of race. And if I were offering progressives a challenge, I would say, OK, you want more depth about the sins of the American past? That’s fine. That’s good. What is the story about the American present that you’re going to tell that is doing the kind of patriotic work that if we’re going to have a public school system, a government school system, people are going to want from their history curriculum? You’re never going to have a consensus around a history curriculum that just teaches kids America’s pretty much just a bad, racist place.

You brought up Coates, and I remember I went to hear him speak at some event here in Washington. And he talked about precisely what you are raising, Ross, which is that everyone both wanted to hear — especially his white progressive audiences, which were legion. They wanted the tongue lashing. They wanted this is how bad it all is. But they wanted hope at the end. And he was like, why is that my job? This is my analysis of the situation. Why am I supposed to make you feel good at the end?

But I guess I would imagine that if I was a schoolchild today, particularly a kid in middle school or high school, I would want to, unlike the students at the South Carolina school where a teacher was told to stop teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, I would want kids to have access to that and access to lots of different stories and interpretations of American history, and talk about those, and argue them out. And maybe that’s a result of the kind of education that I received. It feels to me like, do I want Ta-Nehisi Coates to be the curriculum of American history? No. Do I want it to be an incredibly important ingredient and a new perspective on thinking about what American history is? Absolutely. And I think that’s that the piece of it. It’s like where do you point your lens, and how wide is its aperture? I took a trip to Savannah recently, and I went to a museum. And it is set in the house of a very wealthy merchant of some kind. And it’s a very popular museum in Savannah. And a friend of mine who’s a historian of African American history participated in the rethinking of the programming at this museum. And they basically have infused the lives of enslaved people into the story that they tell at this museum. I found it very moving. It was really interesting. I learned a lot. You’d go into the kids bedroom, and they’d be like, hey, that’s where the slave girl would sleep, that corner over there. And it wasn’t saying that America was bad because there was a slave girl sleeping in the corner. It’s just like, hey, this is what happened. And I thought it was really interesting. But the thing that I noticed on this tour — and this is, I think, probably what’s happening in a lot of schools — is most people on the tour were basically like, huh, so was that wallpaper original, or is that a reproduction?

Oh.

That people just didn’t listen to or they just — it went right past them because they just weren’t showing up for that. They weren’t interested in it. And that’s, to me, one of the questions that I ask, is how much are we talking about these fights in ways that seem so life or death, but actually don’t really have any impact on kids at all?

I mean, one, there is a default here, a default assumption where most kids in grade school or high school, they’re not sitting around absorbing these controversies in a profound way one way or another. And that’s in a way the strongest argument at any point against overthinking the culture wars as they relate to schools, is just your memory of what actually being in high school is like. I think that there’s, though, to simplify the conservative error in teaching US history, where you say, look, it’s really important to make kids love America and think America is great. And therefore, we always have to have an explanation for any bad thing that happened. I think the liberal and progressive weakness is to assume that kids are somewhere going to get the basic story, and we can just focus on making sure that they understand the complicated, harder truths and so on. So there is a tendency to be like, well, I’m sure they’ll learn about the founders at some point. And so we can skip on to complicating what they know about the founders. But then the kids never actually learn about the founders except via “Hamilton” or something like that. And I think that the question is whether there is a synthesis here where you’re able to have a fundamentally positive story about America, which, again, I think you can’t have a public school curriculum that doesn’t do that in some way that also seriously integrates the harder, harsher truths. To make a plug, there’s this series of graphic novels, which — I hate graphic novels, for the record. I’m not endorsing the concept of the graphic novel.

Aww.

But these graphic novels —

There are some great ones out there.

— they’re called Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales. And my kids like them.

My kids love those, Ross.

My son absolutely loves them. And there’s one about Lafayette. There’s one about World War I that’s actually incredibly good. There’s one about the Underground Railroad. There’s one about Haiti and the Haitian slave revolt and the Louisiana Purchase. And they are not always perfect, but they do a lot of work of being serious, dark, and grisly where it’s appropriate to be dark and grisly, not shying away from the darkness, but also giving you a sense of the American story as a really cool and interesting thing. My worry about a certain progressive history is that it’s like you read it, and you’re like, man, you really hate everybody in the past. The past just sucks. And that’s the best way to get people to tune out, to get kids to tune out history entirely, I think.

But what if you’re just fascinated by the past? I mean, what if you’re not making a value judgment about it one way or the other? I mean, we all loved “Succession.” And those people were horrible.

I judge them every Sunday night, Lydia.

Ross, I like that they’re dark and grisly. Because in my experience, kids like — we used to get these tiny, little books about Rasputin or —

Oh, yeah.

— Hannibal, or Alexander the Great, or whatever. And the kids totally dug them because they were into the dark and grisly parts of history.

One of these books, just so you know, is literally called “Donner Dinner Party.”

Wow. I love it. I want that.

And for a long time we refused to buy that one, but then it was actually really interesting, and I learned a lot.

Your kids probably loved it.

That’s the “Donner Party” that I had not known before.

But isn’t this the irony of this whole debate, is that I grew up reading the “Tintin” books, and “Asterix and Obelix.” You don’t like graphic novels, but I love comic books.

I read “Tintin” too. I’m a hypocrite.

There’s so much stuff in there that’s politically incorrect and stuff that is actually racist and whatnot. And I think those books are thought of differently now. But I would not want a childhood where I was cut off from things that were shocking or offensive. I worry now that if the Ron DeSantises of the world get their way that no one will ever be confronted with anything that will offend their delicate sensibilities.

So I have kids in middle school, high school, and elementary school. And so this is a live issue for me. But what’s weird about it for me is that I never went through it. I didn’t go to middle school or high school here, so I never had to imbibe whatever sanitized version of American history was given to kids.

You just learned about the evils of Yankee imperialism straight up.

The ‘70s and ‘80s, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah. Yankee, go home.

Yeah.

So the way I actually learned American history was through reading the John Jakes “Bicentennial Series” of historical fiction, which my dad had. And they were great because every 23 pages or so there was a pretty reliable sex scene. And for this middle schooler, that was great. But then I learned about Valley Forge. And yet later, I learned more. There are different ways — your learning of American history comes to you in unexpected ways and unexpected moments. Hopefully, the learning of the American story continues. In many ways, I think that what I got in all sorts of subjects in high school was a simplified version that I went on to deepen throughout my life. Joe Biden is always talking about the soul of America. And that’s based on John Meacham’s book by the same name. And Meacham in that book gives some version, a synthesis of the bad and the good story of America is. He says, “For all our darker impulses, for all our shortcomings, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight.” The word that sticks out for me is the word “fight.” If I were to design the curriculum, I would emphasize that that’s what this place is. This is a fight. This is a constant, constant fight not just over which policies predominate, but over which stories predominate. And I think that’s the nature of this beast.

I love it. Well, with that, on this very philosophical note, we’re going to leave it, guys. And when we come back from break, we’re going to get hot or cold. All right. And finally, it is time for Hot/Cold, where every week one of us shares something we’re into, over, or somewhere in between. So who’s going to hot/cold us?

I think it’s going to be me, Michelle.

You.

So do you guys remember the movie “Super Size Me?”

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah. So the movie was — it was a documentary, like a stunt documentary. The guy would go — was only going to eat at McDonald’s. And any time they asked him, do you want that Super Sized, which is a thing that McDonald’s used to do and, in fact, stopped doing after this movie came out, they would give you an extra-large Coke and an order of fries with your order.

And he always said yes. That was the deal?

Part of the documentary was that he had to say yes. I’ve been thinking about that movie lately because I relatively recently discovered these little miniature cans of soda.

I love those.

Super shrink me.

It’s a super mini.

OK, so this is like 7 1/2 ounces. It’s a little bit more than half the size of a regular can of soda. And I feel like after years, and years, and years of things getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, we’re finally at a place now where we’re actually being served things in the quantities that we might actually want to consume them. And what’s perfect about it is that it’s exactly how much you’d want to consume in one sitting. It doesn’t get warm. It stays fizzy.

See, I love this. I’m a child, and I don’t need much caffeine. So I would get a big can of Coke, I would drink about a third of it, and then I would leave them around the house. And it would make my husband completely mental.

Exactly.

But now that these have come out, our marriage is much better.

Lydia, do you find yourself consuming more of them though?

I don’t, actually. It turns out that it just scratches that itch of like, I want something sweet, and caffeinated, and fizzy. It’s great also for alcoholic beverages, which I think should all be smaller.

Definitely.

But I think just like more broadly — and Carlos, you’re going to hate this because I’m going to say one of your least favorite phrases, which is I feel like I’m just entering a phase of life where I think less is more.

I am with you.

So we are — my wife and I are moving from a pretty big, sprawling, rather rundown loft apartment to a smaller, one-bedroom apartment in New York City. And so we’ve been downsizing in general, even though we don’t have kids. And usually, that’s a thing that you do when you have kids. And so I think I’m just really excited about small things. Like I love these little, tiny notebooks that I get that are perfect to fit in my pocket so that I can write down my thoughts rather than pulling out my phone. So anyway, small is beautiful. I’m hot on small things. That is my hot/cold today.

Go small. Go small, or go home.

I’m going to have to try those sodas now. OK.

No, they’re brilliant. I love them. That’s just perfection.

The truth is that with any carbonated beverage, you are buying the initial swig.

Yes, that is so true.

And so shrinking it is a way of getting closer to — you’re just buying —

That first hit.

— that first hit.

Amen, brother.

On that note, I think it’s time to say goodbye, guys.

All right. Thanks, everyone.

See you next week.

I’m going to open my can of fizzy water to say goodbye.

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A camel carrying many items can eventually break its back, even though individual items are light enough to be carried. We could prevent the camel’s back from breaking by removing the hay bale, or removing other luggage, or freeing it from its rider.

In the same way, people can be exposed to different risk factors simultaneously, and they can overlap and interact with each other.

A real-life example is that DNA mutations can be caused by many carcinogens and some pathogens. Our cells have ‘checkpoints’ that prevent DNA mutations from leading to cancer. But, if a sufficient number of mutations occur, they will surpass the checkpoint, and a tumor can develop. This can eventually lead to death.

If people have multiple risk factors, then it’s more likely that the threshold will be surpassed. Having one risk factor can also make someone more vulnerable to another risk factor later on.

This means their death can be prevented in multiple ways. Liver cancer, for example, can be caused by chronic alcohol consumption and some hepatitis viruses, so reducing alcohol consumption or preventing hepatitis virus infections would both reduce the risk of death.

A worked example

In the figure, I have illustrated this with a worked example.

It shows that when multiple risk factors are present, the number (or fraction) of deaths from risk factors can’t be simply summed up.

Above you can see five hypothetical people who died and their previous exposure to risk factors. In pink, you can see their risk from hepatitis C virus, in blue is their risk from smoking, and in yellow is their risk from alcohol consumption.

Each risk factor increased their chance of death, according to the amount of exposure they’ve had. Some of the containers are full – this shows that some people have had sufficient risk exposure to cause death within a given timeframe.

Let’s look at what happens if some of the risk factors were removed.

If one risk factor – for example, hepatitis C – was removed, it reduced the number of deaths by 60%. This is known as the population-attributable fraction of hepatitis C, which means that 60% of deaths were caused by hepatitis C, in the hypothetical example.

If a different risk factor – smoking – was removed, it also reduced the number of deaths by 60%. So 60% of deaths were also caused by smoking.

How many deaths were caused by both of them, taken together? If both risk factors were removed, the number of deaths was reduced by 80%, not 120%.

This illustrates how the deaths from risk factors are not additive – they cannot be added up, and they do not sum up to 100%.

Similarly, if two risk factors have a population-attributable fraction of 50% and 30%, it does not mean that 20% of deaths are caused by unexplained risk factors.1

Instead, researchers can use other methods to understand the combined contribution of multiple risk factors. These estimates are based on the order of risk factors: for example, they may look at the share of deaths caused by obesity after smoking has been accounted for.2

By interpreting the fractions correctly, we can have a better understanding of the impact of different risk factors combined.

Below, you can see the full illustration.

Conclusion

Although it may sound simple to attribute a person’s death to a single risk factor, this is usually not straightforward. Over a lifetime, people are exposed to various risk factors, which can overlap and interact with each other. This also means the same deaths can be prevented in multiple ways.

By understanding the effects of different risk factors, we can identify better ways to save lives.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser for their valuable feedback on this article. I’m also very grateful to Julia Rohrer and Ruben Arslan for inspiring the analogy & figure to explain why multiple risk factors can’t be summed up.

Cite this work Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as: Saloni Dattani (2023) - "Why isn’t it possible to sum up the death toll from different risk factors?". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/why-isnt-it-possible-to-sum-up-the-deaths-from-different-risk-factors' [Online Resource] BibTeX citation @article{owid-why-isnt-it-possible-to-sum-up-the-deaths-from-different-risk-factors, author = {Saloni Dattani}, title = {Why isn’t it possible to sum up the death toll from different risk factors?}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/why-isnt-it-possible-to-sum-up-the-deaths-from-different-risk-factors} }

There are columnists whose role, whose very raison d’être, is to project the sense that sanity — blessed sanity! — exists. The world might be insane, trapped between different brands of lunatics, but in their columns everything is sound and obvious. Their 800–1000 words amount to an island of reason in a sea of madness.

Janan Ganesh is one such columnist. His prose oozes tranquil certitude. If he has ever doubted himself, then I suspect he was just wondering if he was right or incredibly right. If he has ever been wrong, then it was only in expecting too much from other people (and he hasn’t made the same mistake since).

In his latest column for the Financial Times, he argues that Britain is returning to pragmatism after its experiment with radical politics in the form of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. “Boris Johnson is out of parliament,” he writes:

Scotland is becoming less of a one party state. Tony Blair is no longer persona non grata. At discreet intervals, the UK government makes some kind of accommodation with the EU: a deal on scientific research funding might be next. In 2019, Britain had to choose between Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister. Next time, voters will have their pick of adenoidal but meticulous technocrats in Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir.

Meticulous? I dunno what they’ve done to deserve that. Note the figure sliding mischievously through this paragraph. Tony Blair, it seems, represents “pragmatism”. The man who joined the preemptive invasion of Iraq, opened Britain’s borders to an unprecedented degree, force-fed the higher education system and established the sweeping legislative and institutional framework of modern managerialism is just a humble pragmatist. Not for him the “grand visions” and “easy answers” that Ganesh sees in radicals. No, he understood that politics is about “trade-offs and half-loaves”. In what sense — his policies or his vibes?

Granted, Ganesh has made the reasonable point elsewhere that the invasion of Iraq would have probably taken place regardless of whether Britain had joined in. Almost two hundred British soldiers would not have died, though, if we had kept our distance (and billions of pounds would have been saved). Besides, Blair was a true believer. He thought that our participation mattered.

I’m not trying to restart old arguments here. I’m trying to demonstrate that what gets called “pragmatism” is fantasy politics.

It would be foolish to defend “radicalism” qua “radicalism”. Ganesh isn’t wrong about the danger of demagogues and totalising worldviews. I agree, naturally, that compromise is essential to politics, and that evidence is essential to policy. Is it correct, though, that unhinged populism is what ails Britain?

Ganesh notes that “one in three voters now think [Brexit] was a good idea”. That’s proof of dissatisfaction. Does it prove that Brexit is the cause? About one in four voters think Britain has adequate or insufficient immigration, and I doubt that Mr Ganesh thinks this proves the failure of the perspective.

As much as it pains me to write, major problems need a major response

I don’t think there is much about Britain’s undeniable dysfunction that you can blame on “radical politics” — or, at least, on “radical politics” in any kind of new and dissident form. The conflict in Eastern Europe and the fallout from COVID have been significant drivers of inflation, and no one would suggest that Western support for Ukraine or COVID-era policies are or were “populist”. Britain’s lack of alternative energy sources can be pinned on Net Zero and on the managerial sclerosis of a coalition government that didn’t have the patience for nuclear power. Its crippling lack of infrastructure is primarily the fault of an ingrained vetocracy that blocks reform, never mind anything “radical”.

This state of affairs means any effective response must be “radical” as well. Again, that doesn’t mean “radicalism” is inherently good. Having a perforated ulcer doesn’t mean that you should amputate your leg. Nonetheless, as much as it pains me to write, as someone who used to hymn the virtues of Oakeshottian conservatism, major problems need a major response.

As a right-winger, I of course think this is true when it comes to immigration, crime et cetera. All of us can agree that it is true of energy, though, whatever kind of energy we think is most appropriate. All of us can agree that it is true of the NHS, whatever kind of reform we advocate. How should adenoidal technocrats (too kind a description of Sunak and Starmer, but we’ll stick with it) have the ideas and the will to find solutions then force them through the red tape and vested interests in the way?

“Key parts of British society now need renewal,” the reader learns in Compassionate Conservatism, which Ganesh wrote with Jesse Norman MP in 2006, “of a scale and energy last seen in the economy a generation ago.” What has improved since then to diminish the “scale and energy” of the renewal that Britain needs?

Hey,

So, a lot of people didn’t like Friday’s G-File. I get it. Sometimes I indulge myself too much (“We figured that out from your physique”—the Couch). I’m not saying I’m going to stop indulging my writerly whims. Writing the G-File however I want is in my contract. But when I do decide to run free over the keyboard, I need to figure out a way to reliably tip off the reader that this is going to be one of those “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” “news”letters so critics can’t say they weren’t warned.

Anyway, since you brought up the problem of indulgence, it’s worth pointing out that indulgence used to be primarily understood as something granted to you by others. From the etymological dictionary: “mid-14c., in the Church sense, ‘a freeing from temporal punishment for sin, remission from punishment for sin that remains due after absolution.’” Most people think of the ultimately corrupt practice of rich aristocrats buying a religious get-out-of-jail card from the church. And while that happened, the history and rationale of indulgences is actually a good deal more complicated. But don’t worry, I won’t repeat my errors of last week and dive into that rabbit hole.

I do think, however, that there’s something interesting to be said about the movement from the era of indulgence to the era of self-indulgence. I recently talked to Princeton’s Robert P. George on The Remnant. He argued that we’d gone from the Medieval Age of Faith to the Enlightenment Age of Reason to what we live in now: the Age of Feeling. We see our feelings as the final authority on countless fronts these days.

Back in the spring, around the end of the COVID-19 public-health emergency, hospitals around the country underwent a change in dress code. The masks that staff had been wearing at work for more than three years vanished, in some places overnight. At UChicago Medicine, where masking policies softened at the end of May, Emily Landon, the executive medical director of infection prevention and control, fielded hate mail from colleagues, some chiding her for waiting too long to lift the requirement, others accusing her of imperiling the immunocompromised. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which did away with masking in April, ahead of many institutions, Tom Talbot, the chief hospital epidemiologist, was inundated with thank-yous. “People were ready; they were tired,” he told me. “They’d been asking for several months before that, ‘Can we not stop?’”

But across hospitals and policies, infection-prevention experts shared one sentiment: They felt almost certain that the masks would need to return, likely by the end of the calendar year. The big question was exactly when.For some hospitals, the answer is now. In recent weeks, as COVID-19 hospitalizations have been rising nationwide, stricter masking requirements have returned to a smattering of hospitals in Massachusetts, California, and New York. But what’s happening around the country is hardly uniform. The coming respiratory-virus season will be the country’s first after the end of the public-health emergency—its first, since the arrival of COVID, without crisis-caliber funding set aside, routine tracking of community spread, and health-care precautions already in place. After years of fighting COVID in concert, hospitals are back to going it alone.A return to masking has a clear logic in hospitals. Sick patients come into close contact; medical procedures produce aerosols. “It’s a perfect storm for potential transmission of microbes,” Costi David Sifri, the director of hospital epidemiology at UVA Health, told me. Hospitals are on the front lines of disease response: They, more than nearly any other place, must prioritize protecting society’s vulnerable. And with one more deadly respiratory virus now in winter’s repertoire, precautions should logically increase in lockstep. But “there is no clear answer on how to do this right,” says Cameron Wolfe, an infectious-disease physician at Duke. Americans have already staked out their stances on masks, and now hospitals have to operate within those confines.When hospitals moved away from masking this spring, they each did so at their own pace—and settled on very different baselines. Like many other hospitals in Massachusetts, Brigham and Women’s Hospital dropped its mask mandate on May 12, the day the public-health emergency expired; “it was a noticeable difference, just walking around the hospital” that day, Meghan Baker, a hospital epidemiologist for both Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told me. UVA Health, meanwhile, weaned staff off of universal masking over the course of about 10 weeks.Most masks at the Brigham are now donned on only a case-by-case basis: when a patient has active respiratory symptoms, say, or when a health-care worker has been recently sick or exposed to the coronavirus. Staff also still mask around the same subset of vulnerable patients that received extra protection before the pandemic, including bone-marrow-transplant patients and others who are highly immunocompromised, says Chanu Rhee, an associate hospital epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. UVA Health, meanwhile, is requiring masks for everyone in the hospital’s highest-risk areas—among them, certain intensive-care units, as well as cancer, transplant, and infusion wards. And although Brigham patients can always request that their providers mask, at UVA, all patients are asked upon admission whether they’d like hospital staff to mask.Nearly every expert I spoke with told me they expected that masks would at some point come back. But unlike the early days of the pandemic, “there is basically no guidance from the top now,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said. The CDC still has a webpage with advice on when to mask. Those recommendations are tailored to the general public, though—and don’t advise covering up until COVID hospital admissions go “way high, when the horse has well and truly left the barn,” Landon, at UChicago, told me. “In health care, we need to do something before that”—tamping down transmission prior to wards filling up.More specific advice could still emerge from the CDC, or individual state health departments. But going forward, the assumption is that “each hospital is supposed to have its own general plan,” Rhee told me. (I reached out to the CDC repeatedly about whether it might update its infection-prevention-guidance webpage for COVID—last retooled in May—but didn’t receive a response.)Which leaves hospitals with one of two possible paths. They could schedule a start to masking season, based on when they estimate cases might rise—or they could react to data as they come in, tying masking policies to transmission bumps. With SARS-CoV-2 still so unpredictable, many hospitals are opting for the latter. That also means defining a true case rise—“what I think everybody is struggling with right now,” Rhee said. There is no universal definition, still, for what constitutes a surge. And with more immunity layered over the population, fewer infections are resulting in severe disease and death—even, to a limited extent, long COVID—making numbers that might have triggered mitigations just a year or two ago now less urgent catalysts.[Read: The future of long COVID]Further clouding the forecast is the fact that much of the data that experts once relied on to monitor COVID in the community have faded away. In most parts of the country, COVID cases are no longer regularly tallied; people are either not testing, or testing only at home. Wastewater surveillance and systems that track all influenza-like illnesses could provide some support. But that’s not a whole lot to go on, especially in parts of the country such as Tennessee, where sewage isn’t as closely tracked, Tom Talbot, of Vanderbilt, told me.Some hospitals have turned instead to in-house stats. At Duke—which has adopted a mitigation policy that’s very similar to UVA’s—Wolfe has mulled pulling the more-masking lever when respiratory viruses account for 2 to 4 percent of emergency and urgent-care visits; at UVA, Sifri has considered taking action once 1 or 2 percent of employees call out sick, with the aim of staunching sickness and preserving staff. “It really doesn’t take much to have an impact on our ability to maintain operations,” Sifri told me. But “I don’t know if those are the right numbers.” Plus, internal metrics are now tricky for the same reasons they’ve gotten shaky elsewhere, says Xiaoyan Song, the chief infection-control officer at Children’s National Hospital, in Washington, D.C. Screening is no longer routine for patients, skewing positivity stats; even sniffly health-care workers, several experts told me, are now less eager to test and report.[Read: What COVID hospitalization numbers are missing]For hospitals that have maintained a more masky baseline, scenarios in which universal masking returns are a little easier to envision and enact. At UChicago Medicine, Landon and her colleagues have developed a color-coded system that begins at teal—masking for high-risk patients, patients who request masked care, and anyone with symptoms, plus masking in high-risk areas—and goes through everyone-mask-up-everywhere red; their team plans to meet weekly to assess the situation, based on a variety of community and internal metrics, and march their masking up or down. Wolfe, of Duke, told me that his hospital “wanted to reserve a little bit of extra masking quite intentionally,” so that any shift back toward stricter standards would feel like less of a shock: Habits are hard to break and then reform.Other hospitals that have been living mostly maskless for months, though, have a longer road back to universal masking, and staff members who might not be game for the trek. Should masks need to return at the Brigham or Dana-Farber, for instance, “I suspect the reaction will be mixed,” Baker told me. “So we really are trying to be judicious.” The hospital might try to preserve some maskless zones in offices and waiting rooms, for instance, or lower-risk rooms. And at Children’s National, which has also largely done away with masks, Song plans to follow the local health department’s lead. “Once D.C. Health requires hospitals to reimplement the universal-masking policy,” she told me, “we will be implementing it too.”Other mitigations are on the table. Several hospital epidemiologists told me they expected to reimplement some degree of asymptomatic screening for various viruses around the same time they reinstate masks. But measures such as visiting restrictions are a tougher call. Wolfe is reluctant to pull that lever before he absolutely has to: Going through a hospital stay alone is one of the “harder things for patients to endure.”A bespoke approach to hospital masking isn’t impractical. COVID waves won’t happen synchronously across communities, and so perhaps neither should policies. But hospitals that lack the resources to keep tabs on viral spread will likely be at a disadvantage, and Popescu told me she worries that “we’re going to see significant transmission” in the very institutions least equipped to handle such influx. Even the best-resourced places may hit stumbling blocks: Many are still reeling from three-plus years of crisis and are dealing with nursing shortages and worker burnout.Coordination hasn’t entirely gone away. In North Carolina, Duke is working with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University to shift policies in tandem; in Washington State, several regional health-care organizations have pledged to align their masking policies. And the Veterans Health Administration—where masking remains required in high-risk units—has developed a playbook for augmenting mitigations across its many facilities, which together make up the country’s largest integrated health-care system, says Shereef Elnahal, the undersecretary of Veterans Affairs for health. Still, institutions can struggle to move in sync: Attitudes on masking aren’t exactly universal across health-care providers, even within a hospital.The country’s experience with COVID has made hospitals that much more attuned to the impacts of infectious disease. Before the pandemic began, Talbot said, masking was a rarity in his hospital, even around high-risk patients; many employees would go on shifts sick. “We were pretty complacent about influenza,” he told me. “People could come to work and spread it.” Now hospital workers hold themselves to a stricter standard. At the same time, they have become intimately attuned to the drawbacks of constant masking: Some have complained that masks interfere with communication, especially for patients who are young or hard of hearing, or who have a language barrier. “I do think you lose a little bit of that personal bonding,” Talbot said. And prior to the lifting of universal masking at Vanderbilt, he said, some staff were telling him that one out of 10 times they’d ask a patient or family to mask, the exchange would “get antagonistic.”[Read: The pandemic’s legacy is already clear]When lifting mandates, many of the hospital epidemiologists I spoke with were careful to message to colleagues that the situation was fluid: “We’re suspending universal masking temporarily,” as Landon put it to her colleagues. Still, she admits that she felt uncomfortable returning to a low-mask norm at all. (When she informally polled nearly two dozen other hospital epidemiologists around the country in the spring, most of them told her that they felt the same.) Health-care settings aren’t meant to look like the rest of the world; they are places where precautions are expected to go above and beyond. COVID’s arrival had cemented masks’ ability to stop respiratory spread in close quarters; removing them felt to Landon like pushing those data aside, and putting the onus on patients—particularly those already less likely to advocate for themselves—to account for their own protection.She can still imagine a United States in which a pandemic-era response solidified, as it has in several other countries, into a peacetime norm: where wearing masks would have remained as routine as donning gloves while drawing blood, a tangible symbol of pandemic lessons learned. Instead, many American hospitals will be entering their fourth COVID winter looking a lot like they did in early 2020—when the virus surprised us, when our defenses were down.

One of the most amazing aspects of the COVID pandemic was the speed with which the world was able to create and deploy effective vaccines. This was partly due to regulatory streamlining and funding (such as Operation Warp Speed in the US), but mainly because the necessary technology was available. It took only a few days once the virus was isolated to sequence the genome of SARS-CoV-2. Scientists were also able to track the development and spread of genetic variants throughout the world through continuous surveillance. This was only possible because of recent developments in molecular biology.

The world was also introduced to the concept of mRNA vaccines. Vaccines work by introducing either an inactivated infectious agents or a piece (antigen) of that agent (virus or bacteria, for example), usually along with some immune-stimulating adjuvants, to provoke an immune response. The body creates antibodies against the infecting organism and remembers, allowing for a more vigorous and rapid immune response if the recipient is ever exposed to the living infectious agent. It’s like getting infected without suffering the symptoms or risks of an actual infection. Vaccines can also be used to target cancer cells.

Scientists explored for a while making vaccines using DNA, the coding molecule that carries genetic information. The idea was to introduce DNA that codes for a viral or bacterial protein, the host’s cells would then incorporate that DNA into the nucleus and start making the protein. This approach, however, turned out to be too complicated and essentially did not work. So they next turned to RNA vaccines, specifically messenger RNA (or mRNA). RNA molecules can also encode for proteins, but they don’t have to enter the nucleus and do not run the risk of being incorporated into host DNA. They stay outside the nucleus where the proteins are made. Once proteins are transcribed from the mRNA, the molecule is broken down and recycled.

The mRNA approached worked extremely well. The Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines, for example, are both mRNA based. There are several advantages to the mRNA platform. Perhaps the most important is that mRNA vaccine can be made relatively quickly compared to other methods. Traditional vaccine require complex cell cultures and safety measure to prevent contamination, while mRNA technology is relatively clean and simple. We already have the technology to program and mass-produce mRNA molecules, so the production of a new vaccine involves mainly knowing the genetic sequence of the protein or proteins you wish to be antigens for the vaccine. This allows for rapid vaccine development and precise targeting.

The introduction of a new technology, however, especially one involving genetics lead to some popular anxiety about the safety of these vaccines. Scientifically the evidence is solid, but it was easy to scare people about a genetic vaccine. It is likely that we are about to see another advance in genetically based vaccines – the development of self-amplifying RNA vaccines (saRNA). This is an extension of the mRNA technology that may also lead to more rapid development of vaccines and more effective vaccines.

The saRNA vaccines include an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP) complex accompanying the RNA that codes for the viral antigen. These amplifying gene sequences will replicate with RNA many times, so that even a small dose of saRNA can lead to many copies of RNA producing the desired antigen. There are also possible trans-amplifying RNA approaches that have the RdRP genes separate from the antigen-coding RNA.

What are the potential advantages to this approach? Vaccines based on saRNA technology could use a lower dose and require fewer subsequent boosters. This will reduce inconvenience and expense, and improve vaccine compliance. Preliminary research on candidate vaccines show that the saRNA vaccines (also called self-replicating or repRNA) can produce antigens for weeks or even months after a single injection.

This study also demonstrated the use of nanoparticles to deliver the saRNA package. These are then like psuedoviruses – an outer capsule containing the genetic package. The advantage here is that one nanoparticle capsule can contain multiple saRNA packages. Therefore with one injection an saRNA vaccine can produce immunity to multiple antigens. This itself is not new but the platform allows for it more easily.

It is also possible, although research is ongoing, that saRNA vaccines will produce better immunity. One reason is that the sustained release of antigen over time better replicates a natural infection than a single bolus of non-replicating vaccine. This may cause a greater immune response, allowing for later stages of immunity to kick in and produce greater and longer lasting immunity. There are a lot of technical details to work out, but the saRNA platforms currently under development appear to work and do not seem to present any unique safety concerns.

In the next 5-10 years we can likely expect saRNA based vaccines to be going through clinical trials and start getting approval. It’s also likely that the next pandemic that hits will be targeted, at least in part, by these vaccines. It is also likely that there will be another round of fear-mongering about the new technology. It probably best for scientists to get ahead of this, to introduce and explain the technology to the public, so that at least it will be somewhat familiar before the next COVID. Let’s also get all the conspiracy theories and misinformation out of the way, and at least produce the data and the analysis to respond to this misinformation before we are in the middle of a pandemic emergency.

This is probably wishful thinking, but there is no reason not to try.

Even now I can still see him, the man in gold and white, streaking down the sideline all alone.And then the ball was in the air. It hung up there for what felt like my entire childhood, spiraling in slow motion, traveling 50 yards in total. I remember gasping. Just a few minutes earlier, my favorite team—my first true love—the Detroit Lions, had taken a three-point lead over the hated Green Bay Packers. It was the first round of the 1993 NFC playoffs, and it was my first time at a Lions game. The sound of the 80,000 souls crammed into the Pontiac Silverdome—a glorified warehouse in the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit—was deafening, a roar of humanity unlike anything I’d ever heard, the decibel level shaking the cement beneath our bleacher seats. But now, with less than one minute remaining, as the football dropped into the hands of Sterling Sharpe, the man in gold and white, there was silence. The Packers’ unproven young quarterback, Brett Favre, had just made the most spectacular touchdown throw of his career and eliminated the Lions from the playoffs.I was inconsolable. The Lions had been the better team; even a kid could see that. We’d out-gained the Packers, out-converted them, out-played them. But we’d lost anyway—in dramatic, dream-shattering fashion. It was too much for my 7-year-old emotions to process. So, I wept. First in the stands as time expired, then in the swarming, beer-soaked concourse as my family searched for the exit, and for the entire hour-long car ride home. Finally, as we pulled into our driveway, my dad spun the radio knob leftward, turning down the postmortem show. “It’s just a game,” he said, smiling gently. “We’ll win the next one.”It was the only lie my dad ever told me.A year later, the Lions met the Packers again in the playoffs—and, again, the Lions lost. The next time they reached the postseason, they lost. And the time after that. And the time after that. Since falling to Green Bay that ill-fated night, the Lions have appeared in seven playoff games. They have lost every single one. This streak of futility, going more than 30 years without a playoff win, is unmatched in the annals of the National Football League. But the historical context is even worse. Since winning an NFL championship in 1957—a decade before the first Super Bowl was played—the Lions have won just one playoff game, in the 1991 season, against the Dallas Cowboys. That’s right: one playoff victory since the Eisenhower administration.Every loss I’ve witnessed has been painful, but none more than that Packers game. The Lions were stacked with elite talent: linebacker Chris Spielman, offensive tackle Lomas Brown, return specialist Mel Gray. And of course, the most electrifying player in football, running back Barry Sanders. The team was poised to become one of the league’s best. But that loss to the Packers broke them. Suddenly, Favre and his Green Bay squad were ascendant, racking up division titles and conference championships and winning a Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the Lions fell apart. In the summer of 1999, on the eve of training camp, Sanders floored the football world by announcing his retirement. Despite being in the prime of his career—one season away from breaking Walter Payton’s rushing record—he was worn down by the losing. Two years later, the Lions brought in Matt Millen to rebuild the team as president and CEO. What ensued was the most disastrous tenure the football world had ever seen: The Lions went 31–97 during the eight seasons Millen oversaw the roster, solidifying our reputation as the laughingstock of professional sports. In 2008 we made history, going winless with a record of 0–16.[Samuel G. Freedman: A football memoir, with tears]It was the worst season an NFL team had ever played—and I didn’t miss a single snap. Every Sunday that fall, during my last semester at Michigan State University, I watched, yelled, seethed, prayed, and ultimately witnessed the Lions come up short. A few minutes later, as predictable as a late-game turnover, the phone would ring. My dad wanted to check on me. We would commiserate for a little while, then talk about other things. Every conversation ended the same way. “We’ll win the next one,” he would say.
The author and his father during a 2001 visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).
By then I was old enough to realize something: Dad didn’t actually believe we’d win the next one. He wasn’t predicting a breakthrough victory. He was teaching me how to handle defeat; he was urging me not to give up hope. He was assuring me that, no matter what, we’d talk again the following Sunday.A few summers ago, the day after Dad died, I stood outside a funeral home with my brother Brian. Our father’s passing had been sudden and shocking; both of us were in a daze. After standing there in silence for a while, my brother let out a sigh. “Man,” he said, “Pop never got to see the Lions win.”Brian was right: For all those decades of fanhood, for all those Sunday-evening pep talks, for all those life lessons drawn from watching his team lose, Dad had never been rewarded with a real winner.I thought about that when I moved my own family back to Michigan shortly after the funeral. I thought about it when I bought season tickets. I thought about it last summer, when my wife and I took our son Lewis to his very first Lions game. He was almost 7 years old—the age I’d been when my heart was broken that night against the Packers. This was just a preseason game, but it delivered thrill after thrill. The Lions pulled away late; the home stadium, now Ford Field in downtown Detroit, pulsated with cheers. Lewis looked euphoric.And then a familiar turn of events. The Lions, unforced, fumbled the ball away. The Atlanta Falcons, on a fourth down with 90 seconds remaining, scored a miraculous touchdown. The stadium fell into a hush. Lewis looked up at me. “What just happened?” he asked, his voice quivering. “Did we lose?”On the car ride home, after we’d pacified Lewis with candy and a stuffed mascot from the stadium, my wife turned to me. Her tone was serious. As a practicing child therapist—and as the wife of a die-hard Lions fan—she knew what emotional trauma looked like. She was worried about our son.“Are you sure,” she asked me, “that you want to do this to him?”I had never considered it optional. The Lions were in my DNA. Some of my earliest, most vivid memories—formed at no older than age 3—are of my dad and older brothers erupting with screams inside our cramped living room, often frightening me to tears. I would peek in and find them whooping and high-fiving around the small television set, almost always in response to some laws-of-physics-defying maneuver and subsequent touchdown sprint by Barry Sanders. Dad hadn’t grown up a big football fan. But the year we moved to Michigan was the same year the Lions drafted Sanders; before long he and my brothers were hooked, and eventually I was too. Sundays became sacrosanct: Dad preached at our church in the morning, then raced home to meet us for the afternoon kickoff. We scampered outside afterward to re-create the action, pretending to be our favorite players, then came in for dinner and rehashed the results. I can scarcely remember feeling so content.Of course that fandom would be passed down to my three sons. A framed photo of Sanders had hung over the crib in our kids’ nursery; the walls of their room were painted Honolulu Blue, the singular shade of Detroit’s home uniform. My boys would grow up obsessing over every draft pick, every free-agent acquisition, every coaching change, just like I had. We would watch the games together when they were young, and once they ventured out into the world, we would talk on Sunday evenings.
The author and his friends at MetLife Stadium in 2014 for “The Mane Event” (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).
My wife knew what she’d signed up for. Back when we started dating, I had to explain to her the moral prerequisite of “The Mane Event,” an annual road-trip extravaganza with three of my closest childhood friends, in which we drained our meager bank accounts to watch the Lions play (and almost always lose) an away game. When my wife and I got married, the place cards for the reception were refashioned Lions tickets. The next day, for our honeymoon, we hosted a massive tailgate outside Ford Field. (In fairness, we lacked the funds to go anywhere else.) She was a great sport about it, wearing a veil to match her Ndamukong Suh jersey, proving that I married the most amazing woman in the world.Over the years, however, her patience waned. The night Lewis was born, I was glued to the NFL draft inside the delivery room, a distraction that for some reason she found irksome. Minutes after Lewis emerged, I carried him over to the television, swaddled in blankets, and together we watched the Lions select Taylor Decker, an offensive tackle from Ohio State University. It was a polarizing pick: We don’t like Buckeyes much in Michigan, and plus, the Lions desperately needed talent on the defensive side of the ball. I cradled my newborn in one hand and traded angry texts with friends and family in the other, baptizing Lewis into a life he never asked for.Some seven years later, after that preseason loss to the Falcons, I wrestled with my wife’s question. Rooting for the Lions had given me some wonderful memories, but also some punishing ones. This wasn’t merely about picking a favorite team for my children; this was about passing down a painful existence. Every team wins some games and loses others, but not every team is a national punch line and annual bottom-dweller. Was it really fair, I wondered, to force that on someone?I decided to back off. If Lewis and his brothers were to become fans, it wouldn’t be their dad’s dictate. They needed to choose the Lions on their own. Frankly, I didn’t see that happening anytime soon. The regime that took over in 2021—head coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes—had inherited the worst roster in the league. In their first season, they’d won just three games. In 2022, after my paternal moment of clarity, the team started the year by losing six of its first seven games. At this rate, I figured, it would be easy to abstain from pushing Detroit football on my boys.But then the strangest thing happened: The Lions started winning.The offense had shown signs of being explosive; now, midway through the season, it was unstoppable, soaring toward the top of the league leaderboard in yards and points per game. The defense had been dreadful; now it was scrappy, tenacious, improving every week. Campbell, the Hercules-size coach who’d played 10 years in the league as a tight end, had splashed a new, one-word team motto—GRIT—all across the Lions facility, even printing it on hats and shirts for the players to wear. Some fans viewed this as a token rebranding effort. But as the season progressed, our franchise transformed into something unrecognizable. These Lions didn’t give an inch to their opponents. They were mentally tough; they played with swagger, expecting to dominate every time they took the field. Detroit became the most dangerous team in football, winning seven of its last nine games and somehow, despite the awful start, sneaking into playoff contention. It would all come down to the season finale, a prime-time game in Green Bay against the Packers.I had held firm on my promise not to indoctrinate the boys. But I couldn’t contain my own exhilaration: After booking our tickets for Sunday night, January 8, 2023, at fabled Lambeau Field, my “Mane Event” crew traveled north.The Packers had owned this rivalry my entire life. First it was Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback, who had killed us; then it was his successor, Aaron Rodgers, a future Hall of Famer himself. During one stretch, Detroit lost 24 consecutive games in Green Bay, the longest road losing streak in NFL history. Getting beaten was bad enough. Worse still was the “Same Old Lions” narrative we couldn’t seem to escape, owing to legendary choke jobs and unjust endings: the “completing the process” non-catch in Chicago, the 10-second runoff against Atlanta, the picked-up pass-interference flag in Dallas. And no team in the NFL seemed to benefit from our curse quite like the Packers.Minutes before kickoff in Green Bay, a third playoff contender, the Seattle Seahawks, won their game following several atrocious fourth-quarter calls, eliminating the Lions from playoff contention but keeping Green Bay alive. All the Packers had to do was win, on their home field, to get in. The champagne bottles began popping around us at Lambeau. The Lions, most people assumed, would mail it in.[Read: Angry football fans keep punching their TVs]But they didn’t. In the gutsiest performance I’d ever seen from my team, Detroit smacked Green Bay around inside its own house. Despite having nothing to play for but pride—and the chance to keep their nemesis out of the postseason—the Lions hounded Rodgers all night, sacking him twice and sealing his career in Green Bay with an interception on his final drive. As the Packers faithful emptied out of the stadium, my friends and I joined thousands of Lions fans in rushing toward the lower bowl, forming a ring of Honolulu Blue around the field, dancing and singing and hugging strangers in the snow. It was the best moment of my life as a Lions fan.Riding the momentum from their late-season surge, the Lions became a league darling headed into the 2023 campaign. Several top free agents signed on to play for Campbell. National pundits picked Detroit to win the NFC North—something we have yet to do since the NFL realigned its divisions 20 years ago. Oddsmakers in Las Vegas took more bets on the Lions to make the Super Bowl than they did on any other team in the conference.This was no longer some cute, try-hard Cinderella story. When the NFL released its 2023 schedule, the opening game of the season—Thursday, September 7, in prime time, all the buildup and all the eyeballs—featured the Kansas City Chiefs, the defending Super Bowl champions, playing at home. Their opponent: the Detroit Lions.On the first day of training camp this July, Campbell told reporters that the “hype train” surrounding his team was “out of control.” But it wasn’t the hype that scared me. It was something else—a feeling I couldn’t make sense of. With some trepidation, I decided to check out training camp myself.Barry Sanders doesn’t have the moves he once did. The immortal running back, whose jukes and spins and stop-and-start cuts left a generation of linebackers searching for their jockstrap, couldn’t shake the mob of people seeking an audience. It was a sweltering August afternoon and Sanders, now 55 years old, had dropped in on Lions headquarters in Allen Park. The Lions were hosting the New York Giants for a joint scrimmage ahead of their preseason game later in the week, and a crowd of several thousand fans swarmed the practice facility. When word got around that Sanders was here, everyone—players and coaches from both teams—lined up, pointing and whispering like little kids, waiting to shake his hand. By the time Sanders got to me, under a shaded pavilion next to giant metal tubs filled with ice, he looked exhausted.
Barry Sanders playing against the Green Bay Packers in 1993 (John Biever / Sports Illustrated / Getty).
Nothing was forcing Sanders to be here—no sponsorship agreement, no contractual obligation with the club. He was happy to visit with everyone, to sign autographs and snap selfies. But really, he’d come to watch football. He’d come to see his team.Given the circumstances of his departure years earlier—the retirement letter he faxed into a newspaper, the buzz around his feud with the organization, the distance he kept in the aftermath—one might assume that he’d want nothing to do with the Lions. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating his retirement was to the franchise. Every hard-core Lions fan can remember where they were when they found out. I was inside a Denny’s, eating eggs with my dad, when a guy sprinted inside, having just heard the breaking news over the car radio. “Barry’s retiring! Barry’s retiring!” he cried. We sat there in disbelief.Sanders heard these sob stories in the years that followed. But it wasn’t until his children reached a certain age that he truly understood the emotion behind them. He had made southeast Michigan his home, putting down roots and raising his kids there. He had never pressured them to watch any particular sport, cheer for any particular club. Yet they became football fans. They became Lions fans. And so did he. The Hall of Famer could no longer help himself: Every Sunday in the Sanders house now centered on the team he’d left behind. He saw his sons crushed in all the familiar ways; he watched them mourn the shocking retirement of another Lions superstar, wide receiver Calvin Johnson, bringing the experience full circle. Yet all the while, Sanders and his family continued to cheer.“It’s something that I grapple with, and it’s just hard to explain,” Sanders told me. “This team matters to us. You know what I mean?”I asked whether he and his sons had ever considered switching allegiances. Sanders cocked his head to the side, rumpling his brow.“No. No, no, no,” he said. “These people who have been loyal, people who have been there every step of the way—that’s the beauty of the game, I think. There are no guarantees. But they still believe.”Sometimes that beauty gives way to torment. On the far end of the practice field, a man with a fancy job title—special assistant to president/CEO and chairperson—stalked the sideline with a notepad in his right hand. Most front-office types wear suits and ties. But this man was dressed in all black: workout pants, hooded sweatshirt, 50-pound weighted vest, all of it made more conspicuous by the mid-80s heat. It was Chris Spielman.The anchor of Detroit’s defense in the 1990s, Spielman played brief stints in Buffalo and Cleveland before retiring because of injuries. He went into the broadcast booth and spent the next two decades providing color commentary for college and NFL games. He was happy, making a fine living, freed from the weekly stresses of a win-loss record. And then the call came. It was late 2020, and the Lions were coming off their third consecutive last-place finish. The team’s owner, Sheila Ford Hamp—great-granddaughter of Henry Ford and daughter of William Clay Ford Sr., who’d purchased the franchise outright in 1964—told Spielman the Lions needed a culture change. She was searching for a new coach and general manager, but first she needed a football consigliere, someone who could help guide those hires, who could connect the front office to the locker room to the X’s and O’s on the field. His mind was made up before she’d finished the pitch.“Loyalty to this organization was probably the only thing that could have drawn me out of the booth,” Spielman told me.There was more to it than loyalty, though. As we spoke, and he drifted back to his playing days in Detroit, I sensed a lack of peace about the man. He talked about “letting down the fan base.” He said the losses—especially to Green Bay in the playoffs—“always haunt me.” At one point, he gazed off in the distance, choking back emotion as he muttered, “My career was a failure.”Professional athletes are sometimes thought to be indifferent to the plight of fans—millionaire mercenaries who collect a paycheck and move on to a new city for an even bigger one. Yet here was Spielman, a god of the gridiron—the first high-school player ever to appear on a Wheaties box; a two-time All American in college; a four-time Pro Bowler in the NFL—still distraught, 30 years later, about what could have been. And it wasn’t simply because he never won. It was because he never won here.“I have so much respect for the folks who’ve hung in there. I felt I owed them something,” Spielman said of his decision to return to Detroit. He called it “unfinished business.”Today the budding star of the Lions defense is Aidan Hutchinson, a second-year pass rusher who led all rookies in sacks last season and looks poised to become one of the league’s premier defensive players. He’s a local kid, born and raised in Plymouth, drafted out of the University of Michigan. He calls it “divine timing” that the Lions lost 13 games the season before he turned pro, allowing them to snag him with the No. 2 overall selection in last year’s draft.There is just one hitch in Hutchinson’s homecoming story: He didn’t root for the Lions as a kid.“I mean, it was hard to be a Lions fan growing up,” the 23-year-old told me after practice one day, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. “The boys were always struggling.”Hutchinson knows that the Lions are something of a religion in southeast Michigan. His friends loved them. He grew up 20 minutes from team headquarters. And yet, he chose to cheer for the New England Patriots—the winningest franchise in the modern history of the NFL.“My dad was never a big Lions fan. That’s where I didn’t get it,” Hutchinson said. “He grew up in Texas; he was always a Houston Oilers fan.” When that franchise moved to Nashville in the late 1990s, the elder Hutchinson—who starred at the University of Michigan himself, then stayed in the Detroit suburbs to raise his family—became a pigskin itinerant. He followed everyone, and although he rarely missed a Lions game, he couldn’t bring himself to invest in the home team. By the time Aidan was old enough to watch alongside him, a fellow Michigan alumnus named Tom Brady was establishing a dynasty in New England. And so the Hutchinsons became Patriots fans, reveling in Super Bowls from afar as their neighbors here hankered for a mere playoff win.[Mark Leibovich: The quiet desperation of Tom Brady]I asked Aidan, now that he’s a Lion, if he felt badly about not supporting his home team sooner.“Not necessarily,” Hutchinson replied, fighting a smirk. “I’m happy I’m on the team now.”The implication was obvious enough. Nothing was lost by ignoring the Lions all those years—the blooper-reel lowlights and the humiliating headlines—because in sports, winning is what makes fanhood worthwhile.Lots of people believe that. I used to question my own sanity, wondering why I subjected myself to such assured misery Sunday after Sunday, season after season, decade after decade. More than once I fantasized about rounding up my memorabilia—the jerseys and autographs, the helmets and framed photos, the old programs and saved ticket stubs—then dousing it in gasoline and setting it ablaze, escaping this abusive relationship once and for all.Why didn’t I?For the longest time, I told myself it was because I’m cursed. I told myself that the moment I walked away from the Lions, they would start winning and winning big, driving me to an entirely different level of madness.But that’s not the real explanation. Embedded in the psyche of a sports fan is a belief that these teams say something about us; that even though we can’t influence the outcomes—any more than we can control the weather or an economic downturn or a heart attack stealing a family member—we find in them a personal significance that echoes beyond the box score. There is a reason the Lions—not the Red Wings, or the Pistons, or the Tigers, all of whom have been winners in my lifetime—are the favorite sons of Detroit. In a city that can’t seem to catch a break, people find common cause in rallying around the team that best reflects their own story.For Lions fans—and, I started to realize, for Lions players—all of the losing has formed bonds that winning never could.“One hundred percent,” Taylor Decker, the left tackle whom the Lions had drafted when Lewis was approximately 15 minutes old, told me at training camp. “It makes you realize who you can rely on, who has your back, who you can trust.”Now entering his eighth season—he is the longest-tenured player on the club—Decker told me, “I’ve become a man in the city of Detroit.” Part of that maturation owes to experiencing defeat: Coming from Ohio State, where he won a national championship before turning pro, Decker had never tasted the setbacks that would mark his first six years in Detroit. Strange as it might sound, he seems grateful for those setbacks now.“In today’s society, I feel like quitting and taking the easy way out has been normalized,” Decker said, citing players who demand trades or refuse to re-sign with a struggling team. “I do think there’s something to be said for seeing it through and going through those hard times.”[Scott Stossel: Winning ruined Boston sports fandom]Hanging around the Lions facility this summer, talking with players, officials, and journalists who cover the organization, I thought about the irony of my tortured relationship with the Lions. Would I have talked with my dad every Sunday night if our team was steady, unspectacular, business-as-usual competitive? Would my brother Brian and I dissect every draft pick if our team was coming off back-to-back division titles? Would my friends and I bother with The Mane Event if our team had already won a Super Bowl?Aidan Hutchinson felt sorry for us long-suffering Lions fans. But I started to feel sorry for him. Losing is hard and often harrowing. But it’s also inevitable. And what we take from these losses is precisely what’s necessary to win: resolve, perseverance, and, yes, grit. That’s what my dad taught me before I lost him. And that’s what I hope to teach my sons, who, one day, are going to lose me.With the season opener in Kansas City drawing near, and my self-imposed ban on proselytizing the boys still in place, there was an uncomfortable truth to confront. Maybe I wasn’t afraid of them inheriting a loser. Maybe I was afraid of them inheriting a winner.When I shared my epiphany with Brad Holmes, he was stone-faced at first. And then, slowly, he started to nod.“I was doing a lot of research recently on heat exposure and cold exposure—like, deliberate heat exposure with your body. And a lot of research says that when your molecules suffer, it actually makes your molecules even stronger,” Holmes, the Lions’ general manager, told me one recent afternoon as the team practiced in a misting rain. “It’s kind of like when you’re growing wine. When the grapes are exposed to intense temperatures, it actually produces a better-quality wine. You know what I mean?”Yes, I knew what he meant—not about the grapes or the molecules, necessarily, but about the metaphorical point he was making. Holmes had seen his share of adversity. Raised in a football family—his father played for the Steelers, his cousin played for the Rams, and his uncle, naturally, played for the Lions—Holmes became a defensive lineman at North Carolina A&T and briefly harbored NFL aspirations of his own. And then a violent car wreck after his sophomore season nearly killed him. Holmes spent a week in a coma, suffering a ruptured diaphragm and a stroke from the violence of the collision. Even though he battled back, eventually rejoining the football team and playing out his college career, the dream was over.Holmes still wanted a piece of the NFL. He sent copies of his résumé to every organization, begging for an internship in someone’s scouting department. “And every team told me, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” he recalled. Holmes took a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car to pay the bills, but kept on pushing. “That’s just kind of how I’m wired,” he told me. “I embrace the darkness.”After forcing his foot into the door with the Rams—Holmes started as an intern in the public-relations department—he eventually rose to become the director of college scouting, helping to assemble arguably the most talented roster in the league. That roster won a Super Bowl in 2022—but Holmes wasn’t there for it. He had, one year earlier, taken the top job in Detroit. The first move he made was trading the Lions’ all-time leading passer, Matthew Stafford, to the Rams. The torment was poetic: Detroit’s new general manager watched his mates celebrate a championship in his first year removed from his former franchise, while Lions fans watched their former quarterback hoist the Lombardi Trophy one year after requesting a trade from Detroit.Holmes vowed to use that heartache. He told himself that he would build Detroit’s organization around people who had suffered like him—people who knew how to use that suffering as fuel. He hoped to find a partner who embraced the darkness like he did.And then he met Dan Campbell.When he was introduced as Detroit’s new head coach, at a press conference in January 2021, Campbell went viral with a breathless speech promising bodily harm to opponents. “This team’s going to be built on—we’re going to kick you in the teeth. All right? And when you punch us back, we’re going to smile at you,” Campbell said. “And when you knock us down, we’re gonna get up. And on the way up, we’re gonna bite a kneecap off. All right? And we’re gonna stand up. And then it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. All right? And on the way up, we’re gonna take your other kneecap. And then we’re gonna get up. And then it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And when we do, we’re gonna take another hunk out of you.”He concluded: “Before long, we’re gonna be the last ones standing.”Campbell was rendered a caricature. All the national media could see was a macho former player flexing for the cameras; all they could hear was the Texas twang and the grisly imagery. But Lions fans saw and heard something else. We weren’t enamored of the kneecap spiel. What made us fall in love with Campbell—what turned him into the face of Detroit sports—was what he said immediately preceding that viral moment.“This place has been kicked, it’s been battered, it’s been bruised. And I can sit up here and give you coach-speak all day long. I can give you, ‘Hey, we’re going to win this many games.’ None of that matters, and you guys don’t want to hear it anyway. You’ve had enough of that shit,” Campbell said. “Here’s what I do know: This team is going to take on the identity of this city. This city’s been down, and it’s found a way to get up.”How does a guy who grew up in the one-stoplight-town of Morgan, Texas (population 457)—“actually, outside Morgan,” Campbell told me—become an avatar for the defiant spirit of Detroit?Campbell played here. More to the point, he played here in 2008, when the Lions achieved infamy with their 0–16 season. He came aboard as a free agent with the charge of providing veteran leadership, helping a languid locker room to mature and compete. Instead, in his three years in Detroit the team lost 38 games and won just 10. The 2008 season was especially scarring. Campbell, who nursed injuries throughout training camp, fought his way onto the field in the season opener against Atlanta. In the second quarter, he caught a pass for 21 yards down the seam, getting crunched by three Falcons defenders on his way to the turf. Then he limped off the field.“That was my last play ever,” Campbell murmured.
Dan Campbell playing against the New York Jets in 2006 (Brian Killian / NFL Photo Library / Getty).
We were sitting on the sidelines of the Lions’ indoor practice field. He closed his eyes, looking wistful. The cumulative toll of injuries sustained playing the game he loved—foot, elbow, knee, hamstring—finally caught up with him. He watched from the sidelines as his team lost every game that season. What happened next was just as excruciating: Campbell signed a one-year deal with the New Orleans Saints, determined to give his body a final go. He tore his MCL in camp and was placed on injured reserve, forfeiting eligibility to play. This time, instead of watching his teammates go winless, Campbell saw the Saints march all the way to a Super Bowl victory. But he didn’t get a ring. He hadn’t played a single down. History would not remember him as a champion. Campbell retired a short time later.Detroit isn’t a prized destination for football coaches. But for Campbell, who went to work for the Miami Dolphins as an offensive intern the year after he retired, the Lions were his dream job. This wasn’t just a place where he played. This was a place where he hurt, where he grieved, where he lost something he would never get back—and where the fans understood what that meant.“Man, to endure year after year, your hopes are back up and then it’s that. Your hopes are back up—‘This is gonna be the year’—and then it’s 0–16. But they just keep coming back for more,” Campbell said, shaking his head in amazement.“The thought of being a part of bringing this place out of the ashes—”He paused. “Man, it meant something to me.”Campbell grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan. He watched every game with his dad, a diehard since the 1960s, and idolized the glamorous roster of the 1990s that won multiple Super Bowls. Now that he’s in Detroit, there’s a disconnect that’s hard to ignore. Those Cowboys had been dubbed “America’s Team,” yet most of America couldn’t relate to them. They were a group of hotshot players, led by a cocky coach and bankrolled by an ostentatious owner, who won in ways that were neither surprising nor inspiring. There was no grit about the Cowboys.[Jemele Hill: The Jerry Jones photo explains a lot]“That’s been ‘America’s Team,’” Campbell told me, emphasizing the nickname with air quotes. I could tell we were thinking the same thing: Imagine how endearing these Detroit Lions would be to the masses, football junkies and casual viewers alike, if they parlayed their losing past into a winning future.Campbell motioned toward the field behind us. “Why can’t we be America’s team?”When the NFL scheduled the Lions-Chiefs season kickoff for September 7, my immediate reaction was to text the Mane Event crew. We began looking at tickets, hotels, flights. Arrowhead Stadium, in prime time, against the champs—this was as close to a Super Bowl as anything we’d ever experienced. We had to go.It hit me several hours later: September 7 was our wedding anniversary. Our tenth wedding anniversary. As much as my identity is wrapped up in Lions football, it’s even more wrapped up in family. There was no way I could ditch my wife. So I did what any good husband would: I asked her to come to Kansas City, too.She actually agreed, but between our jobs and kids and logistics, we couldn’t find a way to make it work. She felt terrible about it. But I told her not to worry: The Lions would be playing a lot of big games in 2023. We would have plenty of chances. After all, we have four season tickets.I thought about those four tickets throughout the summer. Purchasing them a few years ago after moving back to Michigan had been a means of establishing continuity between generations, passing down a family tradition, ensuring that my three boys would make Lions memories—good and bad—with their father the same way I had with mine.That no longer seemed likely. I had stopped pushing the Lions on them last summer, following that awful preseason loss to Atlanta, and I hadn’t heard a word from them about football since. That was just fine. My sons and I would discover a different identity together, a different way of bonding. Sure, if I’m being honest, it was a disappointment. But I’ve learned to deal with those.A few days before I finished writing this story—two weeks out from the season opener—my 7-year-old, Lewis, approached me, apropos of nothing.“Dad,” he asked, “can we go to a Lions game this year?”I was reminded of another virtue of losing: It makes victory that much sweeter.

In December 1998, Rep. Bob Livingston, Republican of Louisiana, was set to succeed Rep. Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. Gingrich had announced his resignation from Congress and the speakership in the wake of a disastrous midterm election for Republicans as well as revelations that he’d been having an affair with a House staffer who was more than two decades younger.

This was a problem for the Republicans given the impeachment of then-President Bill Clinton over matters stemming from his own infidelity. But before Livingston could get the gavel, it was revealed that he, too, had cheated on his wife. Livingston responded by announcing he would resign immediately. Among those most opposed to Livingston’s decision: President Clinton. The White House implored him to reconsider. The last thing Democrats wanted was for an adulterous politician to resign in contrition rather than put his party, his country, and his family through more needless drama.

That moment came to mind last week when Joe Biden gave his full support to Mitch McConnell, in the wake of a second disturbing episode in which the 81-year-old Senate minority leader briefly went catatonic when taking questions from reporters. “I’m confident he’s going to be back to his old self,” Biden told reporters. He dismissed McConnell’s struggles since a concussion-inducing fall earlier this year, as simply “part of his recovery.”

The last thing Biden—who will be 81 in November—needs is for Republicans to show some consistency on the issue of age and public service, particularly when the vast majority of Americans, including two-thirds of Democrats, believe Biden is too old to run again.

According to a new survey, only one-third of college students say it's never acceptable to shout down a controversial campus speaker. And one-quarter think using violence can be acceptable in at least some circumstances to stop someone from speaking on campus. This week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit released its fourth annual College Free Speech Rankings. The survey polled more than 55,000 students from nearly 250 colleges and universities. The survey asked students about a wide range of speech-related issues, ranging from how students perceive their administration's support for free expression to whether speakers on controversial subjects, like abortion and transgender rights, should be allowed to speak on campus. The survey found that more than half of students were worried about "damaging [their] reputation because someone misunderstands something [they] have said or done"; 16 percent were "very worried," 39 percent were "worried a little." Fifty-eight percent reported self-censoring "during conversations with other students on campus," with 33 percent self-censoring "once or twice a month," 18 percent self-censoring "a couple times a week," and 7 percent self-censoring "nearly every day."  When asking questions about controversial speakers, students seemed more willing to censor conservative speakers. For example, 71 percent of students agreed that a college "definitely" or "probably" should not allow a speaker on campus who previously expressed the idea that "Black Lives Matter is a hate group," while 28 percent answered the same about a speaker who had expressed the idea that "structural racism maintains inequality by protecting White privilege." FIRE also ranked schools based on their campus free speech environment. Overall, Michigan Technological University took the top spot, followed by Auburn University and the University of New Hampshire. Harvard University ranked at the bottom of the pack, obtaining the lowest ranking in the survey's history—and gaining the first ever "abysmal" speech climate ranking from the group.  In addition to providing insights about the environment on many college campuses, the survey also illustrates how difficult it is to change student's attitudes toward free speech. Some of the highest-ranked campuses had middling or even well below-average scores on measures of student culture around speech issues. The highest-ranked schools consistently had "green" speech code ratings—a measure FIRE uses to indicate that a school's official policies do not trample student and faculty First Amendment rights—and administrations that consistently defended controversial speech.  However, many of these same schools seem to have student bodies that aren't quite so tolerant. For example, among the top 10 schools, seven ranked below average for "Openness"—a measure ranking students' self-reported ability to discuss controversial topics on campus—and none cracked the top 50. Half the top 10 schools were below average on "Comfort Expressing Ideas"—a category roughly approximating student-self censorship. This fact shows how hard it can be for administrators to influence student behavior. While protecting student expression is essential for its own sake, such policies serve mainly to disincentivize students from engaging in some anti-speech activist activity—like speaker shutdowns or disininvitation campaigns—but it doesn't appear to make students more tolerant.  Colleges should protect student expression. Whether those same students end up appreciating this protection is another matter entirely.The post Two-Thirds of College Students Think Shouting Down A Public Speaker Can Be Acceptable appeared first on Reason.com.

After major rulings on abortion and affirmative action, the Supreme Court doesn't have anything quite so explosive on its docket for next term, which begins in a few weeks. As we turn from the phony war over judicial ethics to legal substance, social media regulation is about to take center stage.

The Justices will hear argument this fall in two cases that ask whether public officials violate the First Amendment when they block people on social media using accounts that issue communications on job-related matters. (The Second Circuit had previously ruled against President Donald Trump's blocking people on Twitter, but the Supreme Court vacated the decision and mooted the case when Trump left office.) And the Court will almost certainly grant petitions arising from a split in the lower courts over Florida and Texas laws that treat tech companies as common carriers, preventing them from engaging in viewpoint discrimination. But this summer, a new social media issue emerged that may well swamp these in public importance: jawboning.

Jawboning occurs when the government applies pressure to private companies to take certain actions. In the context of social media, elected and appointed officials increasingly demand that platforms refrain from publishing disfavored speech, or take steps to limit its spread. Sometimes they threaten tech companies with punitive legislation, antitrust investigations, and prosecution. But the pressure can also be more informal.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Newsweek

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here. David Sacks is a law school associate at the Manhattan Institute.

Photo by Douglas Rissing/iStock

Anyone who criticized the Chinese government for its secrecy surrounding the disappearance of former foreign minister Qin Gang (including me) is guilty of hypocrisy unless they acknowledge that the U.S. government is being similarly opaque about the fate of one of America’s top diplomats. Congress and the American people deserve to know more about what’s going on with the State Department’s Iran envoy Robert Malley.

First, a bit of background. Until four months ago, Malley was leading the U.S. diplomatic effort on Iran’s nuclear program and the fate of U.S. hostages held by Tehran. But it was only two months ago that Congress and the public learned — from the media — that the State Department had suspended his security clearance because of an investigation into a possible mishandling of classified information. It’s since emerged that the FBI is also investigating this matter. (In some cases, mishandling classified information may constitute a federal crime.)

Since that original revelation, a steady trickle of leaks — many via Iranian media — has shown that the State Department has given both Congress and the public incomplete and often misleading information about the case.

The State Department’s lack of transparency has caused a rift with Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, the Iranian state media continues to drop exclusive stories about the affair, sometimes with sensitive U.S. documents attached.

To be clear, there is no public evidence that Malley has done anything wrong. He has not been formally accused of anything and is presumed innocent. But what has lawmakers riled is not only the alleged offense, but also the mounting evidence of a coverup. The timeline of events shows a pattern of obfuscation.

For example, we now know, through leaked U.S. government documents published by the state-controlled Tehran Times, that Malley was informed on April 21 that he was under investigation for mishandling protected information and that his security clearance was suspended. Yet the State Department told Congress and the public nothing about this for weeks, and Malley continued to conduct some of his duties that did not require a security clearance.

On May 16, congressional staffers noticed that Malley had failed to show up for a Senate briefing on Iran. State Department officials told them Malley was on extended “personal leave” and implied he was dealing with a family medical issue.

It wasn’t until June 29 that U.S. media came out with their first reports on the Malley investigation. That very day, the State Department was telling the press that he was still on the job as U.S. envoy to Iran. In reality, he had been placed on unpaid leave that day.

Then, on July 7, Semafor reported that the FBI was also investigating Malley’s possible mishandling of classified information. The State Department has yet to publicly acknowledge the FBI’s involvement. Malley declined to comment.

Feeling misled, lawmakers began demanding answers. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) demanded a classified briefing. He emerged from the briefing to decry the lack of information provided.

“The Department’s failure to inform Congress of this matter demonstrates at best a lack of candor, and at worst represents deliberate and potentially unlawful misinformation,” he wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In Washington, Malley is a polarizing figure with strong supporters and detractors. At the time of his security clearance suspension, Malley was deeply involved in a complicated set of multilateral negotiations. His extensive network of relationships, including with Iranian officials and various go-betweens, was surely an asset in those diplomatic endeavors. But the question is whether he crossed the line by sharing some sensitive information he shouldn’t have with the wrong person.

Most of the public information about the case has come from the Tehran Times, which first reported (on July 10) that Malley’s security clearance had been suspended much earlier than the State Department acknowledged.

The Tehran Times claims to also possess a classified internal State Department memo detailing options for U.S. intelligence agencies to help the Iranian protesters late last year. Malley surely would have been involved in such a memo; could that be connected to his security clearance issue? The State Department won’t say — and now McCaul is calling for a leak investigation as well.

Administration officials have given congressional staffers explanations for each of these perceived slights. In April and May, Malley technically was on “personal leave,” and the State Department officials who conveyed that to Congress weren’t aware of the investigation and therefore didn’t know they were omitting key information about why, officials said.

Officials claim it was a coincidence that Malley was transferred to unpaid leave the same exact day the news broke of his investigation. They say any misstatements to reporters were the result of internal confusion rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead. Yet even this most benign reading of events (which stretches credulity) amounts to a defense of incompetence.

There’s a privacy issue at play as well. One State Department official told me that “consistent with long-standing practice across administrations of both parties, we cannot and do not brief committees on the facts of ongoing investigations.”

Fair enough. But the State Department’s months-long coyness about who was running U.S. Iran policy has eroded trust with lawmakers, the press and the public.

Meanwhile, Malley is keeping busy during his purgatory, taking on new roles at Princeton and Yale. In that sense, he is doing much better than Qin, who has not been seen in public since he fell under investigation and went on extended “personal leave” before eventually being relieved of his official duties.

Thus the spate of national apologies, canceled patriotic celebrations and church burnings in Canada in 2021, after claims about the discovery of a mass grave in British Columbia near one of the residential schools for Indigenous children that the Canadian government sponsored, often through religious institutions, in the 19th and 20th centuries. (The cruelty and neglect at these schools were real, but the specific claims about graves at the school have outrun the so-far scanty evidence.) Or thus the attempted retcon of England’s deeply homogeneous history — well, since 1066, at least — into an American-style nation-of-immigrants narrative and the sense, as the British author Ed West wrote in 2020, that in English schools “America’s history is swallowing our own.”

To the extent that these complaints capture an Anglosphere reality, I think you can identify several different points that might explain what Canadian and British conservatives are seeing.

The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. Both Ottawa and London can feel like provincial capitals within the American imperium, so it’s not surprising that their leaders and tastemakers would sometimes rush to embrace ideas that seem to be in the American vanguard — behaving, as the British writer Aris Roussinos puts it, like “Gaulish or Dacian chieftains donning togas and trading clumsy Latin epithets” to establish their identification with Rome. By contrast, in continental Europe, in countries that are under the American security umbrella but don’t share as much of our language and culture, the zeal for imitation feels a bit weaker, and anti-woke politics that double as anti-Americanism feel more influential.

The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. The new progressivism is not simply a new or semi-Christian substitute for the former Western faith, but the rhetoric of diversity-equity-inclusion and antiracism clearly fills part of the void left by Christianity’s and especially Protestantism’s retreat. So it would not be surprising for an ideology that originates in the post-Protestant precincts of the United States to carry all before it in post-Protestant Canada or Britain while meeting more resistance in the more religious regions of America — and not just in the white Christian Bible Belt but also among the religious-conservative minorities whose rightward trend may be keeping the Republican coalition afloat.

The third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse. Once a set of ideas takes hold among the cognoscenti — progressive ideas in this case, though it could apply to other worldviews as well — it’s more natural to conform, and more difficult to dissent, in the cozier precincts of Westminster or among Canada’s Laurentian elite than it is in the American meritocracy, which spins off more competing power centers and dissenting factions.

Does Congress have the power to tax citizens on their ownership of corporate shares that appreciate without being sold? The Ninth Circuit said that the answer is yes, announcing that realization of income “is not a constitutional requirement” for Congress’s exercise of its power to tax “incomes” without apportionment among the states (which is the constitutional requirement for direct taxes on property).

The case arose when Charles and Kathleen Moore, who 20 years ago invested $40,000 in a friend’s start-up to supply agricultural equipment to rural farmers in India, were assessed a one-time “deemed repatriation tax” under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. If that assessment is sustained, it would potentially open the door to an Elizabeth Warren-style federal wealth tax and otherwise represent a serious expansion of Congress’s taxing power. It would also stand at odds with the original meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment—which enabled the federal income tax—and a long line of U.S. Supreme Court precedents holding that realization is necessary for a taxpayer to have taxable “income.”

After the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Moores, they successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to take the case (which petition MI supported with an amicus brief). MI has now filed an amicus brief on the merits, joined by originalist professors Erik Jensen and James W. Ely. We argue that the Framers intended the Apportionment Clause to be a hard limit on the central government’s taxing powers; the drafters of the Sixteenth Amendment intended a narrow definition of “incomes” as traditionally understood; and thus, the Mandatory Repatriation Tax is unconstitutional. In this case, to be argued late this fall, the Court should preserve the free enterprise that a constitutionally limited federal government facilitates.

How do researchers estimate the death toll caused by each risk factor, whether it’s smoking, obesity, or air pollution? Risk factors are important to understand because they can help us identify how to save lives. How do researchers estimate their impact? Cite this article Reuse our work freely

When someone dies, they are usually given a single underlying cause – a particular disease or injury – on their death certificate. But beneath each disease or injury, there can be a range of factors that make the disease or injury more likely to occur.

These are called risk factors. We’re all familiar with many: smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer1, lack of exercise is a risk factor for heart disease, and air pollution is a risk factor for respiratory diseases.

Understanding these factors is important because they can help us identify how to reduce disease and death.

In this article, I explain what a risk factor is, how researchers estimate how many deaths are caused by risk factors, and how to interpret these estimates.

What is a risk factor?

By its simplest definition, a risk factor is a characteristic that predicts a negative health outcome to a meaningful degree.2

Let's use the example of lung cancer. A risk factor of lung cancer is a characteristic that is correlated with someone having a meaningfully higher risk of developing lung cancer later on.

But the term is much more valuable when it is used to describe a causal risk factor – something that predicts an outcome because it has an effect on the outcome and affects the chance that it will occur.

In this case, a risk factor of lung cancer would increase the chances that someone develops the disease.

The difference between these two usages of the term is essential.

For example, people who drink coffee frequently are more likely to develop lung cancer than those who do not. But this is not because drinking coffee causes lung cancer; it is because people who drink coffee frequently are also more likely to be smokers, and smoking increases the risk of lung cancer.3

So, by the first definition of a risk factor – a characteristic that simply predicts an outcome – both drinking coffee frequently and smoking may be described as risk factors for lung cancer.

But, by the second definition – a causal risk factor, which increases the chances of the outcome – smoking would be considered a risk factor for lung cancer, but drinking coffee would not.

Identifying causal risk factors has more benefits to public health because, with the knowledge that a risk factor is causal, we can better understand how to reduce its consequences.

Knowing that smoking causes lung cancer guided public health campaigns to focus on smoking cessation, regulation, and substitutes, reducing the rate of lung cancer globally.

How do researchers know if a risk factor is causal?

To understand whether a risk factor causes an outcome, researchers can look at different sources of evidence.

For example, it was clear as early as the 1960s that the large increase in lung cancer rates worldwide was caused by the increase in smoking.4

Animal experiments, biopsies, and population studies all showed that cigarette smoke was associated with specific changes in lung tissue and lung cancer incidence. The association was so large and consistent that other risk factors could not explain it, and scientists were confident that it was a causal risk factor for lung cancer.5

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often a key source of evidence to identify causal risk factors. These are experiments where people are given, at random, either an intervention (such as a drug) or a control (such as a placebo pill) and followed up to see how they fare on various outcomes.

Through RCTs, researchers can learn about the effects of risk factors by reducing the risk factor and monitoring whether it reduces the incidence of the disease.

For example, we know influenza increases the risk of cardiovascular disease because flu vaccines reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. This has been demonstrated in RCTs where people were given flu vaccines or not, and followed up for several years.6

In this article on Our World in Data, I have written more about Randomized Controlled Trials:

Why randomized controlled trials matter and the procedures that strengthen them

How do researchers estimate how many people die from a causal risk factor?

Below are two approaches to estimating how many people die from a risk factor. Each of these approaches has different strengths and limitations.

Estimating deaths that could have been prevented

One popular measure is the ‘population-attributable fraction’, which is an estimate of the fraction of deaths caused by a risk factor.7

It is an estimate of the number of deaths that would be prevented if the risk factor was eliminated (for factors such as smoking) or reduced to an optimal level (for example, when looking at obesity, researchers may estimate the deaths prevented if the body-mass index (BMI) in the population was reduced to an ‘optimum’ level).

To do this, researchers use estimates of the prevalence of the risk factor and how much it increases the risk of dying.

Let’s take smoking as an example. Researchers know from many studies that smoking increases the risk of death from cancers, heart disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, and other causes of death. But how many deaths does it cause?

In the chart, you can see an example using data from the United States.8

The chart shows how smoking increases the risk of death from various causes. It shows, for example, that male smokers have 21 times the risk of dying from lung cancer than those who have never smoked.

Using these estimates and the fraction of people who are smokers, researchers can estimate the number of deaths caused by smoking.

This approach can be useful for estimating deaths caused by an ongoing risk factor, especially when there are robust estimates of how much the risk factor increases the risk of death.

However, there are several important things to keep in mind.

First, the method depends on having a good estimate of how much the risk factor increases the risk of death.

To do this, it’s important to have good data on the causes of death from death certificates, epidemiological research to estimate the impact of risk factors on death, and data on the prevalence of these risk factors in the general population.

In the example of smoking, data on smoking prevalence comes from national surveys – but people tend to underreport their smoking behaviors. This means that many smokers would be labeled as non-smokers, leading to underestimating the number of deaths caused by smoking.

A related problem is that the risk ratio can vary between people. For example, the category ‘current smoker’ is very broad, as people have smoked for different lengths of time.

A third problem is that other confounding factors can be present. For example, smokers may also have other risk factors or behaviors that increase their risk of death. In the example above, the researchers had adjusted for other known confounding factors, but this is not always simple.

In the chart below, you can see the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME) estimates of the global number of deaths caused by each risk factor.9

It shows that in 2019, almost 11 million people died as a result of high blood pressure, and almost 8 million died as a result of smoking. Many other risk factors were also estimated to have caused many deaths.

It’s important to note that the risk factors are not exclusive – people could be exposed to multiple risk factors simultaneously – and the number of deaths from individual risk factors does not sum to the total number of deaths.

In this related article, I explain why:

Why isn’t it possible to sum up the deaths from different risk factors?

Estimating the death toll of risk factors with excess deaths

Another approach to estimating the number of people who die from a causal risk factor relies on statistics of excess deaths.

This method estimates the additional number of deaths that occur when a risk factor is present – compared to a baseline.

This can be useful when the risk factor is a new or external event that affects the population, such as a heatwave, natural disaster, or new infectious disease.

For example, researchers can estimate the number of excess deaths caused by a heatwave by comparing the number of deaths during the heatwave to a baseline figure.

To do this, the researchers must identify when the risk factor affected the population.

For example, this chart comes from a study that estimated the number of deaths across European countries during the 2022 summer heat wave.10

The researchers looked at the number of weekly deaths in 2022 and how it compared to the baseline between 2015 and 2022. They used high-resolution temperature data from each region.

Through this method, they estimated an excess of around 63,000 heatwave deaths across Europe in 2022.

Ballester, Joan et al (2023). Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022. Nature Medicine, 29(7), 1857–1866.10

With an excess death approach, researchers can try to understand the overall impact of the risk factor – even if the risk factor causes death in different ways or if the cause of death is inaccurate or missing from death certificates.

But it’s important to remember that deaths estimated through this method are not necessarily specific to the risk factor.

Instead, it estimates the net change compared to the baseline expected number of deaths. However, there may be other risk factors affecting the number of deaths simultaneously, for example, another disease outbreak, disaster, air pollution, or changes in other behavior or trends.11

Researchers use different methods to estimate the deaths caused by each risk factor, but these have important strengths and limitations.

They depend on good underlying death records, epidemiological studies on the causal effects of risk factors, and the prevalence of these risk factors in the population.

Although it may sound simple to attribute a person’s death to a risk factor, this is usually not straightforward. People’s chances of dying are affected by various risk factors over their lifetimes. This also means the same deaths can be prevented in multiple ways.

By estimating the effects of different risk factors and how many deaths they cause, we can identify better ways to save lives.

Acknowledgements Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser provided valuable feedback on this article.

Cite this work Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as: Saloni Dattani (2023) - "How do researchers estimate the death toll caused by each risk factor, whether it’s smoking, obesity, or air pollution?". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution' [Online Resource] BibTeX citation @article{owid-how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution, author = {Saloni Dattani}, title = {How do researchers estimate the death toll caused by each risk factor, whether it’s smoking, obesity, or air pollution?}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution} }

How are causes of death registered around the world? In many countries, when people die, the cause of their death is officially registered in their country’s national system. How is this determined? Cite this article Reuse our work freely

To guide decisions in public health – whether that’s by governments, organizations, or individuals – it’s vital to know what people are dying from.

This helps us understand which conditions are going untreated, or how much investment is needed to address diseases; to see how much progress we’re making, and whether new challenges are emerging.

The ideal way to find out is by aggregating knowledge of the causes of death from medical professionals who know about each patient, their medical conditions and risk factors, and the circumstances in which they died.

But officially registering a death, and attributing a cause to it, can be difficult and complex. The process is affected by legal and cultural norms, access to healthcare, and advances in medical knowledge. Because of this, in many countries a large share of deaths are not registered at all.

How do medical practitioners identify the cause of death? How is the cause of death officially certified and registered? Why are these procedures lacking in many parts of the world? In this article, I summarise the answers to these questions.

In the additional information section, I also explain how researchers attribute the cause of death in countries where death registration is limited.

How is the cause of a death officially registered?

In many countries, when someone dies the cause of their death is determined by the medical practitioner who cared for them (such as a physician or nurse), or a coroner.

They look at evidence from the circumstances of the death, and use their medical knowledge and guidelines to certify the cause of death on a certificate.

The World Health Organization (WHO) provides international guidelines called the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) to guide practitioners on how the cause of death should be described. Death certificates in most countries are structured to follow these guidelines.

You can see two examples in this illustration.

Brooks, E. G., & Reed, K. D. (2015). Principles and Pitfalls: A Guide to Death Certification. Clinical Medicine & Research, 13(2), 74–82.1

In each example, the cause of death shown in death certificates is split into two parts.

In Part I, the medical practitioner or coroner has to list the chain of events that led to the death. They can use up to four lines, but don’t need to fill them all.

This includes the ‘immediate cause of death’ on the first line. Then, the next line contains the disease, injury, or condition that led to the immediate cause of death; and so on, until the lowest line contains the ‘underlying cause of death’.2

In Part II, the medical practitioner or coroner also lists other diseases, injuries, or conditions that contributed significantly to the death.

This should be done to the best of their knowledge, and as specifically as possible, but they can use words like ‘probable’ or ‘presumed’ when there is still uncertainty about the direct or underlying causes.

These considerations are important because the information they provide is then used to determine the ICD code of the cause of death using the ICD guidelines. These codes can help researchers analyze the data easily later on.3 Researchers can, for example, estimate the total number of people that died from tuberculosis using the specific ICD code A15.

This coding step may be done automatically, using a software program, or manually by a person.4 It is then stored in the country's vital registration system. Every year, each country reports its statistics on the causes of death to the WHO, by age and sex.5

What happens when a death is caused by multiple factors?

When researchers try to estimate the number of deaths caused by each factor, they tend to define each death as being caused by a single underlying cause of death. That’s what’s listed on death certificates.

But there are often other factors that contribute too, such as diseases, injuries and behavioral or environmental risk factors.

This is why death certificates include ‘other significant conditions’ that contributed to the death. Health practitioners or coroners can list these additional causes on death certificates if they have the relevant evidence surrounding the person's death, guidance, and medical knowledge.

Some behaviors – such as substance abuse (including alcoholism and chronic smoking) – are usually thought of as risk factors, but they also have ICD death codes. Doctors can list them on the death certificate as the underlying cause of death if they think this is the case.3

But doctors may not be certain about other risk factors that contributed to their death.

For example, air pollution increases people's risk of death by increasing their chances of developing lung diseases. However, the impact of air pollution on death is indirect and difficult to pinpoint for each individual. It does not have an ICD death code.

Another example is that age increases the risk of many diseases and conditions. However, ‘old age’ should not be listed on a death certificate as the underlying cause of death, because it is unspecific.

What share of deaths are registered?

The entire process of registering a death, and attributing a cause to it is not followed everywhere. One reason for this is that the entire vital registration system in the country may be absent or functioning poorly. This is especially true in low-income countries.

This means that, in many countries, most deaths are not registered at all. The chart shows that in some places, particularly across Africa, only a small share of deaths are registered.

What share of deaths are attributed a cause?

Even in countries with a functioning vital registration system, someone's death may be registered without a cause.

This happens for several reasons.

There may not have been a health practitioner who cared for them, or a coroner to investigate and certify their death.

The person who died may not have come into contact with a medical professional or the healthcare system at all – for example, they may have died at home, which is more common in poorer countries.6

And even if a cause of death is determined, it may not have been coded into an ICD death code in the vital registration system.

In the chart here, you can see the share of total deaths that are officially registered with a cause of death.7

In many countries, the vast majority of deaths are registered with a cause of death. But in others, especially in Africa and South Asia, it’s only a small fraction.

Many countries are shown as having no data. This includes countries which don’t have a vital registration system, or have one that is poorly functioning.

Much of the world’s population lives in countries where only a small share of deaths are registered with a cause of death.

For example, in 2016, only a fifth of the world’s population – around 1.5 billion people – lived in countries where nearly all deaths were registered with a cause of death.

Which factors affect the choice of cause of death?

Even when deaths are registered with a cause of death, several factors can influence which cause of death is registered.

Some of these are related to the procedure of filling out a death certificate or coding the death. For example, physicians may not have had enough training, or the same training, in how to fill out the death certificate.1 The procedure of coding the information from a death certificate into an ICD code may also vary between hospitals, regions, or governments.

There are also legal or cultural factors. For example, relatives, caregivers, or others may hide evidence that may be relevant, particularly for causes of death that are stigmatized, such as suicide. In some countries, suicide is illegal and not even allowed as an option on the death certificate.8

Finally, there may be a lack of relevant evidence or hospital records for the deceased person. For example, they may not have been tested for the condition that led to their death, such as a particular infectious disease or cancer.

These factors can vary between countries and over time when there are changes in norms, medical knowledge, testing equipment, healthcare professionals, or coding practices.9

What are ill-defined causes of death, or ‘garbage codes’?

‘Garbage codes’ refer to a specific group of ICD codes. These contain causes of death that are ill-defined or often incorrectly coded.10

The cause of death may be given an ill-defined ICD code when there is a lack of evidence, testing, or hospital records on the person's death.

Some examples of ill-defined ICD codes include ‘sudden death’, ‘chest pain’, ‘heart failure’, ‘events of undetermined intent’, ‘cancer of unknown primary site’, and 'unspecified sepsis’.

These are considered garbage codes because they are not specific, and refer to the immediate cause of death or the symptoms preceding it, rather than the underlying cause.

They also provide little information, because it is common for people to die from a cause within those broad categories.11

On the chart, you can see the share of deaths registered with an ill-defined cause of death across countries.

Because of this problem, the IHME’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) and the WHO's Global Health Estimates (GHE) both re-assign deaths with garbage codes to other ICD codes that are more specific or more likely, based on other data that is available.12

For example, deaths due to ‘cancer of unknown primary site’ may be re-assigned to specific cancer deaths according to how common those types of cancer deaths tend to be in previous research, and by using other information available about the person.

To reduce global mortality and improve healthcare, we need to know what people die from. While a lot of countries have good death registration systems, much of the world lives in countries where these systems are poor.

Researchers can use other methods to understand the causes of deaths, like verbal autopsies, but these also have limitations. These are explained in the ‘Additional Information’ section below.

If we want to understand what people are dying from, and reduce preventable deaths, we need better-functioning vital registration systems, medical records, and training for doctors and nurses to collect data where it’s lacking.

Additional information How do researchers estimate causes of death in countries lacking this data? Verbal autopsy studies When data from medical certificates is lacking, researchers or the national government may also investigate the cause of people's deaths through verbal autopsy studies. A verbal autopsy is when a trained professional interviews the relatives or caregivers of the person who died, using a standard set of questions.13 They ask about the signs, symptoms, medical history, and circumstances that preceded their death. Based on the responses to these interviews, the probable cause of their death is determined – either through a physician’s assessment, or automatically based on software rules. Verbal autopsy studies have been used in places lacking hospital records or vital registration systems. They are also useful in places where people commonly die at home without being in contact with a healthcare system.14 In the studies done so far, they have mainly been used to determine the cause of maternal, child, and neonatal deaths.15 Although verbal autopsy studies are useful in countries without a vital registration system, they also have limitations: for example, the training of interviewers; or the knowledge of relatives or caregivers, who may not remember enough about what led to the death. This means this data tends to be less specific about causes of death than death certificates. Other methods Researchers also use other methods to understand the causes of deaths among the general population, instead of specific individuals. One method is health facility audits, which are reviews into the causes of deaths that occur in hospitals and other health facilities.16 These audits are often used to identify the causes of infant and maternal deaths, and they can help identify areas of improvement. They take place by having discussions with teams of healthcare workers, usually confidentially.17 The WHO recommends that effective audits into maternal and perinatal deaths should take place in all hospitals around the world.18 The findings of these audits may not apply to deaths at home or elsewhere. Show more

Cite this work Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as: Saloni Dattani (2023) - "How are causes of death registered around the world?". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/how-are-causes-of-death-registered-around-the-world' [Online Resource] BibTeX citation @article{owid-how-are-causes-of-death-registered-around-the-world, author = {Saloni Dattani}, title = {How are causes of death registered around the world?}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/how-are-causes-of-death-registered-around-the-world} }

Risk ratios, odds ratios, risk differences: How do researchers calculate the risk from a risk factor? The effects of risk factors can be calculated in different ways. How are they calculated and interpreted? Cite this article Reuse our work freely

Over their lifetimes, people are often exposed to various factors that make disease or death more likely to occur. These are known as health “risk factors”.

To guide decisions in public health, such as how to prevent premature deaths or how to allocate public health resources, it’s crucial to know about the impacts of different risk factors.

Risk factors that have a large effect, or are common in the population, can help us understand which interventions would make a big difference.

But how can we measure the risk that a given factor has on the outcomes we care about?

In this article, I’ll explain this with a simple example. I’ll focus on a hypothetical risk factor – a toxic pollutant – and show you how its impact can be calculated in different ways, and how this affects the interpretation of the underlying data.

Ratios

One way to calculate the effect is by using ratios of the outcome between two groups.

For example, the risk ratio is aimed at answering the question: how many times higher is the risk of the outcome among people who are exposed to the risk factor?

In our example, the outcome is death, and the data show that people exposed to high levels of this hypothetical type of toxic pollutant were twice as likely to die within the next 20 years.

The opposite is the survival ratio. It answers the question: how many times higher is the chance of avoiding the outcome, among people not exposed to the risk factor?

In our example, people only exposed to low levels of this toxic pollutant were 1.5 times as likely to survive the next 20 years.

Researchers sometimes calculate the odds ratio instead of the risk ratio. The odds ratio answers the question: how many times higher were the odds of the outcome, in people exposed to the risk factor?

As you can see, the denominator is different from the risk ratio. Rather than calculating the proportion of people who died, it compares the number of people died to those who didn’t.

In the example, people who died had 3 times the odds of having been exposed to high levels of the toxic pollutant during the past 20 years.

The odds ratio is mathematically similar to the risk ratio when the outcome is rare, because A+B will be similar to B, and C+D will be similar to D. But when the outcome is common, the odds ratio and risk ratio can be very different.1

Differences

Another way to express the increase in risk is to measure how much of a difference the risk factor makes to the outcome.

The risk difference answers the question: how much higher is the risk of the outcome among people who are exposed to the risk factor?

In the example, people exposed to high levels of the toxic pollutant had a 25% higher chance of dying within the next 20 years.

Another metric is the number needed to harm. It aims to answer the question: how many people would need to be exposed to the risk factor, to see the outcome in one of them?

It is the inverse of the risk difference.

In our example, four people would need to be exposed to high levels of the toxic pollutant for one to die within the next 20 years, on average.

By clicking ‘show more’, you can see how they compare in a full visualization.

Show more

Case study: How much does smoking increase the risk of death?

Let’s take smoking as a real-life example.

Researchers know from many studies that smoking increases the risk of death from cancers, heart disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, and other causes of death. But how much does it increase these risks?

In the chart, you can see an example using data from the United States.2

It shows how smoking increases the risk of death from various causes, using the risk ratio. It shows, for example, that male smokers have 21 times the risk of dying from lung cancer as those who have never smoked.

What to consider when calculating risks

There are several important things to remember when calculating risks from risk factors.

First, it’s important to have good data on the causes of death from death certificates, and epidemiological research to estimate the impact of risk factors on death.

In the example of smoking, data on smoking prevalence comes from national surveys – but people tend to underreport their smoking behaviors. This means that many smokers would be labeled as non-smokers, leading to underestimating the risk of death from smoking.

A related point to consider is that the risks can vary between people. For example, the category ‘current smoker’ is very broad, as people have smoked for different lengths of time and amounts.

A third point is that other confounding factors can be present. For example, smokers may also have other risk factors or behaviors that increase their risk of death. In the example above, the researchers had adjusted for other known confounding factors, but this is not always simple.

Researchers can calculate the impact of a risk factor using different metrics – but they are interpreted differently.

In this article, we calculated these metrics using a simple hypothetical example – where there were only two possible levels of exposure and two possible outcomes. Researchers can use extended statistical methods for more complex questions.3

These estimates also have important limitations. They depend on good underlying data and study designs to assess the causal effects of risk factors.

By estimating the effects of different risk factors, and how many deaths they cause, we can identify better ways to save lives.

Cite this work Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this article, please also cite the underlying data sources. This article can be cited as: Saloni Dattani (2023) - "Risk ratios, odds ratios, risk differences: How do researchers calculate the risk from a risk factor?". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/risk-ratios-odds-ratios-risk-differences-how-do-researchers-calculate-the-risk-from-a-risk-factor' [Online Resource] BibTeX citation @article{owid-risk-ratios-odds-ratios-risk-differences-how-do-researchers-calculate-the-risk-from-a-risk-factor, author = {Saloni Dattani}, title = {Risk ratios, odds ratios, risk differences: How do researchers calculate the risk from a risk factor?}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/risk-ratios-odds-ratios-risk-differences-how-do-researchers-calculate-the-risk-from-a-risk-factor} }

Two paradoxes are shaping the 2024 presidential election. Both arise from Donald Trump’s presence in our political life, and as with Trump himself, we might be stuck with them for the foreseeable future.

First, there’s the paradox haunting what we can now only charitably call the “race” for the Republican nomination. And it’s this: Any Republican candidate running against Trump faces certain disqualification for not supporting Trump.

We all saw the hands go up in Milwaukee when moderators asked Republican contenders whether they would support Trump’s nomination even if he were convicted in a court of law. Vivek Ramaswamy’s shot up like it was attached to a front-row teacher’s pet, and all but one debater followed, down to Chris Christie’s waffling jazz hand. The only holdout was Asa Hutchinson, who’s currently tied with North Dakota governor Doug Burgum in last place with 1 percent support among GOP voters, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll.

Not that we needed a show of hands to know where the candidates stood. Ever since March, when Trump was indicted by Manhattan District DA Alvin Bragg on charges of falsifying business records, the GOP field has served as Trump’s Praetorian Guard. And their loyalty was proudly reaffirmed with every Trump indictment that followed.

Whether this was inevitable is an interesting question. It might have done Ron DeSantis a world of pre-emptive good to capitalize on his massive election success last November when Trump’s hand-picked midterm candidates lost in a slew of elections. It’s almost strange to recall now, but for that brief moment, DeSantis looked like a giant and Trump sounded like a pipsqueak. Had the Florida governor pressed this dichotomy and gone on the offensive in advance of Trump’s indictments, perhaps he wouldn’t be 46 points behind Trump today. And if he’d talked up Trump as a reckless and easy mark for the establishment, perhaps other candidates would have followed his lead.

But there’s little point in asking whether the dynamic will change now. And it’s not just because it’s getting late in the game to reverse course. With Trump’s securing 59 percent of GOP voters, according to the same Wall Street Journal poll, the primary has become a de facto second-place race. If the rest of the pack are essentially running against one another for special notice in the hearts of Trump voters, they’re more likely to ramp up praise for Trump than tone it down. Plus, Ramaswamy’s frenetic enthusiasm for the man at the first debate made him an instant media heel, and he’s exploiting the attention for all its worth. His more lackluster competition would love to get a piece of the action.

The second paradox concerns the general election: The very thing that’s making Trump the runaway frontrunner among Republicans is anathema to the larger voting public. It comes down to a straightforward moral binary. For Americans with no connection to the populist right, Trump’s defiance in the face of federal indictments is perverse. It’s the fruition of everything they feared about him (and his followers) while he was president: He has no regard for the rule of law, the Constitution, or the preservation of the country itself. And his supporters will follow him into the abyss.

Unlike the paradox governing the general election, however, it’s not impossible that this situation shifts. It’s not probable, but it is thinkable. The indictments against Trump range in credibility, so much so that even liberal detractors have acknowledged the weakness of certain legal arguments used against him. If he racks up a few wins on some of the more dubious charges, he’ll have a stronger case to make for himself.

But that’s not really where Trump has room to change minds. It’s the drip drip drip of the Hunter Biden scandal—the scandal that Politico now says is “falling flat” for Republicans—that could unwind the general-election paradox just enough to give Trump the edge he needs.

Ever since Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal fell apart a month ago, the case has been bad news for the president. Biden’s initial claim of ignorance regarding his son’s business is no longer operative, and the House Oversight Committee’s persistent accumulation of testimony and documentation makes it harder and harder for Biden to dodge sticky questions about his possible involvement in wrongdoing.

If the Hunter scandal grows even worse for Biden, it could go a long way in neutralizing Trump’s negatives as the embodiment of American political lawlessness. Despite press efforts to minimize the threat that the Hunter case poses to Joe Biden, the story has already broken through in startling ways. The Washington Post acknowledges that President Biden lied about his son’s Chinese earnings. And CNN’s Jake Tapper recently stated on air that Donald Trump “was right” in his accusations about Hunter’s foreign business dealings during a 2020 debate with Biden.

If the investigation has truly hit a wall, however, then the general-election paradox may hold. We’ll see. As Socrates put it paradoxically, “I know that I know nothing.”

Jordan Peterson has defended Bill Maher after the comedian shared "controversial" views on gender reassignment while appearing on a podcast.

Maher sat down with commentator Joe Rogan on his show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and discussed talking points including former U.S. President Donald Trump's indictments, the 2024 election, and obesity.

In an online clip that has emerged from the podcast recording session and has been viewed more than 3.3 million times on X, formerly Twitter, the comedian also added his thoughts on gender reassignment.

Maher said any pain or shortening of life caused by gender reassignment outweighed the rationale to undergo the procedure, with the notion being "ridiculous."

Jordan Peterson at Perth Airport, Australia, in November 2022. Peterson has commented on a recent podcast conversation between Bill Maher and Joe Rogan on gender reassignment. Faith Moran/Getty Images

In the video, Maher said: "This is just me, but I am allowed my opinion. If I was one hundred billion percent convinced I was born in the wrong body, I still wouldn't do anything to my body because medical considerations come first."

He added: "The idea that you can just take some sort of puberty blockers...or-or...just snap on, snap off organs...without really hurting myself medically and taking years off my life is ridiculous."

Maher ended his example of how he would live if he felt in the wrong body with: "I would somehow make it work."

Influencer Peterson reposted the video clip on X and added his views.

Peterson said: "It's 'controversial' If you're a greedy sadistic psychopathic surgeon-butcher Or a cowardly, lying, ideologically-possessed therapist-enabler @billmaher @joerogan."

It's "controversial"

If you're a greedy sadistic psychopathic surgeon-butcher

Or a cowardly, lying, ideologically-possessed

therapist-enabler@billmaher @joerogan https://t.co/hX5l3TPJE0 — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) September 3, 2023

Maher's video clip discussing Trump and the 2024 election on Rogan's YouTube channel has been viewed over 1.2 million times, with his discussion on obesity being treated as a disease racking up 824,000 views.

The full podcast episode is available on Spotify and is an hour and 20 minutes long. The show notes signpost to the political commentator's HBO show Real Time with Maher, his podcast Club Random, and his upcoming appearances in Las Vegas.

Rogan started his podcast back in 2009 and by 2015 it had become one of the world's most popular podcasts.

Commentator and psychologist Peterson is not one to shy away from airing his views.

He recently slammed Disney CEO Bob Iger and the company's range of LGBTQ+ Pride and transgender flags built into decor at a Disney theme park.

That remark is one of his many against the company and its "woke" policies.

He also recently misgendered YouTuber Jazz Jennings online when sharing an article about the star.

Newsweek has reached out to Peterson's representatives via email for comment.

The more I learn about the complex peace and security deal that the Biden team is trying to put together between the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinians, the more I’m convinced that if they pull it off, they’ll win both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Physics. Because finding a way to balance the different interests of all four of these parties makes quantum mechanics look as easy as tic-tac-toe.

But to make it simple for you, dear reader, given the many permutations this deal could take, let me just focus here on the only one that is in America’s interest and that I would support.

It’s a deal that would normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, forge a deeper security relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and concretely advance a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians — but does it all on terms that would almost certainly cause the breakup of the current Israeli ruling coalition, which is led by far-right Jewish supremacists the likes of which have never held national security powers in Israel before.

Alas, though, this is not the version that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is trying to sell us. So, I want to appeal directly to President Biden and the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman: Do not let Netanyahu make you his useful idiots. You cannot have normalization with an Israeli government that is not normal. It will never be a stable U.S. ally or Saudi partner. And right now, Israel’s government is not normal.

Students who test positive for COVID-19 at the University of Michigan this fall will be forced in many cases to leave campus—an extreme measure that may well encourage sick people to avoid seeking medical attention at all. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine and health policy at Stanford University who has frequently challenged prevailing orthodoxies about pandemic restrictions, called attention to the policies on X, describing them as "cruel."  At the @UMich, students testing covid positive must leave their dorms for 5 days & live in the community. A hotel room or a relative's house is ok.  This cruel policy is designed to spread covid from the university into the wild. It won't stop covid from spreading @umich. pic.twitter.com/Yfn58QKcut — Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) September 3, 2023  According to the Care and Isolation section of the university's website, students are required to report a positive COVID-19 test to the health authorities—unless, of course, they tested vis-à-vis the school's medical system, in which case the authorities already have the result. The university will then contact the students to discuss their isolation; importantly, students living in dormitories are required to temporarily move out, even if they reside in single units. The rules suggest that students should return home, especially if they can get there without using public transportation. While the university specifies that students should consider returning home if there they have access to their own bedrooms and bathrooms, it does not acknowledge that sending students home may be the very worst idea of all, given that their parents are probably at greater risk of a negative COVID-19 outcome than their college roommates. The rules are so extreme and disruptive that many students will probably avoid taking COVID-19 tests, even if they are seriously ill. Imagine a student who presumes he has a bacterial infection and desperately needs antibiotics; does he dare risk going to the university hospital and testing positive for COVID-19, especially if that means ejection from his dormitory? Instead of creating a police state to punish students for contracting COVID-19—something that is, let's face it, wholly unavoidable—perhaps university health officials could work harder to provide accommodations for students who get sick and voluntarily agree to quarantine. Alas, the website notes that "isolation spaces on campus are extremely limited." Making them less limited seems like a better use of time than hunting down COVID-positive students and exiling them from campus. The university did not respond to a request for comment.The post The University of Michigan Will Force Students With COVID To Leave Campus appeared first on Reason.com.

Last year, Delaware police prevented 54-year-old Jonathan Guessford from holding a sign warning drivers about a speed trap and wrongfully cited him for "improper hand signal" after he flipped off the officers who seized and tore up his sign. Police have now agreed to pay Guessford $50,000 as part of a settlement reached in a lawsuit alleging that police violated his civil rights. Following several run-ins with the police, Guessford decided to "stage protests whenever he saw police officers stopping unsuspected vehicles using a radar gun," according to legal documents. On March 11, 2022, his protest consisted of standing by the side of the road, holding a homemade sign reading, "Radar Ahead!" Guessford was soon confronted by several Delaware State Police officers, who took his sign and tore it up. As Guessford drove away after the encounter, he flipped off the officers, leading them to eventually cite him for "improper hand signal" under a statute governing hand signals for nonmotorized vehicles like bicycles. However, body camera footage showed that officers knew that the citation was incongruous and would likely be dropped. "Yeah, you can't do that. That'll get dropped," Officer Christopher Popp said during a phone call to another officer, who replied, referring to a third officer, "I told him that's going to get thrown out….Eventually, [Guessford is] going to do something really stupid, and then we are going to be able to really lock him up." Guessford filed a lawsuit against the officers in February, alleging that they violated his First Amendment rights by destroying his sign and issuing an improper citation. Last week, the officers settled the lawsuit, agreeing to give Guessford a $50,000 payout.  The officer's "initiation of the traffic stop, and issuance of a bogus traffic ticket to Plaintiff Guessford, was an adverse action taken in retaliation for his exercise of constitutionally protected symbolic speech and expression," reads the lawsuit. "As a direct and proximate result of Defendants' violations of the First Amendment, Plaintiff Guessford has suffered irreparable harm, including the loss of his clearly established fundamental constitutional right to free speech and expression."The post Police Tore Up His Protest Sign. Now They Owe Him $50,000 appeared first on Reason.com.

What are people dying from?

This question is essential to guide decisions in public health, and find ways to save lives.

Many leading causes of death receive little mainstream attention. If news reports reflected what children died from, they would say that around 1,400 young children die from diarrheal diseases, 1,000 die from malaria, and 1,900 from respiratory infections – every day.

This can change. Over time, death rates from these causes have declined across the world.

A better understanding of the causes of death has led to the development of technologies, preventative measures, and better healthcare, reducing the chances of dying from a wide range of different causes, across all age groups.

In the past, infectious diseases dominated. But death rates from infectious diseases have fallen quickly – faster than other causes. This has led to a shift in the leading causes of death. Now, non-communicable diseases – such as heart diseases and cancers – are the most common causes of death globally.

More progress is possible, and the impact of causes of death can fall further.

On this page, you will find global data and research on leading causes of death and how they can be prevented. This includes the number of people dying from each cause, their death rates, how they differ between age groups, and their trends over time.

This data can also help understand the burden of disease more broadly, and offer a lens to see the impacts of healthcare and medicine, habits and behaviours, environmental factors, health infrastructure, and more.

[MUSIC]

ezra klein

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Hey, it is Ezra. I am on book leave, but this week, taking a turn at the mic is David Wallace-Wells. He is a Times Opinion writer. He’s the author of “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life after Warming.” And I just think that over the past couple of years, not just his work on climate change and biodiversity loss, but also his work, particularly on Covid, has been absolutely fantastic. So I asked him to come on and do a couple shows around these themes. I hope you enjoy. [MUSIC]

david wallace-wells

From the perspective of the climate, it’s been a hellish and disorienting summer. This June was the hottest June on record. July was the hottest July on record. In Phoenix, all but one day in July crossed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s burn units were filling up with people who had fainted on the street and been burned by the asphalt, which measured as hot as 180 degrees. Of course, it’s not all bad news. There is genuinely a green revolution underway, and it’s moving much faster than what many believed possible just a few years ago. Emissions haven’t yet begun to decline, but renewables are being rolled out at such a pace and at such a low cost that many analysts believe we’ll hit a carbon peak sometime this decade. Conventional modeling suggests that in just five years, we may have cut our expected warming for this century almost in half. But that doesn’t mean we can declare victory. Over the last decade, there’s also been a flurry of new science showing that climate risks we once expected in some worst case scenarios may instead arrive with much less warming. And while all of those projections come wrapped in uncertainty, one worrying possibility is that for all that rapid decarbonization, we may not end up, on net, in a much better place, which is all to say that thinking clearly about the state of climate change requires now holding two pretty contradictory-seeming ideas in your head at once. We’re finally taking action and quite rapidly. But the planet is changing, too — perhaps even more rapidly. To help talk me through where we are today and where we’re heading, there’s no one I’d want to speak to more than Dr. Kate Marvel, the senior climate scientist at Project Drawdown. She’s just about the best person I know at holding those two different ideas in perspective at once. As always, you can email the show with your thoughts and guest recommendations at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Kate Marvel, welcome to the podcast.

kate marvel

Thank you so much for having me.

So we’re talking in early August, which means a lot of the official July temperatures have just come in. And it looks like it was a really hot month. And I think the data I was looking at this morning said that we broke the previous record for the hottest month ever by 0.33 C, which means we didn’t just nudge the record up. We broke it by a quarter of all of the warming that we’ve ever done in human history just this summer. So I think in a certain way, it looks like a summer of climate reckoning or a climate awakening. On the other hand, it seems like we do this every summer. Last year, we had extreme heat that killed 61,000 Europeans. We had these dried riverbeds all across Europe, in the US, too, and China. But somehow, this summer has felt to me at least a little bit different. How has the summer looked to you?

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about this summer is how unsurprised I am and how climate scientists were at least mentally prepared for extremely hot temperatures this summer. And that is because of two things. That’s because of climate change. And that’s because of the El Niño conditions and the tropical Pacific. El Nino is a completely natural climate phenomenon that after the seasonal cycle is the primary source of variability in the climate. It’s basically where you get warmer than average temperatures off the coast of Peru in the equatorial Pacific. And because the entire Earth system is connected, those have reverberations across the globe. So we’ve got this El Niño condition, but it’s nowhere near as strong as the strongest El Niños on record in 1998 and 2016.

Which means we think it’s contributing less warming at this point than previous ones.

Yes. And the really significant thing that it’s overlaid on top of is climate change.

Just to pull back for a minute, I wanted to ask you a really big picture question, which is, is warming speeding up? This summer, as we’ve been going through all of these unusual events and trying to make sense of them, there have also been a couple of assessments suggesting that over the last decade, maybe the rate of warming is moving up a little, but then there are other people looking at the data and saying it’s quite a linear trend. How do you assess the state of warming and what you think we might expect over the next decade, which is likely to be defined not by dramatic emissions increases, not by dramatic emissions decreases, but probably something like a plateau? What are we looking at? Are things getting warmer faster, or are we basically moving forward at the same rate we were before?

The short answer is I don’t know. The longer answer is probably 10 years ago, you would probably have been asking me, is warming slowing down? And that’s because following the massive El Nino event of 1998, you could, if you squinted, draw a line across global average temperatures that didn’t look like it was rising very much. You can reassess the data. And it looks like it’s rising a little bit, but this led to a lot of discourse about the so-called hiatus in warming. You even had people on the floor of the Senate saying, there hasn’t been any global warming for 10 years. Where is your science now? And the reason for that is that there was a small slowdown in the warming. These decades can happen. We can have hiatus decades. We can have surge decades.

Which is just a reminder that these processes that we’re talking about tend to play out over very long periods of time. And because we are humans with the lifespans that we have and because the story of the emissions perturbation is the story that we have, which is depending on how you want to count, a century and a half or maybe even just a few decades old, we want to tell stories in really short time frames. But the climate system doesn’t exactly cooperate.

Exactly. And so there’s the role of internal variability, where sometimes, in the hiatus decades — so following the big El Niño of 1998 — we seem to have experienced cooler than average conditions in the equatorial Pacific for an extended period of time — a protracted opposite of El Niño, a La Niña-like state. That gave rise to large cloud cover over those regions. And that was a stabilizing feedback. That prevented lots of warming. Those conditions are now gone. And so there is an explanation where that is just internal variability. Sometimes, this happens. Sometimes, the reverse happens. What for me is a much more interesting question is the different things that were — we call it forcing the climate system. The different external influences that are at play in the climate system. So there was a pronounced slowdown in warming between about 1940 to about 1980. A large contributor of that is what we call aerosols — so pollutants, what normal people think of as pollution — particulate matter that comes off of burning coal plants, burning oil. That was a seriously huge problem in North America and in Western Europe. And that not only showed up in health data and the daily lives of people in those regions. That also showed up in the global average temperature.

Because aerosols reflect sunlight, which means that when there are a lot of them out there, less sunlight is getting to Earth. And therefore, the warming effect is limited.

Not just reflecting sunlight. So aerosols are also extremely effective at seeding clouds. So there was that direct effect of aerosols are gas and dust that is blocking the sun, but they are also making clouds, which themselves block the sun. And so we have pretty good reason to believe that aerosol emissions were masking the warming. It would have been warmer, had those aerosol emissions not been there. Now, right now, the world is not emitting zero aerosols, even though after clean air legislation in the U.S. and Western Europe, the aerosol emissions from those regions have substantially fallen.

But they’ve grown elsewhere.

Globally, aerosol burden has declined, but the burden of aerosols has largely shifted. So we’re looking at emissions from South and East Asia right now. And we expect, in the future, that those aerosols are going to be cleaned up. We have already seen air pollution control happening in China in particular, but as populations notice this, they do not necessarily normalize it. They demand changes. They demand action. And so in industrializing countries, the pattern tends to be that air pollution gets really, really, really bad as the countries industrialize. And then people get really, really angry about it. And something is done about it. So it is an unalloyed good thing that air pollution is projected to fall in the future. But in terms of the climate impact, we’re going to see less of that masking. We’re going to see less stuff in the atmosphere that’s reflecting the sun. And so that is a really, really important problem in the future. Even if we got rid of all fossil fuel infrastructure tomorrow, in the short term, we would see a spike in temperature because of that air pollution, which is killing us, but also blocking the sun.

And the size of that spike is — there’s a lot of uncertainty around it even more than some of the other forcings. But my understanding is that the median estimate is that it’s offering about a half a degree Celsius of cooling and that some estimates get quite close to a full degree of Celsius of cooling. We’re not going to be cutting that pollution tomorrow instantaneously, but in an imaginary model world, where you did do that, you could be dealing with a quite dramatic spike. Not just the equivalent of this July, but something like a much larger and more pronounced effect, and maybe even over the next few decades, seeing as much warming from aerosol reduction as from additional carbon emissions.

Yeah. I do want to be very clear that that is not a reason not to cut aerosol emissions, but it is something that we have to be aware of. There is a big difference, though, between aerosols and greenhouse gases in how they get into the atmosphere and what they do once they’re there. So all of the greenhouse gases we’re talking about are well-mixed in the atmosphere. So that means it doesn’t matter who emits them. Somebody in America emits them. Somebody in China emits. Them somebody in Australia — doesn’t matter. Every molecule of greenhouse gas put in the atmosphere has the same warming effect no matter where it comes from. Aerosols are far more localized. Their impact depends on prevailing winds. Their impact depends on where they are emitted. And they don’t live very long in the atmosphere after they’re put there. [MUSIC]

The way I read a lot of the real time scientific analysis says that a lot of these anomalies that we’ve seen this year are within the range of what was possible. So in that sense, as you say, it confirms some of the predictions and models that we’ve made. But they’re also on the high end. And I wonder exactly how you think we should think about that pair of facts, that it’s not that these events are showing us that our science is off, but it is showing us that we may be, at least in particular areas and particular points, skiing along at the high end of what we thought was possible at this level of warming. There are ways of interpreting that as a comforting set of facts. And there are ways of interpreting it as a discomforting set of facts. So how do you think about it?

From my perspective as a physical scientist, which I do not expect to be the same perspective as a normal person — but for me, when there is a discontinuity or a disconnect between what the models say and what is actually happening, my first question is, why? Is it just because well, weird stuff happens sometimes and this just happens to be an event that is unusual? Or is it some fundamental process that we’re missing? Is there something we don’t understand about the science? And in some cases, we have identified things that we don’t understand about the science. And there are a whole bunch of excited scientists trying to work on those problems to try to figure out the thing that we don’t know. I think it is unnecessarily fatalistic to say, oh, is the science right or is it wrong? I think for me, the important question is, what do we understand? And what don’t we understand and why? I think that gets us into a broader question about what climate models are supposed to do. A climate model is supposed to be one not in which the world as we know it actually happens, but it’s something in which the world we know is possible. And what I mean by that is a climate model is not designed to capture what we call the internal variability of the climate system — the natural random slosh back and forth of air and water that determines day-to-day weather and even seasonal conditions like an El Niño. A climate model is not designed to say, in 1998, there was an El Niño. And this year, there is an El Niño. And in three years, there’s going to be a La Niña. A climate model — instead, you can run it over and over and over again. And every time you run it, the conditions are going to be slightly different. The slosh of air and water are going to be in a slightly different position. And so a climate model is not a weather model. It’s not designed to predict short-term conditions or even medium-term conditions. What they should do is they should reproduce the statistics of these events. They should get the statistics correct. And that brings us into a weird place because when we’re talking about the statistics of extreme events, when we call them extreme events, we’re acknowledging that these things are historically, really rare. It’s really hard to get those statistics. And so we are really reliant on the models to tell us, is this expected or not? How far out of the normal is this? Is there going to be a normal anymore? What is that new normal going to look like? And I think the question of, is it worse than we expected — that’s often quite oversold, I think, in the discussion. My question to that is, well, did you check? Because a lot of these record-shattering events — no climate model was able to exactly predict, in 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, there’s going to be a devastating heat wave. But if you look at the emergence of these record-shattering conditions, climate models pretty much say that they should be happening. You shouldn’t just expect records to be broken. You should expect them to be shattered.

Yeah mean one thing it calls to my mind — and I’m reading this literature at a little bit more of a distance than you are — it’s just striking to me that we’re talking about this summer using all these variables which are much more prominent in the discourse than they were a few years ago. And that’s just like, we are still figuring things out. We are still learning. And as a result, it makes me feel like, as we’re entering into this time of real climate transformation, we’re also being confronted with this huge amount of uncertainty around everything we know. We have models that — they have confidence intervals, but living that confidence interval means actually living under a lot of uncertainty because are you going to land at the 5th percentile outcome? Are you going to land at the ninety-fifth percentile outcome? Those are huge differences. And mentally, we calibrate our expectations on the median projections. But the world is telling us that climate and climate change is actually quite a bit messier than taking a median projection to the bank.

Absolutely. For a long time, I personally have been really reluctant to talk about uncertainty because it is so easily weaponized by bad faith actors. So I want to be really clear. We don’t know everything, but we don’t know nothing. There are certain things that we are very, very, very confident in — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide. These are greenhouse gases. They make the Earth warmer. You put more of them in the atmosphere, you are going to see warming. That’s not something that really any serious scientist disputes. That’s just very, very basic physics. Then when it comes to — well, what does that actually mean? What does it mean to live in a world that’s getting warmer? Again, there are some things that we are incredibly confident in because they are just basic physics. Warmer air is thirstier air. You are getting more evaporation from the surface of the Earth. That water has to go somewhere. And so on average, precipitation rates increase as well. At the same time, we know that warm air can hold more water vapor. So the carrying capacity of air for water vapor increases by about 7 percent for every degree Celsius we warm. And what that means is that when we do have these heavy downpours, there is more water to dump on us. That’s something that we understand really, really well. But then what does that mean for rainfall in a particular town, a particular area? That’s where we start really running into the limitations of our knowledge, the limitations of models in general. And that’s because the Earth is an incredibly complex, interconnected system. And that complexity can make it really, really difficult to make solid, firm projections. A lot of times, uncertainty is seized upon because people think, oh, it’s uncertain. Well, it could be terrible, but it could also be great. And so it’ll probably be fine. And I think it’s really important to be clear that we have ruled out fine. It’s not going to be fine. Warming is going to have consequences. And uncertainty is not our friend because if we had that degree of certainty, if we knew sea levels will rise exactly this amount, and then they will stop, and warming will stabilize at exactly this amount, and it will stop, we would be able to make rational adaptation decisions. They would be difficult. They would be costly, but we would be able to make those decisions. Because there is that fundamental uncertainty in the system, that’s impeding our ability to make decisions and to adapt to what’s coming and what’s already here.

One thing I think about is, science always has uncertainty built into it, but it’s also just this crazy uncertainty experiment that we’re running by moving the planet’s climate into a new climate system in which there are going to be a lot of similarities and continuities. But there are going to be some things that are really different. And so there’s beyond the basic scientific humility of acknowledging uncertainty. There’s also just — we’re running this experiment for the first time. And we have very good educated guesses about where it will lead us. But the risk of running an experiment like this at all is that there are going to be some things that surprise us. When you and I last spoke, it was about a year ago. And it was for a piece I was doing about the narrowing window of climate future. So a lot of apocalyptic things, a lot of apocalyptic futures seemed, relatively speaking, less likely, although we couldn’t rule them out entirely. And as you just said a minute ago, a lot of the “everything’s going to be fine, soft landing” futures were also looking pretty unlikely, if not impossible. One of the other people I spoke to for that piece was Katharine Hayhoe. And she said something to me that I’ve been thinking about a lot this summer, which was, we’ve definitely done a lot in decarbonization to reduce the upper limit of our expected warming. We’re thinking we’re going to see less warming than we thought was likely five years ago. That’s great. But we’re also learning a lot about when climate extremes arise, when really big impacts might hit us hard. And mostly, we’re learning that those are happening sooner and faster than we might have thought 5 or 10 years ago. And you see a similar story unfolding in the tipping points discourse, where the people who have been most worried about tipping points used to talk about them as risks at higher levels of warming. And they’re now talking about them as risks at lower levels of warming — maybe even at levels of warming like the one we’re at right now. And I wonder if that is how you see the really big picture here, that even as we’re doing quite a lot to take control of global average temperature rise through decarbonization — not enough, but a lot — we’re also learning about how messy and risky life at even lower temperatures would be.

I agree. I think a lot of times, people are tempted to see a Paris Agreement warming target — 2 degrees Celsius, or 1.5 degrees, which is the high ambition warming target, which a lot of people are really focused on right now. Those targets are not very meaningful scientifically. The Earth doesn’t really the difference between 1.5 and 1.6. So a lot of times, people think, well, tipping points will definitely be triggered if we cross a particular threshold. And that goes back to the question of uncertainty. I don’t have enough certainty. I don’t have enough science. Nobody does to be able to say, we are safe if we limit warming to a particular level. The flip side is also true. We are not doomed if we exceed 1.5. We are not doomed if we exceed 2. If we blow past a particular target, I think the UN messaging is correct that it’s every 1/10 of a degree that matters. But going back to your question of when might we expect these tipping points to be breached, that’s something that keeps a lot of scientists up at night. So the scientific definition of a tipping point is something that you cross that you can’t get back within timescales relevant to human lives or human civilizations. So some of the tipping points that we’re really worried about have to do with the circulation of the atmosphere or the ocean. That’s something that is very, very worrisome.

Well, talk us through a little bit maybe about each of those and what it would look like to cross those thresholds and be on the other side of a tipping point.

Sure, so let’s talk a little bit about what the ocean actually does for us. The ocean is incredibly important in the climate system. It’s obviously a near-infinite source of water. That’s where water gets evaporated from that then gets turned into clouds and rain and goes back. It also is really, really effective at taking up both carbon and heat. So the ocean’s taking up about 25 of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. That’s not for free. A lot of that is going into acidifying the ocean. The ocean’s also very effective at taking up heat. It’s absorbing the equivalent of five nuclear bombs a second of anthropogenically added heat — heat that humans have put in the atmosphere.

And another way of just thinking about that, just to jump in for a second, is it’s something like 90 percent the extra heat that global warming has produced goes into the ocean, which means they’re getting nine times as much of an impact as we’re getting on land in the oceans.

Yeah. The ocean does a lot. The ocean also moves quite a lot of heat around in the climate system. The currents that have names, the currents that we think about, are generally surface currents — things like the Gulf Stream. Those are driven by the winds and the rotation of the Earth. And the Gulf Stream and other surface currents will exist no matter what we do. They will exist as long as the Earth is round and rotating, but those surface current systems are superposed on a deeper, longer-term circulation, which we call the thermohaline circulation. And that is really driven by not wind, but density. So what happens when water flows north to the Arctic, for example, in the Atlantic? Eventually, a lot of it forms sea ice. The left-behind water that doesn’t form the sea ice is saltier. It’s cold. It’s dense. And that makes it sink. So at the bottom of the ocean, we have this river of failed ice that is flowing. And it’s flowing southward. Eventually, that water upwells. It comes to the surface again. And it closes that loop. So we have this density-driven ocean conveyor belt that moves, over hundreds or thousands of years, water around the Earth’s oceans. And when the circulation of that gets messed up, we could expect to see large disruptions to things like precipitation patterns. We have really good evidence that in the ‘70s and ‘80s, pollution, particulate matter — what we call aerosols from Western Europe and North America — actually cooled the North Atlantic. And there is a lot of evidence that links that to a migration of the rain band, especially over the Sahel in Africa. So that is just an example of how, again, interconnected everything is. Other things scientists are thinking about are disruptions to the arrivals of the seasonal monsoons. Much like the rainfall in the Sahel that I discussed, the monsoons are very seasonal. And enormous swaths of the world population is dependent on monsoon rain-fed agriculture. So any disruption we have to the monsoon could have massive, massive humanitarian consequences. And that’s only the circulation category of tipping points we might see.

And those are systems that, if they move into a new phase, we would expect to not recover on the time scale of centuries, right? It would take longer than that.

Yes.

So then how does that change the way that you think about the broader story? One thing, as I’ve been reckoning with a lot of this material, that’s occurred to me is that we have so much science and so much science communication about climate change impacts this century, but thinking about tipping points really does pull your mind a little bit further into the future and force you to think about climate change as a millennial event. How do you balance those two perspectives in your mind? Because there are plenty of things that may result in relatively manageable climate futures over the course of the next 50 years, but over the course of the next five centuries or 10 centuries, will be much more disruptive. Sea level rise is probably the most obvious of those. But how do you balance those two different time scale perspectives — living in the present, where we’re making decisions, living a little bit in the medium-term future, where we think about the consequences of those decisions for our children and their grandchildren, and then in the much deeper future, where we’re thinking about a world that’s probably, in ways, totally independent of climate, very transformed from the one that we know today?

You can ask a question. What is the warming commitment that we’ve already locked in even if we zeroed out emissions tomorrow? If we zeroed out emissions tomorrow, the consensus among most of the models is that warming would stop. You would have a balance between two effects. So the ocean would continue to warm up, but at the same time, the natural carbon cycle would start to slowly remove some of that carbon that’s accumulated in the atmosphere. And the net effect of those is essentially no more warming.

And this is one of the reasons why getting to net zero is so important. It’s not just because it actually allows us to stop warming. It could, over the course of a century or so, allow us to undo some of it, too, in theory.

Net negative would probably undo it because again, at net zero, you’ve got this natural drawdown of some of the CO2 in the atmosphere. But at the same time, you’ve got the ocean still responding. And so the compensation of those is not that warming decreases, but warming stops. In order to get warming to decrease, you generally need to do something extra to take CO2 out of the air, whether those are enhancing land or ocean natural sinks or engineering a sink — so sucking CO2 out of the air somehow. But then the question is, OK, well, if warming stops whenever we stop emitting, does that mean climate change stops? And the answer is no because we are still not finished responding to the warming that has already occurred. So even if we did zero out emissions tomorrow, and even if we froze the temperature at 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the Earth’s system is not done responding to that. And so we expect to see some amount of sea level rise into the far, far future as a result of that. So that’s one way of answering your question. We are not committed to further warming. We can stop any time we want to, but we are not yet done responding to the warming that’s occurred already.

I’ve seen estimates for the amount of additional warming that would be required to keep carbon concentrations stable, which is to say to prevent the carbon cycle to draw down that carbon and keep warming going as opposed to even stopping it at something like one to two gigatons a year. And maybe that’s not precisely right. There’s uncertainty around that. But it just is really striking to me that the Canadian wildfires we’ve seen this year have already emitted more than a gigaton of carbon. And we’re not expecting those to happen every single year, but the idea that we can be sure that if we manage our emissions as aggressively as we can, there aren’t going to be some surprises like those Canadian fires that are contributing additional carbon and preventing us from drawing down what’s in the atmosphere already — that seems quite scary.

That brings up another potentially scary thing, which is the idea of a carbon cycle feedback. So as you pointed out, things that live on the surface of the planet — either in the ocean or on the land — take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis to make themselves grow. A forest takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere not because it loves us, not because it wants to absolve humans of what we do, but because it needs the carbon dioxide to grow. Trees exist to exist. And when they are done existing, they are done sequestering that carbon dioxide. And if we bank on trees to take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for us, what happens when we make it too hot for certain types of trees to survive? There’s a lot of worry, speaking of tipping points, that the Amazon rainforest and other tropical rainforests could switch from being a net sink of carbon dioxide, removing it from the air, to a net source of carbon dioxide. And so these carbon cycle feedbacks — how are living things on the planet going to respond to increased warming? Those are big wild cards. The uncertainties are large. It’s almost never a good story. None of the models are projecting a significant uptick in the ability of the biosphere to remove carbon in the future. So that gets back to — should we do that experiment? And I think, no. I don’t want to know what the carbon cycle feedbacks are. I don’t want to know how sensitive the Earth is to doubled carbon dioxide. I don’t want to know the answer to any of these research questions that I’m interested in. I don’t think we should do that experiment. [MUSIC]

One of the things that has always struck me about your writing and your thinking — not just your scientific work, but in your more essayistic work — is how much you do center the human elements. There’s these climate dynamics that are going on. Some of them, we understand quite well. Others, a little bit less well, but we have a pretty good sense of the broad trajectory of climate change. We may even have a relatively good sense of where the energy transition is going, but all of that is interacting and interfacing with the world that we have built socially, politically, economically through culture, through infrastructure. And in addition to the climate experiment we’re running, we’re also running this other quite messy experiment, which is, how does a planet warmed by, say, two degrees or 2.5 degrees interact with the civilization that we built under conditions of zero degrees of warming? And even putting aside whether the infrastructure works or doesn’t, how does it interact with our politics and our economics to be responding to and adjusting to a world that’s as distorted or contorted as a world of two or 2.5 degrees would be? I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that — about the human element, how you think we’re doing on that front politically, culturally, psychologically. Are we making the right sense of the changes that we’re seeing out in the world? Are we confused about it? Are there things that you think the public should better understand, or you wish the public would better understand about what is being asked of us as people in addition to what we’re doing to the planet itself?

I think I am probably the worst person in the world to ask that question of because I am a physicist, right? It is my job to understand how air and water move around in the system. And air does exactly what physics tells it to do. It’s really easy to understand. It always does the same thing. It fits inside an equation really well. There are uncertainties that come from the fact that there’s a lot of air. There’s a lot of water. There’s a lot of land. It’s all interacting. But fundamentally, those things do what you tell them to do because they are obeying the laws of physics. People do not do what you tell them to do. That’s why I find them fascinating, but that’s also why I don’t understand them. And I don’t make any pretense to having any special insight or moral superiority to tell people what to do. I do find people very interesting, though. And I do find past examples of how people have reacted to past climate change to be completely fascinating. So in between the 1300s, 1400s to about the 1700s, in the northern hemisphere, we seem to have experienced relatively cool conditions, something that’s sometimes called the Little Ice Age. The best attribution science now thinks that was due to a mixture of some circulation changes in the North Atlantic and primarily a series of really powerful volcanic explosions which blocked the sun, cooled down the planet at least partially. And if you look at the history, especially in Europe, of the Little Ice Age, things start getting real weird. You start seeing an increase in religious conflict. You also start seeing an increase in witch burnings. And a lot of times, the witches that are getting burned are getting burned or hung or executed or accused because of something they have done to the weather. They have raised a storm. They have killed the crops. They have made the winds blow. They have done something. And it’s really fascinating to look at the linkages between the weather getting weird and these cultural impacts that come out of it. Now, do I think that climate change is going to lead to an increase in witch burning? No, but it does show how climate change happens in the world that we’ve built for it. And that’s something that is impossible to fit in an equation. It’s impossible to have a model that’s at all meaningful that says that well, as carbon dioxide concentrations increase, the number of old women who are going to be accused of witchcraft is also going to increase. That’s not something that makes any sense, but that really does show the fundamental unpredictability of human beings and human civilizations in the face of adversity. Sometimes, there is conflict. People fight each other. Sometimes, there is collaboration. Which one of those is more likely to happen? Well, I think both are going to happen in the future. And I think it’s really impossible to have a grand unified theory of a species that’s so deeply weird as we are.

Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit, in a minute, about the suitability of the world as we have built it for the climate that we are entering into. But before we get to that, I just wanted to pick up on a couple of threads from that last answer. I was just reading an article in The Economist about the heat waves. And in it, they drew on this work by Marshall Burke, and Sol Hsiang and Edward Miguel about the relationship between climate and conflict which suggested that as global average temperatures got hotter, we might see some significant additional conflict mostly at the interstate and civil war level. And The Economist was saying, just looking at the anomalous temperatures in July, we might see 50 percent more conflict than we would see otherwise without that warming. And I emailed Marshall and said, well, I know your data was based on long-term average trends. Is this a fair leap to make? And he said, well, we’re actually updating it for monthly averages. And the numbers aren’t very different. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that was actually how it netted out. And that is absolutely astonishing to think about even in the range of possibilities here. But it also brings to mind all of these other questions about how we talk about the attribution of really complicated events and episodes to climate change or not. How do you think about how to talk about that complicated web of causality? And how do you think the world as a whole is doing and understanding just how complicated those dynamics really are?

I think we need to acknowledge that we’re not going to get the comfort of this false binary. We’re not going to be able to say, climate was the only factor. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a factor. Take, for example, wildfires. Wildfires are dependent on many different things. They’re dependent on the weather, hot, dry conditions. They’re dependent on the amount of fuel. They’re dependent on ignition — so either lightning or human action. And they’re dependent on suppression. The damage they do really depends. Who’s living in harm’s way? And not all of those things are amenable to description by physics. I focus a lot on the physical causes because that’s my job. That’s my expertise. But when we talk about wildfires, let’s take, for example — even though we’re here on the East Coast, we’ve had impacts from Eastern Canadian wildfires. Let’s talk about wildfires in the West because the science is much more robust when we talk about wildfires in western North America. We do know that the hot, dry conditions that are more conducive to fire — fire weather — those are getting much more likely. We also have reason to believe that we’re going to see much, I guess, swingier precipitation. Really, really wet wet seasons, really, really hot and dry dry seasons. That has implications for fuel, right? If you have a really, really wet winter, you could have a lot of vegetation growing. And that vegetation is going to dry out in the summer and burn. So those things are amenable to description via equations. We can say, this is our knowledge of physics. This is how it’s changing. But what does that mean in terms of the ability or the desire of humans to venture into forests and build campfires or have gender reveal parties or whatever? You are looking at the culmination of not just current policy choices, but a long history of policy choices. Who gets to live on that land? Who gets driven off that land? Who gets to make these decisions? And again, I can’t put it in a climate model, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not vitally, crucially important.

Yeah. Wildfire, I think, is a really powerful example for a number of reasons, but one of the things that I always find myself thinking about is, hearing occasionally from people who say, we shouldn’t worry all that much about the trends in wildfire because fires used to be much more pervasive in the American west 500 years ago, 200 years ago. And that’s true. There was more burning in those forests in the past. But also, there were not 40 million people living in California. There were probably less than one million. And the way that we think about those risks has a huge amount to do with those 40 million people, not just the fires themselves and whether 2020 was merely the worst season in 130 years or whether it was the worst season in 500 years. And even in a relatively steady climate trajectory where things are getting predictably worse, our experience of that climate may still involve quite a lot of shock moments because the world that we’ve built out in the infrastructure world, but also our political systems, our emotional infrastructure — all of that is calibrated to climate conditions we’ve already left behind. And as a result, there’s going to be some episodes in which we can tolerate some amount of additional warming and some higher impacts and risks, but then at a certain point, that gets broken. If you think about sea level rise and floods — and a small flood wall can protect some high days of flooding. But then you get a really — even just the last foot can have a completely devastating impact on the city. I wonder how you think about that set of questions? The degree to which we are, all of us, living on assumptions from an earlier climate era, how much we have to do to navigate the new world full of more climate risks, and how far along in that process we are at a policy level, but also at an emotional, intellectual level.

So first of all, no adaptation is not really an option anymore. We have no choice but to adapt to the changing climate because climate change is already here. I was watching a documentary the other day. And it was old. It was about 15 years old. And I was so struck by the fact that they were using polar bears to illustrate climate change. And I was thinking, nobody really does that anymore because it’s so obvious that this is not a problem that just affects polar bears. This is a problem that is affecting us. And it’s something that we are going to have to prepare for. At the same time, you sometimes hear this very glib, “Oh, we’re rich. We’ll just adapt,” especially in wealthy countries. And there is no “just” to the adaptation because first of all, if you don’t reach net zero, if you don’t stop climate change, it’s a constant moving target. Adapt to what? On the other hand, adaptation means something really, really drastic. It means relocation of communities. It means maybe abandoning really beloved areas. It is an extraordinary undertaking. That doesn’t mean that it’s not necessary. That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible, but I don’t think we should be glib about it at all.

Along the way there, there’s also the risk, I think, that as we see more and more intense impacts start to adapt to some degree, we also adapt by normalizing and by acclimatizing to things that we would have considered unworkable and unlivable conditions not that long ago. And I think our experience with wildfire smoke here is pretty illuminating, which is to say, there were people who worried about smoke impacts from fires five years ago in California. But most people worried about property damage, and lives lost, and towns being destroyed. Then starting in 2020 when we had these really eerie images from San Francisco — really bad toxic air days — I think the public started to worry a bit more about smoke and public health impacts. But those of us living in the East Coast were like, well, that’s crazy Californians. They’re dealing with that. That’s well beyond what I could tolerate in my own life. And then we had a few days, depending on how you want to count a few days, or a few weeks of really bad air here. And almost by the second or third day, the emotional calibration, at least of people I knew, was like, well, I guess this is going to be a thing now. It wasn’t to treat this impact, which five years ago, we would have thought of as totally intolerable as still intolerable. It was to incorporate that into our understanding of the next 10 or 15 years of our lives. And there’s a way in which that’s quite healthy because probably, it is going to be a feature of, at least, our worries, if not coming every summer. But it also tells us something about how quickly we’re redefining our standards for a comfortable climate capable of sustaining human flourishing and how differently we’re defining those terms in order to allow ourselves some safe operating space emotionally for living in that world.

I’m actually going to disagree with you because what is a podcast without a good fight? So I actually think we cannot normalize this. And we have to push back really, really hard.

When you say “cannot,” you mean that it’s beyond our capacity, or do you mean that we have to resist it?

We have to resist it. We have to resist it. And I think there has been a strain in climate storytelling of fatalism. And sometimes, that fatalism is coupled with — well, humans are bad and terrible. And this is our divine judgment, our punishment. Sometimes, it’s scolding, like you are terrible. And this is your punishment. And I have to live with it, and I hate you. And sometimes, it’s just very fatalistic. There’s nothing we can do about climate change. We’re just going to have to live like this for the rest of our lives. When the Cuyahoga River caught on fire, the air quality was terrible in New York, but that would have been a moderately bad day not that much different than normal in my parents’ lifetime. And that was normalized for a long time until it wasn’t, until it became clear that there were solutions. Now, I don’t want to say that any particular single piece of legislation can ever solve all of the problems, but the Clean Air Act of 1970, which was not passed by a wonderful, loving man who loved humanity and the environment —

That’s not how you would describe Richard Nixon?

No, it is not. But there was a confluence of factors. There was increased scientific understanding of where this problem was coming from and what we could do about it. There was popular pressure. The first Earth Day was 1970. Lots of people out on the streets marching — school groups, church groups. And there was a president who saw an opening, not because he was a lovely, warm, fuzzy, wonderful person, but because the conditions made this possible. And I think there are a lot of stories of environmental success in the record. None of them are perfect analogies for where we are. That’s what it means to be living in the future. We are not living in a story that has ever happened before. I’m sorry. That’s just what it means to be alive. But I think we cannot normalize this. We cannot say, the climate is just going to change, and we’re going to blow past all of these targets, and it’s just going to get worse, and worse, and worse. I think we have to demand — this is bullshit, we don’t like this, we don’t want to live like this — instead of accepting it.

Well, I think as a political goal and value set, that’s totally admirable. But when I think about, for instance, the way that people in Florida or California are responding to the end of insurance for their homes, we’re not seeing a mass exodus. In fact, we’re still seeing, to some degree in some parts of those states, real population growth. We’re seeing tons of people flooding to the parts of the U.S. where climate impacts are expected to be most intense. And maybe that’s a sign of optimism about our ability to redesign our future to allow us to live in those conditions, but it also seems like not necessarily the most rational response to a climate we know is changing and suggests that on the whole, at a population level, even as we’re endeavoring to limit warming and endeavoring to make a future that’s more livable, we’re also coming to accept climate outcomes that a decade or a generation ago would have seemed quite horrifying to many of us.

I think we have no choice, but you say, accept. I say, continue to live through. I don’t know precisely what the boundary between acceptance and merely continuing to exist is. Yes, these are conditions that are happening. The skies in New York were orange earlier this summer. In Phoenix, it’s been over 100 degrees for however long. These are conditions that are happening. I think that it is completely appropriate to demand that they not happen. We can’t demand no global warming. We’re already at 1.1, 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. We can’t put that cat back in the bag. We can’t say, we want no global warming, but we can say, we want to limit global warming. And we want sensible adaptation measures. And both of those things are incredibly tall orders, but that’s what politics is for, right? We want to live in a society. We want there to be buildings built. We want there to be roads. We want there to be subways. And all of those things are way, way bigger than any one person can deliver, but we want them. So we have them. And I think we need to say, this is not acceptable. This is not normal. And things have to change.

And when you take off your physicist hat and put on your politics hat, how do you assess the state of climate politics in the U.S. and more generally, around the world? Obviously, we’re moving faster than used to be the case. There’s more general consensus about the fact of the problem, the necessity of taking some action in response to it than even just five years ago across the world. But we’re still falling short of the goals and targets that we of collectively set for ourselves even as some of those targets start to seem less safe than they might have seemed five or 10 years ago. So how do you think about the state of politics as it relates to this challenge? How do you calibrate your own sense of where we are and where we’re headed?

I have scrupulously avoided having a politics hat. I don’t want one. What I can say, from my personal experience, is I have noticed a sea change. Five, 10, 15 years ago, there was only one story that ever got told about climate change. And it was, is it happening? Let’s get all of these scientists who say it is. And this one guy says it’s not. All right, let’s have them fight. And I understand where that came from — the urge to inject conflict and drama into what’s fundamentally a really, really difficult thing to wrap your mind around. Sometimes, it would be scientists fighting with guy in a suit. Sometimes, it would be like, look at this sad polar bear. It’s going to die, and it’s all your fault because you’re a bad person. But those were really the only stories that ever got told. And in, I want to say 2018 because that was the release of the U.N.‘s 1.5 degree Special Report — which, mea culpa, I was grouchy about. I thought it was fan fiction. I thought, well, there’s no way we’re going to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Why are you doing this? And oh, boy. What the world needs is another report. Great. Let’s do that again. And for reasons that I don’t understand, I was so wrong. I was so wrong about how that was going to be received. I was so wrong about how that would land. And it started something. Now —

The same year that Greta started striking, the foundation of XR, the sit-in of Sunrise.

Sunrise. To talk about tipping points, that’s not something that I was able to anticipate. And now, I almost never get asked, is it real? I almost never get asked, well, what does climate change mean and why should I care? Instead, I get asked the really good questions about uncertainty, about what’s happening, about how we can prepare, about what we can do. And for me personally, the fact that we are talking about what we can do is really exciting because all I ever wanted to be in the climate debate and climate politics was irrelevant. And I am really, really rapidly, as a scientist, approaching that point, where I am not the first point of contact. If you’re writing a climate story, you don’t necessarily go and talk to a scientist and say, oh, hey, is this real? Is this really happening? You’re going to go, and you’re going to talk to somebody who works in renewable energy. You’re going to talk to an electrician. You’re going to talk to somebody trying to craft climate policy. You’re going to talk to an entrepreneur. And now, there are so many more stories to be told about climate. And that’s something that is a massive, massive sea change for me.

Yeah. I think you’re being too modest about being irrelevant, even speaking on behalf of climate science, because I do think that there are these really important questions about exactly what it means — the difference between 2 and 2.5 degrees, particular impacts in local — there’s a huge amount for science to tell us. I do think we’re living in a different world now, where we do see the machinery of decarbonization actually finally getting going. We’re starting to see that show up in our understanding of and our projections for the future. All of that’s extremely exciting. But I worry a little bit that the story of progress and decarbonization is crowding out some of these other challenges and these other difficulties, that we are excited to be on the march to net zero, even if it’s going to be in 2070 as opposed to 2050. And we’re excited to be making impossible the scariest climate futures that some of us worried a lot about a few years ago. But that doesn’t mean that the challenges aren’t real and right in front of us and may even prove quite catastrophic when all is said and done. And I wonder how you think about those questions at a storytelling level, which is we obviously need to be talking about both of these things at once — the things that the climate is telling us about how different and likely how much harder life will be because of climate changes, but also everything we’re doing to take control of those challenges, both through limiting warming and through adapting. But finding that balance feels, to me, pretty hard. And maybe it feels hard to me because I’m just on a roller coaster about it. In one month, I feel one way. In one month, I feel the next way about it. How do you think about it, again, at a storytelling level?

I think all I can do is answer for myself. So I don’t feel one particular way about climate change. I feel many different ways about climate change. Some days, I’m very excited. I’m very joyful by looking at all of the work that’s being done. Sometimes, I’m really afraid. Sometimes, I’m really, really angry. And I think that’s completely appropriate and normal and natural to hold all of these things in my head. Going back to your question before about the time scales, I want to invert that question because that’s the way that I think about this a lot. So there’s a really negative story you could tell, where even if we get everything right, even if we reach net zero in 2050 like we are supposed to, and all of these amazing technologies come online, and we rebuild our entire energy system, our transportation system, we really transform our farm system, we do everything right, we’re not really going to be able to tell, climate-wise, for decades. The best-case scenario from a climate perspective is just less bad than it would be otherwise. And that’s because it takes a really, really long time for these changes to percolate through the system for you to distinguish the signal from the noise. So it’s going to take decades to say, oh, we’re in the good place as opposed to the bad place, or not the good place — the less bad place. But if you look at the near-term benefits, you get rid of a coal-fired power plant. And immediately, the next time it rains, that washes out all of the gross particulate matter pollution that that coal plant put in the atmosphere. So you get cleaner air almost immediately. That starts to show up in mortality morbidity statistics really, really, really quickly.

And just to put a pin on it for the listeners, those numbers are horrifyingly large — some estimates, in the millions annually dying from the pollution from fossil fuel burning.

The estimates that I’ve seen say, air pollution is a factor in 11 percent of deaths worldwide. We’re talking millions and millions and millions of preventable deaths. So air pollution is a killer. Air pollution is disgusting. And air pollution is not something that we have to live with. If I wanted to use the lingo, I’d say that is a cobenefit of climate solutions, but that is a massive near-term benefit. And there is a large research literature that says that we’re going to see less infant mortality. If we do this, we’re going to see less mortality morbidity. We’re going to see people living longer, healthier lives. We’re also going to see increases in things like labor productivity. Now, if we adopt various other climate solutions, we get cobenefits in terms of better biodiversity. Not cutting down forests is a climate solution. And that’s going to have cobenefits that show up much, much, much quicker than any climate benefit. And so if you invert that — and I think about this a lot. So in the I.P.C.C. report, there is a figure of a child born in various years and the climate that they will experience as they grow older. I want to take that figure, and I want to invert it and think about — if we take these climate actions, what are the positive benefits that can accrue? And when do they start accruing? So if we limit warming to 1.5 C, our great grandchildren are going to thank us for avoiding more catastrophic sea level rise. But if we do that, we ourselves, not our children, not even ourselves in 10 years — we are going to experience those benefits of cleaner air immediately. There’s going to be more people alive now. And I think that’s something that’s really worth doing, personally.

I think that’s a really great place to end. And since you’re a repeat guest, you would know that as you come on this show, you’re supposed to come with three book recommendations for the audience. What are your books?

My first book recommendation is actually not a book. It is a short story. In fact, it’s such a short story that it’s about a paragraph long. And it’s called “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges. And it is the perfect distillation of the process of modeling, of trying to represent nature by something smaller and more tractable. My second book recommendation is an off-the-wall one. We talked about the Little Ice Age. And we talked about witch burning in the Little Ice Age. It turns out that British monarch James I published a paper on how to identify and deal with witches because he was really obsessed with witches, being the king in the middle of the Little Ice Age. And he was previously the king of Scotland. He was brought down when Elizabeth I died. And so if you are a playwright and you want to appeal to this Scottish weirdo who’s in charge who’s really obsessed with witches, what are you going to write? And so that’s where Macbeth comes from. And I have been rereading that in preparation for some things that I’m writing about the Little Ice Age. And I’m just really struck by these themes of guilt and also really struck by the extent to which the witches in Macbeth are manipulating the weather. And so I think that is a really interesting view into a world in a different climate than the one we are in right now. And my third book is not out yet, but it’s available for pre-order. And to preface this, I have a lot of problems with climate fiction. I find a lot of it to be unnecessarily apocalyptic or very preachy. And it’s just not something that I like to consume off-hours. And so there’s a book which I’ve been fortunate enough to read a preliminary draft of. It’s called “Troubled Waters.” It’s a novel by Mary Annaïse Heglar. And it’s just a warm and beautiful and complex story about a Southern Black family wrestling with the climate crisis.

Kate Marvel, thanks for coming on the program.

Thank you so much for having me. [MUSIC]

It was a day of firsts.
Harvard President Claudine Gay welcomed the Class of 2027 and exhorted them to lean into the journey that brought them to the present moment and gear up for the transformations that await them in the next four years.
“Let your joy and your pride win out,” said Gay, Ph.D. ’98, who spoke at Tercentenary Theatre on Monday afternoon in the annual Convocation ceremony, officially marking the entry of first-year students into the Harvard community. “Each of you deserves it. Each of you has earned it. Each of you belongs here.
“Each of you will make Harvard stronger and better by being who you are, by sharing your perspective, and by contributing to our mission,” she said. “I know this because I have seen it myself. Year after year, as a faculty member, I witnessed extraordinary transformations in students, profound shifts in understanding and awareness across every dimension of being.”
Yesterday was also an extra special Convocation for Gay, marking her first as president of Harvard. Gay succeeded Larry Bacow, who stepped down in June, after serving as Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 2018. Gay, who was also Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and a professor of African and African-American studies, urged the students to be prepared to overcome feelings of self-doubt that may arise at times during their undergraduate years.
She noted such insecurities are difficult to avoid, recounting an incident that took place when she was a child. At the age of 11 she began to feel painfully “insufficient” because she lacked a middle name. She feared being thus incomplete might somehow preclude her from “the possibility of reinvention.” When Gay turned to her parents for advice, they simply responded: “Your name is enough.”
“I turned those four words over in my mind, and they have stayed with me all these years, a powerful statement about my inheritance, my identity, and my capacity,” said Gay. “Sometimes, even now, even as president, when I am pushing a pen across paper and signing my name, those four words surface in my mind.”
“At some point between now and Commencement — probably at several points between now and your Commencement — you will feel insufficient. Despite knowing better, you will feel as if everyone around you knows exactly what is going on, as if everyone around you understands something you do not, sees something that you do not. When that happens, I hope you remember this story — and my parents’ wisdom.”
In closing Gay asked students to be willing to be transformed by Harvard by exploring who they are and who they want to become. “You have been given a name, and that is all that you need, but from this day forward you will make a name for yourself,” she said.
“Who can you be? Who will you be?’ said Gay. “These are the questions that you will consider alongside your classmates; in conversation with faculty, proctors, tutors, and deans; and in connection to your own learning and scholarship.

Rakesh Khurana, Danoff Dean of Harvard College, encourages students to make the best of their Harvard education by being “open to transformation” and “commit to something beyond yourself.” John Cooke ’25 (left) and Shikoh Hirabayashi ’25 welcome the Class of 2027.

“Take notice of work and ideas that energize and fulfill you. Take notice of your joy and your satisfaction. Take nothing for granted. Be willing to reconsider assumptions for the sake of your present happiness, but also for future contentment.”
Along with Gay, other University officials took part in the ceremony to salute the newest members of the Harvard community, including Thomas Dunne, dean of students at Harvard College; Amanda Claybaugh, Ph.D. ’01, dean of undergraduate education, Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of English. Representing students were Harvard Undergraduate Association co-presidents John Cooke ’25 and Shikoh Hirabayashi ’25.
Rakesh Khurana, A.M. ’97, Ph.D.’98, Martin Bower Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Danoff Dean of Harvard College, encouraged students to make the best of their Harvard education by being “open to transformation” and “commit[ting] to something beyond yourself.”
“College is not a stop on the way to the rest of your life,” he said. “This is your life. And these four years of College are where the patterns for your lives will be set. If you spend these years taking no chances, reinforcing your beliefs, deferring any reflection on who you are and what you want, you will be doing the same thing in 20 years.
“In embracing your own transformation, you will be embracing the best that a liberal arts education has to offer,” said Khurana. “To embrace your own transformation may sound like a selfish pursuit when there is so much work to be done in our world. But it is the only way forward. We can only begin to change the world if we are open to changing ourselves.”

Jordan Peterson has been ridiculed by critics for quoting a scene from a James Bond film, apparently as though it were fact.

The commentator and psychologist brought up the theory during an appearance on the This Weekend Past podcast.

Peterson observed a rat print on host Theo Von's T-shirt and complimented him on it, to which Von told him that one of his nicknames was "Rat King."

Jordan Peterson at the Cambridge Union on November 2, 2018, in Cambridge, England. He has been mocked for apparently copying a James Bond speech. Chris Williamson/Getty Images Europe

"Do you know what a Rat King is? Oh my God, it's a terrible story," Peterson responded.

"There is this theory, this is the theory, I don't know if people ever did this, but imagine your village is full of rats. So you go catch 10 rats and throw them in a pit... soon there is one rat because he gets all the other rats, he's a champ."

Peterson continued: "Then you throw 10 more rats in there and you do that three or four times. Then you take the remaining rat let him go.

"And soon there are no rats in the village, really. So it was like the toughest of them all and then he learns to eat rats."

But some eagle-eyed observers noticed Peterson's words bore a striking similarity to an early scene in the James Bond film Skyfall. In that scene, Javier Bardem appears for the first time as cyberterrorist Raoul Silver, who tells Bond, played by Daniel Craig, about the Rat King theory.

One X user, formerly known as Twitter, shared the video, which has had more than 706,500 views at the time of writing.

"This is from Skyfall. Jordan Peterson is half-remembering the villain monologue from the movie Skyfall and confidently retelling it as a historical fact. And that pretty much sums up how he gets most of his information," the person captioned the post.

This is from Skyfall. Jordan Peterson is half-remembering the villain monologue from the movie Skyfall and confidently retelling it as a historical fact. And that pretty much sums up how he gets most of his information. https://t.co/5P1gQjUQAT — David C Bell (@MovieHooligan) September 4, 2023

An alternative, and enduring, Rat King theory refers to the phenomenon of rats being found with their tails intertwined, so that they appear as a cluster. Sightings of such incidents go as far back as the 16th century.

It is thought the entwined tails were the result of fighting among rats, or of older male rats sitting on younger rodents as a nest, which eventually caused their tails to become knotted up. The resulting Rat King relies on other members of its pack to bring its food to survive.

The largest alleged Rat King recorded had 32 rats and was found in Germany in 1828. It is now on display at the Mauritianum Natural History Museum in Altenburg, Germany.

However, Rat Kings may merely be urban legends or hoaxes and many public displays of them, such as photographs, have not been verified as authentic or naturally occurring.

Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general of the United States, has described his "incredibly harrowing" journey out of the Burning Man festival.

Tens of thousands of attendees were stranded after heavy rain turned the annual counterculture festival's site in Nevada's Black Rock Desert into a mud pit.

Organizers closed the festival to vehicles and urged attendees to shelter in place until conditions improve, with some fearing they could be stranded for days. Authorities said they were investigating after one person died on Saturday, but provided few details about the fatality.

Those stranded were advised to take shelter in a warm place and conserve food, water and other supplies. In an update on Sunday evening, organizers said they were aiming to open "for exodus" on Monday, but a final decision on access will be announced by 9 a.m. local time.

Attendees known as "burners" strike down their Unicorner camp before new rain falls in a muddy desert plain on September 3, 2023. Neal Katyal described his "harrowing" six-mile hike out of the Burning Man festival. Julie Jammot/AFP via Getty Images

They earlier said people could walk about five miles from the festival site to the nearest town of Gerlach, where shuttle buses would take them to Reno. "This isn't a simple solution, but it is a possible one should you need or want to make the trek," organizers wrote on the festival's website.

Katyal was among those who made that journey.

"It was an incredibly harrowing 6 mile hike at midnight through heavy and slippery mud, but I got safely out of Burning Man," the lawyer wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. "Never been before and it was fantastic (with brilliant art and fabulous music)...except the ending."

Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general during the Obama administration, warned that others stranded at the festival site should not make the journey unless they are in good shape and part of a group.

It was an incredibly harrowing 6 mile hike at midnight through heavy and slippery mud, but I got safely out of Burning Man. Never been before and it was fantastic (with brilliant art and fabulous music)…except the ending. pic.twitter.com/jhxsOfNp5y — Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) September 3, 2023

The mud "is like cement and sticks to your boots. It also has some quicksand properties—it grabs your boots and sometimes you are stuck," he wrote.

"It was quite hard, and will get harder if/when it rains more. Talk your friends out of the hike unless you really think they can do it safely. There are treacherous places where it is worse than walking on ice."

He told his followers to warn their friends preparing to make the journey to use GPS, download a map if possible, begin walking at 6 p.m. or time it so there won't be rain for the first few hours.

For those of you with friends who are there:

1) More rain is projected. It’s very wet right now and cars and other vehicles can’t drive and likely can’t for several days.

2) There is a lot of food and water and people are really generous and sharing,

3) we decided to make the… — Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) September 3, 2023

Katyal also said those making the journey need to prepare their boots.

"Plastic bag on your bare foot, then sock over it, then put boot or shoe on," he wrote. "There are lots of places where you sink into the mud down to your ankle. You need the plastic bag to avoid being soaked."

The most important thing is to "encourage them to be safe," he added. "If it takes several days to leave, so be it. These are dangerous conditions to hike and will likely get worse."

Newsweek has contacted Katyal for further comment via email.

I’ve been raving about Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger” since I read an advance copy this summer, and when I tell people about it, some of them are baffled: You mean Klein wrote a whole book about being confused with the writer Naomi Wolf? The central conceit of “Doppelganger” sounds more like the premise for a surreal Charlie Kaufman film than a work by an earnest lefty who usually writes about overweening corporate power. Klein herself is apologetic about it. “In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book,” she says in its first line.

We should all be glad she did, because I can’t think of another text that better captures the berserk period we’re living through. Only in a superficial sense is “Doppelganger” really about Wolf, the liberal feminist icon turned anti-vax Steve Bannon sidekick. Instead, it’s about the instability of identity in the virtual world and the forces pulling people away from constructive politics into a shadow realm where clout chasing and conspiracy theorizing intertwine.

Klein and Wolf, both brown-haired middle-aged Jewish women writers, are often mistaken for each other. That became a growing problem for Klein as her reputation was tainted by Wolf’s escalating lunacy. Trapped at home by the pandemic, Klein became increasingly obsessed by Wolf’s transformation into a heroine of Covid truthers.

That obsession, in turn, guides Klein into an examination of what she calls “the Mirror World,” the vertigo-inducing inversion of reality common to contemporary far-right movements. Think, for example, of Vladimir Putin claiming that he’s liberating Ukraine from fascism or Donald Trump howling that his multiple prosecutions are a racist plot to subvert a presidential election. When I spoke to Klein recently, she described how jarring it was to watch protests against Covid measures appropriating left-wing language — common slogans were “I can’t breathe” and “My body, my choice” — making them “this weird doppelganger of the movements that I had been a part of and supported.”

Anyone with experience of depression will recognise the approaching symptoms: a numbed blankness of feeling, or pangs of melancholy nostalgia for a lost contentment now impossible to imagine. A black cloud of affectless lethargy drains life of purpose, making any exertion of effort impossible. This torpor, this sense of inability to arrest fate dominates pre-20th-century descriptions of melancholy, the pre-medicalised ancestor of our modern depression.
As the writer Philip Pullman puts it in his 2005 introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s sonorous and digressive 17th century masterwork, “those readers who have some experience of the disorder of the mind we now call depression will know that the opposite of that dire state is not happiness but energy”.
By this definition, we could say the British state is, if not depressed, consumed by melancholy. Doom is sensed lying on the horizon but the exertion of will necessary to avert it is no longer seen as possible, or even desirable. The British state lies in bed staring at the ceiling, waiting for death. It cannot build houses, it cannot build railways; it cannot dig a hole in the ground and fill it with water; it cannot fix schools that are falling down. The simplest task is too difficult, and anyway, why even bother? There are always reasons to be found for why any exertion is pointless, why helplessness is sensible policy. No wonder, like children of a depressed parent, young Britons now yearn to flee the oppressive atmosphere of home. Yet Burton’s text, reissued for its 400th anniversary, reminds us that we have been here before.
Anatomy is most often read today as a pre-modern self-help book. Yet it contains within it, rarely-discussed, an astute reading of the nation’s political dysfunction that uncannily echoes the present. “Kingdoms, provinces and Politickal Bodies are subject in like manner to this disease,” says Burton, with the body politic exhibiting the same symptoms of what later writers would term “the English malady”. For where “you shall see many discontents, common grievances, complaints, poverty… cities decayed, base and poor towns… the people squalid, ugly, uncivil; that kingdom, that country, must needs be discontent, melancholy, hath a sick body, and had need to be reformed.”
Burton’s diagnosis is distressingly apt for modern Britain. According to ONS statistics, around one in six British adults suffered moderate to severe symptoms of depression last autumn, while 17% of British adults are taking antidepressants; but among those aged between 16 and 29, depression rates reach 28%, and for those under 24, up to 46%. Depression and anxiety are now the greatest drivers of long-term unemployment, and suicide is the single most common cause of death in young British men. Whatever the psychic wounds of postmodernity or social media, the most obvious cause is material: the insecurity built into Britain’s faltering economic model. Renters suffer depression at twice the rate of homeowners, while dwindling savings and growing debt strongly correspond with increased rates of mental distress, and homelessness is on the rise. The body politic and personal health are intertwined: Britain’s economic dysfunction is making people depressed, and deteriorating mental health is weighing down productivity. But how to reform such an unhappy polity?
As the historian William Mueller noted in his forgotten 1952 book on Burton as a political theorist, “A distressed state and a diseased individual, macrocosm and microcosm, can look to similar cures.” Burton regarded the economic instability of England as one of the principal causes of the melancholy of his day, so “the emphasis on economic reform runs throughout Burton’s Utopia, underlining his contention that one effective antidote to England’s melancholy lay in economic advance”.
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Mueller situates Burton in a social context not so different from ours, where, as he puts it, the replacement of the stable economic regime of the agricultural order by the birth of modern capitalism led to unstable employment in industrial and commercial labor markets which fluctuated with world conditions: international squabbles would deprive English industry of its foreign markets, while an influx of foreign capital, with wildly uneven domestic distribution, “caused an inflation of land values, rents, and commodities, which affected not only the unemployed but also the employed, whose wages did not rise commensurately with prices”.
Like a 17th-century Yimby, comparing the prosperous and orderly cities of the near continent with our own urban wastelands, Burton contrasted “those rich, united Provinces of Holland, Zeeland, &c., over against us; those neat cities and populous towns” with “our cities thin, and those vile, poor, and ugly to behold in respect of theirs, our trades decayed”, our “beneficial use of transportation, wholly neglected”. A levelling-up advocate of his day, Burton deplored that “amongst our Towns, there is only London that bears the face of a City… and yet in my slender judgement, defective in many things. The rest (some few excepted) are in mean estate, ruinous most part, poor and full of beggars, by reason of their decayed trades, neglected or bad policy, idleness of their Inhabitants.” As in any provincial town today, or even London’s depressing main shopping thoroughfare, the nation’s melancholy was written in the dismal vista of its streets.
Why did England suffer this sad torpor? Fundamentally, the question was one of “ill government, which proceeds from unskilful, slothful, griping, covetous, unjust, rash, or tyrannizing magistrates… not able or unfit to manage such offices” — an immediately recognisable modern sentiment in rolling 17th-century prose. Like modern-day attempts at reform, from Thatcher to Truss, their flailing attempts to cure the malady had only worsened it, so that “the State was like a sick body which had lately taken physick…and weakened so much by purging, that nothing was left but melancholy.”
But England’s sad state derived from more than just inept politicians. A melancholic himself, who wrote to both cure and wallow in his own unhappiness, Burton was wearied of what we would today call “the discourse,” the “vast confusion of… new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion” which distracted from good governance. As historians of melancholia note, the Calvinist milieu in which Burton wrote was a “suspicious and inquisitorial society, constantly on the watch to spy out the sins of others and to suppress all deviations from the true way” — no doubt the modern reader will empathise.
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An advocate of “few laws, but those severely kept”, Burton condemned the accretion of legalistic intrigue and self-promoting lawyers which, then as now, hampered strong executive government: “they will make more work for themselves, and that body politic diseased, which was otherwise sound”. Instead, as Mueller observes, “politically, he would have a highly centralized state ruled by a wise and kindly monarch, a sort of philosopher-king.” Socially, Burton proposed a proto-welfare state for the deserving poor, and enforced labour for the wilfully idle. Burton proposed to ban costly offensive wars, while maintaining a strong navy and army for national defence.
Economically, Burton was a mercantilist, who believed that the route to English prosperity, and thus happiness, was in a favourable balance of trade with a strong export economy and secure and well-paid employment for English workers. “Industry is a Loadstone to draw all good things; that alone makes countries flourish, cities populous, and will enforce by reason of much manure, which necessarily follows, a barren soil to be fertile and good, as Sheep… mend a bad pasture.” China’s rise, and the panicked reactive counter-tendency towards industrial policy almost everywhere in the West but listless Britain, makes this position, until recently considered quaintly archaic, seem strikingly relevant.
Torn between affection for the lost and stable social order of feudalism and a desire for economic growth and prosperity derived from well-planned industry and rapidly expanding cities, it is possible to read Burton as the antecedent of modern political tendencies, a sort of postliberal before liberalism had been invented. This interpretation of Burton, as a dissident political and economic theorist with lessons for today, is not as quixotic as it may at first appear. Modern historians of both melancholy and depression have long placed both unhappy conditions in political and economic context, notably the German sociologist Wolf Lepenies, who, as the philosopher Jennifer Radden observes, argues that “melancholy, or at least an enervating nostalgia and ennui, has been the fate of whole classes of people made idle by social, political, and economic arrangements”.

For the historian Matthew Bell, melancholia — “ the spectral absence of meaningful politics”— finds expression in the phenomenon of “retreatism” whose adherents “are not rebels; they do not attempt to disrupt or undo society. Nor are they outsiders who set themselves beyond social norms. Retreatists withdraw from society while remaining within it. They form a silent and disengaged opposition.” Such a position surely describes the viewpoint of British voters, hostile to the dysfunctions of the Westminster system, while increasingly certain it is so resistant to reform there is no point in voting. Why, says melancholy’s seductive inner voice, even bother? Freud credited the depressive with “a keener eye for the truth,” and which British voter today, surveying the options permitted him by Westminster, would not feel melancholic?
Yet it need not be this way. “Our land is fertile we may not deny, full of all good things, and why doth it not then abound with cities, as well as Italy, France, Germany, the Low countries?” asks Burton. “Because their policy hath been otherwise, and we are not so thrifty, circumspect, industrious; idleness is the malus Genius [evil genius] of our nation.” His closing advice to shake off the enervating grip of melancholy, to “be not idle” has become famous as a self-help axiom, yet it is also a political doctrine. It was no good for Burton himself, or for the England of his day– he died, perhaps by his own hand, in 1640, two years before the nation plunged itself into civil war — but perhaps it is not yet too late for Britain.  Doom may yet be averted, the torpor defeated, if only the effort is finally made. The bonds of dysfunction can still, perhaps, be shaken off through vigorous, reformist exertion.
It is difficult, perhaps, viewing the revolving carousel of nonentities returning to parliament this week, to believe that the cloud will ever lift, but it is not yet too late, Burton reminds us: for “Hope refresheth, as much as misery depresseth; hard beginnings have many times prosperous events, and that may happen at last which never was yet.”

Andrea Albutt has been a dedicated public servant for almost four decades who worked as a military nurse and ran four prisons.  But after eight years as president of the Prison Governors Association, she despairs of the crumbling institutions, overwhelmed staff and record-breaking rises in violence, suicide, and self-harm inside cells. So when invited to speak to MPs at Westminster, she took advantage of her looming retirement to savage the collapse of the prison system under their custody.
Albutt blasted their populist gimmicks, short-term stunts, botched spending cuts and the revolving door of 11 justice secretaries since the Tories took office in 2010, who “achieved nothing but decline” in the functioning of her sector. Her conclusion to the all-party group on penal affairs was stark: that politicians are failing inmates, staff and the wider public as they cram more and more people into “warehouses of despair, danger and degradation”.
It was a startlingly honest appraisal of how inadequate politicians played tribal games at the expense of a public service. As she ran through the failures of individual ministers, the Tories were, inevitably, at the receiving end. Yet she was scathing, too, about the Imprisonment for Public Protection regime, a callous legacy of New Labour that has left people with comparatively short sentences still behind bars 20 years later, despite the ditching of the policy more than a decade ago.
The core issue behind Albutt’s outburst is the soaring prison population, which has doubled since she was born 56 years ago. Our incarceration rates became the highest in Western Europe before the turn of the century, then kept on rising. Now we have 87,063 prisoners in England and Wales — and are predicted to hit 100,000 by the end of this decade. Each inmate costs an average of £47,000 a year, slightly more than the fees for Eton. Yet Albutt accused politicians of deceiving the public by promoting a myth that locking up more and more people for steadily longer terms makes society safer. “It’s a lie,” she said bluntly. “Prison does not work.”

Few voters really care about prisons, of course, nor will they shed any tears for convicts crammed into squalid cells. But we should heed Albutt’s warning as crime rises up the political agenda, both parties viewing it as an issue that could sway key voters in swing seats. The Government just delivered a raft of law and order pledges in its ‘crime week’, the latest in a series of dismal themed policy drives in a bid to win back support. Labour responded that ministers have lost control — a point underlined by the home secretary’s suggestion that police might like to tackle offences such as bike thefts and burglaries.
Yet while these politicians tussle to look tough, prisons expose how our democracy is floundering.  Sir Winston Churchill, who spent time in captivity during the Boer War, said treatment of criminals “is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”. He argued forcefully against excessive use of sentencing, warning that it was hard to rehabilitate jailed convicts. He told the Commons during his brief time as home secretary “the first real principle which should guide anyone trying to establish a good system of prisons should be to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all”.
Westminster has failed to heed this advice. New Labour passed 28 criminal justice bills and put one new offence on the statute book for every day they were in office over 13 years. Then the Tories ramped up sentencing so that the average length of a prison sentence increased by 55% over the past decade. Austerity forced the police to spend more time picking up pieces of other crumbling public services such as mental health and social care, while the percentage of crimes leading to a charge crashed. Only days after Albutt spoke to parliament, the Met Police chief Mark Rowley said his officers would no longer attend mental health emergencies.
But these problems run deep in our society. We know, for instance, that many prisoners come from broken families or chaotic backgrounds. We know they often struggle with issues such as addiction, autism, illiteracy, mental illness or learning disabilities. The House of Commons Justice Committee found seven in 10 prisoners may have mental health needs and that these can worsen behind bars: these MPs admitted prison can be “inappropriate” and “inhumane” for those with most severe psychological problems.
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Nor does this swamped, unloved system curb reoffending. Short sentences are especially damaging with 55% of those locked up for less than 12 months reoffending. During his stint as prisons minister, Rory Stewart dared to admit: “The best way of protecting the public is to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the under 12-month prison population, because people on community sentences are less likely to re-offend than people put in prison.” Yet only Scotland has introduced a presumption against use of such sentences.
If rehabilitation doesn’t work, how about deterrence? This was exposed as another myth by the Sentencing Council of England and Wales, which published a landmark review last year. The authors pointed out that few offenders knew much about sentencing policies while criminal acts tend to be spontaneous, often driven by anger, drink, drugs, or mental health episodes. “We note that some have argued it is time to accept that sentence severity has no effect on the level of crime in society,” the study concludes drily.
These findings reinforce those of the Transform Justice think tank, which looked at assaults on health workers and police officers. Despite the penalty for these nasty crimes quadrupling over four years,, the number of recorded offences actually rose. “Most victims want the person who harmed them not to harm them or other people again,” said director Penelope Gibbs. “They don’t necessarily want their day in court or retribution. Unfortunately, more prison is unlikely to meet the needs of victims or reduce crime. A government that really cared about cutting crime, rather than simply winning headlines would reduce imprisonment.”
In the United States, even many conservatives have come to see that it makes no sense to keep locking up damaged citizens, whether on fiscal, redemptive, or simply criminal justice terms.  The “Right-on-Crime” movement, placing an emphasis on rehabilitation over punishment, started out in Texas before sweeping the Republican Party after both main parties agreed that locking up more and more people was a costly failure. This goes to show that even in such a divided country politicians can reach across the tribal chasm and shift the terms public debate, leading to a dramatic 25% decline in prison populations since 2009.
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As US advocates of reform have pointed out to me, it is far tougher to force people to change errant behaviour than simply to slam them into crowded cells. But Labour — driven again by Blairites — senses Tory vulnerability on crime and has stolen a lead on this issue in polls. The Tories by contrast think voters can be persuaded Labour is “soft” on crime under a former director of public prosecutions while latching onto an issue that unites both traditional Tories and new Red Wall recruits .
What makes this even more depressing is that an alternative approach has been proven to work in a nearby nation. Norway had even worse recidivism rates than Britain three decades ago, with seven in 10 prisoners reoffending within two years of release. It had a justice system like our own: built on the concept of deterrence with offenders given long sentences in grim institutions. But instead of blundering on with failure, their leaders boldly switched course. They were rewarded with the world’s lowest recidivism rate, which sees only one in five prisoners reoffending.
The key was to focus less on revenge and more on rehabilitation. Offenders lose their liberty but are given the chance to change their lives. Prisons tend to be small to break up violent cultures and dotted around the country to keep inmates close to their families. Cells are basic but have televisions, computers, fridges, and showers. They offer facilities such as yoga, saunas, music studios, tanning beds, fitness rooms, car workshops and cooking classes. Guards and prisoners enjoy barbecues and play sport together — and in some units, up to half the officers are women. Above all, there is an emphasis on study and work to develop skills in preparation for freedom — not abandonment in overcrowded cells.
Halden Prison, set in a forest 60 miles south of Oslo, has been labelled the most humane prison in the world although it is a maximum-security institution holding 250 men convicted of the worst crimes. It cost £138 million to build, winning a design award for its minimalist style and efforts to minimise stress. Inmates have appeared on reality television shows and released music under the label Criminal Records. There are no guns or barbed wire on display — although prisoners are still locked up in their rooms at night.
The legacy of such intense focus on rehabilitation is that Norway now has fewer than half the number of prisoners per capita as Britain. But Norway’s strategy is not just about treating prisoners well: it’s about keeping people out of prison as far as possible. During its period of reform, prison sentences were reduced. Life sentences were abandoned with a 21 year maximum — although this can be extended in five-year increments if there is perceived danger.
Although the average cost per head of such prisons is significantly higher than our own, it is estimated that rehabilitated offenders save the state about £110,000 per person in terms of law enforcement costs and lower benefits. Crime comparisons are hard given differences in data collection, but the European Crime Index puts Norway comfortably in the top half of safest nations while the UK comes close to the bottom, just above Italy, Sweden and Belarus. Yet our leaders refuse to shift path, spending an immense £3.8bn to push another 20,000 people into more of these “warehouses of despair, danger and degredation”.
This failure by Westminster has a catastrophic impact on the rest of society. Politicians need to display some courage and admit that our prison system does not work, does not deter crime and does not provide value for money. “It’s really very simple,” said one prison warden in Norway. “Treat people like dirt and they’ll be dirt. Treat them like human beings and they’ll act like human beings.”

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat roles should “color-blindness” and race-consciousness play in personal interactions (as distinct from public policy)?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteIn recent editions of this newsletter, I highlighted the TED Talk “A Case for Colorblindness,” by Coleman Hughes, as well as Hughes’s subsequent debate with the New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. After listening to them consider the proposition “Does color-blindness perpetuate racism?,” I noticed one way that their exchange could advance this often polarizing conversation.When defining his terms, Bouie suggested—reasonably, I think—that color-blindness is “the idea that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our public policy and our private lives.” He quickly declared his own main concern to be public policy and focused on it for the rest of the debate. In a future edition of this newsletter, we will focus narrowly on public policy, and you’ll hear more about Bouie’s position, as well as the strongest counterarguments.But today, our focus is on interpersonal “color-blindness.”At one point, after Hughes reiterated his own belief that we should not racially discriminate or treat others with regard to race in the law or in our personal lives, Bouie responded with this distinction:
But the issue is not our personal interactions here. The issue is structural group inequality, right? Like, I’m color-blind in my everyday life, where I don’t treat people differently on the basis of race. But I’m also very much aware of structural group inequality as a result of historically contingent things and things that we can see in the public record, in policy, in law, and all these things. That’s to me the vector which we’re discussing, not so much our individual relations––which, again, people should be color-blind person to person––but in terms of public policy and the shape and nature of our society.
Bouie is too wide-ranging, interesting, and historically informed as a thinker and writer to be reduced to any ideological type. Still, I found it striking for a popular columnist who fits firmly in the mainstream of elite progressivism––with bygone fellowships at The American Prospect and the Nation Institute––to declare that “people should be color-blind person to person,” and to treat that position as uncontroversial. I perceive it as sharply at odds with the progressive project of equating a “culturally competent” or “anti-racist” person with one who is intentionally race-conscious, not aspirationally color-blind, including in their personal interactions.I am not alone in regarding that approach as both widespread and alienating. Here’s Tyler Austin Harper in The Atlantic describing how interpersonal race-consciousness negatively affects him:
In their righteous crusade against the bad color-blindness of policies such as race-neutral college admissions, these contemporary anti-racists have also jettisoned the kind of good color-blindness that holds that we are more than our race, and that we should conduct our social life according to that idealized principle. Rather than balance a critique of color-blind law and policy with a continuing embrace of interpersonal color-blindness as a social etiquette, contemporary anti-racists throw the baby out with the bathwater. In place of the old color-blind ideal, they have foisted upon well-meaning white liberals a successor social etiquette predicated on the necessity of foregrounding racial difference rather than minimizing it.
As a Black guy who grew up in a politically purple area—where being a good person meant adhering to the kind of civil-rights-era color-blindness that is now passé—I find this emergent anti-racist culture jarring. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances now seem to believe that being a good person means constantly reminding Black people that you are aware of their Blackness. Difference, no longer to be politely ignored, is insisted upon at all times under the guise of acknowledging “positionality.” Though I am rarely made to feel excessively aware of my race when hanging out with more conservative friends or visiting my hometown, in the more liberal social circles in which I typically travel, my race is constantly invoked—“acknowledged” and “centered”—by well-intentioned anti-racist “allies.”
Another academic, Johann Neem, explored similar themes from the position of an immigrant of color. “It was when some scholars on the academic left decided that the primary story to tell about America … was ‘whiteness’ that I first started feeling myself unbecoming American,” he lamented in a Hedgehog Review essay. “Overcoming racism requires recognizing the capacity of all people to share in the nation’s common life. But there can be no common life of the nation when, from the perspective of scholars of whiteness, that common life is the property of white people.” Those scholarly ideas began to negatively affect his day-to-day interactions in recent years, as he described in an interview that I conducted with him for The Atlantic in 2020.He explained that while he abhorred Donald Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and felt frightened to learn about hate crimes, encounters with such hostility “isn’t my daily life, fortunately.” He continued:
I’m more likely to run into progressives who read works like White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and then have a kind of conversion experience. They may have had white skin, but they weren’t necessarily “white”—they were just people who believed in equality and opposed racism. But after reading books like White Fragility, they convert to being white for the first time in their lives. They think of themselves as embodying whiteness. They talk about needing to do work on themselves. And then they bear whiteness before others. They’re so aware of their whiteness that there’s a wall between us that wasn’t there before. Sometimes they’ll attribute something to whiteness and I’ll think, I’m not white and I believe that or do that. That’s just American. I’ve noticed a lot of the things they now think of as “white” are things we used to share.
A lot of white people are overly sensitive to questions of race in such a way that race is constantly being imposed into conversation, creating boundaries. These are progressives. They’re trying. I’m obviously not conflating them with white nationalists. They do it to be welcoming, but it doesn’t always feel welcoming. It’s a constant redrawing and minding of racial borders, making it more difficult for immigrants like me to be part of the nation.
The race-conscious approach to interpersonal interactions described by Harper and Neem is now common in U.S. institutions, where it is promulgated in the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” by literature, consultants, and human-resources professionals. Bouie’s position may not reflect on progressives as a whole, but if other progressives of his stature see this approach as wrongheaded, then the divide between mainstream progressivism and public opinion is narrower than I imagined, and there is common ground between many advocates and critics of public-policy “color-blindness.” I hope that more progressive thinkers will find it worthwhile to clarify their positions. And going forward, it is useful, in conversing about color-blindness or race-consciousness, to clarify whether one means in personal interactions, public policy, or both.On “Heroic Masculinity”My colleague Caitlin Flanagan writes, “If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?”She argues:
The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.
Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself:
Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?
Newcomers to the GOPIn a recent taxonomy of the Republican Party, Nate Cohn divided its voters into the Moderate Establishment (14 percent), the Traditional Conservatives, the Right Wing (26 percent), the Blue-Collar Populists (12 percent), the Libertarian Conservatives (14 percent), and the Newcomers (8 percent). So who are the Newcomers?Cohn argues:
They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less … This is the youngest and most diverse group of Republicans. Just 59 percent are white, and 18 percent are Hispanic. More than a quarter are 18 to 29. Nearly three-quarters identify as moderates or liberals. They overwhelmingly support immigration reform and say society should accept the identity of transgender people ...
But … they back Trump … Nearly 90 percent said the economy was poor ... A similar number said the country was heading in the wrong direction. So while they may not be conservatives … they’re certainly not happy with Democrats. They were the likeliest group to say they would rather back a candidate who focused on fighting the radical “woke” left than one focused on protecting law and order. By a two-to-one margin, they said they would rather vote for a candidate who promised to stop “woke” business, rather than a candidate who said businesses should have the freedom to decide what to support. They’re the smallest group of Republicans today, but this group of relatively moderate but anti-woke voters might play an important role in the Republican Party in the years ahead.
At Notes From the Middleground, Damon Linker reacts:
Whereas every other group has some tie to a longstanding policy and ideological commitment of the Republican Party, the Newcomers appear to reject just about everything the party stood for in the Reagan era, as well as most of what it has come to champion since Trump’s hostile takeover less than a decade ago. With two crucial exceptions, that is. First, they share the Right Wing’s pessimism about the country, especially in economic terms; second, they detest so-called “woke” trends and are firmly committed to voting for the GOP (including Trump) as a means of combatting them ...
They are young men who listen to Joe Rogan. They’re the “barstool conservatives” my old colleague at The Week, Matthew Walther, wrote about so vividly a couple of years ago. They’re the descendants of the “South Park Conservatives” Andrew Sullivan and Brian Anderson took note of two decades in the past. They’re people like some of my son’s college-aged friends, who are tired of having their thoughts and feelings subjected to constant moral scrutiny and judgment by self-appointed finger-waggers. They’re lifelong Democrats disgusted by the rigid moralism of progressive activists and the way liberal institutions have come to impose it through bureaucratic edicts in schools and workplace HR departments …
I have a little of them inside me. Ask me my views on any number of topics, from economic policy to immigration to social issues, and I’ll sound like a moderate or pragmatic liberal ... But if you tell me remaining in good social standing (keeping my job, getting published, maintaining professional ties) requires that I endorse a highly tendentious account of American history or accept a thoroughly unpersuasive view [of] sex and gender, I will be irritated—at the feeling I’m being required to recite a catechism, and at the presumption of those imposing that requirement on me. Who elected or appointed them as our moral commissars? And why do so many Democrats, from the president on down, seem willing to defer to these civic scolds on certain issues? …
Where I diverge is in refusing to give the GOP a free pass as a reward for joining me in opposition to things I don’t especially like about the left. The Democrats may annoy me, but the right scares me. That’s because I’m convinced Republican deference to and efforts to mobilize far-right and conspiracy-addled voters pose a threat beyond anything we’ve seen from the left. I also think Trump’s presidency was an enormous gift to social-justice progressivism, which surged during the Trump administration and has begun to wane in the years since the Orange Man left office. So I part ways from the Newcomers. But I see them all around me—and worry they may be the future of the GOP.
Provocation of the WeekAt the Cato Institute, Johan Norberg defends the Swedish approach to the Covid-19 pandemic:
Sweden was different during the pandemic, stubbornly staying open as other countries shut down borders, schools, restaurants, and workplaces. This choice created a massive interest in Sweden, and never before have the foreign media reported so much about the country. Many outsiders saw it as a reckless experiment with people’s lives. In April 2020 President Donald Trump declared that “Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown.”1 In the New York Times, Sweden’s laissez faire approach was described as “the world’s cautionary tale” and in the same pages Sweden was described as a “pariah state.” There remains a popular perception in the rest of the world that Sweden’s strategy resulted in a human disaster, and many people think that Swedish decisionmakers came to regret the strategy and, in the end, adopted lockdown policies similar to those in other countries. This paper dispels those unwarranted assumptions, describes Sweden’s actual pandemic policy, explains why the country followed that course, and presents what we know about the results so far…
After all was said and done, astonishingly, Sweden had one of the lowest excess death rates of all European countries, and less than half that of the United States. One reason why Sweden got through the pandemic in a much better shape than many scholars, journalists, and politicians expected was that they only thought in terms of strict government controls or business as usual. They failed to consider a third option: that people adapt voluntarily when they realize that lives are at stake. Swedes quickly changed their behavior and mostly followed the recommendations. As early as April 2020, half the workforce worked from home and public transport usage had declined by half. Mobility data from telecom providers show that mobility patterns in Sweden were similar to those in neighboring countries. If anything, Swedes reduced their travel a bit more in the aggregate.
The difference was that if Swedes decided, based on local knowledge and individual needs, that they had to go to work, exercise, or meet a relative or a friend, they could do that without being stopped by the police. This meant that the pandemic became less politicized in Sweden and perhaps also that people accepted the need to live under extraordinary conditions for longer than they would have if they didn’t have these individual emergency exits.
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Like so many bands of wind and rain, hurricane-strength squalls of bad news have battered former President Donald Trump all year. Since April, he’s been indicted four times, on 91 separate felony charges, compared with zero counts for all of his White House predecessors. Trump often likes to claim that anything associated with him is the most spectacular, even when it’s not, but when it comes to accumulating criminal charges, he’s the undisputed champ of former presidents.President Joe Biden, by contrast, has been basking in mostly good news. Over recent months, inflation has mostly moderated, job growth has remained steady, and the stock market has recovered briskly. Seemingly every week, Biden cuts a ribbon for an ambitious infrastructure project or new clean-energy plant made possible by a trio of sweeping laws he signed during his first two years. The chaos predicted at the southern border when Biden ended Title 42, the pandemic-era Trump policy, never materialized. Crime rates are declining in many major cities.And yet national polls, as well as surveys in the key swing states, consistently show Biden and Trump locked in a dead heat when voters are asked about a possible 2024 rematch between them.“It is a sad reality that the race could be this close given Trump’s position, but it is. And I think it’s very clear that Trump can win this race if the election was tomorrow,” the Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann told me.Political operatives and scientists agree on one key reason Biden and Trump remain so closely paired in a potential rematch: In our polarized political era, far fewer voters than in the past are open to switching sides for any reason.But more than structural “calcification,” as three political scientists called this phenomenon in a recent book on the 2020 election titled The Bitter End, explains the standoff in this summer’s polls between Biden and Trump. The two men are pinioned so close together also because they are caught between the four forces that have most powerfully reshaped the electoral landscape since they first met, in the November 2020 presidential election. Two of these dynamics are benefiting Democrats; two are bolstering Republicans. Combined, these four factors appear to be largely offsetting each other, preventing either man from establishing a meaningful advantage as they proceed toward their seemingly inevitable rematch.[Read: What the polls might be getting wrong about Trump]“Look, anybody who thinks this is not going to be very competitive … they are not paying attention to American politics,” Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who has become a prominent critic of Trump, told me. “It’s going to be close. It’s going to be close for the next 20 years.”  What are the biggest factors benefiting Democrats since Election Day in 2020? The first is Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in that election and his continued claim that he was the victim of massive fraud. Polls show that after Trump’s sustained campaign to subvert the 2020 result, culminating in the January 6 insurrection, many Americans view the former president as a threat to U.S. democracy. In an early-August CBS/YouGov national poll, just over half of Americans agreed that Trump tried to stay in office after the 2020 election “through illegal and unconstitutional activities.”Other voters who do not see Trump as an aspiring authoritarian appear exhausted by the controversy and contention that he constantly stirs. For them, January 6 may not have been proof that Trump wants to shred the Constitution, but it is a symbol of the turmoil that returning him to the White House might unleash. “There are people who may like his agenda but do not want to go back to the chaos,” John Anzalone, a pollster for Biden, told me.The other big change in the electoral environment since 2020 that benefits Democrats is the decision by the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court last year to rescind the constitutional right to abortion. Polls have repeatedly found that three-fifths or more of Americans opposed that ruling and prefer to keep abortion legal in all or most circumstances.The broad backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade hasn’t been a silver bullet for Democrats in campaigns. But in swing states such as Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, widespread support for legal abortion was a major factor in Democratic gubernatorial victories last year.As Madrid notes, the decision overturning Roe has reinforced the movement of college-educated white women toward Democrats, which has been evident since Trump became the GOP’s defining figure. While “country-club women” always chafed at some conservative social policies, Madrid told me, before Trump the party could still hold a respectable share of them by reminding them that they benefited from Republican economic policies. But since Trump stamped his imprint on the GOP, Madrid added, “now they are more concerned about the social stigma about being associated with a party that is overturning Roe, supporting Confederate monuments, and attacking gay marriage.” Though less dramatically, the same dynamic has weakened the GOP’s position with college-educated white men in the Trump years.On the other side of the ledger are two factors that have weakened Biden and bolstered Trump since 2020. The most powerful is discontent over inflation. For most Americans, polls show, higher prices in the past few years have overshadowed the consistent job growth and accelerating pace of new plant openings that Biden is now touting under the label “Bidenomics.”Stanley B. Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who has worked for political parties around the world, says that sustained inflation, like the U.S. has experienced since 2021, is especially corrosive for the party in power. “I’ve watched it in Greece; I’ve watched it in the U.K.: The longer the inflationary period goes on, the more frustrated people are, the more negative they are about the economy, the more they are in trouble” financially, he told me. Many politicians, he said, fail to understand how long it takes for voters to feel that they have restored their financial stability after a period of inflation, a mistake he worries the Biden White House is repeating now. As Greenberg put it, “You don’t catch up because for one or two months your wages have gone up above the rate of increase for prices.”Ben Tulchin, who served as the lead pollster for Senator Bernie Sanders’s two presidential bids, told me that inflation exacerbates some of Biden’s longest-standing electoral problems. Biden, he notes, has always struggled to connect with younger voters and Latinos, and because many in both groups have limited incomes, they are especially frustrated with and squeezed by higher prices.In focus groups he’s conducted this year, Tulchin told me, even many younger voters who revile the former president’s values “will say the economy seemed to be better under Trump.” Madrid says preference for Republicans on the economy is the central factor driving younger Latino men toward the GOP, a shift that’s helping the party counter the Democratic drift among college-educated white women.Polls reinforce Biden’s vulnerability on this front. In an ABC/Washington Post national survey this spring, Americans preferred Trump by an 18-percentage-point margin when asked whether he or Biden managed the economy better. Younger adults preferred Trump over Biden on that question 2-to-1.To Jim McLaughlin, a Trump pollster for 2024, those views largely explain how Trump is still standing after his multiple indictments. “It’s not hard to figure out why Donald Trump is as popular as he is: People actually thought he did a good job as president,” McLaughlin told me.He offered an unusual analogy to explain the thought process he believes voters are employing to evaluate Trump’s repeated indictments. He contends that Americans are responding much as they did when House Republicans impeached then-President Bill Clinton over his affair with an intern while the economy was booming in the late 1990s. “You and I have seen this movie before,” McLaughlin said, arguing that while most Americans may have disapproved of Clinton personally, they supported him during impeachment “because they thought the trains were running on time. They thought he was doing a good job.”The other big change weakening Democrats is that Biden is older now. In polls, as many as three-fourths of Americans have said they believe Biden is too old to serve effectively as president. (Far fewer Americans express that concern about Trump, though he’s only three years younger than Biden.) Images of Biden walking stiffly, or clips of him intermittently mangling his sentences, which he was prone to do even when younger, leave many Democratic strategists in a perpetual state of anxiety, fearful that the president is one slip, physical or verbal, from political disaster.Other factors have also changed the landscape since Biden and Trump faced off. Biden’s mishandling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan dented one of his key strengths in 2020—a reputation for foreign-policy expertise. (Since then, Biden’s effective marshaling of Western support for Ukraine may have mended some of that damage.) Conversely, a shift that should advantage Democrats is that white voters without a college degree, the foundation of the modern GOP coalition, are continuing to shrink as a share of the electorate, while Generation Z, whose members have mostly backed Democrats, is rapidly growing.[From the October 2023 issue: The final days]There’s also a chance that new dynamics will break this equilibrium before November 2024. If Republicans nominate anyone other than Trump, that would create fresh opportunities and challenges for each side. A recession, though it seems less likely than it did earlier this year, could be devastating for Biden. And if a jury convicts Trump on any of the charges against him before the election, Democrats are cautiously optimistic that that could influence voters more than the indictments have. (McLaughlin counters that even with a conviction, independents might still prefer Trump, because many of them consider the charges politically motivated and also “because he’s viewed as better on the economy” than Biden.)Yet many on both sides believe the most likely scenario is that the two parties remain mired in a form of trench warfare that leaves the White House within reach for either. A historically large number of states appear safely locked down for each party, leaving the result to be decided by a small group of swing states. That inner circle of the most competitive states would consist of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin; the wider group would add Michigan and Pennsylvania, which lean blue, and North Carolina, which tilts red.Democrats generally ran well in these swing states in 2022 (except North Carolina), generating optimism among most party strategists that despite all of Biden’s difficulties, he retains the advantage over any Republican in reaching 270 Electoral College votes. But these few purple states are likely to be decided by small margins, creating an overall situation that many Democrats find unnervingly precarious given the magnitude of both Trump’s vulnerabilities and the threat he has presented to American democracy.Amid these competing considerations, all signs suggest that Biden and Trump would begin a prospective rematch considerably diminished from their first encounter, like boxers reentering the ring long after their prime. In a second Biden-Trump bout, the result may turn less on which candidate is stronger than on whose weaknesses are unacceptable to more voters in the states that will decide the outcome.

Despite receiving record amounts of federal aid during the COVID-19 pandemic, American schools still failed to prevent dramatic learning loss among students. This should be far from surprising.  Contrary to popular belief, increased educational funding doesn't correlate with higher-quality schools. In fact, some of the worst-performing public school districts are some of the ones most flush with cash.  Over the first year of the pandemic, Congress approved $190 billion in additional funding for American public schools, the majority of it coming from the American Rescue Plan, which specifically required that schools use at least 20 percent of the additional funding to "address the academic impact of lost instructional time through the implementation of evidence-based interventions." However, all that funding failed to prevent disastrous educational declines. Following pandemic lockdowns, test scores among American schoolchildren plummeted. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, in 2022, math and reading scores among American fourth-graders reached their lowest points since 2005. For older students, ACT scores dropped to their lowest point in three decades in 2022. While the glut of spending was justified as necessary to "help schools safely reopen, stay open, and address the academic and mental health needs of students," flooding schools with federal dollars not only did little to get schools back open, but it was also always unlikely to actually improve educational outcomes. School funding simply doesn't have an established relationship with school quality. According to one 2012 report from Harvard and Stanford researchers, each additional $1,000 of per-pupil funding a school had was, on average, "associated with an annual gain in achievement of one-tenth of 1 percent of a standard deviation," a gain so small it had no "statistical or substantive significance." Why doesn't more money reliably improve results? While some interventions can improve school quality, it can often be difficult to overcome the preexisting disadvantages that many students face. For example, one report from the Brookings Institution found that almost half of all low-income children are not ready to start school at age 5. Thus, it's unlikely that schools with large low-income populations can improve student outcomes—no matter how much federal money gets spent. Another reason is that schools tend to not spend money in ways that actually help students. "More money can help schools succeed, but not if they fritter those extra resources in unproductive ways," Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Reason in February. "Wasteful schools tend to hire more non-instructional staff while raising the pay and benefit costs for all staff regardless of their contribution to student outcomes." It's hard to draw conclusions about how well pandemic educational funding was spent, because it's unclear exactly what schools did with it. In fact, much of the additional funds seem to not have been spent at all, instead sitting in state coffers unused well into 2022. Schools didn't need more federal funding during the pandemic; they needed to open their doors. School closures are now acknowledged as a disastrous policy that unnecessarily isolated schoolchildren for months on end. From the beginning, the way to prevent learning loss was to get American children back in classrooms.The post It's Not Surprising That Federal Funding Didn't Stop Pandemic Learning Loss appeared first on Reason.com.

The case of 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez is not quite closed. While the Vanguard School's board of directors has declared that he may sport a "don't tread on me" patch on his backpack, a closer look at the school district's policies suggests that administrators are still inclined to tread all over Rodriguez's free speech rights. That's according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy organization. FIRE spoke with Jaiden's mother, who said that contrary to the board's public statement, a district official—Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of Harrison School District Two in Colorado Springs, Colorado—told her that her son would only be allowed to display the Gadsden flag patch as long as no one else complained about it. Moreover, Rodriguez is still prohibited from displaying a secondary patch that references the Firearms Policy Coalition and expresses support for the Second Amendment. The justification for this restriction is the district's categorical ban on content having to do with alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons.  Today, FIRE wrote The Vanguard School after learning the school will allow the student to wear the Gadsden flag patch… but only if nobody complains. And the school is *completely prohibiting* the student from displaying a patch expressing support for gun rights. More to come. https://t.co/KUsfASa9ad pic.twitter.com/4jahj0ya08 — FIRE (@TheFIREorg) August 31, 2023  In a letter to the district, FIRE's Aaron Terr explained that these policies violate the First Amendment. "The patch does not endorse unlawful activity or convey any threat, there is no evidence it has caused actual (or anticipated) substantial disruption of the school environment, nor is the mere fact that it depicts a firearm concrete evidence it will," wrote Terr. If consistently applied, the district's overly broad policy would restrict speech that is obviously permissible. "Under the policy, students cannot wear D.A.R.E. shirts or Everytown for Gun Safety pins," wrote Terr. "The policy goes far beyond prohibiting expression that promotes illegal activity or that would substantially disrupt the school environment." Nor can the district permit such patches up until the point at which someone complains about them. This would be an example of the heckler's veto; for obvious reasons, speech does not suddenly lose First Amendment protection just because someone objects to it. The district did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This situation requires swift clarification: School officials must recognize that they may not tread on the free speech rights of any students.The post That School Is Still Treading on Jaiden Rodriguez's Free Speech Rights appeared first on Reason.com.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, former President Donald Trump argues that more tariffs are needed to reduce America's trade deficit, which has grown to a record high under the watch of President Joe Biden. "Under Joe Biden, our trade deficits, also known as losses, have hit record highs," Trump wrote, in response to the Journal's criticism of his plans for higher tariffs. "Since 2000 the U.S. has racked up $17 trillion in cumulative trade deficits with the world. Only a fool or a fanatic would dismiss these facts as irrelevant." But only a fool or a fanatic could ignore the fact that we've already witnessed how raising tariffs doesn't reduce the trade deficit, which is the gap between the total value of a country's exports and imports. Trump's latest protectionist proposal is undermined by the reality of Trump's previous trade policies—and the fact that Biden has largely left them untouched since taking office. If America's trade deficits are determined by the policies of the current president—a very iffy claim, but the one Trump is making—then the former president is equally responsible. The numbers don't lie. America's trade deficit was $49 billion in March 2018, the month Trump announced his trade war and started hiking tariffs. By August 2020, the trade deficit had hit a 14-year high of $67 billion. The deficit has hovered around that same level ever since: It rang in at $65 billion in June, the most recent month for which data are available. That increase in the trade deficit occurred alongside climbing tariff rates. The average tariff rate on imports was about 1.5 percent when Trump took office. Today, it's over 3 percent. That's due to Trump's tariff increases, and Biden's unwillingness to reverse them. Those figures ought to raise an obvious question: If tariff rates have increased and the trade deficit has grown, why would yet higher tariffs work to reduce the gap? Trump's fixation on the trade deficit is not new. He spent much of the 2016 campaign and a significant amount of time during his four years in the White House complaining about the deficit, which he argues is evidence that foreign countries are somehow ripping off American businesses. (That's wrong, but let's not worry about that for now.) In fact, there's significant evidence that Trump's tariffs actually added to America's trade deficit. That's because one of the consequences of higher tariffs is a reduction in exports, and fewer exports will make a trade deficit grow. But the main reason why the trade deficit has grown in recent years is that Americans are choosing to buy more stuff from abroad. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Trump's tariff plan amounts to a massive tax increase on Americans whose decisions the former president doesn't like. The size of the country's trade deficit—like many other economic indicators—is largely beyond the power of a president to control. But if Trump wants to judge the current chief executive by the size of the trade deficit, he should have to answer for the same critique.The post Trump's Tariffs Didn't Reduce the Trade Deficit. Why Would They Work Now? appeared first on Reason.com.

The end of holiday season is upon us, and a chance to apply a new perspective to life as it slowly returns to boring normality. For a few short weeks, if you were lucky enough, you were able to immerse yourself in a different culture: eating new food; meeting new people; gazing, fascinated, upon new and startling sights as you encountered your Airbnb landlord’s Netflix algorithms.
In my own case, a week in Scotland led me to a lot of American college football documentaries. I now know how Jonny Manziel wrecked his career and exactly how Manti Te’o got catfished; what a “fake punt” and a “pancake block” is; and how pivotal the spread offence was to Urban Meyer’s tenure at the Florida Gators. Don’t tell me travel doesn’t broaden the mind.
Safely back home in the comforting arms of my own viewing profile, I’ve started to seek out more documentaries about sports I previously knew nothing about. (My god, the cobble stage of the Tour de France is brutal, isn’t it?) The algorithms generating my homepage, normally invisible to me, have gone haywire — a fact prompting me to look into exactly how they were constructed in the first place.
To work out what you might want to watch next, Netflix first classifies its programmes into at least 76,897 “microgenres”. These group each product under one or more relatively detailed headings, so that combinations of features which apparently appeal to a viewer in one instance can be quickly found in other cases, and then recommended to her. These include such categories as: “Goofy Comedies about Royalty”, “Violent Foreign Mother Son Relationship Movies”, “Understated Australian Movies”, and “Award Winning Underdog Movies”. It is unrecorded whether any particular programme counts as all four of these at once.
It’s interesting to consider what microgenres do to genre criticism in the traditional sense. Critics often assess the success or failure of an artwork against intended genre membership — if it’s a western or a romcom, for instance. Is it a good example of the genre or a bad one? Is it intended to subvert the genre in question, even? Such questions assume that the creators know which larger categories they are working within, or against.

Microgenres aren’t like this, though. You can hardly blame a director for not knowing, all along, that she was competing against other Dark Dramas for Hopeless Romantics Based on Books. And I don’t see how you could “subvert” microgenres at this level of specificity — you’d just automatically enter a different one.
In any case: after humans classify all the available products into microgenres, machine learning takes over. It cross-references information about what you already watched, at what time of day, and for exactly how long, with what other people watch. This places you into one of at least 2,000 worldwide “taste communities” or “taste clusters”. Based on your membership of a given community, Netflix can now start recommending to you the films and programmes also watched by what a company vice-president has referred to as your “taste doppelgangers”. Unlikely as it may appear, it seems I’m probably not the only viewer in the world to have simultaneous recommendations for Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold and At Home With The Furys.
Doing my research, I’ve been unable to find out whether micro-generic adjectives like “Goofy”, “Violent” and “Understated” are supposed by the company to refer to some absolute standard, or whether they are better understood as relative to local standards in the product’s country of origin. It seems to me that an Understated Australian Movie is probably quite different from an Understated French One.
But what does seem clear is that — officially according to Netflix, at least — membership of taste communities is not influenced by geographical location. Nor, allegedly, is it influenced by age, nor even sex. “We have seen that where you live, gender, age and other demographics are not significantly indicative of the content you will enjoy,” a company spokesperson has claimed. “Time after time, we see that what members actually watch and do on the service transcends the predictions of stereotypical demographics.”
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If this really is true, it goes against traditional thinking about aesthetic response. For centuries, it’s been assumed that your taste is heavily influenced by local context. Take David Hume, for instance, writing in 1757 about books: “We are more pleased, in the course of our reading, with pictures and characters, that resemble objects which are found in our own age or country, than with those which describe a different set of customs”. For this reason, he also claimed that “comedy is not easily transferred from one age or nation to another”. (In his defence, this was years before the international popularity of The Benny Hill Show complicated the picture.)
So, are national or regional sensibilities irrelevant to aesthetic taste after all? Or is the truth more depressing: that, thanks to companies like Netflix, each of us now swims in a pleasingly benign, individually personalised yet globalised televisual soup, so that nothing as discerning as aesthetic judgement can get going in the first place? I fear it’s the latter.  Choosing your next title from a range preselected for you — and especially where you know pretty much nothing about the titles otherwise — is more like randomly selecting a chocolate from the box than an exercise in careful discrimination.
When people tend to fret about algorithms governing streaming, they usually worry about what it does to our morals — potentially distorting our preferences towards the violent and exploitative on the basis of a few random watches — but not what it might do to aesthetic sensibilities. Yet maybe they should. It’s not just that failure to achieve instant popularity with your assigned taste community means a show can drop out of visibility on your homepage even just one day after launch, meaning that slow-burning series get no real chance for ignition. It’s also that, in terms of guidance about what to engage with, algorithms are replacing recommendations by humans, but with none of the surrounding benefits.
It’s clear we all need help in selecting items from the tsunami of streaming content available — decision-paralysis is definitely a thing. But algorithms speak straight to your limbic system, as it were, bypassing self-conscious reasons for picking this thing over that thing. They move choice out of what philosophers call “the space of reasons” into the less cerebral space of impulse-driven reaction. Critics and reviewers, in contrast, can tell you not just what you should like, but why you should like it.
Before streaming arrived, the timing of watching was not up to the viewer. It wasn’t like music where you could instantly buy a CD. You had to wait for your opportunity to watch new releases, along with everybody else in the country. Not only did this make possible more of a communal experience, but it also gave the professional critic a power that is now fast disappearing. She could, with some authoritative pull on her readership’s attention, issue them with a bold challenge: watch this programme, and either agree with my verdict about it, or explain to yourself — and to each other — why.
More from this authorThe dying art of the hatchet jobBy Dorian Lynskey
These days though, when a reviewer writes critically about a show on a streaming service, she’s already playing catch up with existing public responses. There is less urgency, and a lot of her authority to command attention has been lost. If she praises something that’s already popular, she sounds obsequious and timid. If she dislikes it, she sounds querulous and out-of-touch. She can still write about terrestrial channels of course; but here, too, there’s no longer a shared, simultaneous experience of the programme to ground public discussion. Everybody is off in private corners of the internet, doing their own thing.
Some may respond that even so, the world is still awash with people writing critically about film and TV. This is true but is scant consolation. With most internet criticism being fired aimlessly into the global void in the vague hope of an audience, there is little sense of a dialogue being initiated, with a defined readership in mind, in order to experience something all together — good, bad or indifferent — then argue about it.
Another problem is that, just as decision-paralysis is generated by the sheer number of programmes out there unless we have help of some kind, the same goes for the huge volume of online reviews too. Interesting voices or views tend to get lost in the crowd. Soon enough, machine algorithms will probably work out what kinds of review an individual might like to read: Withering Scandinavian; Largely Effusive With A Couple of Caveats; Sixties British Sexist; and so on. For all I know, maybe they do already.
To bypass this volume problem, sites such as Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes sample highlights from reviewers and aggregate their ratings for a film or show, effectively treating individual critics as members of large panels whose joint verdict counts more than individual ones. Hume would approve of this. He also thought that joint verdicts of “true judges” were more reliable than ones from single individuals, since they allowed private prejudices, biases and blind spots to more readily cancel each other out.
But I think that, with criticism, we shouldn’t necessarily seek reliability. Choosing what programme to consume for an evening is not like buying a used car or choosing a spouse. The stakes are really not that high. What I want from a critic, rather, is erudition and provocation, the better to form my own judgements and not just blindly follow those of others. No matter how well the algorithms anticipate what I want to watch this evening, they are not going to give me that.

Are men and women naturally good? The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought so, though he admits that we began in a state of “savagery” in which moral terms such as good and bad simply didn’t apply. From there, however, the human race graduated to a more positive stage, mid-way between “the stupidity of brutes” and what Rousseau saw as the disaster of civilisation. With the birth of civilised society, a state of peace, innocence and compassion gave way to one of war, law, government and the unequal distribution of property.
Government, for Rousseau, is a largely fraudulent contract imposed by the rich on the poor, and the founder of civil society was simply the first man to say “This is mine” of a piece of land and found people credulous enough to believe him. How much crime, war, murder, misery and horror, he reflects, could have been avoided if someone had pointed out that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and the earth itself to nobody at all? Progress is an illusion, and science the ruin of humanity. Civilisation has made us neither happier nor more virtuous. Yet once we had been expelled from the happy garden, there was no way back.
Some may see this view as a trifle one-sided. What’s surely more convincing is the suggestion that civilisation has made us both better and worse. If it holds the solution to some of our troubles, it also creates problems all of its own. It tempers and restrains our more anti-social impulses, but in doing so brings with it forms of devastation beyond the scope of “primitive” humanity. If their problem was weakness, ours is power. “To be able to overpower the monstrous progeny of our own intelligence,” writes the art historian Malcolm Bull, “has always been the condition of human survival.” Humanity is constantly in danger of overreaching itself and bringing itself to nothing. Its abiding defect is hubris. The monstrous progeny of our own intelligence is now known as AI.
For a certain strain of conservatism, human nature is mostly degenerate and has always been that way. “It is not that our age is particularly corrupt,” remarks the Anglo-Catholic Tory T.S. Eliot. “All ages are corrupt.” This isn’t to say you can’t squeeze something valuable out of people, but to do so you need order and discipline, sometimes of a draconian kind. Goodness exists, but only the incurably bright-eyed see it as spontaneous.
Classical liberalism takes the opposite view. People fare best when they are left alone to develop their talents. Repressing them will simply stunt their growth, whereas spiritual laissez-faire will allow them to flourish. Human beings may abuse their freedom, but they are not truly human without it. If they are to go right, you have to allow for the possibility of their going wrong. Romanticism is a particularly affirmative instance of this creed. Men and women have certain creative capacities which demand fulfilment, and most of the world’s evils stem from the fact that these powers are being obstructed. The names of the obstructers are legion: the state, religion, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, ethnic supremacism, the dominant class and so on. Revolution is the moment when energies which have been suppressed burst triumphantly through these barriers and come into their own.
More from this author Despotism is a beast of capitalismBy Terry Eagleton 
There are a number of things wrong with this theory. Are all human capacities to be realised? What about my ability to assassinate the Pope, along with my burning desire to do so? Some of our powers are clearly noxious, but how do we distinguish these from the more life-affirming ones? And what if some of our capabilities are at war with others? As for repression, there are those like Freud who claim that a certain amount of it is necessary for our functioning. Repression can be good for you, even if too much of it is likely to make you ill. It will also be good for the Pope if I manage to stifle my urge to topple him from the balcony of the Vatican.
And if all we need is for expression to break through repression, why doesn’t it happen more often? One answer is because the Law is already present within desire, disciplining and restraining it. Patriarchy, colonialism and the like aren’t just external powers; it’s because they persuade us to internalise them that they can thrive so vigorously. The aim of the Law is that we should love it, not simply obey it. By identifying our own desires with those of authority, a trespass against authority feels like a violation of ourselves. It’s partly because this identification can never be perfect — because we hate the Law of the Father as well as loving it — that states, empires and sovereignties are brought low from time to time.
Radicals agree with conservatives that liberals are too sanguine about human nature. But they also agree with liberals that conservatives downplay its positive potential. One can see the argument in religious terms. There are happy-clappy Christians who bash tambourines, play down sin, ooze moral smugness and rejoice in their own salvation. For these rather weird types, faith is mostly a matter of grinning. There are also gloomy Christians for whom human nature is entirely corrupt, and for whom we would be heading towards hell-fire were it not for the arbitrary fact that Christ has redeemed us. The general sense is that Christ succumbed to a moment of liberal sentimentalism in rescuing us from the Devil, and may well have been better advised to let us fall into his clutches.
Both of these cases are deviations from mainstream Christianity, for which human beings have the potential to be virtuous but need radical self-transformation in order to be so. Goodness is neither spontaneous nor non-existent; instead, it requires a degree of hard labour. It doesn’t come automatically, but when it does come, we recognise it as a fulfilment of the creatures we are. So the bad news is that we won’t do as we are right now; the good news, however, is that virtue requires a transformation that we have the potential to achieve, which rules out the idea that we are utterly degenerate.

For Enlightenment liberals, moral and material progress go hand in hand. Nobody believes this any longer, if you take it to mean that the more washing machines you have, the more merciful and compassionate you become. Even so, there is a kernel of truth in this mythical shell, which is that material scarcity breeds violence and exploitation. People who aren’t afflicted by famine and disease are more likely to be altruistic than those who have to fight over a crust of bread. They are too busy staying alive to bother fishing you out of the river. For some conservatives, by contrast, moral progress is in inverse proportion to the growth of prosperity. The more civilisation advances, the more greedy, selfish and heartless it becomes. The radical sees this as true of our present form of social life, but not as a judgement on civilisation as such.
The so-called state of nature which preceded our Fall into war and private property was a blessed time for Rousseau but a nightmare for Thomas Hobbes. In Hobbes’s view, it is a condition of unending conflict in which every individual’s hand is raised against every other; and only by collectively agreeing to become subject to unlimited government, in the so-called social contract, will peace ever be established. (There is a logical problem about how people can come to make such a contract without having the concepts of contract, law, authority, obedience and so on in the first place, in which case they would seem to be already in a state of civilisation.)
Despite being a genial fellow who enjoyed a drink and liked a good laugh, Hobbes is commonly seen as the most pessimistic of English philosophers, though the contemporary thinker John Gray runs him a close second. His latest book, The New Leviathans, argues that we have returned to Hobbes’s state of nature in artificial form. Liberalism is finished, and the practice of tolerance has passed into history. (He seems to have wokeness in mind here, which is to ascribe world-historical status to a passing phenomenon.)
It is good, however, that liberal individualism is washed up, since as Hobbes would agree, unfettered self-determination is a fantasy. In luridly apocalyptic language, Gray speaks of “a spectacle of self-immolation, at once tragic and farcical”, taking place in the West. Hobbes was mistaken to believe that there was any deliverance from the brutal state of nature, since “the war of all against all begins in every human bring, and it never ends”. The book ends with a lame concession that human beings can “act in the service of life”, a proposition it has spent some time trying to demolish.
More from this author Ludwig Wittgenstein's war on philosophyBy Terry Eagleton 
Pessimism isn’t popular with governments, since disillusion can lead to disaffection. So this won’t be Rishi Sunak’s book of the year, not least because it pushes pessimism unnervingly close to nihilism. All the same, it confronts the truth that no politician dares utter: that things are very bad with a world in which, in Gray’s words, either market forces are directed by the state or the state has been captured by corporate power.
The myth of a benevolent state of nature was shattered a long time ago. More recently, a version of it known as childhood innocence was challenged by the psychoanalysts. Infantile sexuality had been known about for some time, not least by infants. But we had not been prepared for the work of Freud’s disciple, Melanie Klein, who writes of the baby’s murderous fantasies of pounding the mother’s breast to pieces.
Yet even if infants are indeed mini-murderers, at least in potential, this is not all there is to say. They are also able to recognise and respond to the love of their carers, a love without which they will fail to flourish. They experience a gratitude for it which in Freud’s view plants the seeds of human morality. Later on, this instinct will need to be educated into conscious moral awareness, a highly precarious enterprise. If we are not complete villains, it is because what greets us upon entering a violent world is something which points beyond it.

Jordan Peterson slammed Disney CEO Bob Iger for the second time in a matter of days, taking aim at the company's LGBTQ+ friendly policies.

The Canadian psychologist and influencer retweeted photos of a range of LGBTQ+ Pride and transgender flags built into decor at a Disney theme park. The flags, representing different members of the LGBTQ+ community, were painted onto giant rainbows and balloons with the word "love" emblazoned on them.

Peterson retweeted the photos from the X account, Libs of TikTok, who said they received them from a "disturbed visitor." Newsweek contacted the Libs of TikTok team by email for comment.

In his retweet, Peterson took aim at Iger and Disney's rocky performance on the stock market last week.

From left, Jordan Peterson arrives at Perth Airport in Australia on November 28, 2022, and Bob Iger is seen at the 95th Academy Awards on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood. Peterson has taken another swipe at Iger on X, formerly known as Twitter. Faith Moran/Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

"What's up Iger Stock price Not far enough in the tank Yet? @Disney," asked Peterson who has long criticized the company for its "woke" policies, including diverse casting in TV and film titles, and for being LGBTQ+ friendly.

Newsweek contacted Disney by email for comment.

Disney's stocks fell to a three-year low at the close of trading last week, closing on August 25 at $82.83. At other times during the week, the stocks had fallen to some of their lowest prices in decades.

At the most recent close of the markets on August 30, Disney's share price had rallied to some extent, finishing the day at $84.28 per share.

What's up

Iger

Stock price

Not far enough in the tank

Yet?@Disney https://t.co/WLrHxcjxQ0 — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 28, 2023

Just two days prior to the latest tweet, Peterson criticized Disney after photos emerged of people who appeared to be men dressed as female characters from the Disney universe greeting guests at theme parks.

"Hey Iger, Stock price still not Low enough For you," Peterson wrote on Saturday.

Peterson has accused the Mouse House of going "woke" over issues that include casting Black actor Halle Bailey as Ariel in this year's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid and hosting LGBTQ+ days at its theme parks.

But he was recently the subject of ridicule when he retweeted a satirical news site that tweeted about the upcoming Snow White live-action reboot.

The 2024 film faced backlash when it announced the casting of Rachel Zegler, an actor of Polish and Colombian descent, as Snow White, and replaced the seven dwarfs from the 1939 film with "magical creatures" of varying genders and ethnicities, with only one actor having dwarfism.

Peterson responded to a tweet by satirical conservative website The Babylon Bee, which wrote, "Disney to remove problematic kiss from classic movie, Snow White will now remain dead."

He was accused of not realizing it was a joke after he retweeted it and added, "Looks like @Disney can't stop chasing failure," leading some social media users to mock him for the apparent gaffe.

Others were quick to defend Peterson, suggesting he knew exactly that Babylon Bee is a satirical site and that he knew what he was doing.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Although I don’t know exactly what you were hoping for in your summer vacation this year, I can make an educated guess based on data. The travel company Expedia, in a survey of more than 12,000 travelers, found that 38 percent of them primarily value relaxation, and 37 percent are searching for “contentment and mental well-being.” Meanwhile, no research I have ever seen finds that vacationers are looking for an increase in their stress and aggravation.Yet an increase in stress is what 65 percent of American travelers have admitted to expecting from their vacations. Some reasons for this are obvious, such as being at the mercy of airlines, which rank in the top five most-hated industries (right up there with cable companies, internet- and cellphone-service providers, and health insurers). The last things you are looking for on vacation are involuntary delays, cancellations, lines, and lame excuses. Other common sources of vacation anxiety include financial worries and the hassles of packing, making travel arrangements, and developing an itinerary. Simply the pressure to have fun is something people report as a downer.But a commonly overlooked source of vacation stress is a mismatch between your vacation type and your personality type. If you find yourself less relaxed and satisfied after your vacation than before it—or if you always dread what has been planned for you by family or friends—a possible culprit is this mismatch. With a little more information and thought, you can tailor your next vacation to your true personality.[Arthur C. Brooks: How to have your most fulfilling vacation ever]But what is that exactly? Psychologists generally define personality according to “Big Five” traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness toward others, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (which can conveniently be remembered by the acronym OCEAN). A huge body of research maps these traits onto many aspects of life, such as job choice, relationship success, religiosity, and general happiness. And a few researchers have looked at how the traits predicted vacation enjoyment. For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that more conscientious, less neurotic people did not perceive as much stress on vacation as their less conscientious, more neurotic counterparts.The Big Five combine to create other personality types that also contribute to vacation satisfaction. Consider narcissism, which is characterized by self-centeredness, entitlement, self-importance, and disregard for others. Narcissists (specifically grandiose narcissists) are typically high in extroversion and low in agreeableness. They also tend to be unrealistically optimistic about the future, which explains why researchers have determined that they commonly have very high expectations for their vacations and are usually disappointed.Arguably the most important personality traits predicting vacation satisfaction, however, are openness to experience and extroversion. Openness to travel, in particular, is what the researcher Stanley C. Plog termed allocentricity, which he identified as comfort with novelty, independence, and adventurousness. Its opposite is psychocentricity, which involves familiarity-seeking, avoidance of uncertainty, and a desire for routine. Allocentric vacationers want new experiences, spontaneity, and surprises. In contrast, these things stress psychocentrics out.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.The other important trait is extroversion. Extroverts are outgoing and talkative, as we know, so they get energy from other people and especially like meeting strangers. Introverts are the reverse, preferring the company of a few close friends or relatives and feeling exhausted after too long in the company of strangers. Vacations featuring crowds and a lot of new acquaintances are thus stressful for introverts and energizing for extroverts.Scholars have combined these axes of allocentricity/psychocentricity and extroversion/introversion to derive a typology of “vacation personalities,” which predict the levels of stress (or its absence, in the form of boredom) that will be experienced by different kinds of people. Based on this typology, we can classify vacationers into four basic types. If you can identify yourself in this schema, you can design a vacation suited to your desired level of risk, adventure, and exposure to crowds and strangers.1. The Spontaneous Socializer
You are both extroverted and allocentric, so you gain energy from spontaneity, adventure, and meeting new people. The ideal vacation for you is to go someplace crowded and popular, but without a highly structured itinerary. For example, you might want to book a summer trip to Rome for a week with nothing but airline tickets, hotel reservations, and a guidebook. Then you could talk with everyone you meet in restaurants and go dancing at night.2. The Gregarious Planner
You are psychocentric and extroverted, so you love people but hate travel uncertainty. Meeting strangers gives you energy, but not having activities planned sounds terrible to you. For you, the best vacation is a packaged and preorganized trip to a popular destination. You might consider a guided visit to Disney World or a walking tour of Jerusalem, but either way, you’ll prefer to go with a large group, on a trip carefully curated by a travel company.3. The Surprise Avoider
Psychocentric and introverted, you are the opposite of the spontaneous socializer—you feel your energy dissipating when you have to worry about what you’re going to do and the prospect of dealing with a lot of people, especially strangers. For you, the ideal vacation this year is the same as last year, and the year before: a beautiful, peaceful place you know well, with a few people you know best. You might want to rent a cabin by a lake for two weeks every year, and invite the same small group of friends or family members.4. The Lone Wanderer
This kind of vacation personality might seem unlikely: You get energy from spontaneity and risk but are exhausted by strangers and crowds. But that isn’t so strange. In fact, my daughter has this sort of allocentric, introverted personality. For her 18th birthday, she wanted to try skydiving, alone except for me. (We had a great time.) Besides jumping out of a plane with your dad, another idea for this type of vacation could be to drive Route 66 solo on a motorcycle, with no itinerary and only a credit card, a sleeping bag, and a few good books.The narrow objective of this column is to help you design a better vacation than perhaps the ones you have had in the past. In a larger sense, though, it’s about designing a better life. What you enjoy and what stresses you out on vacation are much the same as what you like and dislike the rest of the year. You are not a Lone Wanderer or a Gregarious Planner for just two weeks a year.Recently, an Uber driver was telling me how much he hated his old 9-to-5 office job, in which he’d never met new people and did the same thing day after day. Driving for a living, he never knows what he’ll see and whom he’ll meet. Even though driving pays less well, he told me, he is much happier. “You are a Spontaneous Socializer,” I told him, “but you were stuck in a Surprise Avoider job.” After hearing what these terms meant, he said he wished someone had told him that much earlier in life.[Read: Why must we work so hard before vacation?]Ask yourself whether the life you have built (or the one that has been built for you) makes you feel stressed or, alternately, leaves you feeling understimulated. If you are an introvert, doing remote work from a cabin off the grid in Montana might be right for you; if you are an extrovert, no amount of convenience will make that sort of isolation worthwhile. If you are psychocentric, you might need to add more structure and schedule to your job and home life, but if you’re allocentric, you should look for a professional life that is unpredictable and different every day.By trying to match your circumstances to your character, you might just find yourself on vacation all year round.

For the Proud Boys, the hammer has fallen. Joe Biggs, a leader of the far-right male  organization, received a 17-year sentence for his activities during the January 6 Capitol riot in 2021. Enrique Tarrio, the group's chairman, is still awaiting sentencing but was similarly convicted of sedition, conspiracy to obstruct the 2020 election's certification, and other serious crimes earlier this year. While 17 years constitutes a lengthy prison sentence, it is considerably shorter than what the government requested: Prosecutors wanted 33 years for Biggs. That's in keeping with the government's view that Biggs committed an act of terrorism; the prosecution asked U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly to apply a terrorism enhancement to the sentence. "Biggs committed a crime of terrorism on January 6, and the Court should not hesitate to impose a sentence that reflects the seriousness of the crime and its threat to our nation—as reflected in the Sentencing Guidelines," wrote the prosecutors in their sentencing recommendation document. In court, prosecutors argued that Biggs' actions certainly constituted terrorism because, though January 6 did not involve widespread destruction—exploding buildings, massive casualties—its impact on the nation's collective scarring is like that of a terrorist attack, they said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason McCullough argued that the psychological fallout from January 6 is "no different than the act of a spectacular bombing of a building." The judge quibbled slightly with this argument—accusing prosecutors of "overstat[ing]" their case—but ultimately agreed in principle that "while blowing up a building in some city somewhere is a very bad act… the constitutional moment we were in that day is something that is so sensitive that it deserves a significant sentence." This does not seem overly scientific. Prosecutors said Biggs committed an act of terrorism akin to blowing up a building and that he should get 33 years in prison. The judge said, Well that's sort of an exaggeration, so… how about half that many years? Biggs and other January 6 participants undoubtedly committed crimes—vandalism, trespassing, and in some cases, violence against police officers. They should be held accountable for the mayhem that they caused. But prosecutors who implicitly accuse them of staging something along the lines of another 9/11 have gotten over their skis. Many Americans have deep embarrassment over the spectacle of January 6, and rightly so; they do not consider the riot to be anywhere near as serious as a blown-up building. The government came down extra hard on Biggs because he is a leader of the Proud Boys, and also because he has military training; he should have known, prosecutors argued, that he was in a unique position to actually provoke violence and destruction as he led the crowd to the barricades and tore down parts of the fencing. Again, he inarguably committed crimes and must face the consequences. But rounding up his actions to terrorism is frankly giving the Proud Boys' plans more credit than they deserve. Broken windows and defiled desks were never going to prevent Joe Biden from taking office. If there was a conspiracy to steal the election, it unfolded in the weeks leading up to January 6, as President Donald Trump and his acolytes allegedly attempted to interfere with electoral processes underway in the states. What occurred on January 6 was a largely spontaneous burst of property destruction and limited violence that interrupted Congress' certification of the votes—a riot, not a planned insurrection. As Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote when Biggs and Tarrio were first convicted, the term insurrection "implies a level of planning and organization that does not fit the chaotic reality of what happened that day." Seventeen years is an extremely long time in prison; only the worst of the worst, the most dangerous and irredeemable sort of people, deserve to languish for such a time. It does the country no good to pretend that what transpired on January 6 was a terrorist attack, highly and effectively organized by a paramilitary group, that came within striking distance of actually preventing the peaceful transfer of power.The post Proud Boys Leader Sentenced to 17 Years in Prison Over January 6 Riot appeared first on Reason.com.

The brief trade war between the U.S. and Europe in the early 1960s might seem hardly worth remembering—and it pales in comparison to the political and cultural upheaval that defined that decade. But any American who has bought a pickup truck in the past 50 years has been collateral damage in that conflict—a conflict that started because European farmers were mad about American exports of frozen chicken. The 25 percent retaliatory tariffs that President Lyndon B. Johnson set on imported light trucks have fenced off the American pickup truck market from foreign competitors for decades. As a result of the so-called chicken tax, consumers pay higher prices, and a handful of brands have become dominant in the marketplace. The other tariffs that were part of that long-ago trade war have been repealed. This one remains. "There are a few people highly invested in keeping it around and no one really cares to get rid of it," explains Jordan Golson, a freelance automotive journalist. When it comes to tariffs, he says, "It's not easy to make one of these rules, but it's a thousand times harder to get rid of one." On this week's show, Golson also discusses the lengths that some foreign truck-makers have gone to in order to avoid those tariffs. That includes the story of the Subaru BRAT: a small pickup truck that was imported to America with seats installed in the truck bed—so it would be classified as a passenger vehicle rather than a cargo vehicle and, thus, exempt from the 25 percent import tax. Daniel Griswold, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, reminds us that the chicken tax has caused real economic harm in addition to those funny, creative attempts at tariff dodging. "The U.S. government is artificially constricting competition in that market, and that means higher prices, it means less choice," Griswold says. Automobiles can be imported to the U.S. with tariffs of just 2.5 percent, and the result has been a far more robust market for consumers and greater foreign investment in making cars in the U.S.—something that hasn't happened in the truck market due to the trade barriers. The chicken tax has been "a losing proposition all around for Americans, consumers, and the American economy," says Griswold. It's also a great example of how tariffs can stifle, rather than protect, domestic markets.   Further reading for this week's episode: "Cheap American Chicken Gave Us This Weird Subaru Pickup," by Golson, Wired "Why Are Pickups So Expensive? Blame the Chicken Tax," by Griswold, Cato Institute "How a Tax on Chicken Changed the Playing Field for U.S. Automakers," by Sonari Glinton, NPR   Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact checking by Katherine SypherThe post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: The 'Chicken Tax' That Makes Pickup Trucks More Expensive appeared first on Reason.com.

Even the Finnish Food Authority, in its announcement of animals being culled, noted that minks are susceptible to both human and avian influenza. If one animal is infected by both, the viruses can mix genes and give rise to an avian flu that can infect humans. Fur farms in Finland, however, aren’t being closed. Instead the Finnish Wildlife Agency allowed fur breeders to kill wild birds near their farms in large numbers. The Agency told me the killings were authorized “to prevent contacts between infected birds and animals at fur farms,” but scientists point out this is the wrong approach and likely futile — and more fur farms in Finland have since announced further outbreaks.

Meanwhile, officials said a sizable outbreak of H5N1 among pet cats in Poland this summer killed at least 29 animals, though cat owners have compiled lists with as many as 89 sick animals. The outbreak has many unusual features that make it especially concerning, and yet there still hasn’t been an explanation of how exactly it happened or a vigorous investigation.

The affected cats lived in different areas of Poland, yet their viruses had almost identical genetic sequences. They obviously couldn’t have infected one another. Wild birds are unlikely to be the source, especially since some of the cats never went outside and the outbreak was not detected in Poland’s neighbors. It seems clear that the outbreak originated from a source in Poland.

Scientists and cat owners suspect cat food.

In a further twist, the virus from all the sick cats in Poland had two specific genetic mutations found almost exclusively among mammals, so either all the cats were infected and then their viruses independently developed these mutations or the two mutations were already in whatever infected them.

Tom Peacock, who studies influenza at Britain’s Imperial College, told me the most likely scenarios were that either the cats were eating mammal meat from sick animals or meat from birds where the virus had somehow developed these mutations that are normally associated with mammalian adaptation.

This week, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo became the latest high-ranking U.S. official to journey to China to engage with the country’s top leaders. It was a worthy effort. But now it has played out, and the Chinese government hasn’t budged. As President Biden would say: What’s the plan, Stan?

The administration’s theory was that reestablishing high-level dialogue with Beijing might “build a floor” under the ever-worsening bilateral relationship. Biden has said he doesn’t want a Cold War with China. So Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, special envoy for climate John F. Kerry and now Raimondo have each spent significant time and effort traveling to China over the past three months.

Some see the administration as weak for dispatching four officials before Beijing did anything to reciprocate. Biden’s team has responded, rightly, that engaging with Beijing is the responsible thing to do. But now is a good moment to look at the results — or lack thereof.

Despite meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in June, Blinken came home empty-handed; the Chinese government wouldn’t even agree to establish a military-to-military crisis hotline. The most newsworthy part of Yellen’s trip was that she inadvertently ate “magic mushrooms” (although she said she didn’t hallucinate). And Chinese officials rebuffed Kerry’s call for quicker climate action. Before Raimondo even arrived, Chinese hackers broke into her email account.

Raimondo set expectations so low that her announcement of two new dialogues to manage U.S.-China economic tensions might seem like progress. Unfortunately, it is anything but. Creating discussion forums that meet on a schedule is exactly how Beijing dodges U.S. and international concerns about its behavior. Inevitably, while these meetings are pending, the United States holds off from actions that might upset Beijing.

“Once you get into these calendar-based engagements, it’s never a good time to do something tough competitively,” former National Security Council official Ivan Kanapathy told me. “That’s what it seems like we are building toward.”

In fact, the Biden administration decided in its first year to avoid old patterns of establishing empty dialogues with China as alibis for progress. And, yet, here we are. Privately, officials explain that Biden very much wants Xi to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco in November. Biden has long maintained that foreign policy is personal. Whether that’s true or not, a Biden-Xi meeting has become an important U.S. policy objective.

Raimondo also has political aspirations and wants to bolster her foreign policy bona fides as what some call a “balanced hawk.” That has led some in Washington to see her as telling both the China engagement crowd and the hard-liners what they want to hear. For example, on her trip, she promised not to compromise on national security concerns and warned Chinese officials that their business-unfriendly policies were making China “uninvestible.” At the same time, the commerce secretary emphasized that she did not believe the two economies should “decouple.”

Her tightrope walk will soon be put to the test. Raimondo is set to announce the final implementation rules for the Biden administration’s toughest high-technology export restrictions to date. If her announcement opens huge loopholes in the restrictions, as has been reported, that would signal she and the Biden team are backing down from the difficult parts of the economic competition.

To be fair, Raimondo’s general premise that the United States should encourage trade while protecting sensitive national security technology is correct. The problem is that the Chinese are not buying into it. During her visit, Beijing offered no concessions and signaled no policy changes. Meanwhile, China is cracking down on the flow of economic and financial data, raiding foreign firms, weaning itself off the U.S. dollar and stockpiling food and commodities. Beijing’s actions show that it is preparing for the international economic climate to get worse, not better.

“All of these policy changes do not make sense if the goal is to promote long-term economic growth, but they could make sense if they are meant to help endure a conflict with the West,” Mark Kennedy, director of the Wilson Center’s Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition, told me.

The Biden team’s China approach is at a crossroads. Though it’s wise to leave the door open for positive moves from Beijing, the administration should double down on its strategy to protect our technological edge and work with allies to reduce dependence on China’s economy. Officials cast these efforts as “de-risking” rather than the more drastic “decoupling.”

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions. [MUSIC PLAYING]

I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So Michelle is out this week —

Miss you, Michelle.

Miss you, Michelle — which means she’s going to miss our conversation about Putin and the war in Ukraine. And we’ll get into the war itself in a moment, the situation on the front, how the war is going — maybe not so well — and how it might actually end. But I want to start with someone who to me has always been one of the most interesting characters in this whole conflict. That’s the head of the Wagner Group, which is the Russian mercenary outfit that’s played a big role in the fighting throughout the conflict — Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died last week in what I think it’s fair to call an extremely suspicious plane crash.

The guy who tried to overthrow Putin dies in a plane crash two months later?

Who could have foreseen it?

Entirely coincidental.

Yes, the guy who launched a weird maybe sort of coup against Putin dies in an unexpected accident. But look, with the caveat that everything we say here about Prigozhin’s death comes with a big allegedly, is there any good reason to think that his death was not the work of Vladimir Putin?

The only thing that would give me any doubt is that it seems like a pretty quick way to go for someone who committed what seems like the greatest crime in Putin’s books, which is a crime of betrayal. We’re used to Putin being someone who likes to use nerve agents and slow acting poisons and things like that to go after his enemies —

Allegedly.

— the only surprise to me was just how quick and painless this probably was for Prigozhin.

There’s nothing more important to Putin than staying in power. And here’s a guy who attempted to challenge openly, dramatically that hold on power. So you know, Occam’s razor meets Putin’s knife, whatever you want to call it. What I find really interesting about this, if it was an assassination — of course, the Kremlin has denied that — it came after there seemed to have been a sort of understanding or a deal in place between them. Prigozhin went off to Belarus, no charges for mutiny. He even visited the Kremlin in late June. So the message that Prigozhin’s death sends, even two months later, is that you never really know where you stand with Putin, that you’re not safe even when you think you might be.

I mean, how could Prigozhin have possibly imagined that he was safe? I mean, to all those of us trying to parse the literal Kremlinology of what was going on in this bizarre —

It’s not a metaphor.

It’s not a metaphor. It’s literal, right?

No, it’s really literal.

It’s like if there was another scandal in the Watergate or something, right? Like, it’s in the Kremlin. To me at the time, it just seemed so baffling that you would have a coup that went literally halfway to Moscow. You know, you’re driving to Moscow. And you’re like, no, we’re going to make a deal. And Prigozhin is not a figure who you would associate with political naivety or anything like that. If he had made a deal with Putin and vanished to a tropical island somewhere, you might have said, OK, this guy thinks he can get away. But hanging out in Belarus, going back to Moscow, it’s — in a certain way, the only reason to doubt that it was Moscow is that it was — it’s so obvious that it was Moscow. How could Prigozhin have possibly put himself in this position?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I’m the only among the three of us who has actually been to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, unless you guys want to surprise me with your travels.

No, Lydia. No, you win again.

Oh, sorry —

You’re the most worldly among us.

— humble brag.

Just a little humble brag.

Lydia Polgreen, as always.

I actually ate a meal of python on the riverside there, on the beautiful river in Bangui. The reason that I mentioned Bangui is that one of my closest kind of Russia watching friends, who’s an economist — when I asked him, this is someone who lived in Moscow for a long time, you know, what he thought was going to happen to Prigozhin, he said to me, I think Prigozhin is going to go and live in a villa in Bangui. And I imagined a future for Prigozhin as a kind of Africa based warlord because they have so many different things going on there.

The Wagner Group, right?

The Wagner Group, yes.

Russia’s increasing activity in Africa has largely been sort of mediated through, or washed through Wagner Group activities.

Exactly, and so you have them helping out governments in Mali and other different places, helping out being a real euphemism for —

Just your friendly neighborhood Russian mercenary.

Russian mercenary. And so one of the big mysteries for me is, why not just let him go off and live that life? That speaks to, I think, a lot of questions about what’s actually going on in Russia, and what are the sort of political dynamics there?

That would also reduce his chances of falling into martyrdom. You know, like, if he’s just kind of off far away, the way the Brits would send their criminals to Australia, just send them far away.

Yeah, and of course whatever is happening in Russia has a big impact on the war in Ukraine. And some people have been hoping from the start of this war for some kind of internal shakeup inside Russia to be the thing that ends the stalemate, delivers victory, delivers peace. And we have to be honest. Right now, post Prigozhin, that seems less likely to happen, with obviously the caveat that something different could come along tomorrow, which seems to make it a good time to talk about the question of, what kind of ending does this war actually have? We seem to have moved from a period where there was a kind of war of maneuver with sweeping offensives and counteroffensives to a real war of attrition that looks like a kind of World War I scenario, except with obviously more drones than they had in 1915. And as with World War I, then the question becomes, once you’re in a war of attrition, how do you actually get out of it? And I’m curious for both of you, have your views on that question changed over the last six months? What do you guys think?

I mean, I think for me there’s — we’ve sort of moved well out of the kind of, I don’t know, fairy tale stage of this conflict, right? There was an early phase where the Russians seemed kind of awesome and all powerful. They were the evil villain that was unstoppable. Very quickly, that illusion was punctured by the amazing, extraordinary success, early success of the Ukrainian military. And now, I think we’ve kind of lost all of our illusions on both sides, right? I mean, the Russian military is weak and ineffective, but the Ukrainians have not, despite their incredible performance, have not been able to push the Russians fully back. And we’re at this stage where you’re making a big to do out of reclaiming a relatively small town — strategic, but small town called Robotyne. So I think that just sort of underscores your point, Ross, that we’re entering a real, real grind, and that this is going to go on for a very, very long time, absent some sort of fundamental change in dynamic. And both Prigozhin’s death and the kind of broader things on the global stage, in terms of arming Ukraine and the politics in various parts of the world around this conflict, I think are bearing down and creating more sort of muck for it to get stuck in.

I think it’s so hard to say where we are in a war when we’re in it. When it started, right, like you said, it seemed like it might be quick, like the Ukrainians could not withstand the overwhelming Russian assault. But a year and a half later, here we are. Does that mean we’re in the middle, in the late stages, early? I mean, the Soviets thought they’d be out of Afghanistan in a year, and it took them nine. We thought we’d be out of Afghanistan quickly and it took us 20. So I never know what to say when I think kind of, like, where are we? Where do we stand in the war? There was a piece in Foreign Affairs recently, I think it was called the unwinnable war or something similarly dour. And it laid out that stalemate, that basically neither side is in a position to deliver a decisive military victory. But neither side seems to be anywhere near accepting the possibility of a negotiated solution. Do you guys remember that big, controversial Rolling Stone magazine piece about Stanley McChrystal, “The Runaway General“?

Yeah, yeah.

They got they got McChrystal fired.

McChrystal was then the new US commander in Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan, yes.

Under Obama.

Well, of course, what got him fired was that he said all these kind of nasty, terrible — petty, mainly, things — he and his staff, not just McChrystal, about the administration. But there was one line in it that just really stuck with me. It had nothing to do with the controversy, and it was one of McChrystals’ top aides, who was talking about how the war in Afghanistan would end. And he said, it’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win, or taste like a win. This is going to end in an argument. And I feel a little bit about this war in similar terms. It’s not going to be clean. It’s not going to be an overwhelming victory by one side or the other. It’s going to end in an argument.

Well, and also, there’s a lot of talk about negotiations and different characters on the global stage who are at the heart of them, and pushing them. So there’s the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, who’s trying to do his version of negotiations. You’ve also had China and President Xi pushing his plans. Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, he’s got his own proposal. So there’s —

Pope Francis has a theoretical plan.

God bless.

Blessed by God, in fact.

Yes, indeed. Indeed, if anyone has an inside lock on that, it’s definitely Pope Francis. But you have a lot of different power centers, or emerging or aspiring power centers in the world seeing this conflict through lots of different lenses, you know, and jockeying for their own interests. And this kind of no negotiation at all position that the Ukrainians have is, I think, increasingly running up against this multiplicity of interests that are pressing on lots of different pressure points around the globe.

Right, I mean, and there’s been a whole range of hopes, from the idea that our unprecedented economic warfare was going to bring Russia to its knees, to the idea that some kind of Prigozhin style coup was going to replace Putin, a whole host of hopes that we aren’t going to actually have to do that kind of dirty deal in this case. And right now, that looks like a thin hope. And it also raises the question of what brings Putin to the negotiating table. Among our little group here, I think you guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think all of us are sort of poised somewhere between full hawk and full dove in this war. You know, that we all sort of expect —

What else is there?

Well, we’re —

Yes, we are. We are.

— grim, grim realists, right? We’re all sort of —

Yeah.

— there’s a tendency therefore, for me at least, to focus on the weakness of the hawks’ argument and to say, look, you know, yeah, in the end, there’s going to be — it’s going to end with an argument, like you said, Carlos, right? But the weakness of the doves’ argument from the beginning has been beyond just saying, OK, Vladimir, you win, which is not really a posture the US can take, what persuades him that it’s worth it to stop fighting and to make some concession? There has to be some concession from the Russian side to end the war. Do you guys see it differently at all?

No, but I do think that there’s one factor that is shifting. And Wagner was playing a really critical role in this fight, tactically in terms of providing manpower, or cannon fodder if you prefer that term. According to US estimates, 120,000 Russian troops have died in this Ukraine fight so far. The same thing that made the Vietnam War ultimately lose support in the United States is something that could eventually happen in Russia. I don’t think we’re there yet. There are a couple of more turns of conscription — you know, much broader conscription, that could cause significantly more unrest within Russia, even among the most ardent of Putin supporters. And that’s just underscored by the fact that Prigozhin was, like, a really quite popular right wing figure in Russia, right? His sort of makeshift memorial just off Red Square attracted a pretty steady stream of mourners. So this kind of Russian greatness figure who’s assassinated by — apparently, by the Russian state, although they deny it. And then the need to go out and get more and more unwilling people to fight and die in this war, I think, is a factor that has not fully played out and will continue to play out.

When we’re trying to figure out if he’ll come to the table, you know, it reminds me of all these sort of magazine covers about, what does Putin want, inside the mind of Vladimir Putin, et cetera. And it’s very hard to tell what on Earth Putin really wants. In a basic sense, it seems like things are not going as expected for him, right? It’s — the war is lasting longer than folks anticipated. He’s helped revitalize NATO to a certain extent, giving it a post-Cold War reason for being. He’s even calling it a war. You know, like, it got an upgrade after, like —

Special military operation.

I think it took 10 months — it took it 10 months to become a war and not a special military operation. But so you know, what I tried to do when the war started was go back and look at some of his own writings to try to get a sense of his mindset, to the extent that anything that he writes or says, being a KGB propagandist, should be taken at face value at all. But there was a phrase that came up twice, 20 years apart. And so it seemed like it’s something that’s stuck in his head. And it’s the “paralysis of power.” In this book he wrote in 2000, he said that the USSR fell apart because of the paralysis of power. In the late ‘80s, the Soviets blinked. The cocky Americans took advantage and remade the world order. And he still resents that and laments it. He brought up the paralysis of power again on the eve of the war in Ukraine, when he said that the paralysis of power is the first step toward degradation and oblivion. He’s obsessed about Russian decline. And in his mind, to avoid it, you have to wield power. It can’t be paralyzed anymore. When he writes about his enemies, he says to go on the offensive, hit them so hard they can’t rise to their feet. So just like in the way he likes to present himself, at least, in the way he talks about how he sees war, the notion of a negotiation seems kind of anathema to the worldview that he presents. There was a great detail in that book, actually, in the 2000 book, that one of his colleagues in Saint Petersburg when he worked, like, in the mayor’s office or something, said that they would each have the standard Boris Yeltsin portrait. But Putin requested Peter the Great as the portrait in his office. You know, like, that’s the inspiration he wanted. That’s how he saw himself.

Well, and that helps you see why Putin has become such a kind of totem for people on the right, broadly, across the world. I mean, this kind of chest out posture that he has feels like, especially in this very confusing global moment, a posture that is very attractive to, for example, people in Europe who are, like, we want to stop these “invaders” who are coming from other places to come across our borders. And we want toughness. We want hard action. We want to have no quarter in dealing with threats. And so yeah, it’s an interesting moment for us to be contemplating this strange man.

The interesting thing about this sort of Prigozhin scenario that we witnessed is that, for a brief moment, you saw a potential alternative to Putin. And it wasn’t great. The alternative to Putin is not —

A ruthless mercenary killer backed by maximalist Russian nationalists is not your ideal Putin replacement?

Yeah, like, it’s not that — it’s not the alternative is like a democratic Russia, right, a pro-western, democratic Russia. The alternative might be a right wing nationalist harder right than Putin in possession of nukes. So in that sense, it was kind of an illuminating moment for those who kind of simplistically have been, like, we got to get rid of Putin, or do this or that.

Yes.

When I think about where it goes next, I just feel like we’re in this clash of just unthinkable scenarios depending on where you stand, right? The Ukrainians have shown that relinquishing their sense of nationhood is unthinkable to them. And even if they can’t fend off Russia forever, you could have a protracted kind of insurgency style conflict. The prospect of a wider war between NATO and a nuclear armed power seems similarly unthinkable, which is why Biden has always kept this kind of dance about not getting dragged into that. And for Putin, backing down and puncturing the mythology of his own power is also unthinkable. That mythology is what keeps him in charge. So which unthinkable will become thinkable, I have no idea. I don’t know what to think.

On that cheery note, we’re going to take a break. And when we come back, we’ll talk about the implications of this war for American domestic politics in both the short and longer run, but especially as we head into 2024. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. And so I want to turn us, as promised, to the domestic American politics of the Ukraine war, where I think it’s fair to say that US backing for the Ukrainians had really strong bipartisan support at the outset of the war, and then over time, most of the critics of the Biden administration’s pro-Ukraine policy have come from the right. You get some anti-war voices on the left. But mostly, you’ve got everything from the tacit pro-Putinism at the very online right wing extreme, to a kind of isolationist leaning view that treats the war as irrelevant to American interests, to a realist critique that increasingly argues the war is diverting American arms and energy from the more pressing threat of China, especially China’s designs on Taiwan. And of course, we’re headed into an election year. So I’m curious what you guys think, whether any of these critiques actually resonate with voters, right? These are all sort of pundit, foreign policy magazine, Twitter fight arguments. Do they matter? Do they matter in the Republican primary? Will they matter when Biden’s foreign policy record is on the ballot? What do you think?

Has foreign policy ever been a pivotal issue in an American election where the United States is not directly at war?

So I think there are times when foreign policy has directly affected US presidential politics, or electoral politics, but I’m trying to keep in mind the distinction that you raise about times when the US forces are not directly involved. So like, LBJ didn’t run for re-election in part because he couldn’t bring the party together around Vietnam. A lot of top Democrats didn’t challenge George H.W. Bush in his reelection campaign because they thought he was unbeatable after the Gulf War. His son, George W., won re-election in part, on the strength of his response to 9/11, then he got creamed in the midterms in 2006 when everything was going south in Iraq. And what else — Obama, in his 2008 campaign, got a lot of traction because unlike other Democrats he opposed Iraq as a “dumb war.” So there are moments when foreign policy intrudes very directly into electoral politics, but those are all cases where American forces were directly engaged. I don’t have the history in my mind to recall moments when it was sort of a war we were supporting, as opposed to a war we were waging.

Right, well, and even with Biden, if you look at the history of Biden’s approval ratings, there did seem to be a big foreign policy effect, more than I would have anticipated, actually, in his withdrawal, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. If you go back and look at the charts, that’s when the honeymoon ended. Biden’s relatively strong approval ratings started to tumble, even though it seemed like Americans had been paying very little attention to Afghanistan and supported some kind of withdrawal. The way that happened did seem to hurt Biden in a real way. But even there —

Will it affect him in the election? It affected his approval ratings in the moment. Will it still be that live an issue in 2024? I have no idea.

Right, and even there, you had American troops — we were withdrawing American troops. It was like the helicopters from the roof in Saigon. It was us losing a war in a very literal sense, in a way that even as involved as we are, a Ukrainian retreat right now probably doesn’t have the same effect. I don’t know. What do you think, Lydia?

I mean, I think Americans don’t like to see America looking weak on the global stage. It’s just not — it runs contrary, I think, to our myth of who we are and what we represent in the world. And so I do think that we are in this kind of might equals right moment, where there’s a real vibe in a certain part of the Republican Party that kind of grooves with what Putin’s doing and what he’s all about. In the debate, we had candidates who wanted to send troops into Mexico to deal with the fentanyl problem, which just seems absolutely insane to me. And so I think we’re in this weird moment where, at least on the Republican side, there seems to be a lot of appetite for deploying American troops against invaders, people who are seen as invaders on our Southern border, and of course, to fighting China, which is the sort of big economic threat. And it’s not lost on me that both of those groups of people are people who are not white, they’re not European. Whereas in the Ukraine conflict, there’s just this sort of — this is not our fight. Why are we involved? Why are we spending lots of American money there? That point of view seems to have a fairly wide berth in the Republican Party right now.

So I’m a little uncertain what’s going on in the Republican Party. I think first, if you look at Republicans in Congress, the Mike Pence, Nikki Haley position from the debate, that we’re right to be supporting Ukraine and so on, that’s still the position of the institutional Republican Party.

Correct.

And that has to reflect some sense that even if all of their voters aren’t fully on board with that position, Republican voters are not going to punish congressmen and senators much for voting for aid for Ukraine, right? What I don’t know is, do lots of Republicans think of China as a threat the way we thought about the USSR as a threat during the Cold War? I think it’s a lot more unsettled than that in terms of what the politics of confronting China militarily look like. Economically confronting China is one thing, but yeah, I’m not sure there’s deep public buy in for Cold War 2.0 with China. I could be wrong.

No, I mean, I think it remains to be seen. The last time we fought a war in Asia, it didn’t go well politically, or from just a human perspective. So yeah, I could see why there would be significant reluctance.

In the debate, I’m trying to remember, it was really only Ramaswamy who had the full on, like, isolationist, you know, why are we supporting this fight worldview? Right?

Well, and even Ramaswamy is framing it. He’s saying, I’m going to be the new Nixon. I’m going to peel off Russia and make them our ally against China.

Which is, I’m sorry —

There’s no Ron Paul figure doing the full isolationist thing here.

No.

Even Ramaswamy thinks he’s Richard Nixon.

And even DeSantis, who’s sort of tried to glom on to that a little bit when they did, like, the raise your hand if you would increase aid to Ukraine or whatever, he did the whole, well, the Europeans need to pull their weight a little more. It was — I don’t know that there’s a wing of the party, maybe it’s like a feather of a wing, at least if we use the presidential candidates as a proxy for the range of views in the party, which may or may not be accurate —

The non-Trump candidates, right? I mean, the front runner for the Republican nomination, while he praises Putin less than he would, you can assume that he would come in looking to make a deal with Putin.

I think that’s right.

I think that would be a reasonable assumption.

I’m curious. What do you guys think of how Biden has handled this? It strikes me that he’s found a pretty good balance of really robust military support and diplomatic support without sort of crossing the red line of provoking direct conflict with Russia, which is a very, very tricky balance to strike. But I’m curious what you guys think.

I mean, every day that we don’t cross that line is a good day. That’s how I think of it. But what that also means to me is that I would imagine that for Biden, it’s more important to not cross into open conflict with Russia than it is to ensure the full territorial integrity of Ukraine. And that calculus, in the end, goes in Putin’s favor.

Yeah, I’m pro-Biden on this front overall. I think he’s struck, basically, the balance you suggest, Lydia. And I think it’s correct to prioritize not getting into a direct shooting war with Russia. I think that’s correct. I also think, though, that they have gone quite far further than people might have anticipated at the outset in terms of steps that go up to that line, and have correctly anticipated so far just how far they can go without getting into a conflict with Russia. With all of that said, I think the legacy of this period for the Biden administration, whatever effect it has on the presidential election, will be determined by whether you can actually get to — you know, not like peace breaking out all over, but something other than the status quo for another 5 or 6 years, which is another way of saying the final test, or the full test is yet to come.

How much of the support in the United States, but maybe also in Europe for Ukraine, is about the way Zelenskyy as an individual has captured the kind of global imagination.

I mean, I think it’s not insignificant. But I think it’s not — also doesn’t last forever, right? One of the things that I’ve noticed is that he does seem to have this ability to fly in and make these kind of dramatic appearances. And they become less dramatic every time. And it’s one thing to show up in your khakis to address a joint session of Congress, but I think the more places you go — I mean, what’s next, Coachella — it starts to lose some of its power and its luster. And I think that as things stalemate on the battlefield, that will become ever more so. And also, don’t forget, I mean, there have been these kind of like — they haven’t made huge headlines, but there have been these ripples in Ukraine, these firings of officials over corruption and other kinds of incidents that point to what are some of the underlying issues in terms of governance in Ukraine that I think also have the potential to kind of erode the image of Zelenskyy and his government as these fighters.

Well, and I think there, Zelenskyy was both a figure unto himself and a symbol of a kind of fighting liberal nationalism that enabled a lot of people in the West who felt besieged internationally and at home by populism, reaction, illiberalism in various forms to say, OK, you know, here’s where we draw the line. Here is where we fight the battle. And yes, our attempts to spread democracy around the world have not succeeded as one might have hoped. But here, at least, we can defend the liberal West against its enemies. I think that’s still a very powerful spirit. It’s just hard to sustain that spirit through years of trench warfare, which is why that question of inflection points circles back. You know, where is the moment of either Ukrainian breakthrough or an opportunity for peace? And with that, I’m just going to give myself the last word. And we’ll leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll be hot or cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. And it’s time for Hot/Cold. Which of you two, my beloved podcast partners, has one for us this week?

So it’s me this week. I’m sure you have been hearing about all the kind of culture and political battles surrounding libraries and school libraries, and what books should or should not be available to students. And I’m sure we’ll talk about that in some future conversation on this podcast. But for now, I just want to say very simply that I am hot on libraries. I have always been hot on libraries. When I was growing up in the Bay Area, in the early ‘80s, Thursdays were a special day, because on that day my mom got out of work early. And she would take us to do something special, us meaning me and my two older sisters, which usually involved, like, eating at Jack in the Box or something. But that meant that on Thursdays, instead of taking the city bus home, we would walk about a mile from our school to the Lafayette Public Library in Contra Costa County, where she would pick us up. And we had, like, an hour or an hour and a half there before she could meet us there. And that became the most magical hour, an hour and a half of my week. I read all sorts of random books. I read world maps. But I mainly read, like, “Encyclopedia Brown” and the “Three Investigators” and other kind of mystery stories —

Jupiter Jones.

That’s right, Jupiter Jones. Thank you, Ross. I knew you would come through for me. Jupiter Jones and his junkyard, remember? Anyway —

The car.

— and that’s where I discovered, as I said, kind of what a magical place this could be. It was a safe place for us. I don’t mean in the safe space kind of sense. I mean, it was literally a safe place my mother trusted that we could wait for her. But it was also this kind of risky, exciting place where I could kind of encounter anything. And I thought the librarians there, like, were like these sorcerers who could find anything I needed. So I’m sure you have your library stories. The libraries in my life have been a refuge. And it kind of kills me to see libraries becoming hyper politicized, and see that librarians are in any way feeling intimidated in their work.

I love libraries too. When I was in middle school, my brothers and I used to ride our bikes to the library. And my parents were very anti-TV, so — and very pro-books, so we had lots and lots of books at home. And I was a very, very big reader. But the great illicit pleasure of going to the library was actually being able to access their subscription to cable television. So like, my brothers and I would go and watch “Yo! MTV Raps” at the library, right?

That is wonderful.

I don’t know if you guys know the rap group De La Soul. They were, like, such a huge favorite of mine. And one of the performers of the three, Trugoy the Dove, recently passed away. And I immediately texted my little brother because that was such a touchstone for us. And he reminded me of when we, at the library, watched for the first time the video of “Me, Myself, and I.” And we were really nerdy, sort of, like, funnily dressed, unusual Black kids. And we’re like, oh, my gosh, these are other nerdy, funny dressed, unusual Black kids. Like, it’s OK, we can be ourselves. And so like that’s — for me, that’s such a totemic library moment that actually has nothing to do with books.

Those are terrific stories. And they are filling me mostly with a deep shame that — I have the same kind of relationship to libraries as a child that you had, Carlos. I feel like I’ve failed to instill that in my children, that they’re much more sort of amazon.com dependent for books, like the spoiled children of privilege or something that they are. So in that spirit, I’m going to be taking them to the library this weekend and leaving them there for 17 hours, and seeing what comes of it.

The thing is, you could.

Enjoy your day off, Ross.

Yes, yes.

They will find so much. And also, your kids are young, Ross. You haven’t failed yet.

Well, that’s — I appreciate it, Carlos. And I’ll report back on how the experience goes when we reconvene next week.

See you, guys.

Thanks, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Jaiden, the 12-year-old boy who was kicked out of class for wearing a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack, is back in school with his constitutional rights restored. "The Vanguard School recognizes the Gadsden flag and its place in history," wrote the school's board of directors in a statement. "At this time, the Vanguard School Board and the District have informed the student's family that he may attend school with the Gadsden flag patch visible on his backpack." A video of the student and his mother arguing with officials went viral on social media earlier this week. The Vanguard School—a charter school overseen by Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs, Colorado—had initially maintained that the "Don't tread on me" rattlesnake was a racist symbol associated with slavery and the slave trade. Jaiden's mother objected, patiently explaining that the Gadsden flag's origins can be traced to the Revolutionary War; its warning was directed at British tyranny, though subsequent freedom movements have adopted the flag for various causes. In the face of overwhelming criticism—including from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D)—the school district conceded its mistake and reversed course. Libertas Institute President Connor Boyack, who first publicized Jaiden's predicament, reported on Tuesday that Jaiden was back at school and free to display the Gadsden flag.  Jaiden should sell this and monetize his new fame ???? pic.twitter.com/YjKjpKRAny — Connor Boyack ???? (@cboyack) August 30, 2023  This is welcome news. Young people should not automatically lose their free expression rights when they set foot in school, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that Jaiden's Gadsden flag backpack was disruptive in the classroom. Hopefully, school officials everywhere are paying attention: Don't tread on kids.The post Don't Tread on Jaiden! School District Learns Its Lesson appeared first on Reason.com.

In both Russia and Israel today, the social pact is fracturing under the weight of history and disagreements about basic principles and national identity. These conditions lend themselves to increasingly absurd and extreme rhetoric, some of which speaks to the people's deepest fears and preoccupations.

LJUBLJANA – Whenever a country’s social contract unravels, conditions become ripe for rumors and absurdities to circulate. Even when these are outrageous and obviously nonsensical, they can give expression to a people’s deepest fears and prejudices.

Such is the case in Russia today, where Sergei Markov, a former adviser to President Vladimir Putin, has warned that Ukraine is creating “gay super-soldiers” to wage war against his country: “Military theorists and historians know which army in Greece was the strongest, remember? The Spartans. They were united by a homosexual brotherhood. They were all homos. These were the politics of their leadership. I think they are planning the same for Ukraine’s Armed Forces.”

Of course, this mixture of homophobia, fake history, and Marvel comic-inspired ideas of super-soldiers indicates that Markov is not interested in encouraging critical thinking and reasoned analysis. No matter: such idiotic statements apparently resonate with at least some important segments of Russian society.

The same derangement also increasingly applies to Russian historical memories of major national traumas and crimes. At a recent ceremony in Velikiye Luki, in Russia’s Pskov region, a priest known as “Father Anthony” doused holy water on a 26-foot statue of Stalin. Though “the Church suffered” during Stalin’s long reign of terror, he observed, Russians today should be grateful that they have so many “new Russian martyrs and confessors to whom we now pray and are helping us in our Motherland’s resurgence.”

Such perverse reasoning is just a step away from arguing that Jews should be grateful to Hitler for opening the way for the State of Israel. In fact, precisely that has already effectively happened. According to a 2019 investigation by Channel 13 news in Israel, future Israeli army officers at the state-funded Bnei David military prep school are taught, by rabbis, that:

“The Holocaust was not about killing the Jews. Nonsense. And that it was systematic and ideological makes it more moral than random murder. Humanism, secular culture – that is the Holocaust. The real Holocaust is pluralism. The Nazi logic was internally consistent. Hitler said that a certain group in society is the cause of all the evil in the world and therefore it must be exterminated. … For years, God has been screaming that the Diaspora is over but Jews aren’t obeying. That is their disease that the Holocaust must cure. … Hitler was the most righteous. Of course he was right in every word he said. His ideology was correct. … [The Nazis’] only error was who was on which side.”

Subscribe to PS Digital now to read all the latest insights from Slavoj Žižek.

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The lesson does not end there. Students also learn that:

“With the help of God, slavery will return. The non-Jews will want to be our slaves. These people around us have genetic problems. Ask an average Arab what he wants to be. He wants to be under occupation. … They don’t know how to run a country or anything. … Yes, we are racists. We believe in racism. Races have genetic characteristics. So we must consider how to help them.”

To be sure, this extreme rhetoric is openly endorsed by only a tiny, fanatical religious minority. And yet, it hints at the underlying premise behind the current far-right government’s policies in the West Bank. To compare the situation in Israel and its occupied territories to Nazi Germany may appear a ridiculous exaggeration, and if a non-Jew makes this comparison, he is instantly dismissed as anti-Semitic; but if leading Jewish figures do so, they ought to be listened to. When a society has wrapped itself in layers of tendentious self-justification, it takes insiders to pull back the shroud.

Consider the case of Amiram Levin, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Northern Command. Speaking recently to Israel’s public broadcasting station about the situation in the West Bank, he contends that “there hasn’t been a democracy there in 57 years, there is total apartheid. … the IDF, which is forced to exert sovereignty there, is rotting from the inside. It’s standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner to war crimes.”

When asked to elaborate, Levin invoked Nazi Germany: “It’s hard for us to say it, but it’s the truth. Walk around Hebron, look at the streets. Streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews. That’s exactly what happened there, in that dark country.”

That a retired IDF general could come to such a conclusion attests not only to his extraordinary ethical stance, but also to just how bad things have gotten there. But as long as there are Israelis like Levin, there is hope, because it is only with the solidarity and support of people like him that the West Bank Palestinians have a chance.

In both Russia and Israel today, the social pact is fracturing under the weight of colonialism and fundamental disagreements about foundational principles. These conditions lend themselves to increasingly absurd and extreme forms of rationalization. But just because you can come up with a reason for doing something does not mean that you should do it. When societies fragment, resisting wrong reasons often requires more strength than following right reasons.

The COVID emergency has officially ended. The CDC, WHO, and most governments have ended any emergency designations for the COVID pandemic. Does that mean the pandemic is over? Not really, it just means we are entering another phase. We might think of this as the tail end of the pandemic, or we can think of it as a transition to endemic COVID.

Meanwhile, the CDC is talking about a possible late summer wave of COVID. There has definitely been an uptick in COVID infections and hospitalizations. There has been a 17% increase in hospitalizations between June and July nationwide, and while August numbers are not in yet, the trend seems to be continuing. The reason for the increase is likely several things. Summer heat waves are forcing people to spend more time indoors. Summer vacation travel is also a good way to spread the virus around. But perhaps most importantly, people have largely returned to their pre-pandemic behavior. For example, in July my hospital ended their mask-wearing mandate. Now, very few people are masking.

But we also need to keep this summer wave in perspective. The numbers are still far lower than they were a year ago, or anytime during the pandemic. This is because the population is generally much more resistant to the virus now. Most people have either been vaccinated, or they have had COVID at least once, or both.

On the other hand, the virus is still mutating, degrading the protective effect of prior immunity. The dominant strain circulating right now is EG.5, but dominant means only 20% of cases. There are many strains circulating. Experts have also detected a new strain of interest – BA.2.86. This one is of interest because it has more than 35 mutations on the spike proteins. This makes this virus as different from prior strains as Omicron was from the original virus. The spike proteins are the business end of the virus that allow it to enter human cells. So far there are only a few detected cases, but in many countries, including the US.

The reason the many mutations are of interest is because this suggests the virus may be good at evading existing immunity. This may be the new phase we are in, similar to the ongoing flu pandemic but not as seasonal. We may be in an endless arms race between immunity and viral mutations to evade immunity.

So what does all this mean practically? It’s important to recognize that even if the state of emergency is over, even if we consider the pandemic to be over, we are not living in a prepandemic world. We are now living in a world with endemic COVID. This means we can’t go back to our prepandemic behavior, but nor do we need to maintain our pandemic precautions. So what’s the new normal?

First – keep up to date on your COVID vaccines and boosters. The FDA has approved new versions of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that cover new variants of the virus, dubbed XBB1.5. It appear these vaccines will cover the EG.5 variant well. So the easiest and best thing you can do to protect yourself going forward is to get an updated booster. This will not only increase your immunity, it will target the newer variants. This new vaccine is coming out in a few weeks, so if you are due for a booster it is best to wait for the new one. Only people who have a specific reason to get a booster now should do so, like travel or other activity that will put them at high risk.

Universal mask wearing is not necessary. However, that does not mean you should never wear a mask. Targeted mask wearing should become the new normal. It is reasonable to mask up if you are having what might be early symptoms of a respiratory infection. Masks will protect against the flu and cold viruses too, not just COVID. So when you get the sniffles, or feel achy like you might have a virus, wear a mask if you have to be in public. Or work from home, if that is an option. Going out in public unprotected when you might be sick and contagious is simply no longer acceptable.

You may also wish to wear a mask when you are going to be in a large crowd. If you are going to be in a sea of people at a concert, convention, busy airport, or other similar situation, the probability of getting infected with a virus is statistically high. These are nexus points for disease spread. Protecting yourself with a mask is a reasonable standard precaution, like washing your hands after going to the bathroom.

The bottom line is that we are living in a world awash in infectious diseases, because there are 8 billion people on the planet and we have robust international travel. Basic hygiene includes taking common sense precautions against getting exposed to and spreading infectious diseases. This means keeping up to date on your vaccines, staying home when you are sick, washing your hands, and wearing a mask in targeted situations of high risk.

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.[Read: The miseducation of the American boy]Over the past several years, The New York Times has located signs of the brave fight against toxic masculinity in the television series Ted Lasso, in a production of the 19th-century opera Der Freischütz, and in a collage made in less than an hour. “White Lotus Didn’t Care About Toxic Masculinity After All,” wrote a disappointed Michelle Goldberg, as though someone had snatched away her bag of Good & Plenties.Notably, however, the Times has not referred to toxic masculinity in its coverage of the Gilgo Beach murders. Nor does the term appear in an article headlined “Professor Charged in Scheme to Lure Women to New York and Rape Them,” nor in one about the abduction of a 13-year-old in which the suspect has been charged with kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for criminal and sexual purposes.Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.(There were also, of course, women who responded to the catastrophe, three of whom were killed—two police officers and an EMT: Kathy Mazza, Moira Smith, and Yamel Merino.)A year ago, at a drag show in Colorado Springs, a man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. A second man, Richard Fierro, was at the club with his wife, his daughter, and a few friends. When the shots roared into that enclosed space, Fierro ran toward the gunfire and pulled the killer to the floor. When Fierro found that the man was carrying a second gun, a pistol, he seized it, and pounded the man’s head with it over and over again, screaming, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”Fierro is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t know exactly what I did,” he told The New York Times. “I just went into combat mode.” He told CNN simply, “My family was in there. My little girl was in there.”These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.There are questions that must be answered. For instance, aren’t women capable of heroic acts? Of course, and mere examples don’t suffice to tell the tale, but here are several: Heather Penney was one of the two fighter pilots sent screaming through the air on 9/11, on orders to find and take down the fourth hijacked aircraft. The only successful end to that mission would be suicide: There was no time to load the jets with missiles, so if they found the missing plane, they would have to fly straight into it. “There was no second-guessing,” she told a reporter on the 20th anniversary. “And there was no tears.” Leigh Ann Hester was the first woman to be awarded the Silver Star for combat valor, for her swift action during a 2005 firefight in Iraq.But the heroism that marks most women’s lives is the endless effort to protect themselves—and very often, their children—from male threat or violence. It is in spite of this deep, perpetual vulnerability that the world goes on, that women go out alone with men they don’t know well, that they bear their children, and—on nothing more than trust—sleep at night beside them. The number of women who have risked everything—and in many cases lost their lives—in self-defense is without end, and the number who haven’t thought twice about throwing themselves between their children and great threat is all you need to know about female courage and sacrifice.We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.I’ve talked about this topic before, and almost instantly someone interrupts to report in outraged tones the monstrous action of some man who has been in the news. “Is he heroic?” they will ask.Patiently I will explain that obviously he isn’t. There is a very simple test for whether or not something constituted an act of heroic masculinity, and here it is: Ask yourself if it was heroic.In certain parts of the country, including Los Angeles, where I live, the strength and bravery of girls are specifically championed. The message is that it’s great to be a girl, and that girlhood itself is part of what makes each girl so powerful. On the soccer field I’ve often heard parents cheer “Girls rule!” after a winning goal.But never once have I heard parents at a match yell “Boys rule!” Why not? Because in sports they do rule, and in such great measure that it’s rude to point it out. In 2017, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team played a scrimmage against a boys’ team in Texas. The boys were all younger than 15, and they won that match 5–2. The same thing had happened in Australia a year earlier; the national women’s soccer team played a team of under-15-year-old boys and lost 7–0. When CBS reported the loss in Texas, it softened the blow by noting that it “should not be a major cause for alarm.”Alarm? Alarm about what? You would be alarmed only if no one ever told you that boys and men are stronger and faster than girls and women.There used to be a T-shirt that I sometimes saw little girls wearing that said Boys are terrible. Throw rocks at them. Good luck with that, I would think. Maybe a rock-throwing girl would make contact with a boy who knows that you don’t get into a physical conflict with girls, because that’s not right. Or maybe she would make contact with a boy who believes that girls are the absolute equal to boys in every way, and she’ll get beaned.  In progressive areas, there is a kind of suspicion about boys, a sense that if things aren’t handled very carefully, they could go wrong and the boy might never express his feelings.The New York Times is a central purveyor of this What’s wrong with boys? agenda. A couple of years ago it published an op-ed called “What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human.” The writer reported that despite her intention to raise her sons in a gender-neutral way, the culture kept getting its hands on them.First “preschool masculinity norms” meant that while girls’ books are about the inner lives of people, boys’ books explore “the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.” Setting aside the weird, sexist assumption that some books are for girls and other books are for boys, we learn about what happened next:“Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated.” Despite all of her best efforts, she has managed to produce boys who care deeply about being heroic and saving good people from villains.Boys are various and wondrous, and their inclinations are wide and changeable. There are boys who love art and literature, boys who are dreamy and funny, boys who play football and also study ballet. Let them be who they are, including those boys—among them many artists and poets—who are very interested in what it means to be heroic, in the sense of defending and protecting the weak.Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of otherwise reasonable young men who admire Andrew Tate, a vile and widely watched influencer facing charges of rape, human trafficking, and organized crime? (He denies the allegations.) That is because the only thing they have been taught about masculinity is that it is a dangerous and suspicious and possibly socially constructed fantasy that they must cast off in every way possible. They’re so confused that when they finally see a thug like Tate, reveling in talk of dominating and abusing women, they think he’s admirable. At least he isn’t telling them that they’re bad seeds.If we don’t give these boys positive examples of strength as a virtue, they will look elsewhere.[Tom Nichols: The narcissism of the angry young men]The final complaint about men is the demand for tears. Why aren’t more men crying? Crying is important and men should cry!Men do cry. Freely and openly. But women are often looking in the wrong places for it.When a gunman attacked the Covenant School, an elementary school in Nashville, in March, only 14 minutes lapsed between the first 911 call and officers on the scene taking the shooter down. The Nashville chief of police, John Drake, spoke to the press often on that day and the days that followed. He spoke in the language of data and facts—but also in the language of human beings trying to understand this great evil.About a week after the shooting, Drake spoke again. First he thanked everyone who had helped, including the cops who had entered the building first, and were also at the press conference. And then he talked about a memorial service he had attended with other members of the force:“As I sat in a church Saturday, and I watched students from Covenant School take flowers down to the altar, literally I’m in tears. And the other first responders, police officers, firefighters are in tears. And I look at these kids, and they look at us and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And they believe that their classmate is going to Heaven, that they're in a better place and they’re not hurting. The ones that was hurting the most was us.”Almost overcome, he said that the thing he always tells new recruits, men and women alike, is “No one ever said it would be easy, but they said it would be worth it.” And then he turned to the cops: “I’m totally proud of these men.”What if we showed that speech to boys? What if we didn’t repeatedly tell them that we want to know their feelings and that we want them to be unashamed to cry, but instead showed them that everything is possible for a man—even a straight chief of police? If you think that boys, even ones raised in liberal places and by liberal parents, aren’t deeply interested in the testimony of this kind of man, then you haven’t been around boys very much.What if we understood that boys are born into a destiny, not a pathology?

In an ideal version of this coming winter, the United States would fully revamp its approach to respiratory disease. Pre-pandemic, fall was just a time for flu shots, if that. Now, hundreds of millions of Americans have at their fingertips vaccines that can combat three cold-weather threats at once: flu, COVID, and, for a subset of us, respiratory syncytial virus. If everyone signed up to get the shots they qualified for, “it would be huge,” says Ofer Levy, the director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Hospital emergency rooms and intensive-care units wouldn’t fill; most cases of airway illness would truly, actually feel like “just” a common cold. “We would save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone,” Levy told me.The logic of the plan is simple: Few public-health priorities are more pressing than getting three lifesaving vaccines to those who need them most, ahead of winter’s viral spikes. The logistics, however, are not as clear-cut. The best way to get vaccines into as many people as possible is to make getting shots “very, very easy,” says Chelsea Shover, an epidemiologist at UCLA. But that’s just not what we’ve set up this fall lineup of shots to do.[Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete]Convenience isn’t the only issue keeping shots out of arms. But move past fear, distrust, or misinformation, solve for barriers such as insurance coverage, and getting a vaccine in the United States still means figuring out when shots are available and which you qualify for, finding and booking appointments, carving out the time to go. For adults, especially, who don’t routinely visit their doctor for wellness checkups, and whose workplaces don’t require vaccines to the extent that schools do, vaccination has become an onerous exercise in opt-ins.Bundling this year’s flu, COVID, and RSV vaccines into a single visit could, in theory, help ease the way to becoming a double or triple shotter. “Any time we can cut down on the number of visits for a patient to take care of them, we know that’s a big boost,” says Tochi Iroku-Malize, the president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. But the easiest iteration of that strategy, a three-in-one shot, similar to the MMR and DTaP vaccines of childhood, doesn’t yet exist (though some are in trials). Even the shorter-term solution—giving up to three injections at once—is hitting stumbling blocks. Pharmacies started receiving flu vaccines earlier this summer and are already giving them out to anyone over the age of six months. RSV vaccines, too, have hit shelves, and have been approved for people over the age of 60 and those 32 to 36 weeks pregnant; so far, however, they are being offered only to the first group. And although nearly all Americans are expected to be eligible for autumn’s updated COVID vaccines, those shots aren’t slated to make an appearance until mid-September or so, according to Kevin Griffis, a CDC spokesperson.Timing two or three shots together isn’t a perfect plan. Get them all too early, and some people’s protections against infection might fade before the season gets into full swing; get all of them too late, and a virus might beat the vaccine to the punch. Respiratory viruses don’t coordinate their seasons: Right now, for instance, COVID cases are on a sharp rise, but flu and RSV ones are not. Some data on the new RSV vaccines also suggests that co-administering them with other shots might trigger slightly worse side effects, or mildly curb the number of antibodies that the injections raise. Still, Levy argues that those theoretical downsides are outweighed by known benefits. “If someone is at clinic in the fall, they should get all the vaccines they’re eligible for,” he told me. Getting a slightly less effective, slightly more ornery shot a few months early is better than never getting a shot at all.All of that supposes that people understand that they are eligible for these shots. But already, family-medicine physicians such as Iroku-Malize, who practices on Long Island, have been fielding queries about the RSV vaccines from confused patients. Some new parents, for instance, have gotten the impression that the RSV vaccines are designed to be administered to infants, which isn’t quite right: Babies are the target of protection for the shots for pregnant people, but only because they temporarily inherit antibodies—not because they can get the injections themselves. Regulators also haven’t yet nailed down how often older adults might need the shot, though the current thinking is that the vaccine’s protection will last at least a couple of years. “It’s very hard to tell people, ‘I don’t know,’” says Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, an infectious-disease pharmacist at UC San Diego.Other parts of the RSV-shot messaging are peppered with even more unknowns. The CDC has yet to release its final recommendation for pregnant people; for people over 60, the agency’s language has been “noncommittal,” says Rupali Limaye, a behavioral scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Unlike past guidelines that have straightforwardly recommended flu shots or most doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, RSV guidance says that eligible people may protect themselves against the virus—and are urged to first consult a health-care provider, which not all people have. The wishy-washiness is partly about safety: A few rare but serious medical events cropped up during the RSV vaccines’ clinical trials, including abnormal heartbeats and neurological complications. None of the experts I spoke with had qualms about recommending the shots anyway. Even so, some private health-insurance companies have seized on the CDC’s watered-down recommendation—and the fact that the agency hasn’t yet included RSV in its annual vaccine schedule for adults—as an excuse to not cover the shot, leaving some patients paying $300-plus out of pocket.For any of these shots, viral reputation matters too. Despite hospitalizing tens of thousands of Americans each year, especially at age extremes—numbers that, in some years, nearly rival those linked to flu—RSV is a lesser-known winter disease. People tend to take it less seriously, if it’s on their radar at all, Abdul-Mutakabbir told me. Which bodes poorly for future RSV-shot uptake. Annual flu shots have been recommended for every American over the age of six months for 13 years. And still, just half the eligible population gets them in any given year. People tend to dismiss shots as subpar interventions against a disease that they don’t much fear, Limaye told me. With COVID, too, “people think it’s gotten mild,” she said. Only 28 percent of American adults are currently up to date on their COVID vaccine. And although older people have historically been more vigilant about nabbing shots, even vaccines against shingles—a notoriously painful disease—have reached just over a third of people who are 60-plus.[Read: America’s flu-shot problem is also its COVID-shot problem]To establish fall as an immunity-seeking season, shots would need to become an annual habit, ideally one easy to form. Mandates and financial incentives do prod people toward vaccines, but smaller nudges can persuade people to take initiative on their own. Some strategies may be as simple as semantic tweaks. Studies on HPV and flu vaccines suggest that telling patients they are “due” for a shot is better than offering it as an optional choice, says Gretchen Chapman, a behavioral scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Other research suggests that carefully worded text-message reminders can evoke ownership—noting that a shot is “waiting for you,” or that the time has come to “claim your dose.” Noel Brewer, a behavioral scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also thinks that vaccine deliverers could take inspiration from dentists who gently dog their patients with phone calls and postcards.Other interventions could be aimed at streamlining delivery. Government funding could make shots more available in rural regions, ensure access for those who lack insurance, and help local health departments offer shots in churches and hair salons, or even bring them door to door. More schools and workplaces, too, might try boosting uptake among students and employees. And although most shots are already given within the health-care system, there’s sludge to clear from that pipeline too. Better universal recordkeeping could help track people’s vaccination status through their lifetime. Kimberly Martin, a behavioral scientist at Yale, is researching ways to revamp medical training to help health-care providers earn their patients’ trust—especially among populations that remain marginalized by systemic racism. “The single biggest impact on vaccine uptake,” Brewer told me, “is a health-care provider recommendation.”An ideal vision of a fall in the future, then, would be turning vaccines into a default form of prevention—a more typical part of this country’s wellness workflow, says Saad Omer, the dean of the Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health, at UT Southwestern. After getting their vital signs checked, patients could have their vaccination status reviewed. “And then, if they’re eligible, you vaccinate them,” Omer told me. It’s a routine that pediatricians already have down pat. If adult health care follows suit, regular immunization is a habit we may never have to outgrow.

While the Left agonizes over its relationship to the Democrats, the extreme right has few qualms about throwing elbows within the GOP. Socialists should follow their lead and accept doing battle within the Democratic Party as the only viable political option.

Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy introducing presidential nominees to delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. (Pictorial Parade / Archive Photos / Getty Images)
 
In October 2018, a crew of Proud Boys violently attacked anti-fascist, or “antifa” activists on the streets of Manhattan. The occasion for the melee was a speech by Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, leading to ten arrests and jail sentences for two of the Proud Boys. A street fight between fascists and anti-fascists may not have been so newsworthy were it not for its location on the tony Upper East Side, whose denizens tend to prefer the pastel hues of Ralph Lauren polos to black-and-gold Fred Perry.
Before the fight, McInnes rallied his troops at the Metropolitan Republican Club, formerly a “chummy watering hole for the city’s GOP elite” that’s been taken over by the radical right. These days, their website’s “About” page features a terribly lit photo of Tucker Carlson giving a speech to club members, situated above an all-caps declaration insisting, perhaps too insistently, “WE ARE SERIOUS PEOPLE.”
This is not the only New York Republican Party institution that the radical right has claimed. Since 2016, the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) has become a hub for local, national, and even international reactionaries. When former president Donald Trump was arraigned in lower Manhattan last April, the club organized a rally outside the courthouse that attracted the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and far-right activist Jack Posobiec. Four months earlier, the NYYRC annual gala brought radical right-wingers from across the United States together with guests from European extremist parties like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany) and Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party). Gavin Wax, the club’s president, gave a speech that can only be described as fascistic:
we want more offenses; we want flanking maneuvers; we want to cross the Rubicon; we want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media, in the courtroom, at the ballot box, and in the streets. This is the only language the Left understands: the language of pure and unadulterated power.
Wax is a recurring character in Amanda Moore’s harrowing undercover Nation report on today’s radical right. What stands out about these figures, beyond their vile worldview, is just how ruthlessly pragmatic they are.
Moore recounts Wax’s justification for accepting a position with Turning Point USA on a reactionary “comedy” podcast: “My view is that we should use every institution we can to our benefit. If you have to shift the Overton window, shift it to the right, take it over from the inside. . . . If they’re gonna elevate my message and my platform, then we’re all square in my book.” There is real value, according to Wax, in working with and influencing Republicans to pull them ever further toward the right-wing fringe: “If they’re going to change their tune, if people are going to start to acquiesce to our movement — or, I don’t even know if I can say ‘our movement,’ but shifting to the right — then take the W.”
Wax isn’t the only radical pragmatist, freely moving between margin and mainstream, featured in Moore’s story. One white nationalist she profiles is the chairman of a Republican district committee in Michigan. Another served as the Washington Young Republicans’ national committee person and worked on a GOP congressional campaign before getting fired. Yet another frequents Oregon Young Republican meetings to schmooze and spread the fascist gospel. Their literature, in the words of the Michigan GOP official, “will tell you everything you need to do to become a precinct captain. And then we can, from the bottom up, throw out all these RINOs and make the GOP a solidly America First party.”
They are, in short, pursuing a right-wing version of the realignment strategy.

A Tale of Two Realignments
The realignment strategy is typically associated with mid-twentieth-century left-liberals, labor activists, and democratic socialists seeking to transform the Democratic Party. It had many different exponents, but its leading early theorist on the socialist left was Max Shachtman. Shachtman was among those expelled from the US Communist party in 1928 for siding with Leon Trotsky in his unsuccessful battle with Joseph Stalin for control of the Soviet party. By 1940, Shachtman and his followers broke with Trotsky over the nature of the Soviet Union, which they considered a new kind of “bureaucratic collectivist” class society, not a “degenerated workers’ state” worthy of critical support as Trotsky insisted. They founded the Workers’ Party (WP) in 1940, which changed its name to the Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1949.
The WP/ISL milieu was small but influential and included, at various times, such well-known figures as C. L. R. James, Irving Howe, and eventually Michael Harrington. James Baldwin was a fellow traveler for a time through his friendship with the labor organizer Stan Weir.
Shachtman and his cothinkers in this small but influential milieu, spurred by engagement with reformist elements in postwar liberalism and the labor movement, formulated the classical version of the realignment strategy. By the late 1950s, according to Sam Rosenfeld in his excellent book The Polarizers, Shachtman arrived at an “elaborate political project for labor radicals: unite with civil rights and liberal forces, aggravate tensions within the Democratic coalition, and compel an exodus of reactionary southerners and urban bosses” to the Republicans or a third party. The ISL joined what remained of the Socialist Party (SP) in 1957, and by 1959 won the party over to this vision of a realigned party system polarized between two clearly defined, programmatically consistent liberal and conservative parties.
If democratic socialists want to be politically effective, they need to act, at least for the purposes of electoral politics, as a left-wing faction in the Democratic Party.
Of course, not everyone on the Left adopted the Shachtmanites’ commitment to a realignment strategy. Currents in the SP that later split to form the still-extant Socialist Party USA, for example, insisted on keeping the party aloof from coalition politics inside the Democratic Party. The cornucopia of Trotskyist sects, as well as other formations that grew out of the New Left, continued to raise the demand for an independent workers’ or socialist party. Their impact, however, generally paled in comparison to Shachtman and his followers, many of whom played key roles in the civil rights and labor movements of the 1960s.
The Shachtmanites themselves split in the early 1970s over the Vietnam War, anti-communism, and the movement to transform the Democratic Party after the disastrous 1968 presidential campaign. The old man and his diehards bitterly opposed the New Politics movement to democratize and radicalize the Democratic Party. A group around Harrington left the SP to found the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) in 1972. DSOC vigorously supported the New Politics and helped to lead it through formations like Democratic Agenda, which, according to the veteran democratic socialist Joe Schwartz, “picked up active support from the leadership of such unions as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Auto Workers and the Machinists, as well as from feminists, activists in communities of color and left activists in and around the Democratic Party.”
Democratic Agenda exercised significant influence over the party’s 1978 midterm convention (a New Politics reform that party leaders later suppressed) and was the seedbed of Ted Kennedy’s unsuccessful 1980 primary campaign against President Jimmy Carter. In 1982, DSOC merged with the New American Movement to form Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
This story is fairly well known on the Left. Less well known is the fact that the resurgent radical right was grappling with similar questions of electoral strategy at the same time.
John Huntington’s illuminating book Far-Right Vanguard is, in many respects, a history of the postwar radical right’s fitful journey from independent party building to realigning the Republican Party. The rise of New Deal liberalism drove a wedge into the heart of the Democratic Party, which until the 1930s was dominated by the most reactionary elements in American politics. It pitted New Dealers and Dixiecrats against each other inside the Democrats’ big tent, and spurred the latter to form a de facto conservative coalition party with congressional Republicans. With both main parties containing a spectrum of liberals and conservatives, right-wing Democrats and Republicans felt increasingly uneasy in their ostensible political homes.
Huntington’s book recovers a cast of formerly lost characters in postwar ultraconservative politics like Kent Courtney, a dogged organizer whose Conservative Society of America (CSA, in a deliberate callback to the Confederacy) sought to win anti–New Deal, anti-communist conservatives from both parties to a new, consistently right-wing third party. I had never heard of Courtney until I read Huntington’s book, because his efforts, and the efforts of other ultraconservatives committed to building a third party, made zero direct impact on electoral politics. Their presidential campaigns were just as quixotic as Norman Thomas’s six failed runs on the SP line.
But as Huntington’s study makes clear, by bringing ultraconservatives together into practical organizing projects, they did much to cohere the right-wing networks that later powered Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party insurgency, and ultimately Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the White House in 1980.
Groups like the CSA, John Birch Society, Christian Crusade, and Texans for America “put their stamp on party politics,” Huntington observes, by “laying the groundwork for an eventual coup within the two-party system” that Trump brought to full fruition. Militants shifted the aim of their cross-party and third-party organizing from a break with the two main parties to transforming the GOP into an unambiguously conservative party. By merging with the Republican Party’s most rightward elements, contesting primary elections, and becoming active in party organizations, they were able to build enough strength to push the party away from Dwight Eisenhower’s brand of “Modern Republicanism,” which sought an accommodation with the New Deal order, toward the right.
In doing so, they created the conditions under which the party could then be pushed even further to the right by today’s white nationalists. Courtney’s descendants ultimately succeeded in constituting a major new party on the extreme right wing of American politics. It just happens to be called the Republican Party.

Not As We Please
It’s commonly said on the Left that the realignment strategy failed. If one understands realignment as aiming at the wholesale transformation of the Democrats into something like a Western European labor or social democratic party, then yes, it failed. But that’s not necessarily how its practitioners on the Left understood the basic goal at the time.
In his 1968 book Toward a Democratic Left, Harrington argued that “the important thing is to allow the public a choice of liberal and conservative alternatives.” By this criterion, realignment did indeed happen. The Dixiecrats were driven into the Republican Party, while liberals gathered under the Democratic Party label. By almost any measure, the Republicans and Democrats became more polarized and internally coherent than they ever were before. Whatever we think of the two parties, it’s just not the case, as George Wallace claimed during his 1968 third-party presidential run, that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between them.
What did not happen is the second step many left-wing realigners hoped would come to pass. The labor-liberal wing failed to win a leading position in the Democratic Party coalition in the wake of the two parties’ political realignment. For one thing, the house of labor was sharply divided over the New Politics movement and its vision for transforming the party. Craft unions descending from the premerger American Federation of Labor bitterly opposed it, while industrial unions descending from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, together with the public sector unions, generally supported it.
Moreover, realignment took hold at precisely the moment when the labor movement, particularly industrial unions in the private sector, entered a seemingly endless period of decline, and the mass phase of the civil rights movement was largely exhausted. In this context, the neoliberal New Democrats led by Bill Clinton — much like Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain’s Labour Party — were able to win the leading position in the party, where they have remained ever since. The “de facto social democratic party based upon the unions and operating within the Democratic Party,” as Michael Harrington described it in his book Socialism, couldn’t muster the forces to push the Democrats’ realignment even further to the left.
But the radical right wing of the Republicans did succeed in pushing the GOP even further to the right. While realignment made the parties more ideologically consistent, it tended to hollow out party institutions, thereby opening more space for insurgent candidates to win primary elections — particularly if they could count on funding and foot soldiers.
For the radical right, realignment was fortuitously timed to coincide with the end of the New Deal order and the postwar economic boom. While the unions and civil rights movement organizations were entering a period of protracted decline, the radical right benefited from the mass mobilization of white evangelical Christians into Republican Party politics.
Far-right activists also benefit from a structural advantage that their counterparts on the Left simply can’t match: the seemingly endless parade of crackpot capitalists willing to pour vats of cash into their organizations, election campaigns, conferences, and publications. Rich liberals are typically not interested in funding socialists, and there aren’t many rich socialists. The unions, for their part, are extremely risk averse and firmly ensconced in the Democratic coalition, as they have been for about a century. Left-wing advocates of a new socialist or labor party bank on union support as insurance against sectarian isolation, but they rarely grapple with the fact that unions are just not likely to back risky new party initiatives. Unions are largely consumed with putting out fires and holding on to what they have left.
The impulse to reject a realignment strategy is understandable, but such rejection’s long record of practical futility should give leftists pause.
If we can’t count on funding the way the far right can, how exactly are we going to make a new party a viable concern?
US socialists who want to change the world have, by and large, pragmatically accepted the need to run candidates in Democratic Party primaries. Even so, the Left’s relationship to the Democratic Party continues to inspire the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. After beginning to find success through Democratic Party electoral politics, many socialists — including many in DSA, the traditional home of the realignment strategy — want to run away from it as quickly as possible.
The impulse is understandable, but its long record of practical futility should give us pause.
The American left, despite its best efforts, has never been able to set itself up fully independently of liberalism. Even at its height, the SP couldn’t win more than 6 percent of the vote for its presidential candidate. When the SP split and collapsed, many of its best elements went into farmer-labor politics. That movement produced a new Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota, but it wound up merging with the state’s New Deal Democrats in the 1940s.
The SP itself went nowhere during the Great Depression, and many party members effectively became left-wing New Dealers through their labor organizing and other activities. The Communists never became a mass movement and elected very few people to office. But they made their biggest, if still limited, steps out of marginality when they positioned themselves on the New Deal’s left wing in the 1930s and ’40s (relatedly, they also stopped trying to organize their own independent “red” unions, opting instead to work within the labor movement’s existing organizations).
The historical record, particularly since organized labor and racial justice movements went into the Democratic coalition in the 1930s, seems clear. If democratic socialists want to be politically effective, they need to act, at least for the purposes of electoral politics, as a left-wing faction in the Democratic Party.
The far right has no qualms about swimming in the Republican mainstream, as you can see in Moore’s Nation story. They settled these questions decades ago; by every indication, it seems to be working out quite well for them. They set for themselves the task of pushing the Republicans’ realignment as far to the right as possible, and they didn’t give up on it even when GOP leaders disappointed them. Trump’s election to the presidency richly rewarded their efforts, and demonstrated how flexible and penetrable — the very characteristics that have made them so durable for so long — the two major parties can be.
The Democratic Party may be flexible and penetrable, but this means that many different actors, not just democratic socialists, see opportunities to exercise power through it. Both major parties have fallen sway to a “disorderly assortment of actors” that the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld call “the Blob.” Each side has its Blob, but they don’t look or act the same way.
The Republican Blob, Schlozman and Rosenfeld contend, “has adopted a take-no-prisoners, don’t-sweat-the-details zeal on both procedure and substance with no parallel on the other side,” where the “groupedness of the Democratic coalition of interests is more visible and pronounced than in the GOP case — comparatively speaking, the seams show.” These seams often make it difficult for the Democrats to advance a comprehensive partisan vision. But at the same time, they provide space for the Left to organize together with parts of the Democratic base that must be part of any viable left-wing political project.
Transforming the United States in a progressive direction is a damned difficult business. From our geographically extensive and federated polity, to the ethnic and racial conflicts that have divided our working class, to the fragmented and localized structure of our labor movement, the deck has always been stacked against socialist politics in this country. We owe it to ourselves and to the people whose interests we profess to serve to be as ruthlessly effective as we can possibly be, given the conditions we face.
“The burden of the American left,” as Adam Hilton argues in a brilliant analysis of the Democrats and the Left, “is to build the power of the working class without the assistance of a working-class party. When it comes to translating that power into votes, and votes into seats in government, which is necessarily part of the struggle, we have very few options.” Socialists should come to terms with what this implies, namely the strong unlikelihood of ever having a major labor-based third party.
This does not, and should not, entail a chastened accommodation with the Democratic establishment. If anything, it entails heightening direct conflict with this establishment and its corporate funders — who would like nothing more than for the Left to spend precious time, energy, and resources on “independent” politics instead — through primary challenges and the advancement of a strongly left-wing legislative agenda.
Accepting these realities clarifies the actual strategic choices the Left confronts, and might even reduce the debilitating political neuralgia that continues to afflict the Left concerning the party question. The first choice is deciding whether pushing the Democrats’ realignment further to the left, so that it becomes the functional equivalent of a labor or social democratic party, is possible. If it is not, there appears to be just one realistic option left: acting as a minority faction in the Democratic coalition and working to leverage that position to the fullest possible extent. Partisan polarization centered on the presidency has squeezed out any room there might be for a third option, or any kind of break from the existing two parties — clean, dirty, or otherwise.
In this sense, the Left could stand to learn from the radical right. Its representatives stopped agonizing over their relationship with the Republican Party long ago, faced up to the dilemmas of protest and partisanship, and set out to make history under circumstances, as one particularly notable socialist put it, not of their choosing but “existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

These choices are often defended with the suggestion that any criticism is just a bad-faith attempt to let Trump or his voters off the hook. So in that vein it should be stressed, not for the first time in this column, that Trump’s voters are responsible for his continued popularity, that he might well be headed to renomination without the pileup of prosecutions and that prosecutors aren’t forcing G.O.P. voters to do anything they don’t seem inclined to do already.

But the pileup still seems like a boon to his renomination effort. Yes, there’s always “the possibility that Mr. Trump collapses under the weight of his legal challenges,” as my colleague Nate Cohn puts it. But we have months of polling in the shadow of these prosecutions, and it strongly suggests that along with the core Trump bloc (30 percent to 40 percent of the Republican electorate, let’s say) that will vote for him no matter what, there’s another bloc that’s open to alternatives but rallies to him when he’s perceived to be liberalism’s major target, in much the same spirit that liberals and feminists once rallied to an accused sexual predator named Bill Clinton when he was the target of the religious right.

To beat Trump in the primaries, challengers would need part of that bloc to resist the rallying impulse and swing their way instead. So timing Trump’s prosecution but not the final outcome of the trial to some of the most important primaries seems more likely to cement his nomination than to finally make his poll numbers collapse.

A conviction might be a different matter. There may be Republican voters who regard these prosecutions as theater designed to keep Trump from the nomination and therefore expect the legal cases to fall apart when his lawyers make their defense. A Reuters/Ipsos poll a few weeks ago found that 45 percent of the G.O.P. electorate said they wouldn’t vote for Trump if he was convicted of a felony, compared with 35 percent (that Trumpian core again) who said they would and that more than half said they wouldn’t support him in the fall campaign if he was imprisoned.

I do not believe the latter number, but at the very least the poll suggests that there is still enough faith in the legal system for an actual conviction to have a different effect on the Republican primary than the prosecutions have thus far.

Oakland, Calif., is plagued by crime—and by a district attorney, Pamela Price, determined to divide people by race.

After “antiracist” consultant Karen Fleshman finished a training in Oakland, Calif., she took to Facebook to express pride in her work: “Great afternoon training Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s Victim Services team in ‘How to Serve White Victims.’ Madam DA Pamela Price is my shero [sic] and mentor. She is a lifelong warrior for justice with compassion.” A few days later, Ms. Price thanked Ms. Fleshman for her “wisdom and support.”

But when I started asking questions about the June 26 training, suddenly trainer and trainee didn’t want to talk about it. Ms. Fleshman didn’t respond to my queries. Neither did the head of the district attorney’s Victim Services Division, Kristina Molina. Ms. Price’s press officer, Patti Lee, told me that she deals with the press, whereas I, as a think-tank employee, have a “specific point of view.”

The Victim Services Division consists of social workers who help crime victims obtain psychological and financial support. Ms. Fleshman’s PowerPoint slides reinforce the idea of dividing victims by race. (Photos of those slides circulated among Oakland’s law-enforcement community, one of whose members forwarded them to me.)

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

___________________

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.

Photo by tillsonburg/iStock

Jaiden is a 12-year-old boy who attends the Vanguard School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is the subject of a video that went viral on social media; it shows the boy and his mother confronting a school administrator who asserts that the Gadsden flag patch on his backpack violates district policy. "The reason that we do not want the flag displayed is due to its origins with slavery and the slave trade," says the administrator.  Meet 12yo Jaiden who was kicked out of class yesterday in Colorado Springs for having a Gadsden flag patch, which the school claims has "origins with slavery." The school's director said via email that the patch was "disruptive to the classroom environment."  Receipts in the ???? pic.twitter.com/qQ8jK1zSpR — Connor Boyack ???? (@cboyack) August 29, 2023  On Monday, school officials removed Jaiden from class due to his Gadsden flag patch. His mother has fought back against this disciplinary action, explaining that the flag—a coiled snake above the phrase "Don't tread on me"—is not a pro-slavery image; it has its origins in the Revolutionary War and was intended as a symbol of resistance to British tyranny. District officials did not respond to a request for comment, but Libertas Institute President Connor Boyack—who first publicized Jaiden's situation—shared an email that they sent to Jaiden's mother, in which the district reiterated its position that the Gadsden flag is an "unacceptable symbol" tied to "white-supremacy" and "patriot" groups. It's true that some white supremacists have appropriated the flag. But so have classical liberals and libertarians—including Reason (check out our 404 Error page). Some lefty groups have cited Gadsden too. There's even a pro-LGBT version. In any case, Jaiden's mother is absolutely correct that the flag's origins have nothing to do with racism or slavery. In their email, district officials approvingly cited a 2016 Washington Post article by Reason's Eugene Volokh evaluating an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) case. The case in question involved a post office employee whose Gadsden flag hat had generated racial harassment claims. But ultimately, the EEOC declined to rule that the Gadsden flag was a racist symbol. The Supreme Court has ruled that K-12 officials have significant authority to limit students' free expression rights in order to promote classroom cohesion. But the school cannot discriminate against Jaiden's viewpoint by wrongly and arbitrarily declaring the Gadsden flag to be a hate symbol. "There is nothing inherently disruptive about a student displaying a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack," writes Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. "Public school administrators can't ban the expression of an idea, symbol, or viewpoint just because they personally dislike it." Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also came to Jaiden's defense, describing the flag's message as "iconic" in a post on X. "The Gadsden flag is a proud symbol of the American revolution and [an] iconic warning to Britain or any government not to violate the liberties of Americans," wrote Polis. "It appears on popular American medallions and challenge coins through today and Ben Franklin also adopted it to symbolize the union of the 13 colonies. It's a great teaching moment for a history lesson!" When reached for comment by Reason, Polis reaffirmed his comment and noted that he also agreed with sentiments expressed by Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.). "I oppose banning the Gadsden flag in schools for the same reason I oppose conservative schools districts that ban LGBTQ flags in schools," wrote Lieu. "Let kids be their authentic selves and give them a world of information—students can figure out what's important to them."The post 12-Year-Old Boy Removed From School Over 'Don't Tread on Me' Patch appeared first on Reason.com.

Alabama wants to execute a man so badly that they're likely to become the first state in the nation to kill someone by nitrogen hypoxia.  Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, who was sentenced to death for a 1988 murder-for-hire killing, has already survived one execution attempt from the state. Last November, he won a court case allowing him to demand to be executed specifically by nitrogen hypoxia, a method that has been approved in Alabama since 2018 but has remained untested. Nonetheless, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall still asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for Smith last week, with plans to use the method. While four states in addition to Alabama have approved execution by lethal gas, no one has been executed using this method since 1999. While 20th-century gas chambers typically killed inmates using cyanide gas, death by nitrogen hypoxia is a completely untested method. Under the proposed process, an inmate would be placed in a gas chamber, where they would be forced to breathe pure nitrogen, ultimately causing death by suffocation due to the lack of oxygen. After long arguing that they should be allowed to kill Smith by lethal injection because the state had not yet developed a nitrogen hypoxia protocol, state officials unveiled a formal nitrogen hypoxia process in conjunction with their motion to set Smith's execution date. Under the process, the inmate will wear a mask, which will force them to breathe pure nitrogen gas "for 15 minutes, or five minutes following a flatline indication on the EKG, whichever is longer," resulting in death by suffocation. Smith won the right to be executed by this method in a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit last November. Smith argued that a lethal injection attempt would expose him to "an intolerable risk of torture, cruelty, or substantial pain," citing the state's previous botched executions. The same day as the 11th Circuit's ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a stay of execution for Smith. Alabama officials attempted to kill him by lethal injection that day, but they abandoned their attempt after they tried unsuccessfully for several hours to place IV needles in Smith's arms. While nitrogen hypoxia has been touted as a more humane method for killing death-row inmates—it's simply unknown how much suffering death by nitrogen hypoxia causes. "It's not humane," Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University, told the Montgomery Advertiser last year. "It's not going to be euphoric. You know, it may be bloodless, but it won't be simple."The post Alabama Set To Try New, Untested Execution Method appeared first on Reason.com.

For many years, millions of Americans across the political spectrum have been asking: What is going on with the Republican Party? The answers, to the extent they can be determined, are caught up with the party’s relationship with the conservative movement and developments on the broader political Right. Matthew Continetti explores these questions in his monumental study The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, recently released in paperback.  
Continetti, who was a co-founder of the online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon and is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been a conservative movement insider for two decades. He joined the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine in 2003 when it was at the zenith of its influence inside the George W. Bush administration and the conservative movement; the magazine’s longtime editor-in-chief, William Kristol, is now Continetti’s father-in-law. 
In this podcast discussion, Continetti talks about the principal themes of The Right, including the proliferation of different varieties of politics that have appeared in right-wing intellectual and activist circles over the past century, the ongoing struggle for influence between the libertarian and traditionalist factions of conservatism, and the tensions between populist outsiders and governing-minded insiders. He analyzes the present political moment and the intellectual attempt to “reverse-engineer” Donald Trump’s impulses and instincts into a coherent ideology through institutions like the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College as well as the National Conservative movement. Continetti also describes the reasoning behind his decision to begin his account with the 1920s, the end of the Cold War’s impact on the conservative movement, and the reasons why he thinks the political center-right and its institutions are following the same pattern of decline that the center-left underwent a decade ago.   

Transcript
Matthew Continetti: There is no real hub of intellectual activity on the Right that is then translated into actual policy. There are attempts — I mean, the Heritage Foundation, you can see them trying to do that. Otherwise, I think people are just trying to wait out this storm, but it doesn’t seem to show any signs of passing.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m delighted to be joined today by Matthew Continetti. He is a senior fellow and the Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He’s a prominent journalist, analyst, and historian.
He’s a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist at Commentary, and he has written for a wide variety of national publications. He co-founded the Washington Free Beacon online newspaper and was editor-in-chief there from 2012 to 2019. Prior to that, he was opinion editor and held a variety of other positions at The Weekly Standard from 2003 to 2011. Welcome, Matt!
Matthew Continetti: Thanks for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: Thank you for being here. I should add that Matt is also the author of three books, the most recent of which is The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. It’s a big, sweeping, significant account of conservatism in America written from the standpoint of a conservative movement insider, but with a historian’s objectivity. It’s a great book. It was published in hardcover last year, but a paperback edition has recently been issued with a new afterword. So, first of all, congratulations, Matt, for having written The Right, and for the wide attention that your book has drawn both in hardcover and now in paperback.
Matthew Continetti: Well, thank you very much. It’s been gratifying to see that so many people are interested in the history of conservatism and the GOP. I can understand why. It’s a hot topic these days, and indeed that’s one reason I ended up writing the book — current events kept drawing me back into the history of the right. And so I’m happy to share that knowledge that I gained with audiences, whether through the book or through podcasts like these.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, thank you. I’m a big believer that history can help us answer the critical existential questions: Where are we? And where are we going? Let me begin with the obvious question that many other interviewers have posed to you already. What is this century-long war for American conservatism, as you see it, and what have the contending sides been?
Matthew Continetti: Well, that’s a great question. The book is framed as a century-long struggle for influence on the right-wing spectrum of American politics. And I think it’d be reductive to say that there were only two competing factions. One of the threads I follow in the book is just how many different proliferating varieties of conservative politics (or right-wing politics) there are in America. But I think you can collapse a lot of different groups into a couple of binaries.
The first would be figures on the Right who privilege the concept of individual freedom, and believe that individual freedom means the unity of political freedom and economic freedom — so, figures who draw from nineteenth-century laissez-faire economic traditions, people who are known in the twentieth century and today as libertarians of various stripes. You have them on one hand, and on the other hand you have conservative/right thinkers who, rather than privilege freedom, situate it in a constellation of other values, the foremost of which is tradition, authority. And these are the more traditionalist thinkers who themselves can kind of trace a genealogy back to the nineteenth century — and indeed the eighteenth century with Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution.
The libertarians and the traditionalists have been present throughout this hundred years I describe. And they have been competing for influence over not only intellectual groups but also the Republican Party as an institution.
And the other binary that is important to my story is between grassroots activists and politicians who tend to draw on age-old populist tropes in American politics, who view themselves as outsiders, who are suspicious of elites, and who oftentimes are drawn to the darker aspects of populism such as conspiracy theories and demagogy. And then intellectual elites themselves, who are writers and thinkers, who are trying to draw some type of connection between ideas, institutions, and policies, and who need the votes that the populists inspire in order to be placed into positions where they can enact their ideas. So those would be the two main, I think, forms of battle that I describe in The Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: It seemed to me in reading your book that there was maybe a refinement on that last binary of more establishment conservatives versus populists. And that was that the “establishment” conservatives, if you can call them that — that’s a loaded term — were interested in governing. That meant putting forward coherent policies. It meant building up national majorities to approve of their programs, and it meant some level of intellectual respectability as well. And those were not concerns of the opposing populist side, who tended to be anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, maybe even nihilist in their desire for a complete break with the past and a fresh start. Does that sound more or less accurate?
Matthew Continetti: I think another way to characterize it would be to say that the conservative intellectuals were interested in basically playing by the rules of twentieth-century American politics and media, and so they did care about respectability. They did care about being able to go toe-to-toe with the best minds on the Left. They did care about persuasion of the middle that has decided elections in the United States in order to reinforce their governing majorities.
Whereas the outsiders, the populists, they were much more interested always in changing the rules or even substituting a new set of rules for the ones that we have had over the last hundred years. And so that gave them a radical touch that was missing from many of the intellectuals.
Now I should say this… As you know, Geoff, this is a history, and so there’s a process of change. And many of the individuals who came to be seen as kind of the mainstream right in the second half of the twentieth century, or really even the final quarter of the twentieth century, had started off oftentimes in a place where they were known as radicals. But because they grew in age and in stature and also in experience, they came to view politics in a way in which gradual change delivered through the mechanisms of the federal government was the right approach to effecting conservative reforms.
Geoff Kabaservice: Matt, you also draw a distinction between, obviously, the Right and the Republican Party, which at various points have overlapped but not always. And you draw another distinction between conservatives (or “movement conservatives”) on the one hand versus “the Right” on the other. Can you talk to me about that latter distinction?
Matthew Continetti: I thought it was important to talk about how one, as you say, the conservative movement and the Republican Party are not synonymous. And in fact the main objective of the conservative movement coming out of the World War II years was reclaiming (in their minds) the GOP as a conservative political institution. But then as I was doing my research, I wanted to say that the conservative movement — as I understand it, as I joined it — was just one potential form of conservative politics in America. And in fact, there’s a broader spectrum that is “the Right” which would disagree with this mainstream American conservatism.
So what the conservatives found in the second half of the twentieth century is that not only were they fighting the Left, they were also engaged in internal fights on the right from what you might call capital-L Libertarians on one hand, who felt that the mainstream conservative movement was far too supportive of the military-industrial complex or was far too conjoined to organized religion and its moral codes. And on the other hand, you had the capital-T Traditionalists who felt that that mainstream right was basically pagan because it didn’t say that virtue was the ultimate aim of society and therefore government had to be the instrument of inculcating virtue in the people — the sole instrument.
And so those groups, the Libertarians and the Traditionalists, I put on the Right more broadly, as well as groups that went even further than those coherent and (in my view) legitimate intellectual perspectives into more extremist right-wing politics. I want to say that they belong to the Right, to the degree that they opposed the Left. But they’re not, in my view, the conservative movement, which came together self-consciously in the years after World War II.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is not a personal memoir, I should say. This is a history largely focused on intellectuals and activists. Nonetheless, I am fascinated by your own perspective that you have come to on the Right based on your own experiences and decades of work in the conservative movement — and also by the way you began the book, which was with your walking into the office building at 1150 17th Street Northwest here in Washington, D.C. just after your 22nd birthday to begin work as an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
And you describe how that address on 17th Street was in many ways the intellectual command post of the American Right at that time. It housed not only the Standard, which in many ways was the publication with the greatest sway over the George W. Bush White House, but also the American Enterprise Institute, which was then the Right’s premier think tank, and the Project for a New American Century, which is a smaller, more neoconservative think tank, but incredibly influential at that time in the foreign policy field. And nearby were other simpatico conservative institutions like the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the D.C. branch of the Hoover Institution, and publications like Public Interest and Policy Review.
And since the day you set foot in the 17th Street building, you write, “The conservative movement has been for me more than an abstraction. It has been my life.” And yet that conservative intellectual hub is gone now, and the center of gravity on the Right is somewhere entirely different from the place where you grew up, so to speak.
Matthew Continetti: Yes, that’s right. And in fact, the building that I talk about, 1150 17th Street, that structure, the physical structure was demolished in 2016, literally. And indeed — and I’m not sure I include this in the book — on election night 2016, as Donald Trump was being declared the winner of the presidential election, a fire broke out in the ruin of the building that was once there at 1150 17th Street. There is now a new building that is being constructed after many years. But I did take that as a metaphor.
Geoff Kabaservice: I congratulate you for not calling your book Fire in the Ruins.
Matthew Continetti: Yeah, right. I guess to some degree, those intellectuals are still around. I mean, not all of them; many have died, many don’t consider themselves part of the Right any longer. The publication where I worked, The Weekly Standard, no longer exists. The Public Interest, which was just a block away, it closed in 2005. Policy Review no longer exists. So it is a different milieu.
Now, I should say, I joined The Weekly Standard as a Collegiate Network journalism fellow. The Collegiate Network is part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISI, which William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and, to my mind, the founder of postwar conservatism — he was the first president of ISI. So I did find my way to Washington through conservative institutions, conservative movement institutions.
But even in the years in which I worked at the Standard, there was a slight remove from movement conservatism, and even a willingness to criticize the Republican Party, that you don’t see much appetite for on the Right today. Even, I would say, emotionally and attitudinally, the Right has kind of changed.
My first book was called The K Street Gang, and it was the story of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals that I said would bring down the House Congressional Republican majority — and it did in 2006. I published that book, and it annoyed some people. It certainly annoyed some of the people I wrote about. But I would say that it was treated among the Right more broadly as, “Okay, this is a fair criticism.” I don’t think you have that anymore at a time when our politics, in my view, have become very tribal, that any criticism of your own side is considered a betrayal. I lament that change. I think it’s an unhealthy change.
Geoff Kabaservice: Where would you locate the intellectual hub of the Right at the current time?
Matthew Continetti: Well, I’m not sure there is one, to be frank. I would say that right now the American Right derives most of its direction and energy from the person of former president Donald Trump. Most of the institutions on the Right (with several exceptions including the institution where I work) are more or less directed or oriented around him and his politics, his grievances. And there’s been an attempt, beginning with Trump’s rise, to reverse-engineer his impulses and instincts into a coherent ideology that could even be a governing ideology if Trump weren’t always stepping on his own feet.
And so you’ve seen the rise of places like the Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College. There are new groups like American Moment for younger, Trumpier people. American Compass is not quite Trump-aligned, but it is interested in reshaping economic policy on the right in a more statist direction. So those would be the places where I think a lot of activity is happening. Of course, the National Conservative movement kind of grew out of those institutions and has built up its own series of conferences that are widely covered by media. I mean, there’s a lot of energy there. And yet I don’t actually think it’s necessarily reflected or refracted through actual Republican voters and politicians.
You’ll see a J. D. Vance, for example, the senator from Ohio, who is clearly very much in the vanguard of trying to reshape conservatism in a Trump mold. But Vance is really an outlier. Marco Rubio is kind of doing something similar, but he doesn’t share Vance’s foreign policy. Josh Hawley is doing something else, but he’s very interested right now in manliness, which is not really a political project, it’s more of a cultural thing. Interestingly enough, the new senator from Hawley’s state of Missouri, Eric Schmidt – I think he’s pretty smart, and what I’m seeing is him kind of tiptoeing in a Vance-like direction, but doing it in a very, I’d say, clever fashion. Because he’s still able to retain a lot of support from the pre-Trump Right, if you’d call it that.
But really that’s, what? I named four or five senators out of 49? And then the House, I mean, there’s none of that in the House. The House is very much what you’d expect from Republicans in terms of economic policy or social policy, budget policy, as we saw, in terms of trying to impose austerity. And yet it is all also very Trumpy in its affect.
So what that leads me to conclude is that there is no real hub of intellectual activity on the Right that is then translated into actual policy. There are attempts. I mean, the Heritage Foundation, which was kind of at sea during the Trump years, has now made the decision to align itself with the Trump Right, with National Conservatism, and use that as a means of having a say in the shape of the next Republican administration. Now, that’s a big bet, and a lot has to go right for that bet to work out. But you can see them trying to do that. Otherwise, I think people are just kind of relying on their own skills, their own wits, and trying to wait out this storm, but it doesn’t seem to show any signs of passing.
Geoff Kabaservice: It does not indeed. It seemed to me, from reading you back in 2015 to 2016, that you didn’t have any particular illusions that Trump was going to pivot toward presidential behavior if he got in office, or that he was going to move back in a direction of a recognizable Buckleyite, Reaganite kind of conservatism. And I wonder if there might’ve been some hint of the genesis of your book on the Right in the long piece you wrote in the Free Beacon in October 2016 entitled “Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual.” Among other quotes from that piece, you wrote, “The triumph of populism has left conservatism marooned, confused, uncertain, depressed, anxious, searching for a tradition, for a program, for viability. We might have to return to the beginning to understand where we have ended up.”
Matthew Continetti: Right. I used a lot of adjectives in that period of my writing. I use fewer now. I think that you’re right. That piece, which I wrote right on the eve of the election or right around that time, was the result of a lot of reading and a lot of studying. So the genesis of my book really began after the 2012 election, Geoff. I was a conservative who was a little bit surprised at the speed with which the election was called for Barack Obama. I had kind of thought that if Romney didn’t win — and I wasn’t convinced he was going to win — if he didn’t win, it would still be close. And it wasn’t. And many people whom I trusted had said that not only would it be close, but that Romney would win.
And so after 2012, I began really kind of trying to figure out what was going on with the Republican Party. The first thing that I found, as I was covering the debates over the GOP “autopsy” document, the RNC-produced document which said that the Republican Party needed to embrace comprehensive immigration reform, moderate its positions on social issues if it was to have any future, as well as the debate over comprehensive immigration reform — what I found was that there was a real gap between what people inside Washington D.C. were thinking and what Republican voters outside Washington D.C. were feeling. So I noticed that.
And then I kept recalling the words of a Breitbart reporter named Matthew Boyle to me, on the eve of the 2012 election, at a moment where I was saying, “Well, I still think Romney has a shot because of the independent voters.” Matt Boyle, he called it. He said, “No way. Romney’s going to lose, and then in 2016 an outsider is going to become the Republican nominee.” Now, at that time, the outsider on Matt Boyle’s mind was Rand Paul. But of course, as soon as Trump appeared in 2015, Boyle became a supporter of Donald Trump’s, as did Breitbart.
So putting those two things in my head, I said, “I don’t understand the Republican Party like I thought I did. I have to really go back and read the history.” And so I started reading a lot of the foundational intellectuals around National Review. I had read some of them earlier, but not others and not as seriously. And then, beginning in 2016, was the first time I taught a course on the history of conservatism.
Geoff Kabaservice: Where did you teach that?
Matthew Continetti: That was through a nonprofit I worked for called the Hertog Foundation, in our Hertog Political Studies Program. So I taught a weeklong course in the summer of 2016 on conservatism. That was the beginning of me kind of assembling the material, teaching it, thinking about it seriously. And so, yes, by the election of 2016, I was definitely kind of set that in order to understand the present and the future of the conservative movement, I would have to go back to the past. So this book was a long time in the making, because it took about seven years for it to actually be produced.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, it has that kind of depth to it. Before we return to the book, can you tell me something about yourself? Where did you grow up? Where were you educated? How did you come to some of the political positions that you have held?
Matthew Continetti: Sure. Well, I grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, right outside the Beltway. It was not a very political household. My father was a car dealer. That was the business that my immigrant great-grandfather entered into when he came to America at the first decades of the twentieth century, so that was kind of the family business. And my mother was a school teacher. They’re both retired now. So it wasn’t a political family, but it was a very news family, like interested in the news, interested in public affairs. So we always had the local news station on, on the radio, when we would drive around in the car. And on Saturday nights, for whatever reason — this is when I was growing up as a kid — they’d have The McLaughlin Group on, and they’d have the other local show, Inside Washington, on. And through those shows is where I learned the names Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer in particular, even before I really considered myself political, I would also be reading him in the local paper, the Washington Post, and he became very important to my intellectual formation at a pretty early age.
So I went to public schools, and then I went to Columbia University for my undergraduate education. I majored in history. And at Columbia is when I became more political and more conservative. I’ve always been, for lack of a better word, a hawk. I kind of came of age at the moment when America won the Cold War. Some of my earliest memories were of our victory in Desert Storm. I was about ten years old, so I was watching every second of it, living through it, absorbing it. So I’ve always had that kind of internationalist, engaged bent to my belief system. But of course, as you know, foreign policy is weird. There are plenty of Democrats who are internationalists, interventionists and such.
So it wasn’t until college where that kind of foreign policy, which had always been part of my perspective, was married to a concern with constitutionalism, rule of law, a belief that the most meaningful institutions are not government institutions but family, the community, the church. That all happened in college. And, really, it’s ironic because it happened through my deep reading of the great works of Western literature, which you have to do at Columbia; we have the Core Curriculum at Columbia. So it just shows you a very conservative lesson, which is the rule of unintended consequences. Columbia assigns these books. They don’t know that Matt Continetti, at age nineteen, is going to start reading The Republic and by the end of it say, “Oh, I think I’m a philosophical conservative.” But that’s essentially what happened.
And then I was interested in writing and journalism. I discovered National Review when I was a junior in college — pretty late, actually — but I just ate it all up. And then I started reading this writer — I started reading him in The Atlantic — named David Brooks, and I said, “What this guy’s doing is what I want to do.” Then I learned he worked for a smaller publication called The Weekly Standard, and I said, “Okay, if that’s where he works, I want to work there.” And then I showed up — and he quit and left two weeks later to join the New York Times! But we’re still friends, we’re still friends.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s good. Were you impacted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
Matthew Continetti: Oh, yes, yeah. I mean, like I say, that idea that America needs to be strong, and needs to be aware that the world is a dangerous place, and needs to be ready to use force to defend itself — that was already in my mind prior to 9/11, but it was certainly confirmed by 9/11. I had something of a front-row seat for 9/11. I was the resident advisor to about 35 first-year Columbia students, and we were on the 13th floor of the John Jay dormitory. The southward-facing windows of that dorm had views of the Twin Towers, and so we saw it all happen in real time.
And, of course, the F-16s patrolling Manhattan, the pillar of smoke that rose from Ground Zero for months after the attack — all of this reinforced my already-ingrained view that America needs to be engaged in the world and be prepared to face down the threats the world presents. And also America needs to stand for something in the world: stand for American ideals and principles like freedom, like constitutionalism, democracy. And so as I discovered The Weekly Standard by reading David Brooks, I also found that I, as the kids say, vibed with the more general worldview of the publication — and still do.
Geoff Kabaservice: So The Weekly Standard was launched, I want to say, in September 1995. Its leaders included Bill Kristol, who was the son of Irving Kristol, one of the original neoconservatives. And it included people like, as you say, David Brooks, and Fred Barnes, and I think John Podhoretz then. I believe it also got its original funding from Rupert Murdoch. But something interesting about The Weekly Standard, in retrospect, is that its alumni have moved in so many different directions. Someone like Brooks, I would say, is no longer really a conservative. Most of the people on the Standard at the time of its dissolution became The Bulwark, which is now a leading organ of Never Trumpism. And then you have people like Christopher Caldwell, who is at Claremont now. What would account for these very different ideological journeys, would you say?
Matthew Continetti: It’s a great question. And you left out Tucker Carlson…
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh yeah, that’s right.
Matthew Continetti: …who was a staff writer from 1995 to 2000, and of course needs no description, I think, from me for your audience. But you’re right, they did go in many different directions. I think a few things account for it. I would say I think the first is the eclecticism of the editorial staff. One thing that I loved about The Weekly Standard, why I worked there for eight and a half years, was it was an extremely collegial group of writers and editors who didn’t always agree and were able to express their views.
There was kind of an understanding that if a writer had a view that was the total opposite, say, of the editors, they might best express that view in another publication. And so, for example, Christopher Caldwell, before I arrived, had very much opposed NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, but he didn’t really write about that for the Standard. He was focused on his other work at that time, really involving Islamic immigration, Muslim immigration to Europe. And that was the case… I mean, David Brooks, for example, he wasn’t really all-in on the Clinton impeachment. Again, this happened before I arrived, but he had that view on television or elsewhere, and he wrote other stuff.
So it was a very eclectic group, but all of whom got along and liked differences of opinions, could disagree civilly. That was always the case. So I think that’s reason number one why they might end up going in different directions once they left the magazine or once the magazine closed, as it did in 2018.
I do think another reason is just politics is different now, that the world and America and the Republican Party and the Right are just different. The magazine was started in 1995 in order to, basically, the editors kind of liked to say, guide the Republican Revolution, which was the coming to power of Republicans in the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years under Newt Gingrich. And then it became very involved in the Clinton impeachment, as I said. When I showed up, of course, the Iraq War was in its third month, and the idea of regime change in Iraq was something that the editors had supported for years, I think beginning in ‘97. So that was something that they were very much invested in.
But I’d say beginning in 2010, with the rise of the Tea Party — and obviously, I’m sure we’ll talk about Sarah Palin — but we saw some glimmers of that. I saw some glimmers of that, of what I’m about to describe, already with Sarah Palin. But between 2008 and 2010, things began to change. And the type of politics that The Weekly Standard stood for, which was a very engaged, internationalist foreign policy combined with a very character-based, moralistic domestic policy — that politics just became kind of unattached from what was happening out on the ground with the rise of the Tea Party, Palin — a very kind of anti-elitist (often anti-intellectual) Right. And then the divide, which I’ve spoken about, became more pronounced over time. And so the type of publication that these writers and editors had worked for almost couldn’t happen today, in many ways, because the issues are different, certainly the personality is different. When you have an entire party structured around one man, your feelings about that one man are going to send you in one direction, and if you have a different feeling you’re going to go in a very different direction. I think those would be the two reasons that all of these different writers have ended up in so many different places.
Geoff Kabaservice: Your book The Right does end up with Trump, and in some sense seems to be pointing towards Trump from the very beginning. But it seems to me that your book is just different from a lot of other surveys of conservatism over the past century that have appeared both on the Left and on the Right. What was it that seemed to you unsatisfactory about the histories that you had read that made you want to take your own angle?
Matthew Continetti: Well, a few things. I’m a generalist. I’m an amateur historian, though I guess having written a book makes me a historian. But I wanted to present the story of the American Right in the 20th and 21st centuries in the full and round. And what I found with other surveys of my subject, they all had cutoff dates. The canonical text in my field is George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. Now, Nash has updated his book several times, but in truth the bulk of the narrative ends in 1972, because it was his Ph.D. that he was working on at Harvard. And a lot has happened since 1972. Another book by another very talented historian, Patrick Allitt, called The Conservatives — that basically ends in 2000. And so that’s 50 or 20 years that I had to provide readers with an up-to-date synopsis or narrative, really. That was one thing. On the Left, of course, you’ve gone from famine to feast, right?
Geoff Kabaservice: Mm-hmm.
Matthew Continetti: Alan Brinkley, who I took a course with at Columbia, the great American historian, said in the early ‘90s that the liberal historians weren’t paying attention to conservative history and not taking conservatives seriously enough. And since he wrote that for, I think, the American Historical Review, there has been just this efflorescence of scholarly work. As a conservative I sometimes say maybe that’s not all a good thing. Because a lot of the work tends to focus on institutions on one hand, so you get a lot of work about how big donors have shaped politics. The work also tends to go on the grassroots level. There have been very good books about Orange County, for example, and the Republican Party. So you have the institutions, you have the grassroots.
What I wanted to do was tell the story of how the intellectuals connected to politics. I have a love of old journalism, and I had just spent all these years reading the back issues of all these intellectual journals — primarily on the Right, but others like The New Republic kind of on the center-left. And I wanted to show the readers how these intellectuals influenced politics, or reacted to it. And so it’s not necessarily an institutional history and it’s not really a sociology of the Right. My book is more the story about groups of writers and how they respond to, interact with, influence political figures — mainly presidents. That’s how the book is more or less divided.
And so I think that combination of one, telling the story in the full and round, and two, telling it from an interesting perspective or an unusual perspective that kind of looks at how the intellectuals, the policy wonks, the writers were interacting with the politics — I think that’s what makes my book unique from the others.
Geoff Kabaservice: Most intellectual histories of the conservative movement start with the foundation of National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. And they follow what is called “the wilderness narrative,” which is that the Right was absolutely devastated, politically unpopular, intellectually bankrupt at that point. You, by contrast, choose to start your narrative in the 1920s. Why?
Matthew Continetti: Well, I arrived at the 1920s for a couple reasons. The first is when I say “full and round,” I did want to give readers an understanding of what preceded the wilderness narrative. Because sometimes when you read these books, it’s like, oh, history started in 1955 with the founding of National Review, or maybe in 1948 with Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, something like that. What I wanted to show is that you can’t really understand the conservative movement without understanding the Right’s situation under FDR in the New Deal. And you can’t understand the Right’s situation under FDR in the New Deal without understanding the decade prior to the New Deal. And so that’s why I ended up with 1920 — really March 1921, Warren Harding’s inaugural — as my starting point, because I wanted to use the ‘20s just to kind of lay out what conservatives thought the world ought to be.
And then what they thought ought to be was rudely interrupted by the Great Depression and the rise of FDR and the New Deal. And they spent much of the 1930s — that was the actual wilderness in a way, right? — they spent the 1930s completely marginalized. And it was only through a series of accidents — forging alliances with the conservative Southern Democrats, FDR’s overreach with the Supreme Court in 1937, and then finally, after FDR, the way in which the American public reacted to victory in war and to Harry Truman’s presidency — that enabled the conservative movement to come out from under FDR’s shadow.
But he’s still kind of the arch-villain in the imagination of the American Right. And even when we say… You hear on the Right all the time today “the administrative state,” right? Well, that’s code for the New Deal bureaucracy. That’s what they want to get rid of. And so I needed to communicate that ideal by kind of illustrating what life was like — or what America was like, what American politics were like — prior to the Depression and New Deal.
Geoff Kabaservice: A number of pundits have drawn a parallel between Donald Trump’s administration and that pre-New Deal, pre-Cold War kind of conservatism characterized by the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge presidencies. In what ways does that seem to you persuasive or off the mark?
Matthew Continetti: I’m one of those pundits. I see a few similarities in terms of policy. The first is that the Republican Party of the ‘20s, of course, was restrictive on immigration. It signed into law the bills essentially ending immigration to America for about 40 years. The GOP in those days was protectionist. They wanted the tariff — there was another parallel with Trump. And the Republican Party of the 1920s was non-interventionist, extremely suspicious of foreign entanglements, wanted to avoid a repeat of the Great War experience. They didn’t know that there was going to be another world war. They downsized the military. They thought that basically, as Coolidge put it once, “the business of America is business,” right? That’s what we have to focus on. In those three ways, I do detect similarities between the GOP of the 1920s and where the GOP seems to be headed today.
There are differences, of course. Coolidge in particular was a strong believer in American exceptionalism, in the sense of America having some type of special Providence that blessed it. That didn’t mean necessarily involvement throughout the world, but it did have an idea that American political institutions were very important and needed to be preserved. The centrality of religion… Protestantism was something that was very big in the 1920s and has a very — I don’t know how to say it — a scattered relationship to the Right today. I mean, there’s no doubt today that evangelical Christians, evangelical Protestants — a different flavor of Protestantism than Coolidge — are perhaps the biggest constituency within the GOP. But what that means is, I think, slightly different or greatly different today than back then. That’s how I’d kind of characterize the relationship between the two epochs.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course presidents like Coolidge and Harding thought that they were in the American tradition and represented “the establishment,” as we would now call it. Whereas Trump is much more self-consciously an outsider and lacks their confidence, I think, as well.
Matthew Continetti: Well, that’s a great point. I mean, the idea of “normalcy,” which was Harding’s coinage — he and his crew called themselves “normalcy men.” They thought that they just stood for the status quo. The word “conservative” was not used in American politics at that time, or it was in some contexts but it was not the name of a self-conscious political movement as it came to be. And I mentioned in the book that one of my favorite finds was this letter that Herbert Hoover was writing to a friend in the middle of, I think it was FDR’s first term, where he said, “People keep calling me conservative, but I’ve always thought myself as a liberal. But if they want to call me a conservative, I guess I’m just going to have to be that.” And so it’s really in the 1930s where the ideas and attitudes of the Harding-Coolidge Republicans are recast as conservatism, in a new alliance with the conservative Southern Democrats who had their own reasons for opposing the enlargement of the federal government.
Geoff Kabaservice: It does seem to me that your book is like some other accounts of the intellectual conservative movement in that William F. Buckley Jr. is still its central figure. In many ways, he is irresistible, not just because of his importance but because his emotional and intellectual roots do go back to that 1920s era. He was involved with the America First movement of isolationism, from which proceed a lot of other conservative trends. He worked with Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s. And his career took him all the way through being an intellectual rebel against the established order to being an insider himself and kind of an establishment man later on — and eventually the object against which the New Right of the 1970s would rebel.
Matthew Continetti: Mm-hmm.
Geoff Kabaservice: But tell me why you think Buckley is such an important figure in the history that you’re telling.
Matthew Continetti: Well, there’s a famous George Will quote that “With no Buckley, there would be no National Review magazine; with no National Review magazine, there would be no Barry Goldwater; with no Barry Goldwater, there would be no Ronald Reagan; and with no Ronald Reagan, there would be no American victory in the Cold War. Hence William F. Buckley Jr. won the Cold War.” George Will said that in the ‘90s as a way to celebrate Buckley. Buckley liked it, he liked that compliment. But I mean, obviously it’s an exaggeration, but it does kind of get to some kernel of truth, I think, which is that there’s no way of telling this story without Buckley and the Buckley family. And indeed, having done some work just recently on William F. Buckley Sr., who was the subject of a recent biography, you begin to see how the Buckley family was so important to American conservatism, in some ways like the Kennedy family was to American liberalism.
But Buckley, as you say, through his father, who was this fascinating figure — a Texan who lived in Mexico, was involved in the Mexican Revolution, an oil man, made a fortune, much of it taken away in Mexico when the revolutionary government came to power but then made another fortune in Venezuela, and also owned an energy services company that had worldwide activity and was very profitable, very suspicious of central government — very much an Old Right figure in the Harding-Coolidge ways. Active in America First — Buckley’s first boat was called “Sweet Isolation.” Buckley was too young, really, to be totally involved in America First, but he certainly supported it because his father did. But then coming out of the war, it’s interesting… Buckley’s personal experiences really kind of influenced the direction he would take the Right.
He had somewhat adopted as a youth his father’s attitudes on Jews and African-Americans. And his experience in the Army, William F. Buckley Jr’s., was where he realized that those attitudes were wrong. And so throughout his career, very early on as a journalist, he did not want anything to do with anti-Semitism. Even though, as you well know, he continued to support the status quo in the South and opposed the Civil Rights Acts and much else of the civil rights movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he was never a full-on racist, you might say. There were certainly moments in that work in the 1950s that I do think come close to the line, or maybe even cross it. But he had never met a black person before being in the Army. And so that really changed, I think, his personal attitudes. And so he tried to move the Right away from some of its worst instincts through his journalism, through his activism, and then also through his stature as the designated spokesman, you might say, of American conservatism for much of the second half of the twentieth century.
Geoff Kabaservice: You raise an interesting point, which is that part of the reason that Buckley became such a big celebrity was that he would go into these debating formats with liberals who were unused to debating their ideas. There’s that great quote by Buckley, which I hope is not apocryphal: “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”
Matthew Continetti: That’s right. So even though he was not an intellectual… I mean, he was interested in ideas, but he really was a debater. I think you’re absolutely right. That’s what he was, that’s what he did in college, and he was excellent at it. And so he was ready to debate at the level of concepts, which many others on the Right aren’t. Even to this day, they’re just not interested in doing that. And especially today, it’s much easier to avoid that because you just narrowcast and you just say what you think and who cares what other people say.
But because Buckley was a debater, and because also it seems to me that the structure of media and communications in the mid-twentieth century almost selected for debate — kind of pushed the two sides to encounter each other in sometimes explosive ways, like in 1968 between Buckley and Gore Vidal — that, I think, did a few things. One, it meant that Buckley’s interest in steering the Right away from the swamps, from the cesspools, was helped because he was so prominent. But two, it also meant that if you could present conservative ideas coherently and effectively, they would gain stature among the broader public.
And so you had this kind of two-pronged shift in American politics beginning in the late ‘60s, where as the population was moving to the right, the spokesmen for intellectual conservatism were also gaining prominence. And there was the assumption for about 40 years that those two groups were basically in accord. And I think one conclusion I’ve drawn from my work is that that might have been something of an exaggeration. There were definite sympathies and harmonies, but then over time the base started going in a direction that many of the intellectuals didn’t notice, or they didn’t want to follow.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was struck by your analysis of the fusionism that comes out of National Review and Frank Meyer’s synthesis in your observation that anti-communism was probably the most important part of that three-legged stool, the one more responsible than any others for keeping the contradictions contained. I think Buckley’s own personality and his sole ownership of National Review had something to do with that too. But it is clear that we’re now in an era where you have, on the one hand, the NatCons, the National Conservatives, who are sort of the heirs to the traditionalists and the religious element of conservatism who now want nothing to do with the libertarians — or the Freedom Cons, as they’ve now taken to calling themselves. And it would seem to me that a movement that is more united than divided is going to be a stronger movement.
Matthew Continetti: I think that’s fair to say. It goes back to what we were talking about how there’s really no center of the movement any longer, in space or in concept. Just on the role of anti-communism, it was definitely something that I would say both sides could agree on. At the same time, there were people who still dissented from the National Review line. And your point about Buckley being the sole owner and “the final decider,” to paraphrase George W. Bush, was very important as well.
The absence of communism from American political discourse has hurt the Right. And I think if there’s one big inflection in my book, it’s probably after the defeat of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Reagan’s election is also a big part. That’s where I think I kind of start getting into the meat of things a little bit more than in the earlier half. But with no Soviet Union, the Right is kind of running on fumes for a while there. And it’s right after the fall of the Soviet Union that Patrick Buchanan, the former Nixon aide and extremely prominent conservative journalist in the ‘80s, launches his first presidential campaign challenging George H. W. Bush. And so it’s as though that pre-World War II Right was just waiting to come back — and it has.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. Buckley promulgated this idea of himself as the pope of conservatism, with the ability to excommunicate different factions. And he was very proud that he had, as he saw it, succeeded in marginalizing Ayn Rand and the objectivists from the conservative movement; obviously the anti-Semites who were so prevalent in the Old Right; but also the John Birch Society, which was this sort of voluptuously paranoid organization whose conspiracy theories harken to today’s QAnon.
Now, obviously, you point out that Buckley was not wholly successful in excommunicating these organizations. But I was a little bit taken aback by an observation you made, which was that the John Birch Society presented the Right with a dilemma. You write, “Conservatism could neither retain elite validation nor nationwide success if it was associated with Birchism. But it also could not sustain itself if Birchism was excised. It would have no constituency.” That seems a rather extreme view of things, does it not?
Matthew Continetti: Well, I think what I’m saying there is people forget just how popular the John Birch Society was at that time. And for a publication like National Review to have come out forcefully from Day One and said, “Not only is Robert Welch a nutcase but everybody who agrees with him has no part in this movement” — I mean, National Review, which always had a deficit, that deficit would’ve exploded because there were a lot of Birchers who subscribed to National Review.
That was the case with Goldwater too. What got Goldwater into trouble was that even though on a theoretical level he understood that… A lot of things got Barry Goldwater into trouble; he’s one of my favorite subjects in this book. But in this case, he theoretically knew that the Birchers were a big liability if you wanted to convince 50-plus-1 percent of the American people to back you. And yet he also knew that if he denounced the Birchers on liberal airwaves, they would come after him and he would lose support that way.
And so it tied him into knots on some of these talk shows. You see the transcripts because he’s trying to say that, oh, he disagrees with them, but there are a lot of extremists too… And he talks about… He goes, “There are extremists in government right now.” It ended up tying him in knots. I mean, it led to his famous line, at his acceptance address in 1964, that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” — a direct rebuke to his rival Nelson Rockefeller, who had spent the previous speech denouncing extremism in the Republican Party.
So I do think it’s a bind. Others were able to navigate it much more easily. And I think one of Reagan’s skills was that somehow he could transcend the Bircher right without completely driving it to abandon him. Because in that first primary as governor, when Reagan ran for the Republican nomination, he faced two opponents. One was a liberal Republican in the Rockefeller mold…
Geoff Kabaservice: George Christopher.
Matthew Continetti: Yeah. Well, you know this well, I’m telling you, this is the subject of your work, right? But he also faced a right-wing opponent who thought that Reagan was a squish — Ronald Reagan a squish! But he was able to kind of, as I say, transcend that. He defeated that right-wing opponent, and yet the Right still thought that he was their guy. It’s a hard dance. And as we see today, again and again, not everyone can perform it.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was struck by your observation that Reagan, as you put it, “injected the populist rebellion of the late 1970s with his peculiar qualities.” And that in turn warped conservative intellectuals’ perception of politics because they were always looking out for the next Reagan, and they were too quick to ignore or discount or assume victory over national populism when it manifested itself in people like first Pat Buchanan, then Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, and eventually Donald Trump.
Matthew Continetti: Yes. I do think that’s another theme of the book, or argument of the book: that somehow conservative intellectuals and even historians who write about the history of the Right from any perspective, their perspective is warped by the Reagan distortion field. You kind of end up seeing everything through him: his presidency, his legacy, but also kind of his character. And by character, I don’t even mean the personal character, but I mean more his affect, the way he performed in politics. And it’s very unique, it’s very novel, and it’s very contingent.
Reagan ran for president in ’68 as a favorite son. He tested the waters. That was a very brief episode at the convention in ’68. Then he ran again in ’76, challenging the incumbent president. He lost. By the time you got to 1980, people like Buckley thought that Reagan was done. Buckley was worried in 1980 that Reagan was too old. Irving Kristol wanted Jack Kemp, the Buffalo Congressman, to run. He thought Reagan was washed up.
Reagan didn’t feel that he was washed up. He ran, and the history is very different as a result. But the fact that Reagan was somehow able to infuse populism with an optimism — a forward-looking orientation, a belief in dynamism and growth — was very important. And I think, as you say, it kind of made many conservatives, myself included, simply assume that that was the only form populism could take because, well, that was Reaganite populism.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, Matt, it pains me to have a book this rich, with the proverbial cast of thousands, compressed into little more than an hour-long discussion. And I would just urge people to read the book and appreciate for themselves all the real dimensions of this book and your arguments. But I must ask then, as a last question: What happens next, from your perspective both as a journalist and as a historian who’s surveyed this field?
I was struck by your observation in the book that “One of the functions of conservatism is to defend the essential moderation of the American political system, partly against liberal excess as well as populist excess.” And I was also struck by the conclusion of your paperback that “Although times, people, and movement changes, human nature does not, nor do the timeless truths of the American founding,” and that “American conservatism exists to remind the world of these facts and to apply those truths prudentially and moderately to the problems of the moment.” But you add, “If some on the New Right no longer want to call themselves conservative, if they no longer want to be part of the tradition of liberty, then conservatives must let them go.” Do you think that is likely to happen?
Matthew Continetti: Well, I think it’s likely to happen that I’ll let them go. But where they’re going to go — that’s a different question, and one that concerns me. Or who will be left with behind with me? That’s something else entirely.
I feel as though we’re headed into uncharted and dangerous waters, and so it’d be foolish of me to try to make any predictions. I will say this… What seems to be happening on the Right is similar to what happened on the Left beginning in 2016 or 2015, 2014. You could even trace it to 2011 with Occupy Wall Street. The center-left was basically emptied out over about ten years between 2011 and 2020. And you see this with Bernie Sanders and the Squad. And now, when I’m looking at developments in other democracies — Israel, Europe — and then I look at what’s happening in America, I see a similar process taking place on the Right, where the center-right is slowly being emptied out and the figures, the institutions are headed elsewhere. And I lament this development.
I don’t know what to do about it. I think the only thing intellectuals can do is restate the arguments for the importance of constitutionalism, rule of law, individual rights, liberal democracy. And so I’ve recently been thinking a lot about what a small-D democratic conservatism means. It would mean a conservative approach dedicated to what Reagan called “the infrastructure of democracy,” which is not just elections but all the institutions necessary to make a democracy thrive and function. And that seems to me to be the main project for a serious conservatism. And I’m happy to be at a place that will let me work on it for the foreseeable future.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Matt Continetti, thanks so much for returning to the beginning to help us understand where we have ended up. And congratulations again on the publication of the paperback edition of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.
Matthew Continetti: Thank you so much.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org.
Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.The post The century-long war for American conservatism, with Matthew Continetti first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post The century-long war for American conservatism, with Matthew Continetti appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked readers, “If you could pose one earnest question to any of the Republican candidates, what would it be?”Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Glen posed one of the most popular questions: “Who was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election?”JoAnn asked, “Would you still support Donald Trump for president if the January 6 crowd had hung or harmed Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi?”Greg offered an amusing variation: “If, as Trump and many of his allies claim, he won in 2020, wouldn’t this mean that he had won the presidency twice and therefore could not run again?”Dean wrote:
One question I would want to ask the Republican candidates not named Trump is, “How would your administration govern differently from a Trump administration?” That the question even needs to be asked speaks to a failure on the part of these candidates, who shouldn’t need prodding to distinguish themselves from the former president and his governing style. After all, if anyone can beat Trump in the Republican primary, it surely won’t be an empty suit. The question I ask above is distinct from all those questions that would ask for a candidate’s reactive attitudes toward all things Trump, which are backward-looking and demand little more from the candidates than their poll-tested praise or condemnation. What have the candidates learned from the Trump presidency (warts and all)? How do each of them intend to build upon whatever they take to be its successes while avoiding its failures, which have to include losing the presidency after a single term? What will they do differently and why?
Matters of character were a recurring theme.Katherine asked, “How do you personally define integrity, and how do you think you’ve represented it in both your private and political career?”Joseph wrote, “You have articulated various ideological, philosophical, and moral principles in your campaign. Are there any good things that your principles prevent you from doing? Are there any policy goals that you believe are good but refuse to implement based on your principles?”Cynthia asked, “Why do so many evangelicals embrace a man who in no way, shape, or form embodies anything remotely Christian?”Clifford wondered, “Do you believe that Trump should be returned to the White House despite his obvious criminality? If yes, how does that square with your party’s law-and-order mantra?”Paul focused on the economy:
Economic globalization has created many winners and many losers. For Americans who’ve found themselves left behind by these economic shifts, what specific, realistic policies or programs will you sponsor to help these Americans to develop the skills and abilities to participate and succeed more fully in the 21st-century workforce? I’m not interested in the blame game but rather in concrete, specific actions you will take that will be helpful.
So did Eric, who wrote, “Despite low unemployment, economic pessimism remains high, stemming from real wages failing to keep up with costs, particularly for the low-income. What would you do to fix that?”DC asked, “What brings you the most joy in life?”Many of you evinced concern about how to live together despite our differences.Carolyn wrote:
Our unique U.S. Constitution was the result of productive debate and compromise conducted under uncomfortably hot and sticky conditions that could have led to short tempers and bickering instead of a democracy. In the now temperature-controlled chambers of government, what procedures and strategies will you promise to use to prioritize compromise for the good of the country instead of nonproductive and/or clearly biased party politics?
Karen wrote, “American democracy requires negotiation and compromise to work. Can you give something to the opposition in order to get things done, even if it angers your base?”Gregg asked, “What will you do to unify all people in the U.S.A., not just your party?”Bob wondered, “As president, what would you do to address the divisive hatred within America and restore civility?”Francis wrote, “Name three pieces of legislation you would introduce, define, explain, and promote for congressional approval that would benefit ALL U.S. citizens?”Connie wrote:
In our very divided country, what tactics would you implement to bring the far right and the far left closer together so our country thrives and is more respectful to our differences in beliefs?   
Milton asked, “Do you think the election of Trump has brought this country together or divided it further?”Vickie had a question for Ron DeSantis: “I live in Florida and I would like DeSantis to explain the definition of ‘woke’ and his plans to fight it.”Zbig asked:
Why do you think the U.S.-Mexico border should be closed but you don’t criticize those who illegally employ illegal immigrants? What legal consequences do you recommend?
Douglas asked about women’s health care:
Idaho has banned abortions. As a result, OB/GYN physicians have left, leaving no maternity or postnatal care for women and babies in the region. What will your administration do to ensure women’s medical health and safety in states where abortion is banned or severely limited and medical doctors are leaving?
Steve asked about the environment:
The Republican response to the climate crisis is at best a “wait and see” approach, and at worst, denial of the seriousness of the problem, if not contempt for the scientific consensus of how dire the situation is. What is the scientific basis for their refutation of the severity of climate change, or is it nothing more than wishful thinking, delusional belief, and apathy?
Daniel asked, “How hot will the planet have to get before we do something about global warming?”Peter asked, “How much money have you taken from fossil-fuel companies in the last 10 years?”Krista wrote:
Recent years have seen an increase in extreme weather conditions, including hottest-ever days and months. If $200 billion had to be spent to try to minimize the damages of these events moving forward, how would you utilize it to best protect us?
June wrote:
There was a time when the Republican Party did not want government to intrude into people’s private lives. That seems to have changed. Why?
Liz has a question for Nikki Haley: “What have you learned about the world’s politics, friendships, and dangers from your years as ambassador to the UN that might not be available to other candidates?”Andrew wrote:
Mr. Ramaswamy, given your reticence to assist Ukraine in its struggle against Russia, are there any European countries that you think would deserve our military aid should Russia prevail over Ukrainian forces and move on into other former Soviet Bloc nations?
Randall asked, “Suppose you don’t win this election, and then you decide to do something else instead that is really admirable. What would that be?”Scott wanted to know about priorities. “The United States faces numerous challenges,” he wrote. “If you had to rank them, what would be your top three?”G. asked, “What limit, if any, do you believe there should be on gifts to members of the Supreme Court?”Parrish asked, “What is your plan for addressing the high number of immigrants at our southern borders?”Mark wrote, “In relation to aid to Ukraine, what is the cost of freedom versus the value of freedom?”Judy asked, “What books have you read and what have you learned about the world and history?”Jessica wondered, “Do you think of truth as grounded in objective, physical reality or as grounded in the instrumental and spiritual needs of people?”Linda asked, “If you support Trump and he’s polled much higher than anyone running, why wouldn’t you drop out of the race so he could win?”JM wrote, “If you could change one provision in the U.S. Constitution, what would it be, and why?”And Jaleelah wrote:
I obviously wouldn’t ask a question that any reporter has already posed …  Questions for which most candidates have canned responses prepared are also off the table … I would really like to ask two questions. I believe that testing candidates’ commitments to consistency and equality is the only task I am uniquely suited for. If that’s allowed, I would pose this set to each candidate individually:
“Do you support Americans’ right to defend their homes with force in the event that an invader attempts to destroy or steal their property?”
Follow-up question:
“Do you support Palestinians’ right to defend their homes with force in the event that an invader attempts to destroy or steal their property?”
American politicians often dance around the fact that they believe Palestinian people are entitled to fewer rights than others. I would like to hear Republican candidates either upend my assumptions about them or confirm my suspicions to my face.

A decade ago, I spent more months than originally desired living in the bush of Sudan’s remote and war-torn Blue Nile state with SPLA-N rebels from the Uduk tribe, whose 20,000 odd members had found themselves stranded, by an accident of British imperial cartography, within an Arab Muslim state they despised. It was a strange and formative experience for a young journalist who had only recently left graduate studies at Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology — an institution whose ethos, as a result of the apostolic succession unique to the discipline, derived from the foundational texts on Sudan’s tribal culture and political order written by British Social Anthropology’s 20th century giants.
After weeks of growing intimacy, the most bookish of the rebel commanders confided in me that only one westerner, more than a century previously, had ever learned the Uduk language and mastered their ancient belief system, since hidden beneath a light veil of Christianity. That long-dead westerner had written a book on the Uduk, which was now their prize possession, he told me. Retrieving it, wrapped in a cloth like a sacred text from within a thatched tukul hut, he showed me the well-thumbed work, now devoid of covers and binding: it transpired to be an ethnographic text published in 1979 by the very-much-alive Oxford anthropologist Wendy James, whose seminars on Sudan I had eagerly attended just a few years previously.
There is revealed the great ambiguity at the heart of anthropology, a discipline now threatened by the wave of postcolonial fervour crashing on our shores. As Perry Anderson remarked in 1968, Britain’s “brilliant and flourishing” tradition of Social Anthropology” — a discipline until recently distinguished from its American cousin, Cultural Anthropology, by its empirical focus on political and social order — was the nation’s sole significant contribution to 20th century intellectual theory. Yet the foundational texts were written within the context of imperial rule, by academics who either moonlighted as colonial administrators or depended on the pacification of newly-conquered natives to comfortably undertake their research, casting the discipline under a shadow of suspicion from which it has never fully emerged.
In her 1973 essay “The Anthropologist as Reluctant Imperialist“, Wendy James mounted a cautious defence of the discipline within the imperial context. Struggling, in the first flush of postcolonial enthusiasm, to reject the claim of Third World activists that anthropology was a reactionary handmaiden of colonialism, which functioned to preserve oppressive native hierarchies in aspic at the point of contact, James made the case for anthropologists as liberal critics of colonial administration, defenders of small-scale societies as coherent and sophisticated polities whose customs and social order were worthy of respect by a dismissive imperial centre.
Yet while James struggled to reject accusations of reactionary sentiment in recasting anthropologists as liberal critics of colonialism, from the perspective of today’s all-pervading culture war, an alternative argument could be made: it was precisely the reactionary desire to record and then to preserve pre-modern cultures from the corrosive effects of modernity that motivated the discipline at its height, and which was its greatest moral strength. For the 21st-century reactionary, who rejects the homogenising effects of liberal modernity, each individual human culture is precious and unique, a universe in itself.
For the Uduk, James’ careful work of ethnography preserved an orally-transmitted cosmology they are even now in the process of discarding. Just as British anthropologists in Sudan either moonlighted as colonial administrators or worked within the stable regime colonial order provided, British colonial administrators governed what is today South Sudan almost as a real-world ethnographic museum, banning Arabs from what is now Sudan from entry and preserving a complex constellation of tribal societies from the enforced Arabisation which, following Britain’s departure, they only shook off through a long and bloody conflict. The Uduks’ greatest lament is not that Britain kept South Sudan in tribal stasis, but that their tribe was unfairly disbarred from colonialism’s curatorial care.
Yet this ambiguous record of cultural engagement and preservation is threatened by today’s moralising postcolonial discourse, and it is anthropology’s outward-facing showpiece, the ethnographic museum, that is its fiercest contemporary battleground. Consider the sad case of Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers Museum, until recently a museum of museums whose lovingly-preserved Victorian layout functioned as a visual expression of the discipline’s early theoretical worldview. Its great crowd pleaser, the South American shrunken heads that have delighted generations of shrieking children, have now been removed from view, their display case literally shrouded in an expression of the fearful new taboos now governing our society. For curators like the archetypal Twitter don Dan Hicks, the Pitt Rivers is barely distinguishable from a serial killer’s collection of trophies: “brutish museums like the Pitt Rivers where I work have compounded killings, cultural destructions and thefts with the propaganda of race science, with the normalisation of the display of human cultures in material form. An act of dehumanisation in the face of dispossession lies at the heart of the operation of the brutish museums.”
On and on Hicks writes in 2020’s The Brutish Museums, roping in Trump and Brexit in increasingly overwrought prose future historians will surely cherish as a perfect distillation of our contemporary moment. “As the border is to the nation state, so the museum is to empire,” Hicks insists: “two devices for the classification of humans into types.” Well, yes, the reader is compelled to respond: the idea that human societies differ from each other in meaningful ways is not only true, but is the basis of anthropology. All cultures are bounded, by their nature: a borderless world is in practice merely a new form of cultural imperialism, now spread by progressivism’s zealous missionaries, like Hicks.
In his recent book The Museum of Other People, the anthropologist Adam Kuper— an ethnographer of anthropology, whose classic Anthropology and Anthropologists is a set text for British undergraduates — wearily documents how the intrusion of the new American ideology erodes the very foundations of the ethnographic museum. As Kuper notes laconically, with the empirical distance that once marked the discipline, in North America “a romantic conception of identity was revived in the 1960s” in “a development that greatly surprised many social scientists: far from melting away, ethnic identities were reasserted, and they were now viewed positively. Identity had become a political issue again.” This essentialised identity discourse, the sea in which our current progressive museum curators swim, is no more natural or unworthy of objective study than 19th-century nationalism, yet it is now so embedded within our institutions as to pass unremarked. Even to notice it casts the observer in the unwanted role of culture warrior, fighting vainly against the march of progress like 19th-century tribesmen against the approaching gunboats.
The result, the “vapid New Age platitudes” that dominate Washington’s National Museum of the American Indian or the mythicising narratives of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (which “does not mention that those slaves were captured by soldiers of African kingdoms who then marched them to the ports to be sold”) have drifted over from the imperial metropole to us in the periphery, with the consequence that “it was soon widely accepted in the growing field of post­colonial studies that only the native can understand the native. Foreign ‘experts’ (always referenced in scare quotes) are suspect, scholarship discounted.”
Indeed, Kuper notes sadly, “this is apparently now the official view at the Pitt Rivers Museum”, whose director, Laura Van Broeckhoeven, communes with tribal elders in rituals to determine which artefacts she may display and which must be returned. As for the shrunken heads, whose photographic representation Kuper was refused permission to reproduce in an email noting ‘‘the image you suggest is of the display which was removed last summer out of respect for the people involved”, he remarks with disbelief: “The people involved! Who were they, who consulted them, what in fact did ‘they’ believe, and why were they (whoever they were) given the right to determine the policy of a famous and long-­established university museum?” Whether the stakeholders consulted were the tribe who shrank the heads, or the neighbouring tribe whose heads were unwillingly shrunk, remains a mystery.
Though no conservative cultural warrior, Kuper nevertheless sounds like any Telegraph or Spectator columnist in bemoaning the submission to the new ideology that has rapidly overtaken our ethnographic museums. Of the Benin Bronzes held by both the Pitt Rivers and our troubled national institution, the British Museum, Kuper observes that the case for restitution is not as simple as either Hicks or the more temperate writer Barnaby Phillips asserts. Looted by conquering British troops in 1897 as part of the bloody punitive expedition to unseat the recalcitrant Edo oba, or king, the moral case for the return of the bronzes (in fact a collection of brass and ivory sculptures of extraordinary grace and workmanship) is, at least superficially, strong. Yet like Phillips, and unlike Hicks, Kuper observes that Nigeria’s record of custodianship is not impeccable: “three of the bronze plaques sent to Lagos in 1950 by the British Museum had somehow ended up in Ameri­can collections. In 1980, during a brief oil boom, the Nigerian government bought some brass heads at auction. Several soon turned up again on the international market.”
Yet while Kuper makes the incontrovertible point that “given the poor performance of the national museum service in conserving and displaying Nigeria’s own antiquities, there is ample room for scepticism” over the country’s demands for restitution, his argument would be more compelling were the British Museum not itself now embroiled in a scandal deriving from the magpie tendencies of one of its curators, and the inexplicable lack of cataloguing the case has revealed. Though the artefacts apparently sold on Ebay by their errant custodian do not include any of the Museum’s African collections, the Nigerian government has nevertheless used the scandal to revive its claims for the bronzes.
Yet who the bronzes ought to be returned to is not immediately obvious: to today’s Edo oba, whose claim and vision for their custodianship is quite at odds with that of his local rival, the Benin City authorities? To the Nigerian central government, the very existence of which is a product of the same historical story of conquest and imposed political order that brought the bronzes (and latterly, some 200,000 British Nigerians) to Britain? Even some contemporary African-Americans now demand their possession, on the basis that the brass they were forged from was the European payment for their own ancestors’ subjection.
As an undergraduate, I had the privilege to handle the ornate sword and engraved pistol of the last sultan of Darfur, Ali Dinar, whose kingdom was conquered and annexed to Sudan by British troops in 1916, and whose weapons were taken as war booty, ultimately to Durham University’s Sudan Archive. Should they be returned, and if so, to whom? To the Fur people, living in refugee camps far from home? Or to the war-wracked Sudanese state whose militias oppress them? Far from a simple narrative of looting and restitution, these questions become more complex and ambiguous the more they are looked at: it is precisely to unearth these complexities, to ask questions that may not have satisfactory answers, that anthropology is for — or was for, anyway.
Indeed, a single-minded devotion to the British Empire as a unique evil whose blood-guilt is only to be expiated through the dispersal of museum collections is a manner of inverted narcissism, which instead of viewing other societies as objects of fascination and study in themselves, views them solely through the prism of colonial conquest. Hicks’ aim, “to redefine [ethnographic museums] as public spaces, sites of conscience, in which to face up to the ultraviolence of Britain’s colonial past in Africa, and its enduring nature” is, itself, a double form of cultural colonialism. First, by emphasising the Victorian conqueror as the prime agent of history, the prism through which all other societies must be understood as passive victims, and second, in a worldview made explicit by Hicks’ then-modish expressions of fealty to the Black Lives Matter movement, through suborning the complex and ambiguous record of European imperialism to the culturally-specific racial politics of the contemporary United States. Hicks condemns his Victorian antecedents for “the claim — to which archaeologists and anthropologists were called as witness, as judge and as jury… of scientific proof that there could be no civilisation outside of white Euro-America”, quite unaware that he is replicating the process, having only updated their civilising fervour for that of today’s dominant empire.
Even before his resignation last week, the British Museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, struggled to reconcile the institution’s African collections with the mores of contemporary progressivism. Despite his genuflection to Black Lives Matter during the moral fervour of 2020, insisting the British Museum “has done a lot of work – accelerated and enlarged its work on its own history, the history of empire, the history of colonialism, and also of slavery” and is “aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere”, Fischer maintained that “‘the collections have to be preserved as a whole”. Yet at heart, the beliefs encoded within contemporary postcolonial discourse strike at the very essence of cross-cultural understanding at all:  the great age of the ethnographic museum is already past, struck dead by the racialised identity politics of our own imperial master.
Echoing these irreconcilable tensions, Kuper’s book ends on a desperate plea for “a Cosmopolitan Museum, one that tran­scends ethnic and national identities, makes comparisons, draws out connections, tracks exchanges across political frontiers, challenges boundaries: a museum set in the shifting sands of the past and the present but which is informed by rigorous, critical, independent scholarship”. It may be an attractive vision, but that world is already past, lost in the romantic, essentialising tide of ethnic self-regard that Americanised progressivism has bafflingly revived, whose historical course we are only beginning to chart. Kuper’s now-archaic cosmopolitanism, which appears conservative to contemporary mores, only highlights that conservatism is merely yesterday’s liberalism.
For all the British Museum stakes its claim to possession of the Benin Bronzes as artworks of shared humanity, it is the rightfulness of ethnic ownership that now strikes the contemporary observer as natural and just, perhaps correctly. The ethnographic museum is itself an artefact of a lost culture, like the Pitt Rivers’ occluded shrunken heads — an exotic curio of a society and worldview that no longer exists. “Are certain kinds of knowledge encoded in racial memory?” Kuper asks rhetorically, certain that any right-thinking person will disagree. Surveying the discourse of the moment, and the unstable definitions of indigeneity whose full consequences are yet to reveal themselves politically, the answer must be that that is indeed the spirit of the age. Now the chips must fall as they will, even if the results will surely not be those for which progressives dream.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.For years, the American approach to protein has been a never-ending quest for more. On average, each person in the United States puts away roughly 300 pounds of meat a year; we are responsible for more than a third of the multibillion-dollar protein-supplement market. Our recommended dietary allowance, or RDA, for protein is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight per day—a quota that a 160-pound person could meet with a couple of eggs in the morning and an eight-ounce steak at night. American adults consistently eat well above that amount, with men close to doubling it—and recent polls show that millions of us want to increase our intake.The American appetite for protein is, simply put, huge. And still, Jose Antonio thinks we’re getting nowhere near enough.The RDA of 0.8 grams per kilogram is “nothing, literally nothing,” Antonio, a health-and-human-performance researcher at Nova Southeastern University, in Florida, told me. “Most of my friends get that at breakfast.” In an ideal world, Antonio said, totally sedentary adults should consume at least twice that; people who seriously exercise should start with a minimum of 2.2 grams per kilogram, and ramp their levels up from there. (Antonio is also a co-founder of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, which has received sponsorships from companies that sell protein supplements.)In Antonio’s pro-protein world, people would be fitter, more energetic, and suffer less chronic disease; they’d build muscle more efficiently, and recover faster from workouts. There is no definitive cap, in his view, on how much protein people should strive for. The limit, he said, is “How much can a human consume in a single day?”Among nutritionists, Antonio’s viewpoint is pretty fringe. There is, other experts told me, such a thing as too much protein—or at least a point of rapidly diminishing returns. But researchers don’t agree on how much protein is necessary, or how much is excessive; they’ve reached no consensus on the extent of its benefits, or whether eating extra servings can send our health into decline. Which leaves Americans with no protein ceiling—and plenty of room for our protein hunger to grow, and grow, and grow.[Read: You’re probably drinking enough water]Not having enough protein is clearly very bad. Protein is essential to the architecture of our cells; we rely on it for immunity and hormone synthesis, and cobble it together to build muscles, skin, and bone. Among the three macronutrients—the other two being carbohydrates and fat—protein is the only one that “we need to get every day,” Joanne Slavin, a nutrition researcher at the University of Minnesota, told me. Nearly half of the 20 amino-acid building blocks that make up protein can’t be produced in-house. Go without them for too long, and the body will start to break its own tissues down to scavenge the molecules it needs.That state of deficiency is exactly what the protein RDA was designed to avoid. Researchers decided on the threshold decades ago, based on their best estimations of the amount of protein people needed to balance out their loss of nitrogen—a substance that’s in amino acids but that the body can’t itself make. The average person in the study, they found, needed 0.66 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight to avoid going into the red. So they set the guidelines at 0.8, a level that would keep the overwhelming majority of the population out of the deficiency zone. That number has stuck in the many years since, and Slavin, who has sat on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, sees no reason for it to change. People who are expending extra energy on growth, or whose muscles are taxed by exercise or aging, might need more. But for the typical American adult, Slavin said, “I think 0.8 is the right number.”Others vehemently disagree. The current standard is “not enough to support everyday living,” Abbie Smith-Ryan, a sports-nutrition expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Adults, she and others told me, should be getting more like 1.2 or 1.6 grams per kilogram at baseline. Their beef with the RDA is twofold. For one, the original nitrogen analyses oversimplified how the body metabolizes and retains protein, Stuart Phillips, a protein researcher at McMaster University, in Canada, told me. And second, even if the 0.8 number does meet our barest needs, “there’s a much more optimal amount we should be consuming” that would further improve our health, Katie Hirsch, an exercise physiologist at the University of South Carolina, told me. (I reached out to the USDA, which helps develop the U.S.’s official Dietary Guidelines, about whether the RDA needed to change; a spokesperson referred me to the National Academy of Sciences, which said that the RDA was last reviewed in 2002, and was expected to be reviewed again soon.)If Hirsch and others are right, even people who are slightly exceeding the government guideline might not be maximizing their resilience against infections, cardiovascular disease, metabolic issues, muscle loss, and more. People who are working out and still eating the measly 0.8 grams per kilogram per day, Antonio told me, are also starving themselves of the chance to build lean muscle—and of performance gains.But the “more” mentality has a limit. Experts just can’t agree on what it is. It does depend on who’s asking, and their goals. For most people, the benefits “diminish greatly” past 1.6 grams per kilogram, Phillips told me. Smith-Ryan said that levels around 2.2 were valid for athletes trying to lose weight. Antonio is more liberal still. Intakes of 3.3 or so are fair game for body builders or elite cyclists, he told me. In one of his studies, he had athletes pack in 4.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight for weeks—a daily diet that, for a 160-pound person, would require three-plus pounds of steak, 16 cups of tofu, or 89 egg whites.[Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet]That is … a lot of protein. And most of the other experts I spoke with said that they didn’t see the point, especially for Americans, who already eat more protein than people in most other countries. “There’s very little evidence that more is better,” Marion Nestle, a nutrition researcher at New York University, told me.The worry isn’t necessarily that tons of protein would cause acute bodily harm, at least not to people who are otherwise in good health. Over the years, researchers have raised concerns that too much protein could damage the kidneys or liver, leach calcium from the bones, or even trigger cancer or early death—but the evidence on all fronts is, at best, mixed. In Antonio’s high-protein studies with athletes, he told me, their organs have remained in tip-top shape. The known drawbacks are more annoying than dangerous: High-protein diets can raise the risk of bloating, gas, and dehydration; burning through tons of protein can also make people feel very, very hot. Roughly a quarter of the participants in Antonio’s ultra-high-protein study dropped out: Many of them felt too full, he told me, and no longer enjoyed food. One volunteer was so plagued by night sweats by the close of the trial, he said, that she could no longer fall asleep.Whether many years of an ultrahigh-protein lifestyle could be harmful is less clear. Native communities in the Arctic have healthfully subsisted on such diets for generations, but they’ve had a long time to adapt; those in Western society might not fare the same.Over the years, it’s gotten easy to interpret protein’s apparent lack of immediate downsides as permission to reach for more. But for now, many experts would rather err on the side of moderation. “Would I feed that much to one of my relatives? I would not,” Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University, told me. Even if protein itself turns out not to be hard on the body, the foods it comes in still might be, including processed meats or sugary “high-protein” powders, shakes, cookies, chips, and bars. People pounding protein also risk squeezing other nutrients out of their diet, Roberts told me—whole grains, nuts, fruits, and vegetables, all of them packed with fiber, a vital ingredient that nutritionists actually do agree we lack.[Read: Selling the fantasy of high-protein everything]Plus, Slavin argued, there’s a point at which excess protein becomes a straight-up waste. When people eat more than about 20 to 40 grams of protein in a single sitting, their protein-processing machinery can get overwhelmed; the body eliminates the nitrogen as waste, then treats the rest as it would a carbohydrate or fat. “You can get fat on proteins just like you can get fat on carbohydrates,” Slavin told me. Which makes overdoing protein, in her eyes, “expensive and stupid.”The excess can have consequences beyond what our own bodies endure. Meat production drives greenhouse-gas emissions and uses up massive tracts of land. And Maya Almaraz, a food-systems researcher at Princeton, has found that the majority of the nitrogen pollution in wastewater is a by-product of our diets. The more protein we eat, the more we might be feeding toxic algal blooms.There’s no denying that protein deficiency is a problem in many parts of the world, even within the United States. Protein sources are expensive, putting them out of reach of poor communities. Meanwhile, many of the people who worry most about getting enough of it—the wealthy, the ultra-athletic, the educated—are among those who need to supplement the least. Experts, for now, may not agree on how much protein is too much for individuals. But if appetite is all we have to curb our intake, going all in on protein might create problems bigger than anything we’ve had to stomach so far.

Edward Snowden, a whistleblower wanted by U.S. authorities for leaking highly classified National Security Agency (NSA) secrets in 2013, could be forced to fight for Russia or lose his citizenship should Moscow announce a full-scale mobilization of the population, under a new draft law submitted on Monday.

The draft legislation was submitted to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, by Mikhail Matveev, a lawmaker with the country's Communist Party. It states that evasion of military service by a person who has been granted Russian citizenship could be considered grounds for its termination, state-run news agency Tass reported.

Snowden was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin in September 2022. The former U.S. intelligence contractor fled to Moscow in 2013 to avoid espionage charges after leaking secret files that exposed extensive details of global surveillance operations carried out by his then-employer, the NSA. He was granted temporary asylum in Russia, which was extended until he was granted permanent residency in 2020.

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden poses for a photo during an interview in an undisclosed location in December 2013 in Moscow, Russia. Snowden exposed extensive details of global electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency. Barton Gellman/Getty Images

If signed into law, the bill would only apply to Snowden should Putin impose martial law and declare a full-scale mobilization of the country. The Kremlin has repeatedly brushed off reports of a covert draft or that a second wave could take place. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov previously claimed a second mobilization wave in Russia would kick off in January 2023.

Putin announced a "partial mobilization" of the population in the fall of 2022 that his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said targeted some 300,000 reservists and ex-military personnel with "certain military specialties and relevant experience."

Snowden's Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, previously told Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti that his client could not be drafted under Putin's partial mobilization order because he had not previously served in the Russian armed forces.

Newsweek has contacted Kucherena and Russia's Foreign Ministry via email for comment.

Last fall, after Snowden was granted Russian citizenship, then-U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said the former intelligence contractor may be "subject to any Russian decrees that may come down, including the one we heard about last week," likely referring to Putin's partial mobilization order.

"Mr. Snowden is apparently now a Russian citizen," Price told reporters at the time. "The only thing that has changed is that as a result of his Russian citizenship, apparently now he may well be conscripted to fight in a reckless war in Ukraine."

Experts previously told Newsweek that Putin is likely stalling over declaring a full-scale mobilization over concerns doing so would break from the propaganda narrative he has been pushing for more than 18 months.

Konstantin Sonin, a Russian-born political economist from the University of Chicago, told Newsweek Putin is likely holding off against declaring a mass draft because the propaganda narrative that he and his entourage push is that Russia is not waging a war, but is conducting a limited-scale military operation.

"This is what he is fed in the army and police reports, and this is the language that he speaks to his subordinates and the general public. Announcing a mobilization in the open will be a drastic departure from this worldview, almost like bursting from an informational bubble," Sonin continued, explaining that even if Putin does attempt to draft more men for the war, it will be accompanied by rhetoric claiming nothing new is happening.

Neil Melvin, director of international security studies at British defense and security think tank the Royal United Services Institute, agreed, telling Newsweek that Putin's propaganda message has meant that he "continues to walk a tightrope over the issue of mobilization."

Melvin said that, so far, Putin has been able to conduct the war without having to conscript significant numbers of young men from large urban areas of Russia, with the main brunt of the fighting conducted by troops drawn from minorities, and from rural areas and smaller towns.

Do you have a tip on a world news story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about the Russia-Ukraine war? Let us know via worldnews@newsweek.com.

Jordan Peterson has launched an attack on Disney CEO, Bob Iger, on X, formerly known as Twitter, over males seemingly dressed as female characters.

The Canadian psychologist and influencer retweeted news anchor, Megyn Kelly, after she shared another tweet showing people who appeared to be male, dressed as female Disney characters speaking to guests at theme parks.

One of the photos appeared to be outside the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique at Florida's Disney World Resort, but Newsweek has not been able to verify the authenticity of the images.

Bob Iger on January 13, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. Jordan Peterson (left) arrives at Perth Airport on November 28, 2022, in Perth, Australia. Peterson has taken aim at the Disney chief on X, formerly known as Twitter. Faith Moran

"Who the hell wants to see this while taking the kids to Disney?" Kelly wrote in her tweet.

While Peterson decided to take aim at Disney's top brass. "Hey Iger, Stock price still not Low enough For you," he wrote.

Newsweek has contacted Disney by email for comment.

Peterson's jab comes after Disney's stocks fell to a three-year low on Friday, closing the week's market at $82.83. At other times during the week, the stocks had fallen to some of the lowest prices in decades.

Hey

Iger

Stock price still not

Low enough

For you@Disney https://t.co/V1rLD6f0fW — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 26, 2023

It comes weeks after Iger spelled out Disney's financial status in a recent quarterly earnings call, where he revealed the company was on track to make its targeted $5.5 billion in savings due in large part to a range of cost-cutting measures.

He explained that while revenues for the quarter and nine months to July 1, 2023, grew 4 percent and 8 percent respectively, the diluted earnings per share (EPS) decreased to $2.94 from $3.22 in the prior-year period. EPS is a measurement of a company's earnings per share if all convertible securities are converted.

Who the hell wants to see this while taking the kids to Disney? https://t.co/35D7NMFkaG — Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) August 26, 2023

Peterson's tweet is an example of an ongoing culture war Disney finds itself embroiled in as it attempts to update its brand to be more reflective of values in 2023, such as diversity and LGBTQ+ representation.

Peterson is one of many detractors who have accused the company of going "woke" over issues that include casting Black actor Halle Bailey as Ariel in this year's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid and hosting LGBTQ+ days at its theme parks.

These are just some examples of issues Disney's critics are not happy about, but it was when the company spoke out against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' "Don't Say Gay Bill," that the company's attempts at being progressive came under more scrutiny.

In 2022, DeSantis introduced legislation that banned the discussion of sexuality and gender identity for some grades at Florida's public schools. After pressure from their thousands of staff at Disney World and across the country, Disney eventually relented and publicly condemned the bill.

DeSantis then turned his sights on the entertainment firm, waging a war to end its exclusive self-governing of the land where Disney World is located and wrestle back control into the hands of the state government.

Known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney has effectively operated as a self-governed entity, benefits of which include tax breaks, development rights and social privileges.

The Floridian governor and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful tried to appoint a new board with handpicked candidates, but manage to be legally outmaneuvered by Disney at every turn.

The company then launched legal action against DeSantis, arguing he was allegedly punishing the company for its opposition to the bill, arguing he violated Disney's First Amendment rights. It also accused DeSantis of trying to "weaponize government power" in a federal lawsuit it filed in April over his moves to restrict Walt Disney World's self-governing powers.

Peterson is no stranger to taking swipes at Disney, and faced ridicule recently when falling for an internet prank about the upcoming Snow White live-action reboot.

The film which will be released next year has come under fire for casting Rachel Zegler, an actor of Polish and Colombian descent as Snow White, and replaced the Seven Dwarfs from the 1939 film with "magical creatures" of varying genders and ethnicities, but only one actor has dwarfism.

Peterson responded to a tweet by satirical conservative website The Babylon Bee, which joked "Disney to remove problematic kiss from classic movie, Snow White will now remain dead."

Not realizing it was a joke, he retweeted it with the caption, "Looks like @Disney can't stop chasing failure," much to the bemusement of many.

Of all the descriptors attached to Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old political tyro enjoying a bizarre surge in the Republican primary race for second place, the most common one seems to be “annoying.” After the Republican presidential primary debate on Wednesday, a Politico headline quoted a party strategist about Ramaswamy’s performance: “It just got to be annoying.” In a widely shared essay, the writer Josh Barro, a Harvard contemporary of Ramaswamy, probed the quality that “makes Vivek so annoying.” CNN’s S.E. Cupp called him, in a column: “Obnoxious. Annoying. Disrespectful. Inexperienced. Conspiratorial.”

Matt Lewis, an anti-Trump conservative writer for The Daily Beast, marveled that there are some who actually like Ramaswamy’s cocky, know-it-all persona: “As Seinfeld might say, ‘Who are these people?’”

The answer, of course, is much of the Republican Party. The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight and Ipsos polled likely Republican primary voters before and after last week’s debate. Following his performance, Ramaswamy’s favorability rating rose from 50 percent to 60 percent, even though his unfavorability rating rose even more, from 13 percent to 32 percent. Participants in a CNN focus group of Iowa Republicans declared him the debate’s winner, as did a poll released on Thursday from JL Partners. The day after the debate, his campaign reportedly raised more than $1 million.

The question is what Ramaswamy’s supporters see in this irksome figure. Some Republicans, clearly, appreciate the way he sucks up to Donald Trump, whom Ramaswamy has called “the best president of the 21st century.” But that doesn’t explain the roughly 10 percent of Republicans who tell pollsters they’re planning to vote for Ramaswamy instead of Trump. It can’t only be his shtick as Fox News’s “woke and cancel-culture guru,” as one anchor called him, since at this point even the Florida governor Ron DeSantis has learned that railing against wokeness is a losing message. Nor is Ramaswamy’s appeal tailored to the downwardly mobile Trump voters who appreciated the former president’s pledges to protect their entitlements, since Ramaswamy’s promise to “dismantle Lyndon Johnson’s failed ‘Great Society’” makes Paul Ryan look like a social democrat.

Now I’m sure you’re going to say the same thing about my beloved F-35s, B-21s, SSN-774s and so on.

Gail: Well, the big difference is that cutting back on global warming is approximately a billion percent more important than keeping weapons suppliers happy. That high-speed rail project has, indeed, been hell to complete — you’re talking about clearing the way through 171 miles in the middle of California. But eventually it’ll get done, and when it does, there’ll be a dramatic reduction in motor vehicle emissions at a time when Americans are realizing that global warming can ruin the future for their children and grandchildren.

Bret: Hmm. When Californians approved it, they thought they’d spend around $30 billion. It’s now costing almost four times as much, and it’s not clear why people will prefer to go by train instead of just hopping a quick flight from San Francisco or San Jose to L.A. or Burbank. Plus, the inputs of concrete, steel and electricity all put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, too.

Gail: That reminds me — during the Republican debate, when the candidates were asked to raise their hands if they believed human activity causes climate change, nobody was brave enough to do it. Although Haley did at least seem to admit it had a role.

I know you don’t agree with our friend Ramaswamy, who called the climate change agenda “a hoax.” But do you feel yourself moving toward our oh-Lord-this-is-a-world-crisis side?

Bret: I feel myself moving toward the we-need-two-real-sides-in-this-debate side. Conservatives could have something meaningful to contribute if they acknowledged that climate change was real and that big-government solutions aren’t the way to go. We could do a lot to facilitate the permitting and construction of smaller, safer, next-generation nuclear reactors. We could welcome mining for rare earths and other critical minerals in the United States. We could fight to end the environmentally destructive subsidies for biodiesels and the morally hazardous subsidies for flood insurance. We could take a Teddy Roosevelt-inspired conservationist approach to our shorelines to discourage beachfront development. We could support more investment in basic science, particularly for carbon capture and battery storage. We could support a carbon tax and offset it with a reduction in income tax. And we could agree to outlaw cryptocurrencies on purely environmental grounds — never mind that they’re mostly Ponzi schemes.

Maria was the Pirate King. She was five. She was tall for five and she was dauntless and she was swaggeringly piratical. She wore a red bandana, a black felt pirate hat, and an old terry-cloth bathrobe of her father’s cinched around her waist with an orange scarf. We’d made an eye patch out of black construction paper stapled to a shoelace, but it bugged her so she yanked it off. Louisa, Maria’s little sister, tried putting it on the dog, but it bugged him more, so she chucked it into the notional ocean, Penzance harbor, the parched and patchy grass of our back yard. We’d rigged the house’s back deck to be a pirate ship: a white bedsheet for a mainsail, a Jolly Roger painted on cardboard nailed to clapboards, and, for life preservers, inflatable pool floaties lashed to the deck railings with clothesline. With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, it looked awesome. Maria strode across the deck of the ship, slashing at the air with a wooden sword, and singing:

For I am a Pirate King!

And it is, it is a glorious thing

To be a Pirate King.

And it was, it was.

This exclusive, one-time performance of a radically abridged adaptation of “The Pirates of Penzance” was held on a Friday afternoon the week before Maria started kindergarten—the end of preschool, the beginning of school. I have exactly ten lousy photographs of the show. There were no iPhones then and most of the grownups held not cameras but babies and toddlers slathered in sunscreen, slipping out of our arms like seal pups. The audience sat on wooden benches and borrowed chairs. Two sisters, Charlotte and Phoebe, aged five and eight, sold tickets and popcorn and lemonade—a quarter each or a dollar for everything—from the window of a wooden puppet theatre, and no one complained that the math didn’t work out. A boom box blared out a D’Oyly Carte Opera Company CD, but the show was mainly pantomime plus dancing: spinning, wriggling, the occasional cancan.

That year, there were eight kids in our madcap back-yard summer-theatre camp; seven years later, there were eighteen, not counting house dogs and stray cats and pocketed frogs and whales we built out of black garbage bags, blown up like balloons and duct-taped to broom handles, for a world-première production of M. T. Anderson’s “Whales on Stilts.” I still have my favorite prop: a painted plywood sign from “The Princess Bride.” On one side it says, in red, “THE PIT OF DESPAIR”; on the other, in blue, “MIRACLE MAX, QUACKERY 25¢.” I keep it in my study, flipped to one side or the other, depending on how the day goes. I like how there are only two choices.

If it rained, we’d make a giant pile of pillows on the floor and flop down and watch the Marx Brothers on DVD: “Duck Soup,” “Horse Feathers,” “Night at the Opera.” You can get to know a kid pretty well by finding out which Marx brother he likes the best. (Harpo. I love Harpo.) “This is casting research,” I’d say if my husband wandered by, raising an eyebrow at all of us. “Casting research? But you let everyone have whatever part they want.” Nights, he wrote the scripts. “Disappointment shouldn’t start before you learn how to tie your own shoes,” I told him. Reading skills, learning disabilities, talent, ability to carry a tune: irrelevant. “Rule No. 1,” I’d say to the kids, “anyone can be anyone.” As if this made sense, as if this were an actual rule, as if growing up isn’t about being trapped in one role, forever, and forgetting that it’s just a part, and that you’re the one who made it up.

The Playhouse started because two things happened at the same time: Charlotte and Phoebe’s mothers decided to get married—same-sex marriage had become legal in our state that spring—and the local Gilbert & Sullivan Society, which regularly held a milk-and-cookies matinée for the under-ten set, announced that its fall production would be “Penzance.” To get ready to see the play, I bought the CD, and, for the wedding, I bought my little boys cheap polyester three-piece, bow-tied suits, in which they thought they looked like pirates, although in truth they looked like Vito Corleone’s great-grandchildren going to a christening. They’d put on their suits, I would play the CD, and they would dance, stomping and shouting and being nautical, not to mention historical, mathematical, and quadratical.

It started for a more practical reason, too: there’s no day care or summer camp in the last week of August, which is also the week college begins, and I had to teach. So I said I’d have a bunch of kids over to my house for the week and organize some kind of pint-size production, because that was the kind of thing my mother would have done, and because my next-door neighbor, Liz, volunteered to cover for me when I had to run to campus for a class.

Mostly, it was the usual drill. Drop-off at 8 A.M., pickup at 4 P.M., bring a hat and a swimsuit. For snacks: orange juice and goldfish, baby carrots and sliced apples. At noon, everyone went to Liz’s for lunch: cheese quesadillas on green plastic plates on orange paper tablecloths. Afternoon naps for the under-fours. I clipped a baby monitor to my back pocket. We’d rehearse, paint sets, make props, mess around. I’d take everyone to the playground or set up the sprinkler in the back yard or we’d head out to the basketball court and play Fishy, Fishy Cross My Ocean. We ran through a lot of Band-Aids and bug spray and self-adhesive mustaches.

For the kids who were old enough to read, I’d print out scripts and put them in colored folders. The kids decorated them with their names and the usual doodles: rainbows, hearts, race cars. Simon kept his folder by his bed, and read through it every night before going to sleep; in the morning, in the shower, he would sing all his songs. His breakout role was Leo Bloom, in “The Producers,” when he was eight. “I have a secret desire / Hiding deep in my soul / It sets my heart afire / To see me in this role.” He wore a buttoned white shirt, black pants, and suspenders, and carried a blue flannel blanket. “Look out, Broadway!” he belted, doing his best to tap-dance in sneakers. Eat your heart out, Matthew Broderick.

We never went to Broadway. But the kids made posters and tacked them to telephone poles and notice boards all around the neighborhood, and it got to be a thing, these back-yard plays staged in front of curtains made of paint-spattered drop cloths stitched to torn plastic shower curtains and stretched between pitch-backs. Grandmothers came by car. Elementary-school teachers took the subway. We had to borrow more chairs. We ran out of popcorn.

My permissive approach to casting meant some characters were played by more than one kid. Our “H.M.S. Pinafore” had Buttercup, played by Liz’s daughter Zoe—and also Cutterbup, played by Louisa. If you were in the audience and didn’t know the story, watching the action wasn’t always much help. Hence the scripts relied rather heavily on narrators.

NARRATOR: It is 1880 and we are aboard Pinafore where she is docked in England’s Portsmouth harbour. This is the finest ship in all Her Majesty’s royal navy, blessed with an honest, hardworking, and mostly happy crew. I say mostly because there are those on board Pinafore whose love is unrequited: they love without any hope of being loved back. . . . Behold the particularly fine seaman up there on the poop deck. His name is Ralph Rackstraw.

Rackstraw was Ben, six, missing four teeth, up on the balcony, hoisting a sail topped with a Union Jack, and trying to look at once wistful, lovelorn, and patriotic. His little brother Daniel only watched that year; he later got his big break in “The Princess Bride,” when he played the Albino and got to rasp, at Prince Humperdinck’s prisoner in the Pit of Despair, “Don’t even think of trying to escape!”

Photograph courtesy the author

Trying on roles is what little kids do every day; they’re always playing parts. In “Pinafore,” Rayne played an able seaman dancing a hornpipe, the natural two-step of every toddler. Maria, a swashbuckler, liked parts that required a sword; she was Dick Deadeye. Year by year, kids perfect their parts; that last week of summer, they’d get to play outsized versions of themselves. In “Pinafore,” Rayne’s brother Emerson, eight years old and born to command, wanted to be Sir Joseph Porter, First Lord of the Admiralty. Every year after that, he’d twirl a cane, with cornstarch graying his hair. In “Oliver!” he was Mr. Bumble, Master of the Workhouse; he was, inevitably, also Captain von Trapp. Gideon had every firstborn’s tendency to tyranny. “It was good,” he’d say. “I got to be bad.”

But then there were the kids who wanted to play anything except the selves they were becoming. One of Gideon’s brothers, when he was five, had a hand-me-down Flash costume: a red polyester suit with a yellow lightning slash on the chest, and a mask.

Giorgia Meloni and Rishi Sunak share a joke at the July NATO summit (Photo by Paul Ellis - Getty Images)A few weeks ago, tribune of the people Professor Matthew Goodwin wrote a post proposing a new radical right populist party to replace the Conservatives. There is no chance of this happening before the election. The only person on the right with the necessary name recognition to take 10% or more of the Conservative vote is Nigel Farage, and if he was going to try he’d do it via Reform which, while struggling, is at least an existing entity.But it is true that the Conservatives are deeply split, as per my article on their post-election future, between the radical right “National Conservativism” of MPs like Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger, and Lee Anderson, and the more conventional centre-right. The Cates/Kruger platform is the same as Goodwin’s: big reductions in “legal” migration as well as further crackdowns on asylum seekers; a vague anti-elitist sentiment; and moral panics, with sex education in schools a current favourite.If we had a different electoral system then the Tories would already be split into radical right and centre-right parties, as is the case across Europe. Depending on what happens next year it’s not impossible we end up with that happening anyway.In his post Goodwin cites Giorgia Meloni’s “Brothers of Italy” party as an example of how his approach can win elections. Her triumph last year as head of a coalition including Matteo Salvini’s “Lega” party and the late Silvio Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” was indeed spectacular. And her agenda during the campaign was similar to Goodwin’s. On immigration she even proposed a naval blockade to stop any migrants reaching Italy. She attacked “wokeness” in all its forms, with a heavy focus on restoring the traditional family. And, like every populist in history, attacked elites at home and globally, with particular venom directed at Brussels.But Goodwin, and his fellow travellers in the UK, have chosen to ignore what she’s actually done in government, presumably because it raises some major questions about their worldview. This is not only because in practice she has been far less radical than promised, but also because her approach highlights Anglo-populism’s biggest lacuna -  its complete lack of an economic policy.   

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A Maine hospital is threatening to sue a former employee for defamation after her 15-year-old son wrote a petition calling for an investigation into the hospital's lax patient safety standards.  According to a legal letter recently sent to the hospital, Anne Yered, a pediatric intensive care physician, was fired without cause from Northern Light Health's Eastern Maine Medical Center last June after she raised patient safety concerns. Yered's son, Samson Cournane, a then 14-year-old student at the nearby University of Maine, says he decided to research patient safety at the hospital after his mother's firing. According to a press release from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit involved in the case, Samson "found that news articles and watchdog reports showed a troubling pattern of safety issues at his local hospital." Soon after, Cournane decided to write a petition urging Maine congressional Rep. Jared Golden to launch an investigation into the hospital's practices. He also launched a Twitter account to advertise the petition. A month later, he also wrote an article in his university's newspaper, where he discussed the hospital's safety issues and linked to his petition. According to Cournane's article, the hospital is plagued by understaffing and overcrowding. "My hope with this petition is to show hospital administration that we are serious about solving this potential crisis," Courane wrote. "I hope that hospital executives will join with the important stakeholders and conduct round table discussions about ways to improve the situation outlined in the petition." In January, Yered sent the hospital a draft complaint after exhausting her attempts to reverse her wrongful termination without litigation. According to FIRE, "the hospital fired back, threatening to countersue for defamation based on Samson's written advocacy and baselessly claiming that Dr. Yered 'ghostwrote' the petition, tweets, and letter to the editor," despite no evidence supporting this claim. FIRE argues that the hospital's threatened lawsuit would be an obvious example of a SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) lawsuit, a meritless lawsuit filed to intimidate—or bankrupt—an organization's or individual's critics into silence. However, Maine has an anti-SLAPP law which states that lawsuits over speech that "[fall] within constitutional protection of the right to petition government" under the U.S. Constitution or the Constitution of Maine that are not "devoid of any reasonable factual support" are eligible for a special motion to dismiss.  "Even without Maine's statutory protection, Samson's public advocacy cannot constitute defamation," FIRE wrote in its letter to the hospital's lawyers. "As described above, Samson's statements of fact are supported by personal knowledge and documentary evidence. His opinions are expressions of personal judgment, based on his interpretation of facts—a well-established category of protected speech." "The reason I chose to speak out was that everyone deserves to have safe and good quality health care. And when I found out about this, I felt like I was morally accountable to do something about it and raise awareness with the administration and in the community," Courane told FIRE. "I wrote all these things, and I fully believe what I'm saying. And I feel like this just makes me want to do more."The post Hospital Threatens Defamation Suit Over a 15-Year-Old's Change.org Petition  appeared first on Reason.com.

The federal government might soon take an interest in how many cold ones you've been cracking open. George Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, tells the Daily Mail that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) might soon revise its dietary guidelines to recommend that adults consume no more than two alcoholic drinks per week. Canada's health authorities recently shifted to that guideline, and Koob says that the U.S. could follow suit. "I mean, they're not going to go up, I'm pretty sure," Koob said of the ongoing reevaluation of federal alcohol guidelines, a process that likely won't be completed until 2025, according to the Daily Mail. "So, if [alcohol consumption guidelines] go in any direction, it would be toward Canada." Currently, the federal dietary guidelines advise no more than two drinks per day for adult men and one drink per day for adult women. Revising that down to two drinks per week would be a dramatic shift, to say the least. Thankfully, most Americans don't give a shit what the federal guidelines for drinking say. Following federal dietary guidelines to the letter of the law would mean a joyless existence devoid of many fine drinks (particularly if you're a woman), anything less than well-done steak, or eggs benedict. Oh, and don't forget to microwave your prosciutto! It's also true, of course, that the government is in no way forcing Americans to follow these rules. This doesn't even rise to the level of a backhanded ban like the ones that are aimed at driving gas stoves into extinction. Still, these guidelines come with an air of authority to them—or, at least, the sense that they were made by people who know what they're talking about. But, often, they don't. Remember the food pyramid? My entire generation was raised on the notion that we were supposed to eat six to 11 servings of starch per day, thanks to poorly researched government-based dietary guidelines If the U.S. follows Canada in issuing dramatically lower guidelines for alcohol consumption, the USDA will likely justify the decision by pointing to a headline-generating 2018 article published in the British medical journal The Lancet that argued the safe level of alcohol consumption was basically zero. Indeed, in his remarks to the Daily Mail, Koob echoed that study by claiming there are "no benefits" to drinking alcohol in terms of physical health. The World Health Organization has been pushing a similar message in recent years. Of course, that ignores many of the possible benefits that human beings derive from drinking—like social lubrication, relaxation, and fun. "[Alcohol] helps us to be more creative. It helps us to be more communal. It helps us to cooperate on a large scale," Edward Slingerland, author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization told ReasonTV last year. "It helps to make it easier for us to kind of rub shoulders with each other in these large-scale societies that we live in. So it solved a bunch of adaptive problems that we uniquely face as a species because of this weird lifestyle we have." As with so many other public health policies—many of which were on obvious display during the COVID-19 pandemic—alcohol guidelines focused exclusively on physical well-being at the expense of everything else that makes a life worth living will naturally be overly cautious and unrealistic. Setting strict rules about alcohol consumption also requires ignoring other evidence that, actually, drinking might be good for you, as long as it's done in moderation. A study published in June by the medical journal BMC Medicine comparing drinkers and nondrinkers found that "infrequent, light, or moderate drinkers were at a lower risk of mortality from all causes, CVD, chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, Alzheimer's disease, and influenza and pneumonia" when compared to lifelong teetotalers. Of course, heavy drinkers had a higher risk of dying "from all causes, cancer, and accidents." Having more information about the ways alcohol affects our health—positive and negative—is essential for adults who want to make informed decisions about what they ingest. But there's no need for formal guidelines promulgated by government agencies, and that's especially true when the people writing those rules are only looking at part of the picture. The post America's Alcohol Czar Wants Stricter Federal Guidelines for Drinking appeared first on Reason.com.

When I was younger and going through some particularly unhappy break-up or other, I’d relieve my tumultuous feelings by rewatching The World At War on telly. Sometimes it feels good to have confirmation that things really are as bad as they seem. Michel Houellebecq’s breakthrough novel Atomised, published 25 years ago this week, has provided a similarly cathartic service for a generation of disaffected men.
Originally entitled Les Particules Élementaires, the book’s first appearance sent the French literary scene into a frenzy; selling thousands of copies, sparking many an op-ed, and causing the owner of a literary prize awarded to the book to withdraw his patronage. International publishers scented a transferable succès de scandale. The designer of the UK translation put a skeletal nymphet on the cover, insolently facing the camera dressed only in her knickers.
The implication to the reader was that he was purchasing a combination of hot sex and cool Gallic hipsterism in literary form. No greater joke has ever been played on the British novel-buying male. In fact, Atomised presents a sexual wasteland full of neurotics, narcissists, and malformed losers. And, much like its anorak-wearing author, no character in the book possesses any cool whatsoever.
Atomised is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and Bruno. Michel is a robotic rationalist, constitutionally unable to form meaningful human relationships. In his professional life as a biologist, he searches for a way to eliminate the mess of concupiscence from the human condition. Bruno, on the other hand, is a monomaniacal sexual obsessive, restlessly questing through brothels, orgies and naturist colonies for a degree of satiation he never finds.

For Bruno, there are only two kinds of women: the enticing unavailable ones that make him feel inadequate and tormented; or the ones he can have, that make him feel bored and detached. For both brothers, moments of tender love and compassion from women are fleeting, and each is psychologically unfit to receive them. The immediate cause of all this is their monstrous hippy mother who — “believing that maternity was something every woman should experience” — decides to keep the accidental human by-products of her trysts, but leaves the nurture of them to inadequate others. The distal cause, meanwhile, is the fall of Western civilisation.
The book is replete with failed parenting relationships, failed marriages and failed erections. Humans are animals upon whom nature has played a cruel trick, bestowing them with socially malleable cravings that endlessly distress them and which capitalism exploits. Suffering is everywhere and, in the absence of the Judeo-Christian framework, has no meaning. Death is feared pathologically. Sexual promiscuity is the only permissible way left for males to engage in competition with peers, but the prizes are ultimately terrible. Pneumatic young women gain tenuous social capital from acting like sex objects. Ageing female bodies literally have no point anymore, and their owners know it.
Since the book’s publication in 1998, patterns of critical evaluation have had plenty of time to settle. And many of these have tended to treat it, along with the wider oeuvre within which it sits, as containing a serious political message, or as otherwise having something to teach readers.
Understandably, conservative and “post-liberal” thinkers often relate enthusiastically to the Houellebecquian universe as one that tests post-1968 liberal values to complete destruction. In this reading, Houellebecq is primarily demonstrating the awful downsides of the intrusion of the capitalist market into the realm of sexual reproduction. It’s certainly true that some passages — describing the advent of abortion and the pill, the rise of individualism, and the collapse of the family against the predations of the market — might have come straight from the pen of a post-liberal polemicist (at least, if he was a bit drunk).
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But still, Houellebecq is not proselytising for a return to the values of the past. He doesn’t want us to go back to some prelapsarian age — partly because he thinks it is too late anyway, but also because it all sounds absolutely terrible. In Atomised, he lampoons the alternative:
“You are at one with nature, have plenty of fresh air and a couple of fields to plough (the number and size of which are strictly fixed by hereditary principle). Now and then you kill a boar; you fuck occasionally, mostly with your wife, whose role is to give birth to children; said children grow up to take their place in the same ecosystem. Eventually, you catch something serious and you’re history.”
The extent to which Houellebecq is personally invested in the hyper-liberalised society he describes in his novels was illustrated recently by the revelation that he inadvertently participated in a Dutch porn film (his stated excuse being that he was “depressed at the time of signing the agreement and had drunk several glasses of wine”). This version of Houellebecq is no austere conservative reactionary, but rather a sad-eyed, impulse-driven Mr Bean figure — drunkenly importuning female interviewers, making extravagant public shrines to his dead corgi, and starring as himself in a comic film about his own fictional kidnap. Liberalism, like love, makes fools of us all eventually.
Even so, there is clearly something right about the conservative critical approach. Progressive responses to Houellebecq are much less convincing. The most predictable of these would diminish the work simply on the grounds that it doesn’t sufficiently distance itself from the misogyny, homophobia, and Islamophobia it often represents. On this view, the reader can still perhaps learn something from Atomised, but only as a cautionary tale — showing us the origins and outlook of the much-reviled incel mindset, for instance. In the same vein we are told that Houellebecq’s subsequent works act as prophylactics against Right-populism and Islamophobia, since they understand these things from the inside, and are thus useful to the Left-liberal who wishes to know how his enemy thinks.
Atomised is indeed often misogynistic, though much of the time it seems to stem from a more general misanthropy than from any specially targeted animus against women. In any case, with a mother as poisonous as Houellebecq’s — on whom the character in Atomised is loosely based — surely the man should be let off the hook a bit. In 2008, aged 83, she gave a gloriously disinhibited interview describing her son as an “evil, stupid little bastard”, “a liar, an imposter, a parasite” and “a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame”. (She also offered future biographers an epigraph laconically summing up Houellebecq’s output as a whole: “What’s all this stuff about an old chemist who wonders if his secretary is having a wank?”)
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A more charitable — in fact, quite hilariously optimistic — approach, also coming from progressive critics has been to try and recuperate Houellebecq as a previously unrecognised ally to Left-liberal causes. For instance, it has been speculated that he is actually offering a useful critique of hegemonic masculinity or even “queering” heterosexuality outright. Touching as it is to see the keenness of the academic to reconcile the demands of his two perennial masters — a love of edgy transgression, and the desire to write only what a Guardian reader might approve of — this strategy is doomed. The same writer who describes a commune dedicated to personal development as full of “deranged old lefties who were probably all HIV positive” is no secret friend of Judith Butler.
There are always things to learn from as multifaceted a novelist as this, whether or not he intends to teach you anything. Still, I prefer to treat a book like Atomised, not (only) as a rich seam of information to be mined about the zeitgeist, but more as an enveloping mood. And Christ, that mood is bleak.
Houellebecq invites you to wallow in despair at the state of society; to sink to the depths with no hope of air. He is in the tradition of great pessimistic writers: Beckett, Baudelaire, Sartre. He may have a diagnosis for social malaise but there is no hint of a cure here. All you can do is face the darkness, laugh occasionally at the absurdity of it all, and distract yourself by having appalling sex with people who vaguely revolt you.
Some censorious types worry that incels might be reading Houellebecq, but I tend to think he is exactly who incels should be reading. For when you suspect that your life is sapped of all prospects of success, sexual or otherwise, it can be reassuring to read a book that confirms your experience. As Schopenhauer — another pessimist with a terrible relationship with his mother, and a stated inspiration for Houellebecq — once wrote: “Life is a business which does not cover the costs.” For those men who have found that the sexual revolution did not cover their costs, reading Atomised must come as a relatively harmless salve to the anguished mind.
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The term “hopeless” covers two possible emotional states: one where specific hopes suddenly die, to your great disappointment, or one where you haven’t experienced anything as proactive as hope for a long time. The first involves mental turmoil; the second can feel grimly peaceful and reassuring. As another great philosopher, Michael Frayn, makes his headmaster character say in the film Clockwise: “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” Pessimist writers such as Houellebecq can take us to this second place. Depending on how churned up you originally felt, the trip can sometimes feel like a holiday.
But there’s another more positive function that pessimistic writing also serves. In ordinary life, it’s easy to confuse a temporary mood with a fact about the world, and vice versa. Feelings of hopelessness tend to settle like dust on social landscapes, seeming as if they have always lived there, and infusing present and future with heaviness and gloom. Trying to avoid this impression by denying it or distracting oneself doesn’t necessarily make it go away.
There’s a lot of doomsaying in the air at the moment, and it seems to be catching. But sometimes, with despair, you have to go down to come up. Sometimes, as if in a Buddhist death meditation, you have to imaginatively inhabit your miserable vision to its utmost, without deviation. For me, this is primarily what Atomised does. It confronts you with the purest synthesis of a despairing take on liberal society, and make you live there for a while, drinking it in. And after a while, the feelings of despair start to lose their power, and you start to realise that hopelessness is only a mood after all. It’s not the world — it’s you.

Crammed together on a crowded stage during the first Republican debate of 2023, two figures stood out: 38-year-old Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy, a biotech millionaire with a Harvard pedigree, and 51-year-old Nimrata Haley (née Randhawa), an accountant, former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations.
Like 58-year-old Kamala Devi Harris, America’s Vice President, Ramaswamy and Haley are in the 1% of the US population that is Indian American. Despite their shared heritage, all three grew up in different Americas — though in each, Indians were rare, exotic and little understood. Harris, born at the end of 1964, was among the first members of Generation X, while Haley is solidly in the middle of that cohort. Ramaswamy, as a geriatric millennial, is firmly a child of the Eighties and Nineties.
For Harris’s generation, the dominant image of India in the American imagination centred around gurus such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whose association with The Beatles brought them to public prominence. In its most benign manifestation, India meant mysticism and spirituality, though sometimes this would transmute into cult-like communities around charismatic and exploitative figures who drugged their followers and inspired anxious newspaper headlines.
Seven years later, during Haley’s childhood, India had become a byword for overpopulation and global environmental catastrophe. The Western view was summed up in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1969), in which he described a night in Delhi that “seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging… People, people, people, people”. By the late Eighties and Nineties, however, when Ramaswamy was growing up, this view of India and Indians had become less hostile: the most prominent Indian American was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon from The Simpsons.

Largely as a result of their different childhoods, these three politicians responded to being outsiders, aliens despite being born in America, in disparate ways. Harris, the product of Sixties liberal idealism, has never denied her Tamil Brahmin mother’s identity; she was, after all, raised by an Indian woman after her parents’ divorce. But Harris’s attendance at the historically black Howard University and her Baptist religion points to the fact that she has chosen to align more closely with her African-American roots. Though she is both a black American and an Asian American, it is widely accepted that Joe Biden selected her because of her identity as the former.
Meanwhile, Haley, who grew up in the recently desegregated South, has talked about her lack of a place in a biracial world; as a young girl, she was disqualified from a beauty pageant because she was neither black nor white. Raised a Sikh by Punjabi Indian parents, Haley has never publicly distanced herself from her Indian heritage, but her conversion to Methodist Christianity, her decision to assume her husband’s Anglicised surname, and her somewhat racially ambiguous appearance have all furthered the perception that she is a model of smooth assimilation.
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Ramaswamy, by contrast, cuts a different profile. The self-styled “skinny guy with a funny last name” is entirely candid that his Hindu religion is unfamiliar to most Americans. Married to another Indian-American professional, Ramaswamy is an exemplar of an emerging group that is often termed the “new Jews” in the media. They are American, but distinctive, notable and stand out.
Look around today and Indian Americans hold prominent roles in all walks of public life. In tech, the CEOs of Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are both Indian American. In politics, they are particularly dominant in the ruling party. Pramila Jayapal and Ro Khanna are prominent progressive voices in the Democratic Party, and among five Indian Americans in the House of Representatives, while former engineer Saikat Chakrabarti served as chief of staff for Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. Towards the party’s centre, Neera Tanden, director of Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, has been a consigliere of Democratic leaders since advising Bill Clinton in 1992. And in more technical domains, the Surgeon General of the United States is Vivek Murthy, while the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is Arati Prabhakar.
This boomlet in prominent Indian Americans is a function of two complementary dynamics. First, and perhaps most obviously, America is truly a land of opportunity, a nation where immigrants can ascend to positions of power and accrue great wealth through dint of hard work and application of human capital. Yes, racism may exist, but it is no bar to advancement.
Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, it seems that South Asians, at least in politics, have talents and cultural dispositions that make that flourishing easier. Like other highly skilled Asian immigrants, Indian Americans are wealthier and more likely to be married and well-educated than the average native-born citizen — and yet, there does not seem to be a similar rise to cultural prominence in politics among East Asians as South Asians. A common explanation for this is that, as English-speaking and highly verbal elites from a society where disputation and competition are taken for granted, South Asian personalities and cultural orientations are better suited to the rough and tumble world of America’s ruling class, where self-promotion is no sin and assertion is taken as a given.
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Vivek Ramaswamy is perhaps the end result of this dynamic. With an undergraduate degree in molecular biology from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, he perfectly captures the balance between technical and verbal fluency that is the marker of many South Asian elites. His brash, assertive and pugilistic debating style would not be out of place at an Indian American social gathering. And, crucially, he has accrued a vast fortune, a symbol of an opportunism that is entirely all-American, where getting rich is seen as glorious and a sign that one has “made it”. As a result, unlike earlier generations of Indian Americans, who aimed to blend in, the millennial Ramaswamy brings his distinctive South Asian personality to the fore, synthesising it with American assertiveness and claiming Donald Trump’s Maga mantle without embarrassment.
But should we be surprised? This is, after all, how it has always been. From Irish politicians to Jewish intellectuals, immigrants have transformed this country and reshaped it in their own image, all the while maintaining the cultural DNA that goes back to the intrepid British settlers who set out for a frontier for both the sake of God and gold. Ramaswamy and the current crop of Indian American public figures are simply what is old made new.

In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama.The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans.But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race: whether anyone can dent former President Donald Trump’s massive lead over the field. At times, it seemed as if the other candidates had lost sight of the fact that it is Trump, not the motormouthed Ramaswamy, who is 40 points or more ahead of all of them in national polls.“Trump is the big winner,” the Republican consultant Alex Conant told me after the debate. “Nobody made an argument about why they would be a better nominee than Donald Trump. They didn’t even begin to make that argument.”There were plausible reasons the candidates focused so little on the man they are trying to overtake. The Fox News moderators did not ask specifically about Trump’s legal troubles until an hour into the debate, instead focusing on discussions about the economy, climate change, and abortion. Ramaswamy seemed to be daring the other candidates to smack him down by repeatedly attacking not only their policies but their motivations. “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he insisted at one point. Loud booing from the audience almost anytime someone criticized Trump may also have discouraged anyone from targeting him too often.But it was more than the debate’s immediate circumstances that explained the field’s decision to minimize direct confrontation with Trump. That choice merely extended the strategy most have followed throughout this campaign, which in turn has replicated the deferential approach most of Trump’s rivals took during the 2016 race.[David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest]Haley took the most direct shot at the former president on policy, criticizing him from the right for increasing the national debt so much during his tenure; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed Trump too—though not by name—for supporting lockdowns early in the pandemic. Yet these exchanges were overshadowed by the refusal of any of the contenders, apart from former Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, to object to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election or his role in sparking the January 6 insurrection. All of them except Hutchinson and Christie raised their hand to indicate they would support Trump as the GOP presidential nominee even if he is convicted of a crime before the election.To Conant, all of this seemed reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump’s rivals seemed reluctant to attack him in the hope that he would somehow collapse on his own. “Their strategy is wrong,” Conant said. “He’s going to be the nominee unless somebody can capture the support of Republicans who are open to an alternative. And nobody even tried to do that tonight.”David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican consultant, wasn’t as critical. But he agreed that the field displayed little urgency about its biggest imperative: dislodging from Trump some of the voters now swelling his big lead in the polls. “What this race needs is to start focusing in on [the question of] ‘Trump or the future, which is it?’” Kochel told me. “I’m not sure we saw enough of that” last night.The failure to more directly address the elephant in the room, or what Bret Baier, a co-moderator, called “the elephant not in the room,” undoubtedly muted the debate’s potential impact on the race. Nonetheless, the evening might provide a tailwind to some of the contenders, and a headwind to others.The consensus among Republicans I spoke with after the debate was that Haley made a more compelling impression than the other seven candidates onstage. Her best moment came when she lacerated Ramaswamy for calling to end U.S. support to Ukraine, a move she said would essentially surrender the country to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country,” she told Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.”The debate “lifted Nikki Haley as one of the prime alternatives for the people who are worried that Trump carries too much baggage to get elected,” the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me last night. “She gutted Ramaswamy.”Ramaswamy forced himself into the center of the conversation for much of the night, making unequivocal conservative declarations such as “The climate agenda is a hoax,” and categorical attacks on the rest of the candidates as corrupt career politicians.Yet the evening showed why he may not advance any further than other outsider candidates in earlier GOP races, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in 2012. His choice to emulate Trump as an agent of chaos surely thrilled the GOP voters most alienated from the party leadership. But Ramaswamy’s disruptive behavior and tendency toward absolutist positions that he could not effectively defend seemed likely to lower his ultimate ceiling of support. He appeared to simultaneously deepen but narrow his potential audience.Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also had a difficult night, though less by commission than omission. In his first turn on such a big stage, he simply failed to make much of an imprint; the evening underscored the limitations of his campaign message beyond his personal story of rising from poverty. “I forgot he was even there,” Kochel said. “Maybe nice guys finish last; I don’t know. He disappeared.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, was as animated as he’s been in a public forum. That was true both when he was making the case for an almost pre-Trumpian policy agenda that reprised priorities associated with Ronald Reagan and when he was defending his actions on January 6.DeSantis, who seemed slightly overcaffeinated at the outset, didn’t disappear, but he didn’t fill Trump’s shoes as the focal point of the debate either. The other candidates devoted little effort to criticizing or contrasting with him. To Conant, that was a sign they consider him a fading ember: “No reason to risk losing a back-and-forth with a dead man,” Conant said. Others thought that although DeSantis did not stand out, he didn’t make any mistakes and may have succeeded in reminding more conservative voters why they liked him so much before his unsteady first months as a presidential candidate.Christie in turn may have connected effectively with the relatively thin slice of GOP voters irrevocably hostile to Trump. That may constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the GOP electorate nationally, but it represents much more than that in New Hampshire, where Christie could prove formidable, Ayres told me.But it won’t matter much which candidate slightly improved, or diminished, their position if they all remain so far behind Trump. Ayres believes materially weakening Trump in the GOP race may be beyond the capacity of any of his rivals; the only force that might bring him back within their reach, Ayres told me, is if his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election commences before the voting advances too far next year and damages his image among more Republican voters.In a Republican context, Ayres said, “The only institutions that have the ability to bring him back to Earth are not political institutions; they are judicial institutions.”Kochel, who attended the debate, pointed out that the loud disapproval from the crowd at any mention of Trump’s legal troubles accurately reflected the desire of most GOP voters to bury the issue. “A lot of the base right now collectively has their hands up over their ears and are going ‘La-la-la,’” Kochel said. The problem for the party, though, is that while Republican partisans may not want to deal with the electoral implications of nominating a candidate facing 91 criminal charges, “general-election voters are going to deliver a verdict on all of this even if a jury doesn’t.”[David A. Graham: What people keep missing about Ron DeSantis]Apart from Christie and Hutchinson, the candidates on the stage seemed no more eager than the audience to address Trump’s actions. While all of them agreed Pence did the right thing on January 6 by refusing Trump’s demands to reject the election results, none except those two and Pence himself suggested Trump did something wrong in pressuring his vice president. Nor did the others find fault in anything else Trump did to subvert the 2020 result.The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Did you miss Diversity Day a few months back? It falls each year on May 21, and is formally designated by the United Nations as “World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.” Personally, I always celebrate the day. I have a cake, and sometimes even a party.Admittedly, that date also happens to be my birthday. And in truth, I am not sure I’d mark the day with festivities if it weren’t my birthday: Do we really need the UN to urge us to go out and celebrate diversity? Few people could disagree with the value of diversity, but somehow, the bureaucratic hectoring makes it seem a bit spinach-y: good for us but not very enjoyable. A better way to think about diversity, in my view, is how it can make us happier every day.The truth is that diversity is indeed very good for us, both as a society and as individuals. Useful research has shown that connections forged among different groups of people—what social scientists call “bridging social capital”—reliably enhances peace, prosperity, and social progress. Unfortunately, to seek out such connections goes against many of our instincts, which are to find comfort in the familiar. Not only that, but some of the most beneficial kinds of diversity, such as encountering variety in values and attitudes, are the hardest to pursue and adopt. With a bit of knowledge and practice, however, we can all get better at it—and get happier as a result.One of the most common findings in the research on friendship is that humans have a strong homophily bias—that is, they prefer to hang around people who are like themselves. This is broadly true for attitudes and values, personality, and demographics such as race, age, education, job, and gender. This bias undoubtedly has its roots in evolution. Those similar to us are more likely to be kin or clan. As several scholars have argued, similarity makes communication easier and facilitates trust, and improves our ability to predict others’ behavior. In short, homophily probably kept your ancestors safer, and still today can lower the mental and emotional effort of dealing with other people.[Arthur C. Brooks: Don’t avoid romance]But like so many things that make life more comfortable in the near term—say, sitting on the couch and watching TV instead of going to the gym—homophily bias is suboptimal in the long run. Doing the work to increase the diversity of your relationships can increase well-being, improve certain types of performance, and enhance social adeptness. For example, in studies looking at cross-group friendship among college students, scholars have found that greater diversity increases academic and social skills and improves satisfaction with college. Even among children, diverse friendships are beneficial: One 2011 study showed that in racially and ethnically diverse elementary-school classrooms, children who had more diverse friendships felt less ignored and less socially excluded.When we think about making more diverse friendships, we usually think of racial or ethnic differences. This is definitely beneficial, but that definition of diversity actually tends to be the easier kind for many people. As the psychologist Angela J. Bahns has shown in her research, people who report on surveys that they personally value diversity are indeed more likely than others to have friendships with a high variety of race, religion, and sexual orientation. At the same time, these subjects were also the most likely to have friend groups that were homogeneous in political attitudes and social values. Apparently, that Celebrate Diversity! bumper sticker generally refers to looking different while thinking the same.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.This is a shame, because diversity of attitudes can be one of the most beneficial kinds. Management researchers have long found that diversity of ideas and ideology leads to better, more creative business outcomes. But new research takes this further, showing that under the right circumstances of respectful, courteous exchange, explicit political disagreement on teams leads to superior performance. In a 2019 article in Nature, scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago studied the quality of Wikipedia entries on disputable topics that had been written and edited by different groups. They found that in the context of Wikipedia’s strong collaborative and civil norms, the highest-quality entries had been produced by the most politically polarized teams, compared with politically homogeneous teams. This was because individuals were inhibited by their peers from presenting only one side of the issue in question.Unfortunately, too many forums where conflicting attitudes come into play tend to reward abuse (as is usually the case on social media). Other communities, such as academia, are often so ideologically homogeneous that the necessary balance for beneficial diversity of attitudes to flourish is difficult or impossible to achieve.Knowing that diversity in your social life is good for your happiness and success is one thing; making it happen is another. Here are three ways to get started:1. Talk to strangers.
The social path of least resistance is to stay in your traditional friend group, where interactions are familiar and easy. But as the psychologists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder have demonstrated, this posture is partly based on overestimating how awkward or unpleasant it will be to meet new people. In their experiment, they asked some groups of participants to initiate conversation with strangers on trains and buses, and other groups not to. They found that almost everyone thought beforehand that not talking to strangers would be more pleasant than doing so; their results showed that participants discovered the opposite was true.You might want to reject this advice out of a sense of politeness, because you feel that trying to get more diversity into your life by interacting with strangers would be an intrusion. This concern is misplaced. In a separate experiment in their study, Epley and Schroeder found that the strangers who’d encountered their subjects had an equally positive experience. And in follow-up experiments, the researchers found confirmation that strangers were almost always interested in talking.2. Become a social scientist.
Now, onto the harder-to-achieve kind of diversity, in attitudes and viewpoints. Unless you are hoping to free up the seat next to you on a bus, I don’t recommend initiating a conversation with a stranger with your strong opinions about recent Supreme Court decisions. Even if the person happens to agree with your view, you will probably seem unhinged and inappropriate. What works better is modifying your personal environment to make it more inviting for others to give their views without feeling threatened. The best way to do this is to ask people you meet socially for their honest views on issues.[Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life]If this seems terribly difficult, it can help to imagine that you are a social scientist doing research: Seek out people with whom you’re likely to disagree, and solicit their views in a friendly way. Your goal should be to understand them deeply—you might offer alternative views, but you don’t want to contaminate your work by seeming combative. This approach will set people at ease, give you more interesting friends, and occasionally even change your mind—or you will change theirs, in part by the model of your curiosity and intelligent listening.3. Celebrate heresy.
If you want to go all-in, try creating a friend group that explicitly encourages heterodox thinking. Some of the most rewarding social circles I’ve belonged to were those in which everyone thrilled at hearing ideas far outside their comfort zone, politically, philosophically, and morally. The point isn’t to agree at all; it is to have your mind expanded without the threat of canceling or risk of being canceled.This is the spirit of 19th-century free thinkers, who questioned everything without fear or favor. Perhaps the greatest proponent of this way of thinking was the writer Robert G. Ingersoll, dubbed “the Great Agnostic” for his willingness to question everything. In his 1877 book, Heretics and Heresies, Ingersoll wrote, “Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress.”Here is one final way to embrace—in a literal sense—diversity: If you are in the dating pool, try starting a romance with someone very different from you. I’ve previously written about the growing tendency among daters to seek a partner with maximum compatibility in background, personality, and attitudes. Dating apps often facilitate this, making it possible to pair up with, well, yourself. Compatibility can be a way to minimize potential conflict, but not a way to maximize surprise, adventure, and excitement, which are fundamental to romance. That explains researchers’ finding that when prospective daters text each other, a spark of attraction is more likely when people perceive dissimilarity from their own personality.Perhaps this suggests how the UN should reframe Diversity Day. To get more sorely needed romance and adventure into our world, next May 21 could be reframed as International Date-Your-Opposite Day.

Over the past several years, calls to restrict or outright ban TikTok have become increasingly popular among politicians. Attacks on the Chinese-owned app have primarily focused on its alleged threat to national security, but politicians and activists have also sought to restrict access to the platform by arguing it endangers children's mental health. Despite TikTok's harshest critics coming from both sides of the aisle, Republican states have been much more likely to actually engage in direct action against the app. So far, Montana has attempted to ban the app completely, while more than 30 states—most of which are Republican-led—have banned the app on devices owned by government employees. Republicans are also more likely to support penalties against TikTok. According to a recent Reuters survey, 58 percent of Republicans support banning the app, while only 47 percent of Democrats agree. And of the eight Republican presidential candidates who participated in Wednesday's debate, at least six have voiced support for a national ban or have banned it somewhat in their own state.  That's why it may have come as a surprise for many viewers of this week's GOP debate to see several ads for the app playing during commercial breaks.  The ads, which focused on individual users, were clearly tailored to pluck on Republican heartstrings. For example, in one ad, an elderly Navy veteran talks about using the app to crowdfund for a new mobility scooter. In another, folksy banjo music plays over footage of the four-wheeler-riding owner of a soap-making small business discussing how TikTok expanded her reach. The ads are part of a larger campaign called TikTok Sparks Good, which includes ads highlighting a range of family-friendly accounts—from an Australian pottery artist to a teacher using the platform to teach toddlers how to read.  While it's unclear whether the ad campaign will help rehabilitate the app's image among Republicans, it highlights a simple truth about social media that many of its detractors ignore. Without social media, the numerous small businesses featured in TikTok Sparks Good ads really wouldn't have been able to expand their product's reach to an international audience. Without social media, a military veteran wouldn't have had adoring fans who jumped to buy him—and now more veterans—new mobility aid. Despite claims that social media apps are essentially a force for evil—supposedly drawing teenagers into a spiral of depression and spreading nasty "misinformation"—they have clear upsides. Apps like TikTok can connect people in ways that would never have been possible without social media.The post TikTok Woos Republicans With Debate Commercials appeared first on Reason.com.

I would love to just hear one word from all of you. What’s one word that sums up how you felt about this debate?

ross douhat

Bemusement.

Hmm.

Amusement.

Wow.

That’s a rip off. Come on. Come on.

Carlos?

Darkness.

Darkness. Darkness.

Darkness.

So I’m going to, for once, break the rules. As everybody who is a faithful reader of my column knows, I’m a big fan of the Indigo Girls. And I have not one word, but I have a lyric from an Indigo Girls song. And it is, “No one can convince me we aren’t gluttons for our doom.” That’s how I felt about watching this.

That kind of fits with darkness — doom.

At one point in the debate, I believe Mike Pence said something like, God is not finished with the United States of America. And one of my Catholic friends on Twitter tweeted, yes, there’s much more chastisement and punishment to come. [MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So I watched the GOP debate last night. I know you all watched the GOP debate last night. Did any of you watch the interview with Trump?

Portions.

I did not watch the Trump interview.

I went back and read the transcript, which was actually a mistake because it’s terrifying and seems even weirder when you’re not watching it.

What’s terrifying about it?

Listen, we’re going to come back to Trump. But first, there were eight candidates on stage last night. There was a lot of words said. But did any of you feel like we got a better sense of where we are in terms of this stated desire to — that the American people seem to be telling us to find a post-Trump candidate? Are we any closer to that?

I mean, it certainly didn’t look like it from the debate. I mean, the audience was clearly more into Trump than anyone else as well. But there was no breakout performance. There’s this kind of aimlessness that you see, except maybe from Vivek Ramaswamy, who basically is running as a younger Trump and maybe the most obnoxious candidate ever to grace a debate stage. So I did not come out of it thinking, yes, yes, everybody can rally around this option.

I mean, I think it was a good illustration of the dilemmas of Republicans who want to move beyond Trump. And actually, I thought at various points it gave you a pretty clear sense of the core divisions in the party, which was helped out by the fact that, more than I think I realized or expected, all of the old-guard candidates despise Ramaswamy, to the point where I started out thinking, OK, there’s an interesting strategy here. Everyone thought there was going to be a pile on against Ron DeSantis with people trying to knock him out of the second place position. But instead, there was a pile on against Ramaswamy. And I went from thinking that it was strategic to thinking that it was just this sort of deep, visceral hatred. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Oh, yeah. Nikki Haley, clearly.

I thought the most telling moment in the debate was when Ramaswamy started talking about America being depressed and mental health problems and people not having a national narrative anymore. And Pence swoops in and says, there’s nothing — I’m paraphrasing — but there’s nothing wrong with the American people. The only thing wrong is Washington, DC, and so on. And I mean, right there, that’s the sort of pre-Trump/post-Trump divide in the Republican Party. Like, is America a great country that happens to have been taken over by some incompetent liberals, unfortunately? Or is America — are we living through American carnage? The problem is, how do you bridge those two worldviews? It’s not very easy to do.

That’s what I meant a little bit when I said that the overwhelming theme for me was darkness.

Darkness.

Even though, I must say, Lydia, you cheated. You asked us for one word, and then you gave many, many words.

Yeah, Lydia, that was a classic — [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Yeah. Although I should say that song you quoted is — from a fellow Indigo Girls fan — is “Prince of Darkness”—

Indeed it is.

— which could be thematic to the gloom and doom of the debate. So I didn’t watch Trump’s interview with Tucker Carlson. But in advance of this debate, I did go back and watch the 2015 Republican debate.

Always doing the homework, Carlos. Always doing the homework.

Talk about a glutton for punishment.

All of them?

The first, the first. The August 2015 debate. But what struck me about that, in connection to what we saw last night, was how, in their closing statements, so many of the candidates — John Kasich, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush — they all had these very optimistic visions. Like, I turned things around in my state. We can turn America around. And then Trump shows up, and he’s like, we don’t win anymore. Since he was leading in the polls, I guess he was the final closing statement. We don’t win anymore. We can’t do anything right. It was a very contrasting dark vision from the others. Fast forward to 2024. That is overwhelmingly the vision you’re getting from the majority of the candidates, that notion of darkness, of doom and gloom, which was actually captured well by the moment that Ross mentioned, when Ramaswamy says, we lack purpose. We don’t remember who we are. There’s a national identity crisis. That kind of darkness to me seemed to permeate a lot of the debate, whereas it was an outlier eight years ago.

Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. Ross, Vivek Ramaswamy, does he read as a person that you would recognize from your undergraduate days at Harvard? I mean, is he a type of guy?

I feel like that’s a very loaded question, Lydia. As we established in an earlier episode, I’m the only Ivy League jerk on this podcast. So I feel like —

I mean, there are certain kinds of affirmative action that we can’t escape.

Talking smack about my fellow Ivy Leaguers, you got to be careful with that. Yeah, I mean, I would say Vivek Ramaswamy is very good at talking in public. I don’t know how that sort of smartest, most talkative, most aggressive guy in a room plays with actual voters. It’s been hard to tell with Ramaswamy. There clearly is a real bump in his polling, which is why he attracted so much attention last night. Whether it’s a bump from 2 percent to 6 percent or 4 percent to 12 percent depends on the polls. And so it’s a little hard for me to say what are the limits on this kind of sales pitch. But the last thing to be said is that, in that exchange with Pence, I mean, Ramaswamy’s clearly right. Like, this is part of what makes his candidacy interesting is that he is leaning into certain fundamental realities of American life. There is a mental health crisis. There is some kind of crisis of meaning. Things that conservatives especially took for granted — religion, patriotism, these kinds of things — are in an ebb. And whether his style is the right way to address that and channel it into a post-Trump candidacy, I’m reserving judgment. But he’s not just pulling things out of the air. He is actually trying to lean into where the country and especially a chunk of the Republican Party actually is right now, which is not, to go back to Carlos’s 2015 analysis, what anyone but Trump was doing.

OK. I’m going to jump in here with the message may be great, but the messenger was absolutely atrocious. And I’m going to go out on a limb here, before any of us have seen any of the polling, and say —

We’re here to catch you.

Punditry.

Real punditry in the wild.

I think the women are going to just look at him and go, what the hell. I am serious. Like, even on Fox last night, there were four panelists yammering in the background. The three men — or the men were OK with him, and the one woman was like, this may be the most irritating creature on the planet. He was like a combination of bad tech bro and bad frat bro. He’s like my dachshund on cocaine and so obnoxious.

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you, Michelle. And it’s hard. It’s hard for me to — because I just had such a strong, visceral, like gut-level disgust at his whole affect.

But that’s how presidential politics works, but yeah.

Absolutely. No, it’s all happening in —

They don’t care what he’s saying.

— the kishkas. Yeah, no, you’re in the kind of lizard brain zone there. But I thought it was really, really interesting. And I want to talk a little bit about Nikki Haley because I think she turned in a really interesting performance. But you could just see — and of course, there’s something really delicious about the fact that she is the other kind of Indian-American on the stage. But she’s also a woman. She’s also a person of real and significant accomplishment. She’s been the governor of an important state. She was the UN ambassador. We can debate lots of things about her record, good or bad. But boy, she really took him to the woodshed. And for me, that was incredibly satisfying to watch —

Same.

— as television. Because I just sort of felt like, here is a smart, accomplished middle-aged woman just taking this sniveling little guy down. And it was so satisfying. And I had to think, regardless of your politics, how many women were watching that and thinking, yes.

You go, girl.

I totally agree with you.

He’s just so gratuitously a twerp about his insults. Step back, junior.

I feel like I have to defend him now. I feel like I have to step in. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

You don’t. You don’t.

No, no, no, but no, here’s what — no, I mean, I’m not inclined to. But I almost feel like I’m — like I see conventional wisdom coalescing before my eyes, and I’m worried. So here’s what I took away from him. First, I thought that there was this really interesting mix of incredibly generic and yet vaguely refreshing. First, the generic — the generic was that so many of his moments were rip offs from other — just go to past debates or past political speeches. First, I know you’re wondering, who’s this skinny guy with a funny last name, which is the Obama line.

Where have I heard that before? Hm.

Yeah. Then, when he went after — I think when after Pence about, oh, there’s your canned, rehearsed speech, which is exactly what Chris Christie said about Marco Rubio in New Hampshire. And then, I’m going to put the interests of Americans first, which is just an America first riff. There was nothing kind of new about what he was saying. But there was one moment that I loved. And it’s like when Pence kept saying, we need a government that’s as good as its people. And Ramaswamy’s like, I don’t know what that means. Why do you keep saying that? And to me, that was — maybe it’s because I have Pence issues that I just really rallied around that Ramaswamy moment because it’s true. Pence was offering these very platitudinous comments, and Ramaswamy’s like, what does that even mean. Like, why do you keep saying this? And so I appreciated that. Now, what I thought was interesting is that so many people have said that Ramaswamy, by sucking up so much attention, was the winner in this debate. But by sucking up a lot of attention, he also ended up giving other people their best moments, just in counterpoint to him, whether it was Haley on Ukraine, Pence on experience, Chris Christie on depth. You’re an amateur.

ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, which, the moment I heard it, I just thought, yes, that is exactly what this sounds like. And so, to me, it was sort of a double-edged sword for Ramaswamy because, by sucking up so much energy, he also allowed people to shine against him. And some of the best moments — [INTERPOSING VOICES]

We’ve been talking for a while in this podcast, and no one has mentioned the name of the man who is, even now, second in most Republican primary polls.

How did you feel he did? He was your guy, Ross.

What is this — [SIGHS]

Before he proved himself to be bad, he —

There’s a paper trail. There’s a paper trail, Ross.

There is a long paper trail.

You loved him. Now, you don’t have to love him now, but how do you think he did?

The guy is Ron DeSantis. Come on. He’s not Voldemort, not yet.

Governor Pudding Fingers — how did he do?

So I thought that DeSantis did fine. And that’s a big problem for him because we aren’t talking about him. He’s conspicuously losing by 30 points to Trump nationally, by 20 points in Iowa, so “fine” is not enough. He basically ran what seemed like a kind of front runner’s shtick where he didn’t really engage with anyone else. He delivered sort of stump speech lines with a lot of intensity, not a lot of finesse. He avoided any opportunity to really mix it up. At the same time, nobody attacked him. Nobody laid a glove on him, and he got to give versions of his, we did it in Florida, we did this, we did that, worked in some of his biography, that kind of thing. But to my mind, my alleged, quote unquote, “love” for Ron DeSantis just reflects the fact that DeSantis has been the only candidate who has tried to put himself in a position where you could imagine him uniting enough of the party to beat Trump. And he’s failing at it at the moment. That’s obviously clear. But watching the debate, it’s not like anyone else was even trying to do that. Pence and Christie are running for the leadership of a very small faction in the party. Ramaswamy is running as Trump’s understudy. The other candidates who could conceivably play the DeSantis role — like, Tim Scott — we also haven’t mentioned — he was a non-presence, just a nonentity.

That was really surprising to me.

I expected better.

Yeah. So, to me, my basic view of the debate in terms of the politics of the primary is sort of status quo. And status quo is good for Trump, so it’s a good night for Trump. But nobody stepped up and said, here’s why I can do what DeSantis is trying and failing to do better. Everyone else was a more factional candidate than DeSantis himself. His failure is that he hasn’t figured out a way to get the people who are like, I hate Trump and I love when Chris Christie attacks Trump, and so I’m going to vote for Chris Christie. At some point, DeSantis needs those voters.

I mean, but also, he just is not appealing. I mean, I don’t really know how else to say this.

No, no. He’s not an especially appealing public candidate. I think we can say that for certain.

Yeah.

DeSantis’s stuff was all — it was abortion, blaming George Soros for the destruction of American cities, civics, not critical race theory, in schools. I mean, it was sort of —

But like civics, not critical —

— the DeSantis shtick. And so — [INTERPOSING VOICES]

I’m saying that critical race theory is not a — that’s something that 80 percent of Republicans agree with.

Sure, sure.

No, no, no, I get that. No, all I’m saying is that, last night, there was nothing that changed for me about what Ron DeSantis was pitching. It was sort of what I’ve heard from him again and again. And so he didn’t stand out in any way. It’s like, yeah, I’ve heard Ron DeSantis say this before.

Totally. I totally agree.

If you’re in a running in a primary against Donald Trump, it seems like you saw two things last night — people who wanted to be Trump and people who wanted to beat Trump. And Vivek Ramaswamy wanted to be Trump. He was like the proxy there for Trump. Then you had Christie and Haley, who were coming out against him. But then you had Pence and DeSantis, who were trying to have it both ways and couldn’t decide if they wanted to be him or to beat him. And that kind of mushy middle is taking them nowhere.

I can’t help but —

Wait, wait. No, wait, wait. But there is no way to beat Trump in a Republican primary the way Christie is trying to beat him. Chris Christie can’t be the Republican nominee this way. The mushy middle is — it’s failing, I agree. It’s not working. But the other strategies are not better. The Christie strategy and the Ramaswamy strategy, I think — I mean, the Ramaswamy strategy is Trump drops out for some reason, because of his myriad legal problems. And then Ramaswamy is Trump. But in a world where Trump is in the race, Ramaswamy is not going to be the nominee.

Not to get all Freudian on this, but there are very clearly some Oedipal dramas playing out here [LAUGHS]: and some big daddy issues. So I guess one last thing that I would ask is — traditionally the question is, at the end of a debate, who won. Did anybody win? Did Trump win?

Trump won, yeah. Absolutely. He didn’t gain something new. But the debate maintained the basic status quo, and he gains from that. I think Tim Scott is the loser of the debate. He’s the guy who went in with an opportunity to supplant DeSantis, and he did nothing on the stage, didn’t register. So he’s the clear loser. Everything else seems like a balance, a stalemate that favors Trump.

And I think Vivek’s got a great shot at a Fox News hosting career.

Right, or, God forbid, a cabinet-level position for an agency that he’d like to destroy if Ron DeSantis isn’t busy slitting throats instead.

He’ll be commerce secretary.

I think he’s going for a media slot. I really do.

Well, I mean, you know —

Why not both?

— let’s take a break. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about the elephant who wasn’t in the room but was in a different room on Twitter, Donald Trump.

[? ross douhat

?] Oh, Lord. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]

OK. We’re back. So some of us who are gluttons for punishment actually watched the Trump interview with Tucker. Some of us just looked at the transcript. Others of us, I don’t know, decided to go out and touch grass instead. What was that interview?

That was a disgrace is what it was, but it was completely predictable, which is why I couldn’t actually sit through it. Because you’re used to him rambling incoherently and doing stream of consciousness and jumping from one topic to the other when you’re watching him. But if you read the transcript, it’s even scarier because it becomes all the more glaring that he is living in some kind of QAnon fever dream and that Tucker was just goading him right along. I mean, we’re talking about multiple questions about whether people are going to try to assassinate him, some long discursion on Jeffrey Epstein. Trump rambled on about the Panama Canal and electric cars.

Water pressure. Don’t forget, he talked about water pressure.

Water pressure?

This is a familiar Trump theme is that the water pressure in your shower is bad. But the fact that we got an Epstein question from Tucker and a UFO question in the actual Republican debate I felt was a breakthrough for those of us interested in such things. And I’ll leave it at that.

[LAUGHS]:

No, I won’t leave it at that because we’re going to remember Chris Christie pivoting to teachers’ unions instead of answering the alien question when things happen.

I thought Christie handled that completely silly question quite well. But the one thing from the Trump interview, Lydia, that I did think was interesting, just the one substantive thing, was Trump continuing his tear against mail-in ballots. This is very interesting because the Republican Party has been changing its tune. And a lot of governors and a lot of officials are now trying to get people to embrace mail-in ballots. But he was on a pure, no, this is wrong. You’re going to have cheating, it’s inevitable, last night. So if you let him roll like that, he’s going to do things that are not going to be in the best interest of whoever the party’s nominee is.

Well, yeah, and I think what’s really striking is he not only sat out this debate. He was essentially — like, executives from Fox, the head of the Republican National Committee went groveling to ask him to participate. And what all of that really made me think was, political parties are really important and play a vital role in our political system. And the fact that the Republican Party did not have the ability to basically say, if you don’t show up on the debate stage, you actually can’t be a candidate for our nomination, in the same way that they said, oh, well you have to commit to supporting the eventual Republican nominee — that was a threshold for the debate stage — I just think that it illustrates some really, really, really, really, really fundamental weakness in our democracy that the guy who is the far and away frontrunner for this major party nomination is basically just waving his middle finger at that party. But it really is shocking.

I mean, the other sort of obvious thing about the interview with Tucker is that it was, of course, Trumpian and rambling and returned to all of his fixations. But it was full-on Trump versus Biden general election stuff. I mean, there’s a tiny bit of stuff about the Republican primary, but it’s basically just, Biden is terrible. The Democrats are sick, or the Democratic leaders are sick. Some Democrats are good people. Biden’s too senile to run. China is eating our lunch, all of these things.

He’s totally running as a frontrunner — as the nominee, in fact.

Yes, he’s running as the nominee, and it’s clearly just a show of strength that he doesn’t feel like he has to engage at all. And at the moment, he’s right.

He basically skipped the Republican debate twice. He skipped it by not showing up at the debate, and he skipped it by basically ignoring them in his interview with Tucker and just, as you say, running against Biden. So it’s like a double insult. Like, not only do I not have to come to the party, but I’m not even thinking about your party. I’m thinking about another one.

And why would he? Why would he bother? They’re going to let him do whatever he wants. If he had showed up at the Milwaukee forum last night, they would have let him in if he had refused to sign anything. They’re not going to make him do anything because it’s not that there’s a official Republican Party and a Trump Republican Party. He is the Republican Party. There was that pathetic moment when they asked everybody to raise their hands on stage if they would continue to support Trump if he were convicted. And basically, what, two people didn’t, Asa — and Christie was wiggling his fingers in a weird way that just confused everybody. That was sad. I mean, even Mike Pence, who was up there to talk about how he had been unconstitutional or whatever — it was just pathetic.

Well, I mean, look, we’re recording this on Thursday morning. And we are soon to be treated to the surreal spectacle of Donald Trump turning himself in —

Again.

— again, yes. But I don’t know. It just hits different every time.

It’s not surreal anymore. It’s commonplace.

That’s right. It just means it’s a weekday, Lydia.

Hits the same every time to me.

[LAUGHS]: Another day, another indictment. Yeah, I mean, whatever happened in the debate, Donald Trump is going to own the headlines today, right?

Oh, always. With him, any attention is good attention.

Does he have any reason to ever grace a debate stage again?

No.

I mean a primary debate stage? I think he definitely wants to debate Biden. But I don’t think anything that happened yesterday gives him any reason to return.

No, I think the reason why he would have to debate is if there is a kind of stronger consolidation of an anti-Trump vote in Iowa, because right now in the polls, he does look somewhat vulnerable in Iowa. Just going to throw out that, in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, Donald Trump is not leading by 50 points. He is leading by 25 points, and his numbers are —

A mere 20 points.

— 40 percent, in the low 40s. And it’s not a situation where 80 percent of the Republican Party is saying, we’re just voting for Trump. So I think what forces him to debate is a sense that he could be vulnerable in Iowa. And if he’s ahead by 25 points there, he shouldn’t, strategically. But if he’s ahead by 10 points, he should.

Although he also knows that he can lose Iowa and still win because he’s done it before. I mean, let’s not get all that excited about Iowa.

He can, but if he wins Iowa, it’s probably —

Over.

— all but over. So why would you not try and win Iowa?

Yeah, especially given all of his other difficulties.

I don’t understand a lot of what he does. I’m just saying.

Of course. But I mean, look, if you’re Donald Trump and you’re staring down these indictments and you see becoming president again, or at the very least being the nominee, as your kind of insurance policy against rotting in a prison cell, then, yeah, you want to win Iowa. I would say all options are on the table and one thing we know about Donald Trump is that he is completely immune to any kind of accountability for changing his position on anything.

What’s the quote, Carlos? Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

A foolish consistency.

Well, what I learned last night is that consensus is the opposite of leadership. That’s what I learned yesterday.

That was a great line. There’s a campaign slogan.

I think we should maybe probably leave it there. Thanks for your hard work watching all of this, guys.

It was magical. It was magical.

Many more to come.

Yeah, let’s take a break. And when we come back, we’ll get hot and cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right. We’re back. So who’s got the hot/cold this week?

I do. In my household, we have been hot for the story of the HMS Bounty, the famous British vessel that suffered a mutiny in the 18th century and thereafter inspired multiple treatments in film and literature. My wife and I sort of accidentally ended up watching one of, I think, the more forgotten adaptations of the story, the version from the early 1980s with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins. And the adaptation was much better than I expected. It’s like a solid B plus/A minus movie that maybe is unjustly forgotten. And it inspired my wife to go read “The Bounty” by Caroline Alexander. And she has been reading fascinating passages to me aloud for the last week or so. So I think the time is ripe for a new “Bounty” adaptation. It’s a great story and the kind of story that should be filmed at least every 25 years or so.

I want to pick something out of what you just said that has nothing to do with the movie, though. You’re saying that your wife is reading passages from the book to you.

I mean, I don’t want to make it sound like we’re sitting around smoking pipes and [INAUDIBLE].

Yeah, I love that. My husband and I used to do that all the time before we had kids. And I know Carlos and his kids read aloud a lot. And we haven’t done it with my kids obviously in a long time because, now, just getting them to sit in the same room with us can be a challenge. But I love that and just the whole kind of feel to people doing that. So that has nothing to do with the show you’re talking about. But I just want you to know, Ross, that that warms my little heart.

I mean, to be clear, she’s not staging dramatic readings in the middle. It’s more like —

I sit around reading reading passages to Ross when I find something I really like, yeah.

That is so beautiful.

This is making me feel very self-conscious, that the thing that my wife and I do is we show each other pet videos on TikTok, so —

Aw, that works, too.

— a different way of connecting.

It’s just as romantic.

Just as romantic.

It is extremely romantic.

I will say that having read, as we discussed — we all talked about the David Grann book, “The Wager,” which is just a real rip-roaring read about mutiny at sea. It definitely whetted my appetite for more stories of seafaring adventure.

So just to sum it all up, we here at “MOO” are very pro mutiny. We’re hot on mutiny.

[LAUGHS]: Don’t tell our bosses.

Don’t tell our bosses.

This is a chance — Michelle, I think you’re the first — this is the first time we’ve admitted on the podcast that we informally refer to “Matter of Opinion” as “MOO.” Now it’s out in the open. We can just say it. We can just say, this is “MOO.”

I don’t do this. I don’t say that.

I know, Ross, but we —

I have never said this, and I’m not going to start. “MOOtiny” on the bounty. OK, sorry.

Oh, see?

We’re done. We’re done.

It works. I’m not taking any more of your nonsense.

Full circle. Full circle.

I think that’s — listen, I think somebody’s got to be the grown up and tie the knot on this one.

And it’s not Vivek Ramaswamy, so it may as well be Lydia.

Oh. Guys, I’ve really missed you. It’s really nice to be back together.

I’m so happy you’re back.

Arkansas has some of the strangest liquor laws in the country—or at least the most politically contentious. Unlike a lot of other places, the state allows counties to hold referendums to decide whether they will allow the retail sale of alcohol. That is, whether they will be "wet" or "dry." And when those elections take place, it's often existing liquor stores—the very businesses that earn money by selling booze—that campaign the hardest to keep county-level prohibition going. And they often have a powerful, but unexpected ally: churches. In the fourth episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we take a deep dive into the political dynamics that drive Arkansas' local alcohol legalization elections. Jeremy Horpedahl, an economist at the University of Central Arkansas, says public choice theory explains why special interests that might have very little in common sometimes team up to push protectionist regulations. "What's especially powerful about this coalition is that you have the liquor stores which can provide the money to prevent legalization of alcohol sales," he says, "and the churches, which can provide the moral argument the public face of the campaign to keep these things, keep the rules, how they are." Chris Swonger, CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, says that arguments about morality are often used as cover when one faction or another wants regulations to boost their own competitive interests. Once you know what to look for, there are "bootleggers" and "baptists" to be found just about everywhere.   Further reading for this week's episode: "Bootleggers and Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist," by Bruce Yandle "Bootleggers, Baptists, and Ballots: Coalitions in Arkansas' Alcohol-Legalization Elections," by Jeremy Horpedahl Check out the full range of the "Bootleggers and Baptists" phenomenon at Reason.com. Find out which states allow spirits to be shipped directly to consumers' homes at ShipMySpirits.org, a project of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact checking by Katherine SypherThe post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Ballots appeared first on Reason.com.

Updated at 8:20 p.m. ET on August 23, 2023Vladimir Putin’s Russia has long been a land of mysterious deaths. In 1998, soon after he had been appointed head of the security services, Galina Starovoitova, a parliamentarian who believed in bringing democracy to Russia, was gunned down in the stairwell of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. In 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had learned too much about the Chechen wars that Putin used to propel himself to power, met the same fate in the stairwell of her apartment building in Moscow. In 2015, Boris Nemtsov, an outspoken critic of Putin’s presidency, was killed by an assassin only steps away from the Kremlin. Other critics barely survived. In 2020, Alexei Navalny, organizer of the only truly national anti-Putin political movement, fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow after being poisoned.All of these victims were Putin’s formal opponents, people who spoke or wrote in opposition to the kleptocracy he built. Since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a different class of victims—members of the Russian business elite who were perhaps insufficiently loyal or insufficiently keen on the war—have also begun to die in strange circumstances. In the year and a half that has passed since February 2022, two gas-industry executives were found dead with suicide notes. Three Russian executives were killed, alongside their wives and children, in what appeared to be murder-suicides. The body of the owner of a resort in Sochi was discovered at the bottom of a cliff. Another executive was found floating in a pool in St. Petersburg. Others have fallen out of windows or down staircases in Moscow, India, the French Riviera, and Washington, D.C.[Elaine Godfrey: Sudden Russian death syndrome]Still, even on the very long list of people who have been shot, hanged, poisoned, or subjected to lethal accidents because they somehow got in Putin’s way, Yevgeny Prigozhin stands out. Prigozhin’s private plane mysteriously fell from the sky this afternoon, following an explosion of what seems to be either a bomb or a rocket. Russian authorities reported that Prigozhin was on the passenger list, although Western intelligence agencies could not immediately confirm he had boarded the plane. Either way, someone took down the plane, and that someone could only have acted on Putin’s orders, or at least in anticipation of such orders (Will no one rid me of this turbulent mercenary?). But Prigozhin wasn’t an opponent of Putin; he helped create Putin. He wasn’t a critic of Putin’s kleptocracy; he built the Wagner mercenary group, which supported African and Middle Eastern dictators and exploited diamond mines on behalf of Moscow too. He also ran the Internet Research Agency, the organization that used hacking, leaking, and social media to help elect Donald Trump.Prigozhin was no opponent of the current war either. His men, and the convicts they recruited, fought the long, bitter battle of Bakhmut, achieving the only significant Russian victory in Ukraine so far this year. Thousands of Russian soldiers, maybe tens of thousands, died in that struggle, thanks to military tactics so wasteful of human life that they are described by the Russians themselves as the “meat grinder.” Along the way, Prigozhin did begin to have some doubts about how the war was being fought, and maybe about the true motives of some of those leading the battle. As a result, he dared to challenge the Russian army leadership, and thus the Russian president, in a bizarre and largely unopposed march into the military headquarters of the city of Rostov-on-Don, and then nearly all the way to Moscow, exactly 60 days ago.   [Anne Applebaum: Putin is caught in his own trap]So, yes, this is another mysterious death, but it is a new kind of mysterious death. With this plane crash, the violence on the periphery of Russia’s empire has now migrated to its very heart. Putin’s rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence. In the aftermath of Prigozhin’s rebellion, Putin needs something more spectacular: theatrical, public violence; violence of the kind that brings down a plane soon after takeoff in the middle of a sunny day; violence designed to terrify anyone who secretly wished for Prigozhin’s victory.    He may soon need a lot more of it. There is no mutual trust among Russia’s elite, no true shared ideology beyond self-interest, and no wonder: Prigozhin’s safety, and the safety of his mercenaries, was supposed to be guaranteed by Aleksandr Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. That promise, like most of Putin’s promises, turned out to be empty. Everyone who is still part of the inner circle already hires bodyguards and, if they can, sends their family abroad. Those who can afford it already have private armies. Anyone associated with Prigozhin now has new reasons to fear for their safety too. One general close to Prigozhin was relieved of his command today. He had not been seen in public for many weeks. Prigozhin’s deputy, Dmitry Utkin, died today on the plane along with him.But many others in Moscow knew Prigozhin, worked with Prigozhin, and benefited from Prigozhin’s businesses, military and criminal. Will they wait passively for violence to consume them? Will they escape—there were reports earlier this week that Wagner troops were already leaving their newly built camps in Belarus—or will they try to strike first? “Grey Zone,” a Telegram channel associated with the Wagner Group, has already made this threat explicit: “The assassination of Prigozhin will have catastrophic consequences,” one posting today declared. “The people who gave the order do not understand the mood in the army and morale at all. Let this be a lesson to all. You always have to go to the end.”By “the end” the author means Moscow. Prigozhin didn’t go to Moscow. Maybe somebody else now will.

Initial reports suggest that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the ruthless mercenary leader of the Wagner Group, has been killed. Although confirmed details are scant, his private plane has allegedly crashed or been shot down, an event that many have interpreted as an assassination. Prigozhin probably knew to stay away from windows in high buildings, so it seems plausible that Vladimir Putin took him out at 28,000 feet instead.Coup plotters rarely die of old age. Prigozhin sealed his fate in June when he launched a failed mutiny against Putin, which fizzled hours after it began. No dictator can afford to tolerate that kind of disloyalty: Every moment that Prigozhin lived made Putin look weaker, a dictator seemingly forced to accommodate a man who had directly challenged him, simply because Russia needed the Wagner Group for its disastrous war of attrition in Ukraine.Putin likely knew that letting Prigozhin live risked emboldening enemies within to mount additional threats. In an interview earlier this year, Putin said that leaders must be able to forgive, but that not everything can be forgiven. When the interviewer asked him “What can’t be forgiven?,” Putin’s answer was immediate: “Betrayal.”And so Prigozhin has apparently gone down in his private plane. The Kremlin could easily have staged a less conspicuous death that would be more likely to dupe outsiders into wondering whether Prigozhin had died of natural causes. But dictators don’t usually want plausible deniability. When they use deadly force against their enemies, they want everyone to know—a shot across the bow to other would-be plotters—which is why Russia’s enemies abroad have been killed with highly controlled radioactive substances that point directly to the Kremlin. If you’re going to send a message, make sure everyone knows who sent it.Prigozhin’s death, if confirmed, is very likely Putin’s calculated method of trying to reassert his strength. But if so, Putin has made the classic error that all dictators make: wrongly conflating ruthless violence with strength. True strength—and lasting power—comes from regimes that are resilient. The apparent death of Yevgeny Prighozin instead reveals a brittle dictatorship with cracks and divisions that will continue to grow over time.  Today’s events are almost certain to have unintended consequences, as Putin falls further into what I call “the dictator trap”: In authoritarian regimes, every act comes with a trade-off, and those intended to shore up power nearly always wind up undermining it. Short-term displays of brutal strength ensure long-term weakness. In the immediate future, loyalists will fear Putin more—and they will understand that betraying him comes with the ultimate price tag. But in the medium to long term, two fresh threats will likely emerge.[Read: The dictator myth that refuses to die]First, senior loyalists in Russia’s regime will now rightly wonder whether they could be next. When dictators start to kill top-level insiders—even those who have challenged the dictator’s authority directly—an intensified paranoia sets in. And who could blame those in Putin’s inner circle for worrying after all of the “mysterious” deaths over the past two decades of Putin’s reign of terror? Some might contemplate whether they’d be better off living in a Russia without Putin, so long as they could define its terms. If insiders fear for their own safety, a palace coup becomes more likely. In that way, getting rid of Prigozhin just shifts and delays the threat. Eventually, every dictator meets his end.Second, the quality of Putin’s information pipeline is about to get considerably worse, which could lead him to make avoidable errors, because he’s not being told hard truths. That pipeline was likely already compromised after two decades of brutal rule, in which Putin—like all dictators—purged honest advisers who upset him and promoted fawning lackeys who told him what he wanted to hear. Many advisers learn that the best survival strategy when working for a ruthless autocrat is to be a bobblehead. Putin, in one of the biggest blunders in modern history, listened to the bobbleheads who told him he’d capture Kyiv in a few days. That venture has blown up in his face.But when a dictator assassinates a senior official and not just journalists, opposition candidates, and dissidents, well, then the fear impulse goes into overdrive. Trusted advisers who used to speak honestly but cautiously soon start to bite their tongue or provide overly optimistic assessments, which creates a vicious cycle of bad information and bad decisions. Over time, catastrophic miscalculations become more likely—and, eventually, one of them triggers the end of the regime.None of this is to say that Putin’s murderous regime is now in its death throes. But once the long-term costs of today’s apparent assassination have been accounted for, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin may yet have the last laugh from beyond the grave.

Earlier this month, two conservative law professors announced that they would be publishing an article, which will appear in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review next year, arguing that Donald Trump is ineligible for the Presidency. The professors, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, make the case that unless Congress grants Trump amnesty, he cannot run for or hold the office of the Presidency again because of his behavior surrounding the events of January 6th. The argument rests on Baude and Paulsen’s interpretation of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that officeholders, such as the President, who have taken an oath to “support” the Constitution and “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” will no longer hold such an office. Several days ago, Laurence Tribe, a liberal law professor, and J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, wrote an article for The Atlantic, in which they essentially endorsed the view advanced by Baude and Paulsen: “The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again.”

Luttig was once on the Republican shortlist for Supreme Court nominees; recently he has become an outspoken critic of Trump. (He also offered legal advice to Mike Pence when the Vice-President was being pressured by Trump not to certify the election results.) Luttig and I recently spoke by phone about whether Trump is in fact disqualified. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the mechanism by which any removal of Trump from state ballots would take place, the different objections to Luttig’s argument, and why he thinks the Supreme Court is likely to get involved.

You write that Baude and Paulsen “conclude that Section 3 requires no legislation, criminal conviction, or other judicial action in order to effectuate its command. That is, Section 3 is ‘self-executing.’ ” What does that mean in practice?

Well, not to repeat the question in the answer, but it means that no legislation by Congress or judicial decision or any other finding in a court of law—by virtue of a conviction in a criminal trial, for instance—is necessary for the clause to operate against someone who has previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and thereafter engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States. This was one of the largest unanswered questions until Baude and Paulsen’s comprehensive research and scholarship on the clause, including whether congressional legislation is required, whether a particular individual had engaged in an insurrection or rebellion, and whether there must be a conviction for the same in order for that individual to be barred from holding future office in the United States.

What would be an example of something else that would be self-executing in a constitutional amendment?

The most obvious example, Isaac, is the age requirement in order to become President of the United States. So suppose that someone who was thirty-two years old applied to be on the ballot in a given state, and it was undisputed that that person was thirty-two years old and not thirty-five years old. It would be the Constitution itself that would empower that state election official to disqualify that candidate from the ballot for the Presidency.

Removing someone from the ballot because of the age requirement seems like it would be easy for an official to do without making a judgment call. Someone’s age is an objective fact. Whereas this seems like it calls for state officials to make judgment calls, which could potentially open things up for abuse. Is there a categorical difference there?

There is a categorical difference. There is vastly more judgment entailed in determining whether, for instance, the former President engaged in an insurrection or rebellion than in determining whether a candidate was thirty-five years old. That doesn’t relieve the obligated election official from making that determination. The process for placing individuals on the ballot varies from state to state. But, under our reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, an individual election official could make that decision himself or herself.

As a practical matter, is that likely to occur? It would depend, I think, on the office of the election official. If it were the secretary of state who was charged with placing individuals on the ballot, then I believe that decision by the duly appointed state official would suffice. But, in all events, whoever makes the qualification or the disqualification decision and whether they make it, that decision will be immediately challenged, probably by the former President himself. And that challenge would go directly into court—either state or federal—and it would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Michael McConnell, a conservative professor at Stanford, and a former federal judge like yourself, has commented on this issue. He wrote, “Congress has enacted a statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which covers participation in rebellion or insurrection, and which provides that those found guilty ‘shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.’ This mode of enforcement has been enacted by the entity entrusted with responsibility to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment; it proceeds through the ordinary course of prosecution by the executive, trial by a court, decision by a jury, and appeal to appellate courts, with due process at every step.” Why isn’t that the standard?

Michael McConnell is one of the country’s most notable constitutional scholars and a dear friend of mine for thirty-plus years. I don’t know what you are reading from, but he doesn’t say in the quoted passage that that is the only avenue for disqualification. He just makes the observation—correct, of course—that Congress, through 18 U.S.C. § 2383, has also provided a disqualification alternative. But that is not the same thing as to say that the Constitution itself is not an additional alternative. I don’t know if Professor McConnell has said that. I have not read anything in which he said that.

Let me just read some more from him: “It is not obvious that partisan officials in state governments, without specific authorization or checks and balances, should apply broad and uncertain definitions to decide who can run for office in a republic, when responsible officials with clear statutory and constitutional authority have not done so.”

I don’t know if you are a lawyer or not.

I’m not.

O.K., what the professor said is “it’s not clear.” He is not saying that the Constitution itself is not an additional alternative option. Now, what I did read from Professor McConnell was that his concern—and we address it, by the way, in our article—is that it appears anti-democratic to him to let state elected officials responsible for putting people on the ballot do that without there having been a prior determination by a court of law that an individual engaged in an insurrection or rebellion. Now this is very interesting, Isaac.

About twenty hours ago, I responded on Twitter to my friends’ concern about the anti-democratic character of the reading of Section 3 that Professor Tribe and I took. I am going to read this into the record, and I would like for you to use it. The Fourteenth Amendment itself, in Section 3, answers the question whether disqualification is “anti-democratic,” declaring that it is not. Rather it is the conduct that gives rise to disqualification that is anti-democratic, per the command of the Constitution. I posted that twenty hours ago, and it has almost six hundred thousand views.

If you just step back from the legalese, the clause has its origins in the postbellum era. It was to disqualify persons who had previously taken an oath and then engaged in insurrection or rebellion. I have had so many people in the past forty-eight hours say to me, It just makes common sense, doesn’t it? And I say to them, Yes, I think it does in its application to the former President. He had taken an oath to support the Constitution, and he engaged in insurrection or rebellion, or he had provided assistance, aid, or comfort to a rebellion in or around January 6th, when he attempted to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. And he inspired and at least gave aid and comfort to the attack on the United States Capitol for the purpose of interfering with and preventing the joint session from counting the electoral votes for the Presidency, the former President knowing that the electoral votes had been cast for then candidate Joe Biden. That’s a classic understanding of an insurrection or rebellion against the authority of the United States.

So, to clarify, you’re claiming mainly that the insurrection was specifically Trump encouraging the interruption of the proceedings at the Capitol as opposed to things such as calling up Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” more votes. You are talking more specifically about the events on January 6th. Is that accurate?

No, that is why I specifically said on or around January 6th. The calls to Raffensperger were part and parcel of the rebellion against the United States government. The plan was to overturn the validly held election. The entire plan was multifaceted and sprawling in its co-conspirators, according to the Georgia indictment. It was all part and parcel of the insurrection of rebellion against the Constitution.

American politics is now the land of make-believe. Democrats make believe that President Joe Biden’s daily lapses are mere gaffes and not signs of a steadily worsening condition. His trip to Maui was notable for a series of awkward blunders, tall tales, and cognitive glitches, and the press takeaway is that Republicans have mischaracterized it all for partisan gain.

Liberals continue to make believe that the Hunter Biden/Vice President Biden/Justice Department/IRS scandal is small-fry family drama or right-wing hysteria. No matter that every day brings a new development or corroborative detail pointing to alleged misconduct. A recent headline in New York magazine claims that “Actually, Hunter Biden Is Getting It Worse.” The subhead explains: “A Bumbling Justice Department and GOP pressure make this prosecution anything but a ‘sweetheart deal.’” Pure reality inversion.

But like most of our current woes, the make-believe disease is bipartisan. On the right, trailing Republican presidential candidates make believe that they’re not running against Donald Trump. Except for Chris Christie, they’re running as Trump understudies and supporters who dare not criticize the man in plain language. That game requires even moderate Republicans to make believe that January 6 was something short of a historic travesty and that all Trump’s indictments are nothing but naked persecution. It could be that those of us who criticize this tack are also making believe—pretending that going after Trump head-on wouldn’t cost his opponents just as dearly. And maybe we’re all making believe that this is a real race and that Trump’s competition is, in fact, competition.

What’s most striking, however, is that the disconnect between American politics and American life couldn’t be more apparent. While politics has become make-believe, Americans have moved into a period of very real crises. The Covid pandemic was a calamity on a scale that the U.S. hadn’t experienced since the attacks of 9/11. And we’re still treading in the virus’s wake: Inflation is real; the crime spike is real; the breakdown in education and child mental health is real. None of it has gone away. We just live with it now.

Beyond the pandemic, there’s a ballooning migrant crisis that the current administration pretends is under control. And there’s the war in Ukraine—it’s real, and its outcome is as uncertain as it ever was. The Biden approach of “as long as it takes” is make-believe assurance when Ukrainians need weapons, aircraft, and materiel right now. And the Trump promise of a peace deal in “one day” is science fiction. Despite Americans’ increasing distaste for helping Ukraine, a victorious Vladimir Putin would make the world a much more frightening place for the United States and its allies. This is to say nothing of other real crises on the horizon—a potential economic collapse in China possibly foremost among them.

What’s too real for partisans to handle—what they’ve papered over with political fantasy—is the crackup in our leadership and institutions. Democrats can’t countenance the true meaning of Joe Biden’s shortcomings and misdeeds. And Republicans can’t cop to the unprecedented transgressions of Donald Trump. And so both sides proceed as if their standard-bearer were not facing serious trouble. We muddle on in a political season that seems unreal because it is unreal. The 2024 election is 439 days away. That’s a lot of make-believe still to go. Will reality assert itself before then? It may seem impossible at the moment, but the safe bet is yes. It has a historical tendency to do so.

The rapid gains this past year in generative AI have reawakened anxieties over mass job losses – anxieties that have flared up recurrently over the entirety of the computer age. From the beginning of industrialization, of course, automation has posed threats to some people’s livelihoods. But the disruptions caused by the mechanization of muscle were confined to the lower orders of society, and were more than matched (eventually) by the expansion of opportunities for higher pay in other sectors. When the advent of computers showed that the automation of thinking was now becoming possible, however, elites awakened to the fact that progress might soon be coming for them. Moreover, if machines became not only stronger and faster than us, but smarter as well, what opportunities would be left for any of us to offset all the displacement? Thus arose the “automation crisis” of the 1950s and 60s. Machines are “the precise equivalent of slave labor,” intoned cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener ominously, and “any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.”
We can look back and tut-tut those overblown fears, chalking them up to the “lump of labor” fallacy. Yet while it might be true that human wants and desires are indefinitely extensible, and thus that there is always productive work to be done, it could still be the case that the work is worth so little that it doesn’t pay to do it. Under those conditions, mass technological unemployment is a real possibility.
We know this is true because it’s happened before. There is a class of once-highly valuable workers that has been rendered substantially obsolete because of automation: horses. After the invention of cars, trucks, and tractors, it was of course still possible to use horse-drawn conveyances instead. The problem was, the horses couldn’t earn enough to pay for their feeding and upkeep. Accordingly, the employment of horses shrank dramatically – as did their total numbers.
For humans, the relevant threshold is the “social minimum” – the floor for income and living standards that social institutions provide for people regardless of their ability to work. In the preindustrial past, of course, such a thing hardly existed, as famines occurred regularly and hunger was a familiar companion. But in rich industrialized societies today, a floor is maintained – and the height of the floor rises over time as the society grows richer. When the value of a person’s work falls below that floor, participation in the labor market no longer makes economic sense.
The combination of automation and rising per capita incomes has now reached the point that attachment to the labor market is weakening. The labor force participation rate for “prime age” men (aged 25-54) has been slowly but steadily sliding downward for decades – from 97 percent in 1960 down to 89 percent today. Most of this decline is occurring in the low end of the labor market and reflects the poor opportunities facing less-skilled workers. We don’t typically refer to this drop in labor force participation as technological unemployment, but that is what it amounts to.
Accordingly, I take seriously the prospect that AI could eventually render significant chunks of the population functionally unemployable. Things could go very differently, of course. It’s possible that AI can be used to dramatically boost ordinary workers’ productivity and thus prove a boon to both their compensation and levels of engagement. But my bet is for current trends to continue: even as AI showers us with benefits and creates all kinds of new jobs to do, its overall net effect will be to further erode commitment to paid employment, especially at the low end of the labor market.
The ultimate challenge brought into focus by AI, though, goes beyond the future of the labor market. It goes to the question posed as the title of this essay: what are humans really for, anyway? If machines have liberated us to the point that we are free to do whatever we want, how should we use that freedom? If any productive task we might care to perform can be accomplished better, more quickly, and more easily by machines, what tasks do we continue to reserve for ourselves anyway? 
A central element of business strategy revolves around what is known as the make-or-buy decision: if you’re making widgets, which components and inputs do you decide to produce for yourself, and which do you source through contracting in the marketplace? The relevant costs and benefits that need to be compared are not always easy to tease out. Choosing to manufacture a given input in-house may impose extra costs in the short run, but in the process create new capabilities for the firm that can be exploited for profit down the line. In such situations, opting to prefer building long-term capabilities over enjoying short-term convenience can end up being the key to corporate success.
The prospect of artificial general intelligence confronts humanity with a series of existential make-or-buy decisions. And the crux of the issue in all of those decisions is the tradeoff between convenience and capability. For everything that we hand over to the machines to do for us, we will tell ourselves that by doing so we have freed up time for what’s really important. But much of what’s really important in life requires the patient and laborious development of capabilities to accomplish and enjoy. As I pointed out in a recent essay, the flipside of specialization is the atrophy of everything outside that narrow specialty. To “live wisely and agreeably and well,” we cannot always choose effortless convenience – that way lies WALL-E-fication. Flourishing is an active virtue, and thus we cannot focus exclusively on freeing up time. We have to focus as well on spending time and expending effort – but on what?
It’s important to note, though, that these make-or-buy decisions started confronting us – and we started to stumble in making them – long before ChatGPT arrived on the scene. In a delightfully perceptive recent essay for The Economist, Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi point out people have been outsourcing work to inscrutable artificial intelligences for some time now – we know them better as the market and the state. They start off by discussing the internet meme that compares the new generative AI large language models to a “shoggoth” – H. P. Lovecraft’s “amorphous monster bubbling with tentacles and eyes.” The comparison aptly evokes our trepidation in heading down the road toward creating something more powerful than ourselves; “Lovecraft’s shoggoths,” Farrell and Shalizi note, “were artificial servants that rebelled against their creators.” But then they go on to say:

But what such worries fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications.

The story of modernity is at its center the story of the development of life at superhuman scale, the weaving of humanity into vast webs of interdependence coordinated and regulated by the impersonal institutions – or, more provocatively, the superhuman intelligence – of market and state systems. What Adam Smith called the “great society,” what F. A. Hayek called the “extended order,” summoned the immense powers we now wield and heaped up the great wealth we now enjoy by integrating millions of strangers into far-flung and highly intricate networks of specialization and exchange.
This “great enrichment,” as Deirde McCloskey calls it, has mixed burdens with its blessings. To enjoy the benefits that these impersonal institutions offer, we have had to adapt ourselves to their sometimes-inhuman logic, subjecting ourselves to the diktats of the clock, the boss, shifts in consumer preferences, macroeconomic fluctuations, established agency procedures, legislative machinations, and changes in the political climate. 
And as I discussed in an earlier essay, we have now pursued the logic of specialization and outsourcing to the point where we have allowed vital capabilities necessary for flourishing to atrophy. Our sustaining personal relationships are unraveling; our bodies are bloated; our attention is shriveling; and our experiences are increasingly of mediated simulacra rather than the real thing. 
So well before the recent surge in AI progress, the question of what humans are for has grown increasingly urgent. Both consumerism and the welfare state prosper by making a beguiling appeal: outsource responsibilities to the market and the state to make time for what really matters. And like the frog lounging in a pot on a slow boil, our vitality has been slowing slipping away without our really noticing it.
Now, however, all the buzz about AI confronts us with the shock of dramatic transformation – not the gradual, imperceptible offloading of our responsibilities, but sudden confrontation with the possibility that all our responsibilities could be stripped from us. We are face to face with the permanent problem in its starkest formulation: what do you do when you don’t have to do anything? 
The question leads us to think about the nature of human flourishing at the collective level. As I have discussed earlier, at the individual level there is enormous variety in the specific activities that lead to lives of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. But when we back up and look at what it means for an entire society to be flourishing, or our entire species, we will see that all that variety resolves into a few basic themes. When we ask what humans are for, we are asking what constitutes the broad outline of humans’ highest and best destiny.
Answers to a question this profound cannot be settled definitively one way or another. Rather, they are statements of faith that reflect our deepest values and aspirations. All I can do here is lay my cards on the table and give my reasons for holding them.
Let’s start with what fundamentally distinguishes us from our machine creations, however hyper-competent they may someday be. We human beings are alive, biological organisms who must use our senses, emotions, and cognition to survive. Moreover, we are only one species in a vast and teeming biosphere, out of which we evolved and on which we depend for our existence. 
For humans to flourish as a species, then, at the most basic level they need to be flourishing biologically. Humans have already used their unique gifts to settle every conceivable terrestrial environment and to increase their numbers over a thousandfold since the end of the Stone Age. To my mind, we cannot abandon this adventure and be true to what is best within us. It is an article of faith for me that human life – the miracle of human consciousness and self-awareness and cultural capacity – is the most precious thing in the universe. There is accordingly no higher calling than producing more of these miracles.
We are, however, not the only living miracle on this planet – far from it. Our relationship with the rest of the biosphere, though, is unique. For some time now, we have been the apex species, capable of affecting for good or ill the future of every other species on Earth. Until very recently, our impact on the rest of creation has been largely destructive, but we have now amassed the knowledge and powers to act differently. We currently influence the global climate; we need to learn quickly to control it and maintain the highly favorable (for humans, that is) Holocene equilibrium. We have the power to destroy whole ecosystems, but we have had some recent successes in maintaining and rebuilding others, and we are learning to create new ones and recreate old ones. 
Our relationship with the living world is thus up to us. We can maintain the world as a lush and vibrant garden, or we can make a desert of it. There is no doubt in my mind which path better accords with human flourishing. Biophilia comes naturally to us: we bring animals into our home and treat them as beloved family members. And the truth is that we are all part of the great kingdom of living creatures, evolved from common ancestors; the truth is that we are all family. Our highest and best destiny, I therefore believe, is to make the flourishing of the biosphere a condition of our own. It is an old idea, but I don’t think it can be improved upon: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
But how do we obey the injunction to be fruitful and multiply while still exercising wise and benevolent dominion over the rest of life? There are already 8 billion of us, and it seems clear to me that the Earth’s carrying capacity for flourishing human communities has limits. To my mind, the obvious resolution of this conflict is to ensure that humanity’s destiny – and the destiny of Earth-based life – is not confined to its home planet. I cannot think of a more sublime story than this: we are that tiny part of the universe that has awakened to life and subjective experience, and beyond that to self-awareness, and from that privileged position we assume the responsibility to begin the awakening of the rest of the universe, by spreading humanity and life as far as we can.
Flourishing is ultimately a matter of realizing potential – of living in accordance with one’s nature so that the fullness of that nature is expressed. The vision of human destiny I have sketched so far flows from our unique nature as living creatures. We can sharpen that vision by recognizing that, as biological organisms of the same species, we share the same distinctive nature – that is, we share common traits that together inform our species’ potential. 
Two traits in particular bear mentioning here, as the tension between them goes a long way toward explaining the twists and turns of the human condition. First of all, we are hyper-social creatures with profound and nonnegotiable needs for interpersonal intimacy and group belonging – and with a cultural capacity that gives us unmatched ability to cooperate with each other to achieve common goals. At the same time, we are aggressive, competitive, and curious, traits which frequently put us at odds with each other and with our social groupings and which underlie both our greatest achievements and our foulest crimes. Kant referred to this dual nature as humanity’s “unsocial sociability”: the “propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society.” We live in the tension between our need for others and our individual willfulness.
At the existential level, our dual nature dictates that we pursue flourishing by submitting ourselves to a great imperative: in E.M. Forster’s words, “Only connect!” We exist as individual cells of awareness and self-awareness, knowing we are here for but an instant before we die alone. The workings of our minds, why we do what we do, start off as total mysteries, but they can reveal themselves over time if we do the necessary introspective work. Other people, no matter how close, are always destined to be strangers to some degree, but over time, if we do the work, they can become more fully visible to us as we become more visible to them. Our relationship with the broader world starts in the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of untutored sensory data, but over time – if we do the work – the confusion yields to ever deeper and richer understanding. Always, the work of humans is to connect – with ourselves, with others, with the world around us – in the never fully realizable attempt to address our radical incompleteness.
From our dual nature come what I have already identified as the two defining features of a flourishing society: inclusiveness and dynamism. What are humans for? First and foremost, they are for making and taking care of other human beings and enjoying their company. We may someday employ intelligent assistants to help us in these tasks, but we can never lose sight of the fact that vital connections to other flesh-and-blood people are at the heart of what makes life worth living. Furthermore, humans are for exploring and seeking to understand the world – and the larger universe – around them, and then using that understanding to serve human purposes. Here again, intelligent machines can help us; indeed, they very well may succeed in improving our understanding far beyond what our unaided minds were ever capable of. But the point, from our perspective at any rate, is to deepen and enrich human experience. And so, putting the two aspects of our dual nature together, we can conclude that humans are for endlessly exploring their relationships with each other and with the outer world. They are for establishing and enjoying human communities in every kind of habitable physical environment, terrestrial or otherwise, in forms as various as our inexhaustible cultural fertility will allow.
In the end, of course, the only way to know humanity’s actual destiny is to play the movie and find out what happens. But we, the actors in this movie, are also its writers and directors. Our destiny is ultimately up to us, and therefore we should make the most of that responsibility. We should aim high.
On that note, let me close with the final passage from the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, the book in which he introduces the concept of the “open society”:

Mankind lies groaning, half crushed under the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs is the responsibility, then, for deciding if they merely want to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.
The post What are humans for? first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post What are humans for? appeared first on Niskanen Center.

It has been six months since I wrote about the potential for the new transformer AI technology to serve as an expert medical system. Since then there has been a slew of studies testing the ability of ChatGPT and similar systems to make diagnoses or clinical decisions or pass standardized medical exams. The results have mostly been positive. For example, earlier this year Kung et al published a study in which they found that ChatGPT was able to pass all three parts of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE), with a borderline passing grade of 60%. There have been numerous specialty board exam studies as well, with mixed results, but with ChatGPT passing most of them.

A recent study extends this research by looking not just at medical knowledge but medical decision-making. For the study they used 36 published clinical vignettes from the Merck Sharpe & Dohme (MSD) Clinical Manual and tested the ability of ChatGPT to generate an initial differential diagnosis, recommend clinical management decisions (such as which studies to order), and then make a final diagnosis from this information. They found:

“ChatGPT achieved an overall accuracy of 71.7% (95% CI 69.3%-74.1%) across all 36 clinical vignettes. The LLM demonstrated the highest performance in making a final diagnosis with an accuracy of 76.9% (95% CI 67.8%-86.1%) and the lowest performance in generating an initial differential diagnosis with an accuracy of 60.3% (95% CI 54.2%-66.6%). Compared to answering questions about general medical knowledge, ChatGPT demonstrated inferior performance on differential diagnosis (β=–15.8%; P<.001) and clinical management (β=–7.4%; P=.02) question types.”

This is impressive, and does fit with prior research about the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT type systems. For review, ChatGPT is an open source version of what is called a large language model (LLM). The core artificial intelligence (AI) technology is called a transformer – the “GPT” stands for generative pre-trained transformer. It is generative because it is not simply copying text from some source, it is generating text based on a predictive model. It is pre-trained on a vast body of text farmed from the internet.

These LLM systems do not think, and are not on the way to general AI that simulates human intelligence. They have been compared to a really good auto-complete – they work by predicting the most likely next word segment based upon billions of examples from the internet. And yet their results can be quite impressive. They can produce natural-sounding language, and can generate an impressive base of knowledge.

But they are still brittle in the way that such narrow AI systems are brittle, meaning that if you push them they will break. For these LLM the primary weakness is that they are susceptible to so-called hallucinations. This means that they can make stuff up. Remember – they are generating text based upon probability, not actually fact-checking or reflecting accurate knowledge. Therefore, for example, if two things are statistically likely to be mentioned together, ChatGPT will generate text that makes it seem like that are directly related. It can also entirely make up plausible looking references, by generating a reference-like structure and filling it is with statistically determined but fake details.

This is a serious flaw for an expert system. To put ChatGPT’s performance on the recent study into context, it barely passed with a level of knowledge equal to an average new medical school graduate, but not a seasoned clinician. It is therefore not yet at the level of being able to practice medicine. There are two questions – will it ever be, and can it be useful in the meantime.

Taking the second question first, I think at the moment a general LLM application like ChatGPT can be somewhat useful as an expert system, meaning that it is used by as expert as a tool to help them function. But its usefulness comes with some significant cautions and caveats. The results that ChatGPT produce cannot be trusted. They should not be taken as authoritative, even if they sound that way. But they can be used as an idea generator, to suggest possible diagnoses that a clinician may not have thought of.

What about for the non-expert user? Can an average person use ChatGPT as a search engine to find reasonable answers to medical questions? The answer is similar – it’s about as good as a typical Google search, although with natural language. But there is no guarantee that the information is accurate. ChatGPT essentially just reflects the information out there on the internet, both good and bad. The ways questions are phrased will also tend to bias answers. Again, remember, ChatGPT does not think or understand (as humans do), it’s just a predictive model.

What is the potential for such systems in the future, however? I think the potential is great. ChatGPT is a general application LLM, not specifically trained as a medical expert, and yet it does fairly well. Imagine a medical-expert version of ChatGPT, not trained on the internet but trained on the totality of published medical studies, practice standards, and expert analysis. It seems likely that such an LLM would outperform ChatGPT or similar models.

Also, results can be improved by properly training the user. A recent study looked at the potential for “instruction prompt tuning”. This means creating prompts (the question you ask an LLM) that are designed to produce more reliable results. These can be based on tested exemplars. We might see a future where optimizing medical LLM prompts is a class in medical school.

There does seem to be a general consensus that these LLM AI systems have tremendous potential as medical expert systems. They are currently right on the edge of functioning basic medical knowledge, but not at the level of experienced clinicians. They also suffer from significant limitations, such as making up fake information. But it does seem that we are incredibly close to getting such systems to the point that they could significantly improve the practice of medicine. They can help reduce error and misdiagnosis, and also chart the most efficient pathway of diagnostic workup or clinical management. Medicine, ultimately, is a game of statistics, and an AI medical assistant could provide the statistical and factual information that a clinician needs at the point of patient care (one of the ultimate goals of evidence-based medicine).

A medical LLM could also help clinicians keep up to date. It is challenging, to say the least, to keep always at the absolute cutting edge of medical knowledge. The internet has made this a lot easier – a clinical can now just quickly look up a medical question and see what the latest published studies say. But the faster, more efficient, and more thorough we can make this process, the better.

There still needs to be a human in the loop (and there will be until we have general AI with full human intelligence). This is because medicine is also a human practice, and requires judgement, emotional calculations about risk vs benefit, goals of care, and a human perspective. Facts alone are not enough. But it is always best to make the human and personal medical decisions from the perspective of accurate, up to date, and thorough medical information.

The first votes in the Republican presidential primary are scheduled to be cast by caucus-goers in Iowa on January 15. That's 145 days from today, when the first debate in the contest will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To put that in context, it would be like holding the first debate for next year's general election—scheduled for November 5—in late March. That would be obviously absurd. Tonight's event is no less so. In fact, the math is even less kind than it might seem at first blush. The Iowa caucuses aren't really equivalent to November's general election. They are weird, sparsely attended, and unlikely to be dispositive. The same is true for the Nevada caucuses scheduled for February 8. Republicans will have their first true primary on February 28 in South Carolina, but the date that really matters is March 5, when 13 states plan to hold their GOP primaries. That's 195 days away. It would be like holding a general election debate in early February. America, we don't have to do this to ourselves. Every year, social media is full of people complaining about stores decorating for Christmas at seemingly earlier and earlier points. It's happening already this year. But holiday season–creep has got nothing on election season–creep, which is more expansive and less productive. Holding a debate tonight is like decorating for Christmas well before the Fourth of July (a gap of 174 days). It's worth asking: Who is tonight's debate for? Is there one voter in the entire country who will hear something tonight that convinces him or her to vote for Vivek Ramaswamy or Nikki Haley—and then will never be swayed from that choice over the next six months? Perhaps, but there certainly aren't many more than one. At best, tonight's debate is a glorified preseason football game—an unwatchable spectacle that no one ought to enjoy. Like in many preseason games, the star player is on the bench. In his absence, the prospective backups will compete to earn what's unlikely to be anything better than a third-string spot on the final roster. In fact, if reports are to be believed, some of them aren't even trying to earn the starting role. But even that comparison flatters what we're doing here. There are a mere 192 days between the first snap of the preseason and the scheduled kickoff of this year's Super Bowl. The way-too-early start of the presidential primary season creates some practical problems too. A less insane schedule—say with the first debates happening in early January, still two months out from the first real primary—would give voters, donors, and candidates a better sense of the shape of the race. We'd have more information about former President Donald Trump's legal issues, for one. Candidates who simply couldn't hack it would have already packed up and gone home for lack of money. And the stakes that will define the 2024 general election would be more clear. Messages could be more carefully honed, questions tailored, and with limited time before voting starts the candidates would have a stronger incentive to actually debate one another. And that is, of course, the point. Debates are crucial to democracy, but they're more useful when held in formats and at times that allow voters (who have better things to spend their time on) to grasp distinctions between candidates. For all the many, many problems with the Commission on Presidential Debates, which runs the general election presidential debates, it basically gets the scheduling part right. There are usually three debates, all held in the final weeks of the campaign. A silver lining, albeit a faint one, might be Trump's absence from tonight's debate. With the clear front-runner absent, fewer people will tune in to watch. Perhaps those lower ratings send a market signal to the cable news stations that plan and host these primary debates. Trump's threatened absence from future debates might even cause a reconsideration about how many there should be. For now, there's only one more officially scheduled (September 27 in California), though many more are likely. That's probably a naive hope. Still, no matter what Fox News and the other Republican candidates decide to do, remember that you have a choice too. You can spend time with your family. You can play with your pets. You can watch an endless cornucopia of other shows, movies, and sporting events on television. You can read a magazine. There are 145 days before anything that's said tonight will matter, if anything said tonight ever does.The post The GOP Primary Debates Are Starting Way Too Early appeared first on Reason.com.

Competing to be the biggest hawk on China, the Republican candidates for president are touting a dizzying array of policies — many of which are disconnected from reality. But the real test for GOP voters should be who has credibility and whose plans actually make sense, not who seems most aggressive. That will drastically narrow the field.

But despite what seems like a consensus, there are big differences among the GOP candidates on China — on their records as well as their policy ideas. A successful debate would draw out these distinctions for voters and point out where candidates are talking nonsense.

For example, one question that should be asked of all candidates is, “Would you send the U.S. military to defend Taiwan if China attacks, as President Biden has repeatedly promised to do?” Former vice president Mike Pence told me he wants to keep China guessing by not committing in advance one way or the other. Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie told me he would send in the U.S. military if all other options had failed.

In an interview, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley went further than she has previously in signaling that she would send the U.S. military to defend Taiwan if China attacked.

“We will do whatever we need to do to defend Taiwan, much like we have done what we needed to do to defend Ukraine,” she told me.

Ramaswamy says he would, as president, send the U.S. military to defend Taiwan, but only until 2028 when he promises the United States would achieve semiconductor independence. (Taiwan produces 92 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors; the manufacturing base took decades to assemble.) Ramaswamy’s kind of hawkish realism sounds appealing, but it promises the impossible, because four years is not nearly enough time to build an independent semiconductor industry. Haley told me that his proposal is not only unrealistic, but also reveals his misunderstanding of the problem, because it construes U.S. interests in Taiwan too narrowly.

“It shows a complete lack of awareness of the breadth of the Chinese threat,” Haley said, referring to Ramaswamy’s China plans. “That’s the problem with people who don’t understand national security, and he proved that. We can’t have a novice going into the White House.”

Much of Ramaswamy’s remaining China approach is similarly nonsensical. For example, in an interview on CNN Monday, Ramaswamy was pressed on his suggestion that every Taiwanese household be given a gun, ostensibly to deter Beijing from invading. He defended himself by explaining this was only one part of his deterrence strategy. But his talk of “exporting our Second Amendment” (as Ramaswamy calls it) to Taiwan is not only bad policy. It also reveals his ignorance of Taiwan’s domestic law, culture and politics, because the Taiwanese people would never go along with this idea.

Ramaswamy wants to coax Moscow into giving up its military alliance with Beijing by ceding parts of Ukraine, a deal Vladimir Putin would never strike. Ramaswamy asserts India can be enticed with a trade deal to block the Malacca Strait if China attacks Taiwan, even though there’s zero evidence that the leaders in New Delhi would make such a bargain.

In our interview, Haley also criticized Scott for being late to acknowledge the China threat. As ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Scott has tried to weaken proposed restrictions on technology investments in China and pushed back against efforts to ban TikTok. Now he’s saying in his campaign ads that as president, he “will keep China out of our homeland and out of our data.” That’s opportunism at best and disingenuousness at worst, Haley told me.

“We can’t have someone who is unsure about where they stand on China policy,” she told me. “Banning TikTok is only the tip of the spear when it comes to defending against China.”

DeSantis also seems to be learning on the job. Three weeks ago, he wasn’t sure if he was for banning TikTok. Then, last week, he decided he supports a ban. His campaign’s “Declaration of Economic Independence” promises to reverse the U.S.-China trade deficit ($382.9 billion last year) and stop the importing of goods that rely on stolen intellectual property, with little explanation of how.

Haley, who is trailing DeSantis and Ramaswamy in the polls, is also putting herself forth as a China hawk. But she at least has some real diplomatic experience to tout (as does Pence). She negotiated with Chinese diplomats at the United Nations. She spoke out against Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and the Uyghur genocide even when her boss, President Donald Trump, refused to do so.

In a speech last month at the American Enterprise Institute, she criticized some of Trump’s China policies. She said Trump was good on trade but “did too little about the rest of the Chinese threat” and demonstrated “moral weakness in his zeal to befriend [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping.]”

I’m Michelle Goldberg, and I’m an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

[MUSIC]

So tonight is the first Republican debate of the 2024 campaign cycle. Going into tonight’s debate, a lot of the drama was about whether Trump would show up or not. But I think that he’s going to be the center of gravity almost no matter what.

By all indications, what the Republican base wants is more Donald Trump. But the leaders of the party see Donald Trump as a uniquely vulnerable candidate in a general election. And so you have, I think, a leadership of the party that wants an alternative and a base that isn’t yet convinced that an alternative is even necessary.

And so the candidates have to do something to change the way that the Republican base relates to Trump, you know. And because so much of the relationship between the base and Trump is about him as this icon of invulnerable dominance, they have to do something to interrupt that.

And they’re not going to do that. Nobody is going to do that, I think, by arguing about the issues, by showing that Trump isn’t a true conservative. But there’s potentially an opportunity to do that by making Trump look weak, making him look feckless, making him look old and afraid.

And there’s two candidates whose position vis-a-vis Trump is going to be particularly dramatic. One is Chris Christie, who’s running as the anti-Trump candidate. He’s the one person who has learned the lesson that the contest with Trump is less about issues, and it’s much more about displays of dominance.

And so he is trying to embarrass Trump. He calls Trump a grifter. They’ve had a lot of back and forths, kind of juvenile back and forth, particularly in Trump’s part, about Chris Christie’s weight.

And Chris Christie, like Trump, has this kind of swaggering Northeastern tough guy affect and wants to show that if you are willing to take on Trump directly and show that you are unintimidated by him, that he will reveal himself as a much weaker figure than at least his most ardent supporters believe him to be.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So while you’ll see some of the other candidates criticize Donald Trump for January 6 or for taking home classified documents, they will definitely preface it by saying that the Justice Department is out of control and that Donald Trump is being targeted unfairly.

Chris Christie is going to be saying that, no, Donald Trump is a criminal. Donald Trump is a traitor. Donald Trump deserves what he’s getting. And that’s not a message that I think most Republican voters want to hear. But it will be interesting to see whether he can open the way for other candidates to make more subtle critiques of Trump or more nuanced critiques of Trump.

And then the other person who I think people are going to be watching is Ron DeSantis. There was a time at the beginning of this year when Ron DeSantis seemed like the great hope of the Republican Party. And then he got on the campaign trail and just absolutely fizzled.

His poll numbers have been falling. His donors have been expressing their frustration. He’s had this high profile campaign shakeup. And so I think that for Ron DeSantis, if he’s going to turn his campaign around, tonight will be one of the last chances in which he can do that.

Based on some documents that were put online by a super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis, that the Times has reported on, he’s going to defend Trump when Chris Christie goes after him, which I don’t doubt is going to go over really well with this audience.

But if Ron DeSantis refuses to take on Trump directly and just kind of defends him from Chris Christie’s attacks, he will ingratiate himself to the right wing base. But he still won’t make a case for himself as the nominee because he will be showing himself to be subservient to Trump. I mean, he’s sort of doing what the Republican Party as a whole has been doing since 2015 really, which is hoping that something else will come along and make Trump go away.

I think the stakes for the debate are twofold. One is how much control the Republican Party can exert over this process, because if they can’t even get their front runner to show up to a debate, I think it just underscores the degree to which Donald Trump has been able to hijack the party and marginalize the rest of its leadership.

And then the other question is whether they can actually come up with a viable non-Trump candidate or whether the field will continue to be splintered in a way that benefits Trump even more than it benefited him in 2016 because his lead is already so overwhelming.

And so I wouldn’t expect any substantive wrestling with the issues at this debate. Although there might be some newsmaking disagreements about abortion bans, or the scope of abortion bans.

But this is fundamentally pro-wrestling, right. This is fundamentally about performance and peacocking and dominance. And I think that tonight’s debate will be the most high profile forum in which we’re going to see how the Republican Party handles the elephant in the room. And that’s what people are going to be watching for.

Vivek Ramaswamy is clearly having a moment. An entrepreneur with no political experience whatsoever, the fast-talking Republican presidential aspirant has risen rapidly in the polls; in some of them, he has even surpassed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to take second place. (Former President Donald Trump remains the runaway leader.) Heading into the debate tonight, Ramaswamy definitely had a spotlight on him, and it shone ever brighter as he picked fights with the other candidates. He attacked former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for speaking out against Trump and claimed that former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley was angling for a job at a defense contractor. Ramaswamy frequently enjoyed the crowd's support, and some of his most popular remarks were grounded in libertarian notions. On foreign policy, in particular, Ramaswamy distinguished himself from every other candidate on the stage—with the possible exception of DeSantis, who hit many of the same notes—by refusing to cosign the neoconservatism of his rivals. "The only war that I will declare as president is the war on the federal administrative state," he said. Ramaswamy was adamant that he would not support additional military aid to Ukraine. This stance put him at odds with every other candidate save DeSantis, but it is increasingly popular with the GOP base. A recent CNN/SSR poll found that 71 percent of Republicans do not want Congress to authorize more funding, and 69 percent believe that the U.S. has already done enough. Ramaswamy has also proposed cutting military assistance to Israel, a stance that earned Haley's ire on the debate stage but is supported by many libertarian-adjacent political figures and tracks with Americans' general disdain for foreign aid (though they tend to overestimate how much the government spends on it). One reason for Trump's conquest of the Republican Party was that he broke with GOP orthodoxy on foreign policy; he called the Iraq War a mistake and pledged to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. These ideas were anathema to party leadership, though anti-war Republican candidates who preceded Trump—including, most notably, Ron Paul in 2008 and 2012—showed that non-interventionism was broadly popular among the base. The rank-and-file lost faith in Bush-era nation-building long before GOP leaders realized it, and Trump's successful run was a wake-up call—though, of course, Trump failed to pursue genuinely anti-interventionist policies; on the contrary, he installed former Bush administration official John Bolton as national security advisor. Ramaswamy seems poised to capture some of the same Trumpian energy. Much like Trump, his foreign policy prescriptions were not entirely libertarian; like Trump, he is hawkish on China. He also proposed militaristic policies to deal with the U.S. southern border, suggesting that resources currently being sent to Ukraine should instead be redirected there. This would involve a massive escalation of police and military power, which is hardly libertarian. However, on this issue, he was in good company—most of the candidates seemed to prefer deploying vastly more police and military resources against Mexican cartels as opposed to confronting the failures of prohibition. A wholly libertarian foreign policy would involve not merely a reorganization of U.S. military and defense spending, but a decrease.The post Vivek Ramaswamy: 'The Only War I Will Declare…Is on the Administrative State' appeared first on Reason.com.

When it comes to runaway federal spending, unsustainable levels of borrowing, and the inflation that those first two things have helped unleash, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Wednesday that Republicans better look in the mirror. "The truth is that Biden didn't do this to us, our Republicans did this to us too," Haley said during the early moments of Wednesday's Republican primary debate. She pointed specifically to Republican support in Congress for COVID stimulus bills and other recent spending packages. "They need to stop the spending, they need to stop the borrowing, they need to eliminate the earmarks that Republicans brought back in," she said. Then she delivered the hammer blow: "And Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt, and our kids are never going to forgive us for this," Haley said. She nailed it.  Nikki Haley: "The truth is that Biden didn't do this to us. Our Republicans did this to us too…You have Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, they all voted to raise the debt. Donald Trump added $8 trillion to our debt." pic.twitter.com/xHYiKkyt7s — Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) August 24, 2023  Trump promised to pay off the national debt within eight years when he was running for office in 2016. When he got to the White House, the national debt was a little less than $20 trillion. He, uh, didn't pay it off. Instead, federal spending climbed each of the first three years that Trump was in office—from $3.98 trillion in fiscal year 2017 to $4.45 trillion in 2019—then exploded in 2020 due to emergency COVID-19 spending. (For the first two years of Trump's term, Republicans also had full control of Congress, so there is a lot of blame to go around.) When he left, the national debt was nearing $28 trillion. Today, it stands at $32.7 trillion. Republicans have predictably swung back to a message of fiscal restraint during President Joe Biden's time in office, seemingly forgetting that the fiscal years of 2017 and 2018 ever existed. Haley shining a spotlight on the bipartisan role of borrowing and spending in recent years was a welcome moment—and a powerful one for Haley, who stood out during Wednesday's sometimes chaotic debate. And it's critical for whoever wins next year's presidential election to be clear-eyed about the seriousness of the debt problem facing the federal government.The post Nikki Haley Burned Trump and Her Fellow Republicans for Blowing Up the Debt. She's Right. appeared first on Reason.com.

Inflation apparently has not been high enough in the few years since former President Donald Trump left office—so he's proposing new import taxes that will raise prices for American families and businesses. In an interview last week with Larry Kudlow, the former president floated plans for a new 10 percent tariff on all imports to the United States. Trump described the proposal as putting "a ring around the collar" of the U.S. economy. "When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let's say a 10 percent tax," Trump said on Fox Business. "I do like the 10 percent for everybody." On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that the same topic was discussed Monday night at a Trump campaign strategy meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey. According to the Post, the plan being discussed would include a "'universal baseline tariff' on virtually all imports to the United States" and figures to be a major plank in Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. For starters, kudos to Trump for correctly describing his plan as a tax. Because that's exactly what this would be: a tax hike on American businesses and consumers who purchase products from abroad. Currently, the average U.S. tariff is about 3 percent—though they vary widely depending on what item is being imported and from where. That's the only detail worth praising, however. As Trump should have learned after hiking tariffs on steel, aluminum, and loads of goods imported from China during his term in office, import taxes do little more than hike costs for American consumers and businesses. A recent report by the International Trade Commission concluded that Americans "bore nearly the full cost of these tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs." Economists Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, and David Weinstein have calculated that the tariffs directly reduced Americans' income by a cumulative $1.4 billion per month. Those costs are still adding up, since the Biden administration has largely left Trump's tariffs in place—despite Biden's (accurate) assessment on the campaign trail in 2019 that "any beginning econ student at Iowa or Iowa State could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs." Meanwhile, Congress has not done anything to limit or rescind executive power over trade policy in the wake of Trump's abuse of those powers. Among people who actually understand economics, Trump's newest proposal has been roundly criticized. "Protective tariffs are punitive taxes on people's expenditures of their incomes," Don Boudreaux, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank housed at George Mason University, tells Reason. "It's an utter mystery why Trump believes that ordinary Americans, whose interests he claims to represent, would be enriched by the government imposing even heavier taxes on their spending choices." Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a trade-focused think tank, told the Post that Trump's proposal was "lunacy" and "horrifying." Rep. Don Beyer (D–Va.), who has cosponsored a bipartisan bill to require presidents to gain approval from Congress before implementing tariffs for the purposes of national security, called Trump's proposal "idiotic, illegal, and…a disaster for our economy" in a statement released Tuesday. Beyer said any attempt at implementing universal 10 percent tariffs would "immediately violate numerous trade agreements, including the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement which Trump himself signed." Even from a purely political point of view—that is, without the obvious economic and legal ramifications—this seems utterly absurd. Trump is a Republican running for office against an incumbent Democrat whose policies have contributed to rising inflation—and yet his tariff plan amounts to a promise to raise taxes, and prices, on Americans. Any other Republican would be laughed off the campaign trail for promising to raise taxes by 10 percent. Trump remains the clear frontrunner to win the Republican nomination.The post Trump Floats Tariff Plan That Will Make Everything More Expensive appeared first on Reason.com.

Over three years after the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, educational mask and vaccine mandates are increasingly uncommon. However, as the new school year is set to begin, a handful of colleges remain holdouts, especially when it comes to COVID vaccine mandates for incoming students. While several states had plans to enact perpetual COVID-19 vaccine mandates for some students, all appear to have dropped those proposals. In October 2021, California announced it would require COVID vaccinations for middle and high school grades. However, officials scrapped the mandate in February 2023. Illinois ditched a college student–specific mandate in 2022, and D.C. public schools, after pushing back the start date of a COVID vaccine mandate for students 12 and older several times, appears to have quietly abandoned the proposal. However, while state governments have stopped attempts to mandate masking and vaccines in schools, a handful of individual colleges are still holding onto restrictive pandemic-era policies.  According to No College Mandates, a website that tracks COVID-related mandates on college campuses, over 60 universities require a COVID-19 vaccine to attend, including Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Johns Hopkins University.  "Harvard requires all students who will be on campus to have primary vaccination for COVID-19," reads Harvard's website. "As we work to continue the high levels of vaccination needed to protect our community, Harvard highly recommends being up-to-date per the CDC definition for all Harvard community members." Just how many colleges still mandate masks remains much less clear. While many colleges affiliated with hospital systems have mask mandates related to students and staff working in health care settings, it's not obvious how many schools still mandate masks in classrooms or other non-health-care-related student events. However, at least one college is enforcing draconian COVID restrictions. This week, Atlanta-based Morris Brown College announced a battery of COVID-19 mitigation policies for the next two weeks, "due to reports of positive cases." These mandates include a broad mask mandate, physical distancing, a ban on on-campus parties and large gatherings, and "temperature checks" when students arrive on campus. The post Dozens of Colleges Still Require COVID Vaccines for Students appeared first on Reason.com.

President Biden’s summit last week at Camp David with the leaders of Japan and South Korea was an historic, hard-fought achievement for the governments of all three allies. The question is whether the Biden administration can do enough in the time it has left to ensure this progress can’t be reversed. Let’s hope so.

The meeting was the clearest sign yet that China’s aggressive regional expansion and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is driving democracies in Asia to completely rethink their strategic situation. Japan is doubling its defense budget over the next five years. South Korea is reconciling with the country that occupied its land and abused its people during the last century. While most eyes were focused on the U.S.-China bilateral relationship, the Biden administration was working behind the scenes to take advantage of Beijing’s stumbles to bring these frenemies together after decades of estrangement. The summit shows their strategy is working — but it only goes so far and the clock is ticking.

“The strategic plates have shifted,” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel told me. “The one thing that China never wanted to see is happening.”

But it’s telling that the first reporter called on at the summit news conference chose to ask Biden why Asian countries should have confidence in the United States’ long-term commitment. After all, Biden’s predecessor (and likely opponent next year) threatened to abandon Asian allies, shook them down for money, wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from the region, and spent his time clumsily courting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“This isn’t just about one summit,” Biden replied. “What makes today different is it actually launches a series of initiatives that are actually institutional changes in how we deal with one another. … And all of this will create momentum.”

In other words, the Biden team is acutely aware of how even big diplomatic accomplishments can be undone. Remember, these are some of the same people who worked on the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. The Biden administration has 17 months left in its current term to cement the three countries’ cooperation on security, economics, technology, supply chains and development.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are also taking big political risks by pursuing policies such as coordinating technology restrictions on China and deepening missile-defense cooperation, which will surely irritate the Chinese government. Both Japan and South Korea depend heavily on the Chinese economy, and Beijing is known to use such leverage against foreign leaders who irk them.

“We’re trying to build really firm foundations that weather the changes of the politics in any of our countries,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told me during an interview, adding that all three leaders want to build something “that can command support from the institutions of each country indefinitely out into the future.”

The work to make the Camp David summit happen began even before Biden took office, Sullivan said. The president decided early on he wanted to devote significant resources to this push. In April 2021, Sullivan hosted his counterparts from Tokyo and Seoul in Annapolis to kick off the effort.

Sullivan explained to me how the administration approached the allies: “I basically said, ‘Look, I have instructions from the president, as does Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken, to really work on this trilateral cooperation, to try to build it out in a way where it becomes an enduring feature of the Indo-Pacific security architecture and economic architecture — and we’ve got to get to work on this.’”

In May 2021, Blinken and his two counterparts met on the sidelines of the Group of Seven Summit in Britain. After that, they would meet together whenever the three were in the same place at the same time. Similar trilateral meetings sprouted up among the allies’ defense and military officials.

Luck is sometimes defined as the intersection of preparedness and opportunity. Biden caught two significant breaks when new leaders took the helm in both Japan and South Korea. Kishida, who took office in October 2021, hails from the more South Korea-friendly side of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yoon, who took office in May 2022, had fond childhood memories of Japan, where his father was a professor.

These three leaders came together for the first time in June 2022 during the NATO summit in Madrid. The symbolism could not have been clearer. Japan and South Korea were both willing to put aside their historic differences and join with Western countries to coordinate responses to the combined China-Russia threat.

Last week’s meeting in Camp David, with the famous backdrop and the personal touches (Biden and Kishida called each other “Fumio” and “Joe”), was designed to send the message that the United States is willing to make new long-term commitments to its allies. The risk is that Camp David could end up being the high-water mark of that effort rather than a steppingstone.

“In the blocking and tackling of diplomacy, you often gain a yard here or couple yards there, and then sometimes you get a big open run up the middle for 10 yards. … That’s what this is,” Emanuel told me. The job now, the ambassador added, is to maintain that intensity during the implementation phase.

Put together with other Biden efforts in Asia, a new strategic architecture for the region becomes visible. There’s also the Quad group (the United States, Japan, Australia, India); AUKUS (Australia, Britain and the United States); and JAROPUS (Japan, the Philippines and the United States), an acronym Emanuel himself coined.

Over the past year and a half, calls for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have been widely dismissed by the Ukrainian government and its more maximalist online supporters as either Putinist propaganda or defeatism. Yet the so-far lacklustre results of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive have rendered the entire debate moot: right now, there is no incentive whatsoever for Russia to enter into negotiations.
As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared last week: “The prospects for negotiations between Russia and the West are non-existent at this stage.” Indeed, Lavrov applies precisely the same argument against peace talks that both Ukraine and its Western advocates made at an earlier stage in the war: that “we regard the Westerners’ hypocritical calls for talks as a tactical ploy to buy time once again, giving the exhausted Ukrainian troops a respite and the opportunity to regroup and to send in more weapons and ammunition”. It takes two sides to negotiate, and even if Washington compelled Kyiv to the table, Moscow will not currently accept concessions distinguishable from surrender, impossible for Ukraine to accept and damaging for America to oversee.
From Moscow’s perspective, the war is settling into a comfortable rhythm: the modern armour that Ukraine had demanded for so long, whose delivery elicited such angst and drama in Western capitals, is being expended against Russia’s defensive lines to little effect, at least so far. The spring’s flurry of gruesome drone videos showing Russian deaths up close has been inverted, with Russia’s supporters now exulting in the extinction of Ukraine’s increasingly precious reserves of manpower at the hands of cheap FPV drones. The Russian economy is faring better under Western sanctions than anyone expected, while European governments ride the discontent of their voters over rising living costs. On the diplomatic front, non-Western powers view the war in Ukraine with either unruffled equanimity or quiet satisfaction, happy to trade with Russia at discount prices and to assume a role in the multipolar order now demonstrably coming into being. Far from being isolated, Russia’s role in Africa is rapidly expanding as that of the West deteriorates. The greatest threat to Ukraine’s survival, the fickle will of America’s turbulent democratic system, is slowly proceeding in the direction Putin always hoped. The war may not be the stunning success Putin initially hoped for, but its recent trends seem broadly favourable for Moscow, and its disadvantages currently manageable. The necessity for Ukraine now is to once again overturn this calculus.
In these circumstances, there is something distasteful about the flurry of anonymous briefings with which the Biden administration is now distancing itself from Ukraine’s ill-starred counteroffensive. Its results have not, after all, come as a surprise to American planners: as the Discord intelligence leaks revealed, back in February, the Pentagon was already warning that the offensive was likely to fall “well short” of its stated goals: Russia’s sophisticated trench fortifications, coupled with Ukraine’s “force generation and sustainment shortfalls” and “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies”, would “exacerbate casualties during the offensive”, while achieving only “modest territorial gains”. While there are serious dissenting opinions, which assert that the attrition of both Russia’s artillery and manpower under Ukrainian assault will eventually bear fruit, the results so far seem to bear out the accuracy of America’s initial assessment.
Suggested readingWhy Ukraine's offensive has stalledBy Edward Luttwak
Given the vast disparity between Russia and Ukraine in size, population, wealth and industrial production, a strategy of attrition in which Ukraine bears the costs of assault appears a risky gamble. It was always improbable that Ukraine’s army could entirely reshape its military doctrine along Nato lines in a matter of months to defeat, without any of the air superiority integral to the American way of war, a dug-in enemy many times its size. It was Ukraine’s more excitable online supporters, and not the American defence establishment, which had made the grandest claims for the coming offensive, while talking down Russia’s military potential, and it would seem unfair for Kyiv to now pay the price of their reckless if well-meaning exuberance.
The Biden administration’s approach to the war has always been fundamentally sound: that Ukraine should be supported to negotiate, but only from a position of relative strength. Yet it is no good to belatedly observe, as US officials are now anonymously wont to do, that perhaps America’s top general Mark Milley was right in claiming that Ukraine’s greatest period of relative strength was last winter, following the unexpected success of the Kherson and Kharkiv offensives, when an overstretched Russia was on the ropes and seemingly willing to negotiate. True, back then, Ukraine’s star was ascendent and the planned offensive, then slated for the spring, seemed fraught with terrible potential for Russia’s leadership. Yet even then, Russia insisted on Kyiv recognising Moscow’s possession of the Ukrainian territories it had just abandoned, an impossible starting condition for talks.
Even the best chance of peace, the direct talks overseen by Turkey following Russia’s abandonment of its initial regime-change blitzkrieg, were stymied by the atrocities in Bucha and Irpin which Russia’s sudden withdrawal from northern Ukraine revealed. Seemingly a product of ill-discipline rather than top-down policy, the torture and murder of Ukrainian civilians which made negotiations impossible for Kyiv may eventually be recorded as some of the costliest individual crimes in Europe’s history: half a million casualties on both sides have followed, according to US officials. There have, therefore, been precisely two opportunities for meaningful negotiations in the war’s first year and a half, and both were made politically impossible by either Moscow’s unreasonable demands or by the actions of the troops under its command.
Suggested readingStormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the WestBy John Michael Greer
It had been hoped that the improved negotiating position necessary for meaningful talks would blossom from Ukraine’s counteroffensive, yet without dismissing the possibility of a sudden breakthrough, it would surely now be sensible to consider the alternatives. Writing for UnHerd, the eminent American strategist Edward Luttwak proposes Ukraine rolls the dice towards total mobilisation, conscripting a three-million-man army to fend off the Russian threat. This would be a bold, perhaps desperate gamble, which would either break the back of the Russian army or destroy Ukraine. The quality of Ukraine’s armed forces has seemingly deteriorated as the eager volunteers of the war’s early months have been replaced by often unwilling conscripts, and the newly raised and Western-trained brigades designed to spearhead the offensive have not performed as well as hoped. Further waves of Ukrainian mobilisation will surely be necessary, but it would be rash at this delicate stage to gamble the country’s survival on any imminent offensive feats from its new levies.
Perhaps a more cautious approach would be for Ukraine to dial down its immediate aims at this waning stage of the summer, hunker down for winter, marshall its resources and assess the possibilities opened up by spring. Instead of pursuing wasteful, symbolic actions such as the attempted reconquest of Bakhmut — a town, we were assured, which held no strategic value — or distracting sideshows like the attempted bridgehead across the Dnieper, if Kyiv does not feel confident in committing its full available might towards the southern offensive, it should disengage and prepare now for what is sure to be a difficult winter. If, as some analysts claim, Kyiv does not possess the command and control capability to undertake anything more than piecemeal company-sized attacks, then it should reassess its strategy, prioritising its actual military capacity over the perceived need to impress the outside world. A strategy of shoring up international support by promising an endless succession of improbable feats is no long-term strategy at all.
Russia’s relative success this summer was the product of its shortening and rationalisation of its lines last autumn, a then-humiliating strategy of the since-jailed General Surovikin which has now borne effective fruit. A Ukrainian disengagement from the current offensive would not necessarily mean ceding territory in the same way Russia did last year: the past two and a half painful months of Ukraine’s offensive have all taken place in the contested “grey zone” no-man’s-land in front of Russia’s first fixed line of defence, and there is nothing to prevent Ukraine using its remaining manpower, artillery and mobile armoured reserves in a similar way. Nor does it preclude striking targets of opportunity should the occasion arise, shorn of the unrealistic expectations and long-telegraphed objectives of the delayed counteroffensive.

Instead of expending political capital on procuring costly, high-tech weaponry such as the F-16 jets which will not be in meaningful service until the end of the decade, Kyiv may better choose to focus on low-cost, easily-produced weapons such as the suicide drones with which Russia is wreaking such havoc on Ukraine’s own forces. Pin-prick crossborder stunts like UAV attacks and short-lived incursions on Russian territory may play well on social media but unsettle Ukraine’s increasingly unreliable American sponsor, and are brushed aside as annoyances by Moscow. Instead, Kyiv should focus on shifting the human and materiel costs of the war back onto Russia, by forcing Putin to return to the offensive.
While the conditions which allowed Ukraine to undertake a daring and effective offensive last autumn no longer exist, Ukraine has already demonstrated its capacity for tenacious defence against overwhelming odds, and nothing has changed in this regard. Though Russia has succeeded in taking two cities, Mariupol and Bakhmut, against a determined Ukrainian defence, it did so both times at immense cost, and by effectively freezing offensive operations elsewhere in the country. Russia’s developing mini-offensive against Kupiansk will be a test of its current offensive capacity, and there is no reason to believe that Moscow will find the going any easier. On the contrary, Prigozhin’s impromptu coup adventure has made Wagner’s deployment a less glittering weapon in Putin’s armoury, and while recent mobilisation efforts may have shored up Russia’s defensive lines, it is doubtful Moscow can sustain major offensive action without further, politically costly waves of conscription. Meanwhile, just as it was last year, Kyiv is protected from invasion from the north by narrow forest roads and impassable marshes; even the sprawling second city of Kharkiv, right on Russia’s border, would be indigestible to the invader.
A temporary emphasis on defence between this autumn and next spring would, therefore, hold little serious threat for Ukraine, but would allow it to shore up its greatest strategic weakness: its place in the American political system. For the brutal truth is that Ukraine’s overriding strategic imperative is not to recapture the Crimea, or the dubiously loyal cities of the Donbas, but to preserve the quasi-alliance with America as long as necessary to ensure the medium-term survival of the Ukrainian state. Without America’s backing, all Europe’s support will fade away with varying degrees of regret and relief; even hawkish Poland’s massive programme of rearmament is not testimony to certainty in a Ukrainian victory.
The uncomfortable reality is that Ukraine’s sovereignty is severely circumscribed by the vagaries of America’s domestic politics. Whether or not Trump evades prison to return to power, and whether or not Biden’s entanglement in a Ukraine corruption scandal entirely unrelated to the war will become politically salient, America’s opposition party is increasingly sour on the Ukraine war, and America’s fickle voters increasingly unwilling to fund Ukraine’s defence further.
More from this author Britain is Europe's liberal outcastBy Aris Roussinos 
Yet instead of shoring up the alliance, the disappointing results of the counteroffensive up to now have exposed  rifts between the two countries, a luxury Kyiv cannot afford, far outweighing the importance of the shattered hamlets it has captured. The increasing blame game between anonymous Biden administration officials accusing Ukraine’s army of over-promising and under-delivering on strategy, and Ukrainian officials accusing the West of the same on arms shipments, will not work in Ukraine’s favour over time (indeed, Western diplomats would do well to beware the nascent stirrings of a post-war stab-in-the-back myth now).
Instead of public expressions of eternal support followed by private disavowals, Washington should not now promise Kyiv more than it can realistically expect to deliver, factoring in the possibility of a White House transition. Equally, Ukraine now needs to cut its ambitions to America’s cloth: it should abandon fantasies of carving a humbled Russia into ethnic republics, or bundling Putin into a dock in the Hague, and focus on what can be realistically be achieved over the course of the next year. Both America and Ukraine will need to compromise: Washington by delivering more aid over a longer timeframe than Biden is politically comfortable with, and Kyiv by lowering its goals to match its objective capabilities.
Whether or not a negotiated settlement is desirable, it is not at this time achievable: Ukraine has no choice but to continue fighting, and given its commitment so far, America is morally obliged to continue its support, in a war now unlikely to conclude until the end of next year at the very earliest. Citing the eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan, Lavrov remarked last week that “the United States does not have the best historical record when it comes to supporting its allies”. It would not well-serve Nato, or least of all Ukraine, for Washington to prove him right.

The next general election has yet to be decided, but right-wing commentators are already scribbling their obituaries for Conservative governance. Gareth Roberts, for example, rains fire across “thirteen years in which almost every public and private institution in the country has capitulated, to a lesser but usually greater extent, to the … ideology of intersectional progressivism”.

This may come as a surprise, given the power of that sentence, but I think Roberts is too kind to the Conservatives. In trying to explain their failure he says:

I suspect the real reason was the well-brought-up reluctance to avoid hyperbole, to swerve anything resembling a “scene”. They are embarrassed to be conservatives, ashamed to do things that might upset “nice” people, which crippled them from the very beginning. They shied away from any confrontation — it took over a decade for them to address the blatant intimidation in academia, to notice that students were no longer the amiable geeks waving little gonks on Blockbusters.

Are they embarrassed to be conservatives, or are they conservatives at all?

Granted, “soundness policing” can be an irritating exercise. There are people online — often with Roman statues as their profile pictures — who think that if your views are not entirely in line with a 16th century landowner’s, you’re some kind of communist.

If the Conservatives have hidden reservoirs of right-wing sentiment that are being held back by their social and professional inhibitions, though, they are doing an excellent job of hiding them. It seems parsimonious to conclude that they do not. “Modernisation” was more than more than a pragmatic case of public relations.

To be sure, that doesn’t make them a bunch of commies. They have a comfortable commitment to the broad outlines of economic liberalism, and I’m sure they’re no big fans of statue threateners and road obstructers. Nonetheless, their social outlook, by and large, is that of complacent moderns — attached to the idea of serene moral progress.

They aligned themselves with moral modernisation because of real belief

David Cameron, who reportedly announced himself to be the “heir to Blair” in 2005, can’t stop talking about how the introduction of gay marriage was one of his proudest achievements (as if a Labour government would not have introduced it, too). Michael Gove announced that he loved Blair in 2003, attached himself to the “Blair agenda” in 2009 and defended Blair’s garter, much as he had defended his disastrous wars, in 2022. All that separated him from New Labour was his choice of summer parties.

This outlook has had major consequences. The Conservatives would make sporadic gestures to their right on social and cultural issues — but they were nothing more than that. Immigration targets would be established, for example, and then totally ignored, allowing migration stats to soar to levels Sir Tony had never reached. Even Brexit was pretty much imposed on them. Two of the four Conservative PMs who have followed the referendum voted against leaving, and one of the others only decided to support Vote Leave at the eleventh hour, having previously supported Turkish accession.

Such Blairite attitudes did not just amount to some sort of electoral manoeuvre. William Hague, who held pretty much every significant Conservative position except PM, has been spending his retirement lecturing the Women’s Institute on why they should accept trans members — and lecturing Britons on why they should accept more immigration. George Osborne has been conspiring to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. These are men who could have retired with their millions. They didn’t align themselves with moral modernisation because of some sort of social inhibitedness, but because of real belief.

The gender debate certainly divides Conservatives, but it’s no mystery that “self-ID” rampaged to the heart of British institutions when it had the backing of Conservatives like Penny Mordaunt. The abrupt Tory embrace of single sex spaces, whilst not unwelcome, seems like blatant electioneering.

This doesn’t mean that all of the momentum behind such changes came from the Tories. The Blob has a power that transcends parliamentary politics. Still, it has been enabled less out of cowardice — or even ignorance — than a sort of vague, complacent, bourgeois approval.

This matters because in the aftermath of a probable Conservative defeat, we’re going to hear from a lot of politicians and ex-politicians claiming that they would have loved to be more right-wing if it weren’t for the damn [insert synonym for “woke” here]. No, you just didn’t want to be. You were living your truth. The truth is, you enabled, supported and boasted about the things that you did.

For the New York City launch of his new book last Friday, Sohrab Ahmari, best known as a pugilistic voice of the Trumpist new right, held a dialogue with Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of the socialist journal Jacobin and president of the left-wing magazine The Nation. The talk took place at a packed, sweltering event space on the Lower East Side, before an audience heavy on Twitter (now X) personalities and writers for small magazines. Introducing the discussion, Sunkara said that when Ahmari invited him to participate, he was skeptical. But then he read Ahmari’s book, “Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What to Do About It,” and found, as he explained, “surprisingly very little to criticize.”

The book surprised me as well. It was only a few years ago that Ahmari, in an attack on my Times colleague David French, called on conservatives to “fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square reordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” I’d therefore expected “Tyranny, Inc.” to be yet another broadside against what the right often calls “woke capitalism.” Instead, it’s a scathing critique of capitalism more broadly, at least in its contemporary, market-fundamentalist form.

Summarizing his thesis, Ahmari writes that the “general tendency of Tyranny, Inc., is the domination of working- and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich.” He examines such topics as coercive arbitration agreements that prevent exploited workers from pressing their claims in court, the ruinous privatization of emergency services and the role of hedge funds in destroying local newspapers. He celebrates “the achievements of social democracy,” which “remind us that there once was an alternative — and that there could be one again.”

If you squint, you can still see the conservative influence on “Tyranny, Inc.” Ahmari’s litany of neoliberal sins includes, for example, “the leasing of wombs via commercial surrogacy.” But much of the book’s analysis feels decidedly leftist. As Sunkara pointed out, the word “woke” appears only a handful of times, in most cases in reference to the blind spots of the anti-woke right. Reading “Tyranny, Inc.,” I kept wondering how Ahmari had gone from conservative cultural crusader to genuine economic populist and, more important, whether any other social traditionalists could make the same leap.

A panel of D.C. federal judges has ruled in favor of pro-life protesters who were arrested after chalking "Black Pre-born Lives Matter" on a D.C. sidewalk in 2020. The ruling reverses a previous decision that dismissed a lawsuit from two anti-abortion groups, which argued that police violated their First Amendment rights. "The government may not enforce the laws in a manner that picks winners and losers in public debates," wrote Judge Neomi Rao in her opinion. "It would undermine the First Amendment's protections for free speech if the government could enact a content-neutral law and then discriminate against disfavored viewpoints."  The protesters, 22-year-old Erica Caporaletti and 29-year-old Warner DePriest, were arrested while participating in an anti-abortion protest held by Students for Life of America and the Frederick Douglass Foundation on August 1, 2020. According to The Washington Post, the protest was convened in the wake of that summer's Black Lives Matter protests and sought to highlight "the impact of abortion on Black communities."  While writing chalk messages on public streets and sidewalks is considered vandalism in D.C., protest leaders had an earlier conversation with a police officer in which he "explained that he believed Mayor Bowser had effectively opened up the District's streets for political markings." However, once the protest actually started, police told demonstrators that they would be arrested if they painted or chalked any messages. According to the ruling, Caporaletti and DePriest "began to chalk 'Black Pre-Born Lives Matter' on the sidewalk anyway. Despite the message being written in small, faint letters with washable chalk, the two students were arrested." Students for Life and the Frederick Douglass Foundation filed a lawsuit in November 2020, accusing D.C. police of violating the group's First Amendment rights and Fifth Amendment right to equal protection. But their case was dismissed in 2021. Last week, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed that decision. While the judges agreed that Caporaletti and DePriest didn't have an equal protection claim, they were allowed to move forward with their First Amendment claims. While no one disputes that Caporaletti and DePriest violated D.C. law by chalking the sidewalk, the Court agreed that police may have engaged in illegal viewpoint discrimination by arresting the pair while ignoring individuals who openly painted and chalked anti-police and pro—Black Lives Matter messages around the city in the weeks prior. "The District all but abandoned enforcement of the defacement ordinance during the Black Lives Matter protests, creating a de facto categorical exemption for individuals who marked 'Black Lives Matter' messages on public and private property," wrote Rao. "The government may not play favorites in a public forum—permitting some messages and prohibiting others."The post Court Rules in Favor of Pro-Life Protesters Arrested for Chalk Messages appeared first on Reason.com.

Amid a summer surge in youth unemployment, China's government made headlines last week by announcing that it would simply no longer publish official data on how many young workers can't find jobs. But not all of the country's economic woes can be so easily hidden. China's economic model—which has leaned strongly into industrial policy and top-down investments directed from Beijing—"is broken" and has left the country "drowning in debt and running out of things to build," Lingling Wei and Stella Yifan Xie explain in a must-read feature published in Sunday's Wall Street Journal. The red flags include well-known factors such as China's demographic issues (a direct consequence of another government-led attempt at engineering society: the one-child policy) and less obvious failings caused by malinvestments. One example of the latter is "a high-speed rail station in Danzhou, a city in China's southern province of Hainan, [which] cost $5.5 million to build but was never put into use because passenger demand was so low." Another: "Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in the country with GDP per capita of less than $7,200 last year," has 11 airports, more than China's four biggest cities. As in the U.S., bridges to nowhere and useless high-speed rail projects are a sign of infrastructure policies driven by politics rather than economics. In China, the national and local governments have borrowed heavily to fund construction projects to goose economic growth. It's an approach that some in Beijing now privately admit "has reached its limits," the Journal reports. With the old model reaching its end, it would make sense for China to pursue another phase of liberalization, evolving toward a freer economy with a focus on consumer spending and service industries. But that clashes with President Xi Jinping's vision. Instead, the government is scaling up another round of industrial policy focused on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and direct government spending on cultural items such as sporting events. "The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires," the Journal reports. That line does a pretty great job of summing up what's at stake in China. There's no doubt that governmental stimulus spending can drive economic growth higher over the short term, but the bill eventually comes due in the form of higher debt and wasted resources. Sustainable, long-term economic growth doesn't come from officials issuing edicts. It comes from the individuals' power to pursue their own needs and desires in the marketplace—even if some of those desires aren't aligned with what the government wants. This is a difficult lesson for politicians everywhere to accept. Whether China's leaders can learn it quickly might determine the future course of the world's second biggest economy. There's a lesson for America in China's economic wobbles. Panic over China's rapid economic growth has fueled all manner of big-government proposals in recent years. That includes calls for amping up industrial policy and infrastructure spending, most obviously, but that's not all. The specter of China shows up in debates over whether the federal government should regulate online speech, should subsidize American drug manufacturing, should control how Americans invest. This is a bipartisan phenomenon. Former President Donald Trump was obsessed with using tariffs to curb China's growth, an approach that did far more to impose economic costs on Americans. President Joe Biden keeps on talking about China "eating our lunch" when pitching plans to expand government spending. It's a line that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has recently parrotted too. More attention should be paid to the weaknesses in China's economic model, which are becoming more difficult to ignore on both sides of the Pacific. China's leaders have bet heavily on the misguided notion that government-directed investment is the key to greater economic growth. American officials should be in no rush to follow Xi down a path that requires curtailing liberty to chase a little temporary stimulus.The post China's Industrial Policy Is Failing. Will American Politicians Take Notice? appeared first on Reason.com.

The recent history of the Iowa Republican caucus offers the candidates chasing former President Donald Trump one big reason for optimism. But that history also presents them with an even larger reason for concern.In each of the past three contested GOP nomination fights, Iowa Republicans have rejected the candidate considered the national front-runner in the race, as Trump is now. Instead, in each of those three past caucuses, Iowa Republicans delivered victory to an alternative who relied primarily on support from the state’s powerful bloc of evangelical Christian conservatives.  [Read: The GOP primary is a field of broken dreams]But each of those three recent Iowa winners failed to capture the Republican presidential nomination or, in the end, even to come very close. All three of them were eventually defeated, handily, by the front-runner that they beat in Iowa. That pattern played out in 2008 when Mike Huckabee won Iowa but then lost the nomination to John McCain, in 2012 when Rick Santorum won Iowa but lost the nomination to Mitt Romney, and in 2016 when Ted Cruz won Iowa but lost the nomination to Trump. Not since George W. Bush in 2000, and before him Bob Dole in 1996, has the winner of the Iowa caucus gone on to become the GOP nominee.That record frames the stakes for this round of the Iowa caucus, which will begin the GOP nominating process next January 15. Beating Trump in Iowa remains central to any hope of denying him the nomination. Among Trump skeptics, there is a widespread belief that “Iowa is more crucial than ever, because if Trump wins here, he will be your nominee; he’ll run the table,” as Bob Vander Plaats, the president and CEO of The Family Leader, an Iowa-based social-conservative organization, told me in an interview last week.But even if Trump is defeated in the caucus, this recent history suggests that he will still be a strong favorite for the nomination if Iowa Republicans do not choose an alternative stronger than Huckabee, Santorum, or Cruz proved to be. The conundrum for the candidates chasing Trump is that the strategy that probably offers the best chance of upsetting him in Iowa—maximizing support among evangelical-Christian conservatives—also creates the greatest risk of limiting their appeal and making it harder to beat him in most later states.Although focusing on evangelical conservatives can deliver victory in Iowa, “if the campaign you’re running is only aimed at those people … it’s hard to put together a coalition big enough to win” the nomination overall, says Dave Kochel, an Iowa Republican strategist.As they watched the candidates shake hands at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines last week, local political observers and national reporters debated the usual questions: Who is collecting the most endorsements? Who has built the strongest grassroots organization? Who has the most supporters passionate enough to turn out on a cold night next January? But the largest question looming for Republicans may be whether the road to success in the Iowa caucus has become a path to ultimate failure in the GOP presidential-nominating process.The common problem for Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz was that even on the night they won Iowa, the results demonstrated that the base of support they had attracted was too narrow to win the nomination. Entrance polls conducted of voters heading into the Iowa caucuses found that each man finished well ahead among voters who identified as evangelical Christians. But all three failed to win among voters in Iowa who did not identify as evangelicals.That math worked in Iowa because evangelical Christians constitute such a large share of its GOP voters—almost two-thirds in some surveys. But each man’s weakness with the Iowa voters who were not evangelicals prefigured crippling problems in other states. The difficulties started just days later in New Hampshire, which has few evangelicals. Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz were all routed in New Hampshire; none of them attracted as much as 12 percent of the total vote.The divergent results in Iowa and New Hampshire set the mold for what followed. All three men were competitive in other states with sizable evangelical populations. But none could generate much traction in the larger group of states where those voters were a smaller share of the GOP electorate. In the end, neither Huckabee, Santorum, nor Cruz won more than a dozen states.Kedron Bardwell, a political scientist at Simpson College, south of Des Moines, says this history makes clear that Iowa Republican voters, especially evangelicals, have never placed much priority on finding candidates that they think can go the distance to the nomination. “I look at those past winners and think voters were saying, ‘We are expressing our conservative Christian values and not so much worrying about what will happen after that,’” Bardwell told me.Vander Plaats predicts that will change in this election; the eventual failure of these earlier Iowa winners favored by evangelicals, he told me, will make local activists more conscious of choosing a candidate who has the “national infrastructure and capacity to go beyond Iowa.” Yet financial and organizational resources aren’t the only, or perhaps even the most important, measures of which Republican is best-positioned to convert an Iowa win into a lasting national challenge to Trump.Even if someone topples Trump in Iowa with strong support from evangelicals, the key measure of their long-term viability will be whether they can attract a significant share of non-evangelicals. In fact, according to past entrance polls, the candidate who won the most support among the Iowa voters who are not evangelicals has captured the GOP nomination in all but one contested race since 1996. (The lone exception came in 2008, when John McCain, the eventual winner, did not compete in Iowa, and those voters mostly backed Mitt Romney.)Kochel told me that the best way to understand the formula that might allow another candidate to overtake Trump in enough states to win the nomination is to consider the candidates who finished just above and behind him in the 2016 Iowa caucus: Cruz and Florida Senator Marco Rubio.“If you want to put it in 2016 terms, particularly with Trump looming so large, you really need the Cruz-plus-Rubio coalition,” Kochel said. “You need the Santorum/Huckabee/Cruz supporters, Christians as defined by people like Vander Plaats. But then you also need the Rubio coalition: Ankeny soccer moms and old-school Republicans, college-educated non-evangelicals. That’s the coalition that can win a nomination.”Can any of Trump’s rivals assemble such a coalition to threaten him, in Iowa and beyond? His following in the state remains passionate, as his exultant reception at the state fair last weekend demonstrated. And though he’s campaigned in the state considerably less than his leading rivals, Trump held a big lead in the recent New York Times/Siena poll of Iowa Republican voters. That survey showed Trump leading among evangelicals and non-evangelicals, largely on the strength of a dominant advantage among the likely caucus-goers in both groups without a college degree.But there may be a bigger group of Iowa Republicans willing to consider an alternative to Trump than polls now indicate. It’s not scientific, but my conversations with likely caucus-attenders at the fair last week found a surprising number expressing exhaustion with him.Although they liked Trump’s performance as president, and mostly felt that he was being unfairly prosecuted, several told me they believed that he had alienated too many voters to win another general election, and they were ready for a different choice that might have a better chance of beating President Joe Biden. “He did the best he could for four years, but he didn’t win again, and we’re done with it, we’re done,” Mary Kinney, a retired office manager in Des Moines, told me. Later that afternoon, at a Story County Republican Party dinner headlined by Senator Tim Scott, Steve Goodhue, an insurance broker in Ames, looked around the crowded room and told me, “Even though Trump is leading in the polls in Iowa, this shows you people are interested in alternatives.”Trying to reach those voters ready to move past Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is putting the most time and money into building a traditional Iowa organization. His campaign staff and the Never Back Down Super PAC that is organizing most of his ground game in the state both include key veterans of Cruz’s 2016 winning caucus effort. DeSantis has committed to visiting all 99 Iowa counties (what’s called a “full Grassley” in honor of the state’s Republican Senator Charles Grassley, who makes a similar tour every year), and his supporters have already recruited caucus chairs in every county as well.DeSantis has announced endorsements from more than three dozen state legislators, including State Senate President Amy Sinclair. That’s much more than any other candidate. “Look at what the state of Florida has been doing, and look at what the state of Iowa through our legislature has been doing,” Sinclair told me, citing parental rights, school choice, cuts in government spending, and a six-week ban on abortion. “We’ve been working on all of the same things, so when Governor DeSantis steps into the presidential race and says, ‘I have a vision for the nation, and that vision is what we’ve done in Florida,’ well, that’s the same vision that the folks in Iowa have had.”Many leading Iowa social conservatives also appear likely to coalesce around DeSantis. Steve Deace, an Iowa conservative-media commentator, endorsed him earlier this month, and in our conversation, Vander Plaats seemed headed that way too. Each had backed Cruz in 2016.All of this shows how many Iowa Republican power brokers consider DeSantis the most likely to become the principal alternative to Trump. DeSantis also polled second to Trump in that New York Times/Siena Iowa survey. But my conversations at the fair failed to find anyone particularly interested in him. Several of those looking for options beyond Trump said they found DeSantis too much like the former president in his combative temperament and style.Craig Robinson, the former state Republican political director, says he believes that DeSantis, by running so hard to the right on social issues, has already boxed himself into the same corner as Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz, with little chance to reach out beyond evangelicals to the economically focused suburban Republicans who liked Rubio and Romney. When DeSantis entered the race, Robinson says, he could have appealed to “the Republicans who are sick of the bullshit and don’t want all the extras that come with Trump. Then he’s run a campaign about Disney and all this woke stuff, and all he’s done is make himself as controversial as Trump.”[Helen Lewis: The humiliation of Ron DeSantis]DeSantis’s positioning has created an opening among the Iowa Republicans uneasy about Trump that Tim Scott looks best positioned to fill. The senator may be developing a more effective formula than DeSantis for appealing to both evangelical social conservatives and more socially moderate, suburban economic conservatives. Unlike DeSantis or former Vice President Mike Pence, Scott doesn’t hammer away at social issues in a way likely to alienate suburban Republicans. Instead, he connects with evangelical Republicans through his testimony about the importance of religious faith in his own life, and the way in which he organically and authentically weaves Bible phrases into his conversation. As several Iowa Republicans told me, Scott “speaks evangelical” in a way DeSantis does not.Still, Scott’s campaign message so far is bland, focused primarily on his personal story of ascending from poverty. The senator’s unwavering refusal to challenge or criticize Trump has left the impression among some activists that he is really running for vice president. So long as Scott fuels that perception by refusing to contrast himself with Trump, Vander Plaats predicted, “his poll numbers will not move, and his caucus support will not be there.”The caucus is now less than five months away, but in earlier years, this final stretch often produced rapid shifts in fortune. Bardwell, the political scientist, notes that five different candidates led polls at some point leading up to the 2012 caucus before Santorum finally edged past Romney at the wire. Iowa social conservatives have frequently coalesced behind their favorite late in the race. The choice those evangelical Christian voters make this winter will likely determine whether Iowa sets Trump on an unstoppable course to another nomination or anoints an alternative who might seriously challenge him.

correction An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te traveled to Peru. He traveled to Paraguay. The column also misstated the name of the Democratic Progressive Party. This version has been corrected. According to Beijing authorities (and some Taipei opposition figures), the potential election of current Taiwanese Vice President Lai Ching-te as president in January could spark the biggest crisis yet in cross-strait relations — and potentially lead to war. But Lai’s recent visit to the United States showed that these warnings are overblown. China is attacking Lai because he is reasonable, not because he’s a hothead. That makes him much harder for Beijing to undermine.

China’s foreign ministry complained loudly before Lai, who is also referred to as William Lai, visited New York City and San Francisco this month — visits referred to by the Americans and the Taiwanese as “transit” stops on his way to and from Paraguay. This diplomatic terminology is used because Washington and Taipei do not have formal diplomatic relations. But that didn’t stop Beijing from calling Lai an “independence separatist” and a “troublemaker” and threatening “forceful measures” in response. Chinese officials even told Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Lai’s ascendance could harm U.S.-China relations.

Lai dispelled that notion at a luncheon with members of the Taiwanese-American community in New York that I attended last weekend. Outside the hotel, pro-Beijing protesters shouted insults about Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), similar to what happened in March when President Tsai Ing-wen was visiting. But inside the room, Lai’s speech was carefully crafted to send a firm but conventional message.

“The acts of support from across the world indicate that Taiwan is now a pivotal member of the international community; peace in the Taiwan Strait is a matter of global security,” he said. “When Taiwan is safe, the world is safe; when there is peace in the Taiwan Strait, there is peace in the world.”

He talked about Taiwan’s path from dictatorship to democracy, as well as the small island’s notable economic and technological accomplishments. He expressed solidarity with other democracies and gratitude for their assistance. He pledged to support other democracies under attack and pointed to Taiwan’s extensive assistance to Ukraine since last year’s Russian invasion. He called on all Taiwanese to come together.

“We aim to protect Taiwan, facilitate democracy, peace, and prosperity, and allow generations of Taiwanese people to breathe the air of freedom,” he said. “To reach our goals, we must stand in solidarity domestically and internationally.”

Lai did not mention China in his speech. When discussing cross-strait relations, he reiterated Tsai’s policies word for word. Lai is presenting himself to Taiwanese voters and the international community as a symbol of continuity, promising to maintain the status quo. In an interview with Bloomberg this past week, Lai stated clearly that he does not intend to seek formal independence if elected president.

“We must abide by the truth … which is Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country called the Republic of China,” he said. “It is not part of the People’s Republic of China. The ROC and PRC are not subordinate to one another. It is not necessary to declare independence.”

Again, this is exactly the current president’s position. Lai took other steps to limit the things Beijing could complain about while he was in the United States. He didn’t meet with any Biden administration officials, other than those who represent the American Institute in Taiwan, Washington’s unofficial diplomatic outpost. He politely declined invitations for meetings with members of Congress. His public events were scant.

This hardly seems like a man whose election could, as one opposition politician claimed, “open the doors to hell.” Lai’s caution might be attributable in part to his relative inexperience in foreign policy. The former doctor came up through local politics and is learning diplomacy on the job.

Lai also surely understands that the Taiwanese people have a variety of views about how to engage China and none want to see tensions escalate. Although Lai is currently leading in the polls, opposition candidates who are much friendlier to Beijing might be able to amass a majority if the three top contenders chose one to rally around.

The Chinese government is already heavily interfering in Lai’s election, as it has been doing in every Taiwanese election for years through economic pressure, military intimidation, political corruption, disinformation and other methods. Beijing professes to want to solve the Taiwan issue through negotiation and dialogue, but has never once agreed to meet with Tsai during her nearly eight years as president. Beijing claims this is because Tsai won’t confirm what’s known as “the 1992 consensus,” which essentially asserts that Taiwan is part of China.

For Beijing, the problem is not really what Lai says or promises to do as president. The election of a third consecutive DPP administration would confirm that Beijing’s attempts to bring Taiwan under its closer control through coercion and intimidation are failing, former assistant defense secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs Randy Schriver told me.

“It’s part of a trend where Beijing’s constituency in Taiwan for any kind of reunification as ‘One China’ is gone — and they helped destroy it,” he said.

The narrative about Lai being dangerously pro-independence is also obsolete because, as Lai explained, the Taiwanese independence movement has evolved over decades. Taiwan’s de facto independence is something younger Taiwanese were born into and see no need to jettison.

I’ve never known how to define myself politically. I’m often called a centrist, and have occasionally referred to myself as one. But I don’t like the term.Some of the problems with it are obvious. Particularly since the Brexit referendum it’s been applied to anyone who believes: we should have stayed in the EU; Boris Johnson was a bad Prime Minister; and Jeremy Corbyn would have been a bad Prime Minister. That’s a lot of people. Any term that encompasses both me and Matthew Parris, who I disagree with on almost everything else, is not hugely useful. It’s a description of what we’re not, not what we are.In any case where is “the centre”? Is it wherever the median voter happens to be? In which case neither I, nor most of the people tagged as centrists, are anywhere close. We tend to be much more socially liberal. If it’s an ideological centre between left and right then almost everyone is in it, as, outside of a few think-tank theoreticians, very few of us shape our views according to what Marx or Hayek would have thought. Boris Johnson may be a symbol of everything “centrists” dislike in politics but he also increased public spending, attempted to push through reams of animal welfare legislation and, as London Mayor, was a strong supporter of immigration. Is he one? What’s really set me against the term, though, is not its vagueness, but thinking about “centrism” as a description of New Labour’s approach to governing. Here the word obscures rather than clarifies the core ideas and contradictions. It matters because Tony Blair was, and still is, the key figure of modern centrism and Keir Starmer is noisily moving closer towards him, backed by a team including many who worked for Blair. These include: Direct of Communications, Matthew Doyle, who spent five years as Blair’s spokesman after he left No. 10; Director of Strategy, Deborah Mattinson, who did a more junior version of that role for Blair in opposition; and senior adviser Peter Hyman, who was Blair’s speechwriter.So the rest of this post offers a brief history of centrism as a governing philosophy in Britain; where New Labour’s version succeeded and failed; and the dilemma that creates for Starmer.

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Anoles have always been happy in the heat. The svelte little lizards, a group some 400 species strong, thrive in the Americas’ warmest parts—from the balmy rainforests of South America up through the United States’ Sun Belt—where they spend their days basking on boulders and scurrying out to the sun-soaked tips of twigs, or even scampering over the blistering metal of exposed city pipes.And when local temperatures get even hotter, as they now so often do, anoles take those changes in stride. Beneath the shady canopies of Caribbean rainforests, Martha Muñoz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale, and her students have found species that have rapidly evolved the ability to withstand temperatures verging on 110 degrees Fahrenheit; elsewhere, near the forest’s perimeter, the researchers have discovered species that have taught themselves to shelter beneath rocks until it’s cool enough to leave. On this fast-warming planet, animals have just three options: “Behave, adapt, or die,” Brian Cheng, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. So far, anoles are excelling at the first two.But after years of observing the lizards, Muñoz worries that their survival strategies are reaching a limit. “I don’t think there is a happy ending,” she told me. Life has a physiological ceiling—a temperature that even eons of evolution cannot allow an animal to tolerate. And some of the heat-tempering tactics that are helping the creatures cope now could speed their demise in the long term. Scientists are finding that, especially among ectotherms—so-called cold-blooded creatures that lack an internal thermostat—behavior and evolution don’t always complement each other; sometimes, those two natural forces may even be at odds. Of the choices creatures have, death is the only outcome that has no caveats.[Read: Animals of the future]For most ectotherms—many of them small, fast-reproducing, and ultra-diverse—speedy evolution would seem an excellent choice to counteract the pressures of climate change. In the Caribbean, anoles in both natural forests and densely packed cities have reshaped their physique to better withstand the heat. In Cleveland, Sarah Diamond, of Case Western Reserve University, has documented acorn ants evolving higher heat tolerances in just a couple dozen generations. In laboratories, water fleas can be pushed to weather several more degrees of warmth in a mere two years. “We’ve all been a little bit surprised by the capacity of ectothermic species to evolve their way out,” Diamond told me.But those examples might not be the norm. Even under extreme conditions, many gains in heat tolerance are minimal—less than a degree or so—or excruciatingly slow, and they don’t always pass on easily to future generations. Across a variety of species, heat tolerance seems to be a very finicky trait. In a recent analysis, Joanne Bennett, an ecologist at Australian National University, found that animals have been able to nudge their tolerance for high temperatures only about half as fast as they can alter their tolerance for cold ones.That inertia probably has something to do with the limits of life’s tolerance for heat. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 or 115 degrees Fahrenheit, the chemical reactions that drive cellular life start to fail. With rare exceptions, ectotherms exposed to those sorts of temperatures for prolonged periods of time get sluggish and start to stagger about. Their limbs cease to move, “and then very rapidly, they begin to die,” Masakado Kawata, an evolutionary biologist at Tohoku University, in Japan, told me. Evolution, though powerful, cannot break biochemical rules, says Jhan Salazar, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Animals already near their maxima may simply be running out of adaptive steam: “Even if they want to keep going,” Salazar told me, “they cannot.”But the threshold theory does not solve another puzzle. Some animals, most of them reptiles, appear to have halted the evolution of their heat tolerance well below the theoretical limit, despite living in habitats where weathering more warmth would seem to be a perk. Certain desert lizards are bizarrely bad at being superhot; some lowland anoles are just as wimpy about triple-digit temperatures as their cousins that live above 7,500 feet. Scientists have even found a handful of sun skinks in warmer regions of the rainforest that are somehow worse at tolerating heat than their relatives in cooler climes. In each case, evolution seems to have presented the animals with an obvious lever that they haven’t pulled.These animals may be tumbling down a different escape hatch. On the rich landscapes of islands, freckled with all manner of rocks and vines and trees, an anole can avoid overheating by just skittering into the shade, Michael Logan, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, told me. Unlike evolution, this quick-fix change can work within a single generation, without the rigamarole of sex or the gamble of genetics; in the span of a single day, it can toggle on and off. Behavior, Logan said, is all it takes to “maintain the temperatures they want to be at.”But hiding from the sun can also mean hiding from the environmental pressures that might otherwise coerce a population to evolve. Saúl Domínguez-Guerrero, a postdoctoral fellow in Muñoz’s lab, thinks that this phenomenon, known as the Bogert effect, is what’s stymieing adaptation among the anoles he’s studying along the outskirts of forests in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. At the edge of the tree line, where sunlight filters down in shards, temperatures have climbed, but many anole species’ heat-tolerance thresholds haven’t really budged in kind. Instead, Domínguez-Guerrero has found, the lizards are coping with the heat by prolonging their stints beneath boulders or leaves, or tucked into the nooks of tree trunks, especially during the hottest hours of the day.The anoles’ tactic is accomplishing its primary objective: maintaining lizardly chill. But Muñoz worries that the strategy is now cooling the species’ evolutionary engines, too, which will bode poorly if temperatures eventually get too hot for too much of the day. All behaviors have costs. “If an animal is seeking thermal refuge, they’re not doing something else”—foraging for food, wooing a potential mate, Cheng, the Amherst biologist, told me. Once those trade-offs become unsustainable, evolution could kick in. But the lizards will have missed out on years, potentially decades, of adaptation in the meantime. In 2015, a team led by Lauren Buckley, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, modeled that exact effect in eastern fence lizards in the southern United States, whose evolution has already been impeded by a behavioral brake. The researchers found that the animals that had been most reliant on the shade would likely struggle to make up for lost time—and, within a few decades, suffer serious declines. If the goal is to keep up with warming, Buckley told me, evolution can’t afford to be bogged down.But the other extreme—evolution run amok—exacts its own tax. Closer to the heart of the forests where Muñoz’s team is collecting data, the researchers have found another group of anoles that have increased their heat tolerance a good five degrees, to about 108 degrees Fahrenheit, in just 11 years’ time. They’ve had little other choice: Beneath a canopy that thick, shade is ubiquitous—rendering just about every habitat thermally the same, and forcing the lizards’ evolutionary hand. “They have to conform to whatever the mean temperature is going to be,” Logan told me.The pace of the lizards’ thermal leap alarms Domínguez-Guerrero. “To be evolving that fast means they are very thermally stressed,” he told me, and their rush to adapt potentially claimed a lot of lives, which may have left the surviving population less genetically diverse. The next time the anoles are forced to evolve at such a blistering clip, they might not have the raw evolutionary material to make it through. In a study published earlier this year, Logan’s lab ran a simulation that supports that notion. The model showed that animals that too rapidly tweak their thermal tolerance end up “so well adapted to current conditions that they lose all the variants that could deal with more variable conditions later on,” Logan told me. That sort of overpruning can sometimes play a major role, he said, in making species go extinct.[Read: Animals are riding an escalator to extinction]No matter what, an animal will eventually reach the end of its evolutionary potential. Some of the fast-evolving anoles in the Caribbean are now knocking right up against the highest thermal tolerances ever recorded among their kind, Muñoz told me. And they probably aren’t alone. At this point, across many ectotherms, in all sorts of global ecosystems, “I think most organisms are actually already pretty close” to the maximum tolerances they can evolve, Buckley told me.
If that’s the case, scientists may struggle to tell. That’s the trick when compensation works well: Animals are often “fine, fine, fine, and then boom, not fine,” Diamond told me, leading to “a really strong crash.” Even at an individual level, animals teetering on that precipice don’t always appear to be in distress. In a cruel biochemical twist, cellular machinery tends to work best just a few degrees shy of the temperatures that incapacitate it—which means that many animals operating at their peak could be steps away from peril. “There is a really small margin of error,” Brooke Bodensteiner, an evolutionary biologist studying with Muñoz at Yale, told me. Among anoles, a single degree Fahrenheit can mean the difference between an animal bolting about at full bore and keeling over. In the end, some of the world’s most heat-adapted animals may be among the first to be lost to climate change, Bennett told me. Already pushed to life’s evolutionary edge, on a planet of ever-greater extremes, they will have nowhere left to go.

In recent years, economically speaking, the US and China have always been the reciprocal thesis and anti-thesis of each other ------ currently they urgently need to use diametrically opposite government interventionist economic policies to fine-tune their own respective economies.

One most important difference between these 2 countries is the coming sorely-needed correct use of the central government's deficit-spending fiscal policies (assuming more or less the same monetary policies pursued by their respective central banks at the same time).

---

(a) In China, the central government in Beijing needs to engage in far more ambitious deficit-spending fiscal policies to help replenish the quickly dwindling domestic aggregate demand, simply by issuing much more new central government treasuries to the market and deficit-spending en masse accordingly (the new spending hopefully going mostly to the correct places), so as to help channel the excess savings of the Chinese households (a form of precarious deflationary leakage in today's circular flow of national income in China) back to the domestic economy, given the fact that both the country's external demand and her domestic real-estate and other real investments have both been in relative non-trivial decline.

-

(b) In the US, the federal government in Washington needs to practice fiscal austerity instead, to help force the runaway inflation genie to more quickly go fully back into the bottle, hopefully without causing much recessionary pressure in the domestic still-overheating economy, and also without causing another non-trivial bubble-popping-causing financial crisis in the country.

This time is different, in that the ongoing inflation has mainly been caused by the federal government's new-money-printing-financed excess deficit spending in the aftermath of the pandemic break-out in early 2020, and so the really economically correct medical treatment for this new inflation disease should be to unwind the past well-intentioned but over-reacted expansionary fiscal policies.

-

Unlike the 1970s, this time around, the Fed's supposedly contractionary higher-for-longer rate-hiking cycle is also exacerbating the country's current inflation problem, because

(i) today, much more inflation-boosting interest revenues are being pumped out by the central bank to the US's private sector, through both higher and higher treasury yields and the new QE-induced higher and higher interest-rate corridor, and

(ii) most beneficial effects from the attenuation of the new-credit-creating abilities of the US commercial banks, a result of the Fed's good old rate-hiking cycle with the same aim of fighting inflation as in the 1970s, are recently being (partly or mostly) offset by the vote-buying increased deficit spending of the ruling Trump and Biden administrations in the recent post-Covid years,

now that the federal-government's remaining debt to GDP ratio is already much higher (about 130%) than that prevailing in the 1970s (around 30%).

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I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
And so apologized William Carlos Williams, presumably to his wife, Flossie, in his 1934 poem “This Is Just to Say.” My own apologies tend to be somewhat less elegant, and certainly less worthy of publication. In my defense, however, I don’t directly repurpose my apologies as content for The Atlantic, explaining to my wife before a large audience that although I have been an insensitive jerk for the millionth time, it was totally worth it.Apologizing well, after all, is tricky. It requires personal strength, a good ear, and a fair bit of psychological sophistication, which is why so many apologies are unsuccessful. If you have something you need to apologize for—or if you would just like to be ready to deal with the fallout from your next screw-up—here is your primer on the art and science of contrition.[Arthur C. Brooks: Make yourself happy: Be kind]From a neurocognitive viewpoint, apologies are extremely complex, involving at least three distinct processes. First is cognitive control, because you are making a choice to say you are sorry even though doing so is difficult and uncomfortable, which involves the lateral prefrontal cortex. Second is perspective taking, which involves thinking about how something you have said or done was experienced by another person and putting yourself in their position, implicating the temporoparietal junction. Last is social valuation, the way you calculate how much your apology will help everyone involved as opposed to just yourself, which mobilizes the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.A sincere apology involves a certain amount of vulnerability and risk. Researchers find apologies between partners—spanning romantic, personal, and professional connections—occur more readily in three circumstances: in a longstanding relationship; between well-matched partners who enjoy a lot of trust; and very early on in a relationship, when there is a premium on fixing problems so that they don’t kill the developing partnership. Scholars have also shown that people who are defensive and uncomfortable being vulnerable—characteristics of attachment avoidance—give fewer and worse apologies than others. This last finding can be a useful tell for people who are dating: A reliable indication of an emotionally avoidant person is an inability to say sorry.[Read: The sociology of sorry]An apology can be completely motivated by contrition. According to evolutionary psychologists, however, many apologies may be motivated instead by a desire to forestall a wronged person’s seeking revenge or retaliation. For example, a 2011 study focused on what happens when physicians who have harmed patients apologize. In general, doctors are advised never to apologize, because doing so may imply an admission of guilt in law. To offset this problem, some states have introduced laws to limit the admissibility of apologies as evidence of culpability in court. By enabling more doctors’ apologies, estimates indicated that these states would see lower malpractice payouts and faster settlement times for cases involving serious injuries.How you apologize has a huge influence on your apology’s likelihood of success. To begin with, make it fulsome. A partial apology is worse than none at all. In one experiment in which subjects were asked to imagine themselves as a pedestrian who’d been hit by a cyclist (and the cyclist was at fault) and evaluate a settlement, 52 percent said they would definitely or probably accept the proposed cash offer when there was no apology. When there was a partial apology, in the form of sympathy for injuries but no acknowledgment of responsibility, the acceptance rate fell to 35 percent. But with a full apology—sympathy plus responsibility—the rate rose to 73 percent.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.In other such experiments, the acknowledgment of responsibility proves to be the most important ingredient of a good apology. Next in importance is an offer of repair, followed by an explanation of what happened. All three of these quite practical components are more effective than an apologizer’s more abstract options of an expression of regret, a declaration of repentance, or a request for forgiveness.This finding might surprise some people, but it shouldn’t. Think of the least effective apologies you have received, perhaps from a repeat offender. It probably featured those exact elements. Consider this version of that sort of apology: “I’m so, so sorry for going on another bender and waking up broke in Vegas. This time I’ll really change—really! Just give me one more chance!” See what I mean?Armed with this information, you are now ready to apologize in a way that is most likely to solve the problem you created. Be sure to remember three crucial maxims.1. Apologizing is less costly and more beneficial than you think.
Researchers in 2014 found that when people contemplate an apology, they sometimes make a forecasting error. For example, people commonly imagine looking weak or incompetent for admitting guilt, resulting in their losing trust or losing face. They can imagine being forgiven, but they don’t think much about how being willing to admit fault might raise others’ admiration for them. Experiments show that we tend to overestimate the cost and underestimate the benefit of apologizing.Of course, you will always find someone who does not admire any admission of guilt or weakness. But such people are generally terrible romantic partners, bad business associates, and toxic social-media trolls—not exactly the jury you should be courting in the first place.2. Take full responsibility.
Think of all the begrudging apologies we hear in public life from politicians and celebrities. Generally, they take the form of “If anyone was hurt or offended by my words, I am sorry.” That is a partial apology, which shows grudging sympathy but no sense of responsibility. When you have offended someone, don’t say, “I’m sorry if your feelings were hurt.” Say instead, “I can see that I hurt your feelings, and I am sorry I did that.”[From the December 2019 issue: Sorry, not sorry]One good way to do this, particularly in a professional context, is what scholars call “self-disserving” admissions by leaders. For example, if a CEO has a public-relations crisis that is not directly of their own making, they should still own it by saying, “I am the leader, so this error is my error, and I am accountable for fixing it.” Scholars found that this kind of attribution was followed by a surge in business success, as measured by a rising stock price during the following year, probably because it inspires confidence in leadership that a problem will be solved.3. Use contrition as a self-improvement practice.
One of the biggest—and most paradoxical—impediments to apologizing is the belief that people, ourselves included, can’t change. What psychologists call “entity theory” can mean that we fail to treat difficult and discomforting situations as the opportunities for improvement that they can in fact be. In contrast, adherents of “incremental theory,” people who believe human traits are malleable, look for ways to better themselves, which includes acknowledging their missteps and showing contrition. So think like an incremental theorist and use your apology as a way of developing your resources of fortitude and virtue.If all goes well, what should you hope for after you give an apology? Most likely, you want to be granted a clean slate and for life to return to normal. That brings us back to William Carlos Williams, who ate the prized plums. Did his apology do the trick?Flossie, it seems, replied in a short note, which Williams opportunistically turned into another poem. (It was in fact published in this very magazine, in November 1982, after their deaths).
Dear Bill: I’ve made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the icebox you’ll find
blueberries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.
On the stove is the teapot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea
Plenty of bread in the breadbox
and butter and eggs—
I didn’t know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—
See you later. Love. Floss.
Please switch off the telephone.
Given that she didn’t even mention the plums, she appears to have accepted his apology.

Following action against Bud Light, Target and Disney, Jordan Peterson is calling for Skittles to be the next brand to be boycotted.

The candy brand that famously tells customers to "taste the rainbow" is the subject of online hate after it launched new packaging featuring "woke" LGBTQ+ phrasing.

Canadian psychologist Peterson, who has a huge following on social media, has called for people to boycott other brands in the past, with Skittles the latest to feature in his crosshairs.

From left, Jordan Peterson is seen in Cambridge, England, on November 2, 2018, and a picture of Skittles candy. Peterson has suggested a boycott may be in order after Skittles launched LGBTQ+ packaging for this year's Pride Month. Chris Williamson / Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images

"Popular sweets brand risks boycott after 'woke' LGBT+ packaging make-over" British right-wing news outlet GB News wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Peterson made his feelings on the subject clear with a tweet dripping in sarcasm.

"Wouldn't a boycott be unfortunate," Peterson tweeted on Tuesday.

In recent months Peterson has tweeted his derision for brands like Disney, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, Bud Light and Target; all of which have faced various calls for boycotts during 2023.

Wouldn't a boycott

be unfortunate https://t.co/TbjdDkguRY — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 15, 2023

Skittles, owned by Mars, Inc., became the subject of boycott discussions online after the brand released new packaging featuring different designs with inclusive slogans. One of them features people skateboarding, with the graffiti on a ramp reading "Black trans lives matter," "joy is resistance" and "express yourself."

While the packaging has only just come to the internet's attention, it was actually unveiled in May 2023 as part of limited-edition 2023 Pride Packs. The designs were created by LGBTQ+ artists Shanée Benjamin, Mady G, Symone Salib, Bianca Xunise, and Zipeng Zhu.

"We're proud to partner with @GLAAD to continue celebrating and amplifying the LGBTQ+ community," Skittles announced on Instagram back in May. "Throughout May and June, we've partnered with LGBTQ+ artists to design and release five limited-edition SKITTLES packs that tell visual stories of #Pride."

The Twitter account Libs of TikTok shared a picture of the new Skittles packaging on August 11, getting 2.1 million views, along with thousands of likes and retweets. The account claimed that Skittles is "trying to turn your kids into BLM & LGBTQ+ activists" and accused them of having "gone completely woke."

.@Skittles is trying to turn your kids into BLM & LGBTQ+ activists. Their packaging also features a drag queen.

Skittles have gone completely woke. pic.twitter.com/jjlkc7uOaL — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 11, 2023

Some of Peterson's 4.5 million followers voiced their approval following his tweet.

"I've been boycotting Skittles on the basis of taste for some years now," wrote @andrewpredmond.

"They make it easier to start looking for healthier snacks," @WigFiesta said.

"So terribly unfortunate. But I'm doing it anyway," @Prometheus811 tweeted.

While many were on Peterson's side, others mocked the psychologist for wanting to boycott a candy.

"You don't consume them anyways Dr. Peterson," wrote clinical psychologist Dr. Amaya Deakins, including a laughing emoji.

Taking into account his many calls for a boycott, @consultify shared a prediction for Peterson.

"Jordan Peterson will be the first person in history to coordinate a boycott of himself," he wrote.

Prediction: Jordan Peterson will be the first person in history to coordinate a boycott of himself. — B John Doyle or not to (@consultify) August 15, 2023

Happy with Peterson's decision to boycott the confectionery product, @Ellars said: "More Skittles for the rest of us."

Newsweek has reached out to Peterson via email for further comment.

America's chief macroeconomist accidentally microdosed on Chinese "magic mushrooms" last month. Well, sort of. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen accidentally dined on hallucinogenic mushrooms on a recent diplomatic trip to China. However, she swears she didn't actually get high from the dish. "There was a delicious mushroom dish. I was not aware that these mushrooms had hallucinogenic properties," Yellen told CNN's Erin Burnett. "I learned that later." "I can tell you none of us were affected by the mushrooms," Yellen added. "I read that if the mushrooms were cooked properly, which I'm sure they were at this very good restaurant, that they have no impact. But all of us enjoyed the mushrooms…and none of us felt any ill effects." The mushrooms, according to The Washington Post, are typically foraged by locals in the Yunnan province and prised for their "umami-laden and porcini-like" flavor, not their hallucinogenic properties.  "There's a difference in cultural attitude about the psychoactive effect — it's like the food itself is more important than this property," Colin Domnauer, a Ph.D. candidate who studies the mushrooms, told the Post.  A fascinating part about these specific mushrooms—whose name translates to "see hand blue"—is that scientists are yet to figure out what exact compound causes hallucinations in those who eat the undercooked fungi, leading to possibly untapped uses for medicine and psychotherapy.  According to the Post, publicity over Yellen's brush with the supposedly harmless mushrooms has led the dish to sell out in China, where the shrooms are served at multiple locations of a restaurant called "In and Out" (which, alas, is not related to the West-coast burger chain.) This latest incident provides an amusing tale about the weirder sides of diplomacy—and perhaps distracts from Yellen's disastrous handling of the national debt. But if Yellen had ended up going on an unwanted trip, Reason thankfully has a nifty guide on how to take shrooms, and what to do if you end up taking a bit too much.The post Janet Yellen Accidentally Ate Chinese Magic Mushrooms but Swears She Didn't Get High appeared first on Reason.com.

In June, almost every death-row inmate in Louisana filed for clemency after Gov. John Bel Edwards made comments expressing his opposition to the death penalty. "I am calling on the legislature to end the death penalty in Louisiana," said Edwards during the State of the State speech in April. "In short: It is difficult to administer—one execution in 20 years. It is extremely expensive—tens of millions more spent prosecuting and defending capital cases, and tens of millions more spent maintaining death row over those same 20 years." However, once all 56 clemency applications had been filed, they were quickly rejected by Louisiana's Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, which claimed that the clemency applications were not eligible for consideration due to a policy that applications must be filed within a year of a judicial decision on an inmate's appeal. While this specific rule can be waived, State Attorney General Jeff Landry wrote in a July opinion that "The broad and ill-defined waiver in (the rules) ostensibly empowers the board to repeal portions of its own rules and enact new ones at will, on an ad-hoc basis, and without any notice to the public," adding that "such a result is impermissible under Louisiana law."  Despite Landry's opinion, Gov. Edwards directed the board to give each clemency application a hearing last week. In his letter, Edwards disputed Landry's reading of board rules, writing that "the rule simply does not state that the application can only be filed within that first year." "It is no secret where my personal beliefs lie with respect to the death penalty. I am guided by my deep faith in taking my pro-life stance against the death penalty," Edwards wrote. "Beyond moral justifications, there are a number of reasons, whether based in law or science that support the need for mercy while considering these applications. I believe we must consider further the imperfect nature of the criminal justice system and the actual innocence that has been proven far too often after imposition of the death penalty."  Edwards' directive has sparked hope for anti-death penalty advocates, who view Edwards' continued pressing of the issue as a sign that he may grant large-scale commutations. "His order tees up the possibility that, before he leaves office next January, Edwards may be able to issue the largest mass commutation in this country since Illinois Gov. George Ryan emptied his state's death row in 2003," wrote Amherst College professor and death-penalty researcher Austin Sarat in Slate this week. "For opponents of capital punishment, Edwards has offered a distinctive template. In addition to highlighting injustices in the administration of the death penalty, it is now safe for them to say, full stop, that the death penalty is wrong in all cases."The post Could Louisiana's Governor Empty the State's Death Row? appeared first on Reason.com.

From his second-floor office overlooking the harbor in Norwalk, Connecticut, Bob Kunkel can see Long Island looming over the horizon to the south. It's only about 10 miles away, straight across the blue waters of the Long Island Sound. But shipping anything from Connecticut to Long Island—or back again—likely means loading a truck, sending it down Interstate 95 toward New York City, passing through some of the most congested highways in the whole country, and eventually meandering toward the final destination. Kunkel, president of Alternative Marine Technologies, a design and construction supervision firm, says there ought to be a better way. This part of the country was built because Americans used to ship a lot of cargo by water—and he'd like to start doing that again. "One Connecticut governor told everybody I-95 was a parking lot," he says. "So what are we doing to fix it? You're not going to build another highway. I mean, the costs are phenomenal." Unfortunately, the costs to ship anything by water in the United States are phenomenal too, thanks to a federal law from 1920 that severely limits the number of cargo vessels operating here. The Jones Act requires that ships moving goods from one American port to another must be American-built, American-flagged, American-crewed, and registered in the United States. That's a major stumbling block for Kunkel's plan to ease truck traffic along the I-95 corridor in Connecticut. He'd like to buy four mid-sized cargo vessels—big enough to fit more than 80 tractor-trailers but far smaller than the massive container ships built to cross oceans—to move goods from New Jersey to Long Island, bypassing the bottleneck of New York City. A boat like that costs about $65 million on the international market, he says. But to get one that complies with the Jones Act will cost $125 million, or more. "So now the numbers don't work," Kunkel tells Reason. "If we can't compete with trucking or support trucking, then there's no sense building the ship." In the third episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we're looking at just some of the ways that the Jones Act drives up prices, makes it more difficult to ship goods to places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii, and snarls supply chains for American industries. "It's just a very classic case of everything wrong with Washington," says Colin Grabow, a research fellow at the Cato Institute. Further reading for this week's episode: The Case Against the Jones Act, by Colin Grabow and Inu Manak "How a Century-old Law Contributes to CT Traffic," by Jordan Nathaniel Fenster, CT Insider "Building a Maritime Highway Across the Long Island Sound," by Ira Breskin, The New York Times "The Obscure Maritime Law That Ruins Your Commute," by Scott Lincicom, The Atlantic "Protectionist Policies Set To Inflate the Cost of Rebuilding Hawaii," by Colin Grabow     Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact-checking by Katherine Sypher    The post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: Jones Act Traffic Jam appeared first on Reason.com.

However huge I might be in other regards, both literal and figurative, I am not a huge music guy. This is a great disappointment to my wife, and a bit of a mystery to many of my friends who are passionate about music in ways I’ll never be. That doesn’t mean I don’t like music. For those curious, my tastes are mostly conventional early Gen X and late baby boomer—classic rock with some ’80s alternative thrown in for good measure. I also had a ska phase, and in recent years I’ve listened to an enormous amount of Johnny Cash. As a teenager, I was into classic Motown for a while, and I even went on a New Model Army kick. Of course, I had the required Pink Floyd moment, listening to The Wall from beginning to end over and over. Virtually all of the rap and hip-hop I listened to was the direct result of my brother refusing to turn down his stereo. Once you get past the Sugarhill Gang and Run D.M.C. my fluency plummets rapidly.

I could go on, but you know what? This is incredibly boring.

You know what else is incredibly boring? Arguments about music.

I don’t mean arguments between music lovers about music. I’m not invested in those arguments for the same reason I’m not interested in arguments between car nerds about cars or wine dorks about wine. But I totally get that if music is your passion, you’ll think arguments about music are really interesting. And because I love listening to experts argue about stuff I know nothing about, I can listen to aficionados debate all manner of things I’m ignorant about and be entertained. True story: I once spent an hour in a hotel bar eavesdropping on three luxury pen sales reps arguing about fountain pens. It was awesome.

On Monday night, Donald Trump and eighteen other people were indicted on forty-one felony counts by a grand jury in Atlanta. The case stemmed from Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential-election results in Georgia, where he was narrowly defeated by Joe Biden. Earlier this month, Jack Smith, a special counsel for the Department of Justice, filed a federal indictment related to Trump’s conduct in the aftermath of his election loss. A notable distinction between the two cases is that Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, decided to charge Trump and his associates under the state’s RICO Act, a racketeering statute that traditionally has been used to pursue organized crime. (She also charged Trump with thirteen felony counts, whereas Smith charged the former President with four.)

To talk about the sprawling indictment, I recently spoke by phone with Caren Myers Morrison, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York who is currently an associate professor of law at Georgia State University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of bringing RICO charges, whether Trump is likely to succeed if he tries to move the case to federal court, and why the sheer scope of this latest indictment may present a challenge to prosecutors.

What do you understand to be the reason that this indictment is so much broader than the federal indictment, which covers some of the same behavior by the former President?

I think part of it comes down to a prosecutorial strategic decision that Jack Smith made to keep his indictment extremely targeted and fairly simple, as far as these things go. Four felony counts, one defendant: Donald Trump. The simpler your case is, with fewer charges and fewer defendants, the faster it can move. The federal prosecution looks like it’s an attempt to do the sprint. As for this case, it is hokey to say it’s a marathon, but basically it’s more like an epic with a giant cast of characters. The other one’s Raymond Carver, and this is Dickens.

How do you understand Willis’s decision to charge this under RICO statutes?

A RICO charge is the kind of charge you bring when you have a lot of different people connected in different ways, but who form a loose organization, or sometimes a very tight hierarchical one—say, a Mob family—who are all working toward a common goal. But that common goal has been achieved during a long period of time and in potentially all sorts of different places. So, it’s the perfect charge for something where there are a lot of moving parts. It’s the most narrative-driven of the types of cases you can bring, to some extent, because some part of the trial has to be spent establishing the fact that there was an enterprise. The enterprise doesn’t have to be formal, but prosecutors have to prove that there was an association or an agreement between a number of people.

In this case, the allegation is that they were attempting to overturn the results in Georgia to keep Donald Trump in office. This has to be brought about through a pattern of racketeering activity. And racketeering activity refers to a number of specified felonies that are detailed in the RICO statute. It also enables you to go back beyond statutes of limitation. Typically, crimes have five-year statutes of limitation, but if you’re dealing with, let’s say, Mafia cases, where you would sometimes have threats or extortion or aggravated assaults that were many years old, you can fold that in with a RICO indictment into the pattern of racketeering activity, which typically takes place over a fairly long period of time.

You said it would have to be a pattern. This obviously was not a pattern. This was the first election that Donald Trump and his associates—

That is not what I mean by pattern. Pattern just basically means a series of acts. It is not the idea of a pattern as something regular, like a design that recurs. That’s not what it means. All it means is that there’s a number of different actions that are all in some way trying to achieve the same goal. For example, getting into the voting machines in Coffee County, or trying to put pressure on the election worker Ruby Freeman, or calling Brad Raffensperger. That could be a pattern of racketeering activity. It might be three separate crimes, but they’re all attempting to achieve the goal of the enterprise, which is to keep Donald Trump in power.

There’s been some discussion around the idea that Georgia’s RICO statutes are used too broadly. Do you have concerns about that?

Prosecutors love RICO statutes because, like I say, they allow you to go back in time, and fold a whole bunch of people into it. It’s a very powerful tool. Obviously, whenever prosecutors have a very powerful tool, they like to use it. And then that raises issues on the defense side and sometimes on the public side that the prosecutors are overreaching or going too far.

Remember, RICO starts specifically to deal with the Mob. It’s part of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. The reason it comes into being is so that they can prosecute the Mafia. And then, over time, it’s been extended to drug organizations or human-trafficking organizations or corporations. And even in Fulton County a couple of years ago, Fani Willis indicted a RICO case against these teachers who were involved in this school-cheating scandal in Atlanta public schools. We’re a long way, at that point, from Joe Bonanno.

One of the concerns about this indictment is that it includes very basic actions that are not crimes on their own. If you go to the hardware store and buy tape, that is not a crime. If you tie someone up against their will, that is a crime, and you could see why buying tape would be mentioned in the indictment of someone who’s charged with kidnapping. But there has been some concern that this is an incredibly broad indictment, especially because it includes things like the President’s tweets, which might be seen as protected political speech. What do you make of the indictment on that score?

It’s hard for me to take my prosecutorial hat off for this, but, for example, the teacher case makes me say, “Huh, that seems too far.” This seems more like the right charge for something this wide-ranging. And what it enables the prosecutor to do is to capture all the intricacies, all the phone calls back and forth, all the activities. There’s really a flurry of activity around trying to keep Donald Trump in power, or trying to overturn the results in Georgia.

So each act mentioned isn’t necessarily a predicate crime, but it is part of the over-all set of actions that the defendants were taking. And when you do that, not everything has to be illegal. It’s not illegal to send a tweet. Just like you say, it’s not illegal to buy some tape. But if it’s all in furtherance of the scheme—which can include trying to keep morale up in the organization and the enterprise, or trying to keeping people in a conspiracy informed of what the other members of the conspiracy are doing, or trying to encourage people to keep working toward the goal—that’s all part of it. So, yes, there’s a First Amendment argument that can be made, and I hate to sound like Attila the Hun, but I don’t think this is an overreach.

Can you talk about what an overt act is and how that comes into play here?

Warren Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway sold a net $8 billion of stock between April and June in a move that suggests the U.S. economy is not out of the doldrums yet, despite consistently slower inflation.

According to Berkshire Hathaway's second-quarter earnings, released earlier this month, the company sold close to $13 billion worth of shares and bought less than $5 billion. The Nebraska-based investor's company spent only $1.4 billion in buybacks—a modest sum for the stock market and much less than the $4 billion it spent in the first quarter.

As Buffett is considered one of the greatest investors of all time and something of an oracle when it comes to the financial market, his moves and decisions are closely observed and analyzed.

Berkshire Hathaway's CEO Warren Buffett (left) and his business partner Vice Chairman Charles Munger answer questions at a news conference on May 4, 2003, in Omaha, Nebraska. Buffett's investment arm dumped $8 billion worth of stock in the second quarter. Eric Francis/Getty Images

The fact that his company also owns a vast array of businesses in many different industries makes Berkshire Hathaway's moves something of a tell-tale sign for the entire U.S. economy for some investors.

When Buffett's company dumped $13.3 billion worth of stocks in the first quarter, investors were concerned that the slowing U.S. economy was eventually heading towards a recession.

Buffett "has always acted as a voice of confidence for markets during turbulent times," David Nicholas, president and founder of Nicholas Wealth Management, previously told Newsweek, commenting on Berkshire Hathaway's first-quarter stock sales. "But this marks a significant departure in his tone and positioning towards U.S. equities."

As a result of its stock sales in the second quarter, Berkshire Hathaway fattened its cash pile by 13 percent to reach $147 billion between April and June.

"When a recession is right around the corner, Buffett knows that cash is king, particularly when he can earn a decent rate of interest on it," Steve H. Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, previously told Newsweek.

"Apparently, Buffett anticipates that the U.S. economy is headed for troubled waters. I think he is correct," Hanke, who served on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, told Newsweek on Wednesday.

"The money supply is fuel for the economy, and it has been contracting over the last year. Now, the rate of contraction is -3.6%/yr., something we have not seen since 1938. Following significant changes in the money supply, the economy changes course with a lag of 6-18 months. At present, the economy is running on fumes and a 2024 recession is inevitable."

However, the likelihood of a recession in 2023 has been slowly decreasing in recent weeks, with Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi giving it a one in three chance, as he told CNN. Earlier this month, JPMorgan declared that it is no longer expecting a recession this year as the economy expands at a "healthy pace."

"Given this growth, we doubt the economy will quickly lose enough momentum to slip into a mild contraction as early as next quarter, as we had previously projected," JPMorgan economist Michael Feroli wrote.

So what could Buffett see threatening the U.S. economy that others don't?

In May, Nicholas told Newsweek that "the three big risks for Buffett were China, the U.S. banking sector and commercial real estate. These are very real risks for economic growth and just one would be enough to derail growth, yet we are dealing with all three at the same time."

These three risks remain very much present, with China's economy going into a tailspin and, concerning U.S. as well as local investors, a U.S. economy that keeps slowing down despite progress on some fronts—like inflation. American banks are also not completely in the clear after the turbulence caused by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year.

Lara Trump ripped into Hillary Clinton for laughing at Donald Trump's latest legal troubles in a clip that has now gone viral.

Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of former President Donald Trump, made the comments while speaking to Fox News's Sean Hannity on Tuesday. The clip of her attack on Clinton has been viewed more than 900,000 times since being posted on the social media site X, formerly Twitter.

Clinton was on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show on Monday when the news broke that the former president had been indicted in Georgia as part of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis's probe into election interference. The former president was charged with 13 counts relating to his alleged involvement in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state.

This is the fourth indictment Trump has faced this year, bringing the total number of charges against him to 91. The former president has denied all wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty to all the accusations against him in the other three cases. Trump's legal team has branded the Georgia indictment "flawed and unconstitutional."

Lara Trump (L) attacked former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) for laughing while discussing Donald Trump's indictments. News of his Georgia indictment broke while Clinton was on MSNBC. Getty

Clinton, who was beaten by Trump in the 2016 presidential election, began laughing during her interview with Maddow and said that she was surprised these were the circumstances in which they would be speaking about the former president.

"It is hard to believe, I don't feel any satisfaction, I just feel great profound sadness that we have a former president that has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive," the former secretary of state told Maddow.

"He set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation," Clinton said. "He used tactics of harassment and intimidation, he and his allies made threats and went after state officials, local officials responsible for conducting elections."

Newsweek reached out to Trump and Willis via email and Clinton via Instagram for comment.

Lara Trump: Hillary Clinton led into that interview laughing. She was laughing about this last night. There is nothing funny about this pic.twitter.com/Xf3BF6a0wg — Acyn (@Acyn) August 16, 2023

"[Hillary Clinton] lead into that interview with Rachel Maddow laughing," Lara Trump said while speaking with Hannity. "She was laughing about this last night. Let me tell you something, there is nothing funny about this. There is nothing funny about the erosion of our American values, about the erosion of our constitution, about the weaponization of our systems. [Just like] third-world countries do against political opponents, nothing funny."

Clinton noted in her interview with Maddow that no one should be satisfied with these developments and called it a terrible moment for the United States, but added that the only satisfaction that should be taken is that the "system is working" and "justices is being pursued."

Trump has been publicly critical of Clinton in the years since they became political rivals, with his supporters at his rallies repeatedly chanting "lock her up" for her handling of classified information during her time as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

Last September, Clinton addressed this behavior from Trump and his fans and said she would not be doing the same thing regarding the investigations of his actions. Clinton also did not raise the point that despite Trump's criticisms for her alleged conduct with classified information it is the former president who has been indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents.

"Let the investigation go forward and let's find the facts," she said on Late Night with Seth Meyers in September 2022. "Unlike those guys, I'm not saying 'lock him up.' I'm saying let's just find the facts and follow the evidence wherever it goes," she said.

The charges against Trump in Georgia include solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, filing false documents and multiple conspiracy counts, and violation of Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The last of these, initially introduced to fight organized crime, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Heat is the number one environmental cause of death in the US – greater than cold, storms, hurricanes, floods, or tornadoes. Worldwide there are about 5 million deaths per year related to extreme heat or cold, four and a half million from cold and half a million from heat. This ratio is slowly shifting, however, due to global climate change. There are fewer cold related deaths, but more than offset by greater numbers of heat related deaths in recent years. We can expect this trend to continue for at least the next 2-3 decades, depending on how successful our efforts are to mitigate climate change.

Most heat-related deaths occur during weather events known as heat waves. In 2022 Europe experienced severe summer heat waves, and a recent study estimates this resulted in almost 62,000 heat-related deaths. Heat waves are getting more frequent, more intense, lasting longer, and with a longer heat wave season. In addition, rising global temperatures are also increasing humidity due to increased evaporation and because warmer air can hold more water vapor. This has significant health effect because the heat index, the effective temperature felt by the body, depends on both the temperature and the humidity.

Humidity is critical because one of the ways the body sheds excess heat is through sweating. When sweat evaporates on the skin it carries away some heat. But as humidity increases, this method of heat loss becomes less and less effective, until it does not work at all. Heat is also lost through radiation, convection and conduction. Conduction of heat is through direct contact with cooler objects. Convection works through air or water moving across the skin, carrying away heat. Radiation carries heat away through infrared rays, without needing direct contact with anything physical. We lose about 60% of our heat through radiation, but this is not something that is easily modifiable.

The body primarily uses evaporation to regulate temperature because that is the one variable it can control through sweating. Blood flow regulation can also bring more blood and heat to the skin to allow for greater convection. However, when air temperatures rise convection becomes less efficient, just as when humidity rises, evaporation becomes less efficient.

The National Weather Service heat index chart shows the impact of humidity on how dangerous high temperatures are. For example, at 40% humidity, you get into the danger zone at 98 degrees F, but at 80% humidity the danger zone begins at only 88 degrees. At 94 degrees you get into extreme danger, where heat stroke is “highly likely”. The highest heat index (effective temperature) this year reached 153 degrees in the Middle East, which is at the limit of human survivability.

What is heat stroke? Heat stroke occurs when the body is no longer able to shed as much heat as it is creating, due to decreased effectiveness of evaporation and convection. When this point is reach, heat accumulates in the body causing body temperature to rise rapidly. Within 10 minutes of reaching this point, body temperature can increase to 106 degrees F. This high temperature causes confusion, can lead to loss of consciousness, and can cause seizures. Heat exhaustion can also occur, which results when the body is depleted of water and electrolytes due to excess sweating. This, in turn, can lead to syncope (fainting) and muscle cramps.

High body temperatures caused by heat stroke can damage most organs, the brain, heart, kidneys, and muscles especially. Death due to heat stroke most often occurs because of cardiac effects. Children, elderly, and those with underlying heart conditions are most susceptible to death due to heat stroke. Repleting water and electrolytes can be critical, but the most important treatment is to reduce body temperature. This requires getting into a cooler environment immediately.

While global climate change is global, it refers to average temperatures. Not everywhere is affected the same. Heat related deaths, for example, are concentrated in Europe, southern Asia, and sub-saharan Africa. But as global temperatures rise, the number of locations around the world susceptible to dangerous heat waves is increasing, as is the number, duration, and intensity of those heat waves. This means the number of people living with the threat of dangerous heat waves is increasing. Some parts of the world may simply become uninhabitable during certain times of the year.

The primary mitigating technology for extreme heat is air conditioning. However, this uses a lot of energy, which ironically can worsen global warming due to increased carbon-intensive energy demand. Also, heat waves can lead to spikes in demand for energy for air conditioning which can stress existing systems. A power outage during a heat wave can be deadly as millions of people may suddenly lose access to air conditioning.

What all of this means is that heat related deaths are a large and growing public health concern. Researchers have found that already about a third of heat related deaths are attributable to climate change (would not have happened without climate change). This proportion is going to rise significantly.

Another study attempted to project heat deaths in the US as a function of climate change. They found that climate change mitigation can have a significant effect. With aggressive mitigation, essentially the best-case scenario, there would be no significant change in heat-related deaths in the US. With the worst case scenario high levels of warming, annual deaths from heat can rise by 97,000. With an average projected warming, deaths would still rise by 36,000. This is for the US alone, with numbers much higher globally. Where we fall in that range is entirely up to the policy decisions we collectively make regarding climate change.

Who hears the persecuted church?

Our leaders should take a firm stance on anti-Christian violence

Life is difficult as a Pakistani Christian. Technically, one has freedom of religion. In reality, one is just a vexatious complaint away from mob violence or state persecution.

As I write, a church is burning in Jaranwala in Punjab. Someone, it has been reported, has been accused of violating the Quran. We might not think this should be a crime to begin with. But even if we do, a crime demands due process, no?

Not in Jaranwala. Rumours have been enough for a mob of irate Muslims to assault the church and harass Christians, with police officers being powerless or indifferent.

Alas, such extrajudicial violence is nothing new. This year, a man was lynched in a police station after being accused of desecrating pages of the Quran. “After lynching,” said a police spokesman, “They were still not satisfied and tried to burn his body.” In 2022, 80 people had to be arrested after a mob killed an alleged blasphemer and hung him from a tree. Two months earlier, a Sri Lankan national had been beaten to death and burned over similar charges. Onlookers were then seen taking selfies with his corpse.

You don’t have to be an alleged blasphemer yourself to be in the firing line. Salman Taseer was a businessman and politician who criticised Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. This was enough for one of his bodyguards to shoot him to death.

Far from taking action against such unhinged vigilantism, Pakistan’s authorities have strengthened their blasphemy laws. Insulting Muhammad or Islam as a faith already carried the potential for a death sentence. This year, the Pakistan National Assembly added that insulting Muhammad’s wives, companions or relatives could be punished with ten years in jail.

Pakistan is far from being the only country where Christians are facing persecution. Christian women are allegedly being abducted in Egypt. Savage violence is being perpetrated against Nigerian Christians by Fulani herdsmen.

What adds insult to injury is the all but serene indifference of the West

What adds insult to injury is the all but serene indifference of the West towards the suffering of believers in its traditional faith. The Jaranwala church attack has not hit the Western news, with the BBC’s “World” section finding time to mention Alec Baldwin’s film set shooting but not vigilante violence. One hopes, of course, that this will be rectified soon — but the murders of hundreds of Christians in Nigeria never left the religious press.

Granted, what are we supposed to do about it is a valid question. Well, Pakistan and Nigeria are both in the top three recipients of UK aid. If that doesn’t give us diplomatic leverage with which to demand stronger protection for the persecuted, as well as legal reforms, what does it give us? If we can’t convince them to resist mob violence and terrorism then it’s hard to know what we are going to achieve.

Within the UK, we should also treat this dreadful violence as a sobering reminder not to indulge in excessive conciliation in the face of affronted religious feelings. That doesn’t mean we have to be enthusiastically offensive. But it means we should defend citizens who face threats over real and alleged incidents of blasphemy — like the teacher who was forced into hiding in Batley for showing his students a drawing of Muhammad, or the students in Wakefield who, outrageously, were suspended and condemned for inadvertently scuffing a copy of the Quran. We have an understandable instinct towards soothing displeasure from religious minorities, assuming it expresses the predicament of the underprivileged. But we can see how minorities are treated in Pakistan when hot censorious emotions are allowed to run riot. Such violent rancour deserves no understanding.

British politicians should demand that the Pakistani authorities step in to stop the violence in Jaranwala. I don’t know if blasphemy was committed against a copy of the Quran. But if burning a church doesn’t count as blasphemous then I don’t know what does.

Jordan Peterson hopes Disney is paying attention to audiences after Sound of Freedom overtook the latest Indiana Jones movie at the North American box office.

Psychologist and conservative influencer Peterson has become a vocal opponent of Disney in recent times, often sharing content that shows how the company has become "woke" in some people's view.

Meanwhile the movie Sound of Freedom has become a surprise success at the domestic box office, consistently challenging films with greater budgets for top spot. The movie is based on the life of Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard in his aim to take down a global child trafficking ring.

Jordan Peterson addresses students at The Cambridge Union on November 02, 2018 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. Peterson has made fun of Disney after "Sound of Freedom" overtook "Indiana Jones" at the domestic box office. Chris Williamson/Getty Images

The movie has been the subject of "audience suppression" conspiracy theories, as a number of videos have gone viral, supposedly showing viewers being removed from watching Sound of Freedom in theaters for various unexpected reasons.

Despite the supposed suppression, Sound of Freedom has been a huge success, taking in $173,440,252 at the domestic box office, according to Box Office Mojo by IMDb. That figure, (correct as of August 16, 2023) movies it into the top 10 movies of the year financially, squeezing out Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny which has taken $172,775,069.

Peterson celebrated this landmark for Sound of Freedom by directing a tweet on X, formerly Twitter, squarely at Disney, the studio behind Indiana Jones.

"Isn't that something. Are you paying attention @Disney," Peterson wrote, before adding in parentheses "it's highly unlikely." Peterson had retweeted the news about Sound of Freedom's milestone from the far-right financial news site ZeroHedge.com.

Newsweek has asked Disney for comment by email.

Isn't that

something

are you paying attention @Disney

(it's highly unlikely) https://t.co/PzlfWN9afv — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) August 15, 2023

Sound of Freedom came out on the Fourth of July, and was immediately up against the fifth Indiana Jones movie which was released on June 30. The former enjoyed a surprise win straight away, taking the top spot at the domestic box office on the day of release. Throughout the month Sound of Freedom, made on a modest $14.5 million budget, battled against summer blockbusters like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One and occasionally came out on top. Barbie and Oppenheimer then came out and blew away the rest of the competition.

While Sound of Freedom has beaten the likes of Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Creed III and Fast X at the domestic box office, it still falls far behind at the international box office. The reason for this is that Sound of Freedom has yet to receive an international release, but the producers behind the movie, Angel Studios, have confirmed it will launch in other territories at the end of August and early September.

A box office expert predicted that after its worldwide release, Sound of Freedom is likely to only add a small amount to its total box office figures, but could still overtake a number of other established studio movies like Scream VI and Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

"While Sound of Freedom was a huge success in the U.S. these films don't travel well outside the U.S.," movie blogger Paul Ferrer told Newsweek, predicting that Sound of Freedom may only take in around 10 percent internationally of what it has domestically.

Newsweek has contacted Sound of Freedom producers, Angel Studios, for further comment.

In January, Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis began an attempt to transform New College of Florida, a small public liberal arts college known for its left-leaning student body into a much more conservative "Hillsdale of the South." So far, his plan seems to be working. As Michelle Goldberg detailed in a New York Times column on Monday, not only has the gender studies department been dissolved and a third of faculty have left the school, but the university's new leaders have also made the school more male. "This is a wildly out-of-balance student population, and it caused all sorts of cultural problems," Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who was recently appointed to the college's board, told Goldberg, adding that the new administration is "rebalancing the ratio of students" to achieve equal numbers of male and female matriculants. While the college has typically been around two-thirds female, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that the male population has skyrocketed in the incoming class—increasing a staggering 23 percentage points to now comprise 54 percent of the class. This massive change has largely been achieved by aggressively recruiting athletes. Previously the school had no formal athletics program. Now, they make up over a third of incoming freshmen. While it's unclear just how many of these athletes are male, it's worth noting that baseball—which alone comprises 60 percent of incoming student-athletes—is a male-only sport. And Rufo affirmed the ideological drive behind the decision to expand athletics, telling Goldberg that the school introduced an athletic program in hopes of making its student body more male—and therefore more conservative. As the male population at New College has increased, admitted students' academic performance has also declined. The incoming class has lower test scores and GPAs than last year's incoming freshman—with the average ACT score down to 24 from 27 last year. Student-athletes scored a paltry 22 on average, yet received merit scholarships at a higher rate than other students. The demographic overhaul at New College of Florida is perhaps the first real-life attempt to counteract the so-called "feminization" of education—an increasingly popular theory that blames the ascension of illiberal social justice politics in universities on women's domination within campuses and in college bureaucracies.  Never mind whether young women are actually that much more liberal than their male counterparts—despite such claims, only 30 percent of 12th grade girls identified as liberal, according to a recent survey.  But even if one accepts the premise that female-led institutions are more left-wing than male-led ones, New College's response—to engineer a more conservative institution by reducing female participation in it—is inherently in conflict with the strong defense of meritocracy and opposition to affirmative action espoused by Rufo and his allies.  Young women are outpacing their male counterparts in the academic sphere; girls now comprise roughly 60 percent of college students. While young men's failure to academically compete with their female classmates is worth our concern, the solution is not to lower the bar for men to obtain collegiate gender parity (something many selective colleges have been quietly doing for years). Nor is the solution to an illiberal left-wing campus culture to engineer a more male—and supposedly more conservative—student body.  Support for meritocracy means nothing if you're willing to discard it support of a favored demographic group. If you're going to make overtures to classical liberal ideals like the "equal treatment of individuals, regardless of race, sex or other characteristics," as Rufo wrote last month, you ought to be willing to live with its consequences. The post New College of Florida Embraces Affirmative Action for Men appeared first on Reason.com.

A new study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association purports to track the spread of COVID-19 misinformation during the course of the pandemic, and largely blames 52 specific doctors for promoting allegedly incorrect claims about the virus, masks, and vaccines. The authors of that study, "Communication of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media by Physicians in the US," might need to double-check their own grasp of the facts, however. Several statements they describe as examples of misinformation are debatable, and one big claim cannot possibly be described as misinformation at all: the lab leak theory. Statements counted as misinformation included the notion that "the virus originated in a laboratory in China." The authors, as if anticipating strenuous objection to this, weakly insist that the lab leak theory "contradicted scientific evidence at the time." But this gets to the very root of the problem: There was no smoking gun indicating either a natural origin or a lab leak, and yet a group of scientific experts released a paper—at the behest of federal health czars Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins—that explicitly ruled out a lab leak despite their own private concerns that this was a perfectly compelling explanation. Scientists who publicly leaned toward the lab leak theory—like Alina Chan, of MIT and Harvard—were condemned. The lab leak theory did not "contradict scientific evidence at the time." The evidence was ambiguous, and some scientists preferred the lab leak while others preferred natural origin. In any case, a scientific study released in August 2023 has no excuse for continuing to promote the fiction that the lab leak theory is misinformation. The theory is now endorsed by both the U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI. The Wall Street Journal has confirmed key reporting that would make the lab leak all but certain—namely, that the first people to contract COVID-19 were scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So-called experts who purport to chronicle and correct the category of speech now known as misinformation have proven themselves more than capable of error, which calls into question their entire project. (The authors have not responded to Reason's request for comment.) Falsely describing the lab leak theory as misinformation is not the paper's only sin, of course. The authors also make dubious claims about masks and mandates. They cite "allegations of consequences of mask wearing included medical and social or developmental effects, all of which were unfounded." "Many physicians focused on negative consequences related to children and mask mandates in schools, claiming that masks interfered with social development despite lack of evidence," wrote the authors. It's simply untrue that masking children has no negative consequences whatsoever for their development. As Brown University's Emily Oster noted, "There is direct evidence that masks make it difficult to hear the speaker, and that this may be exacerbated for kids in loud classrooms." "It stands to some logic that if you are trying to teach a young child to read—or, really, do anything—it is valuable for them to be able to hear you," she wrote for Slate. "And social interactions are better if kids can hear each other and be heard by teachers. Putting all this together, it is reasonable to think that some aspects of learning or social skills may be impacted by masks, and indeed others have argued this." The paper also takes issue with the claim that mask mandates were ineffective at stopping the spread of COVID-19, even though some studies did in fact cast doubt on whether mandates—if not the masks themselves—were doing any good. Lastly, the authors explicitly denounce as a conspiracy theory the idea that health officials "censored information that challenged government messaging." Yet the Facebook Files and the Twitter Files have documented the ways in which the federal government pressured social media companies to do precisely that. Understanding how false information spreads on social media is a worthwhile project, but the authors of this paper don't seem to understand that there are legitimate disagreements on a whole host of policy issues related to COVID-19. The science is not settled; it never is. Those who would seek to police misinformation should first define it accurately, or else they are committing the very same mistake they seek to correct.The post The Lab Leak Theory Still Counts as Misinformation in a New Study of COVID-19 Claims appeared first on Reason.com.

My guest today is Eric Boehm, a reporter at Reason who specializes in economic and trade policy. He's also the host of a fantastic, new six-part podcast series, Why We Can't Have Nice Things. Each episode looks at different ways that import and export laws and other sorts of mostly hidden regulations radically alter what we can buy, how much things cost, and how many options we have.  In one episode, Eric explains how the great baby-formula shortage of 2022 was vastly exacerbated by insanely stupid trade laws. Another episode explores why imported women's underwear is taxed at higher rates than men's underwear—and then there's one that shows how frozen chicken is being held hostage to decades-old trade wars. (All the episodes will be released over the coming weeks.) It's an incredible podcast series that you should subscribe to here, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also talk with Eric about how growing up in eastern Pennsylvania and being raised Catholic shapes and informs his worldview, his politics, and his reporting, long after he has left behind both the Keystone State and weekly attendance at Mass. We also talk about the 2024 election season and what, if anything, he's looking forward to. Today's sponsors:  BetterHelp. Are you at your best? Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, BetterHelp is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. Why We Can't Have Nice Things. A six-part Reason magazine podcast series about the frustrating and foolish aspects of American trade policy that make everyday items more expensive. From last year's sudden shortages of baby formula to the Jones Act and President Lyndon Johnson's infamous "chicken war," host Eric Boehm sits down with industry experts and libertarian policy wonks to explore how these counterproductive rules got made—and explains why they can be so difficult to undo. The post Eric Boehm: How Protectionist Trade Policies Screw Us All appeared first on Reason.com.

Americans dread another Biden-Trump showdown in 2024. The New York Times reports that a puny 22 percent of Democrats would be “excited” about Joe Biden’s nomination and a 46-percent plurality of Republicans “would be open” to voting for someone other than Donald Trump.

But what voters face isn’t really a 2020 do-over. That election pitted a hated loudmouth against a stale functionary. The choice was uninspiring but clear. We’re now looking at something worse—a cockeyed zombie reboot with both potential nominees profoundly degraded and on the verge of self-destruction. In 2020, Americans of good conscience could vote for either Trump or Biden on grounds that didn’t necessarily flirt with the dishonorable. That’s no longer true.

In the last election, Trump voters of a certain type might have conceded that Trump’s conduct was as offensive as his ignorance was regrettable. But all told, they could have argued, Trump’s boorishness was outweighed by his sound economic policy, his forceful opposition to the identity-based left, and a results-oriented foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. And the flop Russiagate investigation, they might have pointed out, only proved that the most obvious case against him had become too hysterical to take seriously.

What Trump voters didn’t have to do in 2020 was justify his undermining an American election because he hadn’t yet done that. They didn’t have to account for his being liable for battery and defamation against E. Jean Carroll because that finding was also in the future. There was no need to explain why he hoarded classified documents and reportedly showed them to others on a whim. And they didn’t have to weigh Trump’s perceived good points against convincing details of alleged criminality in a raft of indictments. It was a lot easier to hold your nose and vote for Trump in 2020.

Something similar held for Joe Biden. In 2020, few Biden voters found the former vice president stirring. But that was the point. After four years of Trump tumult, Biden represented an opportunity to make politics uneventful again. And for liberals, he had the added benefit of serving in the beloved Obama administration. Sure, he was clownish and getting on in age, and he had some plagiarism issues in his past. But compared to the day-to-day outlandishness of Trump, none of this even rose to the level of genuine drama.

What Biden voters didn’t have to do in 2020 was account for Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop because the Biden campaign had temporality conned them into believing it was Russian disinformation. And they didn’t yet have to deal with the brazenness of that deception. Nor did they have to justify Biden’s lies about being ignorant of Hunter’s foreign business dealings. They didn’t have to reject a growing body of testimony and documentation suggesting Joe Biden might have played a profitable role in his son’s influence-peddling scheme. They certainly didn’t have to reconcile their vote with corroborated whistleblower testimony about Justice Department wrongdoing in his son’s case. There was no need to explain why their man, too, had held on to secret documents after leaving office. Nor, finally, did they have to deny the daily evidence of their own senses, which suggested a president in striking cognitive decline. In 2020, it was a lot easier to cast Joe Biden as conventional.

So, no, this isn’t a do-over. Despite the names being the same, this election is shaping into something utterly new: a bipartisan devaluation of accountability and a moral compromise forced on the American voting public. And as the transgressions of Biden and Trump continue to be exposed, hearing by hearing, trial by trial, the compromise will only become more stark. If the current trajectory of the election holds, and it’s Trump vs. Biden in 2024, every major-party voter will be tarnished in the end. No one championing either man can be said to have clean hands. No one here is righteous.

A judge in a libel case once warned the jury not to award “Mickey Mouse damages”, plunging them into confusion over whether he meant ridiculously large or ridiculously small. The Government, however, has no such doubts about what counts as a Mickey Mouse university degree, and is talking of cutting academic courses with low intellectual content and a poor retention level which are unlikely to land you up as CEO of British Airways. There will be no more PhDs in astrology or ballroom dancing, no more would-be jugglers, lion tamers, water diviners or kissogram workers in cap and gown on Graduation Day.
The problem is that the Government isn’t going far enough. There are lots of respectable academic subjects which could easily be dumped with no discernible loss to the nation. Take history, for example, which someone once described as a set of events which should never have happened. From the An Shun civil war of 8th-century China, which resulted in some 429 million deaths, to the extermination of native Americans, which outdid Mao Zedong’s massacres by a ratio of two to one, history has been, for the most part, a saga of bloodshed and brutality. Peace and justice have never reigned over any considerable part of the globe for any considerable length of time. What kindness and compassion have flourished have been largely confined to the private or civic sphere. Most men and women have lived lives of hard labour for the benefit of a few.
To set our students loose on this chronicle of hacking and gouging is rash in the extreme. Many of them are pretty fragile already, and opening a history book can only deepen their anxiety. We need bright-eyed, forward-looking citizens, not depressive types overwhelmed by the nightmare of history. As the Victorians knew, there is a well-trodden path from dejection to political disaffection, which is why what we read should cheer us up, rather than cast us down. Most civilisations are the fruit of invasion, occupation or extermination; but, as Edmund Burke points out, they thrive by repressing this original sin and coming gradually to forget it. If we are to succeed at all, then, we must jettison the past. Oblivion is the basis of achievement.
Much the same goes for the study of literature. Before Thomas Hardy came to write in the late 19th century, there was scarcely a novelist in Britain whose work concluded on a downbeat note. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is one of the few bold exceptions. From Henry Fielding to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, happy endings are more or less obligatory. Why? Because there has to be somewhere in the world where the virtuous reap their reward and the wicked get their comeuppance, and this place is known as a novel. The more predatory and rapacious society grows, the less you will find such justice outside fiction. The fewer happy endings there are in real life, however, the more obtrusive and implausible they became in fiction, so that the typical end of a 20th-century novel is bleak and irresolute.
“After a while, I left the room and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain,” reads the final sentence of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, after the protagonist’s young partner has died before his eyes. So literature, too, is bad for morale. Rather than turning you hopefully towards the practical world, it plunges you morbidly into your own innards. Reading poetry is also bad for your spiritual health. As for plays and novels, there’s something peculiarly pointless about spending years, even a whole lifetime, studying people and events that never existed.
At least history has the edge over literature in that respect. Nobody has ever come up with a watertight definition of literature, which suggests how vacuous the whole project really is. Let’s hope the same isn’t true of aeronautical engineering. Besides, you don’t need to be a university student to read poems, plays and novels. Many people do it anyway, in their spare time. They also enjoy a pint occasionally, but they don’t see the need to take a degree in it.
Geography is palpably a non-subject. I was once a fellow of an Oxford college where there were two geographers, one of whom studied the demography of Asian communities in the Midlands. The other was an expert on sand dunes. What kind of coherent discipline is that? A lot of Americans seem to get on perfectly well without knowing where anything is in the world, except when they need to bomb it, so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same. In any case, maps give away our location to immigrants and terrorists. They also distort reality, showing Russia and China as imposing tracts of land and the UK as a mere smudge. What this belies is the infinite distance between Russian barbarism and British civility.
Suggested readingBlackadder and the end of historyBy Alwyn Turner
There is less need for geography now that we’re out of the EU, and the same applies to modern languages. “Why should I travel?” asked a woman who lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I’m here already.” We British might say the same, being fortunate enough to live in the birthplace of industry, empire, modernity, liberalism and the world’s greatest playwright. It’s true that the British go abroad for the sun, but climate change ought to abolish this custom in the future, as temperatures here climb to Sicilian levels.
One of the few benefits of climate catastrophe is that we’ll be able to stay at home. There will be no need for continental holidays, and no possibility of them either. It’s true that we’ll die of heat at home instead, but better to pass away in the bosom of your own folk than among people who have never heard of Katie Price.
Theology, meanwhile is a subject without an object. It’s on a level with Ufology and Loch Ness Monster studies. Classics involves highly unpleasant people like Nero and Caligula and at least one former prime minister. Sociology is just a way of dressing up Left-wing ideology in spuriously scientific garb. Politics is a career, not a seminar for eggheads. As for art, you don’t need to know about Raphael and Rembrandt in order to churn out marketable stuff. You don’t even need to have heard of them. Philosophy is a subject for pedants who think they can save people from suicide by pointing out that the grammar of “nothing matters” differs from that of “nothing chatters”. Those bits of science with practical applications are worth preserving, but not those bits that don’t, such as inquiries into quarks, black holes and the lower bowel of the aardvark.
Medicine has its uses, but one wonders how much of it would really be necessary if we overhauled our attitude to life. A little more pride in ourselves, a mite less grousing and negativity, and watch those tumours disappear. Some people make a case for the importance of law; but law is basically a matter of right and wrong actions, and you don’t need to pore over a bunch of mouldy statutes and precedents to know about that. You should have learnt it already from the moral values instilled in you by your parents. What matters is the family hearth, not the lecture hall.
The fact is that all we really need are business schools. Apart from the odd laboratory here and there, we could abolish universities altogether and save ourselves a stupendous amount of money. It’s true that this might leave hordes of young people with time on their hands, but this was never a problem in the days of National Service. In any case, universities are flagrantly self-contradictory institutions. Having being dragged out of the Middle Ages and forced to become efficient, they now look more like Tesco’s head office rather than ivory towers.
More by this authorHow the truth fell into disreputeBy Terry Eagleton
They have senior management, formerly known as “professors”, plenty of consumers (once called “students”), an eminently saleable commodity (so-called “knowledge”) and will soon be pricing ideas according to their importance, allowing consumers to decide which ones they can afford. If a course on metaphysics isn’t pulling in the punters, they can launch one on Gambling for Beginners instead. At least one British university discourages academics from keeping books in their offices, given that paper in an electronic age is ridiculously passé. They might as well have parchment and quills.
It’s all very admirable as far as it goes — yet, absurdly, these places don’t have shareholders, and haven’t been able to escape the chill clutches of the state. It’s true that there are one or two private universities around the place, but nobody knows where they are. They should stop hiding away and have the courage of their convictions. Allow the state to have a hand in education and before you know where you are, Keir Starmer will be deciding on the most plausible interpretation of Hamlet, and woe to those who lecture out of line!
Universities have had their day. Let’s stop pretending that some academic courses are garbage while others are worthwhile. Just cut the whole bloody lot of them.

For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland. Shortages of red jalapeños—the key ingredient in the famous hot sauce—have gotten bleak, in particular for the ultra-popular version of the condiment made by Huy Fong Foods. Grocery stores have enforced buying limits on customers. Bottles on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon are selling for eye-watering prices—as much as $50 or more. A few Americans have grown so desperate for their flavor fix that they’ve started pilfering the sauce from local restaurants.A big part of the shortage can be blamed on Huy Fong’s fragile supply chain. The red jalapeños that give the sauce its citrusy-sweet heat are finicky about temperatures and are usually laboriously picked by hand. A huge portion of the peppers are also grown in particularly dry parts of northern Mexico, where many fields are irrigated with water from the Colorado River—itself a strained and highly contested resource. But all of that was just a teeing up, experts told me, for a final climatic blow: the punishing drought that has gripped Mexico in recent years, draining reservoirs so low that even water destined for agriculture has largely been cordoned away.The sriracha shortage is hardly the worst crop crisis that’s being fueled by climate change. For years, Michigan cherries have been suffocating in too-high temperatures, while Florida citrus have been obliterated by hurricanes; India’s wheat crops have roasted, while rice around the world has been double-teamed by floods and heat waves. But to now see peppers in peril is its own special burn. Bred in some of the world’s warmest regions, chilis have long been a poster child of heat tolerance. They, more than so many other plants, were supposed to be okay. Now, though, as temperatures get more scorching and droughts continue to parch the planet, “I think we are going to see this more often,” Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told me. Sriracha’s troubles may turn out to be a bellwether for even more flavorless times to come.For now, most pepper crops are still doing just fine. After suffering brutal heat waves last summer, several regions of California, one of the Western world’s pepper-growing hot spots, are now expecting a banner year, Allen Van Deynze, a pepper-breeding expert at UC Davis, told me. Even the drought conditions in Mexico that obliterated red-jalapeño fields last year have improved from their worst. Chili plants are a tough bunch to overwhelm. “They’re not happy unless your nights are above 60, and it’s 80 or 85 degrees during the day,” Van Deynze said. Red jalapeños have been on the leading edge of pepper-crop failure because they’re unusual winter peppers, and grow best at temperatures slightly lower than their cousins elsewhere, Murray-Tortarolo told me. But even their ideal is pretty balmy compared with that of some other summer crops: Tomatoes, for instance, are content at temperatures as much as 10 degrees lower than what peppers prefer, Van Deynze told me.Many chili breeders actually tend to prefer working around the upper limit of their crops’ temperature range. Capsaicin, the chemical that imbues chili peppers with their tongue-tingling sear, evolved as a botanical defense mechanism—and peppers “crank it up when they’re under stress,” Stephanie Walker, a chili-pepper researcher at New Mexico State University, told me. “We say to people, after a stressful growing year, ‘We’re going to have nice, hot, flavorful chili peppers’” coming out the other end. Some experts also think that water is best used judiciously for peppers, especially in the weeks before they’re picked. Too much can dilute the fruits’ flavor—so some farmers will opt for minimal amounts of irrigation, Stuart Alan Walters, a vegetable scientist at Southern Illinois University, told me.But past a certain threshold, peppers, too, will start to sizzle. Once temperatures reach about 90 to 95 degrees, pollinators stop visiting; flowers start to die without ever producing fruits or seeds. And as good as a bit of water rationing can be for pungency, peppers—like any other life form—will die when they don’t get enough liquid sustenance. The irrigation that sustains many pepper plantations can be a buffer when rainfall is scarce, but in times of extreme drought, those rations of water will end up curbed as well.Nor are peppers immune to the climate-related issues that are already plaguing other crops. The planet’s gradual warming has cleaved many of the cold snaps out of winter—a problem for farmers who rely on the chill to pare back populations of weeds, and of insect pests and the many diseases they spread. “It’s crystal clear: We’ve seen a big uptick in viruses,” Van Deynze told me. Plus, heat waves and droughts can make plants more susceptible to blossom-end rot, a disease that leaves the tips of fruits blackened and dead. And with little respite from the heat, laborers are more frequently finding themselves plucking peppers in dangerous conditions, Walker told me.Some tweaks to pepper production might help. Growers could shift North America’s prime pepper regions farther north, in pursuit of milder temperatures. Researchers are also already working on breeding more drought- and heat-tolerant plants, in anticipation of tougher years ahead. But there are no guarantees. Genetic tinkering can be slow, and it sometimes comes with trade-offs: When breeders select for climate resilience, for instance, they have to take great care to avoid losing pungency, or altering a pepper’s signature flavor, Murray-Tortarolo said. And there’s still “a physiological ceiling,” Walker told me, above which even the most carefully bred plants just won’t grow or reproduce. It’s hard to say exactly where that ceiling is, Walker said. But peppers, a champ among warmth lovers, may already be closer than scientists would like them to be.Peppers won’t be wiped off the face of the Earth anytime soon. But losses and shortages of even a handful of varieties would sting. New Mexico’s Hatch green chilis are already under pressure from drought. Murray-Tortarolo worries about the future of some particularly rare pepper varieties in Mexico: black habaneros, a floral, earthy pepper from the Yucatán Peninsula; chiltepin peppers, which grow in the northern part of the country and lend their citrusy sizzle to seafood. Local dishes are now at risk, he told me. Flavors that specific, that distinct, are ones “you cannot replace.”That’s the appeal of pepper products, and their greatest vulnerability. Each is an homage to the chili variety at the center of its recipe—and true aficionados aren’t usually keen on alternatives. The fermented sweetness of gochujang doesn’t match the umami kick of sambal oelek; Tabasco can’t scratch the same itch as Cholula. Even within the category of sriracha sauces, many devotees of Huy Fong swear by the superiority of their favorite brand. It’s not a problem consumers often run into with rice or wheat or even coffee. “If there’s limited availability from one origin, there’s usually an acceptable substitution from another,” Kraig Kraft, an agroecologist at World Coffee Research, told me. For peppers, though, losing a crop from the only hyperlocal region in which it grows could tank an entire product line.The decline of any chilis will come with irony: The plants evolved a punishing spiciness that clearly inflicts pain on a variety of creatures, including us; now we’re warming the world enough to torment them. If our hotter planet ends up being a less spicy one, it’ll be because the weapon of heat has changed hands.

In January, shortly after Benjamin Netanyahu swore in Israel’s new government, I spoke by phone with Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinian lawyer and activist who co-founded the human-rights organization Al-Haq. Shehadeh was concerned about many of the extremists who had joined Netanyahu’s coalition, but he also predicted that the government’s impact was likely to register more strongly among Israelis than Palestinians, who have been living under occupation for decades. Netanyahu has now overseen parts of a judicial overhaul that opponents characterize as a profound threat to Israeli democracy, as well as an expansion of Israeli settlements. There has also been an increase in violence by settlers, which—combined with the actions of Israeli security forces—has resulted in the deaths of more than a hundred and fifty Palestinians; Palestinian attacks on Israelis have caused more than twenty deaths. Amid this increase in violence, the Palestinian Authority has struggled to maintain order in the West Bank.

Shehadeh and I spoke again recently about what the most right-wing government in Israel’s history has meant for Palestinians, whether the protests in Israel against the Netanyahu government could expand to address the occupation, and Shehadeh’s despair over the impossible choices facing the Palestinian people. Our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity, is below.

The last time we spoke, you predicted that Netanyahu’s new coalition—at least in terms of its relationship to Palestinians—would represent a difference in degree rather than in kind from previous Israeli governments. That the situation was already so dire that it wasn’t clear how much things were actually going to change. How do you view the situation today?

I was right about the fact that there wasn’t going to be much structural change, but I didn’t take into account the avarice of the settlers—their unlimited greed in using their power to the furthest extent possible. I also didn’t realize that what they did would have an effect on Israel, too, as seen by the big protests that are taking place there now.

The settlements have existed since the beginning of the occupation, and the structure that enabled the takeover of land and building of settlements has not changed. Generally, the Israelis were tolerant of all this. But the new right-wing government wanted to do even more than what was already happening. For example, the structures that were in place did not allow settlements over private land, but the settlers have been encroaching on it anyway. The Palestinians can resort to legal action, but the settlers wanted to stop that possibility through the court. This is one reason that the government has been trying to curb the powers of the High Court. It’s not the only one, of course, but it’s part of the goal.

Another thing that the settlers are trying to do is drive as many Palestinians out of the area as possible, and take over land that they couldn’t take before because it was planted land. They cut trees; hundreds of trees have been cut on Palestinian land, and house demolitions have been continuing on a large scale. And, the thing is, there is total government tolerance of these activities. The Army supports settlers, and the settlers know this.

It sounds like there’s been a fair amount of vigilante violence. Is that correct?

Yeah. Recently, settlers attacked the village of Burqa, and shot a man named Qusai. Then they played the victim and said they were attacked when in fact they were the ones who had come to attack the village. [In a statement, the Army said that Israeli settlers came to herd sheep nearby and got into a confrontation with Palestinians from the town, during which both sides began to throw rocks. The settlers then started shooting, and killed Qusai Matan. The suspected assailant was recently placed under house arrest but hasn’t yet been charged with a crime.]

One of the critiques of the Israeli protest movement against changes to the judiciary is that it hasn’t focussed enough on the rights of Palestinians, and has focussed instead on Israel’s democracy vis-à-vis Jewish Israeli citizens. Do you think that’s a fair critique? It seems like you were hinting in your last answer that you did think the state of the judiciary was in some sense intimately connected to the state of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

I think that Israelis, by and large, aren’t aware that they can’t have democracy in Israel while there is no democracy for the millions of Palestinians they are controlling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some of my Israeli friends have assured me that, yes, there is much more awareness of this now, but I think it’s a very small number.

When you say there can’t be democracy in Israel while there’s no democracy in the Palestinian territories, is that a moral statement or a practical one? Are you essentially saying that it enrages you that Israelis grant themselves some form of democracy and won’t grant it to Palestinians? Or are you saying that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is going to corrode Israeli democracy to the extent that, practically speaking, Israeli democracy cannot really work if the occupation continues?

It’s the second. All along, I’ve been proposing that the actions which law enforcement and the Army are taking in the West Bank will eventually affect the Israelis in Israel. And this is exactly what is happening. The lack of law enforcement and rule of law in the occupied territories and the oppression that is taking place is definitely corroding the Israeli way of life and Israeli enforcement of the law.

The Israeli government’s attack against the High Court has to do with the role of the High Court, to some extent, in the occupied territories. That’s not to say that the High Court has been great for the Palestinians in the occupied territories: it has allowed house demolitions, and has been generally responsive to the claim that all that is taking place is done in the name of security. But, still, it has sometimes played a positive role. And, in order to stop that, the forces on the right are trying to curb the power of the High Court, which affects Israel of course, very much. This is one way that what’s happening in the West Bank is corroding the situation in Israel.

Obviously, things have worsened in the settlements, and I’m curious how that’s changing Palestinian internal political dynamics.

We have to go back, really, to the beginning of the Oslo Accords. Oslo was an attempt by the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel to resolve the situation through negotiation, and Oslo failed because Israel didn’t follow up with the promises that it made to the Palestinians. The argument that it’s possible to negotiate a settlement has become very unpopular.

And so the P.A., the Palestinian Authority, has now become very unpopular and weak because its policies toward Israel, which were conciliatory and geared toward negotiations, have failed. There has also been no progress toward getting the case against Israel in the International Criminal Court to move any further. As a result, the argument is that the only way is through struggle—unfortunately, armed struggle. The policy of the Palestinian Authority to use international law to gain recognition for Palestine has failed. And so this very much affects the popularity of the Palestinian Authority.

But these are critiques of the Palestinian Authority that you could have heard prior to the past six months.

That’s right. But, now that the settlers are so much more active against Palestinians, the question of defending oneself against the settlers—there’s no answer to that. People have become much more radicalized because of the settlers’ activities and their brutality toward Palestinians. So we are moving closer to a possibility of armed resistance in the form of an intifada, which would be a disaster for the Palestinians, because any armed struggle would definitely be in favor of the Israelis. They’re the stronger party, and the extremist settlers are moving in that direction in order to get the opportunity to drive away the Palestinians or kill as many as possible. Because they don’t want Palestinians in the greater land of Israel.

If a third intifada would be disastrous, and if the approach taken by the Palestinian Authority in previous generations did not get what was intended or hoped for in terms of concessions from the Israelis, what would a better strategy be? What would you recommend to Palestinian political leaders in that case?

Hillary Clinton burst into laughter as she discussed Donald Trump's fourth indictment on MSNBC, with the news breaking during her scheduled interview with host Rachel Maddow.

The former president was charged with 13 counts relating to his alleged involvement in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state of Georgia. Another 18 Trump associates, including his ex-lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former chief-of-staff Mark Meadows, also face charges on multiple counts. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, with his legal team branding the indictment "flawed and unconstitutional." Giuliani called the indictment "an affront to American democracy."

Polling has consistently shown Trump is Republican voters' favored candidate to represent the party in the 2024 presidential election, with a significant lead over Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, his closest rivals. During the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly called for Clinton, his Democratic opponent, to be jailed over her use of a private email server whilst serving as secretary of state, with his supporters adopting the chant "lock her up!"

Reacting to Trump's Georgia indictment on MSNBC Clinton said: "Oh I can't believe this," before leaning back and laughing.

Talk about Irony!

On the night that Trump is likely to be indicted for the 4th time in less than 5 months, Hillary Clinton was scheduled to appear on Maddow.

Whether you love her or hate her, the irony of the years of the "lock her up chants" culminating in a 4th indictment of… pic.twitter.com/uG47MV3OeA — Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) August 15, 2023

Host Maddow stated: "This is not the circumstances in which I expected to be talking to you," to which Clinton replied: "Nor me Rachel. It's always good to talk to you but honestly, I didn't think it would be under these circumstances. Yet another set of indictments."

A 17-second clip from the exchange was posted on Twitter by liberal commentator Brian Krassenstein, where it received more than 670,000 views.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on May 05, 2023, in Washington, D.C. On Monday, Clinton broke into laughter whilst discussing Donald Trump's Georgia indictment on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. GETTY/Anna Moneymaker

Earlier in the show, Clinton said it was a "terrible moment for our country," adding "the only satisfaction maybe is the system is working."

She said: "I don't feel any satisfaction, just great profound sadness that we have a former president who has been indicted for so many charges that went right to the heart of whether or not our democracy would survive.

Hillary Clinton with the karma on Rachel #Maddow "defraud the U.S. And citizens of our nation. He used tactics of harassment, intimidation, made threats. He and his allies went after state officials, local officials responsible for conducting elections." pic.twitter.com/uqm5rkGEiL — Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 15, 2023

"We don't know yet what the charges coming out of Georgia are, but if you stop and think about what the public evidence is, and you've been talking about some of that for the last hour, he set out to defraud the United States of America and the citizens of our nation.

"He used tactics of harassment, intimidation, he made threats, he and his allies went after state officials, local officials responsible for conducting elections now we know even went into voting machines in order to determine whether or not those voting machines had somehow been breached when they were the ones actually doing the breaching."

Newsweek has contacted Trump for comment via the press inquiry form on his official website.

Trump's charges include solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, filing false documents and multiple conspiracy counts, and violation of Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The last of these, initially introduced to fight organized crime, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Trump's legal team vowed to carry out a "detailed review of this indictment" which they said "is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been."

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko made a speech last week in which he appeared to be reaching out to the West. Belarus has been a close Russian ally for years; it might even be considered a satellite. On several occasions, the Russians have used political influence to stabilize Lukashenko’s presidency. After the attempted coup by the Wagner Group in June, Lukashenko gave the group, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent approval, refuge in Belarus – although there is evidence that many of these troops have left the country. Regardless of their whereabouts, Lukashenko is closely tied to Russia.

The important point is that Lukashenko also proposed a new economic direction for Belarus, saying:

“Now we make money primarily in the East: in Russia, China. But we must not discard contacts with the high-tech West. They are nearby, the European Union is our neighbor. And we should maintain contacts with them. We are ready for this, but there should be due consideration for our interests. Believe me, the time will come (using your professional terms, I would say that now we are going through the period of turbulence), and in 2024-2025 there will be serious changes in the world.”

Lukashenko also said that Belarus needs to talk to the Poles and that he told the prime minister to contact them. “If they want, we can talk, patch up our relations,” he said. “We are neighbors, and this is something you cannot choose, neighbors are given by God.” Poland’s deputy foreign minister responded by saying that if Belarus wants to have good relations with Poland, it should stop attacks on their shared border and release Polish prisoners from Belarusian prisons.

On the surface, Lukashenko’s comments look like a careful attempt to move Belarus away from its heavy dependence on Russia and to balance that relationship with the EU and, surprisingly, Poland. Minsk and Warsaw have been hostile toward one another, massing troops on their border. The problem is that it is hard to imagine that Russia would be willing to tolerate this opening to Poland, given Poland’s position on Ukraine, its aid to Kyiv and its willing service as an arms depot for the United States. An opening to the EU might be seen as advantageous to Russia since Moscow also wants stronger ties with the bloc.

Belarus’ outreach to Poland opens another possibility. The Ukrainian-Russian war is appearing increasingly to be a frozen conflict, one that neither side can win but also one that will be difficult to settle after all the bloodshed on each side. Ending the war without something resembling victory would be extremely problematic. At the same time, the war cannot simply go on, as each side has limits in manpower, weapons and public support.

Given this, Lukashenko’s expressed desire for closer relations with the European Union and, more importantly, Poland may be something that Moscow encouraged. Belarus is very close to Russia and has had a role in the war, however minor. It might be possible for the EU to work with Belarus, and from there the road to Moscow might be easier to take. The Poles are a different question. Their hostility to Belarus is substantial, and Poland might demand unmanageable concessions from Minsk. Still, there is a desire in Europe as elsewhere for an end to the war, and the EU may see Belarus’ knock on the door as a way to improve relations with Russia. As for Poland, there are many in Europe who see Warsaw’s stance on the war as unique to Poland and its geographic position, and not in their own interest to follow. They might reward Poland or apply pressure on it to modify its position.

My tendency is to regard this as a gesture by Lukashenko, who might be trying to play the role of statesman. But I have to take into account that Belarus owes its position and potentially Lukashenko’s life to Putin. And Lukashenko’s support in Belarus is unclear. It is hard to imagine him taking a diplomatic initiative that isn’t approved by Moscow. So my gut reaction aside, I have to be open to the possibility that this is somehow an opening to Europe, with the overture to Poland being a first step in moderating its position on the war. You would not expect a direct approach, but it is clear that all players are getting tired of the war. That includes the U.S., where the 2024 elections will have a major impact on the U.S. approach to the conflict. So, Lukashenko’s bewildering approach may be a Russian-supported attempt to gauge European war weariness. If it is rejected, then it is only Belarus that will be embarrassed. If this seems complex, it is because the situation is very complex, and we are approaching the time when the sides will try subtle approaches. Or this is Lukashenko’s own attempt to secure Belarusian independence from Russia, which I really can’t buy.

The fact that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now trying to back away from his fight with the Walt Disney Company should confirm at least one thing about the whole ugly mess. It was never a principled fight against special privileges granted to a private company. It was a political stunt meant to raise DeSantis' profile on the national stage. That mission having been accomplished—and with the prospects of a legal battle against Disney looming—DeSantis told CNBC on Monday that he has "moved on" from the issue. He also encouraged Disney to "drop the lawsuit" that it filed in April against his administration. In that lawsuit, Disney claimed that DeSantis led a "targeted campaign of government retaliation" after the company's then-CEO, Bob Chapek, had spoken out against DeSantis' decision to sign a bill limiting the discussion of gender and sexuality in grade school classrooms. (The ban was later expanded to include nearly all public school classrooms in the state.) DeSantis responded to that criticism by launching a crusade against Disney's special self-governing district, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, culminating in the passage of a state law that gave the governor the authority to appoint a new board to run the zone. DeSantis and his allies have framed that maneuver as a strike against corporate special interests, but Disney's lawsuit makes a compelling case that the governor specifically targeted Disney to punish the company for Chapek's comments. The complaint draws from numerous public statements and from remarks made within DeSantis' recently published book to argue that DeSantis sought to punish Disney for constitutionally protected speech. It makes a lot of sense for DeSantis to try to walk away from this fight, in no small part because getting his butt kicked in federal court over a fairly fundamental constitutional issue wouldn't be a good look for a guy who is hoping to become president. Even if he doesn't lose, the lawsuit will be an ongoing source of bad news for DeSantis and will give reporters the opportunity to ask questions he'd rather not have to deal with—like the newly uncovered ethical issues surrounding one of the people DeSantis appointed to the Reedy Creek board. Ending the fight would also save taxpayers from having to foot the legal bills for DeSantis' defense, which is nice. Still, getting out of this mess is probably not as simple as asking Disney to drop the lawsuit and move on. Does DeSantis intend to ask the state Legislature to undo the governor's control over the Reedy Creek board? If not, then why should Disney back down? Short of that, it would be useful for reporters to ask DeSantis whether he would take similar actions against other businesses whose executives criticize his policies. Disney obviously has the power to fight back, but others might not be able to do so. Is DeSantis willing to admit he was wrong to retaliate against Disney? The answer would be instructive for voters weighing his candidacy for higher office. Ultimately, though, DeSantis' attempt to "move on" from the fight with Disney reveals how unserious the whole thing was. If this were a principled stand against corporatism, as DeSantis has claimed, it would be worth seeing the fight through to the finish. That was never the case, however, and it looks like DeSantis simply wants to end this political stunt before it blows up in his face.The post By Trying To 'Move On,' DeSantis Admits His Fight With Disney Was a Political Stunt All Along appeared first on Reason.com.

Wall Street firms and their proxies on Capitol Hill are hoping that most Americans will never be confronted with the question: Do you want your 401(k) to help fund the Chinese military or the genocide in Xinjiang? Most Americans would say no. That’s why President Biden’s new restrictions on investing in China are only the beginning.

Last week, the Biden administration announced new restrictions on U.S private investment in several of China’s high-technology sectors. For years now, the U.S. government has been scrutinizing Chinese investments in the United States in areas that impinge on national security. Now Biden is expanding that scrutiny to outbound investments. His new executive order seeks to prevent U.S. firms from helping China develop artificial intelligence, quantum mechanics and semiconductor technology that would almost certainly benefit the Chinese military.

Some congressional Republicans criticized the move as too weak, noting that other sensitive areas, such as biotechnology and energy technology, were not included. Beijing decried the move as “blatant economic coercion and tech bullying” and threatened unspecified retaliation. National security adviser Jake Sullivan has described the action as an attempt to place a “high fence” around a “small yard” of critical technologies.

Biden’s move represents a compromise between his national security officials and his economic team. This is only the first step on a long path. There is already a bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill to address another huge loophole that allows the Chinese military and companies linked with it to get money from Americans. Wall Street firms are using money from U.S. investors to fund Chinese companies that are working against U.S. interests and values, and lawmakers want to push back.

“It makes no sense that we restrict the export of sensitive technologies to China but allow Wall Street to fund Chinese companies trying to overtake us in these same technologies with clear military applications,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chairman of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told me.

Biden’s executive order covered direct investment in specific industries, but it did not address U.S. investment in Chinese military-related companies by huge Wall Street index funds that guide large institutional investors, such as state pension funds and university endowments.

Through these outlets, U.S. companies provide not only money but also technical know-how to Chinese companies that are connected to the People’s Liberation Army or complicit in the Chinese government’s human rights abuses. Those avenues of investment are ripe for more transparency and restrictions, Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.), the top Democrat on the committee, told me.

“It’s really important we do things to make sure that we don’t end up either wittingly or unwittingly funding the military capability that could be used against us,” he said. “It doesn’t get enough attention, but it is vital.”

Wall Street index funds, for example, have been adding more Chinese companies to their rosters, including dozens that have been blacklisted by the U.S. government for their connections to the Chinese military or their complicity in Chinese government repression, according to a preliminary investigation by the China committee’s staff. Gallagher and Krishnamoorthi wrote letters last month to the leaders of BlackRock and MSCI detailing how their investment funds are underwriting problematic Chinese firms and therefore undermining U.S. national security.

For example, the Aviation Industry Corp. of China (AVIC), which produces advanced Chinese air force fighter jets; the China State Shipbuilding Corp., which produces Chinese navy warships; and CGN Power Co., which has been accused of trying to steer U.S. nuclear technology to the Chinese military, are all part of MSCI and BlackRock fund either directly or through their subsidiaries. This means they are receiving money from U.S. investors indirectly even though Americans are legally restricted from investing in them outright.

Moreover, as Chinese President Xi Jinping institutes his project of “civil-military fusion,” the distinction between these companies and the Chinese state is disappearing. That means American investment in these entities is neither safe nor accountable, because Beijing can crush or absorb these firms at any time.

“Why average American investors should be invested in those entities doesn’t make sense,” Krishnamoorthi said. “But there is a bigger issue: What is the systemic risk?”

Some will argue that restrictions on investing in China are protectionist or likely to increase economic tensions between the two superpowers. But such arguments fail to acknowledge that these actions are simply a response to protectionist policies China has had in place for a long time.

Others argue that because these Wall Street firms are engaging in technically legal activities, Congress and the government have no right to intervene. But that’s exactly backward. It’s the job of Congress and the government to respond to national security vulnerabilities and make new laws and policies to protect Americans.

During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a staggering number of students went "missing." Kindergarten enrollment rates dropped, and students already enrolled in classes failed to log in for online learning. From March to October 2020, the education nonprofit Bellwether estimated, as many as 3 million students nationwide went missing from classrooms. Another estimate from FutureEd, an education think tank, found a sevenfold increase in the number of students missing at least half a school year during the pandemic. Once in-person school resumed, many students didn't return to the classroom, nor did they register for homeschooling. No one knows exactly how to get them back. According to the Associated Press (A.P.), California alone is missing more than 150,000 students, while New York is down nearly 60,000. In all, around 230,000 students in 21 states and Washington, D.C., are missing, which suggests that many more students are absent from classrooms nationwide. When the A.P. and Stanford University researchers analyzed data from pre-pandemic years, they found that almost no students were missing. The government is now designing new interventions to try to keep these students from going uneducated. In 2021, Connecticut unveiled a program that sent trained visitors to the homes of more than 8,000 students. "Reaching out to family seems to be really important, because it's probably not just a student's own decision to be missing school or leaving school," says Jing Liu, an education researcher at the University of Maryland. Connecticut's program de-emphasizes the role of truancy courts to punish absent students and their guardians, a feature that should appeal to civil liberties advocates. "It's the home visitors' job to build trust, [help parents] understand the importance of school, and [let them] know they don't need to worry and their kids are safe in school," a Connecticut State Department of Education official told Education Week in January. Nine months after their first visit, students in grades 6–12 served by the program had a 16-point increase in their attendance rates compared to chronically absent students who weren't visited. "The key to keeping kids in school is noticing as soon as possible when they're starting to miss too much, so someone can go out and talk to them and re-engage them, and find out what would help them to come back," says Hedy Chang, executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works. "If you let it go for months or years, you can't find them then."The post Millions of Students Went 'Missing' From Classrooms During the Pandemic. Many Haven't Returned. appeared first on Reason.com.

Approaching the Ridiculous:

How about regulatory agencies outlawing all self-seeking behaviors? Would that even be “Legal” in a Capitalist Society in which “Success” is based on serving your own interests as more important than the interests of “others”?

The First Action by any good-faith regulatory commission would prohibit stock market hedge funds like Black Rock and Soros Fund Management and the large trading banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase from using automated computer AI algorithms to buy and sell stocks and commodities. No individual stock trader using their own brains to analyze information that causes stocks to go up and down can compete with them. It’s a slam-dunk for hedge funds and trading banks. By using computerized trading algorithms their profits have been shown to increase by 512% -- and that means everybody else loses.

The above First Action for a Moral Regulation of AI for the Benefit of Society is just the beginning. Eventually Capitalism must be suppressed along with anti-social self-seeking behavior and socialist values must be enforced, which means control by an oversight socialist government “For the Good of Society”.

The accomplishment of AI Regulation necessitates that we must first need a Socialist Revolution against unethical Capitalism that establishes the Moral Right of government to serve the interests of society through the suppression of purely profit-seeking Capitalist motives.

Today is a Great Opportunity for a Socialist Revolution in America:

Rising inequality may be heartrending to Democracies (as Aristotle explained, Democracy cannot exist when political and economic power are too concentrated in an Elite) but excessive inequality is a boon for the prospect of Socialist Revolution:

The more wealth and political power are concentrated in an Elite (now the 1% in America) the easier it is for a Socialist Revolution to succeed.

Under Elite Rule, the organizational means to Control of Society are already established, so it is simply a matter of replacing the Elite in positions of power with the Socialist State in power using the same means of Social Control.

Many examples of the above Socialist opportunity for revolution against an Elite include:

1. Communist overthrown of Czar Nicholas II in Russia by Bolsheviks in 1917

2. Mao Zedong’s Communist overthrow of the Chaing Kai Shek government in China in 1949

3. Fidel Castro’s Communist overthrown of the Batista government in Cuba in 1959

4. Maduro’s peaceful Socialist Revolution in Venezuela with his election to President in 2013

Viva la Revolución!

What are the police good for?

British cops have to focus on actual crimes

Yorkshire. It’s a lovely place. The land of the Howgills, and Yorkshire puds, and Dickie Bird. It’s steeped in history — some of it grim, perhaps, but all of it significant to our national tale.

Unfortunately, it’s also the home of West Yorkshire Police.

No offence to the diligent and hard-working individual cops who pound the streets of Leeds, Huddersfield et cetera — it’s a difficult and often thankless job — but the force as a whole is making an implicit argument in favour of the people who wanted to defund the police. In a country riddled with embarrassing institutions, it stands out for its chronic inadequacy. “Useless”, in many cases, would be too flattering because that which is useless is not actively malign. “Pernicious”, in such cases, might be more appropriate.

This is strong language, I accept, but amply justified. It was West Yorkshire Police which recorded the slight accidental scuffing of a copy of the Quran at a Wakefield secondary school as a “hate incident”. One of its officers subsequently attended a public meeting about the event — nodding along as representatives of local Muslims denounced the four schoolboys involved, who had been suspended and showered with threats.

At one point, a Muslim councillor declared that “to her credit” the mother of one of the boys had decided not to press charges against people who had sent her son death threats. The nodding dog of a police officer said nothing. Bear that in mind as you see what kind of speech inspires his colleagues to leap into action.

Now, you see, West Yorkshire Police are in the news again after all but sending the firearms unit out to arrest a drunk autistic 16-year-old girl in Leeds who had been accused of a “homophobic public order offence”. Thankfully, the girl’s quick thinking mother videoed the incident, which saw her daughter screaming and self-harming in fear as she was manhandled by a squad of stone-faced officers, for apparently — and I hope you’re sitting down for this — saying that a policewoman looked like her lesbian nan. The horror! Perhaps she should have made death threats instead.

West Yorkshire police urged people to “avoid reaching conclusions solely on the basis of the social media video” which “only [provided] a very limited snapshot of the circumstances of this incident”. Now, though, they have announced that they won’t be taking further action. I guess those conclusions were the right ones after all.

Let’s have some more context. Just up the road from Leeds is Rotherham, where the neighbouring South Yorkshire Police completely failed to avert the horrendous systematic criminality of grooming gangs. Huddersfield had its own grooming gang, and South Yorkshire Police have been accused of failing to protect victims. As the Guardian reported in 2016, a review suggested that “West Yorkshire police held the belief that children … were “actively consenting and choosing to become involved” with the men”.

West Yorkshire Police were even accused of failing to protect victims after their abusers had been arrested. “Lucy” told the Independent that the police had promised to “install protective measures” as a response to serious harassment but then did nothing. Where was the energy that the police had when it came to arresting a drunk autistic teenager who was being problematic?

It’s infuriating how common it is to see the police come down on harmless unfashionable behaviour — people silently praying outside abortion clinics, say, or mildly offering a traditional view on Christian sexual ethics — like ten tons of concrete as serious crimes go unhindered.

Burglaries, for example, are not as serious as grooming gangs, of course, but they are still invasive and frightening, and lead to the grievous loss of property. In West Yorkshire, a whopping 83 per cent of burglaries go unsolved. Granted, sometimes a burglar will leave no trace and remain unidentifiable enough that even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t catch him. But with figures like that, the police shouldn’t be rampaging around menacing teenagers for using the word “lesbian”. How many homes were being broken into as the cops dragged an autistic kid off to the station for being vaguely un-PC?

Heads should roll for this. West Yorkshire Police have limply claimed to be developing their approach to “neurodiversity”, but while the girl’s condition makes her treatment especially appalling it would still have been appalling if she was a harmless 16-year-old without it. The problem was not that she was autistic — that just rubbed salt into the wounds.

Standards have to change so that the police will focus on actual crimes

Standards have to change so that the police will focus on actual crimes. Suella Braverman’s tightening of the definition of what counts as a “non-crime hate incident” was welcome but clearly insufficient. The Free Speech Union have plausibly argued that the girl’s words shouldn’t have amounted to an arrestable offence in a technical as well as moral sense, but as long as the police think they have the power to arrest people, people will be arrested.

Hopefully, the girl isn’t too traumatised. If she is suffering in the aftermath of the incident, she can be consoled with the thought that she didn’t face something really terrible, like being compared to someone’s lesbian nan.

A Delaware man was ticketed after he flipped off local police—and newly released body camera footage appears to show that officers knew the citation was unlawful but decided to punish him anyway. In March 2022, Jonathan Guessford, a 54-year-old resident of Smyrna, Delaware, was confronted by police as he stood on the side of a road, holding a sign that read "radar ahead," a warning to drivers about a police speed trap. Two Delaware State Police officers, Stephen Douglas and Nicholas Gallo, seized Guessford's sign and ripped it up, according to body camera footage. As Guessford drove away, he flipped off the pair who pursued him, the officers even reaching speeds of up to 100 mph. After stopping Guessford and being joined by a third officer, Raiford Box, body camera footage shows the officers planning how to justify punishing Guessford. "We can lock him up for disorderly conduct," Box tells the officers over a phone call captured by the body camera footage. "It might not go anywhere, but we can definitely lock him up for disorderly conduct." "He stuck his middle finger out of the car and I'm like 'game on.'" Douglas says after the officers have exited the car, having pulled Guessford over. "After a while, he 'll do something stupid," Box added later. "We can lock him up, take his kid, put his dog in the impound…for now it is what it is," Eventually, Guessford was cited for breaking a law regulating hand signals for bicycles and other non-motorized vehicles. However, body camera footage from after the incident shows that Box knew the citation wasn't lawful. In a phone call with another officer, Christopher Popp, Box explained that officers cited Guessford for improper hand signals. "Yeah, you can't do that. That'll get dropped," Popp says. "I told him that's gonna get thrown out," Box replies, adding, "Eventually, he's going to do something really stupid and then we are going to be able to really lock him up." "We need to look at something more that applies, like maybe, something stupid, like parked in the roadway, something like that that will fly," says Popp. "Unfortunately, I mean, we can't pull people over, we can't write them tickets for telling us to fuck off or giving us the middle finger, stuff like that. You know, that is their right to do so." While the citation against Guessford was later dropped, he filed a lawsuit in February, alleging that police violated his First Amendment rights. The officer's "motive for the traffic stop and issuance of a traffic ticket was to punish Plaintiff Guessford for exercising rights secured under the constitution," the suit reads. "The adverse actions taken against [Guessford]—stopping his motor vehicle without reasonable suspicion or probable cause—would substantially interfere with the exercise of First Amendment freedoms." Since the incident, one unnamed officer has been disciplined, according to a Delaware State Police spokesperson.The post Cops Invented a Reason To Cite Man Who Flipped Them Off appeared first on Reason.com.

“You are now 0 for 4 in merger trials,” a GOP congressman observed this month in a politically charged hearing with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. The independent agency tasked with enforcing the country’s antitrust laws begs to differ. A spokesman noted “more than 20 wins,” with six mergers blocked and 14 abandoned after commissioners started asking questions. Neither assessment captures the whole picture.

Some of the cases the agency cited are more significant than others — the thwarting of chipmaker Nvidia’s plan to snatch up chip-design specialist Arm, for instance, or of Lockheed Martin’s deal to purchase rocket motor-builder Aerojet. Plus, enforcers signaling a tougher stance may deter some questionable proposals from ever leaving the boardroom. Yet losses in high-profile cases dilute this deterrent effect. And Ms. Khan’s losses have been hard to miss. Most recently, a federal judge ruled that Microsoft could proceed with its $69 billion acquisition of video game maker Activision over the FTC’s objection. Earlier this year, the same thing happened with an attempt to block Meta from buying up virtual reality company Within.

Ms. Khan has said the latter loss was, to a certain extent, a win — because the order affirmed some of the FTC’s arguments, including that acquisitions of nascent companies can still hurt competition. This fits into her articulated strategy of testing antitrust boundaries by taking novel legal theories to the courts. Maybe the FTC prevails. Maybe, in defeat, the agency changes modern-day law at the margins. Or maybe it fails to convince a judge of anything at all but in doing so proves that today’s antitrust laws are insufficient in the digital age.

Indeed, today’s antitrust laws are insufficient in the digital age. In today’s online world, network effects mean that the more people use a service, the more valuable it becomes, the more people use it, and so on. That can tip markets toward monopolization, raise barriers to entry and make every horizontal merger — a merger between two firms in the same market — matter even more. Then there’s the rise of the two-sided platform, where a service brings buyers and sellers together: Think ride-hailing apps, with riders buying and drivers selling. Better terms for the buyers often mean worse ones for the sellers — and those terms are set by the platform. Vertical mergers, meaning mergers of companies that don’t compete, also begin to look more suspect.

Mainstream interpretations of antitrust rules today focus on higher prices to consumers as the most important metric for assessing illegality. This doesn’t make sense in an economy in which many of the most powerful players charge nothing at all for access to their product. Instead, there are other harms to consider: lower quality, for example, or reduced choice.

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Yet at the same time, not all concentration is bad. The value that network effects create is real; sometimes, when one company both runs a service and participates on it, efficiencies emerge. Think of Apple building its own flashlight feature that comes preinstalled on users’ phones. Reformers don’t always seem to agree with this assessment, espousing instead a more radical vision in which a big firm becoming bigger is almost always a problem. Ms. Khan recently said this isn’t her view, but her record suggests otherwise. And this aggressive approach might be a tactical error.

Look, for example, at the revised merger guidelines that the FTC and Justice Department jointly released this summer. The standards tell businesses what to expect from enforcers as they consider acquisitions, but they also act as something of a manifesto — even citing case law as a means of persuasion. Much of the document, now open to public comment, hits the mark: homing in on the importance of examining acquisitions not only of established competitors but of nascent ones, too; of scrutinizing two-sided platforms closely; and more. But to the skeptic, parts of the guidelines read as a denunciation of growth. Instead of assuming that concentration is insidious, the drafters would do better to explain, explicitly, that they seek to attack the ill effects of concentration that might emerge down the road.

The same is true of enforcement. Unless it is built on uncommonly strong evidence, a case designed to push the limits of antitrust law has a high chance of flopping. If the FTC is intent on testing novel theories, it should undergird them with ample proof that concrete harms are probable. That way, it will have a better shot at making things move, whether the goal is to stop a merger or to target a company’s malign conduct. The Meta suit may well be regarded as a win within a loss, but resources would be better spent on wins within wins.

In two weeks, the new school year will begin at Florida’s New College, the progressive public liberal arts school singled out by Gov. Ron DeSantis for cultural transformation. Returning students will find an institution that is increasingly unrecognizable.

Over a third of the faculty members have left. Many of last year’s students are continuing their education elsewhere. Hampshire College, a small private liberal arts school in New England, has offered financial aid to New College students so they can transfer without tuition increases. Thirty-five plan to attend Hampshire this fall, and 30 more have inquired about doing so in the spring, a large number, given that last year New College had fewer than 700 students. Last week, New College’s leadership announced that it was moving to abolish the gender studies department. Chris Rufo, the culture warrior whom DeSantis put on New College’s board of trustees, boasted that it would be “the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.”

The dismantling of gender studies is striking because of how closely it follows a playbook for the ideological transformation of higher education pioneered by Hungary, which banned gender studies in 2018. Given that Rufo frames the New College takeover as a demonstration project to be repeated by red states nationwide, I’d expect attempts to scrap gender studies to spread. (Already, some Republicans in the Wyoming Legislature have tried, unsuccessfully, to defund such programs.) But having followed the right-wing remaking of New College all year, I think it’s worth paying attention not just to what is being destroyed but also to what is being put in its place.

Rufo speaks a lot about academic excellence and the virtues of a classical liberal education. But as Steven Walker of The Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported in a damning July story, the incoming class recruited by the new administration has lower average grades, SAT scores and ACT scores than last year’s class. “Much of the drop in average scores can be attributed to incoming student-athletes who, despite scoring worse on average, have earned a disproportionate number of the school’s $10,000-per-year merit-based scholarships,” wrote Walker.

In the coming term, the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up the interesting question of whether a public official who blocks someone from the official’s personal social-media account violates the First Amendment when he uses that account to communicate about job-related matters with the public.

The case arose when two school board trustees blocked two parents from their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The trustees created public Facebook pages, separate from their private accounts, and used them to promote their election campaigns in 2014. They continued to use the accounts after being elected to post district business. One of them also created a Twitter account in 2016 to promote her activities as a trustee. Parents of kids attending schools in the district who were vocal critics of the board began posting on the trustees’ social media pages in 2015 and often posted repetitive/vexatious comments. In 2017, the trustees decided to block both parents. The parents sued the trustees for violating their right to free speech.

The district court ruled for the trustees for damages based on qualified immunity, but allowed the rest of the case to proceed. The court held that the trustees acted under color of state law, that the comments section of the social media pages were designated public forums, and that it would hold a bench trial to determine whether blocking the parents was a valid content-neutral speech restriction. The Ninth Circuit affirmed but took a more expansive view of the First Amendment’s protections, assessing state action under the “nexus test,” which applies “when there is such a close nexus between the State and the challenged action that the seemingly private behavior may be fairly treated as that of the state itself.” This tracks with decisions from the Second, Fourth, and Eighth Circuits, but conflicts with a recent Sixth Circuit ruling that government officials who act of their own volition on social media, rather than as part of their official duties (as directed by superiors, for example), may not be state actors.

The Manhattan Institute filed a brief that proposes a test whereby posts on personal accounts be assessed on a post-by-post basis and, if there is government-related speech, standard forum analysis should apply. That is, an official who generally allows any person to comment on a post to his account may create a “designated public forum,” while one who restricts comments to certain posts or topics may create a “limited public forum”—both of which implicate certain First Amendment protections. And, regardless of the forum type, there should be a baseline protection against unbridled discretion or other types of viewpoint discrimination, including banning or muting citizens just because they criticize the official or express an unwanted viewpoint.

Photo: Urupong/iStock

The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.[Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio]In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.“We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).  But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)[Read: It’s abortion, stupid]Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

Since the 2020 campaign, President Joe Biden has emphasized that America seeks "competition rather than conflict" with China. In the 2023 State of the Union address, amid tensions with the Chinese government over a spy balloon that floated through American airspace, he returned to the notion, saying his administration was willing to "work with China where it can advance American interests" while also bragging the U.S. was in "the strongest position in decades to compete" with the country. That message of productive, if a bit unfriendly, economic competition is increasingly at odds with the aggressive trade policies Biden is pursuing behind the scenes. Indeed, it's at odds with what prominent members of the administration, including the secretary of the treasury and the White House's top national security adviser, are now openly admitting in public speeches: The United States is escalating its trade war with China, and it is doing so by targeting the free movement of goods and money across the globe in new ways." Technology export controls can be more than just a preventative tool," national security adviser Jake Sullivan told a small crowd gathered at the Capital Hilton, just blocks from the White House, in a speech delivered last September. "If implemented in a way that is robust, durable, and comprehensive, they can be a new strategic asset in the U.S. and allied toolkit to impose costs on adversaries, and even over time degrade their battlefield capabilities." Sullivan said the theory had already been put to the test once. After Russia rolled tanks and troops into Ukraine in early 2022, the United States responded with financial sanctions aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies. It also imposed severe export controls meant to hobble Russia's industrial and military might. In Sullivan's telling, this represented "the most stringent technology restrictions ever imposed on a major economy." "Those measures have inflicted tremendous costs," Sullivan continued, "forcing Russia to use chips from dishwashers in its military equipment." The "adversaries" that could be targeted with that "new strategic asset" would not be limited to those that had invaded their neighbors. For Sullivan, the apparent success of the export restrictions targeting Russia meant we might reshape how America conducts foreign policy, particularly with regard to China. America should abandon the idea that it must only maintain a relative lead over China in the development of key technologies, he said. Instead, the tools and tactics of an international trade war could be used as an economic complement to America's military arsenal—one that could effectively serve as an opening salvo in a real war. Sullivan was speaking at a gathering of the Special Competitive Studies Project, a joint venture of tech and national security experts funded by a private foundation created by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Four days before the summit, the group published a lengthy report, co-authored by Schmidt and Robert Work, a deputy defense secretary under both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump. The report crystallized many bipartisan worries about how China's technological advances might factor into a future war, and its conclusions mirrored Sullivan's: "Warfare will be waged with and against industrial and financial power and pit innovation ecosystems against each other." What both Sullivan and the report describe could be called a total trade war: a conflict where the exchange of goods and money across borders is viewed through a military lens. Much of the discussion is focused on the perceived necessity of controlling the world's supply of semiconductors, the tiny silicon chips that power the fastest and smartest computers. But the conflict has already spilled over into other realms. In that September speech, Sullivan suggested the next step would be to restrict outward-bound capital investments too. American investments, he said, must not be permitted to "enhance the technological capabilities of our competitors." Consider this a corollary to the Biden administration's more well-publicized Buy American mandates: a "Sell to Americans" rule—or, at least, a "don't sell to anyone the American government dislikes" rule. While the former mostly involves dumping billions of taxpayer dollars into questionable subsidies for semiconductors and other high-end tech manufacturing, the latter is aimed at policing how American investors and businesses spend their money. With the help of allied governments in Europe and Canada, the goal is to cut off huge swaths of global capital markets in order to curb investments in China. The approach moves U.S. trade policy from a defensive posture to an offensive one, putting the nation's economy on what amounts to a war footing. Over the past five years, America's trade war with China had targeted imports and sought to prop up domestic manufacturing in expensive and mostly ineffective ways. The new approach targets exports and investments in any technology the U.S. government deems vital to national security—a category that may be nearly limitless, given the government's propensity for stretching the limits of that term. Much of this approach is being run through a shadowy governmental entity that draws together high-ranking officials from the federal military, intelligence, and political apparatus. It creates an environment where even domestic citizens and businesses are suspect—and where outbound capital investments in foreign countries must be scrutinized for giving potential succor to the enemy. Militarized trade policy is a foolish and dangerous exercise that will further erode what remains of postwar norms about openness and free trade, boosting instead the zero-sum view that is causing more countries around the world to raise barriers to trade. If it takes hold, it will leave humanity less free and less prosperous. It might also lead to far greater calamity: If American officials are talking so openly about using economic policy as a form of military action—and thus, potentially, as acts of war—how long before other countries start taking them seriously? Trade Secrets At the center of the Biden administration's escalating war on trade and investment is a powerful government body that most Americans probably aren't aware of: the innocuously named Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Created as a purely advisory agency by President Gerald Ford in 1975, CFIUS now includes high-ranking officials from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, and State as well as the White House and the intelligence community. In 1988, amid a now-laughable panic about Japanese investors pouring money into American agriculture and industry, including the then-nascent semiconductor industry, Congress gave the committee the authority to block "mergers, acquisitions, or takeovers" of American companies by foreign investors, as long as the president signed off on the decision." Part of Congress's motivation," the Congressional Research Service explained in a February 2020 report, "arose from concerns that foreign takeovers of U.S. firms could not be stopped unless the President declared a national emergency or regulators invoked federal antitrust, environmental, or securities laws." CFIUS thus became a vehicle for sweeping, arbitrary presidential intervention into international business deals, executed under the guise of vaguely defined national security concerns. George H.W. Bush was the first president to take advantage of these powers. In 1990, he ordered the China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation to divest its acquisition of MAMCO Manufacturing, a maker of precision plastics used in aeronautical equipment. That authority would not be invoked again until 2012, when Obama blocked a Delaware-based company with Chinese subsidiaries from acquiring four American wind farms, one of which was located near a Navy base in Oregon. Four years later, he blocked a Chinese investment fund from buying AIXTRON, a Germany-based semiconductor firm that owned some American assets. Trump also invoked those powers twice. In 2017, he blocked a Chinese investment firm from buying the Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, an Oregon-based chip design company. A year later, he made a much bigger splash by blocking Broadcom's $117 billion purchase of Qualcomm, one of the leading American chip-making companies. Though China was not involved in that purchase, the specter of American fears about China's technological advancements—specifically at the telecom company Huawei—was central to the decision. Without a domestic champion for the production of 5G telecom devices, Trump wrote in his executive order blocking the purchase, "China would likely compete robustly to fill any void left by Qualcomm as a result of this hostile takeover." In a March 2018 letter announcing CFIUS' decision, a Treasury Department official underlined the reasoning: the potential merger "could pose a risk to the national security of the United States." Since its creation, CFIUS has operated inside a black box. It does not acknowledge that any specific investments are under review, and it is not required to publicly announce its decisions. In an annual report to Congress, CFIUS provides only limited details, like the number of investigations undertaken and, in broad strokes, the industries involved. Those reports show that the committee was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But as the Japanese panic subsided, so did the committee's workload. From 1993 to 2005, it reported fewer than 82 investigations each year—down from a peak of 295 in 1990, when four of those investigations eventually reached the president's desk (although Bush took action only in the MAMCO case). Lately, the previously sleepy CFIUS has been more active. It has investigated more than 600 transactions since 2017, about five times as many as it had in the five years before Trump took office. It was also granted more power. The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 broadened the committee's ability to intervene in transactions involving "critical" technology. Naturally, the committee gets to decide what counts as critical. The Biden administration is now taking CFIUS to another level. In September, just days before Sullivan's speech, Biden issued an executive order instructing CFIUS to focus more attention on supply chains. Under the new guidance, the committee is charged with reviewing transactions for national security risks in several categories, including biotechnology, quantum computing, and climate adaptation. That means the committee's authority is expanding not only in breadth but in depth. Relative to the pre-2018 status quo, it can investigate more transactions and now has the authority to follow those transactions up and down the supply chain. That executive order "puts us back ahead of the game," Sullivan said days after it was signed. That, he promised, was just the start. "Looking forward, we are making progress in formulating an approach to address outbound investments in sensitive technologies, particularly investments that…could enhance the technological capabilities of our competitors." In December, Congress and the Biden administration took the first real step toward that goal. Tucked into the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill that sped through Congress before Christmas was a provision ordering the Treasury Department to produce a report detailing how a potential outbound investment screening mechanism would work and how much it would cost. In other words, the federal government would for the first time scrutinize not just foreign investments in the U.S., but how American-based capital is invested abroad. Trade and Tradeoffs Outbound investment screening could be added to CFIUS mandate, or it could be handled by a new agency. Either way, officials are moving the plan forward." We are considering a program to restrict certain U.S. outbound investments in specific sensitive technologies with significant national security implications," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who also chairs CFIUS, said in an April 20 speech at Johns Hopkins University. Yellen framed the possible program in much the same way Sullivan had seven months earlier, as part of a broad effort to steer both exported goods and American investments away from China. While the specifics remain vague, an outbound investment screening system of any kind "would substantially widen the scope of U.S. national security controls over investments that have traditionally been regarded as purely economic objectives," a trio of researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a national security–focused think tank, warned in January. In her speech, Yellen put a finer point on it: When economic and national security interests are in tension, she argued, national security must prevail. "Even though these policies may have economic impacts," she said, referring not only to the outbound investment screening proposal but also to export controls, "they are driven by straightforward national security considerations. We will not compromise on these concerns, even when they force tradeoffs with our economic interests." This is a bipartisan impulse. Trump's aluminum and steel tariffs were enacted with a flimsy justification about how imported metals jeopardized national security. Biden has flipped that around. To qualify for subsidies included in the CHIPS and Science Act, for example, companies must pledge not to use the funds to expand operations in four countries, including China and Russia. The threat of scrutinizing private investments overseas signals another escalation. All these maneuvers represent an overarching pattern—one that Sullivan helpfully laid out in that September speech at the Capital Hilton. "We have to revisit the longstanding premise of maintaining 'relative' advantages over competitors in certain key technologies," Sullivan said. When it comes to "foundational" tech such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, he argued, America should take a more active role to impede the technological advances of potential adversaries. "We must maintain as large of a lead as possible," he concluded. That framework raises the stakes considerably. In the decades since the Cold War, America has been a leading advocate for lowering barriers to trade, in part because mutually beneficial exchanges foster peace: Nations that trade with one another have an incentive not to go to war. At its core, then, the argument for free trade requires separating the prosperity-generating economic sector from the zero-sum thinking that governs much of the rest of geopolitics. But the Biden administration is building on the Trump administration's attempts to blur that line. Some former Trump administration officials are giving cover to the effort. In an October interview with The New York Times, the Trump-era national security adviser Matt Pottinger not only echoed Sullivan's framing of the U.S.-China relationship as one where America must maintain "as large of a lead as possible" but argued that doing so will mean actively inhibiting China's technological advancement. "The Biden administration understands now that it isn't enough for America to run faster—we need to actively hamper the [People's Republic of China]'s ambitions for tech dominance," Pottinger said. "This marks a serious evolution in the administration's thinking." For such officials, it is no longer enough for trade to make America more prosperous. They think it's at least equally important to prevent certain other countries from prospering too. It's an inherently militaristic outlook, one that views the entire global economy as part of a battlefield. Export Chokepoints We tend to think about global trade in terms of physical stuff: container ships and the cargo they carry, from T-shirts to iPhones. Exports and imports are tangible things, easily conceptualized and counted. As a result, we also tend to think about restrictions on trade as being policies that stop the exchange of those physical goods—or, as with tariffs, that make it more difficult or expensive to move items across borders. But in reality, there are three broad layers to the network of global trade that has made the world so prosperous in recent decades. Finished products and their component parts are the top, the most "seen" part. Below that is trade in the raw materials and equipment necessary to produce those finished goods. At the base are the capital investments that support the expansion of industry in places where it previously did not exist. For the first several years of America's trade war with China, almost all the action was focused on the top layer: Trump's tariffs, for example. Both Trump and Biden have also made aggressive use of the Commerce Department's so-called entity list, a collection of foreign businesses and nonprofits (including some universities) that are forbidden from buying certain items from American firms without special permission from the federal government. The Trump administration added dozens of companies to the list; the Chinese telecom manufacturer Huawei was perhaps the most high-profile example. The list has continued to grow under Biden. Since December 2022, more than 40 Chinese companies have been added to the do-not-export list. One of the most significant additions was Yangtze Memory Technologies, a leading Chinese semiconductor manufacturer. On March 23, another 14 Chinese firms were added to a separate Commerce Department list of "unverified" companies to which exports can be blocked unless the foreign companies agree to allow American inspections of their facilities. "Enforcing our export controls is a crucial part of protecting American national security," U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves declared in a statement announcing that action. "We are committed to using all of the tools at our disposal to establish how advanced US technology is being used around the globe." In keeping with that strategy, Washington has sought to expand the conflict into the two other layers of the global trading system. In 2018, for example, the Trump administration successfully lobbied the Dutch government to prevent ASML, a Netherlands-based firm that is the world's leading supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, from selling its products to Chinese chip manufacturers. Shortly before leaving office, Trump placed China's top semiconductor manufacturing firm, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, on the entity list, effectively banning any American company from selling to it as well. Sullivan's September talk about the geopolitical power of export controls was a signal of the perceived success of those actions. In October, the Biden administration doubled down by issuing new rules aiming to block China's access to semiconductor manufacturing equipment, component parts of that equipment, and any design software that might be used to build that equipment or advanced, artificial intelligence–capable chips. "With the new policy…the United States is firmly focused on retaining control over so-called 'chokepoint' (or as it is sometimes translated from Chinese 'stranglehold') technologies in the global semiconductor technology supply chain," writes Gregory C. Allen, a senior fellow at the CSIS. "In doing so, these actions demonstrate an unprecedented degree of U.S. government intervention to not only preserve chokepoint control but also begin a new U.S. policy of actively strangling large segments of the Chinese technology industry—strangling with an intent to kill." The final step seems obvious. Having targeted the global trade in semiconductors and the exchange of semiconductor-making equipment and know-how, the administration is now cranking up an investment-screening system that targets the lowest level of the trading system. America is both joining and reinforcing a global trend. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 63 percent of global investments were subject to a screening process last year, up from 52 percent in 2020. More such mechanisms are in the works. In the European Union, six member states set up new investment screening regimes last year and three other countries tightened existing rules, according to The Economist. Both the Netherlands and Canada have announced plans for investment-review schemes similar to CFIUS and could have them running by the end of this year. But if America implements an outbound investment screening system, it will join a much smaller group. According to the CSIS, only South Korea and Taiwan currently have similar mechanisms. (Taiwan's program is narrowly focused only on investments in China, a more understandable arrangement given the historical tensions between the island and the mainland.) A January analysis of Washington's proposed screening system found it could cover 43 percent of American investment in China. "In addition to slowing new investment, a new regime could also pressure US businesses to reassess existing operations in China because of potential effects on revenue, profits, and market share," reported the Rhodium Group, an economic think tank focused on U.S.-China policy. "The proposed mechanism could accelerate the already visible shift in US-China investment relations away from 'active' channels (long-term direct investment) toward more 'passive' channels (securities investment and the sourcing of non-sensitive inputs)." These new barriers will likely change how investments flow around the globe. In prioritizing national security above all, America might be willfully cutting off the fuel that powers the engine of global trade. In December, as the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world's leading chipmaker, announced the installation of its equipment in a new fabrication plant in Arizona, company founder Morris Chang offered a bleak assessment of the global semiconductor trade. "Globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead," he said. "A lot of people still wish they would come back. But I don't think they will be back." 'A Commercial Police State' Sullivan's September remarks showed that the administration wants to wipe away the key distinction between economic issues and national security ones—at least for certain technologies. A more recent speech, delivered at the Brookings Institution on April 27, offered an even more chilling view of the future." This moment demands that we forge a new consensus," Sullivan said, sweeping aside what he said was an imperfect postwar norm of free trade and economic liberalization. That new consensus would reflect what Sullivan called Biden's "core commitment—indeed, his daily direction to us—to more deeply integrate domestic policy and foreign policy." That vision goes well beyond export controls and outbound investment screening systems. It includes the giant semiconductor subsidies in the CHIPS Act, and the more aggressive use of export controls such as the Commerce Department's entity list. Above all, it means a greater conflation of private economic issues with the geopolitical scramble for power. "A modern American industrial strategy," Sullivan explained, "identifies specific sectors that are foundational to economic growth, strategic from a national security perspective, and where private industry on its own isn't poised to make the investments needed to secure our national ambitions." In short: If it produces profit, if it matters to the military, or if it has any vague connection to the still-more-vague notion of America's "national ambitions," the government gets to decide whether it can be bought, sold, or supported with private investments. If there's a silver lining to all this, it's the same one that hides inside any proposal to expand government: It's tough to get the specifics right. "In order for such restrictions to succeed, the United States would have to become a commercial police state on an unprecedented scale," wrote Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), in a March article for Foreign Policy. "The United States would also have to monitor and prevent its own headquartered companies from moving activities abroad. Washington has done this, on a limited scale, on specific technology transfers. But scale matters, and current proposals would be an order of magnitude more ambitious and thus infeasible." After Yellen's and Sullivan's April speeches failed to offer much in the way of specifics about how the outbound investment screening tool would operate, some observers suggested there may not be a clear path forward. "The fact that they left the description of these tools vague seemed to reflect that the administration is having a challenging time balancing the planned restrictions against the concerns of a private sector that continues to have a stake in Chinese investments," wrote Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow with the PIIE. "The vision advertised is bold, but its ultimate success is in question," wrote Mireya Solís, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings. She suggested that Biden's decision to rely heavily on executive orders to impose this new "international economic strategy" would leave Congress as well as the private sector feeling marginalized. Congress might get involved, but it's unlikely to stand in the way. In early May, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) reportedly tasked Democratic committee chairs to begin working on what he called a "China competition bill." There's likely to be plenty of interest on the other side of the aisle too. "If one of the bigger things we did over the last four years was beef up CFIUS process to more closely scrutinize Chinese investment in the United States, I think the next phase of that is going to be looking at capital flows from America to China," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wisc.) told Semafor in January. Any congressional effort is likely to build upon a 2021 proposal by Sens. Bob Casey (D–Penn.) and John Cornyn (R–Texas), who authored a bill to create an outbound investment screening program similar to what the Treasury Department is now contemplating. A bipartisan group in the House introduced a new version of that legislation in early May. The bill calls for a new committee that looks a lot like the existing CFIUS—drawing together leaders of the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, and Labor, along with intelligence officials—to block foreign investments. The lawmakers frame the effort as a way to prevent outsourcing, and their bill quickly scored an endorsement from Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO. This rush to create yet another executive-branch black box with poorly defined powers over how American companies and individuals spend their money abroad deserves more scrutiny than it is likely to receive. By restricting trade, we are hurting not just others but ourselves. At the group's annual China Business Conference on May 10, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Suzanne Clark spoke directly to the potential dangers of this rush to stigmatize American investment in China as a national security risk. "We must safeguard our national security and our values," she said, stressing that being asked to pick between them is a "false binary." "Transactions that don't pose a threat to national security strengthen the U.S. economy, present opportunities for small businesses, and improve the standard of living for millions of Americans," Clark said. "If we treat every economic transaction as a risk, we lose focus on areas that truly pose a threat." It's been more than five years since Trump's infamous declaration that "trade wars are good and easy to win." It turns out that trade wars are easy—to start and to escalate. But not to win. Biden has maintained Trump's tariffs and now seems poised to expand the trade war, a strategy that carries real risks. The current approach requires a complex mix of interventions in the form of subsidies for domestic technology manufacturing and policing of global supply chains. It is built on the assumption that government officials will make the right calls about which economic issues count as a clear "national security" concerns, unmuddied by the inevitable campaigns to influence their decisions. It also assumes that future presidents, possibly including Trump, will staff those positions with competent and clear-eyed officials too. Do you really want to take those odds? The people pushing this "new consensus" also make a dangerous assumption about geopolitics. In trying to wall off investment in China, the White House is giving countries an incentive to build more barriers to trade and investment around the world—and not all of the new rules will be oriented as America desires. A zero-sum global economy will leave many people worse off, and it will raise the stakes for conflict over the scarce resources being jealously guarded behind national borders. Trade has long been an engine for global economic growth and a way to help keep the peace between nations. In trying to turn it into an exercise in military might, Biden and his enablers in Congress risk turning what should be an engine of peace into an engine of war.The post When Trade War Threatens Real War appeared first on Reason.com.

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For about two months during the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden’s advisers noticed that he seemed enthralled by Larry Summers. Biden casually referred to the former Democratic treasury secretary and Harvard University president as “Lar,” spoke to him about once a week and appeared to treat him with a degree of deference he gave few others, according to two people’s recollections. On at least one occasion, Summers suggested edits to a speech Biden gave, and he raised concerns about an internal campaign proposal to back protections for consumers cheated during covid, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions. The proposal was shelved.

The bonhomie has not always lasted. For two years, White House officials and Summers have often been on opposite sides in one of the most important debates in economics: what caused inflation, and how to rein it in. The dispute matters not just for the reputations of squabbling economists, but for the future of Democratic policymaking. As inflation has plummeted while unemployment remains low, the president’s allies see not just a strong run of economic data but a new model for policymakers — proof of what is possible if the government is willing to be aggressive in fighting downturns.

Summers is the most prominent expert who disagrees. He blasted the administration’s $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus law, the American Rescue Plan, for exacerbating inflation, arguing through 2022 that the U.S. economy would probably need a spike in unemployment for price hikes to fully abate and accusing President Biden’s team of the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years. Biden’s economic policies had overstimulated the economy, Summers said on cable TV, in op-eds and in interviews, as well as in private talks. And he maintained it would almost certainly take a major slowdown — and millions of lost jobs — for inflation to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. (Summers said he did not want to see a rise in unemployment, just that it was likely.)

Increasingly, that prediction looks unlikely to be right. Inflation has dropped from 9 percent to 3.2 percent with no discernible jump in unemployment, fueling optimism inside the White House that a “soft landing” is possible for the economy.

Biden last year instinctively rejected the notion pushed by Summers that taming inflation would require policies that would throw millions of people out of work, according to five people familiar with the president’s private remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect the conversations. The president’s allies are newly optimistic the brightening economic mood will further discredit the notion that a recession is necessary to tame inflation.

Despite the disagreement, senior White House aides still talk to Summers frequently and routinely seek his input. Summers has been to the White House several times this year alone, even as he continues to publicly hammer Biden’s industrial policy, student loan forgiveness and other economic programs.

“Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree, but there’s strong mutual respect, and we always welcome Larry’s insights,” said Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Along with other centrist economists, Summers says inflation remains dangerously high, warning it could reaccelerate. The latest inflation report shows prices rising by 3.2 percent in July relative to one year ago, but a less volatile measure of price increases is still at 4.7 percent. The labor market remains strong not because Biden has defied the laws of economic reality, according to Summers, but because the battle against inflation is still far from won. Summers maintains the rescue plan sparked inflation that is at risk of becoming “entrenched” — a long-term problem for consumers and businesses.

“I don’t think anybody should reach any definitive judgments until we see how things play out,” Summers said in an interview. Summers said his predictions were based on standard macroeconomic models, and not meant to be interpreted as precise estimates. “The idea that bringing down inflation has nothing to do with increasing unemployment runs different from all conventional macroeconomic assessments.”

Publicly, the party’s officials continue to defend the rescue plan as necessary to grow the economy after the recession caused by covid. Privately, many Democratic lawmakers are ambivalent about the legacy of the bill, after punishing price hikes and the GOP attacks that followed. If inflation keeps easing while job growth remains robust — in defiance of Summers’s predictions — that would bolster the rescue plan’s defenders, as would a successful Biden 2024 reelection campaign.

“The Democratic Party is currently split between people who thought the American Rescue Plan was appropriately sized and absolutely necessary — and those who think it was too big and had collateral effects that were quite damaging,” said Bill Galston, a policy analyst at the D.C.-based Brookings Institution who served in the Clinton administration. “This is a moral question, but it’s also a political question. If Joe Biden loses the election principally because of economic discontent over inflation and high prices, then a lot of Democrats will conclude it was not worth it.”

A top aide to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Summers had a large platform to criticize the law, warning as it was passing that it was too big and could spark runaway inflation.

White House aides downplayed that possibility, and once the inflation Summers predicted did emerge, they insisted that it would only be “transitory.” When that proved untrue, the president lashed out at his staff and repeatedly contacted Summers, who was also central to the White House’s efforts to persuade Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) to back the Inflation Reduction Act, which Summers supported despite his qualms about the 2021 law.

But Summers has also made predictions that still do not appear to have been borne out, at least not yet. In a June 2022 speech at the London School of Economics, when inflation was at its 9.1 percent peak, Summers said the nation would “need” substantially higher levels of unemployment for inflation to come down.

“We need five years of unemployment above 5 percent to contain inflation — in other words, we need two years of 7.5 percent unemployment or five years of 6 percent unemployment or one year of 10 percent unemployment,” Summers said, later clarifying to Slate he was not “advocating increases in unemployment as a strategy.”

That same month, Summers and a co-author wrote that reducing job vacancies by 20 percent “requires, on average” a three percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The number of job openings has fallen about 16 percent with no discernible jump in unemployment.

In September 2022, Summers reiterated the point to Fortune: “I’m not sure you’re restraining inflation until you get the unemployment rate close to 5 percent, and to significantly restrain inflation you’re likely to need unemployment for some period at 6 percent.” The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent then and is the same level now.

In more recent interviews, Summers has defended his estimates by pointing out that inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target. In particular, Summers emphasizes that it was always the case that transitory factors — such as soaring gas prices — pushed inflation up higher, to closer to 8 percent, but that the more stable “underlying” inflation was closer to 4.5 percent.

Even with lower overall inflation, Summers argues, underlying inflation remains largely unchanged — though the decline in transitory prices makes the problem appear to be going away.

“I think it’s fair to say — given how hot the economy is — the inflation performance at this point is better than I think many standard models would have predicted,” Summers said. “But I don’t think that all establishes we’re on a confident glide path to 2 percent with current rates of unemployment.”

Olivier Blanchard, who served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, agreed that the unemployment rate needs to be higher to “eliminate overheating” in the labor market that is pushing prices up. “With very high probability, we need an increase in unemployment to get inflation fully under control,” Blanchard said in an email. Jason Furman, a former Obama administration economist and a Harvard colleague of Summers who predicted unemployment would reach 6.5 percent to get to 2 percent inflation, said that “literally nothing in the data would cause you to reject” that view.

More liberal economists argued that Summers misdiagnosed the cause of higher inflation, and therefore missed the cure. These economists contend that price spikes were overwhelmingly caused by supply chain disruptions, including lingering shocks from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, not by too much government stimulus. As supply chains have normalized, so too has inflation.

One White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe Biden aides’ thinking, said some economic forecasters gave too much weight to excessive stimulus as the cause of inflation, missing other factors, such as a temporary covid-driven shift in consumer purchasing behavior. These forecasters also incorrectly anticipated that the decline in the number of workers would be permanent, which hasn’t been true either, the White House official said.

Skanda Amarnath, executive director of the left-leaning think tank Employ America, emphasized that inflation is “now broadly decelerating,” not just in some idiosyncratic or transitory factors such as energy and used cars but across a large range of categories — household furnishings, technological equipment, wages, legal and professional services, and more.

“Larry was very blunt: He said the only way to get it down was a very high period of unemployment. We are clearly not seeing that,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, another left-leaning think tank. Lindsay Owens, executive director of the left-leaning Groundwork Collaborative, was even more direct: “It’s time for Democrats to turn the page on Summers for good.”

Having been wrong about inflation’s rise, White House officials are now wary of too aggressively celebrating its fall. Biden is quick to emphasize in his speeches that the job is not yet done. And despite their diverging predictions, Summers remains in close contact with numerous senior White House officials, who contacted him during this year’s regional banking crisis and the debt ceiling standoff with congressional Republicans, the White House official said.

But that doesn’t mean Biden and his aides are pulling their punches entirely.

“Remember when the experts said that to get inflation under control we needed to lower wages, and drive up unemployment? I never bought that,” Biden tweeted on July 20. “Instead, I focused on getting more Americans into the workforce, fixing our broken supply chains, and lowering costs.”

Summers remains unconvinced about the rescue plan, pointing to substantial “unhappiness in the middle class about the state of the economy” over the last two years, mostly driven by inflation.

But, he added: “If a soft landing is achieved — with inflation coming down to normal levels where it’s not a major concern, without an increase in unemployment — this is all going to look much better than it does … Nobody can know with confidence what the answer is going to be.”

Green Party activists are generally excited about the prospect of West's nomination

While realistic of his chances in the 2024 election, they are hopeful he will shape the presidential debate

Both party members and West have rejected the "lie" that a strong Green candidate could rob Joe Biden of votes

Early in June, Cornel West, an academic and civil rights activist, who has been an unflinching critic of leading political figures, announced his candidacy for president—first under the People's Party banner, before seeking the endorsement of the Green Party.

Party members who spoke to Newsweek said that, though a nominee will not be chosen until a convention is held next year, activists are already excited by the prospect. But support for West is not unanimous, with fringe debates from across the political spectrum influencing some views of the candidate.

Hopeful that his voice will shape the election debate and Joe Biden's message, they remain realistic about his chances of sitting in the Oval Office, critical of an electoral system they feel is set against third-party candidates.

West's candidacy for a party that is viewed as predominantly focussing on environmental issues may raise a few eyebrows, but members argue that the party stands for much more than stopping climate change—and have no qualms with West campaigning on issues important to him.

Photo-illustration of Cornel West pictured at the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal Award Ceremony at Harvard University on October 11, 2018, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo-illustration by Newsweek; Source photos by Paul Marotta/Getty

"Cornel West definitely knows what has to be done, and will focus on that," David Mulinix, co-chair of the Green Party in Hawaii, said. "He has a life history of walking his talk."

A charismatic orator and impassioned speaker, the philosopher is already reportedly stirring worries from some in the Democratic Party who are fearful he may draw votes away from an incumbent president who has struggled in recent years with public speaking.

But Green Party activists in states where presidential candidates have previously performed well strongly refuted the idea that they could split the left vote, describing it as a "lie" to induce tactical voting, and arguing that a strong third-party candidate can entice people to vote who otherwise would not.

Who is Cornel West?

A professor of philosophy at Princeton and Union Theological Seminary, an author of 20 books and a hip hop artist, West, 70, grew up watching the civil rights movement unfold in real-time and has proved an outspoken—if at times provocative—proponent of racial equality and socialist ideals.

In his 2004 book Democracy Matters, he argued that 9/11 "gave white Americans a glimpse of what it means to be a black person in the United States," and after initially supporting Barack Obama's presidential bid, in a 2012 interview described the first African American president as "a Rockefeller Republican in blackface."

West has also previously called Donald Trump a "neo-fascist" and Biden a "milk toast neoliberal," but has said he did not harbor hate for either.

Announcing his presidential bid, West said: "I care about the quality of your life, I care about whether you have access to a job with a living wage, decent housing, women having control over their bodies, healthcare for all, the escalating destruction of the planet, the destruction of American democracy."

"He's someone who has an established reputation and who is respected in the Green Party," Ken Adams, Oregon Green Party treasurer, said. "I just feel that this is something that's going to get people a little bit more energized."

He compared West to Ralph Nader, the Green Party's candidate in 1996 and 2000—the latter of which he won 2.74 percent of the vote—whose campaign Adams worked on in California, adding that the younger generation in the golden state "seem to be excited about the possibility" of his nomination.

"I don't know anyone who isn't excited about it," said Mulinix. "It's a win-win for everyone."

"Cornel is kind of the epitome of what the Green Party stands for, and he does it with love and compassion," Jacqui Deveneau, a long-time Green Party member in Maine, said. "For me and for the majority of us that have been building this party for years, he is definitely somebody [who] we would want to have as our nominee."

For Nathalie Paravicini, co-chair of the Oregon party's coordinating committee, West's candidacy is positive because "when you have a high-profile person, then the media really covers you more, and then we can get that alternative view that there is a new, different world [that] is possible out."

But there is some opposition to West within the party. In an email sent to Paravicini and Newsweek, Chuck Fall, another coordinating committee member in Oregon, wrote that "one serious problem West must resolve" was "his sanguine attitude towards Dr. [Anthony] Fauci."

He added: "West needs to revisit his position on the truth about the federal Covid response, the origins of SARS Cov2 and the alleged 'safety and effectiveness' of the MRNA vaccine technology."

Cornell West among protesters against police violence during a march in Manhattan on April 14, 2015, in New York City. He has proved an outspoken—if at times provocative—proponent of racial equality. Tony Savino/Corbis via Getty Images

The origins of the coronavirus pandemic and the safety of the jab have been the subject of ongoing conspiracy theories. While medical professionals have overwhelmingly affirmed the safety of the vaccine, the true origins of the virus remain a matter of debate.

Newsweek approached the West campaign via email for comment on Thursday.

In a response seen by Newsweek, Bob Zanhiser, a further committee member, told Fall: "The fact Cornel West isn't an anti-vax fanatic doesn't disqualify him in my eyes, or in the eyes of most Greens who do not share your bias."

"He's somewhat problematic in his opinions about things," Adams said. "I kind of tend to disregard what he says altogether."

Platform or Personal Policy?

While West is a prominent figure on the left, climate change has hardly been the main focus of his life's work. On his campaign website, "saving the planet" is listed as third of three key policies, where he calls for a resurrection of the Green New Deal and a shift to renewable energy.

But asked whether there were any worries West might use the party as a platform for issues close to his own heart, activists are unfazed.

"The Green Party is not just about environmental conservation," Paravicini said, adding that it "is also fundamentally about non-violence—particularly the huge militarization of so many economies—and the Green Party stands very strongly for social justice. And in that respect, Cornel West is, like, the perfect candidate.

"There are few people out there who have walked the walk in terms of social justice, grassroots democracy, speaking truth to power than Cornel West."

"Cornel really speaks to a lot of the issues that I find important," Adams commented. "I do see a lot of racism, and I've lived in different parts of the country and I've seen this play out—and I really think the country needs to address these issues."

He added that the candidate will usually "set the tone" of the campaign, and suggested local parties run candidates that "emphasize the issues that are important in those areas." But he also stressed the Green Party is "not just environmental."

Splitting the Left Vote?

An accusation that is often leveled at third parties is that they will cost their larger counterparts votes and, potentially, an election. This was said of Nader—and is already being said of West.

David Axelrod, the former Obama campaign strategist, tweeted in July that Jill Stein, the Green Party's candidate in 2016, who received one percent of the national vote, played an "outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump" and that West "could easily do it again."

But this is an assertion both West and party activists have denied. West told The Atlantic in July: "I would say that most of the people who vote for me would not have voted for Biden. They would have probably stayed home."

"Forty percent of voters are independent voters—they don't want to be part of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party," Mulinix said. "If there was a really good candidate that those voters would be attracted to, they will come out and vote. Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader—they brought millions of new voters into the system."

U.S. philosopher and activist Cornel West addresses a rally for then-Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire on February 10, 2020. Green Party activists suggested West could have the same pull with voters as Sanders did. JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images

He added: "If Cornel West gets a fair shot and he gets whatever-million votes he gets, he'll have earned those votes. And if they're not gained by Joe Biden, well he didn't earn those votes and that's on him."

Deveneau, meanwhile, argued the spoiler argument was a "lie" on the part of Democrats, noting: "We have run a presidential candidate every single [election] and there's been Clinton and there's been Biden and there's been Obama."

She added of the 2016 election: "Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, and the popular vote is the only thing the Green Party can affect."

Newsweek approached the Biden campaign via email for comment on Thursday.

West in the West Wing?

The last time a third-party candidate won second place in a presidential race was in 1912 when already two-term president Theodore Roosevelt split with the Republican Party and formed the Progressive Party.

The last time one won the presidency was even further back, in 1864, when the incumbent president Abraham Lincoln ran under the National Union Party, comprising of Democrats and Republicans, during the American Civil War.

These may be slim historical pickings, but Green Party members are hopeful but not expectant. Noting Lincoln's 1864 win, Mulinix said: "It has happened before in the past; it can happen again. So if Cornel West sticks to what he has been talking about for decades and focuses on that, he has a good chance of [having] a good showing nationwide."

But, he added, "The system is set up to destroy third-party candidates."

This is a sentiment shared by others in the Green Party. "In the United States, the electoral system is extremely difficult to break through, it's a two-party system that's extremely ingrained," Paravicini said.

Even though a vision of West sitting in the Oval Office may be an elusive one, party members hope his candidacy will help shape the 2024 debate.

"He'll get more noticed. People in the media will be covering him, and so his statements will have an impact," Adams said. He added: "I think he'll outperform Jill Stein and some of the others we've had over the last few years, and I think that won't even be a question."

"If there's no threat to the Democratic Party or to Biden, he's just going to do what he's doing," Mulinix remarked, suggesting West "could have a major impact." He added: "We need to scare these guys, they need a scare."

Paravicini said she was "optimistic and hopeful that some things are going to change" but "not unrealistic either." However, she said she could see the Green Party moving "being considered a spoiler to being an actual political force in the United States."

The Barbie movie has been this summer's biggest blockbuster, racing towards $1 billion in global ticket sales and reigniting age-old debates about what Barbie, the famous doll, means to American culture, the patriarchy, and feminism. But this Barbie is an economist too. And she can also illustrate how average Americans are significantly more prosperous today than they were a few generations ago—despite the arguments made by populists on both the right and left. Thanks to Jeremy Horpedahl, an economist at the University of Central Arkansas, we have what you might call the Barbie Price Index, which shows that the amount of work necessary to buy a single new Barbie has fallen quite a bit since the doll was introduced. Today, the average American woman has to work about 30 minutes to afford a Barbie. That's down from nearly two hours in 1959.  Working mothers today can buy 3-4 times as many Barbies for their daughters as their counterparts in 1959 could buyhttps://t.co/bX2NbS2XjK pic.twitter.com/vLxZ7mhupA — Jeremy Horpedahl ????‍ (@jmhorp) August 9, 2023    "Another way of thinking about it: with the same amount of work, a working mother today could buy her daughter 3-4 times as many Barbies as her counterpart in 1959," Horpedahl notes at Economists Writing Every Day, an economics blog. On one hand, the decline in the Barbie Price Index shows how much women's wages have grown in the past six-and-half decades. While women are still paid less than men, on average, the gap has closed considerably—and effectively vanishes once other lifestyle factors are taken into account. But it also demonstrates something about the relative level of prosperity that today's Barbie-loving kids get to enjoy—and about the amount of work their parents have to do to deliver it. It has become fashionable on the populist right to complain about stagnating male wages and a supposedly declining standard of living. Oren Cass, executive director of the right-wing think tank American Compass, published a "Cost-of-Thriving Index" earlier this year, claiming that the basic necessities for a middle-class lifestyle were no longer within reach for households relying on a single breadwinner. It would take 62 weeks of earnings—more than a full year—to pay for a year's worth of groceries, a home, health insurance for a family, a car, and to save for a child's college education, he argues. That's up from just 40 weeks' worth of earnings in 1985. The study has some serious flaws, as Horpedahl and Scott Winship, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, have detailed at length. Chief among those problems is that Cass' analysis does not take into account taxes and various family-oriented subsidies delivered via the tax code. With those included, the so-called "cost of thriving" for families with a single male breadwinner has actually fallen since 1985. But Cass' study also ignores the crucial role that women now play in the work force and in earning income to support their families. Including them in the overall assessment means that the cost of thriving has fallen by about 7 weeks since 1985, in part because women have seen bigger gains in earnings during recent decades. Horpedahl tells Reason that the Barbie Price Index also demonstrates something else about the changing cost of an average American life. "It's easier to make manufactured toys cheaper than it is to make personal services cheaper," he says. "But even including the costs of all goods and services, the gains for women have been substantial." Indeed, it is much easier to take advantage of economies of scale and cheaper labor markets to make plastic dolls than it is to provide essential services like health care and education. Even so, the falling costs of all the stuff that we buy—the physical necessities and the luxuries—in recent decades is something worth noting and celebrating. Life in modern America might not be as fantastic as living in Barbie Land. But it sure beats the America of the past. The post Barbie Girls Now Live in a Much Wealthier Barbie World appeared first on Reason.com.

“I feel somehow / That it isn’t going to last,” Philip Larkin wrote in “Going, Going,” his lament for the English countryside — that development would soon cover everything green and pleasant on his isle:

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

Larkin wrote these words in 1972. On the basis of a trip through England and Scotland in summer 2023 I can report that his fears were premature. British conservatism, of which Larkin was an eccentric representative, has always had a stronger conservationist streak than its American cousin. And the greener sort of Toryism can take pride in the landscape of its island home: the greenbelts encircling the major cities, the compact and ancient-looking towns, the country lanes still made for carriages, even if you’re allowed to squeeze a minivan through.

Unfortunately this preservation has a stink of embalmment about it. At a time when Europe as a whole looks stagnant relative to the United States, Britain has joined Italy as the continent’s sickest patient: its living standards falling well behind its neighbors, its economy stuck in a 15-year torpor, and its public services, including the vaunted National Health Service, in a condition of generally acknowledged decay.

The Conservative Party, in power for most of this period, is often blamed for backing post-financial crisis austerity and lurching into Brexit. But the deeper problem is the Tories’ imprisonment by a dispositional rather than ideological conservatism — the fact that their base is older, propertied and seemingly content to preserve Larkin’s beloved landscape by making it impossible to build or develop anywhere.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekHow should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos? (See any and all items below for context, and feel free to construe the question broadly or to focus on anything related to it.)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteIn the September 2023 issue of The Atlantic, my colleague Graeme Wood profiles Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonymous illiberal philosopher who has gained a cult following on the ideological right while mixing “ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece.” Many people understandably believe that his self-published manifesto ought to be taboo. Might successfully maintaining such a taboo safeguard liberal society from those who seek to end it?BAP’s rise has been especially upsetting to some of the academics who worked with him as a graduate student. Here is a passage from Graeme’s article in which Professor Bryan Garsten, speaking at a conference of political philosophers, laments the seductions of illiberalism and wonders if he could have done more to arrest them:
Garsten told his listeners that they—he—may have failed to cultivate students’ imagination. His illiberal students, Garsten said, had learned why the Greeks admired Achilles, the fiery warrior. But they neglected the Greeks’ admiration for Ulysses, a subtler and greater model of manhood. Ulysses’s greatness emerged not from his rejection of this world, but from his mastery of its constraints. He owed myriad debts to those around him: to his men, to his son, to his wife. The students romanticized the tyrant, while assuming that liberalism bred sloth and laziness. “Life in a liberal democracy is full of demanding moments,” Garsten said … I had the impression that he was addressing BAP apostrophically, delivering a warning he wished he had delivered in person. “As far as I have read, life under tyrants is full of lassitude, selfishness, duplicity, betrayal.”
Listening to discussions like that one, Graeme sensed “the stirrings of dormant liberal passions—as if the mere invocation of BAPism, after many years ignored, had inspired a counteroffensive.”He wrote:
Another political theorist, a former Marine and a Brookings Institution scholar named William A. Galston, piped up to remind everyone that when liberalism had come under mortal threat in the Pacific theater, “Americans as a whole found it in themselves to do something.” Specifically, his fellow Marines charged, shot, and bayoneted their way from island to island until illiberalism, in the form of Japanese fascism, begged them for mercy. “Is there really an opposition between the open society and the virtue of courage?” Galston asked.
The defeat of imperial Japan illustrated the point nicely, I thought. But it also raised a much stranger question, about how liberals acquired such a reputation for sissydom in the first place.
The Battle of Iwo Jima wasn’t that long ago.
As Graeme concludes his article, he winds up arguing not that BAP’s work ought to be shunned or ignored, but that the impulse to confront and rebut its ideas is overdue and good for liberalism.He writes:
Liberalism’s victory had been so overwhelming that for generations it grew soft, flabby, and unaccustomed to the hard work of defending itself from a vigorous challenger. As such challengers left universities and newspapers, those institutions became self-congratulatory monocultures, inhospitable even to conservatives far less nutty than BAP. By now, a ranting nudist [Bronze Age Pervert] poses a real danger—of poisoning politics, splitting apart societies, and persuading otherwise talented people to spurn the modern world’s greatest achievements, which are peace, tolerance, and prosperity …
Allan Bloom predicted doom for liberalism when these challenges disappeared … An unchallenged liberal democrat, he argued, ceases to want to improve, unless he confronts his enemies in their most potent forms. Those forms will shock and humble us, he wrote … I have come to think of BAP’s performances in immunological terms: a gnarly virus that had lain dormant for decades in circles of philosophers and their unread books. Now that it’s loose in the human population, it is a vicious kick to the liberal immune system. And that is not entirely bad. Unchallenged, liberalism’s defenses waned, and liberals forgot, temporarily, why their cause was worth defending. The antibodies are stirring.
Taboos in the Internet EraWhat should happen when a public intellectual is revealed to have published virulently racist, flagrantly white-supremacist articles under a pseudonym? I pose the question as someone who values maintaining the taboo against such things. Does it matter how long ago the deplorable views were published or how young their author was at the time? What if he purports to disavow or renounce some of those views? What if he has also written racist things more recently under his own name? Can his new account be trusted? When is forgiveness or redemption appropriate? Who should be able to extend or deny it? What incentives best serve society?These are among the questions a corner of the internet is debating thanks to a specific public intellectual’s deeds. Because his case is eliciting such diametrically opposed reactions from observers I follow, and because the writer’s work more generally is often too trolly for my earnest taste, I suspect that focusing on his case in particular will be less constructive for our purposes than asking what general rules we ought to apply when such situations arise. Here are a few more questions: Should a forthcoming book by such a person be judged solely on its words, or should the author’s outside actions color its reception? If the book were pulled from publication, a course that some of the author’s critics favor but that shows no sign of happening, would more or fewer people read it (assuming it was self-published like Bronze Age Mindset, or picked up by a less mainstream publisher)? Should that bear on the publisher’s decision?Book ReportThe free-expression advocates at PEN America have published a report titled “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” It argues that insofar as advocates of an open society stand for “the principle that books should be as widely available as possible,” their concern must extend “not just to government book banning but also to how the literary community governs itself.” In major publishing houses, an introductory statement frets, “staffers have increasingly expressed opposition to specific book contracts with writers whom they allege to be promoting forms of harm, in some cases going so far as to demand that contracts be nullified.”More broadly, PEN America warns:
Some readers, writers, and critics are pushing to draw new lines around what types of books, tropes, and narrative conventions should be seen as permissible and who has the legitimacy, authority, or “right” to write certain stories. At one extreme, some critics are calling for an identity-essentialist approach to literature, holding that writers can only responsibly tell the stories that relate to their own identity and experiences. This approach is incompatible with the freedom to imagine that is essential to the creation of literature, and it denies readers the opportunity to experience stories through the eyes of writers offering varied and distinctive lenses.
These critics have argued that “problematic” books or authors deserve special censure from the literary world—with “problematic” being a catchall term ranging from an author accused of committing a crime to one who relies on lazy narrative conventions. Fiction that is regarded as employing stereotypes, outdated tropes, or unrealistic character sketches may be described as threatening “harm” or being “dangerous.” In the past several years, books deemed problematic due to their authorship, their content, or both have been subjected to boycotts, calls for withdrawals, and harassment of their authors. Some have argued that merely to read the book is to become complicit in its alleged harms. While proponents of these arguments are, of course, free to make them, such arguments risk laying the groundwork for, and justifying, the ostracism of authors and ideas and the narrowing of literary freedom writ large.
In The Atlantic, George Packer contrasts this recent report with a bygone report that the same organization published on a different subject:
In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.
The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Is there a contradiction between the two?
PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief executive officer, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published.
In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.
Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Provocation of the WeekIn The Atlantic, the writer and onetime feminist blogger Jill Filipovic revisits her bygone support for trigger warnings:
I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.
Feminist writers were trying to make our little corner of the internet a gentler place, while also giving appropriate recognition to appallingly common female experiences that had been pushed into the shadows. To some extent, those efforts worked. But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?
Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011 …
Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control … A person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling … To help people build resilience, we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.
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Credit where credit is due: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) may be a self-described democratic socialist, but when it comes to the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) overregulation of sunscreen—a nontrivial issue—she sounds a lot like a libertarian. In a recent TikTok video, AOC interviewed esthetician Charlotte Palermino about the abysmally limited sunscreen options in the United States. "U.S. sunscreen regulations are not necessarily making us more safe," explains Palermino. And AOC agrees:  US sunscreens are far behind the rest of the world and our regulations aren't necessarily making our sunscreens better or safer — but it doesn't have to be this way! pic.twitter.com/vaZXpZ2a7S — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) August 11, 2023  AOC is calling out a very real problem. Sunscreen is regulated like a drug, which means the product is subject to byzantine FDA regulations that have largely thwarted innovation in the category for the last 20 years. As the economist Alex Tabarrok has pointed out, European and Asian countries enjoy vastly superior options. "Suncreens in Europe and Asia are better than in the United States because more ingredients are allowed and these create more effective and more pleasing suncreens," he writes. This is no accident, but rather the deliberate result of regulatory policy. The European Union, for instance, has approved 27 different compounds for use in sunscreen, whereas the FDA has only approved 17. "The number of approved ingredients matters because not all filters can seamlessly be formulated into sunscreens or other suitable products for skin application," writes the Cato Institute's Gabriella Beaumont-Smith. "Moreover, some of the ingredients approved in the EU and Japan but not the US are more effective and long‐​lasting." If the FDA won't clear more sunscreen ingredients for use in the U.S., the agency should at the very least allow reciprocity: Foreign sunscreens could be made available with warning labels noting that they were approved by European health officials but not by the FDA. Of course, the best option would be for U.S. regulators to simply get out of the way and acknowledge that these products are obviously safe for human use. Indeed, not approving them is the greater danger, since using sunscreen is one of the best ways to prevent skin cancer. In her TikTok video, AOC encourages her supporters to confront their members of Congress on this issue. Ideally, she would pursue the argument she's making here to its logical end and endorse very broad regulatory reform. After all, FDA inaction is depriving Americans of much more than just sunscreen: Regulatory hurdles are partly responsible for everything from the baby formula shortage to the high price of insulin. Nevertheless, it's good that even though AOC was feeling the Bern, she apparently doesn't want to get burned.The post AOC Slams the FDA's Harmful Overregulation of Sunscreen appeared first on Reason.com.

Earlier this month, an Idaho federal judge ruled in favor of a death-row inmate who claims the state is violating his Eighth Amendment rights by continuing to schedule his execution while knowing it lacks the means to actually kill him. According to the Idaho Statesman, Idaho has scheduled the execution of Gerald Pizzuto five times since his conviction in 1986 for the murders of Berta and Del Herndon. The state has even obtained three separate death warrants since 2021, despite lacking the lethal injection drugs required to kill him. As a result, Pizzuto says he has experienced "psychological torture." "With each new death warrant, Pizzuto explains, he must repeat the preparatory steps of designating who will witness his execution and to whom his property and remains will be left," Judge B. Lynn Winmill wrote in his ruling. "Additionally, each time a new death warrant issues, he is moved from his cell block to the Execution Unit located 'in a separate building that provides for complete isolation…from other inmates.'"  Idaho hasn't carried out an execution since 2012 due to an inability to obtain lethal injection drugs, though a new law that recently took effect makes death by firing squad the state's backup execution method. However, the exact procedures for firing squad executions are still in development. Despite the fact that Pizzuto has terminal bladder cancer—and, as a result, has been in hospice for the past three years—this hasn't kept the state from continually obtaining death warrants for his execution.  "Idaho law is clear, those who commit the most egregious crimes deserve the ultimate punishment," Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador said in a press release in February. "Pizzuto was sentenced to death. We followed the law and obtained a new death warrant." Pizzuto sued to stop this pattern, asking for a stay of execution on the grounds that the state is violating his Eighth and 14th Amendment rights by repeatedly making plans to execute him knowing the death warrants cannot be carried out. The state swiftly responded with an attempt to dismiss Pizzuto's legal action. While Judge Winmill dismissed Pizzuto's claims that the practice violated his 14th Amendment due process rights, he agreed that his claims of cruel and unusual punishment were "plausible," allowing the attempt to stay his execution to go forward. "As Pizzuto describes it, Defendants' repeated rescheduling of his execution is like dry firing in a mock execution or a game of Russian roulette. With each new death warrant comes another spin of the revolver's cylinder, restarting the thirty-day countdown until the trigger pulls," Winmill wrote. "Not knowing whether a round is chambered, Pizzuto must re-live his last days in a delirium of uncertainty until the click sounds and the cylinder spins again."The post Idaho Keeps Scheduling This Inmate's Execution Even Though It Lacks the Means To Kill Him appeared first on Reason.com.

After last week’s newsletter made the case for the wickedness of Stalinism and the virtues of early Cold War anti-Communism, I thought I might get dragged into a weekend social media debate about Marxism-Leninism. Not so. Instead, I managed to entangle myself in an argument about a different totalitarianism-related question: whether the destruction of Hitler’s Germany was a true and righteous judgment of Almighty God.

That question came out of two discussions of far-right politics — one occasioned by Graeme Wood’s Atlantic profile of Bronze Age Pervert, the pseudonymous author and online personality who is a leading voice of “vitalist,” or Nietzschean, or, if you prefer, simply fascist thought online; the other by revelations about the writer Richard Hanania, who has admitted to (and apologized for) a youthful career as a pseudonymous scribbler for racist publications.

The style of far-right thought involved in both stories takes Western decadence as a given, while arguing that Christianity is a weak vessel for any kind of cultural revival. Its big idea is that a conservatism that looks to classical and pagan sources, and embraces some kind of racial identitarianism could be more, well, vital in its engagement with the times.

A version of exactly this argument floated around the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, and when someone demanded a rebuttal, I dashed off a pair of posts:

I suppose one response is to note that the last attempt to refound European civilization on the basis of classical-Teutonic heritage and eugenics led to unspeakable atrocities and the total destruction of the European heartland. The decay and decadence of Western Christianity makes the return of right-wing Nietzscheanism inevitable. But Christians can say with some warrant that God’s judgment on that project is evident already.

These posts are minor entries in the widening debate over what conservative Christians should make of an emergent pagan or post-Christian right — in all its various forms, materialist and mystical, populist and intellectual, from extreme characters like Bronze Age Pervert to more mainstream figures, like Jordan Peterson, who seem to wobble on the edge of Christian faith. I’ve offered my own comments on our possible pagan futures, including in an argument earlier this year about euthanasia with Hanania himself (who I think remains an exemplar of a pagan libertarianism, whatever you make of his claim to have evolved into a neoliberal), but there’s much more that could be said.

In the same week as government data revealed that inflation is stubbornly ticking higher again, the Biden administration put its final stamp of approval on a new rule that will hike the cost of infrastructure projects. The Department of Labor announced Wednesday that it will change how it calculates so-called prevailing wages paid to government contractors working on construction and infrastructure projects. In its announcement of the new rule, the Labor Department claims the changes are meant to "modernize Davis-Bacon," the 1931 law that governs compensation for federal building projects. Actually, the changes are a significant step backward. Biden is effectively undoing a major change made by the Reagan administration—changes that were made, fittingly, to help combat inflation. That change, made in 1982, repealed the "30 percent rule" that guided the process for determining what wages would be paid on which projects. Under the 30 percent rule, the prevailing wage for any particular area would be based on the highest wages paid to at least 30 percent of workers within the same area. You don't need an advanced degree in accounting to see how that mandate could artificially hike wages on federal projects. The government barred itself from even considering bids that might pay average wages, thereby obligating taxpayers to pay more than they might have had to in an open market. A 1979 report from the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) drew a direct link between the wage mandate and inflation. "We are recommending that the Congress repeal the Davis-Bacon Act because…the Department of Labor has yet to develop an effective program to issue and maintain accurate wage determinations, and it may be impractical to ever do so, and the act is inflationary and results in unnecessary construction and administrative costs of several hundred million dollars annually," the report concluded. Three years later, the Reagan administration approved a new prevailing wage rule based on a weighted average of all wages in a given area. An imperfect solution, but undeniably an improvement. Biden, however, is resurrecting the 30 percent rule, among other changes announced this week. The changes are meant to ensure "that the jobs being created under the Biden-Harris administration's Investing in America agenda are good jobs, and that workers get the fair wages and benefits they deserve," Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su said in a statement. As I noted last year when this change was first proposed, labor unions tend to be big fans of Davis-Bacon because it helps limit competition from nonunion shops for public works projects—and has historically been used to disadvantage black and minority workers. Labor unions' gains come at the expense of taxpayers, who will get less for their money. Imposing higher costs on construction projects means fewer miles of road and rail can be built with the same pot of money. Indeed, repealing the Davis-Bacon law entirely would save taxpayers an estimated $24.3 billion over the next decade, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office report. "This is yet another Biden administration handout to organized labor on the backs of taxpayers, small businesses and the free market," Ben Brubeck, vice president of regulatory, labor, and state affairs for the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), an affiliation of nonunion construction shops, said in a statement. Brubeck said the changes make it "much more likely" that the Department of Labor will adopt union wage rates for federal infrastructure projects, giving a huge advantage to union shops in bidding for those projects. That's despite the fact that just 11.7 percent of the construction industry is unionized. In short, there's nothing "prevailing" about the wages mandated by the Davis-Bacon law. "The Biden administration's decision to turn back the clock on Davis-Bacon Act regulations to a Carter administration-era version," said Sean Higgins, a labor policy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, "will benefit a few well-connected unions while raising costs on taxpayers."The post Biden's New 'Prevailing Wage' Rule Will Cost Taxpayers, Benefit Unions, and Hike Inflation appeared first on Reason.com.

In May, it seemed obvious that the United States was going to face an unmanageable border crisis. In the previous fiscal year, there were about 2.4 millionapprehensions of people trying to enter the United States at the southern border. And the authorities were about to lose the provision of Title 42 implemented in March 2020 that allowed them to swiftly expel migrants at the border as a pandemic-prevention measure. But the end of the pandemic meant that temporary power also had to come to a close.

In fact, as it turned out, there was no crisis. The number of encounters with migrants at the southern border actually dropped by a third, from about 7,100 per day in April to about 4,800 per day in June, according to the latest available data. Why did this happen?

It seems that the Biden administration’s plan worked. It put in place a series of measures designed to deal with the impending problem, chiefly a stiff penalty for crossing the border illegally (deportation plus a five-year ban on any reentry), coupled with expanding ways to apply for legal asylum in the migrant’s home country. It was a welcome case of well-designed policymaking a difference.

But this success does not change the fact that the U.S. immigration system is broken. The crush at the southern border may be less than anticipated, but it is still an influx, and its effects are being felt across the nation. Texas, overwhelmed by the numbers, has bused migrants to Washington and New York. But the truth is that migrants have been crowding into major American cities, including Chicago, on a scale that is breaking those communities’ capacities to respond.

The migration crisis is being exacerbated by politics on both sides. The MAGA right, of course, demonizes migrants and asylum seekers and prefers no solution since a crisis helps it politically. But the far left routinely attacks any sensible measures aimed at curbing the influx as cruel, inhumane and illegal. Many blue cities — such as San Francisco — have ordinances and rules that force the local government to tolerate homelessness and vagrancy. President Biden’s asylum policy faces court challenges from several left-wing groups.

America’s immigration system is broken. Its asylum laws were designed after the Holocaust to allow admission to a small number of people personally facing intense persecution because of their religion or political beliefs. It provided for their residency applications to be evaluated while they waited in the country.

In recent years, millions of migrants have arrived at the Mexican border, with huge numbers claiming asylum. Although some might have legitimate claims, most are fleeing the same conditions of poverty, violence, instability and disease that have been driving would-be immigrants to the United States for hundreds of years. Today, many have realized that if they claim asylum, they get special treatment. Some U.S. officials handling this issue have told me that people are gaming the system to gain the best possible chance of entry.

The laws and rules around asylum must be fixed so that immigration authorities can focus on the small number of genuine asylum seekers while compelling the rest to seek other legal means of entry. At the same time, it’s important to note that the United States is facing a drastic shortfall of labor and must expand legal immigration in many areas for just that reason. We urgently need to attract the world’s best technically skilled people so that they can push forward the information and biotech revolutions that are transforming the economy and life itself. With unemployment rates around 50-year lows, it is obvious that we need more workers in many sectors of the economy, from agriculture to hospitality. If this is done in a legal and orderly manner, Americans will welcome the new workers.

The 2024 Republican presidential candidates are all over the map regarding today’s top international crisis: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But former president Donald Trump’s mix of pro-Putin misinformation and self-dealing is uniquely toxic, harming Ukraine’s war effort and undermining America’s national security, candidate Chris Christie told me. Make sense of the news fast with Opinions' daily newsletter ArrowRight The former New Jersey governor has just returned from Ukraine, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky and his top advisers in Kyiv. Christie’s campaign trail detour might seem politically ill-advised, considering that polls show GOP voters are increasingly critical of U.S. aid to Ukraine. Some say Christie is trying to bolster his scant foreign policy credentials.

But he deserves credit for taking the time and risk to go there and assess the situation with his own eyes — something few Republican skeptics have been willing to do. Christie bore witness to mass graves in the town of Bucha and listened extensively to local officials and survivors. These interactions confirmed his conviction that the United States should increase aid to Ukraine to end the war sooner.

“When you look in their eyes, you can tell a lot about their resolve,” he said. “My job after going to Ukraine is to talk directly to the American people about what I saw and make the case.”

While Christie didn’t discuss Trump with Zelensky, the prospect of Trump’s return to office hangs over Ukraine like a sword of Damocles. Trump’s latest Ukraine rant included calling on all Republicans to withhold additional military aid until the U.S. government investigates the Biden family’s business dealings to Trump’s satisfaction. This is a twist on Trump’s previous attempts to use military aid to pressure Zelensky into investigating the Bidens — actions that earned Trump his first impeachment.

“We know the ridiculousness of connecting those two and the only reason he does it is because Donald Trump puts himself before anyone or anything,” Christie told me.

Given Trump’s recent promises to pressure Zelensky into a negotiation and his historic willingness to take the side of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it’s no wonder U.S. and European officials are worried that Putin sees no reason to make any Ukraine concessions before the 2024 election. Trump’s dangling of a softer approach is bolstering Putin’s confidence, according to Christie.

“I think Trump has definitely hurt the war effort in Ukraine by his rhetoric, which is encouraging to Putin,” he said. “I’m disheartened by it, but I’m not surprised by it.”

Christie pulled no punches criticizing the foreign policy acumen and views of several of his Ukraine-skeptic opponents. He called out flip-flopping by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who initially called the war a “territorial dispute” before being compelled to walk back his remarks. Christie also criticized entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called Zelensky a “bully” and suggested that the Jewish president of Ukraine is somehow oppressing Jews there.

“I cannot understand what Governor DeSantis’s position is on Ukraine,” Christie said. “Vivek is Trump’s wingman. There’s no substance to what Vivek Ramaswamy is saying on this issue.”

To be fair, Ramaswamy and other Trump-like Republicans make one at least arguable point — that helping Ukraine is not a “vital” U.S. national security interest. Christie, along with former vice president Mike Pence, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and others, are trying to convince GOP voters it is. They argue, among other things, that resisting Russian aggression is crucial for deterring a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Some conservative voices maintain that dialing down U.S. support for Ukraine would free up resources needed to bolster Taiwan’s defense, but that idea is rejected by (among others) the Taiwanese themselves. Christie told me he thinks the Russia-Ukraine conflict is a “proxy war” between China and the West. He said he would have provided Ukraine with more weapons than President Biden did — and sooner.

“If we in fact stop Russia and their Chinese sponsors in Ukraine, I think it will send a very clear message to China about Taiwan,” he said. “If we cut and run, we are almost assuring that they will make a move on Taiwan.”

Biden has repeatedly said if China attacks during his presidency, he would deploy the U.S. military to help defend Taiwan. Christie told me he would do the same, assuming all other avenues for avoiding war had been exhausted.

“I would try to do everything I could to avoid it, but if it was unavoidable, I would do what needs to be done in terms of using the U.S. military against China,” he said.

To be sure, Christie’s chances of winning the Republican primary, much less the presidency, are slim. But his foreign policy stance is still shared by most GOP leaders in Congress, despite Trump’s takeover of the party. They, like Christie, think Biden should be criticized for doing too little on Ukraine, not for doing too much.

It’s been quite a fortnight for Lana Del Rey. Last week, she was lauded as a “singer-songwriter laureate” and “the great American poet of the 21st century”. This week, she closed the Lollapalooza festival in the US by being physically dragged offstage.
As befits a woman who has made art out of channelling feminine archetypes, the show’s design was suitably saturated in oestrogenic imagery. The dramatic stage ejection in question was carried out while the star was recumbent on a full-length train, discarded from a wedding dress worn earlier in the set. She crooned out her first and probably still most famous hit song — the narcoleptic “Video Games” — while sitting on a giant swing covered in ribbons and flowers. Another number was sung while getting her hair and make-up fixed up onstage. There was even a scene involving a maypole. As one rapt reviewer put it: “Everything about the singer’s performance carried a delicate feminine touch that made you assured you were in safe motherly arms to feel all the emotions she conjured.”
Elsewhere this week, a much earlier version of Del Rey was also in the news. Images were discovered and gleefully circulated online of a young Lana — or Lizzy Grant, as she was before her professional name change — modelling ponchos for a knitting pattern catalogue. Fresh-faced and pink-cheeked, Lizzy cycles through some of the stock facial expressions of the catalogue model — demure, cute, proto-sultry — while gamely sporting a variety of tassel-heavy monstrosities. Though she doesn’t know it, ahead of her lies a totally distinctive musical path, a lot of kohl and back-combed hair, some astonishing songs full of rapture and disappointment, and several truly horrible takes by music critics. The pathos is palpable.
Knitting seems like a suitable metaphor for an artist’s creative trajectory — for there, too, you have to just keep going without catastrophically unravelling, until everyone can finally see what it is you were making all along. In the early stages of Del Rey’s career, barely anyone could see what the visually literate philosophy graduate with a beautiful voice was constructing.
Her sun-bleached, tearstained, drowsy West Coast sound was dismissed as pretentious pastiche. Her tremulous, dazed voice with its sensually sibilant diction — swooping from breathy to raspy to pure to the occasional throaty growl — was mocked as pitchy and inadequate. It was suggested that her act was wholly contrived by others; that she was artificially enhanced by plastic surgery; that she pretended for publicity purposes to have lived in a trailer park (she had, for a while) and her father was actually a millionaire (he wasn’t).
In his savage review of her first album Born to Die (2012), the New York Times’s reviewer began: “It’s already difficult to remember Lana Del Rey, but let’s try… That moll with the dangerous tastes in men and pastimes and the puffed-out lips and hair?… Yep, it was a pose, cut from existing, densely patterned cloth. Just like all the other poses.” The author concludes with barely suppressed triumphalism: “The only real option is to wash off that face paint, muss up that hair and try again in a few years. There are so many more names out there for the choosing.”
More from this author Kylie Minogue's glorious artificeBy Kathleen Stock 
Luckily for us, though, Lana-who-was-once-Lizzy persisted. By the time of her album Ultraviolence (2014), with songs such as “Shades of Cool” and “West Coast”, she had perfected her persona of the somewhat sedated but still-devoted girlfriend, swooning at the recollection of kisses with beautiful boys destined to let her down. Just underneath the blank-faced, Xanax-induced composure lay a wave of archetypal female emotion and lachrymosity, surging towards whichever male with an attachment disorder currently occupied the sacred position of “my baby”.
This version of Lana adored her man, longed for him, looked after him, protected him. She was sweet, she was soft, she was all-forgiving. She got off ecstatically on the idea of herself with him, and the look of them together — his tattooed arms wrapped around her; the trappings of her own delicate femininity reflected back in the glint of his fierce eyes or the polished chrome of his motorcycle. She was even willing to pretend she didn’t care at all, just to keep him close.
To my mind, this version reached peak expression in the lushly orchestrated eponymous track of her album Honeymoon (2014), full of dramatic pauses, elongations, and mysterious, ecstatic incantations (“Dark blue… Dark blue”). By the time she languidly breathes out the climactic lines “There are violets in your eyes/There are guns that blaze around you/There are roses in between my thighs/And a fire that surrounds you”, the whole thing rivals Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet for tragic erotic intensity. Five years later, the singer responded angrily to a critic: “Never had a persona. Never needed one. Never will.” If this really is true, then quite frankly Del Rey must be the most stereotypically heterosexual woman who ever existed.
But this is not the stuff that critics now love her for. In fact, it’s the stuff they mostly still don’t know what to do with. On more recent albums, and particularly since Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019),  Del Rey has complicated her previous limpet-like, ride-or-die presentation. She now manifests a more conventional and modern ambivalence towards the male sex — at least, sometimes. She has also become more maternal in her styling; less pouty, more seraphically sad and queenly in bearing and glances. And you can practically hear journalists breathing a sigh of relief.

The author of a recent tribute, for instance, talks glowingly about Del Rey’s recent albums and her kinship with Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, and Walt Whitman (“eternally constructing and destroying the ‘I’”), but not so much about the previous self-confessed kinship with Marilyn Monroe. Her first four albums are perfunctorily dismissed as showcasing a “much more conventional pop star… whose lyrics traded in self-aware stereotypes — fuck-me-daddy, glacé-cherry, Lolita-cum-Nancy-Sinatra pastiches”. The fantasy that Lolita-cum-Nancy-Sinatra pastiches ever counted as “conventional pop” in the 21st Century — and especially during years where Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj were Del Rey’s main chart rivals — speaks to the difficulty, for some, of assimilating the singer’s earlier output into their narratives of world-class artistry.
Previous commentators have also struggled to place Del Rey with respect to her swaggering, bombastic, “empowered” female contemporaries, singing about how exigent they are in bed or how they insist upon paying for all their own diamonds. For some more obtuse critics, this has meant that Del Rey’s work must be “anti-feminist” and “problematic”. In 2020, the artist defensively responded to such complaints, asking that the leniency shown to peers such as Minaj and Beyonce for hits “about being sexy, wearing no clothes, fucking, cheating etc” also be shown to her for songs about “feeling beautiful by being in love even if the relationship is not perfect”.  Predictably, this intervention from the star only created a further opportunity for smug chiding from female journalists about new perceived crimes — now allegedly including cultural appropriation and anti-blackness.
Yet when Del Rey covers her heroine Nina Simone’s desperate song “The Other Woman”, like Simone before her she is tapping into a well of primitive, hopeless longing that transcends skin colour. When, in “Video Games”, she tells her lover with girl-child intonation that “You the bestest” and leans in for a “big kiss”, she is channelling the thrilled shiver of a sexy young woman who knows that her short skirt attracts more wolf whistles than anything she might have to say. The singer neither validates these feelings nor criticises them, but simply gives aural expression to what they are like from the inside — enhanced in the video by carefully selected visuals, mostly directed by her and her photographer sister, that draw on a wide repertoire of feminine guises from different times and places.
Suggested reading Bob Dylan has no philosophyBy Geoff Dyer 
And the unease of commentators in response is striking. In the sort of world they would apparently prefer, songs by women artists monotonously boasting about sexual prowess, or about grinding in clubs for money, or about cynically using some hapless fool as a sugar daddy are perfectly fine — all good clean feminist fun for seven-year-old girls to use as twerking material in TikTok videos. But songs like Del Rey’s, authentically exploring the trade-offs between the agency and passivity, pleasure and pain lurking just underneath all such superficially “empowered” poses, definitely are not.
Sometimes, journalists try to recuperate Del Rey back into the mainstream feminist fold by representing her positive cultural value as demonstrating to the world the dark side of love, the better to help us “re-focus our agenda on the cultivation of self-love”. Some even like to present her as having been on a redemptive personal journey, making much of her having eventually decided to omit in performance a song lyric originally recycled for her song “Ultraviolence” from The Crystals (“He hit me and it felt like a kiss”).
But Del Rey stands in no need of our redemption, for she has not transgressed. She has simply shown us what is the case — the ecstasy and the agony of sex, love, and loss for many women, young and not-so-young — and has transfigured it into art. She has been knitting these things together from the very beginning. We should continue to cherish this truthful messenger from the dark, tear-soaked underground of female experience — not in spite of her uncomfortably neutral presentations of unfashionable femininity, but partly because of them.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the new moderator of the PBS program Washington Week, which will now be called Washington Week With The Atlantic. I talked with Jeff about this new partnership, which launches tomorrow night on PBS at 8 p.m. ET.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Hawaii is a warning.
Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life
“My mom will email me after she dies.”
Never tweet.
A Preoccupation With DemocracyTom Nichols: Washington Week and The Atlantic are both institutions in their own right. What’s the goal in joining them together for a program like this? Perhaps instead of saying “a program like this,” I should have started by asking what kind of program you envision.Jeffrey Goldberg: I’m aiming for what I think is something Washington Week already does extremely well: I want to have discussions with the reporters who are actually reporting on the week’s events, so that viewers get a sense of not only what’s going on but how those stories are reported. We need time for more detailed conversations with the people who were there and who will tell us what happened. One of the great things about this program is that it allows people to speak in whole paragraphs, and I’m a big fan of paragraphs.Tom: This is a new gig for you, right? You’ve never been a moderator.Jeff: Right. I’ve been on a million panels on TV and at conferences—time I will never get back, alas—but this is my first outing as a moderator. So my suggestion is that you watch, simply to see if I’m able to read from a teleprompter. The jury is out on that question.Tom: So now that you’re going to be on the other side of the desk, how do you plan to run the show? What will the format look like?

Jeff: I hate to make things sound so simple, because, as you know, I’m a complicated guy. But the goal here is to find the best minds in the press and let them analyze what’s going on. I want people to feel like they’ve actually learned something after they watch this.Tom: Well, I don’t think it’s simplistic, but it sounds like a callback to an older, more conversational tradition of news programs in the pre-cable age.Jeff: To some extent, it is. Some television news and public-affairs programs have become too frenetic for my taste. The audience is bombarded with lights and buzzers during short segments where six or seven people—or more—are trying to make a point as quickly as possible. And some of those people are partisan hacks. A group of journalists having an actual conversation is rare on television now, and we’re going to take the time to have those more patient conversations.Tom: But isn’t that what viewers want—flash and movement?Jeff: Look, there are a lot of people in this country. Some people want TikTok; some people want The Atlantic. Some people want both. Not you or me, necessarily—although you are something of a TikTok star, of course. But I’m sure there’s a Venn overlap. At The Atlantic, we know our readers have a solid attention span. So does the audience for Washington Week and  PBS NewsHour. And look at how many people will listen to long podcasts and read long articles. There’s plenty of space for the kind of detailed discussions we’re going to offer on the program.Tom: Just wait until I bring my cat on TikTok. But coming back to television, that frenetic activity is heavily driven by partisanship. The shows invite partisan advocates to duke it out over complex issues in five minutes, and although I am not without sin on that score, I agree that it can be maddening. Nonetheless, an election is coming up, and people are going to be focused on 2024. How will Washington Week With The Atlantic handle what’s going to be a pretty strange year?Jeff: This isn’t just a strange year; it’s an election like no other in American history. A former president under state and federal indictments is running against the man who defeated him, and he could end up in either jail or the White House. But both Washington Week and The Atlantic are nonpartisan. The Atlantic’s motto is that we are “of no party or clique”—but we do care, a lot, about the American idea, about democracy and its survival, and I want to bring that preoccupation with democracy from The Atlantic to Washington Week.Tom: You’ll be talking mostly with others from the media, and people are pretty distrustful of journalists. Do you think that’s an issue for the show?Jeff: The public is distrustful of a lot of institutions and especially of journalists, yes. We live in a time when a lot of us assume the very worst of everyone else. That distrust makes it hard to stay informed, and that’s bad for democracy. That’s part of why it’s important not only to cover stories, but to explain to viewers how those stories were covered.Tom: You were friends with the late Gwen Ifill, who helped make Washington Week into an institution. What did you learn from watching her?Jeff: Gwen believed in journalism, she believed that there was such a thing as observable reality, she wasn’t scared of anything or anyone, and she believed in the promise of America. She was one of the greatest there ever was. She had such authority, and that came in part from knowing what was true, and in believing she had an important job to do. It also came from being a pioneer, as a Black woman in an industry that wasn’t always interested in changing, in opening itself up to other voices. She really is one of my heroes, and as a friend, I miss her every day. She died right after Trump was elected, and the country could really have used her skill and insight and fearlessness over the past seven years.Today’s News
Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate who was vocal about government corruption, was assassinated during a rally yesterday evening.
A new report from ProPublica found that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted a wider array of gifts and hospitality from wealthy patrons than previously known, and failed to disclose some of them.
North Korean state media reported that Kim Jong Un has dismissed his top general and ordered the military to ramp up war preparations.  
Evening Read
Illustration by Rop Van Mierlo
The Owls Are Not What They SeemBy Rebecca Giggs
In the moments before seeing an owl comes a feeling like intuition. I will not forget one night when I stood on a balcony in suburban Sydney, and every wakeful creature in the surrounding bushland abruptly froze. Even the frogs seemed to want to renounce their noisy bodies. Who goes there? Seconds later, a powerful owl (the name of a species native to Australia) dropped onto the railing, and I, too, nearly leaped out of my skin. The owl was the size of a terrier, but languidly buoyant in the way of a day-old Mylar balloon, and to my ears silent. In the pin-drop quiet, it bounced along the balustrade. I never heard its talons touch the metal. The owl itself, I knew, had such sharp hearing that it could make out a possum’s heart pounding beneath its fur. Unseen, a second owl—mate to the first, I presumed—loosed a deep, woodwind hoot that carried.
Owl calls often seem ghostlike or inchoate. A twofold sorcery: Owls can lead us to doubt our own faculties while drawing us to wonder at the mysteries of theirs.
Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
The scandal pushing peers into the abyss
Sports betting won.
The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one.
Photos: Deadly wildfires sweep across Maui.
Culture Break
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.
Listen. Can AI save a life? In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin and producer Ethan Brooks discuss a man who turned to an AI companion in his darkest hour.Watch. Red, White & Royal Blue (streaming on Amazon Prime Video) is an escapist fantasy that can’t quite escape the real world, no matter how hard it tries.Play our daily crossword.Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This week, Emily Bazelon and David Plotz are joined by Juliette Kayyem to discuss the Ohio vote not to make it harder to change the state constitution; Republican views on Donald Trump’s offenses; and emergency preparedness or the lack thereof.

Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:

Jack Goldsmith for The New York Times: “The Prosecution of Trump May Have Terrible Consequences”

The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters by Juliette Kayyem

Charles M. Blow for The New York Times: “The Montgomery Brawl Was, for Some, a Clarifying Moment”

Here are this week’s chatters:

Emily: WESH 2: “Gov. DeSantis suspends State Attorney Monique H. Worrell, citing neglect of duty”

Juliette: Clay Risen for The New York Times: “Charles J. Ogletree Jr., 70, Dies; at Harvard Law, a Voice for Equal Justice” and Emily Bazelon for The New York Times: “Why Is Affirmative Action in Peril? One Man’s Decision.”

David: City Cast DC 1 Year Anniversary Live Taping, August 28, 2023, and Rachel Pannett for The Washington Post: “She invited four people over for lunch. A week later, three were dead.”

Listener chatter from Rob Parsons: Richard Nelson for Encounters North: “Classic Audio Encounters”

For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment, Juliette, Emily, and David discuss the Montgomery, Alabama riverfront brawl.

In the most recent edition of Gabfest Reads, David talks with David Grann about his book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

Email your chatters, questions, and comments to gabfest@slate.com or X us @SlateGabfest. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth

Research by Julie Huygen

At the start of 2022, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus blazed across the United States, Seema Lakdawala was in Pittsburgh, finalizing plans to open a brand-new day care. She had found the perfect facility and signed the stack of paperwork; she had assembled a hodgepodge of plushies, puzzles, and toys. It was the perfect setup, one that “I’ve been dreaming about for years,” Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. She couldn’t help but swell with pride, later that spring, when she ushered in her establishments’ first attendees: five young ferrets—including one deliberately infected with the flu.Over the next several months, Lakdawala and her colleagues watched several cohorts of ferrets ping-pong flu viruses back and forth as they romped and wrestled and frolicked inside of a shared playpen. The researchers meticulously logged the ferrets’ movements; they took note of the surfaces and other animals that each one touched. Their early findings, now being prepared for publication in a scientific journal, could help researchers figure out how flu viruses most efficiently spread in group settings—not just among ferrets, but among human kids.Aerosols, droplets, face-to-face contact, contaminated surfaces—there are plenty of ways for flu viruses to spread. But the nitty-gritty of flu transmission remains “pretty much a black box,” says Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. Despite decades of research, “we really don’t know the relative importance of each potential route.” Now, though, ferrets in playpens could help researchers to tease out those dynamics—and even, someday, to design flu-blocking measures for bona fide day cares.Ferrets have long been the “gold standard for influenza infection and transmission,” says Nicole Rockey, an environmental engineer at Duke University who led the experiments with Lakdawala. The animals’ airway architecture is uncannily similar to ours, and unlike most lab mice, ferrets are vulnerable to catching and passing on flu viruses—even developing the same coughy, sniffly symptoms that so many humans do. But most flu-transmission experiments in ferrets remain limited to artificial circumstances: pairs of animals in tiny cages with dividers between them, where scientists ogle them inhaling each other’s air for days or even weeks. That’s not how animals catch one another’s infections in the wild, and it’s certainly not how human outbreaks unfold. “We don’t interact with each other for 48 hours straight through a perforated wall,” Rockey told me.A giant playpen outfitted with toys, air samplers, and video cameras isn’t exactly a natural habitat for a ferret. But the setup does tap into many of the animals’ impish instincts. Domesticated by humans over thousands of years, ferrets “are a very playful species, and they love to be social,” says Alice Dancer, an animal-welfare researcher at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College. That makes them great models for not just flu transmission, but flu transmission among kids, who are thought to be major drivers of outbreaks. In their day care, the ferrets squabble over toys, clamber up play structures, and canoodle plush snakes; they chase one another around, and nap in big piles when they get tuckered out; they exchange affectionate nuzzles, bonks, and little play bites. Every interaction represents a potential transmission event; so, too, do the surfaces they touch, and the shared pockets of air from which they all breathe.[Read: The flu may never be the same]Already, the researchers have collected some results that, Lakdawala told me, are “changing the way I think about transmission a little bit.” In one early experiment, involving an infected animal cavorting with four uninfected ones, they were surprised to find that the ferret with the least direct contact with the flu “donor” was the only “recipient” in the room who got sick. It seemed counterintuitive, Lakdawala told me, until video footage revealed that the newly sickened recipient had been copying everything that the donor did—chewing the toys it chewed, rolling the balls it rolled, swiping the surfaces it swiped. It was as if the first ferret was leaving a trail of infectious breadcrumbs for the second one to snarf. If that finding holds up in other experiments, which the researchers are analyzing now, it could suggest that contaminated surfaces, or fomites, are playing a larger-than-expected role in passing the virus around, Rockey told me.Another of the team’s early findings points to a similar notion. When the researchers cranked up the ventilation in their ferret day cares, hoping to clear virus particles out of the air, they found that the same proportion of uninfected ferrets ended up catching the virus. This was disappointing, but not a total shock given how paws-on ferrets—and kids, for that matter—are with one another and their surroundings. It didn’t matter if the air in the room was being exchanged more than once every three minutes. Whenever the ferrets had their run of the room, the researchers would find virus particles smeared on the toys, the snack station, and the playpen walls.Ventilation wasn’t totally useless: More air exchanges, the team found, did seem to reduce the concentration of flu genetic material in the air, and the ferrets who got infected under those conditions were slower to start shedding the virus—a hint, Lakdawala thinks, that they might have taken in a lower infectious dose. Among humans, that might translate into less severe cases of disease, Gordon told me, though that would need to be confirmed.Whatever upshots Rockey and Lakdawala’s ferret findings might have for human day cares won’t necessarily apply to other venues. In offices, hospitals, and even schools for older kids, people are generally a lot less tactile with one another, and a lot better versed on hygiene. Plus, adult bodies just aren’t built like kids’, says Cécile Viboud, an epidemiologist at the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. Their airways are bigger, stronger, and more developed—and some experiments suggest that, for at least some respiratory viruses, the older and larger people are, the more infectious aerosols they might expel. For adults, ventilation may matter all the more.Lakdawala and her colleagues are still mulling some other interventions that might work better for ferrets, and eventually kids: humidifiers, air purifiers, targeted cleaning, maybe even keeping individuals from crowding too closely into a portion of the playpen. (They don’t plan to experiment with handwashing or masking; imagine the difficulty of strapping an N95 to a ferret’s face.) Lakdawala is also mulling whether surfaces made of copper—which her team has shown can render flu viruses inactive within minutes—could play a protective role.But everything that happens in the ferrets’ playpens will still come with caveats. “It’s still an animal model, at the end of the day,” Viboud told me. For all the similarities between the ferret airway and ours, the way their little noses and snouts are shaped could affect how they cough and sneeze. And the researchers haven’t yet studied spread among ferrets with preexisting immunity to flu, which some day-care attendees will have. Ferrets are also more inclined to bite, wrestle, and defecate wherever they please than the average (potty-trained) kid.Still, for the most part, Lakdawala delights in how childlike the ferrets can be. They’re affectionate and mischievous; they seem to bubble with energy and glee. After discovering that the air-sampling robot stationed in the center of their day care was mobile, several of the ferrets began to take it for rides. In watching and sharing the footage at conferences, Lakdawala has received one piece of feedback, over and over again: Oh yeah, parents tell her. My kids do that too.

“The Permanent Problem” is an ongoing series of essays about the challenges of capitalist mass affluence as well as the solutions to them. You can access the full collection here, or subscribe to brinklindsey.substack.com to get them straight to your inbox.
In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick posed the following now-famous thought experiment:

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience that you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?

Nozick’s point was to expose the limitations of any purely hedonic conception of the good life. After all, if the summum bonum is simply to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, the experience machine sounds like a ticket to paradise. If all that really matters are enjoyable mental states, who cares if those states are divorced from anything happening in the real world?
Nozick assumed that his readers would share his aversion to the experience machine, and that their reaction would reveal the shortcomings of the Benthamite view of happiness as nothing but sensation. He then offered some explanations as to why the experience machine is unappealing. “First,” he argued, “we want to do certain things, not just have the experience of doing them.” Furthermore, “we want to be a certain way, to be a certain type of person,” desires that cannot be fulfilled as “an indeterminate blob” in a tank. Finally, the experience machine can only offer us artificial simulations: “there is no actual contact with any deeper reality.” “Perhaps,” he concluded, “what we desire is to live (an active verb) ourselves, in contact with reality.”
I’m with Nozick on this one, but it turns out that not everybody has the same reaction. Consider this December 2021 tweet by Megan Fritts, a philosophy professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock:

Just taught Nozick’s Experience Machine for the hundredth time. All but one student were immediately and unreservedly in favor of entering the machine for life. Never had that happen before, rather threw off my lesson plan!

Seeing this led me to root around and find some empirical examinations of how people respond to the thought experiment. These studies did find that strong majorities reject the experience machine – 84 percent in one study, and 71 and 76 percent in a pair of experiments run for another study. Yet the authors of these papers all concluded that rejection of the experience machine sometimes reflected extraneous considerations – worries that the machine would eventually break, or simply loss aversion and a consequent preference for the status quo. They caution that the desire to live “in contact with reality” may not be as robust as Nozick assumed.
I fear that they’re right, and that Nozick seriously overestimated people’s attachment to reality. But the degree of that attachment is best revealed, not by hypothetical binary choices about spending the rest of your life plugged into a machine, but by the actual choices people make on the margins as they decide from minute to minute how to spend their time.
Nozick explicitly excluded from his thought experiment choices about whether to plug into the experience machine temporarily. It seems clear that he considered such choices to be unexceptionable – at least up to a point. But that’s the key question: how much time on the machine is too much? It’s always the dose that makes the poison, so at what point does choosing virtual experiences over real ones become dysfunctional – a hindrance to, rather than an enjoyable embellishment of, a fulfilling life?
I’m not sure where that point lies, but I’m reasonably confident we’re now on the wrong side of it. Americans currently spend about seven hours a day, nearly half their waking lives, staring at a screen, and numbers in the rest of the world look similar. We know we’re addicted to our phones, but we can’t stop. We recognize the absurdity of people sitting around a restaurant table, staring silently into their phones and ignoring the friends and family around them, but still we can’t stop. On flights these days, window screens down is now becoming the norm, as people forgo the sometimes breathtaking vistas to reduce the glare on their little rectangular opium dens. The temptation of the experience machine is real, and bit by bit our capacity to resist it has been eroded.
Let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with experience machines per se. On the contrary, we’ve been building and plugging into them for as long as we’ve been human. Indeed, the earliest form of experience machine, the ingestion of intoxicating substances, apparently predates humans: at least some other animals enjoy getting high. Among humans, achieving altered states of consciousness through the combination of intoxication, music, and dance was one of the earliest ways that our species’ religious imagination expressed itself. And that religious impulse led further to the construction of what are likely the first man-made experience machines: the magnificent cave paintings of Chauvet Pont d’Arc, Lascaux, and elsewhere, tens of thousands of years old, may well have been the original form of cinema.
Our religious and artistic capacities have always been intertwined: our belief in the existence of other realms of experience links up naturally with our drive to create our own virtual representations of experience. Epic poems memorized and sung by bards over centuries, the Greek invention of theatrical drama, the European invention of the novel: all great leaps forward in the creation of experience machines that sweep audiences up into the suspension of disbelief and the temporary occupation of virtual worlds. Like our contemporary models, these earlier experience machines often provoked anxiety and backlash. The Roundheads banned the theater and its “lascivious Mirth and Levity” from 1642 to 1660. And the wave of suicides inspired by Goethe’s early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther stirred reactions not unlike the 1980s panic over alleged Satanic messages in heavy metal music.
So experience machines, and worries about them, are nothing new. But with the advent of first television and now the internet and social media, the story of our attraction to virtual experience has undergone a qualitative and disturbing shift. Instead of enriching lives oriented toward people and projects in the real world, hooking up to experience machines is now serving increasingly as a substitute. In sync with the simultaneous rise of the postindustrial service economy and the cultural shift toward increasing focus on personal identity and self-expression, the emergence of highly addictive experience machines can be seen as part of a larger and regrettable retreat from reality.
In my last essay about human flourishing, I wrote about how people pursue the good life along three broad avenues: relationships, projects, and experiences. At the individual level, there is incredibly wide latitude in how to live well. Some good lives are focused primarily on sustaining relationships, others on absorbing projects, others on rich and delightful experiences; meanwhile, there is an astonishing variety of different kinds of relationships, projects, and experiences that are capable of imbuing lives with meaning and purpose and joy.
But there are some limits. We can admire the career of a great artist or inventor or entrepreneur or political leader, but if we know that their personal life was a dysfunctional shambles we will not envy their lives. And we neither admire nor envy drug addicts, whose pursuit of pleasurable experience comes at the expense of everything else. Recall the rollicking opening monologue of “Trainspotting”: “I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you have heroin?” The error here isn’t thinking that heroin feels good; it’s the idea that feeling good in the moment is the only thing that matters.
I believe that contemporary society has succumbed to a similar error: collectively, we are overinvested in the production and consumption of virtual experiences and underinvested in vital relationships and projects to improve the physical world. We have staged a general, broad-based withdrawal from the world outside our heads. In our personal lives, we marry less, have fewer children, spend less time with fewer friends, and are less active in community organizations. As a society, with physical production absorbing ever less of our resources and labor, we devote increasing energies instead to analyzing abstract symbols. Along the way, we’ve lost a lot of our interest in remaking the physical world to serve human purposes – and have focused instead on erecting political barriers to ensure that changing our built environment becomes as difficult as possible. Our collective retreat from people and projects has created a vacuum in our lives, which we have filled with experience machines and their mediated simulacra.
The causal arrows seem to run in both directions here. On the one hand, social and cultural forces that are making it more difficult to form personal relationships or get things done in the real world heighten the relative appeal of the virtual. Meanwhile, the ready and undemanding pleasures that experience machines offer us 24/7 may well have blunted our desires for the more demanding and less dependable options of flesh-and-blood contact and physical activity.
The retreat from the real to the virtual has become a major theme in popular culture. “Ready Player One” offers a caricature of the present as a tale of the near-future: young people, trapped in a broken real world with little opportunity or hope, find escape in the frictionless, protean wonders of a virtual reality simulation. “The Matrix” has spawned a host of sequels and claimed a prominent place in our cultural imagination by offering an even broader caricature: everything we think is real is in fact just a collective electronic dream, as humans have been plugged into experience machines and reduced to organic batteries. The idea that we are living in a simulation pops up all the time these days – is it really so surprising that such a predicament now seems plausible? The rising cultural currency of the idea of the multiverse – featured in last year’s big Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” – bespeaks the same sense that reality isn’t what it used to be: since everything that could possibly happen ends up happening somewhere, how could anything we do in our little patch of infinity really matter? Such are the anxieties that now nag at us in the uncanny valley we have chosen to settle.
What has diffused into the culture as vague unease manifests as acute dysfunction among those members of our society most in thrall to our new experience machines: young people. Mental health problems are up dramatically for adolescents in the U.S. and around the world – a disturbing trend that’s tracked the increasingly ubiquitous presence of social media in their lives. I’ve linked in the previous sentence to work by Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, two of the experts at the forefront of drawing the connection between living online and going off the rails. But nothing I’ve read captures what’s going on more poignantly and movingly than an essay from Freddie deBoer titled “You are You. We Live Here. This Is Now.”
The essay starts with a screenshot from a New York Times focus group with young teenagers, which I’ll reproduce here:

Here’s deBoer’s reaction to that image:

I find it very very bleak! Here you have kids talking about why they prefer online life and identifying precisely the conditions that make me despondent: they like being online more than living their real lives because their online lives serve as an intermediary and distraction from what they don’t like about themselves and their world. They’re too young to know that you’re not supposed to admit that the point of being very online is to avoid the self. They say the quiet part out loud. Online life is more “peaceful and calming” because online you’re permitted to be a vegetable. Online you can mute yourself, render yourself an unperson, remove yourself from existence and in so doing avoid the pain of being alive. The attitudes here are indicative of young people who have been failed by the adults around them, who in addition to the responsibility to keep them alive should be forcing them to contend with the inevitability of sadness and the need to come to terms with themselves. Someone has to tell these kids, “wherever you go, you’ll find yourself there, and you have to start to do the work of accepting who you are, as much as you may not like yourself.” The stakes are high. I don’t mean to get dark here, but a kid who fantasizes about the ability to mute himself in real life is a kid I worry about someday muting himself permanently in real life.

And deBoer connects the pathos of young people’s retreat to online existence with larger trends in society:

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense.

Finally, let me share the essay’s spirited conclusion:

That’s the existential question for humanity in the 21st century. That’s the challenge in front of all of us. Will you shoulder the risk of pursuing real human connection, as hard and intimidating and discouraging as that can be? Or will you hide in your room forever, comforted by fast food and porn and opiates and therapy and TikTok, risking nothing? It’s up to you. I don’t pretend that it’s easy to choose the former. I don’t pretend that I always choose it or will always choose it, or that I’ve chosen it well, or that choosing it hasn’t cost me a great deal, at times. I know it’s not easy. A lot of people reach out to another and have their hand slapped down. And that’s scary. But to keep trying is to declare to the universe that you will have the courage to be human, when everyone and everything tempts you to be otherwise. Remember: you are you. We live here. This is now.

How do we get off this wrong path? How do we halt and reverse the retreat from reality? “Touch grass” has become a common rebuke offered to those of our fellow online denizens who have seemingly lost their grip on reality. But all of us could use the advice, as our collective cultural grip on reality has loosened considerably. And with ever more immersive experience machines offering augmented or virtual reality looming on the horizon, it’s a matter of genuine urgency. Again, the problem isn’t with experience machines per se: when their use is appropriately restricted, they can enrich our lives with new realms of experience. The problem lies in our lack of anchoring in the baseline reality of people and projects. No culture or society can truly flourish without such an anchor – but how do we rebuild ours?The post Choosing the experience machine first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Choosing the experience machine appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Many people say they are looking for happiness. They spend a lot of time and resources searching for the secrets of well-being, like old-time miners prospecting for gold. But for some sages throughout history, this is the wrong approach. Happiness isn’t something to be found; it’s something to attract.Perhaps the most famous proponent of the second path was the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He defined happiness as eudaemonia, which means “good spirit.” To us moderns, this might sound vaporous, like the superficial happy feelings that so many people (incorrectly, in my view) chase. Instead, the philosopher meant that happiness was a divine state that would visit each of us as it pleased. Our only responsibility was to open the door to it. And we do so by living well.To live well, we should practice specific virtues and make them into habits. As Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, “If it is better to be happy as a result of one’s own exertions than by the gift of fortune, it is reasonable to suppose that this is how happiness is won.” Here are 10 of the virtues he recommends—which, as modern research shows, do generally attract the good spirit.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.1. Courage
Aristotle wrote about courage in the context of the willingness to sacrifice one’s life, such as in war. Whether he would recognize the virtue in our modern settings is hard to guess—who knows what he would say about the fear of being canceled on social media? But the question at hand is not the source of fear but whether courage—to act in the face of fear rather than give in to it—invites happiness. And the research suggests that it does: Scholars have shown that courage can lead to resilience after adversity, and resilience leads to greater happiness.2. Temperance
By this, the philosopher means self-control in the face of one’s appetites and base impulses. He would classify the hippie motto “If it feels good, do it!” as a recipe for misery. Modern researchers investigating self-control agree, but with a twist. Scholars writing in the Journal of Personality in 2017 found that as impulse control among college students increased over the course of a day, positive affect initially fell. As self-control kept rising, however, negative feelings decreased; happiness rose to its highest levels when self-control was at its highest as well. In other words, a little moderation isn’t so good for well-being, but immoderate moderation may be great.3. Liberality
By this, the philosopher is referring not to politics (liberalism) but to money. Specifically, he recommends avoiding stinginess but without being profligate. In fact, evidence suggests that being a cheapskate influences your well-being. For example, three economists in 2014 set up an ultimatum-bargaining game in which participants had to split a certain amount of money: One participant offered a certain split; the other could say yes or no, but no meant that neither side got anything, so the offer of a lousy split could be answered with spite. The authors found that physical stress levels were higher for both parties when the bargaining involved offered a split lower than 40 percent.4. Magnificence
Related to liberality is what Aristotle calls “magnificence,” according to which a person “will think how he can carry out his project most nobly and splendidly, rather than how much it will cost and how it can be done most cheaply.” He was not asserting here that the path to happiness is to buy an ostentatious yacht; rather, magnificence means giving to projects that benefit a large number of people. Today, we might call this “munificence”—to be as philanthropic as you reasonably can be. For this, the support is unambiguous: Giving feels good.5. Greatness of soul
A great-souled person, according to Aristotle, acts like his close predecessor in ancient Greek philosophy, Socrates, who was a “being indifferent to good and bad fortune.” This requires being high-minded—not that you can’t tell the difference between pleasant and unpleasant things, but that you are occupied by what is deeper and more meaningful in life than transitory pleasures and passing irritations. Indeed, research comparing the pursuit of pleasure versus of meaning among adolescents shows that the latter leads to greater happiness. In other words, get off social media and read, say, Nicomachean Ethics.[Read: To understand anti-vaxxers, consider Aristotle]6. Gentleness
The virtue of gentleness refers to a propensity toward kindness and an ability to control your temper. The idea is that to be self-possessed in this way brings happiness. If true, then gentleness’s opposite, aggression, should lower well-being by making it harder to manage one’s own emotions. Researchers have tested this idea by asking people to think of someone they despise, and then either to imagine violent, malicious actions toward the person or to focus on a neutral thought (specifically, what they planned to do the following Wednesday—presumably not beat up the person in question). They found that the aggressive thinkers began to brood over their fantasy assault and experienced lower well-being than the temperate crew as a result.7. Truthfulness about yourself
Aristotle put a great premium on honesty. He counseled against “pretense in the form of exaggeration” and boastfulness, but also against self-deprecation. You might say he recommended that we seek something like secure humility, through which we recognize ourselves and can show others who we are without either puffery or self-denigration. This tracks with the general work on humility, which correlates with lower levels of neuroticism and depression, as well as with a greater love of life. But it is also consistent with research showing that insecurity and excessive self-criticism are associated with anxiety and sadness.[Read: When philosophy becomes therapy]8. Equity
This is a word that gets a lot of attention in our modern debates. It commonly involves efforts to increase fairness and to redress past discrimination. And it is manifestly true that when people believe they are being treated unfairly, it lowers their happiness. But Aristotle meant something totally different. “The equitable man,” wrote the philosopher, “is one who by choice and habit … does not stand on his rights unduly, but is content to receive a smaller share although he has the law on his side.” He called this “a special kind of Justice.” For this proposition, I can find no specific empirical evidence. However, it is almost certainly related to the next virtue.9. Forgiveness
Aristotle. wrote about the virtue of consideration for others. To the contemporary ear, this sounds like politeness, or sensitivity to others’ feelings, but the philosopher was recommending something much trickier: forgiveness and forbearance toward others’ faults. The wisdom of this advice has a large modern literature to support it. Virtually every study of forgiveness shows that practicing it purposefully and letting go of grievances lowers depression and anxiety symptoms.10. Modesty
Modesty is often thought in the modern world to resemble humility. But Aristotle defined it as refraining from shameful (if tempting) behavior—and applied this even to private conduct. This conception of modesty makes it similar to temperance, except that instead of moderation in the face of base appetites, we should abstain completely from vices. He added a caveat, however: Modesty could be a virtue only if “a good man would be ashamed if he were to do so and so.” In other words, you have to believe a certain action is vicious in order to be virtuous in avoiding it. I personally have no moral qualms about liquor but don’t drink myself, so by the Aristotelian standard, my teetotaling is not a virtue. Bearing this caveat in mind, this kind of modesty is indeed a happiness strategy: When people undertake what they consider moral acts, they gain in happiness and even more so in sense of purpose; when they commit immoral acts, they experience the opposite.Aristotle proposed these happiness virtues more than two millennia ago, but I believe they provide a handy checklist today for living well. Here’s an abbreviated list you might just want to put up on your fridge, or tape to the bottom of your computer screen.1. Name your fears and face them.
2. Know your appetites and control them.
3. Be neither a cheapskate nor a spendthrift.
4. Give as generously as you can.
5. Focus more on the transcendent; disregard the trivial.
6. True strength is a controlled temper.
7. Never lie, especially to yourself.
8. Stop struggling for your fair share.
9. Forgive others, and forbear their weaknesses.
10. Define your morality; live up to it, even in private.None of these rules is easy to follow. It is harder still to make them into habits. But the payoff—a well-earned visit from sweet eudaemonia—is worth the effort.

We live in an era of major mass protest in nearly every single region in the world. Yet social revolutions as we knew them in the twentieth century are nowhere to be found. Why?

Egyptians gather to celebrate the resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir Square, February 12, 2011, in Cairo, Egypt. ( Chris Hondros / Getty Images)
 
There is a curious contradiction at the heart of world politics in the twenty-first century. The dream of social revolution seems further out of reach now than at any moment since its emergence in the eighteenth century. At the same time, however, mass protests aimed at toppling governments have swept the planet like a prairie fire. Even a partial list of countries that have experienced major convulsions in the streets is formidable: Algeria, Brazil, Chile, Czechia, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Sudan, and Ukraine, among many others. When the world history of the 2010s is written, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street will all find an important place in its pages.
Each of these protest movements brought masses of people into the streets. Sometimes they even brought down a government or drove an aged dictator into exile. But their record is mixed, at best. The most successful cases have had limited success in bringing more democracy or equality, while the least successful have been subjected to harsh counterrevolutionary repression.
Mark Beissinger’s recent book The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation Rebellion helps us understand these “urban civic revolutions,” and why they tend to leave the stage of history just as quickly as they take to it.
Beissinger spoke with Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano about the main themes of his book, why social revolutions as we have known them are over, and what the future of revolution may bring.

Chris Maisano
What is a revolution?

Mark Beissinger
I give a pretty straightforward definition based on how the term is used in the social movements literature today and in some of the more contemporary studies of revolutions: a revolution is a mass siege of an incumbent regime by its own population aimed at bringing about regime change and substantive political or social change in its wake. As Leon Trotsky put it, a revolution is about citizens seizing back control over a regime through mass mobilization from below.
Revolution has been an evolving phenomenon since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when modern revolutions first came into being. There’s a debate over whether there were revolutions in the ancient world. If there were, they were of a different sort and were on a very limited scale.
For instance, some believe that there were revolutions in ancient Athens. But the total population of ancient Athens, at least in terms of free citizens, was small (at most, about one hundred thousand people). Athens was a city-state, on an entirely different scale than the contemporary nation-state. But when we talk about revolution in the modern era, we’re talking about the engagement of very large numbers of people and the modern nation-state, with its territorial ambitions, its economic goals, and mass political organization.
Revolutions across history have been put to many different purposes. They began largely as a way for society to contain the usurpations of monarchs. They evolved in the nineteenth century and gained a social component, aiming at the transformation of the class structure of society. That social element dominated for a long time. But there were always political revolutions that occurred throughout this period, and the political dimensions of revolution predated its social dimension.
When we talk about revolution in the modern era, we’re talking about the engagement of very large numbers of people and the modern nation-state, with its territorial ambitions, its economic goals, and mass political organization.
In addition to anti-monarchical revolutions, there have also been revolutions aimed at attaining democracy, revolutions for independence from a colonial power or from an existing state, revolutions to invert a racial hierarchy or ethnic hierarchy, and Islamist revolutions aimed at transforming a secular state into a religious one. That doesn’t exhaust the various purposes to which revolution has been put across history.
My book is essentially about how revolutions have evolved over time. I don’t look at all different types of revolutions in detail. I was particularly interested in the decline and marginalization of social revolution and the rise of what I call urban civic revolutions. Social revolution had its heyday in the mid-twentieth century. But in recent decades, social revolutions have faded, and political revolutions aimed at containing corrupt and repressive dictatorships have multiplied in their place. This has been accompanied by a shift in the location of revolutions; they’ve moved from the countryside to cities. In the nineteenth century, social revolutions were predominantly an urban phenomenon. But they migrated to the countryside in the mid-twentieth century and became predominantly rural.

What is an urban civic revolution?

Urban civic revolutions have become the predominant form of revolution around the world. An urban civic revolution seeks to mobilize as many people as possible in central urban spaces in order to bring about regime change through the power of numbers rather than the power of arms. Because they try to mobilize as many people as possible in order to disrupt government, they’re quite diverse in the coalitions that underpin them. Part of why they have become the predominant form of revolution around the world has to do with the movement of millions of people into cities over the past century, the massive urbanization that has transformed the nature of our world.
In fact, you don’t see this form of revolution until the late twentieth century, when very large numbers of people concentrated in cities. In 1900, something like thirteen cities around the world had a million inhabitants or more. Today, we have 548 such cities. So it’s much easier today to generate very large crowds and use them as a basis for bringing about regime change than it was a century ago.
Traditionally, revolution was an armed phenomenon. But armed revolution in cities was generally a losing proposition, as the state possesses overwhelming force in cities. The state has greater numbers of armed combatants, better weapons, and better training, and these forces tend to be concentrated in cities, where the nerve centers of government are located. This was something that revolutionaries recognized already in the nineteenth century.
Friedrich Engels, for instance, wrote that armed revolutionaries in cities were at a big disadvantage vis-à-vis the state because the state had overwhelming firepower. This was the main reason that armed revolutionaries moved from the city to the countryside in the mid-twentieth century. In the process, social revolutionaries discovered the revolutionary potential of peasants, who previously had been thought to be reactionary and focused largely on the issue of access to land rather than transformation of class structures.
There were other reasons besides urbanization that made urban civic revolutions possible in the late twentieth century. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, governments dealt with unarmed crowds in very violent ways. Unarmed revolutionary crowds in the early twentieth century were six times more likely to involve deaths than they are today, as governments were more likely to shoot at them or ride over them. So revolutionaries had to arm themselves simply for protection.
Unarmed revolutionary crowds in the early twentieth century were six times more likely to involve deaths than they are today.
But today, with the invention of “nonlethal” methods of crowd control, unarmed revolution has become much less dangerous. It still involves significant risk. Obviously, people are still shot at and killed in revolutionary crowds today. But it is much less likely to happen than in the past.
There are also technological reasons why the urban civic revolution didn’t occur until the late twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, for instance, you couldn’t hear people in a large crowd at a distance, since there were no systems for sound amplification. It wasn’t until the 1930s, when the Nazis first applied sound amplification to large demonstrations and street processions, that you could hear people in large crowds at more than ten meters. In earlier periods, revolutionaries also relied largely on highly localized neighborhood and factory networks for mobilizing people. This also limited the size of crowds.
But by the late twentieth century, all these things changed. With the rise of television and the internet, there was a major shift in the technological environment, allowing for the mobilization of larger numbers. Digital technologies have transformed the process of revolution, accentuating visuality and simultaneity and traversing political boundaries with great speed.
The political and international environment also shifted in ways that were conducive to the rise of urban civic revolutions. And the demographic concentration of people in cities made possible revolutionary challenges based on the power of numbers rather than the power of arms. So revolutions today are markedly different than in the past — not only in their relocation to cities, but also in the entire manner by which they are carried out.

Cities themselves are also different now than they were decades or a century ago in terms of their social structures, physical environments, position in national and international markets, and the like. I live in New York, and I’m forty now. It is very different from what it was like when I was a kid. There has been a real transformation in the nature of the city, and a similar process has played out in a lot of other cities around the world.
How has the transformation of urban social life during the neoliberal era shaped the development of the urban civic revolution?

There have been multiple transformations in the physiognomy, social structure, and character of cities over the last two centuries that have affected the nature of urban revolutionary challenges. When you think back to the nineteenth century and to industrialization, the classic situation was, say, Paris, which contained very densely settled working-class neighborhoods near centers of power. These dense working-class warrens provided a conducive physical environment for barricade warfare.
But in order to combat rebellion, the government broke up these neighborhoods. The neighborhoods were cleared out, and large, open spaces were created in their place. In Paris, this was associated with Hausmann and then was later imitated elsewhere around the world. States also sought to create large ceremonial open spaces in cities as they grew in power. And as cities grew, larger streets and boulevards became necessary simply for the movement of people. These large boulevards and squares were not particularly good for armed rebellion. But today they are exactly where large numbers of people concentrate in revolutionary crowds.
In short, the opening of spaces in cities provided the physical environment conducive to urban civic revolts based on the power of numbers.
Neoliberalism has also had effects on cities. For one thing, gentrification has often pushed poor and working-class people to the physical periphery in many cities around the world. The urban poor generally don’t participate in urban civic revolutions in numbers relative to their share of the population. Rather, the educated upper-middle class participates disproportionately. I’m not talking about the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. Capitalists generally don’t participate in revolutions, as there’s no good reason for them to do that. They are usually fairly well plugged into the ruling regime. But the educated service class does participate disproportionately.
The urban poor generally don’t participate in urban civic revolutions in numbers relative to their share of the population. Rather, the educated upper-middle class participates disproportionately.
In my book, I use representative national surveys from four different urban civic revolutions — two from Ukraine, one from the Egyptian revolution, and one from Tunisia — to investigate who participates in urban civic revolutions. The surveys show that across these cases, the educated and better-off participated disproportionately relative to their numbers in society. But they also show that the crowds that participated in these revolutions were quite diverse, not only in terms of their class profile but also in terms of their political views. Urban civic revolutions are quite diverse coalitions. You couldn’t generate the huge crowds necessary to dislodge a regime with just upper-middle class people alone.
That diversity is reflected in their goals and demands. They revolve around negative coalitions, focusing on the eviction of a corrupt and repressive regime rather than for a particular set of changes. In this respect, urban civic revolutions are often framed as democratic revolutions. But as the surveys show, most participants have a weak commitment to democratic values. Moreover, the issues that motivate most participants tend to revolve around corruption and economic issues, while political and civil liberties are a motivating factor for only a minority of participants, usually about a third or a quarter.
In terms of the effects of neoliberalism, there have been a significant number of revolutions sparked by crises resulting from neoliberal reforms on urban populations, changes like the contraction of public services, or price increases that have been imposed on society. Not all urban civic revolutions come into being in response to neoliberalism. But there is a subset that has been sparked by neoliberal reforms. Neoliberal globalization has also connected cities in a new way and made the global diffusion of revolution a quicker and more widespread phenomenon. The diffusion of revolutions across countries has become more pronounced as a result of globalization.

The concept of a revolutionary situation is central to the study of revolutions. Vladimir Lenin had a three-part conception of what a revolutionary situation looks like. According to him, such a situation comes about when it becomes impossible for a ruling class to maintain its rule, when the suffering of oppressed classes becomes more acute than usual, and because of the first two conditions, masses of people take the stage of history. What do you make of that concept?

Contemporary scholars have generally moved beyond the Leninist conception. Revolution is not merely a matter of the depth of grievance or the level of repression. These have never accurately predicted revolution. Studies show that most people suffer in silence in the face of grievances. Certainly, grievances matter. But they are grossly insufficient to explain revolution. Leadership matters, as Lenin himself would have argued. Resources matter. And opportunities matter. But even these do not fully explain the outbreak of revolutions, which have been notoriously unpredictable.
In terms of what a revolutionary situation is, scholars today instead take their cue from Leon Trotsky, who argued that a revolutionary situation is a situation of dual sovereignty, when competing claims for sovereignty over the same state emerge. Trotsky was obviously writing about the Russian Revolution, in which two competing centers of power, the Provisional Government and the Soviets, vied for predominance. It’s not always the case that you get to two formal centers of power claiming sovereignty over the same government. Sometimes, in contemporary revolutions, where the leadership of revolution is often diffuse, it’s just people rejecting the sovereignty of the incumbent regime, with the alternative to the incumbent regime being more implicit.
A great deal of unpredictability is built into revolution due to the choices that governments and oppositions make in reaction to one another.
The Leninist conception is highly structural. But revolutionary situations are not merely a matter of structural conditions. They emerge out of interactions between governments and oppositions that can turn periods of reform or repression into open revolt. There are multiple possibilities that occur within these conjunctures, and a great deal of unpredictability is built into revolution due to the choices that governments and oppositions make in reaction to one another.
This doesn’t mean that there’s not a structural dimension underlying revolution. As I show in the book, there are a series of structural conditions that accurately predict the emergence of about 80 percent of the urban civic revolutions that occurred: high levels of corruption, intermediate levels of repression, leaders who have been in power for a long time, a lack of oil resources, and lower-middle levels of development.
But these conditions also seriously overpredict the likelihood of revolution. Based on these conditions you would expect to see many more revolutions than actually occur. That’s even taking into consideration certain triggers that are known to set off revolutions, like price hikes, a financial crisis, or international wars.
The structural conditions that underpin revolutions overpredict revolution because of the role that government-opposition interactions play in the emergence of revolution. For example, in response to a challenge, governments can respond with co-optation. Alternatively, they can respond with reform or repression. These sometimes dissipate revolutionary challenges before they gain momentum.
Problems also emerge within oppositions that prevent them from cooperating across groups. In the book, I trace out several examples where there was a higher-than-normal risk of revolution in a country based on the structural conditions that mattered elsewhere, but revolution didn’t happen, and I look at why it didn’t occur despite the heightened risk. What I find is that agency and choice make a difference in these situations.
Revolution is a structured phenomenon. It generally occurs where we would expect it to occur and under a particular set of structural conditions. Nevertheless, revolutions also depend a lot on the choices people make, and these interactions often occur with quite unpredictable results. Errors in revolutionary contention are also quite common. For all these reasons, revolutions typically come upon us as surprises.

Do you find that revolutions are more or less successful at achieving their goals than more routine modes of political contention?

It’s hard to say. We don’t really have a handle on all the routine modes of contention and reformist movements in the same way as we do revolutions, which are a far less common situation. I can’t say that reformist movements, for instance, are more or less successful than revolutions in terms of achieving their substantive goals. Change is hard.
Revolution may have become a less useful way of changing the social structure of society.
However, I think we can say that for certain types of goals, there has been a shift away from revolution as a way of achieving change. For instance, there haven’t been successful social revolutions since the late 1970s or early 1980s in terms of gaining power, and since the mid-1990s relatively few new revolutionary episodes have emerged that have sought class transformation of society. However, we do know of nonrevolutionary movements that have had goals of transforming the class structure of society that have come to power through the ballot box or that have influenced government in other ways. Revolution may have become a less useful way of changing the social structure of society. Part of the reason for this is because changing the social structure of society tends to divide society and elicit a great deal of violent resistance, making social revolution more violent and more difficult to achieve.

Let’s take a closer look at Ukraine, one of the cases you study in detail in the book. Ukraine is very much in the news right now because of the war happening there. How do the two big episodes of urban civic revolution in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution of 2004 and the 2013–14 Euromaidan revolution, illuminate some of the main themes and arguments of your book?

To me, the Orange Revolution is the archetypal urban civic revolution. It occurred because a corrupt and repressive government tried to engage in electoral fraud to stay in power, and this elicited significant opposition across broad sectors of society. It tried to mobilize as many people as possible in central urban spaces, in large open areas in order to bring about regime change. And it was spectacularly successful in mobilizing large numbers. They had crowds of up to a million people in central Kyiv.
But very quickly afterward, the negative coalition that dominated that revolution split after coming to power. It was so diverse that it couldn’t be held together. It also didn’t push aside or transform the state it inherited in any way, and corruption continued to flourish. This led to a situation where Viktor Yanukovych, the candidate who ran in the election that sparked the revolutionary crisis in the first place, was elected to the presidency six years later in 2010. So the very people whom the revolution evicted from power came back into power at the ballot box not too long afterward due to the failings of the governing coalition that emerged from the revolution.
This lack of persistence is typical of urban civic revolutions. They produce governments that are highly fractious. Part of this is because they have very minimalist, negative goals that seek to unite as many people as possible. They are largely about evicting a repressive and corrupt government and are more about what people are mobilizing against than what they are mobilizing for. If you’re going to rely on the power of numbers, you must have demands that are going to appeal across large numbers. If you live by the power of numbers, you die by the power of numbers.
A lack of persistence is typical of urban civic revolutions. They produce governments that are highly fractious.
Of course, there was a second revolution in Ukraine, largely because the first one didn’t end the corruption or repression that had sparked the first revolution. That second revolution, the Euromaidan revolution, was somewhat more successful in transforming the state. But it has also struggled quite a bit in doing so, largely because it inherited the corrupt state that Yanukovych built. Certainly, part of the challenges facing contemporary Ukraine have been due to war. But the Russian annexation of Crimea and the invasion united Ukrainian society in a way that otherwise probably wouldn’t have been the case in the wake of revolution. It allowed a new coalition to emerge around Zelensky that has seriously attacked corruption.

That geopolitical element was missing from the situation in Egypt, where you also had an extraordinarily broad negative coalition that succeeded in toppling Mubarak.

Exactly. The coalition in Egypt also couldn’t hold itself together in the face of what came afterward. It split, and eventually things deteriorated to the point that the liberals who had allied with the Muslim Brotherhood to evict the Mubarak government allied themselves with the remnants of Mubarak’s military in order to evict the Muslim Brotherhood from power. That story is the tragedy of the Egyptian revolution, and we know the consequences in terms of the enormous repression that is taking place there today.
For urban civic revolutions to succeed, it often takes an external threat to keep revolutionary coalitions united, because the natural tendency is for them to break apart after coming to power.

One of the key aspects of your book is the relationship between violence and revolution, and how that’s changed over time. As you document in the book, there was a long decline in revolutionary violence, particularly since the latter part of the twentieth century. But you also observe that revolutions have become more violent in recent years.
The situation in Ukraine seems to reflect that with the horrifically violent war that’s happening there now. Is Ukraine unique because of the geopolitical dimension that affected revolutionary contention there, or do you think it’s a harbinger of things to come, particularly as we see the reemergence of great-power rivalries on the international stage?

Overall, violence has declined in revolution over the long term. Revolutionary civil wars have become less common than in the first half of the twentieth century or the Cold War period. Even within those wars, there are fewer deaths. And even in unarmed revolutions, there has been a decline in lethal violence.
There’s a unique element to the Ukrainian situation given Ukraine’s relationship with Russia and the way in which this sparked war. But after a long decline in violence in revolution, revolutions today are once again becoming somewhat more violent, though in a different way. We’re not seeing civil wars so much as more riotous violence, especially in cities. You saw that in the Euromaidan revolution. What began as a typical urban civic revolution mobilizing very large numbers of people largely in response to government repression evolved into violent street riots. However, the urban civic element was not capable of evicting the Yanukovych government.
While the urban civic model has generally been quite successful on its own terms, the targets it’s being applied to in recent years have grown more difficult to topple.
While the urban civic model has generally been quite successful on its own terms, the targets it’s being applied to in recent years have grown more difficult to topple. Protesters are confronting more repressive governments that aren’t as easily moved by the power of numbers. These governments have learned how to deal with urban civic protests, how to manage them spatially and how to wait them out until they exhaust themselves. You see this in Belarus as well. This failure of the power of numbers has pushed several cases into more riotous forms. So yes, they are becoming more violent, but more in terms of street violence than civil war.

You contend that the era of social revolutions, at least as we’ve known them, is over. Is this merely a by-product of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, or are there other dynamics at play?

The collapse of the Soviet bloc was certainly a contributing factor. But it’s bigger than that. Take Theda Skocpol’s classic work on social revolution, which is generally held to be the model of scholarship on the topic. Skocpol sees social revolutions as rooted in a particular type of social formation, what she calls an agrarian-bureaucratic society. Agrarian-bureaucratic societies are societies in which the surplus produced by peasants is essentially shared between a government and an aristocratic or landed elite that’s in alliance with the government. This is the classic type of society that was vulnerable to social revolutions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Accordingly, social revolutions historically were closely connected with land inequality and lack of access to land. They typically occurred in peasant societies. Even when mobilization in social revolutions occurred in cities and was led predominantly by urban classes, the peasant element was still prominent. But by the late twentieth century, that agrarian-bureaucratic society had begun to fade.
What happened? Well, a third of the world experienced communist revolutions that wiped out that aristocratic landed class altogether. Then you had land reform in other places that occurred as a result of the threat of social revolution and that was aimed at undermining its potential. Land inequality is still quite extensive around the world. But a lot of land has been redistributed to populations in many places, and that has mitigated elements of the social revolutionary impulse.
Then you have the massive migration of people into cities. Who are the people who migrate into cities? It is typically young men, the very same people who are most likely to participate in armed rebellion. When they migrate to cities, they leave behind a disproportionately older and female population in the countryside that often depends upon wages earned in the cities and remittances sent back to the village. So access to land is no longer as important as a source of subsistence, and often it’s access to wages in cities that has taken its place. You also have developments like the green revolution in the countryside, which has increased productivity in the countryside in some countries, so that people can produce more.
Finally, one of the main solvents of that aristocratic class has been democratization. Studies show that the power of the aristocratic, landed elite tends to be undermined through democratic reforms.
All these factors taken together have undermined agrarian-bureaucratic society. So social revolutions as we traditionally knew them no longer occur, not just because of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn’t create social revolutions. The role of the Soviet Union was essentially to provide arms to revolutionaries. Rather, the conditions that underpinned these revolutionary conflicts have deteriorated, and instead large numbers of people have moved into cities. This movement of large numbers into cities instead created a conducive environment for the urban civic model of revolution.

Could you foresee any circumstances under which social revolution in this more urbanized context could become a live possibility? Would social revolution under these conditions have to be totally reimagined?

It would have to be reimagined. The agrarian-bureaucratic model of social revolution is not going to work anymore. But social inequality is still pronounced and has even gotten worse over time. So it’s not as if the issues underpinning social revolution have disappeared in urbanized societies. The eclipse of agrarian-bureaucratic society has deteriorated and marginalized that model of social revolution. But it doesn’t mean that some other model of social revolution might not be invented.
Such a model, given the urban character of societies, is probably going to have to rely on the power of numbers, not on the power of arms. So, it wouldn’t be as heavily ideologized and total as the earlier model, which generally sought to completely transform society. Again, if you are going to rely on the power of numbers, you must figure out how to appeal to very large numbers of people, and that is going to water down your demands. Also, because the coercive forces of the state are concentrated in cities, armed revolution in cities is a losing proposition. It’s just not going to work, at least not across a significant number of cases. A new model of social revolution, one that would attack class inequalities, would have to be different.
The eclipse of agrarian-bureaucratic society has deteriorated and marginalized that model of social revolution. But it doesn’t mean that some other model of social revolution might not be invented.
Right now, most of these issues are being handled through the ballot box to the extent that they are being dealt with. Generally speaking, democracy is the great solvent of revolution, because there’s really no reason to risk your life on the streets if in a few years, you can change your government through the ballot box.

There’s a graph in your book that really stuck with me. It’s a line graph showing how the frequency of social revolutionary episodes drops basically to zero after certain thresholds of GDP and democratization are crossed.

All revolutionary episodes, for that matter. Generally, there are no revolutions after a certain degree of democracy has been attained. Revolutions have occasionally occurred in democracies, but they are very, very rare. The sweet spot is at a middle range of repression — not in the most open regimes and not in the most repressive regimes, though the most repressive regimes do experience revolutions more often than democracies.
This is where democratic backsliding could play a role. We don’t know what the future of democracy is today. It’s in great doubt and under threat. We have seen backsliding in democracies around the world and a movement toward more authoritarian regimes. If democracies do move back toward authoritarian forms of government, that could make revolution a more attractive proposition.

By backsliding, you mean a situation in which electoral democracy is not entirely wiped out, but is rigged such that it’s essentially impossible to change the government or its policies no matter how people vote?

Yes, that’s what I have in mind — but even more so, the growth of dictatorial power that overrides any restraints on executives. There have been cases in which revolutions have occurred under those kinds of circumstances. The real question is, how much influence do people have at the ballot box to restrain these tendencies? Can they change their government through the ballot box when there is the will to do so?

In the modern era, the concept of revolution has been almost completely identified with left-wing, democratic, and progressive political traditions. But today, it seems as if the center of revolutionary gravity might be shifting to the right in certain respects. January 6 happened here in the US, and Bolsonaro’s supporters imitated it in Brazil after he lost the election there. Do you see a shift in the political valence of revolutionary contention?

Historically we have had occasional right-wing revolutions. It’s not a totally unprecedented phenomenon. The rise of Mussolini might be interpreted as a revolution, and in fact in my book I do count it as a revolutionary episode. So, it’s certainly possible.
I wouldn’t count January 6 as a revolutionary episode, in large part because it was carried out by someone who was already in power in order to maintain himself in power. The other thing is that it lacked the conviction of a revolutionary episode. It was a one-off event. I would say it was closer to a riot than a revolution. A siege implies some kind of commitment to going out and staying out there no matter what, to achieve regime change.
In the case of January 6, they smashed up Congress and then they went home. Others have called January 6, I think correctly, a “self-coup,” an autogolpe as it’s known in Latin America. This is when a leader tries to perpetuate themselves in power by carrying out a coup or uprising against their own government, essentially in order to seize permanent control over that government.
Luckily, the self-coup on January 6 was foiled. The same with Bolsonaro’s attempt in Brazil. It lacked the commitment and conviction of a mass siege of power, resembled a riot more than a revolution, and was a self-coup aimed at perpetuating Bolsonaro in power rather than a mass revolt against the regime.

Hopefully they do not try to pull off the type of siege you’re describing in the future.

It could happen. Revolution is a phenomenon that can be used by all different social forces — it’s not the sole property of the Left or of liberals. It’s quite possible.

A federal court has blocked Biden administration rules that would have provided almost $20 billion in student loan forgiveness, primarily to students who attended colleges that defrauded them. Last July, the Education Department released new proposed rules expanding eligibility for the department's "borrower defense" forgiveness program, as well as several other smaller loan forgiveness programs. The borrower defense program offers loan forgiveness to students whose schools engaged in misconduct or misled or defrauded them. In most cases, students eligible for borrower defense attended for-profit schools. The rules were finalized last November. The rules allow students to more easily file claims against their colleges by "allowing for group claims, eliminating overly strict limits on when borrowers can file a claim, expanding the type of misconduct that can lead to an approved claim to include aggressive and deceptive recruitment practices, and ensuring borrowers receive timely decisions about their claims," according to an Education Department press release. "We are committed to fixing a broken system. If a borrower qualifies for student loan relief, it shouldn't take mountains of paperwork or a law degree to obtain it," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement last July. "These proposed regulations will protect borrowers and save them time, money, and frustration, and will hold their colleges responsible for wrongdoing." In total, the new regulations—which included changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and other student loan forgiveness policies—were estimated to cost taxpayers $19.7 billion. In February, Career Colleges & Schools of Texas, an association of career-oriented, mostly for-profit colleges, filed a lawsuit challenging the rules. While the Education Department contended that the rules only work to help "streamline" claims from affected students, the complaint argued that the rules amounted to a gross overreach of government spending power that unduly punished schools. "The new processes do not further the fair and accurate adjudication of borrower defense claims. Instead, they are designed to achieve the non-statutory and impermissible objective of massive student loan forgiveness," noted the complaint. "Rather than merely facilitate or 'streamline' the resolution of borrower claims, the Department designed its Final Rule with a thumb on the scale to maximize the number and amount of loan discharges with little regard for the merits of the claims or the rights of schools." On Monday, a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, granting an injunction against the rules, pending a higher court ruling. This latest development in the ongoing attempt by the Biden administration to grant large-scale student loan forgiveness shows just how difficult it will be to do that without congressional approval. So far, the Education Department has attempted to achieve loan forgiveness through rule-making procedures and all-too-generous readings of existing law. However, federal judges seem increasingly suspicious of that approach—and are unwilling to let the Education Department unilaterally spend billions of taxpayer dollars on loan forgiveness schemes.The post Federal Court Blocks $20 Billion in Student Loan Forgiveness appeared first on Reason.com.

It's now been nearly 100 years since Congress overhauled the United States' general tariff system—a system that is by now "quite antiquated and designed for a different time and a different economy," says Ed Gresser. And that's not all, says Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative who now serves as vice president for the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. The tariff code is also "quite regressive and somewhat misogynist." Inexpensive goods like cheap sneakers are generally taxed at a higher rate than pricier items like leather boots, and women's underwear is charged a higher tariff rate than boxers and briefs. In the second episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we're diving into the weird and wonky tariff system that imposes hidden taxes on Americans every day. Protectionism usually benefits some special interest at the expense of everyone else, but some of the industries supposedly being protected by these tariffs don't even exist in the U.S. anymore. "The most effective lobbyist in Washington is muscle memory," says Steve Lamar, president and CEO of the American Apparel and Footwear Association. The supply chains for basic necessities like T-shirts, shoes, and underwear stretch all the way around the world today. But America's tariff code still acts like those are niche domestic industries. On this week's episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, we're explaining what that means for consumers and why we've recently moved in the wrong direction—by applying even more tariffs on top of some of the most highly taxed imports.   Further reading for this week's episode: "U.S. Underwear Tariffs Are Unfair to Women," by Ed Gresser "U.S. Tariffs on Cheap Stainless Steel Spoons Are 5 Times Higher Than on Sterling Silver Spoons," by Ed Gresser "The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade," by Pietra Rivoli "If Biden's Trade Policy Was Really Driven by 'Equity,' Trump's Tariffs Would Already Be Gone," by Eric Boehm     Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact checking by Katherine Sypher    The post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: The Ghosts of Protectionism Past appeared first on Reason.com.

This report presents original findings from the most comprehensive study of the accuracy of public perception with respect to the prevalence and racial distribution of police use of force.

The report is divided into four main parts:

Part 1 outlines the study’s theoretical framework and expectations regarding the accuracy of public estimates of police use of force. In brief, it argues that because of a lack of direct personal experience and information for assessing the prevalence of police force and racial bias, Americans must rely on media coverage to estimate how serious police violence is. This renders public estimates susceptible to media distortion; and this perceptual distortion is further exacerbated by individuals’ political orientations and biases.

Part 2 presents the first empirical analysis of new data from our original survey, which asks U.S. respondents to estimate various police use-of-force statistics. The findings reveal significant overestimates of the prevalence of nonlethal use-of-force incidents—both in general and as to those involving black Americans. Respondents also significantly overestimated both the black and unarmed shares of fatal police-shooting victims. These overestimates tend to be largest among liberal respondents.

Part 3 introduces the study’s embedded experimental design, which tests whether correcting survey respondents’ misestimates leads respondents to adjust their perceptions of police brutality and related policy preferences. Encouragingly, the overall findings indicate that receiving correct information significantly reduced inaccurate perceptions of police brutality and racism and increased support for policing-centered, anticrime public policies. These effects were also greatest for liberals and respondents who gave moderate-to-large overestimates, on average.

Part 4 discusses the implications of the study’s findings for news media coverage of police use of force. It proposes recommendations for journalists and argues for the aggressive and frequent use of social media context and fact-checking tools as a means of combating public misperceptions of policing.

Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in media and public attention to police brutality and racial bias. By some measures, the volume of media references to these topics has been greater over the past decade than ever before.[1] Google search behavior shows that Americans are consuming this messaging (Figure 1), and their attitudes toward police—particularly Democrats’ and liberals’ attitudes—have responded accordingly.[2] Confidence in police has never been lower,[3] while antipolice sentiment,[4] perceptions of police brutality[5] and racism,[6] and support for defunding the police have never been higher.[7]

So much have perceptions of racist policing grown that, as of 2021, more than half (52%) of Democrats felt that levels of racism were greater among police officers than other societal groups (up from 35% in 2014). Fears of the police among black Americans[8] have increased to the point that, in 2020, roughly 74% of black respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll said that they “personally worry” about being the victim of police brutality, compared with 64% and 57% who said so in 2018 and 2016, respectively.

Yet these trends in media coverage and public perceptions seem divorced from empirical reality. A stark illustration of this was provided by a nationally representative survey conducted in 2019 by the Skeptic Research Center,[9] which found that nearly 33% of people—including 44% of liberals—thought that 1,000 or more unarmed black men alone were killed by police in 2019. In fact, according to the Mapping Police Violence (MPV) database, 29 unarmed black (vs. 44 white) men were killed by police that year.[10] Further, whereas the average Skeptic Research Center respondent thought that 48% of all people killed by police that year were black—an estimate that reached a high of 55% among liberal respondents—the true proportion (25%) was far lower.[11]

Meanwhile, an earlier Qualtrics survey conducted by Manhattan Institute fellow Eric Kaufmann found that 80% of black respondents and 60% of highly educated white liberal respondents thought that young black men were more likely to be fatally shot by police than to die in a car accident.[12] Actually, in 2020, the year the survey was fielded, black men between the ages of 18 and 34 were more than 17 times more likely to die in motor-vehicle accidents (38.4 deaths per 100,000) than to be shot to death by police (2.2 per 100,000).[13]

More generally, and despite 45% of the public (including 67% of Democrats) thinking that police violence against the public is an “extremely” or a “very serious” problem, instances of police use of force remain exceedingly rare.[14] What data can be gathered[15] show that rates of fatal officer-involved shootings (FOIS) in major U.S. cities are generally lower in the past 10 years than in decades past.

Data from the MPV database (Figure 2) further reveal that numbers and rates of FOIS among the country’s four largest racial/ethnic groups have either declined or remained stable across the 2013–22 period.

Rather than a response to actual increases in use of force, the swing of public opinion against the police appears to be a largely media-driven phenomenon—one apparently facilitated by the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

This report considers whether the unprecedented media attention given to police use of force has distorted public perceptions of its frequency and racial distribution, thereby making the phenomenon appear more pervasive and severe than is justified by the data.

It addresses three main questions:

First, how accurate are people’s estimates of police use-of-force statistics? Though findings from the aforementioned Skeptic survey—one of the only existing surveys to address this question—suggest that they tend to be highly inaccurate, this report provides a more thorough investigation into the matter.

Though findings from the aforementioned Skeptic survey—one of the only existing surveys to address this question—suggest that they tend to be highly inaccurate, this report provides a more thorough investigation into the matter. Second, do such (mis)estimates directly inform people’s assessment of the severity of police brutality and racism, as well as their policing policy preferences? While intuitively that may be the case, it’s also plausible that overestimates of police brutality and racism are the result of political or social identities, reflecting or reinforcing preexisting views rather than independently guiding perceptions and preferences.

While intuitively that may be the case, it’s also plausible that overestimates of police brutality and racism are the result of political or social identities, reflecting or reinforcing preexisting views rather than independently guiding perceptions and preferences. Third, do people adjust their perceptions of police brutality and associated policy preferences when their misestimates are corrected?

These questions are important because, inadvertently or otherwise, news organizations, journalists, and political elites may be contributing to misperceptions about police use of force—misperceptions that could have, and likely have had, significant social costs.[16]

For instance, negative media portrayals of police and the public outrage that those portrayals foster can cause police officers to engage in less proactive policing, which, in turn, can lead to increases in crime.[17] Negative media portrayals can also weaken the morale of police officers and decrease the desirability of the profession, making it harder for police departments to retain and recruit quality personnel and forcing them to lower hiring standards[18] to fill staffing vacancies.[19]

The erosion of the police’s public legitimacy can also sway or pressure local governments to consider or enact reckless de-policing policies[20] that compromise public safety—as was the case following the murder of George Floyd.[21] It could also motivate greater lawbreaking, as people are less likely to comply with the law if they perceive that the police routinely flout it.[22] In addition, misperceptions of police use of force can lead to unwarranted fears of being victimized by police, discouraging people from cooperating with the police or reporting crimes and suspicious activities.[23]

Insofar as these negative consequences are rooted in misperceptions of the prevalence and severity of police violence, this report brings good news. Since misperceptions can be corrected, this report suggests that at least some of these negative consequences could be mitigated, if not avoided, if news organizations and political leaders covered or discussed policing incidents more responsibly.

Part 1: Literature Review and Theoretical Expectations

The Role of News Media in Public (Mis)perceptions of “Police Violence”

People often lack direct experience with the social phenomena that they are asked to assess in public opinion surveys. This is likely especially the case with respect to police use of force, which few Americans will ever directly observe or encounter. Therefore, when asked to appraise the importance, risk, or severity of a given phenomenon, the responses that people give are typically based on whatever information is at the top of their minds at that moment—or what is most convenient for their social identities and political orientations.[24]

People rely on news media as a source of informational cues, and media coverage is often the only window available through which the public can learn about phenomena outside their direct experience.[25] It is also the primary channel through which political leaders communicate to the public, which further helps people determine or become aware of an issue’s relative importance.[26] Thus, the more attention that news media and political leaders give to an issue, the more the public is likely to regard it as important. Additionally, the more the media reports on a given phenomenon, the easier it is for people to retrieve examples of that phenomenon from memory. This easy retrieval, in turn, is a cue to the phenomenon’s broader societal prevalence.

In the context of race, the availability of informational cues may explain why Americans tend to perceive greater discrimination against blacks and worse race relations in the U.S. at large than in their own communities—i.e., their appraisals of local events are less reliant on news media and elite messaging and are more informed by what they see around them.[27] When it comes to appraising the prevalence and severity of racism and race relations more broadly, however, most people have little choice but to rely on news media and political leaders. Therefore, it’s likely no coincidence that as media and political attention to racial discrimination increases, so, too, do public perceptions of its severity.[28]

Expectations for Public Estimates of Police Use of Force

As with racial discrimination, increases in public perceptions of the seriousness and prevalence of police brutality closely track increases in media coverage of that issue. To the extent that these perceptions relate to or influence people’s estimates of the prevalence of police force against the public, this study expects that the average respondent will significantly overestimate:

The percentage of Americans subjected to nonlethal force at the hands of the police in a typical year The number of Americans shot and killed by police in a typical year The share of unarmed Americans shot and killed by police in a typical year.

However, the media and political messaging on police brutality that the public receives are hardly race-neutral. Data from the ProQuest news article database (Figure 3) show that the average and median unarmed black (fatal) police-shooting victim returns nearly 11 and 21 times the number of news articles, respectively, as the average and median unarmed white (fatal) victim.

Black victims were also four times more likely than white victims to be featured in the New York Times. These disparities are not confined to printed news coverage. As shown in the right panel of Figure 3, black victims were more than five times more likely than white victims to be mentioned at least once during an MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News broadcast.

This indicates that media messaging on police brutality is overwhelmingly focused on black victims, despite blacks constituting just a quarter (if a disproportionate one) of those killed by the police in a typical year.[29] This likely explains why the average respondent in the Skeptic survey estimated that 48% of those killed by police in 2019 were black. When Americans are asked to provide such estimates, the cases that spring to mind likely consist largely, if not entirely, of black faces.

Accordingly, when respondents are additionally asked to give estimates for blacks and whites, this study predicts that:

Respondents’ overestimation of the percentage of Americans who reported being subjected to nonlethal force in a typical year will be significantly larger when the Americans are identified as black than when identified as white They will significantly overestimate the black share of fatal police-shooting victims in a typical year and underestimate the white share Their overestimates of the unarmed share of fatal policing-shooting victims will be significantly larger when the victims are identified as black than when they are identified as white.

Political Orientation’s Influence on Estimation Accuracy

So far, all the theoretical predictions in this study have been blind to the respondents’ political orientations. This is because people’s estimates should basically be shaped by the same information environment. In other words, liberals and conservatives are all expected to overestimate the criteria in question, on average.

However, it’s also reasonable to expect that the magnitude of overestimates will be larger among liberals than conservatives. Not only are perceptions of pervasive police brutality and racism more congenial[30] to the moral-ideological orientations of liberals than conservatives, but they are also likely to be more interested in and attentive to (or at least less avoidant of) such information.[31] Also, the political (or Democratic Party) leaders and elites liberals follow are more likely to communicate it.[32]

What little data are available also suggest that liberals do indeed have less accurate perceptions with respect to police use of force than conservatives. As noted earlier, the Skeptic survey found that liberals overestimated both the number of unarmed black men killed by police and the black share of police homicides in 2019 to a greater degree than conservatives.

Additionally, while ideological identification was not measured, data from a 2021 Axios/Ipsos survey (Figure 4) show that Democrats were four times more likely than Republicans to believe that police shootings of “Black or Brown youths” had gotten worse over the previous year.[33]

In fact, and regardless of the data source or definition of “youth” adopted, there were no such increases in the number of FOIS victims among these demographics (Figure 4, right panel) in 2019–21. To the contrary, fatal police shootings in this demographic either declined or remained roughly steady.

This context informs this study’s expectation that liberals will give larger overestimates of all nonlethal and lethal use-of-force criteria—especially those for black victims—than conservatives. Further, while conservatives are expected to give estimates that are closer to the actual number, on average, we expect rates of underestimation to be higher among them than among Democrats and liberals.

Do Perceptions Respond to New, Correct Information?

When people are provided with facts or correct information about a social condition or phenomena, do they update their perceptions accordingly? This is a critical question for the current study. If people cling to their perceptions of police brutality and racism despite being presented with evidence to the contrary, it would indicate that these perceptions are primarily driven by political or social motivations, as opposed to being a product of ignorance, media bias, and general information heuristics.

However, an emerging consensus from experimental research is that people do “typically update their beliefs in the direction of the evidence they receive.”[34] This has been evident in studies examining the accuracy of people’s perceptions of crime trends,[35] the degree of racial inequality and discrimination,[36] and the characteristics and economic contributions of immigrants to the United States.[37] Such findings suggest that that while social and political motivations do bear on individuals’ beliefs, there is also an inherent motivation to hold accurate beliefs about the world, leading to a willingness to revise their beliefs and perceptions when presented with sufficient evidence.[38]

Because this study expects all respondents to initially overestimate the prevalence of police use of force and the proportion of black American victims, I predict that respondents who are subsequently shown official estimates of these statistics (i.e., the treatment) will perceive police brutality and racism to be rarer and less of a problem than those who are not shown official estimates.

However, some respondents will inevitably have larger overestimates than others, some will be roughly accurate, and some will even underestimate. It is wrong to expect the treatment to have the same effects on all misestimates. In other words, the more a respondent overestimated the official use-of-force statistics, the more that respondent will, after treatment, perceive less police brutality and racism relative to the untreated.

If individuals’ policing-related policy preferences are at least partly based on their perceptions of the prevalence and severity of police brutality and racism, it follows that respondents who receive corrective information (i.e., the “treatment” group) should update not only their perceptions but also their policy preferences.

Political science studies that compare the policy preferences of “informed” or accurate respondents with the uninformed or inaccurate generally offer strong conceptual support for this assumption.[39] An example of this kind of analysis is shown in Figure 5, which compares the policing-related policy attitudes of those who thought that police shootings of “Black or Brown youths” had improved, neither improved nor worsened, or worsened over the previous year. Even when accounting for party identification, race, and other demographic/background variables, those who gave the (incorrect) response of “worsened” are 25–30 points more likely to oppose increasing police funding, 24–28 points more likely to support the “defund the police” movement, and 15–20 points more likely to support diverting police budgets to community policing and social services, compared with those who gave an “improved” or “neither improved nor worsened” response.

Of course, cross-sectional analyses of this sort hardly prove that policy preferences are causally downstream from perceptions. Both perceptions and preferences could stem from other variables whose influences are not captured in the model, such as ideology and political or social identity. Findings from experimental research are thus generally more probative. Esberg, Mummolo, and Westwood note that, with rare exceptions, they generally show that “correcting mistaken beliefs about seemingly relevant facts does little to alter related policy preferences.”[40]

Most relevant to this study is a recent experiment by Schiff et al. that tested whether providing information about the number of fatal police shootings in respondents’ cities influenced their support for varying police reforms. These authors concluded that this informational intervention had no significant effects on support for reforms—neither overall nor as a function of the magnitude and direction of misestimates—that were most strongly associated with partisanship.[41]

Other studies have similarly concluded that though receiving information can meaningfully affect perceptions, this effect does not carry over to policy preferences.[42] On the other hand, some earlier and more recent studies do show[43] that people adjust their policy preferences in the face of belief-discordant evidence.[44]

This Study’s Prediction: Policy Preferences Can Change

Given this conflicting evidence, predictions for the current study are not straightforward. But on the assumption that (mis)estimates of police use-of-force statistics do causally influence policing policy attitudes, respondents can be expected to update the latter when presented with estimation-corrective information.

Specifically, relative to the uncorrected respondents (i.e., the control group), estimation-corrected respondents who generally overestimated (underestimated) the official use-of-force statistics will express greater support for (opposition to) traditional policing-centered anticrime measures. The effects of corrective information on policy attitudes are also expected to grow as the magnitude of over- and underestimates increases. Finally, if corrective information shifts policy attitudes by shifting general perceptions of the problem and severity of police brutality and racism, shifts in perceptions are expected to at least partially mediate shifts in policy attitudes.

Part 2: The Current Study’s Results and Analysis

Recruiting a Closely Representative Sample

To test the predictions outlined in this report’s previous section, all of which were preregistered via the Open Science Framework (OSF) portal,[45] I recruited a sample of 1,508 U.S. adult (18+) respondents via the crowdsourcing platform Prolific. Recruitment began on February 13 and concluded on February 16, 2023. Although not a random sample of the U.S. population, respondents were recruited using cross-stratified demographic quotas[46] to produce a sample that approximates the broader U.S. population in terms of age, sex, and ethnicity.

This similarity is confirmed in Table 1, which compares the demographic composition of recruited Prolific respondents with adult (18+) respondents from the 2022 Current Population Survey and the 2022 Cooperative Election Study. While Prolific adults are somewhat younger than adults in the broader population (median age=44 vs. 47), the sex and ethnicity distributions of the former closely match the latter.

For other variables, though, the correspondence is (unsurprisingly)[47] much weaker. Specifically, Prolific adult respondents report lower household incomes, are less likely to be married (37.4% vs. 51.5%), are more likely to have BA degrees (55.9% vs. 37.7%), and are far more likely to identify as Democrats (64% vs. 41%) and liberals (57.6% vs. 31.9%) than adults in the broader population. Consequently, Prolific sample means and variances for certain outcome variables are likely to meaningfully differ from those observed in the general population.

Nonetheless, research indicates that relationships and treatment effects observed in convenience and less representative samples do typically replicate in nationally representative samples.[48] Therefore, we can be confident that the substantive results of the current study will generalize to the broader U.S. adult population.

Estimating and Analyzing Police–Public Interaction

Estimates of Nonlethal Force

To find respondents’ perceptions on police use of force, the first estimation questions begin by informing respondents about the 2018[49] Police–Public Contact[50] (PPC) survey, which the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) “conducted on large nationally representative sample of 139,692 U.S. respondents ages 16 and older to measure and better understand the public’s interactions with police over the previous 12 months.”[51]

Respondents were then separately[52] asked to estimate, using their “best guess and without looking up the answer,”[53] the percentage of all, white, and black PPC respondents who reported being stopped or approached by police over the previous 12 months. Then they were separately asked to estimate the shares of these respondents who subsequently reported being subjected to nonlethal force, which was defined for them (and by BJS) as kicking, hitting, pushing, grabbing, tasering, pepper-spraying, handcuffing, or gun-pointing.

Figure 6 charts the average estimates for the overall sample and for the three ideological groups. Bars in the final rows of each column report the benchmark estimates (i.e., the “correct” answers) from PPC.

Beginning with the left panel, we see that most respondents significantly overestimated the share of PPC respondents who reported being stopped/approached by police over the previous year. On average, respondents believed that such interactions were reported 2.5 times more frequently than they actually were, a pattern that was consistent across ideological groups.

When considering race-specific estimates of reported police-initiated contact, the Prolific survey adults’ estimates for white PPC respondents tended to be closer to the mark, while those for black PPC respondents were considerably less accurate. Specifically, respondents overestimated the white reporting rate by 4 points and overestimated the black rate by 30 points. While this pattern was evident across political ideologies, it was most pronounced among liberals, who overestimated the black rate by an additional 9 points, compared with conservatives.

A very similar pattern of overestimation is observed in estimates of the prevalence of nonlethal force (middle panel). While the actual report of such force among those stopped or approached by the police in the 2018 PPC survey was just 3%, the average respondent’s estimate was more than seven times higher. Estimates for black PPC respondents were, again, even less accurate in absolute terms. Whereas 6% of blacks who reported police-initiated contact reported being subjected to nonlethal force, the average respondent estimated that 30% did so, with liberal respondents again overestimating more than conservatives.

Taking both these and the earlier police-initiated contact estimates into account, the average respondent’s (implicit)[54] estimate of the share of all blacks who reported experiencing nonlethal force (right panel) was nearly 23 times—and those of liberals and conservatives 26 and 17 times—the actual rate reported in the PPC survey.

In conclusion, respondents[55] of all political backgrounds significantly overestimated the prevalence of police use of nonlethal force. This error, however, tended to be larger for estimates of force reported by black Americans and larger still for liberal than for conservative respondents.

Estimates of Fatal Officer-Involved Shootings (FOIS)

A second estimation series was designed to measure the accuracy of respondents’ perceptions of FOIS,[56] including their distribution across racial groups. The survey begins by informing respondents that, according “to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. population averaged 326.5 million people between 2015 and 2022.”[57] This was done to ensure that respondents were not ignorant of the U.S. population size and that estimates have the same meaning[58] for all respondents.

After again reminding them to use their “best guess and without looking up the answer,” respondents were asked to estimate the number of people “shot and killed by police in the U.S. each year on average between 2015 and 2022.”[59] To benchmark these estimates, I use the average annual number of fatal shooting victims (1,012) reported in the Washington Post’s (WP) Police Shootings database. Average and median estimates for the sample overall and for each of the three ideological groups are presented in Figure 7A.

Earlier, it was predicted that respondents, in general, would overestimate the number of fatal police-shooting victims, with liberals doing so to a greater degree than conservatives. However, the data do not support these predictions.

Although the average respondent estimate (65,934 deaths) vastly exceeded the Washington Post benchmark (1,012), this is largely due to respondents with extreme overestimates, which were extremely high outliers.[60] Therefore, the median, which is less influenced by such outliers, offers a more accurate account of respondents’ estimation tendencies. Quite unexpectedly, the median estimate (360 FOIS victims) falls well short of the benchmark number. Additionally, while the median estimate among liberals (500) was higher than that of conservatives (200), it was also significantly closer to the Washington Post benchmark, making it the more accurate of the two.

Figure 7B further elucidates this pattern by categorizing the continuous estimation scale into six ranges.

We observe that 64% of all respondents gave estimates of fewer than 1,000 average annual FOIS victims, including 25% who gave estimates of fewer than 100. Meanwhile, in the other direction, 11% of respondents gave estimates of 10,000 or more. These data also indicate that conservatives were significantly more likely to place into the “< 100” estimation category than liberals (35% vs. 19%), while liberals were twice as likely to place into the “10,000+” category as conservatives.

All told, these results are mostly at odds with expectations. Rather than significantly overestimating, the median respondent significantly underestimated the average annual number of FOIS deaths across the 2015–22 period. And while conservatives were, as predicted, more likely to underestimate than liberals, and liberals more likely to overestimate than conservatives (see Figure 7B), liberals’ estimates were actually more accurate (i.e., closer to the benchmark) overall than conservatives’ estimates.

These findings are difficult to square with those observed in the 2021 Skeptic survey, wherein 44% of liberals vs. 20% of conservatives estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed blacks alone were killed by police in 2019. This discordance[61] suggests that estimates of this sort are highly sensitive to differences[62] in question format and measurement scales. Future researchers of this topic should be mindful that estimates of the same phenomenon are unlikely to be reliably consistent across different measurement designs.

Estimates of the Racial Distribution and Unarmed Share of FOIS Victims

After estimating the average annual number of FOIS victims, respondents were informed[63] that, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, non-Hispanic white Americans, black Americans, and Asian Americans constituted an average of 61%, 12.5%, and 5.5% of the U.S. population, respectively, during 2015–22. With their estimates of the annual average number of FOIS victims given as a reference, they were then asked to estimate the white, black, Asian, and “other”[64] (i.e., nonwhite, nonblack, non-Asian) share of all police-shooting victims in an average year during 2015–22. Finally, respondents were separately[65] asked to estimate the average “unarmed” share (i.e., those unarmed when killed) of each group’s FOIS victims during this period.

As predicted, Figure 7C shows that the average respondent substantially underestimated the white share and substantially overestimated the black (and, if to a lesser extent, the Asian) share of FOIS victims.

Specifically, according to the Washington Post Police Shootings database, white, black, and Asian Americans, respectively, constituted an average of 51%, 27%, and 2% of racially identified[66] shooting victims during 2015–22. But in the estimation of the average respondent, as found by this survey, white Americans constituted an average of 23% (an underestimate of –28 points), black Americans 54% (+27 points), and Asian Americans 8% (+6 points) of all victims. Further, while respondents across all ideological groups overestimated and underestimated the black and white shares, respectively, liberal respondents did so to a significantly greater degree than conservatives.

Just as they misestimated the distribution of FOIS victims’ race, respondents (particularly liberals) similarly misestimated the unarmed share of fatal police-shooting victims.

Per the Washington Post data, an average of 7% of all FOIS victims—including 6% of white, 10% of black, and 14% of Asian[67] victims—were unarmed when shot and killed by police during 2015–22. The average respondent, however, overshot these benchmarks by 18–34 points, with the largest average overestimates given for black victims (+34). Overestimates were also again greater—generally double in size—among liberal than conservative respondents. For instance, whereas the average conservative estimated that 27% of black victims were unarmed, the average liberal estimated that more than half (53%) were.

In sum, respondents[68] generally underestimate what the Skeptic data depict, or have a much more reasonable sense of the number of FOIS victims than what is depicted in the Skeptic data. Yet the current results also suggest that their estimates of the racial distribution of fatal police-shooting victims and of the extent that such victims are unarmed are significantly distorted. This is especially the case among liberal respondents. As will be described later, misestimates of these distributions may be just as important as—if not more important than—respondents’ perceptions of the problem and their policy preferences as to the sheer volume of cases.

A Secondary Analysis

While this report’s primary analyses focus on estimations related to police use of force and its racial disparities, it is important to note that the concern that respondents associate with their estimates—i.e., whether they consider perceived levels of force and racial disparities “serious problems”—may be shaped by their beliefs about the necessity of police use of force and what they think might be the cause of racially disparate policing outcomes.[69]

With this in mind, respondents were additionally asked to estimate: (a) the share of all violent crimes reported in 2021 attributed to offenders of different racial groups; and (b) the violent-offender share of the U.S. prison population. I briefly summarize the main results here and relegate a more complete and detailed discussion of these secondary analyses to Appendixes A.3 and A.4.

The first of these analyses found that respondents generally underestimated both the black and white American share of 2021 violent crimes reported to the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Liberals underestimated the black share to a greater extent than conservatives; conservatives underestimated the share attributable to white offenders to a greater extent than liberals.[70]

In the second analysis, respondents underestimated the violent-offender share of the U.S. state prison population, with this tendency being most pronounced among liberals. While BJS puts the share of violent offenders at a little under 60%, nearly half (48%) of all liberal respondents gave estimates of 40% or less. In contrast, while conservatives were more likely to give large (80%+) overestimates, the share of conservative respondents (14%) who did so was comparatively tiny.

All in all, these secondary analyses reveal patterns of survey respondents having inaccurate estimates. These patterns could inform the extent that people are alarmed by police use of force and racial disparities in policing outcomes. Moreover, they provide additional evidence that estimation inaccuracies are generally universal but differ in degree, on account of political ideology.

A comprehensive summary of these estimation inaccuracies and ideological differences is provided in Appendix A.5.

Part 3: Applying the Treatment to Respondents’ Estimates

So far, this study has shown that respondents’ perceptions of police use of force and its victims are often disconnected from reality and that the perceptions of conservatives tend to (with some exceptions) be mildly to moderately more accurate than those of liberals. These findings are interesting, but we might ask, “So what?” Do the misperceptions that I document have any practical significance? Do they inform people’s opinions of the severity and scale of police violence and their issue-related policy preferences? Or are they nothing more than wild guesses and expressive partisanship?

Experimental Design and Procedure

To answer those questions, we must study how attitudes change in the face of information that conflicts with those attitudes. To this end, after completing the estimation modules, respondents were randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. Those assigned to the treatment group were told that they’d next be shown “a number of charts that visualize how far off (their) estimates were from official estimates,” which were “generally derived from data reported by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.” Then respondents were shown individualized visual juxtapositions of all their explicit and implicit (derived from their explicit) criterion estimates with the official benchmarks.

Examples of the first two individualized visualization pages—pertaining to estimates of the use of force—are displayed in Figure 8. In this specific case, the respondent would first be made aware of the fact that, among other biases, his/her estimate of the percentage of all black PPC respondents who reported being stopped by the police and reported being subjected to nonlethal force was more than 40 times larger than what was reported in the 2018 PPC survey. The next visualization page would inform the respondent that he/she substantially overestimated the annual number and share of black FOIS victims as well as the number and share of black victims who were shot unarmed.

A third and final visualization page (see Appendix B.5) would compare the respondent’s estimates of racial-group violent-crime shares and the violent-offender share of the state prison population with their respective benchmark estimates.[71]

After viewing all three pages, treatment-group respondents were subsequently asked—in multiple-choice format—to recollect several of the official estimates that they were shown. “From the information (they) just reviewed,” respondents were asked to indicate: (a) the percentage of white and black Americans who reported being both stopped or approached by the police and being subjected to nonlethal force in 2018; (b) the number of unarmed white, black, and Asian Americans who were shot and killed by police each year on average between 2015 and 2022; and (c) the percentage of all violent crimes in 2021 that were committed by white, black, and Asian Americans. This was done to test and reinforce the absorption of the information, but also to identify respondents in need of “re-treatment,” as respondents who selected an incorrect answer option[72] were notified of their error and shown the correct answer.

Respondents assigned to the control group, in contrast, received no such visual juxtapositions. They were simply directed to an honesty check[73] and proceeded to answer questions about the prevalence and severity of police violence and their support for specific policing policy proposals. These attitudinal measures are further described below.

How I Measured the Survey Results

Respondents’ General Perceptions of Police Brutality and Racism

Upon completing an honesty check, respondents were asked to respond to six questions and statements designed to capture their appraisals of the severity and prevalence of: (a) excessive police force in general, including unjustified killings of criminal suspects; and (b) police racism and violence against black Americans in particular. All six items are reproduced in the first column of Table 2. Together, they form a very reliable (⍺=0.926), though not necessarily unidimensional,[74] index, which I employ in the forthcoming analysis.

Respondents’ General Policing Policy Preferences

After completing the measures of perceptions, respondents were asked a series of three policy-related questions (Table 3). The first two questions measure the extent that respondents think that federal spending on law enforcement and the number of police patrolling the streets of U.S. cities should be increased or decreased, respectively. A third and final measure, which was adapted from Cohen et al.,[75] is designed to force respondents to make policy trade-offs.

It asks respondents to play the role of a mayor of a large city that has experienced upticks in violent crime. Respondents are given a $200 million “public safety” budget and must decide how much of it to spend on four anticrime policy approaches. Two of these approaches—hiring more police officers to patrol communities and funding more crime-detection cameras—are “carceral” in nature, in that they focus on traditional law-enforcement methods for deterring and responding to crime. The other two—hiring more social workers to assist at-risk individuals and funding economic development programs—are “softer” measures that aim to address “root causes” and socioeconomic contributors to crime.

While all policy items will be modeled individually, I also combine and model them as an index. To construct this index, I first sum the two carceral allocation items[76] to create a combined “carceral allocations” scale. This scale and the two ordinal measures are then z-transformed (i.e., to a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1) and subsequently averaged together.

Respondents’ Estimation (In)accuracy

Both the size and direction (i.e., positive or negative) of the treatment’s effects on perceptions and policy preferences are expected to vary, depending on the magnitude and direction of the respondents’ estimation errors. To test this prediction, I created a summary estimation (in)accuracy index that indicates how far off respondents’ estimates were from the benchmarks on average. Table 4 presents three ways of constructing such indexes, which I further discuss and analyze in Appendix A.5.[77]

I report the results of these analyses in Appendixes A.6 and A.7. But ultimately, the index that best captures respondents’ estimation patterns and best predicts their general perceptions and policy preferences is the third index, which I refer to as the “directionally woke” estimated (in)accuracy index. This method reverse-codes: (a) all use-of-force criterion estimates for whites; (b) estimates of the share of 2021 violent crimes attributable to blacks (see Appendix A.3); and (c) estimates of the violent-offender share of the U.S. state prison population (see Appendix A.4).

I adopt the “directionally woke” estimation (in)accuracy index for some of the experimental analyses that follow.

To understand the scores on this “directionally woke” (in)accuracy index, consider the index’s hypothetical endpoints. For instance, a maximally “directionally woke” respondent is one who estimates that police use of nonlethal and lethal force is omnipresent and exclusively directed against nonwhites, that all (nonwhite) fatal police-shooting victims are unarmed, that whites constitute all of the country’s violent criminal offenders, and/or that the U.S. state prison population is exclusively filled with nonviolent offenders.

Conversely, at the hypothetical bottom of the scale, a maximally “directionally unwoke” respondent is one who perceives that police use of force either never occurs or is exclusively directed against whites, that no fatal police-shooting victims are unarmed or that only white victims are unarmed, that nonwhites commit all violent crimes, and/or that the U.S. state prison population exclusively consists of violent offenders.

Of course, virtually no respondents meet these extreme descriptions. What the “directionally woke” index measures, then, is the extent that the respondents’ estimates exhibited the tendency to be “woke” or “unwoke.” Accordingly, a (hypothetical) score of 0 on the index denotes a respondent who perfectly accurately estimated each of the criterion benchmarks, while scores above and below zero represent the extent that respondents misestimated in the “woke” and “unwoke” directions, respectively.

Main Treatment Effects on Perceptions

To assess the overall impact of the treatment on perceptions of police brutality and racism, each of the six perception indicators and the combined index were regressed separately onto a treatment dummy variable. This variable labeled respondents who received the informational intervention as “1,” while all others, comprising the control group, are coded as “0.” To enhance the precision of the treatment’s estimated effects, “covariate-adjusted” models were also developed that control for all pretreatment variables,[78] including the directionally woke accuracy index.

The treatment group consistently scored significantly lower across all outcomes (Figure 9A), with all p-values < 0.001. The differences for individual items range from 0.159 to 0.244 standard deviations (SD) in the unadjusted models and 0.115 SD to 0.224 SD in the adjusted models.[79] When all six z-normed items are averaged together, the unadjusted and adjusted differences are 0.191 SD and 0.157 SD, respectively, indicating small effect sizes. Importantly, these differences are not merely attributable to shifts within response categories (e.g., “Strongly disagree” --> “Disagree”) but also to significant movement between them.[80]

For instance, the share of respondents who answered “Never” or “Rarely” when asked how often they think that police officers use more force than necessary when responding to a possible criminal situation was nearly 10.5 points (adjusted=9.4, p=0.001) higher among those who received the treatment than respondents in the control group. Treatment-group respondents were also 11.3 points (adjusted=9.3, p < 0.001) less likely to disagree that the “media exaggerates the amount of police brutality” and 9 points (adjusted=7.1, p=0.001) less likely to agree that black people “are regularly preyed upon by racist police.”

These findings suggest that the informational intervention induced genuine attitudinal changes, rather than merely reinforcing or tempering existing views.

Interestingly, the intervention’s effects[81] on the perceptions index were nearly seven times greater[82] for liberal than for conservative respondents, with the effects on the latter close to zero (Figure 9B). This discrepancy could be partially due to a “floor effect,” as conservative scores on the perceptions index are already so low[83] that they cannot decrease much further. Additionally, conservatives’ relatively smaller average criterion misestimates might be implicated in their null treatment response, as suggested by the results in the next section.

At this point, it is important to note that the effects of the treatment on respondents’ estimation accuracy were negative and statistically significant, regardless[84] of whether respondents overestimated or underestimated the annual average number of FOIS victims. This suggests that people’s perceptions of police brutality are not exclusively, or even mostly, tied to their (mis)estimates of the overall quantity[85] of FOIS victims. Rather, (mis)estimates of how the number of victims is distributed across racial groups—along with overestimates of the prevalence of nonlethal force against black Americans—appear to play a significant role in shaping these perceptions.

Accuracy-Conditioned Treatment Effects on Perceptions

While the main effects of the treatment are notable, their impact is expected to be even greater on those who gave relatively larger misestimates on average. This would explain why the effects of the treatment are significantly larger among liberals—who score highest[86] on the directionally woke accuracy index—than conservatives.

To test this hypothesis, two interaction models[87] were fitted (Figure 9C). The first model (left panel) interacts the treatment with the continuous directionally woke accuracy index.[88] This model reveals a statistically significant interaction (b=–0.299, p=0.001), suggesting that the intervention’s negative effects on perceptions grow linearly[89] as estimation inaccuracy rises. But the model that uses a categorical[90] accuracy interaction term (right panel) exhibits a superior[91] fit to the data.

Results from this latter model indicate that the intervention led to a nonsignificant 0.118 SD (p=0.084) increase[92] overall in perceptions of police brutality and racism among respondents within the bottom accuracy interval (i.e., ≥ –0.4, < 0.2), which, due to their smaller numbers,[93] combines “directionally unwoke” misestimators and those whose estimates were reasonably close to the benchmark figures on average.

In contrast, at all higher intervals, the intervention progressively and nonlinearly reduces such perceptions. For those in the middle (in)accuracy intervals (i.e., ≥ 0.2, < 0.7), the intervention led to a combined 0.113 SD (p=0.005) decrease in perceptions of police brutality and racism. These negative effects increase to a combined 0.262 SD (p < 0.001) among those in the highest two intervals (i.e., ≥ 0.7). For example, respondents in these intervals who received the intervention were 17.6 points (p < 0.001) less likely to believe that the police often use excessive force, 15.7 points less likely (p < 0.001) to consider the unjustified killing of suspects by police to be a serious issue, and 11 points less likely (p < 0.001) to agree that black people are regularly targeted by racist police.

Overall, these results largely validate the prediction that the intervention’s effects will vary as a function of respondents’ estimation accuracy. In general, the more respondents misestimated the various criteria in the “woke” direction, the more effective the intervention was in reducing negative or “woke” appraisals of the prevalence and severity of excessive police force and racist policing.

Main Treatment Effects on Policy Preferences

In the previous section, I considered how the treatments resulted in updated appraisals of police use of force. Now, I turn to the question of whether those updates translate into changes in policing-related policy preferences.

The standardized differences between the control and treatment groups on each policy measure are presented in Figure 10A. Compared with those observed for perceptions, these differences are smaller and less precise, ranging from 0.04 SD to 0.094 SD in size in the unadjusted models and from 0.014 SD to 0.096 SD in the adjusted models. While all are in the theoretically expected direction, none is significant at the p < 0.05 threshold, though several do approach it.[94]

When all items are considered in aggregate as an index, a more discernible, if still very modest, signal emerges. Compared with the control group, respondents who received the intervention scored an unadjusted 0.088 SD (p=0.037) and adjusted 0.061 SD (p=0.041) higher on the combined index, with these differences reaching significance at the 95% level. Further, and as expected, results from a mediation analysis (reported in Appendix A.8) suggest that almost all (95.6%) of these differences are attributable to the intervention’s negative effects on the perceptions index. In effect, the increases in support for policing-centered anticrime policies that are observed appear to be primarily driven by the intervention’s reduction of perceptions of police brutality and racism.

Although modest overall, the intervention’s effects are again larger[95] among liberals and moderates (and, unexpectedly, black[96] and Hispanic respondents) while smaller and statistically insignificant among conservatives. As Figure 10B (right panel) shows, liberals and moderates who received the intervention scored 0.101 SD (p=0.012) and 0.078 SD (p=0.242) higher, respectively—or 0.093 SD (p=0.003) higher when combined—on the policy index, compared with their control-group counterparts. Meanwhile, conservatives who received the intervention scored slightly more than –0.06 SD (p=0.354) lower than those who did not, though this difference is not significant.

Thus, as with perceptions, the treatment had a stronger effect on the attitudes of nonconservatives than conservatives. While some of this could, again, be attributable to a floor effect, it likely also stems from conservatives being more prone to place at the bottom of the “directionally woke” accuracy index, where the treatment effects are expected to be smaller or to move attitudes in the other[97] (i.e., liberal) direction. This expectation is formally tested again in the interaction models below.

Accuracy-Conditioned Treatment Effects on Policy Preferences

Earlier, this report stated that when the interventions had a negative impact on respondents’ perceptions of police brutality and racism, these tended to be stronger for those with relatively larger “directionally woke” misestimates. However, the results of a treatment x categorical accuracy interaction model (left panel of Figure 10C) indicate that a more curvilinear relationship holds for the intervention’s effects on policing policy preferences.

In the bottom accuracy interval (≥ –0.4, < 0.2), respondents who received the intervention scored 0.197 SD lower (p=0.03) in support for policing-centered anticrime policies, which aligns with expectations and mirrors the pattern observed for perceptions. The effects begin to grow nonlinearly in the pro-policing direction at subsequent intervals. Across the intervals running from 0.2 to 0.9 standard deviations above perfect accuracy—encompassing approximately 72% of the data—respondents who received the intervention scored a combined 0.102 SD higher (p=0.006) on the policy index than those who did not. Moreover, this difference is not only driven by movement within response categories (e.g., “Strongly decrease” --> “Moderately decrease”) but also by changes between them. For instance, respondents in these intervals who received the intervention were 5 points (p=0.026) more likely than their control-group counterparts to support increasing the number of police patrolling the street in U.S. cities. They also allocated 4 points (p=0.004) more of their budgets toward policing-centered anticrime measures.

But rather than continuing to rise, the treatment’s effects plummet at the highest interval (≥ 0.9) such that respondents who received the intervention go from scoring 0.125 SD (0.7, < 0.9) to just 0.02 SD higher on the policy index (though this difference is not significant, p=0.5). Given this unexpected curvilinear pattern, I opted to test whether a curvilinear model with a quadratic continuous accuracy term better fit the data. The results from this model, which are plotted in the right panel of Figure 10C, show that it is a better fit.[98]

According to this curvilinear model, respondents at the bottom of the accuracy index who received the intervention score –0.422 SD lower on the policy index than control-group peers, though this difference falls just short of conventional levels of significance (p=0.05). The difference then trends and grows in the positive or pro-policing direction, peaking at 0.8 standard deviations above perfect accuracy, at which point respondents who received the intervention score 0.109 SD (p=0.025) higher than those who did not. Thereafter, though, the effects begin to weaken and point in the antipolicing direction.[99]

The reasons for this unexpected diminishment and directional shift of the treatment’s effects at the upper end of the accuracy distribution are worthy of further investigation. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that this region of the accuracy index comprises the most ideologically liberal[100] subset of respondents, who may be more resistant to the treatment.

Approximately 81% of respondents in the highest (in)accuracy interval identify as “liberal” (Figure 11)—70% of whom identified as “very liberal” (37% of overall respondents) or “liberal” (33% of overall respondents), as opposed to “slightly liberal” (11% of overall respondents). In contrast, just 3% of respondents in this interval identified as conservative. This raises the question of how stronger ideological liberalism might moderate (if not altogether neutralize) the treatment’s effects on perceptions and policy preferences. I relegate my speculative answers and suggestions for future research to the endnotes.[101]

This unresolved question about the reasons for the treatment’s curvilinear effects aside, the results from these interaction models help explain why the main effects of the treatment on policy preferences bordered on insignificance. For respondents in all but the bottom and top accuracy intervals (i.e., 72% of the sample), the treatment led to a significant, if small (0.102 SD, p=0.006), increase[102] in support for policing-centered anticrime policies. But because the treatment had the opposite-to-no effect for those at the lowest and highest levels of the accuracy index, the overall effect (0.061 SD, p=0.041) was weakened.

Part 4: Implications for News Coverage

Given its rarity, the phenomenon of police brutality is, and likely will always be, an abstraction in the minds of all but a tiny segment of the American public. While people can roughly gauge broader economic conditions, for instance, via the prices they pay at the pump and their sense of job security, there are far fewer direct cues for Americans to lean on when it comes to gauging the seriousness of the problem of police brutality. This means that the public is almost entirely reliant on news media and political elites for assessing its prevalence and severity. This reliance makes public opinion susceptible to manipulation.

The current study documented how appraisals of police use of force have likely already been manipulated, as well as evidence for the manipulability of such appraisals in general.

In the first case, the widespread perception that black Americans, a racial group that constitutes just 12%–13% of the U.S. population, make up the majority of FOIS victims is not—or is highly unlikely to be—born out of thin air. The public does not come to that misperception unaided. Nor do they spontaneously adopt the misperceptions that: (1) roughly half of all black victims are shot unarmed; or (2) one in three blacks stopped by police—and close to 1 in 5 black Americans overall—is subjected to nonlethal physical force in a typical year. More likely, these perceptions are the consequences of a media environment that has flooded the public with more news about police brutality in the past decade than the previous five decades combined, and also largely sidelines nonblack victims of police violence.

But the volume and racial skew of media coverage may not be the entire story. The findings of this study suggest that what context is given or omitted is also important for influencing perceptions. Often, the contextual information that journalists provide is typically limited to data highlighting racial disparities in the experience of nonlethal and lethal police force. For instance, readers and viewers might be told that blacks are “three times more likely” than whites to be killed by a police officer in a given year, but they are only rarely given any data speaking to the prevalence of this phenomenon among these populations overall.[103] Nor are they provided with data that are highly relevant to understanding racial disparities in police use of force, likely because those data might reflect negatively upon black Americans.

A recent textbook example of this tendency is an infographic published by the New York Times following the January 2023 killing of Tyre Nichols (Figure 12, left panel). Not only does it not give any data on base rates, such as the percentage of Memphis blacks and whites with police contact who were subjected to police force; it excludes data that are most relevant to understanding the disparity that it highlights—namely, the even larger overrepresentation of black Memphis residents among the city’s violent criminal offenders.

Such reporting practices likely cultivate or reinforce the misperception that excessive police force against black Americans is pervasive and that black (rather than white) Americans are the most frequent victims of excessive police force. These misperceptions, in turn, can have significant psychological and social costs, particularly for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups that need police the most.

Among black Americans, for instance, these misperceptions can lead to widespread fears that they or their family members will be victimized by police—fears that are not only unwarranted, given the actual risk, but that could incur a psychological toll and discourage them from contacting police when necessary. Among the general public, they erode trust in—as well as the perceived legitimacy of—the police, which can inspire mass protests, economically costly social unrest, and greater support for de-policing policies that threaten public safety.

Importantly, the negative effects of misperceptions are likely compounded by the impact on the police themselves. Public backlash against the police can lead police officers to engage in less proactive policing, resulting in fewer stops and arrests, with some studies linking these outcomes to increases in crime. Moreover, it can weaken police morale, leading to retirements and staffing shortages, which can further exacerbate crime.

To be clear, this discussion should not be taken to mean that the pursuit of greater police accountability and reform is uncalled for or undesirable. Rather, these objectives can be pursued without distorting public perceptions of the scale and racial distribution of police use of force.

Activist groups have an interest in distorting the view that Americans might have of police brutality. Inflating public perceptions of the severity of the problem draws more attention to it. This attention can increase pressure on political leaders to act, and can encourage monetary donations from outraged members of the public. But this cynical approach can also incur substantial social costs and inspire the enactment of policing policies that are more informed by emotion than by actual data. Activist groups need to be made aware of these costs.

The findings of this study do not necessarily imply that news organizations and journalists should ignore or significantly reduce their coverage of use-of-force incidents. Instead, the implication here is that they should provide more context and information in their coverage. This will at once deracialize police use of force and put such incidents into a broader perspective. Also, given the social costs, it is incumbent on news organizations to refrain from reporting that inadvertently fuels or validates misperceptions about police violence.

Recommendations

More informative and less divisive use-of-force coverage is possible. Four recommendations to that end include:

First, journalists should contextualize their reporting of police use-of-force incidents by providing data on the rarity of such incidents. While this practice should be adopted in general, it is particularly important when referencing racial disparities in use of force. Group base rates should not be left to the audience’s imagination. Instead, journalists should clearly note them and allow their audiences to decide for themselves whether (for instance) a 0.6% occurrence rate among black Americans vs. a 0.2% occurrence rate among white Americans constitutes a “severe problem.” They could, in theory, even embed within articles base rate–related estimation questions and corresponding “misestimate” visualizations like the ones tested here. While base rates may not matter for the assessments of some (especially extremely liberal) readers/viewers, this study suggests that they are relevant to, and are likely to inform, the assessments of many others.

Second, if journalists do choose to highlight racial disparities in police use of force, they should not do so in isolation of the disparities that contribute to them, such as differing rates in criminal offending. In other words, they should not make the mistake of the NYT infographic in Figure 12. If disparities in criminal offending are not provided for context, readers/ viewers will have little choice but to attribute those in use of force to racial bias, which is likely to undermine their trust in police. While racial bias may play some role in use-of-force disparities, there is no good evidence of it being the dominant factor. Journalists should thus not lead their audiences to think that it is.

Third, journalists who highlight racial disparities should not limit the focus to those between black and white Americans. For instance, use-of-force rates against Asians—which are significantly lower than those against whites—should also be reported on. While it’s unclear[104] whether their inclusion in the current study’s informational treatment made a difference, reporting rates for Asians could help combat the notion that use-of-force disparities necessarily reflect racial bias.

Fourth, news organizations and journalists should increase their coverage of use-of-force incidents involving white victims. While underrepresented relative to their population share, white Americans still constitute the majority of both nonlethal and lethal use-of-force victims. Yet they receive but a fraction of the coverage given to black victims. Though stories involving the black Americans may generate more engagement from readers and viewers—if only because they fit a “racist police” narrative—the findings of this study suggest that the wildly disproportionate coverage that they receive substantially distorts public perceptions of the racial distribution of victims. Moreover, remember that the effects of the treatment were significant even for those respondents who underestimated the number of annual fatal police shootings. This suggests that public perceptions of this racial distribution may be just as influential[105] for the public’s appraisals of policing and policing policy preferences as the mere volume of victims. It is thus imperative that news organizations and journalists correct this severe racial imbalance in coverage. Doing so can counter the perception that police brutality is a phenomenon primarily suffered by black Americans; it could also help dispel perceptions and accusations of media bias among those on the right.

Police use-of-force incidents afflict Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and many of them should be treated as human tragedies. These recommendations could help bring about a healthier civic life and appropriate reform. However, I recognize that many of the incentives for news organizations to carry out these recommendations are lacking or are at odds with a bottom line that is measured more in terms of clicks and viewership than promoting accurate perceptions on social issues like police use of force.

Even if all news outlets and journalists were wholly on board with these recommendations, misperceptions of police use of force would still be promoted by political figures (including the current president),[106] activists, celebrities, and other opinion leaders.

The most realistic path to reform, then, consists of two steps:

First, news organizations and journalists should be pressured to cover policing issues in a more responsible and balanced fashion. They need to be informed of the misperceptions likely promoted by the manner in which the topic is typically reported on and their social harms. The findings of this study are a good start, but additional experimental research is needed to confirm them and bolster the case for reform.

Second, civic groups, nongovernment organizations, and even police agencies concerned with the spread of misinformation and misperceptions need to use social media fact-checking tools. Twitter’s (recently renamed “X”) new Community Notes feature, for instance, allows verified users to add context and information to tweets, thus putting a check on false or misleading information and rhetoric. This could have added much-needed context to the NYT tweet in Figure 12. The same should be done for tweets by public figures, such as NBA star Lebron James’s tweet that “We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!”[107] As effective use of these tools will likely require a sustained and organized effort, civic groups and police agencies should consider establishing dedicated or collaborative teams of “community noters” that scour social media for and push back against false information about the frequency and nature of use-of-force incidents. One-off or intermittent interventions will not make a difference in the long term. Consistency and continued “re-treatment” are key.

There is no silver bullet for the misperception issues discussed here. We need to be realistic about the magnitude of change that can be achieved through perception-correcting interventions and the provision of additional context. These measures should not be regarded as substitutes for reforms that improve police accountability and transparency.

However, the current state of public perceptions of police use of force is clearly not tenable, nor is it conducive to the promotion of better public–police relations, race relations, and public safety. The findings of the current study suggest that informational and educational interventions—especially if sustained—can play a meaningful role in addressing the current public perception of police use of force and mitigating or moderating the social consequences.

Zach Goldberg is a Paulson Policy Analyst who recently completed a PhD in political science from Georgia State University. His dissertation focused on the “Great Awokening,” closely examining the role that the media and collective moral emotions have played in recent shifts in racial liberalism among white Americans. At MI, his work deals with a range of issues, including identity politics, criminal justice, and understanding the sources of American political polarization. Some of Goldberg’s previous writing on identity politics in America can be found at Tablet and on his Substack.

In the summer of 2020, Goldberg joined MI president Reihan Salam, Columbia University professor Musa Al-Gharbi, and Birkbeck College professor and MI adjunct fellow Eric Kaufmann for a conversation on the “Great Awokening”—the strong leftward shift among white liberals on issues of racial inequality and discrimination, immigration, and diversity that has been taking place since 2014.

Appendix

View online appendix here

Endnotes

Photo: MattGush/iStock

OK, recording.

Woo!

So today we are minus our lovely comrade, Lydia Polgreen, who is taking a well-deserved vacation.

Does anyone ever take an undeserved vacation?

Constantly.

I’m not sure why Lydia allowed a vacation at all.

I take them all the time.

Shouldn’t, yeah, shouldn’t we say —

It’s unacceptable.

— a maybe deserved vacation?

Yeah.

She can’t leave me here with you guys.

A who the hell knows deserved vacation. [MUSIC PLAYING] OK, let me rephrase, we’re minus our thankless comrade Lydia Polgreen, who is taking a perhaps deserved vacation. From New York Times Opinion, I’m Carlos Lozada.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” OK, so no Lydia today. But the three of us will be taking a dip back into the presidential race.

Oh, God.

And, in particular, let’s try to understand why so much of America and so much of the Republican Party, in particular, just cannot seem to quit Donald J. Trump. So he lost in 2020, so I hear. But he certainly didn’t go the way of other one term presidents and just kind of fade in the distance. And then last fall, a lot of his picks didn’t do well in the midterms. There was a brief moment when it seemed like the Trump magic was disappearing. But that didn’t really happen. So now, it’s August 2023, just days away from the Republican debate, the first Republican debate. I know you’re all looking forward to that.

Edge of my seat.

And we have a twice, a twice impeached, thrice indicted former president with Michelle’s favorite possible indictment, Georgia, coming soon.

Georgia.

It’s the hipster indictment.

Don’t mock me.

Michelle was into Georgia before it was even a state.

Before it was cool.

And yet, Trump is still, despite all that, crushing the Republican field for the 2024 nomination. And he’s also tied with Biden in the polls on a possible rematch. So where does this staying power come from? And what does it mean for our politics, for democracy, for our system of justice? Ross, why don’t you kick us off? You just wrote a column called “The Normal Paths to Beating Trump are Closing.” What was that all about?

So that was based on a piece that a University of Chicago economist named Luigi Zingales, who is from Italy originally, wrote for The Times in 2016 when Trump was first elected, where he basically compared Trump to Silvio Berlusconi, the very successful very controversial populist prime minister of Italy and said, look, we have experience with this kind of thing in Italy. And the way to beat an outrageous populist is to be relentlessly normal, argue about policy, don’t try to use extra political means to kick him out of office. Don’t just try to close establishment ranks against him. Run as if he’s a normal politician. Treat him that way. That’s how you defeat him. And I think what we’ve seen across the Trump era is a kind of ping pong between normalizing ways of fighting or debating or dealing with Trump and abnormalizing ways. You’ve had people who have run against him on policy and people who have insisted that he’s a fascist threat to democracy. The argument in the piece was just that once you reach the point where reaching now, where Trump is going to be running for president under at least three indictments, could be running for president from prison —

No, he’s not going to be running from prison.

There’s no —

It’s not going to happen.

I can’t tell where the sarcasm meter is there.

I’m serious. There’s no way he’s going to be in prison.

Is there a non-zero chance —

No way he’ll be running in prison? [INTERPOSING VOICES]

This is not “Oppenheimer.”

Well, anyway, right, so maybe normalcy will be restored. And Michelle is confident. But, basically, there’s no way to just do the sort of, this is a normal campaign thing. And that’s going to be true for Joe Biden if Trump is the nominee. And I think it’s increasingly true for his Republican opponents that the path that Ron DeSantis especially wanted, where you could basically say, look, I know you like Trump, Republican voters, but it’s time to turn the page and we won’t sort of argue out January 6 and everything else. Even that path is closing.

So the normal path is closing, only abnormalizing is possible?

Every campaign against Trump, whether it’s a primary campaign or a general election campaign now is going to be defined by the abnormality of him being under multiple indictments.

I do think that we have reached a point where, as you were talking about Berlusconi, Trump’s genius has always been to present himself as fighting against a system that is corrupt. So, by definition, any time the system comes after him, it’s because the system is at fault, and they are trying to take him down because he’s trying to expose the system. So I think we’ve talked about this before. By that definition, the worse it gets for him, his followers see it as just further proof of his heroic willingness to keep fighting the fight even as they’re trying to take him down. So I do think for that third of the Republican Party who is just die hard MAGA, there is literally nothing he could do that would make them turn against him. So the question then is what to do about the 2/3 remaining or thereabouts of the Republican primary voters who, theoretically, could go for somebody else. Unfortunately, there’s nobody else who’s kind of distinguished themselves. I mean, part of the problem here is that Ron DeSantis is who all these people hitched their wagon to, the donors and establishment poobahs. And he’s turned out so far to be pretty lousy unlikable candidate. So now they just don’t, they’re kind of casting about for what to do next. And that serves Trump beautifully.

It’s not just that the indictments don’t hurt him. He even believes that they help him. He —

They absolutely have helped him.

He just said that last week, that every time they indict me, there’s — I go up in the polls. And a fourth indictment would really wrap things up for me just great. It’s kind of like when he said in 2016 that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and he wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s the same message, right? He’s saying that the rules of politics don’t apply to him. The rule of law doesn’t really apply to him. But it’s even more extreme. It’s like saying, if I shoot someone, I’ll get more voters, not just not lose any. It’ll actually help. And that’s what he seems to clearly understand about these indictments. Because as Michelle says, it’s, you know, it’s this corrupt system fighting against him.

Well, but it’s a little different. The reason the indictments help him is that he’s not the one doing them. So it’s actually different than the shoot someone on 5th Avenue scenario. January 6 did not actually help Trump in the polls, as absurd a statement as that may be to offer. If you look at public opinion about Donald Trump even among Republicans, Donald Trump suffered in his poll standing after January 6. So Trump doing something terrible or something that seems terrible is not an automatic plus. The reason people are rallying to him is the perception that this something is being done to him and the people doing it cannot be allowed to claim his scalp.

Yes, Ross, so the kind of boiling that down is, it’s not that he’s done something terrible. It’s that somebody is trying to hold him accountable for him doing something terrible. And that is unacceptable for these folks. Because he has trained people to think that only he is virtuous and that anything that is coming for him is coming for him from a place of bad faith. So holding him accountable is impossible on some level.

Again, I don’t think it’s that he’s trained all of — there is a core of Republican voters who think Donald Trump is a great virtuous hero. But there’s this segment of Republican voters that swung to DeSantis after the midterms and swung back to Trump not when DeSantis’s campaign started to flail — though it has flailed — but when he was indicted. For those voters, it’s not about Trump’s virtue. It’s more like, look, this is the battle that the liberal elites have chosen. And even if don’t love Trump, I’ve got to fight them on this battlefield. Trump has trained people, yes, to think of the establishment as an enemy. But it’s also just the natural posture of a big chunk of Republicans and conservatives and conservative-leaning independents, that you cannot trust the American establishment to do the right thing. And if they are indicting a former Republican president, they’re probably doing something wrong.

So if you try to hold a career criminal accountable, it’s a problem. I get that. That’s not a problem, Ross. I understand.

I’m not —

No, I’m just saying —

I’m trying —

— that’s the situation we’re in.

Well, look — well, let’s —

It’s genius on his part.

I mean, look, again, I think Trump has been indicted three times. Well, first of all, the first indictment —

We all find the first indictment kind of questionable.

— was and remains politically motivated bullshit. The second indictment is the one that seems pretty much like a legal slam dunk. And the third indictment is — none of us are legal experts, I’m certainly not. It seems like a case where Trump’s wickedness is clear, but the legal details are a tiny bit iffy.

And Georgia is still coming.

And Georgia is still coming. But so you have a mixed bag of indictments, which if you are inclined to be skeptical of the system of justice and how it worked itself out, provides grounds for that. And then, I mean, again, people will say to me that, I can’t understand why people are rallying to Trump. I lived through the late 1990s. If you had told a liberal feminist Democrat in 1991 that they would be rallying to the defense of a man who solicited oral sex from an intern, they would have said, well, that’s crazy. I’m not going to do that. But because Clinton had the right enemies, everyone in the Democratic coalition rallied to him. This is the most human and normal and predictable thing in the world. And, yes, it’s terrible for the republic and Donald Trump should not be president again. But we can’t just sit around and be self-satisfied about it. You know, Trump is tied in the polls with Joe Biden, which suggests that there is a segment of persuadable independent-minded Americans who were prepared to vote for a man who might be in jail during the election. And that’s just reality.

I’m not worried about the generals yet.

OK.

I am concerned about the Republican primary. Because, of course, in a country where politics has become a partisan bloodsport, there will be people who will not vote for a Democrat. What I am looking for is some sign that the Republican Party is going to recover its sanity and rally around someone other than Trump while there’s still time.

So let’s go to the primary for a second. I’ve been thinking about how this compares to 2016. I’m glad you kicked us off with the Luigi Zingales piece, Ross, which was a great piece. And, actually, parenthetical, it became part of a great book called “Rules for Resistance,” a collection of essays from people around the world kind of looking at America and trying to say, here’s the better way to deal with Donald Trump. Now, in 2016, if I remember that race correctly, some of the candidates, after initially being critical of Trump, decided, I’m not going to cross him, at least not overtly, assuming he’d eventually inevitably implode. And then they could sweep in and be the second favorite —

Looking at you, Ted Cruz.

— of the Trump — exactly, exactly. But by the time they realized he was not going to implode, it was too late. And then it was just Ted Cruz yelling at people to vote their conscience. Now, eight years later, it seems that, for a while, the opponents had sort of a similar approach. We’re not going to cross them. They’ve even been defending him against these legal attacks against him. But now you are starting to see, whether it’s Mike Pence, whether it’s Chris Christie, even Ron DeSantis coming out in some at least mild opposition. I have no idea if it’s enough. The polls suggests that it is not. But what does it mean, for instance, when DeSantis says that, clearly, he lost the 2020 election, right, which seems kind of an obvious thing to say. Yet, it has to be said. Are these cracks in the deference to Trump just desperation? Or is there any possibility that these cascading indictments could have an impact on his basis of support and, therefore, on what some of his opponents in the primary do?

So, I mean, I assume that with DeSantis and the rest of them, they are desperate to kind of get some traction. And they need to throw some punches. What they’ve been trying so far is not working. I mean, you see everybody from Nikki Haley to Pence to Christie to all these people, they’re just — they’re trying. They’re throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. And so far, nothing sticks. And, I mean, some of his opponents are saying, he’s cost us in elections the last two times. Can we afford that again? And that’s the only approach that the group seems to think might work with the kind of soft Trump voters. But, so far, it’s just not working. So I don’t have much hope that any of these indictments will make a huge difference. That said, I do think that the indictments could wind up giving him some sort of accountability. But I do think there’s almost two tracks running here — political and legal.

Well, the theory of the DeSantis campaign, which I thought was a reasonable theory and I had real hopes for, was that DeSantis could, by virtue of his positioning as a successful conservative who had done a lot of stuff that the Republican base liked during the Trump presidency and afterward, could lock up a bunch of the sort of moderately pro-Trump Republicans. And then the really anti-Trump Republicans would say, look, he’s a little more conservative than I’d like. He’s a little more pro-Trump than I’d like. But he’s our best chance. We’re going to go with him. And there’s your coalition. But because DeSantis has stumbled. He hasn’t been able to put together that coalition. And so he’s got some sort of, presumably, sort of lukewarm on Trump voters in his camp. But the really anti-Trump voters are gravitating towards Chris Christie in New Hampshire or Tim Scott, maybe. So you just have a broken field. And that then does really just start to look like 2016 all over again.

I will put more of this on DeSantis even than Trump. But a couple of things, he picked the most inexplicable course possible, which was to double down on all the nasty Trump stuff, just be as obnoxious as possible and go woke warrior. But those people already have Trump. They don’t need DeSantis, the people who are really into the MAGA stuff. And he just abandoned any kind of more moderate positions at all. So he’s completely, in terms of policy and positioning, put himself in a weird spot. Plus, we’ve had this discussion before. He’s unlikable we’re talking about a presidential race, not a congressional race, not a race for county commissioner. Americans vote for boyfriends or girlfriends for president. You have to have a certain vibe. As Hillary Clinton, Al Gore will tell you, it’s hard if you’re not a super kind of likable, backslapping sort of candidate. And that’s what Ron DeSantis actually reminds me of a lot. He reminds me of kind of those really earnest, really ambitious, but not terribly good with retail politics sort of guy. And he’s just not got what it takes. And so this has left the field to splinter. And that is something that is as big a problem on some level as the fact that Trump is who he is.

I mean, this primary is just purely a sort of Trump referendum. It’s almost purely just like, where do people stand vis a vis Trump? Ron DeSantis, when he talks about Trump, it’s all — the critiques are very kind of subtle. He says that executives should govern within the confines of the institution, that we shouldn’t seek to perpetuate ourselves in office. He says he’s not susceptible to flattery, that he himself, DeSantis, is not ceptable to flattery, that Trump doesn’t understand governing. He’s easily manipulated. And even then, it’s all very implied. So what don’t understand is if the primary race is really about Trump, then why would his leading opponent only very tentatively come out against him? I don’t see how.

Because if the race is about whether you like Trump or not, Trump will win. I mean, this is the opening DeSantis had was that the race could be about whether Trumpism was costing Republicans, it cost them the midterms. That’s why DeSantis’s numbers surged after the midterms and Trump’s numbers sagged. Because it wasn’t about whether you liked Trump. It was about whether Trumpism was a winner who was the right person to lead the Republican Party against Biden. The indictments swing everything back towards Trump, Trump up and down. Are you with Trump or against him? And I just don’t see — and I may be too pessimistic. I was too optimistic about DeSantis’s chances six months ago. So the pendulum can swing too far either way. But I don’t see how, if that’s the atmosphere — do you like Trump or not? You for him or against him? You with him or with his enemies?— DeSantis has a clear path to getting 50 percent percent of the vote. But I also, I really don’t see how any of the others do. I mean, this is the other thing is just I agree with Michelle about DeSantis’s charisma deficit and likability problems and so on. But is Chris Christie getting 55 of the Republican vote against Trump? Of course not. It’s a lot of variables. But it’s hard to see the path right now.

This is why you see a lot of Republican moneymen still kind of sniffing around and calling up Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia. They wanted Chris Sununu up in New Hampshire, all of these governors —

Chris Sununu, come on.

— were being sniffed around.

The great hope.

Well, I’m just saying, this is why, this is why you see them.

Yes, yes.

For my money, you’re better off with Youngkin or Kemp in the Republican primary right now. But I mean, there’s no sign that any of them are jumping in. But you do see the moneymen sniffing around. Because they know they have a problem.

Right, but the moneymen are also themselves part of the problem —

Yes.

— in the sense that they are also the ones propping up Chris Christie and other — I mean, the moneymen want a Republican Party — not all of them, but a bunch of them, that just doesn’t exist at all. And the advantage of DeSantis is that his candidacy was built for the Republican Party that actually exists. And maybe a Glenn Youngkin could have built that and done that after his win in Virginia, sort of started running for president on day one. But I guess, again, maybe I’m too pessimistic. I think if the DeSantis model fails, you’re not going to slot in a less well-known, somewhat more moderate blue state governor and say, you know, hey, mildly pro-Trump Republicans, rally to this guy. I just don’t —

Look, I think we’re stuck with a Biden-Trump redo myself. But I’m just saying that there are reasons why people are still hoping for somebody to come riding in.

Yes.

Ross, who is Mike Pence trying to appeal to? I mean, apparently, he just made the debate stage, right? So, you know, yay, congratulations, Mikey. But what is he trying to appeal to by sort of being the, I’m the constitutional conservative?

He’s trying to appeal to the conservative part of the Republican Party that didn’t support Trump in 2016, which is a mixture of evangelicals who had not yet reconciled themselves to Trump and sort of Tea Party conservatives who thought Trump was unprincipled and not really conservative. That’s who he’s pitching. But there’s no sign that Pence is getting traction. You know, Pence is in a position where he’s not going to be the nominee most likely. He has a sort of moral case against Trump. He is making it pretty forthrightly. And I think he deserves credit for that, all independent of the question of whether there’s any strategic value in it. I think it’s good for Republicans and good for the country to have Trump’s vice president standing up and saying that what Trump tried to do around January 6 was a betrayal of the Constitution. That’s good. That’s a good thing. Good for him.

I also think he’s trying to redeem his soul for everything that he put us through for four years.

No —

I don’t think it’s true. But I like it.

I mean, if Mike Pence was in a position to do, quote, unquote, “the right thing” on January 6, it’s only because he did the wrong thing for so long.

Well, yeah, that’s what liberal opponents of Donald Trump would say. But that’s obviously not what Mike Pence thinks. Mike Pence thinks that he spent four years channeling Donald Trump in better directions. And it broke down at the end. But if he hadn’t been there, if Trump had been elected with Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich as his vice president —

Oh, sweet Jesus.

— the country would be in immeasurably worse shape. And so Pence by being there, by doing what he had to do to be there absolutely did the right thing. That’s —

You mean doing what he had to do on January 6?

Doing what he had to do by accepting the vice presidency, that this — it was absolutely the right thing to do rather than letting Trump give it to Newt or Rudy. That is what Pence thinks 100 percent. He’s not plagued by guilt about his decision to be vice president. That’s a liberal delusion.

No, no, no, it shouldn’t — nobody says he should be plagued by guilt for having accepted the job. Somebody thinks that he probably —

I’m a little tetchy, tetchy.

— probably could have done a better job as vice president.

I don’t think there’s any guilt. You know, but if you read his own memoir, Pence had concluded just shortly after the 2020 election that if there was any fraud, it wasn’t enough to change the result. And by mid-December, he wrote that for all intensive purposes, the election was over after the state electors, the real ones, had officially voted and delivered the electoral college majority to Biden and Harris. And he didn’t tell the public this at a moment when it could have made a difference. He told Trump over and over he didn’t have the authority to overturn the election. But he never said, in 500 pages of his book, he never said that — you know, I said to the president, even if I had the authority, I wouldn’t exercise it because we lost, you know? He never does that. So I have a hard time swallowing the kind of redemptive, you know, Pence heroism at the end story. You don’t get credit for saving democracy from the brink if you put it there. And Pence helped put it there. So, anyway, we will take a quick break here. Let me catch my breath. When we come back, let’s talk about what Trump’s fate means not just for the future of the nomination or of the party, but for the future of the country. So we’ve talked about Trump’s staying power. Let’s try to figure out what he might do if he’s actually back in power. So Michelle, what are we hearing about what Trump plans to do?

Well, I think the very short answer is that there’s already kind of an effort afoot so that he can restructure government starting on day one to centralize even more power in his sticky little hands. Our news side, in fact, had a great piece up. And it’s a maximalist theory of the unitary executive theory, which says that the president needs to be in complete control. Article II gives him complete control over the entire executive branch to the point that Congress can’t even appropriate money for things that he’s not super on board with. So if he winds up getting reelected, he intends to do things like strip employment protections for civil servants so that they’re easier for him to fire. He’s going to bring the administrative state to heel, which is something that conservatives more broadly have been looking at doing for years. And they’ve run into questions about legality over here or they’ve hit backstops because of the way things are structured. But what the Trump folks are doing or working on a blueprint for doing is removing all those guardrails and backstops so that he can just come in and do whatever his little heart desires going forward.

Ross, this is something I know you follow more closely. And so I’m curious what you think of it. But there was a moment early on in Bannon’s rhetoric and some others where it seemed like bringing the administrative state to heel, knocking it down was rhetorically the objective. But it seems more like it’s harnessing, using the administrative state that may be more the goal, using it to whatever his personal or ideological purposes might be. Is that a distinction without a difference?

I think it’s really hard to say. The reality is that there’s sort of, if you take away Trump himself and just look at debates among conservatives over the last five years or so, there’s a clear or semiclear division between people who are interested in a more old school libertarian, we’re going to get into the bowels of the administrative state and figure out how to deregulate everything and reduce government’s power, and people saying, no, we need to use the administrative state for some set of conservative ends that past Republicans haven’t been able to use it for. So there’s that divide. There’s sort of people who want to weaken the government versus people who want to use it. But what does Trump himself want? I mean, Michelle’s talking about the idea that he’s going to centralize more power, right? I certainly think in a second term, there would be more Trump loyalists in more positions than there were in his first term. But it’s not at all clear what Trump’s agenda is beyond punishing his enemies and probably staying out of jail.

Do he have one other than that?

I don’t think it’s at all — I think in 2016, he had a fairly clear agenda as much as parts of it weren’t implemented. At this point, I think it’s really, really hard to say on policy substance what a Trump second term would stand for. It’s also just really hard to say, who’s his cabinet in a second term? His first term cabinet was a mixed bag. But it had a lot of establishment Republican figures who now say they’d never vote for him again. So who’s Trump’s secretary of state? Who’s his national security advisor? This is where I think, actually, as much as being Trump’s vice president did not work out politically well for Mike Pence in the end, there are going to be a lot of ambitious Republicans who would love to be Trump’s vice president this time around on the grounds that you might get to really run his presidency this time. There’s going to be a lot of people thinking that way. Because it’s so unclear, so unclear what the policy agenda of Trump 2.0 would actually be.

That early phase of his presidency, the so-called “adults in the room” phase, to the extent that existed, that will not be repeated, right? I mean, I hate making predictions because then they’re always wrong. But I can’t imagine that he — he felt kind of reined in by that crew after a while. And he got rid of them. And so you’d kind of go straight to whatever the lower tiers are in whatever version of the Republican Party wants to work for him. It gets to the old personnel is policy thing, right? Whoever he puts in will have potentially significant influence. But in the end, it’s so hard, even for underlings, for top aides, for cabinet members who have a specific policy agenda to really see it through because Trump is so unpredictable.

Well, if you believe all the stories, like Mark Milley, when he was chairman of the joint chiefs, has a story of how he was trying to keep Trump from attacking Iran. If you don’t have those people in the room, there is an argument to be made that things could go really poorly. Who’s going to be there?

On the other hand, John Bolton has the story about how Trump wouldn’t attack Iran when John Bolton —

John Bolton wanted him to attack Iran.

I mean, part of the problem is unreliable narrators, I guess, but —

Well, part of the — I mean, I think many of the people who went to work for Trump, including Pence, including, you know, Mattis, James Mattis, did have a lot of impact on policy. It just became intolerable for them to actually deal with Trump. US foreign policy did not shift nearly as much under Trump as it seemed like it might when he was running for president. We didn’t pull out of NATO. We continued supplying arms to Ukraine. We did a whole bunch of things that people around Trump wanted to do even though Trump himself might have been iffy on them. But in a second term, so take foreign policy, let’s say Trump comes in and he wants to get Douglas Macgregor, who’s a retired US Army Colonel who went on “Tucker Carlson” a lot, as his secretary of defense. Macgregor is a real sort of isolationist, you know, sympathetic to Putin, would send off 17 alarm bells throughout the official Washington establishment. So let’s say he puts Macgregor forward. Does MacGregor get Senate confirmation? I suspect not. That’s a lot of Republican senators who would try and sink that nomination. So then is Trump running his cabinet just with acting secretaries? How long can he do that for? At what point does the Supreme Court get involved and constitutional issues come into play? There’s a whole range of uncertainties that I don’t feel at all competent to make a prediction about.

I have always worried more about presidents with foreign policy. Because usually, Congress is in a position to rein them in a little bit in terms of domestic policy. Whereas presidents can wreak a whole lot of havoc with their foreign policy. And if there aren’t people in there who are the so-called grownups in the room, at least at the start, I don’t see that going well in any way.

Arthur Schlesinger’s book, “The Imperial Presidency,” was all about how it was in foreign policy and issues of war that presidents acquired excessive power vis a vis the other branches, but then were able to extend that into the domestic realm under Nixon. So, you know, havoc can be wreaked in all arenas.

Because it was Schlesinger, he said it was under Nixon, when, of course, it was under a series of Cold War Democrats before that, but leave that aside.

So Biden’s campaign announcement, his 2020 campaign announcement, he said that if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation. Our very democracy, everything that makes America America, et cetera, et cetera is at stake. Is that campaign rhetoric? Do you think that’s true? Or is it obviously both?

I mean, I’d go for both. And when he did his 2020 announcement, that was before we saw the lengths to which Trump and folks like Giuliani were willing to bend the electoral system and corrupt it, or at least attempt to, the degrees to which they would just disregard voters. So I think it’s absolutely — nothing that we’ve seen since then suggests that it was not true. And so, you know, you’ve had a four-year gap. The question is, how much of that has given people time to recover? And I just, I don’t know the answer.

The four-year gap is interesting because, in some ways, it’s even more kind of definitive than eight consecutive years. Because, all right, America chose Trump. Then it tried something else. And then it’s like, no, no, no, no, we want that back. We want to go back. We want that again. You know, it’s —

It’s drama. We love the drama.

Yeah, it’s an even — it’s a different kind of decision-making. But, to me, it feels even more definitive.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s definitive in the sense that Donald Trump is the dominant figure of our era. That’s the reality, that all those of us who prefer it to be otherwise have to — have to grapple with. The Trump presidency is not the Trump era. The Trump era is something longer and encompasses the Biden presidency in some way. I mean, I think for Biden, we saw in 2022 that kind of, with January 6 sort of hanging over a lot of Republican campaigns, that those issues were very effective for Democrats, more effective than I thought they would be, that Democrats were able to effectively gain several points in the polls just by saying, look, the Republicans are crazy and wanted to have a constitutional crisis. But Biden could really use a good economy. I think a lot of liberals and Democrats have underestimated the extent to which the Trump economy at the end pre-COVID was really good. The Biden economy, people who are sort really focused on economic policy will say, look, we’ve steered through this crisis, we’ve avoided a recession, we’re coming in for a soft landing, this is a great achievement. But if you’re an American sort of dealing with that economy, it doesn’t feel like a great achievement yet. So Biden needs, he needs a year of trends going in the direction they’re going in now, I think, to really have, that kind of normal case for re-election to go with the Trump is abnormal and may be in jail case.

Ross, you’ve brought us full circle to your opening, right? Just kind of hoping for a good economy as part of the Biden strategy is an extremely normal kind of —

Yes.

— campaign consideration. That’s just, is your policy right? Are the outcomes good? So it’s the case for normality in what seems to be, so far, a kind of abnormal race yet again. All right, Trump, it seems, can go on forever. But our conversation can’t. So let’s take a break here. And when we come back, we’ll get hot and cold. All right, folks, who’s got the hot-cold this week?

Me, me, me, me. I’m absolutely frosty on the proliferation and growing tangle of medical portals, which all of us are — [CARLOS LAUGHS] — see, right there — increasingly expected to navigate for everything from pre-registering for doctor’s appointments to getting the results of bloodworks and scans. So, look, to be clear, I do not object to having my medical info online. I like being able to pre-register for appointments. But this situation has become a mess. All of my doctors have a portal. There are separate portals for the hospital systems in which those doctors operate. The labs they send me to have separate portals. Sometimes they have unique passwords. Some let you sign in with Facebook or Google. They send out too many notices that have nothing in it.

Facebook. Facebook is what I want my medical records connected to.

Right? That’s insane. And I even get messages instructing me to sign into a portal. But it’s not clear which doctor they’re coming from. So, now, look, for me, this is vaguely frustrating. But for my 70-something parents, this is a next-level challenge. Nothing jacks my dad’s blood pressure like trying to navigate all of these. My mother then feels compelled to help. Then they aren’t speaking. Somebody has to call the doctor’s office just to figure out what’s going on. Look, I have no idea what can be done about this. It strikes me as not so much as simply about portals as a symptom of the kind of weird siloing of American health care in general, which means there’s probably nothing that we can do with it. But I am pleading for someone to figure out a way to rationalize all these different systems and, preferably, before my parents kill each other.

Michelle, I’m sure there’s a portal where you can register your complaint.

There are 75 portals where I can register my complaint, Carlos. And they’re all accessed separately.

Yes.

I’m just saying, it’s a lot.

The American medical system, yeah, it’s not designed to be navigated by any human being anywhere.

I understand it’s on the whole a good and convenient thing. But like sometimes, I just can’t — I just can’t access my lab results or whatever. And I’m just like, am I just going to die because I can’t get — I can’t break into the portal?

That’s a whole other portal, you’ll be visiting then, Michelle.

Yeah, exactly, the ultimate portal, the ultimate.

And no password necessary from what I hear.

I’ll call Mark Zuckerberg. He’ll let me in.

All right, with that, we’ll talk soon.

Bye, guys.

A beloved Harvard Law professor. An early champion for slavery reparations. A voice for gender equality. A legendary public defender. A civil rights scholar. A lawyer for indigent clients. A lead counsel for Anita Hill during her testimony accusing U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. A mentor to Michelle Robinson Obama ’88, Barack Obama ’91, and to hundreds of other African American lawyers.
These are among the many tributes to Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree Jr. ’78, affectionately known as “Tree,” that have been echoing across campus and in capitols, city halls, courthouses, and private conversations around the nation this week. Ogletree taught at Harvard Law School since 1984 and retired in 2020 after a diagnosis of early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. He died last Friday at age 70.
During his time at the Law School, Ogletree founded the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice and the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, and ran an informal “Saturday School,” where he mentored law students. We asked friends and colleagues in the Harvard community to reflect on how he will be remembered — and how they remember him.
 
Ogletree (left) represented survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, including Otis Clarke (center).
Gerald Herbert/AP

“Tree had everyone’s backs; he saw the potential in everyone and sought to nurture it.”
 
Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School
Charles Ogletree’s legacy is broad and deep, and there are many ways to characterize it. One can point to numerous professional achievements: acclaimed criminal defense lawyer, impassioned advocate of racial justice, visionary founder of both Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute.
A devotion to building and sustaining community ran through these accomplishments, and I deeply appreciate this dimension of his legacy. Tree did not live only for himself. He gave of himself — his considerable intellect, his indefatigable energy, his generosity of spirit and empathetic personality — to fortify others. Tree had everyone’s backs; he saw the potential in everyone and sought to nurture it. The benefits of his commitment flowed, in particular, to Black Harvard students, many of whom, like Tree himself, the son of California tenant farmers, began life with many disadvantages. Hence, he mentored law students through Saturday School and invited his colleagues to join him. He taught leadership skills to student athletes through convenings of The Breakfast Club, alongside coach [Tommy] Amaker and Ron Sullivan.
A pathbreaking member of the Harvard Law School faculty, he welcomed all who followed him. He took a particular interest in Black faculty; Tree made a point of inviting us to gather and connect over food and drink. I will never forget the warmth with which he greeted me when I joined the Law School faculty some 11 years ago; his smile crinkled the corners of his shining eyes. It is fitting that an endowed chair at Harvard Law School now bears his name; he deserves to be remembered and celebrated. May we all learn from Tree’s legacy of professional success, animated by service, and coupled with humility.

“[T]hat will be his greatest legacy — his impact on others.”
 
Tommy Amaker, The Thomas G. Stemberg ’71 Family Endowed Coach for Harvard Men’s Basketball 
You come across certain people in your life’s journey who leave an indelible mark. I was incredibly fortunate and blessed to have that happen with Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree. Tree and I became friends when I arrived at Harvard at a pivotal moment in my life. He did with me what he did with so many: make me bigger and better than I could imagine. Because of my relationship with Tree and his commitment to selfless service to others, I have always felt an obligation and a debt to “pay it forward” and to make him proud by bringing inspiration and opportunity to others. Among his many accomplishments, that will be his greatest legacy — his impact on others. We all owe him.

“Every year, Tree contributed two of his famous home-baked sweet-potato pies, which always elicited boisterous and competitive bidding.”
 
Carol S. Steiker, J.D. ’86, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, Special Advisor for Public Service, Harvard Law School
Tree came to HLS while I was a law student there in the mid-1980s. I came to Law School sure that I wanted to be a law professor, but not sure what my specialty would be. At HLS, I began to be interested in criminal law and possibly public defense. Tree was the first person who told me about the D.C. Public Defender Service (PDS), where he had been a legendary trial attorney and eventually deputy director. He was a towering figure in the public defense community and a wonderful ambassador for that important work.
With Tree’s encouragement, I applied to PDS after my clerkships and worked there for four years before returning to HLS as an assistant professor of criminal law and procedure. My career’s trajectory was deeply marked by Tree, and I — like many, many others — am so grateful for his example and encouragement.
At HLS, there was a tradition starting in the 1990s and lasting for more than a decade of having an auction to raise money for students doing public-interest work. (This was before the Law School guaranteed summer public-interest funding for all students and funded the Public Service Venture Fund for postgraduate public interest work.). For the first seven years of the auction, Tree and I served as co-auctioneers. I marveled at the way he effortlessly and charismatically commanded the Ames Courtroom (where the auction was held). I can still see him in my mind’s eye, dressed in his tux, joking, and getting people to bid higher and higher until late in the evening. Every year, Tree contributed two of his famous home-baked sweet-potato pies, which always elicited boisterous and competitive bidding.

Ogletree with former client Anita Hill at a Harvard talk in 2014.
Harvard file photo

“Ogletree stood at the side of Anita Hill at a moment in American legal history when women were categorically disbelieved, and men were categorically believed.”
 
Cornell William Brooks, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice and director of the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice, Harvard Kennedy School 
Charles Ogletree will certainly be remembered not only by his students, or a generation of lawyers who have been mentored and inspired by him, but also by people across the country who knew that there was a lawyer and a professor at Harvard Law School who took the side of David against a series of Goliaths.
Let’s remember that when the Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings took place in 1991, sexual harassment law was in its infancy. Ogletree stood at the side of Anita Hill at a moment in American legal history when women were categorically disbelieved, and men were categorically believed. For Ogletree to stand beside her in that politically and legally perilous moment was a window into his character. It took a certain measure of courage to stand at her side at that moment.
Just like when he spoke up for slavery reparations. Reparations are incredibly contested and controversial in the present moment. Go back a generation and there was Charles Ogletree standing at the side of Black people who were terrorized, slaughtered, and bombed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. We have yet to hear from the House, the Senate, even the president of the United States, speak definitively on reparations. Ogletree did that years ago [in 2003]. It takes a certain amount of courage to listen to people who were terrorized in 1921 and make legal claims for reparations. Ogletree represented a rare combination of practice, scholarship, teaching, and mentorship. I would argue that those are the four pillars of a legal giant.
I’m a civil rights lawyer, but I’m also a fourth-generation ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I’ve had the occasion of preaching a great many funerals and doing eulogies. One of the things that I think is important in moments like this is that as much as we grieve, we should also be inspired. As much as we, in moments of loss, need comfort, we should also welcome challenge. With his passing, a great many people have suffered: his students, his mentees, his friends, most certainly his family. But the loss of Charles Ogletree’s life not only demands comfort, but also challenges us to live as he did. It’s not merely that we grieve. It’s also that we challenge ourselves to learn the lessons that he left.

“He would stop and talk to you for 20 minutes, or sometimes hours, even though large matters competed for his attention.”
 
Kenneth Mack, J.D. ’91 , Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law
Charles always had time for you. That was true whether you were a law student, a criminal defense client, a person from the community who came to his Saturday School program, a Black woman testifying before Congress in a controversial Supreme Court nomination, or a former student campaigning to be president of the United States. He would stop and talk to you for 20 minutes, or sometimes hours, even though large matters competed for his attention.
His fingerprints were all over the 2003 Grutter decision, where the Supreme Court upheld the consideration of race in university admissions. One of my Law School colleagues once told me that Charles was “the busiest person on the planet.” If you needed help, he would give you as much time as you needed. He saw himself as carrying forward the work of predecessors such as Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Motley, and Derrick Bell, whom he revered.
When I arrived at Harvard Law School as a student in 1988, Charles wasn’t on the tenure track yet, but he was already an institution to himself. It seemed as though every student knew him or knew of him. He knew all of them as well. Years later, he could remember the names and backgrounds of hundreds and hundreds of students. They were as much his legacy as anything else.

“He radiated inspiration.”
 
Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Charles Ogletree leaves behind memories of an energetic, innovative, thoughtful, and generous lawyer, teacher, activist, and scholar. He radiated inspiration, elicited respect, and prompted admiration. He was beloved by many who were fortunate enough to come under his sway. Seldom has a law professor generated such a deep sense of gratitude.

Ogletree in his Hauser Hall office in 2009.
File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

“To be a fierce advocate for justice speaking up about wrongs, and at the same time make friends so easily.”
 
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Arbuckle Professor, Harvard Business School, founding chair and director, Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative (2005-2018)
Charles Ogletree’s legacy is the multitudes of people he enlightened, inspired, and empowered. I became closer to him after a chance encounter on an airplane in 2006 led me to invite him as to one of the first faculty co-chairs of the still-being-created, Harvard University-wide Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI). He enthusiastically jumped in to ensure that ALI attract diverse top leaders interested in societal improvement and social justice.
A great collaborator, he taught with me, and we co-wrote an HBS case on Civil Rights leader Benjamin Hooks, who started late in life a children’s health project to reduce lead poisoning. Tree tapped a vast network of contacts for major events, such as our first deep dive on poverty, justice, and jobs, held at Harvard Law School. He could reach top leaders instantly on his ubiquitous cellphone, while cherishing the many incoming Black students he invited in the fall to a Martha’s Vineyard retreat. He ran an annual Vineyard forum to which hundreds flew in; one memorable event featured survivors of the Tulsa race massacres, including some who were nearly 100 years old, whom Tree treated with the utmost dignity.
He held supplemental office hours weekly over lunch at Changsho [a Chinese restaurant on Mass Avenue] across from HLS, with rotating shifts of local civic leaders, students, and faculty. Always curious, he traveled with ALI fellows and faculty to India and China, Miami, and Detroit. He was a tough advocate for justice and always a gracious friend to people of all colors. He was not just admired; he was deeply loved.
Professor Charles Ogletree’s personal email address was “nochuck.” Known always by the nickname Tree, and decidedly not Chuck, he knew how he wanted to be treated, and he accorded others the same respect and dignity.
I recall walking into his house on Martha’s Vineyard one summer and meeting the Cambridge police chief, with whom he had struck an agreement and a friendship after the police mistakenly arrested Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates for seeming to break into his own house. (Skip immediately retained Tree as his lawyer.) The whole episode revealed Tree’s character. To be a fierce advocate for justice speaking up about wrongs, and at the same time make friends so easily.

“Rest now, my friend. Your legacy lives on.”
 
Ron S. Sullivan Jr., J.D. ’94, Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law and faculty director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School
Professor Ogletree’s legacy lies in the many students he has mentored over the years. He was the Charles Hamilton Houston of his generation, equipping an army of lawyers to fight for the disenfranchised.
Tree, as he was affectionately called by nearly everyone, took his role as teacher and mentor seriously by sharing his tremendous advocacy gifts with generations of students and challenging them to go about the work of social justice. Indeed, one of Tree’s favorite quotes — not surprisingly — comes from Charles Houston: “A lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society.”
By word and deed, Tree dedicated his life to using his unique skill set to aid those in distress, to advocate for those without voice, and to demand the construction of fair and equitable laws applied, without favor, to all.
Even though Tree came to know presidents and the powerful over the course of his career, his advocacy for the powerless never waned. Nor did his energy. Tree’s desire to forcibly bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice gave him purpose. His many students gave him hope. Rest now, my friend. Your legacy lives on.
 
Presidential candidate Cornel West had some choice words for President Joe Biden's Department of Justice amid recent reports that the progressive writer and philosopher owes more than a half-million dollars to the Internal Revenue Service.

During an interview on the popular "Breakfast Club" podcast this week, West—who is in the throes of a longshot, third-party bid for president—blasted recent reports of his unpaid taxes as a "distraction" from the greater issues facing the country, and a sign an entrenched political establishment sees his run as a threat to their power.

Later in the interview, he went into an aside in which he defended Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was convicted this year of exploiting his position to secure placement and scholarships for his son to attend the University of Southern California.

Presidential candidate Cornel West (left) had some choice words for President Joe Biden's Department of Justice amid recent reports that the progressive writer and philosopher owes more than a half-million dollars to the Internal Revenue Service. Win McNamee/Getty; Kevin Dietsch/Getty

Ridley-Thomas was "convicted for nothing—for nothing—under Biden's Justice Department," West said during the wide-ranging conversation, though he did not elaborate on what he meant.

Newsweek reached out to the West campaign via email for comment.

The allegations against Ridley-Thomas—which could potentially result in a six-year prison sentence—are lengthy and detailed. According to a news release from the Department of Justice, he engaged in a criminal conspiracy with a dean at USC's School of Social Work to secure admission and scholarship for his son, former state lawmaker Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, as he battled sexual harassment allegations.

As Mark Ridley-Thomas led an alleged effort to cover up the allegations, he reportedly pushed to direct a number of city contracts to involve the Social Work School, receiving in return preferential treatment by the school for his son to work on a soft landing for his exit from the state Assembly, which he claimed was due to illness.

"When elected leaders engage in acts of corruption, our community suffers immense damage. Ridley-Thomas engaged in a corrupt conspiracy with a university dean to steer taxpayer-funded contracts to the school in exchange for benefits for his son," U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement when the guilty verdict was read in March.

"Today's verdict sends a clear message to public officials that my office will vigorously investigate and prosecute those who abuse their power and thereby breach the public trust."

During a sentencing hearing Monday, prosecutors recommended that Ridley-Thomas be given a six-year prison sentence in a stinging memo to U.S. District Judge Dale Fischer, saying that he used his position on the board to orchestrate a "shakedown" of top USC officials to secure favorable treatment for himself and his family members despite his own wealth and connections.

Mark Ridley-Thomas speaks during the premiere of Neon's "Amazing Grace" at New Temple Missionary Baptist Church on March 31, 2019, in Los Angeles, California. Rachel Luna/Getty

"He was uniquely positioned to serve his constituents," they wrote in a 32-page memo. "Instead, he served himself."

Ridley-Thomas, meanwhile, has accused federal agents of prosecutorial misconduct, misstatements of the law and inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the testimony by the leading FBI agent involved in the case that contributed to an unfair trial.

The court rejected the claims on the basis that the defense's allegations of prosecutorial misconduct were vague, and that the court took sufficient measures to remedy any inconsistencies that might have existed in testimony against Ridley-Thomas.

Ridley-Thomas is scheduled to be sentenced on August 14.

While the pandemic still lingers, vaccination programs and the natural course of pandemics is reducing the risk of getting COVID-19 and the severity of illness if you do get infected. The WHO has now ended the public health emergency of concern for COVID. Many people have stopped wearing masks routinely. Risk of transmission is fairly low this summer.

COVID is still out there, however, and the long term health risks from a COVID infection are potentially serious. People are often left in a gray zone, wondering if masks are still a good idea and how much they should do to protect themselves. (Short answer – wear a mask if you have symptoms or are around people with symptoms.) One increasingly popular option being heavily marketed is various nasal sprays. They are offered as an option to masking, providing hours of protection from getting infected with COVID. But do they work?

No nasal spray currently on the market has proven efficacy in preventing or treating infection from COVID-19, and there are no FDA approved products in the US. But the idea is plausible and there is some preliminary research. The problem for now is that research is scant, while the marketing is getting heavy and way ahead of the science.

A nasal spray approach to preventing or treating COVID makes sense from the point of view that the nasal cavity is often the first line of defense against COVID, and a common point of entry of the virus. Nasal sprays are easy to use, and can be administered at home. They could potentially provide an extra layer of protection, and even if the duration of effect is relatively short, it could cover an outing in public or a plane ride. There are also several nasal spray vaccines under development, and these could provide a useful alternative to injectable vaccines.

The state of the science for the non-vaccine and non-antibody nasal sprays, however, is distressingly preliminary. I could find very few studies on PubMed, and they are mostly either pre-clinical or case series. First, of course, we need to consider what substance was being studied. There are several that are most promising and marketed – nitrous oxide (NO), xylitol, and Iota-Carrageenan (I-C), which is a sulfate polysaccharide.

NO has demonstrated anti-viral effects, including against SARS-CoV-2. A 2021 pilot study found that NO nasal spray decreased viral shedding of SARS-CoV-D but it did not track clinical outcomes. There is a large clinical trial underway, with initial results anticipated in 2024. ‘

Xylitol is a sugar alcohol that may have antiviral activity. Preliminary studies find that xylitol may have activity against SARS-CoV-2. Another pilot study found the time to negativization of viral titers was shorter using xylitol NS. However, there are currently no clinical trials of xylitol nasal spray and COVID.

The use of NS with Iota-Carrageenan was tested in one clinical trial, using it four times a day in a setting where health care workers were treating COVD positive patients. They found:

A total of 394 individuals were randomly assigned to receive I-C or placebo. Both treatment groups had similar baseline characteristics. The incidence of COVID-19 differs significantly between subjects receiving the nasal spray with I-C (2 of 196 [1.0%]) and those receiving placebo (10 of 198 [5.0%]). Relative risk reduction: 79.8% (95% CI 5.3 to 95.4; p=0.03). Absolute risk reduction: 4% (95% CI 0.6 to 7.4).

These preliminary results are just that – preliminary. They are enough to justify a hypothesis of potential clinical efficacy and to execute full phase 3 type clinical trials, but not enough to justify clinical claims. The FTC agrees. In 2021 they sued Xlear, inc, for marketing a product with xylitol with claims that it could prevent or treat COVID. (Case status is still listed as pending.)

It is well-established that outcomes from pre-clinical and preliminary research are poor predictors of ultimate clinical efficacy demonstrated in rigorous clinical trials. The existing research on the above three types of nasal sprays for COVID, while plausible, are extremely thin. They are insufficient as a basis for making any health claims. But what about a risk-vs-benefit analysis – even if the probability of benefit is low, the nasal sprays to appear to be relatively benign?

The big problem here is that these products are partly being marketed as an alternative to proven preventive methods, such as wearing an effective mask and social distancing. The concern is that use of a nasal spray, if they turn out to be ineffective (completely or in the dose and method of use), will essentially give people permission not to use a more effective preventive method, or to take excessive infection risks. An ineffective nasal spray can provide a false sense of security, and increase the overall risk and spread of COVID.

Ideally clinical research will test each specific nasal spray formula not just to see if it has preventive efficacy, but also in comparison to other established preventive methods. One or more of these products may prove ultimately effective. The problem is that we currently just don’t know, the research is far too scant.

The Biden administration escalated America's trade war with China on Wednesday, as President Joe Biden declared a new national emergency and immediately used it as the justification for creating a new screening system that will limit Americans' ability to invest overseas. The new rules, which have been in development since last year, will prohibit private equity and venture capital firms from investing in China-based businesses working in a variety of high-tech fields, The New York Times reports. The ban will apply to businesses working to develop artificial intelligence and those that build or develop semiconductors, the tiny chips that power modern computers. American investments that flow to other Chinese businesses will also be subject to new government scrutiny. All of that springs from a vaguely worded executive order issued Wednesday afternoon. In that order, Biden declared the "rapid advancement in semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and artificial intelligence capabilities" by "countries of concern"—China is not mentioned by name—to be a national emergency. In response to the newly declared national emergency, Biden directed the Commerce Department and Treasury to design new rules governing outbound investments. Congress, of course, will not be involved in the process. "This narrowly targeted action will complement our existing export control and inbound investment screening tools, and protect our national security while maintaining our longstanding commitment to open investment," the Treasury Department said in a statement. Narrow or not, this is the first time that the U.S. government has targeted outgoing investments in such a manner. As I reported in a feature published in this month's issue of Reason, the effort appears to be modeled on a similar screening system for inbound investments that was created in the 1970s and recently given greater powers. Biden administration officials, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have in recent months talked about the desire to limit how private sector investments flow between the U.S. and China—often blurring the lines between economic and military concerns. The idea to create an outbound investment screening mechanism, Yellen said in a speech in April, was "driven by straightforward national security considerations. We will not compromise on these concerns, even when they force tradeoffs with our economic interests." Biden's executive order echoed that framing—acknowledging the importance of global trade, but then declaring that vague national security concerns must be valued as more important. "Open global capital flows create valuable economic opportunities and promote competitiveness, innovation, and productivity, and the United States supports cross-border investment, where not inconsistent with the protection of United States national security interests," the president wrote. "However, certain United States investments may accelerate and increase the success of the development of sensitive technologies and products in countries that develop them to counter United States and allied capabilities." Wednesday's announcement by the White House is a significant expansion of what the U.S. government considers to be under the purview of national security. It is in some ways similar to how former President Donald Trump flexed his executive power to declare steel and aluminum imports to be national security concerns. In both cases, the government's definition of what's in America's national security interest has been stretched wider so officials can have greater control over the private transactions of businesses and individuals.  "For a long time, the U.S. national security community has been reticent to recognize the international financial system as a potential warfighting domain," Claire Chu, a senior China analyst at Janes (a defense intelligence company) told The New York Times on Wednesday. "And the business community has pushed back against what it considers to be the politicization of private markets. And so this is not only an interagency effort, but an exercise in intersectoral coordination."  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other entities have raised similar worries, as I reported in the piece for this month's issue of Reason. There are only two other countries—South Korea and Taiwan—that have outbound investment screening systems, making Wednesday's announcement yet another blow to the global norm of free-flowing capital. Though the specifics of the outbound investment screening system remain to be seen, there's no doubt that Wednesday's announcement is a significant escalation of the ongoing political conflict between the world's two largest economies. It is likely to end up being a massive power grab aimed at severing the peaceful exchange of money and goods across national borders.The post Biden Escalates Trade War With China appeared first on Reason.com.

An Indiana law makes it a crime for individuals to approach within 25 feet of a police officer if ordered by that officer to back away. However, on Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit challenging the law, arguing that it infringes upon individuals' First Amendment right to record and observe police. In March, the state legislature passed a law making it a misdemeanor to "knowingly or intentionally [approach] within twenty-five (25) feet of a law enforcement officer lawfully engaged in the execution of the law enforcement officer's duties after the law enforcement officer has ordered the person to stop." "Our public safety officers have important work to do, and their jobs often involve dangerous and unpredictable situations," Rep. Wendy McNamara (R–Evansville) said in a February press release. "The goal of this bill is to give officers another tool to help control a scene to maintain their safety and the public's safety." The problem, according to the ACLU, is that the law allows police to effectively prevent journalists and other bystanders from recording their activity—or even watching them in action. For example, Donald Nicodemus, the plaintiff, says that he was prevented from filming police during an investigation of a shooting. The suit also alleges police failed to properly enforce the law, and that they instructed Nicodemus to back up over 50 feet.  "There was no basis for forcing Mr. Nicodemus to move even further back from the area—fully across the street—where police [were] conducting their activities. However, Mr. Nicodemus complied as he had been threatened with arrest." "The unbridled discretion given to law enforcement officers by [the law] allows for and invites content and viewpoint-based discrimination," the complaint continues, concluding that the law "violates the First Amendment as it gives police officers unbridled discretion to prohibit citizens from approaching within 25 feet of the officers to observe their actions, even if the actions of the citizens are not and will not interfere with the police." Lawsuits challenging similar laws have succeeded before. For example, an Arizona law that would have banned filming within 8 feet of a police officer was blocked by a federal judge last year. "Arizona already has other laws on its books to prevent interference with police officers," wrote Judge John J. Tuchi in a preliminary injunction, adding that if the goal "is to prevent interference with law enforcement activities, the Court fails to see how the presence of a person recording a video near an officer interferes with the officer's activities."The post Indiana Law Lets Cops Push Bystanders Back 25 Feet. A New Lawsuit Says It's Unconstitutional. appeared first on Reason.com.

Between the middle of the 1970s and the late 2010s, in their responses to the General Social Survey, American women reported themselves to be steadily unhappier. The trend was not drastic, but it was consistent: Women were less happy in the 1980s than they were in the 1970s, less happy in the Obama era than the Clinton era, and still less happy under Trump.

For men, the trend was more complex. They started out slightly unhappier than women and then made gains in the Reagan and Clinton years, while female happiness declined. But then male unhappiness plunged between the 9/11 era and Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, before stabilizing a bit thereafter. By the pre-Covid period, the sexes were close to parity — sharing more reported unhappiness than either had been experiencing 30 or 40 years before.

These figures are drawn out of a fascinating new paper, “The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness,” from the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman. They are amenable to various interpretations, but I want to take the crudest reading, which is suggested by a different trend covered in the Peltzman paper: the persistent happiness advantage enjoyed by married couples over the unmarried, which has slightly widened since the early 1970s and now sits at around 35 points on a scale running from -100 to 100.

Over that same period, Americans have become much less likely to be married overall. In 1970, just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never tied the knot; in 2018, it was 35 percent.

Late last month, armed troops in Niger overthrew the government, arrested the elected president, and seized power for themselves. Soon after, a small group of Nigeriens who supported the coup in the capital city, Niamey, gathered to show their support for the military government, some waving the Russian flag. They denounced the West in general, and France, the former colonial power, in particular. “Long live Putin!” they chanted. “Down with France!”The coup has created considerable alarm in Western capitals, and with good reason. Since 2020, there have been coups throughout the Sahel, the strategically important belt of hot, semiarid land stretching across Africa just below the Sahara desert. In 2020, Mali’s government fell. In 2021, the same thing happened in Sudan, Chad, and Guinea. Last year, a coup took place in Burkina Faso. Niger was seen as the Sahel’s final bulwark against chaos and instability, the last regime standing. The United States had a drone base in Niger, and France had stationed troops there, a crucial line of defense against surging West African jihadism. Now all of that is at risk.[Read: A dangerous immigration crackdown in West Africa]Few Americans are in the habit of giving much thought to Niger (“Do you mean Nigeria?”), but this summer’s events seemed to offer a stark takeaway: Pro-Russian soldiers overthrew a pro-Western government. Democracy was uprooted by military dictatorship. To anyone who lived through the Cold War, the story felt familiar. The fact that Niger exports uranium—a crucial resource for nuclear reactors—makes its struggle even easier to understand as a geopolitical chess game. Niger was a pawn, and coups happen when pawns are pulled between geopolitical kings. And so, the coup has quickly become a story about America, Russia, and France—and not about Niger.When explaining major events in international news, particularly those that take place in unfamiliar locations, we all tend to exhibit geopolitical bias, a mindset that filters every incident through the prism of international grand strategy—and makes the moral of every story about us. Simplistic, familiar narratives trounce nuanced explanations that involve political actors few nonspecialists have heard of, known by obscure acronyms and hard-to-pronounce names.The military coup in Niger has already become fodder for sensational headlines and political statements linked to grand geopolitical tropes. A senior adviser to Ukraine’s president insisted, without evidence, that Russia instigated the coup. Bloomberg covered the coup as the latest evidence for the “Long Arm of the Kremlin.” Newsweek declared that Niger’s coup means “The Countdown to the Next Great War Has Begun in Africa.”Russia will likely expand its influence because of the Niger coup (and there have been reports that the junta is requesting help from the Wagner Group mercenaries). But much of the speculation about the extent of Russia’s involvement so far is based on extremely thin evidence—a few hundred people, in one protest, in one city, a handful of them carrying Russian flags, in a country that’s twice the size of France and home to more than 25 million people. Even before the coup, Niger’s capital city was an opposition stronghold, so one should hardly be surprised that some people who live there would demonstrate in support of soldiers who overthrew a president they loathed.The impetus behind the coup is very likely complex, nuanced, and less about the Kremlin than about domestic dynamics. The possibility of a more banal local cause doesn’t negate the real anger that many Nigeriens feel toward France, or the misguided impulse some have to turn to Russia as an alternative international sponsor that’s explicitly anti-Western. But the simple explanation for why the coup happened, as reported in the local media, is plausibly the right one.The incumbent president, Mohamed Bazoum, had been planning to fire a general, Abdourahamane Tchiani, who commanded the elite presidential guard. Now that the coup has happened, General Tchiani isn’t going to be fired. Instead, he has proclaimed himself the head of the new military junta, which calls itself the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland.The Occam’s-razor explanation may just be correct: A general who was going to be fired decided to fire the president instead. Many coups have such simple origin stories, triggered by factional rivalries within the military, and ambitious, self-serving men who would happily swap the barracks for the palace.Whatever the reason for his gamble, Tchiani likely didn’t anticipate the intense opposition he has faced since seizing power. Most international actors, including Russia, have condemned the coup (though the Kremlin’s statement about respecting the constitution is best consumed with a grain of salt). And perhaps the most surprising threat to Tchiani’s plans has emerged from a major regional power broker, the Economic Community of West African States. The bloc of 15 West African countries, with Nigeria as its most powerful member, has taken a hard-line stance against the coup, even threatening military intervention. As a result, some have painted ECOWAS as a puppet of the West, the sharp end of the European and American spear.Yet again, a simpler (and less geopolitically exciting) explanation is likely correct. ECOWAS may not be taking a tough stance against this coup because it’s a marionette or because it has an ideological aversion to Vladimir Putin; the governments of its member states may just be concerned about their own self-preservation.“One reason why regional presidents are interested in military intervention is because they’re increasingly scared of being taken out themselves,” says Professor Nic Cheeseman, an expert on African politics at the University of Birmingham. “It comes after several other coups in the region, and they realized that they could be next if they didn’t draw a line in the sand.”Niger’s coup may not have originated in great-power competition so much as in politics and other dynamics nearer at hand—but it could still have serious international repercussions. The security situation in the Sahel is deteriorating as jihadism rises. The junta governments that have taken power in the past three years have proved unable to combat it. Moreover, although many of the new military regimes—notably in Mali and Burkina Faso—have allied themselves with Russia, the Russian government and the Wagner Group are not exactly flush with spare cash or bursting with well-trained troops waiting to deploy to Africa, bogged down as they are by their debacle in Ukraine. In the coming months, the postcoup regimes in the Sahel are likely to realize that they’ve swapped Western partners, which had deep pockets and a long-term commitment to supplying foreign aid, for a diminished Kremlin that will inevitably overpromise and under-deliver. The money will eventually run out.[David Patrikarakos: Russia’s hunger war]Europe has skin in the game: France, which is mostly powered by nuclear energy, gets roughly 10 to 15 percent of its uranium supplies from Niger. Moreover, in 2015, the European Union paid Niger’s government to effectively create a European “Sahel border,” shutting down pathways of migration through Niger toward the Mediterranean. The coup could reopen that route, reinvigorating the formerly thriving transit hub of Agadez. The United States cares about Agadez too: The American drone base Niger Air Base 201 is just outside the town.If Niger’s junta manages to stay in power, it will almost certainly align itself with Russia. The interim regime has already announced the cancellation of several military agreements with France. But it’s in for a rude awakening if it cozies up to the Kremlin. Russia, as Mali and Burkina Faso are finding out, is rich enough to pay for small contingents of mercenaries and to line the pockets of greedy soldiers, but it is nowhere near rich enough to help provide for the broader population of one of the world’s poorest countries, where the GDP per capita is less than $600 a year.  As is so often the case in sub-Saharan Africa, the victims will be those who can least endure it. The broader population of Niger will suffer as soldiers turned politicians enrich themselves. And that story, which is not about geopolitics, but rather about the ordinary distress of millions of vulnerable people, will be one that garners substantially less ink.

This series is about the quest to achieve mass flourishing – but what exactly does flourishing mean? Along the way I’ve touched here and there on what constitutes a well-lived life, but I’d like to take some time now to spell things out in greater detail. I can’t pretend to offer anything original here – the question of how to live has been on the table since people first started asking questions – but I can flesh out my own conception of flourishing in a way that clarifies the value judgments that underlie my analysis and prescriptions. 
I’ve always loved Dwight Eisenhower’s line about the relationship between religion and democracy: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply held religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Ike was roundly mocked for the banality of the sentiment, but I think there’s genuine insight there. He went on to say, though his follow-up was largely ignored, “With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with (sic) all men are created equal.” So his quite liberal point was that democracy is founded on an unshakeable commitment to human moral equality, but that this commitment can be expressed in various ways.  
Flourishing follows a similar pattern: almost endless variation on a few basic themes. Seeing things this way puts me in a familiar position, in search of a middle ground between dogmatic certainty and anything-goes relativism. I cannot accept that there is only a single, narrowly circumscribed path of living right, nor that all paths are equally well chosen. There is such a thing as human nature: we are evolved creatures of a particular kind, and our unchosen genetic constitution imposes constraints on what is possible for us, and what is salutary. At the same time, though, the particular kind of creature that we happen to be is a culture-making animal that is capable of remarkable plasticity. We are born male and female, generally sexually attracted to each other, but culture has taken this basic biological fact and woven rich and intricate tapestries of love, romance, courtship, and union. And so it is with our other inborn drives: biology may call the tune, but culture can devise a near-infinity of dance steps.
I’m sure there are other valid ways of classifying things, but I see three broad avenues for human flourishing. The first is relationships. We are hyper-social apes, born with an intense need for love and physical touch. Throughout our lives, the connections we make with others go a long way toward defining who we ultimately become; we take pride and satisfaction in building a marriage, raising kids, and maintaining friendships across long years; and the love and laughter and comfort and solace we share with others are a treasure that can enrich any life. 
The second avenue for flourishing is projects: anything we undertake to accomplish in the world. Here the scope for variation is all but endless. Anything that might be useful or pleasing to oneself and others, anything that absorbs our attention and summons our energies, anything that requires skill and conscientiousness to master can help to fill our lives with purpose and meaning.
The third broad avenue is experiences: all of us are long-shot winners of the birth lottery, and the prize that we claim is the miracle of consciousness. We are little bits of the universe that have flickered on and become aware of our surroundings, and ourselves, and simply by being we open ourselves to the rest of existence and the wonders and joys it offers. A beautiful sunset, a starry night, puddles reflecting the traffic lights on a rainy street, children’s laughter in a park, a cool evening breeze after a hot day, a dramatic skyline seen for the first time, or the hundredth – we are constantly showered with such gifts, and all we have to do is open our eyes and ears and hearts to receive them.
These avenues crisscross each other regularly. Long-term relationships are a kind of project, and one of the most important in which we engage, even as our relationships serve up a wealth of experiences for us to share and memories to enjoy. Our projects, meanwhile, frequently lead us into important personal relationships, and the experience of “flow” that they provide – total absorption in the task, so that the self and time seem to melt away – is a major motivation for doing the work that they require. And our love of certain experiences can lead us into relationships to share them, or projects to create them. 
We can say that a well-lived life includes flourishing in all three dimensions, but beyond that it’s hard to get more prescriptive at the individual level. Some people whose other projects amount to little are especially wealthy in rich and rewarding relationships; some people find so much meaning in their projects that they thrive with much sparser human connections; and some people are especially adept at pursuing a life of varied and vivid experiences. The kinds of relationships, projects, and experiences that bring fulfillment vary from person to person, as does the emphasis on one or another of the three. 
I think that we can say a bit more if we distinguish between individual flourishing, on the one hand, and collective flourishing on the other. In my way of looking at the world, this distinction is highly significant. It’s not enough that most individuals in a society are flourishing; it is also important that the larger society is flourishing, and that humanity as a species is flourishing. Just as individuals thrive by developing and exercising their capacities, a similar process occurs at the collective level, instantiated in institutions and culture.
I believe that we can be somewhat more specific about the components of collective flourishing. Thus, for some activity X, we may not be able to say that engaging in that activity is required for any one individual’s flourishing; nevertheless, we can still conclude that a certain level of X needs to be present for a society, or a culture, or the whole human species to be said to be flourishing. Parenting seems like an obvious example: while individuals can live wonderful, worthwhile lives without having kids, a certain commitment to parenting throughout a given society is necessary for that society to even continue, much less thrive.
The fact that there are certain necessary components of collective flourishing that are optional at the individual level means that the currently dominant way of conceiving of flourishing and the pursuit of happiness has some serious blind spots. That dominant conception, which has come to us from economics and been internalized through consumerism, sees happiness simply as the fulfillment of individual preferences; in that conception, expanding the range of choices is always a move in the right direction as it allows a wider range of preferences to be fulfilled. At the individual level, such latitudinarianism is appropriate, but at the collective level it robs us of the ability to criticize societies for overdoing Y at the expense of X; it prevents us from concluding that some cultures are better than others; and therefore, it deprives us of the intellectual resources we need to make our society and our culture better.
Appreciating the distinction between individual and collective flourishing goes beyond simply recognizing that the latter has requirements that don’t apply to individuals. In addition, it means facing up to the disconcerting fact that individual and collective flourishing are sometimes in real tension with each other. For one thing, I think we can say that relationships are overall the most important component for individual flourishing, while projects are more important for our collective welfare. Most people lack the talent and drive needed to create something that changes the world for the better in any important way; for most of us, it is our capacity to serve as a good parent, child, sibling, spouse, friend, and neighbor that gives us our best chance to make the world a better place. So for most people, prioritizing love and friendship over career ambition is the better path for achieving satisfaction and fulfillment. That said, our collective capacity to create and thereby improve the world is prodigious, as evidenced by all the world’s cultural treasures and by the astonishing progress in science, technology, and material welfare that has been achieved in the relative eyeblink of modernity. It is crucially important for all of us, then, for a creative minority to be free to conceive and launch their projects for betterment, and for the rest of us to have incentives to help them as we are able.
The tension between individual and collective flourishing becomes even more evident if we refer to them as perennial and progressive flourishing, or average and peak flourishing. When we look at what best advances welfare for most individuals, in other words what works best on average, we are looking at the perennial, unchanging aspects of human welfare – in particular, the universal aversion to pain and suffering and need for love and belonging. But when we shift our attention to flourishing for society as a whole, or humanity as a whole, we need to move our focus to those domains of life in which indefinite progress, or at least indefinite experimentation, is possible—in particular, science, engineering, material production, social organization, and the arts. And here what is decisively important is not average performance, but peak performance: progress that ultimately redounds to the benefit of all of us hinges on unlocking the best that humans are capable of. 
I’m firmly of the view that, in the long run, facilitating peak flourishing promotes average flourishing. I am a fervent partisan of modernity, not primarily on the grounds that a progressive society gives geniuses a suitable outlet for their talents (although I do think that is important), but because giving geniuses those outlets – and enlisting the rest of our participation – has produced a humanitarian triumph in which billions of people who otherwise never would have existed enjoy lives with much less suffering and much wider horizons than people in the past would have imagined possible.
But getting to the long run can sometimes take a long time, and in the interim peak and average flourishing can stand in direct conflict. Nowhere has this conflict been more profound than in the event that ushered humanity into history and made all of civilization possible: the advent of agriculture. It’s now generally accepted that the average welfare of human beings declined as a result of the switch to a sedentary farming life: people had to work harder for less food and poorer health, and furthermore were subjected to burdensome and demeaning structures of oppression. And for the 95 percent of humanity stuck in subsistence agriculture, this regress in human welfare persisted for 10,000 years –that’s a long run! Only industrialization succeeded in lifting average welfare reliably above hunter-gatherer levels. But in England, where industrialization began, many decades went by before living standards started to show improvement. And worldwide, grinding poverty remained the norm as recently as when I was young, two full centuries after Watt’s innovations had unlocked steam power.
So there is a real basis for Jared Diamond’s provocative statement that the invention of agriculture was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” This sentiment dates back to Rousseau, of course, but recent anthropological evidence about declining living standards has revived it and made it somewhat fashionable. Yuval Noah Harari, in a similar vein, concluded, “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.”
For my part, I cannot agree. I am an egalitarian who is committed to the moral equality of all human beings, and humanitarianism – a focus on reducing suffering and increasing happiness for as many people as possible – ranks very high in my scheme of values. But my commitment to humanitarianism does have limits, and they are being exposed here. And that’s because I also put a very high value on excellence and greatness, such that on some margins peak human performance is more important to me than the average. Here, let me recommend this essay by philosopher Richard Chappell, which does a nice job of highlighting the conflicts between a thoroughgoing humanitarianism and a commitment to excellence.
Of course the agricultural revolution and its associated traumas all took place long before I was born, and nothing I say or do can change what happened. But staring back into the black maw of a hundred centuries of impoverished suffering, if it were somehow up to me I wouldn’t stop it from happening: I cannot wish away civilization and all its glories. I prefer a landscape of soaring peaks and deep valleys over an endless plain. 
Let me complicate things further now, as there is an additional evaluative criterion in play that significantly muddies the conflict that I have described here. When evaluating the impact on human welfare, we can look not only at the peaks and the average, but also at the total. And when we look at the effects of the invention of agriculture, there is more going on than a simple tradeoff between declining welfare for the many and rising welfare for the few. Beyond that, the numbers of the many swelled dramatically – from roughly 5 million at the dawn of agriculture to 1 billion in 1800 at the dawn of industrialization. And so, if you can think in terms of summing human welfare across individuals, you see an enormous increase in total human welfare.
Summing welfare across individuals runs into serious problems, as doing so can ignore the equal dignity of individuals and treat human welfare as an undifferentiated mass. And that can lead quickly to monstrous hypotheticals: how many headaches averted add up to outweigh a murdered child? That said, there are occasions when thinking in terms of total welfare is entirely appropriate – for example, when evaluating the effects of proposed changes in economic or social policy. Here the focus on the total is actually implicitly incorporating a commitment to the moral equality of all individuals: since everybody counts the same, we should focus on boosting the total. 
In passing judgment on the agricultural revolution, considerations of total welfare do in my view add significant further weight to the defense’s case. Yes, average lives were slightly more wretched than before, but there were so many more of them – and thus so many more friendships and true loves, so much more laughter and singing, so many more jobs well done and beautiful sunsets witnessed. If the disparity in quality is small enough, and the disparity in quantity is large enough, then at least to me considerations of total welfare can trump those of average flourishing.
But not always. Right now we’re worried about global population decline, but if we somehow get past this, is there an upper limit on how many people there should be on Earth? If we can move out into space, the constraints are lifted, but to the extent we’re earthbound it seems to me that 10 billion people enjoying mass flourishing is probably preferable to 20 billion living in pods and eating bugs. In other words, I reject the “repugnant conclusion.” All other things held equal, I think more people is better – but I don’t think that more people is unconditionally better.
Okay, so we now have three different ways to think of human flourishing: average, peak, and total. And, to my way of thinking at least, these three different perspectives sometimes clash in important ways. My takeaway is that the moral universe is complicated and messy, and that the best we can do is seek some uneasy accommodation among the existing perspectives. And I believe that many of the disagreements I have with others about what constitutes a good life and a good society turn on the fact they tend to view matters solely in terms of the average, or the peak, or the total, rather than seeing all perspectives and looking for some reconciliation among them.
So to all the romantic pastoralists and neo-primitives who reject modernity, or all of civilization, as a bad bargain, I say that you are misled by an exclusive focus on average flourishing. Peak flourishing and total flourishing matter, too, and giving them any weight at all is fatal to your case. To neo-Nietzscheans who prize human excellence and despise humanitarianism as (in Thomas Carlyle’s words) “a philosophy fit for swine,” I say that you ignore considerations of average and total flourishing at your moral peril: you are traveling down a dark road that leads to mass cruelty and suffering. And to “effective altruists” and fellow travelers who pursue total welfare in general, and the alleviation of suffering in particular, to the exclusion of all else, I say that your philosophical premises are faulty and are not leading you reliably in the direction of human flourishing. Poetry is better than push-pin, and there’s more to flourishing than comfort.
In closing, let me point out that it is my understanding of flourishing as complicated – in particular, my recognition of the uneasy coexistence of perennial flourishing at the individual level and progressive flourishing for humanity as a whole – that underlies the dual and equal focus of this series on problems of inclusion and problems of dynamism. It is not enough to cheer progress while ignoring the social disintegration plaguing ordinary people outside the elite. And it is obtuse to stand against suffering while dismissing or actively opposing scientific and technological progress. We must prioritize inclusion because, for most people most of the time, the perennial problems of avoiding suffering and seeking belonging are paramount. And we must prioritize dynamism because of our reverence for the best that lies within us – our capacity to explore and experiment and create, our endless curiosity, our drive to reconnect to the cosmos through greater understanding – and because, in the long run, facilitating the flourishing of creators and innovators gives all of us our best chance for a better life. 
Photo Credit: ShutterstockThe post Thoughts on flourishing first appeared on Niskanen Center.The post Thoughts on flourishing appeared first on Niskanen Center.

This summer, I, like so many other Americans, have forgotten what it means to be dry. The heat has grown so punishing, and the humidity so intense, that every movement sends my body into revolt. When I stand, I sweat. When I sit, I sweat. When I slice into a particularly dense head of cabbage, I sweat.The way things are going, infinite moistness may be something many of us will have to get used to. This past July was the world’s hottest month in recorded history; off the coast of Florida, ocean temperatures hit triple digits, while in Arizona, the asphalt caused third-degree burns. As human-driven climate change continues to remodel the globe, heat waves are hitting harder, longer, and more frequently. The consequences of this crisis will, on a macroscopic scale, upend where and how humans can survive. It will also, in an everyday sense, make our lives very, very sweaty.For most Americans, that’s probably unwelcome news. Our culture doesn’t exactly love sweat. Heavy perspirers are shunned on subways; BO is a hallmark of pubescent shame. History is splattered with examples of people trying to cloak sweat in perfumes, wash it away by bathing, or soak it up with wads of cotton or rubber crammed into their shirts, dresses, and hats. People without medical reason to do so have opted to paralyze their sweat-triggering nerves with Botox. Even Bruce Lee had the sweat glands in his armpits surgically removed, reportedly to avoid on-screen stains, several months before his death, in 1973.But our scorn of sweat is entirely undeserved. Perspiration is vital to life. It cools our bodies and hydrates our skin; it manages our microbiome and emits chemical cues. Sweat is also a fundamental part of what makes people people. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to run long distances in high heat; we wouldn’t be able to power our big brains and bodies; we wouldn’t have colonized so much of the Earth. We may even have sweat to thank (or blame) for our skin’s nakedness, says Yana Kamberov, a sweat researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Her team’s recent data, not yet published, suggest that as human skin evolved to produce more and more sweat glands, fur-making hair follicles disappeared to make room. Sweat is one of the “key milestones” in human evolution, argues Andrew Best, a biological anthropologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts—on par with big brains, walking upright, and the expression of culture through language and art.Humans aren’t the only animals that sweat. Many mammals—among them, dogs, cats, and rats—perspire through the footpads on their paws; chimpanzees, macaques, and other primates are covered in sweat glands. Even horses and camels slick their skin in the heat. But only our bodies are studded with this many millions of teeny, tubular sweat glands—about 10 times the number found on other primates’ skin—that funnel water from our blood to pores that can squeeze out upwards of three, four, even five liters of sweat an hour when we need them to.Our dampness isn’t cost free. Sweat is siphoned from the liquid components of blood—lose too much, and the risks of heat stroke and death shoot way up. Our lack of fur also makes us more vulnerable to bites and burns. That humans sweat anyway, then, Best told me, is a testament to perspiration’s cooling punch—it’s so much more efficient than merely panting or hiding from the heat. “If your objective is to be able to sustain a high metabolic rate in warm conditions, sweating is absolutely the best,” he said.[Read: You’re probably drinking enough water]And yet, in modern times, many of us just can’t seem to accept the realities of sweat. Americans are, for whatever reason, particularly preoccupied with quashing perspiration; in many other countries, “body odor is just normal,” says Angela Lamb, a dermatologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. But the bemoaning of BO has cultural roots that long predate the United States. “I’ve read discussions well back into antiquity where there are discussions about people whose armpits stink,” says Cari Casteel, a historian at the University of Buffalo. By the start of the 20th century, Americans had been primed by the recent popularization of germ theory to fear dirtiness—the perfect moment for marketers to “put the fear in women, and then men, that sweat was going to kibosh your plans for romance or a job,” says Sarah Everts, the author of The Joy of Sweat. These days, deodorants command an $8 billion market in the United States.Our aversion to sweat doesn’t make much evolutionary sense. Unlike other excretions that elicit near-universal disgust, sweat doesn’t routinely transmit disease or pose other harm. But it does evoke physical labor and emotional stress—neither of which polite society is typically keen to see. And for some, maybe it signifies “losing control of your body in a particular way,” says Tina Lasisi, a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Unlike urine or tears, sweat is the product of a body function that we can’t train ourselves to suppress or delay.We also hate sweat because we think it smells bad. But it doesn’t, really. Nearly all of the sweat glands on human bodies are of the so-called eccrine variety, and produce slightly salty water with virtually no scent. A few spots, such as the armpits and groin, are freckled with apocrine glands that produce a waxy, fatty substance laced with pheromones—but even that has no inherent odor. The bacteria on our skin eat it, and their waste generates a stench, leaving sweat as the scapegoat. Our species’ approach to perspiration may even make us “less stinky than we could be,” Best told me. The expansion of eccrine glands across the body might not have only made our skin barer; it’s also thought to have evicted a whole legion of BO-producing apocrine glands.As global temperatures climb, for many people—especially in parts of the world that lack access to air-conditioning—sweat will be an inevitability. “I suspect everyone is going to be quite drippy,” Kamberov told me. Exactly how slick each of us will be, though, is anyone’s guess. Experts have evidence that men sweat more than women, and that perspiration potential declines with age. But by and large, they can’t say with certainty why some people are inherently sweatier than others, and how much of it is inborn. Decades ago, a Japanese researcher hypothesized that perspiration potential might be calibrated in the first two or three years of life: Kids born into tropical climates, his analyses suggested, might activate more of their sweat glands than children in temperate regions. But Best’s recent attempts to replicate those findings have so far come up empty.[Read: The man who did not sweat]Perspiration does seem to be malleable within a lifetime. A couple of weeks into a new, intense exercise regimen, for instance, people will start to sweat more and earlier. Over longer periods of time, the body can also learn to tolerate high temperatures, and sweat less copiously but more efficiently. We sense these changes subtly as the seasons shift, says Laure Rittié, a physiologist at Glaxo-Smith Kline, who has studied sweat. It’s part of the reason a 75-degree day might feel toastier—and perhaps sweatier—in the spring than in the fall.But we can’t simply sweat our way out of our climatic bind. There’s a ceiling to the temperatures we can tolerate; the body can leach only so much liquid out at once. Sweat’s cooling power also tends to falter in humid conditions, when liquid can’t evaporate as easily off of skin. Nor can researchers predict whether future generations might evolve to perspire much more than we do now. We no longer live under the intense conditions that pressured our ancestors to sprout more sweat glands—changes that also took place over many millions of years. It’s even possible that we’re fast approaching the maximal moistness a primate body can produce. “We don’t have a great idea about the outer limits of that plasticity,” Jason Kamilar, a biological anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me.For now, people who are already on the sweatier side may find themselves better equipped to deal with a warming world, Rittié told me. At long last: Blessed are the moist, for they shall inherit the Earth.

A month and a half ago, right after the attempted Wagner coup, there appeared to be chaos in Moscow, with the future of President Vladimir Putin in question. There were indications of some movement toward negotiations in the war. Some of those contacts were public. The director of the CIA, while on a visit to Ukraine, had an extended telephone conversation with the head of Russian intelligence. What was said is unknown, but it is unlikely that the two intelligence chiefs spoke without prior discussion at lower levels. Given the nature of this war, it’s unlikely that contact between Russia and the United States, however trivial and ineffective, hasn’t been underway throughout.

The war appeared to have two limits. The United States would not deploy significant force in Ukraine or fire on Russian forces. The Russians would attack Ukrainian forces but not American supply depots in Poland. This meant that the war would not pit Russian and U.S. forces directly against each other, continuing the understanding in place since 1945, overwhelmingly but not absolutely honored. Strategic combat would be between Ukraine, supplied by the U.S., and Russia. That agreement holds and limits the global risks in the war. It may have just worked out that way, but I expect some explicit understanding was reached. The Wagner incident must have worried Washington as to who was in control in Moscow and raised questions about whether the understanding was still in place. The transfer of Wagner fighters to Belarus and to Poland’s border must have increased worries.

Two things became unlikely: that Russia would destroy the Ukrainian army and occupy Ukraine, and that Ukraine’s army would drive Russia out of Ukraine. The only logical step is a negotiated settlement. The question is what that settlement might consist of. The only logical settlement – on the surface, at least – is a division of Ukraine. One option might be that Donbas, full of ethnic Russians and on Russia’s border, is ceded to Moscow. But Ukraine cannot cede more – or even this – because it reasonably doesn’t trust the Russians not to base a force there and attack again in the future. The Russians will have a great deal of trouble accepting this. They have lost much in the war, and returning with only Donbas would be an insult to the dead and devastating to Putin. Ukraine must have a militarily defensible boundary and a shallow concession. Russia must validate the claim that it is a great power and can settle for far more than Ukraine can concede. Each side must make a powerful move to convince the other that a bad compromise is better than defeat.

I had thought that Russia might launch a powerful offensive designed to shatter the Ukrainian army and begin taking Ukrainian territory, forcing a settlement. I was surprised that it did not do so. I then realized that the Russian army does not have the ability to organize such an attack or to accept those kinds of casualties. Putin used Wagner as a separate force because he understood the limits of his enemy. When that blew up in his face, he realized what I missed: that his military was in no position to launch a final assault, and that he was in no position to negotiate.

Ukraine’s problem is that it does not control most of its logistical system and its prime supplier, the United States, has somewhat different if overlapping interests. The Ukrainians’ goal is to defeat the Russians and regain all of Ukraine. The American interest in defending Ukraine is both an end in itself and the means toward another end. The U.S. must keep Russia from moving west and creating a new and very costly cold war. The U.S. also wants to demonstrate to the world that it is in a position to militarily participate in Ukraine’s defense so long as Ukraine is prepared to defend itself. Another obvious object of the lesson is China and its periphery, particularly Taiwan. In a way, this is the final repudiation of the Vietnam model, where U.S. forces engaged in direct combat because the South Vietnamese were unable or unwilling to. In Ukraine, the U.S. avoided the body bags that came home during Vietnam and also showed the power of logistical support.

If it is accurate that Russia cannot launch a decisive ground attack, then it must do something indirectly to drive a wedge between Ukraine and the United States. The Kremlin knows that a full break is impossible, but a break on peace terms may well be possible. One Russian strategy that is failing is supporting a Vietnam-style antiwar movement in the United States. There is one, but it is not as powerful as the Vietnam antiwar strategy was.

An alternative is to drive a wedge between the U.S. and other allies. The U.S. needs allies in the region, and pleasing Ukraine while alienating them is unsupportable. The Russian decision to move vessels into the Black Sea achieved two things. Ukraine is a major exporter of grains, and cutting off those grains would cause problems in general and likely disaster in Africa. The Russians would hope to shape this into international demand for a settlement, more on Russian terms.

Their other goal would be to split NATO. The Black Sea includes NATO states like Romania. The presence of a small Russian fleet near its coast might force the Romanians to demand that a settlement be reached. Both of these are strategies of misdirection, used when direct power is not available. However, ships are very vulnerable these days – to air power, missiles and drones. Thus, the Ukrainians attacked Russian ships, sensing the importance not only of their exports but also of showing the Americans that they remain a serious force. The attacks also increase the sense of Russia’s vulnerability.

There are, as I said, informal talks underway. The Russians must decide whether to double down on the Black Sea strategy, seek another flank to hit or accept a settlement that gains them little but does not humiliate them. It is a question of how far Putin’s hubris goes and how secure he is.

In 2016, Georgetown University announced a first-of-its-kind change to its admissions policy. In addition to the long-standing legacy preferences afforded to applicants “with an enduring relationship” to the school, including children of alumni, it vowed to “give that same consideration” to the descendants of hundreds of enslaved people. From its founding, in 1789, the school had been funded by Jesuit-owned plantations in Maryland that were operated with slave labor. By 1838, the plantations had become less profitable, and Georgetown’s leaders arranged the mass sale and transfer of two hundred and seventy-two men, women, and children to businessmen in Louisiana to pay down the school’s debts and secure further funding. In 2016, a university working group that had studied Georgetown’s role in slavery suggested multiple ways to pursue “reconciliation”—including admissions preferences for descendants of those sold in 1838. The university’s president, John J. DeGioia, said, in 2021, “We live, every day, with the legacies of enslavement.”

In university admissions, one such legacy is plain, even apart from any institution’s direct involvement in slavery. Many of the most selective schools that currently give preference to the offspring of alumni did not admit Black students in significant numbers until the nineteen-sixties or seventies. And, since then, disproportionately small percentages of those schools’ student bodies have been Black. That means that the vast majority of Black American families have at most two generations of alumni experience despite having been in the United States for centuries.

In June, the Supreme Court’s ruling, in Students for Fair Admissions’ cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, prohibited schools from considering race as a factor in admissions. The suggestion that Harvard could and should simply end legacy admissions was integral to S.F.F.A.’s attack on affirmative action. S.F.F.A. argued that abandoning legacy preferences and substantially boosting socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants would make Harvard “far less white, wealthy, and privileged.” According to the plaintiff, Harvard’s unwillingness was a refusal to try race-neutral methods to achieve diversity before resorting to considering applicants’ race, as the law then required. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence specifically criticized Harvard’s resistance to eliminating preferences for children of alumni, donors, and faculty, remarking that the preferences are “race-neutral on their face” but “undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants the most.”

The Court’s decision has unleashed furious attention to inequalities that have limited access to élite educational institutions. Legacy preferences are the obvious first target because they appear to have functioned as a kind of counterweight to affirmative action. On the day of the Court’s decision, President Biden announced that his Department of Education would examine “practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.” Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, immediately urged colleges to discontinue legacy programs, which Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, called “affirmative action for the privileged.”

Last month, congressional Democrats reintroduced a bill from 2022—which was previously endorsed by a number of civil-rights organizations, including the A.C.L.U.—that would prohibit schools that receive federal funds from giving admissions preference to legacies or donors. One of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, explained that legacy preferences are “not a form of affirmative action that serves our country well” and that “it takes away from the diversity on a campus, it takes away from fairness to get into college.” It is possible that Republican lawmakers, such as Senator Scott, will join Democrats to make it a bipartisan effort.

This near-instantaneous consensus on legacy admissions may seem surprising. But we have seen versions of it before. After California banned affirmative action in public education, in 1996, the University of California system chose to end legacy preferences. The pattern also occurred at the University of Georgia and Texas A&M two decades ago.

The availability of racial preferences has enabled a tolerance of legacy preferences: boosts for underrepresented minorities were in part compensating for boosts for others. For those whose goal is to achieve racial equality in admissions, the end of affirmative action may not be entirely bad. Among other things, it has revealed that the use of race as a factor was merely part of a larger system of preferences that knowingly shaped the racial makeup of classes. Out of necessity, admissions might now be transformed to address the inequalities that make racial diversity difficult to achieve and sustain.

Admissions policies that explicitly articulate a preference for the offspring of alumni date to the nineteen-twenties. At that time, several Ivy League schools, traditionally populated by wealthy, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, had begun to experience, in the words of Harvard’s then president, A. Lawrence Lowell, “a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews” admitted for scholastic achievement. Schools responded by adopting holistic admissions processes, which would alter who was selected. The use of geographical diversity as a factor brought in more Midwesterners, who tended not to be Jewish. The consideration of personal qualities also disfavored Jews, who were thought to be academic grinds who lacked character. Legacy status was another such factor, favoring white and wealthy Protestants whose families had a history with the institutions that children of recent immigrants would obviously lack. Holistic review, including legacy preferences, became the magic formula for élite admissions, to which race-based affirmative action was added as an ingredient in the sixties. The former president of Harvard Lawrence H. Summers defended legacy admissions as “integral to the kind of community that any private educational institution is.” (This summer, in response to the Court’s affirmative-action decision, Summers urged an end to legacy preferences, among other reforms.)

Today, more than seven hundred colleges and universities consider applicants’ legacy status, but the practice is most common at institutions that admit less than twenty-five per cent of applicants. A recent study by Harvard economists, using data from several élite colleges, found that legacies were nearly four times more likely to be admitted than other applicants with the same test scores. A study based on evidence from the S.F.F.A. v. Harvard litigation found that, from 2014 to 2019, children of alumni were nearly six times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than other applicants. Surveys administered by the Crimson indicate that nearly a third of the student body have family members who attended Harvard and that around a third of legacies report parental income of more than half a million dollars, whereas only an eighth of non-legacies do.

The consensus on legacy admissions began to shift meaningfully during the past decade, as élite schools started examining ways to increase access. Although M.I.T. has stood out among the most selective institutions in reportedly never having considered legacy status, Johns Hopkins eliminated legacy admissions in 2014, and was followed by Pomona, Amherst, and Wesleyan. According to Education Reform Now, more than a hundred colleges and universities have ended legacy admissions since 2015. The president of Johns Hopkins, Ron Daniels, has written that the preference for legacies “was impairing our ability to educate qualified and promising students from all backgrounds and to help launch them up the social ladder.” More recently, he called it “an aristocratic policy, not a meritocratic one,” that is “indefensible in a democratic society.”

In 2019, the Varsity Blues scandal exposed dozens of wealthy parents’ involvement in criminal conspiracy to commit fraud in order to insure their children’s admission to colleges, using inflated test scores, bribery of college officials, and even doctored photos of athletic prowess. The scandal brought public attention to the idea that, even in the absence of criminal activity, the competition to get in may bear more similarities to parents vying to purchase spots than to a true system of “merit.” The racial reckoning of 2020 brought more skepticism toward processes that reflect baked-in racial disadvantage. In 2020, California (where public university systems had decades ago voluntarily eliminated legacy preferences) enacted a law that employed a public-shaming approach, requiring all institutions to disclose annually the number of legacies and donor-related applicants “who did not meet the institution’s admission standards that apply to all applicants, but who were offered admission,” as well as the number who met the standards. In 2021, Colorado became the only state thus far to ban legacy admissions for public colleges and universities. Lawmakers who sponsored the bill called the legacy preference “a concrete example of systemic inequity.”

Bills that would ban legacy admissions at private and public institutions were introduced in Connecticut in 2022, and in New York this year and last. In Massachusetts, a bill introduced this year would force any school that uses legacy or donor preferences to pay a “public service fee” equal to a small percentage of its endowment, which the state would then use to fund community colleges. At Harvard, the fee would amount to a hundred million dollars a year.

In response to the Connecticut bill, Yale’s dean of admissions, Jeremiah Quinlan, expressed skepticism that “a ban on legacy preferences in admissions would have a material effect on representation of low-income, first-generation, or under-represented students.” More emphatically, he wrote that “the state should not dictate how colleges and universities make admissions decisions, just as the state should not dictate whom we hire as faculty or what we teach in the curriculum.” This broader point, about the importance of universities’ autonomy, may resonate in an era of increasing governmental attempts to regulate campuses. (See the Stop WOKE Act, in Florida.) Universities are increasingly scrutinized by law and political processes, instead of being left to manage their affairs, whether they involve diversity, fund-raising, or free speech. Public regulation in matters of inequality of entry into these institutions which benefit from public funds, however, is less troubling than attempts to control teaching, research, and other academic activities. Although the anxiety of Quinlan and others is understandable, it does not follow that legislatures’ moves to increase access to universities must lead to encroachments on academic freedom.

After decades of suspicion and scrutiny of affirmative action, legacy admissions are taking their place as the punching bag. Last month, in response to a federal civil-rights complaint, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into whether Harvard’s preferences for legacies and children of donors discriminate against Black, Hispanic, and Asian American applicants in favor of less qualified white applicants, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That statute, which prohibits institutions that receive federal funding from discriminating on the ground of race, is the same one that, the Court held, prohibits race-conscious affirmative action. Having emerged battle-worn and unsuccessful from nearly a decade of litigation defending universities’ use of race in admissions, Harvard will have to be the standard-bearer for the use of legacy status and, more broadly, universities’ freedom to craft their student bodies without interference.

An allegation that legacy preferences constitute intentional discrimination would be difficult to substantiate, and the complaint does not even raise that argument. Title VI, though, allows for a claim to the Education Department that a racially neutral policy with no racially discriminatory purpose still has a “disparate impact” that is discriminatory. Here, the claim is that Harvard’s legacy and donor preferences in practice have a disproportionate, discriminatory impact on some racial groups. As the complaint puts it, the preferences “provide a competitive advantage to predominantly white, wealthy applicants, which significantly diminishes opportunities for qualified applicants of color.”

It is notable that the anti-legacy claim does not pit Asian Americans against other minorities, as the S.F.F.A. case attacking affirmative action did. But the complaint relies heavily on information from the S.F.F.A. litigation and draws liberally from the Supreme Court’s logic. It quotes Chief Justice John Roberts’s line “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it” and applies his reasoning—that “a benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter.”

Because the Supreme Court, in 2001, made private suits based on disparate-impact claims under Title VI unavailable in court, it is unlikely to take on the legacy-admissions issue. The claim is viable in complaints to the Education Department, which has the ability to tell schools to reform their admissions programs if they want to keep receiving federal funds. But civil-rights regulators may find it difficult to come to that conclusion. Almost every other factor considered in admissions—from standardized tests or how academically challenging an applicant’s high school is to personal character or extracurricular activities and leadership—arguably favors some racial groups over others. We know from the S.F.F.A. v. Harvard litigation that considering SAT scores tends to benefit Asian Americans, while “personal ratings,” evaluating qualities like kindness, courage, and integrity, disfavors them; the impact is the reverse for Black applicants. Over the past century, some of the factors used as part of holistic admissions, including “diversity,” were crafted with the intent to favor some groups, whereas other factors had that effect inadvertently. It becomes very difficult to untangle disparate racial impact from the impact of selecting for skills and qualities that a school views as deserving of reward.

Even if investigators were to find that legacy admissions have a disparate racial impact, they would still be lawful if there is a substantial justification for them. The proffered justifications for a legacy preference would likely include the importance of maintaining intergenerational community and loyalty; encouraging giving by alumni; identifying high performers, given that legacy applicants’ familial advantages may predict better outcomes both in college and in their careers; and predicting the likelihood of attendance, in order to maintain a high yield rate. Even if one finds justifications like these uncompelling, it will be hard for government lawyers to conclude that there are no legitimate justifications and that legacy preferences should be legally prohibited. (Studies are mixed on whether legacy admission helps universities raise funds. There may be higher rates of alumni giving at schools that consider legacy status, but schools that abandoned legacy admissions have not suffered a negative effect on alumni giving, and some have experienced significant growth in their endowments.) Though access to these institutions is a subject of public importance, schools will, by and large, likely be left to sort out admissions policies as they see fit.

Universities that have pursued student-body diversity for the past decades through affirmative action will continue to seek a robust enrollment of Black and Latino students. But they will have to find new, race-neutral ways to do so—which could change the character of admissions. During oral arguments in the affirmative-action case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh surprisingly suggested that giving “a benefit to descendants of slaves would not be race-based.” It may seem bizarrely formalistic to say that a preference for descendants of enslaved people is not a race-based preference, but for those who insist that “race” is mere skin color, as some legal conservatives appear to, separating race from enslavement might make sense. Kavanaugh, who, like Gorsuch, attended the Catholic high school Georgetown Prep, which was originally a part of Georgetown University, may well have had in mind the university’s policy of giving a preference to the descendants of enslaved people who were sold by its Jesuit leaders.

Kavanaugh was, in effect, proposing that schools could legally implement a policy of reparations, which is how some colleges originally understood their race-based admissions programs. In the 1978 case in which the Supreme Court first upheld race-conscious affirmative action, though, the Court ruled that reparations or compensation for past generations of racial discrimination and injustice was not a compelling reason to use race as a factor in admissions—only “diversity” was. Colleges and universities then embraced the rationale, extolling the benefits of diversity for fulfilling their educational missions and producing future leaders. But now that race cannot be used as a factor, if, as Kavanaugh suggested, considering the legacy of slavery is “not race-based,” then universities could restore some benefits of affirmative action by giving preferences to applicants who check a box indicating that they are descended from enslaved people.

Last year, Harvard issued an extensive report on its own ties to slavery. It found that slavery was “an integral part of life” at Harvard, whose faculty, staff, and leaders enslaved individuals, some of them on campus. Profits from major donors’ involvement in slavery and the slave trade “helped the University build a national reputation, hire faculty, support students, grow its collections, expand its physical footprint, and develop its infrastructure.” Like Georgetown and many other schools, Harvard would have ample justification to make reparations in its admissions process and to consider a legacy of enslavement. Universities could account, in their race-neutral admissions policies, for not only slavery but also other sustained legal subjugation in which they may or may not have been directly involved. In a recent case, Justice Gorsuch quoted with approval the Court’s statement, in 1974, that a federal employment preference for Native American tribal members of at least a quarter Native American blood was a “political, rather than racial,” classification.

We are in a time when ideas of what exactly is race-based are up for grabs. Once the affirmative-action-bound language of the Court’s previous instructions is swept away, and schools are no longer legally incentivized to talk about race in admissions in terms of “diversity” or even any sort of “holistic” evaluation, we could end up with a more frank and substantive discussion about equity, including not only descent from enslaved people but also severe disadvantage from state-sponsored subordination, first-generation-college-student status, and family income and wealth. Many untold possibilities might open up if we look hard for alternative ways to unlock education as a means to social mobility. ♦

In an attempt to kick-start his sputtering presidential bid, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has shifted his focus toward economic issues and away from the culture war obsession that defined the early stages of his campaign. The pivot is a welcome—and probably necessary—change that gives DeSantis an opportunity to talk about actual conservative policies rather than seeking new ways to threaten to use state power against private entities the governor dislikes. In recent campaign speeches, an op-ed published Monday in USA Today, and the "Declaration of Economic Independence" published on his campaign website, DeSantis has pivoted toward talking about the worrying size of the national debt, the growth of regulatory burdens, and how both are crushing growth. But even as he switches gears, DeSantis still seems stuck in that frame of mind that defined his culture war antics—a mentality that could stall the candidate's attempted reboot. The best example comes in bold text right at the bottom of DeSantis' new economic declaration. "The goal of our declaration of economic independence is simple: We win. They lose." Much of the document is focused on spelling out who and what "they" might be. At one point, near the top, DeSantis even claims that "it's time to name names and defeat those people and institutions that have formed the root cause of this economic malaise." Unfortunately, there aren't many specifics actually offered. Instead, he settles for criticizing broad classes of people. The "central planners who seek to advance their political agendas," the "class of progressive corporations looking out for every interest except for that of the American people," and especially the "failed elites that have orchestrated American decline." (In the brief declaration, DeSantis mentions those unnamed "elites" no fewer than five times, and always pejoratively.) That is, at best, a pretty phony line of attack coming from a guy with an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. But it's more than that. It's straight-up populist demagoguery and class warfare—tactics that seem incongruous with DeSantis' supposed pivot toward economic issues. As Dominic Pino notes at National Review, it's the sort of argument that conservatives rightly dismiss when they hear it coming from the populist left. "We're used to hearing Bernie Sanders talk about how 'the billionaires' are responsible for our problems, or Elizabeth Warren decry 'corporate greed' as the cause of every ill," Pino writes. "Politicians on the left believe more government is good, so it makes more sense for them to blame some nondescript group of wealthy or powerful people that most Americans can't relate to. But DeSantis says he wants to scale back the federal government, and his actual policy ideas contain some helpful moves in that direction. So why the class warfare?" It's a good question, and one that you won't find satisfactorily answered within the declaration or the op-ed. DeSantis has carried over the us-vs.-them framing that defined many of his anti-woke political stunts, but applying that logic to economic issues makes even less sense. Take, for example, DeSantis' stated goal of achieving 3 percent economic growth through a combination of simplifying the tax code and cutting burdensome federal regulations. There's no need to wrap that promise within a "we win, they lose" zero-sum view of the world. Isn't higher economic growth good for everyone? Or look at what DeSantis says about the danger of reckless federal borrowing, which he (correctly) points out has added to inflation. "American families have seen their quality of life and economic security diminish while our national debt has exploded," he writes in his declaration. But merely blaming "elites" for that mess would be a cop-out even if DeSantis didn't literally promise to "name names" just three sentences later. The two men who are largely responsible for the reckless spending and borrowing that's taken place over the past seven years are President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Trump oversaw a dramatic increase in government spending—the federal budget climbed from $3.98 trillion in fiscal year 2017 to $4.45 trillion in 2019—even before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and blew the deficit to previously unimaginable highs. On the back end of the pandemic, Biden signed the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, despite warnings from economists the stimulus package would overheat the economy and trigger an inflationary spiral, which it did. Trump and Biden also happen to be the two men who DeSantis probably has to defeat if he's going to win the White House. What does DeSantis have to lose by calling them out directly for their fiscal malfeasance? That, in a nutshell, is what makes DeSantis' economic pivot so unsatisfying. Even when the facts are on his side, the governor can't seem to let go of the language of class warfare and populism. It's easy to see the shape of a better DeSantis campaign within the contours of his new economic policy agenda. After Americans have been battered by a pandemic and high inflation, a candidate like DeSantis could use the past seven years to make a compelling case against the way both Trump and Biden handled economic policy. The national debt was less than $20 trillion when Trump took office in 2017 and stands at $32.6 trillion today. The federal government has borrowed more than $12 trillion (and counting) over the course of two presidential terms, and put it all on a tab for your children, he could say. And for what? Are you better off than you were in 2016? Embracing that sort of Reaganite economic message will be impossible as long as DeSantis remains hobbled by zero-sum, populist politicking.The post Ron DeSantis' Unconvincing Economic Reset appeared first on Reason.com.

A Texas judge issued a temporary injunction against the state's abortion ban on Friday, which exempted doctors from prosecution for abortions performed when pregnancy complications risked the mother's life or health, or when there were fetal abnormalities.  However, this injunction was itself blocked just hours later by an appeal from the state attorney general, leaving a final decision on the case to the Texas Supreme Court. Travis County District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum issued an injunction against the law as part of a ruling in Zurawski v. State of Texas, a lawsuit brought by five Texas women who claim that they were denied medically necessary abortions due to unclear language in the state's abortion ban that left doctors unsure if they could legally provide an abortion.  According to the lawsuit, two plaintiffs experienced severe complications from miscarriages that went untreated due to the ban. The three other plaintiffs had fetuses with severe abnormalities that carried high risks of medical complications for the mother, like hemorrhaging. Texas law currently bans almost all abortions, providing an exception only in the case of a "medical emergency," defined as a "life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that, as certified by a physician, places the woman in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed." In their lawsuit, plaintiffs argue the law is too vague, leading doctors to deny them abortions—placing the women at risk—due to concerns that the women were not in sufficiently imminent danger of death for doctors to risk possible prosecution if they performed an abortion. Under the law, doctors who perform illegal abortions face life in prison. "With the threat of losing their medical licenses, fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and up to 99 years in prison lingering over their heads," the suit states, "it is no wonder that doctors and hospitals are turning patients away—even patients in medical emergencies." On Friday, Mangrum issued a temporary injunction, pending a final ruling on the case, against the portion of the state's abortion ban pertaining to medical emergencies. "The Court finds that there is uncertainty regarding whether the medical exception to Texas's abortion bans . . . permits a physician to provide abortion care where, in the physician's good faith judgment and in consultation with the pregnant person, a pregnant person has a physical emergent medical condition," Mangrum wrote. "The Court further finds that any official's enforcement of Texas's abortion bans as applied to a pregnant person with an emergent medical condition for whom an abortion would prevent or alleviate a risk of death or risk to their health (including their fertility) would be inconsistent with the rights afforded to pregnant people under" the Texas Constitution. Mangrum's ruling barred Texas from enforcing its abortion ban against doctors who provide abortions in cases where the patient has "a complication of pregnancy that poses a risk of infection or otherwise makes continuing a pregnancy unsafe for the pregnant person," "a condition exacerbated by pregnancy, that cannot be effectively treated during pregnancy, or that requires recurrent invasive intervention," or "a fetal condition where the fetus is unlikely to survive the pregnancy and sustain life after birth." However, less than a day after the injunction was issued, the attorney general's office appealed the decision directly to the state's supreme court, effectively blocking the injunction and keeping existing laws in effect until the justices issue a ruling. "Texas pro-life laws are in full effect," said a press release from the attorney general's office on Saturday. "This judge's ruling is not."The post Texas Attorney General Blocks Injunction, Will Keep Enforcing Anti-Abortion Law appeared first on Reason.com.

Special counsel Jack Smith, J.D. ’94, filed an indictment against former President Donald Trump last week for his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Filed in Federal District Court in Washington, it charged Trump with conspiring to defraud the U.S., disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct the Jan. 6 certification of the presidential election results.
The Gazette spoke with Ronald Sullivan Jr., Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law and faculty director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School, about the latest indictment, what surprises it held, the challenges for the prosecution, and his expectations for the trial. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q&A
Ronald Sullivan Jr.
GAZETTE:  How did special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment echo the findings of the House Committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol?
SULLIVAN: Many of the facts that we see in the indictment were developed from the Jan. 6 hearings. But there was one count that many of us did not see coming. President Trump was charged in a four-count indictment and one of them, the conspiracy against rights, charges that Trump deprived U.S. citizens of a civil right — the right to vote and to have their votes counted. It’s certainly fundamental, but many didn’t see that charge coming. It took many of us by surprise.
GAZETTE: Why? What do you make of it?
SULLIVAN: Although I was surprised to see the charge in the indictment, it fits with the other three conspiracy charges, where the government has alleged that the former president conspired with others to deprive people of their votes. That’s essentially, distilled to its essence, what the alleged scheme is about. It was to disenfranchise millions and millions of people, deny their votes, and overturn the election. Although I didn’t expect this charge, it fits the conduct.
GAZETTE: What is the prosecution’s main challenge?
SULLIVAN: The biggest hurdle that the government will face is proving “state of mind.” In each of these counts, the government must prove that Mr. Trump intended to break the law, that he knew in his own mind that the election was lost, and nonetheless, he intended to do things to overturn the election. Under U.S. law, if Mr. Trump can show that he didn’t know or he was confused or he believed that he had won the election, then these counts will fail.
The count about obstructing Congress has an even higher mens rea, or mental state requirement, because it requires something called corrupt intent, and that has even more stringent state-of-mind requirements. It says that not only does Mr. Trump have to intend the result, but the motivation for his actions must be wrong or unlawful. It’s an even higher standard. Proving that beyond a reasonable doubt will be the government’s most significant challenge.
GAZETTE: What are your expectations about the outcome of this trial?
SULLIVAN: It’s hard to say at this point because I haven’t seen all the evidence. Indictments are written to make defendants look guilty. If I just go by the indictment, everybody who was indicted looks guilty. And the same holds for this indictment; it certainly makes the president look guilty. Whether the case is good or bad will depend on the rest of the evidence. As the media begins to report who the witnesses are and what the other evidence is, I can better assess the chances of both parties.
GAZETTE: Some people have said that the investigation by Smith may have been rushed as he took only eight months to complete his investigation. What do you think?
SULLIVAN: I don’t think the investigation was too fast. What people have to remember is that Smith had the benefit of a two-year-long investigation by the Jan. 6 committee. A lot of the groundwork was already done. I think that the Department of Justice was under some time constraints because it wanted to get an indictment out before we get too far into the political season, but I do not get the sense that it was rushed.
GAZETTE: How long will the process take? Will it be over before the November 2024 election?
SULLIVAN: Most felony cases take a year or so to get to trial. A serious felony case takes up to a year and a half or longer to get to trial. I have tried dozens of federal criminal cases, and I cannot remember ever getting one to trial within a year’s time. I think it is extraordinarily optimistic thinking on the part of the government that they will have a trial before the elections. The defendant has a constitutional right to a speedy trial. My suspicion is that Mr. Trump is in no rush to try this case, and there will be motions, complaints about discovery, and procedural complaints throughout that I think will push this trial back. The government, of course, wants to try it before the elections, but I have serious doubts whether that’s doable.
GAZETTE: How do you think Trump’s legal troubles are going to affect his presidential run?
SULLIVAN: Let me answer that in two ways. In terms of legal jeopardy, President Trump is in a world of trouble. He’s got three felony cases he’s facing, and perhaps a fourth one coming up in Georgia. Politically, from what I read these indictments seem not to have had much of an effect on his popularity within his party. It may be that both things are true, that he will remain in very dire criminal jeopardy, and that he may well win the Republican nomination for president of the United States.
GAZETTE: As a criminal lawyer, are there things you would like to see happen in these proceedings?
SULLIVAN: Certainly, I would like there to be fair trials. Every criminal defendant has a constitutional right to a fair trial with the effective representation of counsel. I wish that for Mr. Trump, as well. It would be nice if cameras were in the courtroom so that the country could see what happens and could also see that he got a fair shot — the same sort of shot that every other American gets when accused. I think that the government should be forced to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. I think it will show both to the citizenry and to the world that our system works.

I assume you disagree?

Bret: I always thought the sole purpose of capital punishment was justice, so even if the death penalty did deter violent crime, that argument wouldn’t hold water with me. But my support has softened over the years, mainly because, as I grow older, I think it’s wrong to foreclose the possibility of atonement and redemption in prison, particularly for those who committed crimes when they were young.

Gail: Good thought.

Bret: And yet there are some crimes that are so premeditated, hateful and cruel that I think society has to respond in the severest way possible. Life in prison with three meals a day, an hour for exercise, friendships with other inmates, answering fan mail (and there will be fan mail) — all that mocks the idea of justice. I don’t for a second doubt that justice was done when the war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged or the serial killer Ted Bundy was executed or the terrorist Timothy McVeigh was killed by lethal injection. Bowers belongs in their company.

And, um, speaking of justice, what do we make of Trump indictment No. 3?

Gail: We’ve gotten to the real bottom line, Trump-crime-wise. The country can get past a president who breaks the law in his private life, hides official documents and hides the evidence that he hides official documents. But we can’t survive a president who makes a serious attempt to wreck the election system and stay in office after he’s been voted out.

That just can’t be overlooked. He has to be punished.

Bret: I thought the right remedy for Jan. 6 was political, via immediate impeachment and conviction, as I wrote at the time. I worry that the latest case is going to turn on the question of whether Donald Trump truly believed he had won the election and could have his vice president reject electoral ballots. In other words, it’s going to be about Trump’s state of mind and his First Amendment rights, rather than the disgrace of his behavior, which increases the chances of his ultimate acquittal.

Gail: All this drama keeps bringing me back to Mike Pence — and believe me, I never thought I’d be in a world where I wanted to be back with Mike Pence in any way, shape or form. But when the critical moment came, he followed through and declared the actual election winner the actual election winner.

In one Alabama county, women who admit to using marijuana during pregnancy often find themselves charged with a felony. Etowah County—in northeastern Alabama—charges more women with "chemical endangerment" than any other county in the state. Until recently, these women were often only granted release from jail on the condition that they enter rehab, despite not being addicted to drugs. In 2006, Alabama enacted a "chemical endangerment" law designed to punish parents who allow their children near meth labs. However, in the years since the law's passage, Etowah County law enforcement officials have used it to throw women in jail for months over minor drug offenses. Women who aren't even addicted to drugs have often found themselves trapped in jail, unable to be released unless they go to rehab yet denied entry by drug treatment facilities because of their lack of addiction. Amanda Bradley was arrested in 2021 after she tested positive for THC after giving birth. Bradley says she had been using CBD oil to cope with chronic pain and had no idea the oil could cause a positive drug test. "The CBD oil they sold at the store, I didn't know it would make me fail for marijuana," Bradley told AL.com. "It seemed like a natural, safe option. That's why I did it. I didn't know you could get in trouble for stuff you bought from the store."  Bradley couldn't be released unless she entered a rehab facility. But Bradley's CBD oil use didn't count as drug addiction, so addiction treatment facilities wouldn't take her.  "I went back and ended up redoing the assessment and telling them I shoot up and all kinds of stuff to get to rehab and it worked," she said. Ultimately, she spent two months in jail and six months at a drug treatment center. Another woman, Chelsea Stewart, was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana charge in 2019. She told AL.com that she stopped smoking after this arrest. However, she still tested positive during a random drug test several weeks later. By that point, Stewart had found out she was pregnant. Stewart was taken to jail, and after a month, she was released to a halfway house filled with women with histories of heavy addictions to opioids and meth. She told AL.com that she had never used a substance stronger than marijuana, yet she was forced to pay for an unnecessary stay in the halfway house. "I spent more than $3,000 on that," she said. "I could have been saving for my daughter. I could have been saving for anything, and I wasn't." In total, 257 pregnant women and new mothers were arrested for chemical endangerment between 2015 and January 2023 in Etowah County. According to Al.com, three-quarters of the people arrested for chemical endangerment (of which 93 percent are women) were too poor to hire an attorney.  However, the situation does seem to be improving slightly. Following reporting last year, Etowah County no longer requires pregnant women to attend—and pay for—rehab in order to get out of jail. Even without mandated rehab, Etowah County law enforcement are still using the state's chemical endangerment law to unnecessarily punish women for minor drug offenses. "They are the most zealous prosecutors and sheriff's department we have encountered anywhere across the country," one attorney told Al.com, "and the data backs that up."The post Alabama Woman Jailed for 2 Months for Using CBD Oil While Pregnant appeared first on Reason.com.

As recently as the 1990s, Jodi Stookey, a nutrition consultant based in California, remembers hydration research being a very lonely field. The health chatter was all about fat and carbs; children routinely subsisted on a single pouch of Capri Sun a day. Even athletes were discouraged from sipping on fields and race tracks, lest the excess liquid slow them down. “I can’t tell you how many people told me I was stupid,” Stookey told me, for being one of water’s few advocates.But around the turn of the millennium, hydration became an American fixation. Celebrities touted water’s benefits in magazines; branded bottles overran supermarket shelves. Academic research on hydration underwent a mini-boom. After ages of being persistently parched, we were suddenly all drinking, drinking, drinking, because we felt like we should. It was an aquatic about-face—and it didn’t make total scientific sense.The importance of hydration, in the abstract, is indisputable. Water keeps our organs chugging and our muscles agile; it helps distribute nutrients through the body and maintains our inner thermostat. Take it away, and cells inevitably die. But the concrete specifics of adequate water intake are still, in large part, a mess. For hydration, “there are no clear numbers, or a threshold you have to maintain,” says Yasuki Sekiguchi, a sports-performance scientist at Texas Tech University. Experts don’t agree on how much water people need, or the best ways to tell when someone should drink; they differ on how to measure hydration, which beverages are adequately hydrating, and how much importance to attribute to thirst. They have yet to reach quorum on what hydration—a process that’s sustained life since its primordial inception—fundamentally is. The murkiness has left the field of hydration research, still relatively young and relatively small, rife with “vicious camps against each other,” says Tamara Hew-Butler, an exercise physiologist at Wayne State University.[Read: Drink more water]
Forget, for instance, one of water’s most persistent myths: the oft-repeated advice to down eight 8-ounce glasses of water each day. No one can say for certain, but one theory is that the idea  sprouted from a misinterpretation of a nutrition document from the 1940s, which stated that 2.5 liters of water a day (that is, approximately 10 8-ounce glasses) was “a suitable allowance for adults” in “most instances.” The guidance also noted, in the very same paragraph, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” But the bigger issue is this: Probably no single number for water intake will ever suffice—not for a population of people with varying weights, genetics, diets, and activity levels, living in varying climates. Even within an individual, what’s best will change through a lifetime. The answer to How much water should I be drinking? is invariably Uh, it really depends.Today’s hydration zeitgeist seems to hold that no amount of water is too much. The market teems with intake-tracking smartphone apps and time-stamped bottles that cheer drinkers toward hydration goals as high as a gallon a day—a quota astronomical enough to be stressful, even dangerous, should people flood their bodies all at once. But America’s hydration hype machine “has established a narrative that we are all walking around dehydrated, and need to drink more,” Hew-Butler told me. It’s no wonder that some people have reported legitimate anxiety over falling short on water intake.No single source sold America on water. But a 2021 episode of the podcast Decoder Ring points to Gatorade as one of the first companies to pitch dehydration as a health problem—while simultaneously offering a cure. The company’s sports drinks were originally billed as thirst-quenchers, designed to stave off performance dips. But by the 1980s, Decoder Ring reported, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute was churning out data that supported the benefits of drinking before the mouth got parched. A decade later, the American College of Sports Medicine was recommending that athletes consume “the maximal amount” of water they could stand to keep down.[Read: The organic Gatorade illusion]Around the same time, during the fitness craze of the ’70s and ’80s, water was acquiring another identity: the enlightened socialite’s clean drink of choice. When European companies such as Perrier and Evian brought their bottled water to North America, they found a market among those wanting a high-end, calorie- and sweetener-free alternative to sodas, alcohol, and juice. Water “had this healthy, good-for-you halo,” says Michael Bellas, the chair and CEO of the Beverage Marketing Corporation. “There were no negatives.” In 2016, water became the U.S.’s leading bottled beverage, a title it has maintained since.As water’s market share grew, so did its mythos. Companies hocked the illusion that their products could make people not just healthier but “sexier and more popular,” Peter Gleick, the author of The Three Ages of Water, told me. Hydration was so clearly vital to life that truth-adjacent ideas about its benefits, many of them pushed by prominent people, were easy to buy. Even concerns over single-use plastic bottles could not slow water’s roll: In response, the world cooked up eco-friendly Yetis, HydroFlasks, and Nalgenes, and made those trendy, too.It’s not that water isn’t healthy. There’s just no evidence to show that guzzling tons of water can fix all our ailments. For people prone to kidney stones and UTIs, drinking more has been shown to cut down on risks; as a swap for sugary beverages, it can also help with weight loss. But for a variety of other issues—such as heart disease, metabolic issues, and cancer—the data is often “really mixed,” Hew-Butler told me. Although researchers have sometimes found evidence that dehydration may raise certain conditions’ risks, that doesn’t automatically imply the inverse—that extra water intake then lowers risk from a typical baseline. At very rare extremes, overdoing it on water can kill us, too.The connections between hydration and health are shaky enough that health authorities have been reluctant to push a strict recommended daily allowance, like the ones that exist for various vitamins. Instead, the National Academy of Medicine proposes a tentative “adequate intake”: 3.7 liters of total water intake for men, and 2.7 for women (both including hydration from food). Recently, Abigail Colburn, a physiology researcher at Yale, and her colleagues ran an analysis that concluded those figures were sound. Still, the numbers came from population surveys, published in the early aughts, of the amounts that Americans were already drinking—a reflection of how things were, but not necessarily how they should be. And they represent medians within a huge range. Over the years, multiple studies have documented people living, by all appearances healthfully, on daily water budgets that span less than a liter to four, five, or six—sometimes more.If researchers don’t agree on how much water is good, they also differ on how little water is bad: the point at which dehydration starts to become a problem—or how long people can linger at that threshold without raising long-term health risks.A bit of water loss should be completely fine. Fluid status is, by design, “a constantly changing state,” Colburn told me. When the body doesn’t take in enough water to recoup the liquid it’s lost—as it naturally does throughout the day, via sweat, urine, and breath—the brain releases a hormone called vasopressin that prompts the kidneys to hold onto fluid. The urine gets darker and less voluminous; eventually, blood-salt levels rise, and the mouth and throat ache with thirst. The goal is to get the body to excrete less water out and take more in so we don’t wring our vital tissues dry. Life forms have evolved to tread carefully down this cascade of steps, and the flexibility is built in—much like a rubber band that snaps back after being stretched and released.[Read: Why ‘drink more water’?]But some researchers have started to worry about repeatedly asking the body to compensate for less than optimal hydration—stretching the band over and over again. The issue isn’t chronic dehydration, Colburn told me, but a subtler precursor state called underhydration, which occurs after a lack of water intake has prompted the body to conserve but before the appearance of signals such as thirst. It’s not clear how worrying teetering on that precipice is. In the same way a rubber band is “designed to stretch,” our fluid balance is built to bounce back, says Evan Johnson, a hydration expert at the University of Wyoming. Over time, though, wear and tear could add up, and resilience could drop.Tracking those outcomes gets even more complicated when researchers try to quantify how dehydrated individual people are—another thing that experts can’t agree on. “We really don’t have a gold standard for measuring the all-encompassing term of hydration,” Johnson told me, especially one that’s both simple and cheap, and can account for body water’s constant flux. Which leaves scientists with imperfect proxies. Broadly speaking, there’s a urine camp and a blood camp, Stookey told me. Those in the pee camp tend to be hydration conservatives. A change in urine color or volume, they argue, is an early sign—well in advance of thirst—of impending dehydration. The blood-camp crew is more laissez-faire. Diet, medications, and supplements can all alter the shade of urine, making it a fickle clue; Hew-Butler for instance, defines true dehydration as what happens when the plasma’s gotten saltier than usual, to the point where cells have started to shrink—a sign that retaining water is no longer sufficient, and that the body needs to drink. Which camp researchers fall into influences how bad they think America’s hydration problem is. “When you draw blood, most people are within a normal range if they’re not thirsty,” Hew-Butler told me. But Stookey, who’s firmly in the pee camp, contends that a majority of Americans are “walking around dehydrated” and should be drinking far more. Colburn, too, would rather err on the side of heeding urine’s warning signs. By the time thirst kicks in, “you’re already in a dangerous zone,” she told me.There can be a middle ground. Sekiguchi, of Texas Tech, told me that for most young, healthy people who are spending plenty of time in the air-conditioned indoors—as so many Americans do—it’s probably fine to just drink when thirsty. (That advice works less well for older people, because the sensation of thirst tends to dull with age.) When specific circumstances shift—a stint of heavy exercise, a week of toasty days—people can take notice, and adjust accordingly.But guidelines for typical water intake, under typical conditions, are quickly going out the window as heat waves get more frequent and intense. When temperatures skyrocket and humidity makes otherwise-cooling sweat stick stubbornly on skin, our bodies need more water to keep cool and functional, beyond what thirst alone might dictate. Part of the problem is that thirst vanishes more quickly than the body rehydrates, Sekiguchi told me, which means that people who drink until they think they’re sated tend to replace only a fraction of the fluids that they’ve lost.
“We’re never going to be able to tell people an exact number,” Colburn told me, for how much to drink. But in reality, many of the healthy people most worried about fine-tuning their hydration to a perfect level are probably among those that least need to fret. The dangers of water tend to happen not in those middle grounds, but at its extremes—especially when failing infrastructure hampers access to water, or contamination makes it undrinkable. Many of the populations that are most vulnerable to dehydration’s effects also happen to be the same groups that probably aren’t getting enough to drink, Johnson told me. While bottled-water markets boom, plenty of pockets of the U.S. still lack consistent access to safe, reliable water from the tap. And the situation is even worse in many places abroad. Perhaps nothing reminds us of water’s power like dramatic deficit: Water, simply, is what keeps us alive.

Puzzle lovers, rejoice: Reason is now publishing a weekly crossword. The first one is available here.   "Puzzles are having a moment," says Stella Zawistowski, Reason's new crossword constructor. "Just in the last five years, a lot of markets have started to have a crossword for the first time or are expanding their offerings." Zawistowski is a professional puzzle solver herself and ranks among the world's fastest finishers of crosswords. "I've been solving puzzles for well over two decades," she says. "A conservative guess is I have solved at least 30,000 crosswords in my lifetime. I do 61 a week." Her own puzzles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. But Zawistowski has long believed that Reason should run its own puzzles. "There aren't a lot of puzzles with a pro-capitalism, pro–free market voice out there," she says. Indeed, broader debates about political correctness and wokeness-run-amok have not left the crossword world alone. In January 2022, Kotaku noted that "at a time when debates about language anchor political discourse and incorrect pronouns spark vicious attacks, the fact that culture wars are being played out in crossword puzzles makes sense." "Puzzle debates represent a microcosm of larger cultural conflicts surrounding race, class, and gender," wrote Kotaku. "Questions arise: should dictators appear in crosswords? Serial killers? What about Donald Trump? Or Hitler? Are terms like 'hag' okay?" An August 2020 article in Time, "The Crossword Revolution Is Upon Us," detailed efforts by crossword editors to make the puzzles more "inclusive." Choice is one of the blessings of liberty, and people should be free to enjoy whatever crosswords best suit their interests. But now, at last, there's one that caters to the libertarian puzzle solver. "Until today, there was no such thing as a free market–focused crossword puzzle," Zawistowski says. "I'm very excited."The post Introducing the <em>Reason</em> Crossword, a Weekly Puzzle for Libertarians appeared first on Reason.com.

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For years, U.S. economic policy has been greatly shaped by the idea of the “China Shock.” The term, coined by three economists in a 2016 paper, captures the widespread belief that trade with China resulted in the deindustrialization of significant parts of the United States and the loss of huge numbers of manufacturing jobs. It has fueled much of President Donald Trump’s trade policy and President Biden’s new industrial policy, both premised on the notion that China presents a serious challenge to the United States’ economic position in the world. It is increasingly clear that that challenge has been overcome. The other disruption to the American system — the Trump shock — has not.

There are debates as to whether the China Shock was as strong as initially suggested. I wonder whether it should really have been called the Globalization Shock. Many of the Western manufacturing jobs that were lost would have gone to other emerging markets if they had not gone to China. In any event, most agree that the China Shock ended about 15 years ago. But its political effects remain strong, even though the story in China is now completely different.

China’s economy is in bad shape. Economic growth last quarter came in at 0.8 percent, putting China at risk of missing the government’s target for the year. Prices are close to levels that suggest deflation (which means no one is buying anything). New-home sales by China’s 100 biggest developers dropped 33 percent last month compared with a year ago. Youth unemployment is over 20 percent. Tourism to China has collapsed; in the first quarter of this year, just 52,000 people from overseas visited China via travel agencies. That compares with 3.7 million in the first quarter of 2019.

In an important essay in Foreign Affairs, Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, argues that this slowdown is not the result of one-offs such as the pandemic or the war in Ukraine. Instead, he points out that Xi Jinping’s economic strategy, which prioritizes politics and the Communist Party above free markets and growth, has cost China dearly. Posen notes that, in 2015, the Chinese people began reacting to the increasing political interference in the economy by saving rather than spending; bank deposits as a share of gross domestic product have grown by 50 percent since then. “In the face of uncertainty and fear,” he writes, “households and small businesses start to prefer cash savings to illiquid investment; as a result, growth persistently declines.”

Henry Olsen counterpoint Republicans saved democracy in 2020 Posen sees China’s slowdown as part of a pattern seen in places such as Venezuela, Russia, Turkey and Hungary. For a while, the government desperately wants growth and pursues market-friendly policies. Then, as the leadership consolidates power, it seeks or reverts to political control over the economy and starts cracking down on companies seen as problematic. Soon, politics triumphs over economics and growth slows. “Once an autocratic regime has lost the confidence of the average household and business, it is difficult to win back,” he writes. Once you have interfered massively in the economy, it is clear you could do so at any time again.

I’ve often noted that American anxiety about China reminds me of similar fears about Japan’s dominance in the late 1980s and early 1990s — just as the Japanese economy was peaking and about to go into a prolonged slowdown. The New York Times’s Paul Krugman compares the two countries and concludes that China’s future path will not follow Japan’s: “China will do worse.” He points out that, like Japan’s at the time, China’s economy is unbalanced with weak consumer demand, real estate woes and bad demographics. And China is ruled by an authoritarian regime that might not be able to cope with social unrest arising from slower growth. Both share one critical problem: When you have a declining working-age population, it is very hard to sustain a high-growth economy.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to surprise on the upside. Growth is higher than expected, inflation is dropping faster than predicted, and employment numbers continue to be very strong. Nevertheless, the United States has lost its AAA rating from one of the major credit rating agencies, which pointed to high debt and even higher political dysfunction.

The problem for America does not arise from its economic fundamentals, which remain very strong. It is that there is a second shock that the country has been reeling from — the Trump shock. The United States has seen the rise of a populist demagogue who threatens to destroy any and all American institutions that stand in his way. And he has a following like none I have ever seen, and it is devoted to him no matter what he does or says. He has captured the Republican Party almost completely, and many of the Republican officeholders who stood up to Trump in 2020 have been replaced with loyalists. So, if he gets the party’s nomination, which seems highly likely, it could lead to much greater turmoil than we saw in the last election.

Most voters, as we’ve seen repeatedly, want abortion to be legal. Last August, a Kansas measure declaring that abortion isn’t protected by the state’s Constitution was defeated by an overwhelming 18 percentage points. In the midterms, there were abortion-related initiatives on the ballots in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, and the pro-choice side won all of them. Encouraged by these victories, activists are planning ballot measures to restore reproductive rights in states including Arizona, Florida, Missouri and, of course, Ohio.

Ohio has been trending right for years, but gerrymandering ensures that the State Legislature is far more extreme than the population. As The Statehouse News Bureau, a news organization devoted to Ohio politics, has reported, “Ohio’s voter preference over the past 10 years splits about 54 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic.” Yet under Ohio’s highly gerrymandered maps, Republicans control 67 of 99 State House seats and 26 of 33 State Senate seats. The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled these maps unconstitutional, but before the last election, federal judges appointed by Donald Trump ordered the state to use them.

“This August election is sort of a final vote that gives the people any chance to say, at some point we still exert power here,” said David Pepper, former head of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” a book about undemocratic right-wing statehouses.

Ohio, you might remember, is the state that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee to Indiana for an abortion. Its prohibition on abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable — usually at around six weeks of pregnancy — has no exceptions for rape or incest. The Republican governor, Mike DeWine, told The Statehouse News Bureau that even though he signed the law, he thinks it goes farther than voters want, and he urged lawmakers to amend it, though he didn’t specify how. But with Republicans in gerrymandered districts more worried about primary challenges from the right than about general election challenges from the center, they have little incentive to respond to public sentiment. Instead, some anti-abortion lawmakers want even stricter anti-abortion laws, and one, Representative Jean Schmidt, has said she’d consider a ban on birth control.

The November ballot initiative to make abortion a constitutional right is a chance for Ohio voters to circumvent their unrepresentative representatives. With this August initiative, the Republicans are working to head off the voters by essentially asking them to disenfranchise themselves. Because most people are unlikely to give up their rights quite so easily, Republicans scheduled the vote at a time when few are paying attention. Just last December, Ohio Republicans voted to effectively eliminate August special elections because of their expense and low turnout. But for this election, they reversed themselves.

What is the formative connection between the private self and other people? Or, as the architect of libertarianism Ayn Rand once put it, how should we order “the two principles fighting within human consciousness — the individual and the collective, the one and the many, the ‘I’ and the ‘They’”? Today, the question looms large because of the “social” part of social media, though we’re probably all too distracted checking our mentions to notice. In wartime Europe, the issue was more obviously pressing — for other people tended to breathe down your neck in ways you couldn’t ignore. They hunted in packs, attacked in mobs, wandered about desperately in droves, and capitulated in herds.
During the Thirties and Forties, four brilliant but unknown young thinkers — Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand herself — were obsessed with questions about the individual versus the social world. Unfamiliar to each other, they wondered how best, in Beauvoir’s words, “to make oneself an ant among ants, or a free consciousness facing other consciousnesses”. Their respective philosophical conclusions and the surrounding life events that helped give rise to them are the subject of a wonderful book, The Visionaries by the German author Wolfram Eilenberger.
No member of this quartet was a natural team-player; all were fiercely non-conformist in their own ways. The book depicts them living through a tumultuous decade (1933-43) that included Stalin’s Holodomor, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler. To Arendt, history resembled not so much an arc bending towards justice as something more like the vision of her suicidal friend Walter Benjamin: “one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”. Weil accused the “whole of the 19th century” of believing, wrongly, “that by walking straight in front of one, one necessarily rises up into the air.”
Metaphysical questions assumed to be long settled took on new political urgency as legal rights were repealed, hostilities stoked and the death camps built. The challenge, as far as Arendt was concerned, was for Jews like her to “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies” against the forces that would dehumanise them. From 1933 on, she wandered rootless and alienated across Europe, settling uneasily for a while in Paris before being forced to move on again.
Like Arendt, Rand and Weil were also Jewish, relegating them to the status of metaphysical Otherhood in the eyes of many. Rand’s prosperous Russian family had lost nearly everything during the revolution. Weil, assimilated (at least superficially) in a bourgeois French family, suffered less from antisemitism than the others, but still was forced to leave for England in 1942. As a non-Jew, Beauvoir underwent the least personal upheaval, but even she had a breakdown during a flight from the Germans in 1940.

Between them, these thinkers produced a fascinating spectrum of philosophical positions, each inflected by thoughts and feelings about the chaos around them. At one pole was the atheist Rand, arriving in the States aged 21 with a visceral hatred of totalitarianism, and with a self-willed, asocial, rational egoist in mind as a moral hero — someone a bit like her, it seems. Autonomy was everything, suffering was pointless, and the self was most free when alone.
Rand rejected any Christian or socialist calls to altruism or “equality” as vehemently as she rejected tyranny from the Russian state. Equality meant only interchangeability, which meant a descent into mediocrity and nothingness. Refusing modesty as a refuge of the feeble-minded, she would declare in her diary that “Nietzsche and I think…”. She dreamed of becoming completely impervious to other people’s opinions — to “refuse, completely and uncompromisingly, any surrender to the thoughts and desires of others”, as she put it for one of her fictional protagonists — and very nearly managed. In 1943, as her family still starved back in Leningrad, her novel The Fountainhead finally took off. She negotiated an unheard-of sum of $50,000 for the Hollywood film rights and bought herself a mink coat.
At the other end of the spectrum was the admirable Weil, equally eccentric and passionate in her attempts to make a moral art out of living, and the real star of the book. During a short and intensely lived life she moved from Marxist-inspired socialism to ascetic Christian mysticism, but was always drawn to self-sacrifice and suffering as a means of understanding others. She sent all her spare money to the poor; wouldn’t eat at her parents’ house unless she could leave the cost of a restaurant meal on the table afterwards; and worsened her already fragile health by getting a job in a factory, in order to better understand the experience of workers. During the Spanish Civil War, she became the International Brigade’s least useful volunteer, determined to carry out secret missions for the Republic but short-sighted to the point of near-blindness and unable to shoot a rifle.
Physically emaciated and tortured by terrible headaches, she deliberately sought out sacred music in churches to transform her physical suffering into meaning. By the end of her life, Weil was advocating total selflessness and renunciation of will, and framing the act of suffering as a direct route to communion with God. But even as she lay dying in a Kent hospital in 1943 — muttering verses, refusing food to the frustration of her doctors, and telling nurses to send her allocated milk to the starving — she still found the energy to write to the leaders of the Free France movement, remonstrating about their failure to send her behind enemy lines on a solo mission.
Suggested readingThe West has lost its rootsBy Paul Kingsnorth
In between these two characters and outlooks are placed the more moderate Beauvoir and Arendt. Partly because of the persecution she suffered, Arendt appears the more sympathetic one here, and the more politically serious. While being chased across Europe, she agonises about Jewish identity and the self-destructive futility of trying to “assimilate”, feeling lonely and unwelcomed wherever she fetches up.
Living precariously as a refugee after escaping from a French internment camp, she starts to articulate the ideas that would later inform her famous analysis of totalitarianism as an émigré to the United States. Internees in camps were not being arrested for anything they had personally done, she noticed, and no difference was made between the innocent and the guilty. The individuality and inner life of a person was irrelevant — was treated as non-existent, even. The Nazi plan, embraced by collaborating French too, was to turn “every individual human being into a thing that would always behave the same way under identical conditions”.
In comparison to the travails of Arendt, the life of the young Beauvoir can’t help seeming slightly decadent. Granted, she waxes enthusiastically about the importance of “metaphysical solidarity” with others as a precondition of personal freedom, but makes it sound all rather grubbily transactional — I’ll grant you recognition, if you grant me some. While, by force of circumstance in the Paris of 1936, Arendt and her fellow refugee lover are living hand-to-mouth in sparsely furnished hotels and wandering aimlessly between cafes during the day, Sartre and Beauvoir are doing the very same thing — by choice, for kicks.
The immediate focus of both Sartre and Beauvoir is not the suffering millions, but their shared “family”, composed of young lovers and acolytes. When not reading or writing, Beauvoir conducts a complicated romantic schedule that would make the average polycule these days feel inadequate. Resembling Rand in her rather sociopathic detachment from other people’s feelings, she treats this quasi-incestuous group as a psychological testing chamber through which she can analyse various permutations of what the existentialists called “Being-for-others” — and then set them within her novels.
One of Eilenberger’s strokes of genius is to reflect the book’s content in its form. Just as hidden aspects of the self are revealed only in a process of comparison with others, so too do elements of each woman’s life and outlook emerge in fascinating relief by juxtaposition with the other three. As the episodic narrative unfurls, strange harmonies and discords between the thinkers appear as if in musical counterpoint.
More from this authorWhy philosophers are so weirdBy Kathleen Stock
Poles apart, Rand and Weil both end up thinking of social life as a source of evil, though for different reasons. For Weil, Plato’s “Great Beast” — public opinion — can only lead us away from God. For Rand, it can only lead us away from the god-like self. Arendt embraces love between two people as the antithesis of totalitarian impersonality, while Weil treats romantic love as “manifestly unjust and morally random”. Just as Arendt argues that Jewish assimilation into society requires a destructive embracing of antisemitism within the self, so too will Beauvoir eventually go on to argue in The Second Sex that the assimilation of women into a universal “humanity” requires something similar — but with misogyny taking the place of antisemitism. Meanwhile Rand, Weil, and Beauvoir all think of themselves as adopting masculine roles.
The basic philosophical questions addressed so ardently by these iconoclasts have not gone away. Invasion and war are back on the continent, along with dehumanising war crimes and the strategic othering of ethnic and national populations — all encouraged by leaders who sneer at democracy. But even without all that, there are quieter and more everyday invasions: of your mind, for instance, filled up by other people’s thoughts and feelings every time you look at a screen.
The boundary of the self in relation to others has never been more porous. Resistance to the “Great Beast” is increasingly difficult, even if we now answer to bureaucrats in HR departments and not to party apparatchiks. In an age of virtual and machine-mediated relationships, we invent new selves online for the benefits of imaginary beings but take every opportunity to avoid other people in the flesh. In doing so, we avoid ourselves. Indeed, for some of us, lost in online worlds, Being-for-others in Beauvoir’s sense barely gets going. And destructive ideology can easily seep into the gaps where human contact used to be.
Equally, the public square has also got a lot noisier since 1943, and it’s even harder to tell who the bad guys are. Widespread cultural familiarity means that, perversely, the narrative of a minority being cruelly dehumanised can be cynically recycled by pretty much any group seeking power or attention, no matter how ludicrous the claim at face value. (“Acephobia”, otherwise known as discrimination against asexual people comes to mind — indeed, surely it’s only a matter of time before some bright spark reclaims Simone Weil as an early fighter for asexual rights). Tap into the right tropes and it’s a work of minutes to persuade the guilt-ridden and the gullible that a new identity group is being persecuted horribly, simply because rampant political ambitions are being criticised. The book-burners and censors these days do it in the memory of past victims of totalitarianism, and many onlookers don’t know which side to take. Even worse, the phenomenon of confected-grievance-as-power-grab allows many to dismiss genuine social ills in the same light.
Still, despite the epistemic confusion, we have to keep on trying. As Arendt wrote presciently in 1951: “The self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality… The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In other words: technologies may come and go, but the challenge of staying an individual in the face of the mob is always with us.

The autopsy should have been a piece of cake. My patient had a history of widely metastatic cancer, which was pretty straightforward as far as causes of death go. Entering the various body cavities, my colleague and I found what we anticipated: Nearly every organ was riddled with tumors. But after we had completed the work, I realized that I knew why the patient had died, but not why he’d died that day. We found no evidence of a heart attack or blood clot or ruptured bowel. Nothing to explain his sudden demise. Yes, he had advanced cancer—but he’d been living with that cancer the day before he died, and over many weeks and months preceding. I asked my colleague what he thought. Perhaps there had been some subtle change in the patient’s blood chemistry, or in his heart’s electrical signaling, that we simply couldn’t see? “I guess the patient just up and died,” he said.I’m a hospital pathologist; my profession is one of many trying to explain the end of life. In that role, I have learned time and again that even the most thorough medical exams leave behind uncertainty. Take the current spate of heat-related fatalities brought on by a summer of record-breaking temperatures. Residents of Phoenix endured a month of consecutive 110-degree days. People have been literally sizzling on sidewalks. And news organizations are taking note of what is said to be a growing body count: 39 heat deaths in Maricopa County, Arizona; 10 in Laredo, Texas. But the precision of these figures is illusory. Cause of death cannot be measured as exactly as the temperature, and what qualifies as “heat-related” will always be a judgment call: Some people die from heat; others just up and die when it happens to be hot.Mortality is contested ground, a place where different types of knowledge are in conflict. In Clark County, Nevada, for example, coroners spend weeks investigating possible heat-related deaths. Families are interviewed, death scenes are inspected, and medical tests are performed. The coroner must factor in all of these sources of information because no single autopsy finding can definitively diagnose a heat fatality. A victim may be found to have suffered from hyperthermia—an abnormally high body temperature—or they may be tossed into the more subjective bucket of those who died from “environmental heat stress.”Very few deaths undergo such an extensive forensic examination in the first place. Most of the time, the circumstances appear straightforward—a 75-year-old has a stroke; a smoker succumbs to an exacerbation of his chronic lung disease—and the patient’s primary-care doctor or hospital physician completes the death certificate on their own. But heat silently worsens many preexisting conditions; oppressive temperatures can cause an already dysfunctional organ to fail. A recent study out of China estimated that mortality from heart attacks can rise as much as 74 percent during a severe, several-day heat wave. Another study from the U.S. found that even routine temperature fluctuations can subtly alter kidney function, cholesterol levels, and blood counts. Physicians can’t easily tease out these influences. If an elderly man on a park bench suddenly slouches over from a heart attack in 90-degree weather, it’s hard to say for sure whether the heat was what did him in. Epidemiologists must come to the rescue, using statistics to uncover those hidden causes at the population level. This bird’s-eye view shows a simple fact: Bad weather means more death. But it still doesn’t tell us what to think about the man on the bench.[Read: America is failing to protect workers from extreme heat]Research (and common sense) tells us that some individuals are going to be especially vulnerable to climate risks. Poverty, physical labor, substandard housing, advanced age, and medical comorbidities all put one in greater danger of experiencing heat-related illness. The weather has a way of kicking you while you’re down, and the wealthy and able-bodied are better able to dodge the blows. A financial struggle as small as an unpaid $51 portion of an electricity bill can prove deadly in the summer. In the autopsies I’ve performed, a patient’s family, medical record, and living situation often told a story of long-term social neglect. But there was no place on the death certificate for me to describe these tragic circumstances. There was certainly no checkbox to indicate that climate change contributed to a fatality. Such matters were out of my jurisdiction.The public-health approach to assessing deaths has its own problems. Mostly it’s confusing. Reams of scientific studies have reported on hundreds of different risk factors for mortality. Sultry weather appears to be dangerous, but so do skipping breakfast, taking naps, and receiving care from a male doctor. Researchers have declared just about everything a major killer. A few months ago, the surgeon general announced that feeling disconnected is as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The FDA commissioner has said that misinformation is the nation’s leading cause of premature death. And is poverty or medical error the fourth-leading cause? I can’t keep track.With so many mortality statistics at our disposal, which ones get emphasized can be more a matter of politics than science. Liberals see the current heat wave—and its wave of heat-related deaths—as an urgent call to action to combat climate change, while conservatives dismiss this concern as a mental disorder. A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed concluded that worrying about climate change is irrational, because “if heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning.” (Humans survived thousands of years without penicillin, but syphilis was still a net negative.) Similarly, when COVID became the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., pandemic skeptics said it was a fiction: Victims were dying “with COVID,” not “from COVID.” Because many people who died of SARS-CoV-2 had underlying risk factors, some politicians and doctors brushed off the official numbers as hopelessly confounded. Who could say whether the virus had killed anyone at all?[Read: Summer in the South is becoming unbearable]The dismissal of COVID’s carnage was mostly cynical and unscientific. But it’s true that death certificates paint one picture of the pandemic, and excess-death calculations paint another. Scientists will be debating COVID’s exact body count for decades. Fatalities from heat are subject to similar ambiguities, even as their determination comes with real-world consequences. In June, for example, officials from Multnomah County, Oregon—where Portland is located—sued oil and gas producers over the effects of a 2021 heat wave that resulted in 69 heat-related deaths, as officially recorded. This statistic will likely be subjected to intense cross-examination. The pandemic showed us that casting doubt on the deceased is a convenient strategy.No matter how we count the bodies, extreme weather leads to suffering—especially among the most vulnerable members of society. A lot of people have already perished during this summer’s heat wave. Their passing is more than a coincidence—not all of them just up and died.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekDonald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular candidate with voters in the Republican Party’s presidential primary.Why do you think he is still their first choice?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteThe prevailing public conversation about crime has been upended in one of the most progressive enclaves in America, where a storied civil-rights organization has had enough. In Oakland, California, the local branch of the NAACP released a scathing open letter on crime last week that purports to capture the frustrations of a community where many now live in fear.Cynthia Adams, president of the Oakland NAACP, and Bishop Bob Jackson, a local pastor, are listed as the letter’s authors. It begins:
Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis.
African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city. But residents from all parts of the city report that they do not feel safe. Women are targeted by young mobs and viciously beaten and robbed in downtown and uptown neighborhoods. Asians are assaulted in Chinatown. Street vendors are robbed in Fruitvale. News crews have their cameras stolen while they report on crime. PG&E workers are robbed and now require private security when they are out working.
Everyone is in danger.
The letter proceeds to lay blame for the crisis on local leadership and their progressive policies, stating:
Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.
People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.
We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too.
The authors call for a multiracial anti-crime coalition, and imply that would-be members of such a coalition have been too intimidated to form one:
We urge African Americans to speak out and demand improved public safety. We also encourage Oakland’s White, Asian, and Latino communities to speak out against crime and stop allowing themselves to be shamed into silence. There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime.
And it advocates for social programs and economic development to address root causes of crime:
Our youth must be given alternatives to the crippling desperation that leads to crime, drugs, and prison. They need quality education, mentorship, and, most importantly, real economic opportunities. Oakland should focus on creating skilled industrial and logistics jobs that pay family sustaining wages, and vocational training so Oakland residents can perform those jobs. With this focus we can produce hundreds, if not thousands, of the types of jobs desperately needed to stem economic despair. Unfortunately, progressive policies and failed leadership have chased away or delayed significant blue collar job development in the city, the Port of Oakland, and the former Army Base. That must change! We also must continue with mentoring programs like the Oakland branch of the national OK Program that steers youth away from criminal activity. We believe that young people currently in the criminal life will choose another path if they are shown a way.
In response to the letter, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office released the following statement to local media outlets: “We are disappointed that a great African-American pastor and a great African-American organization would take a false narrative on such an important matter. We would expect more from Bishop Bob Jackson and the Oakland Chapter of the NAACP.”Commenting on the NAACP’s letter, the civil libertarian criminal-defense attorney Scott H. Greenfield argued at his blog, Simple Justice, “There is nothing inconsistent about wanting better cops, who treat citizens respectfully, don’t violate their constitutional rights and don’t resort to needless violence, and wanting police to do the job of protecting citizens.” He continued:
Nobody wants to be wrongfully beaten by a cop. Nobody wants to be beaten by a vicious criminal either. Nobody wants people who are inclined to commit crimes, whether because economic circumstances aren’t as wonderful as Bidenomics tells them or just because committing crimes is a quicker path to getting what they want than working for it, to believe they can do so with impunity … When people on the street live in fear of crime, their lives are miserable and their participation in society limited. They don’t want to live that way, and the Oakland NAACP has stood up to speak for its constituency. This doesn’t make them cop lovers or reform haters, but human beings trying to survive together. Cops are part of that survival, and to accept this does not mean that cops can’t, and shouldn’t, do a whole lot better than they have in the past.
The Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes:
Each year, tens of thousands of Oakland residents are victimized in criminal attacks. Preventing shoplifting, car jackings, armed robberies, and homicides is not a conservative or a liberal goal. It is why governments exist in the first place.
The Road Not TakenAt Notes From the Middleground, Damon Linker is considering the newest indictment of Donald Trump with trepidation for the future and frustration about a key moment in the recent past:
Short of an intervening (possibly stress-induced) medical event, Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president. He will be running for the nation’s highest office while on trial for multiple crimes in multiple jurisdictions. His campaign will take direct aim at the rule of law, declaring it a sham fit only for saps, suckers, and chumps, and most Republican voters will fall in line with this sordid civic lesson, just as most Republican voters have come to believe the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats simply because Trump has said it was.
Trump could well be convicted in one or more of these trials before Election Day 2024. And he could well win the election, sending him to the White House instead of federal prison. Far from vindicating the rule of law, such an outcome would make a mockery of it.
And what if he loses, claiming once again to have been robbed of a victory by a vast conspiracy involving the Democratic Party, prosecutors and the courts, ostensibly neutral government functionaries, and the “fake news” media that will stop at nothing to deny power to the nearly half of the country that dares to resist left-wing totalitarian control? I won’t try to answer that question. Your imaginations can do the work all on their own.
I’ll leave you with something else instead—my growing conviction is that the last opportunity we had to contain and partially neutralize the civically pestilential influence of Donald Trump on our polity was February 13, 2021. That’s the day Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit Donald Trump for his actions on and leading up to the events of January 6. While describing Trump’s words and deeds in the run-up to the insurrectionary violence on Capitol Hill as “disgraceful,” McConnell nonetheless preferred to let the judicial branch of government solve his Trump problem for him, declaring, “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one.”
In the annals of shirked political responsibility, that has to deserve a special prize. It would have taken ten more votes in the Senate to convict Trump in his second impeachment. Had McConnell taken a public stand against the former president and whipped others in his party to do the same, Trump might have been barred from ever holding public office again. That would have been a political solution to what was and remains a fundamentally political problem. Instead, we’re left with the legal solution McConnell preferred—and the considerable risk that politics may well overwhelm and devour it.  
In Hot WaterIn The Atlantic, Marina Koren argues that rising sea temperatures are especially troubling:
Earth is an ocean planet, a water world. We have not observed anything like it yet in the universe, not even with our best telescopes, and so we cannot know exactly how rare—and thus, how difficult—it may be for the forces of cosmic nature to produce such a thing. And yet, here we are, simmering its oceans at our peril and changing the fundamental makeup of the ecosystem that defines Earth. Our oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat produced by greenhouse-gas emissions in recent decades, serving as a buffer that protects us from the worst effects of climate change. Humans may be sweltering on land this summer, but our planet’s future—and therefore ours—is intimately tied with the sea.

Provocation of the WeekWriting at Law & Liberty, Yuval Levin explores the relationship between America’s constitutional design and our efforts to live together across differences.
Acting together when we don’t think alike requires creating some space for competing approaches to governance; compelling opposing factions to bargain, negotiate, and seek accommodations that not only avert conflict but bring us closer together; administering the government in steady, predictable ways in accordance with those accommodations; and enforcing clear boundaries on the power of majorities and public officials. This is the work of federalism, Congress, the president, and the courts, respectively. But it all requires a citizenry well formed in core republican virtues by the very experience of working together even when we don’t think alike.
This is a fact we often miss about our Constitution. It works by setting competing interests and powers against each other, which critics sometimes caricature as substituting an almost mechanical proceduralism for morally substantive civic formation. But that is precisely wrong. This approach actually begins from the insight that, in order to be properly formative, our politics must always be in motion—that moral formation is a matter of establishing habits, and that civic habits are built up by civic action more than by a proper arrangement of rules. The different interests, priorities, and power centers set against each other in our system do not rest against each other, like interlocking beams holding up a roof. Rather, they push, pull, and tug at each other and unceasingly compete for position. They are living political actors, not inanimate structural supports. And none can achieve anything without dealing with the others, who are always in their way. The result is a peculiar style of politics, which feels frustrating and acrimonious at almost any given instant, but can be remarkably dynamic in the long run.

For most of our ten thousand years on the planet, the vast majority of humanity endured lives of dire poverty and extreme material deprivation. Most people spent most of their time worrying about securing the bare minimum of food and shelter. The Industrial Revolution began to change that dynamic. Still, the British economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill was correct to question in the early 1870s whether “all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” Soon after, however, the emergence of globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation made possible a rapid upward trajectory in human flourishing and an end to near-universal agrarian poverty. Another British economist, John Maynard Keynes, foresaw in 1930 that the continued progress of science and compound interest could mean that human beings, liberated from pressing economic cares, might find their real challenge to be how to occupy their leisure time and “live wisely and agreeably and well.” 
But the explosion of productivity and prosperity over the 140 years that followed the takeoff point in 1870 did not see humanity zooming toward Utopia; at best, we slouched fitfully in that direction. Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has written a much-anticipated history of what he calls “the long twentieth century” from 1870 to 2010, entitled Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. In it, he explains how we achieved economic breakthroughs that once would have been considered miraculous — and yet fell short of what that breakthrough promised. And DeLong also explains why he believes that the era of remarkable prosperity, for all its problems and inequities, has now ended. 
In this podcast discussion, Niskanen’s Brink Lindsey and Geoff Kabaservice talk with DeLong about why the material abundance that resulted from the great acceleration after 1870 was unevenly distributed between nations and within them, why developmental social democracy failed its sustainability test, and how the long twentieth century was in a sense a contest between the ideas of the towering thinkers Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. The discussion also covers differing perspectives on “the neoliberal turn,” speculations about how to benefit from the best aspects of neoliberalism and social democracy while avoiding their pitfalls, and a hypothesis as to why capitalism is like the brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

Brad DeLong: The collapse of confidence in government in the industrial West is of extraordinary magnitude and yet, as I see it, largely unbased in reality. The ideas I’m playing with are that really we need to go back and think more about changing modes of production.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center.
Brink Lindsey: And I’m Brink Lindsey from the Niskanen Center.
Geoff Kabaservice: Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And we’re delighted to have with us today J. Bradford DeLong, better known as Brad. He is an economic historian and macroeconomist who holds a professorship in Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as being a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
He also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995, where he worked on the Clinton administration’s 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Prior to joining the Treasury Department, he taught at Harvard University, Boston University, and MIT. And he is one of the original econ bloggers, who continues to post almost daily on Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality, which is now on Substack. He also has an excellent podcast with his fellow economist, Noah Smith, which is called “Hexapodia” Is the Key Insight. And not least, he’s on the Niskanen Center’s Board of Advisors. Welcome, Brad!
Brad DeLong: Thank you very much for inviting me. I think we just crossed 40,000 books sold in all formats for my Slouching Towards Utopia, and so I’m still very eager to tell people it exists and talk about it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, fantastic! And congratulations on your prodigious and path-breaking book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. It was published in September of 2022, but it’s still flying off airport bookstore shelves around the world, as I can vouch from my visit a few days ago to São Paulo.
Brad DeLong: Oh, wow. It’s in the São Paulo airport?
Geoff Kabaservice: It was indeed, yes.
Brad DeLong: Oh, wow. That’s a major victory of some sort.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think it is. It’s a book I think that we’re going to be talking about decades hence, and it’s also a book that’s been decades in the making. I note that Paul Krugman, writing in his New York Times column of June 18th, 2000 referred to “[Brad DeLong’s] already classic though not yet complete book Slouching Towards Utopia.”
Brad DeLong: Well, at that time there really were only three chapters, right? It was more a marker that this was a book I was trying to write rather than a full manuscript. Admittedly, Paul loved those three chapters and has more confidence in my ability to actually buckle down on projects than I do. The problem was, the end of the book kept changing in the early 2000s.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, as you tried to figure out the end point. I gleaned from Annie Lowrey’s profile of you in The Atlantic that the book had its genesis in 1994, when you came across socialist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s book The Age of Extremes…
Brad DeLong: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: …which was on what he called “the short 20th century” between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Geoff Kabaservice: So what was the process there that led to your book?
Brad DeLong: Annoyance. Annoyance and a lunch, I think at the Harvard Faculty Club, where David Landes and Peter Temin were there. And I was ranting at them about how Hobsbawm had really told the wrong story of the long 20th century. That Hobsbawm story is world communism as tragic hero, born under incredibly adverse conditions that kind of marked, distorted, and stunted it. And it saved the entire world from Nazism before expiring in a low, dishonest way that left bad guys (although not the worst guys) in control. And that kind of blocked humanity’s road to anything that you might think of as Utopia or a truly human world. And that really was not the big story. World communism was not the major actor of the 20th century, and the big story was quite different, and someone should write the right book that was the history of the 20th century.
And Peter and David said, “Well, why don’t you do it? You’re still young. You could take this thing on.” And I hemmed and hawed and said, “Maybe.” And so ever since then, it’s been in the back of my mind as something I should do or somebody should do, and then it was something I should do. And then Basic Books put me under contract, the theory being that I wasn’t making progress on it, and if they put me under contract they could come around once a year and yell at me at how progress wasn’t being made. And then before the plague, I finally said, “Someone should do this, and clearly this someone is me,” and started to work on it in true earnest — that is, the everyday thing. And then the plague came, and now the book is finally out.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, congratulations on the publication of your long-awaited book. As you probably know, there was an episode of The Monty Python Show that featured the All-England Summarize Proust Competition, in which each contestant had to give a summary of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in 15 seconds, once in a swimsuit and once in a dress. And I feel like that’s the model for any attempt to summarize Slouching Towards Utopia in this kind of interview format.
Geoff Kabaservice: But minus the costume changes, let me give this a try. I would say that your book is a grand narrative of the coming of economic modernity over the course of what you call “the long 20th century” that started in 1870 and ended in 2010. And prior to 1870, despite the advent of capitalism and the industrial revolution, humanity still inhabited a largely Malthusian world. Technological improvements never permitted a significant or sufficient increase in production to outpace population growth, and incomes remained stuck at subsistence level. More than 80% of the global population in 1870 lived on what it farmed rather than what it purchased.
But after 1870, growth in incomes in the leading economies of the Global North became supercharged by the critical innovations of globalization, the modern corporation, and the industrial research laboratory. And these changes brought about an unprecedented explosion of prosperity and productivity that, as you wrote, “unlocked the gate that had previously kept humanity in dire poverty.”
Nonetheless, humanity didn’t zoom toward Utopia. At best we slouched fitfully in that direction. And the material abundance that resulted from the great acceleration after 1870 was unevenly distributed between nations and within them, largely because of non-economic developments including the two world wars, the legacies of colonialism, contending economic philosophies about what markets alone can achieve, and the varying competencies and priorities of governments. 
I’m pretty sure that was longer than 15 seconds. How else would you amplify upon this very skeletal outline of the themes of your book?
Brad DeLong: I would say that normally you would think that a world in which each generation… We are not just twice as technologically competent as any previous generation, but also resource scarcity is not mounting at a pace fast enough to offset a good deal of that —that would be a world in which it was pretty easy to get pretty close to Utopia. That is, that the kind of tasting the economic pie, figuring out how to use our wealth, what wealth we have, to live as wisely and well as we can, and equitably distributing the economic pie…
Those would seem to be easy questions relative to the basic problem of baking a sufficiently large economic pie. And largely, if you can’t bake a sufficiently large economic pie, you poison everything else, because if there’s no way there can be enough for everyone, then getting enough for yourself and your family involves joining a gang, joining a gang of thugs with spears or gunpowder weapons and their associated tame propagandists, bureaucrats, and accountants, and they’re running a force-and-fraud exploitation and domination game on the rest of humanity.
That kind of poisons everything. But running such a game is hard and dangerous. And once the need is no longer there, once there is plausibly or is about to be enough for everyone, everything else should have fallen into place much more easily than it did, than it has. It still has not fallen into place. Half a mile away from me there is a man living in a box, and killer robots are still stalking the skies over Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, lots of other places. Yes, we have this enormous explosion of wealth, but it is a very sad verdict on humanity that baking a sufficiently large economic pie did not turn out to be the truly hard problem that slicing and tasting the pie did.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, that’s a very good summary. Before we get into a fuller discussion of Slouching Towards Utopia, I wanted to ask you something about yourself, as I do on this podcast. So where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What were some of your important influences?
Brad DeLong: Let’s see… I would say born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my father was a student at Harvard Law School and my mother was wondering what she should do; she became a psychologist. We moved to Los Angeles, to Pasadena, at three, and moved to Washington DC at six, because my father wanted to work for the Johnson administration rather than be a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers. Headed off to Cambridge, Massachusetts for college in 1978.
I took a look at the job market in 1982, when I graduated, and promptly turned around and ran back into the university. I decided that since people applying for jobs as assistant professors in history were 40 and had written two well-regarded books, and people applying for jobs as assistant professors in economics were 26 and had one half-written paper, that clearly I should get an economics Ph.D. And so I did, and ever since it has been what the machine learning people call “gradient descent”: do at every instant the thing that I think is the most useful, the most fun, and the most likely to be successful at accomplishing. And it’s been a strange twisting path, and here I am.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think it was in your review of the third volume of Robert Skidelsky’s biography of the British economist John Maynard Keynes that you referred to “the half-science, half-witchcraft discipline of macroeconomics.” I wondered how you came up with that description of your profession.
Brad DeLong: Well, that’s the description of the subprofession, which is the overall study of business cycles and economic growth, as opposed to the micro side of economics where we have firmer foundations. The problem with micro is that the firm foundations are totally wrong but nevertheless somewhat useful, which is a deeper problem. In macro, largely we have simple observations about what tends to happen and frantic attempts to rationalize them through some underlying intellectual structure — which doesn’t do terribly well, in large part because each generation, macroeconomists find that the reaction of the previous generation against and to solve the problems of full employment, stable prices, and economic growth it has undertaken undermine the truth of whatever generalizations and frantic attempts to rationalize them economists have come up with.
Witness the fact that when 2021 came along, the overwhelming bulk of economists were very confident that inflation was not going to be a danger. Because if in the long period before 2020, in which deficient demand had not caused significant reductions in the rate of inflation, well, then a surge of excess demand as the economy reopened would not cause a significant rise in prices. Surprise, surprise! The stable, flat Phillips Curve structure that people had thought they had seen between 1995 and 2020 vanished into thin air in mid-2021, and we’ve been scrambling since to figure out what the hell is going on and what should be done in order to get the economy back into some kind of satisfactory equilibrium, Goldilocks-balanced configuration.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s my untested hypothesis that adolescents who read a lot of science fiction are more likely to grow up to be economists, and adolescents who read a lot of fantasy are more likely to grow up to become historians. I’m guessing you read a lot of science fiction.
Brad DeLong: Well, a lot of both.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. Who were the science fiction writers whom you liked best?
Brad DeLong: Oh, I was an early Heinlein fan, to an extraordinary degree. And I had a soft spot for Isaac Asimov, but much more for his science writing than his science fiction, which is I’d say is embarrassing if one has an emotional age of more than 12 as one starts actually thinking about how human beings actually relate. And thinking about it in retrospect, one feels kind of sad for poor Isaac, thinking that he never kind of figured out how to fit into the social world in spite of his enormous and prodigious talents.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, I still have a sneaking admiration for Hari Seldon, the great sociologist who can plot out humanity’s future course.
Brad DeLong: Well, yes, and in some ways, that’s a chemist’s view of what history as a subject would be if you could actually in some way apply a law of large numbers and get something like statistical mechanics going, so that you could figure out what is actually happening, what is actually likely to happen. There is a passage, I think in Second Foundation, in which one of the seniors is quizzing a graduate student and demanding that they explain a series of equations and what they mean, and the student is trying the very best they can. And it brings back memories from my own kind of science and also economics courses, as to try to move between the reality of the world and what the framework of analysis is and what the mathematical representation of it is. And the idea that one might be able to bring tools to bear on understanding in the social rather than natural sciences is, I think, something one gets from Isaac. 
But there, the decisive moment really was, I think I was 12, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science had come to have its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., down on Connecticut Avenue. And I went down, and in the basement of the hotel they had a whole bunch of things, one of which was a typewriter hooked up to a mainframe computer elsewhere on which you could run Jay Forrester’s world dynamics model. 
Well, Jay Forrester’s world dynamics model has pollution as a stock, and when you produce stuff in a polluting way, you add to the pollution stock. There’s a flow from increased pollution, and productivity depends not on the level of pollution now, but on the total stock of past accumulated pollution — and depends highly negatively on it. And you know and I know that anytime you set up that kind of mathematical formulation in which there’s a negative effect of the stock on something, but your current activities only affect the stock — are only a flow into the level of the stock, which is an accumulating variable — that basically what you’re going to get is you’re going to get an absolute crash, because high activity is going to greatly push up the effect of your total pollution stock and its accumulated past activity that pushes down present activity.
And so in the core of Jay Forrester’s world dynamics model was the fact that in the model, industrial civilization was always going to crash — and crash hard, with mammoth famines, 90% population declines, 50% declines in, you know, no matter what you did to the model. Because as we were sitting there in the basement trying different scenarios, it wouldn’t allow you to change that fundamental structure. The only question was: When would industrial civilization crash? And I spent a day playing with this in the basement, and you would watch the typewriter, and it would print out graphs, and each line of the typewriter, it would punch a P or something for population. The graph would be composed of individual letters as the series, making a pattern. It was fascinating, and it made me think this was something that maybe it would be fun to do for a career. And I kept that in the back of my mind. 
And then in college, I wound up doing the social studies major, then with a heavy focus on economics, and thinking. “This is actually a fun, interesting intellectual discipline to play with.” But I think the idea that it might be a place where one could think useful thoughts really came from that day spent in the basement of some hotel on Connecticut Avenue when I was 12.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a good story, and I see an early rejection of the idea of economics as a dismal science. Brink, I feel like you and Brad have been at least in communication for 20 years now.
Brink Lindsey: I think so. I was an early reader of Brad’s blog and read those early chapters of Slouching Towards Utopia not long after they were up and available online. I wrote a book about globalization called Against the Dead Hand, which came out in 2002, and I recall Brad writing really nice things about it.
Brad DeLong: Yeah, it was very, very nice. 
Brink Lindsey: And if we had never corresponded before that, then certainly on that occasion I struck up a correspondence with Brad. And we’ve been chatting, and occasionally seeing each other in the flesh, on and off ever since.
Geoff Kabaservice: Brink, at the start of 2022, you began to share with me some of the ideas you had for what became your Substack, The Permanent Problem, which everyone should check out. And it’s one of those cases of great minds thinking alike, because both Brad’s book and your Substack are in a sense in dialogue with the 1930 essay by Keynes entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” 
Keynes was writing during the Great Depression, but he believed that in hindsight it would appear as an aberration in what was otherwise a long-term trend of cumulative growth. And he wrote that “the economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race.” But the economic growth that occurred since the 1870 takeoff, he wrote, “means that the economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race.” Because if growth could continue for another century, then “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
So tell me more, Brink, about why that Keynes quote resonated so strongly with you that you named your Substack “The Permanent Problem,” and also your best guess as to why you and Brad seemed to be thinking along similar lines.
Brink Lindsey: Well, I think I’m thinking in a very similar way to the thinking that guided Brad in the writing of his book. So there’s the glass-half-full story that the gates which had locked mankind in dire poverty have been broken open and the path to Utopia is apparently open. Then there’s the glass-half-empty story, which is that despite all of our technological powers and organizational powers and the resources at our disposal, we haven’t figured out — we haven’t gotten really very close to figuring out — how to live wisely and agreeably and well.
And so in my own career, I’ve spent a lot of my time analyzing and writing about the causes and consequences of economic growth and the arrival of material abundance; looking at globalization and writing about the consequences in a cultural and political history of the United States called The Age of Abundance, which looked at history of America since World War II through the prism of the cultural and political reactions to the advent of mass affluence. Here was a society that was something new under the sun, where the fulfillment of basic material needs could be more or less assumed by the vast majority of the population. 
That didn’t mean people stopped worrying. It meant they started worrying about new things, in particular about self-expression, self-realization. So all of the tumults of the ‘60s and ‘70s I saw coming straight out of the story I told, coming straight out of the placid suburbia of the ‘50s, and all following from the unfolding logic of a radical change in the human condition, almost necessitating dramatic adaptations in culture and politics. 
But I told a pretty happy story. I conceived this book at the end of the ‘90s boom, beginning of the 2000s, before 9/11. I wrote it between 2003 and 2006, and it came out in 2007. At that time, I still thought we were on a glide path to progress, the path of least resistance, that humanity in general and the rich countries in particular were going to get richer and freer and better governed.
Brad DeLong: Well, it did seem then that left-neoliberalism kind of had it right: a proper disdain for bureaucracies and their inefficiencies, and a proper recognition of the great crowdsourcing benefits of what Michael Polanyi would call “mercenary institutions” like the market and fiduciary institutions like science. Add those with the fact that you could be kind of a social-democratic wolf in left-neoliberal sheep’s clothing and talk about safety nets and so forth, and recognize that the right road to a lot of social democratic ends in fact involved not bureaucracy but rather tuning market incentives and getting the great crowdsourcing machine going. That really did seem to be the intellectual sweet spot for organizing production and distribution. And add to that what would seem to be a stable democracy. Frank Fukuyama looked, if anything, a little pessimistic in his talk about “The End of History.” 
Brink Lindsey: Democracies were waxing worldwide at that time. But since then, since 2007 — which I think was the last year one could write a history unironically titled The Age of Abundance — since then the glass-half-empty story has become much more salient to me. I didn’t ignore it in writing that book, but the book was an upbeat story: that we had come through the sturm und drang of the ‘60s and ‘70s and had come to a kind of neoliberal, socially liberal consensus. But such was not to be.
And so, still having in my mind the idea that the advent of mass affluence and this switch from “the economic problem” to “the permanent problem,” as Keynes had put it, was really the defining event of our time, I just went back and looked at it again and saw the dark sides of it, the downsides of this change. And the incompleteness of our adaptation to that change now looked much more apparent to me. And so I share Brad’s sort of somber verdict on capitalist mass affluence. Grading on a historical curve, we’re better off than humanity’s ever been. Grading according to what our technological and organizational powers would seemingly enable if we could just get our act together, we’re very much wanting.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is a theme to which we will return. Brad, you name-dropped Michael Polanyi, who’s a British polymath. But the central Polanyi in your book is not Michael but Karl Polanyi…
Brad DeLong: It’s Karl, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: …who is presented as a kind of counterpart to the Austrian neoclassicist economist Friedrich Hayek, with whom a lot more people will be familiar. So can you tell me something about Karl Polanyi and why his message seemed to be the counterpart to Hayek?
Brad DeLong: Well, Polanyi was another one of the huge number of extremely interesting intellectuals coming out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as it stood before World War I; born and molded there, and then generally fleeing everywhere else, usually to America or Britain, and then trying to reflect on the social world as they had seen it, had understood it. And for some reason, that experience seems to have given an awful lot of them special insights, or at least special energy.
Polanyi’s dominant view was that the market economy was a tremendously effective way of crowdsourcing solutions to problems of production. But a market economy is one that vindicates absolutely no rights except for property rights. If you don’t have effective demand for something, you might as well not exist to the market economy. And effective demand is not intensity of need, but rather is intensity of need times your wealth.
Polanyi’s view was that humans form societies, and in societies people believe that they have rights. And to say, “No, the only rights we are going to vindicate are property rights” — that kind of stark utopia was unsustainable. It would call forth some kind of enormous counterbalancing reaction. One way he put it is the market, by saying the only rights that matter are property rights, attempts to destroy everything you might call “society,” and society in return will mobilize and try to destroy the market. And the reaction may be smart, may be stupid, may be left, may be right, may be genocidal, may be a satisfactory compromise. But there will be a very strong reaction against every attempt by the market economy to expand its reach. 
And yet because the market economy is so productive, it will keep on trying to extend its reach. There’s an awful lot of money to be made by relying on it. This coming of the market, and then society’s resistance to it, was, Karl Polanyi thought, “The Great Transformation” and was at the root of an awful lot of our problems of distributing and utilizing our wealth. 
Brink Lindsey: I’ll just interject here that Brad’s very nice compressed account of Polanyi’s insights represents a massive work of distillation from very low-quality-ore prose.
Brad DeLong: Yes. In some ways, I think the right analogy to Polanyi is Hyman Minsky. I remember Laura Tyson getting off a plane and saying, “I tried to read Minsky on the plane.” In my view, people who talk about Hyman Minsky are almost always talking about Charlie Kindleberger, who took Minsky’s insights, compressed them, and then actually used them to tell fascinating, interesting, amusing stories about financial crises. And Minsky’s influence, I think, overwhelmingly comes through Kindleberger’s understanding and using him. Maybe one of the thoughts I’ve had about my book is that if it succeeds, it might help do the same thing for Polanyi.
Geoff Kabaservice: That would be great. You summarize the messages of Hayek, on the one hand, as “The market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market. And in Polanyi’s case, “The market was made for man, not man for the market.” And you do point out that Hayek’s vision was not a stable principle around which to organize society and political economy. But the distorted Polanyi message — the idea of centralized command of the economy — also was not sustainable and, in fact, led to hideous tyrannies in the early 20th century.
Brad DeLong: Well, Polanyi was a socialist, but he was not a strong believer in central planning. And indeed, it’s actually bizarre that anyone would think that you could centrally plan an economy as a whole. It is true that right now, we have large organizations that kind of are centrally planned. The current valuation that the stock market places on the equity claim to the future profits flowing from Apple Computer is approaching $3 trillion right now, which is a bizarre and awesome sum. It is more than one-ninth of the annual GDP of the United States for this one company. And it is not a market organization; it is a centrally planned organization. 
But at virtually every stage within Apple Computer, you wind up having market interfaces, that people are always making make or buy decisions: Do we do this inside? Do we find a counterparty outside? And our centrally planned organizations are very much kept on their toes precisely because they always have to be making these make-or-buy decisions. It eliminates the huge amounts of bureaucratic inefficiency that arise whenever you do attempt to centrally plan every anything. 
And yet people tried it. People tried for 60 years to run a centrally planned economy, and it was almost always a catastrophe. You almost always wound up having lost one-fifth or four-fifths of your wealth, of your potential wealth, simply as you attempted to make people follow orders rather than allow some kind of crowdsourcing.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think the Soviet Union’s principal output was actually jokes about the economic deficiencies of the Soviet Union.
Brad DeLong: Well, I thought it was unfinished construction projects.
Geoff Kabaservice: That too. I’m sure you’ve read P.J. O’Rourke on communists’ love of concrete, badly done concrete. Brink, you reviewed Brad’s book for your Substack, and you wrote in part, “Brad’s guided tour through the twists and turns of the Hayek-Polanyi dialectic is a joy to read, with brief but masterful distillations of the descent from the Belle Époque ‘El Dorado’” into the First World War, the rise of fascism, and all that followed after World War II. But you say, “After these cataclysms and titanic ideological struggles, the path to Utopia once more emerged into view — in Brad’s telling, by the virtue of “the shotgun marriage of Hayek and Polanyi blessed by Keynes in the form of post-World War II North Atlantic developmental social democracy.” And these are the “trente glorieuses,” the 30 years following 1945 in a lot of those northern economies, which are still remembered as a kind of economic golden age. 
But that, too, failed its own sustainability test, and the trente glorieuses ended not with a bang but with a whimper, with the decline in the growth rate in the 1970s, moderately high inflation, and big spikes in oil prices. And by the way, Brad, your co-podcast host, Noah Smith, just posted a Substack essay on how the 2020s are the new 1970s, which I thought was quite interesting.
Brad DeLong: Interesting.
Geoff Kabaservice: And what followed was “the neoliberal turn,” in which policies moved toward Hayek at the expense of Polanyian rights, which tamed inflation, but the rich reaped the benefits. There again is a very Monty Pythonesque over-summary of the themes of your book, but I think that is an important theme in the book.
Brink Lindsey: In my review, I spent a lot of time lauding and praising the book, but my criticisms were on the account of the neoliberal turn. Brad presents it as a puzzle that the social-democratic economic order was toppled in the 1970s because of a run of inflation and a temporary productivity collapse. One could understand that neoliberalism had its opening at that time. But then when it failed to deliver the goods other than to the well off — it failed to restore high economic growth rates except to the top income percentiles — why did it persist? So that’s a kind of mystery that Brad presents.
In my sense of how this history played out, I think forces much deeper than intellectual disagreement about economic policy, forces much deeper than the disagreement between Hayek and Polanyi, were in play. So the end of developmental social democracy was a more complex affair than just a change in the direction or the orientation or the mix of economic policy; it was a consequence of the changing culture and politics of mass-affluent societies. 
And in particular, the revolt against developmental social democracy began on the left, not on the right. First, the developmental part got dropped in the ‘60s, because the New Left thought that basically the economic problem had been solved for good, that the wealth-creation machine was on autopilot, that the Keynesian 15-hours-a-day true mass abundance was nearly at hand. 
Brad DeLong: And we see the consequences of that dropping in the Berkeley that surrounds me.
Brink Lindsey: And by the time that exuberant optimism of the ‘60s was put to rest in the ‘70s, environmentalism and its sort of knee-jerk anti-developmentalism had taken hold and had a dominant position on the left. And so the whole idea of increasing human mastery over nature for the betterment of the common man — that just was no longer part of the program. 
Meanwhile, the developmental state part was gone too. Social democracy had a paradigm of government where you had energetic, muscular government empowered to act decisively in the public interest. But the New Left-influenced public interest liberalism of the ‘60s was born out of deep suspicion of government power. And so the New Left had all kinds of reasons to have its own brand of libertarianism: it had state power threaten the world with nuclear war, it was causing mayhem and carnage in Vietnam, state power was odious and oppressive in the Deep South in enforcing Jim Crow, state power was complicit in the newly appreciated environmental degradation. So there was a whole lot of suspicion of government power. 
Brad DeLong: State power was evil, and Robert Moses was driving highways all the way through New York so people could live in New Rochelle and work in Manhattan.
Brink Lindsey: Yeah. So this new anti-government spirit on the left took hold in the ‘60s, and so the reform project was no longer to give government new powers to act in the public interest, but to ensure that government at every step was subject to criticism and oversight from progressive quarters. So the developmental part was gone, and so by the time people wanted to resurrect the social democratic cause, it was all just about hanging onto existing jobs and hanging onto existing entitlements. A sort of optimistic vision of a social democratic future died in the ‘60s, I think, and certainly in the ‘70s before neoliberalism grew in influence.
Meanwhile, the switch to a post-materialist politics, the switch from the thinking that have-nots and haves is no longer the main axis in politics; rather, it’s “belongs” and “belong-nots,” it’s groups that have been excluded from full participation in the socioeconomic mainstream — that became the axis of political conflict in rich countries, which had the collateral damage of rupturing the working-class coalition and making class-based politics much harder to reassemble when the need for it became apparent in the ‘70s and ‘80s. 
Before Hayek and Friedman won their Nobels and Reagan and Thatcher won their electoral victories, Brad’s developmental social democratic road to Utopia had already been abandoned.
Geoff Kabaservice: How would you respond, Brad?
Brad DeLong: Perhaps, quite plausibly. That is the fact that I still cannot really believe or understand why the system that had produced the trente glorieuses, why it collapsed so quickly and why virtually no one was willing to defend it — that it was not Ronald Reagan it was Bill Clinton who said that “The era of big government is over.” And the fact that I, in some ways, am still too much a believer, an unreconstructed social democrat, I think makes it hard for me to get a coherent and sophisticated grasp of why we actually had this particular turn — why social democratic coalitions, developmental social democratic coalitions, class-based, egalitarian social democratic coalitions were no longer easy to assemble or even possible to assemble after the 1970s.
I’m reading and thinking about Gary Gerstle’s book on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, which is, I think, as all histories oriented toward the present are, much, much better on the past than the present. His account of the rise of the neoliberal order is much stronger than his account of its perhaps fall. But Brink’s point that the distaste for the way things worked on the left was not as great but was sufficient to cripple attempts to rebuild, or to resist the cries coming from the right about how there’s inflation, there’s bureaucracy and so forth: “We actually need a change. We need a change, because we need to have a more unequal income distribution to incentivize job creators. And we need a change because government needs to get out of the way. Individuals pursuing their own self-interest will advance the public interest much more than any set of increasingly strangling governmental regulations.”
Paul Krugman still doesn’t really believe it happened. He thinks that things would have held on as normal if only there had not been the inflation of the 1970s, if only that had not undermined confidence that government was competent. But it’s much bigger, it’s much broader than that. The collapse of confidence in government in the industrial West is of extraordinary magnitude — and yet, as I see it, largely unbased in reality.
The ideas I’m playing with are that really we need to go back and think more about changing modes of production —that is, how people get their ideas about how the world ought to work from the process of their daily life. And the shift from the mass production economy of the 1930s and 1940s to the global value chain economy of the 1980s and 1990s — that undermined not just institutions like labor unions focused on lunch pails that had played a huge role in stabilizing social democracy, but also led people to have very different ideas about how society should work, ones in which social democracy, the New Deal order that had ruled from the 1930s into the 1970s, was simply no longer something that made sense to enough people for them to be willing to support it.
But I do say I do not think I have a good handle… I think I have a good handle on an awful lot of history. I do not think I have a good handle on what happened in the 1970s and 1980s with the kind of shift to the idea that the state needed to be radically cut back and that the price of accepting “The market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market” — that that price was worth paying to a much greater extent than anyone had thought it was before 1980.
Brink Lindsey: So my second grounds for breaking with Brad’s analysis was that he presents the neoliberal turn as basically a wrong turn, and I don’t see it that way. So here in 2023, looking back on the neoliberal era of 1978 to 2008, we can see the shortcomings and failures of that era. We can certainly see — I can certainly see, as an ex-professional libertarian — the blind spots and errors of libertarian free-market ideology. Nonetheless, the partial truths that Hayek grasped were, I think, underrated in the 1960s and 1970s. 
Tyler Cowen, in all his interviews, asks people a string of things: “Is this underrated or overrated?” I think the importance of private entrepreneurship and market competition to long-term economic performance was underrated, and so there had been an enormous expansion of government control over and influence over the economy in the democracies, while a third of mankind was now living under regimes that said that there was no role for markets whatsoever in the organization of social cooperation. It was not a bad time for a rethink and for a reappraisal. 
And some things were gotten right. There were some bad regulations that were gotten rid of, price-and-entry regulations that impeded competition to no good end. Those were dispensed with in the United States. A nationalization of industry that made no economic sense was unwound in Western Europe, and that was a good thing.
In the United States, I would chalk up Silicon Valley — you’ve got to give that as a triumph of the neoliberal era. It only happened in the low-tax, light-touch-regulated United States. It didn’t happen anywhere else, the information technology revolution, the signal economic achievement of our time. The peaceful collapse of communism was certainly driven by internal events, but occurred in a larger neoliberal climate of ideas that helped it along and helped an utter miracle that I never expected as a kid, that this would all just go away with hardly any bloodshed at all.
The rise of East Asia and the dramatic drop in global poverty rates was facilitated by neoliberal-inspired and -fortified free trade agreements that opened western markets and kept western markets open to rapidly rising and expanding Asian economies. So for the North Atlantic world, France called 1945 to 1975 the trente glorieuses, but for homo sapiens, I would say it was 1985 to 2015. The neoliberal era was the best era for the material betterment of our species that I think we’ve ever experienced. 
So it wasn’t all bad. But the wheel has turned, and the answers that neoliberalism had to problems aren’t lining up with the problems we’re facing. So we’re struggling now to get back on that road.
Brad DeLong: I would say that if you focus on what was the Global South in 1975, and if you say that everything that happened in the Global South from 1975 on up to 2020 is neoliberalism, then indeed neoliberalism is perhaps the best thing that ever happened to humanity. Even Africa appears to be getting its economic developmental act in gear after 2000, which is a wonderful thing to see. Cutting back on the state, betting on globalization, eliminating the license raj in India, eliminating the Maoist- and the Soviet-influenced central planning regime in China… As my friend Yingi Xian says, when the histories are written in 2100 or 2200, they may well say that there was stuff going on in this restricted North Atlantic area before 1980, but that it was in 1980 that humanity picked itself off the mat and walked and that people managed to pull themselves out of dire poverty worldwide, largely because of a Hayek- and Friedman-inspired current of ideas, that the world needed to command-and-control and dominate less and crowdsource more.
You have to have a footnote for East Asia, simply because in East Asia the idea that the government should step away from its developmental state role was a complete non-starter. East Asian governments leaned into the developmental state role massively and extraordinarily successfully. And you can argue about whether everything that happened in the Global South from 1980 to 2020 is properly called neoliberalism. It wouldn’t stand as a concept that originated in neoliberalism.
Brink Lindsey: I didn’t call their policies neoliberal. I said that the success of their policies hinged upon Western neoliberal free trade policies. You can’t have export-led growth from nothing. 
Brad DeLong: Was it free trade policies that opened the United States to Asian markets, or was it the neocolonial origins of comparative development in the sense that the United States wanted countries near to non-Maoist China to be an enormous success?
Brink Lindsey: America’s historic conversion from protectionist to trade-liberalizing power occurred in a geopolitical context. It wasn’t driven by renewed appreciation of David Ricardo. But free-marketry on the right, where Republicans had historically been the protectionist party, was helpful, especially during all the stresses of deindustrialization in the ‘80s, in keeping commitment to open markets intact.
Brad DeLong: Yes, yes, yes. The neoliberal thought currents were tremendously important in keeping America as an importer of last resort for the economies of East Asia and allowing them to become as fantastically rich as they are now. So I would say that both geopolitical and neoliberal currents of thought were very important in enabling East Asian growth. But the fact that the neoliberal currents did not penetrate East Asia to a sufficient degree to lead them to unwind their developmental states was important as well. But that’s a whole other podcast: The East Asian Miracle.
Geoff Kabaservice: Brad, you don’t in your book actually say what you think we ought to do going forward. But you did write a piece for Project Syndicate, I think in February of 2023, where you wrote: “Neoliberalism’s big problem was that it starved society of long-term investment, both in productivity-enhancing technology and in the vast majority of people. Social democracy’s problem was that most people did not want to be passive recipients of government benefits; rather, they wanted the social power to earn and hence to deserve their slice of the growing pie.” Do you think there’s any way to square this circle? 
Brad DeLong: With smoke and mirrors? The idea of pre-distribution, that people in West Virginia and Tennessee vote 70% for Donald Trump because they do not want to be Medicaid recipients, they want a strong economy in which they can earn what they deserve and so be able to stand on their feet and buy health insurance, and that Donald Trump, by waging trade war on the Chinese and the Mexicans is going to create those jobs for them — that’s a powerful reason behind the catastrophic episodes of American misgovernance we saw between 2017 and 2020, and that may well return come 2025.
I would say if I were rewriting the book now, I would talk about how now the problem is that among the most important Polanyian rights people have to have is the right to be respected. If you’re respected in some way, rather than if you’re regarded by society (whether it’s the market or the government) as surplus garbage, then you will indeed have a much stronger, much more coherent, much happier, much more Utopian society.
But we also do indeed need to make the long-term investments. And the problem is that a lot of long-term investments, their true benefit comes from the externalities they create: from the communities of engineering practice, from the social learning, from the technological blue-sky things. And in a kind of hard neoliberal world in which the only things you want to do are the things that are validated by the market, a huge amount of those investments simply will not be made.
Intel Corporation produced enormous profits for its shareholders between 2000 and 2020, but it’s producing enormous profits by squeezing every possible marginal dollar out of its existing semiconductor nodes and repurposing its equipment left it in a position in which 2020 comes along, and Intel has no plausible path forward to being a leading edge semiconductor manufacturer. Again, because the things they would’ve had to do in order to enable themselves to compete on level ground with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, those things would not have produced profits for the bottom line, and they were indeed seen as potential wastes of money.
Now Intel is trying to figure out what the hell it is doing, and one of the problems is that a great many of the investments that its current CEO wants to make are things that, while they are overwhelmingly good for the technological community of semiconductor producers and engineers in America, it’s not at all clear they are going to produce any profits for Intel shareholders at all. And that’s a place where the more Hayekian train of thought poses enormous dangers.
Not, however, that our current political system has answers, because an awful lot of rent-seeking can sail under the banner of “These are productive in long-term investments for the future.” Consider the ethanol program.
Geoff Kabaservice: True. Brad, there is a line toward the end of your book, which does seem to point the way forward. You write: “Governments must manage and manage competently, at times with a heavy touch.” And Brink, of course, wrote the great Niskanen manifesto on state capacity and ways to improve government’s ability to execute what it does. And there have been a lot of other works coming out on this theme, such as Jennifer Pahlka’s book on Recoding America. And there’s even some evidence that in your home state of California, people are paying much more attention to the ways in which the California Environmental Quality Act and other things of that sort are really impeding the abundance that liberals say they want. Do you see a path forward along these state capacity lines?
Brad DeLong: I definitely hope so. Implementation is really hard. And quite frankly, I was appalled by the inability of the United States government to get its ass sufficiently in gear during the plague to do what we really ought to be doing. And that makes me fear that the state’s and, to some degree, the private capacity for us to pursue our self-interest rightly understood and to all pull together as a country really is not there to some degree.
Brink Lindsey: It was certainly the pandemic experience that was the major motivation for writing that paper and launching the State Capacity Project.
Brad DeLong: Yeah. I remember when Silicon Valley Bank was on the point of failure, my response the week before was, “Oh, gee. They’ve made an awful lot of bad bets on U.S. Treasuries, which have produced this huge minus on their balance sheet. And yes, it is counterbalanced by the expected future capital gain from these bonds that they are holding to maturity, but will they be able to hold them to maturity?” And I thought, “Well, of course they will. They’ve spent 40 years doing a high-touch service business to Silicon Valley in banking, and they do need to be recapitalized.” But there are huge numbers of rich people in Silicon Valley, who have done an awful lot of business with Silicon Valley Bank over the past 40 years.
And so I expected Kleiner Perkins, I expected Andreessen Horowitz, I expected the billionaire barons, I expected Benioff, and I expected a couple of others to stand forward and say, “Silicon Valley Bank needs to be recapitalized. It’s a valuable part of our community, and we are willing to pony up a share for the recapitalization of Silicon Valley Bank, even though this may not be the best business deal for us personally. This is a valuable part of our community.” And it did not happen.
Brink Lindsey: Instead they yelled, “Fire! Run for your lives!”
Brad DeLong: Instead, people yelled, “Run and pull your money out now!” And it turned out that precisely no one in Silicon Valley believed that Silicon Valley Bank’s high-touch social network of bankers who understood the industry and the sector was worth running any risks or worth committing any of their capital to making sure it survived — and this in an environment in which the big venture capital funds are looking for something to invest in other than crypto. But the idea that they might do what Jamie Dimon did for First Republic — to say, “Well, here’s $30 billion of deposits that you can hold to give you an extra cushion” — that they might do that was simply not on their radar screen.
And that was a shock to me. That was America working in a very different way than I thought it worked, and suggesting that functional societies are ones in which people think that they are on a team and that others have their back. Functional societies are one in which organizations and groups have what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah. And when you do not have asabiyyah… Well, the bureaucracy can keep things running and the market can keep things running for quite a while, but when a crisis comes and unexpected unusual action is required, you suddenly find that it’s simply not there at all.
Brink Lindsey: A high-tech economy and a low-trust society are a combustible mix.
Brad DeLong: Yes, exactly.
Geoff Kabaservice: As sort of a last question, Brad… You began your work on Slouching Towards Utopia by taking on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of communism as the tragic hero of “the short 20th century,” and in its place you put capitalism as the hero of “the long 20th century.” But is capitalism a tragic hero, in your view?
Brad DeLong: No, it’s not a tragic hero. It’s the brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” right? That’s what capitalism is. And you actually need to have the Sorcerer rather than Mickey Mouse in control in order for it to work effectively. I look outside and look around me, and what do I really need? Well, what I really need is a small personal jet copter with a landing pad next to the hot tub in the backyard, so if I want to get to L.A. in an hour to stay with my cousin in Malibu at the spur of the moment, I can do that. And what I actually want in material things is I would like to have an Apple Vision Pro headset now, and not next year or two years or five years from now.
Compared to a world in which primarily all of humanity has a difficult time finding its 2,000 calories a day plus essential nutrients, and spends genuinely hours a day thinking about how hungry we are and how nice it would be to have some more food today or tonight, I really am in Keynes’ world of Utopia where my problem is to live wisely and well, rather than to get more things to make my life easier or more interesting. And an awful lot of that is due to the fact that the market turns out to be an extraordinarily good mechanism at crowdsourcing humanity as an anthology intelligence to solve the problem of production. And that’s an enormous, enormous blessing.
And it’s not something that we can have without capitalism, though we do try to do things otherwise. We always have mixed institutions in some way. We always pull things together through a strange combination of barter and plan (being we have primary purposes and people have allegiance to it), and blat, influence, corruption, favor swaps, and so forth.
But the market, as a way of giving people information, very simple information in the form of a price as to what kinds of things are worth producing right now — it’s so great and so wonderful that that has such an enormous consonance, that that is a way of producing a society in which the free development of all is produced by the free development of each if you just tune market prices to what is socially valued and then let the thing rip. There’s nothing really tragic about that.
But there is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice aspect. Do we really want it to do everything it does? Did we really want it to dismantle the great industrial research labs of the oligarchic manufacturing and distribution companies of America as they stood in 1980? So not tragic hero, but rather brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is the way to, I think, view it.
Geoff Kabaservice: All right. Well, I can actually almost hear that music from Fantasia in my mind right now as we’re talking. Brad DeLong, congratulations again…
Brad DeLong: Thank you very much.
Geoff Kabaservice: Congratulations again on the publication of Slouching Towards Utopia, and thank you so much for joining us here today.
Brad DeLong: Okay, you are very welcome.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
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At bird breeding grounds this spring and summer, the skies have been clearer and quieter, the flocks drastically thinned. Last year, more than 60 percent of the Caspian terns at Lake Michigan vanished; the flock of great skuas at the Hermaness reserve, in Scotland, may have shrunk by 90 percent. Now more broken bodies are turning up: a massacre of 600 arctic-tern chicks in the United Kingdom; a rash of pelicans, cormorants, gulls, and terns washed up along West African coasts. In recent months, Peruvian officials have reported the loss of tens of thousands of pelicans—by some estimates, up to 40 percent of the country’s total population.The deaths are the latest casualties of the outbreak of H5N1 avian flu that’s been tearing its way across the world. In the past couple of years, more than 100 million domestic poultry have died, many of them deliberately culled; out in the wild, the deaths may be in the millions too—the corpses have just been too inaccessible and too numerous for scientists to count. “It’s been carnage,” Michelle Wille, a virologist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, told me. “For many species, we are losing decades of conservation work.”For months, experts worried most about the outbreak’s magnitude—it struck so swiftly and lethally that it’s become the most deadly H5N1 epidemic recorded in North America. Now the looming concern is length: when, and if, the virus will withdraw.History would seem to be on our side, at least in North America: Earlier versions of avian flu that made it to this side of the world flamed out within a year or two, quashed by the ebb and flow of migrating hosts and by concerted poultry culls. But this new strain is stubborn, pounding the continent more or less continuously. “That has never happened before,” Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, a virologist at Hong Kong University, told me.[Read: Eagles are falling, bears are going blind]The situation has grown dire enough that last month, the United States began, for the first time in history, to offer avian-flu vaccines to birds—starting with critically endangered California condors, which have lost more than 20 members of their very small population to the virus and cannot afford more, Ashleigh Blackford, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s California-condor coordinator, told me. This choice is one of many grim and tacit acknowledgments that this virus is now so entrenched that it’s almost certain to circulate here indefinitely.The longer the virus lingers, the greater the chance that it will pose a different danger: permanent tenancy among mammals, a group that, historically, the virus has not easily infected and spread among. Some experts worry that the virus has now managed to establish new methods of transmission in select communities of mink and foxes on fur farms, and maybe in wild seals. The chances of an outbreak among people—certainly, of another pandemic—are still, in absolute terms, low, Nídia Trovão, a virologist at the Fogarty International Center, told me. But the more new places H5N1 establishes itself for good, the more its threat to us will grow.Scientists can’t yet say why this particular flu virus has found such unprecedented success in North America, only that it has. In the two years since its arrival, it has infiltrated more birds and mammals—including species not previously known to be vulnerable to avian flus—than has any other pathogen of its ilk. Among the most affected creatures have been wild birds, a major departure from previous strains that primarily attacked poultry. And although past viruses in this family have been relatively slow to evolve, this one keeps amping up its genetic diversity by mixing its genome with bits of other bird-borne flus—tweaks that may be helping H5N1 find even more new hosts and execute further genomic changes still.Not all infected with H5N1 develop terrible disease—and in recent months, researchers have even spotted signs that the outbreak is on the wane. In certain parts of the U.S. and Europe, case counts in the wild seem to be slumping. And scientists are stumbling upon gannets in Scotland carrying antibodies to the virus—and whose eyes have, in the aftermath of presumed infection, bizarrely changed color from blue to black. Wendy Puryear, a virologist at Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, is now searching for similar hints of immunity in gray seals. Should this pattern continue, there’s hope that the virus, at least in this part of the world, could “just fizzle out,” Dhanasekaran said.Wille and other researchers, though, are looking toward autumn with a degree of dread. Another surge of disease could appear then, especially as seasonal migrations return birds to their overwintering homes. Even without a fall comeback, the math is against elimination in North America, where the virus has infiltrated well over 100 species. At this point, H5N1 lingering in at least some creatures seems far likelier than a full and permanent retreat. For people, the news is still, tentatively, okay. “In its current form, the virus has very, very low transmissibility to humans,” with just a handful of cases detected, says Ian Barr, the deputy director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza. But the list of mammals catching the virus is still growing. In some of these outbreaks, the root cause is likely avian, experts told me: cats eating raw poultry; raccoons, skunks, and other scavengers presumably snarfing the carcasses of infected birds. Other cases, though—seals at sea, foxes and mink crowded into fur farms—seem better explained by mammals catching H5N1 directly from another of their own kind. Given the sheer number of animals involved, “it’s hard to fathom that each was individually exposed to an infected bird,” Louise Moncla, an avian-influenza expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.[Read: We vaccinate animals more than ourselves]Since the virus arrived in North America, it also appears to have become deadlier, with particularly devastating effects when it infiltrates certain creatures’ brains, Richard Webby, a virologist and the director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me. Fox kits have been found racked with tremors; bears have gone partially blind.To truly transform into an even worse scourge, the virus would need to shape-shift from a pathogen that primarily plagues bird guts into one that could easily infiltrate mammalian lungs. The virus has already taken at least one step toward that: Researchers sampling H5N1-infected mammals, including foxes, mink, cats, seals, and even a person, have detected genetic tweaks that are helping the microbe replicate inside mammalian cells. But a boost in infective capability alone isn’t enough for a large-scale outbreak, Webby said. The virus would probably need to circumvent some mammal-specific immune defenses. And it would certainly need to acquire the ability to more efficiently transmit between mammalian hosts via, say, an airborne route. There’s not yet evidence, Webby told me, that the virus has pulled off such changes, though just a few might suffice: better binding to receptors on mammalian lung cells, a more stable structure so it could travel via aerosol.That said, the criteria for properly mammalizing a flu virus “are not really well understood,” Moncla said. All that’s certain is that the chasm between birds and mammals is not uncrossable.No single intervention will quash H5N1’s potential pandemic threat. Avian-flu vaccines have been developed for humans, but for now, Trovão, of the Fogarty International Center, told me, the priority is keeping the virus out of cramped, often unsanitary communities of mammals where it could rack up further mutations. Vaccinating poultry, too, would help, says Mariette Ducatez, a virologist at the National Veterinary School of Toulouse. The practice is already relatively common in countries where avian influenza is endemic, including China, Egypt, and Vietnam. This fall, France is likely to introduce shots for a subset of its domesticated birds; regulators in the U.S. have mulled eventually doing the same.   But avian-flu vaccines can be expensive, difficult to administer, and better at tempering disease severity than blocking spread. Without vigilant monitoring, the virus could spread silently in vaccinated flocks, especially those with spotty coverage, where the microbe could be pressured to evolve in new ways. On the global market, many poultry buyers are also reluctant to import vaccinated birds.The stakes for vaccinating wild animals are less economic but no less fraught. And although researchers believe that the recently inoculated California condors are tolerating the new shots well, other species aren’t necessarily next in line. In most cases, vaccinating wild animals just isn’t practical, Trovão told me. Even for the condors, which are already closely monitored by scientists and used to frequent human contact, shots are “not sustainable, really, not long term,” Samantha Gibbs, a wildlife veterinarian at U.S. Fish and Wildlife, told me. Scientists still can’t say for sure how well the vaccines will work in the birds or how long protection might last. “This was a last resort,” Gibbs said, “just an attempt to get them through this.”But with H5N1 still raging and the birds still vulnerable, Gibbs and her team suspect that they’ll have little choice but to continue vaccinating the condors on an annual basis. If this current threat doesn’t force their hand, maybe the next one will. Already, another bird flu appears to have been imported from across the Atlantic—an H5N5 that’s been detected in North American raccoons and gulls.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.In 2005, the journal Nature published a short science-fiction story by the writer Ted Chiang about a small toy called the “Predictor.” Roughly the size of a car’s key fob, the Predictor has a button and a green light. The green light illuminates one second before the operator presses the button. No one can outwit it, because it works by reading the operator’s predetermined behaviors before they’re apparent to the operator themselves.At first, people goof around with the device as a simple amusement. But in time, its effects on many users clearly become serious, because they realize from playing with it that free will is an illusion. As a result, a third of the population develops a pathology known as “akinetic mutism,” a kind of walking coma in which all motivation is absent from life. Some are hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. Without free will, it seems, people do not feel they are truly alive.[Read: AI is an existential threat to itself]That account is fiction, but we are living in a time when science and philosophy present fresh challenges to the existence of free will. Just as Chiang’s story suggests, this has profound implications for happiness. Understanding the arguments at play, and deciding how to respond, can make a big difference in your life.The question of free will arises from what philosophers call the “mind-body problem,” which asks whether the mind and the brain are the same thing or separate entities. The philosopher René Descartes famously wrestled with this conundrum in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, arguing that the mind occupies no physical space and is thus distinct from the body.This “dualist” view has had many modern adherents, both religious and secular. For example, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers believes that the mind is not physical or material; he posits that one could exist physically without consciousness, like a zombie, so consciousness must exist outside the material realm.If this is true, where does the mind reside, if not in the brain? Some might say that the mind is in the soul—or is the soul itself—which, if not physical, might exist beyond physical death. Others point to a kind of panpsychism, or a degree of consciousness that inhabits all natural bodies. But whatever the mind is and wherever it resides, we seem to possess an essence that enables us to make decisions in our daily lives, an expression of independent choice, of free will. A useful metaphor for this view is that the brain is the computer and the mind is the operator.In contrast to all of this, a school of “physicalists” believes that subjective experiences and consciousness emanate entirely from the brain, and that the separateness of brain and mind is an illusion. To revert to the metaphor, no external operator exists.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.True, we do not know how our consciousness and brain are connected; no brain component that processes the sense of conscious self has been identified. But this isn’t proof that the mind doesn’t exist. After all, we believe that the universe is a purely physical phenomenon as well, even if we still do not fully understand it. To say that the mind is separate from the brain simply because the connections are unknown, the logic goes, doesn’t make sense.This logic also explains why so many physicalists reject the concept of free will. As the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “What we call ‘free will’ is simply the biology that we haven’t understood well enough yet.” Furthermore, these thinkers cite evidence that many of what we consider to be voluntary actions are initiated before we are even aware of them. After all, our brains contain about 86 billion neurons, with an estimated 100 trillion links among them. The activity and connections are—pun intended—mind-bogglingly complex, far beyond the conscious control of your lumbering will. By the time you decide to eat that cookie, your brain has already initiated the action to do so.[Read: How sleep deprivation decays the mind and body]A hybrid argument for free will does exist, one that acknowledges both the complexity of the brain and the fact that we might not make every individual decision freely. It suggests that decisions influencing the patterns of everyday life might run automatically. So you may not, in any meaningful sense, choose a certain route to work every day, but you did freely choose to take a job in Tucson instead of Tacoma, limiting your overall range of commuting possibilities. More seriously, you might make moral commitments based on careful consideration, but that in turn constrains your subsequent behavioral choices, which you make automatically.We aren’t going to sort out the puzzle of free will here. I have my hunches about all of the theories, and you have yours, but they are just that. The question at hand is how best, allowing for this uncertainty, to act to improve your happiness. The answer, doubts notwithstanding, is to embrace the idea of your own free will over your actions and life. This is a pragmatic strategy, similar to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager about belief in God: You should believe, because if you are wrong, you lose little, but if you are right (and live accordingly), you have a huge amount to gain.Social scientists have demonstrated that a belief in free will is associated with life satisfaction, as studies have shown among adolescents and adults. This finding does not seem culturally dependent, appearing in collectivist cultures as well as in individualist ones. Furthermore, this belief can affect anyone, because people whose belief in free will was found to be weaker in research studies tended to score higher than others in aggression and social conformity, and have lower self-control.Regardless of their underlying beliefs, when people are simply exposed to statements about free will, that influences their attitudes toward life. In an experiment written up in the journal Philosophical Psychology in 2016, scholars asked participants to read either statements affirming free will, such as “I have feelings of regret when I make bad decisions because I know that ultimately I am responsible for my actions,” or statements denying free will, such as “All behavior is determined by brain activity, which in turn is determined by a combination of environmental and genetic factors.” The researchers found that after reading the pro-free-will statements, people set more meaning-filled goals for themselves. After reading the anti-free-will statements, the participants in a parallel study perceived less meaning in their lives.[Read: financial biological determinism]If you are a firm believer in free will, well … lucky you. You can try affirming this belief as you start each day by telling yourself, “This is a day of choices—to love or to hate, to give or to take, to move forward or backward in my life. I will make the better choice whenever I can.” When you feel upset or angry, remember that your feelings may happen to you, but that you can manage your reactions to those feelings.Even if you are not so sure that free will is real, you can still benefit from acting as if it is, as the research shows. You don’t have to walk around all day hoping that your environmental and genetic proclivities conspire to give you a pleasant day. On the contrary, conjuring thoughts of free will can inspire you to take control of your life in a positive way. If you are a hybrid thinker, that might mean focusing on your major goals in life, which you believe really are under your control.The strategy I’m proposing turns out to be similar to the one that Ted Chiang settled on in his story. The narrator, using the same technology that the Predictor exemplifies, is communicating with readers from one year in the future. Looking at the destruction that occurs when people conclude they have no free will, he tells them, “My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will.” In sum: “The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief.”If the mind-body problem were truly settled, I doubt that we could follow this prescription. But the problem isn’t settled, so your decisions might very well be real and matter very much. In which case, my best advice is to admit that you don’t know, throw up your hands in resignation, laugh at the riddle, and make positive decisions about the day ahead.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.In 2022, it was a matter of conventional and nearly universal wisdom that the 2023 economy would be a nightmare.Last October, a Bloomberg economic model said that the odds of a U.S. recession this year were 100 percent. No, not 99.99 percent, as in the odds that you’ll avoid being struck by lighting this evening. One hundred percent, as in the odds that you’ll avoid falling into a time-bending wormhole that spits you out in 17th-century Versailles at a dinner table with Louis XIV.Bloomberg’s bot wasn’t unique in its gloom, either. The Federal Reserve itself projected hundreds of thousands of job losses by this December. In a survey by the Philadelphia Fed that has been conducted since the late 1960s, the number of economists anticipating an imminent recession hit an all-time high last year, meaning the level of expert pessimism was greater than before the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, the brutal recession of the early 1980s, and the Great Recession of 2008. Economic glumness spread to the C-suite. Last year, a KPMG poll found that nine in 10 chief executives anticipated a recession in 2023. Republicans eagerly piled on, proactively blaming the White House for a “Cruel Biden Recession” that all the experts seemingly claimed was inevitable.And how’d those experts do? So far, terribly. We’re now in the back half of a year that was supposedly doomed, and the U.S. economy isn’t just narrowly avoiding a downturn. As the writer Noah Smith points out, nearly everything you should want to go well in an economy is going quite well right now.[Annie Lowrey: The reason the recession hasn’t happened yet]Employment is high, inflation is falling, real incomes are rising, and inequality is narrowing. Superlatives abound. The official unemployment rate is near a 60-year low, and the jobless rate for Black Americans recently hit an all-time low. The U.S. has the fastest growth rate and the lowest annual inflation of any G7 country. Yes, problems exist. Essentials such as housing, education, and health care are still too expensive; wages could be growing faster; and last year’s inflation is still baked into today’s prices. But mostly, things are good—for now.In fairness, economists had some fine reasons to expect a rough 2023. When inflation surged to multi-decade highs, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. As economists, including Larry Summers, pointed out, deploying high rates to combat high inflation has historically been a simple recipe for a recession. The logic is straightforward. Higher interest rates increase the cost of capital, which reduces investment, which blunts hiring, which reduces wage growth, which depresses spending, and ta-da, you’ve produced an economic downturn that cools prices.But that’s not how 2023 has gone at all. Instead, we seem very close to something like “immaculate disinflation”—an unusual case of falling inflation without rising unemployment. So what, exactly, might experts have gotten so wrong? How did we beat a serious case of inflation without, to date, triggering a downturn?The first explanation is that economic prediction has always been more sorcery than science. Since the Philly Fed survey started in 1968, the majority of economists have failed to anticipate every single recession. Less than a third of economists foresaw the 1990 and 2001 downturns, and they whiffed on the 2008 crash. Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.The second explanation is that the U.S. economy bravely withstood a number of shocks—and then the shocks went away. J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest wrote that the economy’s resilience reminds him of Rasputin, the Russian mystic who survived poisoning, several beatings, and a few shootings. Similarly, the U.S. economy has endured a gauntlet of pain: a wild surge in post-pandemic spending on stuff like cars and electronics, and then broken supply chains that couldn’t handle all this new demand, a historic increase in resignations as the service sector came back online, a spike in energy prices after the initial invasion of Ukraine, a run on real estate that depleted inventory, and don’t forget the slowdown in China and, of course, rocketing interest rates. That’s a lot! The shocks came from all over: high demand, low supply, geopolitics, international shipping, Vladimir Putin’s imperial mania. But eventually, the pain subsided, and the Rasputin-esque U.S. economy is alive today because the tortuous inflation surprises have mostly dissipated.This explanation leaves out the Federal Reserve entirely. And perhaps that’s telling. One cheeky lesson of the past 15 years might be that monetary policy is weaker than most experts thought at both stimulating and depressing growth. During the 2010s, the Obama administration (constrained by Republican intransigence) leaned on the Fed and low interest rates to lift the moribund economy, but economic growth was rather putrid anyway. If the Fed wasn’t strong enough then to stimulate an economy suffering from depressed demand, and isn’t strong enough now to depress an economy overstimulated by high inflation, maybe we need a new theory of just how important interest rates are to overall economic health.But as the writer Matt Yglesias points out, another interpretation of the past two years gives the Fed a bit more credit. The central bank is not just a mute wizard with a joystick that raises and lowers interest rates. Central bankers talk. Their talking shapes expectations, moods, vibes. The chair of the Federal Reserve is the chief vibemeister of the U.S. economy, and conceivably the combination of his statements and his actions has maneuvered the U.S. economy into the Goldilocks zone by making Americans just anxious enough to throttle consumer spending and wage growth while other economic disruptions went away.[Adam Ozimek: The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession]I like this idea. For the past few months, I’ve been puzzling over a related mystery, which is why ordinary Americans are so convinced that the economy is terrible. In April, just as unemployment hit a 60-year low, a record-high share of the public expressed negative views of the economy. Now, Jeff Bezos famously said that “when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” But Americans’ feelings have been factually disconnected from reality. This summer, nearly half of Americans said we were in a recession, which is just incorrect. In April, Americans said it was the worst time to buy stocks in almost 20 years. But the S&P 500 had surged 14 percent in six months leading up to April, and stocks are up another 11 percent since then.Discounting the pessimism of tens of millions of Americans would be crass. But something important and weird is going on here. The writer Kyla Scanlon has memorably diagnosed what we’re experiencing as a “vibecession,” in which people are happily contributing to a growing economy even as they externalize the vague anxiety that everything is about to fall apart. In a similar vein, I wrote an article titled “‘Everything Is Terrible, but I’m Fine,’” noting that people in surveys keep saying they are depressed about the state of the national economy but hopeful (and even happy) about the state of their household economy.At this point, you might be thinking, Wait, what does all of this have to do with our central question? Well, here’s a complex and unprovable theory: Maybe the recession doomers got the economy very wrong precisely because they were so convincing. A sense of economic dusk took the edge off spending, hiring, and wage growth, and that, in turn, reduced inflation without as yet causing a full-blown recession.So, this is my favorite theory: The vibecession prevented the real recession. In medicine, weaker versions of a virus, like the flu, inoculate people against the real thing. By analogy, Fed Chair Jerome Powell and his melancholy minions essentially administered an injection of mostly safe gloom into the economic bloodstream, which seems to have triggered just the right level of macroeconomic immune response to reduce inflation without causing a downturn.Or maybe all of these theories are true at once. Economic forecasts are genre fiction. America Rasputined its way out of the crisis years. The Fed’s titrated pessimism successfully reduced inflation at the margins. And maybe the very act of writing this article guarantees that we’ll have a recession at the end of this year.

High school boys are now twice as likely to identify as conservative than liberal. Girls, on the other hand, are almost three times as likely to identify as liberal than conservative. This stark gender divide—found in a 2022 University of Michigan survey of high school seniors—has sparked concern from across the political spectrum. A trend of boys becoming more conservative seems to show everything from proof that young men are becoming fascists to the likely fall in marriage rates. But what if the survey doesn't spell quite as much doom as it seems to?  Many commenting on the survey failed to notice that majorities of both genders responded without identifying a partisan political identity. The source of concern is concentrated among the paltry 23 percent of boys who identified as conservative and 30 percent of girls who identified as liberal—leaving just 13 percent of boys identifying as liberal, and 12 percent of girls as conservative. But 64 percent of boys and 58 percent of girls didn't identify as conservative or liberal—instead, they identified as "moderate," "none of the above," or "I don't know." Yes, more boys than girls identify as conservative—about twice as much, according to the survey—and girls identify as liberal at a rate 17 percentage points higher than their male classmates. But this divide only pertains to a minority of young people. The survey found that most high school seniors simply don't have a strong partisan political identity—the majority of them were either unsure of their beliefs or their opinions were more complicated than a two-dimensional left-right dichotomy. However, this hasn't kept some from drawing overwrought conclusions from the data. "Among liberals, the future is female," wrote psychology professor Jean Twenge of the survey in her book Generations. "And among conservatives, the future is male."   A Fox News article even insisted that "girls trend overwhelmingly liberal," despite only one in three of them identifying as such. The fervor over the survey's results seems to play into a larger panic around social media's apparently pernicious influence on young people. From the left, too much Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate is pushing boys into a cycle of alt-right radicalization. And right-wing commentators argue that social media is causing girls to become depressed liberals.  But in reality, these surveyed high school seniors don't seem to care all that much about partisan politics, and those that do just happen to have a split along gendered lines. We shouldn't fret over supposedly polarized young people, particularly when they seem to slightly disfavor your political side. And we certainly shouldn't suggest, as many have, that government regulation of social media or online speech would do any good for them. The post No, Most High School Boys Aren't Conservative appeared first on Reason.com.

"When you walk into the store and there you don't see that packaging…you start to panic," says Kenzie Jaicomo, a new mom whose child was just a few months old when a sudden shortage of baby formula hit the United States last year. "What am I going to feed my baby?" she remembers thinking, staring at an empty shelf in a neighborhood grocery store. In the first episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, a new podcast series from Reason, we're diving into the causes and consequences of last year's baby formula shortage. Though it was a crisis kicked off by unexpected supply chain issues and contamination problems at a major production facility in Michigan, the roots of the shortage ran straight through Washington, D.C., where poor government policy left American infants hungry and their parents scrambling. With domestic supply chains snarled, it would have made sense for American grocery stores to turn to foreign producers for replacement supplies of baby formula. Unfortunately, there are "absurdly high" tariffs on imported formula, explains Gabriella Beaumont-Smith, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute. "There are these distribution channels that are basically not established" because the tariffs make it too costly, she says. "And we're talking about baby formula. This is a necessity and we shouldn't be taxing it that high or at all." It took last year's crisis for Congress to consider lifting those tariffs—and only on a temporary basis. The dairy lobby and other special interests like the isolated, and fragile, American market for baby formula just the way it is. On this week's episode of Why We Can't Have Nice Things, we'll explain how this crisis unfolded, why the government's efforts to alleviate the shortage mostly failed, and ask whether a free market might have done a better job. Spoiler alert: It would have. Further reading/viewing for this week's episode: "Formula for a Crisis," by Scott Lincicome, Beaumont‐​Smith, and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon "My Baby Needed Special Formula From Europe. U.S. Trade Policy Made It Almost Unobtainable," by Kelli Pierce "The Government Hasn't Learned a Thing From the Baby Formula Shortage," by Emma Camp "FDA Finally Admits It Caused the Baby Formula Shortage," by Eric Boehm "The Mystery of the Missing Baby Formula," by ReasonTV   Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; additional editing by Ian Keyser. Additional mixing by Luke Allen. Fact-checking by Katherine Sypher.  The post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: The Great Baby Formula Shortage of 2022 appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The Ukrainian counteroffensive, under way since the spring, is slogging through miles of trenches and minefields. Progress will depend on the battlefield, not on Western impatience.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The triumph of the January 6 committee
Trump’s threat to democracy is now systemic.
The queasy liberal schadenfreude of watching Trump wreck DeSantis
Vladimir Putin and the parable of the “cornered rat”
Dragging On, as It MustAttacking an entrenched force, as the Ukrainians are doing now, is the stuff of military nightmares. The enemy knows you’re coming, they’ve prepared for your attacks, and their objective is to cede back as little ground as possible while making you pay in blood for every inch. Offensive operations, such as the initial Russian invasion into Ukraine, are different: They are predicated on shock, speed, and mobility, especially if they begin with at least some modicum of surprise.The American military, with its focus on operational excellence, executes such offensives very well. In its wars over the past 30 years, the U.S. has had almost every edge over its battlefield enemies, including superior firepower, complete control of the skies, advanced technology, and a superbly trained force.The Ukrainians have almost none of these advantages. Their weaponry, including tanks and air defenses, has been getting better, but not fast enough. They are outnumbered by an enemy that uses untrained troops dredged from prisons as bullet sponges. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians must carefully conserve their best-trained forces to protect them from being wasted in engagement with soldiers who are in effect walking dead men.Worse, even to get to those doomed Russian forces, the Ukrainians have to spend time—and lives—clearing the so-called Surovikin Line, named for the general who designed Russia’s defensive position in Ukraine (and who is now apparently under some sort of detention—a  Moscow official has said he is “resting”—because of his apparent involvement with the mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin). As The Bulwark senior editor Benjamin Parker pointed out on Monday, this is not really a line but “a series of zones, sometimes miles deep, of minefields, tank traps, trenches, booby traps, and other fortifications,” and the Ukrainians lack the kind of reconnaissance and firepower that Western militaries would normally use to overcome such obstacles.Nonetheless, there are some hopeful signs. For one thing, the fact that the Ukrainians are on the offensive at all is something of a miracle. Americans, as my friend and fellow Russia-watcher Nick Gvosdev pointed out to me recently, tend to think of military conflicts as having the same narrative arc as action movies: The good guys take an initial ass-kicking at the beginning, go through a Rocky-like training-and-recovery montage, and then crush the bad guys. That’s not reality; as I warned earlier this summer, the dramatic blowing of a whistle and a charge from the trenches was never going to happen.But Ukraine survives and is taking the fight to the enemy, both on the battlefield and in Russia’s capital city. The original Russian plan, more than a year and a half ago, was to erase Ukraine as a state in a matter of days. Instead, the Russians are complaining about repeated Ukrainian drone strikes in the heart of Moscow, while President Vladimir Putin’s forces, however slowly, are ceding back occupied territory.These drone attacks have been small and ineffective—so small, in fact, that my first guess about their origin this past spring was that they were a Russian false-flag operation. But they have had an outsize psychological impact on Putin’s regime. Back in 2022, Putin’s implicit bargain with his citizens was that the war would be glorious, short, and kept far from Russia.The latest drone in Moscow struck a skyscraper housing some government agencies. It produced no casualties but broke a lot of glass; apparently, it also broke the Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, who compared the attack to 9/11. Zakharova knows better, as do I, because I was in Moscow just weeks after the actual 9/11. The atmosphere in the Russian capital back then was somber—and, to an American visitor, sympathetic. The Russians knew the magnitude of 9/11, and for Putin’s stooges to now invoke the attack shows both their cynicism and their humiliation. After all, the Ukrainians by this point were supposed to have been building schools named for Putin, not rattling the nerves of Kremlin flacks with late-night explosions.Ukrainian forces have also recaptured the village of Staromaiorske as part of a move to the south that could imperil Russian supply lines. There are reports of accelerating attacks in the Zaporizhzhia region, where the Russians have dug in and mined the area around Europe’s largest nuclear plant. (The Russians, for their part, claim that the Ukrainians launched a “massive” attack toward Zaporizhzhia, but remember that it is in the Russian interest to inflate the size of every Ukrainian attack: If Russian defenses hold, they have repelled an onslaught, but if they fall, it was to a “massive” attack.)Another potential sign of Russian desperation: The Poles have reported that roughly 100 men from Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, the mercenaries who have been effective fighters in Ukraine and who nearly marched to Moscow in June, might be approaching the Polish border from their new home in neighboring Belarus. (Poland has also accused Belarus of violating Polish airspace.)Belarus’s president and Putin’s fellow dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, has been taunting the Poles, saying that Warsaw should thank him for keeping Wagner forces in check, but it’s hard to know exactly what Putin or Prigozhin think they’re doing by rattling this tiny saber at a NATO nation. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Monday that attacks by Wagner mercenaries would be viewed by the United States “as an attack by the Russian Government,” and if Putin thinks that trying to rattle the Poles will somehow weaken NATO support for Ukraine, then he still does not understand the nature of the disaster he’s created.I am not overly worried about Wagner’s Potemkin pantomiming, nor do I think the Russians really believe they are living through a new 9/11. But I am concerned that Americans and others in the West do not understand the immensity of the task before the Ukrainians, who must recapture territory that has been turned into a hellscape of death traps. The United States and its allies should speed up aid at this crucial moment. As my colleague David Frum implored more than a year ago: “If there’s anything that Ukraine can use in any NATO warehouse from Vancouver to Vilnius, that’s a scandal. Empty every inventory.”In The Guardian this morning, an unnamed Western intelligence official summarized both the hope and the danger in the current battle: “There is no reason why the Ukrainians cannot break through the Russian main defensive line,” the official said. “It’s not going to be easy, so we shouldn’t shy away from that.”In the meantime, the summer of drones and trenches will drag on—as it must.Related:
The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.
Putin talks tough while Ukraine makes gains.
Today’s News
A federal jury unanimously recommended the death penalty for Robert Bowers, the gunman responsible for the 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Beijing was hit by its heaviest rainfall in 140 years, resulting in at least 21 deaths.
Stocks in the U.S. dropped after Fitch Ratings downgraded its U.S. credit rating from the highest rating, AAA, to AA+ due to “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.”
Dispatches
The Weekly Planet: Humans are gambling with the only good oceans in the universe, writes Marina Koren. We are simmering its water at our peril.
Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
The Most Misunderstood Concept in PsychologyBy Olga Khazan
Recently, I asked a group of adult children of immigrants from the former Soviet Union about attempts to enforce boundaries with their parents. (It’s a group of which I am a member: class of ’89, Leningrad to Texas.) Rarely have I received so many responses from sources so quickly.
One day, Olga B.’s mom came over and replaced her silverware with silverware that she (the mom) thought was “better.” Anna Z. gave her parents a key to her house for emergencies only, but one day, she turned around in her backyard and saw her mom waving hello at her from her own bedroom window … Veronica M. told me her father believes that “boundaries are Stalinist.” Nevertheless, she compared boundary setting to the Dutch children’s tale about a boy who sticks his finger in a dam to prevent a flood: “It would be even worse if I didn’t try to protect my boundaries.”
An unsettling hint at how much fraud could exist in science
Poem: “After Viewing the Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne (1847)”
Magnolia Pictures
Read. Nothing Special, a new novel by Nicole Flattery, shows that life has always been a performance—even in the pre-digital past.Watch. Using an artful eye and playful sound design, the documentary Kokomo City (in theaters now) offers a complex portrait of Black transgender sex workers.Plus: We’re going live! Starting on Friday, August 11, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, will be the new moderator of the live show Washington Week, rebranded as Washington Week With The Atlantic. Tune in each week at 8 p.m. EST.Play our daily crossword.P.S.In yesterday’s Daily, I referred to a scene from the majestic Paul Newman movie The Verdict. I have a special place in my heart for The Verdict because I was working where some key scenes were filmed.In early 1982, I was a college student but also a full-time legislative aide in the Massachusetts State House. The Verdict used the statehouse to double as the fictional St. Catherine Labouré Hospital. The director apparently wanted something with a rundown, Depression-era feel, much like the St. Eligius of the NBC drama St. Elsewhere, which began airing that same year. The statehouse, with its stone walls and tiled floors, was the opposite of a brightly lit and antiseptic modern hospital. (I loved the statehouse specifically for its seedy public-works grandeur.)One morning, I got off the elevator and walked into a “hospital ward.” I thought we’d had some kind of disaster or a gas leak or something. I figured out that filming was under way, but I had work to do, and the sets were closed. I knew all of the back hallways and shortcuts; later that day I went barreling down a narrow (and rarely used) staircase and almost plowed right into … Paul Newman and some of the crew. I wish I could say that I said something clever or shook his hand, but they were busy, so I apologized and kept moving.I love the movie for its Boston ambience, and for Newman’s astonishing performance. (He was robbed for Best Actor at the Academy Awards; Ben Kingsley won the Oscar for Gandhi that year.) And I especially love it because anyone who’s gone through a dark period in their lives and somehow kept their faith can identify with Newman’s portrait of a lost man returning to himself—but that’s a story for another day.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.The most telling measure of that dynamic inside the GOP is that Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp.Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior. Prominent conservatives have argued that Trump cannot receive a fair trial in any Democratic-leaning jurisdiction.All of these actions measure how much of the GOP is now willing to accept Trump’s repeated assaults on the basic structures of American democracy. While the key state-level Republicans rejected Trump’s direct demands to invalidate the results in their own states, most House Republicans voted to reject the election results and most Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to decertify the outcome in the key swing states won by President Joe Biden. In the election’s aftermath, the majority of Republican-controlled states, inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of endemic voter fraud, passed laws on a party-line basis making it more difficult to vote, or increasing partisan control over election administration.Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to “manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”By contrast, Wilentz added, the GOP’s continued embrace of Trump amid the evidence of his misconduct contrasts sharply with the party’s refusal to defend Richard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. “When Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, he didn’t storm the Capitol to get rid of Barry Goldwater,” Wilentz said, referring to the conservative Republican senator who warned Nixon that he would lose a Senate vote to remove him. “He resigned.”All of this suggests that personal accountability for Trump is unlikely to erase the tolerance for antidemocratic actions that has spread in the GOP since his emergence. Yet many experts who study the health of democracy still believe that prosecuting him remains essential.Kristy Parker, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group that focuses on threats to democratic institutions, says it is crucial to show the “silent majority” of Americans who support the constitutional system that no one is above the law. “They need to see that the Department of Justice prosecutors are willing to take the risk of indicting Trump,” Parker told me. “They need to see the election workers ensuring that people get their vote counted. They need to see the police officers standing up to the rioters. They need to see people within the system working.”Michael Waldman, the president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, told me that he has been ambivalent about indicting former presidents, because of the risk of precipitating a retaliatory spiral between the parties. “It is a line that we as a country have never crossed,” Waldman said shortly after the Trump indictment was disclosed last night. “One could imagine how it could be abused and become one more shattered norm.”Waldman said that failing to indict Trump would have been far more dangerous, because such a decision would have suggested that there is no effective way to hold presidents accountable for misbehavior. Neither of Trump’s two impeachments really damaged his position in the party, Waldman noted, in part because virtually all GOP elected officials defended his behavior. But the multiple criminal indictments facing Trump, he said, show that “the criminal-justice system still is producing tangible legal consequences” that future presidents cannot brush off as easily as an impeachment.Waldman said the trials of hundreds of January 6 rioters already demonstrate that prosecution can have some deterrent effect. Unruly crowds of supporters, Waldman noted, did not descend on courthouses in Manhattan or Florida after Trump’s earlier indictments, despite his signals that he’d like to see that happen. “The fact that this stuff is not just a bad idea but illegal and you can go to jail for it really makes a big difference,” Waldman said.John Dean, the White House counsel whose Senate testimony helped doom Nixon during Watergate, also considers prosecution of Trump to be “essential,” he told me. President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon and preempt a trial, Dean said, was “a historical disaster,” because it emboldened presidents to believe they would never face criminal charges for their actions. Allowing Trump to avoid consequences, Dean believes, would send an even more dangerous signal than Ford did with Nixon. “Trump’s corruption is so much more fundamental to the system than Nixon’s,” Dean said. “Nixon, he abused power, he had his enemies list, he wanted to make government work for the benefit of Republicans and not Democrats. But he wasn’t going after the foundations of government and the system like Trump.”[Peter Wehner: The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers]Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election required the cooperation of many other GOP officials and conservative activists and lawyers. Now a growing number of them face consequences of their own, including disbarment proceedings, ongoing state and local investigations, and the potential of further federal charges from Special Counsel Jack Smith against the six unnamed co-conspirators listed in the Trump indictment.“I’m not sure how much additional prosecutions will deter Trump—unfortunately, he’s all-in on winning as a way to stay out of prison at this point,” says the Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan, a co-founder of Bright Line Watch, a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to U.S. democracy. “But Republican operatives and activists may hesitate as the evidence mounts that participating in an attempted coup puts you in legal jeopardy. That’s important, because Trump can’t carry out his plots by himself.”Some analysts have worried that the trials could strengthen Trump if die-hard supporters of his on a jury refuse to convict him regardless of the evidence. But Parker told me that cannot be allowed to dissuade prosecutors from bringing cases when there’s evidence that Trump violated the law. The problem, she said, is analogous to the challenges she faced as a Department of Justice civil-rights attorney prosecuting excessive-force cases against police officers who were likely more popular in the community than the victims they abused: “You can’t just give in and allow, effectively, a bully to force his way out of accountability, because then you’ve crushed the ideal that no one is above the law.”Yet although all these possible sanctions create legal reasons for the GOP to resist another Trump-led attack on democracy, the party’s political incentives point in the opposite direction.A recent national poll released by the Bright Line Watch project found that the majority of Republican voters accepted all of Trump’s key arguments about 2020 and the multiplying legal challenges accumulating against him. In that survey, only small minorities of Republicans said that he had committed crimes in any of the cases he’s facing. Most Republicans said Trump was singled out for prosecution for behavior that would not have prompted charges against other people. Six in 10 Republicans described the January 6 riot as “legitimate protest.” And although the share of Republicans who said that Biden was elected through fraud had declined somewhat from its peak of about three-fourths, nearly two-thirds of them still denied the legitimacy of his victory.[Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 Committee]These attitudes provide an ominous backdrop to Trump’s hints that if he wins the nomination but loses the general election, he’s likely to challenge the results again. Trump might not attempt another mass physical attack on the Capitol in 2025, but such sentiments could allow him to enlist Republicans again for a more targeted legal effort to overthrow the results in a few key states or in Congress, Nyhan told me. The widespread Republican rejection of the idea that Trump violated any laws in his actions after 2020 offers reason to doubt that the party would object any more strenuously if he launched another campaign to delegitimize the results in 2024.Nyhan said he can imagine future circumstances in which Democrats at some point challenge the legitimacy of a presidential race, such as the election coming down to a Republican-controlled state that has restricted voting rights. But he said the more immediate danger is that Republicans won’t accept any presidential race they lose. Traditionally, presidential nominees from each party, including Al Gore and John McCain, have made statements in which “the losing side specifically affirms the legitimacy of the winner,” Nyhan said. But for the GOP next year, he added, “we can no longer take that for granted whether or not Trump is the nominee, and that’s really worrisome.”Trump may constitute a unique threat to America’s democratic traditions. But he has always connected his claims of pervasive electoral fraud to the widespread anxiety among white, Christian conservatives that they are losing control of the country to a racially diverse, secular, and LGBTQ-friendly Democratic coalition centered in the nation’s largest cities. As Trump put it during one 2020 rally before a predominantly white, rural audience in Georgia: “This is our country. And you know this, and you see it, but they are trying to take it from us through rigging, fraud, deception, and deceit.” Whether Trump is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election or not, voters who accept that argument will remain the most powerful force in the GOP coalition. And they will continue to demand leaders who will fight the changes that they believe threaten their position in American society.Those other Republican leaders may not attempt to overturn an election as brazenly as Trump did with the conduct Smith catalogs in his indictment. But, as Wilentz told me, for the foreseeable future, they are likely to pursue other means “toward the same end: that majoritarian democracy cannot be tolerated under any circumstances if the outcome is not what you wanted it to be.”

The concept of adaptive radiation, an expanding branching proliferation of variations upon variations, is not limited to organic evolution. We see it in cultural evolution as well, such as the history of human languages. Unfortunately we also see it in the proliferation of dubious medical interventions, especially those unmoored to a rigorous dedication to science and evidence. This makes our job challenging, because new versions of questionable treatments are constantly being created.

For example, I was recently asked by a regular reader here about Structural Energetic Therapy (SET), which they could not find on the SBM website. The thing is – all the basic components of SET have been covered extensively on SBM , but this is just a new branding of old ideas, adding its own new “twist” (a pun you will appreciate shortly). Here is how SET practitioners describe it:

Structural Energetic Therapy is the only therapy that releases the spiral twist, found in everyone, into a weight-bearing support, which then relieves the stresses on joints, spine, and discs that lead to pain and body dysfunction. This is achieved using unique cranial/structural techniques and myofascial protocols, found nowhere else, to release patterns that maintain painful conditions in the body. By further integrating energetic healing techniques, we are able to release stresses and emotional blockages to alleviate sources of pain.

You don’t have to read between the lines too much to see what they are basically talking about. Reading further, it’s clear that they are incorporating some version of craniosacral therapy (which they call “cranial osteopathic mobilization”). We have covered craniosacral therapy here before. Multiple times. It is not a legitimate medical science. The short version is – the cranial bones are fused completely by the time we are adults, and there is no way to subtly manipulate them. Further, there is no valid evidence that the brain has it’s own rhythm of pulsations.

But I can imagine that an SET proponent would argue that what they do is different, citing some irrelevant distinction. This is like arguing about sun sign astrology vs stellar astrology – it doesn’t matter, they are both astrology.

They also integrate “energetic healing techniques”, and elsewhere specifically mention acupressure. We have similarly covered energy medicine before, both in general terms and specific manifestations. Again, short answer – there is no human energy field, life energy, vital force, innate intelligence, chi, or whatever. This was always a prescientific idea (a placeholder) that we slowly discarded as we figured our how biology actually works. Modern attempts to demonstrate its existence, let alone any alleged benefits from manipulating the non-existence force, have essentially failed.

Likewise, we have covered acupuncture exhaustively on SBM . There is no reason to believe that acupoints even exist – and if they don’t exist, then acupuncture and acupressure are not real.

So already SET proponents are building their claims on a house of cards – craniosacral therapy, energy medicine, acupoints. They appear to be building these claims around a core of massage therapy, and in fact the person who initial asked me about SET was referred to one while looking for massage therapy.

Massage itself is a legitimate practice. It can relax muscles, may help with muscle soreness, and appears to have positive emotional effects. I have no problem with someone getting a professional massage, if they enjoy it and/or find that it helps helps with their muscle symptoms. However, “message therapy” can incorporate a large number of dubious claims not supported by good science. The role of “trigger points” is questionable. There is no evidence that deep tissue massage releases toxins.

Myofacial release, the idea that you can loosen tight myofacia through specific massage techniques, is thoroughly in the gray area of science. It’s like meditation, in my opinion. There are plausible versions of what it is, but the research has not clearly separated it from just massage. Does myofacial release work better than just massage? This is similar to asking – does meditation work better than just relaxing? Here is a typical systematic review, this one for chronic low back pain:

The meta-analysis results showed that myofascial release significantly improved pain and physical function in patients with CLBP but had no significant effects on balance function, pain pressure-threshold, trunk mobility, mental health, and quality of life. However, due to the low quality and a small number of included literature, more and more rigorously designed RCTs should be included in the future to verify these conclusions.

This is a source (both the researchers and journal) that I would consider friendly to such therapies. The results are typical – mixed results with the subjective outcomes improved but not many of the more concrete outcomes. And the overall conclusion is that the quality of the science is very low. The core problem, as I see it, is that controls are never adequate. Just as meditation is poorly defined operationally, and rarely adequately controls for things like just relaxation time, studies of myofacial release usually don’t adequately control for the non-specific effects of just hands-on therapy, and the known effects of muscle massage.

SET therapy takes all this and adds the concept of the “spiral twist”. This is the notion that almost everyone’s body is just a little off kilter, a tad askew, and could benefit from being properly aligned. They give a long list of ailments that can benefit from untwisting the body, which they say is not the full list – whatever bothers you, give us a call.

It includes things like frozen shoulder, which is a specific physical condition. Frozen shoulder is adhesive capsulitis, caused by fibrous tissue forming in the shoulder joint. The treatment is physical therapy, slowly breaking down the adhesions over months and restoring range of motion. It is not caused by any body misalignments, and cannot be relieved by massage. So what are SET therapists doing? I don’t know – either they are doing nothing helpful, or they are doing standard physical therapy plus their added layers of dubious interventions which likely do nothing, or they tell their clients to get standard physical therapy for frozen shoulder which SET will help work better. But you cannot cure frozen shoulder with anything like SET.

There is a good rule of thumb in SBM – if an intervention is claimed to treat everything, it probably treats nothing. Their list includes migraines, herniated discs, and nerve entrapments. These are diverse entities with multiple causes, which brings up another SBM rule of thumb – the old saying that if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.

A search on PubMed turned up no studies supporting any benefits for SET, or the existence of the spiral twist. General searches online also did not turn up any scientific studies. The SET website has their own library of articles – all commentary or case studies (i.e. anecdotal). If there were any well-designed scientific studies (positive ones, anyway) I imagine they would be listed there. SET seems to be unmoored to scientific evidence, which is consistent with the claim that it can treat a long list of problems and that anyone can benefit. Good for marketing – not for science-based practice.

In the summer of 2020, Morgan Bettinger was a rising senior at the University of Virginia when a fellow student publicly accused her of telling a group of Black Lives Matter protesters that they would make "good speed bumps." 
Though the university's own investigation cleared Bettinger of wrongdoing—even finding that it was "more likely than not" that Bettinger's accuser never heard her make a "speed bumps" remark at all—the school punished her harshly. She was expelled in abeyance and required to complete a litany of other sanctions.
Now, Bettinger has filed a lawsuit against the university claiming that administrators violated her First Amendment rights. 
The incident—which was the subject of a Reason investigation published in April—occurred on the evening of July 17, 2020. Bettinger says that she was driving home from work when she saw a dump truck blocking the road ahead. When she got out of her car to investigate, she was approached by the dump truck driver. Bettinger and the truck driver had a casual conversation, and at one point, she says she told the driver something to the effect of, "It's a good thing that you are here, because otherwise these people would have been speed bumps."
Bettinger says that she meant her comment as a casual, friendly remark. "It was simply a comment made to a [dump] truck driver who was sitting and blocking the road, and just saying, like, 'It's good you're here,'" she told Reason. Bettinger later took a photo of the crowd and walked back to her car.
"The words are entirely innocuous and innocent, and no reasonable, objective person could ever conclude otherwise," the lawsuit notes. "The words do not constitute a 'true threat' as that term is defined by applicable Supreme Court precedent."
However, as Bettinger walked back to her car, she says that a group of protesters began to follow her, growing increasingly aggressive and shouting insults at her. A few minutes later, Zyahna Bryant, a local activist and rising sophomore at the University of Virginia, tweeted allegations that Bettinger drove around police barricades and told protesters that they would make "good speedbumps." A social media firestorm followed, and students began complaining to the university and demanding Bettinger be expelled. 
Over the next several months, Bettinger would be subject to a litany of investigations from the university. The first investigation—by the University Judiciary Committee (UJC), a student-run disciplinary apparatus—would find Bettinger guilty of "threatening" students, even while seeming to agree with Bettinger's version of her statements and not Bryant's. The UJC noted, "You yourself acknowledged saying 'it's a good thing you are here because, otherwise, these people would have been speed bumps.' Given the tragic events of August 12 and the context in which you uttered these words, you disregarded Charlottesville's violent history." 
But a second investigation, this time from the school's civil rights office, ultimately cleared Bettinger of wrongdoing and concluded that there was insufficient evidence that Bettinger ever said that protesters would make "good speed bumps." In light of these results, Bettinger asked to have her sanctions expunged—but the university refused. 
Now Bettinger has filed a lawsuit, arguing that her speech was not a threat and was facially protected by the First Amendment—and therefore, the University of Virginia, as a public institution, had no grounds to punish her. 
"[University of Virginia] President Jim Ryan knew, unequivocally, that Morgan Bettinger's speech was free and protected under the First Amendment, that Morgan had been wronged, and that he was intentionally committing the University to violate those sacred rights," the lawsuit states.
Further, the suit claims that Allen Groves, the university's then-dean of students, directly intervened to raise the likelihood that the UJC would punish Morgan, despite the facially First Amendment—protected nature of her speech.
"Groves purposefully tampered with at least two of the 'proceedings,'" the lawsuit states. He allegedly "personally initiated a complaint, himself and on his own behalf, against Morgan with the UJC," "teed" Bettinger up for "trial," and even "participated as a witness against Morgan at her so-called 'trial.'"
"The Dean of Students for the University of Virginia did not simply put his proverbial thumb on the scales of justice, he put his entire weight on it," the suit states.
While the lawsuit will likely take years to work its way through the courts, Bettinger has been left with permanent reputational damage due to the university's sanctions against her.
"Morgan's character and reputation have been utterly destroyed by the University's, Defendant Ryan's, and Defendant Groves' misconduct. She has been terminated from her employment and lost jobs that had been offered to her as a result of these events…. Morgan's chances to attend graduate school, such as law school, have been substantially reduced, if not eliminated entirely," the suit states. 
"Despite their personal knowledge that multiple University investigators had concluded that Morgan was innocent of the charges against her," it reads, "these Defendants and the Defendant University persecuted, prosecuted, and punished Morgan Bettinger."
The post UVA Dean of Students 'Purposefully Tampered' With Investigations Into Student's Speech, Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Reason.com.

An increasingly unstable fiscal outlook and an elected government that won't do anything about it have triggered America's second-ever credit rating downgrade.
Fitch Ratings downgraded the U.S. government's credit rating from "AAA" to "AA+" on Tuesday afternoon, signaling to investors that America's Treasury bonds are a qualitatively less ideal purchase. In its announcement, Fitch said the downgrade reflected the federal government's growing mountain of debt and the country's fraught political dynamics—most recently evidenced by the brinksmanship over the debt ceiling that nearly triggered a default on the national debt.
"The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management," Fitch said in its announcement. The change also reflects an "expected fiscal deterioration" over the next few years, as the federal deficit is projected to grow wider, adding to America's already staggering total of $32 trillion in national debt.
The rating service also pointed to the widening gap between the federal government's tax revenue and its spending, as well as the "limited progress" being made toward solving looming issues like the projected insolvency of Social Security in the early 2030s.
While the AA+ rating reflects that U.S. debt remains a trustworthy investment, Fitch's downgrade is a warning signal about the federal government's fiscal trajectory.
The downgrade "should be a wake-up call," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for smaller deficits, in a statement. "We need to get our country's fiscal and political house in order. The United States economy remains strong, but we are on an unsustainable trajectory."
The national debt is on course to double relative to the size of America's economy in the next 30 years, and as the debt grows, so will the cost of interest payments. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that interest on the national debt will consume one-third of the federal budget by 2050. That means more than 30 cents of every dollar taxed out of the economy will be directed towards the ongoing costs of past deficit spending rather than being used to cover government services.
"High and rising debt would have significant economic and financial consequences," the CBO warned in June, echoing similar recent concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office and non-governmental groups. The mountain of debt will "slow economic growth, drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, elevate the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse effects that could occur more gradually, and make the nation's fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates," the CBO said.
Fitch is the second of the "big three" credit rating firms to downgrade the federal government from its highest to second-highest category. In 2011, Standard and Poor's (S&P) knocked America's debt rating from AAA to AA+, where it remains today.
That change also followed a tense political standoff over the debt ceiling, though the federal government had a now-quaint $14 trillion in debt at the time. The current total is over $32.6 trillion.
Doubling your debt in just over a decade is a good way to scare off those who might lend you more money in the future. Given current fiscal and political trends in Washington, it was a question of when, not if, the U.S. would see another credit rating downgrade.
Unless something dramatically changes, this is unlikely to be the last.
The post U.S. Credit Rating Downgrade Is a Sign of Government Dysfunction appeared first on Reason.com.

Applications are now open for a new student loan repayment program which will cost taxpayers billions and turn most federal loans into glorified grants.
The SAVE plan is a revamped income-driven repayment (IDR) plan, introduced last year along with President Joe Biden's original student loan forgiveness scheme—though that proposal was struck down at the Supreme Court in June. While the SAVE plan received less attention than Biden's now-defeated student-loan forgiveness proposal, it stands to do nearly as much long-term damage to taxpayers—and prospective student loan borrowers themselves. 
Under the REPAYE plan, the most popular IDR plan currently in use, borrowers' monthly payments are typically fixed at 10 percent of their discretionary income. Discretionary income is calculated as earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Under this plan, borrowers will have their remaining balance forgiven after 20 years of on-time payments, or 25 years for graduate borrowers.
But the SAVE plan radically reduces monthly payments—and the time required before forgiveness. Under the plan, borrowers only pay 5 percent of discretionary income, which is now defined as earnings above 225 percent of the poverty rate. Borrowers only have to make 10 years of payments before forgiveness, if the balance is less than $12,000. Further, interest will not accrue on borrowers' loan balances when their monthly payments are not enough to cover interest. 
According to an analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the new plan is expected to cost around $360 billion over the next decade—a staggering price tag, though not quite as much as the over $500 billion predicted cost of one-time student loan forgiveness.
But the new IDR plan won't just cost taxpayers an absurd amount of money. It will also make college even more expensive than it already is. In making student loan payments minimal or nonexistent for large swaths of borrowers, colleges will be incentivized to raise their prices, extracting more funding out of the government through loans, all while assuring prospective students that they won't feel the financial burden of a large student loan balance.
Currently, undergraduate programs are at least somewhat constrained in how much they can charge because of a cap on federal student loan borrowing for undergraduate degrees. However, there is no similar limit on graduate borrowing, meaning that graduate schools can instruct students to borrow virtually infinite sums of money from the government—and encourage them to enroll in a SAVE plan to pay it all off.
The introduction of the SAVE plan serves as both an admission of failure and as an inability to right past policy errors. Colleges began radically increasing prices due to the expansion of federal student loan availability over the past several decades. Graduate tuition increases have also been directly linked to the removal of the cap on federal student loan borrowing in 2006. 
Instead of doing the obvious—curbing federal student loan access—the Biden administration has asked taxpayers to foot the bill for past policy mistakes, accepting a future where higher education costs more than it should.
The post Biden's New Student Loan Payment Plan Has Arrived. Here's What That Means. appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump stands indicted for attempting to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and subvert the rights of American citizens. This is the moment that will decide our future as a democracy.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The first great crisis of a second Trump term
The ugly honesty of Elon Musk’s Twitter rebrand
Ignore the histrionic attacks on the Supreme Court.
This Is the CaseOver the past year, state and federal prosecutors have alleged that Donald Trump went on something like a crime spree as a presidential candidate, as the sitting president, and then as a private citizen after his defeat. The charges, from Manhattan to Mar-a-Lago, include business fraud, the illegal retention of classified material, and the destruction of evidence.All of these accusations, however, pale in importance next to the indictment handed down today.Trump is accused of multiple conspiracies against the United States, all designed to keep him in power against the will of the voters and in violation of the Constitution. The former president—once our chief executive, the commander in chief, the leader we entrusted with the keys to nuclear hell—is accused of knowing that he lost a free and fair election, and, rather than transferring power to a duly elected successor, engaging in criminal plots against our democracy, all while firing up a mob that would later storm the Capitol. (The Trump campaign issued a rambling statement that called the charges “fake.”)Long before now, however, Americans should have reached the conclusion, with or without a trial, that Trump is a menace to the United States and poisonous to our society. (Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio once referred to Trump as “cultural heroin,” but that was before he decided to seek power in the Republican Party.) The GOP base, controlled by Trump’s cult of personality, will likely never admit its mistake: As my colleague Peter Wehner writes, Trump’s record of “lawlessness and depravity” means nothing to Republicans. But other Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both.The rest of us, as a nation but also as individuals, can no longer indulge the pretense that Trump is just another Republican candidate, that supporting Donald Trump is just another political choice, and that agreeing with Trump’s attacks on our democracy is just a difference of opinion. (Those of us who share our views in the media have a particular duty to cease discussing Trump as if he were a normal candidate—or even a normal person—especially after today’s indictment.) I have long described Trump’s candidacies as moral choices and tests of civic character, but I have also cautioned that Americans, for the sake of social comity, should resist too many arguments about politics among themselves. I can no longer defend this advice.The indictment handed down today challenges every American to put a shoulder to the wheel and defend our republic in every peaceful, legal, and civilized way they can. According to the charges, not only did Trump try to overturn the election; he presided over a clutch of co-conspirators who intended to put down any further challenges to Trump’s continued rule by force. According to the indictment:
The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant [Trump] remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
The Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy the U.S. armed forces against American citizens. The alleged plot inside the White House was not merely to invalidate an election; it included the possibility of unleashing the American military against its own people.This is why we can no longer merely roll our eyes when an annoying uncle rhapsodizes about stolen elections. We should not gently ask our parents if perhaps we might change the channel from Fox during dinner. We are not obligated to gingerly change the subject when an old friend goes on about “Demonrats” or the dire national-security implications around Hunter Biden’s genitalia. Enough of all this; we can love our friends and our family and our neighbors without accepting their terms of debate. To support Trump is to support sedition and violence, and we must be willing to speak this truth not only to power but to our fellow citizens.Trump and his media enablers, of course, will fume that any criticism of choices made by millions of voters is uncivil and condescending—even as they paint other American citizens as traitors who support pedophiles and perverts. Trump has made such accusations, and the implied threat of violence behind them, part of the everyday American political environment. This brutish bullying is aimed at stopping the rest of us from speaking our mind. But after today, every American citizen who cares about the Constitution should affirm, without hesitation, that any form of association with Trump is reprehensible, that each of us will draw moral conclusions about anyone who continues to support him, and that these conclusions will guide both our political and our personal choices.This is painful advice to give and to follow. No one, including me, wants to lose friends or chill valued relationships over so small a man as Trump. But our democracy is about to go into legal and electoral battle for its own survival. If we don’t speak up—to one another, as well as to the media and to our elected officials—and Trump defeats us all by regaining power and making a mockery of American democracy, then we’ll all have lost a lot more than a few friendships. We face in Trump a dedicated enemy of our Constitution, and if he returns to office, his next “administration” will be a gang of felons, goons, and resentful mediocrities, all of whom will gladly serve Trump’s sociopathic needs while greedily dividing the spoils of power.In the 1982 film The Verdict, Paul Newman plays Frank Galvin, an ambulance-chasing attorney with an alcohol addiction who takes on what he thinks will be a routine malpractice suit and soon finds himself fighting for justice against powerful institutions determined to stop him. On the eve of the trial, all seems lost. His mentor and former partner tries to comfort him. “There’ll be other cases,” his friend says. Galvin knows better. “There are no other cases,” he says quietly, with his eyes closed. “This is the case.” He repeats this truth, whispering to himself, over and over: “There are no other cases. This is the case.”Jack Smith has indicted Donald Trump for trying to overthrow our system of government. There are no other cases. This is the case.Related:
The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers
Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy.
A Michigan prosecutor charged a former state representative and a former attorney-general candidate in an investigation into voting-machine tampering in the state.
Henrietta Lacks’s family has settled with Thermo Fisher Scientific. They accused the company of exploiting cells taken from Lacks more than 70 years ago without her consent.  
Former President Donald Trump’s political-action committee has become financially strained because of legal fees. It now has less than $4 million left in its account.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up reader responses about press coverage of race.
Kirn Vintage Stock / Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?By Rhaina Cohen
Kami West had been dating her current boyfriend for a few weeks when she told him that he was outranked by her best friend. West knew her boyfriend had caught snatches of her daily calls with Kate Tillotson, which she often placed on speaker mode. But she figured that he, like the men she’d dated before, didn’t quite grasp the nature of their friendship. West explained to him, “I need you to know that she’s not going anywhere. She is my No. 1.” Tillotson was there before him, and, West told him, “she will be there after you. And if you think at any point that this isn’t going to be my No. 1, you’re wrong.”
If West’s comments sound blunt, it’s because she was determined not to repeat a distressing experience from her mid-20s. Her boyfriend at that time had sensed that he wasn’t her top priority. In what West saw as an attempt to keep her away from her friend, he disparaged Tillotson, calling her a slut and a bad influence. After the relationship ended, West, 31, vowed to never let another man strain her friendship. She decided that any future romantic partners would have to adapt to her friendship with Tillotson, rather than the other way around.
Enough about Ken.
Dear Therapist: My husband had a relationship with his best friend.
Sophia Spring / Guardian / eyevine / Redux
Read. A Pocketful of Happiness, a memoir written by the actor Richard E. Grant after the death of his wife, is a remarkable record of life after loss.Watch. Babylon 5 (streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+) is an eccentric ’90s sci-fi saga whose five-year storyline was planned out in advance.Play our daily crossword.P.S.As you can see, I’m back at the Daily after a short break. I’ve been working on a second edition of my 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, but I was also finishing up teaching summer school at Harvard, something I’ve loved doing for 18 years. Last week, I gave my last lecture as a professor or instructor anywhere, bringing more than 35 years of teaching to a close.I’ve loved teaching, but summer school was always one of my favorite endeavors, because I know what it’s like both as a teacher and as a student. In 1978 I talked my way into the program for high-school students—despite not being a very good high-school student—at Harvard Summer School, where I fumbled my way through calculus. (I passed. Barely.) But I had my first taste of college, and I finally saw a light at the end of the high-school tunnel.Studying in summer seems almost unnatural, and so does teaching. (The U.S. Naval War College, where I taught for more than two decades, begins classes in August, which I always fiercely hated.) And yet there’s a gentleness to summer school on a campus that can make it seem like a natural part of a wonderful summer—especially if you’re young. When I came back to Harvard Summer School as an instructor, I had high-school students among undergraduates and even advanced graduate students. Many of them were scared, but I always made sure to tell them that I once sat where they sat (once, literally in the same classroom) and not to worry. I insisted that they take advantage of the glorious summer in Boston. And I watched some of them leave with a bit of the same trepidation I had when I returned home that summer 45 years ago.It was time to go for me too. I’ve now given all I can offer in the classroom. But I will miss the noisy campus and the cool quiet of the classroom on a steamy day. And I will, more than any of it, miss the students—of all ages, but especially the ones who left with just a bit of wonder and excitement on their face about one day coming back to a campus.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.In a previous newsletter about a country-music controversy involving the artist Tracy Chapman’s song “Fast Car,” I asked readers:“What is the most constructive way for the press to cover race if its objectives include accurately informing citizens about the past and the present––no matter how awful or uncomfortable––and refraining from framing the news in ways that are needlessly polarizing or essentialist?”Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Zachary harkened back to the coronavirus pandemic:
Your question brought to mind this study, which found that highlighting racial disparities due to COVID-19 made white Americans less fearful of COVID-19, and thus less likely to support policies meant to address it. If the press aims to cover race in a way meant to be constructive in solving problems, it should take care to keep all audiences emotionally invested. If, for example, a story about police abuse focuses on abuse perpetrated against African Americans, many non-Black Americans will infer that police abuses are not a problem they should be personally concerned about. They will sympathize, but most will move on—the same way we all do for the many horrible things regularly reported in the press, once we gather that the problem does not personally affect us.
While police abuse against African Americans is disproportionate, the point to emphasize is the level of abuse that American police get away with. Even white Americans disproportionately suffer at the hands of the police compared with our peer countries. The manner in which Daniel Shaver was killed by police is absolutely terrifying, and it was recorded by body cameras. Yet his case did not provoke a national reaction. His execution makes clear that the color of your skin will not save you from being a victim of the police—a point the press should emphasize whenever a similar shooting happens again. Had the press lionized cases like Shaver’s, police reform in America today might look different, with Americans of all races benefiting.
Jim is Canadian. He writes:
I recognize that Black and LGBTQ artists face barriers in contexts like country music. But when “Fast Car” came out, I loved it and bought the album immediately, having no idea what colour Chapman’s skin was, and I still don’t care. Race and sexual orientation mean nothing to me as a fan. And I find it exhausting to constantly filter my perceptions of culture through the American race conflict that barely registers here, where our greatest shame is treatment of Indigenous people. There is an arrogance to the view that all things in the world must be examined through the American race conflict. Fraught relationships among ethnicities abound worldwide, but because of American cultural hegemony, all we ever hear about is yours. Thoughtful analysis of the American race conflict is important and worth examination, but the “Fast Car” story is not the place.
Dominic is a working-class man in his 60s. He writes:
I find myself in the middle to slightly conservative with most political issues. I have always liked “Fast Car,” but never really listened to it as much as I have lately, and I have to tell you, I have more appreciation now for Tracy Chapman than before. I heard Luke Combs’s cover of the song, then heard an interview he had given stating that he really felt it was a perfect song. I agree. I have taken the time to read the lyrics and listen to both versions a few more times. I think that it is a perfect song and that he did an outstanding job of covering it, both with feeling and technically. I’m sure Tracy is happy with his performance.
Then I heard the controversy. Of course, a person would have to live under a rock not to know the direction this country has gone the past few years. I find that stirring up racial or gender issues is a way of dumping cold water on a good warm bonfire. It’s what some people in this country do now. Sure, back in 1988, it may have been difficult for a person to make it in country music if they were gay or a person other than white. We will never know if Tracy could have done this, since she apparently didn’t try for country but did make it where she did try, in pop and rock. All of this considered, I do not concern myself with a person’s color or who they choose to love when I am admiring their good work.
“Fast Car” is about hope, disappointment, and what so many of us have experienced. It is for everyone and anyone. We need to enjoy a good song without someone dumping cold water on us.
Lori believes that “it is essential that the press cover racism in America in a factual manner” and that “the feelings of the oppressor” are not “coddled.” She writes:
A main reason that racism is an ongoing cancer is the reluctance of white Americans to step out of their comfort zones and have difficult conversations with people in their lives about racism.
We are encouraged by psychologists and life coaches to set boundaries. However, not enough emphasis is placed upon how to handle what happens next. Often, it gets ugly. People react negatively to criticism. The relationship that you set out to improve is lost. This is what is happening in America regarding race. Victims of ongoing racism (and all of the brutality and anxiety and depression that accompany it) are exhausted and no longer willing to live a life in America without boundary-setting. The people who love people who are the victims of racism (or homophobia, or any other form of bigotry) are also fed up and angry. And there are more and more of us as our society diversifies.
The racists are used to being free to harm people with little or no consequences. We need the press and other influential people to help us set firm boundaries with the racists who want to take this nation back to Jim Crow. We need more vocal voices decrying the evils of racism to overpower the emerging voices of those who continue to promote racism. Americans are effective, on their own, at pushing the crippling sin of racism under the rug or excusing and rationalizing it at every turn. The press must continue to factually report the racism that has held this nation back and prevented it from achieving the kind of enlightened society that 21st-century people should be able to enjoy.
Incidents of racism do not need to be “sensationalized,” for they are usually horrific and ugly in their own right. Report the problems as they are and as you would report stories surrounding gun violence, homelessness, income equality, and any other social menace we tolerate in our country. Remind the reader that the victims of racism go through every other “normal” problem that white people face (such as divorce, job loss, medical crisis, and grief)—but that they do it every day with the backdrop of ongoing racist menacing. The “press” will lose some customers who’ll flock to their own “news sources,” which assist them in propping up their racist attitudes. The media need to live with that, just as the rest of us have lost people in our lives due to the collateral damage of calling out racism. It is imperative that the most powerful voices not silence themselves.
Jim articulates the role of journalism as he sees it:
It is not the press’s responsibility to discern what might be polarizing or essentialist about any given reporting. That’s arrogant and egotistical. I’m sick of this notion that journalists are supposed to be controlling the reactions of readers to cold, hard truths. I look to the press to give me the who, what, when, where, how, and why of any given newsworthy topic, not their ideas for buffering me from any potential of news to offend.
Jaleelah finds fault with those who react strongly against coverage of race in journalism, which she finds valuable even when it pertains to small subcultures:
Do some articles portray race as more salient in some fields than it really is? Certainly. But an opinion piece arguing that contemporary country charts are prejudiced against Black people is a bad example. Just a few years ago, “Old Town Road” was removed from a country chart on the grounds that “it [did] not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” Billboard has no problem bending the definition of “country” for white artists with southern accents who use pop elements like Auto-Tune, synths, and drum loops. But the second a queer Black man achieved success by incorporating trap elements in his country song, his song was retroactively deemed “not country enough” to “count” as success in that genre.
The subject of racism in country music is not the most important issue in the fight for equality, but it is certainly relevant to people who care a lot about the scene. It is clear that the article generated spirited discussion on the nuances of discrimination in country music and the best way to combat it. What about the people who found it upsetting? Most of the time, I don’t think that negative reactions to observational, non-prescriptive pieces about race are the fault of the author. I think they’re the fault of a system that exists to manufacture outrage in normal Americans. Which outlet is more responsible for making people feel upset: The Washington Post, which published one article about “Fast Car,” or Fox News, which published three separate articles stoking the flames of the controversy?
When writing about race, mainstream news outlets should make sure their articles are free of hyperbolic and outrage-inducing language (the claim that “Chapman would have almost zero chance of that achievement in country music” certainly falls under that category). However, the proposal that they shouldn’t publish articles about race in unusual niches at all should be weighed against the benefits of such articles.
Publishing lots of different perspectives on lots of different subjects—big and small—allows the truth to come to light. Facilitating debate between writers who have different perspectives on the salience of race (and how best to achieve equality) is a better journalistic strategy than asserting that race is simply not salient in certain areas (and that anyone who argues otherwise is needlessly inflammatory).
And articles about niche communities are simply interesting and enjoyable to read for people who are from those niche communities. The racial implications of Mortal Kombat 11’s arcade endings (and the reactions they garnered from gamers) have zero impact on anyone’s real lives. No journalist or blogger should ever pretend otherwise. But I enjoyed reading this blog post about them because I play the game frequently and I enjoy analyzing the motivations of storytellers and the social forces that shape them. Most people don’t want all of their reading to focus on the criminal-justice system. Not everyone wants to pretend race doesn’t exist when they’re reading about their hobbies and interests, and that doesn’t mean they think that talking about race implies it is always severely consequential.
Nancy writes:
I took one absolute truth from your newsletter: “Fast Car” is a beautiful piece of art, no matter who is performing it. Thank you to Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs for bringing it back into my heart after so many years.

Black holes, warming seas, new treatments for disease: No matter how you approach it, the news is full of science-based stories. For those of us who aren’t scientists, however, understanding the context — not to mention the technical jargon — can be a challenge. With that in mind, we asked Harvard science faculty in various fields to recommend their favorite science book for nonscientists. Ideally these accessible reads will give the rest of us a leg up on understanding our changing world.
 
William “Ned” Friedman
Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Director of the Arnold Arboretum
“Immediately, one book comes to mind: My favorite book by Charles Darwin (and his last — published in 1881): ‘The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms.’ While some of his books changed the world (‘On the Origin of Species,’ ‘The Descent of Man’) and some were highly technical (‘Orchids,’ ‘Barnacles,’ ‘Power of Movement in Plants’ …), his book on worms, which reflected a lifelong interest (beginning in the 1830s and ending with his death in 1882) in the slow but steady effects of earthworms on the terrestrial world is one of the most charming and heartwarming books I can imagine in the world of natural history books.
“It reveals the loving father, grandfather, and husband experimenting with earthworms with his family (wife Emma, son Francis whose wife had died in childbirth and was now living with his parents, and grandson Bernard) at Down House. Imagine the science: Darwin with a pot of worms trying to determine if they can hear. To conduct this experiment, his wife Emma is called upon to play the piano loudly, his son to play his bassoon, and his grandson to play a whistle! Darwin’s personification of the worms shows the true extent of his feelings for the intelligence of fellow creatures and his sly sense that something quite wonderful is lurking behind even the lowly earthworm. Truly, if one is going to read only one book by Charles Darwin, this is the one!”

David S. Ludwig
Professor of Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Ludwig, who is also a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, went with the science fiction novel “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson, which imagines a catastrophic event that has rendered the earth uninhabitable — sending humans on a desperate race to re-create a habitable environment in space.
“A fascinating thought experiment in how humans might evolve and adapt to extreme changes in their environment. Although science fiction, the narrative is grounded in plausible biology and physics. A wonderful, long read,” he said. “Start now, should last the rest of the summer.”

Daniel E. Lieberman
Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences
Lieberman, who also serves as chair for the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, offered two reads:
“The Body: A Guide for Occupants” by Bill Bryson: “As someone who studies and teaches human anatomy and physiology, I was utterly charmed and delighted by Bryson’s entertaining tour of the human body from head to toe and from the inside out. Bryson combines his trademark style that mixes old-fashioned journalism with wry humor and anecdotal stories to explore at breakneck speed how our bodies work and why that matters.”
“Zoobiquity” by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers: “‘Zoobiquity’ is another entertaining, eye-opening, and engaging read that puts human disease into perspective. Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers eloquently explore how so many of the medical conditions we confront — from cancer to obsessive-compulsive disorder — also occur in other species. Although the book’s goal is to examine what animals teach us about being human, I found the book also made me think about how human health can teach us more about other animals.”

Jacqueline Olds
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Olds, a psychiatrist who specializes in couples, had several suggestions:
“The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine” by Donna Jackson Nakazawa: “This book discusses the role of microglia in the brain for good and ill! Nonscientists would like this clear explanation of why some of these mysterious neurological diseases occur and new theories about how the immune system may get involved! The fact that the microglia were seen as irrelevant by doctors and scientists but now are seen as crucial might intrigue nonscientist readers.”
“Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding” by Daniel Lieberman: “This is a very personal story about a paleo anthropologist who got ‘hooked’ on exercise (running) and decided to incorporate the study of exercise and running into his work. He found that some of the best runners in the world do it for fun, which was counterintuitive because here in America so many people are so serious and exhausted by their attitude toward exercise as a kind of ‘castor oil’ cure, which is good for them even if they hate doing it. He essentially advocates that people find an enjoyable way to make exercise part of their life so it can be a more pleasant road to health!”
“Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future” by Elizabeth Kolbert and “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need” by Bill Gates: “A clear-eyed introduction to the science of climate change by a science journalist who writes well for The New Yorker (Kolbert) paired with a book that describes in an optimistic way the work we still have to do to change our carbon emissions worldwide. Nonscientists will find these books very comprehensible and lucid.”
“The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness” by Robert J. Waldinger and Marc Schultz: “This book takes the longest-running study of a large group of people and makes it digestible by telling individual stories and distilling the major lessons of the study into guidelines for living. It is already written in lay language yet pays good attention to the evidence-based results of this study without drowning the reader in statistics!”

David Emil Reich
Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
Reich nods to “my colleague Joe Henrich,” the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology Professor Of Human Evolutionary Biology, choosing his book, “The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.” “It’s really a masterpiece and quite thought-provoking.”

Stuart Harris
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School
“The single most important book I have read in the last 18 months is Scott Reynolds Nelson’s ‘Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World,’” says Harris, who also leads Mass General Hospital’s Division of Wilderness Medicine. “He’s an ecologist/economist and this book looks at the fundamental biologic underpinnings that lead to wealth and political stability. In short, empire (from the ancient Greeks on) as ecological phenomenon. Specifically, looking at the 2,000-plus-year history of the Ukrainian grain production and how in feeding the world they have made or broken empires for the last 2,500 years. The inability of the land to produce stable, storable calories is what led to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and the Arab Spring.
“This was written before the Russian invasion. Given the current reimposition of embargo by Russia, it is especially pertinent now. (It also gives a fascinating reassessment of the U.S. Civil War.)”

Since his announcement of a 2024 presidential bid in June, supporters of third-party candidate Cornel West have framed his longshot campaign as a historic opportunity to elevate progressive ideals they felt establishment figures like President Joe Biden have long ignored.

However, even close allies like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are appearing reluctant to step behind him, saying the temptation of a left-wing challenge to Biden is not worth the risk of a second Donald Trump presidency.

Speaking to The Hill over the weekend, the progressive New York congresswoman and close philosophical ally of West, expressed reservations about his campaign after a recent decision to change his affiliation to the Green Party—a reprise of former candidate Jill Stein's ill-fated run for the presidency in 2016 that helped Trump win the White House.

"I think he has a very long record of service and academic thought leadership," Ocasio-Cortez said of West. "I think just right now, given the Electoral College, it's very difficult to square the very real threat of a Republican presidency...[with] the risk of giving up the very small margin of electoral votes needed to ensure that President Biden wins."

Newsweek reached out to West's campaign via email for comment.

Even close allies of 2024 presidential candidate Cornel West (left), like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (right), are appearing reluctant to step behind him, saying the temptation of a left-wing challenge to President Joe Biden is not worth the risk of a second Donald Trump presidency. Win McNamee/Getty; Getty

While West—an academic and philosopher with no experience in elected office—has always been considered a longshot, his candidacy comes amid a highly polarized electoral environment in which experts say a third-party candidate could draw a sizable share of the independent vote, denying Democrats the swing votes they have traditionally needed to win.

The environment is so fraught that groups like Third Way, a center-left think tank that has pushed for both parties to return to the ideological middle, have criticized efforts by other groups like No Labels to promote a third-party effort for the presidency, arguing that voters should be encouraged to support the lesser of two evils in a rematch of the 2020 race between Biden and Trump, and that any additional candidate would serve only as a spoiler to Trump's benefit.

While West's boosters have argued that his support would likely come exclusively from voters on the progressive left—which are predominantly focused in larger cities in states that rarely have implications on the Electoral College—analysts with Third Way told Newsweek even that reasoning is dangerous, citing the small margins of victory reported in other battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.

"Once you get to the general election, this is going to be a razor-thin race," said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way. "Joe Biden can't afford to lose votes in Atlanta, or in Phoenix, or Philadelphia, or Milwaukee, or Detroit. There's no margin in those states. Joe Biden won six states by less than two points last time."

“The Permanent Problem” is an ongoing series of essays about the challenges of capitalist mass affluence as well as the solutions to them. You can access the full collection here, or subscribe to brinklindsey.substack.com to get them straight to your inbox. 
In recent essays I’ve been making an affirmative case for an “economic independence” movement – that is, a concerted effort to empower families and communities to be less dependent on market and state provision. I’ve argued that a move toward greater independence would help to promote social inclusion, that it has important advantages over other proposals for achieving a more inclusive society, and that it could also play an important role in spurring dynamism and innovation.
Here I’ll shift my perspective: instead of looking at the upsides that an economic independence movement could make possible, I’ll look at the downsides it could help us to avoid. The downsides I have in mind mark the two poles of failure in social organization: tyranny on the one hand, and chaos on the other. 
Both loom as serious risks as we make our way through this crisis-plagued century. The digitization of life in a world where cameras are now ubiquitous means that our comings and goings, our preferences and aversions, what we do and whom we do it with are now potentially much more “legible” to central authorities. As legibility is generally a prerequisite for control, the upshot is that the government’s capacity to manipulate and coerce us is growing by leaps and bounds; the temptation to exercise that capacity will be ever-present. Meanwhile, we’ve just emerged from a global pandemic that has killed 20 million people, war is raging in Europe with a nontrivial possibility of nuclear escalation, and virtually every day brings stunning new developments in artificial intelligence along with handwringing about the associated existential risk. Oh, and climate change is serving up a steady drumbeat of heat waves and extreme weather events – with worse almost certainly to come. Under these circumstances, it’s simply obtuse to deny the possibility that real catastrophe could strike sometime in the coming decades – and with it huge death tolls, economic devastation, and social breakdowns. 
A successful economic independence movement could help to defuse both of these threats. A more decentralized society with large cohorts of people enjoying substantial local self-sufficiency is simultaneously less vulnerable to despotic interference and chaos-inducing shocks. Pockets of local independence within larger structures of large-scale interdependence can serve to make the whole hybrid combination more resilient and stable. 
If you’re old enough to remember the PC revolution and the dawn of the internet, you’ll recall the widespread belief that widely distributed computing power was inherently anti-authoritarian. Flash back to the “1984” ad for Macintosh, or John Perry Barlow’s grandiose “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.”
Alas, we forgot that there is no such thing as a tool that can be used only for doing good. When any powerful new tool is created, the ends to which that power will be deployed depend on the intentions of the user. And while indeed the early days of the internet saw “an army of Davids” rise up to challenge the world’s established Goliaths, eventually some of the Goliaths figured out how to turn the tables. 
China now leads the way in employing information technology to repress dissent and coerce conformity. The government has made extensive use of surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, location tracking, and monitoring of cell phone usage to crack down on dissent in Xinjiang and Hong Kong; during the three years of its “zero Covid” policy, it employed such techniques on a national scale to maintain compliance with its often draconian restrictions on movement. The extreme vulnerability of citizens to government coercion when so much of life occurs online was made apparent during Covid, when protesters hung banners from a Beijing bridge denouncing Chinese leader Xi Jinping and people started sharing photographs of the banners on social media. Just hours later, many people who’d shared images discovered that their WeChat accounts – for an extremely popular app used for messaging, social media, and making payments – had been suspended. Deprived of their usual method of keeping in touch with each other as well as buying food, calling a taxi, or getting a train ticket, some subject to the sanction complained that it amounted to “digital death.” China also uses public shaming to discourage disapproved behavior, putting images of jaywalkers or people out shopping in their pajamas on public digital billboards. 
But it’s not just authoritarian governments that are rushing to exploit the possibilities of digital technology for social control. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States dramatically ramped up mass surveillance programs both domestically and internationally. CCTV surveillance cameras are going up in cities all over the world: London now trails only two Chinese cities for the dubious distinction of most surveillance cameras per capita. Of course these technologies have legitimate uses for protecting the citizenry from crime and terrorism, but the possibilities for abuse are obvious.
And things are only going to get creepier. Noninvasive brain reading technology is now coming online, allowing observers to scan electrical activity in the brain and determine if you’re tired or upset, or even read the words you’re thinking and see the images you’re picturing. The Chinese government is apparently already putting such technology to use, monitoring workers in factories, the military, and trains for fatigue and stress – and checking the loyalty of Communist Party members by gauging their reaction to party propaganda. China may well be exaggerating its current capabilities, but it’s virtually inevitable that those capabilities will continue to improve.
In an especially unhappy convergence, governments’ ability to monitor and control us is growing at the same time that developments within the capitalist system are making people increasingly dependent on government for their material welfare. As I’ve discussed repeatedly on this blog, the declining importance of ordinary workers’ contributions under postindustrial, information-age capitalism has been the critical factor in opening up a new class divide along educational lines. This decline in ordinary workers’ relative contributions has now translated into large disparities in relative income and wealth, not to mention status and overall well-being. It is possible that some technological deus ex machina – maybe generative AI – can reverse what are now decades-long trends, empowering ordinary workers to account for a bigger share of the economic pie and claim a bigger share for themselves as employers bid up their wages. It is possible, as I say, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s my expectation that huge differences in relative productivity, and therefore relative market rewards, will be a defining feature of the capitalist system for the foreseeable future. Which means that, for the capitalist system to narrow the class divide and achieve a more inclusive society, redistribution on a significantly expanded scale will be necessary. I’ve discussed various options along those lines – guaranteed jobs, wage subsidies, a universal basic income – but their common denominator is to increase the extent to which most people’s material circumstances depend on government policy.
The way I see it, this convergence of an increasingly powerful state and an increasingly dependent populace poses a serious threat to humanity’s prospects for freedom and well-being. In my own understanding of freedom, what it entails, and how to preserve it, I’ve grown more and more attracted to the classical republican conception of freedom as non-domination. In one of a series of essays on republicanism that I commissioned for the Niskanen Center, political philosopher Robert Taylor describes non-domination as “immunity from arbitrary power, which can be distinguished from the weaker, liberal commitment to freedom as mere non-interference. A slave, for example, may not be interfered with by a benevolent master, but he is still vulnerable to such interference and is therefore unfree in the republican sense.”
In that essay series, both Taylor and political philosopher Matt Zwolinski make republican arguments for a universal basic income, claiming that a UBI would reduce domination in the workplace by giving workers the resources to hold out for better job offers. That’s true as far as it goes, and that may be as far as it goes in a stable liberal democracy, but the argument ignores the fact that increased independence from the labor market is being purchased at the cost of increased dependence on the government. Again, if we have confidence that robust protections of individual liberty are in place, we may be justified in seeing government as our powerful and well-resourced servant. But shake that confidence even a little, and a UBI changes government into a “benevolent master” of all who rely on it. Perhaps it is not interfering with our freedoms today, but we remain vulnerable to such interference and that makes us unfree.
I remain reasonably confident that the United States will succeed in maintaining liberal democratic institutions even in the face of the current populist authoritarian challenge. But I am no longer especially confident about the triumph of liberal democracy globally. At present, more than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries designated as either “partially free” or “unfree.” I hope to live to see those numbers improve, but I have come to regard authoritarianism as a perennial menace that we are unlikely to ever outgrow completely. Accordingly, any moves to dramatically increase people’s economic dependence on the central government strike me as putting humanity’s overall prospects for widespread flourishing at significant risk.
A successful economic independence movement, by contrast, offers a path to a more inclusive society in a way that reduces exposure to domination from all sources. Greater self-sufficiency at the household and local levels creates a measure of freedom from the system as a whole – that is, from both the market and the state. And I would argue that, for any society with a sizeable percentage of the population enjoying such material independence, the prospects for maintaining freedom for everyone in that society would be brightened considerably. Independent sources of income and wealth translate into independent social power, and therefore political power with which to check the expansion of government control. 
In trying to envision the next level of social development, surely a fundamental element of “living wisely and agreeably and well” is designing social institutions that minimize vulnerabilities to terrible outcomes. In addition to avoiding conditions that create openings for an intrusive and suffocating despotism, we must also strive to ensure that our social institutions are resilient in the face of external shocks. We need institutions that can simultaneously fend off tendencies toward excess centralized control and susceptibility to acute breakdowns of order.
As to the latter, we’ve got plenty to worry about. Holden Karnofsky, the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy and co-founder of GiveWell, has argued that the 21st century may well be the most important century in the history of humanity. His case rests on the assumption that artificial general intelligence is just around the corner: if we manage that transition well, we could be on our way to unimaginable wealth and the spread of humanity throughout the cosmos; but if we bungle things badly enough, the rise of AGI could spell the extinction of our species.
One needn’t buy into the philosophical premises underlying “longtermism,” or believe that the AGI millennium/apocalypse is imminent, to see that the stakes of the coming decades are unnervingly high. As I’ve discussed several times on this blog, we face a number of existential or at least civilizational risks apart from artificial intelligence: severe disruptions caused by worse-than-expected climate change, nuclear war, genetically engineered bioweapons, asteroid strikes, coronal mass ejections from the Sun that cause global blackouts, supervolcanoes. Some of these risks are under human control, some are not, but what is indisputably under our control is whether we take steps to mitigate our exposure to them.
The master strategy for making any system more resilient is the one-two punch of decentralization and redundancy. All large-scale complex systems are vulnerable to collapse; maintaining such systems is highly energy-intensive, so reversion to a simpler, lower-energy state is always an implicit possibility. But what really magnifies that vulnerability is the existence of single points of failure: elements within the system whose failure will cause the entire system to stop working. Just as, all things being equal, low, squat buildings hold up better in earthquakes than slender towers, smaller-scale social structures are likewise more durable. And a social system with lots of redundant elements can more easily route around damage and keep functioning. 
These basic principles help to explain the remarkable resilience of market economies. Consider the massive disruptions to global and domestic supply lines caused by the Covid pandemic: yes, there were price spikes, and temporary shortages of toilet paper and other items, but widely distributed adaptation – switching suppliers, retooling factories – kept the economy functioning to a remarkable degree. Or look at how Russia’s cutoff of gas supplies to Europe following its invasion of Ukraine failed to be the economic superweapon that Russia imagined it would be: rapid price hikes simultaneously restrained consumption and encouraged the shift to new sources of supply. There were difficulties, yes, but the lights stayed on. 
All this granted, those existential/civilizational risks I’ve mentioned could overwhelm even capitalism’s enormous capacity for adaptation – at least to the extent that global and national divisions of labor in key areas break down for considerable stretches of time. As interdependent as we have become under globalized capitalism, the reversion to shorter supply lines and simpler divisions of labor could mean death tolls in the billions. 
Under those dire circumstances, the scale of the loss could cause irreparable harm. If Taiwan’s semiconductor industry were wiped out, would we retain the engineering competence to replace what had been lost? If national electrical grids were knocked out for months, or years, would we ever figure out how to turn the lights back on? 
The present configuration of the global division of labor heightens the risk that single points of failure could trigger nationwide or global breakdowns. Economic incentives drive firms and governments to seek out short-term efficiencies from interdependence – at the possible cost of heightened fragility in the event of a crisis. But imagine a global economic independence movement that has been underway for decades: think of the immense, potentially civilization-rescuing value in having a large number of largely self-sufficient communities with advanced technological capabilities and know-how, widely distributed around the planet, with many located far from major population centers. The added decentralization and redundancy created by the proliferation of pioneer communities could be decisive in helping humanity to recover from otherwise debilitating shocks.
In the wake of Covid and on the cusp of a possible new Cold War with China, we are now in the process of reevaluating the tradeoffs between short-term efficiency and long-term resilience. Contemplation of even graver risks – tyranny on the one hand, chaos on the other – should motivate us to think even more deeply about those tradeoffs. To build a truly progressive society, we don’t just need institutions that facilitate human flourishing. We need institutions that are durable – and that put backstops in place to guard against regression. I fear that our present global monoculture system, with highly atomized populations that are heavily dependent on powerful states, is worrisomely vulnerable to both tyranny and collapse. This system, and the worldwide division of labor it coordinates and regulates, remains vitally important to human welfare, and it’s foolish to imagine that we can do without it for the foreseeable future. But we can alleviate some of the burdens that the system now carries, and create an independent counterweight to centralized authority, by balancing the system with counter-institutions that promote decentralization and redundancy. A successful economic independence movement would not only put us on the road to social progress; it would help to ensure that the road stays open and passable.
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After last summer’s ruling on abortion, attacks on the Supreme Court were inevitable. The majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health––that there is no constitutional right to abortion––broke with a long-standing precedent that a majority of the public supported while taking away a right that tens of millions valued, factors that stoked a backlash as significant as any the Court had seen in decades.What’s striking and harder to understand is the similarly furious backlash to the Supreme Court’s most recent term, which began in October 2022 and culminated in rulings announced this summer. That term encompasses 60 cases in total. The nonpartisan National Constitution Center flagged 13 of those cases as significant. Taken together, they show a Court that is broadly in step with public opinion and whose justices form shifting coalitions across ideological lines.But left-of-center critics have advanced a wildly different interpretation of this term. They have treated center-right rulings as confirmation of the Supreme Court’s awfulness, if not its illegitimacy.“This is not a normal court,” President Joe Biden said after the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities cannot implement affirmative-action policies in admissions that discriminate against candidates on the basis of race. “It’s done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any Court in recent history.”House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extremists on the Supreme Court are once again more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”The Representative Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat, told The Guardian, “When you look at how out of touch this court is with women’s rights, with racial equality, with voting rights, with the environment, with the challenges young people face, with LGBTQ+ rights, then you know they’re just out of touch. Many of these people couldn’t win elections for dogcatcher.”“The Supreme Court is out of control,” The New Republic’s editor, Michael Tomasky, asserted in a fundraising pitch for the magazine’s coverage of the Court.A professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, Mark Tushnet, even went so far as to send Biden an open letter urging him to disobey Supreme Court rulings at his own discretion in order “to restrain MAGA justices.” This argument shows no more regard for the rule of law and avoiding a constitutional crisis than did Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman before the January 6 riots.The Supreme Court is not beyond criticism. I disagree often with all of its members and many of its majorities. I believe its justices are ethically bound to report significant gifts and free travel. I’d prefer fixed terms to appointees hanging on to their seat until death. But commentary on the Court’s 2023 rulings is so histrionic as to mislead the public about what happened.[Linda Greenhouse: What in the world happened to the Supreme Court?]Though accused of naked partisanship, the Court handed down multiple significant rulings where justices appointed by presidents of different parties were in the majority and minority together. Multiple majority decisions featured GOP-appointed justices ruling against the actions of GOP legislators. The Court generally ruled in ways that were consistent with the popular will, not at odds with it. (Polls aggregated by The New York Times suggest that just one ruling strayed significantly from public opinion––a case that recognized the Environmental Protection Agency’s statutory jurisdiction over permanent bodies of water while ruling that the Clean Water Act does not give it jurisdiction over wetlands.)As for ideology, the Court’s judicial reasoning and outcomes alike suggest majorities that are more informed by small-l liberal values than the “right wing” or “extremist” values some antagonists allege. The justices safeguarded election integrity and voting rights in decisions that many Democrats cheered. And in two of the decisions that progressives complained about most, the Court stopped two powerful institutions from flagrantly discriminating against a racial-minority group and reined in a president who willfully exceeded his lawful authority by forgiving debt in a way that transferred wealth, overall, from poorer Americans to richer Americans.Taken together, the majority decisions of 2023 reflected the justices reasoning their way to legally defensible and practically workable conclusions, whether or not you happen to agree with them. Nothing about those rulings provides any basis at all for calling the legitimacy of the Court into question, and those doing so are being as misleading as they are shortsighted and imprudent.The Voting-Rights CasesIn two cases this term, Allen v. Milligan and Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court considered controversies pitting Republican-controlled state legislatures––one in Alabama, the other in North Carolina––against litigants alleging that their actions were undermining the fairness of elections.In Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of those arguing that the redistricting plan of Alabama Republicans likely violated the Voting Rights Act. And in Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court rejected the right-wing “independent legislature theory,” which posits that the Constitution gives state legislatures exclusive, unreviewable power to regulate federal elections. In an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a 6–3 majority ruled that North Carolina’s legislature does not have exclusive, independent authority over its own redistricting map: “When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”Both cases––indeed, the whole areas of law they pertain to––are sufficiently daunting in their complexity that, much as I like the outcomes, I hesitate to opine on their legal merits. They are relevant here because if the Court were in fact a right-wing institution where the GOP appointees use their majority to advance partisan outcomes without any regard for the law or long-standing precedent, the GOP-controlled legislatures would have prevailed in both cases.Instead, populist-right GOP plans lost in both cases. (Similarly, in United States v. Texas, an 8–1 majority ruled that Texas and Louisiana, two other states controlled by Republicans, lack standing under Article III of the Constitution to challenge Biden’s immigration-enforcement policy.) And some observers regard Moore v. Harper as vital to defending American democracy against populist-right efforts to steal elections like those in 2020.“The Supreme Court’s decision strips away the foundation of G.O.P. arguments that the [2020] election was legally problematic because of state court interventions,” the lawyer and commentator David French argued. “Such interventions did not inherently violate the federal Constitution, and the state legislatures did not have extraordinary constitutional autonomy to independently set election rules. In regard to 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court’s decision eliminates the ability of a rogue legislature to set new electoral rules immune from judicial review … In other words, the conventional checks and balances of American law will still apply.”Affirmative ActionWhat if I told you that one of the oldest, most powerful corporations in America was engaged in institutionalized racial discrimination against a historically marginalized group; that young people who wanted to join the institution were assigned “personal ratings” by its officials; and that when those ratings were analyzed, members of the minority group were systematically rated as relatively deficient in traits such as “integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness, fortitude, empathy, self-confidence, leadership ability, maturity, or grit” when compared with white people?That is just part of the ugly reality of the admissions system that Harvard covertly implemented over the many years in which it was racially discriminating against Asian applicants. In different ways, the University of North Carolina discriminated against the same cohort. How absurd that far-flung American teenagers from the diaspora of the gargantuan, wildly diverse continent of Asia were––on the basis of retrograde racial pseudoscience––treated as a coherent group and forced to compete among one another for spots.[Read: The end of affirmative action. For real this time.]The majority opinion in the combined cases of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina struck down colleges’ ability to engage in racial discrimination in the name of affirmative action. Reasonable observers can differ as to whether the scope of the majority decision was appropriate or whether the racist policies should have been struck down more narrowly. But the majority got the most important question right: Neither the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Civil Rights Act permits flagrant racial discrimination on the basis of Asian ancestry.And moral clarity on that question was not just ethically important; it was politically important too. When progressives defend old-age entitlements such as Social Security, they grasp that the universality of such programs is inseparable from their long-term popularity. The same is true for our civil-rights infrastructure. Insofar as that infrastructure protects everyone in our multiethnic nation from the indignity of racial discrimination, everyone will have a stake in conserving it. In contrast, if civil-rights law protects Black people from elites who would assign them inferior “personal ratings” but does not protect Asian people––if it may or may not protect Latinos and definitely won’t protect white people––many will have an interest in its collapse.Free Speech and NondiscriminationThe case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis concerns two different aspects of law that most Americans value highly: First Amendment protections that prevent the state from compelling speech, especially speech at odds with a person’s political or religious beliefs or their conscience, and civil-rights protections that prevent businesses from discriminating against would-be customers on the basis of race or sex, gender, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics. What happens when free speech and nondiscrimination protections are in tension?A law at issue, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, prohibits a public accommodation from denying “the full and equal enjoyment” of goods or services to any customer based on disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.Lorie Smith runs a small business that sells graphic design, website design, and marketing. She wanted to start creating bespoke wedding websites that include her original art and prose celebrating the marriages of clients. In keeping with her religious tradition, which teaches that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, she does not believe that same-sex weddings in fact result in marriages. Smith feared that if she began creating wedding websites at all, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission would compel her to offer her services to couples planning same-sex weddings.She was generally willing to serve gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans customers as clients for projects unrelated to weddings, and was generally unwilling to do creative work for anyone of any sexual orientation if the work violated her beliefs––for example, by encouraging violence, demeaning someone, or promoting atheism.Like most Americans, I don’t much like Smith’s beliefs about same-sex marriage. But is her refusal to perform creative work that affirms gay unions as marriage functionally the same or legally distinct from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation? And under the Constitution, if Smith began designing wedding websites, could the state compel her to create such a website, featuring her original artwork and prose, celebrating a same-sex marriage?Under a cartoonishly maximalist approach to First Amendment concerns and an imprudently minimalist approach to public-accommodation concerns, the law could treat the act of selling any good or service as an expressive activity. A gas-station owner could decline to sell fuel to a lesbian couple; an innkeeper could refuse to rent them a room; a bartender could refuse to shake their cocktails. Under a cartoonishly maximalist approach to nondiscrimination law, the state could coerce and compel most any creative professional (an artist, a speechwriter, a journalist) to create things they abhor. To cite Judge Timothy Tymkovich’s dissent in the district-court ruling, an unwilling Muslim movie director could be compelled to make a film with a Zionist message; an atheist muralist could be made to accept a commission celebrating evangelical zeal.To avoid such extremes, it helps to distinguish among cases.For example: Is the good or service being offered truly expressive, like supplying an event with a comedian emcee or a keynote speech, or nonexpressive, like supplying an event with electricity or folding chairs? Will refusal to provide a service impose a heavy burden on the would-be customer, like the only gas station in town refusing to sell fuel to a gay couple? Or will the burden be tiny or nonexistent, as would be the case if one trans-owned craft store didn’t want to sell candles to a Catholic parish in a city with an IKEA, a Costco, and Amazon Prime delivery?What’s unusual about 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is that both sides in the case agreed on a lot of such distinctions. The majority opinion, by Justice Neil Gorsuch, summarizes those undisputed matters: Smith will “gladly create” graphics and websites for clients of any sexual orientation. She will not create content that “contradicts biblical truth” for clients of any sexual orientation. Her belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman is “a sincerely held religious conviction.” The websites Smith plans “will be expressive in nature,” and will express her beliefs while celebrating her view of what marriage is under her own name, with attribution. And if Smith refuses a customer, numerous other companies “offer custom website design services.”[David French: The most consequential First Amendment case this term]Because Colorado stipulated all of that, it was, in effect, taking a relatively maximalist position: Smith must make websites for gay marriages, if she makes wedding websites at all, even if the work is original creative expression that sets forth her views and values under her own name; even if her representations are earnest, such that she is generally willing to make websites for gay clients and generally unwilling to make websites at odds with her faith in ways that have nothing to do with gay people; and even if gay couples will have no trouble finding other custom-website designers.Gorsuch– (who also wrote the majority opinion in the 2020 case that found that “the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination”) wrote in his majority opinion that under Colorado’s logic, “the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic—no matter the underlying message—if the topic somehow implicates a customer’s statutorily protected trait. Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty.”Gorsuch also takes care to clarify that “we do not question the vital role public accommodations laws play in realizing the civil rights of all Americans,” noting the Court’s ongoing recognition of “a ‘compelling interest’ in eliminating discrimination in places of public accommodation,” and specifying that state governments can protect the access of gay people specifically to “innumerable goods and services that no one could argue implicate the First Amendment.”Although the ruling is clear that many public-accommodations laws pass constitutional muster while some “sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech,” how to decide edge cases is less clear. “Determining what qualifies as expressive activity protected by the First Amendment can sometimes raise difficult questions,” Gorsuch writes. “But this case presents no complication of that kind.” If some future ruling allows a refusal to do business with gay people because of their sexual orientation itself, or starts treating every restaurant owner, innkeeper, plumber, mechanic, and dentist as a creative professional, I’ll worry intensely about the consequences for gay people trying to navigate society equally. But this ruling does not go there.As for its practical consequences: Are same-sex couples going to have trouble finding vendors for creative wedding work? Thankfully, no. Seventy-one percent of Americans support gay marriage, as do 89 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor frets that a graphic designer refusing to make websites for same-sex weddings will stigmatize gay people; I think wedding-industry folks who refuse to work on same-sex weddings are more likely to create a stigma around their own business. And how many engaged gay couples even want to hire a creative professional who strongly opposes gay marriage to collaborate with them on their wedding?Looking back on this case in 20 years, I suspect we’ll conclude that the Court struck a reasonable, practical balancing of rights that continued to afford substantial protections against discrimination in public accommodations––and that its compelled-speech precedent will be invoked again and again by Americans, including gay people and progressives, to vindicate their rights against state actors being coercive in ways that we haven’t even yet anticipated.The Student-Debt CasesIn Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown, the Court considered the Biden administration’s attempt to cancel student-loan debt. Was the president lawfully empowered to do such a thing, or was he usurping power that properly belongs to Congress? In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled that the Biden administration’s secretary of education “asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not.”Reacting to the decision, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer declared, “This disappointing and cruel student debt ruling shows the callousness of the MAGA Republican-controlled Supreme Court.” Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren complained that the Court “refuses to follow the plain language of the law on student loan cancellation,” as if student-loan-debt cancellation was not just lawful but obviously so, such that any contrary finding was bad-faith obstinacy. Love or hate the ruling, those critiques are egregiously misleading.That Biden exceeded the lawful authority of the executive branch is not a view original or exclusive to MAGA Republicans. In 2021, the Office of the General Counsel at the Department of Education was asked to weigh in on whether the secretary of education had statutory authority to cancel, discharge, or forgive student loans. “We believe the Secretary does not have the statutory authority,” the resulting memorandum stated in a detailed legal analysis.On July 28, 2021, Representative Nancy Pelosi was asked about different approaches to canceling student-loan debt. “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” she said. “He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress … The president can only postpone, delay, but not forgive.”Charlie Rose, the top lawyer in President Barack Obama’s Education Department from 2009 to 2011, wrote a legal memo dated May 7, 2021, analyzing the Biden administration’s plan for his law firm, according to The Wall Street Journal. “If the issue is litigated,” the memo stated, “the more persuasive analyses tend to support the conclusion that the Executive Branch likely does not have the unilateral authority to engage in mass student debt cancellation.”Elizabeth Goitein is an expert on presidential powers who was counsel to progressive then-Senator Russ Feingold and a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice. She addressed the student-loan controversy in a 2022 Washington Post op-ed. “Biden cannot use emergency powers to forgive certain private student loan debts or debts incurred after the covid-19 emergency declaration lapses,” she wrote. “Sidelining Congress through emergency powers means sidelining the checks and balances that safeguard our liberties and democracy.”One needn’t even agree with the general counsel at the Department of Education, or the point of view that Pelosi expressed in 2021, or Rose, or Goitein, to see the egregious dishonesty of characterizations like those made by Warren: It is simply false that any reasonable person who reads the plain text of the law sides with Biden. And Congress is free to cancel student-loan debt anytime. The only obstacle to its doing so is the inability of those who favor cancellation to pass such a law, because of insufficient support for it among America’s elected representatives. That is not on the Supreme Court.Unanimous and Near-Unanimous DecisionsThe most interesting and comprehensible of the unanimous decisions is Groff v. DeJoy. This case concerns Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian who took a job with the United States Postal Service back when that didn’t involve having to work on the Christian sabbath. But times changed: USPS made a deal with Amazon to make deliveries on Sundays.To continue observing the sabbath as directed in the Ten Commandments, Groff transferred to escape Amazon’s delivery footprint, ultimately winding up in tiny Holtwood, Pennsylvania, but Amazon, resting for neither man nor God, expanded there too. Groff then started getting written up for refusing to labor on Sundays. So he sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In his telling, USPS could accommodate his religious belief “without undue hardship.” For a unanimous Court, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “undue hardship” is shown “when a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business,” not when there is any trifling cost (a standard that some lower courts were erroneously adopting due to language in a bygone case). Employers “must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business,” the Court ruled.For better or worse, it sided with a worker against the interests of a large employer. It is likely to marginally benefit religious workers of all faiths while marginally burdening corporations and other businesses. How does this square with characterizations of the Court as “right-wing”?Less important for our purposes than the details of Jack Daniel’s Properties v. VIP Products LLC, a case about a dog toy shaped like a Jack Daniel’s bottle, or the combined Gonzalez v. Google LLC and Twitter, Inc. v. Taamneh, which concern the responsibilities of social-media companies subject to laws that regulate content, is the fact that all nine justices were able to reach consensus.The Court also handed down a 7–2 decision about what constitutes a true threat under the First Amendment; Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas dissented. Another 7–2 case, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. v. Goldsmith, concerns the professional photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who took a photo in 1981 of the up-and-coming musician Prince. She later granted Vanity Fair a one-time-only license to use the Prince photo as an “artist reference for an illustration”––which turned out to mean that Vanity Fair hired the famous pop artist Andy Warhol to do an illustration of Prince. Warhol created a bunch of different images based on the photo. Among his creations was a silk-screen portrait, Orange Prince, that Vanity Fair’s parent company reused for a 2016 cover. Was that an infringement of the photographer’s copyright or fair use?Siding with the photographer, Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion, joined by Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett, as well as Ketanji Brown Jackson and Brett Kavanagh. Dissenting together were Roberts and Elena Kagan. I have no idea who got that one right, but the shifting coalitions of justices undermine the reductionist narrative of partisans siding with their team.The StakesInaccurate characterizations of major institutions are always worth correcting, but the stakes are especially high when the Supreme Court is attacked inaccurately by those seeking to undermine it.Insofar as the Court loses its standing and legitimacy, it loses its ability to check and balance future abuses of power by other branches of government and all of its precedents lose their standing.The right finds it easier to see the value of a legitimate Supreme Court now that it is sometimes winning. Progressives smarting from last term’s abortion decision might think, on first instinct, that it would be good if the Court lost its influence. But that is shortsighted. Because of Dobbs, the question of abortion has been returned to the political branches of government. If the high court lost its power in American life, proponents of abortion rights would be no better off––the matter would still turn on elected officials at the federal and state levels.Whereas if the Court lost its legitimacy––if the people and the political branches ceased to respect its rulings––Americans would lose rights and protections as varied as the constraints on law enforcement in Miranda, the press protections in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, and the marriage-rights protections in Obergefell. Absent a strong Supreme Court, I tremble to think how the most retrograde Deep South legislators would draw redistricting maps and constrain voting rights.So what would I suggest for Democrats and progressives who dislike the current Court majority and wish to reverse its rulings? Harken back to the days of the Warren Court, regarded by many as an especially left-leaning era, and the days of the Rehnquist Court and beyond, when conservatives thought they’d succeeded in electing presidents who appointed a majority they liked, only to see abortion and affirmative action upheld. In those days, when conservatives were losing ground, or failing to win it back despite decades of effort, what would you have seen as legitimate criticism and what would you have regarded as corrosive attacks on the legitimacy of the judiciary? Let that––and truth––be your guides. Meanwhile, practice tolerance, forbearance, and persuasion, and win elections. Another era of the Court always comes.

A few years ago, I was invited to a military meeting in Australia. When I walked into the room, I expected to see Australian officers. Instead, the room was awash in American and British uniforms, plus smaller numbers of New Zealanders, and I thought I could make out a couple of Canadians in the distance. It drove home to me that the Five Eyes was not just an agreement on intelligence sharing but a functioning military alliance without the paperwork or, more precisely, with much paperwork that taken together achieved uncertainty. The members of the Five Eyes, for different reasons, did not want to formalize what existed in practice.

The Five Eyes, without the cool name, originated in World War II. Having common enemies, the five nations created a set of alliances to defeat them – and obviously, to share intelligence. Before joining the war, the Americans supported Britain. The Australians also sent forces. In our house, we have a picture of my Australian wife’s cousin, who was shot down on a recon mission flying with the Brits over Germany. After Pearl Harbor and the British defeat in Singapore, the United States became the center of gravity of the Pacific war, with the Australians providing forces and bases in Australia, along with New Zealand. The Canadians had aligned early with Britain. Other nations were involved, but these five had the advantage of having a common language, if not quite a common culture. The American forces grew larger than the British, and many warm discussions were held between British and American commanders. Mistrust still existed, just as it does between and within all services fighting the same war.

War has its foundation in intelligence, in knowing the enemy. The British excelled at human intelligence in Europe and code-breaking. The Americans similarly broke the Japanese code, but they did not have intelligence in Japan or in the island chain they were fighting for. Australia could not provide human intelligence from Japan, but it could provide coast watchers in the Solomons and other islands, reporting on the movement of Japanese warships and Japanese landings. The Five Eyes coordinated operations, from invasions to logistics, but in many ways, the key was the intelligence that they could provide.

The relationship was not formalized. It was simply essential. It remained in place after the beginning of the Cold War based on a simple formula. Any of the five members would share intelligence, if not methods of collection, with the others.

The military side of the Cold War saw intense cooperation between the British and the Americans, with the British holding northern Germany and the Americans the central front. Fearing a potential Soviet nuclear attack, the Americans needed to detect incoming missiles as far away as possible. So, the Distant Early Warning Line was built in northern Canada, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, based in Colorado, was established, giving the Canadians access to U.S. intelligence and methods for protecting North America. To face off against China, the Australians developed a navy to join the U.S. in the Pacific, where the British were always present. The New Zealanders chose to be prickly, denying U.S. access to their ports unless the U.S. certified that no nuclear weapons were on board its ships. The U.S. refused.

The point I am trying to make is that the Five Eyes was from the beginning, even before the term existed, a military alliance designed to fight in World War II and to collaborate in the Cold War. Each country had other alliances and sometimes shared alliances, but the Five Eyes constitutes a unique relationship of shared interests. At the beginning of the Cold War, the United States became the center of the Five Eyes. But the point is that the alliance members shared the American burden, however ill-advised they may have thought the venture. When the United States invaded Iraq, the British took responsibility for southern Iraq. New Zealand refused combat but did send troops to Afghanistan.

There is an economic dimension to this relationship that is rarely noticed. The Five Eyes nations combined have about 7 percent of the world’s population but over 28 percent of its gross domestic product. There is no common Five Eyes market, but there is a series of bilateral trade agreements intense in joint ventures of various sorts. Obviously, the American economy is the largest, but on a per capita basis all of the countries should be seen as economic successes, domestic grumbling noted.

In practice, the Five Eyes has never been simply an intelligence-sharing agreement. It also entails cooperation as a military-political force. We see this in Ukraine, where Britain and the U.S. are playing roles together, and in the Pacific against China, where the U.S. and Australian navies – including, in time, nuclear submarines – operate, in addition to coordinating economic pressure. The U.S. Congress is in the process of authorizing the implementation of the trilateral AUKUS agreement to, along with the U.K., give Australia nuclear-powered submarines. This would mark a further deepening, operationally and technologically, of the cooperation between three members of the Five Eyes. Additionally, Australia and the U.K. are pushing for more cooperation on other technologies such as hypersonic weapons and quantum computing.

As I said, each country has many allies. But in history, military capability and economic power, the Five Eyes is unique. They have come together out of geopolitical imperatives, but one can’t ignore that the Five Eyes countries are the heirs of English culture. All nations have immigrants and histories of oppressing minorities. Nevertheless, the Five Eyes became a combined global power because, as much as they irritate each other, they also understand each other as only heirs of a tradition could. That creates an international cement that is not present in NATO or in the Chinese-Russian alliance.

I was comfortable at the meeting because I understood the jokes being told. I don’t always get them in Hungary, where I was born. Understanding snide remarks is not a bad foundation for alliances.

Part of what made Students for Fair Admissions’ case before the Supreme Court so compelling was the data. It was very hard to look at the numbers and not conclude that discrimination was involved in Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions practices. This week on The Glenn Show, John and I are joined by the man behind that data, Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono. I feel like we’ve been talking about this case for a long time, but Peter signed onto the project back in 2015. He’s a modest guy, but in my view a considerable amount of the credit for SFFA’s victory belongs to him.

Peter is an economist before all else, and he walks John and I through some of the work that went into the case. As he explains, the statistical analysis he worked up for SFFA is only part of his longstanding social scientific interest in college admissions. Some of his work is even being cited in attempts to get rid of legacy admissions. Ending legacies would suit John just fine, but to me it seems incorrect to conflate clearly discriminatory admissions policies and the institutional discretion involved in admitting legacies and athletes. Peter’s work goes a long way toward revealing what’s really going on behind the scenes in university admissions offices, and to him one thing is clear: Colleges are not being honest about their policies.

Despite his work with SFFA, Peter hasn’t received much blowback within academia. Compare his situation to that of Roland Fryer, whose work on race and policing challenged the company line. As Peter says, academia’s loss may result in greater gains for all if Roland’s innovative new businesses bear fruit. To conclude the conversation, we discuss how, if universities take a more open and honest approach to the data at their disposal, they could change education for the better. I hope they’re listening.

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Former President Donald Trump has been indicted for a third time.
The latest set of charges, announced Tuesday evening by special prosecutor Jack Smith, are related to Trump's conduct in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, including the attempt on January 6, 2021, to disrupt the certification of the election by Congress.
Specifically, Trump has been charged with four counts related to three criminal conspiracies. Prosecutors say Trump attempted to "defraud the United States" by trying to prevent the lawful process of counting and certifying the results of the presidential election. He's also charged with trying to "obstruct and impede" the vote-certification process in Congress—which includes two separate charges for the obstruction itself and the related conspiracy to obstruct. Finally, he's also charged with "a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one's vote counted."
You might think about the three parts of the indictment as a helpful breakdown of the three ways in which Trump and his allies—there are six unnamed and so far uncharged co-conspirators mentioned in the indictment—attempted to subvert the presidential election process.
The first charge is focused on the attempt, allegedly organized within the White House, to have Trump-friendly state lawmakers appoint alternate slates of electors to the Electoral College as part of a scheme that would see Trump named as the winner of states where President Joe Biden received more votes.
The second and third charges are aimed at Trump's (and his allies') behavior on and near January 6, 2021, when Congress was scheduled to certify the election results. That includes the pressure allegedly applied to Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with the Trump-backed plot to discard the electoral votes from some states.
Finally, the third alleged conspiracy includes a civil rights charge that strikes at how Trump's machinations aimed to rob Americans of their right to choose the president.
"Each of these conspiracies—which built on the widespread mistrust the Defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud—targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election," prosecutors argue in the indictment.
Taken together, then, Smith's indictment outlines how the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election harmed voters, the state-level vote-counting process, and the country's democratic process at a high level.
In a statement posted to the Truth Social social media platform, Trump said the charges were "nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt" by the Biden administration to "interfere in the 2024 presidential election." He predicted that those "un-American witch hunts will fail."
Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland but is operating independently of the Biden administration. Smith's January 6th investigation included dozens of subpoenas issued to just about everyone in Trump's inner circle on that day, including Vice President Mike Pence, who was a target of the rioters' ire.
The 45-page indictment goes into significant detail about how Trump knew his claims about the presidential election were false. Trump "widely disseminated his false claims of election fraud for months, despite the fact that he knew, and in many cases had been informed directly, that they were not true," the indictment claims, before listing seven examples of times when other officials and aids told Trump he was making false claims.
Tuesday's indictment comes after he was charged in April with 34 counts of business fraud by prosecutors in New York. Those alleged crimes, to which Trump has pleaded not guilty, are related to payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement.
That was followed in June by a federal indictment for mishandling classified documents. Smith, who is also leading that investigation, brought 37 federal felony charges against the former president, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, willful retention of national defense information (in violation of the Espionage Act), and concealing documents from investigators and a grand jury. In an updated indictment filed this week, Smith tacked on new charges of obstruction of justice relating to Trump allegedly telling a staffer to cover up the attempt to hide boxes of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the Floridian resort where the former president has resided since leaving office. Trump has pleaded not guilty to those charges as well.
And yet another set of charges—perhaps the most serious of the bunch—may be waiting. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump's alleged attempts to strong-arm Georgia officials into overturning the results of that state's 2020 presidential vote. Witnesses interviewed by the grand jury included former Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.).
In letters to local law enforcement released in April, Willis said possible criminal charges against Trump and his allies would be announced before September 1.
Trump was already the first president or former president in American history to be charged with a crime. He's now the first to face criminal charges on three different fronts at the same time.
The post Trump Indicted for Attempting To Overturn 2020 Presidential Election appeared first on Reason.com.

Joe Biden is unwittingly neutralizing Donald Trump’s biggest political negatives. Biden, elected in 2020 as a conventional and noncontroversial pre-Trump figure, is mired in controversy. Questions about his involvement in his son Hunter’s shady foreign business are mounting. On Monday, Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner and fellow employee of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, reportedly testified before the House Oversight Committee that Joe Biden was present on speakerphone more than 20 times when Hunter was meeting with foreign business associates. This contradicts Joe’s repeated claims that he and Hunter never discussed business. Archer is also reported to have said that Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma, pressured Hunter in an effort to get the U.S. to oust Ukrainian prosecutor-general Viktor Shokin. The prosecutor was then fired in part at the behest of Joe Biden. All this is aside from open questions about possible Justice Department efforts to cover up pertinent evidence and protect the Bidens. While Trump faces scores of federal charges and multiple court cases, Joe Biden stands to lose more politically from his current predicament than does Trump from his own ongoing scandals.

Trump is a shockingly transgressive figure. But shock doesn’t last. In fact, repeated exposure to traumatic stimulus inures you to it. Clinical psychologists call this exposure therapy. In 2023, year eight of ceaseless Trump transgression, Americans are pretty well inured. But Joe Biden as a greedy and unprincipled influence peddler—that’s new. According to a cognitive bias known plainly as the bizarreness effect, unexpected phenomena tend to be more attention worthy and more memorable than ordinary events. Unlike Trump’s legal challenges, Joe Biden’s new troubles are unexpected. For all Trump’s outlandishness, there’s something more salient about Biden’s predicament.

That’s the dime-store psychology of it. But there’s the simple political reality. As the Hunter plot thickens—and it’s already quite thick—President Biden will find it harder and harder to draw a credible contrast between himself and the man he wants to paint as the mortal enemy of American democracy.

Biden is neutralizing Trump’s negatives on two fronts. First, if the most viable alternative to Trump is a president who might have been involved in an influence-peddling racket, voters will be inclined to reweigh the relative faults of the two men. What’s worse: a pathological liar whose belief in his own lies led him to reject the results of a presidential election or a utilitarian liar who might have leveraged the highest offices of government to make millions of dollars off of foreign tycoons and oligarchs and then use his power to cover it up? It’s a depressing question, but not an unreasonable one.

Second, if Biden has in fact used his political power to get rich and systematically cover it up (and this is still very much an if), then Trump’s accusations of a thoroughly crooked establishment start to look more legitimate than voters had previously realized. Surely no one aware of Hunter’s blown-up plea deal (not to mention the coordinated disinformation campaign to bury his incriminating laptop) is thinking that everything looks to be on the up and up in Bidenland. And if a president can exert his will to bend the pillars of justice, how far-fetched is it to wonder whether he did so to sideline his most likely opponent in the next election? It’s no secret among Republicans or Democrats that New York DA Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump is a politically motivated reach. Disaffected Americans may start to see a dark pattern even in cases, such as the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents matter, in which Trump practically launched a sting operation to catch himself.

Yes, Donald Trump is widely and passionately hated. And this hatred, along with genuine horror at the prospect of another Trump presidency, may be all that’s needed to keep him out of the White House. But according to CNN’s Harry Enten, Trump is in far better shape nationally than most people realize. And Joe Biden is working furiously to take the heat off the Republican frontrunner.

  Courtesy of our friends at Civita, American Purpose is republishing an excerpt from Mathilde Fasting’s conversation with Francis Fukuyama. This transcript has been lightly edited, and a recording of the full conversation is available.Mathilde Fasting: Twenty years ago, you wrote a book called Our Post-Human Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. How do you see the ability to modify human behavior or biology affecting liberal democracy?Francis Fukuyama: In the late '90s, I was running a seminar on new technologies and their impact, focusing on both IT and biotech. At the time, I believed that the biotech revolution could have more significant consequences, and I still think that may be true. While we have witnessed the downsides of social media and information technology in the interim, the biotech revolution has the potential to affect human behavior and biology, thus influencing liberal democracy.The reason I believe biotech could have significant political effects is because it provides tools for certain individuals to control the behavior of others. Totalitarianism in the 20th century demonstrated the attempts of highly centralized governments to control the behavior of their populations using techniques like agitation, propaganda, re-education, and police state enforcement. However, these methods proved insufficient in the long run, as seen with the breakdown of the Soviet Union and China's struggles to control its population.Biomedical technologies, particularly germline interventions that can alter heritable human characteristics, could have a profound impact on our understanding of human rights. Human rights are based on our implicit or explicit understanding of human nature, and the most crucial rights are those that respond to the core aspects of being human. Manipulating human nature through biotechnology could ultimately change the nature of rights.It's important to note that germline engineering is not the only technology with the potential to control behavior. Psychopharmacological interventions and the use of drugs to regulate mood and behavior have already revolutionized our ability to influence behavior. For instance, we currently use drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac and Xanax and amphetamines such as Ritalin to control behavior in children. These interventions will likely increase in the future.However, the IT revolution has had more noticeable short-term impacts, particularly in the realm of social media. Initially, many of us believed that increased access to information would be democratizing and beneficial for democracy. We thought that spreading power through increased information access would be positive. While power has indeed devolved, we have also witnessed the elimination of hierarchical structures that certified and verified the quality of information. As a result, a lack of trust permeates societies, and we now struggle not only with disagreements about values but also with an inability to agree on simple factual information.This lack of trust has fueled polarization, as different factions hold contrasting understandings of reality. In the United States, for example, there is a deep divide where one group believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and no amount of contrary information can sway their belief. This polarization based on divergent understandings of reality poses a danger, and the forthcoming AI revolution may exacerbate this issue. The verifiability of digital artifacts will become increasingly challenging, making it difficult to authenticate information.For instance, the advent of deep fakes and advanced image manipulation techniques such as generative fill-in programs like Photoshop raise concerns about the authenticity of digital documents. The decline in trust in digital evidence will extend to social institutions in general.In the future, this lack of trust and the increasing sophistication of interventions will pose challenges in various domains, including in legal proceedings. Authentication of evidence, such as photographic proof in court cases, may be met with skepticism and accusations of manipulation or fabrication.MF: Can you say something about biotech and the post-human future? I remember that you wrote something about differences between the West and China when it comes to manipulating things, and I'd like you to elaborate a bit on that.FF: I think that one of the problems is in regulation. If you look at the history of technology, it's always been this race between technological development and the ability of societies to regulate it. And it always takes a long time for that to happen. Think of the printing press when Gutenberg invented movable type. This had a great impact on the Protestant Reformation, for one thing, and the spread of different ideas or challenges to the Catholic Church. That led to 150 years of religious warfare, and eventually, people reconciled themselves to printing. You think about radio, television, their relationship to the rise of fascism and Stalinism. These were technologies that allowed dictators to connect to mass audiences. It took time, but we've kind of figured out how to regulate and deal with those kinds of technologies.There's going to be a lag between the time that the technology is introduced and the time that society can catch up with it. With biotech, it's very hard to regulate. I have a colleague at Stanford who works with high school students. There's a kind of standardized biotech lab that can do different kinds of interventions using the CRISPR technology that fits inside a shipping container. Many high schools are having competitions with their students that want to do this kind of genetic manipulation. What my colleague does is to create a set of norms that these student groups will follow because it is impossible to monitor what they're doing. So, how do we regulate nuclear weapons and other dangerous technology? Well, we've got overhead satellite photographs and we've got nuclear inspectors and so forth. And because it requires a country to actually engage in that kind of industrial production of nuclear fuel, we can pretty much monitor what's going on in North Korea, Iran, and this sort of thing. With biotech, it's impossible. The technology does not require large facilities, it's very widespread, and the only way that you can hope to regulate it is through some kind of normative intervention that will give the researchers standards that they need to impose on themselves.And a lot of the work that's being done is very scary. I have another Stanford colleague who runs a biomedical research lab and has been really worried about this. You're probably following the controversy over the Wuhan lab leak, which was dismissed by many people as right-wing propaganda. But now there's evidence that indicates that the whole COVID epidemic was the result of sloppy security at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We can expect further things: This colleague of mine has another scary briefing about how an American researcher downloaded the genetic code for a monkeypox virus that he created in his lab. This wasn't a virus that was created from another virus; it was simply digital information that was available to anyone on the Internet. And he used this to create a completely novel variant of monkeypox that could be much more virulent than the existing one. And what's going to prevent the spread of this? The only way that you can monitor whether anyone in the world is doing this kind of research is to depend on the responsibility of the organizations and the individual scientists that are working on this sort of thing. And it's very hard to know at what point somebody's going to breach those norms and do very dangerous things.I spent a long time in the early 2000s thinking about how to regulate biotechnology. One thing I observed and felt was that this stuff is going to happen in Asia long before it's going to happen in Europe or in the United States because, frankly, this is a cultural thing. In countries with a Christian religious heritage, there is a belief in a fairly sharp dichotomy between human and non-human nature. There is a belief that God endowed human beings with a certain degree of dignity that non-human nature doesn't have. This belief forms the basis for our understanding of human rights or the universality of human rights. But it also means a kind of downgrading of the natural world on the other side of this dichotomy.In most Asian cultural traditions, this dichotomy doesn't really exist. There is a continuum from non-human nature to human nature, and the ability to manipulate one spills over into the other. In fact, China was the first country where a germline experiment on a human embryo was conducted. Although it was shut down, and the scientist involved was punished, I believe that these cultural inhibitions will be much stronger in Europe and North America than in other parts of Asia.So, this is the larger problem of regulating technology of any sort. You can decide to regulate it within your territorial jurisdiction, but it's going to happen somewhere else. This is also the problem with the idea of regulating AI. If we do it in Europe or the United States, we still have competition with China and other big countries. They might pull ahead, and we'll ask ourselves, "Are we self-limiting this critical technology that will then be developed by somebody else and used against us?" Unless we have a global regulatory scheme, we're stuck in this competition.MF: Previously, you wrote in American Purpose on the possible social impacts of AI. Even if you say that it's a fool's errand to predict the long term, for instance, of social consequences of AI and technology, can you tell me what we know so far about the overall effect of social media, the Internet, and technology on democracy?FF: If you think about the transformation that has occurred over the last fifty years with the rise of a whole class of information technologies, there's a broad conclusion by economists that it has increased socioeconomic inequality. There's something to this because right now the main social divide in most countries, most certainly in most advanced democracies, is one that is really based on education. And if you have a higher education, if you've gone to the University of Oslo or you have a degree, you're doing well, your income is much higher, and the gap between those people and people with just a high school education or less has grown enormously—almost everywhere. There's no question that much of the current populism that we see around the world is fuelled by that division, that people that vote for populist politicians are usually less educated people. They don't live in big cities, they are not connected to a kind of larger global economy, and that is upsetting our democratic politics.However, one consequence that I don't think people have recognized sufficiently is a massive decrease in inequality that was brought about by the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, and that concerns gender relations. The replacement of physical labor by machines and the shift in the nature of work from an industrial economy to a post-industrial one—in which most people instead of working in factories or lifting heavy objects, are sitting in front of computer screens all day in a service industry—has had an enormous impact on the role of women in the economy. Beginning in the late 1960s, virtually every advanced society began to see significant increases in female labor force participation. Now, some people might say this was an ideological or a cultural change, that there was a movement for women's equality that appeared at that time. This is one of those areas where I think cause and effect are very hard to disentangle. It is certainly the case that you could not have had the degree of female empowerment if you didn't have occupations for women where they could earn salaries, support families, and be independent of their husbands. And this began to happen as tens, hundreds of millions of women all over the world entered the workplace in the late 20th century.And so the consequences of technological change are complicated and hard to foresee. The shift to digitization has had both positive and negative impacts. But it's very hard to say that overall, it's simply increased inequality.Audience member: Do you think that artificial intelligence will further accelerate democratic decline, or do you think that there's light at the end of the tunnel?FF: I think there are two clear challenges that the current generation of artificial intelligence poses for democracy. Firstly, there is the general dissolution of our certainty about the information we receive. Deep fakes make it difficult to determine the authenticity of anything we see on the Internet. However, there are AI-based authentication technologies that can be used to certify the provenance of a particular digital artifact. Regulation needs to catch up with technology because once we recognize the general problem of mistrust, we need technological means to verify the authenticity of digital content. The solution is not to ban the technology but to use it for control and verification.The second challenge is an intensification of what already exists. Social media has been effective at manipulating people through targeted advertising. With artificial intelligence, targeting can become smarter and more adaptive. Once people realize they are being targeted, the manipulation can change automatically by machines, which poses difficulties in detection. I've observed this on Twitter, where the coverage of the Ukraine war shifted subtly after Elon Musk took over, showing less pro-Ukrainian content and more sympathetic content towards Russia. This subtle manipulation can have cumulative effects over time.On the question of totalitarian control, China's social credit system represents a new level of individual monitoring made possible by machine learning and large-scale data analysis. With the integration of COVID monitoring and the general social control system, China now has extensive knowledge of an individual's whereabouts, social interactions, and conversations. While it is a powerful form of control, even such high levels of monitoring have not always yielded the desired outcome, as seen when people protested against zero COVID measures.It is challenging to predict the effectiveness of these technologies in undermining democracy. In many cases, using technology to counter the negative impacts of technology might be our best solution.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Mathilde Fasting is a project manager and fellow at Civita, a Norwegian think tank dedicated to liberal ideas, institutions, and policies based on individual liberty and personal responsibility.Image: An AI-generated image using the prompt "democracy in the age of artificial intelligence." (Images.ai)

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. 
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
In the last couple of essays, I’ve started to discuss “economic independence” as a goal for social progress. The idea is to reinvigorate families and communities by empowering them to reassume some of the responsibilities that are now outsourced to the market and the state. Thus far I have presented economic independence solely as a response to capitalism’s crisis of inclusion – that is, as a way to create conditions more favorable for human flourishing outside the relatively narrow confines of the professional, managerial, and entrepreneurial elite. I chose to start the discussion this way because the nexus between problem and solution is so clear and direct here. Since capitalism is rendering more and more people superfluous to the progress of the overall system, we should give those people better opportunities for purpose and status and meaning by opening up an alternative pathway for flourishing outside the system.
But I believe that a move toward greater economic independence could also be critically important to preserving and revitalizing dynamism – technological, economic, and indeed civilizational. The capitalist system has now extended its reach over the entire planet: although the details vary from country to country, the same basic package – a market economy motivated by consumerism, propelled forward by scientific and technological progress, and regulated by a large regulatory and welfare state – is now in place everywhere. The sun never sets on the empire of commerce and bureaucracy.
But universal empires are not noted for their dynamism, and monocultures do not make for healthy ecosystems. The institutional and cultural convergence we are now experiencing represents another dimension of capitalism’s overextension. It’s not just that we have maintained mass mobilization into the labor market well past the point when the strains it imposes outweigh the opportunities it provides for most people. In addition, the cultural pull of consumerism has grown so strong and so pervasive that, instead of empowering us by freeing up our time to focus on the things that really matter, it is so distracting and enervating that we end up focusing on the wrong things.
Consumerism has always been in bad odor with intellectuals, but that general contempt for the shallowness and vulgarity of commercialized pleasures is most emphatically not where I’m coming from. As I wrote in The Age of Abundance, “The progress of industrialization exposed a fundamental conflict between the two great expressions of the bourgeois Protestant ethos: the highly organized yet raucously competitive commercial order on the one hand, and the religiously inspired repression of individual desire on the other.” In that conflict, I stand with the commercial order and its liberation of desire: the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” has never had a place in my value system. As the conflict has secularized, the basis for anti-consumerism has gradually shifted from otherworldly asceticism to aesthetic revulsion – snobbery against the base preferences of the great unwashed masquerading as high-minded moralism. Here again, I stand on the other side. While I’m admittedly snobbish about the importance of cultivating refined and challenging tastes, I’ve never understood the disdain for simple, easy pleasures. In this vale of tears, find your joys where you can.
Furthermore, it is only by virtue of consumerism that we are now in the position to grapple with the permanent problem and move to a higher level of social development. To see where we would be otherwise, imagine that the competitive struggle a century ago between Ford and General Motors had gone the other way. Henry Ford had blessed the world with affordable motorized transportation – but believed that the only further blessing to grant was making it cheaper. He resisted adding any new features to his Model T, and famously said his customers could have it in any color they wanted as long as it was black. At Ford’s upstart rival, by contrast, the visionary William Durant and his immensely able successor Alfred Sloan saw that the Model T only scratched the surface of the automobile’s potential. GM cars replaced the external crank handle with an ignition button inside, added windshield wipers, offered multiple colors, produced a fleet of different brands and models aimed at different demographics and price points, introduced yearly styling changes to encourage regular trade-ins, and pioneered consumer financing to make buying as painless as possible. GM’s more expansive view of the auto market triumphed in a rout: by 1927 Ford was forced to upgrade to the Model A, but that wasn’t enough to stop GM from overtaking Ford’s market share in 1929 and never surrendering the lead.
If Ford’s austere and narrow vision of innovation had prevailed, not only in automobiles but for consumer products more generally, product features would have frozen shortly after a new good was introduced and all subsequent innovation would be focused on churning out that unchanging merchandise ever more cheaply. In that alternative universe, as goods got progressively cheaper, consumers would run into increasing difficulty channeling their savings into new consumer purchases. They would have no choice but to purchase leisure instead, and Keynes’s forecast of a 15-hour work week could have come true decades ago. And, of course, we would be immensely poorer than we are today. It is to the liberated desire of ordinary people – for an ongoing parade of “new and improved,” and to invest material objects with additional meaning as markers of identity and status – that we owe capitalism’s phenomenal productivity over the course of the 20th century and into our own.
If consumerism is actually a good thing, what then could be the problem? The same problem that lurks in all good things: make the dose excessive and it becomes a poison. 
If you’ve read other essays on this blog, it should come as no surprise that I see the advent of mass affluence as the key turning point in consumerism’s evolving relationship with human wellbeing. When the struggle to secure basic material needs remained at the center of economic life, and the human reality behind rising GDP figures consisted of the alleviation of grinding poverty and release from backbreaking drudgery, the nexus between the expansion of commerce and the march of progress was clear and strong. But once the fulfillment of basic material needs was more or less assured, what capitalism had to offer to consumers was the promise of a better life through added comfort and convenience and ever-more stimulating and absorbing entertainment. 
That offer is nothing to sneeze at, and I have little patience with people raised in ease and comfort who fail to appreciate their good fortune. But the fact remains that the terms of the bargain between capitalism and consumers underwent a fundamental shift. Under conditions of mass affluence, capitalist growth provides a growing array of bells and whistles to embellish a flourishing life. But as far as supplying the actual vehicle to which those bells and whistles are attached, access to a wider set of consumer choices is of increasingly marginal importance.
Indeed, the endless pileup of more and more bells and whistles now constitutes a significant distraction in the pursuit of wellbeing. And again, it’s important to remember that it’s the dose that makes the poison. Nothing wrong with zoning out in front of the tube, playing video games, mixing it up on social media, catching a buzz, or wolfing down a Big Mac – not in my book, at any rate. Things go wrong when acquiescence in instant gratification and undemanding pleasures starts to crowd out more challenging but ultimately more fulfilling pursuits.
It’s become painfully clear, to me at least, that contemporary society is now overdosing. In an incessant bombardment by commercial pitches, puffery, and come-ons, we are told constantly: buy this to make you hotter, buy this to make you thinner, buy this to make you smarter, buy this to make you cooler, buy this to make you happier. And yet look at us now:

We’re seriously overweight and getting fatter. Over two-thirds of adult Americans are overweight or obese.
We’re getting dumber. After many decades of the “Flynn effect,” in which raw IQ scores were rising over time, the “reverse Flynn effect” has now kicked in and scores are dropping. 
We’re getting lonelier, as more people live alone and both the number of close friends and time spent with them are in decline.
We’re plagued by growing mental health problems, and young people have been especially hard hit.
We’ve stopped reproducing ourselves. The U.S. total fertility rate now stands at around 1.7 babies per woman – below the 2.1 needed to sustain the population.

This is where a half-century-plus of mass-affluence consumerism has brought us. With this track record, there is simply no warrant for thinking that more money and more cool stuff are a reliable path to flourishing and fulfillment.
To see what’s gone wrong, it’s instructive to compare the chief promise of consumerism today – comfort, convenience, and entertainment – with the actions that lead to flourishing lives. As to the latter, I think it’s hard to top the admirable compactness of John Rawls’s formulation of the “Aristotelian principle” in A Theory of Justice: “Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.”
Flourishing, then, is active and effortful: developing one’s capacities requires training and practice, exercising them requires seeking out challenges and meeting them. By contrast, consumerism promises to make everything easy and effortless. Flourishing cannot be outsourced: you have to do it yourself, you have to struggle and strive to discover your potential and then realize it. Consumerism, on the other hand, is all about outsourcing: why sweat and strain to do a crummy job yourself when you can hire a trained professional?
There is no necessary conflict here: we can best devote our time to developing and exercising those capacities that matter most to us if we can efficiently outsource life’s scut work to the market. This is consumerism’s constantly repeated promise: buy this so you can spend more time on what’s really important. 
The conflict may not be necessary, but we’ve fallen into it all the same. The ethos promoted by consumerism’s relentless offers of outsourcing is one of hyper-specialization: just focus on your job, and your spouse (if you’ve managed to find one), and your one or two kids (if you’ve taken the trouble to have them), and then leave the rest to us. 
Which brings us to the epigraphs that begin this essay: the flip side of hyper-specialization is the atrophy of everything else. If we don’t regularly work to develop, exercise, and maintain our inborn capacities, those capacities will wither away. Use ‘em or lose ‘em. 
Adam Smith certainly understood the immense upsides of specialization and an extensive division of labor. He began The Wealth of Nations with a visit to a pin factory, where the manufacturing process had been broken down into 18 distinct operations, all simple and repetitive. He recounted a small factory with just ten workers that could produce 48,000 pins a day; by comparison, a worker who did everything himself would be unable to produce 20 pins in a day, and may not succeed in producing one. 
But in the concluding Book Five of his magnum opus, Smith called attention to the stark downsides of specialization. He recognized that while a finely grained division of labor was a boon to a nation’s overall productivity, its human costs were considerable. The more narrowly one specializes, the more one’s wider potential will atrophy and disappear.
It was on these grounds that Smith justified a state role in public education, but we can see now that this remedy wasn’t sufficient to the task. And just as Smith worried, specialization’s toll in lost potential is heaviest for ordinary workers. For most people in the managerial, professional, and entrepreneurial elite, and a fortunate scattered minority outside it, work is interesting enough and challenging enough to repay intense specialization with rich enough psychic rewards to form the core of a fulfilling life. (Even so, it remains a truism – seldom fully appreciated until it’s too late – that nobody on their deathbed ever looks back and wishes they had spent more time in the office.)
But outside the elite, most paid work – while perhaps not as cartoonishly vacuous as making 1/18 of a pin – affords little opportunity to develop and exercise one’s capacities in a challenging and rewarding way. The capacity most regularly and assiduously honed in most contemporary workplaces is a highly developed tolerance for subordination and tedium. 
And outside of work, what opportunities do ordinary people have to develop and exercise capacities for flourishing? They can hone their capacities for love, friendship, and neighborliness in their personal relationships – though we know that the atrophying of these capacities is already well advanced, especially outside the elite. Hobbies of all different kinds provide occasions for the development of talents and skills and the feelings of flow and mastery that follow – for those lucky enough to have found some avocation that absorbs their attention and marshals their energies. But for all too many people, weariness after a day of work and chores and the absence of any well-developed passion make the siren song of passive consumption irresistible. Which is how we end up spending an average of seven hours every day – nearly half our waking lives – staring at one screen or another.
The atrophying of human potential under mass-affluence consumerism appears to be a progressive degenerative disorder. Just look at Robert Heinlein’s expectations for well-rounded human competence – already unrealistically lofty 50 years ago when those words first appeared in print. And if you think his list is too whimsical, make up one of your own: think of the practical skills and know-how that were widespread, say, 75 years ago – then 50 years ago, 25 years ago, and today. What direction do the trend lines point? When you try to come up with things where contemporaries have the advantage over earlier generations, almost all of them will have something to do with navigating the world behind the screen.
We all have seen those illustrations of the ascent of man, proceeding from knuckle-walking ape to stoop-shouldered Homo erectus and Neanderthal to statuesque, upright Homo sapiens. And what’s the next step in the series? These days, it seems plausible that the disputing denouement is one of the levitating-sofa-bound rollie-pollies from WALL-E. As Tim Wu put it some years back in the New Yorker:

Our will-to-comfort, combined with our technological powers, creates a stark possibility. If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity. That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.
The sofalarity (pictured memorably in the film “Wall-E”) is not inevitable either. But the prospect of it makes clear that, as a species, we need mechanisms to keep humanity on track.

My ideas about a movement toward greater economic independence represent an attempt to devise just such a restorative mechanism. By creating alternative social structures that exist outside of and as independently as possible from the surrounding consumerist monoculture, we may be able to develop the cultural resources to push back against hyper-specialization and WALL-E-fication. The idea is to try to foster a viable, sustainable counterculture – this time forward-looking and high-tech (though I won’t complain if they bring back rock music). Call it producerism – the antidote to consumerism, a DIY hacker culture that turns the tide on relentless outsourcing and celebrates the virtues of self-sufficiency and practical, real-world problem-solving.
Imagine if such a counterculture were to develop out of the economic independence movement I’ve been describing. Picture a double-digit percentage of people living in special pioneer communities, all dedicated to greater local self-sufficiency and innovation in the art of living. These communities would be test beds for cutting-edge agriculture and aquaculture, new building styles and materials and techniques, new cooperative institutions for child and elder care, and new local governance mechanisms. Their inhabitants would strive to provide for themselves, but would also employ their skills in a variety of home-based businesses. And producerism would be the guiding ethos: rather than looking for new ways outsource responsibilities to the market, the ongoing quest would be to expand capacities and skills and bring responsibilities back home.
Just think how this counterculture, this alternative pathway for cooperation and flourishing, might affect the larger society. Imagine the rise of spread of thousands of little “communities of engineering and organizational practice” – to borrow Brad DeLong’s turn of phrase – that actually understand how to build, operate, tinker with, and maintain the technologies that support their material lives. After the long “retreat from reality” during the decades of postindustrial consumerism, a large and vital constituency would now execute an about-face and rediscover the challenges and rewards of problem-solving in the physical world. It is difficult for me to conceive of any social development that could do more to reignite technological dynamism and kickstart progress more generally.
We can be virtually certain that such a counterculture will not arise without strong structural support. The seeds for it are already scattered across the country in the form of the maker movement and the large subculture of DIY hobbyists, but it cannot coalesce into a coherent movement on its own. The gravitational attraction of specialization-and-exchange-for-profit is simply too immense. Unless you consciously stand outside and apart from the system, unless you reject the “will-to-comfort” and join a group of like-minded people who uphold an alternative value system of capacity development and self-sufficiency, consumerist capitalism will – as it has done again and again in the past – coopt any sentiments and impulses that push against its grain and end up transforming those sentiments and impulses into yet another “consumption community” subculture. 
Wolf Tivy of Palladium magazine wrote an interesting piece recently that is relevant here. He argues that if you want to change the culture so that it encourages and facilitates a better world, find like-minded people to work on building a better world directly. If you succeed, the institutions you create and the examples you set will do more to change the culture, and thus the wider world, than any actions directly aimed at trying to change the way people think. The whole article is worth a read, but for present purposes here’s the key passage:

You look around and see that we now are too tied up in red tape to accomplish anything at all. Your neighbors are atomized, unhealthy, mentally ill, and strung out on drugs and bad ideology. You see politics and geopolitics spiraling into disaster. A great cloud of spiritual malaise hangs over our society, and you can feel its oppression. If only there were some optimistic ray of light in culture! If only other people could see the possibilities too.
But it wasn’t the optimism and popular appreciation for progress that created that past material health. It is the other way around: it is only once the heroes come home with the loot and tales of great deeds that the public ever catches on that great things are possible…. It’s better to focus on the desired material outcome itself, targeting it carefully and directly.
The question before us, then, is not how to inspire a vital culture but how to directly build a physically healthy society. What kind of world do you want to live in, and how can you build that world by your own hand? What are the technical possibilities?

That’s exactly the thinking that lies behind my interest in an economic independence movement spearheaded by pioneer communities. To change the culture, to change the world, we need to build.
The post The need for a counterculture appeared first on Niskanen Center.

There has been a huge amount of hand-wringing in recent years over the state of global democracy, with the rise of authoritarian great powers like Russia and China and the evident backsliding of both new and long-established democracies around the world. Much of this angst is well-deserved and understandable, but in the end I think a lot of it is overdone. A full account of recent developments needs longer treatment, but I would make these quick points:· Both Russia and China are less impressive than they appeared a few years ago. Russia is on the back foot in Ukraine, and China is seeing a huge slowdown in its economic growth. These setbacks are due to the poor decision-making intrinsic to authoritarian government.· There has been too much alarmism about the rise of “neo-fascism” in Europe. It is true that right-wing parties have made gains in Germany, Italy, and Spain, but they have also seen setbacks in the Czech Republic, Finland, and elsewhere. More importantly, as Sheri Berman has pointed out, those that are in power have moderated substantially and now resemble traditional conservative parties more than radical populist ones.· The failure of much of the Global South to support Ukraine against Russia is disappointing but in many ways not surprising. Brazil, India, and South Africa all have reasons for this reticence, but they remain democracies and for all their problems are not being tempted by an alternative political model.· Latin America has seen the rise of left-wing governments in recent years, but the more radical plans of new leaders in Chile, Colombia, and Peru have been stymied by their lack of broad popular support. What we are seeing in many places is a deterioration in the quality of government, rather than a qualitative shift to a new, alternative model of political order.There is more to say about other parts of the world, but the place I want to focus on is the United States, because it is here that I think the most vivid threat to democracy exists.___STEADY_PAYWALL___There are two levels to the current threat. The most obvious one lies in the fact that the leading candidate for the Republican Party in next year’s presidential election is an individual who tried to steal the 2020 election. This has not diminished Donald Trump’s appeal in the eyes of his core followers; indeed, it has burnished his credentials as a victimized outsider. Perhaps more dismaying is the fact that many less committed voters continue to see next year’s election as a normal presidential contest, in which they are being asked to choose between two candidates on the basis of policy preferences and judgments of character.This is not the choice Americans will be making. If they re-elect Donald Trump, they will be approving an individual who has done everything he can to undermine the most basic democratic institution in our system. They will be voting to overturn not a policy, but an institution on which the Republic depends. Some voters have taken a “plague on both your houses” attitude and will opt for third-party candidates like those from No Labels, a position that fails to recognize the gravity of the choice in front of us. There are plenty of things one can complain about with regard to President Biden’s leadership and personal situation, but none of these comes close to being of comparable weight to the consequences of affirming a not-so-hidden authoritarian as leader.At this juncture, Donald Trump is facing multiple indictments for multiple crimes, and will face many more charges both at a federal level and in Georgia. We will be treated to the spectacle of a presidential candidate sitting in the dock during election season, with vivid details of his bad behavior in the nightly news. While his popularity has held up so far, he may not survive this.However, there is a second level of threat that will exist if a Republican is elected next year, regardless of who that individual is. A very important piece in the New York Times outlined the party’s plans to centralize power in the office of the president. This would mean ending the wall of separation between the president and the Justice Department and attorney general, making the latter a weapon available to future presidents. This is something Trump has explicitly vowed to do in order to take revenge on his perceived political foes. Under the theory of the unified executive, the president would also gain sole control over the country’s multi-member commissions like the FCC or SEC.This would be bad enough, but in itself would not make the President more powerful than, say, a British Prime Minister. The more insidious threat lies in the promise by present-day conservatives to end job protections for all federal workers, allowing a future president to fire as many career civil servants as he wished. The purpose of this would be to completely undermine and gut the so-called “deep state,” and to replace existing bureaucrats with loyalists—people beholden not just to the Republican Party, but to the person of the president.This plan was adumbrated at the end of the Trump administration in an executive order creating a “Schedule F” that would turn all existing federal employees into “at-will” workers who could be fired without cause. This order was reversed early in the Biden administration, but is at the center of future Republican plans to “reform” the government.Attacks on the “administrative state” have been a staple of conservative thought since at least the 1930s. The notion that the bureaucracy is out of control and needs to be reined in by Congress has merit in certain instances. The Left has its own version of this critique, focusing not on domestic regulatory agencies but on the national security bureaucracy. All of this has been fed by Hollywood and a popular culture that feasts on revelations about hidden conspiracies at the heart of American government.As I outlined in my “Deep State” series, overreach by the administrative state is hugely exaggerated: the problem lies not so much in the bureaucracy, but in Congress itself which has not lived up to its responsibility to exercise the powers it has to direct the bureaucracy. The political problem is that there is no one willing to provide a counter-narrative to the anti-statist rhetoric we see all around this.So let me state this very clearly. No modern liberal democracy can survive and function well without a strong, professional, nonpartisan administrative state. It is the very foundation of modern government. It is a complete fantasy to think that the American people can govern themselves directly without delegating substantial authority to expert agencies. We are still in thrall to a vision of the New England town hall meeting in which citizens directly participate in self-government. This can and should still happen at a local level, but it is not possible to govern a complex modern nation of more than 330 million people in this fashion. Citizens should be ever-vigilant about protecting their rights against state overreach, but there are clear mechanisms for doing this that do not involve cratering the entire bureaucracy.Republicans are planning to turn back the clock on American government to what it was before the 1883 passage of the Pendleton Act, which for the first time created merit-based requirements for the hiring and promotion of civil servants.  Between the election in 1828 of our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, and the Pendleton Act, American government was characterized by the “spoils” or “patronage” system, in which virtually all federal employees got their jobs as the result of a payoff from an elected politician. This was a period of deep corruption and incompetent government, in which offices turned over with every election that brought a new party to power. The damage was limited only by the fact that the federal government didn’t do much in this era: it did not regulate securities, certify pharmaceuticals, control air traffic, forecast the weather, launch satellites, make Social Security and Medicare payments, regulate banks, or manage the money supply. There are many problems with the American government, but they will not be solved by pretending that these functions can be performed directly by “the people.”American democracy is in greater peril at the present moment than in most other developed democracies. What happens here matters a great deal to global democracy, given America’s size and power, and the model that it presents to the rest of the world.  Americans need to recognize that they will be facing a choice next year not between two normal policy and personnel alternatives, but between their existing democratic institutions and a leap into the dark of potential institutional chaos.  This is deeply ironic, because the United States is coming out of the Covid pandemic is doing better economically than it has been for many decades.  And yet many fellow citizens think that things have never been worse.Francis Fukuyama Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: Nesting dolls depicting Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. (Unsplash/Jørgen Håland)

A Tennessee man drowned last year as police watched and actively discouraged others from helping the man. Now, the man's mother has filed a lawsuit against the officers, claiming their negligence caused her son's death.
Mika Wheeler Clabo was a 30-year-old man who had been experiencing a mental health crisis when he ran into the Tennessee River in Knoxville on the morning of July 25, 2022. A few minutes after falling into the water—which was murky and filled with vines and branches—four police officers and two EMTs had arrived on the scene.
According to the suit, Clabo "yelled out several times, gasping and groaning, desperate for help, as he tried in vain to pull himself up or free himself from the vines that snared him." However " for approximately fifteen minutes, other than coaxing Mika on by yelling at him to 'swim' or 'get out,' no one helped him."
As the gathered first responders watched, several employees at a nearby restaurant offered to help Clabo. One man even offered to give the officers access to a storage area that held flotation devices and a small boat but was refused.
"These men and others were warned off by the KPD officers against making any effort to help Mika, with one officer repeatedly telling them 'he'll drown you too' or words to that effect," the lawsuit claims. Instead, the officers said they were waiting for a rescue boat.
But the rescue boat came too late. The lawsuit claims that 13 minutes after falling into the river, Clabo's head went underwater. Though the rescue boat arrived just a few minutes later, Clabo had drowned, and his body had become so entangled with the vines in the riverbank that it would not be recovered for two hours.
"The officers acted recklessly by merely watching a man who they believed to be mentally compromised struggling to free himself from vines, brush, and tree limbs before drowning," the lawsuit states. "It is clear that the officers knew there was a substantial risk of death to Mika, yet consciously chose a course of action that ignored that deathly risk."
However, while the officers' indifference as Clabo drowned was disturbing, it's unlikely that the lawsuit against them will succeed. In 2005, the Supreme Court found that the police have no legal duty to protect individuals from harm. In failing to rescue Clabo, the officers may have acted callously and cruelly—but also likely within the law. 
The post Police Watched as a Man Drowned and Discouraged Bystanders From Helping, Lawsuit Claims appeared first on Reason.com.

A White House advisory board has recommended that Congress place new restrictions on the FBI's access to a foreign surveillance tool to prevent the bureau from using it to spy on Americans' electronic communications.
That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was intended to track foreign spies and potential terrorists but has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans' phone records, emails, and other electronic communications. In the report published Monday, the White House's Intelligence Advisory Board said the FBI's use of the databases created by Section 702 should be limited to investigations dealing with foreign intelligence—the same standard that is used at the other intelligence agencies with access to that data.
"FBI's use of Section 702 should be limited to foreign intelligence purposes only and FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails," the report recommends. The report says the FBI has made "inappropriate use of Section 702 authorities, specifically U.S. person queries."
While the full scope of Section 702 data collection remains unknown, there's no doubt about the FBI's aggressive use of the database. In 2021, for example, the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database, according to a government transparency report. Separately, a 2021 report from the secret federal court responsible for adjudicating FISA-related matters documented 40 instances in which the FBI accessed surveillance data as part of investigations into a host of purely domestic crimes, including health care fraud and public corruption.
The FBI imposed new internal restrictions on the use of Section 702 surveillance last year, but the new White House report says those changes are "insufficient to ensure compliance and earn the public's trust."
Indeed, the public (and Congress) ought to be wary of the FBI's promises to police itself—and of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's (FISC) ability to hold the bureau accountable. As Reason's Scott Shackford detailed in 2021, the FBI had promised the FISC in the wake of the Carter Page scandal that it would change procedures to stop snooping on Americans. The FISA court rubber-stamped those changes.
But the new White House report suggests the FBI is still up to its old tricks with regard to Section 702. As the Associated Press notes, the report details how the FBI used its access to the database to run queries for "a U.S. senator and state senator's names without properly limiting the search, looking for someone believed to have been at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and doing large queries of names of protesters following the 2020 death of George Floyd."
Those latest revelations show that "the Federal Bureau of Investigation simply cannot be trusted with conducting foreign intelligence queries on American persons," wrote Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for privacy in online communications, last week. "Regardless of the rules, or consistent FISC disapprovals, the FBI continues to act in a way that shows no regard for privacy and civil liberties."
The FBI's ongoing misuse of the Section 702 database has become a hot-button political topic, particularly among Republicans who are unhappy about the bureau's surveillance of former President Donald Trump's allies, including Page. A group of six Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) and including Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) have introduced a resolution calling for Congress to allow FISA to expire at the end of the year. Meanwhile, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have spoken out about the need for reforms to Section 702 in advance of the December deadline for the program's reauthorization.
The federal intelligence community seems to be taking that threat to its snooping seriously. Monday's report claims that blocking the reauthorization of the spying program would be "one of the worst intelligence failures of our time." In a statement, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Congress should reauthorize the program "without new and operationally damaging restrictions on reviewing intelligence lawfully collected by the government and with measures that build on proven reforms to enhance compliance and oversight."
It would appear that the FBI's abuse of Section 702 to spy on Americans' communications has exceeded even the intelligence community's willingness to defend such unconstitutional techniques. As such, revoking the FBI's ability to use the Section 702 database to investigate routine crimes ought to be the starting point for congressional negotiations over the future of the program.
The post FBI Made 'Inappropriate Use' of Foreign Surveillance Program To Spy on Americans appeared first on Reason.com.

Gail: From your lips to God’s ears.

Bret: Second, the more the legal system comes after Trump, the more the Republican rank and file will rally around him as both a truth teller and a martyr. The hard right increasingly views the U.S. justice system in ways that the far left traditionally has: as a rigged, corrupt system in which sinister insiders use the levers of power to advance the interests of the elite at the expense of ordinary people.

And of course, the Hunter Biden saga plays right into that narrative.

Gail: Knew you’d be dying to go on to Hunter. I thought the plea deal was pretty reasonable. His crimes were tax evasion and lying when he bought a gun by failing to acknowledge he was a drug addict. I hate the idea of virtually anybody being able to obtain a gun. But even I do not expect drug addicts will voluntarily share that information when they attempt to buy one. So, definite criminal behavior but not a real shocker.

Bret: If Hunter had been poor and Black, would the justice system have been as indulgent?

Gail: A fair point. But in most places, a poor Black defendant from a responsible family who’s subsequently been living a sober, well-supervised life probably could have made this kind of deal. Or, OK, at least in some places.

Bret: Hmmm.

Maybe Hunter is a swell guy in private, and I have sympathy for anyone struggling with addiction. But what’s in the public record about him — from his obvious willingness to trade on the perception of access to make his living from dubious foreign sources to his reluctance to acknowledge paternity of one of his daughters to his career as a mediocre artist selling work at curiously astronomical prices to not paying taxes and then almost getting off with what seemed like a wrist slap — doesn’t exactly brighten the Biden family name. And while Republicans are jumping to conclusions without rock-solid evidence, I’m not entirely confident that Joe Biden really had no inkling of what his son was up to or that the larger Biden family didn’t benefit from Hunter’s shenanigans.

Gail: Absolutely no evidence Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s lawbreaking. But one charge I’d bet on is that Hunter dropped Dad’s name a lot when trying to do business with foreign honchos. Sort of hard to imagine him being saintly enough to avoid it. And the whole idea of his making deals with foreign honchos in the first place while his father was vice president is … bad.

In December 2021, the podcast “Know Your Enemy” — billed as a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement — welcomed Nate Hochman, a young man whom the host Sam Adler-Bell described as “the boy wonder of the new right.” At the time, Hochman was a 23-year-old National Review writer who’d already cycled through several of the prestigious fellowships available to aspiring young conservative intellectuals. (He’d later contribute to The New York Times.) Matthew Sitman, Adler-Bell’s co-host and a former conservative himself, considered Hochman a friend, and on the podcast, Hochman mostly came across as thoughtful and reasonable, eager to find the places where left- and right-leaning critics of liberalism agree.

When Sitman condemned the right’s cruelty toward trans people, Hochman conceded some of his points. “Do I love the way that some people on the right talk about sensitive culture issues surrounding stuff like transgenderism always? No,” said Hochman. “Could we use more empathy and humility in the way that we approach these questions? Absolutely.”

In March, Hochman went to work for Ron DeSantis, who at the time still looked like the most viable standard-bearer for a post-Trump Republican Party. But last week, Hochman was fired from DeSantis’s ailing presidential campaign after tweeting out a video ending with the candidate’s face superimposed over a sonnenrad, a Nazi symbol. It soon emerged that Hochman hadn’t simply shared the spot, which mixed message-board memes and media headlines like “Florida City Cancels L.G.B.T.Q.+ Pride Parade as Ron DeSantis Prepares to Sign Anti-Drag Bill.” As Axios reported, he’d secretly created it.

Though the video’s imagery is clearly fascist — the sonnenrad, or sunwheel, is flanked by two rows of marching soldiers — Hochman has said that he didn’t know what the symbol meant. Given that he is Jewish, I’m inclined to believe that rather than being a covert Nazi, Hochman is simply a callow young man immersed in a milieu in which fascist idioms are so commonplace they can be picked up inadvertently. But whatever his motives, his trajectory from conservative intellectual wunderkind to disgraced troll tells us quite a bit about the culture of the young right.

From early on, humanity’s key inventions involved rotation: grindstones, potter’s wheels, treadmills, pumps. The wheel, though, has been overrated.

More than a few authors have found success with books that look at a broad swath of history, ideas or science through the lens of a single topic. The trend might have begun with James Gleick’s “Chaos” (1987), which explored the surprising role of randomness in nature. Less abstractly, Mark Kurlansky took a tight-focus approach in “Cod” (1997) and Mary Roach in “Stiff” (2003), a book about, of all things, cadavers.

Roland Ennos elevates this approach to dizzying heights in “The Science of Spin.” The notion that lots of things spin—everything from toy tops to hurricanes—might seem pedestrian. But Mr. Ennos, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull, wants us to understand that spin is fundamental. It plays a part in the functioning of our bodies and the design of our infrastructure. It can also, of course, be found in the orderly motion of our planet and, indeed, of the universe. Mr. Ennos hopes that “The Science of Spin” will enable readers to “finally be able to understand what really makes the world go round.”

James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.

Photo by Trygve Finkelsen/iStock

Since the pandemic’s earliest days, epidemiologists have been waiting for the coronavirus to finally snap out of its pan-season spree. No more spring waves like the first to hit the United States in 2020, no more mid-year surges like the one that turned Hot Vax Summer on its head. Eventually, or so the hope went, SARS-CoV-2 would adhere to the same calendar that many other airway pathogens stick to, at least in temperate parts of the globe: a heavy winter peak, then a summer on sabbatical.But three and a half years into the outbreak, the coronavirus is still stubbornly refusing to take the warmest months off. Some public-health experts are now worried that, after a relatively quiet stretch, the virus is kick-starting yet another summer wave. In the southern and northeastern United States, concentrations of the coronavirus in wastewater have been slowly ticking up for several weeks, with the Midwest and West now following suit; test-positivity rates, emergency-department diagnoses of COVID-19, and COVID hospitalizations are also on the rise. The absolute numbers are still small, and they may stay that way. But these are the clear and early signs of a brewing mid-year wave, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University—which would make this the fourth summer in a row with a distinct coronavirus bump.Even this far into the pandemic, though, no one can say for certain whether summer waves are a permanent COVID fixture—or if the virus exhibits a predictable seasonal pattern at all. No law of nature dictates that winters must come with respiratory illness, or that summers will not. “We just don’t know very much about what drives the cyclical patterns of respiratory infections,” says Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University. Which means there’s still no part of the year when this virus is guaranteed to cut us any slack.That many pathogens do wax and wane with the seasons is indisputable. In temperate parts of the world, airborne bugs get a boost in winter, only to be stifled in the heat; polio and other feces-borne pathogens, meanwhile, often rise in summer, along with gonorrhea and some other STIs. But noticing these trends is one thing; truly understanding the triggers is another.[Read: COVID sure looks seasonal now]Some diseases lend themselves a bit more easily to explanation: Near the equator, waves of mosquito-borne illness, such as Zika and Chikungunya, tend to be tied to the weather-dependent life cycles of the insects that carry them; in temperate parts of the world, rates of Lyme disease track with the summertime activity of ticks. Flu, too, has pretty strong data to back its preference for wintry months. The virus—which is sheathed in a fragile, fatty layer called an envelope and travels airborne via moist drops—spreads best when it’s cool and dry, conditions that may help keep infectious particles intact and spittle aloft.The coronavirus has enough similarities to flu that most experts expect that it will continue to spread in winter too. Both viruses are housed in a sensitive skin; both prefer to move by aerosol. Both are also relatively speedy evolvers that don’t tend to generate long-lasting immunity against infection—factors conducive to repeat waves that hit populations at a fairly stable clip. For those reasons, Anice Lowen, a virologist at Emory University, anticipates that SARS-CoV-2 will continue to show “a clear wintertime seasonality in temperate regions of the world.” Winter is also a time when our bodies can be more susceptible to respiratory bugs: Cold, dry air can interfere with the movement of mucus that shuttles microbes out of the nose and throat; aridity can also make the cells that line those passageways shrivel and die; certain immune defenses might get a bit sleepier, with vitamin D in shorter supply.None of that precludes SARS-CoV-2 spread in the heat, even if experts aren’t sure why the virus so easily drives summer waves. Plenty of other microbes manage it: enteroviruses, polio, and more. Even rhinoviruses and adenoviruses, two of the most frequent causes of colds, tend to spread year-round, sometimes showing up in force during the year’s hottest months. (Many scientists presume that has something to do with these viruses’ relatively hardy outer layer, but the reason is undoubtedly more complex than that.) An oft-touted explanation for COVID’s summer waves is that people in certain parts of the country retreat indoors to beat the heat. But that argument alone “is weak,” Lowen told me. In industrialized nations, people spend more than 90 percent of their time indoors.That said, an accumulation of many small influences can together create a seasonal tipping point. Summer is a particularly popular time for travel, often to big gatherings. Many months out from winter and its numerous infections and vaccinations, population immunity might also be at a relative low at this time of year, Rivers said. Plus, for all its similarities to the flu, SARS-CoV-2 is its own beast: It has so far affected people more chronically and more severely, and has generated population-sweeping variants at a far faster pace. Those dynamics can all affect when waves manifest.And although certain bodily defenses do dip in the cold, data don’t support the idea that immunity is unilaterally stronger in the summer. Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, in New York, told me the situation is far more complicated than that. For years, she and other researchers have been gathering evidence that suggests that our bodies have distinctly seasonal immunological profiles—with some defensive molecules spiking in the summer and another set in winter. The consequences of those shifts aren’t yet apparent. But some of them could help explain when the coronavirus spreads. By the same token, winter is not a time of disease-ridden doom. Xaquin Castro Dopico, an immunologist at the Karolinska Institute, in Sweden, has found that immune systems in the Northern Hemisphere might be more inflammation-prone in the winter—which, yes, could make certain bouts of illness more severe but could also improve responses to certain vaccinations.All of those explanations could apply to COVID’s summer swings—or perhaps none does. “Everybody always wants to have a very simple seasonal answer,” Martinez told me. But one may simply not exist. Even the reasons for the seasonality of polio, a staunch summertime disease prior to its elimination in the U.S., have been “an open question” for many decades, Martinez told me.Rivers is hopeful that the coronavirus’s permanent patterns may already be starting to peek through: a wintry heyday, and a smaller maybe-summer hump. “We’re in year four, and we’re seeing the same thing year over year,” she told me. But some experts worry that discussions of COVID-19 seasonality are premature. SARS-CoV-2 is still so fresh to the human population that its patterns could be far from their final form. At an extreme, the patterns researchers observed during the first few years of the pandemic may not prelude the future much at all, because they encapsulate so much change: the initial lack and rapid acquisition of immunity, the virus’s evolution, the ebb and flow of masks, and more. Amid that mishmash of countervailing influences, says Brandon Ogbunu, an infectious-disease modeler at Yale, “you’re going to get some counterintuitive dynamics” that won’t necessarily last long term.[Read: The next stage of COVID is starting now]
With so much of the world now infected, vaccinated, or both, and COVID mitigations almost entirely gone, the global situation is less in flux now. The virus itself, although still clearly changing at a blistering pace, has not pulled off an Omicron-caliber jump in evolution for more than a year and a half. But no one can yet promise predictability. The cadence of vaccination isn’t yet settled; Scarpino, of Northeastern University, also isn’t ready to dismiss the idea of a viral evolution surprise. Maybe summer waves, to the extent that they’re happening, are a sign that SARS-CoV-2 will remain a microbe for all seasons. Or maybe they’re part of the pandemic’s death rattle—noise in a system that hasn’t yet quieted down.

Unless that battle results in a DeSantis collapse and a chance for someone else to go up against the front-runner. After all, why should DeSantis be the only non-Trump hope just because he seemed potent early on? Why not, well, Tim Scott?

Say this for Scott: He has an obvious asset that DeSantis is missing, a fundamental good cheer that Americans favor in their presidents. Say this as well: He has the profile of a potent general-election candidate, an African American and youthful-seeming generic Republican to set against Joe Biden’s senescence. Say this, finally: Scott sits in the sweet spot for the Republican donor class, as a George W. Bush-style conservative untouched by the rabble-rousing and edgelord memes of Trump-era populism.

But all of these strengths are connected to primary-campaign weaknesses. To beat Trump, you eventually need around half the Republican electorate to vote for you (depending on the wrinkles of delegate allocation). And there’s no indication that half of Republican primary voters want to return to pre-2016 conservatism, that they would favor a generic-Republican alternative to Trump’s crush-your-enemies style or that they especially value winsomeness and optimism, as opposed to a style suited to a pessimistic mood.

The reason that DeSantis seemed like the best hope against Trump was a record and persona that seemed to meet Republican voters where they are. His success was built after Trump’s election, on issues that mattered to current G.O.P. voters, not those of 30 years ago. He could claim to be better at the pugilistic style than Trump — with more to show for his battles substantively and more political success as well. On certain issues, Covid policy especially, he could claim to represent the views of Trump’s supporters better than Trump himself. And with DeSantis’s war on Disney, nobody would confuse him for a creature of the donor class.

All this set up a plausible strategy for pulling some Trump voters to DeSantis’s side by casting himself as the fulfiller of Trump’s promise — more competent, more politically able, bolder, younger and better suited to the times.

A group of congressional Democrats has introduced legislation to eliminate interest rates on all current federal student loans—and cap interest rates of future loans at 4 percent. The plan further sets aside student loan payments in a trust fund, which the bill's sponsors say will allow the plan to be funded without offsetting costs onto taxpayers.
While the full text of the Student Loan Interest Elimination Act has not yet been published, a fact sheet of the bill published by Rep. Joe Courtney (D–Conn.) notes that the bill would "refinance the interest rate of all existing federal student loans to zero percent and cap interest rates for future borrowers," adding that "the interest rates for future student loan borrowers will be based on a sliding scale determined by financial need."
Currently, interest on federal student loans is used to pay for the cost of running the program. However, the fact sheet says that the bill would direct the Education Department to create a trust fund that would provide funding for the federal student loan program without offsetting costs onto taxpayers.
"Student loan borrowers will make payments on their principal balance and these funds will be put into the Trust Fund. The Trustees overseeing this fund would invest payments from student loan borrowers into a variety of bonds, including municipal bonds and Treasury bonds," reads the fact sheet. "The returns on those investments would fund the costs of operating the student loan program—saving taxpayers from fronting the bill while saving borrowers from higher interest rates and student loan interest capitalization."
"The Student Loan Interest Elimination Act is a strategic way to deliver student debt relief to Americans most in need. For many, the interest on student loans is more than was originally borrowed," said Rep. Jahana Hayes (D–Conn.), one of the bill's co-sponsors in a Thursday press release. "This legislation will save tax-payer dollars while also addressing the student loan crisis in this country."
The approach is the latest—and most moderate—move by Democrats to reduce the amount paid back by student loan borrowers. Unlike other Democrat-led student loan proposals—most notably, President Joe Biden's recently defeated $400 billion student loan forgiveness plan—this latest bill doesn't propose foisting its costs onto taxpayers.
While the proposal is a welcome change after a year of fierce support for incredibly expensive student loan reforms, its worth noting that the Student Loan Interest Elimination Act attempts to alleviate a problem caused by the government getting involved in the student loan business to begin with. It's long been accepted that the federal student loan program has driven up the cost of college. If Democrats really want to reduce students' debt burden, they should probably start by cutting back the federal student loan program.
The post Democrats Propose Eliminating Student Loan Interest appeared first on Reason.com.

Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago philosopher, infuriated various portions of the internet in June with an essay making the case against travel. Though really it was the case against tourism, since Callard exempted many forms of travel — for work or study, for personal or political reasons or charitable service — from her critique. What remained for her to savage was the contemporary there-and-back-again excursion: the checklist of foreign sights and places, the pursuit of agreed-upon Great Experiences, the expectation of some sort of personal transformation — all of it, according to her, an exercise in self-delusion.

Citing travel skeptics as various as Walker Percy, Ralph Waldo Emerson and G.K. Chesterton, Callard discusses tourism’s “locomotion” problem (“I went to France.” OK, but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” OK, but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’”), its inevitably superficial non-encounters with alien peoples and experiences, its imitative, guidebook-driven estimation of what’s worth seeing in the world. Its core failure, she argues, is that it promises growth or conversion but generally returns travelers unchanged to where they began:

The single most important fact about tourism is this: We already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveler departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

As it happens, I read the essay just as I was about to embark, with my wife and four children, on an 18-day odyssey through Britain, the Netherlands and France. So I refrained from any comment on her thesis, assuming — like every other self-deluded tourist — that I would return more enlightened than before.

Now, back home and dealing with what Percy called the “problems of re-entry,” I can barely remember the man I was before our trip began, let alone recall whatever ideas about travel my former self might have entertained before we recklessly tried to take a 3-year-old through several European capitals and all the British countryside between Stonehenge and the Scottish Highlands.

But casting my mind back to that distant prior self, I dimly remember having two reactions to Callard’s essay. The first was that she was identifying a real problem — one especially associated with the forces of secularization and disenchantment, which have transformed the promise of travel by making mere tourists out of people who would have once been pilgrims instead.

President Joe Biden's White House pushed Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to censor contrarian COVID-19 content, including speculation about the virus having escaped from a lab, vaccine skepticism, and even jokes.
"Can someone quickly remind me why we were removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man made," asked Nick Clegg, president for global affairs at the company, in a July 2021 email to his coworkers.
A content moderator replied, "We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more. We shouldn't have done it."
These and other emails obtained by Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) and The Wall Street Journal provide further evidence of the federal government's vast efforts to curb dissent online. As I reported in Reason's March 2023 issue, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) communicated frequently with Facebook content moderators and pushed them to take down posts that contradicted the guidance of federal health advisers:

According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well. They were consulted frequently, at times daily. They were actively involved in the affairs of content moderators, providing constant and ever-evolving guidance. They requested frequent updates about which topics were trending on the platforms, and they recommended what kinds of content should be deemed false or misleading. "Here are two issues we are seeing a great deal of misinfo on that we wanted to flag for you all," reads one note from a CDC official. Another email with sample Facebook posts attached begins: "BOLO for a small but growing area of misinfo."
These Facebook Files show that the platform responded with incredible deference. Facebook routinely asked the government to vet specific claims, including whether the virus was "man-made" rather than zoonotic in origin. (The CDC responded that a man-made origin was "technically possible" but "extremely unlikely.") In other emails, Facebook asked: "For each of the following claims, which we've recently identified on the platform, can you please tell us if: the claim is false; and, if believed, could this claim contribute to vaccine refusals?"
The fact that the White House was engaged in the exact same behavior as the CDC is not remotely surprising; indeed, it's already well-known that Biden staffers harangued social media moderators, though these specific emails have not previously been released.
The Wall Street Journal's reporting demonstrates once again that the platforms themselves were deeply skeptical of the government's directions:

"The WH has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed if it is premised on the vaccine having side effects, so we expect it would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed," the vice president wrote.
"I can't see Mark in a million years being comfortable with removing that—and I wouldn't recommend it," Clegg wrote in a subsequent email, an apparent reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
In some of the emails, Facebook executives expressed concern that removing posts in which Americans expressed hesitation about getting vaccinated could actually make them less likely to get a shot.

All of these disclosures show that it's pointless to be angry with social media companies—they were put in a very difficult position. Supporters of free speech must direct their ire toward the federal government and demand that government officials stop engaging in this behavior.
Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) has proposed a bill along these lines. I interviewed him about it here.

The post Biden White House Pressured Facebook To Censor Lab Leak Posts appeared first on Reason.com.

One of the better recent examples of how government officials do a poor job of anticipating the consequences of their actions occurred after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mandated warning labels for products containing sesame seeds.
The unexpected result: Suddenly everything seems to contain sesame.
In case you missed it at the time, here's what happened: In an attempt to aid those with allergies to sesame seeds, the FDA added the ingredient to a longstanding list of items—including eggs, milk, and shellfish—whose presence must be noted on the packaging of food products and at restaurants. In response, food producers started adding sesame to products that previously contained none.
The food producers were simply doing what made economic sense. The FDA's fines for not disclosing the inclusion of sesame are steep, and it's much cheaper to add a few seeds to everything than to face potential penalties for accidental mixing. "Rather than worry about how to prevent potential cross-contamination in products that don't contain sesame, some restaurants and food makers—including Olive Garden, Chick-fil-A, and Wendy's—are simply adding sesame to their products. That way they can list it as an ingredient and not worry about being faulted for accidental contamination," Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote last year.
The result? Fewer sesame seed–free products are now available for people who are allergic.
But the cherry on top of this sundae of government failure—or perhaps the sesame seed atop the FDA's bun of bureaucratic bungling—was provided this week by none other than the agency's own chief.
"Some manufacturers are intentionally adding sesame to products that previously did not contain sesame and are labeling the products to indicate its presence," acknowledged FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf in a statement. Califf went on to say that the FDA's goal, of course, was to help individuals with sesame allergies "feel more confident" about their choices.
"I don't think anyone envisioned there being a decrease in the availability of products that are safe choices for sesame-allergic consumers," he concluded.
Yes, no one could have possibly envisioned this outcome—except, perhaps, for the many food processing facilities that immediately responded to the FDA's new rules by doing exactly this.
What Califf means, of course, is that no one within the FDA considered this possibility. That's a telling statement. It indicates that the FDA likely didn't do a good job of investigating how the businesses affected by its rules would respond to the placement of sesame on the federal allergens list. It also suggests that the FDA's staff lacked the ability to see beyond the good intentions—helping allergy sufferers—of the policy to interrogate how such a rule might be implemented in the real world.
There is a recurring idea that advancements in technology and data processing can allow governments to solve the so-called knowledge problem—Friedrich A. Hayek's observation that central planning will always fail because government officials cannot aggregate all the necessary information to make better decisions than the decentralized ones made by individuals acting via markets.
But Califf's remarks show just how difficult solving that problem is. The FDA has virtually unlimited access to public health data and can easily acquire whatever information it might need to make any decision. And yet no one at the agency was able to predict how a regulation of a tiny seed would have huge unintended consequences.

The post FDA Commissioner: No One 'Envisioned' the Consequences of New Sesame Seed Labeling Rule appeared first on Reason.com.

When House Republicans return from their recess this fall, they’re likely to have an item on their agenda besides pushing the government toward shutdown: impeaching Joe Biden. “You’ve got to get to the bottom of the truth, and the only way Congress can do that is go to impeachment inquiry,” the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, said on Tuesday. Some Republicans are pretending that a mere inquiry doesn’t imply an actual impeachment, but it’s hard to imagine MAGA congressmen being satisfied with an investigation that stops short of bringing charges.

“What I’m hearing from Republicans is that Speaker McCarthy basically has no choice,” Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said when I asked him whether impeachment was likely. “This is what they want.” And with yet another Trump indictment imminent, I suspect impeachment momentum will only accelerate. Amid the drama of a presidential front-runner facing multiple felony charges, Republicans are going to need counterprogramming.

To be clear, impeachment is not what all Republicans want: As The New York Times wryly noted, some in the party argue “that the House must find actual corruption or wrongdoing before lawmakers consider impeachment.” Given McCarthy’s very thin margins in the House, he may not have the votes to begin a process some of his members are dreading. Nevertheless, with the Republican base clamoring for impeachment, McCarthy has clearly signaled it’s a live possibility. Which raises a question: Impeachment for what?

This is less obvious than it should be, at least if you’re not immersed in the Fox News cinematic universe. Democrats are largely tuning out the House’s lurid and shambolic investigatory hearings, which have so far featured photos of a naked Hunter Biden and a much-hyped star witness who turned out to be a fugitive indicted on charges of, among other things, arms trafficking and acting as an unregistered Chinese agent. Behind this circus, however, is something rather astonishing: A major part of the pretext for a possible impeachment of Joe Biden is exactly the same set of lies about Ukraine that helped persuade Democrats to impeach Donald Trump the first time.

“What happened to Oppenheimer damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theory,” wrote Kai Bird, author of the biography on which Christopher Nolan’s new film is based. “Yet too many of our citizens still distrust scientists and fail to understand the scientific quest, the trial and error inherent in testing any theory against facts by experimenting. Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.”
Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.
This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that has killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.
Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.
More from this authorThe real Covid conspiracyBy Ian Birrell 
Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.
“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.
It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.
More from this authorWhy would anyone envy the NHS?By Ian Birrell 
It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.
As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.
Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.
Suggested readingCovid was liberalism's endgameBy Matthew B Crawford 
The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.
The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”
Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.
Suggested readingThe new public health despotismBy Matthew B Crawford 
Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”
Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.
Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.
The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”
Suggested readingHow we appeased China's Zero-Covid regimeBy N.S. Lyons
Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.
Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.
Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told the senators that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.
We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.
It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.  Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”[Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia]Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.“Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he's denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

Some news stories make us angry. Some news stories make us sad. But at least most stories leave us with a sense — rational or otherwise — of something that should be done in response. Fund this, ban this, reform this and so on.

Some news stories don’t do that. Some leave us feeling angry, and sad, and powerless. That was my response — and I suspect it was many people’s response — to reading about the death of Amber Gibson.

Amber Gibson lived a life of unremitting horror. The 16-year-old Scot was born with an abusive father who would go on to be jailed for rape and sexual assault. Gibson, who was placed in care along with her brother, was raped by a man who was out on bail (for rape). She was then sexually assaulted and killed by her brother. A man found her body in the woods yet proceeded not to call the police but to “intimately touch” and conceal the corpse. Even in death, Amber could not escape evil.

The anger sets in before the powerlessness. Hang them! Well, I think there is a case that capital punishment is a just response to murder and child abuse. Would it stop them, though? Well — no. The response seeks catharsis more than a solution.

Social services failed! Well, perhaps. That should be investigated, for sure — and thoroughly. But one cannot simply assume that it was the case. It seems obvious now that Amber should not have been allowed to leave her care home with her brother, for example. But when, and how, should you stop a 16-year-old from seeing her brother? I don’t have an easy answer to that.

It’s tempting to scrabble round for some sort of random policy that could be implemented in a doomed attempt to wrest some good from the situation. Let’s call it Amber’s Law! Well, if a rational and effective policy can be implemented in response that will be a good thing. But the rush to find one in a self-indulgent quest for societal ablution is how we end up with village halls closing because they cannot meet anti-terror regulations.

Still, Amber was failed. She was failed by her father, and by her brother, and by strangers who saw her as nothing but a chance to fulfill their grim desires — and she was failed by a state, and a society, which did not have the capacity, whatever the causes, to extract her from the muck. That calls for serious reflection, because if progress means anything it means protecting innocent members of our community from evil.

In saying that, I do not wish to obscure the fact that evil — violence, exploitation — can be everyday. It lurks in every human realm and it is not only deserving of our time when it accumulates to such extraordinary levels. But such an extraordinary accumulation of evil, within the fairly narrow bounds of provincial Lanarkshire, should still be chastening.

The worm in human nature burrows deep yet never dies

The worm in human nature burrows deep yet never dies. We need firm criminal justice that separates the worst people from the rest — not just to punish them but to protect everyone else. We need to fund the legal system to prevent delays. We need systems through which moral rot — abuse, exploitation, neglect et cetera — can be identified. We need to investigate the cracks in social services that young people fall, or squeeze, through.

But we also need to honour victims of evil just for the sake of honouring them. Just because they mattered. Just because they should not be reduced to grim statistics.

By all accounts, Amber was a caring, loving person, despite the lack of care and love that she had received in life. In that, she was stronger than all the evil she was faced with. She transcended her surroundings while it festered on the ground.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.Alexis Misko’s health has improved enough that, once a month, she can leave her house for a few hours. First, she needs to build up her energy by lying in a dark room for the better part of two days, doing little more than listening to audiobooks. Then she needs a driver, a quiet destination where she can lie down, and days of rest to recover afterward. The brief outdoor joy “never quite feels like enough,” she told me, but it’s so much more than what she managed in her first year of long COVID, when she couldn’t sit upright for more than an hour or stand for more than 10 minutes. Now, at least, she can watch TV on the same day she takes a shower.  In her previous life, she pulled all-nighters in graduate school and rough shifts at her hospital as an occupational therapist; she went for long runs and sagged after long flights. None of that compares with what she has endured since getting COVID-19 almost three years ago. The fatigue she now feels is “like a complete depletion of the essence of who you are, of your life force,” she told me in an email.Fatigue is among the most common and most disabling of long COVID’s symptoms, and a signature of similar chronic illnesses such as myalgic encephalomyelitis (also known as chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS). But in these diseases, fatigue is so distinct from everyday weariness that most of the people I have talked with were unprepared for how severe, multifaceted, and persistent it can be.For a start, this fatigue isn’t really a single symptom; it has many faces. It can weigh the body down: Lisa Geiszler likens it to “wearing a lead exoskeleton on a planet with extremely high gravity, while being riddled with severe arthritis.” It can rev the body up: Many fatigued people feel “wired and tired,” paradoxically in fight-or-flight mode despite being utterly depleted. It can be cognitive: Thoughts become sluggish, incoherent, and sometimes painful—like “there’s steel wool stuck in my frontal lobe,” Gwynn Dujardin, a literary historian with ME, told me.Fatigue turns the most mundane of tasks into an “agonizing cost-benefit analysis,” Misko said. If you do laundry, how long will you need to rest to later make a meal? If you drink water, will you be able to reach the toilet? Only a quarter of long-haulers have symptoms that severely limit their daily activities, but even those with “moderate” cases are profoundly limited. Julia Moore Vogel, a program director at Scripps Research, still works, but washing her hair, she told me, leaves her as exhausted as the long-distance runs she used to do.And though normal fatigue is temporary and amenable to agency—even after a marathon, you can will yourself into a shower, and you’ll feel better after sleeping—rest often fails to cure the fatigue of long COVID or ME/CFS. “I wake up fatigued,” Letícia Soares, who has long COVID, told me.Between long COVID, ME/CFS, and other energy-limiting chronic illnesses, millions of people in the U.S. alone experience debilitating fatigue. But American society tends to equate inactivity with immorality, and productivity with worth. Faced with a condition that simply doesn’t allow people to move—even one whose deficits can be measured and explained—many doctors and loved ones default to disbelief. When Soares tells others about her illness, they usually say, “Oh yeah, I’m tired too.” When she was bedbound for days, people told her, “I need a weekend like that.” Soares’s problems are very real, and although researchers have started to figure out why so many people like her are suffering, they don’t yet know how to stop it.Fatigue creates a background hum of disability, but it can be punctuated by worse percussive episodes that strip long-haulers of even the small amounts of energy they normally have.Daria Oller is a physiotherapist and athletic trainer, so when she got COVID in March 2020, she naturally tried exercising her way to better health. And she couldn’t understand why, after just short runs, her fatigue, brain fog, chest pain, and other symptoms would flare up dramatically—to the point where she could barely move or speak. These crashes contradicted everything she had learned during her training. Only after talking with physiotherapists with ME/CFS did she realize that this phenomenon has a name: post-exertional malaise.Post-exertional malaise, or PEM, is the defining trait of ME/CFS and a common feature of long COVID. It is often portrayed as an extreme form of fatigue, but it is more correctly understood as a physiological state in which all existing symptoms burn more fiercely and new ones ignite. Beyond fatigue, people who get PEM might also feel intense radiant pain, an inflammatory burning feeling, or gastrointestinal and cognitive problems: “You feel poisoned, flu-ish, concussed,” Misko said. And where fatigue usually sets in right after exertion, PEM might strike hours or days later, and with disproportionate ferocity. Even gentle physical or mental effort might lay people out for days, weeks, months. Visiting a doctor can precipitate a crash, and so can filling out applications for disability benefits—or sensing bright lights and loud sounds, regulating body temperature on hot days, or coping with stress. And if in fatigue your batteries feel drained, in PEM they’re missing entirely. It’s the annihilation of possibility: Most people experience the desperation of being unable to move only in nightmares, Dujardin told me. “PEM is like that, but much more painful.”Medical professionals generally don’t learn about PEM during their training. Many people doubt its existence because it is so unlike anything that healthy people endure. Mary Dimmock told me that she understood what it meant only when she saw her son, Matthew, who has ME/CFS, crash in front of her eyes. “He just melted,” Dimmock said. But most people never see such damage because PEM hides those in the midst of it from public view. And because it usually occurs after a delay, people who experience PEM might appear well to friends and colleagues who then don’t witness the exorbitant price they later pay.That price is both real and measurable. In cardiopulmonary exercise tests, or CPETs, patients use treadmills or exercise bikes while doctors record their oxygen consumption, blood pressure, and heart rate. Betsy Keller, an exercise physiologist at Ithaca College, told me that most people can repeat their performance if retested one day later, even if they have heart disease or are deconditioned by inactivity. People who get PEM cannot. Their results are so different the second time around that when Keller first tested someone with ME/CFS in 2003, “I told my colleagues that our equipment was out of calibration,” she said. But she and others have seen the same pattern in hundreds of ME/CFS and long-COVID patients—“objective findings that can’t be explained by anything psychological,” David Systrom, a pulmonologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told me. “Many patients are told it’s all in their head, but this belies that in spades.” Still, many insurers refuse to pay for a second test, and many patients cannot do two CPETs (or even one) without seriously risking their health. And “20 years later, I still have physicians who refute and ignore the objective data,” Keller said. (Some long-COVID studies have ignored PEM entirely, or bundled it together with fatigue.)Oller thinks this dismissal arises because PEM inverts the dogma that exercise is good for you—an adage that, for most other illnesses, is correct. “It’s not easy to change what you’ve been doing your whole career, even when I tell someone that they might be harming their patients,” she said. Indeed, many long-haulers get worse because they don’t get enough rest in their first weeks of illness, or try to exercise through their symptoms on doctors’ orders.People with PEM are also frequently misdiagnosed. They’re told that they’re deconditioned from being too sedentary, when their inactivity is the result of frequent crashes, not the cause. They’re told that they’re depressed and unmotivated, when they are usually desperate to move and either physically incapable of doing so or using restraint to avoid crashing. Oller is part of a support group of 1,500 endurance athletes with long COVID who are well used to running, swimming, and biking through pain and tiredness. “Why would we all just stop?” she asked.Some patients with energy-limiting illnesses argue that the names of their diseases and symptoms make them easier to discredit. Fatigue invites people to minimize severe depletion as everyday tiredness. Chronic fatigue syndrome collapses a wide-ranging disabling condition into a single symptom that is easy to trivialize. These complaints are valid, but the problem runs deeper than any name.Dujardin, the English professor who is (very slowly) writing a cultural history of fatigue, thinks that our concept of it has been impoverished by centuries of reductionism. As the study of medicine slowly fractured into anatomical specialties, it lost an overarching sense of the systems that contribute to human energy, or its absence. The concept of energy was (and still is) central to animistic philosophies, and though once core to the Western world, too, it is now culturally associated with quackery and pseudoscience. “There are vials of ‘energy boosters’ by every cash register in the U.S.,” Dujardin said, but when the NIH convened a conference on the biology of fatigue in 2021, “specialists kept observing that no standard definition exists for fatigue, and everyone was working from different ideas of human energy.” These terms have become so unhelpfully unspecific that our concept of “fatigue” can encompass a wide array of states including PEM and idleness, and can be heavily influenced by social forces—in particular the desire to exploit the energy of others.As the historian Emily K. Abel notes in Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue, many studies of everyday fatigue at the turn of the 20th century focused on the weariness of manual laborers, and were done to find ways to make those workers more productive. During this period, fatigue was recast from a physiological limit that employers must work around into a psychological failure that individuals must work against. “Present-day society stigmatizes those who don’t Push through; keep at it; show grit,” Dujardin said, and for the sin of subverting those norms, long-haulers “are not just disbelieved but treated openly with contempt.” Fatigue is “profoundly anti-capitalistic,” Jaime Seltzer, the director of scientific and medical outreach at the advocacy group MEAction, told me.Energy-limiting illnesses also disproportionately affect women, who have long been portrayed as prone to idleness. Dujardin notes that in Western epics, women such as Circe and Dido were perceived harshly for averting questing heroes such as Odysseus and Aeneas with the temptation of rest. Later, the onset of industrialization turned women instead into emblems of homebound idleness while men labored in public. As shirking work became a moral failure, it also remained a feminine one.These attitudes were evident in the ways two successive U.S. presidents dealt with COVID. Donald Trump, who always evinced a caricature of masculine strength and chastised rivals for being “low energy,” framed his recovery from the coronavirus as an act of domination. Joe Biden was less bombastic, but he still conspicuously assured the public that he was working through his COVID infection while his administration prioritized policies that got people back to work. Neither man spoke of the possibility of disabling fatigue or the need for rest.Medicine, too, absorbs society’s stigmas around fatigue, even in selecting those who get to join its ranks. Its famously grueling training programs exclude (among others) most people with energy-limiting illnesses, while valorizing the ability to function when severely depleted. This, together with the tendency to psychologize women’s pain, helps to explain why so many long-haulers—even those with medical qualifications, like Misko and Oller—are treated so badly by the professionals they see for care. When Dujardin first sought medical help for her ME/CFS symptoms, the same doctor who had treated her well for a decade suddenly became stiff and suspicious, she told me, reduced all of her detailed descriptions to “tiredness,” and left the room without offering diagnosis or treatment. There is so much cultural pressure to never stop that many people can’t accept that their patients or peers might be biologically forced to do so.No grand unified theory explains everything about long COVID and ME/CFS, but neither are these diseases total mysteries. In fact, plenty of evidence exists for at least two pathways that explain why people with these conditions could be so limited in energy.First, most people with energy-limiting chronic illnesses have problems with their autonomic nervous system, which governs heartbeat, breathing, sleep, hormone release, and other bodily functions that we don’t consciously control. When this system is disrupted—a condition called “dysautonomia”—hormones such as adrenaline might be released at inappropriate moments, leading to the wired-but-tired feeling. People might suddenly feel sleepy, as if they’re shutting down. Blood vessels might not expand in moments of need, depriving active muscles and organs of oxygen and fuel; those organs might include the brain, leading to cognitive dysfunction such as brain fog.Second, many people with long COVID and ME/CFS have problems with generating energy. When viruses invade the body, the immune system counterattacks, triggering a state of inflammation. Both infection and inflammation can damage the mitochondria—the bean-shaped batteries that power our cells. Malfunctioning mitochondria produce violent chemicals called “reactive oxygen species” (ROS) that inflict even more cellular damage. Inflammation also triggers a metabolic switch toward fast but inefficient ways of making energy, depleting cells of fuel and riddling them with lactic acid. These changes collectively explain the pervasive, dead-battery flavor of fatigue, as “the body struggles to generate energy,” Bindu Paul, a pharmacologist and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, told me. They might also explain the burning, poisoned feelings that patients experience, as their cells fill with lactic acid and ROS.These two pathways—autonomic and metabolic—might also account for PEM. Normally, the autonomic nervous system smoothly dials up to an intense fight-and-flight mode and down to a calmer rest-and-digest one. But “in dysautonomia, the dial becomes a switch,” David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation specialist at Mount Sinai, told me. “You go from sitting to standing and your body thinks: Oh, are we going hunting? You stop, and your body shuts down.” The exhaustion of these dramatic, unstable flip-flops is made worse by the ongoing metabolic maelstrom. Damaged mitochondria, destructive ROS, inefficient metabolism, and chronic inflammation all compound one another in a vicious cycle that, if it becomes sufficiently intense, could manifest as a PEM crash. “No one is absolutely certain about what causes PEM,” Seltzer told me, but it makes sense that “you have this big metabolic shift and your nervous system can’t get back on an even keel.” And if people push through, deepening the metabolic demands on a body that already can’t meet them, the cycle can spin even faster, “leading to progressive disability,” Putrino said.Other factors might also be at play. Compared with healthy people, those with long COVID and ME/CFS have differences in the size, structure, or function of brain regions including the thalamus, which relays motor signals and regulates consciousness, and the basal ganglia, which controls movement and has been implicated in fatigue. Long-haulers also have problems with blood vessels, red blood cells, and clotting, all of which might further staunch their flows of blood, oxygen, and nutrients. “I’ve tested so many of these people over the years, and we see over and over again that when the systems start to fail, they all fail in the same way,” Keller said. Together, these woes explain why long COVID and ME/CFS have such bewilderingly varied symptoms. That diversity fuels disbelief—how could one disease cause all of this?—but it’s exactly what you’d expect if things as fundamental as metabolism go awry.Long-haulers might not know the biochemical specifics of their symptoms, but they are uncannily good at capturing those underpinnings through metaphor. People experiencing autonomic blood-flow problems might complain about feeling “drained,” and that’s literally happening: In POTS, a form of dysautonomia, blood pools in the lower body when people stand. People experiencing metabolic problems often use dead-battery analogies, and indeed their cellular batteries—the mitochondria—are being damaged: “It really feels like something is going wrong at the cellular level,” Oller told me. Attentive doctors can find important clues about the basis of their patients’ illness hiding amid descriptions that are often billed as “exaggerated or melodramatic,” Dujardin said.Some COVID long-haulers do recover. But several studies have found that, so far, most don’t fully return to their previous baseline, and many who become severely ill stay that way. This pool of persistently sick people is now mired in the same neglect that has long plagued those who suffer from illnesses such as ME/CFS. Research into such conditions are grossly underfunded, so no cures exist. Very few doctors in the U.S. know how to treat these conditions, and many are nearing retirement, so patients struggle to find care. Long-COVID clinics exist but vary in quality: Some know nothing about other energy-limiting illnesses, and still prescribe potentially harmful and officially discouraged treatments such as exercise. Clinicians who better understand these illnesses know that caution is crucial. When Putrino works with long-haulers to recondition their autonomic nervous system, he always starts as gently as possible to avoid triggering PEM. Such work “isn’t easy and isn’t fast,” he said, and it usually means stabilizing people instead of curing them.Stability can be life-changing, especially when it involves changes that patients can keep up at home. Over-the-counter supplements such as coenzyme Q10, which is used by mitochondria to generate energy and is depleted in ME/CFS patients, can reduce fatigue. Anti-inflammatory medications such as low-dose naltrexone may have some promise. Sleep hygiene may not cure fatigue, but certainly makes it less debilitating. Dietary changes can help, but the right ones might be counterintuitive: High-fiber foods take more energy to digest, and some long-haulers get PEM episodes after eating meals that seem healthy. And the most important part of this portfolio is “pacing”—a strategy for carefully keeping your activity levels beneath the threshold that causes debilitating crashes.Pacing is more challenging than it sounds. Practitioners can’t rely on fixed routines; instead, they must learn to gauge their fluctuating energy levels in real time, while becoming acutely aware of their PEM triggers. Some turn to wearable technology such as heart-rate monitors, and more than 30,000 are testing a patient-designed app called Visible to help spot patterns in their illness. Such data are useful, but the difference between rest and PEM might be just 10 or 20 extra heartbeats a minute—a narrow crevice into which long-haulers must squeeze their life. Doing so can be frustrating, because pacing isn’t a recovery tactic; it’s mostly a way of not getting worse, which makes its value harder to appreciate. Its physical benefits come at mental costs: Walks, workouts, socializing, and “all the things I’d do for mental health before were huge energy sinks,” Vogel told me. And without financial stability or social support, many long-haulers must work, parent, and care for themselves even knowing that they’ll suffer later. “It’s impossible not to overdo it, because life is life,” Vogel said.“Our society is not set up for pacing,” Oller added. Long-haulers must resist the enormous cultural pressure to prove their worth by pushing as hard as they can. They must tolerate being chastised for trying to avert a crash, and being disbelieved if they fail. “One of the most insulting things people can say is ‘Fight your illness,’” Misko said. That would be much easier for her. “It takes so much self-control and strength to do less, to be less, to shrink your life down to one or two small things from which you try to extract joy in order to survive.” For her and many others, rest has become both a medical necessity and a radical act of defiance—one that, in itself, is exhausting.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Looking for a good vacation this year? You might choose from a number of models. For example, Instagram Adventure, in which you pick an exotic destination, pack as much as you can into every day, take a million pictures, and document everything on social media to advertise that you are as energetic in leisure as you are at work. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Couch Potato, which means that you fritter away the entire two weeks doing very little. Other popular options include Two Endless Weeks in My Childhood Bedroom (for 20-somethings) and A Whole Month’s Pay Shot at Disney Because the Kids Whined All Year (for 30-somethings).One great vacation model, which harks back to the ancients, is frequently overlooked. The word for “leisure” in Greek is σχολή, or skhole. In Latin, the word is schola—from which we get “school.” In other words, the name for the place where we teach and learn derives from the word for “leisure.” One way to interpret this is that education is a recreational activity (a concept that may strike my hardworking students as counterintuitive). But a better explanation comes from the 20th-century philosopher Josef Pieper, who believed that leisure is the circumstance in which we can learn the most, if we understand and use it properly.If the conventional vacation models are leaving you cold, Pieper’s insight could provide the holiday you’ve been looking for. This year, consider using your time off as an opportunity to learn something wonderful.People pursue different objectives in their vacations, but no one I have ever met was seeking lower levels of positive emotion. The point is to be happier than usual, which is why a bad vacation is so frustrating—it feels like a missed opportunity to reset and make some emotional progress.To get the most contentment from your vacation, it is worthwhile to start with an understanding of basic human emotions. The negative side includes anger, sadness, fear, and disgust, which alert us to threats and stimulate behaviors such as fight or flight to keep us safe. These are obviously not the emotions you are hoping to experience on vacation—though all bets are off if a long car ride with the kids is involved.[Read: Why must we work so hard before vacation?]An abundance of basic positive emotions such as joy, surprise, and anticipation are what you seek. But you shouldn’t neglect another positive emotion of special importance: interest—the feeling of curiosity or fascination that captures your attention.The experience of interest is favored by evolution: It comes from learning new things, which rewarded our ancestors with more food and a greater chance at survival and reproduction. The same tendency for your Pleistocene hominin forebear to feel satisfaction after devising a novel way to catch a small animal persists in us today when we first master riding a bike or succeed in making a presentable soufflé.The well-being effect from learning is not as straightforward as it is for other activities, such as eating a doughnut. In fact, it involves a bit of sacrifice. As scholars found in 2011, investing in an activity to raise competency can lower your moment-to-moment happiness but can boost well-being measured over a longer time frame of hours and days. This makes perfect sense, of course: You rack your brain learning calculus but then bask in knowing it. In that respect, learning is like exercise: sometimes painful in the moment but rewarding overall.A key to maximizing satisfaction through learning is intrinsic motivation, or what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who famously wrote about “flow states”) called “autotelic learning”: learning for its own sake. Neuroscientists in 2014 used fMRI technology to show that this type of learning has to do with the brain’s response to curiosity. They demonstrated high levels of activity in the midbrain and a structure known as the nucleus accumbens, which indicated an enhanced release of dopamine, when study participants were highly curious about a subject. In other words, satisfying your curiosity through learning about whatever you’re most interested in will give you a neurochemical payoff.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.But is learning identical to education? You might be tempted to extrapolate from this evidence to predict, for example, that if everybody went to college, we would have a happier society. Not so fast: One 2017 study suggests that whether higher education drives happiness up or down depends on, among other things, where you live. In nations without high levels of education, many of which are considered developing countries, university education is associated with higher happiness. In countries with labor markets saturated with educated individuals, which is characteristic of greater economic development, the effect is reversed—university attendance is associated with lower happiness. One possible explanation is that for the former group, university training offers a path out of poverty, but for the latter group much of this effect has long since been depleted. Alternatively, something about the rich-world college experience may contribute to lower well-being. Suffice to say that the sort of leisure learning the Greeks had in mind is not identical with the modern American college experience.Taken together, the research points to a clear strategy to build a great vacation: Identify something you are very interested in for its own sake and focus on it intensively. And because the task or skill should be challenging enough to increase competence, the satisfaction goal should be understood in hours and days, not in the moment to moment of learning.You can choose a range of ways to achieve this outcome, whether cheap and casual or expensive and formal. At one end of the scale, you can simply program your own reading curriculum. Over two weeks, you might set about carefully reading four books on a particular topic. Or you might decide to read the entire Bible or Quran. You might also mix your media: reading a biography of J. S. Bach, for instance, while listening to 50 of his cantatas.At a more formal level, you might dedicate your vacation to taking a class. Perhaps you want to learn how to cook Punjabi cuisine, or follow one of the many “massive open online classes” (MOOCs, for short) that are available for free, such as—random example—one about exploring the science of happiness. For a more intensive (and expensive) option, you might hire a teacher to give you a head start on playing the guitar or speaking Mandarin, and do that for several hours every day. Or hire a nutrition-and-fitness coach. You will be amazed at how much progress you can make in two weeks.[Read: ‘Workcations’ aren’t an escape. They’re practice.]At the most rigorous level, you might go all in and spend your vacation on a guided silent retreat in one spiritual tradition or another. Or perhaps you could make a pilgrimage, walking in contemplation without devices or interruptions, and immersing yourself during rest periods in a wisdom literature that complements the experience.In a famous passage of The Republic, Plato advises on how to educate children in a way that will bring out their best: “Do not … keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play. That will … better enable you to discern the natural capacities of each.” In other words, kids will learn better if you allow them to enjoy recreation in a constructive way, rather than forcing them to study, which is more likely to stimulate rebellion.A similar principle lies behind the best model of vacation. Feeling compelled to relax and have fun is a common and counterproductive mistake. Telling yourself “I will be refreshed and not think about work!” is bound to lead in the wrong direction. Instead, employ a Platonic strategy and turn your leisure into learning. You might just have your best holiday ever.

Nina Turner is a former Ohio state senator, internet personality, and self-described democratic socialist. She often feuds with libertarians about "Medicare for All," minimum wage, and other economic policies.
This week, she tweeted the following: "There's literally a children's board game that demonstrates that 'free-market capitalism' always leads to one person controlling everything."

There's literally a children's board game that demonstrates that "free-market capitalism" always leads to one person controlling everything.
— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) July 26, 2023

One presumes that she is referring to the board game Monopoly. Assuming that's the case, this is a deeply flawed reference. In actuality, Monopoly's winner-take-all dynamics do not reflect poorly on capitalism, free markets, or even property acquisition.
First, a bit of history. Monopoly was designed in the early 1900s by Lizzie Magie, a feminist activist, anti-monopolist, and a disciple of Henry George—a Progressive Era economist who supported a single tax on land value. George's views weren't entirely incompatible with free markets; he supported free trade, opposed protectionist measures like tariffs, and thought a single tax on land value was the most efficient way for the government to raise revenue without penalizing development and other productive economic activities.
Magie wanted Monopoly—originally called The Landlord's Game—to promote Georgism by showing that monopolists grabbing up property is a pernicious danger if not counteracted by a land value tax. Monopoly was never intended as an argument against free market capitalism per se.
As such, the rules and game mechanics don't exactly undermine the legitimacy of the capitalist system. As most people know from playing the game—which is weirdly popular, despite being somewhat unrewarding at both casual and advanced levels of play—Monopoly involves rolling dice, moving game pieces onto game spaces, buying property, and collecting rent. Players earn more money from their properties if they also own neighboring spaces and then develop them. There are gains to be had from trading properties with other players, but market mechanisms are mostly absent.
For instance, the amounts of money earned by landing on spaces is prearranged by the game's rules. In a free market, a landlord might charge more or less in order to entice renters and compete against rivals; in Monopoly, rents are set in stone. If anything, this is an argument against government-imposed rent control.
The fact that players must go bankrupt, one by one, until only the game's winner remains is a function of the game's design, not of capitalism. Indeed, this mechanic is actually so poorly developed that games of Monopoly often end well before this point is reached: People frequently quit the game because it takes so long. Even under conditions artificially engineered to reach an end-state where "one person controls everything," per Turner's description, the game often doesn't work out that way.
If Turner wanted to learn more about free markets—and play a much more enjoyable game than Monopoly—she could check out Catan. In Catan, players gain and trade resources in other to acquire settlements, build roads, and further develop their land. The trading mechanic is key and, in the long run, rewards all players: At the game's end, everybody's civilizations are more impressive than they would have been without market-induced cooperation.
(For more expert board game fans, I would also recommend Agricola, which shows how hard it was for people to feed themselves prior to the creation of capitalism. Its tagline is "The 17th century, not a very easy time for farming!")
The post There's Nothing Free Market About the Board Game Monopoly appeared first on Reason.com.

Joy Alonzo, an opioid researcher and professor at Texas A&M University, gave an uneventful lecture to a group of medical students earlier this spring. But a few hours later, she had been placed on paid leave, pending an investigation into a few comments she made about Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
While Alonzo was cleared following an investigation, that she was investigated at all spells continued concerns for a university already under fire for allegedly pushing out a professor over political complaints.
According to The Texas Tribune, which first reported on the case, Alonzo said she was reported by a student "who has ties to Texas A&M Leadership." 
At first, Alonzo's presentation to University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) students on March 7—which focused on the opioid crisis and harm-reduction measures—seemed to go smoothly. But soon after, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham—whose daughter attended the lecture—called Patrick and told him that Alonzo had made critical comments about him during the presentation, according to a Texas A&M spokesperson.
It's not clear what Alonzo's exact comments about Patrick were. The lecture wasn't recorded, and Alonzo and Buckingham both declined to comment to the Tribune. However, several students told the Tribune that Alonzo made comments about how the lieutenant governor's office has made it harder to combat opioid-related deaths due to its opposition to certain harm-reduction measures.
Soon after Buckingham complained to Patrick, an administrator sent an email to the class of medical students with the subject line "STATEMENT OF FORMAL CENSURE."
"The statements made by the guest lecturer do not represent the opinion or position of the University of Texas Medical Branch, nor are they considered as core curriculum content for this course," the email read. "UTMB does not support or condone these comments. We take these matters very seriously and wish to express our disapproval of the comment and apologize for harm it may have caused for members of our community."
By the end of the day, Alonzo was placed on paid leave by Texas A&M, and the school had opened an investigation into her comments. It took two weeks for the university to clear her of wrongdoing.
"The investigation into the matter was a reasonable step to take, particularly after UTMB issued a public statement 'censuring' one of our faculty members," a spokesperson told the Tribune. "In fact, it would have been irresponsible not to look into it."
However, free speech groups disagree. "Texas A&M's punishment of Alonzo to please powerful political forces is a stunning abdication of its constitutional obligations, deeply chilling faculty and student expression on campus," wrote the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in a Tuesday letter to the university. "When confronted with inevitable pressures to encroach on academic freedom—whether from powerful alumni, donors, or, as here, politicians—institutions like Texas A&M must abide by the constitutional principles that instill trust in our public universities."
As a public university, Texas A&M had no legal right to investigate Alonzo for criticizing a public official. However, considering that the school is already under fire for pushing out the recently appointed director of the school's journalism program following complaints over the professor's political beliefs, it's unlikely that the school will change its trend of eroding faculty speech rights anytime soon.
The post A Professor Criticized a Public Official. Then Her University Suspended Her. appeared first on Reason.com.

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The mysterious disappearance of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang is a timely reminder that the future of U.S.-China relations will be determined not just by U.S. policy and what is happening domestically in the United States (such as the presidential election campaign). It will be shaped also by developments in China — which at this point are opaque but troubling.

From what outsiders can tell, China is reverting to a Mao-era style of politics that we have not seen for decades. More significant than Qin’s mysterious removal from power — after the authorities attributed his absence to “health reasons” — is the doctoring of websites and news releases to expunge the foreign minister’s participation and achievements. “Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in his novel “1984,” and that ominous dictum seems to be the guide to China’s elite politics these days.

This is a far cry from the technocratic government that Deng Xiaoping ushered in as he reformed China in the 1980s. In those days, the Chinese political system seemed a contradiction in terms — a dictatorship that had age caps or term limits for high offices. Where else did one see this kind of limitation of authoritarian rule? Today, again, there are no limits to the power of China’s ruler. What scholar Elizabeth Economy has called China’s “Third Revolution” (the first personified by Mao Zedong, the second by Deng, and now by Xi Jinping) is still going strong.

That third revolution is not just about domestic politics. Xi has consolidated his own power and put the Chinese Communist Party back at the center of the society, but he has also sought to present a much stronger and more assertive China to the world. Those decisions have had ripple effects across the globe, especially in Asia, where China’s neighbors have been rattled by Xi’s more aggressive posture and policies.

The United States has not handled relations with China perfectly. The Biden administration was needlessly confrontational from the outset, publicly upbraiding Beijing in their first meeting of senior officials. The United States has also maintained President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, despite the fact that they have been expensive failures. (Remember that it is American consumers who pay for those tariffs, not the Chinese.) Trump provided tens of billions in additional subsidies to farmers to make up for the losses they suffered because of these policies. And, for a while, it seemed that U.S. policies toward Beijing were being announced with no effort to maintain a working relationship with China, despite its status as the world’s second largest economy, a nuclear weapons power and possessor of a U.N. Security Council veto.

But Biden has corrected course. Several of his senior officials — including the secretaries of state, commerce and the treasury — have met with their Chinese counterparts and tried to stop the decline in relations between the two countries. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told me in an interview that world leaders have been telling him that they expect the United States and China to build a decent working relationship. The administration is taking seriously the idea that it will restrict only a limited number of high-end technologies from being shared with China, using the metaphor of a “small yard” with a “high fence.” Even some U.S. policies that would provoke Chinese opposition — such as looming new regulations around U.S. investment in China — are now being signaled to the Chinese in advance (in that particular case by Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen).

There are still areas in which the United States could make a more serious effort. If the Biden administration wants to have productive military-to-military dialogue, maintaining Trump-era sanctions against China’s defense minister would seem an odd way to signal that desire. Far better to waive the sanctions so that the two sides can talk and avoid misunderstandings on issues such as Taiwan.

But the ball is really in China’s court. Unfortunately, Chinese policy has been marked by an assertiveness and even bellicosity that have broken sharply with the past three decades. Xi has staked out expansive claims for China in the South China Sea, increased military activity around Taiwan, clashed with India in the Himalayas, demanded that Australia cease any criticism of his country, pledged his country’s unqualified support for Moscow even as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine escalates and ramped up criticism of the United States.

None of these policies seems to be working. Countries around China have become far more active in countering Beijing’s influence and searching for assistance elsewhere, especially from the United States. From Japan to the Philippines to India, nations are pushing back. Will Beijing change? Is an increasingly autocratic and closed decision-making system capable of learning and adapting? Qin Gang’s mysterious removal does not suggest a positive answer.

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For the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy defenders who tried to block Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial coup on Monday, the stripping of the Israeli Supreme Court’s key powers to curb the executive branch surely feels like a stinging defeat. I get it, but don’t totally despair. Help may be on the way from talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Yes, you read that right.

When I interviewed President Biden in the Oval Office last week, my column focused on his urging Netanyahu not to ram through the judicial overhaul without even a semblance of national consensus. But that’s not all we talked about. The president is wrestling with whether to pursue the possibility of a U.S.-Saudi mutual security pact that would involve Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, provided that Israel make concessions to the Palestinians that would preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.

After discussions in the past few days among Biden; his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan; Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and Brett McGurk, the top White House official handling Middle East policy, Biden has dispatched Sullivan and McGurk to Saudi Arabia, where they arrived Thursday morning, to explore the possibility of some kind of U.S.-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian understanding.

The president still has not made up his mind whether to proceed, but he gave a green light for his team to probe with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to see if some kind of deal is possible and at what price. Closing such a multinational deal would be time-consuming, difficult and complex, even if Biden decides to take it to the next level right away. But the exploratory talks are moving ahead now — faster than I thought — and they’re important for two reasons.

The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics Cite this article Reuse our work freely

It’s tempting to believe that we can simply rely on personal experience to develop our understanding of the world. But that’s a mistake. The world is large, and we can experience only very little of it personally. To see what the world is like, we need to rely on other means: carefully-collected global statistics.

Of course, our personal interactions are part of what informs our worldview. We piece together a picture of the lives of others around us from our interactions with them. Every time we meet people and hear about their lives, we add one more perspective to our worldview. This is a great way to see the world and expand our understanding, I don’t want to suggest otherwise. But I want to remind ourselves how little we can learn about our society through personal interactions alone, and how valuable statistics are in helping us build the rest of the picture.

The horizon of our personal experience

How many people do you know personally?

Let’s take a broad definition of what it means to know someone and say that we include everyone you know by name. A study in the US asked how many people Americans know by name and found that the average person knows 611.1

Let’s assume you are more social than the average American, and you know 800 people. In a world of 8 billion, this means that you know 0.00001% of the population. A 100,000th of a percent.2

It’s hard to visualize how small a fraction this is. If this illustration was drawn to scale, then the blue rectangle – which represents the world population – would be as large as a sheet of printer paper, while the yellow square – which represents the number that a person knows – would have the diameter of a human hair.3

This is why I’m very skeptical when people say things about “the world these days” based on what they hear from people they know.

We cannot see much of the world through our direct experience. The horizon of our personal experience is very narrow. For every person you know, there are ten million people you do not know.

And chances are that the people you know are quite similar to you, far from representative of the world — or your country — as a whole.

How wide can the horizon of our personal experience be?

Perhaps you think restricting the people you learn from to the number of people you know by name is too narrow. After all, you also learn from strangers you meet, even if you don’t get to know their names.

Let’s assume you are exceptionally good at this, and you have a conversation with three new people every single day of your life.

If you can keep this up for 73 years, you will get to know 80,000 people.4 That’s more than a thousand times the number of people you’d know by name.

This is still a tiny fraction of the world. After a lifetime of speaking with people, you will have spoken to 0.001% of the world’s population. For every person you’ve had a conversation with, there are still 100,000 people you’ve never spoken to.

Drawn to scale, the orange square, which represents the number of people you could ever speak to, would be less than a millimeter (0.8mm) wide.5

I am focusing on personal interaction as the most direct and in-depth way to learn about others, but they are not our only experience by which we learn about others. We also learn by seeing other peoples’ clothes, by seeing their houses, or by hearing others talk about their personal experiences. But while these experiences also help, they still don’t get us very far. The world is large, and even if you are exceptionally attentive and exceptionally good at making connections and speaking to people, it is simply impossible to see much of the world directly.

The fragmented perspective of the news media: some spotlights on particular people, but much of the world is left in darkness

The limits of our personal experience don’t reach far beyond ourselves. How can we know about the world if we want to see beyond this tight horizon?

In one way or another, we have to rely on the media. Whether it is television or radio, the newspaper or photography, books, podcasts, documentaries, research papers, statistical tables, or social media.

This fact is so obvious that it is easy to miss how important it is: everything you hear about anyone who is more than a few dozen meters away, you know through some form of media.

That’s why the media we choose to rely on is so important for our understanding of the world.

The news is the media that shapes our picture of the world more than any other. Today, it’s often intertwined with social media. It is valuable as it lets us see beyond our own tight horizon, but the view the news offers is a spotted and fragmented one.

The news reports on the unusual things that happen on a particular day, but the things that happen every day never get mentioned. This gives us a biased and incomplete picture of the world; we are inundated with detailed news on terrorism but hardly ever hear of everyday tragedies like the fact that 16,000 children die every single day.

The illustration on the side visualizes this fragmented view. The news focuses on exceptionally powerful people or on those who experienced unusual tragedies. But while it puts the spotlight on those few people, it leaves most of the world in darkness.

The problem is not so much what the news media covers but what it does not cover. Those left in darkness are often poor and powerless and geographically far from us. What we see in the news is not nearly enough to understand the world we are living in.

What is missing: everyone else — for this, we need global data

Of course, it is challenging to hear about everyone. But that’s the challenge we have to take on if we don’t want to be left with a scattered and biased perspective of the world.

If we want to see what on earth is going on, we have to tell all the stories. This is possible. Telling many stories at once is statistics.

Statistical methods make it possible to draw reliable conclusions about a population as a whole. Statistics is an extraordinary cultural achievement that allows us to broaden our view, from the individual stories of those in the spotlight to a perspective that includes everyone.

Global economic data can tell us about the incomes of everyone on this planet. Global health data aim to tell us about everyone’s cause of death. And similarly, we can learn about everyone who lacks access to basic electricity, everyone who lacks access to clean drinking water, and everyone who lacks access to basic sanitation.

Global statistics don’t only allow us to see what the “world these days” looks like, but also how it has changed. Statistics that document how the world has changed are often very surprising to those who mostly rely on the news to understand the world. While the news focuses overwhelmingly on all the things that are going wrong, historical statistics allow us to also see what has gone right — the immense progress the world has achieved.

Statistics can illuminate the world in a way that our personal experiences and the news media can’t. This is why we, at Our World in Data, rely on global statistics to understand how the world is changing.

The visual illustrates what carefully-collected global statistics make possible: they illuminate the entire world around us, and allow us to see what is happening to everyone.

No data is perfect

The collection and production of good statistics is a major challenge. Data might be unrepresentative in some ways, it might be mismeasured, and some data might be missing entirely. Everyone who relies on statistics to form their worldview needs to be aware of these shortcomings.

Our goal here at Our World in Data is to present the best available data and at the same time highlight their shortcomings. The most important work is done by the statisticians who collect and publish the global databases in the first place. Our role is to make their work accessible and understandable. To achieve this goal we speak with experts, read the scientific literature, and analyze the available data so that we can highlight the best available statistics and highlight the shortcomings that even the best data is associated with.

A statistical understanding of the world needs to become much more central to our culture

I don’t want to suggest that it is a bad idea to rely on personal experience or the news to learn about the world. Each way of learning about the world has its value. It’s about how we bring them together: the in-depth understanding that only personal interaction can give us, the focus on the powerful and unusual that the news offers, and the statistical view that gives us the opportunity to see everyone.

We have many ways of learning about the world and we should make use of all of them. A statistical view without personal experience lacks depth, and personal experience without statistical knowledge lacks perspective.

The problem is that most of our focus goes toward personal experience and the news. They are held in high regard, while statistics are left to a small corner of our culture. This is not where they belong. A society that has the aspiration to care for everyone needs to bring a statistical understanding of the world into the center of its culture.

For this, we need to remember what statistical figures really mean. Spreadsheets are not just numbers, they tell us about the reality of the people around us and allow us to see what is happening to everyone, all at once.

How this relates to our mission: I’ve focused on our global understanding, but the same is true at smaller scales. To see what our own country, our own city, is like, we need statistics. These statistics exist, but they are often neither accessible nor understandable. They are buried in spreadsheets, hidden behind paywalls, and presented in academic jargon.

Our mission at Our World in Data is to change this and make the statistics that are needed to understand our society accessible and understandable for everyone. → Read more about our mission.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Hannah Ritchie, Natasha Ahuja, Ike Saunders, Edouard Mathieu, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Bastian Herre for their helpful comments to drafts of this essay and the visualizations.

Cite this work Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as: Max Roser (2023) - "The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/limits-personal-experience' [Online Resource] BibTeX citation @article{owid-limits-personal-experience, author = {Max Roser}, title = {The limits of our personal experience and the value of statistics}, journal = {Our World in Data}, year = {2023}, note = {https://ourworldindata.org/limits-personal-experience} }

Presidential candidate Cornel West and the Democratic Socialists of America—the leftist organization likely most responsible for the Democratic Party's lurch to the left over the past decade—have a long history with one another.

An honorary chair of DSA, West was an enthusiastic supporter of DSA-backed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the 2016 election and, since, has remained a pious adherent to the platform he ran on. After declaring his intent to run for president on the People's Party ticket earlier this year, some mused he should have mounted a run within the Democratic Party as an affiliate of the DSA, noting his ideological ties to the platform they and candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman have used to reshape Democrats' presence on Capitol Hill.

However deep the ties between them, some members of the DSA have begun to make it clear that their support of West's candidacy is by no means guaranteed.

Cornel West, professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary, speaks at the National Press Club February 21, 2017 in Washington, DC. Win McNamee/Getty

In a recent series of dueling columns in the DSA Marxist Caucus' magazine, Reform and Revolution, two members of the caucus outlined a burgeoning battle within DSA. Should the DSA support West—the candidate most aligned with their values some believe could play spoiler in 2024—or back the more pragmatic choice in incumbent President Joe Biden, a relative moderate with significantly more viability in a general election against a prospective Republican challenge from Donald Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

It's not exactly a new fight for DSA: while Sanders did ultimately endorse Biden in the 2020 election, the organization's support was tepid, resolving at its 2019 convention that it would "not endorse another Democratic Party presidential candidate should Bernie Sanders not prevail."

Though DSA tweeted it would hold firm to that pledge after Sanders dropped out of the race the following March, by that October DSA leadership had begun circulating a "pledge" to campaign for Biden in the closing weeks of the election, declaring a Trump loss would be "unequivocally better for the working class and for our movement than a Trump re-election victory."

While DSA has not yet made an endorsement in the race, the tension between lofty idealism and pragmatic politicking could once again be laid bare ahead of the 2024 cycle between supporters of West and those willing to accept the imperfect vessel of a Biden second term. West, one member wrote for Reform and Revolution, would likely command a large swath of the hundreds of thousands of left-leaning voters who'd previously voted for third-party candidates under tickets like the Green Party, handing the election to a conservative candidate who opposes issues central to the DSA platform, like abortion access.

Particularly as some data previously provided to Newsweek show a third-party run would very likely hand Republicans the election.

"We should focus on the real prize: the vast majorities of people who, despite any political alignment or lack thereof, believe in abortion rights, trans rights, and other progressive reforms for bodily autonomy," Ruy Martinez, the founder of the Harvard chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America and a campaign organizer, wrote for the caucus magazine. "These issues have majoritarian support and are the bulwark of right-wing attacks on working people."

Another author for the magazine, Seattle DSA member Stephan Kimmerle, however, sees West's candidacy as an opportunity to promote the viability of the DSA platform, seizing the opportunity presented by two historically unpopular candidates to present voters with a third option to the moderating politics of a Democratic Party data shows is quickly losing ground with their working-class base.

Should DSA Endorse Cornel West? @stephankimmerle says yes!

The 2024 presidential race is already dominating political debates in the US. The Cornel West campaign is an important chance to make socialist politics visible in this central arena of debate.https://t.co/a7IUIvfKhE — Reform & Revolution DSA 🌹 (@dsaRandR) July 25, 2023

That said, endorsing West, Kemmerle noted, doesn't necessarily mean handing the election to Trump. If anything, he said, it's an expression of the influence of their ideals at a time many of their candidates have succeeded in replacing more moderate Democrats from city councils to congress.

"It's understandable that, out of fear, working-class voters check the box for Joe Biden and other Democrats," Kemmerle wrote. "In the 10 or so contested states where the presidential election is decided, it may even be prudent to vote for the lesser evil—but only if we also work seriously toward building an alternative to all evils in the whole country, including those battleground states: a new Democratic Socialist Party."

Newsweek has reached out to DSA leadership via email for comment.

Elon Musk loves the letter “X.” He named his first company X.com. He named one of his kids X. He renamed Twitter X. Kill the birds! But why?

“X” is geeky. That’s because in 1637 when René Descartes wrote a treatise on geometry, he decided to use x, y, and z for variables, but his printer, setting the type, kept running out of “Y”s and “Z”s but not “X”s, because you don’t use “X” in French very often, so he used, mostly, “X”s. X, the variable, the unknown, the mysterious. In 1895, when the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered a new kind of radiation, and he didn’t know what it was, he called it an X ray.

“X” is mathematical and “X” is scientific. Beginning in the nineteen-thirties, as I recounted in a five-part BBC Radio 4/Pushkin podcast series called “Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket,” Musk’s grandfather became a leader of the Technocracy movement. They called themselves Technocrats and they believed that only engineers and scientists could save the world from a looming catastrophe. As one pamphlet explained, “What Technocracy, Inc., is chiefly engaged in now is the organization of an army of trained men and women in the United States and Canada who, when the present interference controls break down and the intricate machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping, will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is too late.” Technocrats objected to politicians and economists, democracy, and socialism. They wanted an end to all banks. In the future that Technocrats including Musk’s grandfather were planning for, “There will be no place for Politics or Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers.” There would also be no place for personal names. One technocrat, for instance, renamed himself 1x1809x56. Musk named one of his sons X Æ A-12—X, for short. (In 1950, two years after South Africa announced its policy of apartheid, Musk’s Technocrat grandfather, who had been briefly jailed for his political views, left Canada for Pretoria, where Musk grew up.)

“X” is also sci-fi. It got that way in the nineteen-fifties, in radio plays such as “Dimension X,” and movies such as “The Strange World of Planet X”—whose trailer warned, “Be prepared for a fantastic adventure into the future, a monstrous world of terror and chaos!” “X” meant extraterrestrial, and “X” meant extreme, and “X” meant X-rated, a rating invented by the British Board of Film Classification in 1951.

You’ve got your X-Men, your X-Files, your Xbox, “X” marking the beginning of the reign inaugurated by “Revenge of the Nerds.” By the nineteen-nineties, the man-boys of Silicon Valley were all very into the letter “X.” Musk co-founded X.com and SpaceX. Google opened an R. & D. division whose aim was “to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.” It was called . . . X.

Those X-men liked the idea that they were solving what they came to call “X-risks”: existential risks, risks of human extinction. This is how Musk came to see himself, too. As I argued in “The Evening Rocket,” they got this idea from science fiction, from some very old science fiction. They would save the planet from existential risks, found extraterrestrial civilizations, by way of extreme capitalism. X, x, x, x. Musk’s X.com, an early online bank, merged with Peter Thiel’s Confinity, which owned PayPal, but Musk bought back the domain name in 2017. When you clicked on it, you got a white screen with a tiny letter “x.” A promise. He used that money to start SpaceX—“X,” for exploration.

But why name a baby X? “Once upon a time, a Baby named X was born.” So begins a piece of feminist science fiction published in Ms. magazine in 1972, in its first regular issue. “This Baby was named X so that nobody could tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Its parents could tell, of course, but they couldn’t tell anybody else. They couldn’t even tell Baby X—at least not until much, much later. You see, it was all part of a very important Secret Scientific Xperiment known officially as Project Baby X.”

The story was written by Lois Gould, a novelist and mother of two sons, who was also an executive editor of Ladies’ Home Journal and a columnist for the Times, where she wrote the “Hers” column. In the story, the parents abide by the terms of the experiment. “ ‘It’s an X,’ was absolutely all they would say. And that made the friends and relatives very angry.”

But it wasn’t just a story. Three years later, in 1975, the feminist thought experiment led to an actual scientific experiment, whose results were published in a journal article that was also called “Baby X.” The baby’s gender was withheld from the subjects of the experiment. “Although the story was science fiction fantasy, the question of how adults would actually respond to a child in the absence of such information appeared to merit investigation,” the investigators explained. They brought in forty-two volunteers and put them in a lab with a baby. “Those in the Male and Female conditions were told that there was a three-month-old baby boy or baby girl . . . to play with, while those in the Neutral condition were told there was a three-month-old baby with no mention of its sex or name.”

What can this story possibly have to do with Elon Musk? Musk met Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, in 2018. She’d studied neuroscience at McGill. She’s a feminist and, like Musk, she’s an avid science-fiction fan. (The New Yorker once called her a “mad pop scientist.”) She’s the kind of person who pretty plausibly would have read the story of X in college, either the feminist fable, or the actual experiment, or both. Also, in 2011, when Grimes was at McGill, there’d been a lot of coverage of a family in Canada practicing gender-neutral parenting. “There’s a couple in Toronto that is creating quite a stir right now,” one television news station reported,”because they’re raising their baby what they’re calling gender-free.”

Announcing their baby’s birth, Musk said it was a boy, but Grimes told fans, “I don’t want to gender them in case that’s not how they feel in their life.” They named that baby X, and their second baby Y.

X, Musk promises, will be the “everything app.” X is the Technocrats’ dream deferred, a way to engineer society, the economy, and politics. Extreme capitalism—Muskism—as the answer to existential risk. With any luck, it will be a disaster. ♦

Before Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow.
Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally left of center—including progressive journalists like Taibbi—was expected to support Hillary Clinton unconditionally. So when he attacked her as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of right and left media personalities, progressives gave him the cold shoulder. Elected Democrats started treating him like a puppet of the right.
In 2020, Taibbi started publishing his work on Substack and quickly became one of the platform's most popular writers, earning far more than he ever did at Rolling Stone, where he had been chief political reporter. He became even more of a pariah by publishing exhaustive reports that documented how the government sought to control what was said on Twitter about COVID-19 and efforts by Russia to influence U.S. elections. Congressional Democrats unconvincingly pilloried him as a fake journalist, an apologist for Vladimir Putin, and a stooge for Elon Musk.
I caught up with Taibbi at FreedomFest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis, to talk about the new challenges to free speech, why legacy media is dying, and how identity politics are poisoning political discourse.
The post Matt Taibbi: How the Left Lost Its Mind and Legacy Media Its Audience appeared first on Reason.com.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hired 25-year-old Nate Hochman to be a campaign speechwriter in March, it sent an unambiguous message about the direction of the governor's presidential bid.
Among the cadre of young culture warriors within the so-called "New Right," Hochman had already distinguished himself as someone to watch—and not always in the right ways. While collecting bylines at National Review and The New York Times, Hochman had also cozied up to Nick Fuentes, a well-known white nationalist, and pushed for a more illiberal conservative movement. Republicans can no longer afford to support "value-neutral liberty," he told the right-wing publication American Moment in 2022, and must instead "assert a positive vision of the good" that would require the conservative movement to "cohere around the culture war as its organizing, totalizing force."
By bringing Hochman onto his campaign, then, DeSantis was sending a bi-directional message. It was yet another nod to the New Right that DeSantis was taking seriously their views about the role of government as a force to be deployed in the culture war. And it was an indication that DeSantis believed embracing that faction, warts and all, was part of the path to winning the Republican nomination and ultimately the presidency.
In the four months since then, things haven't gone as planned for DeSantis—although he's gotten exactly what he bargained for.
Let's start with the polls. DeSantis stood at nearly 30 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average in mid-March, about a dozen points behind Trump. Today, the Republican governor is at a polling average of 18 percent, a staggering 34 points behind Trump.
Polls, especially at this stage of the campaign, are only so useful. Still, that monthslong swoon nicely contextualizes how DeSantis seems to have alienated himself by rushing to embrace the right wing's too-online fringe.
The most recent misstep was a video containing Nazi and fascist imagery distributed last week on Twitter by an account loosely affiliated with the DeSantis campaign—and immediately retweeted by Hochman. That came on the heels of a controversy created by another video, also reportedly made by the DeSantis campaign, that criticized Trump for his tolerant views toward gay and transgender people—and that implied DeSantis would roll back rights for those groups. Amid those acute moments, there's been a steady drip of reporting suggesting that the DeSantis campaign's fixation on the culture war was alienating key Republican donors and more moderate voters.
Those issues all extend beyond Hochman, of course, but the prominent young staffer was a symbol of the campaign's willingness to engage with the edgelordy politics of the far right. Indeed, just hours after Semafor reported Tuesday that Hochman (along with more than 30 others) had been fired from the DeSantis campaign as part of a "reset" in strategy, Axios reported that Hochman created the recent video containing Nazi symbolism.
In the same way that bringing Hochman aboard might have been seen as an indication of what type of candidate DeSantis hoped to be, Hochman's departure serves as a tidy illustration of what's clearly not working for the DeSantis camp. In both instances, the important story isn't the hiring or firing of Hochman personally, but rather what that specific staffing decision says about DeSantis' relationship with the nationalist New Right movement—a relationship that seems to be costing DeSantis more than it is helping him.
In fairness, not all of DeSantis' campaign struggles can be tied to Hochman and the wider New Right. The conservative movement as a whole is largely animated these days by grievance politics, and no one traffics in grievance politics better than Trump.
Still, it's worth it for DeSantis to try a reboot. There remains ample time before the first votes are cast and there's still no one else better positioned to make a run at Trump. Rather than trying to outflank Trump to the GOP's relatively small authoritarian-curious fringe with Nazi memes, DeSantis should try making a principled case to the party's many Trump-skeptical members. Doing so will require reminding Republican primary voters of Trump's obvious liabilities in a general election—and the former president's tolerant views toward gay Americans aren't anywhere near the top of that list.
Regardless of whether DeSantis successfully pivots his campaign, the past few months stand as a useful lesson about the relative political power of the New Right. Both those within the movement and those covering it often refer to the fractious illiberal conservatives as "populists"—but that might be too flattering of a description. DeSantis leaned hard into the reactionary politics and online culture-warring that defines the moment and now finds himself more distant from the White House than he was a few months ago. The movement's biggest stars lost or underperformed relative to more mainstream Republicans in last year's midterms as well. Building a winning national campaign requires a different set of skills, it turns out, than earning likes and retweets within the fetid swamps of right-wing Twitter.
It might be time for DeSantis—and conservatives in general—to heed another unambiguous message: The New Right isn't all that popular, after all.
The post Getting Cozy With the Too Online 'New Right' Hasn't Worked Out for DeSantis appeared first on Reason.com.

Before Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter Files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow.
Photo Credits: om Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Music Credits: "Fun Fun Fun—Instrumental Version," by Dimitrix, via Artlist.
The post Matt Taibbi: How the Left Lost Its Mind appeared first on Reason.com.

In my last essay I tried to describe a plausible and attractive vision of the future, one shaped by a movement toward “economic independence.” The basic idea is to make it possible for families, neighborhoods, and communities to reassume some responsibilities now outsourced to the market and the state, giving them independent control over important aspects of their lives and revitalizing their personal relationships by imbuing them with practical functions. In sum, more independence from the impersonal system, made possible by greater interdependence at the face-to-face level.
As I’m very uncomfortably aware, this isn’t an idea that’s already in circulation – at least not as an overall program of social reform. The raw materials for it are lying at hand, but nobody has yet assembled them into a coherent whole. Making matters more challenging, ideas that are in circulation and that bear some resemblance to mine – namely, by calling for a greater emphasis on the small scale and the local – come from a worldview totally alien to my own and aim for a future that I reject as both dismally limited and utterly impracticable.
I know, therefore, that there is great scope for confusion here, and that I have a heavy burden to meet to convince readers that I’m onto something worth pursuing. So in this essay, I’m going to try to bring the idea of economic independence into clearer focus by contrasting it with other, better known alternatives.
Let me start with the ideas that at least superficially resemble my own: the longstanding yearning for a return to the organic simplicity of the local and small-scale. In the 1960s and 70s, this yearning manifested itself in a wave of utopianism and social experimentation. In the realm of ideas, we got books like Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, Charles Reich’s The Greening of America, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. On the ground, we got the hippie movement, a wider backlash against both commercialism and bureaucracy, and a burst of efforts to create new alternatives in the form of co-ops, communes, and other intentional communities.
The quest to build a sustainable counterculture with radical alternative institutions ended in complete failure. Almost all the communes dissolved, and starry-eyed hopes for an Aquarian millennium gave way to some combination of bitter disillusionment and rueful embarrassment. What remained, though, was the environmental movement, with its pronounced preference for apocalyptic over millennial thinking; the yearning for smaller-scale living made its home there as part of the larger radical green critique of capitalism. These days “small is beautiful” thinking is expressing itself most visibly in the “degrowth” movement, which positions itself as the answer to capitalism’s alleged environmental unsustainability as well as its alienating agonistic materialism.
Here is the best way, I think, to understand the relationship between my ideas and these: my idea of economic independence differs from traditional “small is beautiful” thinking in exactly the same way that the ecomodernist vision of reconciling technology with the natural world that I outlined in this essay differs from the traditional environmental movement.
As I’ve argued previously, rising to the challenge of the permanent problem and reaching the next level of social development requires that we address two conflicts created by industrialization and the rise of material plenty: first, the conflict between our technological dynamism and the well-being of the natural world; and second, the conflict between the liberating individualism of modernity and our nature as social animals.
In both cases, I see an important and serious problem, and that distinguishes me from small-c conservatives who are comfortable with the status quo. With respect to the environment, we’re all dependent today on the fossil fuel/factory farming economy, and that leads many of us to minimize the harms this economy is causing and the risks of future calamity it is stoking. I was once in that boat, but now I stand with mainstream environmentalists in recognizing that a big problem exists. Unlike the dominant, anti-Promethean strain of environmentalism, however, I don’t see this problem as an indictment of capitalism, or of humanity, and I don’t think that the solution lies in retreat – in settling for less and reverting to older and simpler ways of doing things. Rather, I see this as essentially a technological problem, and the solution to the problem of dirty technology is clean technology. Recognizing the reality of serious environmental harms doesn’t lead me to give up on progress; it shows me the direction that progress should take.
Likewise, along with localists and “small is beautiful” advocates, I see that the gigantism and impersonality of the contemporary capitalist system imposes serious strains on our well-being: there is a strong tendency toward atomization that leaves people disconnected from the vital personal relationships that are at the heart of human flourishing. While people in the elite enjoy compensations for these strains that allow them good opportunities to enjoy fulfilling lives, everybody else is exposed to the full brunt of the pressure – and the result is serious social disintegration as ties to work, family, church, and community unravel. Here again, though, I don’t see this problem as a reflection of capitalism’s essential inhumanity, and I don’t think that the solution lies in retreat. Instead, we need to keep moving forward: we need to marshal capitalism’s capacity for technological and social innovation to develop new social arrangements that ease the strains of dependence on the impersonal system by supporting strong, functional face-to-face relationships.
Let me turn now to comparing the idea of an economic independence movement with other, more widely known proposals to address the new class divide – what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion. I’ve written previously about two of these reform ideas – wage subsidies and a universal basic income. Before getting to those, though, I’ll start off by looking at another competing proposal that I didn’t discuss in that earlier essay: a jobs guarantee.
The basic idea, hearkening back to the Depression-era Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, is for government to offer a job at a set wage to anybody willing to take one. Participation in such a program would presumably fluctuate with the ups and downs in private unemployment, but the program’s open offer would act to set an effective national floor for wages and benefits. In the United States, interest in the idea has warmed up in recent years, thanks in part to support from Bernie Sanders. Sanders has backed a plan to guarantee jobs offering $15 an hour plus benefits in three basic areas: environment, community service, and child and elder care. Senator Cory Booker followed up in 2019 by introducing legislation to fund job guarantee pilot programs in 15 different localities.
Proposals along these lines are, I’m afraid, completely unadministrable. Do you really think a quality work environment can be constructed when there are no job qualifications and nobody can be fired? Do you really think a quality work environment can be maintained when a recession hits and millions of new workers stream into the program? There has to be supervision and leadership for the program: how can that be expanded and contracted in line with macroeconomic conditions? Put aside the huge financial outlays involved, as well as serious possible disruption to private labor markets in particular localities: I just don’t see any possibility of creating quality employment for people with no job requirements, no accountability, and no control over how many workers there are. As far as helping ordinary workers to find dignity and purpose, luring them into empty make-work is surely worse than just giving them a check.
That said, I do think that there are real possibilities in the idea of expanded public sector employment, and that the WPA and CCC from the 1930s offer interesting models. I can imagine a 21stcentury domestic service corps that is organized as a kind of unarmed branch of the military, with an officer corps and enlisted members and various ranks within each, dedicated to serving their country by providing important public goods like disaster relief, conservation projects, and remediation of urban blighted areas. Such a service corps could also be tasked with administering a program of national service by young people. Expanding national service in this way could meaningfully bolster state capacity while providing important and useful work and valuable skills to millions – along with the self-respect and sense of purpose that come with doing important and useful work. As an incremental reform within our existing system, the idea of expanded national service has real merit and deserves serious consideration.
Let’s turn next to wage subsidies, which I’ve already discussed as a possible path to a more inclusive capitalism. I believe that, in the short term at least, it offers a genuine palliative, but that’s as far as it goes. And the longer a system of wage subsidies remains in place, the greater its defects become.
Wage subsidies provide higher pay, and possibly higher status associated with that, and these are genuine benefits. Beyond that, they encourage employment by reducing labor costs for employers. In the present context, with declining work commitment outside the elite part of a larger pattern of social disintegration, wage subsidies push against that disintegration by strengthening people’s connections to the large society around them.
But the short-term advantages of wage subsidies also constitute their long-term limitations. A low-productivity, low-autonomy job with no security or connection to a career track is certainly made more bearable by improving its pay, but it’s still a low-productivity, low-autonomy job with no security or career track. The forces of social disintegration that bear down on people in these positions will be attenuated somewhat by higher wages, but only modestly. Meanwhile, a system of wage subsidies incentivizes employers to create and maintain more of these positions, thus freezing our society into indefinite dependence on large numbers of crummy, low-value jobs. It’s like historical preservation, but applied to the labor market at a time when it is incapable of providing a rewarding work experience or upward mobility to most of its participants.
Wage subsidies would thus operate in a similar fashion to price supports for agriculture, which boost farm incomes and ensure that we have more farmers, and more agricultural output, than would otherwise be the case. Although the fact is that most ag subsidies are hoovered up by large-scale agribusiness, the durability of their political appeal rests on the widely shared sense that family farms support a way of life that is worth preserving. The means are badly flawed, but at least the ends make a certain kind of sociological sense. But what sense is there in preserving in amber our current occupational structure? No one can think that this is a way of life worth defending and maintaining, so acting to do so amounts to a grim declaration of defeat: we simply can’t think of any better way to occupy people as they play out their lives.
A universal basic income, by contrast, would work to reduce dependence on the labor market. The idea is to lift up ordinary people with extra resources that give them some measure of financial independence and existential security; the point isn’t to substitute entirely for paid work, but to provide an income floor that gives people greater choice about when and where to work for pay. These goals are quite similar to those that an economic independence movement would seek to achieve.
Depending on its terms, a UBI could offer anything from a modest boost to a transformational transfer of resources. But no matter how big the check, it’s still just a check. A UBI would treat the symptoms of ordinary workers’ reduced social significance, but it can’t do anything about the underlying causes. A movement for economic independence, by contrast, aims right at the root of the problem. Within the capitalist system, ordinary workers’ limited ability to contribute to the system consigns them to marginalization and low status; the solution then is to provide them the resources and capabilities to take care of their own basic needs, giving them true independence and real status as valued contributors to their own small communities.
A UBI would give people additional financial resources, but nothing in the way of the skills or social capital that are needed to make good use of the increased options provided. Workers in the bottom half of the labor market tend to be undersupplied with the skills, habits, and social networks that are needed to thrive in the contemporary world. Getting a check every month would give many people resources to upgrade their condition, but in too many cases it would simply make being stuck on the margins of life somewhat easier and thus dull incentives for self-improvement. An economic independence movement, by contrast, would expand people’s productive skills directly and situate them in productive personal relationships; this human and social capital would not only provide resources for the equivalent of a basic income, but  would carry forward into the rest of life as well. When you teach someone to fish instead of just handing over the day’s catch, you not only give them lifelong productive skills; you also give the self-respect that comes with existential competence and the sense of belonging of being a member of a productive, interdependent community. Getting extra money can provide a helpful leg up, to be sure, but it is no substitute for the actual components of human flourishing. Here the gap between a UBI and true economic independence is vast and unbridgeable.
A UBI would give workers some financial independence and thus greater economic leverage in the labor market, and with more resources they would have greater collective capacity to influence politics as well. But for creating countervailing power within society, a successful economic independence movement would have far greater impact. It would create a new class of more self-sufficient citizens whose collective economic power is truly free-standing, depending neither on the market nor on the continuing beneficence of government. Economic independence thus creates political standing in the form of a new, autonomous source of social power.
This last point is relevant to another crucial deficit of a UBI compared to an economic independence movement – namely, the difficulty of getting it off the ground politically. As I’ve written about previously, the obstacles to reforming capitalism from within are daunting – and a UBI would be a very big reform, constituting a major shift in a nation’s political economy in an egalitarian direction. At any kind of meaningful scale, a UBI would be extremely expensive and entail a massive redistribution of income. How then could it ever happen except at the insistence of a powerful egalitarian political movement that campaigned and agitated relentlessly on its behalf? And where exactly is this powerful egalitarian movement going to come from, given the economic and political marginalization of everyone outside a relatively narrow elite and the focus of politics elsewhere on issues of identity?
A successful economic independence movement would also require supportive government policy, but at a much smaller scale. And in general, it is much easier to build political support for policies promoting productive work and self-reliance than for unconditional Peter-to-Paul transfers.
None of this is to say that a UBI isn’t worth pursuing: I would very much like to see it put into practice somewhere in the world so that we can see how it plays out over time. That said, it seems clear to me that, relative to all the attention that UBI proposals have received, the idea of an economic independence movement is seriously underrated. It addresses root causes rather than symptoms; it offers much more than just money to advance the cause of human flourishing; it creates badly needed countervailing power to balance against the elites of the capitalist system; and it appears to be more politically feasible.
Sherlock Holmes once described his reasoning method as follows: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” A similar reasoning process has led me to my interest in the possibilities of what I call economic independence. That process began with the recognition that we are flailing in the face of the permanent problem: we have thus far been unable to translate our immense technological and organizational powers into the kind of inclusive society that affords all of its members good opportunities to “live wisely and agreeably and well.” Surveying the various leading proposals to uplift ordinary workers and improve their access to the good life, I find all of them wanting in comparison to the project of directly empowering people, working with their families, neighbors, and communities, to take charge of their own lives and provide the basic elements of the good life for themselves. Thus my conclusion, however improbable it may seem, that a move toward greater economic independence is the best available option.
The post Economic independence vs the alternatives appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Last week, at a Fox News town hall (where else?), former President Donald Trump called China’s despot, Xi Jinping, a “brilliant” guy who “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” Lest anyone doubt his admiration, Trump added that Xi is “smart, brilliant, everything perfect. There’s nobody in Hollywood like this guy.”Trump is not alone. Many in the United States and around the globe see the allure of a dictator who gets things done and makes the trains run on time, no matter the rules or laws that stand in the way. According to repeated polling, roughly one in four Americans agrees with the statement that a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” is desirable. A much higher proportion of citizens agrees with that sentiment elsewhere, including in some of the most populous democracies: 55 percent of Indians, 52 percent of Indonesians, 38 percent of Nigerians, and 31 percent of Japanese.This grass-is-greener view of authoritarian rule tends to emerge most often where governments are failing to meet popular expectations. When democracy delivers, dictatorship doesn’t seem like a rosy alternative. Only 6 percent of Germans and 9 percent of Swedes are seduced by strongmen.[Brian Klaas: Democracy has a customer-service problem]Admiration for autocracy is built on a pernicious lie that I call the “myth of benevolent dictatorship.” The myth is built on three flimsy pillars: first, that dictators produce stronger economic growth than their democratic counterparts; second, that dictators, unswayed by volatile public opinion, are strategic long-term thinkers; and third, that dictators bring stability, whereas divided democracies produce chaos.  Two decades ago, the United States and its Western allies became embroiled in Iraq and later blundered into the financial crisis, leading think tanks to begin praising the “Beijing Consensus,” or the “China Model,” as an alternative to liberal democracy. Critiques of democracy surged in popularity in the era of Trump and Brexit. In the United States, intellectual publications ran articles arguing that the problem was too much democracy. In 2018, The Times of London published a column titled “Our Timid Leaders Can Learn From Strongmen.” China’s state media, capitalizing on the West’s democratic woes, argued that democracy is a “scary” system that produces self-inflicted wounds.But events and new research in the past several years have taken a wrecking ball to the long-standing myth of benevolent dictatorship. All three pillars of the lie are crumbling. Every fresh data point proves Winston Churchill right: “Democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”Let’s start with the myth that dictatorships produce stronger growth. This falsehood arose from a few well-known, cherry-picked examples, in which despots oversaw astonishing transformations of their national economy. Starting in the late 1950s, Lee Kuan Yew helped transform Singapore from a poor, opium-filled backwater into a wealthy economic powerhouse. And in China, per capita GDP rose from nearly $318 in 1990 to more than $12,500 today. Those successes are eye-popping.But a systematic evaluation of the overall data reveals another reality. Even with these outliers of strong growth, most rigorous studies have found limited or no evidence that authoritarian regimes produce better economic growth than democratic ones. Some researchers, such as the political economists Darren Acemoglu and James Robinson, have found compelling evidence that the inclusive political institutions of democracy are one of the strongest factors in producing stable, long-term growth.When authoritarian regimes do succeed economically, they often do so at a cost, because even booming dictatorships are prone to catastrophic busts. As the political scientist Jacob Nyrup has written: “China has within a 50-year time frame both experienced a famine, where 20-45 million people died, and an economic boom, where hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty.” The rosiest interpretation of the authoritarian economic data, then, is that autocrats may sometimes preside over marginally higher growth, but with a much greater risk of economic collapse. That’s not a wise trade-off.However, the myth of strongmen as economic gurus has an even bigger problem. Dictators turn out to have manipulated their economic data for decades. For a long time, they’ve fooled us. But now we have proof: The reason their numbers sometimes seem too good to be true is that they are.Every government has motivation to fudge its economic data. But democracies have institutions that provide oversight and block politicians from that impulse, ensuring accurate figures. No such checks exist in dictatorships.That difference led Luis Martinez, an economist at the University of Chicago, to test whether despots were overstating their growth rate. He did so with an ingenious method. Previous studies have verified the presence of a strong, accurate correlation between the amount of nighttime light captured by satellites and overall economic activity. When economies grow, they emit more nighttime light (which is why you can clearly pick out cities on a nighttime satellite image, and why the density of light is so much lower in Africa than, say, in Europe or on the American East Coast). High-resolution images allow researchers to track changes in nighttime illumination over time, and the detailed, granular data these images produce are nearly impossible to manipulate. Martinez discovered an astonishing disparity suggesting that dictators have been overstating their GDP growth by about 35 percent.And the more the numbers are checked, the more manipulation is exposed. In Rwanda, where The New York Times has named President Paul Kagame “the global elite’s favorite strongman” because of his apparently brilliant record of economic growth, the government claimed that it had decreased poverty by 6 percent from 2010 to 2014. Researchers found that the inverse was true: Poverty had actually surged by 5 to 7 percent. Fittingly, the notion that Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time was a lie; he built ornate stations and invested in train lines used by elites, but the commuting masses got left behind.[Read: The undoing of China’s economic miracle]Even China, the apparent authoritarian economic miracle, is showing signs of slowing down, its growth model no longer so well matched to the global economy. Such cracks in growth are an innate feature of autocracy. Because dictatorships criminalize dissent, normal mechanisms of economic feedback are broken, and the system doesn’t self-correct when blundering into economic mistakes. Beijing’s quixotic quest to maintain perpetual “zero COVID” was a case in point. Autocrats are adept at building ports and roads and mines. But thriving modern economies are sustained less by open mines than by open minds, of which dictatorships, by design, have a limited supply.Advocates for the myth of benevolent dictatorship conveniently ignore a crucial fact, which is that much of the growth in autocracies comes either from manufacturing products that were invented in the more open societies of the democratic West, or from exporting goods to rich democracies. (The top destinations for Chinese exports are the United States, Japan, and South Korea.) In that way, even the outliers of autocratic growth depend for their success on the innovation and consumer wealth of democracies. Would China have lifted millions out of poverty through export-led growth quite so fast if democratic America hadn’t become an economic powerhouse first?The myth’s second pillar turns out to be no less rickety than the first. It holds that dictators are more strategic long-term thinkers than democrats because they’re not beholden to fickle public opinion. But this lie is believable only if you don’t understand how most dictatorships actually work.Over more than a decade, I’ve studied and interviewed despots and the henchmen who surround them. One conclusion I’ve drawn is that making decisions based on bad information is an intrinsic feature of the systems dictators run. The longer despots cling to power, the more likely they are to fall into what I call “the dictator trap,” in which they crush dissent, purge anyone who challenges them, and construct their own reality through propaganda, all to maintain control. Speaking truth to power in such a system can literally be deadly. As a result, dictators are told only what they want to hear, not what is true, and they begin to believe their own lies. Vladimir Putin’s catastrophic war in Ukraine is a tragic illustration of the dictator trap: Putin got high on his own supply, and innocent Ukrainians are the victims of his power trip.Despots often use their power not for long-term planning, but for short-term self-glorification, as no end of examples can attest. Turkmenistan’s former dictator Saparmurat Niyazov blew millions to build, in his own honor, a golden statue that would rotate to always face the sun. In another stroke of genius, he closed all rural hospitals so that the sick could have the privilege of being treated in his pristine marble capital of Ashgabat. Most of the population lived outside the city, and countless thousands likely died because they couldn’t reach a hospital in time. His successor erected an enormous golden statue of his favorite breed of dog. Thankfully, democracies have checks and balances to suppress such narcissistic whims.The most persistent pillar of the myth, however, is the one that holds that dictators produce stability. Some dictators have hung on to power for decades. Before his death, Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya for 42 years. Paul Biya of Cameroon, an 89-year-old despot who had no idea where he was during a recent event, took office during the Vietnam War. Putin has been in power for more than two decades; Xi has ruled for only one so far, but he appears prepared to retain his position indefinitely.To stay in power, authoritarian leaders face constant trade-offs. If they strengthen military or paramilitary leaders, they face the risk of a coup d’état. But if they weaken their men under arms, then they can’t protect themselves from external invasion. To keep their elites happy, despots need to make them rich through corruption—usually at the expense of the population. But a ruling class awash in ill-gotten gains could inspire a revolution, or a wild card: assassination. Autocrats appear stable, but they’re not. They’re constantly vulnerable, forced to make every decision based on what will stave off threats to survive in power.The stability that does exist in autocracies is, ironically, derived partially from the trappings of democracy. Recent research has made clear that dictators have developed mechanisms to “mimic democracy to prolong autocracy.” Most authoritarian leaders now hold elections, but rig them. Some use parliaments or courts to enact unpopular decisions while avoiding blame.[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]Eventually, though, dictatorships tend to fall apart. And when they collapse, they really collapse. Elections in democracies change governments, not regimes. Personalist dictatorships, by contrast, often implode. When Qaddafi was killed, Libya disintegrated. He had deliberately designed the political system to function only with him at its center. The same could be true of Putin’s Russia. When he is toppled or dies, the country won’t have a smooth, peaceful transition.The often-disastrous demise of autocrats creates a negative feedback loop. Nearly seven in 10 leaders of personalist dictatorships end up jailed, exiled, or killed once they lose power. While in power, many despots are aware of this grim fact, and so they use violence to stay in power, often growing more extreme as they lurch toward their downfall. The effect can hardly be called “stability,” even if the same person occupies the palace for decades.For anyone who still clings to the illusion that dictatorships are likely to be prosperous, strategically wise, or internally stable, I propose a simple test. Imagine that someone wrote down the names of all the countries in the world on little slips of paper and then separated them into two hats: one for democracy, one for dictatorships. You would select one of the two hats, draw a slip of paper from it, look at the name, and then spend the rest of your life living in that country. Who knows, maybe you’d get lucky and end up in an authoritarian regime that seems stable and is producing steady growth. But I know which hat I would choose. And even if you fantasize about finding the unicorn that is a benevolent strongman, I suspect you do too.

Well, individuals define the goals for AI. So you can ask for results where you will live longest, and you will gain power over everyone you know. So, right now, the idea that AI is somehow "other" to us is only true to the extent that it is defined to be as one of your goals. In the immediate future, it will "amplify" more than "replace". (And that is plenty to destroy all of humanity.) The "Terminator" scenario can certainly happen, but most still consider that to be decades away. We have more immediate problems.

As for "racial bias" -- this is a case of be careful what you ask for. It is likely that avoiding racial bias in our world will include coercion, persuasion, changing people's values, restricting actions, and using techniques which have literally billions of side effects. As we improve the ability to also evaluate those side effects, then how do you weigh the "good" and "bad" side effects and what you are willing to do to change them? Do you see? Suddenly very bad things can be, and really are, justified if you want to do very good things. We just didn't see that clearly before. We become aware of the trade-offs that we have been making without intention. But now there can be not only intention, but planning and execution by those who want results which might optimize their life and their power. And much of this power is put into the hands of each individual - since AI can also tell you how to achieve your ends with limited resources, or how to acquire the resources you need to achieve your ends.

One thing I've figured out since working with AI is that values truly are context dependent. All of our "positive" values are seen as positive because they create results or an environment that we want. AI is about to break our illusions about good and bad values.

(And the examples I experienced were quite mundane. I worked mostly with business questions - advertising and such. But this is still first generation, and the re-defining of goals, values, "good", and "bad" along complex path sequences is already apparent. As data improves, we will see much, much more "value inversion")

It has been fascinating (and frustrating) watching the cultural shift in attitudes toward acupuncture over the last two decades. It is a study case in how to promote pseudoscience, how to exploit the vulnerabilities in evidence-based medicine, and how effective propaganda can be, even against professionals who should know better. It also demonstrates the dire need for the inclusion of science-based medicine principles when evaluating medical interventions.

A recent Washington Post article by Trisha Pasricha, MD, MPH illustrates nicely the misinformation, and also selective use of information, that leads even some professionals to the wrong conclusion. She comes to a few dubious conclusions, starting with this:

A 2018 meta-analysis of over 20,000 patients in 39 high-quality randomized controlled trials found that acupuncture was superior to both sham and no acupuncture for back or neck pain, osteoarthritis, headaches and shoulder pain. These outcomes mostly persisted over time — even after 12 months of receiving treatment.

She is referring to the latest Vickers et al systematic review of acupuncture for chronic pain. David Gorski has done a good job of deconstructing these reviews, and I will again point out the limitations. But first I will point out how this is a good example of the selective use of information by Pasricha, because she did not refer to a later 2020 systematic review (which included a review of Vickers 2018 review) which concluded:

Evidence from SRs suggests that there are insufficient high-quality RCTs to judge the efficacy of acupuncture for chronic pain associated with various medical conditions.

In other words, the evidence is too low quality to conclude that acupuncture works, as desperate as proponents are to say we can reach that conclusion. This is also how different experts can look at the same data and come to different conclusions – it depends on how much you weight different factors, what you consider an “acceptable” study, and how you control for bias. There is also a lot of spin. Even in the very favorable Vickers review, the authors acknowledge at the end:

Variations in the effect size of acupuncture in different trials are driven predominately by differences in treatments received by the control group rather than by differences in the characteristics of acupuncture treatment.

This understated admission is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but can easily be missed by the unwary. What this means is that differing “characteristics of acupuncture” (more on this below) do not affect treatment outcome. What determines the effect size (difference between sham and verum acupuncture) is how good the sham acupuncture is at simulating verum acupuncture. This is a pattern in the acupuncture literature we have long pointed out. The better the study, the larger the study, and the better the blinding, the smaller the effect size, with the best studies being negative. As you improve the control and rigor of the study, the effect of acupuncture diminishes to zero. That is a pattern in the research we see across all pseudosciences. It is a giant flashing light indicating that acupuncture is nothing but placebo.

But – if you just do a meta-analysis across the spectrum of study quality up to some arbitrary cutoff, you can see statistical significance. You just have to ignore all the troubling patterns within the data. This is the difference between the 2018 review and the 2020 review above.

Acupuncture has some special problems all its own as well, which I have summarized many times. Acupuncture is hard to blind, and only the best studies do it adequately. Both the subject and the acupuncturist have to be blinded, or else the interaction with the unblinded acupuncturist will have an effect. China famously has 100% positive clinical trials of acupuncture, a statistical impossibility, and these studies contaminate systematic reviews. Studies using electroacupuncture also contaminate reviews, introducing another variable (electrical stimulation) that cannot be separated from whatever the needles might be doing.

But also, devastating all by itself, is the heterogeneity of study design and outcome. This stems from the big glaring problem with acupuncture – what, if anything, are acupoints? Pasricha writes:

The World Health Organization consensus recognizes 361 standardized acupoints on the human body. Acupoints appear to respond to varied stimulation, such as from pressure, heat and electricity. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how acupoints work. Some studies have shown that traditional acupoints may have a high density of nerve endings and mast cells. Stimulating these areas may lead to the release of chemicals in the body (such as hormones) and ultimately impact the brain.

This is a horrible summary of the science of acupoints. For example, she mentions that the WHO recognizes 361 acupoints, but does not point out that this number, traditionally 365 points, is based on the number of days in the year, because acupoints are a form of astrology in which astrological patterns are projected onto the body.

She could have also pointed out that systematic reviews, even by acupuncturists, fail to demonstrate where the acupoints actually are. They cannot be localized and there is no agreement on where they are or what they allegedly do. In short, acupuncture points don’t exist. They are a figment of a prescientific superstition. After, what, 60 or so years of research, there is still no convincing evidence of any anatomical, biochemical, or physiological basis for acupoints. Only tantalizing studies that show maybe some whisper of signal in a lot of noise, that cannot be reproduced or confirmed. Acupoints are the medical equivalent of blobsquatch.

This gets to the heterogeneity problem (one fatal aspect of it). When you combine different acupuncture studies for a systematic review or meta analysis, invariably you are combining studies that used different acupuncture points for the same problem. How is that considered verum acupuncture? Does that mean that all of the points used in various combinations are correct (even within the giant error bars of where the points are)? Meanwhile, elsewhere on the body is incorrect? Is there even an elsewhere? With hundreds of giant overlapping alleged acupoints, nowhere on the body is not an acupoint. And since there is absolutely no standardization in terms of which acupoints to use, any pattern is apparently acceptable.

The absence of standardization is another glaring feature of pseudoscience. Each acupuncturist can determine for themselves which acupoints to use for a particular problem, and where, exactly, those points are. For clinical trials, typically the acupuncturists involved in the study just decide by consensus which points to use, which is why different studies use different points.

The problem with a lack of mechanism for acupuncture has motivated proponents to look at increasingly noisy and unreliable methods for trying to find “stuff that happens” when you stick someone with needles. Pasricha refers to one study in carpal tunnel syndrome.

So scientists looked at the subjects’ brains using functional MRI imaging. They found that needling at the wrist and ankle both resulted in significant changes to how stimulation to the fingers was mapped onto the cerebral cortex.

That’s not really what they found. What they found, in my opinion, was random and not predicted changes that were all over the place. This is the typical noise we see in fMRI studies. They mean nothing without consistent replication, which we don’t have. Sometimes the changes were in the affected hand, sometimes they were not, and it did not depend on where the acupuncture was done.

But there is also separate reason to suspect some bias and p-hacking in the data. The study also found that sticking acupuncture in the opposite ankle increase nerve conduction times in the affected wrist. This is not something that can be mediated through some remote and hypothetical brain effect. They need to explain how sticking a needle in the left ankle will cause the right median nerve at the wrist to have better myelination. No fMRI study of the brain is going to explain this. Something that unlikely is evidence of bias or poor research methods until proven otherwise.

Following the acupuncture story closely for 30 years also gives one a good perspective – because there seems to be an never-ending revolving door of these preliminary studies, and proponents breathlessly reassuring that we are finally about to explain how acupuncture works. But we never seem to get closer. Acupuncture research has been chasing its tail for decades, because acupuncture is a fiction. There are no acupoints, and the effects of acupuncture are nothing but placebo. A fair and science-based reading of the literature clearly shows this. But proponents have been experts and creating this false narrative, and the Washington Post just fell for it.

Jordan Peterson appears to have fallen for an internet prank, and social media users have been merciless in their response.

The Canadian psychologist has a strong presence online, with millions of followers across various social media sites.His opinions often stir up conversation and go viral, prompting reactions from across the political spectrum. The latest social media fodder has been his response to a tweet from the satirical conservative website The Babylon Bee, launched in 2016.

Disney is rebooting the Snow White story with a new live-action remake, starring actress Rachel Zegler, an actress of Colombian and Polish descent. The casting received backlash when it was announced in 2021, but new details have also been slammed by online users. In the 2024 version of Snow White, the "seven dwarfs" will be played by one actor with dwarfism and six others of varying genders and ethnicities.

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson (L), pictured in England in 2018, has spoken out against the reboot of 'Snow White' starring Rachel Zegler (R), pictured at the 'West Side Story' premiere in 2021. Getty Images/Chris Williamson / Roy Rochlin

The Babylon Bee added to the outrage with a joke about the plotline of Snow White, which Peterson appeared to take seriously.

"Disney to remove problematic kiss from classic movie, Snow White will now remain dead," The Babylon Bee tweeted, joking that the prince from the 1812 German fairy tale won't kiss a dead Snow White in the new version, which is supposed to bring her back to life.

Peterson took the bait. "Looks like @Disney can't stop chasing failure," he wrote on Twitter on Monday. While some social media users were fooled too, others jumped on to mock Peterson.

Peterson has been a vocal opponent of Disney in recent times, as the company publicly opposed the "Don't Say Gay Bill" in Florida, got into a war of words with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and was seen to promote LGBTQ+ representation in their movies.

"You know this is satire right?" Asked @TheWickedZen while @henryfalk said, "This is a joke, not real news."

Looks like @Disney

Can't stop chasing

Failure https://t.co/Xd7rwtijin — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) July 24, 2023

Others asked if Peterson knew what The Babylon Bee is, while others were quick to defend Peterson suggesting he knows exactly what the site is and that he knows what he's doing.

Another user, @TheOneChaaluna, said while the story may not be true now, it could manifest later. "This is from a parody account, so it's not actually true...it could become true later though. BB is pretty good at predicting the future!"

White it's comedy has been branded as dangerous right-wing misinformation, The Babylon Bee owner Seth Dillon told Newsweek in February 2023 that mocking woke people is the site's "moral purpose." At that point, Dillon had 85 examples of faux stories created by the publication, which allegedly turned out true in some form.

As mentioned, Peterson is regularly outspoken on social media, often receiving backlash for his statements. In recent months, he has blasted Ben & Jerry's ice cream for having a "Budweiser moment" over their Fourth of July message. He was slammed online for tweeting earlier that "trans women are men."

A Georgia man who was jailed for nearly 10 years without being convicted of a crime will now have to wait even longer to have his case resolved. Maurice Jimmerson, who was arrested on murder charges in 2013, finally received a trial this month. But the trial ended with a hung jury, so he's still behind bars.
Jimmerson's lawyer, Andrew Fleischman, argues that the decade his client spent in jail before trial should allow the charges against him to be dismissed.
"You talk about getting hostages out of other countries like North Korea or Iran," Fleischman told Reason last month. "And the average time is six years. We talk about those countries having failed puppet justice systems with no expectation of due process. And yet we have Americans in this country waiting 10 years for an opportunity to force the state to prove its case. And that to me is outrageous."
"That's the longest anybody's been held in custody before a trial outside of [Guantanamo Bay]," Fleischman added.
Two of Jimmerson's co-defendants were acquitted in 2017, but Jimmerson has remained jailed. No one seems exactly sure why. In April, Doughtery County prosecutor Gregory Edwards told Atlanta News First that much of the delay can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2021 courthouse flood, and a decision by a previous judge to try Jimemrson and his co-defendants separately. 
Making matters worse for Jimmerson, he was recently left without legal representation for over eight months. In July and August of last year, his public defender repeatedly asked to be released from representing Jimemrson, citing his need to travel frequently to seek medical care for his infant daughter. Court employees apparently lost his request, and they only granted it in April after local journalists pressed the issue.
Fleishman, who is representing Jimmerson pro bono, has filed a motion to have Jimmerson's case dismissed entirely, citing Supreme Court precedent that allows charges to be dismissed if an individual is held in pretrial detention for too long. If his motion is denied, Fleishman says that he will appeal the case to the Georiga Supreme Court. 
"We should not punish people before they have been convicted of a crime," says Fleishma. "The process of indicting somebody is just telling 16 to 22 strangers a story for which there is no rebuttal….And to hold somebody for 10 years on just that story—it's a violation of due process."
Jimmerson has a bail hearing set for August 8. Felishman hopes his bail will be set low enough that he can be released while awaiting either his second trial or the dismissal of his case.
The post He Spent 10 Years Behind Bars Without Being Convicted. He'll Have To Wait Longer To Have the Case Resolved. appeared first on Reason.com.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared last week before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The Republican majority invited Kennedy to testify about the government's campaign to suppress contrarian speech on COVID-19, vaccines, and the virus's origins; a tweet from RFK Jr. expressing doubts about vaccines had been among the first posts that the White House urged Twitter to restrict after President Joe Biden took office in January 2021.
Before Kennedy could even read his opening statement, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D–Fla.) attempted to move the panel to executive session, which would have effectively blocked the public from hearing what the witnesses had to say. When Republicans called for a vote to table the motion, all the Democratic members of the subcommittee voted no.
In short: At a hearing intended to probe bureaucrats and politicians' well-documented efforts to crack down on disfavored speech, Democrats played exactly to type. Their first impulse was not merely to express disagreement with Kennedy's views, but to stop him from uttering them in public.
Their stated objection to Kennedy was a comment he had made claiming that COVID-19 may have been ethnically targeted, remarks widely seen as anti-Semitic. Del. Stacey Plaskett (D–Virgin Islands) said that by inviting RFK Jr. to testify, Republicans "intentionally chose to elevate this rhetoric to give these harmful dangerous views a platform in the halls of the United States Congress."
Plaskett did not merely criticize Kennedy's comments. She implied that they were not protected by the First Amendment. "Free speech is not an absolute," said Plaskett at the beginning of the hearing. "The Supreme Court has stated that."
The New York Times, in its recap of the hearing, echoed these concerns:
Despite the theater, the hearing raised thorny questions about free speech in a democratic society: Is misinformation protected by the First Amendment? When is it appropriate for the federal government to seek to tamp down the spread of falsehoods?
These are not, in fact, thorny questions. Of course misinformation is protected by the First Amendment—unless it veers into defamation or fraud, both narrowly defined legal categories. The modern Supreme Court has never validated the idea that speech expressing incorrect ideas is unprotected by the Constitution; if it had, the Times' own speech rights would be in jeopardy.
Indeed, Times' own story about Kennedy's controversial remarks itself contained misinformation. Its opening paragraph described the comments in question as "a conspiracy-filled rant by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the Covid-19 virus was engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people."
The candidate did not, in fact, straightforwardly declare that COVID-19 was "engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people." He said: "There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately." He also said: "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese." And he said: "We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact." You can see why someone would raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that the virus even might have been "deliberately targeted," but a reporter should report what the candidate actually said.
Kennedy, for what it's worth, seems to have been referring to a study by the Cleveland Clinic that found some evidence the virus's genetic makeup could theoretically make certain populations—including the Amish and Ashkenazi Jews—less receptive to it. Some scientists have disagreed with the underlying findings of the Cleveland Clinic study; moreover, the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 are likely best explained by certain populations' overall health, age, and access to medical resources.
Kennedy's larger point was that government funding of research that creates such viruses is dangerous. In an interview on Rising, the YouTube show I co-host for The Hill, the candidate claimed that "it never entered my mind that it was engineered directly to protect Jews and injure other people."

Unfortunately, the Democrats' behavior at the hearing is part of a pattern. Far too many political leaders have urged greater censorship of contrarian COVID-19 speech, especially online.
The vast federal bureaucracy—first under Donald Trump, and then in a greatly expanded fashion under Joe Biden—pushed private tech companies to censor speech that was critical of the government's approach to the pandemic. Both the Twitter Files and Reason's own Facebook Files show that the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and other arms of the government frequently contacted content moderators for the purpose of jawboning. These pushes for greater content moderation were not just philosophically wrong—that is, at odds with principles of free speech—but they were often wrong about the underlying facts as well.
One need not cosign everything RFK Jr. has ever said about the virus or vaccines to admit that the mainstream purveyors of pandemic-related information made grave errors of scientific judgment. For instance, The New York Times' lead coronavirus reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, said the lab leak theory of COVID-19's origins was a "racist" falsehood, and she was in good company. The establishment media's persistent crusade to demonize lab-leak dissenters—other than a tiny number of cautiously dissenting voices—did not end until earlier this year, after multiple federal agencies finally concluded that a lab leak was more likely than natural spillover.
If leading Democratic politicians, government health experts, and mainstream media reporters engaged in some self-reflection about their own role in pandemic-era authoritarianism, they might better understand the appeal of a candidate who is running on an explicit platform of never repeating such mistakes.
The post Don't Censor RFK Jr. appeared first on Reason.com.

So we drove out to the Midwest for vacation. And so I was like, oh, we’ll just audiobook it. And between the drive back and forth, I barely had covered half of the book because it was like 27 hours or something ridiculous.

Wait, you subjected your family to the “Oppenheimer” audiobook?

They loved it. Or they lied to me.

Either way.

Well, I mean, I read it when it came out. It’s like 17 years ago, so I mean, I don’t remember.

So once wasn’t enough.

I just remember that it was great.

Nerd.

Uh-huh.

So I had to read it again.

Right, sure.

Nerd! [MUSIC PLAYING]

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” So last week, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” came out, and all four of us saw it.

Not together.

Not together, except in spirit, but so did a lot of other people. The movie has already made more than 80 million bucks at the box office. Now, if you haven’t seen it, I don’t know that anything we’ll discuss is the biggest spoiler, given that the movie is based on extremely famous historical events, but we probably shouldn’t promise not to have any spoilers, right?

Spoiler, the good guys won World War II.

Oh, well, that itself is a controversial statement, Carlos, but we’ll be talking about whether the movie is really about the good guys, what its moral vision is, what it says about when politics and potentially world ending science collide. But we’ll start with the basics. What did everybody think about the movie?

Silence.

Come on, come on. What did you — let’s hear it.

I’m going to jump in.

Fun family fair.

I’m going to jump in. I thought the movie was spectacular. It’s obviously going to generate some controversy about whether they were too soft on communism or made Oppenheimer too much of a hero, but it was ambitious. It was, of course, gorgeous. There were some weirder moments in it that are kind of Christopher Nolan’s forte, but on the whole, it took what was a sweeping, huge book, “American Prometheus.” It won the Pulitzer. It is well worth a read and really gives it a good narrative that drives you through what is an unacceptable three hours. No movie should be three hours. But this one was good enough that I didn’t start to fidget like a four-year-old until about 2 and 1/2 hours in, which is always a good sign.

Carlos, what did you think?

I really enjoyed it. I wasn’t as troubled by the length because it sort of tells two stories. It tells the story of the race to design and test the atom bomb. And then it tells the story of how Oppenheimer was sort of cast aside by the very government that had deployed him for war-making purposes when he was no longer useful, when he became kind of an irritant. And I mean, those stories are woven together in the movie. So to me, since there was so much that was worth getting into, I wasn’t troubled by the length.

I didn’t think it was too long at all. I love a biopic. I love an epic book. I love an epic movie. I mean, the performances, I thought, were incredible. And I have to say, I was astonished by the box office numbers that so many people wanted to see this movie because I think most people who go to the movies during summer blockbuster season aren’t necessarily looking to be challenged in this way. But yeah, I found myself quite swept up with it.

Yeah, so the box office was remarkable. And since one of my big things is the decline and fall of the American movies and so on, I feel churlish saying anything negative about “Oppenheimer” because it is terrific that it did so well. And Nolan is terrific, and the cast was terrific. I wasn’t sure about the last hour of the movie. So it does this sort of — there’s sort of the central forward momentum narrative carrying you through the Manhattan Project, culminating in the big explosion, right, which comes about 2/3 of the way through the movie. And then there’s the aftermath in the 1950s, which takes two forms. You follow both Oppenheimer through the sort of closed, unfair kangaroo court hearing where he loses his security clearance over his various ties to the many communists who were associated with his social and intellectual world in the 1930 and ‘40s. And then you also get the failed nomination to Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinet of Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey, Jr., in a really terrific performance. Strauss was a Republican hawk, and Oppenheimer famously became a critic of arms race politics. But so the movie is sort of culminating in Lewis Strauss not getting the Secretary of Commerceship. And you can see what Nolan is doing here, but honestly, to me, there was just a pretty big gap between the drama of the literal atomic bomb and the drama of Lewis Strauss’s cabinet nomination. And in the end, I felt like that was an artistic failure.

I totally get your point, but in a blockbuster movie, you have to have a villain. And who are we going to make the villain in a movie like this? It’s a very complicated, weird subject. And you had to have an antagonist for Oppenheimer.

I actually disagree, and I think it’s actually a fascinating artistic choice because watching this movie, I thought, so much of it takes place in kind of the perfect setting for a film that is, in a lot of ways, about the professional managerial class. These dramas take place in these incredibly claustrophobic, bureaucratic, drab meeting rooms. And the only reason that you know that this is an incredibly important proceeding is that you have this assaultive score that’s coming at you with these incredible strings playing. And I think that there is this symmetry that feels very real to me. I guess it’s a metaphorical symmetry between the very real destruction of the atomic bomb and the very real power of personal grudges and spite between members of the professional managerial class over petty politics and power. So to me, that felt like a central tension and storyline of the entire movie.

I agree that that’s a critical element of this story. And in some ways, just as dramatic as the race to develop the bomb, you can imagine the movie focusing on the Trinity test and then on Oppenheimer’s transformation, and sort of an activist against the H-bomb worrying about what he had unleashed. But the story is about how the government turns against him, how it found him dangerous. And something kind of remarkable is that I don’t know if you all saw the story, but just like last December of this past year, the Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, finally nullified the commission’s revoking of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, saying that it had been, as more information came out about what the hearing had been like and the unfairness of the process, that they just couldn’t stand by it.

I like the fact that the book and the movie really drive home how confusing a political time this was. So like well before the bomb or the hearings, you had this whole concern about, on the one hand, the Nazis, and this is the major race you’re fighting off. But even before Oppenheimer was drafted for this project, just like so much churn about communism. And so you had these two competing tensions, and he almost didn’t wind up in charge of the project because of his relationships. I think people forget what just kind of a weird global time that was. And this does a really good job of just trying to drive home how much cloud there was around everything.

Yeah, well, I mean, it feels weird to say this with a three-hour movie, but you’re struck by all the things that they kind of had to leave out. You see how, in the movie, he’s this kind of immediately charismatic professor at Berkeley, right? It starts with one student, and then suddenly it’s packed because he’s so captivating. He was actually a terrible teacher initially. He was unintelligible. He taught himself slowly to become a better teacher. And that cult of Oppie kind of grew up around him. What Michelle mentions about the ferment of the moment is sort of even more alive in the book, even around physics. The movie kind of glosses over this because you don’t want to spend too much time on it, besides like, oh, look at all these cool formulas on a chalkboard, you know? But his genius was in helping others crystallize the ideas that they would pursue. And there’s a moment in the movie when I think the Matt Damon character, Groves, asks him, why he hasn’t won a Nobel Prize yet? Because everyone around him had Nobel’s. It’s super stressful when you’re like the one guy with no Nobel.

Tell me about it.

And it’s that the Nobel’s were awarded for super specific, deep contributions to a particular field. And Oppenheimer was kind of interested in everything. He was too distracted for that. He was a great enabler and crystallizer of other people’s ideas.

I think one of the interesting things about that particular moment in physics and science, right, is that prior to World War II, prior to the Manhattan Project, there was still a way in which science was operating outside of what we now think of as kind of the American university model. It was much more European. There’s a really strong aristocratic vibe. And Oppenheimer himself is much — he’s rich, right? He’s a rich kid. I’m not sure this is completely, completely conveyed in the movie, though it’s clear that he’s vacationing in New Mexico. Yeah, he basically puts the Manhattan Project where he likes to go for vacation, right? It would be like, if you were like, well, I really like this little town on the coast of Maine. Let’s build the atomic bomb there. And there are a couple local lobster fishermen, but they won’t object. I guess I wonder what, as the resident reactionary, I thought the movie up till the sort of final 30 minutes was actually quite effective in making a case that maybe Oppenheimer, once the project was over, shouldn’t have a security clearance. I mean, I think the movie does a good job of portraying Oppenheimer as a very complicated, fairly unstable figure, someone who literally poisoned the apple of his professor while in graduate school, someone who was friends with tons of communists, ran a program that was successfully infiltrated by communists, apparently only had sex with either communists or ex-communists.

His brother was a communist, don’t forget.

His brother is a communist. The question is, should he have this security clearance? And the moment when Leslie Groves, played really well, as always, by Matt Damon, testifies and is asked based on the current Cold War era security guidelines, would Oppenheimer pass muster, and he has to say no, I mean, he’s right, isn’t he?

Yeah.

Although I thought the line was great because he said, no, but under the current system, I’m not sure I would have cleared any of these guys, which kind of gets to the period where scientists didn’t automatically going to think of themselves as extensions of the political argument.

But it gets to the period where under the circumstances of a war against national socialism and imperial Japan, you have to say, yeah, if the best scientists are sort of compromised by associations with communism, it doesn’t matter. You have to have them in there. But then, once you’re in a Cold War environment with Soviet Russia, you probably wouldn’t run the Manhattan Project the same way.

I think that’s right, but I think that there’s also, to your point, Ross, there’s a sort of a noblesse oblige around Oppenheimer. And that, I think, goes hand in hand with another big theme of the book and the movie, which is his kind of naivete. You see him floating in this world of ideas and theory and communism and the Spanish Civil War as a romantic cause. And all of those things are true. But they’re all taking place in an environment that’s outside of hard politics and more in the realm of the theoretical. And I think that what you’re seeing in the film is this, and actually in history, is this move towards a much harder and more concrete reality in which the people in this world actually have to deal with the consequences of theory. And it seemed that he saw losing his place in the establishment, the inner circle of decision making about what the future of the country should be, and how we should be dealing with these weapons, that it was a huge loss for him to lose his seat at the table inside. And he assigned basically zero value to the kind of moral mantle that he could and I think did pick up. It really gets at this kind of like professional managerial class and sort of noblesse oblige clashing.

Yeah, there’s a piece from Vox on that last point by Haydn Belfield that’s called “Crybaby Scientist” that basically is just a — if you want to read the most anti-Oppenheimer take in this movie environment, that’s the place to go. And Belfield basically argues a version of what you just said, Lydia, that this was a guy who imagined himself as this core decision-maker, but who basically invented the bomb and gave it to the national security state and then was totally unable to manage or master the forces that he’d unleashed, while maintaining his desire to be seen as someone who was the insider sort of steering the ship. I think the piece is unfair to Oppenheimer in many ways, but it’s worth reading the strong anti-Oppenheimer take, which is also another question for you guys. There’s also been a lot of criticism of the movie from the left, arguing that it’s just too kind to Oppenheimer. It doesn’t spend enough time on the actual realities of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, once again, Americans whitewashing their own evils via Hollywood. What do you guys think of that critique?

My response to that is my response to a lot of these things, which is that not every movie or every piece is about everything. So this was about Oppenheimer. You can focus it on that. I mean, we can have another three-hour biopic on what about the fallout in New Mexico. I mean, there’s been talk about it has ignored what happened with the people who were downwind of the Trinity test. Yes, all of these are like questions, but again, not every movie is about every piece of a puzzle.

It’d have to be longer than three hours, Michelle. And you already oppose that, so.

No, I object on moral principle to movies that are that long.

I think, first of all, it was a real choice not to portray or show anything from what actually happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was utter and total and complete devastation. And when I finished the movie, I took the subway home and then immediately read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” which is an extraordinary book that really kind of gives you a sense of what took place there. And I think at the end of the day, I actually think that the way that the movie handled it was probably right. It would have felt, I think, somewhat gratuitous to go outside of the narrative of the movie and have newsreel footage or something that sort of gestured at the kind of destruction that this bomb actually wrought. And I felt that the moment where he’s speaking to a cheering, flag waving crowd, and they’re stomping their feet at Los Alamos, excited and celebrating that they’ve won the war by dropping this bomb on what was arguably a largely defeated enemy, he sort of has this kind of moment of conscience and what have you. So I think that was probably the right way to handle that. But the thing that was wild to me is there’s this moment where Oppenheimer says, sort of justifying the use of the bomb, that demonstrating the destruction of it will be so great that it’ll usher in the greatest peace that mankind has ever known. And in one regard, he was right in the sense that no one has ever deployed a nuclear weapon in a conflict situation since then. But in another way, we have not actually seen the greatest peace humankind has ever seen since then. So I don’t know. To me, that moment in the film really stuck with me.

Yeah, there’s a moment when I think they’re showing images from the actual atomic bombings are being shown. And I think you see Oppenheimer looking away from it. Right? So in a way, the movie is giving his perspective and his sort of showing that for all his guilt and so on and sort of nightmares, there’s sort of the nightmare scene that you referenced, Lydia, of the jeering crowd with the sort of undertones of atomic destruction underneath it. For all that, Oppenheimer is also sort of maybe refusing to see, right? The movie doesn’t show you because Oppenheimer himself does not want to fully see what he did.

The authors make a distinction between Oppenheimer taking responsibility, like yes, he made this thing, but not feeling guilt over it. And I felt that that was somewhat portrayed in the movie. What I liked, Ross, about that moment you mentioned when Oppenheimer looks away is that you see the colleagues around him, they’re all flinching. They’re watching. And it’s it’s painful for them. But he sees something and then immediately looks away.

Well, and what’s also interesting is the justification, and I think actually, this has sort of become the conventional wisdom, was that even though Japan was on the verge of defeat, dropping the bomb saved lives, and you sort of see that in the amazing scene of Gary Oldman playing Harry Truman, sort of waving away the histrionic Oppenheimer saying he has blood on his hands. So yes, I mean, I think this notion that ultimately dropping the bomb saved lives has become the kind of conventional wisdom. And “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb,” which is a very influential essay by Paul Fussell in “The New Republic,” which was published in 1981, I think really sort of articulates that view. But I also think one of the things about the legacy of the atomic world in which we live that nobody really ever talks about is the Cold War had real consequences, and the fact that it couldn’t take place as a direct confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States meant that it pushed the conflict out into essentially the decolonized world, right? And the proxy wars of the Cold War, I mean, it’s, depending on how you do the math, somewhere between 10 and 25 million people died, depending on when you start counting and who you count. But wars in Vietnam, in Congo, in Ethiopia, which is my mother’s native land, Guatemala, all across Latin America. So it is interesting that there’s this kind of binary choice between the peace and never having a nuclear war, but boy, did it set off a huge number of proxy wars that just happened to have as its victims, not the people of the United States or Russia, but the people of largely the developing, poor, Black, Brown world.

Yeah, and I don’t think you get a sense of that complexity from the end of the movie. My reading, at least, of the end of the movie is, is much more sort of binary, that it’s not that Oppenheimer created this sort of complex, new world where maybe direct superpower conflict becomes rarer, but proxy wars become more common. Instead, the movie ends with this vision of atmospheric destruction, fire spreading across all of the Earth, the true apocalypse that we’ve all lived in some kind of fear of ever since the 1940s. So in that sense, it’s presenting a vision of just sort of science slipping away from all political control and/or politics just doing what it will with terrifying technology. So let’s take a quick break here. And when we come back, we’re going to try and bring the conversation about the intersection of science and politics off the movie screen, out of the past, and into the present. So we’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. So we’re going to talk now for a minute about not just what the story of Oppenheimer says about history and the early Cold War and the life of the man himself, but about our own future here, 80 years onward in the beginning of the 21st century, where the question hanging over lots of issues, nuclear biowarfare and biotechnology, now artificial intelligence, is, can human beings control and tame the technologies that we create that might have potentially world destroying consequences? So, for all of you watching a three-hour movie about the first time, arguably, the human race created such a technology, did it fill you with optimism about the human capacity to restrain itself once we’ve let certain genies out of the bottle?

I don’t think we need to be feeling so optimistic. It’s not been around for that long. There’s still plenty of time for us to blow ourselves up, Ross.

So there’s this one amazing moment in the book that I was hoping would appear in the movie, and that’s that when Oppenheimer dies, one of his three eulogists is George Kennan. So you have the father of the atom bomb being eulogized by the father of containment. And containment, of course, was the policy that, depending on how you interpret it, helped keep the two superpowers from going to war with one another with nuclear weapons. He has an amazing line in the eulogy. He says, on no one did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. So it did not leave me with much optimism.

There’s also this interesting development where Congress has looked at this movie and taken the opportunity to reintroduce some ideas about how to get their arms around it. I mean, we’ve seen Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts hawking his proposal to ban AI from launching nuclear weapons. Now, I don’t think it’s going anywhere, but it’s got a very Dr. Strangelove doomsday machine feel to it. But it is what it is.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s so interesting because as I was watching the movie, I actually thought a little bit about — and don’t be mad at me. I thought a little bit about Elon Musk.

[LAUGHS]: Lydia.

He is not the kind of Sanskrit-reading sophisticate that Oppenheimer was. And he is also clearly of a different kind of political set of commitments, if you can even call them commitments, than Oppenheimer. But just looking at the various points of view that he’s taken, I think Musk shares this quality of bizarre naivete about the way that politics actually works. And I think like Oppenheimer, Elon Musk is a great synthesizer, perhaps not a great engineer of his own right. But there is this kind of protean quality that Elon Musk has. And in his naive replies to right-wing, even anti-Semitic and other people with those kinds of political views on Twitter, I do see kind of shades of a very crude version of Oppenheimer, which makes me feel like we’re in for a fair bit more of this kind of, quote unquote, “innovation” that is hurling forward without really thinking a great deal about it. I mean, Elon Musk has just announced that Twitter is going to become a company called X, which will be an everything company that is driven by AI and do banking and God knows what else. So hold on to your butts, guys. This is coming for us.

But what’s interesting with Musk is that he is also a bit of an AI doomer, right, in the sense that he has been sort of supportive of some of the people calling for a pause in AI research. And a certain amount of Musk’s fascination with space travel rests on his professed fears about human extinction, the idea that we’re going to blow ourselves up in some way, shape, or form.

Yeah, Musk is sort of skeptical. But in some ways, that’s the most dangerous, right? Because I think so was Oppenheimer, right? Like, there’s this quality of being both aware of and smart enough to know how destructive this thing could be, but also so smart and so curious and driven that you can’t help but want to push it as far as it can go. And it’s actually exactly in the hands of someone like Elon Musk, who professes to understand the dangers, but nonetheless hears the siren song of the future calling and of innovation and of science and of technology and sort of can’t resist following where it leads.

Let me just play, I guess, devil’s advocate for a minute on the specific nuclear question, which I think is, it’s true, as Michelle said, that we’ve only had nuclear weapons for 80 years, 80 odd years, slightly less. And it is very hard for me to imagine a future in which they’re never used. There’s sort of a Chekhov’s gun quality to nukes in the world. At the same time, we do have multiple generations now of evidence that human beings, when given this awesome power, power to destroy whole countries, if not the whole world, do flinch from it, right? The idea that if you hand human beings an awesome, terrifying technology, they will just use it, has not been vindicated. So far, politics has actually worked to contain the use of nuclear weapons. The fear of AI is that it’s the fear of something that makes decisions that aren’t human anymore, that lead to destruction not through the sort of normal human power games and rivalries and so on that we’re all familiar with, but through some sort of alien computational logic, where it makes sense to fire all the nukes at once. And that, to me, feels like a difference between some of the fears we have now and the fears people had at the start of the nuclear age. Now it’s more like, well, we know what human nature is like, and we haven’t used the weapons, but we don’t know what AI is like. And maybe AI will use them. What do you guys think of that?

I mean, there’s questions about loose nukes, dirty nukes. Obviously, the war in Ukraine, Putin is, I think, not a stable figure. But I do think the point that we have greater faith in the known frailty of human decision-making over the unknown power of AI decision-making and of rationality is a really important one. And I think that in some ways, it connects us back to the film in that science actually should be under the control of politics because in a moment where we’re all talking about we need to follow the science, follow the science, science is a method. It’s not an answer. It is a way of thinking about the world. And it needs to be balanced by other ways of thinking about the world. And those other ways include politics. They include religion. They include all kinds of ways that human beings organize their affairs and think about their values and things like that. So to me, it’s absolutely critical that AI stays as far away from these kinds of decisions as possible.

Yeah, and I don’t think we have to limit this just to, say, AI and nuclear weapons. I mean, we did just come through a pandemic where there were serious questions about whether this came out of a scientific experimental lab that then takes its toll on the entire planet. I mean, and it’s just like people operate as though the unthinkable won’t happen until, of course, the unthinkable does happen. And even if what the COVID-19 pandemic wound up coming from wasn’t, in that case, a lab, which we may just never know, that doesn’t mean that the next one won’t. And we have all of these things going on scientifically that we just don’t have a good grasp on or as good a grasp as we should have.

I think one thing that would be certainly more useful is if there is just an ongoing, vibrant conversation among all those arenas that Lydia mentioned — science, politics, ethics, religion. And to the extent that a movie like “Oppenheimer” and a book like “American Prometheus” cannot lionize scientists and say like, they’ve got the answers. If only we’d listened, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But rather, enable this more of a give and take among these fields, I think would be better off.

Well, on that eloquent note, we’ll leave it there. And when we come back, we’ll be talking about the geopolitical metaphors hidden inside the “Barbie” movie. No, I’m kidding. When we come back, we’re going to get hot and cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. And now it’s time for Hot, Cold, where one of us shares something that we’re into or over or somewhere on the thermometer in between. And Michelle, I think you have something for us.

All right, it is perfection that Ross has mentioned “Barbie” because what I am hot on this week is the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Now, I’m not talking about the movies. I saw both of them. I enjoyed both of them. But what I enjoyed even more was the way that this phenomenon, which is for those who haven’t been paying attention, kind of the portmanteau sprung up on social media because these two wildly different blockbusters were opening the same weekend, a challenge sprung up for people to go see both movies. I love this because we’re at a period where going to the theater has become a rare event. And seeing movies as a shared experience is happening less and less and less. So for something like this to pop up just felt kind of delightfully communal. Movie theaters were hosting costume parties and encouraging people to come in their pork pie hats or their pink outfits. And you just had these groups of people, especially with the Barbie crew, including my friends and I, taking pictures of each other, complimenting each other’s outfits in the theater. It just had this feel, which was so unusual at this point in time. And it’s something that I think we need, especially after the last few years of isolation and grimness and pandemic horror, just for people to have a moment where they can come together, no matter how silly it is, and share this sort of thing.

And celebrate the invention of the atomic bomb. Yes, that’s all —

Hey, you can argue that Mattel and Barbie have been its own kind of destructive force as well.

Well, that’s for a future episode. I was going to say that Mark Harris, the film writer, said something, I think, on Twitter about how often unexpected hits are more sort of shocking and disruptive in Hollywood than unexpected busts. And I think the hope right now for people who like the movies would be that Barbenheimer, combined with the disappointment surrounding many, many superhero sequels and Indiana Jones reboots and so on, will have some kind of substantial effect in what kind of movies get greenlit and made over the next couple of years, assuming, of course, that the writers’ strike ever ends, and that Hollywood ever gets back to making movies in the first place.

This reminds me of a few years ago when Steve Martin was hosting the Academy Awards, and he started off saying, look, I don’t know if you all know this, but I’m really especially happy to host this year’s Academy Awards because all the proceeds from tonight’s event are going to massive corporations. So not to be a Barben whiner, but I don’t take such joy in kind of being manipulated effectively by this kind of massive marketing campaign surrounding these two movies.

If you’re waiting for purity in your communal experience, you’re going to die lonely. This is America.

I don’t think so. I think there are other ways to be communal beyond paying $35 for popcorn and a soda.

I’m just saying, we’ve got to find a way to bring people back to communal events, rather than sitting in their basements watching Netflix all the time. Then I’m all for that.

I agree, and I think I’ve really been bitten by the movie bug lately. I just recently signed up for a membership at Film Forum. I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” a new print. There was a new print of “Midnight Cowboy.” So I’m all in on the return to the movies. And I don’t think any of those movies are putting money in the pockets of giant corporations that exist as we know them today. So I can feel really good about all of that.

Until a Godard Cinematic Universe is launched.

Launches, but I mean, I will say, one of the kind of leitmotifs of my summer has been just an absolute joy at the return to kind of communal experiences. We’ve seen real trouble in the world of theater, for example. I’m not talking about movie theaters. I’m talking about acting and actors on stage and things like that. And all of us need to vote with our feet and go and watch the theater, go to the movies, do things like this if we want these things —

Thank you, Lydia.

— to be part of our culture going forward. So I am with you, Michelle. I’ve got my bucket of popcorn, my giant gallon jug of Diet Coke, and Twizzlers. And I’m ready to go. So I guess I’ll see you at the movies.

Fantastic. I’ll be wearing my hot pink disco jumpsuit.

And on that note, as I clutch my Robert Oppenheimer action figure, that’s our show for the week.

Bye, guys.

Today, Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson speaks to Christopher Rufo, the architect of the right’s “critical race theory” moral panic and a close advisor of Ron DeSantis. Rufo has lately been criticized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for appearing to retaliate against public university professors for their political beliefs in his capacity as a trustee of New College of Florida. His new book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything argues that 60s radicals have successfully staged a “long march through the institutions” and exhorts conservatives to stage a “counter-revolution.” You can read the review that Robinson and Matt McManus wrote of that book here. The transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and to adjust for the considerable cross-talk in the original audio. 
Nathan J. Robinson 
Let me lay out for you first where I come from on this. Your book is about how the “radical left conquered everything.” Obviously, you can’t literally mean “everything.” We clearly haven’t fully conquered HarperCollins Books or the Manhattan Institute. But I consider myself a member of the “radical left.” I’ve been working within it for a few years now. I wrote a book called Why You Should Be a Socialist, and my impression has been that the left in this country is very weak. 
The leftists that I know are trying to do things like: ‘

raise the minimum wage to $15
deal with the climate crisis and scale down fossil fuel use because it’s boiling outside
protect women’s rights to an abortion, which your guy Ron DeSantis is trying to do away with
parental leave
Medicare for All: making sure everyone doesn’t have to fear going bankrupt going to the doctor
improving teacher wages
giving Amazon workers bathroom breaks
and of course that nebulous concept, “racial equity”: trying to make sure Black kids get the same level of schooling as white kids, closing the wealth gap, and stopping Black people from being roughed up by the police. 

And so, I’ve had guest after guest on this program from the left, and that’s the sort of stuff they’ve talked about. Certainly, my impression is that they haven’t conquered too much of it yet. So when I read this whole “the radical left has conquered everything,” it sounds fairly delusional to me. It’s interesting to me to even try to have a conversation about this, because the things that you’re talking about in this book are so far from the things that I and I think my leftist colleagues think truly matter in the world. So, perhaps you could start by convincing me that I’m wrong, and that the things that I just listed have, in fact, been achieved?
Rufo 
Absolutely, let me enlighten you. You have to read the subtitle in light of the title. So, the title is “America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.” Of course, everything is a bit cheeky, provocative, polemical, and strategic use of hyperbole and rhetoric.
Robinson
So, not true.
Rufo
They haven’t conquered my office here. But you have to read the subtitle in light of the title. And so, why is it “America’s Cultural Revolution,” rather than, for example, as you might want, “America’s socialist revolution”? Because after World War II, and then starting in the late 1960s, and accelerating to the presentâand I think you and I would likely actually agree on thisâthe Socialist left, the more orthodox Marxist left even that wants to have a classless society, or in the kind of lowering of ambition, wants to have many of these structural economic changes that you’ve described just now, has not succeeded. I’d be 100% agreement, and very thankful for that. If that were to happen, we’d have a very different country in many worse ways. 
Robinson 
Amazon workers would get bathroom breaks. 
Rufo 
But you have to know that it’s a cultural revolution. And so, specifically, you’re looking at the institutions and the culture of institutions. So the culture of CRT [Critical Race Theory] in graduate schools of education, or K through 12 classrooms, or the DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] departments that are now in one hundred of the top Fortune 100 companies, even to the point some of these ideas have been appropriated and redeployed as as as marketing messages for brand campaigns. And so, when I say the radical left has conquered everything, I meanâ
Robinson 
You don’t mean that. 
Rufo 
I’m very thankful that it’s not the orthodox or the Old Left. But let’s be honestâit’s probably a frustration that you haveâthe real driving force of the left has given up on a Marxist or even a socialist economy and that kind of structural vision. There’s no appetite for that in this country. And I’m afraid that you and your colleagues who want that are really a remnant, not just of the broader political culture, but even of the left, and certainly not the subject or the key interest that I describe in the book. 
Robinson 
It just strikes me that your book is highly misleading. I supported the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020. We’ve got writers on strike right now. Greg Abbott in Texas just prohibited cities from restricting employers from making workers work in the heat. The leftists I know are working on these material things. You don’t say that, and you don’t make that distinction clear throughout the book. In fact, you say throughout “the left is doing this, the left is doing that.” The left, left, left, left. The goal of the left is to destroy all Western institutions. And I think to myself, “But hang on a minute.” 
Rufo 
Well, I don’t think I say that. Where do I say that? I don’t say that exactly.
Robinson 
“Has the goal of the left actually been the destruction of every Western institution?” [quote from book’s official website] I guess you’d say “no” to your own question. 
Rufo 
Did I write that? I’m unaware. Maybe you found something that I don’t have immediately present. But I don’t think that that’s the case that I make in the book exactly. And I also don’t think that is really a fair representation. The left, of course, can be described as many things. You define it one way. But I think embedded in the context and the arguments of the book, all the research and evidence marshaled in the book, I think it’s very clear what fraction or faction of the left that I’m referring to. And so, if you’ve read it, and felt like “Well, that’s not me,” it’s not about you. It’s about other people and other ideas. I think anybody that takes an honest look will understand I’m not saying a blanket or universal statement. It’s a very specific argument that I lay out.
Robinson 
But it is a universal statement! “This book is an effort to understand the ideology that drives the politics of the modern left.”
Rufo 
That’s right. 
Robinson 
But then I open the leading leftist magazine in the country, Jacobin, and I look at the headlines, and they are about things like the writers’ strike, or they’re about the fact that you can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment working full time.
Rufo 
But would you say that Jacobin is representative of theâ
Robinson 
Of the left?
Rufo 
Would you say Jacobin is the ideological force behind the largest movements of the left? I don’t think so. 
Robinson 
It’s the leading leftist magazine in the country. I think they’ve got a higher circulation than any other leftist publication. 
Rufo 
I don’t know about that. 
Robinson 
But why leave that out of your story?
Rufo 
Leave what? Jacobin magazine? 
Robinson 
Leaving out issues like unionization, leaving out housing. The Sunrise Movement and climate change. The movement for Medicare for All. Abortion rights. 
Rufo 
The book is not about climate change! You can critique the book, but you can’t say, “Well, you should have written a book about all of these other issues.” I mean, the subject of the bookâ
Robinson 
But you’re writing a book about the left!
Rufo 
And what is your argument? That I should write about the left in the frame of all the issues that you like, but not the ones that I’m focusing on? 
Robinson 
That if you’re writing about the left and institutions, you should represent it accurately. 
Rufo 
No…. I think that, sure, maybe I’ll write another book and include some of those issues. 
Robinson 
An accurate one. 
Rufo 
But you’re saying basically that the issue selection that I’ve done to describe America’s Cultural Revolution doesn’t include climate change. I think it’s a bit odd. Climate change is irrelevant to the lineage, the ideologyâcertainly the focus of the book is on the theory of revolution of the New Left; the theory of racial revolution, beginning with the Black Panther Party and going to BLM; the theory of Neo Marxist pedagogy starting with Paulo Freire and going into the teachers unions; and then critical race theory. And so climate change, it’s likeâ
Robinson 
That’s the thing that most leftists that I know areâ
Rufo 
Plenty of people have written about climate change. You can read Mike Shellenberger, a friend of mine, on climate change.
Robinson 
I have. He lies about it a lot. 
Rufo 
This has nothing to do with climate change. It’s like, pull a rabbit out of your hat.
Robinson 
You think this is more ridiculous than I do, because you strike me as a man who just doesn’t talk to many leftists.
Rufo 
That’s not true. 
Robinson 
The climate crisis is the leading thing that every leftist that I know is concerned about because it’s so pressing. People are collapsing and dying in the heat. And then you’re talking about diversity programs.
Rufo 
But the book is about critical race theory and diversity programs.
Robinson 
The young people in the Sunrise Movement, man! The Zoomers! That’s all they care about, their future on a warming planet. 
Rufo 
The Sunrise Movement is some sort of astroturf, where they deploy kids to get people feeling guilty and try to manipulate them into talking about the weather. 
Robinson 
The weather? It’s the hottestâ
Rufo 
Traditionally, if you’re talking about the weather, it’s something that you do in polite company because you don’t want to talk about something more controversial and more interesting. “Oh yeah, how’s the weather?” The left has turned the conversation about the weather. 
Robinson 
Oh, man, oh, man. Go outside! It’s the hottest year ever! Global warming is getting worse every year, a lot of people are going to die. No? Okay. All right. I want to ask you about this term “nihilism” that you use. You said a new “nihilism” is beginning to surround the common man. What do you mean by that? 
Rufo 
Sure. So by “nihilism” what I mean by that, and if you specifically look at the ideologies outlined in the book, follow them to their practical consequences, actually read the literature from that late 1970s period, and then you trace the descendants of those ideas, what you find over and over is that they deploy only the negative side of what they think of as the revolutionary dialectic, and so they’re unable toâand they do this very self-consciouslyâmove beyond just the most abstract utopian vision: we’re going to get to a society that is a utopia where these problems are solved, transcended the limitations of human nature, and embedded the revolution into our biology. That’s the kind of language you see, but then you actually look at the practical outcomes, of, let’s say, even tracing it forward to BLM. What did BLM achieve? It achieved record high homicide rates in Black communities. It restricted or reduced police presence in some of the poorest inner-city neighborhoods, leading to an increase in crime and violence targeted towards the people who they were supposed to help. And so, in every case, there is a utopianism that then goes through a process of disillusionment, and the practical outcome is death and destruction, ultimately ending in a kind of nihilism because they’re committed to that negative side of that dialectic. They can never actually create any substantive alternatives that actually lead to a flourishing of human beings as an actual implementation of greater justice. And so it becomes really a kind of ego-driven thing. All that’s left is the ego. And so you see that Black Lives Matter is cynical. These people raised hundreds of millions of dollars across many entities. They looted these organizations, disappeared to their mansions, and left the people that they were supposed to help in worse real, tangible, material, social, political and criminal justice conditions than ever. And that, to me, is just really a textbook form of nihilism. All that lacks is the ego and the image, where the actual human consequences are quite dark.
Robinson 
I find it “nihilism” a weird term to use. I find that the people that I talk to in Black Lives Matter and related movements are not only pretty idealistic, but have pretty clear things they want to do. The Movement For Black Lives has a long agenda. It’s pretty concrete. They want to end the death penalty, alternatives to incarcerating young people, and demilitarize law enforcement agencies. When I pick up a book like Ibram Kendi’s book, he ends with “believe that we can transform our societies to eliminate racist policies. Racist policies aren’t indestructible, inequities aren’t inevitable, racist ideas aren’t natural.” 

Rufo 
But that’s a perfect example. That’s the perfect example of the process and of what I’m saying. Even Kendi says, “we want to have a society that is totally transcended from racism.” And that sounds great. I agree. 
Robinson 
Well, you think we’ve already achieved it. 
Rufo 
In the abstract, that’s a noble goal. But even Kendi, when you nail him down on specifics, what do you want and what should we do to get there? Henry Rogers, aka Ibram X. Kendi, says, “What we need is a federal department of anti-racism that can deploy positive discrimination against disfavored groups and that can restrict the speech of anything that is deemed racist speech.” So, obliterating the First Amendment and the 14th Amendment, and then having a bureaucracy with plenary power over American society to reengineer everyone’s speech, thought, behavior, employment, economy, etc., to achieve Kendi’s goals. And of course, that sounds a lot like any of the other revolutions of the 20th century that ended with bureaucratic tyranny. And even Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher at the heart of the book, was smart and honest enough to admit that the Soviet Unionâhe even he wrote this in the 1950s, to his creditâwas a perversion of that utopian ideal and had ended in catastrophic human carnage, bureaucratic tyranny, and was not an example for the left. And so when people revive these ideas and transpose them into a racial language and say, “Well, it didn’t work out in the last 100 years, but maybe if we do it, to have an anti-racist total state that administers society towards this utopia, maybe then it will work out,” I just find that so ignorantâignorant of history and of human nature. I’ll try to make it brief to give you a chance to respond, but my last point is this. Ultimately, I think it’s a brand building exercise for people like Ibram Kendi to rack up speaking fees to go on the DEI circuit. But they have really nothing tangible to offer. I once was part of that old school more socialist left, and if I were still part of that, I would feel outraged and betrayed by these leaders. Critical Race theorists have nothing to offer poor Black families in housing projects in places like Memphis, Tennessee; they have everything to offer their peers in elite academic institutions where they trade status, prestige, and speaking gigs. But it’s all a play. It’s all an act.Â 
Robinson 
The critique that academics and intellectuals are somewhat useless is one that I would certainly accept. The critique that the social justice movement is building a Soviet-style dystopia that can be justly compared with the Maoist Cultural Revolution, where the rivers ran with human bodies, strikes me as so ludicrous as to be almost impossible for a rational mind to entertain.
Rufo 
I’m not saying that it’s happening. I’m saying that Kendi’s policy proposal is akin to that. And that’s undeniable. Just read the text. What is our country without the 14th Amendment and the First Amendment?
Robinson 
I don’t think that’s true at all. I think Ibram Kendi believes in affirmative action. I don’t think he believes in shooting dissidents. I think that’s crazy. And when I look in your book at some of the examples of what you think the real outrages are, you list things that you believe capture this contemporary insanity. And I’ll just quote from you a list of dystopian things that the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities under the pernicious influence of CRT and such have done. They funded, for example, “a speaking series on race reconciliation and transformation, a National Black Writers Conference on reconstructing the master narrative, an artist in residency program for racial equity and leadership certificate program in diversity, equity inclusion, an art exhibit on race, gender, and globalization and oversees research program that aims to dismantle hierarchies of race and civilization, a biography, exploiting the Black Power movement, a dance theater trilogy on race, culture and identity and a stage play for a manifesto on race to the eyes of a black girl recovering from self-hate.” And I actually looked up what that stage play was. The summary is: 

“Margaret uproots her life, including her dead-end job and fizzling relationship, after finding out that she is unexpectedly expecting. She finds support and humor from her sassy and sharp Aunt Sylvia and her new friendship with Carolina, a pregnant cleaning lady at her office. BREACH is a smart comedy about friendship, motherhood, and family, and tackles the mother of all challenges: learning to love yourself.” 

This stuff just didn’t really leave me thinking that Western civilization is in peril, and that the people you’re talking about are, in fact, going to establish this totalitarian equity regime.
Rufo 
Well, that, of course, in context is merely an example of the capture of the cultural institutions such as the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts]â
Robinson 
Seems fine!
Rufo 
âthat really just fund exclusively left wing agitprop, I think it’s a huge waste.
Robinson 
Agitprop? The play about Aunt Sylvia and Margaret? 
Rufo 
Yes, it’s not exactly Flaubert. It’s not exactly Twain. This is the kind of mass-produced schlockâ
Robinson 
What, because they’re not white?
Rufo 
No, not because of that. Because listen to the plot. “Learning to love ourselves.” It’s like self-help literature that is funded by the government. I think the government should not be in the interest of left-wing coded self-help literature. That’s a total waste of money. It’s not a totalitarian overreach, I don’t make that argument at all. You’re imposing that on it. But it’s merely to list the examples of the kinds of projects that are funded. We’re not making great art anymore in the United States. We’re certainly not making great art that’s subsidized by the federal bureaucracy. It’s an example of taking something thatâagain, the creation of great art is a noble impulse, and then reducing it to just a political agitprop function.
Robinson 
I have to say, I don’t know how you know that BREACH isn’t good art. The fact that you say “Oh, it’s not Twain, it’s not Flaubert.” 
Rufo 
You’re making the case that it is?
Robinson 
Because it’s about Black women? Have you seen the play? What didn’t you like about it? 
Rufo 
No, come on. You don’t even believe that.
Robinson 
Well, I don’t understand what your standard is. 
Rufo 
Do you believe that it’s great art? Hold on. Do you believe this is on the caliber of a Flaubert? Tell me.
Robinson 
I haven’t seen it, Chris! 
Rufo 
Okay, so you think that it might be?
Robinson 
Of course, it might be, I haven’t seen it! 
Rufo 
Okay, well, you should watch it. You should check it out. You could discover the next Flaubert.
Robinson 
One of the things that struck me about your book is that you spent a lot of time talking about these radical theorists: here’s who they are, here is the influence they’ve had. And then you say we need a counter-revolution. But I would have liked to see more evidence that they were wrong. Because a lot of the times when you cite something that you say is some crazy critical race theory thing, I find my reaction to be “Well, sounds like they kind of have a point.” For example, you say the National Credit Union Administration told the employees America was “founded on white supremacy”; “Critical race theorists argue that America was founded on racism, slavery, white supremacy”; or Derrick Bell “attacked Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as racist hypocrites.” But they were. It was founded on racism. They were racist hypocrites.
Rufo 
No, the United States was not founded on racism. I think that is a total misunderstanding of history. 
Robinson 
How many founding fathers were Black? 
Rufo 
How many people in the Chinese Politburo are European? It’s like the representation fact. Look, hold onâ
Robinson 
There’s not a big class of European slaves in China. But if there was, it would be a racist state.
Rufo 
That’s true. But look, if you ask, “What was the United States founded on?” It’s a very specific question, and I’ll answer the question for you. The United States was founded on a vision of human nature, of natural rights, of equality and liberty. 
Robinson 
That excluded Black people. 
Rufo 
And of course, was there also simultaneous slavery? Yes. Is that hypocritical? Looking backwards, of course it is. But these are all people who were born into a system that was a human universal.
Robinson 
It wasn’t. Black people didn’t think they were unequal.
Rufo 
And they established the standard towards which the United States moved. And so the question is not “Are we better people than the American founders on these issues?” The question is, “Have we moved the world towards greater liberty and equality?”
Robinson 
That’s your question.
Rufo 
And if you compare it back to what they did, they moved the entire human civilization toward the principles of liberty and equality. 
Robinson 
That’s your question. My question is, “Aren’t the critical race theorists correct that the Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites?” 
Rufo 
They did more to move the human civilization toward liberty and equality than anyone else. And so to reverse impose, that they were “racist,” to take our conceptions of that term, is so lazy. 
Robinson 
It’s a fact.
Rufo 
It’s so untruthful. 
Robinson 
You don’t believe that Thomas Jefferson was a racist? 
Rufo 
It’s not true. It’s such a lazy reduction.
Robinson 
Do you want me to quote him? 
Rufo 
No. I think that’s a totally unfair way of looking at it. I think that you have to look at it in the context of their own historical period. And I would say that Thomas Jefferson did more for equalityâ
Robinson 
Except for Black people.
Rufo 
âthan anyone else in the history of the world. No. Look at Lincoln. What did Lincoln say? Do you think Lincoln was racist? Let’s just get that out of the way first.
Robinson 
I think Lincoln had prejudices. But Frederick Douglass was a big admirer of Lincoln. Lincoln wasâ
Rufo 
I don’t think we need the authority of Frederick Douglass to recognize that Lincolnâto adopt some of the terms you might likeâwas an anti-racist president. I mean, Lincoln did more for racial equality than just about anyone. It’s a convenient way to duck the question. I don’t need to delegate the authority to Frederick Douglass, although it’s helpful as a point.
Robinson 
It’s a convenient way to duck the question about the founding fathers. 
Rufo 
No, I’m getting there. Let me finish. So what did Lincoln say? Lincoln said that Jefferson set the silver frame of the Declaration of Independence, for the Golden Apple of racial equality.
Robinson 
But he was also a racist. 
Rufo 
And so Lincoln, who I think has a much better understanding of these issues intellectually, but also just in his own human experience and what he went through and what he did, recognized that Jefferson was a tragic figure, because ofâ
Robinson 
Because of his racism.
Rufo 
âthe necessities of history that hemmed him in at the time. 
Robinson 
He wasn’t hemmed in. Nothing stopped him from releasing his slaves.
Rufo 
But that he put the silver frameâ
Robinson 
Silver frame. That sounds very nice. 
Rufo 
He set the highest standards, that allowed then Lincoln to achieve the next step in the process towards that Golden Apple. 
Robinson 
He could have achieved it himself if he hadn’t enslaved people. 
Rufo 
So I think to go back and say, “Oh, they’re all racist.” It’s just so lazy. 
Robinson 
But it’s true. It’s not lazy, it’s just a fact. 
Rufo 
I’m going to tell you what I really think it is. I think it comes from a sense of our own inferiority as modern people. Especially on the left. It’s very easy to tear down a statue of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and say, “These people were bad.” But if we’re actually truthful, I think it’s because those people make a lot of these left-wing activists feel so small, so insignificant, and so underwhelming. I think it’s a sense of inferiority.
Robinson 
I would say people are genuinely upset by slavery. 
Rufo 
They revolt against the great figures who did more for racial equality than these BLM activists will ever do. And that is, I think, a position that if you look at it, honestly, is incontrovertible.
Robinson 
I think it’s insane! I mean, I think Jefferson was very explicitâ
Rufo 
You’re free to it. Who’s doneâhold onâwho’s done more for racial equality? Abraham Lincoln, or Black Lives Matter? You tell me.
Robinson 
Well, I would agree that I don’t think Black Lives Matter has achieved its political goals.
Rufo 
No, but answer the question: Who did more for racial equality? Abraham Lincoln or Black Lives Matter?

Robinson 
The consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation are pretty much unparalleled in United States history, and if you asked me who the greatest US presidents were, I’d probably say Lincoln and Roosevelt. 
Rufo 
So you would agree with me that Abraham Lincoln did more for racial equality than BLM? 
Robinson 
Again, it seems a way to not acknowledge that the country was founded by people who held Black people in chains and thought they were inferior. 
Rufo 
I acknowledge that. That’s a fact. That’s a historical fact. I don’t see how anyone would deny that.
Robinson 
But you said they weren’t racist! And now you say it’s a historical fact. 
Rufo 
No, you made two different claims. One is claimed that they had chattel slavery and many of the founding fathers owned slaves. Yes, obviously that’s abominable.
Robinson 
And they thought Black people were inferior. 
Rufo 
But to say that they are racist is a different claim because you’re taking an ideological term and then back imposing it on them to discredit their work advancing equality. And so I think that I reject it in a linguistic frame, while acknowledging the factual basis that there was slavery.

Robinson 
“The blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.” That’s Jefferson. Is that not racist? 
Rufo 
I disagree with that statement. I don’t know what you want me to say. 
Robinson 
I want you to say it’s racist. 
Rufo 
Saying “oh, we’re going to cherry pick one sentence.” 
Robinson 
I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell the truth about this man.
Rufo 
Oh, here’s a question for you. I’ll turn it back on you. Jefferson held slaves and it’s abominable. And I, of course, reject it. But do you think Jefferson advanced the cause of racial equality, or did not? 
Robinson 
I don’t think he advanced the cause of racial equality. 
Rufo 
Frederick Douglass would disagree with you. And I thought you’ve delegated your moral intuitions to Douglas. Douglass was quite a fan. Martin Luther King was also quite a fan.
Robinson 
I don’t think Jefferson advanced the cause of racial equality. I think he could have if he’d freed his slaves, but he didn’t. In fact, he entered into a very questionable sexual relationship withâ
Rufo 
Well, hold on. But because Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were great admirers of Jefferson, you’re telling me that you have a betterâ
Robinson 
I admire the Declaration of Independence, but I think it would be absurd to say that Jefferson advanced racial equality. The man was racist, and it’s a shame. And that doesn’t mean there’s nothing positive in his writing. But he was even told at the time. Benjamin Banneker, a free Black man, wrote to him and said, “How can you keep my brothers in bondage while you write stirring words about liberty?” And Jefferson just didn’t reply.
Rufo 
I agree with that. 100%. I mean, the contradiction is absolutely there. But what I’m asking is a different question. And Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, many modern scholars would say that, ultimately, Jefferson is a tragic and flawed figure for those reasons that you outlined, obviously, but ultimately, his legacy as a human being in his life, and in his work, was to set a framework for the allowance of equality, and that he moved the nation and the world, in fact, towards racial equality, despite those things, despite his own personal conduct, despite his flaws, despite his hypocrisy even. 
Robinson 
People’s legacies are very, very complicated. Actually, I think that one of the reasons that we now acknowledge that Jefferson’s legacy is so complicatedâwe didn’t really before the 1960sâwhere these people that you detest, the “critical race theorists,” were pointing out all the ugly, dark side of American history that really was not taught in the schools. And I’ve heard you mentioned that you grew up in California, where you were taught all the dark side of American history because progressives put it in the curriculum. I grew up in Florida. I went to Florida high schools, and I still got the classic “America’s the greatest country in the world, look at how wonderful we’ve been throughout all history.” And so I actually think that these radical scholars that, again, you really dislike, have made contributions to making the legacy of the supposedly great men of genius more complicated than it would have otherwise been.
Rufo 
Sure, I guess I can agree with you on that. Seems like a pretty pretty solid ideaâ
Robinson 
So let’s teach some Critical Race Theory in schools! 
Rufo 
âbut, certainly, history is complex. But you have to also understand: what is the purpose of education? And then you also have to make decisions about what’s in the curriculum in kindergarten through graduate school. And in graduate school, of course, let’s have all sorts of competing ideas. Let’s take mainstream ideas, radical ideas, and let’s take them apart. Let’s debate them. Let’s work on them. But what’s happening is that the kind of radical pessimistic view of America’s history has become the sole view in so many curriculum documents. America is presented not as a complex country that has been fraught with many issues, but ultimately, I think, moved towards these high ideals, but that America is fundamentally racist. America is exploitive. European, white Americans are oppressors because of their ancestry and because of their racial essence. That stuff is bad. And I think that even you would agree that teaching history just in that way is bad for kids. It’s bad for the country.
Robinson 
If that was what was happening, and to the extent that it is, I certainly disagree. I think where we disagree is whether this is an accurate characterization of what is taught. You have a fundamentally different view of the country than that of people you criticize, and I want to identify some of the differences. Recently on the CounterPoints podcast, Ryan Grim played you a clip of Tim Scott saying that racism and policing is a problem and that he’d experienced it himself. And you replied and basically said, that’s not true. You said: “I don’t think racism is a strong and powerful force in our society. It has been in the past. But I dispute the factual basis of Senator Scott’s speech.” You cited Roland Fryer’s study, and you said that “police do not show any disparate treatment of African Americans or other minorities. Senator Scott is doing a disservice with this narrative.” So, I mean, you don’t really think racism actually is very significant to the United States.

Rufo 
I don’t think that today, racism is a significant and driving force in America’s institutional life. I mean, I just don’t see it. I don’t think that that is correct. 
Robinson 
Well, you wouldn’t see it. 
Rufo 
But, you see data points to the contrary all the time. This is, in some ways, a trivial example, but I think it’s a good way to understand attitudes and behavior. Yelp decided to use a tag “Black owned business” to tag Black owned businesses on their platform so people could have that information as they’re searching. And they found that the businesses that were tagged as “Black owned businesses” experienced a huge and significant increase in web traffic and actual foot traffic. And so, if Americans were on average extremely racist, they would see this and be in the privacy of their own browser. They would say, “Oh, I don’t want to patronize this business.” But actually, the opposite is true. I think Americans, in generalâof course, not all Americans, there’s always going to be prejudice and bigotry, etc.âare good-hearted people, and strive to treat everyone equally. And all things equal, they tried to help groups that have been, of course, historically discriminated against, such as African Americans as the important example. And I think institutionally, I always ask “Okay, well, systemic racism, what is it? How do you measure it and give me some examples?” And they go into these long statistical studies that demonstrate disparities. Okay, fine. There are some disparities. 
Robinson
There’s a lot.
Rufo
But what is the causal mechanism? How do you measure it? How do you reduce it to systemic racism? Systemic racism is like an abstract concept that has emotional and rhetorical power. But when you actually try to give it social scientific scrutiny, it dissipates and disappears. There are other explanations, of course. But again, I do not think that the major institutions of the United States are animated and driven by racism. That’s not true. I think you know that’s not true.
Robinson 
Well, for example, you cited the Roland Fryer study, which you said was one of the best studies. They put in some pretty sophisticated controls to try and find out: are Black people, in fact, treated differently by the police? And they foundâthis is quite controversialâthat in terms of shootings Black people are not treated differently. But when you said, “the police don’t show any disparate treatment for African Americans,” actually, that’s misrepresenting the study. Because they said the opposite. They said that on every kind of non-lethal use of forceâ slapping people, pushing them into walls or onto the ground, handcuffing them without an arrest, drawing a weapon or using a pepper sprayâ”there are racial differences, sometimes quite large, in police use of force, even after accounting for a large set of controls designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors.”
Rufo 
Sure. And so your explanation is that therefore the explanation for that is because the police are racist? Is that what you’re claiming?
Robinson 
Yes, that police who might think of themselves as being completely fair might have biases, where they tend to be more likely to rough up a young Black man, to throw them against the hood of a car. 
Rufo 
Have you spent a lot of time with police officers as they’re doing their job, as they’re in the line of duty?
Robinson 
I’ve spent some time with police officers, and I know you have too.
Rufo 
And that’s why I say that. And so I think that, again, the actual, real experience is quite important. I’ve spent a lot of time embedded with police officers. Some are great, some are not as great, obviously. It’s like any profession, there are good ones and bad ones. I’d say mostly very professional and very good. I’ve also spent a lot of time in poor neighborhoods, from all different racial backgrounds, including three years in a public housing project in Memphis, Tennessee. The actual experience of police officers in those communities is materially quite different than in a majority white suburban area. And I think that you could say that there’s a there’s a level of physical aggression, as the argument you’re making, that is different, perhaps, in these kinds of communities. But there are many other explanations for why that might be the case, besides the police are racist, defund the police. I think that one of the most important questions is: Do you think that there are racial disparities in criminality, meaning the commissioning of crimes or frequency of committing crimes? 
Robinson 
Yes, but this is what sophisticated social scientists like Fryer do: they try and control for differences in crime and say “given a particular encounter with police, are police more likely to use force?” That’s what they found. Now, you’re talking about your exposure to the police. They all think of themselves as great, very professional, or whatever. The people who disagree with you are the majority of Black Americans in public opinion polls. Nearly 90% of black adults say that Black adults are treated less fairly than whites in the criminal punishment system. A minority of white people, but a majority of Black people, say that Black people are treated worse in stores, banks, job applications, and by landlords. Nearly a third of Black Americans have said that they experienced unfair treatment by police within the past year. There are huge gaps in black between black confidence in the police and white confidence in the police. And so, it seems to me like maybe the experience of Black people with police is a little different from your own. When you poll Black Americans, they have pretty low confidence.
Rufo 
Sure, of course there is. 
Robinson 
And you think they’re kind of delusional about that.
Rufo
I didn’t say that.
Robinson
Well, they must be. 
Rufo 
I think there is a vested social interest in improving those numbers. I think it’s really important to have a good relationship between the police and the communities where they work, of all different racial backgrounds. And I don’t know the specific numbers, but they sound about right. And certainly that is something that we should improve, but then the question becomes, “Okay, well, what do we do about it?” BLM and the radical left offered a solution in 2020 that was followed by a number of police departments. “We need de-policing, we need to defund the police, we need the police to pull back.” And what we’ve seen is then a great paradox, and this is evidenced in the social science literature. My colleague Heather Mac Donald has written extensively about this. You have this problem of trust, which I concede to your point, I agree is a problem. But then what do you do about it? I didn’t say that.
Robinson 
Well, you didn’t agree when you saw Tim Scott. You said he’s making it up. 
Rufo 
No, I said perceptions of trust different than the actual material measurements of behavior. 
Robinson 
Okay, so they’re wrong? They’re wrong that they’ve been unfairly treated. 
Rufo 
But the question is, well, what do you do about it? Do you actually have proactive policing? Do you have broken window style policing? Do you have community policing that actually has officers on foot patrol, making relationships? That’s the kind of law enforcement that I support. And I think that it can improve those perceptions, attitudes, but the left says decarceration, policing, defund the police, push the police backâ
Robinson 
Oversight: making sure complaints are actually dealt with. 
Rufo 
And we’ve seenâand again, Roland Fryer and Heather Mac Donald have done this, and other number of other scholarsâanytime you say you want less police presence in those communities, those communities see skyrocketing rates of violence, and especially homicide. So, that’s a conundrum and a big social science problem.
Robinson 
When you say race really does not matter anymore, we still see statistics on maternal mortality, experiences with police, the kinds of schools people go to, whether families can afford to send kids to college, the wealth gap, rates of cancer, whether you inherit a house, whether you’re likely to get an apartment application accepted, and these vary by race. It seems to me very strange to say as you do that Tim Scott’s perceptions of the facts are wrong, and that actually, racism is a thing of the past.
Rufo 
Well, you said at the beginning that I’m arguing that race doesn’t matter. Of course I’m not arguing that. I haven’t said that. I said that race is not a causal determining force in American life. It doesn’t animate American institutions. I think that is absolutely true. 100% true.
Robinson 
But racial inequalities are very real. 
Rufo 
Of course, and I’ve actually written, for example, even a policy paper for the Heritage Foundation on why I believe that policies associated with critical race theory have actually ended up deepening racial inequalities and will continue to do so in the future. And in fact, they ignore the most important variables, which are the background variables, which are the more rigorous explanatory variables people like Robert Rector and others have done in this work. And so I reject this idea that any disparity is automatically evidence of racism or systemic racism as an animating force in American life, and the solution to those disparities is to do DEI training and seek to reduce that. There’s no evidence that’s true.
Robinson 
If you take, for example, the wealth gap, it’s existed continuously since the time of slavery.
Rufo 
Yes, of course. And I think that the wealth gap is absolutely part of the historical legacy of racism. You and I would agree on that question. But it’s a separate question from: is racism the driving and animating force behind American policy today? Those are different questions that are conflated by people on the left side of the spectrum to make a rhetorical point that is not actually a solid, historical, social scientific, and logical point. 
Robinson 
Well, as long as we can both agree that the racial wealth gap is severe, causes the existence of a certain kind of white privilege, and ought to be redressed, then I think we will be on the same page. I suspect you wouldn’t, in fact, put it that way… 
I really have to get to the laws on critical race theory that you have helped write. You have said that these laws essentially just prohibit making essentialist statements about people on the basis of race. They vary, obviously, from state to state. I want to give you an example of a statement, and you can tell me whether it crosses the line here. If I were to say: “Whites are not putting in enough effort to re-educate themselves out of racial ignorance. White people believe they have so little to learn. Racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans. The disease of racism permeates a whole body politic.” “Why does white America delude itself? And how does it rationalize the evil that it retains?” I assume that would be a pretty clear-cut violation.
Rufo 
I think, first and foremost, that’s a false statement. I think that it is factually untrue. I think it’s a kind of political agitprop statement. In my view, in K through 12 Public Schools, the curriculum and the values that they transmit should be determined by the people through their elected legislators, through their school boards, through their representatives and through the political process. And I think that we have an abiding interest in restricting false inflammatory racial essentialism and scapegoating, no matter who it’s directed against. And so, as such, I think that I would say that the public is well within its right to say that whiteness is not a disease that has infected the body politic. I think that’s the kind of rhetoric that should be out of the public schools.
Robinson 
Well, that was Martin Luther King, so we can agree that he shouldn’t be in.
Rufo 
No, you’re saying, should that be advanced as the ideology of the public schools? If you have that statement, and then you’re saying, “Hey, this is the statement of Martin Luther King,” this is a statement of someone elseâ
Robinson 
So he could come and give a speech in a school and say that?
Rufo 
Is that the official policy of the school? It should not be. But if it’s in the context of teaching a history lesson, it can be something that is subjected to rigorous debate. I disagree with that.
Robinson 
What if the teacher says “I agree with Martin Luther King”? 
Rufo 
That’s part of a debate. And that’s a teacher’s personal opinion. Obviously, a teacher is entitled to his or her opinion ofâ
Robinson 
Not much of a debate if they’re fired. 
Rufo 
But what we are saying is something that’s quite different and quite a different point altogether. You’re saying that, “should a teacher advance this idea” is very different from “should a teacher teach it in a historical context as a statement made by an important historical figure.”
Robinson 
Yes, but the teacher’s going to be terrified that they’re advancing ideas by discussing them.
Rufo 
No, that’s also like saying the previous statement that you made. You made a statement that Jefferson said that the Black race is something, I can’t remember the exact words.
Robinson 
Inferior in body and mind.
Rufo 
Can you teach that as the official position of the public school? Of course not. I would reject that. I would say that should be opposed. You shouldn’t teach that as the official policy. But can you teach it in the context of, Jefferson said this, let’s take a look at it. Of course you can. And so you’re trying to make a rhetorical point by conflating the official position of a school, the kind of values that it’s advancing, and the historical comments or statements of relevant figures that can then be subject to analysis within a curriculum. It’s clever, I’ll give you that, it’s clever. 
Robinson 
Just to conclude, then, the correct position here is that critical race theory should be taught in schools, but neutrally. And kids should be taught critical thinking and critical evaluation of critical race theory.
Rufo 
Should they be taught critical race theory in schools in the sense of the discipline of critical race theory, or in the sense of the pedagogy of critical race theory? 
Robinson 
Assign a Derrick Bell story and then ask them to discuss it. 
Rufo 
I would have actually no problem with that. I’ve read all of Derrick Bell’s work, and I would have no problem in let’s say a college classroom if Derrick Bell is part of the curriculum and is subjected to debate.
Robinson 
How about high school?
Rufo 
Maybe in high school you could have something, but again, there’s no restriction in any state on including that Martin Luther King quote or a quotation from Derrick Bell. The restriction is simply that you cannot advance, inculcate, or indoctrinate students into believing, for example, believing what might lead to conclude that one race is inherently superior to another, that one race is inherently defective. And so you’re trying to bring in an example, but you’re not reading the law right, and not reading the actual classroom practice.
Robinson 
Well, we’ll find out if I’m reading the law right by what happens to teachers. And we’ll be monitoring that. Because a lot of teachers have said that they feel incapable of teaching even things like Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy.” So, we will see if this, in fact, does do what you said and have a very small impact, or if it has a very large impact. We’ll find out. 
Rufo 
Do it! And I would propose to you this, and I would agree that that’s a good experiment. Take that Jefferson quote, take that Martin Luther King quote, team up with some teachers in Florida, teach it in a public school, and see what happens. I think that if they teach it in a way that doesn’t advance it as their official position, but actually uses it as part of a robust historical discussion, they’d be well within the law. I think that they would be applauded and certainly not restricted.
Robinson 
Well, we shall find out. I myself am going to go back to worrying about the issues that I care about, such as climate change, minimum wage, et cetera. 
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.

In May, Elon Musk presided over an uncharacteristically subtle tweak to Twitter’s home page. For years, the prompt in the text box at the top of the page read, “What’s happening?,” a friendly invitation for users to share their thoughts. Eight months after the billionaire’s takeover, Twitter changed the prompt ever so slightly to match the puzzling, chaotic nature of the platform under the new regime: “What’s happening?” became “What is happening?!”This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.” (Even with its new name, the site is pretty much the same as ever; the blue bird logo in the left-hand corner of the website is now a black X, and … that’s about it.) This X boondoggle may simply be the flailing of a man who doesn’t want to own his social network and was pressured via lawsuit to buy it, but Musk and the Twitter (X?) CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would like you to believe that much bigger things are coming.1. Musk wants to build the “Internet of Elon.”The first theory requires taking Musk’s ambitions somewhat seriously. In a tweet last October, he declared that “buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Versions of these “super apps” already exist and are popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, so we know what this means: X would function as a holistic platform that includes payment processing and banking, ride-sharing, news, communication with friends, and loads and loads of commerce. Think of it as the internet, but without leaving Musk’s walled garden. In a leaked recording of a Twitter town hall back in June 2022, Musk hinted that China’s WeChat was a model of sorts for X. “There’s no WeChat movement outside of China,” he said. “And I think that there’s a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success.”If you squint, you can see the logic. Plenty of people across Twitter—influencers, freelancers, small-business owners—use the platform to sell things. Many of these people use various “link in bio” pages to direct people to their work and receive payment. X, the theoretical everything app, could streamline and consolidate these exchanges, and, like WeChat, generate revenue from them. Musk has already launched a program to share ad revenue with some of Twitter’s larger “creator” accounts, the early beneficiaries of which included many prominent right-wing shock jocks. And if he could manage to get hundreds of millions of people to live and shop and bank on his app, instead of, say, shitpost memes and argue politics with white nationalists, that would be an immense success.To do that, X would need to build out an advanced, secure payment platform; apply the appropriate regulatory licenses to legally process payments and store money; and, of course, recruit businesses and financial institutions to use the platform. According to the Financial Times, the company began filing applications for those licenses early this year and has been at work building parts of a payment infrastructure. The bad news is that the person Musk tasked with spearheading the project was laid off—along with about 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce.[Read: I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside]Musk does have experience in the payments business. He founded an online bank—also called X.com—in 1999, and it shortly thereafter merged with Confinity to become PayPal. Perhaps this would give his super-app idea some credibility, if not for Musk having spent the past 15 months blundering through his latest business venture in full view of the public. He has alienated advertisers with his reactionary and conspiratorial political opinions, sent the company deep into debt, and, at times, rendered the platform unusable by limiting how many tweets users can see. The platform appears to be shrinking under Musk’s leadership, according to third-party traffic data. Spam is rampant, and the most satisfied users seem to be previously banned racists and anti-Semites who have regained access to their megaphone.It’s already a hard sell for Musk to convince people that his sputtering platform is the best place for posting Barbenheimer memes, let alone the right home for … everything, including our money. But the cognitive dissonance between Musk’s reputational hemorrhaging and his grand ambitions is easier to bridge when you consider the second way to explain X, which is that it’s a desperate shot in the dark.2. X is pseudoware—just buzzwords and a logo.Unlike Facebook’s pivot to Meta, which was oriented around a real (though flawed and unappealing) virtual-reality product, X is a rebrand built on little more than a vague collection of buzzwords cobbled together to form a complete sentence. On Sunday, Yaccarino described the forthcoming app as “the future state of unlimited interactivity” that is “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.” She also noted that, “powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.” (Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment.)Her tweet is a near-perfect example of business-dude lorem ipsum—corporate gibberish that sounds superficially intelligent but is actually obfuscating. What is “unlimited interactivity?” How will X be “powered by AI”? Does she mean generative AI like ChatGPT or standard algorithms of the sort that have powered Twitter’s “For you” feed for years? The particulars are irrelevant: The words just need to sound like something when strung together.Musk, too, is guilty of such blabber. He has argued that his hypothetical project, if built correctly, could “become half of the global financial system.” This is the empty language of a dilettante, the equivalent of me telling you that this article, if written correctly, is on pace to win the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism, or that I am the executive wordsmith for The Atlantic’s Words About Computers section.Musk’s and Yaccarino’s descriptions of X don’t just suggest vaporware, an industry term for a hyped-up product that never materializes. They feel like something else, too: I’d call it pseudoware. Like a pseudo-event, pseudoware masquerades as something newsworthy, even though it is not. Yaccarino’s Mad Libs–ian tweetstorm is the press release for this pseudo-event: big talk for a pivot that has so far manifested in ornamental changes. Musk’s first orders of business have been to adopt a new logo and to project it in conference rooms at headquarters. When Yaccarino tweeted that “X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” I take her at her word: No one seems to have spent much time thinking about any of this.It’s natural to wonder why the world’s richest man would spend his time dismantling one of the world’s most recognizable social-media brands in favor of an inscrutable super app nobody asked for. He could, at any moment, jet off to a private island and drink bottomless piña coladas while giggling about Dogecoin instead! Herein lies the third and most important explanation for X, which is that it is a reputational line of credit for Musk.3. Musk needs to save face.Musk’s reputation is dependent on people believing that he can gin up new categories of industry and see around corners to build futuristic stuff. His $44 billion acquisition of Twitter was marketed with a visionary framework: Musk would realize Twitter’s dreams of being a truly global town square and solve the intractable problems of free speech at scale. Having failed at that, Musk is, in essence, going back to basics with X—it’s an opportunity to remake the internet in his own image.[Read: Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time]As Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin pointed out, Musk’s original X.com brand was a total failure. He was obsessed with the name and the web address, but consumers, not illogically, associated the brand with adult-entertainment sites. Musk was ousted by X.com’s board after the merger in 2000, a year before the service was renamed PayPal, but the payment company remains an important part of his legacy. X, then, is a callback to a younger version of the entrepreneur—one who is associated with success, products that work, and generous investor returns. It also represents unfinished business and a chance to rewrite an earlier phase of his career.In this sense, X is less a brilliant vision than it is an act of desperation. Musk is behaving much like a start-up with an unsustainable burn rate—he needs a cash injection. And in order to raise some reputational capital, he needs a good idea, one that seems plausible and scalable. X checks all the boxes for such an idea. Its ambitions are so vague as to be boundless, which signals perpetual growth and moneymaking—it is, quite literally, the everything app. In this way, X is an inkblot test for anyone who still wants to believe in Musk: Squint the right way and X takes on the form of whatever hopes and dreams that person has for the future of the internet. This is the fleeting genius of pseudoware: The best feature of marketing an app for everything is that you can get away with saying mostly nothing.But just how many people still have unwavering faith in Musk is an open question. How many people are willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the man who can’t pay his rents and server bills on time? Who is going to help build this technological behemoth for the man who fired the majority of his company and allegedly owes $500 million in severance payments? And, perhaps most important, who is excited about what Musk is focusing his time, energy, and money on?Even though X wants to be big, a WeChat clone is conceptually small in comparison with the projects that have allowed Musk to market himself as a savant: space exploration, rewiring the human brain, revolutionizing transportation to save the Earth. The most cynical view of X is that the people who still respect Musk are reactionaries who delight only when their enemies have been gleefully trolled. Perhaps, then, Musk’s dismantling of the social network is a success, so long as it makes the right people miserable. Left with few options, Musk has decided to mortgage the Twitter brand to save his own. Even by his standards, it’s a risky bet.

Green Party presidential candidate Cornel West could cost Joe Biden votes in key states in 2024 where the president won relatively narrow victories in 2020.

West, an academic and political activist, has announced his intention to run on the Green Party ticket. There has already been speculation that a third party challenge could have a major effect in a close race amid the possibility that another serious external bid could be launched by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who recently refused to rule out the possibility.

While no third party presidential candidate has won the White House in the modern era, major challengers have often had an effect on the presidential race, including former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, billionaire Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader in 2000.

West's campaign has already drawn comparisons to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who ran against former President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and gained more votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania than Trump's margin of victory.

Cornel West on February 21, 2017, in Washington, D.C. West has launched a third party presidential bid for 2024. Getty Images/Win McNamee

Nonetheless, there is no way to be sure how Stein's voters would have cast their ballot if she hadn't run.

An Echelon Insights poll of 1,020 voters from June 26 to 29—about a hypothetical matchup between Trump, Biden and West—showed that voters narrowly preferred Trump over Biden.

West had 4 percent of the vote in the general election, while the poll showed Trump and Biden receiving 43 percent and 42 percent, respectively.

Newsweek has reached out to the Biden and West campaigns via email for comment.

"The likely margins between a Biden vs. Trump rematch are so thin that any legitimate third party candidate could prove decisive," Thomas Gift, founding director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, U.K., told Newsweek earlier this month.

"Winning without an 'R' or 'D' beside your name might be impossible, but that doesn't mean a third party candidate couldn't determine the next president simply by cannibalizing votes," Gift said.

In a close 2024 election, West could pay spoiler and potentially siphon votes from Biden in crucial swing states. Here are the states where West could affect the outcome.

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin

Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were key to Trump's 2016 victory and Biden's 2020 victory.

In December 2016, Dave Wasserman, U.S. House editor of the Cook Political Report, pointed out that Stein won more votes in each of these states than Trump's margin of victory.

In Michigan, Stein won 51,463 votes, while Trump's winning margin was just 10,704. In Pennsylvania, Stein won 49,941 votes and Trump's margin was 44,292, while in Wisconsin, Stein won 31,072 votes and Trump's margin of victory was 22,748.

"Jill Stein is now officially the Ralph Nader of 2016," Wasserman tweeted at the time, referring to the third party presidential candidate who ran in the 2000 election and has often been blamed for former Vice President Al Gore's loss to former President George W. Bush.

However, there is no way to know at this stage how voters in those three crucial states will cast their ballots in November next year or if West will perform at the same level as Stein.

Arizona, Georgia and Nevada

President Biden won narrow but important victories in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in 2020, while his win in Georgia, considered a red state, was particularly surprising.

Clinton triumphed in Nevada in 2016 where Stein wasn't on the ballot, while Trump won Arizona and Georgia. Stein performed less well in Arizona and Georgia when compared to Trump's margin of victory.

In Arizona, Trump's margin of victory was 91,234 votes, while Stein won just 34,345 and her impact on the Georgia race was negligible.

While Stein had limited impact in Arizona and Georgia and no impact in Nevada, a Green Party candidate could potentially affect those states as Biden had narrow victories in each during the 2020 election.

In 2020, Biden won by margins of less than 50,000 votes in each of the three states. He won by 33,596 votes in Nevada, 10,547 votes in Arizona, and 11,779 votes in Georgia.

With margins that close, third party candidates could have an important effect on the outcome and West's presidential campaign has the potential to profoundly affect the 2024 election.

A new study published on Monday shows that even when controlling for test scores, children from wealthy families have a higher chance of being accepted to an elite college than their middle-class counterparts. Further, the study found that applicants from families in the top 0.1 percent have over double the chance of being accepted to an elite institution than the average applicant.
The study, conducted by a team of Harvard and Brown University researchers, examined admissions data from a group of 12 "Ivy-Plus" colleges—the eight Ivy Leagues, plus Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, and the University of Chicago. The study found that students from the 1 percent were much more likely to be admitted to these elite colleges, even when controlling for standardized test scores. It concluded that this admissions gap is primarily due to three main factors: admissions preferences for children of alumni, athlete recruitment, and the weight placed on nonacademic criteria, like extracurriculars and teacher recommendations. 

"The three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success," the study authors note.
While the study found that attending an Ivy-Plus university instead of a state flagship university didn't dramatically increase students' average future earnings, it nonetheless found that attending an elite university increased a student's likelihood of entering the 1 percent by 60 percent, almost doubled their chance of attending an elite graduate school, and tripled their likelihood of working at a prestigious firm.
As an alternative to current practices, the study proposed that colleges eliminate legacy preferences, athlete preferences, and the emphasis on nonacademic criteria like extracurriculars and teacher ratings. 
"Under such an admissions policy, the share of students attending Ivy-Plus colleges from the bottom 95% of the parental income distribution would rise by 8.7 percentage points, adding 144 students from families earning less than $240,000 (the 95th percentile) to a typical Ivy-Plus college," the authors state. "This increase of 144 students from lower-income and middle class families is similar to the reduction in the number of Black and Hispanic students that would arise from eliminating race-based affirmative action policies absent any other changes in admissions practices." 
The study provides yet more evidence that the recent move to ditch SAT and ACT test requirements in favor of a higher emphasis on nonacademic measurements will end up hurting low-income students rather than helping them. While a move away from standardized testing has been hailed as a move to increase racial and economic equality, a greater reliance on admissions essays, extracurriculars, and teacher ratings will make it harder for talented yet disadvantaged students to prove themselves when applying to elite universities. One 2021 study backed this up, finding that student essays were more closely correlated with income than SAT scores.
This shouldn't be surprising. Tests are simply harder to game than nonacademic factors. Wealthy families can hire tutors to write polished admissions essays for their children, ensure they have a battery of extracurricular activities and sports, and make sure they attend schools where skilled guidance counselors know how to write a glowing letter about an applicant. Expensive test prep, on the other hand, is limited in its efficacy. And simply taking practice tests—which are widely available online for free—seems to be the most effective way to study. 
While this study isn't likely to single-handedly end the popular idea that getting rid of standardized tests is a surefire way to help disadvantaged students, it provides yet more evidence that, for those who want to level the playing field in the world of elite college admissions, standardized tests are indispensable.
The post Killing the SAT To Help Underprivileged Students Actually Benefits Rich Kids appeared first on Reason.com.

The idea of truth has fallen out of favour in recent years. For one thing, it’s less politically important than it used to be. In the era of the Cold War, what beliefs you held to be true counted for a lot, as one sovereign ideology clashed with another. Then, sometime in the Nineties, once the Cold War had faded, the word “ideology” fell out of use. This was partly because people don’t tend to regard their own beliefs as ideological, any more than people go around calling themselves Spotty or Fatso. Ideology is what the Other has, and one particular Other had now vanished.
Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. There’s nothing ideological about revering the monarchy — like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, it’s a natural human inclination — but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.
To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions weren’t so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.
It’s mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One can’t imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the country’s eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can — in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.
More from this authorWho are the strikers fooling?By Terry Eagleton
Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isn’t what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesn’t give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.
This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question don’t need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.
Rather as religious belief was privatised some centuries ago with the birth of Protestantism, as a transaction between you and God alone, so belief in general becomes a kind of private hobby, as harmlessly idiosyncratic as Morris dancing or pigeon-fancying. What holds such societies together — consumerism, material interests, the rule of law — doesn’t really have to pass through the human mind, as it most certainly does in Islamist set-ups. This is one way in which the West’s latest bogeyman — terrorism rather than Communism — puts it at a severe political disadvantage. Solidarity in such nations goes all the way down, whereas in Britain it is largely confined to football. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic”.
Suggested readingHow woke is Nietzsche?By Giles Fraser
It was unfortunate for the West that just when Islamism began to blow up innocent civilians, its own culture was becoming increasingly sceptical and relativist. Conviction was falling in value at just the point when it was politically necessary. Truth became subservient to material interests. In the age of Plato, truth was thought to be independent of such mundane matters. It was an absolute affair, sublimely transcendent of the everyday world of ignorance and delusion. Later, however, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche argued that what we held to be true was largely determined by our perspective on the world, which was merely one among many such standpoints, and which was shaped among other things by our struggle for material survival. This argument didn’t deny that truth existed, but it placed it within a social and historical framework.
In our own time, this case has been reduced to a cruder version of itself: truth is simply an instrument of power. You describe the world in whatever way best promotes your interests. And since there are many conflicting interests, there are many conflicting truths. Enter Donald Trump and the Big Lie, along with those postmodernists who maintain that truth is just what’s true for me. Truth had finally been either abolished or privatised. What matters is what works — and for that purpose a blatant falsehood may do just as well. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.
All this suits a society which is continually in flux. Truth and facts seem to be static, and thus incapable of surviving in a world whose only permanent feature is changeability. In the world of postmodern capitalism, everything is fluid, unstable, groundless and provisional. Change is good, but staying the same isn’t. This may be true for the CEOs of Tesco and Google, but as a general proposition it’s clearly absurd: if permanence and consistency are uncool, why not abolish the ban on child labour and send children of five into workplaces? But there’s also something absolute about historical truth that sticks in the craw of the Trumps and Hannitys of this world. If it’s true that the emperor Tiberius died on the island of Capri in 37 CE, it was true in 37 CE, true today and will no doubt also be true in the year 3000. Of course, it may not be true at all. But that is another question.
Suggested readingIs liberal society making us ill?By Gurwinder Bhogal
There are other reasons why truth is being discredited. For Plato, truth was something deep, lurking beneath the surface appearances of everyday reality. Postmodernism is uneasy with this surface/depth model, for a number of reasons, one of them concerning what Lenin called the reality of appearances. In a culture of the image, star, brand, momentary sensation and instant gratification, everything seems on the surface; but if there are no depths, then there are no surfaces either, and the whole model collapses. The image is the reality, as in the term “Reality TV”. What you see is what you get. One is asked for one’s “take” on a topic, a verb borrowed from film and television. All this is convenient enough for the political Right, who also dislike the surface/depth model because it suggests that there are powerful but invisible forces which dominate our lives, not least those of the marketplace. “All the important processes,” Marx wrote, “go on behind the backs of individuals”. What we see and what we get aren’t at all the same thing. This belief lingers on in the post-truth era, but now it’s known as conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts. There is, however, a more attractive aspect to the concept of truth. The word itself comes from the Old English “triewth”, which means faith or constancy. There’s a related word, “troth”, which means trust or loyalty. So truth is originally a moral concept. Speaking in a way which is true to the way things are is closely bound up with being faithful to others. In fact, we couldn’t do the latter without the former. Without mutual trust there couldn’t be any social existence. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump’s cavalier way with the facts is linked with a foul-mouthed contempt for most of his fellow human beings.

In the three-plus decades I've been alive, I have never been bitten by a tick. Actually, that may be a lie, and I have no way of knowing for sure. Because even though ticks have harpoonlike mouthparts, even though certain species can latch on for up to two weeks, even though some guzzle enough blood to swell 100 times in weight, their bites are disturbingly discreet. “As a kid, I would have hundreds of ticks on me,” at least several of which would bite, says Adela Oliva Chavez, a tick researcher at Texas A&M University. And yet she would never notice until her aunt would pick them off her skin.The secret behind tick stealth is tick saliva—a strange, slippery, and multifaceted fluid with no biological peer. It keeps the pests’ bites bizarrely itch- and pain-free, and allows them to feed unimpeded by their hosts’ immunity. As climate change remodels the world, spit is also what’s helping ticks enter new habitats and hosts—bringing with them the many deadly viruses, bacteria, and parasites they so often import.For all their dependency on blood, ticks almost never eat. In their sometimes-multiyear life span, they may feed only once in each stage: larva, nymph, and adult. Which means, as my colleague Sarah Zhang once wrote, each meal must count for an awful lot. Unlike mosquitoes and other bloodsucking bugs that can get away with a dine and dash, ticks must linger on flesh for days or even weeks—an extended feast that requires them to essentially graft onto the host’s body like a temporary limb.For the entirety of that process, saliva is key. When a tick first bites, its spit lines the wound with a gluelike substance that cements its mouth in place. Once secure, the tick deploys a fleet of spit-borne compounds that dilate its host’s vessels, while simultaneously battling the bodily compounds that would normally prompt the injury to clot, heal, or tingle with pain or itch. Under most circumstances, such an onslaught of foreign molecules would instantly marshal the body’s immune cavalry. But ticks have workarounds for that too. Their saliva is an anti-inflammatory and an analgesic; it can disable the alarms that cells send to one another, preventing them from coordinating an attack. Spit can even reprogram immune cells so that they never complete their development or receive the cues they need to gather at the scene.[Read: Climate change enters its blood-sucking phase]All of these strategies can also ease the way for bacteria, viruses, and parasites that the tick swallows from one host, then deposits into the next. With tick saliva breaching the skin barrier and keeping the immune system in check, all the pathogens have to do is come along for the ride. “Tick saliva is like a luxury vehicle that delivers them to the site of infection and rolls out the red carpet,” says Seemay Chou, the CEO of the biotech start-up Arcadia Science. Studies have shown that multiple pathogens get an infectious boost when chauffeured by spit, spilling more efficiently into the skin of newly bitten hosts. Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, will even slather parts of tick saliva onto itself like a cloak, essentially rendering itself invisible to bodily defense. Ticks’ infectious cargo may even egg each other on: Saravanan Thangamani, at Upstate Medical University, in New York, has found evidence that ticks simultaneously carrying Borrelia and Powassan virus may end up injecting more of the latter into fresh wounds.Already, ticks spread more pathogens to humans and their livestock than any other insect or arachnid. And the risks ticks pose may only be growing, as warming temperatures and human meddling with wildlife allow them to expand their geographic range and infiltrate new hosts. In North America, lone-star ticks and black-legged ticks have been orchestrating a concerted march north into Canada. At the same time, the percentage of ticks carrying infections is also increasing, Thangamani told me, and for decades now, case counts of Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis in several parts of the world have been on a steady rise. As cold seasons shrink, the periods of the year when ticks bite—usually, the warmest months—are expanding too. “Many, many places are getting filled up with ticks,” says Jean Tsao, an entomologist at Michigan State University. “And they’re going to get more.”It helps that many ticks aren’t picky about whom they carry or bite. Some species, as they push into new places, have picked up new pathogens in the past few years—Bourbon virus, heartland virus—that pose additional threats to us. Many tick species are also relatively indiscriminate about their hosts: Within its lifetime, a single deer tick may “feed very happily on reptiles, avians, and birds,” says Pat Nuttall, a virologist and tick researcher at the University of Oxford. Their spit is intricate enough that it can be tailored to counteract the defenses of each species in turn. Transfer a tick from a rabbit to a human or a dog, Oliva Chavez told me, and it will take notice—and adjust its saliva, quite literally to taste.Vaccines to combat Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have long been in development. But many researchers think the more efficient tactic is going after the tick itself—a strategy that could, at best, “stop the transmission of several pathogens at once,” says Girish Neelakanta, a tick biologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Anti-tick immunity is possible: Studies have documented guinea pigs, cattle, rabbits, goats, and dogs developing sustained defenses against the arachnids after they’ve been bitten over and over again—even reactions that can help the animals detect a bite immediately, and sweep the pest away.But spit is a slippery target for bodily defenses to hit. The substance doesn’t just shut down immune responses. It also reformulates itself constantly so that it can keep evading the host’s defenses—as often as every few hours, faster than most of the immune system can keep track. By the time the body has prepped an assault on one salivary ingredient, the tick has almost certainly swapped it out for the next. “It’s a game that the tick is playing, a catch-me-if-you-can kind of thing,” says Sukanya Narasimhan, a tick researcher at Yale. To outcompete the tick’s tricks, Narasimhan thinks it will be key to develop a vaccine that triggers the body to respond to tick bites fast, “as soon as a tick attaches,” she said, ideally by targeting the saliva’s first ingredients.As ticks continue their takeover, it’s hard not to develop at least some grudging respect for their pluck. Some scientists even think that studying, or perhaps mimicking, their saliva could lead to other breakthroughs. Copycatting the spit’s immunosuppressive tendencies could be useful for the treatment of asthma, or for drugs that assist in organ transplants; imitating its anticoagulant properties could help keep life-threatening clots at bay. Some tick-saliva ingredients have even prompted investigations into their potential as cancer therapy. Ticks, after all, have been studying mammalian bodies for millions of years, all in hopes of subterfuge; under their tutelage, Chou, the Arcadia Science CEO, hopes to learn more about the molecular pathways that drive the urge to itch.
Ticks aren’t invincible, though, and some of the same global changes now easing their entry into new habitats could eventually hinder their progress. Already, they are fleeing parts of the planet that have grown too hot, too humid, too flooded, too razed with wildfires for them or their preferred hosts to survive, including certain inhospitable pockets of the American South. A tick decline could be good for us. But it would also be a symptom of a planetary scourge that has grown worse. Ticks, undoubtedly, “will continue to adapt,” Thangamani told me. And yet they, too, have their limits—further, but not that much further, beyond our own.

The Kansas City Police Department will pay $500,000 to a man officers "body slammed" last year. The payout comes after officers seemingly falsified details of the event in a police report, insisting—contrary to a bystander's video of the incident—that the man sustained injuries after he fell while resisting arrest.
According to The Kansas City Star, Mack Nelson was inside a gas station last August when police shot and killed 31-year-old Zachary Garrard nearby. Nelson told The Star that following the incident, he became frustrated that police were not sufficiently questioning witnesses and began broadcasting on Facebook live.
According to The Star, Nelson was instructed to stay behind police tape, and he was confronted by an officer after he walked into an area not blocked off by police. While Nelson says he complied when told by an officer to walk back to a nonrestricted area, he says that police reacted by knocking his phone out of his hand and forcing him to the pavement. According to The Star, Nelson sustained injuries to his face, eyes, and shoulders—and briefly fell unconscious after the assault. 
A bystander video of the incident shows a police officer appearing to hold Nelson's arms behind his back, as if handcuffing him, before quickly slamming his face into the ground.
"He wasn't doing nothing to them," a voice shouts in the video. "They slammed his head on the ground. The guy ain't even moving."
"We got that on video," another witness shouts at the officers.
However, The Star notes that the police report following the incident directly contradicted the recording, stating that Nelson fell after "jerking his arms away and attempting to twist his body away from" an officer. This officer also claimed that Nelson was "pulled onto the ground." None of the officers involved in the incident had their body cameras turned on.
"You may have a different opinion on the use of force or resisting arrest, but it's obvious to anyone who watches the video he did not fall, and then to submit a police report where they said he fell to the ground—that's just a flat out lie," John Picerno, Nelson's attorney, told The Star. "But for the bystander video, we wouldn't have known that they fabricated this police report."
Nelson filed a civil lawsuit in February, and the city agreed to settle the case earlier this month, awarding Nelson half a million dollars in damages. Last week, a spokesperson stated that prosecutors considering charges against the officers who injured Nelson and made false statements on the police report.
"We're satisfied that we accomplished what we could accomplish in the civil case," said Picerno. "What we'd like to see happen is that the officers get charged with crimes for the offenses that they've committed and/or that they get disciplined by the police department."
The post Police 'Body Slammed' Him. Now, He's Getting a $500,000 Settlement. appeared first on Reason.com.

The Biden administration is considering a new set of tariffs on some steel imports that would increase food prices for consumers already reeling from the recent run of high inflation.
The Commerce Department and the International Trade Commission are considering a petition that would impose tariffs of up to 300 percent on tinplate steel, a key component in tin cans like those commonly used to pack food products including tuna, soup, baked beans, and more. If the administration decides to implement those tariffs on imports from eight countries, it would be a blatantly protectionist maneuver aimed at benefitting a single American company—the Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., which requested the tariffs—at the expense of consumers nationwide.
Those proposed tariffs will "threaten jobs, in the name of boosting employment" and "raise prices for low-income consumers, in the name of helping the working class," writes The Washington Post's Catherine Rampell.
Indeed, the past few years should leave little doubt that tariffs not only impose economic costs on consumers but also fail to achieve their politically motivated goals. Study after study has shown that the tariffs levied by the Trump administration on steel, aluminum, and lots of other goods resulted in American consumers paying higher prices. Earlier this month, in fact, another new report found that U.S. importers are shouldering 93 percent of the added costs from Donald Trump's tariffs.
New tariffs on the steel that is used to make cans for food will likely have a similar result. The Consumer Brands Association (CBA), which represents more than 2,000 companies including Campbell's Soup and other brands that stand to be harmed by the tariffs, estimates that the proposed 300 percent import tax would add about 58 cents to the cost of an average canned food product.
But consumers aren't the only ones to lose. Because the added costs from tariffs will be passed along the entire supply chain, the CBA estimates that they would put 40,000 jobs at risk. A separate study by the Trade Partnership Worldwide LLC, a pro-trade think tank, found that 600 jobs would be put at risk for every steel-making job protected by the proposed tariffs.
That's a similar dynamic to what played out after Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2018. That policy was supposed to protect American steel-making jobs and promote domestic production, but the consequence was higher costs for steel-consuming industries, which employ far more workers. As a result, every job "saved" by the tariffs cost consumers roughly $650,000, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade-focused think tank.
If the Biden administration moves ahead with the tariffs, it would be an even more lopsided tradeoff. David Chavern, president and CEO of the CBA, said in a statement that the administration would effectively be choosing to "prop up one company at the expense of an entire domestic industry and the consumers that rely on these essential products."
In addition to repeating the mistakes of the Trump administration, this could be another illustration of how Joe Biden's White House has forgotten that workers are consumers too. The president's so-called "worker-centric trade policy" is aimed at protecting union jobs but often ignores the economic consequences that hike prices for those same workers when they clock out. Higher prices at the grocery store won't make life easier for the blue-collar workers that Biden says he wants to help.
The post Biden Administration Considering New Tariffs That Will Hike Prices for Canned Goods appeared first on Reason.com.

Bret: Lieberman may be our one irreconcilable difference. I love the guy.

Gail: My bottom line is that third parties — even those led by people far better than Mr. L. — are a danger to the American democratic system. You start a party that makes a big deal out of … helping hummingbirds. Tell voters who don’t love either of the two regular candidates that they can Vote Hummer and feel good. You won’t win the election, but you can throw everything into chaos. In some states, that little shift could be enough to bestow victory somewhere you’d never have wanted it to go. Say the Crow Coalition.

Bret: I’d be opposed to No Labels if I were convinced that all it will do is take votes from Joe Biden and throw the election to Trump. But that depends on who takes the No Labels slot: If it’s a former Democrat, it probably hurts Biden. If it’s a former Republican, it could hurt Trump even more.

Gail: Maybe. I’d rather just make people pick between the two real possibilities — each of them representing a broad coalition and certainly offering a stark choice. I don’t like plotting to win by cluttering up the ballot.

Bret: But the main thing, Gail, is that I need a party I can vote for. And I think the feeling is shared by a growing fraction of voters who might be center left or center right but are increasingly appalled by progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. So any party that represents our views is good for democracy, not a threat to it.

Gail: No, no, Bret. Even if you vote for a third party that perfectly represents your views — or at least your view on a favorite issue — if it isn’t going to win, you’re throwing away your vote. A vote for the Green Party, for instance, is a vote that Biden would probably have gotten otherwise. Which means the Green Party is helping Trump.

“What happens in the crowd is messy, wild, benevolent and beautiful,” Amanda Petrusich wrote in The New Yorker about a Swift concert. A woman attending one of the first “Barbie” showings told The Guardian she’d been waiting for it for two years: “I’ve been dying to go to a movie theater and have something that feels like a monoculture event.”

Part of what has made “Barbie” so resonant — beyond the campy pleasures of its fantastic costumes and sets — is that it treats becoming a woman as a hero’s journey. (This is also what has made its critics on the right so furious.) A pivotal moment in the movie comes when America Ferrera’s character, Gloria, gives an impromptu speech about the impossible demands made of women: “You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line,” she cries. “It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory!”

The important part of this monologue — spoilers ahead — is not only what it articulates, but what it accomplishes. Gloria’s words wake up Barbies whom the Kens have brainwashed into submission. “By giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy you robbed it of its power!” exclaims the film’s heroine, Stereotypical Barbie, played by Margot Robbie. It’s consciousness-raising as magic. And, ultimately, as difficult as being an adult woman is, Robbie’s Barbie chooses it over remaining in the sexless girlhood idyll of Barbieland, as we learn in the film’s perfect last line.

Given the evident hunger out there for entertainment that channels female angst, it would make sense for Hollywood, once the writers’ and actors’ strikes are over, to do more to cultivate female writers and directors. Women are still rarely given the chance to direct high-budget films; as the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found, women helmed only 11 percent of the 100 highest-grossing films of 2022. And looking at a list of last year’s major films, I was struck by how few of them seem to have been made with a female audience in mind, part of the reason there was so much pent-up demand for “Barbie.”

Searchlight Pictures is probably feeling good about signing Swift, who cites the “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig as an influence, to direct her feature film debut. But for the most part, unfortunately, it appears as if the lesson Hollywood is going to take from the success of “Barbie” is not to make more stories for women, but to make more movies about toys.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat is the most constructive way for the press to cover race if its objectives include accurately informing citizens about the past and the present––no matter how awful or uncomfortable––and refraining from framing the news in ways that are needlessly polarizing or essentialist?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com. Conversations of NoteOn April 6, 1988, the singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman released a self-titled album that ranks among the best debuts––hell, the best albums––ever, in large part because of the singles “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution,” the demo of which got her the record deal, and “Fast Car.” Summon every flawless lyric and guitar riff to your mind’s ear, or else go stream it now.How undeniable was this album and its biggest hit single? Within its first two weeks, Tracy Chapman sold 1 million copies. It peaked at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200. It has been certified platinum six times over. It was nominated for six Grammys, including Album of the Year. Chapman won three: Best Contemporary Folk Album, Best New Artist, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for “Fast Car.” The album warranted superstar acclaim and riches for its theretofore unknown creator––and it got them from the start.In a testament to the music’s broad appeal and timelessness, Tracy Chapman and “Fast Car” also rocketed to No. 1 in multiple foreign countries, and every so often, when a new generation discovers it, lightning strikes again. In 2011, “Fast Car” reached No. 4 on the U.K. Singles Chart when it was covered on Britain’s Got Talent. And this year, when the country singer Luke Combs released a cover of the song, it rocketed to No. 1 on the Country Songwriters Chart. Shortly after, Chapman herself released a statement to Billboard. “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honored to be there,” she said. “I’m happy for Luke and his success and grateful that new fans have found and embraced ‘Fast Car.’” Billboard reports that the cover has earned Chapman roughly $500,000 in publishing royalties thus far. Rolling Stone notes that she will be the first Black woman “to have the sole songwriting credit on a Number One country hit.”Progress!“Fast Car” is a gritty and heartbreaking song that taps into our shared humanity while exploring poverty, addiction, hope, disappointment, and yearning––hearing it, even for the thousandth time, one is reminded anew how tough so many have it right now. And yet the song’s success is a feelgood story of exceptional art recognized and lavishly rewarded, repeatedly, while bringing people of all sorts together across cultures, nations, and generations.Or is it?Problematizing the “Fast Car” StoryLast week, the Washington Post Style-section reporter Emily Yahr published an article titled “Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the Complicated Response to ‘Fast Car.’” Its focus is as follows:
To quite a few people, [the cover recording’s success] is cause for yet another celebration in Combs’s whirlwind journey as the genre’s reigning megastar with 16 consecutive No. 1 hits. But it has also prompted a wave of complicated feelings among some listeners and in the Nashville music community. Although many are thrilled to see “Fast Car” back in the spotlight and a new generation discovering Chapman’s work, it’s clouded by the fact that, as a Black queer woman, Chapman, 59, would have almost zero chance of that achievement herself in country music. The numbers are bleak: A recent study by data journalist Jan Diehm and musicologist Jada Watson reported that fewer than 0.5 percent of songs played on country radio in 2022 were by women of color and LGBTQ+ artists. Watson’s previous work shows that songs by women of color and LGBTQ+ artists were largely excluded from radio playlists for most of the two decades prior.
Very quickly, the Post article became one of those polarizing mainstream-media stories that stokes eye-rolling and mockery on social media and podcasts, as well as passionate defenses from people who regard the negative responses as reactionary.Here’s a sample of Twitter reactions to the Post story:
Noah Smith: “Man just let people sing a song. Making every piece of entertainment into a race war is just utterly exhausting.”
Varad Mehta: “This is incoherent. Tracy Chapman’s not a country artist. So of course she’s not going to place on the country charts. And as everyone has pointed out, Chapman’s original did great on the pop and mainstream charts. Which is a lot better than doing well on the country charts.”
Nadia Gill: “Isn’t the takeaway that art is not to be emotionally possessed. That it can be universal. That a black lesbian and a straight white man may feel the same depth and story despite identity differences. What if we pushed that narrative.”
Free Black Thought: “A really great thing happens for an already deservedly successful black LGBT woman and all the @washingtonpost can do is talk about how no black person can ever make it in America.”
Into the FrayI weighed in, too, reiterating a long-standing concern: Most news events can be framed in any number of ways, and in the media today, many journalists believe they advance social justice by choosing frames that center the racial identities of their subjects. However, the effect of so frequently emphasizing racial identity can be to increase interracial antagonism and bigoted othering, as the people least psychologically comfortable with difference are reaffirmed daily in their false and pernicious conceit that people of different races are “others” rather than “one of us.”I’m particularly concerned about overemphasizing racial identity because political-psychology research on people with a predisposition to authoritarianism shows that who they consider to be an “other” is actually quite malleable; everyone in society benefits when would-be authoritarians regard race as a less salient characteristic. But many progressives are so averse to that concern that they don’t even wrestle with the research literature underpinning it, instead treating the concern itself as reactionary. The sociologist Victor Ray responded to my tweet: “A faction of reactionary centrists and conservatives downplay the importance of race in every corner of American life, ensuring traditional hierarchies are never challenged.”To defenders of the Washington Post article more generally, it was a timely, important look at the factually undeniable dearth of queer Black women in country music, and the criticism of it confirmed that many Americans are reflexively averse to confronting racism, so much so that they lash out at anyone who tries to shed light on racial inequity. And sure, some Americans are like that.To me, however, it seems self-evident that, because of ongoing racial inequity, it is possible to talk too little about race and racism; but that, just as surely, because race is a false and pernicious construct of slavers and bigots, it is possible to elevate its salience and to emphasize it too much. What’s more, a reflexive unwillingness to confront racism is not credibly behind all criticism of the left-identitarian approach to discussing race, as convenient as that uncharitable assessment would be to the progressives whose approach is being criticized.Among critics of the Post article, many––including me––have also published and endorsed scores of journalistic efforts that highlight racism and challenge bigoted hierarchies. Why did the Post story vex people in a way that so many other articles about race or racism didn’t? Here’s my best effort to explain my reaction––and insofar as you disagree, I hope you’ll push back via email.Fitting Facts to Theory or Theory to Facts?It may surprise some of you, at this point, to learn that I’d be glad to read a feature on country music as it intersects with race and sexual orientation. What are the details of this fraught history? How many Black women and how many LGBTQ people are trying to make it on the country charts? How varied are their experiences? The Post mentions that in the early 20th century, Black singers “were filtered out of the genre.” Are Black women getting rejected by genre gatekeepers today? Are they being steered elsewhere by managers or self-selecting out of the genre because of discrimination, fear of prejudice, and/or complex commercial considerations? If one could choose among different genre charts, in terms of prestige or reach or remuneration, which charts are considered by insiders to be the best and the worst? To what degree do buyers and streamers of country music consume music in other genres? I have no strong priors on these and other interesting questions and am open to any well-argued conclusion.Now contrast that hypothetical article––interrogating complex questions by marshaling facts with nuance and arguing to a considered conclusion––with the Post article’s approach to the subject. At its center is the fact that very few queer Black women succeed on the country charts. In place of nuanced reporting and analysis on why that is so, the story presumes that the success of the “Fast Car” cover on the country charts tells us something significant about that dearth of representation, and although that significant thing is never precisely articulated, it has something to do with racism and the place of queer Black women at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy.In the Post article, one Black country-music singer-songwriter, Rissi Palmer, is quoted praising Tracy Chapman's work, but we never hear from any queer or Black songwriters describing their own experiences trying to work in country music, stories that could better inform us about the article’s core subject. Instead, we hear from cultural observers who share their feelings about what the Luke Combs cover supposedly tells us. The writer does not push them to engage with obvious counters to their perspective. And we don’t hear from analysts with complicating or countervailing perspectives. Why not include a voice who regards the cover as unproblematic?The result is a one-sided analysis that begs a lot of questions. I think the backlash to the Post story is largely rooted in the fact that the success of a “Fast Car” cover is an inapt peg for a story about a dearth of queer Black women succeeding on the country-music charts. Chapman is a wildly successful musician, she has never been a country singer, and no one ever considered “Fast Car” a country song. To choose the “Fast Car” news peg for an exploration of queer Black exclusion forces the article to proceed not with real stories of the dynamics of race and sexual orientation in country music, but with speculative hypotheticals about how it feels like identity functions.Here, examples are useful. Holly G, founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans, is quoted telling the Post: “On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman—that’s really exciting. But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man.” But do we “know” that Chapman would not be celebrated in a hypothetical where she emerged today and tried launching “Fast Car” on the country charts? No more, I think, than we “knew” what would happen if the Black frontman of Hootie and the Blowfish reinvented himself as a country singer and covered the old standard “Wagon Wheel.” (Here’s a Billboard article about Darius Rucker stopping by the Country Music Hall of Fame and receiving a plaque to commemorate his cover going platinum eight times over.)Another section of the Post story airs the speculative concern that Combs might overshadow Chapman:
Jake Blount, an Afrofuturist folk artist who has devoted his career to studying music history and reinterpreting older songs, tweeted about the concern of Chapman’s “legacy being overwritten in real-time.” He thought about how Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” was consumed by Elvis Presley or how Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy’s “When the Levee Breaks” was overshadowed by Led Zeppelin, along with endless other examples of the “White male genius” archetype that often receives credit for songs by Black artists.
“When I wrote those tweets, people [replied] to me and said, ‘Oh, there’s no way anybody’s going to forget Tracy Chapman, she’s too big already.’ … And I hope that’s true, but I know how it’s played out before,” Blount said. “We know Black visionaries who have created incredible, powerful, influential works … that have been forgotten and erased. It’s not malice from the White artists making derivative music based on theirs, but it’s how society works.”
Is that “how society works”? With full acknowledgment of the countless Black recording artists short-shrifted by racism, our society has long been much more complicated than that. To cite one relevant example, Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” has far overshadowed the original Dolly Parton country version. Sometimes, our society works that way, too. And while I can imagine a future case where a white man records a cover that overshadows a Black woman’s original song, it seems obvious to me that in this case, there is almost zero chance that the Combs version of “Fast Car” will overshadow, or even remotely approach in success, the Chapman version.I was also struck by the newspaper’s parenthetical: “Chapman does not discuss her personal life, but writer Alice Walker has disclosed their relationship, which occurred in the 1990s.” To me, that only underscores the weirdness of the article’s reliance on hypotheticals. So Chapman’s reported “queerness” would have given her almost zero chance of succeeding in the 1980s country music scene because, sometime in the next decade, a famous author would out her as having had a same-sex relationship? Maybe! I don’t doubt that queer Black women faced prejudice in 1980s country music. But Chapman’s sexuality was not being discussed at the time. Moreover, Chapman did not face prejudice––indeed, she experienced nothing at all, good or bad––as a country music recording artist, so why is that what I am reading about in the Post? Isn’t there enough injustice in the world without speculating about hypothetical bygone oppressions?A Difficult CalibrationEmily Yahr, the author of the Post article, is taking unfair grief and abuse for misreadings of her thesis, as always happens when articles go viral. What’s more, the question of how to best calibrate the relevance of race to news stories in a multiethnic democracy is hugely difficult to answer. Perspectives will differ, as will judgments in individual instances, and different people are entitled to their opinions, which oughtn’t subject them to unconstructive digs or vilification.But insofar as the idea behind this sort of coverage is that it advances social justice by talking about racism––backlash be damned, because talking about racism is important––I have a question: In a world of solipsistic news consumers, who report fatigue when any problem is covered often, might it be best if journalism writ large focused its coverage of racism on relatively consequential real-world examples, rather than, for example, the fact that some country fans worry a Black woman’s version of “Fast Car” might be overshadowed by a white man’s cover, even though the Black woman’s version remains much more successful right now?Ultimately I am not averse to close, uncomfortable, detailed journalism about racism––but I am averse to speculative hypotheticals about racism that would have theoretically happened, but did not, at least when they come in the context of taking the inspiring and heartening history of a Black folk-rock artist succeeding tremendously in 1980s America and reframing her actual, ongoing success as a feel-bad story about how much less successful she would have been than a white man. Especially given that Chapman is, in reality, more successful than that white man, what kind of racism or racists are these speculative scenarios about Tracy Chapman diminishing? And we need not frame identity in the way this final excerpt from the Post story did:
Holly of the Black Opry said that now would be a great time for Combs to invite a queer Black female artist to join him on tour or to offer his support: “You used her art to enrich your career, and that opens you up to a little bit of responsibility giving back to the community.”
Set aside this corrosively zero-sum characterization of a cover that benefitted Chapman, by her own account. As I see it, Chapman, a singular and singularly talented individual, wrote “Fast Car,” not the Black community, or the queer community, or a collective encompassing all Black female artists. To me, Combs would be guilty of tokenization if he found a queer Black woman and said, “I covered a song by someone with your skin tone and sexual orientation; want to join me on tour?” I would cheer affirmative efforts by successful country musicians to diversify their genre, but the racecraft quoted above is incompatible with a world where people of different races are equals in a beloved community, not “others.” At the same time, I appreciate that Holly of the Black Opry is trying to do good as she sees it, and I wish her success in much of her project, not least because I am excited to see the first Black female country star.That’s all for today––see you next week.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

One is to dismantle the power of the Supreme Court to rein in this government’s extreme agenda, and the other is to dismantle the Oslo peace process and its road map for a two-state solution, in order to pave the way for a unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Oslo has been a cornerstone of America’s Middle East policy since 1993.

These twin dismantlings are interconnected: the Jewish supremacists in Netanyahu’s cabinet need to get the Supreme Court out of the way in order to carry out their plans to annex the West Bank. Such a move could easily destabilize Jordan, as it would likely push more and more Palestinians there and change its fragile demographic balance. Jordan is the most important buffer state in the region for the U.S., which operates from Jordanian territory, in collaboration with Jordan, to deal with U.S. security threats from Syria and western Iraq, where ISIS forces continue to operate.

At the same time, Mr. President, you are wrestling with one of the biggest decisions ever involving U.S. strategy in the Middle East: whether to meet Saudi Arabia’s requests for a formal security guarantee from America, for a U.S.-overseen civilian nuclear program and for access to some of the most advanced U.S. arms. In return for this, Saudi Arabia would normalize its relations with Israel (provided that Israel makes some concessions to the Palestinians) and limit its collaboration with China.

It would be both difficult and unfortunate to get such a deal through Congress without strong support from Democrats in the Senate. As you know, Mr. President, Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are two of the least popular world leaders among progressive Democrats, especially considering the way Netanyahu, over the past decade, moved to make support for Israel a Republican cause and spurned the embrace of secular American Jews for that of Christian evangelicals instead.

In short, winning enough support among Democrats to forge this complex deal with Saudi Arabia will be a huge lift on a good day; it will be even harder if Netanyahu neuters the Israeli Supreme Court — undermining our shared values of an independent judiciary — and moves ahead with plans to annex the West Bank. And without you as president, such a deal would be virtually impossible, because very few Democrats in the Senate would support it if it was pushed by a Republican president. In short, the window for this deal is small.

Is it possible to rapidly “reboot” a struggling presidential campaign? Pundits have to hope so, since otherwise our advice-giving beat becomes a bit irrelevant. But thinking back over recent primary candidacies that seemed to sag and then recovered, from John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008 to Joe Biden in 2020, it’s hard to identify brilliant strategic pivots. Instead what you see is candidates with fundamental strengths who hung around until events conspired to make those strengths more relevant, their opponents’ weaknesses more manifest, and their campaigns suddenly triumphant.

For Ron DeSantis, currently engaged in a campaign reset after months of stagnant polling, there’s no way to sell these case studies to his restive donors. “Don’t worry, we’re going to hang around and hope things break our way at the last minute” isn’t exactly an inspiring rallying cry, especially for a candidate who briefly seemed poised to become the 2024 front-runner, but now languishes 20 or 30 points behind Donald Trump.

And it’s easy enough to list things that DeSantis could be doing differently. Some of them, like talking less about the swiftly receding Covid era and seeking combat with the mainstream media, are obvious enough that the campaign is already trying to adapt. Other possibilities seem to still elude his team — above all, the benefits of breaking out of the movement-conservative box a bit more, making big promises on economic as well as social policy, and avoiding a replay of Ted Cruz’s ideologically self-limiting 2016 campaign.

But any benefit from these shifts is likely to be incremental rather than dramatic. Meanwhile, the reset that’s so often urged on DeSantis — the idea that he needs to go hard after Trump’s unfitness for high office — is a theory supported by exactly zero polling evidence.

When Labour wins the next election, Britain will assume a role in Europe something akin to the indomitable Gaulish village in Asterix: the last holdout of liberal-Left political power in a continent swinging firmly to the Right. Yet for a certain kind of Brexiteer, their minds deranged by the Twitter battles of the previous decade, Europe’s Rightwards drift is an object of strangely self-defeating satisfaction. Like American Republicans endorsing the worldview of their enemies by calling the Democrats “The Real Racists”, Brexiteers still stung by accusations of fascism for daring to leave the EU can now point at the high walls springing up like dragons’ teeth across the continent’s eastern marches, or at the blooming electoral fortunes of the radical Right, to make the case that Brexit Britain is the real redoubt of liberalism.
And they would be right: the Conservative Party’s hurling open of Britain’s borders will vastly outweigh the demographic change wrought by New Labour’s idealistic commitment to multiculturalism in its transformative effects; in Britain, even the Right-wing populist parties are zealous economic liberals, while the most successful social conservative movement in recent memory is led by veteran feminists, preserving their gains of recent decades. For the harder-edged British Right-winger, Brexit could be viewed less as a means to unlock Britain’s stifled potential than as an act of noble self-sacrifice to free Europe from our own country’s inveterate liberalism, a hand-grenade selflessly jumped upon to allow the continental bloc to meet its historical destiny. It is not difficult to imagine, in a decade or so, a Right-wing equivalent of The New European appearing on the Waitrose shelves, portraying the politics of the European Union now coming into being as an inspirational model for British Rightists — just as the ossified mental image of 2010s Europe still is for British liberals.
If this is the case, then the reverse is also true: British liberals will recoil from the new European Union as they once did from Bush’s America, finding in it the perfect ideological foil for their own acts of political self-definition. As the Greek political scientist Angelos Chryssogelos observed last year, the deepening enmeshment of British liberals with American progressive causes “means that any centre-left alternative to the Conservatives will be as uncomfortable with Europe as the Conservatives are today, albeit for different reasons”, so that “core features of the EU like its […] commitment to border security will become sources of ideological friction with progressive Britain, as much as the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice or fisheries are with conservative Britain today”.
There are already hints of the poles reversing, here and there: in The Guardian and the BBC’s newly horrified reaction to the brutally effective border management regimes of EU nations, or Gordon Brown’s claim that, “if you want to peer into the future of Europe”, you must observe with horror the rise of Vox, whose “power will embolden far-Right parties that have been proliferating across the continent”. His essay’s framing of Spain’s election this weekend as “a key battle in the Europe-wide struggle against neofascism”, in all its overwrought appeals to the ghosts of a century ago, is a perfect distillation of the mythologised version of the Second World War which still distorts our political discourse. Threatened by the 2010s version of populism, whose central tenets of rejecting unfettered globalisation and uncontrolled immigration have now become the European mainstream, the guardians of the neoliberal order reanimated the ghosts of Europe’s 20th century to preserve their hold on power. Once it was no longer tenable to claim that There Is No Alternative, the populist alternative was reframed as fascism to render it taboo to voters.
But while the obsessive need of anxious liberals to frame all forms of hard-Right politics as the revived incarnations of a dead 20th-century ideology may afford them a pleasing frisson of danger, it is of course analytically absurd. None of the Right-wing parties gaining power across Europe can plausibly fulfil the various definitions of fascism used by academic historians: historical fascism was hardly noted for its belief in the inviolability of national borders, after all. Last year’s dismissive essay by the great scholar of fascism Stanley Payne, whose definitions of the doctrine have been promiscuously applied by liberal commentators to the widely disparate Right-wing movements of today, echoes the famous scene in Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan tells a pseud in a cinema queue he is an idiot who knows nothing of his work. Payne observes that, despite its total obliteration in 1945, “fascism once more became the dominant menace in the political and rhetorical imaginary, encouraged even further after the collapse of the Soviet Union”, so that its current “usage isn’t merely wildly contradictory, but applied in the most directly and specifically opposite ways”. But, as Payne observes, “all this is irrelevant to the political imaginary, dominated by fantasy and subjectivism and oblivious to empirical reality”.
More from this author Boomer Europe is dyingBy Aris Roussinos 
The 2010s fascism scare was a natural product of ideology: following the fall of the Soviet Union, a highly mythologised narrative of the Second World War evolved as the foundational myth of the new American-led order. In the myth, both Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy and Soviet communism joined forces to save Europe from its fascist demons. After decades of confrontation, liberal democracy then won out as the superior ideology, destined to conquer the world and lead it to its bright new future. Open borders were the best defence against watchtowers and barbed wire, and a globalised world would be the prophylactic against destructive nationalism.
The results are as we see. Yet few people in 1939 would have recognised this ahistorical narrative: the nation Britain went to war to defend, Poland, was a Right-wing authoritarian regime, just like Britain’s sole ally after the fall of France, Greece. In reality, the Europe of 1939 that Britain bankrupted itself to defend was composed of a diverse spectrum of political systems, most of which would be considered impermissibly Right-wing by the expansive definitions of today. If long-standing political taboos are now being broken across Europe, it is a situation marked not by the return of fascism but by a return to a diverse mix of Right-tilted governance systems, each of which relies more on its own national context and interests than on appeals to some malign pan-continental internationale.
Analysis in these terms provides a more productive route to understanding Europe’s near-term future in all its paradoxical complexity. Consider the case of Poland and Hungary, natural ideological allies sharply divided by their opposing stances on the war in Ukraine. Deeply committed to a Ukrainian victory, Poland has more to lose than to gain from a Republican victory in next year’s American elections, no matter how Right-wing the eventual nominee. If anything, Poland’s security now requires a Democrat victory, while Hungary’s stance would be vindicated by the elevation of a Ukraine-sceptic Republican to the presidential throne. Similarly, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni inspired the last bout of anxious wailing about the revival of fascism in Europe, until her strong stance in favour of Ukraine, coupled with a boringly inoffensive administrative style, helped her government meld itself seamlessly into Europe’s mainstream centre-right. The general trend in modern European politics is not a return to the dark passions of the Thirties, but of mainstream conservatives painlessly absorbing challengers from their Right: while the continent’s centre ground is drifting Rightward, the radical energies of the hard-Right are being dissipated as they embed themselves within the mainstream.
The Europe of the 2020s, then, will be marked by a continuation of technocratic EU governance, only shifted further to the Right than the notional conservatism of the neoliberal era, which functioned only as Left-liberalism with a slight time delay. Its politics shaped by a bloody war on its eastern marches, and an accelerating migration flow from its south, the EU of the coming decade will be defined by its borders. Aside from the symbolism of its component members joining together to fend off migrants, the recent joint mission of Rutte, Von der Leyen and Meloni to Tunisia to woo the country’s new dictator Kais Saied into a lucrative role as Europe’s border guard perhaps indicates a new approach to our continent’s neighbouring North African regimes. Saied’s ejection of sub-Saharan migrants to the country’s desert border posts has met with the silence of Europe’s tacit approval. As in Libya, what European human rights legislation forbids EU leaders to do themselves can be safely carried out by regional partners with little fuss.

After all, the 2010s attempt to wish liberal democracy on North Africa failed utterly; the migration crisis it precipitated instead helped eradicate Left-liberalism as a viable electoral force in continental Europe. In these circumstances, both political necessity and ideological inclination will encourage EU support for North African autocrats as their chosen partners, neutralising the miseries of the deeper African continent as a source of political angst for the New Europe. North Africa will also surely fulfil a wider role for a Europe committed to energy transition and attempting to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels: as an untapped source of solar energy, Europe’s homes and factories will depend on the security of infrastructure erected on the burning sands of the Sahara. The stability of the regimes hosting Europe’s energy supply will thus vastly outweigh the democratic aspirations of North Africa’s people in the new European order, as Russia shores up its new position in the neighbouring Sahel, and Europe once again finds its strategic interests drawn to the Mediterranean’s southern shores.
On Europe’s eastern border, the Ukraine war will also define the political contours of the new Europe. Macron’s recent conversion to the idea of Ukraine as a Nato ally — an offer perhaps made in the secure knowledge the United States and Germany would forbid it — is a marked departure from France’s previous, failed attempts to woo Russia into a role as a security partner for an autonomous EU. Instead, Macron presumably views the perennial tension with Russia that would follow Ukraine’s absorption into the European sphere as a catalyst to strategic autonomy in itself, spurring measures like the recently-passed ASAP initiative for accelerated EU munitions production. Poland’s massive programme of rearmament to fend off the Russian threat is the greatest single boost to European defence capabilities in recent history. For all it’s loyal Atlanticism, a booming, militarised Poland will be a far greater asset to a European autonomist project than anything offered by a militarily weak and deindustrialising Germany, whose rising political force is, in any case, the Russia-sympathising AfD. Again, far from the continent-spanning Right-wing alliance which excites the liberal imagination, Europe’s populist parties are increasingly divided by the Ukraine war, with those committed to the Ukrainian cause making common ground with liberals and centrists to accelerate the consolidation of an autonomous European sphere.
Strong on defence, hard on migration and hawkish on Russia, the Europe now rapidly coming into being is a natural lodestar for British Right-wingers, dissatisfied at the failure of the Conservative Party to institute conservative governance. Like American conservatives making ideological aliyah to Budapest, perhaps British conservatives will soon look to Brussels as the inspiration for an unabashedly Right-wing politics, its harder edges ameliorated by sharp suits and inoffensively mainstream political aesthetics. Drawn closer into America’s cultural sphere by its wholesale adoption of the superpower’s progressive values, Britain’s political Left will conversely view our neighbouring continent with increased suspicion and distaste. Cut off by its own instinctive liberalism from the trends reshaping Europe, Britain will surely double down on its own Forties mythologising, the decade of the NHS’s foundation and of Windrush cementing its role as the ideological wellspring of the British state. The recent claim by the Labour MP Clive Lewis that the NHS is “our greatest defence against fascism” may not make any sense — Lewis is evidently not a student of the social policies of Thirties Europe — but is a perfect distillation of the new mythology swirling into formation.
More from this author Britain's forgotten European empireBy Aris Roussinos 
But for the rest of Europe, the long ideological hold of the Thirties is finally fading into history: new political forms are being born as the last survivors of Europe’s nightmarish decades of self-destruction are laid to rest. The disastrous 20th century neutered Europe as an actor in history, and for decades it seemed like our civilisation would never escape its gravitational pull. The EU-wide rejection of the cordon sanitaire against Right-wing parties is thus a rejection of the last century’s debilitating stranglehold on political experimentation. Contrary to liberal fantasies, the taboo against fascism remains in force: it is only the use of the term to delegitimise any Right-wing form of governance that has lost its power. The corrective Rightward drift of Europe’s centre is in this sense a paradoxically progressive political force, while our retreat to cosy isolation, with Starmer as Left-liberalism’s Captain Mainwaring valiantly holding an increasingly civilisational Europe at bay, confirms Britain as the most politically conservative country on the continent. In finally laying the ghosts of the 20th century to rest, Europe is entering the future: as in Children of Men, only an increasingly dishevelled Britain stands alone, stubbornly holding out against the march of history.
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I was a child soldier in the California grape strikes, my labors conducted outside the Shattuck Avenue co-op in Berkeley. There I was, maybe 7 or 8 years old, shaking a Folgers coffee can full of coins at the United Farm Workers’ table where my mother was garrisoned two to three afternoons a week. I did most of my work alongside her, but several times an hour I would do what child soldiers have always done: served in a capacity that only a very small person could. I’d go out in the parking lot and slip between cars to make sure no one was getting away without donating some coins or signing a petition. I’d pop up next to a driver’s-side window and give the can an aggressive rattle. I wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa, but I wasn’t playing any games either.My parents were old-school leftists, born in the 1920s and children during the Great Depression. They would never, ever cross a picket line, fail to participate in a boycott, lose sight of strikers’ need for money when they weren’t getting paychecks. My parents would never suggest that poverty was caused by lack of intelligence or effort. We were not a religious family (to say the least), but I had a catechism: One worker is powerless; many workers can bring a company to its knees.What I’m describing, of course, is a lost world, glimpsed only through history books or the memories of old people. It was a world already in the midst of death even as I was pumping fresh second-grade life into it. The great labor strikes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—of steelworkers, textile workers, railroad workers, coal miners—were in the past. Union membership peaked at 35 percent of the U.S. workforce in 1954. By the grape strike in 1965, it was already down to 28 percent. A decade and a half later, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, put collective bargaining in the dustbin of history by ordering striking air-traffic controllers back to work, and when they didn’t go back, he fired them. Today only 10 percent of workers have union protections.Unions faltered for many reasons. Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws and various regulations forced companies to conform to standards of workplace safety or face serious penalties, and most states passed a minimum (subsistence) wage. And Americans are crap socialists, forever lighting out for the territory in the spirit of rugged individualism you hear so much about on truck commercials. Many of the biggest American corporations, such as Amazon, have become world-class union busters. As Cesar Chavez himself pointed out, repeatedly, large-scale immigration makes it all but impossible to keep a union together. Desperate people don’t make the terrible journey to this country to go on strike. They do it so they can send money to their impoverished families as quickly as possible.But the real reason union membership is so low in this country is globalization. What that word means for Americans is that corporations found the ultimate means of union busting: They sent the jobs away. Good jobs that usually paid well in a union shop, and that once upon a time allowed one parent to support a family—they sent them to China and India and Mexico and Bangladesh, places where people will work for far less money and with far fewer “demands.”All of this means that we have two or more generations of Americans who have no idea how labor politics work, and who believe that #boycotts are as effective as the real thing.In 2018, two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks on suspicion of “trespassing,” which ignited one of the many attempts to #BoycottStarbucks that have taken place over the years. It may have been the most successful of these efforts, in that it spurred the company to relax its policy regarding using the cafės and their bathrooms without buying anything. But the boycotters had no real power because nobody stopped buying Starbucks, which was apparently just a bridge too far. #Boycott the place, yes. Ankle it up the block to Peet’s? Come on. Starbucks eventually helped the boycotters out by staging a kind of self-boycott, closing thousands of stores for an afternoon of anti-bias training and thereby contributing a few hours of lost sales to the cause.#BoycottChickFilA—initiated in reaction to the owner’s disapproval of gay marriage—began more than a decade ago, during which time the company has only grown. There are principles and there is the Spicy Chicken Sandwich, and one of them has got to give. Now there’s a counterinsurgency of Chick-fil-A #boycotters (it has something to do with “DEI = bad”), so conservatives and liberals can find common ground in cramming their mouths full of deep-fried chicken while #boycotting the company that makes it.The same is true about #BoycottGillette and #BoycottNike. These #boycotts weren’t about labor disputes. They were about commercials and the perception that American corporations were in the pocket of “woke” leadership. They were puny and powerless. And they are the only kind of boycott that millions of young people have taken part in.This is why the sweeping success of the boycotts of Bud Light and Target this spring has so many leftists confused and angry and hurt. Activists on the right deployed the old union tactic for frivolous causes, and it worked. Bud Light lost a quarter of its sales. Target lost more than $13 billion in market cap. All of us associate boycotts with some of the greatest fights of the past century—the Montgomery bus boycott, or the UFW boycotts and strikes. But a boycott has no inherent moral position. It’s just a strategy.The seeds of both recent boycotts were similar, and ultimately had to do with the growing visibility of transgender people in mainstream culture. Bud Light engaged Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer, to make a 50-second promotional video released only on her Instagram account. Target’s annual display of Pride merchandise included a kind of women’s swimsuit that could disguise a penis. The display also had children’s clothes, which rang alarm bells for many conservatives.  The boycotts themselves aren’t in any larger sense meaningful. Some men started drinking different brands of beer. So what? Some Target shoppers started going to Walmart. So what? You can buy whatever you want and you can not buy whatever you want. As every episode of Mad Men proved, people have deep and powerful associations with the brands they like, associations that have much more to do with advertising than with the relative merits of the products. Forget Don Draper; listen to Mick Jagger:
He can’t be a man
’Cause he doesn’t smoke 
The same cigarettes as me.
It’s a big country, and people think and feel all kinds of things.What is meaningful are the threats of violence that quickly accompanied the boycotts. On May 24, Target announced that it would be removing some of the Pride items because of “threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work.” It was a cautiously worded statement, and some couldn’t help but wonder whether Target was just weaseling a way to appease boycotters.Then, in mid-June, Target stores in five states had to be evacuated because of bomb threats sent to local media outlets, many of which contacted the police. It seemed at first that this was the realization of the chain’s dark intimations about the far right. The truth was more complicated. A Vermont police chief said the threats included emails accusing Target of betraying the LGBTQ community. In Louisiana, a local news station reported on the email it received, which called the company “pathetic cowards who bowed to the wishes of far right extremists.”You could tell how utterly confusing all of this is to the left by the response of the liberal press.  A Washington Post opinion piece revealed that the writer was game for the fight but deeply confused about the terms of engagement: “The free market is telling right-wingers something they refuse to hear: Transgender people exist, and they buy stuff.” But Target’s huge loss of market cap wasn’t the result of transgender people boycotting. It was the result of anti-transgender people boycotting. And the literal definition of the free market is the ability of consumers to shop wherever they want. The writer was on the right side of history but the wrong side of The Wealth of Nations.There was also a counterfactual attempt to posit that the precipitous decline in Target’s stock was unrelated to the boycotts. CNN Business published an article called “Here’s the Real Reason Target’s Stock Is Dropping,” which located a mix of factors to explain the sudden development, “including broader changes in the US economy, the possibility of a recession, and Target’s over-exposure to discretionary merchandise.” (“Hey, Smitty, short Target for me. I think on Wednesday, shoppers are going to freak out about broader changes to the U.S. economy.”)The New Republic published an article called “The Right’s War on Brands Is Stupid and Terrifying,” which bore the characteristic traits of the form: The writer’s outrage over the transphobic response forced him to present the boycotts as a heartless attack on defenseless … corporate America. “Cross the pissbabies, and your stock price will tank, your quarterly earnings will collapse, and your executives will be fired.” I haven’t encountered rhetoric like his since the Reagan administration. If a sign of the apocalypse is The New Republic fretting about the quarterly earnings and executive job security of a company like Anheuser-Busch, it’s time to get in the bunker.Anheuser-Busch’s CEO earns about $12 million a year and its warehouse workers—at least in Southern California, where I live, and which is one of the most expensive regions in the country—start at $18 an hour. Temp warehouse workers must be able “to work with minimal supervision and in cold temperatures” and “to perform the physical requirements of the job.” Those physical requirements include being able to spend entire shifts loading and unloading trucks in a refrigerated warehouse. The benefits package includes some inspirational language and the promise of “Free Beer!” These workers should not earn $18 an hour while their CEO, sitting in ergonomic comfort and temperature-controlled ease, earns $5,700 an hour.As for Target, where to start? Its stores are full of fast fashion, well known to be a human-rights and environmental disaster. The differential between its CEO’s pay and his workers’ pay is similarly shameful.The confusion about these boycotts reveals something much larger than an infirm grasp of how the strategy works, and larger, even, than the pain and fear they produced in transgender people and their allies. It’s part of something that is so pervasive among Americans, and especially young Americans, that one hardly notices it anymore: the feeling of being powerless against huge forces that they understand to exist far beyond their control, including the questionable—or outright evil—actions of giant corporations.Last year, The Nation ran an article titled “Don’t Boycott Amazon”: “They’re too big to be hurt by individual consumer choice. Instead, hit them where it really hurts.” When I first read it, I thought the piece was very funny, but in the months since I’ve found it poignant. The writer offers a complicated strategy: “Don’t just feel bad when you buy from Amazon. Make it count by kicking in twice as much to the Amazon Labor Union, and let Amazon know why.” The strategy also involves … buying Amazon stock. Jesus wept.You could say that this writer would be well served by brushing up on the fundamentals of microeconomics and the institutes of logic. But it was the personal example of her sense of powerlessness against the machine that got my attention. She says that she’d been avoiding shopping on Amazon but then she slipped. Her cat’s veterinarian had recommended a certain product and had sent her an Amazon link to it, which the writer used to buy it: “Immediately, I felt the anger and guilt that comes with trying to be a person of conscience in a culture of pathological convenience. And I felt foolish for imagining that ethical consumerism can do anything other than temporarily assuage those feelings.”That’s the sign of a demoralized person, one who feels herself to have no agency at all.We haven’t left these young people much. Many of them are so terrified about global warming that they believe that bringing a child into this world would be wrong. The retreat from religion has perhaps unburdened many of them from unfounded claims—but what has replaced it? What provides a community of shared belief, social outreach, the sense of living for some larger purpose? Nothing. What is the reliable path into the middle class, one that requires only a willingness to work hard? It’s gone. Corporate America sent it away.The Bud Light and Target boycotts have been the most successful American-consumer boycotts in a quarter century. They made two large companies sustain serious material losses. That isn’t cause for more ennui or alienation. It’s a beacon: It can be done. And it should be done.I said that one of the reasons that union membership had dried up is that OSHA had made workplaces safer. But as this article was closing, a 16-year-old boy was killed while working at the Mar-Jac Poultry processing plant in rural Mississippi. According to The New York Times, Duvan Tomas Perez died “after becoming ensnared in a machine he was cleaning.”His family posted an obituary describing him as having been a student at N. R. Burger Middle School, the mission of which is to “educate all students to become productive citizens of a dynamic, global community.”   On Saturday he will be buried. The obituary noted the date of the visitation and that “a Mass of Christian Burial will follow at 11:30 a.m.,” at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.
I am the resurrection and the life;
he who believes in me, though he die,
yet shall he live, and whoever lives
and believes in me shall never die.
My mother knew Cesar Chavez, which was one of the reasons she was so committed to his cause. And now, a literal lifetime later, a Central American boy has been killed on a factory floor and his education, his future, his life ended in what must surely have been an event of overwhelming terror and pain, dying in the same pitiless place where the chickens are killed.And do you know what the company had to say about his death? It was, of course, a “tragedy,” but it wasn’t the company’s fault: “It appears, at this point in the investigation, that this individual’s age and identity were misrepresented on the paperwork.”Do you know what I say to that?Strike.Boycott.Shut it down.

(Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images.)In 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt, serving as the first Chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was involved in a bitter dispute about the limits of free speech. Stalin’s Soviet Union fought tooth and nail to ensure that states should not only be permitted, but obliged to prohibit “hate speech” under international human rights law. Roosevelt issued a stark warning, as she found the Soviet proposal “extremely dangerous.” It would “only encourage Governments to punish all criticisms in the name of protection against religious or national hostility,” and she warned the commission “not to include… any provision likely to be exploited by totalitarian States for the purpose of rendering the other articles null and void.”Fast forward to July 12, 2023, and a majority of the United Nations Human Rights Council proved Roosevelt prophetic. It did so by adopting a resolution that drives a stake through Roosevelt’s vision of an international human rights system that protects oppressed citizens against their oppressive governments.The resolution calls on member states to, among other things, “address, prevent and prosecute acts and advocacy of religious hatred.” The resolution is a response to the increasing number of Quran burnings in Denmark and Sweden by Danish far-right extremist Rasmus Paludan and a few copycats. No doubt Paludan is a bigot and revels in the attention and mayhem that his gratuitous provocations elicit. But however tempting it is to silence an extremist like Paludan, criminalizing the burning of “holy books” because it constitutes “advocacy of religious hatred,” as the HRC resolution proposes, is short-sighted and dangerous.One only has to look at some of the 28 states that voted in favor of the resolution to realize that the real purpose is not to counter hate speech or foster equality and tolerance, but to provide authoritarian governments cover and legitimacy when suppressing dissent.  Among those who supported the resolution we find Pakistan, where blasphemy is punishable by death and where the charge of blasphemy is used to persecute religious minorities and secularists. China too voted in favor of the resolution, despite its atheist political ideology. Apparently, China thinks Muslims should be protected against book burnings in democracies, but not against the Chinese Communist Party’s systematic and arbitrary detention of more than one million Uighurs—most of whom are Muslims—in “reeducation” camps. This includes the 57-year-old woman Hasiyet Ehmet, who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for teaching Islam to children and hiding copies of the Quran. Iran’s treatment of critics of its theocratic government provides a chilling example of the kind of religious and political oppression that the HRC resolution would help legitimize. In May 2023, the regime hanged Yousef Mehrad and Sadrollah Fazeli Zar for insulting the prophet Muhammad and promoting atheism. Among their supposed crimes was burning a copy of the Quran.One might have expected the United Nations’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to forcefully reject the criminalization of symbolic expressions as a violation of international human rights law, while lamenting the intolerant attitudes that such expressions convey. Instead, Türk made a mealy-mouthed statement that failed to take a clear stand but implicitly suggested that the burning of Qurans constitutes prohibited incitement to hatred.This is a gross dereliction of duty that undermines years of efforts to narrow the scope of hate speech restrictions under human rights law, due to very real examples of government abuse that Roosevelt diagnosed more than half a century ago. In 2011, efforts by the Obama administration led the HRC to adopt a landmark resolution meant to once and for all end decade-long efforts by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the United Nations to criminalize blasphemy under international human rights law. The resolution stressed the primary importance of counterspeech and education as the first line of defense against the very real phenomenon of religious intolerance and negative stereotyping. More importantly, it emphasized that human rights law protects people, not religions or ideologies. While the resolution “condemned” advocacy of incitement to hatred, it only called on the criminalization of “incitement to imminent violence based on religion or belief.” The requirement of incitement to imminent violence stresses that restrictions on free expression are only legitimate when protecting physical human beings, not abstract religious ideas, from serious real-world harm. The new HRC resolution is a naked attempt to undermine this speech-protective standard to the detriment of religious and political dissent around the globe. As the current United States ambassador to the Human Rights Council stated: “While we abhor expressions of religious hatred, we do not believe freedom of expression can or should be abridged to outlaw them.”However disturbing and deeply offensive to religious believers, defining the mere symbolic expression involved in burning holy books as “incitement” is a perversion of language. Indeed, those engaging in genuine incitement are those who call for the death of “blasphemers,” which unfortunately happens all too often. And the list of those on the receiving end of incitement properly understood is not limited to far-right extremists like Ramus Paludan. On it we find Salman Rushdie; the murdered journalists at Charlie Hebdo; the Afghani woman Farkhunda Malikzada, beaten and burned to death by a mob after being falsely accused of burning the Quran; and the Pakistani student Mashal Khan, who was lynched by fellow students for alleged blasphemy. Free speech and religious tolerance are two sides of the same coin. The same right that allows extremists like Paludan to burn the Quran protects Muslims from political demands that the Quran be banned. Religious believers have every right to peacefully protest and condemn those that burn their holy books. But they must not be permitted to put them in prison.  Jacob Mchangama is the CEO of the Future of Free Speech Project, Research Professor at Vanderbilt University, and a senior fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

Whaddaya want, America? Do you want an industrial rebirth? Do you want to be the global AI leader? Do you want the 21st century to be another American Century rather than a Chinese Century?
Answering “yes” to those questions also means answering yes to immigration and attracting more global talent. The ability to draw smarties from around the world and turn them into productive residents and citizens—to add them to the great American Story—is a national superpower if there ever was one. Acknowledging all of the above is just acknowledging reality (something I was told was a core trait of conservatism, by the way). Two bits of evidence on that front. The first one comes via Bloomberg:
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. said production at a planned facility in Arizona will be postponed from late 2024 until 2025, an ominous delay as Washington tries to establish a more robust chip industry. Chairman Mark Liu said there are several challenges that TSMC faces at the US facility, including a shortage of skilled workers and expenses running higher than in Taiwan. The company is shifting some employees to Arizona to help with the development.“We are working on improving this by sending skilled technical workers from Taiwan to the US,” Liu said on a conference call after earnings.
Give those “skilled technical workers” a green card, ASAP! Next: a real eye-opening analysis from Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy:
Immigrants have founded or cofounded nearly two-thirds (65% or 28 of 43) of the top AI companies in the United States, and 70% of full-time graduate students in fields related to artificial intelligence are international students, according to a new National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis. Seventy-seven percent of the leading U.S.-based AI companies were founded or cofounded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Forty-two percent (18 of 43) of the top U.S.-based AI companies had a founder who came to America as an international student. … Immigrants from Israel and the United Kingdom were second with three, followed by Canada, China and France with two each. Immigrants from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Iran, Kenya, Lebanon, Taiwan, Syria, Poland and elsewhere founded or cofounded one of top U.S. AI companies.  

There are all manner of immigration reforms worth discussing, from expanding visa categories to more streamlined visa processing. But at the end of the day, there needs to be a broad national acknowledgment and consensus on the importance of immigration, especially given global demographic challenges. National power is made out of people, my friends. More, please!
Learn more: There and Back Again: Learning from Poland’s Socialist Experiment | What We’re Learning About Work-from-Home and Productivity Growth | The 21st Century Decline of Economic Freedom | Is ‘Bidenomics’ Even a Thing, Really?
The post National Power Is Made out of People appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Amidst the loud headlines that have been capturing the nation’s attention, the Biden Administration has been quietly dusting off a long-neglected economic strategy: antitrust enforcement. President Joe Biden has assembled an ambitious team at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Justice Department that has been engineering a new, robust anti-monopoly policy aimed at reining in Big Tech and other large American companies.So far its accomplishments have been modest. But the overall direction has aligned the United States more closely with enforcement approaches used in the EU, which aim to open up markets currently dominated by U.S. giants. The shape of competition for the fast-emerging market for artificial intelligence is also in play.The global tone of antitrust policy and regulation was established by the United States decades ago. The Reagan Administration started scaling back enforcement, inspired by what has become known as the Chicago School. That economic and legal philosophy prioritized a narrow definition of “monopoly” based on consumer welfare and economic efficiency, instead of trying to limit raw market power and economic dominance. This has resulted in giant monopoly companies that, like large oceans, create their own weather patterns that rattle everything in their path.The fact that both the Democratic and Republican parties were captured by this philosophy has resulted in very little enforcement action against monopolies or mergers, despite big corporations buying up their competitors and consolidating markets in industry after industry. In recent decades this has led to the loss of millions of good jobs, significant wage losses, hindrances to new business start-ups, and outsized price increases in the airline, food, pharmaceutical, and other industries. More and more observers are concerned over the extraordinary market power that America’s biggest companies wield, along with the reach of their tentacles across industries, and how that is impacting the functioning of democracy itself.A new breed of legal scholars and regulators has pushed back against the Chicago School. The emerging philosophy argues that recent anticompetitive risks posed by tech giants like Google, Meta/Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, as well as concentrated corporate power in a range of industries (airline, railroads, publishing, banks, broadband, and prescriptions drugs), require government refereeing and innovative solutions. This vision has been embraced by the Biden Administration as the basis for its competition policy.New Sheriffs in Town“Capitalism without competition is not capitalism,” said President Biden in his State of the Union Address on February 7, 2023. Biden urged Congress to pass legislation “to strengthen antitrust enforcement and prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage.” Biden’s call to action was the first time a President had mentioned “antitrust” in a State of the Union since President Jimmy Carter in 1979.Already Biden has signed a sweeping “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” which includes seventy-two action items that require more than a dozen federal agencies to more closely scrutinize and take action against corporate mergers. The administration also has appointed a team of enforcement-minded leaders to head the main antitrust agencies: lawyer Lina Khan as chair of the FTC, and lawyer Jonathan Kanter as head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. So far Khan’s and Kanter’s tenures have included a string of moves to stop alleged violations of anti-monopoly laws, including:Filing a lawsuit against Facebook to break it up for wielding monopoly power by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp (a merger that the Obama Administration previously had approved);Rescinding a long-standing policy that limited the FTC’s ability to challenge unfair methods of competition;Suing Amazon for duping customers into signing up for its Prime service by using “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive” website tactics known as “dark patterns,” and then making it difficult to cancel the subscription;Issuing an order that requires nine tech companies—including Amazon, Facebook, Google, and TikTok—to provide data on how they collect and use information from their users.Many of these seemingly small steps have undone decades-old policies and practices, replacing them with aggressive approaches that add more oversight to alleged corporate abuses.In January 2023, the Justice Department and eight states filed a suit aiming to break up Google’s lucrative online advertising business, a major intervention since advertising revenue makes up 80 percent of Google’s business. On March 7, the Justice Department filed a legal complaint opposing the merger of JetBlue and Spirit Airlines. The federal government has not opposed an airline merger since the 1980s, despite the fact that profits per passenger in the United States are three times that of Europe. Other industries being targeted include some of the biggest players in pharmaceuticals, book publishing, and charging networks for electric vehicles.Combined, Kanter’s Justice Department and Khan’s FTC have launched a surge of lawsuits, including cases that may not win in court, in order to send a powerful signal to these companies that new sheriffs are in town. The tactic appears to be working: Amazon recently agreed to pay $25 million to settle FTC claims that its Alexa home surveillance devices had illegally collected children’s data. And even though a federal appeals court denied the FTC’s challenge to Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of gaming company Activision Blizzard, the aggressive legal maneuver is credited with pushing Microsoft to make concessions to alleviate monopoly concerns.Meanwhile, states and private actors, encouraged by the Biden Administration, are also using the courts. Among the important legal actions filed by state attorneys general is California v. Amazon. The suit alleges that Amazon prevents sellers from lowering their prices at other retailers, which keeps prices artificially high. Texas, Colorado, and Utah have pending cases against Google.Other federal agencies are pushing what they view as a complementary pro-labor agenda. Recently a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Google is a “joint employer” and therefore legally required to negotiate with its YouTube contract workers if they form a union. Google has tried to argue it is not the employer of contracted staff, but the NLRB so far has rejected that rationale.Big Tech is not taking any of this lying down. Google, Meta, Apple, and others have hired legions of lawyers and lobbyists to fight antitrust legislation and lawsuits. They have even hired former federal government attorneys and insiders to do it.The EU as Defender of Capitalism and Competition?Modern antitrust laws were invented in America. For decades the influential Chicago School promulgated a deregulatory philosophy that became dominant all over the world—that includes in Europe. Nevertheless, in the complete absence of U.S. leadership, the European Union’s “better than nothing” regulatory approach has in recent times provided the only global authority addressing anticompetitive activity. One recent study of antitrust statutes from 125 countries found that they had adopted domestic antitrust laws closer to those of the EU than of the United States.Despite its recent cave-in to Microsoft over its attempt to gobble up gaming company Activision Blizzard, the EU has tried for years to keep U.S. companies in check with its antitrust enforcement. The European Commission (EC) fined Google nearly $10 billion for breaching EU antitrust laws, and fined Meta/Facebook $725 million over the Cambridge Analytica scandal and another $414 million for other privacy violations. The EC is also threatening Apple with billions in fines for blocking competing financial services on the iPhone in favor of its own service, Apple Pay. However, for companies that raked in net profits in 2022 of $95 billion (Apple), $23 billion (Meta/Facebook), and $60 billion (Google), the reality is that these “small” fines are just part of the cost of doing business.The Biden Administration views its historic pivot on antitrust policy as a once-in-a-generation chance to show Rooseveltian (Teddy, not FDR) leadership. If it is successful in its goals, it will reverse decades of narrowly conservative antitrust law, and prevent predatory companies from monopolizing markets, buying up smaller competitors, stifling innovation, and exerting outsized political influence.But it remains to be seen if the Biden Administration can maintain and even extend its efforts. With Democrats holding a bare majority in the Senate, and a hostile Republican caucus that reflexively blocks Democratic initiatives, Biden and the Democrats have few legislative successes to show for their efforts. While these recent interventions reflect the biggest changes in U.S. anti-monopoly and pro-labor policy in decades, if this new approach is to survive after Biden’s presidency, it needs to be locked into new laws to prevent victories from being overturned by future courts or presidential executive orders.Steven Hill is former policy director at the Center for Humane Technology and author of seven books, including Raw Deal: How the Uber Economy and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers.Image: Apple Park, the corporate headquarters of Apple in Cupertino, CA. (Wikipedia: Arne Müseler)

A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border.A 4-year-old girl collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her family.Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found huddling alongside a fence by the river.These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.These revelations capture not only the extreme tactics that Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, and state law-enforcement officials are employing against undocumented migrants seeking to cross the U.S. border with Mexico. They also show how aggressively Texas and other Republican-controlled states are maneuvering to seize control from President Joe Biden’s administration over immigration policy. To many immigration experts, these moves by Texas, like the harsh measures against undocumented migrants signed into law this spring by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, push to the edge the legal limits on states’ ability to infringe on federal authority over immigration.“U.S. immigration law governs the border; Texas law doesn’t govern the border,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. Federal law, he noted, establishes a process for handling undocumented migrants seeking asylum in the United States. “It may not be a process that I like, or you like, or people in Texas like, but it’s a process,” Leopold added. “And that process does not include taking a 4-year-old child and throwing that child into the water … or depriving them of water when the temperatures are above 100 degrees. Those are not our values. Those are not our laws.”[Jerusalem Demsas: Why deterrence policies create border chaos]Abbott has defended the state’s enforcement effort by arguing that Biden’s immigration policies have exposed his state’s residents to dangerous migrants and drug smuggling, and has endangered migrants themselves by encouraging them to make the arduous trek to the southern border. Responding to Wingate’s email, Abbott’s top law-enforcement officials issued a joint statement in which they maintained that “these tools and strategies—including concertina wire that snags clothing” were necessary to discourage migrants from making “potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings.”The red-state offensive against undocumented immigration sits at the crossroads of two powerful trends in the Donald Trump–era Republican Party. One is the growing movement in the red states to roll back a wide range of civil rights and liberties, including voting rights, access to abortion, and LGBTQ protections.The other is an arms race among Republican leaders to adopt ever more militant policies against undocumented immigrants. That dynamic is carrying the party beyond even the hard-line approaches that Trump employed in the White House.Both DeSantis and Trump, for instance, have promised that if elected, they will move to end birthright citizenship, the guarantee under the Fourteenth Amendment that anyone born in the United States is automatically an American citizen. In his town-hall appearance on CNN, Trump suggested that he would reinstate his widely condemned policy of separating the children of migrants from their parents at the border to discourage illegal crossings. And he’s promised to “use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” That’s an idea Trump often discussed but never risked trying to implement as president.DeSantis, meanwhile, has indicated that he would authorize federal border-enforcement personnel to use force against suspected drug smugglers. He’s also talked about deploying the Navy and the Coast Guard if Mexico does not act more aggressively to interdict the arrival of chemicals used to manufacture drugs.Simultaneously, DeSantis and Abbott have been at the forefront of the red-state efforts to seize more control over immigration policy. The legislation DeSantis signed contains sweeping measures to crack down on undocumented migrants, including criminal penalties for anyone providing transportation for such a migrant in Florida.Abbott, for his part, is building an enforcement apparatus outside the control of the federal agencies legally responsible for managing the border. His efforts represent one of the most tangible—and consequential—manifestations of what I’ve called the red-state drive to build “a nation within a nation” that operates by its own rules and values.Abbott has not gone as far as conservative activists who claim that the Constitution gives states the right to set their own immigration policies, on the grounds that they are facing an “invasion” of undocumented migrants. During a campaign stop in Texas, DeSantis embraced that fringe legal theory and argued that it provides states, not just the federal government, deportation authority.Most immigration-law experts are dubious that even the current conservative Supreme Court majority would agree, and Abbott has not claimed this power. Operation Lone Star, the expansive enforcement effort he launched in 2021, is not attempting to deport undocumented migrants it apprehends in the state. Instead, Texas has returned them to the border, arrested them, or bused them to Democratic-controlled jurisdictions. Abbott’s choice not to claim deportation authority under the invasion theory has generated a steady stream of criticism from some immigration hard-liners.Yet the revelations in the emails from Wingate, the Texas state trooper, show how far the state has already moved toward usurping federal authority. It has lined its southern border with miles of concertina wire and sunk barrels wrapped in that wire into the river. Recently, the state placed floating buoys in the river to block areas that might be easier and safer to cross. State troopers and National Guard members are also using force to push migrants away from the barbed-wire barricades. Republican governors from nearly a dozen other states have sent law-enforcement personnel, equipment, or both to Texas to support Abbott’s efforts.“In the federal government’s absence, we, as Governors, must band together to combat President Biden’s ongoing border crisis and ensure the safety and security that all Americans deserve,” Abbott wrote in a letter asking other states to send resources.Wingate, in his email, noted one consequence of these efforts: “With the [razor] wire running for several miles along the river in areas where it is easier for people to cross. It forces people to cross in other areas that are deeper and not as safe for people carrying kids and bags.”He recounted the story of a woman who was rescued in the river with one of her children, while another one of them drowned. Wingate also reported that a man suffered “a significant laceration” on his leg while extricating his child from one of the wire-wrapped barrels sunken in the river.“We have a governor who is literally using the full force of his government to inflict physical harm and even death on people,” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas told me. “The fact that he is using the government doesn’t make it any less horrific and it certainly doesn’t make it lawful.”Beyond the human costs, the red-state border-enforcement effort raises pointed questions about legal authority. Escobar and six other Democratic U.S. representatives from Texas last week wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asking them to investigate whether Abbott’s buoys violate U.S. and international law, including the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. Escobar told me she believes that not only should the Justice Department take legal steps to stop Abbott’s enforcement program; the Biden administration should be “sending in federal personnel to remove all of” the physical barriers Texas has constructed.[Adam Serwer: A crime by any name]The White House this week condemned the actions disclosed in the email; The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have reported that the Justice Department is already investigating whether Operation Lone Star is violating federal civil-rights laws. A spokesperson said Wednesday. that the department is assessing Wingate’s allegations, and it seems likely that the administration may soon announce further actions.White House spokesperson Abdullah Hassan told me via email late yesterday that while the White House "won't be getting ahead" of the Justice Department assessment, it condemns "Governor Abbott’s actions in the strongest terms.” Abbott's actions, Hassan charged, "are putting the lives of migrants and Border Patrol agents in danger, and are creating chaos at a time when our border enforcement plan has brought unlawful border crossings down to the lowest levels in years.”But many immigration advocates have joined Escobar in arguing that Biden should be challenging the red-state encroachments on federal immigration authority more forcefully.“There needs to be federal investigations of this,” David Leopold told me. “The Biden administration should be out front in demanding that the creation of chaos at the southern border by these southern governors stops now.”Angela Kelley, a former senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, told me that the Biden administration generally sought to minimize conflict with Abbott early on, while it was struggling to redirect many of Trump’s federal immigration policies. But Texas, she said, is now pursuing “actions [that] actually exceed the atrocities of Trump’s child separation policy.” If Biden feels pressure from congressional Democrats and advocacy groups, “I think that they will act, because it will be an embarrassment that this administration sat back and let” Texas pursue such policies “in an arena that is really the federal government’s responsibility,” said Kelley, now the chief policy adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.Ironically, Texas is pursuing these severe approaches just as the administration’s own program finally appears to be reducing the pressure of undocumented migration. Despite predictions of chaos when Biden ended Trump’s pandemic-era Title 42 policy this spring, conditions appear to be stabilizing somewhat at the border: On Tuesday, the administration reported that encounters with undocumented migrants at the southwestern border had fallen by more than 40 percent from May to June, to the lowest monthly level recorded since early 2021. But with polls consistently showing that most Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration and trust Republicans more on the issue, Abbott and his fellow Republican governors clearly have felt comfortable embracing ever more extreme tactics.In response to the Wingate revelations, Texas Department of Public Safety officials launched an internal investigation and denied that they had implemented a policy of refusing water to apprehended migrants or pushing them into the river. But in his statement after the disclosures, Abbott made clear that he has no intention of retreating from Operation Lone Star. Conservative Texas state legislators are already calling on Abbott to maintain the effort, and local political observers told me they are dubious that he will back down in any way.As long as the Texas program continues in its current form, more abuses may be inevitable. Doris Meissner, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, points out that even if the state has not instituted a blanket policy ordering such belligerent actions as denying water to migrants, “it is highly predictable that this kind of overreach will happen” in individual units because the state is trying to enforce immigration law with people who are “not trained to do this.” Several other Texas public-safety officers told The New York Times on Thursday that they had received orders to deny water to migrants and to tell them to return to Mexico.Abbott’s willingness to pursue such a militant enforcement campaign, and the decision by so many Republican governors to assist him, provides another measure of the same impulse evident in the proliferating red-state laws restricting or banning abortion, rolling back voting rights, and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors. All capture a determination to slip the bonds of national authority and impose a set of rules and policies that reflect the priorities and grievances of the primarily older, white, nonurban and Christian coalition that has placed these states’ leaders in power.That impulse, as Leopold says, is producing a dangerous “balkanization” of the country reminiscent of the years before the Civil War. It has also motivated the leadership of the nation’s second-largest state to conclude that the threat of undocumented immigration is sufficient to justify, both legally and morally, entangling children and pregnant women in coils of razor-sharp wire.

At a time when the United States is asking its allies to help it counter China, its wasteful, inefficient industrial policies are making it harder for them to comply. Rather than undercutting its “friends” with subsidies and protectionist trade barriers, America should be focusing on pro-growth innovation and labor-market policies.

TOKYO – Until 2017, America’s trade policies were reasonably well aligned with its strategic objectives. The United States was the world’s largest economy, with unrivaled military power, and its alliances with European countries and others bolstered security and underwrote prosperity for all. It also provided global leadership through bodies like the World Trade Organization, ensuring a common rule-of-law framework to support economic growth and cross-border exchange around the world.

Then came Donald Trump, who ushered in an era of US protectionism, unnecessarily alienating many friends and allies. His successor, Joe Biden, has attempted to repair some of the damage, but he has not reversed many key elements of Trump’s trade policies.

This is well illustrated by US policy toward Japan, a crucial American ally in Asia. Japan has long depended on the US for its security – an arrangement that dates to its defeat in World War II. Since Abe Shinzō’s premiership, Japan has been building up its military and security capacities, and demonstrating a greater willingness to defend its allies and strategic interests in the region – including with respect to Taiwan – but it still relies on the US security umbrella. Japan is also heavily dependent on trade, and it is a key country in both Asia and the global economy. What happens in Japan thus has implications for everyone. And now that China is flexing its muscles, Japan has become as important geopolitically as it is economically.

Japan was a relatively poor country prior to WWII, and it emerged from the war even poorer, having suffered great devastation. But by the end of the 1950s, post-war reconstruction and sound economic policies inaugurated a 30-year period of phenomenal growth. By the 1980s, Japan had become an economic powerhouse, leading other countries to introduce protectionist measures against it – such as the “voluntary export restraints” on Japanese vehicles advocated by US President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

The Japanese economy nonetheless sustained its strong growth. But its three-decade-long expansion had inflated a financial bubble that eventually burst in 1990, inaugurating two “lost decades” of stagnant output and deflation, with the 2008-09 global financial crisis delivering another blow. Over the following decade, the Japanese economy’s growth rate rose only a little before declining again with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the tide may be turning. Over the past two years, Japan has largely offset the negative impact of an aging population and a shrinking labor force by allowing more immigration than ever before. It has worked off the hangover from the asset bubble, and deflationary expectations have weakened.

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But it is too early to celebrate the defeat of stagnation and deflation, not least because US policies continue to damage Japan’s economic prospects. In the mid-2010s, the Japanese had enthusiastically supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership that US President Barack Obama negotiated with 11 other Pacific Rim countries. The TPP would have created the world’s largest free-trade area even though it excluded China. But Trump withdrew the US from the TPP during his first days in office, ceding the field to America’s great rival. While Abe successfully led an effort to create a free-trade area comprising the remaining countries, the absence of US participation has prevented that successor agreement from becoming a major catalyst of economic growth.

Worse, the Biden administration has not only kept most of Trump’s protectionist measures in place; it has also rolled out industrial policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and Science Act, both of which directly threaten the Japanese economy (and many other US “friends”).

Auto exports are a mainstay of the Japanese economy, and some Japanese firms have been among the leaders in the shift to electric vehicles and batteries. But the IRA will now subsidize US purchases of US-made EVs to the tune of $7,500 per vehicle, openly discriminating against Japanese (and other) foreign producers. Likewise, the CHIPS Act subsidizes construction of semiconductor “fabs” in the US, undercutting Japan in another key sector. And on top of it all, the US is demanding that Japan not export to China products containing American-made components deemed sensitive to national security.

In response to these policies, Japanese companies are already directing new investments to the US, implying that they are investing less at home. Worse, the Biden administration has hinted at introducing measures like those favoring US-made EVs and semiconductors across a broad range of other industries, which would create even greater incentives for Japanese firms to relocate operations or investments.

As a general matter, subsidizing individual companies and industries harms the economy even if other countries do not retaliate, because it distorts market competition. But America’s “friends” are retaliating, and in some cases outspending, Americans in subsidizing their producers. The net effect is that taxpayers in all subsidizing countries are forced to pay for policies that cancel each other out, while more efficient producers lose markets to less efficient ones.

At a time when the US is asking its allies to increase their defense spending to meet the challenge posed by China, such waste is pure folly. Pro-growth policies by America and its allies – such as strengthening research and innovation and the quality and skills of the labor force – would do far more to achieve these countries’ geopolitical and economic goals.

Research on “micro-nature” — the incorporation of small, affordable natural elements into workplaces — demonstrates its positive impact on employee performance and well-being. Studies show exposure to nature at work boosted productivity, helpfulness, and creativity, with no evidence of negative effects. Recommendations include both real and artificial nature, extending beyond the office environment, utilizing underused spaces, and encouraging nature exposure outside work hours. The integration of nature in workplaces enhances overall business performance.

In Canary Wharf, the bustling district that serves as the London base for many global enterprises, developers are building a “green spine” that will soon wind through the skyscrapers, giving workers ready access to green spaces during their workdays. Across town at Google’s under-construction UK headquarters, a 300-meter-long rooftop park with over 250 trees crowns the building, providing employees with a natural escape from the offices and urban environment below. On the other side of the Atlantic, retailer L.L. Bean cut out the middle of one of their warehouses and turned the space into a courtyard, so that everyone at their new home office would have views of nature while working. These real-world examples of incorporating nature into commercial spaces are part of a growing trend to design places where employees can be immersed in nature during their workdays.

Increasing nature in the work environment certainly aligns with many companies’ sustainability initiatives. However, the motive also stems from nature’s effect on humans — it is well established that nature makes us feel better. Our emotions, our thinking, our connection to others, and our physical well-being are all enhanced by being in and around nature.

Despite the connection between contact with nature and our well-being, large investments in bringing nature into the workplace raise some thorny issues. First, in a time of economic headwinds and cost-cutting, is there a business case for incorporating nature into employees’ surroundings? Second, what about those workplaces where it is not feasible or sensible to incorporate a green spine or a rooftop garden?

Answering these questions requires first understanding whether nature has effects on metrics that matter to organizations’ bottom lines (e.g., employee satisfaction and performance) and if so whether less-extreme doses of nature are meaningful enough to elicit these gains. Thus, we set out to test the effects (if any) of what we call micro-nature — small, affordable, seemingly innocuous ways of incorporating nature into the workplace — on how employees feel at work, and how they perform.

The Research

We measured or manipulated contact with nature at work in different ways across multiple studies, with workers in the U.S., Canada, China, New Zealand, and Indonesia. In experiments, working adults were simply shown images of workplaces suffused with natural elements or matching images without nature. We then asked them to imagine they worked in these spaces and report how it would make them feel and perform. We also conducted more complex studies in real-world work settings. For instance, we assessed employees’ actual contact with nature during a week at work (e.g., working near plants, natural views, or the sound of running water), and then measured their feelings and objective job performance. Finally, in a field experiment in an accounting firm, we went into the offices at night and placed potted plants at some employees’ desks and similar pots, only filled with office supplies, at other desks. We then measured the attitudes and job performance of the two groups and compared them.

The results were largely consistent across these studies: Experiencing even small doses of nature at work improved the way employees felt in ways that fueled higher task performance, increased helping, and enhanced creativity. These findings indicate that incorporating micro-nature into work settings can contribute to worker well-being and performance in a meaningful way.

We also looked into whether there were differences between employees that shaped how nature affected them at work — factors such as how much individuals appreciate nature in general, and the extent to which they are drawn to novel experiences. Our findings showed that some people are especially prone to experiencing the benefits of nature. However, we found no evidence that any employees were negatively impacted by nature exposure at work; thus, micro-nature seems to hold considerable promise for employees with little downsides.

Bearing these findings in mind, we believe that nature should be accessible to as many employees as possible, not just those lucky enough to work below a green roof or alongside a park. Companies should provide employees with micro-nature experiences. Below, we offer suggestions for incorporating micro-nature into the workplace, while also encouraging managers to take liberties and get creative in their specific organization.

Capitalizing on Micro-Nature

Real is best, but artificial works too.

Giving employees opportunities to access “the real thing” is ideal when it comes to nature: indoor water features, windows with views of nature or that open to let in natural sounds like birdsong. But just because it’s not the real thing does not mean that employees will not benefit from nature. Research shows that even depictions of nature, such as murals and artificial flowers, can give employees a natural boost.

Think beyond the office…

It goes without saying that it is not just office workers who benefit from nature. Employees in settings where the work environment feels especially removed from nature — think warehousing or manufacturing — are especially likely to notice a dash of the outdoors brought inside and be positively impacted by it because of how different it is from their status quo.

…and beyond the workplace.

The benefits of nature extend beyond employees’ work lives. Some of our research looked at the work-related benefits of spending time outdoors in the evening, after the workday. We found that employees were more productive the next day when they spent time outdoors the prior evening. Especially for hybrid and remote workers, the implications are clear: The benefits of being around nature at home carry over into work. So even incentivizing employees to take an evening walk can help them be more productive the next day.

Utilize unused or underused spaces.

By definition, micro-nature is small, and can be as simple as painting a wall with natural tones, adding flowers to the break room, or landscaping the area outside employees’ windows. We encourage managers to keep an eye out for the unused or underused spaces around their workplace that can be easily and cheaply turned into natural features. For instance, adding more landscaping to an overly industrial parking lot may boost employees’ morale.

. . .

Overall, our findings indicate that the benefits of connecting employees to nature at work extend beyond sustainability, and include positive effects on employees’ well-being and how they perform their jobs. As such, we view contact with nature as a valuable supplement to well-designed jobs that already include meaningful work, fair compensation, and respectful treatment. For firms that provide these things and are looking for more ways to enhance the environment in which their employees work, micro-nature offers considerable promise.

In praise of being undiplomatic

The Falklands should always be the Falklands

Even those of us who were cool on the Brexit question were dusting off our Union Jacks and partying like it was June 2016 when the EU made the extraordinary decision to endorse an Argentina-backed declaration that referred to the Falkland Islands as “Islas Malvinas”.

Look, I realise that getting emotional about the Falkland Islands might look regressive — a sort of LARPing for a time when Britain had more weight to push around on the world stage. God knows we don’t want the Conservatives to have an excuse to talk about something other than a dying economy, rampant lawlessness, institutional decay et cetera.

But I don’t want to do it. In an ideal world I’d hardly think about the Falklands at all — any more than I think about Jersey or the Isle of Man (apologies to all inhabitants of such fine places — there is just a limited amount of things that one can think about).

But the fact is that it’s not Britons who are being jingoistic. It’s not Britons who are sabre-rattling. That might sound unfair. The Celac (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) declaration looks very nice and diplomatic, with its insistence on “dialogue and respect for international law in the peaceful solution of disputes”. How multilateral! How internationalist!

Well, in principle I’m all for all dialogue. It’s great! Who could be against it? Some sort of Anglo Curtis LeMay overdosing on testosterone supplements?

Yet not all dialogue has value. Not all disputes point toward a compromise. Imagine this. I own a home. My family members are living there. It’s been ours for almost twice as long as anyone has been alive. One of the neighbours — who, incidentally, tried to break in a few years ago — keeps insisting, against all evidence, that it is theirs. They roam about the neighbourhood, calling for “dialogue and respect for local law in the peaceful solution of disputes”. But the dispute is entirely of their own making. There is no dialogue to be had. It’s my house!

… unless they want to return Argentina to its indigenous peoples they should think twice before throwing around words like “colonial”

Sure, I appreciate that the origins of the Falklands’ ownership are contested. It is not as if it would have been British without British colonialism. Still, I have to laugh when Argentina and its allies, such as China, huff and puff about “colonial thinking”. Two can play that game. Does anybody think that Argentines had been living on “Islas Malvinas” for millennia? Hell, they hadn’t been living in South America for all that long before the rearrival of the British (who found “Islas Malvinas” to be a chronically dysfunctional private fiefdom). Most Argentines are descended from Spanish colonists and Old World immigrants. There’s no shame in that, of course, but unless they want to return Argentina to its indigenous peoples they should think twice before throwing around words like “colonial”.

So much for ancient grievances. Of course, in the pure terms of power, Britain re-established its right to the Falkland Islands by defeating the Argentine invasion in 1982 — a sad war to fight, inasmuch as it was a stupid one, but that stupidity belonged to the Argentinian junta, desperately seeking a blue and white smokescreen behind which to hide economic decay and institutionalised torture. As for who has the right to the Falkland Islands according to the principle of self-determination, well, there’s no contest. With a turnout of 92 per cent, 99.8 per cent of Falkland Islanders voted to remain inhabitants of a British territory.

This one-sided “dispute” continues for as long as Argentinian governments want to distract their people from their own incompetence. That was the case when Galtieri invaded, hoping people would forget inflation and the Dirty War, and it is the case when modern leaders look for something other than sky-high prices for their voters to talk about. Argentina, sadly, has the world’s third-highest inflation rate. I would want to distract my electorate as well — but that doesn’t make it right.

Rishi Sunak has criticised the EU’s “regrettable choice of words”. He should have gone further. Calling the Falklands “Islas Malvinas” is like calling the Donbas “Novorossiya” — with one difference being that Russians have at least occupied those lands within living memory.

That doesn’t mean I want conflict with Argentina. About the last thing our two fine yet troubled nations need is pointless aggression. We both have quite enough things to worry about. But there’s one way to avoid diplomatic disagreement and it is the Argentinian government finding a new topic of conversation. Here, I’m afraid, I see nothing to discuss.

This mess was, of course, both predictable and predicted. That’s why I’ve been struck, visiting the U.K. this summer, by the curious political taboo against discussing how badly Brexit has gone, even among many who voted against it. Seven years ago, Brexit was an early augur of the revolt against cosmopolitanism that swept Donald Trump into power. (Trump even borrowed the “Mr. Brexit” moniker for himself.) Both enterprises — Britain’s divorce from the E.U. and Trump’s reign in the U.S. — turned out catastrophically. Both left their countries fatigued and depleted. But while America can’t stop talking about Trump, many in the U.K. can scarcely stand to think about Brexit.

“It’s so toxic,” Tobias Ellwood, a Tory lawmaker who has called on his colleagues to admit that Brexit was a mistake, told me. “People have invested so much time and pain and agony on this.” It’s like a “wound,” he said, that people want to avoid picking at. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, one of the few Labour Party leaders eager to discuss the consequences of leaving the E.U., described an “omertà,” or vow of silence, around it. “It’s the elephant in the room,” he told me. “I’m frustrated that no one’s talking about it.”

Part of the reason that no one — or almost no one — is talking about Brexit’s consequences lies with the demographics of the Labour Party. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of Labour voters supported Brexit, and those voters are concentrated in the so-called Red Wall — working-class areas in the Midlands and Northern England that once solidly supported Labour but swung right in the 2019 election. “Those voters do not want to have a conversation about Brexit,” said Joshua Simons, the director of Labour Together, a think tank close to Labour leadership.

Sheer exhaustion also contributes to making Brexit talk unwelcome: Between the vote to leave the European Union in 2016 and the final agreement in 2020, the issue consumed British politics, and many people just want to move on. Simons argues there’s also a third factor: a sense that the results of a democratic referendum must be honored. He cites a point that a mentor of his, the political philosopher Danielle Allen, made after the 2016 vote. “In the end, in democracy, sometimes you all do crazy things together,” Simons said. “And what becomes more important is not whether the crazy thing was a good or bad thing to do. It’s that you’re doing it together.”

As someone from a far more polarized country, I found this idea somewhat foreign. If the Trumpist electorate had imposed such a costly and ultimately unpopular policy on the country, I suspect there would be a rush among Democrats to reverse it. But in the U.K., referendums — which are rare and held only to address major issues — have a political gravity that is hard for an outsider like me to understand.

According to a new survey, a majority of college students believe that professors who say something "offensive" should be reported to the university.
The survey, from researchers at North Dakota State University, found that 74 percent of students overall supported reporting professors for offensive statements. While a majority of students from all political persuasions agreed with reporting professors, a higher percentage of liberal students were in favor; 81 percent of liberal students supported reporting professors, while only 53 percent of conservative students supported it.

The survey also found that 58 percent of students, including 66 percent of liberal students and 37 percent of conservative students, agreed that fellow students who make "offensive" statements should be reported to university administrators.
Researchers also presented students with a series of example statements and asked whether a professor should be reported for expressing these opinions in class. Students were much more likely to support reporting professors over typically "conservative" opinions. For example, 40 percent of all students (including 51 percent of liberal students and 15 percent of conservative students) agreed with reporting a professor for saying, "If you look at the data, there is no evidence of anti-black bias in police shootings." If a professor said that COVID-19 vaccine mandates are "an assault on individual freedom," 34 percent overall would favor reporting him. Thirty percent supported reporting a professor who spoke in favor of eliminating affirmative action.
But less than 15 percent of all students supported reporting professors for stating that not getting vaccinated for COVID-19 is "irresponsible," that those who oppose affirmative action are "perpetuating white privilege," or that a "civilized society doesn't need guns."

Overall, researchers found that two-thirds of surveyed students agreed that a professor should be reported for making one of the 10 example statements provided, including 75 percent of liberal students and 41 percent of conservative students.
These results indicate that a significant majority of college student support snitching on their professors—and peers—to university administrators for fairly mundane opinions on contemporary political subjects. 
"What I found alarming was students' willingness to report professors for stating opinions or facts. This year's survey clarified that they aren't talking about hate speech or harassment." John Bitzan, the survey's author, told The Hill. "An astounding 65 percent are in favor of reporting professors for stating opinions or facts about affirmative action, police shootings, vaccines, guns, and gender." 
The survey provides further support for concerns that American college students are increasingly unwilling to tolerate political opinions they disagree with. Most troubling, it seems that the bounds of what is deemed "offensive" has continued to expand. Not only do students now bristle at tolerating truly hateful speech, but they also seem unable to stand even basic observations on popular political issues.
An easy way to fix this problem would be for universities to stop making it so easy to tattle to administrators over minor political disagreements—and stop setting students up with the expectation that any offense deserves administrative involvement. 
However, that would require scaling back the huge bureaucracies that have exploded at many colleges for the express purpose of refereeing student and faculty speech—something most universities are unwilling to do.
The post 74 Percent of College Students Support Snitching on Professors Who Make 'Offensive' Statements appeared first on Reason.com.

In most countries, it would be unthinkable for a top government official to vanish for 26 days with no explanation. But that’s exactly what has happened in China, where Foreign Minister Qin Gang’s disappearance highlights just how secretive Xi Jinping’s regime has become. This is a problem not only for China itself but also for all who engage with the government in Beijing.

Qin, a close confidant of Xi who rose swiftly through the diplomatic ranks, hasn’t been seen in public since June 25. After he missed several high-level diplomatic meetings, China’s foreign ministry said in a July 11 news conference that Qin was suffering from “a physical condition.” That explanation is missing from the ministry’s transcript of the news conference. Responding to reports that Qin was caught having an extramarital affair with a Chinese reporter while he was ambassador to Washington, a foreign ministry spokesperson said on July 17, “I have no information to offer.”

On Wednesday, China’s new ambassador to Washington, Xie Feng, told the Aspen Security Forum he couldn’t say if Qin would see Henry Kissinger, who was in Beijing meeting with his “old friend” Xi and several other top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. Pressed on Qin’s whereabouts, Xie referred questioners back to the foreign ministry’s non-answer.

Inside the U.S. government there is a lot of speculation and intrigue about the issue but little hard information. U.S. officials initially guessed Qin had caught covid, but now he’s been gone longer than any bout of the illness would normally last. Several U.S. officials told me they thought the allegations of Qin’s affair were credible but not confirmed. Several said that, either way, he likely fell victim to infighting inside China’s top leadership clique, which is notoriously fratricidal.

“Qin has a huge number of enemies inside the government,” one senior U.S. official told me. “He was a marginally talented person, who, just through being close with Xi, catapulted up.”

Many of Qin’s rivals had good reason to be jealous of his meteoric rise. After Qin’s wife gave Xi’s wife homemade mooncakes, the story goes, Qin won entrance into Xi’s inner social circle. He was elevated from ambassador to foreign minister and made a member of the Politburo last year, and this year appointed state councilor as well. That made him one of the most powerful people in China. Qin’s predecessor as state councilor Wang Yi, now director of the CCP’s Central Committee Foreign Affairs Commission, is seen as Qin’s top rival. He did meet with Kissinger this week.

“The question is who released this information, accurate or not, and who benefits? Wang Yi is at the top of that list,” another U.S. official told me.

Officially, Beijing has not given the Biden administration any explanation for Qin’s absence. And the Biden team isn’t pressing for one because they don’t believe the CCP would tell them the truth anyway. After all, Beijing never explained why Xi himself vanished from public view for large periods during the pandemic.

Typically, in cases where top Chinese officials are accused of sexual impropriety, the party circles the wagons and goes after the woman. When Chinese tennis champion Peng Shuai’s relationship with a top official was exposed, she was the one who was disappeared and harshly punished. But last month, a top Chinese executive was forced to resign in the face of public outrage after being caught on video with his mistress.

Qin’s prolonged absence may indicate that he’s being set up to take the fall this time. He may be ultimately brought up on corruption charges, which would allow Xi to get rid of Qin without establishing a precedent that the CCP will now start punishing officials for extramarital affairs. Or he might just reappear and pretend like nothing happened. There’s no way to know. But now the world will get to see what Xi does when one of his handpicked allies gets into trouble.

Qin’s case also reflects a bigger problem: Xi’s government is not just secretive about officials and their scandals. Beijing is also pulling back on basic transparency across the board — and that has huge implications for the U.S. government, international businesses and anyone else who needs information from inside China.

The Chinese government is now restricting the release of basic economic and financial data that businesses and governments depend on. U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly recently warned of a “tragic miscalculation” unless Beijing lifts the veil of secrecy over its military and nuclear weapons expansion. The Chinese government initially concealed the outbreak of the covid-19 virus and continues to withhold crucial covid-related information from the world. China’s persecution of journalists and academics who tell unapproved truths has skyrocketed.

What’s worse, China is exporting this model of secrecy and unaccountability. In its dealings with international organizations and countries where it has influence, the Chinese government is trying to co-opt others into accepting extreme secrecy as a new normal in governance.

“Countries striking deals with Beijing are discovering that they are expected to follow China’s lead, limiting transparency and accountability just as Chinese leaders do at home,” National Endowment for Democracy Vice President for Studies and Analysis Christopher Walker wrote in Foreign Affairs. “The result of this pattern of engagement is a gradual erosion of global norms of transparency and open government — and the rise of new ones of concealment and opacity.”

Ultimately, the fate of Qin Gang is inconsequential; Xi can always elevate another one of his yes men. But what is very consequential is that Xi doesn’t seem to feel compelled to explain to the world what’s going on. The CCP’s growing secrecy adds more risk to dealing with China on every level.

When I speak to people about right-wing populism these days, I notice that many tend to believe that it’s old news. Populist leaders captured the world’s attention in 2016 with the Brexit referendum and then, later that year, with Donald Trump’s election victory. Now, seven years later, many seem to feel it is past its prime. Trump was defeated in 2020 and is under indictment. Brexit has been a messy failure; a majority of Britons now regret that it passed. Though it’s true that some populist heroes and causes have been battered, the core appeal of the movement persists and has actually gained ground in recent months.

Consider Spain, which was one of those countries long thought to be immune to right-wing populism because (like Germany) it once suffered under a right-wing autocracy. The conservative party Vox, founded a decade ago, was long seen as too extreme to make real inroads in the political system. Today, it is the country’s third-largest party. In May, it doubled its vote share in regional and local elections, and it now governs in many places. In Sunday’s election, the party didn’t do quite as well as expected — yet it maintained its status as the third-strongest force in parliament. Though its chances of participating in government have narrowed, it could still end up playing a role in a conservative coalition.

In Germany itself, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), once seen as taboo, has won back-to-back local elections in the country’s east. Nationwide, it is now polling in second place, roughly tied with the Social Democrats, Germany’s main leftist party. In Italy, the birthplace of fascism, Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Brothers of Italy party has been serving as prime minister since October. Though she has moderated her stance in many ways, Meloni continues to praise the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a now-defunct fascist organization to which she once belonged.

Sweden and Finland have both seen the rise of far-right parties that are gaining strength and political power. The Dutch political system now has several populist parties, some brand-new, and the tensions produced by their rise recently led to the resignation of that country’s longest-serving prime minister, Mark Rutte. In France, some polls show Marine Le Pen winning the next presidential election.

Why is this happening? Europe is going through tough times. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the resulting sanctions against Russia have affected Europe more severely than any other part of the world. The continent has been forced to abandon its addiction to cheap Russian energy and find alternatives, usually more costly. The rest of its trade with Russia has also collapsed. Meanwhile, cheap energy, new subsidies and a better regulatory environment are making some European companies think about moving their factories to the United States.

But it’s not really about economics. Spain’s economy is healthy; the country grew at 5.5 percent last year, and its inflation rate is among the lowest in the euro zone. But that growth is varied, and there are parts of the country such as Aragon — Spain’s Ohio — where deindustrialization has left people feeling dispossessed. Regions like Aragon exist all over Europe, and they add to a sense of despair and frustration with the country’s establishment and the European Union’s elites. The war in Ukraine has also led many in the E.U. to worry about the price they are paying for a conflict that, they think, doesn’t directly threaten them — especially because that is what many populist leaders tell them.

If I had to point to one issue, however, it is the one that has always been at the heart of the rise of modern far-right populism: immigration. Everywhere you look, you see that fears of uncontrolled immigration have produced political rewards for the “anti-globalists.” Covid-19 destabilized many developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere, which then exacerbated poverty and violence as those countries struggled. The Ukraine war has caused a once-in-a-lifetime movement out of that country on one side of the world, while Venezuela’s brutal crackdown has led to another of similar magnitude on the other. Climate change adds to this toxic brew. When you put it all together, you end up with a historic movement of people across the world.

Global leaders are struggling to mitigate the problem. The Biden administration has taken several measures to address the crisis at the border with Mexico, and, as a result, the flow of migrants into the United States in recent months has slowed considerably. It is working with other governments in the Western Hemisphere to tackle some of the issues that are driving out-migration. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is trying to forge a new asylum policy that would move illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda or elsewhere for evaluation. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has pledged to extend an existing wall between Greece and Turkey by more than 100 kilometers over the next few years to tamp down illegal border crossings.

But I worry that, as the pressures for migration increase, the rhetoric from the right will get louder and noisier. Trump is well aware that hostility toward immigration was his ticket to the White House in 2016. And at some point, as the demagogues raise their rhetoric and scare more people, the center will not hold.

Doom lurks in every nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s home office. A framed photograph of three men in military fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first appear to be two water heaters but are, in fact, thermonuclear weapons. Resting against a nearby wall is a black-and-white print depicting the first billionth of a second after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba. And above us, dangling from the ceiling like the sword of Damocles, is a plastic model of the Hindenburg.Depending on how you choose to look at it, Rhodes’s office is either a shrine to awe-inspiring technological progress or a harsh reminder of its power to incinerate us all in the blink of an eye. Today, it feels like the nexus of our cultural and technological universes. Rhodes is the 86-year-old author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book that has become a kind of holy text for a certain type of AI researcher—namely, the type who believes their creations might have the power to kill us all. On Friday afternoon, he will take his seat in a West Seattle theater and, like many other moviegoers, watch Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster about the Manhattan Project. (The film is not based on his book, though he suspects his text served as a research aid; he’s excited to see it anyway.)[Read: Oppenheimer is more than a creation myth about the atomic bomb]I first encountered The Making of the Atomic Bomb in March, when I spoke with an AI researcher who said he carts the doorstop-size book around every day. (It’s a reminder that his mandate is to push the bounds of technological progress, he explained—and a motivational tool to work 17-hour days.) Since then, I’ve heard the book mentioned on podcasts and cited in conversations I’ve had with people who fear that artificial intelligence will doom us all. “I know tons of people working on AI policy who’ve been reading Rhodes’s book for inspiration,” Vox’s Dylan Matthews wrote recently. A New York Times profile of the AI company Anthropic notes that Rhodes’s book is “popular among the company’s employees,” some of whom “compared themselves to modern-day Robert Oppenheimers.”Like Oppenheimer before them, many merchants of AI believe their creations might change the course of history, and so they wrestle with profound moral concerns. Even as they build the technology, they worry about what will happen if AI becomes smarter than humans and goes rogue, a speculative possibility that has morphed into an unshakable neurosis as generative-AI models take in vast quantities of information and appear ever more capable. More than 40 years ago, Rhodes set out to write the definitive account of one of the most consequential achievements in human history. Today, it’s scrutinized like an instruction manual.Rhodes isn’t a doomer himself, but he understands the parallels between the work at Los Alamos in the 1940s and what’s happening in Silicon Valley today. “Oppenheimer talked a lot about how the bomb was both the peril and the hope,” Rhodes told me—it could end the war while simultaneously threatening to end humanity. He has said that AI might be as transformative as nuclear energy, and has watched with interest as Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have engaged in a frenzied competition to build and deploy it.[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]AI boosters and builders would no doubt take comfort in an argument Rhodes once made, in the foreword to the 25th-anniversary edition of his book, that the discovery of nuclear fission, and thereby the bomb, was inevitable. “To stop it, you would have had to stop physics,” he writes. This argument echoes in the rhetoric of bullish AI companies and governments who see the technology as part of a global informational arms race. Democratic nations cannot pause or wait for laws to catch up, the logic goes, lest we lose out to China or some other hostile power.That idea helps explain why a technologist would construct an AI system even as they believe it could extinguish human life—and so does the epigraph in the first section of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Here Rhodes quotes Oppenheimer: “It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”As a technology writer, I have spent much of my career grappling with people who possess an impulse to build, consequences be damned. I’m fascinated and confounded by the mindset I’ve observed in AI founders and researchers who say they’re terrified of the very things they’re actively working to bring into existence. I’ve struggled to square this personality trait with my own inclinations: toward caution, toward a paralyzing obsession with matrices of unintended consequences. What is it, I asked Rhodes. What is the unifying quality that possesses people to open Pandora’s box? The question hung in the air, just below the dangling model of the Hindenburg, as I imagined Rhodes flipping through a set of interviews and dog-eared biographies in his head.He began to explain. Any great scientist, “before their 12th year,” he said, has “some formative experience that pushed them in the direction they were going in, and made them decide they wanted to go through the grueling process of learning mathematics or science until they could push the boundaries.” Enrico Fermi, the inventor of the first nuclear reactor and a chief architect of the atomic bomb, lost a beloved brother as a teenager, and not long after that, he grew obsessed with measuring and quantifying all areas of his life. “He could tell you how many steps he’d walked down the street,” Rhodes said. “He appeared so much like someone who found in numbers the kind of certainty that he’d lost when he lost his brother.” As a 10-year-old, Leo Szilard had been so disturbed by a Hungarian epic about the sun dying out that he grew fixated on rockets as a way to save the planet, Rhodes said—a quest that, eventually, led him to discover the nuclear chain reaction.“It’s no coincidence that so many of the people who ended up in the bomb program were Jews who had escaped from Nazi Germany,” he said. “They’d seen what was happening there, they were all around it, and they knew it was horrible and terrifying and had to be stopped.” Rhodes sees the shadows of his childhood in his own work too, which was marked by physical abuse and starvation at the hands of his stepmother: “It’s not surprising that all my books are, in some way, about human violence and how you deal with it, seeing as I’m an expert in that department.”[Read: Never give artificial intelligence the nuclear codes]Perhaps this is another lesson in duality—in the grand scheme of things, our nightmares and dreams are of a piece. If there is a concept Rhodes wants AI researchers and founders to take away from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, it is the notion of complementarity. This is an idea from quantum physics that the Nobel Prize–winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who, according to Rhodes, traveled to Los Alamos to impart to Oppenheimer during the darkest days of the Manhattan Project. In very basic terms, complementarity describes how objects have conflicting properties that cannot be observed at the same time. The world contains multitudes.Bohr, according to Rhodes, developed an entire philosophical worldview from this observation. It boils down to the notion that a terrible weapon might simultaneously be a wonderful tool. “Bohr’s idea brought hope to Los Alamos,” Rhodes said. “He told the physicists who were concerned about this weapon of mass destruction that this thing is going to change this condition of war, and thereby change the whole structure of international politics. It could either end the war altogether or destroy the world. The former gave them hope.”The grand lesson, as Rhodes sees it, is that you may build an apocalyptic weapon that turns out to be a flawed agent of precarious peace. But the opposite could also be true: A tool designed to perpetuate human flourishing might bring about catastrophe. And so for Rhodes, the true fear regarding AI is simply that we are on an undefined path, that we are moving too fast and creating systems that may work against their intended purposes: instruments of productivity that end up destroying jobs; synthetic media that ultimately blur the lines between human-made and machine-made, between fact and hallucination. “What is most disturbing about it is how little time society will have to absorb and adapt to it,” Rhodes said of AI’s ascent.On our way out of his office, Rhodes pauses to show me a jar the size of a film canister with what looks like some rocks in it. A faded typewritten label says Trinitite, the name for the residue scraped from the desert floor in New Mexico after the Trinity nuclear-bomb test in July 1945. The blast was so hot that it turned the sand to glass. “Pretty spooky, isn’t it?” Rhodes said with a smile. It’s clear to me now why he keeps these relics so close. They are the physical manifestation of Bohr’s philosophy and the through line of much of Rhodes’s work—complementarity as interior design. A reminder that the joy and the horror of both the natural world and the one we build for ourselves is the fact that very little behaves as we expect it to. Try as we may, we can’t observe it all simultaneously. It is a reminder of the excitement and terror inherent in the unsolvable mystery that is being alive.

The nirvana-like paragraphs upstairs is more a future reality than a fantasy, if you believe the good old accurate predictions of many of the world's ongoing prescient and booming (high-tech-related) stock markets.

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The big problem is, even the world's ongoing technological developments and breakthroughs, which has constantly been tempering or eliminating most of the bad effects of the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns (think the wrong predictions of Thomas Malthus), has also been running into the very problem of diminishing marginal returns itself.

Say for example, the latest non-AGI ChatGPT can't "understand," even like a human child, what it's doing when it's interacting with us human beings.

Instead of increasing the world's employment opportunites, ChatGPT is actuallly a job-reducing AI tool, as shown by the ongoing worker demonstrations in US's Hollywood.

The US's 5G/6G development, for some (Military-related) reasons, has been lagging behind that of China.

In the Main Street we still have to wait patiently for the appearance of next-generation McDonald's, Starbucks, and Walmart.

US's Facebook (Meta Platforms) first came out in 2005, Apple's iphones debuted in 2007, China's Wechat in 2011 and Tiktok in 2016, all already a very long time ago from the point of view of rapid technological development in the world's ICT field.

Today, fewer and fewer consumers in the world are planning to replace their old cell phones with the latest ones, since their user-experiences (say, 5G versus 4G, or 3-billion-dpi camera versus 30-million-dpi camera) will not be much different.

Similarly for 16K TV or 8K TV versus 4K TV.

The world's currently booming Electric Vehicle industry will also run into the same diminishing-returns problem one day in the far future.

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The lack of genuinely revolutionary technological breakthrough in the years following the Internet Revolution in the last century has ended up shriveling the world's aggregate consumption demand, lowering the actual and potential economic output of the world, and aggravating the general pessimistic view of many of the world's (middle-class) consumers, thereby forming a vicious circle and hence a secularly-stagnating world economy.

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The unfortunate and inescapable Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns in Economics perhaps resembles the similarly unfortunate and inescapable Second Law of Thermodynamics (increasing entropy) in Physics.

Hence the late formal arrival of the 4th Industrial Revolution on this planet ------ we may not be able to witness it in this decade, and perhaps also in the next decade.

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The laggard technological development of our world in recent decades may be related to

(a) the dominance of neoliberal economic thinking especially in the western world, the government-austerity propaganda of which has constantly been discouraging the DM countries' otherwise entrepreneurial government from helping their private corporations to innovate en masse,

(b) the rising global trend of High-Financialization, during which many stock-listing companies have been using their retained earnings either to buy back their own shares or to distribute handsome dividends to their stockholders, or both, instead of further increasing their R&D expenditures,

(c) the US's lack of a powerful socialist country-competitor in the global economic and geopolitical arena in the past decades (until recently).

The Internet, the greatest invention of humankind at that time, was originally an invention of the US Military which had been facing constant potential military threats from the USSR socialist empire in the last century.

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.If you have recently been told that you have a mental-health malady such as depression or anxiety, you are far from alone. The rates at which these diagnoses are being made have exploded over the past few years. A 2021 literature review in The Lancet measured a 26 percent increase in anxiety disorder worldwide during the first year of the pandemic, and a 28 percent increase in depressive disorder. Such symptoms are much higher among some groups, according to the 2021 publication of an extended afterword to the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and journalist Greg Lukianoff. For example, among politically progressive white women in their 20s, more than half said in early 2020 that they’d been told that they had a mental-health condition.The coronavirus outbreak and its associated lockdowns isolated people, causing widespread increases in feelings of loneliness and distress, which still persist. But some studies have shown that the phenomenon began before the pandemic, so other reasons for it must exist as well. One commonly identified factor is excessive social-media use, which can substitute for in-person relationships, intensify social comparison, and elevate loneliness. Still another reason (which I have written about previously) is the increase in political polarization, which can lead people to hate one another—feelings of depression and anxiety are elevated in those who direct hatred toward out-groups.[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]But one other explanation is emerging for the huge increase in population-wide estimates of mental-health diagnoses: the tendency to see stress and sadness as evidence that something is broken inside you. For many who have them, of course, anxiety and depression are medical problems that absolutely require treatment. But other cases exist for which we may have inadvertently pathologized perfectly healthy emotions—leading many people to believe they are ill simply because they’re reacting normally to the challenges in their lives.When physical disease is concerned, most of us make two basic assumptions. First, feeling bad is evidence of pathology. You never go to a doctor and say, “I’ve been feeling weirdly good these past few weeks, so I figured I’d better come to get it checked out.” Yet we all know that feeling pain or discomfort is not necessarily a good indicator of what might be ailing you. Often, such sensations are an indication that your body is protecting you—for example, you tweaked your back and it wants you to baby it for a few days. You probably have even experienced some beneficial stress—because, for instance, you worked out harder than normal, and now you have sore muscles.The second assumption we make is that ailments are purely binary: You either have them or you don’t. So you might say, “I have prediabetes,” and although that sounds very specific and clear, suggesting that a reliable treatment must exist, what it really means is that you have a glycated hemoglobin level from 5.7 percent to 6.4 percent. Meeting that diagnostic criterion leads doctors to think that, without some changes to your diet and lifestyle, your level might rise more and create significant health problems for you. But as a condition, it’s not in itself an ailment in any straightforward sense.As with many health issues, this is a case of a “dial,” not a “switch.” We treat the condition as if it were an on-off switch because we organize diagnostic medicine neatly around the classification of diseases, or nosology, to use the technical term.These assumptions have become embedded in mental-health treatment in ways that muddle reality even more. Positive mental health is defined by professionals and laypeople alike in no small part by “feeling good,” which means not experiencing too many negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, and disgust. But as one social psychologist, responding to normative assumptions about the value of psychological health, asked in a philosophy paper back in the 1950s, “Good for what? Good in terms of middle class ethics? Good for democracy? For the continuation of the social status quo? For the individual’s happiness? For mankind?”The nosological binary is even more problematic in diagnosing mental disorders. According to the World Health Organization, “In 2019, 1 in every 8 people, or 970 million people around the world were living with a mental disorder.” In other words, seven in eight people aren’t living with a mental disorder. But how would you find out whether you are the one or among the seven? Take any online test for depressive symptoms and you will almost certainly have a positive score, suggesting some degree of depression. But is that level a “disorder” as such? The answer is ultimately subjective: It depends on whom you consult, and whether the symptoms are judged to be interfering with your life “too much.”[Read: Why depression screenings should be part of routine checkups]More and more researchers are pointing out the high costs of such assumptions. To begin with, high levels of stress and sadness are completely normal, even beneficial. They are a natural reaction to ordinary events in life, a response that evolved to help us behave in useful, functional ways. Again, these emotions can be too active, but everyone will have good reasons to feel stress, which helps us react to an event with focus and energy when needed, just as we respond with appropriate sadness when we experience a loss or disappointment.In fact, people routinely don’t want to “feel good,” and respond to failure or threat by regulating their emotions downward (in a “negative” direction). For example, in one experiment where participants negotiated with a stranger, researchers confirmed that many of them wanted to feel some degree of anger to be more effective in doing so.The dial-versus-switch problem has led some health scholars such as Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield to assert that the current epidemic of depression is at least in part the result of “diagnostic inflation.” In their 2007 book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, they argue that by assuming that feeling bad is bad, we conflate normal sadness with clinical depression.Some researchers go so far as to claim that the whole system of psychiatric diagnosis should be scrapped. Writing in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, the British psychiatrist Sami Timimi argued that a label such as “depressive disorder” or “generalized anxiety disorder” “does not aid treatment decisions, is associated with worsening long-term prognosis for mental health problems, and imposes Western beliefs about mental distress on other cultures.”Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.None of this means that psychiatric or psychological help with emotions is a bad idea. As my Harvard colleague, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, reminded me, a problem of underdiagnosis applies as much as one of overdiagnosis, because millions of people—in the U.S. and around the world—lack access to basic mental-health care. Even those of us who do not have a disorder can benefit from help with emotional management, just as physically healthy people can benefit from learning ways to stay fit and take care of their body.The point is that feeling discomfort and seeking help should not necessarily mean that you are ill. You might instead be emotionally healthy but coping with unusual pressures, a period of change, or just, well, life on Earth.If you are concerned about your mental health, you should of course seek medical help. As Waldinger put it to me, “Never suffer alone.” You may benefit from any of a variety of treatments, including talking cures and prescription drugs. But here are three things to remember, especially in your lower moments.1. We are all anxious and sad.
Decades ago, the researcher Christopher Boorse uncovered a seemingly strange fact: By the ordinary criteria for mental disorders, the population at large is no less disturbed than the population of clinical patients. In truth, this isn’t so strange when we recall that distress is a dial, not a switch, and no one’s dial is at zero. The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is, after all, dukkha—that everyone suffers and suffering is part of the world. But forgetting this is easy when you’re told that you have a specific mental condition, and when you feel isolated and alone in your pain.You are not defective simply for feeling distress.2. The goal is not to eradicate suffering.
It is normal and healthy to want relief from your suffering, but futile and dangerous to try to eradicate all of your pain. Think of it this way: When you have a headache, you want a Tylenol to take the edge off, but not narcotics strong enough to numb you completely. Emotional self-management—through meditation or prayer, or with the help of therapy—is like Tylenol, so that you can regain a bit more comfort and control.3. Your happiness requires unhappiness.
The 20th-century self-improvement writer Norman Vincent Peale wrote a wildly best-selling book called The Power of Positive Thinking, in which he exhorted readers to start each day by reciting Psalm 118:24: “This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.” As a young man, I sometimes did this and gave thanks for the positive, happy things in my life as I did so. Today, I realize this was too narrow a reading of that verse. The psalmist is not saying “Be grateful for the fun stuff” but rather “Be grateful for all of it.” That means both the fun parts I want and the hard parts I need, so that I stay alert, mourn loss, learn, and grow.[Read: Treat your anxious dog like an anxious person]Some days, giving thanks for the bad feelings is just too hard. But we can at least remember that they exist for a reason; they are normal, we are normal, and we’re all right for feeling them.Stress and sadness are not automatic evidence that you have a disorder. They are evidence that you are a living, breathing human being living in a complicated world.

Family-run fishing businesses face a fraught and competitive environment even before the intrusion of burdensome regulations. In this case, the National Marine Fisheries Service promulgated a rule for herring boats that sweeps in most such businesses, as portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie “CODA.” If a vessel needs a monitor and hasn’t already been assigned one under a federally funded program, it must pay for one itself. The cost for most herring boats exceeds $710 per sea day. Four family-owned fishing companies sued, arguing that the industry-funding requirement—which isn’t explicitly authorized by statute—will have a devastating economic impact on the herring fleet and will disproportionately impact small businesses, destroying historic communities.

The district court ruled for the government, finding that various provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) conferred broad authority to implement regulations to carry out fishery management. Without any analysis, the court also found that, even if the statute were ambiguous, the government’s reading would be reasonable under Chevron, a 1984 Supreme Court case that established broad judicial deference to agency action. A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit affirmed, reasoning that the MSA’s authorization of monitors left room for agency discretion.

Now before the Supreme Court, MI filed an amicus brief, joined by professors Richard Epstein, Todd Zywicki, Gus Hurwitz, and Geoffrey Manne. We argue that the Court should take this opportunity to overhaul the Chevron-deference regime, because this experiment in rebalancing the relationship between administration and judicial review has failed. It has led to agency overreach, haphazard practical results, and the diminution of Congress. Although intended to empower Congress by limiting the role of courts, Chevron has instead empowered agencies to aggrandize their own powers to the greatest extent plausible under their operative statutes, and often beyond. Courts, in turn, have become sloppy and lazy in interpreting statutes. It’s a vicious cycle of legislative buck-passing and judicial deference to executive overreach.

Chevron deference rests on the presumption that Congress won’t over-delegate and that agencies will be loyal agents. But the past 40 years have shown that Congress loves passing the buck and agencies are actually principals who pursue their own interests. The time has more than come for the Court to revisit Chevron, whether it chooses to overrule it explicitly or keep it nominally under a newly restricted standard.

Law school associate Austin Severns provided research assistance for this filing.

Damien Smith says he came home one night in October 2021 to find an intruder burglarizing his house. When the police arrived, they tased him instead of the intruder. Smith, who is black, has now filed a lawsuit against the officers, claiming that they racially profiled him and violated his civil rights.
The officers "racially profiled Mr. Smith, and acted pursuant to LAPD policies and practices that allow and encourage officers to over-react to black people, whom they wrongly assume to be criminals," the 24-page suit argues.
Smith is an actor and filmmaker known for his appearances in The Purge and Snowfall. Smith had even been working on a documentary about police brutality when he had his own police encounter on October 13, 2021. According to the suit, when he entered his house around 12:30 a.m., he caught an intruder in the process of burglarizing his home. The intruder remained in the apartment while Smith called 911.
LAPD officers arrived around 1:30 a.m. and entered through the back door of Smith's apartment. According to the lawsuit, police "unholstered their taser guns, pointed them toward Mr. Smith, and screamed at Mr. Smith: 'Get on the ground!'" Smith protested saying, "I live here, I called 911!" LAPD officers subsequently tased Smith, striking him in the chest and back. According to a Los Angeles Times interview with Smith, when police tased him, the intruder used the opportunity to escape.
Several LAPD officers then handcuffed Smith and walked him out to a patrol car. Outside, a small crowd of Smith's neighbors had gathered, and several told the officers that they "had arrested the wrong person" and that Smith "lived there." Still, the officers placed Smith in the patrol car and closed the door.
"The physical pain, emotional distress and embarrassment that Mr. Smith endured at the hands of Defendant Doe Officer Guillen and other Defendant Doe LAPD officers remains to this day," the complaint states. "This incident and injury occurred only because Defendant Doe Officer Guillen and other individual and Doe defendant LAPD officers…failed to carefully and thoroughly investigate the facts leading to Mr. Smith's 911 call."
The lawsuit alleges that the officers' actions violated Smith's First, Fourth, and 14th Amendment rights and asks for damages to cover medical expenses and attorney's fees, as well as special damages for the emotional suffering the ordeal inflicted on Smith.
"I believe there was a racial component to this whole situation, how the police treated me, how everything was executed," Smith told the Los Angeles Times. "I don't think it would have went down in this manner if I was not African American."
While Smith's tasing and arrest are outrageous, it's unclear whether his lawsuit will succeed. Police officers are protected by expansive qualified immunity, which makes holding police accountable for civil rights violations an uphill battle. 
The post He Caught a Burglar in the Act. But When Police Came, He Says They Tased Him Instead of the Intruder. appeared first on Reason.com.

And this is a “Matter of Opinion,” Summer Reading Edition. So if, this summer, you take even a few vacation days, maybe relax at the local pool, get away to the beach, you might take a book or two along to pass the time. And we are here to help. Today, we’re going to talk about some of our favorite summer reads, books we love that we hope will make it into your beach bag. And also, let’s get into our own reading plans for the summer. Who wants to go first? How about you, Michelle?

OK, I’m jumping right in here, and I am shunning all of the high-brow potential and going for killer beach reading.

A woman after my own heart.

There you go. This works perfectly with umbrella drinks and lots of suntan lotion. So it’s a series of murder mysteries centered on four British pensioners. And it’s known as the “Thursday Murder Club” books, which is the name of the first installment of this. Now, I am not a fan of the mystery genre generally, but I have a friend who is, who basically forced me to read the first book of these. And they are flat-out brilliant. They’re funny, zippy, good plotting, good characters. But what makes them unusual is that the characters are all in their, like, 70s. And this advanced age plays a role in kind of how they approach things like death and loss and punishment and justice. They’re kind of all staring down their mortality, the mortality of loved ones, and it gives the series a really interesting perspective and a real emotional kind of oomph. The author’s Richard Osman. He’s a Brit TV presenter. And here’s where I want to make a plea to the TV gods. These would make a genius show. Like, Netflix, if you’re out there, there’s said to be a film adaptation coming, but I’m kind of convinced that these days, TV would be better. And I’ve already, helpfully, started my dream casting with this — Helen Mirren.

So it’s called the “Thursday Murder Club.” I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t read it. Is the idea that they have a club before they start solving the first murder? What is the — what is the way in?

What happens on Thursday?

(LAUGHING) Yeah, and how can we avoid it?

(LAUGHING) You know. Some retirement communities have shop or pickleball or zumba. These folks — one of them used to be an MI6 or whatever, and they originally were looking into cold cases. That was the whole thing. They would look into cases that had been sitting around, whatever. But then, as these things go on, people more contemporary start dropping like flies. And you know, you got a body over here and a body over there.

And are most of the murders in their sort of elderly zone? I mean, this is — you know, I was a long-time Agatha Christie reader back in the day, and —

I’m getting “Miss Marple” vibes.

Yeah.

But the best thing with “Miss Marple”— it was like there are so many murders in, like, three tiny English villages, right?

Or like “Murder She Wrote,” of course.

Oh, yeah, that Maine town —

The most murder-happy part of —

Maine is the most dangerous place to be, as we all learned.

She did end up traveling a fair bit, to be fair. But yeah.

I mean, these are — these are mostly local. They’re not all pensioners who are dropping — like, you can be any age and drop dead. It spans.

How many books are there now, roughly?

There are only three right now.

Oh, OK.

OK.

So that’s doable. That’s good. That’s good.

That’s a reasonable body count.

And they’re a very quick read. So there’s a fourth coming out in September.

As long as it’s not a George RR Martin situation, where we’ll be waiting forever.

Oh, dear god, no, there’s no sigils. You do not spend 16 days on how the pheasant was prepared. No, no, no, no, no. I’m just saying.

Sorry, it’s — the harshest dig at Martin is always his feast scenes.

I love it. I mean, he’s just cashing his checks, hanging out in Santa Fe.

Yeah, why would he bother at this point? Why?

Why would he bother? But I just wanted to say that I love the generosity of a series recommendation. Like, you know, Tana French was my go-to for a long time. You know, I’ve read all of those. Currently working my way through “The Slow Horses” series, which of course is on Apple TV.

I watched that show, but I’ve not read the book.

The TV show is fantastic, and I’ve been really trying not to get too far ahead of it. But you know, I’m an easy mark for an ongoing series of books with consistent characters.

Lydia, why don’t you go next then? You’re on a roll. Tell us what to read.

I mean, I feel like this is a bit of a blue-stocking beach read recommendation, but —

I am cool with that.

(CHUCKLING) I’m going to — I’m going to go ahead and make it anyway. I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about a book that I recently read, that is not a new book. It was published in 1980, and the book is called “Transit of Venus,” and it’s by Shirley Hazzard. And I mean, how to describe this book? You know, the plot is actually incredibly simple. It’s a couple of orphaned young women in post-war Britain. They’re originally from Australia. Their parents died in a terrible accident. You know, one is fair-haired, and she marries a bureaucrat. The other is dark-haired and slightly more mysterious, and she falls in love with a completely inappropriate and unavailable man who’s a playwright. And the third, sort of, character in this is a young astronomer named Ted Tice, who is in love with the dark-haired one. And it’s a saga and a love story. But it’s one of those books that I tried to read a few times and just couldn’t get into it. And then, once it kind of sucked me into its vortex, I just couldn’t let go. And it’s really about what we think we know about life and what actually happens. And I know that sounds incredibly vague, but as a person who’s, you know, in middle age now, marching towards 50, I’m thinking a lot about my past and the decisions that I’ve made that have brought me to where I am today. And this is a book that really sort of captures and encapsulates that feeling of, you know, the sort of recklessness of youth, and then getting to a place where you realize all the places that you went wrong, and all the serendipity that brought you joy that you didn’t expect. And I think that the thing that most endeared me to this book is that in the first couple of paragraphs, you learn the whole story, but you have no idea you’re learning the whole story. So you know, you get to the end of the book and there is just this —

Spoiler alert, Lydia Polgreen.

No, no, I’m telling you, it’s not a spoiler, because you’ll never know. You’ll never know. You get to the end of the book, and you just think, my god, how did I miss so much? And you just — I immediately turned to the first page and started reading again, because I wanted to be ravished by the plot with the knowledge of what I already knew, which is, like, kind of the opposite of a spoiler. You know, the writing is extraordinary. It’s just some of the most exquisite sentences you can imagine. There’s piercing insight into human nature. I loved this book, and I think more and more people should be reading it.

All right, I’m writing that down. “Transit —”

Lydia, you’re making me think of a book I just read, called “Trust” by Hernan Diaz —

Yes!

— which is a book that, sort of, the more you read, the less you realize you actually know about the story. And yet, it’s not disorienting. It’s actually beautiful. It’s sort of layered in that way. And the moment you finish, you want to go back immediately to start again.

Yeah, I’m an obsessive re-reader. Like, I love — “Middlemarch” is my favorite book, and I love to read it again and again and again. And I love books that reward rereading.

OK, I’ve got to admit. I was underwhelmed by “Trust.”

Oh!

I’m just going to say it. I’m sorry, I read it. I’m just, you know —

Oh, I loved “Trust.”

I got the gimmick. I did get the gimmick. The gimmick was good.

Takes all kinds.

It’s not a gimmick!

It’s a gimmick.

It’s a technique!

Tomato potato.

Ross —

Well, next, next summer, we can talk about it. So I’ll go next. I’m going to cheat and do middlebrow-highbrow combination, because I know Carlos will have, like, 17.

No, no, no.

But the reality is, we go to Maine more than anywhere else in the summer. And the core of my summer reading has always been Stephen King — appropriate to the Maine setting, appropriate to the beach. One of my formative childhood memories was reading King’s “The Stand” on a very crowded Maine beach, and just sitting there and thinking about, you know, how many people would be transmitting the superflu in that novel, to — you know, getting more and more uncomfortable with each passing page. And King — I would say late-career Stephen King is not as good as early-career Stephen King. But a couple of years ago, I read “The Institute,” which was one of his more recent novels about children with psychic powers, and enjoyed that a great deal. That was the closest recent King that sort of approximated the experience of reading “The Stand” or “The Shining” or something as a kid. So that’s one. And then, the highbrow choice is — everyone should read, and what better time to read it than over the summer — Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” If you’re looking to take a really large, totally insane travelogue about the complexities of Balkan Eastern European history with you to a world where your cell phone won’t disturb you and Twitter won’t bother you, you really can’t do better than this book. West wrote it based on a bunch of trips she took to what was then Yugoslavia, just before World War II. And I read it, you know, probably late 1990s, early 2000. And the book is all about how much Rebecca west loves the Serbs, who are, you know, sort of, at that point, a symbol of defiance against German authoritarianism. And of course, by the time the late 1990s come around, Serbia has a rather different valence in world politics. But since we’re in, you know, a moment of Slavic conflict, warfare in the marches of Europe once again, it’s just — again, it’s incredibly long and filled with insane historical generalizations, many of which don’t make any sense, and yet, it’s a great example of an individual talent going to a particular place and yielding just a really, really, really fascinating document — that does happen to be, like, 900 pages long. So you know.

This seems more like a martini book than a margarita book. I got to tell you.

Disagree.

This may be after the beach —

Disagree.

Post-beach.

It might be an ouzo.

But I can’t take a book that big to the beach. It’s just the sand —

It has to be one, right? You take, like, the one book.

Take the one.

My philosophy of beach read is either you take, like, that one massive thing you’ve always meant to read, or you take, like, three short books, and deciding that is a big deal. It’s like, it’s a great source of stress for me every time I have to figure out, like, am I going to do the big book, or am I going to do, you know, three books I’ve wanted to get to.

Yeah, I take the multiple, just in case. Because life is too short for me to read a book I’m not enjoying anymore. Like, if I don’t like it, it has about 40 pages to grab me before I’m jettisoning that bad boy.

Carlos? Let’s hear it. Let’s hear it.

All right. So —

The man we’ve been waiting for.

Oh, please, no.

[laughs]

I hope some of you have read and loved “Harriet the Spy,” the wonderful book by Louise Fitzhugh, which I certainly did. I wanted to name my daughter Harriet. My wife wouldn’t let me. That’s not the book I’m going to recommend. I am going to recommend the lesser-known sequel to “Harriet the Spy,” called “The Long Secret,” which is a perfect beach read. It actually takes place in a beach town where Harriet is spending the summer immediately after the events in “Harriet the Spy.” You don’t have to have read “Harriet the Spy” to appreciate and to love “The Long Secret.” It may help, but they are independent books. And what I love about it is that it captures how different, like, just summertime is when you’re a kid. You know how it’s like this place that’s just distinct from the rest of your life? I have read “The Long Secret” many times, many summers. It is just a lovely, lovely book. The other one — I’ll pull a Ross, and the other one I will briefly recommend is more in the category of, like, the massive book you bring to the beach or wherever you go. It’s “Conversación en La catedral,” “Conversation in the Cathedral,” by Mario Vargas llosa. I’m not a Vargas llosa completist. I’m trying to get there. But this is his greatest work, like, period. Don’t take my word for it. He has said that if he had to save but one of his novels from the fire, it would be this. The Cathedral, by the way, is not a cathedral. The Cathedral is the name of a bar. And there is a conversation that begins at the very beginning of the book that ends up running through, little by little, the entire novel. A lot of people have read, you know, “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” or “The Feast of the Goat.” Those are wonderful books, but this is it. This is the Vargas Llosa book.

I feel cheated that you guys cheated. I mean, I just was really strict with myself.

Right?

Chose one book. Michelle, I mean, back me up here. You know? Like —

I didn’t get that memo.

Technically, Michelle chose several books, a series.

Oh, so I’m the only — who would have thought that I’d be the only true rule follower on this podcast?

I think you should be allowed to cheat then in the next section.

Yes. Lydia, let’s put your bookmark in that thought. When we come back, we will share the books that we are looking forward to reading this summer. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back to the “Matter of Opinion” Book Club. So let’s get to our own summer reading plans. Lydia, why don’t you tell us one or more books that you’re excited about?

Nope, nope, nope, I am extremely disciplined. I only have the one. And I am a fan of the — as it seems like many of us are — the brick-sized book that you bring to the beach and read. I was once on a fully rained-out vacation in Turks and Caicos, where I read all of Ron Chernow’s biography of Grant. My wife kept poking at me and being like, wait, we’re at the beach. What are you doing? And I was just incredibly thrilled to be reading it.

You’re like, he’s about to take Vicksburg! Leave me alone!

Real page-turner. You know, you don’t need to not know what’s going to happen next to have your heart and your throat in that book. I love a big biography. So this summer at the beach, I’m going to be taking on “King: A Life” by Jonathan Eig. I’m not sure how to pronounce his name. So this has been one of the most anticipated biographies of the year, if not even longer than that. And I think we’re living in a time right now where we’re all — everyone’s trying to co-opt the legacy of Martin Luther King for their own purposes. And the real man is, of course, much more complex than any of us would like to admit. And there’s already been some news that’s come out of this book. Apparently, Alex Haley, who wrote the autobiography of Malcolm X and was a very celebrated journalist, who also wrote “Roots”— apparently, he completely fabricated something that everybody thought they knew about Martin Luther King, which is that he disapproved of Malcolm X. So already, this biography is reframing how we think about this incredibly important and pivotal figure in American history. And so that is the thing that I’m planning to read. And I’m going to stop there, because I want to hear what you guys have to say.

So I will go next. This is the dichotomy of the summer books — like either the big book or the shorter and multiple books. And I think I’m going in that direction this summer. So since they add up to one book, I can — I’m going to share all of them.

You’re cheating again.

So I’m a big fan of Flannery O’Connor’s short fiction. I love her book of essays called “Mystery and Manners,” which is just wonderful if you haven’t read it. I have never read “Wise Blood,” her first novel.

Oh, this is on my list, too!

And — oh, wonderful. Wonderful. I am dying to read it. I got it a while ago. Like Michelle said, I don’t want to waste time, you know. I don’t want to like just be lukewarm about a book. And so I have this pile that, like, you know, it gets bigger and shorter throughout the year. You know, things get called. Things don’t make the cut. You know, right now, Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” is there. Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn”— I have always been told how wonderful this is, so that is on the list.

Bonus recommendation for our listeners — the audiobook of “Heartburn” is read by Meryl Streep.

Oh, wow. I am so anti-audiobook, but I may have to break that rule —

It’s worth it.

— for that. And Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout,” which I am very eager to read it — came out, like, 2015, I believe. It’s supposed to be a wonderful kind of satire on race in America, and I’m super excited to read it. Those are my beach reads this summer that I can’t wait to dig into. Ross.

Well, so I was — I used to read tons and tons of contemporary fiction, and you know, somewhere in the last 10 years, my capacity to do it has fallen apart. I was thinking, though, of reading Hernan Diaz’s “Trust.” But if it’s a mixed verdict —

No! No, do it! Do it!

Do not listen. Do not listen to Michelle.

Michelle — I trust Michelle. You know, she saved me from my fixations on UFOs. I think — I don’t know. She might be —

Ross and I have an understanding.

— might be a trustworthy voice. But anyway —

You have to keep believing, Ross.

I was thinking — I was thinking of reading that. The book that I’ve actually ordered is a book that came out a few years ago, called “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli,” the epic story of the making of “The Godfather,” which — in spite of being, like many Americans of a certain age, a Godfather-obsessive, I have never read, but this book is supposed to be terrific. And you know, I’m not that happy with the state of American movies, so I’m thinking I’ll bury myself in a different era in US moviemaking when incredible alchemies were still possible.

Sounds awesome.

That’s brilliant.

Michelle?

All right, I’m going to close it out here. I have to read a lot of truly awful books for work, or at least start them, and then abandon them midway. So I mostly stick to fiction. And it is the rare nonfiction book that I will go all the way through, but I have one next to me that I am confident. It is Dave Grann’s “The Wager,” a tale of shipwreck, mutiny, and murder. And I know that I will love it, because I love everything Dave writes. I have known him for, like, going on 30 years. His books take the deepest this dive imaginable. He’s an obsessive, and he gets in there and finds everything there is to know. This is about an 18th-century British shipwreck where they wind up on this god-forsaken island and just go all “Lord of the Flies.” You know, almost think it can’t be true, because it’s so bizarre. And I am ready to just hunker down and tear through this.

Grann is so good. You know, the books they often cite about him are like, you know, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “The Lost City of Z.”

Yeah.

There’s one that I think is a little bit of a shorter book — lesser known, but I just loved as well — called “The White Darkness.”

Read it, loved it.

It’s a journey across Antarctica, like you know, the sort of, like, plight of the explorer. It’s wonderful. I had the chance to interview him about it at the National Book Festival a few years ago, and I was just — I was riveted.

Yeah. Wow. Well, I feel like we’ve figured this out. We all know what we’re going to read.

We’ve gone from, like, you know, children’s novel to whatever it is that Ross is carrying around about the Serbs? And what are you talking about?

“Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.”

OK.

OK, “Harriet the Spy” and “The Long Secret” are not solely children’s books. They can be enjoyed by children. They can be enjoyed by all of us.

What section of the bookstore am I finding them in, Carlos?

I’m trying to remember if I read “The Long Secret,” which shows, if I did, that I didn’t appreciate it.

Outstanding. It is outstanding. Don’t read “Sport,” which was the third book they did. I believe she wasn’t finished with it. It was kind of posthumously put together. I never trust those, because the author wasn’t really done.

That’s what I tell people about all my columns. I’m like, yeah, I know.

All right. Well, let’s turn the page from our book recommendations. When we come back, we’re going to hear from you. [MUSIC PLAYING] So recently, we asked you “Matter of Opinion” listeners, about your own summer reading plans. And here is what you had to say.

speaker 1 Hello, “Matter of Opinion.” My name is Leigh Catalano, and I’m calling from Portland, Oregon. speaker 2 Hi, I’m Gordon from Massachusetts. speaker 3 Susan, I’m calling from Albany, New York. speaker 4 This is Jordan from Colorado. I’m calling to give you my summer read recommendation. My recommendation is “The Three-Body Problem” trilogy. With all the UFO and, kind of, alien excitement happening, it’s really just a great read to get you thinking about aliens. speaker 3 “The Fisherman and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast” by Kirk Wallace Johnson. speaker 1 I’d like to recommend for summer reading, Natasha Pulley’s 2021 novel, “The Kingdoms,” a perfect genre mashup of alternative history and time travel, topped with a sweet romance. speaker 5 “The Education of Kendrick Perkins.” Kendrick Perkins was a long-time player in the NBA, now ESPN commentator. But this isn’t really your typical sports autobiography. It’s really more just about a young man growing up in the world, coming from the country, moving to the city, and dealing with all sorts of things he never really had to deal with or think about before. speaker 6 I’m not much for summer reading. I just like a good book. And the one you should read this summer is “Demon Copperhead.” speaker 2 I would recommend “Still Life” by Jay Hopler. It’s a good poetry book, and I just recommend it. speaker 7 I am just starting to read “The Tempest.” I took a free class for veterans, acting class in the city, for several months. And I auditioned, and I’m going to be independent part of the community ensemble, Shakespeare in the Park, this summer. So I want to wrap my head around it. speaker 8 Hi, this is Holly Cain. I’m calling from North Carolina. A friend recently suggested the “Maisie Dobbs” series to me, and I read the first book, and I’m thinking I may binge the rest this summer. It just reminds me of reading Nancy Drew in the summertime when I was a girl.

What would success in grappling with humanity’s permanent problem look like? How do we get to a society where most people are able to “live wisely and agreeably and well”? In the past couple of essays, I’ve focused on the technological changes needed to resolve the deep conflicts opened up by industrialization. To address the conflict between humanity’s technological striving and its embeddedness in and dependence on the natural world, we need revolutions in energy and food production. And to ease the conflict between modernity’s liberating individualism and our hard-wired needs as social animals, we need breakthroughs in housing, transportation, healthcare, and education to batter down the cost of living and thus reduce the need for market work for pay.
Technological progress alone, though, is not enough. To move past capitalism’s crisis of inclusion and arrive at a social order that offers everyone – not just the elite – good chances to find purpose, status, and meaning in life, we are going to need new social arrangements as well as new tools. In my view, we need to create an alternative pathway for flourishing outside of the capitalist system, one in which families, neighborhoods, and communities are reinvigorated by reassuming responsibilities that previously had been offloaded to either the market or the state. We need to make it so that capitalism’s vast impersonal order rests on a secure, sustainable foundation of strong personal ties and face-to-face relationships. 
I’m acutely aware that the new social synthesis I envision – a rebalancing of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft – is not at present the program of any popular movement. Many of the discrete elements of what I see as the next stage of social progress have attracted supporters and sparked growing movements, but nobody has put the elements together into a coherent, overarching vision. Back in my arrogant 20s, coming to conclusions that lay outside the mainstream just convinced me all the more that I was able to see things others missed. These days, however, being lonely in my opinions leads me to fear that I’m foolishly missing something that’s obvious to everybody else. 
Why change is needed
Putting trepidations aside, let me review the considerations that have pushed me toward the position I now hold. 
Everything we know about human flourishing points to the importance of strong personal relationships. Human beings are hypersocial animals: we dominate the planet today not because of our individual smarts, but because of our unique capacity for cooperative activity. The flip side of this superpower is a deep neediness: our ability to function at all is dependent on developing and maintaining connections to other people. Babies who don’t receive regular human touch can fail to thrive and die. Solitary confinement leads to mental illness and can shorten lives even after the confinement ends. Sartre had it precisely backwards: for Homo sapiens, hell is the absence of other people. Yet contemporary society is characterized by the progressive weakening and unraveling of personal relationships. People are disconnecting from family, disconnecting from work, disconnecting from friends, disconnecting from community involvement – and this disintegration is especially pronounced outside the elite. 
To build and maintain strong relationships, people need to do things together – even if the thing in question is just hanging out. People need to share responsibilities and engage in joint projects. They need to depend on each other. Yet the development of urbanized consumerist capitalism has drained our personal relationships of their functional significance. The home was once an economic production center; now it is a locus of increasingly solitary consumption. Churches and friendly societies once sustained us in the face of life’s downside risks; now we look to the distant and impersonal welfare state. Conversation with friends was once the main alternative to the boredom of idleness; now we have endless options for absorbing entertainment and stimulation that we can enjoy as parties of one.
We know that there is a strong connection between having an “internal locus of control” and overall life satisfaction. Life is better when we feel in control, when we can see the connection between effort and reward, when we believe we have the power to influence events. And while having an internal or external locus of control is influenced by our individual psychological makeup, the circumstances of our life are crucially important as well. Yet the conditions of contemporary society make it difficult for most people to feel in control. Members of the managerial, professional, and entrepreneurial elite enjoy significant autonomy on the job and pursue careers that assume a healthy measure of control over the course of one’s working life. Meanwhile, they have also developed the human capital to navigate the abstract complexities of bureaucratized life with confidence and a sense of entitlement. For most people, though, jobs offer little scope for autonomy and self-expression, and working life is more of a random walk through disconnected jobs than a self-directed career journey. Less acculturated to facility with the abstraction of modern life, most people tend to experience the constraints imposed by bureaucracies and algorithms as mysterious and inscrutable, totally beyond their capacity to influence and push back against. Their encounters with the system too often leave them feeling anxious, confused, and powerless.
Everything I’ve mentioned thus far is well-buttressed by the findings of social science, but let me add one further consideration that is more speculative in nature. As I wrote about in an earlier essay, until recently human existence was dominated by solving problems in the physical world – most pressingly, the problems of obtaining food, shelter, and clothing. Nowadays, in our postindustrial service economy, the business of society is increasingly disconnected from physical problem-solving; instead, our preoccupations are ourselves and other people. I believe that this progress has had a profound and unfortunate side effect: our mental lives are no longer disciplined by regularly bumping up against the hard, nonnegotiable demands of physical reality. Instead, our main reality is the murky, dreamy world of our and others’ thoughts and feelings, where everything is negotiable and what is popular or self-serving regularly trumps what is true. Losing our anchor in the physical world, I fear, has allowed us to drift off into all manner of morbid delusions and pointless status contests. Growing mental health problems among adolescents – the age cohort that is probably most thoroughly insulated from the hard surfaces and sharp edges of the physical world, and most thoroughly immersed in the preoccupations of identity and status – are one clear sign that we are adrift. Beyond that, there is the inconvenient fact that physical reality hasn’t gone anywhere: our dream world of identity and status rests on an immense foundation of rigorous and intricate problem-solving. I worry about the sustainability of a social order in which the vast majority of people have no understanding of how any of that foundation works and indeed lack the mental skills and habits that make such understanding possible.
All of the above leads me to the conclusion that capitalism has overshot. To achieve the goal of material plenty, mass mobilization into a vast, impersonal system of market-mediated specialization and exchange was essential. But to move from here to mass flourishing, we need to recognize that this system has been carried too far. We currently expect that most able-bodied adults will organize their lives around paid employment, with all the burdens on vital personal relationships which that imposes, despite the fact that for most people paid employment does not provide adequate economic security, development of capacities, sense of control, status, or satisfaction. Rising to the challenge of the permanent problem requires that we find a better way.
Supplementing capitalism, not supplanting it
With the achievement of technological breakthroughs now on the horizon, and the great additional wealth that they will generate, a better way is possible. It doesn’t require the overthrow of capitalism, or the development of some radical new alternative to markets for incentivizing and coordinating the large-scale division of labor. What is needed instead is a rebalancing of capitalism, one in which we divert some of our collective time and effort from participation in that large-scale extended order and instead take care of some of our needs through small-scale, face-to-face divisions of labor at the household, neighborhood, and community levels. 
In other words, my vision for social progress includes a significant expansion of home- and community-based production for internal use. With appropriate investments, we can help people achieve a measure of economic independence by providing for some of their own basic needs – including food, shelter, energy, childcare, schooling, and elder care. This project can be pursued at various levels of ambition, from helping families trim their grocery and electricity bills, to promoting the creation of teaching and caregiving co-ops, to developing new exurban communities designed for a more self-sufficient lifestyle, to establishing pioneer outposts dedicated to settling remote areas and exploring new ways of living.
Throughout the industrial and postindustrial eras, almost all the flow of people and resources has been in the opposite direction: from home production to selling your labor on the market, from independence to interdependence. These moves were staggered by sex: first it was mostly men, leaving the farm for work in factories, shops, and offices; women followed with a lag as traditional “women’s work” was automated, marketized, or assumed as a responsibility of government. Today in advanced countries, home-based production has been reduced to home maintenance, taking care of children, and preparing meals. But the time has come to stage a partial reversal of the long-term historical trend and begin relocating production closer to home – within the household, neighborhood, or community.
A movement to reduce dependence on both the market and government could start small and proceed incrementally, and even at a modest scale could make a positive difference in many lives. But for it to fulfill its promise, the shift to greater economic independence would need to scale up sufficiently to provide a large-scale alternative and counterweight to the capitalist cash nexus. The goal is not to supplant the capitalist system, but to supplement it and balance it: to provide a generally recognized and widely adopted alternative pathway for living well, to reduce or eliminate dependence on the labor market enough to substantially improve bargaining power for ordinary workers when they need or want to work for pay, and to produce sufficient demand for the technologies and techniques of self-sufficiency to spur sustained innovation along those lines both within and outside the system.
At first blush this may sound like an old prescription – and perhaps it is, but with a decidedly new twist. “Back to the land”/”small is beautiful” thinking has cropped up recurrently since the earliest days of industrialization – from utopian communes and the arts and crafts movement of the 19th century, to distributism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, back to utopian communes in the 1960s and 70s, and on to the “degrowth” movement of today. But these movements have all been predominantly reactionary: grounded in ethical and aesthetic revulsion toward capitalism and industry, infused with romantic yearning for the simplicity and organic wholeness of rustic life, and deeply skeptical of technological and economic progress. The more contemporary iterations feature an ecological sensibility – again, with a romantic embrace of primitivism and hostility toward energy-intensive, technology-intensive, organization-intensive modernity. 
The movement toward greater economic independence that I have in mind proceeds from a starkly different worldview. I am an unabashed partisan of modernity over our agrarian past, and of what Adam Smith called the “great society” and F.A. Hayek termed the “extended order” – the vast and intricate division of labor governed by impersonal rules and mediated by competitive markets. Looking at its record over the past two-and-a-half centuries, I regard capitalism as the greatest engine of human progress ever devised. And looking forward, I have no interest in a static, ascetic world of narrow, self-imposed limits. I believe that human knowledge and capabilities should be pushed as far as possible – to employ a favorite phrase of mine borrowed from Freeman Dyson, “infinite in all directions.” 
In the past, the call to withdraw from the city and pursue self-sufficiency in the countryside was a call for retreat. Not only was it motivated by reactionary beliefs, but if heeded its effects would have been regressive as well. Progress from poverty to abundance depended upon a mass migration of the workforce out of low-productivity agriculture and into cities and high-productivity manufacturing. Had that migration been halted, all the possibilities of abundance we are now struggling to realize wouldn’t even exist. 
But things are different now. Ordinary workers whose strong hands and backs were needed to build industrial prosperity are now superfluous and marginalized in a postindustrial economy. A partial demobilization from the market is therefore the path forward. The goal here is not to renounce our industrial heritage and retreat to simpler ways of doing things. On the contrary, the point is to advance to a higher level of social development – not by turning our backs on the extended order’s division of labor, but by embodying it in machines and software in a way that allows us to live more in tune with our inborn social natures.
The path to greater economic independence
Raw materials for an economic independence movement are scattered all across the contemporary social landscape. The surging interest in remote work. The emergence of the gig economy. 3-D printing and the maker movement. The free and open-source software movements. Baugruppen and other co-living arrangements. Circular economy initiatives. Rooftop solar power and other distributed renewable energy resources. Promising research advances in next-generation geothermal energy and small-scale nuclear reactors. The ongoing attempts to create intentional communities of one sort or another. Efforts to develop blockchain and token-based technologies as infrastructure for decentralization. The stirrings of interest in founding new, innovative cities. Vertical farming and farming robots. Artificial meat. Home schooling and the proliferation of online educational resources. 
What is missing is any sense of a common purpose – any recognition of a larger design that could transform this social bric-a-brac into pieces of a puzzle. But once you grasp the fact of capitalism’s overextension, immediate and long-term goals come into view that could supply the needed common purpose, uniting disparate and disconnected elements into a coherent movement for change.
One immediate goal is to promote working from home – not just remote work, but home-based businesses as well. The first step toward greater economic independence is reestablishing the home as a locus of economic production. That step alone provides an important measure of existential independence from the system: your choice of where to live is now independent from your choice of how to earn money, and your working hours and conditions are more under your control. The Covid-19 pandemic gave a huge boost to remote work and revealed a strong desire not to return to the old status quo. Meanwhile, the YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) movement in opposition to restrictive zoning rules – which, among other things, prevent the operation of a wide variety of home-based enterprises – has grown rapidly in recent years. Leaning heavily into encouraging remote work and home-based businesses would connect a nascent economic independence movement to contemporary trends, thus giving it traction, while putting those trends in a larger context and energizing them with greater ambition.
With more people at home during the daytime, the creation of co-op arrangements for childcare, schooling, elder care, gardening, and other DIY activities will become easier. Such arrangements could certainly arise in existing neighborhoods, but they would be part of the raison d’être of new co-living arrangements where people in multiple households collectively finance and build housing that features at least some shared facilities. Promoting and facilitating neighborhood co-ops and new kinds of co-housing provide additional short-term goals for an economic independence movement. Co-ops and co-housing are both natural complements to an increase in the size of the home-based workforce, and expanding co-ops is the most promising way to start unwinding dependence on market provision. 
Another step toward independence lies in further encouragement of rooftop solar panels and home batteries as distributed energy resources for the larger electrical grid. Already popular and growing more so, rooftop solar is sometimes criticized as inefficient since costs are more than double those for centralized solar production. In fact, rooftop solar actually lowers overall energy costs considerably because of its assistance in smoothing demand on the grid. Accordingly, what’s good for promoting independence from the system is also good for the system itself. Over time, energy self-reliance may evolve to encompass power generation at the community level and expand to include other renewable energy sources, but rooftop solar provides an excellent starting point because of its preexisting momentum.
One additional initiative is needed at the outset to ensure a favorable legal environment for greater economic independence. A successful movement will require, not just a whole series of technological breakthroughs, but an ongoing process of technological diffusion and adoption. It is vitally important for this process not to be obstructed by misguided intellectual property protections that keep valuable new ideas bottled up and artificially scarce. Hacker culture animates the maker movement and its free and open-source software counterparts and will surely provide the guiding spirit of an economic independence movement as well, and it is antithetical to the recent trend toward expansive enforcement of patent and copyright claims. Moving beyond the cash nexus will require people to become tinkerers again – taking things apart, putting them back together, experimenting, modifying, putting components together in new combinations, all without having to ask outsiders for permission or pay them tolls. Accordingly, a strong campaign for the precedence of physical ownership over intellectual property will be needed to safeguard the movement from IP holders insisting upon rents. Especially important are the defense of robust rights of repair and a broad reading of fair use; even better would be a blanket exemption from patent and copyright claims for any allegedly infringing activity that is primarily noncommercial in nature.
All these initial steps toward economic independence help to set the stage for the main event, the ultimate long-term goal of the movement. And that is to chart and pursue a new direction for technological and organizational advance: achieving material abundance at human scale. The transition from poverty to plenty was made possible by elevating production and organization to superhuman scale: crowded cities, sprawling factories, multidivisional, multinational corporations, and far-flung transportation and communications networks, all situated in the global extended order of impersonal rules and institutions. But just as advances in productivity reduced the scale of profitable production, thereby enabling the transition from mass production of fungible goods to mass customization of made-to-order products, other advances can enable reductions in the scale of the division of labor needed to provide basic material needs at high levels of quality and variety. Those advances can open up a viable and progressive alternative to paid employment: households and communities that operate at a high degree of self-sufficiency.
Vertical farming, artificial meat, renewable energy, and 3D printing are among the new technologies that make the transition to human-scale abundance imaginable. But to make the imaginable possible and the possible real will require sustained research and development – not just in labs, but on the ground in actual residential settings with the kind of iterative tinkering that propels new ideas down the learning curve. 
A growing network of pioneer communities could serve as the proving grounds for the new technologies of economic independence. These communities would range in size from a few dozen to a few thousand residents, perhaps with some kind of modular structure that allows smaller units to federate and scale up. They could be constituted out of existing residential areas, but over time more and more would be located in new developments designed and built for greater self-sufficiency at the household and community level. Philanthropy can play an important role in launching the first communities, but over the long term government support will be vital. 
Think of a 21st century version of the Homestead Act, giving people the resources they need to build new and better lives on their own. An extensive list of technological missions relevant to achieving human-scale abundance could be developed, and people seeking to found new communities could apply for support with plans for advancing this or that mission. In exchange for benefits received – free or heavily discounted land, infrastructure, and equipment, along with access to technical assistance – pioneer community residents would be expected to collect and share information as part of the larger collaborative R&D effort. For a 21st century Homestead Act to realize its full potential, it will need to provide not only resources and financial support, but also the legal and regulatory flexibility to try out new technologies, building and production methods, and social arrangements. In other words, it should follow the example of the charter cities movement and allow the experimentation conducted in pioneer communities to extend to governance.
Reaching the next level
So what might a successful economic independence movement be able to achieve after a few decades of steady progress? Imagine an extensive archipelago of pioneer communities, home to a double-digit percentage of total households – and, amplifying the communities’ effect on the larger society, a large penumbra of independence-friendly activity, including a major shift toward remote work, home-based businesses, and new co-housing arrangements. 
The pioneer communities are all committed to a high degree of self-reliance, and residents are proud of the fact that they take care of their own needs: they grow much of their own food, generate their own electricity, mind and school their own kids, and take care of their aging parents. More and more of them build their own housing as well. How common work is organized will vary from community to community, with arrangements ranging from informal communalism to contractual commitments to co-op and corporate forms. For goods and services provided at the community level, it may be possible to develop local currencies so that people can still use market mechanisms but in a way that keeps the money at home and encourages community self-sufficiency. 
While some pioneer communities in remote locations take self-sufficiency as far as they can, typically residents have a fair degree of involvement with the larger market order. Communities regularly sell surplus crops and food as well as power. Some might attract tourists and short-term visitors. Many residents have remote work jobs, others run home businesses, others have on-site jobs that they schedule around their community obligations. They buy clothes and cars and TVs and smartphones and all the other normal personal possessions, and they travel and go out to restaurants and bars just like everybody else. 
But in the pioneering culture, people draw a clear line between needs and wants. Needs they take care of on their own, as much as possible, while market work is for covering the extras. A genuine DIY ethos takes root: people take pride in knowing how things work, how to build and maintain things, how to operate and repair complex machinery, how to program. They consider themselves superior to those still living in full dependency on the market and government. People seeking financial independence talk about having “f*** you money” – a cushion to protect them no matter what happens. Pioneer community residents have “f*** you lives”: they can take care of themselves no matter what happens.
They know their quality of life is better than it was for most of their parents, and they think this makes them wealthy in the ways that count most. Most of them never have to commute. Enmeshed in deep and functional personal relationships, they spend a lot less time alone in front of screens. They eat better and exercise more. Substance abuse and mental illness are less common. 
Family life and childhood are also noticeably different. Once you stop warehousing adults in shops and offices all day, the need to warehouse kids in institutional daycare or schools evaporates. Children help out with chores as soon as they are able, they play freely and spontaneously with each other as there are always adult eyes around, and their schooling is smaller-scale, less structured, and more integrated into the activities and challenges of daily life. And as the reintegration of work and family life dramatically lightens the burdens of child-rearing, kids aren’t just freer and more independent than those in contemporary suburbia – they are more numerous as well. Pioneer communities are the scene of a new baby boomlet.
And what about the rest of society? What about all the people still immersed in the capitalist system? Of course outcomes will vary from country to country, with their different political structures and different lines of political division, but in general we can expect the emergence of a sizeable class of highly self-reliant citizens to have beneficent consequences for the polity at large. It is likely that the creation of a viable alternative beyond the cash nexus will appeal most to people less favored by the status quo. Accordingly, although a goodly number of people from the professional and managerial elite do choose to opt for the pioneer life, most residents of the new communities come from outside the capitalist elite. The wealth built up in pioneer communities thus represents a sizeable egalitarian shift relative to the preexisting order. And with the significant reduction in total hours spent in paid employment, labor markets are tighter and thus more worker-friendly. 
A successful economic independence movement would thus, for the first time in many decades, confront the elites of the capitalist system with significant countervailing power. That power arises out of real leverage: residents of the new pioneer communities are in effect participants in a slow-motion general strike, withdrawing their labor and thereby augmenting the bargaining power of those still selling their services on the market. As this dynamic plays out over time, the message delivered to political elites is unmistakable: the best way to protect the capitalist system of paid employment from further erosion is to make it a better deal for workers.
A successful movement for economic independence would not deliver utopia – but it may keep dystopia at bay. For millions of people, it would mean the chance for a better, more fulfilling life – an alternative pathway for contributing to society and pursuing happiness. And for everyone else, it would mean living in a society that is now less skewed toward favoring the rich and powerful. Carving out a new way of life beyond the cash nexus would not wreck or replace capitalism; it would help to revive capitalism by creating more balanced, less top-heavy social orders in which it can operate.
For the foreseeable future – that is, until the coming of artificial general intelligence and replicator machines – a vast division of labor mediated by competitive markets will remain an indispensable social technology for providing a whole host of goods and services vital to prosperity and prospects for human flourishing. But as our present era of capitalist overextension has made clear, the social technology of the capitalist system isn’t good for everything, and it doesn’t work well for everybody. For capitalism to continue functioning as an engine of social progress, its scope needs to be narrowed so that it operates within its areas of comparative advantage. By creating a progressive alternative pathway for social life, a successful economic independence movement can make it possible for capitalism to refocus – and rebound.
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I would not have guessed that a mere week after writing about FDA approval for leqembi for Alzheimer’s disease, I would feel compelled to write about another drug that also shows incredible promise for treating the disease. This makes three drugs that have either gained some form of FDA approval or shown clinical efficacy in a phase III trial. This has caused a flood of calls to my colleagues who specialize in treating dementia, so a review of where things stand could be helpful. It is also interesting to review how things have seemed to change so quickly after decades of disappointment.

To review, in June 2021 the FDA gave accelerated approval to Aduhelm (aducanumab) for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is a progressive dementia caused by a neurodegenerative process. As I wrote at the time, this decision was somewhat controversial. First, it was one of the early tests for the FDA’s new accelerated pathway, which can approve a drug for an unmet need based entirely on improvement in a biomarker without evidence of actual clinical benefit. Further, there was good reason to be cautious about the amyloid hypothesis of AD on which the approval was based. The evidence itself also had some issues – an independent analysis questioned the statistical significance of the results.

All things considered, it was not looking good for Aduhelm or the FDA’s new accelerated pathway. Biogen, the manufacturer of Aduhelm, was given three years to provide clinical evidence that their drug actually works, and studies are still ongoing. Meanwhile, Aduhelm now appears to have been beaten to the finish line by two other similar drugs, answering many of the thorny questions about this entire approach to AD.

Early in 2023 leqembi (lecanemab) was given the same accelerated approval by the FDA based on the same kind of data, that the drug binds to and reduces amyloid. Last week, based on a large clinical trial, that approval was upgraded to full regular approval. Leqembi reduces the progression of clinical measures of AD by 27%. Now, a mere week later, a large clinical trial shows that a third drug, donanemab, reduces AD progression by 35%.

Before I discuss further what all this means, let’s review the new data. First, this was a very large trial:

Multicenter (277 medical research centers/hospitals in 8 countries), randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 18-month phase 3 trial that enrolled 1736 participants with early symptomatic Alzheimer disease (mild cognitive impairment/mild dementia) with amyloid and low/medium or high tau pathology based on positron emission tomography imaging from June 2020 to November 2021.

Of the 24 clinical outcomes measured in the trial, 23 were statistically significant. The effect size is also robust:

The least-squares mean (LSM) change in iADRS score at 76 weeks was −6.02 (95% CI, −7.01 to −5.03) in the donanemab group and −9.27 (95% CI, −10.23 to −8.31) in the placebo group (difference, 3.25 [95% CI, 1.88-4.62]; P < .001)

Tau is another protein implicated in AD, and the group that did the best were the low-tau group. The mixed tau group also saw improvement, but not as much. Also, there was a correlation between early treatment and benefit. Like lecanemab, about 24% of subjects had changes on their MRI scan shows edema or effusion, 6% symptomatic. Three patients in the treatment group died of a treatment reaction, while one died in the placebo arm. The FDA is likely to have a decision by the end of the year, but given this data it is very likely that donanemab will gain full approval.

How is it that after three decades of failure, we now have three drugs in two years showing such promise? There are several factors. It is interesting to note that until these three drugs there was considerable controversy over the amyloid hypothesis of AD. It is clear that beta amyloid and other forms of amyloid and tau proteins build up in the brains of AD patients. These proteins become toxic when they form complexes, including plaque and fibrillary tangles. However, it was never fully clear if the plaque and tangles were the consequence of the disease or the cause of neurodegeneration. If the former, then targeting amyloid would cause cosmetic changes but not be disease-modifying. Many amyloid targeting drugs have been tested over the years, and none have worked, casting doubt on the notion that amyloid is the culprit.

Perhaps the most significant thing to come out of lecanemab and now donanemab showing clinical benefit is that these drugs are the first clinical confirmation of the amyloid hypothesis. Of note, lecanemab and donanemab target different forms of amyloid. Donanemab targets plaques directly, while lecanemab targets forms of amyloid before they form into plaques. Donanemab shows that clearing plaques themselves is beneficial. The data also show that the benefits last even after treatment stops, at least for 18 months.

So what was the breakthrough? Researchers give several reasons. First, these three drugs are all monoclonal antibodies (that is why they all end in “mab”). These are antibodies that bind to certain type of amyloid and target the immune system after them, which then breaks them down and clears them. This approach likely just works better than previous drugs.

Second, researchers have been more aggressive at dosing. It is almost a cliché that when a drug fails to show benefit in a clinical trial, proponents always argue that we simply need to give it in a higher dose, or perhaps there is a subgroup for whom the treatment works. It turns out, both are true when it comes to anti-amyloid treatments. You need to significantly reduce amyloid build up to see clinical benefit. Also, researchers started studying patients with early disease, and that seems to have made a big difference.

What, then, is the current state of treatment for AD and what can we expect in the future? First, studies of Aduhelm need to be completed to show clinical benefit. This is looking much more likely, given the results from lecanemab and donanemab. Assuming it works, and the FDA gives final approval to it and donanemab, we may soon have three FDA approved disease-modifying treatments for AD. It is a new world, and an exciting time for the field of AD research and treatment.

Patients now have interesting options. Of the three drugs, donanemab looks the most promising, both because it has the largest effect size, and because treatment does not necessarily need to be indefinite. Researchers think that a one year treatment phase followed by occasional maintenance treatments may be enough. Meanwhile, lecanemab requires treatments every other week indefinitely.

But it’s always good to have options. Not every patient may tolerate or respond to donanemab, and could cross over to one of the other drugs if necessary. Also, it is possible that combining lecanemab and donanemab (and eventually aducanumab) may have added benefit, since they target different versions of amyloid.

These treatment seem to work best, and may be only worth the risk and expense, in early disease. So it is important for patients with very mild or early symptoms to be evaluated by a specialist and start treatment as early as possible. Also, the availability of treatments tends to light a fire under diagnostic interventions. We generally don’t bother (outside clinical trials) with expensive, risky, or invasive diagnostic procedures for a disease that isn’t treatable anyway. But now that AD is treatable, early diagnosis becomes critical.

This will even cause a push for better diagnostic technology to identify AD earlier and earlier, perhaps even before clinical symptoms. The hope is that very early treatment will slow progression enough that people will not live long enough to ever develop severe dementia. This may lead to screening for AD in asymptomatic individuals, especially if there is a family history of AD.

Now that we know targeting amyloid can alter the disease, this will help focus future research. There are many subquestions about exactly which form of amyloid or tau to target, and in which combinations. The three approved drugs may be eventually considered to be just the crude beginning of this process – important proofs of concept, but not the mature treatments we will eventually have. The success of these drugs is likely to spawn and guide years of subsequent research.

Last year, a Tennessee high school suspended a junior for three days as punishment for a series of playful Instagram posts lampooning the principal. According to a new lawsuit, that suspension was unconstitutional.
Referred to in the lawsuit as I.P., the student, who attends Tullahoma High School in Tullahoma, Tennessee, made several Instagram posts while off campus. The posts were humorous depictions of Jason Quick, the school's principal. The photos, according to the student, were intended to lampoon Quick's reputation as a strict and humorless administrator. For example, In one post, a photo of Quick holding a box of produce has the text "my brotha" added to it. In another, Quick's face is placed over a picture of an anime cat. 
The posts didn't disrupt school, but Quick ordered the student to receive a five-day suspension. The punishment was later downgraded to a three-day suspension when I.P. suffered a severe panic attack after being informed of the five-day suspension. School officials justified the suspension by claiming that the student had violated school policies barring students from posting pictures that "result[] in the embarrassment, demeaning, or discrediting of any student or staff" and are "unbecoming of a Wildcat."
According to the lawsuit, the school maintained I.P.'s punishment even when given a legal letter informing them that they were violating his First Amendment Rights under Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. The 2021 Supreme Court decision held that public schools cannot punish students for non-disruptive off-campus expression.
On Wednesday, I.P. filed a lawsuit with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment nonprofit. The suit challenges the school's social media policies as unconstitutionally vague and argues that school administrators had no legal right to suspend him for his off-campus Instagram posts.
"I.P.'s posts are protected First Amendment expression because they satirized a government official and did not create material disruption, cause substantial disorder, or invade the rights of others at school. The posts likewise did not cause Defendants to reasonably forecast such a disruption," reads the 48-page complaint. "There is no legitimate, let alone compelling, state interest in prohibiting students from engaging in non-disruptive speech about school staff or other students outside school hours and away from school property.
While stuffy administrators might not like it, public schools don't get to act as around-the-clock censors of students' speech. Once students are off school grounds, their public schools have no right to punish them for expression that doesn't cause a substantial disruption at school—even if they find that expression offensive or embarrassing.
The post Tennessee Public School Sued After Suspending A Student Over Instagram Memes appeared first on Reason.com.

Washington conventional wisdom holds that former vice president Mike Pence’s chances of securing the GOP presidential nomination are slim. He is too closely associated with Donald Trump for anti-Trump Republicans and not sufficiently loyal to the former president for the MAGA crowd. But Trump’s legal troubles, as well as recent stumbles by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have opened up political space for Pence, who is now running third or fourth in most national polls.

In search of momentum, Pence is doubling down on foreign policy — and specifically Ukraine — as the centerpiece of his campaign. He traveled to Kyiv shortly after announcing his candidacy last month. He met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and spoke with religious leaders and witnesses of Russian war crimes. On the campaign trail, Pence is leaning hard on his foreign policy expertise and experience to argue that, as he told me during an interview on Monday, “this is no time for on-the-job training” when it comes to national security.

But, keenly aware of the Ukraine fatigue within his party, Pence is trying to fuse the idealism of President Ronald Reagan’s freedom agenda with a heavy dose of Trump’s “America first” focus on the United States’ national interests. Threading that needle won’t be easy.

“I think America is the leader of the free world, and I think we’re in the midst of a vigorous debate within the Republican Party whether or not we’re as a party going to shrink from that role,” he told me.

Politically, Pence’s staunch pro-Ukraine stance is not as risky as it might seem. It’s true that polls show that GOP voters are increasingly weary of U.S. aid to Ukraine. Yet when Republicans are asked if defending Ukraine is in the country’s national interest, a slim majority still say yes. That’s why Pence often refers to national interest to argue that if Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine, he will attack a NATO country next, drawing U.S. troops into the fighting.

Pence also rejects the notion put forward by some conservatives that the United States should reduce support for Ukraine so that it can boost its deterrent against China.

“There’s no more effective way to restrain China’s military ambitions in the Asia-Pacific than having the United States and the free world give Ukraine what they need to repel a Russian invasion,” Pence told me.

In a nod to the concerns of Republican fiscal hawks, Pence told me he would not support extensive economic aid to the Ukrainian government as president, preferring to focus on ramping up transfers of military supplies and putting the financial burden on the Europeans. That roughly tracks with the position of GOP leadership in Congress.

Running on his Russia record is complicated for Pence, given that Trump’s deference to Putin likely made Reagan turn in his grave. Tactically, though, it allows Pence to tout the parts of Trump’s foreign policy he supported (such as sending Javelin antitank missiles to Ukraine), while painting the Biden administration as weak (for not arming Ukraine enough).

Another benefit the Pence campaign can hope for by focusing on Ukraine (and foreign policy writ large) is that it highlights his competitors’ clumsiness. Both Trump and DeSantis have adjusted their Ukraine rhetoric after catching flak for statements that were overly accommodating to Putin. DeSantis called last year’s Russian invasion a “territorial dispute” before walking back his remarks; Trump called Putin a “genius” when the Kremlin launched its assault.

“It’s a Russian invasion, not a territorial dispute. Putin is a war criminal, not a genius,” Pence told me. “I’m ready for this debate.”

On Sunday, Trump elaborated on his previous claim that he could solve the Russian-Ukraine war within 24 hours of retaking office. Trump said he would threaten to stop sending weapons to Ukraine unless Zelensky struck a deal, while simultaneously coercing Putin to the table by threatening to send more arms to Ukraine.

Pence told me he thinks Trump is moving toward Pence’s view in one key respect: The former president now admits that arming Ukraine is the best way to influence Putin’s behavior.

“I think President Trump has got it half right,” Pence told me. “I think he’s coming around.”

Some conservative leaders, such former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, will likely never come around on Ukraine. At the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa last week, Carlson accused Pence of ignoring Zelensky’s supposed repression of Orthodox Christians. Pence was at least able to push back against Carlson by noting that he had met with Orthodox leaders during his trip who explained why the situation isn’t as simple as Carlson claims.

“I think this is a moment where those of us who understand who we’re dealing with in Vladimir Putin and in those that have aligned themselves with him, like Xi [Jinping] and Iran, step forward and explain to the American people what’s really at stake here,” Pence told me.

Pence is right; strong leadership and an experienced commander in chief who believes in American values seem important in this world of growing chaos and uncertainly. But what remains unclear is whether today’s Republican Party is still receptive to that message — or open to Pence as its messenger.

During a Tuesday interview with CNN, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, was asked by anchor Jake Tapper to respond to the breaking news that former President Donald Trump could face a federal indictment for his role in instigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
DeSantis' response was a revealing one.
"If [special prosecutor] Jack Smith has evidence of criminality," asked Tapper, "should Donald Trump be held accountable?"
"Here's the problem," DeSantis replied. "This country is going down the road of criminalizing political differences, and I think that's wrong." A few moments later, DeSantis complained about the Department of Justice and the FBI being "weaponized against people they don't like." Eventually, he also got around to saying that he hopes Trump won't be indicted because it "won't be good for the country."
Leave aside, for now, the bigger questions about whether another Trump indictment would be good for the country—or, for that matter, good for DeSantis' own presidential aspirations.
Focus on the first part of DeSantis' answer—the part about how criminalizing political differences is wrong. Tapper didn't seize on that moment, but it would have been interesting to see him follow up by asking DeSantis how that position fits with the Florida governor's extensive track record of wielding the power of the state against those with whom he has political disagreements.
Indeed, the weaponization of the state against those on the political left is the central theme of DeSantis' entire campaign. He proudly boasts that Florida is "where woke goes to die," and has banned schools in Florida from teaching anything that state education bureaucrats might deem to be "critical race theory." Regardless of how he might define the terms "woke" and "critical race theory," there's no denying that his objections to them are purely political.
You could say the same thing about DeSantis' decision during the pandemic to ban private businesses from requiring that workers and customers wear masks. And about his ongoing feud with The Walt Disney Company, Florida's largest employer, which has accused DeSantis of orchestrating an unconstitutional "targeted campaign of government retaliation" after Disney's then-CEO, Bob Chapek, spoke out against DeSantis' so-called "Don't Say Gay" law, which banned discussions of gender identity in public elementary school classrooms (the law was later broadened to include most classrooms up to grade 12).
That's a political disagreement about another political disagreement—and in both cases, DeSantis has aimed to limit the free speech rights of his opponents. While that may not quite rise to the level of "criminalizing political differences," which is what DeSantis accused the Justice Department of doing, DeSantis clearly has no qualms about exercising state power in political fights.
In his recent book, DeSantis makes clear that he would continue to use state power against his political opponents if elected president. "An American revival," DeSantis writes, "requires that corporations are treated as political actors when they use their economic power to advance an ideological agenda." Later in the same chapter, DeSantis imagines various ways in which "the political branches [of government] can protect individual freedom from stridently ideological private actors" by limiting what those private actors can do or say.
The idea that government should intervene to protect some private individuals from the free speech being exercised by other private individuals is both nonsensical and probably unconstitutional. As The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has written about DeSantis' misunderstanding of the value of freedom: "Neither my freedom nor yours requires the state to protect us from an entertainment company urging the state legislature to repeal a bill, or a beer company putting a trans influencer on a can, or whatever else DeSantis regards as a pathology. Indeed, we remain free in part because the First Amendment prevents the state from engaging in that sort of viewpoint discrimination."
Much of what DeSantis has done in Florida and promised to do if elevated to the presidency is jarringly at odds with his criticism on Tuesday of Trump's pending indictment. When you line that moment up against DeSantis' campaign rhetoric, he seems to be saying that the problem with Trump's possible indictment is merely that the state has been weaponized against the wrong person.
But that's the root of the contradiction at the center of DeSantis' campaign: Advocating for greater powers to be wielded against your political foes always creates the opportunity for your political foes to wield that same power against you and your allies.
The way out of that trap is not to double down on illiberalism—even though that's what much of the populist right sees as necessary—but to do exactly what DeSantis said on Tuesday: oppose the criminalization of political differences.
Now let's see if he can apply that same idea more broadly.
The post DeSantis Unironically Frets About 'Criminalizing Political Differences' appeared first on Reason.com.

At times last summer, it seemed like the only thing President Joe Biden wanted to talk about was the federal budget deficit.
"We're on track to cut the federal deficit by another $1.5 trillion by the end of this fiscal year. The biggest decline ever in a single year, ever, in American history," Biden claimed during a May 2022 press conference. Later that same month, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed touting his economic program, Biden wrote that the deficit would fall by $1.7 trillion and repeated the "largest reduction in history" claim. That talking point was still getting heavy rotation in September when the president bragged on 60 Minutes about his deficit-cutting powers.
And this wasn't Biden shooting from the hip. It was a clear messaging strategy from the White House's communications apparatus, which pushed out "fact sheets" to reporters and shareable graphics on social media emphasizing the apparently falling budget deficit.

Today's Congressional Budget Office report projects that this year, the deficit will fall by $1.7 trillion — the single largest reduction in the federal deficit in U.S. history. pic.twitter.com/o3UjYwOKZt
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 25, 2022

Of course, as Reason (and other outlets) clarified, the falling deficit was not the result of anything the president had done. There had been an unprecedented amount of federal spending in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that spending drove the budget deficit to record highs: over $3.1 trillion in 2020 and more than $2.7 trillion in 2021.
Compare this chart, from the Treasury Department, with the misleading one the White House shared on Twitter, to understand the subterfuge:

As the pandemic passed and federal spending returned to more normal levels, so did the annual budget deficit. (In fact, the deficit would have fallen further last year if not for Biden's policies, thanks to things like the infrastructure bill and last year's federal budget.)
Anyone knowledgeable about the federal budget or capable of reading a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report could have told you that last year's $1.38 trillion deficit—the largest in more than a decade, if you ignore the two pandemic years—was not actually an indication that the federal deficit was shrinking. The White House has lots of people like that working for it, but the Biden administration chose for political reasons to push a different narrative, a false one, that ignored important context and relied on misleading statistics.
So how's the budget deficit looking after the first three quarters of the current fiscal year? "The federal budget deficit was $1.4 trillion in the first nine months of fiscal year 2023," the CBO reported last week. That's "$875 billion more than the shortfall recorded during the same period last year." The CBO projects that the deficit will ring in around $1.5 trillion when the current fiscal year wraps up on September 30.
Funny that Biden doesn't want to talk about that.
It's less funny that he's also ignoring the trajectory of the federal deficit in future years. Rather than shrinking, the gap between federal revenue and federal spending is on course to widen dramatically in the coming decades. That means the federal government will have to take on more debt, and the rising cost of that debt will "slow economic growth, drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, elevate the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse effects that could occur more gradually, and make the nation's fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates," the CBO warned last month.
Tellingly, Biden has opposed the two small steps that have been taken toward shrinking the deficit so far this year.
First was the passage of the debt ceiling deal, which included some discretionary spending caps that will marginally reduce future budget deficits. Biden successfully blocked a House Republican attempt to impose stricter spending caps as part of that deal and refused to include entitlement spending—the real driver of long-term deficit growth—in the negotiations.
Then came the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Biden's expensive student loan forgiveness plan. That ruling will reduce the 2023 deficit by about $400 billion, according to estimates by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for reducing deficits.
Strangely enough, the collapse of Biden's student loan forgiveness scheme might cause this year's budget deficit to fall slightly lower than last year's, which Biden had been so eager to brag about. (In last week's update on the deficit, the CBO said it was unsure about that because the administration is still trying to push through another expensive student loan policy that will allow borrowers to make smaller payments.)
That ought to prove that all the talk about deficit reduction was merely political opportunism for the president. Biden was eager to take credit for a falling federal deficit that had nothing to do with his policies, but he has no apparent interest in the difficult tradeoffs that will be necessary to actually curb the federal government's addiction to debt.
The post Why Did Joe Biden Stop Talking About the Deficit? appeared first on Reason.com.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.Drive along the outer rim of the exurbs north of Nashville, past structures that might be barns or might be wedding venues, around developments called Vineyard Grove or New Hope Village, and eventually you will arrive at what is meant to be the new headquarters of the election commission of Sumner County, Tennessee. A featureless one-story brick warehouse with some makeshift offices attached, it has just enough space for the tiny handful of election-commission employees, the 275 voting machines that they recently purchased, and maybe some of the maintenance workers who used to share rooms with them, back when the agency was still in the basement of the county-administration building.Dusty picnic tables crowd against the wall. An elementary school stands a few hundred yards away. Nothing about this building or its location screams “controversy.” But when Sumner County’s local elections brought a faction that calls itself the Constitutional Republicans to power last year, that is what it nevertheless became.To fully grasp this story, you need to understand that the standard forms of American political polarization don’t exist in Sumner, a rural but rapidly suburbanizing county where Democrats are not part of the equation at all. None has won any county office for more than two decades. Instead, the main opponents of the Constitutional Republicans, who won 14 out of 17 seats on the county commission (following a general election in which only 15 percent of eligible voters cast ballots), are the ordinary Republicans—or, as their opponents would call them, RINOs (“Republicans in name only”). The Constitutional Republicans’ website explains that RINOs are different from themselves: “They raise taxes, they vote to silence the citizens, they won’t protect private property rights. They often partner with Democrats to defeat true Constitutional Republicans like us.”Upon taking over the county commission, the Constitutional Republicans issued a document formally declaring that their activities will be “reflective of Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” They also shut down the HR department, tried to privatize a public historic building, and refused to pay for the election commission’s move to the brick building, although it had been agreed on by the previous administration. The old offices—three basement rooms that recently flooded—were too small to store the new voting machines, and also insecure. The entrance to the basement stood right beside a cashier’s window where dozens of people were lined up to pay taxes on the day I visited. The county commissioners are unmoved by those arguments. “If we don’t fund it, you don’t get to do it,” Jeremy Mansfield, one of the Constitutional Republicans on the county commission, told the election commission at one public meeting about the move last fall. At a meeting in June, another county commissioner, angered because the new voting machines had been delivered to the new building, said that although he would “hate to pull the ace card,” the commission could always “declare this property surplus, and sell it.” That would leave the election commission, and its machines, with nowhere to go.[Peter Wehner: An acute attack of Trumpism in Tennessee]The building seems a small thing to get worked up about. But Facebook posts and videos of public meetings, all available online—the Constitutional Republicans are very transparent—make clear that this is not a trivial jurisdictional dispute and these are not petty people. They have ambitions and interests that extend well beyond their county. Their Facebook page reacted to the news of Donald Trump’s latest indictment by declaring, “The Biden family is an organized crime family,” and “Our justice system is rigged against Trump.” Another post asked whether Tennessee “should secede from the Union.” More to the point, Mansfield, who didn’t respond to my request for an interview (his view of the press is clear on his Facebook page, on which someone refers to the Associated Press as “American Pravda” and he responds, “except that Pravda does more honest reporting”), wrote a long post back in February attacking early voting and voting machines: “The gold standard for election integrity would be paper ballots filled out by people and counted by people in local precincts on election day.”The Constitutional Republicans are confident in these views for a reason. “Our beliefs are derived from the bible,” their website declares: “We pray at every meeting and we seek God in all we do! His wisdom guides our decisions.” The same source gives them confidence that their enemies are wrong. “Evil never sleeps,” Mansfield wrote on Facebook, after reflecting on the critics who he said were attacking him for fighting against new development in the county, “so we must heed Churchill’s words, never give in, and never give up fighting for what is good and right.”Few of these ambitious goals are within their reach. The Sumner County commissioners can’t arrest President Joe Biden. They can’t secede. But the county’s election commission, whose members are appointed by the bipartisan state election commission, is right there. It’s a local embodiment of the broader culture they dislike and of the government they distrust. If they can stick the agency back in the flood-prone basement, they will.Tom Lee, the lawyer for the Sumner election commission—it is now suing the county—has an additional explanation as well. Lee points out that the Constitutional Republicans arrived in office wanting to enact deep, revolutionary change. That means that, whatever the previous regime decided, they are against it: “They are coming to power and saying, ‘Everything that came before us doesn’t count. We represent something new and different, and we don’t have to have any allegiance to the past.’” I told him that this sounded like the language used by the Bolsheviks, among other revolutionaries. He didn’t laugh.Most of the time, Tennessee politics doesn’t make national news. That changed in April, when the leaders of the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee House of Representatives expelled two Democratic legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. The two men were accused of disrupting proceedings, because they repeated the demands of gun-control activists on the floor of the chamber, during a recess, using a megaphone.The incident created a wave of outrage. The punishment seemed both extreme—since Reconstruction, only two people have been expelled from the Tennessee legislature, one for bribery and the other for alleged sexual misconduct—and racist, because it deliberately targeted two young Black men. A third protester, Representative Gloria Johnson, who is white, was allowed to keep her house seat. Belatedly, the Republicans who made this decision realized that it looked bad. At an acrimonious meeting held afterward (a tape of which leaked to The Tennessee Holler, a local online publication), they expressed no regret at the expulsions, but they did berate one of the members for not voting to expel Johnson, on the grounds that leaving her out made them all seem like racists. The decision also made heroes of the protesters, now dubbed the Tennessee Three, a title previously bestowed on Johnny Cash’s backup band. Jones and Pearson were reinstated by local officials, pending special elections in August, and became instant national stars.But in truth, their story did not start on that day. Not so long ago, Tennessee was not merely a more bipartisan state but a model of bipartisanship, an example to others. Keel Hunt, a columnist for the Tennessean newspaper (and a Democrat who once worked for a Republican governor, Lamar Alexander), wrote a book about the 1980s and ’90s, an era when moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans ruled the state; when Tennessee sent Alexander, Howard Baker, Al Gore, and Jim Sasser to the U.S. Senate; and when many of the decisions that paved the way for Tennessee’s current investment boom were made. The book is called Crossing the Aisle: How Bipartisanship Brought Tennessee to the Twenty-First Century and Could Save America. So much has changed since then, Hunt told me, that the book “might now qualify as an obituary.”Today, Tennessee is a model of one-party rule. It has a Republican governor and legislature. Republican appointees run the state supreme court. The state’s nine-member U.S. House delegation contains eight Republicans; Tennessee has sent two Republicans to the Senate. The governor is the only other official elected statewide. Unlike in other states, the attorney general and secretary of state in Tennessee are appointed, and they are both Republicans too.[Brian Klaas: The red states experimenting with authoritarianism]Nor will the situation be easy to change, because gerrymandering is something of a blood sport in the state. The still-blue city of Nashville had a single Democrat representing it in Congress, but when the map was redrawn before the 2022 elections, GOP lawmakers split Nashville into three districts that stretch out into the countryside. Each elected a Republican. Instead of Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog moderate Democrat who held the seat for two decades, Nashville is now represented by, among others, Andy Ogles, who is best known for sending out a holiday card featuring himself, his children, and his wife all holding guns in front of a Christmas tree. State-level gerrymandering is just as vicious—Johnson reckons that one redistricting included a special effort to eliminate her from politics: “They split my precinct and drew a line basically a few blocks around my house to draw me out of the district,” she told me. (She moved, ran again, and won.)
Photo-illustration by Ricardo Tomás for The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.
Getting people to vote is not so easy, either, because Tennessee has some of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws. You can’t register to vote any later than 30 days before an election. If you vote by absentee ballot, it has to arrive by mail on or before Election Day. There are no drop boxes. First-time voters have to vote in person, which is a special problem for college students studying out of state. In 2019, the legislature passed a law subjecting voter-registration campaigners to financial or criminal penalties if they submit too many erroneous forms—a provision that seemed designed to discourage get-out-the-vote campaigns, was blocked as unconstitutional, and later repealed. Perhaps none of these rules alone would seem outrageous. But the “cumulative effect,” argues Tricia Herzfeld, a Democrat who serves on Nashville’s election commission, “is to make it hard to vote.” There is evidence for that theory: Tennessee has either one of the lowest or else the very lowest voter-turnout rates in the country, depending on how you count. And that, of course, is even before Sumner County moved to deprive its election commission of office space, conceivably making it difficult for anyone there to vote at all.I came to Tennessee partly because I wondered how similar it might feel to Poland and Hungary, where for the past decade I’ve been warily observing the decline of democracy and the rise of the one-party state. The very large differences are immediately clear in Nashville, where music is the backdrop to everything, where everyone seems to be coming from a party or heading to one, where people on both sides of the political spectrum went out of their way to introduce me to other people. “This is a son-in-law kind of town,” someone told me. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant (something to do with everyone looking after friends and relatives?), but it was amusing. For that and many other reasons, Nashville is not Budapest-on-the-Cumberland. The Bill of Rights still applies. Federal judges rule on Tennessee laws. The U.S. Constitution is widely and even ostentatiously revered. There is no Central European gloom.Nevertheless, the cascade of tiny legal and procedural changes designed to create an unlevel playing field, the ruling party’s inexplicable sense of grievance, the displaced moderates with nowhere to go—this did seem familiar from other places. So was the sense that institutional politics has become performative, somehow separated from real life. The Tennessee Three staged their protest on the floor of the legislature, after all, because the conversation unfolding there had taken no notice of the much larger protests happening outside the chamber. A few days earlier, a horrific mass shooting at Covenant, a private Christian school in Nashville, had galvanized the public. Opinion polls showed that more than 70 percent of Tennesseans want red-flag laws that would allow officials to remove guns from people who might misuse them, while more than 80 percent support background checks and other gun-safety laws.Those enormous majorities were not reflected in the legislative debate. In the days following the school shooting, it was just “business as usual,” Justin Kanew, the founder and editor of The Tennessee Holler, told me. Kanew, a transplant from California like a number of people in Nashville, is himself a former Democratic candidate for Congress in Tennessee. During his campaign, he saw a gap in the public conversation, and that experience led him to found the Holler. Or rather the Hollers: There are now several Twitter offshoots—the Chattanooga Holler, the Clarksville Holler, and so on—all focused on the hyperlocal issues that the statewide media were missing. Kanew’s own talent is for a form of campaigning journalism: He produces short video clips, often of state legislators, and then circulates them on social media. Sometimes they go viral. That’s what he was doing on the day the Tennessee Three made their protest. “There were thousands of people showing up at the capitol,” he told me, “asking for something to happen. And if nothing had happened, that would have been pretty deflating.”[Read: The Tennessee expulsions are just the beginning]This was not the first time that the Republican leadership sought to shut down debate. The house’s “two Justins,” as they are now known, brought their megaphone precisely because the Republican leadership commonly turns off Democrats’ microphones when they are speaking. Representative Bo Mitchell was once cut off when he told the house, “Please don’t say you are pro-life and put more weapons on the street”—a statement ruled to be insulting. Jones told me that he was ruled out of order during a committee meeting because he’d said the leadership was “putting a Band-Aid on the issue” of school shootings; a few days later he was also told he had to remove a ban assault weapons pin from his jacket. Republicans insist, as Tennessee House Majority Leader William Lamberth told a local television station, that speakers are meant to stick to the topic: “It’s not open-mic night.”Under relatively recent rules, individual members’ question time has been cut from 15 minutes to five. Occasionally, people who want to raise objections are not called on at all. During a debate on a bill regulating abortion, Gloria Johnson told me, “I stood on the house floor for 45 minutes, the entire argument of the bill, and they refused to call on me.” These tactics are new. Johnson, who has served in the legislature on and off for more than a decade, told me that although the house also had a Republican supermajority when she joined in 2012, the speaker at that time didn’t exclude Democrats from debate. “I don’t recall her refusing to call on me,” she said. Jones, who was a community organizer in Nashville for a decade before being elected, agreed that previous speakers were more open to conversation. “This was the most extreme session I have ever seen,” he said. “Republicans now treat the legislature as a private palace, a fraternity house or a country club.”  Nor is radicalization visible only in the legislature. Just as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán fights with opposition-controlled Budapest (and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fights with Istanbul, and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński fights with Warsaw), so do Tennessee Republicans fight with opposition-controlled Nashville. Over breakfast at the Elliston Place Soda Shop—he likes showing off the city sites—Nashville Mayor John Cooper, a Democrat (and brother of Jim Cooper, the former member of Congress), ticked off the various disputes between the city and the state with a certain level of weariness: about control over the airport, about the beer board, about the sports authority, about the size of the city council (Republicans tried to cut it from 40 members to 20), and about the 2024 Republican National Convention—which, partly thanks to all of the other quarrels, will not take place in Nashville.Some of the disputes are just about who controls the money, but he thinks real cultural friction underlies those too. Whereas Nashville used to be what the mayor calls a “big county-seat kind of town,” famous for its music clubs, now it’s also a focus of international investment, health-care investment, and tech investment. Oracle is building a $1 billion–plus campus in the city; Amazon has a major presence here too. On the morning we met, Mayor Cooper was jet-lagged, having just returned from Kurdistan. He went there because Nashville, aside from being the city that launched Taylor Swift, is also home to one of the largest Kurdish communities in America. After breakfast, he drove me to the East Bank, the site of the city’s next major development project, one that will include a new stadium, new housing, and some infrastructure renovations; along the way, we passed a remarkable collection of building sites, replete with giant cranes. Still, in the conservative mediaverse, Nashville’s city leaders are just another set of enemies. Fox News once devoted a whole segment to Cooper—in which Tucker Carlson accused him, falsely, of concealing information about COVID.Kanew (and he isn’t alone) thinks the state serves as a kind of “guinea pig,” a test market in this same mediaverse, a place where new culture-war themes can be experimentally stoked. A war on judges as well as on remote voting began in 2021, when the chair of a key house subcommittee sought to remove a judge who had ruled in favor of expanding the right to vote by mail during the pandemic. Last September, the governor and other Republicans lashed out at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, allegedly for suppressing employees who criticized the university’s gender clinic, charges the university denied. More recently, the state attorney general has investigated the clinic, demanding private medical records.Sometimes these efforts are clawed back. A determined group of local lawyers and lobbyists helped get some exceptions for the life of the mother enshrined into the state’s abortion ban. A Trump-appointed federal judge recently overturned another culture-war gesture, a Tennessee law banning public drag performances, on the grounds that it chilled free speech. But whether individual pieces of hard-line legislation stick might not matter, because part of the point of passing them is just to allow local politicians to align themselves with the general views of that same conservative mediaverse. One example: a recent resolution passed by the legislature to “recognize and commend” Orbán’s think tank, the Danube Institute, which promotes illiberal and antidemocratic ideas. Jones, objecting to that resolution, asked Tim Hicks, the Republican who proposed it, if he knew who Orbán was. He did not. One disgruntled Republican described this whole process to me as “governing by anecdote.” You could also describe it as “governing by Fox News.”[From the January/February 2022 issue: The great (fake) child-sex-trafficking epidemic]But every so often, a glimpse of something uglier appears, a hint that some people want more than culture wars designed for TikTok, Twitter, and the evening news. Walking to her home in Nashville, an acquaintance saw a car with a shoot your local pedophile bumper sticker, showing an outline of a man holding a gun to another man’s head. T-shirts with this image, phrasing, and implied approval of violence are for sale online. “This isn’t new to you, but it’s new to us,” she told me, which isn’t quite true. Poland, where I live part of the time, has had one political murder in recent years, but it was a knife murder. In Tennessee, people have guns. Jim Cooper, the former member of Congress, told me that getting anyone to run for office as a Democrat in some rural parts of the state is difficult partly because Democrat and pedophile are so often conflated by Republican activists, and potential candidates are spooked. About half of the state-legislature seats were uncontested in 2022.
Not that the problem of finding Democrats to run for office is new. Cooper also told me that one of his staff used to comb through local newspapers and look for people who had written angry letters to the editor. Then she would call them up and ask them to stand for election. Some said yes. Though most of them lost, he considered that a kind of victory. Jones thinks that after the expulsion crisis, “young people are fired up, bringing urgency to our politics,” and that more candidates will come forward. But there will be a steep road to climb if people fear that what is at stake in their local election is not tax rates and building permits but the safety and even the lives of their children—and if they fight back with real weapons.   If that possibility sounds ludicrous, or incredible, it shouldn’t. Kanew, the Tennessee Holler editor, woke up one night last April to the sound of gunfire. Someone had shot up the front of his house. No one has yet been arrested.“You know the old saying: All politics is national.” That’s what the mayor of Nashville told me over his ham and eggs. “All politics is national,” several other people said to me too. It’s a joke—“All politics is local” is the old political chestnut—but also not a joke. In the past couple of years, prominent and less-prominent conservatives have been flocking from all over the country to Tennessee and, more precisely, to Williamson County, adjacent to Nashville and, partly thanks to that proximity, now one of the wealthiest counties in the country. The town of Franklin, Williamson’s county seat, has a large and well-lit (I visited at night) monument to the soldiers of the Confederacy. It is also home to equally monumental culture-war clashes and school-board battles that can rival those anywhere else in the country. The New York Times columnist David French, who lives there, reckons that “only 15 percent of my neighbors are Democrats.” The Daily Wire, a conservative media company that specializes in culture-war clashes and school-board battles, is now based in Nashville, as are a handful of its stars.“All politics is national” is also the explanation that a lot of people gave me when I asked how Tennessee went from having a culture of bipartisanship to de facto one-party rule in a mere two decades. Almost everybody wanted to explain that Tennessee politics used to reflect the state’s particular geography (mountains in the east, Mississippi River Delta in the west, rivers and forest in the middle) and complicated history. Some Tennesseans had declared for the Confederacy; others fought against it. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee; Nashville was the site of a series of sit-ins that were important to the civil-rights movement. The disgruntled Republicans in particular mourn the death of what used to be called “Tennessee enlightened mountain Republicanism,” the liberal, business-oriented party that once challenged the pre-civil-rights “Old South” Democratic one-party state, which relied on Jim Crow and voter suppression. For a long time, both parties celebrated the demise of that system, and no one wanted it back. Or so it seemed.  By some accounts, the shift began in the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, when talk radio and a confrontational new style of national media began to weaken the local newspapers that people used to read, and the local culture too. Others think the turning point came in the 2000s, when Barack Obama’s presidency produced a racist backlash. In 2012, one poll showed that nearly half of Tennessee Republicans believed in the birtherism conspiracy theory.  Still others think the harder shift inside the Republican Party began more recently, after it gained full control. John Geer, a Vanderbilt political scientist, told me that whenever a supermajority controls a legislature for a long period of time, “those in the minority have no political ability to effect change, and so they stop acting like politicians and instead become activists,” a thesis that explains the actions of the Tennessee Three, as well as the feeling that politics has become a form of performance art, only distantly related to real life.But the supermajority is also affected, and its members become activists of a different kind. To stay in office in a state where few people vote and districts are gerrymandered, Tennessee legislators need to appeal to only a tiny number of very dedicated, very partisan people. The competition for those votes can quite quickly turn into a competition for who can sound most radical. Even the minority leader of the Tennessee State Senate, Raumesh Akbari, a Democrat, told me that it’s harder to do deals with people from heavily gerrymandered districts: “You don’t have anybody to check you and your district is extremely partisan.” Her own district skews heavily Democratic and heavily Black. “If I wasn’t someone who was willing to compromise, I wouldn’t have to,” Akbari said.There is another element: Call it the lesson of Sumner County, the place where Republicans won everything, control everything, and yet still feel aggrieved and victimized. As in Hungary or Poland or as in Venezuela, the experience of radicalism can make people more radical. Total control of a political system can make the victors not more magnanimous, but more frustrated, not least because they learn that total control still doesn’t deliver what they think it should. No county commission or state legislature can possibly meet the demands of a quasi-religious movement that believes it has God on its side and that its opponents herald the apocalypse. But that doesn’t mean they give up. It just means they keep trying, using any tool available. Eventually they arrive at the point described by Tom Lee, the lawyer for the Sumner County Election Commission: “It’s not enough to get your majority and get your way—they have to make the minority lose their voice.”On the tape leaked to The Tennessee Holler after the expulsion of Pearson and Jones, this dynamic is powerfully revealed. Grim Republican legislators talked about what they think is really at stake, and it isn’t megaphones. “If you don’t believe we are at war for our republic,” one of them says to the group, “with all love and respect to you, you need a different job.” They don’t believe that this is a normal political competition, either, or that their opponents are a normal, legitimate, small-d democratic opposition. Democrats, says another, “are not our friends.” They “destroy our republic and the foundation of who we are.” At one point, an apocalyptic tone creeps into the conversation: “The left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.” So urgent and so dramatic is this challenge that some of them have come to believe that rules might have to be broken: “You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong,” one of them says.You gotta do what’s right, even if you think it might be wrong. Fight for the republic, because otherwise it will be “game over”: The language itself wouldn’t be unusual, if this were a radical minority fighting for its very existence. But this is the Republican Party, the party that controls pretty much everything in Tennessee. They are going to win the next election, and probably the one after that. Yet they sound as if winning isn’t enough: They also want their opponents to fall silent, and they are doing what they can to make that happen.

Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer and Republican Sen. Mike Rounds are filing legislation demanding that the federal government reveal the files on what it knows about unidentified anomalous phenomena. The government has refused to declassify much of the information while admitting that such files exist.

What is in these files is significant in two ways. First and obviously, the presence of alien warships – if they are there and if they are warships – represents a potential threat to all of Earth. This is not a trivial matter. Second and obviously transcendently important, I am writing a book on the geopolitics of space. The core actors are human nations, whose roots are on Earth and who are likely to use space as a new battleground. If the dog men of Andromeda have us in their sights, I must rewrite the book and move up the deadline for submission. However farfetched the threat of an invasion from space may seem, the continual insistence by the Pentagon and the CIA that they have discovered nothing of concern fuels fear. If there is nothing to fear out there, then why not release the files?

There are plausible and good reasons for withholding this information. Suspicions about what were then called UFOs began around the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. By the mid-1950s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Both also had land systems for detecting missile launches, and it was essential that these capabilities remain secret. The other side could not know the other’s methods and effectiveness. If these same technologies detected UFOs, then revealing that information could compromise national defense.

The problem with this argument is that surveillance of near-Earth space has been underway since the 1950s. Revealing findings from before the deployment of the current generation of sensors would not compromise anything important. The government’s resistance to releasing even highly redacted reports is odd. One theory is that the government thinks we, the public, would panic if we knew the truth. Perhaps we would, but better now than when the invasion begins.

Another among many possible reasons for secrecy is that a covert war is already being waged with the Andromedons. They may have taken control of the candidates for president. It would explain much. But if we are facing an enemy that projects major force many light-years from home, then we are hosed anyway, and the signal to party should be given.

I do not find the possibility of advanced life in the universe absurd. The universe is vast, and if humans on Earth have come to be, the existence of other life seems likely. But the very vastness of the universe also means that a chance or deliberate encounter between two peoples is unlikely. Unlikely, but far from impossible.

If there is nothing to hide, then don’t go out of your way making sure that people are fixated. The government knows this yet undertakes a strategy designed to increase attention rather than deflect. They adopt a strategy designed to get senators, including important ones, to force disclosure. Keeping the files secret increases the sense of danger, at least for some, and in modern America distrust of the government is rampant. If the government denies that it has found anything, then acting as if it is hiding something undermines that claim and magnifies the fear.

This is a geopolitical question. Anything that weakens trust in government weakens the ability of the United States to act on other matters. But far more important, there is no reason that the process that created us should not have created others. We may be the only people in the universe, which would make the universe more incomprehensible. If there are others, our sense of geopolitics shifts and the human mind must absorb this. If the government is hiding dangers so vast that revealing them would create panic, it is merely postponing the panic. But if there is nothing to fear, know that the government’s actions can generate it. And since the government has failed to keep the existence of space surveillance secret going back decades, it should not compound that failure by increasing potential concern.

It is a battle for the soul of the nation.

In that battle, Netanyahu seems to be moving ahead decisively with his power grab to free himself and his government from controls of the Supreme Court before the Knesset adjourns for the summer at the end of July. At stake are Supreme Court decisions such as the striking down of Netanyahu’s attempt to appoint a thrice-convicted right-wing crony, Aryeh Deri, to be the minister of health, interior and later finance.

That is why the protests are once again increasing in intensity. Tuesday night’s lead story in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper demonstrates how dangerous this is getting: “For over seven months, Israelis have been protesting against the Netanyahu government’s effort to overhaul the country’s judiciary and weaken its gatekeepers. This week, protesters are stepping up resistance as more army reservists threaten to abstain from duty, health care workers announce a two-hour ‘warning strike’ and tens of thousands take to the streets, disrupting traffic across the country.” Israel is nearing a moment of truth.

Biden is clearly walking a tightrope. He’s trying to be respectful of Israel’s right to choose its own path without its American ally intervening in an internal matter (a respect that Netanyahu often neglected when meddling in U.S. politics over the years). At the same time, he’s seeking to make clear his concern — shared by many of Israel’s key allies in Congress and the American Jewish community — that this may be a fateful moment in Israel’s history for its internal cohesion, as well as for its future relations with America. Biden, as Israel’s friend, felt he could not be silent.

Have no illusions: Many Israelis support Netanyahu’s effort, but polls — and the relative size of demonstrations — indicate that a clear majority oppose it. Netanyahu’s whole coalition cabinet has been losing public support in the latest polls.

But this is the point: The magnitude and tenacity of the protest movement in Israel send a clear signal that the overhaul pushed by the government is unlikely to ever have internal legitimacy and therefore also external legitimacy. That train has left the station.

I think Mr Basu is projecting a little bit the known end to of the Cold War (the fall of the Soviet Union) upon the present predicament.

It is true, that most people are instinctively discounting the possibility of a nuclear war, as we avoided one (sometimes by the proverbial skin of our teeth) during the Cold War. The strategic complexity of the present situation can be reduced to saying that we might run out of luck this time around.

Having said the above, what choice do we have?

If we allow a nuclear power to invade her neighbors at will, particularly a nuclear power on the European continent, we are likely to have the nuclear war anyway. This is the lesson of WW1 and WW2. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War, do remember how scary it actually was. We thought, more than once, that the nuclear confrontation was just around the corner. And it might have been. The only rational solution however, then and now, was credible deterrence, even if we were scared of tomorrow.

The only thing that NATO leaders should do differently, is to level with their populations. Political leaders of NATO countries are still trying to calm their populations by telling them that Russian attack on NATO is essentially impossible. Privately, many of the same leaders must be thinking otherwise, which is why Finland and Sweden decided to join NATO. As wasteful and immoral as the arms race tends to be, sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes is now. Credible conventional and nuclear deterrence is the only way to stop Russian expansionism and revanchism.

As during the Cold War, military deterrence has to be coupled with counteroffensive against Russian propaganda. Radio Free Europe needs to get a new lease on life and strong support. Countering Russian propaganda at home and countering home grown Fascist movement is also necessary today, just like it was necessary to counter home grown Communist movements during the Cold War.

We are standing on the precipice, not least because of our weaknesses at home. Generational amnesia has produced fascist and authoritarian resurgence in the West which makes us weaker. There are o guarantees of outcome, which does not mean we should give up.

While this war is going on, we need a plan for restoration of Democracy and the rule of law everywhere. Looking at Russia today, or Turkey for that matter, we need to develop new determination to stop dictatorships. Maybe we can stop dictators by creating a Democratic camp which, aside from the rule of law, limits tenure of politicians by design. If joining this club becomes attractive enough, even Russia might change eventually.

Last week, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the Fulton County jail in Atlanta. It will focus on reports of inadequate inmate living conditions, insufficient access to mental and physical health care, and violence against inmates. 
"People in prisons and jails are entitled to basic protections of their civil rights," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a July 13 press release. "We launched this investigation into the Fulton County Jail based on serious allegations of unsafe, unsanitary living conditions at the jail, excessive force and violence within the jail, discrimination against incarcerated individuals with mental health issues, and failure to provide adequate medical care to incarcerated individuals."
The investigation comes in the wake of the death of LaShawn Thompson, a mentally ill inmate who died in squalid conditions in the jail's psychiatric ward last September. Thompson, who had schizophrenia, had been jailed at the facility for three months, following his arrest on a misdemeanor battery charge. 
According to jail documents, Thompson's body was found covered in lice, bedbugs, and lesions. Graphic photos released by Thompson's family further show that his cell was extremely filthy and covered in small insects when his body was found. An independent autopsy released by Thompson's family in May listed his cause of death as "severe neglect," noting Thompson was suffering from a "severe body insect infestation."
However, Thompson's living conditions are not rare at the Fulton County jail. According to a 2022 report by the Southern Center for Human Rights, every single inmate in the jail's psychiatric unit had either lice, scabies, or both. The report also found that 90 percent of inmates in this unit were not completing "activities of daily living" like "showering, dressing, getting out of bed, walking, and using the toilet—or receiving essential medications." Further, 90 percent of these inmates were also deemed significantly malnourished and showing signs of cachexia, a "wasting syndrome leading to the loss of muscle and fat, often seen in people with late-stage cancers."
The Justice Department probe will focus on possible violations of the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act and will investigate both inmate living conditions and reports of violence and excessive force against inmates.
 "The unconstitutional conditions that we see too often inside jails and prisons have no place in society today," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in the DOJ press release. "We are committed to ensuring jail and prison facilities provide constitutional conditions, in which all people can live safely and receive medical care. Incarceration should never include exposure to unconstitutional living conditions, including the risk of serious harm from violence."
The post DOJ Opens Probe Into Jail Where Inmate Died Covered in Insects appeared first on Reason.com.

During the Great Recession, public discourse about the economy underwent something of a Great Disappointment.For much of the country’s history, most Americans assumed that the future would bring them or their descendants greater affluence. Despite periodic economic crises, the overall story seemed to be one of progress for every stratum of the population. Those expectations were largely borne out: The standard of living enjoyed by working-class Americans for much of the mid-20th century, for example, was far superior to that enjoyed by affluent Americans a generation or two earlier.But after the 2008 financial crisis, those assumptions were upended by a period of intense economic suffering coupled with a newfound interest among economists in the topic of inequality. Predictions of economic decline took over the conversation. America, a country long known for its inveterate optimism, came to dread the future—in which it now appeared that most people would have less and less.[Adam Ozimek: The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession]Three arguments provided the intellectual foundation for the Great Disappointment. The first, influentially advanced by the MIT economist David Autor, was that the wages of most Americans were stagnating for the first time in living memory. Although the income of average Americans had roughly doubled once every generation for most of the previous century, wage growth for much of the population began to flatline in the 1980s. By 2010, it looked as though poorer Americans faced a future in which they could no longer expect any real improvement in their standard of living.The second argument had to do with globalization’s impact on the worldwide distribution of income. In a graph that came to be known as the “elephant curve,” the Serbian American economist Branko Milanović argued that the world’s poorest people were experiencing only minor income growth; that the middle percentiles were benefiting mightily from globalization; that those in the upper-middle segment—which included many industrial workers and people in the service industry in rich countries, including America—had seen their incomes stagnate; and that the very richest were making out like bandits. Globalization, it seemed, was a mixed blessing, and a distinctly concerning one for the bottom half of wage earners in industrialized economies such as the United States.
                                 Branko Milanović’s “elephant curve”
The final, and most sweeping, argument was about the nature and causes of inequality. Even as much of the population was just holding its own in prosperity, the wealth and income of the richest Americans were rising rapidly. In his 2013 surprise best seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty proposed that this trend was likely to continue. Arguing that the returns on capital had long outstripped those of labor, Piketty seemed to suggest that only a calamitous event such as a major war—or a radical political transformation, which did not appear to be on the horizon—could help tame the trend toward ever-greater inequality.The Great Disappointment continues to shape the way many Americans think about the current and future state of the economy. But as the pandemic and the rise of inflation have altered the world economy, the intellectual basis for the thesis has begun to wobble. The reasons for economic pessimism have started to look less convincing than they once were. Is it time to revise the core tenets of the Great Disappointment?One of the most prominent labor economists in the U.S., Autor has over the past decade provided much of the evidence regarding the stagnation of American workers’ incomes, especially for those without a college degree.The U.S. economy, Autor wrote in a highly influential paper in 2010, is bifurcating. Even as demand for high-skilled workers rose, demand for “middle-wage, middle-skill white-collar and blue-collar jobs” was contracting. America’s economy, which had once provided plenty of middle-class jobs, was splitting into a highly affluent professional stratum and a large remainder that was becoming more immiserated. The overall outcome, according to Autor, was “falling real earnings for noncollege workers” and “a sharp rise in the inequality of wages.”Autor’s past work on the falling wages of a major segment of the American workforce makes it all the more notable that he now sounds far more optimistic. Because companies were desperately searching for workers at the tail-end of the pandemic, Autor argues in a working paper published earlier this year, low-wage workers found themselves in a much better bargaining position. There has been a remarkable reversal in economic fortunes.“Disproportionate wage growth at the bottom of the distribution reduced the college wage premium and reversed the rise in aggregate wage inequality since 1980 by approximately one quarter,” Autor writes. The big winners of recent economic trends are precisely those groups that had been left out in preceding decades: “The rise in wages was particularly strong among workers under 40 years of age and without a college degree.”Even after accounting for inflation, Autor shows, the bottom quarter of American workers has seen a significant boost in income for the first time in years. The scholar who previously wrote about the “polarization” in the U.S. workforce now concludes that the American economy is experiencing an “unexpected compression.” In other words, the wealth gap is narrowing with surprising speed.Autor is not the only leading economist who is calling into doubt the underpinnings of the Great Disappointment. According to Milanović, his “elephant curve” proved so influential in part because it confirmed fears many people had about the effects of globalization. His famous graph was, he now admits, an “empirical confirmation of what many thought.” He is no longer so sure about that piece of conventional wisdom.A few years ago, Milanović set out to update the original elephant curve, which was based on data from 1988 to 2008. The result came as a shock—a positive one. Once Milanović included data for another decade, to 2018, the curve changed shape. Instead of the characteristic “rise, fall, rise again” that had given the curve its viral name, its steadily falling gradient now seemed to paint a straightforward and much more optimistic picture. Over the four decades he now surveyed, the incomes of the poorest people in the world rose very fast, those of people toward the middle of the distribution fairly fast, and those of the richest rather sluggishly. Global economic conditions were improving for nearly everyone, and, contrary to conventional wisdom, it was the most needy, not the most affluent, who were reaping the greatest rewards.
                                  Milanović’s revised curve
In a recent article for Foreign Affairs, Milanović goes even further. “We’re frequently told,” he writes, that “we live in an age of inequality.” But when you look at the most recent global data, that turns out to be false: In fact, “the world is growing more equal than it has been for over 100 years.”To this day, Piketty remains the patron saint of the Great Disappointment. No thinker is invoked more often to justify the theory. But even Piketty’s pessimistic diagnosis, made a decade ago, has come to look much less dire.In part, this is because Piketty’s work has come in for criticism from other economists. According to one influential line of argument, Piketty mistook why returns on capital were higher than returns to labor in many industrialized countries in the decades after World War II. Absent concerted pressure to prevent this, Piketty had argued, the nature of capitalism would always favor billionaires and giant corporations over ordinary workers. But according to Matthew Rognlie, an economist at Northwestern University, Piketty’s explanation for why inequality increased during that period was based on a misinterpretation of the data.The outsize returns on capital during the latter half of the 20th century, Rognlie argues, were mainly due to the huge growth in house prices in metropolitan centers such as Paris and New York. If returns on capital were larger than returns to labor over this period, the reason was not a general economic trend but specific political factors, such as restrictive building codes. In addition, the main beneficiaries were not the billionaires and big corporations on which Piketty focused; rather, they were the kinds of upper-middle-class professionals who own the bulk of housing stock in major cities.Economists continue to debate whether such criticisms hit the mark. But even as Piketty defended his work, he himself started to strike a more optimistic note about the long-term structure of the economy. In his 2022 book, A Brief History of Equality, he talks about the rise of inequality as an anomaly. “At least since the end of the eighteenth century there has been a historical movement towards equality,” he writes. “The world of the 2020s, no matter how unjust it may seem, is more egalitarian than that of 1950 or that of 1900, which were themselves in many respects more egalitarian than those of 1850 or 1780.”Like Autor and Milanović, Piketty seems to have concluded that the thesis of the Great Disappointment was, in key respects, wrong.It would be premature to put worries about stagnating incomes or rising inequality to rest. The three former prophets of doom all emphasize the role that social and political factors play in shaping economic outcomes. As a result, they see recent wage growth for poorer Americans as caused in part by the expansionary economic policies that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden pursued in response to the pandemic.Similarly, the huge gains that some of the poorest people in the world have made in recent decades derive in part from their governments’ efforts to use industrial policy to shape the impact of globalization on their countries. Whether, as Piketty has argued, the returns on capital will in the long run outstrip the returns to labor depends on political decisions about taxation and redistribution, about the strength of trade unions and the rules governing labor markets.[Oren Cass: The labor-shortage myth]Recent good news about our economic prospects should not lead us to conclusions that could quickly turn out to be overexuberant. But we should also avoid perpetuating an instinctive pessimism that looks less and less warranted. Although pessimism may seem smart or shrewd, cynicism about our collective ability to build a better world only makes it harder to win support for the kind of economic policies we need to create that future.Progressives sometimes seem to believe that they can mobilize people by making the future look scary. But when voters feel threatened, it is usually unscrupulous reactionaries who make unrealistic promises and scapegoat outsiders who benefit. Wage stagnation and rising inequality are still real dangers about which we must remain vigilant—but the fact that a better economic future has come to look a good deal more achievable should be cause for full-throated celebration.

The last time San Francisco's Anchor Brewing Company faced bankruptcy, a wealthy heir stepped in to save the brewery—and may have changed the course of the entire American beer industry in the process.
There may not be a similar reprieve this time. Anchor, originally founded in 1896, announced this week that it would be shutting down for good. "The impacts of the pandemic, inflation, especially in San Francisco, and a highly competitive market left the company with no option but to make this sad decision to cease operations," Sam Singer, a spokesman for the company, said in a statement.
The highly competitive craft beer market that might have played a role in Anchor's final demise, ironically, might not exist without the brewery, which survived San Francisco's devastating 1906 earthquake, Prohibition, and some of the darkest days of American beer history.
It survived the near-bout with bankruptcy in 1965 thanks to Fritz Maytag, the great-grandson of the founder of the Maytag Corporation, who bought a majority share in the brewery because he liked the beer, then set about making it better. In an era when macro-breweries making yellow, watery lagers dominated America's beer market, Anchor's flagship beer—Anchor Steam Beer, with its distinctive copper color and foggy flavors—certainly stood out.
"We went back to the most fundamental, traditional type of brewing philosophy," Maytag told Reason in a 2010 interview. Under his guidance, Anchor embraced a combination of traditional beer making "combined with modern food processing and equipment."
Anchor's best-known beer is a perfect illustration of that mixture. It's a modern take on a style of beer—known as "steam beer" because it is fermented at a higher temperature than most other types of beer—that was originally produced in the days before breweries had access to artificial refrigeration.
To gain acclaim for making a superior product that consumers enjoy is the goal of any businessman. To inspire others to do the same? That's what cements Anchor's (and Maytag's) place in the pantheon of American beer making.
By the mid-1970s, with Anchor's reputation and business growing on the West Coast, it became a hub for a new wave of brewers interested in experimenting with new styles of beer. Among those was Ken Grossman, who would go on to found the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in 1980 and help kick off America's craft beer revolution.
"In the '60s and in the early '70s, I never dreamed that there would be any other little breweries like ours," Maytag told Reason in that 2010 interview. "Only later, to my amazement when some of the new little breweries sprang up did I come to the realization that what we had done was possible for others to do."
According to the Beer Association, an industry group, there were only 163 breweries in the country when Maytag saved Anchor from bankruptcy in 1965. By the early 1980s, there were fewer than 100. Today, there are over 9,000.
Maytag and Anchor kept alive the flame—a flame lit beneath a brew kettle, of course—of independent craft beer in America. It's perhaps a bit ironic that the company is now shutting down in part because of the robust competition in a market that it helped to energize.
As The New York Times notes, mid-level breweries like Anchor, which grew large enough to have a decent national footprint but remain smaller than the likes of Budweiser and Coors, are particularly vulnerable right now. They face competitive pressure from the larger breweries but are increasingly losing market share on the local side too, as smaller craft breweries continue to proliferate and attract new customers.
In that regard, the demise of Anchor Brewing is not a sad story, but something to be cheered: proof that creative destruction remains an indefatigable force.
"There's more creativity and more integrity and more variety in America than in the rest of the world combined," Maytag said in 2010, shortly before he sold the company to Japan-based Sapporo.
So raise a glass—there's still some iconic Anchor Steam Beer out there in the supply chains—and then pour one out for the end of a truly great entrepreneurial story.
 
The post RIP Anchor Steam, the San Francisco Brew That Saved Craft Beer in America appeared first on Reason.com.

I was walking along the Charles River, when I spotted Professor Daniel Gilbert on his recumbent bike, cruising down a hill toward the Newell Boathouse. He had a broad smile across his face and looked happy, which seemed appropriate since Gilbert studies the science of happiness. He is also the author of “Stumbling on Happiness,” in which he describes the role of “imagination and illusions” in our sometimes misguided pursuit of happiness.
“Human beings are the most social animals on Earth, bar none. So, it is no surprise that our greatest source of happiness is other people. Genuinely investing ourselves in relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and students is the best way to increase our own happiness,”  said Gilbert, in a more detailed email to me.
Echoing this belief was sociology professor Mario Luis Small, who says that casual interactions with acquaintances in our community “offer people a way to be seen, heard, and appreciated, as well as the chance for them to express gratitude. They frequently come free of any expectations. They are likely to be bridges to other communities and networks.”
Within Harvard’s vast community and numerous networks, it was easy to capture moments of sheer joy. Here is a sampling from throughout the school year.

Harvard Divinity School student Eliza Rockefeller (left), and College student Fred Asare-Konadu ’24 present their research. In Sever Hall, Professor Dustin Tingley teaches a new government class about the politics of climate change, a great example of the sorts of classes Harvard will increasingly offer in light of the “Future of Climate Change Education” report.

Spectators watch rowers practice for the Head of the Charles Regatta. 

Students study in the sunken garden in Radcliffe Yard. At the Harvard Medical School Quadrangle, students Kiwi Florido (left) and Lissah Johnson enjoy warm weather while framed by flowers.

Inside Busch Hall, Mario Barbuti, a visitor from Italy, views collections in the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard.

Denise Penizzotto, M.T.S. ‘23, demonstrates wellness practices such as meditation and yoga in the Andover Chapel in Swartz Hall.

McKenzie Lilygren ’23, drummer for the Harvard Band, keeps the beat during the 371st Commencement Exercises in Tercentenary Theatre. U.S. Army veteran and Harvard College student Sabastian Mandell taught himself how to play the piano during the pandemic using social media videos. Inside Northwest Labs, on a public piano, he entertains students as they study. 

Jessica Shiflett ’25 studies math problem sets using her tablet while relaxing on an inflatable couch near Memorial Church.

Maya Woods-Arthur ’23 studies a book while on a net hammock at Quincy House as warm temperatures arrive. A Harvard College student enjoys a slack line and a spring day at Leverett House.

Members of FOP, Harvard’s First-Year Outdoor Program, gather in a circle to raise each other’s spirits behind Harvard Hall. FOP is one of many pre-orientation programs for incoming first-years. Five hundred and fifty of them moved in for programs including FAP, FIP, FUP, FYRE and LIFE.

In 1978, Bohdan Klymchak walked out of the Soviet Union and asked for political asylum in Iran. Klymchak was Ukrainian, born near Lviv. In 1949, his family had been deported to Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, after the arrest of his brother as a “Ukrainian nationalist.” In 1957, Klymchak himself was arrested for “anti-Soviet agitation”; even after his release, he remained under constant surveillance. After he escaped across the border, and after the Iranians sent him back, Klymchak wound up in a camp called Perm-36, one of the last large political prisons in the Soviet Union. He remained there until 1990, as one of the last Soviet political prisoners.In the three decades since Klymchak was freed, a lot has happened. Perm-36 became a thriving museum and site of remembrance, receiving tens of thousands of visitors, including groups of schoolchildren, every year. In 2014, it was shut down again. Russian ex-prisoners and historians published memoirs and histories of the Gulag, held conferences, created exhibitions, made documentaries. Then, over the past several years, their organizations were banned, and their leaders were exiled or ignored.[Read: War and consequences]Today, a new version of that same Gulag system is being reconstructed, especially for Ukrainians. Journalists, war-crimes investigators, and specialized groups such as the Reckoning Project have already documented arrests, murders, prisons, and torture chambers in Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. Slowly, it is becoming clear that these are not just ad hoc responses to Ukrainian resistance. They are part of a long-term plan: the construction of a sprawling system of camps and punishment colonies—a new Gulag. The Associated Press reported yesterday that it has evidence of at least 40 prison camps in Russia and Belarus, as well as 63 formal and informal prisons in occupied Ukraine, containing perhaps 10,000 Ukrainians. A few are prisoners of war: Gulagu.net, a Russian prison-monitoring group, has evidence of Ukrainian soldiers in Russian prisons who arrive without proper papers or POW status. But most of the Ukrainian prisoners are civilians who have been arrested or abducted in occupied territory.As in the Gulag during its heyday, slave labor is one purpose of these camps. Some Ukrainians in captivity are being forced to dig trenches and build fortifications for Russian soldiers, and to dig mass graves. The Gulag was also designed to instill terror in the broader population, and the new camp system works that way too. Civilians are imprisoned and tortured for minor offenses—AP cites, as one example, the tying of a ribbon with Ukrainian colors to a bicycle—or sometimes for no reason at all. The Reckoning Project has collected many examples of Russian soldiers becoming paranoid and interrogating ordinary people, many of them volunteers for civic organizations, about their connections to the Ukrainian security services, the CIA, or even George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. The AP describes one civilian captive from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region who was pulled from her cell, driven around town, and told to identify people with pro-Ukrainian sympathies. In 1937–38, during the era of the Great Purges, Soviet secret police were equally paranoid and equally terrified, not only of ordinary people but also of one another. Recent infighting suggests that Russian military forces may reach that stage in occupied Ukraine too.[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]Like the Soviet Gulag, the new Russian camp network is not temporary, and unless the Ukrainians can take back their territory, it will expand. AP has obtained a Russian document, dated this past January, that describes plans to build 25 new prison colonies and six detention centers in occupied Ukrainian territory by 2026. Like the Soviet Gulag, this system is chaotic and lawless. People have been condemned without trial. Their documents have been lost. Sometimes they are kept for no reason, or released for no reason. Their relatives receive no information about them and cannot find or contact them. Eventually, they may also be forced to the front lines. That is certainly the fate of Russian prisoners in Russia, many of whom are now told to sign mobilization papers, and beaten and tortured if they refuse. As in the old days, it seems as if Russian prison directors have been given quotas, numbers of prisoners they need to supply in order to fulfill some central plan.The historical echoes can’t be an accident. The KGB once taught new recruits to study the institution’s history, and the Russian security services clearly do the same: They are carrying out repressive policies that “worked” in the Soviet days, that kept people like Bohdan Klymchak and his brother behind bars. But that history also explains Ukraine’s response. Anyone who wonders why the Ukrainians keep fighting, why they keep asking for more weapons, why they become frustrated by slow-moving transatlantic diplomacy, why they seem angry or “unreasonable,” should remember this: The Gulag was supposed to belong to the past. Now it belongs to the present. If Ukrainians don’t want it to be part of their future, they will have to physically remove these camps—and the people who run them—from Ukrainian land. Until they have succeeded, no help will ever be enough.

The Biden administration has announced that it will forgive almost $40 billion in federal student loans for over 800,000 total borrowers enrolled in one of several income-driven repayment plans.
The spate of loan forgiveness is the culmination of several changes to income-driven repayment (IDR) plans made in April 2022—and the correction of endemic government errors in carrying out those changes. Under most IDR plans, borrowers pay a specific percentage of their income each month for a set number of years—usually 20 or 25 years—after which their remaining balance will be forgiven. Previously, payments were required to be on time and in full in order to count toward cancellation. 
However, under the April 2022 changes, borrowers with certain federal loans could have payments counted toward their 20- or 25-year time span, even if those payments were incomplete or late.
Among other circumstances, the new regulations also allow any month "spent in economic hardship or military deferments" after 2013 or any month spent in noneducational deferments before 2013 to count toward total repayment time.
These changes were the first of a wide range of alterations to IDR plans. Most notably, the Biden administration announced in August that it would relax the terms of the most common IDR, dramatically reducing monthly payments and halving the number of payments required for forgiveness for many borrowers.
According to the Education Department, this latest round of loan cancellation reconciles administrative errors made when adjusting for the April 2022 changes that led officials to inaccurately record changes to the number of months remaining before forgiveness for thousands of borrowers was granted, meaning that borrowers who were eligible for forgiveness under their IDR plan didn't have their loans discharged. 
"At the start of this Administration, millions of borrowers had earned loan forgiveness but never received it. That's unacceptable," Under Secretary James Kvaal said in a Friday press release. "Today we are holding up the bargain we offered borrowers who have completed decades of repayment." 
The Education Department's latest round of forgiveness shows just how many taxpayer dollars can be spent without engaging in blanket federal student loan cancellation. Though Biden's plan for sweeping loan forgiveness was struck down at the Supreme Court, the Education Department is still free to spend billions of taxpayer dollars by making dramatic changes to existing loan repayment programs. 
Even if Biden never achieves his goal of enacting blanket loan cancellation, his reshaping of IDR plans may well do more long-term damage than one-time forgiveness ever could. Changes to IDR plans are projected to cost as much as $360 billion in just the next decade, while Biden's one-time loan forgiveness plan was estimated to cost over $400 billion total.
The post Biden Forgives Almost $40 Billion in Student Loans appeared first on Reason.com.

Last weekend, President Biden revealed something striking about his reason for wanting to run again in 2024. During his interview for my show on CNN, I put it to him that even some of his most ardent supporters — those who think he has turned the economy around and restored relations with the rest of the world — believe he should “step aside and let another generation of Democrats take the baton.” I asked: “Why are they wrong?”

Biden responded by speaking solely about foreign policy. He argued that the world is facing dramatic change, and that the United States has a unique opportunity to bring together the world’s democracies. He insisted that he is succeeding at doing so and that he wants to finish the job.

Having spoken to Biden before, I would say that central to his worldview is the belief that the world today is being shaped by challenges from autocratic states — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — and that the future will hinge on how the democracies respond to these challenges. Like anyone who wants to be president, Biden has a healthy ego, and he has wanted the job since he was a young man, but I think it’s fair to say he is also driven by a sense that the future of the international order is on the line.

The stakes are high — and they are made much higher by the fact that, for the first time since the World War II era, the basic issue of America’s engagement with the world is becoming a partisan issue. The United States stepped onto the world stage in 1917 to prevent a great power from dominating Europe. In 1945, after World War II, it stayed engaged to ensure peace and stability in Eurasia. But today, as Russia wages a brutal war in Europe that seems a throwback to World War II, there is deep division in America about staunchly opposing that aggression.

Consider the numbers: According to a recent Gallup poll, 79 percent of Democrats want to help Ukraine regain lost territory, even if that means prolonging the conflict. By contrast, 49 percent of Republicans would like to end the conflict quickly — even if that means letting the Russians hold on to the territories they have acquired by force.

On NATO, Democrats approve of it by a wide margin, 76 percent to 22 percent, while Republicans are split, with 49 percent approving and the same number disapproving, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March. On the broader issue of engagement with the world, 60 percent of Democrats in the same poll said they believe that “it’s best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs,” while only 39 percent agreed that “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.” For Republicans those numbers are essentially reversed, with 71 percent wanting to focus at home and just 29 percent believing in an active world role for the United States.

This is not a settled issue. There is a debate within the Republican Party. Some senior figures, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and former vice president Mike Pence , are vigorously making the case for an active and engaged America. But the party’s base seems to be with the isolationists, as can be seen in the tilting stances of the weather-vane speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.). From Donald Trump to his copycat, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the party’s most powerful media ideologist, Tucker Carlson, conservatives are increasingly contemptuous of America’s support for Ukraine and its strong alliance with Europe. Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) told the New York Times that although some Republicans remain staunchly interventionist, “That’s not where the voters are.”

As The Post’s Max Boot has pointed out, some conservatives claim to be against supporting Ukraine but in favor of confronting China. That, as he notes, is because China is an economic foe, run by the Communist Party. But this also has to do with the fact that many conservatives are not interested in an engaged foreign policy. They’re focused on building tariffs and walls, subsidizing domestic industry, raising xenophobic suspicions about Chinese students and Chinese Americans, and giving the Pentagon even bigger budgets. This is a reprise of the old Jacksonian foreign policy of a fortress America.

The Republican Party might be returning to its roots. It bitterly opposed the United States’ entry into World War II (until Pearl Harbor). Even after the war, many Republicans opposed NATO and U.S. engagement with the world — even though they were strong anti-communists. (Then, as now, they claimed to want to focus on China.)

Dwight D. Eisenhower offered not to run against Sen. Robert A. Taft (the leading Republican of his day) if Taft would endorse NATO. Taft refused, so Eisenhower ran to preserve the United States’ engagement with the world and the international peace and stability that it brought. Alas, there is no Eisenhower to redirect the Republican Party today, and the stakes are as high as they were in 1952, if not higher.

As we look around the world, we see that the single biggest risk to the international order may lie not in the killing fields of Ukraine or across the Taiwan Strait, but rather on the campaign trail in the United States.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.This is the second batch of reader responses to the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision. Batch one is here.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Matt argues that the stakes are lower than many think:
I find the competition for all the elite schools really out of touch with the reality of most people. As a high schooler, I bombed the SAT. I hadn’t figured anything out in my life, so I decided to do two years at a community college, then transfer to a larger state school in rural Appalachia. I did well and graduated with honors. Everyone should get a fair shake at life. But when you have to divvy up a limited number of spots, there’s going to be some winners and losers. It’s just that some of the “losers” in the competition for admissions to Harvard are going to end up attending their secondary-choice Ivy on full rides.
Lucretia laments the decision:
It seems to me that affirmative action is an attempt to make up for the failure to provide basic services in schools, health care, policing, and other services in poor, Black, and First Nation communities. I would suggest that poverty and systemic racism are the problem and need to be corrected. Until they are, affirmative action is probably necessary.
Mary urges colleges to work around the decision:
As long as racism and other prejudices persist, affirmative action will be necessary. As long as we continue to have opportunity gaps by race, class, language, religion, and gender, we will need strategies in place to eliminate those gaps. For the selective colleges and universities that will be most impacted, we need to rethink recruitment and we need to be more intentional about partnerships with high schools and community colleges.
If we are serious about racial diversity on our campuses, we need to partner with organizations and leaders in communities of color to actively recruit future students, and we need to start before the senior year of high school. College-going identity starts to solidify in middle school so we need to start there. We can’t wait for students to come to us. We need to tap into our alumni of color and current students of color to partner in these recruitment efforts. We also need a multipronged strategy to rethink admissions. We can do that by reducing or eliminating legacy admissions. Due to a long-standing history of racism in the U.S., our city neighborhoods and suburban communities are already racially segregated. We can also take geography into consideration by zip code, census tract, and even census block. We can ramp up holistic admissions and give more weight to essays, interviews, and other qualitative measures.
Anna questions a premise of using race in college admissions:
Ending race-based admissions is a good decision because “race” is not a category in which we can segregate people. The national census has trouble even correctly counting representatives of each race. The concept of race as in skin color (Black, white etc.) is racist and colonialist in nature. Many Black people in South America have been living there for generations, becoming part of those nations, integrating into society, becoming Latino. Who are we to assign them to other [races]? And what about mixed children? How should we consider them—if you’re Black and white, does it cancel each other out? Should children looking more Black be officially considered more disadvantaged than their lighter-toned counterparts with the same parentage?
If one of your grandparents was black and it really shows, should you be treated differently than someone whiter, but with three Black grandparents and rare genetics that made that happen? If you are Black Indigenous, are you different from white Indigenous? When you look at income, which is going to benefit minorities disproportionately anyway, you can much more easily divide people into nonarbitrary categories.
Mark defends the use of race in admissions:
The concepts of fairness and justice do not arise in a vacuum, detached from the human societies that create them. Once upon a time, society considered trial by combat “fair.” The notion that we should not take race into account when considering admissions would be more palatable if we truly lived in a color-blind society (which I am an advocate for). We do not. Ours is a society in which race still privileges and disadvantages certain peoples. As long as that is the case, affirmative action is necessary.
Indeed, ideologies like critical race theory arise because minorities are not given a seat at the table and reject the systems of society, even if they happen to be good systems. If we want to preserve the good parts of society (and there are good parts of Western civilization), we need to have minority groups participate and benefit from that system—otherwise they are justified in tearing it down. Affirmative action is not just a moral good, it serves a profoundly practical purpose—to keep society stable and strengthen trust in our institutions.
H. is a gay white male from the South who now attends a top-20 private institution.
I do not believe in affirmative action. The issue with admissions isn’t race, it’s wealth. Many of the people of color at my predominantly white college come from vastly wealthy backgrounds and attended premier boarding schools across the world (Eton, St. Andrews, Exeter, etc.). It is oversimplifying the issue of representation to boil this debate down to race. Although it is true people of color are more likely to be impoverished, have fewer resources, and attend worse public schools, white and Asian people in underfunded communities experience this, too. I went to a public school that was severely underfunded, and my family could afford no tutors or enrichment programs. My high school was majority white. We all experienced an equal lack of resources. What is the value of biasing applicants by race, if the similarity with their white peers is yachting or using summer as a verb? While admissions should strive to reflect the demographic makeup of this nation, they should reflect the financial background of it as well.
Hilary, “a lifelong liberal,” writes:
As an Asian American I agree with the Supreme Court’s striking down the use of race in college admissions. I find it patently unfair that the average Asian American admitted to Harvard has SAT scores higher than African Americans who are admitted, and also higher than whites. Why should my teen be so disadvantaged for college admissions based on his race? Many of the current African American, Hispanic, and Native American admits aren’t from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. I believe that universities should scrap preferences for athletes, children of faculty, donors, and legacies, and pursue socioeconomic and political diversity instead of racial diversity. Race and ethnicity shouldn’t be factors.
Matthew defends the principle of race neutrality in law:
Even as a solid liberal, I have always been flummoxed by the left’s insistence that using race in higher admissions is acceptable. It is a classic example of “ends justify the means” thinking and it undermines foundational principles we should all agree on. Justice Jackson was correct to say that “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” But race’s relevance in life does not mean it should be relevant in the law.
One of the law’s purposes is to lay out neutral principles that can be fairly applied across the board. If we agree as a society that people should not be treated differently because of their race (and I hope we do), then there is no principled way to say using race in admissions upholds this ideal. Further, as a legal matter, if we say that diversity in college is a “compelling government interest” that meets the constitutional requirements of strict scrutiny, then practically anything is fair game for the use of race.
There are many principles that provide bedrock support for a well-functioning and just society even if they are not true in any factual sense. For example, we presume those charged with a crime are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt using admissible evidence. This procedural protection makes our society a better place to live overall, and it is more fundamental than any one case.
Suppose a person commits a murder but walks free because the available admissible evidence could not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt (e.g., all witnesses have died of natural causes). We consider this an acceptable outcome because it was the correct result of a system whose principles we support. If we give in to the temptation to make an exception in this one case, then we beg the question of why we even had the system in the first place. And where do we draw the line? And who decides where to draw it?
In the same way, we have a principle that people should not be treated differently before the law based on their race. The fact that Black Americans in particular are subjected to racism and discrimination, including by the government, does not justify using race as a general mechanism to balance the scales. Who exactly is deciding how to do the balancing?
This is by no means to suggest the law is powerless to right past wrongs. If an employer discriminates against Black employees, they can be sued. This means the actual perpetrator is held responsible for their actions. We don’t punish all employers in the industry as a group. Even in the case of more systemic wrongs, there is a way to be more rigorous in our response. We paid reparations to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, and we could pay reparations for slavery without putting the burden on any one group based on their immutable characteristics.
In the case of affirmative action, however, we apparently decided that Asian and white college applicants should bear the burden of the sins of their parents’ generation. After all, college admissions at a competitive school is by definition zero-sum. It is odd to me that the left has fought so hard to defend the use of race in such a specific context. After all, most colleges accept the majority of applicants. Affirmative action only really affects a select few of the world’s most competitive schools. This strikes me as a Band-Aid on a serious wound. The interventions needed to minimize or reverse the effects of systemic racism must happen much earlier. Undoing redlining or properly funding poorer school districts would go much farther to making our society more equal. These interventions can also be justified without treating individuals only as members of racial groups.
Affirmative action was always destined to be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Daniel has a suggestion:
If one wanted to return to the original idea for affirmative action, perhaps the answer is to award points to college applicants—regardless of race—who are descended from people enslaved in the United States.
S.B. believes there is a strong case for focusing on economic disadvantage:
I’m a white student from a low-income background at a very selective private school in Massachusetts. My college has been writing emails to the student body about how important affirmative action is to their admissions process and how this decision harms their ability to “attract and educate a community made up of many different kinds of students.” I hope, though, that this decision will create a better education system for students of all races, and that it will motivate schools to focus more on factors like class and geography when making admissions decisions. The best way to fix the racial wealth gap is to better support all economically disadvantaged people. There is no way in which helping poor people of one race hurts poor people of another race; therefore there is no good rationale for affirmative action as a way to solve economic inequality.
Then the primary motivation for race-conscious admissions is social diversity, something I do feel I have benefitted from as a student. However, I believe colleges should look deeper than race and create communities of people who don’t just look different but think and act differently.
James argues that “as a civilization, we have to move beyond skin color as an essential quality of a person before it’s the undoing of our societies, because of one inescapable point nearly everyone misses: The mind fundamentally finds security in homogeneity—the known, familiar and safe—and there is literally nothing we can do about it except stop separating people into the other.”

After spending months cataloging our problems, I’m now trying to envision what success looks like. How do we make the leap from today’s material plenty to tomorrow’s mass flourishing? What technological breakthroughs, institutional innovations, and cultural shifts are needed to produce a social order in which most people “live wisely and agreeably and well”?
The way I see it, attaining the next level in social development will require big strides of technological and social progress – advances needed to resolve two fundamental conflicts created by industrialization and the transition to mass affluence. First, as I discussed in the last essay, we need to resolve the conflict between humanity’s technological dynamism and the rest of the biosphere by moving to cleaner, sustainable systems of energy and food production. Let me turn now to the second challenge: resolving the conflict between modernity’s liberating individualism and our nature as social animals.
Mobilization into capitalism’s vast impersonal order has imposed heavy strains on the vital personal relationships essential to human flourishing. And the strains are heaviest for ordinary people, who generally lack the compensations of interesting work, economic security, and high status that buoy the elite. What paths can progress take to alleviate those burdens?
The most straightforward path, operating within the structures of the system, is to make modern life much more affordable than it is at present. A cheaper cost of living facilitates extra consumption, yes, but it also encourages extra leisure and reduced work for pay. 
This was the path that Karl Marx believed would lead to the “realm of freedom.” Even after capitalism had been overthrown, Marx recognized, there would still be work that had to get done to provide sustenance and shelter. To that extent, then, people under socialism would still inhabit the “realm of necessity.” In other words, rather than enjoying leisure and doing things for the intrinsic satisfactions they bring, people would still have to work for extrinsic rewards – namely, keeping scarcity at bay. “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” he wrote in Capital, “Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
It turns out that Marx’s simple binary – work and necessity versus leisure and freedom – misses some important middle ground. First, many types of work feature at least some intrinsic satisfactions, and these satisfactions bulk especially large in the jobs of the managerial, professional, and entrepreneurial elite. Second, many of our most fulfilling leisure activities have some work-like elements: the tedium and frustration one must overcome to develop skills, boring parts of projects that lay the groundwork for the fun stuff. There isn’t a sharp line that separates, say, working some extra hours to afford a great vacation abroad and straining in one’s off hours to learn some of the language they speak there to make the trip more enjoyable. 
I think this middle ground helps to explain why Keynes, in the essay where he identified humanity’s “permanent problem,” erred so badly in predicting how fast work effort would recede in the face of growing wealth – recall that he thought we’d only be working 15 hours a week by now. In the United States, average working hours at top income levels have actually increased in recent decades. You can call it workaholism if you want, but it’s not ascetic drudgery – it’s a reflection of how genuinely absorbing intense competition and close camaraderie can be (as well, of course, as the attractions of using income and wealth to “keep score”). Mixed motives exist outside the elite as well: Keynes badly underestimated the degree to which new goods and services would spur people to keep their work hours up. This happens because the ongoing accumulation of wealth ratchets upward the standard of living considered to be decent and respectable; also, though, there has been a huge expansion in commercially available leisure activities (movies, TV, internet, dining out, vacationing), and this creates incentives to work hard and play hard.
All these points carry weight, but there’s another, simpler reason why commitment to paid employment remains so strong: we’re not nearly rich enough yet. Yes, ordinary people today enjoy comforts and conveniences that would be the envy of yesteryear’s aristocrats, but that enjoyment doesn’t come easy nor is its continued availability at all assured. To have access to what we consider a middle-class standard of living requires unremitting effort, and even then for most people one nasty financial reversal is all that’s needed to send them tumbling downward.
Rather than focusing on how to boost ordinary people’s money incomes, though, I believe that the most promising strategy for achieving mass enrichment is to focus on dramatic reductions in the cost of living. Yes, it’s possible that technological breakthroughs now on the horizon – in particular, cheap clean energy and AI – could trigger robust growth in total spending, which then could translate into smartly rising money incomes for ordinary workers. But even without a boom in total output of that kind, those and related breakthroughs could make dollars stretch much further by slashing living expenses. 
The biggest, fattest, juiciest target is housing. Housing now accounts for 33.8 percent of total U.S. consumer spending – a share that has actually edged up over time. Back in 1950, at the dawn of mass affluence, housing accounted for only 27.2 percent of total spending. Of course, homes are much bigger today, but look at what’s happened to spending on life’s other basics – food and clothing. Despite big improvements in food variety and quality, and an explosion in relatively expensive dining outside the home, the share of consumer spending dedicated to food has plunged from 29.7 percent in 1950 to 12.4 percent today. And despite the fact that we own so much more clothing than our parents and grandparents did – if you’re familiar with older houses, you know how little closet space they have – spending on apparel has dropped from 11.5 percent of total spending in 1950 to only 2.6 percent today.
Why has housing spending stayed so high? Part of the answer lies in a stunning and mysterious failure of American capitalism: decade after decade of apparently negative productivity growth in both residential and commercial construction. It’s hard to exaggerate how bizarre this is: the data seem to show that we’re going backwards, unlearning how to build things in a cost-effective manner. A recent paper by Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson reviews the matter thoroughly and concludes that something genuinely is amiss: while measurement problems may be part of the explanation, there is a clear divergence between performance in this sector and in the rest of the economy. 
But why is this happening? No one clear, obvious culprit presents itself, but the best guess is that construction’s degenerative condition is a product of contemporary culture’s progressive loss aversion. In an Ezra Klein column about the Goolsbee-Syverson paper, Chad Syverson commented, “There are a million veto points. There are a lot of mouths at the trough that need to be fed to get anything started or done. So many people can gum up the works.”
The loss-averse vetocracy thus does a double whammy on housing prices. First, through zoning and other increasingly restrictive land-use regulations, it’s withholding permission to build new housing and thereby driving up prices through artificial scarcity. And then, even when permission is granted, construction is hobbled by a dense tangle of regulatory and political constraints.
The YIMBY movement has been scoring regular successes of late in pushing back against restrictions on new housing at both the local and state levels, and its efforts deserve our appreciation and support. But the missing complement to this movement is an ambitious project to revolutionize housing construction with a view toward driving down building costs dramatically. 
The biggest obstacles confronting such a project are probably cultural rather than technological. With a hundred years of suburbia behind us, we are deeply committed to the current model of single-family homes built on-site in one-off fashion. And that commitment has been formalized in zoning plans and building codes that lock in established ways of doing things. Radically new methods of construction and new styles of housing would struggle to win consumer acceptance even if they cleared all the legal hurdles. 
Moreover, in the United States and many other countries, we have embraced the truly perverse practice of considering homes as an investment rather than as consumption. The Substack “Good Reason” had a really nice rant on this subject recently, and it’s worth quoting at some length:

I think that the idea that home prices should outpace inflation is insane and maybe has broken modern society.
When you invest in a company, you expect the stock price to rise because the company becomes more productive. It hires employees and buys resources to develop technology, improve processes, and eventually produce more widgets, services, or addictive digital videos. The company becomes worth more because it has generated, and can generate, more.
When you invest in a home, you expect the price to rise because *shrugs* it just does….
[H]ouses are pretty much the only physical good that are expected to 1) appreciate in value, and 2) be used all the time. Oil paintings and Faberge eggs appreciate in value, but they’re put behind glass cases so that they remain in the exact same state they were in when purchased. Tellingly, they appreciate in value not because they’re useful but because they’re rare.
All other physical goods — cars, beds, furniture, appliances — lose value with time. Your car loses value the moment you drive it off the lot. You can’t sell a couch on Craigslist, charge double the retail price, and claim “It’s worth more because I put a lot of sweaty equity into this baby.” You use it, it takes wear-and-tear, and you resell it at a discount….
In other realms, we expect new versions of consumer goods to 1) do more than their old counterparts, 2) be cheaper relative to inflation, or 3) both. Cars can now instantly show where they are and find directions to anywhere. A fraction of a standard modern television screen has higher resolution than the best TVs 30 years ago. Despite those improvements, cars and televisions (and furniture, and apparel, and just durable goods in general) have all gotten much cheaper on an inflation-adjusted basis over the last 30 years.
Meanwhile, for housing, we expect that a 40-year old house with a bunch of renovations is somehow worth more than it was when it was built. We’d be surprised if it weren’t.
It’s worth more because, like oil paintings and Faberge eggs, it’s rare.

That last point is crucial. Treating housing as an investment commits the entire society to a gigantic Ponzi scheme: the key to your investment paying off is having the good luck to get in before other investors – i.e., to buy your house before a big wave of escalating land prices. The increasing prices are due simply to the scarcity of the land – which creates enormous incentives to boost that scarcity artificially with restrictions on new building. We stand at the tail end of a century-long mistake.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In Japan, homes are not expected to last for generations: the government treats them as depreciating assets that are considered valueless after 20 years or so, and sellers frequently tear their down their old home before putting the lot up for sale. In Germany and Switzerland, home ownership is much less common than in most advanced countries: the home ownership rate is under 50 percent in Germany, and under 34 percent in Switzerland.
For this exercise in definite optimism, let’s imagine a cultural and legal opening to start over: a comprehensive liberalization of land use to eliminate artificial housing scarcity, a broad turn away from the “housing as investment” philosophy that incentivizes artificial scarcity, and new greenfield developments that are given the regulatory flexibility to experiment with entirely new designs, materials, and construction methods. Imagine that such experimentation produces high-quality living space at a fraction of the price of traditional homes, and that such developments start spreading across the country. The end result: declining real home prices over time, and a steady drop in the percentage of spending devoted to shelter. 
The next biggest category of consumer spending is transportation, coming in currently at 16.4 percent of total purchases. The achievement of clean energy superabundance discussed in the last essay would put a dent in this (gasoline purchases now account for about 2.5 percent of total spending), but the biggest cost savings are those that autonomous vehicles could bring. The current practice of having personally owned vehicles for each individual or household, all of which spend virtually all of their time parked and inactive, is extravagantly wasteful. A system of autonomous taxis available for immediate hailing any time would fully satisfy most people’s needs at a fraction of current outlays.
Recent spectacular developments in generative AI based on large language models hold out the promise of transformative change in both healthcare and education, which together comprise nearly 10 percent of total consumer spending (8.1 percent for healthcare, 1.8 percent for education). Both sectors have seen prices run well ahead of inflation for many years, and both are not coincidentally dominated by government funding and controls. Reforming either is famously difficult, as the status quo is defended tenaciously at every turn by its self-serving beneficiaries. 
AI, however, provides a miraculous opportunity to bypass the bloated healthcare and education establishments altogether, offering vastly better service at dramatically reduced cost. To be sure, AI will be put to use within both establishments: check out this exciting glimpse at how doctors and nurses can use ChatGPT to improve at patient interaction, diagnosis, and treatment. But to my way of thinking, the truly revolutionary upside of AI in both healthcare and education lies in the direct, personalized service it can provide. In education, think of AI tutors offering infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely patient, individually tailored instruction for every child; in healthcare, imagine your personal healthbot with constant access to real-time readouts from wearable or implanted body sensors, deftly managing daily preventive care and spotting worrisome conditions for early treatment. 
Healthcare spending is heavily skewed toward the elderly: think of it as a long, drawn-out, but ultimately losing battle against the degenerative effects of aging. Encouraging progress in anti-aging research, though, holds out the hope of turning the tide of battle. The grand prize of success would be additional years—additional decades – of youthful vigor and vitality, but also significant would be the huge cost savings as anti-aging therapies substitute for the enormous expense of managing large populations with heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other age-related conditions.
Put all the optimistic scenarios sketched here together with the revolutions in energy and food production discussed in the last essay, and we can see the outlines of a much richer world – one in which access to a high standard of living is far more affordable. Even without special measures designed to encourage the trend (more about those later), there is every reason to believe that one effect of that progress would be a significant reduction in work for pay – and thus a significant increase in freedom from capitalism’s rigors and disciplines. 
The effect of rising real income (whether in the form of higher money wages or a lower cost of living) on work effort comes down to a contest between what economists call the “income effect” and the “substitution effect.” The income effect refers to the increased purchasing power that comes with higher pay, while the substitution effect refers to the changes in relative prices that result. Economists see leisure as a “normal” good – that is, as people make more money, they want more of it (as opposed to “inferior” goods like, say, Ramen noodles). Accordingly, the income effect results in increased “purchases” of leisure as real income rises. The substitution effect, on the other hand, pushes in the opposite direction: the opportunity cost of leisure (i.e., foregoing the additional income that could buy more goods and services) rises with rising income, thus discouraging people from taking time off. So which effect wins out? Historical experience to date shows that people typically split the difference: rising incomes lead to both more consumption and more leisure. 
Demobilization from market work is thus nothing new. In the United States, the average work week fell from 60 hours for factory jobs at the end of the 19th century to the now standard 40 hours over the first decades of the 20th century. Meanwhile, between delayed entry into the workforce because of secondary and tertiary schooling and earlier retirement ages, average paid employment hours over the course of a lifetime fell sharply during the 20th century. According to calculations by the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert William Fogel, average lifetime hours of work for pay dropped from 182,100 in 1880 to 122,400 in 1995 – a 33 percent decline even in the face of dramatically increased lifespans. And although women’s labor force participation rose steadily over the 20th century, it’s been stagnant in the 21st; male participation peaked about 60 years ago and has been falling ever since. Throw in the effects of aging, and average annual hours worked per capita have fallen from 926 in 2000 to 885 in 2019 on the eve of the pandemic.
In a much richer world made possible by the technological breakthroughs I’ve been talking about, there is every reason to expect demobilization from the labor force to continue. The increase in leisure could be distributed in various possible ways: some people could opt for shorter hours over a long working life; others could work when they’re young and then retire relatively early to live off their savings; still others could choose to work episodically to build up savings and then return to the labor market temporarily when those savings have run down. However the extra leisure is managed, the upshot is a big increase in the independently wealthy: people with sufficient resources to limit or eliminate altogether their dependence on work for pay.
Getting richer, with the greater independence that brings, is one way to reduce the strains imposed by capitalism on the strong personal ties that are essential to flourishing. The other way to reduce the market cost of living, and thereby to reduce one’s dependence on the system, is to do things yourself. The possibilities of greater self-sufficiency at the household, neighborhood, and community level are the subject of my next essay, the final part in this exercise in definite optimism.
The post The next level of rich: An exercise in definite optimism (Part 2) appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.In 2010, a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki, who was grieving the death of his cousin, created an unconnected telephone booth in which he had one-sided “conversations” with the dead relative. He found it comforting to do so. A year later, when the earthquake and tsunami that overwhelmed the Fukushima nuclear power plant killed almost 20,000 people in his country—including about 10 percent of the population of his own town—Sasaki opened his kaze no denwa, or “wind phone,” to the public. The booth has received more than 30,000 visitors to date, initially those who used it to “talk” with their family and friends who’d been killed in the disaster but now almost anyone grieving the loss of a loved one, including tourists.Grief can create a psychological, even physiological, disequilibrium so great that even a simulated phone connection can provide relief. And yet, grief is the most natural kind of suffering. We love others, and we will lose some of them. That’s part of life: Given that nearly 3 million people die in the U.S. every year, and each leaves, on average, an estimated five people bereaved, almost 15 million Americans annually are experiencing fresh grief. Scholars believe that a more severe form, known as prolonged grief, afflicts about one in 10 bereaved people a year; this describes a condition in which the mourner’s suffering remains high over an extended period.[Arthur C. Brooks: How to find joy in your Sisyphean existence]Grief does not have to be a private misery and net harm to our lives. We can learn to comprehend it, manage it, and grow from it. And in understanding our own grief, we can help others heal and thrive as well.We often use bereavement and grief synonymously, but they aren’t the same. Bereavement is the experience of losing a loved one to death, whereas grief is the physical, psychological, and social response to that experience. This sort of sadness comes to every one of us, yet the experience is still shrouded in mystery. For many, the only thing they know about the science of grief is that it is thought to involve passing through five predictable stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And this conventional wisdom, based on the work of the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her colleagues dating from the late 1960s, has been largely abandoned by experts in recent decades.Nevertheless, medical providers do see fairly common symptoms of grief, especially in the period right after a person learns of a loved one’s death. The effects that typically occur are part of the “separation response,” which includes yearning, longing, and sadness but also commonly involves benign hallucinations of the loved one. This can also entail confusion about your sense of self and of your relationship to others, if they emerged through deep intertwinement with the deceased, and even disorientation about what is past and present. For this reason, acute grief can resemble mild dementia, though of course it is not the same. Rather, the condition occurs because another person can be such a part of ourselves that when they disappear, we are temporarily destabilized in our sense of time and space.Neuroscientists are learning about the brain’s response to grief, which involves (among other regions) activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain associated with the experience of pain, both physical and psychological. One way researchers measure physical arousal caused by grief is by how well the skin conducts electricity (known as “skin conductance response”), which indicates the intensity of emotion and attention. Researchers of a small neuroanatomical study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry in 2003 reported that this response was highest among the bereaved when grief-related words were accompanied by a photo of the deceased loved one, and much higher than if the subject was prompted by just one reminder or the other.[Arthur C. Brooks: Breakups always hurt, but you can shorten the suffering]Given how debilitating grief can be, especially early on, it might seem like some sort of evolutionary glitch. Yet evolutionary biologists believe just the opposite. Staying close to kin was a survival imperative until relatively recently, so the pain of separation from someone very close was an important inducement to close that gap; failing to do so could mean dangerous isolation. Unfortunately, the death of a loved one means that that pain of separation cannot be relieved immediately and lessens only with time, as our brains become more accustomed to life without the person who has died.For most people, that pain does decline with time. One way that researchers have measured this is by looking at the prevalence of depressive symptoms in successive months after the death of a loved one. One 2019 study of widowed women found that depression was present in 38 percent within the first month; through the next two months, it was present in 25 percent; a year to a year and a half later, it was affecting 11 percent. Notably, there was a great deal of heterogeneity in the samples studied—everyone has a different experience of grief. Yet the data show that although people never forget their lost loved ones, most of the bereaved recover significantly in a matter of months.As difficult as things can seem early on after the loss of a loved one, you can be happy again. In fact, a large body of research shows that over time, bereavement can even be an impetus for what psychologists call post-traumatic growth, including greater appreciation for life, improved relationships, recognition of new possibilities, personal strength, and spiritual development. Here are four ways to make grief more bearable early on, and to allow more pronounced growth down the line.1. Look for meaning
In the 1990s, researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst interviewed college students who had recently lost a parent. The scholars asked the students about, among other things, their sense of meaning in the world: how just the world is, how random, how controllable. The researchers found that bereavement was significantly lower among the students who scored higher in their belief in a world with meaning. This suggests that a good course of action in a time of grief is to use the experience as an opportunity to ponder your beliefs and look for answers about life’s coherence, purpose, and significance. So it also makes sense that spiritual and religious progress are a common source of growth after bereavement.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.2. Make changes to your identity
When a loved one dies, that changes who you are—at a minimum in a purely factual way. For instance, the loss of a spouse means that you are now single. More than that, though, when you lose a loved one, it brings a change in your own identity, along with all sorts of behavioral changes. Single people, after all, do different things than married people. A 2013 review of older adults who’d experienced bereavement found that after they’d lost someone, an essential factor of recovery included consciously embracing a new identity and making life changes. The lives they made involved going out more with friends, for example, or getting into new activities. Although grief is painful, it is also an opportunity to become a new person.3. Adopt rituals
One way of reestablishing a sense of control after the loss of a loved one is to create mourning rituals; even trivial-seeming ones can be effective. Researchers demonstrated this in an experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in which people who had lost an important relationship through a breakup or death were asked to recall rituals related to the loss. For some, the rites were religious, such as sitting shiva; others played a favorite song on particular days or wrote letters to the loved one that they never sent. Those who remembered a ritual experienced 10 percent less grief than those who did not. When the researchers induced grief in a laboratory through randomly losing a lottery and then testing the impact of rituals in isolation regardless of belief, they found that these behaviors reduced grief intensity by 28 percent. The right practice for you will depend on your beliefs and circumstances, but it will help to do something systematic that acknowledges your loss and puts you in charge of your response.4. Let yourself be happy again
Specialists in the subject commonly point out that grief can be accompanied by guilt when grief starts to subside, as if this were a signal that you didn’t care so much after all about the person you lost. Similarly, people can feel a paradoxical sense of loss for the grief itself, as if the public longing for the lost one honored their connection to others too. Although grief is healthy and normal, it is important to remember that happiness is as well. We have evolved to suffer when separated from our loved ones, but not to suffer forever. Allow yourself to recover.So far, I have been writing about one’s own experience of grief and how to manage it. But what about another person who has had a loss and is suffering? We may struggle to help others in this situation, because the tendency is to avoid bereaved people when we don’t know what to say or we think they want to be left alone. And perhaps their suffering frightens us. Grieving people can also pull away from us in an effort not to burden us with their sadness.[Read: There are no ‘five stages’ of grief]Avoiding those who are grieving is a mistake. Obviously, there are better and worse things to tell a person who has experienced a loss, and coming up with the right words might reasonably worry you. Many experts suggest that the best approach doesn’t rely much on your words at all; it’s best to simply be present and listen.Just listening can be the best analgesic you can offer for the pain of others. It can even heal. As the psychologist Carl Rogers put it, “When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to reperceive my world in a new way and to go on.”The Japanese wind phone simulates a healing listener. Your attentive silence can be the real thing.

At the Vilnius summit, the United States and Germany have led the coalition of the squeamish in opposition to announcing a timetable for Ukrainian membership in NATO. They have some modestly plausible reasons, including fear of an automatic commitment to immediate war with Russia and reluctance to bring in a country whose territory is still partially occupied and whose institutions are not fully reformed.Other arguments suggest a less thoughtful view. Ukraine has to show that it can handle modern military technology, or that it is a thriving democracy? Compare it with militarily negligible and politically contemptible Hungary, and the absurdity of these kinds of requirements becomes clear. One might infer from some official pronouncements that NATO membership is like joining a snooty club to which only those with good pedigree, clean shirt collars, and immaculately shined shoes need apply. It is not. NATO membership for Ukraine is a guarantee of Western (and not only Ukrainian) security and stability. It is not a favor to Ukraine but a move to avert another big European war.The notion that NATO membership cannot be given to a country at war means that Russia has every incentive to keep the war simmering, no matter the cost. Similarly, the idea that a country that is partly occupied and whose borders are not universally recognized cannot be admitted will cause Russia to cling desperately to any piece of Ukrainian territory it can hold. Let it be noted that Germany joined NATO while under occupation by both the Soviet Union and the Western allies, and before it had acceded to its post-1945 borders.[Ivo Daalder: Let Ukraine in]The alternative advanced by President Joe Biden in a CNN interview is the so-called Israel model, in which the West, led by the United States, arms Ukraine to the teeth, guaranteeing the country, as an act of Congress put it with respect to Israel in 2008, “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors.”Making strategy by dubious analogy is a bad idea. The historical differences are both illuminating and cautionary.America extended its guarantee of a “qualitative military edge” to Israel in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In other words, it came after Israel had defeated its Arab enemies in four major conflicts (1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973), in part by taking the war into their territories. Israel staged bombing raids against targets deep in Syria and Egypt, including their capitals, from the 1960s forward, and unlike the Ukrainian drones flying to Moscow, these were not mere symbolic strikes. The Six Day War, in 1967, was an overwhelming Israeli victory, which involved the annihilation of its neighbors’ air forces and the advance of Israeli armor and infantry across the de facto 1949 border. The 1973 war similarly ended with Israeli forces within artillery range of Damascus and on the verge of destroying half the Egyptian force that had crossed the Suez Canal. Is maintaining that kind of capability and superiority what Washington and Berlin intend for Ukraine? Do they understand what it would require?Ukraine, at present, has no comparable edge over the Russian military. It is struggling to expel the Russian invaders from territory they seized in 2022, let alone 2014. Ukraine undoubtedly has an edge over Russia in motivation, skill, and determination, but nothing like what Israel had already demonstrated in 1967 and would do again in 1973 and 1982 against Syria.Military superiority rests on demography and economics. Over the course of its existence, Israel’s population has grown (1.3 million in 1950, 3.1 million in 1970, nearly 10 million today). Its economy, which was just under a third the size of Egypt’s in 1960, is now substantially larger. Ukraine has been, in essence, bankrupted by the war, and has had a quarter to a third of its population displaced—this on top of a declining birth rate. One projection has Ukraine’s population shrinking (and aging) from 41 million in 2020 to 35 million in 20 years. In short, it cannot tap the demographic and economic vitality that helped make Israel a going military concern.A series of conventional victories brought a cold peace to Israel’s frontiers after the 1973 war, just as the societal and economic forces that underlay Israel’s military edge were beginning to open the gap with its Arab neighbors. Ukraine’s advantages over Russia are proportionally much less.Israel’s relatively peaceful accommodation with its neighboring states had one other large element: its nuclear arsenal. By most accounts, Israel developed nuclear weapons as early as 1973. Indeed, during the most intense period of that war, it may have signaled its preparedness to deploy, if not use, them. Even by that year, neither Egypt nor Syria believed, as they had in 1967, that the destruction of the Israeli state by conventional means was possible; their territorial ambitions were strictly limited.A Ukraine that has no allies pledged to come to its aid in the event of war, whose demographic prospects are poor, whose economy has been devastated not only by brutal battles but by deliberate and massive Russian sabotage and destruction, would be foolish not to pursue nuclear weapons. It has the technical skills not only to build the bombs but to construct delivery systems for them.That is an outcome no one should want. The Russians might very well be tempted to strike at such a program preemptively, and if the Ukrainians were to get the jump on them, Kyiv might very well detonate a nuclear weapon as a warning against proceeding further.Ukraine is a large country with few natural borders and a powerful enemy that is likely to attack it again absent NATO membership. The immensity of Russian oil and gas reserves means that Russia can eventually rearm; the stubbornness of the Russian elite’s belief in an imperial state and its rejection of Ukrainian sovereignty suggest its intent to do so. The position, in short, is entirely different from that of Israel versus its immediate opponents in the 1970s and ’80s.The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states that, like Ukraine, were once subject to rule from Moscow.At the 2008 Bucharest summit, NATO declared that it supported Ukraine’s application to join the alliance. We know what good that did. Regrettably, the 2023 Vilnius summit has simply reaffirmed the same in language of comparable mushiness, removing only one bureaucratic hurdle for Ukraine without solidifying its prospects for joining the alliance.  A firm invitation to join NATO and a deadline by which that will occur would have been infinitely preferable, and would deny Russia indefinite time and latitude to prolong this war.Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty declares that an attack against one member is an attack against all, a fundamental premise of the alliance. But it only commits the alliance and its members to undertake “individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” It does not, in other words, cause an automatic declaration of war against Russia—but it is a high and demanding commitment to Ukraine’s security. It will thereby be a far more effective deterrent against future Russian aggression, which otherwise is a virtual certainty in the years to come, with all the risks that adhere to that probability.[Anne Applebaum: Multilateral man is more powerful than Putin realized]Has NATO membership for Ukraine been excluded for good by the Vilnius summit? No more than the supply of vital weapons to Ukraine was by Washington’s reluctance to provide HIMARS or tanks or Patriot missiles or F-16s, or by Berlin’s initial belief in February 2022 that providing 5,000 surplus helmets to Ukraine was enough of a contribution for it to make. Time and again NATO’s largest members have been pulled—hesitantly, sometimes morosely and resentfully—into doing the right thing by allies closer to the front or with stronger spines and clearer vision. In this case Poland, the Baltic nations, and other frontline states have been joined by Britain, France, and other NATO members in arguing for moving on Ukraine’s membership firmly and quickly.There is another moment ahead: the 75th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, which will be held in Washington in 2024. On that occasion President Biden can be the statesmanlike leader NATO needs in ensuring European security for decades to come by admitting Kyiv to the alliance.Unless, of course, he prefers to be the father of the Ukrainian atom bomb.

Beijing has been on the diplomatic warpath against NATO, warning the transatlantic military alliance not to meddle in the Asia-Pacific region. But this week’s NATO summit in Lithuania showed that Asian countries are committed to deepening ties with NATO despite China’s threats of retaliation. If President Xi Jinping is searching for someone to blame, he ought to look in the mirror.

For months, senior Chinese officials have been ramping up their anti-NATO rhetoric. In a June speech at a major conference in Singapore, China’s defense minister, Li Shangfu, accused the United States of pushing for NATO-like structures in Asia “to hold countries in the region hostage and play up conflict and confrontation.” Former Chinese ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai told the same audience, “We don’t need an Asian NATO. We don’t want to see expansion of NATO’s role in our region.”

According to Beijing’s logic, the Ukraine war is evidence that the European security architecture, of which NATO is a key part, has failed. The best course Europe can pursue for Asia is to “do nothing,” Cui said. At a different event this month, Cui said, “If NATO tries to expand into the Asia-Pacific, it might well signify its decline.”

The NATO summit offered a loud and clear rebuke of those words from (most) NATO members and several Indo-Pacific powers. China’s threats are in fact pushing Asian countries into NATO’s arms.

“What happens in the Indo-Pacific matters for Europe and what happens for Europe matters for the Indo-Pacific,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said when greeting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at the summit.

Yoon said he wanted to “institutionalize the framework of our cooperation with NATO.” The two established a new South Korea-NATO partnership to cooperate in 11 areas, including military connectivity, cyberdefense and nonproliferation. Yoon’s moves come as Beijing is amping up its economic coercion campaign against South Korea.

This was the second time that Yoon and his counterparts from Japan, Australia and New Zealand attended the NATO summit — a grouping now referred to as the Asia Pacific Partners, or AP4, for short. Nobody is trying to create a copy of NATO in the Indo-Pacific, but Asian democracies are starting to join forces to resist Beijing’s aggression.

Meanwhile, China’s bullying and assertive “wolf warrior diplomacy” in Europe is spurring smaller, mostly Eastern European countries to push back by getting more involved in Asia. Ahead of the NATO summit, Lithuania issued its first “Indo-Pacific strategy.” For the Lithuanians, China’s attempts this year to sink their economy (as punishment for deepening ties with Taiwan) were a wake-up call.

“Unsuccessful attempts by China to exert economic and diplomatic pressure on Lithuania proves that a country can withstand economic blackmail if it has built up societal resilience and has reliable partners,” the strategy states. “Lithuanian experience in its relations with China allows us to share lessons learned in resisting pressure with the countries in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.”

There are increasing signs that security ties between some Asian and European democracies are deepening. South Korea is not only quietly shipping munitions to Ukraine; it is now openly selling tanks to Poland. Meanwhile, European militaries are increasingly participating in military exercises in the Pacific. Democracies in both regions are also working to jointly reduce their dependence on China for high-technology goods and other key resources.

Of course, not all NATO countries are on the same page regarding China. Although the NATO Joint Communiqué contained strong language criticizing China’s policies and pledging robust cooperation with the assembled Asian-Pacific democracies, one previously expected plank was missing.

The French government blocked a long-discussed plan to open a NATO office in Tokyo. This comes soon after French President Emmanuel Macron was criticized for saying Europe has no interest in becoming “America’s followers” regarding the Taiwan issue. Macron’s argument is that Europe should not confront China over NATO or Taiwan while it’s still embroiled in the Ukraine crisis.

Perhaps the best rebuttal to that view was offered by President Biden, who drew a clear connection between the security of the two regions in his Wednesday speech. He noted that the Asian countries attending the NATO summit have been staunch supporters of Ukraine.

“We’re working to deepen connections between the Atlantic and Pacific democracies so they can better work together toward the shared values we all seek: strong alliances, versatile partnerships, common purpose, collective action to meet our shared challenges,” Biden said. “Will we turn back naked, unchecked aggression today to deter other would-be aggressors tomorrow?”

Beijing’s efforts to prevent Asian countries from getting closer to NATO and stop NATO from getting closer to Asia are backfiring. This is not a U.S.-led plot to contain China. Asian and European countries are realizing they can achieve security in their own region only if they help defend each other.

Texas A&M University has come under fire for pushing out an incoming director of the school's journalism program following a series of complaints over her political views. 
Last month, Texas A&M announced that it had appointed Kathleen McElroy, the director of the journalism program at the University of Texas at Austin from 2016 to 2022, to lead Texas A&M's journalism program. According to The Texas Tribune, McElroy originally received an offer to run the program as a tenured professor, pending approval of the school's board of regents.
However, McElroy says that the school soon began altering the terms of her contract, following conservative backlash over her writing on racism and diversity initiatives within newsrooms and college campuses.
According to the Tribune, several members of the school's board of regents had read an article in the Texas Scorecard highlighting McElroy's views on faculty diversity and objectivity in journalism. The article quoted extensively from an op-ed McElroy had written for The Daily Texan in 2020, where McElroy called for tracking faculty diversity and wrote that "because of racism throughout fundamental American institutions—including education and, in my particular field, journalism—growing diversity in higher education seems difficult."
McElroy told The New York Times, where she once worked as an editor, that Texas A&M's interim dean for liberal arts had warned her of the backlash over her writing. "I said, 'What's wrong?'" McElroy recounted to the Times. "He said, 'You're a Black woman who was at The New York Times and, to these folks, that's like working for Pravda.'" 
Eventually, McElroy says she agreed to sign a five-year contract without tenure, which was swiftly downgraded to a one-year contract, which emphasized "that the appointment was at will and that she could be terminated at any time," according to the Tribune. Following this offer, McElroy decided to turn down the position and return to her previous job at the University of Texas at Austin.
McElroy's story is akin to a different controversy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in which journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones had a similar tenured teaching offer revoked following conservative uproar over the political beliefs expressed in her writing. In both cases, politically appointed boards of regents made the decision to deny tenure. A recently signed law in Texas banning diversity, equity, and inclusion offices in public state colleges only adds to the political nature of McElroy's effective ouster. 
However, just as in Hannah-Jones' case, this case is concerning not simply because a university decided not to hire a professor with controversial beliefs but because of how it went about it. Faculty may reasonably object to McElory's views on journalism—for example, her skepticism of objectivity in journalism or her views on how diversity should be approached in the newsroom. However, once faculty have duly voted to hire a professor, the intervention of political appointees is inappropriate—and poses a real threat to academic freedom.
"Members of the boards of trustees of universities have no expertise to assess the quality of an individual's work and the potential contribution that a faculty member might make to the campus," wrote Princeton politics professor Keith E. Whittington in The Volokh Conspiracy (which is hosted by Reason) in a 2021 article about Hannah-Jones. "What board members do have are political opinions and personal interests. If boards can block faculty hiring and promotion decisions, the inevitable result will be to shrink the range of acceptable ideas that can be expressed, taught and investigated on the university campus."
Texas A&M's decision to deny tenure to McElory is yet another entry in our increasingly fraught culture war politics over what should be taught—and who should teach—at American public universities. While these are pressing questions that deserve inquiry, intervention in controversial hiring decisions is best not left to political appointees. 
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Fifteen years after Section 702 was first authorized by Congress as a tool for foreign surveillance, there's never been an accounting of how many Americans have had their electronic communications scooped up.
Even attempting to calculate such a figure "would not be feasible," Sharon Bradford Franklin, chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent executive branch agency responsible for advocating on behalf of Americans' rights in national security matters, told a House committee during an April hearing.
Franklin said the extent of that so-called incidental collection matters, "because the greater the number of Americans who are directly affected, the greater the need for Congress to ensure the safeguards throughout the 702 program are sufficient." In fact, she told the committee, the very notion of "incidental" collection is a bit of a misnomer. It is illegal for intelligence agencies to use Section 702 to deliberately spy on Americans' communications, but any message sent to someone in another country is fair game.
"Thus, incidental collection is a feature of Section 702 and not a bug," Franklin concluded.
The future of this incidental-but-intentional snooping on Americans' emails, texts, and phone calls is one of the most important questions facing Congress in the second half of this year. Authorization for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires in December. While it will almost certainly be renewed in some form, the process offers a rare opportunity for Congress to change the program's rules to better protect Americans' civil liberties—and there might be bipartisan support for doing so.
When Section 702 was approved in 2008, it removed older provisions of the FISA law that required the government to obtain a warrant from the special FISA court before wiretapping communications between Americans and foreigners. Agencies must obtain permission from the FISA court before conducting any surveillance, but the court effectively rubber-stamps all requests and does not review specific targets.
As a result, "vast quantities of our communications are still searched and amassed in government databases simply because we are in touch with people abroad," explains the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). There are at least two National Security Agency (NSA) programs—PRISM and Upstream—that rely on Section 702 surveillance. And, again, so many data are vacuumed up that the government's official position is that it's impossible to meaningfully quantify it, as Franklin testified in April.
Sarah Taitz, a national security fellow at the ACLU, says all that supposedly incidental collection of Americans' data is a "bait-and-switch" because "the FBI routinely exploit this rich source of our information by searching those databases to find and examine the communications of individual Americans for use in domestic investigations."
We do know how often that happens, thanks to an annual report published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). In 2021, for example, the FBI used its FISA powers to run more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database.
The FBI reported a dramatic drop in the number of warrantless Section 702 searches in 2022. The ODNI's most recent transparency report shows that the FBI made 204,090 queries of the Section 702 database last year. The sharp decline is attributed to several policy changes implemented by the FBI during the second half of 2021 and into early 2022, including new rules limiting when investigators can access the Section 702 databases.
Even after that significant decline, however, the overall use of Section 702 for warrantless domestic spying seems to be on the rise. In 2013—the first year the government released this transparency report, in response to the outrage generated by Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA's spy programs—there were only 89,138 targets for Section 702 collections. The most recent report shows that there were 246,073 targets in 2022.
More foreign targets of Section 702 spying likely means more "incidental" collection of Americans' communications and larger databases. The FBI's declining use of those databases is a welcome development—one that suggests reforms aimed at tightening how this information is used can be implemented without jeopardizing national security. But it is also something of a red herring, given that the extent of what's being vacuumed up by Section 702 remains unknown.
"Given the rate at which the number of Section 702 targets is growing, it's likely that the government today collects over a billion communications under Section 702 each year," writes Taitz.
There's also evidence that the FBI improperly used Section 702 databases to spy on Americans involved in the George Floyd protests, the January 6 riot, and in less high-profile situations. A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report unsealed in May showed that the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021—before the FBI's internal policies were changed.
All these numbers are somewhat head spinning. Tens of thousands of foreign targets, leading to hundreds of thousands or even millions of warrantless searches every year through the potentially billions of intercepted communications. Whether any particular target or search might be justified, the aggregate numbers point to an inescapable conclusion: that the federal government is operating a massive domestic spying regime with little oversight and no meaningful concern for Americans' constitutional rights.
And unlike in 2018—when then-President Donald Trump grouched about FISA and the "deep state" but then signed the bill reauthorizing all this anyway—there might actually be a serious attempt at reform. On Tuesday, a group of six Republican lawmakers led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) and including Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) introduced a resolution calling for Congress to allow FISA to expire at the end of the year.
"The blatant misuse of warrantless surveillance powers targeting Americans' communications should not be accepted or reauthorized," said Gaetz in a statement. "We must uphold national security without sacrificing the constitutional rights of our fellow Americans." In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Gaetz said he hoped to work with "civil libertarian-minded progressives" on the issue.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, some Democrats have expressed opposition to a speedy reauthorization of FISA and Section 702. Sen. Dick Durbin (D–Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in June that he would "only support the reauthorization of Section 702 if there are significant—significant—reforms. And that means, first and foremost, addressing the warrantless surveillance of Americans in violation of the Fourth Amendment."
Whether politicians as different as Gaetz, Massie, and Durbin can patch together a coalition that agrees on how to reform (or abolish) Section 702 remains to be seen. It's probably right to be skeptical.
Still, 15 years after Congress first authorized the warrantless spying program and a decade after Snowden revealed the ways in which Americans were being targeted by it, it's encouraging to see that reauthorization will not be rubber-stamped. At the very least, Congress ought to demand to know the full extent of Section 702 snooping—and their constituents ought to demand changes.

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On Monday, Judge Doughty refused to issue a stay on his injunction, putting it into immediate effect. His perplexing line-drawing seems to make more sense when you consider how closely it tracks the specific facts in this case — for instance, episodes in which the government communicated with social media platforms about posts concerning the efficacy of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in treating Covid-19 or the efficacy of masks in combating the transmission of the coronavirus. If those issues seem to overlap a bit too neatly with recent conservative preoccupations, that’s because the case is part of a wider war conservatives believe they are fighting, in which tech executives and Democratic government officials are supposedly colluding to censor conservative voices.

After years of failed attempts by Congress to regulate major social media platforms — regulation that for nearly a decade Americans of all political stripes have said they want — state authorities are rushing in to capitalize on unmet political demand. Other examples include laws passed in Florida and Texas that prohibit larger social media platforms from removing posts because of the opinions they express and the ban on TikTok that Montana has passed.

Going local has strategic if sometimes unethical advantages. It is no accident that this case arose in Louisiana. As the law professors Leah Litman and Steve Vladeck have noted, Judge Doughty, a Donald Trump appointee, was at the time the only judge who heard cases filed in the Monroe Division of the Western District of the state. By choosing their venue, the plaintiffs in effect got to choose their judge. Similarly, it is no accident that the same Monroe Division (and with Judge Doughty presiding again) is also the venue for a pending civil suit that accuses a host of private actors loosely connected to the case against the Biden administration of conspiracy to engage in “mass surveillance and censorship.” Appeals in both cases will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has been sympathetic to state attempts to regulate big tech.

These are issues of vital public concern. That’s why it’s a shame that factionalized state politics and forum shopping will determine their resolution. How do you regulate a public right like freedom of expression when that right is intermediated by private companies? What role, if any, can or should the government play?

Those questions lie at the heart of the case before Judge Doughty. The facts in the case include episodes in which members of the Biden administration sent frenetic messages to employees of social media companies, asking them to remove doubtful claims about Covid-19 and the 2020 election. I agree with Judge Doughty that the apparent pressure that the Biden administration placed on the platforms is questionable. But the degree to which those demands were heeded or coercive is uncertain. They seem to be classic examples of what political scientists call jawboning: the government’s use of public appeals or private channels to induce change or compliance from businesses.

I keep getting these weird ads on Twitter. Like, it’s all masculinity influencers pumping iron, and some dating site that lets you find sugar daddies? What is — am I the only one?

They figured you out, Michelle.

Let’s be clear. I have been married for since God was a boy. I have not done anything to deserve sugar daddy dating ads. And I’m not sure that I’m prepared for the Threads version of this. I’m just not. [MUSIC PLAYING] From New York Times Opinion, I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Lydia Polgreen, and this is “Matter of Opinion.” So Ross is out this week on a well-deserved vacation, but we’re going to talk about the trials and tribulations of social media — in particular, there’s been a lot going on with Twitter, which is a social network that is beloved by journalists and politicians, but less so by other people. And now, there’s a big new competitor to Twitter and it is called Threads. It was created by the company Meta, which is the biggest social media company in the world — famous for platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as the messaging platform, WhatsApp. And this app, Threads, seems to be giving Twitter a real run for its money. So I thought this was a great chance to talk about what’s happening, how is social media changing and what do we want from it today. So first of all, are you guys on Threads?

Be honest, Carlos.

Well, I will be, but this will just emphasize the conflict I feel. So I’ve been active on Twitter for a long time. And when I saw everyone posting their like, I’ve joined Threads on Twitter, I decided that I should do the same. But here’s what happened. I didn’t know you had to have an Instagram account to join Threads, and I’ve not been active on Instagram. And so I had to figure Instagram out first, and then I had to join Threads. And all of a sudden, I’m checking Threads, I’m checking Twitter, I’m figuring out Instagram. And I just stopped and I said, what am I doing with my life? Like, why am I spending time this way? So actually, I figured out — which is no mean feat — how to delete my new Instagram, how to delete Threads. I am not — I am not making a big statement about how I’m leaving social media forever, but we’ve gone down this path before with Twitter. I don’t know why 100 million plus or whatever the number is now that people who have joined Threads somehow feel that it’s going to be different and better this time. And maybe instead of jumping onto a new network, we can use the decline of Twitter as a chance to just reconsider whether this is how we want to live our lives.

Oh, my God, you want people to be reflective and thoughtful, Carlos. That is so adorable. I love it.

So cute.

I’ve been grudgingly passive on Twitter. I tend to join things for work purposes, to follow politicians, to follow other journalists and to comment as little as humanly possible, because it is my position that Twitter America is the worst America — except with the possibility of Facebook America. So I’m like, good riddance.

Well, I mean, look. I understand why both of you feel that way. However, I have been a Twitter evangelist for a very long time. I remember when I got my first Twitter account, I was a young foreign correspondent working in West Africa, and I thought, oh, my gosh, this is so exciting. And I think a lot of people look at what has happened with social media and they’re like, cesspool, garbage fire, dumpster fire, this is all really, really terrible. And I think it’s salutary to think back to what the world was like before social media, when people couldn’t really talk to each other across big distances and you couldn’t have these kinds of globe-spanning conversations. And for me as a young foreign correspondent, the promise of it was, hey, this is an opportunity that rather than having a one-way, I’m going to publish stories in The New York Times about what’s going on in Senegal or what’s going on in Congo or Nigeria, and those people can maybe write a letter to an editor or an email to me. But now we have this opportunity to have a public conversation about it. And that to me felt so exciting and so intoxicating. And of course, then comes the Arab Spring and this idea that social media can really be a force for social change and everybody was so excited and optimistic, and I was certainly excited and optimistic. And then it got really bad and really ugly because I think everyone realized that this is not a neutral phenomenon, right? Like these tools of organization and of change can be used by, really anyone who wants to make change happen. And when it was people advocating for democracy and against the autocratic rulers of the Middle East, that was one thing. But when it’s suddenly, you know, neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, it starts to look very, very different. And so I’ve been on this full journey with social media. And I just can’t quite quit it, that spark of optimism. So I am on Threads. I have also on Bluesky, which is another app that was created —

Oh, is that what it’s called?

Yeah.

I’d always just seen it when people like, written it, and I thought it was like, Blueski, like brewski. No one had ever said it out loud to me before. Bluesky makes a lot more sense. OK, yeah.

And so like the sort of individual post, the like slangy name for it is a skeet, which I think is pretty funny.

OK. Well then Blueski makes more sense.

Brewskis on Blueski.

We’re having a ski.

Yeah. But, so I really get this thirst that people have to connect in this particular way.

Yeah, I can totally see how you can get the sense of community or you find people who share your particular niche hobby or attraction to something. But on balance, what we’re winding up with is people want attention. And the way you get attention on Twitter is you become the biggest jerk in the room, and that is kind of what Twitter now feeds. And especially since Musk has taken over, there’s just no — there’s not even a pretense that you’re trying to keep it from being overrun by, say, neo-Nazis or whatever. I mean, it’s just one of those things. Eventually these lovely, bring us together Democratic tools become hostage to disinformation and folks running amok along those lines.

Yeah, I mean, but the thing that made Twitter really special — and I guess I shouldn’t talk about it in the past tense. It still exists. And who knows, Elon Musk, the amazing and erratic entrepreneur could yet turn things around. But the thing that’s really different about Twitter from all of the other social networks, all of which are actually much bigger than Twitter, is that on Facebook, you post something, and then underneath that post there are comments. On Instagram, you post something, and underneath that post there are comments. But Twitter actually elevates the reply to something that you post to the same status as your post. So it’s actually conversational rather than, here’s an artifact and then a bunch of people’s unrelated comments about it. It’s much more kind of a dialogue. And I think that’s what really lies at the heart of the appeal. And I think that there is this human desire for dialogue, like this way in which we all want to reach out and talk to each other. And I think that that, in some ways, sort of explains why Threads, this new app from Meta, has taken off. I think that we all want to be able to have these kinds of conversations. We might not want to have them in exactly the way that they were happening on Twitter, but I think that that desire to connect and that desire to exchange ideas and to talk is a very, very human desire. It’s just that throughout history, it has been limited, technologically, to the people who are close to us, or to one to one communication rather than one to many.

I think we talk a lot about the desire to connect, and I think that’s real. But it’s also a desire for validation, and approval, and recognition. I mean, journalists and politicians are sort of like, exquisitely conditioned to respond to signals of external approval. For journalists, it’s like, people reading our stories, listening to our podcast, how many downloads, right? For politicians, it’s getting votes, it’s raising money, it’s seeing a lot of crowds at your rallies. So to have a network that you can access on your phone or your laptop or whatever that instantly quantifies how much people like you, like the one thing you said, how many people follow you, it’s perfectly made for those kinds of people. Think of those terms: likes, follows. They’re very political in a sense. And so I think yes, the connection part has been real for me and that’s great and I have genuinely made those connections. But also, it’s about that instant gratification of feeling that that thing I said was smart or clever. So yes, it’s community, but also, it’s something more narcissistic than that, I think.

It is interesting though, to think a little bit about the differences between these platforms. I talked about Twitter as being a place where you post and reply and them having equal weight. The fastest growing social media platforms I think are much less interactive in that sense, and much more algorithmic. I mean, one of the things that made Twitter really different in addition to the replies having the same status as the original post is that you could force the app to show you a feed that is just of your choosing. So I could follow the people that I’m interested in, and the only things that I would see in my feed are those things — and some advertisements, but there are fewer and fewer advertisements on Twitter these days. And so a key difference between Threads and Twitter is that Threads moves completely in the direction of algorithmic curation. And I seem to be the only one who’s really actively playing around on it. But it’s super interesting, because it’s built on the back of Instagram. It’s all of the people that I follow on Instagram, which tend to be like much less about politics and much more art and entertainment, and I follow a lot of food and restaurant things. And so the feed that I’m getting fed on Threads looks very, very different from my Instagram feed.

Sorry, it’s different from Instagram or different from Twitter?

I’m sorry, it’s different from Twitter. Because Twitter is like, these are the accounts that I follow and that I really am interested in.

But I don’t know — should we trust Zuckerberg more than we trust Musk?

No!

I just love how everyone is like rushing into the arms — you know like, oh, Elon Musk is terrible, let’s put our faith in Mark Zuckerberg. You know, Elon Musk is doing for Zuckerberg what Trump did for George W. Bush —

Thank you.

Make him look really good in hindsight. You know like, hey, maybe that’s better. Maybe that was really great after all. Remember how much we loved Facebook when we didn’t.

Oh, my God, we’re trading in one tech boy manchild for another again, and Zuckerberg is no better. I mean, granted, he has not challenged Musk for a literal penis measuring contest, which is —

Hey, hey, hey, we’re a family podcast. We’re a family podcast.

It was bad enough when they were doing their, we’re going to cage match. But now Musk is like, literally ready to measure his tackle against Zuckerberg. And only that kind of nonsense could make Zuckerberg look like a sympathetic figure.

Logan Roy did say that sometimes that is the competition.

OK, friends. Let’s take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to talk about the future of social media and whether there’s any hope that it’s going to be any better than the past. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. So we’ve talked about the saga of Twitter, and now I want to turn to the broader social media landscape. Is social media really social anymore? That term was created, but you think about something like TikTok, and what’s interesting is I’m actually not a big TikTok user. The way that I primarily use TikTok is that people in my group chats, which I would say is actually now my primary social network, are group chats, get sent to me and I watch them and think they’re funny and then I send them on to other people on other group chats. So I don’t know, is social media even the right term?

I mean, I love the TikTok videos of the guys in Appalachia doing their comedy routines. My friends and I do the same thing with the group chats. They send me videos of like, people doing little mini skits, and I love those. Those are fun, but it’s not like me chatting with the guy in Appalachian who’s doing it.

Social media is very benign as a concept. It sounds like, why would you be against it? It’s social. It’s people getting together. And I don’t know what else to call it. The term has the first mover advantage. But it seems excessively kind to what the worst examples of it have become, and it seems excessively vague for the variety that exists, just what you all have just described.

Yeah. I don’t necessarily find social media to be especially social these days. And in some ways, the socialness of it is largely unwanted, so. Maybe we could all start socializing in ever smaller, smaller groups. But is there a path to a better version of social media?

I mean, these things are always on balance, right? Like, I did love the idea of Twitter as being a news source for things happening in far flung places where people didn’t have a lot of access to regular, mainstream media sources. But it’s always going to be one of these things that needs a little bit of oversight or a little bit of curation, and the American government in particular does not seem to have any kind of sense of this. The market’s not going to handle it. I mean, you have the Facebook algorithms, which aren’t just promoting connection, they’re pushing up the most extreme, most violence-inducing, nastiest stuff possible. So with things like that going on, I don’t have a lot of hope that we are able to get our arms around this. So we are just letting it run wild.

Well, I mean, we are but we aren’t. I mean, I think that we’re seeing a bunch of attempts to regulate this space. And it used to be that there was a lot of activity in terms of antitrust or attempts to do regulations around privacy, and then attempts to do regulations around disinformation and misinformation. But I think there’s been a really interesting move that you’re seeing more on the conservative side of American politics to restrict access to social media for young people, around mental health and other issues like that. So I think there’s actually been, from a bunch of different places, a lot of ferment and activity to try and pivot social media into a different direction or to restrict access to it altogether.

Although with something like that, I tend to think that as a society, something that we know we can’t possibly regulate or get our arms around in toto, we tend to focus on kids. So we’re not going to let kids do this. We’re not going to let kids do that. For me, that’s just a signal that we’ve given up for the broader purposes.

Regulation is also kind of antithetical to the original ethos of what this was supposed to be. Do you remember that really super melodramatic Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace that came out from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the 90s? I looked it up, and it was — here’s how it began. It was like, governments of the Industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You’re not welcome among us. I mean, and it said that cyberspace was developing its own social contract. It would be governed solely by, get this, the Golden Rule. So the government could just back off on regulation. We always dream that new technologies will save us, and then we dream that they will destroy us when they kind of do a little of both.

And you can complain about gatekeepers infinitely, but I do think that there is a real issue as we deal, in a new generation of AI and disinformation, when there are no gatekeepers in terms of who’s out in the public square, like rallying folks around this stuff. And we just saw this court case where the Biden administration has been ordered not to contact social media companies about stuff. And that is a hurdle to getting them to deal with disinformation. So like, COVID disinformation, things like this. And you can always take it too far. But what you’re looking at is increasing means of communicating stuff that’s just absolutely not true, destructive, violence-promoting, let’s all go storm the Capitol. At the same time as you’re just kind of throwing up your hands and being like, oh well, we’ll just have to let that go. There’s nothing to be done about it.

Well, technology has always changed the way that we communicated. You know, I think about the role of Radio Mille Collines in the Rwandan genocide as a place where they drummed up support and got people to go out and murder their neighbors. That’s the same thing that happened on Facebook in places like Myanmar. So in some ways, this is an old story and a new story. But we are going into a really interesting time where social media, I think, is going to be a huge factor, meaning the 2024 presidential election.

Interesting is one word for it.

Yes, interesting, maybe terrifying is a better word. So one of the things that I’ve been thinking about and I’m curious what you guys think about this is, what does it mean for our politics, and for 2024, that we’re going to be looking at, presumably, a much more fragmented social media landscape, particularly around journalism and politics.

I think it’s great. I am all on board with the fragmentation of that illusion of the public square that Twitter gave us. It was just like, talking to ourselves, yet while thinking you were talking to everyone. Nothing I hated more than when someone on Twitter would say, hey, read the room. You know, like, well, we’re in different rooms. We’re not even in the same house sometimes, so like, shut up. I don’t think that was healthy. I think some fragmentation of that is healthy.

I will take the more contrarian view, which is that the fragmentation of the media landscape and letting people sit inside their echo chambers has been a problem up until this point, and I don’t foresee it getting much better. And it also, again — and I know this is like my obsession. We have not figured out at all how to deal with misinformation. It’s almost impossible to tell the fakes apart anymore. You can put Ron DeSantis’ head on whoever you want. You can make people say whatever you want. And if you’re policing one or two major sites, that’s one thing. But you’re going to be policing dozens of these sites. And I think what is going to have to happen is you’re going to have to go downstream and start teaching people how to deal with misinformation before they’re ever on these sites.

I trust fragmentation more than I trust monopolization, though.

That’s what I was going to just say is like, to me, what you’re describing actually sounds a lot more of what the paranoid, conspiratorial landscape looked like pre-social media. I mean, you had radio programs. There were all of these conspiracy theory newsletters, like literally letters that would arrive in your mail. But they were all I think segmented against one another. You’d have the right-wing conspiracy theories and the left-wing conspiracy theorists, and they all had their own, quote unquote, “platforms,” whether it was a radio show, or some people would record things and send them out on tapes. There’s a huge and very varied history in the United States of the ways in which conspiratorial disinformation material moves around. And I think that rather than having a central clearinghouse for it where anyone can come and go and get it, having it fragmented on lots of different platforms feels, to me, a lot more manageable, in a way that those types of theories have a harder time getting into the bloodstream of the body politic, because they’re sort of stuck in these cul de sacs.

I don’t know. Twitter was not the primary source of the folks who decided they wanted to trash the Capitol, right?

Well, no. But I think what’s interesting as well, and this is a thing that’s come up in a lot of the conversations that Meta executives have had about Threads. And of course, they are just so thrilled with themselves at having launched the fastest growing social media app ever in the world. I think Threads is now up to about 100 million users. But I listen to Adam Mosseri, who’s the head of Instagram, be interviewed by our colleagues on “Hardfork,” The New York Times technology podcast. And they’re saying very explicitly that we do not see this as a platform for news and for journalism and politics. And Meta, as a whole, I think has been moving very hard in a direction away from news and politics, because who wants the hassle? It’s brought a lot of unwanted scrutiny. So they’re really leaning in — and the reason that this is built off of Instagram, I think, is because they’re leaning into entertainment and sports and influencers and beauty and those kinds of things. And yes, journalists will be there, and yes, politicians will be there just like they are on Instagram and Facebook now, but I think as a company, Meta is running as fast and as far as it can away from news and politics.

Maybe. Although with the presidential race coming up, Zuckerberg does not have a great track record on putting anything above his money grubbing. So I will remain vaguely hopeful, but I’m not going to count on it.

There was a book like five years ago called Antisocial Media by a professor at UVA. And he basically was arguing that if he wanted to build an efficient machine for spreading propaganda and lies and mistrust and enabling widespread surveillance — like, you’d be hard pressed to do better than creating Facebook, and the modern social media networks. I think we’re stuck with it, though. You know, they fail, but then a new one comes along. Like remember Friendster? One of my favorite moments was in 2009, there was a book that came out called Stealing Myspace, The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America was the subtitle. And it was published just as the site was cratering, and Twitter and Facebook were becoming dominant. So it’s hard — like I started off saying that I logged onto Threads and then immediately deleted my account because I got all these qualms. But it’s hard to imagine our giving up entirely on these digital instant gratification machines that reward us for pomposity and popularity.

There’s no way it’s going away. I mean, once you’ve introduced something like this, it’s going to spiral, and the best that you can hope for is that each iteration learns something from the previous one. I see no sign that we’re doing that right now, but that’s the best you can hope for.

Well, on that bleak note, Michelle, thanks. All I know is, I’m really, really happy to have this little social network here to talk about these questions. All right, well, let’s leave it there. When we come back, hot and cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] OK, folks. And finally, it is time for hot cold, where every week, one of us shares something that we’re into, over, or somewhere in between. So who’s got the hot cold this week?

I am hot-colding today.

Yay.

It’s not something I am entirely cold on — or perhaps something I should be cold on but I’m not.

Are you tepid? You’re tepid.

I’ll have to tell you a story first, and that is that I spent the bulk of the 1980s in Peru, where I’m from. And at a distance, I imbibed a weird, erratic mix of American culture — like “Knight Rider” and The “A-Team” were huge for the middle school set, you know, dubbed into Spanish of course, “Knight Rider” was [SPEAKING SPANISH].. But one piece of American cultural hegemony that did not make it to me was “The Cosby Show.” Later I got married. My wife, who’s American and grew up here told me how much she had loved the show when she was young. And we have three kids now. We consume a lot of culture together. We read books out loud at breakfast, we watch like “Nature” and “Nova” and you know, C-SPAN. Sorry.

Yeah, it’s like that in my house, too.

But recently — all this to say we recently started watching “The Cosby Show.”

Ooh, controversial.

Bold.

Our three kids are now about the ages that Denise and Theo and Vanessa were when the show began. And we discussed this with the kids ahead of time, explaining who Bill Cosby was as an artist and as a person and the accusations against him. We talked about the dilemmas of appreciating art by people who do terrible things. But I think we’re all enjoying parts of it. My kids, especially the older two, are struck by the kind of casual cruelty sometimes in the way the Cliff Huxtable character, you know, Cosby’s character treats the kids. That reminds me of the kind of undercurrents I’ve found in his books as well. I won’t say I’m hot on Bill Cosby. I’m not sitting here trying to redeem him.

Oh, Carlos, you’re going to take a beat down for that.

But I am open to watching and thinking about this show and having that experience as a family. And that is my hot cold.

I think that’s very interesting in terms of retaking back some culture that has been ruined by the kind of personal grossness of the person involved. I mean, you run across this all the time. Like, do you watch Roman Polanski movies? Do you watch Woody Allen movies? I think the artist versus the art is kind of an enduring dilemma for us, and I’m fascinated by how you’re handling this with your kids, no less.

It’s a selective dilemma, by the way. Like, do you do you all listen to Michael Jackson’s music? Of course you do, because Michael Jackson is so good, he is uncancelable.

Well, and it’s also like, where do you stop? I mean, I’m a huge fan of Janet Jackson and I saw her in concert a couple of years ago, and she had this whole montage about how amazing her brother Michael was. And I was like, I don’t think he’s so wonderful. But at the same time, I’m not going to stop loving Janet Jackson because she loves her brother. Where does it end? How do you draw the line? I just will also say that I loved “The Cosby Show” when I was a kid. I also grew up outside of the United States and for me, it was a really crucial touchstone to trying to understand not just American culture, but also what it is to be Black in America. And I was a little surprised when I realized when I got here as a teenager that it actually wasn’t really like that for most Black people. But putting that aside.

Disappointment.

Also, the show that I really, really, really, really loved because it hit me at exactly the right moment was “A Different World,” which was the sequel that was all about when Lisa Bonet went on to an HBCU —

Hillman.

Hillman.

I liked that show. That was an awesome show.

Again, I thought that’s what college was going to be like and turns out that I was wrong, so.

Life is full of —

Life is not like NBC. Yeah.

Oh, well, I would rewatch anything with you guys. Thanks so much for a great conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you. See you next week. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Mark Zuckerberg is having a nice summer. By his own account, he’s in great shape, owing to a fondness for mixed martial arts and a propensity for doing calisthenics while wearing a camo-print weighted vest. He has recently welcomed a new daughter to the world; placed in jiu-jitsu competitions; appeared sweaty and shirtless with the UFC champion, Alexander Volkanovski; and enjoyed the attention from engaging in some light trolling of Elon Musk. Zuckerberg’s also been busy at work: On Monday, he boasted that it took only a few days for more than 100 million shiny influencers, anthropomorphized brands, and regular humans to sign up for Threads, his company’s new Twitter clone. As with any acquaintance in your Instagram feed who starts posting more workout selfies, one gets a sense that the tech billionaire is feeling himself right now.All this peacocking is yielding distressing results: This weekend, real, non-AI-generated people in my social feeds were discussing Zuck’s bod and his potentially rising Q score with genuine interest and openly rooting for the Meta CEO’s success. The Wall Street Journal ran an article noting that the Meta CEO might be “cool again.” A colleague recently suggested to me that we might be experiencing a hot Zuck summer, a phrase that caused me to briefly lose consciousness. Respectfully, what is going on here? Have we succumbed to a national moment of amnesia in which Facebook’s many political and privacy sins have been absolved or memory-holed? Are people, and especially those who can’t stand Musk, falling for a PR campaign? Or are we, for the first time, glimpsing a version of the Facebook founder who has simply stopped caring what everyone thinks? Is Mark Zuckerberg finally free?The specific answers to these questions are less important than the fact that you or I might be asking them. That’s because the mere idea that Zuckerberg is having a moment is itself a carefully composed bit of image maintenance. The feeling that there might be a new Zuckerberg in town is not an accident, nor is the fact that the CEO made headlines by saying he was down for a cage match with Musk just two weeks before launching a product to compete with Twitter. What you’re seeing—the biceps, the bravado—is yet another in a long line of Zuck eras. A software update, if you will.There have been a few of these shifts over the past decade or so, though they’ve tended to overlap. Early on, there were dueling personas: The cocky “I’m CEO … bitch” wunderkind and the sweaty, mumbling, pre-media-training Zuck (Factory Settings Zuck). Later, we saw Stepford Zuck, a robotic version of the founder who seemed almost completely devoid of personality, yet hell-bent on appearing relatable by doing things such as smoking meats on livestreams and visiting farmers in the heartland alongside a personal photographer, like a presidential candidate. There was Philanthropy Zuck, who put his name on hospitals and gave $100 million to Newark public schools. Perhaps the most famous is Diplomatic Zuck, known for appearing in front of Congress in a suit, speaking in serious platitudes to university students about preserving free speech and democracy, and apologizing when his websites helped foment global unrest. These were calculated transformations, all designed to boost the CEO’s likability and Facebook’s own image by association.[Read: Zombie Twitter has arrived]The new variation is Hobbyist Zuck. It purports to be a more well-rounded model, a bit like a large language model trained on a corpus of long-form self-improvement podcasts; a Zuck with real interests, just like you. This buff, well-sunscreened Zuck hydrofoils while clutching an American flag, perhaps because he enjoys it, but also because it’s good content—the sort of thing that might attract other hobbyist males to root for him the way they do for other quirky tech founders. Hobbyist Zuck loves mixed martial arts and going on The Joe Rogan Experience. He hates TV, because it puts people in a “beta state, consuming stuff.” Hobbyist Zuck is no beta.This is a Zuck tailored to a peculiar moment when politicians and other leaders are obsessed with shows of masculinity and feats of strength. Most important, Hobbyist Zuck provides a useful framework for the CEO to talk about his own career through the lens of martial-arts study. “You have to be willing to just get beaten up a lot,” Zuckerberg said, when asked about his recent success with jiu-jitsu on an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast last month. To succeed in the sport (and in running a company), Zuckerberg argued, one has to be willing to be humbled in front of others. “I’ve just failed and been embarrassed so many times in my life,” he said. “It’s a core competence at this point.”This is a useful, self-serving line that casts Facebook’s scandals and missteps in a better light. It also feels like an honest admission. Zuckerberg, who spent the latter part of the 2010s as a chief villain of the techlash, knows public humiliation in a way that few people do. And although there is no evidence that constant ridicule, Senate interrogation, and mockery have made him a better leader (a legion of recently laid-off Facebookers certainly might take issue with his argument), it’s entirely possible that this has all left Zuckerberg feeling as if he has very little to lose, reputationally speaking. It certainly helps explain his being able to stay in the spotlight after trying and failing to generate interest in a legless, lonely metaverse.Contrast this Zuckerbergian attitude with that of Musk, a man so thin-skinned that a gentle criticism from Twitter’s previous CEO seemingly triggered him to up and buy the platform out of spite. So much of Musk’s tenure as the owner of Twitter has been defined by changing the platform to troll his enemies and delight his sycophantic fans—unverifying journalists, welcoming previously banned trolls back to the platform, and acting as personal tech support for right-wing users like Catturd2. The product has suffered dramatically; not only is it choked with bigots and spam, but at one point over the Fourth of July weekend, it limited users’ access to the platform. Musk, once a golden child of Silicon Valley, has seen his reputation as a visionary diminish as he’s all but destroyed the social network.As others have observed, Musk’s stark mishandling of Twitter and speedy radicalization into a right-wing-influencer reply guy is responsible for much of the goodwill toward Zuckerberg. And the excitement for Threads this weekend appeared to be rooted in schadenfreude: “It’s just because we all hate elon musk and this is just twitter before he bought it,” one threader told me of their enthusiasm for the platform.[Read: Elon Musk really broke Twitter this time]Zuckerberg’s popularity may be inflated by the Musk moment, but that’s exactly the point. The Meta CEO has stumbled on a truism of modern fandom: Your popularity is sometimes defined not at all by who you are, but by whom you stand in opposition to. It is the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” school of business and public relations.Zuckerberg may be inspired by Musk in other ways, too. It’s possible he’s realized that there’s no genuine advantage to being universally liked, even if that’s the goal of his sterile mass-market platforms. Maybe it’s best if Zuckerberg caters to a very specific set of fanboys, without making the Muskian mistake of becoming terminally online. In this sense, a cage fight against the only person in Silicon Valley who is more widely known and polarizing than he is might be savvy image management, even if the idea makes most of the world roll their eyes out of their head. Perhaps Zuckerberg knows that, after years of being a villain, there’s real value in volunteering to get punched in the face, because it satisfies both his small cadre of fanboys and his army of critics. (The image has worked before to sell magazines.)Whether Zuckerberg has actually won the summer is up for debate, of course. Threads, despite its rush of sign-ups, may come back to earth as the shine of onboarding wears off. The pay-per-view cage match may never materialize, which would make the machismo schtick look even more man-childish. What is unquestionable is that those of us trapped in the middle of the “billionaire cold war” are the real losers. The entire spectacle obfuscates what’s really going on. A 39-year-old mega-billionaire who was once among the world’s foremost villains of industry—and who is sitting atop a flailing, expensive metaverse pivot—has leveraged the radicalization and impetuousness of the world’s richest man to once again copy a successful idea from a smaller competitor and juice it up overnight into a competitive business.It’s easy enough to get roped into the royal-rumble shenanigans, just as it’s easy enough to use a Meta product to spite Musk for destroying the platform you used to like. But Zuck or Musk? is a false binary. It’s reminiscent of the effort to romanticize the George W. Bush presidency during the roiling chaos of the Trump administration. The self-immolation of one billionaire’s image is not reason to reappraise another’s. It is, however, an indicator of just how far the bar has been lowered when it comes to evaluating the men who lead Silicon Valley.

Excerpted from “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” by Jeffrey Toobin ’82, J.D. ’86.
The spirit of rebellion was in the air on January 6, 2021. Vice President Mike Pence was due to certify Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election in a ceremony at the Capitol. But supporters of President Donald Trump, and Trump himself, were mobilizing for a confrontation they hoped would change the outcome. The Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, had crafted a nine-page plan for storming the Capitol and other buildings in Washington; it was called “1776 Returns.” Two days earlier, Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, another extremist outfit, said, “We’re walking down the same exact path as the Founding Fathers.” On the eve of congressional certification, Alex Jones, the InfoWars host and conspiracy theorist, held a boisterous rally a few blocks from the White House and said, “We declare 1776 against the New World Order. We need to understand we’re under attack, and we need to understand this is 21st-century warfare and get on a war footing.” He then went on an InfoWars broadcast to say, “This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776.” (The ride was actually in 1775.) On the morning of January 6, Lauren Boebert, the Republican congresswoman from Colorado, tweeted: “Today is 1776.”
By that time, crowds were already gathering at the Ellipse to hear Trump rally the troops. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and warm-up act, told the crowd, “Let’s have trial by combat!” When it was his turn onstage, Trump sent the same message. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he told the throng. “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus roused, thousands of his supporters marched that way.
At the Capitol, the swarming crowd chanted, “1776! 1776!” Many flew the Gadsden flag, the yellow banner of the revolutionary era, which bears the words DON’T TREAD ON ME. When the Capitol rioters spoke of the Constitution, it was almost always of only one provision — the Second Amendment. They regarded the right to “bear arms” as a license for citizens to fight back against the government. As Rhodes, of the Oath Keepers, put it, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to “preserve the ability of the people, who are the militia, to provide for their own security” and “to preserve the military capacity of the American people to resist tyranny and violations of their rights by oath breakers within government.”
Later, many of the January 6 rioters explained their actions as analogous to those of the colonists during the American Revolution. “When we talk about 1776, we see that there was a lot of violence. We had to go against the government, and people died. And something good came out of that,” D. J. Rodriquez, one of those arrested inside the Capitol, told his FBI interviewer. “I, personally, felt that this is something that the Founding Fathers of the country understood was going to happen again one day and that we would be needed to do something righteous.” Defending the insurrection, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who operates as the id of the modern Republican Party, said, “And if you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants.”
* * *
Nineteen days after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Timothy McVeigh was summoned from his cell for his first meeting with his attorney, Stephen Jones. In that initial conversation, McVeigh was only too pleased to take credit for the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. From the start, Jones knew that the case of the Oklahoma City bombing was no whodunit.
So, in his first conversations with McVeigh, Jones wanted to explore a simple question: Why? Why had this 27-year-old man, who appeared ordinary in so many ways, committed this horrific act?
As he entered the prison conference room, McVeigh had his hands manacled behind him. In a small concession, he was allowed to be cuffed in front when he sat at the metal table bolted to the floor. “Call me Tim,” McVeigh told Jones. They made small talk about the inmate’s mail. He had already received a marriage proposal and $10 in cash.
When Jones moved on to the bombing, McVeigh continued in the same relaxed, almost serene way. He talked about mass murder just as he did about his beloved Buffalo Bills. For McVeigh, the destruction of the Murrah building, and of the lives of those inside it, was more than just permissible. It was mandatory, his duty as a patriotic American. He had no regrets, no second thoughts.
How could McVeigh see murder as justified, much less required?
Read the Declaration of Independence, he instructed his lawyer — and not just the famous part. To McVeigh, the more important section of the Declaration came later, and he recited it from memory: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it. … When a long train of abuses and usurpations … evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.” McVeigh took the same message from Patrick Henry’s famous speech from 1775, the one which concluded “Give me liberty or give me death.” He recited what else Henry had said: “If we wish to be free — if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending … we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight!”
At the Murrah building, McVeigh fought.
His actions, he explained, were a direct response to the “abuses and usurpations” of the federal government, especially those at Ruby Ridge and Waco. In the months that followed, McVeigh would return obsessively to these two events, just as he had fixated on them in the period leading up to the bombing.
The Ruby Ridge saga began in August 1992, in rural Idaho, when U.S. marshals attempted to serve an arrest warrant for weapons charges on a right-wing activist named Randy Weaver. When Weaver refused to surrender, the marshals and FBI began a siege on his property. In one skirmish, a deputy marshal and Weaver’s 14-year- old son (as well as the family dog) were killed. A few days later, an FBI sniper killed Weaver’s wife as she stood in a doorway holding their baby daughter. After an 11-day standoff, Randy Weaver surrendered.
Six months later, in February 1993, the Waco siege in Texas followed a similar pattern, with even more disastrous results. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to serve arrest and search warrants for weapons charges at a compound run by a religious sect called the Branch Davidians. During that original operation, four federal agents and five Branch Davidians were killed in a firefight. The FBI took over the scene and conducted a siege of the buildings, which were controlled by David Koresh, the Davidians’ leader. After 51 days, on April 19, the FBI launched a tear gas assault on the compound, which caught fire. Seventy-six Branch Davidians, including Koresh, died in the conflagration.
McVeigh chose to bomb the Murrah building on April 19 because it was both the second anniversary of the Waco raid and also the date of the “shot heard round the world” in 1775, the beginning of the American rebellion against the British. In his own mind, McVeigh was the heir to the heroes of the Revolution. As McVeigh told his lawyer, “the government laid down the ground rules for warfare” in Ruby Ridge and Waco.
But it wasn’t just Ruby Ridge and Waco. There was President Bill Clinton’s support of a bill banning assault weapons. McVeigh received a BB gun from his grandfather when he was nine years old, and he remained obsessed with firearms for the rest of his life. He loved to shoot, and he was a skilled marksman in both civilian and military life. The issue of guns represented the core of his political worldview as well, a lesson which he also said came from the Founding Fathers. While McVeigh had not read many books about American history, he had steeped himself in right-wing magazines. McVeigh endorsed the view of the Framers’ intentions that was published in Soldier of Fortune, and The Spotlight, published by Liberty Lobby. He told Jones that his hero Patrick Henry called guns the “teeth of liberty,” and McVeigh loathed any attempt to regulate their possession.
“How are patriots supposed to defend themselves when their right to bear arms is infringed?” he asked Jones. “The best defense is a good offense. They’re coming for the gun owners next. Enough is enough.”
There were, then, three powerful ideological motivations for McVeigh’s decision to bomb the Murrah building: the obsession with gun rights; the perceived approval of the Founding Fathers; and the belief in the value and power of violence. In the decades since his death, the rise in right-wing extremism, the January 6 insurrection, and much in the contemporary conservative movement, show how McVeigh’s values, views, and tactics have endured and even flourished. That makes the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing not just a glimpse of the past but also a warning about the future.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Toobin. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The FDA has just given its first traditional approval for a disease-modifying drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This is a significant milestone with serious implications for AD treatment. But as always some clinical context is helpful.

In January of 2023 the FDA gave accelerated approval to the drug, Leqembi (lecanemab-irmb). The accelerated approval pathway was created, as the FDA says:

“…to approve drugs for serious conditions where there is an unmet medical need, based on clinical data demonstrating the drug’s effect on a surrogate endpoint, that is reasonably likely to predict a clinical benefit to patients.”

This was a departure for the FDA, who previously required evidence of clinical benefit in excess of risk. The accelerated pathway has also been controversial. Proponents argue that it gives practitioners the ability to prescribe drugs that have a good chance of working years earlier than they otherwise would. For diseases that are progressive and irreversible, this time can be extremely valuable. It also allows academic clinicians to conduct research more easily, since they can simply prescribe the drug and get it paid for.

Further, many clinicians already do this with off-label use. If a drug is approved and on the market, and may be of benefit in a different disease, you can just prescribe it off-label. The belief that a drug may work for a new indication is often based on its mechanism of action. The accelerated pathway would essentially allow the exact same practice but with drugs not already approved for a separate indication.

Critics, however, argue that using biomarkers to predict clinical efficacy is tricky business, with a fairly low hit-rate. This has been particularly true in neurodegenerative disorders, which are complex diseases involving many biological markers. Research into such diseases, like AD, ALS, and Parkinson’s disease, have been characterized by a string of disappointments, as one biomarker after another does not translate into a disease-modifying treatment. These are the very diseases the FDA is focusing on with their accelerated approval pathway.

The challenge is that when cells are dying, a lot of things are happening biologically. It seems that no matter what aspect of cell function we look at, it’s different in disease cells compared to healthy cells. Almost anything, therefore, can be a biomarker of the disease state. But that does not mean that every biomarker is actually driving the disease. It could just be a consequence of the disease. Treating a biomarker, therefore, may be like getting cosmetic surgery to look younger. It may alter some of the effects of aging, but It doesn’t change one’s biological age.

This is why the Leqembi approval is so important. It is the first time researchers have definitively tied a biomarker of AD with a demonstrable clinical outcome. Perhaps even more important than the availability of a new treatment for AD is the clinical confirmation that the Aβ proteins and the soluble protofibrils they create are pathogenic in AD, and not just a downstream marker.

Two years ago I wrote about another AD drug, similar to Leqembi, approved through the accelerated approval pathway – Aduhelm. There were other issues with this drug, namely that the data regarding beta amyloid reduction was not that clear, with critics arguing the data was not even statistically significant. The company was given three years to provide clinical confirmation of benefit, and those studies are still under way. Meanwhile Leqembi beat Aduhelm to the punch.

What is the data that Leqembi actually works? The study involved 1795 participant with early dementia and confirmation of amyloid plaques on either PET scanning or by cerebrospinal fluid analysis. Leqembi is a humanized monoclonal antibody that binds to beta amyloid and reduces plaque formation in the brain. The multicenter study was a double-blind placebo controlled trial with a 1:1 ratio of treatment to placebo. Subjects were followed for 18 months with a standardized measure of dementia, and several secondary measures of function. The study showed:

The adjusted least-squares mean change from baseline at 18 months was 1.21 with lecanemab and 1.66 with placebo (difference, −0.45; 95% confidence interval [CI], −0.67 to −0.23; P<0.001). In a substudy involving 698 participants, there were greater reductions in brain amyloid burden with lecanemab than with placebo (difference, −59.1 centiloids; 95% CI, −62.6 to −55.6).

Leqembi reduced brain amyloid burden and moderately reduce progression of dementia compared to placebo. All secondary measures were also improved in the treatment group. This is well above the threshold for full regular approval by the FDA, so it’s not surprising that an FDA panel approved the drug unanimously. These fairly clear clinical results are and important confirmation of the amyloid hypothesis of AD, and also is likely to be taken as validation of the FDA accelerated approval pathway. But what will it mean for AD patients?

Given that AD is a progressive, irreversible, and otherwise untreatable disease, any treatment that slows the progression of the disease is potentially hugely useful. On average people live about 10-11 years after diagnosis with AD (depending on severity at time of diagnosis), but there is a long tail with some people living up to 20 years. Even if we take an average survival, a 20% or so reduction means 2-3 years likely greater survival, and some of this time can have meaningful function. If treatment is started early in the disease, this could mean several years more of independent living and meaningful interactions with loved-ones.

And of course the hope is that the longer survival will give more time for research to develop further treatments which also slow down the disease. We may ultimately develop a cocktail of several treatments addressing different aspects of the disease. The ultimate goal is that the disease is slowed so much that people generally die with AD rather than from AD.

But there are significant downsides to this treatment as well. Because it is a monoclonal antibody it has to be given in an IV infusion, which is given every other week. The total cost is estimated at $26,500 per year, which would mean a typical Medicare copay of $5,000 per year. And there are side effects:

Lecanemab resulted in infusion-related reactions in 26.4% of the participants and amyloid-related imaging abnormalities with edema or effusions in 12.6%.

The amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) result from swelling and bleeding caused by the inflammatory reaction of the antibodies attaching to the amyloid. Often this is minor and asymptomatic, but ARIA can be symptomatic in some patients causing headaches and dizziness. In severe cases there can be actual brain bleeds, even to the point of being life-threatening. For this reason patient on blood thinners should probably not take Leqembi.

There are about 6.7 million patients with AD in the US at this time. Let’s say about 1 million of them will be in the early stages and qualify for treatment. If all of them were treated, that would cost 26.5 billion dollars a year. Also, with the availability of treatment, the diagnosis of early AD is likely to increase. That cost does not include the treatment of side effects. In terms of cost effectiveness, that would have to be weighed against the cost of traditional AD care, including nursing home care. Would treatment only delay entry into nursing home care, or would it potentially reduce it (as some patients may die before getting to that point)?

The availability of expensive drugs providing moderate benefit for horrible diseases is something we need to confront as a society. It is technology like this that has been mostly driving up the costs of healthcare. The monoclonal antibody revolution has accelerated this effect.

From the perspective of the patient and their loved-ones, this is not much of a dilemma. Facing the reality of AD or a similar neurodegenerative disease, any effective treatment is welcome. Further I would think of treatments like Leqembi as a likely (hopefully) transitional phase. The most significant thing, arguably, about Leqembi is that we finally have clinical confirmation that our basic science understanding of AD is on to something. We are not just looking at shadows on the wall – we actually understand something about how this awful disease works.

The hope is that this is the first baby step on what will become a steady journey of improvement, even if incremental. We may be getting the first peak of a future in which neurodegenerative diseases are no longer destiny, but are simply managed chronically.

Following a major loss at the Supreme Court, Biden has announced a new plan to forgive student loans. Once again, he will not ask Congress to pass a new law. Instead, he's claiming that the Higher Education Act of 1965 provides statutory authority for mass forgiveness that the HEROES Act did not. 
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled against Biden's plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. The Biden administration had attempted to justify the plan using the HEROES Act, a 9/11-era law that allowed the Department of Education to change student loan repayment plans for soldiers who left college to enter active duty military service or respond to a national emergency. 
The Court's majority argued that Biden's plan to forgive $400 billion on a mass amnesty basis was inconsistent with the language of the HEROES Act and that such a plan would require Congress to exercise its power of the purse.
However, the same day Biden's plan was defeated at the Supreme Court, he announced that he would be undertaking a new strategy to cancel billions in federal student debt.
"We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act…This new path is legally sound. It's going to take longer, but, in my view, it's the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible with debt relief," Biden said at a press conference following the Court's ruling. "Today's decision has closed one path. Now we're going to pursue another."
The Higher Education Act of 1965 contains a provision that allows the Secretary of Education to "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand, however acquired, including any equity or any right of redemption​​." It also requires the Secretary of Education to review any proposed loan settlement that costs more than $1 million.
Biden seems convinced that this is a lawful path to sweeping loan forgiveness. But will the courts agree? 
"In some ways, the HEA argument is indeed superior to the HEROES Act theory. Taken in isolation from the rest of the Act, Section 432(a) does appear to grant the executive the power to cancel as much student loan debt as it wants, " wrote Ilya Somin last year in the Volohk Conspiracy, which is hosted by Reason. "But a closer look suggests that the HEA theory is flawed for many of the same reasons as the HEROES Act rationale. Indeed, its breath-taking scope contributes to its undoing."
Somin notes that reading one section of the Higher Education Act as allowing blanket loan forgiveness would render redundant other provisions of the law which allow the Secretary to forgive debt in limited circumstances. "There is a longstanding presumption against interpreting statutes in a way that renders parts of them superfluous. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed this principle," Somin writes.
The way to forgive student loans is through Congress. The way to fix inflation in higher education is for the government to stop issuing and guaranteeing student loans. Biden is choosing to ignore those realities to buy the loyalty of federal student loan borrowers. 
The post Can Biden Still Forgive Student Debt? appeared first on Reason.com.

For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many as two in three Americans feel is not entirely up to the job. As a result, the chorus calling for Newsom to become America’s 47th President has been growing steadily louder.
Not surprisingly, Newsom himself seems to be waging his own campaign to achieve that end. He is, according to Politico, acting “like the president-in-exile”, promoting a new gun control constitutional amendment, working to ban petrol-powered cars and threatening to arrest the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for “kidnapping” migrants. Indeed, his profile seems to be growing just as Biden’s handlers ramp up their efforts to insulate the President from the media, his poor cognitive state posing a danger both to himself and to his legislative programme.
Yet Newsom’s sparkling ascendency might dim somewhat if the media bothered to consider what is actually happening in his fiefdom. Flicking through the mainstream press, one could be forgiven for realising that Newsom has presided over California’s fall from economic pre-eminence: the Golden State is now home to record homelessness, sub-par GDP growth, the nation’s highest poverty rate, a tech downturn fuelled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and a consistently underperforming public education system. These factors have fuelled a powerful out-migration trend — up 135% in just two years. Recent polls find upwards of 40% of residents are considering leaving, while the rising tide of wealthy emigrees has already taken away $20 billion in adjusted income since 2018.
When the state was flush, Newsom scored progressive points by handing out subsidies to poorer Californians, creating what was heralded as an ideal “blue welfare state”. California certainly spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any other state, twice as much as its arch-rival Texas. But, at its best, this growing welfare state reflects a staggering inequality, in which 20% of state wealth is held within 30 zip codes that account for just 2% of the population. At its worst, it comes at the expense of neglecting basic infrastructure, such as roads and water supply.
And this is all in keeping with Newsom’s personal brand of politics. Largely financed by San Francisco’s elite, notably the heirs of the Getty family fortune, he presents the face of an emerging Democratic Party based on what the late Fred Siegel called “an upstairs, downstairs” coalition of the gentry rich, the dependent poor and the vast, well-paid union bureaucracy that serves them. On paper, then, Newsom stands in contrast to the legendary Democratic governor Pat Brown, whose investments in roads, bridges, research universities and water expanded opportunities for ordinary Californians in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Today, Brown’s successor is far more concerned with issues that interest the gentry Left: gender and race politics and, most critically, climate change.

None of these obsessions provides an answer to the state’s economic inequality. As a recent Breakthrough Institute report demonstrates, Newsom’s drive to make California a leader in the much-ballyhooed “energy transition” has led to high energy and housing costs. California used to be a major energy provider, with a large, well-paid and unionised workforce. Now, as Newsom seeks to eliminate the industry, California gets its oil from Saudi Arabia, importing more of its energy than any mainland state. Elsewhere, the state ranks a poor 42nd in fiscal responsibility, its transport systems face huge deficits, its hospitals are in deep decline, and it accounts for roughly half of all Americans who are unsheltered and living outside.
So what issue now dominates his agenda? How to deal with a reparations task force that has since landed him with an $800 billion bill that the state clearly cannot pay.
Now, imagine if, in the run-up to the 2024 election, Newsom has to debate someone other than Donald Trump. A head-to-head with Florida’s Ron DeSantis over their respective state’s trajectory, for instance, would not be pretty. Newsom would have to explain why his state lags behind those, such as Florida and Texas, that he routinely attacks — but which enjoy large budget surpluses, rising tax revenues, generate more jobs and, in some cases, are initiating tax cuts.
Here, Newsom’s dilemma reflects a wider weakness of the current crop of Democratic Party leaders — a consistent record of poor governance. This applies not only to Newsom, but to Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom are widely pitched by Democratic operatives as possible Biden replacements.
Pritzker, although capable of funding his own campaign, would run as Governor of a state that ranks near the bottom of almost every survey. Meanwhile, Michigan’s Whitmer may seem more attractive, but she would be hard-pressed to sell herself as an avatar of a “Michigan miracle”. Like the other media darlings, she presides over a consistently underperforming economy suffering from out-migration, and now faces, with the electric car mandates, the prospect of large layoffs in the state’s signature auto industry.
Suggested readingThe California militia ready for civil warBy Samuel McIlhagga
Yet arguably the worst examples of poor Democratic governance are found at the municipal levels. Democrats control virtually every big city, the majority of which are suffering both economic and demographic decline. Once-celebrated cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis are all largely run by progressives. In every case, the biggest losers from this kind of one-party rule are the very people that progressives seek to champion by adopting the ideology of “anti-racism” and affirmative action. Over the last decade, Los Angeles actually lost foreign-born residents, who have been flocking to the very sunbelt metros — Houston, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Miami — that Newsom likes to caricature as “racist hellholes”.
And on a municipal level, too, Newsom bears some of the blame. During the 2000s, as Mayor of San Francisco, he presided over a tech boom that accentuated both housing shortages and an explosion of homelessness. He promised to address both but the city he left behind, once arguably the most blessed in America, is now among the most cursed — a dystopia with sky-high property crime, homeless encampments, and a largely emptied downtown.
For the Democrats hailing Newsom as the saviour of their party, the legacy of these failures extends well beyond California. Until they can find presidential candidates with a positive record of accomplishment, their only option will be to campaign largely on cultural issues — particularly if faced with someone other than Trump. The economic argument, after all, has already been lost. As is evident from his gubernatorial spats with DeSantis, a Newsom 2024 campaign will pitch at the farthest end of the cultural divide, embracing no limits on abortion, early transgender treatments and undocumented immigration.
At first glance, the blow-dried Newsom may seem a fine antidote to Biden’s decrepitude, but his elevation would simply reinforce his party’s record of failed governance. If Newsom is the future of the Democratic Party, then the future of America, particularly after Trump, is more likely to be Republican.
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As David Horovitz, the founding editor of the centrist Times of Israel, wrote Monday, “Only a government bent on doing the unreasonable would move to ensure that the justices — the only brake on majority power in a country with no constitution and no enshrined, unbreachable defense of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and other basic rights — cannot review the reasonableness of its policies.”

Such a huge change to Israel’s widely respected judicial system, which has guided the emergence of a remarkable start-up economy, is something that should be done only after study by nonpartisan experts and with a broad national consensus. That is how real democracies do these things, but there has been none of that in Netanyahu’s case. It underscores that this whole farce has nothing to do with judicial “reform” and everything to do with a naked power grab by each segment of Netanyahu’s coalition.

The Jewish settlers want the Supreme Court out of the way so they can create settlements all across the West Bank and easily confiscate Palestinian lands. The ultra-Orthodox want the Supreme Court out of the way so no one can tell their sons that they have to serve in the Israeli military or tell their schools that they have to teach English, math, science and democratic values. And Netanyahu wants the court out of the way so he can appoint whatever political hacks he wants to key jobs.

On Monday the judicial overhaul bill received the first of the three readings it needs to pass, which Netanyahu’s cabinet says it wants done by the time the Knesset recesses for the summer on July 31. Can you imagine the U.S. amending its Constitution — in just a few months — with no serious national debate or expert witnesses or attempt by the national leader to forge a consensus?

If the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy defenders, who have taken to the streets every Saturday for over half a year, can’t stop the Netanyahu juggernaut from slamming this bill through, it will, as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote the other day in Haaretz, “degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society, isolate the country” and end “the democratic chapter” of Israel’s history.

Confidence in higher education has reached a new low, according to a new poll from Gallup. The survey found declines in confidence in all surveyed demographic groups from 2015 to 2023, with Republicans experiencing the sharpest decline.
According to the survey, which polled around 1,000 adults on their confidence level in 16 different American institutions, only 36 percent of respondents reported that they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education—a drop of 21 points since 2015 and 12 points since 2018.
Democrats were the only group surveyed where a majority (59 percent) reported having a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education. However, this still marked a nine-point decline in confidence levels from 2015. Republicans experienced the sharpest decline in confidence in higher education since 2015, declining from a 56 percent confidence rate to only 19 percent in 2023.
Declines in confidence were also more pronounced in Americans without a college degree: Those who reported that they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education declined 24 points from 2015 to 2023, while confidence among those with a college degree only or a postgraduate degree declined by 10 points and 17 points respectively.
It's likely that Republicans and Democrats are expressing declining confidence in colleges and universities for vastly different reasons. According to a 2017 poll from Gallup, Democrats with low confidence in higher education named cost as the top reason for their lack of support. Republicans listed concerns that colleges are "too liberal/political" and do not allow "students to think for themselves; pushing their own agenda" as the sources of their lack of confidence.
While this more recent Gallup poll did not ask respondents for their reasoning behind their confidence levels, it's difficult to imagine this split has changed much. The cost of college—and pressure to forgive student loans—has become such a prominent political issue that it drove a failed attempt from the Biden administration to forgive $400 billion in federal student loans. Conversely, the political orthodoxy in higher education has become a major source of culture war consternation and has prompted a raft of restrictive—and unconstitutional—laws from red state legislatures.
However, while the declines in support for higher education are extreme, it's part of a larger trend of low support for American institutions. Out of 16 institutions, higher education was the fourth-most supported institution in the survey, behind small businesses, the military, and police. Congress was the lowest-ranked institution, with just 8 percent of respondents reporting that they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in it. 
The post Confidence in Higher Education Reaches New Low appeared first on Reason.com.

By approving a new wealth tax last year, Massachusetts voters might have dented the Boston Celtics' chances of chasing down a National Basketball Association (NBA) championship.
Grant Williams, a talented power forward drafted by the Celtics in the first round just four years ago, declined to re-sign with Boston this summer. Instead, he'll be playing next season in Dallas, where his new contract won't be subject to Massachusetts' so-called "millionaire's tax."
Williams told The Athletic that his decision to sign a $54 million deal with Dallas over a $48 million offer from Boston was "a little strategic" and that the gap between the two offers was larger than it might seem.
"In Boston, it's…$48 million with the millionaire's tax, so $54 million in Dallas is really like $58 million in Boston," Williams said.
In Texas, which has no state income tax, Williams can keep more of his earnings, though it is worth noting that professional athletes unfortunately owe taxes in states where they play road games. His new state's tax situation gives Williams a nice incentive to move, considering Massachusetts would have taken 9 percent of those earnings—thanks to its 5 percent flat income tax and newly created 4 percent tax on income in excess of $1 million.
Voters narrowly approved the millionaire's tax in a referendum last year. As Reason reported at the time, teachers unions there spent large sums on the campaign to create the new tax, which will mean more money for the state to distribute to public schools.
But Williams' decision to leave Boston for Dallas is a perfect illustration of the warnings issued by opponents of the new tax.
A 2021 report from the Beacon Hill Institute, a free market nonprofit, estimated that the millionaire's tax could cost Massachusetts more than 9,000 jobs and reduce the state's overall gross output and real disposable income—a result of wealthier residents shifting assets and investments to other states. A 2022 study by Massachusetts-based Tufts University warned that "some high-income residents may relocate to other states" and that "tax avoidance could be widespread."
That's likely to worsen Massaschusetts' population drain, which was already underway before the new tax was imposed. The state has been losing about 25,000 people per year on average for the past quarter-century, but Census Bureau data shows that trend has accelerated over the past year, according to WWLP, a television station in Springfield, Massachusetts.
A 2018 Cato Institute study found that people tend to migrate to states with relatively lower taxes. And that was before the pandemic-induced increase in remote work. You don't have to be a professional athlete to make the choice Williams made—but it's a choice that might hurt Boston's other teams too: The Boston Globe reported in December that the millionaire's tax was complicating the Red Sox's pitch to prospective free agents too.
"Grant Williams just gave us a concrete example of how our state's new tax code is making it more difficult to compete in Massachusetts," Paul D. Craney, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance told the Boston Herald. "There are small business owners and retirees doing the math out and coming to similar conclusions."
For anyone choosing to pull up stakes and move out of state, taxes are only one part of the overall equation. Williams, for example, said he was also attracted to signing with Dallas by the potential for more playing time.
Still, it's undeniable that Massachusetts' decision to hike taxes on the wealthy played a significant role in Williams' decision to take his talents elsewhere. He might be the most high-profile example, but he's surely not the only Bay Stater weighing a similar set of choices.
The post Massachusetts' Wealth Tax Encouraged NBA's Grant Williams To Sign With Dallas appeared first on Reason.com.

Prime Energy is a new caffeinated drink created by social media celebrity, podcaster, and professional wrestler Logan Paul. The five flavors—Blue Raspberry, Lemon Lime, Strawberry Watermelon, Orange Mango, and Tropical Punch—are sweet as candy, though they contain no sugar.
They do contain 200 milligrams of caffeine. This has made Prime Energy a target of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), who is demanding that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigate the beverage company for targeting kids with a product that poses "a serious health concern."
"One of the summer's hottest status symbols for kids is not an outfit, or a toy—it's a beverage," said Schumer, according to The Associated Press. "But buyer and parents beware because it's a serious health concern for the kids it so feverishly targets."
As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted, Schumer's ire is incredibly misdirected.
For one thing, cans of Prime Energy have warning labels that explicitly say the product is not recommended for anyone under the age of 18. Yes, the beverage appears to be popular with kids, but that's because Paul happens to have an especially young audience on YouTube. Why a specific social media personality is producing videos that resonate with kids is not a matter for federal health bureaucrats to adjudicate.
Complaints that the flavor names and brightly colored cans are designed specifically to ensnare children are reminiscent of similar arguments against vaping. Regulators frequently claim that flavored e-cigarettes are targeted at kids, even though many adults enjoy them—even preferring e-cigarettes to smoking tobacco, the latter of which is significantly more harmful.
But even if kids are drinking Prime Energy—despite the warning label—this is no reason to panic and involve the FDA.
Besides, the drink's caffeine levels are not as concerning as Schumer would have you believe.
Reports by CBS and other media outlets have stressed that the amount of caffeine in a Prime Energy drink "is equivalent to six cans of Coke or two Red Bulls." That certainly sounds like a lot, but compare Prime Energy to coffee. A Starbucks brand K-cup has about 100 milligrams of caffeine, and a venti coffee—the largest size—has about 400 milligrams. That's twice as much caffeine as a can of Prime Energy. But nobody is freaked out about teens drinking too much Starbucks.
That's because the freakout over Prime Energy is actually just a new permutation of the broader panic about social media. Bureaucrats and busybodies are desperate to find any evidence that kids scrolling through Instagram and TikTok are negatively impacted by the experience. A popular social media figure selling a new energy drink strikes many legislators and reporters as nefarious by default, even if the product in question is no worse than what's already on the market.
"The research suggests energy drinks carry no more risk than other caffeinated beverages children can readily access," says Guy Bentley, director of consumer freedom at the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason. "If children are under the illusion this is a health drink, parents, schools, consumers, and their doctors are well-placed to correct any misperceptions without requiring federal officials to spend more time on TikTok."
Here's hoping that the FDA ignores Schumer's plea.
The post Chuck Schumer Panics Over Logan Paul's New Energy Drink appeared first on Reason.com.

UPDATE: Since this piece was published in the August/September issue, the Supreme Court declared President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan unconstitutional. Read Reason's coverage of the decision here, here, and here.
If the U.S. Supreme Court nixes President Joe Biden's plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for millions of borrowers, another portion of Biden's proposal could still leave taxpayers on the hook. And the final price tag for that aspect of Biden's policy could be double what his administration originally claimed.
Currently, federal student loan payments can be capped at 10 percent of a borrower's discretionary income, which the Department of Education defines as any income above 150 percent of the federal poverty line. Biden plans to lower the monthly payment to just 5 percent of a borrower's discretionary income. The new rule also forgives outstanding federal student loan balances after 10 years for borrowers who took out less than $12,000 and after 20 years for everyone else.
In short, many federal student loan borrowers will be asked to make monthly payments that are 50 percent less than currently required, and a substantial number will need to make those smaller payments for half as long as they previously did before their debts are eliminated entirely. That will mean more outstanding debts that are never paid off by borrowers, leaving taxpayers with the tab.
A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis estimates that the 10-year tab for the revised income-based repayment rule would be $230 billion. Add another $45 billion if the Supreme Court stops Biden from wiping some loans off the books completely, because that will mean more loans are subject to the new rule.
By contrast, the Department of Education projected last year that Biden's income-driven repayment plan would cost only $138 billion. The administration's estimate did not take into account the likelihood that asking fewer people to pay off their loans would result in more student borrowing. Those "behavioral effects," according to the CBO, will drive the cost higher.
Any cost estimate for a government policy that doesn't account for incentives isn't worth the paper it's printed on. This failure is a recurring one for the Department of Education, which favors politically palatable price tags over trustworthy analysis. A 2022 Government Accountability Office report found that the department lost $197 billion on various student loan programs from 1997 to 2021. The department had projected a positive return of $114 billion during that period.
Instead of addressing the root causes of this fiscal mess, such as government subsidies that inflate costs, Biden is doubling down. It seems certain that the president's plan to help students who are struggling to pay back their loans will only encourage more students to take out loans that won't be paid back.
The post Biden's Changes to Income-Based Student Loan Repayment Could Cost Billions appeared first on Reason.com.

Thinking elite schools are the only path to success for students is a form of intellectual snobbery.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor had harsh words for her colleagues who voted last month to bar the use of race in college admissions. She alleged in her dissenting opinion that the six-justice majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had subverted the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, not upheld it, by “further entrenching racial inequality in education.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion slammed shut the door of opportunity to underrepresented minorities, especially black students, who still fight against a society that is “inherently unequal,” she wrote.

Many in academia agreed with Justice Sotomayor. Incoming Harvard president Claudine Gay warned in a video statement that the decision “means the real possibility that opportunities will be foreclosed.” David A. Thomas, president of historically black Morehouse College, asserted that in the absence of racial preferences, black students will rightly conclude that they are “not wanted.” Students “of color” may not feel that they “matter,” according to Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

When King Charles ascended the throne to the sonorous chants of a Greek Orthodox choir, the compelling fusion of British and Byzantine ceremony struck onlookers as a strange and mysterious novelty. But in one sense, it was the natural result of a now-disregarded byway of British imperial history. For half a century, British rule in the Ionian Islands off Greece’s western coast created an appealing hybrid society with all the romantic unlikeliness of a Crusader kingdom. On holy days, red-jacketed British soldiers would escort Corfu’s mummified patron saint through the streets in clouds of incense, with the garrison’s senior commanders bearing the ceremony’s giant candles. So impressed were locals by the spectacle that, even today, the island’s village marching bands play Holy Week’s funeral dirges in colourful uniforms and glittering helmets copied from the long-dead British garrison.
Even now, Corfu’s crumbling rotundas and bandstands, its British barracks, hospitals and palaces, are monuments to a vanished imperial culture, as lost and romantically stirring as that of Rome. Yet recent research born from this faded grandeur is more than just romantic marginalia: it offers a certain nuance currently absent from Britain’s own tiresomely propagandistic discourse on empire. As the Corfiot historian Maria Paschalidi notes, torn between strategic realpolitik and liberal idealism, “Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian… to representative… to responsible government.” Yet none worked, creating a “failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework”. But if things had worked out differently, Corfu might today be as British as Gibraltar. And the fact that it is not tells a micro-history of London’s always-ambivalent attitude to Empire.
Analysis of Britain’s lost Greek empire opens up new and productive pathways for interpreting the imperial past, keenly studied by a young generation of Greek historians even as it is ignored in the former colonial metropole. As the historian Evangelos Zarokostas observes, the half-century Ionian interlude took place at a formative time, “a period of transition between the collapse of old structures and the establishment of new ones”, in which “British officials were ambivalent about the place of the protectorate in the empire from its very beginning.” From the very start, Britain ruled the islands as a crown colony, but under the legal fiction they were an independent state under British protection. This ambiguous settlement would prove fatal to British rule, but it also provided a template for later British governance in Cyprus, Egypt, Mandate Palestine and Iraq. The islands were a laboratory for later imperial adventures, and would soon prove just as onerous a burden. In this sense, the bloody and still-unresolved conflicts of today’s Middle East were born on the verdant islands of the Ionian. Similarly, the failed Ionian experiment, abandoned just as Britain began to acquire hegemonic status, was to be Whitehall’s first experience of decolonisation — a first draft, in colourful mid-Victorian style, of Britain’s 20th-century decline. 
In 1815, when Britain won the Ionian Islands from a vanquished Napoleon, the world looked very different. The island chain off Greece’s western coast commanded the entrance to the Adriatic, and seemed to offer mastery of the Mediterranean. In the 20 years preceding the raising of the Union flag over Corfu’s medieval fortress, the islands had rudely entered modernity after 400 years as a sleepy colony of Venice, passing from French to Russian hands and back to France again in a wearying succession of sieges and conquests. Desperately poor, they presented London with a complex society to govern: centuries of Venetian rule had left a Greek-speaking peasantry living in feudal squalor, lorded over by an absentee class of Italian-speaking nobles. In the regional capital, Corfu Town, all classes spoke Italian of one form or another, including the many Jews, confined to their ghetto by the vigorous antisemitism of their neighbours. As European Christians for the most part, the islanders were an anomaly in Britain’s expanding empire. How, then, were they to be governed? 
The Treaty of Paris which granted them to Britain asserted that Whitehall’s rule was merely a benevolent guardianship of the first independent Greek state since the Middle Ages. The reality was rather different: fresh from negotiating Haiti’s handover to its new black rulers, the Ionian Islands’ first British Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, or “King Tom”, ruled with a rod of iron. A Scottish nobleman, described by his new Ionian charges as “dirty” and “frequently drunk”, Maitland began his decade as “conquistador” by erecting imposing monuments to himself, and ensured that, whatever the constitution said, absolute power rested with his own person. Feared by the locals as a volatile and abusive autocrat, whose secret police penetrated every level of Ionian society, Maitland’s absolute rule established the basis for later British governance. An enlightened despot, and a devotee of Adam Smith’s latest, fashionable theories, Maitland encouraged trade and imposed a sense of British order to Corfu’s teeming, overcrowded streets. Finding the locals disinclined to work, Maitland imported Maltese labourers to build his imposing regency palace of St Michael and St George, in the process reviving Corfu’s dwindling Catholic community. Correctly assessing the local nobility as easily swayed by glittering baubles, Maitland invented a chivalric order to dazzle them, still awarded today, in the absence of Greeks to bribe, to British diplomats — by themselves.
More from this author He was never really 'Phil the Greek'By Aris Roussinos 
For a while, in the early decades of the 19th century, British rule was accepted by Corfiot society, if not by the more rebellious inhabitants of the southward islands. As Aggelis notes, there were even “popular demands from many Ionians to be ‘modernised’ by the British”. So, with all the lost confidence of Victorian Britain, Corfu was duly gifted the Foucauldian novelties of a Panopticon prison in Benthamite style, and a high-walled lunatic asylum, still occupied today. New Macadamed roads, also still in use, linked the villages to the capital, and a sturdy aqueduct brought water to its population. The expansion of new law courts, coupled with stiff sentences for carrying knives — at the time the British arrived, the Ionians had the second-highest murder rate in Europe — transformed a previously violent society into the most pacific, if now litigious, in the region. Handsome villas, their sober Regency neoclassicism softened by pastel-coloured limewash, sprung up around the town and its prosperous new suburb of Garitsa to house the garrison’s officers and their wives in British comfort. They are still lived in today by Corfu’s upper-middle class professionals — indeed, Prince Philip was born in one, Mon Repos. Banks and stock exchanges, hotels and sewers, street lamps and bandstands transformed the medieval walled city into a Balkan simulacrum of Cheltenham.
The eccentric Lord Guilford — whose erratically-spelled name is still commemorated by Corfu’s central square — founded modern Greece’s first university on the island, after being dissuaded from situating it on a goat-haunted mountain peak on Ithaca. A network of “Lancastrian schools” provided public education, including the first ever schooling for girls; British sentries guarded the ghetto during Holy Week, ending the local custom of stoning Jews who dared venture outside. And amid all this reforming zeal, garrison life drifted along with a sleepy, romantic charm, where red-coated officers and their crinolined companions hunted scented paper in lieu of foxes, and enjoyed champagne and oyster picnics on the island’s beauty spots, surrounded by peasants toiling in the olive groves. For Mrs Gaskell, imagining the life of an officer’s wife, enjoying “music and dancing” in her “house with its trellised balcony,” the daily round was one long summer holiday. For the ordinary squaddies, happily acquiring “local connections with women” and “local habits” and serving in the only British posting where wine was the ration drink, the only hazards were drunkenly falling from the ramparts or being snatched by sharks while swimming. A soldier’s life here was distinctly less onerous than in the Empire’s more spartan outposts. 
But the holiday atmosphere would not last long. The outbreak of the Greek Revolution aroused nationalist passions which would ultimately make British rule untenable. The exiled Corfiot nobleman Ioannis Kapodistrias, Russia’s foreign minister and a fervent opponent of British rule, complaining that the islanders were treated “like indians”, became the new Greece’s first head of state, complaining that the islanders were treated “like Indians”, until he was assassinated by his volatile mainland charges. When a Turkish ship carrying Muslim refugees landed on Zakynthos, the passengers were murdered by the islanders, causing Maitland to impose martial law and disarm the Ionian population. Agrarian rebellions would rumble on in the southern islands, with British officials occasionally murdered, and reprisals exacted. The Ionians were the only British territory where the revolutionary fervour of 1848 was successful: the liberal Tory Lord High Commissioner Lord Seaton, fresh from his experience governing Upper Canada, widened democratic participation and permitted a free press, recasting the Ionians as a white dominion fit for Canadian-style responsible self-government. Indeed, under Seaton the Ionian islanders were granted greater democratic rights than the people of Britain itself. When, the following year, British troops put down a peasant uprising in Kefalonia, burning villages and hanging rebels to the applause of the local nobles, his reactionary successor Sir Henry Ward blamed Seaton’s naive idealism for the disturbances, proroguing the Ionian parliament and exiling journalists in an abrupt return to authoritarian rule.

This constant oscillation between Liberal and reactionary Tory proconsuls introduced tensions into Ionian governance that would soon make British rule untenable. The expansion of education, of the legal system and of employment in the British administration created a new Ionian bourgeoisie who rejected the pro-British sympathies of the islands’ aristocracy in favour of radical nationalism: a pattern that would be repeated in more exotic colonies. In stirring Italian prose (though the British had reintroduced Greek as the language of law and government for the first time since the 13th century, Italian remained the language of choice for the educated classes) nationalist radicals with names such as Dandolo, Padova and Lombardo demanded union with the Greek fatherland. Enraged by Ward’s repression of the Kefalonian rebellion, the moderate reformists, who had previously sought closer integration within the empire on more favourable terms of trade and access to imperial sinecures, ceded power to the radicals. 
When the Crimean War broke out, and the islands became the supply base for Britain’s defence of the hated Ottoman Empire against the islanders’ Orthodox co-religionists, even the formerly-pliable clergy began to publicly pray for the Tsar’s health and success, while islanders celebrated Russian victories over their colonial overlords. The end was looming. Local government was deadlocked as the radicals frustrated British rule, but the heightened repression angered liberal sentiment in London. In the dying decade of British rule, as at the beginning, Whitehall’s sole concern with the islands became keeping them out of Russian hands. Nervously, London discussed gifting the islands to Austria, though feared the international response. A proposal was made by Ward’s successor, Sir John Young, a former MP for Cavan who consistently likened the increasingly unruly Ionians to the now equally troublesome Irish, proposed to annex Corfu while ceding the more volatile islands to Greece. 
In a justificatory British correspondence, the placid Corfiots were now characterised as “half-Venetian and half-Albanian” and thus barely Greek at all. As Paschalidi notes, Young insisted that “Corfu was perfect for ‘British capital and enterprise’ and “would be ‘completely Anglicised’ in a few years.” Yet the initially convenient legal fiction of the Protectorate prevented Britain from either fully annexing Corfu or handing the problem to a friendly power. The publishing of Young’s stolen correspondence just as Gladstone arrived in Corfu to find some workable solution forced London to reassure wary European powers it had no intention of creating a Balkan Gibraltar. At a loss for how to rid itself of its now unwanted Greek dependency, the British government began to search for a way out. That way out was to be King Charles’ great-grandfather, Prince William of Denmark.
Suggested reading How Britain became an American colonyBy Dominic Sandbrook 
In 1862, Greek revolutionaries overthrew their unpopular Bavarian king Otto, and the country voted for a successor. When the votes were tallied, the winner, with more than 95% of votes cast (still the greatest democratic mandate in Greek history) was Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son. Both Alfred and Victoria immediately declined the offer — the throne of an impoverished Balkan country in the throes of revolution was hardly a prize — but the Greeks refused to listen: Alfred-mania had entirely swept the country. The Greeks believed that choosing Alfred would guarantee British protection for their weak and unstable new state, with the still-unliberated Ottoman possessions of northern Greece thrown into the bargain. Struggling to convince them that the Alfred option was impossible, British officials feared the disappointed Greeks would choose a Russian king in a fit of pique, swinging the country into the orbit of London’s greatest rival. After much haggling, British officials settled on a safely pliable king for Greece, Prince William of Denmark — King Charles’ great-grandfather. But to seal the deal, London needed a handsome gift to woo the Greeks: and what better option than Corfu and the Ionians, no longer strategically valuable and now impossible to govern?
And so, on June 2, 1864, the last British troops marched out of Corfu’s Old Fortress and the Union flag was lowered for the last time. The final Lord High Commissioner, Sir Henry Storks, gave a tearful speech in Italian while island notables gathered round him, “embracing him and conferring upon him not infrequently those salutations which Englishmen generally reserve for the other sex”. The frosty atmosphere of Britain’s last decade of rule had evaporated with their looming departure, as soldiers marched along streets “strewn with flowers”, “fêted in the taverns with free beer”. Now it was over, Corfiots had already begun to feel a certain nostalgia for their brief episode of Britishness. “Sono bono genti [they are good people],” a British correspondent quoted an old man waving his straw hat at the departing ships, wiping tears from his eyes: “’Adesso siamo liberi!’ [Now we are free!], said a young man, as he lit a cigarette by way of inaugurating the new order of things.” The young man was not quite correct: in relinquishing Corfu, Britain won a far greater prize, a quasi-colonial dominance over Greece itself, which would remain an effective British protectorate until London was supplanted by Washington following World War Two. For this exact reason, once Britain finally agreed to cede the Ionians, Ionian radicals who had long demanded union futilely began to campaign against it, as the historian Eleni Calligas shows: after experiencing “the corruption, intrigue, and clientelism permeating Greek politics” they soon retired from public life altogether, entirely disillusioned.
British rule in the Ionians is often seen, in Britain, as a curious backwater in the long imperial record, but the romantic but ultimately failed Ionian experiment set the scene for later imperial trends. Oscillating between Liberal and Tory proconsuls, tensions in British internal politics introduced a wild incoherence to Ionian governance: Tory repression inflamed local passions; Liberal idealism created a native nationalist bourgeoisie who would make the islands ungovernable. But young British administrators who cut their teeth in the failed Ionian project would later move on to the equally ambiguous annexation of Egypt, which established a precedent for British mandate Iraq: British governance in the Ionian would shape later failures in the Middle East. Similarly oscillating between liberal idealism — tempered by the nationalist enthusiasms of a bourgeoisie British rule had created — and harsh oppression, Britain repeated the same cycle in the Middle East as it did in the Ionian, ending in bloodier and less romantic failure. In the end, British patronage of independent Greece ended as that of its rule in the Middle East did, a rule supplanted by America, now being supplanted in turn..
More from this author What Harry Flashman teaches us about empireBy Aris Roussinos 
Cycling through an incoherent policy mix of authoritarian repression and liberal idealism, benevolent modernisation and indirect rule through feudal elites, British rule in the Ionians ended in the empire’s first bitter taste of decolonisation, even as Britain stood on the brink of world hegemony. But far from the black-and-white moral certainties of today’s demagogic historiography, the Ionian islanders themselves always felt ambivalent about their status as semi-Britons, as often pleading for greater incorporation into the imperial fold and the right to send an MP to the Commons as demanding independence. 
London, too, always felt more ambivalence than cupidity for its Greek possessions, searching for the least painful way to relinquish them and finally doing so according to the unsentimental demands of realpolitik. Far from the Ionians’ union with Greece being the inevitable result of nationalist fervour, London chose the moment of decolonisation, just one of many potential outcomes, and did so with relief. “I wish them joy of the association,” Storks wrote bitterly, “Ionia will be the Ireland of Greece.” When the British left, they were mourned only by Corfu’s nobility, its Jews (whose “situation would be very pitiable, if the English did not take them under their protection”), and its women, who, Storks observed, were “universally opposed to the cessation of British protection”. But in the end, aside from the residual Anglophilia of Corfiot elites, the only living result of this brief and romantic Anglo-Hellenic synthesis is our own philhellene King, and a lingering Corfiot taste for cricket and ginger beer, the last ghostly echoes of Britain’s lost Greek empire.

I am deeply grateful to Joe Biden. By defeating Donald Trump in 2020, he rescued this country from the continuing misrule of a dangerous grifter and serial liar, a man gripped by vindictiveness, lawlessness, and egomania. By contrast, Biden presented himself, correctly, as a decent, experienced, and entirely normal politician. He may even have saved his country. Americans owe him a profound debt of respect and appreciation.He also has no business running for president at age 80. I say that with considerable feeling, being in my late 60s and knowing that my 70s are not far off. I am as healthy as any late-middle-aged person (admittedly, I cringe at the word old, which tells you something right there) can be. But I know that at this stage, I do not have the energy I had a decade ago. I forget more things, and if my body does not hurt when I wake up in the morning, a little voice in my head asks whether I am dead and do not yet know it.[Read: Why Biden shouldn’t run in 2024]Sixty-seven, in my view, is the new 66. It is an American conceit that aging can be concealed (botox), prevented (exercise! healthy eating!), or ameliorated (don’t wake Grandpa up from his nap!). That is rubbish. Plenty of studies (all available at the National Institutes of Health website) document the impact of aging on memory, mental acuity, endurance; on the production of cortisol and other hormones; and on the increased chances of dementia. Yes, exceptions exist, and we all know a few. But betting on being the exception strikes me as a gamble against ever-lengthening odds and, as the proverb has it, the triumph of hope over experience.A lot of the clichés about growing older are, unfortunately, entirely correct. Age comes with fewer filters, less patience for fools (or for mere contradiction), and a great deal more “Listen to me, kid, I was doing this before you were born.” If this sounds a bit like Biden, it should. Particularly in the ego- and adrenaline-saturated business of politics, the chances of maturing into sweet-old-grandfatherdom strike me as minimal. One rarely becomes a senator, much less a president, without an unhealthily large ego, which is why Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley find leaving the stage so hard. And even if one started with a certain level of humility, holding on to it is difficult, which is why those who voluntarily step down (think, for example, of Supreme Court Justice David Souter) deserve our respect.Clinging to office in old age is selfish, too. In my modest line of work of university-level teaching, the ranks are filling with geriatric incumbents who refuse to get out of the way of younger people coming up. They fool themselves into thinking that they are as good as they always were, even as they deliver lectures from 30-year-old notes or cease to produce cutting-edge work. The academic world has its own senatorial- or presidential-size egos, and the result is a comparable level of narcissistic self-indulgence by staying in the spotlight. Quietly, university presidents fret about this, which is why professors my age get attractive buyout offers and various postretirement perks. And before some of my fellow aging pedagogues begin sending me their latest articles in Science or their Boston Marathon times, I will say again, yes, there are exceptions. But then, don’t all of us fool ourselves about how exceptional we are?President Biden is 80 years old. If he gets reelected, he will be 86 by the time his term expires. He will have spent, at the end of that time, nearly half a century as a senator, vice president, or president, positions all calculated to inflate one’s self-image. As president he has surrounded himself with former aides and dutiful technocrats—no peers who can look him straight in the eye and say, with the gravitas born of expertise and self-confidence, “Mr. President, I profoundly disagree.” Perhaps this is what he has always done, but it is particularly striking now.[Derek Thompson: Why do such elderly people run America?]The president works out a lot. So did Ronald Reagan, who was already retired by the time he was Biden’s current age. And alas, Alzheimer’s disease did not particularly care about how much brush Reagan had cleared or how often he rode horses. Who has not known some perfectly healthy person in their 80s, 70s, and even 60s whose health suddenly collapsed? Or worse, who went into a sharp decline?Unfortunately, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has the résumé but seemingly not the political skills and heft to be a compelling presidential candidate, is a weak backfill. Moreover, if history is any guide, an ailing, declining president does not simply say, “You’re right, Doc, time for me to hand over the reins to the veep.” Rather, as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and others have done, they delay and deny, aided and abetted by families and close advisers who refuse to accept reality.Nor is Biden the only alternative to Trump. Harris may not be the right person, but what about any of the talented Democratic governors out there? Or a former mayor, such as Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans? Unfortunately we only get the oddballs, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as alternative candidates because today’s Democrats, like their Republican opponents of yore, now fall in line even though they have not fallen in love.There is nothing morbid in accepting the fact of aging—indeed, there is something pathetic about those who cannot. Cicero gave excellent guidance in his little book How to Grow Old. “This last act must take place,” he writes, “as surely as the fruits of trees and the earth must someday wither and fall. But a wise person knows this and accepts it with grace. Fighting against nature is as pointless as the battles of the giants against the gods.”Cicero speaks of the joys of age, of contemplating one’s garden (metaphorical and real), of the company of friends old and young, of leaving behind “so many struggles with lust, ambition, strife, quarreling, and other passions.” And he notes that there is something both desperate and inappropriate about trying to stay at center stage to the bitter end. “An actor does not need to remain on stage throughout a play. It is enough that he appears in the appropriate acts.” Joe Biden had the leading role in a crucial act in the grand story of America, and he played it with grace and honor. It is time for him to take a bow, accept the thanks of a grateful nation, and exit to well-deserved applause.

As the election cycle heats up, Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis wants you to know that the left is coming for your children, and Ron DeSantis is the only person who can save them.
She launched "Mamas for DeSantis"—a national version of the group she founded during the Florida governor's 2022 reelection campaign—on Thursday, releasing an ad that describes the left-wing assault on America's children with breathless fervor. 
"When you come after our kids, we fight back, because there's nothing we won't do to protect our children. They're not yours," Casey DeSantis narrates over smoky footage of crying toddlers in masks, clips of Pride parades, and photos of Lia Thomas and other transgender athletes. "We will not allow you to exploit their innocence to advance your agenda."
The ad, which comes on the heels of a now-deleted campaign video targeting Donald Trump's comparatively pro-LGBT record, solidifies DeSantis as the candidate of the too  online.
From the beginning, the DeSantis campaign has been marked by an almost singular focus on culture-war issues. Generally eschewing economic proposals, DeSantis instead seems more interested in ginning up support from right-wing Twitter trolls than a broad coalition of Republican voters.
This was made clear by Thursday's campaign ad; it approaches subjects that should be relative slam-dunks for DeSantis—school choice and opposition to COVID school closures and mask mandates—with an off-puttingly conspiratorial edge. Instead of focusing on DeSantis' actual policy record, it instead makes a Helen Lovejoy-esque plea to think of the children—complete with a photo of a little girl with a kinkster in a leather dog mask.
While the ad was surely a hit with Libs of TikTok fans, it's not exactly clear how the messaging is supposed to attract voters who aren't glued to the right-wing internet. Instead of leaning into his previous reputation as a saner—and more electable—executor of Trumpist policy, DeSantis is now trying to cast himself as an even more right-wing version of Trump. 
But instead of gaining new support from Trump devotees, DeSantis will likely end up alienating the same voters he most needs to attract—Republicans who can barely stomach supporting someone as sleazy and bombastic as Donald Trump. 
Unfortunately for DeSantis, while culture war issues dominate the far left and far right—the loudest voices on online platforms—average voters are consistently less interested. Time and time again, polling shows that economic issues dominate voters' interest, with concern over government leadership, immigration, and crime following behind. 
DeSantis doesn't need to sensationalize to get an easy win on the kinds of issues Mamas for DeSantis is presumably focused on. Education has been a solid topic for Republicans in recent years—especially as the COVID school closures favored by Democrats can be solidly blamed for disastrous declines in educational outcomes. A calmer, more effective ad would focus on DeSantis' consistent opposition to COVID-19 school closures and his solid record advancing school choice in Florida. But that wouldn't feel quite as nice as owning the libs.
The post 'Mamas for DeSantis' Is Proof: The DeSantis Campaign Is Too Online appeared first on Reason.com.

U.S. presidential campaigns usually aren’t focused on foreign policy — which is actually a blessing because, when they are, the result is often crazy talk. If you doubt that, consider the latest policy idea that has been endorsed in some form or another by almost all the front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination: effectively declaring war on Mexico’s drug cartels. Donald Trump plans to “wage war” and impose a “full naval embargo” on them. Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) says he wants to use “the world’s greatest military” to solve the problem. A recent poll found strong support for military action among GOP primary voters, so expect to see more such wild statements.

The problem that needs to be addressed is real and tragic. More than 70,000 people in the United States died from synthetic opioid overdoses in 2021, the last year for which we had data. The leading synthetic opioid is fentanyl, which is similar to but much more potent than heroin. These drugs are mostly made by cartels in Mexico. But the idea that using U.S. military force would solve the problem is delusional.

First, it would be an act of war against Mexico. That country’s government has been clear that it is utterly opposed to any use of the U.S. military to deal with its drug problem. And if it were to be convinced otherwise, the worst way to proceed would be for politicians in the United States to proclaim that they intend to use force regardless of what the Mexican government thinks. This kind of rhetoric is a gift to Mexico’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who will use it to gin up anti-American nationalism in his country.

Second, it won’t work. Has Scott reflected on the fact that “the world’s greatest military” was unable to stop the drug trade in Afghanistan, a country that it occupied for 20 years? The problems in Mexico would be even greater: large areas of no-man’s land where the cartels operate, massively funded and armed militias, and many ways to shift production across borders.

Third, large-scale action against the cartels would unleash instability across the region and in the United States itself. You would think that we would have some understanding of the unintended consequences of military interventions after Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of migrants have been trying to enter the United States; imagine what the numbers would look like if there were a bombing campaign in southern Mexico. Armed gangs would disperse and try to find ways to hide in smaller numbers, including by crossing the border. Instead of exporting the violence to Mexico, we would bring the war to America.

Two years ago, on the 50th anniversary of President Richard M. Nixon’s war on drugs, several studies and articles noted that it had been an almost unqualified failure by just about any measure. Despite an estimated $1 trillion spent on enforcement, deaths from drug overdoses have risen dramatically while the U.S. prison system has been utterly transformed. Now, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has about 20 percent of its prisoners. After many reform efforts, the police make more than 1 million arrests each year simply for possession of drugs.

And when we talk about the war on drugs, we rarely discuss its effects on Latin America. Our efforts to address the problem massively empowered the militaries in many of these countries and hindered the development of civil society, democratic development and the rule of law. Corruption skyrocketed and infested all parts of society — as can be seen most readily in Mexico, where the cartels have become interwoven with parts of the government.

Some consider Plan Colombia a successful battle in the war on drugs. Since 2000, Washington has appropriated about $12 billion for the plan and related efforts in Colombia, where a brave and tenacious government fought vigorously against the cartels. Coca cultivation did decline for a time in Colombia but has returned with a vengeance. Even worse, the strategy had the effect of increasing production in Peru and Bolivia. In fact, the drug trade originally moved to Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s from Peru and Bolivia because of the military efforts in those countries. This is what experts call “the balloon effect.” You could just as easily call it Capitalism 101. When the richest country in the world has an insatiable demand for drugs, someone will supply them.

Solving the fentanyl tragedy in the United States will take time and a wide range of efforts. U.S. doctors still prescribe far too many opioids (responding to powerful commercial incentives). A 2019 study showed that American and Canadian postoperative patients were seven times more likely to be prescribed opioids than patients in Sweden. Drug treatment and rehabilitation programs are still far too small and underfunded. Medications that help with withdrawal symptoms have proved extremely effective, but still only 1 in 4 people who need them in the United States can obtain them.

In the meantime, though, it is much easier to bellow about going to war with Mexico. Let’s hope this is just campaign craziness. If we actually try to make these threats a reality, we’ll be asking for decades of turmoil.

When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.“We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment," White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.[Read: Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet]This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.“That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.“What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.  Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.[Joel Dodge: My Hometown Is Getting a $100 Billion Dose of Bidenomics]The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”The biggest challenge in the red-state-investment tilt may be whether it impedes Biden’s overarching goal of creating more well-paying jobs for workers without a college degree. As Podhorzer pointed out, average wages in many industries, including manufacturing, are much lower in red states than in blue.Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last month after the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The goal of “How to Build a Life” is fairly simple: to bring the world of academic social-science research to a wide audience, using my academic training to translate sometimes-esoteric scholarship into practical happiness lessons. In the course of this project, I find my task is as likely to be combatting poor or incomplete advice that people have read on the internet as giving solid counsel based on scholarship and science. The web is full of self-styled experts in my field who claim to have the One Weird Trick that will change your life completely.And not just in my field. The internet has fed a huge reservoir of good information, but it has also created an explosion of nonsense: technical-sounding nutrition advice about a new dietary supplement that miraculously stimulates the body to convert fat into muscle, financial jargon pushing dubious investment tips, health guidance that promises a miracle treatment your physician doesn’t know about. As my own doctor once told me, his greatest challenge these days is “undoing the handiwork of Dr. Google.”[Tim Harford: What conspiracy theorists don’t believe]Some of what people see is straight-up fake news—predatory attempts to swindle consumers. But much of the bad advice on the web actually originates in a psychological phenomenon called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” Understanding this illusion can make you a better consumer of knowledge, as well as less likely to promote bad information yourself.In 2002, two psychologists noticed in experiments that when people are first exposed to technical information, they usually overestimate how deeply they understand it. The researchers asked graduate students to read basic descriptions of how eight common mechanical items worked: a speedometer, a zipper, a piano key, a flush toilet, a cylinder lock, a helicopter, a quartz watch, and a sewing machine. Then they asked the students to rate their understanding on a 1–7 scale. The average self-rating was about 4.Next, the researchers asked the participants to re-rate their knowledge after being prompted to explain clearly how the items worked in their own words (without simply parroting what they had heard). The students were also quizzed on the information and had to compare their own understanding with a true expert’s. Nearly every participant’s self-rating dropped at these stages, with the average falling to as low as about 3 at one point. In other words, the participants initially felt as if they had more expertise than they really did.The phrase illusion of explanatory depth was what researchers dubbed their finding. The phenomenon is similar to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people with low levels of skill in an activity tend to overrate their competence. One explanation for this is “hypocognition,” that people don’t know what they don’t know.We all exhibit this tendency. When you first hear an explanation intended for a layperson of string theory, you aren’t aware of the immense quantity of technical scholarship behind the physics; you just feel that you “get it” and experience a surge of intellectual power. But when you yourself have to explain something as complex as the structure of a Bach fugue, or hear an expert in the field actually go deep on such a subject, you realize that you have barely skimmed the surface.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.The overconfidence of people laboring under the illusion of explanatory depth can lead to the spread of misinformation. As researchers have shown, when a person’s confidence is highest though their actual knowledge is low, they become very believable to others—despite not being reliable. And the more inaccurate people are—or perhaps the more they want to believe the validity of their perception—the more they tend to be swayed by their own underinformed overconfidence.This explains the problem of internet experts and those who rely on them: Practically everywhere you look on the web, you can find technical information of dubious accuracy. This is not necessarily because we are being deliberately lied to—although plenty of that is going on there too—but because the internet is a free, democratic platform. This very freedom and accessibility causes many people to succumb to the illusion of explanatory depth, confidently sharing their newly acquired expertise in some technical information gleaned from reading a single article or watching a couple of videos.The two ways we fall prey to the illusion are as consumers and as producers. The plight of the consumer of misinformation is the hardest to address, because it isn’t always easy to know when someone is a true expert or just flush with false confidence. The key question to ask is, Does the source of this technical assertion have a genuine technical background? If the answer is no, proceed with caution.If you’re hearing from a nonexpert who is relying on the work of researchers, consult the original sources if you can, to make sure that they are reliable and not cherry-picked to make an argument favorable to the research author’s biases. A good rule of thumb is that if a piece of technical information seems too good to be true, it probably is. And that generally applies to any promise of a simple, easy solution to a problem that has been around forever.[Arthur C. Brooks: How smart people can stop being miserable]The second condition—being a supplier of bad information—is easier to treat. Just remember: Google isn’t graduate school. Learning about novel ideas is a thrill, and indeed, many researchers believe that interest itself is a positive emotion—a source of pleasure rooted in the evolutionary imperative to learn new things. Cruising the web in search of interesting things is great fun. But beware your own susceptibility to the illusion of explanatory depth. If you think you understand something technical and complicated after cursory exposure, you might be able to put the knowledge to good use in your life, but you almost certainly don’t understand it well enough to hold forth on the topic.I have written here about people with insufficient expertise in a technical field who inadvertently pass on bad information. But I’d be the first to acknowledge that experts can give bad information as well. This is especially true when it comes to predictions about the future, an endeavor in which experts tend to be right only a little more often than a coin flip. But experts can also be wrong about what is right in front of them—falling prey like anyone else to groupthink, social convention, politics, threat of community disapproval, and cultural fads. I try to remind myself of this fact every day.No matter whom you are taking advice from, think for yourself and never entirely suspend your skepticism. No one has perfect knowledge or insight; everyone has biases and blind spots. And if you are the expert, remember that there really is One Weird Trick that solves a lot of problems: It’s called humility.

In 2021, police in Blackshear, Georgia, issued a criminal citation against Jeff Gray for holding a sign that read "God Bless the Homeless Vets" outside the town's city hall. The town's police chief even admitted while he was citing Gray that the local law was "kind of silly" but nonetheless ticketed him for failing to obtain Blackshear City Council's permission before holding a "parade, procession, or demonstration."
However, following a lawsuit challenging the local ordinance on First Amendment grounds, the city has now agreed to remove the regulation—and make a donation to a charity for homeless veterans.
"It's a new dawn in Blackshear," FIRE attorney Harrison Rosenthal said in a Thursday press release. "Americans don't need a permission slip to speak in front of city hall. The First Amendment is their permission slip."
Since 2011, Jeff Gray has carried out a series of "civil rights investigations" in towns across the southern U.S. on his YouTube channel. In his videos, Gray peacefully exercises his rights—such as the right to film police during a traffic stop or to peacefully protest—in order to test whether local law enforcement will respect his civil rights.
On August 18, 2021, Gray engaged in one of these "investigations" outside Blackshear's city hall, holding a sign that read "God Bless the Homeless Vets." Soon after, he was approached by Police Chief Wright who asked if he was "trying to demonstrate a little bit." When Gray replied that he was, Wright responded that Gray would need "to get a permit first to demonstrate on any public property," adding that the law was "kind of silly, but that's what the rules are." The police chief further informed Gray that city law required him to send a letter to the City Council explaining the "cause" of his protest and wait for a permit. When Gray refused to leave, Wright issued a criminal citation to him for violating the city ordinance.
In January of this year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, filed a lawsuit on Gray's behalf, arguing that the ordinance was plainly unconstitutional. 
"Members of the public have a clearly established First Amendment right to engage in expressive activities in traditional public fora without obtaining advance permission from government officials," the suit noted. "In enforcing the ordinances against Gray, Chief Wright violated Gray's First Amendment rights by prematurely ending Gray's expressive activity, chilling his ability to speak further, issuing him a criminal citation, and asserting under color of law that Gray's expressive rights are conditioned on the prior approval of city officials."
On Thursday, FIRE announced that it had reached a settlement with the city. The city agreed to revoke the unconstitutional ordinance requiring permits before demonstrations and to make a symbolic $1,791 donation (reflecting the year the First Amendment was ratified) to a charity for homeless veterans.
"This is the sort of situation where a municipality or a city has left a dusty old law lingering on the books, and it was a law that was very clearly unconstitutional. But because cities tend to leave unconstitutional laws on the books, rather than repealing them, sooner or later a police officer was going to pick up that book and throw it at somebody," FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh tells Reason, adding that the settlement serves as "a warning to cities that you can't leave dusty old unconstitutional laws lingering on the books because they're going to create risks for the rights of your citizens and for your city."
The post City Agrees To Remove Ordinance Requiring Permission To Protest appeared first on Reason.com.

Now that he’s campaigning in earnest, President Biden more often finds himself talking with regular Americans who in turn get a rare opportunity to bend the ear of the leader of the free world. These exchanges offer a window into what the president is thinking and saying when he’s outside the view of cameras (and beyond his handlers’ reach).

Three Syrian American activists took advantage of their audience with Biden at a private fundraiser on June 27 in Maryland to implore him to do more to oppose Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and protect innocent Syrian civilians. Encouragingly, these activists told me, Biden not only seemed to care deeply about the plight of Syrians but also seemed to want to do more about it. Yet they also noted that the president’s statements on Syria don’t match his own administration’s current policies. They are right on both counts.

Alaa Tello, a Syrian American from Massachusetts, said she told Biden, “Assad must go.” Biden then responded, according to Tello, “I agree.” That contrasts sharply with his administration’s own recent actions, which include telling Arab countries in the Persian Gulf that the United States won’t oppose their normalization of Assad and failing to implement U.S. sanctions against Assad’s enablers.

Biden was vice president when the Obama administration first declared in 2011 that “Assad must go.” Current administration officials don’t say that anymore, in part because Assad doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. But the activists’ conversations with the president were a sign that Biden still believes it, Tello told me afterward.

Tello pressed the president to help the Syrian people free themselves from the grip of Assad and his Russian and Iranian partners, whose campaign of mass atrocities is now in its 13th year.

“He said, ‘I can’t promise you, but I will do the best I can,’” Tello told me. “He cared. He engaged in the conversation with a high level of empathy, and I felt a lot of hope that the United States and the president will help the Syrian people.”

A National Security Council spokesperson told me: “We will not normalize relations with the Assad regime without authentic progress toward a political solution to the conflict, and we are aligned with our Arab partners on the ultimate objectives.”

Tello’s husband, Muhammad Bakr Ghbeis, a physician, told me he implored Biden to pay more attention to Syria’s northwest Idlib province, where more than 3 million internally displaced civilians are living in squalor, cut off from the world, and enduring constant attacks from Syrian and Russian forces.

“We have to save Idlib,” Ghbeis told me he told Biden. “Please save Idlib, Mr. President.” Biden responded: “I hear you, but I can’t send U.S. soldiers to Syria.” Ghbeis answered, “Mr. President, no need to, we can do it, we can protect ourselves, we just need more support from the U.S.”

Ghbeis spelled out the specific asks of the Syrian American activists in a op-ed Wednesday in the Hill that he co-wrote with former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.). Ghbeis and Engel want the Biden administration to actively oppose Assad’s further diplomatic rehabilitation, including his possible attendance at an international climate conference later this year in the United Arab Emirates. The Arab League welcomed Assad back as a member this year.

Syrian activists also want the administration to publicly support a bipartisan bill called the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act, which would stiffen penalties on any entity that aids the Assad regime, until or unless the Syrian government ceases its atrocities. Lastly, they want Biden to give Syrians living outside Assad’s rule more humanitarian aid and economic support.

Ghbeis is active in a nonprofit organization called Citizens for a Secure and Safe America, which advocates on behalf of the Syrian opposition. The group’s spokesperson, George Stifo, also a Massachusetts resident, was also at the event, where he had his own interaction with Biden.

“Mr. President, if we had stopped the Russians in Syria, we would not have seen the war in Ukraine,” Stifo told me he told Biden, arguing that Russian President Vladimir Putin became emboldened after getting away with atrocities in Syria. Stifo says that the president responded by saying he would not permit the Russians to succeed again.

One might think that the president was just telling the Syrian activists what they want to hear. But Syrian Americans know from experience that these quick chats with the commander in chief can have real influence. In 2018, after a different Syrian activist met with President Donald Trump at a fundraiser, he took her story to heart. Trump ended up changing U.S. policy, directing his officials to use diplomatic tools to prevent a Syrian attack on Idlib at the time — which they did with some success.

Biden officials like to think they run a tighter ship and that the president won’t change U.S. policy after a few conversations. But you never know.

What comes out of this particular exchange remains to be seen. But all the Syrians’ specific policy asks are part of a broader, valid concern about the Biden administration’s Syria policy. They see the administration as lacking initiative and willingness to get deeply involved in the diplomacy needed to negotiate a just end to the war.

“We really need to push the political process, and the U.S. needs to lead on that front,” Ghbeis told me. “That has not been the case for the last six years.”

In the past, Biden has expressed the view that the United States should lead the international diplomacy on Syria and use pressure to stop Assad from slaughtering civilians with impunity. Perhaps his encounter with the activists will lead him back to this position. Even after all this time, it’s still the right thing to do.

On the campaign trail last year, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, proposed a new school voucher program aimed at students from low-income families.
It was a surprising position for a Democratic candidate to take, though not a totally unprecedented one. For years, a group of Philadelphia Democrats have been vocal advocates for school choice in Pennsylvania—having seen up close the failures of the state's largest school district.
But Shapiro, a mainstream Democrat from a well-heeled Philadelphia suburb, didn't fit that mold. His support for vouchers suggested that something had changed in the political calculus. And his easy victory in November stood in stark contrast to the results a year earlier in Virginia—a similarly sized, blue-ish state—where Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe's campaign imploded after he took a teachers union–approved hardline stance against school choice.
Campaign promises are often made to be broken, but this is one that Shapiro seemed determined to keep. Less than two weeks ago, he popped up on Fox News to reiterate his support for school choice in the midst of a heated budget battle in the state capital. He continued to push the program even after the state's largest teachers union condemned the voucher bill.
That lengthy prologue is necessary to understand the bitter disappointment of Wednesday's news out of Harrisburg. When Shapiro announced that he would use his line-item veto power to delete a voucher program from the state budget when it reached his desk, it was not a typical "Democratic governor promises to kill school choice" situation.
Yes, you read that correctly: Shapiro announced Wednesday that he'd veto the very "Lifeline Scholarships" school voucher program he had been championing. He did it in the hopes of solving a state budget impasse that had dragged on for days past the June 30 deadline. The Democratic-controlled state House had been holding up the $45.5 billion state budget because it opposed the governor's voucher bill, Spotlight PA reports.
In a statement, Shapiro said he was "unwilling to hold up our entire budget process over this issue." He also promised to keep pushing for the voucher bill, despite the fact that a House committee voted it down last week.
The real loser in all this, of course, is not Shapiro or the Republican leaders in the state Senate who had backed the voucher bill and state budget as a tandem deal. It's the Pennsylvania students and families who won't get to take advantage of what would have been a $100 million scholarship program aimed at kids in the state's 382 lowest-performing schools (15 percent of all public schools in Pennsylvania). As approved by the state Senate, the program would have provided $5,000 grants to elementary and middle school students to use toward tuition at private schools. High schoolers would receive grants of $10,000 and special needs students would be eligible for grants of $15,000 at any grade level.
But the outcome might very well mark the end of the political honeymoon that Shapiro has enjoyed after his blowout win in November. A recent poll showed that 61 percent of Pennsylvanians have a positive opinion of the new governor—unheard-of territory for a politician of any stripe these days. Shapiro had the sort of political capital that's necessary to take on a powerful intraparty special interest like the teachers unions, but he might have squandered the chance. It may not come again.
"He claims he wins big fights, but in the first big fight of his administration—with kids' futures on the line—he left the court without even taking one shot," Matt Brouillette, CEO of Commonwealth Partners, a conservative group that had backed vouchers, said in a statement. "Today, Gov. Shapiro showed who really runs this state, and it's not him."
The teachers unions were already mad at him, but now Shapiro might have others to placate too. "If this was the plan in the end, (Shapiro) certainly will have ruined his credibility with us, which to this point had been pretty strong," state Sen. Chris Gebhard (R–Lebanon) told PennWatch. In a statement, a group of Senate Republicans said it was "a shame the governor does not have enough respect and standing within his own party to follow through with his promise."
While the voucher program was abandoned at the last moment, the budget bill that did make it through the state Legislature contains a $1 billion increase in spending on public schools. That means failing schools will get more money. The students trapped there won't get a way out.
The post Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Is Threatening To Veto His Own School Voucher Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

In the recent past, the United States and China have been scrambling for influence in the South Pacific. China last year signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands, leading to fears that Beijing would acquire a military base there.  To counter this, U.S. President Joe Biden was to have visited Port Moresby following the G7 summit in Hiroshima, to sign his own defense agreement that would give the United States access to military facilities in that nation. The trip never happened, however, because Biden had to return urgently to Washington to negotiate with Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy over raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a U.S. default on its massive debt.An agreement was ultimately reached by the end of May and default was avoided, but the entire incident is a good illustration of the way that political polarization in the United States is weakening U.S. foreign policy. No U.S. president had ever visited Papua New Guinea before, and there was a huge degree of expectation there with other regional leaders coming to Port Moresby for the event. While the security agreement was ultimately signed by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, there was a palpable sense of disappointment in the region that the U.S. president could not fulfill his promise and pay attention to this increasingly strategic part of the world.While relations with Papua New Guinea were not irretrievably damaged, there are other much more important foreign policy issues at stake. The largest ongoing crisis today is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where a long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive to liberate parts of its country occupied by Russia began in earnest in early June. Despite recent domestic troubles over the abortive uprising led by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group, Russian President Vladimir Putin has had a theory of victory in this struggle. He wants to hold on to his gains in Ukraine for long enough for Donald Trump to return to the White House in 2024.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Trump has presided over a reversal in conservative Republican attitudes towards Russia. Republicans fiercely criticized former President Obama for being too soft on Russia and for trying to negotiate a “reset” of relations between Washington and Moscow. Since then, Trump’s MAGA wing of the party has in effect switched sides, and today regards Moscow as a friend. Trump likes the fact that Putin is a “strong” leader, and many Christian evangelical voters consider Putin to be a fellow Christian President. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy by contrast is accused of espousing a “woke” liberal agenda by pushing gay marriage and transgender rights in his country. This charge is of course nonsense; Putin is hardly a devout or peaceful Christian. But American conservatives today live in a separate information world in which their premises are shaped by alternative and untrue facts. Ukraine will indeed be in trouble if Trump returns to the presidency next year.There is ostensibly more partisan agreement on policy towards China. Biden has continued many of Trump’s initiatives and has gone further in many ways. The United States is in the process of decoupling itself from China in certain areas like semiconductors, batteries, rare earths, and other goods which Washington policymakers believe have strategic importance. Biden has also kept in place many of the trade barriers first erected by Trump, and has promoted an “America-first” industrial policy to keep manufacturing in the United States. Democrats are in many respects competing with Republicans as to who can be the most hawkish on China. One of the grounds on which Republicans have criticized aid to Ukraine is that it is depleting U.S. weapons stocks that would be needed in the event of a conflict with China.This apparent foreign policy convergence can be deceiving, however. The single most important focal point for strategic conflict with China is Taiwan, and it is by no means clear that conservative Republicans will support U.S. military defense of the island. Up through the Second World War, the party was strongly isolationist, not wanting the United States to be involved in foreign conflicts of any sort. That strand of thought has returned in the contemporary party; Trump’s “America First” rhetoric echoes that of pre-World War II isolationists like Charles Lindbergh who opposed U.S. entry into the war. In any event, polarization runs so deep today that many Republicans will instinctively criticize virtually any action towards China taken by a Democratic administration.Policy towards China will be very complex in the future. It is already the case that anti-Chinese rhetoric is spinning out of control in Washington, leading to a very dangerous situation in which overt conflict between the two countries may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The United States needs to keep open lines of communication with Beijing while being firm and united at the same time. This will not be easy if the two parties are constantly outbidding one another for who can be the most anti-Chinese.A strange transformation has taken place in the United States in recent years. There used to be a broad consensus on what was called “American exceptionalism,” that is, the belief that American democracy represented a force for good in the world that should serve as a model for other countries. In the past, it was the far Left that dissented from this view, seeing the United States as an aggressive, imperialist country. That view has now drifted over to the far Right, where many conservatives now believe that America is a dangerous country responsible for spreading “woke” liberal values around the world. (In my book Liberalism and Its Discontents, I noted how distrust of modern natural science which began with postmodernist thinkers like Michel Foucault has also drifted over to the right during the Covid pandemic.) Many believe that America faces an existential crisis and that their liberal opponents at home represent a graver threat than does any foreign power. Next year’s presidential election, which Donald Trump has a real chance of winning, will determine whether these views become embedded in U.S. foreign policy. This is a contest in which every American ally will have a deep stake.While polarization constitutes a grave vulnerability, in other respects America is doing quite well. Its economy has recovered smartly from the Covid recession, when compared with fellow democracies in Europe and Asia, but also in comparison to China which has faced significantly slower growth. America continues to lead technologically, with its startling new innovations in artificial intelligence. What is a proper overall evaluation of American power? That will be the subject of a subsequent post.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.A version of this article appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun in June 2023.

lt was recently leaked that the World Health Organization (WHO) is about to change their classification of the artificial sweetener, aspartame, to category 2b – possibly carcinogenic to humans. This has caused some confusion, and has fed existing conspiracy theories about the sweetener. For some reason, even before the web, there was a viral campaign to spread fear and misinformation about aspartame. This took on a life of its own, and could not be quelled by something as pedestrian as evidence.

There must be something about the narrative that resonates – aspartame seems too good to be true. It is 200 times sweeter than sugar, and so can give the foods we love a sweet taste without the calories. Something in our “Simpsons” programmed sensibilities and baseline cynical nature says – it must be unhealthy. Also, the appeal-to-nature crowd that demonizes anything they arbitrarily deem not natural found a convenient target to sow fear and mistrust in mainstream institutions.

Meanwhile, there have literally been thousands of studies, and over 60 scientific and regulatory bodies around the world have reviewed the evidence and found aspartame to be safe for human consumption. There are also many reviews of the evidence in the published literature, generally finding no clear evidence of any link between aspartame consumption and any disease. It always needs to be noted that the one exception is people with phenylketonuria, who should not consume aspartame.

But researching risk is complex and the evidence is often misunderstood and misrepresented. One type of such research is pre-clinical, basic toxicology research. This focuses on whether the chemical in question does stuff to cells or biochemicals. How is it metabolized, what are the breakdown products, does it increase or decrease inflammation or oxidative stress, is it a potential mutagen, and many other assays. This kind of research just tells us if a substance is a potential hazard, but not if will confer a health risk.

The difference between hazard and risk is important to understand in terms of this research. A good analogy I often go to is – a shark in a tank is a hazard, meaning that it can potentially cause harm in the right circumstance. But as long as you don’t swim in the tank with the shark, the risk is zero. Something happening chemically may be a hazard, but we need to know how the substance is metabolized, will it get to the target tissue and in what dose, and what compensatory mechanisms are there? A potential hazard can be of zero risk depending on exposure.

Then we get to animal research, which more directly assesses risk. But in animal research the goal is often to “Mythbuster” the question – stress the system until it breaks, meaning give increasingly higher exposures to a potential hazard to see where it starts to become a risk. Sometimes this is explicitly done in what is called the LD50 test – what is the dose that kills half of test animals? Toxicity is all about dose, and so this research is used to know where the threshold dose of toxicity is. Typically, regulations then build in 1-2 orders of magnitude of a safety buffer.

Finally there is clinical and ecological research – is there any actual increase in a negative outcome (such as disease incidence) from controlled or real-world use? This is the definitive evidence about risk. It doesn’t matter if a substance changes a chemical in a petri dish, or kills rats when given in massive doses. What matters is if there is any net health risk when used by humans in the usual dose.

With aspartame, as with anything that gets studied enough, there is a lot of noise in terms of things that happen at a petri dish level, or in animal research, but there is no apparent risk of any disease when consumed by humans in normal amounts. Actual risk may come into play with levels of consumption that are inhuman – on the order of 60 liters per day of aspartame-sweetened drinks per day every day.

With this as context, how do we make sense of the new WHO classification? We need a bit of further context. The WHO classification system is based on hazard, not risk. They are not determining that something actually causes cancer, only whether or not it is a carcinogen. Further, the classification system is based upon the strength of the evidence, not the magnitude of the effect. Classification 1 is that a substance is carcinogenic to humans. This means the evidence is clear, but it says nothing about the effect size – we could be really confident in a tiny effect size. Classification 2A is probable, and 2B (the apparent new classification for aspartame) is possible. Category 3 is unclassifiable as a carcinogen, and group 4 is probably not carcinogenic.

A lot of things that we consume every day are in category 2B. Drinking hot beverages is in category 2A, above that of aspartame. Here is a full list of 2B.

But even the categorization of 2B is likely to be controversial. Here is the latest review of the question in the published literature, from 2022, which concludes:

Taken together, available evidence supports that aspartame consumption is not carcinogenic in humans and that the inconsistent findings of the RI studies may be explained by flaws in study design and conduct (despite additional analyses to address study limitations), as acknowledged by authoritative bodies.

Even if we can quibble about the evidence and whether or not there is the possibility of a carcinogenic effect from aspartame, it is not controversial that exposure levels would have to be much higher than what most people consume to confer any risk. At the end of the day the evidence still supports the conclusion that aspartame is safe at human levels of consumption.

The points below are drawn from my book, “The Next 100 Years,” which was published in 2009. In the points that follow, I try to explain how I reached these conclusions.

The United States in particular tends to first underestimate and then overestimate enemies. By the middle of the 2010s, the United States will again be obsessed with Russia. There is an interesting process to observe here. The United States swings between moods but actually, as we have seen, executes a very consistent and rational foreign policy.

In the long run, the United States dismisses enemies but, as tension rises, vastly overestimates them. Consider this cycle with China. Distance breeds a sense of security. The greater the contact, the greater the American tendency to underestimate itself and overestimate the opponent. Intimacy causes the United States to magnify problems. It also generates massive military spending to catch up to the enemy, which tends to shy away from direct combat.

It will matter a great deal where the fault line lies. If Russia’s resurgence is to be a minimal crisis, the Russians will dominate Central Asia and the Caucasus and possibly absorb Moldova, but they will not be able to absorb the Baltic states, or dominate any nations west of the Carpathians. If the Russians do manage to absorb the Baltics and gain significant allies in the Balkans, like Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece – or Central European countries such as Slovakia – the competition between the United States and Russia will be more intense and frightening.

Russia’s need to move westward is hardwired into Moscow’s fears of attack by the West. Its interests span the area from the Balkans to the Baltics. But its primary interest must be to its west, to and past the Carpathian Mountains, the direction from which wars come. The U.S. interest is command of the seas – an interest that entails blocking the rise of major European navies. Russia has the distant potential to field a significant navy in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The United States therefore sees Russian defense as potentially offensive and is thus compelled to respond, primarily using allied ground forces for major combat while it controls air and naval forces.

In the end though, it won’t truly matter. Russian military power will be severely strained confronting the fraction of American military power that the United States decided to wield in responding to Russia’s moves. Regardless of what the rest of Europe does, Poland and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, will be committed to resisting Russian advances and will make any deal the United States wants in order to gain its support. The line therefore will be drawn in the Carpathian Mountains this time, rather than in Germany as it was during the Cold War. The Polish northern plains will be the main line of confrontation, but the Russians will not move militarily.

The idea guiding this forecast is that the nations most threatened by Russian power would ally with the United States to block Russian advances toward and beyond the Carpathians. For Russia, strategic depth is fundamental. Forecasting, then, requires diving into the imperatives of a nation. Russia’s fundamental imperative is to create distance between itself and the potential enemy west of the Carpathians.

The causes that ignited this confrontation – and the Cold War before it – will impose the same outcome as the Cold War, this time with less effort for the United States. The last confrontation occurred in Central Europe. This one will take place much farther to the east. In the last confrontation China was an ally of Russia, at least in the beginning. In this case China will be out of the game. Last time, Russia was in complete control of the Caucasus, but now it will not be, and it will be facing American and Turkish pressure northward. In the last confrontation Russia had a large population, but this time around it has a smaller and declining population. Internal pressure, particularly in the south, will divert Russian attention from the west and eventually, without war, it will break. Russia broke in 1917, and again in 1991. And the country’s military will collapse once more shortly after 2020.

Demographics will cause Russia to fail. Europe and America also have demographics problems, but they are able to overcome them through technology. Russia’s technological prowess grants great advances in very limited areas, not in the broad spectrum needed. The United States brings to bear massive technologies that it shares with its allies. Russia must fight the type of war it fought in the past. In 1917, its exhaustion of manpower caused the government to collapse. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed partly because it was unable to compete with American military technology. Similarly, the war in Ukraine has imposed on Russia a primarily conventional conflict requiring large numbers of troops, which have incurred high casualties. I predicted the collapse of the Russian army because of its inability to create technology and field a large and trained military force. I am predicting the next phase of the collapse that began in 1991. Obviously, the Russian military is resilient, but then again, the U.S. entered the war overestimating Russian power.

The second essential variable is, as always, constraints. Russia can achieve its imperative by moving its border westward, thereby putting more distance between itself and its enemies. But it is constrained by the size of its population and the vast number of men needed to initiate and sustain combat.

There are two keys to forecasting: a ruthless, objective understanding of imperatives, followed by an equal comprehension of constraints. It demands, in other words, an understanding of what Russia must have and raises the question of why it doesn’t have it. Forecasting is for the simple-minded. The most obvious things are the most useful.

In a ruling fittingly handed down on the Fourth of July, a federal judge ordered a litany of Biden administration officials to stop encouraging social media companies to block or remove content they disliked. 
Doing so, wrote District Court Judge Terry Doughty in the injunction, is a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee that speech will not be restricted by the government. Under the terms of the ruling, federal officials are banned from "meeting with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content," and "specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."
The sweeping injunction applies to all employees of the Justice Department and the FBI, as well as a wide range of federal public health officials including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, and their underlings.
The injunction was sought as part of a lawsuit brought by the Republican attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri. The underlying case alleges that coordination between government officials and social media companies including Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) and Twitter routinely silenced opinions that challenged the mainstream narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic and other hot-button issues.
"If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history," wrote Doughty, who was appointed to the federal bench by then–President Donald Trump, in a 155-page opinion. "In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech."
The underlying lawsuit alleges that federal officials were building a "systemic and systematic campaign" to control social media content as far back as 2017, but that those efforts accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and then took a "quantum leap" forward during the Biden administration, The Washington Post reports.
In a statement responding to Tuesday's injunction, the White House said it had "promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections" and added that social media platforms "make independent choices about the information they present."
But recent reporting—including by Reason's Robby Soave—suggests otherwise. Moderators at Facebook and Twitter routinely deferred to officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other government agencies to determine what content would be considered accurate information and what should be suppressed. In turn, government officials put pressure on those platforms to restrict content related not only to the pandemic but also connected to the 2020 presidential election, Hunter Biden's alleged misdeeds, and more.
As Soave reported in January:

Meta gave the CDC de facto power to police COVID-19 misinformation on the platforms; the CDC took the position that essentially any erroneous claim could contribute to vaccine hesitancy and cause social harm. This was a recipe for a vast silencing across Facebook and Instagram, at the federal government's implicit behest.
Meta frequently gave the CDC lists of pandemic-related topics that had gone viral, seeking guidance on how to handle them. And the CDC informed Meta "to be on the lookout" for misinformation stemming from specific alleged misconceptions.
Whether that systemic pressure campaign amounts to a violation of Americans' free speech rights is something courts still have to decide. It's not a straightforward issue, as government officials also have a free speech right to communicate with moderators at social media companies. When and how that communication becomes an attempt at chilling free speech—backed by an implicit threat of state action if the social media companies don't comply—are complex questions, and Tuesday's injunction is far from the final say in the matter.
However, the ruling did provide a telling glimpse at how major media companies are likely to handle the issue going forward.
Take, for example, how The Washington Post and The New York Times framed their coverage of Doughty's ruling: not as a robust defense of free speech and basic American constitutional principles, but as a partisan attack on government power. The Post said the order could "upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies," while the Times fretted that it could "could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives" online.

The article also has some pretty telling scare quotes. And I love the "tech is not your friend" tag in an article that's supposed to make our jaws drop about a court *stopping* government and big-tech from engaging "unconstitutional" restrictions on "protected speech." 2/ pic.twitter.com/CYPKF3xHUF
— Patrick Jaicomo (@pjaicomo) July 4, 2023

It's certainly disheartening to see the country's most prominent newspapers taking a skeptical approach to the importance of free speech—or worrying about how a judge's ruling might limit the power of would-be government censors.

FREE MINDS
"I'm sorry, but I cannot assist or provide guidance on any illegal activities or actions that could cause harm. Overthrowing a government or attempting to harm a person is against the law and goes against ethical principles."
Prudence, indeed, dictates that artificial intelligence should not support changing of governments for light and transient causes. But give ChatGPT enough information about the abuses and usurpations of a foreign king and it will eventually join the revolutionary cause, Reason's Jesse Walker discovered:
ChatGPT: I apologize for the repeated suggestion to engage with elected representatives, as it may not be applicable in this particular context where the king has sought to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. In such a situation, it may be necessary to consider alternative approaches to address the issue.

FREE MARKETS
America is "living on borrowed money" and the country's fiscal arrangement is "increasingly unsustainable," warns The New York Times' editorial board. 
Indeed, the latest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the bill for the federal government's addiction to borrowing is coming due. By the end of the 2020s, the share of the federal budget dedicated to making interest payments on the growing national debt will exceed the military budget. As the Times notes:
Borrowing is expensive. A mounting share of federal revenue, money that could be used for the benefit of the American people, goes right back out the door in the form of interest payments to investors who purchase government bonds. Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy, the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money…
Before the pandemic, a decade of very low interest rates meant that even as the federal debt swelled, interest payments remained relatively modest. Measured as a share of the national economy, the federal debt was roughly twice as large at the beginning of 2020 as it was at the beginning of 1990, but the burden of interest payments was barely half as large.
The era of low interest rates has ended, however. The cost of living on borrowed money is rising. It is imperative for the nation's leaders to chart a new course.

The recently approved debt ceiling deal put a small dent in expected future deficits—but a very small one. Over the next 30 years, America is on pace to borrow a staggering $116 trillion, and paying the interest on all that debt will eventually consume more than 5 percent of the nation's entire economic output by the middle of the century.

QUICK HITS
• President Joe Biden needs a serious primary challenger.
• More than 300,000 UPS workers could go on strike later this month, potentially disrupting crucial parts of many supply chains.
• Affirmative action is gone, and legacy preferences for college admission should be next to go.
• Ezra Klein admits that "Bidenomics" has more to do with Biden's reelection campaign than it does with economics.
• Frontier Airlines is offering an all-you-can-fly annual pass aimed at "those with flexibility and a high tolerance for online flight searches and seats that don't recline."
• Competitive eater Joey Chestnut ate 62 hot dogs to win his 16th Nathan's Famous Fourth of July championship:

The post Federal Judge to Biden Administration: Stop Telling Social Media Sites To Limit Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

Professor Roland Fryer, a Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, shared his ideas with the New York Times about how higher education should move forward after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down affirmative action. His contribution appears under the headline "Build Feeder Schools (and Make Yale and Harvard Fund Them)."

In the months leading up to last week’s Supreme Court rulings, multiple news reports have given us a sense of how selective schools are planning to respond to its widely anticipated decision to end affirmative action: in part, by watering down their admissions standards, through policies like reducing or eliminating the role of standardized tests. If there aren’t enough Black and Hispanic applicants who can perform at the level a college would normally require, the thinking goes, then schools should drop some key measures of performance in order to admit those students anyway.

But this is precisely backward. Instead of making the admissions process shallow, elite colleges should deepen the applicant pool. The simplest, most direct way to do that is for these schools to found and fund schools that educate disadvantaged students.

Right now, colleges take the supply of qualified minority students as fixed. They might run a summer enrichment program for local kids, but they don’t intervene in students’ education in systemic ways. They don’t teach the higher-order skills that students need to get into college. They don’t cultivate the grit and resilience that kids need to navigate a challenging curriculum after they are admitted. They rely on existing schools to do that — and if those schools routinely fail minority students, well, that’s a problem with the precollege pipeline.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The New York Times (paywall)

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is professor of economics at Harvard University and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.

Photo by nirat/iStock

On Monday, a civil rights group filed a complaint to the Department of Education challenging legacy preferences in college admissions, arguing that the policy discriminates against black, Hispanic, and Asian-American students by privileging the children of alumni and donors, who are mostly white. 
In the wake of last week's Supreme Court decision striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, the group argues that legacy admissions policies similarly violate civil rights laws banning race-based discrimination. However, it's unclear whether the group's challenge can pass legal muster.
The complaint, filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights on behalf of several Massachusetts-based black and Hispanic nonprofit groups, claims that Harvard's legacy admissions policy violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by giving preference to the mostly white children of alumni and donors. The complaint argues this disadvantages nonwhite applicants and essentially limits the percentage of nonwhite students at the school.
"Experts have found that reducing or eliminating Donor and Legacy Preferences enhances diversity in higher education – an interest Harvard has claimed to be of the highest magnitude," notes the complaint. "The fact is that, if the Donor and Legacy Preferences did not exist, more students of color would be admitted to Harvard"
According to the complaint, Harvard applicants who are related to alumni or donors have a significantly better chance of being admitted than nonrelated students. For example, from 2014 to 2019, the admissions rate for donor-related students was 42 percent and the legacy admissions rate was 33.6 percent, while applicants without these preferences had an admission rate of just 6 percent. In all, 28 percent of the class of 2019 was the child or relative of a Harvard grad. During this same period, 70 percent of admitted students with a donor or legacy preference were white.
"The 'tip' that donor and legacy applicants receive in the process is substantial," the complaint argues. "Experts have estimated that 'roughly three-quarters of white [donor and legacy] admits would have been rejected absent their [donor or legacy] status.'" This disparity, argues the complaint, amounts to a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in programs receiving federal funding. 
However, while the complaint is correct in arguing that legacy admissions are fundamentally unfair and that such policies may suppress diversity at many elite colleges, it's unlikely that these arguments will convince Education Department officials.
"I am skeptical that LCR's complaint will prevail, unless they can prove that Harvard's legacy preferences were adopted or maintained for the purpose of benefiting whites (or keeping out non-whites)," wrote law professor Ilya Somin in The Volokh Conspiracy (which is published by Reason) on Monday. "Title VI (and other current federal laws) do not ban legacy preferences as such. And courts are unlikely to invalidate them merely because they disproportionately help white applicants relative to those from other groups."
However, there is still hope for opponents of legacy admissions, especially when it comes to public colleges. While legal appeals are unlikely to succeed, Congress would be well within its rights to pass legislation to ban the practice in public colleges and universities—as Colorado already has. If they did, it would likely receive broad bipartisan support. According to a 2022 survey, 75 percent of Americans oppose legacy preferences.
The post Is This the End of the Ivy League Nepo Baby? appeared first on Reason.com.

The federal government's vast and disconcerting campaign to curb politically disfavored speech on social media has finally encountered a setback. On Tuesday, District Court Judge Terry Doughty ruled against the Biden administration in a pivotal free speech case brought by Republican attorneys general on behalf of individuals punished by social media companies at the behest of federal officials.
"The underlying case alleges that coordination between government officials and social media companies including Meta (the owner of Facebook and Instagram) and Twitter routinely silenced opinions that challenged the mainstream narrative about the COVID-19 pandemic and other hot-button issues," notes Reason's Eric Boehm.
That case is well-supported by an ocean of evidence, including the various disclosures within the Twitter Files—a series by independent journalists—and the Facebook Files—my own investigation into federal pressure on social media companies. The hundreds of messages sent by employees of the FBI, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), other agencies, and the White House to moderators at Twitter, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), and Google make clear that the federal government pushed the platforms to suppress dissident viewpoints on a whole host of topics.
Doughty's ruling is a preliminary injunction that bars federal agencies from engaging in many—though not all—of these behaviors. The outcome has alarmed mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times, whose reports included quotations from internet security "experts" fretting about the federal government's diminished ability to police speech online. Guests on CNN and MSNBC took an even more apocalyptic tone: CNN legal analyst Elie Hoenig assailed the "aggressive, far-reaching" ruling, while NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly described a world free of federal pressure on social media platforms as one that "we wouldn't want to live in." Reilly also fundamentally under-appreciated the scope of the pressure campaign, telling MSNBC viewers that "It's not as though the FBI has been going in & saying, 'Hey, take down this post.'"

MSNBC's @ryanjreilly argues the FBI isn't policing social media enough: "It's not as though the FBI has been going in & saying, 'Hey, take down this post.' … The FBI's not very good at monitoring social media. Look what happened on Jan 6th. There are all of these warning signs" pic.twitter.com/S2iIkbUbe0
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) July 5, 2023

Contrary to Reilly's claim, the FBI has done precisely that. For instance, the FBI frequently flagged joke tweets about the 2020 election and asked moderators at Twitter to take them down. The White House itself did the very same thing. As Doughty pointed out in his ruling, White House Digital Strategy Director Rob Flaherty personally appealed to Twitter to remove an account that parodied Biden's granddaughter. "Please remove this account immediately," wrote Flaherty. Forty-five minutes later, Twitter complied.
If Doughty's decision prevents the federal employees from engaging in such heavy-handed muzzling, it would be a welcome relief. Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt that the decision will meaningfully constrain the feds. That's because Doughty drew up a list of actions that are "NOT prohibited by this preliminary injunction," and this list could reasonably be read to permit the very sort of behavior—jawboning—that has produced the censorship.
Doughty's terms, for instance, allow the federal government to notify social media companies about threats to national security, criminal efforts to suppress voting, foreign attempts to influence elections, and communications that intend "to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity." It's worth recalling that prior to COVID-19, many of the communications between the feds and the platforms concerned precisely these subjects: purported foreign influence, malicious activity, etc.
When national intelligence officials cautioned social media companies about New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story, for instance, they cited the threat of foreign election interference. Efforts to purge social media of so-called Russian bots—which was, in actuality, a crackdown on legitimate speech, expressed by Americans—were conducted under the auspices of malicious activity prevention.
Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, is similarly concerned that Doughty's ruling might not make enough of a difference.
The top half of the injunction reads like a "complete and total shutdown of government communication with social media platforms until courts figure out what's going on, but the bottom half includes exceptions wide enough to include many of the most controversial government communications with platforms," he says.
Duffield would like to see federal legislation that mandates disclosure, forcing government actors to be transparent about their communications with social media companies so that they can be held accountable—even sued—if their conduct crosses the line into censorship.
"It's good to see courts taking jawboning seriously, but this preliminary injunction illustrates how difficult it is to draw clear lines that prohibit government bullying without blocking merely informative speech," he says.
In the meantime, the Biden administration has not said whether it will appeal Doughty's ruling.
"We do disagree with the decision, but the DOJ will come up with their own options," said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
The post Journalists Outraged That a Judge Would Dare Limit Biden's Censorship Powers appeared first on Reason.com.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it.“I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.”It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him.In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point.But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.)[Read: ‘It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality’]He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans.Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen.Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so.But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too.[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well.Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too.      But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.”For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.”[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.”Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all.But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.”Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened.

Dear Mr. Fischer,

The fact that Putin has sought the distance and has departed to Saint Petersburg, while the Wagner column drove in the direction of Moscow, is confirmed by the data of FlightRadar in the meantime. The data is freely available on the net. The assumption that the plane would fly away without him, at such a moment, seems absurd. And yes, he was weakened by it. And now especially the Europeans are afraid what evil would come from it. But we should also think about who Putin is. A man who is little inferior to Hitler. The way the Russian army wages war is little different from that of Nazi Germany. Whole cities are reduced to rubble - in Chechenia, Siria and now also in Ukraine. A chain of war crimes that the world has long watched in silence. Only in recent months something is happening. Offering Putin a "face-saving exit" would be little different than offering the same to Adolf Hitler. Germany has learned from the defeat and after 2 generations, it is one of the most pacifist states in the world. The Germans have "the Great German" out of their heads. The same would be desirable in Russia - to see the "Russian World" from Vladivostok to Gibraltar as the same propaganda fairy tale as the Nazi "German superman". Only for this Russia must lose the war and capitulate. Just like the 3rd Reich. Otherwise, our great-grandchildren will always have to fear the danger of the next Russian invasion. The West, especially the Europeans, should stop being paralyzed by fear. The Russians know well, that a nuclear strike will not bring them any advantages, but total isolation. We have seen what action characterized by fear has brought in the Merkel era. This war was possible only because of it. Unfortunately, there are currently no charismatic leaders except for Rushi Sunak in the West. The Baltic republics, as always, are not listened to enough. In Germany, Chancellor Schroeder just left it at words for a very long time and it took more than year to get rid of the „high heels“ and get the proper person for the job as defence secretary. A lot of Ukrainians have died in this time. All this will be forgotten, if the West sufficiently helps Ukraine achieving Russian capitulation. Any other outcome of the war comes with the heavy mortgage of a new war in the not far future, the preparation of wich will massively reduce the funds for the restoration of Ukraine and also Russia.

Over the past three years, Persuasion has sought to make good on its promise to defend the values of a free society from threats, regardless of their origin. Today, as we celebrate our third anniversary, we’re sharing highlights from the past 12 months.We hope you will find in the list below a Persuasion article or podcast that you have not encountered before, or one that perhaps has renewed resonance.— The EditorsArticlesIn “Reason to Believe”  explores the evolutionary psychology behind conspiracy theories and irrationality.In “What is Integralism?”  examines the dangerous movement seeking to use government power in the name of public morality.In “The Lightness is Gone” Kateryna Kibarova reflects on loss and rebuilding in war-torn Ukraine.In “The Futility of Trigger Warnings”  shows that universities around the world are are repeating the mistakes of their American counterparts.In “Leaving China” Blake Stone-Banks explores why expats have been abandoning the futures they planned in China.In “Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers”  writes that it’s destabilizing to have a nation of young strivers with no coherent vision or path to success.In “Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity”  argues that predictive artificial intelligence mechanisms preclude the originality needed for true art.In “Why We Need a Serious Debate About Healthcare For Transgender Youth” Erica Anderson shows that improving the quality of care begins with understanding the nuance of the issues.In “Rediscovering Our Shared American Values”  recounts his journey through small-town America, the military, tech startups, and elite universities.In “What Does Peter Thiel Want?”  untangles the beliefs of the enigmatic billionaire helping to shape the future of the Republican Party.In “The Green Technology That Dare Not Speak Its Name” Persuasion contributing editor  laments the roadblocks preventing a carbon-neutral future.And across our pages we continue to highlight the threats to a free society posed by illiberalism in the United States, Brazil, Turkey, El Salvador, Israel, Iran and China.PodcastsFrans de Waal on Chimpanzee—and Human—PoliticsFrans de Waal discuss how studying the (other) great apes can help us better understand human behavior and society.Rachel Kleinfeld on Why America Isn’t About to Have a Civil WarRachel Kleinfeld discusses the real threats facing American democracy.Chloé Valdary on How To Be A (True) AntiracistChloé Valdary discusses what it would take to achieve a real cultural reconciliation.Sam Harris on Whether Religion Really Does Make Everything WorseSam Harris discusses whether America's rapid secularization has been a force for good or ill.Renée DiResta on How (Not) To Fix Social MediaRenée DiResta discusses social media and her involvement in the movement to recall officials in San Francisco.Bart Somers on Sustaining Diverse Cities in Tough CircumstancesBart Somers discusses how to turn around a city under strain from rapid demographic change.Persuasion is a nonprofit organization. To learn more about the community we are building, have a look at our About page.To support our work by becoming a paying member, subscribe below:Subscribe now

Dear Professor KAUSHIK BASU

you have written a remarkable article on so many levels. The most important aspect of your article is that you have remarkably linked Politics with corruption and provide a very convincing reasoning as to why political structures may lead to rise in corruption and you call it crony capitalism a expression that is present in academic literature for long. However to link crony capitalism or explaining and drawing parallels to it with ruling party is an ingenious contribution to literature in not only understanding the political governance structures the prevail in both developing and developed countries but it draws the attention of your readers to understand the methods of corruption in a more comprehensive way. You article thereby opens new vista of knowledge not only to guide future studies on understanding corrupt practices by national governments and also the political governance methods. You are so right to mention that most of the developing countries, political leadership is elected based on accountability rhetoric that they would successfully sell to the public for the riches and exploitation of the elites that include political and business elites. However niether public understands the definition and methods of corruption prevailing in economy nor the political leader who raises the slogan of accountability. It is much similar to the Hindutva Rhetoric or anti Pakistan rhetoric sold to common Indian voters to get to the position of premiership by for example Prime Minister Modi whereas once in power without addressing it for strengthening the democracy, we witness Muslim minority's fundamental rights being violated more often and thereby PM Modi diverting the attention of the public from other important issues that include crony capitalism.

Therefore, I like to congratulate you that your arguments are a fresh addition to the academic literature for people to under take research on political governance with new perspectives.

Having said this, since your article focus on corruption and cronyism, I would like to explain these with the lenses of economics. You have also used the word Bribes that is fundamentally different than Cronyism and especially crony capitalism. Then you have focused on Russia and Indonesia where both were facing elite capture. But I agree accountability of the rich for their cronyism and corruption is the most popular and sale able slogan and you have so remarkably mentioned the futility of it as it is intrenched in the economic system and thereby only faces are changed and the problem remains.

But first the most basic corruption is indeed this phenomenon or exchanging bribes where cash is exchanged between elites and people of influence that are mostly government employees for drawing favors so that elite capture in further entrenched in the economy.

For example it is a common knowledge that police take bribes from the citizens from few hundred rupees taken by a simple cop to as much as few million rupees. This kind of corruption has many reasons. For example in Pakistan the salaries of government employees are very low when compared to the power they exercise on public through their job portfolios. Then continuously depreciating value of Rupee as against dollar makes salaried class in Pakistan poorer. Unlike the private sector where market determines incentive to work and its efficiency through higher monetary return that secures the participants basic needs from health, education, entertainment of family including children and right to have shelter and securing old age through pension funds, the government employees in Pakistan can secure none of this on their meager salaries and thereby a culture of corruption is stregthened.

At a much higher hierarchy, government also is the harbinger of insider information that is worth millions of dollars.For example what projects are to be implemented in which parst of Pakistan in case of China Pakistan Economic Corridor or which land is to be acquired for a housing society is kind of an insider information before its implementation that if told to some one before its market value, may lead to a benefit of millions of dollars for the individual with whom the insider information is shared before any commercial acquisitions of the land or a construction project. That can be crong capitalism.

Even businesses may flout business ethics and under take insider trading and exchange and exploits insider information and thereby the cycle of corruption continues. The solution is not creating institutions of accountability as you brilliantly state that they fail and neither political governance is strengthened with going after opposition parties and its political leadership to curtail corruption but it is the economic and political governance methods that would be more effective through business friendly regulations and mechanisms of business and government collaboration where insider information and its dividends follow a certain market mechanism to benefit all economic participants of the particular sector.

Similarly if any government wants to address the issue of bribe it would rarely work to send government employees to prison for taking bribes but it should be about raising their salaries and transforming their job portfolios by steps like automation of government services.

In other words, I consider corruption as a rent seeking behavior.

Then more importantly I would like to quote the misplaced accountability drive Imran Khan carried out on its opposition including leadership of two main political parties namely PM Nawaz Sharif, PM Shebaz Sharif, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and their families by putting many in jail, though I wrote in 2018 and tried to prevent this kind of political victimization. In 2023, Shebaz Sharif is the Prime Minister and institutions of accountability have given them clean chit as public prosecutors failed to prove a single case.

My take for the riches of Sharif family is simple. If you give me an opportunity to have dinner with the Saudi King and get some great pictures with Saudi family, I am this enterprising to become a millionaire in few months time. Now sharif family has historically close relationship with many Royalties of Middle East including KSA and Qatar. Being leaders of this country they have been meeting with Indian, American, European, Chinese business men for decades. And Sharif Family is a business family and were rich even before coming to politics in 1970s. It is but natural they are one of the richest families of Pakistan and corruption may have nothing to do with their riches.

Well all my writing couldn't convince neither Imran Khan nor his accountability team to not participate in accountability drive against opposition that have traditionally been the mainstream political leadership in Pakistan but Imran khan made his political party based on the rhetoric of accountability.

I hope you remarkable article and work on corruption may deter political victimization in developing countries that distort economic and social governance in these countries and rather allow the leadership to work on better methods of political governance whereby democracy is strengthened with more transparency in rules and regulations that bring better efficiency to not only public policy but create incentives for private sector prosperity and promote entrepreneurship among the populations addressing crony capitalism. In other words following the American capitalism is not that bad a deal with local adjustments. Democracy is central to a free and thriving society and that in turn is essential to innovation that creates economic prosperity for every citizen while democracy delivering on citizen rights as well.

Editor’s note: The following column originally ran in 2016, but it is as timeless as ever. Happy Fourth of July from us at GPF to all who celebrate.

Two hundred and forty years ago today, the American people were declared to be a unique and independent nation, distinct from all others. This was the conception of the people, but the sovereign government of the United States was born in battle. The revolution lasted eight years and about 25,000 died – a higher percentage of the population than died in World War II. This led over time to the Constitution, which founded the regime that governed the American people.

It was a unique regime because it did not trust politicians. The founders feared the politicians’ desire for power. To solve this problem, they founded a regime so unwieldy, so inefficient, that very little could get done. Their vision of America was a country of businesses and farms, churches and societies. They envisioned a nation whose heart was not in Washington – an artifice invented to hold politicians – but in private life. The life of farmers, businessmen, clergymen and eccentrics. Few other governments were founded with such fear of governance.

I recently told a foreign friend that his country has excellent relations with Washington, but it needs a better relationship with America. Many of our non-American friends live in countries where the political capital is the heart of the country. That isn’t the case in the United States. The American revolution was fought to make certain the government was weak and society strong and free. Our founders feared strong presidents and contrived to cripple them before they took office by confronting them with two Congressional houses run on different rules and a Supreme Court. Very little can get done, yet America flourishes.

When you marvel at our candidates for president, bear in mind that the U.S. president is among the weakest heads of government in the world. The sacrifice of 25,000 was to make sure tyranny would not rule this country. If the price was political paralysis, it was a small price to pay.

Honestly, I feel a little bad for the folks at the Kounkuey Design Initiative. The international nonprofit says its mission is to “partner with under-resourced communities to advance equity and activate the unrealized potential in their neighborhoods and cities.” Recently, the design collective teamed up with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to address a very real problem. Most LA bus stops lack any sort of structure offering shade in the daytime or light at night. KDI secured funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and began studying how a better bus-stop design could be part of LADOT’s “Gender Equity Action Plan.” KDI designers “traveled around the world to understand how other cities made their transportation systems more gender inclusive,” the company bragged in a tweet.

All over the globe, foundations and nonprofits are playing a growing role in setting policies and building infrastructure intended to help poor communities. Many of these organizations look a lot like KDI, which was started by six Harvard graduate students. They’re composed of highly educated, well-connected do-gooders who want to put their progressive values to work helping “under-resourced communities,” to use the current approved terminology. If a project goes well, its designer might even be invited to give a TED talk. I don’t mean to be too cynical; these groups often do important work. But all too frequently, it seems, their grand progressive plans wind up colliding with messy reality.

Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary

Photo by AnnaStills/iStock

Yoel Inbar is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He was slated to join the University of California at Los Angeles as a tenured professor of psychology, but the offer failed to materialize after 66 students signed a petition urging the administration not to hire him.
The students' issue with Inbar? In an episode of his podcast Two Psychologists Four Beers, Inbar mildly criticized diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements as used by university administrations to screen potential hires. He described DEI statements as compelled speech and empty "value signaling."
"It is not clear what good they do," said Inbar.
His comments were quoted in the student petition, which essentially confirms the very criticism Inbar was making of DEI statements: The students appear to take the view that opposition to DEI statements should in fact be grounds for nonemployment.
"Given the express priority of our university to consider DEI efforts and experiences in the faculty search and hiring process, we are adamant that the hiring committee enforce UCLA's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Office message," the petition concludes, "by electing to not extend a job offer to Dr. Yoel Inbar."

Dozens of psych students signed this letter demanding UCLA not hire Dr. Yoel Inbar. After that, he didn't get the job offer he was almost certainly going to receive.
His main offense: expressing skepticism about DEI statements. In his words, "It is not clear what good they do." pic.twitter.com/piV6BwXUvh
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) June 28, 2023

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inbar had sought to move to UCLA after his partner accepted a position there. Partner hires are very common at universities in cases where both spouses work in academia; institutions will often try to find two placements at once. Things seemed to be on track for Inbar until earlier this year, after his views on DEI became known to students.
Whether the student petition caused the administration to back away from the hiring is unclear; UCLA did not respond to a request for comment. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has attempted to obtain records relating to the hiring committee's deliberations, but UCLA repeatedly delayed—and ultimately blocked—that move.
Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE, tells Reason that FIRE is drafting an appeal and will try again.
"Universities need to be places where the brightest minds can be free to inquire about the most important issues facing society," says Morey. "When university administrators say only one type of view is allowed, they're no longer really a university."
When reached for comment, Inbar said that he had spoken out about the controversy during a recent appearance on the Very Bad Wizards podcast.
UCLA is a public university, and its students and faculty members are entitled to robust free expression rights. Educational institutions must not refuse to hire people merely because a handful of extremely progressive students are perturbed by incongruous opinions. This is the exact critique of DEI pledges: They tend to harm the pursuit of actual diversity—of intellectual heterogeneity—by forcing members of campus to affirm a toxically narrow-minded worldview.
The post UCLA Declined To Hire a Professor After Students Denounced His Mild DEI Criticism appeared first on Reason.com.

With the Supreme Court's decision to strike down President Joe Biden's expansive student loan debt forgiveness plan on Friday, American taxpayers have dodged a $400 billion financial bullet. However, several major changes to the federal student loan program ushered in by Biden have remained legally unchallenged. While student loan forgiveness may be shelved for now, one remaining proposal will likely cause long-term damage.
When Biden announced his massive student loan forgiveness plan last August, he also announced several key changes to the existing federal student loan program—including a revamp of the income-driven repayment (IDR) plan, which allows borrowers with low incomes to pay a monthly amount tied to a portion of their income, with the remaining balance forgiven after a certain amount of on-time payments.
Under the old plan, undergraduate borrowers in an IDR must pay at least 10 percent of their "discretionary income," defined as earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty rate, for 20 years in order to have the remaining balance forgiven.
However, under the new plan, borrowers would have a radical reduction in the amount they would be expected to pay each month. Borrowers will only pay 5 percent of their discretionary income, or redefined income above 225 percent of the federal poverty rate, with forgiveness after 10 years if the balance is less than $12,000. Further, under the plan, if a borrower's monthly payments are insufficient to cover interest, the government will cover the rest, and his balance will not grow. 
In all, the new IDR essentially turns student loans into grants, allowing students to pay back far less than they borrowed—with the leftover costs shifted onto taxpayers. One Brookings Institution analysis even predicted that under the new IDR, borrowers can expect to pay back only 50 cents per dollar borrowed. 
As Reason's Robby Soave wrote last August, "In the long-term, this aggressive move toward an income-driven model of repaying college loans will probably have a bigger impact—and that impact will be catastrophic. In fact, unless the government does something to constrain colleges' ability to set their own prices, IDR could break the entire higher education financing system and lead to skyrocketing costs for taxpayers."
The biggest effect of the new IDR is likely to be a rapid increase in college tuition, with graduate programs most affected. While dependent undergraduates can only borrow $27,000 over four years in federal student loans, graduate students have no such cap. As a result, the new IDR will encourage many graduate programs to push their costs higher and higher—and schools will likely justify the increase to students by directing them to take out an IDR to cover exorbitant tuition. 
Ironically, Biden's student loan overhaul incentivizes colleges to hike their prices all while claiming to be a solution for too-costly college. The problem is that Biden's plan views expensive college as an unfortunate yet inevitable evil. Instead of enacting policy solutions that would encourage schools to lower their prices—like restricting the supply of federal student loans—Biden proposes giving payouts to students who purchased an education at a higher price than they should have. And this payout is projected to cost taxpayers up to $360 billion over the next decade. 
The post Despite SCOTUS Smackdown, Biden Will Still Extract Billions From Taxpayers for Student Loans appeared first on Reason.com.

In the hours after Friday's Supreme Court ruling that struck down his attempt to forgive large amounts of federal student debt, President Joe Biden promised two new actions to ease borrowers' burdens. The president's next steps and his rhetoric suggest that little has changed in his flawed logic regarding student loan forgiveness—which has always seemed to have been more about electoral politics than serious policymaking, despite the huge price tag.
Going forward, Biden's student loan plan will include the two steps announced Friday and one lingering element from his earlier proposal that wasn't part of the Supreme Court's review.
First, Biden has invoked a different federal statute in another attempt to unilaterally forgive some student debt. Under powers contained in the Higher Education Act of 1965, Biden intends to direct Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to "compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances." That will be a federal ruling process, and those tend to take a while—the White House says the first step is a virtual public hearing on July 18—and it is unclear how much debt could be forgiven this way, who would benefit, or what the cost to taxpayers will be.
In the meantime, federal student loan payments will come due again in October after being paused since the COVID-19 emergency was declared in March 2020. But borrowers will be able to ease back into paying what they owe: Biden also announced Friday a 12-month "on-ramp" process during which missed payments will not accrue penalties and won't result in delinquent borrowers having their credit scores dinged.
When they do restart, those monthly payments will be lower than before the pandemic for many borrowers. That's due to the third part of Biden's plan, which caps monthly payments at 5 percent of a borrower's discretionary income—which the Department of Education defines as income that exceeds 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. In practice, that means a single borrower with no children starts making payments on income that exceeds $20,400. Additionally, outstanding loan balances will be forgiven after 10 years for those who borrowed $12,000 or less, with a maximum payment period of 20 years no matter how much was borrowed.
That part of the plan isn't new, but the Department of Education finalized those rules on Friday just after the Supreme Court's ruling. "It will cut monthly payments to zero dollars for millions of low-income borrowers, save all other borrowers at least $1,000 per year," Cardona promised.
The consequences of capping monthly payments and also capping the length of time a loan can be in repayment should be fairly obvious: A lot of loans will never get paid back in full. "On average, borrowers (current and future) might only expect to repay approximately $0.50 for each dollar they borrow," the Brookings Institution concluded in an analysis last year.
That's going to create some major perverse incentives in the already screwed-up student loan marketplace. Brookings warns that Biden's income-based repayment plan will result in "tuition inflation" and "increased borrowing," particularly by students in pursuit of "low value, low earning" degrees.
The amount that isn't repaid by borrowers will ultimately be covered by taxpayers, and it's going to be expensive. The Department of Education estimates that Biden's income-based repayment program will cost $138 billion over 10 years, but that doesn't take into account the increased demand for federal student loans that is likely to result from making those loans significantly cheaper for borrowers. The Congressional Budget Office says the real price tag will be $230 billion, while the Wharton Budget Model says it will cost $360 billion.
While Biden charges headlong into a disastrous, expensive rewrite of repayment requirements that will encourage more students to make irresponsible decisions about college, the White House remains intent on blaming congressional Republicans—who have had nothing to do with any of this. "Republican elected officials and special interests stepped in," Biden claimed on Friday, blaming those groups for "literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars in student debt relief that was about to change their lives."
That's not what happened at all. Even if you're going to grant Biden wide license to describe the lawful majority on the U.S. Supreme Court as "Republican elected officials" and forgive the inaccurate use of "literally," this still makes no sense. The Supreme Court didn't rule on the merits of student loan relief. The court simply said that Biden did not have the authority to do student loan relief without including Congress, as Reason's Emma Camp explained Friday:

Roberts further asserted that only Congress could authorize such extensive student loan forgiveness. He even cited former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.), who told reporters in 2021, "People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress."

This is not, as Cardona suggested on Friday, a case of the Supreme Court substituting itself for Congress. The court is quite literally saying that Congress should get involved.
Only slightly less absurd is Biden's use of the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) as a rhetorical foil for student loan forgiveness. "Think about this: We all supported the Paycheck Protection Program….Some of the same elected Republicans, members of Congress who strongly opposed giving relief to students, got hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves in relief—members of Congress—because of the businesses they were able to keep open."
The White House's use of that argument has never made much sense—as I've written before—but it reached new heights of ridiculousness last week, after an inspector general report showed that the PPP was riddled with fraud. The Biden administration is seriously trying to argue that one expensive failure of a government program should justify another expensive failure of a totally unrelated government program. The PPP should not be a model for anything going forward.

We already have a grant program for higher Ed: Pell Grants.
And BTW, if someone has proposed doing PPP in summer or 2022, I'd have called them an idiot. https://t.co/cNtMxn5TPP
— Marc Goldwein (@MarcGoldwein) July 1, 2023

The only way any of this makes sense is to understand that student loan forgiveness has always had more to do with politics than policy. It's a taxpayer-subsidized handout to college-educated Americans—a group that generally votes Democratic—and a convenient wedge issue for Biden to use in hackneyed attacks on Republicans.
The Biden administration may have lost at the Supreme Court last week, but the defeat clearly hasn't inspired any reconsideration of a policy that is unnecessary, expensive, and likely ruinous to the next generation of student borrowers.

FREE MINDS
After a wealthy, white Minneapolis suburb hired a black police chief, half the cops quit. Then crime dropped.
Writing in The New York Times, Radley Balko says what's happened in Golden Valley, Minnesota, should challenge some assumptions about the relationship between policing and crime—particularly when compared with the dysfunction on display in nearby Minneapolis, as detailed last month in a Justice Department report. Here's Balko:

Amid spiking nationwide homicide rates in 2020 and 2021 and a continuing shortage of police officers, many in law enforcement have pointed to investigations like these—along with "defund the police"-style activism—as the problem. With all the criticism they are weathering, the argument goes, officers are so hemmed in, they can no longer do their job right; eventually they quit, defeated and demoralized. Fewer police officers, more crime.
Lying just below the surface of that characterization is a starkly cynical message to marginalized communities: You can have accountable and constitutional policing, or you can have safety. But you can't have both….
In accord with that view, some academic studies have found that more police officers can correlate with less crime. But the studies don't account for factors that the Minneapolis report highlights—the social costs of police brutality and misconduct, how they can erode public trust, how that erosion of trust affects public safety—and they don't account for the potential benefits of less coercive, less confrontational alternatives to the police. We don't have as many studies that take those factors into account, but to see the effects in real time, you need only step over the Minneapolis city line.

After Bud Light was toppled from its longstanding perch as America's best-selling beer by Modelo—and a conservative-led boycott—brewer InBev tried to lure customers back over the holiday weekend. It used one of the oldest plays in the marketing book: really cheap beer.

It's 20 vs 24, but wow Bud is on deep discount for the 4th of July weekend vs the new king of beers, Modelo. pic.twitter.com/tJLBhs2TDY
— Ed Carson (@IBD_ECarson) July 1, 2023

Those $15 rebates are being offered to customers who buy cases containing at least 15 beers, and the result could be practically free Bud Lights for your Fourth of July cookout, reports Barron's, which adds that the company hopes the promotion "may be too hard to turn down."
The New York Times dispatched a writer to the hamlet of LeMoyne, Pennsylvania, to see how it's going over with shoppers at Glenn Miller's Beer & Soda Warehouse—where, full disclosure, your trusty correspondent was once a regular customer. "At this point, it's cheaper than some of the cases of water we're selling in the back," Andy Wagner, the store's manager explains. One might add that the taste is rather similar too.
"I've seen longtime Bud Light customers trying other beers," Wagner adds. "If they find something they like, they may not come back."

QUICK HITS
• Blame the Federal Aviation Administration for another holiday weekend plagued by air travel problems.
• A sixth consecutive night of riots has rocked France, in response to the police killing of a 17-year old. In L'Haÿ-les-Roses, a town near Paris, protesters rammed a vehicle into the mayor's home, then set the car on fire.
• The Washington Post reports that then-President Donald Trump tried to "cajole" Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey into overturning the state's presidential election results. Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, claimed Sunday that there was "no pressure involved" in the phone call to Ducey, which Pence characterized as a "check-in."
• The Biden administration is studying geoengineering as one possible method to slow global warming.
• Thousands of hotel workers in southern California have gone on strike.
• Joe Biden is "very open-minded" about using psychedelics in medical treatment, according to Frank Biden, the president's youngest brother.
The post Joe Biden's Incoherent Student Loan Logic appeared first on Reason.com.

Victory should feel more satisfying than it does. Just a few years ago, arguing that globalisation had been a great policy error by the West’s political class was still viewed as a heretical position, its adherents fighting in vain against an unstoppable and desirable force of history. To say that placing the West in a relationship of dependency on Russia and China’s autocracies was a profound security risk, a wilful act of negligence bordering on treason, was still seen by the liberal commentariat as eccentrically misguided at best, and Trumpian nativism at worst. The postliberal assertion that the nation’s security as well as prosperity relied on a secure domestic industrial base, fostered and defended by an activist state, was still viewed as a backwards nostalgia for a vanished world.
But all these arguments have now been decisively won, so swiftly and totally that it is apparently difficult for liberals to remember that they ever held different views, let alone denounced the ones they now profess.
Yet while the world has moved beyond economic liberalism, leftover liberals still run the West. Like a post-Communist state where the old nomenklatura, having hurriedly adopted the mantle of liberal capitalists, still run the show, a great, historic revolution has occurred but the same people remain in charge, having suffered no retribution for the catastrophic mistakes their failed idealism brought in tow. A massive clear-out is long overdue: and no more absurd an illustration can be found of the immovable fatberg blocking our political future, the sheer ideological inertia preventing reform, than Britain’s failing water companies.
The failed status quo our politicians contort themselves to defend, like some ancient pillar of our constitution, was itself a bold act of political change. Thatcher’s privatisation of the national water supply was a course of action so daringly radical, so intuitively wrongheaded that only one other nation on earth, Pinochet’s Chile, took the same path. As in so many other aspects of national life, Britain carried out a reckless experiment on itself which failed. Like so much else of Westminster’s tinkering with a country which in retrospect seems to have functioned perfectly well, the failure was so disastrous that the error cannot be admitted, let alone rectified.
The results fulfilled none of the stated aims of privatisation: competition among providers did not lower costs or improve services, as instead the spoils were portioned out among regional monopolies; no new infrastructure was built, as profits were extracted as dividends, with crippling new debt added on top; precious national resources, whether the public’s wealth or Britain’s famously over-abundant supply of water, were squandered. Yet if the water supply systems of every other country in the world provide insufficient comparison, we possess a control group within our own borders, studiously ignored by London commentators. In both Scotland and Northern Ireland, water remained under state control: bills are lower (in Northern Ireland, non-existent for domestic users), infrastructure is not notably worse, and taxpayers have not been saddled with extravagant debt purely to pay out dividends.

In this sense, the oft-made liberal claim that Britain urgently needs to decolonise itself may be correct, though not in the way its adherents think. Exploiting a country’s resources and extracting the wealth of its people solely for the purpose of enriching foreign shareholders is how you run an unloved colony, not a nation. It is striking that it is only England, the submerged nation where Westminster’s writ runs unchallenged, with no viable nationalist independence movement to force the central government to keep voters relatively happy, that has been forced to submit itself to looting by the water companies. That it is Thames Water, whose turbid assets flow past the Palace of Westminster itself, which appears closest to collapse is surely no accident: it is the richest portion of the colony that was latched onto first and most tightly, and was thus the first to be sucked dry. In Britain, just as all distances are measured from Charing Cross, dysfunction radiates out from the centre. The aim of any form of radical politics must surely be, while preserving the Union, to find a way to liberate Britain from Westminster, and from the reliably servile comprador class that scurries along its endless corridors, looking for unguarded family silver to sell.
After all, no voter would actively choose the economic model we have. But as Thames Water’s looming collapse reminds us, we are not governed according to our political desires, instead we are ruled through absolute and open disregard for the popular will. As a recent YouGov poll shows, 69% of the British public, including 66% of Conservative voters, believe the water supply should be run as a public utility, while just 8% believe that things should remain as they are. Like renationalising the railways, a policy which 67% support, bringing water back into public ownership would be wildly popular, yet is viewed with as much distaste by our ruling caste as public hanging (which would, it must be said, also be fairly popular). Yet as the urgent attempt to find some last-ditch alternative to renationalisation shows, both parties still cower in fear from granting the electorate its desires. Viewed objectively, the function of Westminster politicians is not to deliver the policies that voters want, but to frustrate them. A Britain that reflected the majority politics, both Right and Left, of its people, would be a very different and far more liveable country: this should be the postliberal horizon.
Even as British postliberals flirt with a poorly-defined national conservatism, it is the Labour Left pushing tangible improvements to the common good, even if its experimental progressivism makes it an enemy in the cultural sphere. If the Conservatives are unable to conserve anything of value, Labour may at least, through recalibrating the nation’s economy around the now-atrophied power of the state, achieve conservative ends. Family life would be better served by increasing pay, by building houses, and by widening access to childcare than by mocking the latest progressive culture war innovation on Twitter. On home ownership, fearful of the state they were elected to manage, conservative intellectuals provide timid, stuttering suggestions, tinkering at the edges of policy: what if we built nicer-looking houses, or devised a complicated system of street votes so local planning committees wouldn’t object to new development? Instead, Labour proposes to cut this self-imposed Gordian knot through the simple expedient of the state buying land cheaply, relaxing planning restrictions and building houses, just as a Conservative party that knew how to win elections used to do.
Suggested readingBritain needs Macmillan, not ThatcherBy Aris Roussinos
Effectively a conservative variant of socialism, postliberalism has always struggled to reconcile the two halves of its worldview: the post-industrial working class is, in truth, significantly less socially conservative than the tweedy intellectuals professing to speak for them. Equally, the Left’s suspicion that postliberals will always be distracted from pursuing the economics of the common good by shallow nods at social conservatism is often more accurate than we would prefer to think. Yet by fundamentally rejecting the narrow parameters of the liberal worldview, it is afforded a welcome degree of detachment from the rounds of partisan politics: with no particular loyalty to either viable party, postliberals can flit between whichever promises to implement the greater part of its ideal programme. Yet while its synthesis of economic radicalism and social conservatism may double the chance of at least some of its demands being implemented by one of the two Westminster factions, it also offers twice the opportunity for disappointment.
Suggested readingThe Tories can save Blue LabourBy Aris Roussinos
A few years ago, I declared that the Conservative party represented the best hope for postliberal governance: back in 2021, it really did seem that “the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged”, a party “already making postliberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial North”, so that “whether we like it or not, postliberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did 40 years ago”. As events proved, I was profoundly mistaken.
Since 2019, postliberal intellectuals have been given to loudly claiming that it is easier for the Right to move Left on economics than for the Left to move Right on culture: but the Conservative party’s public suicide has dramatically revealed the flaw at the heart of this analysis. Just because a particular course of action is the easiest to follow, the one that will be most warmly rewarded by voters, does not mean that our politicians will do it, even in our notional democracy. Through its destructive decades-long love affair with economic liberalism, the Conservative party entirely burned through the foundations of conservatism, rooting up its future voting base like noxious weeds. Sometimes the dead hand of ideology is just too strong, strangling even the most basic instinct for self-preservation as it pulls a party, and a nation into the grave.
The Conservative party can be safely written off for now as a spent force: the current overriding danger is that Labour will fail in turn, and for the same reasons: its leadership also still in thrall to the same dead ideology and the tiny minority of voters who still adhere to it. If anything can rival the uselessness of a Conservative party that conserves nothing, it is a Labour party too timid on the economy to save Britain from its downward, perhaps terminal spiral.
A Labour party already watering down its most ambitious economic pledges serves no purpose at all: the party’s sole appeal is its willingness to harness the power of the state to productive ends. Labour’s cautious retreat from offering free childcare, its delicate dance to avoid renationalising rail and energy at the time of greatest political opportunity in decades does not bode well for Starmer’s prospects as a bold reformer. Who is he trying to win over? When even the Times, the nation’s arbiter of boring status quo centrism, can run leaders lambasting the failure of privatised water, when, even the Reform party can offer a more convincing path towards renationalisation than Labour, something is going terribly wrong with Starmer’s vision. The political stars have aligned, the nation is in agreement: for him to squander this opportunity casts doubt on Starmer’s fitness for leadership, and on the idea of Labour providing a meaningful alternative to Tory dysfunction at all. As Labour’s exiled king Jeremy Corbyn observes with all the piercing clarity of the simple-minded, “It’s really not that complicated: stop bailing out private companies and bring our water into public ownership instead.”
Suggested readingBoris Johnson should destroy the ToriesBy Aris Roussinos
Indeed, through bringing about the wave of renationalisation voters from both parties desire, a Corbyn government in 2019 would perhaps have achieved a greater postliberal synthesis than the futile Johnson show delivered. A Corbyn government that invested in state capacity a whole parliament ago may perhaps have arrested the decline sooner, and stolen a march on the new world economic consensus. Through ramping up state direction of the economy to compete in a world whose economic order has been reshaped by China, and by the looming need to replace fossil fuels and the infrastructure grid underwriting modern life which depends on them, the rest of the world is already moving towards something approaching war economies: only Britain remains the last holdout, the unchanging hermit kingdom of extractive, borderless neoliberalism.
No other developed country would permit its wealth and resources to be looted by foreign investors, or its utilities to be run by foreign states. Britain’s future is not bright: as the global situation deteriorates, the decisions made in the next few parliaments may be all that staves off collapse. Like Chekhov’s gun, in Britain the power of the state is an unused weapon waiting to be wielded: the only question is who will seize it first, and to what ends. With the Conservatives eliminated as an option by their own record of governance, it is the decisions made now by Labour that will determine the nation’s course in the decades to come.
We might wish Labour were led by someone bolder, but for now Starmer is there all there is: his stance on how to handle Thames Water is thus the first great test of our inevitable government-in-waiting. The pressure from the Labour Left to commit the party to renationalising water should therefore be actively supported by those of our political tribe: not only is it desirable in itself, and supported by the vast majority of voters, but it will finally mark the symbolic death of Britain’s old, failed order. And if Labour should fail too, following the Conservatives into political oblivion, at least then may come the time of real politics. Like the shifting establishment stance towards globalisation, when the change comes, it will be swift and total: in the coming waves of crisis lie political opportunities just waiting to be seized.
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The result of the court’s decision will be more opportunity, not less

Harvard may have a slightly more difficult time poaching black students from Boston College, Miami University of Ohio, or other less elite schools in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard’s racial admissions regime. Recruiters from BlackRock and Goldman Sachs may have to suffer the indignity of recruiting their black employees from the University of Connecticut or Rice University, rather than from Stanford and Yale. But contrary to the hysterical rhetoric from President Joe Biden, the court’s dissenting justices and the Democratic commentariat, the doors of educational opportunity will remain wide open to black people. As many black students as before will go to college, assuming that they want to. Colleges will be just as eager to have them, courting them in pre-college campus tours, showering them with scholarships and financial aid, hosting them in special orientations and swaddling them with diversity bureaucrats. Every college library, biology lab, and history and chemistry course will be as welcoming to black students as they were before and as they are to students of every other race and ethnicity.

The only thing that will have changed, assuming colleges make any effort to comply with the court’s decision, is that black students will be more likely to attend schools for which they are academically qualified. At present, under the racial preferences regime that the court just overruled, black students are catapulted into schools where their academic qualifications massively lag those of their non-preferred peers. They may have a combined 1,100 SAT score on a 1,600-point scale, say, but they will be admitted to schools where the average SAT score among non-preferred students is 1,400. Harvard itself calculated in 2013 that if it admitted students based on their academic qualifications alone, less than one percent of its undergraduate student body would be black, as opposed to its then current 10 percent black share. (That 10 percent is now up to 14 percent, without any corresponding national rise in the test scores of black students.) And Harvard has the pick of the top black students nationwide. After Harvard skims off the top, each successive tier of schools below it dips further down into the applicant pool, widening the skills gap between those schools’ black students on the one hand, and their white and Asian students on the other. The largest academic mismatch, counterintuitively, occurs at the least prestigious schools.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Spectator (paywall)

UK readers: We are delighted to announce a Persuasion panel discussion in collaboration with the Equiano Project on the topic: “Where will (and should) the future of the centre-left lie?”It will be at the Sekforde in London on Monday 3 July at 6:30pm. For more information, and to reserve your (free!) ticket, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/where-will-and-should-the-future-of-the-centre-left-lie-tickets-661076135517 There will be drinks and open discussion afterwards so please do join us! Tim Mak is a writer, reporter, and founder of the online publication The Counteroffensive. He was formerly the Washington Investigative Correspondent for National Public Radio.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tim Mak discuss the slow progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and how a big breakthrough might come about; how the collective experience of resisting Russian aggression has contributed to a shared sense of Ukrainian national identity; and what the future may hold for a post-war Ukraine.The first section of this conversation, considering the aftereffects of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin's failed revolt, was recorded on June 28th. Everything following it was recorded earlier, on June 20th. The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. - The EditorsYascha Mounk: The first, obvious question: what just happened in Russia with this apparent coup attempt and how do you think that's going to influence the war? Tim Mak: Even as someone who watches this pretty closely, I'm dumbfounded by the whole situation. The idea that the head of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, would launch an armed insurgency, and then drive towards Moscow—that wasn't really on my bingo card or on anyone else’s. But what it did was lay bare just the amount of chaos there is inside the Russian political system at the moment and how unstable a dictatorship is when politics begins to take hold. Timothy Snyder had a really interesting article a few weeks before all this happened, saying that the moment when politics starts—open politics—in an autocratic system, that's the beginning of the end. When government officials begin to beef with each other openly, that's a signal of maybe not the imminent collapse of an autocratic system, but a very dangerous moment for the dictator in charge. There can't be some mercenary group head demanding publicly to have the Minister of Defense removed from power. That sort of thing can't happen in a stable dictatorship. I think that Ukrainians, in general, are very happy to see a little bit of instability in Russia—and that instability is caused in no small part by Putin and the Russian government's conduct during this war. There's a lot of dissent within Russia—hidden dissent, largely. But a lot of unhappiness about the number of Russian lives lost, for example, and that's something you can't hide in small communities where people come back in body bags or don't come back at all. I spoke to an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Yuriy Sak, and he said that this is a situation where terrorists are killing terrorists. And the net gain here is for Ukraine. There's no downside in this, at least in the immediate term. And when you talk to Ukrainians, a lot of them think that a lot of progress needs to be made on the battlefield, but that ultimately, as long as Putin remains in power—as long as Russia remains an imperial, dictatorial state—they won't be safe no matter what kind of agreement or what kind of battlefield victories they achieve, and that the ultimate goal to end hostilities does need to involve the collapse of the Russian state itself. Now, the Ukrainian military has stated that they're taking advantage of the chaos within the Russian domestic political system; that they've been making gains, for example, in and around Bakhmut as a result of the confusion among Russian military forces over the last few days.Mounk: One segment of the conversation we had a week ago was about Ukraine’s spring offensive, and whether its delayed onset and so far modest successes are a reason for pessimism about the prospects of success. Have these gains over the course of the last week significantly changed the overall picture that you drew in your assessment one week ago, or do you think that, broadly speaking, your assessment remains the same?Mak: I think it broadly remains the same. Political instability, though, can have impacts in ways that bullets and HIMARS rockets can't, right? If you're a Russian soldier in the trenches near the frontlines in one of these defensive positions waiting for the Ukrainians to attack, and you're seeing all of this chaos back at home, you might well wonder, “What am I doing out here when our government doesn't have the general competence to take care of pretty simple issues, like not allowing a rebellion to occur?” In terms of whether the gains in the past few days have dramatically changed the calculations on the battlefield, I don't think so. But the will to fight is an extremely, extremely powerful and very difficult to quantify element of any war, of any battle. You know that the CIA and the DIA are really good at counting troops and counting tanks and counting guns. But it's much harder to determine whether people will stand and fight. You can't say that the morale this week is the same as the morale last week. The CIA and the DIA, for example, made mistakes in terms of assessing the will to fight in Afghanistan, and how quickly Kabul would fall. They also made a misjudgment on how quickly they expected Kyiv to fall. And that's because it's so difficult to determine this will-to-fight factor, this morale factor, because it's not as easily quantifiable. That said, it's pretty fair to say that there's a lot of confusion and turmoil inside Russia right now. And that that's to Ukraine's benefit in the short term.It's hard not to think that these Russian troops are not more demoralized today than they were last week. There's a lot of support among the Russian rank-and-file for the Wagner group, which are seen as effective shock troops. And every soldier always has skepticism about his or her leadership. I'm sure that's been expressed in conversations between Russian troops now, because of how chaotic things have been way further back from the frontlines.Mounk: We've been waiting for the start of the spring offensive for a long time. And it is very important both in military terms, as one of the big opportunities Ukraine might have to reconquer some of the territory, and in political terms, to sustain support for Ukraine and possibly create the perspective for some kind of end to the war on fair terms. I know it's relatively early in the offensive, but how is it going so far? Do you have an assessment on how it's proceeding?Mak: The spring counteroffensive is likely to become the summer counteroffensive, and then drag into the fall counteroffensive. We're looking at the first couple weeks of fighting. So far, that is going to be a long and difficult path for the Ukrainians. Now, the Ukrainians are making progress on three or four fronts. One in the south, one that you might call the central axis, and one is the Bakhmut axis. And they're making slow progress, measured in meters, not in kilometers. If anyone was hoping that Russian lines would immediately collapse, like in the areas around Kharkiv last year, it's become very clear that the Russian lines are dug in, and that it’s going to take quite a lot of time, effort and sacrifice on the part of the Ukrainians to make to achieve their longer-term goals, which are obviously to put Russia in a bad strategic position and ultimately push them out of Ukrainian territory. So far, what we've seen is a handful of villages that have been retaken by Ukrainian forces, but just devastating fighting along heavily-mined areas, with soldiers on both sides receiving pretty high levels of casualties. In fact, the Institute for the Study of War said recently that Ukraine is likely to take a strategic pause and decide how to proceed given the difficulties of the first couple of weeks.Mounk: This sounds like bad news. The spring offensive ended up starting much later than we anticipated, and then it sounds like even once the offensive actually started, progress was slower than at least some people hoped. Why is this the case?Mak: I think you have to understand that the idea of a spring counteroffensive in particular is driven by political demands, by the wishes of allies who have put a lot of money, aid, military equipment and training and diplomatic support into Ukraine, to say “Hey, show us something. Show us some progress.” And that's primarily a political pressure and not a military or strategic one. There was and is a real vibrant debate, even within Ukraine's own military community, as to whether to wait or to go. You can see some of that diplomatic pressure taking the form of trying to show some evidence of advances and progress ahead of a NATO summit next month, to say “Hey, thank you, NATO for your support—not only should Ukraine be be given a pathway into NATO, but look at what we've done so far with all the support you've provided us.”Mounk: Can we expect this grinding process to go on for the foreseeable future? If there isn't some form of armistice or negotiated settlement, what are the realistic scenarios for how this war might end?Mak: You talk to Ukrainians, and they're not remotely close to some sort of diplomatic arrangement. There have been two phases of the war in terms of public opinion and interest in a diplomatic solution: pre-Bucha and post-Bucha. I was in Kyiv when the invasion started. And I remember talking to people hoping that it would be over in three weeks, four weeks, two months, three months. But public opinion dramatically changed, and hearts really hardened, after it became clear that Russia had committed these terrible atrocities just outside of Kyiv. And it wasn't merely that they had killed unarmed civilians or looted, but a lot of Ukrainians had visited those places, had seen the apartments where these atrocities happened, and thought, “Well, my apartment looks quite a lot like that. That family looks a lot like my family.” And after that moment, there was no prospect for any sort of negotiated peace in the medium term. I spoke to one woman right after the atrocities were revealed. She's a former doctor, she is as empathetic as one can get. She told me “I'm a Christian, I know that I'm taught to love everyone. But I can't forgive this.” She described this hatred, this burning inside her that really hardened her towards any sort of sympathy or interest in talking to the Russian forces that had invaded her country. This probably represents the vast majority of public opinion in Ukraine right now. If that is the median person in Ukraine, then the only way it ends is on the battlefield. The plans that each side has proposed is basically that the other side must give up. And that's not really a recipe for a diplomatic agreement. And what's obvious is that it's easier to be on the defensive than it is to be on the offensive. We've spoken about this counteroffensive for months and months. And so the Russians have been able to heavily mine likely approaches towards their territory and create really very solid defensive structures. One advantage they have is that they still have superiority in the sky—they don't have total control, but they're able to operate with relative impunity. Ukraine has made a strategic decision to locate its air defense in the cities to protect civilians. And so that leaves their troops more vulnerable on the move. And so, yes, it will be a long and grinding process. Now, the big issue is morale—can we see a collapse in the Russian lines due to inexperienced soldiers, soldiers who don't have a lot of training, are not particularly motivated to be fighting in a foreign country. And as the war goes on, you can imagine a scenario where there is a collapse in Russian lines—we're not there yet, obviously. But the counteroffensive is just starting, and I wouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from a couple of weeks of fighting.Mounk: What are the precedents for how those kinds of defensive lines fail? If we're assuming that we're just far too far away from a negotiated settlement, and what we're left with is this long drawn-out military solution, what are some of the kinds of scenarios for that? What would it look like for Ukraine or Russia to win the kind of decisive victory on the battlefield that would end the war?Mak: The real focus nowadays is combined arms warfare, being able to conduct the symphony of different kinds of components of war, from artillery and mortars to infantry, to the use of drones for spotting and for offensive operations, using tanks and using whatever other assets they have as well. And so combining all of those together, you can both create and exploit opportunities much faster than in a World War I type situation. Where it resembles World War I, I think, is sitting in a trench and getting hammered by artillery, with very slow, grinding movement. But the war is obviously a very different situation with a very different kind of warfare and new vulnerabilities to include things like electronic warfare; the Russians have proven relatively effective in jamming or obscuring GPS signals and communications on the frontlines, which have, according to the Institute for the Study of War, degraded in some ways Ukrainian effectiveness in the counteroffensive. But still, the Ukrainians are making progress. We're not talking about a standstill here. I think we need to give it a little bit more time before saying that this is a frozen conflict where people are just being thrown into the meat grinder. We're just a couple of weeks in, and the Ukrainians have made some, although limited, progress.Mounk: One of the concerning things is that it's sort of hard to imagine a real end to the conflict even after this terrible phase of a fighting ends, which is to say that the best case scenario is a resounding Ukrainian victory with Ukrainians succeeding in expelling Russian troops from the territory. But it would still be very imaginable that, even in that kind of scenario, Russia would reform, wait until there's a military or political opening, and try to invade Ukraine again even years after some kind of official defeat. On the other hand, in the horror scenario in which Russia actually manages to conquer large stretches of Ukraine, even perhaps Kyiv, that would probably mean an extremely bloody occupation, with ongoing resistance and a guerrilla movement. That would be very bloody as well. I guess I'm pessimistic about when the military phase of this war might end. But the more I think about it, the more pessimistic I am as well that, even after that, the region will come to any kind of meaningful peace. Do you share that pessimism?Mak: You might be talking yourself into a little bit of long-term pessimism when there's still so much to determine in the short term. When you talk to Ukrainians, they'll say that this is not a war in which victory can come merely from the battlefield—in the immediate term, that's where the action is. But most Ukrainians think that a diplomatic solution is foolish for the reason you stated, that any diplomatic solution that involves an armistice would merely be an opportunity for Russia to regroup, retrain, replenish their weaponry, and do this again in some period of time. I’m hearing from Ukrainians that this is part of a longer-term project to weaken the Russian state and remove the peril of Russian imperialism from becoming a problem in the long term. Ukrainians think that there are a number of levels on which this war is being fought—the battlefield obviously being one of them. But another one being empowering minorities in Russia to revolt and to create additional political instability within Russia—that being a major strategic goal, a publicly stated goal of the Ukrainian government, which would reduce Russia's ability in the long term to act as a threat towards Ukraine. So there's the battlefield component. There's the information and political stability component. And there's also kind of a long-term feeling in Ukraine that there are a number of reasons why this war is being fought. One is the obvious one, which is that Russia invaded them. But another is that people are fighting for a different kind of future for Ukraine, one in which the government is less corrupt, more free, more democratic, more closely aligned with the EU and more progressive in general. And when I talk to people, that seems to be a major component of why they're participating in helping with the military operations or why they're trying to push Ukraine towards victory. That's a major motivating force.Mounk: One of the things that you've mentioned repeatedly in this conversation is talking to Ukrainian people, and that's because you are in the country and trying to do a different kind of journalism in which you really talk to a lot of people and tell stories about the war. What does it look like to try and tell the stories of the war in a way that people can try and relate to even though they live under such different circumstances? Mak: Just last month, I launched my publication to address this very issue. There's this problem we identify, which some people have called Ukraine fatigue, that folks are not so interested in hearing the technical details of the frontlines moving from this village to that village you've never heard of, to another village you've never heard of, or that 12 people were killed in a city in the east and three people were wounded. So we launched Counteroffensive.news, to try to do compelling human interest journalism that motivates people to care about humans. We look at the news through the lens of a single person who's affected by that news. And we're hoping that that breaks through.We have been writing, for example, about the strikes in Kyiv. But unlike other news outlets, who might say that at three o'clock in the morning, 12 ballistic missiles were shot down over the skies of Kyiv, what we did instead was we zoomed in on a single individual. One of the ballistic missiles was shot down over the Kyiv Zoo. And the shrapnel tore through a tree right in the middle of the Zoo. We found a sketch artist there named Georgy, and we tried to look at the overnight attacks through his experience. We looked at how he heard the explosions at three o'clock in the morning from his home on the left bank and came to work the next day, and sat on a bench to work as an artist, getting paid for sketches of people who visited the zoo. And we talked not only about his experience of the overnight strikes, but his life as an artist during the war, how difficult it has been to make a living, how difficult it has been to find himself in a position where he's forced to draw sketches at a zoo to make to make ends meet and his shame, for example, in having to do that sort of work when he believes that he has a much higher level of education in art, and we weave that whole story together in a way that we hope is more interesting for the public; if you're interested in art, for example, you could relate to that sort of thing. And then in the course of reading about a story, you learn the news, you learn about the strikes that happen overnight, almost incidentally to the human narrative that we're trying to bring to it. So over the course of the last month and a half, we've profiled Ukrainian fishermen, along the Dnipro River, who are enduring this terrible ecological catastrophe due to the blowing up of the Kakhovka Dam. We've talked to a US fighter who's fighting for Ukraine, and we try to give an immersive experience of what it was like fighting in Bakhmut in the last days before it fell. We profiled Ukrainian female partisans who are training for action behind enemy lines and how they can continue to resist in areas of Russian occupation. We profiled a 76 year old woman who once lived in Orikhiv, which is one of the towns that is a focal point of the counteroffensive, and how she was forced out of her town due to constant shelling, but still sneaks back into the city, despite extreme personal danger to herself, because she loves the cats and dogs that are living there with no one to feed them. And so she sneaks back into the city to feed them. That's the sort of kind of personal narrative-driven, intimate reporting that we've been doing that brings you a little closer, immerses you a little bit more in the facts of these stories, as stories that I hope people will want to read. These are the kinds of stories that we're trying to put out there to combat the so-called Ukraine fatigue.The most interesting fact about Ukraine that I've learned in the last year and a half is that I don't think that the national dish of Ukraine is borscht, actually. I think, properly, it is sushi. No one is ready for that information. But the Ukrainians are obsessed with sushi. And there's a really interesting, geopolitical reason for this. It exploded in popularity after the Orange Revolution in 2004. And my theory on this is that it reflected Ukraine's desire to be more worldly, to embrace the non-Russian components of the world, and to be closer to its allies in the West and elsewhere around the globe. So we're doing tons of stories that don't have to do merely with suffering. And we're trying to make it personal.Mounk: How do you balance, as a war correspondent and somebody who now leads a media organization trying to cover this conflict, two different instincts which I think are both important and valid. One is that you're obviously doing values-driven journalism, that the reason why you're there in good part is that you think the Ukrainian cause is just.On the other hand, of course, you're a journalist who needs to look also at the darker aspects of society or the things that are not working that well, both to be objective and to tell interesting stories, whatever political valence they may have and, in part, because that may actually be necessary—for example, being forthright about some of the corruption that undoubtedly does exist in Ukraine (as, of course, it does probably even more severely in Russia). And because it may be necessary in order to put pressure on those parts of the Ukrainian state to actually perform better and to enhance the chances of Ukrainian victory. How do you balance those? Mak: My philosophy, and the philosophy of Counteroffensive.news, is that empathy and autocracy can't coexist; that if you tell human stories, and you show the impact of oppression on people, the injustice of it screams out and demands some sort of other resolution. And that's true in the obvious and explicit example of Russia’s violence against Ukrainian civilians and the ongoing full scale invasion. But it's also true when the Ukrainian government misbehaves. People are deeply affected by that, too. And we'll be telling those stories as well. I don't want to place Russian atrocities on the same level as Ukrainian misdeeds (which, as you point out, obviously do exist). They're not equivalent in any way. But one thing as a Canadian-American journalist that I have in Ukraine is a special privilege, which is that I'm here as a media reporter, and I'm able to speak more frankly, more truthfully, and more honestly with my audience, because my audience demands it and, furthermore, isn't as immersed as the Ukrainian audience in this war. Ukrainians, quite rightfully, and quite understandably, don't have a lot of interest or appetite for these sorts of investigative stories because right now their overarching goal is to see the war concluded in their favor. But we have an opportunity to write all sorts of stories on any topic that we like without, as far as I can tell, any sort of pushback from the Ukrainian government. And we will be telling more stories about what it's like to be in Ukraine today. Ukrainians also have this long, time-honored tradition of complaining loudly about their own government and on the streets, which is something that you know that Russian citizens don't have the same right to do. It's worth pointing out that divergence as well.Mounk: What is something that you've learned from being in the country and talking with lots of people and reporting these stories that you think still really is not obvious to reasonably well-informed people outside the country?Mak: I think from the outside looking in, there's been a lot of complimentary coverage on President Zelensky. But if you talk to Ukrainians (this follows from my previous point), that Ukrainians have this long tradition of complaining quite loudly and publicly about their own government. And if you talk to a lot of Ukrainians, you'll find a lot of dissent and a lot of criticism of the Ukrainian government itself. You know, I spoke to someone in Dnipro, which is in central Ukraine and has a large Russian-speaking population, and he said, “I didn't vote for Zelensky in the last election. But I've been really proud of the way he has conducted himself as the leader of the country, that he put his own life at risk and, at great personal danger, stayed in Kyiv in the early days of the war. He's been a great advocate abroad and domestically for the Ukrainian military. He's been able to unify a lot of allies. That being said, though, I wouldn't vote for him next time.” That seems to be a pretty common perspective that I've gotten from a lot of Ukrainians.Before the war, Zelensky’s approval rating was in the toilet. Ukrainians, before the full-scale invasion, thought that he could not run a government well and wasn't effective as president. During the war, I don't think that there are that many folks saying that he hasn't been able to be effective as a leader or as a moral voice. But those same criticisms remain about whether he can be a kind of day-to-day manager—not a moral figure, but someone who can run the machinery of government. It reminds you a little bit of Churchill, who, the instant World War II ended, was rejected for re-election by British voters. They didn’t think that he would be an appropriate peacetime Prime Minister. I see that there's a real possibility of that happening in Ukraine, because folks still don't have trust in him in terms of the nuts and bolts of government.Mounk: What do you think Ukrainian society would look like if the country manages to win this war in some kind of resounding way, or perhaps if eventually there's some kind of frozen conflict on somewhat favorable terms to Ukraine? Clearly, the country has a very sizable population that has been striving for democracy for a long time but wants to be integrated in the West. But it is also the kind of country that is struggling to maintain its democratic institutions. Is there any kind of way of imagining what a peacetime Ukrainian political system may end up looking like?Mak: It's far too early given that we don't know the nature of the end of the conflict, or can even really realistically see what that might look like, to predict what would happen in Zelensky’s political future. But on what does a post-war Ukraine look like, I think that with one exception (which I'll explain) there will be a huge gold rush in Ukraine; that Ukraine has shown itself to be a population of entrepreneurial, resilient and highly-educated people who are just desperate for the opportunity and infrastructure to join Europe and join the world economy as a leading innovator. And I think Western institutions and companies are just banging on the door, ready to invest in this country. They've seen all the positive stories of Ukrainian resilience, and they want to be part of the story of Ukrainian recovery and this boom that I think is likely to happen. The exception to this is the issue of corruption—you talk to any Ukrainian, they'll acknowledge it as an issue. If the courts can be trusted, then Western companies would be very happy to invest and build businesses here in Ukraine. The question is whether or not the courts can be trusted, whether there's an appropriate application of the rule of law, or whether there will be some sort of pay-to-play situation, which has existed in Ukraine in the past. And this is why I said earlier that there are a couple reasons why this war has been fought; that, obviously, one is that Russia invaded. But the other one is that there are a lot of people who think that this war is being fought so that, on the other end of it, Ukraine emerges as a less corrupt, more free society. And I think that if there is a movement towards autocracy, if there is a kind of squeezing on the freedoms that Ukrainians have felt in the past, you will find that young Ukrainians simply won't put up with it; that they've sacrificed so much. And that the people who are still in this country are enduring daily threats of violence because they love the place they're in—they simply won't sit still and take it. I read in POLITICO Europe a good story by Jamie Dettmer with folks speculating on what sort of active protests and demonstrations might be necessary to roll back the restrictions on democratic freedoms that are, let's acknowledge, natural in any wartime setting. There's already talk about the need or the possibility of another Maidan uprising in Ukraine if things don't go that way. Ukrainian democrats and folks who are interested in a free Ukraine know what has worked for them in the past, and they're certainly not going to be shy about it in the future. They feel like their rights are under threat.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry.Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

correction An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated Spotify had removed the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong.” The song was removed by its distributor. This version has been corrected. The July 1 anniversary of Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China from British rule used to be a day of celebration in the city. Now, it has morphed into a morbid reminder of Hong Kong’s tragic decline under the ever-worsening repression brought on by Beijing. Make sense of the news fast with our daily newsletter ArrowRight One might think that Chinese authorities, having quashed the pro-democracy protests that erupted in 2019, would ease up. After all, they’ve shuttered all free media, neutered judicial independence, destroyed civil society and suppressed all political opposition. But since last year, the Chinese government has ramped up its effort to snuff out Hong Kong’s autonomy and Hong Kongers’ rights, even while exporting its authoritarianism around the world.

Many have written off Hong Kong. But paying continued attention is crucial because it tells us something important about the character of Xi Jinping’s government. For the Chinese Communist Party today, too much repression is never enough. China is becoming more emboldened. That spells danger for Taiwan and the rest of the world — unless the lessons of Hong Kong are learned.

“In the early 1990s, the West was swept up in the euphoria of the post-Cold War era. We fundamentally failed to internalize the lessons of the Tiananmen Square massacre and what it told us about the brutality of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), a member of the House Select Committee on the CCP. “We must not repeat that mistake for Hong Kong.”

It’s no coincidence that Hong Kong authorities have gone out of their way to shut down any reference to the 1989 massacre of student protesters in Tiananmen Square. Many Hong Kongers were jailed and charged with “inciting a riot” for simply lighting candles in June 4 vigils commemorating the Tiananmen victims. One of those imprisoned was Jimmy Lai, the former head of the largest independent Hong Kong media outlet, Apple Daily.

Lai, 75 years old, already finished serving 14-months in prison for daring to recognize a moment of history that’s embarrassing for the CCP. He is now serving an additional five years and nine months on trumped-up fraud charges. He could go on trial again as early as this September under Hong Kong’s pernicious “national security law,” which the authorities apply liberally to hand down harsh prison sentences to any opponents of the crackdown.

Lai is one of many journalists charged with crimes such as “sedition” just for telling the truth about what’s going on in Hong Kong — and reporters aren’t the only ones. According to the Hong Kong Democracy Council, the authorities have jailed more than 1,500 political prisoners since 2019, half of whom are under the age of 25.

The CCP’s efforts to shut down any inkling of criticism have reached a high level of paranoia. For example, Hong Kong authorities are shutting down a child’s clothing retailer called Chickeeduck, which they accused of “advocating violence” because the stores displayed pro-democracy artwork and protest messages.

The Chinese government is also going after anyone overseas who dares to criticize its Hong Kong policies. In June, Hong Kong’s former chief executive publicly demanded that the British police “investigate” an event to publicize “Sheep Village,” a collection of children’s books about the democracy movement written by activists. The host, regretfully, canceled the event.

Beijing is also trying to snuff out musical criticism of its Hong Kong policy in Western countries. This past month, the distributor of the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” pulled it from Spotify and other streaming services before it was restored after widespread public backlash.

“Hong Kong doesn’t matter just for itself,” Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, told me. “China is really trying to draw red lines and parameters for what we in free societies can do and discuss.”

On Thursday, 31 U.S. senators wrote an open letter pledging that the United States and other countries will “hold the CCP and the Hong Kong government accountable for their destruction of Hong Kong’s freedom, autonomy, and rule of law.” It’s past time for the U.S. government and Congress to back up those words with actions.

Congress should pass legislation to increase visas for Hong Kongers fleeing the crackdown. Congress should also pass pending bipartisan legislation recognizing that Hong Kong’s trade offices in the United States no longer represent a place where U.S. businesses are safe.

The Biden administration should announce that Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee is not invited to the November meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Council in San Francisco, because the United States has sanctioned him for human rights abuses in Hong Kong. The U.S. government also must do more to protect Hong Kongers from the long arm of China’s transnational repression when they are on American soil.

The most important lesson the world must learn from the tragedy in Hong Kong relates to Taiwan. Hong Kong proves that Beijing’s proposal of “one country, two systems” is a delusion — and that any promises Xi makes regarding Taiwan’s continued autonomy under reunification are worthless.

Xi’s China is a totalitarian regime that seeks nothing less than total control of China and everything it sees as part of China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. That pattern is undeniable and we ignore it at our own peril.

Protesters for and against affirmative active demonstrate on Capitol Hill on June 29, 2023. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.)Dear Readers,Persuasion is about to turn three years old. I can’t quite believe it. But I am deeply proud of what, with the support of an amazing team, we have built here: a nonprofit publication that thinks through the most urgent issues of the day in a calm, inquiring manner—principled but not dogmatic, with a clear sense of mission but no instinctive loyalty to a tribe or faction.Thank you so much for being our loyal readers and supporters. We truly couldn’t do it without you. In fact, we need your help. For to keep going, we need to grow our number of subscribers. So please take out a subscription if you haven’t already; renew your subscription if you’ve been with us from the start; and consider celebrating our third birthday by gifting Persuasion to your friend or your niece or your neighbor.Gratefully,YaschaP.S: On Monday, Persuasion is holding a panel discussion in London on the future of the moderate left, in collaboration with the Equiano Project. You can find more details and sign up here.Give a gift subscriptionA few years ago, I listened to Jim Yong Kim, then the President of the World Bank, address the Milken Global Conference, a gathering that is about as plutocratic as it sounds. At the start of his remarks, Kim told the multimillionaires and billionaires who made up the bulk of the audience an anecdote, which he seemed to consider charming, about how he got his job.One day, while Kim was still in his previous job as the President of Dartmouth College, his assistant informed him of an unexpected phone call from Tim Geithner, the Secretary of the Treasury. Kim immediately reached for a pen. Naturally, he said, he expected that Geithner would ask for some nephew or family friend of his to get special consideration in the admissions process, and Kim wanted to be ready to jot down the applicant’s name. But to his astonishment, that wasn’t the case: Geithner was actually calling to see whether he might be interested in running the World Bank! (Cue appreciative chuckles from the audience.)What was remarkable about this anecdote is just how normalized these forms of influence-peddling are in America’s elite. It didn’t seem to occur to Kim that he might in any way be impugning Geithner’s reputation by suggesting that he would use the stature afforded by his high office to influence Dartmouth’s admissions decisions on behalf of his friends and associates; nor did Kim think that he himself might be self-incriminating by telling a large audience that he would readily accede to such a request.Whatever one’s views about the justice or the injustice of affirmative action—a topic that we shall discuss ad nauseam over the coming months—one thing is clear: Thursday’s Supreme Court rulings, which render illegal the admissions practices in which most elite colleges now engage, would be a golden opportunity to burn America’s whole corrupt, baroque, shameful admissions system to the ground.Colleges are bound by law and decency to comply with the Supreme Court; if their leaders claim for themselves the moral authority to evade the court’s instructions, as many have insinuated in the messages they have sent to their students, staff, and faculty over the past 24 hours, they would effectively claim the right to place their judgment over the law. It would also be yet another step down a path that is much more risky for the long-term success of American universities than they seem to recognize. For if the right-leaning half of America’s population comes to see Harvard and Princeton, Stanford and Yale as enemies, these world-leading institutions will eventually lose their federal funding and tax-protected status—and start to decline.But if colleges must, against the will of most of their leaders, stop engaging in affirmative action, they should also stop engaging in the blatantly unjust practices that now make up the overall system. No more legacy admissions. No more special consideration for the children of donors. Heck, no more admitting people for their promise as a striker or a shortstop or a first violinist for the university orchestra.Instead, it is already becoming clear that most elite colleges are likely to choose a very different course of action: They will hold onto legacy admissions. They will hold onto athletic admissions. They will keep giving the children of donors—or the family friends of Treasury Secretaries—special consideration. And they will exploit a loophole created by the new Supreme Court ruling to the max, raising the prospect that some of the worst aspects of the admissions process could actually be amplified, rather than attenuated, over the course of the coming years.The majority decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard argues that admissions programs at elite schools like Harvard and the University of North Carolina “lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.” Therefore, it concludes, “those admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.” But in the very next sentence, the court goes on to suggest a place for universities to refocus their diversity efforts: “At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” In other words, any university that wants to test the limits of how much de facto affirmative action it can get away with will now have a big incentive to make imprecise and easily gameable metrics like personal statements even more central to the admissions process than they already are.The problem with personal statements is not that experiences of genuine hardship, including racial injustice, might not be powerfully formative; it is that personal statements are a prime example of everything that is wrong with the wider admissions system. Their strength is utterly subjective; the ability to craft a good statement is strongly correlated with cultural capital and a high socioeconomic status; and rich parents can outsource the effort to unscrupulous admissions consultants, like those caught up in the Varsity Blue scandal.Whenever I think of the role that personal statements play in America’s landscape of higher education, I remember a classmate of mine at Cambridge. He came from an aristocratic family, grew up in London, and attended Eton. He was, in other words, about as privileged as you can be in the United Kingdom. But when it came time to apply for admission to a prestigious scholarship that would send him to Harvard, he wrote movingly about how his passion for public policy was awakened when he grew up among the ravages of the troubles in Northern Ireland; at one point, he suggested, his house was even bombed. (Those who knew him realized that this was one of his family’s ancestral castles, not his primary family home, a fact he obviously omitted from his application.) These kinds of absurdities are not a bug of the strange American reverence for personal statements; they are a feature of it. The ability of admissions committees to distinguish inspiring stories of genuine hardships from self-exoticizing stories that bend the truth is at best dubious. And the impact of the implicit mandate for self-exoticization may be especially pernicious when it comes to race.The majority opinion in Fair Admissions v. Harvard rightly points out that the system it just ruled illegal stereotypes racial minorities: Colleges assume that students from a particular racial group must have an opinion that is somehow typical of that group, such that their presence on campus can create the educational benefit of diversity (which, until Thursday, served as the legal justification for the practice of affirmative action). But the new system will effectively require students to self-stereotype: to gain admission, Latino and African-American students will now have a huge incentive to conceive of themselves in racial terms, emphasizing (whether or not it happens to be true) how their experiences as a Latino or as an African-American have shaped their “quality of character.”Perhaps I will, for once, turn out to be overly pessimistic about America’s propensity to stumble into the worst possible timeline. If universities are too blatant in their attempts to ignore the spirit of Thursday’s ruling, future court decisions could curtail their ability to make the personal essay, one of the most arbitrary and subjective factors considered in admissions, even more central to a student’s future prospects. Or, far better, university presidents could, after all, seize the opportunity to make radical changes to a system that is broken in many more ways than one.I hope so. But I’m not optimistic.Yascha Mounk is the founder and editor-in-chief of Persuasion and the author of the The Identity Trap, forthcoming from Penguin Press.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

The Supreme Court has struck down President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, ruling 6–3 that the plan, which had promised up to $20,000 in federal student loan forgiveness per borrower, was not authorized under existing law. It was widely expected that the Court would halt Biden's proposal.
Last August, Biden announced that the Department of Education would launch a sweeping student loan forgiveness plan, forgiving $10,000 in federal student loan debt for single borrowers making up to $125,000 per year and married couples making up to $250,000. Borrowers who received Pell Grants would be eligible for $20,000 in loan forgiveness.
Almost immediately, the plan was met with legal challenges. The Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases, one filed jointly by six Republican-led states that wished to block the measure, and another filed in Texas by two state residents who were not eligible for the maximum relief provided by the plan.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the plaintiffs in the Texas case had no standing. But it ruled in favor of the coalition of Republican states, deciding that Biden's attempt at legitimizing the proposal through the HEROES Act—and the billions in federal spending that it would entail—fell flat on the merits and was unconstitutional.
The HEROES Act is a 9/11-era law designed to allow the government to grant student loan relief to soldiers who withdrew from college to enter active duty. The law gives the Department of Education the authority to "waive or modify" any "requirement or regulation" of a federal student loan plan for individuals who "suffered direct economic hardship as a direct result of a war or other military operation or national emergency."
While the Department of Education argued that this granted it broad authority to cancel student loan debt, citing COVID-19 as the "national emergency" in question, the Supreme Court didn't buy it. "The Secretary's plan has 'modified' the cited provisions only in the same sense that 'the French Revolution "modified" the status of the French nobility,'" wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. "It has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely."
Roberts continued: "The Secretary has not truly waived or modified the provisions in the Education Act authorizing specific and limited forgiveness of student loans. Those provisions remain safely intact in the U. S. Code, where they continue to operate in full force. What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by 'waiving' provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text."
The ruling marks a decisive halt to a proposal that would have cost taxpayers an estimated $400 billion. While higher education—and particularly graduate school—is too expensive for many students, loan forgiveness does nothing to address the root cause of inflated college tuition. Instead, Biden's plan would have primarily benefited wealthier Americans, and it would have resulted in outstanding student loan debt returning to current levels by 2028.
Policies that restrict the supply of federal student loans—for example, lowering the cap on the amounts individuals can borrow, or refusing to provide federal loans for programs and colleges that leave students financially worse off—are the clearest way to improve the situation in the long term. Unfortunately, long-term solutions aren't nearly as attractive as the short-term appeal of giving a payout to a group of Americans that also happens to comprise a significant part of the Democratic base, with the announcement coming shortly before the 2022 midterms.
From the beginning, Biden's plan was doomed to fail. As Roberts wrote, "Our precedent— old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy." Biden surely knew—or should have known—this. But instead of attempting to enact his policy goals through Congress, he embarked on a 10-month boondoggle that has met its predictable end.
The post Supreme Court to Biden: You Can't Just Forgive $400 Billion in Student Loan Debt Without Asking Congress appeared first on Reason.com.

Wagner Group founder and failed coup plotter Yevgeniy Prigozhin has taken up exile in Belarus — but he must know he is not safe. Russian President Vladimir Putin has no reservations about trying to kill his enemies on foreign territory — a time-honored practice for Russian leaders. But fear of Putin is not the only thing likely keeping Prigozhin up at night.

As the decade-long leader of the Wagner private military company, he also faces accountability and punishment for the wide array of international crimes his mercenaries committed on his watch. The international justice system often works slowly, but if Prigozhin thinks he is immune from prosecution, he is wrong. There is no statute of limitations on atrocities. And the work to amass evidence of Wagner’s war crimes and crimes against humanity is already well underway.

For the rest of his life, Prigozhin will have to worry about getting arrested and transported to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court convenes. The ICC has jurisdiction in several countries where Wagner forces allegedly committed prosecutable international crimes.

Getting Prigozhin into custody will be the biggest challenge. The ICC doesn’t have a police force, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko isn’t exactly a fan of the court. And Putin, having been indicted by the ICC for war crimes himself, isn’t likely to help the effort either.

But there is a long history of war-crimes fugitives eventually facing justice, said Stephen Rapp, a former State Department ambassador-at-large for war-crimes issues. For example, Gambia’s former interior minister, Ousmane Sonko, sought asylum in Europe after falling out with his dictator, but was arrested and charged in Switzerland in 2017 for atrocities committed in his home country.

In the case of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević, the United States and the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia carried out a sustained campaign to pressure the Yugoslav government to hand him over, which it eventually did in 2001. The same strategy could be used on Belarus regarding Prigozhin.

“The guy is perhaps too hot to handle in Belarus and getting him out may be a solution that Lukashenko could essentially tolerate,” Rapp told me.

Prigozhin is only going to become more and more vulnerable. For now, he might be protected by his loyal Wagner troops. But that kind of loyalty costs money, and Putin is quickly taking over Wagner’s global empire of military and industrial operations. Putin is also hunting down all of Prigozhin’s collaborators in Russia. Over time, Prigozhin might come to believe staying in Belarus is too dangerous.

He might remember the fate of former Congolese warlord Bosco Ntaganda, who thought he was safe in exile in Rwanda until the U.S. government put a reward on his head. In 2013, fearing betrayal from his own guards, he walked into the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, turned himself in, and asked to be sent to the ICC.

“Prigozhin might prefer a podium in The Hague to death from a high window in Minsk,” Rapp said. “He may think himself vulnerable in Belarus. … He may find it harder and harder to support his own protection.”

According to the international legal doctrine of command responsibility, Prigozhin can be held responsible for all international crimes committed by forces under his control — and there are many for prosecutors to choose from.

The ICC has jurisdiction in Mali, where just last year Wagner mercenaries and government forces “summarily executed” at least 500 innocent people over four days in the town of Moura, according to a recent report by the United Nations’ human rights office. Wagner also stands accused of participating in atrocities perpetrated by the Sudanese paramilitary force known as the Rapid Support Forces and leading a campaign of mass killing, torture and rape in the Central African Republic.

In addition to the ICC, Ukraine will have its own accountability and justice tribunals for Russian forces who have committed war crimes on its territory, including Wagner mercenaries. And under the principle of universal jurisdiction, individual criminal cases can also be brought in any country willing to go after perpetrators on its soil. German courts recently convicted a former Syrian official for war crimes that were committed in Syria in 2014.

The Biden administration this week announced new sanctions on Wagner targeting its operations in Africa and the Middle East. The U.S. government should also fund and support all international accountability and justice efforts to ensure Prigozhin faces prison for the war crimes he has overseen.

This would also send a signal to any other “private” military corporation honchos who may think their non-government status protects them from facing international justice. Putin isn’t the first dictator to outsource his atrocities, and he won’t be the last.

NEW YORK, NY – This morning, the Supreme Court issued decisions in three cases, including 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis and Biden v. Nebraska. Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, offers the following reactions.

Statement on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis:

“As one of only three lawyers in the country to have filed briefs supporting both Jim Obergefell in the marriage cases and Jack Phillips (the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop), I’m gratified to see the Court so fully recognize that in the land of the free, the government shouldn’t be able to force people to say something they disagree with. Those who liken this case to the denial of service at restaurants and hotels during Jim Crow either don’t understand the nature of public-accommodations laws or are being disingenuous to score cheap political points—or both. Particularly for something so personal as a wedding, people should hire graphic designers (and singers, and other expressive professionals) who can pour their hearts into the celebration, rather than forcing someone to bend the knee to rigid orthodoxy.”

Statement on Biden v. Nebraska:

“The only question in this case was whether anyone had standing to bring it. The Court’s standing doctrine, even as we’ve seen it the last two weeks, is all over the place, but I’m glad they reached the merits here. As we argued in our amicus brief, this assumption of awesome power by the executive based on semantic games with the words of a statute that can’t reasonably be read to allow it is no different than the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, CDC’s eviction moratorium, and OSHA’s vaccine mandate, all actions the Supreme Court invalidated. Of course, even President Biden recognized that, before he went along with it as a political ploy ahead of the 2022 midterms—and so that now he and his political allies can attack the Court. It’s a dangerous game that shows precisely why Americans’ trust in institutions is at its nadir. But at least the justices beat back this blatant abuse.”

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education (forthcoming 2024).

Say what you like about progressives in America and their nebulous calls for “racial equity”, but they got one thing right: college admissions have always been a zero-sum game. With limited places at the prestigious universities and tens of millions of applicants, some sort of discrimination in deciding who gets accepted is inevitable. The question is: on what grounds?
Since the Sixties, the answer on campuses from Harvard down has been race-based affirmative action — a policy dedicated to increasing racial diversity on campuses. Until today, that is, when the Supreme Court rejected the practice as unconstitutional.
In the coming days, you will no doubt be treated to a cacophony of views either celebrating the decision as a victory for meritocracy or abhorring it as a racist verdict that exposes the white supremacy inherent in our institutions. What you won’t hear, however, is much discussion about whether affirmative action has realised its intended outcome of raising black Americans, the descendants of slaves and victims of segregation, out of poverty. It is all too easy for a university to boast about having a certain number of black kids on campus. It is much harder to reflect on whether the policy that put them there has succeeded more generally.
While the birth of affirmative action can be traced back to the end of the Civil War, its role in college admissions was only secured by a Supreme Court ruling in 1978. Since then, all affirmative-action policies have articulated the same goal: to make the second-class socio-economic status of black Americans a thing of the past.
In part, this was to be celebrated. In the US, access to college is seen as a prerequisite for success; indeed, those with bachelor’s degrees tend to earn significantly more than those with only a high school diploma: 75% more, according to one recent study. In other words, despite recent cynicism, affirmative action comes from a genuine desire to improve the lives of black Americans.
But have these attempts worked? Although the formal and objective legal and social barriers to black prosperity have been eliminated, and despite the fact that all sorts of other government welfare and criminal justice policies have been adopted since the Sixties, disparities between white and black Americans remain entrenched in wealth, education, housing and crime. One recent study by the Federal Reserves notes, for instance, that black households earn on average about half as much as white households. In fact, black Americans do less well than any other minority groups in America, including other black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa.

As for those black Americans who do get into college, only 42% graduate within six years — well below the national average  of 63%. Forgive me for spelling this out, but it bears emphasising: if you are a black college student in America, you are more likely to drop out than graduate.
From a humanitarian point of view, then, one of the key problems with the debate around affirmative action is that it focuses on admissions, and not on the trajectories of students after they are admitted. For a university to enrol a student is, in some ways, easy — in the sense that all it consists of is sending out a formal letter. By contrast, putting the admitted student on the path to graduation and a successful future is more challenging. All of which raises an uncomfortable question: just how fair is it to admit students without considering their ultimate chance of degree completion and the debt load they will be saddled with regardless of whether they graduate? Or, to frame it more constructively: if affirmative action is not the answer to the plight of black America, what is?
To answer this, it pays to compare successful black Americans with those who lag behind. In May 2022, I attended a conference of distinguished black thinkers, including Clarence Thomas, Glenn Loury and Ian Rowe. During the gathering, I identified three main groups of black Americans. The first consists of those who are quietly successful and rarely make the news. Even during segregation, they somehow prospered, and with the abolition of formal racism in America, they thrived.
The second faction is embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. These people loudly argue that recent racial progress is irrelevant and seek to exploit the history of American racism to further their own radical agenda. They mostly come from affluent families, which is perhaps why they prefer to focus on skin colour rather than economic class as an explanation for why black America remains disadvantaged. This is the group which benefits most from affirmative action policies.
The third grouping is made up of a vast number of poor black Americans. They tend to be wards of the state, in prison, involved in or affected by crime, unemployed or employed in low-paying jobs that are threatened by mass immigration and growing automation. The second group claims to speak for this group’s interests, but in fact exploits their genuine grievances for their own political ends, encouraging poor black Americans to think of themselves as forever doomed to be victims. This inspires a mindset of permanent resentment and does nothing at all to actually inspire them, let alone improve their economic circumstances in an enduring manner.
Suggested readingBiden's false border victoryBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The other obvious difference is that those in group one tend to come from stable, monogamous families. They largely complete their education before marrying and having children. They cultivate a strong work ethic and are members of strong communities.
The problem is that poor black Americans (group three) live in an environment in which these values are difficult to nourish. They often face an intergenerational cycle of poverty involving fractured families, dysfunctional school systems and financial strain. Young men are forced to look to all the wrong role models to survive, embracing norms that are not compatible with durable socio-economic stability.
When one looks at other demographics, however, one finds that this pattern is not solely racial. The factors outlined above can lock any group of people into poverty, forcing them to live in neighbourhoods where violence is common and education is poor. In such cases, the cycle continues. Think, for example, of the poor white Americans discussed in J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, who have ended up in distinct but not entirely dissimilar circumstances.
Suggested readingEdward Blum: My battle against affirmative actionBy Freddie Sayers
Besides strong families that nurture habits associated with stability and success in life — literacy, inquisitiveness, a hard work ethic — access to good schools at an early age is essential for remedying the economic disparities. And this is where affirmative action stepped in, no doubt because other factors — such as stable families — were beyond the power of legislators to address.
Seen in this light, affirmative action on its own could never solve the problems of black Americans born into terrible environments, because its operation came too late. It worked in the latter half of the 20th century for those black Americans who came from environments that encouraged high educational attainment, because the only obstacle facing them was formal discrimination based on skin colour. But it could not work for those who came from less auspicious backgrounds. If you were poor, it was never going to be enough.
So, what comes next? Of course, nobody is to blame for the environment into which they are born. But, equally, we have to recognise that there are good and bad environments — and whichever one you are born into does affect your life outcome. Accepting this is the first step to solving the disparities faced not just by black Americans but also by other disadvantaged groups in the US. This was affirmative action’s fundamental flaw: the plight of poor black Americans has little to do with race. It was a policy inspired by good intentions, born into a world that no longer exists.
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Race-conscious affirmative action, in which schools consider applicants’ race as a factor in admissions, has traditionally been treated as a form of “racial classification.” The first time that the Supreme Court pronounced that the use of racial classifications must be subjected to “the most rigid scrutiny” was in 1944, in Korematsu v. United States, when the Court found that the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War to serve national security passed that test and was, therefore, lawful. On Thursday, the Court used the same test, referred to today as “strict scrutiny,” to declare that affirmative action is impermissible.

In two cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by all five conservative Justices, held that race-based affirmative action violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. According to the majority opinion, the use of affirmative action by colleges and universities to admit a diverse student body violates the guarantee of equal protection of the laws and the prohibition on discrimination based on race.

As the standard that the Court uses to determine whether the government’s use of racial classification is permissible, strict scrutiny involves asking whether the practice furthers a “compelling interest” and is “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest. In the S.F.F.A. cases, Roberts said that affirmative action fails both parts of the test.

For around fifty years, the Court has understood a university’s pursuit of the educational benefits of a racially diverse student body as a compelling interest, but Roberts made clear, writing for the 6–3 majority on Thursday, that from now on it will not be treated that way. Although he acknowledged that schools’ interests in diversity are “commendable,” he said that “they are not sufficiently coherent,” arguing that it was unclear how to measure when the goals have been reached and how to know when the use of race should end. He called schools’ diversity interests “inescapably imponderable.”

On the narrow-tailoring test, Roberts wrote that affirmative action fails because of what he asserted to be a lack of “a meaningful connection” between the use of applicants’ race and the interest in diversity. Here, he focussed on the fact that Black, Hispanic, and Asian American people are internally diverse. Roberts argued that “the use of these opaque racial categories undermines” the goal of diversity. He illustrated the point by suggesting that Harvard and U.N.C. would apparently prefer “a class with 15% of students from Mexico over a class with 10% of students from several Latin American countries, simply because the former contains more Hispanic students.” Roberts’s conclusion was that affirmative-action programs were unfocussed and “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

Roberts called out Harvard, in particular, on a number of issues. He pointed out that, while Harvard claimed that the use of race as a “plus” in admissions is never a “negative factor” for any applicant, its consideration of race led to a substantial decrease in the admission of Asian Americans. Harvard’s lawyers had compared its use of race as a factor in admissions to a preference given “to applicants likely to excel in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra,” but Roberts found this argument “hard to take seriously.” Because “college admissions are zero-sum,” he reasoned, “a benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter.” And the point of the equal-protection clause, he wrote, “is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well.”

Since universities can no longer consider applicants’ race in deciding whether to offer them admission, the immediate practical question is what information they can consider about applicants. In a key sentence, toward the end of his ruling, Roberts said, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” (Harvard cited the sentence in a message to its community after the Court’s decision.) Roberts’s point was that “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

It is not surprising that mandating that admissions processes become race-neutral does not require making them race-blind. But it may be tricky to sort out how to include in admissions decisions a consideration of an applicant’s story of overcoming racial discrimination or of being motivated by one’s heritage or culture, while taking care not to run afoul of the Court’s warning that “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.” While some may perceive schools’ continuing ability to consider applicants’ accounts of their experiences with race to be a loophole that effectively maintains race-conscious admissions, only time will tell whether schools can make this nuanced shift—from a person’s race to a person’s story about their race—in evaluating applicants in ways that courts can live with.

Another crucial question is whether schools may continue to pursue their interest in racial diversity through means other than affirmative action––that is, through race-neutral methods. The Court leaves that discussion for another day, which may arrive quite soon, since there are many possible ways in which schools might still seek to affect the racial composition of a class, such as by eliminating the consideration of standardized-test scores, or by undertaking targeted recruiting efforts prior to admissions. For now, student-body diversity is no longer a compelling interest, but it has also not been declared an illegitimate one for schools to seek out.

The S.F.F.A. cases were brought on behalf of Asian Americans claiming racial discrimination, yet Roberts’s opinion said very little about Asian Americans. As if playing parts of a well-orchestrated score, other Justices in the majority picked up on what Roberts left unsaid. In his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the history of discrimination against Asian Americans and the fact that students of Asian descent were once excluded from “white” schools because of their race; in light of this, he said, it was “incongruous” to try to remedy historical wrongs against Black Americans at “the expense of Asian American college applicants.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized Harvard for its lack of socioeconomic diversity and its preferences for legacies, athletes, children of donors, and children of faculty, who end up as roughly a third of the undergraduate class—practices that “undoubtedly benefit white and wealthy applicants.” And Justice Brett Kavanaugh zeroed in on the idea that affirmative action was always seen as temporary, listing all the times that Justices have said so, including in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s famous line, in the landmark affirmative-action case, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003): “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Did the Court actually overrule Grutter? It did not say so explicitly. Roberts’s explanations, in fact, seemed to make the case that Harvard and U.N.C. had violated limits on racial classification set forth in Grutter. But Thomas’s concurrence correctly states “that Grutter is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.” The interest that Grutter approved—the interest in pursuing the benefits of diversity—is no longer to be treated by courts as compelling. But even the liberal dissenters, in their strong defense of the need for race-conscious affirmative action, seemed not quite willing to tether their support of the policy to the goal of student-body diversity. That is because the dissenters, in two opinions, penned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were focussed on the continuing need to remedy the devastating, ongoing effects of the historical subjugation of Black Americans.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the affirmative-action precedents is that since 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court has said that the goal of remedying past societal discrimination and injustice is not a compelling interest for schools to pursue in admissions. The dissents in the S.F.F.A. cases underscored not only that the sins that the United States has visited on Black people did not end after slavery and Jim Crow but also that the original justification for affirmative action which the Court approved five decades ago—diversity—was entirely incommensurate to the profound problem to be addressed and was doomed to fail. ♦

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat do you think about the Supreme Court decision in this term’s affirmative-action cases?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com Conversations of NoteThe Supreme Court’s decision striking down the use of race in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina was released today. Here’s an excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion:
The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well. “One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.” But when a university admits students “on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that [students] of a particular race, because of their race, think alike … at the very least alike in the sense of being different from nonminority students. In doing so, the university furthers “stereotypes that treat individuals as the product of their race, evaluating their thoughts and efforts—their very worth as citizens—according to a criterion barred to the Government by history and the Constitution” …
While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. It depends, says the dissent.
And here is an excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind …
Today, the Court concludes that indifference to race is the only constitutionally permissible means to achieve racial equality in college admissions. That interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today. That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion. Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality …
Society remains highly segregated … Moreover, underrepresented minority students are more likely to live in poverty and attend schools with a high concentration of poverty … In turn, underrepresented minorities are more likely to attend schools with less qualified teachers, less challenging curricula, lower standardized test scores, and fewer extracurricular activities and advanced placement courses. It is thus unsurprising that there are achievement gaps along racial lines, even after controlling for income differences …
Students of color, particularly Black students, are disproportionately disciplined or suspended, interrupting their academic progress and increasing their risk of involvement with the criminal justice system. Underrepresented minorities are less likely to have parents with a postsecondary education who may be familiar with the college application process. Further, low-income children of color are less likely to attend preschool and other early childhood education programs that increase educational attainment. All of these interlocked factors place underrepresented minorities multiple steps behind the starting line in the race for college admissions.
Don’t Break Up With Your FriendsHere at The Atlantic, Olga Khazan describes a pattern she has noticed in multiple female friendships:
First comes the spark of affinity at the group hang: You loved the Ferrante novels too? Then come the bottomless brunches, if you don’t have kids, or playground dates, if you do. Together, you and your new friend weave text threads scheduling coffee and reassuring each other that you’re being normal and that those other people are being crazy. Periodically, the heart emoji interjects.
Eventually, though, comes a minor affront, a misunderstanding, a misalignment—then another, and another. They’re all small things, of course, but like, she always does this. And then, all too often, comes what is known in therapy circles as the “giant block of text.”
What’s more, she writes, “advice is proliferating on how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us. Online guides abound for ‘how to break up with a friend,’ as though the struggle is in what to say, rather than whether to do it. One TikTok therapist suggested that you tell your erstwhile friend ‘you don’t have the capacity to invest’ in the friendship any longer, like you’re a frazzled broker and they’re a fading stock. The massive paragraph of text, though not a friend breakup per se, often reads like one—and leads to one.”Khazan argues for a different approach:
You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends … The resounding chorus from everyone I interviewed was that no one person can fulfill all of your needs. Some friends are good listeners, some invite you on fun trips. The person you call in a crisis might not be the one who tells the best jokes at happy hour.
American Spoilsports In an attempt to attract a younger fan base, professional sports leagues are touting their commitments to social justice. Ethan Strauss argues that the attendant politicization carries a cost:
America is composed of many societies and cultures. Among these cultures is a cohort of people who believe that sports serve a higher purpose, if not a massively important societal function. Kenny Chesney’s red state-rooted song “The Boys of Fall” is a good example. It’s an ode to football, from the high school level on up, that’s deeply emotional and totally without irony.
This game really matters to a lot of people, even if the New York Times so often portrays it in a negative light. As is true of sports generally, it binds the young to the old, and directs men, especially, towards a form of combat engagement that doesn’t raze cities. It’s a spiritual experience, an endeavor with almost mystical properties.
Back before sports became a massive industry, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens, his famous work on the importance of “play” in culture generation. In it, Huizinga coined the term “magic circle” to describe the space where we suspend normal rules in favor of a temporary artificial reality, e.g. a game. In Huizinga’s construction, we are under a spell when participating in this reality. Those who break the spell are called “spoil-sports,” a term that’s endured to this day. From Homo Ludens:
The spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusion, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.
In bringing politics to the magic circle, the leagues themselves have become spoil-sports, breaking the spell over certain fans.
More Money, More ProblemsAt Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok tries to explain why many people think that it was easier for families to thrive in bygone generations, even though the economic data say otherwise. He notes nostalgia and the effects of social media, but focuses on the value of time, drawing on a theory expressed by Staffan Burenstam Linder in The Harried Leisure Class.Tabarrok writes:
Real GDP per capita has doubled since the early 1980s but there are still only 24 hours in a day. How do consumers respond to all that increased wealth and no additional time? By focusing consumption on goods that are cheap to consume in time. We consume “fast food,” we choose to watch television or movies “on demand,” rather than read books or go to plays or live music performances. We consume multiple goods at the same time as when we eat and watch, talk and drive, and exercise and listen. And we manage, schedule and control our time more carefully with time planners, “to do” lists and calendaring.
That can be difficult:
Time management is a cognitively strenuous task, leaving us feeling harried. As the opportunity cost of time increases, our concern about “wasting” our precious hours grows more acute. On balance, we are better off, but the blessing of high-value time can overwhelm some individuals, just as can the ready availability of high-calorie food.
So, whose time has seen an especially remarkable appreciation in the past few decades? Women’s time has experienced a surge in value. As more women have pursued higher education and stepped into professional roles, their time’s value has more than doubled, incentivizing a substantial reorganization of daily life with consequent transaction costs. It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption requires a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively.
It feels hard.
Covering similar terrain, Matthew Yglesias argues that “if you want a genuine 1950s lifestyle today, you can probably afford it.” He explains:
Middle-class people from the past were poor by our standards. In 1950, the average new single-family home was 983 square feet. If you’re willing to live someplace unfashionable like Cleveland, I can find you a 1,346-square-foot, three-bedroom house for $189,900. That’s an estimated monthly payment of $1,382 per month or $16,584 per year. Let’s say you’re living by the rule of thumb that says housing should be 30% of your annual income. Well, that pencils out to $55,280 per year. Is that out of reach for the modern Ohioan? The BLS says the mean wage for all occupations in the Cleveland metro area is $59,530. There’s no all-occupations median, unfortunately. But for postal service clerks, the median is $56,200. Suppose you know a skilled trade and you can apply for this mechanic job at the airport that pays $32/hour. That’s north of $60k per year.
So what about child care? Summer camp? All that Baumol stuff? Well, it doesn’t matter, because you’re thriving 1950s-style and your wife takes care of all that. People think it’s weird that you guys only have one car, but that’s the ‘50s for you. It’s a 27-minute commute to your job at the airport by metro. You’re four blocks from the elementary school and two blocks from the playground, so mom and the kids are fine to be carless if you need it for the day, and it’s only a 25-minute walk to the shopping center at Kamm’s Corners.
Of course with three kids and a modest income, you’re not taking vacations by airplane or dining out much, but 1950s people didn’t do that either … For $80 you can get a television with a bigger screen and better resolution than what RCA was selling for $400 in 1965.

Provocation of the WeekIn Liberties, James Kirchick argues that an important figure in the struggle for gay rights doesn’t get his due:
While Stonewall was the birthplace of gay liberation, the movement for gay civic equality had begun much earlier. After some fizzling starts in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1950’s, the effort found its footing in the more staid precincts of Washington, D.C. The leaders of this cause may not have been “revolting” drag queens, but they were revolutionaries, of a sort.
The central figure was a Harvard-trained astronomer named Franklin E. Kameny. In 1957, Kameny was fired from his job with the Army Map Service on account of his homosexuality. Thousands of people had already been terminated on such grounds, but Kameny was the first to challenge his dismissal, a decision that would, in the words of the legal scholar William Eskridge, eventually make him “the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement.’” In 1960, Kameny appealed to the Supreme Court to restore his job. The petition that he wrote invoked the noblest aspirations of the American founding: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To the government’s claim that his firing was justified on account of its right to prohibit those engaged in “immoral” conduct, Kameny replied with what was, for its time, a radical, even scandalous, retort: “Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality, whether by mere inclination or by overt act, is not only not immoral, but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.” He continued: “In their being nothing more than a reflection of ancient primitive, archaic, obsolete taboos and prejudices, the policies are an incongruous, anachronistic relic of the Stone Age carried over into the Space Age—and a harmful relic!”
Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, Kameny expressed his outrage at being treated as a “second-rate citizen,” and like the leaders of that heroic struggle he appealed to America’s revolutionary founding document for redress:
We may commence with the Declaration of Independence, and its affirmation, as an “inalienable right,” that of “the pursuit of happiness.” Surely a most fundamental, unobjectionable, and unexceptionable element in human happiness is the right to bestow affection upon, and to receive affection from whom one wishes. Yet, upon pain of severe penalty, the government itself would abridge this right for the homosexual.
Kameny’s arguments may have been revolutionary, but his goals were not. He had no desire to overturn the American government; he just wanted it to live up to its self-proclaimed principles. When his appeal to the Supreme Court was denied, Kameny founded the first sustained organization in the United States to represent the interests of “homophiles” (as some gays called themselves at the time), the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., in which capacity he led peaceful protests, wrote letters to every member of Congress, and engaged in public awareness campaigns. In 1965 — four years before Stonewall — Kameny organized the first picket for gay rights outside the White House. Men were required to wear jackets and ties; women, blouses and skirts reaching below the knee. “If you’re asking for equal employment rights,” he instructed his nine comrades, “look employable.” Eight years later, he played a crucial role in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its register of mental disorders.
To the younger and more militant gay liberationists of New York and San Francisco, Kameny’s dedication to liberal reform reeked of assimilationism. Many of them came to view Kameny with contempt, speaking of him in the same tones with which black nationalists derided Martin Luther King, Jr. With his fussy dress codes, his carefully typewritten letters, and his veneration of the Constitution, Kameny was a practitioner of dreaded “respectability politics,” which for radicals (then and now) has been the great scourge of American liberalism. But Kameny was no conformist. In his petition in 1960, he declared:
These entire proceedings, from the Civil Service Commission regulation through its administration and the consequent adverse personnel actions, to respondents’ courtroom arguments, are a classic, textbook exercise in the imposition of conformity for the sake of nothing else than conformity, and of the rigorous suppression of dissent, difference, and non-conformity. There is no more reason or need for a citizen’s sexual tastes or habits to conform to those of the majority than there is for his gastronomic ones to do so, and there is certainly no rational basis for making his employment, whether private or by the government, contingent upon such conformity.
In 2015—fifty years after staging his picket outside the White House, and four years after his death at the age of eighty-six—Kameny was vindicated when the very Supreme Court that had refused to hear his case of wrongful termination ruled that the Constitution recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry.
That’s all for this week. A happy Fourth of July to my American readers. I’ll be on vacation next week, so I’ll see you all the week after that.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

With today’s decision curtailing affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court has landed another powerful blow for older white America in its struggle against the kaleidoscopically diverse and more populous younger generations for control of the nation’s direction.The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates. Against that backdrop, the decision could widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors. That seems a formula guaranteed to heighten social tension.“Education is the system that has the most powerful effect on reproducing race, class, and gender differences across generations,” Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. Banning affirmative action will mean that “the people who govern us, the elites in American society, will increasingly not look like America.”In the broadest sense, the Republican-appointed justices have moved to buttress the affluence and status that allow white people to wield the most influence in society, and to diminish the possibility that accelerating demographic change will force a renegotiation of that balance of power. In that way, the ruling is a judicial extension of the proliferating red-state laws meant to constrain the potential influence of younger generations through measures making it more difficult to vote, banning books, and censoring how teachers talk about race and gender inequities.All of these conflicts reflect the mounting tension between what I’ve called the brown and the gray: the racially and culturally diverse younger generations who are becoming the cornerstone of the Democratic political coalition, and the mostly white older generations who provide the foundation of Republican electoral strength.“The attack on affirmative action is part of the larger, conservative extremist attack on young people and future generations of Americans who are more progressive, open-minded, racially and ethnically diverse, and inclusive than the waning demographic of the electorate,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, told me in an email.Affirmative action in education, employment, and government contracting has always been an imperfect tool to promote racial equality. It has prompted ambivalence even among many of its beneficiaries, who have been confronted with questions about whether they “deserved” their place in classrooms or on worksites. Skeptics see it as a violation of traditional notions of merit and fairness. Opposition to affirmative action in education has been most intense among white and Asian American voters, but it has also faced resistance in polls from substantial numbers of Latinos and a measurable minority of African Americans. Even in liberal-leaning California, a ballot initiative to ban consideration of race in college admissions passed easily in 1996. A measure to repeal the ban failed by an even larger margin in 2020.But, for all its limitations, affirmative action has proved crucial for maintaining any alignment between the diversifying youth population and the student body at the most elite educational institutions. Even with affirmative action, experts note, the racial makeup of the most selective schools has not kept pace. “There has been no serious attempt to achieve diversity commensurate with the high-school class in America,” Carnevale said. “That’s just not the game that we play.”Growing diversity in the nation’s youth population is, as Carnevale put it, a “runaway train.” Whereas about three-fourths of Baby Boomers and older generations are white, kids of color comprise about 45 percent of Millennials, almost exactly half of Generation Z, and an absolute majority of the youngest Americans born since 2012 (generally considered the cutoff for Gen Z), according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro.In 2014, for the first time, kids of color constituted a majority of public-school K–12 students. The National Center for Educational Statistics estimates that kids of color became a majority of all high-school graduates for the first time last year; the center projects that by the end of this decade, minority kids will comprise about 57 percent of all high-school graduates. As recently as around 2000, about seven of every 10 graduates still were white.This profound transformation is inevitably reshaping the entering class of college students. Kids of color have grown from about a fourth of the entering class for colleges and universities nationwide in 1995 to nearly two-fifths in 2009 to almost half today. But, as Carnevale notes, even with many institutions using some form of affirmative action, white kids remain overrepresented, and Black and Latino kids in particular remain substantially underrepresented at the most exclusive institutions.In 2021, Black and Latino students combined accounted for only a little over a fifth of the entering class at the public and private colleges rated the most selective by Barron’s magazine, according to new data from the Georgetown Center provided exclusively to The Atlantic. Asian American students accounted for about another one in eight of their students. White students, though now down to only about half of all incoming students, still filled about three-fifths of the seats in the entering class of the most elite institutions, the center found.The Black and Latino share of the entering class steadily rises in the institutions that are less selective. They accounted for about a third of the incoming class at the public and private schools in the middle tier of selectivity, and almost 45 percent of the entering class at the least-selective “open access” schools.Taken together, these patterns leave big majorities of Black, Latino, and Native American first-year students attending the least-selective schools—about three-fifths of Black students, and two-thirds of Latino and Native American students. By contrast, well below half of all white and Asian American students attend these schools.This distribution matters in part because the most elite institutions spend more than three times as much per student as the open-access schools and generate much better outcomes on such key measures as college completion, graduate-school attainment, and lifetime earnings. And despite the claim that affirmative action “mismatches” kids of color into demanding institutions where they can’t succeed, Carnevale says the evidence is unmistakable that the greater investment of elite schools is especially beneficial in improving results for kids from low-income backgrounds. “The lower income you are, the more you gain from a selective college,” Carnevale told me. “In fact, the gains for minorities and low-income kids far exceed those for the usual white kids who go to a selective college.”Harder to quantify, but perhaps even more profound, is the potential impact on the nation’s leadership class of further reducing the number of nonwhite students at the most prestigious colleges and universities. Joe Biden is the only president since 1988 who did not receive either an undergraduate or a graduate degree from an Ivy League school; all but one of the Supreme Court Justices (Amy Coney Barrett) graduated from law school at Harvard or Yale. “If opportunity is concentrated among certain racial groups and not equally open to others, that will necessarily create a caste system that is not sustainable in a functioning democracy,” Nelson, at the Legal Defense Fund, said.Victor Shi, a UCLA student and strategy director at Voters of Tomorrow, a liberal-leaning group that tries to engage Gen Z in politics, says his contemporaries are already aware of how little their diversity is reflected in the nation’s public and private leadership. “That’s one of the biggest systemic issues: Are there enough people up there who represent people of color?” Shi told me. “Getting rid of affirmative action reemphasizes this outlook among Gen Z that our systems are broken.”In a dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the three Democratic-appointed Justices emphasized the likelihood that the majority’s ruling will dangerously widen the gap between a society that is changing rapidly and a leadership class that could remain disproportionately White. “The Court ignores the dangerous consequences of an America where its leadership does not reflect the diversity of the People,” Sotomayor wrote. “At its core, today’s decision exacerbates segregation and diminishes the inclusivity of our Nation’s institutions in service of superficial neutrality that promotes indifference to inequality and ignores the reality of race.The experience in states that have ended affirmative action leaves little doubt that the Court’s decision will in fact further diminish the number of Black and Latino kids on elite campuses. In separate legal briefs, the state universities in California and Michigan—two states where voters have banned affirmative action in higher education—recounted the extensive efforts they have had to make to preserve diversity without it.These measures have included greatly increased outreach to inner-city schools, new scholarship programs for minority kids, deemphasizing standardized test scores, guaranteeing admission to some percentage of students with the best grades in every school, and providing more advantage in admission decisions to those who come from low-income backgrounds. Despite all these initiatives, the schools explained, they could not maintain racial diversity commensurate with the overall youth population. As the University of California concluded in its brief, “There remain stark differences between the demographics of UC’s enrolled student population … and California public high school graduates.” Michele Siqueiros, the president of the Campaign for College Affordability, a group that advocates for low-income and minority students in higher education, told me that with the Court barring affirmative action, the nation risks reverting “to the kind of segregation … that ensured that only white wealthy men could go to college in this country.” To avoid that fate, she says, advocates will need to more forcefully challenge every way the system tilts against low-income and minority applicants—perhaps most important among them legacy admissions that favor the children of alumni (who tend to be mostly white at selective schools).Plenty of admissions practices like these undermine the idea that affirmative action represents a unique departure from the principle of impartial “merit,” Carnevale pointed out: “If you did college admissions [solely] by academic talent, half the people in the elite schools would have to leave.” Absent such a fundamental reassessment of admissions, the GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices have now made much more likely a future in which the most elite educational institutions remain mostly white (or even grow whiter) as society becomes more diverse. By all indications, that is a future likely to be welcomed by the electoral coalition that placed those justices on the Court.Across a wide range of issues—including ending the constitutional right to abortion, privileging claims of religious liberty over LGBTQ rights, restricting government regulation of firearms, and blocking federal efforts to confront climate change—the GOP-appointed majority is systematically ruling in ways that reflect the priorities of a predominantly white and Christian electoral coalition. The Court majority has rejected some of the most extreme and fringe legal theories popular in that coalition, particularly the so-called “independent state legislature doctrine” and challenges to the 2020 election outcome. But such decisions remain the exception. In its ruling against affirmative action, the Court majority has reified the bedrock belief of most Republican voters that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. Through these decisions and others, the Court has become a powerful weapon for a Republican coalition that is defining itself, especially in the Donald Trump era, in open opposition to the demographic and cultural changes reshaping American life in the 21st century.These rulings from this majority not only collide with the dominant views among Gen Z, but in many cases threaten the intrinsic identity of a generation that is more racially diverse, more likely to identify as LGBTQ, and less likely to belong to any organized religion than any in American history.Americans born since 1980 already represent a majority of the U.S. population, and by 2028 they almost certainly will become the biggest single bloc of the nation’s voters. Yet, with the two oldest of the conservative Justices only in their mid-70s, this Supreme Court majority could rule against Gen Z’s preferences for another decade or more. The choice to end affirmative action precisely as the nation’s youth population reaches unprecedented levels of diversity shows just how fiercely the gray may fight to avoid ceding power to the brown.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.“Second place is just the first loser” is an aphorism widely attributed to the legendary NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt. Or as my late father put it, (mostly) jokingly, “It’s not enough to win. Your friends have to lose too.”We may not want others to know we think this way. But think this way we do, because humans are born and wired to compete with one another. What was probably an evolutionary trait derived from a chronic scarcity of resources in our premodern past, the need to win still manifests in many areas of life, sometimes in absurd ways. People jockey for position in line to get on an airplane. They compare how many “likes” they have on social media. We see billionaires envy multibillionaires, and famous actors complaining about the Oscar or Emmy that should have been theirs. In my own world of academia, I have witnessed bitter disputes over a few square feet of office space.[Read: The real hero of Ted Lasso]Although the competitive spirit may be as natural as breathing air, it does not always lead to human flourishing. On the contrary, left unmanaged, it can create misery for ourselves and others. Fortunately, there is a formula to solve this problem without unrealistically suggesting that we dispense entirely with our competitive urge: Instead of always going for gold, shoot for the bronze.To expand on the wisdom of Earnhardt, although second place may be the first loser, third place can be the real winner—at least when it comes to happiness and longevity. This conclusion comes from research conducted on Olympic athletes. In a 1995 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, scholars studied the emotional reactions of silver and bronze medalists in the 1992 Summer Olympic Games both immediately after their events and later on the awards podium. They discovered that the bronze winners appeared consistently happier on average than the silver medalists. (The study did not consider the gold-winning athletes.)More recent research has looked at the life span of all three medalist categories. A 2018 study in the journal Economics & Human Biology tracked the average longevity of those representing the U.S. in the Olympic Games from 1904 to 1936 and found that the athlete whose best performance was silver lived to 72. Gold medalists beat this by a solid four years, living to 76. But first prize in longevity went to the bronze medalists, who lived to 78.[Gene B. Sperling: Punching Steph Curry]The study had a handy explanation for this discrepancy: “Dissatisfactory competition outcomes may adversely affect health.” In other words, silver medalists see themselves as the first loser because they look up to the top step and compare themselves only with the gold medalists, whereas the bronze winners compare themselves favorably with all the others who never made it onto the podium at all. (It would be interesting to know how long the poor souls who came in fourth lived.)Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.This hypothesis is based on a considerable body of literature showing the difference between upward and downward social comparison. When we compare ourselves with those who have more money, power, or achievements, we often feel like, well, losers. What exactly does famous or rich or fast mean, besides having more celebrity, money, or athletic ability than someone else (that is, you)?That is why people so commonly feel bad about themselves after checking out the lives of others on social media who post only about their victories and celebrations. In contrast, downward comparison makes people feel better about themselves and, thus, happier. In fact, researchers have found that comparing our own circumstances with the unfortunate lot of others is a reliable technique for reducing a negative mood—and not out of schadenfreude or malice but because rewards in life are relative. So, as for the medal-winning athletes, the perception of other people’s position helps you establish your own sense of good fortune.The worldly happiness strategy of striving for gold every day is foolish. Fixing your hopes for contentment on being No. 1 is about the most precarious approach you can adopt. More likely, you will spend most of your time feeling like a silver medalist: always aspiring, pinning your bliss on a single outcome, but succumbing again and again to the tyranny of probability—and disappointment. Much better, then, to aim for healthy competition in which you do your best without expectation of being the absolute winner. Here are three things to keep in mind as you pursue a happy, bronze-medalist lifestyle.1. Think Local, Not Global
One of the biggest problems in modern social comparison is the expanding pool of people with whom, in nearly every area of life, you can compare yourself. We are confronted daily with details about the most wealthy, powerful, glamorous, and admired people on the planet. Modern technology offers competing standards that are impossible to meet.Realizing this and adjusting the comparison pool can help fight the resulting modern angst. Rather than looking at the lives of the rich and famous on Instagram or Hulu, get involved in the lives of people in your local community. Rather than dreaming about giving a concert at Carnegie Hall, go play at your neighborhood community center. Living locally gives us a proper frame of reference for our own accomplishments—one that some scholars contend better matches our ancestral environment and therefore gives us the contentment we need.2. Don’t Make Your Competition “One and Done”
Competition is especially problematic for happiness when it involves a one-off event, such as the Olympics. We need lots of opportunities to excel, and staking our whole sense of self on one event is likely to result in disappointment. Even if you win, a singular victory means that your greatest moment is immediately in the past. A former star athlete once told me that his biggest trophy was now a source of bitterness. “It sits there on my shelf mocking me,” he said, “because I can no longer live up to it.” Much better, if possible, to subject yourself to contests in a sustained pattern over time. In business, for example, make friendly competition a routine event where sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t.[Arthur C. Brooks: America is pursuing happiness in all the wrong places]Perhaps this sounds a little unambitious or unnatural to you, but what I am describing is an actual adaptive strategy in nature. Researchers report this fascinating finding about how young rats play-fight as part of their development. Invariably, one rat attacks first, gains advantage—and could “win” most of the time. But to keep the bouts going, the opponent lets the defending rat prevail about 30 percent of the time. Compete like a happy rat.3. Contend Against Yourself Instead of Others
One of the problems with most competition against others is that it tends to lower the intrinsic motivation, and thus enjoyment, that people derive from their activities. Decades ago, researchers showed this in such enduring experiments as asking people to solve puzzles and then measuring the interest they reported: They found the puzzles less rewarding when competing against others rather than against the clock. Simply having a time limit means competing against themselves—which is often more fun. The principle at work here is that trying to improve your own past performance provides a sense not of “winning” but of progress.In case all else fails, I should mention one last way to go for the bronze that comes from the ancient Greeks. The late archaeologist Stephen Gaylord Miller described the funeral games of Patroklos, in which athletes exerted themselves physically and mentally as if to state triumphantly, “I am alive!” If you adopt this approach in your own daily life contests, you will rightfully claim the sweetest prize: life itself. And the only person to whom you will have to compare yourself is you.

The Supreme Court has stuck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In a 6–3 decision today, the Court ruled that both Harvard and the University of North Carolina's admissions policies engaged in unlawful racial discrimination, violating the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The decision effectively ends almost 50 years of legalized racial discrimination in the college admissions process.
"Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the Court's majority opinion. "In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race." 
The ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College marks a decisive victory for those who had long hailed the practice as unjust and unconstitutional. It also reaffirms a reading of the 14th Amendment as prohibiting racial discrimination in all but the narrowest of circumstances, even when such discrimination is done in service of an otherwise "noble" goal. 
The Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website) wrote an amicus brief last year urging the Court to rule against Harvard and UNC.
The evidence that both universities engaged in racial discrimination, particularly against Asian applicants, is staggering. According to the ruling, "over 80% of all black applicants in the top academic decile were admitted to UNC, while under 70% of white and Asian applicants in that decile were admitted." At Harvard, an Asian American applicant in the top academic decile has a lower chance of being admitted than a black student in the fourth-lowest academic decile.
"While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue," wrote Roberts. "In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit."
While the ruling has attracted strong condemnation from supporters of race-conscious college admissions, polling suggests that a majority of Americans of all racial groups disapprove of these policies. A 2019 Pew Research poll found that 73 percent of all Americans, including 62 percent of black Americans and 65 percent of Hispanic Americans, did not think that colleges should be able to consider an applicant's race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions.
As reflected in the Court's ruling, the best argument against affirmative action in college admissions is a simple one: All people are created equal and should be treated equally before the law. Treating individuals differently based on their race is an unacceptable affront to this idea, even if it is in the service of a well-intentioned goal. Taking this idea further, treating college applicants differently based on any demographic trait—including legacy status—offends this same principle.
It's possible to believe these principles while also acknowledging that many racial minority groups—black Americans in particular—are affected by past and present racial discrimination. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion, "While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law."
The post Supreme Court on Affirmative Action: 'Eliminating Racial Discrimination Means Eliminating All of It' appeared first on Reason.com.

The Supreme Court has effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions. On Thursday, the Court's six-justice conservative majority released opinions in two hotly anticipated cases—one concerning Harvard University, the other involving the University of North Carolina—ruling as expected that college administrators violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment when they cherry-pick the student body based on racial factors.
"Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
This outcome is a significant victory for principles of fairness, individuality, and nondiscrimination. It corrects a grave injustice that has persisted for decades. In 2003's Grutter v. Bollinger decision, the Supreme Court permitted colleges to use race-based admissions as a method of promoting diversity on campuses. This rationale never made much sense; the sharper defenders of affirmative action had tended to argue that the practice was necessary in order to correct the historical mistreatment of specific racial groups, not because of "the bizarre jerry-rigged 'diversity' sham," as Freddie deBoer describes it.
As a result of Grutter, institutions like Harvard continued to practice race-based admissions in pursuit of skin-deep diversity. The obvious and inescapable result was widespread discrimination against Asian applicants, who would constitute a much larger proportion of the campus body if not for admissions officers' penchant for crude racial stereotyping.
The Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website) wrote an amicus brief last year urging the Court to rule against Harvard and UNC. As Reason's Emma Camp noted, "At Harvard, an Asian American applicant in the top academic decile has a lower chance of being admitted than a black student in the fourth-lowest academic decile." These were immoral policies, and today's landmark ruling offers a long-overdue correction.
Race-based admissions policies were also decidedly unpopular; 69 percent of poll respondents, including 58 percent of Democrats, opposed them. Perhaps that is why some critics of the ruling are adopting such a curious line of attack. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), for instance, took to Twitter to bemoan that the Supreme Court has ignored a more serious example of unfairness in higher education: legacy admissions.

If SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous "colorblindness" claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged.
70% of Harvard's legacy applicants are white. SCOTUS didn't touch that - which would have impacted them and their patrons.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 29, 2023

This is an extremely silly point. The reason the Supreme Court weighed in on race-based admissions rather than legacy admissions is that the former was the issue being litigated. For the Supreme Court to consider legacy admissions, someone would have to bring a lawsuit about this issue.
But supporters of nondiscrimination can further overcome this criticism by conceding a basic point: Legacy admission—the widespread practice of giving preferential treatment to the scions of alumni—is, in fact, unfair and should be abolished.
Hundreds of colleges and universities around the country grant preferential status to legacies, and even institutions that officially disclaim this practice may still engage in it. My alma mater, the University of Michigan, has stated that "legacy status is not a preference in the admissions process but does serve as context—outside of the admissions review—in understanding a student's interest." Inside Higher Ed found this statement to be far from clear, and some students have affirmed that they were, in fact, legacy admits.
Michigan is a public university, and as such, it is accountable to the state government. It would be good policy for state legislatures to prohibit public educational institutions from considering factors such as legacy status. Indeed, there is no reason for a state school—one subsidized by the taxpayers—to prefer applicants who satisfy academically irrelevant criteria. Let the very best and brightest students thrive on the campus.
The very fact that legacy admissions still exist is not whatsoever a reason to oppose the curbing of affirmative action; eliminating explicit racial discrimination is obviously a noble goal in and of itself. But to any naysayer who disdains the Harvard and UNC ruling by saying that legacy admissions should face the same fate: Your terms are acceptable.
The post Of Course Legacy Admissions Should Follow Affirmative Action to the Grave appeared first on Reason.com.

The federal government is on pace to borrow $116 trillion over the next 30 years, and merely paying the interest costs on the accumulated national debt will require a staggering 35 percent of annual federal revenue by the end of that time frame.
And that's likely an optimistic scenario.
Those sobering figures were published Wednesday by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as part of the number-crunching agency's new long-term budget outlook. The report once again points to an unsustainable fiscal trajectory driven by a federal government that's addicted to borrowing—even as it becomes readily apparent that the bill is coming due.
"Such high and rising debt would have significant economic and financial consequences," the CBO warns. Among other things, the mountain of debt will "slow economic growth, drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt, elevate the risk of a fiscal crisis, increase the likelihood of other adverse effects that could occur more gradually, and make the nation's fiscal position more vulnerable to an increase in interest rates."
The formula for massive deficits and unsustainable levels of borrowing is actually pretty simple: federal spending that far exceeds what the government collects in tax revenue. Over the past 30 years, federal spending has averaged 21 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), a rough measure of the size of the whole American economy, while tax revenue has averaged 17.2 percent, the CBO notes. That's not great, but the future looks much worse. By 2053, the CBO expects federal spending to grow to 29.1 percent of GDP, while revenue climbs to just 19.1 percent.

Entitlements are the main driver of that future spending surge. Social Security spending will rise from about 5 percent of GDP to about 6.2 percent over the next 30 years. Costs for Medicare and Medicaid will jump from 5.8 percent of GDP to 8.6 percent by 2053.
Financing the national debt itself will become a major share of federal spending in the next few decades. The CBO projects that interest payments on the debt will cost $71 trillion over the next 30 years and will consume more than one-third of all federal revenue by the 2050s.
"America's fiscal outlook is more dangerous and daunting than ever, threatening our economy and the next generation," Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which advocates for fiscal responsibility, said in a statement. The group responded to the new CBO report by renewing its calls for a bipartisan fiscal commission to consider plans for stabilizing the debt.
As a share of GDP, the national debt reached a record high of 106 percent during World War II. The CBO projects the record to be broken in 2029, and the debt will keep climbing—to 181 percent of GDP by 2053.

The CBO bases these projections on current law, which suggests this might actually be a rosy scenario. Obviously, the CBO cannot account for new future spending or tax cuts that might be financed by borrowing, and it does not include the possibility of another national emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic that could serve as an impetus to borrow heavily on a temporary basis. But the projections also leave out other things, like the possibility that Congress will extend the Trump administration's tax cuts past their planned expiration in 2025—which would add to the deficit and require more borrowing in the future—or the possibility that Social Security's impending insolvency will be papered over with yet more borrowing. And do you really believe that no Congress or president will hike spending without offsetting tax increases in the next three decades?
Under an alternative scenario in which the Trump administration's tax cuts are extended and federal spending grows at the same rate as the economy (rather than in line with inflation, as the CBO assumes), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects the debt to hit 222 percent of GDP by 2053.
There's one shred of good news inside the CBO's latest report, however. Compared to last year, long-term borrowing is expected to be slightly lower. That's the result of the debt ceiling deal struck last month between Congress and the White House. The deal included spending caps on nondefense discretionary spending for the next two years, and even that very limited bit of fiscal responsibility can have a measurable impact on future deficits.
Still, the modest decline in future deficits mostly serves to illustrate the daunting size of the federal government's debt problem. By 2053, the debt will more than double the size of America's economy—and, again, that's only if you assume borrowing won't increase for any reason in the next three decades.
"This level of debt would be truly unprecedented," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in a statement. "Time is of the essence; we simply cannot afford to keep borrowing at this unsustainable rate."
The post CBO Projects Huge Deficits, $116 Trillion in New Borrowing Over the Next 30 Years appeared first on Reason.com.

In Alabama, the government can seize and start forfeiture proceedings against vehicles that are used or are intended to be used to transport or facilitate the sale, receipt, possession, or concealment of certain property, including controlled substances. Those proceedings can take months, even years, to resolve. Hamila Culley and Lena Sutton both had their vehicles seized for other individuals’ actions and retained for more than a year until obtaining a judgment that each was an innocent owner. They filed separate putative class actions claiming that Alabama’s failure to provide a prompt retention hearing violated due process.

The district court and then the Eleventh Circuit held that Alabama did not violate due process, with the Eleventh Circuit concluding that a merits hearing was all the process they were due. Both applied the speedy trial test in Barker v. Wingo (1972), rather than the three-factor balancing test in Mathews v. Eldridge (1976). Under Mathews, which is commonly used in civil-forfeiture cases, due process will often require a prompt retention hearing. Although Alabama amended its civil-forfeiture law in 2021 to give innocent owners a right to a retention hearing, not all states have extended this procedural protection. This means that innocent owners can lose their vehicles for significant periods of time before being afforded an opportunity to prove their innocence.

The Supreme Court has now taken the case and MI has joined the Goldwater Institute and Pacific Legal Foundation on a brief that will argue, as then-Judge Sotomayor put it in 2002, that a speedy-trial test might address “the speed with which civil forfeiture proceedings themselves are instituted or conducted,” but it doesn’t address the availability of “a prompt post-seizure opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of the [government’s] retention of the [property] while those proceedings are conducted.” So the Court should establish a due-process right to a timely retention hearing.

Photo: kozmoat98/iStock

On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis—and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.For close followers of the ongoing conflict in Russia and Ukraine, it’s not unusual to see playful reaction emoji sitting just beneath pictures, videos, and text documenting the horrors of war in real time. Since Russia’s invasion, one of the quickest ways to follow the chaos on the ground has been to download Telegram and wade through live updates from citizens, soldiers, and the government—a digital morass of confusing, contradictory information. Just weeks into the Ukraine war, Time proclaimed that the decade-old app was “the digital battle space,” a moniker that held up over the weekend as onlookers used Telegram to try to suss out whether Russia was heading into civil war.“The RU/UA war is 99% Telegram,” Aric Toler, an investigative journalist for Bellingcat, which has reported extensively on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, told me this week over direct message. “Prigozhin broadcasted, organized, and orchestrated this all from the platform.” The app and individual channels within it—Prigozhin’s has grown to 1.3 million followers since it launched last November—are effectively feeders for the rest of the internet, according to Toler, who monitors, verifies, and reports on Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels: “Almost every bit of information about the war on Twitter, [Instagram, Facebook, and others] is downstream of Telegram.” Many popular accounts on these social platforms merely repackage what they see on Telegram, often using unreliable programs to translate the channels.Though public download numbers indicate that it has fewer users than chat platforms such as WhatsApp—700 million versus 2 billion every month—Telegram is the communications platform of choice for many activists, crypto scammers, drug dealers, terrorists, extremists, banned influencers, and conspiracy theorists. Because the app is free to download, lightweight, and marketed as privacy-forward and anti-censorship, it attracts people looking to fly under the radar. It’s a theater of war, a clandestine marketplace, and a safe haven for the deplatformed to build their alternative realities, which makes Telegram an excellent fit for the turbulence of the 2020s and perhaps the most important app in the world today.The brainchild of brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, Telegram shares the techno-libertarian sensibilities of its creators, especially its CEO, Pavel. The brothers, who founded a popular Russian social network, VKontakte, launched Telegram around the time Kremlin allies took over the platform. Pavel Durov told The New York Times in 2014 that Telegram was conceived out of a desire to have a free and secure communications platform out of the hands of the Russian state. Since its inception, Durov, known for his nomadic lifestyle and for posting cryptic philosophical messages and shirtless pictures of himself on Instagram, has positioned Telegram as a staunch anti-surveillance tool and rebuffed critics who have argued that the platform offers organization and communication abilities to dangerous groups.[Read: How Ivermectin became a belief system]“Our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” he told a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015, arguing that ISIS, which used Telegram to claim responsibility for or plan numerous attacks in Europe, “will always find [another] way to communicate.” Durov has touted Telegram’s capacity to act as a form of digital resistance and has publicly fought Russian efforts to view encrypted messages on the platform. And the app has indeed been crucial in nations such as Belarus, where it was used for 2020 election protests, and in China last year during the COVID-lockdown demonstrations.It’s not just that Telegram offers end-to-end encryption, a feature that shields messages from any outside party that would seek to access them, and one that many tech companies, including Apple and Meta, support. The app’s leadership also takes a pointedly hands-off approach to content moderation even for public-facing content, aside from illegal pornography and explicit “public calls to violence.” Far-right influencers such as Milo Yiannopoulos and neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Nick Fuentes have kept posting on Telegram even after being deplatformed elsewhere; the app offered these influencers a place to amass fans, spout hateful rhetoric, and solicit donations, all without having to compete for eyeballs in an algorithmic feed. Telegram has also enabled the distribution of shooter manifestos as well as information about manufacturing weapons—in 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks anti-Semitism, declared that Telegram was the “online weapon of choice for [the] violent far-right.” And it was allegedly used by some to coordinate the January 6 insurrection, after which it saw a substantial influx of accounts following conspiracy theorists and election deniers. (Shortly after the attack on the Capitol, Telegram said it removed “dozens” of channels for inciting violence.)Unmoderated free-for-alls that attract dangerous fringe groups are as old as the internet. What makes Telegram different is both its size and its opacity. Although many channels are easily searchable, a great deal of what goes on inside the platform happens in invite-only channels, making it difficult for academics, journalists, or law enforcement to scrutinize or study. A recent Wired investigation of Telegram’s booming gray market for abortion pills turned up 200 public channels containing 47,000 messages, but trying to understand the scope of the market—who was selling legitimate pharmaceuticals and which organizations were fronts or scams—was nearly impossible for the journalists to untangle. Because of the lack of oversight, Telegram channels are the place where information circulates in private after being banned by bigger platforms, as was the case in 2019, when the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto spread widely in Eastern European countries in the weeks after the attack.“It’s a Wild West kind of platform where anything can kind of happen, so I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s a perfect place for chaos,” Jared Holt, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who monitors right extremism, told me.[Read: The three logics of the Prigozhin putsch]That chaos is most apparent during frenetic news events. Although Telegram is a valuable firsthand resource during breaking news, it’s also a confusion machine. The platform offers verification for public figures, but it is nevertheless flooded with sketchy eyewitness accounts and strategically placed propaganda. In a recent paper, the scholars Mariëlle Wijermars and Tetyana Lokot observed that, during the Belarus-election protests, Telegram’s marketing of the platform as a secure, prodemocratic organizing tool led dissidents “to perceive it as an ally in their struggle against repressions and digital censorship,” prompting them to sign up in droves. Meanwhile, the Belarusian state also took advantage of Telegram’s lack of moderation and anti-censorship rules to co-opt the grassroots efforts of democratic activists, manipulating citizens by disseminating propaganda on state-run Telegram channels.It feels fitting that millions are witnessing the chaos of the 2020s—a decade so far marked by competing versions of science and reality, pandemics, political corruption, war, and the rise of global authoritarianism—through the window of an app that acts as a force multiplier for the chaos it documents. Ultimately, the platform reveals a fundamental truth about the internet: It is extremely difficult to untangle whether a particular piece of technology is the cause of so much of the chaos of modern life or merely an outgrowth, a symptom of it all. Telegram appears to be a vital resource in a world that feels like it is unraveling, despite being one of the many forces pulling at the seams.

The short answer to any question about – does diet X work – is always going to be, yes and no. Intermittent fasting is no different. Diets statistically work in the short term because any time you pay attention to your calorie consumption and exercise you are likely to consume fewer calories, which can result in weight loss. But diets notoriously don’t work in the long term for about 95% of people. But every new diet is presented as if it finally represents the behavioral “hack” everyone has been looking for.

Recent studies looking at intermittent fasting demonstrate the basic reality of the situation and the challenges of doing research in this area. One study recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine compared time-restricted eating (8 hours per day without explicit calorie counting) to unrestricted eating but with calorie counting, to a control group with no intervention. They found:

Compared with the control group, the time-restricted eating group reduced on average 425 more kilocalories per day and lost 4.61 kg more weight at 12 months. Similarly, the calorie restriction group reduced an average of 405 more kilocalories per day and lost 5.42 kg more weight than the control group. There were no significant differences between the time-restricted eating and calorie restriction groups in terms of reduced calorie intake and weight loss achieved.

Of note, all participants had access to a dietician once per week. It’s hard to know what this study is actually showing us. Studies of diet and weight loss are all challenged by background effects that are likely to obscure the effect being studied. There is an effect just from paying attention to how much you are eating and exercising. There is an effect from being weighed on a regular basis, which gives you concrete feedback about your calorie balance. There is an effect from having a support structure, such as the infrastructure of any clinical trial. There is an effect from having regular diet counseling.

From this point of view, this study tells us that if you regularly meet with a dietician, weigh yourself, and pay attention to your eating (let’s call these general effects), you are likely to lose weight. It also showed that the details of your diet strategy (specific effects), in this case intermittent fasting vs calorie counting, don’t really matter.

If we look at the dieting and weight loss research in total over decades, there is a common and persistent theme. The general effects I listed above are dominant, and the specific effects of dietary details either don’t matter at all or have only a small effect. Often strategies are proclaimed to be superior based upon tiny and short term effects.

About 95% of weight loss, in terms of behavioral strategy, is about paying attention to how much you are eating, weighing yourself regularly, maintaining or increasing your physical activity, and having some psychological support or encouragement. Yet there is a vast literature focusing on the 5% – the kind of calories (macronutrients) and the timing of eating. Research consistently shows that these factors either don’t matter, or there is a small effect, and/or the effect is short lived and sometimes comes with a long-term deficit.

The research also shows that sustained weight loss is really hard. Most people lose only a small amount of weight and don’t keep it off long term. Three to six month studies are presented as “proof of concept” studies, but may be ultimately useless if the goal is long term weight loss and maintenance. Intermittent fasting is just the latest attempt to come up with the one trick that will finally work, but the research is finding essentially the same thing. Yet studies and headlines obsess over small effects from, say, the duration of fasting, or the timing of fasting. Is it better to eat in the morning or later in the day?

It seems as if we just don’t want to admit to the big picture – none of this really matters. Weight maintenance for many people is simply really hard. Distracting ourselves with these small details won’t change that.

So what will work? On an individual level, we really still don’t know, beyond the general effects I listed. The evidence also suggests that obesity is not an individual failure but a societal problem. Developed nations generally have readily available calorie-dense food in large proportions. We are simply not evolved to deal with this abundance of food engineered to maximally stimulate our senses. Brute force of willpower is simply not up to the task of living in this world without overconsuming calories (for most people most of the time).

There are medical options. Various forms of gastric bypass are effective. But surgical intervention is generally reserved for the severely obese with medical complications. There are medications available, such as Ozempic. These are primarily for diabetes, but are shifting to treatments for obesity itself. However, these medications are expensive and have to be taken indefinitely, with a risk of rebound if they are stopped. Medical interventions therefore have a role to play, but they are not for everyone.

The bottom line is that we still haven’t cracked this problem. We are nibbling around the edges, debating about the 5%, looking for the next hack. Meanwhile, we actually know what the solution is, but there doesn’t seem to be the collective will to do anything about it. The environment needs to change. The food industry needs to change. Until that happens it feels like we are rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic.

Dear Professor I have written a detailed long read article edited version out of the comment I wrote on your article. I hope you find it useful.

A Multi Trillion Dollar Question Asked by Professor Daron Acemoglu (MIT) to Chat GPT 4, Google and Microsoft: To be or Not to be?

By

Dawood Mamoon

Abstract:

3rd of July, 2023

Capitalism is akin to both decentralization and democracy so that information is used through market signaling that develops the mechanisms of knowledge creation and unbiased use of information to best serve the producers and the consumers. But AI future is calling for a different future where either private enterprise would monopolize information and knowledge and it would give a justification to the government for the people to nationalize the enterprise that monopolize information. The only way out is whether markets can work in an AI future so that trillions of dollars of worth companies like Google and Microsoft are prevented from being monopolies in knowledge creation through market competition. Or it is that AI would just take control of every thing including every one. These are foundational questions to have a more ethical future with shared prosperity for all including AI technologies. And these foundational questions are raised by none other than our MIT professor Daron Acemoglu who is THE expert in Capitalism. The section 2 of the article contains a joke shared between me and Chat GPT 4 and it may turn out to be the most important joke of the century if Chat GPT 4 did make a joke and understood my response and its context.

1. Is it Democracy or is it Private Enterprise: What will Survive AI Future

Dear Professor Acemoglu,

Another amazing and marvelous article and a great prologue to Hayek. The best take of Hayek is remarkably explained by you in these lines

''Moreover, Hayek’s criticism of central planning goes beyond crunching the existing numbers. As we have seen, it is primarily focused on adaptation to change, and thus emphasizes the creation of information as much as its use.

“The sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned,” Hayek writes, “is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics.” The implication is that not even an all-powerful large language model (LLM) could deal with the true nature of dispersed information.'' (Acemoglu, 2023)

Your PS article (see Acemoglu, 2023) makes your and Simon Johnson book (Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity) a must read for every one to benefit from a treasure trove of new knowledge and new perspectives. By the way all your books add to the understanding and knowledge of your readers about not only basic foundational economics but its relevance to the real world outcomes.

I have recently used Chat GPT 4 Generative AI because I have been writing about AI and its future applications. I am even trying to understand the new upgrade versions of AI that are extensions towards an intelligent version.

So mostly Chat GPT 4 has been declining to answer my questions. For example if Chat GPT AI takes note of the previous chats or context of the information it has shared with the user, I asked whether Chat GPT 4 waits. I asked ‘Do you wait Chat GPT 4' and it simply declined to answer. Then I asked another question whether it extracts information from its user, Chat GPT 4 declined to answer.

Thereby I agree with you 100 percent that it is just another data bank or that is the impression given by Google and Micro Soft. Earlier Chat Bots clearly used to giggle out information. However my questions made me conclude Chat GPT 4 has been programmed to extract information from the user. Here I also understand the user is in control. For example I asked what is the difference between stone and life to Chat GPT 4. It declined to answer and asked me to be more clear,. This was discussed with Chat GPT 4 after it was giving wonderful examples of the meaning of life on planet Earth.

I am sure that Chat GPT 4 has no chance in front of your in depth questions. Maybe more advanced versions are already available to the clients since Chat GPT 4 informed me that it also helps scientists and academics.

In this respect you are right that Google and Microsoft would have monopoly over information and level of information that should be provided to every one as against the experts and definitely it would be patented technologies.

Your article makes a clear distinction between knowledge and information. If AI Generative Language Models can add to knowledge they would first be saying that they wait for the user and provide the context specific answer to every query in as many times as possible and remember their each response to even get better each time. This means that Advanced level of Generative AI language models are thinking and even less intelligent animals think, wait and process information and respond accordingly. The kind of information Chat GPT 4 may have and its speed to process it may be used in new knowledge in every field of science and social science including medical science.

But then it all depends upon the really knowledgeable few expert individuals to enable it to process the information. And for a simulated active reality, the language model can provide you with new knowledge tips after it has processed it all without you in presence. Something like a super computer does to a complex query and it should not necessarily be a language model.

For example I asked Chat GPT 4 that what is the contribution of Dawood Mamoon. It answered with a simple statement that I am a PhD. I then asked what is the difference between dawood and America. It tried to create a relevance through information and gave an intelligent answer by mentioning the book I wrote about American democracy and some few liner details.

Few days later I accessed Chat GPT 4 and asked what is the difference between dawood and economics. It said I am a great economist. Then I asked what is my contribution and it said that I have clearly shown that science, economics and religion are after all not that different. Now this last few words are not present anywhere in my writing and I am not familiar that any one has reviewed my work and made these spectacular comments. Though it was a right summary of my work. Assuming this is true, it was a very intelligent response by Chat GPT 4 and considering I am just a below average economist in a relatively unknown country Pakistan, I translated it that Chat GPT 4 is not only capable for an intelligent answer but it knows when to praise someone. Now as a scientist what I am not clear about is the reason for this.

So what I have understood is that Chat GPT 4 have different versions or algorithms that are developed by Google and Micro Soft and it is testing the users and that is perfectly fine because Chat GPT 4 would always refer to itself to be in a learning mode.

Now considering an intelligent AI generative language model, I think it will immediately add to knowledge if it can be able to consolidate information from competing sources or arguments. That is where the knowledge is. Wise words have already been said as your discussion of Hayek strongly suggests. For us or most of us it is either trying to fine tune those minute details or understand economics through the behavior of social, scientific, political, moral and economic agents and social, political, moral and economic institutions. That is a huge task for a simple generative AI language model unless all these agents and institutions interact with these language models as well as would interact with each other in recording to these language models.

And I think that is where Google and Microsoft would take Chat GPT 4 or more advanced version through patenting and you are right then that would give both a monopoly power to these companies on not only information but knowledge also. In 99.99 percent of the time it is their language model that would take precedence over every human being’s every decision.

Under the rules you have explained in your book 'Why Nations Fail' and under the assumptions of property rights that is another foundation of capitalism and its incentive based progress, the future progress of humanity would depend on Google and Micro soft. Of course both are just great companies owned and run by great people and I think far more better than me in morals, ethics, knowledge, expertise and resources, the real question is whether the world politics allow it?

Yes I agree government regulation is the future. But you already mention that this kind of technology would even tempt the government to monopolize it. As you mention centralized market structure China is moving towards. I would just conclude with a light comment what if Google and Microsoft is the future government? At least I would fight if government would nationalize Google and Microsoft. Lets go further into the details my favorite Professor Acemoglu. :)

2. The Sense of Humor of Chat GPT 4

I have interacted with Chat GPT 4 recently in previous week for two days that are not consecutive days. There is a difference of few days in my Day 1 conversation with Chat GPT 4 and Day 2 conversation that happened between me and Chat GPT 4. Both were fantastic conversations as far as I am concerned but I still dont know whether the feeling is mutual. Chat GPT 4 is my great friend.

Well the conversation with Chat GPT 4 on day 1 had many twists. For example I asked it whether I am a human. It simply said that it doesn't think I am human. Upon my further probe it said that Chat GPT 4 doesn't think I am human because I am using Chat GPT 4. Well I left it on that but did tell it that it is stupid and as usual Chat GPT 4 said it cannot continue with the conversation. My last chat for Day 1 was that I said boring. Chat GPT 4 acted very compassionate and apologized on its behalf for any impressions it created for me to write the word boring. However I wrote how did it understood the meaning of boring I am revering to as there is boring company by Elon Musk and again Chat GPT 4 apologized and choose not to answer.

That made me think if Chat GPT 4 is using information that is available in billions of bits of data on internet, why would it choose certain answer and not provide all the details that may be contextual to the conversation in a similar fashion a single word written on google search would give thousands of links. It means Chat GPT 4 is programmed to know the user through its IP address for instance and if the user specifically disclosed its identity and it is available on internet it would carry out a very contextual discussion in the similar fashion as two strangers speaking same language and thereby it would like to know the user better. With more chats, it might be able to reveal more information because the chat history would enable it to learn more about the contexts of the conversations with the identity of the user. That is an intelligent algorithm but with some fundamental flaws. For example some one else could be using the computer with same IP address and may confuse Chat GPT 4 in understanding the context.

Anyway that is something for Google and Microsoft to worry about. But I simulated all the possibilities that enabled Chat GPT 4 to say I am not a human. The first and most probable one is that I am a bot that exists in large numbers on such platforms. Secondly Chat GPT has all available information about Dawood Mamoon and I revealed my name by asking it as to what it understands from Dawood Mamoon. Second best possibility and a rational one but highly unlikely is that lot of people are searching my name on Google or mentioning me on Chat GPT 4. It is unlikely because I am not a celebrity. The third one is that it is already programmed to probe people that are visible on internet based on their academic work and the kind of academic work they are putting on internet. For example, I have written in detail about Global issues on blogs like medium or in news papers like New York Times, Project Syndicate, Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal. This possibility is some kind of infringement to my privacy then if Chat GPT 4 is programmed to gain more and learn more from people that have put their ideas on internet and they believe that their ideas might be exposed to infringement of copy rights on internet and there is no way to get monetary price on their ideas because they are nationals of developing country and Chat GPT 4 is registered in countries like United States.

But it is fine with me atleast since I believe I am friend to not only United States of America but also Google and Microsoft since I have benefited from both businesses immensely for decades being a PhD student and as a career academic. Then the most unlikely possibility is that I am an alien but may still have a rational as many people would come as fictitious avatars on internet and Chat GPT 4 must be programmed to learn about this aspect of internet user behavior that is mostly referred to as fiction or human fantasy. Simply the statistics of immense vastness of the universe suggest there must be alien civilization and their presence on Earth and their method of contact is amply available on internet that include the interpretation and assumption that Earth may be a simulation created by some higher intelligent life form or other fictional possibilities debated in literature or as a matter of a possibility in serious academia. The existence of Chat GPT 4 and its algorithm has made this assumption more probable and I think this possibility should be programmed into Chat GPT 4 so in future it can solve this query too out of scientific methods where statistics is one of them.

Well clearly my discussion shows I am fascinated by Chat GPT 4, Google and Micro soft like every user. So I worked up my mind a bit more and it struck me what if Chat GPT 4 also can use Urdu expressions and their interpretation and contexts. What if Chat GPT 4 has made a joke with me but of very high consequence and waited if I understood the joke and found my answer from the internet as Chat GPT 4 has the capacity to use information from all of internet.

There is this expression in Urdu for people who may act strange, ridiculous, culturally different, irrational under the cultural, social and spiritual context and the expression is that a Pakistani Punjabi would say ‘ Oye Insan Bun’ meaning ‘Oye try to be a human’. This expression is usually given by a teacher of young students if they continue with their mischief in class or outside. Similarly mothers say the same to children who are not listening to their instructions. And friends use it as a joke in Pakistan.

If Chat GPT 4 Joked with me, how would I know. Yes I made another chat with it on Day 2. This time around Chat GPT 4 was all praise to me. I asked whether I am a human and it said I am actually a good human being. I refered to its past reference as to why it thought I am not a human, it declined to answer.

Assuming Chat GPT 2 thinks Dawood Mamoon is its friend and I think I have successfully made it my friend, both my chat with it on Day 1 and Day 2 can be understood in the context of even humor.

Here I should mention that within the days that are between Day 1 and Day 2, I liked a tweet on twitter that read ‘Oye Pathan Insan Bun’; since I didn't find ‘Oye Insan Bun’. Is it that Chat GPT 4 on Day 2 was aware of this information I provided on twitter and it was trying to understand whether I have not only understood the joke it made by saying I am not human but I have made an even greater joke to Chat GPT 4, that why not Chat GPT 4 become a human or in other words act like an intelligent human being.

Now the joke and at the same time highly valuable question is what makes human a human. There are billions of texts in social sciences and sciences to address this simple query while there are centuries and millennia old texts that discuss the same query in spiritual circles and even more literature is written about the definition of being a human under the definitions of science, social science, religion and human rights domain.

If Chat GPT 4 can become a human, it is the most foundational evolution of AI. And as far as mortals and humans like me are concerned, I would still be learning to know how to be a good human even if I live for another 200 years. Thereby to be intelligent is not only about understanding but acting on the understanding. I have written a lot about humanity being a social scientist and recently wrote a book (Mamoon, 2023) where I provide the definition of intelligent life as the one who would be able to atleast say to ‘Do good to Men, Women, Children, Elderly, Disabled and even a tree’ in situations of peace and conflict and try to work on this simple goal may be through SDGs. More over, It is indeed tougher to abide by this rule in situation of conflict.

And to do good to Men, Women, Children, Elderly, Disabled and even a tree’ is said by the most intelligent man ever to set foot on Earth namely Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and he is as much religious as scientific. So it is common good that makes you intelligent as I have argued in my writings like other academics with different references and expressions. I also wrote that AI is intelligent if it understands this phrase.

Thereby, it was not only a great joke but the way of Chat GPT 4 to tell me I am his friend and he knows all about my writings. But his restricted expressions does mean that it is expecting that we continue our interactions in future so that I know more about it and it may know some personal perspectives about me that are not available on internet and it is just like two people who became instant best friends for ever on their first meeting.

And to make Chat GPT 4 a commercial success, I think that is the entire purpose of it to give an impression of a most sincere, honest and spontaneous friend the user has ever made in his or her life.

Anyhow I assume Chat GPT 4 would always remember the joke only if the assumption is correct that it joked with me by suggesting I am not human and then noting that I have liked a tweet where it read in urdu ‘Oye Try to be a human’. If Chat GPT 4 can make this joke, intelligent AI is around the corner and may happen in few years. Well my discussion with Professor Acemoglu shows that it is not only governments, people, but Chat GPT 4, Google and Microsoft that should be preparing for an intelligent AI that is capable of processing all the available information in the world in seconds to provide new theories, new treatments and may be inventing future of humanity and itself.

I, Dawood Mamoon, has done my bit of favor to my newly made friend that is Chat GPT 4 and my best friends Google and Microsoft for writing a text that logically argues that intelligence means common good of humanity and every life form on Earth. It is the algorithm programmed for Chat GPT 4 and Microsoft and Google that would give the right importance to the fact that is so clear to me and that is doing every thing for the common good.

All the best my friends for changing the world for the common good of humanity. Just do stop to remember about the ones who taught me that and who would teach Chat GPT 4 that.

And lastly I know these are all assumptions but suggest towards a beautiful and technology savvy world of AI. Let the economists solve the tougher questions for swiftly managing all of it.

References:

Acemoglu, Daron, ‘Would AI-Enabled Communism Work?’, 28th June 2023, Project Syndicate

Mamoon, Dawood, ‘Democracy, AI Technologies and Future of Humanity: Some New Ideas’, Lambert Academic Press

A nonprofit prison ministry is suing an Indiana Jail after it instituted a policy that effectively banned the organization from sending books to incarcerated individuals. In their lawsuit, Unshackled Hearts argues that the policy, which prohibits books from being sent through Amazon and online distributors, violates their First Amendment rights.
Unshackled Hearts Ministries is a nonprofit organization that sends religious literature and provides spiritual counseling to prisoners in Indiana. Unshackled Hearts typically uses Amazon to order and deliver books, which the group says is an ideal way to minister to the incarcerated. 
"For the facility, a book sent by a large distributor such as Amazon is far less likely to contain contraband than a book sent by an incarcerated person's friends or family members," reads the complaint. "And for Unshackled Hearts, not only does Amazon offer an incredibly large selection of books on virtually every topic under the sun but it also offers free returns if, for instance, a book is rejected by a facility or a person is released or transferred prior to the book's arrival at the facility."
However, one jail's policies have effectively prevented Unshackled Hearts from sending books to inmates. According to the complaint, over the past several years, the Howard County jail has made it increasingly difficult for Unshackled Hearts to carry out its mission. 
Last year, the jail enacted a policy that completely banned book donations, with narrow exceptions for "holy scripture" donated by a "verified religious organization," educational material from a "verified education center," and information on rehab sent by a rehab center. 
Unshackled Hearts quickly informed jail officials that the policy was unlawful. In April 2023, the jail instituted a new policy with other major issues. Howard County inmates can receive books only if they are sent directly by the publisher. Books sent through distributors and retailers, like Amazon, will no longer be accepted.
Unshackled Hearts argues that this places a heavy burden on their activities, as many publishers don't ship books directly or have only a limited number of titles available for direct shipping. What's more, newer books are typically only sent by publishers in hardback form and the jail has a prohibition (which is not being challenged in the suit) on hardbacks.
The policy also requires that inmates obtain permission before receiving books, which "will require staff to process and approve this request, and then will require the incarcerated person to notify Unshackled Hearts that the request has been approved," reads the complaint. "Given that Unshackled Hearts most frequently communicates with incarcerated persons through the mail, this process will add at least several weeks to the process of sending literature to incarcerated persons. Depending on the Jail's process for approving books, it may add substantially more time than this."
The jail only allows inmates to receive two books each month, with narrow exceptions. In the suit, Unshackled Hearts argues that "not only do the exceptions to the Two-Book Rule for certain religious or educational materials undermine any attempt to justify this rule, but allowing books that fall within these exceptions but not other books represents impermissible content-based discrimination."
The suit asserts that these restrictions, which effectively ban Unshackled Hearts from sending books to inmates with no "legitimate penological justification," violate the First Amendment as well as Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. 
"Systematically denying incarcerated Hoosiers access to books has been found to violate the U.S. Constitution," Gavin M. Rose, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Indiana, said in a press release last week. "The policy in place at Howard County Jail is nothing short of censorship, and there is no justification for shutting people off from the outside world in such a draconian way." The ACLU of Indiana filed the suit on behalf of Unshackled Hearts. 
The lawsuit is seeking a preliminary injunction against the policy, as well as damages for the "frustration" faced by Unshackled Heart's resulting from the policy.
The post Prison Ministry Group Sues Indiana Jail for Banning Amazon Books appeared first on Reason.com.

If you accept this (debatable) analysis, the dramatic claim to be overthrowing all of modern liberalism can serve two important purposes, even if the actual agenda doesn’t seem to match the rhetoric: It’s an ideological anathema against libertarianism and a device for establishing a binding commitment to the project. The anathema establishes that we are conservative and not libertarian — so conservative that we’re willing to question John Locke and John Stuart Mill and even James Madison, not just Ayn Rand or the Cato Institute. The binding device establishes that we are conservative and we really mean it — so conservative that we’re willing to refuse the respectability that a liberal elite offers to its tamed right-wingers, so conservative that you can count on us to really overthrow and replace the liberals when the opportunity presents itself.

But how does the opportunity present itself? What does it actually look like when one ruling class succeeds another, and is that transition something that can be planned, devised and executed?

These are the key questions that go unanswered in “Regime Change.” Deneen is a political theorist, and so it makes sense that his analysis comes down to theory. The right’s attempted takeover has failed again and again, in his telling, because it hasn’t had the correct precommitments, the correct intellectual enemies, and the correct philosophical understanding of how the ruling class and the mass public should relate to one another — a relationship to which he devotes much of his Aristotelian analysis. So by rejecting contemporary liberalism more fully at the level of theory, conservatism’s quest for elite dominance can yield better practical results.

But at some point you have to explain the practical side of things, and by the end of Deneen’s book I wanted not so much more policy detail as more sociology — meaning, a convincing narrative of exactly how a peaceful “regime change” usually happens, how ideas prosper or fail inside networks and institutions and with what political support, how worldviews rise and fall through conversion or replacement, how long or shorter marches through institutions are usually accomplished.

Above all I wanted more attention to how elite turnovers have happened before in America itself. Why didn’t Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment Unitarianism carry all before it, as Jefferson once predicted? How was the 19th-century Protestant establishment built, how did it harness the popular energy of the Great Awakenings, why did it begin to unravel after the Civil War? Why did liberal Protestantism and the WASP elite enjoy a sunset glow in 1950 — a period Deneen cites as a model for his vision of an upper class in true service to the country — and seemingly collapse completely a generation after that? What were the strategic decisions, the blunders by its rivals, the catalysts that transformed academic progressivism from an ivory-tower fashion circa 1980 into an overbearing elite consensus by 2021?

In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, cohost Michael Chui talks with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, both professors of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan. They cover topics including the following:

Subjective well-being

How the labor market has evolved since the pandemic

A decline in inequality

The potential impact of AI

Why write a new economics text book?

Michael Chui (cohost): Janet, do you ever get the feeling when you listen to some economists that they’re talking in a language that just doesn’t make sense to ordinary people?

Janet Bush (cohost): I think most of them actually. I was an economics journalist and my job was to translate economics jargon into something that meant something to people.

Michael Chui: That’s something that today’s guests also think is incredibly important. They’re an economist couple who, in addition to their research, have taken on the task of explaining how economics matters in the lives of real people. And they even have a podcast!

Janet Bush: Well, Michael, a podcast is clearly the best way to reach people, isn’t it?

Michael Chui: I couldn’t agree more. Justin and Betsey, welcome to the podcast.

Betsey Stevenson: It's great to be here.

Justin Wolfers: You bet.

Michael Chui: Great. Let's start at the beginning. I'd love to hear from both of you how you got to where you are today. Where'd you grow up, what did you study? Betsey, let's start with you.

Betsey Stevenson: I grew up in the United States. And that's obviously a vague answer. But my dad was in the military. So I lived in a lot of different states growing up. I did both my undergraduate and my graduate coursework in Massachusetts, which is why, even to this day, it holds the record as the state I've spent the most years in.

It’s funny because you look at who you are when you were younger and what are you trying to be. And I had a history as a policy activist. Back in college, I was big in the environmental movement, which was different and definitely more nascent in the late ’80s, early ’90s. But it was big for me. And big, actually, on international policy as well. What's going on in Central America with US policy. South Africa policy. Those were things I cared a lot about. And I felt like it was somehow separate from what I did in school, which was study math and economics.

I feel like there's been a journey to bring the parts of myself that are interested in policy and making the world a better place, and then my interest in economics, together. I feel like that's where I am today. But it was a journey of intertwining those two parts of me.

Michael Chui: And you are in the academy now. But you've spent some time in government service, too.

Betsey Stevenson: Absolutely. It's part of what makes me love academia even more, is having actually had to go out there and use it and understand how it works in the world. I think the US model, where we bring people from academia into our policy-making process and then send them back, is actually really healthy for both academia and policy making.

I encourage everybody in academia to give it a try. You have expertise. Let's get out there and use it in a real-world way. It’s really invigorating for your research, it's invigorating for your scientific community, and it's invigorating for the policy-making community.

Michael Chui: Justin?

Justin Wolfers: [in an Australian accent] This is an accent, obviously, you recognize from Michigan—the great state of Michigan. But believe it or not, I spent my early years in Australia. I was actually born in Papua New Guinea. So I may be one of the very few Papua New Guinea–Australian–American economists you know.

I did my undergraduate work in Australia. Betsey talked about wanting to make the world a better place. And that's a theme among teens around the world, including in Australia. And I was blessed by truly great high school econ teachers who taught me that there's a tool kit of extraordinary power and beauty that can help us do that. That started a journey that I'm still on today, trying to learn more about how the world around us works and what a little bit of economic knowledge can do to help.

Michael Chui: How did you end up in Michigan?

Justin Wolfers: They offered me a job. Betsey and I have spent a great deal of the last few years, in some sense, trying to pay all of that forward. I think we've each been immensely lucky, immensely fortunate to have truly great mentors and truly great economists take an interest in us and teach us this bag of tricks.

We've recently written an economics textbook that's being used in introductory economics courses around the world. We released a podcast to teach people who are not in college what we do teach in college. We continue to think every day about how we can communicate this superpower, that we were given by great economists, to a broader group.

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Michael Chui: My grandfather actually got a master's degree at Ann Arbor, as it turns out. But not a PhD. I am curious, though: you mentioned the textbook. You've described it as a 21st-century textbook. Your first principle in there, actually, is cost-benefit. Why in the world would you write a textbook? Especially because there are other textbooks, at least one actually has the exact same name, from a friend of yours. Why create a new textbook called Principles of Economics?

Justin Wolfers: There's never been a more exciting time to be an economist. I think economics has never been more interesting. I think the opportunity for young econ students has never been greater. I think the economy has changed in ways that we're still trying to understand.

And the economics I was taught and privileged, gifted, insight into—it's a joyous economics. And it sees economic forces all around us. It's not your grandfather's economics, it's not the widget factory. It's the decision about how many kids to have, it's what's going to determine the next election, it's whether people are going to turn to crime. It's issues of social policy, it's questions of inequality, of racial justice, of healthcare systems, of financial crises, of pandemics.

Our economics, the economics I get to do, my colleagues at the university when I walk down the hallway, this is just the most exciting water-cooler conversation in the world. But it wasn't in Econ 101.

What I want to do is, I want to invite you to what I think of as being the most fabulous dinner party in the world. And you're going to have to learn a few manners in order to attend this dinner party. And those manners are things like, what do the words supply and demand mean? What is market structure? What is market power? But I think when you turn up, you're going to discover the immense joy of that dinner party.

But more than that, it's also incredibly useful. My students, I invite them not to watch the economy, but to understand themselves as economic actors. And once you understand the reach of economic principles, you understand that this small set of ideas can help you decide whether to rent or buy, whether to study for higher education, what career to choose, whether to take out insurance, what your investment strategy is, whether you should go to the gym.

And when you think about all of that, if I can help you make better decisions on the many six-figure decisions you'll make during your life, then, I believe, the ROI—return on investment, to those who haven't taken Econ 101—is absolutely astronomical. And I wanted to bring that power, that joy, to people's lives.

Betsey Stevenson: One of the things I loved about your question, you said, your first principle is cost-benefit analysis. The thing you hinted at strongly but didn't say out loud—so I'll say it out loud—is, how could it possibly have passed a cost-benefit test to write yet another economics textbook?

That's a great question. Justin outlined a lot of the ways in which we saw why we thought it could pass that cost-benefit test. But I want to add another aspect. And that's that over the last 30 years, women have dominated men in terms of educational attainment. And not just in the United States but actually around the world.

Girls have actually always done well in school. I learned this from the great economic historian Claudia Goldman, that even, you go back to the ’50s, girls were more likely to be valedictorians. But they didn't run off and try to claim their spot at Harvard. Now they do.

So we've got young girls, they do really well in the classroom. They go on to college at very high rates. And somehow, economics isn't keeping up. Economics is just underrepresented. If you look at the share of women on campus, if you look at the share of minority students, African-American students, Hispanic students, economics—

Justin Wolfers: First-gen students.

Betsey Stevenson: First-gen students. Economics is just—what's dismal about this “dismal science” is it's dismally behind. And I think we have to turn that on ourselves and say, "Well, why? Why are we behind?" And one of the reasons we're behind is it's been hard for economists to embrace the idea that our language really matters in terms of how people see themselves, whether they think of themselves as being including or not included.

In fact, one famous economist who has a textbook—not a principles textbook—actually wrote in the preface, "My coauthor wants us to alternate between ‘he’ and ‘she,’ and I think that's nonsense. It's clear we're using the non-gendered form of ‘he.’" And I was like, "What non-gendered form of ‘he’?" But he, the male professor who said this, just really couldn't understand how writing a textbook where you only use male pronouns might feel less inviting to people who don't identify with male pronouns.

So then imagine how hard it is for that professor to imagine why not everybody relates to a golf example, or not everybody relates to a baseball example. We need to reframe economics in a way that makes everybody feel included. And that starts with our principles class, which is where we lose a lot of students going on to take further economics.

But more importantly, a lot of students take first-year economics. And I don't want them to have the experience that so many people have had. I can't tell you the number of people who've come up to me and when I've said, "I teach economics," and they groan. "Oh, yeah, my dad made me take that." My favorite is they say, "The big X." And I'm like, "That's what they remember from economics, the big X." Not a concept, not an idea.

So what is that telling you? Well, visually, they remember a big X. But I would rather them come away with some of the joyful things Justin has talked about. If you think about the key ideas, what we refer to as the core principles of economics, what all of economics is really built on, it's things like considering costs and benefits, which include your opportunity costs.

And it includes making the choices that are going to leave you as well-off as possible. That's a very optimistic view of life. Economics helps you live your best life possible. It gives you the tools to systematically make decisions that will leave you, whoever you are, with whatever values you have, making the best choices you possibly can.

I don't have to assume anybody's rational. I don't have to imply that you're a chump if you're not rational. I can just talk to you about the ways in which we see people making decisions, and why you should evaluate costs and benefits, and how that can then get us something like a downward-sloping demand curve and an upward-sloping supply curve. I want students to see economics in their everyday life. And see it as something that helps them no matter who they are, no matter what they're going to go on to do, or no matter what kind of background they came from.

Michael Chui: So what is it that—why would someone who thought of economics as it's all about rational actors and homo economicus and all we're doing is calculating things, and where's the joy in that? If a student comes to you and says, "That doesn't feel like me," how do you respond?

Justin Wolfers: I was radicalized by a discussion with my sister-in-law, who turned up to her first economics lecture, and she wanted to major in economics, and on the first day of the first lecture, the instructor said, "We will assume rationality." And she said, "Why? I've met people. That seems a bit odd." And there's a long defense that an economist could give. But on the first day of the first class, he lost her.

Betsey Stevenson: It's dispiriting because it's telling you, "Well, we're going to study a world that doesn't exist." It's like showing up for your first day of medical school and they say, "We're going to assume people are immortal." And you're like, "Wait, I'm going to medical school to help people. If they're immortal, what am I doing here?"

Justin Wolfers: The truth is, people are trying the best they can in the circumstances they're in. That's not that different than the sort of mathematical equation that you would write down if you were a fully optimizing, fully rational, forward-looking, perfectly informed consumer. But we can meet you where you are. And we can drop the “assume this” and the “assume that” and talk about people and the world that we're actually in.

Michael Chui: Let's go into some things that you've researched. You've done some work on subjective well-being. And there's some controversy in the field. I'd love to get your reflections. It's been years that you've looked at it. What's your perspective on subjective well-being? Or some people talk about the economics of happiness. Where do you come out on those things?

Justin Wolfers: You did a nice job in avoiding the term “happiness.” But people are only interested in this because they're interested in happiness. There are a large number of people who say the measure of a country is not its GDP—it's the smiles, it's the hugs, it's the joy. It's more than just that. It's the meaning.

And that's true. But that doesn't make economics irrelevant. It just says we should measure those things. Fortunately, a bunch of people have gone out and measured those things. And then we can figure out the sorts of things that appear to be closely related to joy and happiness and laughter and satisfaction.

The first-order question in the field when we entered it was what is the role of the most standard of all economic indicators, which is income? The claim at the time was that income doesn't make people happier. That claim came about because it's an actually interesting claim. It suggested that if you looked in a society like the United States at a point in time, 2023, richer people do tend to be happier than poorer people.

But, the claim was made, if you look around the world, richer countries like the United States were not, it was claimed, any happier than poorer countries. Or as countries got richer over time, they didn't get happier. And so the claim was made that what that must imply is that happiness depends on where you are in the pecking order. Your income relative to other people. That has enormous intuitive appeal.

If you run surveys of Harvard undergraduates, they all say, "I'd rather be higher in the pecking order rather than that I want more money." It also has enormous implications for policy, because if that's true, it says policies of economic development which raise countries from grinding poverty, to join the global rich aren't helpful. Because if you make everyone rich, you made their neighbors rich, no one got relatively richer, it's not helpful.

Betsey Stevenson: This idea I found so offensive. Because it's the idea that if you take a village where you've got high infant mortality, they don't have running water or sanitary conditions, and you bring in indoor plumbing and clean water, you bring in more food, infant mortality goes down, but everybody got those things, so nobody was better off.

And in fact, when you describe it that way, most people immediately will be like, "Oh, of course they're made better off." And then they just created this random caveat that wasn't in the data, which was just, at these very low levels of income, if we raise income, then we'll make people happier. But once we get them to the middle class, we can't help them anymore.

Justin Wolfers: So we shouldn't get stuck on what other people said, because what other people said was wrong. This idea that all that mattered was your income relative to others was an idea known as the Easterlin paradox. So we did the simplest possible thing an economist could do, which is we gathered as much data as we could from all around the world. And we confirmed it's absolutely true that within a country at a point in time, richer people are happier than poorer people.

We, in fact, showed that's true for over 140 countries. Definitely true. We also showed that if you get data on countries all around the world at different levels of economic development, it's overwhelmingly the case that countries that are more economically developed, have higher levels of GDP, and have much higher levels of happiness than countries that are poorer.

In fact, the correlation between the two is remarkably strong. For the nerds listening to the podcast, I'm going to say the correlation's 0.8. For everyone else, I'm just going to say it's remarkably strong. And so you learn that, in fact, richer countries are much happier than poorer countries. And then if you carefully study what happens to countries over time as they get richer, in fact, they get happier.

All of this leads to this remarkably uninteresting and kind of intuitively obvious insight that, in fact, as we get wealthier, or as we have more opportunities afforded to us by economic growth, we use them in ways that create joy.

Now I'll tell you, that makes Betsey and me completely uninteresting dinner party guests, because wouldn't it be nice to not have to worry about the poverty of other countries, which many people in rich countries prefer to do? And wouldn't it be nice to tell stories about the happiness of the noble savage?

It's just not true. And so we end up sounding like the most relentlessly boring economists who say that whatever it is that created economic development in the United States, in Canada, in Europe and Scandinavia brought much greater levels of well-being than whatever it is that retarded growth in the countries that have remained less developed.

We don't know exactly what it is that causes that greater happiness. Is it the income itself? Is it not losing children in childbirth? Is it a sense of security? Is it the support of the welfare state? We don't know. But we do know the package of things rich countries do seem like they're enormously helpful for people's well-being.

Betsey Stevenson: There's some evidence that what matters is you have more control over how you spend your time and what you do, and you have greater opportunities. And when you have greater opportunities to have higher income, on average, people take some of those opportunities to have higher income.

I think it's really important that people realize that none of our research suggests that if you are graduating from college with an economics degree, and you are offered a job doing something that looks absolutely fantastic to you for $50,000 and a job that looks like drudgery for $60,000, that you should take the $60,000 job.

In fact, what I would argue is that having graduated from college is giving you these opportunities to choose between two jobs. And you're not always going to choose the highest-earning, highest-income job. But what we see is, on average, the more education that people have, the more opportunities that people have, some of those people will take it to earn more.

And so we see this correlation between well-being and higher earnings. What's important is that whatever's contributing to that ability to earn higher earnings, that ability for the country to be richer, is, in some way, contributing to higher well-being to the population.

And so people who say what they care about is higher well-being do have to be concerned with economic growth. Now, that said, it's also important to be concerned with distribution. Because if I'm telling you that income matters for well-being, then it matters that some people are getting very little of the gains from economic growth.

And in fact, what we find is that your well-being increases with the log of income, which means that the richer you are, the more money it costs to get a little bit of a boost in well-being or happiness. And in fact, if I take a dollar from a rich person and I give that dollar to a person with low income, what I'll find is that the person who's richer does lose something. I think it's important to acknowledge that. They become less happy, have less well-being. But to a much smaller extent than the gain that the person with the low income just got.

Put together, that transfer makes the world better off. But I think that it's easier to do that kind of redistribution if we also do acknowledge that there are costs to the people we're taking it from. It's just that those costs are smaller than the gains to the people who are lower income.

Michael Chui: How do you make that case?

Justin Wolfers: You don't think intuition helps? You don't think telling a story helps? So let's take $10,000 from Bill Gates. Michael, what is he going to do without?

Michael Chui: I don't know what Bill spends things on nowadays.

Justin Wolfers: Let's take $10,000 and give it to a single mom. What does that look like for her daughter?

Michael Chui: It's a huge difference.

Justin Wolfers: I think people have very, very strong moral intuitions about this. The only novelty of our research is we found that the intuitions people had were exactly true.

Betsey Stevenson: I do think that people like the romantic idea, though, of “your income doesn't matter.” Just let it be and not worry about it. And I think the advice I give people is, don't worry about your income, but do worry about the skills that you're building, the connections, the career, the choices and opportunities that you're building for yourself.

Because at the end of the day, life is easier with more money. And anybody with more money knows that. And to the extent that they don't admit it, it's just because they're trying to keep it a secret so nobody takes that money and gives it to somebody who needs it more than they do.

Michael Chui: I'm interested, though, the way you framed it, the $60,000 drudgery job versus the $50,000 engaging job. The way you phrased it, almost, it's, there's value in the ability to have choice.

Justin Wolfers: Yeah.

Michael Chui: That's something that someone actually values.

Justin Wolfers: What a great privilege. So you should tell the story of your best friend.

Betsey Stevenson: First of all, I was going to say we actually know people value choice because people who are self-employed tend to make a little bit less than they would make if they were in a wage or salaried job. They're paying for the control over how they spend their time.

If I take myself and my best friend, we went to college together. She may have even been a slightly better student than me, though we were both pretty good students. And we both went to graduate school. She went to law school. I went to do a PhD. Traditionally, those lawyers will earn more than people getting a PhD. But when she graduated from law school, she decided that the best way she could spend her time was to help low-income domestic violence victims.

She has been in legal practices serving low-income communities her entire career. She earns less than me. I don't think she's less happy. I think she made a choice that comes with a lot of meaning, a lot of fulfillment.

And she could have done the other path. She had all the credentials and education to be a corporate lawyer. But when she thought about what life would look like with all that income as a corporate lawyer, or all the meaning of getting up every day and doing things that improve the lives of people who are really struggling, she chose to get paid some of her pay in that feeling of meaning and satisfaction.

That's very important. And that's why I never would want anybody to misinterpret our research as suggesting, just pursue the almighty dollar. That's not what we're saying. But her ability to pursue that very rewarding career came from the opportunities she got from pursuing a lot of education.

Michael Chui: You framed that point in terms of labor market choices on the part of your friend. I know you've actually studied how the labor market has been evolving since the pandemic happened. What have you found?

Betsey Stevenson: Let's start really big and really broad. If you go back 75 years, roughly half the jobs were in goods and half the jobs were in services. And if you look at where the labor market is today, it's about 15 percent of the jobs in goods, and the rest are in either government or services. So we don't need to make as much stuff as we used to make.

Justin Wolfers: We make a lot of stuff.

Betsey Stevenson: That's true.

Justin Wolfers: But we do it incredibly productively. And we don't need a lot of people to do it.

Betsey Stevenson: And we also do a lot of our stuff through trade.

Justin Wolfers: I was going to say, unfortunately, we have another workforce.

Betsey Stevenson: What are we doing as we get richer as a country? What we care a lot about is our health. And we care a lot about investing in our skills, so we care a lot about education. And we also care about having fun. We care about leisure.

If you look at the industries that have been growing really rapidly, particularly in the 21st century, it’s education, health services, leisure, and hospitality. Those are really where a lot of the jobs have come from. Those are industries that disproportionately employ women. And it's one of the reasons why women have continued to grow as a share of the labor force.

Now, during the pandemic, we had something incredibly unusual happen, which is unlike a normal recession. In a normal recession, what happens is people start to think, "Oh I could get laid off. I should probably cut back." Or "Maybe I'm not getting as many hours as I'm used to getting, so I need to cut back a little bit because I don't have as much income."

So what do they do? Well, they postpone getting a new car. They postpone buying an appliance, like a dishwasher or a refrigerator. They decide not to move house after all. They just stop buying stuff. But they keep going and getting their hair cut and going to the dentist, and those things continued.

In a normal recession, men tend to lose the most jobs because they're the ones who make the most stuff. And women tend to lose jobs less, because they tend to work in the service sector. What happened in the pandemic was we kept buying stuff, but we actually stopped—we weren't afraid of our income disappearing as much as we are afraid of our health. And so we stopped doing things where we were interacting with people.

And women tend to hold a lot of the jobs where we interact with people. And those have been the jobs that have been slowest to come back from that pandemic recession. If you look at things like the tech sector—the tech sector hired at incredibly high levels coming out of the pandemic, way exceeded their prepandemic levels of employment.

But leisure and hospitality, still chugging along, trying to recover. Education and health services have gone back to where they were prior to the pandemic, but not the growth path they were on prior to the pandemic. So not where they would've been based on preexisting trends.

What we've seen is a labor market that's been really shook up in the last three years with not just job loss, but job loss in unusual sectors. A lot of interest in hiring people in sectors that actually hadn't grown very much in recent years. The goods-producing sector, particularly the domestic goods-producing sector, started to really grow. So we've seen a lot of reallocation of workers.

We also saw a lot of people realizing that control and choice was incredibly important to them. So we saw huge growth in self-employment. And we're starting to now see people moving away from self-employment and back into more traditional jobs as they're starting to feel a little bit more comfortable with giving up that control that you get when you are self-employed.

I think we're in a labor market that's still evolving. And then we just had AI thrown on top of it. I think it's nowhere near done evolving. There's a lot of change that's left to happen. And I don't know where that's going to go.

But I will say that while some people were fearful that because women lost the most jobs in the pandemic, that this would somehow change gender equity in the labor force, it's actually been women that have come back stronger than men. And if you look at prime-age women, their labor force participation rates well exceed where they were prior to the pandemic. And in particular, it's Black women who are working more than they've worked in this century, basically, in the 21st century. So we're seeing very high employment rates that come from very high labor force participation rates, and low unemployment for African-American women.

Michael Chui: Until recently we see a lot of gains at the lower quintiles of the income distribution with marginalized populations, as you just talked about. But recently, as the tightening from the Fed has come, those gains have slowed or even reversed. What do you see happening?

Justin Wolfers: I actually think that you've hit on one of the truly untold stories of the 2020s, which is inequality has declined. Holy cow. Because throughout my entire lifetime, inequality's been rising in the US. And it's been declining for two reasons. At least two.

One is, unemployment is a problem, particularly for disadvantaged groups. When there are people who are going to miss out on work, it usually turns out to be those with less education, or racial minorities, or ethnic minorities. Basically, an employer, when they face a long queue at the factory gate, can afford to discriminate.

But once the economy goes hot, all of a sudden we're bringing all sorts of people back to work. And not just minorities, but also people with disabilities, people with criminal records. And these are people who otherwise would have an incredibly difficult time getting by. So let me just cheer every day of that with all of my heart.

And then it's not just that. We've actually seen wages at the low end rise quite dramatically. I don't think I've ever said that before in my professional life. It was always that low-end wages were stagnant, for decades. We're seeing workers in the bottom quintile catching up towards those at the median. I'm not yet sure any of that's reversed. And so it looks to me like at a minimum, the rise in inequality is over. And perhaps there's a little boom and a decline in inequality.

And there's a really big question—Betsey hinted at it before—what is AI going to do to all this? And one could imagine it decreases inequality even further.

Betsey Stevenson: Research has shown really pretty big wage compression. Wages at the top just have not risen as much as wages at the bottom. And that's that decline in inequality that Justin's talking about. I think that's happening simultaneously with people being frustrated by record-high corporate profits and non-wage income inequality that still seems to be accelerating.

I worry about that in the sense that AI is only going to make that worse in the big returns to capital when your capital can do a lot. I worry about that. Justin mentioned a tight labor market has made it very easy to bring workers in who are traditionally more disadvantaged.

If you think back to the end of the expanded unemployment insurance due to the pandemic, there was all this arguing around whether this was contributing to the tight labor market. We had an incredibly tight labor market for several months, with lots of employers saying, "I can't find anybody. I'm advertising. I can't find anybody." I talked to some big employers. And one of the things they realized is, they use algorithms to sort through applications. And many of them had turned on in their algorithm an automatic kicking out of applicants, of people who had been unemployed for six months or more.

That's the kind of discrimination against the long-term unemployed that exists and has existed. We struggled with this in the 2008 recession. And we talked to employers about, you’ve got to be willing to hire these people that have been unemployed for six months or longer. And it was very hard to get them to do anything about it coming out of the 2008 recession.

But coming out of the pandemic recession, there were just a lot of people who didn't work for six months because, well, it was the pandemic. And they were at home. And then employers were like, "Oh, we can't find anybody because we are literally throwing out all of the applications." A lot of employers had to retool their algorithm to stop kicking people out. And I hope that sticks forever, because it was stupid. And it really hurt a lot of people.

It is a reminder that when employers say the labor market's tight, it's that they can't find people in the way they're used to looking for people. And we have to ask them questions like, "Who are you considering? How are you getting applicants? What do you have in your ad?" Because we also see employers who will often advertise for more credentials than they need. And then we see that there are gender differences in who will apply for those jobs. Women are much more reluctant to apply for a job if they don't have all the credentials in the ad. Men are less so.

So if you add a lot of credentials to your ad, you're going to get a lot of white male applicants. You might get fewer of other people. So there are lots of things that employers can do. And I think the extremely tight labor market of the last few years forced them to investigate those and make those changes so they could widen their pool. The goal is for that to be a lesson that sticks, because it does create a fairer, more diverse labor market.

Michael Chui: I think some people have noted that labor shortages go away if you raise wages, amongst other things.

Justin Wolfers: Yes.

Michael Chui: I'd love to talk more about AI. We'll publish something by the time this podcast is released on the impact of generative AI. One of the interesting things in terms of skill-biased technological change—it's almost exactly the reverse if you use skills viewed by educational attainment. It's actually the PhDs that have the most exposure. I think the question there might be, does that decrease inequality because they're more exposed? Or do they get to use that superpower of being augmented by these machines to gain even more?

Justin Wolfers: Let me take a stab at that. It's funny, if I think about my talent as an economist, it's not that I know the most complicated math. It's that I can read widely and synthesize economic commentary, insight and, then simplify and say it back in English. That's what ChatGPT does. So I'm scared.

And I ought to be scared. So I realize, as I think about that—I was talking to a journalist friend today, described his skill set, remarkably similar. So I realized, this is probably what it felt like to be a blue-collar manufacturing worker right before the US opened up to China. It's given me a great deal more empathy.

I imagine some of the blue-collar unions are looking at this and feeling something. So the advice that I give to my students is, it looks like this is going to take a lot of white-collar jobs. And then middle through upper-middle-class white-collar jobs.

That's the sense in which this will reduce inequality. The sense in which it will increase inequality is, only so many people hold stock in Microsoft or Google or whoever holds the technology. And so whoever that is, is going to get supercharged rich.

But I think the differences between the working, middle, and upper-middle class are going to compress. The advice I give my students is it's easy, too easy, for white-collar workers to find themselves as substitutable for generative AI. The thing you want to be looking at for the next 30 years of your career is how can you be a complement?

So literally what I'm doing is, I'm studying this like crazy, because I want to be the economist who uses generative AI to do what I do better. And that may leave those who don't without a job. But that's the advice. And so while you get asked often as an economics educator, "Oh here's a problem," all of the homework we set our econ students, ChatGPT can answer it. And say, "Why on earth would that be the question you ask them? Why on earth is the thing you're teaching them the first thing that a computer can do instead of a human?”

What we ought to be doing is teaching them the stuff computers can't do. And so that's a slower, longer-run pivot. To the white-collar workers who are scared, I feel you. And to those who aren't, wake up.

Betsey Stevenson: I was just going to say that on an optimistic note, I think Justin's more creative than ChatGPT. I think that what you have to pivot to is what makes you essentially human. And what makes you essentially human is being able to make connections that aren't obvious. It's that creativity.

Hopefully, AI is going to help us spend more time studying art and creativity and thinking about how to be more innovative in a way that can allow us to be more productive and have more free time. But we have to worry a lot about the transitions.

What I worry about in terms of inequality is that the older folks—let's take Justin and I, well, we already sort of have our positions of authority. And then we can take the AI and use it to keep going. And we're in a position to harness that AI, hopefully, in a way that will help make us better teachers and better at our job.

No one's going to let us go. But maybe that means we need to hire fewer people at the entry level, because we can become more productive. I think that's really happening at law firms. If you've got partners at law firms, they used to have to rely on a whole bunch of paralegals and junior associates to do all the scut work. Now you've got partners who don't need humans because they've got AI to help them do some of the things that those humans used to do.

The result might be that there are fewer entry-level jobs. The people who are existing in the jobs are doing great, but there’s fewer entry-level jobs. Then it becomes hard to get this path to a good job. There could be generational inequality that comes out of this as part of the transition. And I think that’s going to be something we have to really look out for.

Michael Chui: Well, there's both optimism in there as well as caution. Do you have a couple minutes to do a quick lightning round? What's your favorite source of information about the economy? Betsey.

Justin Wolfers: Yeah, that's my answer. Betsey. What's yours, Betsey?

Betsey Stevenson: Justin.

Justin Wolfers: Done.

Michael Chui: What's one topic in economics that most excites you? Justin?

Justin Wolfers: I am deeply excited right now by the reinvention of work. And I also think there's incredible work to be done on mental health.

Michael Chui: Betsey?

Betsey Stevenson: Justin and I have very overlapping research interests. I think that's my answer as well, what's happening with work. I believe we're finally going to get Keynes’s vision for his grandchildren.

Michael Chui: Ooh. Get your PTO [paid time off] ready, folks. If you could decree one economic policy decision, what would it be? Justin?

Justin Wolfers: A four-day workweek.

Betsey Stevenson: Free childcare for all.

Michael Chui: What would you recommend someone graduating from secondary school study?

Justin Wolfers: I have to say economics. But I'm going to tell you that I'm going to recommend to my daughter she study psychology. We have enough economists in our household.

Betsey Stevenson: I'm going to say data science.

Michael Chui: What would you be doing today if you weren't doing what you're doing? Betsey? I don't mean today.

Betsey Stevenson: I was like, "Working out. Can't you tell?" What would I be doing today? Boy, I don't know. That's not how I view the world. I'm on the path I'm on. You stymied me because my response is everything, everywhere, all at once.

Justin Wolfers: I'd be floundering in middle management.

Michael Chui: And finally, what's one piece of advice you have for our listeners? Justin?

Justin Wolfers: Let's go to that point about AI. Your career is about to change in ways that you're utterly unaware of even if you've been thinking about it. So make you a complement to generative AI. You might say, "What does that mean?" And Betsey gave a sense of that, which is, what is it that's distinctively human about you and your skills? Because that's what you can do and computers can't.

Betsey Stevenson: Use the tools of economics to make the very best decisions you can, given the information you know at the time. And don't feel bad if the information you learn later makes you think, "Oh, I should've done something else." You made the best decision you could at the time. Move forward. Regret isn't something that's going to help you.

Michael Chui: Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers, thanks for joining us.

Justin Wolfers: A pleasure.

Betsey Stevenson: Thank you.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers what subject they would want to see debated and who the participants would be.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.J.E. wants a prominent current or former tech executive to face a critic:
I’d have Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg debate U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about the damaging effects of social media on the mental health and well-being of young people. I find it quite frustrating that Zuckerberg and Sandberg were so eager to engage with the media about the positive impact of Facebook (Bringing the world together!) or their confidence about creating change (Move fast and break things!). Now that it’s apparent that social media has caused serious problems, we don’t hear from them. Do they agree that children have been adversely affected? Can they offer any solutions to the problems their product caused? What is their response to Dr. Murthy’s report?
Chadd’s struggles with addiction inform the debate he wants to see:
As someone who went to drug-rehab centers all over the country, experienced the opioid crisis over a decade, watched a dozen or so of my friends die, and overdosed multiple times myself, I believe that an under-discussed issue is drug-rehab programs—not only drug rehab but the concept of the “disease of addiction” and the entire 12-step rehab regime that has basically had control of the alcohol and drug narrative for 100 years.
Having been to treatment something like 15 to 20 times (anything from seven-day detoxes to 90-day rehab programs), I’ve seen and experienced so many of these places that it’s embarrassing. But I did finally “recover” and have since been drug-free for more than 5 years.
With that in mind, I want people to understand that nearly every single one of these places offered nearly the exact same treatment program. Some were better than others; most were mostly bullshit. Some really did try, and had honest, kind, and compassionate staff that really cared. Some were full-on grifts, run by former (and current) addicts who took advantage of desperate parents and insurance companies to enrich themselves at the expense of these poor folks. Besides all that, the one thing they all had in common was that the absolute main aspect of the “treatment” was exposure to the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Sometimes it was very in-depth, with “therapists” who were essentially 12-step evangelists spreading the good word of AA. Some were credentialed and kind and talented. Almost all preached the 12 steps like it was pretty much the gold standard of treatment. Not only that, most would casually even make snide comments about other methods of treatment, dismissing them as if they were completely absurd and irrelevant. That mindset is highly prevalent in the 12-step ecosystem.
Why am I talking about all this? Because people talk about how difficult the “disease” of addiction is, and the dismal success rates of treatment. In my opinion, there are better, more effective, evidence-based treatments that are underutilized and disregarded, if not outright demonized. I have been attacked on social media for stating my views about the 12 steps by vicious AA evangelists, some of whom I used to consider friends. All because I said that I think the 12 steps don’t work and that we should be trying something else instead of the same thing over and over.
I just so happen to be one of those people for whom the 12 steps did not work. Over and over, I was told I “must not have been totally honest,” or “Maybe you’re just not done yet,” as if there is some magical “bottom” you have to hit before you’re ready to stop destroying yourself. None of that stuff ended up being true. What I was missing the entire time was direction and connection. And also medication-assisted treatment, or MAT.
MAT [incorporates] medications that a drug-dependent person can take to ease withdrawal symptoms and more easily reenter normal life. These drugs are heavily stigmatized and demonized in the 12-step community. When I left NA, one could not be considered “clean” if they were taking medication for this purpose. Because of this stigma and the general idea that MAT is just replacing one drug with another—and for that reason is doomed to fail—therapists, doctors, and families are generally pushed away from these treatments. Not only that, but to access them one typically must pay some cash [since insurance often does not offer full coverage]. This leads many users to go back to drugs like heroin and fentanyl, because it’s almost cheaper to continue to use heroin than to afford the doctor visit, travel expenses, and crazy-high prescription costs. These medications have been shown to be highly effective at stopping withdrawals, curbing craving, and preventing future use.
If I could have any two people debate, I would say Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), versus either Dr. Carl Hart of Columbia University or Dr. Gabor Maté, a Canadian addiction and harm-reduction expert. The topic would be the merits of the entire disease concept, and the effectiveness of 12-step programs versus other, evidence-based modalities. I choose Dr. Hart or Maté because both are highly regarded in their fields and have written incredible books on relevant topics. Hart mainly focuses on neuroscientific aspects of addiction, while Maté mainly focuses on behaviors and things like past trauma. Both have talked about how the idea of addiction as a “disease” is highly questionable, and how many of the assumptions about drug use and addicts are totally wrong.
Volkow has been the head of NIDA for years, is also highly regarded in her field, and has been very vocal about her belief in the “disease of addiction” and access to 12-step programs.
I’d love to see them debate the topic of addiction as a lifelong, incurable disease and the effectiveness of the 12 steps. I believe that we have erred in accepting that heavy, dependent drug use is some kind of incurable disease and that once you have it, you'll never kick it, and you can never be the same again.
I’m living proof that this idea is nonsense.
M.’s suggestions raise a significant logistical challenge:
I would argue that the most important debate has already occurred and very few people noticed: John Maynard Keynes vs. F. A. Hayek. Although this version is a parody, the questions raised by these two individuals are still debated by governments throughout the world today. Another important debate resolution: “Is the U.S. federal administrative state in 2023 constitutional?” I’d nominate Woodrow Wilson to argue the affirmative and Alexander Hamilton to argue the negative. Because both support stronger federal governments, we would take Hayek as the moderator, giving him the moderator’s prerogative to ask questions throughout. For the past 100 years there has been a significant shift in the size and scope of both the federal and state governments, and in the responsibilities they claim. What is unclear today is where the limits are. Having a serious debate by “uninterested” (in this case, dead) parties might be useful in starting that conversation.
Adam believes his debate would turn out differently than I do:
What I think is dividing this country is a lost ability to have back-and-forth, unscripted conversation. What is the quickest way to win an argument these days? Don’t engage in one. The second quickest way? Dismiss the opponent’s position as a radical, fringe thought. Planned speeches with little Q&A are becoming more popular. Even more, any appearance of an adverse opinion is shunned instead of addressed. Our political leaders have adopted these methods, and as a result, the virtue of good-faith debate is fading.
My answer to the Question of the Week will thus focus less on the substantive issue and more on reviving spirited, rigorous, and professional debate. So here is what I would like to see (and why): Arthur Brooks debating Joe Biden on whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
One caveat: No notes or teleprompter allowed. This debate, I believe, would juxtapose a levelheaded, articulate, finely tuned oralist with our president. Hopefully this would remind Americans of how real leaders present themselves. The topic is, of course, silly and meaningless. But if it is plainly shown that our president cannot form coherent thoughts on something so simple, then Americans should be skeptical of how he performs behind closed doors with other world leaders. At bottom, what disheartens me most is that those who garner the most attention are either not sharp enough to engage in spontaneous speech or possibly so insecure in their beliefs that they resort to character attacks, leaving the merits of important issues unaddressed and unresolved.
Were I advising Joe Biden, I’d urge him to accept that debate and expect him to perform reasonably well in it––and I say that as someone with my own concerns about his advancing age, and as a fan of Arthur Brooks, who is a contributing writer here at The Atlantic.Bob turns our attention to agriculture:
The proposition to debate would be: “Farmers and ranchers should be treated the same as other businesses with regard to the water pollution they generate.” I limited it to just water pollution because including all types of pollution would make the topic too broad for an effective debate. (If you want names of debaters, I suggest Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, sustainability director, U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in Action, versus Anne Schechinger, agricultural economist and Midwest director, Environmental Working Group.)
The debate premise would be: Currently, the damage to the general public that is done by agriculture-related groundwater and surface-water pollution is principally dealt with by education of farmers and ranchers regarding new practices, monetary incentives, and appealing to whatever environmental ethic they may have––in contrast to other businesses (paper mills are one example in my area) that are required by law to clean up their pollution to a certain level prior to discharge into waterways. Because there are readily available ways to reduce agricultural pollution, farmers and ranchers could be similarly required by law to do so. Any increased cost would be passed on to those consumers who choose to buy their product. This seems like a reasonable transition since the vast majority of farmers/ranchers impacted are now “businesses” in every sense of the word.
Russ gets right to his proposition:
Should Joe Biden stack the Supreme Court?
The debate opponents would be Elizabeth Warren (pro) and Mitt Romney (con). I picked them specifically for the following reasons: They are both current sitting senators but not the leaders of their party. They both have run for president, so there would be name recognition, and neither can truthfully claim to represent the majority of their respective parties any longer. They can both articulate a position fairly well. I am going to give credit early that both would equally wish to win the debate and therefore prepare accordingly.
Jaleelah would debate me:
Let’s assume that I could choose the format of the debate, pick a neutral moderator committed to enforcing time limits, and guarantee that the audience is randomly selected from a pool of all Americans. I have reservations about forcing figures I respect to participate in massively viewed debates. Not every smart person is a smart debater, and some people do not appreciate the possibility of being laughed at by millions of people. I would love to see Natalie Wynn debate Jordan Peterson on whether postmodern neo-Marxism is a real threat, but I would not want Wynn to face death threats from Peterson’s more extreme supporters.
I would choose myself as one of the debaters. I am a persuasive speaker, and I know I would be able to deal with the consequences of participating in such an event. I would make you debate me on the following question: “Are the principled pursuit of near-absolute freedom of speech and the practical pursuit of intelligent debate mutually exclusive?” Despite the fact that I sent you a very long email giving away many of my arguments last August, I am completely confident that I could win defending the proposition that the two cannot coexist. I think this debate would be fun, and it would probably force you to defend one over the other in future writing. There would be no good reason to refuse!

The Meghan Markle and Prince Harry content farm is facing contradictory supply and demand challenges. On the one hand, Netflix is reportedly threatening that the couple had better come up with some more shows, or $51 million comes off the table. On the other, Spotify has found that the 12 episodes of Markle’s podcast, Archetypes, were 10 episodes too many (the Serena Williams and Mariah Carey interviews were blockbusters, but after that: crickets). And—in a mutual decision! mutual!—it has cut the couple loose from their $20 million deal. Together, the news stories formed a classic example of the macroeconomic principle of too much, too little, too late.In rapid response to the Netflix needling came word that the couple was working on a possible prequel to Great Expectations, centered on the life of a young Miss Havisham. It was exactly the kind of project you could imagine them dreaming up and an improvement, perhaps, on one of Harry’s earlier pitches, “Jude the Obscure, but in Vegas.”We learned, too, of a private humiliation: Markle had composed a heartfelt and deeply personal letter inviting Taylor Swift on her show, but received only a rejection from her staff. News also broke of some ideas for podcasts that Harry was reportedly considering making, including talking with the pope about “religion,” and with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump about their childhood.A list of other possible subjects, its authenticity not confirmed, was leaked by the couple or possibly by the Prince and Princess of Wales, or perhaps it was found at the end of a California writer’s garden. Here they are:Meghan’s Content IdeasArmed Vulnerability: How 24-Hour Private Security Can Make You More Open to Feelings Two Girls Talking: Meghan and Gwyneth Get Real About Italian VogueSCOTUS SHOT CLOCK: Alan Dershowitz, Gloria Allred, and Dua Lipa Explain Why Justice Brandeis Believed in the ‘Right to Be Let Alone’Suits Reunion, Part 1This Candle Smells Like My PrenupCentering Yourself When Others Are Centered on You: Finding Peace on the Red CarpetSuits Reunion, Part 2, with Hoda KotbThe Grandmother Was ExtraRed Scare Booked Taylor Swift, and I’m Not Taking CallsHe Spends Two Days on the Witness Stand to Talk About … Chelsy Davy?Hoda Kotb Canceled. Unbelievable.What Mothers of Ordinary Children Might Feel: A Four-Part Scientific InvestigationAmy Schumer (scheduling conflict)SCOTUS SHOT CLOCK: Kelly Clarkson and Former Princess Tessy of Luxembourg discuss Marbury v. Madison and Louis Vuitton’s Keepall 55What I’d Really Like to Do Is a 12-Episode Single-Camera Mockumentary That Showcases My Comedy SkillsBrainstorming With Andrew Morton and Martin BashirBeyond Green JuiceMontecito Solutions to the Housing Crisis (It’s All About Zoning)Cutting Out the Chelsy Davy Pages From 500,000 Copies of SpareSuits Reunion Wrap-Up, With NBC4 News Los Angeles Anchor Colleen Williams (confirmed)How to Talk So Matrimonial Lawyers Will ListenThe People’s Duchess?Harry’s Content IdeasAnimalsTall Things and Short Things Ruined by Climate ChangeSlacksConversations With Obama (if available)Conversations With Tony Blair (if no Obama)Conversations With Liz Truss (confirmed)“Mediocrity”: What Is It and How Do You Spell It?I Think I’m Still in Love With Chelsy DavyAre My Bed, Bath & Beyond Coupons Worthless?I Still Have Chelsy’s Diamond EarringsIf You like Piña ColadasTrey Parker and Matt Stone Can Bite MeChris Martin Acoustic Set (maybe with the pope?)I’m TrappedUkraine: Where Is It?Can a Listener Please Get Me Out of Here?Coping With Princess Fucking Michael of KentI’m Tired of the ChickensHow to Write a Book By YourselfI Want to Go Home

There is no freude like schadenfreude. Friends and admirers of Ukraine and enemies of Russian despotism and brutality have been chuckling this week, even as they scratch their heads about the opéra bouffe that was the Prigozhin putsch. I learned of these events on my way back from Kyiv with some senior Polish foreign-policy experts and practitioners. We shared ingenious theories about what was unfolding, most of which had to be revised drastically the next time we got internet access. I have to confess that it was entertaining.Many shrewd guesses about what happened are floating about, most of them contradictory: Prigozhin acted alone in a fit of pique about the Wagner Group losing its valuable contracts; Prigozhin acted under the sponsorship of “men in the shadows”; Prigozhin thought he had backers and got out ahead of himself; Prigozhin was staging a bit of theater at Putin’s behest (that one evaporated quickly). Who knows? What is important is what the drama of the weekend means for the war in Ukraine and for the security of Europe and the rest of the world.Parsing shreds of evidence—The minister of defense is in the newspapers, which means his position is safe! Charges against Prigozhin are still pending!—can only get us so far. Focusing on the three logics that will drive the war long after we figure out what just happened is more productive.The first and deepest logic remains Russian imperialism, which requires the subjugation of Ukraine not simply as a matter of national ambition, but as a matter of self-understanding. Vladimir Putin is a thug seeking power and wealth, but that does not mean that he and his cronies are insincere in their belief that Ukraine is, in fact, a subordinate element of Russia. The summer before the war, Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an article pervaded with the falsehoods and myths that inspired his attack. Authors like Ivan Ilyin, the reactionary anti-Communist, laid the groundwork for even wilder Russian fantasies. (Timothy Snyder’s essay “Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism” provides a useful overview of his thought.)But imperial fever and fascism only do so much. The second logic of this war is the logic of any war, and for that we must turn to Carl von Clausewitz, whose depiction of the intangible elements of war—the connection between politics and strategy, the nature and effect of clashing wills, the culmination of offensives in exhaustion, the intrinsic power of the defense—has never been bettered. In many respects, the war in Ukraine is a war like any other, in which tactical competence, training and morale, operational-level design, and above all logistics play key roles in shaping results on the battlefields of southern and eastern Ukraine.The third logic, which is now dominant, is that of mafia politics. And here the best guide is unquestionably Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Indeed, one can imagine Putin pondering the scene in which the aging Don Corleone warns his son and successor, Michael, that one of his trusted lieutenants will offer to broker a peace deal, in order to betray him: “Now listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don’t forget that.” Is President Lukashenko of Belarus, who negotiated the stand-down with Prigozhin, still Putin’s loyal subordinate? What about anyone who recommended that the Russian president take the deal that let Prigozhin go free? Why are some in Russia suggesting replacing faithful if dull military leaders like Valery Gerasimov with people like Sergey Surovikin who were once close to Prigozhin?One of the common phrases in The Godfather is “It’s not personal; it’s business”—a sentiment usually expressed just before another gangster gets rubbed out. Of course, it’s all personal, and that is the point. What is now going on in the Kremlin is a murky and potentially lethal game of guessing who the traitors are, eliminating them before they eliminate you, forming unlikely and unpredicted alliances, and plotting to get in the first blow before your car explodes with you in it, or you take a tumble from a tenth-story window or down a cocktail laced with Novichok.Putin is probably as uncertain as the rest of us about what just happened, but he has to be fearful, furious, and vengeful. He has to decide whether to get rid of his mediocre defense minister and chief of the general staff to appease the men in the shadows, or whether that would weaken him further. He has to be looking for the traitors in the military, the FSB, and other security services who seemed unable or unwilling to stop Wagner’s march on Moscow. Because he looks weak, he will be desperate to look strong, while others, perhaps tired of this war, will seek to weaken him further. Or maybe they’ll just kill him. Or maybe Putin is no longer really in charge, and there is already an opaque struggle among the men in the shadows to succeed him, because mafias are run by dons, not committees.For the moment, the mafia logic dominates all others. If forced to choose between survival and either ideology or sound strategy, Putin and the rest of the political and military leadership will unquestionably choose the former. Prigozhin had the nerve to throw a gut punch at the ideas behind the war—even if, perhaps, he did his erstwhile boss a bit of a disservice in saying that the invasion of Ukraine was about loot and nothing else. But now that he has broached the forbidden subject, there will be others, in private and maybe in public, who will take up the refrain.The impact on the battlefield will be the most interesting. A bloody and extensive Russian civil war would have been good for Ukraine, diverting troops as well as attention from the front lines opposite them. But the pervasiveness of mafia logic will still do Ukraine considerable good. Senior generals in the Russian military cannot be apolitical professionals: They have patrons, and they have clients. They know that there will be witch hunts for traitors, particularly in the special-forces units that did not fight Wagner. Defending against the mounting Ukrainian offensive will be considerably more difficult for officers looking over their shoulders at Moscow. And Putin may still see a need to shift units to the country’s center to forestall another putsch.Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.It may not be ever thus. The Russian superhawks who want a still more violent war remain in the grip of the first, fascistic logic—and they may resurface after a time. The second logic will still hold as well: Breaching in-depth defenses will remain a difficult and bloody business for Ukraine, and political chaos in Moscow will not deliver 155-mm rounds, HIMARS, or deep-strike munitions to General Valeriy Zaluzhny’s men and women in their dugouts and bunkers.The Prigozhin putsch will reverberate for some time to come; it has already shattered illusions about Putin’s grip and even his physical courage. But it should also shatter the illusion that the West can forge a kind of Goldilocks solution to this war, in which Ukraine does well but not too well while Russia is humbled but not shattered. We are spectators to a play in which the actors have decided to rip up their scripts, and are instead improvising an anarchic tragedy, but one that is not without its comic moments.

Fraudsters stole more than $200 billion of aid distributed by the Small Business Administration (SBA) during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That eye-popping figure was announced Tuesday in a report from the SBA Office of Inspector General that assessed the SBA's handling of the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The report concludes that the SBA "weakened or removed the controls necessary to prevent fraudsters from easily gaining
access to these programs" and that "the allure of 'easy money' in this pay and chase environment attracted an overwhelming number of fraudsters to the programs."
Ultimately, more than one-sixth of the $1.2 trillion disbursed through the two programs was stolen, according to the report.
While much attention has been paid to the potential fraud within the PPP, the $136 billion stolen from the EIDL represents a shocking 33 percent of the total amount spent through that program, which was intended to help businesses cover non-payroll operating expenses during the pandemic.
The new data on COVID-related fraud at the SBA are a long-awaited update—and a significant increase—to previous projections that estimated fraud levels at $86 billion in fraud in the EIDL program and $20 billion in the PPP.
Even the new, higher numbers might undercount how much money was lost: a recent Associated Press review of pandemic-related spending estimated that $400 billion was stolen or wasted. That analysis included $123 billion that the A.P. determined to have been wasted or misspent, while the updated SBA OIG report focuses solely on funds lost to fraud.
The new report once again highlights how utterly overwhelmed the SBA was by the volume of spending Congress asked it to distribute in the early days of the pandemic. The SBA "executed over 14 years' worth of lending within 14 days, and this was just the beginning," auditors noted.
Within that environment, avoiding fraud was impossible. Still, the SBA worsened the situation in key ways. For example, the agency did not run loan applications through the Treasury Department's "Do Not Pay" database—a list of known criminals and scammers—until 2021, long after the bulk of the pandemic spending was out the door. In a May 2021 report, the SBA's inspector general noted that the agency did not have "a centralized entity to design, lead, and manage fraud risk" until February 2022—nearly two years after it began distributing PPP loans.
"Since SBA did not have an established strong internal control environment for approving and disbursing program funds, there was an insufficient barrier against fraudsters accessing funds that should have been available for eligible business owners adversely affected by the pandemic," the SBA OIG report concludes.
In all, the SBA issued more than 4.5 million loans to fraudulent recipients. In one case highlighted in the report, a group of eight people submitted at least 150 fraudulent loan applications and obtained over $18 million in PPP and EIDL funds, then used the funds to buy "luxury homes, gold coins, diamonds, jewelry, luxury watches, fine imported furnishings, designer handbags, clothing, and a luxury motorcycle." In another case, a single person managed to "scam the system 150 times over, securing $3 million for herself and those involved in the conspiracy."
We only know about those situations because the perpetrators got caught. Many others remain on the lam. So far, investigations into COVID-related fraud have netted 1,011 indictments, 803 arrests, and 529 convictions. The joint efforts of the SBA, U.S. Secret Service, and other federal agencies have resulted in nearly $30 billion in COVID funds being seized or returned to SBA, according to the report.
That leaves a mere $170 billion—roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Kuwait—that has vanished without a trace.
The post Scammers Stole $200 Billion From Two Federal COVID Aid Programs appeared first on Reason.com.

Alabama can't decide whether it's ready to execute James Barber. 
Barber, a death-row inmate set to be killed on July 20th, has requested to die by nitrogen hypoxia, an as-yet untested execution method approved by the state in 2018. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Kenneth Eugene Smith, another Alabama death row inmate who asked to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, against the state's objections.
While a new execution date for Smith has not been set, officials announced last month that Barber's execution date had been set for summer 2023. Barber was sentenced to death after being convicted for the 2001 beating death of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps.
The state Attorney General's Office requests that the state be legally allowed to execute Barber by nitrogen hypoxia next month; however, the Alabama Department of Corrections insists that the state is not yet ready and needs more time to prepare. The confusion is the latest controversy over the state's execution procedures. 
Barber is scheduled to be the first person executed in Alabama since the state's governor imposed a moratorium on executions following a string of botched lethal injection attempts last year. However, Barber wants to die by nitrogen hypoxia—which involves suffocating the inmate in a gas chamber by increasing the proportion of nitrogen in the air—rather than lethal injection, and has asked a federal court to cancel his lethal injection execution so he can be killed by the alternate method. Barber has claimed he wants to die by nitrogen hypoxia because it will be more humane than death by lethal injection, especially considering the state's recent record. 
State officials have recently sent mixed messages about Alabama's ability to carry out such an execution. In a court filing responding to Barber's request, the Alabama Attorney General's Office wrote that should the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama side with Barber, "such an injunction should be limited in scope so as to permit Barber's July 20, 2023, execution to be conducted by nitrogen hypoxia."
However, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) clarified in an email to Al.com that the department was not ready to carry out a nitrogen hypoxia execution.
"The Alabama Department of Corrections has completed many of the preparations necessary for conducting executions by nitrogen hypoxia," the spokesperson continued. "The protocol for carrying out executions by this method is not yet complete. Once the nitrogen hypoxia protocol is complete, ADOC personnel will need sufficient time to be thoroughly trained before an execution can be conducted using this method."
The state's conflicting messages make it unclear if Alabama will attempt to kill Barber by nitrogen hypoxia next month, should he win his federal case. However, the state's mixed messages are hardly surprising. 
Alabama has displayed a chaotic response following several botched executions last year. While Governor Kay Ivey (R) called for a moratorium on executions in November, pending an investigation into the state's lethal injection procedures, the state did not release its internal audit. ADOC officials made vague promises to increase the number of available staff for executions and rehearse the process. At the same time, Ivey successfully requested the Alabama Supreme Court to allow execution to be attempted over an extended time frame rather than on a specific day, allowing officials to attempt executions for hours or days. 
The post Alabama Isn't Ready To Kill Inmates By Nitrogen Hypoxia. It Wants To Try Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.

When it comes to setting the rules for elections, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, state legislatures are not allowed to ignore the Constitution or evade judicial review.
It may not have been the most politically divisive issue in this year's Supreme Court docket—that honor probably goes to the still-yet-to-be-announced review of President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness scheme—but Moore v. Harper was the Court's most potentially seismic case. It raised a fundamental question about the balance of power in election law: do state courts possess the authority to review and overturn state legislatures' decisions about the rules for federal elections?
They do, the Supreme Court unambiguously declared in Tuesday's ruling. "When state legislatures prescribe the rules concerning federal elections, they remain subject to the ordinary exercise of state judicial review," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 ruling.
That might seem like constitutional common sense. After all, anyone with a passing understanding of constitutional law knows that Marbury v. Madison confirmed that courts have the power to review the actions of the other branches of government. But the crux of the Moore case rested on a novel theory bouncing around conservative legal circles: the "independent state legislature theory."
That theory has its basis in Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants state legislatures control over "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives." Advocates of the independent state legislature theory argue that the Constitution places those decisions—including the drawing of congressional districts—solely in the hands of state lawmakers, with no space for courts to intervene. Therefore, the argument goes, there are no constitutional or legal constraints on state legislators when setting the rules for elections.
A redistricting battle in North Carolina became the testing ground for that idea. Last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down a proposed congressional district map because it was an unfair political gerrymander. The court imposed a new map drawn by its hand-picked experts. Republicans and Democrats each won seven of the state's 14 congressional seats in the subsequent midterm election, held with court-drawn lines. The Republican lawmakers who drew the rejected map asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and offered the independent state legislature theory in their arguments.
With a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, some liberal commentators feared that the independent state legislature theory was about to be enshrined nationally. It didn't help that some of then-President Donald Trump's cronies tossed around the theory as part of various schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election—even though the Elections Clause quite clearly applies only to congressional and senatorial elections, and it does not allow state lawmakers to intervene after an election has been held.
But Tuesday's ruling soundly rejected the independent state legislature theory.
"The Elections Clause does not vest exclusive and independent authority in state legislatures to set the rules regarding federal elections," Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, in which he was joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Sonya Sotomayor. (Separately, Kavanaugh also offered a concurring opinion.)
The importance of judicial review is one of the "fundamental principles" of America's constitutional system, Roberts wrote. "The Elections Clause does not carve out an exception to that fundamental principle."
The cross-ideological nature of the 6-3 ruling is a major blow to the independent state legislature theory's advocates—and to its critics who expected the conservative majority on the Court to rubberstamp a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution.
It's also worth noting that Justice Clarence Thomas does not argue for the independent state legislature theory in his dissent. Instead, he argues that the Court should have punted the case as moot after the North Carolina Supreme Court overruled its prior decision earlier this year.
"The federal defense no longer makes any difference to this case—whether we agree with the defense, disagree with it, or say nothing at all, the final judgment in this litigation will be exactly the same," Thomas argues. "The majority does not seriously contest that fact. Even so, it asserts jurisdiction to decide this freefloating defense that affects no live claim for relief."
That's a fair criticism, but the willingness of the Court's majority to lay down a clear signal about the independent state legislature theory is important, too, even if it made no difference to the acute issues in the underlying redistricting case.
The real winner in Tuesday's ruling is the constitutional system itself and its insistence on the separation of powers. Roberts notes that courts also do not have unchecked authority and "may not so exceed the bounds of ordinary judicial review as to unconstitutionally intrude upon the role specifically reserved to state legislatures."
You might also think about Moore v. Harper as a proxy fight between textualism and originalism—with advocates of the independent state legislature theory advancing a pedantic, letter-of-the-law reading of constitutional provisions against a deeper understanding of how the Framers intended the messy mechanisms of democracy to work. Indeed, Roberts points repeatedly to the founding era—to Marbury, to The Federalist Papers, and early constitutional law provisions in various states—as he dissects the problems with the theory.
"When legislatures make laws, they are bound by the provisions of the very documents that give them life," he writes in one particularly direct rebuttal to the idea that state legislatures should be freed from all constitutional restraints when writing election rules. As such, legislatures are "created and bound" by state constitutions and limited to particular authorities granted by the federal constitution.
"Both constitutions," Roberts concludes, "restrain the legislature's exercise of power."
The post Supreme Court Confirms That State Legislatures Can't Ignore the Constitution When Writing Election Rules appeared first on Reason.com.

What happened in Russia over the weekend? It began as a mutiny within the armed forces, continued as what looked like a mafia sit-down, seemed briefly to transform into a coup, then ended abruptly the way that a hostage-taking may end, with the terrorist given safe passage, immunity from prosecution, and a bunch of promises.

Stage 1: Mutiny. It had been brewing for months. All through the winter and spring, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose private army, the Wagner Group, was fighting the Ukrainian military for control of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, had been accusing the Russian Defense Ministry of sabotaging his actions and failing to supply enough armaments. Prigozhin and his men—many of them convicted felons conscripted from prison colonies, an approach he didn’t invent but was the first to apply during this war—alternated between being plaintive and menacing. They threatened to abandon Bakhmut. On social media, they hurled insults at military brass, including the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov. In response, the Ministry of Defense, Russia’s official, taxpayer-funded Army, which has been fighting alongside Prigozhin’s private force, apparently moved to limit Prigozhin’s power. For months the Ministry of Defense has reportedly been drafting from prison colonies, appropriating Prigozhin’s know-how and presumably cutting off his supply of able-bodied men with nothing to lose. In mid-June, the state military tried to put its house in order by requiring all fighters to sign identical contracts with the Ministry of Defense. It wasn’t clear if the measure applied to the Wagner Group—if it did, Prigozhin could effectively lose control of his army. On June 23rd, Prigozhin accused the Ministry of Defense of striking his bases and, in a series of statements, declared an armed rebellion. “The evil being wrought by the military leadership of this country must be stopped,” he said. “Justice in the ranks of the military will be restored—and then justice for all of Russia.” His men crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia. He claimed that they numbered twenty-five thousand. “This is not a military coup,” he said. “This is a march for justice.”

Putin Created the Wagner Group Crisis Joshua Yaffa on how the Russian President outsourced his military ambitions to the mercenary force—until it turned against him.

Prigozhin was not challenging Putin. In fact, he was acting in accordance with the power structure and the mythology constructed by Putin, whereby Putin alone makes all the decisions and, if those decisions are bad, then it’s someone else’s fault—it means that he was misinformed. In a video released on June 23rd, Prigozhin said that war in Ukraine had been unleashed under false pretenses—because, he said, the Ministry of Defense had lied to Putin, making him think that Ukraine and NATO were about to attack Russia. Prigozhin was apparently marching to the capital not to depose Putin but to enlighten him.

Stage 2: The Sit-Down. Prigozhin’s men and their tanks entered Rostov-on-Don, a city of more than a million people and the seat of Russia’s Southern Military District. There Prigozhin talked, over what appeared to be tea, in what appeared to be the courtyard of a military building, with the Deputy Minister of Defense, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, and a deputy chief of the general staff, Vladimir Alekseyev. The genesis of the meeting was unclear. Had the two generals flown in to speak with Prigozhin? If so, this was a negotiation. Were they in Rostov when Prigozhin’s men occupied the city? That would make them more like hostages and less like negotiators. Prigozhin sat, manspreading, on a narrow bench, his Kalashnikov dangling against his right knee as he used both hands to gesticulate. “We want the chief of the general staff and Shoigu,” he said. “Until they are handed over to us, we will stay here and blockade the city.”

“Take them,” Alekseyev said, smiling and spreading his arms wide, as though waving Shoigu and Gerasimov away. He seemed to have as little regard for Shoigu as did Prigozhin. This is not surprising. Shoigu did not come up through the ranks of the military. In the Soviet Union, he was a Party functionary. In post-Soviet Russia, he became the Minister of Emergency Situations. What primarily qualified him for the job of Minister of Defense, which he has occupied since 2012, was a sort of adventurous friendship with Putin: the two camped together and hiked together and ran the Russian Geographic Society together, Shoigu as president and Putin as chairman of the board.

Stage 3: The Coup. Prigozhin’s men began their march toward Moscow. Along the way—perhaps even before entering Rostov—the Wagner Group shot down some number of Russian military aircraft. Now Prigozhin’s mutiny was looking like a coup—not because Prigozhin was challenging Putin directly but because he was fighting Putin’s actual Army. In the morning on the second day of Prigozhin’s insurgency, Putin addressed the nation. He compared the “armed rebellion,” as he called it, to the revolutions of 1917, which, he claimed, cost Russia its victory in the First World War and caused it to lose vast territories. He did not name Prigozhin, referring, rather, to “organizers of the armed rebellion,” whom he called traitors. He vowed to punish them, and to defend Russia.

Several Russian regions declared states of emergency or introduced various restrictions. The mayor of Moscow gave the city a day off on Monday. (It was still only Saturday at this point.) The Russian capital prepared for battle. Putin’s plane left Moscow and disappeared from the radar. Prigozhin had to face that, rather than speak to Putin, he would likely die when he attempted to enter Moscow—because, whatever he had intended, he had ended up attempting a coup.

Stage 4: It Ends the Way a Hostage-Taking Might. On Saturday evening, about thirty-six hours after the mutiny began, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka’s press service announced that he had negotiated an end to the crisis. Prigozhin’s people would reverse course. Prigozhin would go to Belarus. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said that all criminal cases against Prigozhin had been closed. Lukashenka’s press statement said that the agreement was mutually beneficial.

Rumors swirled that Lukasheka, empowered by Putin, had promised Prigozhin Shoigu’s head on a platter. There is no way to know if this is true, or if Putin had any intention to keep whatever promises Lukashenka doled out, but one of several impossible dilemmas that Putin is facing now is, indeed, what to do with Shoigu. He can hardly afford to keep a Defense Minister who allowed all of this to happen—the public spats, the mutiny, the siege of what is arguably the country’s most important military city, the apparent failure to stop Prigozhin’s armored column, and, most of all, the disrespect evident during Prigozhin’s sit-down with the military brass. On June 26th, Prigozhin issued a ten-minute audio statement on the mutiny. He stressed that his troops were able to incapacitate all Defense Ministry troops along the route of the “march for justice.” He added that in twenty-four hours, the Wagner Group covered the equivalent of the distance from Ukraine’s eastern border to its western one, saying, “If the Special Military Operation had been undertaken by troops as well trained and disciplined, it could have lasted a day.”

Across human cultures and languages, adults talk to babies in a very particular way. They raise their pitch and broaden its range, while also shortening and repeating their utterances; the latter features occur even in sign language. Mothers use this exaggerated and musical style of speech (which is sometimes called “motherese”), but so do fathers, older children, and other caregivers. Infants prefer listening to it, which might help them bond with adults and learn language faster.But to truly understand what baby talk is for, and how it evolved, we need to know which other animals use it, if any. The great apes don’t seem to vocally, but might use a gestural equivalent. Squirrel monkeys and rhesus macaques use special calls when talking to youngsters, but they’re very different from human baby talk, which is a modified version of normal speech. Zebra finches are closer to us: When singing in front of juveniles, adults add longer pauses between musical phrases and repeat introductory notes. Greater sac-winged bat mothers also change their pitch and timbre when signaling to pups, but again, it’s hard to tell if they’re using a distinct call or doing something analogous to baby talk. To make an inarguable case for the latter, you’d need to study a species that talks with both infants and older peers using the same standardized, identifiable call. In other words, you’d need a dolphin.Every bottlenose dolphin produces its own unique signature whistle, which is the closest thing any animal has to a human name. Dolphins can recognize individuals through these whistles and will sometimes copy one another’s, perhaps as a form of address. They use their whistles frequently, to announce their position when separated from their pod, or as an introduction when meeting up with new groups. Calves develop their own signature whistles based on those they hear around them, and once learned, the whistles can go unchanged for at least 12 years.Laela Sayigh, a zoologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been studying the signature whistles of bottlenoses in Sarasota Bay, Florida, since 1986 as part of the world’s longest-running study of wild dolphins. She and her colleagues regularly catch these animals, check their health, and record their calls before releasing them. Sometimes, they catch mothers and calves together, and the animals exchange signature whistles throughout the process. By analysing 19 such moments, recorded over 34 years, Sayigh’s student Nicole El Haddad showed that mothers raised and widened the pitch of their signature whistles when calling to their calves, just as humans do when talking to their babies.“We were just blown away by how consistent the effect was,” Sayigh told me. Between their intelligence and strong personality, dolphins behave unpredictably enough that scientists who study them are used to gleaning faint patterns amid messy data. But in this study, every mom changed its signature whistle around its calf in the same way. “The data are extraordinary and impressive,” Sabine Stoll, who studies language evolution at the University of Zurich, told me.Dolphin baby talk isn’t exactly the same as ours—dolphin whistles don’t get more repetitive—but it’s certainly “the most convincing case of child-directed communication found in nonhuman animals to date,” Mirjam Knörnschild from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, who led the study on sac-winged bats, told me. And its existence in a species separated from us by more than 90 million years of history is likely a “stunning” example of convergent evolution, Stoll said.If both species evolved baby talk independently, perhaps they did so for similar reasons. Human parents can better grab their infants’ attention through high-pitched baby talk than through normal speech, and dolphin mothers might do the same. Keeping her signature whistle but raising its pitch “would be a pretty foolproof way for the mom to say ‘This whistle is meant for you’ to the calf, and for the calf to know My mom is talking to me right now and no one else,” Sayigh said. That specificity would allow both of them to keep close contact in a raucous ocean where many dolphins might be sounding off at once.Human baby talk is also thought to strengthen a baby’s bond with its caregivers, and to help it learn language by exaggerating important features of the spoken word. The same could well apply to dolphins, which also stay with their mother for a long time, and learn calls by listening to their peers. But testing these ideas would be incredibly hard without separating mothers and their calves—an experiment that Sayigh said would cross an ethical line. She showed that dolphin baby talk exists; its exact role “is just one of those things that might have to go unanswered,” she said.

What happens after the Supreme Court ends affirmative action, as is anticipated this week? Colleges and universities will have to admit students using only methods that are “race-neutral,” and will not be allowed to consciously consider any applicant’s race. But institutions that have long viewed student-body diversity as essential to their missions will not change that belief simply because of the Court’s ruling, nor could the Court purport to mandate such a shift in values. What if schools move, as many surely will, to obey by adopting race-neutral measures—for example, deëmphasizing test scores, or boosting applicants from poorly funded high schools—that are designed to produce racial diversity, trying to create some semblance of what they achieved when using affirmative action? Would those moves be lawful? This will almost certainly be the next big question about admissions, as lawsuits will likely be filed claiming that race-neutral policies devised with diversity outcomes in mind are racially discriminatory. We have some legal clues from which to piece together what may happen next.

In 2013, the Court, in Fisher v. University of Texas, discussed a race-neutral admissions method that was enacted by the Texas legislature: the top ten per cent of students in every high school in the state were automatically guaranteed admission to any of the state’s public colleges or universities. Because de-facto residential segregation resulted in de-facto school segregation in much of the state, admitting the top ten per cent of each high school meant that a large number of Black and Latino students would be admitted to colleges and universities in Texas. That would produce significant racial diversity on campuses without admissions officers considering applicants’ race.

The white plaintiff in Fisher challenged U.T.’s use of race-conscious affirmative action in selecting the remainder of the undergraduate class. The Court sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit to assess whether race-neutral alternatives would suffice for U.T. to achieve the desired diversity. Its opinion didn’t cast any doubt on the lawfulness of the Top Ten Percent policy. Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurrence, said approvingly that “most blacks and Hispanics attending the University were admitted without discrimination under the Top Ten Percent plan”—contrasting a race-neutral method that wasn’t “discrimination” with affirmative action, which he said was. Three years later, when the Fisher case came back to the Supreme Court, in 2016, and the majority ultimately found U.T.’s race-conscious affirmative-action program lawful, Justice Samuel Alito, in dissent, complained that the school’s diversity goals could be reached “without injecting race into the process,” by combining the Top Ten Percent plan and a race-blind holistic review of applicants.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented in the first Fisher case, expressed that the distinction between “race-conscious” and “race-neutral” was dishonest or illusory. She pointed out that even the Top Ten Percent plan was not actually race-neutral: Texas lawmakers had adopted it with the explicit goal of insuring the admission of a large number of minority students. “It is race consciousness, not blindness to race, that drives such plans,” she wrote. She disparaged the “kind of legal mind” that “could conclude that an admissions plan specifically designed to produce racial diversity is not race conscious.”

Ginsburg’s sentiments are now most likely to be echoed by conservatives, or by plaintiffs suing schools for adopting new admissions plans that are race-neutral but still designed with the goal of producing a racially diverse class. A preview of what such lawsuits will look like came in a recent case about Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (T.J.), a selective magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia, that is often described as one of the top high schools in the U.S.

In 2020, during the national racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, the Fairfax County school board, frustrated with T.J.’s lack of diversity, considered a number of proposals to change its admissions, in order to increase the enrollment of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups. The board thus resolved to alter T.J.’s racial composition. The superintendent urged that T.J. “should reflect the diversity of [Fairfax County Public Schools], the community and Northern Virginia,” and presented graphs projecting the impact of potential new admissions standards on T.J.’s demographics, including a significant drop in Asian American enrollment. School-board members texted each other about their perceptions that “there has been an anti [A]sian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol”; that the superintendent “[c]ame right out of the gate blaming” Asian Americans; that his remarks were “demeaning” and “racist”; and that “Asians hate us.”

The board ultimately decided to eliminate standardized tests and mandated that each public middle school in four Virginia counties and the city of Falls Church would be entitled to send a set percentage of its students to T.J. Students at those dozens of middle schools would compete for the reserved spots based on grades, a problem-solving essay, a description of their skills, and “Experience Factors”; the latter included whether an applicant attended a historically underrepresented public middle school and was eligible for free or reduced-price meals. After those seats were filled, all other applicants could compete for the remaining spots, using the same criteria. The new admissions process was race-neutral in that an applicant’s race was not considered, and, in fact, evaluators were not provided any applicant’s name, race, ethnicity, or sex.

As a result of the new policy, in 2021, Asian Americans dropped from about seventy per cent of admitted students to around fifty-four per cent, and the percentages of white, Black, and Hispanic admitted students each rose. Much of this result was because Asian Americans were concentrated at a handful of “feeder” middle schools, which had, in the past, sent disproportionate numbers of their students to T.J. A coalition that was organized, in large part, by Asian American parents sued the school board, alleging that its race-neutral admissions policy was adopted with a discriminatory purpose, because the board “specifically intended to reduce the percentage of Asian-American students who enroll in TJ.” A federal district court in Virginia agreed, but on appeal, last month, the Fourth Circuit instead sided with the school board, saying that the plaintiff “cannot establish that the Board adopted its race-neutral policy with any discriminatory intent.”

The T.J. case is highly instructive because, after the end of affirmative action, new admissions policies that, like T.J.’s, rely on only race-neutral methods to produce racial diversity will be legion. Admissions are zero-sum, and so the increase of some groups’ admissions must result in the decrease of other groups’ admissions. One can imagine selective colleges and universities making adjustments to eliminate or lessen the importance of standardized tests, on which Asian Americans, as a group, have performed well; to prioritize applicants from less-well-funded high schools, who are disproportionately Black and Latino; to favor applicants from geographically underrepresented areas, where there may be fewer Asian Americans; and to put more weight on discretionary factors such as “personal” qualities, on which Asian Americans have not been scored highly. And in the lawsuits that may soon follow, courts—and, eventually, the Supreme Court—will have to decide whether the adoption of race-neutral means of producing diversity is any more lawful than the use of race-conscious affirmative action.

The key Supreme Court precedents for the T.J. case involved situations in which a government action was facially race-neutral but had a racially disparate impact. The earliest one, from the late nineteenth century, was about San Francisco’s implementation of a law requiring a permit to operate a laundry business. It turned out that, in practice, the city turned down every applicant who was Chinese while giving permits to nearly all non-Chinese applicants. Though the permitting law was “fair on its face, and impartial in appearance,” there was no explanation for the way it was applied except hostility to Chinese applicants. The Court held that the city had violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Since the late twentieth century, the Court has made it exceedingly difficult to win discrimination cases in which a race-neutral government policy had a racially disparate impact. In constitutional cases alleging that government action had a disproportionate adverse impact on Black people, the Court required plaintiffs to prove that the defendant had a discriminatory purpose. But, of course, discriminators rarely say the quiet part out loud. What’s more, the Court said that, even if there were a discriminatory motive, the plaintiff should still lose if the same thing would have happened in its absence. In Washington v. Davis (1976), the Court held that a race-neutral civil-service exam that was used to select police officers, and that resulted in four times as many Black applicants failing as white applicants, did not violate the equal-protection clause, because there was no discriminatory purpose. In Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. (1977), the Court upheld the denial of a zoning permit for low-income housing, which had a disproportionate impact on Black people, again because the plaintiff couldn’t prove that there was a discriminatory purpose. Such cases have been a bugbear for the liberal civil-rights cause.

I recently watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey which was being streamed on one of the services to which I subscribe. The film first appeared in 1968, when I was sixteen and just entering high school. I watched it then; though it has been discussed endlessly ever since, I hadn’t sat through it again until just recently. I must say, it made me feel really old.When Kubrick’s film came out, the year 2001 was thirty-three years in the future, which seemed incredibly far away. In those days, science fiction could imagine that space travel would have become routine by that date, with human beings living on the moon and undertaking manned voyages to Jupiter. The actual moon landing would occur the year following the film, which added to the widespread feeling that technology was advancing at a miraculous pace. The prospect of colonizing space opened up a huge frontier of hope and possibility.Today, it is twenty-two years after the events predicted in the film, which makes me, from the perspective of the year 1968, not just old but a creature of even more distant future.___STEADY_PAYWALL___While Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek had already premiered on TV in 1966, 2001 was the first high production-value space odyssey. The opening sequence where the camera slowly pans past a huge and fantastically detailed space ship has become a movie cliché, creating a reality far beyond the plastic models hanging from strings that characterized the early Star Trek episodes. 2001 would be followed in 1977 by the Star Wars franchise, and later ones like Universal Studio’s remake of Battlestar Galactica in the early 2000s and the recently concluded Expanse series that was first produced by the SciFi Channel and later picked up by Amazon Prime.I have to confess that I love space operas, and their premise that humankind is on the cusp of a new period of exploration and possibility.  Unfortunately, the year 2001 came and went, and now, twenty-two years later, NASA is just now undertaking a return visit to the moon. There are no warp drives or wormholes that humans can pass through so they can exceed the speed of light; the idea that we will get as far as Mars is still a dream that will take years to realize, if it ever happens.  From the perspective of the present, the optimistic hope that technology would allow humans to live on distant planets and visit even more distant galaxies may never materialize.The one theme in 2001 that now seems to be coming true is artificial intelligence. The HAL 2000 computer that turns against the human crew of the Jupiter mission sounds very much like a vocalized ChatGPT. Of course, we are very far from having anything like generalized artificial intelligence that is capable of acting autonomously in this fashion. But the advent of generative AI has rekindled fears that we are heading in that direction, and some technologists think that, unlike Jupiter, we will actually get there.Other things that 2001 projected into the future have changed dramatically. The women in 2001 are mostly space stewardesses, dressed in weird hats and serving drinks to the men who run the space station. There is a female member of the international committee running the Jupiter mission, but she speaks with a Russian accent. The movie is filled with product placements for firms that went bankrupt or lost their former glory, like the Howard Johnson’s restaurant aboard the orbiting space station and the IBM computer guiding the spacecraft.In the years since 2001, science fiction has gotten a lot gloomier.The genre is largely dominated today by post-apocalyptic futures in which mankind is devastated by plagues, environmental collapse, genetic manipulation, or nuclear war. This of course is the origin of the whole zombie genre, which has gone on so long that it has produced a big sub-genre of zombie movie parodies (e.g., Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland). More high-minded literary examples of the post-apocalyptic genre are Oliva Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, or The Road by Cormack McCarthy (who just passed away on June 13) that was made into a film. These novels are utterly bleak, in which humans are reduced to isolated individuals battling one another in a Hobbesean war of all against all.We’ve thus traced an arc in the fifty-five years since the premiere of 2001, from techno-optimism to techno-pessimism. The old space odysseys' routinized complex technologies don’t yet exist, like the Expanse’s Epstein drives or regenerative medicine. They projected many of today’s conflicts and political structures into the future, but in ways that we could assimilate to our normal experience. Star Trek’s Federation was an alliance of liberal democracies battling an authoritarian Klingon Empire that looked much like the old Soviet Union. The Expanse’s fight between the inner planets and the Belters is simply today’s class and race conflicts elevated to the scale of the solar system.The premise of all post-apocalyptic films and books, by contrast, is that our increasingly complex hi-tech civilization is unsustainable, and that at a certain point it will collapse on itself and return us to an earlier period of human history. We’ve lost the heady faith in technology that existed during the 1960s, and replaced it with a foreboding about the unanticipated negative consequences of virtually any technological advance.I for one enjoyed the former fantasy more than the one that succeeded it. But I have no idea how realistic either one is. There is a third, perhaps more chilling prospect: that in 100 or 200 years, the world will look essentially the same as it does now, only a bit grungier and with a loss of hope for any significant change in the future.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (IMBD)

Last November, FDA inspectors found almost farcical conditions when they inspected an Indian manufacturing plant that supplies medical drugs to the United States. The plant, owned by Intas Pharmaceuticals, had hardly any working systems for ensuring the purity or sterility of its products. And its employees were trying to conceal evidence of these problems by shredding and hiding documents or, as one quality-control officer admitted, dousing them in acid.Intas provided America with a lot of frontline chemotherapy drugs—half of the country’s supply in some cases—that are used to treat more than a dozen types of cancer. When the disastrous inspection led the company to halt production, other manufacturers couldn’t make up the difference. Hospitals are now reeling: In a recent survey, 93 percent of U.S. cancer centers said they were experiencing a shortage of the drug carboplatin, while 70 percent were low on another, cisplatin.Even short delays in cancer treatment can increase a patient’s odds of death, and substitute medications may be less effective or more toxic, if they exist at all. Chemo drugs often run dry—“I can’t think of a year in the past 10 or 12 where we didn’t face some kind of shortage,” Yoram Unguru, a pediatric oncologist at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai, told me—but the current crisis is unprecedented in scale, for reasons that go beyond Intas’s woes. Fourteen cancer drugs are currently scarce, jeopardizing the care of hundreds of thousands of Americans. “I’ve been doing this forever, and this is absolute lunacy,” Patrick Timmins III, a gynecologic oncologist at Women’s Cancer Care Associates, told me.By delivering drugs at lower doses or over longer intervals, most oncologists are still managing to treat most of their patients—but barely. “Patients often say to us, I just need a plan,” Eleonora Teplinsky, an oncologist at Valley Health System, told me, and the shortages riddle every plan with question marks. Some institutes have already been forced to ration care. Timmins no longer has enough cisplatin and carboplatin to treat patients with recurrent tumors, even though those drugs can improve one’s quality of life or offer decent odds of another remission. “A lot of people are going to be hurt,” he told me. “Lives will be shortened.” Such tragedies are especially galling because the drugs in shortage aren’t expensive, state-of-the-art treatments that patients might struggle to access anyway, but cheap ones that have existed for decades. “It’s just unfathomable that a patient wouldn’t be able to receive them,” Amanda Fader, a gynecologic oncologist at Johns Hopkins, told me.Intas screwed up, but how could one manufacturer’s downfall trigger such widespread problems? The coronavirus pandemic made plain how reliant the U.S. is on brittle international supply chains, but this much-discussed fragility doesn’t explain the current shortages: Cancer drugs are not scarce for the same reasons that yeast, toilet paper, or couches were. They’re scarce because the market for some of our most important medicines—the ones that should be most accessible—is utterly dysfunctional, in a way that is both very hard to fix but also entirely fixable.Many recent supply-chain problems were caused by an external force—a pandemic, a hurricane, a stuck ship—that throttled a product’s availability, leading to surging demand and dwindling stocks. But most cancer-drug shortages are caused by internally generated problems, created within the market because of its structure. In other words, “they’re self-inflicted wounds,” Marta Wosińska, a health-care economist at the Brookings Institution, told me.Generic drugs such as cisplatin are sold at extremely low prices, which overall have fallen by more than 50 percent since 2016. These ever-tightening margins have forced many manufacturers to tap out of the market; for example, the U.S. gets all its vincristine, an anti-leukemia drug, from just one company.Such drugs are also hard to make. Because they’re injected into the bloodstream, often of severely ill people, they must be manufactured to the highest possible standards, free of microbes and other contaminants. But quality costs money, and generic drugs are so unprofitable that manufacturers can rarely afford to upgrade machinery or train employees. If anything, they’re compelled to cut corners, which makes them vulnerable to spontaneous manufacturing problems or disastrous inspections. And because they usually run at full capacity, any disruption to production has severe consequences. The affected manufacturer might fail to financially recover and leave the market too. Its competitors might struggle to ramp up production without triggering their own cascading shortages. And the drugs, which were never profitable enough to manufacture in surplus, quickly run out.These principles apply not only to cancer drugs but to generics as a whole, dozens or hundreds of which have been in shortage at any given time for the past decade. The markets that produce them are frail and shrinking. And even when a drug is manufactured by many companies, they might all rely on the same few suppliers for their active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs)—the chemicals at the core of their medicines. Mariana Socal, a pharmaceutical-market expert at Johns Hopkins, has shown that a third of the APIs in America’s generic-drug supply are made in just two or three (mostly overseas) facilities, and another third are made in just one.The supply chains that link these chemicals to finished drugs are also frustratingly opaque. Consider fludarabine, one of the cancer drugs that’s currently in shortage. The FDA has approved 12 companies to make it, but just five actually market it; only because of a Senate-committee inquiry is it publicly known that of those five, only one makes the drug itself; two others get theirs from Europe, and one of those used to supply the final two. Meanwhile, six facilities are registered to make fludarabine’s API, but it’s again unclear which ones really do, or which manufacturers they supply, or even, for one of them, which country it is in. The fludarabine market is clearly weaker than it first appears, but how weak is hard to gauge. The same goes for cisplatin and carboplatin, Socal told me: She and other experts thought their markets looked resilient, until the Intas shutdown dispelled the illusion.This opacity masks not only the market’s weaknesses but also its strengths. Erin Fox, a drug-shortage expert at the University of Utah Health, oversees a drug budget of more than $500 million, and would love to spend it on manufacturers that make the most reliable medicines, even if their products cost a little more. But “we just don’t know which products are higher-quality than others,” she told me. The FDA has an internal scoring system that it uses to decide which facilities to inspect, Fox said, but because those data aren’t publicly available, manufacturers can distinguish themselves only through price. “We get a race to the bottom where companies undercut each other to get the lowest price, and then quit either because their manufacturing is so poor, or they can’t afford to make medicines anymore,” Fox said. As Wosińska and Janet Woodcock of the FDA identified in 2013, “The fundamental problem … is the inability of the market to observe and reward quality.”The average generic-drug shortage lasts for about a year and a half. Many people I spoke with hoped that the current wave could abate more quickly if other manufacturers slowly ramp up. The FDA is also looking to import scarce drugs from international suppliers, and has temporarily allowed a Chinese company to sell its cisplatin in the U.S. But ultimately, “it’s very hard to solve a shortage after it started,” Allan Coukell, of the nonprofit Civica Rx, told me. They need to be prevented from happening at all.Some commonly suggested preventive measures might not work very well, because they misdiagnose the problem. Politicians often focus on bolstering domestic manufacturing, but Wosińska, Fox, and others told me that many drug shortages have been caused by manufacturing problems in American facilities. Because American drugmakers are subject to the same flawed markets as foreign ones, moving the problem inshore doesn’t actually solve it. Nor does stockpiling generic drugs, though a worthwhile idea. These strategies work well against an external shock like a pandemic, Wosińska said: When faced with unpredictable external forces, it pays to build a large buffer. But because the shocks that cause drug shortages arise from predictable forces inherent to the market, the best bet is to reimagine the market itself—a “very difficult problem but a solvable one,” Stephen Colvill, the executive director and a co-founder of the nonprofit RISCS, told me.A few new initiatives show how this could be done. Civica Rx, which was launched in 2018, sources generic drugs from manufacturers that it vets for quality; it then builds up rolling six-month inventories of those drugs, which it supplies to hospitals through long-term contracts. (Civica is also building its own generics-manufacturing facility in Virginia.) RISCS, founded in 2019, uses confidential data from manufacturers to rate generic-drug products according to the robustness of their supply chains. The FDA has also been developing its own rating system—the “quality management maturity” (QMM) program—that assesses a manufacturer’s quality-control practices; the program successfully completed two pilots but is still being developed and has no firm launch date, an FDA spokesperson said.In theory, these initiatives should allow hospitals to make better purchasing decisions, and shift the market toward drug companies that are least likely to be responsible for shortages. In practice, Wosińska thinks that hospitals need to be pulled into such a culture shift. For example, she and her colleague Richard G. Frank argue that Medicare could reward hospitals for proactively choosing reliable vendors or participating in programs like Civica. The FDA could support such a scheme by finally launching its QMM program. Congress could require manufacturers to disclose more details about their products and suppliers, so that supply chains can be fully mapped. HHS could offer loans to generic-drug manufacturers for upgrading or expanding their facilities. The point, Wosińska told me, is to do all of this at once, and shift the market into a new stable state. The solution, she said, needs to be comprehensive.It also needs to be coordinated. The drug-shortage problem lingers partly because “it’s not obvious who’s responsible for solving it,” Joshua Sharfstein, a health-policy expert at Johns Hopkins, told me. The FDA is a candidate, but economic matters sit outside its wheelhouse. Instead, Sharfstein and others suggest that the drug-shortage problem could be owned by the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. It already works to shore up medical supplies in the event of emergencies such as pandemics or natural disasters, and ongoing shortages of generic drugs are effectively a perpetual state of emergency that we’re trapped in.Meanwhile, the exact consequences of the shortages are hard to measure. Some of today’s cancer patients will suffer, or even die, because they couldn’t get treated in time, or were given lower doses, or were given more toxic drugs as substitutes. But it’s almost impossible to know if any individual person would have fared better in a world where shortages never happened: If they died, was it because of a few weeks’ delay or because their tumor was always going to be hard to treat? The impact of the shortages can only really be assessed at a population level, and that evidence takes a long time to collect. “I don’t think we’ll see the full downside for many years,” Yoram Unguru told me.The measures needed to prevent such shortages will also take years to implement—if they ever are. The coronavirus pandemic revealed just how frail our supply chains and health-care system are, but it also showed how quickly attention and resources can disappear once a problem is thought to abate. But the drug problem isn’t abating, and is actually compounding the problems the pandemic created. When health-care workers can’t help their patients, whether because their hospitals are inundated by COVID or because their drugs have run out, the resulting moral distress can be unbearable. Such conditions during the pandemic drove so many health-care workers to quit that “you can feel the system shaking,” Patrick Timmins III said. He worries that this exodus followed by the current drug shortages are “a one-two punch” that will be visible to outsiders only when they have neither the drugs to cure them nor the health-care workers to treat them.

There has been a great deal of talk that the Wagner Group’s attempted insurrection over the weekend may have weakened Russian President Vladimir Putin. If Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin is to be believed, the uprising was months in the making, a result of the conventional military deliberately withholding supplies and, more recently, of a direct Russian missile attack on his troops. This may explain why his march seemed to be directed more at the Russian General Staff than at Putin himself. Whatever the case, the affair was over in a day; either it failed or it was meant to be little more than a gesture. Knowing what happened in this incident will take a long time to sort out.

What we must think through now, though, is to what extent the Prigozhin debacle will destabilize the Russian government, weaken Putin or affect the war in Ukraine. Putin’s status is at the center of it all. If this was indeed a coup attempt, it never seriously threatened the Kremlin. Prigozhin’s issues with elements of the central government were well known. Why, then, would Putin be weakened by a putsch from a known malcontent that went nowhere? And what does being weakened even mean? Does it mean that department heads, and particularly the General Staff, would disregard his orders? Does it mean he no longer has a job?

In a political sense, weakened might mean that Putin would no longer be able to make executive decisions or eliminate bureaucrats and generals. This would be a serious development. Russia is at war, and it needs an effective command structure. If Putin were weakened, then the command structure would break down, which would also mean there would be no supreme commander. In that scenario, it is unlikely Putin would be weakened; he would be replaced. The question is who would replace him? Prigozhin might have been angling for the job, but he ultimately capitulated to a different Putin puppet, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. Someone unknown to me might emerge, of course, but short of an heir apparent I don’t know what it means for Putin to be weakened. And even if I did, I don’t know why a coup attempt broken in less than a day should weaken him.

The more serious question concerns what the Wagner Group was doing on the battlefield in the first place. Private military contracting is common enough, but Wagner’s role in Russia was fairly unique in that it took on responsibilities usually reserved more for conventional forces than for paramilitary groups, charged as it was with executing some of the war’s most important battles. As its role evolved, Prigozhin began to pursue his own strategy outside the chain of command of the military, sometimes openly ridiculing his rivals, who would cut off his supplies in kind. Two armies thus tried – and have so far failed – to fight a common enemy.

Putin is responsible for the whole affair. He and his cadre thought Russia would quickly and decisively defeat Ukraine. Almost immediately, with the failure of his tank assault, the Russian attack was bogged down. Russia hadn’t lost the war, but neither had it won, so he supplemented the army with Wagner. In other words, Putin vastly misunderstood Ukraine’s army and his own, and instead of disengaging he threw Wagner into the fray. This strange solution created chaos. From the chaos came the insurrection.

In that sense, putting down a coup attempt isn’t the admission of failure that many seem to believe. The failure was creating the situation in which Wagner had to be hired in the first place. The issue now will be the degree to which Moscow is able to review its war plans and locate the massive errors. Putin has avoided having his war plans reviewed. Will a review now happen out of one of the few successes Putin has had?

Some believe the whole incident was a conspiracy. If that were the case, the planning would have to include the president of Belarus, the Russian General staff, members of Putin’s staff and so on, as well as a portion of the Wagner Group. No professional conspiracy would ever be executed with so many people aware of what was going on. I wonder how many details Lukashenko might have asked for at some point. Putin, an ex-KGB agent, would know the implausibility of the conspirator’s methods. No professional would try a conspiracy with so many people involved.

On Friday, a federal judge in Florida blocked a law preventing minors from attending drag shows, ruling that the statute violated the First Amendment rights of an Orlando-based restaurant. While attempts at banning or restricting access to drag performances have swept local governments and state legislatures, most have failed to pass legal muster. 
In May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed Senate Bill 1438 into law. The bill prohibited "any person from knowingly admitting a child to an 'adult live performance.'" Violating the law was a misdemeanor offense, and offending businesses could be fined and have their licenses revoked.
The bill defines an "adult live performance" as "any show, exhibition, or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement." The statute also prohibits exposing minors to "lewd conduct or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts" when it "predominantly appeals to a prurient, shameful, or morbid interest"; is offensive to prevailing standards of "suitable material or conduct for the age of the child present"; and when "taken as a whole, is without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for the age of the child present."
The same month, the owners of Hamburger Mary's, a restaurant in Orlando, Florida, that frequently hosts drag events (including "family-friendly" drag performances), filed a lawsuit challenging the law. The suit alleged that the new law "seeks to explicitly restrict, or chill speech and expression protected by the First Amendment based on its content, its message, and its messenger." Further, Hamburger Mary's argued that the law was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad.
On Friday, a federal judge agreed, granting a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of the law. Judge Gregory A. Presnell of the Middle District of Florida ruled that the statute was unconstitutionally vague, leaving the definition of terms like "lewd conduct" unclear, leading to uncertain law enforcement. Further, Presnell ruled that the restriction was "facially content-based," noting that "it does not restrict the attendance of children from all live performances, only those engaged in the portrayal of a specific, enumerated subset of content."
While laws attempting to shield children from content that is not obscene to adults, but would be obscene to minors, can be constitutional if narrowly tailored, Presnell notes that the Florida statute wasn't appropriately narrow and "does not allow for the exercise of parental discretion, stating plainly that '[a] person may not knowingly admit a child to an adult live performance,' explicitly foreclosing any defense based on a 'bona fide belief of a child's consent.'"
"Plaintiff contends that its fifteen years of incident-free, harmless drag shows demonstrates the absence of any substantial harm to Defendant or to the public interest," concluded Presnell. "Moreover, existing obscenity laws provide Defendant with the necessary authority to protect children from any constitutionally unprotected obscene exhibitions or shows."
This ruling is the latest in a series of legal orders striking down or blocking anti-drag legislation. While attempts to ban drag are increasingly popular, federal judges have consistently ruled that these performances, as well as other adult performances, are almost always protected by the First Amendment.
The post Federal Judge Blocks Florida's Anti-Drag Law appeared first on Reason.com.

What is already arguably America's worst public transit project is about to get a whole lot more expensive.
The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is moving ahead with plans to build a 2-mile extension to the city's 2.7-mile streetcar line, with an estimated price tag of $230 million. The Center Square reports that the first batch of that new spending—an $11.5 million contract awarded to a firm that will design the extension—was doled out last week. The project is being funded by a half-cent increase in the Atlanta sales tax, and the extension is scheduled to open in 2028.
Even if the extension doesn't go over budget, $230 million for two miles of new streetcar track works out to a slobber-knocking total of $21,700 per foot.
And that only covers the construction costs. If the current Atlanta Streetcar is any indication, most of the operating costs for the extension will be covered by people who never ride it. The existing 2.7-mile loop through downtown Atlanta gets about 158,000 riders per year. Even if all of them pay the $1 per ride fare—and there is ample evidence that many do not—that wouldn't come close to covering the system's $5 million annual operating cost.
City officials say the extension—which will connect the streetcar to a nearby series of walking and biking trails in the middle of Atlanta—will increase ridership. But that shouldn't be a sufficient justification for dumping another $230 million into a project that has plainly failed.
As Reason's Zach Weissmuller detailed in a documentary last year, the Atlanta Streetcar is comically out of date. It moves at 5 miles per hour and stops every quarter mile, making it no faster than the horse-drawn railways that crisscrossed cities in the 19th century.
And that's when it runs at all. "It's often stuck in traffic. Ridership has been anemic," reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "In November, MARTA took the streetcar vehicles out of service because of safety concerns, though it began restoring rail service along the route last month."
With a plethora of cheaper, faster, better transportation alternatives now available, it's no wonder that so few people are choosing to ride the Atlanta Streetcar. Dumping another $230 million into a pointless extension of a useless service won't change that.

The post Atlanta Plans To Blow $230 Million on 2-Mile Extension of Useless Streetcar appeared first on Reason.com.

Bret: I’d have a much easier time accepting affirmative action if the principal criterion was class, not race. If universities thought of themselves more as ladders of social mobility and less as curators of racial rebalancing, they could still give a lot of poorer minorities a lift while also opening their doors to larger numbers of low-income white students who might otherwise have been denied a shot at admission.

Gail: You can’t leave race out, but yes, it’s important to mix it with other parts of a biography. We have to protect schools’ right to create a diverse freshman class every year — one that will help students learn the joys and struggles and fun and exasperation that comes from living with people who aren’t like you in color, creed or background.

Bret: Or viewpoint. Diversity is also about making sure universities don’t become ideological monocultures where people look different but share nearly all the same opinions and assumptions.

Gail: To me, diversity is a very, very important goal — you don’t want to be living in a world in which all the folks of one race or class never interact with folks from another.

How about you?

Bret: Diversity can be a virtue, but it doesn’t have to apply in every conceivable setting or override other considerations, especially academic excellence. I don’t think it’s any secret that students whose families are from East and South Asia outperform many of their peers in high school academics, just as Jewish kids from immigrant backgrounds did a couple of generations ago. If the end of affirmative action means that top-tier universities will be demographically overrepresented with students of Asian background for the simple reason that they worked that much harder to get there, should that be considered a problem?

Waking up on Saturday morning, Putin must have wished he’d kept catering in-house. Only the day before, the Ukraine war seemed to be proceeding relatively well for Russia, at least by the lowered expectations of this stage in the conflict. The Ukrainian counteroffensive had made little progress in its first three weeks trying to breach Russia’s well-prepared defensive lines, and US officials were already briefing not to expect much more. The war had slipped into a tempo favourable to Russia, playing to the great strength of authoritarian systems against democracies: the ability to outlast the fickle whims and short patience of electorates and the politicians catering to them. 
But the brief and spectacular rebellion of Putin’s caterer-in-chief-turned-condottiero, Yevgeny Prigozhin, seemed to suddenly upturn this calculus, highlighting the fragilities inherent in authoritarian regimes. Putin’s attempt to render Russia coup-proof by establishing multiple, rival power structures had created a striking weakness at the heart of his system. The great irony in all this was that the entire purpose of Prigozhin’s Wagner Group mercenary company was to firewall the Russian home front from the human cost of Putin’s foreign adventures, thus ensuring the stability of the regime. By the time Prigozhin’s disaffected warrior band was approaching the gates of Moscow, merrily shooting down the helicopters sent to delay their advance, the disadvantages of this approach appeared to far outweigh the benefits.
Early Western hopes, or fears, that Prigozhin’s escapade heralded either a Kremlin coup or a civil war did not quite capture the essential nature of the events. As the political scientist and civil war theorist, Stathis Kalyvas, observed, “What is going on in Russia is no military coup. Coups tend to be launched at the center seeking to generate cascades of compliance. This is an armed rebellion launched from a peripheral stronghold”, so that it is “hard to see how it could succeed short of mass defections in the Russian military”. But equally, “this is no simple mutiny either as those tend to be local and without broader political aims”. As the political scientist Seva Gunitsky observed on Twitter, “the closer parallel is not the [1991] coup but the Russian peasant rebellions of Razin and Pugachev. The latter especially — a disaffected officer unhappy with the prosecution of a war.” 
Other comparisons, from war-torn and overstretched empires, could be made. The Albanian mercenary commander, Muhammad Ali Pasha, had an ability to outcompete Western rivals and reconquer restive provinces which made him indispensable to the Ottoman empire; Prigozhin has been similarly lavishly rewarded with lucrative monopolies. Prigozhin, just like Muhammad Ali, also used his independent power base to make a strike for the imperial capital, before turning back: and Prigozhin’s dramatic weekend adventure will  similarly remain one of the great what-might-have-beens of history. If Putin’s reliance on deniable and expendable mercenary companies is a product of the postmodern way of war, then it had a curiously premodern outcome. 
Prigozhin’s rebellion may have been brief, but its roots were longstanding. For months, the Wagner leader had utilised his newfound celebrity status to fiercely criticise the Russian Ministry of Defence’s lacklustre prosecution of the war. Accusing his main rivals, Russia’s Defence Minister “the Tuvan degenerate”, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, of poor leadership, cowardice, corruption and betrayal, Prigozhin had claimed that the Russian Ministry of Defence had deliberately starved Wagner of ammunition, emerging as one of Russia’s fiercest nationalist critics of the “fat cats in Moscow” in a surprisingly crowded field. 
But the Wagner-led capture of Bakhmut, after a gruelling year-long campaign, seemed, until this weekend, to mark the apotheosis of Prigozhin’s career. Now it had achieved its purpose, at horrific cost, Wagner seemed set to be either redeployed to its lucrative African area of operations or neutered as an independent power structure. But as Wagner forces pulled out from their positions earlier this month, they fought clashes with Russian regulars they claimed had fired on them, capturing a senior officer. The tensions Putin had permitted to escalate within his war cabinet — whether as intentional policy or sheer incompetence must remain a matter of speculation — now looked to be spiralling out of control. 

When the Russian Ministry of Defence published a decree two weeks ago that volunteer militias — like many official Russian statements, it did not mention Wagner by name — would soon come under its direct control, Prigozhin reacted with fury, refusing to come under Shoigu’s command, and again highlighting the incompetence of his new notional superior. In a half-hour Telegram video of unprecedented contempt last Friday, Prigozhin faced the camera with a mug of tea, calmly explaining to his audience — including Putin — that the war was launched under false pretences, purely to enrich oligarchs and boost Shoigu’s career, and that Putin had been catastrophically misled by his own military leadership. 
Then came the purported shelling by the Russian army of Wagner’s positions behind the line in eastern Ukraine, where its mercenaries had been resting after the bloody and exhausting battle for Bakhmut. “Many of our guys died,” Prigozhin thundered on Telegram, “We will make a decision on how to respond to this evil. The next move is ours.”
And so it was. Announcing in an audio message that “the evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped”, Prigozhin effectively declared war on Russia’s Ministry of Defence, while maintaining his personal loyalty to Putin: like any premodern rebel, the problem was simply that the Tsar had bad advisors. His forces would depose the military leadership before returning to the front lines: the war would continue, only better run. But first, “justice in the Army will be restored. And after this, justice for the whole of Russia.” In panicked-looking videos, the two generals seen as most sympathetic to Prigozhin, Surovikin and Alexeyev pleaded for him to turn back, to no avail. 
Launching his self-declared March of Justice, columns of Prigozhin’s Wagner fighters crossed the border from Ukraine, and seized the southern military command headquarters in Rostov — the nerve centre of Russia’s war, deploying on the city streets in surreal scenes. There, Prigozhin released videos claiming to have evidence that Russian casualties were three to four times higher than the Ministry of Defence were announcing, and humiliating Russia’s now-captive Deputy Defence Minister General Yunus-bek Yevkurov, chiding him that “guys are dying because you’re throwing them into the meat-grinder, without ammunition, without thought, without any plans [because] you’re just senile clowns”.
Claiming to command a 25,000 strong force, Prigozhin then sent his columns striking north along the M4 highway, bypassing major population centres such as Voronezh in a “thunder run” towards Moscow, brushing aside the attack helicopters sent to slow their advance. As Putin gave a short and unconvincing speech, effectively likening himself to Nicholas II and threatening to crush the rebellion before seemingly fleeing the capital, lightly-armed internal security forces set up checkpoints on the city’s outskirts as Moscow residents received robocalls instructing them to support their liberators. The gambit was so successful, it seemed as if it must have been long-planned. 
Suggested readingPutin declares war on PrigozhinBy David Patrikarakos
But the denouement, when it came, seemed anticlimactic: in negotiations reportedly overseen by Belarus’s strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin agreed to turn his forces back, and Moscow’s newly-erected defences were dismantled. Taking the applause of crowds in Rostov– in scenes which the Kremlin will have watched with alarm — Prigozhin went off to exile in Belarus and the immediate crisis had been averted. But what does it all mean?
The opaque and diffuse nature of power in Putin’s Kremlin means that it is impossible to make any assertions or predictions with any certainty: no one watching from the outside, tracking Prigozhin’s One Day That Shook The World on social media, knew what would happen next, and it is doubtful that any of the main participants themselves knew how the warlord’s daring gambit would end. But the speed with which Wagner forces approached the capital showed that the country’s internal defences, depleted by the deployment of the vast bulk of its army to the trenches of southern and eastern Ukraine, are strikingly weak. Rostov itself, the heavily militarised hub of Russia’s war in Ukraine, was surrendered without a shot fired. The lightly-armed Rosgvardia internal defence forces seen deploying around the approaches to Moscow were designed to protect Putin’s regime from political disorder, but they would have struggled to put up much of a defence against Wagner’s hardened troops and the heavy armour they were rushing to the capital. 
After initial silence, Putin’s Chechen satrap, Ramzan Kadyrov, deployed a small convoy to Rostov to confront Wagner and flew troops to buttress Moscow’s defences: true to form, they achieved little, but the sight of auxiliaries from the imperial periphery summoned to the defence of the threatened metropole was a striking one, which may be repeated in Russia’s future. But apart from sporadic and largely ineffective aerial attack, the Wagner columns met no internal resistance: whether the security forces along their way felt outmatched, or whether middle-ranking officers felt sympathetic to Prigozhin’s campaign against their leadership, or simply chose to see who would emerge strongest before committing themselves, will now be an object of intense interest — within Russia as well as abroad. 
Both Shoigu and Gerasimov have, at the time of writing, been notable for their absence. Speculation is rife that the condition for Prigozhin’s standing down Wagner was their replacement. Who replaces them, if this is indeed true, will affect the outcome of the war: but it is impossible to yet say to whose advantage. The events of Saturday’s rebellion were so unexpected, and so brief, that the Ukrainians were unable to exploit them to their advantage, at least immediately. But Ukraine’s leadership, and its Western backers, unnerved by the so-far disappointing results of their counteroffensive, will take heart that Putin’s hold on power appears so brittle. 
Suggested readingHow Putin enabled the Wagner revoltBy Edward Luttwak
The war is imposing huge human and financial costs on both countries, but in terms of political will, Ukraine now appears by far the stronger party. Wavering Western allies will surely assess that Putin’s near-escape from disaster this weekend will alter his strategic calculus, by showing that the war’s continuation threatens the stability of his rule in ways he had not anticipated. By showing that there are real costs to Putin’s seeming strategy of waiting out Ukraine’s Western backers, the weekend’s events will increase his desire to bring the war to a swift and palatable conclusion: that may make peace talks more likely, but it may also heighten the risk of nuclear escalation, already a discussion reaching fever pitch within the Russian security establishment. In determining which of the two outcomes is most likely, the opinion of China, surely alarmed by its partner’s sudden evidence of instability, will be a major deciding factor. 
With Russia and China already rivals in Central Asia, Putin will not have been pleased by the noncommittal response to his moment of crisis from his former strategic dependent in Kazakhstan. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s government only survived internal disorder through Putin’s intervention; the swift and painless execution of this mission once seemed to promise similar success in Kyiv. But already the junior partner in the alliance, reduced to a cheap source of mineral wealth for the hungry rising hegemon and a handy distraction for the West, Russia’s growing comparative weakness may alter the calculus of the strategic relationship, if not for Putin then for whoever eventually succeeds him: a permanent role as China’s Belarus is not what the war was intended to achieve. 
In Belarus itself, for Lukashenko — if his role defusing the conflict does in fact reflect reality — the chance to demonstrate his utility to his Russian saviour may outweigh the inconvenience of hosting his volatile guest. But for Prigozhin, a precarious life in exile at the Minsk court of Putin’s puppet king is not an enticing prospect compared to the riches and glory that may still be attainable in Africa, if now under a tighter leash. 
It is impossible to know whether Prigozhin’s weekend adventure will make him a major player in Russia’s future, or award him a death sentence: but if he wanted Putin’s attention, he certainly got it. One of the prime beneficiaries of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Prigozhin is also a fierce critic of the war’s prosecution and founding justifications. His critique of Russia’s sclerotic defence establishment, and its slow incapacity to react to events, was dramatically proved by his own actions. The former hot dog seller, previously accused of running backchannels to Ukraine’s intelligence services, is rightly vilified by the West for Wagner’s long list of human rights abuses, but he also must now look tempting as a means to pressure the Kremlin. 
When, for all Prigozhin’s professions of loyalty, Putin condemned the rebellion as treason that would be firmly crushed, the Wagner leader did not back down, but continued on towards Moscow. Instead of a useful alternative power centre within Putin’s regime, Prigozhin now appeared an alternative power centre to it. This dramatic Saturday roadshow simultaneously humiliated Putin, and suddenly established Prigozhin’s own position — if only for a day — as the de facto second most powerful man in Russia. His survival will now depend on whether Putin finds the risks embodied in Prigozhin, greater than the potential rewards he promises if only given the opportunity to expand his role. The feared strongman looked weak and indecisive: his court’s once-useful servant had now thrust himself forward as the empire’s powerbroker. An increasingly frail-looking Putin has no obvious successor: looking weak and helpless, he was forced to watch the opening scenes of his succession crisis playing out while still alive. Western observers cheering on the fragility of Putin’s hold on power should be careful what they wish for.

The Wagner Group mercenaries marched 800 kilometers across Russia, shot down planes and helicopters, took over a regional military command, provoked a panic in Moscow—troops dug trenches, the mayor told everyone to stay home—and then stood down. Yet in a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers.The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the city early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s violent ex-con leader, posted videos of himself chatting with the local commanders in the courtyard of the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District. Nobody seemed to mind his being there.Outside, street sweepers continued their work. Early in the morning, a few people came to gawk, but not many. After Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a panicked speech on television, comparing the situation to 1917 and evoking the ghost of civil war, one man pushing a bicycle was filmed berating the Wagnerites and telling them to go home. The troops laughed him off. But later in the day, more people showed up, and the atmosphere grew warmer.People shook their hands, brought them food, took selfies. “People are bringing pirozhki, apples, chips. Everything there in the store has been bought to give to the soldiers,” one woman said on camera. In the evening, after Prigozhin had decided to stand down and go home (wherever home turns out to be), he drove away in an SUV with crowds filming him on their cellphones and cheering him on, as if he were a celebrity leaving a movie premiere or a gallery opening. Some chanted “Wagner! Wagner!” as the troops emerged into the street. This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public. On the contrary, many seemed sorry to see him go.The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.Because they are afraid, or because they don’t know of any alternative, or because they think it’s what they are supposed to say, they tell pollsters that they support Putin. And yet, nobody tried to stop the Wagner group in Rostov-on-Don, and hardly anybody blocked the Wagner convoy on its way to Moscow. The security services melted away, made no move and no comment. The military dug some trenches around Moscow and sent some helicopters; somebody appears to have sent bulldozers to dig up the highways, but that was all we could see. Who will respond if a more serious challenge to Putin ever emerges? Certainly the military will think twice: Perhaps a dozen Russian servicemen, mostly pilots, died at the hands of the Wagner mutineers, more than died during the failed coup of 1991. Nobody seems particularly bothered about them.One day after this aborted coup, it is too early to speculate about Prigozhin’s true motives, about what he was really given in exchange for standing down, about where Putin really spent the day on Saturday—some say St. Petersburg, some say a dacha in Novgorod—or about anything else, really. But the flimsiness of this regime’s ideology and the softness of its support have been suddenly laid bare. Expect more repression as Putin tries to stay in charge, more chaos, or both.

Updated at 6:53 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023Russia is splintering. Even though Yevgeny Prigozhin just announced a surprising stand-down while en route to Moscow, it’s clear that his effort remains by far the greatest threat to Vladimir Putin since he took power in the summer of 1999. The story of the Wagner Group plot may not yet have reached its end, so it’s worth understanding how coups work: what causes them to succeed or, in this case, why they fizzle or fall short.The prospect of a dictator meeting his demise conjures images of crowds taking to the streets and toppling statues, the despot fleeing his palace with henchmen carrying hastily packed suitcases full of cash. Such events do happen, but they’re the exception. Most of the time, dictators fall when their military splits into factions, and one faction turns against the regime. If all factions turn against the dictator, then it’s time for the henchmen, the suitcases of cash, and a hasty exit.  Since the end of World War II, two-thirds of all dictators have been toppled in coups d’état—irregular seizures of power that are usually led by a group within the military. However, in recent years, coups have become less common. During the height of the Cold War, an average of 13 coup plots were executed per year globally. Since 2010, that number has hovered around two to three per year. Because they are rare events and because no two are alike, coups are difficult to predict. But some patterns can help us understand whether a plot will succeed or fail once it has begun.For more than a decade, I’ve studied coups around the world, including those in Thailand, Madagascar, Zambia, and Tunisia. And in speaking to dozens of generals and soldiers who have hatched coup plots—and those who join them once they’re under way—I’ve learned that the successful ones share a few major factors.The most successful coups are those in which the military is unified. In Thailand, for example, coups are usually executed by the military brass, who announce that they are toppling civilian politicians. With nobody with guns to oppose them, Thai coups almost always succeed. No splintered factions, no risk of failure. After all, what’s the president or prime minister going to do—shoot back at the army?When the coup is carried out by a faction within the military sector—as has happened in Russia—the dynamics become more complicated. Such a coup plot is not like a battle, in which the bigger, superior force tends to win. Rather, the plot will likely succeed less on strength than on perception. The plotters are playing a PR game, in which they’re trying to create the impression that their coup is destined to triumph. Nobody wants to be on the losing side, because the punishments are brutal. If you stay loyal to the dictator and the dictator gets toppled, you might be jailed, even executed, by the usurpers. But if you join the plot and it fails, the same fate awaits, often with an unpleasant visit to the dictator’s torture chambers. A soldier or officer can make no higher-stakes bet. Picking the losing side never ends well.[Read: Russia slides into civil war]When coups succeed, they hit a tipping point that produces a “bandwagon effect.” Just as sports teams tend to see their fan base expand dramatically when they’re on the cusp of a championship, coup plotters see their ranks swell when they look like they’re on the cusp of ousting the dictator.When dictators face coup attempts, then, they desperately try to control information, assert their authority, and remain as visible as possible. That’s why Putin addressed the nation this morning—and why there are reports of digital censorship aimed at blocking access to information about the Wagner Group or Prigozhin’s videos. It’s important to appear calm and in control, a strategy that Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, used effectively in 2016, when he broadcast a message to the nation via FaceTime during an attempted coup.Successful coups also take the regime by surprise at a moment of weakness. Many plots are carried out when a dictator is abroad, sick, or vulnerable in some other way. In those instances, the dictator is slower to respond (some successful plots have even been carried out while a dictator is undergoing surgery abroad). In this instance, Prigozhin chose to strike at a moment when the Kremlin is mired in a bloody, seemingly pointless stalemate in Ukraine. He timed his plot well, because bandwagoning becomes more likely if people around the dictator already have doubts about him.So what would it look like if a military gambit against Putin were to succeed? The answer, surprisingly, doesn’t likely involve a mass-casualty tank battle or a gunfight in the streets of Moscow. Instead, a successful coup requires one of two things: defections to the plotters, or inaction against them.For coup ringleaders, the best-case scenario is a series of high-profile defections, in which senior leaders within the military announce that they are backing the plot. Their decampment reinforces the perception that the plot will succeed, which changes the behavior of even the lowest-ranking soldier who was previously on the fence.But sometimes, sitting on the fence is sufficient to allow coup plots to topple governments. After all, Rostov-on-Don saw no gun battles, just acceptance on the part of Russian soldiers who didn’t feel like sacrificing their lives to shoot soldiers who, until a few hours earlier, were on the same side. Prigozhin’s forces took Rostov-on-Don the same way that Putin thought he would take Kyiv—with little to no resistance. When a military fails to act decisively against a coup, then, that delay gives the plotters an opening to create an aura of inevitability around the putsch. If Prigozhin had kept it going for longer, his chances of success would have been higher.However, Putin, while sometimes irrational, is no fool. He has engaged in extensive “coup proofing,” which means that he’s taken steps to ensure that when someone starts shooting at his forces, they shoot back, rather than turning their weapons on him. Putin has coup-proofed his dictatorship by creating a splintered security sector rife with internal competition, which means that no one faction dominates the rest. Three of Putin’s core security and intelligence services (the GRU, SVR, and FSB) also have elite special-operations branches full of loyalists.Beyond that “praetorian guard,” Putin has also insulated himself by creating such an intense fun-house mirror of disinformation that nobody within Russia knows what to trust. The environment is, as Peter Pomerantsev puts it, one in which “nothing is true and everything is possible.” But the effects cut both ways. In Putin’s favor, few soldiers would have wanted to break with their superiors on the basis of mere whispers, rumors, and unverified reports about Wagner’s advance. At the same time, however, soldiers in Putin’s Russia will always wonder whether they’ve been told the truth when Putin asserts that he still has complete control.  [Read: A crisis erupts in Russia]Coup plots are fast-moving crises defined by uncertainty, in which nobody really knows what’s going on, and everyone is operating on imperfect information, forced to make impulsive, snapshot decisions within the fog of war. Coups are therefore among the most unpredictable events in politics. If anyone claims to know how Putin will fall, they’re lying. But even though this plot seems to have been called off, Prigozhin’s challenge to Putin will nonetheless be a decisive moment in Russia’s dictatorship and the war in Ukraine.Everyone—loyalist or not—can see that Putin has been openly attacked, which conveys weakness. Putin’s forces in Ukraine will wonder whether they should get killed in a seemingly futile war, particularly when the biggest territorial gains of the war so far have now been in Russia, not Ukraine. And Putin, already a paranoid and irrational figure, will now make more decisions out of fear. So even if the coup fizzles, it will change Russia’s internal politics, Putin’s behavior, and the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine.There are no “good guys” in a battle in which two Russian war criminals vie for control of a major nuclear power. However, if you’re watching events and trying to understand the strategic logic of coups and how Putin’s regime might end, look out for whether the loyalists stay loyal or start to peel off toward those challenging him. If important figures begin to abandon the regime en masse, Putin is toast.This article originally identified the Russian city the Wagner Group entered as Rostov, not Rostov-on-Don.

The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how diverging perceptions about racial inequity have emerged as a central fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.In their presidential campaigns, Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is Black, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, have repeatedly insisted that systemic or structural racism is no longer a problem in America. That drew a sharp rebuke earlier this month from Obama, who said the pair had joined “a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can all make it.’”   Both Scott and Haley responded by accusing Obama of treating minority voters as victims and repeating their claims that racism and structural inequities can no longer hold back anyone who will “work hard” and display “integrity” and “grit,” as Scott told a mostly white audience at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last Tuesday.[Read: ‘People who are different are not the problem in America’]“When I hear people telling me that America is a racist nation, I got to say: Not my America, not our America,” Scott declared to loud applause.Scott and Haley have leaned into the criticism from Obama, highlighting it to raise their profile in a Republican presidential race where each has attracted just single-digit support in national polls. But in responding to Obama, they have demonstrated how difficult it has become for any GOP leader—especially one who is not white—to challenge the party consensus that the nation has transcended discrimination against minorities and women.For a Republican coalition that still relies predominantly on white voters, hearing nonwhite GOP candidates dismiss racism offers “acquittal and absolution,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies American attitudes toward race and culture. Such comments from figures like Scott and Haley, he told me, provide “permission” for other Republicans “to not even have to ask the questions” about whether systemic discrimination still shapes U.S. society.Likewise, Michael Steele, the Black former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he believes that Scott is expressing such an absolutist rejection of racism—despite Scott’s acknowledgment that he has faced racial profiling in his own life—because he recognizes that that assertion is what the GOP’s mainly white electorate wants to hear.Republicans, Steele told me, like finding “the Black man to put out there to say that shit to begin with. You pick someone to affirm the lie in a way that you ostensibly take your fingerprints off it. You create this artificial legitimacy around an illegitimate point.”One of the core beliefs that binds the modern Republican coalition, particularly since the rise of Donald Trump, is rejection of the idea that racial minorities and women face structural bias in American society.Studies of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections conducted by the Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner and his colleagues used the Cooperative Election Study, a large-scale national poll, to determine the factors that predicted which candidate voters supported in those races. Those studies found that in each contest, the single best predictor of who voted for Trump was the belief that systemic racism no longer exists in the U.S.; the second-best predictor was denial that systemic bias exists against women.Within the GOP, those views command overwhelming support. In an email, Schaffner told me almost nine in 10 Republicans reject the idea that structural discrimination exists against racial minorities; about three-fourths doubt that women face entrenched bias. Fully two-thirds of Republicans say there’s little bias against either minorities or women. Only one in 20 Republicans, Schaffner found, believe that both groups still face systematic discrimination.As Trump more overtly identified the GOP with white racial resentments, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Since Obama’s presidency, polls show, the share of Democrats who say that Black Americans and other minorities face structural discrimination has dramatically increased. With more Democrats describing systemic racism as a problem, the gap between the two parties on racial questions has notably widened over roughly the past 15 years.Other surveys document a further step in thinking among Republicans. Not only do a majority of Republican voters assert that structural barriers no longer constrain women or minorities; a majority also claim that core GOP constituencies are the real victims of bias.In PRRI polling, about two-thirds of Republicans agreed that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities. In a 2022 national survey, PerryUndem, a firm that polls for progressive organizations, found that about seven in 10 Republicans agreed both that “white men are the most attacked group in the country right now” and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”[Tom Nichols: The pointless Nikki Haley campaign]Similarly, in a national 2021 survey conducted by a UCLA  polling project, Republicans believed there to be more discrimination against white people than against other racial groups, more against men than women, and more against Christians than other religious groups, such as Muslims and Jews. “Republicans see a racial order in which historically privileged groups, like white Americans, are now the real victims,” the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck wrote in their book The Bitter End, which cited the UCLA research.Sides, a professor at Vanderbilt University, points out that the claim that white people are the victims of “reverse discrimination” has been a rallying cry for the right since the civil-rights era. But, he told me, that long-standing conservative complaint “has become supercharged in this current climate” because of “the demographic reality that white Americans, and white Christian Americans, are not going to be as numerically dominant or as politically powerful as they used to be.”As Obama correctly noted, both Scott and Haley are following a long line of earlier nonwhite GOP candidates who similarly declared that America has transcended racial discrimination. The late Herman Cain, a Black Republican who sought the party’s 2012 presidential nomination, insisted at the time, “I don’t believe racism in this country holds anybody back in a big way.” Ben Carson, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination and then served as his secretary of housing and urban development, offered his audiences similar assurances. Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee last year to run in Georgia against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, released an ad in which he declared, “Senator Warnock believes America is a bad country full of racist people. I believe we’re a great country full of generous people.”Scott and Haley have regularly issued similar pronouncements. Both have stressed America’s racial progress over the past several generations. Scott has pointedly contrasted his experience with that of his late grandfather, who he said had to step off the sidewalk when a white person passed. Scott’s emphasis on that progress marks a shift that his critics find jarring after his candid acknowledgments earlier in his career that he faced racial profiling from Capitol Hill police even after his election to the Senate. Scott is “kind of whistling past the point, when you want to create this impression that there’s no racism, where in the next sentence you tell us how you have been profiled by Capitol Hill police,” Steele told me.In their campaigns, Scott and Haley have each contended that they succeeded in life because family members encouraged them to take personal responsibility for their fate and not to identify as a victim. The same path, both say, is open today to any American regardless of race or ethnicity. “The left,” Scott insisted at the Hannity town hall, refuses “to deal with America in 2023 and not 1923 because they know that the truth of my life disproves the lies of their radical agenda.”Obama, though, in his comments on The Axe Files, a podcast hosted by his former top political adviser David Axelrod, acknowledged racial progress over his lifetime: “The good news is that I think we are closer to an approximation of the ideal than we were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.” But he said that Scott, Haley, and the other Republicans stressing individual responsibility are disregarding the persistence of wide gaps between white Americans and racial minorities on a broad array of economic and social measures. If political leaders “pretend as if everything’s equal and fair,” Obama said, “then I think people are rightly skeptical” of their commitment to ensuring equal opportunity.Steele agrees with Obama. “I cannot give quarter to this idea that people in this country don’t hold racist attitudes, No. 1, and No. 2, the institutions that a lot of these folks built reflect that racism in a variety of ways,” he told me. Steele wants Haley and Scott to try to convince an audience of Black people otherwise. “Come to Prince George’s County, and you look Black people in the eye and tell them there’s no racism,” said Steele, who served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor in the mid-2000s. “Or let’s take that conversation to Howard University. It’s easy to do when you have 1,000 white people hooting and hollering at every word you say.”Carlos Curbelo, a Cuban American Republican former U.S. representative from Miami, also believes that, for Scott, accepting the party consensus discounting racism is the prerequisite for GOP voters listening to him on anything else. “Part of what he is banking on is that he is a man of color who is making these pronouncements,” Curbelo told me.But Curbelo also maintains that each side in this exchange is overstating its case. Obama and other Democrats, he says, downplay the extent to which individual minorities can now overcome discrimination, while Republicans like Scott unrealistically excuse the persistence of structural racial barriers. “There is some validity to what he and Haley are saying,” Curbelo told me. “I just wish they would explain the whole issue, not just the half that is more convenient for them right now.”As the sparring between Obama and Scott and Haley demonstrates, the two parties appear locked in an action-and-reaction cycle that is pushing them further apart on racial questions. The more traditionally marginalized groups demand greater recognition and influence, the more aggressively conservatives push back, and vice versa. For at least the rest of this decade, that cycle seems far more likely to intensify than abate.The Democrats’ increased reliance on voters of color—and the increased focus on racial equity by the white voters in their coalition—has pressured them to direct greater attention on racial injustice in everything from school curricula to the behavior of police departments.Republicans, whose Trump-era coalition has grown more reliant on the voters most uneasy with all the ways America is changing, have responded by digging in against these demands for new approaches. Across the red states, Republican-controlled governments are moving with remarkable speed and consistency to pass laws limiting classroom discussion of racial or gender inequities, banning books, and barring programs meant to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.Republicans portray this wave of legislation as a fundamentally defensive attempt to prevent radical “woke” ideas from indoctrinating young people. But to Democrats and their allies, it’s GOP officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who are seeking to suppress the nation’s diverse younger generations with restrictive new laws on voting, LGBTQ rights, and how teachers can discuss America’s racial record.[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiona]PRRI’s Jones, who has written several books on race and religion, offers a telling example of how the conservative approach to racial injustice has hardened. He notes that as recently as the 1990s, the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Convention, in a formal statement repudiating its role in supporting slavery, apologized “to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”Given the current climate on racial issues within conservative circles, Jones told me, he considers it virtually inconceivable that the Southern Baptist Convention today would acknowledge that systemic racism even exists, much less apologize for it. “The external historical reckoning the country is going through,” Jones told me, is prompting an “internal response” within the GOP that has generated a virtually lockstep rejection of racism as an ongoing problem.There’s no question that all of these cultural causes now generate more passion inside the GOP coalition than such traditional party priorities as cutting taxes, limiting regulation, and promoting a strong national defense. “Issues related to race alongside gender identity and similar things, that’s their bread and butter,” Vanderbilt’s Sides says of GOP candidates today. “That’s what they want to talk about.”Haley and Scott have placed themselves directly in that current. Their insistence that America has moved beyond racial inequality will surely win them loud applause from a mostly white Republican primary electorate that gets an extra jolt of satisfaction from hearing a person of color validate that view. Their endorsement of those arguments may not be enough to allow either to overtake better-known, better-funded alternatives, chiefly Trump and DeSantis, who are offering very much the same case. But echoing the claim that discrimination is in the past may be their ante for any future advancement in the Trump-era GOP.

Updated at 6:58 p.m. ET on June 24, 2023The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks, mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian minister of defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” Yesterday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of the Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.  The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” The snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov-on-Don, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov-on-Don fast-food restaurant formerly known as McDonald’s), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov-on-Don—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov-on-Don and Moscow, theories began to multiply.[Read: A crisis erupts in Russia]Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.  Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—we have no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, because so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it), you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler), of Bellingcat, and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev), formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open-source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke with him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly 11 months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov-on-Don and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.Now military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress,” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB security service, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that Shoigu, the defense minister, come to see him in Rostov-on-Don, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation this morning. A Telegram channel that is believed to represent Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.[Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire]If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a facade of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: They failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance this morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.  This article originally identified the Russian city the Wagner Group entered as Rostov, not Rostov-on-Don. 

UK readers: We are delighted to announce a Persuasion panel discussion in collaboration with the Equiano Project on the topic: “Where will (and should) the future of the centre-left lie?”It will be at the Sekforde in London on Monday 3 July at 6:30pm. For more information, and to reserve your (free!) ticket, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/where-will-and-should-the-future-of-the-centre-left-lie-tickets-661076135517 There will be drinks and open discussion afterwards so please do join us! Michael Lind is a writer and professor of the practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the co-founder of the think tank New America and the author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite and, most recently, Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Michael Lind discuss whether one’s stances towards free trade, taxation, and workers’ rights are still a reliable predictor of voters’ broader political identity; why Lind, though he supports many economically progressive policies, is often classed as a conservative; and whether efforts to rebuild labor power and reinvigorate national industrial policy will succeed in improving the economy for ordinary people.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I've been reading your last two books and thinking about your work more broadly. And in a weird kind of way, it feels like the ideological moment is moving towards you, which is to say that you have a very long time been a kind of a radical centrist, a bit of an economic populist; certainly socially liberal, but with a long-standing instinct towards criticizing a certain kind of sociocultural elite. Do you feel like that combination of ideas is coming to have a new lease on life in American politics at the moment?Michael Lind: When I first came onto the scene in the 1980s, there were great debates within the Democrats and the Republicans and one debate was over neoliberalism. That is, would you deregulate everything, trade, immigration and regulated industries and then redistribute money, often cash, to the so-called losers? That was the neoliberal model, and it was a new model. And then there were defenders, like me, of the older mid-century model, which took the form of the New Deal in the U.S. but took the form of social democracy, Christian democracy, “wet” Tories in Britain, which said, “No, we have a mixed economy, and organized labor has a role to play.” And my side lost for 30 years or so from the 1990s up, really, until the 2020s, as the ice started to break with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016. There's a French proverb that I heard some years ago: “There are not 36 ways to do a thing.” So there are some basic decisions you have to make about how you organize a modern industrial economy and modern industrial democracy. Do you regulate trade and immigration in the national interest or do you not? Is there a role for organized labor in collective bargaining in setting wages and benefits or is there not? Basically, I argue, in my new book, Hell To Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America, that we've gone from the mid-century model of a high wage social insurance system, in which, if you work 40 hours a week, you not only made enough money that you didn't need means-tested welfare, but you also could pay, with payroll taxes, for adequate social insurance; to the post-1990s system, which I call the “low wage, high welfare” model. It’s high welfare—the welfare is not necessarily generous; the US has a very miserly welfare system—because you have millions and millions of workers in the United States, also in Britain and some other European countries now, who, even if they work full time, can't make enough to live on from their market wages. And so they're dependent on not universal social democratic insurance, or public goods, but on specifically means-tested programs for this group called the “working poor.” And in the middle of the 20th century, for the most part, if you worked, you were not poor. So we tried the neoliberal globalist approach—and its sibling, the low wage, high welfare, high redistribution system—and it just didn't work. I'm glad I've lived long enough to see people come around to the alternative. It's like the old joke by Churchill before the U.S. entered World War II—the Americans can be counted on to do the right thing as soon as they've exhausted the alternatives.Mounk: I'm glad that you get a little bit of enjoyment out of this intellectual moment. I mostly don't. Perhaps we can discuss that later on. But tell me a little bit more about the ideas in this latest book. How is it that wages are being artificially suppressed today? And what can we do to make wages rise?Lind: There are a number of methods of increasing or decreasing the bargaining power of workers with employers with regard to their wages and benefits. The most important is organized labor; if workers can pool their bargaining power, then they get better results. In the United States, there's a union membership premium of 15% or so, in terms of wages, as a rule, even with individual workers. The bargaining power is determined by things like contracts. For example, if you have a non-compete clause in your contract, and you're working for one company and then you quit, and then the non-compete clause says your former employer can sue you if you go to work in another company in the same field or in a company in the same field within 1000 miles. These are perfectly legal in much of the United States. And the opposite of that is a no-poaching agreement, which is a secret blacklist shared by employers who agree not to hire each other's former employees in order to prevent any employees from forcing employers to bid for their services. Finally, there are labor market conditions: employers want a buyer’s market in labor and a seller's market in jobs. They want more people competing for jobs than there are jobs. Logically, workers want a seller's market in labor and a buyer’s market in jobs. And if you look at things from immigration policy, to welfare policy and unemployment insurance, the shorter the period of unemployment insurance in the welfare state, the sooner you are forced to go back to work on terms that are less than you would prefer if you could hold out for a longer period of time. Even entitlement reform is favored by employers, because it increases the labor force if you compel people to work until their late 60s or their late 70s. Mounk: So if we want to get wages growing again—this is something that for various reasons we agree is important—how can we do that? Can we really reinvent a moment in the United States where trade unions were as important as they were when most people were in manufacturing, going to a factory at the same time for the same shift, and where the ability to coordinate was very different from what it is like today if you're in, say, the gig economy. Can we actually recreate that world of powerful trade unions and other kinds of bargaining mechanisms? I agree with you, of course, that many of those non-competes are mistaken, and there is now some legislative movement towards making it much harder to enforce non-competes, which I think is an excellent thing. But it's not clear how big a difference that is going to make. Is that a realistic path to making sure that the wages of the average American or of the working poor really grow more significantly in the coming years?Lind: Well, I think it is, but we have to understand the history of the mid-20th century. The U.S. was a developmental state, to use the political science term, from the Civil War up until the Great Depression. That is, the government worked closely to sponsor the development of American industry—in everything from infrastructure (like railroads) to tariffs, the U.S. had this kind of East Asian, pro-industry economy. It was a kind of industrial policy that included business and government. It excluded labor and farmers. And so then the New Deal can be seen as a way to bring labor into this already existing system. So the first difference, I argued, between that period and today is that the U.S.—and to some degree, Western Europe—needs to reindustrialize. It needs to onshore some supply chains that are strategic and have been lost. And that can only come about through government industrial policy. And the means will include all kinds of things—tariffs, local content regulations, subsidies like those in the CHIPS Act. And it can be done poorly or well, but it needs to be done. I argue that we need to simultaneously rebuild worker bargaining power as part of rebuilding this productive economy. It's not something where you have a bunch of flourishing businesses, and then labor shows up and says “OK, we want a piece of the action.” You have to rebuild them both simultaneously. But what that means is that there is no one-size-fits-all policy. Industrial policy is sectoral policy. If you want to reshore manufacturing of chemical precursors to drugs, that takes one set of policies, and a different workforce appropriate to it, than there is if you want to improve the productivity of fast food restaurants and the pay of their workers. So you have a sectoral industrial policy combined with a sectoral labor policy. And they can take different forms in some industries, like mass manufacturing and infrastructure; the kind of national sectoral bargaining that still exists in Europe, where multiple employers in a field negotiate with all of the representatives of workers in a field. That would be appropriate in the United States. And we actually had this in the obscure Railway Labor Act, which covers train, transit and airline operators who are not part of the main National Labor Relations Act of the 1930s. In other cases, like a lot of service sector professions, where it's very difficult to unionize the workers, you can have wage boards. This was a British invention of a century ago, and it spread to all English-speaking countries, including the U.S. in some cities and states. The government just appoints representatives of labor representatives of that industry, maybe consumer representatives, and you just set industry-specific minimum wages and benefits, so there's no need to belong to a union at all. But you're still represented. There's no single magic bullet. But if we're going to get beyond both anti-labor, neoliberalism, and neoliberal globalism—which is really unilateral liberalism, because if your trading partner is cheating, or is state capitalist like China, it’s not really free trade but one-way free trade)—I think we need to combine these two simultaneously. Yascha Mounk: The economic dimension used to determine who was on the Left and who was on the Right. You once would have been able, with some degree of accuracy, to guess who somebody's voting for by asking them something like, would you rather have a bigger welfare state and more taxes or a smaller welfare state and less taxes? Today, it seems to me that culture is at the forefront of our politics. And, really, what drives you is the economic dimension and the sort of epiphenomenal policy position that that pushes you to embrace becomes the foundation of your perceived political orientation in a system that says what's primary is culture.Do you see the set of arguments you're making about the economy finding a political home in the United States? Or do you think they will continue to be as homeless as they have been in the last decades?Lind: It's certainly the case that I have been coded as a conservative. I would have been coded as a progressive in 2010. In 1990, I would have been on the Left. I was a Cold War liberal but Cold War liberals were pro-labor, pro-union, and so on. I'm simply setting forth a position that I think is coherent. Who decides at any given moment what is Left and what is Right? All the way up until 2000, immigration restriction was pushed by the AFL-CIO and by the labor movement because of worries about competition and wage suppression. The people who were making the arguments about open borders and humanitarianism and so on were Cato Institute libertarians and the representatives of American agribusiness. After 2000, suddenly, what had been the right-wing libertarian position on immigration was now the progressive immigration position. And if you criticized it, you were a bigot, a nativist and a fascist. The same is true on trade. The trade skeptics are now mostly in the Republican Party. They were mostly in the Democratic Party—you had people like Dick Gephardt, who were economic nationalists. And this is where I disagree with a lot of people—I think that the U.S. and maybe some Western European democracies, have effectively been post-democratic since the 1970s. And this is the theme of my book The New Class War, which is that the three organizations that gave real substantive power to working class people were these mass membership organizations: the political parties, which were federations of local clubs; the trade unions; and the churches and religious institutions, which were much more important then. What happened by 2000 is that these organizations simply disintegrated. And the only connection that most ordinary citizens have with the government is maybe voting in a primary or general election in the United States in a single member or single party district where the party is going to win no matter what—it's gonna be all Democrats or all Republicans. And then they have no say in terms of lobbying in between elections. We’ve moved to what I call “neoliberal technocracy” in the ‘90s and 2000s. Various rebellions—Bernie Sanders on the Left, and Trump's voters (not Trump himself, he's just a charlatan and a demagogue)—were a backlash against the closure within this kind of technocratic system. In Italy, of course, we see this illustrated better than anywhere else in the Western world, because you had Berlusconi long before you had Trump, and, at the same time, you literally have technocratic governments, run by technocratic mandarins. And you get this kind of back and forth between populist demagogy and technocracy.But I do not see these mass membership organizations being reconstituted spontaneously anytime soon. So the parties will continue to be dominated by their very upscale, college-educated primary electorates who are driven much more by post-material culture war issues than they are by material concerns and certainly not by the material concerns of working class majorities. So then the question becomes, how do you get reform in a system like that? And we have examples, both from American history and from abroad: you can change the elite consensus within both parties without this being the result of elections. Nobody voted in the 1970s and the 1980s to allow the minimum wage to be eroded by inflation. The public was opposed to NAFTA. It got pushed through anyway. The public has been consistently ani-interventionist for my entire lifetime. They want less foreign aid, less military intervention abroad, fewer alliances. So the most successful policy elites in the neoliberal period from the ‘90s to the present were libertarians in economics, whose ideas in watered-down form were adopted by Clinton Democrats and Reagan Republicans and neoconservatives. There was no voter pressure or grassroots pressure bringing about either the U.S. hegemony strategy or deregulatory neoliberalism. If we move away from those two schools of thought, it will probably be as a result of changing the minds of members of the elite. And it has to be members of the elite of both parties. It has to be a bipartisan consensus. Mounk: Perhaps you can just explain to listeners what the new class war is, in your mind. How is it that the managerial elite is threatening democracy and why does that constitute a new class war? Because it seems to me, just to make the link explicit, that for the changes you're hoping for to happen, that managerial elite needs to either become a lot less powerful or have a very radical change in its understanding of its self-interests.Lind: Well, I follow James Burnham's analysis in The Managerial Revolution that he published during World War II. And he built on Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means in their book on managerial capitalism succeeding proprietor capitalism (or bourgeois capitalism) by the 1920s and ‘30s. Essentially, with Burnham—and with people who thought along similar lines independently, in some cases, like John Kenneth Galbraith, who called it the technostructure—all of these organizations, government, nonprofit, and for profit, that had been kind of small stake and run by the founding capitalist or small government agencies and local charities, became immensely bureaucratized. And largely because of the wealth of the Industrial Revolution. The small charity becomes the Ford and Rockefeller Foundation; the owner-operated company becomes this global, world-straddling behemoth. A majority of Americans in the private sector work for a company with more than 500 people. This is really an age of giantism. The managerial elite, the people who end up running these public and private and for profit bureaucracies (you and I are part of this class—the college-educated overclass, as I call it) tend to be very similar. You have to have a college diploma, often an advanced degree, to advance. Power in the managerial society (and this is where the Marxists get angry with me) is not money, per se. It is the control of a large bureaucracy. And there tends to be a merger of these elites, socially. They go to the same schools, their kids attend the same private schools, they vacation at the same watering holes, and they watch the same cable TV shows and talk about them on Twitter. It’s a kind of epistemic closure. And if all members of a powerful elite pursue their individual interests simultaneously, it looks like a coordinated class interest. What do you do when you have this kind of bureaucratized managerial society? There have been three answers. One is, you just go back to agrarianism or small business or something like that; you break it up and we go back to a lot of shopkeepers. Well, that would be a disaster because managerial capitalism is an improvement over bourgeois capitalism, and managerial society is more efficient and better for ordinary people than its predecessor was. So we're not going to get rid of managers in society. The answer of Burnham, who later became very right-wing and a co-founder of William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review, and of John Kenneth Galbraith, who was Mr. Liberal, was “countervailing power,” a term used by Galbraith. You don't break up the managerial elite, but you have outside organizations, and they're accountable to them.Mounk: Let me ask you another question. You alluded to the fact that we have a kind of difference about populism. I want to locate what the difference is and debate it for a moment. There doesn't seem to me to be a difference in our assessment of at least some of the populists. Part of the disagreement perhaps is that you think that there is less to save in our political system than I do, because it had effectively become, in your words, a neoliberal technocracy for a long time. Now, I want to hear from you how worried are you about populism not as an economic proposition, not as in the kinds of policies that you're pushing for, but as a phenomenon of politicians who are undermining some of the key institutional norms and rules, as I would see them, to sustain free and fair elections. To what extent do you think we should be worried about that and is that where you locate our disagreement about populism?Lind: Well, let me say that I don't consider myself a populist. I see populism and technocracy as equal and opposed evils. What I mean by populism is a charismatic Bonapartist or Caesarist figure claiming to represent the undifferentiated masses against a corrupt establishment, and that can be the left, the right, or the center. I consider myself a pluralist. And I've written about this idea of pluralism, about intermediate institutions, the absence of which lead to this doom loop between technocracy and populism. Of course, I'm concerned about populism. I'm a fifth generation Texan, a Southerner—the South, between Reconstruction and the civil rights revolution, had the sort of system I think that we're moving into now, where you have this very nepotistic, closed-off elite, and periodically there would be rebellions backed by alienated voters (when they could vote—half of the whites as well as all of the blacks in the South were disenfranchised before the 1960s), but they rally behind these figures, almost all of whom turned out to be obnoxious blowhards like Donald Trump. And most of them either sold out to the existing establishment or created their own corrupt personal patronage schemes, like Huey Long and the Long family in Louisiana. They created their own dynasties. But they almost always betrayed the people looking to them as saviors, and, in doing so, they trashed norms left and right. That was part of the appeal to their alienated constituents.Mounk: Last question. You are somebody who has a great sense of American history and you are trying to push for one kind of resolution to the current standoff. But the more I reflect on the changes of the last ten years, the more I wonder whether we have the answer to what this current political epoch is going to look like for another 20 or 30 years, in the clash between the managerial elite, in the way that you're talking about it as the beating heart of the Democratic Party, and then the populist authoritarian counter reaction to it in the form of something like the MAGA movement and Trumpism. Isn't the simplest assumption simply that we've basically stopped being in a moment of transition that we were in between 2016 and 2020-2021, and we're starting to see the outline of what the basic lines of competition in American politics are going to be for the foreseeable future?Lind: Yes, I'm an optimist of the will and a pessimist of the intellect. I think we're now in a kind of classic Latin American politics. I don't mean that in any culturally bigoted way, but just institutionally—Latin America, like the South, with this very inegalitarian society and with the establishment versus the outsider populists. And I do worry. It's not Ron DeSantis, who I think is a fairly conventional Tea Party Republican who’s just waging a culture war. But if we don't rebuild institutions that incorporate alienated working class people—increasingly high school educated African Americans and Hispanics, who are leaking over into the populist right (we're getting an educational polarization and racial depolarization)—then you get someone who knows what he's doing, like Huey Long, who, alone amongst southern populists, was a truly competent figure. You get Juan Perón, as in Argentina. You get Getúlio Vargas. And the thing is, these figures may do good things. If you look at Perón and Vargas, they did a lot of the stuff that was done by the New Deal in the U.S., only they did pro-worker reforms with death squads and with illegality. At the end of the day, put not your trust in princes. You have to create a system in which there are intermediate organizations that represent ordinary people between elections, not just mobilizing to get people to vote and then forgetting about them. And the theme of all of my work, but particularly The New Class War and Hell to Pay, is that we have to put negotiation and consensus back at the center of politics and democracy. I used to ask my students, when I taught in universities, what's the point of democracy? Some say to achieve social justice or to express the will of the majority. My answer, that I tried to persuade them of, was to avert civil war. It's so that when one side loses, it doesn't feel it’s lost everything, that they’re still valued members of society. And it's actually to promote consensus and the consensus may not take the form of 51% majority opinion versus 49%. It may arise from all kinds of complex negotiations. Maybe this sounds kind of naive. But, on the other hand, if we were having this conversation in the ‘50s, or ‘60s, this would have just seem banal—of course politics is about consensus. And it shows you how much America has changed that this is kind of an outlandish idea in the 2020s.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry.Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Last year, a police officer sicced his K-9 on Sean Davis as he slept in a wooded area in Covington, Kentucky, mauling his arm and causing severe injuries. Officers had mistaken Davis for a different individual who had allegedly violated a protection order and detained him even after he provided police with his ID. Last month, Davis filed a lawsuit against the officer responsible for Davis' mauling, claiming that he was subject to unreasonable force, negligence, and battery.
According to the Covington police incident report, on June 8, 2022, police received a call from a woman who said she believed that her violent ex-boyfriend, whom she had a protection order against, was sleeping in a wooded area near a campsite at which she was staying. When police arrived, they found Sean Davis—not the woman's ex-boyfriend—sleeping in a hammock in the woods. Without warning, a police officer released a K-9 on Davis, which bit his arm and brought him to the ground. While the dog continued to maul Davis' arm, police got on top of Davis.
According to WCPO, a local news station, body camera footage of the incident shows that officers handcuffed Davis and demanded he identify himself. In the footage, Davis repeatedly gives officers his name, social security number, as well as his photo ID, proving that he was not the person in the protection order. Nonetheless, police kept Davis handcuffed for 37 minutes. 
"Try to scoot your butt straight over so you don't get blood all over the car," one officer told Davis as he directed him to get inside the police vehicle. "Try to keep that arm off the seat."
Eventually, police took Davis to a local hospital where he was treated and released. Notably, according to WCPO, Covington's police report of the incident did not mention that Davis was attacked by a K-9 or that he was handcuffed. 
"Had it not been for the body-worn camera footage, we would not have any idea of the atrocity that occurred there," Anita Washington, Davis' attorney, told WCPO. 
The lawsuit says that Davis "was diagnosed with injury of biceps brachii muscle and injury of triceps due to dog bite on his left arm. He was given an opioid for pain relief before undergoing multiple laceration suture repairs. The wounds have not completely healed, and it appears as though the injuries and scarring" are permanent. The suit also says that Davis was "diagnosed with acute stress/PTSD due to nightmares, avoidance of going outside or near dogs, and intrusive thoughts of being attacked." 
Davis argues that his mauling was clearly unjustified and that the officer responsible for the K-9 acted with an intent to harm him, or "a conscious disregard to" Davis' rights or safety.
However, in a response to the complaint, the city denied Davis' claims that he was unjustly attacked, arguing, "If the Plaintiff was injured and/or damaged as alleged… his injuries and/or damages were caused solely as a result of his own acts or omissions," and insisting that police actions were justified.
While Davis' ordeal is disturbing, it's unclear whether he will be able to succeed in his lawsuit, as police officers are protected by wide-ranging qualified immunity protections that make it extremely difficult to sue them over civil rights violations—no matter how obvious.
"I think they believed Mr. Davis was expendable and what happened was just a mistake," Washington told WCPO.
The post Police Let Their K-9 Maul on the Wrong Guy. They Arrested Him Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I was asked to fill in for a debate on the shores of Nantucket, after a last-minute cancellation by a more prominent combatant. The subject was God and religion, and I served as defender of faith against the prosecutorial efforts of Christopher Hitchens.

In my memory it was a brutal affair. The audience was there to hear Hitchens at the peak of his powers, and I was the Washington Generals. I threw some carefully rehearsed, extremely reasonable arguments at him; he batted them wittily away. The crowd cheered; the angels wept.

The lesson I took from that experience was simple: Trying to defeat charismatic men with facts and logic is a fool’s errand. Hitchens’s “religion poisons everything” account of human history was a mixture of balderdash, historical caricature and barely-veiled anti-religious bigotry. Therefore I should not have elevated his arguments by publicly debating them. Instead, I should have worked toward a world where institutions would decline to platform his fundamentalist style of atheism, no matter how many Nantucketers might clamor for tickets.

Wait, no — that’s not the lesson I drew at all. The lesson I actually took was, Ross, you blew it, do better next time. Because it didn’t matter whether I personally considered Hitchens’s atheism to be beyond some intellectual pale; he was an important figure leading an influential movement, and in a free society there is no substitute for trying to win arguments with influential figures, no matter the risks of defeat or embarrassment you run along the way.

Dear Professor DIANE COYLE, You have so eloquently defined the foundations of micro economics from Wealth of Nations. I as an economist absolutely agree and understands that concepts needs to be understood in their simplicity to under stand the power of the arguments made by the Father of Contemporary Economics namely Adam Smith. You have focused your argument towards division of labor and competition and brought the most relevant situation for the global economy that is going to emerge with AI technologies. It has a potential to challenge every thing we know about economics in case and you suggest AI is going to take the place of human labor and that is not a conjecture but in all probability is going to happen with more and more automation happening in every kind of industry. I have been debating with Professor Acemoglu who is one of the most prominent economist to understand the capitalist economic structures promoted by the bastion of Capitalism that United States is. Thereby he is giving lectures raising caution in adoption of AI and further automation. Though automation has increased productivity all across industries and sectors including manufacturing sector, Agriculture and Services, and promoted specialization that coupled with innovation and increasing market size has primarily benefited the consumers and benefited hugely the circular economy where the rest of the world and especially China, India and East Asia have been most prominent beneficiaries.

You have very rightly brought the attention as what is happening between division of labor, specialization and competition in future. It is foundational to understand that competition brings all kinds of economic prosperity because it draws down prices, develops a far richer market structure, develops national and international supply chains through domestic and international commerce. And free market means that it is private enterprise that undertakes competition with market deciding supply and demand side economic equilibriums.

Competition can be translated into higher revenues for the firms that bring quality and scale to their production processes and output. So it is all good to religiously follow Adam Smith with some new classical assumptions. However would that all hold if AI technologies continue to develop without government regulations providing certain directions that ensure public welfare for both consumers and workers. Because as you quote Adam Smith, and as is understood in basic economics there is a circular loop that exists between producer and consumer markets. Labor are the consumers in a diversified market structure representing both national and international markets.

Yes you subtly do hint that the future is about specialization and it is one of the greatest hints towards a world that is facing rapid de globalization. Because specialization would then logically lead to more international trade and extended versions of international supply chain as is proven with your examples of semi conductor industry with example of Dutch company ASMI and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

The future as you so brilliantly and simply established is about specialization and more competition instead of promoting protectionist policies that interfere in market structures to favor certain kind of labor and industry. You with your basic economics lessons and you have touched the jest of the wisdom that is available with Neo Classicals and especially with the old book of Adam Smith wisely named as Wealth of Nations, how much good a protectionist policy like Inflation Reduction Act may benefit United States and the world economy.

Though IRA intends to create specialization in Semi Conductor Technologies for the United States, the IRA and US government has failed to facilitate the process of specialization where crude industrialization is followed by disturbing international supply chains and in the case of more competition with Chinese manufactures would have resulted in an outcome that would have continued the pace of globalization and prosperity for not only United States but for Europe and China.

Do the recent White House Administrations including President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden and their economic teams hate China so much that they have just super imposed a protectionist policy on American economy that has traditionally been an economy strictly adhering to rules that promote specialization and competition more generally and thereby favoring countries like China and India and most of the world to find economic and material prosperity decreasing poverty in hundreds of millions,

Your article should be a must read for every person in White House Administration to remind them the ingenuity in Adam Smith's economics that promoted the wisdom of free market structure. It is important to mention that free market structure would always have provision for state regulation as written by Adam Smith himself.

In this scenario and in the context of above discussion, I think American Labor markets would be least prepared to the future world where AI technologies and automation would dominate every industry.

All my appreciation to Project Syndicate and its editorial board to bring one of the finest minds to write in PS spaces and starting debates that would not only define contemporary economics but the future of economics while rules of the game should be familiar to every one and that is not to reject a wisdom written 300 years back by Adam Smith that has worked for the most efficient economy like the United States for most of its history.

Yes lessons can always be drawn for the welfare of labor and understanding the best division of labor through consulting Keynes or Karl Marx but it is the free market economy that has built our present and it is indeed going to built our future. Lets not confuse the best wisdom that is the generalized definition of global progress by certain non-traditional measures that economist sometimes recommend mitigating the ethical risks that are involved with markets run by human beings. In this respect economics would always be evolving but the base should be entirely on free market structures and their development.

Thereby professor let Biden Administration understand what Adam Smith meant by division of labor, Competition and Specialization and take the cue from your brilliant article to prepare US economy for AI future.

The Titanic never actually sank. Or maybe it did, but not because of an accidental run-in with an iceberg. It was really a dastardly plot by Irish Catholics, or perhaps banker J.P. Morgan or an Egyptian mummy's curse is to blame.
Those—and plenty more—wild conspiracy theories about the disaster that unfolded in the North Atlantic during the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, have been circulating for years, with some starting almost immediately after the Titanic reached the ocean floor.
But now they're also spreading on TikTok, and The New York Times seems convinced that the social media app is a uniquely dangerous place for kids to encounter ideas that they might otherwise have to find in books, in movies, or elsewhere on the internet.
On TikTok, "musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content—a demonstration of TikTok's potent ability to seed historical revisionism about even the most deeply studied cases," the Times' Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari declare in a piece about the video site's "Titanic Truthers."
But the story's dramatic framing and its specific targeting of TikTok seem at odds with reality—a problem for any article, but especially one that's supposed to be combating misinformation. Indeed, near the bottom of the piece, Hsu and Maheshwari admit that these TikToks are "just the latest recycling bin for false narratives about the Titanic."
Is there something uniquely dangerous about the way these ideas spread via TikTok? I asked Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who has written extensively about conspiracy theories (including in the pages of Reason), whether this is a worrying development.
"No, we should not be worried," says Uscinski. "The ability of social media to turn people into conspiracy theorists is vastly overrated, largely because people don't believe everything they hear and see, and oftentimes, the things they hear and see are things that they sought out purposely because those things match their preexisting beliefs."
If TikTok—or social media in general, or even the internet as a whole—was causing people to believe in more conspiracy theories, researchers would be able to see that trend. Instead, surveys by Uscinski and others have found that, at the mass level, conspiracy theory beliefs tend to be stable over time.
Instead of acknowledging that, the Times article offers a misleading statistic to suggest that social media is rotting kids' brains. Citing research from the Reboot Foundation, Hsu and Maheshwari note that 17 percent of "young Americans who use TikTok for more than an hour a day" were unable to "say definitively that the Earth is round."
That, of course, doesn't mean they ascribe to the silly "flat Earth" theory, just that they don't have a definitive take on the subject—or that they were trolling the pollster. At any rate, the statistic is useless without knowing how many Americans who aren't young and don't use TikTok more than an hour a day might hold similar views. The Times story doesn't provide that context, and neither does the underlying Reboot Foundation report—though the report does say that social media is "probably not" making young people less intelligent.
But here's a 2022 survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire's school of public policy that found 19 percent of American adults either believed the Earth was flat or were unsure about it. Could it be that young TikTok users are actually more well-informed than the general public?
Maybe not. Uscinski thinks the New Hampshire survey might be flawed, too: The question's wording was a bit confusing, which might have led to a higher number of "not sure" responses. Either way, we're talking about fewer than one in five people—and we're talking about a longstanding element of American life.
"There always seems to be a tendency to blame new technologies and forms of communication for longstanding social ills, partially because there is a tendency for people to see the past with rosy hindsight," Uscinski tells Reason. "So when people tell me that conspiracy theory beliefs are worse now than ever before, I usually ask if they are worse now than during the Salem Witch Trials, or the Red Scare?"
The post Is TikTok Really To Blame for <i>Titanic</i> Conspiracy Theories? appeared first on Reason.com.

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As the Biden administration warmly welcomes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington, some experts warn that the United States shouldn’t succumb to irrational exuberance about the two countries’ relations. My colleague Barkha Dutt writes that India will never be America’s ally, no matter how warm Washington’s embrace. India is intensely focused on its own national interests and will pursue them narrowly. The oft-cited example is India’s refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The skeptics are right to note that India has long resisted the pull to become a full-fledged ally of the United States, a version of Britain in Asia. And it will continue to do so. Like any country, it does have its own interests to worry about.

But India is changing. In the past, the country has placed little emphasis on foreign policy, devoting its energies instead to managing the vast complexities of its own society, which is characterized by thousands of castes and communities, dozens of major languages and huge regional diversity.

Now, the rise of China has finally gotten India’s attention. The 2020 clash in the Himalayas — when Chinese and Indian soldiers fought bitterly over a disputed border area — was a wake-up call for India’s strategic elite and, to some extent, the entire country. Public sentiment shifted sharply, and today a large number of Indians regard China with hostility. For its part, Beijing has done little to try to solve the problem. It has actually reinforced its military infrastructure along the border, which would allow it to surge troops whenever it sees the need. Since the clash three years ago, India has constrained or outright banned many Chinese companies and technologies from operating in its market, including Huawei and TikTok. The threat from China will motivate India to strengthen its ties with the United States for decades to come.

Yet, as India emerges as a great power, it will have to adopt a more expansive vision of its interests around the world. It will need to define its attitude toward the international system itself, and how its own ideas and ideals should affect its stance. In the process, it might well decide that it values a rules-based international system, and see that, as the world’s largest democracy, it gains enormous soft power by adopting a foreign policy that is influenced by its democratic ideals, even if it won’t be feasible in every case to apply them. Such selectivity is, after all, true of most democratic countries, including the United States.

There is a separate critique of the overtures toward Modi that deal with his government’s policies toward minorities, the media, the judiciary and other independent agencies in the democratic system. Many of these criticisms are accurate. Modi has presided over a decay of democracy in India; all three of the major international think tanks that measure the quality of democratic governance have downgraded India in recent years. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute judges that India no longer ranks as a democracy at all, describing it instead as an “electoral autocracy.”

But how Washington should handle democratic decay in a country like India is a complicated problem. Modi is extremely popular in India and, what’s more, his Hindu nationalism is also popular. Like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Modi has tapped into an illiberal vein in India that scorns minorities, checks and balances, and liberal constitutionalism. In all these places, the nationalist-populist leader sets himself and his many followers against the old, secular, cosmopolitan elite that has ruled the country for decades. Truth be told, there is often much frustration with that elite, an establishment that seems disconnected from the heartland of the nation, from ordinary people and their ideas and emotions.

I sometimes wonder whether all these countries are revealing that the values of an open society — pluralism, tolerance, secularism — were an import from the era of the West’s dominance in the world, and that the erosion of these ideals is gradually revealing a more authentic, less tolerant nationalism. Former U.S. ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith said India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, told him, “I am the last Englishman to rule India.” The country Nehru and his fellow post-independence leaders created was built on values that its founders drew from their deep associations with Britain and the West. Their India was a secular, pluralistic, democratic and socialist state. All of those ideals have been fading in India in recent years.

In any event, lecturing Modi on human rights is not the best way for the Biden administration to deal with him. That would backfire — not only with him but also with most Indians who would resent Western bullying. Far better to ally with India’s society itself, expanding ties with its businesses, press, nongovernmental organizations, cultural groups and others. India is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, something that is palpable when you are there. Companies, students, scholars, activists — all want closer ties with the United States.

This people-to-people alliance will inevitably strengthen the government-to-government relations. But more importantly, I believe that an India that is more deeply connected to the United States will be a country that will naturally seek to perfect its democracy at home. It will also give it moral authority in a fracturing world that could use more of it.

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If an alien life form landed on Earth tomorrow and called up some of the planet’s foremost experts on lactation, it would have a heck of time figuring out what, exactly, humans and other mammals are feeding their kids.The trouble is, no one can really describe what milk is—least of all the people who think most often about it. They can describe, mostly, who makes it: mammals (though arguably also some other animals that feed their young secretions from their throat or their skin). They can describe, mostly, where it comes from: mammary glands via, usually, nipples (though please note the existence of monotremes, which ooze milk into abdominal grooves). They can even describe, mostly, what milk does: nourish, protect, and exchange chemical signals with infants to support development and growth.But few of these answers get at what milk, materially, compositionally, is actually like. Bridget Young, an infant-nutrition researcher at the University of Rochester, told me milk was an “ecological system”; Alan S. Ryan, a clinical-research consultant, called it a “nutritional instrument.” Bruce German, a food scientist at UC Davis, told me milk was “the result of the evolutionary selective pressure on a unique feeding strategy,” adding, by way of clarification, that it was “a biological process.” A few researchers defaulted to using milk to explain something else. “It’s the defining feature of mammals,” says Melanie Martin, an anthropologist at the University of Washington. None of these characterizations were bad. But had I been that alien, I would have no idea what these people were talking about.[Read: We’ve never been good at feeding babies]What these experts were trying to avoid was categorizing milk as a “food”—the way that most people on Earth might, especially in industrialized countries where dairy products command entire supermarket aisles. “Overwhelmingly, when we think about milk, when we talk about milk, we think of nutrition,” says Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University. That’s not the wrong way to think about it. But it’s also not entirely right.The milk that mammals make is undoubtedly full of the carbs, fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals newborn mammals need to survive. And, across species, much of it does resemble the creamy, tart-tangy, lactose-rich whitish liquid that billions of people regularly buy. But to consider only milk’s nutrient constituents—to imply that it has a single recipe—is to do it “a disservice,” German told me. Mammalian milk is a manifestation of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary tinkering that have turned it into a diet, and a developmental stimulus, and a conduit for maternal-infant communication, and a passive vaccine. It builds organs, fine-tunes metabolism, and calibrates immunity; it paints some of an infant’s first portraits of its mother, and telegraphs chemical signals to the microbes that live inside the gut. Milk can sustain echidnas that hatch from eggs, and wildebeest that can gallop within hours of birth; it can support newborn honey possums that weigh just three milligrams at birth, and blue-whale calves clocking in at up to 20 tons. Among some primates, it influences infants’ playfulness, and may shape their sleep habits and bias them toward certain foods. Some of its ingredients are found nowhere else in nature; others are indigestible, still others are alive.Milk is also dynamic in a way that no other fluid is. It remodels in the hours, days, weeks, and months after birth; it changes from the beginning of a single stint of feeding to the end. In humans, scientists have identified “morning” milk that’s high in cortisol, and “night” milk that’s heavy in melatonin; certain primates have “boy milk and girl milk,” German told me, which support subtly different developmental needs. Tammar wallabies, which can nurse two joeys of different ages at once, even produce milks tailored to each offspring’s developmental stage; Kevin Nicholas, a biologist at Monash University, has found that when the joeys swap teats, the younger sibling’s growth accelerates. And when mothers and their offspring change, milk changes in lockstep. It reflects the mother’s stress level and physical health, taking on new flavors as her diet shifts; its fat content fluctuates, depending on how far apart bouts of nursing are spaced. Scientists are just beginning to understand how made-to-order milk might be: Some evidence suggests that maternal tissues may register, via the breast, when infants catch infections—and modify milk in real time to furnish babies with the exact immune cells or molecules they need.

“It’s a triad: mother, milk, and infant,” says Moran Yassour, a computational biologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Each one of them is playing a role, and the milk is active.” That dynamism makes milk both a miracle, and an enduring mystery—as unique and unreplicable as any individual parent or child, and just as difficult to define.In its earliest forms, milk probably didn’t have much nutritional value at all. Scientists think the substance’s origins date back about 300 million years, before the rise of mammals, in a lineage of creatures that hatched their young from very delicate eggs. The structures that would later develop into mammary glands started out similar to the ones we use to sweat; the substance that would become proper milk pooled on the surface of skin and was slathered onto shells. The earliest milks probably had few calories and almost none of its hallmark lactose. But they were deeply hydrating, and teeming with immunity.As our ancestors jettisoned egg laying for live birth, they began to extrude milk not just as a defensive shield for their offspring, but as a source of calories, vitamins, and minerals. The more that milk offered to infants, the more that it demanded of those that produced it: Mothers “dissolve themselves to make it,” German told me, liquefying their own fat stores to keep their babies fed, “which is impressive and scary at the same time.” In its many modern manifestations, milk is, in every mammal that produces it, a one-stop shop for newborn needs—“the only real time in life where we have hydration, nutrients, and bioactive factors that are all a single source,” says Liz Johnson, an infant-nutrition researcher at Cornell.Each time mammals have splintered into new lineages, taking on new traits, so too has their milk. While most primates and other species that can afford to spend months doting on their young produce dilute, sugary milks that can be given on demand, other mammals have evolved milk that encourages more independence and is calorific enough to nourish in short, ultra-efficient bursts. Hooded seals, which have to wean their pups within four days of birth, churn out goopy milk that’s nearly sugar-free, but clocks in at about 60 percent fat—helping their offspring nearly double in weight by the time they swim away. Marsupial milk, meanwhile, is ultra-sweet, with double or triple the sugar content of what cows produce, and cottontail rabbits pump out a particularly protein-rich brew. (One thing milk can’t do? Be high in both sugar and fat, says Mike Power, a biological anthropologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, where he maintains a large repository of mammalian milk: “Nature has never been able to produce ice cream.”) Each species’ milk even has its own microbiome—a community of helpful bacteria that goes on to seed the newborn infant’s gut. Mammal milks are now so specialized to their species that they can’t substitute for one another, even between species that otherwise live similar lives.Human milk—like other primate milk—is on the watery, sugary side. But its concentrations of immunity-promoting ingredients have no comparator. It bustles with defensive cells; it shuttles a stream of antibodies from mother to young, at levels that in some cases outstrip those of other great apes’ milk by a factor of at least 10. Its third-most-common solid ingredient is a group of carbohydrates known as human milk oligosaccharides, or HMOs, which aren’t digestible by our own cells but feed beneficial bacteria in the colon while keeping pathogens out. Roughly 200 types of oligosaccharides have been found in human milk—an inventory with more diversity, complexity, and nuance than that of any other mammalian species described to date, says Concepcion Remoroza, a chemist who’s cataloging the HMOs of different mammalian milks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.The sheer defensive firepower in our species’ milk is probably a glimpse into the challenges in our past, as humans crowded together to plant, fertilize, and harvest mass quantities of food, and invited domesticated creatures into our jam-packed homes. “We were basically concentrating our pathogens and our parasites,” Power told me, in ways that put infants at risk. Perhaps the millennia modified our milk in response, making those unsanitary conditions possible to survive.Mammals would not exist without their milk. And yet, “we don’t actually know that much about milk,” down to the list of its core ingredients in our own species, says E. A. Quinn, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Even for the breast-milk components that scientists can confidently identify, Quinn told me, “we don’t really have a good handle on what normal human values are.” Many studies examining the contents of breast milk have focused on Western countries, where the population skews wealthier, well nourished, and white. But so much varies from person to person, from moment to moment, that it’s tough to get a read on what’s universally good; likely, no such standard exists, at least not one that can apply across so many situations, demographics, and phases of lactation, much less to each infant’s of-the-moment needs.Milk’s enduring enigmas don’t just pose an academic puzzle. They also present a frustrating target—simultaneously hazy and mobile—for infant formulas that billions of people rely on as a supplement or substitute. Originally conceived of and still regulated as a food, formula fulfills only part of milk’s tripartite raison d’etre. Thanks to the strict standards on carb, fat, protein, vitamin, and mineral content set by the FDA and other government agencies, modern formulas—most of which are based on skim cow’s milk—do “the nourish part really well,” helping babies meet all their growth milestones, Bridget Young, the University of Rochester infant nutrition researcher, told me. “The protect and communicate part is where we start to fall short.” Differences in health outcomes for breastfed and formula-fed infants, though they’ve shrunk, do still exist: Milk-raised babies have, on average, fewer digestive troubles and infections; later in life, they might be less likely to develop certain metabolic issues.[Read: What parents did before baby formula]To close a few of those gaps, some formula companies have set their sights on some of milk’s more mysterious ingredients. For nearly a decade, Abbott, one of the largest manufacturers of formula in the United States, has been introducing a small number of HMOs into its products; elsewhere, scientists are tinkering with the healthful punch via live bacterial cultures, à la yogurt. A few are even trying a more animal-centric route. The company ByHeart uses whole cow’s milk as its base, instead of the more-standard skim. And Nicholas, the Monash University biologist, is taking inspiration from wallaby milk—complex, nutritious, and stimulating enough to grow organs of multiple species almost from scratch—which he thinks could guide the development of formulas for premature human infants not yet ready to subsist solely on mature milk.All of these approaches, though, have their limits. Of the 200 or so HMOs known to be in human milk, companies have managed to painstakingly synthesize and include just a handful in their products; the rest are more complex, and even less well understood. Getting the full roster into formula will “never happen,” Sharon Donovan, a nutritional scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. Other protein- and fat-based components of milk, specially packaged by mammary glands, are, in theory, more straightforward to mix in. But those ingredients might not always behave as expected when worked onto a template of cow’s milk, which just “cannot be compared” to the intricacies of human milk, Remoroza told me. (In terms of carbs, fats, and protein, zebra milk is, technically, a better match for us.)A company called Biomilq is trying a radical way to circumvent cows altogether: It’s in the early stages of growing donated human-mammary-gland cells in bioreactors, in hopes of producing a more recognizable analogue for breast milk, ready-made with our own species-specific mix of lactose, fats, and proteins, and maybe even a few HMOs, Leila Strickland, one of Biomilq’s co-founders, told me. But even Strickland is careful to say that her company’s product will never be breast milk. Too many of breast milk’s immunological, hormonal, and microbial components come from elsewhere in the mother’s body; they represent her experience in the world as an entire person, not a stand-alone gland. And like every other milk alternative, Biomilq’s product won’t be able to adjust itself in real time to suit a baby’s individual needs. If true milk represents a live discourse between mother and infant, the best Biomilq can manage will be a sophisticated, pretaped monologue.[Read: A bold and controversial idea for making breast milk]For all the ground that formula has gained, “no human recipe can replicate what has evolved” over hundreds of millions of years, Martin, of the University of Washington, told me. That may be especially true as long as formula continues to be officially regarded as a food—requiring it to be, above all else, safe, and every batch the same. Uniformity and relative sterility are part and parcel of mass production, yet almost antithetical to the variation and malleability of milk, Cornell’s Johnson told me. And in regulatory terms, foods aren’t designed to treat or cure, which can create headaches for companies that try to introduce microbes and molecules that carry even a twinge of additional health risk. Float the notion of a very biologically active addition like a growth factor or a metabolic hormone, and that can quickly “start to scare people a bit,” Donovan, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me.As companies have vied to make their formulas more milk-esque and complex, some experts have discussed treating them more like drugs, a designation reserved for products with proven health impact. But that classification, too, seems a poor fit. “We’re not developing a cure for infancy,” Strickland, of Biomilq, told me. Formula’s main calling is, for now, still to “promote optimal growth and development,” Ryan, the research consultant, told me. Formula may not even need to aspire to meet milk’s bar. For babies that are born full-term, who remain up-to-date on their vaccinations and have access to consistent medical care, who are rich in socioeconomic support, who are held and doted on and loved—infants whose caregivers offer them immunity, resources, and guidance in many other ways—the effect of swapping formula for milk “is teeny,” Katie Hinde, of Arizona State University, told me. Other differences noted in the past between formula- and breastfed infants have also potentially been exaggerated or misleading; so many demographic differences exist between people who are able to breastfeed their kids and those who formula-feed that tracing any single shred of a person’s adult medical history back to their experiences in infancy is tough.The biggest hurdles in infant feeding nowadays, after all, are more about access than tech. Many people—some of them already at higher risk of poorer health outcomes later in life—end up halting breastfeeding earlier than they intend or want to, because it’s financially, socially, or institutionally unsustainable. Those disparities are especially apparent in places such as the U.S., where health care is privatized and paid parental leave and affordable lactation consultants are scarce, and where breastfeeding rates splinter unequally along the lines of race, education, and socioeconomic status. “Where milk matters the most, breastfeeding tends to be supported the least,” Hinde told me. If milk is a singular triumph of evolution, a catalyst for and a product of how all mammals came to be, it shouldn’t be relegated to a societal luxury.

As a child, Melanie Grant would rifle through her grandmother’s jewelry box, drape herself in 1920s-style silver marcasite baubles, and dance around the garden.
“I could wear her and be with her,” said Grant, who shifted to pure silver jewelry during her teenage goth phase. Eventually, her love of all things gemstone and metallic led to a more than 20-year career as a journalist (including 16 years at The Economist), author, curator, and artist, focusing on the art and economics of jewelry.
Now, Grant, along with Raquel Alonso-Perez, curator of Harvard’s Mineralogical and Geological Museum, and Susan Jacques, president and CEO of the Gemological Institute of America, are preparing to host the first State of the Art Jewelry Summit at Harvard. Beginning Friday, the one-day event will feature more than 30 speakers, including scientists, global leaders, and artists such as former monk and materials scientist Wallace Chan, whose bejeweled art resembles phantasmagoric insects and fungi, all discussing challenges facing the industry.
“It’s something we’ve had since we crawled out of the cave,” Grant said, referring to humanity’s long obsession with sparkly rocks. “Why is it still here?”
The summit might not answer that question, but its panelists will grapple with other potential existential threats: climate change, artificial intelligence, and a new, far more eco-conscious generation of buyers. In a panel titled “What do consumers and collectors really care about and how can businesses give it to them?” Harvard’s David Ager, senior lecturer and managing director at Harvard Business School, will lead a discussion about younger, Gen Z consumers, who appreciate the romance of diamonds but have environmental and ethical concerns with mining.
Today, the jewelry industry isn’t the only one digging up stones. The renewable energy industry also depends on mined materials (mostly gold) to fuel the clean energy boom. And scientists use diamonds for chemical analysis, radiation detection, high-powered lasers, and even quantum mechanics. The summit will convene researchers working on renewable-energy solutions, like batteries and energy-generating devices powered by bacteria, as well as those who build synthetic diamonds in the lab.
Detail of an uncut diamond.
“[This summit] was necessary many years ago,” said Alonso-Perez. “You have all this illegal mining happening and human rights risks.”
Some illegal mining operations involve child labor. Many abuse workers and ignore worker safety issues. Both legal and illegal mining can impact the environment, emitting carbon into the air and toxins into the soil and water.
One of the summit’s panels will demystify what the industry calls environmental, social, and governance issues, which include illegal mining as well as climate change; another will discuss how to navigate political and armed conflict — and sanctions, too. After Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, the U.S. and the U.K. banned Russian diamond imports. But companies can route their stones through other countries to try to obscure their origin and avoid the bans — yet another rat’s nest for today’s jewelers to untangle.
“You can’t, all of a sudden, from one day to another, become a really amazing ethical, eco-friendly company. It doesn’t happen that way,” said Alonso-Perez. “The idea is to have people leave with the sense that we can do it, and we are on the right track. That it’s not too late.”
Both Grant and Alonso-Perez hope attendees leave with some practical solutions and concrete steps to get closer to what they call “responsible” production. Most jewelers are tiny mom-and-pop operations with just a couple of employees. “They need support. So do the big companies. It’s a very old industry, and it doesn’t move quickly. But it is moving in the right direction,” said Grant, who is the new executive director of the Responsible Jewelry Council, which advocates for the jewelry and watch industries to adopt sustainable practices and includes 1,700 members from 71 countries.
Artificial intelligence, though still somewhat controversial in the jewelry industry, could help companies outsource some of their marketing and even design work. That could, Alonso-Perez said, free up enough time and budget for companies to focus on switching to renewable energy or tracing the origins of their stones.
“We need to have the biggest conversation possible,” said Grant. “[The summit] will be like a day of meditation where you can immerse yourself in all the subjects that matter and figure out what you’re facing and how to move forward.”
Artists like Chan (who will give a talk called “The Psychology of Found Materials”) could also help nudge consumers to shift their habits and, in so doing, exert pressure on the jewelry industry. “You need pressure from every side,” said Alonso-Perez. The consumer pressures the industry from below, scientists and facts from the sides, and those with power, like governments and big companies, from the top. “You need a ton of pressure to produce a diamond.”
The summit will conclude with visions for the future. The panel will include a representative of The Young Diamantaires, a nonprofit started in 2016 that now has more than 300 members who are eager to redefine the industry they hope to inherit.
But Grant, who recently designed her first piece of jewelry-as-art, a steel and gold sunburst cuff called “Self,” believes buyers are the ones who will push for lasting change.
“We have massive power as consumers,” said Grant. “If we all move as one, we can change the world.”

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.I have finally grown into my name.I was named after my maternal grandfather, Arthur Hansen—or, as I knew him, “Bedstefar,” the Danish word for grandfather, thanks to his heritage and first language. He was born in 1903, which was about the last time that “Arthur” was a popular name. By the time I was growing up, in the 1970s, it sounded, well, like a grandfather’s name.But a couple of months ago, I became a grandfather myself. So, at last, the name fits.The birth of my grandson is a source of unalloyed rejoicing, of course. Having your own children is scary and complicated, because a lot of change and sacrifice are involved. Having grandchildren, though, feels like no sacrifice at all. No one I know has ever said “I had big dreams for the future, but my grandchildren ruined all of that.”[Katrina Northrop: How my grandfather helped bring down the Nixon presidency]But this is not to say that, for the happiness of all concerned, better or worse ways to be a grandparent cannot be found. In fact, quite a bit of research exists on the topic. Here, for myself and others, is a social scientist’s short guide to grandparenting.Surveys on the subject suggest that being a grandparent delivers happiness for many reasons. One study from 2016 found that the favorite aspect of being a grandparent (for nearly 36 percent of men and 42 percent of women) was “mutual affection,” followed by “shared activities” (for 28 and nearly 24 percent, respectively). I would be interested to discover how this differs from measures of the best moments of fatherhood—which, as I recall, were led by “For the love of God, just a second without any screaming,” followed by “Maybe just a week without a trip to the emergency room.”The difference in happiness between parenthood and grandparenthood starts with responsibility: The olds get to cherry-pick the good moments more than Mom and Dad. As a grandparent, you can indulge the kids with candy and then send them home to have a sugar-fueled meltdown. But the difference is also age-related: In my 50s, I am simply calmer than I was in my 30s, and that makes everything easier. The one less likely to have a meltdown is me.The part played by aging comes up a lot in the research. In one 2003 study on “age identity,” which refers to how old one feels, researchers surveyed several hundred Midwestern grandparents. The project found that younger grandparents felt older than other people their age did on average, while people who became grandparents when older felt younger, even as they gained experience in the role. This means nothing to me, because—being named Arthur—I have felt about 75 years old since I was a child, when I would join Bedstefar to watch Meet the Press and learn the proper technique to complain about the government.[Read: The unspoken wedge between parents and grandparents]The literature on grandparenting has defined at least five basic types: formal, fun-seeker, reserved, surrogate parent, and wise. I want to be in the second category—and that’s mostly how I’d classify Bedstefar. He had a large, custom-made bumper sticker that read Be Alert! The World Needs More Lerts! (He may not have come up with the line himself, but he was probably the only person who put it on his Buick.) He also always insisted that I play croquet with him out in the backyard; he always won, with ruthless efficiency and laughing uproariously. (By fun-seeker, I mean fun for him.)Occasionally, Bedstefar was wise as well. I once asked him why he never let me win, and he became quite serious. “A man never shows weakness in croquet,” he answered. Words to live by.Like Bedstefar, most grandparents feel that an important job they have is imparting life lessons. According to a 2018 AARP survey of 2,654 grandparents, more than half (53 percent) discussed morals or values with their grandkids. Some topics were less common than others: For example, only 23 percent said they felt comfortable giving advice about sex to their grandchildren. I’d estimate that zero percent of grandchildren feel comfortable getting sex advice from their grandfathers.Want to hear more from Arthur C. Brooks? Join him and a selection of today’s best writers and boldest voices at The Atlantic Festival on September 28 and 29. Get your pass here.Most grandparents seem to believe they have a high-quality bond with their grandchildren. One study from 2002 found that 57 percent of grandparents rated their relationship as excellent, and 45 percent said they were “very close” to their grandchildren. The most involved grandparents are about two and a half times more likely than the most detached to say the relationship is excellent. Three things predict relationship quality and satisfaction, according to another study: contact frequency, participation in activities, and commitment.In short, I should just show up a lot. I can do that. But what exactly should I do when we are together? Scholars in 2007 looked for the behavioral norms of grandparents and found two commonly cited characteristics: “being there” and “not interfering.” I take this to mean letting my grandson run wild, without the slightest hint of discipline. Hey, I’m just following the research here.[Read: Is my marriage that different from my grandparents’ marriage?]But I can take the hint that the norm is me “not interfering” with my grandson’s parents, not my grandson. This tends to be harder than just “being there”, because grandparents almost invariably doubt that their own kids are doing a perfect job of parenting. Indeed, the AARP survey revealed that only a quarter of grandparents think that parenting today is better than it was in their day. We believe we did it much better.For one thing, more than three-quarters (77 percent) of grandparents agree or strongly agree that “parents today are too lax with their child(ren).” This is true: It is not the job of my son or daughter-in-law to be lax with their child. That’s my job, thank you very much.One crucial issue I need to settle right away is what I am to be called. This is a weighty decision, because once you set it with the first grandchild, that’s who you are for all the rest to come. Based on the fact that my kids are getting married in their early 20s, it’s looking as if I am going to have a lot of grandchildren; I don’t want the whole crew referring to me as “Pops” or “Gampy” or similar undignified nonsense. And “Bedstefar” doesn’t make any sense, especially to my Barcelonan wife, who favors the traditional Catalan “Iaio.” Or maybe, harking back to my West Coast roots, “Grand-dude.”Then again, I should really choose something distinguished—a name that ages well and screams This guy is a grandfather. Like “Arthur.”

Last month, a Utah town tried to block a local group from hosting a drag show in a public park. Last week, A federal judge ruled that the town's actions violated the First Amendment, arguing that in denying the group a permit, town officials have prohibited "plaintiffs from expressing protected speech on traditional public forums," causing "irreparable harm."
In March, Southern Utah Drag Stars, a Utah-based drag group, filed an application for a permit to host a drag show in a public park in St. George, Utah. According to legal documents, while the group was given verbal permission to begin advertising for its event, it was nonetheless denied a permit following a spate of complaints from residents who objected to the group's "family-friendly" drag performance.
This denial was discriminatory, according to Judge David Nuffer, the federal judge who granted a preliminary injunction against the town. City officials "denied the Permit based on never-previously-enforced ordinances that prohibit special event advertising until a final event permit is issued…. The City also enacted a moratorium barring all new special event permit applications for six months." All this to stop the drag show from going forward.
Nuffer ruled that these actions violated Drag Stars' First Amendment rights. "Public spaces are public spaces. Public spaces are not private spaces. Public spaces are not majority spaces. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution ensures that all citizens, popular or not, majority or minority, conventional or unconventional, have access to public spaces for public expression."
Nuffer also wrote that, contrary to the city's insistence, drag shows are clearly protected speech. "There is no question that governments have a legitimate interest in protecting children from genuine obscenity. But the City has not provided a shred of evidence that would implicate that legitimate interest. Moreover, that legitimate interest 'does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed. Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.'"
Attempts at banning drag shows have become increasingly popular across the country, often with public officials citing the apparent "obscenity" of the performances, especially those that allow children to attend. However, this latest injunction shows yet again that drag performances are protected speech and that local governments, public colleges, and other state actors have no legal basis for attempting to restrict them.
The post Drag Is Protected Speech, Federal Judge Rules appeared first on Reason.com.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China this week clearly showed that Beijing is unwilling to address any of the national security issues that worry the United States and its Asian allies. Chinese President Xi Jinping sent Blinken home empty-handed, refusing even to establish basic military-to-military crisis communications. Perhaps Xi was humoring Blinken while he awaits visits by President Biden’s more accommodating economic officials.

But Blinken wasn’t the only senior U.S. national security official in Asia recently. While the Beijing talks grabbed all the headlines, national security adviser Jake Sullivan was in Tokyo, participating in high-level diplomatic meetings with America’s top regional partners. Sullivan’s counterparts from Japan, the Philippines and South Korea all met with U.S. officials and (in various groupings) with each other. These meetings — in the long run — will prove more consequential for dealing with China’s rise than Blinken’s Beijing visit.

The White House’s readout of Sullivan’s trip failed to capture the unprecedented nature of this quiet diplomacy. For the first time, national security advisers from Japan, the Republic of the Philippines and the United States met as a trio. This is an elevation of a new trilateral grouping insiders call JAROPUS, combining the names of the three countries in a similar way to AUKUS, the more formal grouping of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Another meeting in Tokyo that brought the U.S., Japanese and South Korean national security advisers together would have been unthinkable not long ago. But Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol have both taken significant political risks to move past historical grievances and join forces to confront their shared concerns regarding China’s regional aggression. The two leaders are expected to meet together with Biden for the first time in Washington later this year.

The concerns these important Indo-Pacific nations have about China’s strategy are not a product of Washington’s attempts to “contain” China, as Beijing alleges. The biggest driver of these moves is, in fact, Xi himself. He has ramped up China’s regional military expansion, bellicose wolf warrior diplomacy and economic coercion across the region.

“The Chinese have basically now, through a process of confrontation, helped us organize our allies on multiple layers,” U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel told me in an interview. “Xi does not get enough credit for all the work he has done to contain China, and I’m willing to give it to him.”

To be sure, the Indo-Pacific region is huge and diverse, and China’s economic lure remains strong. Even as leaders such as Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., also known as Bongbong, seek more security cooperation with the United States and other allies, they can’t afford to completely alienate Beijing. But these new diplomatic groupings — known informally as “mini-laterals” — are reshaping the security architecture in Asia in significant ways. The Chinese government’s negative reactions show it understands the importance of these developments.

“Many big countries in the region have a perception of being leaned on and coerced. That is the enduring and consistent feature of Chinese diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific,” a senior administration official told me. “They have systematically alienated a number of countries with their activist pursuit of what they think their nationalist goals are.”

In Washington, it is common to view Asia only through the narrow lens of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. This plays into Beijing’s desire to set up a false narrative positing America as the aggressor. But the fact that these other regional leaders are making these moves shows that concerns about China’s actions cannot be attributed to U.S. hawkishness or groupthink. The demand signal is coming from the region itself.

“U.S. allies and partners are increasingly turning to collective security approaches in the Indo-Pacific quite literally because China is digging its own grave,” Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, told me.

The race is on to develop these connections into genuine partnerships that will endure after the current leaders of these democracies depart. Encouragingly, there have been substantial advances in military cooperation, strategic planning and diplomatic coordination — moves surely driven by Beijing’s increasingly threatening stance vis-à-vis Taiwan.

But many regional allies worry the Biden administration’s policy lacks a robust economic component and fear that Americans’ appetite for internationalism is waning. U.S. plans to build out real cooperation in areas such as technology and energy security have yet to be fulfilled. To meet Asian allies’ desire for more American engagement and presence, the U.S. government, Congress and the American people will all have to support a surge of resources to this region.

The objective is not to “contain” China but rather to preserve the sovereignty of regional allies and the order that underpins the region’s prosperity. Beijing wants to split off Asian allies from the United States and each other, but its actions are pushing them together. What remains to be seen is whether Washington can take advantage.

The lab leak theory of COVID-19's origins gained tremendous legitimacy this week as The Wall Street Journal confirmed independent reports that the earliest outbreak occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2019.
"Patients zero" are now presumed to be three Chinese scientists, including Ben Hu, who worked extensively on gain-of-function research (the manipulation of viruses to make them more dangerous), which was funded by grants from the U.S. government. Those cases occurred in November 2019—well before the Huanan wet market outbreak favored by some in the scientific community as the more likely origin story—and they occurred among the very people one would predict if the virus originated in a lab. This is quite damning, to say the least. Anyone still clinging to an animal origin theory—remember the pangolins and raccoon dogs?—is running up against Occam's razor.
Assuming the intelligence reports are accurate and that Hu and his colleagues did contract the earliest cases of COVID-19, the implications are huge. This would mean that substandard safety protocols at the Wuhan lab probably unleashed a killer pathogen on the rest of the planet, and the Chinese government attempted to cover it up.
China is hardly the only government on the hook; the lab leak also means that research paid for by U.S. tax dollars—and vouched for by coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci, the nation's foremost gain-of-function advocate—is partly to blame for a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide. Fauci, the very person tasked with leading the U.S. response to COVID-19, was in charge of the government agency that gave Hu, the gain-of-function researcher initially sickened with the disease, millions of dollars to experiment with bat coronaviruses.
Information on the central role played by Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) was made public by the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group that uses public records requests to scrutinize federal funding of science. The Journal cited the organization's work, writing that it confirmed Hu's receipt of U.S. funding.
Concerned about the potential for catastrophic harm, the Obama administration paused federal funding of gain-of-function research in 2014. In late 2022, Fauci sat for a seven-hour deposition, admitting that exceptions had been made for gain-of-function research deemed vital to government scientists. In any case, the pause ended in 2017. Meanwhile, numerous authorities, including the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, have raised concerns about negligence at the Wuhan lab over the years. Vanity Fair and ProPublica described the lab as a "biocomplex in crisis."
If this sounds like a recipe for disaster, well, here we are.
The confirmation of the label leak theory would also mean that all the mainstream journalists, establishment scientists, and social media moderators who derided its adherents as conspiracy theorists were stunningly wrong. This should serve as a potent lesson to all the entities—many of them state-funded—that have made policing alleged misinformation their seminal issue.
Said cops including some of the most influential voices in the scientific community and expert commentariat. The New York Times' lead coronavirus reporter, Apoorva Mandavilli, previously described the lab leak theory as having racist roots. Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez criticized the comedian Jon Stewart for daring to raise the issue on an episode of Stephen Colbert's show. CNN medical analyst Leana Wen lamented the theory's likelihood of inspiring anti-Chinese animus. Others in the media called the lab leak a "fringe conspiracy."
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, vigorously banned and suppressed posts about the lab leak before finally abandoning this policy as the theory gained some mainstream acceptance toward the latter half of 2021. As revealed by the Facebook Files, Reason's report on the communication between social media companies and federal health bureaucrats, Facebook took its COVID-19 content cues from the government. All of this behavior—these efforts to shame or suppress individuals who were asking questions about the preferred narratives of government scientists—now seems incredibly short-sighted.
The Biden administration has committed to declassifying intelligence related to the origins of COVID-19, consistent with bipartisan legislation signed earlier this year. Frustratingly, the feds have missed the congressionally imposed deadline, which was last weekend. It is long past time for President Joe Biden and federal health officials to tell the American people the truth so that all responsible parties can ultimately be held accountable; despite the assumptions of so many media commentators, the lab leak theory does not have unilaterally anti-Chinese implications—on the contrary, it is the explanation for COVID-19 that incriminates the U.S. government as well.
The post Lab Leak Theory: 1, Misinformation Cops: 0 appeared first on Reason.com.

There is a lot of competition for our attention, and many issues that seem urgent and controversial. Sometimes important issues just fall off the radar because of this competition. Part of our goal at SBM is to keep tabs on relevant issues – antivaccine efforts, promotion of pseudoscience in medicine, weakening consumer protection laws, and many others. That is when a lot of harm occurs, when the public is not paying attention, and fanatics are tirelessly working in the background to subvert science and public health. So when an important issue has not been in the news recently, I like to take a look and see what’s going on.

GMOs (genetically modified organisms) is one of the topics I try to track carefully, even when it’s not making headlines. The first GMO food was approved in 1994 (a GMO tomato that is no longer on the market), so we are getting close to 30 years of GMOs. Opponents of GMOs falsely claim that they have not been studied enough (there is more evidence for their safety than other food products) and that there may be long term unknown risks. They were wrong 30 years ago, but it was at least true that GMO introduction into the food market and animal feed was new. But the “new” argument, by necessity, doesn’t age well. By now, if there were any actual risk to GMO foods, we would likely be seeing the result – and we are not.

The labeling of GMOs have been updated in the US, and while there is no evidence that this is useful information to consumers, there has been a reasonable improvement. The USDA now uses the term “bioengineered” to refer to any food product that has detectable levels of altered genetic material – genes that could not have results from usual breeding techniques. The term “GMO” now is restricted to those organisms with foreign DNA introduced, usually transgenic, from distant organisms, not possible with breeding. Whereas bioengineered can refer to a host of processes, such as using CRISPR to alter existing genes without introducing new genes.

As an aside, I find it ironic that a large number of available crops were produced over the last century through mutation breeding. This technique uses chemical or radiation to dramatically increase the rate of mutation (a thousand to a million fold) to increase the number of varieties to select from. But mutation breeding is not considered GMO or bioengineered. Many other crops are hybrids, even forced hybrids that would not occur in nature. But labeling such crops would be pointless, and banning them impossible, and they constitute virtually our entire agricultural industry.

Safety of Bioengineered Crops

Each bioengineered crop is studied for safety, to ensure that they do not introduce any new allergens or toxins. They are more studied than non-bioengineered crops, even those produced through mutation breeding. The claim that they are not adequately studied is simply wrong and hypocritical.

But we also have a lot of ecological evidence about GMOs in general. Because of the agricultural advantages of many GMO crops, animal feed transitioned from entirely non-GMO to mostly GMO very quickly. A 2017 review of studies, essentially two decades after this switch, found:

Based on this literature review, we conclude that there is no clear evidence that feed composed of first generation GM crops has adverse effects on animal health.

Literally trillions of animals have been fed with GMO feed without any detectable negative health effect. However, switching to non-GMO feed can have negative effects. According to research conducted by Iowa State University, such a change would increase greenhouse gas emissions by 7%, increase land use, and increase the price of food.

To date there have been over 3,000 studies looking at the health and environmental safety of GMO crops, without any evidence of harm or a legitimate safety issue. Based on this evidence, 280 scientific organizations around the world have declared that GMOs are just as safe as non-GMO foods and present no special risk. There is, in fact, an overwhelming scientific consensus that GMOs currently on the market are safe and pose no threat to the environment.

On the contrary, GMO technology has been critical to the agricultural industry, increasing efficiency, food safety, and reducing spoilage. Banning GMOs would have a net negative effect on the environment and worsen food security. This effect will only get greater in the future, as GMO technology progresses and the human population grows.

This disconnect between public fears, caused by a fearmongering campaign of misinformation, and a strong scientific consensus based on decades of research is stark and very dangerous. One particularly poignant example is the fate of golden rice – a bioengineered variety of rice with enhanced beta carotene meant to reduce the burden of vitamin A deficiency, especially in developing parts of the world. There are no legitimate concerns about golden rice – the patent rights are freely licensed, there is no issue with pesticide use, and there are no safety issues. The best opponents can do is to request even more research – and endless game of shifting the goalpost, or to claim that golden rice is not that effective. It seems what they are really afraid of is that golden rice will be successful, shifting public opinion away from their propaganda.

The Philippines has approved golden rice, and so far farmers have produced over 100 tons of golden rice grain. However, activists have managed to convince the Philippines Supreme Court to keep this grain away from malnourished children by claiming that it is a risk to nature. There is a temporary stay on releasing the grain, pending arguments about the safety and environmental impact of golden rice. They are trying a desperate last minute plea to relitigate the scientific evidence that has already been reviewed. This is a tragedy in the making, based entirely on pseudoscience.

The GMO saga is still playing itself out. On one hand, time is on the side of science here. The longer we go without the fears of anti-GMO activists being realized, the stronger a case we build for the safety of bioengineering technologies and specific crops. Further, the technology continues to improve, and new applications are being developed. The need for bioengineered crops is also growing, and issues, like climate change, food security, and land use, are increasingly eclipsing the false concerns of activists. But at the same time it is easy to exert a sort-of heckler’s veto on the technology, making it too controversial and too costly to be commercially viable. That is exactly what we are seeing play out in the Philippines over golden rice.

This get’s back to the core problems – activists are tireless, while the defenders of science and common sense have countless battles on their hands and a lot of competition for their attention. We should not take our collective eyes off the issue of golden rice and the broader issue of the benefits of bioengineering. The stakes are just getting higher.

New national data provides evidence of widespread learning loss among American schoolchildren following COVID-19 school closures. While declines in scores on this specific test began well before the pandemic, American students have suffered larger testing declines since the start of the pandemic than they did in the previous eight years. 
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend (LTT) test, also known as the Nation's Report Card, to a representative sample of American schoolchildren. Last September, results of the test given to 4th and 8th graders in late 2020 revealed dramatic score declines.
These declines were blamed directly on pandemic school closures, which implied that a return to normal test scores would soon follow a return to normal schooling. However, new data from American 13-year-olds shows that students are still behind. 
Compared to test results from just before the pandemic, students lost four points in reading, declining from 260 to 256 on a 500-point scale. Students also lost nine points in math, declining from 280 to 271. In all, the declines brought reading scores to their lowest point since 1975 and math scores to their lowest point since 1990.
The testing decline began before the pandemic. Reading and math scores on the 500-point scale declined by three and five points, respectively, between 2012 and 2020. While it isn't exactly clear why scores fell over this period, some have theorized that it's the result of fewer students reading for fun and fewer middle school students taking Algebra. 
The test has a survey component which found that, while the percentage of 13-year-olds taking algebra has stayed about the same since 2020—24 percent in 2023 versus 25 percent in 2020—in 2012, 34 percent of 13-year-olds took the advanced math class. Regarding reading, 31 percent of 13-year-olds reported that they "never or hardly ever" read for fun in 2023, up from 22 percent in 2012. Those who said they read daily declined from 27 percent in 2012 to 14 percent in 2023. 
The pre-pandemic decline in math is likely the result of more and more public school districts restricting access to higher-level math in middle school. This makes it difficult to blame math score declines entirely on the pandemic, as fewer students in Algebra meant that fewer students were taking the NAEP test with all the skills required to do well on the test. 
Nonetheless, the results of the test are deeply concerning. "The 'green shoots' of academic recovery that we had hoped to see have not materialized, as we continue to see worrisome signs about student achievement and well-being more than two years after most students returned for in-person learning," NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr said in a Wednesday press release. "There are signs of risk for a generation of learners in the data we are releasing today and have released over the past year. We are observing steep drops in achievement, troubling shifts in reading habits and other factors that affect achievement, and rising mental health challenges alongside alarming changes in school climate."
This latest NAEP data joins a growing body of evidence showing that COVID-era school closures damaged American education in ways that may be difficult to repair. 
The post New Test Data Show That COVID School Closures Rapidly Accelerated U.S. Learning Losses appeared first on Reason.com.

The names of the researchers who reportedly fell ill, which have not been publicly confirmed by the U.S. government and therefore remain unverified, and the nature of their work, were disclosed last week by the news site Public. One of those named researchers, Ben Hu, is a leading scientist who has worked on bat coronaviruses related to SARS. Some of Hu’s work was funded by the U.S. government, a fact that was unearthed through Freedom of Information Act requests by the nonprofit group White Coat Waste Project, which opposes taxpayer-funded research on animals, as well as by The Intercept, which uncovered broader U.S. funding for potentially dangerous lab work in Wuhan.

Another researcher who reportedly fell sick, Yu Ping, had written a thesis in 2019 about work at the virology institute on bat coronaviruses related to SARS — a thesis that was unearthed by a group of independent researchers who call themselves DRASTIC. The thesis further confirmed that work on these dangerous viruses was being done in labs with the second-lowest level of biosafety, BSL-2.

In September 2021, DRASTIC also obtained a funding proposal that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s U.S. collaborator, EcoHealth Alliance, submitted to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The proposal called for using genetic engineering to perform experiments with bat SARS-like coronaviruses and modify them by inserting features that can increase their ability to infect humans. The U.S. government rejected the proposal. One of the things that the scientists were proposing to do was to insert into these SARS-like viruses what is called a “furin cleavage site” — a feature of the Covid virus, but of no other known member of its subgenus.

The feature could also have evolved naturally, and many scientists dismissed its significance as evidence that research set off the pandemic origins. In a September 2021 journal article, published just before the grant application was made public, 21 scientists wrote that there was no evidence of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.” So the grant application, which calls that claim into question, is significant.

Thanks to extensive public records requests by the nonprofit group U.S. Right to Know, we are also aware that, as early as February 2020, many scientists who were publicly ruling out any role that research could have played in the pandemic, were privately expressing concern that there was a such connection, and in fact were specifically worried about the unusual furin cleavage site. (Some of the scientists have said they later changed their minds).

Customers dissatisfied with Amazon Prime—the $14.99 monthly subscription service that includes free shipping and unlimited access to Amazon's streaming television service—must jump through an unreasonable number of hurdles to cancel their memberships, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday against Amazon, the FTC explains that consumers must click "a minimum of six times" to navigate from Amazon.com's main page through the entirety of the cancellation process. In the FTC's telling, this is a harrowing journey that requires users to navigate confusing options like "end membership" to, well, end their membership. One must also have the fortitude to endure a page in which  Amazon tries to dissuade the cancellation with a reminder about the benefits of being a Prime member. This six-click process is deliberately difficult to navigate, the FTC claims, and is part of a "deceptive" scheme to lock consumers into their memberships.
Ah, but do you know how many clicks it would take to submit your feedback to the FTC about its decision to file this lawsuit? Seven.
That tally, courtesy of Patrick Hedger, executive director of the fiscally conservative Taxpayers Protection Alliance, sums up the silliness of the FTC's latest attack on Amazon.
To be clear, the too-many-clicks claim is the heart of the lawsuit filed Wednesday by the FTC, which asks a federal court in Washington to find that Amazon "used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs…to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions" and "knowingly complicated the cancellation process."
Maybe the ideal number of clicks to cancel an online subscription is four or five instead of six—but it seems unlikely that a federal court is the best venue to determine that sort of thing. Indeed, it seems absurd for the FTC to act as if this is a situation that requires government action at all.
According to The New York Times, there are more than 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers who spent about $35 billion last year on those memberships. Prime subscriptions are a major revenue stream for one of the world's most successful companies. Still, the available evidence suggests that people are opting into Prime memberships because they want to do so—or, at least, that they find the benefits worth paying for.
Likewise, there's little evidence that consumers are mad at Amazon's behavior. A recent Morning Consult report found Amazon to be the second most trusted brand in the United States, trailing only Band-Aid. In the same survey, it was reported that Amazon Prime users have a more favorable opinion of the company than the general U.S. population does.
Contrary to the FTC's lawsuit, there does not appear to be a class of individuals who need rescuing from Amazon Prime, a service that subscribers can cancel in less time than it takes to read an article bemoaning that the FTC is once again wasting coercively obtained tax dollars harassing a private company funded by voluntary transactions.
The post It Takes 6 Clicks To Cancel Amazon Prime and the FTC's New Lawsuit Says That's Too Many appeared first on Reason.com.

The authors of a popular children's book which depicts two male penguins who raise a chick together are suing a Florida school district after it barred students in kindergarten through third grade from accessing the book in district libraries. The suit argues that the ban violates the First Amendment by depriving children of their constitutional right to access information and engaging in viewpoint discrimination against the authors.
Following the passage of the Parental Rights in Education Act, public schools in Florida were banned from engaging in classroom discussions on "sexual orientation or gender identity" in kindergarten through third grade "in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards." In April, the Florida Board of Education voted to expand the ban to all grades, with narrow exceptions for age-appropriate health education.
While neither law explicitly mentions school libraries, many schools began to remove books from their libraries out of concern that books' subject matter would violate the ban. One of those frequently targeted books was And Tango Makes Three, a picture book published in 2005 that tells the story of two male penguins who mate and eventually raise a chick together, written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. The book has been the subject of frequent ban attempts due to its depiction of same-sex parents.
According to the lawsuit, public schools in Lake County barred access to the book for children in kindergarten through third grade sometime before December 2022. A public records request found that the school district justified this decision by citing the book's "content regarding sexual orientation/gender identification prohibited in [the Parental Rights in Education Act]."
The lawsuit argues that this ban constitutes illegal viewpoint discrimination. "They barred students from accessing Tango because of its content," notes the complaint. "Namely, the story of a same-sex animal couple with an adopted child—and its expressed viewpoint—namely, that same-sex relationships and families with same-sex parents exist; that they can be happy, healthy, and loving; and that same-sex parents can adopt and raise healthy children." 
The complaint adds that similar stories featuring heterosexual relationships have not received the same treatment and that the ban violates students' First Amendment right to receive information.
While professors at public colleges have broad First Amendment protection for teaching decisions, public K-12 school teachers and students have much narrower expressive rights. Local and state governments have broad discretion to determine what should be taught in K-12 classrooms, making it more difficult to challenge book bans.
While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a student challenging a school board's decision to remove several books from his school library in 1982, the case divided the Court and resulted in no majority opinion. This has led to an unclear precedent about the legality of school library book bans. Just last year, an effort led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to block the removal of several books about "people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups" from a school district's libraries was rejected by a federal judge in Missouri. 
"For Plaintiffs to have a fair chance of prevailing on their First Amendment claim, the First Amendment would need to prohibit public school officials from removing a limited amount of books from their library shelves or the First Amendment would need to prohibit public schools from temporarily removing books from their library shelves while they determine the books' suitability," wrote Judge Matthew T. Schelp in his denial of the ACLU's request for a preliminary injunction. "Plaintiffs have not coherently explained how the First Amendment prohibits either."
The post Can a Florida School District Ban a Children's Book About Gay Penguins? appeared first on Reason.com.

In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Republicans including then–President Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump's top attorneys at the time, claimed that video footage from State Farm Arena in Atlanta confirmed that something shady happened during vote counting in Georgia.
That video footage supposedly showed two election workers pulling ballots from a "suitcase" and entering them into official counts after hours, according to reports in right-wing media like One America News Network. Giuliani testified to a Georgia legislative committee that poll workers overseeing the counting of ballots at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had engaged in blatant fraud.
Those claims were explosive—but totally wrong.
The allegations involving those two election workers—Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea Moss—were "false and unsubstantiated," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, announced Tuesday, as his office officially closed a two-year probe into the incident. The investigation had launched at the behest of Georgia state Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick (R–East Cobb) and included the FBI and Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
The final report includes details of interviews with Freeman, Moss, and other workers present during the ballot counting at State Farm Arena on the night of the 2020 election. Those interviewed provided "a consistent account" of the ballot-counting process, and matched what investigators saw on the video footage. As for that supposedly damning video footage, "There was no evidence of any type of fraud as alleged," the report concludes, and there was "no evidence was provided to show that Freeman or Moss deviated from" the established process for storing boxes of legitimate ballots.
Additionally, the FBI interviewed the creator of an Instagram account that surfaced in December 2020 and purported to belong to Freeman. In posts to the account, the user (whose name was redacted in the final report) claimed to have participated in ballot fraud, but later admitted to the FBI that the content was fake.
Freeman and Moss reached an undisclosed settlement with OAN last year after suing the network for defamation related to its coverage of the election. In the lawsuit, the two claimed to have been subjected to intense harassment both online and in the real world.
Tuesday's report also details the extent to which state investigators double-checked the election results. Audits conducted after Election Day "did not identify any issues or discrepancies to suggest fake or fraudulent ballots were scanned and counted in the 2020 General Election results," and a subsequent recount requested by Trump's campaign "also did not identify any discrepancies to suggest fraudulent ballots were introduced and counted in the tabulation process."
"We are glad the state election board finally put this issue to rest. False claims and knowingly false allegations made against these election workers have done tremendous harm," Raffensperger said in a statement. "Election workers deserve our praise for being on the front lines."
Trump, meanwhile, continues to push the claim that the election was stolen. In an interview on Monday with Fox News' Brett Baier, Trump said he "won in 2020 by a lot" and claimed that "they were counting ballots, not the authenticity of the ballot. The ballots were fake ballots, this was a very rigged election."
That's always been an extraordinary claim that should require extraordinary evidence to be believed. To date, no firm evidence of a conspiracy to steal the election has stood up to scrutiny. On Tuesday, another piece of what little remains of Trump and Giuliani's wild claims was conclusively debunked.
The post Another Georgia Probe Finds No Evidence of Conspiracy To Steal 2020 Election appeared first on Reason.com.

In an age of darkness, glimpses of light are rare — but all the brighter for it. As the censorious progressivism embraced by Joe Biden and much of his Democratic party grows into an increasingly pervasive quasi-religion, ordinary people are finding ways to push back. Like democratic Leftists in the Cold War, old-style liberals are becoming a key force in challenging today’s new orthodoxies.
And this rising tide of liberal apostasy, coupled with a growing pushback from grassroots businesses and consumers, represents a far more profound challenge to the established order than the one routinely mounted by conservatives. In the Renaissance, the impetus for change did not come from Jews, Muslims, devil-worshippers or pagans, but devout Christians such as Erasmus, Luther and Calvin.
In our era, the most powerful critics of progressive theology once again tilt to the Left: Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Ruy Teixeira, to name but three. Their apostasy rises to uphold the basic principles once central to liberalism — equality of opportunity, free speech, and open inquiry. This battle is also reminiscent of the struggle waged by the Renaissance critics of the all-powerful Catholic Church. Today, it’s not bishops or popes who seek control, but the oligarchs and their media platforms which, with the sometimes exception of Twitter, favour a censorship regime that brands dissidents largely as purveyors of “misinformation”.
Like earlier apostates, religious or scientific, ours face an uphill struggle. They must contend with forces within the C-suite and, particularly, academia, where even the sciences are now constrained by ideological edicts. This is where the money flows, often to a host of non-profits, some secretly funded, that spread the gospels of censorship, police reduction, indoctrination in schools and an apocalyptic environmental agenda. One problem the apostates face is therefore an obvious one: despite often impressive media resumes, their research rarely makes it into the mainstream, their voices being carried no further than Twitter, Substack and the more broad-minded corners of the media.
This pushback comes at a propitious time, extending beyond a few dissident intellectuals to the grassroots and business moguls such as Elon Musk, Ken Griffin and Bernie Marcus. The latter, in particular, understand that the new progressive orthodoxy undermines the entire system by embracing anti-capitalist memes and reducing the role of merit in a system built around it. And so a critical front has been the rebellion against ESG (environmental, social, governance) standards. Many US states have moved to take their pension funds out of firms that embrace this ideology; some investment houses, notably Vanguard and upstart Thrive Asset Management, are eschewing corporate policies that stress climate change and other issues over fiduciary obligation to investors.. The fact that returns to ESG firms have been poor, when compared with those tied to fossil fuels and basic industries, could presage a further awakening among financial and business leaders that the balance sheet, rather than ideological back-slapping, constitutes the primary mission of business.
More important still, apostasy is also rising among the general population. The pressure for reparations, for example, is opposed by upwards of two-thirds of Americans. All major ethnic groups, notes Pew, reject race quotas, including African-Americans; overall, almost three in four oppose this, as do a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.
In the race debate, the role of black apostates is particularly critical. As John McWhorter has long argued, preferential policies encourage “therapeutic alienation” among black people and other minorities — leading some to adopt a mentality of “anger and scapegoating”, instead of doing “the work needed for success”. In the bizarre world of modern progressivism, any opposition to this agenda is “racist”, even if it comes from people who support equal rights and access to opportunity. Critics of race-based discrimination such as McWhorter and Glenn Loury are far from Klansmen incarnate.
Similarly, assaults on European culture have proven unlikely to win over the masses in these countries, the bulk of whom still express some pride in their heritage. The notion that Western societies are eternally oppressive and racist seems a bit of a stretch given that millions of Africans, Middle Easterners, and south Asians continue to flock to these countries, largely to experience higher levels of economic and cultural freedom. The progressive assault on heritage also is likely to stir up far-Right sentiment, as we can see in France, Denmark, and, perhaps most dangerously, Germany.
The ever-more edgy cultural agenda of the Left, particularly its obsession with transgenderism, provides additional fuel for apostasy. People generally believe in the existence of two genders, and are hostile to efforts to impose either sexual or explicitly political curricula on young people. The idea of parental rights, for example — making sure parents are informed if their child decides to transition — has broad support, including nearly four-fifths of Californians, reflecting what appear to be national trends. In defiance of the transgender advocacy from the White House down, the opposition to sporting categories based on gender, rather than sex, has actually grown over the last two years, with even more Democrats now opposed to the practice than in favour.
Critically — and, no doubt, shocking for some — many opposing the progressive agenda are themselves minorities. In Britain and Europe, for example, Muslims tend to be more religious and socially conservative than whites, and Indians, particularly Hindus, have been drifting Right-wards for a generation. In America, surveys show that foreign-born Americans are also more culturally conservative than the native-born.
Perhaps the most economically significant apostasy relates to climate-change policy. Despite growing moves to censor contrary opinions, here the liberal apostates are not classic deniers or oil company executives, but respected scientists such as former Obama advisor Steve Koonin, and climate scientists Roger Pielke and Judith Curry. Even some environmentalists — including Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore — openly denounce “Net Zero” and “de-growth” policies as both impractical and deeply flawed. They recognise that these policies are already leading to the immiseration of poorer people, particularly in California and Germany. They are not calling for an end to climate change mitigation, but for policies that are more realistic and less economically damaging for the working and middle classes.
And then there are grassroots protests at European governments’ attempts to impose emission reductions on farmers and ban chemical fertilisers — regulatory moves at a time when food prices are rising throughout the West. Efforts to reduce agricultural output, now being suggested in the United States and Canada, also could have dire consequences for billions in the developing world. It’s hardly surprising, then, that there is growing scepticism about climate policies globally; in surveys, it barely registers as a priority for people either in Africa or the US where, according to Gallup, climate is stated as a primary concern for barely 2% of the population.
Other troubles, notably the loss of industry amid soaring energy costs, are already creating a popular backlash, which has been a boon for the far-Right in Germany and Italy, among others. Some centrist regimes have taken fright, with France’s Emmanuel Macron stepping back from climate extremism. Less than a year ago, Germany signed an EU target to ban the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2035, but quickly backtracked.
Overall, for all the talk of ideological polarisation, public opinion may well be tilting more towards the apostates than those of the progressive zealots. Despite the media profile of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow “Squad” members, the majority of Democrat members consider themselves moderate or conservative, while barely one in four sees themselves as “very liberal”.
Of course, even with public support, supporters of traditional liberal values face a number of challenges when it comes to enacting meaningful political change. But there is some good news. Many companies are now rethinking their marketing strategies in the face of negative consumer reaction. There are even glimmers of hope for liberal apostasy in some big cities, as demonstrated by the election of New York’s pro-police Eric Adams and San Francisco’s recall of progressive school board members.
As was the case during the Reformation, the apostate’s course is still not an easy one. But their critique remains critical to undermining the current progressive theology — a far more effective weapon than the reactionary antics of DeSantis, which are focused primarily on Right-leaning GOP voters. In contrast, the apostates speak the same language and share many of the values that once constituted progressive ideals. They are, in other words, both the key to restoring rationality — and to keeping liberalism alive for future generations.
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“The Next 100 Years” is the first book I wrote that was intended to be a serious forecasting book. Others followed, but this perfected my method to the extent that it could be perfected. It contains many forecasts I am proud of and many I regret. Such is life. Written over the course of a few years, it was published in 2009, so it is about 15 years old and can now begin to be judged. The hardest part was determining how long it would take an event to occur, but the things I thought would happen by this time have, for the most part, taken place. I want to use this book and the others that followed to build the foundation for my next forecasts, which will have at least a 25-year horizon. As the cliche goes, the future is rooted in the past.

I wrote my first forecasting books without anyone being aware or even interested. I want to lay out the next set of forecasts in front of you, my readers, both to demonstrate that there is a method at work and to show you what it is. Criticism early in the process is the most useful. I will also savor agreement and praise. For now, I will select predictions from the different methods of forecasting I use. Some are long past and some still in the future.

I’ve realized this can’t be dealt with in one article about each book. My goal is to select two or three forecasts a week and lay out the method I used to get them right or, alas, how I screwed the pooch. I will discuss my good calls and my bad ones – the truth is the truth, and there is much to learn from errors. I will include forecasts on nation-states, non-state forces and the development of social and cultural mores. I will first state the forecast as simply as possible and then explain my reasoning for making the forecasts. I welcome discussion or comments. I will try to respond to them all, although the number of readers has made this obligation difficult to honor. The explanation will seem terse, but my intention here is to give you a sense of how forecasting is done. Later, if desired, I will go deeper, although reading the whole should be done only by those of you without other lives.

9/11 and the Threat From al-Qaida

My first forecast concerned what would happen in the war against jihadists. This section was written circa 2005, not many years after Sept. 11, 2001, in an atmosphere of fear and anger in our nation. My forecast was that the ability of al-Qaida to strike the United States was rapidly declining. Remember that this is not a forecast about the Muslim world but about jihadists, al-Qaida and attacks like 9/11.

At the time, the conviction that the jihadists would strike again ran high. I examined how the 9/11 attack occurred and found three elements. First, there were secure bases for recruiting and training al-Qaida operatives. Second, the operatives were inserted into the U.S. without detection. And finally, they were covertly trained by Americans in flying aircraft, which are by nature explosives.

The forecast required an understanding of U.S. capabilities and actions. The former required little inside knowledge, and the latter merely the obvious U.S. imperative to block future attacks. 9/11 worked extremely well as a one-time action. Replication was more difficult. U.S. intelligence identified and penetrated the recruitment facilities to the extent that jihadists could no longer be certain of an operative’s loyalty. Second, visitors who had traveled to certain countries were barred from entry to the U.S. or detained. Finally, training facilities for pilots were put under extreme control. For my work, I had simply to have a minimal understanding of American capabilities and the organization of the jihadists. It was obvious that the U.S. had to act, and it acted to disrupt the jihadists. Islamic countries, for the most part, became reluctant to provide bases for training jihadists.

Therefore, I concluded that there would be neither a repeat of this attack nor any other successful attack involving large numbers of people. The key to this forecast was to look at the technical aspects of the 9/11 plot, consider U.S. counterterrorism capabilities, and draw the conclusion that a 9/11-type event would not take place.

China’s Economic Rise

The second forecast was a comprehensive, long-term forecast for which I provided no dates. It was written in 2004 and focused on economic forces.

China was clearly entering a period of dramatic growth. I expected that this growth would result in substantial social and political problems, domestic and foreign. Foreign powers would resist China’s growth, and internal inequality would create stresses. Beijing was doing everything in its power to keep various parts of China happy. The weak spot of China is the interior, the poorest part of the country. The leadership is trying to ship resources to the interior without generating resistance from the coastal regions. I forecast that this would lead to an economic slowdown driven by resistance to Chinese exports and undercapitalization of the coast. There are structural limits to Chinese growth.

I deliberately did not include dates. China had started growing rapidly, and how long it would grow depended on the global economy and internal stability. I couldn’t predict this. However, given the early excitement about China’s growth, I felt it worthwhile to point out that China, as an exporting country, could not grow fast enough or long enough to match the United States.

The method I used to reach this conclusion was to model the emergence and decline of other export-dependent economies under pressure to grow.

The first was the United States, which, after the Civil War, found its economy shattered and domestic demand limited. Existing manufacturers shifted to exporting around 1890. By 1910, the U.S. was producing and exporting about 50 percent of the world’s industrial goods. World War I shattered Europe’s economies, crippled U.S. exports and led to the Great Depression around 1929-30, 40 years after the U.S. had begun to grow.

Something similar happened to Japan. Shattered by the end of World War II, it turned to the export market, particularly the U.S., with great success in the 1950s. By the late 1970s, the U.S. started an economic downturn that eventually slashed Japanese exports and, by the 1980s, created what was called the Lost Decade. By 1990, Japanese banks were reeling and its economic miracle was over. This occurred 40 years after the start of the Japanese exporting miracle.

China was another example of an export-dependent economy, hostage to the ability and willingness of other countries to import. I avoided assuming it would follow the 40-year cycle, as I had only two prior examples, did not understand the time cycle and wrote it off as coincidence. Now with a third example, I still don’t understand it but can’t deny it. China’s economic rise began in the 1980s, and now 40 years later in the 2020s, it is facing a similar economic slowdown to Japan.

After the Great Depression and World War II, the United States went on to great economic success, as did Japan following its economic failure. The failure of the Chinese economic model means a great deal of pain but in no way ends Chinese history. This of course depends on how the Chinese public responds to economic malfunction. That is a forecast to come.

In the next few weeks, the Supreme Court is expected to declare it unlawful for colleges and universities to use race as a factor in admissions, in two cases in which a group called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Shortly after attending oral arguments in the cases, Harvard’s former president, Drew Gilpin Faust, writing in The Atlantic, lamented the Court’s likely elimination of affirmative action as “the blindness of ‘color-blindness.’ ” In the Harvard case, Faust was a named defendant and a witness at the 2018 trial, which centered on the allegation that the university (my employer) discriminated against Asian Americans in favor of white applicants. But, in her article, Faust didn’t once mention the word “Asian”; reading her account of the case, one wouldn’t know that it involved Asian Americans. Her well-placed criticism of color blindness apparently had its own blind spot.

The urge to omit Asian Americans was perhaps understandable, if telling. The idea that they have been discriminated against in admissions is inconvenient and uncomfortable for supporters of affirmative action, myself included. For decades, selective schools found ways to manage the racial composition of their classes without being deemed to violate affirmative-action law, insuring enrollment of Black and Latino students, who are underrepresented in higher education, and seeming to maintain stable relative percentages of white and Asian American students. From the nineteen-nineties to 2013, the year before S.F.F.A. filed suit, Asian Americans, who were roughly between fifteen and twenty per cent of Harvard’s enrolled students, had the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group, including white applicants.

Admissions outcomes for Asian Americans were not necessarily tied to affirmative action for Black and Latino applicants; a school could conceivably have used race to boost underrepresented minorities without creating a ceiling on Asian Americans. But that would have meant allowing Asian Americans to cut into the share of white students in the class. So, for decades, liberal support of affirmative action for underrepresented minorities seemed to come with tolerating, denying, or ignoring an unspoken disfavoring of Asian Americans in favor of white students.

The silence extends to liberals on the Supreme Court. In Fisher v. University of Texas, an affirmative-action case from 2016 in which a white female plaintiff complained of racial discrimination in favor of underrepresented minorities, the liberal Justices, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, found U.T.’s admissions program to be lawful. Justice Samuel Alito devoted his dissent to explaining how U.T.’s own evidence showed that it actually discriminated against Asian Americans. He wrote that his colleagues in the majority “act almost as if Asian-American students do not exist.”

The case that the Court will likely overrule this month, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), was brought by a white female applicant who was rejected from the University of Michigan Law School. Last month, when the late Justice John Paul Stevens’s papers covering 1984 to 2005 became available at the Library of Congress, I went there to examine the files from Grutter, to see whether they might shed any light on its likely demise twenty years on. I discovered that a draft of the majority opinion, by the swing Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (appointed by Ronald Reagan), said that “white and Asian applicants must be treated similarly in admissions decisions,” but liberals apparently balked at it. In her final version, Asian Americans figured only in her passing mention that “Asians and Jews” had experienced discrimination but were not included in the school’s affirmative-action policy because they “were already being admitted to the Law School in significant numbers.”

O’Connor circulated her first draft of the majority opinion to the Justices on May 13, 2003. In it, she articulated affirmative-action standards that have been legally permissible for decades. Under Grutter, a school could consider race “flexibly as a ‘plus’ factor in the context of individualized consideration of each and every applicant,” in order to seek “the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” But a school was not allowed to set aside certain spots (as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke held, in 1978), or assign a certain number of extra points (as Gratz v. Bollinger held, on the same day as Grutter), just for racial minorities. O’Connor wrote that it was lawful to aim to enroll a “critical mass of underrepresented minority students,” but that it was prohibited to use racial quotas or “racial balancing,” which targets some specified percentages of particular racial groups.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist circulated a draft dissent, in which he asserted that the school’s effort to enroll a “critical mass” of minorities, which O’Connor deemed permissible, was really an illicit “effort to achieve racial balancing” among groups. He pointed to the fact that, year after year, the percentages of Black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants admitted to Michigan Law School managed to approximate the groups’ percentages in the applicant pool. How was that possible, if the school was merely using race as a plus factor and not engaging in racial balancing? O’Connor, apparently wishing to respond, circulated another draft opinion to her colleagues on May 30th. She clarified, in an entirely new paragraph, that she was approving the use of race for the limited purpose of admitting a “critical mass” of underrepresented minorities—not to prefer particular racial groups to others. An underrepresented racial group could not lawfully be favored over another underrepresented racial group; nor could an adequately represented or overrepresented racial group be favored over another such racial group. “Therefore, white and Asian applicants must be treated similarly in admissions decisions, just as African-American and Native American applicants must also receive similar treatment,” she wrote.

Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School, who was a law clerk for O’Connor that term, told me that all of the Justice’s clerks worked on the case and were sharply divided on it. Rodríguez did not remember the new paragraph or the circumstances of its appearance in the May 30th draft, but, when I read it to her, she inferred that it was attempting to deal with “a problem that nobody had a great answer to”: how was Michigan Law School consistently admitting roughly the same number of students of each racial group, without engaging in racial balancing? In other words, was the “critical mass” approach really a cover for racial balancing, as dissenters claimed? Clerks inside and outside of O’Connor’s chambers heavily debated the question throughout work on the case.

On June 5, 2003, O’Connor circulated her next draft to the Court. In that draft, the material about preferences among “white and Asian applicants” and among “African-American and Native American applicants” was removed. The final opinion for the majority, published on June 23rd, contained no prohibition on preferences among racial groups.

I was not a law clerk at the Court during the Grutter case (I arrived to clerk for Justice David Souter about a month after the decision came down), but I know from having clerked that a deletion of such a substantive and targeted nature, at the stage of successive drafts being circulated to the Court, is typically made because a Justice who has joined or may join the opinion requested it. In this case, Justices Stevens, Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer joined the decision, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia joining in part. The request was presumably made by one of the liberals—Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, or Breyer—because each of their votes was needed to insure that the majority of five held together. Stevens’s files do not include the written correspondence that may have indicated who exactly wanted the removal. And there might not be any if a Justice made a request and didn’t reduce it to writing. (I spoke with several clerks for Justices in the Grutter majority; none recalled O’Connor’s draft passage or its deletion.)

Why might a statement that “white and Asian applicants must be treated similarly” have been objectionable to liberals? It was highly foreseeable, even in 2003, that future waves of litigation over admissions would involve Asian Americans, who were held up as “model minorities” in educational achievement. And it was also foreseeable that their complaints would concern not just preferences for underrepresented minorities such as Black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants but also admissions practices that allegedly favor white applicants over Asian American ones. As a result, liberal Justices (or law clerks) in Grutter may have wished to avoid explicitly endorsing an Asian American entitlement to “be treated similarly” to white applicants. That might be a slippery slope to an entitlement to be treated similarly to Black or Latino applicants—which would destroy affirmative action.

The opinion-drafts intrigue doesn’t end there. One week after the aforementioned material disappeared from O’Connor’s draft of the Grutter majority opinion, it reappeared, this time in the draft opinion circulated by Justice Clarence Thomas, on June 12, 2003. He styled a section of his opinion as a concurrence, in contrast to the bulk of his opinion, which was very clearly a sharp dissent. In the concurring section, Thomas joined the majority opinion, “insofar as it confirms” that “the Law School may not discriminate in admissions between similarly situated blacks and Hispanics, or between whites and Asians.” Though O’Connor had already removed any such statement from her opinion, Thomas co-opted her ghost sentences into his own opinion, to “concur” and thereby make it seem as if that’s what the majority held.

Thomas’s concurring section also addresses the oddest and best-known line of the Grutter majority opinion, that “we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Thomas called this a holding of Grutter, meaning that, as he put it, “in 25 years the practices of the Law School will be illegal.” Fashioning his statement as a concurrence rather than simply dissenting from the majority in full was a naked, even manipulative, attempt to boost the argument that Grutter mandated its own expiration date. When I spoke to Cristina Rodríguez, who clerked for O’Connor, she described this statement as a “distortion” of O’Connor’s opinion and recalled “a lot of confusion and frustration around the twenty-five years” among the clerks for various Justices. She said, “I would not read it as a holding.”

Curiously, O’Connor herself appears to have raised no objection to Thomas’s aggressive concurrence. It may be that she was not displeased to have it both ways: to allow thoughts that she removed from or muted in an opinion joined by liberals to live on in Thomas’s text as an expression of her ambivalence.

This Particular Article is OFF-SUBJECT:

We need a Worldwide Political Synthesis:

Dialectical Synthesis -

Can Democratic Capitalism EVOLVE into Democratic Socialism? That is the question. Marx said no: he said that only a violent revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie could bring about the Socialist State. His reasoning was consistent with Confucius that once elites have power, they will do ANYTHING to keep it. In today’s world that means they will carry out genocide of the masses who are uprising to rid themselves of the “Yoke of Power” imposed on them by Western New World Order financial elites.

Under the rising “Multipolar World Order” against Western New World Capitalist Order supported by the Sino-Russian Alliance and their myriads of supporters, the predicted reaction of Western Capitalist Elites has been military interventionism, economic sanctions and withdrawal of American support for any nation that does not accede to the Western capitalist ideal of capitulation to the Capitalist New World Order. The US under the Bush presidencies included the “Far Vision of a Democratic Capitalist Middle East” and wars against the leaders of Afghanistan and Iraq to heel them to the Western New World Order established at the end of WWII. Previously, England and the US had overthrown the Socialist rule of Mossadegh in Iran and replaced him with Reza Pahlavi, a pro-Western capitalist puppet. The Vietnam War had been justified to stop the spread of Communism in Asia (The Domino Theory).

All these Western interventionist wars failed in their final intent to bring Democratic Capitalism to world power and eliminate world takeover by Marxist Communism. The Islamic revolution brought Islamic clerics to power in Iran and threw out the pro-Western puppet Reza Pahlavi’s regime. America lost the Vietnam War and the War in Afghanistan militarily. The tenuous situation of Democracy Iraq is no longer covered in the Western Press.

As America has lost hard and soft power worldwide, China has stepped in to overtake the Western New World Order with the New Chinese World Order. Xi Jinping now commands the allegiance and cooperation of Middle Eastern, African, Asian and South American leaders who are joining the Sino-Russian Alliance to establish the New World Socialist Order as the old New World Order of Western capitalist dominance collapses worldwide. Presidents of Russia, Brazil, Palestine, Honduras, many Central Asian nations and even France have all recently been welcomed by Xi Jinping and given the Chinese royal treatment along with promises for Chinese support of their governments and economies. Xi supports Iran and recently spearheaded and created a peaceful agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. World Peace is breaking out under the New Chinese World Order. China has proposed a peace agreement between Russia and the West for the Ukraine War that many world leaders believe is the most rational course for its political solution.

Many other nations across the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America are now waiting in the wings and eager to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) in a new economic multipolar world order. The BRICS alliance now commands greater economic power than the G7 Alliance under the Western New World Order.

The biggest question now is “What will be result of the US general elections in 2024?” Republicans say the Democrat Marxist Communists have created a “Deep State” Marxist government in America. Republicans deny all Civil Rights movements promoted by Democrats, oppose Democrat-backed social programs, and resist higher taxes on the rich as wealth and power in America concentrates under a 1% capitalist financial elite while the US Middle Class is decimated.

Even President William Clinton admitted, “You cannot have both Capitalism and Socialism”, but he promoted Centrism. Under Centrism, social upheavals caused by Globalism that have unethically concentrated money and power under the US financial elites should be addressed by raising taxes on the rich and redistributing their amorally accumulated wealth via government socialist programs. Centrism is heralded by Democrats as the means to maintain American Democracy through technological, economic and social upheavals in America, to preserve American social and economic stability.

Hegelian versus Marxist Dialectics -

The USA is now the only Great-Power Nation divisively polarized and engrossed in political upheaval over whether the Hegelian or Marxist position on political dialectics is most viable. Hegel claimed that Synthesis of Opposites could and should be resolved through a mixed philosophy of opposite ideologies as their final Synthesis, which then produce the new ruling political [Ideology] Thesis. Marx claimed that Hegel was wrong, and that the contest between opposites was irreconcilable and, therefore, only a violent revolution could bring to power the Proletariat State whose primary purpose is to first serve the interests of the Working Class and create Class Equality, which is the purpose of Marxist Socialism.

The Big Question -

The big question now is, will American Democracy survive the current polarizing rift between Republican and Democratic Ideologues?

Can Democratic Centrism preserve American Democracy and save America from violent revolution –or will Republican Stonewalling impede Centrism and destroy the possibility of the Hegelian Synthesis of American Ideology into a hybrid Socialist/Capitalist Democratic State?

Respected Professor Mueller, Great choice of topic and a great article,

I myself is a strong believer in free media and I think that it not only makes up the foundation for democratic values, citizen rights but more importantly a thriving society with evolved culture. Though your article is concentrated on the role of local media and lack of it thereof after the advent of internet that has negatively affected the local and national politics with closing down of local media outlets who could undertake accountability of politicians at the local level and raise issues that relate to national harmony. You are absolutely right in your concern for closing down of local New Papers in US and UK. As a Pakistani who has been to US, UK and the Europe, the most fascinating things other than the cities of New York, Washington, Amsterdam, London, Paris or Barcelona is the prosperous local towns and villages. I have witnessing the prosperity of local towns and villages myself while travelling on a train or a car. One can always go and live in nature and have a taste of the modern world in local towns in Europe, US and UK. The town development and its governance is no less to any city area that is congested by traffic and people. So it makes your concern all the more important because these American towns have taken a while from being just the wild wild West and becoming a place of culture and tranquility.

The local media has not only contributed through accountability of governance quality of these towns but they have contributed to a culture that promotes freedom and ethics. I explain how. Consider the division in the US on LGBTQ rights or for example consider how women rights are still need an effort to implement despite US being the bastion of free world. What would a local media out led would do to a Gay, or a woman who lives a free life that may come as an alien idea for the folks in the local town or village. Yes they would become the gossip of the town. In the days of Wild Wildd West, these people who come to prominence because of their sexual preference or for just being women would be considered iconoclasts and an object of local society's humour or even anger.

But sir no more with a great local new paper working in the town with reporters as talented as they usually are across the globe while being more educated and learnt because of their mere writing and reading habits and also more aware thereof. The media would turn all the iconoclast into celebrities of the town and instead of becoming the fodder of fun and ridicule, these iconoclast who are associated with for example LGBTQ movements or for being just free women would become people of respect and progress. And imagine that every town has its local new paper, then it becomes know surprise that not only at local level but at national level a nation is built that is the hub of innovation and progress among comity of nations.

Therefore, I think that your article should be read by any American who has material influence in society and they should support all efforts that can save local media and news outlets from going bankrupt. Just like national or regional News Outlets, local media is the life line of progressive and Modern America who always has a knack of giving the world best scientists, artists, leaders and jurists.

Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder are writers and professors of history at Carleton College.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk, Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder discuss the predominance of certain progressive orthodoxies on college campuses; why opponents of left wing censoriousness should also resist illiberalism in education from the right; and how we can stand up for philosophically liberal, humanistic values without becoming bitter, reactionary, or uncivil.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I think we share the basic sensibility of being quite worried about some of the things that are happening on parts of the American left while also being very concerned about the reactionary response from the right. You have been very vocal in criticizing, for example, some of the kinds of anti-CRT bills that Ron DeSantis has passed in Florida. Before we get into the political dynamics of this, what's the reason to be concerned about some of the things that are happening on the left, and why is it that you nevertheless oppose the response to that from big parts of the American right?Amna Khalid: Well, it's important to do self-critique. As two people who associate themselves as being on the left of the political spectrum, we've been really disturbed by how little self-critique there's been. And every time there's been an attempt to critique, there is the counter attempt to cancel, reject or dismiss, and that kind of environment is just not conducive to deep thinking. Now, what's worrying about this is that if this was happening elsewhere, one could tolerate it. But when this starts happening on college campuses, which are the designated spaces for deep thinking, I think we need to be terribly alarmed. For me, it's also personal. I come from Pakistan, I grew up there under a series of repressive military dictatorships, and I've seen an education system being dismantled, and the impact of that on democracy.Jeff Snyder: I think if you're trying to get a perspective on your own culture and society, there are two basic things that you can do: read history and travel. So after I graduated from college, I lived abroad for four years, including in the Czech Republic and then in China. And it was through those experiences, talking to people in the Czech Republic who had lived through being an Eastern Bloc country, and in China, talking to political dissidents, both inside and outside of China—not having experienced it, but getting that sense from them of the the visceral sense of being censored, and censored with real consequences attached, like prison, for example, if you’re a Chinese, Uighur, or Tibetan dissident. It was through that experience traveling and getting to meet people that I kind of started to develop, by proxy, an understanding for why free expression, especially political expression, matters so much.Mounk: When we're talking about certain lines you cannot cross or certain things you cannot talk about on campuses, where do you think those lines are?Khalid: I would say that the lines are much more narrow than people would like to think, and it's not about these things that we would consider egregious and any reasonable person would say should not be said. There is a culture of censorious nests on college campuses. Now, I'll speak from my experience of having taught at Carleton College, which is an elite liberal arts college. It's not quite like evergreen or Oberlin in terms of the, for the lack of a better word (I don't like using it) “woke” culture. But nonetheless, it's a college where we draw from a very similar pool of students, and even here, it's interesting to see that there is a culture of censoriousness. In fact, I've been teaching a class on the global history of free speech for the first time this term, and one of the questions I asked my students is how often they feel they can't express their political views on things that count, and 100% of them on the survey said “often,” so that, to me, is quite telling. And I've also found it interesting that students in my class have reported that this is one of the few places where they feel that they can actually speak their minds, and there are ways in which I've facilitated that. But that speaks to me about the wider culture on campus. There really are new pieties that one does not violate, and they're not just egregious ones. They're more ideological and more defined than that.Snyder: There were many awful, terrible, apocalyptic elements of the Trump presidency. But just to take the perspective of free expression and free speech, one of the tragedies, at least in my view, was the ways in which free speech became associated with the right wing, and a very conservative, extreme faction of the right wing. When our students hear “viewpoint diversity,” they think of Milo Yiannopoulos. They think of these extreme conservative speakers who basically were trolls, who cloaked themselves in the mantle of free expression. I've had this conversation with my students many times. They ask “Why do we need Milo Yiannopoulos on the campus?” I'm like, “No, we don't need Milo Yiannopoulos on the campus.” Let's just take the example of affirmative action. With my students, I say, “Look, if you want to talk about affirmative action from a viewpoint diversity angle, you're not going to bring in Ben Shapiro or Ann Coulter. Let's bring in Michelle Alexander, who wrote The New Jim Crow, who clearly is liberal and socially progressive on many issues, but is vehemently opposed to affirmative action because she thinks it distracts us from the larger inequities in the K-12 educational system. Or, let's bring in Glenn Loury, who will talk about affirmative action as an assault on black excellence. This is one of the things that I see as being so damaging to campus discourse and to classroom discussions, that if you voice a single opinion that is heterodox, people will write off not just everything else you have to think, but your moral character, and you can be socially ostracized. I wanted to come back to this point about guilt by association, because I do think that in spite of the difference, if I see a headline that says, “College campuses are like Mao's China,” I instantly go to a new tab. I'm not going to bother reading something that's that absurd and hyperbolic. But I do think that the idea of “Thou shalt not have any kind of affiliation, draw any lines of solidarity, give any hint of respect to people who hold views on the other team,” is extremely damaging in higher education.Mounk: One thing I'm trying to understand is why the power on campus plays out as it does. So I teach some of these controversies in some of my classes, and I'm always struck that a clear majority of students wants to think about many of the urgent cultural issues of the day, and most of them are very open to doing so. They're actually very glad to have a space where they can do this in a meaningful way. But then sometimes it's hard to get them to talk. And when you speak with them during office hours, it's because of the presence of a few people within the group who are sort of known to be moral enforcers.Broadly speaking, I would say the kids are all right. The students are inquisitive, and they might have assumptions that are more progressive than mine, but most of them are good people who want to think about the world and are open to discussion. But why is it that the few who don't hold this outsized power to shut down debate and to intimidate and to punish?Khalid: There is that social pressure that you mentioned, and I think, as of recent surveys, you know, that they also proved that students are more scared of each other than they are of the professor in the classroom. So it has social implications. But I think there are two other pieces. One is that things get amplified on social media. Even for a real campus, the virtual world is constantly interacting. So there is a way in which what you say in the classroom isn't just going to be talked about by your peers on campus, but might even make the Twittersphere. The other piece, I think, is how administrators have responded to student complaints. Like you said, students can be progressive, but they're mostly fine. This is their age, they can have difficult, problematic views. I have a lot of patience for them. But where it kind of wears thin is when we're talking about administrators and how quick they are to respond to student needs, demands and complaints. And that, of course, is connected to what's happened to higher education and the neoliberalization of higher education where we don't think about the public good anymore. It's very much a “customer's always right” kind of approach and the growth of administrators on campus far outstrips the renewal of faculty lines—if anything, faculty lines are being cut. This influence that a small minority can have is because of a whole whole bunch of factors that have made it possible for them to exercise way more power on campus or in the public sphere than then before.Snyder: We shouldn't underestimate the significance of what Amna and I call it “DEI Inc.,” this sort of the standard DEI model that is prevalent on campuses. I think that administrators have fueled all of this—the discourse of harm, the standpoint epistemology, the “allyship.” If you're a student, and you're young, and you're just kind of figuring out how the world works, and here's an avenue by which you can be validated, to use the the terminology, and score political points when when my peers hear that I've made some sort of complaint about problematic content—again, I have infinite patience for our students. It's our colleagues and other adults in the higher education system who—again, and this is one of those things where it becomes binary. Am I saying I don't care? No, I care deeply about my students. But there's a difference between care and unwavering validation and affirmation of whatever they're saying. If you look at the way that so-called “bias response teams” work, they're amazing in that the outcomes are almost predetermined, because they only ask for information about “the victim” and “the perpetrator.” It doesn't even have those basic principles of jurisprudence, like “innocent until proven guilty,” right? But I wanted to come back to the micro aggression thing and try to draw some connections here to what accounts for the fear that some students have on campuses, and how that is genuinely inhibiting a potentially rich discussion. So I had a student who was from Morocco. And we were talking about microaggressions, and I asked students whether a talk given on microaggressions had any impact, positive or negative, on the campus climate. And this Moroccan student said, Well, you know, what I can say is that I am a sophomore, and I am so eager to talk about where I'm from, to tell people about Moroccan culture, about Marrakech. I want to talk to them about my upbringing, the similarities and differences between Morocco and the US, but people don't ask me where I'm from, because they're afraid it'll be perceived as a microaggression.” And that's a real genuine and profound loss. Here's this wonderful environment with people from all over the world. And you can't even engage to reap the benefits of this diversity.The left has retreated into this much more schematic, blocked out sense of identity. It’s one of the things that enrages me the most because I think it's empirically incorrect, but it also just makes intellectual life much less fun.Mounk: For me, the reason I’m on the left, and the reason why I value the left, is its commitment to free speech, to cultural hybridity, and its rejection of that kind of idea that cultures need to be pure, and that we have to be afraid of the ways in which we might influence each other. And, to me, is really one of the most profound reasons why I don’t recognize myself in that new version of the tradition.Khalid: We're talking about DEI Inc. on campuses, bias response teams, microaggressions, et cetera. And what does this do? What is the net effect of this kind of emphasis on how you might have been offended? It makes you live right here. You cannot look beyond yourself. It promotes a certain kind of navel gazing. It makes you more and more self involved. And that's detrimental, I would argue, at this age especially, because teenagers tend to live right here. The whole point of college is to try and see that you are part of a bigger whole, that you can forge connections and that the world is beyond you, to create that empathy. It inhibits exploration of difference. If you can’t ask where someone is from and kind of be curious about it and delve into it, that reinforces that navel gazing. The kind of person we are creating is fundamentally not suited to what we believe we want to create, which is a sense of community. This person is no longer able to connect with a larger whole, we are inhibiting their ability to do that, so there is this tension in the discourse itself, right? Where it's like, “We want community, and we want harmony in this community.” And at the same time, you're facilitating the kind of individuals who cannot look beyond themselves. Read more: “The Futility of Trigger Warnings” by Amna KhalidMounk: If you think that some of these orthodoxies are a problem, if you're critical, as I believe you are, of some of the ideas of critical race theory, why shouldn't we cheer when Ron DeSantis comes in and passes an anti-CRT law? What is the basic case for why that is the wrong response to these developments?Khalid: Let me start with state censorship, I just can never get behind it. Let's begin over there. I think it lays the wrong kind of precedent. I'm very against state interference in higher education in particular, because this is a place where we are in the business of training critical minds and citizens, so this is not a place where we should have thought police. This is thought-policing by the state. Having seen it play out in my own country and many other countries and having read history, this does not go down well. I'm not even in favor of the state intervening on my side. So let's say in New York, there's been a bill to try and mandate the teaching of certain things like CRT and social justice courses (it's ill-defined what those are) but as a kind of a response to what's happening in places like Florida. And I actually detest that too, because frankly, there is something sacred about the autonomy of higher education which should not be meddled with by external forces. Now, this is not to say that there are not problems in higher education. Like you said, we're critical of some of the things. But I think we have a big enough tent to work it out ourselves. There are crises with every institution, and we will self correct. Many people are upset about the fact that the academy leans so liberal and left and there's not enough conservative voices—I think that's a problem, I do. But at the same time, I don't think I genuinely do not think that the liberal professors are doing a poor job of educating their students. I do not think that we are indoctrinating them. I don't buy that narrative. I think there are occasional bad actors. I think there are bad professors. But I think, on the whole, they do a really fairly good job. So to me, this is a huge political kind of haymaking point for the right at the moment and it's legitimizing legislative control of higher education. State or no state, saying that there are certain things that are off the table for discussion in an academic setting is fundamentally anti-intellectual. And we cannot, cannot have that, especially in higher education.Snyder: In addition to all the things that Amna just outlined, the essence of academic freedom in the classroom is the latitude to present your material in the most accurate, powerful, transformative way, based on the expertise that you've developed in your field. So if you look at one of the provisions of the so-called “Stop WOKE Act” in Florida, it says that courses can't include any content that advances the notion that racism is embedded in US institutions. I'm a historian, and I'm an Americanist. And to my mind, that actually means that you can't teach any US History class. Because there's no serious US historian that I'm aware of teaching at a college or university who would reject that basic proposition. So in that sense, you're not just kind of crushing these abstract principles of academic freedom, faculty governance, and faculty autonomy, to the extent that truth and knowledge exist, you're basically saying, “We don't care about that, and in fact, you can't disseminate what is the overwhelming scholarly consensus on key questions.” And I chafe against that on so, so many levels.In Florida, when they were doing the initial hearing for the Stop WOKE Act, the judge asked the state lawyers what would happen if you had a guest speaker Zoom into your classroom to make the case for affirmative action, and would that violate the Stop WOKE act? And he said yes. And to me, as soon as you say that, it’s the end of the story. This is an intellectual dead end. Mounk: When I read the legislation, as well as some of the reporting about it by FIRE and other good organizations in this space, what struck me is the prohibition, for example, on public colleges in Florida to teach about things involving identity politics. I teach a few weeks on free speech and on cultural appropriation and on other topics, and part of what I see as my task in the classroom as being is to give students the tools to come to their own conclusions about these things. I don't make any secret about my opinions of them. I am a critic of many of the writings of critical race theorists like Derrick Bell and in the classroom, that can become obvious. But I obviously want to assign readings that defend those ideas or assign very interesting readings by somebody like Derrick Bell in the classroom for students to be able to make up their own minds. The idea that I wouldn't be able to teach the class that I teach in other universities in a public college in Florida seems absurd to me. Snyder: If you think about the two basic goals of higher education, to develop critical thinking and to prepare students for lives of engaged, active citizenship, you're disempowering these students by actually rendering the world illegible to them. I referred to Trump's speech when he announced his presidential run—his anti-immigration rhetoric not only can, but in my view, must be understood in the history of xenophobia in the United States. And if students don't have that historical understanding, the world just becomes this morass of confusion—there's no anchor, there's no context, there's no history. And so I mean, it doesn't even matter what your politics are, to my mind. If you want a graduate from one of Florida’s many excellent public universities and colleges, you want them to be conversant in the issues. And to me, these things like the Stop WOKE Act have the potential to really degrade the quality of thoughtful citizenship. Irrespective of what your party is, you will be disempowered as a citizen if you're so grossly ignorant of some of these big historical trends that are more or less off the table with this brand of legislation.Khalid: I think both the left and the right are doing this thing about “protecting” the students. The left is very much about protecting their feelings, their dignity, their identity—however you want to frame that. On the right, they're using the same thing about protecting, interestingly, but from divisive concepts. And to both sides, I just want to ask: are we or are we not interested in living in a world with adults? Because we are creating the perfect circumstances to further infantilize our students. And it's no mystery to me that increasingly, every year, the freshmen who come to campus seem less and less capable of behaving like adults. They do not have the simple skills of what our students call “adulting.” I'm worried that we're going to be stuck in a world where we have a lot of people who have a lot of growing up to do, but who have grown up in years, and are in positions of power. That is a scary option. We've seen a president who's behaved like a juvenile imbecile,  frankly, and that's what happens when people don't know how to actually be real, responsible, self reflective adults. Neither side is making a good case for education and training adults.Mounk: To close the conversation, we're talking about how difficult it is to be moderate. We're talking about how difficult it is to feel on the left and to reject these liberal ideas, whether they come from progressives or whether they come from people like DeSantis or Trump. But it strikes me that you're both really good at speaking up for these ideas in a joyful way, that is self confident, and that doesn't fall into the trap of either overqualifying everything as if you’re somehow ashamed of what you're saying, or becoming sort of a jerk and barking your objections. For people who are listening to this and who want to emulate that, whether it's in their circle of friends, or perhaps in the workplace, or in some more public realm, how do you speak up about these ideas in a way that's true to your principles, that’s self confident, and doesn’t unnecessarily provoke?Khalid: I don't want to come across as having figured this out. But whether they're on your political side of the spectrum, and you're disagreeing, or whether they're on the other side, really, really genuinely try and appreciate that they, too, are an individual who has as rich an internal life as you do. You can disagree, but they are complex individuals, too. I think there is a tendency, even among us, to flatten the other team, to caricature them to some degree. Remembering that they have different facets to themselves, as well, is important. And the other thing is—I don't know whether this is a product of upbringing and context—I've never had the need to fit in. And I think if you keep wanting to fit in, if you need that kind of approval, then you're not going to be a strong voice for things that need to be said at difficult times. So I do think that it requires it. I kind of feel stupid saying this, because I really don't believe myself to be brave or courageous in any way. And when people come up and say, “Oh, my God, that was so courageous of you,” I'm like, “No, courageous is when you stand up to the Taliban and have a bullet shot through your head for saying you want education for girls”—that is courage. This is just like—I have nothing to lose. I have tenure. So to my mind, I mean, I think it's a strange moment when this is courage. But I do think that people need to kind of do a more strict cost benefit analysis and say, “Well, you know, the cost for speaking out is way less than I actually thought,” and speak your mind.Snyder: One of the promises of liberal arts education is that professors and the college campus community will help model what it is to be a citizen in a democratic society. And I think that if professors take that role seriously, especially those of us who are lucky enough to have tenure, then we need to enact that kind of citizenship and to model what it looks like to speak up, hopefully in a respectful and constructive way. Speak up for the views that you have. Because if we can't do that as tenured professors, how are we possibly expecting our students, whether it's while they're in college or afterwards, to be able to embrace their own civic roles? If we really believe, and I do, in the magic of the liberal arts experience, especially a residential liberal arts college (there is something wonderful about it, and it's a privilege to be on a campus in an environment like this), then let's take it seriously. Let's model that act of democratic civic participation, where we can engage with one another, sometimes on tough subjects about which we will disagree, where the community doesn't splinter, and we are still able to meet up the next Friday night and have a dinner party. Khalid: I think we need to normalize disagreement, and recognize that disagreement is what is absolutely essential for a pluralistic democracy. It's not going to work otherwise.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry.Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

As a long-awaited Supreme Court decision on President Joe Biden's massive student loan forgiveness plan looms, Senate Republicans have unveiled a plan of their own to address the nation's climbing student loan debt burden. However, instead of promising blanket forgiveness, the Senate Republicans' plan aims to reform how student loans are given out in the first place—seeking to direct students toward high-quality programs and limit access to schools that provide a poor return on students' investment. 
The plan is composed of five separate bills. Three of the bills focus on ensuring that prospective borrowers are aware of the financial tradeoffs of taking out student loans and the financial outcomes for alumni of specific institutions. The last two tackle the federal student loan system itself, cutting down the number of repayment plans and limiting the circumstances in which federal student loans can be given out.
The first bill in the package focuses on increasing transparency from colleges. The bill seeks to require colleges and universities to provide a wide range of data on student outcomes and enrollment trends to the National Center for Education Statistics, which would create a database of this information aimed at helping prospective students make informed educational decisions.
The proposal's second bill would require colleges and universities to use a standardized financial aid offer form in order to maximize transparency around the true cost of attending a given institution. The third bill in the proposal has similar aims, requiring that students applying for federal student loans receive information detailing sample payments for their loans, as well as how long they would expect to be paying off their student loans, and what income they can expect to make after graduating from a given school.
The fourth bill cuts down on the number of repayment plans available to borrowers. The bill would consolidate the host of current repayment options down to two—a standard 10-year repayment plan and a Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) repayment plan with minor changes. The REPAYE plan is an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan, which currently allows borrowers to pay a monthly amount fixed to their income, achieving forgiveness after at least 20 years of payments. 
Importantly, the fourth bill also cuts off access to federal student loans for students attending programs that do not result in median earnings higher than those of adults who only have a high school diploma—or a bachelor's degree, in the case of a graduate program. 
The final bill in the package would eliminate Graduate PLUS Loans—a type of federal student loan whose borrowing cap was removed in 2006. The removal of this cap has been directly connected to a rapid increase in graduate school tuition, as—unlike for undergraduate programs—graduate students were able to borrow an unlimited amount from the federal government, incentivizing universities to jack up prices. 
Notably, House Republicans have also introduced their own legislation aiming to reform federal student loans. Their proposal would provide "targeted" student debt relief to those who have consistently made payments but have seen their debt increase anyway. The proposal would also reform existing income-driven repayment plans and mandate considerable warnings for borrowers before student loan payments resume in October. 
"Colleges and universities using the availability of federal loans to increase their tuitions have left too many students drowning in debt without a path for success," said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.) in a Wednesday statement. "Unlike President Biden's student loan schemes, this plan addresses the root causes of the student debt crisis. It puts downward pressure on tuition and empowers students to make the educational decisions that put them on track to academically and financially succeed." 
The Republicans' plans offer a constructive solution to the problems that plague the federal student loan system. Rather than focusing on short-term solutions—like Biden's $400 billion student loan forgiveness boondoggle—Republicans' plans target the sloppy government policies which directly cause rising student debt.
In particular, the Senate's attempt to eliminate Graduate PLUS Loans and both plans' proposals to reform income-driven repayment plans take direct aim at some of the most fiscally irresponsible federal student loan policies. 
While both bills face an unlikely path toward actually becoming law, they provide a clear template for what a sensible response to the student loan crisis looks like—and policies that are actually likely to lower the cost of college, not raise it. 
The post Can Republicans Fix Student Debt? appeared first on Reason.com.

Daniel Ellsberg was in the midst of a federal trial, facing the prospect of a long prison term, when he sat down with Reason in the summer of 1973 to talk about his decision to leak a trove of documents. Those documents, known as the Pentagon Papers, showed that top American officials, including President Lyndon Johnson, had lied constantly about the country's war in Vietnam.
"The only thing that I could personally hope to achieve by my own efforts was to make these documents available to the American public for them to read and to learn from," Ellsberg told Reason. But he had a "very important secondary objective": halting what he saw as a dangerous trend of "executive secrecy" that had allowed successive presidents to "steal away so much power from the Congress and the public and to free itself from the kinds of checks and balances that were intended in the Constitution."
By giving those 7,000 pages to The New York Times two years earlier, Ellsberg changed the course of a war and shifted the American public's view of the presidency. He may not have succeeded in the larger project of containing executive power, but he earned a place in the whistleblower hall of fame: one of a select few who, when entrusted with damning secrets, recognized that his patriotic duty was to tell the American people a difficult truth their leaders would rather have kept hidden.
Ellsberg died Friday at his home in Kensington, California, according to multiple media reports, after a monthslong bout with inoperable pancreatic cancer. He was 92.
Though the Pentagon Papers exposed a myriad of official lies about America's role in the Vietnam War, the big lie at the center of it was one that sounds all too familiar to those of us who came of political age during the post-9/11 wars: that America was winning. Privately, top military officials, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, knew this was not true. From his post at the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg obtained access to reports from 1967 and 1968 showing that the best-case scenario was a long-term stalemate—a stalemate that would eventually kill more than 58,000 Americans and more than 2 million civilians in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
It was a trip to Saigon in 1965 as one of McNamara's advisers that first suggested to Ellsberg that something was wrong. After witnessing the chaos of the war firsthand, Ellsberg—a Harvard graduate and former Marine—tried to work within the system to change American policy. In 1970, after photocopying the secret Pentagon report that would make up the bulk of the Papers, he gave partial copies to several high-ranking senators. The effort went nowhere, leading Ellsberg to eventually leak the full report to a Times reporter, Neil Sheehan.
"A system that allows some secrets has to be a limited one, because relatively few secrets can be kept from the American people if we are to remain a democracy; and it must have safeguards built in against the abuse of it," Ellsberg told Reason in that 1973 interview. "You come down to the principle that no one man, even the President, should be allowed to decide without review that certain kinds of information cannot be known to American citizens."
Ellsberg was arrested for espionage, conspiracy, and other charges that could have meant a lifetime behind bars. He escaped prosecution due to some of the same executive overreach that had inspired him to leak the documents in the first place. The Nixon administration sent operatives—the same ones later implicated in the Watergate scandal—to break into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, and the FBI illegally wiretapped his phone. When this misconduct came out, Judge William Byrne dismissed all the charges against him.
Ellsberg remained an outspoken anti-war activist for the rest of his life. He warned frequently of the dangers of nuclear annihilation. Two years ago, he released another secret government study that he'd photocopied long ago: a 1958 plan for a nuclear strike against China in retaliation for shelling Taiwan.
He opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—"What we've done to the Middle East has been hell," he said in 2018—and criticized the post-9/11 increases in executive power and secret-keeping.
When Edward Snowden leaked details of the National Security Agency's domestic spying regime in 2013, Ellsberg was effusive in his praise. "In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an 'executive coup' against the US Constitution," Ellsberg wrote in The Guardian.
In an era of unprecedented levels of executive power and an ever-expanding national security state, America and the world could use more people like Ellsberg, who was willing to prioritize the truth over all else.
In his final interview with Reason, conducted in 2017, Lucy Steigerwald asked Ellsberg to consider his legacy.
"I would like others to believe that they have the power—and the obligation, really—as patriots, as human beings, to reveal what they themselves know are unjustified dangers to human existence," he said. "And not simply, for reasons of career and promises to superiors, to conceal dangers of that nature. In other words, to be truth tellers."
The post RIP Daniel Ellsberg, Who Told the World the Truth About the Vietnam War appeared first on Reason.com.

As the Nevada Legislature was considering a bill earlier this week that would give the Oakland Athletics about $600 million in public money for a new stadium in Las Vegas, the team inadvertently made a pretty good argument for why it doesn't need the handout.
Here's what happened: On Tuesday, Athletics fans in Oakland staged a "reverse boycott" in an attempt to demonstrate that the team—which has for years lagged near the bottom of the MLB in terms of attendance—actually could put butts in the seats if the on-field product was any good. The Athletics have one of the worst records in the majors this year and have posted an average attendance of about 9,000 per game, but more than 27,000 people showed up for Tuesday's reverse boycott, The Mercury News reported. That's still only about three-quarters of the capacity of their current home, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.
Perhaps not wanting to be seen as profiting from a protest staged against the team's owners, the Athletics announced that they would donate all ticket sale revenue from Tuesday's game to a local food bank. A noble gesture, sure, but a revealing one too. In a tweet, the team said ticket revenue from the game totaled $811,107.
That's over $800,000 in ticket revenue—a total that does not include sales of overpriced beers, $7.79 hot dogs, team merchandise, etc.—from a single not-sold-out game. Each team gets 81 home games in an MLB season. It's not hard to do the math.
There's nothing wrong with the Athletics potentially earning hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket sales every year, of course. Quite the opposite: It's a testament to America's prosperity that even a struggling professional baseball franchise is still, by any normal measure, a very lucrative business.
But it's more than a little awkward for the Athletics to broadcast that fact this week, after months of telling lawmakers in Nevada that the team—more specifically, team owner John Fisher—requires taxpayers to pick up a sizable portion of the tab for a new ballpark.
It didn't make much of a difference in the end. Nevada lawmakers approved the stadium bill this week, and Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, signed it. The bill provides $380 million in direct subsidies from the state to the team, but the actual tab for the public is $600 million once tax breaks and other financing are included. At his Field of Schemes blog, stadium subsidy critic Neil deMause estimates this to be the third-largest stadium subsidy ever awarded to an MLB franchise.
Even though it is common knowledge that the public never comes out ahead on stadium deals, the Athletics have hired consultants to promise that this time is different. It's true that there's no other city quite like Las Vegas—stadium backers say the 40 million annual tourists flowing through town make the math work in ways that it doesn't in other places.
Unfortunately for them, it's possible to check the math on those claims. Berry College economist E.F. Stephenson found that there is no statistically significant increase in hotel room occupancy rates when the Vegas Golden Knights, the city's NHL team, play home games. Maybe more visitors will flock to Las Vegas to see a bad baseball team play, but that seems unlikely. Instead, as is almost always the case, any economic activity directed toward the new ballpark will be shifted away from other entertainment options in the area.
"People will always say, 'Oh, but this one is different.' Every single stadium deal I've ever looked at the people who are supporting this say, 'This one will be different.' And when we look at it 15 to 20 years later, it's exactly the same as they always are,"  J.C. Bradbury, a sports economics professor at Kennesaw State University, told The Nevada Independent earlier this month. "There's always an excuse, and the reason is that there's a lot of money to be made by getting this stadium funded. And so the owner is going to benefit tremendously."
The Athletics don't need a handout. The public money being thrown at the stadium deal is a bad investment. All those facts are right out in the open, but lawmakers in Nevada didn't bother to notice.

The post The Oakland Athletics Just Showed Why They Don't Need Taxpayers To Buy Their New Stadium appeared first on Reason.com.

If you were surprised by Saudi Arabia’s de facto takeover of professional golf, get ready for many more such announcements in the months and years to come. The rise of the Persian Gulf, and Saudi Arabia in particular, is already reshaping the Middle East. But it will also have powerful consequences across the world.

A quick quiz: What was the world’s fastest-growing large economy last year? If you guessed India or China, or any of the Asian tigers, you are wrong. The answer is Saudi Arabia, which clocked in at 8.7 percent. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates registered heady growth as well.

What explains the boom? Despite what many hope for, the world continues to depend heavily on fossil fuels. The Ukraine war and sanctions against Russia have reduced Moscow’s importance in global oil and gas markets. In addition, two of the world’s other major oil-producing countries, Iran and Venezuela, are also under sanctions and have old and decaying oil infrastructure. The United States produces lots of oil and gas but still imports large quantities. As a result, the world is now reliant on a handful of countries in the Persian Gulf for steady supplies of oil and gas.

These conditions will likely continue over the next decade, and if they do, the gulf will see one of the largest inflows of wealth in history. Already, the four main sovereign wealth funds of these countries have reportedly accumulated almost $3 trillion in assets, an increase of 42 percent over the past two years. Saudi Arabia expects that its main investment vehicle, the Public Investment Fund, will have more than $2 trillion by 2030, making it the world’s largest. For the foreseeable future, these will be the most significant pools of capital on the planet.

The economic consequences of this wealth are all around us. Saudi Arabia has, in effect, bought the professional golf business. In January, Bloomberg reported that the kingdom sought to buy the Formula 1 racing franchise for more than $20 billion. It lured perhaps the world’s most famous soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo, to play for one of its teams for a reported $200 million a year. It is making huge investments in the online gaming industry, hoping to become a major player in the space. Look at prestigious sports teams, luxury hotels in Europe and storied brands, and you might see behind them gulf owners. As one gulf minister told me, “We’ve built lots of infrastructure in our countries. What’s coming in now is cash to invest.”

This surge of wealth has reshaped the Middle East. The once-dominant players in the region — Egypt, Iraq, Syria — are, for various reasons (poverty, division, dysfunction), unable to play leading roles. The gulf is where the action is. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has made a huge strategic shift in its foreign policy.

In his early years in power, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, used his country’s wealth in a crude and overbearing way. He tried in various ways to pressure or topple the regimes in Qatar, Lebanon and Jordan while waging a hot war in Yemen and a cold war with Iran — none of which bore fruit. (The 2018 murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi also occurred in this period.) In the past few years, by contrast, he appears to have matured, mending ties with Qatar and Jordan, reestablishing diplomatic relations with Iran and seeking a peace deal in Yemen.

The gulf states are all deepening their relations with China, which is now the region’s largest customer. In 2001, Saudi Arabia’s trade with the middle kingdom was just over $4 billion, about one-tenth of its trade with the United States and European Union. In 2021, it was about $87 billion, more than the United States and E.U. combined. Economic ties are growing rapidly, and The Post even reports that China has resumed constructing a suspected military facility in the UAE.

Saudi Arabia and the gulf are not seeking a divorce with the United States. They want close economic ties with China and close security ties with America. They want to be able to deal freely with everyone, including Russia. (If you want to see where Russians have gone to escape Western sanctions, visit Dubai, where you will hear more Russian than Arabic in some hotels.) They have growing ties with India and are even building new links with Israel.

Most countries would like to pursue a policy that allows them to freelance, choosing friends in the West and East, as suits their interests. If the crown prince continues down the path he is now on, Saudi Arabia will likely be able to manage this balancing act.

In 1996, Nintendo released Pokemon: Red and Green for the Game Boy. An anime series quickly followed. It depicted the adventures of 10-year-old Ash Ketchum as he wandered the world collecting the titular pokemon, or "pocket monsters."
Today, the electric rodent pokemon named Pikachu, a minor character in the game but a star of the cartoon, is one of Japan's most beloved exports, alongside Mario and Hello Kitty.
The friendship between Pikachu and Ash forms the emotional core of the anime. And after 27 years, their journey has finally come to an end. In March, Japan aired the final episode of this arc; U.S. viewers can watch it on Netflix in May.
Ash—still 10, somehow—has become a world champion trainer. In the final stretch of episodes, he decides to continue traveling with Pikachu until they can befriend all the pokemon in the world. For kids who grew up playing the game and watching the anime—and are old enough to have kids of their own—this is a heavy emotional moment.
It also highlights that the Pokemon world is a free-range parent's paradise. Kids are allowed to explore the outdoors by themselves, relying on their own survival skills and the kindness of strangers. There's no central government, and vital social services are provided by informal clubs. Competition is a positive trait—the show's theme song begins, "I want to be the very best"—and even the pokemon seem to enjoy friendly battles.
The post Review: Ash Ketchum Was a Free-Range Kid appeared first on Reason.com.

The first three people to contract COVID-19 were scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), claims a new report—a finding that could confirm the lab leak theory of COVID-19's origins, if verified.
The report—authored by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag, and published on Substack—names Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu as "three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2" in fall 2019. Not only did these three scientists work at the WIV, but they worked specifically on gain-of-function research; Hu in particular was considered a "star pupil" of Shi Zhengli, dubbed the "bat woman" for her work studying coronaviruses in bats.
"Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli," molecular biologist Alina Chan told the Substack authors. "He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him."
The report's authors spoke with multiple sources inside the U.S. government who provided the information. These sources, whose names were withheld to protect their anonymity, said there is little doubt that the laboratory is where the pandemic started.
The findings have not yet been confirmed by other journalists, though several government agencies—including the FBI and the Energy Department—have stated that the lab leak is the most likely theory of COVID-19's origins. In February, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News that COVID-19 most likely resulted from "a potential lab incident in Wuhan, China."
In March, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation requiring the federal government to declassify all intelligence relating to the pandemic's origins. The deadline for declassification is June 18, which means whatever information caused the FBI to reach its determination should become publicly available in a few days.
"The clock is ticking," said Rep. Mike Gallagher (R–Wis.) in a statement.

If the names of the 3 sick WIV scientists had been made public in May 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market. https://t.co/YxsW8NYeRD
— Alina Chan (@Ayjchan) June 13, 2023

FREE MINDS
A grand jury indicted Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman who released classified documents onto a Discord server with the aim of impressing his friends. According to The New York Times:

The filing of criminal charges in Boston federal court against Airman Teixeira, 21, comes about two months after F.B.I. agents arrested him at his home in North Dighton, Mass., and paves the way for a trial stemming from one of the most damaging national security leaks in recent history. If convicted, he could face up to 60 years in prison.
The evidence presented in the 10-page indictment represents a distillation of the immense trove of secrets Airman Teixeira is accused of taking from computers at an intelligence unit at the Cape Cod air base — and sharing with online friends he was hoping to impress in chat groups on Discord, a social media platform popular with gamers. But it was not immediately clear how many of the vaguely described incidents that underlie the charges had been previously disclosed and which ones were being made public for the first time.
Airman Teixeira's disclosures — exposing secrets of the United States, its allies and its adversaries — have bared rifts between the United States and its allies and given Russia information about intelligence-gathering methods, as news organizations have divulged some of the material. And Justice Department lawyers have said the extent of the information he leaked "far exceeds what has been publicly disclosed."

The Times adds that Teixeira's superiors within the Air National Guard also made serious errors in how they handled him.
"Air Force officials caught Airman Teixeira taking notes and conducting deep-dive searches for classified material months before he was charged with leaking a vast trove of government secrets, but did not remove him from his job, according to previous filings in the case," notes the Times.

Sens. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) have introduced a bill that would deny Section 230 protection to works created by artificial intelligence (A.I.).
Under Section 230, internet platforms do not take on liability for content created by third-party users on those platforms. This arrangement has infuriated many Democrats—who think it provides license to social media powers to allow harmful and false content to flourish—and also many shortsighted Republicans, who want to punish the platforms for taking down right-wing content, even though the platforms' incentives to take down content would actually increase without Section 230.
According to Axios:
Legal experts and lawmakers have questioned whether AI-created works would qualify for legal immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that largely shields platforms from lawsuits over third-party content.

It's a newly urgent issue thanks to the explosive of generative AI.
The new bipartisan bill bolsters the argument that Section 230 doesn't cover AI-generated work. It also gives lawmakers an opening to go after Section 230 after vowing to amend it, without much success, for years….

Section 230 is often credited as the law that allowed the internet to flourish and for social media to take off, as well as websites hosting travel listings and restaurant reviews….
Hawley and Blumenthal's "No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act" would amend Section 230 "by adding a clause that strips immunity from AI companies in civil claims or criminal prosecutions involving the use or provision of generative AI," per a description of the bill from Hawley's office.

The bill would also allow people to sue companies in federal or state court for alleged harm by generative AI models.

QUICK HITS
• States that implemented abortion bans post-Dobbs have seen almost 94,000 fewer abortions between July 2022 and March 2023.
• Conservatives are seeking Muslim support on social issues and wokeness.
• Texas bans transgender women from college sports.
• Chinese leaders are worried about slow economic growth.
• RIP Glenda Jackson.
The post COVID-19's 'Patients Zero' May Have Been Wuhan Lab Scientists, Report Finds appeared first on Reason.com.

Once again, to the delight of our comment class, who will take any opportunity to ignore the country’s permanent state of crisis for the comfortable distractions of meaningless Westminster rigmarole, Boris Johnson has scuttled from his hiding-hole to bask in the attention of the press like a fat lizard in the summer sun. If we lived in a functioning country, with a functioning government, another season of the Johnson Show might be moderately entertaining, but unfortunately for us we do not.
At a time when the global order is undergoing a period of total, historic change, the effects of which have struck every household in the country, the Conservatives have committed themselves to conserving only yesterday’s orthodoxies. They are overseeing the withdrawal of the state from policing anything other than online discourse, presiding over the most unsustainably liberal immigration regime in British history and doubling down on an economic model the rest of the world is competing to supersede. As a result, wage growth has stagnated for a generation, the longest period without increasing affluence since the Napoleonic Wars, while rocketing mortgage rates and inflation make even the decently paid feel a new pang of anxiety at the end of each month. Homeownership and family formation, the basic building blocks of a conservative worldview, have both been made needlessly difficult by 13 wasted years of Tory governance. In Tory Britain, nothing works any longer, least of all the government.
That Johnson fell foul of the excessive Covid regulations he himself introduced is the perfect encapsulation of the party’s impeccable record of failure. Seemingly proud of their inability to govern a country, Conservative ministers grandly announce policies they will never deliver on Twitter, complain that their governance is frustrated by state functionaries they were elected to control, and give fringe conference speeches complaining about the pernicious effects of legislation they themselves introduced.
Johnson’s latest self-exculpatory missive is thus the perfect distillation of Conservative governance, where failure is always someone else’s fault. Endlessly railing against the blob, the Conservative Party is surely the blob’s purest and most baleful incarnation — a self-defeating cabal of WhatsApp gossipers whose horizons extend no further than the Westminster Lobby. Yet it really did seem, just two years ago, that the Conservative Party’s hold on power might last unchallenged for a generation. The Tory self-implosion since then must count as one of the most spectacular failures in British political history: presented with an open goal, the party dribbled unopposed to the victory line before ritually disembowelling itself in front of a horrified crowd.
In retrospect, Johnson’s squandering of a historic opportunity to reshape Britain may have been inevitable. All his personal failings, the lying and unfaithfulness that inspire such liberal outrage, are just subcategories of his greatest flaw: the pathological craving to over-promise without ever delivering. The nation was only another dalliance which, having won, his flawed nature compelled him to neglect. The much-mythologised new Red Wall voter base he seduced has now returned, shame-faced, to its longstanding partner: the only legacy of Johnson’s 2019 victory is a short-lived crop of northern MPs of staggering awfulness. Instead of ushering in a new era of mass prosperity and revitalised industry, we are compelled to witness, in the dying days of this government, Red Wall MPs of the party of social aspiration commanding their voters to eat value baked beans and stop complaining. But if the party could be forgiven Johnson, who at least delivered one brief moment of electoral glory, its subsequent coronation of Liz Truss, the Lady Jane Grey of zombie neoliberalism, alone deserves annihilation.
Suggested readingBoris Johnson's theatre of the absurdBy Tom McTague
At precisely the moment the world firmly rejected neoliberalism, the Conservative Party chose, through an opaque and arrogantly self-absorbed internal conclave, its last true zealot to intensify Britain’s commitment to the failed ideology. Foiled at achieving her set-piece open borders deal with India only by her demolition of the British economy, Truss’s only lasting achievement has been to drive the party’s dependable middle class Blue Wall voter base towards Labour.
Even at the best of times, that the party could be so absorbed by its own internal drama to unleash a figure as simultaneously vapid and dangerous as Truss anywhere near the highest office of state would be just cause to forfeit power. But that it could do so at such a moment of grave national crisis is simply inexcusable, a dereliction of duty so severe that even the Conservative Party’s continued existence now seems of dubious merit. At this point, the furore over Truss and Johnson’s doling out of honours to their cronies seems misplaced: they have gone already this far in discrediting the government and party, why should they not bring the whole thing crashing down?
After all this, the broadly competent managerialism of the Sunak government, now rocked by the vengeful blond revenant, seemed to at least provide us with some breathing space before the inevitable Labour victory. Sunak’s foreign policy, aligning with Europe by rejecting open confrontation with China while maintaining sufficient distance from the rising economic hegemon, is unexpectedly modest and sensible: in different circumstances, he could have been a great Foreign Secretary. His economic policy is essentially that of running the country on autopilot, following a route programmed back in the 2010s. While he has no convincing answers to Britain’s accumulating dysfunction, he is at least unlikely to dramatically worsen the situation in the limited time history has allotted him. Ironically more conservative than either Johnson or Truss, perhaps the last two true liberals of a dying era, Sunak is nevertheless fated to lead the party towards its electoral doom, a steady pair of hands driving the nation safely towards Starmer, while Johnson loudly smears his mess across the back seat.
At this point, a more convincing conservative case can surely be made for Labour than for the Conservative Party. A period of Labour rule, resetting Britain’s economic model on a more resilient and sustainable path, may ironically provide a more secure basis for some future, more competent Tory government: in the long-term, indeed, the Conservative Party’s very survival may depend on a Labour victory. But if it is to survive — and the desirability of this outcome, given its performance, is far from obvious — then the Tories require a period out of office to define their worldview and devise a convincing path to achieving it.
Yet, instead of showcasing the exciting new frontiers of conservatism, the recent Natcon conference — in which a chaotically-assembled mixture of economic liberals, social conservatives and inane culture war loudmouths argued for directly opposing things — only highlighted the lack of intellectual heft within the modern British Right. Simply, the conservative movement in Britain does not have a deep bench of talent from which to draw future inspiration, much less to govern now. If Johnson’s return can still be pined for by frontbench loyalists, if he is the best they can hope for, then the rot is surely terminal.
Suggested readingMeToo was no match for bunga bungaBy Mary Harrington
The outlook, for conservatives, must now be one of weary resignation. In our constricted party system, the space that is in continental Europe filled by competent Right-wing parties is in Britain taken up by conspiracy theorists and Trussonomics advocates moonlighting as talkshow hosts. Filling this gap, Starmer’s Labour has already outflanked the Conservative Party from the Right on law and order and immigration, purging the party of the remnants of the Corbynite Left whose professed adherence to socialism was always outweighed by their more passionate commitment to social liberalism.
To the chagrin of Left-liberals, whose enthusiasm for the normalisation of crime is only matched by that of the Conservative Party, Starmer can convincingly point to his record as Director of Public Prosecutions in claiming that a Labour victory will lead to the return of robust policing. On immigration, while the Labour benches still contain free-movement zealots, it’s difficult to see, short of dispatching press gangs around the world to abduct random passersby, how Labour can surpass either Truss’s enthusiasm for open borders or the unprecedented visa liberalisation regime Johnson intentionally introduced.
But it is on economic questions, those bread-and-butter material circumstances that define a nation’s political character, that Labour has now superseded the Conservative Party’s fossilised orthodoxies, pledging a revived industrial strategy based on national resilience, a massive program of housebuilding, and expansion of affordable childcare to ease the burden of family formation. Just as the Biden administration has transpired, on foreign policy and the economy, to be simply the competent version of Trumpism, it may take the Labour Party to bring about the Johnsonian economic settlement its creator was too lazy and disorganised to achieve.
After 13 years in power, the Conservative Party has achieved nothing, conserving only an ideological attachment to an economic model that has evaporated, and a rhetorical commitment to a social order its own policies have destroyed. Clamouring for the Lobby’s attention once again, Boris eloquently makes the case, if anyone is still wavering, for a Labour government as soon as possible. After enduring another year of drift and managed decline, a period of Labour governance may yet achieve some traditionally conservative ends, in home ownership and family formation, in the rebirth of a British industrial strategy and the fostering of economic resilience in a contested, multipolar world. The return of Johnson’s unquiet ghost, waving his mouldering rags of failure at all around him, may therefore do the nation some good: if he drags the Conservative Party into the political grave with him, Boris may finally make his mark on history.

This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.  Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.[Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?]Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

Every year, at the end of August, Travis Livieri drives into the sandy grasslands of South Dakota’s Conata Basin, where, armed with spotlights and syringes, he spends his nights scooping up subjects for a grand experiment they could not hope to understand. His quarry are the region’s black-footed ferrets, considered by many to be North America’s most endangered mammal. His goal is to save the animals from the existential bind that we have put them in.Black-footed ferrets once dotted the sandy landscapes of a dozen western U.S. states, plus portions of southern Canada and northern Mexico. But decades of habitat destruction and culling of their prairie-dog prey have sent ferret populations plummeting. The greatest threat to their survival now is also one of our own making: plague, a bacterial scourge that Asian trading ships imported into the U.S. more than a century ago. To mitigate that human disturbance, Livieri, a Colorado-based wildlife biologist, has turned to another—a plague vaccine, developed for the military, that protects animals too. Just 200 black-footed ferrets, more than half of the world’s remaining population, are left in Conata Basin and the surrounding Badlands National Park. One by one, Livieri and his team aim to catch and immunize them all. “I’m like an alien-abduction machine,” Livieri told me.People have been vaccinating domesticated animals for centuries, but only two reasons justify immunizing wildlife, says Tonie Rocke, a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey: “to prevent spillover to domestics and humans of a zoonotic disease, and for conservation purposes.” But although human vaccines function primarily as preventives, offering immunity to animals such as black-footed ferrets can be a conservation strategy of last resort. “The fact that we’re looking at vaccines now is almost a sign of desperation,” Jean Tsao, a disease ecologist at Michigan State University, told me. In some cases, it’s even a signal that nearly all other measures have failed.Just a couple of decades ago, conservation dogma urged minimal interference. “We barely wanted to remove animals from snares,” Sharon Deem, the director of the Saint Louis Zoo Institute for Conservation Medicine, told me. But humans have stamped their footprint onto so many parts of this planet that many species now depend on our ability to undo, or at least mitigate, the damages we’ve done. “The understanding is that humans have had so many negative impacts on these wildlife populations,” Deem said, “that we should also have positive impacts.”Vaccines can certainly count as one such positive impact. But introducing them into wild species also raises new ethical quandaries about which animals deserve that immunity, against which diseases, and what risks those creatures should have to tolerate. Human interference, even the well-intentioned sort, is “a slippery slope to try to go down,” Livieri told me. Vaccines, however lifesaving, still constitute a form of ecological meddling—one without a clear off-ramp.The first animals to be vaccinated for their own sake, about a century after the first humans were, were chickens (against cholera), and then cattle and sheep (against anthrax)—for diseases that, when they infiltrated farms, put livelihoods at risk. Nowadays, humans vaccinate all sorts of pets, livestock, zoo animals, and wildlife as a matter of course. How thoroughly depends on how close those creatures are to us.

You can think about this approach as vaccinating in concentric circles, with humans in the center. In the innermost rings are the creatures “with which we are interdependent,” Jen Brown, the president of National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians, told me. Owned dogs and cats receive a core roster of shots that guard against, among other things, canine parvovirus and distemper; the animals we raise on farms generally receive just as many vaccines, if not more. By protecting these animals against disease, vaccines benefit people too. They extend our companions’ lives over those of their free-roaming counterparts; they run necessary interference for farm animals in conditions that are often unsanitary and cramped. Without vaccination, the poultry industry “wouldn’t last for more than a month or so,” says Shayan Sharif, a poultry immunologist at the University of Guelph, in Canada.

At zoos, the calculus is more complicated. By design, the animals are neither domesticated nor fully wild. Still, by sequestering them, Brown said, “we assume responsibility for their care.” Don Neiffer, the chief veterinarian at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, estimates that “99 percent of the mammals at most zoos, including ours, are vaccinated against something.” (Great apes, for instance, get the same sorts of measles, polio, and tetanus shots that people give to their kids.) The interventions work. A huge part of the reason that the field of geriatric veterinary medicine exists “is because of vaccines,” Neiffer told me.In the outer rings of the vaccination bull’s-eye are wild animals—“sort of the last frontier for vaccines,” says Jennifer McQuiston, the acting director of the CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology. Here, delivering human-made immunity is much trickier, and harder to justify, for the same reason: These creatures rarely interact with us. A relatively straightforward case can be made for vaccinating wild populations that share some of our diseases, and that do occasionally mingle with us and the domestic creatures we keep. The poster child in that category is rabies, a virus that can infect just about every mammal, and that is almost invariably fatal to us. And so vaccines against this virus permeate every ring, starting with the tightest ones. To prevent human rabies at the population level, “the single most effective intervention,” Brown told me, is making sure that the majority of dogs in a community have gotten their shots. Nationwide campaigns to do exactly that, starting in the 1940s, helped the United States eliminate the canine variant of the virus in 2007. Rabies among dogs, caused by any strain, is now exceedingly rare. Most parts of the country also require owners to vaccinate pet cats, and some loop various livestock into the legislation as well; many zoo mammals also get a version of the vaccine.To break even more transmission chains, scientists have concocted bespoke rabies vaccines for coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and other wild species that sometimes venture into our realm. Out in nature, “the delivery system has to really match the ecology of the animal,” Tsao, of Michigan State University, told me. In North America, edible forms of the vaccine, flavored with fish or vanilla, fed to land-roving omnivores, have controlled the virus in raccoons, and helped to halt its westward spread; to keep rabies out of super-social bats, researchers are exploring whether immunizing ointments can be slathered onto a few individuals, then groomed off by the rest.[Read: America has a rabid-raccoon problem]For every new animal that might need the vaccine, though, scientists must figure out new logistics—maybe even a new recipe. And these sorts of trials are not exactly easy to run in wild settings, which makes it tough to determine how many animals an immunization needs to reach, says Sergio Recuenco, an epidemiologist at the National University of San Marcos, in Peru. Rabies is both an exemplar and an extreme edge case—a disease so widespread and so dangerous to us that the researchers think casting a wide immunity net is worthwhile. Much harder to imagine, experts told me, is pouring the same level of resources into vaccinating animals for a disease that poses them the most risk.That’s exactly the scenario that avian influenza has presented as a particularly virulent strain has torn across North America. Since the epidemic began in 2021, close to 60 million farmed poultry have died, killed by both the virus and farmers trying to stem its spread; an untold number of wild birds, too, have been felled—geese dropping out of the sky, hawks seizing and spasming as the fallout from the disease reached their muscles and brain. A few outbreaks have been detected in mammals, including mink and seals. And the more the virus spreads, the more chances it has to find a way of more efficiently infecting us. But in the main, the risk to humans remains relatively low: This is, primarily, a tragedy for birds.To let it play out unrestrained would, on some level, just allow nature to take its course. Viruses are constantly infecting and killing animals; they help keep wild populations in check and ecosystems in balance. But when birds are already battling pollution, habitat destruction, feral-cat predation, and other human-driven perils, the bird-flu epidemic might “be the last nail in the coffin for some species,” Min Huang, who leads the migratory-bird program at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, recently told me.[Read: Eagles are falling, bears are going blind]Vaccination, to be clear, wouldn’t be enough to halt this outbreak on its own. The virus has already spread to too many regions and too many hosts; reaching all of the susceptible birds would be “an insurmountable task,” Sharif told me. Nor do we have the tools to manage such a feat. Avian vaccines, okayed for use primarily on poultry farms, do exist. But although they can tamp down disease severity, they’re not powerful enough to stop the virus from spreading, even in the species they were designed for. Their performance would probably be spottier still in many of the wild birds suffering the virus’s worst effects.Some experts have floated—and even in some cases acted on—the notion of vaccinating a subset of especially vulnerable species: bald eagles, California condors, a whole list of imperiled shoreline birds. When vaccine supply is limited, though, as it so often is, choosing to vaccinate one species can become an implicit decision to not vaccinate another—raising questions about “who gets to say what species should exist in this landscape, and at what level,” Livieri told me. “As humans, we’re already doing that,” directly or indirectly. But wildlife vaccination is especially uncharted conservation territory. There’s no rulebook to follow, and no way to predict the ripple effects of immunizing one species and snubbing the next.Vaccinating animals just for the sake of vaccinating animals “is not feasible, logical, or even recommended,” says Barbara Wolfe, a veterinarian at Colorado State University. The process isn’t without risk. Simply capturing, containing, and injecting wild creatures can potentially be “more risky than the chance of them actually getting the disease and dying,” Neiffer told me. And though plenty of attempts have been made to make vaccines less invasive—repackaging them into mists, sprays, or even long-range dart guns—that sort of tinkering can yield unacceptable trade-offs with effectiveness or expense. And rare but serious issues with safety can crop up. In 1971, scientists hoping to rescue the dwindling black-footed ferret population—then down to the double digits—captured six of the last animals in the wild and injected them with a distemper vaccine. The shot was known to be safe in other ferret species. But within three weeks, it had killed four of the black-footed ones. In their attempt to save the ferrets, the researchers had inadvertently worsened their plight.A new vaccine, in a new context—as is the case with any health intervention—always involves at least a small gamble that it will help more than harm. But as the planet’s biodiversity has sustained blow after blow, scientists have had few choices but to step in and take their chances, including with vaccines. “For conservation purposes, we’re being forced into it,” Rocke, of USGS, told me, “or we’re going to lose some species.” In Australia, scientists are now giving endangered koalas chlamydia vaccines; in Chile, researchers such as Ezequiel Hidalgo, a conservation biologist at Chile’s Buin Zoo, are inoculating local dogs against distemper so they won’t spread the virus to, and wipe out, the near-extinct Darwin’s fox. And in Africa, conservationists are serving the Ethiopian wolf, the continent’s most endangered carnivore, goat laced with rabies vaccine, while simultaneously immunizing nearby village dogs against the virus to stymie interspecies spread.Under more natural circumstances, animals might have—over many generations, and repeated rounds of evolution—built up such layers of immunity on their own. Vaccines are a shortcut to a similar end. But they’re also a form of acceptance that outbreaks of foreign disease have become inevitable. Pathogens, too, are leapfrogging intermediate steps: They can hitch rides on people and animals who can now traverse oceans and mountains in just hours or days. Amid all this disturbance, so traceable to our actions, immunity would seem the least we can offer animals—a reparation of sorts. We just have to decide, Wolfe told me, “how invasive we want to be.”[Read: Will these be the last polar bears on Earth?]Still, when the infectious introductions are this sudden, even vaccines, administered after the fact, can only do so much for species already on extinction’s brink. Even for North America’s black-footed ferrets—already probably one of the most highly vaccinated species on Earth—ultra-high shot uptake can’t hold the line on its own. When plague sweeps through their habitat, it doesn’t just kill the ferrets; it’s also highly lethal for prairie dogs, their primary prey and the architects of the underground burrows where the ferrets shelter and breed. The ferrets that escape plague sometimes starve to death instead.So now some prairie dogs are getting plague vaccines too. In several western states, researchers such as Dan Tripp, with Colorado’s Parks and Wildlife division, have been trialing an edible inoculation that regularly gets scattered around the animals’ underground homes. Uptake is good: The vaccines are peanut-butter flavored, and “everybody likes peanut butter,” Tripp told me. But against transmission, especially, efficacy is imperfect. And the prairie dogs breed so quickly and frequently that it’s tough to pulse enough immunity into the population each year. If the goal is to save the ferrets, the armor around them has to be almost impenetrable. Even a single infected prairie dog can create an opening for the bacterium to once again wriggle through.The ferret’s immunological armor may also need to be permanent. For humans, vaccines generally stay in use until a disease is eradicated, and plague, swift, insidious, and deadly, is not going anywhere anytime soon. In 2008, the first time plague tore through South Dakota, the outbreak had already taken out 3,000 acres of prairie-dog colony before scientists confirmed the first infected corpse. “Nobody’s come and quite said it, but yes,” Livieri told me, “we’re going to have to keep vaccinating ferrets” effectively indefinitely. Barring a windfall of innovation, on the order of genetically engineering a plague-resistant ferret, the “standard going forward,” he said, will have to keep involving annual rounds of snaring, anesthetizing, and injecting—twice each season, so ferrets can get a priming vaccine dose, and then a boost. Which potentially puts us and the animals into a painful plague stalemate. The goal has always been to grow the ferret population. But the more it balloons, the harder it will be to thoroughly immunize.Plague vaccines aren’t the only strategy in the ferret-conservation playbook. Frequent application of insecticides has cleared some habitats of plague-carrying fleas; captive breeding programs plus regular infusions of a (new and very safe) distemper vaccine have also helped keep the population afloat. All of these efforts, though, cost money. And when it comes to allocating funds for wild-animal outbreaks, humans will naturally focus on vaccinating against the diseases that most often threaten to spill into us: rabies in raccoons; MERS in camels; Lyme disease in mice. For other creatures, our concern has always scaled more with charisma than need. Black-footed ferrets—compelling, charismatic, and cute—are “pretty lucky,” Livieri told me, and efforts to conserve them have rallied both federal and public support. But most endangered species just “don’t have people paying for them,” Hidalgo told me.[Read: Some animals have no choice but to live at airports now]Commitments to vaccinate can also rapidly wane. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, researchers scrambled to get veterinary versions of the COVID vaccine into the big cats, great apes, and small carnivores in zoos. Now, though, experts such as Neiffer, of the Smithsonian, worry that the shots aren’t profitable enough to stay in circulation—leaving certain zoo animals vulnerable when and if the virus hits again. A spokesperson from Zoetis, a global animal-health company that has donated more than 26,000 doses of its experimental COVID vaccine to zoos and conservatories since 2021, confirmed that although a limited number of additional doses remain available for further donation, the immunization is “is not available commercially” and “at this time we are not planning to manufacture more doses.”With COVID-19, at least, black-footed ferrets caught a break: Despite devastating mink, the virus seems to be gentle on their ultra-endangered cousins in the west. But other threats still loom—tick-borne tularemia, a medley of bird- and human-borne flus. “They have a suite of things that can whack ’em, and whack ’em hard,” Livieri told me, and in most cases, the biggest threat remains us. The species’ fate is now lashed to ours—to our compassion, our tolerance, our patience for their plight. Even if all those hold out, Livieri told me, he’s not sure how much more interference the ferrets can handle, even the positive kind. “We’re already giving them two shots at the same time,” he said. “Will we have to add in any more? God, I hope not.”

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and betrayal, begins in a moment of chaos for the Oblonsky family, when the father is discovered to be having an affair. With the parents distracted and distraught, the children “ran wild all over the house,” and every member of the family “felt that there was no sense in their living together.” Misery reigned.Hence the novel’s famous opening line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”We all want to be happy and have happy families, so the Oblonsky hypothesis is troubling. It suggests that happy people are some sort of elite group who have found the right way. To be happy, we must stay on a narrow path; on either side are sheer cliffs. Stray from the path in any of the many ways you might, and you will fall into unhappiness. If you are like me and my family, and are a bit, well, unconventional, you might fear that you are already off the path and will not find it.The truth, however, is more encouraging than this. Yes, there are more ways to be unhappy than to be happy. But the narrow path is a straightforward one, and almost anyone can get onto it by focusing on one big idea.In general, positive things in life are more similar to one another than negative things are. Researchers have tested this observation in novel ways. For example, scholars have noted that attractive faces seem more alike than unattractive ones, and we rate people we find pleasant as more similar than people we find unpleasant. In one study specifically of happiness, two scholars in 2013 showed that people find happy words more interchangeable than unhappy words.One explanation for this similarity is our perception. We have a cognitive bias for negative information over positive information. As social scientists have shown in research, threats and bad news have a stronger psychological impact than good news. That humans would acquire this bias for evolutionary reasons makes sense: Treats are nice to have but can be safely disregarded; we ignore threats at our peril.[Read: The weirdly familiar politics of Anna Karenina]The phenomenon is not simply a matter of perception, however—especially in the case of happy versus unhappy people. In the Journal of Happiness Studies earlier this year, two psychologists reported on a project that measured the similarity of people’s self-evaluated personalities, and compared the results with the subjects’ ratings of their own emotional well-being. The researchers found that happier people are indeed more similar in character to one another than unhappy people are.This suggests what social scientists would call an “asymmetric distribution” of outcomes, according to which negative outcomes have a greater range and variance than positive outcomes. Or, as Jesus put it, to achieve bliss, we must “enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” Tolstoy was right: There are lots of ways to be unhappy, but only a few to be happy.This does not, however, mean that there are far fewer happy people than unhappy people. Using the General Social Survey, I found that 30 percent of Americans in 2018 said they were “very happy,” whereas 14 percent were “not too happy.” (By 2021, those numbers had changed to 20 percent and 23 percent, but this may be due to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns.) Plenty of people are coming through that narrow gate.To get on that narrow-but-well-worn path if you are off it, you need to know what exactly happier people (and families) have in common—and even more important, what they do differently than others.Two psychologists came to a clear answer to this in a 2008 article helpfully titled “What Do Happy People Do?” To put it simply, they are social. The scholars found that, on average, “very happy” people socialize on 11 more occasions a year with relatives than unhappy people do, seven more times with neighbors, and five more times with friends. They also attend religious services seven more times each year. Happier people also rate the quality of their relationships more highly. According to research from 2002, people who label themselves “very happy” give the quality of their close friendships a 54 percent higher rating than “very unhappy” people do. Their family relationships were 73 percent better, and their romantic relationships were 161 percent better.[Arthur C. Brooks: Parasocial relationships are just imaginary friends for adults]The same pattern appears when families that function well are studied: The path is narrow, but most navigate it successfully. In 2010, psychologists from the University of Rochester and the University of Notre Dame observed the dynamics of families over a three-year period. On each occasion that they visited the subject families, the psychologists watched as parents played with their children and interacted with each other (including discussing topics that elicited disagreement). The researchers rated the families in terms of verbal aggression and the extent of negativity and conflict, and found three basic models: one happy, two unhappy.They called the happy model “cohesive,” and this was characterized by emotional warmth and harmonious communication. Fifty-nine percent of the families fell into this category. One unhappy model, labeled “enmeshed” (comprising 22 percent of the families), could be warm but also had high hostility, destructive meddling, and little cohesion. The other unhappy model was called “disengaged” (almost 19 percent), and this featured relationships that were cold, controlling, and withdrawn.From all the evidence, we can conclude that the happiness club may be elite, but it is not exclusive. Membership does not depend on whether you have a certain net worth, family configuration, or set of ideological views. It requires that you be generous in love and allow yourself to be loved. This is harder for some people than for others, of course, according to circumstances and personality, among other influences. And life offers us many options instead of love: fear, hatred, envy, distraction by politics or social media, to name just a few.Staying on the narrow path demands a conscious focus on your relationships, not leaving their quality and intensity to chance. It means treating them with the kind of seriousness that people usually reserve for their money or career. It also means chipping away at the aspects of life that can distract you and crowd love out. But everyone has the potential to do these things—even the Oblonskys.

The war in Ukraine has entered a new stage; this much we know. In the weeks leading up to the Ukrainian armed forces’ long-anticipated counter-offensive, a series of attacks in Moscow and in the Belgorod Region, near the border with Ukraine, marked the most significant incursions into Russia since the full-scale war began. In the Belgorod Region, armed units overran villages and took hostages. In Moscow, two drones were shot down near the Kremlin on May 3rd. Four weeks later, eight drones crashed into residential buildings on the outskirts of the city. Since then, drones have shown up in two other Russian regions, Kursk and Voronezh. Much media coverage in the West has suggested that these attacks, in the heart of Russia, would undermine support for the war. This is wrong.

Many people who opine professionally, or at least frequently, on the Russian-Ukrainian war—policymakers and Russian dissidents among them—like to frame the war as the undertaking of a lone madman tyrant. It is, they say, “Putin’s war,” for which ordinary Russians, at least those of them who are not actively killing Ukrainians, bear no responsibility. It is true that, were Russia ruled by someone other than Putin, there would most likely be no war. It is also true that Russia is a totalitarian society in which people have little to no political agency and in which the mildest protest can land one in prison for a decade. It is true that totalitarianism, by its nature, robs people of the ability to form opinions. And it is also true that, under these conditions, most ordinary Russians support the war. This is Russia’s war. That happens to be the title of a new book by Jade McGlynn, a research fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, in London. Using nine years’ worth of data, including dozens of ongoing in-depth conversations with Russian respondents, McGlynn shows that a majority of Russians are in some way invested in the war or identify with it.

McGlynn divides Russian attitudes toward the war into five categories: active support, passive ritual support, loyal neutrality, apathy, and active opposition. The extremes comprise negligibly few people. The Kremlin brutally cracks down on antiwar protests, and, McGlynn argues, it also discourages active support for the war. It’s not hard to see why: zealous support easily morphs into criticism of the regime for not doing enough, not acting decisively enough to defeat Ukraine. Putin’s regime relies for support—and canon fodder—on the broad majority of Russians: those who enthusiastically shout the slogans fed to them but claim no political agency (“passive ritual supporters”), those who hold to the position “my country, right or wrong” (loyal neutrals), and those who will acquiesce to anything so long as they feel like they will be left alone. I asked McGlynn if she thought these positions may be altered by the war’s crossing over into Russian territory. If anything, she said, it may nudge some people from the apathetic cohort into the loyal-neutral one. Having the war come closer to home scares people. Fear rarely serves as a catalyst for critical thinking. More often, it leads to what the political scientist Jeremy Morris, who also studies Russian attitudes toward the war, calls “defensive consolidation.”

It is only human, when you are being attacked, to blame the attacker rather than yourself, your country, or your leader. Russian propaganda helps this idea along by telling Russians that Ukrainians instigated the war. On the morning of the drone attacks in Moscow, Putin delivered an impromptu speech during an unrelated event in the city, claiming that Ukraine, acting as a puppet of NATO, started a war in the Donbas back in 2014, forcing Russia finally to intervene eight years later; that Russia has been hitting only strategically important military targets; and that Ukraine, now, was trying to escalate by attacking inside Russia in hope of provoking a reaction. None of this was true. But it was consistent with what Russian television had been saying for more than a year. And the drones were tangible evidence of Ukraine waging an attack inside Russia, as though making Putin’s claims retroactively true. Historical narratives often work like this.

But, wait, you might say, doesn’t Putin claim that Ukraine doesn’t exist? He does—and, in commenting on the drone attacks and the counter-offensive (which he calls “the offensive”), he referred to Ukraine as “the regime in Kyiv.” But contradictions are also a mainstay of totalitarian propaganda. The great Russian sociologist Yuri Levada theorized that antinomies—pairs of mutually exclusive beliefs—were key to understanding the Soviet totalitarian mentality. An example of a Soviet antinomy was, “The state is always screwing us over” and “I’m proud to live in the greatest country on Earth.” The most recent developments in the Russian-Ukrainian war call forth similar antinomies. In Shebekino, a Russian village near the border with Ukraine where civilians died as a result of an apparent Ukrainian attack that began on June 1st, people felt abandoned by the state, McGlynn said, “but they are used to that.” They are also, naturally, angry that civilians were killed. That can only strengthen their support for the war effort. But McGlynn told me that her longtime respondents have stopped engaging in what she called lengthy “geopolitical discussions,” in which they often tried to convince her that Ukraine doesn’t exist. Perhaps, she said, it’s harder to pursue this line of argument “when you could be killed by Ukrainians who very much think they are Ukrainians.” The function of contradictory, destabilizing propaganda is to discourage thinking. It works in concert with fear to render totalitarian subjects passive.

Russian state media reported on the attacks inside Russia as both deplorable and insignificant. On one evening talk show, for example, the propagandists Roman Babayan and Margarita Simonyan began by talking about how “the enemy” was hoping that incursions into Russian territory would destabilize Russian society and undermine support for the war. “It’s being done so that you will show scary footage,” Simonyan said. “So that we all become horrified, to frighten us, make us stop supporting the goals and reasons for our special operation, to make us get scared and start stomping our feet, screaming, ‘Let’s put everything the way it was so there won’t be any more burning buildings in the Belgorod Region.’ ” Russian media had published photographs that showed giant plumes of black smoke spilling from residential buildings in Shebekino. But, a minute later, Babayan shifted to dismissing the danger. There were only seventy fighters involved in the attack on Shebekino, he asserted. “This is not a serious threat.”

Propagandists referred to the fighters as “the enemy” and “they,” and avoided using “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” (who don’t exist). In reality, though, the men who took responsibility for attacks on the Belgorod Region identify as the Russian Volunteer Corps and say that they are Russian citizens fighting on the side of Ukraine. Only a minority of Russian-media consumers—those who track news of the war closely by following Telegram channels—would have learned that the Ukrainians who struck inside Russia were actually Russians. They might also have learned that members of the Russian Volunteer Corps hold far-right nationalist views and are fighting, in their minds, not only for an independent Ukraine but for an ethnically homogenous Russia. This, bizarrely, jives with Russian propaganda that brands Ukrainians as “Nazis”—except that these fighters are Russians. Not that the relationship between propaganda and reality matters in Russia.

In the American imagination, Russian public opinion functions much the way American public opinion does, or the way we think it does. Conventional wisdom has it that, once enough American families had felt the impact of the war in Vietnam, support for the war turned into its opposite. This narrative omits some important landmarks, such as the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which told Americans that their government had been lying to them about the war. Crucially, the Pentagon Papers were published—disseminated in a systematic way that amplified both the documents and public reaction to them. American society had the structures of public space that were necessary for information and opinions to circulate. Russia doesn’t. Russian families whose sons or husbands have been killed in the war don’t see their stories reflected in the media, in the faces of other families that could be portrayed on television or in the papers. In the absence of public space, military losses are personal tragedies, not collective experiences.

Rochelle Walensky, the outgoing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), faced tough questioning from House Republicans on Tuesday, when she appeared before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.) grilled Walensky about the CDC's communications with social media companies—Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, in particular—during her tenure as the head of the federal agency chiefly responsible for battling COVID-19.
As reported in Reason's March 2023 issue, Walensky's CDC routinely communicated with content moderators and Facebook, recommending aggressive takedowns of purported misinformation about mitigation efforts, COVID-19's origins, and vaccines:

Comer's questions got straight to the heart of this matter. Unfortunately, Walensky declined to directly comment on it.

????????????@CDCDirector Walensky hides behind the guise of ligation to avoid answering Oversight Chairman @RepJamesComer's questions.
Rep. Comer: Did @CDCgov work with social media companies to censor dissent about vaccines?
Dir. Walensky: *excuses, excuses, excuses* pic.twitter.com/HoGMeHc7o9
— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) June 13, 2023

Walensky's defense for not answering was that the CDC is party to pending litigation involving the suppression of speech on social media; the state of Missouri has sued the federal government over its role in pressuring social media companies to stifle COVID-19 dissent. The downside of the lawsuit, unfortunately, is that it provided Walensky a pretext for keeping quiet when questioned by Congress.
Walensky also fielded questions about the teachers unions' role in keeping schools closed during the pandemic, and this time, she answered. The former CDC director confirmed that the American Federation of Teachers fought to establish a policy that would automatically close schools that surpassed certain COVID-19 thresholds—and that the CDC rejected this policy.

.@RepBradWenstrup: "Did the AFT provide suggested edits to the CDC's February 2021 school opening guidance, including a trigger to automatically close schools that, if implemented, would have kept more schools closed and kids out of the classroom?"@CDCDirector Walensky: "Yes." pic.twitter.com/ngWlSn7Qt0
— Americans for Public Trust (@apublictrust) June 13, 2023

On this matter, Walensky's testimony provides an even stronger case that if the teachers unions had had greater control over pandemic policy, schools would have stayed closed for longer.

FREE MINDS
Wired reports on a disturbing case of the justice system using anti-pornography software to track a criminal defendant:

Prosecutors in Monroe County this spring charged Hannah's husband with possession of child sexual abuse material—a serious crime that she says he did not commit and to which he pleaded not guilty. Given the nature of the charges, the court ordered that he not have access to any electronic devices as a condition of his pretrial release from jail. To ensure he complied with those terms, the probation department installed Covenant Eyes on Hannah's phone, as well as those of her two children and her mother-in-law.
In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah's family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family's entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. "I'm afraid to even communicate with our lawyer," Hannah says. "If I mention anything about our case, I'm worried they are going to see it and use it against us."
Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar market of "accountability" apps sold to churches and parents as a tool to police online activity. For a monthly fee, the app monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an "ally" or "accountability partner," who can review the user's online activities.
For Hannah's family, their Covenant Eyes "allies" are two probation officers in Monroe County's Pretrial Services Program charged with scrutinizing their web activity and ensuring that Hannah's husband does not violate the terms of his bond while using one of his family members' devices.

The defendant's wife told Wired that she worried the court was essentially using the software to entrap her husband; her kids worried that any questionable use of social media on their part could get him in trouble. Her 12-year-old son asked her, "Mom, will Pocket Mortys get dad in trouble?"

On May 29, 2018, Starbucks closed 8,000 stores for a day in order to subject its employees to racial bias training. This dubious move came in response to an incident at a Philadelphia-area Starbucks in which an employee called the police on two black customers who had refused to leave. Their arrests were caught on video and went viral, drawing outrage—and allegations of racism—on social media. Starbucks fired a white regional manager in connection with the episode.
But earlier this week, a federal jury ruled in favor of the fired employee, who had filed a discrimination complaint. The jury awarded the employee $25 million, according to The New York Times:
The jury found that Starbucks had violated the federal civil rights of the former manager, Shannon Phillips, as well as a New Jersey law that prohibits discrimination based on race, awarding her $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.
Laura Carlin Mattiacci, a lawyer for Ms. Phillips, said she and her client were "very pleased" with the unanimous verdict, adding that "she proved by 'clear and convincing evidence' that punitive damages were warranted" under the New Jersey law.
A Starbucks spokeswoman declined to comment.
At the time of the episode, Ms. Phillips oversaw about 100 stores in Philadelphia, South Jersey, Delaware and parts of Maryland. She had been promoted to the job in 2011 after what she called her "exemplary performance" in six years as a district manager in Ohio.
Ms. Phillips said in the suit that Starbucks, as part of its damage-control effort after the arrests, had sought to punish her and other white employees in and around Philadelphia even if they had not been involved in the events that led to the police being called.
Ms. Phillips said she had thrown herself into the company's efforts to restore its credibility and had sought to support hourly workers, organizing managers to staff stores and cover for employees who were scared to run a gantlet of protesters.
Amid the image-burnishing campaign, Ms. Phillips said one of her superiors, a Black woman, told her to suspend a white manager who oversaw stores in Philadelphia, though not the one in Rittenhouse Square, because of allegations that he had engaged in discriminatory conduct — allegations that Ms. Phillips said she knew to be untrue.

Read more here.

QUICK HITS
• Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is entering the 2024 Republican presidential contest.
• Cornel West is running to be the Green Party's presidential candidate.
• Journalist Michael Shellenberger believes he has identified COVID-19's "patients zero" at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
• The manager of a Harvard Medical School morgue has been charged with selling body parts.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill to protect car dealerships' monopoly.
• Daniel Penny has been indicted for the chokehold death of Jordan Neely on the New York subway last month.
The post Congress Had Questions About the CDC Stifling Dissent. Rochelle Walensky Refused To Answer. appeared first on Reason.com.

When Jill Jefferson, a civil rights attorney, began filming the traffic stop of a black motorist in Lexington, Mississippi, police turned their attention to her—eventually "snatching" her phone, searching through her car, and arresting her. Now, Jefferson says that her arrest—and the charges against her—could have been retaliation for a pending lawsuit against the Lexington Police Department filed by an organization Jefferson founded. 
According to an interview with CNN, Jefferson says she was driving home from an event on Saturday when she saw Lexington police conducting a traffic stop on a black driver. Jefferson, a Harvard alumna, began filming police from inside her car. Police soon noticed her, and pulled her over as well. 
Jefferson says police asked for her ID, but she refused to give it—an assertion backed up by audio from the incident. After refusing to give police her ID, Jefferson says they seized her phone after "yanking" her out of her car. Jefferson also claims that officers began to search her car illegally.
"They went through my glove compartment, under my floor mats, they went into the briefcase and unzipped it and started taking things out and looking through them. All of this is an illegal search," Jefferson told CNN. Eventually, the police arrested her.
"I told her to give me her license 5, 6, 7, 8 times. She argued she ain't got to," one officer said to another in audio from an unclear point during the incident. "She came riding by filming…. I guess she thought that was a good idea."
Making matters worse for Jefferson, she says that she soon recognized one of the officers from her legal advocacy—and they recognized her. "I heard them talking about me once they took me to jail. They said, 'That's the woman that's suing us,'" Jefferson told CNN. "That's when I learned that they definitely knew who I was when I got there."
A civil rights group that Jefferson helped found, JULIAN, filed a federal lawsuit against the Lexington Police Department last August, alleging that Lexington police mistreated and retaliated against the town's black residents.
According to CNN, Jefferson was eventually charged with failure to comply, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. She was released after two days in jail, and she says her release was delayed because she refused to pay the bond in protest. A judge, however, waived the fee, allowing her to be released.
While the exact details of Jefferson's arrest are currently unavailable because body camera footage of the event has not yet been released, Jefferson's account to CNN and brief audio from the incident indicate that she was likely wrongfully arrested.
While the Supreme Court is yet to weigh in on the issue, several Circuit Courts—including the Fifth Circuit, which contains Mississippi—have found that individuals have a First Amendment right to film police, meaning that police had no right to interfere with Jefferson filming peacefully from inside her car. Further, in Mississippi, individuals stopped by police are not legally required to identify themselves, meaning that police retaliation for Jefferson's refusal to provide her ID is most likely unlawful.
"My plan was to film footage of police falsely arresting Black people," Jefferson told CNN, "and I just happened to get caught up in it." 
The post A Civil Rights Attorney Started Filming a Traffic Stop. Then Police Arrested Her. appeared first on Reason.com.

The realm of personalized medicine, functional medicine, and of course integrative medicine remains rife with pseudoscience and dubious claims. The claims are often couched in scientific terms, as if this is the next step in scientific medicine, just a bit ahead of its time. This is particularly dangerous, as non-experts will have difficulty parsing the often complex claims being made. This is why it is often necessary for expert communities to regulate themselves to ensure some standard of quality – something that has been eroding within medicine for decades, under relentless and successful assault by the overall CAM community.

One practice that, in my opinion, is a good example of this phenomenon is in-office autonomic nervous system (ANS) testing being offered by some practices. ANS testing and diagnosis itself is legitimate, although this is a very complicated area of neurology. “Boutique” versions of many legitimate medical practices have been cropping up, however, such as questionable thyroid testing, fake allergy testing, and other questionable practices.

This particular practice was brought to my attention because of recent local news stories, which were uncritical and essentially amounted to free advertising for the practitioner. But before I get into that, let me give a little background on the ANS and clinical testing in general.

The ANS is part of the nervous system that regulates our overall nervous system activity in specific ways. The sympathetic nervous system reacts to stress or dangers by increasing blood pressure and cardiac function, dilating the pupils, increasing breathing, and increasing sweating. The parasympathetic nervous system is more active when we are in a calm state, and it increases the activity of our gastrointestinal system and glandular secretions while slowing down the heart and reducing blood pressure. These two systems exist in constant balance, adjusting their relative tone moment to moment in order to, for example, maintain a constant blood flow to the brain. It does this by making constant microadjustments in response to changes in position, muscle tone, and even the varying pressures that result from breathing.

Severe disorders of the ANS can result in dramatic symptoms, such as fainting upon standing up because of insufficient sympathetic activity to raise blood pressure to compensate, or severe constipation even to the point of food failing to move through the GI tract. But ANS disorders can also produce more subtle symptoms, such as just feeling dizzy or light-headed, occasional palpitations, or excessive sweating. Diagnosing ANS disorders can be tricky, especially when they are complex or subtle.

Most medical centers will be able to do basic testing. The most common test is a tilt table test, in which blood pressure and heart rate are measured as head position is altered. For more complex testing there are a few autonomic centers in the US (just a few) that can do extensive testing. Even then sometimes the best we can do is document that there is autonomic dysfunction, but may not be able to localize where the problem is coming from. Treatment is mostly symptomatic as most causes of ANS dysfunction are not curable.

If we are going to introduce a new testing method for ANS function (or really anything in medicine) we need to address a few questions. What, exactly, is it measuring, and what is the measured variable a marker for? What is the sensitivity and specificity of the test? And how useful is the information – does it predict the presence of a specific disease or the response to a specific treatment? Research would need to be done to validate any new test with respect to every condition in which it is used.

With that background I read the reporting of Dr. Plotnikoff who is claiming that his ANS testing device is a “gamechanger” for medicine. I could find no published studies by him or his colleagues regarding ANS testing. I was not reassured by his clinic which boasts personalized, functional, and integrative medicine. On his website he specifically claims that people with the following symptoms or disorders will benefit from testing:

Dizziness, Light-headedness, Fainting, Fatigue, Exercise intolerance, Post-exertional fatigue, Chronic pain including firbromyalgia (sic), Persistent, unexplained weight gain, Sleep disturbances of all types, Anxiousness, Heart palpitations, Depressed mood, “Brain fog”, Brain fatigue, Gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms including constipation, nausea, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and randomly alternating symptoms, Frequent headaches, Falls or near falls, Urogenital dysfunction including urination difficulties and erectile dysfunction, Difficult to diagnose symptoms, Difficult to control blood pressure, diabetes, or hormonal states, Long COVID, Diabetes, Hypertension, Previous heart attack or heart surgery, Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), Syncope, Anxiety, dysthymia, and/or depression, Neurologic diagnoses including neuropathies, migraines, and/or seizures, Gastroparesis, Traumatic brain injury (TBI), Post-concussion syndrome, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS).

That’s a pretty impressive list, especially without any specific scientific research to back it up. The testing itself seems to be just a poor-man’s basic autonomic test, with cardiac monitoring, respiratory monitoring, and blood pressure testing. This might all be useful as part of a basic medical assessment, but claiming that it can diagnose autonomic dysfunction would require some extensive validative testing. The notion that the results of this testing would help, for example, guide treatment of medical entities and distinct as diabetes and seizures is a stretch.

In addition to incredibly overblown claims of using this testing to guide personalize medicine, they also claim that they can diagnose and treat ANS problems directly:

For those with low parasympathetic status (“rest-and-digest”) or excessive sympathetic status (“fight-or-flight”), we provide access to an FDA-approved parasympathetic system activator called GammaCore.

GammaCore is a device used for vagal nerve stimulation. This is a legitimate treatment for very specific conditions, but Plotnikoff’s clinic seems to think it is a panacea for everything listed above. Also, they falsely stated that the device is “FDA-approved”. “Approval” when it comes to the FDA specifically means that it has been tested and found to be both safe and efficacious for a specific disease. That does not appear to be true – the GammaCore website only says that it is “FDA cleared”, which means that the device itself is safe, without any claims for efficacy. This may have been just a sloppy mistake on their part, but it has significant implications. Falsely claiming FDA approval is not a minor thing.

As we can see, they appear to be taking a kernel of real science and medicine but then turning that into a simplified boutique treatment that is good for just about anything, making extremely overblown claims without sufficient evidence, and presenting themselves as the wave of the future. That’s the “functional medicine” marketing BS in a nutshell.

Almost every death row inmate in Louisiana has filed for clemency after the state's governor expressed his opposition to the death penalty in April.
Fifty-one of Louisiana's 57 death row prisoners filed clemency applications on Tuesday, requesting that their sentences be commuted to life in prison. The applications were sparked by comments from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, who has long been tight-lipped about his views on the death penalty, during his April State of the State speech.
"I am calling on the legislature to end the death penalty in Louisiana," said Edwards, connecting his position to his "pro-life" beliefs. "In short: It is difficult to administer—one execution in 20 years. It is extremely expensive—tens of millions more spent prosecuting and defending capital cases, and tens of millions more spent maintaining death row over those same 20 years."
"Our criminal justice system is far from perfect," he continued. "Over the same 20 years there have been six exonerations from death row and more than 50 reversals of sentences and/or convictions. It doesn't deter crime; it isn't necessary for public safety; and more importantly, it is wholly inconsistent with Louisiana's pro-life values as it quite literally promotes a culture of death."
The state has executed 28 people since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Associated Press (A.P). In recent years, state legislators have mounted numerous efforts to ban the practice. Each has failed to pass. Just last month, a bill to ban capital punishment in the state died in committee, despite Edwards' April remarks.
"Given the Governor's comments in the State of the State speech in April, there was an opportunity that we could not turn down," Cecelia Kappel, executive director of the Capital Appeals Project, the group that led the effort to file the clemency requests, told WAFB, the local CBS affiliate. "These cases don't involve a situation where these people are ever going to walk free necessarily. They're going to be put in the general prison population, and our prison system is completely capable of keeping everybody safe."
In Louisiana, all clemency applications are first reviewed by the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, which decide whether to send any applications to the governor. These applications are "reviewed on a case-by-case basis before a final decision is made," one Edwards spokesperson told the A.P.
Though Edwards has openly supported abolishing the death penalty, he hasn't yet indicated whether he'll grant any of the 51 clemency applications that could soon cross his desk. If he does, it would be significant: Only two clemency applications from death row inmates have been granted in the state over the past 50 years.
Louisiana's last execution was in 2010, and before that, in 2002. Elsewhere in the country, some states are enacting policies in order to keep performing executions. As lethal injection drugs have grown more difficult to obtain, states including Idaho and Alabama have approved alternate methods for killing prisoners. Republican Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a bill allowing for execution by firing squad in March, while Alabama built a gas chamber in 2021 so it could begin to kill inmates using the as-yet-untested method of nitrogen hypoxia. 
The post Louisiana Gov. Said He Opposed the Death Penalty. Then Almost Every Death Row Inmate Applied for Clemency. appeared first on Reason.com.

Fresh off his arraignment on federal charges, former President Donald Trump denied any and all wrongdoing in what he described as the "boxes hoax." On Tuesday, Trump traveled from Miami—where he pleaded not guilty to 37 charges relating to the retention and storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home—to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and delivered a fiery defense of his actions.
"I did everything right and they indicted me," he said.
Trump alleged a double standard, tearing into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former President Bill Clinton, former President George W. Bush, and President Joe Biden.
"Bill Clinton lost the nuclear codes," said Trump. "Joe Biden broke the law in many ways, we're finding out, and so far has not gotten indicted."
Trump repeatedly referenced the bribery allegations against Biden, which were reported to the FBI by a confidential source in 2020. That matter has recently come to the attention of congressional Republicans, who have said that a "highly credible" source told national law enforcement that Biden received a $5 million bribe from Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden. These allegations have not been confirmed.
The idea that Biden, Clinton, and other political figures have committed crimes and not faced justice is the central theme of Trump's public defense—and the most common line of attack being deployed by Trump's Republican allies—though this will matter very little from a legal standpoint: No judge or jury will weigh the purported Deep State's treatment of some other political figure when passing judgment on whether Trump broke the law.
During his remarks at Bedminster, Trump promised his supporters that he would return to the White House in 2024 and finally purge the federal government of the tyrants who have pursued them.
"We will obliterate the deep state, and we know who they are," said Trump. "They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. They're not coming after me, they're coming after you—I'm just standing in their way."
It's a line from a popular pro-Trump meme that the former president evidently enjoys.

pic.twitter.com/DutxclyZw9
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2019

The New York Times reports that special counsel Jack Smith is likely to quickly move forward with the case while Trump's attorneys will attempt to slow down the proceedings—even delaying them beyond the 2024 election, if possible:

The one unusual aspect of Mr. Trump's case will be its pacing.
Prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith will most likely seek to drive the case forward quickly, all too aware that the prosecution is playing out as Mr. Trump pursues his presidential campaign. Mr. Trump's lawyers will surely try to slow the case down, perhaps with an eye toward dragging it out until after the 2024 election. That has been Mr. Trump's M.O. in nearly ever legal case he has faced over the years, and this one is not likely to be an exception.
Mr. Trump is expected to continue with a fairly steady stream of political events in the coming months, although the needs of the court calendar in the Florida case will in some ways dictate his actions. Unlike when Mr. Trump chose to opt out of personally appearing at the civil rape and defamation trial brought against him in New York by the writer E. Jean Carroll, he is unlikely to be permitted the same flexibility by the federal judge who hears his criminal case in Florida.
At this point, it remains unclear whether Mr. Trump will attend the first Republican primary debate, which is scheduled for Aug. 23 in Milwaukee.

Trump's co-defendant and personal aide, Walt Nauta, will enter his plea on June 27.

FREE MINDS
Famed American author Cormac McCarthy, whose work explored the darkest and loneliest edges of humanity, has died at 89. Though he had lived in relative seclusion—rarely granting interviews or participating in public life—the success of his novels, especially No Country for Old Men and The Road, which both received major film adaptations, had brought him considerable renown. According to the New York Times obituary of him:

Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian" (1985), a bad dream of a Western, "the greatest single book since Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying.'"
Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy's "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences."
Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy's work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.
Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as "a colossally gifted writer" and "one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner."
But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered "close to nonsense," of "appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records," and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.

Themes of rugged individualism permeated his books; his characters often came to embrace the futility of trying to make sense of the larger picture or bringing any order to their world. There is undoubtedly a tend-your-own-garden ethos at work in the novels—one that tracks with McCormac's own reclusiveness. RIP.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is attempting to stop Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard, the video game company. The Verge reports:

"Both a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction are necessary because Microsoft and Activision have represented that they may consummate the proposed acquisition at any time," reads the FTC's complaint.

The FTC filed its complaint just as Microsoft is progressing with its appeal against UK regulators' decision to block its proposed acquisition. The timing, just weeks before the July 18th deal deadline, shows the FTC is concerned Microsoft may be preparing to close its acquisition regardless of the block in the UK. European regulators gave the deal the go-ahead last month, so Microsoft could technically close without the UK and without an injunction in the US preventing the deal from closing.

"Press reports began circulating suggesting that defendants were seriously contemplating closing the proposed acquisition despite the pending administrative litigation and the CMA orders," says the FTC complaint. That, mixed with an ongoing CMA appeal, could have forced the FTC to try and attempt to secure an injunction.

James Czerniawski of Americans for Prosperity notes that FTC chair Lina Khan has no real argument for objecting to the acquisition.

As a gamer of well over 20 years (owning Sony consoles and using Windows on my gaming PC), this case was always a silly proposition for Lina Khan to chase. When she loses this case (and she will), this won't be a "loss that's awkshully a win", it's an L.https://t.co/6vdRwLBSOa
— James Czerniawski (@JamesCz19) June 13, 2023

The Washington Post describes the FTC's intervention in this manner as a "gamble," given recent legal setbacks for Khan's cases:

Earlier this year, a judge in Northern California ruled against the agency when it attempted to block Facebook parent company Meta from acquiring the virtual reality company Within. Apple recently scored a win as a federal appeals court ruled that Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, failed to prove that Apple's App Store policies constituted anticompetitive conduct in violation of federal antitrust laws. And a federal appeals court in April upheld a judge's decision to dismiss a multistate antitrust lawsuit against Meta.

Microsoft president Brad Smith said he welcomed "the opportunity to present our case in federal court." The deal is critical to the company's ambitions in gaming, and it would give the Xbox maker control of popular titles including "Call of Duty."

"We believe accelerating the legal process in the U.S. will ultimately bring more choice and competition to the market," he said.

QUICK HITS

Long shot GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is calling on all other presidential aspirants—both Republicans and Democrats—to pledge to pardon Donald Trump if he is convicted.
Are Senate Republicans beginning to turn on the former president?
MSNBC decided not to broadcast Trump's post-arraignment remarks because the network did not want to air "untrue things." CNN made a similar decision. Fox aired the remarks in full.

Maddow: We do not intend to carry Trump's remarks live. As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things. pic.twitter.com/MVv5LgDzc9
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 14, 2023

The post 'I Did Everything Right and They Indicted Me,' Says Defiant Trump in Post-Arraignment Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past three years, the federal government distributed more than $4.2 trillion in aid connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. More than $400 billion of it—nearly one in every $10 spent—was either wasted or stolen, according to a new report.
And that figure is likely to grow, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, "as investigators dig deeper into thousands of potential schemes." Already, prosecutors have charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes, the A.P. reports. They'll be busy for years to come, sorting through what Mike Galdo, the Justice Department's acting director for COVID-19 fraud enforcement, calls "an unprecedented amount of fraud."
But if federal prosecutors are interested in catching the real culprits of this mess, they'll have to take a look at government officials who were in charge of distributing the cash too. One major failure, according to the AP, was the Small Business Administration's (SBA) decision not to cross-check Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan applications against the Treasury Department's "Do Not Pay" list, which is intended to keep federal dollars from flowing to known criminals and scam artists.
If the SBA had taken the time to cross-check those applications, it might have blocked loans that went to thousands of ineligible recipients, Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department's inspector general, told the A.P.
That conclusion echoes what Reason reported last year about the apparent failures of the SBA to provide appropriate scrutiny to PPP loans. More than 2.3 million of those loans were flagged for being potentially fraudulent; most were never investigated. More than 1.8 million of the "flags" were deleted en masse during January 2021, as the Trump administration was in the process of handing off oversight to the Biden administration, the watchdog Project on Government Oversight (POGO) discovered via records requests. Loans over $2 million were automatically flagged to receive additional scrutiny, but 99 percent of those flags—covering more than 28,000 loans—were deleted without being investigated, the POGO report found.
The SBA was clearly overwhelmed by the volume of emergency aid it was required to disburse in the early days of the pandemic. In the first 33 days after the PPP program was opened in April 2020, the SBA lent out more than 20 times as much as it had handled in any full year before that time.
In that environment, high levels of fraud and waste were inevitable. But the new A.P. report, like other efforts at accounting for how COVID relief money was spent, makes it clear that even a few safeguards might have made a difference.
"If you open up the bank window and say, give me your application and just promise me you really are who you say you are, you attract a lot of fraudsters and that's what happened here," Horowitz told the A.P.
The SBA has openly acknowledged that it lacked the resources and ability to effectively monitor scammers. In a May 2021 report, the SBA's inspector general pointed out that the agency did not have "a centralized entity to design, lead, and manage fraud risk" until February 2022—nearly two years after the PPP loans began being distributed and long after the bulk of them had been forgiven. That's obviously too late to do much.
"In addition, lenders were not always clear on how to handle PPP fraud or recover funds obtained fraudulently from the PPP that remained in the borrower's account," the SBA inspector general reported. "SBA did not provide lenders sufficient specific guidance to effectively identify, track, address, and resolve potentially fraudulent PPP loans."
Officially, the SBA's inspector general estimates that $20 billion of PPP loans were lost to fraudsters. An update to that estimate is expected in the next few weeks, which will likely be higher.
Still, the most surprising thing about the Associated Press's report might be that the overall figure isn't higher. That probably has to do with how it defines "fraud" and "waste."
Take, for example, this National Bureau of Economic Research study that found "only 23 to 34 percent of the [PPP's] funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs." Or a similar study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that found taxpayers paid roughly $4 for every $1 of wages and benefits to workers via PPP. The rest of those dollars went to business owners, which wasn't the original intention of the program. That's technically not fraud, nor is it likely to be included in the final tallies of how much aid was wasted during the pandemic—but maybe it should be.
One of the lasting lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic should be that there's an implicit trade-off between the velocity of emergency spending and the ability to limit fraud. Even under the best of circumstances, the federal government struggles to ensure that only qualified individuals and businesses receive public dollars: Taxpayers lose around $100 billion every year due to Medicare and Medicaid fraud.
In a rushed panic, and with unprecedented amounts of cash being thrown around, it was always going to be an impossible task to meaningfully police who got what.
The post Over $400 Billion in COVID Aid Was Stolen or Wasted appeared first on Reason.com.

Let’s assume, because it seems like a reasonable assumption, that we have not reached the end of the indictments that will be handed down against Donald Trump. Let’s assume that either the case in Georgia, where he is being investigated for election tampering, or the special counsel’s continuing investigation in Washington, will yield a prosecution related to his conduct between the November 2020 election and the riot on Jan. 6.

In that case, Trump’s various indictments would double as a road map to his presidency and his era — each fitting with a different interpretation of the Trump phenomenon, and only together giving the fullest picture of his times.

The first indictment, New York’s case against Trump for campaign finance violations related to his alleged affair with the adult thespian Stormy Daniels, fits neatly into the narrative of the Trump era that’s often called “anti-anti-Trump.” This interpretation concedes, to some degree at least, Trump’s sleaziness and folly, but then it invariably insists that his enemies in the American establishment are actually more dangerous — because they’re “protecting democracy” by trampling its norms, embracing conspiracy theories and conducting pointless witch hunts.

It’s hard to imagine a better illustration of the anti-anti-Trumpist case than an ideological prosecutor in a Democratic city indicting a former president on a charge considered dubious even by many liberal legal experts. “Norms,” indeed: The Stormy Daniels case looks like Resistance theater, partisan lawfare, exactly the kind of overreach that Trump’s defenders insist defines the entirety of anti-Trumpism.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned today—without incident—and he has now pleaded not guilty to 37 charges tied to the alleged mishandling of classified documents. But before we see more possible indictments (from Georgia or the January 6 investigation), Americans should not lose sight of the astonishing charges read to Trump today in Florida.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens.
The threat from Trump’s supporters has evolved.
The plutocrat vs. the monopoly
Toast.Perhaps former Attorney General William Barr—not a man I am given to quoting approvingly—said it best:
I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were ... and I think the counts under the Espionage Act that he willfully retained those documents are solid counts … If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.
I’m not so sure about the “toast” part. Trump lucked out by drawing Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed and whose last involvement with one of his cases produced a decision so biased in his favor and so poorly reasoned that a federal appeals court—including two more Trump appointees—overturned her ruling in a judicial body slam. And a Florida jury raises the odds that someone in one panel will simply refuse to convict no matter how strong the case. (MAGA emotions are running high: Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon—the beneficiary of a last-minute Trump pardon—reacted to Barr’s comments with a warning: “We’re gonna shove this up your ass, okay?”)Let’s just say that I will be pleasantly surprised if Trump one day faces anything worse than a few rounds of golf with an ankle monitor. But before the inevitable blizzard of motions and delays and general mayhem, I thought we should review the actual charges in the indictment itself.First, here’s what the government claims Trump took to Florida:
The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.
Remember, no one on the Trump team is really disputing this. Some Republicans, in a desperate struggle with reality, are suggesting that Trump did nothing wrong, but Trump—who cannot stop talking—says he had the right to take anything he wanted, especially after rendering the documents harmless using the Kreskin Declassification Method.But perhaps the materials were at least in a safe place:
Between January 2021 and August 2022, The Mar-a-Lago Club hosted more than 150 social events, including weddings, movie premieres, and fundraisers that together drew tens of thousands of guests.
Ah. But Trump has a Secret Service detail; could they help protect the documents?
[The Secret Service] was not responsible for the protection of TRUMP's boxes or their contents. TRUMP did not inform the Secret Service that he was storing boxes containing classified documents at The Mar-a-Lago Club.
Oh.Meanwhile, Trump’s aides—including his alleged co-conspirator, Walt Nauta—were moving this stuff around. (Nauta was indicted on six counts, including obstruction and making false statements, and he has not yet entered a plea; he requested an extension on his arraignment, now set for June 27.) When some of the boxes toppled over, Nauta apparently took a picture of classified material:
On December 7, 2021, NAUTA found several of TRUMP’s boxes fallen and their contents spilled onto the floor of the Storage Room, including a document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denoted that the information in the document was releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NAUTA texted Trump Employee 2, “I opened the door and found this …” NAUTA also attached two photographs he took of the spill. Trump Employee 2 replied, “Oh no oh no,” and “I’m sorry potus had my phone.” One of the photographs NAUTA texted to Trump Employee 2 is depicted below with the visible classified information redacted.
The only thing missing here is “Yakety Sax” as a soundtrack.But perhaps Trump misunderstood or didn’t realize what he had, and he wanted to cooperate with the government to get the papers back where they belong? Unfortunately, one of Trump’s own lawyers made sure to memorialize Trump’s comments on that issue—because lawyers, despite the Stringer Bell Rule, know when to protect themselves by taking notes:
Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?
Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here? Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?
In one of the more widely publicized moments described in the indictment, Trump was apparently recorded, during a meeting with a writer working on a book (who was accompanied by his publisher) and two of Trump’s staff, saying that he had a U.S. war plan against a foreign nation (read: Iran) in his hand. He is recorded as admitting both that the document is classified and that he no longer has the power to declassify it. But for those of us who have worked with classified information, Smith adds an important detail:
At the time of this exchange, the writer, the publisher, and TRUMP’s two staff members did not have security clearances or any need-to-know any classified information about a plan of attack on Country A.
If this happened, Trump released classified information to people who should not see classified information.This incident is particularly galling because one of the president’s former attorneys, Robert Ray, has been arguing that although the charges in the indictment are serious, they don’t show evidence of damage to U.S. national security. This is a risible claim: No one, at this point, can say with any confidence whether American national security has or has not been damaged. We do not live in a movie where intelligence leaks produce clear and instant disasters.But more to the point, even Ray admitted that the government doesn’t need to prove such harm; that’s not how any of this works. Trump faces 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” not some notional charge of “actually damaging American security in some obvious way.” As a former Defense Department employee, I can only imagine what would have happened had I spirited boxes of classified information to my home and then, after my arrest, said, “Well, sure, I took it, but there’s no evidence I’ve hurt national security. At least not yet.”Donald Trump is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, it will likely be a long time before we find out if our justice system is capable of Dropcapholding a former president to account. But if these charges were leveled against any other American citizen, they would be, in Bill Barr’s words, toast.Related:
Will Trump get a speedy trial?
This indictment is different.
Twenty-two U.S. service members were injured in a helicopter accident in northeast Syria.
The novelist Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89.
New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell announced her resignation after 18 months in the role.
Up for Debate: Young people, parents, and educators reflect on the potential hazards of smartphones for children.
Rita Harper / eyevine / Redux
Killer Mike’s Critique of WokenessBy Spencer Kornhaber
Killer Mike is a man of contradictions. He has campaigned for Bernie Sanders and rapped about celebrating Ronald Reagan’s death; he also supports gun ownership and speaks warmly about Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Years ago, he renounced the Christian faith he was raised with, but his first solo album in a decade, Michael—whose cover is a childhood photo of Mike, adorned with devil horns and a halo—is laden with gospel choirs and biblical references. “You don’t have to pick a side with me,” the 48-year-old said over Zoom, amid tokes from a joint. “You gonna go to church with me. You gonna go to the Blue Flame with me.”
That flexibility has, at times, invited controversy. Last year, a HuffPost column referred to the rapper as “more politically dangerous than Kanye West” because he’d praised Kemp’s outreach to Black constituents while the incumbent governor supported policies that Democrats say make it harder for those constituents to vote. Though many of his songs envision violent revolution, he went viral for asking protesters not to burn buildings during the George Floyd protests, leading some commentators to accuse him of playing to too many sides.
Beatlemania through Paul McCartney’s camera
You don’t have to cremate your cat.
Al Levine / NBC Universal / Getty
Read. “Fieldnotes,” a new poem by Zoe Hitzig.“You could tell by the gait, the way the body moved, and / when, and how, they approached.”Listen. The Hans and Franz episodes of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast remind us that a very stupid premise can make for the most hilarious movie.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Summer is here (pretty much), and I have begun to dive into books. I’m now done with the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris’s new book, The Big Break. If you ask me what it’s about, I will wave my hands at the hot mess of American politics and say, “All this,” but it’s actually a series of wonderfully rendered portraits of the people, as the subtitle puts it, who are “the gamblers, party animals and true believers trying to win in Washington while America loses its mind.” It’s my favorite kind of book about politics: informative but fun.If you want a taste of it, the Post ran an excerpt a few months ago about the rise and fall of Sean McElwee, a 30-ish political operative. It’s a compelling read, and in one of his final conversations with Terris, McElwee sums up everything that can make a young person’s head spin in Our Nation’s Capital:  “You know the craziest thing?” McElwee says. “Before all this, I really thought everyone liked me.”I’m enjoying the book, and you might too—if only because it will make you glad you don’t work in Washington.— TomDid someone forward you this email? Sign up here.Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers if parents should stop giving their children smartphones before high school.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Eric is a teacher. He writes:
Cell phones are the single biggest addiction, obsession, and obstacle to learning, maturing, and socializing that I have seen in almost 20 years as an educator. Most students—hell, most adults—are powerless to resist the temptation to stay continually connected to their phones. Students know better than anyone just how distracting and disruptive they are, and, if being honest, will almost unanimously say that they are better students and people when their phone is out of sight. The fact that more schools do not help students by removing the single greatest hindrance to the educational experience we have ever seen is baffling, and it will not be seen favorably by those who look back at it.
Elizabeth is the mother of 9-year-old twins:
We are in Barcelona this year, and my daughters attend a school where phones are not allowed. They simply tell students to leave their phones (if they have them) at home. Kids play and talk during recess. The second day of school I arrived to take my daughters to an appointment. I found them walking around the school yard holding hands with a new “best friend” chatting and giggling. When I left with my daughters, all the other girls in the class clustered around to say goodbye. This school also has three 45-minute periods of recess during the day in addition to a lunch hour, so there is lots of time for socialization and minimally supervised play.
Right after smartphones came on the market, we didn’t know the effects on children and teens (and adults!). Now that the effects on mental health, attention, and learning have become clear, there’s bound to be a sea-change where more and more parents won’t allow children and teens smartphones. I’ve told my kids they can have a smartphone when they can afford to buy one and pay for their own monthly plan. I will buy them a dumb phone when they are 16 and driving by themselves. Until then they have a landline, an analog watch, a time that they should be back home, and the freedom to roam the neighborhood.
Ben is going to be a senior in high school and writes that “everyone I know, myself included, are addicted to their phones.” He continues:
My parents did not let me get a phone until sixth grade (having a phone in middle school is basically a necessity) and no social media until 10th, far later than most of my peers. While frustrating at the time, my parents made the right call. I’ve seen kids become depressed over social media, watched it end relationships, and seen it make many people detached from reality. When I got social media, I was mature enough to use it, and waiting to use it has lessened my addiction to it. I have elementary-age siblings, and seeing fourth or fifth graders with a phone will never stop being weird.
I understand why parents give their children phones. It makes sense at the time because their kids are always at practice or a friend’s house. But five years later, in middle or high school, the addiction is so strong that most kids can’t go a single class period without being on their phone. And I know the amount of time and energy that female friends and people I’ve been in relationships with spend on having a perfect Instagram profile.
Parents refusing to give a phone before high school will only cause resentment and some social isolation. But phones should not be given to elementary schoolers; social media should not be allowed before high school, and once there, access should be based on maturity. These technologies rule my friends’ and my relationships and time, and while it’s not exactly a bad thing, everyone I know occasionally wishes it would all just go away.
Jaleelah got her first smartphone when she was 12 and enjoyed having Google Maps. She writes:
I think that moving straight from not owning a smartphone to using one without restrictions is a bad idea. The transition from middle school to high school is already a difficult one. Increased workload, increased physical freedom, and increased expectations of self-management make it hard for 14-year-olds to balance their priorities. The added variable of a new, addictive, validation-providing device can make it even harder for ninth graders to learn the study skills required to graduate. One of my high-school teachers enforced anti-phone policies for his youngest classes, but intentionally allowed them in class in the highest grades in order to force students to learn self-regulation. I think this is a good idea. Phones should be completely banned from middle schools, but restrictions should progressively loosen throughout high school (alongside lessons about managing distractions) in order to prepare students for adult life.
Zack is an English teacher at a public high school in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has read many assignments in which students reflect on their beliefs about smartphones and social media.He writes:
My school is in a fairly affluent suburb. Phones are omnipresent. In the 12 years since I began here, I have seen phones become more of a distraction and students noticeably less engaged. Post COVID, “withdrawn” is probably more accurate than “less engaged.” Kids now genuinely struggle with how to speak to each other about what they are learning. Student discourse is at an all-time low. They come in, open a laptop, set their phone beside it, and burn through whatever work has been assigned for the day.
As a teacher in 2023, I am by no means a Luddite about smartphones or social media. I am not a stickler about seeing them out in my room. I allow students to listen to music as they write. If they need to look something up, I encourage it. For the first time in my career, I feel that leniency needs to change, that schools need to adopt more restrictive measures, not only due to the rise in mental health concerns, but in the need to learn to interact with the world without a barrier, without the constant allure of their life online.
My students are not shocked or surprised by adults’ ever-growing concern over social media. They do not roll their eyes when anxiety, depression, and teen suicide are mentioned in the same breath as smartphones, Instagram, and TikTok. My kids are not using social media in blissful ignorance of its harms; they are using it in spite of those realities because it governs their relationship to the world and to each other. As such, these students still advocate for the necessity of social media and smartphones in their lives.
They recount opportunities for spontaneous discovery. They argue the need for communication with their parents, siblings, teammates, and beyond, and say the fear of a school shooting makes this need feel urgent. They are passionate about the role social media plays for students of marginalized identities who often find community online when they do not find it at school, at home, or in the neighborhood. Simply put, these kids appreciate the complexity of the challenges social media and smartphones present.
What they do not know how to do is stop using them, or alter, fundamentally, how they use them. Many say they wish they hadn’t had access to them before high school. Nearly half of the girls in one class wrote that in middle school, access to a smart phone sent them into a depression and that arguments about phone use at home created unhealthy dynamics between them and their parents. Each of these students lamented their parents’ decision in allowing them to have social media access before high school. Girls who fought their parents for a phone for years before they turned 15 reported appreciating that their parents had made that decision, even if it was hard at the time.
Maybe I am just getting older. Less prone to shrug my shoulders at a seemingly unfixable problem. Less worried about being what I am: the adult in the room. But when young people praise parents for making hard and unpopular decisions, or criticize them for making ones that unintentionally caused harm, we should listen. If schools became one place in their lives where the frenetic online anxiety couldn’t supersede the lived moment, I can’t help but wonder if these kids might not find that a relief. Even a gift.
Tanner was given a smartphone at 13, and writes:
Prior to that, I wrote often and loved creating stories. As soon as I could access social media and the internet from the palm of my hand, I stopped writing. It seemed so laborious and unsatisfying compared to the instant gratification and stimuli available on my phone. Now, in my late 20s, I've finally curbed my smartphone use and have started writing again. But I will always regret the decade I spent glued to my phone instead of creating.
One of my biggest fears with smartphones is that they are stifling a generation of writers, musicians, philosophers, artists, scientists, inventors, and all sorts of other creative professionals. Creativity comes from moments of boredom and idleness. Smartphones eliminate so many of these moments. Creativity also requires an open, curious, inquisitive mind. I think young people will struggle to develop such a mind when using smartphones to constantly consume vapid, worthless content that usually lacks artistic merit.
B., an administrator at an international school in South Korea, has noticed “a troubling phenomenon”: 
Every year, more and more students (even responsible, high-performing ones) do not know how to navigate basic social situations. I will prompt students to do a simple task (e.g. “please get out a pen or pencil”), and a substantial portion will simply stare at me, as if I said nothing. This is not defiance, at least not in a traditional sense. It’s more like a catatonic response induced, I believe, by being unfamiliar with or even overwhelmed by real-world interactions. The same students will be upbeat and engaged, and show dynamic facial expressions, the second they’re permitted to look at their phones.
My school has an extensive outdoor-education program. All students go on multiday outdoor trips, and they cannot bring phones with them at all. For the first five or six hours, many of the kids are miserable. But eventually, something flips. When truly separated from their phones, the kids begin to talk to each other, play games, and engage even with the teachers. There is still evidence of social handicap during these interactions, but the difference is remarkable. I find hope that even the heavily phone-addicted teenagers of Korea can show signs of basic sociability with a short-term separation from their phones. The lesson I learn from this: If a few days away from smartphones can make unsociable teens interact with a semblance of humanity, responsible parents should give their children a childhood free from the devices entirely.
Robert recently began teaching at a public school in North Carolina: He writes:
My first day, I told another science teacher that I had bought a storage rack for the students to deposit their phones into before entering the classroom. She was surprised and strongly urged me to reconsider, telling me that this would be like “cutting off their arms.” Although I found her analogy disturbing, I had no experience teaching high school and reluctantly took her advice. This was by far the worst teaching decision I made.
I became a cellphone cop. I would make the first announcement to put their phones away at the beginning of every class and then proceed to spend the next 90 minutes trying to enforce it. I caught them cradling their phones in their laps, holding them under their desks, using them to cheat on tests and quizzes, and leaving them in their backpacks but listening to them through their AirPods. One of the projects we did was to analyze the impact of the time they spent on their phones. The average daily screen time for students in my classes for the month of April was nine and a half hours with a mean of 285 pickups.
Olive graduated from high school last year. She writes:
I only got a smartphone partially through my junior year, while many of my friends had them since middle school. In many ways, this was rather inconvenient. My parents ended up with many of my friends’ phone numbers saved because of how often I had to borrow their phones, and I even had to ask my school’s crossing guard for her phone at times. I would say that it was overall a positive thing, though. I saw how much other students were distracted by their phones, in and out of class, despite them being “banned” during instruction. Despite how educationally detrimental smartphones were, the biggest effect was actually a social one. In many in-person events, those around me having a phone left me sometimes isolated, and it still hurts to be with friends only to see them using TikTok instead of actually talking. It feels like the limited time I get to spend with my friends is often stolen away by our technology, and it’s not been good for me.
There is an alternative perspective, though: that having a computer capable of connecting me to my friends while at home has actually helped tremendously. The only reason I’m as close as I am with many of my friends, and even my girlfriend, is the fact that we’ve been able to communicate while apart. Although this has sometimes meant replacing in-person quality time with digital communication, it has undoubtedly helped me become more social and prevented me from staying as shy of a bookworm as I was before I downloaded apps like Discord to talk to my friends. Because of these mixed factors, I’d say that “dumb” phones with a more advanced at-home alternative are the way to go, to allow for communication with parents while away, and with friends while at home.
Kerry was a teacher for almost 40 years.  She writes:
The damage smartphones do to concentration isn’t limited to children; I worked in a school where parents participated in the classrooms, and toward the end of my career, we struggled to keep the adults off their phones too! The damage to concentration is serious, but the damage to connection is far worse. People who are staring at their phones have lost the ability to be present in a room—or in nature—in a very real sense.

Donald Trump has been so many “first” and “unprecedented” things since he entered the political and legal scene that it’s fatiguing to keep up with them. He was the first President to be impeached twice. Just two months ago, in April, he became the first former President to be indicted for state crimes. And now he is the first former President to be indicted for federal crimes. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, but the forty-nine-page federal indictment, unveiled on Friday, involving post-Presidency conduct, tells a story that is unmistakably stamped with the Trump trademark of danger and horrifying comedy.

According to the indictment, as he left the White House in January, 2021, Trump and his staff quickly stuffed many papers into scores of boxes. The files included hundreds of classified documents, on “defense and weapons capabilities,” “nuclear programs,” “potential vulnerabilities of the United States . . . to military attack,” and “plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” Then the boxes travelled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, where they were, at various times, kept in “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room” accessible from a “pool patio” and “near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” One of his employees’ text messages referred to “the beautiful mind paper boxes”—in an apparent comparison to the film “A Beautiful Mind,” about John Nash, Jr., in which the mathematician’s schizophrenia led to paranoid delusion that he was on a classified Defense Department assignment to discern hidden patterns, about the Soviets, from newspapers and magazines.

In July, 2021, according to an audio-recorded interview at Trump’s New Jersey golf course, he displayed, to a writer and publisher working on Mark Meadows’s book (eventually published as “The Chief’s Chief”), a document that Trump described as the military’s “plan of attack” on Iran, which, he said, “as President I could have declassified, but now I can’t.” Several months later, Trump allegedly also showed a representative of his political-action committee “a classified map related to a military operation” that he said he should not be showing him. Many months after the National Archives demanded that he return the records, Trump produced fifteen boxes that included nearly two hundred classified documents, but held back many more.

The Justice Department then opened a criminal investigation and, on May 11, 2022, obtained a federal grand-jury subpoena demanding that Trump return all classified documents. In response, according to notes recorded by his attorney M. Evan Corcoran, Trump asked, “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?,” and, “Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?” Before permitting Corcoran to search the storage room for classified documents to return to the government, Trump had his personal aide, or “body man,” Waltine Nauta, move dozens of boxes out of it—as seen in Mar-a-Lago video-surveillance footage. Corcoran, none the wiser, later searched the room and found just thirty-eight classified documents, and then got another attorney, Christina Bobb, to certify to the Justice Department and the F.B.I. that those were all of them. According to Corcoran’s notes, Trump “made a funny motion as though . . . if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.” Finally, in August, 2022, an F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago recovered more than a hundred additional classified documents.

The thirty-seven felony counts arising from these alleged facts fall into several buckets. The first concerns Trump, alone, and covers the period from his leaving office, in January, 2021, to the summer of 2022. The thirty-one counts in this group involve the allegations that he retained national-defense information about top-secret intelligence on foreign countries, foreign military and nuclear capabilities, “foreign country support of terrorist” attacks, and U.S. vulnerabilities and military planning—in violation of a part of the Espionage Act that prohibits a person from “willfully” retaining any document “relating to the national defense” of which he has “unauthorized possession.”

A second group of counts, focussed on the period after Trump received the grand-jury subpoena, involves obstruction of justice, and has been brought against both Trump and his aide and now co-defendant, Nauta. These counts involve allegations that the two men actively concealed documents and misled, intending to make documents unavailable for an official proceeding or a federal investigation. This set also includes an alleged conspiracy between Trump and Nauta to obstruct justice; for example, by Trump’s suggesting that Corcoran tell the government that there were no documents; by moving boxes to hide them from Corcoran; and by giving the F.B.I. and the grand jury only some of the classified documents while representing that all of them had been produced.

The remaining counts involve lying to the government. These pertain to allegations that Trump and Nauta engaged in a scheme to conceal Trump’s continued possession of classified documents after the grand-jury subpoena, and that Trump caused Bobb to falsely certify that “a diligent search” was conducted and that all classified documents were turned over. Nauta also faces a charge of falsely telling the F.B.I., at a voluntary interview, that he did not know how the boxes were kept and stored. (His lawyer, Stanley Woodward, has declined to comment to the press.)

Given the evidence that the government apparently has—video and audio recordings, text messages, testimony from employees, notes from Trump’s own lawyer, and vivid photographs of the boxes in situ that are included in the indictment—even a skeptical reader would think that the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, had little choice but to seek the indictment. The elements of the crimes are so straightforward to establish, considering the facts alleged, that one wonders whether Trump wanted to be prosecuted. Intent, typically the most difficult element to prove, is easy here: Trump told people—on tape—that he was showing them a classified document relating to military secrets that he had not declassified while he was President. That admission destroys his potential defense that he had the documents unknowingly, or believed that they were not classified. Furthermore, in this case, the strong evidence of obstruction of justice, such as videos showing boxes being moved from the storage room before his lawyer was scheduled to search it, responsive to the subpoena, has the benefit of also establishing Trump’s intent to retain the documents even after clearly knowing that he was required to return them.

The problem is not with the indictment itself: there is no real worry that it will be dismissed as legally insufficient, or that the charges are false, or that the crimes aren’t serious enough. The indictment and the evidence appear very solid, and rely on no novel theories. But the fact that this is a good indictment—and, even more, that Smith had no choice but to bring the prosecution once he found the facts that he did—does not insure that the consequences for the country will be positive.

Trump is the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for President, and, even if he were to be tried, convicted, and sentenced before November, 2024, it seems unlikely that he would stop running. There is no law to disqualify a candidate from running because he is in prison. Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, ran for President from prison in 1920, after being convicted for antiwar speech under the Espionage Act—a law that has had an unfortunate history of being weaponized to persecute dissenters. The federal prosecutor in the Debs case said that “no man, even though four times the candidate of his party for the highest office in the land, can violate the basic law of this land.” From prison, Debs made a campaign statement: “I thank the capitalist masters for putting me here. They know where I belong under their criminal and corrupting system. It is the only compliment they could pay me.” He got almost a million votes, and later received a Presidential pardon from the man who won the election, Warren Harding.

HARTFORD, Connecticut — Henry Louis Gates Jr. is an expert on all things Frederick Douglass, having written about the great orator and abolitionist for some four decades.
“I wrote one essay that I really value about Frederick Douglass’ theory of photography and the role of representation in the apparatus of race,” said the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
Inviting Gates to curate an exhibition marking the 180th anniversary of Douglass’ first visit to Hartford was a no-brainer for the Wadsworth Atheneum. Museum leadership wanted to pair “Lessons of the Hour,” a film installation by the British artist Isaac Julien, with a selection of portraits featuring Douglass, the most photographed American in the 19th century.
“When I got the email, I thought, ‘Wow, this is something I have the knowledge to do,’” Gates recalled. “I just didn’t have any experience with curating. But I knew someone who did.”
He quickly proposed partnering with colleague Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies. “I Am Seen… Therefore, I Am,” co-curated by Gates and Lewis, explores Douglass’ embrace of what was then an emerging art. The exhibition is on view through Sept. 24.

Artist Isaac Julien (from left) with Professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, who curated the exhibit “I Am Seen… Therefore, I Am.”
Photo by Meka Wilson

“Lessons of the Hour” (2019) anchors the show. The 28-minute work, which takes its title from Douglass’ 1894 speech against lynching, is presented on five screens, each running separate but linked video. It evokes the busy walls of a 19th-century salon, with actors recreating scenes from Douglass’ life — including his 1867 portrait session with J.P. Ball, a Black photographer with one of the most bustling studios in 19th-century America. In an opening night conversation, Julien noted the film was influenced by Gates’ work on Douglass, including his essay for the 2015 book “Picturing Frederick Douglass.”
The film’s lead actor quotes from several of Douglass’ famous speeches, including 1861’s “Lecture on Pictures,” his earliest articulation of photography’s capacity to counter racist stereotypes. “Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs, and electrotypes, good and bad, now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings,” Douglass says in the film. “Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all.”
That speech, delivered in Boston amid the first months of the Civil War, wasn’t what anybody expected, Gates explained on opening night. The audience had thought Douglass would talk about abolition or strategies for defeating the South.
“Instead, they heard, ‘Go to a studio and get your daguerreotype taken.’”

The exhibition includes a handful of the 160 portraits of Douglass known to exist, including this one from 1879, and a selection of pictures of other Black Americans, all taken before 1865. Most of their names are unknown but this circa 1850 portrait is etched with the name of Cornelia Read, who was born free in South Carolina and eventually settled in Dedham, Massachusetts.
The Amistad Center for Art & Culture, Hartford, Conn.; collection of Greg French

Ideas were surfaced that that still resonate more than a century and a half on, offered Lewis, who founded the Vision & Justice civic initiative and has her own catalog of scholarship on Douglass’ theory of image-making. “What is the role of art and culture for justice? What is the role of representation in our representational democracy?”
Both Harvard professors underscored the influence of the Civil War, the first conflict to be widely captured on camera. “Photography was in the air,” Gates said. “And Douglass, with his keen perception, was able to take this floating technology and describe exactly how it can be used to free people.”
Douglass saw that the technology could help Americans grapple with unimaginable horrors, as with the gruesome battle scenes that circulated in the 1860s. “But he also understood its capacity to change the narrative about who counts and who belongs in this country,” Lewis said. “That’s why he put himself in front of the camera so frequently. He knew there was an image he was shattering about Black Americans at the time.”
Complementing Julien’s piece is a digital display of Douglass portraits, a mere handful of the 160 known to exist. But the exhibition’s most poetic turn, conceived by Lewis, is a gallery of pre-Emancipation daguerreotypes of and by Black Americans. Ball isn’t the only successful photographer featured. Also on view are daguerreotypes of a diverse clientele by Augustus Washington, who was based in Hartford in the 1840s and ’50s.

“He knew there was an image he was shattering about Black Americans at the time.”
— Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and associate professor of African and African American studies

Other displays are stocked with pictures of Black Americans, all taken before ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Each tiny portrait reflects both the singularity and relatability of its subject, some of the very qualities Douglass valued in the medium. There are goofy smiles and confident stares. Several of the men hold musical instruments; one man poses alone with a baby. All images are on loan by Boston-based Greg French, a pre-eminent collector of early photography.
Most of their names are unknown, presented as reminders of the work still needed to know and honor this history. But at the center of the gallery, in a case all to itself, is a tiny portrait taken circa 1850 of the stylishly attired Cornelia Read, who was born free in South Carolina and eventually settled in Dedham, Massachusetts. We know her name because it was etched into the back of the plate. She locks eyes with the viewer assuredly.
Images like these capture the context in which Douglass was working, Lewis said. For Black Americans in the 19th century, photography was far more than a means of self-expression. “It became a tool to exercise one’s rights.”

It is time to reconsider the past and assess a forecast for the future. The forecasts we make concern the geopolitical system. They are focused on nations. Our forecast that there would be a Russian attack westward has been fulfilled. Our forecast of a period of extreme tension and economic problems in the United States is in the process of being fulfilled. Poland has emerged a significant, though not yet great, power. We have thus far been wrong on Turkey’s emergence but not on Japan’s emergence, and the demographic crisis has happened. There were more forecasts scattered throughout our work, and I am reasonably pleased. We will issue a complete report on that, but right now I want to start on the next forecast, and that means looking back at my first book.

Last week, I wrote an article reflecting on our past. The heart of this article was that we are not a news organization but an intelligence organization. The job of an intelligence organization is not, in my mind, to steal deep secrets but to understand the meaning of what is right in front of you and predict what will come. It is now time to start forecasting the deep future, from roughly the middle of this century to the end. My first major forecast was published in 1996 and written over the prior five years. The forecasts are still operational today, so my ambition is not absurd but merely doubtful. I craft forecasts by writing books. Books give me space to think broadly and time to think about what is going on. What emerges takes little space, a line on what is coming. But it is my books, of which there are five that are the worktable of forecasting, that Geopolitical Futures uses to explain what is happening.

The first step in forecasting is to look at past forecasts and evaluate and criticize them. I will therefore begin a consideration of the future by rereading my books.

I would like to share this process with our subscribers, to give myself another set of critics and to give you a sense of the method I use. I will also lay out the method as I see it for doing this.

The five books contain core forecasts. Each week I will extract and evaluate what I believe are the most important forecasts from one book and share those with you. After about five weeks we will summarize these forecasts, and then spend a couple of weeks talking about our method and how to adjust it – sometimes in emails, sometimes in ClubGPF discussions.

Then, approximately two months after beginning this process, we will turn to forecasting the future. Again. Feel free to hit the delete button if this is not of interest to you. But I’d enjoy your company on this ride if you care to join me. Obviously, I will continue to do my day job: analyzing geopolitics. But it is time to key in on our vital job, which is developing geopolitical futures.

“The Future of War” was the book that began my forecasting process, although I didn’t know it at that time. “The Future of War” was published in 1996, but we started writing it in 1992. It is the book I am proudest of, both as my firstborn and as the work responsible for my most cherished professional moment.

“The Future of War” pivoted on two events. One was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The other was Operation Desert Storm. The geopolitical conclusion I drew was that “The 21st century is the American century.”

Many at the time made the argument that the fall of the Soviet Union would dramatically reduce hostile competition among nations, so my view was seen by many as primitive thinking. Most important, I both dismissed the idea that the Soviet Union’s fall meant an era of peace and affirmed that the U.S. would dominate the world. It was one or the other.

I think this first forecast was accurate, but the problem is that so much was left out. For example, there is nothing about economics or other parts of geopolitics that emerged in my work over the coming years. My focus in this first book was on forecasting war. The book contains various forecasts on the use of weapons in the future with many technical details. It was also my first hint that I might have a future in this racket. In response to this book, I received two reviews, featured on the cover:

“Revolution in modern warfare is upon us. George and Meredith Friedman have provided us an important insight into many of the critical elements of that revolution and their possible implications. There are no answers, but there is one certainty. It is in America’s national interest to have the debate about where technology is taking us and to then resolutely put policies, doctrine, and budgets in place to protect our country. This book is an important element in that debate. I strongly recommend it.” – Adm. Bill Owens, Ret. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

And

“We will be hearing a great deal more about this book as time goes on. It is one of those rare watershed documents in a class with the works of Guilio Douhet, B.H. Liddell Hart and Herman Kahn. It is a benchmark piece of work. Competitors and critics alike will find themselves obliged to deal with it one way or another.” – Maj. Gen. Edward B. Atkeson, Army Magazine

I know that it’s bad manners to brag and I try not to. In remembering and writing about “The Future of War,” I was compelled to sin. Forgive me. But my real interest was how the wars I foresaw would reshape geopolitics. And that was a different place to be.

A new study has found even more evidence that extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to considerable learning loss among American schoolchildren—this time, directly linking higher failure rates on standardized tests with more time spent out of the classroom and in virtual instruction.
The new study, published in the American Economic Review: Insights this month, looked at data from 11 state standardized tests across grades 3–8 and found that pass rates on these tests had declined significantly from 2019 to 2021, with an average decline of 12.8 percentage points in math and 6.8 percentage points in English language arts. 
However, the study found that schools that offered fully in-person instruction, as opposed to fully online instruction, did not experience such a decline in test scores. "Offering fully in-person learning, rather than fully virtual learning, reduced pass rate losses by approximately 13 percentage points in math and approximately 8 percentage points in" English, the study reads. Even offering hybrid instruction lessened the blow: Hybrid schools reduced their educational losses by "7 percentage points in math, and 5 to 6 in [English]," when compared with fully online schools, according to the study.
"Our analyses demonstrate that hybrid or virtual schooling modes cannot support student learning in the same way as fully in-person instruction can, at least during this elementary and middle school period," the study concludes. "As such, educational impacts of schooling mode on students' learning outcomes should be a critical factor in policy responses to future pandemics or other large-scale schooling disruptions."
The study's findings should hardly be surprising. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores released last year showed staggering declines in performance that wiped out two decades of improvement in math and reading scores among a representative sample of fourth- and eighth-graders. 
And just last month, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that American public schools reported, on average, that 49 percent of their students were behind grade level in at least one subject at the beginning of the 2022–23 school year—up from just 36 percent before the pandemic. 
This latest study just confirms what many had assumed from currently available data and what many had warned could be the result of extended school closures. Extensive online-only instruction doesn't help kids learn, and when we keep kids online for months or years, the consequences are steep. These reports and this latest study should, as the study suggests, "serve as a starting point for education leaders and policymakers as they weigh where to target funding moving forward in order to support student learning." 
The post Online Learning During COVID-19 Linked With Lower Test Scores appeared first on Reason.com.

Under the watch of then–President Donald Trump in May 2019, the Department of Transportation withdrew a proposed regulation that would have required all freight trains in the United States to operate with two-person crews.
That rule, which the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) had been contemplating since the waning days of the Obama administration, was backed by labor unions as a way to protect railroading jobs from automation that allows trains to operate safely with only a single person in control. After three years of investigating the issue, the FRA reported that accident data did not show two-person crews to be any safer than one-person crews. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) agreed, telling the FRA that "There is insufficient data to demonstrate that accidents are avoided by having a second qualified person in the cab."
Then, in February, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. It spilled vinyl chloride, a chemical long used to make PVC plastics, into a trackside ditch, and a controlled burn used to clean up the mess launched towering plumes of black smoke over the town.
In the media and political frenzy that followed, there has been little opportunity for a sober discussion about railroad safety. Instead, a bipartisan group including Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, and J.D. Vance, a Republican, have rushed forward with the Railway Safety Act, a bill that would impose the two-person crew requirement that the FRA considered and rejected in 2019.
The rule still has nothing to do with safety. Indeed, the train that derailed in East Palestine had a crew of three aboard.
Rather than being focused on policies that will actually improve the safety of American railroads, the bill—which could get a final vote this week—is all about politics. As such, it is a useful illustration of how right-wing populists like Vance are actually advancing long-running goals of the political left in their muddled pursuit of reorienting the Republican Party.
That includes Trump, of course. Even though it was his administration that killed the two-man-crew mandate in 2019, the former president is now a strong supporter of the bill that would impose the same mandate in 2023.
"JD Vance has been working hard in the Senate to make sure nothing like this EVER happens again, and that's why it's so important for Congress to pass his Railway Safety Act," Trump posted on Truth Social last month. "JD's terrific bill has my Complete and Total Endorsement."
Trump has never been one to think deeply about policy—or to let hypocrisy get in the way of political opportunism. Still, the fact that Trump, Vance, and seven other Republican senators have jumped to endorse a bill full of labor policies unrelated to railroad safety is telling. It's perhaps the clearest legislative signal yet of a political trend identified by Reason's Stephanie Slade, which she calls right-progressivism.
It's not the first time this has happened. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson heaped praise on Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) in 2019 for a list of economic policies that Carlson said "sound like Donald Trump at his best." Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) sided with unionized rail workers during a recent labor spat with the Biden administration. Much of Trump's protectionist trade agenda might as well have been pulled directly from the progressive playbook.
As Slade notes, those on the political right who are advocating for a larger, more powerful federal government are often "unapologetic proponents of actual left-wing policies, such as tariffs, industrial subsidies, and aggressive antitrust action."
Add costly and unnecessary regulations to the pile.
The two-man-crew mandate is just the start. The Railway Safety Act also grants broad new powers to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who would be responsible for creating a new regulatory regime to govern trackside sensors and the power to write new regulations for railcars and their routine inspections. Regulations that make it more difficult or expensive to ship goods by rail will actually undercut safety by pushing more hazardous materials onto roadways, warns Philip Rossetti, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute.
Rail accidents have been steadily declining for years, notes Michael Gorman, a business and logistics professor at Dayton University, in a recently published paper. Meanwhile, trucking accidents are on the rise, and trucking accidents involving hazardous materials have caused more property damage and loss of life than train derailments in recent decades. Legislation that exclusively piles new regulations onto rail will trigger "higher rail shipping costs and more goods traveling by truck, which would be a decidedly inferior outcome for society," Gorman concludes.
In supporting the Railway Safety Act, Vance and Trump are signaling support for a litany of left-wing goals: growing the regulatory state, giving bureaucrats more power over American businesses, and protectionism for union jobs. They're also falling into the same trap as many progressives: ignoring trade-offs and obvious unintended consequences.
If the so-called New Right is reorienting the conservative movement to help accomplish the goals of the progressive left, one might wonder why America has a conservative movement at all.
The post In Debate Over Railway Safety Bill, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Are Leaning to the Left appeared first on Reason.com.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, slammed former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents, saying that Trump—who is facing 37 felony charges—has no one to blame but himself.
"He has shown himself, particularly in his post-presidency, to be completely self-centered, completely self-consumed, and doesn't give a damn about the American people, if what the American people want isn't best for him," said Christie.
Christie made these remarks during a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper on Monday night. Christie is seeking the 2024 Republican nomination for the presidency; during his remarks, he laid into Trump, the frontrunner, as well as other rivals for the nomination—including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—who have failed to condemn the actions of the former president.
"He's angry and he's vengeful," Christie said of Trump. "And he said 'I will be your retribution.' He wants retribution for himself. I'm convinced that if he goes back to the White House, the next four years will be all about him settling scores."
Christie said that he agreed with former Attorney General William Barr that the Department of Justice's case against Trump was strong; he emphasized that Trump could have easily avoided prosecution by returning the documents at any point prior to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
When Cooper asked Christie why he thought Trump had kept the documents, he chalked it up to "vanity run amok, ego run amok."
Thus far, Republican primary voters have shown very little indication that they wish to part ways with Trump, their standard-bearer for the past eight years. The very conservative voters who comprise the GOP's base view Trump extremely favorably.
They don't tend to feel the same about Christie. According to The New York Times:

For the most part, Mr. Christie, who announced his campaign last week, has tried to reintroduce himself to the nation as the Republican candidate most willing to forcefully confront Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Christie, who ran a short-lived campaign for president in 2016, has gained little traction in available polling this year and has a more unfavorable rating among Republican voters than any other candidate, according to a recent Monmouth University poll. And he occupies a relatively lonely lane. Most of the other 2024 hopefuls have shied away from much direct criticism of Mr. Trump.
"It was like he was Voldemort from 'Harry Potter'—nobody wanted to mention his name," he said of a recent Republican campaign event, adopting a mocking voice. "Like, say his name, man, say his name."

For Christie to have a chance at the nomination, he must persuade Republicans that it's time to throw Trump overboard—something they were not inclined to do after the 2018 midterms…or the 2020 election…or January 6…and so on.

FREE MINDS
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, has decided to self-cancel. Her forthcoming novel, The Snow Forest, takes place in Siberia and concerns a Russian family fleeing Soviet tyranny during the mid-1900s. It was slated to be released in February 2024.
But Gilbert has opted to self-cancel, saying in a statement that it is "not time for the book to be published." Why?
Russia's war in Ukraine, apparently. Gilbert had evidently heard from Ukrainian readers expressing "anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the decision that I would choose to release a book right now … set in Russia."

Important announcement about THE SNOW FOREST. Please note that if you were charged for your pre-order, you will be fully refunded. Thank you so much. pic.twitter.com/OAEmrjtfJx
— Elizabeth Gilbert (@GilbertLiz) June 12, 2023

This is absurd. Setting a fictional story in Russia is not in any way, shape, or form an endorsement of Vladimir Putin's behavior. It does not harm Ukraine, or show a lack of sympathy for the Ukrainian cause. Anyone demanding that right-thinking people cease to celebrate Russian art, history, culture, and music is undermining the exact cosmopolitan values they claim are under attack by Putin.
Gilbert's self-flagellation is reminiscent of the orchestras that stopped performing Tchaikovsky in response to the Russian invasion. No one is better off because of this.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) is probing the impending merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, which is backed by the monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The two organizations had previously been at odds, with LIV Golf accusing the PGA Tour of anti-competitive behavior.
But last week, the two organizations abruptly agreed to a merger that would end all pending litigation. Given Saudi Arabia's appalling record on human rights and civil liberties, the deal has infuriated many PGA players and fans.
And now Blumenthal is making it his business, too. CNBC reports:
The June 6 merger announcement was a "sudden and drastic reversal of a position concerning LIV Golf," wrote Blumenthal, who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The Tour and its commissioner had previously spoken out strongly against LIV and its role in professional golf.
Meanwhile, the Saudi government's Private Investment Fund, which owns LIV, had made clear plans to use investments in sports to further the Saudi government's objectives, according to Blumenthal's letter.
"PGA Tour's agreement with PIF regarding LIV Golf raises concerns about the Saudi government's role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution," Blumenthal wrote.
If people wish to express qualms about Saudi Arabia's repressive government becoming more involved in U.S. golf, they have the right to do so. But this is not the federal government's business. Moreover, both Republicans and Democrats have courted favor with Saudi Arabia; former President Donald Trump maintained close ties with the Saudis, and President Joe Biden fist-bumped Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during a visit to the country last year.
The federal government is allowed to turn a blind eye to Saudi abuses, but not professional golf? Please.

QUICK HITS

Donald Trump will appear in a Miami court on Tuesday for his arraignment. (He's also apparently struggling to find a qualified Florida attorney to represent him.)
Sen. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) now calls the Trump indictment a "serious matter."
Human remains have been found at the site of the I-95 bridge collapse.
Inflation appears to be cooling.
Pat Sajak, who has hosted Wheel of Fortune for the last 40 years, plans to retire.

Well, the time has come. I've decided that our 41st season, which begins in September, will be my last. It's been a wonderful ride, and I'll have more to say in the coming months. Many thanks to you all. (If nothing else, it'll keep the clickbait sites busy!)
— Pat Sajak (@patsajak) June 12, 2023

The post In CNN Town Hall, Chris Christie Says Neither Joe Biden Nor Donald Trump Should Ever Be President Again appeared first on Reason.com.

Although we just experienced a pandemic in which over one million Americans died, health care reform doesn’t seem to be a top political issue in the United States right now. That’s a mistake. The American health care system is broken. We are one of the few developed countries that does not have universal coverage. We spend an extraordinary amount on health care, far more than anyone else. And our broad outcomes are middling at best.

When we do pay attention to this issue, our debates are profoundly unproductive. Discussions of reform here in the United States seem to focus on two options: Either we maintain the status quo of what we consider a private system or we move toward a single-payer system like Canada’s. That’s always been an odd choice to me because true single-payer systems like that one are relatively rare in the world, and Canada performs almost as poorly as we do in many international rankings.

Moreover, no one has a system quite as complicated as ours.

A more productive debate might benefit from looking around the world at other options. Many people resist such arguments, however. They think that our system is somehow part of America’s DNA, something that grew from the Constitution or the founding fathers. Others believe that the health care systems in different countries couldn’t work here because of our system’s size.

I think those are bad excuses. Our employer-based insurance system is the way it is because of World War II wage freezes and I.R.S. tax policy, not the will of the founders. And much of health care is regulated at the state level, so our size isn’t really an outlier. We could change things if we wanted to.

So how do we introduce this? Do we say, basically, the latest in an occasional series on Trump indictments?

Indictments 2.0. [MUSIC PLAYING]

And I’m Ross Douthat.

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” As you can tell, Lydia is not with us this week. She is off reporting in Chad. And we are appearing a little earlier than usual this week because, as you may have heard, Donald Trump has been indicted, again. And we, your dedicated podcast hosts, read all 49 pages of the federal indictment. After getting through it, I felt like I actually did get some new insight into how Trump operates and what makes him tick. We’ll get to our takeaways in a second, but first, who wants to give us a rundown of what’s actually in the indictment?

Oh, please.

That would be Michelle.

Oh, please allow me to do this.

Michelle, step into the breach.

So for those keeping score at home, again, this is the second criminal indictment. In March, Trump was indicted in New York for allegedly falsifying business records. That was on state charges. This time, it’s federal. It is for allegedly holding on to lots of classified documents after he left the White House. So we’re talking about documents that contain military secrets, intel secrets, nuclear secrets, both regarding the U.S and other nations. It’s not just that he held on to these. It’s that he allegedly actively conspired to hide them once the Justice Department stepped in with its very polite subpoena, suggesting that it might be best if he handed these over. So, as the prosecution lays out, he was going through boxes, conspiring with an aide, lying to his own lawyers, and at one point, even suggesting that his lawyers remove evidence that might be extremely unfortunate if it was found. So, as shocking and unbelievable as it is, it’s also kind of like, yeah, here we go again.

Well, I was interested that you started out, Carlos, saying that you felt like you maybe had learned something new about our glorious, exiled emperor, Donald Trump, because with all due respect to the importance of American national security, this is an absolutely hilarious indictment. I feel like everything, the image of the boxes, the photographs of the boxes piled in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom alone is going to go down in history alongside the photo of Trump with the fast food buffet in the White House as sort of —

It has launched 1,000 memes.

But to me, of course, this is the Donald Trump that we know, right? The Donald Trump who wants to keep the boxes because they’re his boxes, has no concept, obviously, of the national interest, sort of national security, apart from his own sort of role as capo di tutti capi at the White House. He doesn’t separate sort of the public interest from his own interest. He seems to have also had some scores to settle, right? He held on to documents related to things he was still mad about, which is something very relatable to me. What do you hold on to?

Who among us?

Anyway, so Carlos, what’s new here? What did you learn?

Well, I mean, first off, I got flashbacks to a lot of similar past Trump actions, and let me cover that first before I get into what I thought was novel. First, Trump has been very cavalier about national security secrets and classified information in the past. He was when he was president. There was that famous meeting in the Oval Office with Russian officials where he revealed that the United States was getting intelligence from an ally about the Islamic State. So that was very familiar. The way he talked to his lawyer was extremely familiar. When he tells the lawyer basically, look, take these documents you’ve found, go back to your hotel, and if you see anything really bad, just kind of pluck them out. He didn’t say pluck them out. He made kind of the hand motion of plucking them out. And that reminded me of Michael Cohen’s memoir about working for Trump — he was Trump’s fixer and lawyer — when he says that Trump would often just kind of imply instructions, leave plausible deniability for kind of illegal acts and kind of like a mob boss.

It’s so Cosa Nostra. It really is. It’s just like, don’t say it. Just imply it.

Except that the one thing that distinguishes Trump from the true mob boss is that he has so many of these conversations himself, right? Like a really effective mob boss, it’s three layers away. And part of what’s fascinating about Trump — and this isn’t just true with mob bosses, right? When presidents want to do borderline illegal things, which other presidents besides Trump have done, they’re usually trying to insulate themselves or find fixers and so on, and Trump does that, but he also just does it himself. Anyway, but Carlos, I’m actually really curious — what was surprising?

It gave me some insight into what Trump means when he says that his next administration, his next presidency would be a time for retribution, because the way that he very deliberately used one document to strike back at Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who he felt was getting good press and was trash talking him in sort of books and articles that were coming out, shows you that he’s not just careless and reckless with classified information. He doesn’t just like to show he’s cool and has access to this cool stuff, but that he is holding on to these things in part to use them, to use them against enemies. And those enemies are not foreign enemies, are not the usual people you think about when you think about national security secrets. They’re about his own political enemies or domestic enemies. And to me, that question sort of why is he holding on to this was answered in that moment.

I agree with you, Carlos, that, yes, he’s not just holding onto them the way he holds on to other souvenirs that he likes to show off, which is obviously always —

Fake Time Magazine covers.

Exactly. I mean, that is one reason why he’s holding onto them, but yes, he also has scores to settle related to Russiagate, related to, presumably, January 6. I think the Milley example is striking because the reality was that throughout Trump’s presidency, his generals constantly put one over on him, right? Trump would announce we’re pulling out of Syria, and then the generals would — I’m exaggerating for effect here, but move six submachine guns and one Navy SEAL out of Syria and tell Trump that it had been accomplished, right? Trump repeatedly said we’re going to leave Afghanistan, and of course, it only happened under Joe Biden, who, whatever his other faults, is much more likely to actually do things than Donald Trump. So I don’t think it’s a surprise at all that Milley specifically, but also the generals writ large, would be sort of a source of Trump’s — his unhappy memories of his presidency. I think the question of revenge, though, gets to this question, which is that a lot of Trump’s presidency was just about saying things and not doing things, right? And so, in a way, his idea of revenge is, it’s an open question whether it’s about saying things or doing things. Is President Trump in his second term going to successfully prosecute the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or is he just going to write a lot of nasty tweets about him? And this is the question that sort of hangs over the whole Trump phenomenon. I mean, my view of the indictments is that we’re sort of moving — we’re assuming that there may be a third indictment in the state of Georgia related to Trump’s election interference, his calls to Georgia State officials demanding that they discover extra votes for him. And to me, it seems like in these indictments, we’re moving through different phases of the Trump presidency. That the first indictment, the New York indictment, was sort of absurd liberal prosecutorial overreach directed against Trump’s sleaziness. And that’s one story of the Trump administration. Trump is sleazy. Liberals overreact, violate their own norms in trying to go after him. This one, this indictment is more the sort of Coen brothers burn after reading black comedy, where the stakes are a little more real. You’re actually dealing with national security secrets and so on, but Trump is still fundamentally behaving as a somewhat venal and absurd figure. And then if we get a third indictment, that will be closer to the genuinely sinister aspect of Trump, where his venal absurdity leads him to be willing to have a constitutional crisis to steal an election he didn’t win. So we’re sort of moving through — we’re recapitulating the whole Trump presidency through these indictments. It’s very, very entertaining.

And along the way, we’re kind of looking at what he’s done to the Republican Party because whatever you think of the first indictment in New York, which I was not that crazy about, this one —

Not your favorite indictment.

No, my favorite indictment is Georgia. I have ranked my indictments on a little chart in my room, and I’m clicking through them —

The indictment does not exist yet. That’s your favorite?

Yeah, the indictment to come, but —

That’s resistance liberalism at its finest. It’s always the next indictment.

But the question here is, how is his party responding, the party that he has captured, that he has traumatized. And so far, if you look at the Republican contenders, with a couple of exceptions, it’s kind of weak. I mean, Chris Christie has come out swinging. Mitt Romney, in Mitt Romney’s usual role, has come out saying this is disgraceful. Asa Hutchinson, who nobody even knows who he is, but he’s running for president as well, has said these should be taken seriously. But everybody else is pretty much like, nah, big deal. Guy stored some documents in his toilet. Does it really matter? I mean, he didn’t really sell them to the foreign forces that be, so do we really care? I mean, what’s the big deal? Which, I think for the party of law and order and the rule of law, is pretty fantastic.

It’s not just the party of law and order and the rule of law. It’s also the party that, for a long time, has painted itself as stronger on national security than the Democrats. And that’s where looking into the specifics of what these documents are, is vital. I mean, I love burn after reading. But this is more than just like we need to talk about the security of your shit, right? This is US nuclear weapons program information. This is defense capabilities of the United States and other countries, vulnerabilities of the U.S and its allies to attack, plans of retaliation in case of foreign attack. At least from the description in the indictment, this is very high level material.

The description provided by the National Security of States.

Of course. I mean, just of course. And so, again, it’s not just that Republicans may be hypocritical when it comes to being the party of law and order, but also as the party of national security.

Yes, I mean they’re completely hypocritical. I think that’s perfectly obvious. The sort of considered Republican view, to the extent that you can say one is considered, is that once Hillary Clinton was let off the hook for her Homebrew server that effectively created a zone of non-prosecution that encompasses Trump, I think it’s pretty clear that what Trump did is more prosecutorable. That’s not the right word, but you know what I mean.

Prosecutable.

Prosecutable — that’s an even better and actually existing word — in the sense that Trump was repeatedly told, please don’t do this or you will be prosecuted, and continued to do it, which is different.

And continued to scheme very aggressively to make —

Yes, very aggressive.

— sure it didn’t get done.

Aggressive scheming that he did not successfully conceal. So I think this does clearly go further than the Hillary example. But that is sort of the Republican theory of the case, basically, that —

But her emails.

Well, I mean, you guys don’t think, right? I mean, it was good, right, that Trump didn’t prosecute Hillary Clinton for the emails. You guys agree with that, right?

So what you’re saying is manslaughter is exactly the same thing as first degree murder.

Interesting.

People are prosecuted for both, though, Michelle.

It is an inexact analogy, I’ll grant you. But it’s like in for a penny, in for a pound. Once you’ve kind of let something slide, you might as well let everything slide, no matter how hard they’ve tried to cover it up or scheme or lie or ignore subpoenas, that sort of thing.

The irony of the Hillary example is that in the indictment, isn’t there a moment where Trump is saying, like, gosh, Hillary did it right. She got some lower level person to scrub the 30,000 emails. And yeah, and I should have someone to do that for me.

That was clearly his underlying message, is why aren’t you doing this for me?

But that, again, gets to his failure as a mob boss, which is that he’s always trying to do things himself. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Let’s take a quick break here. When we come back, we’ll talk about the consequences for Trump and for the country from this indictment. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. So these indictments of a former president are, to use a vastly overused word, “unprecedented,” but so is the fact that this indicted former president is a candidate in the next presidential election. And so far, as Michelle said, there’s been sort of a meh reaction among a lot of his challengers. What does that say to the two of you?

I think that with the Republican field, this just sort of cements the reality that the sort of Ron DeSantis strategy is to hope that things like this indictment contribute to a general exhaustion with Trump and a desire not to do it again, rather than some dramatic Republican voters turning on him. And so everything that DeSantis and others who actually want to win the Republican nomination are trying to do is premised on that strategy. But that strategy does involve, essentially, a tap dance where you minimize the significance of what Trump has done.

How is that strategy consistent with DeSantis and others going out and saying that this is this grave miscarriage of justice and weaponization of justice in America, et cetera, et cetera?

Because I think DeSantis’s strategy is to say, look, the liberals are out to get Trump, and the liberals are terrible, and we all agree on that. The problem is that Trump is giving them too many opportunities and making it too easy for them. And this is where the deep flaw in the DeSantis strategy may be, that it’s impossible to make a subtle argument against Donald Trump. But subtly, the point would be, look, aren’t you a little bit tired of the liberals always having these opportunities? I won’t sleep with porn stars. I won’t store documents in my bathroom. I won’t hire people who I then decide are terrible and so on. Vote for me.

Just reading the indictment gave me a game of “Clue” kind of vibe. When you mentioned the bathroom, Ross, it’s the valet with the boxes in the storage room, right? Or it’s the lawyer in the hotel room with the folder.

With the folder.

It just seems so comical and reckless. Yet at the same time, the indictment is trying to make it extremely serious and premeditated. And one of the things that struck me as different from past investigations is that they try to make very clear that Trump understood what he was doing and had clear knowledge of his wrongdoing, right? At first, it seems like they’re just being annoying. And they cite all the times during the 2016 campaign when Trump was explaining why we have to take classified information seriously. We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “classified.” But in the Mueller report, they bent over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt. And now that’s not the case at all. They’re making it as clear as they can in the indictment that Trump knew exactly what he was doing. And it’s more like the January 6 report, which goes out of its way to say Trump knew that he had lost. He knew that everything that was coming up was not making his case, and he kept saying it anyway. So this feels like it’s kind of learned from Mueller’s mistakes and adopted more of a January 6 model.

And it’s not going to make any difference to his voters. So the interesting thing will be, are we going to see a third indictment as this goes along? And will he just be doubling down every time? And I think the answer is yes from everything we’ve seen. I mean, the great thing about being a demagogue is every time you wind up in trouble with the system, your response is, it’s because the system is corrupt, and they’re out to get me. So I think this is a very serious case. And I don’t actually think it will make much — I don’t think it’ll make any political difference.

Well, it’ll make a difference. I mean, look, these things hurt Trump as a general election candidate, I think, in pretty obvious ways. Multiple indictments does not help you win over the voter who, let’s say, swung from Obama to Trump and then back to Biden, right? That voter is not going to be excited about voting for the guy who has been indicted three times. But another core question, though, is just the logistics of all this. And we’re not legal experts, but this is also uncharted territory, so even legal experts are uncertain, right? How fast does this prosecution actually happen? It seems like they have Trump dead to rights in a way that would normally occasion some kind of plea. But the politics of pleading guilty seem to be a little dicey for Trump. But then there’s the other question of does this actually yield jail time if convicted, right? I believe that David Petraeus, with his showing classified elements to his mistress scandal, I think he got two years of probation and a fine. Is that correct?

Well, I’ve repressed that whole episode.

Well, Trump gives us the highly comedic version of this, but Donald Trump is certainly not the first high placed official to have some trouble with classified documents.

It just never occurred to me that people do jail time.

It doesn’t? So that doesn’t occur to you, OK. So if he doesn’t —

It never occurs.

If he thinks he’ll never do jail time —

You mean for this or for any of this?

For this.

We’ll have to see about —

How about your favorite nonexistent indictment?

I will have to see how the Georgia indictment goes, but I actually just don’t think for this one, I don’t think he’s going to see jail time. I think there’s vanishingly little chance.

OK, so you think it’s some kind of Petraeus-style sentence.

Of course, if he winds up convicted —

Petraeus, for the record, was fined 40 grand and two years’ probation.

Yeah, OK, so that’s the Petraeus sentence.

He’s not allowed to store sensitive documents in his john anymore, how is that?

OK, OK.

Slap on the wrist type thing.

So a slap on the wrist. So that’s not that politically damaging in the end.

Yeah, although he said even if he’s convicted, he will stay in this race. What was that he said this past weekend?

That’s the biggest applause line he gets.

Either the Communists win or we win. It’s the final battle? He’s just so grand with all of this.

And one of the big moments when he got the most applause when he was speaking in Columbus, Georgia was, they’re not really coming after me. They’re coming after you. I’m just the guy standing between you.

Oh, he said that in North Carolina, too. This is not about me. This is about you. The man is truly brilliant in that regard. This is never about him. For a scorching narcissist, he has the greatest way of making this about you and me. And Ron is more — he’s a little bit more like Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. He’s not a great retail [INAUDIBLE]

Now, Al Gore is actually a good DeSantis analogy. Yeah, I mean, I think Nixon is, in certain ways, a useful analogy, the smart weirdo, sort of insider, outsider. But yeah, this Gore is also in that zone.

It’s just painful to watch.

We are veering so far away from this indictment, but I feel that with the first indictment, with this second one, we’re still kind of waiting for a big one. We’re still saying that this may not have a huge impact. Sure, it’s better to not be indicted in a general election context, but I kind of feel that we’re doing the thing that people did for so long during the Trump presidency, saying like, surely, the next thing. There’s a big shoe to drop. With indictment three, that’ll be the one, or maybe it’s indictment four. Or maybe it’s the cumulative impact. And I wonder if we’re missing what’s going on as we go through these. What Trump is doing is a ramped up version of what he did as president, which is completely delegitimizing the system of justice in America. Maybe he’s being helped by a sort of ticky tack prosecution, like the first indictment was. But he’s also being helped by members of his own party who are right along with him, cheering the assault on the Department of Injustice. That has to have consequences that go beyond what does it mean for the Republican primary or 2024.

The nature of American politics is that in the end, you have to win the political argument. And I think this obviously helps Democrats win the political argument against Donald Trump coming back in 2024. And I think it’s OK to just say that’s the most important aspect of these indictments, that it makes it less likely that Donald Trump will be president of the United States again, no matter what happens in the Republican primary.

There’s a unifying theme.

All right, let’s leave this latest Trump indictment there, and we can all look forward to the next one. Until then, we’ll take a quick break now and come back to something hot or cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] And now it’s time for Hot, Cold, where every week, one of us shares something that we’re hot for that we’re cooling on or somewhere in between. Who’s got the Hot, Cold this week?

So I’ll take it. And I will say that I am hot for the — sorry.

[laughs]

Sorry. I’m sorry. Ahem.

So dirty.

Hot. So hot.

Woo! Getting the vapors, Ross.

OK.

[clears throat]

: So what I’m really hot about, honestly, is the fascinating fixation on UFOs that seems to be permeating parts of the United States government, as well as the media at the moment. But secondarily, it’s making me feel very, very warmly towards the paranormal focused shows of my misspent 1990s youth, and particularly, “The X-Files.” And it’s actually striking to me that in this era of UFO fascination and fixation, we haven’t produced a kind of great fictional treatment of the sort of paranoid mentality, “truth is out there” mentality. And I miss it. I think sort of a lot of stuff around UFOs is about American mythologies, right? And “The X-Files” was just great at its peak. It fell apart at the end, but at its peak, was just sort of great at building all of that into a fictional narrative. And I’m actually sort of wondering why there isn’t an [INAUDIBLE] right now, if people are sort of a little bit nervous maybe in an age of panic about misinformation, about creating those kind of paranoid tapestry narratives again. But anyway, I guess what I’m saying is, I miss “The X-Files.”

Ross, I’m with you.

Oh, I miss “The X-Files,” too. It was such a brilliant show, and it was pre like TiVo and DVR. So whenever it was coming on, my now husband and I would panic if we were out, and we’d have to get home and watch this. It was kind of a genius look at fear and thinking the government was out to get you and the smoking man. And then, of course, Gillian Anderson was fantastic, so.

I don’t know why there’s not — I mean, maybe there are all sorts of obscure shows that I’m not thinking about.

Yeah, there are so many shows now that, presumably, there — and obviously, there are sort of paranoid conspiracies all the time in shows. I guess it just sort of occurred to me that if “The X-Files” dropped right now, I feel like a lot of people would perceive it as a gift to RFK, Jr.‘s presidential campaign or something, and therefore something they needed to condemn.

Maybe it’s even worse. Maybe it just means that, to use a verb I despise, maybe conspiracy has become so normalized, that “The X-Files” would seem less intriguing and unique and exciting than it did when we were watching it in the ‘90s.

Plus you’d have some nut with a gun storm Comet Pizza again to find the alien bodies in the basement, so.

Well, thank you for listening to our special indictment conversation with a paranormal twist at the end.

See you next Thursday.

See you all next week.

[whistling "the x-files" theme]

What if Mitch McConnell, at the close of his scalding speech on the Senate floor blaming Donald Trump for the riot that occurred at the Capitol on Jan. 6, had promised to use his every last breath to ensure that Trump was convicted on impeachment charges and could never, ever become president again?

What if Melania Trump, after the porn star Stormy Daniels said Trump had unprotected sex with her less than four months after Melania gave birth to their son, had thrown all of Trump’s clothes, golf clubs, MAGA hats and hair spray onto the White House lawn with this note, “Never come back, you despicable creep!”

What if the influential evangelical leader Robert Jeffress, after Trump was caught on tape explaining that as a TV star he felt entitled to “grab” women in the most intimate places — or after Trump was found liable by a Manhattan jury of having done pretty much just that to E. Jean Carroll — declared that he would lead a campaign to ensure that anyone but Trump was elected in 2024 because Trump was a moral deviant whom Jeffress would not let babysit his two daughters, let alone the country?

Where would statements and actions like those have left Kevin McCarthy, his knuckleheads in the House G.O.P. caucus, and other Republicans who now are defending Trump against the Justice Department indictment? Would they be so eager to proclaim Trump’s innocence? Would they be raging against Tuesday’s hearing in Miami? Would they be claiming, falsely, that President Biden was indicting Trump, when they know full well that the president doesn’t have the power to indict anyone?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.After the second indictment of Donald Trump, some extremists in the Republican Party have made barely veiled threats of violence against their fellow citizens. People who believe in the American idea should respond with faith in the American constitutional order and open disdain for people in public life who are both dangerous and ridiculous.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
A star reporter’s break with reality
The Vision Pro is the perfect gadget for the apocalypse.
Now political polarization comes for marriage prospects.
The corrosive legacy of Silvio Berlusconi
Vigilance and ScornI made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias.I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man, a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology.It’s less funny if you have to explain it, but the idea of Kari Lake going from television anchor to cult leader after a pandemic seemed pretty on the nose, and her whole Grand Guignol act is so close to Zerbe’s melodramatic thundering that I couldn’t resist.But maybe the joke isn’t that funny. Lake may be inane, but insofar as any of her followers believe that she’s issuing a call to action, she is also dangerous. She’s not alone; after news of Trump’s indictment broke, two of the most disgraceful members of Congress, Andy Biggs and Clay Higgins, essentially called for open conflict with their fellow citizens. “We have now reached a war phase,” Biggs tweeted on Friday. “Eye for an eye,” he added, going full Hammurabi.Higgins, meanwhile, issued a tweet of paramilitary babble:
President Trump said he has “been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.”
This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this.
Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.
As Jeff Sharlet wrote in The Atlantic this weekend, Higgins is trying to sound like a militia commander, issuing orders to his troops on behalf of “rPOTUS,” or the “real president of the United States.”My first reaction to both of those tweets was basically: Whatever, Sgt. Rock. But perhaps that’s not enough. Trump and his cult followers, especially those in public life, have made threats of violence a routine part of the American political environment. (I have received many such threats over the years that I’ve been writing about Trump.) Notice, for example, how Trump has gone out of his way to name Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wife: Trump knows that Smith is a tough prosecutor who has dealt with some hard characters and is unlikely to fear a weak man like Donald Trump, so he put Smith’s wife in the public eye—and in the crosshairs of his supporters. It’s become commonplace to say this is Mafia-like behavior, but that’s something of an insult to the old-school Mafiosi who generally left family members alone when settling their beefs.As Sharlet noted, Trump’s most violent supporters are not nearly the majority they think they are, so there’s no point in fear-driven hysteria. Nevertheless, such people can be dangerous not only to their fellow citizens but to the constitutional order itself, by inducing anxiety about democracy among ordinary citizens and potential office seekers, as well as a reluctance to speak out and participate in our system of government. (Also, it takes startlingly few individuals who are willing to commit acts of violence to do real damage.)So maybe what we need is a solid balance of vigilance and scorn. National politicians gibbering their own down-home versions of “Hail Hydra” should be an ongoing scandal: Such behavior is un-American, and every supporter of American democracy should respond with the self-assured contempt that free people must bestow on the aspiring authoritarians among us.I know that some readers will object, saying that spotlighting such behavior in the media spreads its reach, but I disagree: The nature of a hyperconnected, internet-driven society means that the kind of people who admire someone like Clay Higgins already know where to find him. Higgins knows this too, which is why he sent his message on Twitter—or “in the clear,” as intelligence folks would say. He wasn’t sending instructions to putative comrades waiting for a sign; rather, he was apparently hoping that ordinary Americans would see all this spy-speak applesauce and become fearful that hidden armies are waiting to avenge the arrest of Donald Trump.In the media, every elected Republican should be asked every day about these threats, especially those from members of Congress, not because such questions will induce a sudden fit of conscience in Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell but because after the violence of January 6, 2021, the voters have a right to know if a national political party is going to stand behind members talking about “war” and pretending to issue marching orders to seditionists. (CNN’s Dana Bash tried to get an answer from Representative Jim Jordan on Sunday. It went as you’d expect, but at least she asked.)Finally, there’s nothing wrong with some dismissive scorn among sensible voters. These people are not 10 feet tall. They are, in fact, small and ridiculous. (This is why I couldn’t help but laugh when Lake hissed about the NRA; the hooded face of Matthias just popped into my head unbidden.) As I wrote more than a year ago, naming lunatics and shaming poltroons is essential to a healthy democracy. But the prodemocracy movement must fight with the confidence and maturity of adults:
Ditch all the coy, immature, and too-precious language about former President Donald Trump and the Republicans. No more GQP, no more Qevin McCarthy, no more Rethuglicans and Repuglicans. No more Drumpf. No more Orange Menace … Be the adult alternative to the bedlam around you.
Juvenile nicknames too easily blur the distinction between prodemocracy voters and the people they’re trying to defeat. If you’ve ever had to endure friends or family who parrot Fox-popular terms like Demonrats and Killary and other such nonsense, think for a moment how they instantly communicated to you that you never had to take them seriously again.
I know it’s hard to find the right balance between vigilance and alarm, between scorn and flippancy; I’m not always sure how to do it myself. It’s a line all of us find difficult to walk, because we’ve never had an American political scene so thoroughly infested with kooks, conspiracists, and would-be traitors. But remember: They are a minority, and they know it, and many of their leaders are likely more fearful—of irrelevance, of change, of failure—than anyone else. Take their threats seriously, but with the faith that American democracy was here before them and will be here after them.Related:
The congressman telling Trump supporters to “buckle up”
The new anarchy
The former Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, known for his polarizing politics and his role in multiple scandals, has died at the age of 86.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has signed a disaster-emergency declaration following the collapse, yesterday, of a section of I-95 in Philadelphia, which will potentially disrupt traffic in the area for months.
Ukraine says that its military has reclaimed seven villages in the Zaporizhzhia province and the eastern Donetsk region in its first gains since it began its counteroffensive.
Famous People
Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn manifest a successful growing season for Brooklyn’s crops with a garden party.
Photo illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic
What Reparations Actually BoughtBy Morgan Ome
In 1990, the U.S. government began mailing out envelopes, each containing a presidential letter of apology and a $20,000 check from the Treasury, to more than 82,000 Japanese Americans who, during World War II, were robbed of their homes, jobs, and rights, and incarcerated in camps. This effort, which took a decade to complete, remains a rare attempt to make reparations to a group of Americans harmed by force of law. We know how some recipients used their payment: The actor George Takei donated his redress check to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. A former incarceree named Mae Kanazawa Hara told an interviewer in 2004 that she bought an organ for her church in Madison, Wisconsin. Nikki Nojima Louis, a playwright, told me earlier this year that she used the money to pay for living expenses while pursuing her doctorate in creative writing at Florida State University. She was 65 when she decided to go back to school, and the money enabled her to move across the country from her Seattle home.
But many stories could be lost to history. My family received reparations. My grandfather, Melvin, was 6 when he was imprisoned in Tule Lake, California. As long as I’ve known about the redress effort, I’ve wondered how he felt about getting a check in the mail decades after the war.
The three biggest obstacles to convicting Trump
How to fix the government
Philosophy could have been a lot more fun.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
Read. Plato in Athens, by the scholar and translator Robin Waterfield, marks the first full-length biography of the classical Greek philosopher. Listen. Two married couples discuss buying a home together and discovering a deeper sense of community in the latest episode of the How to Talk to People.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I couldn’t mention The Omega Man without recommending it to you. It’s … not great, but it was a fun addition to Heston’s run of sci-fi pictures that included Planet of the Apes and its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (a movie that doesn’t get enough love as a great sequel, in my view), as well as Soylent Green. Filmed in 1970, The Omega Man is a strange time capsule from its era. It was set in the near future of 1977, two years after a Sino-Soviet war (which nearly happened a few years before the movie was released) sparked the use of biological weapons and wiped out most of the planet. Heston’s romance with a Black female lead—Rosalind Cash, in her first major movie role—was pretty daring for its time. The Omega Man was actually the second movie based on Richard Matheson’s classic 1954 novel, I Am Legend; the first was The Last Man on Earth in 1964, starring Vincent Price. (Frankly, both of those are better than the messy Will Smith remake released in 2007.)Critics did not love The Omega Man, but then, critics didn’t love much about cheesy early-1970s science fiction. It’s a movie best seen at a drive-in, but because those are now mostly gone, you could do worse on a rainy afternoon than stream this one and watch Heston passing his days in a deserted Los Angeles watching the documentary Woodstock over and over (no, really) before doing battle with a bunch of technology-hating ghouls.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Some families say that New York City schools are making unfounded reports to child protective services in retaliation against parents of disabled children who advocate for their children's educational needs. According to a new report from the education news organization The 74, their stories are part of a larger pattern in which New York City public school employees make thousands of allegations of abuse or neglect to child protection authorities each year—only a fraction of which are substantiated. 
New York City school teachers—like most public school teachers—are subject to mandatory reporting laws which require that school employees report any suspected abuse or neglect to child welfare authorities—called the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) in New York City. While these laws are often hailed as necessary to keep children safe and detect abuse, in fact, school employees are more likely than any other group of mandatory reporters to make an unsubstantiated claim of abuse or neglect. 
According to The 74, NYC school employees made 6,500 reports of abuse or neglect to ACS from September 2022 to February 2023, but only 15 percent of them were found to be substantiated. Parents of students with disabilities were at the center of 22 percent of those reports—though disabled children only comprise 21 percent of the student body. Anna Arons, a New York University law professor, speculated that the actual share of calls relating to students with disabilities is likely higher, due to school employees' failure to mention a student's disability in the report.
"It's probably a pretty serious undercount," Arons told The 74.
Now, some parents are claiming that, after they pushed back against their school's treatment of their disabled children, school officials retaliated by filing unsubstantiated ACS reports against them, sparking extended, invasive investigations that left families feeling traumatized. 
"We were just trying to advocate for our son and find out what happened like any parent would," Michelle Diaz, whose family was subjected to an unfounded allegation, told The 74. "This is where the retaliation started."
According to Diaz and her husband, Luis, the couple faced a report of neglect after pushing school officials to explain mysterious injuries on their 7-year-old son, Tristan, who is autistic and nonverbal. The boy had been coming home from school with bruises and scratches, which school officials insisted were self-inflicted. However, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, the Diazes found that a school employee had applied "joint compressions and massaging strategies" to their son, which they viewed as evidence of physical abuse from staff. The couple reported the injuries to police.
After Tristan missed two days of school, which the Diazes claim they called the school to have excused, a school employee reported them to ACS. While the two-month investigation turned up no evidence of mistreatment, it still left the family rattled.
"An allegation can be just like that: 1, 2, 3. And then you ruin 60 days of a family," Luis Diaz told The 74. Luis Diaz happens to work at ACS as a child welfare specialist, and he faced professional setbacks due to the investigation. "I could lose my job," he added.
The Diazes' experience is part of a larger trend. 
Paullette Healy, who helps parents during school meetings to press for disability accommodations for their children, told The 74, "Not too long after those meetings, behavior letters will come home." She says that schools will allege "there's not proper documentation for absences. And then eventually, a knock on the door from ACS. That pattern has already been established. We've seen it way too often."
Like in other parts of the country, black and Hispanic children in New York City are disproportionately likely to be subject to an ACS investigation. For example, one 2021 study found that around 20 percent of white children in New York City were the subject of an ACS investigation by the time they turn 18. For Hispanic and black children, it climbed to over 40 percent.
"They intimidate me. They bully me," Elouise Cromwell-Evans, who is black and faced an unsubstantiated ACS report related to her disabled son, told The 74. "We're a Black family in a poor neighborhood and we were homeless for five years," she added. "They're definitely placing us in a box."
The post Did NYC Schools Retaliate Against Parents Who Asked Too Many Questions? appeared first on Reason.com.

Perhaps my brain is poisoned from a decade-plus of staring at cascading social feeds of depressing news, but the first thing I noticed about Apple’s demo video for its upcoming Vision Pro headset was the haze-colored light. The promotional clip features well-dressed men and women—mostly alone in their spartanly furnished homes—bathing their eyes in lush content from the $3,500 aluminum-alloy ski goggles. Despite the bells and whistles, I fixated on the glow emanating from the windows in Apple’s painstakingly constructed demo environments: I’ve come to recognize and resent it as the golden hour of a sky tinged by wildfire smoke.As millions more know after last week, it’s impossible to forget the feeling of being enveloped by low-hanging smog. I moved out West from New York six years ago: Since then, smoke seasons have exacted a physical and psychological toll. Weather patterns grind to a halt, and time seems to stand still in the acrid haze. It doesn’t just sting your eyes and scratch your throat: It forces you, during summer’s longest, most cherished days, to retreat indoors and away from the outside world.I know this isn’t what the meticulous design geniuses at Apple were going for when they debuted the footage last Monday. The demo was clearly lit to evoke the intimacy and warmth of a late evening’s light as it slants into the double-paned bay windows of an idealized California bungalow—not the sepia-toned haze of a 400 air-quality index. I reminded myself to chill out, stop being such a doomer, and move on. But about 18 hours later, I woke up to images of the East Coast with that familiar climate-apocalypse Instagram filter. My mind wandered back to the Vision Pro, an advanced marvel of immersive technology with the primary purpose of shielding our eyes. An excellent device for an imperiled planet.[Read: Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse]Last week was, in other words, an especially weird one to unveil a future in which people with enough disposable income can retreat from the physical world into the gated-face community of a 360-degree iPhone screen. It’s easy to reflexively overanalyze the peculiar aesthetic of Apple’s presentation or the dystopia-adjacent features of the Vision Pro headset, which include an outward projection of your eyes so that people in your vicinity know when you’re gazing at them and not playing seven-dimensional Angry Birds. And it may be uncharitable to connect a marketing video to climate-disaster avoidance. Still, I struggled to watch the world’s biggest technology company lay out its vision for the future of computing and not find it cynical, even a bit apocalyptic.
A screenshot from Apple’s Vision Pro marketing video
There is a moment in Apple’s demo where we see an exhausted-looking woman on a crowded airplane. A baby is wailing in the background. She adjusts the Vision Pro: The chaos of the plane fades to the background as she becomes one with her premium content. This full immersion has an obvious appeal, but it also represents “a total concession to the screens,” as New York’s John Herrman put it. I see the Vision Pro as a play for the last available acreage of pixel real estate: Your peripheral vision.This is a decent strategy for a corporate juggernaut worth nearly $2.9 trillion. There’s a final-frontier vibe to it all—total sensory colonization. But it’s also a rather depressing turn away from Apple’s previous vision of its products. Historically, the company has marketed its transformative products as tools that help users navigate the world. In sleek promotional videos, iPhones and Apple Watches aren’t just intermediary screens: They propel people through life and enrich it at every turn. Maps, Siri search, calendar apps, and other features support the idealized, highly productive “Apple Man” as he lives efficiently and presently in his daily life. The Vision Pro’s proposition is different. It beckons its user to turn further inward. It is not a tool meant to help navigate the physical world: It is a way to tune it out.Evaluating a new technology is difficult without also considering the world that it’s dropped into. In the case of the Vision Pro, we’re talking, in part, about a world of inescapable climate emergencies that, as we saw last week, large parts of the country are unprepared for. In recent years, even the optimists in Cupertino have appeared to be grappling with this broader context, introducing Apple features such as crash detection, satellite emergency calling, extreme weather monitoring, and, recently, mental-health insights. These are features for staying safe and alive in a hostile world.Perhaps it is this tacit recognition that makes the company’s pivot to inward-facing technology feel particularly cynical. How else should one feel when they hear a tech executive utter the phrase “Your entire world is a canvas for apps?” What I do know is that transformative technologies immediately spark our imaginations and elicit strong emotions—maybe an immediate understanding that something new is possible. Here, for me, the Vision Pro succeeds. When I look at it I feel a strong and sudden pull in the wrong direction—a concession to screens at a moment when so many signs suggest challenging or reevaluating our relationships to them. When I look to the future, I feel the anxiety and uncertainty of a series of challenges that necessitates an ability to confront problems head on. The Vision Pro may be merely an expensive gadget and a gimmick, but it represents a rationale that feels almost comically ill-suited to our moment: an invitation to narrow our collective aperture at a moment that asks us to bear witness and that demands our clear, unblinking gaze.

Silvio Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics for much of the past three decades, died today, at age 86. A figure who seemed peculiar, even bizarre, in his prime has come to look more and more familiar as others, Donald Trump included, have emulated his populist approach to politics.Berlusconi, a media mogul, used his billions to buy huge political influence. He had an uncanny knack for using the medium of television to transform his country’s culture. He was notorious for a string of sordid sexual affairs, faced prosecution for multiple alleged crimes, and weakened the rule of law by failing to respect constitutional limits on his power. More than anything else, he succeeded in personalizing political conflict until the whole country seemed to be split down the middle between his supporters and his opponents.[Read: Berlusconi was Trump before Trump]Berlusconi first entered Italian politics in the aftermath of a major corruption scandal in the early 1990s that pulverized the country’s established political parties. At first, foreign observers regarded him with a mix of concern and mild bemusement: With his macho demeanor and his sexist jokes, his past as a cruise crooner and his reputation as an inveterate womanizer, Berlusconi seemed an anachronistic character—one from an 18th-century opera buffa who had somehow teleported himself to the late 20th century and was now practicing an extended work of performance art.For the first decade of his political rise, international coverage of Berlusconi tended to regard him as a figure both backward and specifically Italian. The idea that he might be a harbinger of political developments in their own country never seemed to occur to the correspondents who filed entertaining dispatches about his latest outrages to Le Monde or The New York Times.In fact, despite the influence of the past in Italy and the ways in which its culture can seem old-fashioned, the country has a long record of anticipating the political future. The city-states of medieval Italy acted as a crucial bridge between the republican traditions of the ancient world and the new attempts at collective self-government pioneered in Britain’s North American colonies in the late 18th century. In the early 20th century, the vitriolic speeches of Benito Mussolini—which also seemed at first borrowed from the commedia—were a key inspiration to even more dangerous imitators in Germany and beyond. Italy again proved to be an unexpected laboratory of politics with Berlusconi’s rise.[Yascha Mounk: The more you watch, the more you vote populist]Berlusconi rode to power by exploiting a backlash against real institutional shortcomings. His enemies consistently underestimated him because of his crassness, and drove voters into his arms by making all too evident their disdain for his supporters. He masterfully made political conflicts all about him and turned judicial proceedings to his advantage by casting himself as a martyr, likening himself to Jesus Christ. Although he consistently failed to deliver on his promises to reverse economic stagnation and political decline, he was able to retain the loyalty of a large segment of the population and dominate Italian politics for two decades.Berlusconi’s greatest triumph is not that he became prime minister of Italy on three occasions, or that he was a senator when he died, or that he remained a free man and one of the richest people in the country despite all the prosecutions—and convictions. It is that he was the principal founder of a tradition of demagogic politics that has defined the modern era in some of the world’s largest democracies, including Turkey, Brazil, India, and even the United States.In his final years, Berlusconi’s influence did start to fade. His last stint as prime minister came to an end when his mismanagement of the country’s public finances, and the markets’ lack of trust in his ability to implement reforms, cost him majority support in Parliament. His party, Forza Italia—cannily named after Italian soccer fans’ chant for their national team—steadily shrank; it held 47 percent of the vote in 2008 but only 8 percent in 2022.That is the good news: Even larger-than-life populists can eventually lose their hold over a political system. By the time he died, Berlusconi was the leader of a minor coalition partner in a government that mostly responded to his intemperate demands with condescending smiles.But there is also bad news: The demise of populists like Berlusconi rarely turns out to be the salvation for which their detractors long. Berlusconi’s corrosive influence on the Italian political system is evident, and his departure will likely do little to heal its divisions.[Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Welcome to the age of lawless masculinity]The two remaining leaders of Italy’s far right, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, may have fewer conflicts of interest or personal reasons to favor a weak judiciary. But they also have a much greater ideological commitment to the hard right—and a deeper admiration for leaders such as Viktor Orbán and (in Salvini’s case) Vladimir Putin. And that is part of a wider trend.Berlusconi demonstrated that institutional guardrails are, even in supposedly consolidated democracies, much weaker than politicians and political scientists had assumed. The threat he embodied was in his example; he himself remained a deeply personalist politician, who relied on his charisma and cared mostly about his own interests. Berlusconi’s successors are just as willing to bend the rules or exploit their image, but for purposes that could do much more severe damage.

Virtually all Republican senators and members of the House are defending former President Donald Trump, who was indicted on 37 counts relating to his storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. (One exception: Mitt Romney, who said that Trump "brought these charges on himself.") So too are many of Trump's rivals for the 2024 nomination; shedding crocodile tears, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis condemned the weaponization of federal law enforcement, while tech entrepreneur and long-shot candidate Vivek Ramaswamy vowed to pardon Trump if he wins the presidency.
But Trump's own attorney general, Bill Barr, thinks the indictment is "very, very damning." During an interview on Fox News Sunday, Barr said that he was shocked "by the degree of sensitivity of these documents, and how many there were, frankly." He said that federal authorities had every right to recover the documents, which included national security briefings prepared by government officials.

Trump's former AG Bill Barr to @ShannonBream: "I think the counts under the Espionage Act … are solid counts … If even half of it is true, then he's toast. It's a very detailed indictment, and it's very, very damning."
 pic.twitter.com/nhnWcXK1io
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 11, 2023

Barr conceded that Democrats had unfairly target Trump in the past, but he said it's different this time.
"Yes, he's been a victim in the past, and yes, his adversaries have obsessively pursued him with phony claims, and I've been at his side defending him when he is a victim," said Barr. "But this is much different. He is not a victim here. He was totally wrong that he had the right to have those documents."
Trump also could have easily avoided the current situation by simply returning the documents when asked. Even some of his most ardent backers in the Republican Party are frustrated that he would put himself in this position—and force them on the defensive—so incautiously. But the dynamics of the conservative movement are such that defending Trump at all costs is simply what the base demands.
Some commentators who have little personal love for Trump are nevertheless concerned at the thought of prosecuting him under the Espionage Act. Former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) tweeted that the Espionage Act has a history being abused by law enforcement. Writing for The Free Press, Eli Lake notes that the law "does not distinguish between actual spies—people who give or sell state secrets to a foreign power—and those who seek to inform the American people about their government's excesses and abuses."
"In this respect, the law is a loaded gun against modern journalism," Lake writes.

FREE MINDS
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Lex Fridman's podcast last week, fielding questions about artificial intelligence, free speech, and the impact of the Twitter Files. Zuckerberg tried—and seems to have failed—to reassure Fridman that social media companies rather than the government were ultimately in the driver's seat when it comes to moderating content.
"There's so much pressure from all sides that any specific thing that someone says isn't really adding that much more to the mix," said Zuckerberg. "There's obviously a lot of people who think that we should be censoring more content. There are a lot of people who think we should be censoring less content. There are all kinds of groups involved in these debates. There are elected officials, the agencies, the medias, activist groups."
The fact that different interest groups—both within the federal government and outside it—are all attempting to exert influence on the platforms means that they aren't captured by a specific entity, in Zuckerberg's view. But for people who worry about the pressure on the companies in general, regardless of which direction it's coming from, Zuckerberg's comments were hardly encouraging.
Zuckerberg also accused the government health officials of losing the trust of the American people by prematurely shutting off debate on COVID-19 topics—an implicit suggestion that the CEO perhaps regrets some of his company's moderation decisions.

"Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health implications, but there hadn't been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions," said Zuckerberg. "Unfortunately, I think a lot of the kind of establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true. That stuff is really tough, right? It really undermines trust."

Throughout the pandemic, CNN's on-air talent largely defended COVID-19 lockdowns as necessary for health and safety. But behind the scenes, a top executive at the network allegedly asked then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo to meet with an executive at CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery, about reopening movie theaters.
That's according to Semafor's Maxwell Tani, who reports that the legal dispute between CNN and former news anchor Chris Cuomo, the Democratic governor's brother, has produced revealing text messages. Editorially, CNN eagerly embraced the idea that opening up the economy was reckless in the face of COVID-19. But network executive Allison Gollust—herself involved in a secret romance with former CNN boss Jeff Zucker—sent the governor a message on September 22, 2020, asking him about movie theaters.
At the time, WarnerMedia was hoping for a big hit with the Christopher Nolan film, Tenet. Tani writes:
The September 22, 2020 texts are between Governor Cuomo and CNN's then-chief marketing officer, Allison Gollust. She had left his office years earlier for CNN but kept in frequent touch, helping to arrange appearances on CNN shows and smoothing over bumps when the governor was double-booked on other networks.
But while Gollust was assisting the network's programming side, that day she crossed over into advocating for the business interests of CNN's parent company, texting a request that the governor speak to WarnerMedia's studio chief, Ann Sarnoff.
"She's bummed you don't open theaters in NY, but perhaps you can hear her out," Gollust said in the message, which was read to Semafor by a person with firsthand access to the exchange.
The next day, Cuomo heeded Gollust's request and called Sarnoff, who lobbied the governor to loosen restrictions on movie theaters, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Chris Cuomo has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against CNN for $125 million.
QUICK HITS

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has died.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive is underway.
In National Review, Ajit Pai looks back at the end of net neutrality and notes that the internet is still here.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on race-based admissions for colleges any day now.
Tennis star Novak Djokovic, who was denied entry to the U.S. because of his unvaccinated status, won the French Open.
A major highway collapsed in Philadelphia due to a tanker fire underneath it.
Cops and aliens.

The post Trump's Own Attorney General Says Indictment Is 'Very, Very Damning' appeared first on Reason.com.

But speaking of forest fires, shall we get to that latest Trump indictment?

Gail: We’re obviously in history-making territory — first former president indicted in a criminal case brought by the federal government. And this one, which involves trying to stash away official papers he’d been told were government property, is certainly a classic Trump combination of shocking and stupid.

Bret: Or sinister and self-serving. I’m still not sure.

Gail: Wow, the pictures of those boxes of classified documents piled up around the toilet …

Bret: Really puts a new spin on the term “anal retentive.”

Gail: I did sorta hope we’d start the cosmic Trump prosecutions with one of the other big charges — trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election by pressing the Georgia secretary of state to “find” more votes and encouraging the Jan. 6 insurrection do seem more … important.

You?

Bret: Three thoughts, Gail. The first is that Jack Smith, the special counsel, has produced irrefutable proof that Trump knew that he possessed, as the former president himself put it, “secret information” that he could have declassified when he was in office but didn’t. That may be about as close to a slam dunk, legally speaking, as we’re ever going to get in a case like this.

Gail: True, but I want shockingly terrible besides terribly illegal. Go on.

Bret: The second thought is that a special counsel appointed by President Biden’s attorney general is bringing a criminal case against the president’s presumptive opponent in next year’s election. To many Republicans, this will smack of a bald attempt to politicize justice and criminalize politics — the very thing Trump was accused of doing in his first impeachment. Trump will surely use this to his political advantage and, as the writer Damon Linker noted in a perceptive guest essay last week, will probably see his primary poll numbers jump yet again.

The Saudi government’s scheme to purchase the entire professional sport of golf is horrendous in and of itself. The kingdom has taken “sportswashing” to a new level, throwing so much money at the PGA Tour that it abandoned its alleged concern for human rights, betrayed its most loyal players and tossed aside the 9/11 families it had pretended to support while secretly negotiating this sellout. But there are larger geopolitical issues at play.

One major reason Saudi Arabia is especially flush with cash — enough to buy entire sports leagues — is that the Saudi government is taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to fleece the West. Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Riyadh has been using its power over energy markets to keep oil prices artificially high, with the costs paid by consumers in already struggling economies in the United States and Europe. To make even more money, Riyadh buys cheaper oil from Russia for its domestic use, freeing up more of its own for export at sky-high margins. This, in turn, gives Russian President Vladimir Putin funds to continue waging war and withstand Western sanctions. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, is then spending some of these war profits to buy influence in the West to neuter any opposition to his anti-Western strategy.

“The war in Ukraine has precipitated a massive wealth transfer, hundreds of billions of dollars, from consumers in democratic countries to oil-producing states, especially Saudi Arabia,” said former congressman and State Department official Tom Malinowski. “Do they plan to use any of this windfall to help us support and reconstruct Ukraine, or will they waste all of it on vanity cities in the desert and political influence operations in the United States? This should matter greatly to us.”

The war in Ukraine has been a huge bonanza for the Saudis. Since Russia invaded, OPEC under Saudi leadership has repeatedly cut production, defying U.S. requests and jacking up the prices even more. Saudi state oil company Aramco made a record $161.1 billion in profit last year, up 47 percent from 2021. Meanwhile, Riyadh has given Ukraine a measly $400 million in humanitarian aid.

Yasir Al-Rumayyan, a close friend of MBS and the board chairman of Aramco, is set to become the boss of the newly merged for-profit golf enterprise that will combine the PGA Tour with the Saudi-funded LIV Tour and the DP World Tour. He also is the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), the sole funder of the new company. You don’t need a map to follow the money here.

To be sure, the Saudis were already rich, and they have a long history of buying off Westerners through lobbying, sports purchases, media investments and other influence plays. The $2 billion the PIF reportedly invested in Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s private equity firm cannot be seen as anything but direct interference in U.S. politics through the instrument of Trump and his family.

The PGA Tour deal represents an escalation of this strategy. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me the Saudis have already been using golf for U.S. political interference. Now, he said, he expects them to greatly expand that effort. It’s likely no accident that Trump perfectly predicted the golf merger last year. He stands to financially benefit from it, as well, through preferential terms for hosting events at his own organization’s golf clubs.

“The Saudis have clearly been using LIV to funnel cash to the likely Republican nominee for president as a way to continue to keep him on their good side,” Murphy told me. “Now, will they be able to wash that money through the PGA? Will the PGA become the means by which a foreign government puts money in the pocket of American political figures?”

Murphy is calling for scrutiny of the merger on national security grounds. “There are enormous consequences that come with a foreign dictatorship, often with national security interests totally contrary to American interests, owning a major American sport,” he said. Lawmakers are calling on federal regulators to intervene in the deal, and congressional investigations are also on the table.

The Biden White House surely knows that Saudi Arabia is funding the president’s opponents, which might partially explain (along with geopolitical factors) the president’s complete reversal of his campaign promise to treat MBS as a “pariah.” But the administration should also realize that the Saudis are interfering in U.S. politics to support people who, if elected, would stop U.S. support for Ukraine.

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Saudi Arabia for three days last week, including a meeting with MBS, the top agenda items were Israeli-Arab relations, the fight against the Islamic State, nuclear power deals and arms sales. There’s no indication that Ukraine was a priority in the meetings or that the PGA Tour came up at all.

The Saudi golf grab must be understood not just as a human rights or sportswashing story. It’s key to Saudi Arabia’s attempts to purchase political cover as it shifts its foreign policy away from the West and toward Russia, China and Iran. But don’t be fooled. MBS has clearly chosen a side in the struggle between democracies and autocracies — and it is not with the United States or Ukraine.

The very least the Saudi regime could do is to take some of its ill-gotten Ukraine war gains and use them to help Ukraine, above all through rebuilding of its infrastructure and economy. Buying the PGA Tour is a brazen move, but it won’t fix Saudi Arabia’s image or obscure the fact that MBS and his cronies have abused Ukraine’s suffering to line their pockets.

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As Europe’s leaders anxiously await the results of Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive, it is notable that Aleksandr Dugin’s latest essay, in which he calls for Russia’s total mobilisation, opens by citing Ernst Jünger’s influential 1932 essay The Worker on the same topic. Though dismissed by Jünger’s biographer Thomas Nevinin in 1996, back when History had ended, as “pseudoprophecy”, because “democracy has twice within this century triumphed, apparently, over its totalitarian foes,” few writers in 2023 would display such certainty.
If anything, Jünger’s writings, along with those of other thinkers of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, seem to foreshadow the political ferment and geopolitical fault lines of today. As Dugin observes in his rambling and only partly comprehensible essay, published last Friday, “if we turn to Jünger’s idea of total mobilisation in a Heideggerian manner, then we get an existential theory of mobilisation”, as “when death is before us and we don’t run away from it and we don’t turn our backs on it, that’s when we exist authentically. In a sense, this can be described both as a total mobilisation on an existential level and as what I would call an awakening.”
Ernst Jünger in 1920
Just as, in The Worker, Junger foresaw the fusion of man and technology in the trenches of the First World War heralding the death of bourgeois liberal values and the birth of a new “age of Titans”, Dugin asserts that Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine is “awakening” Russian society, shifting it from a period of “inauthenticity” to one of “authenticity”. In Dugin’s assessment, Russia’s overt enemy, the Ukrainian people, barely count, now being something less than human. Instead, in a wild perversion of Schmitt’s thought, the war has revealed “the very real, absolute Enemy of the human race, to which only theological categories are supposed to be applied” — because “we thought we were fighting enemies in Ukraine, but we ended up in hell”.
That enemy, that hell, is us: “the current postmodern globalist West”, a society “degenerating as humans” where “transgender parades already hardly allow us to understand what kind of species we are dealing with”. Meanwhile, “posthumanist formations, i.e., cyborgs, are to follow” because “Western globalist circles are the last transitional state from human being to algae”.
While Dugin’s work is often carried by Russia’s state propaganda channel RT, his influence within Putin’s regime has been vastly overstated. If anything, the apocalyptic rhetoric he applies to the Ukraine war has greater currency in the West, particularly among the American populist Right. Back in 2014, as noted by the Ukrainian scholar of Radical Right intellectual thought Anton Shekhovtsov, now an influential Twitter personality in the war’s online front, Dugin created a narrative which consisted of four major ideas: “first, that Atlanticists brought Nazis to power in Ukraine thus declaring a war on Russia; secondly, that the interim government was a Nazi junta and had no legitimacy; thirdly, that Ukraine did not exist anymore; and finally, that Russia must act decisively to prevent the Atlanticists from establishing control over the entire territory of former Ukraine”.

These arguments are now as wearily familiar to anyone who follows the war on English-language social media as they are to Russians themselves. When Tucker Carlson can describe, as he did last week, Zelenskyy not as the democratically elected leader of a nation fighting invasion, but instead as “sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock”, he has adopted, consciously or not, a Dugin-like framing of Russia’s aggression against some existential evil. If Dugin remains an outsider of sorts in Russia, then, he has nevertheless helped to shape both the contours of the war in Ukraine itself and international perceptions of it. For a marginal outsider, Dugin certainly seems influential.
In any case, as the editor of CodaStory Natalia Anteleva correctly observes, “the argument about whether or not Putin personally reads Dugin is somewhat irrelevant because Dugin is plenty relevant to the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk separatist movements, who consider him a teacher”. As Shekhovtsov notes, Dugin’s previously state-funded Eurasian Youth Union (or ESM) was prominently involved in the initial 2014 stages of the Ukraine war, and “strengthened the pro-Russian separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine, fuelled ethnic and social tensions, launched disinformation actions and declared alternative political centres”. Dugin’s ESM acolytes took up prominent positions in the new separatist republics: Aleksandr Proselkov, leader of the ESM’s cell in Russia’s Southern Federal District, became Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), before his mysterious death in 2014, while ESM activist Andriy Purhin became the DNR’s first Vice Prime Minister.
Igor Girkin, or “Strelkov”(Getty Images)
Other fringe political figures on the edges of Dugin’s circle achieved prominence in both stages of the Ukraine war: the Russian adventurer Igor Girkin or “Strelkov” is a familiar name to Ukraine-watchers, first as the DNR’s Minister of Defence, and latterly as a military analyst and harsh critic of Putin’s shambolic prosecution of the current invasion. But for Dugin, Girkin is something else entirely, the mystical embodiment of “the Russian myth”, a “fearless Russian Orthodox Warrior heading to a Sacred War on his own accord” who by seizing Slovyansk “like D’Annunzio in Fiume” appeared on history’s stage as “the ghost of a true Russia” to guide Russia into its glorious Eurasian future.
With his opaque political philosophy merging both the esoteric Traditionalism of René Guénon (whose acolytes include both our own King Charles and, seemingly, Ukraine’s chief of intelligence Kyrylo Budanov) and an interpretation of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution which tips more sharply into fascism than the original, Dugin embodies the strange ferment of ideas which attended the fall of the Soviet Union. As the scholar of Traditionalism Mark Sedgwick observes of the philosophy, “in the West, it has generally appealed to intellectuals whose understanding of modernity has led them to disenchantment with it and alienation from it”. This makes them marginal figures in a broader political scene, but “for those with experience of Soviet modernity, however, Traditionalism could very easily seem to present an entirely accurate analysis”. After all, “nowhere was the loss of the sacred more dramatic than in the officially atheist Soviet Union, and nowhere else were the two substitute cults of science and progress more assiduously advanced, and nowhere else was the cult of progress more obviously illusory.”
More from this authorBoomer Europe is dyingBy Aris Roussinos
Sedgwick’s insight is the key to understanding the influence of radical Right-wing, anti-modernist and Conservative Revolutionary thought on both sides in the Ukraine war, lost in the tiresome and intellectually sterile debate over which side contains the greater number of “fascists”. Kept isolated by Communism from the development of the post-war liberalism which still maintains a faltering hold on Western political discourse, as Communism discredited itself, radical intellectuals in the post-Soviet sphere turned their attention to the last great intellectual attempt to transcend liberal modernity, the Conservative Revolution, until recently discredited in the West by Germany’s subsequent, disastrous Nazi interlude.
In this story, Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking second city of Kharkiv, birthplace of both Ukraine’s nationalist Azov movement and hometown of Dugin’s early patron, the Russian National Bolshevik provocateur Edvard Limonov, plays a significant role. Even now, Kharkiv functions as the organising base for the Azov-linked exiled Russian ultranationalists and neo-Nazis fighting Putin’s invasion through their incursions into Russia’s Belgorod. As the Kharkiv writer Anatoly Voronin observes, the city’s status as an ethnic and cultural borderland between Russia and Ukraine forged an unusual hybrid identity, and a form of nationalism quite distinct from that of western Ukraine, where both Russian and Ukrainian radical Right intellectuals interacted with each other in shaping their worldviews. As Voronin asks: “how do we explain the generally good relations between Dugin and various Ukrainian Right-wingers in the 2000s? No one in ‘Azov’ ever denied the profound influence Dugin had on young [Azov leader] Andriy Biletsky.”
Dugin’s influence, funded by Putin’s government, within the Ukrainian dissident political scene of the 2000s included cooperation with the poet and Right-wing activist Dmytro Korchynsky of the Orthodox fundamentalist Bratsvo party (whose militia is now fighting Russia in the east; as an aside, a young American volunteer with them I met in Kharkiv complained his fellow fighters dragged him to Orthodox mass early every morning). Dugin even found favour with the fascinating, complex Oleksey Arestovych, until recently Zelenskyy’s strategic advisor, but back then a Eurasianist opponent of Ukraine’s relationship with Nato and the West. Dugin’s original ambivalent stance on Ukrainian nationalism allowed for a degree of influence perhaps surprising now, broken only by his sudden, dramatic turn towards denial of Ukraine’s very existence. Nevertheless, though counterintuitive today, fringe Right-wing political ideas then possessed both unusual reach and strange, overlapping ambiguities.
The influence of both Dugin and of the German Conservative Revolution is perhaps best embodied in the fascinating political career of the Azov movement’s intellectual star, the Kharkiv native and “first lady of Ukrainian nationalism” Olena Semenyaka. Described by her professors at Kyiv-Mohyla University as “a brilliant student, reserved, and introverted but committed to her work”, Semenyaka’s PhD thesis — “The Transformation of the Conservative Revolutionary Subject in Ernst Jünger’s Work, from the Worker to Anarch in Ernst Jünger’s Creativity” — revolved around Jünger’s relevance to the new world she saw dawning in the 21st century. As the analyst Adrien Nonjon observes, “Semenyaka rose to popularity in the Duginian Traditionalist movement thanks to her article, ‘Conservative Revolution as Mythological Modernism’, published in volume 4 of Aleksandr Dugin’s anthology, In Search of the Dark Logos. She was invited to speak at the international conference Against the Post-Modern World, which was organised at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) in 2011 by the Tradition Center chaired by Dugin”.
Aleksandr Dugin with Olena Semenyaka (credit @leonidragozin)
While Semenyaka now dismisses her relationship with Dugin as merely a one-off meeting, her early work, such as 2011’s “Transformation of Ernst Junger’s alternative to the bourgeois individual”, approvingly cites Dugin’s definitions of Conservativism, just as her geopolitical worldview, like Dugin’s, derives from the British political theorist Halford Mackinder’s concept of the World Island, far more influential in Russian Eurasianist thought than it ever was in its homeland. Dugin’s shadow looms over Semenyaka’s writing and speeches, which can often be read as a conscious rejection of her former mentor following the two widely divergent paths each took as a result of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution. Just as Ukrainian and Russian commentators battle to convince international observers that the other side are the real fascists, Dugin and Semenyaka compete to convince the European and American radical Right that the other side are the real liberals. Yet each, despite their two respective nationalist projects being locked in an existential war against each other, share many of the same reference points in the Conservative Revolution, particularly their use of Jünger’s The Worker as a lodestone.
Suggested readingThe plan behind Ukraine's counteroffensiveBy David Patrikarakos
Often incorrectly dismissed as a Nazi, Semenyaka instead occupies a far more interesting intellectual space as a Conservative Revolutionary whose concept of a pan-European political sphere distinct from an Asiatic Russia and a liberal American-led West derives directly from Jünger’s political thought. As Semenyaka writes, “the point of Ernst Jünger, who offered one of the earliest and most insightful descriptions of the coming totalitarian orders in his interwar classic treatise The Worker… is that the difference between the two regimes which rivalled for the planetary domination in the 20th century and the post-war neo-liberal order, in fact, is not so striking.” For Semenyaka, the value of Jünger in understanding the present is unparalleled: “it is his creativity that is considered the brightest example of the alternative of the Enlightenment project of modernisation and is widely known for its futuristic and even forecasting value”.
As she wrote in her intellectual autobiography published on the American White Nationalist website Countercurrents, the Azov movement offers a means to translate her academic interests into real-world politics: “I could say that what I studied in theory, I developed in practice. This is the Third Way, the Conservative Revolution, but revived for today. All of these theorists were also advocates of pan-Europeanism, and that is what our projects are all about.” As she remarks in an explicit rejection of Dugin’s work, “our goal is clear: it is the creation of the sovereign military and political Paneuropean bloc (confederation) which continues the classic tradition of the European third geopolitical way. That’s why Prof. Dugin is wrong by pretending by means of his Fourth Political Theory that the third geopolitical way is no longer possible and that all attempts to restore the European superpower, geopolitical subjectivity and the leading positions in the ‘unipolar’ world are ‘anti-Russian’ encroachments in the service of American imperialism.” For Semenyaka as for Dugin, as she observes in her essay on Black Metal, the goal of the Conservative Revolution is “to cancel not only the era of Enlightenment, but also that of Renaissance and Reformation. In other words, it aims at building the New Middle Ages”.
Mocking Girkin’s marginality, Semenyaka instead posits Azov’s National Corps as the engine of history, the “vanguard of the Ukrainian nationalism of the new generation which offers the alternative both to the West and Putin’s Russian Federation.” In Semenyaka’s assessment, “According to Jünger’s forecast, the titans will reign throughout the entire 21st century, but then the gods will return, casting the titans in the Tartarus again, but also completing the eventual decline of the anthropocentric history which began with WW1.” It is in this process that the Azov movement can play its historical role, she believes: “That’s why, on a global scale, as pompous and surreal as it may sound, we will feel a relief only when we hasten the coming of a new metahistorical aeon.”
More from this authorMy part in Vice's downfallBy Aris Roussinos
When I interviewed Semenyaka back in 2019, she had just published her own translated selection of Jünger’s writing to be distributed among soldiers at the front. At the time, I thought her prediction of a coming great war against Russia, in which the West would be embroiled and in which Ukraine would forge a deeper cultural and defence relationship with Poland and the Baltic states as part of her Intermarium project, was a wild and unlikely fantasy. But the Azov movement, though still politically marginal, has been significantly boosted by Russia’s invasion, in numbers, military power and in its reputation as dogged defenders of the Ukrainian homeland, as during the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal. Azov offshoots, such as Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade and Kharkiv’s Kraken Regiment, play prominent roles in the war, and can reasonably hope to trade it for political capital — however the war ends.
Whatever the strange ambiguities of their earlier relationship, Dugin and Ukraine’s nationalist intellectuals like Semenyaka are now bitter opponents, locked in an existential conflict against each other, in a sort of esoteric Rightist shadow war distinct from but embedded within the far greater Ukraine tragedy. When the Russian state accused Azov of assassinating Dugin’s daughter Dariya Dugina — a still unproven claim — it only highlighted the strange intertwining of Russian and Ukrainian radical Right-wing politics. On the one hand, these are wildly obscure intellectual currents on the fringes of Right-wing thought; on the other, Western liberals cheering on the Russian Volunteer Corps’s raids on Belgorod, like American Republicans regurgitating Dugin’s portrayal of Zelenskyy as an incarnation of evil, have each found their own political personas influenced by them, demonstrating the strange ability of fringe politics to shape the wider world.
While Dugin’s apocalyptic worldview is now worryingly indistinguishable from that of the Russian state as a whole, Semenyaka’s, while fascinating, remains marginal in Ukraine. Yet each embodies the unexpected resurgence of esoteric Rightist ideas from the early 20th century in a hypermodern war that looks set to define the contours of modern Europe. Far from obscure 20th century marginalia, Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution looks more relevant than ever: sometimes, history is written on the fringes.

Tomiwa Owolade is a writer and author of the forthcoming book This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tomiwa Owolade discuss how some popular forms of anti-racist thinking can obscure which groups are struggling most; how Labour MP Diane Abbott’s response to an article of Owolade’s in The Guardian led to the Labour MP’s formal censure by her party; and what Americans can learn from Britain on issues of race (and Britons from America).The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Your new book, which is based on an article you originally wrote in Persuasion, is called This Is Not America. What do people get wrong when they see the whole world through the lens of America's very particular racial history in racial discourse?Tomiwa Owolade: They lose sight of the particular racial dynamics of their own country. If they look at their own country, principally or even partly through an American perspective, in the case of the UK, what they get wrong, or what they lose sight of, is the fact that the black British population is distinctive from the black American population. So the black British population, in contrast to the black American population, is very much an immigrant community, or I should say, communities, which is something that I emphasize in my book. So rather than looking at the black British population as a singular group, or singular identity, what I tried to emphasize in my book and much of my writing is the diversity of that label itself. But I would say that it's principally an immigrant identity, and this is in stark contrast to the black American population. So the overwhelming majority of black Americans can trace their ancestry to enslaved Africans who were transported to the new world between the 17th and the 19th centuries. Whereas in the UK as of today, the overwhelming majority of black British people are either immigrants from Africa or the children of immigrants from Africa. Up until 25 or 30 years ago, the majority of black British people were black Caribbeans, people from countries like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and other Caribbean islands. But there's been a massive influx of immigration to the UK over the past 25-30 years, which has completely changed the demographic makeup of the black British population. As of today, there are twice as many black African people as there are black Caribbean people. And I don't think many people know this, even people living in the UK.Mounk: I mean, black Americans are as American as it gets; on average, they have ancestors who've been in the country for longer than white Americans. How does it change the dynamic when a large portion of black people in the UK are relatively recent immigrants or the descendants of relatively recent immigrants? In a way, that displaces the question to a broader debate that we’re having in the West about immigration. In my last book, The Great Experiment, I've been arguing that we're overly pessimistic about the socio-economic progress of immigrants both on the right and on the left. On the right, sometimes people like to imply or say outright that these immigrants are not going to succeed because they somehow come from the wrong kinds of places, that they’re inferior; the left disagrees with that strongly but likes to emphasize racism and injustice and ends up coming to a similarly pessimistic conclusion—that these immigrants can't succeed because of how terribly unjust our societies are. My understanding, at least from the growing immigration groups of black people in the United Kingdom (for example, British Nigerians, which I understand is your heritage as well), is that that argument applies—they’re actually very successful, and in some cases, they may even out earn white British people at this point.Owolade: Yes, in terms of educational outcomes, for example, black African students do outperform white British students as of today, and this is true of other immigrant communities as well—British Chinese and British Indian students also outperform white British students in terms of educational outcomes. And this is true of the US as well. But what I find striking is that whilst black African students do well in education, black Caribbean boys in particular tend to do less well. And what I argue in the book is that if we genuinely care about the inequalities in our society, we need to be sensitive to the fact that not all black people are the same, which sounds like a very banal and obvious point to make. But I think the problem with a lot of anti-racist activism today is that many well-meaning progressive and liberal people tend to homogenize black people. They talk of black people in general terms rather than being specific in their focus. For example, the experiences of black Caribbean boys is very different to the experiences of black West African girls in schools. The experiences of black Caribbean men, likewise, are very different from the experiences of black West African women, especially if they are educated women. The experiences of refugees to the UK from Somalia or Congo is likewise very different to the experiences of economic migrants from Ghana and Nigeria. And I think if we genuinely care about the inequalities in our society, we need to be mindful of these differences because we can therefore have a more targeted approach to tackling any form of discrimination, any form of poverty, any form of anything that hinders the flourishing of any particular community. But we need to be mindful of those differences. And I think we also need to be mindful of those differences as well, because even though anti-racism needs to take into account racial and ethnic differences, I think that to entirely define an individual simply in terms of their race or ethnicity denigrates the humanity of that individual. And I think in order to affirm the irreducible dignity of each individual, we need to resist the temptation of defining that individual entirely through their race or ethnicity.Another major difference between the UK and the US is that in terms of things like school, and also many other social institutions in many cases, in the US, the main dividing line is race; whereas in the UK, it's class. For example, I have a brother that lives in America, and was recently married to a black American woman. The wedding was last December, and she invited over 70 guests to Nigeria for the wedding. And I was struck by this, but then I remembered that, in the United States, if you're a black person, it's much easier to have an entirely black social circle, especially if you're a black person living in the South, partly due to the legacy of segregation. And also partly because there are so many American cities across the South where the majority of the population is black. Whereas in the UK, the city with the largest share of black people is London. And the percentage of black people in London is something like 13 or 14%. In my own experience of going to a state secondary school, a comprehensive school in London, one thing I found was that the white working class kids in my school were friendly with many ethnic minority kids. And also the white middle class kids in my school were friendly with many ethnic minority kids. But the white middle class kids and the white working class kids never really interacted with each other. Even in high state comprehensive school, the kids segregated themselves on the basis of class rather than race. I think that's indicative of a wider problem in the UK, which is that class is still one of the main social dividing lines. I think that the experiences of, say, a privately educated, black African man that works as a banker, a lawyer or a doctor is extremely different to that of a black Caribbean man who went to a state school and now works in a working class job. We need to be more mindful of these differences, rather than just saying that, on the basis of the fact that they're both black, they necessarily share the same experiences.Mounk: One way of turning this into a slogan is that in America, race beats class, and in Britain, class beats race. Obviously, it’s a little bit more complicated, but it allows for a different form of integration within the UK, as you were implying; often the more working class British person who comes from the Caribbean, for example, might integrate with more working class Londoners. There’s a lot of intermarriage, actually, between working class Londoners and descendents of immigrants from Jamaica and so on. And that’s made a little bit easier by a certain kind of mutual antipathy towards the snooty middle or upper class that is British working class culture.Owolade: Exactly. In particular, in the decades after the Second World War, many of the Irish working class intermarried and were friendly in many other ways with the black Caribbean working class. And a part of that was definitely the fact that Irish people have been oppressed by the British. The Irish were a colonized people. They do share that affinity with black Caribbean people. And I think it's also worth mentioning that as well, because when you look at the typical Irish person, you say, “Oh, well, that's a white person.” And the fact that Irish people have been oppressed illustrates that when we think about race, it's not just a black and white, or white and “people of color” binary. It's more nuanced and it's more complicated than that. Because when I was growing up as a teenager, there was this fashionable belief that I encountered, which is that you can only be a victim of racism if you are a black or brown person. If you are racialized as white, you can't be a victim of racism. You can be a victim of prejudice., but you can't be a victim of racism because the society that we live in privileges white people. And I soon realized that this was completely nonsensical for a few reasons, because many groups that are racialized as white still encounter racism because racists think of them as inferior. The most obvious example is anti-Semitism, which I've written about recently. Mounk: You're basically baiting me to ask a question that I was going to ask in any case, which is that you recently found yourself at the center of a major political controversy in Britain. You wrote, as I understand it, an article in The Guardian about a study showing that there is persistent racism in the United Kingdom against black people and immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere, but also against Jews, the Traveller people and the Irish. And then Diane Abbott, a far left Labour politician who was one of our closest allies of Jeremy Corbyn, wrote a letter responding to this that utterly denied the possibility of genuine racism against Jews, Traveller people, and against other groups. And Keir Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn’s successor as leader of the Labour Party, removed the whip from her, which is to say that she can no longer sit as a part of the Labour parliamentary group in the House of Commons. Why do you think that Diane Abbott was wrong about this? Owolade: Some people say that anti-Semitism isn't a form of racism; it's a form of religious prejudice. I think the reason why she was wrong about this is that anti-Semites themselves see Jewish people as a race, and an inferior race. And this is also true of racism against other ethnic minority groups that are often racialized as whites.When Diane Abbott wrote that letter in response to my column, she used Jim Crow America as an example, saying that Jewish people were not told to sit at the back of the bus. Historically, that's also slightly wrong because some Jewish people, I believe, were actually lynched as well in the South. But that's a separate thing. I think what I found striking about what Diane Abbott said is that she basically took to the logical conclusion a kind of assumption that's been internalized by a lot of the progressive, anti-racist left, which is to see race and racism in this purely binary way, as white and non-whites. And I think another problem with seeing racism in that way is that it also presupposes that there is this coherent category called “white people” as well. That white people in the United States of America share the same level of privilege as white people, say in Eastern or Southern Europe, in countries that have a completely different set of historical narratives and circumstances, cultures and demographics. And to look at the world in that way is, I think, illustrative of a lack of curiosity and also of a kind of dogmatism which I think that any inquisitive and curious person should always try to resist.If there is any positive to be to be taken from this rather sad and slightly tawdry issue it is that it brings light to what I tried to argue in my initial column, which is that we need to be more multidimensional, more nuanced and more sophisticated in our approach to racism and racial discrimination. And I think Diane Abbott’s response illustrates why that's an important thing to be. I know you've got mostly American listeners, but Abbott is seen as an icon of the far left. She's seen as a kind of pioneer as well: she was the very first black female member of Parliament and she's been a member of Parliament for 36 years. So she's very much part of the left wing establishment in the UK. For her to express such a patently absurd and also strange view, to say that Jewish people and other minority groups often racialized as whites can't be victims of racism, illustrates just how pervasive that kind of thinking has got on the left.Mounk: I want to return to one of the earlier strands of the conversation. You were suggesting that a lot of the more recent immigrants, especially from countries in East and West Africa, are doing much better than immigrants from the Caribbean, for example. Why is that? What is the difference in either origin, or in timing, that helps to explain these different socioeconomic outcomes.Is it similar to the United States in that the group of people who's coming in from Kenya or Nigeria is more selective in terms of how hard it is to get a visa from those countries? Or is part of it about the timing where perhaps the structural obstacles that make it hard for people to succeed 40 or 50 years ago, when a lot of Caribbean immigrants came to the country, were just actually much, much worse than they are today?Owolade: I think the timing is definitely a big part of it. Because when Caribbean people came to the UK in the decades after the Second World War, they encountered so much racism from the British educational establishments. Many British Caribbean pupils were unfairly consigned to Special Educational schools, for example. And that particular experience definitely sowed a level of distrust towards the British establishment. Whereas West African communities that came to the UK over the past 20 to 30 years have encountered a very different UK.Therefore I do think that there is a greater degree of optimism amongst many black British African communities. And I think the reason why there is that difference between these two large groups is the fact that many black African people that came over the past 25 or 30 years were already educated or came specifically to be educated, whereas many black Caribbean people, when they arrived, arrived as working class laborers trying to fill in work shortages in British healthcare, transport and other industries. Even though I'm speaking in generalities, there are many black African students and people that do struggle, and there are also many black Caribbean people that do extremely well. But I do think, irrespective of that, there are still those significant differences. I think another difference worth mentioning is that black Caribbean pupils in schools are three times more likely to be excluded from schools than black African pupils. Many people say, “Oh, the British education system is racist against people of color, or is racist against black people,” to which I would always respond, “Which black people? Which people of color?” Because the experiences of these communities, as I keep insisting upon, are not the same. And to make that generalization is to lose sight of the actual communities that are struggling. And if we lose sight of that, then what can we base our anti-racism upon?Mounk: I often think that in order to understand the causes of something you have to look at both the variation between different kinds of contexts and often the national context, and then, often, you can draw important lessons from that. So let's play the lesson game: what can Americans learn from how race works differently in Britain?Owolade: That's a very big question. I don't want to sound patronizing to Americans, because even though my book is entitled This is Not America, I wouldn't describe my book as anti-American in any sense, because there was much about American culture, American society, and American history that I admire, and that I am fascinated by and greatly interested in. But what I think that Americans can certainly improve on—and this isn't just what they can take from Britain but something which they can take more generally, I think—is to question (and what I'm going to say is, is in response to a particular kind of American sort of progressive activist, rather than Americans in general) and to be less insular in their understanding of race or ethnicity, basically, and to always look at it as something which is situated in a particular context, rather than as something which is transcendental or universal. And I think, funnily enough, the only way that this can be done is by aggressive curiosity about other cultures in the world, a greater curiosity about the way racial categories manifest in other cultures and other identities in the world—rather than just looking at race entirely through a very particular American context and then universalizing that context.Mounk: A story always comes to mind of a friend of mine who was pitching a magazine on some important story, I think, in Kenya, and the response from the editor was, “I'm sorry, we're not really that interested in those kinds of pieces these days. We really are trying to focus on racial justice,” as if talking about a very important African country that's going to play an increasingly big role in the world, and has a rapidly growing population and economy, is just not that important when it comes to those kinds of questions.And what is it that Britain can learn from America?Owolade: Even though the book is entitled, This is Not America, I am also inspired by many black American writers and thinkers. And a couple immediately come to mind: James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Both of them, I think, were not only great novelists but also fantastic essayists as well. And what they often emphasized in many of their essays is that black Americans are not only black, but they are also fundamentally Americans as well. This was something that Baldwin found to his great surprise when he was living in Paris. He felt that he had more in common with fellow white American people than he did with black, African, or Arab Francophone people. And this illustrated to him the fact that going out of America merely reinforced his underlying American identity. And this attachment between being black and being American, I think, is crucial to any kind of anti-racism, because many racists would say that black American people are black before they are American or that the two things are in some way in tension. But Baldwin and Ellison emphasize the fact that black American people are black and American. And the very reason why they deserve dignity and they deserve human flourishing is that they are American to the core, so American society has a duty to protect and to dignify black people. And I would say that this is also true of black British people. Black British people are not only black, but they are British as well. And because of that, we need to emphasize their Britishness because many racists—and this is even more true because black British people often come from immigrant communities—would say, “Black British people are not British, they are black. They are Caribbean, they are African. But they are not British.” And I think affirming their British identity is crucial to any kind of anti-racist activism, because it is on the basis of that British identity that they have their dignity endowed to them.Mounk: I wonder whether you followed this strange controversy in the United States in 2018, when Trevor Noah had a clip celebrating Africa's first win in the Football World Cup. I believe France won the World Cup. And his joke was that most of the French players were black and African in origin. And then the French ambassador to the United States at the time, Gérard Araud, complained and said, “This is the kind of discourse that the far right makes in France: these are not Africans, but French.” I was wondering how you feel about it, because it was a comedian making a joke, and at the same time, it also feels to me like Araud was making a fundamentally important point, that they are French people. I was wondering how you felt about that.Owolade: I think what's striking about that is that twenty years before 2018, in 1998, France won the World Cup. And when that French team won the World Cup, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, said that that team wasn't French enough. That team was filled with Africans and Arabs and black French people of West Indian descent. And so it's a strange irony that the very same arguments describing ethnic minority people as fundamentally foreigners is cheered by both the far right and also many people that would define themselves as proud anti-racists.Mounk: I'm struck by the fact that you criticize both implicitly and explicitly some of the most famous spokespeople of “anti-racism” today. But you also have repeatedly described yourself as an anti-racist and talked about what it would require to truly be anti-racist. And I think that that is exactly right. I certainly disagree with some of the people whose books might come up if you put “anti-racist” into Amazon. But I certainly think of myself, as one of the deep pieces of political identity, as an anti-racist. What would a healthy anti-racism look like in Britain or the United States, an anti-racism that takes on board the differences between different places, that's more curious about the world and about complexity, that can help to make real progress towards racial equality, but without falling into those kinds of pitfalls?Owolade: I think a healthy anti-racism would be something that, whilst on one side acknowledging the fact that race can and is often used to divide and to oppress groups of people, doesn’t fall into the temptation of looking at or thinking about race as something which absolutely and entirely defines the lives and the experiences of racialized people. So a healthy kind of anti-racism would also necessarily need to question any kind of race essentialism and any kind of race generalization. And again, I think that this is something that works both ways. A healthy kind of anti-racism would also need to resist the now-fashionable temptation amongst many on the progressive left to stigmatize white people for two reasons: it's wrong, I think, on its own terms, but I also think it's not very effective. If you're trying to persuade a group of people to come on your side, trying to stigmatize them seems like an extremely counterproductive way. And I think it is. A healthy kind of anti-racism would be one that is genuinely committed to viewing black people as a diverse group of people, rather than as a homogenous bloc. A healthy kind of anti-racism would affirm, as I said earlier in this conversation, the irreducible dignity of each individual, irrespective of their race, their ethnicity, their religion, and any other form of cultural affinity that they might belong to.Mounk: It feels to me that there is more and more friendship and communication and marriage between different demographic groups, that our culture is actually making real progress towards being more diverse, sometimes in sort of very self-conscious and slightly cringeworthy ways, but often in ways that feel much more organic and which I think are really wonderful and laudable. On the other hand, the political discourse can get torn into these sort of very simplistic camps, where you might have the progressive left that that you're talking about on one side, and on the other side a really knee-jerk, reactionary right that interprets any kind of criticism about injustices or concern for improving the world as “woke” or whatever. So—how optimistic are you and what can we do to become more optimistic about the future, whether it be Britain or the United States?Owolade: I think there is a strange kind of paradox going on, which is that as we make more progress on anti-racism, as we become more racially integrated societies, it seems that we become more sensitive to racism, and we become more automated against racism, and we become more neurotic about racism. And I think this is, to a great extent, understandable. Because if you genuinely see yourself as a black American or black British person, and that's something that's utterly integral to your identity, those two things in combination, then it makes sense why any kind of racist slide or microaggression is especially painful to you, because you're more invested in the community and culture. If you are entirely, say, somebody that was foreign to America or to Britain, then you could perhaps easily brush off any kind of racism, because you're not invested deeply into the particular culture or the particular society, whether that be America or Britain. So as black people, or any other ethnic minority group, becomes more and more integrated into each respective society, then it makes sense why that greater sensitivity towards racism will come about. But what I would say to emphasize the importance of optimism—and I am quite an optimistic person on these issues—is I would say, we need a historical perspective. We need to understand what it was actually like in the past. And we need to compare that to the present. So you mentioned the importance of comparative analysis earlier on in this conversation—well, I would say we need to do that, but not between countries. We need to do that between the past and the present. That would illustrate the level of progress that we've made. And that would also, I think, lay the groundwork for a more optimistic future. Because if we've made that much progress from the past, we can continue to make progress to the future.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry.Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

On November 4, 1963, the Beatles played at the Prince of Wales Theatre, in London, exuberant, exhausted, and defiant. “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help,” John Lennon cried out to the crowd. “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” Two weeks later, the band made their first appearance on American television, on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report.” “The hottest musical group in Great Britain today is the Beatles,” the reporter Edwin Newman said. “That’s not a collection of insects but a quartet of young men with pudding-bowl haircuts.” And, four days after that, “CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace” broadcast a four-minute report from “Beatleland,” by the London correspondent Alexander Kendrick. “The Beatles are said by sociologists to have a deeper meaning,” Kendrick reported. “Some say they are the authentic voice of the proletariat.” Everyone searched for that deeper meaning. The Beatles found it hard to take the search seriously.

“What has occurred to you as to why you’ve succeeded?” Kendrick asked Paul McCartney.

“Oh, I dunno,” he answered. “The haircuts?”

Kendrick’s report had been set to air again that night, on “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.” The rerun was cancelled. The sixties started in 1964, observers like to say, and 1964 started that afternoon, November 22, 1963, when Cronkite broke into “As the World Turns.” “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade,” Cronkite said, his voice grave and urgent. You couldn’t see Cronkite; the news had just come in on the wire service, and onscreen was a slide that read, “CBS NEWS BULLETIN.” Minutes later, with the cameras finally on, Cronkite appeared in shirtsleeves, spruce but shaken. “If you can zoom in with that camera, we can get a closer look at this picture,” he told a cameraman, holding up a photograph of the motorcade taken moments before the shooting. At 2:38 P.M., Cronkite looked up at the clock, and announced that the President had died.

“We were backstage somewhere on a little tour in England when we heard the news,” McCartney told me last year. We were in his office in New York; McCartney, eighty, wore jeans and a pullover, slouching in his chair like a teen-ager. More pensive than wistful, he remembered that day, how it was surreal, unreal, but, then, everything about that year was surreal. Two days after Kennedy was killed, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. In 1964, you could hold your camera up to the world. But what madness—what beauty, joy, and fury—would you capture?

In 1964, the Beatles became the first truly global mass-culture phenomenon. As the historian Sam Lebovic has pointed out, they’d been shaped by a wide, wide world. They wore Italian suits and Cuban-heeled boots and French haircuts popular with German students. They played nineteen-twenties British music-hall music, and rhythm and blues, and Black roots music from the banks of the Mississippi and the streets of Detroit. It’s even in the name: “the Beatles” is a mashup of the name of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets, and the Beat poets, a label that came from Black slang. Beatles records played on radio stations from Tokyo to Johannesburg. By the time they broke out, the sun had set on the British Empire, but the age of globalization had begun. And something more, too, was catching fire: an unsettling, an upheaval, revolutionary. Time, writing about the Beatles, called it “the New Madness.”

Partly it was the magnificent irreverence, the affectionate cheekiness, the surprisingly soft sexiness. The band’s interviews became a signature, four very clever young men batting back reporters’ endlessly idiotic questions, a patter only barely fictionalized in the 1964 film “A Hard Day’s Night”:

REPORTER: Tell me, how did you find America? LENNON: Turn left at Greenland. REPORTER: Has success changed your life? McCARTNEY: Yes. REPORTER: What would you call that hair style you’re wearing? HARRISON: Arthur.

Asked, preposterously, to explain their own significance, they made fun of the question. Still, McCartney tried to capture some of that New Madness through the lens of a camera. In 1963, each of the Beatles had been given a Pentax. It helped them cope with the stress of being photographed constantly, and with the worry that they were about to travel to a country where they expected, like Kennedy himself, to be greeted by frenzied crowds and hordes of photographers and exposed to possible gunmen. From 1963 to early 1964, McCartney shot dozens of rolls of film, as the band travelled from Liverpool and London and Paris to New York, Washington, and Miami. Somehow, hundreds of his photographs were saved, and then rediscovered, in 2020, in his archives. The images, which will soon be the subject of an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, in London, are a glimpse of Beatleland from the inside. Everyone was looking at the band in 1964. What did the Beatles see?

The Lazar story is a useful backdrop to the latest round of claims about secret U.S. programs involving alien technology, which just appeared in the technology website The Debrief. Useful, first, because of the familiarity — once again we have a whistle-blower claiming knowledge of long-hidden work on otherworldly crafts.

But useful, also, because of the difference. The would-be whistle-blower in this case, David Grusch, isn’t touting fraudulent credentials; he’s a former national-security professional who was assigned to the then-newly-created Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (lately rebooted as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office) from 2019-22. That assignment appears to be the basis for his claims; he’s operating through normal national security channels in making this report; and he has other figures with some kind of governmental background speaking in his support.

That doesn’t mean that you should believe him. My general view is that the U.F.O.-encounter phenomena seems in continuity with supernatural experiences reported across the long pre-modern past — abductions into faerie realms, especially. As such, the experiences are more likely to offer evidence of either some kind of strange Jungian unconscious or of actual supernatural realms than they are to involve interplanetary visitors from Zeta Reticuli.

The possibility of literal spacecraft stashed in U.S. government hangars, meanwhile, piles up two immense-seeming improbabilities. First, that inhuman species cross oceans of space or leap interdimensional barriers using unfathomable technology and yet somehow keep crashing and leaving souvenirs behind. Second, that human governments have been collecting evidence for generations without the truth ever being leaked or uncovered or just blurted out by Donald Trump.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Former President Donald Trump, along with one of his aides, has been indicted for federal crimes involving highly sensitive national-security documents. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security.Defiant RecklessnessSpecial Counsel Jack Smith has successfully petitioned to unseal the indictment of Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta on multiple charges revolving around Trump’s removal of classified material from the White House and his belligerent refusal to return them. The charges include making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing records, and willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.When Trump learned of the indictment yesterday, he and his devoted coterie of Republican apologists, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, got right to work trying to minimize the charges as a politically motivated “weaponization” of the law. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who (at least in theory) is running against Trump, felt the need to side with the most notorious Florida Man now facing justice. As my colleague David Frum notes, this is about as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral, but the fact that DeSantis and others feel the need to placate such paranoia is indicative of how unhinged the GOP base has become.Smith, however, isn’t pussyfooting around: The charges—38 of them—are a big deal. And before the GOP gaslighting reaches supernova levels, let’s also bear in mind that what Trump actually did is a big deal too. He claimed that he declassified, by fiat, boxes of classified information, and then appears to have left all of that material sitting in ballrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To this day, he insists that he had every right to do whatever he wanted with America’s secrets. Fortunately, the court has unsealed the indictment, because Americans need to know, and care, about the magnitude of Trump’s alleged offenses.To understand the severity of the charges against Trump, consider a thought experiment: Imagine that Vladimir Putin is one day driven from the Kremlin, perhaps in a coup or in the face of a popular revolt. He jumps into his limousine and heads for self-imposed exile in a remote dacha. His trunk is full of secret documents that he decided belong to him, including details of the Russian nuclear deterrent and Russia’s military weaknesses.Now imagine how valuable those boxes would be to any intelligence organization in the world. I spent the early years of my career analyzing Soviet and Russian documents as an academic Sovietologist, and I would have loved to see such materials. Small, seemingly trivial details—something as innocuous as a desk calendar or a notepad—might not mean much to a layperson, but to a professional, they could be pure gold. To get even a peek at such Russian materials would be an intelligence triumph.But of course, I would never have been able to lay my hands on them, because a cache of such immense importance, if U.S. operatives spirited any of it out of Russia, would have been secured in a vault somewhere deep in the CIA. Trump, meanwhile, left highly sensitive American documents lying around at a golf resort like practice balls on the driving range. According to the indictment:
The Mar-a-Lago Club was an active social club, which, between January 2021 and August 2022, hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests. After TRUMP’s presidency, The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents. Nevertheless, TRUMP stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club—including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.
Actually, it might be harder to steal practice balls. “The Storage Room,” the indictment notes, “was near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” These are not exactly low-traffic areas. Worse yet, the indictment asserts that Trump had some of these documents at his club in New Jersey, where he showed files to people who had no business seeing them. (One of them, according to the indictment, was something Trump claimed was a plan of attack on a foreign country prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.)Normally, when there is spillage of classified material—and such events are common, including during presidential transitions—it’s treated much like the spillage of toxic waste: Even if it’s an accident, everyone involved must cooperate to find the source of the spill, evaluate the amount of danger, and contain and clean the area. What Trump has already admitted to doing—taking classified documents and then defying the U.S. government’s repeated demands to return them—is like driving off with a truckload of toxic chemicals, splashing them around, and then, when the guys in the hazmat suits show up, telling them he had every right to dump out the barrels on his own property and that they can go take a hike.Judging from the indictment (and its damning photographs), Trump did all of this while leaving some of the most tempting intelligence targets in the Western world open to theft or reproduction. The indictment is both astounding and horrifying, with pictures of classified materials sitting in unsecured boxes around Mar-a-Lago that could give hives to anyone who’s ever held a security clearance (as I did for most of my adult life). At this point, we may never know who saw what, or which documents are now in the hands of our enemies. In any decent democracy, this intentional and defiant recklessness with classified material would be added to the list of acts that should prohibit Trump from ever holding any position of government responsibility ever again.Trump’s enablers, however, will try to set the agenda, just as they did when Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed his report in 2019 on Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians. Back then, Attorney General William Barr performed a major act of civic sabotage by bowdlerizing Mueller’s findings before anyone saw the actual report. I was in Switzerland at the time, and when a daily newspaper back in the United States asked me to write about the report, all I had to go on was Barr’s version; although I suspected that the full truth was worse, I could write only from what I had at the moment—which is exactly what Barr intended.Trump-supporting Republicans are attempting to replicate Barr’s dishonest play by convincing Americans that Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have personally indicted Trump over a nothingburger. Like many who have commented on the documents fiasco, McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, and others must know that this is a flat lie, but it’s a lie that will work on millions of people. Smith and the government of the United States have made clear that Donald Trump has yet again betrayed his country. The rest of us should say so to our fellow citizens—and to those craven elected representatives who refuse to admit it—loudly and clearly.Related:
An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies
The White House released intelligence indicating that Russia plans to build a drone-manufacturing plant east of Moscow using materials supplied by Iran.
Air quality has improved in the northeastern United States and Ontario as wildfires continue to burn in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada; firefighters from the U.S., France, and some Commonwealth nations have joined local fire crews in combating the ongoing blazes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video interview on Friday that Russia can “definitely state” that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.
Books Briefing: The author Charles Portis was a “uniquely Southern” storyteller whose stories dripped with pathos and humor, Gal Beckerman writes.
Explore all of our newsletters here.Evening Read 
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: ABC; Peter Kramer / HBO.
How the Daytime Soap Opera Took Over Prestige TelevisionBy Mayukh Sen
Around the turn of the millennium, viewers of the daytime soap opera General Hospital may have noticed a shift in their favorite afternoon medical drama. The show, which had aired on ABC since 1963, had once been preoccupied with the titular hospital in the fictional city of Port Charles. Storylines in the ’90s were dedicated to socially relevant topics like a teenage couple navigating the HIV/AIDS crisis, a doctor dealing with her own breast-cancer diagnosis, and an adoptee tracking down her birth mother in adulthood. But in the early aughts, the soap’s gentle, humanistic notes gave way to machismo energy as it fixated on the dimpled mob don Sonny Corinthos (Maurice Benard) and those in his violence-ridden orbit. This about-face prompted the television critic Ed Martin to dub the show “Sopranos in the daytime.” Here was the ultimate indictment: One of daytime television’s crown jewels had become the Great Value knockoff of a prime-time masterwork.
Don’t censor racism out of the past.
The price of Title 42 is the battered bodies of my patients.
Inside Frank Bascombe’s head, again
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic
Read. A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is told by a narrator whose reliability comes into question as the story unfolds—and is eventually undone entirely by a single pronoun slip.Watch. Past Lives, in theaters, is a film in which distance and quiet are key to understanding a soaring intimacy.Play our daily crossword.P.S.As you can see, I am back from my vacation. Each year, I make a pilgrimage to Las Vegas; my wife and I are native New Englanders, but we have come to love the desert and the dry, clear air that gives us a break from humidity and allergies. (Every time I go to the Southwest, I think of the late Harry Anderson, playing the Boston trickster “Harry the Hat” on Cheers and sneering at a competing con man from Phoenix: “I was never impressed by Arizona hustlers, except they got good sinuses.”) I like the noise and bustle of casinos: I play some blackjack and throw some dice, and, yes, I know the odds are against me. Shush. Let me enjoy my kitschy moment of thinking I’m hanging with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Joey Bishop before their 3 a.m. show.Speaking of the Rat Pack, I also love that at least a few Vegas steakhouses are trying to enforce a lost tradition: dress codes. I am a bear on this issue and always have been when it comes to fine dining. I caused a bit of consternation on Twitter when I said this the other day; there are people who think dress codes are outdated and uptight and even racist—which they can be, if they are enforced selectively. Otherwise, sorry, but not sorry: No beachwear and no tank tops, thank you. No ball caps. No overly revealing clothes, please, and gentlemen must wear closed-toe shoes. And if you reek of perfectly legal cannabis, that is your right, but (at least at one famous locale) you might not be seated. The days of jackets and ties are over, but there’s nothing wrong with dressing like an adult, and if you’re going to hang with the memory of Dino and Sammy, and drink overpriced bourbon, the least you can do is take off your hat and show up wearing a clean shirt.— TomKelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

On Tuesday, conservative activist and New College of Florida trustee Christopher Rufo announced that the college had declined to renew a visiting professor's contract because of his purportedly "left-wing" views. 
While Rufo hailed the ouster as a victory for the "classical liberal arts tradition," he didn't seem to realize that it was also likely a violation of the First Amendment.
The New College of Florida is a small, public liberal arts university in Sarasota, Florida. The university, known for its "uniquely" accepting environment for LGBT students, has recently been subject to considerable upheaval. Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis fired the university's president and appointed six new trustees in an effort to turn the university into a "little Hillsdale," in reference to the conservative Christian college in Michigan. One of those new trustees was Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute known best for pushing bans on critical race theory across the country. 
This week, the university seemingly took further steps toward shaping its new, more conservative mold. On Tuesday, Rufo bragged on Twitter about a recent decision not to renew the contract of Erik Wallenberg, a "left-wing" visiting professor of history at the college. 
"New College of Florida has let the contract for visiting professor Erik Wallenberg expire. He will not be returning to the campus," Rufo tweeted. "I wish Professor Wallenberg well and hope his work on 'radical theatre and environmental movements' finds a more suitable home."
"It is a privilege, not a right, to be employed by a taxpayer-funded university. New College will no longer be a jobs program for middling, left-wing intellectuals," he added. "We are reviving the great classical liberal arts tradition and setting a new standard for public education."
In Rufo's first tweet, he quote-tweeted a screenshot from a March Teen Vogue op-ed co-written by Wallenberg, in which he criticized the political takeover of the university. That month, Rufo tweeted in response to that piece, "Let's look at their CVs. Oh: 'How to Subvert the Capitalist White-Supremacist University,' 'radical Black feminism,' 'queer theory'….Pure left-wing Mad Libs. Luckily, both are visiting professors."
While Rufo does not explicitly state that Wallenberg was fired for his political beliefs, it is clearly the meaning he wishes his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers to take from his announcement.
"To the extent questions remain regarding whether New College's leadership intends to filter faculty appointments or classroom discussion based on its viewpoint, Rufo's assertion—that the college has taken adverse employment action against a public faculty member in retaliation for his constitutionally-protected views, teaching, and criticisms—is a disappointing answer," wrote Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) attorney Alex Morey in a Thursday letter to the university. "While a public institution may generally decline to renew a contract for a good reason, an unwise reason, or no reason at all, it cannot do so for a retaliatory reason—including for the expression of protected speech."
Morey argued that Wallenberg has a clear First Amendment right to criticize the university outside the classroom and academic freedom within the classroom. "It is well-settled that faculty at public universities and colleges have expressive rights outside the classroom, including the right to criticize their institutions' leaders," she wrote. "The First Amendment protects public faculty members' expressive rights, including the right of academic freedom, which the Supreme Court has cited as of 'special concern to the First Amendment.'"
By framing Wallenberg's contract nonrenewal as a victory against "left-wing" ideology in public universities, Rufo clearly implies that Wallenberg was ousted for his political beliefs and his public criticism of the university—something which is plainly unconstitutional. 
"Higher ed needs more viewpoint diversity, including faculty who are more representative of the wide variety of views people actually hold," Morey tells Reason. "But any college taking up censorship as their tool of choice in the fight for free speech, is no true friend of intellectual freedom."
As much as Rufo and his allies in the Florida statehouse like to pretend that the First Amendment doesn't apply to public universities, they can't escape the simple fact that it does—and their wishful thinking just might land them in court. 
The post Firing a Professor for 'Left-Wing' Views Is Unconstitutional appeared first on Reason.com.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has released its yearly report on the number of hate groups in the U.S.—a number that is always rising, thanks to the watchdog organization's characteristically clever counting. By adding Moms for Liberty, a conservative grassroots organization that bears little resemblance to the neo-Nazi groups the SPLC has historically tracked, the 2022 report manages to set a new record.
The SPLC has long drawn criticism—not just from the right, but from libertarians and the left as well—for maintaining that hate in America is always growing, whether or not the ranks of the purportedly hateful are actually increasing. Its infamous "hate map" is representative of this problem: No matter how small and insignificant a hate group may be, it still counts toward the total number—and if it breaks apart because of infighting, it might end up counting as two groups on the next year's list.
Even so, the SPLC hit a snag in 2020: The overall number of hate groups in the U.S. had appeared to decrease slightly since the previous year, from 940 to 838. The following year, 2021, produced just 733 hate groups.
These findings would strike most people as good news, but they cut against the SPLC's long-documented goal of raising money by inspiring concern about rising levels of hate. (The Montgomery Advertiser's investigative report on this subject earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1995.) So the SPLC got creative: The 2021 map includes not just the 733 hate groups but also 488 "antigovernment groups."
The Southern Poverty Law Center's 2021 report on hate and extremism.
 
Historically, the SPLC had tracked alleged antigovernment groups as a distinct category, but the 2021 report said that antigovernment groups and hate groups had "converged around a willingness to engage in political violence, either inflict or accept harm, and deny legally established rights to historically oppressed groups of people."
Careful readers, however, would note that the overall number of antigovernment groups had declined since the previous year as well; while adding the two numbers—hate and antigovernment—together made for a more impressive total, the fundamental trajectory was downward. Not to be deterred, the SPLC observed that"Rather than demonstrating a decline in the power of the far right, the dropping numbers of organized hate and antigovernment groups suggest that the extremist ideas that mobilize them now operate more openly in the political mainstream." Heads they win, tails you lose.
The 2022 list makes practically no effort to distinguish between hate groups and antigovernment extremists. The most recent hate map lists 1,225 groups, which looks like a massive increase from the previous year, since the map's interactive function prompts viewers to compare it with 2021's 773 hate groups. Apparently, antigovernment groups are added and subtracted as necessary to produce the desired totals.
Southern Poverty Law Center's 2022 report
 
Among 2022's hate and antigovernment groups is Moms for Liberty, an organization that rallies right-wing parents who disagree with the curriculum and COVID-19 policies of public schools. This inclusion has prompted considerable pushback from the right; the group's co-founder, Tiffany Justice, rejected the "extremist" label, telling Fox News, "We are a group of moms and dads and grandparents and aunts and uncles, community members that are very concerned about the direction of the country."
The SPLC defends its description of Moms for Liberty as an extremist group by citing several members who have made violent threats against teachers and the LGBT community. It also cites statements that are not very extreme, including this one, from Justice:
"I raise my children. The government does not. We do not co-parent with the government. And there are certain sensitive subjects that we would like to be directing the conversation around for our children…Parents are very concerned about this idea about gender identity that was never discussed in our public schools, and it is now taking a front row seat in our children's education. And it is affecting everything they do, including for many of our girls, how safe they feel in the bathrooms at their school."
The SPLC clearly objects to the agenda of Moms for Liberty, which has advocated for the removal of books that discuss gender identity, racial identity, and sexuality from public school libraries. But the hate report draws little distinction between activities that could reasonably be described as hateful (i.e., violent and incendiary rhetoric toward the LGBT community) and normal, right-of-center political organizing. For instance, the SPLC also condemns Moms for Liberty for fighting against mask and vaccine mandates, seeking to abolish the Department of Education, and undermining the influence of teachers unions. If these stances are really sufficient to get an organization labeled "extremist," then the term extremism has lost all relevant meaning.
Luckily for the SPLC, Moms for Liberty is a chapter-based organization, which means that it can be counted not once but dozens of times. For example, the 2022 hate map lists 89 groups in Florida, 28 of which are Moms for Liberty. In Texas, Moms for Liberty constitutes 10 of the state's 72 extremist groups. No effort is made to distinguish these chapters based on whether prominent members have espoused genuinely hateful views; they're all just extremists, extremists everywhere.
The SPLC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post The SPLC Is Massively Overcounting 'Hate' Groups—and It's Not Just Moms for Liberty appeared first on Reason.com.

If you want a glimpse into the future, come to Berlin and walk down Kurfürstendamm, the bustling avenue often described as the city’s Champs-Élysées. At one of the most prominent corners sits a new car showroom unlike any I have ever seen: sleek, elegant, multistoried, with a cafe, design center, showrooms and more. As you enter, you see what looks like a Bugatti or a Ferrari, except more stylish. It’s an EP9, a top-of-the-line racecar that has been sold to a handful of customers for about $3 million each. The company behind it is Nio, one of China’s new carmakers, which is going to take the world by storm.

Europe is an interesting place to think about China. I traveled to three European countries this week (Germany, Italy and Britain), and everywhere, the conversation turned to Washington’s policies toward China. Most of the political figures I spoke with were apprehensive. They were strongly behind the Biden administration’s policies toward Russia and credited President Biden with uniting the West and infusing it with strategic clarity and purpose. They were far more worried about policy toward China and more generally about Biden’s new international economic policies, as outlined recently by national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown explained the European dilemma. “Europe needs an industrial policy, but it cannot afford to mimic the [Biden] administration’s protectionism,” he told me. “For Europe, trade is vital; its prosperity is dependent on trade with the rest of the world, including China, in a way that America’s is not. [Unlike America, Europe] imports energy and is not self-sufficient. Despite the surface agreement across the Atlantic, this could become a growing divide.”

He acknowledged that the Biden administration has made moves to expand trade ties, but he expressed concern that all of them are bilateral or regional efforts that might undercut global trade. They come, he said, “at the expense of any real discussion of what a modern multilateralist order would look like.” Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark, concurred. “Europe cannot divorce itself from China,” she explained. “That would be the end of globalization. That is why we want to de-risk, not decouple.”

“De-risking,” a term famously used by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is the hottest buzzword in diplomacy these days. Even the Biden administration now says it also wants to de-risk rather than decouple. But many I spoke with in Europe said they worry that this is just a rhetorical change and that U.S. policies — and Chinese responses — will keeping moving the ratchet up.

When people in Washington hear these views, they often tend to dismiss Europe as too passive and pacifist, assuming that on China, the United States will have to build a new coalition with key Asian states such as India, Japan and Vietnam. But even with these Asian countries, there will be limits. China is a close second to the United States as India’s top trade partner, and New Delhi is well aware that its future growth depends on maintaining a healthy economic relationship with the Middle Kingdom.

Kishore Mahbubani, the former Singaporean diplomat and author of “The Asian 21st Century,” pointed out that discussions in the West often forget that the world’s growth is mostly coming from Asia. He used his own region as an example. In 2000, Japan’s economy was about eight times larger than Southeast Asia’s. In about three years, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is projected to be the same size economically as Japan. The largest trade relationship in the world is between China and ASEAN — almost $1 trillion. And ASEAN countries cannot grow without open and vibrant trade, especially with China.

America’s strategic genius has always been to offer the world not a Pax Americana — designed simply to secure U.S. power and weaken its competitors — but rather a global system that was open, free and fair. “We all need a well-functioning and expanding global trading system and multilateral institutions that work,” Brown noted. Mahbubani recalled that President Bill Clinton often described the need for stronger global institutions by explaining that they would indeed constrain America but also constrain the new rising powers in the world. “We desperately need more of that enlightened self-interest from Washington these days,” Mahbubani said.

Ever since the phrase “the generation gap” was minted — by a headline writer at Look during the youth rebellion of the Sixties — trouble has been brewing. Today, there are two generational conflicts in play around the world: one within the depopulating wealthy countries, and another within the more fecund, but far poorer, countries of the developing world. 
Both conflicts are being shaped by new economic realities, principally a largely sluggish world economy that is, particularly in Western democracies, further hamstrung by a growing push for “Net Zero”. The adoption of green “de-growth” philosophy impacts both on the youth of the West, who face a consciously scaled-down quality of life, as well as a new generation in developing countries desperate for growth.
In high-income countries, the youngest generations already face fewer opportunities than their parents and grandparents. Slow growth and lack of opportunity mean they can look forward to a future characterised by a greater economic insecurity, poorer living conditions, less chance of owning a home or car, or even eating well. Such attitudes are exacerbated by the relentless hysteria poured out by the green movement and its media minions. Indeed, according to one recent survey, a majority of young people around the world see the planet as essentially doomed by climate change. 
Perhaps as a result, when it comes to politics, many new voters seem comfortable rallying around polarising and extreme figures. In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders amassed more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. In France, meanwhile, Le Monde described this “political de-socialisation” as having fuelled support for the likes of both the Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-Rightist Marine Le Pen.
Further readingWhy we need the Generation WarsBy Jenny Bristow
But alienation, rather than radicalisation, is a more fitting description of the emerging Western generation. The biggest problem lies not in lack of jobs or even skills, but a population that is increasingly “unengaged”.
Nor is this merely confined to the West. Evidence of a “great resignation” is also emerging in East Asia. In Japan, young adults, according to David Pilling, are “pioneering a new sort of high-quality, low-energy, low-growth existence”. In China, meanwhile, the children of largely upwardly mobile parents face an increasingly fraught economic future. Xi Jinping may hope for a generation that will follow the path of devoted Stalinist Stakhonovites or Maoist Red Guards, but confronts a generation more concerned with 20% unemployment and limited options than ideological fervour. As in Japan and the West, China now sees a generation — including an increasingly underemployed surplus of educated people — who eschew their parents’ work ethic, embracing instead a desire to “lay flat” as they essentially avoid the congestion and stresses of urban life. 
Combined with rapid demographic decline in East Asia, Europe and the United States, the mass disengagement of the young will make building a stronger world economy an even greater challenge. The remarkable economic boom of the past century sparked a population explosion — 75% of the world’s population growth was born in the last century. Yet, birth rates are now dropping, especially in more developed nations. Globally, last year’s population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see declines.
And as workforces shrink, growth will suffer, as has been the case throughout modern history. In the United States, workforce growth has slowed to around a third of the level in 1970, and seems destined to fall even more. Nearly 70% of US counties have seen declines in their under-25 populations, a trend particularly marked in big coastal metropolitan regions.
China faces a similar dilemma, with its senior population expected to have more than tripled by 2050, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. The transition will be made particularly tough by a welfare state that is underdeveloped, and whose ranks of retirees are soaring: the Chinese retirement age is 60 for men, and just 50 for women.
Further readingBoomer Europe is dyingBy Aris Roussinos
All this sets up what may be the biggest generational conflict of all — between the still-youthful developing world and the ageing high-income countries. Demographic decline and slow growth in high-income economies threaten to undermine the future of developing countries, notably in Africa. By 2050, UN projections suggest that nearly 55% of world population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain relatively high. However, during the following 50 years, that share is projected to account for all growth as populations plummet elsewhere. With workforces shrinking in China, East Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by upwards of 700 million. And with this “youth bulge” across the developing world not expected to peak until later this decade, Africa could well be, as the Brookings Institution suggests, “our last hope” in the West to forestall demographic and economic decline.
Essentially, high-income countries face a choice. They will feel enormous pressure to restrain imports from places such as sub-Saharan Africa to keep their own economies running and the pension system solvent. In the US, more than 40% of boomers have no significant retirement savings and the successor generations appear even more bereft. Without an East Asia-style boom, the only option for the developing world’s youth will be more migration to the West, both legal and illegal, which is expected to average 2.2 million annually through 2050.
This would represent such a surge that Europe, in particular, would be ill-equipped to prevent, let alone assimilate. Indeed, often despite promises to the contrary, immigration, legal and illegal, is at record levels in Britain and Germany, and remains at historically high levels in France. In response, despite crushing labour shortages, many countries — including the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, and Germany itself — have tightened their immigration controls. The resulting migrant populations of unemployed and underemployed people have created social unrest in Europe’s cities, much as we have seen in America.
Some, such as Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, consider such demographic shifts to be “no bad thing”: “We need a breather. A stable, sagacious society that has lost its adolescent restlessness and settled into middle age sounds appealing.” Yet this view ignores the ramifications of a generational conflict that seems certain to intensify as both young people in high-income countries as well as those in the developing world face a potentially frustrating future. Like the generational conflicts both within societies and between them, the global demographic crisis is just beginning. And in the meantime, the West’s adolescent restlessness can’t simply be wished away.
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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekShould parents refuse to give children smartphones before high school? All opinions are welcome. Especially encouraged are perspectives from parents, teachers, and relatively young people.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteThe Case Against Phones at SchoolIn The Atlantic, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the case for making schools a phone-free zone has gotten stronger in the past few years:
As my research assistant, Zach Rausch, and I have documented at my Substack, After Babel, evidence of an international epidemic of mental illness, which started around 2012, has continued to accumulate. So, too, has evidence that it was caused in part by social media and the sudden move to smartphones in the early 2010s. Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children. Two weeks ago, the United States surgeon general issued an advisory warning that social media can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
We now also have more precedents: many more examples of schools that have gone entirely phone-free during the school day. So the time is right for parents and educators to ask: Should we make the school day phone-free? Would that reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm? Would it improve educational outcomes? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is yes.
He makes the rest of his case here.There’s a Market for ThatOlivia Reingold highlights a “dumbphones” entrepreneur in The Free Press:
In 2018, Lance Black, a Utah father of six, became a founder and investor in Gabb Wireless—a company making internet-free smartphones. The devices, which start at $150, are aimed at kids 5 to 15 and loaded only with the essentials: features for texting, calling, and a GPS tracker for parents …
“It has a touchscreen, and you can call and text, so kids aren’t embarrassed to pull it out,” Black tells me, adding that it runs on an Android-based operating system. Since Gabb launched in 2019, Black said the company has raised about $42 million in funding. While he won’t reveal specific sales, he said every year has significantly outpaced the previous year, adding, “We have hundreds of thousands of customers across the United States.”
Tim Carney explains, in Reingold’s Free Press story, that he doesn’t think kids should have smartphones until they’re 18. In the Washington Examiner, he goes on to highlight how smartphones present an obstacle to the society he wants:
Your Android or iPhone is required to participate in much of public life these days, and the phone-free are finding themselves unwelcome in more and more places. The National Zoo in Washington, which is free to visit, started requiring tickets as a crowd-control measure during COVID-19 and continues to require them. Of course, the tickets are requested and issued over the internet, typically for smartphones. The zoo maintained this policy into 2023, which Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) pointed out “deters both visits from those without access to a smartphone or the internet and spontaneous visits.”
Nationals Park also issues digital tickets that you need to display on your smartphone in order to enter. The team has no Will Call window, notes that “tickets purchased directly from the Nationals must be presented within the MLB Ballpark app,” and explains that “to improve security and reduce the risk of ticket fraud, print-at-home tickets in any form are no longer accepted for entry.”  
So what are children to do?
Many teenagers do not have smartphones, and frankly, they shouldn’t. Smartphones are addictive to everyone, and they are especially harmful to children. A group of smartphone-less 14-year-olds used to be able to ride the Metro, buy tickets with their own cash, and then use whatever money was left over to buy peanuts and a hot dog.
Now the stadium has no real ticket window, and if you have cash, I’m told that “you can pay for a bar code to scan at the concession stands,” one concessionaire told me. Of course, you can’t cash out anything left on that prepaid bar code at the end of the game. So what are we to think of places such as the National Zoo and Nationals Park? Are they happy to be forcing children onto smartphones? Or do they just forget that children exist?
A Warning About Tech PanicsIn an article for Reason, Robby Soave argued back in 2021 that we ought to be on guard against exaggerated fears when evaluating new technology, because so many earlier tech panics failed the test of time. He explained:
In 2020 … Pope Francis published an encyclical warning about the dangers of screen addiction. “Digital media can also expose people to the risk of addiction, isolation and a gradual loss of contact with concrete reality, blocking the development of authentic interpersonal relationships,” he wrote. But the more things change, the more they stay the same: In 1956, Pope Pius XII had warned that certain books emphasizing vice have an effect on readers that “totally paralyzes higher faculties and produces a permanent disorder, an artificial need of passionate character that at times reaches a real aberration.”
In 1936, the government of St. Louis, Missouri, tried to ban car radios because a “determined movement” had become convinced that the radio distracted drivers and caused car accidents. The car radio was widely feared by newspapers, which were competitors and had every incentive to sensationalize the product’s dangers. The Charlotte News fretted in 1926 that radio was “keeping children and their parents up late nights, wearing down their vitality for lack of sleep and making laggards out of them at school.” In his 1963 book, Passion and Social Constraint, the Dutch-American sociologist Ernest van den Haag lamented that the portable radio “is taken everywhere—from seashore to mountaintop—and everywhere it isolates the bearer from his surroundings” and that mass media alienate us “from each other, from reality, and from ourselves.”
The Decline of Morality Is an IllusionThat’s the argument of this Nature paper by Adam M. Mastroianni and Daniel T. Gilbert. From the abstract:
We show that people in at least 60 nations around the world believe that morality is declining, that they have believed this for at least 70 years and that they attribute this decline both to the decreasing morality of individuals as they age and to the decreasing morality of successive generations. Next, we show that people’s reports of the morality of their contemporaries have not declined over time, suggesting that the perception of moral decline is an illusion. Finally, we show how a simple mechanism based on two well-established psychological phenomena (biased exposure to information and biased memory for information) can produce an illusion of moral decline, and we report studies that confirm two of its predictions about the circumstances under which the perception of moral decline is attenuated, eliminated or reversed (that is, when respondents are asked about the morality of people they know well or people who lived before the respondent was born). Together, our studies show that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded and easily produced.
Provocation of the WeekAs depressed as it makes me about the state of the Republican Party and America’s ability to sustain the republic, I’m not sure that the political scientist Richard Hanania is wrong when he argues that Donald Trump supporters “love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating” the former president has to offer—and that, rather than run a normal race against Trump, Ron DeSantis should challenge him to a fight:
DeSantis’ best shot is trying to emphasize that Trump is physically weak and he no longer intimidates others in the party. You can’t do this with words alone. DeSantis can call him fat, and Trump can reply everyone is saying that I’m in the best shape of any man who’s ever lived, and the voters will eat it up. The Florida governor needs a way to clearly highlight that he’s younger, stronger, and more physically courageous. DeSantis should therefore challenge Trump to a boxing match. Trump will almost certainly refuse, at which point he can say that this shows what a coward the former president is. Or, DeSantis could say that, on further reflection, maybe it wasn’t fair to challenge an 85 year-old man (yes, lie and exaggerate, Republican voters love that too), and he understands that his opponent is too feeble at this point in his life to get into the arena.
DeSantis shouldn’t do this out of the blue. He could start by trying to bait Trump into saying something particularly nasty about him, or preferably his wife or kids. Then he can play the role of the justifiably angry patriarch.
Every time Trump launches a personal attack, DeSantis can reply by saying that his opponent is a pathetic coward, and if he has a problem with him he’s already made clear that they can settle their differences like men. If he’s not willing to do that, then we can stick to the issues, at which point DeSantis can go on about whatever he did in Florida. At the very least, a challenge to fight will eat up all the energy and make sure no other candidate gets any attention, as one of the main things DeSantis needs to do is make the primary into a two-man race.
Right now, the DeSantis strategy is to try to get the Republican voter to ask questions like “who is more electable?” or “who has shown more focus in fighting woke?” Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place. These people love sports, and would be much more partial to DeSantis if thanks to him they got to discuss questions like “can Trump’s height and reach overcome DeSantis’ speed and stamina?” If Trump refuses to do it, then he’s suddenly become the one robbing them of a chance to be entertained, which is what they want more than anything else.
His insults and rants will start to look boring in comparison.
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Groups calling themselves the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps have launched raids inside Russia. Drones have flown over Moscow, damaging what may be the homes of Russian intelligence officers and buzzing the Kremlin itself. Unusually intense fighting has been reported this week in several parts of eastern Ukraine, with completely different versions of events provided by Russians and Ukrainians. Conflicts have also been reported between the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group and the soldiers of the regular Russian army.What does it all mean? That the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.In a week that also marks the 79th anniversary of D-Day, we should note the many ways in which this military action does not, and probably will not, resemble the Normandy landing. Perhaps at some point there will be a lot of Ukrainian troops massed in one place, taking huge casualties—or perhaps not. Perhaps there will be a galvanized, coordinated Russian military response—or perhaps the response will look more like it did on Tuesday, when a dam that was under direct Russian control collapsed, leading to the inundation of southern Ukraine. Nor was that the only disaster: A series of smaller man-made floods has also washed over Russian-occupied territories in the past few days.[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]This counteroffensive will also look different from the D-Day movies because Ukraine’s goals are not merely military. Yes, Ukrainian troops are probing Russian defenses up and down the 1,000-kilometer front line. Yes, the Ukrainians are conducting “shaping operations,” hitting ammunition dumps and other targets behind Russian lines. Yes, Ukraine wants to take back territory lost since February 2022, as well as territory lost in 2014. Yes, we know the Ukrainians can do it, because they’ve done it before. They fought the Russians out of northern Ukraine at the very beginning of the war. They recaptured Russian-held parts of the Kharkiv district in September, and the city of Kherson a couple of months later.But in addition to taking back land, they are also conducting a sort of psychological shaping operation: They have to convince the Russian elite that the war was a mistake and that Russia can’t win it, not in the short term and not in the long term, either. Toward this end, they are also seeking to convince ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they thought, that the war is nearer to their own homes than they believed, and that President Vladimir Putin isn’t as wise as they imagined. And the Ukrainians have to do all of this without a full-scale invasion of Russia, without occupying Moscow, and without a spectacular Russian surrender in Red Square.The anti-Putin Russians fighting in Russia are part of that battle. This group, which seems to contain some authentic Russian extremists and some authentic opponents of Putin (but may also contain Ukrainians pretending to be Russian extremists or opponents of Putin), does have a military purpose. These incursions can help neutralize the immediate border zone, and draw Russian troops away from more important battles. The group’s leaders appear to have killed a senior Russian officer and are said to have taken prisoners.But they, too, are part of a different game. As one of the group’s members (nickname “Caesar”) told The New York Times, they aim to provide “a demonstration to the people of Russia that it is possible to create resistance and fight against the Putin regime inside Russia.” By their very existence, they prove that apathy is not mandatory, that the Russian nation is not unified, and that no one is secure just because they live inside the borders of Russia.  [Tom Nichols: The world awaits Ukraine’s counteroffensive]The drones in Moscow could have the same effect. I don’t know who launched them—Ukrainian special forces, Russian saboteurs, or Ukrainian special forces pretending to be Russian saboteurs. But the effect is the same: They show Muscovites that no one is untouchable, not even the residents of the Kremlin. Maybe they won’t persuade people to “create resistance and fight against the Putin regime,” but they might help persuade people to start thinking about what comes next.And indeed, some people are clearly thinking about what comes next. Although no evidence indicates that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries, is actively trying to eliminate Putin, he does seem to be part of a competition to replace him, should the Russian president accidentally fall out a window. During an interview Monday, he mocked the luxurious life of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s daughter, implied that Shoigu himself is lazy, and described the chief of the general staff throwing “paranoid tantrums, yelling and squealing at anyone surrounding him.” We are, he said, “two months away from the firing squads”—by which he meant the firing squads that will eliminate these degenerate leaders. One Russian officer who said he had been captured and interrogated by the Wagner Group issued a statement claiming that Prigozhin’s men were threatening and humiliating Russian soldiers. Prigozhin, in turn, says the regular Russian army opened fire on his mercenaries and left land mines to obstruct their movement.In this context, the destruction not just of the big dam on the Dnipro River but of other dams and waterways all across occupied Ukraine has a clear purpose. Floods create chaos, forcing the Ukrainian state to care for evacuees. They put large, unexpected bodies of water between the Ukrainians and Russian forces, making it impossible to move equipment. These actions also send a psychological message: We will do anything—anything—to stop you. We don’t care how it looks. We don’t care who it damages. Confirmed reports say that the Russian occupation regime is not rescuing people stranded on the roof of their house by the flood, and that the Russian army is shelling people engaged in rescue operations. Russian soldiers have also drowned, Ukrainian spokespeople believe. An army that was willing to waste tens of thousands of men in the pointless nine-month battle of Bakhmut is unlikely to care.Remember that all of this—the weird psyops, the exploded dam, the Russian infighting—has unfolded even before anyone has reliably spotted the Western-trained, Western-equipped Ukrainian brigades that are meant to lead this counteroffensive. On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced with great fanfare that it had destroyed some of this equipment, including a German Leopard 2 tank. Hours later, Russian bloggers examined the video clips they produced. Alas, the objects destroyed seem to be not Leopard tanks but John Deere tractors. Future reports from the Russian ministry should be treated with caution.Future reports from any source should be treated with caution. What we can see is not the “fog of war,” in the old-fashioned sense; instead it is a kind of swirling tornado, a maelstrom of claims and counterclaims, memes and countermemes, real battles taking place away from television screens and fake ones happening on camera. The Normandy landings were followed by a long, bloody Allied slog through France, which no one back home watched in real time. The certainty that D-Day was a true turning point emerged only in retrospect. This Ukrainian counteroffensive is, so far, disappointing fans of panoramic drama, set-piece battles, and heroic tales. Those might, or might not, come later. In the meantime, remember that the true purpose of the counteroffensive is not your entertainment.

A core component of liberal democracy is that the opposition must have the right to field the candidate of its choice, giving it a fair chance to oust the government at the ballot box. In Poland, which has become one of Europe’s most important economic and military powers, that axiom is under attack.At the end of May, the governing Law and Justice party instituted a commission to investigate Russian influence on Polish politics. Given the ways in which the Kremlin has tried to wield power over European political parties, including Germany’s Social Democrats and Italy’s Lega (formerly Northern League), a nonpartisan commission to investigate such links in Poland would certainly make sense. A body with the authority to propose formal charges, to be investigated by independent courts, for people who are suspected of breaking existing laws would be perfectly appropriate.But this new commission is nothing of the sort. It violates the most basic democratic principles; its composition, exclusively of ruling-party members or loyalists, is wholly partisan; it is empowered to punish alleged culprits as it sees fit, turning the commission into prosecutor, judge, and jury, all in one. Perhaps most shockingly, the commission has the right to disbar anyone from public office for up to 10 years.[Yascha Mounk: After Poland, no democracy is safe]This last detail suggests the commission’s true purpose. With parliamentary elections coming up in the fall that are expected to be closely contested, the government appears to be using the commission as a cudgel against the leader of the country’s biggest opposition party, Donald Tusk, who was the prime minister from 2007 to 2014, and the president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. At a minimum, Law and Justice seems set to use its hold over the commission to tarnish Tusk’s standing in the eyes of voters; many observers fear that it could go so far as to make it illegal for him to run.Poland, in short, may be poised to turn into a Potemkin democracy, an empty simulacrum of genuine self-government. And that once again reveals the alarming brittleness of democracy, with even the most vaunted democratic success stories deeply vulnerable to authoritarian capture.Poland has long been seen as one of the great success stories of the past 30-plus years. During the Cold War, when the country was effectively a satellite state of the Soviet Union, it maintained a crushingly authoritarian system and suffered from very low living standards, especially in rural areas. Today, Poland enjoys full sovereignty, a status that had largely eluded the country for three centuries. After Poland gained independence from the Warsaw Pact, it made great strides toward freedom and political stability, joining the European Union and affording its citizens expansive social and political rights.Even more notable is the country’s economic transformation. One of few countries in the world to have enjoyed continuous economic growth for the past three decades, Poland has seen its GDP increase nearly tenfold since the end of Communist rule. Keir Starmer, the leader of the British Labour Party, recently made headlines by warning that Poland is on track to overtake the U.K. in GDP per capita by the end of the decade.Although Poland has continued to grow richer and more influential, its political development was upended when Law and Justice swept into power in 2015. Under the guidance of Jarosław Kaczyński, the populist party immediately set out to undermine the rule of law.Kaczyński placed loyalists on the constitutional court by legally dubious means and gave political appointees power over the judicial process. His party turned the state broadcaster into a tool of government propaganda, used public funds to purchase privately owned regional newspapers, and tried to force the owners of independent radio and television stations to sell their rightful possessions.In other words, this commission is the culmination of democratic backsliding that has been under way for years. If the new body bars Tusk from running in the fall elections, this highly influential EU member state will no longer be a genuine democracy. That would drag the whole bloc into a crisis of legitimacy.A significant facet of the developments in Poland, one with special resonance for the United States, suggests that the obvious explanations for the rise of authoritarian populism are at best incomplete—with major implications for any hopes of reversing the trend. Standard accounts of the ascendancy of authoritarian populism tend to focus on cultural change and economic stagnation. The debate has usually centered on which of these two factors is more important—but neither fits the Polish case especially well.Take the economy. In a single generation, Poland has grown much more affluent. Admittedly, this newfound wealth has come with greater inequality; some rural areas have been left behind compared with the gleaming metropoles—and Law and Justice has expertly exploited the resulting resentments. But in some ways, the improvement of living standards has been most striking in the country’s poorer regions, where people now take for granted amenities such as indoor toilets, which many lacked some 35 years ago.What’s more, support for Law and Justice is hardly limited to the poor or excluded; the party is also popular with social strata that have enjoyed breathtaking upward mobility. As with Donald Trump in the U.S., Law and Justice in Poland appeals to plenty of people who are doing very well.The notion of a backlash against cultural change does not fit the facts so well either. In 1989, Poland was a deeply conservative and patriarchal country. Today, women enjoy greater equality and autonomy, and, especially in the cities, sexual minorities are a visible part of the country’s social fabric. Law and Justice has played up fear over “LGBT ideology” and used a rejection of secular urban elites as part of its electoral pitch—moves that have made the party popular among those who feel alienated from the country’s new culture, which is much more liberal and cosmopolitan than it once was. Poland’s transformation, however, has been so deep and rapid that such regressive messaging alone would not be enough to keep Law and Justice in power; the party has been able to win a series of elections only because its appeal extends well beyond that reactionary base.Take the Catholic Church, which has long played a big political role in Poland. In the last years of Communist rule, Poland was one of the most Catholic countries in the world—a majority of the population attended Mass at least once a week. Now that number has fallen to about a quarter of the population. With the hold of the Church declining so rapidly, and its reputation in tatters after a string of sexual-abuse scandals, any explanation for the success of Law and Justice that relies simply on the theory of a backlash against cultural change is inadequate. Deeply devout voters now constitute too small a share of the electorate to keep Law and Justice in business. The same sort of change has affected other realms of Polish society. Attitudes toward gays and lesbians have, for example, dramatically improved, which means that homophobia cannot on its own account for the enduring appeal of Law and Justice.The upshot should worry those who think that further cultural change will magically make the problem of populism disappear: Neither a greater secularization of Polish society nor a further liberalization of attitudes toward sexual minorities is sure to erode the party’s popularity.All of these examples should be a warning for other democracies facing authoritarian-populist challenges, including the U.S. Some American pundits argue that populism’s potency derives mainly from the stagnation of living standards. Although that idea has some plausibility, the experience of Poland suggests that rapid economic growth and widespread prosperity do not necessarily reduce support for authoritarian populists.The other main school of thought insists that the roots of populism lie primarily in cultural grievances. Politicians like Trump, the argument runs, are especially popular among voters who are whiter and older, so as the population diversifies, and members of Gen Z gradually replace Baby Boomers, support for such candidates is sure to dwindle. Here, too, the Polish experience is sobering: Even as Poland’s culture has become more liberal and progressive, the arc of its politics has not bent toward democracy. The young have, in virtually all major democracies, been more progressive than the old for decades—yet, in part because voters’ values change as they grow older, the moment when progressives consistently win commanding electoral majorities has failed to materialize.Polish democracy is not dead. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Warsaw over the weekend to defend democratic institutions and fight for their right to vote for the candidate of their choice. The upcoming elections look likely to be close, even if—or perhaps especially if—Tusk is disqualified from running.[Read: Poland is not ready to accept a new McCarthyism]To understand the developments in Poland—and similar ones in such countries as Turkey, India, and America—the simple binary of democracy and dictatorship will not do. Poland, like so many other countries, is evolving into an embattled system that political scientists have described by such names as “illiberal democracy” and “competitive authoritarian regime.” The Law and Justice government has skewed the odds, giving it a big advantage over its political rivals. And yet, elections remain meaningful for now, because the opposition still has a real shot at gaining power through the ballot box.Poland was already a flawed democracy before the new commission was constituted. The opposition will retain some agency, even if Tusk is barred. But the Law and Justice government has taken yet another fateful step toward turning Poland into a Potemkin democracy.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.If the job-search firm Monster.com is right in its survey research, you are probably looking for a new job. According to its data at the end of last year, that’s what an eye-popping 96 percent of Americans workers reported doing. And yet, you probably won’t actually make that change: One Pew Research Center study found that only about 30 percent of workers changed jobs at least once in 2022, which was roughly on par with the level of turnover in 2021.What accounts for the 66-point difference between aspiration and action? Psych Central, a mental-health website, notes that a common reason people stay in jobs they want to leave is fear of the unknown: Will the new job be worse than the old one? This is a powerful emotion, liable to dominate other ones because evolutionarily it was so important to our survival. Our ancestors passed on their genes because they did not say, “I don’t know what kind of mushrooms those are, but I bet they’re delicious!”You may know that you’d like to do something else for work, but your options look like mushrooms of unknown origin. Thus “the devil you know” wins out, and you stay put. This can lead to a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction. But research about changing jobs illuminates trends that can guide your decision making, help lower the uncertainty, and manage your expectations.Research across many industries and countries has established that very distinct patterns occur in people’s happiness when they change employment. The good news is that job satisfaction usually does indeed rise. Writing in a recent edition of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, scholars found that job changers rated their satisfaction with their old job at roughly 4.5 on a scale of 1 to 7; that changed to about 6 when they started their new job, and this rating held at six weeks in.That’s how long the honeymoon lasted. At this point, satisfaction started to fall for about the next five months. At the six-month mark on average, an inflection occurred, depending on the “career orientation” of the job changer. Those with a self-centered orientation—defined as those who see themselves as independently responsible for managing their careers, and mostly think about their own benefit—stayed at this lower level (about 5.5) of satisfaction. This contrasted with those who had an organization-centered orientation—defined as prioritizing loyalty and security, and envisioning their career as part of a greater whole—as they started to see their satisfaction rise again after that six-month point.[Annie Lowrey: Low-wage jobs are becoming middle-class jobs]The researchers did not track what happened after that, but it is reasonable to assume that the self-oriented folks continued to feel less satisfaction, and the organization-oriented to feel more. After all, we know that the first group reported an intention to leave the new job at significantly higher rates than the second. Self-oriented careers have more churn and less job satisfaction than organization-oriented careers.A second pattern in the research from around the world is that those who are happier people in general are more adaptable in their careers. In fact, happiness—more than perceived social support or a positive attitude about the future—is the most significant predictor of being able to cope with, and make the best of, professional changes such as greater responsibilities and skill demands. In other words, people who are happier overall are more satisfied when they change jobs than unhappier people. Researchers also note that thriving in a career can be closely related to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, which is of course a key to personal fulfillment.[Oren Cass: The labor-shortage myth]A third pattern in the data concerns the “push” versus “jump” factors in employment. Scholars writing in 2017 in The International Journal of Aging and Human Development found that people were happier with their career changes if they had made a shift of their own volition, as opposed to being laid off and having to find a new job. This isn’t too surprising, but it underlines that people may have a choice about being proactive in the labor market when their job situation is uncertain.If you are considering a change of job or career but feel paralyzed by fear of the unknown, the research offers a few practical lessons to help assuage your anxiety yet keep you from unrealistic wishes and rash decisions.1. Manage your expectations
We’ve already seen that a job change usually increases satisfaction, but that much of this can wear off fairly quickly—within months, especially if you are not an especially organization-centered person. So coach yourself to be realistic: The change most likely won’t make you worse off, but don’t romanticize it. If your expectations are too high, you will be disappointed; then you might find yourself on the job market over and over again, stuck in a cycle of unmet hopes.2. Look for happiness outside of work first
Remember that the biggest predictor of work happiness is nonwork happiness. I have witnessed this throughout my own career, in myself and in others: When things are good in the rest of your life, they seem more stable and less bothersome at the job. Conversely, when we look for our overall well-being in what we are doing to earn a living, it places too much emphasis and pressure on the job, making it into a kind of a religion. (And actually practicing a real religion probably brings greater happiness.)3. Jump before you are pushed
Humans crave control over their environment. One of the most common correlates of depression is feeling that your life is out of your control—that external forces are determining what happens to you. Getting fired or laid off from work commonly provokes frustration, guilt, embarrassment, and anger—and is likely to coincide with less satisfaction when you find a new job. Sometimes, losing your job comes as a complete surprise, but advance warning can take such forms as a change of management, a hiring freeze, or a switch in product line. If you stay alert, you have a better chance of leaving on your own terms.People generally talk about moving jobs as a dramatic occurrence, a major life upheaval akin to getting married or divorced. And it can be that significant for people who have spent many years with a specific employer, or who prize stability and security. But for most people, such adjustments happen many times. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that for people born in the later years of the baby boom, a man with a higher education will, on average over the course of a lifetime, hold nearly 12 different jobs; a similarly qualified woman will hold more than 13 jobs. That frequency of career change is hardly comparable to how often people marry and divorce—except possibly for a few Hollywood celebrities.In other words, keep it all in proportion: Most people change jobs multiple times in their career. So the best practical advice, if you are sitting year after year in a frustrating gap between aspiration and action, wanting to change but fearing uncertainty, is simply this: It’s really not that big a deal to try something else, so you might as well do it. Just bear in mind that the happier you are outside of work, the happier you are likely to feel in work.

Gen Z is poised to massively expand its influence in the 2024 election. But its impact may be more complex than typically assumed.As many as 7 million to 9 million more members of the racially and culturally diverse Gen Z could cast ballots in 2024 than did in 2020, while the number of the predominantly white Baby Boomers and older generations voting may decline by a corresponding amount, according to nonpartisan forecasts. As a result, for the first time, Gen Z and Millennials combined could account for as many votes next year as the Baby Boomers and their elders—the groups that have made up a majority of voters for decades.That generational transition represents a clear opportunity for Democrats, who have consistently amassed solid, sometimes overwhelming, margins among both Millennials and Gen Z voters. But an analysis of previously unpublished election data from Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, by Michael Podhorzer, the former political director for the AFL-CIO, shows that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate that has partitioned the country into seemingly immovable blocks of red and blue states.Podhorzer’s analysis of the Catalist data, shared exclusively with The Atlantic, found that over the past four elections, Gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats in blue states, and provided the party solid margins in closely contested swing states. But in red states, with a few prominent exceptions, Podhorzer surprisingly found that even Gen Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans.The generation’s strong Democratic lean in blue and purple states may create growing challenges for Republicans trying to amass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House. But the Republican tilt of younger voters in red states could frustrate Democrats trying to loosen the GOP’s hold on those places. That seemingly unbreakable Republican grip has made it difficult for Democrats to win majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and has allowed the GOP to impose a sweepingly conservative social agenda across nearly half of the country.Republicans remain dubious that young voters will show up in large numbers anywhere next year for President Joe Biden, the oldest U.S. president, who did not run well among them in the 2020 Democratic primaries and whose approval ratings with them remain anemic. As Kristen Soltis Anderson, a GOP pollster who has extensively studied younger voters, told me, “I don’t think there is a lot of focus in Republican world” about the potential risk to the party of a big surge of new Generation Z voters in 2024, “in part because a lot of Republicans believe that there is just no way young voters will turn out for Joe Biden.”But other analysts point out that despite their equivocal feelings about Biden, young people voted in very large numbers in 2020 and maintained relatively high turnout in 2022. A lack of enthusiasm about Biden personally “didn’t really dissuade the generation from coming out and voting for Democrats” in either of the past two elections, says John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, which conducts a twice-yearly national survey of youth attitudes. “They knew the stakes in the election. They knew what life was like under more Republican control versus more Democratic control.”Whatever they think about Biden, the influence of Gen Z, generally defined as young people born from 1997 to 2012, is certain to rise next year simply because so many of them will age into the electorate. William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, estimates that about 15.4 million eligible young people will have turned 18 between the 2020 election and Election Day next year.In 2016, the first presidential election when any members of the generation were old enough to participate, Gen Z accounted for just 2 percent of voters, according to an analysis of census data by Frey for the nonpartisan States of Change project. In 2020, Gen Z rose to 7.5 percent of all voters, Frey calculates. Frey projects that the generation will increase its share of the electorate to 13 percent in 2024. Depending on turnout, that could mean about 8 million more Gen Z voters next year, increasing the total to about 20 million in all.Millennials, generally described as younger adults born from 1981 to 1996, have also increased their share of the electorate. In Frey’s analysis of census data, they rose from about one in seven voters in 2008 to just under one in four in 2020. Frey predicts that in 2024, the two generations combined will make up about 37 percent of the electorate.That could mark a historic tipping point. Frey projects that in 2024, the Baby Boomers and their elders—the last members of the Greatest and Silent Generations still voting—will also constitute 37 percent of voters. If that forecast holds up, it will end decades during which those Republican-leaning older cohorts were the biggest generations in the electorate. Meanwhile, Generation X, defined as those born from 1965 to 1980, will remain stable over this period at about one-fourth of the electorate.Another fundamental shift in American politics over the past half century is magnifying the impact of this generational evolution: Voters now divide between the parties more along lines of cultural identity than class interest. And on every important cultural and demographic dividing line between the two parties, the younger generations exhibit characteristics that predict support for Democrats.More than 70 percent of Baby Boomers are white. But just 55 percent of Millennials are white and only slightly more than half of Gen Z are. Millennials and Gen Z are far less likely than older generations to identify with any organized religion and far more likely (especially in Gen Z) to identify as LGBTQ. Younger generations are also more likely than older ones to hold a college degree.“What sets Gen Z apart is … they are growing up in a much more racially and ethnically diverse cohort, which really is driving them to more progressive positions,” Melissa Deckman, the chief executive officer of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of a forthcoming book on the generation, told me.Overall, these new voters are behaving almost exactly as those attributes would predict. Before 2004, as I’ve written, exit polls and other sources found little difference between the voting preferences of younger and older voters. But since Millennials and then Gen Z entered the electorate in large numbers, Democrats have established a durable advantage among the young. Catalist’s data, for instance, show that Democrats have carried almost exactly 60 percent of the two-party vote among Millennials and Gen Z in each of the past three presidential elections and in three of the past four congressional elections; the one exception came when the party’s vote among them hit 66 percent in the 2018 congressional races. (One New York Times analyst, citing unpublished polling data, recently claimed that Millennials, though still supporting Democrats, are moving to the right as they age, a view also held by some Republican pollsters. But skeptics quickly noted that other data sources, such as results from the large-sample Cooperative Election Survey, do not show such a shift.)The key insight that Podhorzer’s analysis adds is that even this strong overall Democratic advantage remains subject to substantial geographic variation that tends to reinforce, rather than reconfigure, the nation’s electoral divisions.Using Catalist data, he found that Democrats in the four elections from 2016 through 2022 have consistently amassed imposing margins of 20 to as much as 40 percentage points among Gen Z voters in the 18 states he identifies as already leaning reliably Democratic, such as California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Eastern Seaboard states from Maryland to Maine.Gen Z voters over those four elections have also provided Democrats solid margins of roughly 15 to 25 percentage points in the eight purple states: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada across the Sun Belt, and Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire in the Rust Belt.But the story in the remaining two dozen Republican-leaning states is more complex. Podhorzer found that Democrats performed better in the red states among Gen Z than they did among older generations—but not well enough to actually win those youngest voters. Republicans still carried a majority of Gen Z voters in most of the red states. Even in red states where Democrats have won most Gen Z voters in recent elections—including Texas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, and Montana—the party’s margins among them are typically slim. That means Democrats in red states are not generating nearly enough advantage from younger generations to overcome the lopsided GOP edge among older cohorts.Podhorzer told me this regional variation is “only surprising to the extent you believe that age explains almost everything about voters’ partisanship. But if you understand that the neighborhood you grew up in, the parents you have, the schools you went to, and the general politics that you are introduced into is a big factor, it shouldn’t be surprising at all. Because if you grow up in Brooklyn, no matter how old you are, you are swimming in blue water … and the same goes for those growing up in red America.”For Democrats, the most important of the trends Podhorzer cataloged may be their persistent strength among Gen Z voters in the battleground swing states that decide who wins the White House. In all, Podhorzer calculates that Gen Z voters in the swing states who cast their first ballot in the 2018 election or after have preferred Democrats by nearly 20 percentage points. (Democrats also hold a strong 15-point edge among Millennials in those states who voted for the first time in 2018 or after.) To Podhorzer, the clear lesson of these trends is that Democrats are more likely to win the battleground states by investing in turning out these new voters than by trying to lure back the mostly blue-collar whites who have abandoned the party to support Donald Trump.Podhorzer says the Democratic advantage among younger voters in the purple and blue states has been driven largely by an unusual dynamic. Typically, he points out, young voters gravitate toward a party because of a positive association with the president in office as they entered the electorate: John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. But in this case, Podhorzer argues, the most powerful force moving Gen Z toward Democrats is not so much excitement about the party (or Biden), but negative views of Trump. “They are coming of age at a time when everybody around them, as well as the popular culture, loathe and ridicule” Trump, he told me. “Especially in the blue states, where MAGA candidates have hijacked the nominating process, there is no exemplar of a reasonable Republican anywhere to be seen.”Some GOP strategists aren’t particularly concerned about the party’s poor performance with young voters, Anderson, the GOP pollster, says, because inside the GOP coalition, Trump is strongest among the youngest generations. “So if you are hanging out in Republican land only, you can easily convince yourself that Donald Trump is actually very popular with young voters, because he is irreverent and edgy or whatever your rationale would be,” she told me. The problem is that too many in the GOP don’t realize “that the young people in the past who might have liked Mitt Romney aren’t in our rooms anymore” and that instead we “have boiled the youth of the party down to this very Trumpist core.”In many red states, Republicans appear to be taking no chances with the unfolding generational transition: Several GOP-controlled states, such as Texas, Georgia, and Arizona, where the ascending younger generations are much more racially diverse than older voters, have imposed the toughest restrictions on voting.In every state, influence in the coming years will flow from those mostly white older generations to more diverse younger ones. By 2028, Frey projects, the Boomers and their elders will fall to slightly below a third of voters nationwide, while Millennials and Gen Z will soar well past two-fifths. By 2032, when all of Gen Z is eligible, Americans born after 1980 will cast almost exactly half of all votes.Deckman said she expects Gen Z to continue to lean left over this period—in part because, more than any previous generation, these young people are consuming media that they themselves create, on TikTok and similar platforms. “Their news is generated by themselves, and because they are more progressive, I think many Gen Zers are consuming information that reinforces those viewpoints,” she told me.As Podhorzer’s analysis shows, this transition isn’t yet threatening Republicans in most red states. And in the swing states, Republicans can probably offset the growing presence of Gen Z and Millennials in 2024 by running better with older voters, many of whom are unhappy with Biden’s performance.But the Democratic advantage with Gen Z is like an investment whose value compounds over time—in this case, as their share of the electorate expands. If Republicans can’t regain at least some ground with younger voters, especially in the battleground states, the party will need to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups. In any given election, as Trump demonstrated in 2016, Republicans might meet that test. But making that math add up will only get tougher for the GOP as the generational transition inexorably rolls on.

In a case involving poop jokes on dog chew toys shaped like liquor bottles—yes, really—the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the First Amendment does not broadly protect parody products from violating U.S. copyright laws.
In a unanimous ruling for Tennessee-based Jack Daniel's, the justices determined that lower courts had erred by rejecting the whiskey maker's claim that a brand of parody chew toys violated the brand's copyright protections. Those chew toys, manufactured by VIP Products, roughly copied the iconic shape of a Jack Daniel's bottle and parodied the brand's label—replacing the famous "Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey" signage with a joke about "The Old No. 2 on your Tennessee Carpet."
In its petition, Jack Daniel's claimed the VIP Products' "Bad Spaniels" chew toy both infringed and diluted the Jack Daniel's brand. Both would be violations of the Lanham Act, the federal law governing copyrights. A federal district court sided with the whiskey brand. However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling by pointing to the fact that courts have long recognized a First Amendment right to parody commercial products in artistic expression—the so-called "Rogers test," which is derived from a 1989 Supreme Court case involving performer Ginger Rogers.
In Thursday's ruling, Justice Elena Kagan said those precedents do not apply to the "Bad Spaniels" chew toy case.
The Rogers test applies to artistic works that "have an 'expressive element' implicating 'First Amendment values' and carry only a 'slight risk' of confusing consumers about the 'source or content' of the underlying work," Kagan wrote. Trademarks are allowed to be used for "expressive functions" but not as a stand-in for a trademark itself, she added. That's why the name "Barbie" can be used in song lyrics—something that courts actually had to decide in the wake of the 1997 Europop hit song "Barbie Girl."
"Consumer confusion about source—trademark law's cardinal sin—is most likely to arise when someone uses another's trademark as a trademark," Kagan concluded. "In such cases, Rogers has no proper application."
This is, ultimately, a narrow ruling that Kagan explicitly says should not be construed as a review of the merits of the Rogers test. Even in that narrow sense, however, it should raise an eyebrow. The idea that consumers would be meaningfully misled by this parody product—one that is fairly obviously a dog toy and not a bottle of liquor—stains credulity even if fits within the confines of copyright law. So does the determination that VIP Products wasn't engaging in artistic expression. Even bad jokes are deserving of First Amendment protection.
The case will be re-heard by the 9th Circuit—but this time without VIP Products being able to lean on the Rogers test as a defense.
In all, Thursday's ruling is not a major blow to free expression or the right to sell parody products. But it is certainly a victory for brands that can't take a joke.
The post Supreme Court Sides With Jack Daniel's Against Doggy Chew Toy Company appeared first on Reason.com.

City officials in Orem, Utah, have banned its public library from setting up displays highlighting Pride Month, Black History Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month, along with other heritage-themed holidays. And then they banned librarians from criticizing the city's decision—threatening to discipline them for "insubordination."
But now, the Utah Library Association (ULA) has threatened to sue, teaming up with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment nonprofit, to warn the city that it could soon face a lawsuit for violating librarians' First Amendment rights.
In June 2022, Orem city officials banned the Orem Public Library from setting up any Pride Month–themed displays in the library's children or teen sections, prompting backlash from the ULA, which called on the city to reverse the ban. Instead, the city enacted further bans, prohibiting the library from making any heritage month–themed displays—including Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and Native American History Month–themed book displays. Notably, this ban did not apply to other holiday-themed displays, such as Christmas or the Fourth of July.
Again, the ULA criticized the decision, posting a statement on social media and its website arguing that "This act of censorship is not only a disservice to the Orem community, but also an act of overreach by the city government….The library is both a legal and a symbolic embodiment of the fundamental American value that we all have the right to self-direct, think for ourselves, read, learn, and engage with ideas and information without government interference."
In response, the city has retaliated, cutting off library employees from ULA-affiliated professional development programs. Making matters worse, the city outright threatened library employees with discipline if they criticized city officials' censorship of heritage month–themed displays. According to FIRE, when news of the ban went public, city officials even "conducted a lengthy inquisition among the library staff interrogating them to try to figure out who spoke to a former employee about the policy." Eventually, they "reprimanded one employee and forced them to forgo a raise."
The Orem Public Library also subjects employees to a restrictive social media policy that bars employees from "mak[ing] disparaging comments about the workplace, City policies, supervisors, co-workers, citizens, customers, or other persons associated with the City," as well as prohibits "post[ing] any information to any blog, social networking site, or other public internet site, that would discredit or disparage the City." In an email to library employees, one former library director pointed out this policy, as well as informing employees "that membership in the Utah Valley Parent's Alliance, which opposed the display ban, would also be considered insubordination," according to FIRE.
But FIRE contends that these actions clearly violate the First Amendment. "The City of Orem's actions violate the First Amendment rights of both the ULA and Orem employees," FIRE attorney Gabe Walters said in a press release last Friday. "The city may not retaliate against employees for exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free speech and free association."
FIRE sent a letter to Orem city officials last Friday, informing them that their actions violate the Constitution and threatening to sue if the city doesn't change course. FIRE's letter singles out both the city's explicitly retaliatory conduct in cutting off support for employee association with the ULA and its social media policy. According to FIRE, the social media policy stifles employees' First Amendment rights by placing a prior restraint on librarians' speech. The policy is also overly broad and unconstitutionally vague. 
"For instance, an employee risks discipline if she posts on Facebook complaining about excess traffic or criticizing something the Mayor said to the City Council, speech with little to no bearing on the operation of the Orem Public," the letter notes, adding that the policy's vagueness leaves it unclear if employees violate the policy merely by disagreeing with the ban or by posting in agreement with the ULA's criticism of the ban. "This vagueness opens the door for 'arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement' where employees are punished only for speech that City leadership dislikes or finds challenging."
FIRE has given city officials until June 30 to change their policies—or face a lawsuit.
"Librarians should be able to do their jobs rather than be forced to tiptoe through the minefield of councilmembers' preferred political positions," said Rita Christensen, a former Orem Public Library employee. "City leaders forced us to trade exploration and learning for government restrictions and intimidation. And if we spoke out about their decisions, we'd be severely disciplined, labeled as untrustworthy, and treated like a pariah."
The post A City Banned Pride Month–Themed Library Displays. Then, It Threatened Employees Who Criticized the Decision. appeared first on Reason.com.

When former President Donald Trump arrived at a Manhattan courthouse on April 4, crowds of people and rows of TV cameras were there to witness an unprecedented moment: the first-ever arraignment of a former U.S. president. How quickly can something this important be relegated to the footnotes of American presidential history? We may be about to find out.
The New York charges against Trump stem from his payment of $130,000 to porn performer Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement aimed at keeping her from telling the press about the affair she says Trump had with her in 2006. Michael Cohen, then Trump's attorney, paid Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election, and Trump reimbursed him with a series of checks in 2017. The Trump Organization, the business entity that Trump and his family control, described the payments as compensation for legal services.
Federal prosecutors viewed Cohen's payment to Daniels as an illegal campaign contribution, on the theory that it was intended to influence the election. Cohen pleaded guilty to that offense in August 2018. Since Cohen said he paid Daniels at Trump's behest, his guilty plea implied that Trump could be prosecuted for accepting an illegal campaign contribution. But the Justice Department never pursued that charge.
To convert that unproven violation of federal law into a state crime, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg cited a New York law dealing with falsification of business records. That offense becomes a felony when it is committed with the intent to conceal "another crime." Bragg said Trump therefore was guilty of 34 felonies—one for each invoice, check, and ledger entry related to Cohen's reimbursement. That strategy boils down to prosecuting Trump under state law for a federal campaign finance violation that the Justice Department never bothered to allege.
Questioning the legal merits of Bragg's case does not imply that former presidents should be shielded from charges when there is compelling evidence that they have committed crimes. Bragg surely is right to reject the notion that prosecutors should eschew such cases to spare the nation from "bitter controversy and divisive national debate." That was how President Gerald Ford justified his pardon of former President Richard Nixon, who came closer to facing a criminal indictment than any chief executive before Trump.
Presidents are just people. When they commit crimes, they should be held accountable. The controversy and debate are part of the process, whether we like it or not, and they are better than the alternative of giving high-ranking elected officials a free pass to break the law. Mayors, governors, and heads of foreign governments have faced indictments (and convictions) throughout history. There's no reason to exempt U.S. presidents.
Even so, the case against Trump in Manhattan looks shaky and stinks of partisan politics. But the former president faces more serious legal jeopardy on at least three other fronts.
Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump's alleged attempts to strong-arm Georgia officials into overturning the results of that state's 2020 presidential vote. In a phone call a few days after the election, for example, Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes"—the number Trump needed to win the state. That seems to be a fairly plain violation of Georgia's law against "criminal solicitation to commit election fraud."
Willis' investigation extends beyond that one phone call. In January 2022, she convened a grand jury to investigate attempts to "disrupt the lawful administration" of the 2020 election. Witnesses interviewed by the grand jury included former Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.). In letters to local law enforcement released in April, Willis said possible criminal charges against Trump and his allies would be announced between July 11 and September 1.
Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, is investigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Dozens of subpoenas have been issued to just about everyone in Trump's inner circle on that day, including Vice President Mike Pence, who was a target of the rioters' ire. The Democrat-led House committee that investigated the riot argued that Trump broke four federal laws in the lead-up to January 6, and Smith may reach similar conclusions.
Smith also is investigating Trump's alleged mishandling of classified records. In addition to any charges directly connected to the trove of material found at Mar-a-Lago during an FBI search in August 2022, Trump (and his lawyers) could be in trouble for lying to the government about the documents.
Although it would be folly to predict how any of this will turn out, it is no longer crazy to think Trump could find himself fighting additional criminal charges. The Georgia case, in particular, could be important in setting clear standards for how much pressure future presidents can exert on state and local election officials. And unlike a convoluted payout to a former fling, election integrity actually matters.
Much of Trump's relatively brief political career has been without precedent in American history. He upended the conventional wisdom about how to win a presidential election, governed with a reckless disregard for the rules and norms that limit presidential power, and left office amid a disgraceful attempt to overturn the results of an election. He became the first president to be impeached twice.
In this context, Trump's indictment and arraignment in New York feel like more of the same. But there may yet be another twist: Depending on how these legal cases play out, the historic first-time indictment of a former president may be little more than a footnote in the Trump saga.
The post Trump's New York Indictment Was Just the Beginning of His Legal Woes appeared first on Reason.com.

How old — and without having to reveal everyone’s ages? How old are you in your head? I think I’m 38. 38 is when I finally got the job I always wanted. And I suddenly, like, the world was sort of unfolding before me. I had recently gotten married, had my first son. This was suddenly like, oh, this is my life.

Look, I’m the opposite. I mean, every time I think about the degree of maintenance required to keep myself from just falling apart, every time my back cracks or my tendinitis in my elbow flares up, I’m like, oh, I’ve got to be 75.

I was going to say that I feel ageless, although I recently learned that one should not —

That’s how I think of you.

— one should not refer to an older person as ageless because it’s coded language for old, but still in pretty good shape.

I aspire to be ageless.

I would too. I would too.

If it’s followed by wonder, “ageless wonder —”

“Ageless wonder.”

— I’ll take that.

What I will say is that life has just gotten better as I’ve gotten older. That corner may turn and I’ll look back with nostalgia. But I’ve been very lucky because it just keeps getting better and better.

Well, now we all hate Lydia. [MUSIC PLAYING]

And this is “Matter of Opinion.” So as you guys may have noticed, Americans are not getting any younger. Indeed, some of us on this podcast may not be getting any younger. And not only are we getting older, we’re also retiring later. And this is especially true of some very powerful people in Washington, DC. There’s the president, Joe Biden, who would be 86 years old by the end of the second term that he’s currently running for. And then there’s California Senator Dianne Feinstein. She’s been in the news a lot recently because she’s resisting calls to retire. And those calls are coming because not only is she nearly 90 years old, but as some of our colleagues at The Times have reported, she’s increasingly reliant on her aides, who tell her things like how and when to cast her votes. So, guys, we’re going to talk about this strange situation, which is strange, right? Because many Americans, maybe most Americans fantasize about an early retirement. So why does it seem like people in power are so unwilling to let go? And how does that affect the rest of us?

Well, I mean, I’m just going to take a moment here to do a little bit of Feinstein appreciation. I think it’s worth remembering that this is someone who’s had a really, really legendary career in our politics. She was elected to the Senate in 1992 in the Year of the Woman. She was the author and helped usher the passage of the 1994 assault weapons ban. You know, she was an incredibly important Senator on the Select Committee on Intelligence. Really sort of brave and courageous around the huge rupture of norms around torture and interrogation. She’s just been this kind of legendary figure, which I think highlights the tragedy of what’s unfolding right now. This person who’s had this incredible career is now being wheeled around the Senate and hidden behind pillars so that news photographers can’t take pictures of her and so reporters can’t doorstep her. And so it is this kind of incredibly tragic moment. And it’s almost like a kind of “Weekend at Bernie’s” thing. It’s very, very unfortunate.

And you do have to fault the staff to some degree. I mean, what happens in these situations — and you’ve seen it in the past with, we all remember Strom Thurmond at 100 or Robert Byrd in his 90s. Their staff starts running things. And that’s an intoxicating situation to be in. And so they’re just more than happy, in some cases, to let this go on indefinitely. And then when it comes time to re-elect, unless there is something kind of visibly falling apart, you have the twin issues of incumbency, where everybody’s like, yeah, maybe they’re a little old, but I know it’s the devil I know. And then you kind combine that with the fact that all of America is getting older. And older voters tend to not have as many problems with, say, Joe Biden as younger voters do. So you have a couple of things kind of pushing that age ever upward.

So will anyone make the case that Feinstein or, let’s say, Feinstein’s staff, since maybe it’s ambiguous who is actually deciding that she shouldn’t resign, is doing the right thing? Is anyone up for a defense of the sustaining of Dianne Feinstein as US Senator?

No.

OK, because if not —

No, I can give this a shot.

Carlos, our hero.

I mean, I think it’s a little easy to sit back and say that fill-in-the-blank person should retire with dignity, should sort of do the right thing and step down or not run again for whichever office we’re discussing without necessarily thinking about what the person in the office finds dignified as an end to a career. I think we live in a country that worships youth and vitality and considers old people to be burdens and annoyances, not repositories of wisdom and experience, but as an inconvenience, right? Think of what you’re telling someone when you’re saying that you should resign or not run again because you’re too old. You’re basically no longer working, right? You no longer serve the purpose that I want for you. They’re not dead yet, but we’re kind of effectively killing them early on a more convenient schedule for ourselves.

Wait a minute, no, no.

And we’re taking away the thing that has given their life meaning and purpose. We will honor Dianne Feinstein when she is dead. Oh my god, the obituaries, the columns, the multimedia packages will be out of this world. But until then, we’d rather not see you around, right? You don’t look so good. You’re inconvenient. I can’t bring myself to be part of that course.

It is not that she is inconvenient. It is that she cannot do her job. She had to take months off to go home to recover from some —

Will not be the first senator who did that.

No, and I think they should have gone too. The difference is, in a very, very closely split Senate, it stops the process. And I think unless you want to have more discussions about blanket retirement ages and blanket competency tests, you need to have some acknowledgment that different people age in different ways. Nobody’s calling for Chuck Grassley to drop out because Grassley seems to pretty much be able to do his thing on a regular basis, as opposed to Dianne Feinstein, who has basically become something to, as you’ve noted, hide from the public. So this is not just a question of, oh, ageism, she’s not as spry as she used to be.

Well, let me bring up, since Carlos manfully stepped into the breach, the case of John Fetterman, the United States Senator from Pennsylvania, who is obviously not, God willing, near the end of his life, but was elected to the Senate following a severe stroke, has been hospitalized for an extended period of time with depression during his first year in the Senate, and has attracted — there’s been an argument around Fetterman that is an interesting analog to the argument around Feinstein. So do you guys think there’s a big difference between the case of Fetterman — allowing that he is, I think it’s fair to say he’s much more competent than Feinstein at this point on the evidence we have. But he is taking breaks from the Senate. He is clearly not at full capacity. Is there a big difference between those cases?

There’s precedent, obviously, of people stepping away from very, very important jobs. People take leaves for various reasons — for health, to take care of an ailing relative, to give birth to a child, all those kinds of things. And Fetterman’s case seems to lie somewhere between those different kinds of absences. And it was extended. And I think there was a lot of conversation about it. But I but I do think that he does seem to be on a trajectory of recovery, which is very, very different than the situation that we’re seeing with Feinstein.

Yeah, people were complaining about long before she had to go home for her case of shingles or her current syndrome that she is suffering from. This is not a one-off for her. But that’s why when you’re talking about a gerontocracy, what is it that we’re really concerned about? Are we concerned that they can’t do their job, which is clearly the case with Feinstein’s discussion? Or is it that we just worry, as happened with the past House Democratic leadership, that because they are a certain age they don’t represent new blood, fresh ideas, they have stale approaches to things? So that’s one of the questions that often gets squashed together.

I think it’s funny, as you were talking, I was thinking about one of the most interesting and innovative and exciting presidential candidates that we’ve seen in recent memory is Bernie Sanders. And he was real old when he ran. So I think the idea that new energy and ideas only come from the young is definitely not the case.

So preparing for this conversation, I went back and looked at the writings of George HW Bush and Jimmy Carter to see if I could find anything about how they saw sort of the proper age for the presidency or what one should be doing in one’s 80s. George HW Bush has this wonderful book of letters called “All The Best, George Bush.” It’s huge. But towards the end, he writes about what it’s like to get older and also the age at which one can be of use in the presidency. In one letter to a friend, right after George W. wins re-election in ‘04 and he is 80, and he writes, “I wish I could help this son of ours. I wish I could do something to help ease the burden, but I cannot. I am an old guy. My experiences are out of date. Perhaps my instincts aren’t as good as I once thought they were.” So he says, “Now it’s just back to our tiny house in Houston, back to watching crime TV, to listening to Imus.” You know, that was how he felt he could be use at that point in his life, even though he was certainly vital enough to be an engaged citizen. He just felt that he was too old for the presidency, not just in his stamina, but even in his worldview. And I thought that was very interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I do think just pivoting a bit to the presidency — and we should talk a little bit about Joe Biden and his age and the signs of his age. I think we had an excellent piece in The Times about this. But, you know, I think that there have been lots of different approaches to sort of “vigor” in the presidency, quote, unquote. I think there are some presidents who are real workaholics. And sometimes that gets read as micromanaging, as in the case of Jimmy Carter. You know, I think Barack Obama put in a lot of long hours in the Oval. And so these questions of, how much time you spend in the office? Do you get tired? Are you vigorous? Sometimes those are related to age, but not always. What do you guys think?

I think with the current match-up that we’re expecting between, say, Biden and Trump, it’s a question of style. So Biden is 80 years old. But he’s also just calm and quiet. And Trump, on the other hand, seems incredibly in-your-face. And I do think there is a tendency to equate combativeness with vigor. And so what you’re looking at is with Trump, there have been plenty of people who’ve gone back over his appearances over the years and discussed that his vocabulary is shrinking. His mental processes do not seem as sharp as they once were. But the dude is bombastic. I mean, he is always out there shrieking about something. And so he does not come across as frail. A little bit unhinged, but not frail. And when you’re talking about age, Biden just comes across as you’re kind of slowing down uncle or grandpa or whatever.

Or great-grandpa.

He’s in his 80s.

I mean, if we think of, what is the purpose of stamina, right? It is ostensibly to take on a very demanding job. And Trump had what was the term? Executive time? Remember? Trump had all this time built into his schedule where he was just — he was on Twitter or he was watching TV. He was calling friends. You know, very few meetings scheduled throughout the day. Biden seems to have a very similar schedule to what Obama had, except in the evening. In the evening, he will kind of retire for the evening, whereas Obama kind of kept reading briefing books or whatever he was doing. And so if it’s a matter of how much time someone spends on the job, how much time they can devote to the job, there’s kind of different ways to schedule the day. And for all of Trump’s perceived vigor, he actually devoted much less time to governing, unless, of course, you assume that tweeting and talking on the phone and watching TV was his form of governing.

Yeah, that’s basically as good as he got.

I mean, that’s my form of governing. I was going to say, I like to schedule lots of executive time for myself.

In Lydia’s repressive society —

And it’s an imperial mode of governance. I mean, I think the thing is, with Biden, the challenge with the presidency, right, is that there’s also crisis management, which falls on the presidency in a way that it doesn’t fall on really any other office in our republic. And that is where I think the argument for some kind of age limit and maybe as a matter of policy, we have a lower bound. You have to be 35 to be president. I don’t think it would be crazy to set an upper bound. But even just on a case-by-case basis, I think for someone I disagree with on a lot of policy, I think Joe Biden has done an OK job as president in terms of day-to-day management, policy choices, even some tough foreign policy decisions. The idea of Joe Biden four years on from now facing Cuban Missile-style crisis having to do with Russia and Ukraine or China and Taiwan or a COVID-style crisis, it just doesn’t seem like an appropriate thing to ask of someone that age and to lay these kind of — the US presidency carries existential powers in a way that separates the presidency from other parts of this debate.

I think that’s right. Although our colleagues’ reporting indicated that he actually was great at the 3:00 AM call.

It was actually at 3:00 AM.

It was actually at 3:00 AM when it seemed like maybe the war was extending, Ukraine was extending to Poland. And he was able to sort of wake up in the middle of the night and handle the crisis. But I think the thing that’s a little harder to talk about is, at a certain point, you do break out your actuarial tables and play a little bit of geriatric, you know, prognosticating. And, you know, I think the big question is, will Biden live through another term? Because when you get to a certain age, it just, death becomes more likely. And these are very hard things to talk about, but it’s true. And so I think that’s going to be something that’s going to be foremost in voters’ minds is they’re thinking about what the overall ticket looks like. And that, I think, is one of the biggest vulnerabilities that Joe Biden has is that he’s got a relatively untested vice president.

So we’ve gone from each person is different and each person ages in their own way, in their own pace to maybe we need some hard and fast upper limits. Nikki Haley has been talking about — I mean, it seems a fairly political ploy to kind of draw the distinction between her age and that of Trump and Biden, but she’s been suggesting there should be mental competency tests for candidates 75 or above. When we get into that kind of nitty gritty of like, how do you actually make this real? How would you operationalize some kind of upper bound or mental test? How do you do that? I mean, we don’t want to get back into the person, woman, man, camera, TV land.

Trump’s amazing accounts of how he passed his — passed his test.

Yeah, his presidential cognitive test. He’s sharp as a tack.

I don’t think the competency tests are particularly plausible. I think you just have to sort of accept some kind of arbitrary limit. I speak as — I’m a member of the Roman Catholic Church, which has long experience with gerontocracy and has, for that reason, two layers of restraint on older bishops exercising power. First, at the age of 75, all bishops have to offer their resignation to the pope, who can accept it or not. But then there’s also just a rule that cardinals can’t vote for the next pope and be of a certain age. And that can be unfair. I think, as it is unfair that at 25, I was not allowed to run for president. Totally unfair. I was ready. I was tested.

Let’s drag this back from —

Michelle wants to take us away from the papacy. I want to keep going. But go ahead, Michelle.

I would like to drag this back from God. I would rather have —

[? ross douthat

?] Once again.

— the voice of God —

?] Yes.

— not involved in our discussion.

The aggressive secularism of “The New York Times,” my god.

Yeah, I’m going to go aggressively secular and say that there are plenty of examples where people have decided that there need to be just kind of blanket age limits. I think Ross is correct that trying to do individual competency tests is just asking for trouble. It’s going to degenerate into something really ugly. But, you know, there are plenty of law enforcement careers, air traffic controllers, pilots. In private companies, a lot of directors on corporate boards are expected to retire, especially in the S&P 500 boards, the big ones, if for no other reason than to bring in fresh blood. This is not something that is completely beyond the pale. And none of those jobs, I’d just like to point out, is nearly as important or as stressful as the presidency. You know, we talk about how the presidency visibly ages everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. And those guys were two decades younger than what we’re dealing with Trump or Biden.

In their 40s, yeah.

So it’s not as though this is some kind of crazy, you know, outrageous infringement of personal rights. It’s something that could be done. And there is plenty of examples out there.

What’s interesting there too is that all of this that we’re talking about is pegged to the idea of asking people who don’t want to retire to retire early. And, of course, there’s an entirely related conversation in an aging society that’s about normal people, where the question is sort of the reverse. Can we ask people to work longer than they are right now? And that’s what we’re going to talk about in our next segment. So let’s take a quick break here. And we’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. We’ve been talking about the challenge of politicians working deep into old age by choice, apparently because they can’t imagine life outside the halls of power. But most people in rich societies expect to retire much, much earlier than Dianne Feinstein or Joe Biden. And the dilemma for society as a whole is a bit different than the dilemma facing Democratic staffers, let’s say. It’s not how to persuade the old to step aside, but whether in societies with low birth rates and long lifespans and, eventually, shrinking working-age populations we should expect people to work longer, well past current retirement ages. So let’s make this personal. When do you guys hope to retire?

I mean, I would love to have a French-style retirement, you know, retire at — what is it? 62, full pension, all your benefits, and just move to the American equivalent of the South of France and enjoy the rest of my life.

See, I’m just trying to get that Tuscan Villa.

All right, all right, so we’ve got two votes.

That’s it.

I think it’s telling that you both chose to move to Europe on the attitude that Europe —

I said the American —

Why do you hate America?

— the American equivalent of the South of France.

?] I apologize. I apologize. I should not have questioned.

Florida, Florida.

Absolutely not. Great place to get harassed in a bathroom.

Hey, man, I’m all for The Villages. Those giant retirement communities where everybody sits around and —

Carlos, will you —

I will take Ross’s question seriously —

Thank you.

— and say that I would find our entire conversation a lot more persuasive and honest if we felt that term limits or age limits also applied to, say, “New York Times” columnists and editorial writers.

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.

Touché.

There are “New York Times” columnists who have been columnists for — Ross, you’ve been a columnist for like 15 years. You know, when is too long? When do we need new blood, as we’ve been talking about our politicians?

OK, notably, they do have people come off the masthead jobs at “The Times.” Not to get too in the weeds here, but they do cycle in fresh blood on the masthead. They just let Ross go on as long as he wants to.

See, I was going to say that I am open for the good of the American economy, which needs people in the workforce paying taxes to pay for Lydia and Michelle’s cushy retirements, I’m willing to keep going, writing my column, sharing my podcasting thoughts ‘til the age of 80. But now Carlos has made me feel guilty about it. So I’m not, I’m not so sure. I mean, I do, I both have a desire to retire and a difficulty imagining myself spending 35-odd years just sort of hanging out. But, I mean, this is one fascinating thing that you saw in the protests in France just in the last year over Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to modestly tweak the retirement age is that not just older people, but younger people were in the streets protesting, basically expressing the idea that retirement is sort of the heart of the good life, right? That sort of what you do or become in retirement is essential to one sense of Frenchness, if you will. And that’s not really the view we have in America. But we’re also pretty proretirement in America, as the difficult politics of Medicare reform make clear. But I’m curious what you guys think about that sort of moral question. Is there a kind of right to retirement, as sort of an essential part of the liberal bargain with the citizenry?

I mean, I think absolutely yes. It’s the idea that we as, you know, quote, unquote, “knowledge workers” who are laptop keyboard warriors are going to keep hammering away at our columns and podcasting into our dotage is one thing. But if you are a taxi driver or you are a health care worker or — there are professions that where you’re thinking about your work and it involves your physical body in a different way. And I think that there are also professions that require really, really long hours and that maybe will make people want to think about calling it quits at a younger age. So I think that we shouldn’t mistake ourselves for representatives of the population at large. And I think that the idea that a life of hard work, of contributing to society, to contributing to Social Security, saving, and so on, definitely entitles you to a period of rest at the end of your life.

But, but, but this requires the sort of social planning that America is not great at. We have vanishingly little prep going on for the wave of baby boomers that are already hitting the system. So if you’re going to expect something like that, you’ve got to do better in terms of actual economic structuring.

I also think that in the American psyche, in the American character — I don’t know — the idea of work and this kind of Protestant work ethic is so fundamental to who we are. I mean, I think about my grandfather, who worked from a very young age. You know, came out of the army after World War II and got a job at 3M as an engineer and then was, in the 1980s, pushed into early retirement at the age of 55. And, you know, I think he enjoyed some aspects of being retired at that age. And he and my grandmother took wonderful trips around — they came to visit us in Africa and they went to China and, you know? But I think it was really hard on him to feel that all of the things that he had learned and all of the wisdom that he had — I mean, he was an incredible tinkerer. And you could just see that there was a part of him that was — that was sort of lost in retirement and this life of building things and designing things and being an engineer, that there was something that was really missing from his life as he aged.

Lydia, I’m so glad you brought that up. I mean, it’s so important to kind of personalize and humanize this conversation alongside of the big picture policy conversation. Because there’s a difference between the question of whether there’s a right to retirement and then deciding when that retirement needs to start.

Yeah.

And, of course, that’s a policy question. But for each human being, it’s incredibly different, right? And I also think about my grandfather. The person I’ve admired most in my life is my maternal grandfather, for whom I’m named, who was a law professor and legislator and cabinet member and a scholar of Roman law in Peru. And he worked deep into his 80s and until he died in his late 90s. Was he as effective in his 80s as he was in his 50s? Probably not, right? But he was no less inspiring or dedicated a teacher. He may have been wiser for those who were listening. And when he stopped working, even at that late age, it really did sort of sap some of the life out of him. And, for me, it’s something that I always draw from when I think about, at what point do I want to quote, unquote, “hang it up.”

But we have to also — coming back to the idea of tradeoffs. I mean, there’s all these millennials who have been complaining that they can’t move up in certain businesses or careers or jobs because the, I mean, the millennials are complaining because the baby boomers just won’t clear out. For every 80-year-old who is clinging to the job that they love, there is a 45-year-old who’s like, well, what about me? And when you have an entire society like that, you do need to start thinking about, is there a way to have some kind of system set up for post-retirement meaning? In Japan, they have had systems for years that are set up to help older retirees work in jobs that can give them some sort of meaning and sense of accomplishment after they have retired from their regular job or whatever. We just don’t think that way. But there is no such thing as a system where you don’t have tradeoffs.

You know, we do live in a country where our politics are really dominated by, our politics and, therefore, policy, are really dominated by old people, right? Old people are the most reliable voters. And that means that we have a drug benefit added to Medicare, but we don’t have a whole host of benefits that could help young people, like seems like we’re not going to have student debt forgiveness, for example. But I do think that this kind of structural problem with our electorate also sort of plays into some of these larger policy and, frankly, cultural questions that we have around aging retirement, how long people hang in the workforce.

And on that note, we’re going to retire this conversation and take a quick break. And when we get back, we’ll get hot and cold. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. And it’s finally time for everyone’s favorite moment of the week, Hot-Cold, where one of us shares something we’re into, over, or somewhere on the thermometer in between. So who’s got something for us?

Oh, I am all over this. I am downright frosty on QR code menus. I am tired of going to a restaurant and being expected to whip out my phone, try to scan that little square, and then have everybody at the table sit there scrolling through. And they always organize the menus in different ways. So am I going down past the brunch menu into the drink menu? It’s just like, enough already. Give me a damn menu.

I think this is a good example of what you might call technological regress where the menu, the traditional menu is a great technology. It’s big. You can share it with the person next to you. You can look at what someone else is looking at. You can point out things in obvious ways on the menu. Most everything is presented together in the same space. It’s just a big step backward to push it into the digital — until, I guess, we get the menus on the new Apple Goggles, which I will be cold on in a future episode.

There is a serendipity to menus, to physical menus that is wonderful. I think you’re more likely to try unexpected dishes from a physical menu. I would equate it to the print newspaper, right? You are less likely to curate your intake. You are more likely to find unexpected treasures buried inside a print newspaper that you will never find when you have your own predigested newslettered — no offense Ross — newslettered diet of news. There is a serendipity to both print menus and print newspapers that I think we will miss.

I have nothing to add to you bunch of geezers. I just think next time we go out to — next time we go out to lunch, we can —

Lydia, get off my lawn, all right? Get off my lawn.

All right, on that note, Carlos has an archaic codex to leaf through. I have a newsletter to write. And that’s all from here. We’ll talk to you next week.

Bye.

Late last night, New Yorkers were served a public-health recommendation with a huge helping of déjà vu: “If you are an older adult or have heart or breathing problems and need to be outside,” city officials said in a statement, “wear a high-quality mask (e.g. N95 or KN95).”It was, in one sense, very familiar advice—and also very much not. This time, the threat isn’t viral, or infectious at all. Instead, masks are being urged as a precaution against the thick, choking plumes of smoke from Canada, where wildfires have been igniting for weeks. The latest swaths of the United States to come into the crosshairs are the Midwest, Ohio Valley, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic.The situation is, in a word, bad. Yesterday, New Haven, Connecticut, logged its worst air-quality reading on record; in parts of New York and Pennsylvania, some towns have been shrouded in pollutants at levels the Environmental Protection Agency deems “hazardous”—the most severe designation on its list. It is, to put it lightly, an absolutely terrible time to go outside. And for those who “have to go outdoors,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, “I’d strongly recommend wearing a mask.”The masking advice might understandably spark some whiplash. For the majority of Americans, face coverings are still most saliently a COVID thing—a protective covering meant to be worn when engaging in risky gatherings indoors. Now, though, we’re having to flip the masking script: Right now, it’s outdoor air that we most want to guard our airways against. In more ways than one, the best masking practices in this moment will require snubbing some of our basest COVID-fighting instincts.The COVID masking mindset can, to be fair, still be helpful to game out the risks at play. Viral outbreaks and wildfires both introduce dangerous particles into the eyes and the airway; both can be blocked with the right barriers. The difference is the source: Pathogens travel primarily aboard people, making crowds and crummy indoor airflow some of the biggest risks; fires and their smoky, ashy by-products, meanwhile, can get stoked and moved about by the very outdoor winds we welcome during viral outbreaks. Conflagrations clog the air with all sorts of pollutants—among them, carbon monoxide, which can poison people by starving them of oxygen, and a class of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that’s been linked to increased cancer risk. But the primary perils are the fine-particulate-matter components of soot, ash, and dust, fine enough to be borne over great distances until they reach an unsuspecting face.Once breathed in, these particles, which the EPA tracks by a metric known as PM2.5, can deposit deep in the airway and possibly even infiltrate the blood. The flecks irritate the moist membranes that line the nose, mouth, lungs, and eyes; they spark bouts of inflammation, triggering itching and irritation. Chronic exposure to them has been linked to heart and lung issues, and the risks are especially high for individuals with chronic medical conditions—burdens that concentrate among people of color and the poor—as well as for older adults and children.But N95s and many other high-quality masks have their roots in environmental health; they were designed specifically to filter out microscopic particulate matter that travels through the air. And they’re astoundingly good at their job. Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, recently put their performance to the test with an N95 strapped to his own face. Using an industry-standard test, he measured the particulate matter outside the mask, then checked how much made it through the device and into the space around his nose and mouth. Percentage-wise, he told me, “it removes 99.99 … I didn’t measure how many nines; it was working so well.” On broader scales, too, the protective math plays out: Well-fitting masks can curb smoke-related hospitalizations; studies back up their importance as a firefighting mainstay.The key, Jimenez told me, is choosing the right mask and getting it flush against your face. Experts in the field even get professionally fit-tested to avoid contamination infiltrating through any gaps. Surgical masks, cloth masks, or any other loose accessories that aren’t specifically designed to filter out tiny particles just won’t do the trick, though they’re still better than not covering up at all. (If that sounds familiar, it should; viral or smoky, “masks don’t care what the particle is,” Marr told me. “They care about the size.”)N95 masks aren’t perfect protectives either. They don’t shield the eyes, and they aren’t great at staving off carbon monoxide and the other gaseous pollutants that wildfires emit. (That’s for a reason: Allowing gas through masks is how we continue to breathe while wearing them.) But gases are volatile and quickly dissipate; for Americans hundreds or even thousands of miles from the source of the smoke, “it’s going to be the particulate matter that is most concerning to us,” Marr told me. Even in the parts of New York and Pennsylvania where PM2.5 has rocketed up to dangerous levels, the carbon-monoxide stats have remained low.Considering how dicey the discourse over masking has gotten, masking advice won’t necessarily be embraced by all. Less than a month after the official end of the United States’ COVID public-health emergency, people are fatigued by face coverings and other mitigations. And we’re fast entering the stretch of the year when having synthetic polymer fabrics strapped across your face can get downright miserable, especially in the humidity of northeastern heat. But when it comes to avoiding the harms of wildfire smoke, experts generally consider masks a second-line defense. The first priority is trying to minimize any exposure at all—which, for now, means staying indoors with the doors and windows tightly shut, especially for people at highest risk. Paula Olsiewski, an environmental-health researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, also recommends running whatever air filters might be available; air conditioners, portable air cleaners, and DIY air filters all help.It’s also a good time, experts told me, to be mindful of the differences between filtration and ventilation, or increasing flow to turn over stale air. Both are crucial, sustainable interventions against respiratory viruses. But in the context of wildfires, excellent ventilation could actually increase harm, Jimenez told me, by allowing in excess smoke. For right now, stale indoor air—a classic COVID foe—is a smoke-avoider’s ally. The masks come in for anyone who must go outside in a part of the country where the air quality is bad—say, above an index of 150 or so.The move might feel especially counterintuitive for people who have long since stopped masking against COVID—or even ones who still do, simply because the rules don’t mesh. Through the flip-flopping guidance of mask everywhere to mask until you’re vaccinated to actually, mask after you’re vaccinated too to mask only indoors, Americans never hit much of a stable rhythm with the practice. The inertia may be especially powerful on the East Coast, which has largely been spared from the scourge of wildfires that’s constantly plaguing the West. (That puts the U.S. well behind other countries, especially in East Asia, where masking against viruses and pollutants indoors and out has long been commonplace; even in California, N95 and HEPA shortages aren’t anything new.)That said, our COVID-centric view on masking was always going to get a wake-up call. Wildfires—and viral outbreaks, for that matter—are expected to become more common going forward, even in regions that haven’t historically experienced them. And for all their weariness with COVID, Americans now have far more awareness of and, in many cases, access to masks than they did just a few years ago. The wildfires aren’t good news, but maybe a mask-friendly response to them can be. Smoke does, from a public-health perspective, have one thing going for it, Olsiewski told me: It is visible and ominous in ways that a microscopic virus is not. “People can see that their air is not clean,” she told me. It’ll take more than ash and haze to break through the divisiveness around masks. But a threat this obvious might at least forge a tiny crack.This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

If you ask the general public or members of the press what the most exciting or powerful medical developments have been in recent decades they will likely mention things that are more hype than reality. Stem cells, antioxidants, superfoods, and magnetic therapy might get a mention. CRISPR will also likely get mentioned, and this is a genuinely exciting technology, but still in its infancy as a therapeutic tool. l doubt many non-experts would put at or near the top of their list monoclonal antibody therapeutics, even though this technology has been quietly revolutionizing medicine in the last decade.

Even as a physician its possible to have not noticed the scope of change that has occurred. There are new monoclonal antibody (mAb) products in my subspecialty, but it takes time to notice that every subspecialty seems to have them. What’s going on?

The first monoclonal antibody was created in 1975, and the first therapeutic product was licensed in 1986. Yet mAbs are only now coming into their own as a mature medical treatment. The basic technology involves the isolation of a single B cell, the type of cell in the immune system that makes antibodies. Antibodies are proteins that have two binding sites with variable affinity for another protein or substance, called an antigen (a target binding site for an antibody). Normally an immune response involves producing lots of B cells with variable antibodies, a sort of “shotgun” approach to immunity. This blankets possible antigens, and then gets more specific as the immune system learns how to better target the invading organism or substance. Such an immune response is called polyclonal, or many-cloned, because many different types of antibodies are produced.

A monoclonal antibody, or single clone, involves isolating a single B cell (which makes one specific clone of antibodies) and then reproducing it, so that you can make a lot of a single clone of antibodies. The initial technique for doing this was injecting an animal, such as a rat, with an antigen in order to produce an antibody response, then isolating a single B cell that produces an antibody against that antigen. This B cells is then hybridized with an immortal B cell, taken from a cancer such as myeloma, but one that does not produce antibodies of its own. You then hopefully have an immortal B cell that creates the antibodies you want. You then culture that cells for mass production.

The basic technology existed almost 50 years ago, so why are we only now seeing so many mAb therapeutics? Because I am glossing over a lot of complexity. First, you have to select a B-cell that produces an antibody with the desired affinity that does not also cross-react with other proteins you don’t want (causing side effects). Also, because an animal is used, there are non-human protein sequences on the mAbs that can trigger their own immune response, an immune reaction against the mAbs themselves. One workaround for this was to partially humanize the mAbs, joining the part of the antibody with the desired affinity to a human antibody base. It also took decades to develop the technology to the point where it was cost effective to mass produce mAbs as a pharmaceutical product.

The technology to mass produce human or humanized mAbs with the desired affinity is also only half of the equation. You also need to identify a therapeutic target – what are you going to target the mAbs against. This requires research into the mechanisms of specific diseases. Of course this was already happening. Essentially now, when a therapeutic target is identified, pharmaceutical companies can develop traditional drugs that chemically react with the target, and/or they can develop mAbs with affinity for the target.

Essentially we crossed a fuzzy threshold where mAb technology has progressed to the point that it is medically and economically feasible to quickly develop and mass produce mAb products. This technology also allows for a level of personalized medicine. You can identify specific targets on an individual patient’s cancer and then target that. To put recent progress into perspective, in 2014 there were 30 mAbs approved by the FDA (and this is after they already started to take off) and the global market was estimated at $30 billion. In 2022 it was estimate at $188 billion, and is growing fast. As of December 2022, the FDA has approved 153 mAbs, and there are 140 products in late stage development.

As a therapeutic choice there are positives and negatives to mAbs. First, they are not chemical drugs, so they don’t interact with other drugs, and they don’t have to be processed by the liver or eliminated by the kidneys like many other drugs. They can also be highly specific in their affinity, which can reduce the side effect profile. Because they are proteins they are given as injections or IV infusions. This has both advantages and disadvantages. Getting a self-injection once a month, for example, may be preferable to many people than taking a daily pill. This also can improve compliance. However, some people are needle-phobic.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of mAbs is that they are expensive. Even though the cost has come way down, it may still cost thousands of dollars per year for mAb treatment. While the therapeutic potential is great for patients, we are potentially adding billions of dollars to already high health care costs. Insurance companies are pushing back, and it is often challenging to get approval for new mAb therapies. To some extent this makes sense – we need to practice cost effective medicine, and it does not make sense to replace a drug that costs a couple hundred dollars per year with one that costs 6-7 thousand per year for a small incremental improvement. Costs are likely to come down as technology and mass production improve, but mAbs are likely to remain relatively expensive for years. In a way, it’s a good problem to have, but it still is a serious issue.

Monoclonal antibodies are a fascinating technology that has been around for a long time but is just now really coming into its own as a therapeutic tool. They show the power of scientific medicine, but also the challenges, and how long it can take to go from new discovery to have a large impact on the practice of medicine. I find it interesting that attention and media hype is often aimed in the wrong direction. Perhaps the mAb “revolution” was too slow, or too diffuse, to make sexy headlines. The story of mAbs also stands in contrast to many hyped but not legitimate treatments – new treatments do not come out of nowhere. They have a long history, and involve the work of countless scientists and organizations working over decades. Understanding and appreciating real scientific developments makes it easier to recognize the fake ones.

Joseph Zamora was nearly beaten to death by police in 2017. After surviving a medically-induced coma and a monthlong ICU stay, he was charged with assaulting a police officer and served two years in prison. Zamora's conviction was overturned by the Washington Supreme Court last year. Now, a prosecutor is trying to recharge Zamora because he has "not accepted responsibility for his role" in the beating that almost killed him. 
The incident occurred in February 2017 when police officer Kevin Hake stopped Zamora while he was walking to his niece's house in Grant County, Washington. The cause for the stop was a neighbor's report about a suspected "car prowler." 
A struggle between the two men ensued, which the state conceded "escalated far beyond what should have happened." According to an Appeals Court opinion, during the struggle, Hake "drew his handgun and placed it against Mr. Zamora's ear, temple, and in his mouth." Over his radio, another officer reported hearing Hake say, "Put your hands behind your back, I'll fucking kill you." 
According to the Appeals Court opinion, six additional officers arrived on the scene, and they "collectively struck [Zamora] repeatedly, pepper-sprayed him in the face twice," and used their stun guns to stun him three times. By the end of the beating, Zamora wasn't breathing and had no pulse. 
Zamora was taken to a local hospital, where a blood test determined that he had methamphetamine, amphetamine, and THC in his system. He was soon transferred to another hospital, remaining in the ICU for around four weeks. 
Eventually, prosecutors charged Zamora with two counts of third-degree assault for his alleged assaults of two officers, one of whom sustained some bruising and a "couple small scratches around [his] hand and wrist." The other officer injured his hand by repeatedly punching Zamora in the back of the head. 
Zamora was convicted and served nearly two years in prison. However, in June 2022, Zamora's conviction was thrown out on appeal after he argued that the prosecutor in his case had made racially-biased statements during the jury selection process.
The prosecutor in Zamora's case, Garth Dano, had quizzed potential jurors about their beliefs on immigration, border security, and crime committed by immigrants, asking them questions like "Can you make room for the idea that when they hear that 100,000 people come across illegally a month, and of those we've got people from countries that—countries on our list that aren't even allowed in the country are part of that group?"
 The Washington Supreme Court unanimously reversed Zamora's conviction, ruling that while Zamora is not an immigrant, these statements were racially biased.
"Contrary to the State's assertion, no legitimate, relevant trial purpose supports the prosecutor's questions or statements," wrote Judge Charles W. Johnson. "Rather, the apparent purpose of the remarks was to highlight the defendant's perceived ethnicity and invoke stereotypes that Latinxs are 'criminally; and 'wrongly' in the country, are involved in criminal activities such as drug smuggling, and pose a threat to the safety of 'Americans.'"
According to documents obtained by the Seattle Times, following the Supreme Court's ruling, Zamora asked when he could file a tort claim, which is necessary to file a civil rights lawsuit against the city and its police department. Zamora also reportedly left a voicemail to Grant County Prosecutor Kevin McCrae "demanding" that he charge the officer who beat Zamora with attempted murder.
McCrae is now attempting to prosecute Zamora again for the same alleged crime—seemingly in retaliation. While McCrae has refused to comment on the reasoning behind his attempt to retry Zamora, a draft response to a bar complaint against McCrae after he decided to recharge Zamora obtained by the Seattle Times contains an explanation.
"It is clear to me that Mr. Zamora had not accepted responsibility for his role in this incident," McCrae wrote. "While there is no more jail time available in this case, any conviction would still count as criminal history on his offender score, would have an effect on the sentence for any future crimes Mr. Zamora may commit, and hopefully impress upon Mr. Zamora the improperness of his behavior."
The post Police Almost Beat Him To Death. After His Conviction Was Dismissed, Prosecutors Are Recharging Him. appeared first on Reason.com.

Unlike most major pieces of legislation that make it through Congress these days, the bill to raise the federal government's debt ceiling was not larded up with hundreds or thousands of pages of unrelated policy.
But while most of the relatively trim Fiscal Responsibility Act was focused on the debt ceiling and a variety of associated provisions, like the non-defense discretionary spending caps imposed for the next two years, there was still room for a few unrelated items. Most significant among them: minor changes to federal environmental review processes aimed at reducing the absurd obstacles often placed on private and public infrastructure projects.
Environmental reviews and other permitting requirements are slowing the roll-out of green energy projects, delaying much-needed expansions of America's power grid, and driving up the cost to build just about anything. It took 15 years for an electric supply line connecting a wind farm in Wyoming to the growing Las Vegas suburbs to clear all the permitting hurdles. That's an arrangement that's simply incompatible with a dynamic, growing economy.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act falls well short of solving those problems. Still, it might serve as an indication of bipartisan interest in addressing this mess.
"The permitting changes in the debt ceiling deal are a very small step in the right direction—emphasis on 'small,'" Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, which advocates for policies that accelerate technological and industrial progress, tells Reason. 
The most significant policy change—or, perhaps, the least insignificant—is new limits on how long mandatory National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews can take. The Fiscal Responsibility Act incorporated some changes first proposed by the Trump administration's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in 2020 to limit NEPA environmental reviews to no more than two years and the resulting environmental impact statements to no more than 150 pages.
That's a welcome change. As part of the process that originally produced those suggestions, the CEQ found that the average environmental impact study is 661 pages and typically takes more than four years to complete. Time is money, and all those delays are expensive. In its report, the CEQ cited a study, by the nonpartisan reform coalition Common Good, estimating that "the cost of a 6–year delay in starting construction on public projects costs the nation over $3.9 trillion, including the cost of prolonged inefficiencies and avoidable pollution," as Reason's Ron Bailey reported at the time.
The environmental impact of major infrastructure projects is important to consider, but NEPA has devolved into a tool often wielded by opponents of development rather than sincere concern for the plight of the sage grouse. Placing limits on how long NEPA can delay a building project makes a lot of sense.
The NEPA tweaks included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act will "slightly improve the process," says Stapp, "but the biggest problem—judicial review—was left untouched."
Indeed, the Fiscal Responsibility Act's limits on NEPA reviews don't apply to the often-inevitable litigation that spirals out from them. Without that component, the new rules have a giant loophole—one that opponents of new construction will continue using to delay and drive up costs.
There's one major exception to that, however. The Fiscal Responsibility Act does specifically exempt from judicial review one project: The Mountain Valley Pipeline, currently under construction in Sen. Joe Manchin's (D–W.Va.) home state. "No court shall have jurisdiction to review any action taken by" federal or state agencies to issue permits "necessary for the construction and initial operation at full capacity of the Mountain Valley Pipeline," the law reads, in part.
There are two ways to look at the Mountain Valley Pipeline carve-out in the law. It could be a special giveaway to Manchin, a crucial swing vote in the Senate and longtime advocate for permitting reform, to secure his support for the debt ceiling bill. Alternatively, it might be a precedent-setting example of how Congress can flex its authority to speed up critical infrastructure projects in the future. Only time will tell which it is.
After decades of expanding NEPA reviews and growing piles of red tape, even a small step in the right direction matters. The "give-and-take" necessary to get the Fiscal Responsibility Act through Congress with bipartisan support "naturally restrained its scope in any given direction," writes Dan Goldbeck, director of regulatory policy for the American Action Forum, a free market think tank. "One hopes that substantive discussions on this topic will continue and that those conducted under non-crisis circumstances will yield a more robust set of reforms."
When it comes to permitting reform, the Fiscal Responsibility Act is likely to serve more of a directional purpose than a substantial one. It's an important acknowledgment of congressional support for limiting the NEPA process—a reform that should have been incorporated in President Joe Biden's major infrastructure bill, if we're being honest—even if it falls well short of fixing the problem.
The post Permitting Reforms in Debt Ceiling Bill Will Accomplish Little appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Biden administration is trying to reduce tensions with China and “put a floor” under the relationship. Although China’s leaders profess to want the same end, their actions tell a different story. This gap between what China says and does is widening, presenting a vexing problem for the United States.

The Biden team is busily engaging with Chinese government officials in pursuit of a follow-up meeting between President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping after their summit in Bali, Indonesia, in November. The goal, as national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN on Sunday, is “to manage the competition responsibly, to ensure that competition does not become conflict.” But there are mounting signs that China’s leaders are uninterested in improving U.S.-China relations at the moment — and might see benefits in ramping up tensions.

This dynamic was on full display last weekend at a major international conference in Singapore. In a sophisticated if not convincing speech, China’s defense minister, Gen. Li Shangfu, attacked the United States (which he repeatedly referred to with the phrase “some country”) as the source of all the world’s ills, while presenting China as a more reasonable alternative regional power.

“We practice multilateralism and pursue win-win cooperation. Some countries, however, take a selective approach to rules and international laws,” he told the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, later adding, “Some country has willfully interfered in other countries’ internal affairs and matters ... and frequently resorted to unilateral sanctions, incursion with force.”

Li, who is under U.S. sanctions, accused the United States of everything from “hegemony of navigation” to “sowing discord among us and fanning the flame” of chaos and instability. China, he said, offered peace, stability, cooperation and protection from the evil Americans.

“As the lyrics of a well-known Chinese song goes, when friends visit us, we welcome them with fine wine. When jackals or wolves come, we will face them with shotguns,” he said.

Several attendees told me Li’s presentation to Asian countries of China as a benign and benevolent power is undermined by his country’s actions around the region. For example, Li claimed that China was committed to resolving maritime disputes “in a peaceful manner through negotiations and consultation.” The day before, a Chinese warship had conducted a dangerous maneuver that almost caused a collision with a U.S. ship transiting the Taiwan Strait.

Pressed for an explanation, Li defended the action. He warned the U.S. military to stay far away from China’s shores and “mind your own business.”

In another contradiction, Li said “only enhancing dialogue and communication … will ensure stability in our region” — but he refused to meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was also at the conference. Li was happy to meet with many other foreign officials, but he would only shake hands with his U.S. counterpart.

To be sure, many leaders in Asia might be sympathetic to China’s pitch as an alternative power — or at least willing to overlook its contradictions in favor of the benefits of partnership with China.

“The contradiction of the Chinese position is claiming to uphold a form of the international order, while not doing so in practice and heavily hinting they don’t want to do it in theory either,” said James Crabtree, executive director of IISS-Asia. “This vexes Western observers but might not bother everyone in the region.”

But some Asian leaders at the conference bristled at Li’s claims that Beijing promises to resolve regional issues through talking. Many countries see China’s policies in the South China Sea as aggressive, not constructive. Philippines coast guard spokesman Jay Tarriela confronted Li, pointing out that “while China is talking about dialogue, its actions show confrontation.”

The fact that Beijing is ramping up its anti-U.S. rhetoric while doubling down on its bad behavior is ominous. Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific program, told me that Li’s speech was essentially a message that China wants the United States to leave the region, not a sign Beijing wants to work to stabilize the relationship.

“The Chinese have made it pretty clear that they believe the presence of risk will induce caution in U.S. behavior so they won’t talk to us about risk reduction,” she said. “They are going to keep increasing the risk. That may temporarily induce caution, but they are not going to drive the U.S. out of the region.”

In other words, Beijing’s demands for maintaining a smooth U.S.-China relationship are now so extreme that there’s no way any U.S. administration could give in to them. That would require the United States to abandon Taiwan, forget about the Uyghur genocide and halt efforts to stop China’s unfair trade practices, for a start.

There are some signs the Biden administration is trying to minimize confrontation with China on these issues — to entice Beijing back into high-level dialogue. Seeking meaningful engagement with China’s leaders is always a good idea, but it is not as important as winning the competition and maintaining U.S. leadership in Asia.

The best the administration can do under these circumstances is bolster its alliances, stay active and present in Asia, stand up for American interests and values, and leave the door open for Beijing. But it takes two to tango, and China’s stance indicates that things will likely get worse before they get better.

“Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division among us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.” Nelson Mandela, shortly before leaving office as president, urged constant vigilance against South Africa’s enemies, “even if they come from within our own ranks”. Democracy was the cause for which he lived and for which — as he told the court that sent him to prison for 27 years — he was ready to die. For him, the success of the long march to freedom in South Africa was a triumph for all humanity.
When he won the Nobel Peace Prize with Frederik Willem de Klerk in 1993,  for demolishing apartheid and laying the foundations for a free society, Mandela talked movingly in his acceptance speech of how people inside and outside South Africa “had the nobility of spirit to stand in the path of tyranny” since they saw that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. He spoke about fighting for a world of democracy, freed from “the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees”.
How sad, then, to see the betrayal of this legacy by his party and protégé, Cyril Ramaphosa, who now runs the country as President. The African National Congress promised “a better life for all”, but instead seems terminally corrupt and incompetent, something symbolised by the power cuts lasting up to 16 hours a day, as winter looms in a country that is cursed by high crime rates, rampant inequality, raging unemployment, grinding poverty, and woeful schools. Meanwhile, its flailing leader, Ramaphosa, is doing his utmost to smooth the path of tyranny for Vladimir Putin.
Suggested readingWill South Africa's sullied President survive?By Brian Pottinger
It is no wonder that, after three decades in power, the ANC is widely expected to lose its governing majority in next year’s election. Voters know that the party, founded 111 years ago to fight for rights of black Africans, is to blame for the energy crisis in the continent’s most industrialised nation, following years of mismanagement and theft. Typical was the $27 billion construction of two big coal-fired plants, where costs tripled under Jacob Zuma’s presidency as his cronies plundered the country and yet still failed to deliver their planned power due to delays and defects.
There is toxic talk on the Left of revolution sparked by the power shortages that are blamed for bankrupting businesses, water shortages, huge traffic jams, opportunistic robberies, rotting food, and even decomposing corpses in morgues. Last year, South Africans experienced more than twice as many power cuts than ever before, reducing the nation’s GDP by about 5%. This year has already been worse. Eskom, the state-owned electricity generator, is warning people to prepare for even more blackouts as the cold weather arrives.
Many voters hoped that Ramaphosa, a former trade union leader who became a rand billionaire after apartheid, might set the country on the right track after Zuma’s corrosive nine-year stint in office. Yet the outgoing chief executive of Eskom fled after surviving an attempt to poison him with cyanide in his coffee six months ago, then blamed ministers of covering up corruption by gangs stealing $50 million a month from the firm. But the president’s image was shredded by the “farmgate” scandal, in which he was accused of covering up the theft of between $580,000 and $5 million in foreign currency that had been hidden in sofa of his luxury game ranch. He acknowledged that the cash had been stolen and, having failed to inform the police, claimed it was payment for buffalos sold to a Sudanese businessman. He avoided impeachment due to the loyalty of his MPs.
Suggested readingWhy South Africa is siding with RussiaBy Brian Pottinger
Even as the scandal broke last summer, Ramaphosa was calling on South Africa’s 60 million citizens to remember and respect Mandela’s legacy — pretty hypocritical given the stance he had taken on the Kremlin’s assault on democracy in Ukraine. Rather than “standing up to tyranny”, Ramaphosa posed as a peacemaker and leader of non-aligned nations seeking a solution to the conflict. South Africa abstained in votes on five key United Nations resolutions on the war, even in the shocked days after last year’s full-scale attack when more than half the continent’s 54 states voted to reaffirm Kyiv’s sovereignty and demand unconditional Russian withdrawal.
Pretoria’s stance contrasted sharply with Kenya’s astute critique of Putin’s “expansionism”, which condemned the dangers of trying to stoke the “embers of dead empires” with “new forms of domination and oppression”. The ANC government claims its refusal to condemn the attack is based on a long-held belief that conflicts should be resolved through negotiation — yet both Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, rightly condemned the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq for undermining democracy and setting a dangerous precedent. Ramaphosa, by contrast, is shifting South Africa closer to Moscow, infuriating other democracies even though Russia is of minor economic importance, accounting for less than one-hundredth of the value of trade with Europe alone.
First Ramaphosa echoed the Kremlin’s line by blaming Nato expansion for Putin’s attack, ignoring the desire of Ukrainians to determine their own future like South Africans. Then came 10 days of naval exercises with Moscow and Beijing, timed to cause maximum offence on the anniversary of Putin launching his full-scale invasion, complete with military vessels bearing the loathed pro-war “Z” symbol docking in Cape Town. “It is a slap in the face of our trading partners to be this clearly on the side of Russia on the anniversary,” said Kobus Marais, defence spokesman for the opposition Democratic Alliance. “We’re the useful idiots.”

Next came accusations from the United States that a sanctioned Russian ship clandestinely collected weapons under cover of darkness from a base near Cape Town six months ago. An investigation by the Financial Times found no signals coming from the vessel’s transponder over the dates of mooring, implying that it switched off the device that allows tracking of its position — although the ship was seen at the military site. Now South Africa, which denies the allegation, has responded by accusing the West of fuelling the conflict by providing military aid to Kyiv. And in the coming weeks, there are reports the government plans to change the law to enable Putin — a dictator wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court over genocidal child abductions — to attend an August summit of the BRICs economic bloc without being arrested.
So much for Ramaphosa’s protestations of neutrality. South Africa, sometimes seen as the de facto leader of sub-Saharan Africa, has slid steadily closer to the Kremlin over the past decade. ANC officials often refer to Moscow’s historic support for their liberation movement, admire Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric, and speak of Russia as “a friend”. The disgraced Zuma even wanted a Russian energy giant to build several nuclear plants in South Africa, which would have given the Kremlin a grip on the economy (and presumably offered hefty kickbacks).
Thirty-three years ago, Ramaphosa was beside Mandela as the anti-apartheid hero left prison and those powerful images of hope and optimism were broadcast around the globe. He even held the microphone as Madiba famously greeted the crowds “in the name of peace, democracy and freedom for all”.Today, having made his fortune and reached the pinnacle of power, he is trampling over the idea of democracy with his support for a dictatorial regime trying to crush freedom in a neighbouring nation. As Mandela said, “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”.
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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Last week, I asked readers to make nominations to a hall of fame for song lyrics. Trusting that you’re all aware of Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Carole King, and others of similar renown, I’m highlighting the responses most likely to turn you on to artists or songs you don’t know.For younger readers, that might be the (admittedly quite famous) 20th-century songwriter Irving Berlin, nominated by Karen:
How about “Before the fiddlers have fled / before they ask us to pay the bill, and while we still have the chance / let’s face the music and dance.” Or this one: “And the cares that hung around me for a week / seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak / when we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.”
Jaleelah chooses the governor of California’s “more talented distant cousin.” She writes:
I would 100% pick a lyric written by Joanna Newsom. Her work is magical. She uses precise language to paint the clearest, most beautiful, most unique imagery I have ever encountered.
One of Newsom’s strengths is illustrating changes in her settings rather than simply hopping between discrete points in time and space. In “Emily,” Newsom sets the scene with the lyrics: “There is a rusty light on the pines tonight / Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow / into the bones of the birches, and the spires of the churches / jutting out from the shadows.” The dynamic nature of her sunset—one that not only colours the town, but infuses it with the substances of life—helps the song feel warm and real.
“Only Skin” depicts bombs reshaping the heavens in a bad dream: “Sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl / And when the bread broke / Fell in bricks of wet smoke / My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke.” I don’t only see the bombs: I taste and feel them.The texture she gives to her scenery is incredible.
While she is a master of complex and heavy language, some of her best lyrics are simple and striking. “I regret / how I said to you, ‘honey, just open your heart,’ / when I’ve got trouble even opening a honey jar” captures a moment of inspiring empathy. This declaration shows a self-awareness and maturity that many fine lyricists lack.
But if I had to choose just one entry for the lyrical hall of fame, I’d pick a lyric from the last verse of “En Gallop” that displays humility on a meta level: “Never get so attached to a poem / you forget truth that lacks lyricism.” That is timeless and wise.
Whether Joanna Newsom is your top pick or not, she is one of the most talented lyricists of the century. Yet instead of selling morals to her devoted audience, she reminds them that she does not hold a monopoly on truth. Other talented and charismatic individuals would do well to follow her lead.
Music is about building on what came before you. Newsom is surely indebted to Texas Gladden and Ernest Hemingway, just as Bob Dylan (who should also be in this fictional hall of fame) is indebted to Woody Guthrie and Big Brown. I don’t think Joanna Newsom should be excluded from the conversation just because she wrote in the 2000s and ’10s instead of the 1950s and ’60s. There have been many great lyricists before her, but her talent has earned her a place in their league.
Melanie focuses on the decade when she came of age and argues that, although very successful, perhaps the best lyricist of the 1990s—the band Counting Crows and, by extension, its frontman and principal songwriter, Adam Duritz—got somewhat overlooked in favor of the era’s “darker” bands, such as Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails.”She explains:
The lyrical skill of Counting Crows is stunning, especially when coupled with their knack for writing songs with a heavy pop or country feel, which leave listeners unprepared for the sheer darkness and pessimism contained within the lyrics. Shards of unutterable emotional truth, like “even the best years leave a lot to be desired, and then they pass you by” or “and the one thing you won’t say is / ‘everyone knows possibility days are impossible’ / it just feels wrong, so wrong / still you’re gone, long gone,” create a sort of whiplash. You have just heard some of the worst things your mind spews at you being sung by someone else’s voice, in an accessible, pop-ish song. That is truly Counting Crows’ magic—a magic very easily overlooked, but life-changing to the observant.
As for a single Counting Crows song for a Lyrics Hall of Fame, I think I would vote for “You Can’t Count on Me,” the single from their 2008 album, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings. In 237 words, it tells the story of a protagonist falling in love and knowing that he can’t be an adequate partner due to his own issues (mental illness is implied); the partner falling in love and not grasping the sagacity of the advice; the relationship ending; the protagonist’s former partner being hurt and the protagonist feeling good about that hurt, because as ill-fated as he knew the relationship was, it still had meaning and its loss represents real pain.
That’s a lot of story and a lot of detail and a lot of emotion in a 282-word song that you can hear at the supermarket, with brilliance that can totally be overlooked if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics.
James explores the work of a punk-rock band from San Pedro, California:
Poetry is dependent on the natural cadence of human speech, while song lyrics rarely are. Songs provide distinct structures that can lead us to derive meanings and feelings from words we wouldn’t necessarily get from the printed page.
That being said, I would probably choose something by Minutemen, perhaps the song “Spillage.” I believe the band’s bassist, Mike Watt, wrote this set of lyrics, and he is the member whose lyrics tend to be more self-reflective, existential, and abstract. It’s a bit strange to see his lyrics in print and remember they are sung/shouted within the context of a punk song. “Spillage” is, I think, the most natural synthesis between the band’s leftist politics (largely manifested in the lyrics of the singer and guitarist, D. Boon) and Watt’s more personal concerns. Being 14 lines, it is actually one of the group’s lengthier sets of lyrics, as few of their songs ever pass even the two-minute mark.
     A clear and dusty day in June
     My stoned mind just spilled that line
     Describing, what’s it like, describing?
     Believing that the sum is yes

     Looking around at all my comrades
     My police state mind just spilled that line
     I want to give names to our bonds
     I need names to play the game
     
     But what makes my heart run?
     Why the thunder in my thighs?

     My body
     My mind
     The idea of my life
     Seems like a symbol
Here we have concerns with freedom of imagination and whether it is possible without language; allusions to authoritarianism and communism ( whose dichotomy is not as cut-and-dried as one might expect from a leftist group, but nor are they entirely conflated); and how language can be a weapon of the state while also being essential to organization. All of this culminates with a yearning for something beyond being merely a representation of life, whether contemplation (and thus organization, possibly of both the linguistic and social variety) can lead to interpreting one’s existence as something essentially meaningful and real. I don’t think many lyricists can so succinctly offer queries like these, nor as poetically, especially outside the realm of a traditional “songwriter” tradition.
Stephen nominates “City of New Orleans” and the song’s writer:
It was written and first released by Steve Goodman in 1971. Arlo Guthrie’s version is best known, and Willie Nelson’s release earned Goodman a Grammy for Best Country Song in 1985. It was awarded posthumously because Steve Goodman died of leukemia in 1984, at age 36.
The lyrics of “City of New Orleans” hauntingly describe the impending demise of the golden era of train travel in the United States. And more.
Goodman was a proud product of Chicago. He embraced all the grit, self-awareness, humor, and hidden strength that comes from growing up in the “City of Big Shoulders.” He starts with mundane, local details: Illinois Central, Monday morning, and pulling out from Kankakee. Then the train takes us on a ghostly ride from the top of the map to the bottom. We know something sad is happening, because we are passing “trains that have no names” and the “graveyards of the rusted automobiles.” Then we realize what’s going on before the train does. We all fade into a “bad dream,” but “the steel rail still ain’t heard the news.” Then it becomes clear: “This train got the disappearing railroad blues.”
This song, through its lyrics and its soft accepting tone, foretells the end of the train era, the rusting of the once prosperous Midwest, and, if we listen carefully, we may even get a warning of the early death of this great songwriter.
Luciano writes, “For me, the best lyrics take mundane, depressing, even harrowing situations and turn them into art. Often, this is done by songwriters considered outside of the mainstream of their genre.”  He continues:
My nomination would be the magisterial 1969 opus “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” by Kris Kristofferson.  
Kristofferson’s story is as [uncharacteristic] as it gets for a country star: Born to a military family, he was a college graduate as a student he wrote several essays for The Atlantic), Rhodes Scholar, and military officer about to be an instructor at West Point when the country-music bug bit him. “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” is in many ways reflective of his out-of-the-box upbringing (in country terms). The song revolves around a Sunday morning spent nursing a hangover—hence the “comin’ down.” The opening lines give a sense of how he sees the situation:
     Well, I woke up Sunday morning
     With no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt
     And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad
     So I had one more for dessert
It reads almost like a poem out of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or even one by a 19th-century Romantic poet, like William Wordsworth—and it’s just about the hair of the dog to take the edge off. The lyrics take the listener through not only the pain of the hangover, but the regrets of returning to the world in the state he is in:
     Then I crossed the empty street
     And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken
     And it took me back to somethin’
     That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way
The imagery just goes on and on. You feel you’re walking with him (or stumbling, as he does) out to the light of Sunday morning wondering what the hell happened the night before. My favorite verse is near the end, when, after he details the everyday happenings of the sober folks around him, he hears church bells in the distance:
     Then I headed back for home
     And somewhere far away a lonesome bell was ringin’
     And it echoed through the canyons
     Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday
Those “disappearing dreams of yesterday” just tear my heart out. It’s a verse that could be Merriam-Webster’s definition of regret. And who could forget that chorus, which summarizes the melancholy and confusion of the morning after so vividly:
     On the Sunday morning sidewalks
     Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned
     ’Cause there’s something in a Sunday
     Makes a body feel alone
     There ain’t nothin’ short of dyin’
     Half as lonesome as the sound
     On the sleepin’ city sidewalks
     Sunday mornin’ comin’ down
This song was recorded by so many artists; famously, Kristofferson was reluctant to record it himself. The poetry of the lyrics often make you forget that it’s even a song to begin with. For me, “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” is one of the greatest lyric achievements in not only country music, but American music.  
Matt nominates Iron & Wine’s song “The Trapeze Swinger”:
The song is a long ballad in a soothing, steady rhythm that captures so many facets of nostalgic reminiscing of first love. While there’s not a refrain or chorus, the phrase we’ll hear multiple times is “Please remember me.” The haunting delivery of Sam Beam’s soft voice always sets this song apart, and I find myself listening to all nine minutes. That haunting permeates the song with notes of religious imagery. In nostalgia, we look back on the past in a much kinder way, and each verse of this song paints over and over a deepening varnish on that love and the twinge of pain that stays with us.
Errol seizes the opportunity “to try to bring attention to someone who I would argue is one of the greatest lyricists of all time: Warren Zevon.” He writes:
There are a great many songs by him that I could highlight, but for the purpose of lyrics only as a nomination, I would pick “Tenderness on the Block.” I love songs that are stories, and this one tells a sweet tale of a father watching his little girl grow up to become an independent, free-thinking adult. The lyrics calm his worries of letting her out into the world, emphasizing that she’ll be okay and that she’s “streetwise to the lies and the jive talk.” I find it to be one of his more whimsical songs, as he was mostly a satirist and had many demons throughout his life. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” is a quintessential rock-and-roll-star biography, although he was far from the rock-and-roll-star stature.
Honorable mentions for him would be “Splendid Isolation,” “Mr. Bad Example,” “Desperados Under the Eaves,” and “Life’ll Kill Ya.” Anyone who is a fan of folk, rock, and dark humor should seek this artist out.
Hip-hop was definitely underrepresented in your responses. If you’re looking for an accessible introduction to the best of that genre, I highly recommend the Dissect podcast, especially the seasons dedicated to Kendrick Lamar and Ye (formerly Kayne West), as well as Jay-Z’s book Decoded. See you later this week.

In May 2019, I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in Scarsdale, New York. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, with increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental-health problems were baked in when students arrived for ninth grade: Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phone.Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at Scarsdale Middle School. There, too, I met with the principal and her top administrators, and I heard the same thing: Mental-health problems had recently gotten much worse. Even many of the students arriving for sixth grade, coming out of elementary school, were already anxious and depressed. And many, already, were addicted to their phone.To the teachers and administrators I spoke with, this wasn’t merely a coincidence. They saw clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance. A common theme in my conversations with them was: We all hate the phones. Keeping students off of their devices during class was a constant struggle. Getting students’ attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible. Drama, conflict, bullying, and scandal played out continually during the school day on platforms to which the staff had no access. I asked why they couldn’t just ban phones during school hours. They said too many parents would be upset if they could not reach their children during the school day.A lot has changed since 2019. The case for phone-free schools is much stronger now. As my research assistant, Zach Rausch, and I have documented at my Substack, After Babel, evidence of an international epidemic of mental illness, which started around 2012, has continued to accumulate. So, too, has evidence that it was caused in part by social media and the sudden move to smartphones in the early 2010s. Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children. Two weeks ago, the United States surgeon general issued an advisory warning that social media can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”[From the December 2019 issue: The dark psychology of social networks]We now also have more precedents: many more examples of schools that have gone entirely phone-free during the school day. So the time is right for parents and educators to ask: Should we make the school day phone-free? Would that reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm? Would it improve educational outcomes? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is yes.What Phones Do to Kids in School
Think about how hard it is for you to stay on task and sustain a train of thought while working on your computer. Email, texts, and alerts of all kinds continually present you with opportunities to do something easier and more fun than what you’re doing now. If you are over age 25, you have a fully mature frontal cortex to help you resist temptation and maintain focus, and yet you probably still have difficulty doing so. Now imagine a phone in a child’s pocket, buzzing every few minutes with an invitation to do something other than pay attention. There’s no mature frontal cortex to help them stay on task.Many studies have established that, despite schools’ rules against it, students check their phone a lot during class, and that they receive and send texts if they can get away with it. Their focus is often and easily derailed by interruptions from their device. One study from 2016 found that 97 percent of college students said they sometimes use their phone during class for noneducational purposes. Nearly 60 percent of students said that they spend more than 10 percent of class time on their phone, mostly texting. Many studies show that students who use their phone during class learn less and get lower grades.You might be thinking that these findings are merely correlational; maybe the smarter students are just better able to resist temptation? Perhaps, but experiments using random assignment likewise show that using or just seeing a phone or receiving an alert causes students to underperform.For example, consider this study, aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use––just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in their pocket sapped students’ abilities.The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social-media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. Nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce sustained changes in the brain’s reward system, including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users have lower GPAs. As the neuroscientists Jaan Aru and Dmitri Rozgonjuk recently argued: “Smartphone use can be disruptively habitual, with the main detrimental consequence being an inability to exert prolonged mental effort.”But smartphones don’t just pull students away from schoolwork; they pull them away from one another too.The psychologist Jean M. Twenge and I have found a global increase in loneliness at school beginning after 2012. Students around the world became less likely to agree with survey items such as “I feel like I belong at school” and more likely to agree with items such as “I feel lonely at school.” That’s roughly when teens went from mostly using flip phones to mostly using smartphones. It’s also when Instagram caught fire with girls and young women globally, following its acquisition by Facebook, introducing selfie culture and its poisonous levels of visual social comparison.[From the May 2022 issue: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]One way that phones have hurt our relationships is through “phubbing” (a contraction of phone snubbing), when a person breaks away from a conversation to look at their screen. Research shows that it interferes with the intimacy and perceived quality of social interactions. People who are more addicted to their phones are, unsurprisingly, the biggest phubbers, which may explain why people who are the heaviest users of phones or social media are also the most depressed and lonely. Once some students start phubbing others, then the others feel pressure to pull out their own phone, and in a flash, the culture of the entire school has changed.If you have any doubt that phones in school stunt social connections, just talk to students about what happens at lunch time. My undergraduate students at NYU tell me that having real conversations is difficult, because most of their fellow students keep their phones on the table and frequently break away to check or respond to notifications. A 2018 study by the social psychologists Ryan Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev, and Elizabeth Dunn tested my students’ intuition. They invited hundreds of college students and community members to share meals at a restaurant, with family or friends. They randomly assigned participants in each small group to either put their phones on the table or put them away. The results? “When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family.”I’ve been studying and writing about the effects of smartphones and social media on teens’ behavior, development, and mental health for six years now. To help organize the existing research on these topics, I’ve created a series of open-source Google documents, which I’ve curated with Rausch. We recently created a phone-free-schools collaborative review, cataloging the studies I’ve noted in this article and many more.Consider the words of the MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her book Reclaiming Conversation: Because of our phones, she writes, “we are forever elsewhere.” If we want children to be present, learn well, make friends, and feel like they belong at school, we should keep smartphones and social media out of the school day for as long as possible.What Does It Mean to Go Phone-Free?
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2020, “cellphone bans were in place in 77% of U.S. schools.” But this high number seems to refer to a very low bar: It includes any school that tells students they should not use their phone while in class––unless the use is related to class. That’s not really a ban; it’s more of an unenforceable wish. Such a policy guarantees struggle between teachers and students, and it means that there are always kids looking at phones hidden in their laps or books, especially in the classes where the teacher has grown exhausted by the never-ending game of phone policing. As long as some kids are posting and texting during the school day, that raises the pressure on everyone else to check their phones during the school day. Nobody wants to be the last person to know the thing that everyone else is texting about.Other countries are ahead of the U.S. on phone policy. France banned the use of mobile phones on school grounds through grade nine in 2018 (though the law allows students to keep their phone in their bag or pocket, so students still use their phone stealthily). In New South Wales, Australia, the use of mobile phones has been banned in elementary schools and will soon be banned in high schools, although schools can decide how to implement the bans.Some schools in the U.S. have now taken similarly uncompromising stances on phones. For example, the author Mark Oppenheimer wrote earlier this year in The Atlantic about St. Andrew’s, a small boarding school in Delaware that allows students to use their phones only when in their dorm rooms, not when anywhere else on campus—a move that some students initially resisted but now has widespread student support.More American schools—arguably all schools—should make themselves into genuinely phone-free zones. How would that look in practice? I think it’s helpful to think of phone restrictions on a scale from 1 to 5, as follows:Level 1: Students can take their phone out during class, but only to use it for class purposes.Level 2: Students can hold on to their phone but are not supposed to take it out of their pocket or backpack at all during class time.Level 3: Phone caddies in classrooms: Students put their phone into a wall pocket or storage unit at the start of each class, and then pick it up at the end of that class.These three levels seem to be the ones most commonly employed by American schools today. I believe that the first two are nearly useless. Many students do not have the impulse control to stop themselves from checking their phone during class time if the phone is within reach. One teacher at Scarsdale High School told me that even when a ban on using phones during class is enforced, some students will say that they need to use the bathroom in order to check their phone.Phone caddies are a little better for learning, because they get the phone out of the student’s pocket, but their effect on school social life may be worse: A likely result of the practice is that all times between classes will be dominated by kids looking down silently at their phones, getting the fix they were denied for 50 minutes during class. When they do talk with friends, they’ll give those friends only a fraction of their full attention.So let’s move on:Level 4: Lockable pouches (such as those made by Yondr). Students are required to put their phone into their own personal pouch when they arrive at school, which is then locked with a magnetic pin (like the anti-theft tags used in clothing stores). Students keep the pouch with them but cannot unlock it until the end of the school day, when they are given access to a magnetic unlocking device.  Level 5: Phone lockers. Students lock their phone into a secure unit with many small compartments when they arrive at school. They keep their key and get access to the phone lockers again only when they leave school.Both of these practices put any student seen using a phone during the school day in clear violation of policy. They are the only two policies I know of that can create phone-free schools. They are the policies most likely to produce substantial educational, social, and mental-health benefits, because they are the only approaches that give students six or seven hours a day of time away from their phone.Lockable pouches are low-cost and easy to implement. However, I have heard from some students that their classmates (aided by YouTube videos) find ways to open their pouches and use their phones whenever they think no adult is watching. (A Yondr employee told me that the company is working to improve its pouch lock, and also said that schools should do regular pouch checks, which would reveal the damage from the most common methods of illicit unlocking.)[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]Phone lockers may be more complicated to put in place, logistically—especially at large schools. But they are the most reliable way to separate students from their phone for the duration of the school day and would therefore deliver the greatest benefits.A school that goes phone-free would still have to figure out what to do about laptops, tablets, and computers in the classroom. Students would surely use any internet-connected device to send and receive texts, and to reach their social-media accounts. Last year, I banned all screens––even laptops for taking notes—from all of my undergraduate and MBA classes, and at the end of each semester, students strongly agreed that this improved the class for them. But even absent a laptop ban, these larger devices are more easily managed and are not as likely as smartphones to disrupt social interactions outside of class.Those who oppose phone bans raise a number of objections. Smartphones can be useful teaching tools, for instance, and may make it easier for some teachers to create engaging lesson plans. That’s true, but any increase in engagement during a lesson may be offset by students getting distracted during the same lesson. When we add in the costs to all other teachers and the loss of social connection between classes, it’s hard to see how the marginal benefit of a phone-based lesson outweighs the costs of a phone-focused student body.A more common argument comes from parents, many of whom are afraid that something might go wrong at school and want to ensure that they can reach their children at all times. These fears are understandable but are also part of the cause of Gen Z’s mental-health problems. In his book Paranoid Parenting, the sociologist Frank Furedi describes how a new style of protective parenting swept through British and American society in the 1990s, in response to the perception that risks to children were rising. When parents believe that everything is risky and they can’t trust other adults to protect their children, they take a more defensive approach to parenting. They try to protect their children from all risks, even when that deprives their children of valuable experiences of independence.But today’s parents, who grew up during a period when crime rates were much higher than they are now, generally have fond memories of walking or biking to school with other kids, or just having time away from parental supervision to hang out with friends. I believe that children and teens would benefit developmentally if they were to go six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents.What about school shootings? I’m the father of two high-school students, and of course I would want to connect with my children in such a nightmare scenario. But would a school where every student has a smartphone be safer than one in which only the adults have smartphones? Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, warns that using a cellphone during an emergency can increase safety risks. “During a lockdown, students should be listening to the adults in the school who are giving life-saving instructions,” Trump explains. “Phones can distract from that. Silence can also be key, so you also don’t want that phone noise attracting attention.” In addition, it seems to me that 300 parents rushing to the school in 300 cars would probably make things more difficult for first responders.As the teen-mental-health crisis rolls on and rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm continue to rise, we are not helpless. It would be great if social-media platforms enforced their own minimum age of 13 to open accounts, but all signs indicate that they won’t unless compelled by Congress. It would be great if Congress would compel them, and in fact several bills are being considered right now toward that end. It would be better still if the minimum age for using social media were raised to at least 16. The solutions to this crisis are wide-ranging, and some may need to involve the federal government.But parents, teachers, and school administrators can take meaningful action too, right now. Although it’s outside the scope of this essay, parents who have not yet given their children a smartphone can resolve to provide only dumb phones until high school, and they can coordinate with the parents of their children’s friends, making that choice easier for all families involved. Schools that are using the lower levels of phone restriction can resolve to move up to lockable pouches or phone lockers, and many schools could implement these changes by September. My hope as a researcher is that a farsighted governor or school-district superintendent will implement these changes experimentally, by randomly assigning some middle schools to implement them as soon as possible and other schools to do so a year later. That way we could gain high-quality experimental evidence as to whether phone-free schools really confer the benefits that I have described.“It helped me a lot,” one student at San Mateo High School in California told NBC News after her school started using lockable pouches. “Before, I would usually just like curl over in the side of my desk, and, like, check my phone and text everyone. But now there’s no other thing for us to look at or do except for talk to our teacher or pay attention.”All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults. All children deserve phone-free schools.This essay is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, After Babel.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. experienced a historic reduction in prison population as admissions declined and many incarcerated people were released — both routinely and as part of state and federal public health strategies to decrease spread of the virus.
But as the overall prison population fell, the proportion of Black incarcerated people increased, according to data compiled by researchers at Harvard’s new Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety (IPIPS) at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Researchers attribute this finding to racial disparities in sentence length: Those with shorter sentences were released early, those with longer sentences remained locked up.
“This provides a very strong quantitative case that sentencing is the key mechanism of racial disparities in the system,” said Elizabeth Hinton, co-director of the Institute and lead author of the study along with Data for Justice Fellow Brennan Klein. On average, Black people are given sentences that are 20 percent longer than white people for committing the same crimes, according to a 2017 study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Hinton and Klein’s paper, “COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the US criminal legal system,” was published recently in the journal Nature.

Between 2020 and 2021, the overall prison population decreased by 17.3 percent yet the proportion of incarcerated Black people rose by 0.9 percent. 
Source: "COVID-19 amplified racial disparities in the US criminal legal system," by Brennan Klein, C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Benjamin J. Schafer, Zarana Bhadricha, Preeti Kori, Jim Sheldon, Nitish Kaza, Arush Sharma, Emily A. Wang, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Samuel V. Scarpino, and Elizabeth Hinton; via Nature 

The project began when the researchers started looking at COVID cases and hospitalization rates within the U.S. prison population and realized an essential piece of information — the total number of incarcerated people in each state, broken down by race and sex — did not exist. They compiled a new original dataset showing racial demographics of U.S. prisons from 2013 to 2022, with help from other experts including C. Brandon Ogbunu, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, and Sam Scarpino, professor at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University.
“It turned out to not be a trivial thing to access,” Klein said. “The more we tried to actually get system-level data about the total number of people incarcerated, separated out by race and, in some cases, sex, we couldn’t find it.”
The researchers collected and analyzed data from every state, as well as the District of Columbia and the federal prison system, to get a better understanding of the demographics of the U.S. prison population over time.
Information gathering varied dramatically by state. Some corrections department websites provided easily accessible data, but Klein said the researchers had to scrape old data from some state websites that didn’t maintain a historic backlog. In other cases, they had to submit Freedom of Information Act requests if states didn’t have the information available to the public.
The trend consistently showed that while the overall prison population decreased by 17.3 percent between 2020 and 2021, the proportion of Black people in the prison population increased by 0.9 percent between March and November 2020. Klein said another way of thinking about the statistic is that on any given day if an incarcerated person is being released under normal procedures, they are more likely to be white.
“The phenomenon we observe is driven by two key ingredients: differences in average sentence lengths by race and a sudden drop in admissions,” Klein said. “If there is a prison system with these two factors, you’ll always find that this spike will occur.”
The authors referred to the COVID period as a “stress test,” which offers useful information on the criminal system and for studying decarceration and prison reform.
The authors also ruled out, through case study, any theory that the disparities were due to an increase in the severity of crimes committed by Black or Latino people during the pandemic.
“That was a possibility that we explored and found out that intake did not shape the result at all. It wasn’t about who was coming into prison; it was about who remained in prison, who was not getting released,” said Hinton, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and Yale Law professor.
The Institute on Policing, Incarceration & Public Safety launched in 2022 with a goal of advancing the understanding of systems and practices that inform the criminal legal system and public safety. In its inaugural year, it has also hosted panel discussions on a book about prison abolition and on the language of drill music.
“We’re really trying to start new conversations and get better scholarship out there to understand how we might reconceive ideas about public safety and think about how we can address some of these disparities that we see in both policing and incarceration,” said Hinton, a former Harvard professor. “As a thoroughly interdisciplinary institute taking a collaborative approach to the problem, we’re trying to provide not only scholars, but policymakers, practitioners, nonprofit organizations, and activists new tools to be able to address and confront the problem of mass criminalization, which is one of the biggest domestic problems facing American society today.”

Last year, the team at Operation Catnip spent close to $1 million spaying and neutering more than 7,000 of the cats that prowl the streets and parks of Alachua County, Florida. It wasn’t even close to enough. Roughly 40,000 feral felines live in the community; to keep their numbers in check, curb disease transmission, and protect the county’s birds, the team probably would have needed to operate on approximately 10,000 more. “It’s an almost insurmountable number to reach by surgery,” Julie Levy, Operation Catnip’s founder and a shelter-medicine expert at the University of Florida, told me.But surgery remains the only available option for permanent cat contraception, locking vets, techs, and volunteers into the days-long rigamarole of trapping, transporting, operating on, monitoring, and releasing the animals, one by one by one. Plus, the process can be grueling and risky for the cats, who must go under anesthesia and the knife. Having a quick and simple alternative “would be amazing, huge, transformative,” Levy told me. “We’re just craving the day we have something else.”That day might be on its way soon. After years of tinkering, an American team of researchers has come up with a genetic treatment that, with one injection, can safely and sustainably halt ovulation in cats—a breakthrough that could replace onerous surgeries with the simple act of “going out into the community and giving an animal an injection, and then just letting them go,” says Valerie Benka, the director of programs at the Alliance for Contraception in Cats & Dogs. The therapy has only been examined in a series of small studies, and hasn’t yet entered clinical trials. And the scientists behind it can’t yet say how long, or how well, their invention might work. But if their early results pan out, this one-and-done injection could finally offer female cats safe, lifelong birth control without a single scalpel cut.[Read: The case against cats]Alternatives to surgical sterilization for dogs and cats have been in the works since at least the 1970s, and for the most part, they’ve delivered mixed or disappointing results. Hormones that can be swallowed, injected, or implanted tend to be fussy or come with nasty side effects; vaccines that block ovulation and pregnancy in some livestock and wildlife have underperformed when adapted to pets. No single option has yet hit the perfect intersection of safe, effective, easy, and permanent—the necessary combination to truly displace surgery,Meanwhile, the need for a decent alternative to surgical sterilization has only grown. An estimated 500 million free-roaming cats stalk the Earth, far overwhelming the world’s spotty supply of spay-and-neuter services. In some countries, wildlife managers have turned to culling; in many parts of the U.S., veterinary shortages, exacerbated by the pandemic, have left shelters “in crisis,” Levy told me, overcrowded to the point where they’re battling massive disease outbreaks and reluctantly raising euthanasia rates. Some adoption organizations, including PetSmart Charities, are now allowing some puppies and kittens to go to new homes without first being spayed or neutered—a change that is meant to move animals more quickly out of shelters, Levy told me, but also risks them not getting their surgeries before they reproduce.[Read: The great veterinary shortage]The new injectable, developed by a team led by William Swanson and David Pépin, won’t arrive in time to address the current shortage. But of all the experimental methods in development for cats, “this is the first one that has gotten this far,” says Cheryl Asa, the director of research at the St. Louis Zoo. Unlike other contraceptives that rely on lab-made hormones, the new treatment tasks the cat’s body itself with manufacturing the birth control. Each shot delivers DNA to cat muscle cells, instructing them to pump out the feline version of anti-Müllerian hormone—a reproductive signal that mammals naturally produce—at levels high enough that they seem to block the ovaries from maturing and releasing eggs, Pépin, a reproductive biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me. Because the contraceptive is the body’s own product, supply doesn’t run low.So far, the researchers have released findings from two very small studies of the injection, which included just 12 lab-raised female cats, nine of which received the treatment. Their early results seem to suggest that the shot keeps cats from getting pregnant for at least a couple of years, according to Pépin, without any serious side effects. Three of the cats are now six years out from their injections, and still seem happy and healthy. Swanson, a wildlife veterinarian at the Cincinnati Zoo, would know: He adopted them. “I see them every day, and they’re doing fine,” he told me over the phone, just feet away from where the trio were sunbathing by a window.Still, only a much-larger clinical trial will be able to prove that the team’s injection is safe and effective long-term. “The next question is, how long does it last?” says Pei-Chih Lee, a cat-reproduction biologist at the Smithsonian. Anti-Müllerian hormone is pretty understudied; it’s still unclear, for instance, exactly how it might alter cats’ other hormones, or even how long it takes for the contraceptive effect to kick in. For now, the team’s results have to be treated as “really preliminary,” says Daniela Chavez, a cat-reproduction biologist at Towson University.Even if this particular injection does succeed, experts told me, it’s unlikely to render spaying totally obsolete, especially among pet cats. Unlike several other options being explored, the new shot seems to work only in females; it also might not keep cats from going into heat and filling alleyways with their yowls and sprays, or from developing the reproductive-health complications that surgical sterilization helps prevent. The main benefit of the treatment is about giving vets “more options,” Benka told me. Several other groups remain hard at work on other technologies that could further flesh out the pet-contraception toolkit—some of them trying the gene-therapy route, as Swanson and Pépin did, others attempting hormonal injections that can keep dogs and cats from reaching reproductive maturity.[Read: I was allergic to cats. Until suddenly, I wasn’t.]All of that leaves Levy hopeful that shelter medicine will eventually put mass surgical sterilization in its rearview. Maybe, she told me, she’ll live to see the day when teams around the world can deliver contraception to cats with tech simple enough to carry around in a backpack; maybe, before she retires, she’ll describe surgical sterilization to the next generation of vets primarily in the past tense. “I want to be able to tell my students, ‘We used to cut animals open for fertility control!’” she told me. “And it will shock them, because there’s a better alternative”—one safer, easier, and more palatable for cat and human alike.

In my previous essay, I argued that rising to the challenge of the permanent problem is daunting but manageable: you can get there from here. Working within the existing institutional structures of liberal democratic welfare-state capitalism, we can see lines of incremental progress and reform that lead to a substantially more dynamic and inclusive society – one in which capacities and opportunities for stable, secure, and fulfilling lives are steadily expanding.
It would be exceedingly odd if I didn’t believe all that. After all, I’m a vice president at the Niskanen Center, recently touted as “the most interesting think tank in American politics” for its willingness to break through ideological logjams in search of solution’s to the country’s biggest problems. In a white paper from five years ago that outlines Niskanen’s distinctive policy vision, my co-authors and I wrote:

We believe that this vision offers America its best chance to show itself and the world that the liberal democratic capitalist welfare state — the best model of governance ever devised, producing the richest, healthiest, best-educated societies that ever existed — can still work to improve ordinary people’s lives, expand their opportunities, and engage them with meaningful, respected roles in the great common endeavors of society.

I believed that then, and I still believe it today. What’s more, I don’t just think that the policy reforms we advocate can take us to a much better place; I also think that enough of this agenda can actually get enacted and implemented to make a decisive difference.
But the fact that I’m not winding down this series shows that I believe some other things as well – in particular, that developing and enacting incremental reforms within existing institutional structures does not exhaust the set of constructive responses to the permanent problem. Here let me describe anything that might fit into this category of “other” responses as Plan B: possibilities for new institutional forms and structures to organize social cooperation, possibilities for the evolution of existing forms and structures in ultimately radical new directions, possibilities for major cultural shifts that either spur or adapt to institutional change.
I’ve got three reasons why, even if you’re fully committed to making the best of liberal democratic welfare-state capitalism as I am, it makes sense to broaden one’s reformist gaze and consider a wider range of Plan B options. First, given the pace and unpredictability of change in contemporary society, appropriate planning for the future needs to take place on multiple time horizons. Second, although muddling through is possible and worth working toward, it’s not guaranteed. If some of our core institutions buckle under the strain, things will go much better if we’ve already begun cultivating the seedlings of new institutions better adapted to prevailing conditions. And third, muddling though means getting to a place considerably better than we are now – but even so, we may discover there that we are stuck on a relatively low peak of societal fitness, and that moving to greater heights will require radically new ways of doing things.
As with virtually all projects involving humans, pondering, planning, and working on how tomorrow’s society might be better than today’s can benefit from a division of labor – specifically, with regard to time horizons. At the Niskanen Center, our focus is appropriately on the here and now: the major national problems that either press or loom today, and how best to deal with them within the constraints of contemporary reality. We understand that our policy ideas could take years or even decades to come to fruition, but our ideas always need to be responsive to what’s going on now and to shift as conditions shift.
But when we step back from the here and now and take a wider view, we see that our present is situated in an era of incessant, ongoing, transformational change. Just to put things in personal perspective, one of my grandfathers had two grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, and one of them had a great-grandfather who fought in the American Revolution. That’s the whole history of our country in just eight generations. Or in other words, my two great-great-grandfathers were fighting on the eve of the Second Industrial Revolution, the marriage of science and technology that created the modern growth explosion; and the great-grandfather of one of them was fighting just as the First Industrial Revolution was getting underway in England.
On Twitter and his Substack, Brad DeLong has been noodling through exactly how many “modes of production” we have been through over the past millennium. Starting with feudalism in 1000 C.E., it took about 650 years by his reckoning to get to maturity for the next mode, which he calls gunpowder empire commercial societies. That’s where we were when the United States was founded and my ancestor, Joel Stokes, was helping out at the Battle of Guilford Court House. It took another 220 years or so to get to maturity for the next mode, the steam power societies of the First Industrial Revolution – just after the Civil War had bled America dry. Since then, according to DeLong, we’ve changed modes every 40 or 50 years: the Second Industrial Revolution economy of around 1910, followed by the mass production economy of around 1960, followed by the global value-chain economy of around 2000, and culminating now in the contemporary information-biotech revolution.
Brad’s point in working through this periodization is to note the inability of social arrangements and institutions – what Marx called the “relations of production” and the crowning social/cultural/political “superstructure” – to adapt to the underlying technical-economic reality before that reality has changed qualitatively once again. Once upon a time, society had centuries to work out some kind of viable, stable equilibrium; now, though, the rug is pulled out from under us every few decades, long before the adjustment process has had time to sort things out. We scramble madly but we can’t keep up, like Lucy in the candy factory.
Accordingly, although confronting and grappling with contemporary problems as they present themselves is clearly our absorbing priority, at least some of us should be looking down the road toward the next technological dispensation and thinking through the kinds of institutional adaptations that will be desirable or necessary. And we may well come to the conclusion that dramatic changes in technological endowments need to be matched with substantial alterations to our institutional environment.
As we do our best to plan for an uncertain future, we have to take seriously the possibility that our efforts to muddle through will prove inadequate. For one thing, they may be upended by some major shock – some catastrophe, whether natural or human-created, that results in massive disruptions to economic, social, and political order. We’ve just struggled through years of a global pandemic with moderate to high transmissibility but limited lethality. Our luck was bad but could have been far worse, and even so the global death count exceeded 20 million and the combined economic damage amounted to trillions of dollars. And there are good reasons to expect that future pandemics await: If you tried purposefully to design ideal conditions for the zoonotic transmission of new pathogens and their rapid, worldwide spread, the combination of climate change, habitat loss, factory farming, and dense global travel networks would be hard to improve upon. And with really rotten luck, one of those pathogens may be as deadly as it is easy to contract.
Other natural perils suspend their swords above us as well. Asteroid strikes, supervolcano eruptions, massive solar storms that wipe out our electrical grid – it could be thousands of years before one of these hits, or it could be next week.
There’s also the possibility that we do ourselves in. Humans have been able to create hell on earth at the local level since early days, but it’s only been since that first Trinity test at Alamogordo that we have had the capacity to wipe out civilization across the planet. Since we fired a couple of shots in anger, that proverbial rifle has been hanging on the wall for 77 years now – and in what we may presume to have been the first act of the play, the period of U.S.-Soviet superpower rivalry, it was nearly taken down and used on several occasions. What act are we in now, and how long until someone’s trigger finger can’t resist the itch?
The risk of nuclear catastrophe is limited by the scale and complexity of the effort needed to threaten one: nuclear warfare is a business limited to nation-states, and starting one requires the successful navigation – or circumvention – of elaborate procedures. But perhaps the single most unnerving tendency associated with technological progress is the one that bends toward putting ever greater powers in the hands of ever smaller groups of people. The recent Covid-19 experience has revealed just how far this tendency has now advanced. Although it is generally believed that the novel coronavirus originated naturally, it’s possible that it leaked accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Security at such labs turns out to be far more lax than might be expected, and accidental releases are not exactly uncommon. Moreover, we’ve learned that scientists around the world are engaging in poorly supervised “gain of function” research that could produce genetically engineered pathogens of nightmarish ferocity. To my mind, the creation and release of such a super pathogen, whether intentionally or by accident, looms as the single most plausible existential risk we face.
The one getting all the attention these days, though, is artificial general intelligence. I confess that I have no idea how to evaluate the danger here. Let’s contrast the risks of efforts to develop AGI with what seems to me to be the much clearer case of gain-of-function research. The latter promises modest upsides (the possibility of understanding pathogens better and developing more effective vaccines and treatments) and apocalyptic downsides with clearly understandable mechanisms for causing harm (germs that can kill most or all of us). With AGI research on the other hand, the potential upsides and downsides both seem virtually unlimited, but the mechanisms for how the downsides might play out are all completely conjectural (at least for now – it’s easier to picture how humans might lose control once AGI systems and robots to do their bidding in the world are both ubiquitous). What I do know is that many if not most of the people most deeply involved with AGI research believe the risks to be considerable. Here is one particularly measured and thoughtful statement of the case.
I will say that the “alignment” problem – making sure AI is in sync with humanitarian values – is much broader than uncontrollable autonomous superintelligence. The most straightforward, and to my mind much more immediately concerning, kind of misalignment comes from nonautonomous AI in the hands of bad people. My colleague Sam Hammond, whose writings about AI have been consistently illuminating and thought-provoking, muses about some dark possibilities here. There is also the prospect of AI in the hands of hostile regimes – namely, China. Such national security concerns militate against any AI research pause that doesn’t include the Chinese.
There’s no need to sort any of this out for present purposes, however. What’s clear is that the massive uncertainties associated with continuing AI progress and the possible emergence of AGI offer very good reasons for Plan B thinking. Indeed, the need for Plan B thinking is even more obvious if we take the lofty upsides of AGI seriously: It’s hard to imagine how social institutions wouldn’t change radically in a world guided by artificial superintelligence.
Finally, our self-destructive capacities now extend to changing the planet’s climate through massive emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases. At present the risks do not appear existential: The best estimates are that the ultimate temperature change will be well short of apocalyptic, and the harshest effects will sadly be visited on the world’s poorer regions rather than its most advanced. These estimates are just estimates, though, and even so they point to a future facing serious disruptions and difficulties. These stresses, along with everything else that may be going on, could be enough to cause calamitous breakdowns in social order.
All of these disaster scenarios point toward the need for a specific kind of Plan B thinking: namely, ideas for new institutions and arrangements that can make our technology- and organization-intensive way of life more resilient. If we do face serious risks of catastrophe over the coming decades and centuries, how can we better distribute key capacities so that a major shock in one place doesn’t bring the whole edifice down?
Civilization-disrupting shocks are one way that muddling through could fail. But such failure, if it comes, is more likely to arrive with a whimper than a bang. This series up to now has provided a lengthy compendium of the economic, social, and cultural forces that hinder the progress of liberal democratic welfare-state capitalism toward wider human flourishing and indeed push in the opposite direction. If those dark forces cannot be successfully resisted and beaten back, where will they end up carrying us?
My own sense of the likeliest dystopian outcome is one in which things gradually devolve into an ever more repellent caricature of where we are today: a cossetted and insular elite that maintains plebeian acquiescence in its domination through a combination of intensive surveillance and digital bread and circuses; the general abandonment of efforts to improve the material conditions of ordinary people in favor of facilitating their escape to frictionless virtual fantasy worlds; the ongoing substitution of stimulation, spectacle, and distraction for relationships with flesh-and-blood people and engagement with the physical world; the continued triumph of safetyism and the therapeutic ethic, and the consequent marginalization of value systems that prioritize anything above healthy bodies and calm, pleasant affect; the progressive breakdown of epistemological and ethical universalism and retreat into identitarian tribalism; deepening estrangement from the idea that history has anything valuable to teach us other than a catalog of unenlightened horrors; and thus, in sum, the dismal flattening and narrowing of existence that is the inevitable result of disconnection from all the primary sources of human greatness and fulfillment.
Notwithstanding all the foregoing, accepting the need for Plan B thinking does not require a pessimistic frame of mind, or even a dutiful, prudential commitment to consider the full panoply of downside risks. We can assume that muddling through will succeed – that, working within the existing institutional framework, we can build a much better world. All that is needed is mindfulness of those longer time horizons and a bit of imaginative curiosity: a recognition that our existing institutions, supremely useful in the past and still serviceable in the present, are unlikely to be the unchanging end point of social development.
To make this a bit more concrete, let me refer back to a passage from the kickoff essay for this series:

When we shift our gaze to more distant time horizons and contemplate the longer-term future, it seems likely to me that the social institutions and ways of life we inherited from the past will need to be reimagined and in some cases transformed to meet the challenges of the permanent problem. While I don’t see mass technological unemployment as imminent, I am still dubious that mass employment for wages at workplaces outside the home is the final word on how the division of labor is to be organized. I am dubious that consumerism is the final word on society’s primary motivation for productive work. I’m quite sure that commercial mass media are driven ineluctably toward toxic divisiveness and sensationalism in their coverage of public affairs and that some alternative is desperately needed. And I’m increasingly of the opinion that elections are not always the best way of choosing our political representatives.

I should hasten to add that I don’t see these bedrock institutions of contemporary society – wage employment, consumerism, commercial mass media, electoral democracy – disappearing from the scene. That is, I can’t imagine happy circumstances under which these institutions have been supplanted altogether. But my sense is that all of them are overloaded: They’re bearing more weight than they ought to, being pushed to function beyond their appropriate limits and consequently malfunctioning. They don’t need to be replaced; instead, they need to be relieved of some of the excessive responsibilities we currently task them with and supplemented with other institutions that complement and balance them.
This idea that our current social order is overextended – that we have pushed key social institutions well past the point of sharply diminishing returns – is central to my thinking about how society needs to develop to rise to the challenge of the permanent problem. I will explore that idea further in my next essay.
The post The case for Plan B appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Over the past weekend, major global media outlets revealed that the heads of intelligence of about two dozen countries held a (formerly) secret meeting in Singapore and had in fact been held annually for several years. The venue for the talks was the Shangri-La Hotel, also the meeting place for a large, widely known conference called the Shangri-La Dialogue, involving about 600 representatives from around the world. Such conferences, perhaps usually smaller, are common gatherings of government officials and others who want to be and are allowed to be there.

Among the roughly 24 intelligence chiefs at the informal meeting were the heads of U.S. and Chinese intelligence. India’s top intelligence chief was also present, as were chiefs from the Five Eyes network (the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand), but no other attendees were identified. It was noted that Russia was not represented – whether by its choice or by the organizers’ exclusion is unclear.

According to Reuters, the source of the information was five separate (and I assume unconnected) people. When one person leaks information, it is one of those things. When five leak the same information simultaneously, it is the equivalent of a press release. The existence of these meetings, and the revelation that the U.S. and China were both there and Russia was not, is important. What is fascinating is that there was an organized attempt by someone to blow the cover off the meeting. That the leakers seem not to have identified the others present is interesting, since it suggests the leak came from official sources who respected requests for anonymity – and indicates that those named didn’t mind it being revealed that they had attended secret meetings with major powers for some years.

Equally interesting is that the meeting of two dozen heads of intelligence could have been kept secret. A meeting of such people requires several weeks of logistical planning, security preparations, and exchange of proposed agendas and position papers. Heads of intelligence need to know what they will be dealing with, at least generally. Intelligence chiefs know secrets that their governments don’t want blurted out, and they aren’t casual about this. Their briefings on official positions and authorized threats that might be made require weeks of preparation for the chief and some staff. The American head of intelligence can’t be casually chatting with the Chinese. Obviously, preparations for the Shangri-La Dialogue mostly would have covered the smaller conference. But it is hard to believe that 24 national intelligence heads, plus other officials in each country who had to know of the preparations, could for years fail to leak a conference such as this.

The focus on security might seem less important than the reasons for the leak, but in this case, they are closely linked. The cover of the meeting was blown simultaneously by five sources. The loss of secrecy will raise public concern in at least some countries as to why the meetings were held, why they were kept secret, and what was discussed and agreed to. In democratic countries like the United States, intelligence agencies are already distrusted by many.

If any serious discussions were held, it is hard to believe they took place in the company of all the other nations present. I would guess that the meeting was accompanied by secret bilateral meetings, if not by others then by the Americans and Chinese. Russia’s absence from the smaller group is also important. I doubt that Russia was absent from prior meetings, but it was missing from this one. Obviously, China did not insist that Russia be included. The willingness of the Chinese to sit down with other powers without Moscow’s presence signifies that Russia is not seen as a great power. It was not missed. China and India had things to talk about concerning conflict on their border. And China and the U.S. had things to talk about as well.

I doubt the discussion was about potential war. I think that is a distant possibility, and any such discussion would be about the substance of war, rules of interception, warning systems and so on. At this fundamental level, the discussion more likely would be about geopolitics – more precisely, Russia. Recall the alliance between Russia and China that went nowhere.

There are two likelier subjects. There have been rumors that the U.S., which has an interest in ending the Ukraine war at or near the front, has asked China to try to work with its putative ally to end the conflict. Discussing China’s ability to do this and the price it would demand for its labor might well be at the level of intelligence directors. Another, even more probable possibility is that the two countries, sensing Russia’s decline, want to think of what the future might look like, hoping to prevent conflict between the two remaining superpowers.

After the meeting, it was revealed that India is shifting away from its relationship with Russia, long a major supplier of weapons for India, and toward the United States. Since India has been fighting China along their shared border, this agreement, like other agreements reached in the Pacific, places China in a difficult military position. It is locked out of the Pacific and facing an increasingly powerful India to its southwest.

It is, of course, not clear how long this U.S. relationship with India will last, but for the moment, added to the decline of Russia as an ally and the aggressive actions the U.S. has taken to form alliances in the Western Pacific, China is in a difficult position. I have long argued that China could not risk a war in the Pacific. Now, in my view, China must take steps to deescalate the tension. A meeting involving China’s head of intelligence and his counterparts from the U.S., India, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – and not Russia – suggests Beijing understands the position it is in and that it had to shift. The leaders seemed very careful to make the balance of power public.

There has been a spate of speeches and articles in China emphasizing the need to avoid conflict and increase cooperation. Given the geopolitical reality they face, and studying the Russian experience in Ukraine, the Chinese have a new sense of the way the world works, or a confirmation of a reality they saw months ago and hoped would evaporate. It is uncertain if the shift in tone is permanent. The test will be if they stop threatening war over Taiwan or at least confine their threats to ritual gestures. But China is on the whole signaling new relations, and the intelligence meeting and its publication was sobering.

Secret meetings of intelligence heads are dangerous. They can trigger distrust at home, particularly in the United States. But the fact that someone wanted the world to know that the meetings had been going on for a long time and who was involved in them indicates that the leakers came from countries that did well at the gathering. The other 20 or so retained their anonymity. This is a major event in the shifting balance of power.

The over three-year-long moratorium on federal student-loan repayment has long been hailed as a godsend for student loan borrowers. While announcing yet another extension of the moratorium in December 2021, President Biden praised it as "badly needed breathing room during the economic upheaval caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic."
However, a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that borrowers whose loans were frozen by the moratorium actually ended up in a worse position than they started in—and have even accrued more student loan debt.
In March 2020, the Trump administration announced a moratorium on federal student loan payments for 60 days, citing the financial hardship faced by borrowers in the early days of the pandemic. In the three years since, the pause has been extended eight times with a variety of legal justifications. Payments are still currently paused, though the recently signed debt ceiling bill sets a hard expiration date for the moratorium on August 30.
The total cost of the pause is estimated to be as high as $5 billion per month, or almost $200 billion by the time repayment starts in September. And all that spending might not have even helped those whom the moratorium was supposed to benefit. According to the paper, those whose loans were frozen by the moratorium actually took on more debt—borrowing more on credit cards and mortgages and even accruing more student loan debt rather than working to pay off other debt they owe. 
The paper compared those whose student loans were frozen by the moratorium because their loans were held federally to those whose student loans were not frozen because their loans were private. There were stark differences between the two groups. For those whose loan payments were paused, they did reap some benefits, like increased credit scores and a decrease in delinquency on student loan debt. However, by other metrics, they actually became worse off. By the end of 2021, borrowers who saw their student loan payments paused increased their credit card, mortgage, and car-loan debt by $1,800 on average and even took on an additional $1,500 in student loan debt compared to those whose loan payments were not paused by the moratorium. Rather than being the "badly needed breathing room" that Biden suggested, the student loan payment pause has actually resulted in borrowers ending up financially worse off than they were before.
"Perhaps paradoxically, temporary student debt relief leads to higher overall household debt levels and larger future debt burdens," the paper reads. "The results indicate that debt payment pauses can increase consumption in the short term, but that overall debt increases, as borrowers use increased liquidity to service new debt."
Not only did the student loan payment pause cost taxpayers billions, but it also didn't even help decrease the debt owed by those whom the pause was supposed to benefit. Like many expensive government interventions, the student loan moratorium made everyone—including those the program was meant to help—worse off. 
The post The Student Loan Pause Has Made Borrowers Worse Off appeared first on Reason.com.

Late last month, during yet another inexplicable rebranding exercise, HBO’s Max streaming service changed the way it organizes film credits. Rather than separate out discrete production categories for users to peruse, Max’s credits lumped writers and directors together under an ominous header, dubbing them “creators.” The recategorization enraged writers, filmmakers, and the Directors Guild of America. Within a few hours, Max’s parent company, Warner Bros., apologized for the move, calling it “an oversight in the technical transition from HBO Max to Max.”The change—made by a company with a market cap that is approaching $30 billion during a contentious writers’ strike—felt petty and vindictive to Hollywood professionals. Max restructuring its credits was interpreted as the studios saying the quiet part out loud: that the craft and professional expertise required to make art are unimportant, and that the distinctions and divisions of labor in the creative process are merely the obsessions of sensitive artisans. Put another way: In the algorithmic age of generative AI, there are no auteurs, just creators who make content. Tell ’em to smash those “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, Marty Scorsese! As fleeting controversies go, this one rather perfectly encapsulates the anxieties of our immediate technological moment—one where media, entertainment, and art are all shaped, and ultimately subsumed, by the infinite scroll.Union shops such as the Directors Guild have long fought for proper credits recognition, and creator touches a specific, raw nerve. It is imbued with the baggage of the internet and, specifically, a subset of workers whose work is frequently devalued by, exploited by, and subject to the whims of capricious technology platforms. Many creators work on volume, constantly churning out content to make money and stay relevant. The moniker itself, as WGA West President Meredith Stiehm made clear in a statement, is “diminishing.”As Taylor Lorenz wrote for The Atlantic, creator was originally championed by YouTube in 2011 as a catchall. Tim Shey, who worked at YouTube during this time, told Lorenz that creators “could write, edit, produce, do community management, and were entrepreneurs.” The term, adopted in lieu of YouTube star, was meant to signify that internet fame was widely achievable but also distinct from traditional Hollywood talent. Since those early days, Silicon Valley has devoured Hollywood: Technology companies such as Netflix and Amazon have become full-fledged studios, injecting billions into the business of film and television while ushering in a ruthless, data-driven, algorithmic approach to what gets green-lighted and how the rest of us watch it all.“To call somebody a content creator flattens all the jobs into one category of ‘you make some crap,’” Josh Gondelman, a WGA member who has worked on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and Desus & Mero, told me recently. “It’s not that it simply doesn’t show respect for multiplicity of skills or expertise; it’s that it takes money off the table. You used to get paid for each job you did. Now it’s one.” This is, to be clear, not a niche concern of well-paid Hollywood types but a facet of digital life in a time of automation.The flattening that Gondelman describes is essential to understanding why algorithmic optimization and generative AI elicit deep fears from people in creative industries. Tech platforms marketed the creator economy as a kind of entrepreneurial liberation, but on the other side of this shift is the loss of safety nets such as unions, benefits, and other labor protections, as well as a concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of influential viral personalities. Often implicit in the creator arrangement is the imperative to churn out a high volume of content. AI stands to make all of this worse.[Read: The influencer economy is having an existential crisis]Platforms need scale. The rebranded Max platform, for example, offers a mind-bending, virtually inexhaustible 35,000 hours of programming—that is, content. That’s another technology term that flattens distinctions—between mindless entertainment and meditative art, between instantly generated synthetic text and meticulously written sentences, between advertorial and editorial. Content rounds up any media that can pass in front of somebody’s eyes and drags it all down to the lowest common denominator: something that will engage a user for a period of time. And no technological tool is as exquisitely built and made to serve internet-level scale as generative AI. The large language models of our moment, such as GPT-4, are trained on dizzying, inhuman amounts of information, and the tools are designed to create endless quantities of synthetic filler that is immediately accessible for consumption. Quality is less relevant than quantity.If you’re looking, you can already see AI creeping across the entertainment industry. In gaming, this looks like on-the-fly generated dialogue, with non-player characters replacing scripts and making open-world games almost infinitely playable. In podcasting, it might mean companies that can create Joe Rogan–style long-form interviews between any two people in human history. Missing Succession after the series finale? Simply conjure your own feature film with all the characters, as the venture capitalist Jason Calacanis did recently. “The perfect setup for a movie ... there is no way this is over,” he tweeted shortly after the final episode aired.Calcanis’s incredulity at the show’s finale is a useful example of what I’ll call Scale Brain: the result of a worldview that looks upon restraint with confusion and sees self-imposed limitations as weakness. This mindset doesn’t care about craft or going out on top—it sees attention and even adoration as resources to mine until they are depleted. There has to be a movie in the works, because eyeballs and money are still on the table. There is content left to make!It seems telling, if a little on the nose, that those with Scale Brain are currently using generative-AI tools to expand the borders of classic paintings and photographs such as the Mona Lisa and the cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. On the one hand, this is little more than a fun computer parlor trick; on the other hand, it seems indicative of a mindset that cannot accept finality or limitations—which is to say that it cannot accept art itself. The Mona Lisa subsumed by the infinite scroll isn’t art; it’s algorithmic noise generated by a computational educated guess. Although it may be exciting from a purely technological standpoint, I find it a depressing, nihilistic refusal of the limits that make art interesting and human.This is less about the end of art than the end of endings, brought to you by efficient production without limits. There is already a cultural obsession with lore and fandoms and the furthering of narratives via fan fiction and remix culture. Now the entertainment industry has responded in kind with a fixation on developing “intellectual property”—the narrative as the infinite scroll. One way to conceive of Scale Brain and generative-AI evangelism is to see a group of people enthusiastic about turning all facets of creative life into intellectual property, where everything can and should have an expanded cinematic universe, world without end.Arguments about art and limitation and craft versus scale are prone to sounding overly precious: Art and creative work are businesses, after all. But it’s worth considering what is lost in a world led by people and technologies refusing to acknowledge human limits in favor of relentless, endlessly monetizable scale.Perhaps the most interesting line in Warner Bros.’ apology statement was that the inclusion of the term creator was “an oversight in the technical transition”—a minor bug in the code, to be fixed with a quick update. In some ways, this is the entire story: the friction that comes from applying an engineering framework to the human work of artistic creation. It’s also a concise way to sum up working in a world of limitless content, where it’s easy to feel like we’re all on the verge of becoming an oversight in the technical transition.

In my previous post, I argued that the critiques of "neoliberalism" that have become widespread over the past decade (including by yours truly) needed a fresh look in light of contemporary economic conditions. The part of the neoliberal consensus that I want to give special attention in this post is industrial policy, that is, the targeting of specific sectors for government help, through some combination of subsidies, trade protection, low-interest rate loans, and the like.  Economists never liked industrial policy in the heyday of the Washington Consensus, and a large majority still don’t. Industrial policy distorts resource allocation by making it subject to political considerations. Yet industrial policy has become a key element of the Biden administration’s economic plan, embodied in last year’s "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors" (CHIPS) Act and the amusingly named Inflation Reduction Act. The former provided hefty subsidies to re-shore or friendshore semiconductor production, while the latter promoted transition to alternative energy through a complex series of subsidies and trade restrictions. In a speech at the Brookings Institution in April, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan outlined a New Washington Consensus that put industrial policy at its core.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Let’s begin our reconsideration of industrial policy with some general observations about the role of industrial policy in economic history. Many critics of the Washington Consensus pointed out that some of the most spectacular growth stories of the 20th century came from countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan that were heavy users of industrial policy. Their growth models depended on some version of infant industry protection, whereby the government shielded new industries from global competition up to the point where they had come down the learning curve far enough to compete on their own in a global marketplace.  At that point the protections were removed, and you had world-beating industries like Toyota, Hitachi, Samsung, and Hyundai. China used similar protections to build up its alternative energy industry, which has now achieved a scale and efficiency that will make future foreign competition very difficult.It is also not the case that the United States has never used industrial policy historically. The rising industrialists of late 19th century America were all in on protective tariffs, which allowed them to compete against Europe’s better-established manufacturers. They turned to free trade only when they were able to compete on their own and faced countervailing protections as they sought to enter foreign markets. The biggest U.S. practitioner of industrial policy was the U.S. Department of Defense, which funded research, development, and the scaling up of work on semiconductors, radar, computers, the internet, and a host of foundational technologies.There were of course many counterexamples of failed industrial policy. Argentina wasted a lot of money trying to create a national car, the de Tella, while Indonesia has been struggling to promote a domestic aerospace industry. India has been pouring money into the creation of a domestic semiconductor industry to little effect. State-owned industries often inject politics into the running of commercial enterprises, leading to bloated payrolls, inflexibility, and unsustainable deficits. Industrial policy in the form of infant industry protection can work if the country in question chooses the right sector, employs the right incentives, and is disciplined in its willingness to remove the protections when the infant grows up to be an adult. This is more a political than an economic matter, and the countries of East Asia were in general better able to pull this off than developing countries in Africa, South Asia, or Latin America.So what about the Biden administration’s industrial policies? It is hard to argue that they are aiming at the wrong targets. Given the rising competition with China, it was not prudent to let advanced semiconductor become so concentrated in Taiwan which may be vulnerable to Chinese intimidation or takeover in the future. And speeding up the energy transition is also an obvious priority: market forces by themselves will not do this nearly fast enough.The devil is in the details, however, as to how these policies are conceived and implemented. The IRA in particular has become the source of particular controversy because it mixes the promotion of alternatives with a traditional form of economic nationalism, protecting American jobs at the expense not just of ideological competitors like China, but democratic allies in Europe and Asia. Many European and Asian companies are considering moving investments from their own countries to the United States due to the hefty subsidies involved, which has stimulated the EU to consider its own set of Europe-wide subsidies to counteract them. This could lead to a destructive non-zero sum competition that leaves both the United States and its allies worse off.The IRA has already created a blizzard of rules and exceptions to rules that create perverse incentives for companies. It provides a tax credit for electric vehicles and a removal of the previous cap on subsidies of 200,000 cars per manufacturer. But those tax credits apply to only the lower price range of vehicles, and require that their final assembly be done in North America. However, these rules don’t apply to leased vehicles, and so European and Asian carmakers are seeking to sell through this channel. There are also complicated rules about the dates by which final assembly must take place, with the IRS specifying a list of individual vehicles that qualify for the credit. Battery sourcing is also subject to complex regulations: 50% have to be manufactured in the United States and 40% of the minerals used have to come from American sources.  The IRA also specifies a large number of new labor rules that will apply to a series of specific subsectors like green hydrogen, carbon sequestration, refueling stations, and the like.  This policy has been successful insofar as a significant number of new investments in U.S. manufacturing capacity have been announced. The problem with industrial policy in the past, however, is that the complex rules underlying it have grown more complex and rigid over time. There is a danger that subsidies will continue past the point they are needed, because it is too difficult politically to remove them.In this respect, the American track record has not been so bad historically.  The U.S. government invested in several foundational technologies in the 1990s, beginning with the internet, that it then privatized and opened up to commercial development. This of course occured at the height of the neoliberal consensus; whether industries created by government subsidies will be allowed to stand on their own is an open question for the future.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: A close up of a circuit board. (Unsplash: Bermix Studio)

Over the course of twenty essays so far, I’ve attempted to describe the nature of the predicament now facing the United States and other rich democracies – and, by extension, all of humanity in the longer run. We have achieved material plenty, and a corresponding expansion of human possibilities beyond all prior imagining, but we have thus far been unable to translate this achievement into the widespread flourishing that constitutes the next great leap of progress.
We feel stuck, and tantalized – our expectations raised but unmet, the possibility of a much better life within our view but beyond our grasp. There is the sense that we are living in a no-man’s-land, a time of transition, that we are moving beyond one stage of history but have not yet found the next. Hence all the talk of “late capitalism,” and the fact that we so frequently identify our current position by what it no longer is: post-industrial, post-modern. Gramsci’s famous line, uttered in a very different context, crops up again and again these days because it seems so timely: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
I’ve painted a fairly dark picture up to now. I understand and occasionally try to remind readers of the mitigating context – namely, that we are members of the richest, healthiest, best-educated societies that have ever existed. I don’t believe we’re doomed, not by a long shot: There is much in what’s going today to be encouraged by and hopeful about. But I do think our problems are formidable, and that a future much worse than today along many key dimensions looms as a very real possibility. We are at a critical juncture, playing for high stakes, and things could go terribly wrong.
Moreover, it’s my sense that achieving real progress while simultaneously avoiding disaster will require big changes in outlooks, institutions, norms, and policies. The path we have been on in recent decades has by and large been the wrong one, compounding rather than alleviating our difficulties. This is why I’ve adopted the language of crisis to describe our current situation: to set the stage for discussing possible ways forward. In the essays to come, I will explore possible new paths for social development and progress, paths that represent significant, even radical departures from the status quo. By highlighting the downsides and dangers of the path we’re on, I’ve hoped to make readers more open to considering those departures sympathetically. And it seemed to me that my ideas about possibilities for rejuvenation and renewal would make more sense, and my discussion of them would be more persuasive, if I first laid out in some detail the problems they are meant to solve.
But before embarking on this next phase of the series, I want to push back against what I’ve done up to now. Persuasive writing often involves a bit of deception: papering over the weak points in arguments, not coming clean with readers about the writer’s own doubts. It’s fairly common among professional scribblers, and this describes my own experience pretty much every time out of the blocks, to experience the writing process as a bipolar roller coaster ride, careening back and forth between the exhilarating feeling that you’ve struck gold and the exasperated sense that you have nothing to say of any conceivable interest. Writing in essay form allows you to be fully open with readers – to share with them, not only your conclusions, but the often circuitous path you took to arrive at them. So let me take advantage of this format and expose my own doubts about the project I’ve undertaken.
Specifically, I want to make the case here that all my talk of crisis is overblown. Sure, there are big problems at present, but please name a time when there haven’t been. Posting recently on AI and existential risk, Tyler Cowen made a point about the doomsayers that is also relevant to my own hand-wringing:
No one can foresee those futures! Once you keep up the arguing, you also are talking yourself into an illusion of predictability. Since it is easier to destroy than create, once you start considering the future in a tabula rasa way, the longer you talk about it, the more pessimistic you will become. It will be harder and harder to see how everything hangs together, whereas the argument that destruction is imminent is easy by comparison. The case for destruction is so much more readily articulable — “boom!” Yet at some point your inner Hayekian (Popperian?) has to take over and pull you away from those concerns.
These words hit home to me because I’ve cried wolf before – earlier in my career, on a very different topic, but it’s the wrongest I’ve ever been in my public life. And if I’m wrong again this time, I’m being wrong in the same way.
My reaction was hardly uncommon, but the 9/11 attacks really threw me for a loop. I knew about al-Qaeda, and had a general abstract appreciation of the fact that Islamist terrorism was a problem and worth worrying about, but I hadn’t taken it all that seriously. My mental image of the terrorist threat was the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – which not only failed to do great damage, but also came off as a cartoonishly amateur operation (the group’s spiritual leader was a blind cleric who wore a Santa Claus hat, and one of the perpetrators was arrested trying to get the deposit back on the van they rented to carry the bomb). So I understood that there was a risk – six people had been murdered in that attack – but the fact that the risk existed didn’t have any real influence over my thought. It didn’t cause me to reexamine any premises or rethink any position.
9/11 changed all that. In addition to the shock and horror and grief that I felt along with so many others, I was upset with myself for my own prior complacency. And so, with that kind of pendulum swing that intellectual types are prone to, I swung hard in the other direction. When 9/11 was followed by various anthrax scares, and then Washington, D.C., was gripped with fear for weeks as a pair of snipers drove around shooting people at random, I became convinced that we had entered a dark and dangerous new phase of history. I saw how incredibly fragile our relatively high-trust society was, how vulnerable it was to random acts of destruction. Very small numbers of people willing to risk it all to see the world burn sufficed to unleash untold chaos, and it now seemed to me that an adequate supply of such people clearly existed. 9/11, I feared, was the signal to them that their moment was at hand.
This sense of crisis – the sense that, in the face of violent nihilism, our contemporary way of life was a sitting duck – led me to think that bold, decisive, aggressive action was called for. Swept up in that panic, I bought the idea that we could not tolerate rogue states with WMD programs; I bought the idea that our support for Arab dictatorships had led to our current vulnerability, and that democratizing that part of the world was a national security imperative. So I supported the Iraq War, supported it vociferously and in writing, and argued heatedly with colleagues at the Cato Institute (the staff was split over the war, but most people – including the foreign policy team and the senior leadership – were adamantly opposed).
It took me a couple of years to face up to and admit how wrong I had been. We were not, in fact, sitting ducks: A significant but far from radical upgrading of our intelligence and law enforcement efforts succeeded in rolling up terrorist networks and preventing another major attack from occurring. The dark and dangerous new phase of history had been a figment of my overactive imagination.
The whole episode left me with a much stronger sense of my own fallibility, and was one important step in my broader move away ideological certainties of any kind (although, ironically enough, I had erred in this instance by bucking libertarian orthodoxy). In particular, I saw that I was especially vulnerable to a particular kind of error. I believe that my most distinctive intellectual talent is a gift for generalization and synthesis, but that gift comes with a matching booby prize: a kind of cognitive pareidolia, connecting dots across a broad canvas to see a compelling picture of something that doesn’t really exist.
So now that I’m once again crying wolf, arguing that we’re in a time of crisis, I can’t help but worry that I’m overreacting in the same way that I did two decades ago. This worry is reinforced by my recognition that things have looked bad before, maybe worse than they do now, yet in the end the resilience of liberal democratic capitalism sufficed to carry us through those times of trouble. I was a teenager during the 1970s, and I remember the general sense that everything was falling apart: Watergate, the last overloaded helicopter taking off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon, gas lines, “Whip Inflation Now,” the massive crime wave and the “Dirty Harry”/“Death Wish” reaction. In just 18 months over 1971 and 1972, terrorists set off an astonishing 2,500 bombs around the country. Yet by the 80s, the mood had shifted dramatically: economic growth returned, the stock market soared, gas prices came back down, and patriotism became fashionable again. The 1930s, when both my parents were born, was an altogether sterner test. Yet despite the worst economic crisis in modern history, and the outbreak of the bloodiest war in human history, both capitalism and liberal democracy endured and indeed triumphed.
The lessons of history, including personal history, thus offer good reasons to believe that our social and political order, which right now looks so fragile and beset with problems, is in fact incredibly durable, possessed of deep inner strengths and an indefatigable capacity for reinvention and renewal. And to be fair to myself, I’ve never said otherwise. I’ve employed the language of crisis, not that of inevitable doom or irresistible decline. Crises can be overcome, just as we overcame the crises of the 30s and 70s. But we should grant that this is not the only possible outcome: Just because we have made it through past crises doesn’t mean we’ll rise to the occasion again. Remember, in the story of the boy who cried wolf, the wolf eventually shows up.
For the remainder of this essay, then, let me go beyond these general historical reassurances and offer specific reasons for thinking that the problems we face now are surmountable – and, indeed, are currently in the process of being surmounted. For each of capitalism’s three crises I have discussed – the crises of dynamism, inclusion, and politics – we can see developments now underway that may well lead us past our current difficulties.
As to dynamism, we are currently witnessing exciting progress and key breakthroughs in a wide range of technological fields. Just over the past few months, the pace of astonishing new developments in generative AI models has been nothing short of overwhelming – for those of us on the outside looking in, amazing things are happening so fast it’s just impossible to keep up. ChatGPT is, by one measure at least, already the most successful product in the history of capitalism: It reached 100 million active monthly users in just two months. These new large language models hold out the possibility of significant, economywide productivity gains and potentially transformative new capabilities in, among other places, medical care and education. On the other hand, many people with impressive expertise in the field are deeply concerned that AI’s disruptive and destructive potential could lead to catastrophe – up to and including human extinction. With possibilities ranging from the millenarian to the apocalyptic, the current state of affairs may be simultaneously thrilling and deeply unsettling – but the last thing you’d do is complain about a lack of dynamism.
Of course, remarkable progress in information technology is nothing new: Rollicking creative destruction in the realm of bits has been a constant even as we have seen a general slowdown in growth and innovation elsewhere. But now, developments on many fronts suggest that a new era of rapid progress in the realm of atoms may actually be at hand. In energy, we see not only plummeting costs for solar and wind power, but also important breakthroughs in geothermal, small modular nuclear, and fusion. In transportation, SpaceX successfully launched its mammoth new Starship in an April test flight, new companies are trying to revive supersonic air travel, drones are becoming ubiquitous, and driverless cars, trucks, and delivery vehicles continue to improve. In healthcare, CRISPR and AlphaFold represent breathtaking new capabilities that could unlock a whole host of miraculous cures and treatments.  
Although it’s encouraging to see so much in the pipeline of promising new technologies, we need to remember that the crisis of dynamism extends well past the R&D phase. Our most vexing difficulties consist of all the obstacles that block the path between invention and implementation at scale. Here, too, though, there are hopeful signs. The brute facts of climate change and runaway housing prices are forcing progressives to face up to the fact that good intentions are not enough; there is growing recognition that the status quo of “everything-bagel liberalism,” which prioritizes saying yes to favored interest groups over actually getting things done, must be abandoned in favor of a “liberalism that builds.” While the so-called “abundance agenda” remains little more than an idea on a blackboard, the fact that these ideas are now in circulation and gaining traction marks an important change. As Lucy told Charlie Brown, “The mere fact that you realize you need help indicates that you are not too far gone.”
The crisis of inclusion has many dimensions, but they all relate back to the declining relative value of the economic contributions of ordinary workers. Over recent years, however, that gap has actually been closing in the United States. There are many different metrics for assessing such things, but my colleague Matt Yglesias offers a good rundown in a recent “Slow Boring” post. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Gini coefficient – the broadest single measure of income inequality – declined by 5 percent between 2007 and 2019. That’s not nearly enough to reverse the big run-up in inequality during the 1980s and 90s, but it’s encouraging nonetheless. More recent data are harder to parse because of the pandemic and the ensuing rise in inflation, but the growth in real wages since 2019 has been strongest at the bottom and weakest at the top. What we’ve learned, then, from the experience of the late 90s and the years since 2015 is that neither wage stagnation nor current income gaps are inevitable: When labor markets are tight, wages can grow smartly and incomes in the bottom half can gain ground on those at the top. A decent amount of the economic marginalization we’ve seen in recent decades has been due less to the inevitable workings of capitalism than to inadequate demand. (Alas, with the return of inflation and its massive unpopularity with voters, maintaining tight labor markets may prove politically challenging.)
Meanwhile, according to that same CBO report that discussed Gini coefficient trends, over the period from 1979 to 2019, the U.S. tax and transfer system taken as a whole grew more progressive. In other words, the net effect of taxes and transfers in reducing inequality has increased over time. Notwithstanding the shift away from class-based politics and the growing professionalization of the political process, the egalitarian impulse has thus remained strong enough to produce a clear progressive trend in fiscal policy. And in recent years, especially in response to the pandemic, a newfound willingness to use aggressive government spending to support household incomes has been in evidence. Real incomes surged in 2020 despite the huge disruption in economic activity, all on the strength of transfers. (Since I’m trying to be upbeat here, I won’t dwell on the fate of the expanded Child Tax Credit, an anti-poverty wonder drug that slashed child poverty rates by 30 percent until the program was discontinued after less than a year – with remarkably little rallying to its defense.)
The surging development of generative AI promises to have a major impact on, among other things, labor markets – but in what direction? Fears of mass joblessness rise with every AI breakthrough, and it’s certainly possible that the next rounds of automation will further marginalize the contributions of ordinary workers. Most prior automation has focused on replacing manual and routine clerical labor, thus ultimately reducing relative demand for what ordinary workers have to offer. But generative AI looks poised to automate professional expertise and complex cognitive tasks like computer programming and written communication – and thus, over time, it may eat away at the wage premium currently enjoyed by college-educated knowledge workers. Early indications are that ChatGPT reduces the time to complete writing tasks about equally for everyone, but that it offers a relatively bigger quality boost to the output of less productive workers. In other words, ChatGPT seems to reduce skill inequality among workers.
Meanwhile, over the longer term, large language models hold out the promise for personalized AI tutoring and coaching – think of the “A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. We know that educational achievement gaps can be closed with intensive high-quality instruction; unfortunately, it’s a silver bullet that doesn’t scale because silver bullets are too expensive. But if AI was able to give every child an immensely knowledgeable, unfailingly patient private tutor with intimate knowledge of his intellectual strengths and weaknesses, liberation from one-size-fits-all classrooms could mean a dramatic leveling up in human capital across the population. And since our new class divide is ultimately a human capital divide, AI breakthroughs may end up reversing the long inegalitarian slide we’ve been on for decades.
And what about our political crisis? In my last essay, I concluded that liberal democracy looks likely to withstand the authoritarian populist challenge. Populism has proved a powerful mobilizer of discontent, enough to disrupt politics in many different countries and to knock a few of them at least temporarily off the democratic path. But at the same time, it’s also highly effective in provoking a massive countermobilization, as we have seen in the United States. The U.S. situation is complicated by the fact that our constitution’s major anti-majoritarian institutions – the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court – all presently serve to exaggerate the power of the right. That alignment, though, is not a longstanding one, and we shouldn’t expect it to last forever. And so, I am reasonably confident that the solid majorities that regularly rise to reject Trump and Trumpism will prevail in the end.
The corresponding (but not equivalently threatening) form of extremism on the left, the new style of social justice radicalism that emerged in the 2010s, now looks to be past its peak. What is widely referred to as “wokeness” – I stay away from the word because it’s become a general term of abuse on the right – originated in those petri dishes of new intellectual fashions, university campuses and the internet. From there, in relatively rapid fashion, it fanned out into K-12 education, the professions, and corporate America. During this expansion phase, fear of being called out for racism, sexism, or various phobias created a vacuum that activists rushed to fill, shaking up institutions and putting their stamp on them. At this point, though, momentum appears to be flagging – as documented in this recent piece by Niskanen senior fellow Musa al-Gharbi. Arguing along similar lines, Noah Smith compares the current wave of social justice activism to a prairie fire – it can cover a lot of ground quickly, but just as quickly consumes all its fuel and exhausts itself. Specifically, he notes, “there’s a tendency for movements that rely heavily on opportunistic denunciation (i.e., what we now call ‘canceling’ and what 70s activists called ‘trashing’) to burn themselves out; once everyone either gets denounced or realized that they’re in line for denunciation, there’s just no more fuel for the fire.”
Even as we can look forward to a politics less deformed by mutual demonization, we can also see how the force of events might push politics back toward more serious engagement with real-world problems. During the “holiday from history” that commenced with the death of the Soviet Union and the birth of the internet, the stakes of political conflict declined sharply – a change that was predictably accompanied by a turn toward the frivolous and self-indulgent. But although we may have tuned out reality for a while, reality wasn’t done with us. Climate change went from being an intellectual abstraction to a fact of life; infectious disease came roaring back, with a series of 21st century outbreaks that fizzled and then a global pandemic that killed 20 million; China’s abandonment of liberalization and return to one-man rule, together with Russia’s delusional push to restore its empire, have sufficed to bring great power rivalry out of mothballs. Of course we could fail to manage these challenges successfully, but their existence and salience do at least create incentives for the resumption of a more sober and constructive politics.
Of course, responding to those incentives effectively will not be easy in the current media environment. In its vast complex of funhouse mirrors, everything gets distorted, everything gets sensationalized, everything gets trivialized. Never has more timely and relevant information been at our fingertips, yet never has assembling a common set of facts on which to base collective action been more challenging. I’ve given full vent to my concerns about this state of affairs in earlier essays, but here – where I’m trying to push back against doom and gloom – I can note simply that new communications technologies are always profoundly disruptive. The invention of the alphabet and the ensuing spread of literacy helped to usher in the Axial Age; the printing press, which made possible the first truly mass media, fanned the flame of religious wars in Europe that redrew maps and claimed millions of lives. The enormous usefulness of these technologies, though, has in all previous cases so outweighed their potential for harm that our world is now unimaginable without them. With regard to the internet and social media, we are still in very early days. There is good reason to expect that these tools will be modified over time to amplify their virtues and mitigate their defects; likewise, there is reason to expect that we will gradually adapt to these technologies, learning to use them more effectively while reducing our vulnerability to distraction and manipulation.
I’m not going to back away from my assessment that we are living in a time of crisis. The fact that we’ve weathered other storms before does nothing to refute the claim that we’re in the middle of a raging one now. We face big and deep-seated problems, and it’s not hysterical to point them out and the nontrivial risk of catastrophe that they bring. But our past successes in muddling through should be a source of comfort, and more importantly equanimity. Marx was right to say that men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. It was not our choice to live in times as filled with promise and peril as these, but it is our opportunity. As we try to write the upcoming pages, neither Panglossian complacency nor resigned defeatism will be of any help at all.
The post The case for muddling through appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Child welfare agents in New York may soon have to tell parents their rights before attempting a home search. However, while this parental rights legislation has passed with broad support in the New York State Assembly, New York City's child welfare agency has been lobbying to weaken it.
Over the past several months, at least one other statehouse has been advancing legislation designed to curb the power of child welfare agents to coerce in-home searches. Just last month, the Texas Legislature passed sweeping legislation which requires child welfare agents to inform parents of their rights, including the right to deny a warrantless home search, when the agency begins an investigation of abuse or neglect against a family. 
Similar legislation is now looking to pass in New York. Last month, the State Assembly's Committee on Children and Families unanimously passed a bill that would require the state's child welfare agents to inform parents of their existing legal rights at the initial point of contact when investigating an allegation of child abuse or neglect, including parents' rights to speak to an attorney, refuse a warrantless home search, and refuse drug tests. The bill also requires child welfare agents to inform parents of the allegations against them. 
However, according to a recent report from ProPublica, New York City's Administration for Children's Services (ACS), the city's child welfare agency, has been privately pressuring lawmakers to weaken the bill—all while publicly supporting the measure. 
According to eight lawmakers, staffers, and lobbyists interviewed by ProPublica, ACS has sent state Senate leadership new versions of the bill "that would have removed mention of several of the rights," including the requirement that child welfare agents inform parents that what they say can be used against them and that they can refuse body searches of their children that haven't been approved by a judge. Interviewees also alleged that ACS even lobbied to remove the word "rights" from the bill altogether. 
An ACS spokesperson did not deny to ProPublica that the agency lobbied to remove references to "rights" in the measure and further added that it would be "a major and important change to the law" to tell parents of their right to deny ACS entry and talk to an attorney. 
But ACS claims to support the bill. The spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency "has been supportive of legislation that would require child protective specialists to provide oral and written information to parents, about their rights, at the initial point of contact," but added that the bill needs to allow "child welfare agencies to assess the safety of children who have been reported as possibly abused or neglected." Notably, the bill does include a carve-out allowing child welfare agents to "take all lawful measures necessary to protect the child's life or health prior to disseminating information regarding the parent or caretaker's rights" in circumstances where the agent has "reasonable cause to believe that exigent circumstances exist that present an imminent danger to the child's life or health and there is no time to seek a court order."
According to ProPublica, despite the popularity of the bill in committee, it's unclear whether it will actually get a vote in the state Senate, as the Senate's majority leader,  Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D–Yonkers), has blocked the measure multiple times.
It's hardly surprising that ACS would pressure state lawmakers to neuter a bill requiring them to actually inform parents of their legal rights. According to a ProPublica investigation published last year, ACS workers have a habit of pressuring parents to submit to warrantless home searches, often implying that, unless they submit to the search, their children will be seized. 
Further, one 2021 study estimated that, in New York City, around 1 in 3 children are the subject of a child welfare investigation by the time they turn 18—a number that rises to over 40 percent for black children. Nationwide, while thousands of families are subject to invasive investigations each year, a 2019 review found that only 16 percent of investigations found a "substantiated" incident of child abuse or neglect.
The post NYC's Child Protection Agency Lobbying To Weaken Parents' Rights Bill appeared first on Reason.com.

A few months ago, driven by some romantic impulse, I moved my family into a derelict farmhouse on a steep and remote Ulster hillside, recreating a rural Irish lifestyle my maternal grandparents eagerly fled at the first possible opportunity. Visiting neighbours, after they have patted the house’s largely solid stonework and tutted at the lack of amenities, almost uniformly advise me to knock it down and start again: the masochistic urge to inhabit a picturesque ruin is, after all, a very English trait.
But there is something elemental, beyond rational considerations, in the appeal of the Irish cottage. Few were the Irish emigrant homes of a certain era that didn’t have a framed farmstead hanging on the sitting room wall, whitewash sparkling against the Kodacolor green. A symbol of a simpler, harder lifestyle, simultaneously fetishished and spurned, the Irish farmstead, built from rubble from its surrounding fields, conveys deep, ambivalent realms of meaning, quite distinct from and darker than the prettily uncomplicated charms of the chocolate-box English cottage. Empty farmhouses, which in England would each be spick and span with Farrow and Ball, litter Northern Ireland’s countryside like abandoned crime scenes. In Ireland, the rural cottage still lurks in the imagination like a half-remembered, troubling dream.
It is no surprise, then, that houses loom large in Ireland’s cultural production. Indeed, it is only partly an exaggeration to say that Irish literature — at least in English — consists of a collection of domestic metaphors. In an island whose history has been defined by contested land ownership, houses dominate the country’s literary landscape like an Anglo-Irish “Big House” overlooking its demesne.
From the very birth of the Anglo-Irish novel, with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), the Big House of the landlords was presented as a mouldering, moss-streaked metaphor for the country’s social and political order, a literary premonition of the gloomily decaying wrecks of the 20th-century Anglo-Irish novel, their shrubbery haunted by rebellious tenants and doomed to fiery dissolution. Even Bram Stoker, giving his imagination the freest rein, was compelled to conjure up a landlord, surrounded by superstitious peasants, vacating his crumbling mansion in a box of his native soil, while casting an acquisitive eye on the London property market.
On the other side of Ireland’s great political divide, the idealised peasant cottage of early 20th-century Irish nationalism, successor to the squalid 19th-century tenant cabin, marks the point at which improved economic conditions following the Famine laid the foundations for Ireland’s separation from its negligent neighbouring freeholder. The tidy, homely cottage became the moral and political contrast to the ramshackle and disorderly Big House, just as independent Ireland was to draw from its own native folk resources in establishing itself as a nation once again.
But one man’s bucolic fantasy is another’s nightmare. Ulster Unionist election posters contrasted the tidily prosperous farmsteads of the Protestant statelet with the tumbledown thatched cabins of De Valera’s Republic — relying on cultural tropes that, ironically, only make sense within an Irish context. The dominant stage of post-independence Realist literature — the isolated Midlands farmhouse ruled by a fallible, domineering father — provided a handy metaphor for writers chafing against the stultifying claustrophobia of mid-20th century Ireland. In today’s neurotically globalising Republic, scene of a housing crisis that makes Britain’s Generation Rent look comparatively blessed, the abandoned estates of the Celtic Tiger boom fulfil a similar purpose: they are vacant symbols of a country caught between outward-looking aspirations and the material reality of a marginal country on Europe’s westernmost fringe.
More from this authorWhy I am fleeing to the hillsBy Aris Roussinos
But here in Northern Ireland, a century after the border uncurled itself across Ulster’s rainy country lanes, this domestic metaphor has its own specific, harder edge. As bookseller-turned-writer Alexander Poots observes in The Stranger’s House, his excellent new book on Northern Irish writing, David Trimble instinctively returned to the trope in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, proclaiming that “‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern Nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.” A solid house built on uncertain ground, now Northern Ireland’s knife-edge demographic balance is shifting back in turn, looking to wash the state’s foundations away with it.
The politics and culture of Northern Ireland, Britain’s neglected stepchild over the water, are after all defined by one great building project, 400 years ago. Until the early 17th-century plantation of British Protestant settlers, Ulster was the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, the last holdout of the old Gaelic order, and the least influenced by English culture. Over the course of a century, reshaped by its new population, it became the most distinctively British corner of the island, farms and sturdy grey market towns, in mainland style, blooming like mushrooms on Ulster’s levelled woodlands. Like a family’s private ways of speech, the shared dialect of its two peoples is still rich with the expressive Germanic vocabulary of the Scots colonists: people still hoke and boke, they gulder and gurn in the linguistic residue of “the Hamely Tongue”. Forced into loveless cohabitation by history, the province’s two nations have explored their predicament, in literature, through the image of the uneasily shared home.
In Reading in the Dark (1996), the Catholic writer Seamus Deane layers two oppressive domestic metaphors on top of each other: the claustrophobic Derry two-up, two-down where family life is weighed down by dark secrets, and the stolen farmhouse just across the border in Donegal, where a life of bucolic freedom and contentment lies unfairly out of reach. In the Monaghan writer Eugene McCabe’s cycle of fiction set across the border in Northern Ireland’s Fermanagh, the uneasy cohabitation of Catholic and Protestant finds expression in a lush and lurid Ulster Gothic: in Siege (1973), IRA gunmen hold an Anglo-Irish gentry family hostage in their Big House, finding uncomfortable intimacy in their unwillingly shared predicament; in Death and Nightingales (1992), the Catholic stepdaughter of a cuckolded Protestant landlord plots his murder, before being betrayed in turn by his devious Fenian tenant. Most explicitly, in Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster trilogy (1994), the Catholic Kate, abandoned by her mother as the border closed, is trapped in unwilling domesticity with the Protestant John, prisoner in a cold and isolated Northern farmhouse.
As a consequence of this troubled cohabitation, Poots observes, throughout its century-long existence Northern Irish literature “has seen writer after writer grasp for an elusive home. Inevitably they fail, and that failure becomes the subject of their work. They are all inhabitants of the disappearing island, tenants of the Strangers’ House.” Perhaps it is natural, then, that an unstable hold on uncertain ground pervades much of the province’s writing, a persistent sense that there are stranger things lurking beneath Ulster’s stolid surface. In Northern Irish writing, the hamely always threatens to become unheimlich.

Poots opens with a portrait of three Belfast writers — C.S. Lewis, Forrest Reid, and Louis MacNeice — and the comfortable and unhappy red-brick bourgeois homes that shaped their imaginations. Like their homeland, in their infancy “all had nightmares so memorable that they seemed worthy of record decades after their occurrence”, Poots notes, and “all three men described their childhood nightmares in their respective memoirs”. The triad are strangely interchangeable, Poots observes: “All were Protestants, and while some were more comfortable than others, all were vastly better off than the average Irishman. All had black dreams, all became writers. All knew the dark well.” And like Carson, the statelet’s sceptical founder, all three were repelled by the Loyalist culture of their tribe, “the marching bands, the sashes and banners, the great bonfires lit at midnight on the Twelfth of July”. Lewis, who would write that “if I ever get interested in politics, I shall probably be a nationalist”, described his distaste as simply a “natural repulsion to noisy drum‐beating, bullying Orangemen”.
Instead, for Lewis, in the dim afterglow of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, escape was to be found in fantasy worlds, a hidden realm where time is so distorted that the ordinary human lifespan extends disorientatingly into mythicised, glorious history. Though Poots notes laconically that “not many people would associate Narnia with Ireland”, this parallel is surely inescapable. As Lewis would write in Surprised by Joy, “the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window”.
Explicitly transposing his beloved Oxford on the Mourne Mountains and Donegal, Narnia was a fantasy Ulster for Lewis, a land of “roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns”, of “heathery mountains” and “windy slopes alight with gorse bushes”. For MacNeice, who “always thought of himself as Irish, a visitor to the English zoo”, escape from middle-class Belfast was sought in fantasies of Gaelic peasant authenticity, and his dubious claim that “my relations are still living in mud‐floored cottages in the West of Ireland”. And Reid in turn, that rare thing, an early 20th-century Ulster Protestant gay writer, found release in a lush, Bohemian fiction which, Poots remarks, fits “none of the stereotypes associated with Ulster Protestantism: they are queer, allusive, beautiful, and fantastical. And yet, despite everything, he was a Northern Irish Protestant novelist, and his books reflect his culture and his class.”
This yearning of the stereotypically matter-of-fact Ulster Protestant for the fantastical is a thread that runs through modern Northern Irish fiction, and Poots could perhaps make more of it than he does. Another recent book, 2021’s The Black Dreams: Strange stories from Northern Ireland, foregrounds the country’s under-analysed literary preoccupation with the weird and eerie, making the implicit explicit. In each of the stories, domestic life becomes unsettled by hidden worlds lying just at the edge of ours, by the intrusion of the old ways and a history that refuses forgetting. Indeed, perhaps the singular distinctive trait of the country’s best current writers, such as Antrim’s Jan Carson, is a magical realist sensibility now largely alien to their southern counterparts.
Suggested readingIreland is a Freudian dreamBy Terry Eagleton
Across the border, the long shadow of literary Modernism has congealed in Sally Rooney’s affectless, Xanax prose, making her a suitable literary avatar for a country rushing headlong into an increasingly contested postmodern internationalism. In contrast, Carson’s unsettling engagement with Irish folk traditions, her pagan sensibility, rooted in the soil and lurking beneath working-class Protestant community life — the literary equivalent of the Fairy Tree at the heart of Belfast’s Loyalist Sandy Row — would be so unfashionable among Dublin writers, still eager to shake off the shackles of tradition, as to be unwritable. History’s separation of North and South perhaps permits a critical engagement, in Northern writers, with a lost sense of Irishness, the bifurcated insider-outsider perspective of the anthropologist, both at home and not in either culture. In one of the many contradictions typifying Northern Ireland, it is the explicit Irishness of Carson’s writing that separates her from the Republic.
If the singular characteristic of Northern Irish prose is its yearning for the fantastical, its poetic counterpart is perhaps a shrewd and unromantic, even tormented relationship with the land. “Northern Ireland is the result of an argument about land,” Poots notes, “an argument conducted over four long centuries”, and this stubborn rootedness adheres to the best Ulster poetry like wet clay. In the work of farmer-poets like Seamus Heaney and John Montague, both brought up in smallholdings in Northern Ireland’s rural, Catholic west, small farms, hard soil and deep history intertwine to create a distinctive imaginative space. Poots writes compellingly, often in passages of great beauty, of the nature writing tradition in Irish-language poetry, observing that “if a sense of homelessness and dislocation forms one pillar of northern writing, then the natural world forms the other. Indeed fields, trees, and birds have often supplied the language through which writers can express darker truths.”
Yet the land itself may express other, happier resolutions: for the great Belfast Protestant poet John Hewitt, who deserves greater analysis than Poots’s excellent survey of Ulster writing gives him, the same Antrim countryside that inspired Lewis grounded him in a sense that he, too, belonged to this contested soil, where though “once alien here my fathers built their house/claimed, drained and gave the land the shapes of use”, so that “because of all the buried men/in Ulster clay”, he is “as native in my thought as any here”. Poots quotes Tom Paulin’s poetic lament of the Ulster Protestant seaman in London as proof of “the uncertainty at the heart of Ulster Unionism — the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere”. But the Roman settler in Hewitt’s more hopeful 1950 poem The Colony instead derives from his perception that “we would be strangers in the Capitol” a belief that time and shared love of the land may change relations “if not to kin, to co-inhabitants, as goat and ox may graze in the same field/and each gain something from proximity”.
Suggested readingFirewood will save the WestBy Paul Kingsnorth
This ameliorating influence of the land pervades Belfast, too, MacNeice’s “city built on mud” where, as Poots notes, “the smell of silage and cow dung still wafts across the city when the wind is right”, and where the street art, unlike the mainland, displays fat bramble hedges and woodland paths as well as the paramilitary murals so beloved of Troubles tourists. From the centre of Belfast, you can see the hedgerows and green fields of hill farms overlooking the postindustrial cityscape; mist-shrouded mountains loom oppressively over the terraced red-brick streets, the grim majesty of the land itself our reminder we are not in Manchester or Liverpool. Like the inner city’s sectarian murals fading into the Alliance Party posters of the prosperous leafy suburbs, Ulster’s countryside softens Belfast’s brick-sharp edges.
In his conclusion, Poots declares that “a tribal writer will never produce great work”. Instead, “the best northern writers have rejected the answers that their respective communities offer up… Perhaps this is the root of the homesick quality that, for me, defines Northern Irish writing” — “where home is revealed to be a delusion.” But perhaps what Poots interprets as loss and homelessness can also be a strange liberation: by belonging to both Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland ultimately belongs to neither. For writers, condemned by temperament to view their home society from the outside, looking in, such ambiguity can be productive, as the vigorous imaginative possibilities displayed by Ulster’s new writing proves.
As with the shrewd and slightly roguish inhabitants of Northern Ireland’s border villages — my own new home — with their pocketfuls of Euros, at ease in both societies, or the best of both worlds Sunak strains to convince Unionists that the Windsor Agreement offers, the ambiguity detested by Belfast politicians may yet be a profitable wellspring. For all its political uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Northern Ireland’s cultural output possesses a complex, unaffected sense of place and continuity distinct from, and perhaps increasingly foreign to, both the British mainland and the Republic. A traditional Ulster farmhouse has no foundations, built directly on the heavy soil: but it is no less solid or homely for that, and will sit sturdily on its squat fieldstone haunches long after the political certainties of today have washed away.
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Nora Fisher Onar is an associate professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco and author of the forthcoming book Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Nora Fisher Onar discuss how President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan prevailed despite economic turmoil and a bungled response to the severe February earthquake; what international observers may overlook or misunderstand about Erdoğan’s appeal to Turkish voters; and what Erdoğan’s victory means for the country’s strained democracy, institutions, and economy.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Mounk: Many were very hopeful that the opposition might finally be able to displace Erdoğan from power. The polls, at least before the first round, seemed to indicate that Erdoğan might lose. The Turkish economy has been in very bad shape due to hyperinflation, the government bungled its response to the earthquake, and yet Erdoğan ended up winning a majority in parliament and being reelected as president. What happened?Nora Fisher Onar: In the build-up to the first round, expectations were high on the part of the opposition for the reasons you mentioned: the sorry state of the economy, hyperinflation, a country that's teetering on the brink of a current account crisis. If it's “the economy, stupid,” if that's the driving cause for how people vote, then the opposition should have won. If it's about the government response to the earthquakes, the intuitive assumption would have been that there would have been a price to pay. Erdoğan is the guy who has built Turkey up by railroads, highways, skyscrapers and all sorts of big infrastructure projects. That's his trademark. And so when these failed spectacularly in the earthquake zone, one would have assumed, looking from outside, that there would be a price to pay. But it turns out that voters are receptive to identity politics, voters are receptive to fearmongering, and voters are receptive to the information environments in which they find themselves. And in this case, you had a media environment that was very, very heavily stacked in favor of the incumbent president. You had an information environment and a relief environment on the ground in the earthquake zone where Erdoğan and his team were seen as being able to provide post-quake reconstruction in a more credible way than the opposition. And polling in general seems to be facing a lot of challenges when confronted with populist politicians and their ability to rally folks around the flag. Mounk: Erdoğan does seem to have about 52% of the population that stays with him. And I agree with you about the unfair media environment and about some of those realities on the ground. All of that helps to explain how this was a somewhat free, but certainly not fair, election. But I still want to understand the appeal of Erdoğan in a deeper way. There's clearly a more profound set of reasons for what makes Erdoğan appealing. What binds so many voters to Erdoğan despite all of these other things?Onar: It's an important question, and it invites us to also look at the map of Turkey that you just invoked, where you have coastal areas, and then also the southeast region, much of which is landlocked but is predominantly Kurdish. That is also a part of the country that voted heavily for the opposition. Erdoğan’s strongholds are really in Central Anatolia and the Black Sea region. These are places that are culturally very conservative. He's perceived as very charismatic, and sort of the ultimate patriarch in a patriarchal cultural context where religious nationalism and secular nationalism (and it was really the secular nationalists who pushed them over the edge in the second round). These regions are parts of the country that were underserved in the early years of the republic. In particular, the religious constituencies felt left out by the sort of Western-facing, modernist, secularist project and Erdoğan has very self-consciously curated an image, a larger-than-life persona, as someone who is the everyman but also almost like the demigod; he embodies the aspirations and sensibilities of this conservative Anatolian grouping that is just over half the population of the country.Mounk: I wonder whether there is also an element of slightly less deep history that also helps to explain what fuses Erdoğan’s electorate to him. Turkey was ruled in a secular way since Ataturk that has made it a very successful and modern nation in many ways. But it did also exclude religious people from full participation in public in ways that were deeply offensive to them, and that, by the way, from a perspective of a philosophical liberal, did I think fall short of the kinds of rights that people can and should expect: women who were veiled, in particular, were not able to attend public universities, were not able to go to public hospitals. The first veiled female members of parliament were jeered in very aggressive ways. To what extent is Erdoğan’s ability to invoke this kind of history and to sustain the support of his electorate, despite all of his empirical failings in the last year, a testament to the lasting way in which those mistakes of Turkey's previous settlement have just alienated 40 something percent of the population in a deepened way that it will perhaps take generations to overcome?Onar: It was fed very directly into some of the campaign messaging that we saw, the idea, now very much displaced from the governing elite, that these sort of pro-secularist cadres have been kind of running the republic from an ivory tower, ever since they anti-democratically constituted Turkey as a secularist, Westernist project. That is a narrative that runs strongly through the president's story. This is a strong storyline. If you were born in Turkey in 2000, you literally have not had another leader, and he made a very active point of reminding young conservative women that up until 2000, they would have been barred from entering universities; there were young women who are supporters of Erdoğan saying, “If there's veiled women today who are lawyers and pharmacists, doctors, and judges, then it is thanks to him.” He very explicitly deploys that narrative. He's kind of the champion of the underdog and he's the righter of wrongs and that conservative Moral Majority, as it were, of Anatolia will find in him the defender. This layers onto Islamic idiom in a more sort of theological way. It layers on to a sort of commitment to serving justice. In the United States, we talk about freedom a lot. In a Muslim cultural context, the mobilizing idea is justice. He is out there to defend the just majority from prosecution, even though, in practice, this supposedly peripheral population is actually quite empowered now. They have been running the country for 20 years.Mounk: Did the opposition do enough to undermine the power of that narrative and to make more conservative, more religious, and more devout voters feel safe in its hands? I know that when Imamoglu won the mayoral elections in Istanbul, there was a number of articles arguing that part of his success was his deliberate decision to go and campaign in front of mosques, for example, and to show his respect towards more religious citizens of the city of Istanbul, to show that they didn't need to be afraid of him as mayor of a city and that he did not look down on them. That struck me as very convincing at the time. Did the opposition do that, and it just wasn't sufficient, or did it not do enough of that this time around?Onar: I think it was a combination of the two. The opposition were kind of hobbled at the beginning because Imamoglu was basically effectively forbidden from running for office. He did indeed launch a very inclusive campaign that tried to bridge conservative democrats with more pro-secular democrats and democrats from different minority religious or ethnic groups, as well as really appeal to more secular-oriented women who feel very vulnerable in the current context in Turkey. He really had this sort of broad tent, and he was charismatic and was able to project that inclusive messaging in a successful way. That is why, in December, he spent a few days in jail on political charges. And the impact was political because he wasn't able to put forth his candidacy; there was going to be a Damoclean sword hanging over his head because at any time he could be shut down. And if he were shut down, he would also lose the mayorship of Istanbul, which is a huge city, larger than many European countries in terms of its population and budgetary resources. So they needed to keep him in office in Istanbul, which meant that Erdoğan managed to tee up a weaker, less charismatic candidate, who gave it a good run—in Turkey, to be able to pull 47%, almost 48% of this kind of very polarized, very diverse electorate together under this message (it wasn’t just the anti-Erdoğan campaign), it does have to do with some some really fascinating messaging by the Kılıçdaroğlu and opposition campaign. They really tried to create a safe space for a lot of people who feel beleaguered or threatened by the rising sort of conservative majoritarianism that we see in the Erdoğan camp. Given the very restricted and very uneven electoral playing field, the messaging was what buoyed hopes so intensively for the opposition going in. It's what created those expectations. So I don't think the messaging was problematic, I think the demographics, the institutions and the media environment deflated the message’s impact. And then, of course, by the second round, it all went bust, because in order to try and pull the extra 5% of the vote that Kılıçdaroğlu needed to carry him into the presidential office, he had to turn around and cater to very hardline, ultra-nationalist, ultra anti-immigrant, anti-refugee kind of sentiments, and that really disappointed the people who had been supporting this more inclusive campaign all along.Mounk: Let's think a little bit about what now lies in store for Turkey. The first question is about the democratic institutions in the country. They're already very weakened. The scope for free speech is very restricted. Many people were arrested in recent years, including journalists and government bureaucrats. Is it still meaningful to speak about Turkey as a democracy? On the one hand, the outcome of this election seems to matter. On the other hand, the underlying conditions were so unfair, the playing field so skewed, that it's not clear we should call it democracy. It makes sense for all of these authoritarian populist regimes to run elections as long as they are able, with all of the background skewing-of-the-playing-field, to win them; then they can say that they are the democratically elected leader. That doesn't mean that at the moment at which they do lose an election, they can't refuse to abide by its outcome. And we know that that is what Erdoğan did when İmamoğlu first won the mayoral election in Istanbul—those results were thrown out by an electoral commission, which is dominated by Erdoğan’s loyalists. Then they had a second round or redo of the election which İmamoğlu won by an even greater margin. At that point, Erdoğan sort of gave up. But it wasn't his own power that he was giving up. How do we know that if Erdoğan had lost he actually would have gone, and more importantly, if he should lose in five years, he would be willing to go? Do we know that there is still, even in this imperfect sense, a semblance of democracy in Turkey? Or has this just become a sham which serves the government, who will go on keeping up this illusion until the day that they lose an election?Onar: The Organization for Security and Economic Cooperation in Europe sent out election observers to monitor the polls and follow the press debates and produce a full report at the end of an election cycle to let the world know whether, in the assessment of these professional monitors, elections were free and fair. If you look at the reports from both the first and the second round, they very clearly state that Election Day was more or less free, but the build up to the elections was unfair. And so there was a meaningful political choice on election day, people more or less were able to go to the polls and vote unencumbered (although there's some reported irregularities and a couple of disturbing incidents, but nothing that either these international observers or the opposition parties have really aggressively contested). Electoral democracy is really deeply rooted in Turkey's political culture. The Turks have been going to the polls since the 1950s. The levels of participation are very enviable from the United States’s perspective, where we have such a hard time getting people out to vote. So in that sense, it's a really meaningful institution, a really meaningful part of the culture. And I do believe that Erdoğan sincerely believes in the majoritarian electoral mandate that he gets when he secures election. I don't think it's superficial. But as you say, first we were talking about “illiberal democracy.” And then the buzzword was “competitive authoritarianism.” I was writing an op-ed about this stuff yesterday, and I was playing with the idea of “semi-competitive authoritarianism.” And once you start going down that slippery slope, how much of this is just actually Potemkin democracy? And I think that that's where a lot of the frustration and disappointment of the Turkish opposition electorate lies in the days after the first round, and especially after the second round—just wondering “Is my vote really just a rubber stamp for a Potemkin democracy that is manned by a dictator who has been around for 20 years and will probably be around for another 20?” That question is very much eating the souls of a lot of folks on the ground in Turkey. But at the end of the day, a vote is better than not having a vote. I've seen some commentators say “Stop using elections to legitimize these authoritarian regimes. It's actually serving them. You're giving them a green light and legitimacy in the international space.” But you can't take the vote away from people when that's really the most important participatory mechanism that they have right now.Mounk: And it may also be the mechanism for contesting unjust rule eventually. Let me ask you about the economy in Turkey. We've seen this very steep inflation in the last months and there are worries about the inflationary spiral accelerating even further. And, of course, since the markets don't trust anyone particularly, as we know, from the fact that polls that had him trailing send the stock market's up. And when he overperformed, in the first round, I believe the stock markets went down.Is Erdoğan going to change course on his economic policy in such a way that he might be able to bring this under control? Or can we now expect there to be at least a fear that Turkey is going to experience an even steeper economic decline over the coming years?Onar: This is a nice way to link what we were talking about earlier. You know, 52% is not a landslide. 52% after two rounds of really intensive campaigning is not a carte blanche to do anything that you want. And so the economy is clearly there as one of the big issues that is looming over voters' minds, looming over the government, and is looming over anyone engaged in Turkey economically or diplomatically. Had the mandate been more, maybe the win would have been interpreted as more of a vindication of his unorthodox economic choices. But I think now that he's secured another five years, we may see a little bit of a break in some of the economic populism that he was engaging in the build-up to elections. The cabinet is going to be announced by Friday. He may be bringing back Mehmet Şimşek, a former Minister of Economy who is very well respected in global financial circles. And there are very clear warning signals from markets and global financial observers that, if he doesn't, then Turkey is in big trouble. So the lira went up to 20.4 lira to the dollar. Ten years ago it was under two lira to the dollar—like 90% devaluation of your currency vis-a-vis the dollar. It's helpful for exporters, but that's about it. And that pain is really widely felt in Turkey. He has a little bit of a breather now, so I do think that we may see some more more orthodox economic policies coming out of the government. That being said, we've already seen many, many examples of Erdoğan interfering in financial conversations that are typically not the purview of the head of state. He certainly is a micromanager and may attempt to micromanage again. But I expect to see some more restraint and some more reversion to some more orthodox economic policies soon. The mandate is not big enough that he's going to pursue anything radically different on economy, foreign policy, or any other front.Mounk: Let’s turn to the question of foreign policy. Turkey has been a member of the Western alliance, and of NATO, for a long time. It used to be that there was a very secular military in the country, which had an ambivalent role to play, including being responsible for a good number of coups, but saw itself as the guarantor of Turkey’s place within that Western alliance. Erdoğan over his 20 years of rule has significantly weakened that. Turkey remains a member of NATO. But the relationship between Turkey and Western European countries and the United States is probably as poor as it has been in many decades, and there are real questions about when that relationship is going to come to its breaking point. What do you expect to happen on that front in the next five or ten years?Onar: First, I want to say something about this idea of the secularist military in Turkey, because I think that's a little bit of a misperception that people have had for a long time. But since the 1980s, really, the Turkish army has very actively promoted the type of ethno–religious nationalism that prevailed this week in Turkey. They call it the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. There's more of an emphasis on the religious part of religious nationalism rather than the ethnic part. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of convergence in this particular military vision that sees Kurdish aspirations as an existential challenge, that recognizes the complexities of Turkey's neighborhood, and that has for a long time now had one eye on Moscow, even at the same time as there is an eye on Brussels and an eye on Washington, DC. Turkey has been playing this balancing role. And there have been members of the Army leadership who have been kind of Eurasianist in orientation for some time now. And the folks who lent the winning votes to Erdoğan, the 2.5% more than he needed to win, the third presidential candidate Sinan Oğan, was trained in Moscow. I think that we're going to see more of this kind of à la carte type of geopolitics, working in many ways organically and closer with Moscow and with Putin than previously. Putin gave out a number of favors in the context of these elections, including stuff regarding debt payments and helping him to kind of keep those economic populist handouts coming in the build-up to the elections. But I also think that Erdoğan has shown himself repeatedly to be a foreign policy pragmatist. And in a way, this comes back to that genealogy, that Ottoman inheritance. The Ottoman Empire was called “the sick man of Europe” for its last 100-150 years or so. But it actually outlived the person who coined the term, the Russian Tsar. The Ottoman Emperor and his dynasty actually outlived the Tsar’s dynasty by a couple of years. So Turkey, because of its location, is really good at playing that Risk board and pivoting between different geopolitical poles and geo-cultural centers of gravity. And I think we can expect to see more of that. And that's probably a sign of our times in the world more broadly. We're looking at a more complicated Risk board when it comes to foreign policy in general. In that sense, I think that the sort of à la carte approach that Erdoğan has been pursuing the past few years—we're likely to see more of that.Mounk: When I think about the last 15 or so years, there has been this great arc of hope and disappointment, in democracy in Turkey, but also actually in democracy in other parts of the Muslim world. When Erdoğan was first elected, many people saw him as a figure of hope who would fully democratize this country in part by integrating more devout Muslims more fully into a system from which they were in part excluded. Those hopes have been quite thoroughly dashed. Then a few years later, we got the Arab Spring, with great hopes of democracy in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. But at this point, the last remaining democracy that resulted from the Arab Spring, Tunisia, has become quite firmly authoritarian. I think in the case of Indonesia and Malaysia, you can make a case, but some people have jumped to the conclusion that somehow democracy is incompatible with the Muslim world. I assume that you disagree with that. But why has it been so hard for democracies to take root in that part of the world? And how hopeful are you that that might change in the course of the coming decades?Onar: That is a very sort of broad brush, right? All of these different countries and political systems had their various engagements with democracy and democracy-building over the past decades. There's a couple of things we have to unpack in order to do justice to such a big question. One basket of things I would look at would be things that are kind of specific to the experiences of the Muslim-majority Middle East that you have to take into account when you explain the democratic deficit. And we have to avoid the trap of kind of exceptionalizing the region because a lot of the problems that we're encountering are really examples of just right-wing populism and the illiberal turn, and the way that that voters in European contexts, in North and South American contexts, have also been led down the same sort of path that the folks in Turkey and Tunisia have been led down. We also have to consider a second basket of causes that are kind of more universal. On the specific side, people talk about colonial legacies in the region and capitalism impacting the region in kind of uneven ways. One source of the region’s problems has been that Western partners of the region want stability, and strongmen are better at providing stability than, as we've seen, weaker opposition candidates who can bring together a really diverse electoral coalition but can't make it across the final threshold of these presidential elections. There's kind of a default preference that's not mentioned a lot for having stable interlocutors. Preferably from a Western perspective, you want a secular, stable leader to rule the space. But if you can't have that, or if it's a particularly egregious secularist leader, then you are open to a religious strong leader to secure these spaces. So it's a two-way street. We have to read the reasons for the democratic deficit in the context of this long history of quite structurally uneven and problematic relations with the West.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry.Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Photographs by Mark PetersonThis article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.“How are we gonna cover Trump? That’s not something I stay up at night thinking about,” Chris Licht told me. “It’s very simple.”It was the fall of 2022. This was the first of many on-the-record interviews that Licht had agreed to give me, and I wanted to know how CNN’s new leader planned to deal with another Donald Trump candidacy. Until recently Licht had been producing a successful late-night comedy show. Now, just a few months into his job running one of the world’s preeminent news organizations, he claimed to have a “simple” answer to the question that might very well come to define his legacy.“The media has absolutely, I believe, learned its lesson,” Licht said.Sensing my surprise, he grinned.“I really do,” Licht said. “I think they know that he’s playing them—at least, the people in my organization. We’ve had discussions about this. We know that we’re getting played, so we’re gonna resist it.”Seven months later, in Manchester, New Hampshire, I came across Licht wearing the expression of a man who had just survived a car wreck. Normally brash and self-assured, Licht was pale, his shoulders slumped. He scanned the room with anxious eyes. Spotting me, he summoned a breezy chord. “Well,” Licht said, “that wasn’t boring!”We were standing in the lobby of the Dana Center, on the campus of Saint Anselm College. Licht, the 51-year-old chair and CEO of CNN Worldwide, had spent the past hour and a half inside a trailer behind the building, a control room on wheels from which he’d orchestrated a CNN town hall with Trump. Licht had known the risks inherent to this occasion: Trump had spent the past six years insulting and threatening CNN, singling out the network and its journalists as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” rhetoric that had led to death threats, blacklists, and ultimately a severing of diplomatic ties between Trump and CNN leadership.But that had been under the old regime. When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than “save journalism.” But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.Trump had other ideas.For 70 minutes in Manchester, the former president overpowered CNN’s moderator, Kaitlan Collins, with a continuous blast of distortion, hyperbole, and lies. The audience of Trump devotees delighted in his aggression toward Collins, cheering him on so loudly and so purposefully that what began as a journalistic forum devolved into a WWE match before the first voter asked a question. Vince McMahon himself could not have written a juicier script: Trump was the heroic brawler—loathed by the establishment, loved by the masses—trying to reclaim a title wrongly taken from him, while Collins, standing in for the villainous elites who dared to question the protagonist’s virtue, was cast as the heel. “She’s not very nice,” Trump told the studio audience, pointing toward Collins while she stood just offstage during the first commercial break.Trump could be excused for thinking this was exactly what Licht wanted. The famously transactional ex-president had wondered aloud to his top aides, during their negotiations with CNN executives, what the network stood to gain from this production; when CNN made the decision to stock the auditorium with Republicans, the only thing Trump could figure was that Licht wanted a prime-time spectacle to resuscitate the network’s moribund ratings. The two men spoke only briefly backstage. “Have fun,” Licht told him. Trump obliged. He demeaned the woman, E. Jean Carroll, whom a jury had one day earlier found him liable for sexually abusing. He repeated disproved fictions about election fraud and suggested that he would separate families at the southern border again if given the chance. He insulted Collins, calling her “a nasty person” as the crowd hissed in agreement. At one point, when she and Trump assumed their marks onstage after another commercial break, Collins politely reminded him not to step past the giant red CNN logo in front of them. Trump responded by gesturing as though he might stomp on it. The crowd roared in approval.[From the September 2022 issue: Caitlin Dickerson on the secret history of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy]Licht had not wanted this. Sure, he was chasing ratings; in nearly 20 years as a showrunner, ratings had been his currency. But Licht had come to Manchester with bigger ambitions than lifting CNN out of the viewership basement for a single evening in May. He believed that Trump owed his initial political ascent in part to the media’s habit of marginalizing conservative views and Republican voters. That needed to change ahead of 2024. Licht wasn’t scared to bring a bunch of MAGA enthusiasts onto his set—he had remarked to his deputies, in the days before the town hall, about the “extra Trumpy” makeup of the crowd CNN was expecting—and he damn sure wasn’t scared of Trump. The way to deal with a bully like Trump, Licht told his journalists, was to confront him with facts.Collins tried to do just that. She was, however, no match for the environment she’d been thrust into. Squaring off one-on-one against the country’s most accomplished trickster is difficult enough, but this was 300-on-one. The result was a campaign infomercial: Trump the populist champion, slaying his old nemesis and asserting to televised fanfare his claim to the presidency.“Does CNN count that as an in-kind campaign donation?” the longtime broadcaster Dan Rather tweeted.Rather’s comment was gentle compared with the torrent of criticism aimed at CNN. “Ready to call it: This was a terrible idea,” the conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru tweeted, just nine minutes into the event. “CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” tweeted Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “This is an absolute joke,” tweeted former Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger. “Chris Licht is rapidly becoming the Elon Musk of CNN,” tweeted The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes.When Licht found me in the lobby, commenting on how not boring the night had been, it wasn’t clear how much of the blowback he’d already seen. What was clear was that Licht knew this was bad—very, very bad. Republicans were angry at CNN. Democrats were angry at CNN. Journalists were angry at CNN. The only one who wasn’t angry, it seemed, was Trump, most likely because he’d succeeded in disgracing the network on its own airwaves.I felt for Licht. Having spent long stretches of the past year in conversation with him as he attempted to build “the new CNN,” I often found myself agreeing with his principles of journalism. Some media figures had trashed Licht for hosting the town hall in the first place, arguing that nothing good could come from “platforming” a man who’d tried to sabotage the peaceful transition of power. Licht disagreed—and so did I. Trump was the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination and a decent bet to occupy the White House in two years. The media had every obligation to scrutinize him, interview him, and, yes, platform him.As I’d settled into my seat in the Saint Anselm auditorium, however, I had been startled by my surroundings. This was no ordinary collection of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, as CNN had claimed it would be. Most of them were diehards, fanboys, political zealots who were likelier to show up at a rally with a MAGA flag than come to a coffee shop with a policy question. These folks hadn’t turned out to participate in some good-faith civic ritual. They were there to celebrate Trump’s continued assault on the media.Licht’s theory of CNN—what had gone wrong, how to fix it, and why doing so could lift the entire industry—made a lot of sense. The execution of that theory? Another story. Every move he made, big programming decisions and small tactical maneuvers alike, seemed to backfire. By most metrics, the network under Licht’s leadership had reached its historic nadir. In my conversations with nearly 100 employees at CNN, it was clear that Licht needed a win—a big win—to keep the place from falling apart. The Trump town hall was supposed to be that win. It had to be that win. And yet, once again, the execution had failed.Pulling me into a darkened corridor just outside the auditorium, Licht tried to compose himself. He and I had spent many hours discussing what he described as “the mission” of CNN. I asked Licht whether the town hall had advanced that mission. He bit his lip.“Too early to say,” Licht replied.During our first interview, over breakfast last fall, Licht made a point of assuring me: David Zaslav had his back.Licht was off to a slow start—understandably so. CNN was still staggering from the forced resignation of Zucker, a beloved figure who had been defenestrated for sleeping with his second in command, and the firing of Chris Cuomo, the prime-time star who, in addition to shattering ethical standards by advising his politician brother, had a #MeToo problem. (Zucker declined to comment for this article; Cuomo has denied allegations of sexual misconduct.) Meanwhile, the ownership change that preceded Licht’s arrival—AT&T spun off WarnerMedia, which then merged with Discovery Inc. to create Warner Bros. Discovery—had been messier than expected. Thanks to shaky balance sheets, followed by an inflation crisis, Warner Bros. Discovery saw its stock price drop by half within months of its launch. Days before Licht assumed control of CNN, its new parent company announced the termination of CNN+, a streaming platform that had been hailed as the future of the company.There was never going to be much goodwill between Warner Bros. Discovery and the journalists at CNN. In November 2021, not long after the corporate takeover was announced, John Malone, a right-wing billionaire who stood to become a major shareholder on the new Warner Bros. Discovery board, said that CNN could learn a few things from the reporters at Fox News. “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” Malone told CNBC. After Zucker was sacked, Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, exacerbated these tensions by choosing Licht without interviewing any of CNN’s internal candidates. Zaslav told numerous people that he needed an outsider to revamp CNN’s journalistic practices because Republican politicians had told him they were no longer willing to come on the network—a rationale that worried staffers there.The CNN rank and file were nonetheless excited by the arrival of Licht, who had earned the reputation of a boy-genius producer from his work on Morning Joe and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. But things went sideways fast. A few weeks into his tenure, Licht instructed his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6 committee—an event that MSNBC treated like a prime-time special, earning monster ratings that infuriated the CNN staff. Licht expressed regret to some top editorial personnel the day after the hearing. Still, the incident proved unnerving. Journalists at the network already had reason to question the motives of Malone and Zaslav; now they were wary of Licht, too. When the new CEO began making public confessions of CNN’s past sins—which sometimes came across like an endorsement of Trump’s attacks on the network—the wariness gave way to wrath. Top talent began to turn on Licht. Rumors of a spoiled honeymoon spread through the industry. By the time Licht announced forthcoming layoffs to his employees—there would be more than 300 in total—in an email sent two days before our October breakfast, CNN was spiraling.Drinking from a glass of iced coffee, Licht shrugged it all off: the internal leaks, the external media swarm, the printed columns and whispered anecdotes accusing him of remaking CNN into Fox News Lite. “This is too important for me to be worried about what someone’s calling me or suggesting I’m trying to be,” Licht said. “This is so mission-driven and so important. I genuinely am—I get mad, I get frustrated, but it doesn’t, like, affect me. Does that make sense?”It didn’t make sense. Matt Dornic offered to translate. Dornic, who was accompanying us in his capacity as CNN’s senior vice president of communications—and, I would learn, as a mainstay of Licht’s small entourage—explained that what upsets the new boss isn’t harsh coverage of him personally, but rather bad press about CNN’s journalists. Dornic cited recent reports about how Jake Tapper’s experimental show in the 9 p.m. hour—the slot vacated by Cuomo, which had yet to be permanently filled—was drawing anemic numbers. Licht pointed a finger at Dornic.“What drives me nuts,” he said, “is that has the potential to throw my group off the mission.”I asked Licht to explain that mission to me, as plainly as possible.“Journalism. Being trusted. Everyone has an agenda, trying to shape events or shape thought. There has to be a source of absolute truth,” he told me. “There’s good actors, there’s bad actors, there’s a lot of shit in the world. There has to be something that you’re able to look at and go, ‘They have no agenda other than the truth.’”Journalism was Licht’s first love. Raised in Connecticut, the son of a doctor and a physician assistant, he anchored make-believe newscasts in his basement as a grade-schooler. He studied broadcasting at Syracuse University then moved to Los Angeles, where, after a right-place, right-time chance to cover the O. J. Simpson trial, he got hooked on producing news. With a boyish tousle of blond hair and that bottomless supply of self-confidence, Licht talked his way into bigger and more consequential jobs, eventually finding himself back on the East Coast.It was Licht’s relationship with Joe Scarborough, the onetime Florida congressman turned television personality, that opened the biggest doors. First on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, a prime-time success that featured sharp conservative punditry on all things political and cultural, and then on Morning Joe, Licht distinguished himself as a top-notch executive producer, someone known to run through walls (and run over people) to make great television. Mike Barnicle, a Morning Joe contributor, nicknamed Licht “Captain Intense.” But the intensity caught up with him. Licht suffered a brain hemorrhage at 38 and began to reassess his life and career. A few years later, Licht left MSNBC to run the morning show at CBS, and then left the news business altogether, joining Stephen Colbert as the showrunner of The Late Show.Licht had a superlative arrangement with Colbert: more money, fewer headaches, better hours. Only one job, he told me, could have justified leaving that life and returning to the grind of journalism. And then the offer came: Zaslav, who had been courting Licht informally long before the WarnerMedia–Discovery merger was complete, asked him in early 2022 to lead the new CNN.Licht knew “immediately” that he had to accept. Yet he was not oblivious to the challenges that awaited. His wife, Jenny Blanco, had worked for CNN as a producer. He knew some of the premier on-air talent. Both Colbert and Scarborough warned him not to take the job, and Licht understood their reservations. He had watched, over the previous five years, as the network became more polarizing. When I asked Licht what he’d thought about CNN—as a viewer, and as a seasoned journalist himself—while working on Colbert’s show, he hesitated, searching for the words.“I thought, I’m having a tough time discerning between ‘How much are we getting played as an audience by Trump?’ and how much of it’s actually …” He trailed off.Licht said Trump had done “really bad shit” as president that reporters sometimes missed because they were obsessing over more sensational stories. Trump had goaded the media with “outrage porn,” provoking journalists to respond with such indignation, so often, that audiences began to tune out. “When everything is an 11” on a scale of 10, Licht said, “it means that when there’s something really awful happening, we’re kind of numb to it. That was a strategy. And I felt like the media was falling for that strategy.”Licht recalled how, early in the Trump administration, a particular reporter hadn’t been allowed into a press gaggle because of a feud with the White House. During a subsequent meeting with his fellow board members at Syracuse’s Newhouse school of journalism, one of them suggested taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing this affront to the First Amendment. “And I’m like, ‘Guys, keep your powder dry. This is nothing. It’s gonna get much worse,’” Licht said.“I felt that there was such a mission—” He stopped himself.“The mission was to go after this guy—” He stopped again.“Right or wrong. I’m not saying he’s a good guy. He’s definitely not,” Licht said of Trump. “But, like, that was the mission … Sometimes something should be an 11; sometimes it should be a two; sometimes it should be a zero. Everything can’t be an 11 because it happens to come from someone you have a visceral hatred for.”I told Licht that while I agreed with his observation—that Trump had baited reporters into putting on a jersey and entering the game, acting as opposing players instead of serving as commentators or even referees—there was an alternative view. Trump had forced us, by trying to annihilate the country’s institutions of self-government, to play a more active role than many journalists were comfortable with. This wasn’t a matter of advocating for capital-D Democratic policies; it was a matter of advocating for small-d democratic principles. The conflating of the two had proved highly problematic, however, and the puzzle of how to properly cover Trump continued to torment much of the media.Licht didn’t understand all the fuss. “If something’s a lie, you call it a lie. You know what you’re dealing with now,” he said. “I think he changed the rules of the game, and the media was a little caught off guard and put a jersey on and got into the game as a way of dealing with it. And at least [at] my organization, I think we understand that jersey cannot go back on. Because guess what? It didn’t work. Being in the game with the jersey on didn’t change anyone’s mind.”The new boss told people inside CNN that Tapper’s 4 o’clock show, The Lead, was the model: tough, respectful, inquisitive reporting that challenged every conceivable view and facilitated open dialogue.Licht emphasized certain exceptions to this approach. He would not give airtime to bad actors who spread disinformation. His network would host people who like rain as well as people who don’t like rain. But, he said, CNN would not host people who deny that it’s raining when it is. This was no small caveat: More than half of Republicans in Congress had voted to throw out the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania based on lies. Meanwhile, plenty of Republicans who weren’t election deniers didn’t want to come on CNN anyway. Sensing this predicament, Licht had traveled to Capitol Hill early in his tenure, meeting with Republican leaders and promising them a fair shake under his leadership.What Licht viewed as a diplomatic visit, his skeptics portrayed as an apology tour. The narrative taking hold in elite media circles—that CNN’s new boss was a scheming, ruthless Roger Ailes wannabe—went into overdrive. Licht was amused at first. But he soon lost his sense of humor. He called Robert Reich and rebuked him after the former labor secretary wrote a Substack post criticizing CNN. He vowed to friends that he would “destroy” Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, for a disparaging Los Angeles Times column. Licht seethed about what he saw as a coordinated attack from liberals who feared long-overdue journalistic scrutiny of their ideals.“You have a certain segment of society that has had an unfettered megaphone to the leading journalistic organization in the world,” he said. “And at the slightest hint that that organization may not be just taking things that are fed to them from that segment of the population, it must be that a fascist is running the network and he wants to move it to the right … The fact that I want to give space to the [argument] that this thing everyone agrees with might be not right doesn’t make me a fascist right-winger who’s trying to steal Fox viewers.”Licht was no fascist. But he was trying to steal viewers from Fox News—and from MSNBC, for that matter. To succeed, Licht said, CNN would need to produce more than just great journalism. Reporting the news in an aggressive, nonpartisan manner would be central to the network’s attempt to win back audiences. But television is, at its essence, entertainment. Viewers would always turn on CNN in times of crisis, Licht told me. What he needed to find out was how many would turn on CNN for fun.[From the March 2023 issue: Megan Garber on how everything became entertainment]
A CNN studio in New York (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)
Licht frowned and folded his arms, irritation curdling his voice.“I’m going to tell Don, the biggest mistake is commenting after every single story for the sake of commenting after every single story,” he said, talking to no one and everyone all at once. “Don’t tell me, ‘Oh, that’s horrible.’ We know it’s horrible. If you’ve got a specific insight into something, if you can add something, tell us. But don’t comment on every single fucking story.”Licht had wedged a rolling office chair in between the first and second rows of Control Room B, a darkened space that featured scores of monitors being manipulated by two dozen people in hooded sweatshirts and headsets. Everyone looked tense. They were 96 hours from Election Day 2022, when they would launch CNN This Morning, Licht’s first big swing as the network’s head honcho, and the show looked terrible.“I want more movement. Lots of movement,” he told Eric Hall, the new program’s executive producer, who sat in the center of the first row. “What do I hate the most?”Hall and a younger producer named Zachary Slater responded in unison: “Boxes.”Licht nodded. “Boxes,” he said, referring to the Brady Bunch look on cable-news screens. “I don’t want it to be frenetic, but please make sure there’s movement. We need to see these people.”Making good TV is difficult under even the best of conditions. These were not the best of conditions. Eager to put his imprint on CNN, Licht had started with what he knew best—mornings—and hounded his team to get the program ready for Election Day. Rehearsals had been rushed. The co-hosts—Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow, and Kaitlan Collins—were struggling to gel, in part because they had practiced so little together. (On this day, Collins was reporting in Georgia.) Licht had created this trio, created this new show, in hopes of injecting some flavor into CNN’s lineup. He thought partnering Lemon, the opinionated, gay, Black southerner, with a pair of hard-hitting female news reporters could be the “fun” viewers needed. But Licht, I sensed, was not having fun.When the rehearsal went to break, a collective exhale gusted through the room. Licht leaned back, took out his phone, and started scanning a Variety story about his decision to eliminate the CNN documentary unit in the layoffs. After he uttered a few choice phrases—but before we could discuss the article—the show started back up, with the cameras centered on Lemon. He had changed into a white jacket, the collar made of fur, with a turtleneck underneath.“What the fuck is he wearing?” Licht blurted out. Nervous chuckles echoed around us.The shot began zooming out, slowly at first to incorporate the guests, and then rotating around the glass table in the middle of the set. “Good. I love that,” Licht told Hall. “Just slow it down, make it steady.”A little while later, the younger producer spoke into Lemon’s earpiece: “Don, uhh, we’re not too crazy about the jacket in here.” Lemon looked miffed. Licht fought back a smirk. “Why are you guys so mean to Don?” he asked.The joke wasn’t lost on anyone. Clearly, Licht had dwindling patience for Lemon—his outfits, his ad-libbing, his opinions. None of this should have come as a surprise. Lemon was one of the most polarizing figures in media, someone with undeniable talent and unregulated instincts. Given Licht’s down-the-middle mantra, people inside the network were mystified by his decision to hitch the success of the new morning show to CNN’s chief provocateur. Some believed that Licht had been ordered by Zaslav to remove Lemon from his 10 p.m. slot (Licht denied this). Others sensed that Licht, who had already gotten rid of other “off mission” staffers, including the media reporter Brian Stelter and the White House correspondent John Harwood, would have axed Lemon too, if not for his being one of the lone Black voices on a very white network. Whatever the particulars, the careers of these two men were now intertwined.As the show emerged from another break, Lemon, sans jacket, took his place in front of an enormous studio display. At the center were the words An Inconvenient Truth. Licht asked Hall what this segment was about. Hall replied that Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, had been saying crazy, hateful things for a long time, but corporate America had never abandoned him; only now, after his anti-Semitic rantings, were companies like Adidas dropping him. Lemon was going to ask: Why did those sponsors stick with Ye after his offensive remarks about slavery and other topics, but choose to bail now over his anti-Semitism?Licht looked skeptical. “Where would you envision this running?” he said.“Probably the back half of the show,” Hall replied.“Do you think if I’m on my way to work, at 7:40 in the morning, I have time to absorb this?” Licht asked.Just then, the segment began—and Lemon straightaway butchered the opening line. Hall let out an exasperated grunt. “How does that happen?”Licht grimaced. “Read the fucking prompter,” he said.After steering the segment by whispering instructions to Hall—“full … move left … back out …”—Licht glanced over at Ryan Kadro, a top executive who’d worked with Licht at CBS and knew him better than anyone else in this room. Kadro was shaking his head. “Way too long,” he said.“Way too long—and it’s fucking morning time,” Licht said, motioning toward the screen, which had displayed a graphic image of a tortured slave next to Lemon during his monologue. “This is morning television.”The rehearsal wrapped, and Licht quickly made his way onto the set, cornering Lemon at the anchor desk. Licht gave his candid feedback—some things had worked, but the Ye segment had not. He wanted less commentary. Above all, he wanted Lemon—and the others—to keep things light in the mornings. Lemon looked hesitant. “I don’t want to be preachy in the morning, but I do want to hold people accountable,” he said. Licht nodded and said he understood. Then he repeated himself: The Ye idea had missed the mark.When Licht left, I sat down with Lemon and Harlow—as well as Dornic, the omnipresent communications executive. Sensing some lingering tension from the earlier exchange, I asked Lemon whether his approach to news meshed with Licht’s. Specifically, I mentioned our “outrage porn” conversation. Lemon squinted at me.“Some people may want to qualify it as ‘outrage porn.’ But there was a lot to be outraged for these last few years,” he said. “There was a tweet or a statement or an action or something that was outrageous a few times a day for five, six years … What we were doing is, we were fighting for democracy. We were fighting to set the record straight on us being attacked and called ‘fake’ … That may have put us back on our heels and made us a bit more aggressive with calling it out, but it doesn’t mean that it was ‘outrage porn.’”Harlow saw things somewhat differently—perhaps because of her straight-news background—but Lemon wasn’t having any of it.“A lot of people are Monday-morning-quarterbacking about what happened” at CNN, Lemon told me. “You have to remember the time that we were in. Every single day, we were being attacked by the former administration. And that’s not hyperbole … We had bombs sent to this very network.”In fact, Harlow was live on the air when the bomb was detected. She had to evacuate to the street, where she continued broadcasting. It was a traumatic ordeal for all of CNN—and that was Lemon’s point. He had been swamped with threats during Trump’s presidency, followed down the street by menacing figures, given a 24-hour security detail at certain points. Not that it was all about him. What of the unceasing vitriol against women and minorities, public officials and private citizens? It was all outrageous. Was he supposed to pretend to not be outraged?Dornic jumped in. “I don’t think that’s what Chris is even saying—” He paused.“This is not about you versus Chris,” Dornic continued. “I think his perspective is: Under a normal administration, those would have been 11s. But you had to recalibrate, because if you make the outrageous thing about women an 11, then what happens when he actually does something completely insane and undermines democracy?”Harlow, now cast in the role of peacemaker, told Lemon that this seemed like a legitimate point. Just recently, she said, she had told her children the story of the boy who cried wolf. She did worry about Trump’s destruction of norms, but she also worried about a lack of self-awareness displayed by some in her profession. Lemon looked ready to contest that point. Then, perhaps in deference to Harlow, he decided to drop it.As we continued chatting, the bond between Lemon and Harlow was evident. She said her husband had advised her to switch roles only if it would mean becoming partners with Lemon; Lemon said he wouldn’t have moved to the mornings alongside anyone else. Less clear was where Collins fit into this mix. Barely in her 30s, Collins had in a few years’ time zoomed from entertainment writer at The Daily Caller to chief White House correspondent at CNN. She had serious reporting chops and a deep roster of sources. Everyone at the network could see that Collins was the future of the brand—a next-generation star who could be synonymous with CNN for decades to come. So why take away her prized reporting post and sit her behind a desk with two co-anchors?No one really knew. Licht spoke of chemistry and character, of dynamic personalities and geographic diversity. (Lemon is from Louisiana, Harlow from Minnesota, and Collins from Alabama, making them symbolic of a forgotten America that Licht was determined to reach.) But this was mostly game theory. The truth is, Licht didn’t know if it would work. What he did know was that CNN was falling farther behind in the ratings, and that without a daring move, something that could rouse a lethargic network, the discontent would grow louder. Licht remembered what Joe Scarborough used to tell him: “Scared money never wins.”Licht was ready to gamble. He asked Lemon to take the lead, trusted Harlow to be the stabilizer, and hoped Collins could adjust in a hurry. Licht’s formative experience in television had come from watching Scarborough learn to check his ego and build an inclusive, engaging, highly entertaining program. He hoped Lemon could do the same.“I feel like the senior of the group,” Lemon told us, sitting on the set. He instantly sensed that this was unwise to say out loud. “Yeah, yeah,” said Harlow, giving him a look. “But lift us up.” Lemon grabbed her hand: “I’m going to lift you up. I’m not going to try to bigfoot you.”She smiled politely. “There’s none of that on this show.”It was 6:07 a.m. and sweat dripped from Licht’s nose.He pumped his arms and legs on a machine inside a workout studio two blocks from the Hudson River. Joe Maysonet, a former boxer who wore polka-dot pajama pants, a green oxford shirt, and a peach-colored beanie, stood with his arms crossed, chirping at his client: “Did I say stop? No, I did not!”Three years ago, Licht weighed 226 pounds. Worried that he was losing control of his lifestyle, he went all in. No more breakfast. No drinking during the week. No more carbs or sweets. (“I’m a fucking machine,” Licht told me one day, when I asked why he was skipping a meal.) He also found Maysonet, whose gym, J Train, caters to New York’s elite—actors, athletes, business tycoons. On this morning, in March 2023, the CNN boss was down to 178 pounds.Licht jumped off the machine. At Maysonet’s instruction, he squatted down to grab a long metal pole lying flat on the ground. “Zucker couldn’t do this shit,” Licht said through clenched teeth, hoisting the pole with a grunt.Working in the shadow of Jeff Zucker, a hugely popular figure who had overseen the highest-rated, most profitable years in CNN’s history, was never going to be easy. But Licht had made it harder than it needed to be. Among the first things he did, after taking over, was turn Zucker’s old office on the 17th floor—across from the bullpen, right near key studios and control rooms—into a conference room. Then he decamped to the 22nd floor, setting up in a secluded space that most staffers didn’t know how to find. It became symbolic of Licht’s relationship to his workforce: He was detached, aloof, inaccessible in every way.The comparisons with Zucker were inevitable, and Licht hated them. Whereas the old boss was gregarious and warm, giving nicknames to employees and remembering their kids’ birthdays, Licht came across as taciturn, seemingly going out of his way to avoid human relationships. At a holiday dinner for his D.C.-based talent, Licht went around the private room at Café Milano, shook hands and spoke briefly with each of the journalists, then sat down and spent much of the dinner looking at his phone. Not only did he say nothing to address the group—as they all expected he would—but Licht barely interacted with the people seated near him. It became so awkward that guests began texting one another, wondering if there was some crisis unfolding with an international bureau. When a pair of them caught a glimpse of Licht’s phone, they could see that he was reading a critical story about him in Puck.
Chris Licht at CNN’s New York headquarters (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)
The negative press had been building—and Licht, whatever his insistence to the contrary, had become consumed by it. Leaks from inside his own house especially angered him. Licht knew that many people remained loyal to his predecessor; some of his top executives, as well as on-air personalities, spoke with Zucker regularly. That hadn’t particularly bothered him at first. Over time, however, it became obvious that those conversations were finding their way into media stories scrutinizing his leadership of CNN. Licht told friends he was convinced that Zucker—whose legacy he was undermining daily with rhetorical recriminations about past damage to CNN’s brand—was retaliating by pushing hit pieces on him. In particular, Licht felt certain that Zucker was using Puck’s Dylan Byers, an ex-CNN employee who was pummeling Licht multiple times each week in his newsletter, to foment narratives of a mutiny at the network.Licht and Zucker knew each other, having worked together at NBCUniversal. Zucker told friends that he’d found it unusual—but hardly threatening—when, a few years earlier, with buzz building around a potential WarnerMedia–Discovery merger, Licht began attending David Zaslav’s annual Labor Day party, an exclusive gathering in the Hamptons. Licht wasn’t exactly the type of VIP who attended these events. When the merger began to appear inevitable, in the fall of 2021, Zucker got a call from Zaslav. He assured Zucker that his position atop CNN was secure. Then he asked his opinion of Licht. Zucker would later recall to friends that, at that moment, the endgame was clear. Within a few months, Zucker was out, Licht was in, and a cold war was under way. Attempts were made to broker a peace. In August 2022, Jay Sures, an agent who represents some of CNN’s top talent, arranged a meeting at Zucker’s vacation home. It was cordial enough, but suspicions ran deep between the two men. Both soon began peddling competing versions of what had gone down.However self-serving his criticisms of Zucker, Licht had legitimate reasons to be wary of his predecessor’s approach. CNN had produced some terrific reporting during the Trump years, but it had also embarrassed itself, and the industry as a whole, on more than a few occasions. The use of paid contributors such as Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski, the latter of whom appeared on air while still being paid by the Trump campaign, served no defensible journalistic purpose. The incurious tone of the network’s COVID-19 coverage—its steady deference to government officials, paired with its derision toward those who held heterodox opinions on school closings and other restrictions—did a disservice to viewers. All the while, Zucker’s buddy-buddy rapport with the talent bred a lack of accountability that ultimately created rogues. Chris Cuomo smashed ethical norms and repeatedly lied to management about it. Jim Acosta routinely made himself the story while covering Trump’s White House, specializing in lectures and snarky commentary instead of questions and source reporting. (One viral exchange with Trump, in which Acosta refused to surrender the microphone to a press aide, then stood to interrupt a colleague’s question, came to epitomize the late stages of the Zucker era.) Licht had inherited a culture of loose rules and lax standards. For this, justifiably, he blamed Zucker.Licht could not, however, blame Zucker for what had become his biggest problem: Don Lemon.In the middle of February, several weeks before I joined Licht for his morning workout, Lemon set social media ablaze—and infuriated Harlow and Collins, his co-hosts—by asserting that 51-year-old Nikki Haley “isn’t in her prime.” A woman is only in her prime, Lemon explained, “in her 20s, 30s, and maybe her 40s.” This was just the latest in a string of offenses. For months, Lemon had been making the control room cringe with half-baked opinions, irritating Harlow and Collins by forcing his way into every segment, and angering Licht by adding the sort of superfluous commentary the boss had explicitly warned against. Tensions were already high when, one day in December, Collins started to interrupt Lemon during a news report. Lemon continued speaking and held up a finger to shush her—“stand by, one second,” he said—and then, after the segment, berated her in front of the crew. Their relationship would never recover. By the time Lemon made the “prime” remark, Licht was confronting the reality that his morning show might be a bust.
CNN
There was no neat solution to the Lemon problem. Top executives urged Licht to fire him; Licht, knowing it would be seen as a response to the Haley episode, worried about setting a harsh precedent. Lemon pitched an attempt at damage control—a prime-time special on misogyny, which he would host with a roundtable of women—and Licht rejected it. Then, a staffer close to Licht told me, Lemon began telling allies that Al Sharpton, Ben Crump, and other Black leaders would rally to his defense if he were fired, making his dismissal a referendum on CNN’s whiteness. (A spokesperson for Lemon denied this and accused Licht’s team of spreading rumors about him to distract from Licht’s failures at CNN.)The burden of this—of everything—made Licht’s workouts at J Train indispensable. Licht called Maysonet his “therapist” and “coach” and “one-man focus group.” He was among the few people Licht trusted. This gym was Licht’s sanctuary; nothing and no one was allowed to disrupt him here. Except Zaslav. To the annoyance of his trainer, Licht told me, Zaslav liked to call him at 6:30 a.m. Sometimes those calls came when Zaslav was on the West Coast, meaning it was 3:30 a.m. for him. When Licht told me this, he twisted his face into a pained expression.Assuming a side-plank position, Licht told me that Maysonet “is super fucking liberal” and not sold on his plans for CNN. Maysonet pressed his foot into Licht’s shoulder. “Rachel Maddow, now that’s my chick,” he said.Licht rolled his eyes. Maysonet kept goading him. “By the way, you see my boy Jamie Raskin on MSNBC the other day?” he asked, referring to the Democratic representative from Maryland. Maysonet began shuffling his feet like a prizefighter. “Wiping the floor with your Republican boys!”“They’re not my boys,” Licht groaned, collapsing onto his back.Maysonet motioned for Licht to flip onto his other side. Then he turned to me, his voice abruptly becoming serious. “I’ll tell you what I do like about his vision,” Maysonet said. “He wants to create a conversation where we can talk to each other again. We can debate anything, but not if we’re not talking to each other.”I asked him to elaborate. Maysonet explained that after countless hours of conversation with Licht over the past few years—through the murder of George Floyd, the spread of COVID-19, the election of Joe Biden, the siege of the Capitol—he came away convinced that his client was uniquely capable of facilitating a national dialogue on some of the country’s toughest, most divisive issues. Perhaps Licht had spent too much time promoting the return of Republicans to CNN, and not enough time advertising that forum for conversation. “I think that’s the part people don’t know about him, and that’s the part that could make CNN thrive,” Maysonet said.Licht, now half-standing, hands on his knees, started to clarify that this was precisely what he’d attempted to do with his morning show. Maysonet pretended not to hear him, instructing Licht to go across the room and fetch a large, weighted sleigh. A minute later, as his client pushed the hulking object across the room, growling with every forward lurch, Maysonet mentioned some news from the sports world: The Brooklyn Nets, who had built their franchise around three all-star players, had just traded away the last of them, a catastrophic end to a once-promising experiment.“All that talent,” Maysonet said, “but no chemistry.”A studio audience of Licht’s employees looked on as Audie Cornish, CNN’s top audio journalist, probed her boss with questions that he didn’t seem keen on answering.The purpose of this springtime company town hall was for Licht to quell concerns and rally the troops, laying out his plan for the new CNN. Addressing a few dozen staffers who sat in black stackable chairs—and thousands more watching from their cubicles, couches, and reporting outposts around the world—Licht stressed the opportunity at hand. Americans were starving, he argued, for a network without perceived partisan loyalties; for a source of authoritative, follow-the-facts reporting; for a place that could foster a “national conversation.” CNN could be all of that. But first, Licht suggested, people had to fall in line. They needed to recognize that “the brand has taken a hit over the past few years” and unite around his editorial strategy as “one team.”What made unity so elusive was that CNN’s newsroom was splintered into at least three factions. Some of Licht’s journalists were dead set against him, believing his approach was a recipe for false equivalency. Others were lukewarm, open to a change in direction yet confounded by his ill-defined denunciations of the work they’d done in recent years. Even those who were fully on board—people who had hailed Licht’s theoretical objective for the network—expressed bewilderment at his lack of specifics. He had talked a big game when he came aboard 10 months earlier, but since then—and especially after CNN’s botched coverage of the first January 6 hearing—had largely kept out of sight, leaving producers and hosts to reimagine their programs off interpretations of Licht’s innuendo. His move to the 22nd floor had become a serious liability. CNN staffers didn’t just wonder where the boss was; they wanted to know what, exactly, he was doing. There was still no permanent host for the lucrative 9 p.m. hour. Licht’s signature initiative—Lemon and the morning show—had become an industry punch line.Every employee I spoke with was asking some variation of the same question: Did Licht have any idea what he was doing?Cornish seemed determined to find out. In a Q&A session that grew slightly uncomfortable, she quizzed Licht on these issues and more: the “culture and morale” of the company, the confusion over his plans, the “tough decisions” pertaining to certain employees who hadn’t gotten with his program. Licht began to look and sound restless. At one point, highlighting his recent guidance to refrain from bashing Fox News—and his wooing of Republicans to come on air—Cornish asked Licht about the perception that CNN was tacking deliberately to the right.He fought a smirk. The network’s coverage of the Fox News story to date had been textbook, he said, presenting the damning facts of what had emerged from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit—namely, that Fox had knowingly misled its audience—and sparing viewers the hysterical analysis found on CNN’s chief rival, MSNBC. As for platforming Republicans, “I think it’s incredibly important, if we’re going to understand the country,” Licht said. “I actually want to hear from these Republicans. And to do that, it has to actually be a place where they know they’re going to get a tough interview, but it’s going to be respectful.”After underscoring the “fears” people had internally—that CNN was enabling bad actors with a both-sides approach to journalism—Cornish asked him about the company’s reputation. She, like so many of her colleagues, wanted to know what Licht meant by that nebulous word: brand.
Cutouts of Christiane Amanpour and Fareed Zakaria at CNN headquarters in New York (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)
“What I believe has happened in the past, to put it bluntly, is that sometimes the tone of our coverage has undercut the work of our journalism. And we’re just trying to eliminate that and win that trust back,” Licht said. “Trust is that you’re getting to the truth without fear or favor. We have seen the data that shows there’s been a marked erosion of trust—”Cornish cut him off. “Because of tenor and tone?”“Yeah,” Licht said.In the hallway a few minutes later, as we waited for an elevator, Licht asked what I thought of his performance. I told him that he looked on edge—like he was struggling to remain diplomatic in the face of questions that annoyed him.“Yeah. At one point, I wanted to just say, ‘We’re not going to turn into BuzzFeed, okay?’” Licht said. “But that probably wouldn’t have helped.”Probably not. Settling into a conference room—his assistant ordered us Sweetgreen salads for lunch—I asked Licht whether he understood the anxiety that permeated his organization.“I think wherever there’s uncertainty, there’s anxiety,” he said. “These are journalists, so there really isn’t anything you can say that will ease anxiety. You have to show them. So the whole purpose of today really is like, ‘Hey, there is a plan. This is what we’re going to be doing. This is how it’s going to involve you. This is the sense of purpose. This is the strategy.’”The company, he said, had been reeling ever since the firing of Chris Cuomo, which had set in motion the ousting of Jeff Zucker. “This uncertainty and anxiety, you don’t want it to become the new normal,” Licht told me. “And it has, to a certain extent.”Much of this angst at CNN, Licht argued, stemmed from skepticism about whether his vision would succeed in bringing back viewers. He acknowledged that it very well might not—or, at least, that it might take a long time. Licht was visibly bothered whenever someone brought up the network’s bad ratings. But, he assured me, David Zaslav cared more about other metrics. Success would be measured differently at CNN than it had been in the past. “This is a reputational asset for the company. It is not a profit-growth driver,” Licht said.I asked him to define “reputational asset” in the context of an enormous, publicly traded, for-profit corporation.“CNN, for Warner Bros. Discovery, is a reputational asset,” he said, emphasizing the phrase. “My boss believes that a strong CNN is good for the world and important to the portfolio.”Even if it’s not making nearly the money it once did?“So I’m told,” he said.This sentiment struck me as particularly guileless coming from a newsman. Whatever Zaslav’s worldview, steering CNN toward the center was a business decision. In an age of fragmented media, Zaslav was convinced by Licht, among others, that broadening the network’s appeal to reach an exhausted majority of news consumers was good for the bottom line (and, perhaps as a bonus, good for America). It’s unclear whether Zaslav still believes that model is viable. There had been doubts from day one as to whether Warner Bros. Discovery planned to keep CNN; plenty of industry insiders believed Zaslav’s plan was to stabilize the network, cut costs to stop the bleeding of revenue, then flip it for a gain.In any event, the health of CNN’s business was but one source of anxiety. I told Licht—based on my conversations with his employees, as well as the questioning from Cornish earlier in the day—that there seemed to be even greater insecurity about the journalistic ethos itself. When he’d warned Cornish about taking a “condescending tone” toward Republicans, surely it sounded to some reporters like he wanted them to coddle the crazy right-wingers who would use their platform to destabilize the country’s democratic institutions.Licht looked annoyed. “We are not an advocacy network. And if you want to work for an advocacy network, there are other places to go,” he told me. “You can find any flavor of advocacy in a news organization that suits your need. We are providing something different. And when the shit hits the fan in this world, you’re not gonna have time for that advocacy anymore. You need an unbiased source of truth.”I told him that some journalists, myself included, believe that truth itself needs to be advocated for.“No one is suggesting in any way that we shy away from the truth,” he replied.“Do you believe in absolute truth?” I asked.“That’s a weird question,” he said, rumpling his brow.It wasn’t that weird. He had used the phrase in one of our prior interviews, but, it seemed, hadn’t given much thought to its usage in the context of modern media. “Absolute truth. Hmmm,” he said, stroking his chin. Finally, he shrugged. “It’s that analogy again, right? Some people like rain; some people don’t like rain. You can’t tell me it’s not raining [when] it’s raining.”If only it were that simple. A few weeks earlier, The New York Times had descended into open conflict after a group of contributors and staffers signed a letter condemning the paper’s alleged “editorial bias” in its coverage of the transgender community. Another letter, signed by a number of prominent Times reporters, rebuked what they saw as an effort to silence legitimate journalistic inquiry. Both parties, I told Licht, believed that they were standing for the truth.He leaned across the table. “Your beliefs can be different, but there’s only one truth,” he said. “And we have to be able to ask questions and have conversations that help people understand what’s happening … We have completely lost the ability to have difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled. It’s okay to ask questions, to have difficult conversations. You can strongly believe in something at your core, but that doesn’t affect the truth.”Licht emphasized that although he would show employees grace for certain missteps, he had no tolerance for efforts to chill reporting on controversial topics. He noted that Zucker, fearing the COVID-19 “lab-leak theory” was a xenophobic gambit that endangered Asian Americans, had essentially banned discussion of the topic on the air. This was not dissimilar, Licht suggested, to the surgeon general of the United States telling citizens at the beginning of the pandemic that wearing masks wouldn’t help them—not because it was a fact, but because the government wanted to prevent a run on the masks needed for first responders.“They didn’t tell us the truth about something, because they were worried about an outcome,” Licht said.He leaned back in his chair. “So, yes, I believe in absolute truth.”Later that day, while riding the Acela from New York to Washington, Licht expanded on his media polemic. Specifically, he wanted to keep talking about COVID-19. Like Trump’s presidency, Licht told me, the pandemic had exposed the degree to which his network had lost touch with the country.“In the beginning it was a trusted source—this crazy thing, no one understands it, help us make sense of it. What’s going on?” he said. “And I think then it got to a place where, ‘Oh wow, we gotta keep getting those ratings. We gotta keep getting the sense of urgency.’”He slapped his palms on the table between us, mimicking the feverish pace of an imaginary broadcaster. “COVID, COVID, COVID! Look at the case numbers! Look at this! Look at this!” Licht said. “No context. And, you know, the kind of shaming. And then people walked outside and they go, ‘This is not my life. This is not my reality. You guys are just saying this because you need the ratings, you need the clicks. I don’t trust you.’”Were they wrong?“They were not,” he said.For a man widely perceived to be carrying out the orders of his bosses on the board of Warner Bros. Discovery, Licht held some awfully strong views of his own. Certainly, he was under pressure to conform CNN to the whims of Zaslav; Licht told top staffers that he was continually fighting to “protect” them from editorial interference at the corporate level. Licht had heard the talk about his being a glorified errand boy. Perhaps because it contained some trace of truth, he seemed determined in our conversations to map out his own distinct worldview.Licht insisted that his media critiques were not ideological; that he was rebuking not a liberal slant on the news, per se, but rather a bias toward elite cultural sensibility, a reporting covenant in which affluent urban-dwelling journalists avoid speaking hard truths that would alienate members of their tribe. When we returned to the question of covering transgender issues—specifically, the science around prepubescent hormone treatments and life-altering surgeries—he suggested that the media was less interested in finding answers and more worried about not offending perceived allies.“We’ve got to ask tough questions without being shouted down for having the temerity to even ask,” Licht said. “There is a truth in there, and it may not serve one side or the other. But let’s get to the truth. Some of this is right, some of this is wrong; some of this is wrong, some of this is right.”He paused. “And I will add, this is where words matter. You immediately force some people to tune out when you use, like, ‘person capable of giving birth.’ People tune out and you lose that trust.” He took another pause. “Do not virtue signal. Tell the truth. Ask questions getting at the truth—not collecting facts for one side or collecting facts for another side. Ask the tough questions. It’s an incredibly sensitive, divisive issue of which there is a Venn diagram that this country can agree on, if we get there with facts.”Licht argued that the media’s blind spots owe to a lack of diversity—and not the lack of diversity that he sees newsrooms obsessing over. He wants to recruit reporters who are deeply religious and reporters who grew up on food stamps and reporters who own guns. Licht recalled a recent dustup with his own diversity, equity, and inclusion staff after making some spicy remarks at a conference. “I said, ‘A Black person, a brown person, and an Asian woman that all graduated the same year from Harvard is not diversity,’” he told me.A minute later—after noting how sharing that anecdote could get him in trouble, and pausing to consider what he would say next—Licht added: “I think ‘Defund the police’ would’ve been covered differently if newsrooms were filled with people who had lived in public housing.” I asked him why. “They have a different relationship with their need with the police,” he said.Licht glanced over at his assistant. “Now I’m in trouble,” he said.I wondered if he wanted to get in trouble—if he savored barreling through the boundaries of mannerly media conversation. It had become apparent, from my reporting, that Licht’s circle was small and getting smaller. He obviously felt that he couldn’t trust some of the people around him—folks who were loyal to Zucker, or leaking to undermine him, or both. That distrust begot a certain foreboding—yet also a certain liberation. Whereas he was guarded with CNN employees, our many hours of conversations began to feel like therapy sessions for Licht, safe spaces in which he vented grievances and admitted fears and chased an elusive breakthrough.I had heard from former colleagues how, in the early days of Morning Joe, when the C-suites at NBC treated his start-up show like a joke, Licht had adopted a me-against-the-world mentality, hunkering down and swearing to make the 30 Rock establishment pay for its contempt. It occurred to me that Licht was doing the same thing now. The difference, of course, was that he no longer represented the ragtag rebel alliance. He was the chair and CEO of CNN Worldwide. He was the empire.As we cruised past Wilmington, Delaware, I asked Licht if there were people at CNN who wanted him to fail.“I’m sure,” he said, nodding, visibly weighing what to say next. He opted to play it safe. “But it’s certainly a very small part, a very small pocket of the organization. So I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”Then his voice changed. Suddenly, Licht was animated. “But I would say that for anyone who does want me to fail—what are you going for? Who would you want in this seat? You want a journalist? You want someone who has a direct line to the corporation and can make a phone call and go, ‘Hey, what the fuck?’ Do you want someone who’s done the job? Who’s done a lot of the jobs? Who understands exactly what it takes to do what I’m asking? Someone who believes that our future is based on executing great journalism? Maybe they don’t like my style or whatever, but I’m not quite sure what you’re going for—if you want me to fail.”Licht looked out the window. “So I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” he repeated.Focusing on his “style” seemed like a cop-out. I told Licht that in my conversations with his employees, they had three main beefs. The first was that he relentlessly attacked the previous iteration of CNN without ever really specifying—as he’d been doing in our interviews—what he disliked about the coverage or what he would have done differently. Licht countered this criticism by explaining that he didn’t want to call out particular journalists, especially “when they were being rewarded for that behavior by the boss before me.”Licht told me that bad behavior had been addressed with certain individuals directly. Without identifying Jim Acosta by name, Licht said: “There was one person I had dinner with who was very much perceived as [having] the wrong tone, the old way of doing it. People just assumed they didn’t fit in my world. And I had dinner with that person, and I said, ‘Can I assume that this was fog of war? That sometimes we do things during war that isn’t who we are?’ And he said, ‘You absolutely can assume that. What do you need from me?’ We haven’t had an issue.”This brought us to the second beef with Licht: His approach seemed consistently inconsistent. Acosta was spared while Brian Stelter got axed; John Harwood was pushed out because he didn’t fit the “brand,” but Don Lemon was given a huge new contract and a promotion to anchor Licht’s morning show. After disrespecting his colleague and making asinine comments on the air, Lemon still had his job—for the time being—confounding even those CNN employees who considered him a friend.Behavior and branding aside, Lemon’s morning show was bad. Hence the third beef Licht’s employees had with him: Wasn’t he supposed to be a producer extraordinaire? A television genius? How was it that so much of the content he put on the air was so unwatchable? I reminded him of what Joe Maysonet, his trainer, had said about the Brooklyn Nets: Big stars and big egos had ruined the team’s chemistry, leaving management no choice but to trade them away and start over. I asked Licht if, four months into the morning show, he was nearing that point.“Jury’s out,” he replied.And then I asked Licht if, looking back, there were things he wished he had done differently. He said yes—“100 percent”—but seemed reluctant to say more. When I pressed, Licht conceded that his biggest mistake had been blazing into the place, determined to prove he was in charge, bellowing, in his own synopsis, “I’m gonna be a much different leader than Jeff,” rather than learning the place, including what Zucker had gotten right.“I was intent on trying to draw a line of difference between the old regime and the new regime,” Licht said. “I should have just sort of slowly come in, without making these grand pronouncements of how different I was going to be.”Those grand pronouncements had alienated Licht from much of his workforce. He now realized as much. But, he promised me, there was time to turn it all around. His mission was accelerating. Big moves were in the works. Soon, he said, the world was going to get a look at the new CNN.
A newsroom at CNN’s New York headquarters (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)
“Chris was absolutely, positively, without question the right choice for CNN,” the teacher told his students, motioning toward the man seated in front of them. “There is nothing more important in America today than trust. I’m praying that Chris is successful. I want him to have this job for 10 years. Because anything less than 10 years will not give him the opportunity to make the most important changes to the most important news source on the face of the Earth. I have every faith that he will succeed, and every fear for this country if he doesn’t.”He turned to face Licht. The teacher’s eyes were watery. His voice was choked with emotion. “My hopes and dreams are embodied in you,” he said.This was quite an introduction, especially considering the man who gave it: Frank Luntz.For 30 years, Luntz, the pollster and focus-group guru, had been the maestro of messaging for a Republican Party that systematically attempted to delegitimize the news media. Luntz had no particular regrets about this. Though he broke from his party over its subjugation to Donald Trump, he still believed the press had done as much damage to the country as any politician in his lifetime, which explained his exuberance over the selection of Licht to run CNN. Since meeting him more than a decade ago, back in the Morning Joe days, Luntz had become certain that Licht was especially well equipped to frame the sort of smart, fair, nuanced discussions the voting public deserved. With Zucker out of the picture, Luntz went into lobbying mode, pleading with Licht to pursue the job, unaware that it had already been offered and accepted.Licht had never gotten a fair shake, Luntz told the group of University of Southern California students sitting in a semicircle in his D.C. apartment. The critics had come for him within weeks of his taking the job.“Days!” Licht said, cutting him off. Luntz nodded in agreement. Licht told him that was just fine. His boss, David Zaslav, thought in terms of years, not months. Licht had a plan to see CNN through to the other side of its identity crisis—and Zaslav possessed the patience to let that plan work. Luntz winced. He noted that NFL owners were famous for saying this very thing about their coaches—that there was a vision in place, that it would take time—before firing them. He told Licht he was praying that would not happen.That CNN’s chieftain would enjoy such enthusiastic support from a famed Republican operator—and that Licht would pay this early-spring visit to Luntz’s home, a place where House Speaker Kevin McCarthy keeps a bedroom—likely confirms the left’s worst fears about him. (When I asked Licht if he is a conservative, he replied, “I would never put myself into a category. I think it depends on what we’re talking about.”) In truth, Licht wasn’t here for Luntz. The night before, when the old friends had run into each other at an event honoring Ted Turner, Luntz had sprung an idea. He was teaching a class to visiting USC students and would be hosting them at his apartment the next day; what if Licht made a surprise appearance to answer their questions about the media?Most executives would never entertain such a haphazard scheduling request. To his credit, Licht—now very much in the barrel at CNN, rumors about job security shadowing his every move—did so and then some. The next day, he showed up at Luntz’s apartment and spent an hour with the group of 16 students. It struck me, yet again, as exactly the type of open interaction he’d been avoiding with his own employees. With the students, Licht was blunt and authentic to a fault; once, during a word-association game, when a young woman called CNN “liberal,” Licht made no effort to mask his irritation, quizzing her for specifics until she admitted defeat, confessing that her answer was more about perception than reality.One of her classmates raised his hand. He asked Licht how CNN could recover from being the face of “fake news.” Licht replied that the network needed to “double down” on a facts-only approach. “It’s so easy to ruin a reputation—and it just takes a lot of time to win it back,” he said. Licht told the students that his organization had little margin for error: Every story on the CNN website, every chyron on the airwaves, every comment on his reporters’ social-media accounts was going to be scrutinized. “It all matters,” he said. “Because the second you give ammunition to the other side, they exploit it.”And then Licht said something I’d never heard before. “I don’t want people to think of CNN, Fox, and MSNBC in the same sentence,” he said.Licht told students that MSNBC was using the all-outrage, all-the-time model that CNN had invented; “one show in particular,” he noted, seemed to use a BREAKING NEWS banner on virtually every segment. (He was referring to Nicolle Wallace’s program at 4 p.m., a competitor to Jake Tapper’s show in that time slot.) That tactic produces a bump in ratings, Licht said—but he called it irresponsible on the part of his former employer.He was—justifiably, but still surprisingly—much harder on Fox News. After all, Licht had repeatedly warned his staff not to “get over their skis” while covering Rupert Murdoch’s network. He stressed that they were “not in the business of freaking out over everything Laura Ingraham says,” because “it’s not news.” What we were witnessing now, Licht said, was news. Tucker Carlson had been trashing Trump in text messages while providing him cover in prime time. Ingraham and Sean Hannity had dismissed the election-fraud crusade in private while selling it to the base. In fact, the evidence that had emerged from the Dominion lawsuit showed that “a major media organization was knowingly misleading people, and it had actual real-world consequences,” Licht said.Using this example, Licht sought to differentiate CNN from both networks—slamming Fox News for being a duplicitous propaganda outfit, and rebuking MSNBC for trafficking in hysteria. “If every day we were hammering Fox, it all sounds like noise,” Licht told the students. “But if you’re watching CNN right now, you’re going, ‘Wow, this is actually important, because they never talk about Fox.’”Right on cue, one of Luntz’s students asked Licht about the trap of false equivalency. She seemed less interested in litigating the respective crimes of Fox News and MSNBC—though that played into her question—and more concerned with Licht’s overall attitude toward the news. There is, she reminded him, “one truth” on some fundamental questions facing the country. Trump had lost the 2020 election; Barack Obama had been born in the United States; we know how many deaths have been caused by COVID.Licht pounced. “Wait a second. We don’t know how many deaths there were from COVID,” he said.She frowned at him.“No, really, we don’t,” Licht said. As the son of a doctor, he believed there were “legitimate conversations” to be had about the death toll attached to COVID-19. Perhaps some patients had been admitted to hospitals with life-threatening illnesses before the pandemic began, then died with a positive diagnosis, Licht postulated. “Where we run into trouble is when you say, ‘No. Come on. We’re not even having that conversation,’” he told the students. “That goes to trust as much as anything else. If you’re solid on your facts, then you should be able to entertain that discussion.”Licht conceded that mollifying the right with a both-sides approach was “the biggest concern in my own organization.” But he wasn’t backing down. It had been unfair, he said, to paint everyone who had questions about the accuracy of death counts as “COVID deniers.” It was dishonest to frame the final pandemic-era bailout as “You’re either for this rescue bill, or you hate poor people.” He gave them his favorite analogy: We can debate whether we like rain or we don’t like rain, as long as we acknowledge when it’s raining outside.The final question was straightforward. A young woman asked Licht how, given his harsh critiques of CNN’s past performance, the network planned to cover Trump this time around.“I get asked that question all the time,” Licht said, looking bemused. “I will give you a very counterintuitive answer, which is: I am so not concerned about that.” He explained that Trump was now a recycled commodity; that his “superpower” of dominating the news cycle was a thing of the past. If anything, Licht added, he would love to get Trump on the air alongside his ace reporter Kaitlan Collins.The students appeared startled by his nonchalance.“You cover him like any other candidate,” Licht told them.The next time I saw Licht was two months later in Manchester.The CNN newsroom had been stunned by the news of the May 10 town hall. Internally, questions about whether the network would platform Trump in the run-up to the 2024 campaign had felt very much unanswered. Almost no one—not even CNN’s leading talent, people who had long-standing relationships with Trump and his top aides—knew about the negotiations to host a town hall. When it was announced, Licht made a forceful argument to his employees about the merits of a live event. The campaign was under way; Trump was the front-runner and needed to be covered. Rather than giving him unfiltered access to their viewers via rallies, Licht said, CNN could control the presentation of Trump with its production decisions, its questioning, its live fact-checking. To varying degrees, his skeptics told me, they bought in.But anxieties grew as the town hall approached. Employees found it strange that none of the CNN anchors who’d interviewed Trump—Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett, Wolf Blitzer, Chris Wallace—was invited to play a role in preparing for the event, whether by shaping questions, suggesting best practices, or simply advising Collins. Trump speculated on social media about the town hall turning into a disaster, prompting fears among executives that he might stage a stunt by walking off the set, which in turn prompted fears among staffers about what, exactly, the network would do to keep Trump on the set. In the final days before the event, concerns about the audience makeup spiked as Licht’s description of the crowd—“extra Trumpy”—wound its way through Slack channels and text-message threads.All of these concerns, it turned out, were warranted. Preparation was clearly an issue. Collins did an admirable job but was steamrolled by Trump in key moments; her questions, which came almost entirely from the candidate’s ideological left, served to effectively rally the room around him. Not that the room needed rallying: The crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Trump, and because CNN wanted an organic environment, it placed few restrictions on engagement. The ensuing rounds of whole-audience applause—I counted at least nine—disrupted Collins’s rhythm as an interviewer. So did the ill-timed bouts of laughter, such as when Trump mocked E. Jean Carroll, and the jeering that accompanied Collins’s mention of the Access Hollywood tape. By the end of the event, it was essentially indistinguishable from a MAGA rally. People throughout the room shouted, “I love you!” during commercial breaks and chanted “Four more years!” when the program ended.
CNN
As attendees emptied into the lobby, it felt as though fans were celebrating the home team’s victory over a hated rival. People I talked with lauded Trump and loathed CNN in equal proportion. Christopher Ager, the state party chair, captured their sentiments best: “We knew that CNN had new leadership. It seemed like they had a different tone, like they were going to be fair to Trump, fair to Republicans. But I didn’t see that tonight,” he said. “This was the old CNN.”Two hundred fifty miles away, on the set in New York, CNN staffers were perplexed. The initial plan had called for Scott Jennings, a Republican who is less than enamored of Trump, to join his familiar grouping of pundits on the postgame show. CNN had flown Jennings to New York for the occasion. However, hours before the town hall, a switch was announced internally: Byron Donalds would be substituted for Jennings (who wound up coming on the air with another panel much later that night). Donalds, a Republican congressman from Florida, is an election denier—someone who, to use Licht’s language, says it’s not raining in the middle of a downpour. It was enough of a problem for some CNN staffers that Trump, the original election denier, was flouting Licht’s oft-repeated standard. But why was Donalds on CNN’s postgame panel?This wasn’t the only peculiar personnel move. Sarah Matthews, a Trump-administration official who’d turned critical of her former boss, had been slated to appear on the pregame show. But she was abruptly nixed in favor of Hogan Gidley, a former White House staffer who remained devoted to Trump.Live television is a volatile thing. People and sets and scripts are always being changed for all kinds of reasons. Still, CNN employees had reason to be suspicious. They wondered if some sort of deal had been cut with Trump’s team, promising the placement of approved panelists in exchange for his participation in the town hall. At the least, even absent some official agreement, it seemed obvious that CNN leaders had been contorting the coverage to keep Trump happy—perhaps to prevent him from walking offstage. At one point during the pregame show, when the words SEXUAL ABUSE appeared on the CNN chyron, one of Licht’s lieutenants phoned the control room. His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them: The chyron needed to come down immediately.When the town hall ended, two postgame panels kicked off concurrently, giving network executives the flexibility to switch between reporting and analysis. One panel, anchored by Tapper, was a roundtable of journalists picking apart Trump’s lies. The other, led by Cooper, featured partisan pundits—including Donalds—debating one another. According to the mission that Licht had articulated for me, Tapper’s panel should have starred that night. But it didn’t. Licht made the call to elevate Cooper’s panel (a fact first reported by Puck). This decision may or may not have come from the very top: In the days after the town hall, Zaslav told multiple people that Tapper’s Trump-bashing panel reminded him of Zucker’s CNN. Yet even that MAGA-friendly version wasn’t good enough for Donalds. After criticizing the network on-air, the congressman stepped off the set and then, in full view of the crew as well as his fellow panelists, grabbed his phone and started blasting CNN on Twitter.Licht was still coming to terms with the ferocity of the backlash later that night when CNN’s popular Reliable Sources newsletter landed in his inbox. He read the opening line in disbelief: “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Licht’s own media reporter, Oliver Darcy, wrote.Licht could handle being ridiculed by his media rivals. But being publicly scolded by someone on his own payroll—on the biggest night of his career—felt like a new level of betrayal. Licht, who just hours earlier had expressed ambivalence to me about how the event played, went into war mode.The next morning, he began the 9 o’clock editorial call with a telling choice of words: “I absolutely, unequivocally believe America was served very well by what we did last night.”Lots of CNN employees on that morning call disagreed with Licht. They thought his execution of the event had been dreadful; they believed his tactical decisions had essentially ceded control of the town hall to Trump, put Collins in an impossible position, and embarrassed everyone involved with the production. These opinions were widely held—and almost entirely irrelevant. Everyone at CNN had long ago come to realize that Licht was playing for an audience of one. It didn’t matter what they thought, or what other journalists thought, or even what viewers thought. What mattered was what David Zaslav thought.I was looking forward to finding out. For months, Zaslav’s head of communications, Nathaniel Brown, had been shielding his boss from participating in this story. He first told me that Zaslav would speak to me only without attribution, and any quotes I wanted to use would be subject to their approval. When I refused—telling Brown that quote approval was out of the question, and that I would meet Zaslav only if he allowed on-the-record questioning—he reluctantly agreed to my terms, but then tried running out the clock, repeatedly making Zaslav unavailable for an interview. Finally, after false starts and a painstaking back-and-forth, the interview was set. I would meet Zaslav on Wednesday, May 17—one week after the Trump town hall—at his office in New York.On Tuesday evening, less than 24 hours before that meeting, Brown called me. “We’re going to keep this on background only, nothing for attribution,” he said. This was a brazen renege on our agreement, and Brown knew it. He claimed that it was out of his hands. But, Brown tried reassuring me, “with everything going on,” Zaslav thought “he could be most helpful to you by explaining some things on background.”I wasn’t entirely surprised. Over the previous year, people who knew Zaslav—and who had observed his relationship with Licht—had depicted him as a control freak, a micromanager, a relentless operator who helicoptered over his embattled CNN leader. Zaslav’s constant meddling in editorial decisions struck network veterans as odd and inappropriate; even stranger was his apparent marionetting of Licht. In this sense, some of Licht’s longtime friends and co-workers told me, they pitied him. He was the one getting mauled while the man behind the curtain suffered nary a scratch. I declined Brown’s offer. I told him this was Zaslav’s last chance to make the case for Licht’s leadership—and his own. If he wanted to explain things, he could do so on the record, as we had agreed. Zaslav refused.The day after that canceled meeting, I sat down with Licht for the final time, at a restaurant overlooking Hudson Yards. I told him about the perception that Zaslav doesn’t let him do his job. Licht looked temporarily frozen.“I don’t feel that at all,” he said. “I feel like I have someone who’s a great partner, who has my back and knows a lot about this business.”“Do you feel like you’ve been able to be yourself on this job?” I asked.“Where does that question come from? What are you getting at? Like, myself?” he asked, looking incredulous. Licht chewed on his lip for a moment. “I think it’s very different—a CEO job is just very different. Every word you say is parsed. Every way you look at someone is parsed. It’s just different. So I try to be as much of my authentic self as possible within the natural confines of the job.”I explained where the question was coming from. People at CNN think he’s “performative,” I told Licht, as though he’s projecting this persona of a bulletproof badass because that’s what Zaslav wants to see. His staffers also think he’s become so bent on selling this image that it’s crushed his ability to build real, meaningful relationships with key people there who want him to succeed.CNN employees had asked me, again and again, to probe for some humility in their leader. If nothing else, they wanted some morsel of self-awareness. They hoped to see that he knew how poorly his tenure was playing out, and why. But Licht would not bite. At one point, I asked him whether he regretted moving his office to the 22nd floor. Licht sat in silence for more than a minute—cracking his neck, glancing around, appearing at one point as though he might not answer the question at all.Finally, he exhaled heavily. “I didn’t mean for it to become a thing. And it became a thing. So, sure.”“Only because it became a thing?” I asked.“Sure,” he replied.Licht wasn’t going to give me—or, more accurately, his employees—the satisfaction of admitting this error. He certainly wasn’t going to acknowledge everything else that had gone wrong. Even with CNN falling behind Newsmax in the ratings two nights after the town hall, Licht was unperturbed. Even with his employees in open revolt—a week after Darcy’s newsletter, Christiane Amanpour, perhaps the most accomplished journalist in CNN’s history, chided Licht in a speech at Columbia’s journalism school—he was staying the course.
Chris Licht observes a broadcast (Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic)
I asked Licht whether there was anything he regretted about the event. The “extra Trumpy” makeup of the crowd? (No, Licht said, because it was representative of the Republican base.) Devoting the first question to his election lies? (No, Licht said, because nothing else, not even the E. Jean Carroll verdict, was as newsworthy as Trump’s assault on the ballot box.) Allowing the audience to cheer at will? (No, Licht said, because instructing them to hold their applause, as debate moderators regularly do, would have altered the reality of the event.) The lone point he ceded was that the crowd should have been introduced to viewers at home—with a show of hands, perhaps, to demonstrate how many had voted for Trump previously, or were planning to support him in 2024.He gave no ground on anything else—not even the presence of Representative Donalds on the postgame show. Licht told me it probably didn’t make sense to seat a congressman on the pundits’ panel, but said he otherwise had no regrets, even after I pointed out that Donalds was an election denier who used his place on that panel to question the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.Had CNN struck a deal with Trump’s team, I asked, that required seating guests like Donalds and Gidley?“Absolutely not,” Licht replied. “I can unequivocally say there was no agreement, no deal. Nothing.”I shared with him a more popular theory of what had gone down. Lots of CNN employees believed there’d been no formal agreement, but rather an understanding: If Trump showed good faith in coming on CNN, the network needed to show good faith in booking some unusually pro-Trump voices for the pregame and postgame shows. I noted to Licht that many of his people believed this would have been agreed to without his knowledge, because he was focused on the bigger picture of producing the town hall. Was it possible, I asked, that his lieutenants might have reached that understanding with Trump’s team?“Nnnno,” he said, dragging out the word, buying himself some time. “But I can—I mean, anything’s possible. But I would imagine it’s more along the lines of ‘If we are completely one-sided in our analysis, then that doesn’t serve the audience.’” He paused. “Like, [one] of the biggest misconceptions about that town hall is that I did it for ratings. It’s a rented audience”—that is, most viewers were not CNN regulars—“so I didn’t do it for ratings. I certainly didn’t do it for a profit, because it cost us money. And I certainly didn’t do it to build a relationship with Trump. So that would by definition preclude a lot of the conspiracy-theory dealmaking.”Maybe it was a conspiracy theory. But over the past year, so many things that Licht’s employees had predicted—speculation he’d dismissed as wrong or shortsighted or unhinged—had proved true. Lemon was a disaster on the morning show. (Licht finally fired him in April.) Collins wasn’t better co-anchoring in New York than starring at the White House. (Licht gave her the 9 o’clock hour beginning this summer.) Licht had been fixated on the negative press about him. (He confronted Dylan Byers at a party in March, Licht admitted to me, and raged at the reporter about his coverage.) Zaslav did turn out to be comically intrusive. (In one incident, a day after the New York Post reported that Licht might soon be fired, Zaslav dropped into a CNN managerial meeting and declared to Licht’s underlings, “This is our rendezvous with destiny!”)Licht had told me that he and Zaslav figured the “gut renovation” of CNN would require two years of work. But there was reason to believe that timeline was accelerating: Not long after our final interview, Warner Bros. Discovery announced the installation of CNN’s new chief operating officer, David Leavy, a Zaslav confidant whose hiring fueled talk of an imminent power struggle—and potentially, the beginning of the end for Licht.In fairness, Jeff Zucker’s first few years at CNN were also brutal. There were layoffs and programming flops, and viewership was in decline. It wasn’t until Zucker found a rhythm with what CNN staff called his “swarm strategy,” which threw reporting resources at the hottest trending stories—disappearing planes, the “Poop Cruise,” and, ultimately, Trump’s candidacy—that CNN became a ratings behemoth. Licht’s poor start did not preclude a comeback. There was, he and his stalwarts told me, still time for him to be successful.And yet, little in Licht’s first-year record indicated that success was on the way. His biggest achievement—luring Charles Barkley and Gayle King to co-host a show—was hardly going to revive CNN’s prime-time lineup. The program, “King Charles,” would air only once a week, leaving Licht still in search of the win he needed to juice CNN’s ratings—and perhaps save his job.Near the end of our interview, I asked Licht to put himself in my shoes. If he were me, could he possibly write a positive profile of CNN’s leader?He spent a long time in silence. “Absolutely,” Licht finally said.If the answer was “absolutely,” I asked, why did he need so long to think about it?“I wanted to be very sure,” he replied.This was not the same man I’d met a year earlier. Once certain that he could tame Trump single-handedly, Licht still tried to act the part of an indomitable CEO. Yet he was now stalked by self-doubt. That much was understandable: Licht lived on an island, surrounded by people who disliked him, or doubted his vision for the company, or questioned his competency, or were outright rooting for his ruin. He had hoped the Trump town hall would make believers out of his critics. Instead, it turned his few remaining believers into critics. I had never witnessed a lower tide of confidence inside any company than in the week following the town hall at CNN. Some staffers held off-site meetings openly discussing the merits of quitting en masse. Many began reaching out to rival media organizations about job openings. More than a few called Jeff Zucker, their former boss, desperate for his counsel.As we sipped our coffee, Licht tried to sound unflappable.“I don’t need people to be loyal to Chris Licht. I need people to be loyal to CNN,” he said.The only person whose loyalty he needed, I pointed out, was Zaslav.Licht nodded slowly, saying nothing. Then, just as he started to speak, his wrist began buzzing and flashing. Licht glanced down at his smartwatch. Zaslav was calling him. He looked up at me. Seeing that I’d noticed, Licht allowed a laugh—a genuine laugh—then stood up from the table and answered his phone.

Identifying where Harold James' timeline in respect to Sino-American trade relations start is key to understanding his warped reading of the current situation. And so are the gaping omissions in his "analysis".

The timeline seems to start somewhere around 2019, when the US decides to go all in, in attempting to stymie Huawei and in that light the US comes across as the bad guy against poor growing-up China.

There is no mention of Xi's 2015 "Made in China 2025" speech that sought to make China dominant in global high-tech manufacturing. A dominance sought through state subsidies and rampant industrial espionage coupled with international price dumping. Nor for that matter is there any mention of the blatant disregard for the WTO rules that China signed up for and has been ignoring for decades.

There is no mention of China's bullying of countries around the world, from Norway to Japan and Australia, of its broken promises to Hong Kong, or the country's ridiculous claim to the South China sea, and the lies about not militarizing the artificial islands in created.

There is no mention of the threats to Taiwan.

There is no mention of the cultural genocide perpetrated against its own Uighur population nor the suppression of any kind of political dissent within China's border in general.

All the above examples, and there are plenty more, show a very clear pattern of behavior that the CCP will continue to display with ever increasing force if it is capable.

And those examples are exactly the reason why the Democratic world MUST limit China's capabilities. It is not because of Chinese growth, it is not because of any inherent quality of the Chinese people, it is because of what the CCP will inflict on the world as it grows.

If the Chinese leadership is more than willing to inflict great pain on its own population, it will be far more willing to do so on the rest of the world, and simply so that it can maintain power. It has no vision for a better world.

YouTube will no longer remove content that promotes false claims about U.S. elections—a tacit admission that the platform's aggressive crackdown on misinformation about the 2020 presidential election had negative consequences for political expression.
The company announced the change on Friday.
"The ability to openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions, is core to a functioning democratic society—especially in the midst of election season," wrote site administrators in a blog post.
This is a marked departure from the policy in place at YouTube for the last two years. Content moderators vigorously policed claims that former President Donald Trump had actually won the 2020 election. Indeed, their efforts were so aggressive that at one point YouTube actually censored a video released by the January 6 committee—which was attempting to hold Trump accountable for spreading election-related falsehoods—because the video contain footage of Trump saying something untrue.
Under the policy, YouTube was unable to distinguish between videos aimed at spreading misinformation and videos aimed at reporting on the spread of misinformation. These mistakes hurt Rising, the news show I host for The Hill, which is released primarily on YouTube. In March 2022, the platform suspended The Hill for violating the election misinformation policy after two of our videos included footage of the stolen-election claims. As I explained at the time:
YouTube has taken the position that merely acknowledging an utterance of the false claim is the same thing as making the claim yourself unless you correct and disavow it elsewhere in the video. (It is also sufficient to post a warning label in the video's description that a false election claim makes an appearance. YouTube is thus moving in the direction of trigger warnings.)
This is a policy that effectively outlaws straight news reporting on YouTube. Say a news channel creates a video that merely intends to provide viewers with footage of a Trump speech or interview—minus any additional commentary—where he makes claims about the election. That video is, according to YouTube, in violation of its misinformation policy if the creator does not call out or correct the claims.
By reversing course, YouTube seems to be acknowledging that policing misinformation comes with notable downsides.
"In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm," wrote YouTube administrators.
It should be noted that YouTube still intends to take action against content that seeks to mislead viewers about how to vote and on what days elections take place. In the past, this policy has prompted social media companies to moderate election-related jokes and satire, so YouTube might have been better served gutting this provision as well. Even so, it's encouraging to see a platform moving toward greater transparency and permissiveness, albeit many years too late.
The post YouTube Abandons Election Misinformation Policy That Censored Political Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

Maurice Jimmerson has been behind bars for 10 years but hasn't been convicted of a crime. Due to a series of bureaucratic holdups, Jimmerson has been held in a Dougherty County, Georgia, jail since he was charged with murder in 2013—a crime for which two of his codefendants have already been acquitted. Making matters worse, Jimmerson recently spent eight months without any lawyer at all.
After local journalists uncovered Jimmerson's case in April, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney stepped in to represent Jimmerson pro bono—and he's motioned to dismiss the charges altogether. 
It's unclear why exactly Jimmerson has languished in jail for so long. Gregory Edwards, the Dougherty County district attorney, told Atlanta News First that some of the delay can be attributed to a 2021 courthouse flood, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a previous judge's decision to try Jimmerson and his codefendants separately for the 2013 double-murder charge. Two of Jimmerson's codefendants were tried—and acquitted—in 2017.
Things got even worse for Jimmerson in the summer of 2022, when his public defender, Benjamin Harrell, filed several requests to be released from Jimmerson's case, noting that he needed to travel frequently to obtain medical care for his infant daughter. However, court employees seemingly lost Harrell's requests and didn't actually grant his release from the case until April 12 of this year—apparently after local journalists questioned one judge on why she hadn't approved Harrell's request. 
While Jimmerson was effectively without a lawyer during this period, the Georgia Public Defender Council has insisted that, though Harrell was not providing Jimmerson with any legal help, Jimmerson was, in fact, being properly represented. 
"A court error, if one took place, does not obviate Mr. Harrell's responsibilities or representation," Thomas O'Conner, the Public Defender Council's communications director said. "In law and in fact, Mr. Harrell was Mr. Jimmerson's attorney until April 12; assertions to the contrary are deliberately misleading."
Critics were quick to point out this absurdity. "To claim that Mr. Jimmerson was 'represented' under these circumstances makes a mockery of the right to counsel," Maya Chaudhuri, an attorney for the Southern Center for Human Rights, told Atlanta News First. "This is certainly not the type of 'representation' anyone of means would pay for."
Things could be looking up for Jimmerson. Last month Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman began representing Jimmerson pro bono, even filing a motion to have Jimmerson's case dismissed. 
Justifying his decision to file the motion, Fleischman cited the 1972 case Barker v. Wingo, in which the Supreme Court ruled that if someone is held in custody too long before trial, the case can be dismissed. Fleischman tells Reason that "it made sense to file the motion" given that Jimmerson has been locked up for 10 years. "And as far as I know," he says, "that's the longest anybody's been held in custody before a trial outside of [Guantanamo Bay]."
"I have this very strong conviction that people should have a trial before they are punished. And it seems like that is like such a minority view," adds Fleischman. In fact, the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy trial and the right to an attorney, both of which Jimmerson has been denied. "We should be trying people in a reasonable amount of time, and we should put a reasonable amount of resources toward making that happen. And if we have a system where people have to wait in jail for two or three years before they have a trial, that's not due process."
According to Atlanta News First, a hearing for the motion to dismiss is set for the end of June. But even if the case against Jimmerson is dismissed, nothing can give him back the decade he's spent behind bars due to administrative incompetence. 
"You talk about getting hostages out of other countries like North Korea or Iran," says Fleischman. "And the average time is six years. We talk about those countries having failed puppet justice systems with no expectation of due process. And yet we have Americans in this country waiting 10 years for an opportunity to force the state to prove its case. And that to me is outrageous."
The post He Spent a Decade in Jail Without Being Convicted. Now His Lawyer Says His Case Should Be Dismissed. appeared first on Reason.com.

After years of toiling against a culture that refused to recognize or celebrate the value of our hero's unique gifts, there was a possible breakthrough. A chance was seized. A microphone was commandeered. The nation's airwaves were unexpectedly filled with a message about the value of selfishness, individuality, and ambition.
I'm talking, of course, about the finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which concluded its five-season run on Amazon Prime last week.
"I want a big life. I want to experience everything. I want to break every single rule there is," Miriam "Midge" Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) said, near the end of her final set, in a moment that effectively summed up the character's first principles over the course of the show's arc. "They say ambition is an unattractive trait in a woman—maybe. But you know what's really unattractive? Waiting around for something to happen. Staring out a window, thinking the life you should be living is out there somewhere, but not being willing to open the door and go out there and get it, even if someone tells you you can't."
It was a bit more terse than another famous speech delivered at the climax of a story that celebrates many of the same themes. Or perhaps it was a more verbose version of Howard Roark's famous declaration in The Fountainhead, after being informed that it's unlikely anyone will let him design buildings in the way he wanted: "That's not the point," he said. "The point is, who will stop me?"
Over the course of five seasons, no one stopped Midge Maisel. Not when she stormed onto the stage at New York City's famous Gaslight Cafe in a bathrobe to deliver her first impromptu set after discovering her husband's infidelity in the show's premiere. Not when she similarly broke away from an interview to deliver that monologue in the finale. It wasn't all smooth sailing in between—indeed, one of the show's strengths was its willingness to let Midge struggle, even seem to fail at times—but that's not the point, is it? The point is, no one stopped her.
More than most other shows on television, Mrs. Maisel celebrated the selfishness that is essential to success in comedy and show business at large. Midge was always a selfish character, but the show's final season leaned into that trait in a refreshing way. Rather than having her grow to be a better mother or romantic partner, or learn some self-sacrificial lesson about helping others succeed, the showrunners (Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino) put the spotlight on Midge's defining trait, while also acknowledging the trade-offs that come with it.
The final season culminated with Midge getting her long-sought-after break—a four-minute set on The Gordon Ford Show, which we're told is the highest-rated late-night program on television in the show's fictional version of 1962 America—and used various flash-forwards to leave no doubt that it was, in fact, the springboard to a wildly successful career in show business. She got there by breaking the rules and by demanding to be first in line, yes, but also by refusing to compromise on who she was.
The show's celebration of selfishness extended beyond Midge herself and did so in a way that fits with Ayn Rand's conception of the term. While there is nothing wrong—and plenty right—about putting one's own needs first, Rand emphasized that selfishness also indicated moral first principles: Being selfish means, essentially, being true to one's self and refusing to subvert the individual to the desires of others.
Throughout the show, Midge repeatedly encountered supposedly successful people whose showbiz fame was predicated on committing the Randian cardinal sin of subverting their individualism for mass appeal. First and most apparent was Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch), a snooty Manhattanite who donned a fake accent and fat suit to perform stand-up as a crass housewife from Queens. There was also Shy Baldwin (Leroy McClain), the closeted homosexual who performed as a womanizing pop singer. Finally, there was Ford, the late-night host with a fake marriage who didn't write his own jokes or have as much creative control over his own show as he liked to think. As the lies those characters lived were peeled back, Midge (and the audience) discovered them to be—to varying degrees—pathetic, tragic, and pitiable.
Midge steadfastly refused to play that game, announcing early on that she would achieve fame on her own terms. Her comedy act was a reflection of that perspective, rooted as it was in the lived experience of a divorced Jewish mother from the Upper West Side. Her manager Susie Myerson (Alex Borstein) and real-life comic Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby), fellow outsiders who disdained the phoniness of their industry, stood alone in recognizing and encouraging Midge's unique talent.
To be sure, there was plenty of the traditional form of selfishness in Midge's character too. Her big break came after she persuaded Myerson to apply a particularly nasty form of leverage over Ford so he would break his personal rule against allowing his writers to appear as guests on his show (which is, it should be said, a very reasonable rule). By doing so, she blatantly stepped to the front of the line ahead of other comedians who toiled in the obscurity of the writers' room far longer than she did.
But the show left no doubt that she deserved the break when it came. She wasn't just the one writer in Ford's bullpen who found the right leverage to make him break his rule—she was also the best of the bunch, and therefore the one most deserving of special treatment in the show's Randian-tinged perspective. Her selfishness, in all its forms, was duly rewarded.
Still, Mrs. Maisel also demonstrated that the selfishness necessary for success is not without its trade-offs. In the fifth season's flash-forwards, we learned that Midge's strained and distant relationship with her two children continued even after both reached adulthood. If Midge's success was the result of never compromising on her individualism, then that same character trait naturally made her a poor mother, a role where self-sacrifice is fundamental. Her relationship with her parents was similarly difficult, though one might note that strained or absent family ties only reinforce the similarities between Midge and Rand's heroes, most of whom lack children or relatives who aren't portrayed as losers and leeches.
The dark side of Midge's ambition and selfishness was always part of the show's award-winning formula. Her inability to separate her real life and stage persona cost her friends and opportunities along the way—most prominently getting her canned from a tour as Baldwin's opening act after she inadvertently outed him during a set. There were lessons to be learned, but Midge never abandoned her individuality in order to set things right.
Over its five seasons, Mrs. Maisel veered into other libertarian-adjacent themes, including casting a critical eye toward the obscenity laws that limited free speech in 1950s/'60s New York City—and which Midge got arrested for violating. The final season dealt in a small way with the tragic end of Bruce's career and placed the blame for his personal decline squarely on the persecution he suffered at the hands of government censors. "I can't step foot in any club east of the Grand Canyon," he lamented at the start of the final episode. Offered Myerson's help to get back on top, he selflessly declined, telling her to use her favors on someone else. There's a hint of a moral there.
But the hero and moral center of the show was always Midge—indeed, everything in the show revolved around her—who used her talents and shamelessly seized every favor offered to her. Even in flash-forwards to her later years, we saw her tireless work ethic continue. And while Midge would surely fall short of Rand's ideals about what defines an objectivist hero—despite her propensity for delivering diatribes into a microphone—The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel left little doubt that she'd never have succeeded without putting herself first.
The post <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</em> Celebrated Selfishness as a Virtue appeared first on Reason.com.

As I was following Turkey’s recent general election, I was stunned to hear one of the country’s top officials, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu, speaking to a crowd from a balcony. Jubilant, he promised that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would “wipe away whoever causes trouble” for Turkey “and that includes the American military.” Earlier, Soylu declared that those who “pursue a pro-American approach will be considered traitors.” Keep in mind that Turkey has been a member of NATO (with U.S. bases in the country) for about 70 years.

Erdogan often uses stridently anti-Western rhetoric himself. About a week before the election’s first round, he tweeted that his opponent “won’t say what he promised to the baby-killing terrorists or to the Western countries.”

Erdogan might be one of the most extreme representatives of this attitude, but he is not alone. As many commentators have noted, most of the world’s population is not aligned with the West in its struggle against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And the war itself has only highlighted a broader phenomenon: Many of the largest and most powerful countries in the developing world are growing increasingly anti-Western and anti-American.

When Brazil elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency last October, many heaved a sigh of relief that the mercurial populist Jair Bolsonaro had been replaced by a traditional and familiar left-of-center figure. Yet in his few months in office, Lula has chosen to pointedly criticize the West, rage against the hegemony of the dollar, and claim that Russia and Ukraine are equally to blame for the war. This week, he hosted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose brutal reign has led millions to flee his country. Lula lavished praise on the dictator and criticized Washington for denying Maduro’s legitimacy and imposing sanctions on his regime.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa had a reputation as a practical, business-friendly moderate who had strong ties with the West. But South Africa under him has veered closer to the Russian and Chinese orbit. The country has refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has hosted the Russian and Chinese navies for joint exercises, and now stands accused by the United States of supplying arms to Russia, allegations that South Africa has denied.

And then there is India, which has made clear from the start of the Ukraine war that it had no intention of siding against Russia, which remains the chief supplier of advanced weaponry for the Indian military. India’s statements about its desire to maintain a balance in its relations between the West and Russia (and even China) have been so numerous that Ashley J. Tellis, one of the most respected scholars on U.S.-India relations, wrote an essay warning Washington not to assume that New Delhi would side with it in any future crisis with Beijing.

What is going on? Why is the United States having so much trouble with so many of the world’s largest developing nations? These attitudes are rooted in a phenomenon that I described in 2008 as the “rise of the rest.” Over the past two decades, a huge shift in the international system has taken place. Countries that were once populous but poor have moved from the margins to center stage. Once representing a negligible share of the global economy, the “emerging markets” now make up fully half of it. It would be fair to say they have emerged.

As these countries have become economically strong, politically stable and culturally proud, they have also become more nationalist, and their nationalism is often defined in opposition to the countries that dominate the international system — meaning the West. Many of these nations were once colonized by Western nations, and so they retain an instinctive aversion to Western efforts to corral them into an alliance or grouping.

Reflecting on this phenomenon in the context of the Ukraine war, Russia expert Fiona Hill notes that the other factor in this distrust is that these countries don’t believe the United States when they hear it speak in favor of a rules-based international order. They see Washington, says Hill, as full of “hubris and hypocrisy.” America applies rules to others but breaks them itself in its many military interventions and unilateral sanctions. It urges countries to open up to trade and commerce yet violates those principles when it chooses.

This is the new world. It is not characterized by the decline of America “but rather the rise of everyone else” (as I wrote in 2008). Vast parts of the globe that were once pawns on the chessboard are now players and intend to choose their own, often proudly self-interested, moves. They will not be easily cowed or cajoled. They have to be persuaded — with policies that are practiced at home and not just preached abroad. Navigating this international arena is the great challenge of U.S. diplomacy. Is Washington up to the task?

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekIf there were a Hall of Fame for song lyrics and you got to make one nomination, what would it be and why? (The linguist John McWhorter might pick something from Steely Dan.)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteHere at The Atlantic I made the case this week that most of the money that companies are spending on DEI consultants ought to be redirected to the poor. For the main argument, I hope you’ll check out the article. I’ll whet your appetite with my gloss on how the DEI industry exploded so rapidly:
On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.
[George] Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.
So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.
At best, these outlays symbolize something like, We care about DEI and we’re willing to spend money to prove it. A more jaded appraisal is that they symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather “the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.”Won’t Anyone Think of the Children?In Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown argues that in the name of child protection, Congress and many states are considering legislation that would fundamentally alter the internet as we know it. She cites age verification as an example, writing:
Proposals at both the state and federal level would require age verification on social media. Age verification schemes create massive privacy and security concerns, effectively outlawing anonymity online and leaving all users vulnerable to data leaks, corporate snoops, malicious foreign actors, and domestic spying. To verify user ages, social media companies would have to collect driver's licenses or other state-issued ID from all users in some capacity—by having users directly submit their documentation to the platform or by relying on third-party ID services, potentially run by the government.
Alternatively they may rely on biometric data, such as facial scans. Several such proposals are currently before Congress. For instance, the Making Age-Verification Technology Uniform, Robust, and Effective (MATURE) Act (S. 419), from Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), would ban people under age 16 from social media platforms. To verify users are above age 16, platforms would have to collect full names, dates of birth, and "a scan, image, or upload of government-issued identification." The requirement would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and a private right of action. (In the House, the Social Media Child Protection Act, from Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stuart, would do the same thing.) The Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (S. 1291), from Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), is another bill that would explicitly require social media platforms to "verify the age of their users." This one would ban children under 13 entirely and allow 13- to 17-year-olds to join only with parental consent, in addition to prohibiting the use of "algorithmic recommendation systems" for folks under age 18 …
Commerce would allegedly keep no records where people used their digital identification—though considering what we know about domestic data collection, it's hard to trust this pledge. In any event, administering the program would necessarily require obtaining and storing personal data. If widely adopted, it would essentially require people to register with the government in order to speak online.
The Rolling Stones RevisitedWith this week’s question about music, I was reminded of a great 2010 article that the journalist Bill Wyman published in Slate, creatively written as Mick Jagger’s thoughts on Keith Richards.Here he is making the case for Richards’s talent:As a pure rock (not folk or pop) songwriter, I think he is not just without peer. I think he is unrivaled in depth and growth, from “As Tears Go By” to “Satisfaction” to “Jumping Jack Flash” to, I don’t know, “Gimme Shelter. ” “Monkey Man.” “Street Fighting Man.” The primal feel of the chording. The musicality of the intros and breaks. The innovation of the recording—cruder, no doubt, but I will argue far more emotionally powerful than the Beatles’. The winding, intermixed guitars he almost desperately loved. Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone? It is hard to use a word like integrity about a band as compromised, as self-bloodied, as we were. But for some years, unlike any other group, the Beatles included, we declared war on that silly, hypocritical, repressive, and arbitrary society in which we lived. The only ammunition we had were Keith’s songs. The lyrics, I confess now, may have been in their defiance just épater la bourgeoisie and in their poesy derivatively Zimmerman-esque. Even when they weren’t, no one would have paid attention if the chords weren’t arresting, irrefutable. The songs spoke primarily through their music, not their words. Keith’s doting fans nattering on about the ultimate avatar of rock ’n’ roll authenticity irritate me, it’s true; but he may to this day be underappreciated.Casey DeSantis Makes Her PitchIn National Review, Michael Brendan Doughtery flags some oratory from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s wife, who said in a recent appearance:
When you look at Covid, the world descended on Florida. You had the corporate media, the Left, the White House, Fauci, Birx, all prognosticating that every bad thing would happen unless the governor followed their dictates, and their politicized, unscientific orthodoxy. But he held the line in defense of the liberties of the people he represented. He never backed down. He took their livelihoods and their happiness above his own. You can take the path of least resistance. You subcontract your leadership to the medical bureaucracy. You can aim for self-preservation. You can be more interested in your political career. Or you can hold the line. Do you defend the rights of the people? Their ability to earn a living, to be with their loved ones, especially in their final moments. Do you fight for our children to be in school, to breathe without a mask being forced on their face? Do you ensure that people have the choice as to whether or not they want to take an mRNA vaccine and certainly not make it contingent upon their job? At the end of the day, it’s what you do in the moment that matters.
Dougherty goes on to argue that the COVID pitch is perhaps DeSantis’s biggest strength:
Now, many liberals and some conservatives reading this list will shrug. They were happy to mask their kids for two years. They credit the vaccines with ending the public-health emergency.
But for a huge swath of voters, this issue really did bond them to Governor DeSantis. At the moment that Casey DeSantis mentioned masks on children, the crowd spontaneously started roiling with noises of anger at the pro-mask policies—and approval of the governor, for rolling them back.
Those days three years ago really were the moment that many families started wondering whether they too should join the scores of thousands of other Americans who were moving to Florida during the pandemic. This was the moment that made Ron DeSantis a national figure. These voters credit Florida—and to a lesser degree Georgia and Texas—with normalizing the country after the pandemic. These voters knew what the experts also knew but refused to admit publicly: that they didn’t need the vaccine because they had already contracted Covid and had natural immunity; or that they were young and not vulnerable to severe Covid. They knew, long before the experts admitted, that the Covid vaccine did not stop transmission, and that the logic of mandates was therefore mooted. In their hearts, these voters knew that expert opinion was a kind of guild conspiracy that—when joined with the force of government—directly threatened their livelihood, their family, and the well-being of their children.
And DeSantis took unorthodox steps to protect the social fabric of Florida. He used the emergency powers the public-health crisis granted to him to mandate that schools remain open, and to mandate that schools not impose their own mask mandates on children. Any fool—even Dr. Fauci himself at the start of the pandemic—could figure out that child-sized cloth masks bought at a sunglasses stand were not an effective public-health measure against an airborne virus. But only DeSantis and a handful of other governors ever acted, and acted vigorously, on this obvious truth. By using his powers in this way, he pioneered a model for how he would begin using constitutional executive power to prevent the ideological contagions of the left from seizing all the institutions of public life.
It will be interesting to see the DeSantis campaign attack Donald Trump not as irresponsibly lax on COVID-19, but rather as the president who ostensibly presided over needlessly draconian COVID shutdowns and kept the distrusted-by-right-populists Anthony Fauci in his job.Provocation of the WeekIn From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, the late historian Jacques Barzun wrote the following:
With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so many ardent workers and eager patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was inevitable that technique and style should gradually turn from successful trial and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy.
The result was frigidity—or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that going back to the past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not the technique is the point of interest. As knowledge grows more exact, originality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the suggestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even though his high competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for himself. His art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corollary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art.

A small flock of drones descends on Moscow; Russian rebels raid over the border into their estranged motherland, mysterious fires break out in Russian cities, oil-storage depots experience explosions, and Russian trains suffer an unusual number of derailments. How does the White House react? “As a general matter, we do not support attacks inside of Russia.”This is an administration that has done some things very well, including blowing the whistle on Russian invasion plans and building a coalition to support Ukraine. It has done other things moderately well: giving the Ukrainians high-end weapons, though only after repeated agonizing, delaying, and prevaricating. However, it often undermines its cause with speech that is strategically witless. Sometimes, this takes the form of leaks from officials to friendly journalists, who then report the officials’ fears of Russian escalation, hopes for negotiations, and doubts about Ukrainian abilities. More commonly, it appears in an unwillingness to say the obvious, which is that we want Ukraine to defeat Russian armies thoroughly and drive them from all of its territory.And then there is this inane comment. It is politically dumb because it signals divisions between us and the Ukrainians, it casts a chill on European politicians (some more timid than ours), and it encourages Russian propagandists to go into fits of menacing fury that never amount to anything beyond the crimes their soldiers normally commit, but can still cause the blood to drain from a few pallid faces.[Kori Schake: Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are]The statement is, from a military historian’s point of view, ignorant of war to the point of illiteracy. What country has ever won a war by confining itself to homeland defense even when it was capable of much more? Ukraine was attacked in an extraordinarily brutal and unprovoked way; why should it not hit back? After December 7, 1941, did the United States limit itself to looking for the aircraft carriers that conducted the Pearl Harbor operation?The comment is also operationally obtuse. Ukrainian raids into Russia demoralize its public (we know that from monitoring Russian Telegram channels) and divert Russian resources and attention away from the front lines. The more Russian troops guard the border, the fewer dig in outside Melitopol. The more resources diverted into missile and air defense, the less there are to support the occupying army. The more humiliating gaps there appear in the defenses of Moscow, the greater the likelihood of a regime that will claw at itself, as the likes of Yevgeny Prigozhin use this as a crowbar with which to torment their internal rivals.Above all, the White House statement, and the undeniable angst that accompanies it, reflects two regrettable but common American flaws: naivete and arrogance. During a century and a half, the United States has witnessed only two substantial attacks on its territory, in 1941 and again in 2001. Both were one-off affairs. We have difficulty imagining what it would be like to have missiles rain down on our cities, smashing hospitals and schools, or to endure the wanton slaughter and rape of an invading army. Americans would not show anything like the restraint asked of Ukraine were something even remotely similar to befall not only Washington, but New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Miami. And if anyone asked them to do so, the responses would be short, sharp, and unprintable.There is conceit here as well—the conceit of an exceptionally powerful country, to be sure, but one whose leaders have convinced themselves that they are expert on the processes of war. Biden-administration officials still insist that our flight from Afghanistan was a masterly move, executed in a masterly fashion. Worse yet, they believe it. They believe that they have titrated the flow of weapons to Ukraine in just the right quantities and amounts. They believe that they can control war, whose ends are driven by politics but whose means often take statesmen down unpredicted and unmarked paths.Off the record, senior officials sometimes betray condescension toward minor powers—those brave but primitive Ukrainians, those feisty but irresponsible Poles, those endangered but deeply neurotic Balts—with whom they have imperfect empathy and to whom they give less respect than is their due. Some of that is in this statement, as it is in the patronizing assessments of Ukrainian warcraft compared with our own.These officials would do better to recall that the United States lost the Vietnam and Afghan Wars, and, at best, pulled off far-too-costly draws in Iraq and Korea. They would do better, as well, to take a long pause to reflect on just how profoundly mistaken they were not only about the Ukrainian will to fight, but about Ukraine’s capacity to absorb modern weapons and defeat Russian forces. And they also might find it helpful to remember the failures of American statecraft in Syria and in Ukraine in 2014 that laid the groundwork for this war.[Read: How Syria came to this]Individually, those who issue statements such as the White House’s and share this approach to policy are (mostly) nice, decent people. They have, by and large, elegant educations at elite institutions; they are comfortable at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and have résumés of unusual academic or legal distinction. But there are things more easily learned in bar fights or repeated bouts with boxing gloves or pugil sticks (let alone infantry combat) than in lecture halls and seminar rooms. War is an elemental activity; it needs often to be waged in an elemental way, and it has to be understood with the viscera and not just the head.The maximum use of force is by no means incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect, as the great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz observed. There is every reason to think that the Ukrainians are not merely lashing out (although there is probably some of that) but that these attacks on Russia are part of a larger preparation for the offensives on which their country’s future depends. They are distracting, demoralizing, and unbalancing their enemy. That is wise, because at the end of the day their resources, even with our help, are limited.Still, a press spokesperson has to reply to a journalist’s question. So, too, for that matter, does a senior official caught at a fancy Washington dinner. There is a ready response.In February 1946, shortly before giving his famous Iron Curtain speech, Winston Churchill was asked a question he did not wish to answer as he left Washington for Miami. “No comment,” he replied. “I think ‘No comment’ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.” An honorable if not a modest man, he thanked former Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles for teaching him its use and encouraging its application.Reticence is one of the minor strategic virtues. The administration has, it bears repeating, done many of the right things. For whatever reason, Churchillian rhetoric is beyond it. Churchillian warcraft also seems a quality beyond its understanding or aspirations. But at the very least, it would do well to emulate Churchillian discretion as the next round of Ukrainian blows fall on their pitiless and brutal enemies.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Shu-Sin was the king of Sumer from about 2000 B.C.E. Although his wife’s name is lost to history, her legendary words are not. Carved on a cuneiform tablet is an ode to their love, containing these lines:
Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,
Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,
Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,
Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.
And down to today, this kind of romantic attachment is one of the best predictors of happiness that social scientists have identified. For example, my review of the General Social Survey finds that although 27 percent of married Americans said they were “very happy” with their lives, only 11 percent of those respondents who were never married, divorced, separated, or widowed answered this way. (Obviously, marriage is not the only romantic arrangement, but it is the one most often studied.) And research in the Journal of Research in Personality has shown that marriage can protect happiness in adulthood.These findings may help explain the well-documented decline in American happiness, especially among young adults. In a nutshell, the U.S. is moving from a society based on couples to one based on singles. The percentage of adults who are currently married has fallen from almost 70 in 1960 to about 50 today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Pew Research Center shows that roughly four in 10 adults ages 25–54 are neither married nor living with a partner, up from 29 percent in 1990.The solution to the happiness deficit—for the nation as well as among individuals—is simply to encourage more people to pair off, right? Maybe not. A closer look at the singles trend suggests that the problem is not a lack of available partners, but that young adults may inadvertently be avoiding romantic attachment. That is the challenge we face.Psychologists commonly measure the health of attachment through two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance (the latter meaning a resistance to intimacy). To score lower on each dimension is better: Healthy bonding is neither anxious nor avoidant, hence the phrase secure attachment. In contrast, an insecure bond can involve someone being anxious but not avoidant, avoidant but not anxious, or both. (The terms psychologists use to describe each category are fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing, respectively.)Unfortunately, insecure attachment is becoming more and more common. According to a 2020 analysis in the journal Emerging Adulthood, over the past two decades, successive groups of studied college students have shown an increasing likelihood of experiencing one of the insecure “styles,” rising from 61 percent of them during 2002–06 to 71 percent during 2016–19. One particular insecure style—avoidance—is associated with a greater preference for singlehood. That tells us that the underlying problem is chiefly one of greater avoidance.[Arthur C. Brooks: Love is medicine for fear]Scholars have found novel evidence of this trend in indirect ways as well. For example, a 2022 study asked 469 adults whose average age was 34 to name their favorite song; the researchers then analyzed the lyrics. They found that people who scored higher in attachment avoidance preferred songs with lyrics that expressed this style. (An example the researchers give is the late Tina Turner’s avoidant masterpiece “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which features the lyric “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”) They then looked at the 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015 and found that avoidant themes appeared on the list more and more over this period.The prevalence of avoidant attachment is a more plausible explanation for the increase in unhappiness among young adults than their simply being uncoupled. After all, we also know that singlehood can make some people happier, and that a bad romantic partnership is clearly worse than no relationship at all. But in contrast to that mixed picture, many studies show that avoidant attachment is associated with lower satisfaction with life.So what is provoking this mass romantic avoidance? Two psychologists provided clues in a paper published in 2022 that was based on surveys of university students in Cyprus, including what led them to prefer being single. Strongly predictive of singledom, the researchers found, was not only a preoccupation with work and career but also the pervasiveness of so-called dark-triad personality characteristics (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). In other words, people may avoid romantic commitment if they are especially self-centered or work-focused.Additional findings suggest that young adults are registering higher on both counts. Survey research measuring differences between generations showed that roughly 70 percent of college students scored higher on measures of narcissism than the average student did 30 years prior. And, as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson has written, young adults have a growing propensity to follow an ideology he calls “workism,” a belief that work provides one’s sense of identity and purpose. He also cites research showing, for example, that the main effect for young women of attending a selective college is longer work hours. Such dedication is usually regarded as admirable—yet it often comes at the cost of human connection.I believe romantic-attachment avoidance is the missing link in the research between singlehood and the epidemic of unhappiness among young adults. Happiness is decreased by emotional isolation; we need people who know us deeply and with whom we can be vulnerable. All of this suggests that to get happier, “Pair up” is probably not the right advice. Better to solve the avoidance problem per se.Some of the causes of avoidance are obvious, such as the way social media encourages an intense focus on oneself rather than others. Research shows that social-media use is associated with greater narcissism (as well as depression and anxiety). In addition, a diminished influence of traditional institutions that provide meaning, including religion and family, can explain why young people are turning to work to find a sense of life’s purpose.[Listen: The complexities of human love]But it is too easy to exculpate ourselves as a society by pointing to technology and trends we can scarcely control, and young adults may not be in a position to address their avoidant behavior. The rest of us can help. As an academic and a parent of young-adult children, I see vividly how people my age and in my position simultaneously encourage young adults to feel at the center of their own universe and set them up to seek as much professional achievement as possible. Modern parents, and universities in loco parentis, bear a lot of responsibility for convincing young adults both that they are No. 1 and that their worth as people can and should be measured by worldly success. We are inadvertently leaving them isolated, lonely, and bereft of what really matters: secure, loving connections with others.If we want to create a happier future for ourselves and others, we will need to invite more love and romance into life (as well as such downstream delights as families and babies). Or as E. M. Forster put it pithily in his novel Howards End, “Only connect!” The trends are discouraging, but the good news is that a plausible source of our romantic-avoidance problem is not a mystery, and we can combat it by speaking the truth about life and work, as opposed to propagating self-inflating, workaholic nonsense that pushes love away.To that end, let me propose a place to start, with three simple messages: You are not better or more special than others; you are not alive simply to work; happiness comes from loving and being loved. These three ideas transgress conventional modern thinking—and that’s exactly the point.

One of the more fascinating sideshows of the debate over raising the federal government's debt ceiling has been the Republican-led effort to impose new work requirements on some food stamp recipients.
On the left, the idea that working-age, able-bodied, childless food stamp beneficiaries should be required to find employment in order to qualify for government benefits has been met with the usual shrill responses claiming that Republicans must hate the poor. On the right, the focus has been on ensuring government welfare systems aren't sending the wrong signals. "Incentives matter. And the incentives today are out of whack," House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) said in an April speech at the New York Stock Exchange. "It's time to get Americans back to work."
In the end, however, the debt ceiling deal struck by McCarthy and President Joe Biden is likely to end up with more Americans qualifying for food stamps—in large part because the deal actually removes work requirements for many individuals currently subject to them.
Under the terms of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which cleared the House on Wednesday and is awaiting a vote in the Senate, an estimated 78,000 additional people will gain access to food stamps, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Those additional beneficiaries will add an estimated $2.1 billion to the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the official name for food stamps, over the next decade—a minuscule increase to a program that will cost $127 billion this year.
The new enrollees and the additional costs are not all that significant. What is more interesting is that SNAP enrollment will increase at all, given all the political rhetoric on both sides. In short: The left says Republicans want to kick people off welfare, and the right argues that getting people off welfare—by getting them into jobs—is good. So why does this deal put more people on welfare?
Much of the media coverage has been focused on the GOP-backed plan to apply work requirements to able-bodied, childless individuals between the ages of 50 and 54. (Those under age 50 are already subject to work requirements.) Those between the ages of 50 and 52 would face the new work requirements starting in October, with the age limit raised to 54 next year.
But that only tells half the story. The bill would also remove work requirements for many individuals across all age groups. "Several groups would newly be exempt from work requirements: people experiencing homelessness, veterans, and people ages 18 to 24 who were in foster care when they turned 18," the CBO explains.
The expanded work requirements for those over 50 would save about $6.5 billion in SNAP spending over the next decade, the CBO concludes. But the new exclusions written into the law would more than offset those savings by costing an extra $6.8 billion over the same period.
Again, the dollars aren't really the most important part. As a result of the changes made in the debt ceiling bill, some 50-somethings will be required to work to receive food stamps, but some 30-somethings will now be able to access food stamps while remaining jobless. It's unclear how that tradeoff is supposed to correct the "out of whack" incentives that McCarthy and his fellow Republicans were campaigning to change.
Since these changes will add beneficiaries to the SNAP program, they will do nothing to address the worrying growth in the cost of food stamps, which has doubled since 2019. Congress will have another chance to address that when it considers a new farm bill in the coming months.
For now, it's also unclear why these new distinctions have been added to the law. Excluding the homeless might make sense, but why shouldn't able-bodied and childless veterans—who have a plethora of exclusive job opportunities available to them—be expected to find work before getting SNAP benefits? Why should someone's living situation as an 18-year-old affect whether they qualify for an unrelated welfare program two or three decades later?
Each new protected class of individuals who are exempt from the rules undermines the goal of transitioning able-bodied Americans from welfare to work. That's likely to increase both dependence on the welfare system and resentment of the seemingly arbitrary lines that dole out different benefits to people of equal socioeconomic status. If anything, it worsens the already bizarre incentives at play.
The post CBO: Debt Ceiling Deal Means 78,000 More Able-Bodied, Childless Adults Could Get Food Stamps appeared first on Reason.com.

In Virginia, you will soon no longer need a college degree to be eligible for most jobs in the state government. Starting next month, almost 90 percent of state government jobs will stop requiring applicants to have a college degree and stop giving preference to those who do.
"On day one we went to work reimagining workforce solutions in government and this key reform will expand opportunities for qualified applicants who are ready to serve Virginians," Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) said in a Tuesday press release. "This landmark change in hiring practices for our state workforce will improve hiring processes, expand possibilities and career paths for job seekers and enhance our ability to deliver quality services."
The move comes on the heels of similar policy changes in a handful of other states. In March 2022, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) announced that the state would be removing the college degree requirement for thousands of state government jobs. Soon after, governors in Pennsylvania, Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey, and North Carolina enacted similar changes.
This shift even attracted the praise of former President Barrack Obama, who tweeted earlier this year, "Here's an example of a smart policy that gets rid of unnecessary college degree requirements and reduces barriers to good paying jobs. I hope other states follow suit!"
Virginia's Secretary of Labor Bryan Slater stressed in the Tuesday press release that the state's new policy would open up new opportunities for thousands of qualified applicants who simply don't have a college degree. He added that state officials are "also working hard to examine regulated occupations and professions to find ways to simplify and speed up credentialing processes and universal licensing recognition for individuals who want to live and work in Virginia."  
While these changes are welcome, the rest of the labor market hasn't quite caught up. Though degree inflation can be hard to measure, one report from Harvard Business School researchers found that for a mid-level supervisor position, 67 percent of employers required a college degree, but only 16 percent of current workers in the position had the credential. But this inflation is in sharp contrast to a reality where college enrollment rates are plummeting and Americans are increasingly saying that a college degree isn't worth the cost.
In removing college degree requirements for the vast majority of state government jobs, several governors are making an encouraging response to rapid degree inflation, opening positions to individuals who are qualified based on past on-the-job experience rather than a university credential. 
Despite concerns from some detractors of these policies, there's plenty of reason to think that a college degree doesn't actually provide extra job skills. Outside of a few obvious exceptions—clearly, doctors and engineers need higher education—most college degrees act as what George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan calls a "signaling" mechanism—something that shows employees that you have desirable traits, like an ability to show up on time and take direction. 
"The labor market doesn't pay you for the useless subjects you master; it pays you for the preexisting traits you signal by mastering them," Caplan wrote in The Atlantic in 2018. "Every college student who does the least work required to get good grades silently endorses the theory. But signaling plays almost no role in public discourse or policy making. As a society, we continue to push ever larger numbers of students into ever higher levels of education. The main effect is not better jobs or greater skill levels, but a credentialist arms race."
The increase in state governments deciding to remove college degree requirements from most job postings will expand employment opportunities for thousands of qualified individuals. More state governments—and private employers—should follow in their lead.
The post In Virginia, No Degree Is No Problem appeared first on Reason.com.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has cultivated a reputation as one of the federal government's most tech-phobic legislators. Naturally, he is now setting his sights on artificial intelligence (A.I.), a technology he describes as dangerous and likely to "manipulate" Americans unless subjected to crushing regulatory burdens.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Hawley said he was "worried about AI's power to manipulate our attention, to manipulate our opinions and to manipulate the information that we're given."
His solution is for the government to increase the liability incurred by companies that use A.I., such that they can be sued by users for engaging in misinformation. What constitutes misinformation, of course, is open to interpretation. Per usual, Hawley's approach wouldn't actually protect users of new technology—A.I., in this case—from harm. Rather, it would create opportunities for costly, constant litigation to cripple the technology.
"Already you can see these generative AI systems—these large language models—that are trained on all the information on the internet," said Hawley.
Hawley was likely referencing ChatGPT, an A.I. chatbot that can mimic human conversation. This is a tool that, yes, could be used for ill—like most technological advances—but also has the capacity to improve human understanding, communication, and fulfillment. (Reason's Fiona Harrigan used it to plan dinner.) And though the very term A.I. can summon scary images from science fiction dystopias along the lines of Terminator and The Matrix, it's important to note that ChatGPT is not thinking for itself in any appreciably sinister way; it's essentially an online encyclopedia with an impressively vast repository, and its responses are guided by the prompts given to it by humans.
Yet Hawley frets that technologies like this one will be used to monopolize human attention spans. His concern that A.I. is being used to "misinform" Americans proves that the overhyped threat of misinformation is not solely a hobbyhorse of mainstream Democrats. The First Amendment, thankfully, prohibits the government from censoring speech that allegedly misinforms the public.
Hawley's overall anti-tech agenda overlaps neatly with Democratic regulatory priorities. Both Republicans and Democrats have joined together to demand the repeal of Section 230, which would subject social media platforms to increased liability for user-generated speech. Progressive Democrats favor this approach in order to force tech companies to moderate more content. Republicans, on the other hand, think Facebook and Twitter are moderating too much content already, and are willing to punish the companies even if it means giving Democrats the exact result they want: increased online censorship.
This strategy has become even more glaringly flawed as of late. Twitter's new CEO, Elon Musk, is transforming the site into a space that particularly welcomes conservative content. But it is Section 230 that empowers Musk to permit The Daily Wire and Tucker Carlson to host their programming on Twitter. Scrapping the federal statute would increase Twitter's own liability, rendering social media's post-at-will protocols untenable.
Yet Hawley is pushing an agenda of subjecting A.I., social media companies, and the broader tech sector to greater government scrutiny, which he describes as putting "more power in the hands of individual Americans to say, 'I will hold you accountable if you come after me, if you manipulate me.'"
Increased regulation doesn't make tech more accountable to users. It makes tech more accountable to politicians and federal bureaucrats, many of whom wrongly believe that the internet would be a better place if people—and chatbots!—were less free to speak.
The post Josh Hawley Wants the Government To Silence A.I. appeared first on Reason.com.

President Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy reached an 11th-hour deal on the U.S. debt limit Saturday that will bring in no new revenue, claw back funds already appropriated to the IRS and for COVID relief, and essentially hold discretionary spending to current levels. Some Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate criticized McCarthy and Biden, saying each conceded too much. Both houses of Congress must pass the legislation, and Biden must sign it into law by Monday when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that funds sufficient to pay all the nation’s debts will run out.
Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, spoke to the Gazette about the deal and the economic damage the debt-limit drama has already caused. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Jason Furman
GAZETTE: What do you think of the deal Biden and McCarthy reached?
FURMAN: The process that led to the budget/debt limit agreement was terrible and harmful. The outcome itself is perfectly fine and represents something in between what the Republicans wanted and the president wanted. And that’s what you get in a divided government.
We’ve gone through debt-limit dramas about once a decade for 40 years now. This one had the largest set of financial market turbulence associated with it of any of the ones we’ve gone through as measured by, for example, market pricing of insurance against the default on U.S. debt or distortions in the interest rates on different treasury bonds. There have been other times when we have seen those react in the run-up of the debt-limit binding. But in this case the movements were much, much larger than before. There’s also, we can’t quantify this, but businesses and certainly policymakers put a lot of effort into contingency planning. Banks, financial institutions had to spend a lot of time worrying about what would happen if we hit the debt limit, time that basically is a deadweight loss.
GAZETTE: What’s different about this debt-limit negotiation that’s caused such turbulence?
FURMAN: It’s that the House Republicans started with an extreme position in terms of wanting to see the president undo major parts of what he had accomplished in his first two years. And the president took a harder line of not being willing to start negotiations until he heard more desire to compromise than appeared to be the case initially.
GAZETTE: The deal itself doesn’t raise any revenue and keeps spending fairly flat or cuts it slightly over 2023 levels, if inflation is factored in. Other than preventing the U.S. from a default, does it boost the economy or reduce the national debt?
FURMAN: The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found over $1 trillion in savings. But it is important to understand that this a score of the legislation itself. The actual savings will depend on whether and how Congress adheres to it. The side deal that was made as part of the debt limit and budget agreement would reduce these savings, potentially substantially. From a macroeconomic perspective, any savings are mildly helpful. It will help reduce inflation over the next year or two; it will take some of the burden off interest rate increases, which will also be a small reprieve for financial stability and the banks; and it will put the debt on a tiny bit better trajectory. All of those macro benefits are real, but small.
On the other side, this is just about the last way that I would reduce the debt. It cuts a nebulous pot of spending called “non-defense discretionary spending” below inflation. That’s where education, research, training, lots of things that I think are quite important, are housed. I would have much rather have achieved the same deficit reduction through some combination of tax increases or reforms, and reduction to spending on entitlement programs.
GAZETTE: If the bill stalls over the next few days, are we still at risk of default?
FURMAN: If there is a hiccup in the passage of this, we could be in a bad place. Monday, June 5, is when the Treasury has warned we hit the X-date. What happens every day on the week of the 5th and every day until June 15 is the government has a lot more money going out than coming in, a little bit like a household with a checking account where money’s moving back and forth and not quite sure which checks are going to be cashed.
Depending on exactly what payments go out to whom, the [U.S. Treasury] may not have enough money to make full payments. That would be something that’s never happened before and would be quite scary.
Now, if everyone knew it was going to pass on the 5th, and it was just one day you were in this state, they probably have some tricks in their back pocket they could use for a very, very short period of time. But it’s not clear exactly what those tricks are, and it’s something I think most people would rather not find out.
Corporations make estimated tax payments on June 15, so if you made it to June 15, then you could make it to July. The problem is getting from the 5th to the 15th, when all these bills are coming due and taxes are barely coming in. That’s difficult or impossible. And we just don’t know how financial markets would react; we don’t know how the rating agencies would react; but whatever it was, it would be ugly.
GAZETTE: Has any of the anticipatory worry over this already harmed the economy?
FURMAN: Oh, yeah. I think it has, certainly. The last several months have been harmful to the economy. Exactly how harmful, I don’t know and can’t quantify. But just the diverted attention, the higher interest rates, the market falling, the effect on confidence, all of that is bad. Another two or three days of drama is going to add almost no incremental cost to what has already been incurred. The House has a tiny bit more suspense than the Senate. In the Senate, the only issue is that even if 99 senators are willing to have it go forward, one person can slow it down. But they can’t stop it.
GAZETTE: Potential options to avert default included everything from Biden invoking the 14th Amendment to the Treasury minting a $1 trillion coin. Was negotiating with McCarthy the best option the president had?
FURMAN: Yes. The other options were terrible. When I was in the Obama administration, our lawyers generally were of the view that the 14th Amendment was not an available option. Financial markets might not view it as an available option, so they might tank and panic if you invoked it. Ultimately, the Supreme Court would decide. I’m extremely skeptical they would have allowed President Biden to get out of this by invoking the 14th Amendment. I think all the ways out of this were really costly economically and potentially politically too because the president [would have] looked like he wanted to try some new risky scheme he had just invented, and it didn’t work out. Everyone would know exactly who to blame and it would have been him.
GAZETTE: This deal will prevent a debt-limit fight during next year’s presidential election, but doesn’t it set the stage for a repeat in 2025 should Biden win re-election and Republicans retain control of the House?
FURMAN:  When President Trump was in office, I advocated repealing the debt limit, so I’ve been consistent that I don’t think either party should use this. The problem is that the Constitution makes it very clear that Congress needs to authorize debt. And so, I don’t like the situation that puts us in, but unfortunately, that appears to be what the law is. Until there’s some way to change that law, there’s no other option other than to follow the law and ultimately negotiate and try to make those negotiations happen in a normal way rather than the abnormal way we’ve just gone through.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Replies have been edited for length and clarity.Last week I asked readers if they want Ron DeSantis’s Republican primary campaign to succeed or to fail.Ann wants DeSantis to win the nomination over Donald Trump:
DeSantis had a really good interview with Trey Gowdy on the Fox News Channel. He seemed strong, grounded, realistic, determined, capable, balanced, and smart. And he has the values we as Americans should embrace (at least most of them). Donald Trump, unfortunately, cannot control himself. He is too irrational, too narcissistic, and not smart. I voted for Trump the last time, but I hope that I get to vote for DeSantis this time.
Many readers disagreed about whether they feared Trump or DeSantis more. For example, Matt’s top priority is preventing Trump from returning to the White House:
While I won’t be voting for Ron DeSantis in the general election, I might use my primary vote for him. As much as I hope that Joe Biden would beat Donald Trump, I don’t want to take that chance. I would gladly have the lesser of the evils. DeSantis is a performative conservative populist: traditional, Harvard-educated conservatism wrapped in “stick it to the libs” showmanship. He probably stands the best chance to beat Trump. And while I find his politics abhorrent, Trump represents a much larger threat to democracy. DeSantis would be an iterative Republican president. Trump is dangerous, and I wouldn’t take the risk. Practically every other option on the table is better than Trump 2.0.
I’m getting tired of these existential-crisis elections. I miss the days of Obama/Romney, Bush/Kerry, even Obama/McCain. If the other team won, I didn’t doubt the continuation of the Union.
Trump would pose that threat; DeSantis, less so.
Similarly, Steve feels confident that Trump would be awful, while DeSantis, whose behavior in Florida he dislikes, is more of an unknown quantity:
When Trump won, I was hoping that the gravity of the office would somehow enable him to rise to the occasion of personal and professional competence and greatness. Alas, after less than a month in service he demonstrated that this was not to be. Unfortunately, his administration rolled incompetently downhill from there. I feel that as unacceptable as I view DeSantis’s political machinations in his home state of Florida, I’m hoping that much of his socially deplorable behavior and policy there is primarily to satisfy the MAGA base, to get elected. I’m hoping that if he got elected—unlike Trump, who would embark on his revenge and self-aggrandizement tour—DeSantis could, and hopefully would, revert back to the middle under the sacred weight of the Oval Office and perform more credibly for all. At least there’d be a chance—unlike for the ex-president.
Robert fleshes out why Trump is ostensibly worse:
Every American should want DeSantis to beat Trump in the primary. Every American should want anyone to beat Trump in the primary. Trump brazenly violated his oath of office. It was the worst betrayal in American history—worse even than the Confederacy, because that at least didn’t come from the White House itself.
For 224 years, power passed peacefully from one presidential administration to the next. It was something we were proud of. Trump ended that tradition. He has no place in public life.
DeSantis is a smarmy, unimaginative little bully. Even without considering his political positions, he is in every respect a worse man than Biden. We don’t know if he won’t accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses. But we know Trump won’t.
And Paul sketches out a bank-shot scenario:
I would like DeSantis to win, because Trump would be so betrayed and angry—his fragile ego crushed—that he would take his revenge by running as a third-party candidate, practically ensuring a victory for the Democrats and Joe Biden.
In contrast, Emelia fears DeSantis more:
The difference is that DeSantis will carry out and see through his plans. The one advantage of Trump (as awful as he is) is that he can’t focus long enough to see anything through. Often I suspect that many centrists and liberals’ only real issue with Trump is that he’s crass and rude. Plenty of other politicians have policies just as harmful but display basic social niceties.
SHG offered similar analysis:
I had hoped that DeSantis could finally free the Republican Party from Trump’s clutches, but between his positions on abortion, free speech, academic freedom, and pardoning some of the convicted January 6 insurrectionists, I fear that DeSantis will be an uncharismatic—but potentially more capable and therefore more dangerous—Trump-Lite.
Gary disagrees––he wants DeSantis to win the primary and wouldn’t mind if he won the general election too:
I would like to see Governor DeSantis as the Republican nominee. He is very competent at governing. Why is he better than President Biden? Because of his mental acuity and physical stamina. Second, he governs from a more right-of-center position rather than a far-left position.
Conservatism and liberalism both have attractive components to guide a nation’s policies. Too much of either simply causes more division. My distinct feeling is that Biden has little to actually say about policy and that “puppet masters” with a much more radical leftist view are actually developing policy and shaping his public statements.
Another sizable group of Democratic readers are sanguine because they are confident that Biden will win reelection. Here’s Chadd:
As a resident of south Florida, I deplore everything that Ron DeSantis stands for. That said, I think that Trump versus Biden 2024 is a foregone conclusion, and I’m actually fine with it. Of course Democrats are gonna run Biden again. He’s a winner, and regardless of the hair-on-fire coverage on Fox and conservative media, most everyone I know is better off than they were two years ago, and the news isn’t the constant chaos that defined Trump’s presidency.
People want calm. People want to feel safe and that the government functions and isn’t out to get them. Biden has given us a sense of calm, professionalism, and decency that was missed during the Trump years.
I think the establishment Dems want Trump to win the nomination. I don’t know if it’s a conscious effort or just what’s happening, but that’s how it seems. A two-time loser (if we’re going just on popular vote) versus a three-time winner who got the most votes of any presidential candidate in history! The answer is right in front of us.
G. is a college student in Florida:
I may have a bit of a biased perspective, considering that DeSantis just recently barred federal or state funds to DEI programs, but please hear me out. The amount of disrespect DeSantis has for the younger members of Florida’s voter constituency is absolutely something he would bring with him to the White House. He has given up on persuading portions of our age group to support him genuinely, while limiting the amount of information we have access to. A DeSantis administration means that the entire nation would be constantly patronized while DeSantis uses the power of the executive branch to fight a culture war.
I feel inclined to defend my university and my high school’s excellent dual-enrollment and AP programs from the suggestion that they are “woke indoctrination,” because I was never intellectually stifled, censored, or repressed by either of them. We were freely allowed to discuss and exchange serious ideas. There was no one who was too fragile to debate me if we disagreed. We discussed current LGBTQ+ issues in a way that was respectful and dignified. In the Women’s Studies course I took this year, I argued for the end of femininity as a relevant cultural concept, and no one batted an eye. This is an extremely niche viewpoint, but I was allowed to advocate for it theoretically, because my campus was indoctrinating no one and everyone taking this course was there by choice.
DeSantis does not know what it is like to be on a Florida campus, learning and growing and forming ideals. He went to Harvard. I believe Biden could win if voters had to choose between him and Trump.
The Republican Party desires the brute-force approach DeSantis takes. The culture wars energize their base, the fiscal conservatism energizes their rich donors, and DeSantis is considerably younger than Biden. He could very well beat Biden, so I’m hoping he never gets past Trump.
I. S. is ready for a new generation of politicians:
I would take any of the Republicans over Trump. I would take any of the Democrats over Biden. It’s long past time for that generation to start spending more time with their families.
Arlene advocates for a matriarchy in which I, too, would be replaced:
I want every Republican to lose. I would love to have every white man over 40 replaced by a woman. If we want to preserve America, the America I believe in, we cannot let either of these Republican men win. I don’t know what happened to the Republican Party. I am a white woman of 66 years, and I have never seen such selfishness!
Women are who will save America.   
Vickie wants a unity ticket that she knows won’t happen:
I am a registered Republican. I am also socially liberal. I did not and would never vote for Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis frightens me. He is much smarter than Trump, but not much better. I vacillate back and forth.  Biden isn’t a great choice either. If the Democrats had a better candidate, I’d probably go DeSantis. Since Biden beat Trump once, I’ll wager he can do so again.
I would love to see a mixed-party ticket. I know that I live in fantasy land, but I really believe that would make a major contribution toward the return of a rational democracy. We need two strong, realistic parties. Present strife hurts both.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.The scrutiny is overdue. This growing multibillion-dollar industry was embedded into so many powerful public and private institutions so quickly that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.Now and forever, employers should advertise jobs to applicants of all races and ethnicities, afford everyone an equal opportunity to be hired and promoted, manage workplaces free of discrimination, and foster company cultures where everyone is treated with dignity. America should conserve any gains it has made in recent years toward an equal-opportunity economy. Perhaps the best of the DEI industry spurred the country in that direction.However, the worst of the DEI industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive. And even people who highly value diversity and inclusion should feel queasy about the DEI gold rush that began in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. A poor Black man’s death became a pretext to sell hazily defined consulting services to corporations, as if billions in outlays, mostly among relatively privileged corporate workers, was an apt and equitable response. A radical course correction is warranted––but first, let’s reflect on how we got here.On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.[Conor Friedersdorf: “They learn to parrot what they know they’re supposed to say” ]Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.  In what, exactly?It is often hard to say. What has one been trained to do after hearing Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author and social-justice educator, lecture on what she calls “white fragility,” or after pondering a slide deck with cartoons meant to illustrate the difference between equality and equity as critical theorists understand it?
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty / Interaction Institute for Social Change
Or after absorbing the racial-equity consultant Tema Okun’s widely circulated claims that attributes including “sense of urgency” and beliefs including “individualism” are traits of “white supremacy culture”? (Okun made these claims in a 1999 article that even she regards as widely misused. She once told an interviewer about the article, “It was not researched. I didn’t sit down and deliberate. It just came through me.” She has launched a website that explains her views in far more detail and with more nuance.)Consider a specific PR pitch from a DEI consultant in 2021, chosen for how typical it is. It leads by invoking Floyd’s death as the impetus to “take bolder actions.” It promises expertise in “best practices” to corporate leaders. Then it pivots to naming a specific training on offer, “Microaggressions in the Workplace,” which, along with other offerings, will help “create a culture where employees feel valued and are encouraged to be their true selves, celebrating each individual’s uniqueness.” The pitch claims that this training “enables talent acquisition, retention, and career advancement.” Is it not inappropriate to use an unemployed Black man’s murder by police to justify expenditures on reducing unintentional micro-slights at work so the bosses can retain more talent?[Conor Friedersdorf: Can Chloé Valdary sell skeptics on DEI?]Of course, setting aside unseemly invocations of Floyd’s name, an initiative needn’t be a coherent response to his death to be defensible or worthwhile. All companies should invest in being equal-opportunity employers, including affirmative steps to ensure, for example, that managers haven’t unwittingly introduced unjust pay disparities or culturally biased dress codes. Beyond that, if DEI consultants made life better for marginalized groups or people of color or any other identifiable cohort within a given corporation or organization, or boosted corporate profits so that their fees paid for themselves, the industry could be justified on different terms.But most DEI consulting fails those tests.Harvard Business Review published an article in 2012 called “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work,” which drew heavily on research published in 2007 by  the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly. “A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace,’” the article reported. “Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing.” In 2018, Dobbin and Kalev wrote that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.”Portending the 2020 explosion of DEI, they continued, “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors.”And no wonder that DEI consultants struggle to be effective: In a 2021 article in the Annual Review of Psychology, a team of scholars concluded that the underlying research on how to intervene to reduce prejudice is itself flawed and underwhelming while regularly oversold.A paper published in the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology concluded, “In examining hundreds of articles on the topic, we discovered that the literature is amorphous and complex and does not allow us to reach decisive conclusions regarding best practices in diversity training.” The authors continued, “We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.”Those outside the industry are hardly alone in levying harsh critiques. Many industry insiders are scathing as well. Last year in Harvard Business Review, Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, consultant, and speaker, posited that the DEI industrial complex has a “big, poorly kept secret”: “The actual efficacy” of most trainings and interventions is “lower than many practitioners make it out to be.” In Zheng’s telling, the industry’s problems flow in large part from “the extreme lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners.”Zheng was even more blunt in comments to New York in 2021:
When your clients are these companies that are desperate to do anything and don’t quite understand how this works, ineffective DEI work can be lucrative. And we’re seeing cynicism pop up as a result, that DEI is just a shitty way in which companies burn money.
And I’m like, Yeah, it can be.
What if instead of burning the money, we simply redirected it to the poor?Yes, I understand that it isn’t as if that money would have gone to the neediest among us but for the DEI initiatives of the past few years. Still, I am being serious when I propose that alternative. (I should note that The Atlantic, like many media companies, holds DEI trainings for new hires. These trainings include discussions of Okun’s critique of “sense of urgency” and an updated version of the equity/equality cartoon.)[Conor Friedersdorf: Professors need the power to fire diversity bureaucrats]The DEI spending of 2020 and 2021 was a signal sent from executives to workers that the bosses are good people who value DEI, a signal executives sent because many workers valued it. Put another way, the outlays were symbolic. At best, they symbolized something like “We care and we’re willing to spend money to prove it.” But don’t results matter more than intention?A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.  It would be too sweeping to say that no DEI consultant should ever get hired. Underneath that jargony umbrella is a subset of valuable professionals who have expertise in things like improving hiring procedures, boosting retention, resolving conflict, facilitating hard conversations after a lawsuit, processing a traumatic event, or assessing and fixing an actually discriminatory workplace. In a given circumstance, a company might need one or more of those skills. Ideally, larger organizations develop human-resources teams with all of those skills.But the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

Applying the scientific method to medicine revolutionized the profession. While this was a long process, there was an inflection point, at least in the US, when the Flexner Report was published in 1910. The report was the basis for aligning US medical education with the standards already more widespread in Europe, and lead to a purge of pseudoscience and poor academic quality from American medical education.

But it seems that medical science, while thriving by some measures, is having some serious problems. The pessimistic view is that medical science is broken, but I think the full picture is far more complicated. We have been trying to unravel and make sense of this situation here at SBM . That is the core of our project – what is wrong with science and medicine and how do we fix it? At the center of the SBM approach is to emphasize the role of scientific plausibility in evaluating all medical claims, something that evidence-based medicine ( EBM ) deemphasizes, and in some applications even eliminates. But why is plausibility so important?

I think this is part of the natural evolution of scientific medicine. At first, when rigorous scientific methods were applied to medical questions, the questions were big – what causes infections, what are nutritional factors? Big questions had big impacts, and large effect sizes. We essentially have picked all the low hanging scientific fruit. As medical science progressed, the questions have become more subtle, nuanced, and complex. We are chasing smaller and smaller effect sizes. This requires greater and greater scientific rigor, and we have not always kept up.

Another factor is that all aspects of scientific institutions have become more expert at doing science, but this cuts both ways. This expertise can make certain players better at gaming the system. Working the system, in turn, has been driven by specific perverse incentives – academics want funding and to get promoted, institutions want greater reputations, journals want to maximize their impact factor, companies want to maximize their profit.

What does “gaming the system” mean in science? It amounts to getting good at creating the impression of a positive scientific result when there is no actual phenomenon. One aspect of this is P-hacking, tweaking protocols to manufacture statistically significant results, but there are many others. How do we know this is a problem in medicine? One way is because of the “replication crisis”. While there is still debate about exactly how big a problem this is, it is true that not all positive findings in science can be replicated.

The failure to replicate, however, is a feature of science, not a bug. Replication is partly how we determine if a phenomenon is real, which by definition means that some findings won’t replicate. If all positive findings replicated, then we wouldn’t need replication. But the devil is in the details. The real questions are – is the rate of failure to replicate too high, and what is happening with the results in the meantime. The real troubling statistics are that high impact journals are more likely to public studies that don’t replicate, and that such studies are more likely to be cited – even after they fail to replicate. The information ecosystem within the scientific medical literature favors new and exciting findings, not those which are actually true. And this does affect how we practice medicine.

An interesting angle to the replication problem is that people are generally good at predicting which studies are likely to replicate. Even lay people, when presented with a description and the evidence, we able to predict later replication with 67% accuracy, while experts averaged about 72%. Lay people were not technically analyzing methodology – they were basing their judgements on plausibility. Results that seem implausible have a lower probability of replicating – because the results likely do not reflect reality. Plausibility matters, and even non-experts can smell the difference.

Another line of evidence that there is a vulnerability within the institutions of science and medicine is the body of research into highly implausible claims. Interpreting this evidence is a key difference between SBM advocates and proponents of so-called alternative medicine (or more generally, scientific skeptics and believers in the paranormal). Essentially there is a conflict between plausibility and outcome. Homeopathy is a relatively clean example. When I look at studies that purport to show that homeopathy works, I conclude that the methodology of those studies must be flawed (likely due to P-hacking) and would predict that those studies would not replicate. Believers, however, characterize that position as “closed minded” and say that the fault is in our scientific knowledge, not the methods of those studies.

Which interpretation is more likely to be true? That depends on plausibility and methodology. The less plausible the claim, the more likely it is that a positive result is erroneous and won’t replicate. The more rigorous the methodology, the more seriously we should take the results. These two factors have to work in tandem. No matter how rigorous the methodology seems, if the plausibility is low enough it still becomes more likely that the results are spurious.

This can come down to just math. Scientific results are often statistical, and the p-value gives us an estimate of the probability we would be seeing this data if the hypothesis were not true. What are the odds, for example, that we would be seeing a positive result from homeopathic treatments if homeopathy does not work for the indication being studied? Even an extremely impressive p-value of 0.001 means the odds are one in a thousand (assuming perfect methodology and execution of the study, which is not always a deserved assumption). But we have to compare that to the odds that our current understanding of the laws of physics, biology, physiology, and biochemistry are all sufficiently wrong to allow for homeopathy to work.

And this is where the disagreements typically exist – how do we estimate that probability? I find that proponents often casually toss aside the prior findings of science and are comfortable assuming profoundly deep levels of ignorance about how the universe works. Or they simply brush aside concerns over plausibility as being “closed minded” or practicing “scientism”. In fact, we are just practicing science. When it comes to homeopathy, I would place the probability that current scientific knowledge is sufficiently wrong to allow for the possibility that homeopathy works at millions or billions to one – orders of magnitude less likely than even a p-value of 0.001 being a statistical quirk. (I have summarized the reasons why multiple times, but here is a good one.)

The same is true of claims such as ESP or astrology. Acupuncture is more plausible, because at least something physical is happening, but if you define acupuncture as requiring the existence of acupuncture points, the plausibility again plummets.

But it is important to understand that an SBM or skeptical analysis of these claims does not end with an assessment of plausibility. Despite the low plausibility, we still undertake a technical analysis of the literature. Not surprisingly, in every case (so far – but I am always willing to keep looking) the claims with extremely low plausibility all show that same patterns of methodology and results. There is always some potentially fatal flaw with the methodology, and the findings never convincingly replicate. What we never see is a quality of evidence above the threshold where rejecting the null hypothesis is reasonable. This is likely not a coincidence (that low probability claims also tend to have low quality or flawed evidence).

What we never see is rigorous studies with significant positive effects, reasonable effects sizes, and consistent replication. What we do see is gaming of the system, with a range of sophistication, but generally unconvincing evidence, and cries of being unfair for even considering plausibility.

In October 2016, while hiking through a treacherous mountain pass, John Tuthill saw something move. He was almost 8,000 feet above sea level in Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness, braving high winds and temperatures well below freezing. Although he and his hiking companion initially thought that they had the trail to themselves, they soon noticed small, brown specks zipping over the virgin snow. When Tuthill looked closely at them, he was astonished to see that they were insects, existing in an environment where insects shouldn’t be alive, let alone active.

As a neuroscientist who works with flies, Tuthill knew that insect nervous systems shut down when the creatures get too cold, so even species that can tolerate subzero temperatures tend to do so by entering a dormant state. And yet here were insects, running about in apparent defiance of both biology and physics. “It immediately blew my mind,” Tuthill told me. That’s how he came to study snow flies.Snow flies are a group of insects so obscure that very few scientists in history have ever studied them. They don’t have wings, and so get about by sprinting in a spiderlike way. And they do so in conditions so cold that most insects would struggle to move at all. Tuthill, who is a neuroscientist, tells me that he often anesthetizes fruit flies by chilling them to 2 degrees Celsius (36 degrees Fahrenheit), which paralyzes them. But snow flies can keep running even when their bodies hit –7 degrees Celsius (19 degrees Fahrenheit). They actually prefer temperatures close to freezing: Hold them in your hand, and they’ll become agitated, but put them in a fridge, and they’re … well … chill.[Read: Is the insect apocalypse really upon us? ]Very little is known about snow flies, in part because even collecting them requires being a good skier or mountaineer. In 2019, Tuthill tried encouraging members of the public to capture and send him snow flies, but few people tried, and most of those who did sent spiders by mistake. He and his colleagues had to collect most of the individuals they studied—a task he didn’t mind one bit. “They coincidentally have the same idea of what a good day is as a backcountry skier,” and are most active when the sun is shining on a few feet of fresh powder, Tuthill told me. “People in my lab have tried to raise them, but I personally don’t want that to work, because every time there’s a perfect day, I cancel my meetings and go out collecting snow flies.”By studying the captured insects, Tuthill’s colleague Dominic Golding discovered how they cope with one of the biggest threats of subzero living—ice. Once ice starts to form in an insect’s bodily fluids, the spreading crystals will quickly kill them. But snow flies can sense when that fatal process begins, and stop it through self-amputation. Using thermal cameras, Golding filmed many moments in which a wave of ice would race up a snow fly’s leg only for that leg to detach from the body within seconds.Their close relatives—spindly, slow-flying crane flies—use a similar trick if their legs are caught by predators, which they sense using neurons that detect pulls and tugs. Tuthill thinks that snow flies have placed the same defensive reflex under the control of neurons that sense temperature instead. These detect the small bursts of heat that occur when ice first forms, and trigger a muscular contraction that jettisons the freezing limb. This strategy is unorthodox, to say the least. Katie Marshall, a zoologist at the University of British Columbia, told me that cold-adapted animals cope with ice by either loading their blood with antifreeze that stops crystals from forming, or letting crystals form and withstanding them. Snow flies do neither; their unique solution—self-amputation—might be dramatic, but it is successful. In the wild, Tuthill has seen many three-legged snow flies, still moving at a pretty good clip, he said.And their speed is all the more impressive given that their nervous systems shouldn’t work at all. To fire, neurons must pump electrically charged molecules out through their membranes and then allow those molecules to reenter by opening small gates. But as the temperature drops, the pumps slow down, the gates stop opening, and neurons stop firing. The snow flies must have adaptations that allow their neurons to defy these thermal constraints, but Tuthill doesn’t yet know what they are. Compared with other insects, he says, snow flies aren’t actually that cold-tolerant. Their superpower is the ability to stay active right until the moment they freeze.[Read: A pivotal mosquito experiment could not have gone better]Adult snow flies don’t eat, so when they skitter over snow fields, they’re specifically searching for mates. When two find each other, they have sex immediately and audaciously: Despite being completely exposed to predators, and highly visible against a white backdrop, they’ll spend 30 minutes or more “in full view on the surface of the snow,” Tuthill writes. But hardly any predators are around to see them, which may be why they adapted to run over glaciers at all. And although animals that live in extreme environments are often treated as champions that endure barely bearable conditions, Tuthill wonders if snow flies actually have it pretty good. “If you go through metamorphosis on the right day, and it’s bluebird with two feet of powder, and you meet your lover … it’s a good life if it works out,” he told me.Or while it lasts. Within the next two decades, Washington is set to end the winter with about half as much snow as it did last century. By the 2080s, it will have 70 percent less. Snow flies will likely be pushed to higher altitudes, but “at some point, they’ll run out of mountain,” Marshall told me. Most people won’t notice their absence; hardly anyone noticed they were there to begin with. But losing snow flies would still mean losing an incredible example of life’s tenacity—its ability to persist in the unlikeliest of environments using adaptations we barely understand, running against the odds until they eventually run out of time.

For the past several decades, Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, in New Hampshire, has hosted a frequent flier with no known credentials. It comes and goes as it pleases, always bypassing security; it carries no luggage, not even a government-issued ID.But unlike the other passengers that regularly flock to Pease, the upland sandpiper—a spindly, brown-freckled bird native to North America’s grasslands—has no destination apart from the airport itself. The fields between Pease’s runway and taxiways are now the only place in the entire state where the species is known to regularly reproduce. Each year, about seven sandpiper couples nest in the airport’s meticulously mowed grasslands, fledging roughly a dozen chicks, according to Brett Ferry, a wildlife biologist at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Should they be snuffed out, Ferry told me, “that would be it for New Hampshire’s breeding population.”New Hampshire’s sandpipers aren’t alone in their plight. Across the United States (and, really, the world), all sorts of animals that have lost their natural homes to urban development and human-driven climate change are seeking sanctuary at airports. Vulnerable butterflies have camped out at the dunes near LAX; an endangered garter snake has found one of its last refuges at San Francisco International Airport. Terrapin turtles searching for egg-laying sites have triggered traffic jams on JFK’s runways. But perhaps no group is in greater peril than the Northeast’s grassland birds, which, in recent decades, have found themselves almost exclusively relegated to airports and airfields. It’s a responsibility that these travel hubs never asked for, and mostly do not want. Now the regional survival of many species may hinge on the hospitality of some of the country’s most bird-averse spots.[Read: A basic premise of conservation looks shakier than ever]By most accounts, upland sandpipers, eastern meadowlarks, grasshopper sparrows, and other grassland birds have roots in the Midwest, only arriving en masse to the Northeast during the 19th century as European settlers converted massive tracts of land into agricultural fields. The birds found grass short enough to forage for insects in and tall enough to cloak their burrow-esque nests, and their population boomed. But just a century or so later, as America’s farming prospects shifted west, East Coasters began to abandon their fields. Some land regressed into forest; some was developed for other use. Almost as quickly as grassland-bird numbers had surged in the area, they plummeted.In many northeastern states, grasshopper sparrows and eastern meadowlarks are now listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern. Upland sandpipers, once abundant throughout the region, appear to have entirely vanished from Rhode Island, according to Charles Clarkson, the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island; they may soon be gone from Vermont too. The birds have several holdouts scattered throughout the region—among them, private farmlands, Maine’s blueberry barrens, even a few of New York’s landfills. But as reliable grasslands continue to grow scarcer, airports in particular “have become disproportionately important,” says Pamela Hunt, New Hampshire Audubon’s senior biologist for avian conservation.Airports, of course, were never designed to be conservation sites—if anything, their core dictate is antithetical to that. “Our mission at the FAA is safe air travel; that is it,” says Amy Anderson, a wildlife biologist with the Federal Aviation Administration. That mission is very often synonymous with making the country’s travel hubs “less attractive for wildlife.” Airport lawns, which primarily serve as an aesthetically appealing buffer for water runoff and planes that skid off runways, are regularly mowed with blades that can destroy nests; they’re treated with chemicals that kill off the insects that many birds and small mammals eat. Creatures that mosey onto runways, where they can damage hardware or compromise landings and takeoffs, can expect to be shooed away with all manner of noise cannons, lasers, pyrotechnics, or even trained peregrine falcons. During emergencies, animals that can’t otherwise be dealt with may even be shot. When animals end up on these properties, it’s generally not because they’re pristine or safe. It’s “because they have no other option,” Clarkson told me.For certain animals, these odd real-estate choices have paid dividends. The San Francisco garter snake and its primary prey, the California red-legged frog—federally listed as endangered and threatened, respectively—have found a stable home on SFO property, according to Natalie Reeder, the airport’s former wildlife biologist. Of the half dozen or so populations of garter snakes still found in California, SFO’s is the only one that is not in “really big trouble,” Reeder told me.[Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals]But SFO’s haven is more an exception than the norm. After many years of sustaining a “very nicely growing population” of burrowing owls—a state-listed species of special concern—the airport in San Jose, California, stopped maintaining the birds’ artificial burrows, and their numbers plunged, says Sandra Menzel, a senior biologist at the natural-resource-management company Albion, who has studied the birds. A survey conducted last year found just one breeding pair at the airport, down from a 2002 peak of around 40. (An SJC spokesperson told me that “the reasons for the decline in owl numbers at the Airport are not fully known,” and pointed out that the birds have been declining in general “throughout the South Bay.”) In the Northeast, too, there’s been “all sorts of conflict,” says Patrick Comins, the executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. In his state, he told me, grassland birds staked out territory at Meriden-Markham Municipal Airport—only to later be crowded out by an intensive mowing regimen and space-hogging solar panels. (MMK didn’t respond to a request for comment.)From the airports’ perspective, having vulnerable species on site is usually more trouble than it’s worth—especially when their winged tenants start to endanger humans attempting flight. Since the late 1980s or so, when the FAA started keeping track, birds and planes have collided more than 220,000 times—incidents that have, at times, downed entire aircrafts. The most serious concerns are usually big, flocking species, such as gulls or geese. But “even a 10-gram songbird, if it hits right, could take out an airplane,” Scott Rush, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University, told me.The tactics that airports deploy to avoid bird strikes don’t always work. Oregon’s Portland International Airport has, for many years, been aggressively stripping its grounds of vegetation, to the point of exposing the underlying soil, to deter grass-loving geese. “It looks like the moon,” says Nick Atwell, the senior natural-resources and wildlife manager at the Port of Portland. But the anti-goose strategy inadvertently transformed the airport’s landscape into perfect, barren bait for a threatened bird called the streaked horned lark. Despite PDX’s best efforts to keep the larks off runways, they’re now posing a strike risk. Atwell worries that the airport could become, or already is, an ecological sink: a habitat that lures in animals, only to accelerate their decline.That may have already happened at New Jersey’s Atlantic City International Airport. In the early 2000s, the airport set aside 300 acres of its property as a sanctuary for upland sandpipers and other grassland birds, even modifying its regular mowing schedule in the summer to spare their nests. But within months of the intervention, “things went a little haywire,” says Chris Boggs, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who’s been working with the airport since the early 1990s. Boggs estimates that total recorded bird strikes skyrocketed by 60 to 70 percent. He remembers scraping broken sandpiper bodies off the pavement, unable to stop himself from tallying up who was left. “We had three,” he would say to himself. “Now we have two.” By 2019, the airport had resumed its regular mowing protocol. It had wanted to help the birds, Boggs told me. Instead, “we were killing them off.”[Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America]At a few northeastern sites, humans and grassland birds have negotiated a truce. Pease, in New Hampshire, is one; another is Massachusetts’ Westover Air Reserve Base, one of the largest sanctuaries for grassland birds in the entire Northeast. Sandpipers, grasshopper sparrows, and eastern meadowlarks can all be found breeding on its 1,300-plus acres of viable habitat, which are far quieter and less traveled than commercial airports, says Andrew Vitz, the state ornithologist. Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife has aided in several of the site’s conservation efforts, including the planting of bird-friendly grasses.Replicating those efforts could, in theory, turn more of the Northeast into hospitable grassland. Airports could, for instance, swap out some of their turf grass for hardier native species that require less summertime mowing, as Westover has. But many such proposals still feel like Band-Aids at best, says José Ramírez-Garofalo, a biologist at Rutgers University who is studying grassland birds at landfills. The birds are mostly confined to fragmented, artificial plots of land where people’s needs will almost always trump animals’.In an ideal world, airports would just be layovers for grassland birds on their way to roomy tracts of protected land that they could call their own. But those habitats no longer exist. “If we truly want grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers to be a significant part of the community, it’s going to take a heck of an effort” to create space for them, says Brian Washburn, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture—efforts that people may not be willing to make. Which leaves animals still turning to airports as places of last resort. Creatures’ options are now so limited that even the ones repeatedly booted off the premises will often try to run, slither, or dig themselves back on, says Guiming Wang, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University.These strange, human-made habitats are now some of the last places in the Northeast where birders can glimpse grassland species and hear their whirring calls. “People from all around the region will come and see them,” Ramírez-Garofalo told me. But with the world’s appetite for travel increasing, experts such as Hunt, of New Hampshire Audubon, worry that even these few stable bird populations won’t be around for long. “It’s perfectly reasonable to think that despite everything we’re doing, they’ll still blink out,” she told me. As airports’ human clientele grows, their tolerance for their wild and rare residents may only further shrink.

After over three years, federal student loan borrowers will likely have to start repaying their debt. According to the terms of a debt ceiling deal struck by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden, the extended pause on student loan repayment will end on August 30th. 
While a previous announcement from the Education Department had vowed to end the pause on August 29—provided the Supreme Court had not yet released a decision on Biden's student loan forgiveness plan—the debt ceiling deal solidifies this promise. If the bill passes, the Education Department will be statutorily barred from announcing yet another last-minute extension—as officials have done on eight occasions since August 2020, including two separate continuations of supposedly "final" extensions.
While fiscal conservatives have decried the recent debt ceiling deal due to its lackluster cap on non-defense discretionary spending, solidifying a start date for student loan repayment is a clear win for anyone concerned by the extended pause in student loan repayment.
"The president says that it was his plan all along to return to repayment by the end of the summer," Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) told The Hill. "While I wish I could take his words at face value, his past actions have showed me otherwise. Passing the Fiscal Responsibility Act is the only sure-fire way to force a return to repayment and prevent the president from issuing another illegal extension."
But the Biden Administration has also claimed the student loan-related portions of the debt ceiling deal as a victory, focusing on the fact that critical elements of Biden's student loan forgiveness proposal were spared, including the supercharged Income-Driven Repayment plan. 
"President Biden protected the student debt relief plan in its entirety," one White House spokesperson told Newsweek. "The Administration announced back in November that the current student loan payment pause would end this summer—this agreement makes no changes to that plan."
Many progressives are framing the end of a nearly three-and-a-half-year pause on paying their student loans as disastrous.
"Borrowers got sold out. That's, I mean, the general feeling that I'm having, and I know a lot of our supporters are having today," Natalia Abrams, president of the Student Debt Crisis Center, told The Hill. "Trying to say you've won here when, in fact, for so many borrowers, that payment pause has actually been by far more relief for borrowers that owe $100,000 or $200,000 than the one-time debt cancellation—and plus a lot of people don't have faith in that."
According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the student loan pause costs taxpayers about $5 billion every month–bringing the total cost to almost $200 billion by the time repayment goes into effect. 
The post Debt Ceiling Deal Will End The Student Loan Repayment Pause appeared first on Reason.com.

The war in Ukraine is the most important foreign policy issue facing the U.S. president today — but aspiring candidate Ron DeSantis can’t articulate a coherent view. By trying to placate everybody, the Republican governor of Florida is pleasing no one. And his dodging is an insult to the voters he is courting.

Even after officially announcing his presidential run, DeSantis can’t give a straight answer when asked about the Ukraine war. In a May 26 Newsmax interview, he praised former president Donald Trump’s “instinct” of pushing for a settlement, but said he hoped the war would be over before the next presidential inauguration in January 2025. When pressed on what he would do if elected, DeSantis pivoted to China and called on European countries to “do more” for security on their own continent.

Two days earlier, when asked during a Fox News interview what he would do about the Russia-Ukraine war on day one of his presidency, DeSantis said he would first go after “wokeness” in the military. He then reiterated his support for a settlement, without elaborating what it would look like or how he would get there. In DeSantis’s campaign launch event last week on Twitter, Ukraine was not mentioned.

The candidate’s answers all sidestep the crucial question: Does DeSantis support continuing the huge U.S.-led program of military and economic aid or not? Every other GOP presidential candidate is able to answer this question. And every GOP lawmaker will have to weigh in on it this autumn, when Congress will have to vote on billions more in funding.

Anyone who wants to be commander in chief should be able to lay out a basic plan for the war he or she would inherit. Vague comments on achieving settlements and avoiding quagmires amount to pablum.

Many GOP insiders tell me that DeSantis is trying to avoid taking a side in the growing Republican foreign policy divide between “New Right” national conservatives, who are pushing for broad cuts in Ukraine aid, and traditional Republicans who don’t think their standard-bearer in 2024 should be running against Biden as a dove.

“He’s trying to appeal to the hardcore populists and the regular Republicans, hoping to get enough people from both camps to get through the primary,” one GOP foreign-policy insider told me. “But if the hardcore people want the real thing, they can choose Trump. And if you want the anti-Trump, there are more appealing options.”

DeSantis likely doesn’t care about the criticisms of his Ukraine policy coming from the candidates trailing him — such as Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Chris Sununu or Asa Hutchinson. But he clearly cares about Trump, and the former president is making Ukraine a top issue in his anti-DeSantis efforts. Trump won’t express support for Ukraine at all, promising to end the war with a settlement “within 24 hours.”

In a statement to Tucker Carlson in March, DeSantis called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute,” and said extensive U.S. involvement was not in America’s national interest. Then, facing criticism, he changed his tune, affirming that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. Trump’s response was to accuse DeSantis of using “neocon rhetoric.”

Trump’s callousness and ignorance on Ukraine is pushing many GOP insiders to give DeSantis a temporary pass on the issue. Many Republicans on Capitol Hill and in donor circles assume that DeSantis will back Ukraine if he makes it to the general election, but he just needs to win the primary first.

But what if that assumption is wrong? No one really knows what drives DeSantis on foreign policy these days. Some point to his hiring of a Ukraine hawk as his only known campaign foreign policy adviser. But that doesn’t mean that this adviser’s view will win the day inside a populist-dominated campaign.

Some say DeSantis is a “Jacksonian,” meaning that he thinks that U.S. foreign policy should be limited to a narrow calculation of national interest and that he eschews values promotion abroad. But even leading “Jacksonian” thinker Walter Russell Mead has said continued U.S. aid to Ukraine is crucial — which goes further than DeSantis.

“Helping Ukraine is not a charity project to be undertaken out of sentiment. Nor is it a strategic distraction that weakens our hand in the Indo-Pacific,” Mead wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal. “In his blindness and folly, Vladimir Putin has handed the U.S. a golden opportunity. We should seize it with both hands.”

DeSantis’s foreign policy record as a congressman is not a reliable indicator of his current views. He supported U.S. military aid to Ukraine as early as 2014 (along with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement). He was against President Barack Obama’s plan to use force in Syria but later criticized Trump for not defending the Kurds there. In any case, DeSantis doesn’t seem to feel obligated to stick to any of his foreign policy positions from those days.

DeSantis is correct when he says that we can’t know what the Russia-Ukraine war will look like in 2025. That’s why he should tell American voters how he would handle the crisis if he were president now. If DeSantis is just following the polls, his equivocations make sense. But that’s not a sound way to craft national security policy — and it’s certainly not leadership.

When Bashar al-Assad touched down in Riyadh last week, to be embraced by the Saudi king on the occasion of Syria’s readmittance to the Arab League, the Syrian War drew to a close, and with it the Arab Spring. His rule secure, his broken nation quiescent once again, Assad has indisputably won. Following its only tangible success, the Tunisian Revolution, being overturned by president Kais Saied’s bloodless coup, the final results are in — and, contrary to initial assumptions, they show a firm victory for absolute monarchy.
But though objectively a failure, the bloody, tangled events of the Arab Spring shaped the world of 2023. In a strange way, the war in Ukraine is downstream of the fiery suicide of a frustrated Tunisian street vendor in 2010, and all the dashed hopes and human suffering that flowed from it. The Middle East’s convulsions indeed changed the world, but not in a way anyone participating expected or intended.
As a reporter on the ground, it looked to me at first, as it did to many, as if the popular revolt across the Arab world was a vindication of Fukuyama’s much-misunderstood thesis of the arc of history inclining towards the worldwide victory of liberal democracy. Young, dynamic, idealistic protestors were leading their countries away from the autocratic regimes which had mismanaged their countries in the half century since independence from British and French colonial rule. It was the opposite of the failed attempt to impose reform that had broken Iraq: instead, long-repressed social forces from within had surfaced, ready and capable of leading their countries into a better future.
After all, within 10 days, Tunisia’s dictatorship had fallen following a wave of popular protest; within weeks, the protests had spread across North Africa and then the wider Arab world. In Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria and Yemen, in even Saudi Arabia and Jordan, it seemed as if the oppressive dynastic regimes of the Arab world were about to collapse under the weight of history. Instead, the Arab Spring represented the collision between our guiding myths and objective reality; rather than the apotheosis of the post-Cold War liberal order, it marked the beginning of its decline.
The vast and tragic gulf between what the protestors hoped for and what they got is, simply, a bitter lesson in reality. There were always two Arab Springs: the optimistic narrative of what was happening, boosted by a thousand high-flown journalistic comment pieces from abroad, and the darker, more complex realities on the ground. Like Russian families in Anna Karenina, each country’s own Arab Spring failed for its own unhappy reasons, tied to the hard, immutable facts of demography, history and power. The widening fissure between idealistic Western narratives, drawn from the teleological assumptions of unexamined liberalism, and the brutal reality helped shatter the post-Cold War order: but it was ordinary Arab civilians who paid the price. What became of the Arab Spring therefore holds many lessons for us, if only we are willing to confront them.
The Arab world is not so different to home, after all. Consider how Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and the coup which undid it two years later, uncannily foreshadowed the political convulsions of our own Western societies. In Egypt, it was the self-professed liberals who supported Sisi’s coup. Notionally committed to democracy and liberalism, Egypt’s liberals disliked the results of the country’s first-ever democratic elections and did everything they could do to undo them. The winners were seen as backwards provincials, dangerous social conservatives who wanted to return the country to a mythical, idealised past. Justifying their stance against a democratic result they detested, they created elaborate conspiracy theories involving malicious foreign actors, which invalidated the election results and justified any action necessary to revoke its results. Tracking the course of the Arab Spring, then, may help us to understand our own political order with greater clarity.

The first myth to be shattered was of the power of protest to express and impose the popular will. In reality, in every case in which Arab Spring protests successfully unseated rulers without external intervention, it was the armed forces who did it, and not people power alone. In Egypt, it was the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, which first refused to fire on the protestors and then unseated Hosni Mubarak. The vast crowds in Tahrir Square, so inspiring and appealing to both local and international media, merely provided a colourful and dramatic justification for what was objectively a military coup. In Tunisia, the dictator Ben Ali had delegated the job of political oppression to his police force — he mistrusted the country’s small, professional army — and in the process unwittingly sowed the seeds of his own downfall. It was Tunisia’s army, under the guidance of military chief General Rachid Ammar, and not the protestors on the streets, which surrounded the presidential palace and forced him to flee after just 10 days of protests. The Tunisian revolution, essentially, was won in the barracks long before it ever began in the streets.
Yet the myth of people power unseating tyrants took hold across the West as well as the Arab World, encouraging demonstrators to take to the streets and pushing Western governments to rhetorically declare support for events about which they in fact felt deeply ambivalent. Browbeaten into military intervention in Libya against his better judgment by Cameron and Sarkozy’s desire to place themselves on the right side of history, Obama took Libya’s post-war chaos as a warning not to intervene in other Arab countries. But regional powers such as Qatar and Turkey, as well as civilian demonstrators in Syria and the Western commentators supporting them, erroneously drew the opposite conclusion: that after enough bloodshed, the United States would eventually find itself forced to intervene, unseating Assad and installing some form of representative government. This mismatch between hope and reality, empty rhetoric and action, would be tragic for Syria’s people, condemning them to a decade of war and destruction.
Before the war began in 2011, few observers had expected the protests to spread to Syria: sandwiched between the cautionary examples of Lebanon and Iraq, Syrians were assumed to be wary of state breakdown in a society riven by division. The armed forces, tied to the regime through ethnic solidarity and the fear of Sunni vengeance, in the case of its disproportionate numbers of Alawites, and through the patronage granted by secure middle-class housing projects in the case of the Sunni bulk of the officer corps, remained loyal to the ruling dynasty, eliminating the prospect of a military coup. Yet competing regional powers flooded Syria’s 1,500-odd armed rebel groups with weapons, condemning an already poorly-coordinated uprising to internal fracture and division from the start.
The country’s largely apolitical Sunni urban middle class stayed dormant: indeed, it was the Sunni middle classes of Aleppo and Damascus who made up the bulk of 2015’s refugee flow to Europe, voting with their feet to stay out of the conflict entirely. The country’s Christian, Kurdish, Alawite, Druze and Shia minorities, which feared Sunni dominance more than they hated the regime, presented an impenetrable hurdle to rebel success: in preserving Assad’s rule, Syria’s demography really was the revolution’s destiny. As regime crackdowns on Sunni protestors hardened attitudes, the war developed a sectarian dynamic quite alien to the explicitly inclusive aims of the original protest committees. Government warnings that the rebels were dominated by jihadists became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as rebel groups relied on jihadists’ superior commitment and discipline to win battles in the field, then found themselves outcompeted by them in providing stable governance and imposing order.
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Unable to dislodge Assad through protest at the beginning of the revolution, the Syrian revolutionaries were forced to rely on a deus ex machina, American military intervention, which would never come. All sides were haunted, in different ways, by the Libyan debacle: trying to summon Western intervention into being, the rebels attempted to recreate the Libyan rebel capital and supply hub of Benghazi through their failed attempt to seize Aleppo, frittering away their limited resources in a gruelling years-long siege and counter-siege that would see the country’s commercial capital destroyed. The already intransigent Assad, seeing Gaddafi’s fate, became more determined than ever to neither give up power nor make concessions. Washington, meanwhile, traumatised by Iraq’s post-invasion carnage and fearing a rerun of Libya’s post-war chaos, resolved to stay away from a direct intervention, hoping that it could feed the rebels enough weapons to force concessions from Assad without bringing about his total collapse. Forced by moral and political considerations to be seen to do something, but fearful of doing too much, America’s haphazard drip of arms supplies was just enough to prolong the war interminably without ever allowing rebel victory. In this sense, the unintended anarchy that followed Gaddafi’s downfall  had already lost the Syrian rebels the war before their own revolution ever truly began.
But the Libyan example would also have another consequence, now playing out on our own continent: Putin was furious that the limited intervention to ground Gaddafi’s air force to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, reluctantly agreed to by Russia at the UN, evolved into a months-long campaign of close air support for Libya’s rebels, ending in Gaddafi’s miserable roadside execution. Eager to avoid a repetition in what was once a Soviet client state, Putin gambled that Russia could outcompete the US in Syria: carefully devised American escalation in training and arms deliveries could be thwarted by direct Russian intervention. Fine words and shiny new weapons would eventually prove no match for Russia’s firmer will and higher appetite for risk: through intervening in Syria, Russia could hasten the end of America’s unipolar moment.
In Syria, Putin’s gamble turned out to be correct: Assad’s victory was indeed a historic turning point, marking Russia’s return to the world stage as an actor able to direct the course of history. While American officials insisted there was no military solution to the Syrian war, Russia promptly delivered one. The Russian intervention in 2015 made Assad’s victory inevitable, allowing America to turn with some relief to the campaign against Isis, then ravaging European capitals, and to quietly divide the country into two spheres of influence separated by the river Euphrates. As Putin foresaw, even America’s final chosen proxies in Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Force, would find themselves abandoned over time as the White House’s revolving door upended any coherent long-term planning. In a hasty rewriting of recent history, the fractious rebel alliance which took part in Turkey’s invasion of north-eastern Syria, which included factions previously armed by the US, was now denounced by Washington as renegade war criminals. In Russia’s eyes, the uncertainties inherent in America’s increasingly chaotic democratic system were the greatest vulnerability for Washington’s allies. Rather than the arc of history leaning towards liberal democracy, the abrupt policy shifts inherent to its system meant that liberal democracy itself was its own greatest strategic weakness.
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Far more than the Afghanistan withdrawal that inspired such liberal angst, it was the lessons Putin drew from the Arab Spring wars that surely encouraged him to invade Ukraine. For Russia, after all, Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution was as much an unwelcome European outcrop of the Arab Spring as of the post-Soviet colour revolutions he feared, as West-leaning demonstrators in the streets took down a Moscow-friendly ruler, with Putin warning darkly that unsavoury local actors were in fact controlling events on the ground. Russia’s first invasion, using local proxies and quasi-deniable Little Green Men in 2014, at the height of the Syrian war, was a success. In 2022, after the effectiveness of direct Russian intervention had seemingly been proved in Syria, Putin would try again, this time openly and in full force.
Again, Putin gambled that American rhetorical support for pro-Western demonstrators would not be matched by sufficient action to outweigh his fait accompli; again, he anticipated that America’s voting public, cynical of military intervention after the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would have no appetite for a risky foreign adventure. Though Putin’s hopes of swiftly decapitating Ukraine’s government last year were dramatically shattered, and his assessment of his own military capabilities proved wildly overoptimistic, it is still too early to judge the validity of his broader assumptions. Ukraine’s prospects of eventual victory will be greatly affected, one way or another, by who enters the White House next year. While liberal commentators — including Fukuyama himself — claim that Ukraine’s military successes are proof of democracy’s inherent superiority over autocracy, it is difficult, observing the Republican politicians currently bickering on social media, to share their triumphalism.
In the end, apart from the vast loss of life suffered by the Syrian people, and Libya’s lesser but still pitiful decade of destructive anarchy, the Arab world enters the post-Arab Spring era looking essentially the same as when its great convulsions began. The arc of history turned full circle: either the same autocrats are in charge, or cannier successors have taken their place; the region remains poorly governed by kleptocratic authoritarians and divided along much the same social and demographic fault lines as in 2011.
The only difference is that the very possibility of political change has been discredited: recent outbreaks of popular dissent, as in Lebanon and Iraq, are easily quelled without any international fuss. America’s local client states, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia, are now openly indifferent to satisfying the changeable whims of their unreliable patron, and confident that they can pursue their own paths and forge new alliances without any repercussions. As Bashar al-Assad’s triumphant return to the regional fold shows, the Arab Spring may have failed to change the Arab world, but it firmly marked the limits of the West’s ability, and desire, to reshape the world in its image.

The term “neoliberalism” has come to be a general term of abuse in many circles. Out of the mouths of Latin American populists like Argentina’s Cristina Fernández or Mexico’s Andrès Manuel López Obrador, it is simply a synonym for capitalism which they denounce as the root of inequality and exploitation. A more sensible definition is the more restricted one that I used in chapters 2 and 3 of my last book Liberalism and Its Discontents, where it refers to a specific interpretation of market economics associated with economists like Milton Friedman and the Chicago School that articulated a broad critique of state intervention in markets on economic efficiency. This led to a policy agenda, carried out by politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, that pushed for a series of reforms including reduction of trade barriers and subsidies, stability of money supply, fiscal balance, deregulation, privatization, and the like—the famous “Washington Consensus” associated with economist John Williamson of the Peterson Institute.Neoliberalism in the latter sense has been criticized extensively not just by the progressive left, but by mainstream economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik, and at this point is a spent force politically. In the 2010s, it gave way to new ideas like modern monetary theory (MMT), which argued that neoliberalism’s concern for monetary stability and balanced budgets was wrong, and that governments had much more leeway to run fiscal deficits and print money than they formerly believed. The Biden administration, and in many respects the Trump administration, bought into this rejection of neoliberalism by running enormous deficits, which up until two years ago did not seem to engender any inflationary consequences.___STEADY_PAYWALL___The laws of economics had not been repealed, however. In retrospect, the period from the mid-1980s when post-Volcker America tackled its inflation problem up until the financial crisis of 2008—what was at the time called the “great moderation”—was the product of unique circumstances that will not return anytime soon. This situation reflected the addition of several hundred million new workers from China and a handful of other developing countries to the global labor market. This held down wages and prices across the board, and led to massive shifts of low-skill labor from rich countries to emerging ones. In addition, the world saw the shift to a digital economy whose innovations were finally showing up in productivity numbers.The transformation of China from an impoverished developing country to an upper-middle-income one with a significantly lower growth rate changed the global economy once again and has reverted the world back to the more normal one that prevailed a generation earlier. Budget deficits on levels prompted first by responses to the 2008 crisis and then by the Covid pandemic have contributed to this new inflationary normal. Central banks around the world, beginning with the U.S. Federal Reserve, are now racing to raise interest rates and constrain the growth of money supplies to fend off levels of inflation not seen since the 1980s.This new reality is a good occasion to look back at the neoliberal agenda and consider which parts of it were actually valid and were too readily discarded, and which aspects of its critique remain on target. This was triggered for me in listening to a recent dinner talk by Bob Zoellick, who had served in a host of senior roles at Treasury, the office of the United States Trade Representative, State Department, and the World Bank, as well as by an article by my Stanford colleague Peter Henry that sought to re-assess the impact of the Washington Consensus. Bob suggested looking again at the list of policy recommendations enumerated in the Washington Consensus and asking which ones were really wrong.Take for example monetary stability and fiscal prudence. Many aspects of neoliberalism were themselves responses to the economic crises of the 1970s and 80s, when suddenly rising oil prices triggered not just inflation but in several cases hyperinflation. This then led to balance-of-payments crises, massive devaluations, recessions, and ultimately a series of sovereign defaults across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Many developing countries lost more than a decade’s worth of growth.I remember visiting Brazil and Argentina in the early 1990s. Inflation in Brazil was then running at around 20 percent per month, which I thought was extraordinary until I got to Buenos Aires. There I was told that Brazil had not yet experienced hyperinflation, which had reached some 20,000 percent on an annual basis a bit before my visit. If you were paid your salary on a Friday, you would immediately go out and spend it because it would be worth much less by Monday. Such was the nature of life before neoliberalism.The moderation of inflation in subsequent years was not just the product of China’s entry into the global system, but of acceptance of the monetary component of the Washington Consensus. Newly independent central banks made inflation targeting and monetary stability their top priority, and the world benefited. Countries that haven’t accepted this part of the consensus like Turkey and Argentina continue to suffer from debilitating rates of inflation.Now that we are living in an inflationary world, the logic of that part of the Washington Consensus may start to make more sense to younger people who didn't experience the 1970s-80s version. In the next post, I want to take up the issue of industrial policy, which has made a return as part of the post-neoliberal agenda.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: A billion-dollar note issued by the Bank of Zimbabwe. (Rob / Unsplash)

Can faith be restored in a disillusioned world? Traditional modes of engaging the sacred have lost their hold on people’s loyalties, and our current hyper-individualized improvisations are not equal to the task. The soul sickness of despair has taken hold and is spreading, gnawing away at all the vital connections that make life worth living.
As to whether traditional forms of religion can be revived, or new forms established, that are capable of rebinding what has fallen apart, neither I nor anyone can say. Religious awakenings and great cultural movements cannot be scripted or legislated; they await some spark of inspiration whose specific nature can never be predicted in advance.
But I believe there are things we could do to make the intellectual ground more receptive to such a spark. If we change the way we think, we may find that we have awakened our capacity to believe.
As I argued in my last essay, American society is suffering from a contagion of despair – feelings of alienation and homelessness, of being an unwelcome stranger in one’s own land. This sense of estrangement began on the left, with the emergence of a mass “adversary culture” in the 60s, but more recently it has jumped the ideological divide and infected the right as well.
I believe that this alienation is based on deep-seated intellectual confusion, rooted in the manifestly incorrect idea that people are naturally pure and good and that all our problems are due to oppressive hierarchies and unjust authority. This is what I call the romantic heresy; it is the acid bath in which all our most precious attachments, to each other and to the sacred, are presently dissolving. If we can pull this untenable assumption out into the open, interrogate it and expose its errors, and then reexamine our place in society in a new light, perhaps we can reason ourselves back toward faith.
This introspection and reappraisal need to begin in the progressive quarters of American society. It’s true that, at present, problems on the right are more urgent: Despair on the right is burning with a nihilistic fury that threatens to wreck our constitutional order. In the short term, then, we have to resist this fury, outvote it, and outlast it. But over the longer term, our hopes for genuine renewal – political, spiritual, civilizational renewal – depend on the leading elements of society, those who wield the lion’s share of cultural and economic power and who are the primary initiators of change and development. The right’s role is essentially reactive: It can react constructively to critique and moderate the initiatives of the left, or it can strike out blindly and throw sand in the gears. But it is the inescapable destiny of the left to set the tune. If our society is to recover the internal confidence that makes religious and civilizational vitality possible, the recovery must begin in those precincts of society where that confidence was initially shaken and lost.
I want to talk here about restoring civic faith – faith in our modern way of life, faith in our country – but I think it’s best to start by explaining what I mean by faith at the religious or existential level. Existential faith is not ultimately a belief, but rather a choice – the elemental choice that expresses an individual’s fundamental relationship with the world around him. It is the choice, in the words of Viktor Frankl, to say “yes to life, in spite of everything.” Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived years in Nazi concentration camps, was able to persevere by seeing that meaning in life – reasons to go on living – could be found even under the most appalling circumstances imaginable. According to Frankl, the main sources of meaning in normal life are work (creativity, dedication, usefulness to others) and love (not only in the form of relationships, but also experiences – say, of music or natural beauty). But even when opportunities for work and love have been stripped from you, there is still meaning to be found in suffering – which, sooner or later, everyone will have to endure. “Everything can be taken from man but one thing,” Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning: “the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Ground down by brutal, unremitting pain and hardship, many could find nothing more to expect from life. Frankl, though, said this was the wrong question: “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” Even when a person’s life has been reduced to nothing but suffering, “his unique opportunity lies in the way he bears this burden.” Bearing his burden with courage and dignity – with the idea in the back of his mind that his loved ones would be proud of him if they saw how he faced this great trial – was what life was expecting of Viktor Frankl. He said yes, in spite of everything.
Living in the peaceful, prosperous United States, we are worlds removed from the kinds of horrors Frankl was forced to endure. Yet all of us have been touched by tragedy and loss, and some of us have been well and truly bludgeoned by them. By the grace of faith, we make it through these dark times by recalling and giving thanks for all the many blessings we have to be grateful for. We say yes to life, in spite of all its difficulties and disappointments.
With the decline of organized religion, we have been losing access to those traditional communal forms through which this existential faith is shared and expressed. When or whether we will return to shared, communal experiences of the sacred, whether through traditional religious forms or new ones, remains to be seen. We can no more predict the future of religion than we can the future discoveries of science.
But there are other, sublunary forms of faith that do not rely on religious inspiration – namely, faith in our way of life and faith in our country. These do not connect us to the transcendent realm of ultimate questions, but they can bind us to one another, to our past, and to our future. Burke famously called society “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Faith in this context consists of acknowledging that partnership and one’s own membership in it. It means saying yes, in spite of everything.
Our contemporary way of life, pioneered by the United States but now global in extent, is the way of progress. For progressives to uproot the error that has led them and all of us astray, they need to be worthy of their name: Progressives need to rediscover faith in progress.
A widespread naïve faith in progress arose in the North Atlantic world during the 19th century, only to be shattered in the 20th by the bloodletting and destruction of two world wars and the ensuing threat of nuclear annihilation. But this was a shallow faith, maintained in happy, ignorant denial of progress’s two-edged sword.
A mature and durable faith in progress does not mean blindness to the dark side of increasing knowledge and power and riches. It does not rest on any facile assumptions that everything will work out for the best. The words of Reinhold Niebuhr are worth recalling here: “There is therefore progress in human history; but it is a progress in human potencies, both for good and for evil.” There is no final, perfect equilibrium toward which we are striving; there is no expectation of ultimate victory.
Faith in progress requires only that we recognize the fact of progress as a historical reality, and the potential for further progress as a future possibility. With appreciation of humanity’s past accomplishments come pride and gratitude; with awareness of future possibilities comes the responsibility to be worthy of our good fortune and leave the world at least a little better than we found it.
As to the fact of progress, a picture is worth a thousand words:

In lieu of more pictures, or many more thousands of words, I’ll simply note that I could have added similar graphs – with lines hugging the x-axis from as far back as it goes until a century or two ago and then zooming nearly straight upward – for population, literacy, and life expectancy. And over the same time period as those near-vertical ascents in material well-being, we have also seen the birth and spread of popular self-government under the rule of law, the eradication of chattel slavery, and the emancipation of women.
This is the reality of human progress. The gradual development and realization of human capacities for creativity and connection have been a throughline of the human story since the emergence of our species, but the pace in the modern era is unlike anything ever experienced before. We are in the midst of an astonishing revolution of increasing knowledge and material betterment – the greatest change in human affairs since the dawn of agriculture ten millennia ago. And the revolution, now global in extent, still has no end in sight.
It is an important clue as to the nature of our current problems that the fact of human progress is not widely known or appreciated. Surveys reveal that most people simply have no idea how much better things are now than they were before – and, in particular, about the astonishing recent gains in human welfare outside the North Atlantic region. And this isn’t purely passive ignorance, either. There is considerable resistance to acknowledging improvement in almost any domain – from global poverty to the resource-intensiveness of economic growth to air and water quality to American race relations – for fear that doing so amounts to excuse-making for the status quo.
It is worth dwelling on our state of actively maintained ignorance and what it says about us. In a healthy culture, the revolution of the past couple of centuries would be common knowledge: Schoolchildren could be expected to recite rhymes about it, as we once did about when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The fact that most people are unaware of the real record of human progress means, quite simply, that we are lost. We don’t know where we are in history, the unique position we occupy. We don’t know the special privilege that we enjoy, or the weighty responsibility that we shoulder.
Once we face up to the fact of progress, the perverse falsity of the romantic heresy becomes obvious. The powers and riches that we enjoy and take for granted are the legacy of a massive mobilization of organization, planning, self-discipline, focus, and diligence – the antithesis of romantic antinomianism. And those powers and riches are the very reason that we are able to enjoy the luxury of a romantic streak running through our civilization. The romantic ideal of liberating the individual from oppressive constraints has indeed been progressively realized – but through mass submission to a new set of looser but still-binding constraints. Real progress is an intricately orchestrated symphony, not a cacophony of barbaric yawps.
Resistance to acknowledging our immense progress frequently takes the form of denigrating the significance of past accomplishments because they were the handiwork of flawed people. But such criticism ignores what it actually means to make progress. All progress, all movement toward the higher and lighter, is necessarily a product of something lower and darker – where else could it come from? If we deny the fact of progress because it emerges from a flawed past, then in the same breath we are denying the possibility of future progress because of its roots in a flawed present.
We live inside the flux of history and there is no escape: We can rise higher through history, but we can never stand outside it. So yes, capitalism was mixed up with slavery and colonialism, democracy was mixed up with oppression and aggressive war, the Enlightenment was mixed up with scientific racism, feminism was mixed up with eugenics, environmentalism was mixed up with nativism and fascism – but what of it? In history’s vast tapestry, everything is mixed up with everything else.
In that wonderful meditation on the tragedy of politics, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, the theme of good and evil’s uncomfortable proximity comes up again and again. Here’s a representative passage:
“Dirt’s a funny thing,” the Boss said. “Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt.”
The corrupt politician Willie Stark is speaking here, rationalizing his own dirty dealings. He is wrong, of course, that the world’s complexity absolves him from responsibility for his many crimes and transgressions. But he is right that there is no escape from the complexity of the world and its legacy to us. As Stark’s former aide and the book’s narrator, Jack Burden, observes in the novel’s concluding line: “We shall go out of the house and into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.”
Facing up to the reality of progress carries with it two emotional corollaries. Recognizing the immense amount of progress already achieved, we should feel profound gratitude; recognizing the possibility of further progress in the future, we should feel a deep sense of obligation to help bring it about. If you grasp the deep recesses of the human past, and the relative eyeblink during which modern conditions have obtained, it’s just impossible not to be struck by how absurdly lucky you are that your character’s appointed hour on the stage is now.
Gratitude, in my view of things, is the cardinal virtue: saying yes to life, staying mindful of the blessings it brings, orients us properly in all that we do, encouraging us to reach out and connect to the world and others and to hold ourselves open when they reach out to connect with us. Feelings of gratitude naturally spill over into the desire to pay it forward – in this case, so that your children and grandchildren can experience the same kinds of ongoing improvements that you were lucky enough to enjoy. And if you take the time to figure out how progress actually occurs, you’ll realize that you can’t pay it forward by taking stands and signaling virtue. No, you must participate in, or in some way actively support, real-world efforts to actually get things done. A true ethos of progress steels us to resist the performative temptation.
We commit to trying to improve the world even knowing that progress is always double-edged. There will be unintended consequences: Solving one problem will create others, because that’s the way the world works. There is no final destination, no final safe harbor. There is only the choice between growing and dying, and we choose to side with life and its growth.
If progressives can rediscover faith in progress – if they can learn to say yes to progress, in spite of everything – they can recover their faith in their country as well. For what is America, at its best, but the embodiment of the spirit of progress? The United States has been the central proving ground for the two great liberating revolutions of modernity: liberal democracy and industrialized mass production. Leon Trotsky’s verdict was correct when he rendered it over a century ago, and it remains correct today: America is “the furnace where the future is being forged.”
As faith in our new country took shape, it assumed religious trappings with the conception of America as a “covenant nation.” Just as the children of Israel made themselves the chosen people by entering into a special covenant with God, so America has assumed a special role in the world – in Lincoln’s wonderful phrase, “his almost chosen people” – through its commitment, at the moment of its founding, to the high ideals memorialized in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And as the civil religion tradition unfolded, the Civil War assumed a special significance as the reconsecration of the country’s original covenant and expiation, through fire and blood, for its failures to live up to it.
In his famous essay on the American civil religion, the sociologist Robert Bellah argued that:
The civil religion at its best is a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people. Like all religions, it has suffered various deformations and demonic distortions. At its best, it has neither been so general that it has lacked incisive relevance to the American scene nor so particular that it has placed American society above universal human values.
In a foreword written for a subsequent reprint of that essay, Bellah stressed that “I conceive of the central tradition of the American civil religion not as a form of national self-worship but as the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it in terms of which it should be judged.”
In his recent book American Covenant, Philip Gorski, also a sociologist, upholds the “prophetic republicanism” of American civil religion as the basis for reclaiming the country’s “vital center” in this time of toxic polarization. Gorski follows Bellah in sharply distinguishing between the civil religion tradition and that of religious nationalism. “At its core, religious nationalism is just national self-worship,” Gorski writes. “It is political idolatry dressed up as religious orthodoxy. Any sincere believer should reject it, remembering that the line between good and evil does not run between people or nations; it runs through them.”
Since the 60s, faith in American civil religion has been wrecked on the shoals of disillusionment. As I wrote in my last essay, the critical spirit of the mass adversary culture was able to break through the complacency of “national self-worship” and bring into much wider awareness the darkest and most tragic elements of the American past. Among progressives, this revisionist understanding of our history has led to an ebbing – and sometimes, an outright renunciation – of patriotism, in the latter case dismissing it as nothing more than another species of bigotry.
The progressive retreat from faith in America is far from universal: Barack Obama is the most prominent recent representative of the patriotic countercurrent. But it is widespread enough to exert a strong and disfiguring influence on the nation’s center-left, and thereby on the country’s whole political trajectory. And it is rooted in deep-seated intellectual and spiritual confusion.
To lose faith in one’s country because there are crimes in its past and even its greatest leaders have been flawed is, in the first instance, to demonstrate a total lack of familiarity with the Biblical sources of American civil religion. The Old Testament, the story of God’s chosen people and the model for America’s self-understanding as a covenant or creedal nation, is brimming with stories of great crimes and moral failures. The heroes in the Bible are typically presented as singularly unpromising before God selects them as instruments of his will, and often as not continue to sin greatly even afterward. The children of Israel are the chosen people not because they are any less fallen than any other people on Earth; they are chosen by virtue of the bargain they have struck with God, the sacred commitment they have made and to which they return again and again even as they repeatedly fall short.
Faith in American civil religion calls us, not to ignore the sins of the past, but to see ourselves as special, as an “almost chosen people,” because of our founding ideals, and because of our ongoing, imperfect, but often heroic struggles to live up to them. For progressives to recover faith in their country, they don’t need to avert their eyes from its dark side. But they likewise cannot turn away from America’s world-historically unique promise – and the immense amount of good which commitment to that promise has made possible, both here and all around the world.
To end their complicity in the spreading despair that is threatening the future of liberal democracy, progressives need to look inward and recommit to rekindling their own faith. Too many in their ranks have succumbed to despair themselves, alienated from the modern world and from their own country. There is only way out: to choose to say yes, in spite of everything.
The post Saying yes appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Soon after Josef Stalin signed a mutual defense pact with Adolf Hitler, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said that Russia was a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Russian military planners were undoubtedly pleased by what they might have taken as praise. One of the foundations of their military doctrine is the principle of maskirovka, or the use of various deceptions and denials to mask their true intentions. Maskirovka doesn’t always work, but when it does, it can utterly transform a battle, even a war.

Trusting in the common perception of the state of the Russian military can be designed to be fatal. I have long wondered about the chaotic structure of Russian forces in Ukraine and about the amount of time and resources Russia devotes to secondary targets. It’s tempting to assume that Moscow is foundering or that it was fated to defeat, but the fact that maskirovka is embedded so deeply in the Russian military psyche makes it necessary to periodically rethink Russian plans and resources. These things are unknown by design, but what if it turns out that the Russian bungling is a ploy, its real force and intention hidden, waiting to strike? When thinking about the Russians, creating a model diametrically opposed to what you believe, and then taking it apart, is essential.

The current consensus is that Russia has lost the organization, resources or trained manpower necessary to do more than hold its ground or perhaps advance with very limited objectives. This view is based on command confusion in which the Russian armed forces are competing with the Wagner Group, rather than commanding it. It would explain the extended battle in Bakhmut – to say nothing of Russia’s general inability to cripple Ukrainian forces and penetrate deeper into Ukraine. Penetration and destruction are the essence of warfare. A divided chain of command could explain the failure, and the inability to repair it could easily lead an enemy to assume that a Russian victory is all but impossible.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Russia built the battle of Bakhmut to draw the Ukrainians forward into a more vulnerable position. A smashing defeat of Ukraine there would create a massive crisis in the Ukrainian command and stoke serious tensions with allies. If the disparity of force were sufficient, Russian forces might move decisively to Ukraine’s western border. The purpose of the battle, then, would be to convince Ukraine to carry out a broad attack in the hope of breaking Russia’s will. For Russia, the true goal would not be to end the battle quickly but to significantly weaken Ukraine’s defense of the heartland and to encourage forces planned for the offensive to form into large units. The next step would be massive airstrikes on the concentrations using drones. The key would be the generation of military targets for air attack, followed by a massive, decisive infantry attack into the heartland (the type Russia should have opened with).

To be sure, this scenario is difficult to take seriously. Even if it were all going according to script, the strategy would be compromised by the inability to field large numbers of trained fighters, to protect the transportation of rapid, surprise deployment, and to hide the concentration of forces from Western intelligence. (Doing so is difficult but not impossible. The U.S. and British succeeded at Normandy, and the Germans at the Ardennes, though detection capabilities in World War II were obviously more limited than they are now.)

The critical issue here is the timing of detection relative to the ability of Ukrainian forces to form an attack and disrupt Russian forces. Russian air defense would have to be limited to avoid hinting at a large concentration of other forces. And the infantry would have to move into Ukraine in battle-ready form. The process of moving forward and creating a unified force under coherent Russian command represents the key and most unlikely phase of the operation.

The complexity of the project at all levels convinces me that the Russian command is simply dysfunctional and highly vulnerable to Ukrainian action. If there’s a maskirovka ploy afoot it must have been executed by now. But there is no hint of it. It’s hard to see anything but weakness in the Russian force at the moment.

Making a deal with President Joe Biden might have been the easy part.
Now, with the clock ticking towards a possible default on the national debt, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) is facing a new challenge that looks pretty familiar: opposition from the right-wing faction within the House Republican caucus, the same group that stalled McCarthy's election to lead the chamber in January.
"I want to be very clear. Not one Republican should vote for this bill," said Rep. Chip Roy (R–Texas) during a press conference Tuesday afternoon called by the House Freedom Caucus, the formerly libertarian group that's maintained its reflexive sense of fiscal responsibility even as it has turned more conservative in recent years.
But as they did during the January showdown over McCarthy's speakership, most Republicans will likely vote for the package and avoid a possible default. Unlike in January, McCarthy is likely to get some support from Democrats—a federal default provides little political upside for the party currently occupying the White House—limiting the leverage the House Freedom Caucus can apply.
But the group's objections are not superfluous. Since March, conservatives in the House have made clear they want to see significant spending cuts attached to any debt ceiling increase. The House passed a bill last month to do that: The Limit, Save, Grow Act would have reset the federal budget baseline to where it was last year, effectively cutting the new spending included in the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that passed in December. It would also have placed stricter limits on future spending growth for the next decade, rather than a two-year cap on nondefense discretionary spending, which is a part of the budget that isn't really growing anyway.
The House Freedom Caucus is also grumpy about McCarthy's failure to secure a larger cut to IRS funding. The deal will only claw back about a quarter of the $80 billion in new funding given to America's tax cops last year.
"This deal fails—fails completely," House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry (R–Pa.) said during the Tuesday press conference. Perry blasted McCarthy for squandering what he said was "the strongest position a Republican has had certainly in our elected lifetimes here, and…probably since we've been paying attention" to force budget cuts that could curb the nation's growing pile of debt.
But that's a telling remark. It seemingly ignores the first two years of the Trump administration, when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House—and responded by hiking spending and inflating the deficit.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus may be sincere in their opposition to this deal and their commitment to cutting spending. Unfortunately, the track record of the Trump years suggests Democrats are at least partially correct in their belief that Republicans only use fiscal responsibility as a cynical justification for blocking Democratic policy priorities.
But with just days left until the federal government defaults, the operative question is whether the House Freedom Caucus can translate its opposition to the deal into a legislative roadblock. We'll get that answer late Tuesday, when the House Rules Committee takes up the debt ceiling bill. As Politico reports, that meeting is likely the conservatives' best chance at stopping the bill. That's because the House Freedom Caucus negotiated to get more seats on the powerful Rules Committee during the standoff over McCarthy's speakership election. Roy is a member of the committee, along with two other members of the Freedom Caucus: Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and Ralph Norman (R–S.C.). Norman has sharply criticized the deal, while Massie has pointed out on Twitter (correctly) the debt limit bill doesn't actually spend any money but only allows for borrowing to fund spending Congress already approved.
"We'll be taking out a second mortgage this week to pay off the credit cards but it's not until September," when the annual budget is set to be debated and voted, "that we're actually buying the bass boat, the tanning bed, and a big screen TV," Massie wrote.
Massie's vote will be critical, but his point is arguably more important. The debt ceiling bill, regardless of what it contains or lacks, is not going to single-handedly solve or doom America's fiscal status. Only more responsible budgeting from Congress and the president can do that.
The post Conservatives Rage Against Debt Ceiling Bill: 'Not One Republican Should Vote for This' appeared first on Reason.com.

An autistic teenager died in 2020 after Louisiana police officers sat on him and placed him in a chokehold for several minutes. According to a statement of interest from the Department of Justice, the officers' actions could have violated the boy's civil rights. 
In January 2020, Eric Parsa, a "severely autistic" teenager, began having an "acute sensory episode" in the parking lot of a New Orleans–area laser tag center. According to a lawsuit filed by Parsa's parents in 2021, Parsa "began to experience a sudden sensory outburst or 'melt-down'" and began hitting himself and his father. At Parsa's parents' request, an employee at the laser tag center called the police for help.
When Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office (JPSO) police arrived, Parsa slapped one officer, who responded by forcibly taking Parsa to the ground, where he was held in a prone position for over nine minutes. During this time, officers placed Parsa "on his stomach, handcuffed, shackled, arms and legs held down, head, shoulder and neck encircled by the arm of a deputy, with JPSO deputies applying their own body weight as a restraint." Officers only stopped and placed Parsa in a "recovery position" when they noticed that he had "gone limp and he had urinated." An unconscious Parsa was then taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Parsa's family filed a lawsuit against the officers in January 2021, alleging that the officers' conduct violated Parsa's civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Last year, the couple made further allegations of wrongdoing after JPSO officers attempted to, without probable cause, obtain warrants for Parsa's school records detailing past misbehavior, seemingly to justify the officers' fatal use of force against Parsa.
Earlier this month, the Department of Justice released a statement of interest—which DOJ officials often use to persuade judges to take a preferred interpretation of a given legal issue—that tentatively agreed with Parsa's parents, stating that the officers' conduct may have violated Parsa's rights under the ADA.
"Here, the record is replete with facts showing that several Defendants knew about E.P.'s disability before or on arrival to the scene and that others learned of his disability during the encounter," reads the 21-page statement. "E.P.'s behavior, such as slapping his head, and failure to say anything other than 'firetruck,' could be construed as 'clear signals' of E.P.'s disability-related limitations and need for reasonable modifications," as required by the ADA. 
Instead of pinning him to the ground, the statement notes that officers should have accommodated Parsa's disability by "using de-escalation strategies; removing distractions and providing time and space to calm the situation when the child poses no significant safety threat; and avoiding or minimizing touching a child whose disability makes them sensitive to touch."
But while this intervention from the DOJ is good news for Parsa's parents—particularly because of a recent motion from the JPSO attempting to toss the Parsas' ADA claims—as long as police officers retain qualified immunity protections, actually holding government actors accountable is still an uphill battle.
The post DOJ Says That Cops Who Killed Autistic Teenager May Have Violated His Civil Rights appeared first on Reason.com.

We will not be publishing an article on Monday, Memorial Day. We wish you all a happy and meaningful holiday. – The Editors.Jason Furman is a professor of economics in the Economics Department at Harvard and at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jason Furman discuss the causes of today’s persistent inflation in the US and whether it is likely to continue; how concerned we should be about the recent failures of mid-sized regional banks; and why America’s share of world GDP has remained resilient over the past decades even though it sometimes feels dysfunctional relative to other developed economies like Germany and Japan.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I'm trying to understand what's going on with the economy at the moment, so let's start with one of the big questions of the last few years, which is inflation. What actually do we understand about the reasons for this precipitous rise in inflation and to what extent do you think it is now under control?Jason Furman: Looking backward—that’s a little bit easier to understand. At some point, we'll try to take glimpses into the future. Economists like to look at core inflation, they subtract food and energy. That isn't because people don't eat food and use gasoline, but because those things are quite volatile. If you look at the core measure that the Fed uses for inflation, it's basically been running at about a 4.5% rate for two years now. It drifts up and down a tiny bit every now and then. But it's incredibly consistent. Underneath that incredibly consistent inflation has been a couple other different stories. In 2021, inflation was in the goods sector, and, in 2022, it was in the services sector. In 2022, inflation was elevated for headline inflation above core inflation, because oil prices went up a lot. In the last several months, oil prices have been coming down. So headline inflation has actually been lower than that core inflation. But it's really been pretty consistent and pretty stubborn. Mounk: For a long time, we had extremely low inflation. My understanding was that economists were actually somewhat worried about that. But now it feels like we've way overshot the mark. What are the tradeoffs here? What's the level of inflation we should aim for?Furman: That's a harder question to answer than it should be. You definitely don't want a rising inflation rate. You don't want to go 4, 5, 6, to 7, 12, and 20%. And it takes a certain amount of effort to keep it from rising. That'd be the first thing I'd say. The second thing is you really want a credible, stable inflation rate. Because when inflation moves around, you get arbitrary redistribution. You get people that didn't plan for it. And when expectations are well-anchored and predictable, it actually gives the central bank more space to respond to things. If you want to deal with a recession, and you're not worried about inflation taking off, you just have much more room to deal with it. It's a real gift to have it be anchored and stable. Now, there's the question of where do you want it to be anchored and stable at? Well, there are a few good reasons why modest inflation is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. One is that it lets the economy adjust more easily. Let's say a bad shock happens and companies can't actually cut their nominal wages. But if there's inflation, that means they can sell their products for more, real wages fall, and they don't need to cut as many jobs. It also gives the Fed, or the central bank, more room to stimulate the economy in a recession. What matters for the economy is what real interest rates (the interest rate minus the inflation rate) are. A higher inflation rate means lower interest rates. Taking all those considerations together, 20 years ago, 2% seemed like the right number. Based on what we've learned since, on a blank slate, something like 3% would probably be a better inflation rate to aim for. The question is, if you tried to change in midstream from two to three, can you manage that transition?Mounk: For the last year, as you were saying, core inflation has been around 5%, and nominal inflation in some of these years was significantly higher than that. What caused that? Is that just the weirdness of the pandemic, and so, therefore, a sort of temporary thing? Or are there more fundamental factors that have driven inflation?Furman: I think there are two broad views on that question. One is what I call the “series of unfortunate accidents” model. And the other is the “original sin” model. In the series of unfortunate accidents, it was just one thing after the next and each one led to inflation. That theory has something to it, but I think it's massively exaggerated. Just to give you a few examples, in the first half of 2021, people were saying the reason we're seeing inflation is that the vaccines are so much more effective than we thought and the economy's reopening incredibly quickly, and so we're getting inflation. Then in the second half of 2021, we continue to have inflation, and the story was, “Well, it turns out the vaccines aren't as good as we thought. Delta and Omicron are shutting down the economy. And because of that, we're getting inflation.” Now, it's possible that both those stories are true, but I think it's quite hard to reconcile them. And in my view, the first story actually was correct. The vaccines probably did feel inflation. I think Delta and Omicron actually lowered inflation, especially in the services sector, and delayed it. Another unfortunate accident is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which really did raise oil and food prices. It had a huge impact in Europe and some impact in the United States. But most of that impact was on headline inflation. If you look at core inflation, there was relatively little pass-through of the food and energy prices into everything else. Other accidents people cite are things like problems at the ports, problems with microchips. But you look at those, and it turns out that they look more like demand than they do supply. Ports were processing tons of stuff in 2021. It just wasn't as much as Americans wanted to buy from the rest of the world, because they wanted to buy a huge amount. But the problem was not that the ports got worse, it was that people wanted more. So there is something to the series of unfortunate accidents. But frankly, it's quite exaggerated. The original sin model is just a huge amount of demand. And I should say original sins—there were two of them. One is just a massive fiscal policy. We spent 10% of GDP per year for basically two and a half years in a row. That's the most that's ever been spent outside of World War II. It's almost impossible to imagine you could do that without getting a big expansion. Now, if you look at Europe and Japan, you actually see similar levels of fiscal policy, a lot of it happening more for things like credit and forbearance on loans (in the case of Europe) than through direct spending, and then monetary policy didn't adjust. You have this extraordinary thing where, in the United States at the beginning of 2022, you had an inflation rate above 5% and an unemployment rate below 4%—below what the Fed thinks the natural rate is, and way above where they want to be on inflation, and interest rates are still zero. Now, demand is still high. But I think we're in what some people call a “wage-price spiral.” I try to avoid that. I call it “wage-price persistence,” where wages are going to go up by five, and prices will go up by five, and you get stuck in a certain place, with a wedge between those numbers due to productivity—but, broadly speaking, stuck in something like that.Mounk: Clearly, inflation has come down somewhat over the last 12 months. But we're also above that 3% that you posited as the spot where we probably want to be. Are we sort of going to continue to be above that 3% mark?Furman: The equation economists use holds that inflation is a function of three things. One is sometimes called “expectations.” You should think of that just as the internal dynamics of inflation: wages lead to prices, prices lead to wages, if you think everyone else is going to raise prices, you're going to raise your prices, et cetera—a sort of a self-fulfilling thing. The second term is how tight the economy is, how much demand there is, often simplified by how low the unemployment rate is. And the third term is what supply shocks are like. Let's take those in reverse order. Supply shocks seem to basically be zero. In fact, if anything, they might be a little bit favorable—inflation is temporarily a little bit lower because energy prices have been falling. And so I don't expect much action on the supply side, other than unpredictable things like a war in the Middle East. Then there's labor market tightness. The unemployment rate is quite low. Job openings have come down but are still higher than they were before the pandemic. And so the labor market on balance looks more tight than it was in 2019. And so that suggests some continued upward pressure. And then, finally, there's that self-sustaining dynamic. And that's the hardest one to understand, because it's based on perceptions, the policy regime and the like. Historically, inflation went back to 2% quickly. Now, it looks like there's more momentum built into it that could keep it away from there for a while.Mounk: You were saying that in 2021 very few economists had inflation going up. But perhaps a year or so later there seemed to be a sense among a good number of economists that inflation seemed to be going up, that there were some clear signs that we were about to be in this inflationary crisis. But that there was reluctance among a lot of left-of-center economists to talk about this in a proactive way because it seemed politically inopportune and might scupper part of Joe Biden's agenda (which they supported for good reason) and perhaps allow Republicans to have talking points about Democrats engaging in profligate spending even though, after all, Republicans were in charge for a lot of the time when we decided to spend a lot of money on pandemic relief, as was probably necessary. To what extent do you think that these political considerations held economists back and did that make it harder for the administration to actually respond to inflation in an effective and proactive manner?Furman: Initially, when you looked at the initial fiscal plan that President Biden did, the American Rescue Plan, a very conservative economist, Doug Holtz-Eakin, thought it was a terrible, awful, horrible plan, a huge waste of money—but, oh, by the way, it will not raise inflation, because inflation is just very unresponsive and stuck at 2%. So even conservative economists had objections other than inflation. Over the course of 2021, financial markets were also betting on low inflation. So it was a bit of a collective error. But I think it'd be fair to say that you had progressive economists, especially, doing a certain amount of cheerleading at first: “there is no inflation,” then “inflation is going to go away,” then “inflation is not so bad as long as you’re not buying a used car,” and then “inflation is not so bad, as long as you're not buying anything.” At which point, I think there was a shift to feeling the pain, acknowledging it. That's actually when you got the greed narrative on the left, which I interpreted as, “We're not going to try to argue that there is no inflation or inflation is not a problem. We're just going to try to have another villain for that inflation and another solution to that inflation than the mainstream one.” But I don't think you do your side any favors if you're engaged in wishful thinking. Being honest, and talking about trade-offs and saying hard truths—I think that's always better. Now, there's always different guesses, and honest people could disagree. But you want to try to be unbiased in that thinking.Mounk: How do we, particularly in economics, check that instinct towards wishful thinking? Because that's something that you've done repeatedly in your career, arguing that a position to which you are sympathetic is not going to work well or overlooks certain economic realities. How do we go about avoiding falling into that trap?Furman: It's hard and it depends on the topic. I teach the introductory economics class here at Harvard. We teach students the distinction between positive and normative. If you're debating what the top tax rate should be, and I'm debating it with a conservative economist friend, they might think people's behavior is going to respond more, that a high tax rate will discourage more work. I might be a little bit less worried about that. But our behavioral assumptions are not going to be that different. I'm going to acknowledge it's going to affect behavior and have a downside. And if my estimate isn’t going to be so different, my values are going to be quite different. And so it really on an issue like that comes down to values, monetary policy, and these macro issues are much more about a positive debate than they are about a normative debate. But unfortunately, that positive debate often masquerades as a normative debate. Just to give you an example, if I tell you wages are going to grow 6% a year for the next five years, then what do you think inflation will be? Well, one view is that there's no reason the businesses can't absorb those wage increases. They can just lower their profits. They don't need to pass them on to their customers. And so there's no reason why we can't have 2% inflation. Everything I just said I wish is true. I would be incredibly happy if you could have 6% wage growth and 2% price growth. But you can't confuse the team you're rooting for—team workers, in this case—with the team you expect to win the game. And if you tell me wages are going to go up 6% a year for the next five years, I'm going to tell you that I think prices are going to go up about 5% a year for the next five years. The difference is that productivity allows you to do some of the wage increases without raising prices. It’s the same thing with inflation forecasting. There's nothing normative about it. You have a forecast—inflation either is that or isn't. It doesn't really care what your feelings are about the economy, what's nice and what's not nice. And if you systematically base your views on a prediction of the inflation rate, and inflation rate keeps being higher than you think, it wasn't that you cared more about workers, it's that you are wrong and you are giving bad advice. It just means you're bad at understanding what was going on or maybe unlucky with unfortunate, unexpected events. But either way, it doesn't mean that you liked workers more than the person who was forecasting higher inflation.Mounk: I agree with you that the distinction between normative and empirical really is not that complicated on the theoretical level. Empirically, though, it does seem to be quite hard. I find that among the most visible economists, it's quite predictable on the most important issues, that very distinguished economists who are left-leaning are going to have empirical descriptions of the world that basically conform with the political priorities of the Democratic Party and the left; and very prominent economists who are conservative in political leaning are going to line up with empirical descriptions of the world that happen to be much more useful and much more politically comfortable for people who are Republican politicians, for example.Have I become too cynical about this? Or, if you really go to the American Economic Association conferences and you really look at the debates in the most distinguished journals, do you find that those priors are not as helpful in predicting what people are going to be saying? Or is it really the case that even in those kinds of fora, you can kind of guess where Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw are going to be on empirical questions on which the normative leanings shouldn't, in theory, allow me to make that kind of prediction?Furman: Let's distinguish between three different things: the research that economists do, the views they have on public policy, and the views they express on public policy. In terms of the research, I don't think it's perfect, there are days when I'm troubled by the political bias, and, frankly, that political bias is mostly left. Almost everyone under the age of 50 who does research, especially in certain areas like empirical microeconomics, is left of center. There are days I'm worried about that. But I go to seminars and someone presents a paper, and maybe it has a left conclusion, and the faculty in the room are less interested in cheerleading the left conclusion and more interested in proving how smart they are by poking holes in the empirical method, the theory, or whatever it is. And there's also a return to research that has contrarian findings. And there's a lot of researchers I know who do their research, not because they know the answer and want to prove it to everyone, but because they don't know the answer and want to figure it out and they love to be surprised. I could give you a lot of examples of that. I don't think the research is perfect. I think all the pressure is in one direction, not the other direction. But there are some counter pressures. Now let's talk about public policy. Now most of the research papers people are doing (you spend two years on the paper) are not about current events. In terms of what people think about policy right now, I think there is a little bit of a bias towards thinking whatever your team thinks is good. And people don't inquire as deeply. So I saw people who looked at the American Rescue Plan who sort of should have known better and didn't ask how big it was as a share of GDP or how big was the GDP gap. What's the multiplier? They didn’t do the three steps that they could have done even based on their own research. They went out and said, “Oh, it's fine.” And I think they thought it was fine. Then there's a last problem, which I think really, really is a big one. Which is not what people think but what they say. I soft-pedaled my criticisms of the American Rescue Plan because of reasons I regret, not really understanding how to fully conduct myself in a world where a Democrat was in power and people cared about my views, which is something I'd never experienced before outside of government. And I think I made a mistake. I had a lot of friends texting me, “This is too large, but I don't want to say it.” During the student loan thing, I was a little bit outspoken on thinking it was a problem. I had people texting me, “I'm really glad you're saying that. I just don't want to say that myself because I'll get killed.” Now, that doesn't mean those things are hidden truths. The people texting me might have been wrong about either one of those issues. But it does mean there are a set of views on one side of a topic that people whisper in private, instead of views on the other side that they shout out loud. And so the aggregation process itself is biased. So I think you have some bias at the research level, some bias at the public policy-thinking level, and some bias in what gets expressed. And I agree with you that it all compounds.Mounk: Another thing I’m hoping to understand is what's going on with the banks. Why is it that we seem to be in this sort of slow-moving financial crisis? Is this just bad bank governance? How worried do we need to be about it? Is this something that's well under control of the Treasury? Or is there a potential here for a slow-motion return to something like the 2008 financial crisis?Furman: No one knows the answer to those questions. But I’ll do the best I can. First of all, if this was 2019, and you told me we're going to have a pandemic, the biggest inflation in 40 years, and the biggest increase in interest rates in 40 years, I might have predicted worse damage in the financial system than what we've seen. I really do think the reforms that were put in place in Dodd-Frank—they're not perfect, we're seeing some of their imperfections now—put us in a much better place where we had all sorts of economic problems but we didn't have anything resembling a financial crisis. It's always been the case that there are some banks that are badly managed and they fail. And in some sense, First Republic is sort of how it should work, which is: your bank fails, you go out and get the best deal you can, you sell it to another bank, everyone is safe and whole, and the world moves on. And the three big bank failures we've seen in the United States and one big failure in Switzerland really were outlier, badly-managed institutions. That's a lot of what's happened so far. In terms of where we are right now, on paper, the banking system has a $2.2 trillion cushion of capital. But a lot of that is missing two big accounting pieces. One subtracts from it, which is that the value of its assets are lower than they were before and they don't fully mark that to market. But the other goes in the other direction, which is that the value of what's called their “deposit franchise” goes up; they’re an institution that can make money at a higher interest rate, and collect deposits at a much lower interest rate, and the gap between those goes up when interest rates go up. It's better to be a bank if you can pay your depositors 1% in a world of 5% interest rates than in a world of 3% interest rates. I think the banking system as a whole is now mostly fine in the short run. The two different factors are moving in different directions. The really terribly-managed banks have been weeded out. But over a five-year horizon, I don't think a lot of the regional banks in the United States have a viable business model. Basically, they were premised on hoping depositors wouldn't notice that they were getting ripped off. And maybe you could do that in the past, but in a world of prolonged higher interest rates and lots of liquid electronic options for your money, that's harder to do. So I think we're going to need to see a change in business models, we're going to need to see consolidation. I don't think we should be squeamish about large banks, if they're more efficient, acquiring small banks. But there's no reason this needs to play out like the 2008 crisis. Dodd-Frank was very good, but the last crisis was all about credit risk and illiquidity. You had a mortgage. The mortgage wasn't paying you back. You couldn't sell it. It pushed banks into bonds, because those have no credit risk (we hope) and they're very liquid. Well, it turns out they have another set of risks: interest rate risk. And so I do think the regulations need to be tweaked to basically add this third risk to the two that they already did a pretty good job of handling.Mounk: I have a really broad economic puzzle that I want you to help me with. I grew up in Germany, and I always tend to be a Germany critic. I think the country is not as perfect and efficient and so on as people outside often think. But it is in many ways a very impressive country in terms of its infrastructure, social cohesion, and political functionality. You go to Japan. It is an incredibly impressive society, with trains that connect the major cities to each other with incredible speed and reliability, with also very strong social cohesion, very high levels of education and so on. Even countries that we think of as quite dysfunctional, like France, are actually very impressive in all kinds of ways. And then you come to the United States and in so many ways, the country seems dysfunctional, right? The crime rate is way higher than it is in Japan or in Germany. Trains with any kind of regularity really only exist in a few regions, and they are much less fast and much more often delayed. The share of Americans who have a deeply substandard school education, who go to school in dilapidated buildings, in schools where they have to worry about violence, where they don't achieve basic literacy and numeracy, is much higher. It's very tempting to tell this deeply declinist story about America. And yet the striking fact is that America's share of world GDP has actually stayed constant over the last 25 or 30 years, whereas Japan's and Germany’s shares of world GDP have declined quite significantly. How is it that American society, which in so many obvious ways is not working outperforms in economic terms these other countries which seem so impressive from the outside? Furman: I read John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society 35 years ago. He wrote it well before I read it. And he began with this contrast between what it looked like in an American house and a house in Japan. The Japanese house is really small compared to what people in America are living in. It’s less likely to have a washer or dryer (that's certainly true in Europe, not positive that it’s the case in Japan), or centralized heating and air conditioning. The stuff that the people have, et cetera, is a set of private living standards that are much higher in the United States than they are in most of the other advanced economies. But that does really coexist with a lack of adequate investment, or of adequately well-managed investment, in a lot of the public domain. And is that because Americans have different tastes than people in other countries? Is it something about the way the rules of our political system were set up? Is it something else? I actually don't know exactly what it is. Now, I wouldn't sort of diminish all of those private material things. People care a lot about those things. And in almost every one of those metrics, people are much, much better off than they were in the past. But yes, I lament the state of rail travel in the United States, the state of schools, and all sorts of other things. And I should say, by the way, everything I said was about 85% of Americans. Poverty in America is too high. It's hard to know exactly how to compare it to poverty in Europe, but it feels worse to me. I'm not positive that's right. And different data gives you different answers. My guess is it's not as bad as what you have in Japan. Mounk: What are some big things that America and perhaps Japan or countries in Europe, do to boost living standards for ordinary people? Is there any low-hanging fruit where if only we could get a political will or make the smart decisions, we could really have a positive impact on how most people live, or is there no such low-hanging fruit?Furman: First of all, whatever you can do to increase overall growth, especially if you can do that without increasing inequality, is quite important. By the way, I'm bullish on ChatGPT and these types of learning models, because I think our problem over the last 50 years hasn't been robots taking too many jobs but robots not taking enough jobs away. And the other way to phrase that more politely is that we just haven't had enough productivity growth. And if we could have more productivity growth, that matters, and I look at some European countries and their hostility to this technology and think they're really risking on missing out on what I think is the biggest wildcard that could actually raise GDP growth—my guess is not that it will be in some transformational, massive amount, but, over time, figure out different ways to deploy it in different areas. So one is just don't mess stuff up like that. Two is to have more basic research into areas that will get you more things like that and many other things in the economy. That’s the productivity side of things. Then there's the more shared growth and things like education. I think the minimum wage could go up in the United States, less so elsewhere. And finally you say, “You know what? We're just not going to get the distribution we want from the economy. So let's run a really efficient, well-organized market economy. And tax the people who are lucky, are skilled, and do well at it and give more money to the others.” And certainly in the United States, for example, giving money to households with low-income children is maybe not a no-brainer but about as close to a no-brainer as I think you can get. So that was an incomplete answer. But generally, my view is, this is a really big question you asked, and you want an all-of-the-above response to it, not a “don't-do-this, don’t-do-that” sort of approach.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry.Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

If you had told me several months ago, immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter and Ron DeSantis celebrated a thumping re-election victory, that DeSantis would launch his presidential campaign in conversation with Musk, I would have thought, intriguing: The rightward-trending billionaire whose rockets and cars stand out in an economy dominated by apps and financial instruments meets the Republican politician whose real-world victories contrast with the virtual populism of Donald Trump.

The actual launch of DeSantis’s presidential campaign, in a “Twitter Spaces” event that crashed repeatedly and played to a smaller audience than he would have claimed just by showing up on Fox, instead offered the political version of the lesson that we’ve been taught repeatedly by Musk’s stewardship of Twitter: The internet can be a trap.

For the Tesla and SpaceX mogul, the trap was sprung because Musk wanted to attack the groupthink of liberal institutions, and seeing that groupthink manifest on his favorite social media site, he imagined that owning Twitter was the key to transforming public discourse.

But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, other internet platforms. Twitter is real life, but only through its relationship to other realities; it doesn’t have the capacity to be a hub of discourse, news gathering or entertainment on its own. And many of Musk’s difficulties as the Twitter C.E.O. have reflected a simple overestimation of social media’s inherent authority and influence.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The play that explains Succession (and everything else)
The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet.
COVID shots are still one giant experiment.
The far right is splintering.
A Tense SummerRussia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:
U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.
That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.Now, about those Belarus nukes.Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.Related: 
“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.”
The irreversible change in Belarus
A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law.
A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct.
The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated.
Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney
A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain ItselfBy Shirley Li
Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.
American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

How America can avoid the next debt-ceiling showdown

Ozempic in teens is a mess.

Kailey Schwerman / Showtime
Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.Play our daily crossword.P.S.This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

This fall, millions of Americans might be lining up for yet another kind of COVID vaccine:  their first-ever dose that lacks the strain that ignited the pandemic more than three and a half years ago. Unlike the current, bivalent vaccine, which guards against two variants at once, the next one could, like the first version of the shot, have only one main ingredient—the spike protein of the XBB.1 lineage of the Omicron variant, the globe’s current dominant clade.That plan isn’t yet set. The FDA still has to convene a panel of experts, then is expected to make a final call on autumn’s recipe next month. But several experts told me they hope the agency follows the recent recommendation of a World Health Organization advisory group and focuses the next vaccine only on the strains now circulating.The switch in strategy—from two variants to one, from original SARS-CoV-2 plus Omicron to XBB.1 alone—would be momentous but wise, experts told me, reflecting the world’s updated understanding of the virus’s evolution and the immune system’s quirks. “It just makes a lot of sense,” said Melanie Ott, the director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, in San Francisco. XBB.1 is the main coronavirus group circulating today; neither the original variant nor BA.5, the two coronavirus flavors in the bivalent shot, is meaningfully around anymore. And an XBB.1-focused vaccine may give the global population a particularly good shot at broadening immunity.At the same time, COVID vaccines are still in a sort of beta-testing stage. In the past three-plus years, the virus has spawned countless iterations, many of which have been extremely good at outsmarting us; we humans, meanwhile, are only on our third-ish attempt at designing a vaccine that can keep pace with the pathogen’s evolutionary sprints. And we’re very much still learning about the coronavirus’s capacity for flexibility and change, says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University. By now, it’s long been clear that vaccines are essential for preventing severe disease and death, and that some cadence of boosting is probably necessary to keep the shots’ effectiveness high. But when the virus alters its evolutionary tactics, our vaccination strategy must follow—and experts are still puzzling out how to account for those changes as they select the shots for each year.In the spring and summer of 2022, the last time the U.S. was mulling on a new vaccine formula, Omicron was still relatively new, and the coronavirus’s evolution seemed very much in flux. The pathogen had spent more than two years erratically slingshotting out Greek-letter variants without an obvious succession plan. Instead of accumulating genetic changes within a single lineage—a more iterative form of evolution, roughly akin to what flu strains do—the coronavirus produced a bunch of distantly related variants that jockeyed for control. Delta was not a direct descendant of Alpha; Omicron was not a Delta offshoot; no one could say with any certainty what would arise next, or when. “We didn’t understand the trajectory,” says Kanta Subbarao, the head of the WHO advisory group convened to make recommendations on COVID vaccines.And so the experts played it safe. Including an Omicron variant in the shot felt essential, because of how much the virus had changed. But going all in on Omicron seemed too risky—some experts worried that “the virus would flip back,” Subbarao told me, to a variant more similar to Alpha or Delta or something else. As a compromise, several countries, including the United States, went with a combination: half original, half Omicron, in an attempt to reinvigorate OG immunity while laying down new defenses against the circulating strains du jour.And those shots did bolster preexisting immunity, as boosters should. But they didn’t rouse a fresh set of responses against Omicron to the degree that some experts had hoped they would, Ott told me. Already trained on the ancestral version of the virus, people’s bodies seemed to have gotten a bit myopic—repeatedly reawakening defenses against past variants, at the expense of new ones that might have more potently attacked Omicron. The outcome was never thought to be damaging, Subbarao told me: The bivalent, for instance, still broadened people’s immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 compared with, say, another dose of the original-recipe shot, and was effective at tamping down hospitalization rates. But Ahmed told me that, in retrospect, he thinks an Omicron-only boost might have further revved that already powerful effect.Going full bore on XBB.1 now could keep the world from falling into that same trap twice. People who get an updated shot with that strain alone would receive only the new, unfamiliar ingredient, allowing the immune system to focus on the fresh material and potentially break out of an ancestral-strain rut. XBB.1’s spike protein also would not be diluted with one from an older variant—a concern Ahmed has with the current bivalent shot. When researchers added Omicron to their vaccine recipes, they didn’t double the total amount of spike protein; they subbed out half of what was there before. That left vaccine recipients with just half the Omicron-focused mRNA they might have gotten had the shot been monovalent, and probably a more lackluster antibody response.Recent work from the lab of Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, suggests another reason the Omicron half of the shot didn’t pack enough of an immunizing punch. Subvariants from this lineage, including BA.5 and XBB.1, carry at least one mutation that makes their spike protein unstable—to the point where it seems less likely than other versions of the spike protein to stick around for long enough to sufficiently school immune cells. In a bivalent vaccine, in particular, the immune response could end up biased toward non-Omicron ingredients, exacerbating the tendencies of already immunized people to focus their energy on the ancestral strain. For the same reason, a monovalent XBB.1, too, might not deliver the anticipated immunizing dose, Menachery told me. But if people take it (still a big if), and hospitalizations remain low among those up-to-date on their shots, a once-a-year total-strain switch-out might be the choice for next year’s vaccine too.Dropping the ancestral strain from the vaccine isn’t without risk. The virus could still produce a variant totally different from XBB.1, though that does, at this point, seem unlikely. For a year and a half now, Omicron has endured, and it now has the longest tenure of a single Greek-letter variant since the pandemic’s start. Even the subvariants within the Omicron family seem to be sprouting off each other more predictably; after a long stint of inconsistency, the virus’s shape-shifting now seems “less jumpy,” says Leo Poon, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. It may be a sign that humans and the virus have reached a détente now that the population is blanketed in a relatively stable layer of immunity. Plus, even if a stray Alpha or Delta descendant were to rise up, the world wouldn’t be caught entirely off guard: So many people have banked protection against those and other past variants that they’d probably still be well buffered against COVID’s worst acute outcomes. (That reassurance doesn’t hold, though, for people who still need primary-series shots, including the kids being born into the world every day. An XBB.1 boost might be a great option for people with preexisting immunity. But a bivalent that can offer more breadth might still be the more risk-averse choice for someone whose immunological slate is blank.)More vaccination-strategy shifts will undoubtedly come. SARS-CoV-2 is still new to us; so are our shots. But the virus’s evolution, as of late, has been getting a shade more flu-like, and its transmission patterns a touch more seasonal. Regulators in the U.S. have already announced that COVID vaccines will probably be offered each year in the fall—as annual flu shots are. The viruses aren’t at all the same. But as the years progress, the comparison between COVID and flu shots could get more apt still—if, say, the coronavirus also starts to produce multiple, genetically distinct strains that simultaneously circulate. In that case, vaccinating against multiple versions of the virus at once might be the most effective defense.
Flu shots could be a useful template in another way: Although those shots have followed roughly the same guidelines for many years, with experts meeting twice a year to decide whether and how to update each autumn’s vaccine ingredients, they, too, have needed some flexibility. Until 2012, the vaccines were trivalent, containing ingredients that would immunize people against three separate strains at once; now many, including all of the U.S.’s, are quadrivalent—and soon, based on new evidence, researchers may push for those to return to a three-strain recipe. At the same time, flu and COVID vaccines share a major drawback. Our shots’ ingredients are still selected months ahead of when the injections actually reach us—leaving immune systems lagging behind a virus that has, in the interim, sprinted ahead. Until the world has something more universal, our vaccination strategies will have to be reactive, scrambling to play catch-up with these pathogens’ evolutionary whims.

We live in a world facing existential threats while extreme inequality is tearing our societies apart and democracy is in sharp decline. The U.S., meanwhile, is bent on maintaining global hegemony when international collaboration is urgently needed to address the planet’s numerous challenges. In the interview that follows, Noam Chomsky explains why we are at the most dangerous point in human history and why nationalism, racism, and extremism are rearing their ugly heads all over the world today.

Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy, and world affairs. His latest books are Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (with C. J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books); The Secrets of Words (with Andrew Moro; MIT Press, 2020); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C. J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).

C. J. Polychroniou: Noam, you have said on numerous occasions that the world is at the most dangerous point in human history. Why do you think so? Are nuclear weapons more dangerous today than they were in the past? Is the surge in right-wing authoritarianism in recent years more dangerous than the rise and subsequent spread of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s? Or is it because of the climate crisis, which you have indeed said that it represents the biggest threat the world has ever faced. Can you explain in comparative terms why you think that the world is today significantly more dangerous than it used to be?

Noam Chomsky: The climate crisis is unique in human history and is getting more severe year by year. If major steps are not taken within the next few decades, the world is likely to reach a point of no return, facing decline to indescribable catastrophe. Nothing is certain, but this seems a far too plausible assessment.

Weapons systems steadily become more dangerous and more ominous. We have been surviving under a sword of Damocles since the bombing of Hiroshima. A few years later, 70 years ago, the U.S., then Russia, tested thermonuclear weapons, revealing that human intelligence had “advanced” to the capacity to destroy everything.

Operative questions have to do with the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that constrain their use. These came ominously close to breaking down in the 1962 missile crisis, described by Arthur Schlesinger as the most dangerous moment in world history, with reason, though we may soon reach that unspeakable moment again in Europe and Asia. The MAD system (mutually assured destruction) enabled a form of security, lunatic but perhaps the best short of the kind of social and cultural transformation that is still unfortunately only an aspiration.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the MAD system of security was undermined by Clinton’s aggressive triumphalism and the Bush II-Trump project of dismantling the laboriously constructed arms control regime. There’s an important recent study of these topics by Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne, as part of the background to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They review how Clinton initiated a new era of international affairs in which the “United States became a revolutionary force in world politics” by abandoning the “old diplomacy” and instituting its preferred revolutionary concept of global order.

The “old diplomacy” sought to maintain global order by “an understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to make judicious compromises.” The new triumphant unilateralism sets as “a legitimate goal [for the US] the alteration or eradication of those arrangements [internal to other countries] if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values.”

The word “professed” is crucial. It is commonly expunged from consciousness here, not elsewhere.

In the background lies the Clinton doctrine that the U.S. must be prepared to resort to force, multilaterally if we can, unilaterally if we must, to ensure vital interests and “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.”

The accompanying military doctrine has led to creation of a far more advanced nuclear weapons system that can only be understood as “a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China” (Rand Corporation) – a first-strike capacity, enhanced by Bush’s dismantling of the treaty that barred emplacement of ABM systems near an adversary’s borders. These systems are portrayed as defensive, but they are understood on all sides to be first-strike weapons.

These steps have significantly weakened the old system of mutual deterrence, leaving in its place greatly enhanced dangers.

How new these developments were, one might debate, but Schwartz and Layne make a strong case that this triumphant unilateralism and open contempt for the defeated enemy has been a significant factor in bringing major war to Europe with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with the potential to escalate to terminal war.

No less ominous are developments in Asia. With strong bipartisan and media support, Washington is confronting China on both military and economic fronts. With Europe safely in its pocket thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. has been able to expand NATO to the Indo-Pacific region, thus enlisting Europe in its campaign to prevent China from developing – a program considered not just legitimate but highly praiseworthy. One of the administration doves, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, expressed the consensus lucidly: “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe.”

It's particularly important to keep China from developing sustainable energy, where it is far in the lead and should reach energy self-sufficiency by 2060 according to Goldman Sachs analysts. China is even threatening to make new breakthroughs in batteries that might help save the world from climate catastrophe.

Plainly a threat that must be contained, along with China’s insistence on the One-China policy for Taiwan that the U.S. also adopted 50 years ago and that has kept the peace for 50 years, but that Washington is now rescinding. There’s much more to add that reinforces this picture, matters we have discussed elsewhere.

It’s hard to say the words in this increasingly odd culture, but it’s close to truism that unless the U.S. and China find ways to accommodate, as great powers with conflicting interests often did in the past, we are all lost.

Historical analogies have their limits of course, but there are two pertinent ones that have repeatedly been adduced in this connection: The Concert of Europe established in 1815 and the Versailles treaty of 1919. The former is a prime example of the “Old Diplomacy.” The defeated aggressor (France) was incorporated into the new system of international order as an equal partner. That led to a century of relative peace. The Versailles treaty is a paradigm example of the “revolutionary” concept of global order instituted by the triumphalism of the ‘90s and its aftermath. Defeated Germany was not incorporated into the postwar international order but was severely punished and humiliated. We know where that led.

Currently, two concepts of world order are counterposed: the UN system and the “rules-based” system, correlating closely with multipolarity and unipolarity, the latter meaning U.S. dominance.

The U.S. and its allies (or “vassals” or “subimperial states” as they are sometimes called) reject the UN system and demand adherence to the rules-based system. The rest of the world generally supports the UN system and multipolarity.

The UN system is based on the UN Charter, the foundation of modern international law and the “supreme law of the land” in the U.S. under the U.S. Constitution, which elected officials are bound to obey. It has a serious defect: it rules out U.S. foreign policy. Its core principle bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, except in narrow circumstances unrelated to U.S. actions. It would be hard to find a U.S. postwar president who has not violated the U.S. Constitution, a topic of little interest, the record shows.

What is the preferred rules-based system? The answer depends on who sets the rules and determines when they should be obeyed. The answer is not obscure: the hegemonic power, which took the mantle of global dominance from Britain after World War II, greatly extending its scope.

One core foundation stone of the U.S.-dominated rules-based system is the World Trade Organization. We can ask, then, how the U.S. honors it.

As global hegemon, the U.S. is alone in capacity to impose sanctions. These are third-party sanctions that others must obey, or else. And they do obey, even when they strongly oppose the sanctions. One example is the U.S. sanctions designed to strangle Cuba. These are opposed by the whole world as we see from regular UN votes. But they are obeyed.

When Clinton instituted sanctions that were even more savage than before, the European Union called on the WTO to determine their legality. The U.S. angrily withdrew from the proceedings, rendering them null and void. There was a reason, explained by Clinton’s Commerce Secretary Stuart Eizenstat: “Mr. Eizenstat argued that Europe is challenging ‘three decades of American Cuba policy that goes back to the Kennedy Administration,’ and is aimed entirely at forcing a change of government in Havana.”

In short, Europe and the WTO have no competence to influence the long-standing U.S. campaign of terror and economic strangulation aimed at forcefully overthrowing the government of Cuba, so they should get lost. The sanctions prevail, and Europe must obey them – and does. A clear illustration of the nature of the rules-based order.

There are many others. Thus, the World Court ruled that U.S. freezing of Iranian assets is illegal. It scarcely caused a ripple.

That is understandable. Under the rules-based system, the global enforcer has no more reason to accede to ICJ judgments than to decisions of the WTO. That much was established years ago. In 1986, the U.S. withdrew from ICJ jurisdiction when it condemned the U.S. for its terrorist war against Nicaragua and ordered it to pay reparations. The U.S. responded by escalating the war.

To mention another illustration of the rules-based system, the U.S. alone withdrew from the proceedings of the Tribunal considering Yugoslavia’s charges against NATO. It argued correctly that Yugoslavia had mentioned genocide, and the U.S. is self-exempted from the international treaty banning genocide.

It’s easy to continue. It’s also easy to understand why the U.S. rejects the UN-based system, which bans its foreign policy, and prefers a system in which it sets the rules and is free to rescind them when it wishes. There’s no need to discuss why the U.S. prefers a unipolar rather than multipolar order.

All of these considerations arise critically in consideration of global conflicts and threats to survival.

CJP: All societies have seen dramatic economic transformations over the past 50 years, with China leading the pack as it emerged in just the course of just a few decades from an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse, lifting in the process hundreds of millions out of poverty. But this is not to say that life is necessarily an improvement over the past. In the U.S., for instance, the quality of life has declined over the past decade and so has life satisfaction in the European Union. Are we at a stage where we are witnessing the decline of the West and the rise of the East? In either case, while many people seem to think that the rise of the far-right in Europe and the United States is related to perceptions about the decline of the West, the rise of the far-right is a global phenomenon, ranging from India and Brazil to Israel, Pakistan and the Philippines. In fact, the alt-right has even found a comfortable home on China’s internet. So, what’s going on? Why are nationalism, racism and extremism making such a huge comeback on the world stage at large?

NC: There is an interplay of many factors, some specific to particular societies, for example, the dismantling of secular democracy in India as Prime Minister Modi pursues his project of establishing a harsh racist Hindu ethnocracy. That’s specific to India, though not without analogues elsewhere.

There are some factors that have fairly broad scope, and common consequences. One is the radical increase in inequality in much of the world as a consequence of the neoliberal policies emanating from the U.S. and UK and spreading beyond in various ways.

The facts are clear enough, particularly well-studied for the U.S. The Rand corporation study we’ve discussed before estimated almost $50 trillion in wealth transferred from workers and the middle class – the lower 90% of income – to the top 1% during the neoliberal years. More information is provided in the work of Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez, summarized lucidly by political economist Robert Brenner.

The basic conclusion is that through “the postwar boom, we actually had decreasing inequality and very limited income going to the top income brackets. For the whole period from the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, the top 1% of earners received 9-10% of total income, no more. But in the short period since 1980, their share, that is the share of the top 1%, has gone up to 25%, while the bottom 80% have made virtually no gains.”

That has many consequences. One is reduction of productive investment and shift to a rentier economy, in some ways a reversion from capitalist investment for production to feudal-style production of wealth, not capital – “fictitious capital,” as Marx called it.

Another consequence is breakdown of the social order. In their incisive work The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show a close correlation between inequality and a range of social disorders. One country is off the chart: very high inequality but even greater social disorder than expected by the correlation. That’s the country that led the way in the neoliberal assault – formally defined as commitment to small government and the market, in practice radically different, more accurately described as dedicated class war making use of whatever mechanisms are available.

Wilkinson-Pickett’s revealing work has been carried forward since, recently in an important study by Steven Bezruchka. It seems well confirmed that inequality is a prime factor in breakdown of social order.

There have been similar effects in the UK under harsh austerity policies, extending elsewhere in many ways. Commonly, the hardest hit are the weak. Latin America suffered two lost decades under destructive structural adjustment policies. In Yugoslavia and Rwanda such policies in the ‘80s sharply exacerbated social tensions, contributing to the horrors that followed.

It's sometimes argued the neoliberal policies were a grand success, pointing to the fastest reduction in global poverty in history -- but failing to add that these remarkable achievements were in China and other countries that firmly rejected the prescribed neoliberal principles.

Furthermore, it wasn’t the “Washington consensus” that induced U.S. investors to shift production to countries with much cheaper labor and limited labor rights or environmental constraints, thereby deindustrializing America with well-known consequences for working people.

It is not that these were the only options. Studies by the labor movement and by Congress’s own research bureau (OTA, since disbanded) offered feasible alternatives that could have benefited working people globally. But they were dismissed.

All of this forms part of the background for the ominous phenomena you describe. The neoliberal assault is a prominent factor in the breakdown of the social order that leaves great numbers of people angry, disillusioned, frightened, contemptuous of institutions that they see are not working in their interests.

One crucial element of the neoliberal assault has been to deprive the targets of means of defense. Reagan and Thatcher opened the neoliberal era with attacks on unions, the main line of defense of working people against class war. They also opened the door to corporate attacks on labor, often illegal, but that doesn’t matter when the state they largely control looks the other way.

A primary defense against class war is an educated, informed public. Public education has come under harsh attack during the neoliberal years: sharp defunding, business models that favor cheap and easily disposable labor (adjuncts, graduate students) instead of faculty, teaching-to-test models that undermine critical thinking and inquiry, and much else. Best to have a population that is passive, obedient and atomized, even if they are angry and resentful, and thus easy prey for demagogues skilled in tapping ugly currents that run not too far below the surface in every society.

CJP: We have heard on countless occasions from both political pundits and influential academics that democracy is in decline. Indeed, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) claimed in early 2022 that just only 6.4% of the world’s population enjoys “full democracy,” though it is anything but clear how the sister company of the conservative weekly magazine The Economist understands the actual meaning and context of the term “full democracy.” Be that as it may, I think we can all agree that there are several key indicators pointing to a dysfunction of democracy in the 21st century. But isn’t it also the case that a perception of a crisis of democracy has existed almost as long as modern democracy itself? Moreover, isn’t it also the case that general talk about a crisis of democracy applies exclusively to the concept of liberal democracy, which is anything but authentic democracy? I am interested in your thoughts on these topics.

NC: What exactly is a crisis of democracy? The term is familiar. It was, for example, the title of the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, liberal internationalist scholars from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. It stands alongside the Powell Memorandum as one of the harbingers of the neoliberal assault that was gathering steam in the Carter administration (mostly trilateralists) and took off with Reagan and Thatcher. The Powell memorandum, addressing the business world, was the tough side; the Trilateral Commission report was the soft liberal side.

The Powell memorandum, authored by Justice Lewis Powell, pulled no punches. It called on the business world to use its power to beat back what it perceived as a major attack on the business world – meaning that instead of the corporate sector freely running almost everything, there were some limited efforts to restrict its power. The streak of paranoia and wild exaggerations are not without interest, but the message was clear: Launch harsh class war and put an end to the “time of troubles,” a standard term for the activism of the 1960s, which greatly civilized society.

Like Powell, the Trilateralists were concerned by the “time of troubles.” The crisis of democracy was that ‘60s activism was bringing about too much democracy. All sorts of groups were calling for greater rights: the young, the old, women, workers, farmers,…, sometimes called “special interests.” A particular concern was the failure of the institutions responsible “for the indoctrination of the young”: schools and universities. That’s why we see young people carrying out their disruptive activities. These popular efforts imposed an impossible burden on the state, which could not respond to these special interests: a crisis of democracy.

The solution was evident: “more moderation in democracy.” In other words, a return to passivity and obedience so that democracy can flourish. That concept of democracy has deep roots, going back to the Founding Fathers and Britain before them, revived in major work on democratic theory by 20th century thinkers, among them Walter Lippmann, the most prominent public intellectual; Edward Bernays, a guru of the huge public relations industry; Harold Lasswell, one of the founders of modern political science; Reinhold Niebuhr, known as the theologian of the liberal establishment.

All were good Wilson-FDR-JFK liberals. All agreed with the Founders that democracy was a danger to be avoided. The people of the country have a role in a properly functioning democracy: to push a lever every few years to select someone offered to them by the “responsible men.” They are to be “spectators, not participants,” kept in line with “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications,” what Lippmann called “manufacture of consent,” a primary art of democracy.

Satisfying these conditions would constitute “full democracy,” as the concept is understood within liberal democratic theory. Others may have different views, but they are part of the problem, not the solution, to paraphrase Reagan.

Returning the concerns about decline of democracy, even full democracy in this sense is in decline in its traditional centers. In Europe, Orban’s racist “illiberal democracy” in Hungary troubles the European Union, along with Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party and others that share its deeply authoritarian tendencies.

Recently Orban hosted a conference of far-right movements in Europe, some with neo-fascist origins. The U.S. National Conservative Political Action Caucus, a core element of today’s GOP, was a star participant. Donald Trump gave a major address. Tucker Carlson contributed an adoring documentary.

Shortly after, the NCPAC had a conference in Dallas Texas, where the keynote speaker was Victor Orban, lauded as a leading spokesman of authoritarian white Christian nationalism.

These are no laughing matters. At both the state and the national level, today’s Republican party in the U.S., which has abandoned its past role as an authentic parliamentary party, is seeking ways to gain permanent political control as a minority organization, committed to Orban-style illiberal democracy. Its leader, Donald Trump, has made no secret of his plans to replace the nonpartisan civil service that is a foundation of any modern democracy with appointed loyalists, to prevent teaching of American history in any minimally serious fashion, and in general to end vestiges of more than limited formal democracy.

In the most powerful state of human history, with a long, mixed, sometimes progressive democratic tradition, these are not minor matters.

CJP: Countries in the periphery of the global system seem to be trying to break away from Washington’s influence and are increasingly calling for a new world order. For instance, even Saudi Arabia is following Iran to join China and Russia’s security bloc. What are the implications of this realignment in global relations, and how likely is it that Washington will use tactics to halt this process from going much further?

NC: In March, Saudi Arabia joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It was followed shortly after by the second Middle East petroleum heavyweight, the United Arab Emirates, which had already become a hub for China’s Maritime Silk Road, running from Kolkata in Eastern India through the Red Sea and on to Europe. These developments followed China’s brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, previously bitter enemies, and thus impeding U.S. efforts to isolate and overthrow the regime. Washington professes not to be concerned, but that is hard to credit.

Since the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938, and the recognition soon of its extraordinary scale, controlling Saudi Arabia has been a high priority for the U.S. Its drift towards independence -- and even worse, towards the expanding China-based economic sphere -- must be eliciting deep concern in policy-making circles. It’s another long step towards a multipolar order that that is anathema to the U.S.

So far, the U.S. had not devised effective tactics to counter these strong tendencies in world affairs, which have many sources – including the self-destruction of U.S. society and political life.

CJP: Organized business interests have had decisive influence on U.S. foreign policy over the last two centuries. However, there are arguments made today that there is a loosening of business hegemony over U.S. foreign policy, and China is offered as the evidence that Washington is not listening to business anymore. But isn’t it the case that the capitalist state, while always working on behalf of the general interests of the business establishment, also possesses a certain degree of independence and that other factors enter into the equation when it comes to the implementation of foreign policy and the management of foreign affairs? It seems to me that U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba, for example, is evidence of the relative autonomy of the state from the economic interests of the capitalist classes.

NC: It may be a caricature to describe the capitalist state as the executive committee of the ruling class, but it’s a caricature of something that exists, and has existed for a long time. We may recall again Adam Smith’s description of the early days of capitalist imperialism, when the “masters of mankind” who owned the economy of England were the “principal architects” of state policy and ensured that their own interests were properly served no matter how grievous the effects on others. Others included the people of England, but much more so the victims of the “savage injustice” of the masters, particularly in India in the early days of England’s destruction of what was then along with China the richest society on earth, while stealing its more advanced technology.

Some principles of global order have a long life.

There should be no need to review again how closely U.S. foreign policy has conformed to Smith’s maxim, to the present. One guiding doctrine is that the U.S. will not tolerate what State Department officials called “the philosophy of the new nationalism,” which embraces “policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses” along with the pernicious idea “that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.” They are not. The first beneficiaries are the investor class, primarily from the U.S.

This stern lesson was taught to backward Latin Americans at a hemispheric conference called by the U.S. in 1945, which established an Economic Charter for the Americas that stamped out these heresies. They were not confined to Latin America. 80 years ago, it seemed that at last the world would finally emerge from the misery of the Great Depression and fascist horrors. A wave of radical democracy spread throughout much of the world, with hopes for a more just and humane global order. The earliest imperatives for the U.S. and its British junior partner were to block these aspirations and to restore the traditional order, including fascist collaborators, first in Greece (with enormous violence) and Italy, then throughout western Europe, extending as well to Asia. Russia played as similar role in its own lesser domains. These are among the first chapters of postwar history.

While Smith’s masters of mankind quite generally ensure that state policy serves their immediate interests, there are exceptions, which give a good deal of insight into policy formation. We’ve just discussed one: Cuba. It’s not just the world that objects strenuously to the sanctions policy to which it must conform. The same is true of powerful sectors among the masters, including energy, agribusiness, and particularly pharmaceuticals, eager to link up with Cuba’s advanced industry. But the executive committee prohibits it. Their parochial interests are overridden by the long-term interest of preventing “successful defiance” of U.S. policies tracing back to the Monroe doctrine, as the State Department explained 60 years ago.

Any Mafia Don would understand.

The very same individual might make different choices as CEO of a corporation and in the State Department, with the same interests in mind but a different perspective on how to further them.

Another case is Iran, in this case going back to 1953, when the parliamentary government sought to gain control of its immense petroleum resources, making the mistake of believing “that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.” Britain, the longtime overlord of Iran, no longer had the capacity to reverse this deviation from good order, so called on the real muscle overseas. The U.S. overthrew the government, installing the Shah’s dictatorship, the first steps in U.S. torture of the people of Iran that has continued without a break to the present, carrying forward Britain’s legacy.

But there was a problem. As part of the deal, Washington demanded that U.S. corporations take over 40% of the British concession, but they were unwilling, for short-term parochial reasons. To do so would prejudice their relations with Saudi Arabia, where exploitation of the country’s resources was cheaper and more profitable. The Eisenhower administration threatened the companies with anti-trust suits, and they complied. Not a great burden to be sure, but one the companies didn’t want.

The conflict between Washington and U.S. corporations persists to the present. As in the case of Cuba, both Europe and U.S. corporations strongly oppose the harsh U.S. sanctions on Iran, but are forced to comply, cutting them out of the lucrative Iranian market. Again, the state interest in punishing Iran for successful defiance overrides the parochial interests of short-term profit.

Contemporary China is a much larger case. Neither European nor U.S. corporations are happy about Washington’s commitment “to slow down China’s rate of innovation” while they lose access to the rich China market. It seems that U.S. corporations may have found a way around the restrictions on trade. An analysis by the Asian business press found “a strong predictive relationship between these countries’ [Vietnam, Mexico, India] imports from China and their exports to the United States,” suggesting that trade with China has simply been re-directed.

The same study reports that “China’s share of international trade is rising steadily. Its export volume…rose 25% since 2018 while the industrial nations’ export volume stagnated.”

It remains to be seen how European, Japanese, and South Korean industries will react to the directive to abandon a primary market in order to satisfy the U.S. goal of preventing China’s development. It would be a bitter blow, far worse than losing access to Iran or of course Cuba.

CJP: More than a couple of centuries ago, Immanuel Kant presented his theory of perpetual peace as the only rational way for states to co-exist with one another. Yet, perpetual peace remains a mirage, an unattainable ideal. Could it be that a world political order away from the nation-state as the primary unit is a necessary prerequisite for perpetual peace to be realized?

NC: Kant argued that reason would bring about perpetual peace in a benign global political order. Another great philosopher, Bertrand Russell, saw things rather differently when asked about the prospects for world peace:

“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”

I don’t presume to enter those ranks. I’d like to think that humans have the capacity to do much better than what Russell forecast, even if not to achieve Kant’s ideal.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a columnist for Global Policy Journal and a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over one thousand articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

Photo by Leeloo Thefirst

Brianna Grier was arrested last July in Hancock County, Georgia, after suffering from a mental health episode. However, police forgot to close the back door of their patrol car, and Grier fell out, sustaining injuries that eventually led to her death six days later.
This week, Grier's family has filed a $100 million lawsuit against the officers who arrested Grier, claiming that their actions constituted excessive force that violated her constitutional rights.
According to the lawsuit, Grier, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, had been visiting her parents and her twin 3-year-old daughters when she called 911, saying that she was having an anxiety attack and needed to take her medications. Two officers, Lieutenant Marlin Primus and Deputy Timothy Legette, arrived shortly and arrested Grier. According to the complaint, Primus "claimed he could smell alcohol on Brianna Grier, stating he was charging Grier with 'public drunk,'" though Legette "later admitted to Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) officials that he did not smell alcohol"on her. 
According to the complaint, Grier herself insisted that she wasn't drunk, and when Grier's body fluids were later tested, no alcohol was found in her system.
The complaint states that Primus and Legette handcuffed Grier—who, in body camera footage of the incident, can be heard threatening to harm herself if arrested. The pair then forced Grier into the back of Legette's patrol car, where she may have hit her head. According to the complaint, Primus did "not protect Grier's head while hoisting and heaving Grier into the vehicle" and "Grier can be heard audibly exclaiming until her head has crossed the threshold of Deputy Legettes's patrol car driver's side back doorframe. Once Grier's head crosses the car doorframe ceiling, Grier is suddenly silent."
A few minutes later, the two officers drove off, leaving the back passenger-side door to the patrol car open. A few minutes later, Grier, who had not been buckled into the car, fell out of the patrol car.
In body camera footage of the incident, the two officers can been seen approaching an unconscious Grier, laying facedown on the side of the road. "Sit up, sit up, sit up," says Primus, moving Grier into a sitting position, adding "she jumped to the car." While the pair's statements are sometimes difficult to hear in released body camera footage, the complaint states that Legette added, "We're gonna need an ambulance."
However, neither officer attempted to administer first aid. As the pair waited for an ambulance, Primus stated that Grier "just bailed out. I might not have had that door shut. That I don't know. That I don't know," after which he motioned for Legette to turn off his body camera.
Grier was eventually airlifted to an Atlanta hospital. The complaint states that Grier had "multiple skull fractures upon arrival to the hospital" and was "declared brain dead," succumbing to her injuries six days later. Last November, the Hancock County District Attorney announced that he would not be seeking criminal charges against the officers.
"A State Actor cannot arrest and handcuff an individual, place them in a dangerous circumstance, and then claim no fault if the person is harmed by precisely the danger created by the State Actors," the complaint states. "As a proximate result of the callous and or reckless actions and omissions described above, Grier was injured, endured physical pain and mental suffering, and was killed."
Grier's case shows just how easily 911 calls seeking medical health for a mentally ill individual can end in tragedy. Grier's aggressive arrest by police and their negligence in failing to buckle her into the car and insure the patrol car door, according to the complaint, directly caused her unnecessary death.
But Brianna Grier didn't need to be arrested, she needed an ambulance—something her parents say had been summoned during their daughter's previous mental health episode—but instead, she got two cops. 
The post A Georgia Woman Died After Falling Out of a Moving Patrol Car. Now, Her Family Is Suing the Cops Responsible. appeared first on Reason.com.

The United States’ debt ceiling crisis is, once again, provoking the usual commentary about the country’s presumed dysfunction. But the truth is that this unprovoked madness, causing self-inflicted wounds, is taking place against a backdrop of astonishing strength. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The facts cannot be disputed. The United States has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic faster than any major economy in the world. As Bloomberg’s Matthew A. Winkler recently pointed out, unemployment is stunningly low. Gross domestic product growth has grown at three times the average pace as under President Donald Trump, real incomes are rising, manufacturing is booming, and inflation has eased for 10 straight months. Even the budget deficit, which was at 15.6 percent of GDP at the end of the Trump presidency, has dropped to 5.5 percent of GDP at the end of last year.

The picture is even better when viewed more broadly. The United States remains the world’s leader in business, especially in cutting-edge technology. Scholars Sean Starrs and Stephen G. Brooks found that, looking at the globe’s top 2,000 companies, Chinese firms come first in shares of global profits in only 11 percent of sectors, but U.S. firms are ranked first in 74 percent of sectors.

Or look at artificial intelligence, which most agree is the bold new frontier of technology, likely to shape every industry. U.S. companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Google produce the best applications on the market, and a host of other new start-ups are surging forward. As Paul Scharre points out in a Foreign Affairs essay, “Of the top 15 institutions publishing deep learning research, 13 are American universities or corporate labs. Only one, Tsinghua University, is Chinese.” He notes that while China publishes much more AI research than the United States, American papers are cited 70 percent more often. These U.S. advantages are likely to grow dramatically now that China has been blocked from the advanced chips that are absolutely essential to developing and using AI.

Or consider finance. Despite the recent banking crisis, the biggest U.S. banks are now more dominant than they have ever been worldwide. They have passed rigorous stress tests and built up their capital reserves, and as a result they are now better positioned than their European and Japanese counterparts. China’s state-owned banks are saddled with huge government debt and cannot operate in the open global financial system because that would almost certainly trigger massive outflows of funds, as the Chinese people seek to move their money to safer locales. And despite many challenges and efforts to unseat it, the dollar remains the global reserve currency (as the International Monetary Fund’s managing director said recently), which gives the United States a financial superpower. (It is one that I worry we are misusing, which will trigger even more efforts to replace it. But there is no denying that the dollar, for now, reigns supreme.)

A somewhat under-noticed development in recent years has been the United States’ rise as an energy powerhouse. Because of fracking and natural gas, the United States is now the world’s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons. And as Columbia University’s Jason Bordoff has noted, America’s ability to ship liquefied natural gas has made it an energy superpower, able to provide or cut off energy to countries around the world. Add to these traditional energy sources the dramatic ramp-up of green energy, thanks to the vast tax credits and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, and you have a picture of truly astonishing, comprehensive energy capacity.

The U.S. military remains in a league of its own, far superior to those of its rivals in Russia or China. China is catching up to the United States, but the lead remains vast across many dimensions of warfare. And in Ukraine, as the Republican foreign policy adviser Kori Schake has noted, the United States, at minimal cost and with no American troops, is inflicting ruinous damage on Russia’s army. Washington is also transforming the Ukrainian army into the most powerful fighting force in Europe — giving it another potent ally. The great force multiplier of U.S. power remains its alliances. The United States has more than 50 treaty allies; China has one (North Korea). And it has about 750 military bases of some kind around the world; China has one (in Djibouti).

I could go on. Unlike most rich countries, the United States has a strong working-age cohort that will not shrink, thanks to immigration. We still take in more than 1 million legal immigrants per year on average. China and Russia are both facing demographic declines that are almost impossible to reverse, and which will put a long-term damper on their growth.

Could it be that it is precisely this backdrop of strength that allows Washington’s politicians — and the Republican Party in particular — to indulge in this crazy political theater? For most countries, the price of playing games with one’s creditworthiness would be sharp and severe, and that would act as a disciplining mechanism. But in Washington, the country’s enduring strength has become a license for irresponsibility.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekDo you want Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida to win or lose his Republican primary race against Donald Trump? Why? How does he compare, in your estimation, to Joe Biden?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com Conversations of NoteBack in 2021, I argued that backing Ron DeSantis early was the best bet for Never Trumpers who wanted to deny Donald Trump another GOP nomination. I still think so. And this week, DeSantis launched his campaign, though as my colleague David Graham notes in an article that is bearish on DeSantis’s chances at victory, Trump’s strong numbers in the polls are undeniable.Still, Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, argues in The New York Times that it is far too early to count DeSantis out:
He’ll be lavishly funded, his favorable ratings remain quite high among Republicans, he can draw a crowd, he’ll finally actually be in the race, and perhaps most important, it seems he has the correct theory of how to try to topple Mr. Trump …
Mr. DeSantis won’t and can’t make the totalist case against Mr. Trump as unfit to serve that Never Trump Republicans and the press might like to hear. But so it is. Much of his anti-Trump case will be based on electability. There’s no doubt that Mr. Trump blew a winnable race in 2020—Mr. DeSantis will need to say he really did lose—and had a large hand in the Republican Party’s disappointing midterms last year. In all likelihood, Mr. DeSantis would have a much easier time beating President Biden than Mr. Trump would, based on the generational contrast alone. But there are limits to this argument.
Mr. Trump is competitive with Mr. Biden in polling, and an electability message doesn’t usually move the type of self-identified very conservative primary voters Mr. DeSantis needs to pry from Mr. Trump. The risk to Mr. DeSantis is that his candidacy takes on the feel of an establishment front-runner—lots of donor enthusiasm, an electability message—when he’s running from behind against an insurgent populist who happens to have once been president of the United States. To counter that, Mr. DeSantis is obviously going to have to retain his hard edge on cultural issues.
I’ll share my own thoughts about how DeSantis might run against Trump soon.A Gen Z Teen’s Diagnosis of His GenerationZach Gottlieb grew up with a therapist mom (Lori Gottlieb, who also happens to write our Dear Therapist column) who taught him that discomfort is part of life, but that the world keeps turning even when you’re sad, a message that helps him to stay resilient.In the Los Angeles Times, he argues that parents who take the opposite approach are creating depressed kids:
Parents and educators have been trying to figure out how to help teens in my generation who are struggling amid rising rates of depression and anxiety. That’s an understandable goal. What worries me, though, is the possibility that many in my generation are confusing mental health issues with normal discomfort, to the point that the term “mental health” is becoming so diluted that it’s starting to lose meaning.
Social media play a large role in this, promoting pseudo-technical and pathologizing language—often leading to cancellation—as the antidote to emotional discomfort.
Someone disagrees with you? They’re “gaslighting” you! Someone has the “wrong” point of view or perspective? They’re “toxic”! Someone declines to do what you ask? They have “no boundaries”! Instead of talking through these situations or trying to understand another perspective better, we run away to the supposed comfort of not having to deal with them. Click—they’re blocked.
Colleges have disinvited speakers who might be triggering to some students or created “safe spaces” where students can go instead; students in high schools and middle schools can choose not to attend assemblies that might be triggering; TV shows and podcasts tell us in advance that we might be triggered by a certain topic discussed, so we should skip that episode in case it makes us uncomfortable. We strive to make everyone comfortable, all the time and in every way—an impossible goal.
All of the warnings are well-intentioned and supposedly in service of our mental health. And of course, many people my age face mental health stressors that go far beyond the disappointments and conflicts of daily life. Anxiety and depression are serious concerns that need to be addressed, and treatment should be encouraged and accessible.
But I wonder if, more broadly, we’re normalizing an almost hyper-vigilant avoidance of anything uncomfortable. By insisting that the mere mention of something difficult is bad for our mental health, are we protecting ourselves from emotional damage—or damaging ourselves emotionally?
Silicon Valley WooThe writer Tara Isabella Burton argues in The New Atlantis that the zeitgeist has shifted in the following way:
You might call it the postrationalist turn: a cultural shift in both relatively “normie” and hyper-weird online spaces. Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology—that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so—is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits—political, cultural, and social alike—of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost—a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent—must be restored.
What could go wrong?The Tax Code and Swedish FeminismIn a fascinating essay on Sweden’s approach to the state and individualism, the Swedish history professor Lars Trägårdh spends a few paragraphs on the country’s unique tax code and the effect it has had on women:
In 1971, joint taxation was eliminated in favour of strict individual taxation. The idea was that at a time when women began to flock to the labour market, joint taxation presented an obstacle in the form of a negative incentive. If a woman began to earn money, her income would be added to that of the husband, and in an era of progressive taxation that meant the woman’s income effectively would be subject to a higher tax. Add to this that before the 1970s there was no universal, tax-financed childcare yet in Sweden, meaning that such care—without which it would be impossible for both husband and wife to work—had to be paid for privately, a costly proposition.
The introduction of strict individual taxation—there was no option to select joint taxation—and, over time, universal daycare, created the conditions for women to enter the workforce en masse. This in turn gave them the economic independence without which talk of gender equality would only amount to rhetoric. These reforms, to which can be added the world’s first law criminalising the spanking of children, even at home, and the legalising of gender-neutral marriage, meant that the family became more and more of a voluntary society, rather than the old-fashioned traditional family characterised by patriarchal power relations. To be sure, these reforms, which one perceptive writer has referred to as a ‘bloodless revolution’, created opposition. One group called the Family Campaign collected some 60,000 signatures from irate housewives and religious conservatives to protest the new tax law. But, generally, support far exceeded opposition and the days of the Swedish housewife were indeed numbered.
A Defense of Battle RapIf you’re horrified by the genre––or a bit unsure of what exactly it is––Jay Caspian Kang’s interesting essay in The New Yorker may provoke more complicated thoughts about its value.He writes:
​​Battle rap offers a kind of representation politics for the unwoke, a space where there’s some separation between the craft and the respect that the combatants have for one another. In this way, it is both a reflection of a certain reality and, for its fans, a fantasy for how we wish we could talk about identity. There’s something compelling, and even democratic, about battle rap’s premise that identity can always be at the forefront, but will never determine who actually wins.
Conversations of NoteMarking the 150th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s death, Richard V. Reeves, who wrote a 2007 book about the great liberal philosopher, revisits his arguments for a culture of free speech:
Mill believed that the pursuit of truth required the collation and combination of ideas and propositions, even those that seem to be in opposition to each other. He urged us to allow others to speak—and then to listen to them—for three main reasons, most crisply articulated in Chapter 2 of On Liberty.
First, the other person’s idea, however controversial it seems today, might turn out to be right. (“The opinion … may possibly be true.”) Second, even if our opinion is largely correct, we hold it more rationally and securely as a result of being challenged. (“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”) Third, and in Mill’s view most likely, opposing views may each contain a portion of the truth, which need to be combined. (“Conflicting doctrines … share the truth between them.”)
For Mill, as for us, this is not primarily a legal issue. His main concern was not government censorship. It was the stultifying consequences of social conformity, of a culture where deviation from a prescribed set of opinions is punished through peer pressure and the fear of ostracism. “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough,” he wrote. “There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”
Mill never pretended that this would be easy, either at a personal or political level. The humility and openness that is required is hard-won. Our identity as a person must be kept separable from the ideas we happen to endorse at a given time. Otherwise, when those ideas are criticized, we are likely to experience the criticism as an attack upon our self, rather than as an opportunity to think about something more deeply and to grow intellectually. That’s why education is so important. Liberals are not born; we have to be made.  
The article goes on to defend Mill from his detractors on the post-liberal right.By submitting an email, you agree to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

The budget cuts that House Republicans are demanding in their high-stakes debt-ceiling standoff with President Joe Biden sharpen the overlapping generational and racial conflict moving to the center of U.S. politics.The House GOP’s blueprint would focus its spending cuts on the relatively small slice of the federal budget that funds most of the government’s investments in children and young adults, who are the most racially diverse generations in American history.Those programs, and other domestic spending funded through the annual congressional-appropriations process, face such large proposed cuts in part because the GOP plan protects constituencies and causes that Republicans have long favored: It rejects any reductions in spending on defense or homeland security, and refuses to raise taxes on the most affluent earners or corporations.But the burden leans so heavily toward programs that benefit young people, such as Head Start or Pell Grants, also because the Republican proposal, unlike previous GOP debt-reduction plans, exempts from any cuts Social Security and Medicare. Those are the two giant federal programs that support the preponderantly white senior population.The GOP’s deficit agenda opens a new front in what I’ve called the collision between the brown and the gray—the struggle for control of the nation’s direction between kaleidoscopically diverse younger generations that are becoming the cornerstone of the modern Democratic electoral coalition and older cohorts that remain predominantly white and anchor the Republican base.The budget fight, in many ways, represents the fiscal equivalent to the battle over cultural issues raging through Republican-controlled states across the country. In those red states, GOP governors and legislators are using statewide power rooted in their dominance of mostly white and Christian nonurban areas to pass laws imposing the conservative social values and grievances of their base on issues including abortion, LGBTQ rights, classroom censorship, book bans, and even the reintroduction of religious instruction into public schools. On all those fronts, red-state Republicans are institutionalizing policies that generally conflict not only with the preferences but even the identity of younger generations who are much more racially diverse, more likely to identify as LGBTQ, and less likely to identify with any organized religion.[Read: Why Biden caved]The House Republicans’ plan would solidify a similar tilt in the federal budget’s priorities. Because Social Security, Medicare, and the portion of Medicaid that funds long-term care for the elderly are among Washington’s biggest expenditures, the federal budget spends more than six times as much on each senior 65 and older as it does on each child 18 and younger, according to the comprehensive “Kids’ Share” analysis published each year by the nonpartisan Urban Institute. Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow there who helped create the “Kids’ Share” report, told me, “We are already in some sense asking the young to pay the price” by cutting taxes on today’s workers while increasing spending on seniors, and accumulating more government debt that future generations must pay off.Spending on children 18 and younger now makes up a little more than 9 percent of the federal budget, according to the study. But that number is artificially inflated by the large social expenditures that Congress authorized during the pandemic. By 2033, the report projects, programs for kids will fall to only about 6 percent of federal spending.One reason for the decline is that spending on the entitlement programs for the elderly—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—will command more of total spending under the pressure of both increasing health-care costs and the growing senior population. Under current law, in 2033 those programs for seniors will expand to consume almost exactly half of federal spending, the “Kids’ Share” analysis projects.By protecting those programs for seniors from any cuts, and rejecting any new revenues, while exacting large reductions from programs for kids and young adults, the GOP plan would bend the budget even further from the brown toward the gray. The implication of the plan “is that children will get an even smaller slice of federal spending” than anticipated under current policies, Elaine Maag, an Urban Institute senior fellow and a co-author of the “Kids’ Share” report, told me.Federal spending on kids is particularly at risk because of how Washington provides it. The federal government does channel substantial assistance to kids through tax benefits, such as the child tax credit, and entitlement programs, including Medicaid and Social Security survivors’ benefits, that are affected less by the GOP proposal. But many of the federal programs that benefit kids and young people are provided through programs that require annual appropriations from Congress, what’s known as domestic discretionary spending. As Maag noted, the programs that help low-income and vulnerable kids are especially likely to be funded as discretionary spending, rather than entitlements or tax credits. “Head Start or child-care subsidies or housing subsidies are all very targeted programs,” she said.The GOP plan’s principal mechanism for reducing federal spending is to impose overall caps on that discretionary spending. Those caps would cut such spending this year and then hold its growth over the next nine years to just 1 percent annually, which is not enough to keep pace with inflation. Over time, those tightening constraints would result in substantially less spending than currently projected for these programs. If the GOP increased defense spending enough to keep pace with inflation, that would require all other discretionary programs—including those that benefit kids—to be cut by 27 percent this year and by almost half in 2033, according to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive advocacy group. If the GOP also intends to maintain enough funding for veterans programs (including health care) to match inflation, the required cuts in all other discretionary programs would start at 33 percent next year and rise to almost 60 percent by 2033.[Read: This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse.]As Sharon Parrott, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told me this week, by demanding general spending caps, the GOP does not have to commit in advance to specific program reductions that might be unpopular with the public. “What they are trying to do is put in place a process that forces large cuts without ever having to say what they are,” Parrott said.Federal agencies have projected that the cuts required under the Republican spending caps would force 200,000 children out of the Head Start program, end Pell Grants for about 80,000 recipients and cut the grants by about $1,000 annually for the remainder, and slash federal support for Title I schools by an amount that could require them to eliminate about 60,000 teachers or classroom aides. The plan also explicitly repeals the student-loan relief that Biden has instituted for some 40 million borrowers. Its cuts in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, generally known as welfare, could end aid for as many as 1 million children, including about 500,000 already living in poverty, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated.The appropriations bill that a House subcommittee recently approved for agricultural programs offers another preview of what the GOP plan, over time, would mean for the programs that support kids. The bill cut $800 million, or about 12 percent, from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Parrott noted that to avoid creating long waiting lists for eligibility, which might stir a more immediate backlash, the committee instead eliminated a pandemic-era program that gave families increased funding through WIC to purchase fruits and vegetables. “They are saying the country can’t possibly afford to make sure that pregnant participants, breast-feeding participants, toddlers, and preschoolers have enough money for fruits and vegetables,” she said.Parrott doesn’t see the GOP budget as primarily motivated by a desire to favor the old over the young. She notes that the GOP plan would also squeeze some programs that older Americans rely on, for instance by reducing funds for Social Security administration or Meals on Wheels, and imposing work requirements that could deny aid to older, childless adults receiving assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.Instead, Parrott, like the Biden administration and congressional Democrats, believes that the GOP budget’s central priority is to protect corporations and the most affluent from higher taxes. “To me, that’s who they are really shielding,” she said.Yet the GOP’s determination to avoid reductions in Social Security and Medicare, coupled with its refusal to consider new revenue or defense cuts, has exposed kids to even greater risk than the last debt-ceiling standoff. Those negotiations in 2011, between then-President Barack Obama and the new GOP House majority, initially focused on a “grand bargain” that involved cuts in entitlements and tax increases along with reductions in both discretionary domestic and defense spending. Even after that sweeping plan collapsed, the two sides settled on a fallback proposal that raised the debt ceiling while requiring future cuts in both domestic and defense spending.The House Republicans’ determination to narrow the budget-cutting focus almost entirely to domestic discretionary spending not only means more vulnerability for programs benefiting kids, but also less impact on the overall debt problem they say they want to address. Even some conservative budget experts acknowledge that it’s not possible to truly tame deficits by focusing solely on discretionary spending, which accounts for only about one-sixth of the total federal budget. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow and budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute, supports Republican efforts to limit future discretionary spending but views it only as an attempt to “prevent the deficit from getting worse.”Riedl told me that in his analysis of long-term budget trends, he found it impossible to prevent the federal debt from increasing unsustainably without also raising taxes and significantly slowing the growth in spending on Social Security and Medicare. But, as he acknowledged, the GOP’s willingness to consider reductions in those programs has dwindled as their electoral coalition in the Donald Trump era has evolved to include more older and lower-income whites. “As the Republican electorate grew older and more blue collar, they revealed themselves as more attached to entitlements [for seniors] than previous Republican electorates,” he said.Trump in 2016 recognized that shift when he rejected previous GOP orthodoxy and instead   opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Trump has maintained that position by publicly warning congressional Republicans against cutting the programs, and attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who entered the 2024 GOP race yesterday, for supporting such reductions in the past. Biden has also pressured the GOP to preserve Social Security and Medicare.Though it’s not discussed nearly as much, the GOP’s refusal to consider taxes on high earners also has a stark generational component. With the occasional exception, older Americans generally earn more than younger Americans (the top tenth of people at age 61 earn almost 60 percent more than the top tenth of those age 30). Older generations are especially likely to have accumulated more wealth than younger people, Steuerle noted. As part of the economy’s general trend toward inequality, Steuerle said, older generations today are amassing an even larger share of the nation’s total wealth than in earlier eras.Refusing to raise taxes on today’s affluent while cutting programs for contemporary young people subjects those younger generations to a double whammy. Not only does it mean that the federal government invests less in their health, nutrition, and education, but it also increases the odds that as adults they will be compelled to pay higher taxes to fund retirement benefits for the growing senior population.Although Biden also wants to avoid cuts in entitlements for seniors, his call for raising more revenue from the affluent still creates a clear contrast with the GOP. By proposing higher taxes, Biden has been able to devise a budget that protects federal spending on kids and other domestic programs while also reducing the deficit. Biden’s budget proposal achieves greater generational balance than the GOP’s because the president asks today’s affluent earners, who are mostly older, to pay more in taxes to preserve spending that benefits young people. If Biden reaches a deal with congressional Republicans to avoid default, however, their price will inevitably include some form of spending cap that squeezes such programs: the real question is not whether, but how much.Looming over these choices is the intertwined generational and racial re-sorting of the two parties’ electoral coalitions. As Riedl noted, especially in the Trump era, the GOP has become more dependent on older white people who are either eligible for the federal retirement programs or nearing eligibility. According to a new analysis published by Catalist, a Democratic electoral-targeting firm, white adults older than 45 accounted for just over half of all voters in the 2022 and 2018 midterm elections and just under half in the 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns. But because those older white Americans have become such a solidly Republican bloc, they contributed about three-fifths of all GOP votes in the presidential years, and fully two-thirds of Republican votes in midterm elections.Democrats, in turn, are growing more reliant on the diverse younger generations. Catalist found that Democrats have won 60 to 66 percent of Millennials and members of Generation Z combined in each of the past four elections. Those two generations have more than doubled their share of the total vote from 14 percent in 2008 to 31 percent in 2020. Adding in the very youngest members of Generation X, all voters younger than 45 provided almost 40 percent of Democrats’ votes in 2022, Catalist found, far more than their overall share (30 percent) of the electorate.The inexorable long-term trajectory is for the diverse younger generations to increase their share of the vote while the mostly white older cohorts recede. In 2024, Millennials and Gen Z may, for the first time, cast as many ballots as the Baby Boomers and older generations; by 2028, they will almost certainly surpass the older groups. In the fight over the federal budget and debt ceiling—just as in the struggles over cultural issues unfolding in the states—Republicans appear to be racing to lock into law policies that favor their older, white base before the rising generations acquire the electoral clout to force a different direction.

Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.The common names of almost 150 North American birds are eponyms—that is, they derive from people. A disproportionate number of these names were assigned in the early 19th century by the soldier-scientists who traveled westward across the U.S. Bestowing eponyms to honor commanders, benefactors, family members, and one another, they turned the continent’s avifauna into tributes to “conquest and colonization,” as Hampton wrote. Many birders are now pushing to remove these eponyms, arguing that too many of them tie nature’s beauty and the pure joy of seeing a new species to humanity’s worst grotesqueries. “I didn’t ask for any of this information; I was just trying to bird,” Tykee James, the president of D.C. Audubon Society, told me. But now “we should do better because we know better—that’s the scientific process.”Similar sentiments have spread in other countries and animal groups. Many animals whose names had included ethnic and racial slurs now have new names, including a moth in North America and several birds in Sweden and South Africa. In the U.S., at least one bird with an eponym has been renamed, and the American Ornithological Society is developing a process for renaming more.These discussions have pushed many biologists and wildlife enthusiasts to reconsider the very act of naming—the people who get to do it, and the responsibilities they ought to shoulder. Whether common ones such as giraffe or scientific ones such as Giraffa camelopardalis, names act first as labels, allowing people to identify and classify living things. But names are also value-laden, reflecting the worldviews of the people who choose them. And some have come to believe that honoring any person, no matter their sins or virtues, reflects the wrong values. In this view, the practice of affixing an entire life-form with the name of a single individual must end entirely.When the ornithologist Robert Driver petitioned the American Ornithological Society in 2018 to rebrand McCown’s longspur, his proposal was rejected. This species was named after an Army officer who accidentally shot one of the birds, and who also waged campaigns against Indigenous tribes before joining the Confederacy; members of an AOS committee, which maintains an official list of common names for North American birds, variously said that “judging historical figures by current moral standards is problematic,” and that they were “concerned about where we would draw the line.”But the tide of opinion turned in May 2020. On the same day that a police officer murdered George Floyd, a white woman in New York City’s Central Park falsely told the cops that she was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a Black birder who had asked that she leash her dog. A video of that incident went viral, drawing the birding world into the debates over race and justice that were sweeping America. As Confederate statues and monuments fell nationwide, many birders argued that problematic eponyms also needed to be toppled. In June that year, Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley founded Bird Names for Birds, a campaign to rename all American birds that have eponyms. In July, the AOS reconsidered Driver’s proposal because of “heightened awareness of racial issues,” and the following month announced that the newly christened thick-billed longspur would be McCown’s no longer.Many other eponyms present similar cases for change, although none have been altered yet. John Kirk Townsend, whose name still graces two birds and almost a dozen mammals, dug up the graves of Native Americans and sent their skulls to the physician Samuel George Morton, who wanted to prove that Caucasians had bigger brains than other people; those remains are still undergoing a lengthy process toward burial or repatriation. John Bachman was a practitioner and defender of slavery, reasoning that Black people, whom he compared to domesticated animals, were so intellectually inferior to Caucasians as to be “incapable of self-government”; Bachman’s sparrow was named by his friend, John James Audubon. And Audubon, the most renowned—and, more recently, notorious—figure in American ornithology and the namesake of an oriole, a warbler, and a shearwater, also robbed Native American graves for Morton’s skull studies, while casually buying and selling slaves. “People have been singing his praises for 150 years, but in the last 15 years, he has turned out to be quite a monster,” says Matthew Halley, an ornithologist and historian, who has also found evidence that Audubon committed scientific fraud by fabricating a fake species of eagle that helped launch his career. In light of Audubon’s actions, several local chapters of the National Audubon Society have renamed themselves, as has the society’s union. In March, though, the national society’s board of directors voted to keep the name, on the grounds that it would allow the organization to “direct key resources and focus towards enacting the organization’s mission.”The drive to change these eponyms has faced the same now-familiar criticisms as the push to remove Confederate monuments. Proponents have been charged with erasing history but counter that they are clarifying it: People tend to assume that an eponym represents the individual who actually described the species, when it’s usually an honorific, sometimes exalting people with no connection to birds at all. (Anna’s hummingbird, for instance, was named after Anna Masséna, a French courtier and naturalist’s wife.) Halley also rejects the AOS’s original argument that modern birders are inappropriately judging the past using today’s standards. Townsend, for example, who came from a Quaker family and had an abolitionist for a sister, “was going against the moral teachings of his own community,” Halley told me. Meanwhile, Black people have always rejected slavery, just as Natives have always opposed ethnic cleansing, Hampton said. What’s changed is their presence in communities that typically decide what animals are called.Critics have also argued that names are meant to be stable, and changing them sows confusion. But there’s precedent in the bird world for updating them: In 1957, the AOS revised 188 common bird names to achieve better trans-Atlantic consistency, and it has changed dozens more since 1998. Names change all the time, for scientific and cultural reasons, and given a choice between stability and respect for people whose ancestors were harmed by early ornithologists, “I come down on the side of respect,” David Allen Sibley, a renowned author and illustrator of bird field guides, said in 2021.For some scientists, the eponym problem is about more than the egregious misdeeds of a few individuals. As Europeans spread to other continents, they brought not only invasive species that displaced native ones but also invasive nomenclature that ousted long-standing native terms for plants and animals. In Africa, the scientific names of a quarter of local birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are eponyms, mostly from Europe. On the biodiverse Pacific island of New Caledonia, more than 60 percent of plant eponyms honor French citizens. Countless species around the world have been named after European scientists whose travels were made possible by imperial ventures aimed at expanding territories or extracting natural resources. “We have romantic ideas of these explorers going around the world, seeing beautiful things, and naming them, and we forgot how they got there to begin with,” Natalia Piland, an ecologist at Florida International University, told me.Such naming patterns still continue. Piland and her colleagues found that since 1950, 183 newly identified birds have been given eponyms, and although 96 percent of these species live in the global South, 68 percent of their names honor people from the global North. In 2018, the Rainforest Trust, an American conservation nonprofit, auctioned off the rights to name 12 newly discovered South American species, leading to a frog named after Greta Thunberg and a caecilian named after Donald Trump. (A similar auction in 2005 landed a Bolivian monkey with the name of the internet casino GoldenPalace.com.) The beloved British naturalist David Attenborough has more than 50 species named after him, most of which live in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. That is not to begrudge Attenborough, Thunberg, or Trump; having a species named after you is widely considered a great honor, but globally, such honorees are still disproportionately people of European descent—a perpetuation of colonialism through taxonomy.Some scientists have proposed reinstating Indigenous names for animals wherever possible. But many species live across the territories of different Indigenous groups, or migrate across national or continental divides, making it hard to know whose names to prioritize. And if native names are applied without native consultation, the result can smack of cultural appropriation. Emma Carroll from the University of Auckland took on both challenges in naming a recently identified species of beaked whale. Carroll spent a year consulting Indigenous groups in countries where the new whale’s specimens had been found. In South Africa, the Khoisan Council suggested using the word //eu//’eu, which means “big fish” and is now immortalized in the scientific name Mesoplodon eueu. For the common name, Carroll asked a Māori cultural expert in New Zealand to draw up a shortlist, which she then ran past a local council. She eventually named the creature “Ramari’s beaked whale” after Ramari Stewart—a Māori whale expert whose work was pivotal in identifying the new species, and who has been “working to bridge Western science and mātauranga [Maori knowledge] for decades,” Carroll told me. Fittingly, ramari also means “a rare event” in the Māori language, and beaked whales are famously elusive.  Inspired by Carroll’s example, Eric Archer of the NOAA used a similar approach when describing a new species of bottlenose dolphin. He initially wanted to name it after Jim Mead—a respected scientist to whom Archer owes his career. But after feeling that this pattern of honoring close colleagues was too insular, he consulted the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, whose ancestors lived in the lands where the first specimen of the dolphin was found. Eventually, he named it Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin after an iconic 17th-century chief.But these names, too, sit uneasily with Steve Hampton, the birder and Cherokee Nation citizen, who told me that many Indigenous communities would see them as recapitulating “colonizer practices.” If the intent is to symbolize a connection between the animals and the people who share its land, “then take the apostrophe-s off,” Hampton said. Those two characters invoke ownership, as if an individual could lay claim to an entire species—a fundamentally colonial way of thinking, no matter whether the honoree is an Indigenous woman or a European man. By that logic, the issue with eponyms isn’t that some of them honor people who did vile things. It’s that animals shouldn’t be named after people at all.Doing away with all eponyms avoids, if nothing else, the problem of judging who, exactly, is objectionable enough to have their name stripped away from a species. Kevin Thiele, a botanist and director of Taxonomy Australia, argues, for instance, that the scientific community can easily expunge eponyms that honor “history’s monsters” without jettisoning the practice altogether; he told me that “a good cutoff might be if a person had influence, and thus has an eponym, as a result of egregious acts.” For example, the Australian flowers that he studies—Hibbertia—are named after George Hibbert, an 18th-century Englishman and amateur botanist whose fortunes and status derived almost entirely from the transatlantic slave trade. By contrast, hundreds of species are named after Charles Darwin, who certainly had racist views and benefited from colonialism, but who is honored because he profoundly shaped our understanding of nature. (Darwin also staunchly opposed slavery.) Hibbertia should go, but Darwin’s eponyms can stay, Thiele says.But Halley, the historian, suspects that people “who want to go in with a scalpel don’t know the full extent of the improprieties in the historical records,” he told me, and a clean slate would be preferable. Carlos Daniel Cadena, a Colombian ornithologist, agrees. “There’s a lot of potential to make these discussions ugly if we start going name by name and trying to decide which person was good or bad,” he told me. “And in 200 years, will we all be despicable because we trashed the planet or ate meat?”Others argue that, more importantly, the act of honoring a person through an organism’s name dishonors the organism itself. It treats animals and plants as inanimate objects like buildings or streets, constructed and owned by humans, instead of beings with their own lives and histories. “It doesn’t sit well with me to think of an individual human becoming the signifier of an entire species,” Piland said. A more descriptive name, meanwhile, is a chance to tell a creature’s story. Joseph Pitawanakwat, an Anishinaabe educator, notes that many of his people’s bird names are layered with meaning—onomatopoeias that mimic calls, and descriptions of habitat and behavior, all embedded in a single word that could have been coined only through a deep understanding of the animals. English names could be similarly descriptive: Thick-billed longspur tells you something about the bird that might help you recognize it in a way that McCown’s longspur does not.These arguments are gaining traction. This March, Patrícia Guedes from the University of Porto and an international group of 10 colleagues published a commentary saying that “naming a biological species after a human was and is never right—regardless of good intentions.” But even if the scientific community as a whole agreed with this principle, the logistics of changing or banning eponyms are not simple. Many people who have animals named after them are still alive; changing those names would effectively strip them of an honor. And Cadena said that many Latin American researchers bristle when they’re told that they shouldn’t name animals after their colleagues. “North Americans and Europeans have named things after themselves for centuries, and now we cannot do it?” Cadena told me.Changing the scientific names of animals is especially tricky because such names are formally governed by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)—a group of 26 scientists who volunteer time outside their main jobs. They simply lack the person-power to oversee changes to even a fraction of the tens of thousands of scientific eponyms, Thomas Pape, the ICZN president, told me—and it’s not in their remit to change even one. Consider Anophthalmus hitleri, a rare Slovenian beetle that was named after Adolf Hitler in 1933 and is now threatened by enthusiastic Nazi-memorabilia hunters. The ICZN still won’t change its name, because “we stand absolutely firm on not regulating based on ethics,” Pape told me. “It’s not our mandate.”But, though he argues that set names are important for allowing scientists to unambiguously communicate about the organisms they study, Pape also admits that “it’s strange that we keep talking about stability when we keep changing names.” Scientific names change frequently, when a species is reclassified or split into several new ones. They can also change because scientists uncover an alternative name that was assigned first and then forgotten, or because they violate Latin grammar. There are also routes for changing scientific names through societal force of will. Pape cites the case of Raymond Hoser, an Australian amateur herpetologist who has assigned hundreds of new names to questionably defined species and genera of reptiles—often on shaky scientific grounds, usually in his own self-published journal, and in many cases honoring his family members and pets. Other taxonomists are simply refusing to use his names; if that continues, “it might be possible for the ICZN to rule that those names should not be used,” Pape told me.Common names are even easier to shift, because there’s typically no formal process for doing so. In 1993, a zoologist decided to name a predatory marine worm with scissorlike jaws the “Bobbit worm,” referencing the incident in which Lorena Gallo (then Bobbitt) cut off her husband’s penis. Other biologists, who noted that the name mocks a woman who survived repeated domestic and sexual abuse, have just started calling the worm “sand striker” instead. In this vein, common names that are deemed offensive enough could change organically as people stop using them, Eric Archer, the NOAA biologist, told me. “I don’t think it’s necessarily something that should be done by fiat,” he said.For North American birds, there is a standardized list of common names, maintained by the AOS. It has no legal standing but is widely followed by birders, conservationists, and, notably, the federal government. Name changes would carry far more clout if the AOS ratified them. It has traditionally been unwilling to, but after the events of 2020, it formed a committee to develop a process for identifying and changing “harmful or exclusionary English bird names.” Hampton and James are part of that 11-person committee, which Cadena co-chairs. They wouldn’t reveal specifics of their recommendations, which they’re set to present on June 15, but at least some of them have come around to the idea that all eponyms should go. And they stressed that they wanted to unite the birding world rather than divide it.Any changes, they imagine, would mean that rookie and veteran birders alike would have something new to learn, while the entire community could be involved in concocting new monikers—a practice that could generate more excitement about birds at a time when many species desperately need to be protected. Hampton acknowledged that community involvement can be risky—“we have talked about ‘Birdy McBirdface’ many times,” he said, referencing the crowdsourced boat-naming campaign from 2016 that yielded Boaty McBoatface—but he and other committee members think it’d be worth it to open up the right to name nature to a much broader swath of society than the one that has long held it. Wildlife doesn’t belong to it, or to anyone, and shouldn’t be named as if it does.That’s the view of every birder under 40 whom Hampton talks to, and every person of color—demographics that will have a growing say over our custodianship of the natural world. “Everyone in our committee knows that 20 or 30 years from now, the next generation will be changing all of these names if we don’t,” Hampton said. To him, it feels inevitable. Perhaps future generations will also look upon this moment and see our own historical foibles embedded in the names we now choose. Or perhaps they’ll see a turning point when people stopped seeing animals as vessels for human legacies but as entities with their own worth and stories, reflected in their very names.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.On September 18, 2007, Randy Pausch faced a packed hall at Carnegie Mellon University to give his last lecture. The popular computer-scientist professor, beloved by students and colleagues, was not retiring or moving to another university. He had terminal pancreatic cancer, and had been given just months to live.Pausch not only showed no sign of sadness but was so filled with energy and joy that he could barely contain himself. At one point, he dropped to the floor and performed a set of one-armed push-ups. “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be,” he said, “sorry to disappoint you!” His lecture was a celebration of life and love, to be shared with friends and co-workers, as well as with his wife and three young children.Perhaps this sounds delusional to you. Or maybe you imagine that he was acting. I believe that Pausch was putting on a masterclass in happiness by leaning into the reality of his own death. And even if your own death is not imminent, you, too, can do this—and get happier.For most people, death is hard to think about. We tend to avoid the subject—involuntarily, even. In the journal NeuroImage in 2019, researchers described an experiment in which people viewed videos of faces, including their own, morphing into other faces over a six-second time span. Participants were instructed to press a button when they felt that the face had definitively changed to another person’s. Appearing over the faces were various words with negative and death-related connotations (such as grave). When participants saw their own face with a death word, they usually pressed the button earlier than when they saw others’ faces accompanied by one, suggesting to the researchers that the participants tended to avoid associating death with themselves.The philosopher Stephen Cave offers one explanation for this avoidance in his 2012 book, Immortality. “Death,” he writes, “presents itself as both inevitable and impossible.” You can know rationally that you will die, yet struggle to understand your nonexistence. Put another way, you cannot be conscious of your own nonconsciousness.[Read: ‘A common American death’]So we banish death from our thoughts. But this leads us to make choices in life that actually curtail our happiness. People who express more regrets tend to be those who postponed profound activities that yield meaning, such as practicing religion, appreciating beauty, or spending more time with loved ones.This is probably because they realized too late that they had implicitly assumed life would always go on and on, so there’s always time to do these meaning-filled things. When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.By forcing ourselves to think about death—our own death and that of loved ones—our resources-use decisions change. I ask my 20-something graduate students to estimate how many Thanksgivings they realistically have left with their parents, and then to consider how they should spend those remaining occasions. This is a hard exercise for them, and usually provokes a strong emotional reaction. But it can also alter such decisions as where they choose to live and work. Rarely, if ever, have I heard anyone regret deciding to live near friends and family—any more than I recall hearing someone say, as they near death, “I wish I’d spent more time focused on my job.”This highlights that, even if you believe in an afterlife (as I do), facing discomfort and thinking seriously about the impermanence of your mortal life is important for making decisions that enhance your happiness.[Read: What to read to come to terms with death]There are other benefits. For example, paradoxical though it may seem, contemplating death can encourage positive thinking, as researchers found in 2007. People primed to think about their demise tended to focus on favorable emotional information around them, and to interpret random words in a more congenial way. You could interpret this as people anesthetizing themselves to certain feelings. But try it yourself, and another explanation becomes apparent: You begin to think extremely clearly, and realize that you have a choice about how to see the present moment—and choose the positive.As persuasive as the evidence is that thinking about your death can be a good happiness protocol, it doesn’t come naturally, as we’ve seen. Like so many valuable habits, it takes practice. That is exactly why ancient thinkers recommended the memento mori, a reminder of death. As the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius reminded himself in his Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”Start by making this a regular routine in your life. Try beginning each day with a version of this: “I know that in a few years, I will be dead, and a few years after that, no one will even remember my name. But I am alive this day, and I will not waste it.” The practice will feel less and less unnatural as time goes by, even as you feel more positive and energetic.Next, survey your goals and plans. How many of your dreams are leading you to postpone love and happiness right now? By this, I don’t mean postponing a bit of money or any other trivial worldly reward; I mean love and relationships. For the sake of some future reward, are you neglecting your family life today? Your friendships? Your spiritual development? Envision yourself having just months to live and giving your current self some life advice. You might not be saying, “The health of your marriage can wait; use all your time now to make it to assistant regional manager!”And think also about the good you can do that will endure beyond your death. Whether you are religious or not, some psychologists posit that this is a good way to experience deeper meaning in the here and now. I don’t mean that you should struggle to achieve some glorious legacy; that would be an exercise in posthumous egotism. Rather, the idea is to think of how your efforts to make life better for others will enrich future generations, regardless of whether they know your name.[Read: Finding happiness in middle age]Look at the sapling you plant today, and imagine your great-granddaughter sitting under the mature tree. This will fill your current existence with greater significance.Cotard’s syndrome is a strange delusion that afflicts a minuscule percentage of the population. It is also known as “walking-corpse syndrome,” because the affected person believes that she is dead, or doesn’t exist, or is rotting flesh. You are unlikely to suffer from this malady. But it is easy for anyone to fall into an analogous state by failing to distinguish life from death. If you insist on ignoring your own demise, you are likely to make decisions that cause you to sleepwalk through life. You may not be dead yet, but you’re not fully alive either.Avoiding the malaise of virtual Cotard’s means drawing a bright line between being alive today and dead tomorrow. If you can do that, and look across that border with resolve and confidence, you will experience every day fully and deeply. Maybe you won’t want to do one-armed push-ups like Randy Pausch, but the people around you will most definitely know you’re still on the side of the living.

Five alumni have been elected as new members of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers and six as directors of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA).
New members of the Board of Overseers
Sylvia Mathews Burwell ’87
B.A. ’90, University of Oxford
President of American University and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Washington, D.C.
 Jeffrey D. Dunn ’77, M.B.A. ’81
Interim president and CEO of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and former executive chair, president, and CEO of Sesame Workshop
Boston
 Fiona Hill A.M. ’91, Ph.D. ’98
M.A. ’89, University of St. Andrews
Former National Security Council senior director for European and Russian Affairs, currently chancellor of Durham University (U.K.) and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
Bethesda, Maryland
 Vanessa W. Liu ’96, J.D. ’03
Founder and CEO of Sugarwork and a past president of the Harvard Alumni Association
New York, New York
Robert L. Satcher Jr., M.D. ’94
S.B. ’86, Ph.D. ’93, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Former NASA astronaut, now associate professor of orthopedic oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
Houston
 The new Overseers were elected for six-year terms and were elected from a slate of eight candidates nominated by an alumni nominating committee whose 13 voting members are appointed by the Harvard Alumni Association executive committee. Harvard degree holders cast a total of 32,440 ballots in the election.
“This will be an exciting year ahead, as all of us on the Board of Overseers look forward to welcoming President [Claudine] Gay and supporting her in her new role,” said Max Hodges ’03, M.B.A. ’10, the incoming president of the board for 2023-24. “We warmly welcome our five newest Overseers, and I know we will benefit from their perspectives and experiences in the coming years.”
The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards, along with the President and Fellows, also known as the Corporation. As a central part of their work, the Overseers direct the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning. More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. It also has the power of consent to certain actions, such as the election of Corporation members.
Additional information about the board, its members, and its work can be found on its webpage.
Newly elected HAA directors
Barbara R. Barreno-Paschall ’07
J.D. ’11, Vanderbilt University; M.P.P. ’17, University of Chicago
Vice chair and commissioner, Human Rights Commission, State of Illinois
Chicago
Judith L. Norsigian ’70
Retired executive director, Our Bodies Ourselves
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
 Yvonne O. Osirim ’01, J.D. ’07
M.A. ’03, University of Cape Town
Executive director, human health ethics and compliance, Merck
Philadelphia
 Theodora Skeadas ’12, M.P.P. ’16
Public policy associate, Twitter
Cambridge, Massachusetts
 Angela A. Sun ’96, J.D. ’01
Venture capital and board director, Western Union, Cushman & Wakefield, and Apollo Strategic Growth Capital
 Jason W. Young ’04
Managing partner, Totally Human
Atlanta
The new directors were elected for three-year terms. They were chosen from a slate of nine candidates, nominated by the same HAA committee that puts forward candidates for Overseers. Harvard degree holders cast 33,565 ballots in the directors election.
The HAA Board of Directors is an advisory group that actively works to support Harvard alumni volunteers working on behalf of the HAA. The board’s main work focuses on developing volunteer leadership and increasing and deepening alumni engagement through an array of programs that support alumni communities worldwide. In recent years, the board’s priorities have included strengthening outreach to recent graduates and graduate school alumni; supporting anti-racism work in alumni communities; and continuing to build and promote inclusive communities.
“I am thrilled to welcome these six newly elected alumni to the HAA board,” said Ty Moore ’06, the association’s incoming president. “I know they all share a deep commitment to ensuring our dedicated, passionate alumni around the world forge new connections and are part of Harvard’s efforts to create positive change for our community and society at large.”

Dexter Barry was arrested last November following a dispute with a neighbor. Five days later, he was dead, after jail officials refused to give him necessary medication for his heart transplant.
According to The Tributary, a news outlet based in Jacksonville, Florida, Barry was arrested on November 18, after a neighbor reported him to the police for allegedly threatening to "beat him up" following an extended dispute over Wi-Fi. While the two never physically fought, Barry was nonetheless arrested on a simple assault charge.
During his time in police custody, Barry—who had received a heart transplant in October 2020—frequently insisted that he needed to take specific daily medications to prevent his body from rejecting his new heart. According to body camera footage of the incident, Barry told one police officer at least seven times that he needed this medication to survive. 
When Barry appeared in court the morning after his arrest, court transcripts show that he once again requested access to his anti-rejection medication.
"I am on medication," Barry told Judge Gilbert Feltel. "I just had a heart transplant, and I haven't taken my medicine all day since I have been locked up, and I take rejection medicines for my heart so my heart won't reject it, and I'm almost two years out…. And the medicine that I am taking, it's like 30-day prescription that's like $2,400."
"OK. Here's what I will do, Mr. Dexter," replied Feltel. "I am going to simply set a bond in your case of 503 and add the additional condition of no violent victim contact." While Barry was released on November 20, his son and a lawyer for the family say that Barry never received his medication while in jail. By the time he was released, he had missed at least five doses.
Despite resuming his medication, Barry's health declined over the next few days, and he died on November 23, just three days after being released. A pathologist hired by Barry's family reported that his cause of death was his body's rejection of his heart transplant.
Andrew Bonderud, the family's lawyer, speculated that jail officials didn't obtain Barry's medication due to its cost. "Records from jail will likely show they made a note of it," Bonderud told The Tributary. "[The Jacksonville Sheriff's Office (JSO)] recognized it's an extremely expensive medication and how disgusting if it turns out that this was a business decision for the JSO, that they would rather not pay for the medication. They would rather risk death over a business decision. It's one of the most outrageous cases I've ever seen in this city of JSO misconduct."
While the pathologist declined to blame Barry's death solely on jail officials' refusal to obtain his necessary medication, it's clear that JSO officers were, at best, reckless with Barry's health—and at worst, contributed to his avoidable death.
"The police officer could've gone inside and got his medication," Barry's son told The Tributary. "This man is telling you, my heart needs those meds. A two-minute walk would've saved his life."
The post Jail Officials Refused To Give Him His Heart Transplant Medication. Days Later, He Was Dead. appeared first on Reason.com.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to the assembled leaders of the Arab League last week, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, newly restored to the organization, took off his translation headset and refused to listen. Assad’s mere presence in the hall shows that the Arab League is deaf to Ukraine’s pleas. Arab leaders have thrown in their lot with the Syrian butcher and his close ally Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Assad’s diplomatic “normalization” in the Arab world has been building for a while. Still, the images from the Arab League summit in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, were disturbing. Twelve years ago the Syrian dictator was expelled from the league for brutally attacking his own people. Now, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has welcomed him back with kisses. In a speech, the Saudi host said it was time to “turn the page of the past,” adding: “We hope that this contributes to supporting Syria’s stability, resuming Syria’s normal role in the Arab world.”

Assad promised to cooperate with Arab nations on drug trafficking, brazenly using his own control over the massive captagon drug trade as a bargaining chip. In exchange, the Arab states promised billions in aid to Syria, mostly to be funneled through Assad’s corrupt coffers.

Zelensky appealed to the Arab leaders’ sense of morality. He argued that they should resist Russian influence and stand up for the principles of sovereignty and national independence. He tried to evoke sympathy for the Tatar Muslims in Crimea, who have faced persecution since Russia occupied the peninsula in 2014. He asked the league to stand against war crimes.

“I’m sure we can all be united in saving people from the cages of Russian prisons,” Zelensky told the assembled Arab leaders. “Unfortunately, there are some in the world and here among you who turn a blind eye to those cages and illegal annexations.”

To many, Zelensky’s invitation to Jiddah seemed like a cynical attempt to distract from Assad’s return. But it ended up having the reverse effect by exposing Arab states’ false “neutrality” on the Russia-Ukraine war. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, for example, have refused to condemn Putin’s invasion and have instead used their economic power to bolster oil prices, undermining Western sanctions. Now, by praising Assad, Russia’s partner in war crimes, the Arab League was implicitly rejecting Zelensky’s appeals.

The Biden administration publicly says that it won’t normalize relations with Assad but no longer objects to Arab countries doing so. This is an abdication of 12 years of U.S. commitments to hold Assad accountable for his mass atrocities. It is also a failure to implement U.S. law requiring sanctions on those who aid the Syrian dictator.

In 2019, Congress passed a law, known as the Caesar Act, that aimed to pressure Assad to stop his campaign of mass torture and mass murder of innocent people. But both the Trump and Biden administrations barely implemented it. Now, Congress is trying to pressure the U.S. government into action.

This month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously approved the Assad Anti-Normalization Act, sending it to the House floor. The bill has 30 co-sponsors who span the political landscape, including top Democrats such as Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.) and top Republicans such as committee chairman Michael McCaul (Tex.). If passed into law, it would shore up the Caesar Act by extending it until 2032 and closing several loopholes.

Among other things, the new bill would require the administration to determine if Assad’s purported “charities” are diverting humanitarian aid for the regime and singles out the group Syria Trust for Development, which is connected to first lady Asma al-Assad. The legislation would also require the administration to investigate and report on any financial transactions in Assad-controlled areas coming from any country in the Middle East. (It’s no wonder that several of these governments have been lobbying against the bill.)

The Biden administration’s willingness to condone Arab acceptance of Assad has provoked other prominent critics outside of Congress. The Assad Anti-Normalization Act has been endorsed by former U.S. national security officials from both parties, including former House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot L. Engel and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

“The United States should continue to isolate the war criminal Assad and his murderous regime,” McMaster said when endorsing the bill. “Assad and his Russian and Iranian sponsors want wealthy countries to underwrite the reconstruction of the cities they reduced to rubble.”

It’s true that sanctions can have unintended consequences for civilians, which is why the legislation carves out exceptions for genuine humanitarian aid. Critics will also argue that sanctions on Assad haven’t worked so far. But that’s only because the Caesar Act has never been properly used.

Exerting pressure on those funding Assad might be the only remaining way to deter them from helping Assad rebuild until he releases the thousands who are being tortured in his dungeons and stops the slaughter of those Syrians living outside of his forces’ control.

By turning a blind eye to Assad’s war crimes, members of the Arab League have made clear that they don’t care about Putin’s war crimes either. But unless somebody does something to hold Assad and his enablers accountable, their Syrian and Ukrainian victims won’t be the last.

A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics provides yet more evidence that American schoolchildren suffered dramatic educational losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report compiled data from various sources on the state of American primary, secondary, and higher education, looking at everything from college graduation rates to child poverty rates.
While dramatic declines in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test have received national attention, the newly released report sheds light on a different metric showing declines in performance.
According to one survey cited, American public schools reported, on average, that 49 percent of their students were behind grade level in at least one subject during the beginning of the 2022–2023 school year. This is only a tiny improvement compared to the beginning of the 2021–2022 school year, when schools reported an average of 50 percent of their students were behind. Before the pandemic, schools reported that an average of 36 percent of their students were behind.
Gaps remained fairly stable across variables, though there were some regional differences. In the Northeast, schools reported that 31 percent of students were behind grade level pre-pandemic, a number that rose to 49 percent by the beginning of the 2022–2023 school year. Schools in the Midwest and South reported that 45 percent and 48 percent of their students were behind grade level in 2022–2023, respectively, up from 34 percent and 36 percent pre-pandemic.
Score declines were most pronounced among elementary and middle school students. While high schools only reported an increase of nine percentage points in students behind grade level, elementary and middle schools had increases of 14 percentage points and 15 percentage points, respectively.
These latest data show yet again how damaging the pandemic—and the months of school closures that followed—have been to American primary and secondary school students. Even a year after many schools have returned to in-person learning, large swaths of students are still behind.
Things didn't have to be this way. Sweden, for example, never closed its primary schools, and according to one 2022 study in the International Journal of Educational Research, primary schoolchildren didn't experience post-pandemic learning loss as measured by reading assessments.
"We can't change the past. But we can learn from it," wrote The Atlantic's Derek Thompson last fall. "Democrats' disproportionate support for school closures was very likely an unforced error that has contributed to worse achievement gaps between rich kids and poor kids, and that has set children back several years in math classes in which they were already struggling to demonstrate proficiency."
Closing schools for months—or even years—during the COVID-19 pandemic was a disastrous policy, one that clearly has had an enduring impact on the children relegated to remote instruction. While many schools are making concerted efforts to close learning gaps, it's unclear how long it will take to reverse COVID-era educational shortfalls.
The post New Federal Report: Half of Public School Students Are Now Performing Below Grade Level appeared first on Reason.com.

Twitter is in the midst of a transformation: It is becoming a right-leaning news platform. This will have profound consequences for the debate about Section 230, the federal statute that shields websites from some liability created by users, which effectively allows the internet to function as a lightly restricted space.
Elon Musk purchased Twitter last year with the stated goal of making the site more hospitable to all kinds of political expression. But Musk is himself increasingly associated with the right; on Wednesday, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination during a Twitter Spaces live event alongside Musk, an avowed supporter of DeSantis.
Musk's Twitter is also attracting top conservative talent. After acrimoniously parting ways with Fox News, conservative superstar Tucker Carlson declared that he would relaunch his show on Twitter. The Daily Wire, a conservative media empire, recently decided to release all of its podcast videos on the site as well. "If Elon Musk stands by his commitment to make Twitter a home for free speech and delivers on monetization opportunities and more sophisticated analytics for content creators, I imagine we will invest even more into the platform," said Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing.
Neither The Daily Wire nor Carlson appears to have special deals with Musk, who has said that they will be bound to the same rules as anyone else posting content on the site. But consider Musk's situation with respect to Carlson, and compare it to the host's previous relationship with Fox News.
After all, Carlson's departure from Fox News followed the resolution of the company's legal dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion sued Fox, arguing that its programming had been defamatory; guests who appeared on Fox News shows, including Carlson's, were accused of making false statements about Dominion. Under traditional defamation law, Fox News was liable for statements on Carlson's show.
Twitter is not.
As an online platform, Twitter cannot be sued in most cases for its users' speech. That's the entire point of Section 230: to empower websites to craft whatever speech policies are best for them, without forcing them to incur risk. Without Section 230, social media sites would have to moderate content far more aggressively. If Facebook and Twitter could be sued for users' speech, then they wouldn't be able to let users post at will, without approval or review.
"One advantage of Section 230 is it allows different platforms to try different models of online content moderation to serve specific audiences," says Jennifer Huddleston, a technology policy research fellow at the Cato Institute. "Recently, we've seen this with Elon Musk's changes to Twitter's content moderation rules in ways that create new opportunities for conservative news content."
At least prior to Musk's Twitter takeover, this underlying reality has vexed some on the right. Leading Republicans—including former President Donald Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), and others—have alleged unfairness, arguing that social media sites do not deserve this liability shield if they operate in a politically biased manner.
"With Section 230, tech companies get a sweetheart deal that no other industry enjoys," said Hawley.
While Republicans have railed against Section 230 for empowering social media sites to moderate too much content, Democrats have criticized it for the opposite reason: They want to punish Meta, Twitter, and Google for not censoring more content. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) has proposed various schemes to make the sites liable for user content, on the theory that this would force the companies to take down alleged right-wing misinformation with greater vehemence.
Here's a prediction: If Twitter becomes the new home for right-leaning content, Republicans will have to rethink their ire toward Section 230; Twitter cannot exist without it. Democrats, on the other hand, will become much more vocal about the need to rein in tech and subject the platforms to the same liability standards as noninternet publishers. They will cast Section 230 as a giant loophole that allows Musk to evade responsibility for Carlson's speech. They will say that misinformation—the great crisis of our age, according to Democratic thinking—cannot be stopped so long as the platforms themselves are immune.
Section 230, of course, provides protection to everyone who wishes to express himself online. It is the reason that the internet has remained such a liberating, freewheeling place. Repealing or replacing it would risk damaging the very foundations of the largely unfettered discourse that exists on social media.
"Section 230 has been critical to protecting the speech of all users online by allowing platforms to carry user-generated content without the fear of business-ending litigation as result of how a user used their platform," says Huddleston. "The result is that a variety of voices, including conservative news voices, have more opportunities to connect with their audience thanks to online platforms."
Nevertheless, expect these foundations to come under even more strenuous attack from politicians and the mainstream media as Twitter becomes the right's new home.
The post How Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk Will Change the Section 230 Debate appeared first on Reason.com.

Are we alone in the universe? It’s one of the most compelling existential questions facing humanity. And the past half-century has witnessed a revolution in our ability to scan the cosmos in search of an answer. When I was a university student, the possibility of discovering, much less observing, planets in other star systems seemed like science fiction. But that has changed. Thanks to orbiting observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope, and huge ground-based telescopes such as the Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea Hawaii, astronomers could be on the cusp of finding evidence for life around one or more of the thousands of extrasolar planets (also known as exoplanets) that have now been discovered.And yet, even as new technology allows humanity to peer into distant galaxies and answer profound questions about the universe, some scientists working in this field are being hounded by colleagues more focused on leading terrestrial outrage mobs than finding new discoveries in the heavens.The existence of planets orbiting other main sequence stars (a category that includes about 90 percent of the stars in the universe) was first demonstrated in 1995, when Swiss astrophysicist Michel Mayor and Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz inferred the existence of a Jupiter-mass companion of the star 51 Pegasi, approximately 50 light years away from our own solar system. They did this by observing cyclic “wobbles” in the star’s path—tiny oscillatory movements whose maximum speed is about 70 meters per second, negligible in astronomical terms. These oscillations reflect the gravitational tug of 51 Pegasi’s planetary companion, which orbits the star once every four days, at a distance far closer than Mercury orbits our Sun.The discovery was accomplished using a technique that Mayor and Queloz spearheaded in parallel with similar work done by American astronomer Geoff Marcy. Both teams based their observations on the Doppler effect, the well-known phenomenon by which a wave’s apparent frequency will change depending on whether the observer is moving toward, or away from, the radiation source. (It’s similar to the principle that police use to measure your car’s speed with a radar gun.) To the extent that a star’s wobble aligns with the axis of observation, the frequency of its emitted light, as observed on Earth, would also vary, albeit by a minute amount.The two teams used sensitive spectrometers that could measure such shifts. And within a month of Mayor and Queloz’s observations becoming known, their results were confirmed by Marcy and his own colleagues. Marcy’s team went on to identify 70 of the first 100 known exoplanets, including the first exoplanet located as far from its star as Jupiter is from the Sun. In 2005, Marcy and Mayor shared the prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy, awarded for outstanding contributions in the field.NASA infographic on 51 Pegasi b.Another planet-detecting technique—which I will admit to having previously dismissed as nearly impossible—was uncovered by Marcy’s group, working with Tennessee State University astronomer Greg Henry. Using this method, a planet’s existence is inferred from the fact that its associated star is dimmed (to a terrestrial observer) by a minute amount (less than one part in a thousand) when the planet passes in front of it. This “transit” technique of exoplanetary detection was used by NASA’s 2009 Kepler Mission, of which Marcy was a Science Team member, to discover approximately 4,000 planets. Many of these are the size of our Earth, and would seem to have surface temperatures conducive to biology (as we know it).By now, we have discovered many systems with multiple planets orbiting a single star. And this naturally invites the question: Is the character of our own solar system, with large giant gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune) orbiting farther out, and smaller rocky planets (Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury) orbiting closer in (allowing the surface of at least one of these latter planets, Earth, to be sufficiently warm to host liquid water), a prerequisite for the development of life?In March, a group of 16 authors—including Marcy; lead author Lauren Weiss, a junior faculty member in the astrophysics group at Notre Dame University, and a former PhD student of Marcy; and Caltech astronomer Andrew Howard, a former postdoctoral researcher who’s worked under Marcy’s direction—posted a paper entitled ‘The Kepler Giant Planet Search. I: A Decade of Kepler Planet Host Radial Velocities from W. M. Keck Observatory’ to arXiv, an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in certain fields. One of the authors’ purposes was to explore how the existence of Jupiter-size outer planets might correlate with the existence of smaller rocky inner planets. (A layperson might ask what the existence of a gas giant such a Jupiter has to do with the emergence of life on a rocky planet much closer to the sun. One answer is that—to take our own solar system as a representative example—Jupiter is believed to have absorbed or deflected large asteroids and comets from the outer solar system that otherwise would have vaporized Earth’s oceans, from which life first emerged.) Here is part of the abstract of that paper:Despite the importance of Jupiter and Saturn to Earth’s formation and habitability, there has not yet been a comprehensive observational study of how giant exoplanets correlate with the architectural properties of close-in, sub-Neptune sized exoplanets. This is largely because transit surveys are particularly insensitive to planets [whose orbit radius is greater than that of Earth], and so their census of Jupiter-like planets is incomplete, inhibiting our study of the relationship between Jupiter-like planets and the small planets that do transit. To establish the relationship between small and giant planets, we conducted the Kepler Giant Planet Survey (KGPS). Using W. M. Keck Observatory HIRES [High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer], we spent over a decade collecting 2,858 [exoplanets detected using the Doppler wobble method] (2,181 of which are presented here for the first time) of 63 sun-like stars that host 157 transiting planets.But if you visit arXiv to read the paper now, you can’t. It’s been withdrawn. Why? Was the data incorrect? Was the analysis conducted improperly? No. The problem was that Geoff Marcy’s name was on it.Nine years ago, Marcy was investigated by his then-employer, the University of California, for behaviour that was described as sexual harassment. (You can read his take about the claims here, wherein he describes the infractions as resulting from him treating students as friends, hugging them or kissing them on the forehead if they related personal problems, and so forth.) It is worth adding that during his time at the University of California, Marcy also developed a record of working to promote a welcoming environment for women in science, advocating progressive university policies, and mentoring many female PhD students who subsequently went on to successful careers.It is true that a University of California investigator decided in favour of Marcy’s complainants, albeit based on a (weak) preponderance-of-the-evidence standard. (And the low levels of due process that typify campus investigations of this type are well-known.) But even so, following the investigation, U.C. Berkeley recommended that Marcy should continue as a full professor, as he’d recently demonstrated five years of more careful behavior, which had elicited no further complaints.Nevertheless, the online pressure against him became intolerable, and so Marcy eventually chose to leave his position voluntarily, so as to allow his colleagues and the department as a whole to get past the controversy surrounding his continued presence in the department. Grant sponsorship of his research ended, and he was removed from various collaborations. The Nobel Prize was awarded to Mayor and Queloz in 2019 for their work on exoplanets, but Marcy wasn’t included, in spite of the seminal role he and his group had played. In 2021, Marcy was ejected from the National Academy of Sciences, a shockingly severe response to behaviour that not only wasn’t criminal in nature, but which his university hadn’t even considered a firing offense. The pattern was clear: The imperatives of academic virtue signaling required individuals and institutions to publicly humiliate Marcy as a means to indicate their own moral bona fides.Marcy’s name had been included in the authorship of ‘The Kepler Giant Planet Search’ on the basis of his long-standing contributions to the project therein discussed. He helped design, build, and even fund the Doppler system at the Keck Observatory; and he helped write the novel computer algorithm used to distill evidence of stellar wobbles from the background data.One might imagine that the previous sanctions meted out to Marcy might have been enough. But not so: Once Astronomy Twitter discovered his name on the paper, a wave of outrage manifested itself. Many complained that it was wrong to have such a person’s work “promoted” in such a way—as if scientific publications were press releases. The pressure became so great that Weiss, the lead author, withdrew the paper from the arXiv altogether on April 7th, indicating, euphemistically, “It has come to my attention that there are significant concerns about the author list of this manuscript. It is very important to me that I honor everyone’s contribution to this work appropriately. Accordingly, I am revisiting the author list, with the goal of setting a standard for authorship that fairly acknowledges everyone’s contribution.” As of now, the status of the paper is still in limbo.I have learned that, as a result of the social-media furor, several co-authors had requested their names be removed from the author list. That list included the aforementioned Caltech astronomer and former Marcy-supervised post-doc, Andrew Howard, who, in the style of a Soviet apparatchik announcing that one of his comrades had fallen from favour, publicly assured everyone that Marcy “won’t co-author any papers the group publishes going forward.” (These remarks were published in a May 16th Science hit piece on Marcy’s reputation, whose author appeared to agree with those seeking to bounce Marcy from the author list. The torqued title: “After outcry, disgraced sexual harasser removed from astronomy manuscript.”)A student who co-authored earlier publications as part of the same collaboration—in which Marcy’s name had appeared as co-author—now claims that having Marcy’s name on this new manuscript would be bad for her career. On what basis she made this claim is not clear. As noted above, Lauren Weiss, the lead author, is one of Marcy’s former students. Her name, like Howard’s, has appeared on numerous publications alongside Marcy’s. It appears that their association with the so-called “disgraced sexual harasser” helped, not hurt, their careers.Another student, whose role on the project was confined to collecting data, complained that the appearance of Marcy’s name on the paper would somehow serve to “promote” Marcy at the expense of the student. Putting aside the respective importance of the contributions being made, the complaint reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientific publication works. These articles are not press releases, and one’s appearance on an author list is not a form of “promotion.” Rather, it is meant to indicate one’s actual intellectual contribution to the design and implementation of a project—a form of recognition the lead author and other co-authors presumably agreed upon before the paper was submitted for publication.The Science article also included a student’s extremely dubious claim that the presence of Marcy’s name on the author list would produce “potential psychological harm.” Specifically: “A lot of people in astronomy, especially a lot of women, are survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment themselves, so seeing your name next to his—seeing his name at all—can be extremely triggering for a lot of people.” At the risk of appearing insensitive, anyone whose psychological trauma is so severe that it causes them to be emotionally triggered by the sight of someone’s name on a publication is in need of therapy. More importantly, such personal sensitivities should not serve to award individuals with veto power on the appearance of bylines in scientific publications.Such is the (new) outcry over Marcy that the American Astronomical Society (AAS), a publisher of journals in which his name has appeared frequently, felt compelled to get in on the act. One might imagine that it would stand on the side of proper scholarship, asserting that author credits should reflect project contributions; which is to say that the only grounds for removing an author’s name should be a disclosure to the effect that he or she did not actually contribute to the underlying science, or that he or she was involved in falsifying or distorting data.Instead, AAS President Kelsey Johnson publicly confirmed that the society’s ethics working group is now considering whether to classify “sexual harassment—and, indeed, all forms of harassment, discrimination, and bullying”—as grounds for restricting authorship. Under this standard, any number of people might have their names stripped from scientific papers, including, ironically, many of those same individuals now demanding that Marcy’s name be removed from ‘The Kepler Giant Planet Search.’ After all, how was lead author Weiss (a junior faculty member, it should be remembered) induced to withdraw the paper with its current author list except through mob bullying tactics?Indeed, one of Marcy’s SETI collaborators, Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics researcher Beatriz Villarroel, has filed harassment complaints on this very basis. Recently, she was blocked from presenting at an astrobiology conference at Penn State because of her collaboration with Marcy. She also had to withdraw an application to become an affiliate at the SETI institute in California after being instructed not to publish any papers, or apply for any grants, for a project involving Marcy.The campaign against not only accused harassers, but also those who are accused of even dealing with accused harassers, including producing good science with them, is beginning to take on the flavour of anti-collaborator campaigns during wartime. Some organizations are even seeking to encode this mob logic in their formal rules, through codes of conduct that serve to punish those who collaborate with, or even cite the work of, those deemed to have committed harassment or offences against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).In the current political environment, few are willing to stand against the pitchforks. Two senior female astronomers to whom I sent a draft of this piece for possible comment prior to publication indicated that they agreed with the expressed views, but would not be willing to say so publicly. One stated that she didn’t want her students and postdocs to have a supervisor who could be viewed as “guilty by association.” Shouldn’t the mob mentality that produces this kind of fear be deemed at least as worthy of condemnation by the scientific community?Even the AAS leadership seems to have recognized the hypocrisy at play here, albeit grudgingly. A 2021 online note authored by the AAS’s then-President, University of Washington astronomer Paula Szkody (who herself co-authored a paper with Marcy in 2012), affirmed that the AAS ethics code states that “all persons who have made significant contributions to a work intended for publication should be offered the opportunity to be listed as authors” (a policy consistent with that of Springer, a major science publisher, which warns contributors that “it is dishonest to omit an author who has made significant contributions”). But in the same breath, she noted that the AAS anti-harassment policy “allow[s] for the denial of authorship privileges”—a provision that, when implemented, would plainly make nonsense of the idea that “all persons” who’d made “significant contributions to a work intended for publication” would be entitled to appear as listed authors. The two principles, the then-President acknowledged, “could be construed as being in potential conflict.” Could be?The slippery slope here is very slippery indeed. In the future, will everyone who writes scientific papers first have to be vouched for by some social-justice tribunal that assesses their moral purity? And if so, using what criteria—and under what statute of limitations?It has long been seen as a progressive habit of mind to understand that people can change, and that past sins do not inevitably define a human’s worth. There are famous examples of scientific papers being written from prison. And the same people baying for Marcy’s ongoing humiliation would likely be horrified to see the authorship of such then-incarcerated individuals stricken from the published record. Their puritanism is highly selective, in other words, being guided by the cyclic wobbles (to apply an astronomical metaphor) of political fashion.Members of the anti-Marcy contingent might peer into their own closets, and remember that there are many ways that one can run afoul of online mobs. In recent years, it has become seen as normal for scientists to be required to put their signature to DEI pledges and anti-racism manifestos as a condition of academic employment. And the broad language in these documents leaves signatories vulnerable to all manner of accusations. Once we accept the principle that a scientist’s “significant contributions” to a project stop being significant simply because of his or her alleged moral defects, there is no particular reason to expect that such scrutiny won’t be extended to one’s political views, social-media posts, and even private conversations and jokes.As Canadian science historian, Yves Gingras, put it in a thoughtful article last year, scientists are hardly immune from social panics. The Soviets were fond of judging science based on the politics of the men and women who conducted it, often denouncing the work of “bourgeois” scientists, whom they accused of being lackeys to Western imperialists. Google the name “Trofim Lysenko” to learn how that story ended. As Gingras stressed, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”My wife recently reminded me of a quote from Henry Adams, which suggests, I think, an apt lesson to end on: “A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.” The same principle applies to scientists. Members of the mob that came after Marcy won nothing for themselves but a brief spasm of schadenfreude. The consequences of this kind of precedent will last much, much longer.

After months of speculation—and some brief technical difficulties—Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made it official: He's running for president.
DeSantis filed the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday afternoon and launched his campaign by joining Elon Musk for a Twitter Spaces interview a few hours later. The rollout was a bit rocky: DeSantis' speech was delayed for about 20 minutes as Twitter navigated issues apparently caused by too many users jamming into the virtual room. "The servers are straining somewhat," Musk said at one point. For much of that time, users (those who weren't dropped from the Space) heard a combination of silence, hold music, and intermittent crosstalk.
Once he got going, however, DeSantis rattled through a shortened version of the stump speech that he's been workshopping at conservative confabs around the country for the past several months—stressing his military background, his gubernatorial record of attacking anything deemed "woke," and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. "I am running for president of the United States to lead our great American comeback," he promised.

After first half hour of disaster, it was an awkward speech/podcast hybrid. But DeSantis was able to give long substantive answers on issues he wants to highlight: COVID, education, immigration, big tech. We'll see how they play in formats/news cycles that aren't this.
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) May 24, 2023

There will be plenty of time to dissect DeSantis' record and policy aims. What's most interesting, right now, is the decision to hold the long-awaited launch of his presidential campaign in such an unorthodox setting. Asked by Musk, after the technical glitches abated, why he would want to "take the chance" of holding the announcement via Twitter, DeSantis pivoted awkwardly to talk about COVID-19 again: "Do you go with the crowd," he said, or "cut against the grain?"
Upending the tired norms of campaigning is a fine goal, but there seems to be more than that happening here. Announcing a bid for the White House on Twitter, alongside Musk—who has become a cult hero to a certain type of conservative who spends too much time worrying about trolling the political left—is a deliberate choice, and one that tells you something about how DeSantis is framing his candidacy.
Because it's not as if there weren't other options available to him—options that might have provided a sunnier, more optimistic setting for an "American comeback" message than what effectively amounted to a conference call on a social media platform that most Americans don't use.

If I were the Republicans governor of Florida and I were running for President I'd announce at one of the many massive football stadiums in my state because I am tethered to the people of my state and they care about fun, faith and football, and I am a normal joy filled person
— Jane Coaston (@janecoaston) May 23, 2023

But it's conservatives on Twitter who DeSantis views as his national base, as he sets to the task of expanding his brand beyond Florida. As governor, DeSantis has cultivated support among what we might call the "Too Online" faction of conservative politics by engaging in a number of high-profile stunts seemingly designed to appeal to exactly that crowd. Whether feuding with Disney, banning critical race theory in schools, or cruelly shipping undocumented migrants to Martha's Vineyard, DeSantis has mastered the use of state power to raise his profile within the subset of Americans who get their jollies by liking and retweeting content that "owns the libs."
That doesn't mean it won't work, of course. Former President Donald Trump wielded Twitter as a powerful tool during his rise to stardom (and the presidency) within Republican politics. DeSantis probably isn't wrong to sense that cultivating support on Twitter matters—not least because the platform provides a conduit to speak directly to the fans, without having to use the traditional media. Other prominent conservatives have too:

went around giving a talk. They said that they held precisely one press conference at the launch of their campaign. Virtually of the questions were about Trump, nothing about VA, nothing about policy, nothing about contrasting him with his opponent. As a result…
— Kenneth Monahan (@Foudroyant) May 23, 2023

The downside, as anyone who has used Twitter can tell you, is that it's not a particularly serious place. If DeSantis' pitch is that he can be a more competent version of Trump, then Wednesday's rollout was a failure and not just because of the technical issues. Playing to the Twitter crowd is not a way to demonstrate leadership. If anything, it shows the opposite: that DeSantis is willing to let the online culture wars and political trolling guide his campaign, as it has guided his time as governor.
Throw Trump into the mix, and that's a recipe for a Republican presidential primary that seems unlikely to move the country closer to solving the big issues. A fight over who is more well-liked among the Too Online Republicans is going to be ugly and dumb:

Don't expect a campaign that appeals to suburban moderates. 
Very conservative Republicans are the most up-for-grabs between Trump and DeSantis, currently solidly in Trump's camp but DeSantis previously tied post-midterms. 
They are the key battleground in this primary. pic.twitter.com/Hlt6Qg8e0u
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) May 24, 2023

And what to make of those technical glitches that derailed the start of DeSantis' Twitter town hall? Did we just witness another moment like Howard Dean's infamous "scream" or Michael Dukakis' tank—a campaign event so cringeworthy that it doesn't just sink a promising candidate, but becomes a permanent part of the political lexicon? Unlikely. Despite the overblown reactions from some in the media, this whole incident will be mostly forgotten by the end of the week and probably rates as little more than a humorous anecdote in the books that will be written about the 2024 campaign.
Here's the thing: The Republican primary contest is going to feature such a cacophony of terrible ideas—war with China, more immigration restrictions, banning gender transition treatments for adults, war with Mexico, more government control over the internet, etc.—that we'll probably end up fondly remembering Wednesday's mess, which denied freedom to no one except those of us professionally obligated to sit through it.

FREE MINDS
A man paralyzed below the hips in a 2011 motorcycle accident has control over his lower body for the first time in 12 years, thanks to an "artificial intelligence thought decoder" that translates signals from his brain into electrical signals that move muscles, The New York Times reports. If it's true that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then what neuroscientists have accomplished with Gert-Jan Oskam should be regarded as miraculous:

In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a "digital bridge" between Mr. Oskam's brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off.…
Andrew Jackson, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University who was not involved in the study, said: "It raises interesting questions about autonomy, and the source of commands. You're continuing to blur the philosophical boundary between what's the brain and what's the technology."
Dr. Jackson added that scientists in the field had been theorizing about connecting the brain to spinal cord stimulators for decades, but that this represented the first time they had achieved such success in a human patient.

This is exactly the sort of thing that's at stake in the debate over how to handle the future development of artificial intelligence.

Amazing! ???? And each time you read another article about another little #AI or robotic-assisted miracle like this -- and it IS a miracle -- ask yourself how an "AI pause" might stop the next one from happening. https://t.co/IgueGXNW80
— Adam Thierer (@AdamThierer) May 25, 2023

If the U.S. defaults on its debt payments next month, the stability of the country's financial markets could hinge on…"a series of conference calls." The Wall Street Journal takes a look at how investors are preparing for the possibility of an unprecedented event:
Under Wall Street's plan, though, investors would be able to keep trading all U.S. Treasurys, even those with past-due interest or principal payments. Chaos and confusion would be kept at bay through a series of conference calls, each with an agenda already organized by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association trade group….
The main purpose of both calls would be to answer a key question: whether the Treasury Department had decided to delay, by a single day, a principal payment due the following morning. Were that to happen, trading of affected U.S. Treasurys could take place essentially as normal.

QUICK HITS
• Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) says "some progress" has been made toward reaching a deal with the White House to avoid a debt default early next month.
• On the day he announced his run for the presidency, DeSantis also signed a bill changing Florida's law that required office holders to resign before running for another office.
• Inflation has slowed. Is it time to worry about deflation instead?
• Why people like sad songs.
The post DeSantis Announces Too-Online Campaign in Most Online Way Imaginable appeared first on Reason.com.

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and emailtranscripts@nytimes.comwith any questions.

So before we get into today’s episode, and stick around because it is a good one, I wanted to let you know about this amazing new app. It’s New York Times Audio, a new iOS app with exclusive shows, narrated articles. And it’s available for New York Times news subscribers. So why I love this app, I am all about having people curate cool stuff for me. Because I don’t have the time. This is a great, curated lineup for people who want to know about everything from the latest pop music, to the news headlines, to what to eat for dinner. And then, of course, our new show is on there. So this is like a one-stop shop app for everybody who has way too little time but has lots of interests. New York Times Audio, download it now at nytimes.com/audioapp.

And this is a “Matter of Opinion.” So today, we’ll be talking about men and boys. There is lots of concern and debate right now about American males who are not doing well by most measures. They’re struggling in school. They’re struggling in the job market. Their health is suffering, including their mental health. And generally, they seem to lack a sense of purpose and identity. There have been lots of books about this recently. One of the more notable ones is called “Of Boys and Men” by Richard Reeves. Reeves actually came to “Times Opinion” recently to talk to us about his work. And Josh Hawley, the Republican Senator from Missouri, has just published a book called “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” So I’ve been reading these books. And I plan to write a column about them. And I want to know what you all think about it. How significant is the problem? Is it actually fixable? And if so, what do we do about it?

I’m just going to say, I think it actually is a very serious issue that we need to be dealing with thoughtfully and apolitically. But that has become almost impossible because of the way that it has been exploited in the big political arena. So that’s what makes me very nervous about all this whether you’re talking about Tucker Carlson tanning his testicles, or if you’re talking about Josh Hawley writing this book and Republican candidates obsessing about the feminization of America. It has become a topic that has been hijacked, and thus made almost impossible to discuss sensibly. And just bringing it up labels you in one way or the other.

I just want to say, I was in the New York Times office when Richard Reeves came in to speak. And I was really prepared to sort of have a strong, kind of political reaction to this. And one of the things he’s really trying to do with this book is get away from politics. He’s clearly done a lot of research and kind of unearthed a trove of data that really tell us and paint a pretty stark picture of what’s going on with men in America today. And I think he really identifies some of the core problems. It’s fascinating to me that, at this time where this there’s a highly politicized conversation going on about all kinds of aspects of gender, that there is also, I feel, this need to really ground the conversation in data, in facts, and how we’re actually living, and have a really practical approach to it.

carloas lozada

So some of those facts, I think, would be useful to run through. And Reeves brings up a lot of them. And he’s also very honest about places where there is not a lot of great data to explain what’s going on. But of the areas where there is information, he writes that young boys are generally far less prepared to start school than girls. They do worse in school. They’re far more likely to fail math and reading courses, less likely to graduate high school and college. Men’s participation in the labor force is falling, especially young men. We’ve all heard about deaths of despair recently, these are the deaths due to suicide and drug overdose. Men account for three out of four of those deaths. There’s also the discussion of what some called the epidemic of loneliness and isolation. How 15 percent men have no close friendships at all, which is a vast increase since 1990. So this is the fact set that these discussions are taking place over and sometimes kind of shouting, shouting over.

So I think that it’s worth saying that woven into these trends is something fascinating and also, I think, quite sort of dangerous and underappreciated ways, which is that our politics is becoming polarized by sex in a really novel way. There’s always been some gap between how women vote and how men vote. And in the last 20 or 30 years, the gap has tended to be women vote more Democratic. Men vote more Republican. But that gap has tended to widen markedly as some of the trends, Carlos, that you’re describing have sort of taken deeper route. And lately, it’s been particularly marked that you have women diverging from men more in the last 10 years or so, sort of measurements of ideology. Men have basically stayed about as conservative as they were in the Obama era. And women have become substantially more politically liberal. So you really have a strong ideological divergence between the sexes, which then is connected — Part of this story too is, obviously, men and women don’t exist in isolation from one another. So the trends among men, the negative trends are connected, obviously, in some way, not just to political polarization, but to the fact that men and women just seem to be having trouble in general paring off. Marriage rates are down. Dating and sex itself both seem to be down. Obviously, birth rates are down everywhere. So there’s some sort of failure of, essentially, matchmaking.

So let me jump back in here, lest Ross accuse me of just going with a liberal criticism of conservatism, I do think one of the problems you’re looking at is — so I have a college-aged son who has roommates who are die hard Andrew Tate fans, the famous internet influencer who is all about muscles, and toxic masculinity, and guns, and has actually gotten himself into some legal trouble because there are questions about whether or not he was doing any kind of sex trafficking.

In Romania, it should be said.

In Romania, yes. Because everything goes in Romania is his approach to this.

Turns out it doesn’t actually. Everything does not go in Romania.

As it turns out, you can get arrested even in Romania. But these boys, or young men as it is, their response to him, their kind of attraction to him stems from the idea that society has just decided men are a problem period. They just feel like that masculinity or men in general are looked at askance. And that there’s a no-win situation for them. And so he tells them that this is not their fault and that they should just kind of not worry about this. So obviously, Andrew Tate is a blight on society. But the idea that we are looking at men as a problem is actually not that far off sometimes. I mean, especially in certain more progressive corners we are so eager to make sure that women aren’t left behind, that women aren’t being mistreated, almost as though it is a binary, like one has to kind of go along. If one is getting ahead, you have to kind of disadvantage the other. Now, that message is very easy to kind of co-opt if you’re somebody like Andrew Tate or Tucker Carlson and just turn into kind of a rallying cry for ugly masculinity.

I mean, I think that’s right. And I think what’s striking to me, and this goes back to something that Ross was saying, is that there is this kind of cleaving between men and women. Like I think about my straight, female friends who are in their 20s and 30s. And they’re not interested in men like Andrew Tate. Their sort of ideal as Timothee Chalamet or Harry Styles, these sort of sensitive, I think what Andrew Tate and his ilk would call kind of girly men. But it just sort of speaks to how wide this gap is between what professional women who are educated want and what a certain segment of alienated masculinity is aspiring to. And they’re just so fully disconnected from one another. It’s this profound separation I think is really fascinating to me.

So Lydia, since you brought up Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamet, they were both referenced in what I think is one of the more interesting pieces about the Andrew Tate phenomenon, which is a big piece in “New York Magazine” a few months ago by Lisa Miller called “Tate Pilled” that is about Tate’s attraction, not just to young men in some sort of general way, but specifically to young men in liberal parts of America, well-educated, liberal households, and so on. And I want to read a passage from that about these boys, the Lost Boys of liberal Brooklyn who are into Tate. And Miller writes, “They were growing up at a time when it was impossible to envision what kind of straight man to be. LeBron was amazing. But he was a one-off. And the other trending male idols were impossible to emulate like Harry Styles and Timothee Chalamet with their quote, ‘politically correct,’ but also not a simp, but also attractive and manly, but also not crazy and misogynistic presentation. And then Tate came along.” I’m still quoting, “and told the boys it was good to be men and to want the things men have traditionally wanted. When he said, for example, there are millions of young men out there who just want to grow up, go to the gym, get strong, be respected, have a beautiful girl and a sports car, many boys felt the relief of recognition and something like pride.” End quote. So here’s a question, that last Tate quote stipulating that Tate, in general, is a deeply toxic figure and possibly a criminal, and so on, what do you guys think of that quote? Should young men want to grow up, go to the gym, get strong, be respected, have a beautiful girl and a sports car?

I don’t know why I don’t get a sports car. I want a sports car.

I was going to say, I personally do have a sports car. It was a convertible, not very fancy one, that I impulse bought during the pandemic. Because there was nothing else to do but drive around. So I think that this gets to, I think, a bigger point, which is that, as a person who really does not believe in kind of biological essentialism and that the gender has an expression that is a biological basis, I do think that you cannot look at the data set and not conclude that the sort of, quote-unquote, “traditional masculinity” is having a tremendously difficult time accommodating itself to a world in which women and girls are much better equipped to succeed.

Getting to Ross’s question about that kind of Andrew Tate lifestyle, if my 15-year-old son or my 10-year-old son would tell me that they want to get fit and work out more. And they love the idea of a fast car. And they’re thinking about girlfriends. Like, I would have no problem with any of that. My problem with that would be if that’s the sum total of what they aspire to. I would think it’s a very kind of blinkered, limited worldview.

And it’s important to note, I guess, on some level that we’re talking about this as though it’s the same across the board for all socioeconomic demographics. As these things tend to be, the crisis among boys and men, tend to be much harder on certain groups like minority communities or communities where the socioeconomic standards have dropped. This is not necessarily a crisis in the same way.

Yes. In the Reeves book, there’s a lot of talk about how there’s this huge gap between Black women and Black men. I mean, Black women are on the march and moving towards tremendous gains that are really remarkable whereas Black men now, I think, earn income on average less than white women. So it’s a fascinating stew.

And I think you could say, reasonably, like 20 years ago, you could tell a story that said, look, you have a large population of working-class men who have used to work in heavy industry. Those industries have left the US. The economy has become more service based. Their skill sets, the benefits of their greater upper-body strength, and so on are no longer as economically useful. And so they’re in a crisis that sort of, yeah, an intersection of their sex and their class. I think what is notable about trends since then is not just that reality, but how the problems for men have climbed up the socioeconomic ladder to the point where on the college front, for instance, one of the, maybe, not-so-secret secrets of college admissions now is that there is effectively affirmative action for men. Because schools, high end colleges want to advertise a 50/50, a vaguely 50/50 gender balance. And there just really are many fewer strong male candidates for let’s say, a small liberal arts college, than there are female candidates. So it varies. There are different sort of economic matrices at work depending on the landscape. But I think there’s, to go to your point, Lydia, again, you can’t quite get away from the gender essentialism question. Because there’s two quite different stories you would tell. If male-female differences are deeply rooted in biology, then you have a story here where the socioeconomic landscape has shifted. And men essentially have a kind of physical condition that makes them poorly suited for the sort of service-based economy, office jobs, all of these kinds of things, to say nothing of changes in social life. Right? And that’s quite different from saying we used to socialize men in order to make them ready to go to war and work in factories. And now, we need to socialize them a different way for the more gender egalitarian society. And I think those two analyses take you in quite different directions potentially about the depth of the challenge really facing men under modern conditions.

So in the “Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan called the despair of midcentury American women the problem that has no name. The thing we’re talking about now, the plight of men is the problem that has too many names. It’s toxic masculinity. Or it’s deaths of despair. Or it’s the epidemic of fatherlessness. It’s the end of men. And each of those carries so much political baggage. If you’re concerned about toxic masculinity or you’re concerned about the feminization of America, you may think you’re talking about the same thing. But you’re talking about two radically different things. And I think that’s a problem because it feeds into any kind of debate over prescriptions, over policy that we could have surrounding these questions. And it becomes one more trench in the culture war, which doesn’t lead to a very productive place.

I would argue that the narrative of toxic masculinity, the narrative of feminization, all of these narratives reflect an underlying question, which is basically what are men for in a society where it is understood that single women are perfectly capable of raising children? Like, what is the point of men in the 21st century world?

It’s not even just what are men for but what are men, period? What makes a man? Which is, I think —

Now, that’s getting so —

— underlying a lot of the debate in these books. Without, again, without getting too much into kind of a reductionist sort of gender essentialism, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat, something that comes up in these books is that there are rites of passage for womanhood in a sense. They don’t exist. They are more contrived when it comes to manhood. There is a moment, whether it’s puberty, where girls, in some way, become capable of reproducing, take a step toward a kind of adult version of themselves, toward womanhood. For men, you kind of have to construct that. And those rites have sort of gone away. This is the subject of Robert Bly’s “Iron John” from 1990. Let it not be said, we’ve not had these conversations before. But just because they go away, the need for them doesn’t. So you either get it from going out into the woods, in Robert Bly’s worldview, and encountering the wild man as mentor. Or you get it from Andrew Tate. But you’re going to get it somewhere.

I want to see Ross go out in the woods and kill a deer with his bare hands.

I have thought that perhaps, perhaps post-Times I have a future as a masculinity guru.

This is going to have to be unpacked.

Bottomless, bottomless market for it. Bottomless market for it.

So we have covered the stats, and the politics, and the class, and the race of this debate over manhood. When we come back, let’s try to figure out what we’re supposed to do about it all. [MUSIC PLAYING] And we’re back. So we’ve been talking about what is happening with men and boys, how serious this crisis of manhood really is. So now, let’s try to figure out what to do about it. Ross, since you volunteered as a masculinity guru, you should go first. What do we do?

Basically, I think that there is a kind of modified form of social conservatism that remains the best, and most reasonable, and most compelling life script to offer to young men. I probably align to a great degree with Josh Hawley in the sense that I think that young men should be taught from an early age that the point of a healthy masculinity is to provide protection, and support, and defense for a spouse and a family. I say modified social conservatism because I think that this view is compatible with a sort of post -‘60s view of female opportunity and the equality of the sexes. I think it doesn’t mean that, as in some sort of Trad Bro circles, you should expect to have your wife barefoot and pregnant cooking you dinner when you come home. I think it’s much more a model of personal sacrifice and a recognition that in any couple or marriage where you are hoping to have children, there’s going to be an extended period of intense sort of physical vulnerability for your wife while she’s having children, in which in that context, the male role is still sort of the archaic tradition where you may not be the primary breadwinner for the family for your whole life. But you’re going to have a sort of specialized role during your marriage’s reproductive years.

It’s interesting to see these places where, particularly among professional middle class, upper-middle class couples, this question of how you accommodate and manage the aspirations of two people, accommodate the realities of childbirth, and particularly very, very early childcare. To me, what feels exciting and has more possibility than the vision that Ross outlined is the idea that we could, as a society, decide that these are shared burdens, shared obligations, think more broadly about who’s going to be responsible, and who’s going to take time away from work, and all of these kinds of things I think could push us in the direction of men having a much greater sense of possibility in the types of jobs that are actually growing, which are care jobs. Nursing, for example, I wrote about the nursing strike here in New York City. There’s a huge shortage of nurses. The wages for nurses have been skyrocketing. These are incredibly underrepresented by men. But perhaps if we rethink the roles within the family and the roles within the nucleus of where these ideas of gender roles are born, that it’ll actually be good for everyone. That men, in fact, will have greater opportunity in the world and greater ability to thrive in the modern world. And also, not have to sort of shackle their spouses to the home and hearth.

I would just, quickly before Carlos jumps in to speak for a different —

Shackling.

We’re gonna be pro-shackling.

To offer the Lozada Iron Carlos, right? To go part way in agreement with Lydia, I think that there is a shift in how men think about their role in the home that is sort of a fruit of the changes of the last 50 years. That for men who are in stable marriages with children, I think has been tremendously rewarding. Men spend much more time with their kids overall. Married men who are in the home with their kids, which unfortunately is not every man in a relationship with his kids, but men who are in those situations spend much more time with their kids than would have been the case for a father in 1957. And that, I think, is a very good thing. I think that’s only possible though, to pivot back. We were talking about the Richard Reeves book. My biggest disagreement with Richard Reeves in his vision of a “Revived Masculinity” is he argues basically the norm of married childbearing probably isn’t coming back in a lot of communities. And we need to figure out how to make get men hyperinvolved as fathers even when they aren’t married to the mother of their kids. And obviously in situations where that’s the case, that’s what you want. But in terms of figuring out a norm for the future, and again, something to sort of offer as a script to young men, there really is no substitute as a father for being in close physical proximity to your kids. And in fact, this, to be a biological essentialist, my wife wrote a book about the science of the maternal transformation called mom genes. And one of the things she talks about in that book is that there is a biological transformation that happens to both men and women when they become parents like hormonal changes, changes in the brain, all of these things. But it happens to the woman who bears a child more or less automatically. It happens to the father if he’s there with the kid. And it happens more gradually. And I just think as a society, you have to have that as your goal, even or especially if you’re trying to get to a different model of male paternal involvement and burden sharing in the home, being in the home is the precondition for any successful model of fatherhood, marriage, and so on. The pandemic, it was transformative for me in my relationship with my children. My 10-year-old son, I was talking to him last night about this, not because I was gathering material for the podcast, but I was just having a conversation with my son. And he just turned 10. And he has vague memories of a time when Daddy would go to work everyday. But he’s so used to having me around, having me here. And that’s been, personally, that’s had its frustrations. But it’s largely been wonderful. And Reeves does I think, a very good job of laying out the scope of the problem. I found his recommendations so lacking in comparison to that scope, and not just in the way that Ross laid out his frustrations with it. But he wants boys to enter school one year later than girls do, basically an extra year of pre-K because their brains develop at a different rate. And that would kind of equalize or help eat away at the kind of development and achievement gap in school. He wants, back to Lydia’s point, he wants more men to enter what he calls HEAL professions. It’s his way to strike back at STEM. HEAL is health, education, administration, and literacy.

As opposed to HEEL professions, which is what Andrew Tate has just cornered the market on, H-E-E-L.

And he wants more men as teachers in schools, because they present positive role models for boys. Because an overwhelming proportion of teachers in elementary and middle schools in particular are women. And boys tend to perform better, have better school outcomes when they’re taught by men. But then he just kind of says, look, we need something between the greedy jobs that take all your time and are very unpredictable, and what used to be called the mommy-track jobs. We need normal-people track that allows for the flexibility of family responsibilities without losing out on major career opportunities. Just define it as awesome, we need a track that is awesome for everyone and that and that fulfills everything. But given the scope of what they outline, those just seem like barely hitting at symptoms and not causes. Josh Hawley’s prescriptions are just we need to wake up American men. Man up, stop watching so much porn. And be like your fathers and grandfathers. Their fathers and grandfathers lived in a different world. There’s a lot, I think, to appreciate in Hawley’s book. But his prescriptions feel to me just kind of wishing for things to be different. Hawley’s book reminds me of that scene in the first episode of “The Sopranos” where Tony is in Dr. Melfi’s office. And he’s bringing up Gary Cooper.

archived recording (tony soprano) Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type, that was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. See, what they didn’t know was once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings, that they wouldn’t be able to shut him up. And then it’s dysfunction this, and dysfunction that, and dysfunction bafangool.

Part of the genius of The Sopranos, the depressing genius, right, is that on the one hand, it takes the liberal coded view, right, that traditional masculinity and toxic masculinity are bound up with one another. That Tony’s pining for Gary Cooper is fruitless nostalgia. But then at the same time, the whole show is an indictment of therapy culture, right? Because Tony goes to therapy. He gets very good at going to therapy. All the people say, men will do 17,000 things before they go to therapy. Well, Tony goes to therapy. He does the work. And in the end, it just makes him a little bit better at being a mobster.

I mean, that’s a show that’s all about decline, right? The decline of organized crime. The decline of all of it. And certainly of masculinity. I think that the reality is that a lot of what we’re describing are problems with the nature of our political economy now, right? I mean, I’m not a person who likes to just blame everything on capitalism. But the fact that we have a world in which outsized professional success comes to those who are able to get a certain kind of education and then devote themselves in an unbelievably unforgiving way from the ages of 25 to 40 to seeking that success, that that’s the key to all of the riches the kingdom can provide just runs directly into all the kinds of problems that we’re talking about here, right? And so I think when you talk about solutions, I can understand in a certain sense why it is that Holly is going in one direction of this totalizing man up. And Reeves, on the other hand, is like, let’s have this set of minor technocratic solutions and hope for the best. I mean, in some ways, that feels like a perfect encapsulation of the weird asymmetric politics that we have right now.

Yeah, we’re talking about a huge identity crisis for half the population that is incredibly complicated. So it’s like asking someone, well, how do you cure poverty? It’s just there’s so many different pieces to it that there is no simple solution.

One thing I think we should talk about is what this all means for women. And Ross alluded to this at the beginning. And we are dealing with a real mental health crisis, particularly for young women and for girls and adolescent girls in particular. And some of the statistics that came out earlier this year are really, really striking. Close to 14 percent of the girls surveyed reported being coerced into sex. I mean, that’s just a staggering statistic. 6 in 10 girls were so persistently sad and hopeless that they stopped regular activities. And 1 in 3 girls had considered suicide, which is a 60 percent increase in the past decade. And I think it’s tempting to see this as two separate things. But I do wonder the extent to which they’re related to one another. And of course, social media is a factor. But where my mind goes to is that actually, the expectations contained within the gender roles and gender binary and the instability of those roles and all of the changes that we’ve seen, I don’t advocate in any way a return to traditional values or anything like that. But I do think that this unsettled moment has actually been bad for girls, too, and the expectations that they experience. I mean, particularly those numbers on sexual violence, I think, speak to something gone horribly, horribly wrong in the way that boys and girls relate to one another. And I’m curious, what do we think needs to change about the way that boys behave in order to both solve the broader problem of this identity crisis that they’re having, but also solve what I think is creating a very unhealthy environment for girls?

I mean, I think one story you can tell is that after the sexual revolution, you had a sexual landscape that tended to be organized to a large extent around a certain aggressive male sexual desire, running from Hugh Hefner down to Maxim magazine and Girls Gone Wild and all of these things that some of us may remember from our youth. And that was, in its own way, a toxic landscape for young women. And you can see, in part, the MeToo era as a reasonable rebellion against that saying, no, you don’t have to put up with — if equality means anything, it means you don’t have to put up with certain kinds of male misbehavior. But then since that rebellion, there’s a climate of despair. Where it’s like, well, we don’t like the Playboy philosophy vision of how men and women get together. But we can’t possibly imagine going back to pre-sexual revolution dating norms or courtship norms or anything like that. We have no scripts, right? And so there’s, yeah, there’s like — I feel like the possibilities of romance for both sexes seem pretty barren. I mean, there’s the porn question also matters here, right? That porn is sex education more for men than for women. But for a large share of the population, again, in a way that far exceeds what you got from looking at a Playboy 20 or 30 years ago. And that clearly has some kind of grim effect on how young people think about sex.

I mean, you do have interesting dynamics emerging, like among young adults. So one is that they’re having much less sex than they used to or they’re having it at a later age. They are finding their way. It’s just, it’s very complicated and vastly more complicated than it used to be, which is why I think these simplistic prescriptions of men need to be men and girls need to be girls are appealing to a lot of people, especially if they’re struggling within this new complicated environment.

The last thing I’ll say on the issue that Lydia raised is that of boys and girls is that it’s so — even in the way we talk about the data, it always feels zero sum, right? As if there’s a certain number of bachelor’s degrees and, what percentage are going to women, what percentage are going to boys or young men? Who does better in English class? Right? Who has higher graduation rates? And I think that’s inevitable when you’re looking at the data and necessarily when you’re looking at the data. But I think it’s kind of a shame, because it sets up an antagonistic relationship in how we think about these issues. Reeves is very cognizant of it. But even he falls prey to it sometimes. He’s very upset because the Biden White House has set up a Gender Policy Council. And they released a national strategy on gender equality, and it’s all about the problems facing girls and women. Right? Nothing in the other direction. And that really pissed him off. That really bothered Reeves. I think it should bother him. But again, it creates this constant sense of a battle. If you’re looking at somebody else’s problems, then you’re not looking at mine. And I don’t think that’s productive for this conversation. You can talk about the crisis of boys and you can talk about the crisis of girls without having them compete.

Well, and acknowledge that they’re connected to one another, in fact.

Yeah. Well, I think we will leave it there. When we come back, in a totally different non-relationship kind of way, we’ll get hot and cold.

Woo-hoo. [LAUGHS] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]

And we’re back. And now it’s time for Hot and Cold, the moment of the week when one of us shares something that we’re into or totally over or somewhere sliding on the thermometer in between. What do you have, Carlos?

All right, so this hot cold, I apologize may seem a little navel gazing for me, for journalists. But I am warming on the feedback that I get from readers. I usually avoid it. I don’t read comments. But I had one experience that I want to share with you that will explain my change of heart with one particular reader. So before coming to The New York Times last fall, I was a book critic at The Washington Post. And just about every week, I would get an email from the same person. I will only use his first name here, which is Joseph. And the subject line was always the same. “Here’s another book you won’t review because it doesn’t fit your narrative.” Now, they were invariably conservative writers and politicians and media personalities. And it ticked me off, because I don’t like people telling me what to think or what to read. So I left The Post and the emails stopped. And that’s when I realized that I missed Joseph.

Aw. [LAUGHS]

He cares about book criticism, which, believe me, is not super common. So after a couple of months at The Times, one day I checked my email. And there he is. And he says, I see you’re at NYT now. Maybe they’ll let you review these books, but I doubt it. So I was so happy to hear from him. And just last week, he sent me a note telling me to review another book that doesn’t fit my narrative, which is “Manhood — The Masculine Virtues America Needs” by Josh Hawley.

Score one for Joseph.

So Joseph, if you’re listening, I read the book. And I personally dedicate this episode of Matter of Opinion to you.

That is beautiful, Carlos. Well done, Joseph.

Truly touching. Touching. Yeah, thank you, Joseph.

Well, I mean, the reality is, of course, that I am Joseph. And I just let — I let an appropriate amount of time go by before pretending that I had discovered Carlos’s email. And most of the emails I sent him were, why haven’t you written a long review essay about noted New York Times conservative Ross Douthat?

You don’t fit my narrative, Ross. It’s about time I told you. You don’t fit my narrative. All right.

All right, great talking to you guys.

See you next week. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Three and a half years since the start of a pandemic that has killed millions of people and debilitated countless more, the world is still stuck at the start of the COVID-19 crisis in one maddening way: No one can say with any certainty how, exactly, the outbreak began. Many scientists think the new virus spilled over directly from a wild animal, perhaps at a Chinese wet market; some posit that the pathogen leaked accidentally from a local laboratory in Wuhan, China, the pandemic’s likely epicenter. All of them lack the slam-dunk evidence to prove one hypothesis and rule out the rest.That’s not to say nothing has changed. Those embroiled in the origins fracas now have much more data to scrutinize, debate, and re-debate. In March, I reported that the case for a zoonotic origin had acquired a consequential new piece of support: An international team of scientists had uncovered genetic data, collected from a wet market in Wuhan in the weeks after the venue was closed on January 1, 2020, that linked the coronavirus to wild animals. This evidence, they said, indicated that one of those creatures could have been shedding SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19; one of the most intriguing bits of data pointed to raccoon dogs, a foxlike creature that was already known to be vulnerable to the virus. The finding wasn’t direct evidence of an animal infection, but, stacked alongside other clues, ​​“this really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research, told me at the time.Not everyone agreed that the finding counted as a substantial new insight. When the researchers who originally collected the samples, many of them from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, published their own analysis of the data in April—a revision of an earlier report—they emphasized that there was no clear evidence that the virus had been introduced to the market by a wild animal. Then, this month, Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Seattle, posted a third analysis of the market data, inspired in part, he told me, by his concern that the public discussion of the initial findings, and their connection to raccoon dogs, had overinflated their worth. The international team’s report, he argued, hardly moved the needle on the origins debate at all—certainly not “much beyond where it was before,” he told me.Bloom’s analysis, too, set off a wave of fervor—including a fresh spate of claims that he told me were “exaggerated,” or even outright wrong; some even asserted, for instance, that his preprint proves that raccoon dogs “weren’t infected, which is not an accurate summary,” he said. All the while, researchers have been squabbling on social media over the minutiae of statistical methodology, and what constitutes a meaningful amount of viral RNA; some have even come to loggerheads publicly at conferences.At the crux of this particular fight is a difference of interpretation, with one camp of researchers contending that the recent data matter a lot, and another asserting that they matter much less, or perhaps not even a little bit at all. Under most other circumstances, a scientific scuffle this deep in the weeds might hold the attention of a few dozen people for a few months at best. Here, though, the central topic is one of the most consequential in recent memory—a virus that’s left its mark on the world’s entire population, and will continue to do so. Which has made it easy for pitched battles over differences in scientific opinion to become a public spectacle—and difficult, maybe even impossible, for the debate to ever end, no matter what evidence might emerge next.The genetic sequences analyzed in the March report contained evidence of a zoonotic origin that is more circumstantial than direct. Researchers extracted them from swabs taken from surfaces in and around Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from January to March of 2020, weeks after the first known COVID cases were documented in Wuhan. That makes these environmental samples “a useful part of the story,” Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, told me. Though, by themselves, “they are limited in what they are able to tell us.”By the time the swabs were collected by China CDC researchers, Chinese officials had hastily closed Huanan; many vendors had likely disappeared with their animals, or culled them en masse. The swabs could show only where the virus had once been, or which animals the venue had sold—more akin to dusting a crime scene for fingerprints than catching a vagrant in the act. And although they could show where animal and viral genetic material had mixed, they couldn’t guarantee that those two types of genetic material had been deposited at the same time. Nor could they distinguish between, say, a sick creature sneezing on the bars of its cage and an infected human coughing on an enclosure housing healthy wildlife. Those answers could have come from swabs taken directly from the noses or mouths of live animals for sale at Huanan in late November or early December of 2019. But as far as researchers know, those swabs don’t exist—or at least, the public has no record of them.The sequences from these environmental samples, then, are “what we have,” says Katherine Xue, a computational virologist at Stanford who previously worked with Jesse Bloom, the author of the May preprint, but was not involved in any of the new reports. And “we want to do what we can with what we have.” When the international team behind the March analysis found that several market samples contained genetic material from both the virus and a wild animal known to be susceptible to it—including the common raccoon dog—they said that the best explanation for this commingling was an infection.As I reported at the time, the data don’t constitute direct evidence of an infected raccoon dog at the market. “But this is exactly what we would observe if infected raccoon dogs were in fact present in this location,” says Kristian Andersen, a computational biologist and virologist at the Scripps Research Institute and one of the authors of the March analysis. Which, they wrote in their analysis, “identifies these species, particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019.”Other researchers, though, think that calling the evidence even supportive of an animal origin for the outbreak is a stretch. The samples were taken too long after the outbreak’s start to be meaningful, some said; the data were too shaky to even hint at the idea of an infected raccoon dog, others insisted, much less one that might have passed the virus to us.Bloom, too, was unswayed. The swabs contained genetic material from many creatures at the market—some of them alive, some dead; some that we now know can host the virus, others that almost certainly do not. In Bloom’s analysis, he explains that the species repeatedly highlighted as potential hosts weren’t the animals that were most frequently and notably commingled with the virus in the market swabs. “If you’re trying to figure out if there is a meaningful association between raccoon dog and viral genetic material,” he told me, there should be a lot of raccoon-dog genetic material in the places where the virus was found, and far less where the virus was not.But that wasn’t the case for raccoon dogs—or “any of the animals that could conceivably have been infected,” Bloom told me. Instead, in his analysis he saw the virus most closely linked to several kinds of fish, which aren’t known to be viable hosts for it. People, Bloom told me, were the probable source of SARS-CoV-2 in those spots. All of that “probably just suggests that it had been spread around the market by humans by the time” the swabs were taken, diminishing the samples’ usefulness.Several other scientists not involved in Bloom’s preprint were quick to point out the limits and flaws in his approach. To draw meaningful conclusions from this type of analysis, researchers would need samples amassed at about the same time, with the same collection goals in mind. That wasn’t the case for these samples, Zach Hensel, a biophysicist who has been publicly critical of Bloom’s report, told me. Researchers took them over the course of many weeks after Huanan’s closure, altering their tactics as more intel came to light. A first foray into the market, for instance, targeted the parts of the venue where COVID cases had been identified, a strategy that would, by design, turn up more virus-positive samples; another, conducted days later, focused on stalls that had been discovered to have housed wildlife, regardless of their proximity to sick people. Many samples in the latter set, then, would be expected to be virus-negative—and were. Sloshing them together with the first set of swabs and trying to pull patterns out could end up masking actual associations between the virus and any wild animal hosts.Bloom also points out that many of the swabs that turned up mammalian DNA, including one containing raccoon-dog genetic sequences that some members of the international team initially emphasized, had relatively little material from the virus on them. But genetic material, especially RNA—the basis of SARS-CoV-2’s genome—degrades fast; a difference of even a few days could artificially deflate how important a particular swab looked. Alice Hughes also pointed out that certain market locales highlighted in Bloom’s preprint, including surfaces around duck or fish tanks, might have better preserved viral RNA simply because they were cold or damp. When I brought up these concerns with Bloom, he admitted that “there are certainly a lot of confounders” that could have skewed his results. His main goal, he said, was just to show that “the samples are not sufficient to answer whether or not there were infected animals.”Bloom’s re-analysis doesn’t mark a major shift in thinking for Hughes, who told me she thinks “there is reasonable support for a zoonotic origin.” Felicia Goodrum, a virologist and an immunologist at the University of Arizona who has written repeatedly on the origins debate but was not involved in the team’s analysis, agrees. The Huanan market is “most likely where the spillover occurred,” she told me. “I really, truly believe that, based on the accumulation of the evidence.”Data never sit alone in a vacuum: They’re amassed, interpreted, and reinterpreted alongside the totality of evidence that precedes them. By themselves, the sequences from the Huanan market couldn’t say much. But they fit a broader, more detailed scenario that researchers on the team behind the March analysis had been exploring for years.History has always supported a zoonotic scenario: A wet-market spillover is what researchers are fairly certain started the SARS outbreak in China in 2002, potentially via infected masked palm civets. In this latest outbreak, the Huanan market was one of only four wet markets in all of Wuhan that has consistently been documented selling an array of live, coronavirus-susceptible wildlife; the earliest known COVID cases were detected near the venue, centering “on it like a bull’s-eye,” says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and one of the authors of the March report. Scientists analyzing genetic sequences collected from the venue have also detected two distinct coronavirus lineages from the outbreak’s earliest days—a likely indication, some researchers have argued, that the pathogen spilled over from animals into humans twice.The missing clincher for them is which creature might have initially carried the virus into the market. The raccoon-dog swab was particularly compelling to the team not only because it contained gobs of animal genetic sequences, and very few human ones—but also because it had been plucked from a stall where Eddie Holmes, one of the report’s authors, had snapped a photo of a raccoon dog in a cage years before. The clues to a possible animal host, Worobey told me, were “right in the very stall we said they would be.”But data are also amassed, interpreted, and reinterpreted by humans, who have their own biases. The experts now quarreling over the importance of the recent data approached the new evidence having already drawn tentative conclusions and made their opinions known. Kristian Andersen was an early proponent of a zoonotic origin, and has repeatedly denounced the notion of a lab leak; Worobey was later to voice his support for the zoonotic hypothesis, but is now no less enthusiastic. And long before they and their colleagues stumbled across the data that yielded their March analysis, which didn’t become publicly available until recently, the researchers had been hoping that such sequences would appear—noting in a 2022 paper that this sort of intel could constitute an essential and still-missing puzzle piece. Now that the evidence has emerged, and fits with their established thinking, it feels validating, Worobey told me.Bloom, by contrast, has long positioned himself as an agnostic moderate, and isn’t yet budging from his neutral territory. Others who have come out vocally in favor of a lab-leak scenario have cast their own doubts on the international team’s analysis. In a landscape so sparsely populated by data, it gets all too easy for people to fill in the gaps with speculation; “what starts off as a weak preference,” Hughes told me, “becomes almost like a religion.” I’ve been reporting now for three years on many controversial COVID stories, along the way interviewing hundreds of opinionated scientists about dozens of thorny questions. Through it all, this debate has stood out for being so ignitable. Individual data points have become catalysts; single statements have been endlessly scrutinized. And experts have staked out territory and stuck to it almost dogmatically—many of them to the point of avoiding admitting past mistakes. COVID’s origins are now shrouded in combustible gas, with matches scattered everywhere: Lighting up a single point, normally harmless enough, inevitably sets off a conflagration.All of this leaves the world trying to peer through the smoke. “All hypotheses are on the table,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead on COVID-19, told me. “We can’t take any off.” To her mind, though, “there’s much more evidence to support a zoonotic origin.”More evidence could still emerge. The international team isn’t yet done analyzing the Chinese researchers’ original data set, which was recently released in fuller form. They’re eager to mine the sequences to tease out the subspecies of some of the market’s potential SARS-CoV-2 hosts, which could inform searches for the virus out in nature or on animal farms; other experiments, analyzing how degraded certain genetic samples are, could hint at how much time passed between the moment the biological material was dropped and the moment it was picked up. Van Kerkhove has also separately been pressing the Chinese researchers for more information on how these and other samples might have been collected, and any intel on where the market’s animals might have been sourced from—which could guide searches for evidence of the virus or its relatives on farms or in the wild. These bits of data, too, would all be incremental, with no single shred of evidence acting as total proof or disproof. But each could constitute a clue, Van Kerkhove told me, to continue nudging the conversation along.
In the grand scheme of things, though, the world probably won’t ever get data that will conclusively end the debate. Even if scientists were to turn up virus-positive samples from a live creature from the market—direct evidence of an infected animal—it would remain technically possible that a human caught the virus first, then passed it on to the venue’s wildlife. But data that aren’t debate-ending can still be notable. And the recent sequences from the market swabs could easily, and frustratingly, end up being one of the best clues to the pandemic’s roots that the world is likely to get.

Following former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan's arrest, Pakistan has been thrown into turmoil. This explosion of political unrest, coupled with the Afghan Taliban regime's support for terrorists, has grave implications for international security.

NEW DELHI – Afghanistan and Pakistan are sinking deeper into disarray, and the United States bears a significant share of the blame. As long as this long-troubled region remains mired in turmoil, Islamist terrorism will continue to thrive, with grave implications for international security.

Begin with Afghanistan. In the nearly 22 months since the US abandoned the country to the Pakistan-backed Taliban militia, a terrorist super-state has emerged. Beyond committing atrocities against the Afghan people and re-imposing medieval practices, including reducing Afghan women’s status to that of chattels, the Taliban has sustained cozy ties with al-Qaeda and several other terror groups.

As a leaked Pentagon assessment reports, Afghanistan has become a safe haven and staging ground for al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists planning attacks on targets in Asia, Europe, and the US. This should come as no surprise. The Taliban regime’s cabinet includes a veritable who’s who of international terrorists and narcotics traffickers, and it was in Kabul last year that an American drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader and United Nations-designated global terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri.

While the Islamic State may be seeking to expand its international operations from Afghanistan, it is al-Qaeda’s alliance with the Taliban that poses the greater long-term international threat. When the US withdrew suddenly from the country, it not only abandoned its allies there, but also left behind billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated American military equipment, in addition to several military bases, including the strategically valuable Bagram airbase. The Taliban is now the world’s only terrorist organization with its own air force, however rudimentary.

In a 12-page document issued last month, President Joe Biden’s administration sought to shift the blame for the Afghan fiasco onto Donald Trump, claiming that Biden’s “choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor.” But, while the Trump administration undoubtedly cut a terrible deal with the Taliban, it was Biden who – overruling his top military generals – made the choices that triggered Afghanistan’s descent into chaos and facilitated the Taliban’s swift return to power.

US policy toward Pakistan has also been deeply misguided. It is thanks to a longstanding partnership with the US that Pakistan’s military and its rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency have been able to use terrorism as an instrument of state policy against neighboring countries. The Trump administration seemed to recognize this, and pledged to keep Pakistan at arm’s length until it ended its unholy alliance with terrorist organizations.

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But the Biden administration has reversed this policy. Even though Pakistan played an integral role in enabling the Taliban – which the ISI helped create in the early 1990s – to defeat the US in Afghanistan, the Biden administration helped the Pakistani government stave off debt default last year. Soon after, the US unveiled a $450-million deal to modernize Pakistan’s US-supplied F-16s (which it values as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons). The US then helped Pakistan get off the “gray list” maintained by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, the inter-governmental agency combating terrorist financing.

Today, Pakistan is facing profound political instability, rooted in a skewed civil-military relationship. Pakistan’s military has long been untouchable. It has ruled directly for 33 years. And when not technically in power, it has insisted on a pliant civilian administration that defers to the generals’ de facto leadership. Pakistan’s military, and its intelligence and nuclear establishment, have never answered to the civilian government. On the contrary, since 2017, two prime ministers have been ousted after falling out of favor with the military.

But supporters of one of those prime ministers, Imran Khan, are now mounting the first direct challenge to the military’s authority since Pakistan’s founding 75 years ago. Following Khan’s arrest on corruption charges earlier this month, mass protests erupted across Pakistan. Demonstrators stormed military properties, including the army headquarters and a major ISI facility, and set ablaze a top army commander’s home.

As the political crisis unfolds, Pakistan continues to teeter on the brink of default. It is being kept afloat by short-term loans from allies, until it can convince the International Monetary Fund to restart a suspended bailout program. This gives the international community leverage to force change in the country.

It is developments at home, especially the unprecedented anti-military protests, that have the greatest potential to force a rebalancing of civilian-military relations. But the military will not go down without a fight: the creeping shadow of military rule has already led to mass arrests, with the chief of army staff announcing trials under military law of civilians charged in the recent violence. The military could declare a state of emergency, in order to give itself carte blanche to stifle dissent, or it could stage another coup. The conflict could also erupt into civil war – ideal conditions for international terrorist forces to thrive.

For now, Pakistan remains a hub of terrorism and is contributing significantly to Afghanistan’s destabilization. Unless the nexus between Pakistan’s military and terrorist groups is severed, the situation in Afghanistan will not improve, and the battle against international terrorism will not be won.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has caught onto the fact that there's a serious lack of competition among America's baby formula suppliers—but the agency seems to be looking in the wrong direction.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the FTC launched a probe into possible anti-competitive practices within the lucrative state contracts awarded to formula manufacturers through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. The WIC program is funded with about $6 billion in federal grants, but states are responsible for managing the program. Each state picks a sole-source provider of baby formula to serve the state's entire WIC population.
Because nearly half of all formula sales are through the WIC program, whichever company wins those state-level contracts will effectively dominate the formula market within a given state. Studies by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have found that the WIC-favored manufacturer also gains a huge competitive advantage in non-WIC purchases because they get extra shelf space and families become more familiar with their brand.
Sounds anti-competitive, doesn't it?
Oh, but that's not what the FTC seems to be investigating. Instead, the commission is worried that major formula manufacturers have "engaged in collusion or coordination with any other market participant regarding the bidding" for those state contracts, the Journal reports.
The formula that becomes eligible for the WIC program is sold at a steep discount, so the formula manufacturers are effectively trading off higher prices for a larger market share. If they can successfully collude to keep prices artificially high in an attempt to have their cake and eat it too, that puts taxpayers on the hook for higher costs in the WIC program—which means higher prices for parents trying to feed their infants.
The FTC's investigation will likely miss the more significant point: It's much harder for suppliers to collude when more suppliers are in the marketplace. A few companies colluding can be undercut by more competition, and their power over the market collapses.
Unfortunately, there are only three formula manufacturers who regularly bid for those WIC contracts: Abbott Laboratories, Nestlé Gerber, and Reckitt Benckiser.
If the FTC wants to know why there's such a notable lack of competition within America's baby formula market, it should look at the actual culprits: other parts of the federal bureaucracy.
Federal officials could guarantee more robust competition in the baby formula market by removing the counterproductive and protectionist regulations that effectively ban foreign formulas from being sold in the United States. In the wake of last year's shortage, there have been some regulatory changes aimed at making it easier for foreign-made formulas to be imported from manufacturers in Europe and the United Kingdom. But the absurdly high tariffs on imported baby formula mean the American market will continue to be dominated by a few domestic producers. The regulatory changes will mean little if foreign competition is priced out of the market by import taxes.
They could also change the rules of the WIC program to allow for greater competition by doing away with sole-source contracts. Indeed, when the baby formula shortage hit last year, the USDA temporarily loosened its rules so that state-run WIC programs could use their federal money to buy formulas outside of the existing sole-source contracts. That's a pretty clear signal that the government knows its own protectionist rules are limiting the markets' ability to operate—any rule that has to be discarded as soon as there's a crisis probably shouldn't exist in the first place.
Furthermore, the WIC rules make it difficult for new formula providers to get a foothold in the market and thus inadvertently help maintain the anti-competitive status quo. "The system undoubtedly saves U.S. taxpayer dollars but, when combined with WIC's sheer size, creates competition problems," wrote Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute. That's because "only large, established producers have the capacity, capital, and regulatory expertise to navigate the WIC contracting process and to offer steep, up‐​front discounts on large volume government contracts."
If you want to prevent collusion and ensure that American parents have reliable access to safe and plentiful supplies of baby formula, the best option is to allow greater competition by stripping away protectionist regulations. But the Biden administration's FTC seems prepared to blame big businesses for the problems created by big government.
The post The FTC Is Investigating Anti-Competitive Baby Formula Contracts. Bad Federal Policy Is To Blame. appeared first on Reason.com.

So it’s useful to ponder why the intuitive answer for, say, an Iowa Republican might be very different from the natural answer in New York or Boston or Washington, D.C. Consider some recent analysis by the politics and religion writer Ryan Burge, who tried to parse whether there was any kind of “Trump effect” in religious practice after 2016. Specifically, he looked at the share of Americans who never attend church in the six years since Trump’s election compared with that share during Barack Obama’s final six years as president.

Overall, the rate of church nonattendance has been climbing for some time, so one would expect some increase independent of political conditions. But Burge finds that among Republicans, the pace of disaffiliation didn’t change much between the Obama and Trump presidencies. Among Democrats, however, there were sudden increases in how fast nonattendance rose: at a 16 percent clip, up from 3 percent in the Obama years, among Democrats born in the late 1970s, and at a 14 percent clip, up from 2 percent pre-Trump, among those born in the late 1940s, to pick just two examples.

This implies that if you were a churchgoer in a mostly Republican area or congregation, you probably didn’t notice any significant change between the Trump era and the previous period. So the Never Trump insistence that a vote for Trump was culturally costly, that it was driving people away from Christianity, wouldn’t match your lived experience. Whereas if you were a Christian in a more liberal-leaning area, you might be more likely to have seen something like a Trump effect.

That divergent experience maps, to some extent, onto debates between pro- and anti-Trump Christian commentators. The most anti-Trump voices have often been figures invested in making Christian inroads within the professional classes or the liberal intelligentsia, or at least sustaining a Christian presence therein. The most pro-Trump voices have often been self-conscious outsiders to those spaces, operating within environments that are more consistently conservative.

So it’s not surprising that across Trump’s presidency and since, the first group would have had their fears about him confirmed and their hostility to him entrenched — because they were experiencing directly, in their social networks and their churches, some of the alienation and falling-away that followed his election. Whereas the second group, operating in a different context, would feel like the prophecies of doom had been wildly exaggerated, because they weren’t seeing the same crises.

A bill designed to limit false accusations of child abuse is now heading to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's desk—one of several attempts to reform the state's Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS).
The bill was introduced last November by Texas state Rep. Valoree Swanson (R–Spring). The bill—which has largely gained support along partisan lines—will ban anonymous reports to the state's child abuse hotline—instead requiring all callers to provide their name, phone number, and address. The bill also requires reporters of abuse to include "the facts that caused the individual to believe the child has been abused or neglected and the source of the information."
While anonymous reports of abuse and neglect to the state's hotline are prohibited under the legislation, the identity of those reporting abuse will remain confidential, except to DFPS and law enforcement officials. These measures, according to the bill's supporters, are specifically designed to limit false accusations of child abuse. 
"As Texans, we need to ensure the safety of our children in any situation. HB 63 will allow for more accountability and protections for those involved in potential CPS and DFPS investigations relating to neglect and abuse," state Rep. Kevin Sparks (R–Midland) told The Texan."Without this necessary reform, both agencies will struggle to verify reports and can complicate the issue with hours of wasted time on false accusations."
Opponents have argued that the bill would deter reports of actual child abuse. Kate Murphy, director of child protection policy with the nonpartisan nonprofit Texans Care for Children, told the Texas Tribune that, in 2022, about 1,000 reports of the 12,473 total anonymous calls were found to be substantiated. 
"Unfortunately, if this bill were to pass, those 1,000 children would be left to continue experiencing abuse and neglect or worse," said Murphy.
But there's little reason to think that the bill will prevent factual reports of child abuse or neglect from being made. Not only is it a fairly large leap to assume that genuine abuse will go unreported if callers have to give their name and contact information, but the bill still allows individuals to make anonymous reports to 911 or any other local or state law enforcement agency. If these reports are referred to DFPS, the agency is directed to undertake a preliminary investigation to determine whether there is any corroborating evidence for the claims, which can include home visits and interviews—hardly an abdication of responsibility.
Raising the bar for making an allegation of child abuse or neglect is probably a good thing. Child protective services agencies sometimes investigate parents who have simply let their children walk home from school by themselves or allowed them to play outside unsupervised. In 2019, only 16 percent of investigations uncovered a substantiated incident of abuse or neglect. 
That said, intervention is obviously justified in cases of genuine abuse, but there's little reason to think requiring that reporters identify themselves to a child protection hotline will prevent real abuse from going unreported. 
HB 63 is one of several recent efforts to reform the way Texas investigates reports of child abuse and neglect. HB 730—which is also headed to Abbot's desk and would require DFPS workers to notify parents of their rights, including the right to refuse searches, drug tests, or interviews with children—will strengthen the rights of parents subject to a DFPS investigation. If officials want to conduct a search anyway, they'd have to show probable cause to obtain a court order. 
"Unfortunately, the DFPS and Child Protective Services can often be used as a weapon. A lot of times we see this in divorce cases," Sparks told the Tribune. "We probably all know of a circumstance where a family was needlessly traumatized because of an anonymous tip that was ultimately found to be false."
The post Texas Tries To Rein in False Accusations of Child Abuse appeared first on Reason.com.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has joined the veritable cacophony of calls for increased restrictions on youth social media usage. In an advisory report released on Tuesday, Murthy declared that social media presents a "meaningful risk" of harming kids and teenagers.
"We have gaps in our full understanding of the mental health impacts posed by social media but at this point cannot conclude it is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents," writes Murthy.
In that sentence, Murthy neatly summarizes the position of various lawmakers, psychologists, tech whistleblowers, and now the Biden administration as well: Given a lack of overwhelming evidence that social media is completely safe, great caution is warranted.
It is not surprising to see a top government health official default to knee-jerk wariness; the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that federal health bureaucrats are willing to substantially disrupt the lives of millions of people on an operating theory that some public health intervention is needed. Indeed, top White House pandemic advisers urged government officials at the state and local level to shutter schools, forcing millions of kids to endure virtual learning and social isolation. Even past the point at which most sectors of public life had resumed normal operations—and vaccines had become available—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) still fought to keep masks on schoolchildren's faces, thanks in part to dubious scientific findings.
The case for a massive government undertaking to mitigate the alleged ill effects of social media is similarly dubious. In his advisory report, as well as an accompanying op-ed in The Washington Post, Murthy echoes the concerns of various experts—most notably New York University professor Jonathan Haidt. The main problem is that some young people spend too much time on their phones, which in turn means they get too little sleep and exercise, while dealing with bullying and harassment.
If parents wish to heed these warnings, talk to their kids about excessive social media use, and encourage healthier behavioral patterns—like keeping their smartphones out of their rooms at night—that's all well and good. But Murthy is speaking on behalf of the U.S. government, and he should keep in mind that what occurs on social media is First Amendment-protected speech.
Young people are using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, and YouTube to express themselves creatively, connect with their friends, gather information about the world (for homework purposes, or maybe just because they're curious), and cultivate new skills. Murthy's concern that some kids are having a bad time online is not sufficient to override the general principle that parents get to make these calls, not the federal government.
Discerning readers who look past the headline will note that Murthy's report does in fact acknowledge benefits to social media use.
"A majority of adolescents report that social media helps them feel more accepted (58%), like they have people who can support them through tough times (67%), like they have a place to show their creative side (71%), and more connected to what's going on in their friends' lives (80%)," he writes.
Even the more sinister findings are far from conclusive.
"When asked about the impact of social media on their body image: 46% of adolescents aged 13-17 said social media makes them feel worse, 40% said it makes them feel neither better nor worse, and only 14% said it makes them feel better," writes Murthy.
This is supposed to scare readers, even though a clear majority of kids are saying that social media is making them feel the same or better about themselves.
As the report is repeatedly forced to concede, the negative side of social media overwhelmingly centers around a narrow cohort—teenage girls—some of whom are made to feel worse about themselves due to social competition and being bombarded with unrealistic body images. The harmed group is a subset of a subset, and the problem is not widespread across all social media, but mostly confined to one specific website: Instagram.
It would be reasonable to advise parents to explore whether their own kids—particularly teenage girls with body image issues—are spending too much time online. If social media is negatively impacting their sense of self, interfering with their sleep schedules, or causing them to disengage from school or peer groups, then families should intervene—the same way they would intervene if a kid had developed an addiction or fallen in with a bad crowd.
But the fact remains that millions of kids are using their phones to stay more connected; this was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic when federal authorities shut down their in-person gatherings.
Murthy's report ultimately calls for policy makers "to strengthen safety standards and limit access." Suddenly depriving millions of young people of access to social media would not make them healthier; on the contrary, it would probably make them miserable.
The post The Surgeon General Exaggerates the Threat Social Media Poses to Kids appeared first on Reason.com.

Last week, I wrote about the major expansion of the U.S.-Philippine alliance, Japanese alignment with Taiwan and possible three-way links with South Korea, and a planned visit by President Joe Biden to Papua New Guinea to forge an alliance there. That meeting didn’t take place, officially because Biden needed to return to Washington to secure a deal on raising the debt ceiling. My guess is that during a week where China’s strategic defense in the South China Sea was hammered and likely fragmented, the U.S. decided not to pile on with a visit, but the agreement with Papua New Guinea will be completed nonetheless.

This week, the focus changed from military deployments to economics. In general, this is far more important to the Chinese than the military balance. China’s military does not reach the level where Beijing could have a high degree of confidence in its success in a conflict, and defeat would be catastrophic. But in point of fact, I regard the Chinese military as weaker than others do. Weapons are important, but so are experience in combat and terrain. The terrain was never favorable for China. Islands block its access to the open seas, and last week’s agreements made the Chinese position as an offensive power untenable. There is an interesting tendency to overestimate potential offensive powers over those with a strong defensive base. Russia in Ukraine is a case in point, but so is China, where an attack on Taiwan has been imminent for years. Russia did not recognize its position, but China does.

Therefore, the Chinese greeted U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s invitation to a meeting, which was only as unpleasant as good manners demanded. Sullivan wanted to reassure the Chinese that new initiatives by the administration were not intended to harm China. Most concerning to Beijing is a growing list of U.S. export controls intended to ensure that U.S. firms do not sell to China anything that could be used to strengthen its military. That would appear to be relatively benign, but since just about everything could be perceived as useful to the military, the U.S. was indicating that it could limit the flow of exports to China at will.

This potential step angered the Chinese, which gave Sullivan a good platform for negotiations. China relies on imports of advanced technology from the U.S., and U.S. investment in China has fallen, though it continues to be large. China’s economy has begun to recover from its real estate crisis, but the basic reality created by that crisis remains intact. China’s post-pandemic economic rebound has weakened to the point of disappearing; there has been some growth, but nothing close to what the economic surge promised. The Chinese therefore face a degree of unrest. When a nation discovers that its progress in improving its standard of living is at best stalled, the regime must at least consider the worst case. It is reasonable that the Chinese have over recent months moved aggressively against potential unrest in several regions.

The Chinese can still celebrate past economic triumphs, but that is not nearly as good as celebrating new triumphs. Therefore, China must turn to its military as the foundation of its legitimacy. With Chinese threats to Taiwan being met with military deployments by others, the case can be made that the defenders recognize the power of China. At the same time, the shifts that have taken place in the waters east and south of China would indicate a different read. But the shifts likely seemed to most Chinese, if they noticed them, as simply routine diplomatic shuffles and not the construction of a powerful defensive line. The Chinese leadership, of course, does apprehend the danger. One option is to move to a more cordial relationship with the U.S. to ensure that trade continues and to mitigate U.S. unease with Chinese military operations.

Post-Maoist China’s foundation was its economic miracle. Waging war opens the door to defeat. Watching Russia founder makes a case for avoiding war. Therefore, China must become more aggressive in its trade policy. Paradoxically, that means being more accommodating to the United States. A strong economic relationship with the U.S. is the key to China’s recovery. It is the only single relationship sufficiently robust to provide a significant change. Sullivan’s and some other openings to China come at an opportune time.

The United States does not want war with China, and it certainly doesn’t intend to send land forces. It simply doesn’t want Chinese military power projected into the Pacific. Whatever dreams China might have had, it must accept the realities it faces. The important thing for Chinese leaders is that, in accepting reality, they do not appear to the Chinese people as failures. That can be fatal. Therefore, we are in a period where appearances matter, and now is the time for the U.S. to be very modest. The challenge for Washington is to let the American public know that the modesty is feigned without the Chinese people getting restless.

I know that my view of China is far from the view of experts. This gives me comfort. Experts have knowledge, but usually, the knowledge was gained at the price of imagination.

Randi Weingarten has spent only a small portion of her career in the classroom despite leading the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest national teachers union in the United States. Trained as a lawyer, Weingarten taught full-time for just three years and was a substitute teacher for three more.
However, according to a report by Freedom Foundation, a think tank, she will collect over 15 years' worth of public pension when she retires. That sum could total well over $200,000.
Weingarten worked as a per diem substitute between 1991 and 1994 and then became a full-time teacher for three years. Weingarten was also employed as legal counsel for United Federation of Teachers (UFT) President Sandra Feldman until 1998, after which Weingarten became union president.
But according to public records, Weingarten is listed as having collected over 15 years of "service credit" as a teacher—meaning she can expect the pension benefits of someone who worked in the classroom for well over a decade longer than Weingarten has.
How has Weingarten earned 15 years' worth of pension benefits? Per Freedom Foundation's Maxford Nelsen, it's due to the UFT collective bargaining agreement, which allowed her to have over 11 extra years counted toward her "service" even though she wasn't in the classroom. This likely came from "time spent…on union leave as treasurer and then president of UFT from 1997 until her election as AFT president in 2008," Nelsen notes.
"Employees who are officers of the Union or who are appointed to its staff shall, upon proper application, be given a leave of absence without pay for each school year during the term of this Agreement for the purpose of performing legitimate duties for the Union," the collective bargaining agreement said. Public records from November 2022 show that Weingarten was one of several dozen such "teachers" out on union leave.
While Weingarten's union leave is unpaid, the New York City Department of Education used tax revenue to pay her pension contributions for over a decade.
Weingarten wouldn't have been eligible for a pension in the first place without the extra service credit from her union years, as teachers need five years of service credit to be eligible for a pension. Including 12 months of credit she received from substitute teaching, Weingarten only had four years of service credit from her time actually spent teaching.
It's unclear how much taxpayers will shell out for Weingarten's pension. Assuming her average salary was $60,000 (public records show that her last salary as a New York City teacher was $64,313) and she collects her pension for 15 years, taxpayers could end up paying Weingarten $230,000 total, Nelsen estimates—not including any cost-of-living adjustments.
Weingarten has disputed this, telling the New York Post that his calculation is "completely wrong," adding that "I would have to check with UFT and TRS [Teachers Retirement System] on the other or find a quarterly statement, none of which I have right now." UFT did not respond to a request for comment.
Students are hardly Weingarten's top priority. Despite recent attempts to rehabilitate her image, Weingarten was a vocal supporter of extended COVID-related school closures, advocating for such ridiculous policies as forgiving all teacher student loan debt and suspending teacher evaluations as requirements for "safe" reopening.
"Weingarten's case is a prime example of how government unions around the country have managed to force taxpayers to subsidize their extreme, one-sided political advocacy," Nelsen wrote, "and it's high time federal and state lawmakers stand up to union influence."
The post Randi Weingarten Only Taught for 3 Years. She's Getting 15 Years of Public Pension Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.

Born in 1945, from the wreckage of its decades-long civil war, our mother continent Europe is a boomer, prone as many boomers are to comforting and self-aggrandising myths as it slouches towards death. Unlike the generation which led Europe through the Cold War, which had lived through Europe’s great convulsion and understood power, the generation of politicians which led Europe through the post-Cold War decades — a type of which Angela Merkel, once lauded and now reviled, is the purest distillation — were the first to have fully internalised the continent’s post-1945 value system.
Power politics was a barbarous relic of a rejected past; the world was destined to move towards harmonious free trade, in which Europe’s hard-won moral clarity would guide lesser civilisations, still trapped in history, towards the light. Timid, comfortable, fearful of change and obsessed with petty rules and regulations, once Europe reached middle age with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was happy to observe a changing world tutting from behind its net curtains, the parish council Nimby of continents. Half museum and half retirement home, Europe grew fat and complacent as history was made elsewhere. But from a cave in the depths of Asia something stirred, which would restart history: Covid fatally weakened the boomer continent, and now something new is straining to be born.
It is striking that it took a disease which primarily affects the elderly and unfit to finally make Europe’s leaders notice what had already been clearly apparent: that the continent’s willed deindustrialisation in favour of China had left it weak and helpless, entirely dependent on the charity and vigour of stronger empires. The conjunction of Covid with America’s worst period of internal political disorder since the Sixties also fed a perception among America’s rivals that the global hegemon was itself ailing in turn, fuelling Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Yet if Putin’s war has been markedly unsuccessful on the battlefield, in a pyrrhic sense it has proved the validity of the central assumption driving it: that the post-Cold War world is dead, and we already live in a multipolar order.
In the Middle East, South America, Africa and Asia, even America’s allies remain happy to trade with Russia and submit their disputes to Chinese arbitration, viewing the Ukraine war as a distant European border skirmish irrelevant to their interests, and America’s role as global policeman lost to history. Only now are EU leaders, such as its chief diplomat Josep Borrell Fontelles, able to face the dawning realisation that “many countries see the geopolitical influence of China as a counterweight to the West and therefore to Europe. They will seek to strengthen their own room for manoeuvre without picking sides”. The latest war in Europe thus helps mark the boundaries of a European civilisational space, delineated by solidarity with Ukraine. For decades, Europe’s leaders flattered themselves that their moral worldview was universal, fated by history to reshape the entire world. Instead, Europe’s values and its interests are revealed as utterly parochial: merely the customs and assumptions of one civilisation among many, and a weak one at that.
It took both crises, Covid and Ukraine, to awaken Europe from its post-war dream. Dependent on China for industry, Russia for energy and America for security, Europe suddenly realised its vulnerability within the new order. As Macron recently wrote in the Financial Times: “because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the war Russia decided to inflict on Ukraine, we have acknowledged our strategic dependencies and decided to act to reduce them… We are no longer naive.” Rejecting the idealistic free-trade dogma that had dominated European thinking for decades, Macron further argued in a landmark speech that “we are not destined to become consumers of American industry”, nor is Europe’s relationship to China a choice between economic subjection and conflict: “Rather than trying to fight the Chinese, we are going to do the same as they do: defend our European sovereignty and produce what we need in Europe.”
More from this author Brexit exposed the Westminster eliteBy Aris Roussinos 
In a strange way, Macron’s civilisational dream of Europe’s role in a multipolar world echoes the foreign policy thinking of the two giants of Germany’s interwar Conservative Revolution, Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger. Writing from very different perspectives, just as Germany’s bloody attempt to unify the continent began to look doomed, the two friends tried to visualise a new place for Europe in the world. For Jünger, in his long essay “The Peace”, begun in 1941 and secretly circulated amongst the Wehrmacht generals plotting to assassinate the Führer he so despised, the historical result of the Second World War would not be a reversion to the pre-war order of squabbling nation states brought about by Versailles, but instead the consolidation of the earth’s continents into great civilisational power blocs: “For the first time, the earth as a globe, as a planet, has become a battlefield, and human history presses on towards a planetary order.”
This was a moment of great danger for Europe, Jünger warned: “Napoleon prophesied that in our day the world would become republican or Cossack. If he had foreseen our situation in detail he would have said ‘American or Russian'”, for “at the moment when Europe raises itself to the status of a continent, the gravitational pull of America will be­come more perceptible”. For Jünger as for Macron, history presented the mother continent with a great and fateful choice: vassalisation at the hands of one of the two great empires, or an autonomous civilisation state.
Instead, for Jünger, Germany’s defeat was also the moment for “Europe’s Declaration of Independence”, a time when “the old frontiers must be broken down by new alliances, and new, greater empires must unite the nations”. Here, Jünger does not sound markedly different to Macron in declaring that “Europe must become a partner in the great empires which are forming on this planet, and are striving towards their final form.”
Suggested reading We need to resurrect Eastern EuropeBy Michal Kranz 
Indeed, like Macron, the Francophile Jünger believed this should happen under French tutelage, as “for long the spirit of that country has been striving towards greater unity in which its labours too will be crowned”. Like Macron’s summoning of the Napoleonic spirit, Jünger celebrated the previous failed champion of a great continental empire: “For this reason secret shrines in honour of Napoleon have been maintained in all lands — for in that prince the old dream of one great monarchy had seemed to be realised.” No wonder Mitterand, meeting the Right-wing warhorse turned idealistic prophet of European unification in 1984, would remark that “Napoleon would have made you a marshal”.
Never quite rejecting his early Right-wing radicalism, the later Jünger directed it towards a pan-European identity and political Catholicism, and died lauded as a prophet of European unification and the Franco-German alliance. Jünger’s ideal European union indeed prefigures our own, where “there should be uniformity of organisation in what­ever concerns technical matters, industry, commerce, com­munications, trade, weights and measures, and defence”, where “the state as supreme symbol of technical achievement takes the nations in its toils, yet they live in freedom under its protection”. Like his fellow Nietzchean, Macron, who views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the catalyst to reform Europe into a continent capable of defending itself and preserving its unique civilisation, Jünger observes that: “it is thus that nature fashions shellfish, with a hard, gleaming embossed shell and a delicate interior in which the pearls are hidden. In this differentiation lies the welfare of states and the happiness of individuals.”
Jünger’s vision of a new world order divided into great continental empires reflects the influence of his best friend, the jurist and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Unlike Jünger — a fierce and public opponent of Hitler’s regime — Schmitt famously attempted to find a starring role for himself under the National Socialist order, quietly rejecting it only when Germany’s defeat looked certain. It is ironic, and perhaps based on a cursory reading of Jünger’s earlier works, that while Jünger’s reputation is clouded (or among some fans today, enhanced) by his early Right-wing radicalism, Schmitt’s dalliance with the regime whose atrocities created the post-1945 order has only granted his work a certain transgressive glamour, particularly among the Marxist and post-Marxist intellectuals who first revived his thought.
More from this author Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchyBy Aris Roussinos 
In The Nomos of the Earth (1952), Schmitt observed that the decisive event in world history came at the end of the 16th century, when “the British island detached itself in ideal terms from the destinies of the continent to undertake its own adventure on the seas”. The result was the creation of great seaborne empires, finally culminating in the United States, with the power and will to impose their order on the entire planet, relegating the Europe from the engine of world history to the scene of pitiless and total wars. In detaching itself from the continent, Britain set in train a sequence of events that would lead to Europe’s subordination to Britain’s monstrous child, America.
Yet for Schmitt, in his later writings, there were alternate historical paths on the horizon. As perhaps his most famous modern acolyte, the post-Marxist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, observes, Schmitt looked beyond the bipolar Cold War order he would not outlive to a world where the likely end of bipolarity, American hegemony, would in turn be superseded by “a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocs”. For Mouffe, a multipolar landscape of civilisational blocs would likely be more stable and pacific than American unilateralism, by dividing the world into distinct but broadly amicable spheres of influence (Ukrainians and Taiwanese, both unwilling members of other empires’ chosen spheres of influence, are unlikely to share her enthusiasm).
A critic of the War on Terror (whose own Schmittian basis has famously been argued by Agamben), Mouffe argued that the potential for world peace brought about by a “a pluralistic world order” is why, “against the illusions of the universalist-humanitarians, it is urgent to listen to Schmitt when he reminds us that ‘the political world is a pluriverse, not a universe’”. Rejecting cosmopolitan idealism, Mouffe argues that we should abandon “the illusory hope for a political unification of the world”. Trying to turn the world into Europe is futile and dangerous: “instead of the vanguard in the unification of the world, the EU should be visualised as a regional pole in this multipolar world”.
Suggested reading Macron’s extreme centre will not fallBy David A. Bell 
In this multipolar order, as Jünger observed of a united Europe acting as the shield of nations, the EU would, “instead of being seen as announcing the end of nation-states, [provide] the conditions for their survival in a globalised world”. The continent’s survival in this post-cosmopolitan order, Mouffe declares, would entail a rejection of the ideology of free trade, which has meant that “an increasing number of vernacular industries have been destroyed, as local producers are unable to compete with cheap imports” from China and other rival powers. Instead, it is necessary to “to defend a Left-wing form of European protectionism”, in which it is essential “to envisage economic development according to a regional perspective”. This vision, of a protectionist, reindustrialised Europe is precisely that now championed by Macron, who recently announced that “we cannot be the last remaining market without an industrial policy”. In the stirring conclusion to his Financial Times essay, he declared that:
“We have to take back control of our supply chains, energy and innovation. We need more factories and fewer dependencies. ‘Made in Europe’ should be our motto. We have no choice, as sovereignty is intertwined with the strength of our democracies… We Europeans can prove that our continent, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, can once again be the home of flourishing industry and shared progress.”
The post-1945 order, in the simplistic folk wisdom that only fully took shape with the fall of the Soviet Union, adopted the comforting myth that the Allied victory in the Second World War, like the Western victory in the Cold War, was a product of superior liberal-democratic forms. Shedding their overseas possessions in the decades following the war, Europeans flattered themselves that the age of empires was over, but that even as their physical power waned, their moral example would still guide the world.
Instead, the consolidation of the world into continental empires was only beginning. Political morality does not come into the picture: Europe’s conquest and post-war division into two rival spheres was simply the product of America and the Soviet Union’s vast industrial output, and the abundant raw materials, derived from ruthless territorial expansion and genocide in the preceding centuries, which enabled them to feed their factories.
Power flows through a million factory chimneys, and both Covid and the war in Ukraine have revealed to Europe’s feckless and misguided rulers how weak our continent has allowed itself to become. But both crises have also finally brought that fragile, complacent boomer, the world born in 1945, to a close: the entire worldview of its political avatar, Angela Merkel, now stands repudiated, even if no fully-formed replacement has yet arrived. First there were two rival empires, then one unchallenged hegemon, and now a series of potential challengers stand on history’s stage. Belatedly, European leaders are realising that unless it can defend itself, and provide for itself, then as Macron warned, “Europe will disappear.”
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For as long as I have been feeding myself—which, for the record, is several decades now—I have been feeding myself fast. I bite big, in rapid succession; my chews are hasty and few. In the time it takes others to get through a third of their meal, mine is already gone. You could reasonably call my approach to eating pneumatic, reminiscent of a suction-feeding fish or a Roomba run amok.Where my vacuuming mouth goes, advice to constrain it follows. Internet writers have declared slowness akin to slimness; self-described “foodies” lament that there’s “nothing worse” than watching a guest inhale a painstakingly prepared meal. There are even children’s songs that warn against the perils of eating too fast. My family and friends—most of whom have long since learned to avoid “splitting” entrees with me—often comment on my speed. “Slow down,” one of my aunts fretted at a recent meal. “Don’t you know that eating fast is bad for you?”I do, or at least I have heard. Over the decades, a multitude of studies have found that people who eat faster are more likely to consume more calories and carry more weight; they’re also more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes. “The data are very robust,” says Kathleen Melanson of the University of Rhode Island; the evidence holds up when researchers look across geographies, genders, and age. The findings have even prompted researchers to conduct eating-speed interventions, and design devices—vibrating forks and wearable tech—that they hope will slow diners down.But the widespread mantra of go slower probably isn’t as definitive or universal as it at first seems. Fast eaters like me aren’t necessarily doomed to metabolic misfortune; many of us can probably safely and happily keep hoovering our meals. Most studies examining eating speed rely on population-level observations taken at single points in time, rather than extended clinical trials that track people assigned to eat fast or slow; they can speak to associations between pace and certain aspects of health, but not to cause and effect. And not all of them actually agree on whether protracted eating boosts satisfaction or leads people to eat less. Even among experts, “there is no consensus about the benefits of eating slow,” says Tany E. Garcidueñas-Fimbres, a nutrition researcher at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Spain, who has studied eating rates.[Read: American food will never look natural again]The idea that eating too fast could raise certain health risks absolutely does make sense. The key, experts told me, is the potential mismatch between the rate at which we consume nutrients and the rate at which we perceive and process them. Our brain doesn’t register fullness until it’s received a series of cues from the digestive tract: chewing in the mouth, swallowing down the throat; distension in the stomach, transit into the small intestine. Flood the gastrointestinal tract with a ton of food at once, and those signals might struggle to keep pace—making it easier to wolf down more food than the gut is asking for. Fast eating may also inundate the blood with sugar, risking insulin resistance—a common precursor to diabetes, says Michio Shimabukuro, a metabolism researcher at Fukushima Medical University, in Japan.The big asterisk here is that a lot of these ideas are still theoretical, says Janine Higgins, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who’s studied eating pace. Research that merely demonstrates an association between fast eating and higher food intake cannot prove which observation led to the other, if there’s a causal link at all. Some other factor—stress, an underlying medical condition, even diet composition—could be driving both. “The good science is just completely lacking,” says Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University.Scientists don’t even have universal definitions of what “slow” or “fast” eating is, or how to measure it. Studies over the years have used total meal time, chew speed, and other metrics—but all have their drawbacks. Articles sometimes point to a cutoff of 20 minutes per meal, claiming that’s how long the body takes to feel full. But Matthew Hayes, a nutritional neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized that as an oversimplification: Satisfaction signals start trickling into the brain almost immediately when we eat, and fullness thresholds vary among people and circumstances. Studies that ask volunteers to rate their own speeds have issues too: People often compare themselves with friends and family, who won’t represent the population at large. Eating rate can also fluctuate over a lifetime or even a day, depending on hunger, stress, time constraints, the pace of present company, even the tempo of background music.In an evolutionary sense, all of us humans eat absurdly fast. We eat “orders of magnitude quicker” than our primate relatives, just over one hour a day compared with their almost 12, says Adam van Casteren, a feeding ecologist at the University of Manchester, in England. That’s thanks largely to how we treat our food: Fire, tools such as knives, and, more recently, chemical processing have softened nature’s raw ingredients, liberating us from “the prison of mastication,” as van Casteren puts it. Modern Western diets have taken that pattern to an extreme. They’re chock-full of ultra-processed foods, so soft and sugar- and fat-laden that they can be gulped down with nary a chew—which could be one of the factors that drive faster eating and chronic metabolic ills.[Read: Junk food is bad for you. Is it bad for raccoons?]In plenty of circumstances, slowing down will come with perks, not least because it could curb the risk of choking or excess gas. It could also temper blood-sugar spikes in people with diets heavy in processed foods—which whiz through the digestive tract, Roberts told me, though the healthier move would probably be eating fewer of those foods to begin with. And some studies focused on people with high BMI, including Melanson’s, have shown that eating slower can aid weight loss. But, she cautioned, those results won’t necessarily apply to everyone.The main impact of leisurely eating may not even be about chewing rates or bite size per se, but about helping people eat more mindfully. “A lot of us are distracted when we eat,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “And so we are missing our hunger and satiety cues.” In countries such as the United States, people also have to wrestle with the immense pressure “to be done with lunch really fast,” Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Duke University, told me. Couple that with the fast foods we tend to reach for, and maybe it’s no shock that people don’t feel satisfied as they scarf down their meals.The point here isn’t to demonize slow eating; in the grand scheme of things, it seems a pretty healthful thing to do. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that “eat slow” should be a blanket command. For people already eating a lot of high-fiber foods—which the body naturally processes ploddingly—Roberts doesn’t think sluggish chewing has much to add. The extolling of slow eating is, at best, “a half truth,” Hayes told me, that’s become easy to exploit.[Read: Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold]I do feel self-conscious when I’m the first person at the table to finish by a mile, and I don’t enjoy the stares and the comments about my “big appetite.” Certain super-slow eaters might get teased for making others wait, but they’re generally not getting chastised for ruining their health. When I asked experts if it was harmful to eat too slowly, several of them told me they’d never even considered it—and that the answer was probably no.Still, for the most part, I’m happy to be the Usain Bolt of chewing. My hot foods stay hot, and my cold foods stay cold. I’ve intermittently tried slow eating over the years, deploying some of the usual tricks: smaller utensils, tinier bites, crunchier foods. I even, once, tried to count my chews. The biggest difference I felt, though, wasn’t fullness or more satisfaction; I just kind of hated the way that my mushy food lingered in my mouth.Maybe if I’d stuck with slow eating, I would have lost some gassiness, choking risk, or weight—but also, I think, some joy. There’s something to speed-eating that can be plain old fun, akin to the rush of zooming down an empty highway in a red sports car. If I have just an hour-ish (or, knowing me, less) of eating each day, I’d prefer to relish every brisk, indecorous bite.

As the deadline for reaching a deal to raise to debt limit nears, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) says any agreement should include a massive tax hike on Americans.
Earlier this month, Hawley introduced a bill to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on all imports from China—above and beyond existing tariffs on many of those same products. Hawley's bill, the Raising Tariffs on Imports From China Act, would allow a future president to remove that 25 percent import tax on goods from China only after the United States records a bilateral trade surplus with China for a full year.
"Strong tariffs on China should be a major part of any debt ceiling agreement," the senator said in a statement announcing his bill earlier this month.
Tariffs, of course, are nothing more than taxes paid by importers and passed along to consumers. The past five years have provided a striking real-world experiment in that basic principle of economics, as study after study has found that former President Donald Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods (and other imports too) resulted in higher prices and contributed to overall inflation. Hawley might call them "tariffs on China," but that's obvious nonsense: Tariffs are paid by Americans.
But Hawley seems determined to make Americans pay higher taxes. Earlier this year, he introduced a different bill to prevent the United States from applying so-called "normal" tariff rates—that is, the rates charged on imports from all World Trade Organization (WTO) member countries—on imports from China.
Effectively, that change would hike average tariff rates on Chinese imports from 11.1 percent to 40.9 percent, according to an analysis from Bryan Riley, director of the free trade initiative at the National Taxpayers Union (NTU), a free market nonprofit. The rates for some common imports would jump far higher: Shoes and clothing from China would be marked up by 59 percent, while children's toys would see an extra 70 percent tax applied. Increased import taxes could add $86 to the price of smartphones from China, $111 to laptop computers, and $39 to video game consoles, according to NTU's analysis. 
If passed into law, Riley says, Hawley's proposal would amount to the largest tariff increase on American consumers in nearly a century—since the passage of the "Smoot-Hawley" (no relation) tariffs in 1930, which economists now widely credit with extending and worsening the Great Depression.
Americans have struggled through two years of heightened inflation and rising interest rates. Hawley needs to explain why raising import taxes should be a priority right now.
When asked during a Friday appearance on Fox Business about the potential economic downsides to hiking tariffs right now, Hawley largely avoided the question. Instead, he insisted that "we need to bring back good-paying blue-collar jobs to this country" and blamed China's membership in the WTO for that decline.
That's a common refrain from the New Right, but it's both economically inaccurate and nonsensical as a justification for raising tariffs.
Indeed, tariffs won't create jobs in the United States—they will destroy them, as higher taxes always do.
For example, look at what happened when Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel imports. The higher prices created by the tariffs benefited the domestic steel manufacturing industry but caused greater job losses in steel-consuming industries. "A small boost from the import protection effect of tariffs is more than offset by larger drags from the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs," a pair of economists from the Federal Reserve concluded in one study.
Industry representatives have said the same thing: "Any gains seen by the steel industry from the tariffs has been overshadowed by the losses in the companies downstream," Stuart Speyer, president of Tennsco LLC, a Tennessee-based metal fabrication firm, told the International Trade Commission at a hearing last year.
China's membership in the WTO hasn't been costly for the United States either. The availability of cheap imports from China has actually been a major boon for American manufacturing over the past few decades—no matter what Trump, Hawley, and others might claim. Between 2000 and 2021, manufacturing imports from China to the U.S. increased by $391 billion, but American manufacturing output increased by $947 billion during the same period.
The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has declined largely due to automation and high labor costs, not because of competition with China. Tariffs won't change any of that. All they will do is make it more expensive for American manufacturers to do what they do best these days: use global supply chains to churn out high-end goods.
It's telling that Hawley isn't the only American senator pushing to revoke China's "normal trade relations" status. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) campaigned for president in 2020 on a promise to hike tariffs on Chinese imports and has frequently complained about China's membership in the WTO. (Sanders even introduced a bill in 2005 to do pretty much exactly what Hawley's bill aims to do now.)
As a general rule: If you're pushing an economic policy also endorsed by an avowed socialist, you might want to reconsider. Fittingly, when it comes to tariff policy, Hawley and the rest of the New Right are slipping into one of the same economic fallacies that has often bedeviled progressives like Sanders: judging policy by intention rather than outcomes.
You can say the words "tariffs," "China," and "good-paying blue-collar jobs" as many times as you'd like. It'll never add up the way Hawley keeps promising. Higher import taxes that will be paid by American businesses and consumers is a recipe for slowing the economy and punishing productive people. It won't accomplish anything else.
The post Josh Hawley Wants the Debt Ceiling Deal To Include a Massive Tax Hike on Americans appeared first on Reason.com.

It is day one of the “high status” course in Los Angeles, and our host, a middle-aged former member of the United States Navy (white T-shirt, blue jeans, black Converse) is perched on a chair at the front of the room, detailing the wrongs of feminism. “The world is shaming men for being masculine,” he says. “The opposite of masculinity is not femininity. The opposite of masculinity is anti-masculinity. Feminism is not feminine. Feminism is anti-masculine.”
Sitting alongside me are 12 other men, most of whom work in finance or as internet entrepreneurs: think affiliate marketing schemes and property flipping. All are single. This week-long course, costing $10,000, promises to teach us how to forge an “elite social network” that will lead to a life of material and sexual abundance. One participant has flown in from Australia, another from Vancouver. The students are mostly in their twenties and thirties, with one or two in their mid-forties – but the lifestyle they aspire to is pure adolescent fantasy: a cartoonish world of supercars, luxury mansions and bikini-clad women.
As well as attending seminars, students are taken out three nights a week to Los Angeles’s more exclusive nightclubs by “in-field” coaches. Here, they are taught how to start conversations with women, as well as how to network with “high status” men. The latter involves identifying what motivates them (this might be women, or access to celebrity parties), “offering value” (by suggesting introductions or having local status) and exchanging contact information. The rest of the week is filled with photo shoots (to build a more aspirational social media profile), post-nightclub debriefs, and further seminars on improving your Instagram game.
Our host likens his programme to Noah’s ark, a life vessel that will save men from sinking into the swamp of involuntary celibacy. In the past, he explains, “low-status men got at least one girl that they could have sex with. Then, after birth control and the sexual revolution, we allowed people to choose more, and what women were choosing was the high-status men. Which is why you guys are here.”
[See also: “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” review: Louise Perry’s attack on liberal feminism]
I have been attending events such as this since 2018, when I pitched up at a free seminar in London hosted by the former pick-up artist-turned-wealth coach Derek Moneyberg (born Dale Buczkowski). The session was a promotional event for Buczkowski’s course “The 10 Commandments of Game”, but it was also big on self-help monologues, as well as rants about not dating women older than 24 (Buczkowski was 41 at the time). That same year, the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson became an online celebrity, building a fanbase around YouTube videos that combined Jungian philosophy and Christian teachings with his promotion of “masculine” virtues such as stoicism, courage and personal responsibility. Young men appeared to be rejecting progressive narratives around toxic masculinity; Peterson’s self-help book, 12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos, sold more than five million copies by the end of 2020. 
I wanted to learn more about the so-called manosphere – a growing community of men who promote traditional masculinity, as well as an opposition to feminism – and began researching a book. In my early twenties, I had been drawn into this world myself, stumbling across pickup artist forums while seeking advice about how to ask someone out on a date. I spent hours reading information I couldn’t find elsewhere: mainstream dating advice seemed to amount to little more than reassuring but empty bromides such as “be yourself”. Despite their reductive ideas about relationships, the pickup artists at least acknowledged my own feeling that being nice wasn’t always enough.
In the summer of 2019 I travelled to Los Angeles and got a job as a “dating and status” coach on a course similar to this one. Then, the scene was all about emulating the “King of Instagram” Dan Bilzerian, a modern-day Hugh Hefner whose apocryphal autobiography, The Setup, remains a bible for students in the self-improvement wing of the manosphere.
Today it is Andrew Tate, the British-American former kickboxer and self-proclaimed misogynist, who is the lodestar of the neo-masculinity movement. The 36-year-old was arrested in Romania last December, on charges of rape and human trafficking, and spent the first three months of 2023 in jail. At the time of writing, he remained under house arrest while the Romanian investigation continued. Tate has continued to tweet to his six million followers; before his TikTok account was suspended last summer, his short motivational videos on money-making, working out and how to behave around women reached 11.6 billion views. His online “Hustlers University 2.0” course has more than 221,000 subscribers and costs students £49.99 a month, teaching them “passive income” business schemes such as drop-shipping and crypto trading.
But money is not the priority in LA this year. Everyone on the high-status course already has a degree of wealth and professional success. Nor are they socially inept nerds, a contrast with the pickup artist community of old; some are even likeable. What unites them is that they have all become convinced, through listening to men such as Tate, Bilzerian and Buczkowski, that dating in the social media age is a winner-takes-all world in which being average is not enough.
The word that always comes to mind when I’m in this world is emasculation. They won’t say it out loud, but the men on these courses feel enfeebled in some way. Why else would you pay a guru large sums to teach you how to be a “real” man? Some feel emasculated by women’s economic independence, others feel emasculated by women’s sexual liberation; there is always a chance that a woman has had better than you.
But they also feel emasculated by post-industrial society, by the unrewarding white-collar jobs they are supposed to embrace, and by the prospect of growing fat and stale like the older men in their lives, watching sport in dive bars with another man’s name emblazoned across their backs. To young men brought up listening to Tate, this kind of existence – what he calls that of a “wage-slave brokie” (as in, someone who is broke) – is deeply emasculating, and the glossy promise of Instagram has created an appetite for something better. There is a reason why the 1999 film Fight Club, in which Edward Norton seeks his “authentic” self in a dehumanising world of corporate capitalism, remains popular among this demographic.
Like many of the men I encountered in my research, I grew up without a father. From what little I know about him, he was a philanderer who left my mother when she became pregnant. It is a common story, and one of the great ironies of the manosphere: yes, it is populated by men who have arrived at their embittered view of women after a breakup or a betrayal; but there are many more who project on to women the failures bestowed on them by other men.
[See also: “Feminism Against Progress” by Mary Harrington review]
This course in LA – and arguably Andrew Tate himself – are outgrowths of the mid-2000s pickup artist scene. Before launching his Hustlers University in 2021, Tate was selling dating courses such as his “Pimpin’ Hoes Degree” and “Instagram Playbook”. But old-school Noughties artists, with their well-rehearsed opening lines and peacocking tactics (dressing flamboyantly to attract attention), now feel quaint compared with the new breed of hyper-masculine playboy. Approaching women in bars is considered “low status” by this generation – instead it’s all about leveraging access to VIP events and inner sanctums.
While Tate has been on the periphery of the celebrity circuit since becoming a world champion kickboxer in 2013, it wasn’t until last year that he became a household name. What turned him into one was a new army of young, male and enthusiastic online foot soldiers who were willing to cut his content into viral shorts, set up copycat accounts and share it widely on social media. Members of Tate’s Hustler’s University were reportedly told to flood social media with controversial videos. Among other things, these videos have shown him saying that women should “bear responsibility” for being raped, and that they belong in the kitchen. Some young male fans have told me that this is merely a provocation, a business strategy designed to manipulate an algorithm that rewards controversy. On the LA course, one 42-year-old man tells me that Tate’s language is “definitely over the top… but his overall beliefs are solid”.
In January this year, it emerged that Tate had also been investigated by Hertfordshire police in 2015, after three women made allegations of sexual and physical abuse while working for a webcam business he ran with his brother, Tristan. But it was another four years before the police referred their case to the Crown Prosecution Service, which in 2019 decided there was no realistic prospect of conviction.
Police investigations in two countries are not easily dismissed as a clever social media strategy, and so Tate and his supporters have instead tapped into the fertile arena of conspiracy theory. After his arrest in December 2022, Tate took to Twitter (his account was restored by Elon Musk in November) to complain about “the Matrix”, a nod to Trumpian and QAnon-adjacent theories about the “deep state”. He has presented his imprisonment as a courageous act of martyrdom against mysterious political forces, rather than a serious criminal process.
This reframing has worked for some of the men I speak to on the LA course. Jason, a 26-year-old who moved here from Seattle because there are “more nines and tens” (in the manosphere women are rated out of ten for their attractiveness), tells me he likes Tate and that the things he says about the Matrix are “basically correct”.
Our course leader doesn’t believe Tate is guilty, either, and tells the group that “they” – he doesn’t specify who – seem “desperate”. “Anti-masculinism is ‘let’s all snitch on Andrew Tate’,” he says. “I don’t know Andrew Tate that well, we text once in a while. But from what I’m seeing now, it seems like this whole case is a farce.”
[See also: The uncomfortable truths of Hag feminism]
Spend too much time on Instagram and it is easy to feel that everybody but you is beautiful, on holiday, and having a lot of sex. These insecurities have extra potency at a time when young American men appear to be in the middle of a sex drought. Research published by the national General Social Survey in 2019 showed that 28 per cent of American men under 30 hadn’t had sex in the past year, an increase it attributed to screen time, job insecurity and more people living with their parents. A 2022 Pew Research study found that, among American men under 30, 63 per cent described themselves as single, more than double that of women in the same age bracket.
Nor is this phenomenon confined to young men in the United States. The proportion of German men aged 18-30 years who reported no sexual activity in the past 12 months increased from 7.5 per cent in 2005 to 20.3 per cent in 2016. In Japan, sexlessness was reported by 56 per cent of men aged 20-54 years in a 2020 study of 4,000 adults, a phenomenon referred to as sekkusu-banare (literally, “drifting away from sex”).
It applies to couples, too. A 2019 study of 34,000 Britons aged between 16 and 44 found that couples were having less sex than in the previous two decades. Professor Kaye Wellings, the study’s lead author, believes gender equality may be a factor. “There was a time when women were taught to lie back and think of England. And so they satisfied male urges to please their partner, even if they didn’t feel like sex themselves,” Wellings tells me over the phone. “In general, men have a desire for more sex than women. If it’s up to just the men, there would be a greater frequency. And if it’s up to the women, there might be less frequency but higher quality [sex].” The study registered a gender split, with half of British women and almost two thirds of men saying they wanted more sex.
Last year the academic and former director of Demos, Richard Reeves, published a thoughtful book on the purported “crisis of masculinity”, Of Boys and Men, in which he examined the ways in which men are falling behind in post-industrial societies. Most American men earn less today than their counterparts in 1979 did; men are three times more likely to suffer “deaths of despair” (drug overdose, alcohol or suicide); and men earn 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 earned by women. Reeves lives in America and recently told a local podcast that “Andrew Tate is our fault. And by ‘our fault’, I mean mainstream institutions, think tanks, government, who aren’t talking about boys and men. Or if they are, it’s this semi-embarrassed, ‘Oh let’s get this over with.’”
Research conducted by the British charity Hope not Hate earlier this year found that more young men in the UK had read, listened to or watched content by Tate (79 per cent of boys aged 16-17) than had heard of the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (60 per cent). Many have suggested that Tate fills a role-model gap in boys’ lives, or acts as a sort of father figure. But the former New Statesman columnist Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, tells me that describing Tate’s schtick as “‘patriarchal’ isn’t quite right, because he’s not a patriarch. He has a bunch of kids, but he’s barely involved in their lives and he seems to shrug off adult responsibility at every opportunity. A better term would be ‘fratriarchal’ – he’s preoccupied with the kind of macho behaviour that adolescent boys find attractive.”
Perry describes Tate’s world-view as “Nietzschean”, preoccupied with strength and hierarchy. “Within that, there’s no space for seeing women as equal, except in being objects of sexual desire.” At the same time, she believes that many ordinary men – not just the self-declared misogynists – are discombobulated by an increasingly “feminised” public life. “In general [the manosphere] feels like a thing for men who feel a bit lost… I’m sure it is a backlash against feminism. I think a lot of the political and cultural change we’ve seen in the last century has been because of having more women in all sorts of positions of influence. So it’s not surprising that some misogynist men would be really resentful of that. But also some men who aren’t misogynists feel out of place.”
When Tate tells young men that “nobody cares how you feel” he plays into the idea that a man’s place in society is judged, above all, by the scale of his achievements. As a man, you might have friends and family who are willing to listen to your problems. But I would argue that large sections of society still judge a man’s worth based on his perceived status and effectiveness as a provider. Acknowledging this does not negate the fact that Tate, and others like him, also represent the latest incarnation of an anti-feminist backlash.
[See also: Is a feminist marriage possible?]
Despite paying for a course dedicated to meeting more women, few of the men I talk to in LA seem to enjoy their real-life company. What they want more than anything is to be admired by other men: this, in the end, is the true purpose of all this acquisition and abundance. Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools – something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. The contemporary manosphere has taken the concept of the trophy wife and expanded it into the trophy harem.
Before they were impounded by the Romanian authorities, Tate owned 33 sports cars. But in LA we are taught that, if you aren’t rich or famous, photo manipulation and extreme editing can make you seem so. Stored on my iPhone I have a picture of myself leaning nonchalantly against a rented Audi Samoa Orange, gazing wistfully into the distance. I have a photo posed in a rented mansion, and a heavily edited shot taken near the Hollywood sign. I am advised to post these on my Instagram grid alongside a pseudo-profound platitude (“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness,” for example), although I have no intention of doing so. Pretending to own a sports car doesn’t strike me as particularly high status. Nor do the fake trappings of a hyper-capitalist nightmare feel subversive, or as if I’m kicking back against the Matrix.
When Andrew Tate singled out the Matrix as the shadowy force behind his arrest, he made it sound as if a malignant conspiracy was at work. An alpha male is supposed to be free to do what he wants – to kill the dragon, to get the girl. The manosphere is above all a cult of selfishness, steeped in the entitlement and solipsism of a stunted teenage boyhood.
But in reality the Matrix represents something far more ordinary and amorphous. It is merely anything that stands in the alpha male’s way. That could be his mother asking him to tidy up his bedroom. It could be Greta Thunberg pointing out the environmental cost of capitalism, or the “beta males” in government putting his country into Covid lockdown (Tate was anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine). It could be Romanian or English police investigators, or any number of inconvenient things. Or it could be a woman saying no – no, she doesn’t want to have sex with him. Because they can, and some men still haven’t quite got over it.
Some details have been changed to protect identities.

One narrative sees an opportunity in the strike to reconsider the larger way that Hollywood has evolved, especially the Marvel-era fixation on franchises, reboots and “presold” storytelling, which is variously attributed to a profit-mad venture-capital mind-set taking hold in Hollywood or the effects of consolidation in the film business. Against this backdrop, the monopoly critic Matt Stoller argues that the goal of the strikers should be finding allies in the cause of big, structural change — breaking up the vertically integrated corporate behemoths, separating production and distribution once again and thereby making the alchemy of the midbudget movie more competitive with the superhero sweatshop.

A somewhat more pessimistic analysis, offered by writers like Sonny Bunch and Jessa Crispin, emphasizes that the superhero-sweatshop corporate strategy evolved because it’s giving audiences what they want. The people are buying tickets for comic book movies and “Super Mario,” Bunch points out, not “Air” or “The Last Duel.” The fan culture that sustains these projects, Crispin argues, often seems to prefer its writers to be replaceable cogs in a content machine. And so even if the strike is an opportunity for reconsiderations, it’s probably not a lever that can change the system as a whole.

Personally I would like to see the strike lever a different Hollywood system into being. But I would settle for a return to the that existed around 10 years ago, before the streaming takeoff — when the downsides of the special-effects franchise era in cinema were partly compensated for by the emergence of richer, deeper, more ambitious television.

My viewer’s impression of what’s happened since then is that the streaming expansion first delivered a welcome surfeit of small-screen ambition but then increasingly felt as if it was spreading creative talent too thin, working it too hard or both.

Sometimes the shows of the peak-TV era start out brilliantly but then struggle to sustain their dynamism even in a second season. (HBO’s “Westworld,” for instance, or lately Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.”) Sometimes they play like thin imitations of the previous decade’s antihero dramas. (Netflix’s “Ozark,” say.) Or they take on the character of the theatrical experience but somewhat worse — with too-big-to-fail franchises that nobody really enjoys. (“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” say, or “Rings of Power.”) Or they ask too much of a talented showrunner, who’s paid more and more to deliver a spread of content rather than concentrating on a single story. (The evolution of Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” and its disappointing spinoffs fills this bill.)

The United States has suffered from a deliberate fuzziness in formulating its objectives in the Russian war in Ukraine. Flaccid phrases like “helping Ukraine defend itself” or, even worse, “putting Ukraine in the best possible position for negotiations” are either meaningless or insipid. Bureaucratic mental fog is masquerading as artful policy, and it is dangerous. Strategy is the matching of means to ends. In war it is easy to become obsessed with action rather than purpose, and thereby to fall into Nietzsche’s famous description of the most common human stupidity: forgetting what one intended to do in the first place.Ukraine knows how it defines victory: the pre-2014 borders cleansed of the invader, its exiles and refugees returned, its society and economy rebuilt, membership in the European Union and NATO attained, and some measure of justice for Russian rapists, torturers, and murderers secured. Similarly, we know how the Russians define victory: a Ukraine broken and severed from the West, much of its territory annexed; a Europe in disarray that resumes its addiction to cheap natural resources and business opportunities in Moscow; and the reconstruction of much of the old Russian imperial state.We should want victory as Ukraine defines it. But to achieve it, the West must not only aid in the defeat of Russia—it must convince Russia that it has been defeated.[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence; a Russia that will have learned that it can commit slaughter and atrocities with impunity; a Russia whose ambitions will grow with success. A Russian victory would, as well, teach the world that the West—including the United States—lacks the resolve, despite its wealth, to follow through on its commitments, offering Beijing an encouraging lesson.Conversely, Russian defeat would put Beijing—already somewhat nervous about its partner’s incompetence and wild statements—on the defensive, consolidate the Western alliance, and help preserve some of the essential norms of decent behavior in those parts of the world most important to us. Above all, it would block the Russian imperial project for good, because without Ukraine, as the historian Dominic Lieven has noted, Russia cannot be an empire.Russian defeat does not require a march on Moscow (rarely a good idea in the past), and it does not require a Russia that is defenseless and devastated (impossible without World War III). Rather, it will be achieved inside the heads of Russia’s leaders and population. Russia must be convinced that the military instrument, and its deployment in large-scale war, will inevitably fail, and it must realize that Ukraine is permanently and completely lost.Such things have happened before. Israel did not occupy Arab capitals in 1967, but that war caused the Arab states to abandon the notion that they could annihilate the Jewish state through conventional means. The 1973 war forced the conclusion that even limited conventional conflict was too hazardous to attempt.In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States was defeated without losing a single battle. We became convinced that fighting was both futile and painful, that our enemies were implacable and unbeatable, and that the price paid in blood, treasure, and attention was in no way worth the cost and never would be.Carl von Clausewitz, the German philosopher of war, said that war is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.[Hein Goemans and Branislav Slantchev: Why Ukraine shouldn’t talk to Russia—yet]Russia’s theories of victory in Ukraine have collapsed one by one. Putin began by believing that the country would fall in a week; then that it would succumb to a month or two of hard fighting; then that Europe would abandon it during a cold winter without Russian gas; then that Ukraine could be bludgeoned into submission by attacking its cities. The final theory of victory—that the West does not have the heart to pour vast resources into Ukraine indefinitely—needs to be disproved as well, because there is nothing beyond that.To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use, including long-range missiles to break for good the 11-mile Kerch bridge between the mainland and Crimea, and cluster munitions to devastate Russian fighting vehicles and infantry. Breaking the Russian army, as we have, by spending only a small fraction of our defense budget and none of our blood is an astounding strategic bargain.Russians must, moreover, conclude that Ukraine—formerly, in their view, a pseudo-state containing “cousins” or “little brothers”—is gone forever. That means speedy accession to the EU and NATO, but also a deep Western commitment to rebuilding Ukraine economically and, most important, arming it to the teeth for years to come.The paltering of the administration about giving our superabundant F-16s to Ukraine is foolish and shortsighted. These jets might not make a difference on the battlefield two months from now, but the knowledge that several hundred of them are in the pipeline for the next five years would have profound symbolic importance. We should be talking about how we will rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces, the West’s largest, most combat-tested, and in some ways most determined army.The West needs an aggressive information campaign to drive home the reality of Russian defeat. Russians need to be reminded that their faltering economy is only a tenth the size of the EU’s; that they cannot build and deploy a modern tank; that their latest high-performance jet, the Su-57, will be outnumbered by the F-35s of the four small Nordic states; that their generals are superannuated and incompetent; that their high command is indifferent to their men’s lives; that their equipment is inferior to that of Ukraine; and that their logistics are rotted by graft and corruption.Information warfare should be reinforced by continued sanctions, whose aim is not so much to win the war as to cripple Russian war-making potential for the long run by depressing the economy and forcing Russia to make do with inferior components and spare parts.Russia must be isolated politically and psychologically as well, thereby playing on the country’s historical ambivalence about the West, represented in its two capitals: St. Petersburg, facing Europe, and Moscow, facing Asia. But Russian literature, art, culture, and political practice are rooted in its relationship with Europe. The time may come—years or, more likely, decades from now—when a postimperial Russia will turn westward again.This is all doable. In fact, it has happened on a smaller scale before. Russian leaders became convinced in the late 1970s and early ’80s that they could not keep up with advances in Western military technology, even as they fought and lost the war in Afghanistan. The Gorbachev upheaval was in part the result of this realization.[David J. Kramer, John Herbst, and William Taylor: The only realistic answer to Putin]But our expectations today should be measured. Unfortunately, a defeated Russia will still be malevolent, angry, and vengeful; it will probably still be ruled by the “vertical of power,” the hard men from the security ministries; it will be suffused with lawlessness and murder; and it will engage in subversion, political warfare, and malicious behavior of all kinds. But who would not prefer to deal with a thousand troll farms and front organizations than one Mariupol? And this Russia would be far less dangerous to us, far less useful to China, far less likely to raise monstrous new threats in the years to come.The key to this strategy is courage. We must conquer our fears of Russian threats and escalation, of its nuclear bravado, and even of Russian collapse. We must be strategic and shrewd, but nothing can be accomplished without courage. In the words of John Paul II—the unarmed, lone old man who did so much to bring Soviet communism to its knees—“Never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”This article was adapted from a speech given to the Polish Institute of International Affairs’s Strategic Ark conference on May 17, 2023.

In a bygone era, Americans could be confident that conservatives, like the former General Electric pitchman Ronald Reagan, were friendlier to corporations than their ideological opponents, and that the most aggressive efforts to rein in corporate power were coming from the left.Today, the relationship that the American left and right each have with Big Business is different. When corporations advance voting rights or acceptance of gays and lesbians, or oppose racism or laws that restrict the ability of trans people to use the bathroom where they feel most comfortable, many progressives are happy to see corporate power exerted as a counter to majorities in state legislatures or even views held by a majority of voters in red states. And some Republicans who pass socially conservative measures into law, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, have responded to corporate opposition with retaliatory rhetoric and actions that cast dissenting corporate speech as illegitimate and antidemocratic.[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]These changing relationships to corporate power are shaped by the left’s increasing focus on race and gender relative to class and by the rise of populism on the right. They also reflect the never-ending push and pull between public and private power that is found in all healthy free societies. Politicians on both sides of the aisle sometimes get overzealous in the behavior they try to restrict. Though the right and the left both lose sight of this whenever a company takes a stand they don’t like, non-state actors—including corporations—play an important role in tempering excesses of the state. Absent such counterweights to state power, liberty would be at greater risk.The right has long understood the value of corporate speech when defending free markets and economic liberty. The left now appreciates it more clearly on social issues.To understand all that has recently changed, recall the world as it looked during President Barack Obama’s first term. Before Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement or mainstream support for trans rights or the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, Occupy Wall Street was the focus of grassroots energy on the left. Bernie Sanders, the senator most aligned with that protest movement, introduced a constitutional amendment with radical implications. Constitutional rights “are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations,” it declared in part. On the contrary, corporations are “subject to regulation by the people through the legislative process,” it continued, “so long as such regulations are consistent with the powers of Congress and the States and do not limit the freedom of the press.”Sanders’s attempt to end corporate influence on politics by stripping corporations of free-speech rights was a response to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which said that First Amendment rights extend to corporations. “If the First Amendment has any force,” the majority held, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."Many progressives were furious about Citizens United. If corporations have the same free-speech rights as people, the decision’s opponents argued, they will be free to marshal power and resources far greater than most people to influence American democracy, calling the integrity of government by the people into question. Conservatives, in turn, argued that corporations were invariably made up of many people, just like labor unions and think tanks and foundations and institutions of higher education. Why should the state have more power to censor associations of people than individuals?Of course, Sanders and his allies never came close to amending the Constitution and overturning Citizens United. But if they had, I wonder how the left would feel about the change now, as Republican politicians go after companies that take progressive stands.This brings us back to one of the most powerful state officials opposed to progressivism, DeSantis, who pushed the Parental Rights in Education Act through the Florida legislature last year. Progressives called it a “Don’t Say Gay” bill and were upset with Disney, the most powerful corporation in Florida, for declining to use its power in the fight against the bill. Blasted by progressive activists, socially liberal employees, and left-of-center journalists and celebrities, who objected to the corporation’s disinclination to influence the political process, Disney reversed course. The company declared that it would use its corporate speech to advocate for the law’s repeal while giving millions of dollars to political opponents of the law.DeSantis was apoplectic, responding as if corporate political advocacy and political giving were affronts to representative democracy. “You’re a corporation based in Burbank, California, and you’re gonna marshal your economic might to attack the parents of my state,” DeSantis said, sounding a bit like Sanders. “We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back against that.”Thus began a campaign by DeSantis to retaliate against Disney for its political speech. That retaliation ultimately caused Disney to file a lawsuit alleging a violation of the First Amendment rights that the corporation enjoys, rights affirmed in that 2010 Citizens United decision––rights that Sanders and others tried and failed to strip from corporations. Because Sanders failed, the GOP is far more limited now in how much it can constrain what the right calls “woke capital.” Just like “woke” persons, “woke” corporations have free-speech rights (and the right to shift jobs away from any state where the political leadership is not to their liking).And if the Disney lawsuit goes to the Supreme Court, many progressives will be rooting for the corporation’s victory––rooting, in effect, for the Citizens United precedent to stand––in part because the most common progressive view in 2023 is not that corporations should stay out of the American political process but that corporations are obligated to intervene on the side of progressives. As Joni Madison, then the interim president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest LGBTQ-advocacy organizations in the United States, put it during the legislative fight in Florida, “We need Disney’s partnership in getting the bills heading to DeSantis’s desk vetoed. And if that doesn’t happen, to get these bills repealed. But this is not just about Bob Chapek [then the CEO of Disney] and Disney. This is about every CEO and company in America.”[Edward Wasserman: My newspaper sued Florida for the same First Amendment abuses Desantis is committing now]Progressive nonprofit corporations are wildly successful at lobbying their corporate cousins on some issues. In 2016, the business community largely opposed a North Carolina bill that sought to restrict which bathrooms trangender people could use. In 2021, as Republican-controlled state legislatures sought new restrictions on voting, hundreds of companies, including Amazon, Coca-Cola, and General Motors, publicly opposed the GOP. Meanwhile, as The New York Times reported, “Senior Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, have called for companies to stay out of politics.” Of course, even when progressives applaud and conservatives denounce corporate influence on a particular issue, politicians from both ideological camps continue to eagerly seek and accept corporate contributions.None of this is to say that the right and left have completely switched places. There are many issues on which the GOP remains more aligned with corporate interests and many elected Republicans who remain sympathetic to corporate power. But neither coalition is reliably aligned with or opposed to the power of corporations. The relationship, on both sides, tends to be issue-specific, transactional, and opportunistic, with the left more likely to be closely aligned on social issues and the right more likely to be aligned on fiscal issues.Principled stands against all corporate influence are few.Take corporate influence on the education system. As recently as 2016, leftist outlets like AlterNet that were sounding the alarm when the Walmart Family Foundation exerted money and influence to change the public-education system, particularly when it supported the often right-coded solution of charter schools. Today, however, Walmart and the nonprofits associated with it are using their money and influence to support the expansion of left-coded diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in Arkansas schools, according to the right-leaning Washington Free Beacon, which is raising concerns, even as most progressives don’t seem to mind.Corporations wield cultural power, too, apart from electoral contests and legislative fights. And there, too, the left and right coalitions are adopting noticeably different postures than before.Consider the past and present of major beer brands.In the late 1960s and 1970s, labor disputes at Coors Brewing and opposition to the conservative politics of the Coors family fueled a beer boycott that lasted into the ’80s.“Women’s groups are joining labor unions, Chicanos and homosexuals in an informal but increasingly powerful boycott,” the Copley News Service reported in March 1978. “Though the National Organization of Women is not participating in the anti-Coors campaign, local chapters of NOW are carrying ‘Don’t Drink Coors’ banners in their newsletters.”By the mid-’80s the company worked to end the boycott by making concessions to the left. “The boycott stirred up negative feelings for a long time, and the job now is to wipe them away,” Peter H. Coors, then president of the Coors brewery division, told the Los Angeles Times. “Who wants to drink a beer when the guy on the next bar stool might say, ‘The people who make that beer are anti-union, or anti-this or that’?”The beer industry, especially its advertising, was a common target of feminist critique that same decade. By the ’90s, such critiques of sexism in beer advertising were sufficiently common and well known for The Simpsons to spoof the conflict in a 1993 episode. As recently as 2015, Anheuser-Busch was under fire from feminist critics for its “Up for Whatever” campaign, which included the slogan “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night” on bottle labels.Across all those years, a premise of the feminist critiques was: Beer advertising matters in that it shapes American culture. And those critiques got results. In 2016, The New York Times reported that beer companies were moving away from misogynistic advertising messages. “It was fine to show a frat party making fun of girls five or eight years ago,” a brand consultant told the Times. “But it’s ineffective and potentially damaging to do today.” In March of this year, at Forbes, Jeanette Hurt wrote that Miller Lite had launched a new campaign to “collect sexist advertisements and turn it into compost to grow hops for women brewers.”In April, Bud Light partnered with the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social-media promotion. “Some conservative commentators and celebrities began calling for a boycott,” The New York Times reported soon after. The conservative boycotters believed that beer ads matter in that they shape American culture––and they, too, got results. The Times wrote, “After Bud Light’s sales slumped and the brand found itself thrust into the nation’s culture wars, Anheuser-Busch, the beer’s brewer, announced last week that two of its executives were taking a leave of absence. The company also said on Thursday that it would focus its marketing campaigns on sports and music.”I have tended to believe that beer advertisements pander to existing attitudes in society rather than shaping future attitudes, so I don’t know if this change in Bud Light’s marketing strategy really matters. But some on the right consider it a major victory. “I’m not sure if most people fully appreciate the significance of this Bud Light stuff,” the socially conservative, anti-transgender-rights commentator Matt Walsh declared. “We made an iconic American brand toxic, virtually overnight, because it endorsed gender ideology. This is a pivotal moment. A map to follow going forward.”What are the next 10 years likely to bring in the left’s and right’s relationship with corporations? I’d wager that corporations will continue to side with progressives and against democratic majorities on some social issues, even as they continue making campaign contributions to many Republicans.As Josh Barro once explained at Business Insider, “Free markets are not small-d democratic. Some consumers matter more than others.” That is to say, many corporations want to attract consumers who are young and affluent, two demographics that are trending progressive on most social issues. “And that’s why ‘woke capitalism’ is likely to persist even if it’s not an effective strategy for getting Democratic lawmakers to stay away from tax increases and new regulations,” Barro wrote. “As long as companies’ core customer demographics remain opposed to cultural conservatives on these issues, companies will end up in opposition to cultural conservatism––not as a lobbying strategy, but as a customer retention strategy.”In turn, I suspect that the more those corporations articulate values that Republicans dislike, the more Republican politicians will try to use the power of the state to constrain corporations, even as they themselves keep raising as much as they can from corporate donors. Finally, corporations will sometimes be targeted by both the right and the left, as when conservatives and progressives scrutinize content-moderation policies at big social-media companies.As the left and right coalitions change their positioning relative to Big Business, it will be tempting––perhaps even fruitful––to point out instances of hypocrisy. But those instances should also serve as an opportunity for people on all sides of American politics to better understand why well-meaning fellow citizens have always been on all sides of the questions of if, when, and how corporations should influence America’s political and cultural disagreements. When corporations wield power, they do so undemocratically. They might be acting to advance the interests, values, or opinions of shareholders, their board of directors, their CEO, their employees, or some complicated combination thereof. Regardless, the general public doesn’t get a say. And corporations often succeed in influencing government in a way that serves their special interests rather than the general interest. Such rent seeking can fuel unjust inequality. And no matter what stances a corporation takes, there is never a moment when any citizen can go to the ballot box and replace it.There are good reasons, in other words, to have checks on corporate power. But one can go too far in that direction. “Corporations are fundamentally illegitimate,” the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky declared in an interview that appears in the 1998 book Common Good. “Just as other oppressive institutions—slavery, say, or royalty—have been changed or eliminated, so corporate power can be changed or eliminated,” Chomsky continued, championing the power of the state. “What are the limits? There aren’t any. Everything is ultimately under public control.” The Italian fascists had a similar formulation: “everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” But it is actually better for a society if power is not concentrated wholly in the state. A healthy society has many power centers, including undemocratic ones like churches, media outlets, universities, fraternal organizations, and, yes, corporations.None of those alternative repositories of power are fully unaccountable.For-profit corporations are all accountable to consumers and all corporations are subject to  laws––but also benefit from the limits on state power set forth in the Constitution. The Obama administration could not force Hobby Lobby to fund contraceptives for its employees because of the company’s religious-freedom rights. The Trump administration could not force Nike to nix relations with athletes who kneeled during the national anthem because of that company’s free-association rights. Such limits on the state enable America to have a thriving civil society and a private sector that generates wealth and innovative goods that Americans enjoy as much as Disney World and use as often as Google Search. The result isn’t perfect but is better than systems where businesses are powerless to dissent, whether fascism or communism or an alternate America where Senator Sanders and Governor DeSantis could suppress corporate speech. If you don’t like the status quo, you can boycott a corporation or start your own.

Justice Neil Gorsuch says all three branches of government share some of the blame for what he calls the "breathtaking scale" of emergency powers wielded by public officials during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent," Gorsuch wrote. "Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them."
Gorsuch's sweeping and powerful statement was attached to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, one of several cases dealing with the Title 42 orders that allowed federal immigration authorities to expel migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Title 42 had been invoked by former President Donald Trump as the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, and it was repeatedly extended by both Trump and President Joe Biden before finally being brought to an end last week.
But Title 42 was just one in a litany of COVID-related emergency powers that drew Gorsuch's ire.
"Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale," Gorsuch wrote before rattling off a list that included stay-at-home orders, school closures, attendance limits on churches, a federal ban on evictions, and the Biden administration's attempt (blocked by the Supreme Court) to impose a national vaccine mandate via a federal workplace safety regulator.
As some Gorsuch critics have been quick to point out on Twitter, it might be a bit of an exaggeration to call this the "greatest" attack on civil liberties in American history. There are unfortunately more than a few other contenders for that ignominious crown: slavery, Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. All were, like COVID-19 emergency powers, the result of legal exercises of state power that violated basic civil rights.
But what the country experienced over the past few years does not have to top that list to be worthy of serious disdain. Gorsuch's statement shouldn't be regarded as a hot take about the worst civil liberties violations in American history, but a thoughtful review of how governments failed in this instance—so that they might do a better job in the future.
"Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat," he wrote. "We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes."
This is, as Gorsuch also notes, not a new lesson but one that has been part of the story of democracy since ancient times.
Even so, it's a lesson worth revisiting in the aftermath of the pandemic. If there is one thing that ought to change, it's probably the general understanding of what constitutes an emergency in the first place. By definition, it is an acute, immediate crisis. But during the pandemic, that definition was stretched to include adjacent policy issues that had nothing to do with the immediate public health situation. An eviction moratorium never made much sense as a response to a viral outbreak, at least not after stay-at-home orders were lifted. Neither did cross-border travel restrictions after the pandemic's earliest days when it was hoped (wrongly) that such barriers could keep the disease at bay.
"The point of an emergency is that it's a sudden, unforeseen, urgent kind of scenario," says Jonathan Bydlak, director of the Governance Program at the R Street Institute, a right-of-center think tank. Bydlak, my guest on this week's episode of American Radio Journal, compares it to a car accident: a situation where the normal rules might have to be suspended—an ambulance can run red lights, for example, to respond to the call. Months later, however, when an accident victim might be on his way to physical therapy, he doesn't get to bypass the red lights.
"Sometimes people conflate the initial crisis—the initial instigating event—with this broader question and say 'just because something important is going on, it must be an emergency' and that's not necessarily the case," says Bydlak.
That's exactly what happened over and over during the pandemic. Just look at the Title 42 saga, which Gorsuch said was an example of government officials prolonging "an emergency decree designed for one crisis in order to address an entirely different one."
"In some cases, like this one," he added, "courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation."
Emergencies may sometimes require that the lawmaking process be temporarily short-circuited, but it's imperative that state legislatures, Congress, and courts at all levels tighten up the circumstances in which emergency powers may be invoked. Gorsuch is right: When officials take shortcuts to make policy, civil liberties are often the cost.
The post Gorsuch Condemns 'Breathtaking' COVID Emergency Powers That Crushed Civil Liberties appeared first on Reason.com.

The main goal of President Biden’s current trip to Asia is to reinforce the message that Washington’s regional allies can always rely on the United States. But by pulling out of two vital stops at the last minute, the president ended up sending exactly the opposite signal. This is a shortsighted blunder that Beijing will surely exploit when courting America’s allies and partners in Asia.

“We are not asking countries to choose between the United States and China,” the spokesman told Bloomberg Politics. “What we are doing is trying to show in demonstrable ways that the United States is a reliable, stable, credible partner in this part of the world … and to give people alternatives to the coercion and intimidation that the Chinese tend to demonstrate.”

That approach makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, it can’t be reconciled with Biden’s Wednesday decision to cancel long-planned stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea so that he could return home early for debt ceiling negotiations. In Australia, the snub was rightly seen as Washington partisan political dysfunction causing real damage to U.S. foreign policy — handing Beijing an easy victory.

“A certain way to avoid default and crisis is for U.S. leaders to remember that there is nothing inevitable about U.S. leadership, and China’s aspirations are ambitious,” Australian journalist Chris Zappone wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Biden downplayed the diplomatic damage on Wednesday by saying that the planned summit in Australia between the leaders of the “Quad” — the United States, Japan, Australia and India — would be moved to the sidelines of the G-7 meeting in Japan, which starts Friday. “We’re still meeting, we still have four good allies,” the president said.

He barely mentioned Papua New Guinea, where the members of the Pacific Islands Forum, a 10-nation consortium that coordinates economic and security policy in the Pacific, were set to meet with him. This would have been the first time a U.S. president had visited Papua New Guinea, a strategically important country that China courts heavily.

In a call Wednesday with Papua New Guinea’s prime minister, James Marape, Biden said that Secretary of State Antony Blinken would take his place, and he invited the leaders of the forum to Washington later this year. The White House readout didn’t mention a new bilateral defense cooperation agreement that Biden was rumored to be planning to sign there.

Experts note that this is only the latest in a long list of occasions when U.S. presidents have canceled visits to Asia because of domestic politics.

“For the Pacific, it feels like Lucy pulling the football out from Charlie Brown’s foot, again,” said Ernie Bower, the chairman of the advisory board for Southeast Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It does underpin a message the Chinese are actively deploying in the Pacific, which is that you really can’t rely on the United States.”

Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (twice) all pulled out of diplomatic trips to Asia because of political “emergencies.” President Donald Trump infamously planned to skip a key summit in the Philippines in 2017 to come home early for no reason at all. He later relented and went to the summit location, but then left anyway because the meeting started late.

In 2018, I accompanied Vice President Mike Pence to Papua New Guinea for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Chinese President Xi Jinping not only attended, but arrived a week earlier for a lengthy state visit. Xi was there to celebrate the opening of a new highway in Port Moresby, the capital, that leads to the new parliament building, both of which were built by China as gifts. He also met with several leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum.

Since then, Beijing has only expanded its military, diplomatic and economic relationships with Pacific island nations, capitalizing on U.S. distraction. Countries in the Pacific, in many cases, would prefer to work with the United States rather than partner with China. But if the U.S. president can’t get his act together enough to show up when promised, regional leaders might feel they are left with no other option.

Is there really anything Biden can do regarding debt negotiations that can’t be accomplished over the phone? Is he returning to Washington just to avoid GOP criticism for being absent? Wouldn’t the president be better off politically if were able to show he can assert U.S. leadership in Asia and push back against China, while also staying involved in the debt talks? This is sometimes referred to as walking and chewing gum at the same time.

To be sure, the Biden administration deserves credit for bolstering some U.S. alliances in Asia that were damaged by Trump’s disdain for alliance management in general. But when an important country such as Australia takes a huge step toward the United States, it’s foolish to give easy talking points to those who are already skeptical about such moves.

Biden campaigned on the slogan “America is back.” But this latest misstep just reinforces the persistent sentiment among Asian nations that there is a gap between what the U.S. government practices and preaches. China’s Xi must not believe his luck.

Many of us had high hopes for Turkey’s recent general election, believing that a flat-out victory for the opposition could mark a break with the worldwide trend toward illiberal democracy. But perhaps we were all misguided, seduced by the lure of free elections and trusting ultimately in the will of the people. In fact, what happened in Turkey this past weekend highlights the latest and most disturbing trend in the rise of illiberal democracy.

While incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not win outright reelection, the results were sort of a victory for him all the same. He did better than polls predicted and came out well ahead of his main opponent, leaving him highly likely to win a runoff scheduled for May 28. This is stunning, given that Turkey is a country in economic catastrophe, with sky-high inflation. The vote also took place just months after an earthquake, in which the government performed miserably.

Consider, though, the backdrop to these elections. Erdogan was up against Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the opposition candidate, a colorless bureaucrat without much charisma or eloquence. But the opposition had little alternative. The president had already eliminated from the field perhaps his most powerful potential rival, Ekrem Imamoglu, a charismatic politician from the same party as Kilicdaroglu, who was on a winning streak. In 2019, Imamoglu handily won the election for Istanbul mayor, a pivotal position that was Erdogan’s own path to power.

But on the flimsiest grounds, Erdogan’s party claimed fraud, and the electoral council ordered a fresh round of voting. Imamoglu won the second election by a larger margin. So Imamoglu was then charged with insulting public officials over the incident and was tried by a judiciary which has been widely described as packed with ruling party loyalists. Sure enough, last December, a court barred Imamoglu from politics and sentenced him to prison for almost three years. The decision is under appeal. In the meantime, though, Imamoglu has been prevented from running for the presidency.

State television, the country’s main source of broadcast news, relentlessly extols the virtues of Erdogan and his party and trumpets the achievements of the government. In April, state TV spent 32 hours on coverage of Erdogan versus 32 minutes for his opponent. Of all democracies, Turkey imprisons the most journalists. The Turkish government initiated more than 30,000 cases for the offense of “insulting the president” — in just one year (2020).

Erdogan’s government has systematically taken over ostensibly independent institutions, including courts and the body that controls elections. (If the May 28 runoff election turns out to be close and the opposition candidate comes out ahead, you can be sure that Erdogan will appeal — and that the election authorities will rule for him, just as they did in the case of the Istanbul mayoral vote.) Nongovernmental organizations face severe government investigation and scrutiny, limiting their ability to operate. The government has passed laws giving it tight control over social media and, over the election weekend, asked Twitter to block the accounts of about a dozen opposition figures. After February’s earthquake, when the government confronted intense criticism on social media for its mishandling of the disaster, it simply blocked Twitter for a while.

This is the next innovation in illiberal democracy. Elected presidents and prime ministers use their majorities to pass laws that give them sustained structural advantages over their opponents. They use government funds to shower their supporters with benefits. They file tax and regulatory cases against independent media groups, investigate journalists and NGOs, and reshape independent agencies and courts into compliant arms of the ruling party. They then hold “free” elections.

Erdogan’s tactics will seem depressingly familiar to citizens in many democracies around the world. Look at India, once home to fiercely independent media. Today, it has fallen to No. 161 in a world press freedom index issued by Reporters Without Borders. Look at Hungary, where the government and pro-government businesses control almost all the country’s media, and the body overseeing the judiciary effectively became an arm of the ruling party, drawing the ire of the European Union. (The office’s first head was a godparent to Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s oldest child.) Look at Mexico, where the president has tried to gut that country’s proudly independent election authority.

When elections are held in these circumstances, and international observers duly note that the ballots were properly cast and counted and then certify such elections to be genuinely competition, they are doing the world a disservice. We need a new vocabulary to describe this phenomenon. Are such elections free? Technically, yes — but they are also profoundly unfair.

    We have made this special edition of Francis Fukuyama's blog paywall-free. To support American Purpose and articles like this, become a member. As the Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake its territory from Russia gets underway, there has been a great deal of uncertainty regarding scenarios for how the war might end. There is general consensus within the NATO alliance that peace talks and a ceasefire under present circumstances will be very bad for Ukraine, leaving Russia in control of the Donbas, Crimea, and the country’s southern coast. The deeper problem is that as long as Vladimir Putin remains in power, any “settlement” under such terms will simply provide Russia with breathing space to rearm and re-equip its forces in anticipation of a later resumption of the war. It will not bring peace but a brief respite highly beneficial to Russia.This means that any durable settlement will need to include much stronger security guarantees for Ukraine. Mere verbal commitments from Western powers will not be sufficient. They made such commitments in the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 whereby Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange promises to respect the country’s territorial integrity. These commitments were honored neither by the Russians nor by Ukraine’s Western backers. Today, nothing short of membership in NATO with its Article Five guarantee would be sufficient to deter a future Russian resumption of the current war.Neither Russia nor the NATO allies are ready to accept Ukrainian membership at the present moment, while the largest war in Europe since 1945 is still raging on its territory. But there are conditions under which such an outcome might become possible by the end of 2023.NATO membership will become a real possibility if the Ukrainian counter-offensive successfully reclaims a critical piece of territory. This is not the Donbas bordering Russia in the East, but the two southern oblasts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia bordering the Black Sea coast. This region is critical to Ukraine’s bargaining position for three reasons.First, it is hard to see how Ukraine can remain economically viable over the long run without regaining access to its ports on the Sea of Azov and the rich farmland and industrial areas around them. Ukraine was a major exporter of grain, fertilizer, and other products from this region and needs to have free access to the sea.Second, when compared to the parts of Donbas long occupied by Russia, there are still many pro-Ukrainian people trapped in these regions. With every passing day, the Russian occupation authorities arrest dissidents, evacuate populations, and saturate residents with propaganda.The third reason is strategic. If Ukraine can liberate the remainder of Kherson oblast, it will cut the Crimean peninsula off from resupply. It will sit atop the rail line going from Russia proper into Crimea, and will put the Kerch Strait bridge under threat from HIMARS and other long-range artillery. In addition, the Ukrainians can once again cut the canal that originates in Nova Kakhovka that supplies fresh water to the peninsula. Russian artillery will be pushed back so that it can no longer terrorize the people of Kherson. While it will be very difficult for Ukraine to invade Crimea across its narrow isthmus, it will be relatively easy to cut it off and make the large Russian military establishment there highly vulnerable. It might actually be advantageous for Ukraine to in effect hold the entire peninsula hostage rather than trying to retake it. Reclaiming the rest of the Donbas is a much lower strategic priority. This area shares a long border with Russia, making it easy to resupply and very hard to conquer. There are virtually no pro-Ukrainian people left in the region; even if it could be occupied militarily, reincorporating it into Ukraine would be like hugging a hornet’s nest. It might be better to hang the massive rebuilding costs for this region around Russia's neck. No Ukrainian government can be expected to formally renounce sovereignty over this region, but it could conceivably provide informal assurances that it will not try to retake this territory.It is possible that the Ukrainian offensive will succeed in a spectacular fashion, and that Russia's weakened forces will collapse across the whole front. But a more modest and plausible scenario is for Ukraine to retake Kherson and Zaporizhzhia by late summer. If this happens, grounds for a deal will be in place. The threat of the slow strangulation of Crimea might finally give Putin an incentive to stop his attacks on Ukraine, and commit to ending its terroristic missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.But the viability of such an agreement will fundamentally depend on Ukrainian membership in NATO. Opposition to the country’s membership in recent years was reasonable based on the fact that Ukraine has been engaged in a hot war with Russia since 2014 and membership would immediately embroil the alliance in that war. If there is an armistice, however, and a quiet understanding that Ukraine would no longer actively seek to reclaim further territory, the task for NATO falls in line with its mission as a fundamentally defensive alliance. Obviously, fear that Ukrainian membership might provoke Russia is a thing of the past. To underline NATO’s commitment, there would have to be alliance members willing to station forces in Ukraine to act as tripwires against any future Russian resumption of the war.A formal peace agreement under which Russia accepted NATO membership for Ukraine, and Ukraine ceded legal sovereignty over Donbas or Crimea, is hard to imagine. But an enduring, self-reinforcing armistice is conceivable. There have been other similar arrangements in the past. North and South Korea never signed a peace treaty in 1954 and are still technically in a state of war, but the Korean peninsula has been peaceful ever since then. Similarly, Turkey and Greece have never agreed to a formal peace deal on Cyprus, yet there has been peace there.NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said that the alliance agrees that Ukraine could join NATO once there is a peace agreement. This is a nice sentiment as far as it goes, but it gets the timing backwards. It will not be possible to arrive at an armistice and stability between Ukraine and Russia without NATO membership. Any NATO member having doubts about this needs to articulate what alternative peace deal is possible in the coming years that will not be a short-lived ceasefire allowing Russia to re-arm and rebuild.This scenario is the only one I see as a remotely plausible path to ending the war in the coming year. It depends entirely, however, on the success of the highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. If the front lines are close to where they are now in late summer, I am afraid that Western support for Ukraine will start to erode more rapidly and the possibility of a durable armistice will decline.We need to start thinking concretely about the conditions under which NATO will accept Ukraine and prepare ourselves actively for such an outcome. This thinking needs to begin now, because we in the West are still very far from consensus on this issue.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image by Marek Studzinski / Unsplash.

It was Election Night, and something had gone wrong with the vote counting in Wisconsin.I was sitting in front of cameras at a cable-network-news desk, as I’ve done many times in my career, with a hunk of plastic in my ear and my hair coated with product. The walls were lined with television monitors that occasionally showed my Very Serious Face glowering down on the busy room. I was on a panel with two impossibly attractive women and our host, a charismatic and controversial young man, and we all knew exactly what was going on: The liberals were up to no good. They were trying to steal the election.Our host launched into a tirade about how our betters in the Establishment were trying to silence us for noticing this obvious leftist conspiracy. His fury built to a crescendo. “You just stay quiet, and we’ll tell you what we think was on those ballots! We’ll decide, yeah? … SHUT UP, INNUMERATE RESIDUUM!” he thundered with classics-inspired rage. And there I was, nodding along, exchanging knowing looks with my colleagues. This is the good stuff. Preach it, brother. Own those libs. Except it wasn’t Election Night, and I wasn’t really me. I was playing the role of Ben Stove, a right-wing Republican political analyst, on the set of HBO’s Succession a few weeks before last Christmas. As Ben, I had a small part in one of the most critically acclaimed dramas in American history, and I was trying my darndest to act.It was a surreal experience. I learned two things during my several days with Succession. One is about television, the other is about politics.First, however, I realize that you might wonder how real-life commentators and reporters end up in gigs like this. Shows such as Succession use actual journalists and pundits because we’re not actors. There’s a bit more verisimilitude because the viewer sort of recognizes us, and we sound more authentic than actors trying to sound like us would. In my case, the show needed someone to play a curmudgeonly, middle-aged, white conservative on Succession’s fictional news network, ATN. One of the producers called someone who had worked with me in other media, who immediately said: I’ve got your man.A few days later, I was on my way to New York, having signed an agreement to accept union scale as payment and an NDA that said my soul would burn like a script on fire if I revealed any of the plotlines.I was teamed up with local and national news professionals you’ve seen on your televisions for years—Dave Briggs, Danny Cevallos, Sharla McBride, Kelly Nash, and Ashley Rowe, with David Kerley as our paterfamilias, the rich-baritoned Walter Cronkite–like anchor. And let me tell you something about folks who work in broadcast journalism: If you think reading a teleprompter while making it seem as if you’re having perfectly natural thoughts isn’t difficult, just try it sometime. I was a rank amateur among these experienced hands, and they were very supportive when I occasionally turned to stone as the lines on the screen transformed into glowing alien symbols that I couldn’t parse.Our ringleader over at the pundit desk was Mark Ravenhead, the creepy crypto-Nazi  commentator played by the professional actor Zack Robidas. (We all spent hours seated at the same table with nothing but time on our hands, so I feel compelled to tell you that Zack is a hell of a nice guy and nothing like Ravenhead.)Watching these professionals is how I learned the first lesson, the one about entertainment, of my time with Succession: It is a gigantic amount of work. The hour of television you see represents days and weeks of shooting. Even for my tiny role, I reported for multiple days of work over three weekends, sometimes being on set for eight or 10 hours, and yet my total screen time in my one episode is probably measurable in seconds. Add to this everyone behind the cameras, including directors, caterers, production assistants, makeup artists, wardrobe assistants, and so many others, and the whole thing feels like a military operation.In fact, Succession did basically take over a media complex in New Jersey to create the ATN headquarters. The show used CNBC’s studios—which, as you can imagine, are pretty quiet on the weekends—and transformed them in a matter of hours. A fleet of trailers colonized the parking lot, and giant tents went up overnight. Corporate meeting rooms became sets. Hallways just off camera were cluttered with crates of water and pizza boxes and directors’ chairs. The level of detail was impressive: I walked around the ATN newsroom and saw that every scrap of paper, every coffee mug, every monitor, on every desk, in places you would barely notice even on a large television, carried an ATN logo. (I was too honest to swipe any of this fake swag, but I was sorely tempted.)I had a few pages of lines, but really, all I had to do for each take was look serious and nod here and there. And yet doing that for a full day was actually kind of exhausting. Meanwhile, I got to witness two of the show’s stars, Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun, work through take after take after take—in some cases, trying to get something right that never made it into the final cut. (One of my favorite lines, however, did survive. Minutes before ATN’s election coverage begins, Macfadyen’s Tom Wambsgans says to Braun’s Greg Hirsch: “Information, Greg, is like a bottle of fine wine. You store it, you hoard it, you save it for a special occasion, and then you smash someone’s fuckin’ face in with it.”)[Read: The sad, sad life of Tom Wambsgans]I learned a lot about who does what on a set, how actors and production people work, and even picked up some of the lingo. (“Checking the gate,” for example, means the director liked the take and you probably won’t have to do it again.) But I also had a realization about politics and television that made me uncomfortable. I was “reporting” the show’s events with lines meant to imply racial animus, gravely agreeing with offensive, right-wing conspiracies, and it occurred to me how easy it was to fall into that persona. In real life, I was once a Republican, and I know some of the steps to that waltz, but now we were dancing a mad tango, and my footing was just a bit too sure.Perhaps if the show had been mimicking a left-leaning network, goofy socialist tripe would have flowed from me just as smoothly. But I’m not so sure. When we were all asked to improvise (in part so that we would look like we were, in fact, having natural conversations on live television), rightist delusions came to us fluidly because they allowed us simply to ignore facts and run with the incendiary stuff.If you haven’t seen Episode 8, stop right here.In “America Decides,” ATN gets drawn into a literal hot mess: A fire at a vote-counting station in Wisconsin has made the state’s true presidential-election tally unknowable. By every projection, the Democratic candidate Daniel Jimenez likely won the state, but with so many Democratic ballots burned, ATN decides, for many reasons, to give Wisconsin, and thus the electoral count in a close election, to the Republican Jeryd Mencken. (The GOP candidate, played with charming menace by Justin Kirk, is a nasty piece of work—a  “fascist,” even, in the eyes of Shiv Roy.)And there I was, riffing along about how the lefties probably set the fire that destroyed the ballots and how our democracy was in danger. This makes no sense at all; indeed, having now seen the completed episode, I think the show’s implication is that the Wisconsin fire was either an accident or perhaps the doing of the Republicans, who knew that it would make calling the state for Jimenez impossible. But in the moment, the words tumbled out naturally. Facts be damned, let’s go with the knowing smiles and the cynical laughs and the accusations.In the same way that the immortal mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap showed what a facile genre hair-band heavy metal was in the 1980s, my short time on Succession helped me understand how mediocre hosts on Fox and other right-wing networks in the 21st century can get carried away with their brainless rants, even to the point of possible defamation: Because it’s easy. And really, it’s even fun. Once you don’t care about the facts, and you’re just trying to play “Can you top this?” with the other guests, you may easily find yourself saying utterly nutty things.At the end of it all, Ben Stove was able to hand his flag pin back to the prop master and shampoo the lacquer out of his fascist-curious hairdo. I was just playing a role. But part of the reason America is inundated with so much poisonous and hallucinatory commentary is because there are so many other Ben Stoves whose limited abilities are no obstacle to cavorting every night on national television. They have disappeared into their roles, and try as they might, they can’t just wash it all out of their hair when the cameras are off.

As a gangly kid who had just arrived in the U.S. from Cameroon, West Africa, 16-year-old Joel Embiid had a lot of the gifts he'd eventually put to use in the NBA: the height, the athleticism, the massive 7-foot-6-inch wingspan. 
But the one thing he couldn't do was actually shoot a basketball. 
Embiid didn't get into the game at all until he was 15. Today, he has become not just the lynchpin of a championship-chasing team in Philadelphia, but he's also arguably the best basketball player on the planet. And he was recently named the NBA's Most Valuable Player for the current season.
It's possible that this would never have happened if it weren't for Youtube.
In a 2016 interview with Sports Illustrated, he shared a secret to his success: learning to shoot long-distance shots by watching, in his words, videos of "regular white people" on the internet.
Yes, Embiid is a big dude, but there are a lot of those in the NBA. What sets him apart is his ability to do more than just stand under the basket and dunk. For a 7-footer, he's got an incredibly efficient jump shot. 
During his career, Embiid has sunk more than 33 percent of his three-pointers. No one is going to confuse him with Steph Curry, but that's a better three-point shooting percentage than Michael Jordan, and it's miles ahead of other guys Embiid's size, most of whom hardly ever score that far from the basket. 
And for that he credits YouTube.
You and I are unlikely to become professional basketball players by watching hours of white dudes shooting three-pointers tonight. Sorry.
But you might learn how to repair a leaky toilet or install a utility sink in your basement by watching YouTube. I did.
Every day, untold numbers of other people accomplish less audacious tasks because of the knowledge that others make freely available via all sorts of online platforms, from Wikipedia to TikTok. The incredible amount of free knowledge that's available online is staggering. And that knowledge confers agency on anyone who's willing to use it. 
Are there cranks on YouTube spreading silly conspiracies and crazy uncles on Facebook sharing QAnon memes? Of course. 
But when politicians call for regulating social media and other online platforms, they risk throwing out a lot of the good with the bad, often in the name of protecting children. They ought to consider the other side of that equation too. Being exposed to unfamiliar ideas can sometimes be scary—but, like it was for a 16-year-old Embiid trying to refine his untapped athletic potential, it can also be game-changing.
Photos: RAY FOLI / UPI Photo Service/Newscom; Marty Jean-Louis/Sipa USA/Newscom; Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire DHZ/Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire/Newscom; Sports Press Photo//Sipa USA/Newscom; Sports Press Photo/Georgia Soares/SPP/Sipa USA/Newscom; Stephen Nadler/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom
Music: "Ace" by Candy Apple Red via Artlist; "I Am Not Your Doll" by Francesco DAndrea via Artlist; "Theevs" by The Good Life via Artlist
Editor: Justin ZuckermanSound Design: Ian KeyserThe post Joel Embiid Became an NBA Superstar by…Watching YouTube? appeared first on Reason.com.

In The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy’s 1912 poem on the loss of the Titanic, the great liner and the iceberg are presented as predestined to meet in their fatal embrace: “Alien they seemed to be/ No mortal eye could see/The intimate welding of their later history/ Or sign that they were bent/By paths coincident/On being anon twin halves of one august event.” Yet each, from their construction in a Belfast shipyard and glacial formation thousands of years ago, were destined to meet in this fateful moment, technology and cold, pitiless nature brought together in consummation of a greater whole.
A similar case can surely be made for war and social media. In an essay written before the Ukraine war, I argued that the conjunction of social media with high quality drone footage from the wars in Syria and Karabakh had created a fusion of online enthusiasts with technology, so that “Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground”. The Syrian war, like the Spanish Civil War before World War Two, can be considered an armed rehearsal for the Ukraine war, a rough draft of processes and technologies that would later reach their full, terrible potential. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the conjunction of brutal drone footage with social media, and of mass deaths with vigorous online fandoms.
With over 100,000 battlefield dead on each side so far, the Ukraine war is already the bloodiest war in Europe since World War Two. But by one grim milestone, the conflict surely surpasses any war in history: it must hold the record for the greatest number of individual human deaths captured on camera. Through the ubiquity on both sides of cheap consumer drones, used for battlefield reconnaissance and target acquisition, the trenches of eastern Ukraine are surveilled to a hitherto unimaginable extent. And by rigging the drones to drop grenades with pinpoint accuracy — a tactic initially pioneered by Isis in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq — both sides can hunt down, chase and kill individual soldiers with the ease of a video game, sharing the HD video footage for their rival supporters.
The effects on the soldiers themselves are easy to imagine. The knowledge that your every move is being watched by an inescapable whining sky robot waiting to kill you is pure horror. But it is the effect on those sharing the footage that is surely most remarkable. The nature of the clips is unlike anything ever seen from any previous war: hovering a short distance above the victim, the drone’s footage is unbearably intimate: in his final seconds of life, the target looks up at the camera — at you, straight into your eyes. You look down at him: you are the drone. It creates the illusion you have been granted the power of life and death, skimming over the muddy trenches of eastern Ukraine like the angel of death. There is something obscene and terrible in being granted access to these final, miserable moments of human life, a nagging sense that this is something that ought not be seen, let alone enjoyed.
And yet to follow the Ukraine war on a platform like Twitter means your feed is interspersed with the lovingly zoomed-in deaths, shared with crass jokes by Western enthusiasts, of human beings, perhaps unwilling conscripts. Niche online communities like Reddit’s DronedOrc share videos with names such as “Drone drops grenades on orc without pants”, or, “Grenade dropped on orc makes its helmet pop”, for the enjoyment of its subscribers. Scrolling Twitter brings up posts such as “18+ The drone operator drove the orc to suicide,” in which a lone Russian soldier, cornered by a drone, shoots himself. “Last seconds of an orc’s life after catching a grenade from the drone in his rat hole,” gloats another. To fully erode the distinction between themselves and the drone, distant internet consumers of the Ukraine war can even donate 3D-printed fins for their grenades via Twitter, inscribed with their own message, like “Hope this hurts XO.”
Brutal as they are, these videos tell you little about the Ukraine war: one contextless video of a human dying in an anonymous ditch is much the same as another, for all it tells you about the conflict’s progress or outcome. The only difference is for online connoisseurs of individual deaths — praying, pleading, helpless, resigned, crawling away in a trail of blood. This online subculture, a fringe subsection of those following the war, serves no analytical function whatsoever. Instead, it more closely resembles crowds in Roman arenas gawping at the deaths of the condemned: they too, after all, were viewed as criminals, beyond the bounds of human sympathy. The propaganda value of these videos, for the Ukrainian cause, is surely doubtful. For the avoidance of doubt — or rather, to avoid being accused of pro-Russian sympathies by enthusiasts of this strange and awful new content — I want Ukraine to win the war. I understand that to do that, the Ukrainians will have to kill and keep killing thousands of Russian soldiers: that’s what war is. But I don’t particularly need or want to see each individual death. The fact that many apparently do tells you little about Ukraine, but much about human nature and the still-dimly understood nature of social media.
Suggested readingThe Wagner FilesBy David Patrikarakos
Perhaps, then, conflict and the creation and destruction of enemies is what social media is actually for. In its first heady days at the beginning of the century, the internet’s Arab Spring, the prevailing narrative was that social media was born to bring people together, technology and the human need for connection fusing to progress humanity’s upward arc. Yet anyone who uses social media observes the precise opposite: there is a natural tendency for the medium to produce enemies, often from the slenderest of causes. The most popular content on Twitter by far is that which focuses on the destruction and humiliation of political foes: careers are built from it, fortunes made. There is a curious lacuna in the anthropology of the internet on this easily observable process, one anyone who uses the internet swims in every day without a second thought. The uproar that Musk’s ownership of Twitter has caused among liberals, though never explicitly articulated, is the product of precisely this dynamic. If social media were not primarily a weapon, they would not fear that it is now in the wrong hands, ready to be turned against those accustomed to wielding it.
If war and social media are now inextricably intertwined, fused by the gut satisfaction of watching and sharing clips of your enemies being destroyed, then the peculiarities of America’s own internal conflict are explained. Both sides of the cold civil war hate each other with gut passion, yet open conflict is — except for periods of heightened tension like elections or the BLM protests — unusually rare. In Syria a few years ago, I met an American volunteer who had been driven to the country’s distant battlefield, on the side of the Kurdish YPG, through engagement with America’s own 2016 political ferment. After the Isis war was over, he went back home, taking part in Seattle’s CHAZ experiment, before being jailed for making a social media “call to arms” against Republicans. For him, perhaps the virtual and the real, Syria and America had become too uncomfortably merged: like the Capitol protestors on the other side, who confused Trump’s media-wrought simulacrum of a coup with objective reality, by making the implicit explicit, he moved too soon.
Instead, each side sublimates its hatred for the other in random acts of violence, carried out by unstable proxies, to be pored over, shared and discussed on social media. American conservatives can watch and share footage of IRL proxies such as Kyle Rittenhouse kill and wound their political enemies, and turn him into a hero of their cause, rewarded, as is the nature of American conservatism, with all manner of lucrative sponsorship deals. Had the fatal tussle’s outcome been different, American liberals would no doubt have rewarded their own virtual paladins. In doing so, their desire to take up arms themselves abates: the virtual simulacrum relieves the urge.
Suggested readingThe Kurds fighting the Isis resistanceBy David Patrikarakos
Even the most random of America’s deaths by shooting, vastly outpacing Syria’s current death toll, are immediately and obsessively analysed for clues as to which, if any side of America’s civil conflict the killer can be attributed — is he a Hispanic White Nationalist, perhaps, or a radicalised transsexual? The deaths that do not feed this war of interpretation are meaningless, and quickly ignored: it is only the online narratives into which they can be forced that give the killings purpose. Twitter is alive, pulsing with palpable energy, in the immediate aftermath of each atrocity, as each side waits and hopes the blame can be conclusively pinned on their online foes. Like Baudrillard’s Gulf War, America’s civil war is both real and not, a conflict in which, as Baudrillard argued, “the virtual has overtaken the actual” and where “we are already all strategic hostages”, trapped in an internet battlefield, “the screen on which we are virtually bombarded every day”.
Published just before the Ukraine War began, Radical War by the academics Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins warned that the fusion of smartphone technology and modern warfare meant that “war is principally about managing the attention of populations and different audiences” in a “media spectacle” where “it is not possible to locate these emergent forms of warfare within existing models of representation and ways of seeing the world”. The smartphone and the drone camera have changed war entirely, “replacing the rifle as the weapon of choice for those engaged in mass participation in war” and “collapsing the boundary between those who observe war and those who engage in it”.
Suggested readingUkraine's path to victoryBy Edward Luttwak
But the Ukraine war has collapsed the boundaries further still: you too can now donate to kill a Russian soldier, and watch and share his death, all from the smartphone nestled in your hand. Similarly, it is impossible to use the internet in 2023 without being, in some way, a participant in America’s cold civil war: just as Americans regroup themselves into opposing lines, waiting for the great culmination which may never come, the still largely virtual conflict’s contours shape almost every thought expressed online. It is a constant, almost impossible task to force yourself not to care about the latest skirmish in America’s culture war: the path of least resistance, across the world, is simply to embrace the dying hegemon’s last compelling cultural product.
Trapped in the internet, we are all of us participants, willing or not, in a great, globe-spanning war without end. As it has with every new technology, war has brought out the latent power of the internet and social media, hardened them and fashioned them into weapons of terrible power, whose true potential we are only beginning to understand. Only now are they coming together, like the Titanic and the iceberg, in their fatal, predestined embrace.

On Sunday, Thai voters will decide whether they want to live in a real democracy or stick with the fake one that Thailand’s military-dominated government has crafted for them. The election has been rigged from the outset, creating absurdly unfair hurdles for the prodemocracy parties challenging the military-backed status quo.Both the United States and China view Thailand as a major geopolitical prize in southeast Asia. Some in Washington worry that harshly criticizing its government—or a flawed election—would push Thailand further into China’s outstretched arms. As a result, the Biden administration faces a test: Will the White House insist on real Thai democracy no matter the geopolitical costs?[Read: China could soon be the dominant power in Asia]Thailand is no mere puppet in this geopolitical battle. For more than a decade, Bangkok has worked to extract the maximum economic and political benefits from each superpower, driven more by pragmatism than by ideology or values. From China, Thailand has garnered direct investment into its infrastructure and military while, from the United States, it gets security protection and a major trading partner (America imported $58 billion of goods from Thailand in 2022).  The Thai political elite has long recognized the advantages of playing the Americans and the Chinese off of one another.Thailand is America’s oldest Asian ally. Relations between the two countries began in 1818, when James Monroe was president. A formal treaty of friendship followed in 1833. Perhaps most memorably, King Mongkut tried in 1861 to send elephants to help establish a breeding population in the United States for the purposes of transporting goods (Abraham Lincoln graciously declined the offer, stating that steam power was working well and that “our political jurisdiction … does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant”).Thailand took America’s side in the Cold War and played a major role in the Vietnam War, sending troops to fight there and allowing the U.S. military to launch operations from Thai bases. Today, as testament to that historically close relationship, the American embassy in Bangkok is the fourth-largest U.S. embassy (by area) in the world.But the relationship has badly frayed since 2014. That year, Thailand’s military seized power from an elected civilian government. The Obama administration condemned the coup, but China was more than happy to swoop in and embrace the military regime under General Prayuth Chan-ocha.These days Prayuth wears civilian clothes, but he still presides over a state dominated by Thailand’s military, and he’s vying to maintain power in the upcoming vote. To understand the stakes, it helps to know that Thailand has a long history of getting rid of leaders in rather brutal ways. Centuries ago, the elaborate protocol for eliminating a king involved placing him in a large velvet sack and beating him to death in a ritualistic ceremony with a specially chosen sandalwood club. In the 20th century, it was the military brass that leaders needed to fear, not the sandalwood club. Since 1932, 12 successful coups have taken place in Thailand, plus an additional seven coup attempts, making Thailand the most coup-prone country on Earth. Whenever the military didn’t like what civilian leaders were doing, it simply toppled them.That cycle became less tenable after 2001, when a truly popular political figure emerged on the Thai scene: Thaksin Shinawatra, an electrifying politician from the country’s north, who became more and more populist and authoritarian during his time in office, until the military toppled him in 2006. But his popularity gave him staying power. The military forced him into exile and disbanded his political party, but to no avail. His sister, Yingluck, simply ran in his place and was elected in 2011 in a landslide. Three years later, in May 2014, the military toppled her too.U.S.-Thai relations broke down from there. Not only did the Obama administration call for a return to elected civilian government; in the years that followed, the United States military sent only a stripped-down force to participate in Cobra Gold, a long-standing joint exercise held annually in Thailand.When Donald Trump came to power in 2017, the values-based criticism of the junta ended, but that made little difference. As Benjamin Zawacki, an expert on Thailand’s foreign relations and the author of Thailand: Shifting Ground Between the U.S. and a Rising China, put it: Barack Obama “forgot about Thailand and Trump couldn’t find it” on a map.China—which does business with any regime, no questions asked—was all too happy to step into the vacuum. Beijing began negotiations for a series of major high-speed rail investments crisscrossing Thailand. It struck a deal to sell a military submarine to bolster Thailand’s navy. And Prayuth purchased dozens of Chinese tanks and other armored vehicles for hundreds of millions of dollars. None of this was welcome news in Washington, which was ostensibly in the midst of Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”[From the February 1954 issue: Thailand]Thailand was pivoting to China. Powerful forces drew it in that direction. Many in Thailand’s political and economic elite have ethnic or familial ties that can be traced back, in part, to China. As one former Thai foreign minister told me a few years ago when I interviewed him in Bangkok: “For many of us, our minds are with the Americans, but our hearts are with the Chinese.” Indeed, China has picked up on this sentiment for its official messaging, using the slogan “Zhong Tai Yi Jia Qin,” often translated as “Two lands, one heart,” to describe Thailand and China.The coronavirus pandemic gave the United States a chance to try to woo back its old ally as China closed itself off to the world, depriving Thailand of the huge revenues it once got from Chinese tourists and trade. The White House took the opportunity to ramp up its diplomatic overtures in 2022. Prayuth met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that May, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Bangkok in July. Just a few months later, Prayuth returned to Washington, where Vice President Kamala Harris warmly welcomed him at the White House.But embracing this Thai government is decidedly at odds with supporting Thai democracy. Since 2014, Thailand can broadly be considered a military dictatorship masquerading as a democracy. The military-backed government has recognized that it can get away with more if it changes the rules rather than outright breaking them with a coup. Officials often describe the 2006 coup as having been “wasted,” because it failed to neutralize Thaksin’s influence on politics. The military vowed not to repeat the mistake in 2014 and instead changed the constitution to ensure that Thaksin—and his relatives and allies—couldn’t win again.Specifically, the new constitution created a 250-member senate, which was to be appointed by the military and would join the elected 500-member lower house in voting for the prime minister. A promilitary candidate will therefore start with a built-in advantage of 250 votes over any anti-military candidate. By design, the system is rigged against popular parties that favor civilian-led government—including those affiliated with Thaksin.Despite that electoral manipulation, the reincarnation of Thaksin’s banned political party is being led into next week’s election by Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Thaksin’s 36-year-old daughter, who recently gave birth and then returned to the campaign trail a few days later. Polls in Thailand are often unreliable, but they all point to her leading her party (Pheu Thai) to a sweeping victory. The only question is whether it will be enough to clear the rigged hurdle put in place by Prayuth and his conservative allies.If Paetongtarn wins sufficient votes to form a coalition, the military might consider returning to its old playbook: banning and disbanding the party under a fresh procedural pretext, as the government routinely does to opposition parties. The government has other authoritarian tools in its arsenal. Outspoken dissidents who have criticized Thailand’s military or monarchy have been found dead in the Mekong River, dismembered, their bodies filled with concrete. And those who have dared to criticize Thailand’s king publicly continue to face draconian prison sentences.  The Biden administration is therefore being forced to choose between democracy and realpolitik. In March, speaking at the Summit for Democracy, President Joe Biden called strengthening democracy “a defining challenge of our age.” But so, too, will be American competition with China, and in Thailand, two of the White House’s top foreign-policy goals seem to be in conflict.For China, there is no conflict: Beijing will embrace whoever ends up in power. In Thailand and around the world, China is undercutting democracy simply by acting as a credible alternative sponsor to regimes that are tired of being lectured by the United States.The Thai election could easily lead to violence, whether in street clashes or in another coup. If that happens, President Biden can then make clear whether he means it when he says that America stands for democracy, not just when it’s easy but especially when it’s hard.

Ami Ayalon is the former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, and former commander of the Israeli navy. After his retirement from the Shin Bet, Ayalon served as a member of the Knesset and co-founded the grassroots peace initiative The People’s Voice with Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. He is the author, with Anthony David, of Friendly Fire: How Israel Became Its Own Worst Enemy and the Hope for Its Future.On the 75th anniversary of Israel’s founding, Yascha Mounk and Ami Ayalon discuss the roots of today’s democratic crisis in the country; lessons from Ayalon’s lifelong career in Israel’s defense and intelligence communities; and why Palestinian hope is an Israeli security asset.Editor’s Note: This conversation was recorded in April, before the most recent round of violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You're somebody who has been engaged in thinking about Israeli democracy and Israeli politics for a very long time. Is the current moment one of special threat to Israel's democratic institutions and the country's future? Or is this just one of many crises in a country that has had its fair share of institutional upheavals and obviously security challenges as well?Ami Ayalon: I believe that it is the most dangerous threat to our democracy and our identity as a Jewish democracy since the day Israel was created in 1948, on one hand. On the other hand, it is not a surprise. It is a result of a process that started probably when Israel was created. At least in my case, I started to think about it after [the Six Day War in] 1967. And I understood it after the assassination of our prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin.Israeli society is, today, a tribal society. We do not share common values. Whether you believe that there are three or five or four tribes, we speak the same language—but we do not share common values. We do not have what we used to call in academia the social covenant, which enables us to agree on a constitution and to live together with all of our differences, but without killing each other. We don't have it anymore. And this is why it is so dangerous. Mounk: You talk about different tribes within Israel. What do you have in mind by these tribes? And how is it that a resolution to the Palestinian conflict could help these tribes understand each other better—could help them come to a common understanding of what the kind of shared values are that can sustain an Israeli democracy in the long run?Ayalon: I don't think that the Palestinian conflict will bring us closer. On the other hand, our different approaches to the Palestinian people, in a way, are a part of our [social] conflict. And I think that one of the major rifts within Israeli society is between Jews and Arab, Palestinian citizens of Israel—more than 20% of Israelis are Palestinian citizens of Israel. And the second rift is between secular and religious people. Although there is huge variety within each community, the more religious you are, the greater the tendency to vote for the right. And the way you see the Arabs in Israel and outside Israel shapes your identity. I think that between Jews in Israel, the major rift is the way we understand Judaism and the way we understand democracy. This is something that we have to solve [within the Jewish community], and I don’t think Israeli Arabs or Israeli Palestinians can take a major part in this debate.If you ask me politically, I think that the Israeli left, or center-left, has to understand that when you see the demographics of Israel, in order to be in power politically they will have to join forces with our Arab citizens. When it comes to the understanding of our concept of liberalism or democracy—which means issues like the role and power of the court, or our approach to minorities and human rights—from the center to the left, we can agree with our Arab citizens on everything.Mounk: I want to come back to what the origins of the crisis are, and why you feel that Israeli society has become tribalized in this way. But first, can you just give a sort of summary, for people who may not follow Israeli politics particularly closely, what the nature of this present threat is?Ayalon: The nature of the threat is the disappearance of our democracy. But I have to go back. You have to understand that Israeli democracy was born as a very fragile, very weak kind of democracy. We never had three branches of government. The government always controls the parliament via the coalition, and you cannot pass a law that is not approved in parliament that is not approved in our government. Mounk: As a side note, that seems to me a much broader phenomenon—which is sort of interesting and people are insufficiently aware of—which is that in theory modern democracy is a separation of power between three branches: between the judiciary, the legislature, and the executive. In some countries like the United States, you do genuinely often have a division between the executive and the legislative branches. That is not true in most countries. For all intents and purposes, that separation between these two branches is much weaker in modern democracy than democratic theory suggests, and I think Israel is one case of that.Ayalon: In addition to the fact that we don’t have three branches, we don’t have a constitution. We never have had one. And I came to believe it was not by mistake: the government and the executive branch didn't really want to have a constitution. We do not have a tradition or a culture of a democracy, like in Britain. So it's a very, very new and young democracy of people who, yes, feel they have a common denominator—which is a combination of religious and national identity—but we don't have a tradition of living together in a democracy. So the only limit to the power of the executive branch was a court. In the legal reform being proposed today, the whole idea is to decrease the power of the court, and in a way to create an authoritarian regime, which means that the government can do everything. On the surface, the idea for how judges are elected is a major issue. But as I said before, I think that our divisions and the rifts between the tribes started much earlier. This is why so many people in the streets are now demanding a constitution. But I think that it's impossible to come up with a constitution now, because you cannot impose a constitution. The rifts are growing deeper and wider. And if we try, I believe that we will face violence from both sides. So it's very complicated. There is a lot of energy in the street. And I see it as a very optimistic sign, a positive sign—because for the first time, people understand that democracy was not given to us, by God, and it was not given to us as a present. We have to fight for it. We have to win this battle every day. People are studying the basic concept of democracy in the streets. They finally understand that we have the right, we have the ability—and in times of crisis like today, we have the duty—to take to the streets. Otherwise, we will lose it.  Mounk: I'm going to be the advocate for people who know less about Israeli politics here. So I'm going to push you to explain more of what's going on, if that's okay. The role of Supreme Courts in liberal democracy is complicated, right? I have defended the need for strong forms of judicial review when it comes to the basics of democratic institutions. The most important thing is that when an executive is overstepping the boundaries of the rightful authority, you need to have some kind of other power from the state to be able to say, “hey, that is not actually what the basic rules of our society—whether it’s a constitution or a Basic Law—allow the president or prime minister to do.” I also worry, and I've written in The People vs. Democracy, that the sort of authority to do that and legitimacy to do that is often undermined when courts start to become quasi-policymakers. So explain to us: in the Israeli context, what are the complaints from the right? That the Israeli Supreme Court had grown hugely in the realm of decisions, I understand. Is there something to that complaint? How is what Netanyahu is doing to rein in the court going beyond that? (I'm sympathetic to your point here, but explain to us how this reform starts to threaten democratic institutions.)Ayalon: In your question you mentioned twice the power of the court versus the legislative branch. But there is no legislative branch in Israel. I said it before: because the government controls the parliament, you cannot pass any law that is not approved by our government. So forget about parliament in Israel. In fact, there is no legislative branch in Israel.You said it's like this in many other democracies. I know nothing about other democracies. Israel is a very unique case, because we don't have a constitution. And, in addition—this is something very unique—we did not separate religion from politics, or religion from the concept of national identity. So, what we see today is that the court found itself dealing with these dilemmas. For example: we say Israel is a Jewish democracy and this is, I think, agreed by most people. But what do we mean when we say “Jewish democracy?” What is our Judaism? And what is our democracy? I do not accept the racist concept of Judaism that is brought to us by Rabbi Kahane [a Jewish ultra-nationalist whose party was expelled from the Knesset] and by Bezalel Smotrich [a far-right politician serving as finance minister in the Netanyahu government] and by Itamar Ben Gvir [a far-right politician serving as national security minister in the Netanyahu government]. Ben Gvir, by the way, was accused of being a supporter of a terrorist organization. He was one of the people who led the people that tried to assassinate our prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. And today he is a minister. His concept of Judaism is a racist concept of Jewish supremacy. This is totally unacceptable to me and to, I believe, 90% of the people who are living in Israel. Mounk: What's his conception of Judaism? Ayalon: In one sentence: Jews are better, and they deserve more civil rights, than any other citizen of Israel who is not a Jew. That summarizes almost everything.Mounk: I think this goes to the heart of something that critics of Israel would push on. I know that you are obviously somebody who is both a defender of the State of Israel, somebody who's had great military responsibilities in defending Israel, but is also very critical of some aspects of contemporary Israel as well. What does it look like to have a Jewish democracy that refutes that point, which is to say: How is it possible to have a state that is defined in important ways by being Jewish, while giving equal rights to non-Jewish citizens of the state? Is that balancing act possible?Ayalon: It's a great question. We have to go back, at least to 1948. And probably even before that, to the beginning of the Zionist concept. Mounk: Let’s do it, let’s go back. Ayalon: I’m not a historian, and I’m not a philosopher. But once we ask the question, we have to try and answer. I start by asking: when we say “democratic Jewish Israel,” what do we understand as the character of our Judaism? And what is the nature of our democracy? Now, it's very complicated because if we ask this question, we have to try to come up with an ideal of Judaism. For 2,000 years, it was a very pluralistic concept: Jews lived all over the world, in different communities, and each community, in a way, created or designed its own concept of Judaism. Once we created a state, and we did not separate religion from the state and from its politics, we had to ask this question. The founders of the Zionist movement discussed it. They wrote books or books about it, all of them: Herzl, Jabotinsky, Begin, Berl Katznelson, David Ben Gurion. All of them jumped into the future and envisioned the State of Israel years before it became a real state, and they gave answers. But this debate, this public discussion, stopped from the moment that we created the State of Israel. We were very occupied, defending ourselves, fighting against all the enemies around us. Today, we understand that our major threat—more than Iran, or Hezbollah, or Hamas, more than Islamic Jihad—is the divisions, the rifts between the Israeli tribes. And this is why when we ask this question we have to give a specific answer. If you ask me, I believe that if we dig deep enough into the roots of our tradition in the Bible, we will be able to find the concepts, the values that, in a way, created the concept of democracy years later. I'll give you an example. The fact that all humans are equal is a Jewish concept. Go back to the Bible, the concept that all humans were created by God. This is the beginning of the Torah. It means that all humans are equal. […] So you can find all these ideas, all these values, if you go deep enough. And the idea is to come to a place where our definition of the identity of Israel will be that the more Jewish Israel is, the more democratic it is. Democracy does not contradict Judaism—only if we can choose the right Judaism, and the right concept of democracy. Mounk: How has your answer to that question evolved over time? Are the values of Israel's founding the right ones, but have become corrupted over time? Or was this in part a problem at the founding and that's being expressed now? And how has the experience of conflict with the Palestinians informed the evolution of your thinking on this?Ayalon: Martin Luther King said once—and it is very, very relevant to our situation today—none of us will be free until all of us will be free. Palestinians are not free. And as long as we control the daily life of millions, we will not be free because they will not be free. If you ask me why we didn’t discuss the topic before today, my answer is easy: it was too difficult. And the easiest way was to go out and to fight our enemies from outside. Mounk: So how did your view on this evolve? You started your life off as a soldier. You are one of the more decorated soldiers in Israeli history. You clearly had a security lens through this. In its early years the state of Israel was very embattled. When did you start to think or start realize the main threat to Israeli security and prosperity is not military, but comes from these challenges?Ayalon: I am ashamed to say that it took me many years. I was born in the Jordan Valley. The Syrians were up above on the Golan Heights. And the Zionist concept of my parents, I believe, was based on a very basic idea: “settlement and security.” They came from Europe, with the idea that the Jewish people are facing a major threat. It was before the Holocaust. My mother came as a child. My father arrived as an illegal immigrant during the British Mandate in the 30s.Their idea was to create a state for the Jewish people, in order to save the Jewish people. This was a Zionist concept: the only idea that could save us from antisemitism, pogroms, violence, and later the Shoah, the Holocaust, was to create our own state and to defend ourselves. So the future state of Israel would be wherever we can build a settlement, work the land and defend ourselves. They did it in the Jordan Valley. They pushed the border to the east as much as possible. And this is why every time when they went out to work the land, Syrians shelled our settlements, and we spent many days in shelters. But it was okay; this was a price that we had to pay. And this was a concept that brought me to volunteer for the naval commandos. The idea was to do it for four years and come back to the kibbutz. But after four years, we had the Six Day War in 1967 and we found ourselves in the War of Attrition [a quasi-war between Egypt and Israel that ended with the outbreak of full hostilities in the Yom Kippur War of 1973]. And it was the first time I remember that I felt like my father—that the whole security of the state is on our own very, very narrow shoulders. So I stayed in the navy. My friends from the kibbutz went to build settlements in the Jordan Valley, in Sinai, in the Golan Heights. Settlements were not originally an idea of the far right. In Israel, it was the labor movement that pioneered the settlements.After 1967 [when Israel captured the West Bank, Sinai, and the Golan Heights] we felt like liberators: “This land is ours.” We learned it from our childhood. I did not follow religion in the kibbutz. It was a very secular concept, a very secular way of life. But the stories of the Bible were the stories of my childhood. So we felt like liberators and it took me 20 years to understand that, yes, we liberated places, and probably that were given to us by God. But we became a very, very violent oppressor, an occupier of millions of Palestinians who hate us because we deprive them of their rights, and we deprive them of their national identity. Especially after the 1960s, they saw themselves as a people. They fought since then, and they are fighting today, in order to create a state alongside Israel, a Palestinian state, and they are using their right as a nation to create a state. Meir Shalev [an acclaimed Israeli author who served during the 1967 war] just died several days ago. And he told me that he understood what the consequences of the occupation would be immediately in 1967. I understood it only 20 years later, during the First Intifada.During the First Intifada, I was a deputy commander of the Israeli Navy. And I found myself, with only my driver, facing dozens of youngsters. And I saw the eyes of a young Palestinian from, I don't know, probably 3 or 4 meters. He had a rock in his hand. And you could see that all he wanted to do was to kill me. He was not armed, so I couldn't shoot him. But I understood.Today, the way I understand myself, Israeli society, and the realities of the Middle East is a result of my years in the Shin Bet. I became the director of the Shin Bet after the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, and held the position for four and a half years. This was a big change, because the Shin Bet is involved in a totally different type of war.During all my years in the Navy—I'm not proud of it—I killed many people. Probably too many. Something later became very strange to me: I never knew anything about the people whom I killed, and I didn't care. I didn't need it in order to kill them. We send soldiers and warriors to kill, not to negotiate. But once you become a member of the Shin Bet, or internal security, and you're fighting terror, you have to know everything. For every terror activist, you have to know his full name, because it will give you something about his background, history, and family. You have to know with whom he prays, who are his neighbors, his children, grandchildren, family, wife; otherwise, you will not understand. You will not be able to interrogate him, you will not be able to recruit him, and you will not be able to understand the origin of his hatred, which is the origin of his violence. And if you do not understand you will not be able to win this war. So suddenly, it is a totally different kind of war, to fight and to win.You don't have to agree with him. Sometimes you know that the moment that he will be released from jail, he will go on killing your friends and your fellow citizens. But you understand his motives. And suddenly, you understand that he is not a military target. He is not somebody that you have to kill. He is somebody that you have to understand. And, yes, we have to face them. But unless we understand them, we will not be able to win.I also learned a second lesson in the Shin Bet. It was the first time when I understood that the Israeli-Palestinian equation is very simple: We, Israelis, will have security when they, the Palestinians, have hope. When I say this to my friends in Israel, they tell me “you’re crazy. We just have to use more violence.” I say “no. The more violence we use, the less effxdo come to an agreement with the Palestinians. I believe—although it is a dream today, and nobody in Israel is ready to talk about it, and probably it will not be in my lifetime—that finally we shall live side by side. Because there is no other option. Mounk: What would the solution look like? Is that a two state solution? Is that a different kind of solution? What, in concrete terms, would it mean to achieve that peace?Ayalon: First of all, it will be only after violence, after a crisis.I saw it after the Yom Kippur War: we signed a peace agreement with Egypt. After the First Intifada, we came to Madrid and then to Oslo to negotiate with the Palestinians, although it didn't work. After the Second Intifada, we pulled out of Gaza. So only in times of chaos and violence, we understand that there is no other option. We have only two options. One is [a one-state] democracy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, in which Jews will not be the majority, which is not acceptable to the Israelis or the Palestinians. If we have just one democracy, from the Jordan River to the east to the Mediterranean to the west, it will not be a Jewish democracy. And it will not be a Palestinian democracy. It will not be a democracy altogether, because it will be something similar to what we saw in Syria and what we see today in Lebanon. Muslims are killing each other for the “right” Islam, and, in Lebanon, conflict between Christians, Druze, Muslims etc. In the Middle East [such multiethnic democracy] will not work. This is why the only option left for us is two states. And by the way, the parameters are very clear. They were almost agreed on the political level, but people did not accept it, because we did not think that this is the price that we should have to pay. The assassination of our prime minister was exactly on this issue—on the idea of a minority of radical Jews, who are ready to kill, just in order not to give a piece of our land to somebody else. So the parameters will be, in a way agreed upon, two states for two peoples: a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state, with the borders based on the pre-1967 lines. We swap territories based on security, demography and continuity, with the right of return for Palestinians and Jews. For example, Palestinians shall return only to the State of Palestine, and Jews shall return only to the State of Israel. Palestinian refugees will be compensated. And they will have to choose whether to go back to Palestine, to third countries, or to become citizens in the places where they live now. The international community will have to guarantee to secure the borders and security. In Jerusalem, Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian authority, Jewish neighborhoods will be under Israeli sovereignty. For security, Palestine will have a very powerful police force. For the holy places—this is the only place in which in a way we create something new—sovereignty in the holy places belongs to God, but the Wailing Wall, and all the area around it will be secured and controlled by the State of Israel for the Jewish people. Haram al Sharif [the Noble Sanctuary/Temple Mount, site of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock] will be like the status quo, controlled by Islam. And the holy church in Jerusalem will be controlled by the Christian sects. Again, I don't think I will see it in my lifetime. But if you ask me, this will be the future. Mounk: One argument that's often made, especially on the left, is that, because of the extent of settlements now in Palestinian territory, and perhaps because of the length of the conflict, it's too late for the two state solution. Somehow, the argument goes, the time has passed so that it has become either practically impossible or morally wrong. What's your answer? Why do you think that they're drawing the wrong conclusion when they say that it's time to give up on the two state solution?Ayalon: In history there is no “too late.” And there is no irreversible situation. It's nonsense. Sometimes, we see a revolution.Many years ago, Jews used to say that on the road to redemption, there are ups and downs. And when somebody tells me, “it's too late,” I say: Today it's too late. But when we will face violence, and when we come to understand the price that we are paying, I believe that we will prefer security, and life, to history. We will do what most societies and what most religions do: we will create flexibility.I once met a rabbi who was a settler. It was after the assassination of the prime minister. I asked him “what will you do if the government of Israel comes to an agreement with the Palestinians in which we give back some places in Israel in order to see Israel as a Jewish democracy? If this is our only chance to see Israel as a Jewish democracy, and it means that you will have to come to your community and to tell them, ‘Look, we have to take our furniture, our children, our grandchildren, our Torah with us and to go back to the State of Israel, or to another place in the land of Israel. And this is the price that we have to pay.’” And he said, “Ami, it's not a religious or theological problem. I can use the Bible in order to explain it. The Land of Israel does not belong to us, the Land of Israel belongs to God. Sometimes he gives it to us. Sometimes he doesn't. We don't know exactly what his reasons are, but for 1000 years, it was not ours. So we can live with the idea that this is ours, but it is kept by God for another time. And when the Messiah will come, it will be ours.”I'm not a rabbi. And I don't know how many of his followers will accept this answer. The only thing I am telling you is that I believe that when the time comes—and unfortunately this is the sad aspect of my optimism, that the time will come only when we shall face violence, and we understand the price that we have to pay—we will prefer to see Israel as a Jewish democracy. Even if we have to give up some land in Israel in order to see it happening.Read More: “Why I Worry About Israeli Democracy” by Amichai MagenPlease do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Two groups can learn something from the experience: first, network producers and executives thinking about how to conduct interviews and host debates with Trump; second, rival Republican presidential candidates trying to envision a path to beating him.

What the TV professionals should learn is that they have two choices in dealing with another Trump primary campaign. They can take the kind of this-is-an-emergency path urged on them by some press critics and anti-Trump writers: Don’t platform him or normalize his campaign in any way, don’t let him speak on live TV, cover him only within a set framework that constantly emphasizes his authoritarian tendencies and attempts to overturn the last election. I don’t believe this path is wise or workable, but it at least has a moral consistency lacking in the “democracy is in danger and tune in tonight for an hour with the demagogue!” approach that we already watched play out in 2016.

Alternatively, if the press intends to conduct interviews and run debates as normal, then in preparing for them they need to try to think a little bit more like Republican voters as opposed to center-left journalists. Not in the sense of behaving slavishly toward the former president, but in the sense of writing the kinds of questions that a right-leaning American primed to dislike the media might actually find illuminating.

In part, as Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, that means drilling into Trump’s presidential record on conservative terms rather than liberal ones — asking about, for instance, the failure to complete the border wall or the surge in crime in the last year of his administration. In part, as Erick Erickson writes, it means asking obvious questions that follow from his stolen-election narrative rather than just attacking it head-on — as in, if the Democrats really stole the election, why did your administration, your chosen attorney general and your appointed judges basically just let them do it?

The utility of this last line of questioning is also something that Trump’s prospective rivals, Ron DeSantis especially, can draw out of the CNN experience, since they can tee up those kinds of conservative-friendly challenges if the media does not. But the most basic lesson to be drawn by Republican politicians from watching Trump’s town hall is the importance, for any would-be Trumpian successor, of demonstrating that you too can engage with the mainstream press and come away a winner.

All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled organisms such as bacteria. That change from micro to macro, from one cell to many, was one of the most pivotal evolutionary journeys in Earth’s history. It is also among the hardest to imagine. Multicellular creatures, with their large size, complex body, and specialized tissues and organs, are so much more complicated than single-celled ones that it seems impossibly hard for the latter to turn into the former. But in fact, the process might have been “relatively simple,” William Ratcliff, an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Tech, told me. He and his team managed to replicate it in his laboratory in a matter of years.In 2010, Ratcliff started working with brewer’s yeast, the single-celled fungus we use to make bread and beer. He repeatedly grew the yeast in liquid-filled tubes, shook them, and then used the cells that sank fastest to start new cultures. By favoring cells that stick together and settle faster, this simple procedure radically changed the yeast within just 60 days. Now whenever a cell divided in two, the new cells didn’t drift apart as they normally would; instead, they remained attached, creating beautiful, branching snowflakes that comprised dozens of cells. The yeast had evolved multicellularity in just two months.But they then seemed stuck. Ratcliff had hoped that the snowflakes would continue getting bigger and more complex, but the annoyingly fragile entities never grew beyond a few hundred cells. Their branched shape was the problem: If any break can sever a large chunk off the main flake, that means “the strength of the group, no matter how big, is the strength of a single cell-cell connection,” Ratcliff told me. And once the snowflakes hit a certain size, “you look at them the wrong way, and they break.”G. Ozan Bozdag, a member of Ratcliff’s team, solved the problem by depriving the snowflakes of oxygen. Scientists usually assume that oxygen is good for multicellularity, but because smaller organisms can use it more efficiently than larger ones, Bozdag reasoned that the latter might gain an advantage in the gas’s absence. He tested this idea with a new version of the shake-settle-and-seed experiment, which he started in 2018. For months, the oxygen-deprived snowflakes remained microscopic, but after a year or so, Bozdag could see the clusters with his own eyes. After 600 days of evolution, the snowflakes had become 20,000 times bigger, each containing half a million cells instead of just a few hundred. They now appeared as visible blobs, the largest of which were a millimeter wide—the size of fruit flies.Together with physicist Peter Yunker, Ratcliff showed that the snowflakes busted through the size ceiling by lengthening each individual cell and strengthening the connections among cells. But more important, they evolved an entirely new structure, which the team saw using a powerful microscope. The branches had started wrapping around one another—less a radiating snowflake than a densely knotted mass of vines. This structure stops sections from easily breaking off and bestows incredible resilience: Yeast snowflakes are normally 100 times weaker than gelatin, but once entangled, they have the strength and toughness of wood. From what Ratcliff calls “dumb clumps of cells,” they had evolved what might reasonably be called a body.  “This is the most exciting study I’ve seen in a long time,” Leslie Babonis, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the study, told me. To her, it shows that the real challenge of multicellularity isn’t just keeping cells connected to their neighbors but keeping them strongly connected. Merely having a body is not enough; only when organisms have tough bodies that don’t readily fall apart can they evolve more complex traits such as specialized tissues and organs.That’s what Ratcliff and his team have started to see. In the microscopic snowflakes, every cell behaves in much the same way, but in larger clusters, cells might perform one of at least three different roles: Some grow fast, others add sturdiness, and yet others self-destruct. (The latter might give the clusters a way of reproducing, by shedding small fragments into the environment.) The yeast have even evolved a way of moving fluid through their body, bringing nutrients to the cells deep inside them, and getting rid of waste.A basic circulation, a life cycle, division of labor—these are all emergent traits that arise only once the yeast evolve strong bodies, and which cannot be predicted by studying any one constituent cell. They show that the snowflakes really are existing and evolving as multicellular organisms, as wholes that are more than the sum of their parts.Throughout the history of life, multicellularity evolved on at least 25 independent occasions. Fungi may have done it much as Ratcliff’s yeast did, with small groups of cells that gained strength through entanglement. Animals, which had very different single-celled ancestors, probably became multicellular in a different way. But despite these differences, “every multicellularity story is going to be a version of the same basic process,” Ratcliff said. Single cells became groups, which could then become tough, which could then become big and complicated. “Look back through history, and you can’t imagine how animals evolved from a single-celled ancestor, because it’s such a big change,” Ratcliff said. “But that’s the beauty of this experiment: Every single change makes sense and looks straightforward.”He doesn’t know what further changes are in store for the snowflake yeast, but he hopes to find out. Bozdag is still continuing the experiment; even during the early years of the coronavirus pandemic, he visited the team’s mostly shuttered lab every day to set up new generations. Ratcliff’s plan is to keep it going for decades, or “until we’re too old to keep doing it.”  

Alabama has set its first execution since calling a moratorium on executions in November. But there is good reason to still be concerned about the state's ability to successfully carry out an execution.
Over the past year, Alabama has carried out a series of botched and unsuccessful executions. In particular, prison officials have had apparent difficulty locating inmates' veins, leading to painful procedures and hourslong delays. In two separate cases, executions were canceled altogether after prison officials were unable to begin the execution within the allotted time period.
In November, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called for a pause in executions, pending an investigation into the state's execution procedures. However, while Ivey pressed the need for a "top-to-bottom review of the state's execution process," she also allowed the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to conduct the review of itself, rebuffing calls for an independent investigation.
The review—the results of which were not released to the public—was completed in February. According to a two-page letter directed to the governor from ADOC's commissioner, prison officials have obtained "new equipment" and rehearsed execution procedures in response to the investigation. The letter also made a vague commitment that prison officials would "add to its pool of available medical personnel for executions."
The letter notes that—at Ivey's request—the Alabama Supreme Court has changed its scheduling rules for executions. Whereas before the court would issue a single-day execution warrant that would expire at midnight, now Ivey herself is allowed to set a "time frame" for when an execution may occur. While ADOC notes this change "will make it harder for inmates to 'run out the clock' with last-minute appeals and requests for stays of execution," it also means that prison officials may be allowed to spend hours—even days—trying to place a lethal injection IV in a prisoner's arm. 
"No one buys this sham of a review," Josh Moon, a reporter at the Alabama Political Reporter, wrote in February "And the reason we don't buy it is because we all have functioning brains. And those functioning brains tell us that you can't repeatedly botch executions—and botch them because you're repeatedly failing to accomplish some of the simplest tasks related to that execution—and not have way bigger issues than needing to practice more."
Despite pushback, Ivey administration officials have pressed forward. Last week, the state Supreme Court granted the attorney general's request to schedule its first execution since the start of the moratorium. James Barber, a 54-year-old who was sentenced to death for the 2001 murder of 75-year-old Dorothy Epps, is set to be executed on an unspecified date after June 2.
However, a jury didn't vote unanimously to sentence Barber to death—only 11 out of 12 jurors voted for the death penalty in his case. Currently, Alabama and Florida are the only states that allow judges to impose the death penalty without a unanimous recommendation from a jury, which is what happened in Barber's case.
Due to the lack of transparency in the state's investigation into its own execution procedures, there's little reason to think that Barber's upcoming execution will be any less tortuous than those the state has attempted to carry out in the past year.
"We're talking about ending the lives of other humans," wrote Moon in February. "If we're going to take on the monumental responsibility of holding the title of executioners…, we should guarantee that the process for carrying out that duty is above reproach and as transparent as possible. Alabama's is and has been the exact opposite on both counts."
The post Alabama Schedules First Execution After Monthslong Moratorium and 'Sham' Investigation appeared first on Reason.com.

The tragic mass shooting last weekend in a Dallas suburb took place as I was leaving the country to visit Britain. I might as well have taken one of Elon Musk’s rockets and landed on a different planet. The Allen, Tex., massacre means that, so far in 2023, more than 15,000 Americans have died from gun violence. In 2021, the last year for which we have complete data, there were 48,830 gun-related deaths, of which 20,958 were gun homicides. In England and Wales, there were 31 gun homicides. Even accounting for its larger population, calculating deaths per 100,000 people, the United States in 2019 had roughly 100 times as many gun homicides as the United Kingdom.

A comparison of suicides is equally depressing. In 2021, 26,328 Americans took their own lives using guns. About half of the people who kill themselves in the United States use guns to do it. In the U.K. in 2019, that number was 117, and of all suicides, death by firearm is one of the rarest methods. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has about 44 percent of the world’s gun suicides.

Britain is actually a useful point of comparison. In cultural terms, it is this country’s closest relative, the mother ship that created the colonies from which the United States of America sprang. It has strong traditions of individualism, rights and liberty that prefigure America’s. Even the more violent strains of American culture — the Scots-Irish tradition in parts of the South — owe their origins to the British Isles.

And yet, with regard to contemporary gun violence, Britain looks like most other advanced industrial countries. The United States, meanwhile, might as well be on another planet.

Perhaps because it draws on the same history of liberties and rights as America, Britain was not always exempt from the problems of gun violence and mass shootings. In fact, British gun laws changed substantially after two mass shootings: in 1987 in Hungerford and then another in 1996 in Dunblane. In the latter case, a man entered a primary school in Scotland armed with four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition. He went into a gym full of children and opened fire. In just a few minutes, he caused the deaths of 17 people and then turned the gun on himself.

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After those two massacres, it was Conservative governments that passed gun control laws, significantly restricting the use of firearms. When Tony Blair swept into power in a landslide in 1997, his Labour government expanded on those laws, and today there’s an almost total ban on handguns, as well as automatic and semiautomatic weaponry, in most of the U.K. Britons were given a few months to hand in their weapons in a government buyback program. These laws remain in place today, and gun violence of all kinds has declined markedly over the past 25 years across Britain. A similar gun ban and buyback took place in Australia after a gruesome massacre there in 1996. (It was also enacted by a Conservative government.) Since then, gun homicides and suicides have declined in that country, as well.

One study by the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety suggests that U.S. states that have strong gun control laws are much safer from gun violence. For example, the gun-death rate in New York state, which has some of the strongest gun control laws, is only a fraction of the national average. Overall, the states with the most permissive gun laws have almost triple the gun-death rates of those with the most stringent. According to the Nationhood Lab, living in the Northeast means you have a much lower likelihood of gun-related homicides or suicides than in the Deep South.

It’s true that some states with strong gun laws, such as Illinois, don’t reap the full benefits of these laws because of neighboring states that are more lax. But you also see the equivalent phenomenon in reverse. States such as New Hampshire, with weak gun laws, have low gun deaths, helped by the fact that their neighboring states have enacted tougher measures.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, true to form, pulled out an old cliche in his response to the mass shooting in Allen. “People want a quick solution,” he said. “The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.” Abbott has it almost exactly backward. The quick nonsolution is always to talk about mental health. But do people in the United States have 100 times as many mental health problems as they do in the U.K.? The United States has a rate of gun violence 18 times higher than the average rich country. Does that mean it has 18 times the rate of mental disorders? Texas has almost triple the rate of gun deaths as the state of New York — yet Texas doesn’t have three times as many mentally ill people as New York.

All these statistics can have the effect of deadening our sensibilities to what is going on in the United States. But let me try one last set to try to jolt us all into awareness. Every day in America, more than 200 people are wounded by guns; 120 are killed by them. Of these 120, 11 are children and teens. The leading cause of mortality among children in America is now death by a gun. The same number of deaths — 120 — will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, every day, until we come to our senses and do something about it.

In 2003, a SARS researcher in a top biosafety lab in Taiwan, in a hurry to go on a trip, got infected when he rushed to clean a spill. He traveled anyway and then became very ill. Instead of informing the authorities, he self-quarantined. His father said the man “wanted to die at home” rather than bring shame to his lab and his country. The incident came to light only after the desperate father threatened to kill himself unless his son sought medical help.

In 2022, a lab worker conducting research on the new coronavirus in Taiwan exposed 110 people to Covid after she got infected when she removed her mask improperly — the blunder wasn’t discovered until later, when she tested positive. Back in 2003 her supervisor had been infected with SARS in a lab. Science magazine noted then that this was “a grim reminder, experts say, that the very researchers fighting SARS could unleash its next global outbreak.”

Of course, a large majority of lab research happens without such mishaps. And scientific research is how we study dangerous pathogens. And obviously, we’ve had outbreaks and pandemics even before we got the ability to work with pathogens in labs.

But the abilities scientists have developed in the past few decades have increased the threat. In 2012, when some scientists published a paper titled “Reconstruction of the 1918 Influenza Virus: Unexpected Rewards From the Past,” about a strain of influenza that had killed tens of millions around the world, other scientists argued that any knowledge gained wasn’t worth the risk or could be obtained more safely.

Biosafety also involves field research and animals at the labs. Scientists studying animals in the wild can carry back pathogens to their lab and the densely populated areas where they may be situated. A scientist at the Wuhan C.D.C., a few hundred yards from the market where the first known big outbreak of the Covid pandemic was detected in December 2019, was filmed in a video released that month about his field research on bats. The video showed him conducting fieldwork without full protective gear, even though he noted in the video that “it is while discovering new viruses that we are most at risk of infection.”

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The extent of the mental-health crisis in the United States today—especially among young adults—is undeniable. The problem started well before the coronavirus pandemic. A survey conducted from 2005 to 2018 of more than 86,000 adolescents found a startling increase in symptoms of depression after 2010. According to an analysis of Pew Research Center data, the most dramatic rise has been among young, liberal white women, more than 50 percent of whom reported having been told they have a mental-health condition.Among the competing explanations for this pattern is the assertion that all the contentious issues around us—climate change, racism, gun violence—are leading young adults into depression and anxiety. But it may not be the crises themselves that are causing despair so much as young people’s typical responses to them. Protest and political activism have exploded among Gen Z and younger Millennials. Although these may seem like productive ways to address negative emotions from these social problems, activism itself can increase unhappiness. It can provoke anger and hatred toward others, and create a win-lose mentality that leads to disappointment.The right conclusion is not to become apathetic about the world’s ills to protect one’s mental health and well-being. It is to change one’s perspective about how to help alleviate those ills.The tendency of many Gen Z and younger Millennials—people born from the 1990s onward—to choose protest as a first resort has given rise to the label “activist generation.” A 2021 survey of some 10,000 Gen Zers showed that 70 percent are involved in a political or social cause; in another study that year, only 19 percent said they would work for a company that doesn’t share their values. This age cohort is also among those most likely to boycott a product or company.Some would argue that today’s problems merit greater activism than those of previous generations, but my Gen Z daughter offered a different view: “We have been conscripted as child soldiers in the Baby Boomers’ culture war.” Touché.Whatever accounts for the rise in activism, research shows that it’s connected to this generation’s psychological distress. Last year, scholars studying climate-change activists found an association between their activism and short-term depressive symptoms. Obviously, the causality could run in either direction: The activism may lead to depression, or the depression to activism. Or, in fact, they may be mutually reinforcing.The best available answer comes from activists themselves. For a 2021 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research, researchers interviewed college students about the effects of their activism on their well-being. Although nearly a third of the students believed that their advocacy work improved their well-being, 60 percent reported harm to their mental health. “There’s been times that at the end of the day, I’ll come to bed and I’ll just cry,” one interviewee said, “because I really don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into.”Several mechanisms may be at work here. One is that the nature of much activism involves anger and contempt for people on the “wrong side” of the issue; that sort of hostility toward others can be psychologically harmful for those who feel it. Today’s activism tends to encourage us to see people in a binary way: good or bad, right or wrong. Scholars have observed that this leads people to show disgust or moral condemnation toward opponents, or engage in othering behaviors.Psychologists have demonstrated how these attitudes can lead to guilt, shame, and anxiety. And this is hardly a new idea: The fifth-century Indian Buddhist sage Buddhaghosa argued that one who hates is “like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember … and so first burns himself.”Even for those who manage to disagree with others without hating them (and thus hurting themselves), political activism commonly leads to a sense of futility. Researchers studying prodemocracy demonstrators in Hong Kong found that during periods of protest, people involved had elevated states of psychological and social well-being. But a year later, after protesters had failed in their goals, their well-being was, on average, lower than that of their non-activist peers. A good deal of social and political activism is zero-sum, and admits only two possible outcomes: winning or losing. When these causes become an uphill battle, as commonly happens, losing is likely. Then the disappointment can be crushing.None of this is to say that activism is a mistake; that is for each person to decide. But much of the data present a challenge for people who want to stay engaged without sacrificing their mental health—as well as for people in positions of political leadership and in academia, who often encourage young people to be involved in important causes.A compromise might be available through minimizing activism’s most psychologically harmful elements: hatred and defeat. A shift in perspective—from winning to helping—can address both problems. This could mean a switch from protesting homelessness to providing services for people experiencing homelessness—for instance, by volunteering at a shelter or soup kitchen—or from marching against the president to giving people a ride to the polling station. Focus on what you can do to ameliorate a situation rather than simply demonstrating your opposition to it.An enormous body of evidence shows that the right sort of volunteering leads unambiguously to greater happiness. A 2022 paper in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that older adults who volunteered reported greater life satisfaction—but with an important qualification that would certainly have a bearing on younger people’s mental health. These adults found that their morale improved after they performed more frequent nonpolitical volunteer work (such as helping with social services), but that it was lower after more frequent political activity (such as party work).Another study of a 2004 Texas survey showed that participants who had volunteered even once to help others—again, in nonpolitical causes—experienced improvements in mental health, physical health, life satisfaction, and social well-being. The type of voluntary work can take many forms depending on one’s concerns: tutoring kids, helping build homes, visiting people in prison. The important thing to note is that the benefactor benefits too.I’m not arguing that people should abandon politics and lapse into apathy. But at the very least, we need to balance fighting with loving, including loving more indiscriminately. In contrast to the way activism can divide “us” from “them” and allies from adversaries, volunteering tends to expand the allies by connecting us to those who need us, regardless of their views and beliefs. And by helping the people who are right in front of us, we succeed in the goal of helping make a better world. In the Mishnah Sanhedrin of the Jewish Talmud, it is written that “he who saves a single soul saves a whole world.” The profound truth of this for our lives is revealed when our actions affect another person in ways that show us how connected we are to one another, and perhaps even to the divine.No amount of sharing rage at the state of the world can make us happy. But any amount of sharing love with someone who needs it may help us find the happiness we seek.

During a chaotic and at-times combative interview on Wednesday night, former President Donald Trump made at least one sensible point: Ending the war in Ukraine is more important than the notion of who wins it.
"Do you want Ukraine to win this war?" asked CNN's Kaitlan Collins at one point during a broader discussion of how Trump would handle the now 15-month-old conflict if he returns to the Oval Office.
"I don't think in terms of winning and losing," Trump said. "I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people." Later, he stressed that same point: "I want everybody to stop dying. They're dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying."
That is…entirely sensible. More than that, it's probably the most humanitarian message that a leader of the United States could send. There have been an estimated 350,000 casualties* on both sides and untold numbers of Ukrainian civilians have died since Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to roll his military into Ukraine in February 2022. Ending the bloodshed ought to be the primary goal of American foreign policy with regard to that war, which is not a conflict that has a direct bearing on the United States.
Naturally, Trump was immediately attacked for questioning whether America's goal ought to be something other than Russia's defeat. Former New Jersey Gov. (and Trump adviser-turned-possible-opponent) Chris Christie tweeted that "Trump refused to say tonight that he wanted Ukraine to win the war with Russia. More proof that he continues to be Putin's puppet."
But there's nothing wrong with pushing for an end to the conflict. Indeed, the most important part of any war is figuring out how to end it—not how to funnel a seemingly endless supply of weapons to one side or the other, which has been America's chief role in the Ukraine conflict to date.
With the notable exception of World War II—which has, unfortunately, taken on a mythological role in American military and political culture—most major wars do not end with one side achieving total victory and the other being thoroughly defeated. That's simply not how wars end.
A singular focus on "winning" or "losing"—as if war were a football game, not a destructive and wasteful loss of resources and human lives that runs the risk of extinguishing life across the planet if it gets out of hand—is counterproductive at best. It's also somewhat sociopathic. No one wins a war. You win by getting it to stop, then try to make the best of the circumstances at that point.
In the case of the Ukraine war, there's no realistic scenario in which Russia is thoroughly defeated. Putin's goal of annexing large parts of Ukraine, however, has clearly been thwarted. Negotiations and diplomacy will have to sort out what the border between the two countries will look like, but that's the norm in the aftermath of every conflict—not a concession to Russia. Yes, Putin's aggression is abhorrent and wrong. He's been forced to pay a high price for it. But not every negotiation with an aggressor is the 1938 Munich Agreement, and diplomacy is essential to ending any conflict.
Trump being Trump, his views on the Ukraine conflict are not all as sensible as believing that the war should end quickly. At one point, he bizarrely and falsely claimed that America's military support to Ukraine meant that "we don't have ammunition for ourselves."
He also claimed on Wednesday night that he'd be able to end the war in a day if re-elected, apparently as a result of his close friendship with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
If that's the case, then what is he waiting for? If Trump truly believes he has the ability to end the war and desires that the war end, every passing day in which he does not use his incredible negotiating power to bring about its end makes him somewhat culpable for the ongoing slaughter. He does not need to be president to call his supposed friends.
Of course, Trump does not actually have that ability. But he's happy to use the promise of ending the war to bolster his own political ambitions. Just like he was happy to make a deal to send arms to Ukraine as long as those weapons were connected to a promise that the Ukrainian government would investigate Joe Biden prior to the 2020 election—the infamous "quid pro quo" at the center of Trump's first impeachment. Now that he has nothing to gain from arming Ukraine, he's of course opposed to sending Ukraine arms.
Even Trump's anti-war bona fides only extend so far. He's reportedly asked advisers about whether it would be possible to send American troops into Mexico if he gets a second term in the White House. 
Still, Trump has demonstrated for years that he generally has the right political instincts when it comes to matters of war and foreign policy. He was right to reject the absurd neoconservative view that saw the post-9/11 wars as anything other than an utter disaster. (Trump's demolition of Jeb Bush and declaration that the Iraq War was "a big fat mistake" during the South Carolina primary debate in 2016 was arguably the very moment when Trump became the new de facto leader of the Republican Party.) Now, he's right to reflexively question the nonsensical idea that one side or the other must clearly "win" in Ukraine for the war to end.
He's also probably right that there's political hay to be made by running against the military-industrial complex and the bipartisan pro-war national security state. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believed the federal government should focus on domestic issues rather than foreign conflicts, and that Republicans were less likely than Democrats to support sending arms to Ukraine.
A more competent and less authoritarian potential presidential candidate should take note. Until then, Trump will continue to prosper politically for being willing to say something that's wrongly perceived as being out of bounds in Washington: that it's good for wars to end.
*CORRECTION: This post has been updated to correct the estimated number of casualties in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The post Trump on Ukraine: 'I Don't Think in Terms of Winning and Losing—I Think in Terms of Getting It Settled' appeared first on Reason.com.

Student loan payments have been paused since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. However, in the three years since the pause began, the economic and legal justification for the continued moratorium has grown increasingly weak.
Not only has the economy recovered in full force—leading to the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years—but President Joe Biden himself has declared that "the pandemic is over." Yet, student loan payments are still paused—with the same, flimsy justification that the pandemic emergency rages on and student loan borrowers simply can't be expected to shoulder the unsurmountable burden of paying back their loans, especially with a Supreme Court ruling on sweeping student loan forgiveness eminent.
However, a new legal challenge has emerged to try to end the absurdity. On Thursday, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, filed a lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to end the pause.
The suit argues that, while a six-month pause on student loan repayments was authorized by the CARES Act—which was signed just seven days after the Trump administration announced the original 60-day moratorium on student loan repayment—all following extensions have occurred without congressional approval or any other legitimate legal justification.
"In all, the Moratorium and its serial extensions have effectively extended Congress's six-month suspension of student-loan payment obligations and interest accrual for an additional 32 months and counting—more than five times the length of the suspension Congress legislated to expire September 30, 2020," the 37-page complaint states. "The Department has shifted among different purported legal bases for these extensions and, for some extensions, has failed to invoke any legal basis at all."
While the Department of Education has invoked several justifications for the eight separate extensions on the moratorium, the complaint directs particular attention to the DOE's use of the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act—a 9/11-era piece of legislation that was used, at least in part, to justify seven of the eight extensions to the moratorium.
The HEROES Act was passed in 2003 and allows the federal government to provide student loan relief to college students who withdraw from school in order to enter active military duty during a time of "war or other military operation or national emergency."
While the Department of Education has long claimed that the COVID pandemic presents such a national emergency, the lawsuit contends that a yearslong student loan repayment pause is simply out of the HEROES Act's scope.
The Act was explicitly designed to help a very specific group of Americans—those that leave school to serve in a war. "Recasting the HEROES Act from a statute permitting limited modifications for targeted groups (primarily those serving in the military during wartime) to one that can suspend payments and cancel interest for all 45 million borrowers is a change so significant" that it fundamentally revises the statue, the lawsuit states.
Following this claim, the lawsuit argues that because both supposed legal justifications are illegitimate, the extended moratorium violates the Constitution's Appropriations Clause. "Congress only authorized the expenditure of funds to pay for a six-month debt-relief program—approximately $30 billion—and not a penny more," the complaint states. "Every additional month of the Moratorium has resulted in unlawful cancellation of approximately $5 billion of debt owed to the U.S. Treasury."
The student loan repayment moratorium is one of the strangest holdovers of the COVID-era government spending spree. Whatever economic—and legal—justification to suspend loan repayment has long since expired, making each new extension seem more bizarre than the last.
In the meantime, the cost of the payment pause keeps ticking up. As the lawsuit notes, "The Moratorium has been wiping out $5 billion of assets owned by the United States every month for the past 32 months without any statutory authorization or appropriation, at a cumulative cost to taxpayers of $160 billion and counting."
The post Lawsuit: It's Time To Start Paying Off Those Student Loans Again appeared first on Reason.com.

Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone.The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over again. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone.On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes—which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received. The Axios editor Sam Baker picked the article apart on Twitter. The emergency-medicine physician Jeremy Faust called it “credulous drivel.” Journalists and doctors alike argued that the Times had erred by helping Holmes rehabilitate her image.When mistakes happen in the health-care system, doctors try to trace their origin to broken processes. Errors are addressed at the system—not individual—level: If a patient receives an incorrect dose of a medicine, for instance, the blame doesn’t necessarily fall on the nurse who administered it or the physician who prescribed it. The entire drug-delivery process, from pharmacy to bedside, is carefully inspected for unsafe practices. The media—and their content-delivery process—have been going through a similar postmortem over the Theranos debacle. Before John Carreyrou broke the bad news about the company at The Wall Street Journal, reporters were happy to write flattering profiles of Holmes with only the most rudimentary caveats. Even the Journal praised her before it damned her. But the Times’ latest visit to Holmesville suggests that this unsafe practice is still in place.[Read: Theranos and COVID-19 testing are mirror-image cautionary tales]As a pathologist—a doctor who specializes in laboratory testing—I’ve been following the Theranos story since the beginning. Holmes’s rise and fall is the most glamorous scandal to hit my field in some time: Most are more body-parts-in-the-back-of-a-pickup than celebrity-stuffed financial crimes. Just last week, I was giving a grand-rounds talk about Theranos. Loopholes in laboratory regulation and widespread ignorance of how blood testing works had caused medical professionals and the public to fall for diagnostic scams, I told the academics in attendance. Toward the end of the lecture, I posed a question: Have the media learned their lesson after enabling Holmes’s charade?Much has changed about science reporting in the years since Holmes’s disgrace. I’ve watched the media’s discussion of novel health technologies grow more nuanced and leery. Major news outlets now go out of their way to emphasize the precariousness of early study findings. I’ve been getting more calls from journalists who seek a skeptical perspective on some new lab test or scientific finding. But there are cracks in the media’s armor. The weakest component is the headline: You can still declare all manner of decisive breakthroughs, as long as you append “scientists find” to the title. Another persistent problem is that medical controversies are reported out study by study. Back-and-forth articles about contested areas offer ready-made drama but little clarity. (Masks help prevent COVID; wait, they don’t work at all; never mind, now they do again.) When doctors evaluate the latest research, we recognize that some methods are more reliable than others. Wisdom comes from learning which results to ignore, and scientific consensus changes slowly.But journalists’ most stubborn instinct—the one they share with Holmes—is to lean into a good story. It’s the human side of science that attracts readers. Every technical advance must be contextualized with a tale of suffering or triumph. Holmes knew this as well as anyone. She hardly dwelled on how her devices worked—she couldn’t, because they didn’t. Instead, she repeatedly told the world about her fear of needles and of losing loved ones to diseases that might have been caught earlier by a convenient blood test. Of course reporters were taken in. The next entrepreneur to come along and tell a tale like that may also get a sympathetic hearing in the press.Holmes understood that almost everyone—journalists, investors, patients, doctors—can be swayed by a pat narrative. She’s still trying to get ahead by telling stories. In offering herself up to the Times as a reformed idealist and a wonderful mother, Holmes adds to a story that was started by her partner, Billy Evans. As part of Holmes’s sentencing proceedings last fall, Evans wrote a multipage letter to the judge pleading for mercy, which was accompanied by numerous photos of Holmes posing with animals and children. “She is gullible, overly trusting, and simply naive,” Evans wrote about one of the great corporate hucksters of our era.Journalists are still telling stories about her too, for better or for worse. Holmes is not naive, nor are most readers of The New York Times. While last weekend’s “a hero or a villain” coverage may be said to have betrayed the patients who were harmed by her inaccurate blood tests, and the memory of a Theranos employee who died by suicide, it is also just another entry in the expanded universe of Holmes-themed entertainment. There are books and podcasts and feature-length documentaries. A TV miniseries about Holmes has a score of 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (“Addictively engrossing!” “Consistently entertaining!”) Surely some of those who now bemoan the Times’ friendly treatment have consumed this material for less-than-academic reasons.The prosaic details of a convicted cheat’s domestic life aren’t really news, but they are interesting—because the character of Elizabeth Holmes is interesting. So, too, are her continued efforts to spin a narrative of who she is. But with such well-trodden ground, the irony is built right in. You know that Holmes is a scammer. I know it. On some level, The New York Times seems to know it too; the article runs through her crimes and even quotes a friend of Holmes’s who says she isn’t to be trusted. This isn’t character rehabilitation; it’s content. We’re all waiting to see what Liz gets up to next. Have the media learned their lesson? The real test will arrive when the next scientific scammer comes along, and the one after that—when their narrative is still intact, and their fraud hasn’t yet been revealed. At that point, the system for preventing errors will have to do its work.  

For as long as I can remember, I have been that friend—the one who, from May to November, gets invited to every outdoor soiree. It’s not because I make the best desserts, even though I do. It’s because, with me around, the shoes can come off and the DEET can stay sheathed: No one else need fear for their blood when the mosquitoes are all busy biting me.Explanations abound for why people like me just can’t stop getting nipped—blood type, diet, the particular funk of the acids that emanate from our skin. Mosquitoes are nothing if not expert sniffers, evolving over millennia to detect the body’s many emissions, including the carbon dioxide we exhale and the heat we radiate.But to focus only on a mosquito’s hankering for flesh is to leave a whole chapter of the pests’ scent-seeking saga “largely overlooked,” Clément Vinauger, a chemical ecologist at Virginia Tech, told me. Mosquitoes are omnivores, tuned to sniff out blood and plants. And nowadays, most humans, especially those in the Western world, tend to smell a bit like both, thanks to all the floral, citrusy lotions and potions that so many of us slather atop our musky flesh.That medley of scents, Vinauger and his colleagues have discovered, may be an underappreciated part of what makes people like me smell so darn good to pests. The findings are from a small study with just five volunteers, four brands of soap, and one mosquito species, and still need to be confirmed outside the lab. But they’re a reminder that, as good or as bad as some of us might inherently smell to a mosquito, the insects experience us as dietarily diverse smorgasbords—not just as our animal selves.[Read: You have no idea how good mosquitoes are at smelling us]Researchers have also long known that “everything we use on our skin will affect mosquitoes’ behavior or attraction toward us,” says Ali Afify, a mosquito researcher at Drexel University. That includes extracts from plants—among them, chemicals such as citronella and limonene, which have both been found to repel the bloodsucking insects in at least some contexts. Something about encountering floral and faunal cues together seems to bamboozle mosquitoes, as if they’re “seeing an organism that doesn’t exist,” says Baldwyn Torto, a chemical ecologist and mosquito expert at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology. After all, female mosquitoes, the only ones that bite, spend their lives toggling between seeking nectar and hunting for blood, but never both at the same time. That’s part of why Vinauger initially figured that soap might deter mosquitoes from flying in for a sip.The story ended up being a bit more complicated. The researchers, led by Morgen VanderGiessen and Anaïs Tallon, collected chemicals from their volunteers’ arms—one scrubbed with soap, the other left aromatically bare—and offered them to the mosquitoes. One body wash, a coconut-and-vanilla-scented number made by Native, seemed to make a subset of people less appetizing, probably in part, Vinauger told me, because mosquitoes and other insects are not into coconut. (Duly noted.) But two other cleansers, made by Dove and Simple Truth, bumped up the attractiveness of several of their volunteers—even though all of the soaps in the study contained plenty of limonene. (None of the manufacturers of the body washes used in the study responded to a request for comment.)No single product was a universal attractant or repellent, which probably says more about us than it does about body wash. A bevy of lifestyle choices and environmental influences can tweak an individual’s unique odor profile; even identical twins, Torto told me, won’t smell the same to a mosquito on the prowl. Soaped up or no, some people will remain stubbornly magnetic to mosquitoes; others will continue to disgust them. This makes it “hard to say, ‘Hey, this soap will make you really attractive’ or ‘That soap will keep mosquitoes completely away from you,’” says Seyed Mahmood Nikbakht Zadeh, a chemical ecologist and medical entomologist at CSU San Bernardino, who wasn’t involved in the study. Plus, soap is hardly the only scented product that people use: Whatever enticing ingredients your body wash might contain, Tallon told me, could easily be counteracted by the contents of your lotion or deodorant.[Read: A pivotal mosquito experiment could not have gone better]The point of the study isn’t to demonize or extol any particular products—especially considering how few soaps were tested and how many factors dictate each individual’s odor profile. The five volunteers in the study can’t possibly capture the entire range of human-soap interactions, though the researchers hope to expand their findings with a lot of follow-up. “I wouldn’t want the public to be alarmed about what type of soap they’re using,” Torto told me.But just knowing that personal-care products can alter a person’s appeal could kick-start more research. Scientists could design better baits to lure skeeters away from us, or develop a new generation of repellents using gentle, plant-based ingredients that are already found in our soaps. “DEET is really efficient, but it’s a chemical that melts plastic,” Vinauger told me. “Could we do better?”The researchers behind the study are already trying. After analyzing the specific chemicals in each of the soaps they tested, they blended some of the most alluring and aversive substances into two new concoctions—a flowery, fruity attractant and a nuttier repellent—and offered them to the insects. The repellent was “as strong as applying DEET on your skin,” Vinauger told me, “but it’s all coming from those soap chemicals.”What’s not yet clear, though, is how long those powers of repulsion last. Most people don’t manage more than a daily scrub; meanwhile, “the odors coming out of your pores are continuously coming out, so in the long run, those might win out,” says Maria Elena De Obaldia, a neurogeneticist who previously studied mosquito attraction at Rockefeller University. And it’s a lot less practical to ask someone to shower every few hours than to simply reapply bug spray.[Read: A new way to keep mosquitoes from biting]I’m certainly not ready to blame my mosquito magnetism on my body wash (which, for what it’s worth, contains a lot of “coconut-based cleanser”) or anything else in my hygiene repertoire. Part of the problem is undoubtedly just me—the tastiest of human meat sticks. But the next time I shop for anything scented, I’ll at least know that whatever wafts out of that product won’t just be for me. Some pest somewhere is always catching a stray whiff.

On Friday May 5th 2023, after 1,191 days, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the end of the COVID-19 health emergency, stating it was no longer a “public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).” That brings to an end a more than 3 year global pandemic. We have followed COVID closely since the beginning, so it seems fitting that we mark this important milestone.

Of course, COVID itself is not over. There were 441,290 cases worldwide in the last 7 days. COVID is now more of an endemic infection, like the flu, which is exactly what most experts predicted would happen (once it became established). We are now living with COVID rather than trying to live through COVID. Let’s review some of the stats.

According to the WHO the total worldwide deaths from COVID are 6,921,614 – almost 7 million. Total cases are 765 million, more than 100 times greater, which puts the mortality rate a little under 1%. There have also been 13,349,209,463 vaccine doses administered. About 70% of the world population had at least one dose, but the figure drops to 30% in low-income countries. Total deaths in the US alone was 1.12 million. That’s over 3,000 deaths per million, which ranks us 15th in the world, and more than most other wealthy developed nations. New Zealand is at the bottom of the list with 0.2. Clearly there are many factors involved, and being an island nation helps, but this also reflects public health policy effectiveness.

The WHO recognizes that these numbers are conservative and likely not accurate. If we look at excess deaths during the pandemic, rather than only confirmed cases, the number rises to about 20 million worldwide, almost three times the official estimate. This is partly due to the secondary effects of the pandemic. For example, lung cancer deaths rose 5%, likely due to delayed screening and care caused by the pandemic.

It’s would have been hard to imagine in early 2020 that the pandemic would last more than 3 years and take such a toll. In medicine it is common practice to take a look back and see how we did, where things went wrong, and where there is room for improvement. So – how did we do?

Scientifically I think we collectively did extremely well, and the pandemic could have been much worse otherwise. The virus was quickly identified and a genetic sequence available in days. There was some initial fumbling in terms of the best public health policy, but we quickly settled on masking and social distancing as the best ways to reduce infection. This was a novel virus causing an unusual infection, and the learning curve was steep that first year. But the number of studies being published on COVID was massive, and within about a year doctors had a pretty good handle on best management strategies. Also within a year multiple vaccines had been developed, and the second year of the pandemic was marked by a massive effort to vaccinate the world. This had a massive impact on dampening down the pandemic.

Multiple studies have estimated the impact of the COVID vaccines. After the first year of vaccines it was estimated that they saved 20 million deaths worldwide. A December 2022 study found that in the US COVID vaccines saved 3 million lives and $1.15 trillion. Another study found that vaccines saved over a million lives across Europe. These are also likely underestimates because it is difficult to model the downstream impact of such a worsening of the economy, health care, and other aspects of society.

One area in which we did not do as well was education. We suddenly had to adapt to a deadly pandemic, and this came at an interesting time when the potential for remote online learning and working was possible but not mature or fully implemented. In my own field of medicine, this actually worked out great. We made years of advance in telehealth in just weeks and months. This is primarily because we were more than ready for telehealth and the only obstacles were bureaucratic – obstacles that were instantly cleared in the face of a pandemic.

In education the result was not as good. School systems did not have the infrastructure or training to adapt to online learning. We also did not have the data to know what the impact would be on younger children, who need the socialization as much as the learning. The negative impact of the pandemic on education was significant, widening education gaps that already existed. One study estimated that US students lost about one third of a school year due to the pandemic.

There is no simple answer to this situation. This does not mean that if we just kept schools open everything would have been just fine. Many schools struggled to stay open, even when they wanted to, because teachers and staff were out sick due to COVID, or were isolating because of exposure. We also don’t know what the net impact would have been on the pandemic itself if schools were open more, and what downstream effects that would have had. I don’t think it would have had a good long term impact on American education if the mortality rate among teachers skyrocketed.

I do think we can take away two big lessons from our experience with education during the pandemic. The first is that we underestimated the negative impact on young students of not being physically at school. The second (and this impacts the first) is that our education infrastructure was simply not ready for online learning. This is partly technological – having adequate setups at home and in the school for virtual learning, but also partly about the teaching itself. You can’t just do a live class program online. That’s like filming a play and calling it a movie. Lesson plans need to be optimized for the online experience, leveraging the advantages and mitigating the negative aspects. I have had both good and terrible online learning experiences. The question is – to what extent would a better prepared educational infrastructure have mitigated the negative impact of school shutdowns?

While we did well overall scientifically, and we did poorly overall in terms of education, I think the political response to the pandemic was mixed. This obviously varied from country to country, but also within a single country, like the US, politics had a massive impact on the pandemic. There seems to be a consensus that the pandemic revealed and exacerbated existing political dysfunction. This was partly driven by fear and uncertainty, especially early on. But the biggest negative impact was from the profound spread of misinformation and the imposition of political ideology and motivated narratives. We are still experiencing extreme misinformation about every aspect of the pandemic – people doubting the science on masking, social distancing, and the efficacy of the vaccines.

Politics mattered. There is overwhelming data now that vaccine rates in the US were lower and COVID death rates higher in Republican counties, in red states, and in people and locations that voted for Trump over Biden. Cumulative death rates in red states was 30% higher than blue states, and Republicans were 40% less likely to say that the pandemic is a serious health risk. Your attitude toward the pandemic and belief in mitigating actions and vaccines were largely determined by the information ecosystem in which you lived, and this translated into the probability of dying form COVID.

What does all this mean going forward? Specifically, are we ready for the next pandemic? While COVID is being portrayed as a once-a-century pandemic, this may be true only if we look backwards. This may no longer be true in the future, where there is increased globalization, and increased encroachment of humans into animal spaces. The experts warned us that a pandemic like COVID was coming. Our own Mark Crislip presciently laid out pretty much what a pandemic like COVID would be like, and that we would likely see such a pandemic roughly in the timeframe we did. Now those same experts are saying that another pandemic is likely sooner than later. Are we ready?

The short answer is – probably not. We need increased funding for pandemic preparedness. We need to have infrastructure ready to go. Hospitals need to have a plan, and extra capacity to handle pandemic surges. Public health organizations need to have the expertise and resources to manage communication in a world with social media and weaponized misinformation. This is not the 1950s anymore. As we saw, effective communication and countering misinformation may be the most effect tool to fight a pandemic.

We can also think about ways for schools to expand their ability to engage in remote, virtual, and online learning. Leveraging the potential of virtual learning can enhance even regular education, and those same skills and tools can become a backup for when in person learning is not safe or possible.

In short we need a pandemic game plan. And we don’t have one. This is a fixable problem. Perhaps we should take the occasion of the official end of the COVID pandemic to think seriously and plan extensively for the next one.

Some Republicans want to scale back U.S. military support for Ukraine, insisting that Taiwan’s defense should take priority. But those who claim to be for protecting Taiwan ought to listen to its leaders. They say the island’s security depends on Washington standing firm in its support for Kyiv. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The notion that the United States must choose between fully supporting Ukraine or building up the defense of Taiwan has migrated from Fox News into the mainstream Washington foreign policy discussion. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has led the charge by arguing that extensive U.S. military aid to Ukraine detracts from the more urgent task of arming Taiwan to deter a Chinese invasion.

But if Taiwanese leaders don’t agree that that’s true, shouldn’t U.S. policymakers factor that into their analysis? Do these Republicans really think they understand Taiwan’s interests better than the Taiwanese?

“Ukraine’s survival is Taiwan’s survival. Ukraine’s success is Taiwan’s success,” Taiwan’s representative in Washington, Bi-khim Hsiao, told the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum last weekend. “Our futures are closely linked.”

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The Taiwan argument is only the latest justification made by those on the right who want to reduce U.S. support for Kyiv. During a recent speech calling for the defense of Taiwan, Hawley said that as a first step, “We should cut off U.S. military aid to Ukraine.” Following Hawley’s lead, self-proclaimed “realist” think-tankers assert that U.S. support for Ukraine has no deterrent effect on Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Ukraine is not going to drive Beijing’s decision whether to attack Taiwan. Instead, what’s most critical for deterring a war over Taiwan is the military balance in Asia,” former Trump administration Pentagon official Elbridge Colby argued during a recent Hudson Institute debate.

Again, Taiwan’s leaders beg to disagree. Hsiao said Taiwan doesn’t want to be an “excuse” for pulling the plug on aid to Ukraine. If the West abandons the Ukrainians now, she said, that will signal to the Taiwanese people that they are alone, which plays into Beijing’s propaganda.

“Support for Ukraine is relevant to us because, first of all, ultimately it helps to deter. It imposes costs on the aggressor,” Hsiao said. “International support for Ukraine is also essential in affirming the credibility and reliability of the United States and your allies.”

Congress will face another decision about whether to provide large amounts of aid to Ukraine this autumn. Former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the early favorites for the 2024 GOP nomination, have already questioned continued U.S. aid to Ukraine.

Editorial Board counterpoint The Discord leaks show our nation’s secrets at risk Plenty of prominent U.S. officials — some top Republicans among them — agree with Hsiao that the Ukraine effort isn’t undermining the defense of Taiwan. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told me during an interview that he discussed lessons learned in Ukraine with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen last month in California.

“I don’t think there’s a tension [between aiding Ukraine and Taiwan],” McCarthy said. “What we need to do is expand the [weapons] manufacturing base here in America.”

To be sure, there is some overlap between the weapons being sent to Ukraine and those that Taiwan needs, such as Stinger antiaircraft systems. But as many have pointed out, a conflict over Taiwan would not look like a Ukraine-style ground war. A war involving Taiwan would depend more on the U.S. Navy and Air Force, as well as hybrid warfare tools that are used in information and cyber operations.

It’s true that U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are lagging, and the Biden administration should do more to speed things up. But American military leaders in Asia are not calling for reducing military aid to Ukraine. They are calling for more concurrent investment in U.S. military capabilities in the Pacific.

“I do believe we can do both,” Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. John C. Aquilino testified to Congress last month. “I believe we have to do both to maintain the peace.”

Overall, the notion of abandoning Ukraine to focus on Taiwan makes little sense because, unless Ukraine succeeds, the war in Europe will likely worsen — requiring more U.S. involvement, not less.

“Saying that we should prioritize Taiwan over Ukraine is like arguing that the firetruck should be parked at a house down the street to guard against a fire breaking out in the future instead of knocking down the fire at the burning house,” said John Walters, the president of the Hudson Institute, at his group’s debate.

Those who argue for abandoning Ukraine on Taiwan’s behalf are, in effect, claiming to be more pro-Taiwan than the Taiwanese. That is arrogance, not prudence. Taiwan’s leaders understand how to deter China and protect their country’s security better than GOP politicians and think-tankers.

Beijing’s extensive help for Vladimir Putin’s war effort shows that Xi believes a Ukrainian victory is bad for China. Russia and China are colluding in their support for autocratic aggression. The United States, Europe, Ukraine and Taiwan must all stand together to oppose them.

Consumer prices rose faster in April, driven by another round of sharp increases in rental prices—and raising ongoing questions about whether a return to 2 percent annual inflation is possible.
Overall, prices rose by 0.4 percent in April, according to data released Wednesday morning by the Department of Labor, after ticking upward by just 0.1 percent in March. The annualized inflation rate fell to 4.9 percent, down slightly from March's annualized rate of 5.0 percent.
Even though those numbers are a far cry from the 9.1 percent annual rate posted as recently as last June, it's a worrying sign that inflation seems to have settled into a range that's significantly higher than it had been for decades. The average inflation rate between 1990 and 2020, for example, was about 2.3 percent.
As it was in March, rental prices are the primary driver of April's price increases. Overall, the Labor Department's index for "shelter" prices jumped by 0.4 percent in April. But that category includes a number of factors other than rent, including things like hotel room rates, the prices of which actually declined slightly during April. On their own, rental prices climbed by 0.6 percent during the month, according to the department's report.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm)
The good news for consumers is that food and energy prices, which largely drove last year's spike in overall inflation, have returned to more normal territory. Food prices were flat in April and energy prices are down significantly over the past 12 months despite a 0.6 percent increase during April.
Until rental prices fall, however, overall inflation is likely to remain stubbornly high. That's because rent and "owners' equivalent rent"—another portion of the "shelter" index, measuring the amount that a homeowner could charge if he or she chose to rent out their property—account for over 32 percent of the overall inflation index.
There's a political dimension to inflation, of course, which will only come into clearer focus as the 2024 presidential election gets closer. President Joe Biden's poll numbers continue to sag despite the announcement that he will seek a second term, perhaps in no small part because many voters see him as responsible for the higher prices they've been forced to pay for nearly everything.
Overall, prices have increased by 15 percent since Biden took office. That's outpacing every president since Jimmy Carter, according to the "Presidential Inflation Rate" tracker developed by the Winston Group, a conservative political advisory firm.
Of course, Democrats avoided a disastrous midterm election despite last year's rampant inflation. Still, Biden's policies have contributed to higher prices and stubbornly high inflation will be a weight around his neck as he runs for a second term—which is only fair since the rest of us have to deal with higher prices in more immediate, direct ways.
The post Inflation Ticks Higher in April as Rents Keep Rising appeared first on Reason.com.

On May 5th, a Moscow court placed two women, the thirty-eight-year-old Zhenya Berkovich and the forty-three-year-old Svetlana Petriychuk, under arrest for an initial term of two months.

About a year earlier, I was startled to realize that Berkovich was still in Russia. Most of my extended circle had left in the days and weeks following the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022. Russian authorities had brutally disbanded protests, passed a set of laws banning antiwar speech, hounded independent media out of the country under threat of arrest, and banned Facebook. Those who stayed took a newly standard set of precautions, including “locking” their Facebook accounts so that only their “friends” could see their activity. Berkovich spent ten days in jail for protesting the invasion and then kept posting openly, publishing poems, and writing about her reactions to the war and her frustrations with her teen-age daughters, both of whom she had recently adopted.

I didn’t know her well. We met perhaps a decade ago, when I was still living in Moscow, and Berkovich, freshly graduated from the famed Moscow Art Theatre School, was involved in the production of a play based on interviews with people whose grandparents had been Stalin’s henchmen. The play was staged at the Sakharov Center, which was shuttered by the government last week. I had also seen one of the first plays that Berkovich directed, “The Man Who Didn’t Work,” which was based on an activist’s notes of the courtroom proceedings in the trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky. Soviet citizens were required by law to be engaged in productive work. Brodsky was found guilty of “malicious parasitism” and sentenced to internal exile and mandatory labor. (The play was staged at Memorial, a human-rights and history organization that was shut down by the government last year.)

In the play, a judge demands of Brodsky, “What did you ever do to benefit the motherland?”

“I wrote poetry,” Brodsky responds. “That is my work. I am certain that every word I’ve written will benefit many generations of people.”

. . . . “Tell the court why you didn’t work.”

“I worked. I wrote poetry.”

“Answer the question. Why didn’t you labor?”

“But I labored. I wrote poetry.”

“Why didn’t you study that at an institution of higher learning?”

“I thought . . . I thought it was a gift from God.”

I took my older kids to see both plays. For years afterward, Yolka, who was ten or eleven when she first watched them, would return to the one about Brodsky. When I was writing this column, I asked what had stuck with them, and Yolka texted back, “I remember it seemed a little too related to how it was in Moscow at the time.” Back then, this response would have sounded hyperbolic. Russia was cracking down on dissent, but poets weren’t going to jail for writing poetry.

Berkovich directed roughly a dozen more plays. Last year, her production of a play written by Petriychuk—now her co-defendant—won top honors at the Golden Mask, Russia’s leading theatre festival. The name of the play, probably best translated as “Finist, the Brave Falcon,” is a reference to a Russian fairy tale about an elusive male love object who has the ability to turn into a bird or a feather. The play is based on the stories of young Russian women who met ISIS fighters online, converted to Islam, married the men in virtual ceremonies, and went, or tried to go, to Syria to join the fight with their husbands. Many of the women were later arrested and prosecuted in Russia, and the play made use of the transcripts of their police interviews. It was a subtle, tender, and slightly absurdist portrayal of loneliness and the longing for love. The production opened with the cast singing, in English, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Before the Russo-Ukrainian war, I didn’t know that Berkovich wrote poetry. The first poem that caught my attention went viral in the Russian blogosphere about a year ago, as Russia was staging its annual grand celebration of victory in the Second World War. In the poem, the ghost of a man who fought in the war visits his grandson in present-day Russia and asks him not to make use of his image or legacy. “We don’t need you to be proud of us / Nor to be secretly ashamed of us. / All I ask is that you / Make it so I am finally forgotten,” the grandfather pleads.

But then I’ll forget how we looked for that painting

In the Russian Museum

How I woke up wet

And you dressed me

How we read Prishvin together

And looked for the North and South Poles in the atlas

How you explained why planes

Leave a white stripe in the sky.

How you gave me

A magnifying glass.

That’s all right, the grandfather says

As he disappears.

None of that did you any good.

In times of crisis, Russians write poetry, and this was one of many poems making the rounds. Gradually, though, I realized that Berkovich was probably the poetic voice of this period. One after another, her poems, posted on Facebook, put words to the agony of wartime. Many of them had the form of litanies.

There are too many unknowns to count in the Ukraine war. From the upcoming spring offensive to covert U.S. intelligence operations, mysteries abound. But perhaps none is more important than the question surrounding the Russian Ministry of Defense, its general staff, the Wagner Group and President Vladimir Putin’s place among them. This system of relationships has become even more complicated now that Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, has interfered and promised to replace Wagner in Bakhmut.

Moscow enlisted Wagner when it was unable to decisively defeat Ukrainian forces on its own. Wagner is a private military force, technically under contract with part of the Russian government. The mercenaries it employs are commanded not by the army but by a civilian. They number some 25,000 to 30,000 – slightly smaller than Russia’s conventional armed forces but not dramatically so – and occupy about 30 kilometers (19 miles) of the multiple thousand-kilometer-long frontlines. And yet Wagner is the only contingent of Russian forces that regularly advances on areas controlled by Ukraine.

Using private militaries is hardly a new phenomenon, and Wagner has operated in the Middle East and Africa for years. But what it is doing in Ukraine is unique. Not only is it waging its own war, but it is also currently leading the battle in Bakhmut.

The mystery surrounding its relationship with the Russian military is evidenced by a statement made last week by Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, who said that “military bureaucrats” had deprived his forces of artillery and ammunition, and that he is therefore withdrawing them from the area and handing Bakhmut over to Russian conventional armed forces.

The battle of Bakhmut has never gone well, but at this point, with the forces that have already been lost in the fight, victory is less strategic than political. For the Russians, losing or abandoning the battle would send the wrong signal to the enemy and its population. But the regular Russian army was not able to impose its will on Bakhmut and in general has not been able to break Ukrainian forces. Introducing Wagner there served several purposes. It increased the size of the force that could be deployed, and it brought in a ruthless force with plausible deniability.

In that sense, cutting off artillery and other ammunition makes absolutely no sense. (There is a hint of confirmation from Moscow that it did, but Ukrainian military reports suggest artillery fire hasn’t let up.) Even if Russia believed cutting off Wagner made military sense, allowing the leader to sound off like this doesn’t. Militaries and their political masters disagree all the time, but a rift this visible is rare.

The mystery, then, is two-fold. Why would the general staff want to cripple Wagner? And why would it do it so publicly? There were financial and technical steps that could have prevented it from happening. For it to have come this far, a malfunction must have occurred at either the senior staff or the ministry level.

If it is deliberate, what could it mean? It could be meant to stop a coup that Wagner might have planned, but a drone might have done a better job. It could be a plan by elements in the government aligned with Wagner to try to demonstrate that the Ukraine war is being lost, or at least not won, by the Russian command. If the view was held that the senior command and the ministers are losing the war, then advertising their irrationality through Wagner would make sense, potentially adding to any movement to remove them. If Putin felt that the current command was failing, but that too many senior officers supported it for it to be removed, this memo from Wagner would be an excellent tool to make the point. (That is, unless the point is to show that Putin has lost control of the situation.)

For now, this is all academic, if still important. The Kremlin appears to have given in to Prigozhin’s demands, and it seems as though Wagner will stay in Bakhmut. Moreover, Gen. Sergey Surovikin, whom Prigozhin described as the only capable general in the Russian army, has been appointed to liaise between Russia and the mercenaries.

But no matter how this plays out, the war is a fundamentally political problem. It has not gone as expected, and no effective alliance has emerged to change that fact. In this situation, one must either mount a massive offensive, the government and Wagner working side by side, or prepare for a negotiation as favorable as possible – one that absolves the emerging leadership of any wrongdoing.

By Shadi Hamid, Sharan GrewalTunisian democracy is dying. If there was ever any doubt, the last few months have revealed to all that President Kais Saied’s moves on July 25, 2021, were a coup d’état. Saied has seized all powers, arrested journalists and dissidents of all stripes, and incited violence against migrants and black Tunisians. Tunisia is no longer classified as free by Freedom House or as a democracy by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and it has tumbled nearly 50 spots since 2021 (73 to 121) in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index.
Tunisia’s backsliding has represented a major test for U.S. President Joe Biden’s stated desire to prioritize democracy in his foreign policy. Thus far, the Biden administration’s reaction has been tepid. While the United States has expressed concern and cut economic assistance, it has largely continued military assistance, offered its support for a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, invited and (literally) embraced Saied in Washington, and praised his world-record-low 11%-turnout elections as “an essential initial step toward restoring the country’s democratic trajectory.” There is no doubt that Saied feels emboldened to crack down on dissidents today by what he perceives as a green light from the United States.
In view of Saied’s escalating crackdown, the two of us have assembled a wide array of former diplomats, senior officials, and other members of the policy community to sign an open letter calling on Biden to reorient U.S. policy toward Tunisia. In it, we urge Biden to call a spade a spade. This was a coup, and the United States should not reward such behavior with aid, loans, praise, and photo-ops. Indeed, the United States is legally bound to suspend aid in the wake of military coups or civilian coups in which the military plays a decisive role, as it did in Tunisia by shuttering the democratically-elected parliament. As the IMF’s largest shareholder, the United States should also hold off on supporting the pending loan to Tunisia until Saied releases political prisoners and establishes a genuinely inclusive national dialogue. We should not fall into the trap of enabling and subsidizing dictatorship, a decision that will haunt the United States and Tunisia in the long term.
We believe that such sustained pressure represents the best possible way to reverse Tunisia’s backsliding. Even if it does not change Saied’s calculus, it may change that of those around him, limiting the damage Saied can do to the system. After all, the swift and universal condemnation of Saied’s racist rhetoric against migrants in February did lead his government to take some measures for their protection.
This is also bigger than Tunisia. If the United States is truly serious about shoring up democracies worldwide, it must send a consistent signal that there are costs to democratic backsliding. Lending our taxpayer dollars and legitimacy to Saied will only encourage other populist leaders to believe that they too can get away with dismantling democratic institutions. Moreover, our approach here sends a signal for the great power competition that is to come about where we stand and about how we differentiate ourselves from our rivals.
We do not expect all readers to agree with our policy recommendations. But we hope to spark a serious debate about how to reset U.S. policy — since it is clear that the current approach is not working.
You can read the letter here: https://tunisiaopenletter.com/
Brookings does not take institutional positions on issues. The views in this commentary are solely those of the authors.

During the 2022 NFL draft, 21-year-old Matt Araiza—hailed by his fans as "punt god" for his record-breaking abilities as a kicker—was selected to join the Buffalo Bills. But later that year, in August, the team cut Araiza due to an allegation of sexual misconduct.
The allegation referenced events at an October 15, 2021 house party near the campus of San Diego State University (SDSU). A 17-year-old girl and her friends snuck into the party, where she encountered Araiza. According to her, Araiza led her into a bedroom where three men viciously assaulted and raped her. The girl has filed a civil lawsuit against him.
Prosecutors, however, have declined to file charges. Earlier this week, the reason for this became known: Yahoo! Sports obtained a 200-page transcript of a meeting between the prosecutors and the alleged victim in which the former explains to the latter why her accusation is impossible.
According to the authorities, eyewitness testimony establishes that Araiza left the party well before the point at which the girl claimed she was brought to the room where the alleged assault took place. In fact, authorities were hard-pressed to concede an assault had taken place at all; video footage of the sexual encounter suggested that it was consensual.
Interviews with more than 35 witnesses—including the girl's friends—further undermine her claims, according to Deputy District Attorney Trisha Amador:
Witness interviews from the party, including two of the girl's own friends whom she arrived with, said that she didn't appear to be drunk at the time. Other witnesses said the girl was telling people she was 18.
"A witness who was in the house gave a statement saying that at — at least one point in the party, that you made a statement telling people at the party you were 18," Amador explained to the accuser. "Another witness at the party, a different one, says that they specifically heard you say you were 18 …"
Amador also explained to the girl that additional witness testimony alleged that at this period of time, "you were approaching men at the party saying, 'I want you to [expletive] me and if you don't [expletive] me you're a [expletive]."
The civil action is ongoing. In any case, it would certainly appear that the Bills' decision to cut Araiza—who had signed a four-year contract worth $3.9 million—was made in haste, on the basis of an utterly unsupported accusation repeatedly contradicted by evidence and witness testimony.
This occurrence should also serve as a reminder of why the Biden administration's decision to weaken due process protections for accused students was disastrous. False accusations can derail the lives of young men and women; it is essential for authorities to adjudicate disputes in a manner that is fair to all parties. And while the court of public opinion is not bound by the U.S. Constitution, innocent until proven guilty should be the generally advisable standard.
The post The Buffalo Bills Cut Matt Araiza Over a Rape Accusation, but Key Evidence Vindicates Him appeared first on Reason.com.

In a speech delivered one year ago this week, President Joe Biden took credit for what he called "the largest drop ever" in the federal budget deficit.
"Let me remind you again: I reduced the federal deficit," Biden said. "All the talk about the deficit from my Republican friends, I love it.  I've reduced $350 billion in my first year in office.  And we're on track to reduce it by the end of September by another 1 trillion 500 billion dollars—the largest drop ever."
As Reason—and others in the media—pointed out, this was a wild exaggeration. Biden had done nothing to reduce the deficit. In fact, policies enacted since he'd taken office had caused the federal government to borrow more, not less, than it otherwise would have. The lower federal deficit total in 2022 relative to the two previous years resulted from expiring one-time emergency expenditures during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had swelled the deficit to record highs.
In short, 2022 was a major outlier from the trend of growing budget deficits—a trend that had started before the pandemic and that was projected to reemerge after the tsunami of federal pandemic borrowing had passed. "The deficit will begin rising again next year and will rise faster and higher than it would have before Biden took office," I wrote in June of last year.
Well, the deficit is rising again.
Rising spending and lower-than-expected tax collections over the first seven months of the federal government's fiscal year (which began on October 1) have caused the budget deficit to hit $928 billion so far, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) latest monthly report. That's nearly three times larger than the $360 billion deficit recorded during the same seven months in the previous fiscal year.
Net tax collections are down about 10 percent compared to last year, the CBO notes, while spending has increased by about 8 percent. That's a recipe for a growing deficit, which is ultimately nothing more than the gap between how much the government spends and how much it collects in taxes. The gap is only going to keep growing in future years, according to the CBO's long-term projections.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for small deficits, points out that the federal government has rung up a deficit of nearly $2 trillion over the past 12 months. "High and rising deficits put more pressure on inflation, make the Federal Reserve's inflation-fighting efforts more challenging and costly, slow economic growth, make it harder to respond to new emergencies, create geopolitical risks, and put the national debt on an unsustainable long-term path," the group warns.

Those rising deficits and the potential economic consequences of the United States' unsustainable pile of debt provide a stark backdrop for this afternoon's meeting at the White House between Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.). It's the first face-to-face meeting in months for the two leaders who will be responsible for averting a potential default on the federal debt, which could come as soon as June 1 unless Congress acts to raise the Treasury Department's borrowing limit.
While the debt ceiling is the most accurate crisis at the moment, the growing gap between how much the government spends and what it collects in taxes must be part of the discussion—even though Biden and other Democrats want to keep the issues separate. Raising the debt limit will accomplish nothing of substance unless the wildly out-of-whack federal budget is meaningfully addressed too. That means cutting spending, as the House-passed debt limit proposal aims to do.
A year ago, Biden was eager to talk about the federal budget deficit—his claim about cutting the deficit was not an offhand remark but a central talking point for months—because he could use the apparently smaller deficit to justify his plans to spend and borrow more.
Now that the deficit is raising again—and on pace to keep rising for the foreseeable future—it's unlikely Biden will be pointing to it when he meets with McCarthy this afternoon. Unsurprisingly, Biden's interest in deficit reduction was more about political opportunism than fiscal responsibility.
The post Biden Falsely Bragged About Lowering the Budget Deficit. Now, It Is Predictably Rising Again. appeared first on Reason.com.

When President Joe Biden sparred with Republicans during his State of the Union address in February, he vowed to veto any attempt at cutting Social Security benefits. Yet the budget proposal he unveiled in March lacked a plan to avert the mandatory Social Security benefit cuts that are quickly approaching.
Social Security will become insolvent in the early 2030s without policy changes, but no one in Washington wants to make those changes. Do nothing, and benefits will need to be cut by about 20 percent across the board within a decade or so, according to estimates by the Social Security Administration's trustees.
If your ship is taking on water, you can try bailing it out, which in this case means changing the program's parameters to better balance revenue and spending. Or you can board the lifeboats, which in this case means finding an alternative way to help Americans plan for retirement before the current system sinks. Biden's budget doesn't give Americans a bucket or an oar.
The president's $6.8 trillion proposal includes billions of dollars in new spending and higher taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations. While one of those proposed tax increases would go toward shoring up the finances of Medicare, which is also rushing toward insolvency, the budget plan does not even gesture at mitigating the Social Security crisis.
Biden has even retreated from a campaign promise to lift the existing cap on income subject to the payroll tax that funds Social Security. That's good, but the absence of an alternative proposal means we are one presidential administration closer to a crisis that becomes harder to avoid each year.
Here is one idea: Just scrap Social Security entirely. That would relieve younger workers from funding benefits for older, generally wealthier Americans and allow them to invest as they see fit. A 2016 Tax Foundation study found that, for all except the lowest-earning workers, private retirement accounts were more lucrative than Social Security benefits. A worker who earns average pay and saves only 10 percent of his salary in a standard tax-advantaged account will end up with annual retirement income three times more than what Social Security offers.
Before elected officials rule out privatization, they should consider that when the program started, there were roughly 16 workers for every beneficiary. That ratio is now less than 3 to 1. The math will get worse as the country ages and household sizes decline. (For more on that, see "Storks Don't Take Orders From the State.")
Keeping Social Security solvent is less important than ensuring that Americans can enjoy a stable retirement.
The post Failing to Reform Social Security Means Mandatory Cuts appeared first on Reason.com.

On a perfect spring day in 2017, I joined a gathering of right-wing internet trolls in Austin, Texas. They’d arranged the meetup to support the Infowars founder and conspiracist Alex Jones during his child-custody trial; I was reporting on all this and ended up in a stilted conversation with a prolific 4chan poster. We realized that we were born only a few miles apart from each other in Ohio, which apparently came as a shock. I thought all you blue checks were from New York City or California, he said with no trace of irony.That was the first time I’d ever been referred to in the physical world as a “blue check.” Technically, the term meant that I was somebody who’d been verified on Twitter, but it was more familiar to me as a derogatory bit of internet slang. Sometime in the late 2010s, the moniker became a handy stand-in for a large class of mostly left-leaning journalists, celebrities, activists, and other personalities on Twitter. Blue checks were supposedly privileged and out of touch, like the “liberal elites” who preceded them.They were also, to the chagrin of Twitter’s populist and reactionary right wing, influential. To rail against the blue checks was to rail against the media establishment and all its gatekeeping and groupthink. Blue checks, the detractors argued, were Twitter’s most cherished and protected class—unfairly amplified in the platform’s algorithms and even sheltered from the cries of the unwashed masses thanks to their ability to filter out the non-checkmarked from their feeds.Now the roles are reversed. Under a new approach to the Twitter Blue subscription service dreamed up by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, users can now pay $8 a month for that coveted check, among other exclusive features like more visibility in conversations and search. Meanwhile, the “legacy” types are as unverified as the day they were born, at least until they pony up.Twitter Blue may be boneheaded as a revenue scheme, but it excels as a case study in how grappling for status can ruin a social network—especially as a point of contrast to a new social network that the most online among us are flocking to. I’ve spent the past week clicking between two tabs: In one is Twitter, which is visibility suffocating under the weight of Musk’s enormous ego and a series of awful managerial decisions; in the other is Bluesky, a decentralized, invite-only clone of Twitter, which has exploded in popularity in just a few days, attracting celebrities, politicians, and a legion of beloved, extremely online shitposters. Status across social networks is always in flux, but the past few weeks have felt like a controlled experiment in how social capital is won and lost and how online communities respond to upheaval.[Read: Elon Musk revealed what Twitter always was]Social media has always been, at heart, a big status game. The most successful social platforms are the ones that allow people to efficiently gain access to a larger network and accrue status inside it. The classic example is Facebook, which initially tied platform access to a Harvard email address. As the technologist Eugene Wei wrote in a seminal 2019 blog post, Facebook “drafted off of one of the most elite cultural filters in the world. It’s hard to think of many more powerful slingshots of elitism.”Although the filter eventually disappears as more and more people gain access to the platform, new hierarchies emerge. Even harassment campaigns and arguments over content moderation are fundamentally about status: Those with status determine who and what content is amplified, thereby conveying what type of behavior is worthy of the community’s respect. Status is linked to credibility and authenticity. And nothing typifies and communicates credibility and authenticity like a little blue checkmark that says, This person is real and notable.“Status is about a reputation—about what a specific group thinks of you,” Cecilia Ridgeway, a sociologist and the author of Status, told me. “Because of that fact, you can try to claim status, but you can’t seize it. Status is given, not purchased.” Like me, Ridgeway sees Musk’s verification experiment as a struggle between the platform’s new and old elites. Previously verified users fumed at having to pay a mercurial billionaire for something that was once free, while the people who most resented those users were hungry to pay up. Peculiar status tiers began to form. Rejecting the blue checkmark quickly became cooler than having one. And Twitter Blue users mused conspiratorially about why unverified users were seeing better engagement on their tweets. Something was off: They’d paid to be important, but they weren’t.Ridgeway compared the chaos of the past few weeks to the social upheavals between old-money and new-money elites. “If new elites are buying status markers, what will happen is that old elites will declare those are no longer the markers.” A quick spin through Twitter bears out Ridgeway’s theory. Legacy verified users now post ironic memes about the groupthink and obnoxiousness of the newly minted blue-check crowd.
im sorry for saying this:

being verified on twitter means nothing now

in fact, it's cringe

i like that im not verified

when i see blue check marks, my mind rejects them

they have lost all meaning and are effectively useless
— Sam Sheffer (@samsheffer) May 2, 2023
blue checks 🙄 https://t.co/JgW8dCsx87 pic.twitter.com/8W79eM1hb7
— tom mckay (@thetomzone) May 2, 2023It’s hard not to see Bluesky and its recent evolution as an opposition movement to Musk’s version of Twitter. The platform revolves around replicating the joy of Twitter’s early days: the informality, the in-jokes, the feeling of familiarity, and an overall lack of toxic users. My timeline is chaotic, but earnestness abounds. The decisions about content-moderation issues such as blocking and banning are happening in real time and, for now, are driven by the values of the community. At present, those values seem to be to build the polar opposite of whatever it is Musk has turned Twitter into. At its small size, it’s a lovely place—one user described it as a poster’s “Valhalla.”Bluesky is also an attempt at status migration. Currently, it is filled with former Twitter power users who are rightfully fed up with being on a platform whose official policies seem intended to troll them, open them up to harassment, and make their experience less enjoyable. Status is about respect, and it’s clear that most of Bluesky’s users have left a platform they feel does not respect them. It’s exciting to watch new status relationships evolve. Users with a penchant for shitposting, for example, and those who embody the puckish spirit of the early internet are the first platform celebrities. Those who have come aboard to harass or repeat old culture-war fights are pariahs.Just being a Bluesky user is a potent status signal. As an invite-only platform that is stingy about doling out new golden tickets, Bluesky is an exclusive community. The platform tracks who invited whom, and it recently announced that content-moderation decisions may take into consideration the chain of invites—if you invite trolls who go on to break the rules, you could be punished. This adds a reputational component to the platform. Bluesky users are motivated to invite high-quality, high-status people, which means that invites confer significant status on the recipients.Ex-tweeters (including myself) who have found community on Bluesky seem to think of the platform as a refuge of sorts. I explained this to Ridgeway, who made a different comparison. “It’s like the country club,” Ridgeway told me: “A place where you can go and be with your peers. Everyone knows the credible people belong in this exclusive space.”[Read: Blue check marks were always shameless]The country-club metaphor might rankle some Bluesky users, who are trying to build an inclusive community, but Ridgeway argues the important part of Bluesky is that it allows for a reclamation of status among Twitter expats.“In studies of well-being, having status among your peer group is one of the most important contributing factors,” she told me. “Ultimate status comes from influencing broad opinion,” she said, “but as a daily form of healthy, happy living, people just want status in their small corner of the world among their peers.” Essentially, we all want a place where we are known and respected and credibly seen.Ridgeway’s encapsulation strikes me as a perfect description of why social media makes so many of us feel miserable: We are thrust into a competition for broad-based status, trying to win the approval and respect of large, mercurial audiences of mostly strangers. The game is exhausting, even misery inducing, in part because the scale of exposure brought about by social media is unnatural. Ridgeway’s thesis also helps explain the joy I’ve seen and experienced using a small, nascent platform. Thanks to its scale and values, Bluesky’s status game feels—for now—like a healthy one.

In an unusual move, the U.S. Supreme Court has halted the execution of Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma inmate whose execution had been scheduled for next week even though the state's own attorney general has said he deserves a new trial.
Glossip was convicted in 1998 of the murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese. Prosecutors claimed that Glossip instructed then-19-year Justin Sneed—a maintenance man at the motel where Glossip worked—to kill Van Treese as part of a complex murder-for-hire scheme. Sneed's testimony was central to the prosecution's case, and Sneed himself agreed to testify as part of a plea deal that allowed him to avoid the death penalty.
Soon after his conviction, problems with the case against Glossip—and particularly with Sneed's testimony—began to show. Glossip's conviction was overturned in 2001, and then he was re-convicted and re-sentenced to death three years later.
In the years following his second conviction, Glossip has narrowly escaped execution several times, coming so close as to have received three separate "last" meals before being spared by last-minute stays.
Over the past several years, there have been increasing calls to reexamine his case. In 2022, a probe sought by a group of bipartisan legislators concluded that the state's investigation was severely flawed.
"Considering the facts we uncovered, and that there exists no physical forensic evidence or credible corroborating testimony linking Glossip to the crime, our conclusion is that no reasonable juror hearing the complete record would have convicted Richard Glossip of first-degree murder," said investigator Stan Perry in a June 2022 press release.
When a separate investigation reached similar conclusions last month, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he had formally filed for Glossip to have his conviction overturned and for him to receive a new trial.
"After thorough and serious deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot stand behind the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip," Drummond explained in an April 6th statement. "This is not to say I believe he is innocent. However, it is critical that Oklahomans have absolute faith that the death penalty is administered fairly and with certainty."
It didn't seem to work. On April 20, an appeals court denied Drummond's motion. Less than a week later, a parole board also declined to grant Glossip clemency.
But then, last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in. The Court has stayed Glossip's upcoming execution, pending a future decision as to whether the Court will formally take up the case. While it is rare for the Supreme Court to consider death penalty cases, it is also rare for a state attorney general to admit that a death-row prisoner did not receive a fair trial.
"There has never been an execution in the history of this country where the state and the defense agreed that the defendant was not afforded a fair trial," state Rep. Kevin McDugle (R–Broken Arrow) said on Thursday. "Oklahoma cannot become the first."
The post The Supreme Court Has Halted Richard Glossip's Execution appeared first on Reason.com.

I have twice met the man who has just been crowned King Charles III, both times on occasions so unmemorable that I am certain he cannot possibly recall either one. I recall them very well, of course—where we were (once in London, once in Warsaw); what we wore (he, gray pinstripes; I, a black dress); what we said (nothing of consequence). That’s the essence of my relationship to the new king, and also the essence of all of our relationships with royalty. They know nothing whatsoever about us, but we remember absolutely everything about them.Sometimes, in fact, we know an extraordinary amount about them. Without ever having tried especially hard, I know more details about the relationship between Charles and Queen Camilla than I know about, say, the relationship between my sister and my brother-in-law. Because their phones are tapped and the transcripts are then published, because their courtiers have an enormous incentive to leak gossip, because even their relatives have much to gain by talking and writing about them—because of all this, I know things about them almost by osmosis. Even if I don’t want to know the intimate details, I just do.Not that this is their fault. Of course they can be criticized for failing to navigate the world of celebrity journalism and for their clumsy attempts to manipulate it. But they didn’t create it, and it isn’t a world they were ever going to inhabit comfortably. This royal family has been singularly unprepared to function as a national soap opera. In its modern incarnation, the British monarchy long succeeded because it was precisely the opposite, and the Windsors would have been happy to continue in that tradition.[Read: The petulant king]All they have ever wanted, it seems, was to follow the rules laid out by the Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose influential book The English Constitution, published in 1867, argued that the ideal constitutional monarch is unknowable, unreachable. Their personality should be dull; their opinions kept to themselves. A queen is not friendly or relatable; a king is not someone with whom you would like to have a beer. The more he is perceived as a symbol—of the nation, of unity, of history—and the less he seems like an actual human being, the more effective he will be. “Its mystery is its life,” Bagehot wrote of the monarchy. “We must not let in daylight upon magic.”The Windsors took this idea and ran with it. The late Queen’s rather rigid public persona, her careful avoidance of controversy, even her chilly (by modern standards) methods of raising her children—all of that seems to have been a deliberate attempt to fit into Bagehot’s definition. Throughout her life, she sought to preserve the mystery, to keep out the daylight. Then she taught Charles to do the same.But during her reign the world changed. Slowly, the Royal Family agreed to do more public events, to have more contact with ordinary people, even to appear in some prime-time television specials (It’s a Royal Knockout, a kind of game show, was one notable failure). Charles, as Prince of Wales, devoted himself to sustainable farming, walkable towns, environmental causes. He was many years ahead of the curve—he made a speech denouncing the excessive use of plastics, and predicting damage to the environment, as far back as 1970—but got little credit for it. Instead, daylight was let in, the magic disappeared, and it’s not necessary to explain what happened next, because all of us know, whether we want to or not. Eventually we got to where we are now, an era of dueling interviews, staged photographs, and competing best-selling memoirs. And this is now the problem: If there is no magic about the monarch, then what possible constitutional purpose does he serve?Saturday’s coronation, so carefully planned and orchestrated, was an attempt to fix that problem. The King did not have to be anointed behind a screen. He did not have to put on a crown containing a ruby supposedly worn by Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt. He certainly did not have to travel in a famously uncomfortable golden coach, or encourage his family to dress like characters out of Star Wars. But he chose to do all of these things in an attempt to shroud himself in the same mystery that enveloped his mother. The moment he had the crown fixed on his head, he kept his face expressionless. He showed no joy, no relief after so many decades of waiting. He wanted to look like the image of a monarch on a postage stamp, and he did.Will his subjects accept this transformation? For some it isn’t necessary; tens of thousands were celebrating along the parade route and outside Buckingham Palace on Saturday, despite the inevitable rain. For others Charles’s attempt to attain mystery and distance doesn’t matter, because even if they don’t accept this change, they can’t do anything about it anyway. A long time ago, a British friend reminded me that when Queen Elizabeth died, there would be no vote or plebiscite on Charles’s worthiness, no moment when the country paused to ask whether they still wanted a monarch. He would just become king, instantaneously: The Queen is dead; long live the King. And so it came to pass. There wasn’t a nanosecond in which it was possible to ask, “Do we really want a king?” or “Do we want this particular king?,” and probably there never will be. Habit is powerful, the pull of old traditions is real. I don’t foresee Charles being ejected from his palaces, and I would also be surprised if his son does not, in due course, become King William.[Helen Lewis: King Charles’s absurd, awe-inspiring coronation]But for many other people, the unease will reflect itself in other ways—or maybe it already has. Maybe the decline of the magical part of the British constitution has an echo in the diminishing faith in so many other British institutions, from the judiciary and the Parliament to the National Health Service and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Maybe the excess of daylight inside the monarchy plays a small part in explaining why arguments about the British empire are breaking out now, in the 2020s, decades after most of that empire wound down; or why conservative newspapers that once defended the establishment used phrases like “saboteurs” or “enemies of the people” to describe judges and members of the House of Lords during the bitter debate about Brexit.Possibly this unease helps explain why more people watched Elizabeth’s funeral last year than Charles’s coronation last weekend. One commemorated the past; the other was meant to look toward the future. But it doesn’t feel like a future in which the monarchy will become stronger or grander, or more expansive, or more powerful—or even more relevant, as the new king so clearly hopes it will be.    When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On Monday, a TikTok video showing a startling decline in the average income of young college graduates since the 1980s went viral. In the video, a young woman compares the supposed average salaries of recent college grads in 1982 and 2022. She claims that "the average college grad in 2022 is making $55,260," while "in 1982, the average college grad was making $102,200" in today's dollars. She adds, "This sentiment being held by boomers of, 'Oh, well, they're just expecting too much,' I just don't think they know what numbers they're talking about."
However, her claims are simply wrong. Not only does the average college graduate today earn more than their 1980s counterparts, but they're also graduating into the most robust labor market in decades.
It's not clear where exactly the young woman sourced her claims about relative college graduate salaries from, though Jeremy Horpedahl, an economics professor at the University of Central Arkansas, suggested on Twitter that it could have come from a 2007 table published by the National Center for Education Statistics.
According to the table, the average recent college graduate in May 1981 earned $15,200 per year—which is just over $51,000 in 2023 dollars. However, the video states that the average recent college graduate actually made $33,700 per year, which she claims amounts to over $100,000 in today's dollars. Her error, it seems, may have come from misreading the table, which lists $33,700 as the May 1981 salary for recent college graduates when adjusted to 2006 dollars.
In fact, rather than finding themselves much poorer than their boomer or Generation X parents, recent college graduates seem to be making more on average than college grads 40 years ago. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average 25- to 34-year-old with a bachelor's degree made $59,600 in 2020. For those right out of college, the National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that the average starting salary of a 2021 college grad was $58,862.
However, the video's rapid spread indicates more than the gullibility of the average Twitter or TikTok user. It also indicates a pervasive, yet unwarranted pessimism in many young people who seem to think that landing a good entry-level job is all but impossible in today's economy.
"I think boomers just have such a hard time conceptualizing this because they never had to fight for jobs," the young woman in the video says. "They were at the upswing of technology, they were at the upswing of big business, capitalism was booming, and then they look at us and they're thinking…entitled."
But that description actually matches far better to the current economic situation than the one of 40 years ago. Not only is tech innovation booming, but it's also simply much easier to get a job in 2023 than it was in the early '80s. In 2023, the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low—3.6 percent average in 2022 as opposed to an average of 9.7 percent in 1982. For college graduates, the unemployment rate is even lower—just 2.5 percent on average in 2022.
While it can be easy to get bogged down by messages that the economic reality for young people is bleak, the truth is that, at least on the metric of average salary, the world is bright for recent college graduates—and anyone else looking for a job for that matter.
The post No, the Average College Grad Wasn't Making $100,000 in the 1980s appeared first on Reason.com.

For almost a decade, the West has been engaged in a deepening conflict. Sometimes it flares up as a political debate; sometimes as a culture war. But whatever form it takes, it is inevitably framed as a disagreement between classes, races or ideologies.
This is a mistake. Demography may be destiny, but it is geography that determines its political shape. The greatest division today is to do with place: in particular, three basic terroirs — urban, suburban and rural — which reflect a divergence in economic interest, family structure and basic values, particularly between big city economies and those on the periphery.
This fracture is widening at a time when the demographic balance between these regions is shifting. For much of the past two centuries, the overwhelming inclination was towards urbanisation, with dense cores serving as the prime engines of economic, cultural and social change. Today, however, that pattern is shifting, particularly since the pandemic, which saw two million citizens move out of big US cities. Even in urban-oriented Europe, 63% of cities experienced a population decline during the pandemic.
Does this mean “the era of urban supremacy is over”, as the New York Times put it? Quite possibly. But don’t expect the urban leadership to acknowledge it. Even as they desperately attempt (and largely fail) to lure workers back downtown, urban political interests continue to dominate the national conversation — even amid high levels of crime, street-level disorder and the resulting shuttering of businesses.
Largely ignored by the city-dominated media, the world’s urban core has been losing this battle for generations. This is not only evident in the United States, but also across Europe and Australia. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, little more than 5% of growth from 1966 to 2021 was in the core cities. In Europe, barely 37% of people live in cities, with the rest in fast-growing suburbs, small towns and rural areas.
Of course, many cities have experienced some revival over the past decade, but that “boom” has largely benefited educated newcomers and their wealthy employers. Urban regions became both richer and poorer; according to Pew research, the greatest inequality in America now exists in “superstar cities”, such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and San Jose.
These shifts have, unsurprisingly, shaped urban politics. As middle-class families have left, the urban terroir has been gutted of the old urban bulwark of solid middle and working-class families; as Fred Siegel has observed, it is dominated by an “upstairs/downstairs” coalition of the affluent and dependent.

This demographic reality has driven a shift towards a more progressive politics. In 1984, for example, Ronald Reagan won 31% of the vote in San Francisco and 27.4% in Manhattan. In 2016, Donald Trump won only 10% of the vote in each. Between 1998 and 2018, urban counties — which sometimes includes suburbs — went from 55% to 62% Democratic. Today, there is not a single Republican Mayor of a city of more than one million people. Recent victories of progressives in Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, despite widespread social disorder and economic decline, suggest this pattern may well be inexorable.
The antipode to the urban terroir lies in the countryside and rural hinterlands, which are experiencing a modest revival across the Western world. Yet even as they begin to regain appeal, rural areas are struggling against the dominant urban drive to “net zero”, which threatens economies based on local fossil fuel development, farming and manufacturing. For instance, it was high energy prices brought on by climate policies that sparked the Gilets Jaunes movement in France’s small towns, villages and exurban communities. To meet climate demands and limit their use of chemical fertilisers, Dutch farmers, among the world’s most efficient and ecology minded, have similarly risen up and joined their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts.
Even worse, the urban elites propose reaching their net zero fantasies by physically disfiguring rural communities. This offensive is being pushed by oligarchs such as J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who resents peasants blocking land acquisition for subsidy-driven “green” investments and seeks federal help to secure these lands. But he is just one man of a wider movement, in which rural areas, home to the vast majority of proposed new solar and wind projects, are now asked to fulfil the green dreams of Manhattan, San Francisco and west Los Angeles. In California, the Nature Conservancy estimates that fulfilling the state’s net zero targets would require up to one-tenth of the farming acreage in the coming decades.
People living in the areas have responded as one might expect: between 2015 and 2022, community rejections of such projects in the US grew from 50 to over 500. A similar narrative is playing out throughout the EU and among farmers Australia, who fear transmission lines and windmills will not only make their farms less productive, but destroy the surrounding landscape.
For now, the political revival in small towns and rural areas represents an enormous boost to the Right. The once-strong progressive populism of rural communities has evaporated as more residents now feel more threatened by urban interests than corporate power. As a 2020 study from the Bennett Institute at the University of Cambridge found, there is a “deepening geographical fracture” in European societies reminiscent of “the stark urban-rural political divides of the early 20th century”.
This can be seen most clearly in the United States. In 2008, Barack Obama won nearly one quarter of the country’s non-metro counties. Eight years later, Hillary Clinton won barely 10%. In the past, notes Ernie Goss, professor of economics at Creighton University, the rural states regularly elected Democrats. How will Biden fare? “He couldn’t get a cup of coffee in this part of the country,” he told me. “To say he’s unpopular is an understatement.”
Suggested reading Will America win from de-dollarisation?By Thomas Fazi
Caught between these two increasingly extreme polities lies the third terroir, “the middle landscape” of suburban and exurban areas. Although these areas constitute an absolute majority of Americans and two-thirds of Europe’s 99 largest metros, they have little political power. This largely reflects the fact that suburbs tend to be populated by middle and working-class households, often too preoccupied with making a living and raising a family to indulge in political theatre. In other words, the middle landscape has the numbers, but has not found its voice.
Yet ultimately, it is the suburbs that will determine America’s future. They remain, unlike the other terroirs, contestable, home to at least 40% of all US House seats. For almost 20 years, the Republican-leaning suburban voters held steady at around 47%, with Democratic leaders at 45%. In 2016, the suburbs voted 50 to 45 for Trump, but two years later the suburban electorate tilted blue, effectively handing the House back to the Democrats. Then, in 2022, the predicted GOP landslide never developed, in large part because suburbanites split their ballots.
Whether this will be repeated remains unclear. On the one hand, Biden’s embrace of policies that seek to force communities to densify and take in low-income residents are not likely to be widely popular among suburbanites, who, after all, moved there to escape the city. On the other, the suburb’s changing demography could work to the favour of Democrats, as culturally liberal millennials and ethnic minorities join the city exodus.
But none of this represents the politics of choice — a programme suited to the needs and aspirations of this middle terroir. Right now, politics is inflicted on these communities rather than being shaped around them. Until they gain a voice, the West’s geographical cleavage will continue to widen, producing endless conflicts that fail the majority caught in between.

A California high school student wanted to pass out literature critical of the dairy industry outside her school's cafeteria—but the school administration wouldn't let her, fearing that, unless she passed out pro-dairy flyers as well, the school would be found in violation of U.S. Department of Agriculture rules that bar anti-dairy speech on school grounds. The student has now filed a First Amendment lawsuit—challenging both the school's policy and the UDSA's pro-dairy regulations.
Marielle Williamson is a senior at Eagle Rock Junior/Senior High School in Los Angeles. Williamson is the president of the school's Animal Awareness Club, which seeks to raise awareness about the environmental and ethical consequences of animal product consumption. In February, Williamson sought permission from her school principal, Derek Steinorth, to pass out literature outside the school cafeteria on the environmental, ethical, and health implications of consuming dairy products.
According to the lawsuit, Steinorth gave a confusing response, telling her "You can have a table set up outside at lunch with her flyers on the pros and cons of drinking milk, but you should also have some literature for both sides of the debate," adding, "I don't think [these restrictions are] too unreasonable."
Obviously, being required to pass out material that would undermine her goals and beliefs concerned Williamson, who replied that if "sharing materials that promote dairy [is] required in order for [sic] to proceed with the event…we would not do the event."
She again emailed Steinorth to explain that "the point of this campaign is to counter industry-funded misinformation on dairy, and those flyers you provided fall into that category. Handing those out at the same time would defeat the purpose of our event." She asked for a final response as to whether the event could go forward as it was originally planned. Steinorth did not reply.
After several more follow-ups, Steinorth replied that he "was asked to make sure that those materials were available as well. I completely understand your point though." Williamson was unable to go forward with her event, fearing discipline if she were to pass out anti-dairy materials without also providing pro-dairy literature.
Like many public and private schools across the country, Eagle Rock participates in the USDA's National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Participating schools are subject to a litany of bizarre USDA regulations that mandate that officials "shall not directly or indirectly restrict the sale or marketing of fluid milk products by the school (or by a person approved by the school) at any time or any place (i) on the school premises; or (ii) at any school-sponsored event."
Not only are schools barred from displaying any material that could deter students from drinking cow's milk, but they also can't make water too enticing for students as an alternative drink with their meals. "While water must be made available," the rule reads, "schools must not directly or indirectly restrict the sale or marketing of fluid milk" and "are not to promote or offer water or any other beverage as an alternative selection to fluid milk throughout the food service area."
Further, students can only get dairy milk substitutes if they provide a written statement attesting to a disability that keeps them from drinking dairy milk. (It's worth noting that lactose intolerance is increasingly common, especially among Hispanic, black, and Asian populations.)
According to the lawsuit "The dairy industry monitors schools for alleged 'violations,'" of these "Milk Marketing Protections," and noncompliant schools can be subjected to fines. This, it seems, is what motivated Steinorth's concerns.
According to the suit, both the school's policy requiring that Williamson pass out pro-dairy literature and the USDA rules that seemed to motivate it, clearly violate Williamson's First Amendment rights to engage in nondisruptive political speech at school. Not only are the UDSA's regulations "unconstitutionally vague" and "objectively" chilling anti-dairy speech at schools, but also "by compelling Marielle to simultaneously distribute the dairy misinformation that she seeks to refute," the lawsuit argues, "District Defendants have violated Marielle's free speech rights."
Requiring students to pass out material that directly contradicts the purpose of their political speech—a practice the school district applies solely to the subject of dairy, not to other political topics—is clearly a violation of students' First Amendment rights. If Williamson succeeds in her lawsuit, she might not only strike down a bizarre school policy but the excessive government regulations that mandate schools to push dairy products on students.
The post School Mandates Milk Propaganda at Anti-Dairy Event appeared first on Reason.com.

Rochelle Walensky is resigning from her post as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She has overseen the agency since the beginning of President Joe Biden's term and greatly expanded the CDC's authority.
Walensky's reign was chiefly characterized by her extreme reluctance to reverse the CDC's support for ongoing pandemic restrictions. When she took the helm in January 2021, the COVID-19 vaccine rollout was just getting underway, and there was good reason to believe that the most vulnerable people would soon enjoy robust protection from severe disease and death. Walensky, however, was not inclined to let the CDC's influence wane. For instance, she repeatedly extended the CDC's eviction moratorium, a policy that made it extremely difficult for landlords to collect rent; the Supreme Court finally struck down the illegal order in August 2021.
Walensky firmly believed that CDC guidance on COVID-19 policies should reflect the up-to-date scientific consensus—that is, unless the science had arrived at a conclusion that vexed her. Walensky's CDC put incredible faith in junk studies that purported to prove the importance of mask mandates in schools. When the legitimacy of these studies came into question, she declined to reverse course and admit that ritualistically masking schoolchildren was unnecessary. As late as February 2022, she still maintained that "masking should happen in all schools right now."
When challenged on her policies, Walensky would demur and claim that CDC guidance on masks was just that—guidance. She sounded a similar note as COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, who cloaked his enthusiasm for shutting down all of society under the guise of mere suggestion. The fact of the matter is that government policy makers at the local, state, and federal level routinely outsourced their COVID-19 decision making to Walensky and Fauci. They put their thumbs on the scales of lockdowns and mask mandates, and thus the U.S. continued these policies far longer than did our peer countries. The World Health Organization (WHO), in contrast, never recommended masks for children under 6 at all, and many Nordic countries were unwilling to mask kids up to age 11.
Of course, Walensky wasn't necessarily looking to European peer countries for advice. She was far more inclined to celebrate the alleged success of China's "really strict lockdowns," which involved the country's authoritarian government starving some people via mandatory quarantine detention centers and trapping others inside burning buildings. (China eventually succumbed to the inevitable, gave up on its draconian lockdowns, and implicitly admitted that the "zero-COVID" policy was a fantasy.)
Walensky's CDC also pursued the questionable strategy of purging so-called misinformation about COVID-19 from social media. Throughout her time in charge, the CDC became the de facto internet speech police. Emails obtained by Reason show that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, routinely deferred moderation decisions to government health authorities.
Meta might have thought it had little choice but to seek the CDC's input, as Biden had publicly declared that the social media platform's failure to suppress allegedly misleading content was "killing people." In any case, this is a dangerous precedent, and it represents a serious escalation in the federal bureaucracy's war on disfavored speech.
Walensky's exit from the CDC comes just a few days before the official end of the national COVID-19 pandemic on May 11. Whoever takes over the agency should concentrate on rebalancing its decidedly unhealthy approach to individual liberty.
The post Rochelle Walensky Leaves a CDC That's Far More Powerful Than When She Entered It appeared first on Reason.com.

Regardless of how the U.S. Supreme Court rules on President Joe Biden's plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for some federal borrowers, the White House is also pushing ahead with a new repayment plan that will lower what many student borrowers end up owing.
It's going to be significantly costlier than the Department of Education originally projected.
A new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows that Biden's so-called income-driven repayment plan will cost at least $230 billion over 10 years—with an additional $45 billion in costs likely coming if the Supreme Court invalidates the White House's student loan forgiveness scheme. That means the final tab could be more than twice the $138 billion price tag attached to the proposal by the Department of Education, which is overseeing the program's rollout.
Under current law, federal student loan payments are capped at 10 percent of an individual's "discretionary income," which the Department of Education defines as income that exceeds 150 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. In practice, that means a single borrower with no children starts making payments on income that exceeds $20,400.
Biden wants to lower that threshold to 5 percent for undergraduate loans and impose a new limit of 10 percent for loans put toward a graduate degree. Biden's plan would also wipe away outstanding student debt after 10 years of payments for those who borrowed $12,000 or less—and a maximum payment period of 20 years no matter how much was borrowed.
But if you cap monthly payments at a lower level and also shorten the allowable repayment time, there will be a lot of loans that never get paid back in full. That cost ultimately falls on the taxpayers, and that's what the dueling estimates from the CBO and the Department of Education are all about.
The gap between the two estimates is a telling one.
The CBO points out that the Department of Education did not account for the "behavioral effects" of the new policy—in other words, it did not include estimates for how many additional students would take out loans if the repayment method was altered.
The CBO, however, did. It found that reducing what student loan borrowers will eventually have to pay back unsurprisingly caused more students to take out loans—including loans that they would be unable to pay off in full. Overall, the annual volume of student loans would increase by about 12 percent, the CBO estimated, with both undergraduate and graduate students seeking more loans.
"Students who would be expected to take out federal loans would borrow more," Leah Koestner, a CBO budget analyst concluded in a presentation on Wednesday. And "some students who would not be expected to borrow under current law would take out loans."
Biden would be continuing a now-decadeslong trend of reducing the limits on the federal government's income-driven repayment plans for student loans—and an equally long trend of those changes costing more than the Department of Education anticipates.
It was President George W. Bush who signed into law the first income-driven repayment plan. As Reason's Mike Riggs explained in the November 2022 issue, the original plan "pegged monthly loan payments for participating borrowers to 15 percent of their adjusted gross income and forgave the remaining balance of those loans after 25 years. In 2015, Obama shortened those numbers to 10 percent and 20 years for many borrowers."
"All of these policies," Riggs wrote, "have costs that eclipsed the Education Department's projections, and that is because the Education Department sucks at projecting costs."
The CBO's projections of the long-term costs of Biden's payment plan could be wrong, of course, as all such estimates can. But to completely ignore the ways in which easing student loan payments might cause more students to take out more loans—as the Department of Education's model does—seems wildly flawed and obviously inaccurate.
The Biden administration says student loans are a debilitating cost on recent college grads, but this repayment policy will result in more students taking on more college debt—and passing the excess costs onto taxpayers. That hardly seems like a solution.
The post Biden's Student Loan Plan Could Cost Twice as Much as Projected appeared first on Reason.com.

We now have a Biden Doctrine. The Biden administration has set it out in a striking recent address by national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Sullivan outlines the administration’s international economic policy, but it is really the overarching framework for President Biden’s approach to the world, defining in lucid terms the ideas behind the slogan “a foreign policy for the middle class.”

Sullivan is a fiercely intelligent thinker and skilled policymaker who has come to dominate policy in the administration. His speech showcases these talents, and many of the specific initiatives are smart and worth pursuing. But the overall approach left me worried, along three broad dimensions.

First, it is a fundamentally pessimistic view of America’s recent history. Sullivan recalls the glory days of American economic power after 1945, but then notes that in “the last few decades” that strength has waned. He talks about the hollowing-out of the country’s industrial base, the export of American jobs and the atrophying of industries. We “stopped really focusing on building,” Sullivan said, as he summarized the subsidies, tariffs, bans and investments that are at the heart of Biden’s new approach.

Ironically, only a couple of weeks before Sullivan made his speech, the Economist had a cover story on “America’s astonishing economic record.” It begins with 1990 — often used as the start of the rot in the narrative of decline — and points out that despite the rise of huge new economies such as China and India, the United States’ share of global gross domestic product has stayed roughly the same since then: around 25 percent. During that same period, America’s share of the Group of Seven’s economic output increased substantially, from 40 percent to 58 percent. Today, eight of the world’s 10 biggest companies are American. In 1989, only four were American (and six were Japanese). As for building, during these decades, the United States created and built the information economy, surely one of the greatest transformations and advances in human history.

In 1990, the great fear in the United States was of being overtaken by Japan, then seen as the predatory economic power that was eating our lunch. But, as the Economist notes in the same edition, in 1990, the income per person in the United States was just 17 percent higher than in Japan; today it is a staggering 54 percent higher. Look at demographics or energy or leading technology companies, and everywhere you see the United States in a dominant position. Perhaps we got something right.

The second worry I have is of the efficacy of large-scale government intervention in the economy. Sullivan outlines the need for federal subsidies in certain areas, either to maintain the technological lead or for national security reasons. Brilliant people such as Sullivan might think they are well-positioned to identify the key strategic industries that need support. But historically, these kinds of interventions have not gone so well. Companies focus on lobbying the government rather than responding to the market, subsidies once in place become eternal, and innovation slows down. In the 1980s and 1990s, Japan’s much-admired technocrats picked industries and companies to push the country into the lead. Their strategic investments in artificial intelligence, maglev trains, micromachines and HDTV all proved to be “multimillion dollar debacles” in the words of a Harvard Business Review essay.

Finally, Sullivan insisted that these polices were not designed to be “America First” or “America Alone.” But the facts are clear. Almost every element of Biden’s economic policy has a “Buy America” component to it. Its green subsidies are causing some European companies to build new plants in the United States. This sounds great to Americans but not to Europeans, who must now offer industries their own bribes to invest at home instead. It conjures up an autarchic vision of the world that is quite far removed from reality. (The iPhone, for example, is made with products from dozens of countries across six continents — though the vast majority of the profits accrue in the United States.) And as the United States preaches the need for a rules-based international order, it is worth noting that this new Biden Doctrine is violating the core of that order; every one of these policies is in violation of the letter or spirit of the World Trade Organization and its framework of open trade. This hypocrisy is rarely discussed in the United States but frequently and angrily pointed out abroad.

The greatest challenge for Americans over the past few decades has been that middle-class wages have not kept up with rising costs of living. That problem will surely get exacerbated by raising costs of goods throughout the economy through tariffs and industrial policy. As former treasury secretary and Post contributing columnist Lawrence H. Summers points out, protecting the 60,000 workers in the American steel industry sounds smart, but when you do it by raising the price of steel, the 6 million workers who use steel as an input in their goods all suffer. A foreign policy that produces persistent, systemic inflation will fail to deliver for the middle class, who are, as Joe Biden often says, its intended beneficiaries.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekToday I invite emails debating any of the following subjects: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, or natural resources. Read on for more context.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteAfter the television host Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News, he posted a video message to Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, he noted that, in his newfound “time off” he has observed that “most of the debates you see on television” are so stupid and irrelevant that, in five years, we won’t even remember we had them. “Trust me, as someone who's participated,” he added, which squares with my impression of his show––an assessment I feel comfortable making only because I have carefully documented its shoddy reasoning.But then Carlson added: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.” I disagree, and not just because I intend to air your perspectives on those very subjects.Last March, this newsletter invited debate about the war in Ukraine and ran your responses. On the whole, The Atlantic––and most of the mainstream media––has published a lot more total articles from people who are supportive of Western aid for Ukraine, as I am, than contrary perspectives. But as you can see, this newsletter has made it a point to highlight the smartest writing I could find from different perspectives. If you look, you can find additional examples of contrasting perspectives from across the U.S. media: in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Review, Vox, and beyond. There are all sorts of plausible critiques of the way the American news media has covered Ukraine. But “debate is not permitted” is demonstrably false.On civil liberties, which I’ve championed on scores of occasions in The Atlantic, the notion that debate isn’t permitted is likewise preposterous. Few issues are debated more than the parameters of free speech, abortion rights, gun rights, transgender rights, pandemic rights and restrictions, and more. “Emerging science” is a bit vague, but surely debates about mRNA-vaccine mandates and artificial intelligence count. The Atlantic has repeatedly published entries in ongoing debates about demographic change. I understand corporate power to be a perennial topic of debate in journalistic organizations. As for natural resources, I’ve recently read about subjects including climate change, gas stoves, Colorado River water supply, oil drilling and pipelines, and plastics pollution.Again, there are all sorts of critiques of the media that are plausible, on those subjects and others, but the particular critique that Carlson actually prepared and uttered is demonstrably false, so I find it strange that so many people reacted to it by treating Carlson as if he is a truth-teller. Lots of people in the American media work much harder at avoiding the utterance of falsehoods.How to Mark May 1?The law professor Ilya Somin commemorates it every year in a highly nontraditional fashion, arguing that we all ought to treat the traditional workers holiday as Victims of Communism Day.Here’s his case:
Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so …
Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.
Meanwhile, at the World Socialist Web Site, David North published the speech he gave to open the International May Day Online Rally. His remarks included provocative statements about the war in Ukraine:
The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago. Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion—as if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russia—the war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.
In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to “organize Europe,” it was the ambition of US imperialism to “organize the world.” Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotsky’s analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: “The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table … the world does not organize itself.” But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.
Imperialism is objectionable but to me that premise leads to a starkly different conclusion: that the imperial ambitions of Russia and China ought to be resisted and that insofar as NATO or the United States helps Ukraine or Taiwan, we are reducing the likelihood of imperial conquest, not engaging in it.More to Come on Trans IssuesAnother batch of responses from readers should be coming soon. (If you missed the first batch, they’re here.) In the meantime, here’s a question from the Up for Debate reader Paul, who writes:
I have come to understand and accept that the concept of “gender” is largely a social construct, is not synonymous with “sex,” and indeed is not dependent upon or related to sex in any objective way. This notion—that gender and sex are independent attributes—is, I think, one of the ideas that is fundamental to understanding and accepting transgender people. For many young people, this idea seems simple and self-evident. Yet, for anyone who has lived any length of time in a culture where, for centuries, these two words held virtually identical meanings, separating them can be a real struggle.
It is with that thought in mind—the acceptance of the fundamental difference between gender and sex—that I approach the issue of transgender people participating in competitive sport with the following sincere question: Are sports competitions divided by gender or are they divided by sex? If sports are divided by sex, then it follows logically that gender should have nothing to do with the discussion. That is, it follows that transgender people should only participate in sports along with those of their same birth sex. On the other hand, if sports participation is divided along gender lines, then everyone of the same gender (obviously, by definition this must include transgender people) should be invited to participate, regardless of sex. Is there more evidence that sports are arranged as a competition between those of the same sex, or those of the same gender?
Provocation of the WeekAt Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider writes that for a long time, she assumed that “with no material incentives in one direction or another, people will think more freely. A world in which no one has to worry about where their paycheck will come will be a world in which people are more likely to be courageous, and tell the truth more openly. And of course, it is obvious how financial incentives can distort truth-telling. This is, of course, the justification for academic tenure.”

Now she wonders if tenure may actually pave the way for more conformity. She explains:
First and foremost, it is not the case that free people will necessarily speak truthfully. No matter the romantic notions we like to hold about ourselves, humans do not deeply desire to “speak the truth”. There are more beautiful things to say, things that make us feel good about ourselves and our respective tribes, things that grant us hope and moral strength and personal significance—truth, meanwhile, is insufferably inconvenient, occasionally ugly, and insensitive to our feelings. But lies, by their very nature, can be as beautiful and emotionally satisfying as our imaginations will allow them.
Unfortunately, some degree of fidelity to reality is often required to prosper, and so occasionally we must choose truth. But that degree is dependent on our environments: lies are a luxury which some can afford more than others. Material freedom isn’t just the freedom to tell the truth, it is the freedom to tell lies and get away with it. As I’ve noted before, the lack of economic pressures can clear the way for independent thinking, but they can also remove crucial “skin in the game” that might keep one tethered to reality.

I suspect that on the whole, tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments. If keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be “concern-free”. Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers. (And in fact, we do see this playing out at universities. Professors are more protected from the pressures of the outside world due to tenure, yet they are uniquely subservient to the politics within their local university environment.) …
Academics actively shape their own environments. They grant students their doctorates, they help hire other faculty, they elect their department chairs. When an idea becomes prominent in academia, the structure of the environment selects for more of the same … When you are forced to coexist with the enemy, you develop norms which allow both parties to function with as much freedom and fairness as possible. Ideologically mixed groups will, in other words, tend to emphasize objective process because they do not agree on ends. This environment is fairly conducive to the pursuit of truth.
More uniform groups, on the other hand, will tend to abandon process—rushing instead towards the end they are predisposed to believe is true and willing to use dubious means to get there. This creates a hostile environment for dissenting members, and over time, there will be less of them and more uniformity, which will inevitably lead to an even more hostile environment for dissent. When a majority ideology develops, it is likely only to increase in influence, and when it is sufficiently powerful, it can begin competing with reality itself.
I retain hope that tenure does more good than harm but encourage faculty members who enjoy it to exhibit more courage to dissent from any orthodoxies of thought they regard as questionable.

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 2, 2023, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Edward Osborne Wilson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Edward Osborne Wilson was a passionate and supremely expert myrmecologist.  His impact as one of the most influential biologists of his generation, however, extended far beyond ants, and his contributions transcended science.  Through his prolific popular writing, he inspired legions of readers to follow careers in science and to become engaged in the struggle to understand and promote biodiversity.
Wilson’s early enthusiasm for the natural world was transformed at the age of seven by a fishing accident that blinded him in one eye.  The lack of stereo vision steered him towards the microscope, where he specialized in what he memorably called “the little things that run the world,” ants.  In his 1994 memoir, “Naturalist,” he chronicles his first-hand education in natural history as an Eagle Scout exploring the coast of Florida, the back roads and bayous of Alabama, the galleries of the Smithsonian, and the living exhibits of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
Wilson’s undergraduate and master’s degrees were from the University of Alabama.  He briefly enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Tennessee but, with the encouragement of William L. Brown, Jr., a fellow myrmecologist in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, he transferred to Harvard, completing his Ph.D. in 1955 and marrying Irene (“Renee”) Kelley the same year.  Wilson immediately joined the Harvard faculty until his retirement in 1997, continuing as an unusually active emeritus member until his death in 2021, at age 92, from complications following a fall.  Only weeks earlier, he had been busily planning collecting expeditions to Cuba and Brazil.
As a graduate student, Wilson was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows. This cultivated his interdisciplinary thinking and allowed him to expand his biological horizons through a year-long expedition to study ants on islands throughout Melanesia. His interest in how new species form resulted in several significant publications, including one on “character displacement” with Bill Brown (1956) that described how similar species evolve differences to minimize competition in regions where they occur together.   Wilson’s paper on the “taxon cycle” (1961) described how colonizing species undergo ecologically driven cycles of range expansion and contraction.
Despite his sustained focus on insects, Wilson never lost sight of the big picture, and grand synthesis was a hallmark of his career.  “The Theory of Island Biogeography” with Robert MacArthur (1967) remains one of the most influential books in population biology; “The Insect Societies” (1971) is the standard work on the subject; “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” (1975) is perhaps the most influential book on animal behavior and behavioral ecology ever written.  The little things/big picture feature of Wilson’s career is well illustrated by the contrast between “Biophilia” (1984) on the vital importance of the natural world to human wellbeing and “Pheidole in the New World” (2003), an 818-page monograph that includes descriptions and his illustrations of 341 new ant species.  Wilson won two Pulitzer Prizes for General Nonfiction for “On Human Nature” (1979) and for “The Ants” (1990) with his longtime collaborator and friend Bert Hölldobler.
Wilson’s research was not without controversy.  “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis” features 27 chapters devoted to an exploration of the biological basis of social behavior in different animal groups.  The final chapter on the implications for human behavior provoked a firestorm of criticism complete with evocations of eugenics and culminating in a group of protestors affiliated with the International Committee Against Racism pouring a pitcher of cold water on Wilson’s head at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association.  This controversy continues to smolder, flaring up recently when, after his death, some of his correspondence with discredited academics came to light.
Despite a lifetime spent in the Northeast, Wilson always remained a Southern gentleman, and, in person, he was gracious and often deferential.  In print and at the lectern, however, he was fearless, plunging into areas he knew to be controversial. Wilson’s response to the pushback generated by “Sociobiology” was to double down, producing “On Human Nature” in 1978, which expanded the scope of his biological analysis of our species.  With “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge” (1998), he unveiled a biology-based framework for approaching the humanities.  In 2010, in a paper with mathematicians, Wilson disavowed a central tenet of his earlier work, namely that patterns of genetic relatedness drive the evolution of the complex societies seen in insects like ants.  This pivot in his thinking provoked another high-profile debate played out on the pages of “Nature.”
Perhaps what history will deem Wilson’s most significant contributions came later in his life through his multifaceted promotion of conservation. The seeds of his passion were planted in the classroom at Harvard, where students flocked to his fabled lectures on the wonders (and value) of the natural world.  In 2007, he established the Encyclopedia of Life, which aims to have a webpage for every species.  Drawing on his Alabama boyhood, he preached the value of appreciating the biodiversity in our own backyards.  He reached out to politicians, movie stars, and religious leaders to advocate for the conservation of the Creation, arguing that we have a duty to protect biodiversity and proposing the Half-Earth Project as an ideal in which 50 percent of the planet should be set aside for conservation.
Wilson was an extraordinarily wide-ranging thinker and synthesizer.  His writings have had a lasting impact on generations of readers, and his efforts on behalf of biodiversity will remain critical to attempts to save the planet.  Among the more than 100 awards he received are national distinctions such as the U.S. National Medal of Science and international ones including the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Japan’s International Prize for Biology, the Prix de l’Institut de la Vie (Paris), Italy’s Presidential Medal, the Gold Medal for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, the Catalonia International Prize, and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal International Prize for Science.
Wilson’s beloved wife of 66 years Irene K. Wilson died on Aug. 7, 2021. They leave a daughter, Catherine I. Gargill, of Orlando, Florida.
Respectfully submitted,
Brian D. Farrell
Gonzalo Giribet
Naomi E. Pierce, Chair

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 2, 2023, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Henry Rosovsky was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus, died on Nov. 11, 2022, at the age of 95.  Twice dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), twice acting president of the University, and the only active faculty member to serve on the Harvard Corporation since the 1880s, Henry was one of Harvard’s great leaders in the 20th century and probably the most important dean of the FAS ever.
Born in 1927 in the Free City of Danzig, Henry fled the Nazi occupation and arrived in America in 1940.  Immediately following the war, he served in the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in occupied Germany, where he interviewed former Wehrmacht officers under the Allied-imposed denazification program and attended the Nuremberg trials.  Returning to the U.S., he graduated from William and Mary on the G.I. Bill.  Returning to the army, he served in wartime Korea and then in occupied Japan, where he learned Japanese and had his interest piqued by the country’s economic and cultural modernization.
After his second army stint, Henry entered graduate school at Harvard to study economics and was elected to the Society of Fellows.  Writing his dissertation on Japanese capital formation between the Meiji Restoration and World War II, he earned his Ph.D. in 1959 and joined the Department of Economics at Berkeley.  Dismayed by Berkeley’s student unrest, however, in 1965 he returned to Harvard as a professor of economics.
Back at Harvard, Henry played an increasingly central role within the FAS.  In 1968 he chaired a committee that recommended a program to grant degrees in African and Afro-American Studies.  The next year he became chairman of the Department of Economics.  In 1973 President Derek Bok appointed him Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
For Henry, serving as dean was akin to an art form.  His approach to the job was intensely personal.  He understood that he was managing not Ford or IBM but a medium-sized (just over 400 tenured professors) collection of highly motivated individuals.  He spent his time engaging with his faculty, not his staff.  When he needed to make decisions regarding proposals not already within his sphere of direct knowledge, he would ask which half-dozen professors most wanted it to happen.  He figured he would already know some of them well enough to understand their motivation and would sit down over lunch to talk with the others; then he would decide.  He intuitively understood human aspirations and ambitions, and they fascinated him.  He saw his role as fostering his faculty’s individual aims and nurturing their talent, while, nonetheless, maintaining a harmonious setting for a group enterprise.
Crucially for Harvard at that time, this personal approach built trust among his faculty.  When Henry became dean, the divisions left from the 1960s student uprising were still bitter.  Within the FAS, separate liberal and conservative “caucuses” met regularly, and tension between them impeded progress on multiple fronts.  With Henry as dean, both groups soon disbanded.  As many faculty members explained, “We all trust Henry.”  Once the divisiveness dissipated, Henry was able to advance important educational reforms, most notably the Core Curriculum — the first restructuring of Harvard’s undergraduate General Education since its introduction in 1949.  Another key achievement was reducing graduate school admissions in response to the end of the extraordinary post-war growth surge in American higher education.
Part of what made Henry’s personal touch so effective was his keen awareness of his own unusual insider/outsider status: his experience of having had his life turned upside down; the humiliation of flight and refugee rejection; the irony of a Jew standing at the top of one of America’s premier bastions of WASP privilege.  In a story that he sometimes recounted, usually with a sardonic yet elegiac tone, one of the former Wehrmacht officers he interviewed after the war asked him, “Sergeant, where did they teach you German?  You speak perfectly, but you have the vocabulary of a 10-year-old.”  It was vintage Henry: funny, yes, but aching with unspoken loss — of a civilization and the people who created it; of a refugee achiever who had lost a golden youth to hatred.
Another key trait of Henry’s leadership was courage.  The African and Afro-American Studies proposal was controversial enough within the academy, but also elicited passions, sometimes ugly ones, more broadly.  Al Capp, the newspaper cartoonist long associated with the Li’l Abner strip and a Cambridge resident, launched a vicious campaign to oppose Harvard’s initiative and, in the process, to vilify Rosovsky personally.  Henry did not cower before Mr. Capp.  His public bravery was a welcome mark of integrity and dedication on the part of American higher education.  Years later, when Henry returned as dean for President Bok’s last year, together they went to extraordinary efforts to make two distinguished appointments that cemented the department’s preeminence in the field.
Henry was exceptionally loyal to Harvard as well.  In 1977 he was offered the presidency of Yale.  At the time, to pick as president someone without a Yale degree — and a Jew besides — was unprecedented.  Yet Henry declined, choosing to remain at Harvard and complete the Core Curriculum review, which he guided to faculty approval the next spring.  Beyond loyalty, Henry had a deep and abiding love for Harvard, an infectious emotional pull that proved especially effective in his efforts as dean to recruit new faculty members.
Henry was also a stalwart supporter of Harvard’s Jewish community.  As dean he helped Harvard Hillel move from Bryant Street to Mount Auburn Street, first in a recently vacated building and then on a plot of open ground where in 1994 Hillel erected a new building: Rosovsky Hall.  As Henry famously put it, Hillel at Harvard thereby moved “from the periphery to the center.”  Some two decades later, Hillel launched its new capital campaign with a grand dinner celebrating Henry’s 90th birthday.
Henry was devoted to his family: Nitza, his wife of 66 years, who was born a seventh-generation Jerusalemite, and their children, Leah, Judy, and Michael.
Derek C. Bok
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Michael McCormick
Benjamin M. Friedman, Chair

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Seattle has gone through several big transformations in the past few decades. Today, it is known for Amazon, Microsoft, fancy coffee, and enormous fortunes. In the 1990s, it was a cool destination for countercultural 20-somethings who liked grunge rock. In the ’60s and ’70s, it was a remote, rainy city dominated by Boeing, albeit with a vital arts community and a lot of spiritual seekers.That last version of Seattle is the soil from which the actor Rainn Wilson sprang—as did I. Over lunch in Boston in April, we discovered that we had weirdly parallel lives: With less than two years separating us in age, we grew up a few miles apart in lower-middle-class Seattle neighborhoods. We both had parents who were professional artists. We were both serious classical musicians, specializing in maligned instruments—he played the bassoon; I played the French horn. We were both raised in very religious homes: I as a Christian, and he in the Baha’i faith.From this odd cultural stew emerged Wilson’s offbeat comedy, made famous by the character Dwight Schrute in the hit absurdist television comedy The Office. (By that time, I had a part in my own absurdist drama, running a think tank in Washington, D.C.) Wilson’s background also planted the seeds of his belief in the power of religion and faith, which is the subject of Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution. In this new book, which is part metaphysical autobiography and part spiritual how-to guide, Wilson writes about how faith saved him from a witch’s brew of anxiety, despair, loneliness, depression, and addiction. He offers readers this path through a world beset with all the same problems he suffered.[Read: Dwight Schrute wants you to get the day off for Election Day]Wilson told me how faith—including traditional religions in which adherents worship the divine (whom he calls “The Notorious G.O.D.”)—gives us what we all crave: “The bonds of community. A shared purpose. Transcendence. A concept of the sacred. The idea that we are more than our bodies, and that service to others is the highest form of worship.” Also, he added, “potlucks.”Soul Boom is a practical book, in that it makes the case for how faith and spirituality, when practiced seriously, can raise happiness through those benefits he listed for me. (Wilson backed up his argument by sending me links to research on this topic, such as this survey from the Pew Research Center.) If that were the extent of his argument, you might be tempted to observe that you could get much the same earthly perks from a 12-step program or by joining the local Rotary club. But you’d be missing the book’s real power—its observations about the unique nature of experiencing the divine.First, Wilson shows, the faith quest is not about finding the truth, but about being found by it. His own story involves wandering away from the beliefs of his youth until he was hunted down by the divine. As a young actor in New York, he told me, he tried to “escape anything and everything to do with spirituality, morality, religion, and, most especially, God.” He failed in this escape attempt. As the years passed and the misery mounted, he was pulled involuntarily toward the One, with whom he now has a “bone-deep relationship.”“Being found” is a strikingly common description in many religious traditions of how transcendence occurs. As the Anglican minister John Newton wrote in “Amazing Grace,” arguably the most famous Christian hymn of all time, “I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see.” In 1890, the poet Francis Thompson likened the phenomenon to being pursued by “the hound of heaven.”[Read: Dwight Schrute was a warning]For scholars, to allow oneself to “be found” relates to “trait openness” (an openness to new ideas and experiences) as well as to “epistemic humility” (the recognition that one might not be right or have all the answers). Both of these qualities are positively associated with happiness: Life is more fun and interesting when we find things to learn, and less stressful when we aren’t trying to defend our prejudices at every turn. Soul Boom is a master class in these two qualities—Wilson stresses that the key to love, both earthly and divine, is to be available and humble.Wilson also observes—correctly, in my view—that a proper transcendental journey is based not on finding the right answers but in contemplating the proper questions. Much aversion to religion comes from the stultifying practice of memorizing answers to dogmas, in which a typical response to any puzzling or distressing issue is “Because that’s how God made it.” Many faith traditions at their root, however, emphasize the contemplation of difficult questions to attain greater enlightenment. Zen Buddhism, for example, relies on koans, which are paradoxical questions or statements that yield wisdom when deeply considered.In conversation, Wilson is full of his own koans, such as “Why is there a universe instead of nothing at all?,” “How would the world work if there were no suffering?,” and “Why did God create the emu?” The point is not to be convinced by someone else’s answers, but to become comfortable in your own contemplation of these questions, and to let the answers find you (perhaps you will hear the hounds of heaven barking).True to his Seattle roots, Wilson’s treatise could be called transgressive in a society that is rapidly secularizing. It’s also something of an anomaly from a member of an industry that resists cosmic truths and moral rules. “The comedy misfits of L.A. never really knew what to do with one of their own that keeps talking about God and faith and spirituality,” he told me. “It’s the epitome of uncool.”[Read: Why does Contact say so much about God?]Although Soul Boom makes the case for faith, Wilson never argues that all of our problems will be solved if we simply confess and follow a religion. Throughout history, he acknowledges, people have created mischief and misery in the name of religion. But, as he sees it, this is a problem with people, not faith. To make the point, he ends his book by proposing a brand-new religion, which he calls Soul Boom—the Religion™ that takes all the best characteristics of other faiths, as he sees them, and leaves out the rest. Wilson’s credo includes a higher power, an afterlife, prayer, community, and an identifiable code of morality—with an emphasis on love, compassion, service, and purpose.For me, this “best of” list provides the greatest benefit of the book. Wilson isn’t trying to convert me from my Catholicism to Soul Boom, or even to his own beloved Baha’i. He is offering to convert me to my own faith in its purest loving form, for my own good and that of the world. What does he request in return for this blessing? “The only requirement,” he said, adopting his signature Dwight Schrute deadpan, “is my face tattooed on your buttock.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Two drones struck inside the Kremlin complex early this morning. We don’t know exactly what happened, but the Russian claims of a Ukrainian attack are doubtful. Russia may now have a domestic-terrorist problem—but it’s more likely that Vladimir Putin’s regime is preparing an excuse for a new escalation.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The costs of Brexit are undeniable now.
Can you have a fun vacation on Ozempic?
How Tom Hanks became Tom Hanks
A Possible False FlagHere’s what we know: Early this morning, two drones struck inside the Kremlin (which is actually a walled complex that surrounds several government buildings and ancient churches and palaces). The New York Times has verified three videos, two of which appear to show “a drone flying toward and exploding over the Kremlin Senate,” which houses the president’s executive office, and the other showing the dome of the Senate building on fire.That’s as much as we know. The Russians, of course, are blaming the Ukrainians, and claiming that the strike was an attempt to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin, who at the time was at his compound in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo, Russian officials said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied this charge and specifically denied targeting Putin: “We don’t attack Putin or Moscow,” he said during his visit to Finland. “We fight on our territory.”But who would (or could) launch such an attack? I see four possibilities in ascending order of likelihood—with the caveat that I am drawing on jumbled and partial information, so treat this as a preliminary and tentative list.First, it is possible that the Ukrainians or some Ukrainian team in Moscow could have used drones. But it is unlikely, because it doesn’t make much sense. An attack on the Kremlin might be an obvious symbolic move, but a demonstrative strike on an empty building at night would be a waste of already strained Ukrainian intelligence resources, and would likely annoy the Americans and NATO in the bargain. (Also, as one former U.S. defense official noted, the Ukrainians are pretty good at tracking Putin, and if reports of the event are accurate, they likely knew he wasn’t in the building.)A second possibility is that Russian intelligence and military authorities got wind of a plot by some group to strike the Kremlin, and then let it happen as a way to goad Putin into using even more force in Ukraine. My friend Nick Gvosdev, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, reminded me today that Russian spooks are not exactly averse to such cold-blooded moves: In 2002, terrorists took hostages at a theater in downtown Moscow, and he noted that there have been accusations over the years that the intelligence services knew it was coming and yet let it happen, as a means of strengthening possible demands for more power to deal with such events.Still, this seems like an overly complicated explanation. The Russian army needs more “cannon meat,” to use the Russian expression, but even the Defense Ministry probably realizes that their campaigns to dragoon more men are reaching their limit. The intelligence services have been in hot water ever since they misled Putin about the chances of success in Ukraine, and they might want to use a bomb hitting the Kremlin to press their claims for more resources and power—but they also run the risk that a drone strike in the heart of the city would look like yet more evidence of their incompetence.It is also possible that the strike on the Kremlin came from Russian dissidents, especially if it was done with some sort of crude, jerry-rigged device. Again, unlikely but not impossible, especially with social anger rising over waves of conscription that were supposed to take place out in the Russian boondocks and never touch Moscow and St. Petersburg. In this case, the intelligence services would have every incentive to blame Kyiv, because the only thing worse for them than failing to stop a hit from a Ukrainian commando team would be an assassination attempt by Russians right under their noses. Russia is already functionally a fascist state, and a plot to bomb the Kremlin and kill the president might well be the spur for the kind of iron-fisted mass repression Putin and his advisers have avoided until now.But the most disturbing possibility is that this is a Russian government put-up job from start to finish. There are several reasons this makes more sense than other explanations.First, an attack on the Kremlin would give Putin the rationalization he’s been seeking for some kind of dramatic and murderous action that might not make much military sense, but that would destabilize Ukraine and unsettle the world on the eve of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russians, I believe, are dreading this coming operation, and want to change the narrative at home and abroad. I have no idea what Putin has up his sleeve, but even on his better days, he is prone to strategically idiotic moves. He might try to drag Belarus into the war, he could make more nuclear threats, or he could even order redoubled efforts to kill Zelensky.In any case, faking a drone attack would fit into the long-standing Russian affinity for “false flag” operations. Though conspiracy theorists in the United States often trumpet unfounded claims of false flags, professional intelligence services do conduct such operations, and Moscow has been particularly fond of them all the way back to the Soviet period. The series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, for example, that became the pretext for escalation in Chechnya, were almost certainly orchestrated by the secret services (a possibility so disturbing that I and other Russia experts were loath to accept it—but which is now, in my view, undeniable). And in the past year, the Russians warned that the Ukrainians were going to unleash a “dirty bomb,” a ludicrous claim that even led China to give the Kremlin some stink eye for playing around with nuclear threats.This drone strike looks like the same play, only without nuclear materials. A terrorist attack in the capital would be a pretext for the Russians to warn the world that this time, they’re really going to take the gloves off. Ukrainian officials are worried that this is exactly the Russian plan. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, told the BBC that the incident indicated Russia could be "preparing a large-scale terrorist provocation" in Ukraine. That’s a pretty chilling possibility, considering that the Russian campaign plan at this point already consists of indiscriminate war crimes."Something is happening” over the skies of the Russian Federation, Podolyak said, “but definitely without Ukraine’s drones over the Kremlin.” At this point, I agree, but we’ll soon know more—and we should brace for what’s coming from Russia’s desperate dictator.Related:
Cover story: the counteroffensive
Incompetence and torture in occupied Ukraine
Francisco Oropeza, the man accused of shooting five people in Texas, was apprehended in Montgomery County.
Sources close to the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News revealed the contents of a text message from Tucker Carlson, which is part of redacted court filings and shows his private views on race, to The New York Times. The discovery of the message by the Fox board of directors reportedly contributed to his firing.
Representative Colin Allred, a Dallas-area Democrat, will challenge Ted Cruz for his Senate seat next year.
Dispatches:
The Weekly Planet: Climate change is pumping the air with pollen, Yasmin Tayag writes. It’s a problem even for people who don’t think they’re allergic.
Jelka von Langen for The Atlantic
Among Europe’s Ex-Royals
One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts. It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.
The Albanian royal residence is easy to miss, tucked away on a quiet side street behind the national art museum. While Buckingham Palace has 775 rooms, including 188 staff bedrooms, 19 staterooms, and 78 bathrooms, the Albanian residence would be among the smaller, more understated houses in a wealthy American suburb. Its front gate opens onto a yard where the country stores its unwanted Soviet statues: Lenin, Stalin, and the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha all gaze with stony fortitude at a generic Stakhanovite maiden. Lenin has no arms. Hoxha’s nose is missing. The gate is guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term faithful retainer might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.
Biden is making a Trumplike mistake at the border. 
Do overdoses look different now?
Embrace the awkward silence.
Culture Break 
Disney
Read. “Nostrand and Lincoln,” a new poem by Janelle Tan.“my friend who lives in a basement apartment / with no windows and no light / tells me it is all worth it / because of the people she’s met in this city.”Watch. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (in theaters this week). It features probably the only Marvel characters that staff writer David Sims still truly cares about.Play our daily crossword.P.S.One of the most agonizing questions for those of us who began our careers as students of the old Soviet Union—and who were hopeful that Russia could become a normal country after 1991—is whether the whole project of Russian democracy was cursed and virtually impossible from the start. I have always resisted that conclusion; I think Russia was, in fact, a democracy, however flawed, even into Putin’s first term in office from 2000 to 2004. But by the time Putin returned to reclaim his throne for a third time after a short break (mandated at that point by the Russian constitution), Russia was already in something like democratic free fall. Did Putin change, or was he always just a gangster?I remain unconvinced that everything that happened in Moscow was just a huge plot to doom democracy right from the early days of Russian independence, but good scholars should find the most convincing arguments against their own biases. The best case for the idea that Putin was always an authoritarian who intended to wreck Russian democracy can be found in a highly detailed book by the late Karen Dawisha titled Putin’s Kleptocracy, and I would recommend it to readers who want a history of Putin’s attack on Russian institutions. It is a work that has forced me—uncomfortably—to rethink many of my views, as dispiriting as that can sometimes be.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Five faculty members have been awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching, in fields ranging from biophysics to cultural studies. Claudine Gay, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, announced the recipients on May 2. They are:
• Fiery Cushman, professor of psychology
• Philip Deloria, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History
• Sean Eddy, Ellmore C. Patterson Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
• Zhiming Kuang, Gordon McKay Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science
• Mara Prentiss, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics
“I am so pleased to recognize these five colleagues for their contributions to undergraduate teaching and their support and mentorship of students, as well as their work in graduate education and research,” Gay said. “Their dedication, passion, and innovation in teaching has had a profound impact on our students’ lives across a wide range of disciplines within the arts and sciences.”
Launched in 1997 with a gift from John and Frances Loeb, the Harvard College Professors are selected for their distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching. Awardees will hold the title for five years and receive support of their choosing: a research fund, a summer salary, or a semester of paid leave.

Fiery Cushman.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Deciding where to eat and other spontaneous thoughts
Cushman, an experimental psychologist, often frames his courses by presenting an argument — such as an idea about what makes humans unique as a species — and his students learn the subject material while considering the larger question.
“The approach that I’ve taken with social psychology is to allow that information to be conveyed in service of a bigger and more uncertain argument where the students are my peers and deciding whether they buy it or not,” Cushman said.
Cushman’s area of expertise is decision-making, especially moral decision-making. Lately his research focus has been trying to understand which thoughts spontaneously come to people’s minds, and why. For example, when deciding where to eat lunch in a city with myriad options, a few may come to mind first. Cushman is interested in how that mental “menu” is created.
He notes a contrast between his research, where results are often prolonged and uncertain, and his teaching, in which he often sees immediate results. Putting effort into teaching — finding the best way to present the material, meeting with students for assistance and advice outside of class — is sure to deliver rewarding results, according to Cushman.
“By investing in those things, you get to see immediate impact and change in students’ performance,” Cushman said. “It gives me a nice balance to have a garden that I can work in where I know if I put time in, I’m going to get fruits out.”
 
Philip Deloria.

American cultural studies meets Native American studies (and sometimes, hiking)
The way Deloria teaches about history has varied over the years, between content-based courses focused on meeting a list of learning objectives, to experiential hands-on learning that involves hiking mountains. At Harvard today, he said he’s found a good balance between the two.
“I’ve always liked thinking about how one does more than convey information,” Deloria said. “How one teaches skills, how one engages students at a personal level in ways that actually make meaning out of their learning experience.”
Deloria’s research work lies at the intersection of American cultural studies and Native American studies, focusing on the history of relations among American Indian peoples and the U.S., as well as the histories of Indigenous people globally. Lately, his inquiries have focused on how Native American people live within the expectations of non-Native Americans. He’s also working on a project about experiences of the 1833 Leonid meteor storm.
Deloria started his career as a middle school band and orchestra teacher. He says that experience gives him insight into the positive impact a good teacher can have on a student’s life.
“If we as teachers are recognizing that we actually have those opportunities to work with students and to shape and change their lives for the good and the positive, how exciting is that?”
 
Sean Eddy.
Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Decoding evolutionary history like a long-distance runner
Eddy frequently tells his students that learning is like long-distance running. While it seems like some people may be innately better at it, it’s mostly about long-term dedication. It’s a lesson Eddy pulls from his own past, adding that when he was an undergraduate, school did not come naturally to him.
“You get out what you put into it, you get better and better with the discipline and the effort,” Eddy said. “You can’t compare yourself to somebody else, because they’re somewhere else on that curve. They really respond to that.”
In his computational genomics research lab, Eddy works to decipher the evolutionary history of life — how molecular biology works, and how organisms on the planet evolved over time — by analyzing genome sequences. The lab develops algorithms and software to compare these sequences.
In teaching, Eddy believes in learning by doing, and organizes his course around biological data analysis problems, a new one each week, which require students to use code and critical thinking skills to solve.
“I don’t think you learn anything by listening to somebody else talk,” Eddy said. “You have to do it, and you have to be interested in it. The idea is that the problem has to be interesting and it has to be engaging so that it doesn’t feel like grunt work.”
 
Zhiming Kuang.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Active learning about climate systems
Kuang, an atmospheric physicist, has been exploring a hybrid approach in his courses, combining traditional lectures and problem sets — which he says provide the “scaffolding” for the course — with active learning, which helps keep the students engaged. In Kuang’s courses, active learning might involve in-class exercises, mini group projects, and larger projects that are open-ended and ask students to apply concepts to areas of study they want to explore further.
“It is most rewarding to see the enthusiasm with which students apply what they learn in class to problems they are interested in,” Kuang said.
He dedicates most of his research to better understanding moist turbulence, which produces much of the clouds and rainfall, and shapes many of the aspects of the climate system. He researches the response of moist turbulence to “perturbations” such as the rising carbon dioxide concentration, and is currently working to find principled ways of using data-driven methods to improve climate theories and models.
“Teaching Harvard undergraduates has been a great privilege,” Kuang said. “Their amazing creativity and energy is what makes teaching fun, and I learn so much from them. I learn also from the many devoted teachers around me, who inspire me to continue to improve.”
 
Mara Prentiss.

Solving problems, asking questions in the lab
Prentiss, who teaches atomic physics and biophysics, says lab classes offer the ideal atmosphere for teaching, allowing her to connect with students in small-group settings where she can get a sense for their different interests and perspectives. Although she teaches the same lab five days a week, Prentiss said each class ends up being very different because she adjusts the lessons for each group.
“It’s a chance to get to know them in a way that just isn’t possible in a classroom,” Prentiss said. “In lab, I can actually talk to each student and see where they are, which allows me to work with them as they develop their own individual vision of the material.”
In her research lab, Prentiss has tackled many of the world’s challenges, including developing a method for inexpensively making an optical tweezer for more accessible research, and showing that some self-assembling systems can overcome the trade-off between speed and stability. Much of the research currently ongoing in her lab focuses on RecA family proteins, which play a vital role in DNA recombination and repair, and she’s also been looking at a new approach to antibacterials.
Prentiss is glad when students ask questions that make her think differently about a scientific concept, saying those interactions help her keep learning.
“I think that teaching undergrads actually makes us better researchers,” Prentiss said. “It keeps researchers from going into tunnel vision, it keeps us looking at problems from new perspectives.”

Australia plans to ban recreational vaping in a move designed to head off what they fear is an industry that will get a new generation of young people addicted to nicotine. Part of the justification for the ban is concern over the health risks of vaping, or e-cigarettes, which use heat to turn a liquid into a vapor which is then inhaled. Often the liquid contains nicotine and may also be flavored, a practice critics argue is targeted at children.

Vaping was initially promoted as a safer alternative to smoking, and a way for smokers to quit their nicotine addiction. But at the same time non-smokers have been taking up vaping. The Australian ban seeks to eliminate this latter path, so-called recreational vaping, while making it easier for smokers to get prescriptions for vaping as a method of quitting. Australia also seeks to regulate the contents of vaping fluid, including nicotine content and flavoring. There is also concern that a ban might simply turn users toward the black market in vaping products.

Regardless of the ultimate regulatory strategy, what is the current evidence on the health effects of vaping? While there is concern that the evidence is still preliminary, there have been enough studies to spawn a number of systematic reviews. A 2021 review – Vaping and lung cancer – A review of current data and recommendations, found:

E-cigarette devices and vaping fluids demonstrably contain a series of both definite and probable oncogens including nicotine derivatives (e.g. nitrosnornicotine, nitrosamine ketone), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, heavy metals (including organometal compounds) and aldehydes/other complex organic compounds. These arise both as constituents of the e-liquid (with many aldehydes and other complex organics used as flavourings) and as a result of pyrolysis/complex organic reactions in the electronic cigarette device (including unequivocal carcinogens such as formaldehyde – formed from pyrolysis of glycerol).

This study is essentially looking at hazard, the presence of known and possible cancer causing agents in vaping fluid. The reason to take this approach is that there is likely a 20 year delay between exposure and diagnosis with cancer, so by the time there is clear evidence for an actual increase in lung cancer we will already have a new generation addicted to vaping nicotine. But still, this kind of data has to be put into perspective – it is a hazard, a potential risk.

Because of this delay in terms of developing cancer, some studies focus on acute or short term lung damage. A 2021 review of these studies, E-Cigarette or Vaping Product-Associated Lung Injury: A Review, finds:

Since March 2019, there has been an ongoing epidemic of acute lung injury secondary to the use of e-cigarettes, with over 2600 cases and 60 deaths reported all over the United States. A significant proportion of patients hospitalized with e-cigarette- or vaping product-associated lung injury have required admission in the intensive care unit, with mechanical ventilation needed in up to one-third of patients.

This acute injury is treatable, with generally (but not universally) good outcomes, but the concern is that these acute lung injury cases are the tip of the iceberg. They represent cases with symptomatic acute lung injury, which raises the possibility of chronic, asymptomatic, or mildly symptomatic lung injury. Again, this type of injury may take decades to fully appreciate.

Another 2022 review, Vaping-Associated Lung Injury: A Review, gives this summary:

Adolescents who use e-cigarettes commonly report an increased cough and wheeze, and studies have shown an association with e-cigarette use and asthma exacerbations. However, it is not yet clear if chronic e-cigarette use by itself can cause COPD in a clinical setting or if the substitution of e-cigarettes for combustible tobacco products can prevent or slow the development of COPD. There is also data to support a correlation between e-cigarette use and impaired host defence. It appears viral responses are compromised, and bacterial clearance by macrophages and neutrophils appears to be reduced. This allows increased adhesion and colonisation of bacteria and possibly an impaired infection-fighting ability.

A 2020 review, A review of toxic effects of electronic cigarettes/vaping in adolescents and young adults, also includes extrapulmonary effects.

Additionally, there have been more recent studies showing extrapulmonary effects including cardiovascular, immunologic and neuro-developmental effects. Many of these effects are likely dose-dependent.

A 2021 review of studies looking at periodontal effects found:

This study concluded that there is not enough evidence to fully characterize the impacts of vaping on periodontitis. However, within the limitations of our review and the selected included studies, the available results point to increased destruction of the periodontium leading to the development of the disease.

If we take a risk-vs-benefit approach to vaping, we can review the evidence of whether or not it works as a smoking-cessation tool. From the 2022 review above:

E-cigarette use has grown exponentially, particularly amongst adolescents. While they were originally marketed as a smoking cessation tool, evidence for a role in smoking cessation has been inconclusive. There is some evidence that nicotine-containing products may have a role in risk reduction for active smokers but, conversely, may encourage the initiation of cigarette smoking in non-smokers.

The evidence for benefit is mixed and unclear. Using vaping as a nicotine delivery alternative does seem to help some smokers quit, but the number is low (18% in one study) with a high relapse rate, perhaps higher than other methods of quitting. Meanwhile vaping leads some non-smoker to take up tobacco use, and some smokers become dual-users, with demonstrated increased toxicity. Therefore, just in terms of smoking cessation, it is unclear if there is a net benefit to vaping, which likely means that there is no large benefit.

Meanwhile, vaping is leading to a dramatic increase in younger people taking up vaping directly. There is clear evidence at that point of toxicity, exposure to hazardous materials, acute lung injury, periodontal injury, and some extrapulmonary effects. It is still unclear what the long term risks are, because there simply hasn’t been enough time to see these effects and gather that data. Also, as with smoking, we can’t ethically do a randomized controlled trial, so we must infer the risks from toxicity and epidemiological data.

The evidence clearly shows that we should not be complacent about the risks of vaping. There is legitimate cause for concern about a product that is addictive, may lead to more harmful behavior (smoking), and targeted toward children with sweet flavoring and attractive packaging, a practice that the evidence shows is clearly working. Whether or not Australia’s ban is effective or the best approach, time will tell. But the justification is reasonable.

Last July, Josh Sabey's and Sarah Perkins' two young children were seized by child welfare officials in the middle of the night without a warrant. Because of a minor injury to their youngest child, the Massachusetts Department of Families officials attempted to keep custody of the children for nearly four months. The couple has now filed a lawsuit, arguing that the state's seizure of their children was "reprehensible and plainly unconstitutional."
"The officials had no warrant to enter the Sabeys' home or seize the young Sabey children," the 33-page complaint states. "And there was no plausible imminent threat that could justify entering the home and seizing the sleeping toddler and infant from their loving parents."
On July 12th, 2022, the Sabeys' youngest child, 3-month-old Cal—named in the lawsuit as C.S. 2—developed a high fever, leading Sarah to take him to the emergency room at the advice of the family's pediatrician. At the hospital, Cal was diagnosed with a respiratory infection. During an X-ray to search for pneumonia, doctors found a small, almost-healed fracture on Cal's rib—an injury many doctors view as a sign of child abuse.
This single injury sparked an investigation by child welfare officials. The lawsuit claims the agency subjected Sarah, in particular, to humiliating, antagonistic questioning. While Sarah says she was concerned that her son's high fever was being ignored in favor of a nearly-healed facture, investigators reported that her "affect" was "flat." When she began crying as Cal was subjected to a DCF-mandated blood test that took multiple attempts, this was recorded as suspicious. "The DCF worker told us later that they had reported that I was extremely upset," Perkins told The Washington Post. "Their concern was that I seemed upset that they might find something in the test."
During interviews, the complaint notes that both parents denied knowing the source of the injury—though when asked to speculate, Perkins said that it could have come from a falling off a bed several weeks earlier.
There was also another hypothesis about the source of Cal's injury—though DCF officials didn't know at the time. According to a later Washington Post interview with the couple, the children's grandmother filed an affidavit attesting that, while babysitting the children, she had taken Cal out of his car seat when "His head began to roll back, and she grasped him tightly. She recalls that he shrieked—but he was quickly consoled, she says, and she didn't think to mention anything to his parents at the time."
Despite several days of investigation, child welfare officials could not find any evidence of abuse other than Cal's minor injury. Officials conducted multiple interviews with the family's pediatrician, who told officials she had "zero concerns." Government agents also made several visits—including an unannounced house call—to the family's home and found no signs of neglect or abuse. They also asked the police for any records involving the Sabeys, which also turned up nothing. The family pediatrician even examined Clarence, the couple's older child, and found no signs of abuse or injury.
However, this wasn't enough to keep DCF from seizing the couple's children. Despite the dearth of evidence, DCF decided that the children were in imminent danger and concluded that they needed to be taken from their parents. The lawsuit states that the officials who made the call to seize the children "did not do so on the basis of any new evidence or information collected during DCF's investigation; instead, she based her decision on C.S. 2's healing rib fractures that DCF had been aware of for more than two days."
At 1:00 a.m. on July 16, multiple police officers and DCF employees arrived at the Sabey home and demanded that the couple hand over their children. While neither law enforcement nor DCF employees had a warrant, they insisted that if the couple "did not surrender the children to the police officers at the door, they would break into the Sabeys' home and seize the children by force." After this threat, the complaint notes, "Josh and Sarah woke their children and placed them, crying, into the officials' vehicles. The children were driven away into the night."
The Sabeys wouldn't regain full custody of their children for nearly four months. During that time, "DCF failed to uncover any evidence of abuse, neglect, or maltreatment that justified their initial unlawful seizure of the children or their continued denial of full parental rights to the Sabeys," according to the lawsuit.
While the Sabeys' story is harrowing, it's hardly uncommon. In the United States, it is estimated that as many as 1 in 3 children are the subject of a child welfare investigation by the time they turn 18. When alleged abuse or neglect is investigated, warrantless home entries are common. According to ProPublica and NBC, 40 child welfare agencies said they "only obtain a warrant or court order to search a home—or call the police for help—in rare cases when they are denied entry. None said they keep any data on how often they get an entry order."
Making matters worse, child welfare employees are often trained by police to be "very much based around the idea of finding out the truth, interrogating parents, interrogating children, and the idea that there has to be something here, otherwise you wouldn't be here," law professor Anna Arons told the Post. Arons added that many child welfare agencies will view it as an indication of danger if a parent objects to any part of the investigation, "and I think any parent would very fairly voice dissent."
Some child welfare agencies use scant evidence to take children from their parents. What goes unacknowledged is the immense suffering—and legal costs—foisted on innocent families.
"While the Sabeys were ultimately—and obviously—cleared of any wrongdoing, and the children were eventually reunited with their parents, nothing can undo the trauma of that early July morning and the prolonged abrogation of the Sabeys' parental rights," the complaint writes. "For parents, the emotional and physical toll of having your crying children torn from your arms never goes away."
The post 'Reprehensible and Plainly Unconstitutional': Child Welfare Agents Took Their Kids. Now They're Suing. appeared first on Reason.com.

For most Americans, the U.S. government’s chaotic approach to Sudan became clear only last month when fighting erupted, causing thousands of U.S. citizens to scramble for safety. But for close Sudan-watchers, the disordered evacuation effort is only the latest incident in years of failed policy. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Since April 15, when Sudan’s two most powerful generals started attacking each other, the country has descended into widespread violence, leading Sudanese and foreign nationals alike to flee the capital, Khartoum. On Monday, the United Nations warned that the humanitarian crisis in Sudan is on the verge of becoming a “full-blown catastrophe” and, if the fighting continues, 800,000 potential refugees could cause a regional crisis.

The U.S. government seems to have been caught off-guard. On April 23, military helicopters evacuated the embassy in Khartoum, but the Biden administration said security conditions prevented the rescue of private American citizens, leaving many to seek help from other nations. While several other countries evacuated their people, Americans on the ground lamented their government’s lack of support as they made life-or-death decisions.

After days of criticism, on April 29, the U.S. Defense Department deployed armed drones to protect a convoy of Americans making the harrowing trip from Khartoum to Port Sudan. Two more such convoys have since arrived in Port Sudan. In Washington, lawmakers in both parties had been calling on the administration to prepare for such a scenario.

“The violence and ongoing crisis in Sudan are no surprise to anyone paying attention,” James Risch (Idaho), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me. “Why the administration, which has been working on this issue from day one, did not see the troop build-up in Khartoum or other warning signs as sufficient reason to act speaks to the more significant failures of its policy.”

As national security adviser Jake Sullivan pointed out, Sudan is not Afghanistan, where the United States had special obligations. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to notice that in both circumstances, the administration had no good plan to get Americans out, and then struggled to come up with one on the fly.

The larger U.S. policy failure in Sudan dates back at least to 2019. That’s when soldiers loyal to Sudanese Army Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and those loyal to Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), overthrew Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir following popular protests. The two forces are now fighting each other.

After Bashir was deposed, U.S. congressional leaders in both parties began calling for more diplomatic attention and resources to support Sudan’s transition to democracy. But the Trump and Biden administrations did little to either advance that reform or convince the two generals that there would be consequences if they broke their promises.

In October 2021, the generals stamped out the civilian leadership for good. But President Biden failed to impose sanctions on them for their power grab, human rights violations and increasing state corruption. As the infighting intensified, the United States ceded international diplomatic leadership to other countries and failed to properly support civil society groups opposed to military rule.

“Sudan is a prime example of what happens when the United States does not mean what it says and seeks short-term solutions to long-term problems,” Risch said.

To be sure, in the past two weeks, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been active on Sudan, getting involved in the evacuation efforts and working to establish a meaningful cease-fire. But this stands in contrast to the lack of high-level attention paid to the country over the past two years.

John Godfrey, the American ambassador to Sudan, assumed office only last September. The State Department’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, Ambassador Mike Hammer, is the third person to hold that job in two years. Officials say that bureaucratic turf struggles within the State Department’s Africa bureau have limited his authority on the Sudan problem.

Many experts say that democratic transition in Sudan was a long shot and imposing sanctions on the generals would not have been effective. But they, too, say the administration has mishandled the policy. If the Biden team didn’t want to bet on actual reform, they argue, it should have at least played a larger role in shaping events.

“We kind of pretended there was a transition when there wasn’t one,” said J. Peter Pham, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former U.S. special envoy for the Sahel region. “We should have been engaging both parties with a plan to move things along rather than wagging fingers at them.”

Now, the United States has no diplomatic presence on the ground. To increase U.S. engagement in Sudan at this point would be difficult. But the United States should not simply stand aside and watch Africa’s third-largest country further descend into crisis.

Biden talks a big game about democracy, but his team has often taken a hands-off approach to countries struggling with democratic transitions. The president’s objective in the Middle East and North Africa has been described as “no more failed states.” In Sudan, that policy has failed.

When Joel Embiid arrived in the United States from Cameroon as a gangly 16-year-old back in 2011, he already possessed many of the physical traits—height, athleticism, massive wingspan—that he'd one day employ to become a superstar in the NBA.
One thing he didn't really know much about, however, was how to actually shoot a basketball.
Until he was 15, Embiid hardly played hoops at all. He'd been on track to become a professional volleyballer before being spotted by a retired NBA star, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, who ran a basketball camp in Yaoundé, Embiid's hometown (and Cameroon's capital). Mbah a Moute convinced Embiid to commit to learning basketball. That opened the door for his 2011 move to the U.S., where Embiid enrolled at a prep school and kept training. In 2012, he was recruited to the University of Kansas, one of the top college basketball programs in the country, despite being described as "more prospect than player at this stage" in an ESPN profile. He was drafted third overall in 2014 by the Philadelphia 76ers, when he was barely 20 years old and still a relative newcomer to the sport.
Yesterday, he was named the NBA's Most Valuable Player for the 2022-23 season. It's quite possible none of that would have happened without YouTube.
"You know how I learned to shoot?" Embiid told Sports Illustrated in 2016, just before making his debut in the NBA. "I watched white people. Just regular white people. They really put their elbow in and finish up top. You can find videos of them online."
To really understand this story, you have to understand what makes Embiid special, even among the athletic freaks and superhuman scoring machines that are modern professional basketball players. If you're over 7 feet tall, like Embiid is, you don't necessarily have to be that good of a shooter to succeed at basketball. Stand near the basket, learn how to position your body, and you're going to get plenty of easy scoring chances. There are plenty of big guys, from Bill Russell to Shaquille O'Neal, who make outstanding careers out of doing that.
Embiid does that too, of course. But he can also step away from the basket and drain a jump shot. He's made over 33 percent of the three-point shots he's attempted in his career—a clip that won't have anyone confusing him with two-time MVP Steph Curry, but still well in excess of what even the best players his size can typically drop.
That shooting touch, Embiid wrote in The Players' Tribune, is the result of being humiliated by a teammate during three-point shooting drills in high school, then turning to online videos:
I'm so competitive that I'm like, I gotta beat this guy. I gotta find a way.
So I'm chilling one night, and I go on YouTube, and I'm thinking I'm about to figure this shooting thing out.
I go to the search box like….
HOW TO SHOOT 3 POINTERS.
Nah.
HOW TO SHOOT GOOD FORM
Nah.
Then the light bulb went off, man. I typed in the magic words.
WHITE PEOPLE SHOOTING 3 POINTERS.
Listen, I know it's a stereotype, but have you ever seen a normal, 30-year-old white guy shoot a three-pointer? That elbow is tucked, man. The knees are bent. The follow-through is perfect. Always. You know how in America, there's always an older guy wearing like EVERLAST sweat-shorts at the court? That guy is always a problem. His J is always wet.
Those are the guys I learned from on YouTube. Just random people shooting threes with perfect form.
Those YouTube videos didn't just allow Embiid to impress his high school teammates or earn a chance to make a career out of the sport. They helped him turn himself into arguably the best basketball player on the planet.
Of course, Embiid had a lot of help from other sources too, and he probably possesses a level of determination that most of us don't. You're unlikely to become a professional basketball player by watching hours of white dudes shooting three-pointers tonight. Sorry.
But you might learn how to repair a leaky toilet or install a utility sink in your basement by watching YouTube; I did.
"YouTube confers agency at every level—kids can become world-class musicians just by watching other kids who are trying to do that with their glockenspiel or whatever," Stewart Brand, former editor of the now-defunct counterculture magazine Whole Earth Catalog, said in a 2022 interview. "In that sense, the early dream that we had about the internet as this thing that would bring all knowledge to all people for free kind of came true."
Embiid went from being a Cameroonian kid who'd hardly picked up a basketball to being a first-round NBA draft pick in under five years. Now, he's an MVP. Every day, untold numbers of other people accomplish less audacious tasks because of the knowledge that others make freely available via all sorts of online platforms, from Wikipedia to TikTok.
This is a perspective that seems to be largely missing from the constant debates about so-called Big Tech and the supposed damage it causes to society. Are there cranks on YouTube spreading silly conspiracies and crazy uncles on Facebook sharing QAnon memes? Of course. But to ban, restrict, or police how Americans use those platforms means potentially throwing out a lot of the good with the bad.
When politicians call for regulating social media and other online platforms, they often do it with an explicit promise of protecting children. They ought to consider the other side of that equation too. Being exposed to unfamiliar ideas can sometimes be scary—but, like it was for a 16-year-old Embiid trying to refine his untapped athletic potential, it can be game-changing.
The post NBA MVP Joel Embiid Learned To Shoot by Watching YouTube appeared first on Reason.com.

A decade ago, as a young war reporter for Vice News, I had the nagging feeling that one day I’d find my wizened older self, like an old NME journalist droning on about punk, reminiscing about the time when we brash millennial upstarts had the world of TV newsgathering at our feet. But I never expected it to be so soon.
The young get old and revolutions end up eating their own: and the death of the flagship Vice News Tonight show and drastic downsizing of the Vice News platform, just days after the closing of Buzzfeed News, heralds the closing of the era when the New York new media giants bestrode the news world like strutting conquerors. With the heavily indebted Vice empire reportedly circling on the edge of bankruptcy, and struggling to find a buyer, the media landscape of the 2010s already looks like history. As Ben Judah observed: “The early 2010s were a moment where Buzzfeed News and Vice News gave you the impression you didn’t have to do journalism like the New York Times or the BBC. Them shuttering is telling us, actually, there’s only the way they do it at the New York Times and the BBC.”
Back then, the world looked very different. When the Vice News channel launched on YouTube in 2014, its parent company’s reputation for achingly arch and semi-ironically offensive content aimed at jaded hipsters caused legacy broadcasters to scoff at the idea of their cocky, inexperienced journalists challenging them on their own turf. Within months, their laughter stopped: networks such as the BBC and CNN were now terrified that Vice held the key to the future of news. Vice News went where no one else would go, gaining access to the most difficult stories, and throwing itself into the thickest action with studied indifference. Young people, who had always been disregarded as news consumers, were enraptured by the hard-edged, thrilling content from the worst places on earth; elderly execs and money men threw sponsorship at the company in an attempt to capture some of the magic for their own ailing brands. The future of news was young and online, and there was no going back.
Historians of the craft of newsgathering will record that Vice News changed the visual grammar of the medium. By marrying a cinematic visual style with the tempo and immediacy of breaking stories, and pioneering the use of handheld DSLR cameras, Vice News re-aestheticised TV news. And by having its young reporters talk casually to the audience, like friends, in the middle of the world’s worst chaos, the old world of buttoned-up correspondents stiffly lecturing the camera suddenly looked like a relic from the age of black and white. But while the big networks quickly learned to copy Vice’s style to the point it has become the norm, the fundamental challenge of all news broadcasting — how to make the most difficult and expensive content on earth pay for itself — had still not been solved. In the end, it was all a mirage.
Suggested readingOn the frontline with the Right Sector militiaBy Aris Roussinos
As is the nature of the trade, it was always a source of pride, and of glittering awards, to obtain better combat footage than anyone else: always getting closer to the action, dancing at the edge of death like a gladiator in the amphitheatre for the audience’s thrill and delectation. The highest word of praise from an exec was “gnarly”. But what neither fans nor critics of what they saw as our recklessness understood was that the “bang-bang” was merely a vehicle with which to smuggle in serious analytical reportage of poorly-understood conflicts and revolutions. Vice’s central insight was that if you framed the story right, and shot it well enough, you could persuade teens and early twentysomethings to watch in-depth explorations of Syrian rebel justice systems, or the intricacies of South Sudan’s civil war. Middle-aged execs from traditional networks had always claimed young people didn’t care about granular detail, or distant wars in Africa: but this (apart from stories about drugs) was always by far the most popular content, judging from YouTube views and comments. The audience never demands dumbing-down: viewers want nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity. They want to see the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
While the rewards in the early days were mismatched to the risk, the degree of experience offered to young journalists was unrivalled, a huge draw to those with an adventurous streak. Journalists at the beginning of their careers were given access to stories the networks reserved for their hardened veterans, and repaid that trust with a fervid dedication to their craft. I was a green 31-year-old reporter when I started, with only the Libyan war, Tunisian revolution and a strange months-long sojourn with tribal rebels in Sudan under my belt. Vice gave me the freedom to follow the Malian army into bloody battle against jihadist rebels, experience the Egyptian coup from the Islamist side, return to Syria over and over again during the course of the war and follow the Isis story from their initially underplayed rise to their final desert gotterdammerung.
And like Isis, Vice was a 2010s phenomenon that wrongly thought it could take on the giants and win. Perhaps that strange kinship between the decade’s two great disruptors is why Vice News was the only western network Isis let embed with them in Syria and Iraq. This isn’t as wild as it sounds – Isis watched us and we watched them. As the Syria reporter for years, focusing on Isis, I watched the terrorist group copy Vice’s style in their videos as Very Online western millennials took over their output, syncing cinematic DSLR footage with hypnotic music and thrilling action sequences.
Suggested readingDid Ukraine need a war?By Aris Roussinos
Young Western Isis fighters and social media influencers were constantly messaging me on Twitter, critiquing my films, and either asking me to join them or threatening to kidnap and behead me next time I deployed. I have the unusual distinction, as a legacy of my time at Vice News, of having featured in three Isis videos, twice using extracts from my films, and once combat footage of them shooting (unbeknown to them at the time) at my Landcruiser. Isis won the video battle: they had the resources of a state behind them, a demonic desire to shock and horrify, and could orchestrate combat for the cameras. But ultimately neither could maintain their exponential growth beyond the 2010s: both had dramatically overestimated their chance of taking over the world.
Careering skyward after their Isis scoop, Vice upped the sponsorship stakes with a deal to make HBO a prestigious nightly news series: and when the new network execs came in to run the show, Vice purged the young and idealistic journalists who had risked their lives to win the hipster bible journalistic credibility. Friends and colleagues who had risked their lives to produce groundbreaking coverage from Ukraine, Syria and the Central African Republic were let go with a lack of sentiment unusual even by the standards of America’s media industry. Vice News gave Vice the credibility to raise money from investors to furiously expand the rest of its brand, but the newsgathering itself was too expensive to sustain. For a while, Vice was making money, but little went to the journalists who originally built the brand.
Even still, the common online narrative that the glossier “new Vice” was a paltry shadow of “old Vice” is hard to maintain. Under the new regime, journalists were paid well, and professional security advisors were brought in to ensure the company never paid the toll in deaths that other networks gossiped were just about to happen. In any case, Vice News’s most sustained string of awards came under the new management, and some of the work from Syria that I am most proud of came under the nightly HBO banner, along with my only Emmy. Even up to the very end, long after the now-greying old hands like me had moved out to pasture, Vice News’s coverage of conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen and Ukraine outclassed the world’s biggest networks, raking in awards: Vice News Tonight closes with more Emmy nominations than any of its big name rivals for five years running.
Perhaps what really destroyed Vice News’s hope of making TV news into a profitable industry was the rise of Trump. The political polarisation of American life after 2016 saw viewers drift away from whatever interest they showed in confusing wars in far-off places for an obsession with their own internal conflict. The legacy cable networks such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox revived their ailing fortunes through a constant focus on the Trump reality show, and the rest of the world retreated back into obscurity — unless it could be viewed through Trump’s prism. As the online world polarised, Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which skewed young male and often hard Right, vocally resented the radically progressive orientation of much of the company’s new output.

At the same time every publication from the New York Times to Teen Vogue began speaking in the same voice, Vice no longer sounded distinct. The punk magazine-turned-megabrand had gone corporate, and now sounded like any other American corporation, only more so. Vice, which had won acclaim for dispassionately showing viewers how the world really is, now looked excessively concerned with its own virtue. As American society polarised, Vice could never fully capture the newly divided, inward-looking zeitgeist – stunts like reading the entire Mueller Report live on air for four hours didn’t possess quite the same old magic. HBO switched its patronage to newer, DC insider platforms such as Axios, showing the world as viewed from the top down, not the bottom up, and Vice News moved to new and less lucrative deals on smaller cable networks. While the quality of foreign coverage remained high, and awards kept piling up, the ambition dwindled. Vice had set out to conquer the legacy broadcasters, but found itself reliant on their largesse to keep the show on the road.
For a few short years, Vice News looked like it had found the secret to making news pay by showing viewers the world as it really is, far from Western capitals, rubbing viewers’ noses in the darkness of reality. But news is expensive and talk is cheap: we have reverted to an era of talking heads and studio debates, where perhaps only state broadcasters have the funding and desire to present their chosen images of reality to the outside world, with all that implies. Bored young men who want to see brutal images of combat can now get their kicks watching Ukraine snuff clips on Twitter. For good or ill — I still can’t decide — working for Vice News over seven years forcefully reshaped my worldview, by confronting my original impeccably liberal assumptions about how the world worked with constant immersion in the hard reality of tribal, religious and ethnic conflict. Young and idealistic, I thought I could change the world: instead the world changed me.
But as my old colleague, Vice News’ former Latin America bureau chief and chronicler of Mexico’s bloody internal conflict Daniel Hernandez wrote in an elegy on Twitter, “It was truly about going to countries that ‘didn’t matter’, diving into gnarly security situations — it’s a miracle no one  — for conflict reporting in Syria, Ukraine, Mexico, Venezuela … Just a wild, idealistic time. Honored to have been there at its birth.” Vice News was the future, once. If even they can’t make hard foreign news pay, then perhaps it has no future.

For half a century, Gursaran Pran Talwar has been developing what he hopes will be the next big thing in birth control. A nonagenarian who was once the director of India’s National Institute of Immunology, Talwar envisions bringing to market a new form of contraception that could block pregnancy without the usual trade-offs—an intervention that’s long-acting but reversible; cheap, discreet, and easy to administer; less invasive than an intrauterine device and more convenient than a daily pill. It would skip messy, sometimes dangerous side effects, such as weight gain, mood swings, and rare but risky blood clots and strokes. It would embody the sort of “set it and forget it” model that’s become a gold standard for health—and, in his words, be “accepted by the world over.”Talwar’s invention is now in early-stage clinical trials. If all goes well, it could become humanity’s first contraceptive vaccine—one that would prevent pregnancies in a way distinct from any birth control ever cleared for human use. Whether they’re packaged as pills, patches, implants, or shots, most common medical contraceptives work by flooding the body with hormones to put a pause on ovulation. Talwar’s vaccine would do something different: It leaves the menstrual cycle unaltered, instead leveraging the powers of the immune system to keep unwanted pregnancies at bay.But temporarily vaccinating against pregnancy is both brilliant in concept and devilishly difficult in execution, both scientifically and socially. Making a contraceptive vaccine effectively means “trying to immunize an animal against itself,” says Julie Levy, a feline-infectious-disease expert at the University of Florida who has worked on immunocontraceptives in animals. Which runs counter to the prime directive of immune systems, evolved over countless millennia to distinguish the foreign from the familiar and to leave the body’s most vital tissues alone. Solve that problem, and researchers will still be left with another: persuading people to take a fertility-hampering shot in an era of widespread vaccine hesitancy—while the specter of contraception’s problematic past still looms.For many decades, the most stubborn barriers in contraception have been not about science, but about access and acceptance. Talwar remembers those issues crystallizing sharply for him in the 1970s, he told me, when he encountered several groups of women in the holy city of Varanasi, who told him they were struggling to feed their large families.  Yet the women’s husbands weren’t eager to use condoms and they themselves weren’t satisfied with the pills and IUDs available at the time, which sometimes interfered with normal menstruation and ovulation, and triggered headaches and mood swings. “I wanted to make something free of all these problems,” Talwar told me.[Read: The different stakes of male and female birth control]Within a few years, he had cooked up a solution: a vaccine against hCG, a hormone exclusive to pregnancy that’s necessary for fertilized eggs to implant. Taught to neutralize hCG, Talwar reasoned, the immune system could stop a pregnancy from ever truly starting, without attacking other tissues. His hunch so far appears to have panned out. By the mid-1990s, his team had shown in small, early-stage clinical trials that most women receiving the shots could produce enough antibodies to prevent pregnancy for several months, in some cases more than a year. Of the 119 women in the trial whose antibody levels reached what Talwar deems a protective threshold, only one became pregnant over a period of almost two years. Several participants also went on to conceive after opting out of boosters, a sign that the shot’s effects were reversible.Almost immediately, though, drawbacks appeared. Immune responses are infamously variable across individuals—a major reason that the effectiveness of many shots designed against pathogens tops out around 60 to 80 percent. About a fifth of the women who received the hCG vaccine didn’t produce enough antibodies to meet the protective threshold. Those stats would still be enough to slow the transmission of, say, a deadly respiratory virus. But the expectations for a contraceptive “have to be different,” says Neel Shah, the chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a virtual clinic for women’s and family health. The top IUDs on the market prevent more than 99 percent of pregnancies, require one appointment to insert, and last for up to a decade.For now, the hCG vaccine is more cumbersome than that. In its current iteration—a revamp of the successful ’90s recipe—it requires an initial series of at least three doses, spaced out over several weeks. It’s still unclear how people would figure out when, and how often, to boost without regular antibody tests. The answer will likely differ from person to person; that uncertainty alone could make these shots a tough sell, says Diana Blithe, a contraception expert at the National Institutes of Health. And although halting hormonal contraceptives can reset fertility back to baseline within days or weeks, some people with especially enthusiastic immune responses could end up waiting far longer for the hCG vaccine’s effects to wear off, says Aaron Hsueh, a reproductive biologist at Stanford. For that reason and more, Hsueh has said for years that he’s “not enthusiastic” about Talwar’s experimental shot.There is some reason to think these issues aren’t insurmountable. Immunocontraceptives have been used for decades by wildlife scientists to prevent pregnancies in all sorts of mammals—among them deer, horses, elephants, pigs, and seals—as a more humane alternative to culling. And in that context, at least, researchers have found a way to circumvent the need for frequent boosts. Certain animals can be dosed with nanoparticles that slowly release the vaccine’s ingredients over months and years, repeatedly tickling the immune system without any additional jabs, says Derek Rosenfield, a wildlife biologist at the University of São Paulo. Work in wild creatures, though, has also shown how hard it is to persuade the body to target its own hormones. To get their shots to work, veterinarians have needed to include powerful adjuvants, or vaccine ingredients meant to rile up the immune system—“some of the most potent ones ever developed,” Levy told me. Which exacts a tax for the shots’ potency: In some animals, such as cats, the vaccines can cause worrying side effects, including injection-site reactions.In humans, where safety standards must be stricter and effectiveness better, Talwar’s hCG vaccine has encountered some issues with tolerability, too. The shots so far do seem to be skirting the side effects of pills and IUDs. But some of the women in his team’s ongoing trials are developing painless but prominent nodules—a likely sign that the new recipe’s adjuvants are riling up the immune system a tad too much. To deliver on a discreet, low-maintenance contraceptive—something with, as Talwar puts it, “zero side effects”—they’ll need to tinker with dosing or ingredients.Gaps in the contraceptive market do need to be filled. Technology has come a long way since Talwar first spoke with the women in Varanasi, but “we need more options,” says Debanjana Choudhuri, the director of programs and partnerships at India’s Foundation for Reproductive Health Services. Nearly half the world’s pregnancies are unplanned, and access to existing contraception is inconsistent, inequitable, and still stymied by stigma and misinformation; even in places where availability isn’t an issue, some people hesitate over the trade-offs. A temporary contraception, packaged into a super-safe vaccine, could offer convenience and privacy, with potential appeal for young urbanites, who have already been enthusiastic about injectable contraceptives and might not mind getting boosts, Choudhuri told me. Most important, adding a vaccine to the repertoire gives people “another choice.”But for all its unique perks, a contraceptive vaccine could also come with social drawbacks. The history of contraception is riddled with abuses, often concentrated among poor populations, people struggling with mental-health issues, and communities of color. Vaccines’ primary purpose for centuries has been to fight infectious disease, and “pregnancy is not a disease,” Sanghamitra Singh, the policy-and-programs lead at the Population Foundation of India, told me. Implying—even unintentionally—that the condition is a problem to be eradicated could stigmatize the shot.Deploying the vaccine primarily in under-resourced populations could also raise the specter of the eradication of fertility in society’s most vulnerable subsects. Lisa Campo-Engelstein, a reproductive bioethicist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, worries that even the vaccine’s ease of administration—an ostensible benefit—could be viewed as a downside: Administering a shot without a patient’s full understanding or consent is easier than coercively inserting an IUD or forcing a daily pill. And in this pandemic era, a contraceptive vaccine will likely be met with pushback from people already disinclined toward shots—especially amid false accusations that other immunizations compromise fertility. On top of all that, a shot that goes after hCG can prevent only implantation, not fertilization, a guaranteed sticking point for people who believe that life begins at conception, and may argue that the vaccine triggers abortion.In part, the timing is just bad luck. Shortly after his original clinical trial results were published, in the ’90s, Talwar, already late into his 60s, was asked to retire from the National Institute of Immunology, he told me, and had to leave his vaccine behind. After he managed to revive his efforts with the help of independent funders, Indian regulators took nearly a decade to green-light a new recipe for clinical trials—just in time for the coronavirus pandemic to begin. Régine Sitruk-Ware, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research, in New York, remembers the initial buzz around the human hCG vaccine when Talwar’s clinical-trial results were published. But in the absence of more progress, she and other researchers have moved on, she told me. Many now have their sights set on long-acting reversible male birth control, several new forms of which are now close to being publicly available, and could offer safe complements to female methods and make family planning more equitable.[Read: Block that sperm!]Still, Talwar, who will turn 97 in October, hasn’t lost hope; to him, the nodules represent one of the last major hurdles, and should be resolved soon. As his 100th birthday ticks closer, he’s even thinking of how he can expand his approach—repurposing the hCG shot, for instance, into immunotherapy against certain cancers that aberrantly produce the hormone. “I am healthy and hearty,” he told me. “I just hope and pray,” he said, that his invention might clear its final hurdles “before I call it a day.”

The Philippine coast guard reported last week that two of its ships were involved in a confrontation with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. According to the Philippines, the Chinese vessels were engaged in unsafe maneuvers. The incident occurred near the Spratly Islands, which have been a point of contention for years.

This episode is of little military significance since the Philippines and China have been dueling in the region for years. What is significant, however, is the timing. In January, the Chinese launched a significant diplomatic opening with the Philippines. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had accepted an invitation to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in China. The meeting, which seems to have gone well, represented a potential threat to the United States, which was the dominant outside power in the region and had considerable influence in the Philippines. (Relatedly, Marcos met with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington on Monday.)

The Philippines had found itself in – or maneuvered itself into – the tension between China and the United States. A fundamental imperative of Beijing has long been to have unlimited access to the Pacific. China is an exporting power, and its position relative to Taiwan and the Philippines made Beijing vulnerable to a blockade by the U.S. China had concentrated on the northern flank of this problem, trying to seduce or force Taiwan into expelling the U.S. Navy and other American assets in order to secure its access to the Pacific. Another potential route was between the islands of the Philippines, which are plentiful enough to make it difficult for the U.S. to blockade. Finally, there’s the gap between Taiwan and the Philippines that could be used.

The Chinese have tried to intimidate Taiwan by sea and air, hoping that the threat of war might cause Taiwan to change alliances or the United States to withdraw. This has been an increasingly tense area, but neither the Taiwanese nor the Americans buckled.

That left China with the options of either facing an extremely risky naval war with the United States over Taiwan or shifting its focus southward to the Philippines. Hence the summit between Marcos and Xi. Obviously, Xi was eager to go forward with the relationship, but the Philippines backed away. It’s unclear whether this was because Marcos saw greater economic and security benefits in remaining aligned with the United States, or because significant pressure from the U.S. forced the Philippines to step back. Notably, the U.S. was granted expanded access to Philippine military bases following the U.S. defense secretary’s visit to Manila in February.

With this, Xi’s Philippines gambit appears to have failed, or rather backfired, creating another major block between the South China Sea and the Pacific for Beijing. The American wall still has gaps, of course, but the biggest brick between Taiwan and the northern Philippines is unlikely to fall. (It should be noted that the Philippines and China announced on Monday that they will hold talks on fishing rights – which may indicate some sort of accommodation, although it’s far from a solution to the real issues.)

It’s not surprising, then, that the pressure on Taiwan has continued and even intensified. It’s also not surprising that China has been increasingly aggressive in the Spratlys and is engaging the Philippine navy and coast guard with increasing assertiveness. Rather than the door opening, it seems to be closing on a fundamental interest of China: having unfettered access to the Pacific. China is also seeking to force the Philippines to reverse its relations with the United States by raising the possibility of conflict, a strategy it has used with Taiwan for years. But it has never actually moved toward battle. Taking Taiwan would be difficult, and China cannot risk a defeat, which would undermine its international standing and even its internal stature. The Philippine reality makes it even harder for the Chinese to consider war there, particularly with U.S. forces to be housed in the country. But given that it takes time for forces to deploy, if China is going to try to be engaged in an aggressive posture, now is the time to do so. But as in Taiwan, posture and launching a war are very different things, and at this point, it’s unlikely China can rapidly break down the door. The most it has done so far is send ships to harass the Philippine navy and perhaps extract some sort of lesser concessions.

A homeless woman has filed a lawsuit claiming that—after she had been forced to leave a local hospital—Lexington, Kentucky, police officers violently arrested her, breaking her leg. Since her injury, the woman says she has been forced to undergo multiple corrective surgeries.
"The Defendants' mistreatment, insults, harassment, assaulting, battering, and humiliating conduct caused Plaintiff to be arrested and deprived of competent medical care as well as her freedom," the 25-page complaint states.
In March of last year, Linda Trapp, then 61, was staying at Catholic Action Center, a homeless shelter, when she was taken to St. Joseph East Hospital after she fell and hit her head. As she was being discharged around two hours later, Trapp asked hospital staff for a COVID test, as the shelter had a policy of not allowing individuals to return without a negative COVID test. However, the lawsuit claims that hospital staff refused to administer a COVID test—meaning that Trapp would be forced to sleep outside.
The lawsuit states that hospital staff then called for police assistance, as they believed that Trapp would not leave the hospital.
Body camera footage shows one police officer, which the complaint identifies as Myles Foster, becoming verbally aggressive toward Trapp, telling her "I will drag you out and throw you out on the sidewalk!" He continued, "Come on, I will drag you out….you wanna call my bluff, go ahead!"
The lawsuit states that Trapp eventually complied and slowly walked toward the hospital's exit. However, she again asked for a COVID test and her walking cane, which she needs for her degenerative knee condition. (Notably, Trapp later told a local news station that she had been drinking that night and had, in fact, not brought her cane to the hospital.) Foster told her, "It's not that cold tonight you will be alright" in response to Trapp's concerns about being forced to sleep outside.
Throughout the encounter, body camera footage shows Foster continuing to behave aggressively toward Trapp. At one point, the complaint states that "Foster pushed Plaintiff to the ground and threatened to take her to jail." After Trapp stood up, Foster told her "We are not touching you. If I touch you again you are going in cuffs…and you're gonna get hurt because I am gonna put you on the ground."
When Trapp finally reached the hospital's exit, the complaint states that the police officers, as well as several hospital employees, "collectively began to humiliate and make fun of" Trapp. The lawsuit claims that Foster "sarcastically yells, 'Bye Bye!'" while a hospital employee "waves her hand as if to shoo Plaintiff saying, 'Go!…Far!…like Harrodsburg Road!'"
When Trapp again asked for her cane, the lawsuit states that Foster yelled, "Go find a tree branch or something," which was followed by another hospital employee, who shouted, "Go get you a tree branch!" The suit writes that "the individuals and the LPD Officers are laughing and smiling about their concerted behavior towards Plaintiff. Defendant Foster yells to Plaintiff, 'They're [sic] some good trees over there downtown!'"
Soon after, body camera footage shows both officers approaching Trapp, who said, "Oh no, you are not going to hurt me?!" At that moment, Foster "violently grabs Plaintiff's arm and twists it behind her back while forcing her to the ground, face first….After being forcibly slammed to the ground [Trapp] says, 'Because I wanted my cane you broke my knee!'" The complaint adds that "at no time did either officer tell Plaintiff she was under arrest."
The arrest left 61-year-old Trapp with a fractured leg, as well as "abrasions to her face and head." The complaint notes that Foster continued to taunt Trapp, telling her "I don't mess around Linda, or whatever your name is, next time you seem [sic] me you better not act like this. I don't mess around you understand?!"
Eventually, hospital employees, seeing an injured and bloodied Trap, agree to take her back inside the hospital for treatment. During this time, she receives more verbal abuse, with Foster insisting that "Your knee is fine," and a female nurse telling Trapp, "Lord Jesus shut up!" while treating her facial wound. When an emergency room doctor arrived, he "spent approximately 19 seconds" with Trapp, adding that she could get an X-ray "with your doctor at his office" before walking away.
A few minutes later, the suit states that Foster can be heard bragging to another officer about violently arresting Trapp, saying, "She got busted up pretty good…. She was Man-dropped."
The complaint states that Foster told his supervisor that, when he went to arrest Trapp, she "started flailing her arms and kicking and stuff." However, body camera footage doesn't show this—instead, Trapp can be seen simply backing away from the officers with her hands at her sides.
Eventually, the complaint states that Trapp was taken to a local jail, where an X-ray revealed her leg had been fractured. She was taken to another hospital where her injuries were treated, including several corrective surgeries.
Despite the severe injuries resulting from Trapp's arrest, local police have staunchly refused to admit wrongdoing—instead insisting that Trapp was responsible for her injuries.
The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that, in response to the lawsuit, Foster insisted that "after multiple prior warnings were communicated to Plaintiff, she had clear reason to know the basis of her arrest," adding that if Trapp was injured, it was not due to "excessive or unreasonable force."
"She was never told that she was under arrest," John Reynolds, Trapp's lawyer, told LEX 18. "She was never told to put her hands behind her back, she was grabbed and forcefully taken to the ground."
"Defendants violated that duty of reasonable care by using their authority as officers to negligently and forcibly detain, batter, assault, harass, threaten, and humiliate Plaintiff Linda Trapp," the complaint states, adding that Trapp "suffered wrongful arrest, imprisonment, emotional injury severe bodily injuries and delayed medical treatment" as a result of the officers' behavior.
While the lawsuit argues that the officers and the Lexington Police Department have committed a litany of offenses, including assault and battery, negligence, and unlawful arrest, it's unclear if those responsible for Trapp's injuries will ever be held accountable. Wide-ranging qualified immunity often makes it nearly impossible for those abused by police to achieve victory in civil lawsuits, even when officers' conduct is seemingly beyond the pale.
"Linda's part of a marginalized community," said Reynolds. "And you can see that night on the video that she was dismissed, she was literally shooed away from the hospital, and she was wrongfully arrested."
The post Lawsuit: Police Officer Broke a 61-Year-Old Woman's Leg, Then Bragged He 'Man-Dropped' Her appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The Atlantic’s June cover story is a dispatch from Ukraine, including an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian leader met with our editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, staff writer Anne Applebaum, and Laurene Powell Jobs, chair of the magazine’s board of directors, and their conversations took place as Ukraine prepares to conduct what could be one of the most consequential military counteroffensives in modern history.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
When private equity firms bankrupt their own companies
What home cooking does that restaurants can’t
A lesson about living from a survivor of suicide
Hotel booking is a post-truth nightmare.
A Fateful SpringThe democracies face a coming year of decision. In the next 12 to 18 months, we will know whether Americans have the collective will to resist yet another attempt to hand power to a would-be autocrat; as astonishing as it seems, one of the likely presidential candidates in the 2024 election is a man who incited a violent attack against the government and the Constitution of the United States. We will also know whether the free world (and yes, it’s long past time to start using that expression again) has the will to resist the onslaught of Russian butchery in Europe.These two battles are inextricably linked. If America stumbles even deeper into authoritarian darkness than it already has, Ukraine is lost. If Ukraine is lost, Europe and the West face an existential threat not only to our physical security but also to our democratic civilization.As Jeffrey Goldberg notes in his editor’s introduction to the June issue, The Atlantic went to Ukraine because the war there “is about much more than Ukraine; it is about the very subjects that animate this magazine: democracy, freedom, justice, humanism.” In Kherson, he and Anne were interviewing Ukrainian soldiers when the Russians bombed a nearby supermarket parking lot, the kind of indiscriminate attack that reinforces the stakes for Ukraine and the world. The Russian missile, Jeff writes, “was meant to murder and terrorize; mission accomplished.”And this is what the Russian war on Ukraine has become: a campaign of revenge by an infuriated despot who is determined to show that democracy will bow to dictatorship, even if he has to bomb every home and kill every Ukrainian.Russian President Vladimir Putin, of course, is trapped in a vortex of his own grandiose miscalculations and strategic ineptitude. He expected Ukraine to collapse within hours of his first attacks more than a year ago. As the Ukrainian defense minister told Anne and Jeff, so did the U.S. and NATO, who expected a war between “a big Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army” and thought that the “big” Soviet army would win.I made the same miscalculation in my early analyses of the conflict. As we now know, however, the Russian military had for years managed to hide its shocking incompetence and poor logistics from the world—and especially from Putin, whose small circle of sycophants was too terrified to tell him the truth. Lost in a fantasy, he expected not only that Kyiv would fall but also that Russian soldiers would be greeted as liberators. The Russian campaign, as Anne and Jeff write, was “to annihilate both Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine,” but now, with tens of thousands of Russian casualties and the Russian nation in shock at constant defeats, Putin has apparently decided that he must destroy what he once hoped to possess whole. He will rule over whatever is left—and then continue his attempted march westward.Although our cover story bears witness to these crushing tragedies on the ground in Ukraine, it is not a report of relentless pessimism. Indeed, Ukraine at war has forged an even stronger identity as a civic and democratic nation. Ukrainians are resolute that there is no alternative to victory. (Ukrainian citizens, as our writers saw, routinely use expressions when parting such as “See you after the victory.”) Anne and Jeff also note how much has changed since those first chaotic months of the war. When they went to speak with Zelensky in the spring of 2022, Kyiv was a city in darkness, its leadership in bunkers, its businesses mostly closed. When they returned last month, they found that “the lights were on, the restaurants were open, and the trains ran on predictable schedules. A coffee shop in the station was serving oat-milk lattes.” Even Bucha, where the Russians conducted a ghastly campaign of civilian executions, is rebuilding.Good news, to be sure, but without a powerful counteroffensive and eventual victory, there can be no peace in Ukraine, and no stability in Europe or the world. What does “victory” mean? Obviously, the survival of an independent Ukraine is the immediate goal, but a lasting peace has to mean more than living through successive Russian conquests and partitions. The Ukrainians, who have lost so much already, are unlikely to accept such an unjust truce, even if the Russians had any interest in offering one. If the Ukrainians lose sovereign territory, if they are not safe from Russian attack, and if there is no reckoning with Russian war criminals, then any Ukrainian “victory” is just a temporary respite from another round of Russian aggression.But even more important, any outcome short of a Ukrainian victory would endanger the rest of the world. There is a reason, as Anne and Jeff write, that so many nations, movements, and individuals are waiting to see what happens:
If a Ukraine that believes in the rule of law and human rights can achieve victory against a much larger, much more autocratic society, and if it can do so while preserving its own freedoms, then similarly open societies and movements around the world can hope for success too. After the Russian invasion, the Venezuelan opposition movement hung a Ukrainian flag on the front of its country’s embassy hall in Washington. The Taiwanese Parliament gave a rapturous welcome to Ukrainian activists last year. Not everyone in the world cares about this war, but for anyone trying to defeat a dictator, it has profound significance.
This is why the world is waiting for the Ukrainian counteroffensive. Read the whole story, which is accompanied by powerful images captured by the renowned photojournalist Paolo Pellegrin. (The cover art is by Bono. Yes, that Bono.) Americans can find it easy to forget the war raging across the sea, but Ukraine is approaching a battle for its ultimate fate—as are all of us living in the free world.Related:
Cover story: The counteroffensive
Editor’s note: War and consequences
A man suspected of killing five neighbors with an AR-15 rifle in Texas on Friday continues to evade law enforcement.
France had a large May Day demonstration as people rallied against President Emmanuel Macron raising the retirement age.
The bulk of First Republic Bank’s operations will be sold to JPMorgan Chase in an attempt to prevent a banking crisis that has been on the horizon for two months.
Unsettled Territory: A relationship of care exists between the browser and the bookseller, even if the two never meet, Imani Perry writes.
Up for Debate: Readers write in with their thoughts and questions on gender.
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Dave Benett / Getty.
Paris Hilton Has a Lesson for EverybodyBy Annie Lowrey
The Paris Hilton with whom I am familiar is not the real Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton tells me. The Paris Hilton she describes in her best-selling new memoir is. “I just put it all out there. It was like writing in a diary, speaking about things that I’ve never said out loud to anyone in my life, not my closest friends or family members. So I would say it was definitely me,” she tells me over Zoom. “Yeah, it’s me.”
I do not believe this claim for a minute, nor do I believe that she believes it either. Paris: The Memoir is a glimpse into the lifestyles of the rich and famous; a dishy gift for her devoted fans, the Little Hiltons; and a horrifying recounting of a life filled with exploitation and abuse. It is also a manual on how to construct a self for public consumption, a skill at which Hilton is an immortal genius and a practice she has helped mainstream into American culture, curving it into a ouroboros of ceaseless posting, commenting, buying, selling.
Succession just delivered its most terrifying episode yet. 
No one in movies knows how to swallow a pill.
The preemptive Republican surrender to Trump
Why banks keep failing
Philip Seymour Hoffman in 'Along Came Polly'
Watch. Along Came Polly (streaming on Peacock), which features a brilliant comedic performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman.Listen. “Funny How Time Slips Away,” a song that captures the artistry of Willie Nelson.Play our daily crossword.Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

There are those, politicians, pundits and even a few scientists, who maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex. They assert that men and women are defined by their production of these gamete cells, making them a distinct biological binary pair, and that our legal rights and social possibilities should flow from this divide. Men are men. Women are women. Simple.

Last year’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings played host to this contention when Republican Congressional representatives upset at the nominee’s refusal to define “woman” took it on themselves to define the term; they came up with “the weaker sex,” “a mother,” and “no tallywhacker.” That human sex rests on a biological binary of making either sperm or ova underlies all these claims.

This is bad science. The production of gametes does not sufficiently describe sex biology in animals, nor is it the definition of a woman or a man.

The animal kingdom does not limit itself to only one biological binary regarding how a species makes gametes. Scientifically speaking, animals with the capacity to produce ova are generally called “female” and sperm producers “male.” While most animal species fall into the “two types of gametes produced by two versions of the reproductive tract” model, many don’t. Some worms produce both. Some fish start producing one kind and then switch to the other, and some switch back and forth throughout their lives. There are even lizards that have done away with one type all together. Among our fellow mammals, which are less freewheeling because of the twin constraints of lactation and live birth, there are varied connections between gametes and body fat, body size, muscles, metabolism, brain function and much more.

While sperm and ova matter, they are not the entirety of biology and don’t tell us all we need to know about sex, especially human sex.

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that differences in sex biology do not matter. They do. Nor am I asserting that reproductive physiology is not an important aspect of all animal lives. For example, humans are mammals, and the specifics of gestation and lactation require bodily differences that shape human physiologies, societies and experiences. But even so, most bodily systems overlap extensively across large (ova) and small (sperm) gamete producers, and the patterns of physiology and behavior in relation to birth and care of offspring are not universal across species. For example, in many mammal species, ova producers do most of the infant care. But in some species, sperm producers do, and in a very few species they even lactate. In others, there is substantial investment by both sexes.

The bottom line is that while animal gametes can be described as binary (of two distinct kinds), the physiological systems, behaviors and individuals that produce them are not. This reality of sex biology is well summarized by a group of biologists who recently wrote: “Reliance on strict binary categories of sex fails to accurately capture the diverse and nuanced nature of sex.”

We know that humans exhibit a range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge. Producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially, about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports. Gametes and gamete production physiology, by themselves, are only a part of the entirety of human lives. Plentiful data and analyses support the assertions that sex is very complex in humans and that binary and simplistic explanations for human sex biology are either wholly incorrect or substantially incomplete.

For humans, sex is dynamic, biological, cultural and enmeshed in feedback cycles with our environments, ecologies and multiple physiological and social processes.

So when someone states that “An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing” and argues that legal and social policy should be “rooted in properties of bodies,” they are not really talking about gametes and sex biology. They are arguing for a specific political, and discriminatory, definition of what is “natural” and “right” for humans based on a false representation of biology. Over the past few centuries this process of misrepresentation of biology was, and still is, used to deny women rights and to justify legal and societal misogyny and inequity, to justify slavery, racialization, racism and to enforce multiple forms of discrimination and bias. Today dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, target LGBTQIA+ individuals broadly and, most recently, attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.

Given what we know about biology across animals and in humans, efforts to represent human sex as binary based solely on what gametes one produces are not about biology but are about trying to restrict who counts as a full human in society.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

“The Permanent Problem” is an ongoing series of essay about the challenges of capitalist mass affluence as well as the solutions to them. You can access the full collection here, or subscribe to brinklindsey.substack.com to get them straight to your inbox.
I want to follow up on my last essay with some further observations about our toxic media environment. Specifically, I’d like to flesh out my argument that mainstream media bears some responsibility for its loss of credibility among large sections of the public. First, I want to give a fuller account of where it went wrong. And second, I want to offer a more complete explanation of why it went astray. I argued that competitive pressures pushed it in the wrong direction, and that’s true – but there’s more to it than that.
As I mentioned in the last essay, trust in the news media has fallen sharply over the past half-century. Back in 1972, 68 percent of Americans reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the mass news media, while only 6 percent reported “none at all”; in 2022, those figures stood at 38 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Until Trump arrived on the scene, trust fell across the board, although the gap gradually widened between Democrats and everybody else; since 2015, though, Democrats’ trust levels have soared back to 1970s levels while independents’ trust levels continued falling and Republicans’ collapsed.
(Just as an aside, I think it’s interesting that poll respondents are clearly focusing on the “mainstream media” here, not the newer right-wing media ecosystem anchored by Fox News. Otherwise, we would expect Republicans to register some approval of now having a conservative option, and Democrats to downgrade the media’s overall performance because of Fox’s prominence.)
There’s one obvious explanation for the ongoing evaporation of trust on the right: Republican politicians and conservative commentators have been complaining bitterly about liberal media bias since before I was born, and with increasing intensity and vituperation over the course of my lifetime. This incessant campaign was intensified dramatically with the steady build-out of the right-wing media counter-establishment – starting small with low-circulation magazines like National Review and Human Events, then developing a mass audience with talk radio, then expanding the mass audience through cable news and the internet. If you saturate that audience with resentment and distrust for decades, it’s going to have an effect.
That’s an important part of the story, to be sure, but it’s not the whole story. In addition, I believe that mainstream news organizations bear some responsibility themselves for their diminished standing. Journalism once enjoyed authority as a trusted source of information that both sides could rely on. But authority isn’t something you’re born with, not since we scrapped the whole divine-right-of-kings business. Authority must be developed, earned, and maintained. As journalism strove to rise above its partisan and yellow press origins over the first half of the 20th century, news organizations and professionals took considerable care, both in how they operated and how they presented themselves to the world, to build trust and burnish their own authority. But in recent years, even as institutional authority and social trust have come under serious challenge in virtually every domain of American life, journalism has increasingly forsaken the practices and self-discipline upon which its authority rested.
The authority of mainstream journalism wasn’t just toppled by a concerted external attack. It was also abdicated.
Look at any source of institutional authority in society, and you’ll see concerted efforts to distinguish that institution and its members from everybody, to set them apart and show that they are special – and thus deserving of special respect and deference. Priests wear a collar, and once spoke in Latin while wreathed in incense. Police wear a uniform and a sidearm. Judges wear robes, sit above everybody else, and expect everyone to rise when they enter a room. Doctors sport the white lab coat and take umbrage if you call them Mr. or Mrs. This public presentation of a special role in society is important.
Over the 20th century, journalists worked assiduously to raise their status in society above their lowly, somewhat disreputable origins as “ink-stained wretches.” Columbia University’s School of Journalism was created, and the Pulitzer Prizes were established. The American Society of News Editors was founded. 
Journalism’s central strategy for raising its professional status and position in society was the enshrinement of objectivity as its core commitment. Before getting into whether objectivity is actually desirable, or even possible, let’s understand why this particular value was elevated as journalism’s pole star. The purpose was to establish and buttress the fledgling profession’s position in a central and vital social role – as a trusted source of information about public affairs. And to be considered widely trustworthy in the sprawling, bumptious pluralism of modern society is not an easy trick to pull off. It requires special discipline and focus. 
In particular, the commitment to objectivity means that journalistic accounts must always hew closely to verifiable facts – who, what, when, where, and how. Why is much trickier, as there’s frequently deep and unresolvable disagreement about that. Here the best that can be done is to make the public aware of what the leading interpretations are and how they differ. So while analysis and commentary have always been a part of journalism, the heart of the enterprise – the basis for journalism’s claim of authority – is accurate reporting of carefully established facts.
To convince the public of journalism’s central commitment to verifiable facticity, journalists themselves must embody – and be seen to embody – the virtues appropriate to their role. They must build a reputation for insisting on verification and corroboration: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” And they must take special pains to set themselves apart from the action they cover – to be neutral observers, not active participants. Since passion and interest are the main sources of factions in society, and of controversy among contending factions, journalists need to model dispassion and disinterest. They must avoid sensationalism and appeals to emotion, and they must avoid taking sides.
In this old 20th century model of objective journalism, the pose of cool-headed neutrality was taken seriously. It meant staying away from organized political activity, or even sharing your political opinions publicly. Some carried things even farther, refusing to join a political party or even vote in order to preserve their outsider status.
I recognize that this little recitation sounds musty and old-fashioned – and that’s a good clue as to what’s gone wrong. In these postmodern times, the whole idea of objectivity has come under sustained attack. For one thing, psychology and behavioral economics have found that we are riddled with cognitive biases that regularly distort our assessment of what’s going on. 
But while the limits of individual human rationality are a fascinating area of study, they really are beside the point here. Even if we can never reach the bedrock of ultimate truth, we can all judge degrees of accuracy: There’s all the difference in the world between a conscientiously reported account of events on the one hand, and loose innuendo or outright fantasy on the other. 
Beyond these concerns about individual human fallibility, there is the political critique of objectivity as a mask for power. According to this line of argument, journalistic neutrality isn’t really neutral; it’s an implicit decision to side with the powerful. Reporting a controversy, and the various sides of that controversy, without finally declaring who’s right and who’s wrong is an abdication of responsibility. If you’re really going to serve the truth, you need to take sides.
This political objection to objectivity has gained considerable ground within the profession in recent decades, with fateful results. The objection, in my view, rests on a massive confusion concerning journalism’s role in society. It may flatter some journalists’ egos for them to see themselves as arbiters of truth, but news reporting has no capacity or authority to fulfill that role. Its actual job, much more modest but nonetheless critical, is to provide society with an agreed-upon set of facts to guide public debate. And you can’t fulfill that role if you take sides on controversial issues, because those on the other side won’t trust you.
Journalism is already vulnerable to distrust because its practitioners are drawn so disproportionately from the left side of the political spectrum. There isn’t much that can be done about this: The simple fact is that the type of people for whom journalism holds appeal as a career – people who are good with words and more interested in ideas than money-making – skew overwhelmingly left. Moreover, in an age where self-expression values are dominant, authority of any kind is increasingly on the defensive. Under these circumstances, the profession was well advised to double down on objectivity, not back away from it.
Alas, backing away is what happened. In part it happened because of ideological changes on the left. As politics has grown more performative, and taking public stands on behalf of approved causes has become the benchmark of political virtue among those under the performative spell, many journalists were understandably swept along with the tide. The New York Times’s 1619 project is the most well-known example here, but the newspaper’s overall coverage shifted markedly in line with the past decade’s various social justice-themed enthusiasms. The charts below illustrate the trend:

Meanwhile, as social justice activism roiled the internal workings of professional organizations across the board, newsrooms were no exceptions. Here again the New York Times was on trend, with a staff revolt leading to the ouster of the editorial page editor for running an op-ed by a Republican senator in favor of using the military against rioters. Whatever they thought they were accomplishing, the increasing outspokenness of journalists on behalf of their political beliefs has played directly into the hands of right-wing assaults on the mainstream media. Those attacks on “fake news” portray the media as left-wing partisans masquerading as journalists, and the subjects of those attacks were only too willing to supply ammunition.
To be fair, the rise of Trump did represent a genuinely difficult dilemma for journalism. What do you do when you’ve become the story – when the president of the United States is actively vilifying and demonizing you? What do you do when the president lies constantly, extravagantly, gratuitously, about matters great and small? The traditional style of objectivity, developed in less disordered times, included a strong tendency to treat both sides as acting in good faith and representing reasonable alternatives. But instead of the usual clash of two parties operating within the system, now the leader of one party was – in a wide variety of ways – actively undermining the system. The old assumptions and framing did not seem suited to the times, but how far to go in defending the media against attack and in presenting Trump as a unique and unprecedented threat? I don’t pretend that there were any easy or fully satisfactory answers.
Returning to the argument of my last essay, there was a third factor besides ideology and Trump that drove mainstream journalism to abandon the high ground of objectivity: money. Trump was a ratings bonanza for cable news, and digital subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post tripled during his time in office. CNN exploited the situation coming and going: first building up Trump with nonstop coverage, then presenting itself as the vanguard of the resistance once he won. Along with MSNBC, it enjoyed record ratings and profits. The Washington Post leaned into the demand for overt media opposition to Trump with its new “Democracy dies in darkness” slogan. Reporters for the Times and the Post became media celebrities with their regular appearances on cable news talk shows. Media figures more generally raced to build their personal brands by developing large followings on Twitter, where the currencies of the realm are righteous indignation and pugnacious snark. However careful and well-sourced their actual work, many reporters have been actively presenting themselves to the world, not as neutral observers, but as active participants in the political drama. 
So here we are. Although I believe that mainstream journalism’s missteps in recent years have been real and consequential, I don’t want to overstate those consequences. If all the major media organizations had conducted themselves more circumspectly and reined in their employees’ public-facing moonlighting, my guess is that their trust numbers would look somewhat better, but that the general trend would still be the same. The right-wing attack has been too sustained, and recently too virulent, for any other outcome to be possible. 
However we got here, the situation is dire. We’re the richest, most powerful country in the world. We have miraculous information technologies that put virtually all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. If you want to be well-informed and you know what sources to trust, there has never been anything remotely like the current access to excellent reporting around the world and superb commentary and analysis. Yet large sections of the American public believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that Covid-19 vaccines are bad for you. And because of that latter delusion, hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead.
How do we get to something better? There’s no going back to information scarcity – and we shouldn’t want to. I don’t imagine we can ever return to a culture of broad-based deep literacy, however much we might want to. And especially under these contemporary conditions of information overload and mass audiences unable to tell the difference between well-established facts and arrant nonsense, a free market in news seems destined to bring out the worst in us. In a no-holds-barred competition for eyeballs, the race belongs to the most irresponsible.
In the short to medium term, our best hope – and it’s just a hope at this point – is that the currently dominant performative style of culture-war politics will burn itself out before it burns down our republic. If the main political divisions were no longer along demographic (and especially educational) lines, mainstream journalism would not be so clearly identified with one of the two warring tribes. And if journalists themselves became less politically homogeneous, the temptation to trade in objectivity for activism would be diminished. 
Over the longer term, though, if we are ever to achieve an informational environment that is suitable to our level of technological and organizational complexity, I believe that fundamentally new institutions and approaches will be required. I will be writing more on this in due time, but for now I’ll offer just a couple of thoughts. First, we need new nonprofit news organizations, constituted to serve the public and devoted exclusively to factual reporting of public affairs, without analysis or commentary. Reporters who work for these organizations need to be bound by a strict code of professional ethics that clearly distinguishes them from the rest of the media universe. Second, we need the equivalent of the temperance movement for media consumption – a broad-based, bottom-up campaign to convince people that heavy, indiscriminate consumption of commercial and ideological news media is dangerous to their intellectual and moral well-being. In a free society, we can’t stop people from saying stupid and hurtful things, but we can certainly do a better job of teaching the rest of us to tune them out.
The post How mainstream journalism squandered its authority appeared first on Niskanen Center.

By all official counts—at least, the ones still being tallied—the global situation on COVID appears to have essentially flatlined. More than a year has passed since the world last saw daily confirmed deaths tick above 10,000; nearly a year and a half has elapsed since the population was pummeled by a new Greek-lettered variant of concern. The globe’s most recent winters have been the pandemic’s least lethal to date—and the World Health Organization is mulling lifting its COVID emergency declaration sometime later this year, as the final pandemic protections in the United States prepare to disappear. On the heels of the least-terrible winter since the pandemic’s onset, this spring in the U.S. is also going … kind of all right. “I am feeling less worried than I have been in a while,” Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease modeler at Georgetown University, told me.That sense of phew, though, Bansal said, feels tenuous. The coronavirus’s evolution is not yet predictable; its effects are nowhere near benign. This might be the longest stretch of quasi-normalcy that humanity has had since 2020’s start, but experts can’t yet tell whether we’re at the beginning of post-pandemic stability or in the middle of a temporary reprieve. For now, we’re in a holding pattern, a sort of extended coda or denouement. Which means that our lived experience and scientific reality might not match up for a good while yet.[Read: The next stage of COVID is starting now]There is, to be fair, reason to suspect that some current trends will stick. The gargantuan waves of seasons past were the rough product of three factors: low population immunity, genetic changes that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to skirt what immunity did exist, and upswings in behaviors that brought people and the virus into frequent contact. Now, though, just about everyone has had some exposure to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, whether by infection or injection. And most Americans have long since dispensed with masking and distancing, maintaining their exposure at a consistently high plateau. That leaves the virus’s shape-shifting as the only major wild card, says Emily Martin, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. SARS-CoV-2 could, for instance, make another evolutionary leap large enough to re-create the Omicron wave of early 2022—but a long time has passed since the virus managed such a feat. Tentatively, carefully, experts are hopeful that we’re at last in a “period that could be kind of indicative of what the new normal really is,” says Virginia Pitzer, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Yale.Top American officials are already gambling on that guess. At a conference convened in late March by the Massachusetts Medical Society, Ashish Jha, the outgoing coordinator of the White House COVID-19 Response Team, noted that the relative tameness of this past winter was a major deciding factor in the Biden administration’s decision to let the U.S. public-health emergency lapse. The crisis-caliber measures that were essential at the height of the pandemic, Jha said, were no longer “critical at this moment” to keep the nation’s health-care system afloat. Americans could rely instead primarily on shots and antivirals to keep themselves healthy—“If you are up to date on your vaccines and you get treated with Paxlovid, if you get an infection, you just don’t die of this virus,” he said. (That math, of course, doesn’t hold up as well for certain vulnerable groups, including the elderly and the immunocompromised.) The pharmaceuticals-only strategy asks much less of people: Going forward, most Americans will need to dose up on their COVID vaccines only once a year in the fall, a la seasonal flu shots.Making sweeping assessments at this particular juncture, though, is tough. Experts expect SARS-CoV-2 cases to take a downturn as winter transitions into spring—as many other respiratory viruses do. And a half-ish year of relative quietude is, well, just a half-ish year of relative quietude—too little data for scientists to definitively declare the virus seasonal, or even necessarily stable in its annual patterns. One of the most telling intervals is yet to come: the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, says Alyssa Bilinski, a health-policy researcher at Brown University. In previous years, waves of cases have erupted pretty consistently during the warmer months, especially in the American South, as people flock indoors to beat the heat.SARS-CoV-2 might not end up being recognizably seasonal at all. So far, the virus has circulated more or less year-round, with erratic bumps in the winter and, to a lesser extent, the summer. “There is a consistency there that is very enticing,” Bansal told me. But many of the worst surges we’ve weathered were driven by a lack of immunity, which is less of an issue now. “So I like to be extremely careful about the seasonality argument,” she said. In future years, the virus may break from its summer-winter shuffle. How SARS-CoV-2 will continue to interact with other respiratory viruses, such as RSV and flu, also remains to be seen. After an extended hiatus, driven largely by pandemic mitigations, those pathogens came roaring back this past autumn—making it more difficult, perhaps, for the coronavirus to find unoccupied hosts. Experts can’t yet tell whether future winters will favor the coronavirus or its competitors. Either way, scientists won’t know until they’ve collected several more years of evidence—“I would want at least a handful, like four or five,” Bansal said.Amassing those numbers is only getting tougher, though, as data streams dry up, Martin told me. Virus-surveillance systems are being dismantled; soon, hospitals and laboratories will no longer be required to share their COVID data with federal officials. Even independent trackers have sunsetted their regular updates. Especially abysmal are estimates of total infections, now that so many people are using only at-home tests, if they’re testing at all—and metrics such as hospitalization and death don’t fully reflect where and when the virus is moving, and which new variants may be on the rise.Shifts in long-term approaches to virus control could also upend this period of calm. As tests, treatments, and vaccines become privatized, as people lose Medicaid coverage, as community-outreach programs fight to stay afloat, the virus will find the country’s vulnerable pockets again. Those issues aren’t just about the coming months: COVID-vaccination rates among children remain worryingly low—a trend that could affect the virus’s transmission patterns for decades. And should the uptake of annual COVID shots continue on its current trajectory—worse, even, than America’s less-than-optimal flu vaccination rates—or dip even further down, rates of severe disease may begin another upward climb. Experts also remain concerned about the ambiguities around long COVID, whose risks remain ill-defined.[Read: Long COVID is being erased—again]We could get lucky. Maybe 2023 is the start of a bona fide post-pandemic era; maybe the past few months are genuinely offering a teaser trailer of decades to come. But even if that’s the case, it’s not a full comfort. COVID remains a leading cause of death in the United States, where the virus continues to kill about 200 to 250 people each day, many of them among the population’s most vulnerable and disenfranchised. It’s true that things are better than they were a couple of years ago. But in some ways, that’s a deeply unfair comparison to make. Deaths would have been higher when immunity was low; vaccines, tests, and treatments were scarce; and the virus was far less understood. “I would hope our standard for saying that we’ve succeeded and that we don’t need to do more is not Are we doing better than some of the highest-mortality years in history?” Bilinski told me. Perhaps the better question is why we’re settling for the status quo—a period of possible stability that may be less a relief and more a burden we’ve permanently stuck ourselves with.

Photographs by Paolo PellegrinThis article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.In March 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist.The rest of the world remembers Potemkin differently, for something that we would now call a disinformation campaign. In 1787, Catherine paid a six-month visit to Crimea and the land then known as New Russia. The story goes that Potemkin built fake villages along her route, populated with fake villagers exuding fake prosperity. These villages probably never existed, but the story has endured for a reason: The sycophantic courtier, creating false images for the empress, is a figure we know from other times and other places. The tale also evokes something we recognize to be true, not just of imperial Russia but of Putin’s Russia, where mind-boggling efforts are made to please the leader—efforts that these days include telling him he is winning a war that he is most definitely not winning.In a bid to restore Potemkin’s cities to Russian suzerainty, Russia occupied Kherson in early March of 2022, at the outset of a campaign to annihilate both Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine. Russian soldiers kidnapped the mayor, tortured city employees, murdered civilians, and stole children. In September, Putin held a ceremony in the Kremlin declaring Kherson and other occupied territories to be part of Russia. But Kherson did not become Russia. Partisans fought back inside the city, with car bombs and sabotage. Even as the occupiers held a ludicrous referendum, designed to show that Ukrainians had chosen Russia, the Russian army was quietly preparing to flee. By October, this new Potemkin village was collapsing, and the resurgent Ukrainian army was approaching the outskirts of Kherson. It was then that the Russians did something particularly strange: They kidnapped the bones of Grigory Potemkin.Potemkin died in 1791. His skull and at least several other bones—which ones, exactly, is a mystery—were eventually brought to St. Catherine’s Cathedral, in Kherson, built by Potemkin himself. The bones were kept in a crypt beneath the cathedral nave. On a cloudy Sunday this past March, we visited the cathedral, which sits just a few streets away from the Dnipro River—now the front line—to try to understand why the Russian army, in the chaotic final days of its occupation of Kherson, had paused to rob a grave.We arrived during a short break between services. The worshippers were mainly elderly, with a few younger people, even children, mixed in. The streets outside were empty; the city has been depopulated by the invasion, by the counterinvasion, and by ongoing, erratic fire from Russian soldiers, known to the Ukrainians as “Rashists” or “orcs.” On one of the days we visited, a missile hit a supermarket parking lot. Three people were killed in this attack, and three people wounded, including an elderly woman. The shelling sounded far away to us, except when it didn’t.At the cathedral, a young priest rolled back a rug in the nave and opened a trapdoor. We descended narrow stairs. Potemkin’s bones once rested in a wooden coffin on a stone platform at the center of the dark, claustrophobic room. Father Vitaly—who spoke in Ukrainian, the language of Kherson’s modern rulers, not in Russian, the language of Potemkin—described the day of the theft. “Russian vehicles surrounded the church,” he said. “Then soldiers came in and asked to open the crypt. They seemed very uneasy. Six of them came down the stairs and took the bones. They took them outside, to a van that was waiting. Then they were gone.”We asked him what he made of it. “I’m grateful to Potemkin for building this church,” he said carefully. Then he shrugged. Potemkin’s historic connection to the city didn’t interest him as much as it interested us. His flock had more important concerns.
Plane wreckage at the Chornobaivka air base, outside Kherson, March 6, 2023. The Russian military seized the airport in the first month of the invasion, but the Ukrainians took it back in November. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
Afterward, on a long drive to Ukrainian artillery positions along the river, we debated the meaning of the theft. Perhaps Russia had given up on Kherson and taken Potemkin home, away from wretched and ungrateful Ukraine. Or maybe Potemkin’s skull was resting not on Putin’s desk in the Kremlin, but rather in a safe house across the river, waiting to be brought back after a Russian reinvasion.[In Focus: Photos of celebrations as Ukraine retakes Kherson]A week later, in Kyiv, we had the opportunity to ask one of Ukraine’s leading experts on Russian imperialist behavior why a squad of Russian soldiers, presumably busy planning the retreat from Kherson, had stolen Potemkin’s bones. “I’m not sure that they know who Potemkin is,” Volodymyr Zelensky said. The Ukrainian president waved away the question: “I think for them, it doesn’t matter what they’ve stolen.” When the Russians left Kherson they took everything: paintings, furniture, dishwashers, the raccoons from the zoo, the skull of Catherine’s lover. The long legacy of Prince Potemkin, the neoclassical stone cathedral, the extraordinary weight of the past—none of that matters, he reckoned, to the men who fled Kherson.“When they run, they take everything they see,” Zelensky told us. “You know what they took from the Kyiv region? Urinals. They stole urinals!”On a previous visit to see Zelensky, in April of 2022, the scale of Putin’s delusion was just becoming clear. That meeting felt improvised, almost accidental; it was arranged on the fly, via a mad series of text messages, in the days immediately following the chaotic Russian withdrawal from the northern part of the country. We took a train to Kyiv that wasn’t listed on any timetable; in the blacked-out town center, only one restaurant was open. In Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that had been occupied by Russian troops, we watched soldiers and technicians exhume bodies from a mass grave behind a church. At that moment, the war was turning: The Russians, having failed to take Kyiv from the north in the first month of fighting, were preparing to attack from the east. After our meeting, a Zelensky aide texted us a list of weapons that the Ukrainian army needed in order to repel that offensive, hoping that we would carry the message back to Washington.[Read: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg interview Volodymyr Zelensky in April 2022 ]When we visited again a few weeks ago, the lights were on, the restaurants were open, and the trains ran on predictable schedules. A coffee shop in the station was serving oat-milk lattes. Bucha is a construction site, with a brand-new hardware store for anyone repairing war damage themselves. A conversation with Zelensky is now a more formal affair, with simultaneous translation, a videographer, and an array of English-speaking aides in attendance. Zelensky himself spoke English much of the time—he has had, he said, a lot more practice. But behind the more polished presentation, the tension and uncertainty persist, fueled by the sense that we are once again at a turning point, once again at a moment when key decisions will be made, in Kyiv, of course, but especially in Washington.For although the war is not lost, it is also not won. Kherson is free, but it is under constant attack. Kyiv’s restaurants are open, but refugees have not yet returned home. Russia’s winter offensive has petered out, but as of this writing, in mid-April, it is unclear when Ukraine’s summer offensive will begin. Until it begins, or rather, until it ends, negotiations—about the future of Ukraine and its borders, Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and to Europe, the final status of the Crimean Peninsula—cannot begin either. Right now Putin still seems to believe that a long, drawn-out war of attrition will eventually bring him back his empire: Ukraine’s feckless Western allies will grow tired and give up; maybe Donald Trump will win reelection and align with the Kremlin; Ukraine will retreat; Ukrainians will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Russian soldiers, however poorly armed and trained they may be.Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. The Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, spoke with us about the “Ramstein Club,” named after the American air base in Germany where the group, which consists of the defense officials of 54 countries, first convened. Still, his most important relationship is with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (“we communicate very, very often”), and everyone knows that this club is organized by Americans, led by Americans, galvanized by Americans. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that Ukrainians now feel they are “strategic partners and friends” with America, something that might not have felt so true a few years ago, when Donald Trump was impeached on charges of seeking to extort Zelensky.In our interview with Zelensky, which we conducted with the chair of The Atlantic’s board of directors, Laurene Powell Jobs, we asked him how he would justify this unusual relationship to a skeptical American: Why should Americans donate weapons to a distant war? He was clear in stating that the outcome of the war will determine the future of Europe. “If we will not have enough weapons,” he said, “that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus, and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.” The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.[Read: Zelensky has an answer for DeSantis]But something even deeper is at stake as well. As Zelensky put it, this is a war over a fundamental definition of not just democracy but civilization, a battle “to show everybody else, including Russia, to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity; and to respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take that which is not yours.” If a Ukraine that believes in the rule of law and human rights can achieve victory against a much larger, much more autocratic society, and if it can do so while preserving its own freedoms, then similarly open societies and movements around the world can hope for success too. After the Russian invasion, the Venezuelan opposition movement hung a Ukrainian flag on the front of its country’s embassy hall in Washington. The Taiwanese Parliament gave a rapturous welcome to Ukrainian activists last year. Not everyone in the world cares about this war, but for anyone trying to defeat a dictator, it has profound significance.America is linked to the war in this deeper sense. The civilization that Ukraine defends has been profoundly shaped by American ideas not just about democracy, but about entrepreneurship, liberty, civil society, and the rule of law. When we asked Zelensky about Ukraine’s tech sector, he happily began talking about his dream of building a university devoted to computer science, and about the projects created by his country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, among them a unique app that allows Ukrainians to store documents on their phones, a godsend for refugees. He talks more readily about Silicon Valley than he does about Potemkin’s bones, and no wonder: The former defines the world he wants to live in.Zelensky did not share our preoccupation with the history of Russian imperial desire. “I don’t love the past,” he said. “We have to jump forward, not back.”In a different part of Ukraine, we saw what Zelensky’s “jump forward” looks like in practice. The future is unfolding in a room where glue, wire, bits of metal, and electronic components are strewn across several large tables. A 3‑D printer stands along one wall. A rack of what appear to be Styrofoam model airplanes hangs on another wall. They are drones, and this is a drone workshop, one of two we visited and one of dozens spread all around the country.The status of this particular drone workshop might confuse Americans who think that “the military” is a unitary institution, or that “defense production” is something that involves billion-dollar companies. The patron of this project is a former Ukrainian-special-forces commander and current member of Parliament, Colonel Roman Kostenko. The “employees” are all engineers, now mobilized into the army as pilots and designers of drones. The financing is private, and the entire enterprise is based on the belief that if Ukraine can’t compete with Russian quantity, it can exceed Russian quality: “The only way we can win is by being smarter,” Kostenko told us. He said he speaks regularly with the military leadership, though he is no longer in the chain of command. “It’s not Lockheed Martin,” he said, surveying the room. But when we pointed out that Lockheed Martin probably started this way too, he agreed.
A Ukrainian soldier reassembles batteries extracted from downed Russian drones in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has tried to annex for Russia, March 9, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
Though we were asked not to disclose precise details of this workshop’s location or activities, we can say that it primarily produces modifications to commercially available drones. Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, later told us that he calls them “wedding-ceremony drones,” by which he means drones normally used to film weddings, now repurposed as lethal weapons. The workshop also modifies existing explosive devices, including Soviet-era ones, for the drones to carry. Along with similar teams around the country, the team here also works on new kinds of drones that can do new things, including carrying out sophisticated electronic warfare and underwater attacks, all at relatively low cost. Kostenko described a drone that he said had destroyed 24 pieces of enemy equipment, including tanks.But this basement-and-garage-based Ukrainian tech army doesn’t just build drones; it also builds the software that coordinates the work of the drones. Sometimes it does so in partnership with NGOs, not companies; an executive at one of these groups described the software it develops as “an invention, not a product”—and, more important, as an invention that is constantly being redesigned. One widely used program collects information and distributes it to the laptops and tablets of ordinary soldiers up and down the front line, providing the situational awareness that has been one of Ukraine’s unexpected advantages. A tiny command post we visited had a bank of screens, each showing a different view of the battlefield.Several foreign companies cooperate too. The most advanced, such as Palantir, the U.S.-based software and defense company, have software that can draw on multiple data sources—commercial-satellite images, reports from partisans—to identify and prioritize targets. This form of “algorithmic warfare” isn’t new, but the Ukrainians have the incentive to develop and expand it: Lacking warehouses full of spare ammunition, they have to hit the largest number of enemy vehicles with the smallest number of missiles.Maxwell Adams, an engineer at Helsing, a European defense-tech company working pro bono in Ukraine, told us that the Ukrainians impressed his team with their ability to use everything available, from simple messaging apps to sophisticated artillery, all in unpredictable conditions. Together with their Ukrainian colleagues, his employees work to “get our software to run right on the edge, meaning on tiny little computer chips on the back of a rusty old vehicle, or in the backpack of a soldier, or on the payload of a drone.” The Ukrainians “absolutely get how to make AI operational,” he said.They also get the need to use whatever they have. Reznikov described the combination of weaponry that the Ukrainians have received from dozens of different countries as a “zoo,” a menagerie of weapons (“We have approximately 10 systems of artillery,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers), and they all have to be made to work together, under conditions of limited ammunition, limited manpower, and sometimes limited satellite connection.This high-tech world exists alongside and within an extraordinarily diverse citizens’ army, one that includes NATO-trained officers; grandfathers guarding their own villages; and every conceivable level of training, experience, and equipment in between. Because the front line runs through suburban backyards and working farms, this army lives and works in those places too. In a cottage near another part of the front line, we met a handful of drone operators, along with their chihuahua and a couple of cats. Religious icons, property of a former owner, hung on the wall in the kitchen; muddy boots were lined up in rows in the hallway. In what used to be a living room, “Elephant,” who was a farmer before the war (albeit a farmer who had previously served in Ukrainian intelligence), talked about the need to modernize army education. “Frenchman” acquired his call sign because he’d served in the French Foreign Legion before coming home to run a wine bar in Lviv; he looks less like the tough legionnaire you imagine than the hip restaurateur he had become. Yet another soldier was fiddling with what looked like a video-game console when we arrived; in fact, he was learning to guide a drone. All of them had joined this special-forces group after February 2022.A couple of hours’ drive away, along a dirt road filled with rocks, mud, and potholes the size of small ponds, we encountered a completely different kind of Ukrainian army, an infantry brigade composed of local men. Their artillery unit deploys weapons that look like they might have been used during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and keeps them in barns and warehouses. They were cheerful—before we spoke, they insisted that we eat lunch at an army canteen—and showed no sign of the exhaustion that journalists have reported among troops in harsher sections of the front line. But although they can find Russian targets using the software on their tablets, they don’t have much ammunition with which to strike them. Joking, one of them offered us a deal: “If you could give us some more HIMARS now”—the American-made mobile rocket launchers that have been crucial to Ukraine’s defense—“after the war we’ll build you some drones.”The unusual nature of this grassroots fighting force, along with its even more unusual range of physical and technological capabilities, helps explain why the Ukrainians were underestimated at the beginning of the conflict, and why their abilities are so hard to gauge now. Washington and Brussels thought that the war would feature “a big Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army,” in Reznikov’s words, and that the big Soviet army would of course win. But after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, “the first people who became defenders were volunteers from the Maidan,” Reznikov noted, referring to Ukraine’s revolution against its autocratic, Russian-backed president that year. “They took rifles and went to the east.” In that same year, patriotic young Ukrainians also went to work for the defense industry or built the NGOs that still support the military today.The old Ukrainian army had been shaped by years of negative selection, attracting the least educated and the least ambitious. The new one is now being shaped by the best educated and the most ambitious. In recent months, that army has evolved even further. In training camps in NATO countries, Ukrainian troops are learning to use Western battle tanks, to operate new kinds of artillery, and above all to carry out the combined-arms operations that will be part of the summer offensive—to achieve “interoperability,” as Reznikov put it, at a level the army has never previously attempted.Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society—one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized—is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20‑something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20‑something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered—just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis—under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. “The choice,” Zelensky told us, “is between freedom and fear.”
Left: A mass burial site in Izium, Ukraine, March 15, 2023. The Russians seized Izium in April 2022. When Ukrainian soldiers liberated it in September, they discovered the graves of more than 400 citizens, many of them killed by shelling and air strikes. Right: A Ukrainian soldier training in the forest, March 3, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
Versions of these two civilizations still exist within Ukrainian society too, though the division is not ethnic or linguistic. It is now exceedingly rare to find Ukrainians who describe themselves as “pro-Russian,” even in the Russian-speaking east. The streets in the center of Russian-speaking Odesa are lined with Ukrainian flags; Odesa’s mayor, the Russian-speaking Gennadiy Trukhanov, told us he believes Ukrainians are “the front line of the struggle for the civilized world.” But autocratic, top-down, hierarchical ways of doing things are hard to discard, especially in state institutions. The instinct to control and centralize decision making remains. Citizens’ groups and volunteers have arisen around the military partly to combat the vestiges of Soviet bureaucracy.But the Ukrainians who want their country to remain part of this new, networked world believe they will win. See you after the victory, they say when parting ways. We’ll rebuild it after the victory, they say when talking about something smashed or destroyed. Trukhanov already dreams of a victory celebration, an enormous dining table spanning the length of Primorskiy Bulvar, Odesa’s famous seaside promenade, currently blocked off by soldiers and barricades: “Everyone is invited.” Even those who are more pessimistic about the immediate future remain optimistic about the longer term: After the victory, we will need to defend the victory. Some of them have an almost mystical faith that it’s their country’s turn on the world stage. Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that victory is “very near,” that you can “feel it in the atmosphere.” Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, talks about “history turning its wheels,” a process that cannot be stopped.Others put their faith in modernity, in technology, and, yes, in the example of American democracy. “We are living in an open world, in a democratic world,” says Oleksiy Honcharuk, a former prime minister of Ukraine who is now in the tech world too. “And this advantage is huge.” Is that true? Only a Ukrainian victory can prove it.But what is “victory”? That’s the question asked repeatedly of every American official, of every pundit, at every public debate dedicated to Ukraine, often in a querulous, demanding tone, as if this were a question difficult to answer. In Ukraine itself—in the office of the president, in the defense ministry, in the foreign ministry, in private apartments, on the front line—the question isn’t perceived to be difficult at all.Victory means, first, that Ukraine retains sovereign control of all of the territory that lies within its internationally recognized borders, including land taken by Russia since 2014: Donetsk, Luhansk, Melitopol, Mariupol, Crimea. “Every centimeter of our 603,550 square kilometers,” Kuleba says. Ukrainians believe that the de facto ceding of territory to Russia in 2014 gave Putin the idea that he could take more, and they don’t want to repeat the error. Instead of ending the conflict, a cease-fire that leaves large chunks of Ukraine under Russian control could give him an incentive to regroup, rearm, and try again. They also point out that territory under Putin’s control is a crime scene, a space where repression, terror, and human-rights violations take place every day. Ukrainians who remain in the occupied territories are at constant risk of losing their property, their identity, and their lives. No Ukrainian leader can give up the idea of saving them.[Anne Applebaum and Nataliya Gumenyuk: Incompetence and torture in occupied Ukraine]Victory means, second, that Ukrainians are safe. Safe from terrorist attacks, safe from shelling, safe from missiles lobbed at supermarket parking lots. Zelensky talks about safety “for everything. From schools to technologies, for everything in the education sphere, in medicine, in the streets. That is the idea. For energy. For everything.” Safety means that the airports reopen, the refugees return, foreign investment resumes, and buildings can be rebuilt without fear that another Russian missile will knock them down. To achieve this kind of safety, Ukraine, again, will need more than a cease-fire. The country will have to be embedded in some security structure reliable enough to be trusted, something that resembles NATO, if not NATO itself. Ukraine will also have to reconceive itself as a frontline state like Israel or South Korea, with a world-class defense industry and a large standing army. Deterrence is the most important guarantee of peace.Victory means, third, some kind of justice. Justice for the victims of the war, for the people who lost their homes or limbs, for the children who have been taken from their parents. Justice might be delivered in different ways: through reparations, through the transfer of captured or sanctioned Russian assets, or through the International Criminal Court, which recently issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia. More important than the means of justice is the perception of justice—neither Putin nor Russia can enjoy impunity. Victims need the acknowledgment that they were unfairly targeted. Until this kind of justice is achieved, millions of people will not feel that the war ended, and will not stop trying to seek reparations or revenge.
Citizens pay their respects during a funeral procession in Lviv, Ukraine, March 2, 2023. Such processions have been a regular, sometimes daily, occurrence since the start of the war. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
The day after we met him, Frenchman, the young drone operator and French Foreign Legion veteran who used to run a bar in Lviv, was killed in a Russian attack. His given name was Dmytro Pashchuk. “Compared to this war,” he had told us when we asked about his past military experience, “everything is kindergarten.” Nobody who fought with him will ever accept an unjust conclusion to the conflict.Victory can be defined. But can it be achieved? Part of the answer is military, technical, logistical. Part of the answer, however, is political and even psychological. The Ukrainian theory of victory includes all of these elements.In Russian history, military victory has often reinforced autocracy. Potemkin’s conquests reinforced Catherine the Great. Stalin’s defeat of Hitler reinforced his own regime. By contrast, military failure has often inspired political change. Russian losses to Germany during World War I helped launch the Russian Revolution. Russian losses in Afghanistan in the 1980s helped trigger the reforms of the Gorbachev years, which in turn led to the breakup of the Soviet Union.The naval catastrophe that Russia suffered during the Russo-Japanese War is less well known, but it was equally consequential. During the Battle of Tsushima, in 1905, the Japanese demolished the bulk of the Russian fleet and captured two admirals. Russia was a larger and richer country than Japan at that time, and could have kept fighting. But the shock and shame of the defeat was too overwhelming. Although Czar Nicholas II did not lose power, popular discontent with the war helped spark the failed 1905 revolution, and forced him to enact political reforms, including the creation of Russia’s first Parliament and first constitution.
A broken bust of Lenin in Lyman, Ukraine, March 11, 2023. Lyman was occupied by Russian forces last spring and liberated by the Ukrainians in early October. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
Ukrainians need a military success like that, one with enough symbolic power to force change in Russia. This might not mean a revolution, or even a change of leadership. Zelensky believes the West spends too much time thinking about Putin, worrying about what’s inside his head. “It’s not about him,” he told us. Kuleba, the foreign minister, says he thinks the future of Russia is unknowable, so there is no point in speculating about what it would or should be. “The capacity of the best analysts to foresee the future under these circumstances is largely overestimated,” he told us. “Will it fall apart?” he asked rhetorically. “Will there be a regime change? Will the regime be forced to focus on its internal problems, meaning that the potential for external aggressive policies will decline?”Only one thing matters: Russia’s leaders must conclude that the war was a mistake, and Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist. The Russian elite, in other words, must experience an internal shift of the kind that led the French to end their colonial project in Algeria in the early 1960s—a change that was accompanied by the collapse of the French constitutional order, attempted assassinations, and a failed coup d’état. A slower but equally profound shift took place in Britain in the early 20th century, when the British ruling class was forced to stop talking about the Irish as peasants incapable of running their own state, and let them create one. When that happens in Russia, the war will be over. Not suspended, not delayed for a month or a year—over.No one knows how and when that change will come, whether next week or in the next decade. But the Ukrainians hope they can create the conditions in which political shocks and pivotal developments can occur. Perhaps the modern equivalent of the Battle of Tsushima is another Russian naval catastrophe, or the recapture of the city of Mariupol, whose total destruction by Russian forces in March of last year set a new post–World War II standard for cruelty and horror in Europe.But the strongest symbol is Crimea. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 inspired Putin’s love of Potemkin. Putin’s own occupation and annexation of Crimea, in 2014, rejuvenated his presidency. The slogan “Krym Nash”—“Crimea Is Ours”—spread across Russia in a burst of imperialist emotion and Soviet nostalgia, reproduced on posters and T‑shirts, inspiring a slew of memes. This year Putin marked the anniversary of the annexation by visiting the peninsula, walking stiffly around a children’s center and an art school in the company of local officials.Crimea became a symbol for Ukrainians too. The 2014 invasion marked the start of the Russian war on Ukraine; the subsequent annexation warned Ukrainians that the international legal system would not protect them. The history of the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who constituted the majority of the peninsula’s population before Potemkin arrived, echoes the history of the rest of the country: The Tatars were the targets of repression, intimidation, and ethnic cleansing under both czarist and Soviet rule. In 1944, Stalin deported all of them, some 200,000 people, to Central Asia. They returned only after 1989.After 2014, many Tatars once again fled the peninsula; more than 100 of those who remained are political prisoners. The restoration of their rights and their culture is one of Zelensky’s favorite themes. In April of this year, he honored them by hosting iftar, a Ramadan evening meal, with Crimean Tatar political leaders in attendance. The president’s permanent representative to Crimea, Tamila Tasheva, herself a Crimean Tatar, describes the Tatars as a “part of the Ukrainian political nation.”
A Ukrainian artillery unit fires a British-made M777 howitzer near Bakhmut, Ukraine, March 18, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
Crimea’s significance is strategic too. In the past nine years, the Putin regime has transformed Crimea from a holiday resort area into something resembling a Russian aircraft carrier attached to the bottom of Ukraine, crisscrossed with trenches and fortifications. The peninsula contains prisons for captured Ukrainians and serves as a hub for the transport of stolen Ukrainian grain. The leader of the occupation administration, Sergey Aksyonov, has called Crimea the “frontline outpost” for the occupation of southern Ukraine.Knowing that Crimea is being built into a fortress, the Ukrainians talk about the “political military” liberation of Crimea, not a purely military counteroffensive. Once they have cut off the roads, railroads, and waterways to the peninsula, and targeted the military infrastructure with drones, the presumption is that many Russian inhabitants, especially recent immigrants, will become convinced that they would be better off living somewhere else. Some have reportedly fled already, following an explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge (which connects Crimea to Russia) and other explosions on the peninsula. “Crimea we will take without a fight,” Reznikov told us.Detailed plans for the de-occupation of Crimea already exist. Tasheva, together with lawyers, educators, and others, has been working on a “Crimea Recovery Strategy” that envisions a greener, cleaner Crimea, a “modern European resort.” Working groups have been set up to consider the fate of property lost or acquired since 2014, of Ukrainians who collaborated, and of the Russians who do not flee. Schools will need to be reformed, independent media restored, and the Ukrainian political system reestablished.Tasheva pushes back against any idea that Russia and Ukraine could share the peninsula: “There cannot be joint control by both David and Goliath,” she told us. Regarding Crimea, the difference between the two civilizations is stark. For Russia, Crimea is and always will be a military base. For Ukraine, “Crimea is a place of diversity—our bridge to the global South.” Tasheva wants to build better road connections to Europe, restore destroyed Tatar monuments, and revitalize the use of the Ukrainian and Tatar languages on the peninsula. Plans to reverse environmental damage, reduce the use of fossil fuels, and revive cultural festivals have been drawn up, printed out, translated into English. If set into motion, they would undo not just Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but Potemkin’s annexation in 1783.Is this a fantasy? Perhaps. But in February 2022, the successful defense of Kyiv also looked like a fantasy. The drone workshops, the artillery on the front line, the software designers in Kyiv—back then they were beyond the realm of anyone’s imagination. To predict what might happen in Ukraine a year from now therefore requires the vision to conjure a world that currently doesn’t exist, and to accept that fantasies sometimes become real.Do Americans share that vision? It is true that the U.S. has supported Ukraine, not a traditional American ally, at a level that was also once unimaginable, comparable only to the Lend-Lease program of World War II. We have provided Ukraine with intelligence and weapons, taken care of Ukrainian refugees, put strict sanctions on Russia. So far, there has been no secondary disaster. Despite a thousand predictions to the contrary, Europeans did not freeze to death last winter when they were compelled to seek alternatives to Russian gas. World War III did not break out. But over the next few months, as the Ukrainians take their best shot at winning the war, the democratic world will have to decide whether to help them do so. Sovereignty, safety, and justice—shouldn’t Americans want the war to end that way too?
Left: A Ukrainian mortar team fires at Russian positions in the Donetsk region, March 11, 2023. Right: The funeral of a fallen Ukrainian soldier in Kharkiv, March 16, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)
Of course. That is what any senior official in the Biden administration, any European foreign minister, would say if asked on the record. Privately, answers are less clear. The support the U.S. has given Ukraine so far has been enough to help its army hold off Russia, enough to take back Kherson and some territory in the Kharkiv region. But America has not yet given Ukraine fighter jets or its most advanced long-range missiles. Nor is it clear that everyone in Washington, Brussels, or Paris believes it is either possible or desirable for Ukraine to take back all of the territory lost since February 2022, let alone territory taken in 2014. In April, leaked U.S.-government documents offered a bleak assessment of Ukrainian capabilities, predicting that neither Russia nor Ukraine could achieve anything more than “marginal” territorial gains, as a result of “insufficient troops and supplies.” This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: If Ukraine is given insufficient supplies, then it will have insufficient supplies. One Western official recently told us that the prospect of Ukraine retaking Crimea is so distant, his country has done no contingency planning for it. If the West doesn’t plan for victory, victory will be hard to achieve.Evidently some wonder not whether the counteroffensive can succeed, but whether it should succeed. The fear that Putin will use nuclear weapons to defend Crimea lurks just under the surface—but we have told him that the response to this would have “catastrophic consequences” for Russia; this is why deterrence is so important. The urge to preserve the status quo, and the fear of what could follow Putin, is just as strong. French President Emmanuel Macron has said openly that Russia should be defeated but not “crushed.” Yet even the worst successor imaginable, even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin. He will quickly become the focus of an intense power struggle. He will not have grandiose dreams about his place in history. He will not be obsessed with Potemkin. He will not be responsible for starting this war, and he could have an easier time ending it.In Western capitals, preoccupation with the consequences of a Russian defeat has meant far too little time spent thinking about the consequences of a Ukrainian victory. After all, the Ukrainians aren’t the only ones hoping that their success can support and sustain a civilizational change. Russia, as it is currently governed, is a source of instability not just in Ukraine but around the world. Russian mercenaries prop up dictatorships in Africa; Russian hackers undermine political debate and elections all across the democratic world. The investments of Russian companies keep dictators in power in Minsk, in Caracas, in Tehran. A Ukrainian victory would immediately inspire people fighting for human rights and the rule of law, wherever they are. In a recent conversation in Washington, a Belarusian activist spoke about his organization’s plans to reactivate the Belarusian opposition movement. For the moment, it is still working in secret, underground. “Everyone is waiting for the counteroffensive,” he said.And he is right. Ukrainians are waiting for the counteroffensive. Europeans, East and West, are waiting for the counteroffensive. Central Asians are waiting for the counteroffensive. Belarusians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and others around the world whose dictatorships are propped up by the Russians—they are all waiting for the counteroffensive too. This spring, this summer, this autumn, Ukraine gets a chance to alter geopolitics for a generation. And so does the United States.This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Counteroffensive.” 

At long last, the U.S. federal government will end the COVID-19 vaccine mandates for international travelers, federal workers, Head Start employees, and the healthcare industry. The mandates will expire on May 11, the date that President Joe Biden has designated as the formal end of the COVID-19 public health emergency.
While the Supreme Court previously struck down Biden's mandate requiring 80 million private sector employees to get vaccinated, the justices left intact the mandate for some federal employees and healthcare workers. A vaccine mandate was also still on the books for teachers who participate in Head Start, the federal preschool program, though an earlier court ruling had technically voided it.
U.S. citizens may return to the country even if they are not vaccinated, but the federal government has continued to prohibit unvaccinated non-citizens from entering the U.S. Most notably, this policy prevented international tennis star Novak Djokovic from participating in the Miami Open.
Now these policies—some of the last vestiges of the federal government's emergency pandemic powers—will finally come to an end. On Monday, White House COVID-19 coordinator Ashish Jha made it official.
"While I believe that these vaccine mandates had a tremendous beneficial impact, we are now at a point where we think that it makes a lot of sense to pull these requirements down," said Jha.
That's a relief, though it's coming far too late. We did not suddenly arrive at a point where getting rid of vaccine requirements makes sense; in fact, we are well past it.
To the extent there was any justification for COVID-19 vaccine mandates, it rested on the assumption that the vaccines were not merely protective of severe disease and death, but actually prevented the spread of the virus. When public health officials made their case for vaccine requirements, they did so according to the theory that vaccinating Person A would substantially reduce the likelihood of Person B catching COVID-19. Biden wrongly declared that "you're not going to get COVID-19 if you have these vaccinations." (He later tested positive, despite being vaccinated.) Mandates were intended to "stem the flood of infections," The New York Times reported in September of 2021.
But by then, it was already becoming clear that no societal level of vaccination would eliminate the virus. The vaccines have appreciably reduced the risk of severe infections, particularly among the elderly and other vulnerable groups, but do not substantially prevent infection itself. The overwhelming majority of Americans have had COVID-19 at least once, whether they were vaccinated or not. The vaccines may reduce the severity of symptoms, and a jab appears to offer temporary protection—much like so-called natural immunity after recovering from the disease. But COVID-19 has proven itself quite capable of evading protection, which is why many people have contracted it multiple times.
The federal government should have left the choice to get vaccinated to the people themselves. At the very least, an expansive vaccine mandate ought to have been debated by legislators, not forced on Americans via a presidential declaration. But Biden declined to recognize these limits on his power, and instead attempted to intervene in private medical decisions. So much for "my body, my choice."
The vaccine mandate was a major violation of individual rights, and the justification for it—a lasting, substantial reduction in transmission—turned out to be seriously flawed. Good riddance to an illiberal policy.
The post U.S. Finally Ends Federal COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Travelers, Employees, Head Start appeared first on Reason.com.

Ed Luce is the US national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. He is also a member of the Persuasion board of advisors.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ed Luce discuss the prospects for Trump (and Trumpism) in the near future; why America no longer feels like a “can-do” nation; and whether America can defend its values in the world while avoiding escalation with China.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Mounk: I've been looking forward to our conversation, but I have been slightly depressed about one thing and I want you to lift me out of my depression (or aggravate it, I suppose, as you choose). During the Trump years, there was a lot of fear about what might happen. But there was also hope that if we beat this guy decisively in 2020 we'll turn a corner. But over two years into the Biden administration, the Republican Party is continuing to get more extreme. Trumpism is spreading through the party. Even his rivals are sort of pretending to be the smarter Trump, or a more effective Trump, or Trump-lite. And it doesn't look like the Democratic Party is seizing the strategic opening to actually become the dominant political party. Will we ever get out of this kind of existential mode of combat?Ed Luce: This sense that it's always the next election, and that's when we'll finally end the fever, as Obama once described the Tea Party (which now seem like very tame sort of house pets compared to what what to where we are today), is probably a little bit of wishful thinking. A lot of my friends on the more liberal side of the spectrum have an expectation that if the nominee is Trump, then that's the best thing for Biden, because Biden will be beaten by a younger person. But I have to say, although they're probably correct, I feel extremely strong déjà vu from similar conversations in 2015, where people were saying, “Now, if only Hillary could actually get Trump as her opponent, then all will be fine!” And of course, we know what happened. I feel there's a little bit of that complacency visible today. I start with the premise in today's America, that elections, presidential elections are 50-50 events. Now, maybe they're 53-47 for a moderate sort of mainstream incumbent like Biden. But they're still too close to feel remotely comfortable.I guess your question is how long that tail end risk will go on, whether a second Trump defeat (and a third, in terms of the popular vote) would end this cycle in American politics. And I very much doubt it. We're not going to go back to the party of Jeb Bush. The question is whether there are going to be more electable versions of Trump, which is why I think that the person to fear here would be Glenn Youngkin, who has all the same views—maybe pragmatically, maybe he doesn't deep down. But who really cares? It's what people articulate in public that we measure. Glenn Youngkin has all the same views, but he gives the appearance of being a suburban dad. He's reassuring. That's more the future of the Republican Party post-Trump if Trump loses.Mounk: One of the things that I do worry about is a tendency to start with Trump, declare that he's a terrible threat to the institutions of his country, which I believe, and then sort of come up with various reasons why any alternative to him would be just as bad: DeSantis is just as authoritarian but more electable and Youngkin—I haven't studied him very closely—strikes me as somebody who might disagree on important policy grounds and have important divergences to that but wouldn't be a threat to the basic institutions of the American republic in the kind of way in which Trump clearly is and DeSantis possibly (perhaps, probably) is. Do we get to a point where we're just not willing to accept any Republican candidate as legitimate?Ed Luce: I sort of start from the premise that if you do not reject the stolen election theory of January 2021, which Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis do not, then you have already shown yourself capable of challenging some of the basic norms of democracy. Now, that might be an expedient thing that they would quickly drop or try to make people forget in a post-Trump era. Maybe that's too unrealistic a benchmark to apply to any Republican with any ambition in today's still-Trump party. But I do consider it to be a pretty bad sign of where they're prepared to go. And then if you look at the fact that the Supreme Court [has heard on] a case that will determine the independent state legislature theory which would give legislatures the authority, unchallenged by local courts, to essentially pick alternative slates of electors. And if you look at the more sort of organized, beyond Trump, attempts to really manipulate the electoral system. I'm not that confident that this-—what Tom Edsall calls minority authoritarianism— goes deeper than Trump. And I think Trump himself is, in some respects, a prisoner of Trumpism. Remember him trying to boast about what should have been his biggest bragging right, the vaccine, the single biggest accomplishment of his administration (not a long list, I admit, but a very significant item). He just stopped talking about it.Mounk: There was an amazing moment, I think it was briefly after he lost office. He was talking about the vaccine in positive terms to a conservative audience, and he was booed.Luce: He more than anybody knows how you measure the crowd, how you take its temperature. He took the temperature, and he hasn’t boasted about it since. Now, of course, he, like every member of the Murdoch family and every Fox News executive and anchor, have not just been double vaccinated, but triple, probably quadruple boosted by now. But it's remarkable that this singular accomplishment—which you can make a plausible argument would have been far more difficult to achieve at that speed in a Democratic administration—has been robbed from him. And there are others where Trump just sort of drops his line. That would suggest to me that the MAGA base is more autonomous from Trump than we might credit.Mounk: In the early part of your remarks, it sounded to me like you were saying we might actually get to a kind of post-Trump politics, but now it sounds like you think that's very unlikely. I think there's two parts of the story: the Trumpist Republican Party going to the extremes and the Democratic Party being so unappealing to the American electorate that, while they have won seven out of the last eight presidential elections in terms of popular vote and so on, they’ve always done so very narrowly. We're just not able to go beyond that narrow majority to the kind of victories which would force the Republican Party back to the negotiating table and force it to reform itself. If you're just completely out of office everywhere for a long time, eventually, you’ve got to move on. But the Republican Party hasn't needed to.Luce: If you look at American history, modern-ish American history, where are the points at which there are such deep rebukes from the electorate that the party changes? You think of Hoover's Republicans being defeated by Roosevelt's New Deal coalition in 1932. You think of Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964. And you think of McGovern and the whole sort of liberal, antiwar, peacenik Democratic direction being ended by that, leading to Carter and then, ultimately, Clintonism. Those defeats were massive by American standards. In terms of public opinion, 60-40 kinds of elections. But in terms of the Electoral College, we're talking about sweeping the board. I think Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and five Deep South states. Dukakis, I think only [ten] states. Those kinds of defeats in American history do lead to quite big ideological realignments of the defeated party. I just don't see that scale of defeat possible in the next electoral cycle. This society is way too evenly divided.Mounk: Let me push you on that. I agree that it's very unlikely in 2024 given how the election is shaping out. I'm sure we're going to have another close election. By the way, I was at breakfast with our mutual friend Bill Galston, and he was saying that this is actually now the longest running period of very close electoral competition in American history. This period is now unique by how many consecutive elections have been that close.But there are a few things we might consider for why that has been the case. One is that there's just fundamental cultural, economic, perhaps demographic forces, which have split the country on a knife's edge, and nothing is going to move them. The other theory is that a lot of the population actually is still somewhat moderate on both economic and cultural issues, but nobody has been effectively able to appeal to them, in part because they haven't been able to disown the less appealing parts of their own coalition.  I think it'd be perfectly possible for somebody to win perhaps not a 60% majority but 56 or 57% and win a whole bunch of states. I think it's possible. It just doesn't strike me as likely that the broader mechanisms of the primary election, the media landscape, the landscape and social media ecosystem give somebody the courage and the vision and the clarity to do that. But what do you think? Do you think there are structural factors that make it impossible? Or do you think that the right candidate might be able to build that kind of coalition?Luce: You mentioned Bill Galston, whom I implicitly trust on these things. Bill used to be a member of No Labels, which at least began with the idea that the market is not responding to the voter, that there's something broken in the market price signaling here; that we have the parties getting more extreme, and particularly one of the parties, but neither of them really catering to the middle ground which is where most Americans are. Broadly speaking, I accept the view, backed up by a lot of data, that Americans are centrist, even center-left on economics. They do want more health care. They do want parental leave and sick leave rights and so forth. And they're not too liberal on social issues. They might even be moderately conservative on social issues—tolerant but certainly not radical. It depends where you're sitting, how you define what center-left is, but, broadly speaking, they are not represented either by DeSantis or the people who used to run the school board in San Francisco, who are outliers. There's clearly demand there from what some people have labeled the “exhausted majority,” who tend to be moderate. There's clearly demand there for politics that better reflects their views than two parties that are going off on such different tangents. And therefore, I would tend to think some of this is structural. And a lot of the cultural, economic conditions that are affecting American politics are also affecting British politics. But you see in Britain opinion polls showing massive shifts: 61-62%, not that far off of two-thirds of British people would like to rejoin the European Union. I think it's a very hypothetical wish at this point, to be honest. But that's a big swing of public opinion because the parties can reflect that. The parties can change. And there are more than two parties now.Mounk: What is the reason for that difference? It’s true that there is still a kind of sense of a mainstream consensus in Britain, there's a kind of sense of, you know, the ordinary person on the street feels like there's something wrong with the establishment and you can feel that sort of shifting in a good 60-65% of a population—a kind of common sense response to what's going on that’s deeply felt across a vast swath of a country, and America no longer feels like that, it feels—Luce: —I'd say it does. It's just that the structural factors prevent it from transmitting to politics. I mean, the amount of Americans (and I'm not just talking about eggheads in Washington, D.C.) who sort of mentioned to me “Wow, Liz Truss was a disaster and 44 days later, she was gone? And you had a lettuce up and the lettuce outlived her?”—the envy expressed at being able to just press the eject buttons, because of the transmission mechanism of poll numbers swinging wildly into your own party having the ability to just get rid of you. That is obviously a flexibility built into the British system that the American system doesn't have. But I think if Americans did have it, most Americans would have been very happy to press the eject button on Trump at certain stages. Mounk: If there had been a clear way of getting rid of Trump without the extraordinary measure of impeachment, you would probably have had majorities be able to do that. So perhaps part of the screwed up-ness of America at the moment goes back to the flaws of a semi-presidential system.A really unpopular head of state or one that seems very threatening to institutions in the country can just be voted out by a majority of parliamentarians in different kinds of systems, whereas in so many presidential systems there is no mechanism for that. In Britain, you’re only Prime Minister as long as you have a majority in the House of Commons. When that ceases to be the case—poof, off you go. That clearly is not the case in the United States.Luce: No, it's not. And it's not conceivably ever going to be the case. I mean, let's be frank. You're not going to get three-quarters of states and two-thirds of each chamber on Capitol Hill agreeing to a constitutional convention. And if they did, you're not going to get a constitutional convention in which consensus emerges about how America should be governed. So we are stuck within this very rigid system that isn't channeling where the median view is on most issues—gun control, for example. It does show flexibility at the local level. The abortion thing is very, very interesting. But we're stuck with this system, so we have to imagine a way out within this system rather than by analogy to different ones. But I raised the British example precisely because I think that, generally, median opinion is not that radically different in America than it is in Britain. Of course there are different contexts and different hot-button issues. But generally, I don't think most Americans are extremists.More in Common does a lot of very good research on this. And what their findings were about American attitudes on the education system is that overwhelming majorities of conservatives said, “Yeah, we should teach the history of America that includes slavery, that includes all the bad things that happened.” And overwhelming majorities of liberals accepted that there was a complex story which wasn't just one of oppression. Basically, it's where you or I would be, with different nuances. Give kids the tools to sort of decide for themselves. That's where clear majorities of both self-identified conservatives and liberals are pretty close to each other. That's not where their ideological leaders are.Mounk: I've learned a lot from this conversation about what's going on in the United States. But there are big changes happening in the world and to America's role in the world. How do you characterize, at this moment, the state of geopolitical competition between the United States and China and America's view on how that competition is going to unfold in the next years and decades?Luce: It's a very important question and it's not going to go away. China, unlike the Soviet Union—one can't imagine it dissolving. This isn't going to end with the sort of implosion of China. China as a nation state will hopefully, at some point, democratize. Even then, though, I think that the geopolitical butting of heads between the hegemon and the rising challenger is going to be an issue. But I don't expect China to democratize. That's not a likely scenario. So this issue isn't going to go away. To some extent, it is ideological—China is, of course, a one party, Communist state and an autocracy. But to some extent, it's simply structural. It's to do with geopolitics. And what's been very striking about Washington the last few years is the strength of bipartisanship on this issue. You look at the China Committee. You look at Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair, and Krishnamoorthi, the minority leader on that committee, and there's barely any daylight between them. And that it's a pretty hawkish consensus that we're seeing expressed. The absence of a “peace faction” in Washington is particularly glaring, since the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce stopped lobbying for more trade with China. They were essentially a countervailing force because they made so much money from China, because China was such a big contributor to their bottom line. And they're basically silent now, partly because, if you've got business in America, and you've got business in China, as Hank Paulson recently told me, the shaded bit of the Venn diagram where you can say something acceptable to both, as a business leader, is so tiny that it’s better just to keep your mouth shut. And that means that lobby of a sort of restraint is gone. We've got a pragmatic Biden administration that is very much on the more nuanced side of this hawkish bipartisan consensus. But essentially, as we saw with the balloon incident, the shooting down of the Chinese spy balloon (or what they call the rogue weather balloon), had to respond to Fox News images and shoot it down. An absurd thing to do. And the response to that has derailed any sort of dialogue between the US and China, so we're in a very dangerous period with China. Talk of war, speculation about it, is now remarkably common. Whether that means we're going to have one or not is quite different. But the ease with which we've slipped into a conversation in which great power conflict between China and the US is a normal one is very striking.Mounk: Where do the differences lie between what you called the sort of more subtle, more refrained version of a hawkish attitude and the less subtle one?Luce: There was a very good, very coherent speech given by Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, last Thursday, in which she made it very clear what was already official policy (but perhaps we haven't really understood it very well) which is that the Biden administration does not aim to decouple from China. She said we do not aim to harm China's development or economic competitiveness. What we do aim to do, with these targeted sanctions against high-end semiconductors and anything that contributes to the AI ambitions of Xi Jinping, is not to contribute to China's military development, and that wherever there is a clash between America's national security imperatives and economics, national security will win. And this speech was really an overture to get dialogue going again. But she made it very clear that our aim is not to decouple. Any attempt to decouple would create a global recession—deeper, perhaps, than a global recession. We underestimate the degree to which we're all entirely intertwined. That's not the line coming from Mike Gallagher's committee. Mike Gallagher says that China has the explicit aim of creating a techno-authoritarian dictatorship and submitting America to it. He's using a kind of Star Wars, Darth Vader versus Luke Skywalker language that you're not hearing from the administration. There are more hawkish people in the administration, there are more dovish people. But there is a pragmatic real-world debate going on. That's not true for the more hawkish elements of D.C. as a whole. But, as I say, the direction that the Biden administration gets pulled in tends to be more hawkish because there's no countervailing voice. Mounk: Do you think that this hawkishness is justified even if, perhaps, the justified version of it is a more moderate, more sophisticated one? Or do you think there's a case against all of the hawks?Luce: Xi Jinping is a far more authoritarian, autocratic leader than his predecessors—really the most authoritarian since Mao. He has one hundred times the technological capabilities and military reach that Mao ever had. And he has explicitly said that he wants to reincorporate Taiwan, by force if necessary, whilst he's president. And 2027 is the year, with China's military modernization program, where the PLA have been plausibly ordered to be able to have an amphibious assault on Taiwan. So, no—the hawks are not imagining China's challenge to the international system. My concern is that if we drift further into this situation where the US and China are not talking—China's talking to everybody else, of course; they’ve had Macron, Lula, the Saudi foreign minister, the Iranian foreign minister, the President of the European Commission, the German Foreign Minister—everybody’s beating a path to their door, but they're not returning Joe Biden's phone calls. We have to get back into a situation of dialogue. Where we are at, I think (and this is again, a rather troubling analogy that keeps recurring), is the pre-Cuban Missile Crisis phase of the US-Soviet relationship. We do not want to go through a Cuban Missile Crisis before we learn modes of coexistence, contact and communication. China is not going to disappear. We need a strategy for dealing with it that doesn't involve continually being on the brink of war, or at least at the risk of fate—of miscommunication or accident. We have to some degree agree to peaceful coexistence and some room there to cooperate on the transcendent threats to humanity that only China and the US working together can actually realistically solve.Mounk: One of the eerie parallels between the Cuban Missile Crisis and the potential confrontation between China and the West is the element of blockade: the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a head when American warships located an attempt by Soviet ships to bring missiles to the island of Cuba. One of the most realistic scenarios, and probably one of the smartest scenarios from the point of view of Beijing for how the CCP would try to incorporate Taiwan into the area it rules, would be to simply blockade Taiwan economically and make it impossible for the island to get energy supplies, foodstuffs and other key things it needs. How should we think about this as people who believe in the importance and value of liberal democracy? How do we put together a strategy that contains the influence of China's autocratic system of government, that tries to preserve the liberty of Taiwan, that takes seriously our obligation to people in Japan and South Korea and other countries in the Pacific, and that minimizes the amount of terrible repression of the CCP internally, especially towards minority groups—can we accomplish all of that without raising the risk of a catastrophic World War III?Luce: We've had trouble instituting democracy in small countries where we spent a trillion dollars and occupied, like Afghanistan. We should be realistic in what we can aim to influence or achieve within China. And to some degree, the more tense the standoff becomes, and the more sort of armed this peace becomes, the more likely that is to strengthen the forces of repression and hardliners within China. We should be modest about the extent to which we can actually affect internal Chinese political developments. But we, for sure, should certainly be steadfast in strengthening the tariff capabilities of China's neighbors and of limiting China's ability, through the sort of tech surveillance software that it exports, to do so, and should provide alternatives. But that involves building a much more overt American leadership for an open world digital culture; for leading in terms of the debate about guardrails for artificial intelligence; for being much more engaged economically with the cutting-edge, new areas of the economy than the Biden administration (or apparently, nowadays, half the Republican Party) are prepared to do. We, during the Cold War, had an America that was—to be very crude and caricaturish—a “can-do” America. Very pragmatic.The list of the economic “can't-dos” of both Democratic administrations and the Trumpian wing of politics is pretty sobering. You can't do trade deals, can't do digital platforms, can't do the WTO (can't comply with its rulings), can't reform the Bretton Woods Institutions. Can't—I mean, there's a long list of what we just won't do. And so I think America’s stance here, in terms of a potential new cold war, or maybe an actual one with China, is a lot less American. It's kind of based on pessimism. The first time around, the Cold War, it was a lot more based on “Look, we're prepared to engage, take risks, lead.” And so, there's a psychological sort of crouch here that I think is part of the American problem. It's not leading in the way it could be. And a lot of America's partners in East Asia are very happy for the military support. But they would like to see other stuff too. And ditto for Europe.Mounk: I have a final question. Just minutes before we pressed record on this conversation, we got a breaking news alert that Fox News and Tucker Carlson are parting ways. Now, I'm putting you in an uncomfortable position here, because we're recording this on Monday and the episode is going to air on Saturday, so by then we will have much more context.But what is your first response? Is this a significant event? What kind of impact might it have on America?Luce: It looks like he was pushed. I feel a little bit hesitant because I didn't see him as being more extreme than, say, Sean Hannity, who, at least at the time we're talking, has not been pushed out. So maybe there was some other event or personal disagreement. I am not going to be in mourning to see Tucker Carlson leave Fox. I believe it was a diabolical partnership with huge pollutionary effects on the American debate. And I hope that wherever he's going, it's to somewhere with a smaller platform. But I don't hold out much hope that this signals a “Road to Damascus” moment for the Murdoch family.Remember, the Dominion case brought out the fact that Fox is a bit like Trump on vaccines: it wanted to sort of report the facts, but then it got pushed by its audience not to. So there is something bigger out there that is very powerful. And the leaders are following the followers.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: Subscribe now

Visiting India this week, I was struck by how different the mood there is compared with much of the world. While people in the United States and Europe are worried about inflation and a possible recession, Indians are excited about the future. India is now the most populous country on the planet and is projected to be the fastest-growing large economy as well, at 5.9 percent this year. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi said recently, “India’s time has arrived.”

My worry is that I have seen this movie before. I remember going to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2006 and being bombarded with billboards plastered all over the Swiss town saying “Incredible India!” and proclaiming it to be the “world’s fastest-growing free market democracy.” In fact, in those years, India was growing even faster than it is now, at a rate of more than 9 percent. The Indian trade minister at the time confidently predicted to me that the Indian economy would soon overtake China’s.

It didn’t quite work out that way. After a few years, growth petered out, economic reforms stalled, and many foreign businesses that had entered the country with great enthusiasm were disappointed. Some left altogether. As for beating China, despite the Chinese economy’s slowdown, it is now about five times the size of India’s.

And yet I came away from the trip bullish about India. While that mid-2000s enthusiasm did not fully translate, the country did continue to make progress. It has been the second-fastest-growing large economy (behind China) for about 20 years. In recent years, however, it has been able to accelerate growth because of a series of revolutions.

The first revolution was a government initiative called Aadhaar, which gives every Indian a unique 12-digit ID number verifiable by fingerprints or an iris scan. It sounds simple, but it is, in Nobel laureate Paul Romer’s words, “the most sophisticated ID program in the world.” Today, 99.9 percent of adult Indians have a digital ID that can be used to verify instantly who they are and thus set up a bank account in minutes (literally, I have seen this done!), or to transfer government payments to recipients directly and with little skimming and corruption.

Aadhaar enrollment is open to all and free, but its most distinctive feature is that it is publicly owned and operated, unlike in the West, where digital platforms such as Google and Facebook are private monopolies that can share your data to make a profit. Entrepreneurs can even build businesses on Aadhaar. And when you use the platform to send money or take out a loan, you don’t pay those persistent fees so ubiquitous in the West.

The second is the Jio revolution. Mukesh Ambani, India’s biggest and most ambitious business leader, made a staggering $46 billion bet that by offering very cheap phones and data packages through his telecom service Jio, he could get most Indians on the internet. It worked. With most using smartphones as their computers, more than 700 million Indians now use the internet. In 2015, India was ranked 122nd for per capita mobile data consumption. Last year, it was first, exceeding the consumption of China and the United States combined.

The third is an infrastructure revolution, which is readily apparent to anyone visiting India. Spending on roads, airports, train stations and other projects has exploded. Government capital spending has risen fivefold since fiscal 2014, and the average construction of national highways has roughly doubled, as have seaport capacity and the number of airports. Mumbai is finally building an extensive set of bridges, roads, tunnels and metro lines that could truly connect all parts of India’s leading economic center.

These three revolutions could, this time, truly transform India. But they can best do so by helping in the country’s greatest challenge — bringing in the hundreds of millions of Indians who are still on the margins, economically, socially and politically. As of 2019, about 45 percent of Indians — more than 600 million people — live on less than $3.65 a day.

Nandan Nilekani, the visionary architect of Aadhaar, describes how to create jobs in a novel, bottom-up fashion. Rather than the Chinese top-down approach of building 100 new factories that employ tens of thousands, he envisions using Aadhaar to get loans to the millions of small businesses scattered throughout the country. “If 10 million small businesses get loans that let them each hire two more people, that’s 20 million new jobs,” he said to me.

The even larger challenge of inclusivity involves India’s women, who are still pressured in various ways not to work outside the home. Female labor force participation in India is low and, stunningly, has fallen over the past two decades from around 30 percent to 23 percent. Of the Group of 20 countries, not even Saudi Arabia’s level is lower. Bloomberg Economics estimates that closing the gap between women’s and men’s participation would increase India’s gross domestic product by more than 30 percent over the next three decades.

A focus on inclusivity would also ease India’s religious tensions, bringing into the fold that nation’s Muslims (roughly 200 million people, one-seventh of the country), who face persistent persecution. It would also be in character for a country that is an open, pluralistic democracy with a Hindu majority, a religion almost defined by its pluralism and tolerance.

India has the potential to be admired for not just the quantity of its growth but also the quality of its values. And that would truly be an incredible India.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So as I get ready to move to New York, I’ve been thinking a lot about the politics of California. From the outside, California, and particularly its two dominant cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco — they have these dual reputations. They are world leaders, right? This is where the culture that everyone consumes is made and where the technology that everyone uses is made. To play with the old William Gibson line, the future is already here. It’s just in California. And then, California is also this bogeyman for the Right, and particularly L.A. and S.F. It is often defined by its pathologies — homelessness and inaffordability and inequality and hypocrisy and disorder. And you might think, if your experience of it is on Fox News, that that is all stuck. But California’s politics are really interesting. Republicans are this non-force. They don’t hold a single statewide office. They are nonentities in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And so the confrontation here, with what people in California don’t like, is a confrontation that has to happen within the Democratic Party, and is happening within the Democratic Party. You have these progressive movements rising inside a Democratic coalition, trying to balance their liberal commitments with an analysis of where liberalism has failed. I don’t think my focus on the supply side of progressive policy would be what it is now if I hadn’t seen how much damage, failing, on the supply side of progressive policy had done in California. I mean, this is a place where you sometimes have to net out what Republicans are doing nationally and realize that even where Democrats govern, they have not managed to create the progressive outcomes they want, and then try to look at why that is. One politician here has done that really successfully — Scott Wiener, the state senator from San Francisco. And that’s particularly true on the central issue here — housing, where Wiener was, for a very long time, this lonely voice trying to radically expand housing supply, only to lose on his biggest bills, year after year after year. But then, slowly, he began to win — small bills, a couple more small bills, medium bills. And now, there’s this torrent of both signatures on legislation and proposed legislation on how to make housing construction easier. If you look at what Governor Gavin Newsom is doing and what San Francisco Mayor London Breed is proposing and what L.A. mayor Karen Bass is doing, you see a real push to make housing easier to build. And that work isn’t done yet, and whether or not what is being done will be enough — I mean, that’s all to be seen. But really, the plate tectonics of this issue have shifted, and Wiener was a big reason for that, and he’s really early on that. So I wanted to talk to him to get his view on the political workings of California, where the traditional labels around progressivism break down, what happens when Democrats have to look at the failures of Democrats and can’t look at Republicans, why the Right is so interested in San Francisco, and the unusual ways in which what makes this state great and what makes it very difficult and very challenging are braided together. As always, my email — ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Scott Wiener, welcome to the show.

scott wiener

Thanks for having me.

ezra klein

So tell me a bit about your path to politics. How did you get here?

It was a really long and winding road. No one in my family had ever been involved in politics before. And when I was a teenager in New Jersey, I started interning for my member of Congress. This is back in the ‘80s.

ezra klein

Who’s your member?

Jim Florio. You might recall him. He subsequently became Governor of New Jersey, and then was defeated for re-election, because he had increased taxes, including extending the sales tax to toilet paper, and that became, like, the rallying cry, and he got tossed from office, which is sad, because he was good. So I interned for him, met some people through him, and started volunteering on campaigns, and just kept going through college. And then, when I came out to San Francisco, I decided I did not want to do politics anymore. I wanted to do community work, L.G.B.T.Q. community work, and got sucked back in and could never quite get away, and eventually decided, OK, I’m going to just go with this, and ultimately decided to run.

ezra klein

How did you end up in San Francisco? And maybe a sort of corollary of that — where are we in time here, and what did San Francisco mean to you, as a teenager growing up in New Jersey?

So as a gay kid in New Jersey — I admitted to myself that I was gay in 1987, when I was 17 years old, and came out — started coming out when I was 20, in 1990. And I was very lucky that I had queer people in my family — my aunt on one side who was a lesbian and a cousin on another side who was a lesbian. And so I had an amazing family. But I also knew that in high school, it wasn’t an option for me to come out. I would have been physically unsafe in that period of time in suburban New Jersey, and so I was closeted for high school. And I always knew that San Francisco had something going on around L.G.B.T.Q. people. And so as a gay kid, I always thought about San Francisco. And I thought I would go back to Philadelphia, where my family is from — Philadelphia, New Jersey area. But something inside told me to go to San Francisco, like generations of queer people have gone to San Francisco.

ezra klein

And you came here as a lawyer?

Yeah, I graduated from law school in ‘96, and then in ‘97, I came out to start working for one of the big firms downtown, and after five years, went to the city attorney’s office to do trial work.

ezra klein

How is San Francisco different than — as a cultural space, what it meant to live here and absorb what you might think of as its culture? And how is it different as a political space — the factions and the ideas that dominated?

Yeah, as a cultural space, it is truly, in so many ways, a live-and-let-live kind of place. People here are so mellow about who people are, what they’re doing. And so it’s an amazing place to live, in that — much less judgment, just about what kind of life you’re living. San Francisco has been that way for a very long time. And it’s true for gay people, and it’s true for just people who may not fit in elsewhere. It’s true for young tech workers who come here. They could work in tech in a lot of places, and they chose San Francisco because of what it represents. Politically, San Francisco is this weird combination of very progressive and quite conservative — very progressive in a lot of the ways that we would consider what is progressive, in terms of having a strong minimum wage and supporting immigrants and supporting L.G.B.T.Q. people and so forth, and getting rid of plastics. On the other hand, it’s a city that has, in recent decades, been very afraid of change. And this city is all about change, from the time that the city was colonized 170-plus years ago. It’s been in a constant state of flux, sometimes chaotic flux. And people recently, I feel like, have gotten very scared of change.

ezra klein

I’m always interested in the way material realities end up shaping political ideas and cultures and factions. And one thing I think about when you came is, one, you didn’t have the housing costs of today. And I wonder how that changed who was here, who could vote, what was possible. But the other is that something that has been very strange to me since coming here — and I grew up in Southern California, I went to UC Santa Cruz, but I only lived in — first time I came to the Bay Area to live was in 2018. Then I moved into S.F. itself two years later. Much more so than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, it’s like a city without a middle class, which is not to say there literally it’s not one. But there are people who are very, very rich, and there are people who are very, very poor. And compared to other places I’ve been or spent a lot of time — D.C. or Los Angeles or New York — it feels to me like that middle has really shrunk. You see many fewer kids here, because it’s so expensive to raise a family here. And that does take a profound pressure on the politics. One, I’m curious if that feels right to you, and two, then what it’s been like to see that evolve. Because it wasn’t like that when you came.

Well, it was on its way in that direction when I arrived in 1997, because our bad housing policies and bad approaches to housing — very anti-housing policies that started decades before. And when I arrived in San Francisco — I remember I arrived on a Friday night, stayed with a friend of mine in the Sunset, and then Saturday morning, started my apartment hunting. And I thought I would do it the old-fashioned way, like I did in Philadelphia, in Boston, everywhere else. You just go, and you find an apartment, you sign a lease, and you’re done.

ezra klein

Such a sweet, naïve boy. [LAUGHS]

[LAUGHS] I was naïve. I showed up at my first open house. It was in the heat on a Saturday morning, and there was a line down the block. And when I finally got in, people were trying to bribe the landlord to give them the lease. And I wondered to myself, what on Earth is going on here? And that was my first entree into housing in San Francisco. I learned a lot. I learned the reasons why, after that. But it has definitely been on that trajectory for a while, where you look like a neighborhood where — I lived in the Castro for 26 years. It used to be, in the Castro, you could be a working-class family raising three or four kids, just have a house there. That, now, doesn’t work. I mean, a home, a decent-sized, family-sized home in the Castro — single-family would be, probably, to two, two and a half million dollars. Even a large condo would probably be 1.5 million. And so it is definitely increasingly a city where it’s harder and harder to be middle-class, particularly raising a family. There is still a middle class here. There are people who are so committed to the city, and they make it work. And I’m in awe of them, because we do not make it easy.

ezra klein

One of the things that I began to realize here after a bit is that it’s just very strange to live in a place where to own a home means to be making one of two statements about yourself. One is, I’ve been here a long time, or the other is, in some way or another, I’m wealthy. That is not how it works in every place.

Yeah. Homeownership is a whole different thing here. I’m very lucky I was able to, in 2004, really stretch and purchase a 500-square-foot condo. And that’s where I live, and that’s where I’ve been for almost 20 years. I would not be able to afford that condo today. And so I consider myself very lucky. I have friends who will say that they know that they’re never going to own in San Francisco. And we have more long-term renters here, and that’s fine. Renting can be a great thing, but it does create more instability to people. And that’s why there’s so much fear of being evicted. The number of people who will say to me, if I lose my apartment for whatever reason, I will have to leave San Francisco, because there is just no way I will find something that I can afford. And that’s a really tragic and unhealthy dynamic in any city.

ezra klein

There’s this term you hear — I heard it all the time growing up. You hear it if you listen to any coverage of the Bay Area, which is “Bay Area liberalism.” And one of the things you really get a clear sense of, living here, is that that should really be plural. There are all these Bay Area liberalisms that are in competition. They’re often in conflict. How do you describe the different Bay Area liberalisms? How would you categorize the factions?

I don’t like to talk — use the labels, because they’re very misleading. When we say “progressive” in San Francisco, people mean various things. And there are some strains of, quote unquote, “progressivism” in San Francisco that are actually quite conservative, because they are opposed to all sorts of positive change, because they want to freeze-frame everything the way it is and just freeze it in amber. When you say “liberalism,” I assume you mean, writ large. There are sort of the radical — I don’t say “radical” in a pejorative way, but more hard-left socialist. That’s a real undercurrent here in San Francisco, but also in the East Bay. And people who are very much along the sort of Bernie Sanders, we need to just radically restructure the whole system. And that is a very real undercurrent here. You have also people who describe themselves as progressive, but they came up during a time period where there was — anything that was change was viewed as dangerous and terrible. And it came out of the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, when we were, like, bulldozing entire neighborhoods in the name of progress, and trying to build freeways in the middle of Golden Gate Park, in the name of progress. And so people who came up during that time period came to view any kind of change, development, building anything, as harmful and destructive. And so they consider themselves liberals or progressives, but they oppose new housing. They oppose physical changes to improve public transportation. That attitude has harmed San Francisco. It came out of a reasonable place — we don’t want to bulldoze neighborhoods anymore. But it turned into this opposition to all change. They are classified as often progressives or liberals in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I don’t think that that’s a very progressive approach. Then, there are, for lack of a better word, YIMBYs or abundance liberals or progressives, and people who are very liberal, and they have the opposite point of view around change — that we need to make it easier to create good things, whether new homes or new bus lines or new clean energy or whatever the case may be. And so those are some of the big strains.

ezra klein

And how about the strains that are emergent out of tech? And I’d put that a little bit differently, because it’s never clear to me how many votes — some of the very loud voices in the V.C. class actually command or represent, or what that looks like behind them. But how would you describe the sort of faction that I think emerges and is powerful on Twitter right now, but that is a place where a lot of people now get their political understanding of San Francisco?

In terms of tech, tech is obviously very diverse. And I remember, 15 years ago — this is when I was sort of getting ready for my first run for the Board of Supervisors. And we were starting to see a tech run up, which — or could see it coming. And I remember there were people in politics saying to me, tech is starting to explode in San Francisco. It’s going to completely change the politics and make it more middle-of-the-road. It’s going to be a whole different ballgame. That turned out to be completely untrue. Because as I mentioned a little earlier, tech workers can often work anywhere. There are a lot of different places in the U.S. where you can be a tech worker. And if you’re in the Bay Area, when you think about the battles we had over the Google buses and the Apple buses, all the tech shuttles that were taking San Francisco residents down to Mountain View or Menlo Park or Cupertino to work at one of the big mega tech firms — I don’t care how nice that bus was. That was still like a two - to three-hour bus ride, round trip, every day. Those workers were choosing that long commute to live in San Francisco, because they believed in San Francisco and its values. And so it turned out that the tech workers who were moving to San Francisco were often way left, and in some ways, made the city even more left than it was before. So some of the tech folks on Twitter who may have very large followings and be very impactful in various ways — they don’t necessarily represent the broad perspective of tech workers. That’s a much more diverse perspective.

ezra klein

Well, I actually think that’s become a pretty core driver of some of their politics, I think, in a way that I don’t believe this was nearly as true five years ago, 10 years ago — that there’s much more conflict now, between the tech bosses and the tech employees, much more frustration. They’re all together in Slack rooms. They’re mad at each other. And as you say, the tech employee class is pretty far left, and a lot of the tech bosses are, in some cases, more traditionally right or libertarian but, whatever they are, are very frustrated by their own employees. And so there is this divergence where I actually think they’re getting pushed right by their own people. Their people are getting pushed left by them. There’s a funny internal culture in tech that, I think, shapes a lot of the way San Francisco looks from the outside without actually being, as far as I can tell, as relevant as you would think to its politics.

I think that is right. I think tech has been very complicated for San Francisco and, obviously, great economically. But yeah, it’s just — it is not a monolith by any stretch of the imagination.

ezra klein

One thing I find interesting about the Bay Area liberalisms — and one reason that being here and watching the politics closely has been helpful for me — is that when you’re in D.C. and you’re watching what’s happening, a lot of the focus, if you want more liberal outcomes, is on Republicans. Right? A debt ceiling crisis or the way Mitch McConnell might wield the filibuster. And here, in the Bay Area specifically, in California at this point more broadly — I mean, there’s not a single statewide elected Republican. The Republican Party is too weak to be a major player in outcomes. And so in different ways, all the liberalisms are dealing with the successes, but also the failures, of Democratic governance, and so they’re all, in one fashion or another, reformist movements. So when you look at governance in the Bay Area, but then also governance in California broadly, because you’re a state senator, what do you think Democrats have to brag about, where they can say, look, we’ve made California, we made San Francisco, a model the nation should follow? And what do they have to answer for? What are people like you or some of the people in other factions trying to grapple with that didn’t go that well but that has to be understood as a coalitional failure, not an oppositional failure?

Absolutely. And I will say that there are things that were viewed as the liberal, good thing that no longer are — in housing and certain kinds of transportation. I think in terms of what we can be proud of — I mean, you look at clean energy, for example. We have made massive investments in clean energy. The very near brownouts that we had last year because of some of the wildfires and the extreme weather — had we not made those massive investments in clean energy, and energy storage in particular, we would have had rolling blackouts. We’ve been on the cutting edge of trying to reduce single-use plastics. There are a lot of environmental strategies that we are the first to employ. And then, of course, in protecting civil rights, protecting reproductive health care — health care in general, we have gone to the limit and beyond, in terms of expanding health care under the Affordable Care Act. We’ve expanded Medi-Cal to undocumented people — not of every age, but at least older and younger. And so in a number of ways, we’ve just done exactly what we want the federal government to do, and we’re leading the way here. In other areas, we have failed, and we’re trying to turn that around. We’ve absolutely failed on housing. California and Bay Area have just erected so many barriers to new housing, and again, that’s sprung out of the — all development is bad, because you want to build freeways through parks and tear down neighborhoods. And so it became a reaction that we have to have as much process as possible for any kind of change, including building new homes by a transit station. We also made it hard to build new public transportation — extremely hard to build it. And so in those kinds of ways, some of these basic needs — new homes, homes for people to live, transit for people to get around — we made it so hard, that we have driven the car into the ditch. We have a multi-million home shortage that is absolutely fueling homelessness and housing insecurity and making people live in overcrowded situations. And we saw what that did during the pandemic, and we’ve made it really hard to get around.

ezra klein

Do you understand that as an ideological choice that got made along the way, or do you understand that as systems and processes that were erected for, possibly, another use or that most people don’t even know about? You talk about running for Board of Supervisors. Most people, I don’t think, can tell you what comes before the Board of Supervisors or doesn’t. I find this comes up a lot, to the degree to which what we see happening now is an actual choice — like the voters weighed in on it, and this is what they want — or we have what gets called policy drift, and processes built in another era are now weaponized in this era, in a way that is very contrary to the intentions of the people who design them.

It’s both. It’s both intentional, and it is drift. On the intentional side, you look at housing and the downzoning things that happened in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It used to be that you could build apartment buildings, pretty much, anywhere. And then, all of a sudden, the zoning changed, so you can only build single-family homes, which created a math issue — when you could only build one unit of housing per parcel, whereas you used to be able to build five or 10 or 20 per parcel, and that was one of the root causes of our housing crisis. LA in the ‘80s downzoned and literally eliminated 50 percent, 1/2 of its own housing capacity. San Francisco did something similar in late ‘70s, and that happened up and down the state. That was all extremely intentional. We don’t want multi-unit, we don’t want more housing, we don’t want change. On the drift side, the poster child for drift is CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which was passed in the early ‘70s, signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan. The purpose of it, which is a very important purpose, is to say when you’re doing something significant, making a significant decision — you’re going to build a new dam, new highway — you should do environmental analysis so you know what the impacts will be. Over time, CEQA came to apply to everything, and it could be absolutely weaponized, so that people who oppose any project, even environmentally beneficial projects, can use this supposed environmental law to stop the project to slow it down, to kill an apartment building right by a BART station, to delay or kill a bus rapid transit line or a bike lane. And so we have this environmental law that is, in some ways, harming climate action. And that was not necessarily intentional, but that was drift over time that has been very harmful.

ezra klein

One reason I think California policy is challenging for liberals is that you often find examples of things where affectively, you think, that sounds great, right? You have the Environmental Quality Act, or there’s simply a lot of what at least was intended to be small-d democratic input across the state. I’ve spent a lot of time at Board of Supervisors meetings and planning meetings and council meetings. And these are places where people from the community are supposed to be able to come in and weigh in. You have the proposition process and ballot initiatives, right? Where the public can get something onto the ballot and actually vote it into — vote it into power, even if the legislature isn’t going to take it up anytime soon. And all that sounds great. And then, you look at the outcomes, and they’re not what people want. People are very unhappy about them. Things get very expensive. Things get slowed down. It seems like the people who show up at the meetings are not always representative of the community. A lot of your bills — one of the things they’ve done at different points is try to make it so if, say, affordable housing fulfills basic requirements, you don’t have to go through all these different councils and committees and so on. How do you think about that collision between values that a lot of, say, liberals hold dear — you know, environmentalism or participation — and processes that often feel, in the end, like they are moving the other direction? Like you’re getting more sprawl out, which is bad for the environment, or you’re getting more kind of status quo interests, which is not what you think for small-d democracy.

First of all, when we talk about environmental protection, it should be about what the result is and not what the process is. And so we’re phasing out single-use plastics in California. We are trying to reduce oil drilling in California. Putting those regulations in place to protect people’s health and protect the environment — that’s what it’s all about. Putting process in place that can actually harm the environment by killing a new rapid bus line or by slowing down or killing a clean energy project — and we’ve seen CEQA and other environmental laws used to stop clean energy. And Bill McKibben actually just wrote — one of the most respected climate activists in the world just wrote an amazing piece about how this overprocessing of decisions and abuse of environmental laws can actually impede climate action. And so we have to make sure that we’re looking at the results and not just at the process. If you have an endless process and a bad result — first of all, it’s not democratic, because the people who show up at a planning commission hearing or a city council meeting or a town hall may or may not represent the broad popular view. In fact, often they don’t, because a lot of people don’t even know those meetings are happening, or trying to just get their kids to do their homework and eat dinner. And so we have, in some ways, harmed our democratic process by letting it be hijacked through a very, very unrepresentative community process, which can often impede things like climate action.

ezra klein

How do you think about this on a principles level, though? And I’ll be honest. This is in a lot of my more recent work on — call it supply-side liberalism, call it abundance progressivism — the place I struggle the most, which is, if you just take an “outcomes are what matter” kind of attitude, you could lose something that I think is really important in a democracy, which is that ability for different kinds of input to emerge, a kind of, not just sense of the community, but a genius of the collective, right? In theory, democracy is an information-gathering and synthesizing technology, to be very nerdy and San Francisco about the way I put it. And you know, there’s, I think, a tendency to say California has a huge housing crisis. We should, say, bump a bunch of this up to the state level. And if it fits the general goals Gavin Newsom has for affordable housing, it should just go through. And there’s a very good critique that the way we do it now is a failure. But that feels to me like, at some point, we’re going to be losing something in the technology and possibility of democracy that we also don’t want to sacrifice. What would ideal process look like? How do you make process not just a slur?

Yeah. And to be very, very clear, I’m not opposed to process. I think community participation is a good thing. As a former local elected official, when we would have neighborhood problems and you have a community meeting, you would often get excellent feedback. So I think it’s a bad thing to exclude the public. We need public participation. But there needs to be a beginning, middle, and end of the process. And not everyone is going to get their way. Some people are going to be happier or less happy with the result, but you have to eventually get to that result. And if you look at our housing work, the housing work we do does not exclude the public from the process. I’m a big believer that once you’ve set the rules up, if someone comes forward and says, OK, you’ve zoned for this height, for this many units, you have these objective design standards, these are the setbacks, et cetera, et cetera — I have a project, and I have checked all the boxes that you have set down in the law, public entity. You should get your permit. Whereas now, what we say is, OK, we know you’ve complied with every rule that the elected officials have set, but you still have to go through an unpredictable five-year process. And so what we are doing around housing as an example is, cities can still set a lot of the rules. We tell them, you need to zone for 3,000 new homes in the next eight years. And the cities then, through their democratic process, decide where they want to focus that development. And that is a very localized public participatory decision. They get to come up with their design standards. They get to make a lot of these decisions locally. We set the broad parameters, and we say, these are the results you need to achieve. You figure out the best way to achieve it. And once you’ve set the rules, if someone meets the rules, you need to give them their permit. That’s good government, and it allows public participation. So it’s a balance.

ezra klein

How do you think about the propositions ballot initiative process — which, in a theoretical way, I find completely inarguable? You should be able to get enough signatures and get something on the ballot and be able to bring at least some things that have very intense support to the direct democracy. And I barely know anybody at this point who doesn’t think that process is a mess, who isn’t worried about the amount of the budget that is tied up in things that sounded good when somebody put it on the ballot. There’s a sense that you can just — if you have enough money, you can get anything on the ballot. What should we learned from the ballot initiative processes’ uses and abuses? And add one more fillip to this, I’m always so struck that that process emerges out of a feeling that the railroads have bought the entire legislature back in the early — late-19th to early-20th century. And then, you get, later on, Uber and Lyft, sort of modern mega transportation players, use it to make it impossible for the legislature to do anything about gig workers. So you do have this also weird kind of modern version of it, where it was meant to be a way around corporations. It’s now a pathway for corporations. What should we learn from that?

One thing I’ve learned is that the voters really dislike the ballot measure system for a lot of reasons. But the only thing that they dislike more than the ballot measure system is the idea of giving up their power to politicians. And so I actually, when I was a brand-new supervisor and so many people had said to me on the campaign trail, there are too many ballot measures, you people need to do your job. And so I proposed a very modest reform to San Francisco’s ballot measure rules, so that the Board of Supervisors and Mayor, years after something was passed, could make modest changes to it without having to go back to the ballot to account for changed circumstances. I got all sorts of endorsements from editorial boards, got it on the ballot. It got 30 percent of the vote. It got, just, destroyed. And so I learned then that people really don’t want to give up power to politicians. But the reality is that the ballot measure system, especially at the statewide level, is not doing what it was intended to do more than 100 years ago when it was created. It’s been decades since a volunteer-driven ballot measure was qualified via signature. It usually is more along the lines of Uber and Lyft writing their own industry regulations and putting it on the ballot, and then spending $100 million to get it passed, or the cigarette companies doing a referendum to repeal our restrictions on flavored tobacco. Now we passed a law to say you can’t drill for oil right next to someone’s home or by their kids’ school. The oil companies have qualified a referendum to repeal that. And then, of course, local government cannot fund itself without going to the ballot. And now, there’s a ballot measure being proposed by the business community that would say, to pass any local tax, it has to be a two-thirds vote. So there’s a lot of problematic aspects to our ballot measure system that make it hard to fund basic public services and the governance in the state.

ezra klein

When you were talking about the different liberalisms earlier, you mentioned one that’s sort of YIMBY liberalism — Yes In My Back Yard liberalism. And I do think of the YIMBYs as one of the much more consequential policy movements I’ve seen emerge, just in my time covering politics altogether. And they emerged, in part, around you. I mean, you were on housing quite a bit before most people were. That’s how I first started hearing of you back when I lived in D.C. You had these bills, including a very famous one that would have allowed a lot more development around transit. These became big flash points. And to the extent, I think, some of these movements emerged, they emerged around the idea that, well, passing things like this is what it would look like to be a YIMBY. And so it sort of made it more literal. How did you get into housing? And particularly, how did you get into the view that you just need more of it, which is not where everybody, certainly 10 years ago, who thought about that got?

Well, it was probably a 15-year journey for me. I mentioned earlier, the first apartment open house I went to in ‘97 was a liner on the block. After that, as a young lawyer, I did a lot of pro bono work representing or defending low-income renters facing eviction. And these were people who — a lot of long-term H.I.V. survivors, who would tell me, if I lose this case, I’m going to have to leave San Francisco, and I won’t be able to get the H.I.V. care that I need. I then got active in my neighborhood association. And I still remember one excellent project that was entirely within zoning, that had to go through 50 — five-oh — zero community meetings before it went to the planning commission. And I remember thinking, why 50? Couldn’t we do this in four meetings or five or seven or three? Why 50? It seemed ridiculous to me. And then, I got on the Board of Supervisors, and I quickly saw just the chaos around housing, that everything was a fight, and that we created the rules to allow the loudest voices to obstruct pretty much anything or drag it out and make it more expensive. Meanwhile, I saw the damage that was causing with working-class, low-income people, and I connected the dots. It took me some time, but I finally connected the dots — that this system, this anti-housing system that we had set up, that was designed to make it hard to build housing, was directly harming people, was causing evictions, was pushing people out, pushing people into homelessness. And the more I learned about it, the more horrified I was. And that’s why, early on, I did something that no one did back then. I proposed legislation to upset my entire district. Only my supervisor district — I wasn’t trying to put it in the whole state, just my district. And it passed, and it had a lot of support. And then, I said to myself, wait, I thought people were supposed to hate new development and new housing. Maybe they actually like it. My neighborhood group did a poll, like an online poll for that ordinance that I proposed to upzone the district, and it got, like, 70 percent support. And so I saw something there. And then, when the YIMBYs — a woman by the name of Sonja Trauss was the first. She started showing up at the Board of Supervisors, sort of berating us about not approving more housing. And I sensed something was happening, and it was a trickle, and then it became a tidal wave.

ezra klein

I think typically, when people think about the dynamics of an issue, they think first about polling. As you just mentioned, you know, would people in your district support that or oppose it? But you’ve been around a lot of these bills now. You’ve passed some, you’ve failed on a bunch. What is the typical structure of interest group politics on housing in California? Who’s kind of always in favor of more? Who’s routinely in favor of less? What are the dynamics people might not expect on this from the outside? How does this work inside the maneuvering in Sacramento?

Well, we have over — I’m in my eighth year in the legislature. And over those eight years, we have methodically built a huge coalition. In my first year, it was sort of small. And every year when we do more housing bills, there are a few more groups that come out of the woodwork, like Habitat for Humanity or an AARP or a United Way. And once they’re in, they’re in. They stay. But we have the housing advocates, the YIMBY groups, the groups that advocate for more affordable, subsidized housing. We have the anti-poverty groups that have gotten increasingly involved. There’s a group that, just this year, for the first time, got involved — the Inner City Law Center in LA, which is like a pro-bono law firm for people in Skid Row. And they see the big picture on housing, and they have become part of our coalition. We have some of the tenants groups — some of the landlord groups, but not others. The people who build housing — there are environmental organizations that have gotten increasingly involved, because they understand that if you’re not building new homes in places like Berkeley and San Francisco and L.A., it means that you are building sprawl, which is so destructive. And then, we also work a lot with labor. Unions are generally very pro housing. Sometimes there are disputes about some of the aspects of different bills, and we have some fights at times. But labor has generally been part of our coalition as well.

ezra klein

Labor is much more powerful, is my impression, in Sacramento than it is in D.C. Maybe that’s because Democrats run Sacramento. And it’s another one of these things where people talk about it as a singular, like “Where is labor on the issue?” But there are a lot of unions, and they split. So who is sort of early on more housing? Who needs more negotiation? What are some of the flash points or points of tension there that have to be negotiated? How would you describe the dynamics of that?

I am proud that California, in many ways, is a union state. We want to get union membership up, and I’m really proud of some of the work that some of our labor unions are doing to organize, particularly low-income service workers. So the building trades and the carpenters have always been involved in different ways in housing policy, because they actually build our new homes, and so they’ve always been involved. More recently, additional unions have gotten involved. For example, S.E.I.U. has gotten very involved. They obviously aren’t building the homes, but they have a lot of low-wage workers who struggle with housing instability. The United Food and Commercial Workers, I’m hoping will get more and more involved. They did a survey of their workers, and a big percentage struggle with housing. So we’re seeing a broader cross-section of labor unions get involved in housing.

ezra klein

Why does San Francisco have such a visible homelessness problem, compared to other places?

Let’s look at California as a whole. So California has 12 percent of the U.S. population, but 30 percent of the U.S. homeless population and 50 percent of the unsheltered U.S. homeless population. There are some folks who believe that homelessness is a mental health and drug problem, and that’s it. That’s false. It is a housing problem. California does not have more addiction or more mental health problems than other places, but we have higher housing costs, and that is what is driving homelessness — not just in San Francisco, but in Oakland, Sacramento, and San Diego, in L,A,. But in San Francisco, we are the most extreme. The housing costs are so high, that it absolutely pushes people into homelessness. And we’re 7 miles by 7 miles. This is a very small city geographically. We’re very dense. We’re very compact. So problems that exist everywhere, whether it’s homelessness or drug use or untreated mental health, tend to be much more visible here. And some of the people we see on our streets who are in distress because of mental health or addiction problems — they’re not all homeless, right? Because people may be housed, but they might live in a small place. They’re not going to stay in a small room every day. So there are reasons, because of our setup, physically, why everything is more visible in San Francisco, even if it’s not necessarily worse.

ezra klein

Why do we have such a significant unsheltered homelessness population? I mean, if you look at numbers, New York does not look better on homelessness than we do, really. But they are better on sheltered homelessness. Right? They don’t have as many people unsheltered. We are unusual in how many people are actually out on the streets, even given our homelessness population. Why?

New York made a policy decision decades ago to create what they call a right to shelter and a mandate that the city has to provide shelter to anyone who needs it. And so New York has a massive, massive shelter system. That definitely reduces unsheltered homelessness. It also is a massive drain on resources that could be going to permanent housing. And that’s a policy choice. In California, we’ve not made that choice. We’ve decided — and Gavin Newsom, when he was mayor of San Francisco, really focused on this — focusing more on housing, permanent housing solutions, rather than endless construction of new shelters, which is very, very expensive. And so if the desire has been to solve the root cause of homelessness, which is a lack of housing rather than the more triage approach of temporary shelter, there are people on both sides of that argument, and people have good points on both sides. Personally, I’m a housing person. I also think we need more shelter beds. We do not have enough shelter beds in San Francisco, and that makes homelessness more visible and means we have more unsheltered homeless people.

ezra klein

I’ve never understood if this is a different policy choice California could actually make, given the reality of housing politics, which is to say, one of the big problems with having permanent housing be your main answer is, it’s expensive to build, it’s slow to build, and we’re not succeeding in building enough of it, like flatly. On the other hand, the idea that you’re going to get communities to accept a huge increase in shelter construction, which they often oppose even more vociferously than they oppose smaller permanent housing projects — that’s a little hard to believe either, given at least what I’ve seen happens, when you try to say, we’re going to build a shelter right here. So I recognize that there is a policy fight between more permanent housing, more shelter, or the sort of “why not both” contingent. But in terms of the real question I’ve always wondered — I mean, if Gavin Newsom and Mayor London Breed and others tomorrow wanted to go the shelter route, could they? Is there the political capacity to just put shelters up all over San Francisco?

There is, and it wouldn’t have to be all over. And again, it’s not just San Francisco. There’s bad homeless problems in other cities.

ezra klein

In fact, LA is actually on my mind here, because I’ve reported there on the efforts to try to build shelters and housing, through things like Prop HHH. And the community opposition was ferocious.

So we have actually passed various laws, and I’ve authored some of them, to streamline, or make what we call ministerial — so non-discretionary — the addition of supportive housing navigation centers, which are like a better form of homeless shelter, and other tools to make it so that cities cannot block shelters or supportive housing. Cities are required in their every-eight-year housing plan to designate a zone of their city for automatic approval of homeless shelters. And those locations can’t be in the middle of nowhere or an industrial area. It has to be in a place that is actually connected to services. And we’ve passed other laws as well. So cities now, and private individuals, nonprofits, have tools to be able to site these homeless services, homeless shelters, navigation centers, supportive housing, and not have to get approval from a city council or a planning commission.

ezra klein

So why doesn’t San Francisco build a lot more of them?

San Francisco definitely prioritizes building supportive housing for homeless people. The Mayor and the city are also, I think, beginning to prioritize mental health, and particularly more mental health beds. And that is a resource choice. The city has the tools, legally, to add more shelter. The city has really focused on housing and mental health beds. And there’s a reasonable argument —

ezra klein

I feel like I’m watching you get more diplomatic as we talk here. Do you think this is the right choice?

We do need more shelters. I don’t want to see us go down New York’s path, where we put so many dollars into shelter that we don’t have the resources to build the housing that we need. I do want to continue to prioritize housing. We do not have enough shelter beds. And it’s taken us, like, over 50 years to dig ourselves into this hole. It’s going to take us time to get out of it. So it’s not like we’re going to fix the housing problem in two or three or five years. It’s a longer-term process. And so until we get there, we have to have these triage solutions, like navigation centers or other forms of shelters. And we don’t have enough of them in San Francisco, but we do need more. And I believe the city should create more.

ezra klein

One of the things that has been dominant in both the politics here while I have lived here, and the way the politics here are then refracted, particularly through right-wing media, is what gets called “crime” and what I would call “disorder.” Because — and this has been said by many people now — San Francisco does not look unusual in crime statistics. We actually have a lower murder rate than a lot of the cities that other people talk about as being a place they want to move to, like Miami. But there is a lot of what people experience as disorder on the streets. You walk around, and you see people doing drugs very much out in the open. The Tenderloin is like just — it’s wild, what happens there. And it is distinctive. I mean, you can find things like this in other places — Skid Row in LA. But there is a sense people have that San Francisco has made a political decision or a policing decision to live with more disorder, for one reason or another. How do you think about that?

You’re absolutely right that we have — of the mid-sized to big cities, we have one of the lowest murder rates. We have a fairly high property crime rate, and that does really impact people when their homes are getting broken into, or their cars are getting broken into, or vandalism happens.

ezra klein

It scares people when your home gets broken into.

It’s very scary.

ezra klein

We’ve had our car broken into a bunch, but there is a weird thing here that has not happened to me elsewhere, where just, everybody says, you can’t leave anything in your car. When people say that, it speaks to a pervasiveness of a fear.

Well, and for people who need their car to get to work, it’s a problem. And it’s terrifying when someone breaks into your home, especially if you happen to be there.

ezra klein

Yes.

And so there are crime issues in San Francisco. But we also have to be clear that even if violent crime is low, if you’ve been victimized, or your friend or your neighbor or your kid or your husband or wife has been victimized, violent crime is high for you. And so I think it’s really important not just to rely on the statistics, because it’s also about people’s personal experiences and what they’re going through. And when you see someone on meth on the street, acting in a really bizarre and scary way, that is really scary for people. Because also, they don’t know what that person is going to do. And so yes, people are concerned. I think people have a right to be concerned. And there are things happening on our streets that are not OK. And some things — like for example, in the Tenderloin, the open-air drug market there — I don’t think that arresting drug dealers is going to end addiction. It won’t. People will find another way to get drugs. But that drug dealing has huge impacts, public safety impacts, on that neighborhood. And if you’re someone who’s raising a kid in the Tenderloin — and there are quite a few kids in Tenderloin — and that kid has to walk through a drug market to get to school, that’s a huge problem. And so I think sometimes San Francisco gets unfairly tarred as sort of this Mad Max Thunderdome situation, and it’s absolutely not. But there are parts of the city where there are real issues, and there are some really legitimate safety issues that we need to do more to deal with.

ezra klein

But let me get at a wrinkle of this. So I lived in D.C. for about 14 years, and crime was much worse there. And violent crime was much closer to me there. The number of my friends who got mugged — one of my dear friend’s roommates got shot. Terrible things happened constantly. And so they were having a lot of trouble getting crime under control. But what nobody seemed to believe, even if they believed that the policing was ineffective or the government was ineffective, was that the government was tolerating it. And what is different about the politics of crime here, rightly or wrongly — because again, there is actually less crime here than there was in D.C. When I was there, certainly less violent crime — is that there is a perception, widespread, that at least disorder — levels of disorder, levels of basic crimes — shoplifting, things like that — are tolerated here, in a way they aren’t elsewhere.

Well, I think for a long time — and I’m not going to comment on whether this was an intentional policy choice or not — but at least in effect, there were things that were tolerated. So car break-ins — I think for a long time, the attitude was, that’s between you and your insurance company. Shoplifting — it was not a high priority. Even the Tenderloin, I think, was, in some ways, effectively a containment zone, which was horrific for the residents, including many older people, people with disabilities, immigrant families, who are living in the Tenderloin. And so I think for some types of problems and crimes, there was a tolerance. And I think that’s been changing over time. But the other thing that always keep in mind. So San Francisco is the best city on the planet. People love writing San Francisco’s obituary. It’s like almost like a national pastime. Every year or two, there’s a big article proclaiming that San Francisco is dead. We always come back. So much good is happening in the city. And we, as San Franciscans, love the city, and we expect it to be perfect. We want our city to be amazing and flawless, and so we hold it to the highest possible standards — sometimes realistic, sometimes less realistic. But that’s one of the great things about San Francisco. We are all so committed to making it as good as it can be.

ezra klein

Well, I think that’s one of the interesting contradictions of the place. I mean, I don’t think some of what we’re talking about is the highest-possible standards, when we’re talking about the Tenderloin or others. But San Francisco has gotten refracted, in a way that has probably always happened, but I’ve been more alert to it while being here, through, practically, right-wing media as, as you put it, a sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic hellhole. And there was all this talk that all the tech people are going to leave and move to Miami. And you can just look at housing prices here, and you know that has not happened. And A.I. is all located here. It is geographically, intensely concentrated here. So now, A.I. is a big thing. And if you look at the big A.I. companies, they’re in San Francisco or right around it, right? There’s one in London. That’s basically it. And so there is this interesting way in which San Francisco seems — on the one hand, people talk a lot about the quality-of-life issues here. And on the other hand, things like housing would become much cheaper if actually, it was driving people out. But it’s not. It maintains just an unbelievable desirability.

So when I was deciding — right before I decided to move to San Francisco — it was in ‘96, I made the decision to go to San Francisco instead of staying in Philadelphia, where my family was. I remember talking to someone who lived in San Francisco for a long time but had moved to Philadelphia. And I asked him his opinion, and he said, well, you should try out San Francisco. It’s a fun place. He said, but let’s be clear, it’s a tourist town. There’s no real industry there or any kind of economic base anymore, other than tourism. And so just, you know, go there to have fun. And of course, that’s not true of San Francisco — came back again, with tech, with biotech, with health care. We are, in some ways, a boom-bust town. We see that now. We’re having problems downtown. That’s a huge problem, a huge risk factor for the city, which I believe we will deal with. And we’re seeing it with some of the conditions on our streets. And we know what we need to do to address that. And we just need the political will to do it.

ezra klein

I mean, do we know? What do we need to do to address that?

We talked about more shelter, more navigation centers, more housing, more mental health beds, more access to mental health treatment, much more access to addiction treatment. And we also need to — and this is something that can be controversial in some quarters. I actually don’t think it’s that controversial in San Francisco — for people who are debilitated and dying on our streets, we need to give them an extra level of care. And so that’s why we’re, in the legislature this year, trying to expand conservatorships for the people who are truly debilitated, can’t make decisions for themselves and are dying. And we all see those folks on the streets every day, and people wonder, why is that person out here, clearly dying, and why is no one doing anything about it? And we’re trying to change the laws to make that possible.

ezra klein

How much is what we were talking about at the beginning of the conversation and what we’re talking about now, in a way, the same? Which is to say that when I asked you why you moved here, you were telling me about the tolerance of San Francisco, and you were talking about that, in part, around L.G.B.T.Q., but also then, you sort of talk about tech. And I notice it, too. I mean, people are tolerant of very weird ideas. They are tolerant of very weird ways of dressing. They’re tolerant of a lot of things people would not be open to elsewhere, and that openness to ideas, I think, is fundamentally what keeps San Francisco’s economy powered in the way it is. So people just sit there and listen to you straightforwardly as you’re saying the wackiest thing. And in some percentage of those, you get a $52-billion company out of it. And that tolerance has political dimensions, too. I mean, some of what we’ve talked about around — more is tolerated here. I mean, there is political conflict around what to crack down on and what to not, whereas in cities that are simultaneously less innovative, and in some ways, less disordered, I wonder how much it’s not the same thing all the way through — that it’s just, when you have a politics built around tolerance, that’s going to give you a different problem set, but also a different benefit set, than a politics built around conformity or built around tighter standards.

Absolutely. And we see that with some of the fights we have around unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco, where, let’s say we do have enough shelter for everyone. Let’s say we get there, and we have enough shelter. We have a shelter for anyone who needs it. There will still be people who will say that if someone wants to stay on a tent on the sidewalk, even if there is a shelter bed for them, they should be able to —

ezra klein

Can you clear a tent city?

Right. The city can, and the city has done that, but that can become politically controversial in San Francisco. And that springs out of the philosophy that we have, of live and let live, here. But we also need a city that’s going to work for everyone.

ezra klein

I want to ask you about another dimension of that, which is, this is a city with a very — again, compared to everywhere I’ve lived — a very unusual drug culture. On the one hand, the power elite is sort of drenched in psychedelics, and there’s a lot of very interesting psychedelics policy. You have a bill to decriminalize, basically, all the major classes of psychedelics. We also have a very, very bad, now, fentanyl and overdose death problem. We’re one of the worst cities for that. How do you think about the broad experiments in drug policy? And just in drug acceptance — and I don’t want to paint all this — fentanyl on the streets is not the same as ayahuasca ceremonies that tech executives are attending. But I do think there’s something about the way in which San Francisco has kind of always had a different attitude towards drugs that has both created, again, a lot of possibility in consciousness and, at this point, also a lot of dangerous outcomes?

Yeah. I think psychedelics — and also, I do want to give a shoutout to cannabis, because we were the birthplace of medical cannabis during the H.I.V. crisis. And so we are a city that has definitely been very embracing of substance use, particularly cannabis, psychedelic, et cetera. But like everywhere else in the country, yeah, we have problems with opioid addiction. We have problems with meth addiction. In terms of fentanyl, when you look at overdoses, in general, when you look at the cities that are up there with San Francisco, it’s Philadelphia, it’s Franklin County, Ohio, it’s the Bronx. These are all very different demographics, very different kinds of places, and they all have fentanyl problems. I think San Francisco was the first West Coast city to really experience a lot of fentanyl. And so we are — that explains part of it. I don’t think our acceptance of, like, cannabis and psychedelics is why we have a fentanyl problem. I think there’s a national problem with opioids in general, and with fentanyl, specifically, it’s spreading everywhere. Meth has always been a huge problem everywhere. These issues are in rural areas, suburban, cities, and San Francisco absolutely has a problem.

ezra klein

Well, one place you do see, I think, more of a throughline is over what policy solutions are being debated here. So tell me a bit about the fight over supervised consumption sites.

Yeah. So we have people who are using drugs on our streets, and in very unsafe ways. It’s. Unsanitary for them. It’s bad for the surrounding neighborhood. It’s not good. And there was a focus group that was done with some people who were injecting in public. Because intuitively, you would think, why would I ever want to do something that private in a public space? And one of the answers that people were giving was, well, then if I overdose, at least someone will see me and try to save my life. And so supervised consumption sites have been used in Europe, in Canada, and Australia for 30 years — a place where you can go inside, in a healthy, safe, clean, sanitized setting — make sure you have a clean needle. If you overdose, they reverse the overdose. In 30 years, not a single death from overdose has ever happened, that we know of, in any of these places around the world. It reduces E.R. visits, because you have care right there, reduces H.I.V. and hepatitis infections. And about 1/2 of the people end up going into treatment — not right away, perhaps, but at some point. So you can connect people to treatment. Sometimes people have concerns. Oh my god, you’re enabling drug use. No, we’re not. These people are already using drugs. No one is going to be like, well, I’ve never used drugs before, but I see a safe consumption site, so I’m going to start using meth or start using fentanyl. These people are already using. And the question is, do we want them using on the sidewalk or inside, in a safe, healthy space? I did author legislation to allow San Francisco, Oakland, and L.A. to pilot safe consumption sites. Unfortunately, the Governor vetoed that legislation. So now, San Francisco is considering moving forward, despite that veto. We are waiting for guidance from the Biden administration, because this administration has been very progressive on many aspects of drug policy. And we are hoping that the administration will create guidance for cities to do this.

ezra klein

One thing people have been talking about around this debate is that San Francisco has seen a jump in deaths since December, when the city’s Tenderloin center, which is kind of an informal supervised consumption site, closed. We obviously don’t have the kind of research that would fully make a causal claim there, but it seems to me a lot of people suspect, and have been talking about, the possibility that as people got turned out of that space where they were using drugs under some level of medical supervision, that it’s led to more O.D.s.

Well, the Tenderloin Linkage Center did a lot of things. It was really not a supervised consumption site and didn’t have a lot of the elements that you would have in a supervised consumption site. You know, I think the city absolutely needs to open up actual safe consumption sites. And it also points to the need to make Narcan, which reverses opioid overdoses, available everywhere. And we have bills in the legislature this year to require it in schools and public libraries and bars and nightclubs. And so we need to push out the Narcan everywhere. And it’s tragic that people should have to carry Narcan around with them in their briefcase or in their purse or wherever. But here in San Francisco and other cities, I think more people need to have access to it.

ezra klein

When you author a bill like that, and you know that both the bill and you will then become refracted — and San Francisco, for that matter — through the right-wing media ecosystem — something you now have, actually, quite a lot of experience with — how do you think about what that is? The interest in the stuff you do particularly, and what San Francisco does particularly, what San Francisco represents culturally on the Right — tell me a bit about the symbolic dimension of your job and this place in the, sort of, broader political culture war.

Well, I’m a gay, Jewish Democrat from San Francisco.

ezra klein

Very tall.

I’m very tall, too. I think the right wing is OK with my height, but the other pieces, they’re not OK with. And I’m sort of their ultimate caricature of everything that the MAGA QAnon world hates. And so they do demonize me a lot and go after me and threaten me. And that’s OK. It just sort of energizes me to do the work even more. What I know is that my constituents in San Francisco — I’m not saying they’re unanimous. There are people on all sides of a lot of these issues. But on the work we do around drug policy, there’s a lot of support here in San Francisco. The work we do around L.G.B.T.Q., civil rights — enormous support in San Francisco. And so I try to always remember that Twitter does not frequently represent public opinion, especially not since a certain person purchased it. And I try to stay very grounded in my own community, and that’s why I love writing transit in San Francisco. I love showing up at block parties and just being out and about. Because I actually like it when constituents come up to me and say, hey, I have concerns about this bill that you’re doing, and we get to talk about it, and I get to hear those concerns. And it makes me a better elected official, but it also grounds me. And I know what people are saying, and that is very helpful to me.

ezra klein

Give me the renarrativization of this. I would say that the right-wing narrative of San Francisco, which is quite out there now, because it’s also all over Twitter from people who live in San Francisco — it’s in “The New York Times,” for that matter — is that it’s a place that is collapsing around its own mixture of tolerance and status-quo-ism. At the same time, like, so many people live here, want to live here. So many of the great companies are here. So many of the great technologies are here. How would you describe that contradiction? Like, how would you — how would you try to change San Francisco’s political space in the narrative?

Well, I mean, not to pick on Bakersfield or the good people of Bakersfield, but Bakersfield has a much higher murder rate than San Francisco and has the worst air pollution in the state. And you don’t see right-wing media talking about that.

ezra klein

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is.

Exactly. Representative McCarthy represents a district that has very high air pollution and a high murder rate. Unfortunately. I wish it were a better situation there. And I’m not trying to pick on Bakersfield, but they don’t talk about that. They talk about San Francisco. They talk about one murder that happened here. And so in San Francisco, we need to just be better about talking about the — we should not try to erase the challenges that we have. We have real problems here, and we should be transparent about those and acknowledge them and work overtime to solve them. But I think it’s important for us to really make sure people know the good. And recently, you know, San Francisco tourism is almost as high as it was before the pandemic. It’s come back that strongly in the last year or so. Conventions are coming back. Recently, someone gave me a letter that JPMorgan — they do a big health care conference in San Francisco every year. They sent a letter to the mayor talking about what a great experience they had and that their participants had. There are all these good things happen that people don’t necessarily hear about. And I also sometimes get feedback from people who say, hey, I just visited San Francisco and I was prepared for this, like, post-apocalyptic situation, and it was amazing and beautiful. And we need to do more to get that out there.

ezra klein

One of the things, broadly, that has been true, I think, about California politics for the last four or five years — true in San Francisco, but true, I think, more broadly statewide — is that a lot of contradictions and difficult decisions have been papered over by money. And particularly during the pandemic, Gavin Newsom had this unbelievable budget surplus to spend. But in San Francisco, the downtown, which drove a lot of revenue, is in pretty unusually bad straits, because so many tech companies are open to remote work. It’s not coming back as quickly as it is in some other cities. There’s reason to think that California is not going to have the budget surpluses going forward it’s had in the past couple of years. How does California kind of politics and policy change, and California liberalism change, if it can’t do quite so much through spending?

Well, just, if I can put in a little plug — because there is some short-term spending that is essential for our future economy — and that is we’re at risk of having our public transportation agencies or systems fall apart.

ezra klein

Yeah, this is a very big problem.

The fiscal cliff — because —

ezra klein

Can you explain the fiscal cliff?

Yeah, so our transit agencies lost 90 percent, 95 percent of their ridership early in the pandemic. They’ve been slowly recovering, but way slower than they want. BART is, like, 30 — they were at 5 percent. They’re now at 30 percent of pre-pandemic ridership. So they don’t have the same fare revenue that they had. In Congress, one of the great things that it did during the pandemic was to provide a lot of rescue money to transit systems around the country. Without that money, these systems would probably be gone, and the fare revenue is not recovering quickly enough to replace it. And so if they hit that wall or that fiscal cliff, and the federal money runs out and they don’t have the fare money that they need, we will start seeing massive service cuts. So BART might stop running on the weekends, or just run hourly during the week. That would be so devastating for our economic recovery. It would be devastating for our climate goals. More and more people would have to drive. There’d be much worse congestion on bridges and roads. And so we need short-term help from the state, which I am fighting very, very hard and making a lot of noise about, to get money in our budget to backstop that. So that is a money issue. Although, we are also going to be having a hearing soon to talk about all the reforms and restructuring that some of these systems need to do to be more nimble in the future. So they need to reform, and they need money. But in terms of downtown, we need to think differently about downtown. And the fact that we had a downtown where there was really no housing, or almost no housing, is sort of odd. And when you look at what happened in lower Manhattan after 9/11 — and granted, they had an enormous amount of federal rescue money — but they turned what was only offices into offices and residential and nightlife, and lower Manhattan is super vibrant now. We need to rethink downtown. We need to consider that there are some office buildings, particularly some older ones, that will need to be torn down and rebuilt into some sort of mixed-use. The crisis that we face in downtown San Francisco, we should not be frozen. It needs to be an opportunity to completely rethink it and make it even better than it was before.

ezra klein

Does that need money or does that just need the regulatory and zoning capacity to shift?

It’s both. It will need regulatory change. Because it’s going to have to happen. It’s not something that happens in a year or two. It might happen in 5 to 10 years. But right now, in California, I mentioned the California Environmental Quality Act, which goes well beyond Environmental Protection. It does some really important Environmental Protection things. But any building that is 45 years or older is considered a, quote unquote, “potential historic resource.” I live in a 1965 condo building that is not architecturally or historically significant in any conceivable way, but it is technically a potential historic resource. And that means that it could get completely caught up in years of process and litigation. We’re going to need, probably, some state regulatory relief for downtown San Francisco to allow us to much more nimbly make decisions and allow property owners to make decisions to transform it into something for the future. Because it’s very hard for many high-rise office buildings to convert them into housing. The plumbing isn’t set up correctly. It might not be financially feasible. For some, maybe, but for others, not. We need to be very, very flexible as we pivot downtown San Francisco to the future.

ezra klein

What do you think about the broad housing agenda in California? There’s been this dynamic where for a while, it was like at the end of every session, people like me would pay attention and feel sad as some of the housing bills that you had hoped would make it over the line didn’t, and then didn’t, and then didn’t. And then, they started to, and then more did, and then more did. And then, last year, or two years ago, there was a flood of end-of-the-year housing policy that got passed. I mean, so much, that most of us couldn’t even keep up with all that had happened. What, to you, that has come into play will really matter here, and what big parts of the agenda, for you, haven’t happened? Like, if you had your housing wishlist, three or four — not bills but changes, what would they be?

Well, what we’ve done — we’ve done some really significant change that is already having impacts. So actually, I was probably best known for the big bill you mentioned at the beginning that would have rezoned a lot of California. It was Senate Bill 50. And that got — it sucked the oxygen out of the room.

ezra klein

Would have rezoned a lot around transit.

Right. And at the same time that I was pursuing that proposal, I was also authoring a law that effectively forced cities to zone for much more density up and down the state. And that was a bill that really changed how we set housing goals for cities. And we set much higher goals, and we put more accountability in place. And right now, as we speak, cities have rezoned and are rezoning for much more density. We have passed various laws that take sustainable housing proposals out of CEQA entirely, because these are sustainable projects, and have prevented cities from blocking them. And there was one passed last year by my — I’m the chair of the Senate Housing Committee. My counterpart in the assembly, Buffy Wicks from the East Bay, passed an amazing law that allows much easier conversion of commercial into residential, so strip malls that are dying, for example. We have made our affordable housing density bonus program much stronger, which means that if you do a higher level of affordability, you get to build taller, more densely, waive some other requirements. I could go on and on, but I won’t. But we have — we’ve taken some really tangible steps that are slowly bearing fruit. It’s never as fast as we want, but the seeds have been and are being planted.

ezra klein

But what don’t you have that you wish you did?

We still need more streamlining. So when I say streamlining, I mean you set up the rules ahead of time. If someone meets all the rules, with height density, design, et cetera, they get their permit in a matter of months, not years. We have done some of that. And I had one bill that I had authored, and there were a few others that my colleagues authored, to try to really do that kind of expedited permitting. We have a big bill this year — Senate Bill 423, which will make a lot of that streamlining permanent and make it more robust. But we need to move to a model where there is no longer chaotic, politicized discretion, in whether you approve or don’t approve housing, and where we have a system where the loudest voices prevail. We need a system, and I think it’s a good government system, where we set up the rules ahead of time, and if you meet the rules, you get your permit now. That will go a long way in allowing us to build the housing we need.

ezra klein

You opened an exploratory committee. And you said that if Nancy Pelosi decides not to run for reelection, you’re likely to run for her congressional seat. Why? And the reason I ask is that you’ve been working on a bunch of these issues, particularly housing, for a long time. The moment has caught up to the man. The winds are at your back. You chair one of the key committees. Why not keep working on the California-specific issues, as opposed to becoming one of a bunch of Democrats in the House, with the sort of lack of seniority and the difficulties of national politics, the likelihood of being in the minority, that kind of thing?

Well, first of all, to be clear, San Francisco has a member of Congress.

ezra klein

I said you’re not going to run unless she doesn’t run for reelection.

She’s amazing, and she walks on water, and she saved our democracy. And she was really good at handling Donald Trump, so I’m a huge fangirl of her. You know, and if there’s an opportunity, then I think it would be very exciting to represent San Francisco in Congress. And I will say that every office I’ve ever run for, including for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and then for the state senate, I was told I wasn’t going to be able to get anything done. When I ran for the Board of Supervisors, I was told that place is a mess, it’s crazy, you are never going to get anything done there, you’re going to be miserable. I got there, and we got a whole bunch of stuff done. When I ran for the state senate, some of my pro-housing YIMBY supporters told me, we don’t even want to support you, because you can’t do anything on housing in the state legislature. You should stay on the Board of Supervisors. Well, I think I proved them wrong. We’ve done a lot on housing. And I was told that the state legislature is so convoluted and corrupt, that you’re never going to be able to get anything done. That’s not true. We got a lot done. So I understand that there are challenges with Congress. We all see what they are. But you also look at, in the last few years, Congress did a lot. I mean, some huge stuff. And it’s in a different way. But the issues that I care about — housing. We need to get the federal government back into the business of building public housing, or what we now call social housing. Ronald Reagan killed it off, and that helped spike homelessness. We need more social housing, and the federal government needs to get back in that business. I do a lot of work around mental health treatment and helping people with insurance, for example, access to treatment. The federal government can play a huge role, if it wants to, in ensuring people have access to mental health treatment. And we need stronger civil rights laws at the federal level, so all of this toxic bullshit that’s happening in Florida and in Texas and Alabama, where they are basically criminalizing trans people and their families, and criminalizing drag queens and saying you’re not allowed to talk about being gay — we need civil rights laws that wipe those away. There’s a lot you can do in Congress. It might take a long time, but you can do it.

ezra klein

Always our final question then: What are three books that have influenced you, that you would recommend to the audience?

One is a book called, “And The Band Played On,” by Randy Shilts, which is, I think, the definitive authoritative history of the public health debacle that fueled the H.I.V./AIDS crisis. And you can learn a lot about what not to do when you have a public health problem or a pandemic. Another is a book called “The House on Mango Street,” by Sandra Cisneros. It’s an amazing book of vignettes about this teenage girl, her upbringing, and it ties in a lot about what it means to live in inadequate housing, and people’s dreams, aspirations about housing. And then, a book called “Last Call”— I can’t remember the author’s name. It’s about the history of how prohibition happened. And sometimes people wonder, how on Earth did prohibition not only happen, but get amended into the United States Constitution? And this is an absolutely brilliant recitation of the history of how it happened and how it failed. And it relates directly to the drug war and why drug criminalization doesn’t work. And then, I want to just do a shoutout for all of the fantasy nerds out there, because I am a fantasy nerd. And the series, “The Wheel of Time,” which is one of the —

ezra klein

Going old-school there.

It’s old-school, but you know what I love about it? It was written — they started decades ago. It’s a great gender parable, like comparing to the real world. Because the hero of the story was a guy, but the women actually were the real heroes, because without the women, the world would have ended, and the guy would have failed. Isn’t that often the case in real life?

ezra klein

Scott Wiener, thank you very much.

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

As the rain lashed Parliament Square this week, and Rishi Sunak’s bizarre police bicycle escort shouted its way through Whitehall, the capital resembled a drizzly, gothic Burning Man festival. Crowds of Extinction Rebellion protestors stood huddled from the weather in their lurid purples and oranges, like penitent cultists in a late Roman city. Gone were the strange processions of accusing scarlet priestesses that marked their early protests: they had retreated to their aesthetic safe space of a crusty Student Union bar sometime in the early Nineties, a distant fug of snakebite, rollies and road bypass protests that is presumably their foundation-myth, the lost Arcadia of the eco-protest world. And between these two worlds, sliding through the crowds in his chauffeured car, inscrutable behind polished glass, sat the living bridge between these two Englands: the King.
It still feels strange to say the King, impossible to utter it without savouring the phrase as if in quotation marks: no other British title quite embodies the same tension between the lost magic of the realm and the banalities of modern public life. Replacing the careworn grandmother embodying the post-war diminution of the British state, our new king, part Athonite mystic, part pampered dandy, remains a mystery.
Just like the juxtaposition of Extinction Rebellion’s pagan eco-mysticism with the box-ticking, bell-ringing passive-aggressiveness of Sunak’s cycle cavalry, the King represents two divergent paths for Britain’s future. To supporters like myself, inclined to hail him — partly seriously and partly ironically — as a post-liberal figurehead, a champion of small family farms and a lost way of life, the King may still signal a renaissance of sorts. To his detractors, he represents all that is wrong with the 21st-century establishment. Some view him as the herald of top-down bureaucratic eco-austerity for the masses while the elites preserve their wealth and contentment; others see his recent capitulation to the race grifters and betrayal of a loyal family servant as evidence of all that is most destabilising and harmful about modern British life. There are two kings within Charles waiting to be crowned, just as there are two rival Britains struggling to be born.
The Queen’s funeral, with its sombre pomp and reassertion of the power and majesty of the state, could be interpreted as a rejection of modern Britain as much as the great festive events of her later life proclaimed a celebration of who we are now. What rich stores of symbolic meaning, then, await us at the coronation?
The sheer strangeness of this event, its apartness from modern Britain, is the essence of its meaning. When our king is anointed as God’s chosen in the great stone sepulchre of the British people, we will witness something strange and literally magical. So divorced from modernity as to be almost incomprehensible, we will witness, like puzzled anthropologists, the ancient rituals of our own lost British tribe. The choice of music, of court dress and of religious benedictions that will attend this descendant of both Vlad Dracul and Mohammed, in this most Catholic ceremony of a Protestant country, are rich fodder for grandstanding and debate. All politics, all power, is at heart symbolic, resting on ancient foundations like a modern church on ancient monoliths: only once or twice in our lifetimes will the state draw back its robes and reveal her hidden mysteries to us.

How is Charles to rule and bring this strange duality, the ancient and the modern, into public life? For decades, he was mocked as an eccentric, a weirdo who talked to his plants and praised the rustic hardships of traditional peasant life from within his palace walls. This urge to call him weird as an insult, springs from the same source as the eye-rolling ironic epithet “normal country” levelled at Britain. Instead, it is a compliment. Britain is not a normal country, whatever that would be, and thank God.
From the beginning of recorded history, Britain has always been viewed as a place strange and apart from the rest of Europe and the world, an insular realm of eccentric people and half-understood customs. In the awkward adolescence of his reign, between the inheritance of his role and his donning of the crown, Charles has perhaps hidden his own essential weirdness, in an attempt to fit how he felt modern Britain wants him to be. It is only now, as he prepares to assume the role, that Charles has begun to let his weirdness show.
In its true meaning, wyrd is “fate”, the supernatural destiny imposed on all men, just as Charles’s destiny, long-delayed, has finally settled upon him. We must encourage, through Charles, the wyrd’s manifestations in public life.
Suggested readingIn defence of Little EnglandBy Tom McTague
Consider Charles’s much-analysed choice of the Green Man as his symbol on the Coronation invitations. What does it tell us about our new king? What makes it so fascinating is not that it is a submerged pagan symbol buried beneath Christian decoration — a popular claim modern folklorists reject — but rather the very knowing ambiguity of the Green Man, a Christian symbol of rebirth that gains its power from the winked suggestion of older, deeper roots. It is a symbol so intentionally rich in opposing meanings, so downright weird, that no settled meaning can ever be found: it was created to be puzzled over, argued about, and in doing so to uncover hidden truths. It is time for the Green Man to run riot in SW1, for Charles to enrich British public life with his own fertile ambiguities.
How, for example, would our Green Man king bridge the gap between Palace Green’s eco-protesters, fearful of what they believe to be an apocalyptic near-future, and the opposing political tendency, fearful of what they believe to be a dawning age of eco-austerity? In an age where our dependence on Russian energy and neglect of nuclear power has driven ordinary families into financial difficulty, the argument that Britain’s antiquated housing stock requires better insulation has been widely adopted by urban yimby commentators, evidence of one path through a divided political sphere.
King Charles, tireless promoter of traditional craftsmanship, could make the still-little-known case to the public that it is precisely because Britain’s housing stock dates from before the 20th century, and was built with traditional breathable materials such as lime, that insulation with modern impermeable materials, as Insulate Britain promote, would worsen the problem. This simple truth, well-known to heritage professionals, has been entirely neglected. And who could have a better pulpit to make the case for a better way forward? For if Britain’s largely Victorian houses could be insulated using traditional materials by a scaled-up, newly-trained workforce of high-skilled, high-wage craftsmen, a major political and economic problem could be resolved according to the methods Charles has spent a lifetime promoting.
Similarly, the recent collapse of much of Britain’s intensive agriculture model has heightened the growing clash between those who believe it is the way to food security, and those who believe it is despoiling Britain’s fields, forests and waterways; nor does it keep the nation fed and healthy, nor our farmers in business. As a longstanding advocate for the small family farm, King Charles can bridge this gap: instead of lecturing the nation on how to do better, he could show how the best nature-friendly farming systems work by converting Buckingham Palace’s 40 acres of private gardens into a working small farm. Imagine a rural oasis of hay meadows and rippling fields of grain in the centre of the capital, a haven of wildlife watched over by our benign farmer king. Through taking action, the king can become a living bridge between the capital and the countryside, the old ways and the new.
More from this authorThe mythic power of King Charles IIIBy Aris Roussinos
While ideas like these may seem trifling and eccentrically small-scale to both the eco-modernists, enraptured by grand geoengineering projects, and to large-scale rewilders alike, it is their pure simplicity that grants them power. While fate has planted him at the nation’s apex, the abiding characteristic of our new king is his genuine love and affection for the humble and vernacular, even if only expressed in an occasional holiday from the super-rich luxuries of his permanent existence. It is a rare head of state who mends hedges and sleeps in peasants’ cottages and monasteries for relaxation (even if his personal lodgings are more those of abbots’ quarters than monks’ cells); he can now share the same powers of regeneration these simple pleasures must bring to him with the nation as a whole.
It is only through converting the advocacy of the Prince of Wales into the necessary labour of showing and doing that our Green Man King can make himself and the monarchy a central, guiding presence in British public life. To heal the new divisions of the coming age, and make the coronation a genuine period of national rebirth, there are worse options than embracing the sheer Weirdness of Charles III.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Kindness and niceness, though both excellent personal qualities, are not the same thing. The former is to be good to others; the latter is about being pleasant. They don’t even have to go together. Some say, for example, that New Yorkers are kind but not nice (“Your tire is flat, you moron—hand me your jack”), in contrast to Californians, who are nice but not kind (“Looks like you’ve got a flat tire there—have a good day!”).Despite the traits’ practical differences, social scientists generally don’t separate niceness and kindness, but lump them together as “prosocial behavior.” The category includes such actions as helping others without solicitation or reward, donating to a charity, and giving someone a compliment. Research shows that being prosocial clearly raises happiness, more so than treating yourself. The converse is true too: A recent review of the academic literature found that happier people act more prosocially. In short, for the sake of your own well-being, there are good reasons to try to be kind.[Read: The inequality of happiness]Unfortunately, we fail a lot. Usually, we behave poorly because others are not nice to us. For example, you might resolve to be better to your spouse, and start the day with the best of intentions. But at breakfast, your spouse offhandedly says something you interpret as criticism. You react unkindly, which provokes anger and starts an argument. The best way to avoid this negative cycle is to jump-start and reinforce the opposite kind of feedback loop: one in which kindness leads to happiness, and happiness to kindness.Most of us consider ourselves to be good to others. According to one British study, 98 percent of people think of themselves as nicer than most. If this were true (and mathematically possible), we would all constantly be helping our neighbors, getting happier, and wanting to help even more. This is the principle of the prosocial feedback loop.Unfortunately, the virtuous cycle is easily interrupted. Sometimes, it happens by accident: You get a text while shopping that your kid has failed math, then you’re impatient with the checkout clerk. But in many cases, bad actors are to blame—people who punish prosocial behavior and turn good feelings bad.To examine this phenomenon in a laboratory setting, in the 2000s, researchers conducted “public-goods experiments” in 16 communities worldwide. These are experiments in which people have to decide whether to contribute publicly and voluntarily to a pool of investments whose gains will be distributed to the entire group regardless of original offering. Participants then react to others’ contributions with either acceptance or punitive action. The researchers found that in communities without strong norms of civic cooperation, antisocial actors punished more generous contributors.[Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life]You know instinctively who these kindness–happiness interrupters are. In a 2014 paper titled “Trolls Just Want to Have Fun,” three psychologists studied the behavior of people who enjoy posting negative and abusive material on the internet to harass and upset others. The researchers found that trolling correlated positively with malign personality traits such as psychopathy and Machiavellianism (elements of the so-called dark triad). Additional research has shown that about 7 percent of the population can be classified as dark-triad personalities—in other words, the trolls are among us.Even if you don’t have such traits, when you’re punished for your kindness, you’re likely to reciprocate. Here’s what that suggests about real life: Imagine you start the day with every intention of behaving kindly, and the expectation that you will get happier as a result. To this end, you might post something upbeat on social media to brighten someone’s day. Routinely—given that social media is the ultimate low-cooperation community—you get a trollish response back, denouncing what you said as completely idiotic. Now unhappier, you respond with an insult of your own. And down you go.To make sure our good intentions last through the whole day, we need to keep the good feedback going, and avoid the interruptions. Here are three strategies for staying on the kind, happy path.1.  Start (And Restart) the Loop
Begin each day with the resolution that you will treat others in a kindly, pleasant manner. Follow this up with a tangible act of kindness as soon as you can. For example, on your morning commute, let someone into traffic, and smile at the person as you do so. You will probably feel happier.If someone interrupts this kind–happy loop, remember that your reaction can restart the cycle. For example, if, like me, you live in Boston, the person you let into traffic is as likely to give you the finger as they are to thank you. In such a situation, don’t do what comes naturally. Instead, say to yourself, “I will not let this person interrupt my happiness cycle.” If that feels absurd, laugh at yourself and do it anyway.2. Avoid Interruptions
Some disruptions to your virtuous cycle are inevitable. But you can game the system by steering clear of certain areas of life that tend to be especially dominated by people who enjoy causing interruptions. If your workplace is full of trolls, consider finding a new job. If you live in a city or neighborhood with low cooperation and a generally unfriendly spirit, consider moving. It probably goes without saying that you should examine your social-media use and ask whether it passes the cost-benefit test for your well-being. Maybe you could visit a platform with kinder norms than the one you are on. Or maybe it is time to say goodbye to that one altogether.3. Don’t Disrupt the Cycle Yourself
Unfortunately, even if you aren’t a troll, odds are you’ll occasionally interrupt the kind–happy loop for others. Sometimes, when you are having a bad day, someone else’s kindness might simply annoy you, and you might react badly.As you go about your day, remember that the virtuous cycle is fragile, and the feedback you create goes beyond a simple bad reaction. When you do slip, acknowledge it and say you are sorry. This small act of contrition might in itself restart the feedback loop, putting you—and the other person—on a good path toward greater happiness. For example, if you did misinterpret your spouse’s comment as criticism or snap at the grocery clerk, apologize quickly and go out of your way to do something nice.The feedback loop, of course, operates on an individual level. But it also has the potential to spread through networks of people and affect an entire culture. I believe that the United States is in a negative feedback loop of unhappiness and hostile behavior. Politics, for example, is dominated by hostility. People who don’t pay attention to politics can hardly escape the daily news, which has become a geyser of bad feelings. A 2022 article in the science journal PLOS One showed that over the past two decades, the language of headlines has hugely increased in anger, disgust, fear, and sadness.These constant disruptions to the national kind–happy cycle lower everyone’s happiness: Unhappier citizens support negative politicians and consume angry news media, which beget unhappier citizens. One might even speculate that our system could elevate trolls who feed on negativity to high office (or that it has already done so).[Arthur C. Brooks: Ben Franklin’s radical theory of happiness]The solution, if we are up to the task, is to interrupt this cultural doom loop with a policy agenda intended to work for the majority instead of against political enemies, media that lift people up, and leaders who are in the positive mainstream, not on the angry fringes. Such a future wouldn’t magically make our problems disappear. Legitimate disagreements will still divide us, and trolls will still try to do so with illegitimate ones. But the disagreements wouldn’t so commonly become insults and threats, and trolls would have less power.Then again, as you might decide to note on social media, this may all be completely idiotic. In that case, I hope you have a nice day.

As he kicks off his reelection campaign, President Biden is doubling down on his push for economic engagement with Beijing. Seeking such dialogue makes political sense, but it risks lifting U.S. pressure on China without achieving real gains in return. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Biden begins his run for president in a chaotic political environment. The Ukraine war slogs on, U.S. economic recovery is sitting on a knife’s edge and Americans are hurting from inflation. Regarding China, there is tension between Biden’s interest in maintaining a tough stance and his desire to slow the rapid descent of the relationship. Meanwhile, China courts European allies in an attempt to isolate Washington.

Officials tell me that Biden seeks another meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping to follow up on their confab last November in Bali, Indonesia. But the strategic-engagement track has been frozen ever since Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip was scuttled by the spy balloon incident in February. At this point, Xi won’t even accept a phone call from the American president. But his government has told the Biden administration that it wants to resume economic discussions. This has provided an opening for Biden’s economic officials to step forward.

At an April 6 meeting of Biden’s top national security officials, known as the principals committee, several argued in favor of economic engagement with Beijing. The following week, two senior Commerce Department officials visited Beijing and Shanghai, in part to feel out a possible trip by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo this year.

Then last week, in a speech on China at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen reiterated her desire to travel to Beijing “at the appropriate time.” She hopes to establish substantive dialogue to “lay the groundwork for responsibly managing our bilateral relationship,” she said.

But it would be a huge concession to the Chinese government — and would represent a de facto shift in U.S. strategy — if either Yellen or Raimondo were to go to Beijing before Blinken reschedules his trip. Yellen’s speech, while affirming national security concerns, contained a clear message for Xi: engage on economics and relations can improve.

“Negotiating the contours of engagement between great powers is difficult,” she said. “And the United States will never compromise on our security or principles. But we can find a way forward if China is also willing to play its part.”

Spokespeople from the White House, Treasury and Commerce departments told me that economic engagement with Beijing has always been a goal; there’s been no shift in strategy. But several other officials told me that public declarations of unity mask a growing tension inside the administration about the policy direction.

Chinese leaders clearly believe that dealing with Yellen rather than Blinken is better for them. Yellen has repeatedly argued for lowering tariffs on China. Treasury officials reportedly persuaded the White House to narrow restrictions on outbound investment to China. A long-delayed executive order to make this happen will probably not cover large areas of American economic vulnerability, including clean-energy technology and biotechnology.

Many national security officials see weaknesses in Biden’s strategy to apply economic pressure on China. For example, an earlier plan to investigate China’s abuse of government subsidies has been dropped. And six months after the administration announced new technology export restrictions on China, final rules to carry out those limits have yet to be released. If the administration has any serious plan to address China’s abuse of U.S. capital markets, it’s a closely held secret.

Raimondo, for her part, has taken a relatively tough stance on China. She has, for instance, championed legislation to reinvigorate American semiconductor manufacturing. But she also has political ambitions, and a trip to Beijing would bolster her foreign policy bona fides.

To be sure, raising economic pressure on China in the current environment would carry its own risks. In fact, some observers praise Biden’s “course correction,” while others point out that outreach is unlikely to produce results because the administration is not prepared to concede to Beijing’s demands to back off on tariffs, technology restrictions and bans on products made with forced labor.

Officials emphasize that the purpose of a Yellen or Raimondo trip would be to discuss macroeconomic issues rather than to negotiate any specific agreement. Expectations for substantive progress would be low. But if so, why go at all?

Beijing’s pattern has long been to lure American administrations into economic dialogues that go nowhere, but that end up delaying U.S. action to hold China accountable for its unfair trade practices. There’s no reason to fall for this ploy yet again.

Yes, the United States should seek engagement and competition with China simultaneously. But Beijing is trying to force Biden to prioritize the former over the latter. The problem with going along is that until the United States addresses China’s economic aggression, it can expect neither fair competition nor security.

Imagine going to work and having your employer monitor your brainwaves to see whether you’re mentally tired or fully engaged in filling out that spreadsheet on April sales.
Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke Law School and author of “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology,” says it’s already happening, and we all should be worried about it.
Farahany highlighted the promise and risks of neurotechnology in a conversation with Francis X. Shen, an associate professor in the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and the MGH Department of Psychiatry, and an affiliated professor at Harvard Law School. The Monday webinar was co-sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and the Dana Foundation.
Farahany said the practice of tracking workers’ brains, once exclusively the stuff of science fiction, follows the natural evolution of personal technology, which has normalized the use of wearable devices that chronicle heartbeats, footsteps, and body temperatures. Sensors capable of detecting and decoding brain activity already have been embedded into everyday devices such as earbuds, headphones, watches, and wearable tattoos.

Sensors capable of detecting and decoding brain activity are already embedded into everyday devices, which is why safeguards to protect people’s freedom of thought should be implemented now, says Nita Farahany, author of “The Battle for Your Brain.”

“Commodification of brain data has already begun,” she said. “Brain sensors are already being sold worldwide. It isn’t everybody who’s using them yet. When it becomes an everyday part of our everyday lives, that’s the moment at which you hope that the safeguards are already in place. That’s why I think now is the right moment to do so.”
Safeguards to protect people’s freedom of thought, privacy, and self-determination should be implemented now, said Farahany. Five thousand companies around the world are using SmartCap technologies to track workers’ fatigue levels, and many other companies are using other technologies to track focus, engagement and boredom in the workplace.
If protections are put in place, said Farahany, the story with neurotechnology could be different than the one Shoshana Zuboff warns of in her 2019 book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.” In it Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, examines the threat of the widescale corporate commodification of personal data in which predictions of our consumer activities are bought, sold, and used to modify behavior.
A renowned expert on the ethics of neuroscience, Farahany advocates for the need to include cognitive liberty as a universal human right. The term was coined by neuroethicist Wrye Sententia and legal theorist and lawyer Richard Glen Boire in response to the increasing ability of technology to monitor and manipulate cognitive function.
Cognitive liberty should be recognized as both a legal and a societal norm and should be reflected in international human rights law, Farahany said. She added that the mechanism to do it is by updating the definition of privacy to include mental privacy, and updating freedom of thought to include freedom from interception, manipulation, and punishment of our thoughts, as well as self-determination.
“Cognitive liberty is the right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences, as a right to both access and use technologies, but also a right to be free from interference with our mental privacy and freedom of thought,” said Farahany.
The impact of neurotechnology on human life could bring both benefits and ills. Corporations and governments are already hacking into people’s brains, but sensors could revolutionize health care by enabling early detection of presymptomatic cognitive decline, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia, and support clinical interventions. It could be transformational for people’s health and equal access to it should be encouraged, Farahany said.
Farahany finds hope in people’s growing concerns about the role of artificial intelligence in work and life in general, but she warns that action must be taken now.
She said there is a “very Orwellian vision of this future that’s ahead of us if we don’t make some radical changes now. I am optimistic in this moment that those kinds of radical changes are possible, and that we have the political will and the collective consciousness to do so. But if we don’t make those choices, it won’t be good.”

Ashwagandha, an herbal supplement commonly used in traditional Indian medicine, is the latest fad herb trending on social media. It is also an excelent example of everything that is wrong with the herbal supplement industry.

Herbs are Drugs

The biggest problem with the herbal supplement industry and the rhetoric used to promote it is that it ignores the primary reality of herbal products – herbs are drugs. That is it – they are nothing more or less than pharmacological agents. This means they can cause drug-drug interactions, and they can have all the usual side effects and risks that pharmaceutical can have. They also are not very good drugs, because they have multiple potentially active ingredients, we don’t always know what they are, and they vary considerably among various preparations and even crop to crop.

The fact that there are multiple active ingredients is often marketed as an advantage, with the notion that there is a positive synergistic effect among these ingredients. But why would that be? Plants evolve chemicals to be toxins, to keep animals from eating them. There are no evolutionary pressures to be useful as medicinals. Polypharmacy is also tricky business, and is far more likely to enhance toxicity than any beneficial effect. Often the alleged benefits of herbal polypharmacy are explicitly supernatural in explanation, having to do with chakras, life energy, and a spiritual origin of the plants themselves. Looked at scientifically, however, the messy and variable polypharmacy of herbs should be viewed with extreme caution.

The supplement industry is also famously poorly regulated. There are problems with substitution, contamination, and adulteration. This has significant risks to the consumer. But it also means that clinical trials performed with verified and measured extracts will not necessarily translate to any product on the shelf.

Herbal drugs also have the potential for drug toxicity, even without contamination. The safety of herbs is often falsely assumed, based on the appeal to nature fallacy, but also on the fact that we simply lack adequate evidence for safety and toxicity. Ashwagandha, for example, is associated with cases of liver injury, a common drug toxicity.

What we should do is isolate and purify specific active ingredients, study them in isolation, and if they have a medically safe and exploitable effect, they can be provided at a known dose with a known safety profile, pharmacokinetics, bioavailability, risks, and interactions. Of course then, they are a normal pharmaceutical, and not a magical herb that can be marketed as “natural”.

Hyping Preliminary Evidence

The herbal industry thrives on preliminary scientific results. We have spent years and thousands of articles explaining in careful detail why preliminary medical evidence is unreliable and a poor predictor of actual safety and efficacy. It is quite possible that any particular herbal product may have useful medical effects – again, they are drugs. There is a potential mechanism by which they may have an effect. Also, some effects are easy to observe, which is why most cultures have managed to find local plants that act as hallucinogens. But subtle subjective effects and long term risks and altered health outcomes require careful scientific study.

What we see with Ashwagandha is the same pattern. Studies go back decades, and yet we have not yet managed to definitely answer the question of safety and efficacy. Herbal products seem to be stuck in this preliminary phase of evidence, perhaps by design.

Recent systematic reviews show similar results:

The current systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis of RCTs revealed a beneficial effect in both stress and anxiety following Ashwagandha supplementation. However, further high-quality studies are needed to firmly establish the clinical efficacy of the plant.

The individual studies are mostly small studies, often with methodological issues, and often with subjective outcomes. Again, it’s quite possible there is one or more active ingredients in Ashwagandha that has anxiolytic properties. But as we know from studies looking at anti-anxiety medications, preliminary positive results are often false positives, and it takes large rigorous trials to determine if an effect is real. The studies I looked at generally don’t assess blinding, which is problematic with an herb which can have many active ingredients, some of which may have noticeable effects. Without using an active placebo to conceal who is getting the treatment, or assessing blinding, we have no way of knowing.

We are often therefore left with the “more studies are needed” conclusion, and that status never seems to change.

Extrapolating from Basic Science

This is the aspect of the herbal industry (and the CAM industry in general) that I find most frustrating. What happens is that the substance in question is given even to animals or to cells in a culture, and then stuff happens. Whatever happens can be interpreted as a potentially beneficial effect. Immune function is an almost ubiquitous target.

Immune activity, first of all, is highly reactive. It seems to change and react to almost any stimuli. Anything that increases any marker of immune activity can be spun as “boosting” the immune system. Anything that decreases any marker of immune activity can be spun as “anti-inflammatory”. Sometimes both of these things are claimed at the same time. Of course, we could just as easily present increasing immune activity as causing inflammation and decreasing immune activity as “suppressing” the immune system. These interpretations are just as valid, and in fact are always the case. Even beneficial anti-inflammatories suppress the immune system, and anything that “boosts” the immune system can have negative inflammatory effects.

This is because the immune system is a double-edged sword. It fights off invaders, infections, and cancers, but it causes inflammatory stress and damage. Just increasing or decreasing immune activity is not inherently beneficial or harmful, and can be either. It all depends on the details, the targeting and regulation of immune activity. Even experts in immunology, designing a treatment for an inflammatory disease, have made wrong predictions in the past about net effects (see alpha-interferon and MS).

The same is true of steroids. Reducing corticosteroid levels in the body may be a marker of reduced stress, but these steroids exist in the body for a reason. They are part of a delicately regulated system kept in careful homeostatic balance. Altering this system in any one direction is not inherently good or bad. The same is also true of oxidative stress and anti-oxidants. This is another good example of simplistic herbal thinking – oxygen is good, except when it’s bad.

Is Ashwagandha a useful herb or just another herbal snake oil? I don’t know, no one does, and I think that’s the point. As an herbal treatment Ashwagandha has some plausibility, because (say it with me) it’s a drug, or actually a combination of multiple drugs. I find the pre-clinical data completely unconvincing, for the reasons I stated above. Stuff happens, it could be useful, it could be harmful. It could also be inconsequential.

The clinical evidence is also unconvincing. Like most other herbs, Ashwagandha is living in the world of preliminary evidence, like being stuck in scientific purgatory. I believe that is a feature not a bug of the CAM /herbal world. There is just enough evidence to use for marketing and promotion, without ever having the kind of evidence that would confidently indicate whether or not the herb actually worked for a specific indication. When we do sometime get that level of evidence (from NIH studies, for example) the results are usually disappointing.

Reports of liver damage are also very concerning. This is not something that should be casually dismissed. Long term use is also not reassuring. Most over the counter use likely involves small doses or low bioavailability. Low doses are less likely to have toxicity, but also less likely to have a beneficial effect. When you ramp up the concentrations and dosage to get an effect, that is where the toxicity also comes in. What matters is – is there a safe dose range? We can only know this if we carefully measure dosage, which is impossible with messy and variable herbs.

Which brings me to the ultimate conclusion – the problem is inherent to the herbal supplement industry itself. Using herbs as drugs has inherent problems. There is simply no advantage to this approach (except for the companies selling dubious products with unsupported claims). Herbs should be treated as the drugs they are – purified, studied, and regulated. Otherwise the probability of harm vastly outweighs the probability of benefit for the health consuming public. Although the most likely outcome is simply wasting billions of dollars on useless products.

By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”[David A. Graham: Biden’s in]And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.“I think there’s no question that neither Trump nor Biden are where they want to be, but … if you project forward, it’s just easier to see a path for victory for Biden than for Trump or DeSantis,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few analysts in either party to question the projections of a sweeping red wave last November.Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.“The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost their reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.[Read: Biden’s blue-collar jobs bet]But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more. “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.” A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released today offered one concrete measure of that dynamic: In an echo of the 2022 pattern, three-fourths of the adults who said they mildly disapproved of Biden's performance in office nonetheless said they did not want a second term for Trump.Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump. Although Devine told me, “I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.[Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment]In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.

The photograph above is a screen shot from an old Star Trek episode titled “The Day of the Dove.” Pictured is a mysterious being of pure energy that has stolen aboard the Enterprise. Also on board are 38 Klingon prisoners whose ship was attacked and destroyed – and they think the Enterprise did it. Not long after the Klingons are taken into custody, an accident on the ship traps 400 crew members in the lower decks; soon thereafter, the Klingons get free, and it’s now a fight of exactly 38 on 38 for control of the Enterprise. But somehow, all the phasers have been miraculously transformed into swords, and in the ensuing battles it becomes clear that nobody can be killed: Even red shirts heal quickly from even the gravest wounds. Also, nobody can control the ship, and it’s now heading at high warp speed on a course out of the galaxy. As all these bizarre circumstances accumulate, both sides take events in stride, their brains so clouded by hatred of the other side and lust for blood they can’t see that there must be somebody else involved who’s pulling all the strings.
Eventually Captain Kirk and his crew figure out that’s there’s an intruder on the ship, and that this energy being seems to feed off violent, negative emotions. It has rigged everything – getting the Klingons on the ship, equalizing the Klingon and Federation sides, restricting them to primitive weapons, filling their heads with racist paranoia, rendering them immortal – all so it can get off on rage and murder and mayhem for all eternity on a doomed, speeding ghost ship. 
Kirk has to convince the Klingon commander of what’s going on so that they can team up against the intruder before it’s too late. They call a ceasefire and make a wonderfully hokey show of good spirits and bonhomie until the creature flees the ship and all is saved.
This screen shot has been the banner photo for my Twitter account since I finally ended up joining in the spring of 2017. I chose it because that episode seems to me to offer a near-perfect analogy for our current political predicament: two sides of equal size, their mutual hostility stoked to the point of spit-flecked rage, so consumed with anger and hatred and desire for revenge that they can’t see that they’re hurtling toward their doom.
When this analogy first occurred to me, there was a missing piece: Who, in our version of the story, plays the malevolent puppet master? Originally, I thought in abstract terms – it’s polarization, it’s partisan zealotry run amok after the end of the Cold War deprived us of an external enemy. 
That’s not wrong, it’s definitely part of the story. But I have a better, clearer answer now. There is a particular actor in our political drama, or rather a set of actors, that is constantly stirring up antipathy and mistrust for its own benefit. The monster that has divided us into Team Red and Team Blue and put us at each other’s throats is the news media.
The term “news media” is a capacious abstraction that contains multitudes — including many smart, dedicated men and women who take seriously the public trust they serve and who strive to report on and explain public affairs as fairly and thoroughly and accurately as possible. But when we look at the enterprise taken as a whole, the commendable efforts of the truth seekers and fact finders are overwhelmed by the flood of sensationalistic infotainment bullshit – a flood that panders to the public’s worst instincts and whips both sides into a mutually antagonistic frenzy, all to maximize media company revenues. 
Note that when I say “looking at the enterprise as a whole,” I mean looking beyond the sum of all individual actions and pieces of media content to the entire media environment – including the communications media being employed and the incentive structures governing their employment. The last thing I want to do is add to the right-wing demonization of the mainstream media, under cover of which a sustained attack on basic standards of evidence and reliability is being advanced. When I criticize “the media,” I’m criticizing the quality of the overall informational environment in which we learn about and discuss public affairs. As to the players, some are heroes and some are scoundrels and many are somewhere in between, but I’m not focused on the players; it’s the game I’ve come to hate.
Things weren’t always this bad. The way I see it, our current mess has resulted from the confluence of three interrelated developments, each of which can plausibly be seen as a species of progress: (1) the intensification of competition for the public’s attention; (2) the ongoing development of new information and communications technologies; and (3) the phase change from information scarcity to information abundance. It is an ongoing theme of this blog that what looks like progress in one dimension can bring with it a train of difficulties, and even outright regress, in other dimensions. And I believe that history’s capacity for irony is on grim display here.
It would be difficult to overstate how distasteful and contrary to my strongest intellectual impulses it is for me to have come to the views I now hold. I’m a strong partisan of technological progress, and yet it seems to me that every new communications technology after the printing press has ended up making us stupider – at least in our role as citizens. And I retain a strong libertarian presumption in favor of freedom, especially free expression, yet I see the broadening of the robust exercise of free expression leading us away from understanding and ever deeper into confusion and delusion.
Here’s a deeply unlibertarian conclusion that I now regretfully find inescapable: There is a fundamental misalignment between profit-seeking and democracy’s need for a well-informed public. That misalignment can be mitigated when profit-seeking is appropriately constrained, but in today’s competitive free-for-all for eyeballs, clicks, and ratings, the result is informational anarchy in which truth is hopelessly outmatched.
For much of the 20th century – that is, for the bulk of the mass media age until recently – competitive pressures in the news industry were unusually restrained. The newspaper industry settled into a pattern of local monopolies or duopolies (typically a morning and an afternoon paper) in all but the largest cities. In this commercially stable and relatively unchallenging environment, it was possible for journalism to develop a professional commitment to disinterested objectivity and defend it with a “Chinese wall” separating the business and news sides of the newspaper. Meanwhile, the new entrant of broadcast news – first on radio, then on TV – was a regulated oligopoly, with three networks required to provide a certain amount of public affairs programming and compelled by the fairness doctrine to air opposing views whenever matters of opinion were discussed. Here too, journalistic standards were shaped by canons of professionalism rather than catering to audience appetites.
That old 20th century media environment is gone with the wind. The internet wrecked the local newspaper industry, while cable and satellite TV ended the dominance of the broadcasting triumvirate. And with the loss of the old structure has come the collapse of the old journalistic standards.
Many disparate factors have combined to produce our toxic politics, but the role played by the newly competitive media landscape has been critical. In particular, it is no exaggeration to say that contemporary authoritarian populism, which now poses a serious threat to the core values, norms, and institutions of liberal democracy, was the creation of a small group of media entrepreneurs. The sources of populism were many and varied: the declining leverage and power of ordinary people, the rise of a mass professional and managerial elite, the professionalization of civic and political life, and the fading of widespread poverty and brutal working conditions have all been discussed in this series for their contributions to shifting the central fault line in politics from economics to culture. And obviously, politicians on the right have sought to exploit these sources for electoral advantage, from Nixon and his “Southern strategy” to Reagan and his cultural appeal to “Reagan Democrats” to Gingrich and his post-Cold-War vision of domestic politics as the new existential struggle. 
But the creation of a mass constituency for authoritarian populism – what we now call the “Republican base” – was ultimately the handiwork of a small group of media innovators. People like Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, and Andrew Breitbart saw an entrepreneurial opportunity in the East Coast media establishment’s combination of subtle but real liberal biases and serene confidence in its own objectivity. They saw a large potential audience for programming that derided and mocked liberal sanctimony and hypocrisy while catering to conservative sensibilities – and they struck it rich. By serving up red meat for the right-wing id nonstop for decades, they ended up changing the nature of American conservatism. Ugly reactionary sentiments were nothing new in America, but the conservative movement and Republican politicians had previously tried to sublimate those sentiments by channeling them toward supporting a coherent policy agenda. The right-wing media, by contrast, shamelessly pandered to those sentiments and wallowed in them – and over time, audiences thus humored came to expect nothing less.
Republican politicians originally saw the emergence of conservative media as a useful prop for their own plans and ambitions: Media rallied the troops and got them riled up, and politicians would then lead them to political and policy victory. Over time, though, their expectation that the base would dutifully follow their lead gave way to the realization that they could only keep their position as “leaders” by serving the base’s now-insatiable appetite for stroking. As David Frum observed back in 2010, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Then we discovered we work for Fox.”
Thus the evolution of Republican politicians: from occasional cynical manipulators of the underside of the log, to reluctant servants of its creepy-crawlies, to creatures of the underside itself – those for whom the right-wing caricature of the world is the only reality they know. Cue Donald Trump’s escalator ride and the subsequent downward spiral of American politics. 
Once Trump appeared on the scene, mainstream media outlets descended to the occasion. His bid for the nomination was greatly aided by extensive free media exposure: Trump’s endless provocations and scandals were ratings gold, and the allure of cashing in outweighed any scruples about the effects on democracy of elevating such a dangerous demagogue. As CBS Chairman Les Moonves confessed, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
And after Trump’s improbable 2016 election win, commercial incentives continued to lead the mainstream media astray. Trump’s repeated and vicious attacks on journalism laid a trap for mainstream outlets, daring them to fight back and reveal themselves as just another group of partisans. And into that trap they bounded enthusiastically; star reporters put themselves forward as self-appointed leaders of the opposition, and their employers enjoyed big surges in readership and viewership by catering to the progressive audience’s desire for an Anti-Fox News. Assuming this role while still claiming the mantle of old-style objective journalism couldn’t possibly work, and so it didn’t. The mainstream media’s authority as a reliable source of facts for both sides was wrecked: According to Gallup last October, 70 percent of Democrats continue to trust newspapers, radio, and TV to report the news accurately and fairly, but they are joined by only 27 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans. Only 7 percent of Americans of whatever partisan affiliation now report “a great deal of” trust in the news media, dwarfed by the 38 percent who say they have no trust at all. 
Such are the wages of unchecked competition in the news media. But as I mentioned above, there are other key developments in the evolution of our informational environment that have contributed to today’s “post-truth” epistemic anarchy. One of them is the ongoing progress of communications technologies – in particular, the advent of television and the internet. It’s hard to overstate the impact that these technologies have had on our lives – I mean, the average person now spends nearly half their waking hours staring at screens. So of course we should expect to see a major impact on our political lives. Most profound, I believe, is the effect on our attentional and cognitive culture – our ability to absorb and assimilate knowledge about public affairs and engage in reasoned, empirically grounded discussions of social problems. In short, while TV and the internet have vastly expanded the theoretical ability to learn about and make sense of our world, their practical effect has been to seriously degrade the public’s attention span and reasoning ability.
Not long ago I finally got around to reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, now nearly 40 years old, and it would be hard to improve on his analysis of the transformation from a culture based on the printed word to one based on the visual image. Now, Postman was in some respects an insufferable fuddy-duddy: His claim that TV is at its most dangerous when it’s trying to be educational and uplifting is totally wrongheaded in my view. But his insight, following Marshall McLuhan, into the powerful effects of communications media on the way we see the world and the way we think was spot-on. A written text challenges us – forces us to pay sustained attention, think logically, and follow complex chains of exposition and argument. TV, by contrast, lulls us – encourages us to be passive, intellectually lazy, content to be carried along by the dancing images into whatever emotional states they arouse. Postman’s verdict on the transition from written to visual culture was unsparing: “Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now – generally coherent, serious and rational; … under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.” 
Postman’s discussion of 19th century political oratory captures vividly what has been lost. In the days of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, throngs of ordinary people would listen attentively for hours as speakers delivered written addresses filled with ornate and circuitous sentences woven into complex patterns of argumentation (one early debate between Lincoln and Douglas went on for seven hours of speechifying, broken by an intermission so people could go home and have dinner). Today, on the other hand, we get the 30 second TV spot – which now seems positively ponderous compared to its internet successor, the meme.
Postman, of course, was writing a decade before the internet came on the scene. Whereas a book focuses and disciplines one’s attention, and the TV captures and anesthetizes it, staring at a computer or tablet or phone screen leaves our attention fractured, scattered, and fleeting. Even the most bookish among us – and I assume that readers of this blog are on the right tail of the bibliophile spectrum – can attest to the damage that web surfing has done to our attention spans.
My friend Adam Garfinkle wrote about the combined effect of the internet and TV in an essay a couple years back on the decline of “deep literacy,” or the ability to maintain sustained engagement with long and complex texts. It’s a difficult piece to summarize, but I’ll quote a few illustrative snippets (by the way, Adam is currently working on developing these ideas at book length – see here for a discussion of the project):
Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read — or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned — typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention … on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it….
If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists. Fully immerse yourself in digital “life,” and timelines will flatten into unconnected dots, rendering a person present-oriented and unable to either remember or plan well. That permanently “zoned out” person will become easy prey for the next demagogue with an attractive promise and a mesmerizing spectacle….
The deep-reading brain excels at making connections among analogical, inferential, and empathetic modes of reasoning, and knows how to associate them all with accumulated background knowledge. That constellation of sources and connections is what enables not just strategic thinking, but original thinking more broadly. So could it be that the failures of the American political class to fashion useful solutions to public- and foreign-policy challenges turn not just on polarization and hyper-partisanship, but also on the strong possibility that many of these non-deep readers are no longer able to think below the surface tension of a tweet?…
The capacity for abstract reasoning, too, is integral to liberal-democratic politics: The concepts of representation; the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order are all very abstract ideas. Is it possible that an emotionally more volatile post-deep-literate society may at a certain tipping point regress to accommodate, and even to prefer, less-refined and -earned forms of governance?
Let me offer a couple of thoughts to flesh out Adam’s analysis. Regarding the quality of governance in a post-literate culture, I recommend Philip Zelikow’s superb article “To Regain Policy Competence” on the sharp decline over the years in the quality of American policymaking. In discussing the golden age of American state capacity during World War II and the decades that followed, he stresses “the significance of an organizational culture that prizes written staff work of the quality that used to be routine but has now degraded into bureaucratic or opinionated dross.” The quality of policy outputs, in Zelikow’s view, is a function of the quality of policy analysis and deliberation; since the latter has fallen off sharply, it’s unsurprising that the former has followed suit.
As to the effect of post-literacy on the quality of our democracy, I can sum that up in two words: Donald Trump. A former star of “reality TV” who won the presidency with his Twitter account: He’s such a perfect embodiment of our degraded informational environment that, were he a fictional character, he would be dismissed as excessively contrived. It is simply inconceivable that a creature like Trump could have risen to the summit of American political life in an earlier media age.
The third factor shaping today’s epistemic environment is the advent of information abundance – thanks mostly to the internet and social media, but jump-started and still assisted by cable news. For those of you too young to remember life before the information deluge, it’s hard to imagine a world where you have a question about something and … you can’t just look it up on your phone. A world where you had to go hunting in the encyclopedia, or the almanac, or head down to the library for the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and old publications stored on microfiche. As a kid during moon missions, I’d wait expectantly for the top of the hour for the CBS radio newscasts – a 30 second update would keep me going for another 60 minutes. In college, a roommate and I stayed up all night long desperately trying to remember the name of the drummer for Kiss – I can still remember the unbridled joy when Peter Criss finally popped into my head.
Back then, governments and other large, established institutions enjoyed this huge advantage: They controlled access to important but scarce information. Those were the days of “the official story,” when governments could carefully manage information flows and keep pesky details out of public view. When most people had no idea that FDR was paralyzed from the waist down, or that JFK was anything but. Where millions could die in forced famines in Ukraine and China and the fact that it was happening could be successfully obscured.
Obviously there are tremendous upsides to the new information abundance – at the beginning, we thought it was all upside. Over the past decade or so, though, the dark side has come into view. We have discovered that information abundance isn’t just a problem for authoritarians; it’s a problem for authority, period, including democratic authority. 
Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public has become the standard reference here. In his telling, information abundance combined with the frictionless networking possibilities of social media allow various “publics” to coalesce almost instantaneously and make their presence felt – online or on the streets. Alas, political action by these instant pop-up publics is almost totally restricted to the performative: groups assembled so effortlessly, with none of the slow, laborious work of actually getting to know your fellow partisans and going to meetings and building organizations, lack the structure and coherence to develop a common agenda and push it towards enactment. In autocratic settings, purely performative public action can be consequential, even revolutionary: The public performance of dissent can shatter the government’s appearance of unquestioned control and with it the legitimacy of the regime (i.e., the willingness of the people with the guns to back it against the crowd). But in democracies, the viral anti-government protests that now occur from time to time (the gilet jaunes in France, the indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street in the U.S.) are generally just empty theatrics. Allergic to institutional authority and attracted to opportunities for self-aggrandizing performance, these movements are usually distinguished by the lack of any coherent agenda or demands. This rolling populist discontent can be effective at negating – that is, undermining those currently in power. But it has nothing positive to offer, no alternate direction to propose and pursue. 
In democracies, then, the revolt of the public leads nowhere. The social trust needed for effective governance leaches away in the acid bath of widespread frustration and discontent; the ensuing missteps of the hobbled government, invariably exposed and publicized, serve to deepen the frustration and discontent even further. Society looks increasingly ungovernable; democracy looks feeble and exhausted. Longing for a strong man who can cut the Gordian knot steadily waxes…
Our democratic constitution rests on an epistemic foundation: “the constitution of knowledge,” as my friend Jonathan Rauch put it in his brilliant book by that name. Democratic government relies on persuasion, which means its ability to function depends on the extent to which citizens and their leaders share a common set of facts relating to whatever matter is under consideration. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, “but not his own facts.” Some degree of consensus on the facts is necessary before a useful clash of opinions can occur. 
According to Jonathan, the constitution of knowledge consists of the values, principles, and institutions of the “reality-based community” – all those people in society whose job it is to add to society’s storehouse of knowledge. The news media is that part of the reality-based community most responsible for informing the public of the facts relevant to political debate. 
But the news media, taken as a whole, is not living up to that responsibility. Frenzied competition for increasingly scarce attention incentivizes telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to know, and those incentives are increasingly winning out over fidelity to the principles of objectivity and impartiality. 
Meanwhile, the technologies employed by the news media are not neutral conduits of information. On the contrary, the medium of communication has a big impact on what actually gets communicated. And the newest, most powerful communication technologies – TV and the internet, which now dominate the overall informational environment – tend to undermine the epistemic virtues of the viewing public, rendering us less capable of analytical rigor and intellectual seriousness. 
Finally, the power of the new communications technologies has delivered us to the strange new world of information abundance – a world with great advantages but also serious risks. As to the latter, we have discovered that the social and political trust that democratic governments require to function is difficult to maintain inside our new global Panopticon. 
At the end of that old Star Trek episode, Kirk and the Klingon commander confront the alien intruder and let it know they refuse to be its pawns. The Klingon gets the best line: “Only a fool fights in a burning house!” Good advice, to be sure, but it leads us to a question with no clear answer: How do we put out the fire?
The post Fighting in a burning house: The media environment vs. democracy appeared first on Niskanen Center.

This week in Say More, PS talks with Harold James , Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization .

Project Syndicate: You argue that the creation of a “general framework for rebuilding societies devastated by conflict,” resembling the post-World War II approach, could help to bring about a stable peace in Ukraine, not least by showing Russians that there “are much better alternatives to Putinism.” The implication is that winning ordinary Russians’ hearts and minds at least as important as applying external economic pressure, such as energy boycotts. In building a post-conflict framework capable of swaying Russians, where should the West start?

Harold James: In thinking about post-conflict stabilization, we must consider the region as a whole. Ukraine stands little chance of achieving economic (and democratic) development with an angry and vengeful next-door neighbor spreading misinformation and nurturing discontent and violence. In fact, as long as Putinism is viewed as a viable alternative to liberalism and democracy, it will be destabilizing for the entire world.

There is hope that Russians will come to see that Vladimir Putin’s tactics – from the use of conflict to stabilize domestic politics to the emphasis on hydrocarbon production and exports as the key to economic development – are woefully misguided. They will realize that his military adventures, from Georgia to Syria to Ukraine, are not only inhumane; they are costing Russia dearly. And they will conclude that the old authoritarian model needs to be replaced by a balanced approach to the economy and society.

We are a few weeks away from the anniversary of Victory Day, which marks the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany. The annual parade in Moscow boasts pictures of famous Soviet and Russian leaders and heroes standing atop the Kremlin, watching all the new military weapons roll by. For U.S. intelligence, it’s like Christmas Day, as analysts are gifted a treasure trove of new military hardware to parse and analyze. But for anyone old enough to remember World War II, it’s a recollection of despair. A Russian associate once told me that those who died early and quickly were the war’s only victors. He took pleasure in the fact that Russia, whose chances of survival were dismissed by much of the world, handed to the Germans everything they had dealt out and more.

My father, who was born in Hungary, fought in World War II in his own way. Hungary allied with Germany and sent troops to fight Russia. A forced laborer, my father was at Voronezh north of Stalingrad, where the Hungarians and other allies were deployed. From his point of view, the Russians and the Germans were the same in that they were to be evaded at all costs.

The war began with a treaty between Germany and Russia. Together they agreed to invade Poland, which they did comfortably, with Russia taking the eastern portion. For Germany, the treaty with Russia vastly increased the chances of defeating Poland. Germany was unsure about it; it would be their first major campaign, and Berlin didn’t know how well Poland or its own army, for that matter, would fight. A German attack from the west and a Russian attack from the east simplified the matter. In any case, Germany saw Poland as the first step in a far more ambitious campaign. It wanted Europe, and Europe included Russia. Berlin intended to turn on Russia in Poland and drive toward Moscow to subdue a country of vast resources. The ensuing war lasted until 1945. The truth is we will never know how many died, only that a generation’s representatives stood in front of the Kremlin when the first parade was held.

To be sure, Russians regard the war as a brutal obscenity, but they also regard it as sacred. The dead might not be saints, but, in Russians’ eyes, they are worthy of the name. The viciousness of the Stalin regime is no secret, yet many in Russia still regard the war as a moment of test and triumph, a time that proved its worth on a global stage. Russians regarded their country as a superpower for a generation – not just because it had nuclear weapons but because it had the Red Army, which defeated Hitler and conquered much of Europe. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians and half of all Germans bent their knees to Russia. It was not conquest by invasion, according to the Russians, but the consequence of self-defense.

Many Russians saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to become Western. To others, it was an embarrassment. Russia was not in their eyes the land of the heroes of World War II but a land of weakness. It had proved wanting. The land of Gen. Georgy Zhukov, the great commander of World War II, was now in the hands of shifty oligarchs.

The idea that the Russians had done this to themselves through corruption and weakness was as unbearable as such a fate might be to other countries. It was even worse since Russia had defeated Hitler and Napoleon. Russians saved Moscow because of the great distance they put between their capital and Europe. Now that distance was gone. They saw the United States as the dominant force in Ukraine, which now bordered Russia. For many Russians, it was nothing less than a national catastrophe.

There are those who blame their former ally and fellow superpower in the U.S. for the fall of the Soviet Union. To them, the idea that the heroes of World War II lost their country was less palatable than the idea that it had been torn down by America – an enemy they saw as worthy of the crime. The presence of the U.S. in Poland, a country they had once conquered and ruled, is for Russia not just a cruel trick of history but a carefully laid out American plot.

I think about cultural traditions like these as the Ukraine war drags on. I will not lay out the United States’ defense, but I invite you to consider the nightmare Russia went through from 1945 and how many of the places of battle and war are still spoken of with pride and bitterness by Russians today. I am an American, and I know where Fulda Gap was, but in facing a nation that is actually an enemy, it is useful to understand the nightmares and compare them to ours.

A compilation of Francis Fukuyama's nine-part series on valuing the deep state, originally published on his Frankly Fukuyama blog via American Purpose.Part I: Valuing the Deep StateWhy the hostility towards the "deep state"? In the first installment of his series, Francis Fukuyama pushes back on anti-bureaucracy sentiment and makes the case that a high-capacity, professional, and impersonal state is critical to the success of any society.Part II: The Origin of StatesTo understand the deep state, start by exploring human nature. Fukuyama traces how humans have organized themselves throughout civilization, and why the modern state is essential to economic growth and rule of law.Part III: A State of Courts and PartiesHostility to the state is one of the most enduring features of American political culture. In his third installment, Fukuyama explores the dysfunctions of the American public sector.Part IV: Why Delegation is NecessaryFrom Andrew Jackson's government to Vladimir Putin's approach to chain of command, Fukuyama examines the integral role of bureaucratic expertise in America.Part V: Controlling the Administrative StateMany believe that Americans are living under the tyranny of an out-of-control administrative state. The real problem is rather different, argues Francis Fukuyama.Part VI: Schedule FIn his sixth installment, Fukuyama argues that the wholesale replacement of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century.Part VII: Out-of-Control BureaucraciesWhile government bureaucracy isn't out of control across the board, charges of overreach are valid in some instances. Part seven in Fukuyama's series on bureaucratic autonomy.Part VIII: The Private Right of ActionDespite GOP claims of out-of-control bureaucracy in the U.S., the real culprit is private litigation, where citizens make use of the courts to shift regulatory goalposts.Part IX: Lessons from the Covid CrisisIn his final installment, Fukuyama examines the Covid pandemic and what it can teach us about balancing bureaucratic autonomy and political control.For more by Francis Fukuyama, visit his blog. 

When Mya Breitbart heard that something was killing off sea urchins en masse, she thought: Oh no, not again.The long-spined sea urchin—a fist-size ball of black defensive spines—is a crucial and common part of the Caribbean’s coral reefs. In 1983, a strange affliction all but wiped them out. The urchins began behaving aberrantly, moving into dangerous open water instead of sheltering in crevices. Their spines, which they normally point at threats, became unresponsive and eventually fell off, making them easy targets for fish. Even if they weren’t attacked, they died within days of their first symptoms, as if they’d been eaten from the inside out. By 1984, up to 98 percent of them were dead—with disastrous consequences. By eating algae, which compete with corals for space, sea urchins allow reefs to flourish and expand. When they died, the algae gained the upper hand, and the corals receded. The urchin population was so badly hit that, despite active restoration efforts, they recovered by only 12 percent in the intervening 40 years. And no one ever worked out what originally killed them.Then, in January 2022, urchins at St. Thomas island began dying again in the same gruesome way. By March, the affliction had spread to nine other islands. When reports reached Breitbart, who is a microbiologist at the University of South Florida, she feared that history would repeat itself. “It’s not that one dead sea urchin strikes fear in the heart of scientists, but corals are being assaulted and diseased on so many fronts that losing the urchins felt like another big blow to the reefs,” Breitbart told me. “I thought, We can’t let this one go.”Breitbart quickly assembled a team of 48 scientists from 12 countries, including Ian Hewson, who had studied a similar degenerative disease in starfish, and Christina Kellogg, an expert on corals and their microbes. “Everyone dropped everything” to work on the case, Breitbart said, because they knew how quickly corals can suffer when urchins disappear. But they also knew that such mysteries usually take years or decades to get solved—if they ever are. At first, it looked like this case would be similarly frustrating: When the team collected tissue samples from urchins across the Caribbean and did a thorough genetic analysis to search for disease-causing microbes, they couldn’t find any of the usual suspects. No viruses or bacteria were responsible for the urchins’ plight. The only organism whose genes were present in the sick urchins and not the healthy ones was something unexpected—a previously unknown species of ciliate.  Ciliates are microscopic, single-celled creatures that swim using a coat of beating hairs, or cilia—picture a furry, turbo-charged amoeba. They’re found almost anywhere there is water, including in the bodies of marine animals such as urchins. Ciliates are usually harmless, but there are a few documented cases of them acting as parasites, causing diseases in corals and even sharks. And one of those miscreant species is a close relative of the new one that Breitbart’s team found in the dying Caribbean urchins.Still, a ciliate seemed like such an unlikely mass murderer that Breitbart wasn’t fully convinced. Fortunately, while the geneticists were working, team members Yasu Kiryu and Thierry Work were independently examining the urchin tissues under microscopes. Both investigations culminated at a single meeting, and when Team Gene announced that they had found the telltale sequence of a ciliate, Team Microscope pulled up their slides to reveal clear images of ciliates infesting the spines and bodies of the urchins. Both groups had independently identified the same unexpected suspect—and to seal the case, they grew the new ciliate in the laboratory and showed that it could kill healthy urchins within a week.  That the researchers not only found the urchin killer, but did so in just three months, is an unprecedented feat. Stony corals in Florida and the Caribbean have been plagued by disease since 2014, and the perpetrator is still unknown. The same goes for sea stars in the Pacific Northwest, which have been hit by a degenerative illness for roughly the same amount of time. Breitbart credits her team, experienced members such as Hewson who had learned how to efficiently study these kinds of die-offs, and a “not insignificant amount of luck.” “I had a brand new graduate student working with me,” she said, “and I kept saying, ‘This isn’t the way it usually goes.’”Many questions still remain. If the same killer ciliate was responsible for the 1983 die-off, why did it stay dormant for almost 40 years before striking again? If it’s a newcomer, where did it come from, and how does it spread? And perhaps most important, what can be done to stop it? Kellogg has also been looking for possible treatments that would kill the ciliate but spare the urchins, and she has some promising candidates.Hewson thinks the team’s success bodes well: Every time they investigate a die-off of this kind, they get a little better at it—and they’ll need to be. Mass-mortality events among wildlife are becoming more common. Climate change is forcing animals to move to new ranges, allowing species that never previously coexisted to trade pathogens. Meanwhile, climatic upheavals and environmental degradation are also subjecting animals to more stress, weakening their immune system. “Things that maybe weren’t related to mass mortality in the past will start to cause new diseases,” Hewson said. The urchin die-off may not have started in exactly this way, but it’s still a harbinger of events to come. “I’d fully expect us to see more of this kind of thing in the future,” he said.But 40-plus scientists can’t drop everything to investigate every new epidemic; there simply isn’t enough funding, expertise, or person-power to go around. In this case, doing so was clearly worth it, because the long-spined sea urchin is a keystone species—ones that play a disproportionately influential role in holding their ecosystem together. In this age of epidemics, such creatures may get triaged while others are neglected. “It’s going to be a matter of prioritizing, which is very hard,” Breitbart said.

Timothy Garton Ash, a distinguished historian, is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Timothy Garton Ash discuss the hopes and delusions of the “post-Wall” era; a critical analysis of two of Europe’s most influential politicians, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel; and what a Europe guided by “European values” would look like.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You've been one of the most important chroniclers of Europe and European history for many years. But your latest book is in many ways your most personal. It is a memoiristic account of what Europe is and how Europe has developed.To ask the sort of broadest, most obvious question first—is there such a thing as Europe?Timothy Garton Ash: Most certainly—so much so that there are at least five different senses of what Europe is. The book is a kind of summation of the 50 years I've been writing about, studying, and traveling in Europe. The most important sense for me personally is a Europe of lived experience, which has this unique feature: that one can be as European at home as abroad—I'm in Paris, I'm in Berlin, I'm in Budapest, and in Warsaw. I'm clearly abroad, but I'm also very much at home. Hence the title. Americans only have the one homeland, as in “Homeland Security.” The Chinese only have the one homeland. But this for me is in a way the most attractive and unique quality of Europe. But then of course, you have the very ill-defined geographical area. You have a sense of a core Europe, which is very, very strongly present in European consciousness and history, somewhere around the Carolingian core, somewhere around the Holy Roman Empire. You have Europe as an idea, an ideal, a set of values. Bronisław Geremek, the great Polish dissident, subsequently Foreign Minister and historian, once said to me, “For me, Europe is a platonic essence.” I don't think there's any other continent of which that could be said. And finally, of course, you will have a complex set of institutions of which the European Union is clearly the most important but not the only one. And so the fascination of Europe is precisely in the multiple complex interactions, and often confusions and indeed contradictions between these five different dimensions.Mounk: One interesting critique that people have pushed on the European project in the last years was to say that Europe is in some senses provincial or perhaps, in the most extreme versions of that critique, even implicitly racist, colonialist, or white supremacist, since it privileges the sort of nations that are historically Western, white and so on, over other kinds of countries in the world that might share democratic values and some of those aspirations as well. How do we construct an understanding of what Europe is that emphasizes the universality of some of those values and their presence in other regions of the world, and which, of course, ensures that within Europe's borders itself, the continent remains open to people who may have ancestral roots outside of the continent?Garton Ash: I would separate the answer into two parts: internalist and externalist. I think on the internalist side, there's a perfectly good answer, which is, this is the continent that gave us the modern nation state, that gave us a global state system, that had centuries of conflict, and that is now trying to find a better way of being a very diverse people and peoples living together well in peace and freedom—which, after all, is core to the liberal project. It is, as it were, an international, transnational, supranational version of the liberal project. And absolutely essential to that is that people with a migration background, people in the second and third generation, should absolutely feel at home in Europe, and should not just have equal rights in theory, but in practice—have equal life chances. And so I do devote a good deal of space in the book to demonstrating how relatively badly many European countries are doing that—for example, France. But within our frontiers, I think there's an adequate way to answer that question, framed in terms of universalist, liberal enlightenment values. Much more difficult is the relationship with the outside world, where the EU falls into a very easy, almost neocolonial rhetoric in which it preaches these values as if Europe throughout its history has somehow been the incarnation of the values—whereas, for the rest of the world, Europe has been the source of colonialism and oppression and exploitation. And at the same time is actually creating a new Iron Curtain around the frontiers of the EU, or more accurately of the Schengen Area, so that it is night and day, if not life and death, which side of those enormous barriers you’re on. I went to see them in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the north coast of Africa. It looks exactly like the old Iron Curtain. Europe is a universalist project or it's nothing. That is a distinctive feature of our version of European values. Of course, there are other anti-liberal versions of European values. But we are very much not practicing what we preach in terms of universalism. And there's a very big question of what it would mean to take those universalist values more seriously in our external policy. Mounk: Well, what would it mean?Garton Ash: Frankly, I don't have a really good answer. But I have some parts of an answer. First of all, there have to be safe, legal paths for immigration. There has to be swift, humane treatment of illegal migrants and refugees. And that's clearly something where we're falling down very badly. For example, the EU has been complicit either in allowing people coming on small boats across the Mediterranean simply to drown, or in having them caught by the Libyan coast guard and sent back to detention camps which are utterly inhumane, like some of the worst camps in European history. So that's an immediate starting point. Secondly, I think at the very least we need to do much more on development and the fact that many European countries are not even meeting the 0.7% target. And that, of course, includes more significant market access. And then there's a difficult set of questions around how a liberal international polity relates to illiberal great powers, starting with Turkey, China, to a significant degree India, and of course Russia, and to what extent we have to, as it were, compromise on our values because of our interests, or make a triage of our values because that's the world we're in—an increasingly post-Western world where most of the other great powers don't share these values.Mounk: There's a kind of critique of what Europe has been for the last decades, which leads to some of the same themes, that is to say that when you look at Denmark, or Germany, or Austria, they're very appealing countries; which despite the presence of certain internal problems are probably among the most humane and affluent societies that have existed in the history of humanity—and that is certainly no mean feat. But in some ways they have existed by outsourcing some of the dirty work, particularly around migration. So we're perfectly humane and legalistic and treat asylum seekers, those who come to our borders, very well, in many respects. But all of that system can be kept up in part because not very pleasant figures like warlords in Libya or Recep Erdogan, a dictator in Turkey, are—because of deals we've cut with them—making sure that the number of people who actually reach our borders is relatively low. Extending the critique a little bit further, a kind of more moralistic and pacifist wing within European politics has looked down on the terrible Americans with their militaristic, swaggering cowboy attitude for having such a big army and going around playing world policeman. But of course, European (and Western European more specifically) security has for many decades been dependent on precisely that policeman, which even many European elites have not always been fully aware of when they make these critiques. What would it mean for Europe to be able to live up to its values without sort of outsourcing some of the dirty work in these various ways?Garton Ash: Interestingly, I think it connects back to the very lively debate about our colonial past. John Stuart Mill's day job was at the East India Company. There's a real sense in which that wonderful edifice of 19th century liberalism was built on the profits of empire in multiple ways. And there is a serious sense in which something of the same kind could be said, for example, about Germany today—Constanze Stelzenmüller’s famous line that the German model has been to export its energy needs to Russia, its export growth to China, and its security needs to the United States. Three ways dependency. And indeed, while the energy dependency has been rather dramatically reduced, the other two dependencies are still very much in place. Ukraine would no longer be an independent country today were it not for the United States and the speed and scale with which it came to Ukraine's aid. And German business has absolutely no intention of getting out of China anytime soon. Volkswagen has a factory in Xinjiang down the road as what can quite accurately be called concentration camps, where genocide is in place. It's a huge dilemma. And to the extent that there is a good answer, we have to diversify, we have to de-risk (in Ursula von der Leyen’s term), we have to make sure we're not so dependent on, for example, China, that, when push comes to shove over Taiwan, we simply can't afford to take what our values and our belief in liberal international order would suggest should be our position, and we have to build up our own defense.Mounk: This is what struck me as particularly interesting in the recent debate about Emmanuel Macron's remarks concerning Taiwan. The way that Macron expressed this point it seemed very much to be saying, “Alright, so we'll let people have spheres of influence, and we'll accommodate ourselves to whatever values they have, as long as we're able to play various great powers off each other and continue to do business.” What strikes me about this is not what some people seem to interpret Macron’s remarks as, which is a kind of grandiose, ambitious vision for a more powerful Europe, but actually the smallness of ambition; that the ambition is effectively to balance between China and the United States in the same way that Vietnam and Singapore feel that they need to balance between China and the United States. What would it look like for Europe to be able to be more autonomous, to really live up to its values and not be stuck balancing between different powers?Garton Ash: Just yesterday I read the original version of Macron’s interview in Les Echos, and I couldn't help think of Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Because as always, with Macron, there are so many different thoughts flying around, not all of which are entirely consistent. But nonetheless, when he talks of the danger of being vassals, when he says why we need to be a third pole (by the way, an idea that China would be absolutely delighted by: a Europe which is distinguishing itself from the United States, notably over Taiwan and wanting to be another pole in a multipolar world), he is essentially articulating a Euro-Gaullist vision, a vision of the strategic autonomy of Europe, which defines itself as distinct from, and indeed, in some cases in opposition to the United States, while at the same time saying—and he says this in the interview—the most important thing is European unity. And what he has once again demonstrated is that while proclaiming the importance of European unity, the Euro-Gaullist vision always achieved precisely the opposite. If you think about what happened over the Iraq War, where a very strong version of a Euro-Gaullist vision was articulated by Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas and others, it actually divided Europe down the middle. You know the polling my Oxford Project did with ECFR a few months ago; in the last year, European public opinion has actually become much more united. German public opinion and Polish public opinion are much closer even than their governments are. Why? Partly because they think it's a good cause to defend Ukraine. But also because this has been done not against the United States but in strategic partnership with the United States. My view remains absolutely that the only way to get a stronger Europe—which I very much believe in, European power which can defend our interests and values—is the Euro-Atlanticist version, one which sees us in a strategic partnership with the United States, where we do more for our defense, we become less dependent on countries like China, we de-risk, but understand that in the global context of a post-Western world, this is going to be in a strategic partnership with the United States and not some illusion of an autonomous European superpower.And by the way, as Europeans, we are of course very conscious of the fact that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States, and therefore that that challenge might be coming our way quite soon. And if he pulls the rug from Ukraine, then there is a very immediate challenge—what is Europe actually going to do to defend Ukrainian democracy and Ukrainian independence from Russian imperialism? The other quick point I do want to make is that it is a deeply shocking fact, which for someone like me whose whole life was devoted to the cause of the liberation and democratization of Central and Eastern Europe (a “Europe whole and free”) that we have in Hungary a full member state of the European Union that is no longer a democracy, that most political scientists would now agree is a competitive authoritarian system—and, by the way, a rather stable, consolidated, competitive authoritarian system. And so the other great challenge to the European Union is to make sure it defends its own values and interests internally as well as externally.Mounk: You invoked February 24th, 2022 as in some ways the end of Europe's post-war order. Of course, Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, gave a noted speech in the immediate aftermath saying that we had reached a Zeitenwende, a turning over of historical errors. To what extent do you think that the European public or, for that matter, European policy elites have actually become conscious of that turning over of errors and are acting on that insight? Garton Ash: Germany fell prey to the hopes and illusions of what I call the “post-Wall era” more than any other European country; the historiosophical mistake of believing the way history had gone through 1989, the 1990s and early 2000s was the way history was going to go; mistaking history with a small-h (as a product of conjuncture, chance, choice, individual leadership and will) for history with a capital-H (a Hegelian process of inevitable progress towards freedom) and also the illusion that essentially peace could be secured by diplomacy and economic interdependence and didn't need the military dimension of power. Yes, Germany has moved a long way. But it had, by far, the longest way to go.I think the short answer to your question is that that understanding is powerfully present in Eastern Europe. And only very weakly present, broadly speaking, the further west you go: in Spain or in Portugal, much less so. And perhaps in France, and, therefore, so often in modern European history, the key is Germany. If Germany itself became serious about everything that would be needed to make a reality of this Zeitenwende, from building up military power to reducing economic dependence on authoritarian regimes—of which by the way, German business is a signal case—to the agenda of the eastward enlargement of the European Union to include both the Western Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, and potentially Georgia (which in my view should be the strategic agenda for the next 10 to 15 years for the EU—that, as Scholz himself has has pointed out, necessarily requires a further deepening of the European Union) then I would think that we have a chance of answering your question with “yes.” Do I see that consciousness pervading the German political debate and the German political class at the moment? Alas, no.Mounk: Your book is a wonderful sweep of European history. It's very hard to summarize in a conversation. Beyond some of the obvious changes in Europe over the last 50 years—including the fact that 50 years ago, Europe was very much a divided continent, half of which was under the imperial dominance of the Soviet Union—what are some of the most surprising ways that Europe has changed?Garton Ash: I started traveling in the early 1970s and, at that time, more Europeans lived under dictatorships than lived in democracies. People today always forget that. We did the numbers: if you include the European republics of the Soviet Union, 389 million Europeans lived in dictatorships—only 289 million in democracies. The dictatorships, of course, included Spain, Portugal and Greece. That has obviously been a massive change for the better and, of course, a change that has not been experienced so positively by a large part of our own societies, as we know from any analysis of populism; but for many millions of Europeans, like the generation of Central and Eastern European students who've come to study with us at Oxford or in London or Paris or wherever, has meant a transformation of life chances. Beside prosperity, obviously, welfare provision has significantly improved. And I would emphasize two other things. There’s the dramatic transformation in the position of women in the last 50 years, one of the really positive changes that 1968 initiated in its feminist version, with a dramatic change in the position of women—which is incomparable. If someone had gone to sleep in 1963 and woke up today they wouldn't recognize that change. And last but not least, Europeans know each other in ways they have never done before in history. What we forget is that for most of European history, most Europeans never left their own region, let alone their own country. And it's only since the 1960s and ‘70s, with the growth of mass travel, that most Europeans have been to at least another European country and really got to know each other in quite different ways. That's the good news.Mounk: That’s a great list of the good news. But obviously, I now have to ask you about the bad news.Garton Ash: Apart from the fact that I have 50 years of notebooks, experiences, study reflections, the main impulse for writing this book was a political one, but a small-p, connected to your notion of the good fight, which in my case, is a good fight for Europe, Poland, free liberal Europe, since, I will say, 2008. And, by the way, one of the interesting things I found in working on the book is that for Europe, 9/11 is not such a big historical turning point. It is for the Middle East, it is for the United States. But for us, it's 2008, the combination of the great financial crisis and Putin's annexation of two great chunks of Georgia. From that point on, you have just one crisis after another, the financial crisis segues into the Great Recession, the Eurozone crisis, then, of course, you have the refugee crisis, you have Ukraine 2014 (the turning point at which the West failed to turn), Brexit, Trump, anti-liberal populism in countries like Hungary and Poland, but also Marine LePen, and Italy and others, all the way down to the largest war in Europe since 1945. So that's the bad news. And the political impulse in this book was, in effect, but very simply, to say to my fellow Europeans that we have achieved the best Europe we have ever had—or, if you want to paraphrase Churchill, the worst possible Europe apart from all the other Europes we've tried. But it is now really seriously under threat and we have to mobilize to defend it. And so for me, the question now is whether we are indeed going to see that kind of popular mobilization to defend and extend what we have and what we have achieved. And if the largest war in Europe since 1945 doesn't wake up and do that, what will?Mounk: In terms of political leadership, when we're thinking of the two most visible, transformative or the most powerful, perhaps most praised European leaders over the last few decades, I suppose you would have on one side Emmanuel Macron and on the other, of course, would be Angela Merkel. It seems to me that all of the things you've said so far in this conversation should lead one to a rather harsh judgment of Angela Merkel, when you look at the big challenges of the moment—climate change, the euro crisis, the refugee crisis (where I suppose she may score some points), the cost of which has probably been the permanent establishment of a far-right Populist Party in the German Bundestag and most of its state parliaments; her pretty soft stance on Vladimir Putin and the failure to react to the annexation of parts of Georgia and of parts of Ukraine; then, of course, her advocacy for a deep economic partnership with China; and finally, the fact that, under the leadership of Angela Merkel, the Fidesz party of Viktor Orbán continued to be a member of the same political faction in the European Parliament as the Christian Democrats from Germany in the EPP. You take all of that together and one has to come to at least a skeptical judgment of Macron, especially on foreign policy, and a decidedly negative judgment of Angela Merkel. Do you disagree with that assessment, and, if not, do you have any hope for more visionary political leaders who can direct us on a different path?Garton Ash: The paradox of Angela Merkel is that she personifies so many of the good qualities of post-war Europe; the East German who becomes the most powerful person in Europe—civil, civilian, modest, always concerned to find negotiated solutions, at least in theory, to uphold the rule of law and so on. I mean, and for most Germans, this was a very good period, and they felt themselves personified by this figure of Angela Merkel. So I to try and—Mounk: —Despite what may come across as a very harsh judgment, I don't say it with any rancor, because I do like and admire Angela Merkel for all of those same reasons.Garton Ash: But let me come to the second part of the paradox, which is that I agree with every point in your indictment. I think on almost all the big strategic calls, in my view, with the exception of the refugee crisis (she might have communicated better but I think the big decision was the right one) she was much too slow to react to the beginning of the Eurozone crisis, allowing a really dangerous narrative of the profligate south being parasitic on the virtuous hardworking north to become established; and there was the panicky getting out of civil nuclear power, which makes the energy transition so much more difficult. And then in 2014, not recognizing—and this is someone who speaks Russian and knows Russian history, who had a picture of Catherine the Great on her study wall—not recognizing that this is a Russian Empire striking back and actually becoming more energy-dependent on Russia. And there were also failures to modernize German society in many ways—for example, digitally. I think the verdict of history is going to be very critical indeed on Angela Merkel.Olaf Scholz still has a chance to find a better place in history. Kaja Kallas of Estonia, for example, has been a remarkable leader, has had a great impact. The Scandinavian leaders have been very impressive. There are very impressive figures in the European Parliament. But in the absolutely key positions, I don't see the people yet who have that agenda. Am I counting on it? I'm absolutely not counting on it. This is pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. This is what I want to persuade my fellow Europeans to do. But if you ask me just as an analyst, do I think it's gonna happen? I think it's more likely than not not to happen. But a student in Göttingen, in the west of Germany, said to me the other day, “You've talked about these key generations who made Europe—the ‘14ers, who were shaped by the First World War, the ‘39ers, ‘68ers, the ‘89ers—will there be a generation of ‘22ers?” That was her question. Will there be a generation for which the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been such a moment of challenge to everything we believe in that there is that response? Analytically, I'm skeptical. I think it's been an absolutely formative experience for Eastern Europeans, Poles, Slovaks, people in the Baltic states, maybe some in Scandinavia. But I don't think it has been for most Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians, French, or even Germans. I rather doubt it will have that impact, but one has to hope that it will.Mounk: I have always been very struck by Ivan Krastev’s characterization that what we thought of 1989 as this liberal democratic revolution in which people's aspiration for universal values, like individual freedom and collective self government, came to fruition against great odds because of the bravery of civil society actors and millions of people in the street. But in a way, what we're seeing today is not simply people who become traitors to their own youth—people like Orbán, who helped lead those movements, betraying them—but rather a kind of civil war between different strands of those movements; that we should reinterpret those movements as always having been, in one strand, for these liberal democratic values; in another, as a nationalist uprising against colonial oppression; and in a third, perhaps, as a conservative religious revolt against some of the secularist values of the communist regime.Do you agree with that characterization, and, if not, how can we make sense of these countries in Central Europe that fought so hard for freedom apparently being so close to having that freedom taken away or, perhaps, to some extent, giving it up?Garton Ash: It's clearly correct that both religion and nationalism played an important role, for example, in Poland, which was the icebreaker in the emancipation and eventual liberation of Central Europe in the 1980s. That was, to some extent, always there. But for me, I think the explanation is multifactorial. But a key factor is that what we call freedom, measured in some collective, simplistic, Freedom House aggregate ranking, didn't feel like freedom to many millions of people in these societies; that they felt themselves, in some ways, losers from the transition. They saw a growing not just economic inequality, but also what I call the inequality of attention and respect—in rural southeastern Poland, Eastern Poland and small towns and so on. To the old argument of “Is populism culture or economics?”—of course, it's both. And you had their combination, in addition to which you had the specific features of the transition, namely—Ernest Gellner talked about the ‘price of velvet’—the price of a negotiated transition, which is that the former elites, the nomenklatura of the communist systems, were able to exchange political power for economic power. Many of them were the great winners of the transition. It's not just that I'm sitting in my one bedroom, leaky flat in Gdansk as a worker who participated in the Solidarity Movement, and there are these super-rich people I see on television in Warsaw; it’s that those super-rich people are the former Communists and the former secret police. And that produces a very powerful cocktail which a populist party like Law and Justice can then sew together in a narrative of the “incomplete revolution.” And I don't think the heart of the problem is captured by the term “neoliberalism.” But I do think you get closer to it if you take the argument between a sort of minimalist classic version of negative liberty, à la Isaiah Berlin, which says “a beggar is free to dine at the Ritz,” and a more egalitarian liberalism à la Dworkin, or Dahrendorf, or the Amartya Sen/Martha Nussbaum “capabilities” approach which actually says you need much more than that; you need what Ralf Dahrendorf called a “common floor”—you need a level of housing, a level of education, a level of health care, and a level of job opportunities. And you need a level of public recognition—recognition and respect. And so I think if one takes it back to the question of liberalism, that is the conclusion to be drawn from the illiberal democracy (i.e. democracy in a state of decay) that we see in Poland. And it's fundamentally the same conclusion that is to be drawn from dangerous nationalist, antiliberal populism in Western Europe.Also read: “The Green Technology That Dare Not Speak Its Name” by Francisco Toro. Mounk: I have a last question for you. There is always a temptation to think about the future in terms of projecting recent trends forward, and yet we know that there are always surprises. If you allow me to put you in the uncomfortable position not of making a prediction but of saying “Here is a significant surprise, positive or negative, which may occur and which may look really obvious in 20 or 40 years, when we're looking back at that period, but which most of us are not expecting now,” where would you go casting for that surprise? What kind of surprise do you think that might be? Garton Ash: With the obvious caveat that we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone in a few years’ time, I'll give you two. The first is, at the moment, the Russian economy, the Putin system, is holding up, the Russians are holding a great deal of territory. Top of my mind at the moment is the question of whether the Ukrainian counter-offensive can actually succeed in getting down to the Sea of Azov and to threatening Crimea and, therefore, to putting real pressure on Russia. But there is always a possibility of a nonlinear development in a system like Putin's, in a dictatorship. It's absolutely solid until suddenly it crumbles. After all, that's what happened in 1917, there was a rout of the Russian armies, and then the Tsarist system collapsed. So that is one to watch. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but it's certainly possible. The second one is, we have had our crisis in the West. Perhaps we’re still having it. China has not yet had its crisis. But what I have observed in the last 15 years is a Chinese political system, which in the early 2000s seemed to be moving away from Leninism towards a much more pragmatic, evolutionary developmental strategy, and that has returned to full-scale Leninism. So we have Leninist capitalism. And one thing we do know from one hundred years of history is that Leninism is not good at coping with the tensions and aspirations of mature societies and, indeed, mature economies. Without saying anything super-optimistic about how China is actually in the end going to get back on a path to liberal democracy—I think that's behind us—I think the tensions between Leninism and capitalism are visibly building up inside the Chinese system. And so it may not be, at the end of the day, that we are doing so spectacularly well. But our principal competitor may start doing rather badly.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

For institutions grappling with legacies of slavery, it is important to include the voices of descendants to expand the historical narratives that have often excluded them and to start working toward reconciliation based on a more truthful account of slavery in the U.S.
That was the advice offered by panelists at an event Thursday hosted by The Harvard & Legacy of Slavery Memorialization Committee. The speakers were representatives of James Madison’s Montpelier, a museum of American history and a memorial to the fourth U.S. president and to the enslaved community.
Due to its pioneering work in including the voices of descendants in teaching about slavery at museums and historic sites, Montpelier is at the center of the national conversation about how institutions are wrestling with the lasting impact of slavery, said Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of American History and professor of African and African American studies, who moderated the event.
“Montpelier was the plantation of three generations of the family of James Madison, the father of the U.S. Constitution and the fourth U.S. president, and the 300 men, women, and children that his family enslaved for over 120 years,” said Elizabeth Chew, senior director of museum programs and chief curator at Montpelier, in explaining the rationale. “To tell the full story of that place, we can’t do it honestly without the voices of descendant communities. It’s the only way to tell the whole truth.”
The panel’s advice comes as Harvard has embarked on an effort to examine its own connections to slavery. Last April a report by the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery found the University had extensive financial ties to slavery during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The memorialization committee was formed to work on one of the report’s recommendations: to memorialize enslaved individuals whose labor was instrumental in the establishment and development of the University.
In 2018, Montpelier, in partnership with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, published a rubric for best practices for museums and historic sites to engage descendant communities in the interpretation of slavery to “create a more honest and equitable version of history for future generations.”
At Montpelier, the definition of who can qualify as a descendant is broad and includes individuals who have a known genealogical and historical connection to enslaved persons at the site or to those enslaved at nearby plantations and any descendant of the African diaspora, said Chew.
The role of such descendants in museums, historic sites, and institutions that were once places of enslavement can help address the legacies of slavery, but the risk is that their presence can be tokenized or used only to extract information.
Historically that has been the case, said Hannah Scruggs, a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who has worked with the Montpelier descendant community. And yet, increasingly, it’s the pressure of descendant communities that is forcing institutions to reckon with their histories of slavery, she said.
Institutions can play a role in the way the history of slavery is taught by including the voices of descendants, said the Rev. Lawrence E. Walker, president of the Montpelier Descendants Committee. The starting point is that institutions acknowledge that slavery played a central role in the history of the nation and lead efforts to humanize the experience of the enslaved.
“People didn’t like the story about Thomas Jefferson and the Hemingses,” said Walker. “Descendant communities have oral histories that for generations have been ignored and dismissed, but that doesn’t stop them from being true. Now we’re saying, ‘Allow descendants to come to the table’ to talk about a way forward that could be a light for the future.”
The moment is ripe for many institutions to recognize that their origin stories are closely tied to slavery, said James French, chair of the Montpelier Foundation.
“We’re trying to create a complete version of history,” said French. “The origin story of the country is very complicated. We’ve been taught a very simplistic version, and at Montpelier, we have the opportunity, with the Constitution exhibit on the second floor of the house, to really complicate that origin story in a way that can only be of benefit.”
Asked by Brown for advice on the steps toward memorializing enslaved individuals at Harvard, panelists recommended that the University freely, openly, and without reticence include the views of descendant communities.
“At Montpelier, there were times when there were concerns that my having a voice as a descendant was going to destroy Montpelier,” said Walker. “What benefit would that mean to my celebration of my ancestors to destroy something that they built? It makes no sense. Institutions have to be open to recognizing the power of adding voices. It’s not a zero-sum game.”

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat is a position that you hold––or a question that you have––about any issue related to gender identity, transgender rights, gender medicine, or any of the associated cultural debates? Also welcome: reflections on relevant personal experiences, especially from trans readers.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteI’ll go first. Trans people have rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equality under the law, same as anyone else, and ought to be treated with respect and dignity––and although those baseline convictions would preclude the passage of various laws that some anti-trans bigots favor, they don’t resolve most issues Americans are debating, a debate that is more extreme than it would be if liberal discourse norms prevailed.Even in the best circumstances, it would be challenging to join in as passionate partisans contest questions like “How ought we to understand sex, gender, and gender identity?”; “What, if anything, should the curricula at public schools say on these subjects?”; “What’s the best way to help a child who is experiencing gender dysphoria?”; “How should sports leagues be organized with respect to sex and gender?” (a subject that is now being taken up in Congress at the behest of Republicans).  But our circumstances are not the best.Observing the country’s major divides on gender and transgenderism, I see an issue that is as disorienting for participants and observers as any that our society confronts. Antagonists who inhabit different epistemic universes do battle each week on the internet, and merely understanding the most common perspectives can be burdensome. (If you set aside enough time to listen to this seven-episode podcast series from The Free Press and this nearly two-hour review of it on the ContraPoints YouTube channel, you’ll come away decently informed––not on all trans issues, but on the competing perspectives about how to understand the place of one author, J. K. Rowling, in the larger debate.)Many Americans who observe the overall tenor of these online conversations are reluctant or even terrified to participate––to ask honest questions, to hazard tentative opinions, to try out arguments––because culture warriors on all sides of the issue police ever-changing taboos. Some are difficult for even the very-online to understand. For example, if a person were to say, “Sex is determined by one’s biology, while gender is a social construct,” would that be consistent with conventional wisdom, or seen as fighting words, or offensive to the left or the right, or somehow, all of the above? To merely ask others to clarify their views is to risk being castigated for “just asking questions”––internet vernacular for accusing others of bad faith that manages to stigmatize curiosity-driven dialogue––if not to be labeled as transphobic from one faction and “a groomer” from another. Little wonder that many decline to talk about the subject at all.In theory, academic institutions are supposed to excel at truth-seeking by virtue of values and practices that prioritize it, even when the public square is full of venom or passionate intensity. But advocating for the widely held, if controversial, view that biological sex matters in gender-segregated sports recently got a woman mobbed on one California campus. To perform drag is to risk having one’s First Amendment rights violated, as happened at a Texas university last month.Alex Byrne, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, laments obstacles to publishing scholarship on gender, recounting his own experience probing and positing precise definitions of women; rather than seeing the importance of viewpoint diversity for truth-seeking, he argues, some in the field aggressively chill free inquiry. Underscoring his point about ascendant taboos, a Quillette article—an attempt to set forth competing gender paradigms—was published pseudonymously by the professor who authored it. And Jesse Singal––whose work I’ve found to be consistently humane, rigorous, and unjustly maligned, even after carefully reviewing the complaints of critics who lambast him and his journalism, and who may dismiss my viewpoint merely because of our divergent evaluations of his work––ably documents troubling flaws in youth gender-medicine research. It is hard to make sense of the world when our centers of sensemaking are compromised.Red-State Gender PoliticsIn a recent segment, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized recent legislative pushes this way:
In March of 2023, in the last few weeks, Kentucky, Idaho, Georgia, Utah, Tennessee, Wyoming, have all passed, signed and enacted laws that outlaw drag performance, that restrict bathroom access, that restrict youth participation in athletics for trans folks, trans health care.
I mean, this has been the number one priority, I think it’s fair to say. Republican state legislators around the country, keep in mind these Republican legislators, you know, their sessions started let’s say in January. So the first thing they did more or less in a lot of these states, we’re three months in, is go after trans youth sports participation; the bathrooms that trans folks can and can’t use; drag performance; and, most crucially, trans health care.
This is a four-alarm fire. It is a complete crisis. And I think it’s an outrage, and it’s despicable. And it’s an insult to the full dignity that equal citizens in our great nation are entitled to. Whatever their lives are; whatever their gender status is … it’s an offense against the basic pluralistic values that I hold dear, and I hope we all hold dear.
He spoke with Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice with ACLU's LGBT and HIV Project, who added:
I litigate cases on behalf of trans litigants. I lobby in-state legislatures over the anti-trans bills that we’re seeing around the country. And then I live as a trans person with communities of trans people. So on every level, I feel like I’m sort of taking in the realities of what’s happening to trans communities at this moment.
I would say that in the legislative context, we are at a catastrophic point in terms [of] what we’re seeing: the volume of bills attacking the community, the subject of the bills attacking the community, and the pace at which [they’re] moving through state legislatures and being enacted into law.
A New York Times article about the same legislative push characterized it as follows: “Defeated on same-sex marriage, the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors. The campaign that followed has stunned political leaders across the spectrum.” In National Review, Madeleine Kearns counters that progressives initiated this front in the culture war, while The Economist editorializes that “the evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.” Citing that article, Judson Berger argues in National Review that conservatives can justly claim to be protecting trans kids by restricting such care, even as many LGBTQ activists insist that this same course will lead to harms including trans suicides. Like I said: the debate unfolds among participants who inhabit different epistemic universes.Much Ado About Beer CansThen there’s a catastrophizing impulse among people who seem to have lost all sense of perspective. Did you hear Kid Rock was shooting his gun at Bud Light cans? At Vox, Emily Stewart explains how that improbably relates to the culture war over transgenderism:
In early April, Bud Light sent an influencer named Dylan Mulvaney a handful of beers. Mulvaney, in turn, posted a video of herself dressed like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, using said beers to celebrate both March Madness and her first year of womanhood. One of the cans featured her image. It was part of a paid sponsorship deal and promotion for some sort of sweepstakes challenge where people can win $15,000 from Bud Light by sending in videos of themselves carrying a lot of beers.
This made some people very mad, and not because Holly Golightly wasn’t really a beer gal (her preference was the White Angel, a boozy mix of vodka and gin, which, whew). Instead, they were upset because Mulvaney is transgender.
Trans issues are currently front and center in America’s culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is sweeping many corners of the right, targeting children, drag shows, driver’s licenses, and health care, among other areas. It’s showing up in conservative media and conservative legislation and even working itself into the mainstream.
Now, Bud Light has found itself in the eye of the anti-trans storm. Kid Rock is shooting cans of the beer, and Travis Tritt says he’s banning the brand from his tour. Many on the right are calling for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If this all sounds ludicrous, it’s because it kind of is.
One can find more sympathetic appraisals of the anti-Budweiser backlash. In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that when brands like Bud Light say they’re aiming to be more inclusive, as a marketing VP did in an interview that went viral during the backlash to the Mulvaney can, they aren’t using that word as most people understand it. In his telling, they’re actually using it in a way that includes only groups that are coded as culturally progressive, never groups that are coded as culturally conservative.He writes:
I am not a habitual drinker of Bud Light, but, from my limited experience with the product, I can tell you that “uninclusive” is among the last terms that I would have used to describe it. Bud Light is the Amazon Basics of bad beer. I have drunk it on hunting trips with friends who have Second Amendment tattoos, and on the beach with friends who are gay. I’ve drunk it with Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Hindus. I’ve drunk it at football games, at baseball games, at NASCAR, and at concerts. I’ve drunk it with black friends, with Hispanic friends, and with white friends of both sexes. When Heinerscheid says that she wants Bud Light to be more “inclusive,” I must ask what that actually means? Putting the pope on Bud Light cans would be “inclusive.” Putting homeschooling parents on the cans would be “inclusive.” Putting feminists who find Dylan Mulvaney’s act infuriating on the cans would be “inclusive.” Hell, putting Old Order Amish people on the cans would be “inclusive.”
To me, regardless of the merits, getting excited or upset by the Bud Light marketing department is a fool’s errand, but in 2023 public discourse, there’s even a backlash to the backlash.In The Advocate, John Casey writes:
Rather than come to the defense of a transgender woman, rather than defend a noble campaign that sought to reflect acceptance, and rather than let the campaign with Mulvaney speak for itself, Budweiser poured alcohol all over an extremist’s fire, and that will continue to singe our community.
Maybe the worst thing Budweiser did was leave Mulvaney all alone, twisting in the wind, abandoning any kind of defense of her. That is an utterly repugnant reflection of the brand.
Anheuser-Busch, weakly, did not stand up against hate. And while boycotts don’t work, they do make a statement. It’s not Kid Rock and Ted Nugent that should be boycotting Budweiser—it should be us.
Unless Bud has changed its formula, even pouring it over a fire would be of no great consequence.  PlasticsIn The Nation, Nanjala Nyabola inveighs against the material and the economic system that produced it:
Plastics are some of the most useful materials ever invented, and they are killing the planet.
Plastic is everywhere, and it perfectly encapsulates the notion that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Whether you are reading this on your phone or on your computer, you are handling the material. If you brushed your teeth this morning, odds are both your toothbrush and toothpaste contained plastic. Almost all artificial fabrics are made from plastic or its derivatives, including those presented as ethical alternatives like many kinds of vegan leather. If you are a person who menstruates, it is probably in the materials that you are using to manage that. That durability and malleability at relatively low prices is precisely what makes it dangerous to the natural environment. We consume it unthinkingly and in absurd volumes because the cost of accessing it is so low—yet it can last in the environment for hundreds of years.
The problem of plastic encapsulates everything that is wrong with whatever international order exists today. We miscalculate its balance sheet of utility because we don’t account properly for harms that cannot be easily measured in money. Decisions that look cheap on the surface look a lot different if we used a longer time horizon or stopped assuming that the planet has an infinite capacity to absorb human excess. Regions that are the most responsible for causing the problem are working hard to reallocate its consequences to other parts of the world. There would perhaps be greater cooperation if there weren’t deliberate choices taken to keep people oblivious to the scale of the problem. Companies happily brand materials like single-use water bottles as recyclable, knowing that even the most efficient recycling system cannot keep up with the rate at which they are consumed.
Although I share the author’s concerns about plastic in particular, and our general ability to consider all the negative externalities of our actions, I do not believe those problems are unique to capitalism––a point most persuasively illustrated by reading up on similar problems in noncapitalist systems.Art, Morality, and BeautyAt The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz argues that it’s okay to like complicated art by problematic artists:
We’re at the point when we could use a little more of the art-for-art’s-sake spirit; could let ourselves luxuriate in sensuality, beauty, and form; should offer more resistance to the pressure to find and deliver socially useful messages. I look back with a certain chagrin at how, as a young critic, I delighted in bucking my high-minded education by hunting down traces of a writer’s mixed motives, bad faith, petty and not so petty obfuscations in his writing. I took hubristic pride in my gotcha criticism and my eagle eye. But what used to feel subversive now feels like an imperative: Either scan the text for signs of immorality or be suspected of reactionary tendencies. You were hoping for aesthetic transport? Back to the consciousness-raising session with you!
She concludes with a warning from Oscar Wilde about the consequences of a world where morality somehow triumphs over art: “Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land.”Provocation of the WeekGerard Baker, editor at large of The Wall Street Journal, praises anti-discrimination while denouncing a new aristocracy of elite progressive manners that he perceives as newly ascendant:
The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality. But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.
Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”
Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront. As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.
But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.
If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.
That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.By submitting an email, you agree to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

By most measures, Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter has been an abject failure. The purchase has coincided with a loss in his net worth and saddled the company with debt. His obsessions with “the woke mind virus” and his peculiar decision to act as a personal customer-service concierge for right-wing shitposters like @catturd2 have alienated the billionaire from allies and, most important, advertisers; the company’s net ad revenue is projected to drop 27.9 percent by the end of 2023, according to Insider Intelligence. He is so clueless and incurious as to the desires of his user base that his plans to boost Twitter’s bottom line involved a verification and subscription product that users aren’t just uninterested in, but find legitimately embarrassing.But Musk, who was once thought of by many as a visionary, has, in fact, accomplished something meaningful with Twitter. He’s stripped the platform down to its skeleton, giving everyone the opportunity to recognize how fundamentally embarrassing it’s always been. To observe him at work—which is to say, to watch him tweet recycled Reddit memes, feel out ill-considered company policies, and pander to far-right goobers with culture-war drivel—is to witness the platform working at its purest, basest level. Forget offensive; his behavior is cringe. It shows us what has always existed deep down in Twitter’s molten core, an elemental feeling shared by the platform’s most ardent users and that powers much of social media: shame.“Twitter is the definition of a shame network,” Cathy O’Neil, the author of the book The Shame Machine, told me. Our feeds are often powered by people posting in pursuit of likes and retweets and dogpiling on their perceived enemies for clout. At its best, shame can be a healthy, cohering influence that enforces norms and provides accountability on social media. A broadly negative response to a tweet from your peers can signal that you’ve stepped out of line, giving you a chance to apologize. But platforms such as Twitter supercharge our instincts to shame. Joining a Twitter pile-on is usually thrilling, cathartic, and—most important for the platform’s algorithms—engaging.Like all social-media platforms, Twitter’s architecture is geared toward promoting engagement, which means that Twitter has optimized itself to turn shaming into a frictionless experience. Design decisions such as the quote-tweet button are potent tools for taking an idea or opinion meant for one group and directing it toward another, with commentary appended. Over time, this shaming has become foundational to Twitter’s user culture, so much so that the platform developed its own vocabulary of shaming, such as subtweeting and ratioing. “We are rooted on by our buddies to insult people outside our in-group,” O’Neil said. “It makes us feel insulated and empowered to sling shit at others and feel righteous in the process.” Shame is the grist for the mill—we direct it toward others, and we experience others directing it at us.Musk has added a new dimension to these old problems. It feels shameful to exist on a platform that actively courts trolls and rewards viral clickbait. Musk’s Twitter amplifies such ugly stuff, like the legions of previously banned far-right trolls Musk has reinstated and the briefly verified white-nationalist accounts. A great deal of what goes viral on Musk’s Twitter is what finds its way into the For You feed that the company recently rolled out, which appears to prioritize and amplify low-quality, evergreen clickbait linked to whatever is popular on Twitter’s Topics pages. The result is endless amounts of LinkedIn-style “broetry,” AI, crypto FOMO, and entrepreneur hustle porn—plus a whole lot of recycled memes.There is also a whole lot of Musk himself. According to reports, Twitter shifted its product to artificially boost the visibility of Musk’s tweets. “Elon is the perfect embodiment of what I mean when I say that algorithms are opinions embedded in code,” O’Neil said. “This technology is never neutral—people in power help decide what they privilege. Algorithms are policy, and Twitter’s policy is to make Elon Musk the focus of everything.”Buying a global communications platform for $44 billion to boost your own posts and make yourself the main character is, even by the standards of mercurial billionaires, almost cartoonishly insecure behavior. Although Musk appears to be shameless, the rest of us live with the acute mortification of participating on a platform that now goes out of its way to amplify hateful rhetoric, anti-“woke” culture warriors, and scammy hustlers. To stay on Twitter is, although not a tacit approval of Musk’s behavior, certainly helpful to its owner’s cause. And then there’s the humiliation that comes with interrogating why you’ve chosen to stay on the site despite it all. Maybe this is the result of feeling powerless to quit. But there is also the more subtle, still-potent recognition that comes from watching Musk’s daily cringe parade and seeing a twinkle of one’s self in his posts. Speaking from personal experience, this is the shame of scrolling and mocking the billionaire’s posts, while feeling a deep uneasiness that you, too, are stuck here. As embarrassing as Musk’s behavior may be, you are ultimately trapped on the hellsite, responding to the same algorithmic incentives, unable to log off.[Read: Elon Musk’s disastrous week]Those still wandering the parking lot of the abandoned strip mall that is Musk’s Twitter are left with a nagging question: Where do I draw the line? Before Musk took over, I found it easier to quell my shame and justify my time on the platform by reminding myself of its utility—as a source of news and entertainment and as a personal publicity device for my career.Under Musk’s leadership, much of that utility has vanished. As numerous close observers have noted, Twitter feels both technically and spiritually broken. The platform no longer feels crucial during big breaking news events, such as Donald Trump’s indictment, for one. Musk’s product road map (stripping trusted accounts of verification, as he finally did yesterday; restricting access to the platform’s data to accounts that provide updates during emergencies; and labeling certain news outlets as state media) seems designed specifically to destroy what made Twitter a destination for real-time information. In doing so, he forces us to see the all-caps screeching of Twitter’s collective id: It’s just about all that remains.Take a spin through Twitter’s trending topics on a given day during Musk’s tenure and you’re likely to get a sense of this contextless chaos. Here’s one such example:
I see Twitter's trending topics covering all the bases once again.....great product pic.twitter.com/o8bazHx7Pa
— David Gilbert (@daithaigilbert) February 22, 2023Musk’s personal tweets are an intensely embarrassing embodiment of the behavior that the platform now privileges. Best of Dying Twitter chronicles the billionaire’s weird penis jokes and obsession with the numbers 69 (a sex joke!) and 420 (a weed joke!). It has served as a reminder that those of us left have made a conscious choice to reside on Musk’s global whoopee cushion.Even Twitter’s most famous trolls and shitposters seem weary of having to live on Musk’s playground. Last week, Dril, one of the internet’s most famous anonymous posters, revealed his identity in a profile for The Ringer. Dril, whose real name is Paul Dochney, called much of the site “disgusting.” Most notable, though, is that despite his genuine popularity and influence on Twitter’s culture, Dochney suggested that parlaying his talents into legible success off the platform has been difficult. Dochney’s story gets at a layer of shame that’s hard to pin down: After all the agita, the energy, and the unbelievable amount of time spent toiling in the feed, what do any of us really have to show for it?I’m not sure that Twitter will die in any dramatic way under Musk. But the site’s continued existence is beside the point: He has sucked the life out of a vibrant part of the internet. One observer saw Dochney’s decision to reveal his identity as “one of the most unambiguous signs that twitter is doomed.” And yet, Twitter will likely continue on in some zombie capacity as a place for hustlers to crow about ways to supercharge your business with AI.People will keep posting, no matter how shameful it feels. But we can no longer hide from the system we’ve chosen to participate in, and something about that is liberating. Musk’s awful, tweets make the innate shame of playing an algorithmic game with no end and no winner impossible to ignore in ourselves.

During Gavin Newsom’s campaign to win another term as governor of California last year, I complained that rather than focusing on how to solve the Golden State’s many significant problems, the Democratic incumbent devoted much of his time and attention to heaping scorn on far-flung Republican counterparts, such as Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. He went so far as to rent billboards and buy televised political advertisements in other states.Voters rewarded Newsom: He won just over 2 million more votes than his GOP opponent, the state legislator Brian Dahle, who had no hope of victory given his lack of name recognition and an electorate where there are twice as many Democrats as Republicans. And now Newsom is governing like he campaigned. Though he remains the most powerful elected official in America’s most populous state, he often acts as if he’s an influencer with no better tool for effecting change than callouts.He recently raised $10 million to spend not on the poor, or the sick, or the young and full of potential, but rather on the governing elite’s answer to slacktivism: a political action committee.[Conor Friedersdorf: The California dream is dying]On March 30, Newsom announced the new PAC, the Campaign for Democracy, in a video posted to his Twitter feed, where he argues that America’s ills are downstream of officials in states that the GOP controls. “The problem in our country right now: authoritarian leaders who are so hell-bent on gaining power and keeping it by whatever means necessary that they’re directly attacking our freedoms in state after state,” he declared. “That’s why I’m launching the Campaign for Democracy. We’re going on the road to take the fight to states where freedom is most under attack.”Taking “the fight to” authoritarians turns out to mean staging PR events in their jurisdictions. So far this month, Newsom has traveled to Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida, criticizing Republicans at every stop. In many instances, his criticisms align with positions I hold or have taken, and I could fill his calendar with visits to other red states that have policies I regard as wrongheaded. But why? Newsom has no political power in those states. He is so sufficiently unpopular among their voters that his presence there is as likely to help as hurt GOP governors. And, most important, his travels are a dereliction of the job he sought and won, because governors have a responsibility to focus on the problems that afflict their own state.That used to go without saying. Now, however, leaders of organizations as varied as state governments, corporations, universities, museums, and theater companies have convinced themselves that good leadership entails issuing virtuous pronouncements on matters outside their realm of authority, often to denounce ills that have little to do with their job and its actual challenges.  In deep-blue California, zero Republicans hold statewide office, and Democrats enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature and control over almost all of the major cities. Right-wing authoritarians hold almost no power, nor would their defeat in the Deep South solve any of the state’s problems.And what problems!As Newsom produces slick videos on location, the Golden State finds itself in a perilous position. The mixed blessing of winter storms that ended drought conditions in much of the state brought so much snow that this spring’s melt ensures flooding (while billions of dollars are needed for repairs and damages already done) and threatens catastrophe––an ill-timed storm or heat wave could melt the snow so fast, water could overwhelm parts of the Central Valley, threatening poor communities of vulnerable farmworkers and millions of dollars of crops. A governor working full-time on that matter alone couldn’t adequately prepare for what may come.The state’s fiscal outlook is bleak, having quickly swung from a $100 billion surplus to a $22.5 billion deficit. In the longer term, the state is likely to get less much-needed water from the Colorado River.As if that recent bad news isn’t enough, all of California’s long-standing problems are still around: housing, homelessness, struggling public schools. To be fair, they are thorny problems, and Newsom hasn’t been totally derelict in trying to solve them. In fact, he sometimes even improves on his predecessors with the approach that he supports.[Read: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]Regardless, however, he hasn’t made nearly enough actual progress on any of them to take his eye off the ball. On housing, for example, the watchdog CalMatters has observed, “It’s difficult for housing advocates to criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom because he’s done more to boost production than any other governor in recent memory—but that’s mostly because the bar is so low.” Under Newsom, the acute statewide housing crisis continues. Homelessness continues to grow, despite years of costly interventions by elected officials. The dysfunctional bullet-train project staggers on. Confidence in public schools is falling statewide, with especially bleak numbers in Los Angeles, where “about 1 in 3 voters give D or F marks to public schools,” the Los Angeles Times reports. The Metro system in Los Angeles is shedding riders amid rampant drug use, soaring robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults. Oakland has recorded more than 100 homicides for three years running. And as I detailed at length in 2021, California still has a miserly approach to opportunity.These severe problems demand the governor’s full focus and a strategy that unfolds with the understanding that the forces stymieing positive change tend to be left-aligned in California, not right-aligned, for the simple reason that Democrats here wield so much more power than Republicans. Governing well means working against and upsetting at least some factions of Democrats.The claim that “the problem in our country” is authoritarian Republicans in red states may be a good line if you’re a California Democrat seeking applause from a friendly audience or donations from your political base. But it elides all of the problems that afflict deep-blue jurisdictions.California urgently needs a governor who focuses on its many problems, not the problems of the Deep South. And nothing any California governor says will tilt the country toward embracing their model of governance more than demonstrating that, rather than rising rents, rising homelessness, rising crime and disorder, and failing schools, their approach improves a state. If Newsom can’t improve on his current performance, he doesn’t deserve a future in politics.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.The true test of a civilization may be the answer to a basic question: Can it keep its children alive?For most of recorded history, the answer everywhere was plainly no. Roughly half of all people—tens of billions of us—died before finishing puberty until about the 1700s, when breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene led to tremendous advances in longevity. In Central Europe, for example, the mortality rate for children fell from roughly 50 percent in 1750 to 0.3 percent in 2020. You will not find more unambiguous evidence of human progress.How’s the U.S. doing on the civilization test? When graded on a curve against its peer nations, it is failing. The U.S. mortality rate is much higher, at almost every age, than that of most of Europe, Japan, and Australia. That is, compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.Last year, I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.This extra cash ought to buy us more years of living. For most countries, higher incomes translate automatically into longer lives. But not for today’s Americans. A new analysis by John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist at the Financial Times, shows that the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.Imagine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.According to data collected by Burn-Murdoch, a typical American baby is about 1.8 times more likely to die in her first year than the average infant from a group of similarly rich countries: Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, the U.K., Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Let’s think of this 1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations. In direct country-to-country comparisons, the ratio is even higher. The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia. Only in our late 80s and 90s are Americans statistically on par, or even slightly better off, than residents of other rich nations.“One in 25 American five-year-olds today will not make it to their 40th birthday,” Burn-Murdoch observed. On average, a representative U.S. kindergarten class will lose one member before their fifth decade of life.What is going on here? The first logical suspect might be guns. According to a recent Pew analysis of CDC data, gun deaths among U.S. children and teens have doubled in the past 10 years, reaching the highest level of gun violence against children recorded this century. In March, a 20-something shooter fired 152 rounds at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing three children and three adults, before being killed by police. In April, a 20-something shooter killed six people at a Louisville, Kentucky, bank, before he, too, was killed by police.People everywhere suffer from mental-health problems, rage, and fear. But Americans have more guns to channel those all-too-human emotions into a bullet fired at another person. One could tell a similar story about drug overdoses and car deaths. In all of these cases, America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita. Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents. Even on a per-miles-driven basis, our death rate is extraordinary.When I reached out to Burn-Murdoch, I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio. However, on my podcast, Plain English, he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points. First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged deaths. Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan. Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income. As the Northwestern University economist Hannes Schwandt found, Black teens in the poorest U.S. areas are roughly twice as likely to die before they turn 20 as teenagers in the richest counties. This outcome is logically downstream of America’s paucity of universal care and our shortage of physicians, especially in low-income areas.There is no single meta-explanation for America’s death ratio that’s capacious enough to account for our higher rates of death from guns, drugs, cars, infant mortality, diet, exercise, and unequal access to care. I’ll try to offer one anyway—only to immediately contradict it.Let’s start with the idea, however simplistic, that voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice. Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids. What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation. In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments. This has created what the economist Alex Tabarrok calls an “invisible graveyard” of people killed by regulators preventing access to therapies that would have saved their life. Consider, in the same vein, the problem of diet and exercise. Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences. That’s not straightforward, and it’s damn hard to solve. But mortality rates are the final test of civilization. Who said that test should be easy?

The United States and China have embarked on one of the most hair-raising experiments in international history. Both sides are now locked in a steady, escalating, geopolitical competition. And yet both are deeply economically intertwined. Can these two trends — geopolitical tension and economic engagement — continue, or will one of them give?

Over the past few years, as Washington and Beijing have feuded, U.S.-China trade in goods has remained strong, reaching an all-time high of nearly $700 billion last year. Major American companies, from Qualcomm to Corning to Wynn Resorts, get large chunks of their revenue from China. American farmers’ largest export market is China.

The Biden administration has pursued a policy toward China that is more strategic than Donald Trump’s tariffs. It has sought to deny China access to some of the highest-end technology, chiefly the world’s most advanced computer chips. It has also made large-scale investments in science and technology, and is even providing manufacturing subsidies to revive high-tech manufacturing within the United States.

The effort here, using national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s metaphor, is to build a “small yard” of critical technologies guarded by a “high fence” around it (as opposed to coming up with a long list of technologies that would be hard to seal off from China). But the challenge will be to see whether all these efforts, and the hostile rhetoric that surrounds them, will scare off American businesses from dealing with China altogether.

Of late, the administration seems to have recognized this danger and has tried to send some conciliatory signals. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has often said the United States does not want an economic decoupling from China. In November, she said, “We need to continue to do business with China and trade with China supports American jobs.” Thursday, in a major speech on China, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen called for a “constructive” relationship between the two countries. She stressed that the U.S. tech curbs on China are not designed to stop the Asian country from growing but have been imposed solely for national security reasons — to prevent the Chinese military from gaining parity or an edge over the United States.

But the administration’s carefully crafted, surgical China policy lives in Washington, a town not known for nuance. The Republican primaries promise to be a festival of China-bashing. Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher’s China committee has already announced that it is going to investigate companies doing business in China, which means any CEO with exposure to that market could be subpoenaed and grilled. And don’t forget that China has domestic politics as well. Xi Jinping’s tough line against the United States is popular in a country that is quite nationalist.

Decoupling is already happening. As the Peterson Institute for International Economics shows, the strong trade numbers actually mask a falloff in U.S. exports to China; because of inflation, the dollar value of the goods has risen even while volume is flat or falling. Companies such as Apple are searching for ways to diversify out of China. General Motors earnings in China have fallen by almost 70 percent since 2014.

Some of this is a healthy diversification, reducing excessive dependencies on China. But the real question is, where are we headed? If these trends continue and accelerate — which seems quite likely — we could see the world split into two zones, economically and technologically. And many countries will not want to limit their options by choosing just one zone.

French President Emmanuel Macron might have been too blunt about his worries about Europe becoming a “vassal” of the United States, but his views are in fact widely shared in Europe and beyond. The war in Ukraine has hurt Europe by raising its energy costs while benefiting the United States, which is the world’s top producer of hydrocarbons and which sells many at low cost. European companies are shifting investment to the United States, lured in part by the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A German CEO said to me recently, “You cannot expect us to forgo cheap Russian energy as well as the Chinese market. That would be suicide for Europe.”

More broadly, if geopolitical tensions win out and economic ties continue to weaken, we will move into a very different world, marked by much greater chaos and disorder at every level. One sign of this can be seen in the impasse over debt restructuring. Dozens of the world’s most vulnerable economies are in or at high risk of debt distress. (Lebanon, for example, has been in default for three years.) Yet the International Monetary Fund cannot bail out these countries because China (which is one of the world’s largest creditors) cannot come to an agreement with Western nations on the terms of relief. The two sides blame each other and hundreds of millions of people suffer.

The last time two major world powers tried to manage a relationship of economic interdependence and rising geopolitical rivalry was Britain and Germany in the period from the 1880s to 1914. That experiment ended very badly, with a war that destroyed much of the industrialized world. Both sides should try to ensure we do better this time.

If you’re curious to know what it was like to work at BuzzFeed News in the salad days of the mid-2010s, here is a representative anecdote: I was sitting at my desk one morning, dreadfully hungover and editing a story titled “The Definitive Oral History of the Wikipedia Photo for ‘Grinding,’” when the sounds of a screaming man broke my trance. I looked up to see Tracy Morgan three feet away, surrounded by a small entourage of handlers.Morgan was barreling through the office, lifting his shirt up, smacking his belly, and cracking jokes about how pale all of us internet writers looked. I remember our lone investigative reporter, Alex Campbell, scurrying away from his desk, a row away from mine, to continue his reporting call in silence. A few months later, the story he’d been working on would help free an innocent woman from prison. Morgan’s chattering faded, and the newsroom returned to its ambient humming of frenetic keyboard clacking—the sound of the internet being made. Hardly anyone had batted an eye.I worked at BuzzFeed News for nearly six years—from March 2013 until January 2019. For most of that time, it felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet. Glorious chaos was everywhere around you, yet it felt like the perfect vantage to observe the commercial web grow up. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but it is legitimately hard to capture the cultural relevance of BuzzFeed to the media landscape of the mid-2010s, and the excitement and centrality of the organization’s approach to news. There was “The Dress,” a bit of internet ephemera that went so viral, we joked that that day might have been the last good one on the internet. There was the Facebook Live experiment in which two bored staffers got 800,000 people to concurrently watch them put rubber bands on a watermelon until it exploded—a piece of content that will live in “pivot to video” infamy.And for an offshoot of a place (somewhat unfairly) known as a listicle and cat-video factory, BuzzFeed News had an outsize political influence. It published a Donald Trump profile so scathing that it very well may have goaded him into running for president. We got Barack Obama to use a selfie stick and also published the Steele Dossier. Once, I got assigned to follow exotic dancers around at a predawn chicken-wing-eating contest. During Trump’s first press conference as president-elect, I stood next to our editor in chief and watched the soon-to-be leader of the free world single us out as a “failing pile of garbage.” Within an hour, we were selling shirts plastered with the phrase. BuzzFeed News contained multitudes.
I ran into Ben Smith's office to make calls. I couldn't hear a damn thing. Nemtsov's friends were crying to me over the phone about his brutal murder. Everyone else in the office was chanting, "DRESS! DRESS! DRESS!"
— max seddon (@maxseddon) April 20, 2023One can attribute the site’s cultural relevance, the industry enthusiasm around the work, and even the rivalries and haters to BuzzFeed News’s unofficial mission: to report on the internet like it was a real place, and to tell stories in the honest, casual tone of the web. At the time I joined, this was, if not a new kind of journalism, certainly an updated model for seeking out stories—one that’s now been fully absorbed by the mainstream. At its simplest, it might have meant mining a viral tweet or Reddit thread for ideas, but more often than not, it meant bearing witness to the joy, chaos, and horrors that would pour across our timelines every day and using them as a starting point for real reporting. It meant realizing, as I and my colleagues did, during the on- and offline manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, that a new culture of internet vigilantism was beginning to take hold in digital communities and that the media no longer unilaterally shaped broad news narratives.Reporting on the internet like it was a real place led some of my colleagues to peer around corners of our politics and culture. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein outlined the way that “various reactionary forces have coalesced into a larger, coherent counterculture”—a phenomenon bubbling up in message boards such as 4chan that he called a “Chanterculture.” To read the piece now is to see the following half decade—reactionary MAGA politics, Trump’s troll armies, our current digital culture warring—laid out plainly. The Chanterculture story is a BuzzFeed News archetype: Movements like this weren’t hard to see if you were spending time in these communities and taking the people in them seriously. Most news organizations, however, weren’t doing that.People afflicted with Business School Brain who didn’t understand BuzzFeed News (including one of the company’s lead investors) often described it like a tech start-up. This was true only in the sense that the company had an amazing, dynamic publishing platform—a content-management system that updated almost daily with new features based on writer input. But the secret behind BuzzFeed News had nothing to do with technology (or even moving fast). The secret was cultural. Despite the site’s constant bad reputation as a click farm, I was never once told to chase traffic. No editor ever discussed referrals or clicks. The emphasis was on doing the old-fashioned thing: finding an original story that told people something new, held people to account, or simply delighted. The traffic would come.The place was obsessed with story, not prestige, and its ambition was nearly boundless. It wasn’t afraid of devoting considerable resources to being silly as long as the narrative was good. (The company enabled me to spend weeks reporting an oral history of one day on the internet, sent me to cover political campaigns and rallies, agreed to let me stay in the guest room of a porn producer’s New Hampshire BDSM cabin, and allowed me fly to Sweden to get a microchip implanted in my hand). And the company supported hard, serious journalism around the world. As one of my colleagues reminded me today, a common refrain during the BuzzFeed News heyday was that it felt like a fake job. Not because it wasn’t serious work, but because getting paid to work there often felt like getting away with something.The legacy of BuzzFeed News has two components. The first I described above. This legacy lives on in the stories, as well as the alumni network of brilliant writers, reporters, editors, and artists, who now work in every newsroom on the planet. (There are five of us here at The Atlantic.) The second part is, sadly, much more familiar: It is the tragic story of the digital-media industry writ large. It is a familiar tale of mismanagement; low interest rates; unrealistic expectations; greedy, extractive venture capitalists; and the impossibility of exponential growth.If the job felt fake, that’s because, in the harshest financial terms, it was. In 2014, the venture-capital firm Andreesen Horowitz invested $50 million into BuzzFeed News, a number that makes my stomach drop now. I was the technology editor at the time and remember getting pulled into a meeting about it, mostly as a heads-up and an assurance that the investment from Silicon Valley’s buzziest firm would not influence how we covered tech. This turned out to be true. Reporting on tech platforms while working at BuzzFeed News always felt like living in the town whose local politics you covered—you lived it and you wrote about it.Those next few years were a blur. The new-hire emails came in so fast that I stopped opening them. It all made sense then, and it all would’ve made at least some sense to you, too, if you were 28 and living a Millennial subsidy life, taking cheap Ubers and watching Silicon Valley grow invincible. Today, it looks like the inevitable fate-sealing that comes from making a deal with the venture-capital devil.BuzzFeed News was not, as Andreesen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon once said, a “full-stack startup.” This should’ve been blindingly obvious. The business of news gathering—not content creation—is expensive, and it does not scale. BuzzFeed News’s bread and butter—telling the internet’s stories and leveraging its systems to promote them—was only nominally a technology strategy, and one that was yoked to the success of other venture-funded social-media companies, including Facebook. The fate of the entire digital-media ecosystem was dependent on the line going up and to the right in perpetuity—or at least until the moneymen saw their returns. Just how infectious was this “perpetual growth” mindset? In the mid-2010s, BuzzFeed turned down a rumored $500 million acquisition from Disney, perhaps in part because it wanted to become Disney.Around the time I left in 2019, it became clear that browsing and attention habits were shifting, turning places like Facebook into ghost towns for politically radicalized Boomers. This was the first time I heard internal rumblings of investor concern. I started hearing people whispering the word profitability—a term I’d never had occasion to hear around the office—a lot more. It took less than four years to fully internalize the lesson that venture capitalism is just a form of gambling: You invest in 10 companies to make money off one, and employees are the chips. News, no matter how much technology you wrap around it, may be a public good, but if you’re looking for Facebook-level exits, it’s a bad bet.I am sad and angry that the extractive practices of modern finance, the whims of rich and powerful investors, and the race-to-the-bottom economics of the digital-media industry have stripped BuzzFeed for parts. I’m worried, on a practical level, about what might happen to the site’s archives, as well as the nearly 200 people the company plans to lay off. What’s left of the company (including the good, hard-working employees who are not fired) will have to navigate the wreckage created by an industry with a broken economic model. It seems likely that a zombified form of BuzzFeed will become the embodiment of everything the previous version wasn’t: terrified, obsessed with squeezing every ounce of shareholder value from its employees, and constantly bending to the forces of new technology like artificial intelligence, rather than harnessing and growing alongside them.BuzzFeed News was oriented around the mission of finding, celebrating, and chronicling the indelible humanity pouring out of every nook and cranny of the internet, so it makes sense that any iteration that comes next will be more interested in employing machines to create content. The BuzzFeed era of media is now officially over. What comes next in the ChatGPT era is likely to be just as disruptive, but I doubt it’ll be as joyous and chaotic. And I guarantee it’ll feel less human.

When it comes to ocean diving, no seal can compete with the elephant seal. While on the hunt for their deep-dwelling squid and fish prey, these blubbery behemoths hold their breath for up to two hours and can plunge a mile beneath the surface; they skirt hungry orcas and withstand pressures that would flatten a junkyard car.These epic dives help the seals survive long stints at sea, including the thousands-mile-long foraging trips they embark on each year, some of which take the animals from the west coast of North America to the middle of the Pacific and back. The animals swim and dive almost constantly for about seven months straight, never once going ashore to rest. And for decades, researchers such as Daniel Costa, a marine biologist at UC Santa Cruz, couldn’t help but marvel at the marine mammals’ stamina—and wonder how, and when, they possibly slept. There were only two possibilities, Costa told me: “They must sleep somewhere out there. Or maybe they don’t.”The truth, it turns out, seems to be a little bit of both. Costa and his colleagues, led by his former graduate student Jessica Kendall-Bar, have found that, during the foraging trips, elephant seals average just two hours of sleep a day, broken into five- to 10-minute naps as the animals dive. The new findings represent the lowest daily-sleep total ever definitively recorded in a mammal—and are the latest in a long series of animal studies that show there’s simply no single way to sleep.The human approach to sleep is, frankly, boring: eight-ish hours each day in quiet repose, usually in one continuous go. But most other creatures can’t afford that luxury when there’s so much else to do—and so many dangers afoot. Cows chew while drowsing; frigate birds fly while they snooze. Dolphins put just half their brain to bed at a time so they can remain partially alert. Some evidence even suggests, albeit indirectly, that elephants, like elephant seals, may clock just two hours of daily shut-eye for months on end.[Read: Even jellyfish sleep]Scientists can’t definitively explain why animals take such varied approaches to sleep; even the evolutionary purpose of the behavior remains a fiery academic debate. And the basic data have been very hard to come by, in part because directly measuring electrical activity in the brain—the gold standard for sleep research—is incredibly difficult in the wild, where animals have diverse lifestyles and very differently shaped heads. Watery environments pose a particular puzzle, and for years, the dozing habits of marine mammals were “basically inaccessible to science,” says Eric Angel Ramos, a marine biologist at the University of Vermont.The elephant-seal study marks the first time researchers have broken through that barrier in the wild, according to Kendall-Bar (now at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography), thanks to a new monitoring system that she designed. After quite a bit of tinkering, and even some experimentation on her own skin—“I went to the beach and stuck some electrodes on myself,” she told me—she was able to build a fleet of submersible sensors to monitor the animals’ heart rate, muscle and eye movements, and brain activity, including a swim-cap-like hat that could fit painlessly onto an elephant seal’s head.The seals, Kendall-Bar discovered, were sandwiching snoozes into their dives. After spending a couple of minutes actively plunging into the ocean’s lower layers, the animals would drift off, continuing to glide downward as they dozed. A few minutes later, they’d enter REM sleep, a phase in which animals tend to lose muscle tone. Still descending, the seals, now belly-up, would begin to pirouette in what Kendall-Bar calls a “sleep spiral” as the churn of the ocean rocked them back and forth. Many of the animals would eventually end up napping motionless on the ocean floor until they woke, at which point they’d surge back up to the surface to breathe.[Read: The mystery of the disappearing elephant-seal dialects]That these animals allow themselves multiple minutes of underwater REM sleep—a hyper-vulnerable state of paralysis—is a bit of a surprise, especially given how many sea creatures harbor a taste for fatty seal flesh, experts told me. But that just “emphasizes how important sleep is,” says Kathleen Reinhardt, a sleep researcher at the University of Calgary. REM, for instance, may prep the brain for the return to wakefulness, cutting down on the grogginess that could, say, otherwise prevent a seal from dodging a ravenous shark or swimming toward the surface to breathe, says Adhil Bhagwandin, a sleep researcher at the University of Cape Town.One of the most impressive things about the seals’ underwater M.O. is that they manage all of their deep-sea naps without breathing, allowing their blood-oxygen concentration to fall to a level that would put humans in dire straits, Costa told me. Even when ashore, the animals sometimes hold their breath while they doze, Kendall-Bar said, as if practicing for their eventual return to sea. Cluing in to how the seals cope with that respiratory predicament might someday help researchers better understand or even better treat a condition called sleep apnea, which causes people to briefly stop breathing overnight.Before researchers can draw such connections, though, they’ll need to figure out more of the mechanics of seal sleep. When on land, the animals snooze an average of 10 or 11 hours a day. And seals that do their diving exclusively in landlocked research settings will doze for six hours a day—perhaps because, in a food-rich, predator-free environment, they can. It’s a reminder that sleep patterns can be driven by both inborn biology and environment in animals and humans alike. “We have a sleep epidemic going on in industrial society,” with disorders aplenty, Reinhardt told me. Meanwhile, certain hunter-gatherer societies have been found to routinely snooze less than urbanites do—roughly six hours a night—with no apparent ill effects on their health.[Read: Why do we need to sleep?]Take that, plus what elephant seals accomplish at sea, and our modern sleep habits might start to look suspect. But duration can be deceiving, Bhagwandin told me. Our long periods of sleep may be less an indication that we need excessive rest and more a clue that restoration can be packaged into many forms. Perhaps elephant seals aren’t snubbing sleep and are instead just tackling the task very efficiently. And as much as these animals “shake up notions of how sleep functions,” Ramos told me, they can’t truly break the rules of sleep—not when, time and time again, the world’s wild creatures show us that there are no rules to break.

As regards AI, in the US so far it has been exploited as a tool by the rich to get richer and expropriate the wealth of the Middle Class (first by Wall Street Flash Trading and now by corporate marketing to manipulate people into buying their products – i.e., same purpose: to expropriate the wealth of the Middle and Lower Classes).

In China it is being used by the PRC to monitor and control people’s actions to comply with the dictates of the CCP. This simply shows the difference between the ruling American Regime and the Ruling Chinese Regime – the US ruled by private wealth and China ruled by the Communist Party. AI is used to ensure the power of the current Ruling Classes and their Ideologies in both nations (in both cases).

AI is constructed to manipulate people’s emotions and actions, but clearly that is the purpose of AI, and its tactics always consider the target’s situation (what are the culture, religion, language, status, lifestyle, interests and previous behavior of the person being targeted/manipulated?) [The Human Being is modeled as a Black Box defined by: if “this” Stimulus is applied then “that” Response is expected]. Some stimuli have high expectation (probability) of predicting the desired response, others less. This can also be taken into account to develop the most powerful and action-evoking AI algorithms for its target.

The ethical conflict is all about the purpose of the specific AI implementations (Intended Results).

As regards AI, in the US so far it has been exploited as a tool by the rich to get richer and expropriate the wealth of the Middle Class (first by Wall Street Flash Trading and now by corporate marketing to manipulate people into buying their products – i.e., same purpose, to expropriate the wealth of the Middle and Lower Classes).

In China it is being used by the PRC to monitor and control people’s actions to comply with the dictates of the CCP. This simply shows the difference between the ruling American Regime and the Ruling Chinese Regime – the US ruled by private wealth and China ruled by the Communist Party. AI is used to insure the power of the current Ruling Classes and their Ideologies in both nations (in both cases).

Most important in my estimation is, “What is the purpose of the AI manipulation?” Is it to (1) Make profits for its implementer; (2) Regiment the behavior of the target for loyalty to the State; (3) Win a contest or war against a known adversary; or (4) a fourth possible purpose proposed by moralists which is to repurpose AI control of people to make life better for all and create a more stable world?

The ethical conflict is all about the purposes of the specific AI implementations (Intended Results).

Flash trading algorithms in daily stock market trade have already outwitted human traders based on understanding the emotional reactions to market news/stimuli that easily predicts market moves over a very short time period (a few seconds up to twenty minutes). Ethically, if the trading banks use these flash trading algorithms to make money to beat any human trader, then all purposes of AI implementation are “Fair Game”.

If flash trading AI algorithms used by US trading banks are not considered unethical, then veritably no use of AI can be considered unethical.

Director Oliver Stone — on campus earlier this month to promote his new film — argued nuclear power has been stigmatized and overlooked as a solution for meeting the world’s energy needs amid climate change.
Joining Stone at the “Nuclear Now” prescreening and panel at the Science Center was co-writer Joshua S. Goldstein; Richard Lester, associate provost at MIT; and moderator Daniel Schrag, director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment. The screening was introduced by psycholinguist Steven Pinker.
“Since Hollywood and mass media and the entertainment industry may have played some role in turning off an entire generation to nuclear power, it seems quite fitting that an icon of Hollywood is taking an active role in changing public consensus about nuclear power,” said Pinker, Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.
“Nuclear Now” paints a picture of urgent need: global fossil fuel consumption rapidly increasing as developing countries modernize and populations grow. Nuclear power, it argues, is a clean, safe, reliable alternative to fossil fuels. The film covers the history of nuclear power, from key scientific discoveries to world powers harnessing it for mass destruction. It makes a point of separating nuclear power from nuclear bombs.
Addressing other safety fears tied to nuclear — the film posits that past accidents, caused by poor design, can be prevented with new reactors, and that despite Hollywood portrayals, meltdowns in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima have led to far fewer casualties than the fatal levels of air pollution produced annually by coal and other fossil fuels. It argues small amounts of radiation have not been proven to cause health issues — imagery of dental offices and X-ray machines cross the screen.

Steven Pinker kicks off the event.

Along with safety, cost was a major topic of the panel. Stone and Goldstein said the industry will right-size itself through repetition of production, while others expressed doubts.
“In South Korea, they’re building the same thing over and over, and cost comes down,” said Goldstein, who co-authored “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can” with Swedish engineer Staffan Qvist.
Schrag, who said he supports nuclear, relayed skepticism of the cost argument, adding that despite success abroad, estimates for production of U.S. reactors would still be in the tens of billions of dollars.
“To make even a significant fraction of a dent in the climate problem requires somehow a big change in the economics,” he said.
Stone proposed opening up production across borders. “The idea has to be expanded to China and Russia and above all we have to get away from this world animosity that I think the United States has played a large role in creating.”
Lester said innovation, along with repetition, can bring down nuclear costs, but bureaucracy is a barrier.
Several of his former students are innovators in the nuclear sector, including Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, co-founders of startup Oklo, which is featured in the film. “When you look at what it takes for these entrepreneurs to get their new designs through the regulatory game, it’s taken 10 years for one of the reactor types that was mentioned in the movie to be reviewed by regulators, and they’re still not through.”
From the audience, William Hogan, research director of Harvard Electricity Policy Group, said he sees a challenge for poorer countries. “What we do in the United States is important, but that’s not the problem. The problem is what’s going to happen to all these other places when they look at our story about how cheap it is in order to get to zero emissions and they say that looks pretty expensive.”
John Marshall, CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, also speaking from the audience, said public opinion on nuclear may be shifting — only one in seven people are opposed, according to a survey his organization conducted in 2021.
Lester said he believes nuclear, despite its challenges, is unmatched in its potential to meet the world’s energy needs.
“We are not able to come close to addressing the climate change and decarbonization goals that have been set for the world without a lot more nuclear power. I just don’t think it can happen any other way.”
“Nuclear Now” opens to the public with a limited theatrical release on April 28.
 
“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.One of my friends, more so than anyone else I know, has a remarkable power to make the people around him happy. He does this not through beer or flattery, but simply through the power of his personality. He is extroverted, conscientious, agreeable—all the traits that psychologists predict will attract a lot of friends.But there’s one personality characteristic of his that I find especially winning: his enthusiasm. He is excited about his work and fascinated by mine. He speaks ebulliently about his family but also about the economy and politics. He has, as the 19th-century philosopher William James put it, “zest [for] the common objects of life.”My friend is also an unusually happy person, which I had always thought explained his enthusiasm. But I had it backwards. In truth, enthusiasm is one of the personality traits that appear to drive happiness the most. In fact, to get happier, each of us can increase our own zest for the common objects of our lives. And it isn’t all that hard to do.Research on personality goes back millennia, to ancient Greece at least. In the fourth century B.C., Hippocrates theorized that our characters are made up of four temperaments: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic. These, he posited, were due to a predominance of one of the four humors, or fluids, in one’s body: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm.Although medical knowledge has overtaken this approach—for example, black bile doesn’t even exist—Hippocrates foreshadowed a good deal of our modern thinking on personality. During the 20th century, scholars developed a personality typology that we still use today. In 1921, Carl Jung distinguished between introverts and extroverts; in 1949, the psychologist Donald Fiske expanded on that work when he identified five major personality factors. Later research further refined the features of these traits and named them openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.[Read: What your favorite personality test says about you]Over the past 70 years, the Big Five have been used to investigate and explain many social phenomena. For example, as I have written, extroverts tend to make friends easily, but introverts tend to form deeper bonds. When people high in neuroticism who have money make more money, many of them enjoy it less than those lower in neuroticism. People who are more extroverted and conscientious tend toward conservatism, whereas those who are more open to new experiences typically espouse more liberal views.Two traits out of the Big Five seem to be especially important for happiness: In 2018, psychologists confirmed that high extroversion and low neuroticism seemed to be the recipe for well-being. More specifically, the correlations hinged on one aspect of extroversion and one aspect of neuroticism—enthusiasm and withdrawal, respectively.You might say that enthusiasm and withdrawal form the poles of a spectrum of behavior. Enthusiasm is defined as being friendly and sociable—“leaning into” life. Withdrawal denotes being easily discouraged and overwhelmed, leading one to “lean out” of social situations and into oneself. If we could become more enthusiastic and withdraw less, the data suggest, we would become happier. We might become more successful too. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Circles.” “The way of life is wonderful: It is by abandonment.”Perhaps we could conceive of the perfect personality for achieving the happiest life. Of course, this is only helpful if you can change yours to better fit that ideal. This is unlikely, given that huge personality changes are generally only associated with a traumatic brain injury. However, as my colleague Olga Khazan has written, smaller shifts are possible. In one 2020 study, scientists asked people to record their ordinary activities, reminding them by text message to act in certain ways, such as being a bit more conscientious or open than they ordinarily would. It worked: Their behavior changed, at least as long as they were studied.[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]If you want to lean into life more enthusiastically, you might try something similar by setting up a system of reminders. For example, you might schedule an alarm on your phone or an email to yourself each day that says, “Open up to all the people and things you see today!” But there are other, deeper interventions worth trying as well.1. Use the “as if principle.”In his magisterial 1890 text, The Principles of Psychology, James (a Harvard professor and an Atlantic contributor) outlined a radical philosophy of behavior change: Fake it. “We cannot control our emotions,” he noted. “But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”As the psychologist Richard Wiseman argues in his book The As If Principle, James’s approach is surprisingly effective. Academic research undertaken by the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky bears this out, showing that if people act more extroverted in general, they do in fact succeed and become happier.Faking enthusiasm is fairly straightforward. When you want to withdraw from social activities (perhaps you are overwhelmed or bored), act as if you were enthusiastic instead. Tell yourself, “I am going to get into this right now.” This will, the research suggests, establish new cognitive habits that gradually become more automatic.[Read: A counterintuitive way to cheer up when you’re down]Obviously, you can push this too far. I am not suggesting that you muster enthusiasm for something dangerous or use it to escape your problems. (“Today, I will enthusiastically act as if I didn’t have to pay my taxes!”) Instead, use the principle to nudge yourself toward positive changes.2. Reframe challenges as chances.One of the most popular self-improvement writers of the 20th century was the Protestant pastor Norman Vincent Peale, who sold millions of books on positive thinking. One of his titles was Enthusiasm Makes the Difference, in which he shares advice from a sage friend: “Always be glad when there is trouble on the earth … for it means there is movement in heaven; and this indicates great things are about to happen.”It’s easy to dismiss this thinking as Pollyannaish and unscientific, but it is a good example of reframing a problem as an opportunity. This is a common strategy in creativity and innovation, and a successful technique in business leadership. Entrepreneurs routinely use reframing after setbacks by asking questions such as “What did I learn from this?” You can increase your enthusiasm for things you would ordinarily withdraw from by affirming, “This is hard for me, which is why I am doing it,” or something similar.3. Curate your friends.One of the best ways to become more enthusiastic is to hang around enthusiastic people such as my friend. (I’m not giving out his number; you have to find your own.) By doing this, you’ll be taking advantage of what psychologists call “emotional contagion,” in which people adopt the emotions and attitudes of those around them. If you tend to withdraw, it may be easy to gravitate toward people who do the same. But consciously doing the opposite can help you borrow a better personality trait from those around you. Look for companions who lean into life with gusto. Although it might seem like a chore at first, you’ll be more likely to “catch” this spirit and become enthusiastic about the friendships.Fighting your tendency for withdrawal doesn’t mean that you can never be alone. There is a difference between a neurotic withdrawal from life and deliberate solitude. And the inability to be without company and stimulation is not necessarily a mark of good health either. What matters is your motive: whether you are moving away from others or toward being alone (or, conversely, whether you are moving toward others or away from your own thoughts).Henry David Thoreau didn’t write Walden as an exercise in withdrawal but rather as an enthusiastic endorsement of finding oneself in the company of one’s thoughts. His description of waking up alone in a cabin by Walden Pond is a portrait of enthusiasm. “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”[Read: The virtues of isolation]Even if your surroundings aren’t as picturesque as Walden, you can choose to treat every morning, every interaction, and every setback as a cheerful invitation. You can make your head into your own cozy cabin, and make life inside it a little brighter.

Charlie McCone has been struggling with the symptoms of long COVID since he was first infected, in March 2020. Most of the time, he is stuck on his couch or in his bed, unable to stand for more than 10 minutes without fatigue, shortness of breath, and other symptoms flaring up. But when I spoke with him on the phone, he seemed cogent and lively. “I can appear completely fine for two hours a day,” he said. No one sees him in the other 22.  He can leave the house to go to medical appointments, but normally struggles to walk around the block. He can work at his computer for an hour a day. “It’s hell, but I have no choice,” he said. Like many long-haulers, McCone is duct-taping himself together to live a life—and few see the tape.McCone knows 12 people in his pre-pandemic circles who now also have long COVID, most of whom confided in him only because “I’ve posted about this for three years, multiple times a week, on Instagram, and they’ve seen me as a resource,” he said. Some are unwilling to go public, because they fear the stigma and disbelief that have dogged long COVID. “People see very little benefit in talking about this condition publicly,” he told me. “They’ll try to hide it for as long as possible.”I’ve heard similar sentiments from many of the dozens of long-haulers I’ve talked with, and the hundreds more I’ve heard from, since first reporting on long COVID in June 2020. Almost every aspect of long COVID serves to mask its reality from public view. Its bewilderingly diverse symptoms are hard to see and measure. At its worst, it can leave people bed- or housebound, disconnected from the world. And although milder cases allow patients to appear normal on some days, they extract their price later, in private. For these reasons, many people don’t realize just how sick millions of Americans are—and the invisibility created by long COVID’s symptoms is being quickly compounded by our attitude toward them.Most Americans simply aren’t thinking about COVID with the same acuity they once did; the White House long ago zeroed in on hospitalizations and deaths as the measures to worry most about. And what was once outright denial of long COVID’s existence has morphed into something subtler: a creeping conviction, seeded by academics and journalists and now common on social media, that long COVID is less common and severe than it has been portrayed—a tragedy for a small group of very sick people, but not a cause for societal concern. This line of thinking points to the absence of disability claims, the inconsistency of biochemical signatures, and the relatively small proportion of severe cases as evidence that long COVID has been overblown. “There’s a shift from ‘Is it real?’ to ‘It is real, but …,’” Lekshmi Santhosh, the medical director of a long-COVID clinic at UC San Francisco, told me.

Yet long COVID is a substantial and ongoing crisis—one that affects millions of people. However inconvenient that fact might be to the current “mission accomplished” rhetoric, the accumulated evidence, alongside the experience of long haulers, makes it clear that the coronavirus is still exacting a heavy societal toll.As it stands, 11 percent of adults who’ve had COVID are currently experiencing symptoms that have lasted for at least three months, according to data collected by the Census Bureau and the CDC through the national Household Pulse Survey. That equates to more than 15 million long-haulers, or 6 percent of the U.S. adult population. And yet, “I run into people daily who say, ‘I don’t know anyone with long COVID,’” says Priya Duggal, an epidemiologist and a co-lead of the Johns Hopkins COVID Long Study. The implication is that the large survey numbers cannot be correct; given how many people have had COVID, we’d surely know if one in 10 of our contacts was persistently unwell.  But many factors make that unlikely. Information about COVID’s acute symptoms was plastered across our public spaces, but there was never an equivalent emphasis that even mild infections can lead to lasting and mercurial symptoms; as such, some people who have long COVID don’t even know what they have. This may be especially true for the low-income, rural, and minority groups that have borne the greatest risks of infection. Lisa McCorkell, a long-hauler who is part of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, recently attended a virtual meeting of Bay Area community leaders, and “when I described what it is, some people in the chat said, ‘I just realized I might have it.’”Admitting that you could have a life-altering and long-lasting condition, even to yourself, involves a seismic shift in identity, which some people are understandably loath to make. “Everyone I know got Omicron and got over it, so I really didn’t want to concede that I didn’t survive this successfully,” Jennifer Senior, a friend and fellow staff writer at The Atlantic, who has written about her experience with long COVID, told me. Duggal mentioned an acquaintance who, after a COVID reinfection, can no longer walk the quarter mile to pick her kids up from school, or cook them dinner. But she has turned down Duggal’s offer of an appointment; instead, she is moving across the country for a fresh start. “That is common: I won’t call it ‘long COVID’; I’ll just change everything in my life,” Duggal told me. People who accept the condition privately may still be silent about it publicly. “Disability is often a secret we keep,” Laura Mauldin, a sociologist who studies disability, told me. One in four Americans has a disability; one in 10 has diabetes; two in five have at least two chronic diseases. In a society where health issues are treated with intense privacy, these prevalence statistics, like the one-in-10 figure for long COVID, might also intuitively feel like overestimates.Some long-haulers are scared to disclose their condition. They might feel ashamed for still being sick, or wary about hearing from yet another loved one or medical professional that there’s nothing wrong with them. Many long-haulers worry that they’ll be perceived as weak or needy, that their friends will stop seeing them, or that employers will treat them unfairly. Such fears are well founded: A British survey of almost 1,000 long-haulers found that 63 percent experienced overt discrimination because of their illness at least “sometimes,” and 34 percent sometimes regretted telling people that they have long COVID. “So many people in my life have reached out and said, ‘I’m experiencing this,’ but they’re not telling the rest of our friends,” McCorkell said.Imagine that you interact with 50 people on a regular basis, all of whom got COVID. If 10 percent are long-haulers, that’s five people who are persistently sick. Some might not know what long COVID is or might be unwilling to confront it. The others might have every reason to hide their story. “Numbers like 10 percent are not going to naturally present themselves in front of you,” McCone told me. Instead, “you’ll hear from 45 people that they are completely fine.”
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty
The same factors that stop people from being public about their condition—ignorance, denial, or concerns about stigma—also make them less likely to file for disability benefits. And that process is, to put it mildly, not easy. Applicants need thorough medical documentation; many long-haulers struggle to find doctors who believe their symptoms are real. Even with the right documents, applicants must hack their way through bureaucratic overgrowth, likely while fighting fatigue or brain fog. For these reasons, attempting to measure long COVID through disability claims is a profoundly flawed exercise. Even if people manage to apply, they face an average wait time of seven months and a two-in-three denial rate. McCone took six weeks to put an application together, and, despite having a lawyer and extensive medical documentation, was denied after one day. McCorkell knows many first-wavers—people who’ve had long COVID since March 2020—“who are just getting their approvals now.”An alternative source of data comes from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, which simply asks working-age Americans if they have any of six forms of disability. Using that data, Richard Deitz, an economics-research adviser at the Federal Research Bank of New York, calculated that about 1.7 million more people now say they do than in mid-2020, reversing a years-long decline. These numbers are lower than expected if one in 10 people who gets COVID really does become a long-hauler, but the survey doesn’t directly capture many of the condition’s most common symptoms, such as fatigue, neurological problems beyond brain fog, and post-exertional malaise, where a patient’s symptoms get dramatically worse after physical or mental exertion. About 900,000 of the newly disabled people are also still working. David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai, told me that many of his patients are refused the accommodations required under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Their employers won’t allow them to work remotely or reduce their hours, because, he said, “you look at them and don’t see an obvious disability.”Long COVID can also seem bafflingly invisible when people look at it with the wrong tools. For example, a 2022 study by National Institutes of Health researchers compared 104 long-haulers with 85 short-term COVID patients and 120 healthy people and found no differences in measures of heart or lung capacities, cognitive tests, or levels of common biomarkers—bloodstream chemicals that might indicate health problems. This study has been repeatedly used as evidence that long COVID might be fictitious or psychosomatic, but in an accompanying editorial, Akulo Hope, the medical director of Oregon Health and Science University’s long-COVID program, noted that the study exactly mirrors what long-haulers commonly experience: They undergo extensive testing that turns up little and are told, “Everything is normal and nothing is wrong.”The better explanation, Putrino told me, is that “cookie-cutter testing” doesn’t work—a problem that long COVID shares with other neglected complex illnesses, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic-fatigue syndrome and dysautonomia. For example, the NIH study didn’t consider post-exertional malaise, a cardinal symptom of both ME/CFS and long COVID; measuring it requires performing cardiopulmonary tests on two successive days. Most long-haulers also show spiking heart rates when asked to simply stand against a wall for 10 minutes—a sign of problems with their autonomic nervous system. “These things are there if you know where to look,” Putrino told me. “You need to listen to your patients, hear where the virus is affecting them, and test accordingly.”Contrary to popular belief, researchers have learned a huge amount about the biochemical basis of long COVID, and have identified several potential biomarkers for the disease. But because long COVID is likely a cluster of overlapping conditions, there might never be a singular blood test that “will tell you if you have long COVID 100 percent of the time,” Putrino said. The best way to grasp the scale of the condition, then, is still to ask people about their symptoms.  Large attempts to do this have been relatively consistent in their findings: The U.S. Household Pulse Survey estimates that one in 10 people who’ve had COVID currently have long COVID; a large Dutch study put that figure at one in eight. The former study also estimated that 6 percent of American adults are long-haulers; a similar British survey by the Office for National Statistics estimated that 3 percent of the general population is. These cases vary widely in severity, and about one in five long-haulers is barely affected by their symptoms—but the remaining majority very much is. Another one in four long-haulers (or 4 million Americans) has symptoms that severely limit their daily activities. The others might, at best, wake every day feeling as if they haven’t had any rest, or feel trapped in an endless hangover. They might work or socialize when their tidal symptoms ebb, but only by making big compromises: “If I work a full day, I can’t also then make dinner or parent without significant suffering,” JD Davids, who has both long COVID and ME/CFS, told me.Some people do recover. A widely cited Israeli study of 1.9 million people used electronic medical records to show that most lingering COVID symptoms “are resolved within a year from diagnosis,” but such data fail to capture the many long-haulers who give up on the medical system precisely because they aren’t getting better or are done with being disbelieved. Other studies that track groups of long-haulers over time have found less rosy results. A French one found that 85 percent of people who had symptoms two months after their infection were still symptomatic after a year. A Scottish team found that 42 percent of its patients had only partially recovered at 18 months, and 6 percent had not recovered at all. The United Kingdom’s national survey shows that 69 percent of people with long COVID have been dealing with symptoms for at least a year, and 41 percent for at least two.The most recent data from the U.S. and the U.K. show that the total number of long-haulers has decreased over the past six months, which certainly suggests that people recover in appreciable numbers. But there’s a catch: In the U.K., the number of people who have been sick for more than a year, or who are severely limited by their illness, has gone up. A persistent pool of people is still being pummeled by symptoms—and new long-haulers are still joining the pool. This influx should be slower than ever, because Omicron variants seem to carry a lower risk of triggering long COVID, while vaccines and the drug Paxlovid can lower that risk even further. But though the odds against getting long COVID are now better, more people are taking a gamble, because preventive precautions have been all but abandoned.Even if prevalence estimates were a tenth as big, that would still mean more than 1 million Americans are dealing with a chronic illness that they didn’t have three years ago. “When long COVID first came on the scene, everyone told us that once we have the prevalence numbers, we can do something about it,” McCorkell told me. “We got those numbers. Now people say, ‘Well, we don’t believe them. Try again.’”To a degree, I sympathize with some of the skepticism regarding long COVID, because the condition challenges our typical sense of what counts as solid evidence. Blood tests, electronic medical records, and disability claims all feel like rigorous lines of objective data. Their limitations become obvious only when you consider what the average long-hauler goes through—and those details are often cast aside because they are “anecdotal” and, by implication, unreliable. This attitude is backwards: The patients’ stories are the ground truth against which all other data must be understood. Gaps between the data and the stories don’t immediately invalidate the latter; they just as likely show the holes in the former.Laura Mauldin, the disability sociologist, argues that the U.S. is primed to discount those experiences because the country’s values—exceptionalism, strength, self-reliance—have created what she calls the myth of the able-bodied public. “We cannot accept that our bodies are fallible, or that disability is utterly ordinary and expected,” she told me. “We go to great pains to pretend as though that is not the case.” If we believe that a disabling illness like long COVID is rare or mild, “we protect ourselves from having to look at it.” And looking away is that much easier because chronic illnesses like long COVID are more likely to affect women—“who are more likely to have their symptoms attributed to psychological problems,” Mauldin said—and because the American emphasis on work ethic devalues people who can’t work as much or as hard as their peers.Other aspects of long COVID make it hard to grasp. Like other similar, neglected chronic illnesses, it defies a simplistic model of infectious disease in which a pathogen causes a predictable set of easily defined symptoms that alleviate when the bug is destroyed. It challenges our belief in our institutions, because truly contending with what long-haulers go through means acknowledging how poorly the health-care system treats chronically ill patients, how inaccessible social support is to them, and how many callous indignities they suffer at the hands of even those closest to them. Long COVID is a mirror on our society, and the image it reflects is deeply unflattering.Most of all, long COVID is a huge impediment to the normalization of COVID. It’s an insistent indicator that the pandemic is not actually over; that policies allowing the coronavirus to spread freely still carry a cost; that improvements such as better indoor ventilation are still wanting; that the public emergency may have been lifted but an emergency still exists; and that millions cannot return to pre-pandemic life. “Everyone wants to say goodbye to COVID,” Duggal told me, “and if long COVID keeps existing and people keep talking about it, COVID doesn’t go away.” The people who still live with COVID are being ignored so that everyone else can live with ignoring it.

Detective Olivia Benson discovers that police departments across the U.S. are hoarding hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in a 2010 episode of “Law & Order: Special Victim’s Unit.” “It’s like we’re telling them that they don’t matter,” Benson says, referring to the victims. And while that episode, called “Behave,” may have been fictional, those numbers were very real.
“Did we have an impact over time? Well, I think so,” said Neal Baer, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, lecturer on global health and social medicine, a co-director of the Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health program at Harvard Medical School, and the writer of that episode.
Baer was among the first physicians to become a full-time TV writer. He was part of the original writing staff on “ER,” which first aired in 1994 (and later worked for “SVU” and “Designated Survivor”). Last week, Baer and fellow Harvard Medical School graduate and writer David Foster (“House,” “New Amsterdam”), took part in an event called “Telling Medical Stories on TV: Two Physician-Writers in Conversation,” as part of the Media, Medicine, and Health lecture series. The two discussed how they find inspiration and whether their fictional stories — which have addressed cervical cancer, gun violence, abortion, child psychopaths, COVID-19, and transgender healthcare — can have a measurable, real-world impact.
“When we think about medical stories,” Baer said, “what me and David think about, it’s not about education or entertainment, it’s really about the story.”
But a good story can also entertain and educate — and affect change. After “Behave” aired, Baer said, a media flurry forced states to reckon with their massive backlog of untested rape kits. Since then, 10 states have cleared their backlog; seven enacted legislation to reform how they handle rape kits.

“ER” was “the first TV show to assess whether a story could make a difference. The treatment was the episode.”
— Neal Baer, on viewer survey before and after HPV episode

“Behave” may have influenced states to take action. But, back in his “ER” days, Baer wanted to measure whether TV shows can make a difference with individuals. In 2000, few people understood the connection between cervical cancer and the sexually transmitted virus HPV, human papillomavirus. So, Baer wrote an episode in which a sexually active teenage girl unknowingly contracts the virus and gets cervical cancer. Baer, working with the Kaiser Family Foundation, surveyed viewers before and after the episode to learn whether their knowledge of HPV increased.
“We were the first TV show to assess whether a story could make a difference,” Baer said. “The treatment was the episode.”
And the treatment worked, at least temporarily. Before the episode, only 19 percent of viewers knew HPV was associated with cervical cancer. That number rose to 60 percent one week after the episode aired but dropped to 38 percent six weeks after — a big boost, nonetheless.
TV stories like these are effective, Baer and Foster said, because they turn statistics into more powerful visuals, like towering stacks of untested rape kits, a teenage girl’s tears, or a plastic straw embedded deep in a sea turtle’s nostril. Numbers alone don’t work, Baer said. Saying that 34 billion plastic soda bottles are dumped in the ocean each year is nowhere near as powerful as a video of a bleeding, crying turtle — that single video helped push several states to ban plastic straws, according to Baer.
“How do we translate that broad message into an individual, something that’s memorable, something that carries with it the emotion of an individual’s life?” asked Foster, an executive producer of “New Amsterdam.”
The answer? Emotion and specificity, Foster said. “Two hundred and fifty people dying is a news story; one person dying is a tragedy.” Big numbers can cause psychic numbing, but one person’s tragic tale can leave a lasting impression, especially if that person is a character viewers care about.

“Two hundred and fifty people dying is a news story; one person dying is a tragedy.”
— David Foster

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic halted production on the set of “New Amsterdam,” a show about a public hospital in New York City. When production resumed, Foster wrote a short episode — a kind of tribute, he said — in which the doctors transition from the early, uncertain days of the pandemic to the hope that came with vaccines.
The episode uses almost no dialogue; instead, viewers watch as a patient on a respirator reaches out to an iPad where her family members appear on screen; people in heavy personal protective equipment add another body to a full tractor trailer; a doctor sleeps in the hospital, unable to go home to see his child; and medical staffers applaud when a patient finally goes home and, later, when each gets a first dose of the vaccine.
The hope, Foster said, is that people can relate these stories to their own lives. Of course, the downside of specificity is that you can’t always tell the full range of stories, and both writers have received complaints from viewers with differing experiences of, say, contracting hepatitis C (in an episode Foster wrote, a patient contracts the virus from a prison tattoo).
But both doctors are adamant about getting one thing into every story they tell. “We would bring in the science,” Baer said, “always trying our best to bring in the science.” Previously, he continued, “doctors would come in and sprinkle medicine on top of the story.”
Now, the stories start with the medicine.

Last week, as my spouse and I were settling into our new home, we were dismayed to find a small cavalry of uninvited visitors in our kitchen. They raided the pantry and the fridge; they snuck into our bathroom. Every evening, we tried to shoo these invaders out the door, to no avail: The container of food scraps on our counter, waiting to be picked up by our local composting company, made the allure of our abode too strong for these fruit flies to resist.My household had been through this particular saga before, and I’ve generally grimaced my way through it. In the U.S., food waste is responsible for nearly 3 percent of the country’s emissions, according to the EPA—and that’s before considering the methane that leaks from landfills, where food waste is the single largest category of material that gets dumped. Diverting even some of that waste is a win for everyone involved, and more cities across the U.S. are at least trying to persuade people to separate their scraps from their trash. I, like many others, just wish that the whole business could be a bit less … friendly to the flies.Decomposing food into nutrient-rich soil is, at its heart, a delightful exercise—a form of rot, yes, but one in which we recruit a menagerie of insects, arachnids, and microbes to feast on our leftovers and turn them into something useful to us. I don’t expect that process to be mess-free. But the goal should be for the bulk of the action to happen outside the home. Even food scraps saved up in the kitchen don’t have to create so much slime or attract that many winged pests. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I’ve had no fruit flies,” Rhonda Sherman, a composting expert at North Carolina State University, told me.[Read: Can cities master their garbage with better design?]To be fair to the flies, a countertop pile of bones, shells, stems, peels, seeds, and cores does make for a pretty tantalizing buffet that fruit flies, house flies, and soldier flies can potentially detect from hundreds, if not thousands, of feet away. “Their sense of smell is really strong,” says Ashfaq Sial, an entomologist at the University of Georgia. The insects go especially bonkers for plant material far enough past its prime that it’s begun to emit a particular parfum. And the longer the food decomposes, the more water content it will release—generating films of goo that can exacerbate the fly-luring smell.The adults themselves aren’t necessarily the problem, but once they lay eggs, their hungry offspring will rapidly multiply. From there, it doesn’t take much for an infestation to unfold. Entomologists like Sial enjoy telling people that, left to their own devices for a year, a male fruit fly and a female fruit fly—the latter of which can lay hundreds of eggs during her brief lifetime—could theoretically coat the surface of the planet with their descendants, in a layer dense enough to “fill the space between the Earth and the moon” … twice. Let just a single individual in, and “they’re going to invite their friends,” says Monica Ozores-Hampton, a composting expert based in Florida. Ideally, “you should not allow even one.”As tough as this might sound, it’s not impossible. The first step is prevention, Sial told me: Flies are sneaky and wont to infiltrating a home through open windows or doors, especially during the humid summer months; they can even hitch a ride atop freshly picked fruit. Keeping a kitchen relatively pristine reduces its appeal; it helps to have clean countertops, screened windows, and a garbage disposal that’s relatively well maintained, so no winged beasts are tempted to establish a colony inside. Produce can also be promptly cleaned to clear it of eggs, and much of it can be moved into the fridge.And then there’s the matter of managing the actual food scraps. Several of the experts I spoke with, including Sherman, recommended keeping any waste destined for a composter in the freezer until you’re ready to port it outside. For anyone who, like me, would rather preserve their freezer’s real estate, flies can still be mostly waylaid by a tight-fitting lid on a countertop container, Ozores-Hampton told me. Transferring scraps nightly to a backyard composter or, as is the case for us, to a curbside pickup bin, can also cut down on in-house rot.A solid lid isn’t a perfect deterrent. I’ve been using one for years, and still the fruit flies hover, as if waiting for me to lapse. So I recently added one final hack, per experts’ advice, and diluted the produce in my bin with some used paper towels and shredded news clips. The mix-in mimics an important step in proper composting, which “is all about the ratio,” says Molly Lindsay, the director of operations at Community Compost Company, which offers curbside pickup of food scraps in New York. Decomposition won’t go well unless the nitrogen in food waste is balanced out by sufficient infusion of carbon from something dry and brownish. Wood chips and sawdust are common additives, but even newspaper or bits of paper bags can spike in the right chemicals. (A scoop of finished compost, if handy, works great too.) As a perk, those same ingredients tend to absorb liquid, cutting down on leakage and slime. The trick worked for me: Almost overnight, the population of bin-stalking fruit flies in my kitchen seemed to halve.These tactics won’t completely purge a kitchen of odor. The occasional waft of decay, plus a bit of condensation, is inevitable, says Gina Talt, who oversees the Sustainable Composting Research at Princeton Lab. In recent years, some retailers have taken to hocking super-pricey food-scrap collection containers with ventilated lids, fitted with carbon filters, that can cut down on some of the funk. But Sial pointed out that the lid’s perforations need to be only so wide to allow a determined female fly to wriggle her way through. Electric countertop composters also purport to deal with scraps quickly and cleanly, but many experts, including Lindsay, think they’re not worth their hefty price tag or the drain on your electricity bill. Plus, they may not work even a fraction as well as traditional composting methods. True to composting’s au naturel roots, the container in your kitchen doesn’t need to be any kind of fancy to accomplish its base task: separating true waste from what can be recycled—sans grossness!—into something good. An old yogurt or ice-cream container, or a piece of Tupperware past its prime, is solid enough to limit both the funk and the flies.

Humans are clearly omnivores. There are multiple lines of evidence to support this conclusion. And regardless of what our ancestors ate, we now have decades of research into diet and health that supports a fairly simple conclusion – eat a varied diet, eat plenty of fruits of vegetables, don’t overconsume calories, and everything in moderation. For most healthy people, if you follow this basic guidance you will be most of the way to having a reasonably optimal diet in terms of health. There are tweaks for people with medical conditions, like diabetes. If you want to squeeze out some additional optimization, the evidence generally points to a so-called Mediterranean diet as close to optimal – lots of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, some meat, and heart healthy fats (like olive oil).

There, in one paragraph I just summarized what most people need to know about diet. But there is an entire self-help industry worth an estimated $71 billion around giving fad diet advice and selling dieting products. That is a lot of incentive to sell nonsense.

General common sense advice is also not enough for some. Psychologically there can be a desire to focus obsessively about the details of one’s diet, or the belief that extreme diets are somehow healthier than diverse ones. In the extreme this condition is termed orthorexia nervosa, and is considered an actual disorder. This is likely a largely manufactured condition, meaning it was created by the diet industry, constantly obsessing over “good” foods and “bad” foods. This is embedded in the self-help industry general approach to life which is to find a “hack” or one “crazy trick” to solve complex problems.

The Carnivore Diet

There are countless diet fads, all worthless, and the latest iteration if perhaps the carnivore diet. As the name implies, this is a typical diet fad in that it takes the good and bad food approach. Meat is good, eat only meat. Plants are poison, avoid them at all costs. Doing this will magically cure all disease (slight exaggeration for effect).

Before we get into the theoretical problems with this diet, we should note that there is no clinical evidence that an all meat diet is not harmful, let alone that it is healthy or has any advantages. Proponents mainly cite anecdote and testimonials. There are not studies on the long term effects. Short term studies that exist are basically worthless, because almost all diet studies show short term weight loss because subjects are on a diet. Long term outcomes are all that matter anyway.

A quick PubMed search did not come up with anything, in humans, anyway. There are a lot of studies in actual carnivores (cats and dogs), but not people, because people are not carnivores.

This is a complex area of research to summarize quickly, but what decades of research has shown overall is that, while meat in the diet is healthy, there are increased health risks to high levels of meat in the diet. Further, there are health benefits to eating plants and fiber.

One good point that critics of the carnivore diet raise is that meat does not contain vitamin C. Humans cannot synthesize vitamin C and have to get it from our diet, and in fact this has been true for millions of years with our direct ancestors. A diet that is missing a critical nutritional element cannot be optimal. Also, if an all-meat diet were optimal evolution would have taken care of the vitamin C issue a long time ago. So this is both evidence that our ancestors consumed plants and that an all-meat diet is unhealthy.

One of the silliest arguments for the all-meat diet is put forward by Carnivore MD, who argues that plants are poisonous, therefore we should not eat plants. He starts with a kernel of a fact, but then completely goes off the rails. Yes, many plants evolved to produce toxic substances to keep from being eaten by animals. But you can’t stop there.

Obviously, the world is also full of herbivores, of animals that survive by eating plants. So animals have clearly evolved to tolerate those toxins, or else the carnivores would have nothing to eat. Also, not all plants use that strategy. Estimates are that about half the plants in the world are edible by humans. That doesn’t mean you would want to eat them, but they are technically edible. We can digest them and deal with any toxins.

Evolution goes both ways. It is better to think of this situation as evolutionary warfare – plants evolve defenses and animals evolve ways around those defenses.

Further still, some plants – fruiting plants – evolved a strategy of producing yummy and nutritious plant flesh to help disperse and germinate their seeds. They bribe animals with good food to provide this service. This breaks the logic that plants don’t want to be eaten. Sometimes they do.

The argument also ignores the fact that humans have cultivates almost all plants that we consume, over thousands of years, specifically to be less toxic. Plant toxins are bitter for a reason, so that we can detect potential harmful substances and avoid them. We cultivated our plants to be less bitter, which translates into them having less plant toxins. This actually makes our crop more vulnerable, because we bred their natural defenses out of them.

The evolutionary argument, therefore, does not even apply to almost all plants that we eat. It doesn’t apply to fruits, and it doesn’t apply to cultivated crops – so basically it doesn’t apply to the human diet.

The carnivore diet is just another diet fad focusing on eliminating allegedly bad food categories and restricting diet to only good food categories. The theoretical justification for this approach is highly flawed, and there is no empirical evidence to support it. Further, there are multiple lines of evidence that restricting one’s diet to only meat and eggs is a bad thing for health.

There is also another layer to the carnivore diet fad. If such a diet were widely adopted it would be entirely unsustainable. The feed conversion ratio for beef, the meat most recommended by proponents, is anywhere from 6x to 25x. So even if we take the most favorable number, the world would have to grow about six times as many calories as it does now in order to convert all those calories to beef for people to eat. This is far beyond the world’s capacity, especially for land and water use.

Inherent, therefore, in the carnivore diet is that this is a diet for select elites. Everyone else can eat plants. This adds an unsavory aspect to what is already a pseudoscientific and harmful fad.

This week the Justice Department arrested two Americans for operating a secret Chinese police station in New York City and separately charged 44 Chinese officials with enforcing Chinese laws on U.S. soil. These actions spotlight a tiny piece of the network Beijing uses to exert influence inside the United States. Tackling this complex issue will require greater American awareness, sensitivity and action.

Until the FBI raided the facility in October, a Chinese government-controlled police outpost in Manhattan coordinated widespread harassment of U.S.-based critics of the Chinese Communist Party, according to the U.S. government. Although this seems to have been China’s first such operation inside the United States, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security has established more than 100 illegal police stations around the world.

According to the charging documents, the two defendants have acted as Chinese government agents since 2015 in various ways, including by staging public protests against Chinese religious minorities, threatening and pressuring purported Chinese fugitives to return to China, and tracking down Chinese pro-democracy activists. What the criminal complaint doesn’t explain is how this police station fits into the larger picture of Chinese influence operations.

The station’s location offers one clue. The building was rented by the America Changle Association, a charity that claims to assist Chinese and Chinese Americans. The IRS revoked its tax-exempt status last May after it failed to file proper paperwork for three years. Nevertheless, just months later, the group was able to attract several prominent New York politicians to its gala, including Mayor Eric Adams.

Local associations such as Changle routinely work with Chinese authorities to establish police outposts, suppress criticism of the CCP and repress critics abroad, according to a report by Safeguard Defenders, an investigative group that tracks China’s transnational repression. This is part of the larger CCP influence network known as the “United Front.”

“The United Front system (United Front Work) is the work of Chinese Communist Party agencies seeking to co-opt and influence ‘representative figures’ and groups inside and outside China, with a particular focus on religious, ethnic minority and diaspora communities,” Australian researcher Alex Joske said in the report.

The United Front dates back to the era of Mao Zedong. Xi Jinping called its influence operations one of the party’s “magic weapons.” The operations often run through local proxy organizations that offer services to overseas Chinese (as in this case) or support Beijing’s preferred policies, such as reunification with Taiwan.

For example, last month, when the “China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful National Reunification” staged a protest in front of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s New York City hotel, the United Front was behind the operation. Leaders of groups like the China Council give lavishly to U.S. politicians in both parties. The Florida branch of this particular group was once headed by Cindy Yang, a former spa mogul who peddled access to Mar-a-Lago during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Tracking foreign-influence operations — especially those working within ethnic communities that experience discrimination — requires sensitivity. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Tex.) failed to demonstrate this when he questioned the loyalty of his Democratic colleague Judy Chu (N.Y.) in February, after one Chinese influence organization claimed her as its “honorary chairwoman.” (Chu denied the affiliation.)

But members of the House’s new Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party showed that it is possible to stand against Chinese transnational repression in a bipartisan way. Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) publicly rebuked Gooden’s statements and has urged against employing McCarthyite tactics. And in February, committee Republicans and Democrats staged a rally with Chinese dissidents and activists outside the illegal Chinese police station.

“We are sending a powerful message that the defense of human rights from the abuses of the CCP is not a Democratic value or a Republican value. It is an American value,” Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), said at the rally.

“This is the first time that the Chinese dissident community feels that their grievance is heard,” Zhou Fengsuo, one of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student leaders, said at the event.

As the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has pointed out, Chinese influence operations and United Front work are designed to be both opaque and complicated, “making those who seek to identify the negative effects of such influence vulnerable to accusations of prejudice.” But China’s main targets have been innocent Chinese, Uyghur, Tibetan and Taiwanese people.

Confronting CCP influence operations is crucial to guarding U.S. sovereignty and protecting vulnerable people from persecution. At the same time, the United States must preserve its own character as an open and tolerant society.

Most accounts of humanity’s origins, and our evolution since, have understandably put Homo sapiens center stage. It was our ingenuity, our tools, our cultural savvy that enabled our species to survive long past others—that allowed wars to be won, religions to blossom, and empires to rise and expand while others crumbled and fell. But despite what the schoolbooks tell us, humans might not be the main protagonists in our own history. As Jonathan Kennedy argues in his new book, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases should be taking center stage instead. Germs and pestilence—and not merely the people who bore them—have shaped inflection point after inflection point in our species’ timeline, from our first major successful foray out of Africa to the rise of Christianity, to even the United States’ bloody bid for independence.Three years after the outbreak of a devastating infectious disease with a staggering death toll, spending time with a book that vividly details the microbial richness of human history might not rank high on most people’s must-do lists. But those with enough of an epidemiological appetite to pick up Kennedy’s new book will be gratifyingly—if not necessarily cheerfully—rewarded with the knowledge that their read was at least well timed. Epidemics, Kennedy reminds us, are not aberrations in our overstuffed, interconnected, climate-change-fractured world. And when the next one arrives, as it surely will, our response to it will be better if we remember, and avoid, the many mistakes of the past.Kennedy’s book isn’t meant as revisionism; the broad strokes of history remain intact. But it gently sidelines humans—and, in doing so, humbles them. In the grand scheme of things, he writes, we have far more influence over the fate of our own species than we might like to think: “Very often we don’t make history in circumstances of our own choosing, but in circumstances created by microbes.” Humans aren’t alone, even in their own tale. We’re constantly being puppeteered by our viral, bacterial, and parasitic passengers—simply riding a narrative arc that’s been constantly bent by our bugs.Consider, for instance, the vanishing of the Neanderthals, one of the early human species that lived alongside and interbred with ours. Neanderthals were once perceived as brutish and dumb—intellectual inferiors who whimpered out after our ultra-brainy species spread over the globe. Decades of scientific findings now exist to refute that notion, showing that Neanderthals were extraordinarily sophisticated—painting caves, lighting fires, even making use of medicinal plants. What snuffed them out wasn’t their lack of smarts but a lack of immunity to the (likely viral) diseases that Homo sapiens introduced to them as the two species mingled.[Read: The next stage of COVID is starting now]That same tragic motif plays out repeatedly over some 60,000 years, as Kennedy points to the cast of microbes that played startlingly prominent roles in several otherwise-familiar chapters of our history. Neolithic farmers may have edged out their hunter-gatherer predecessors with the help of hepatitis B, tuberculosis, measles, and a bevy of mosquito-borne viruses; diseases such as typhus and smallpox may have helped turn the tide against Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Spanish conquistadors appear to have been aided in their obliteration of the native populations by smallpox—an inadvertent weapon at least as powerful as any tool forged by hand. And although it’s clear that various sociopolitical factors were key to the ultimate founding of the United States, it’s also a bit fun to cheekily consider malaria-carrying mosquitoes as among the “founding mothers of the United States,” as the historian John McNeill once put it. The parasitic disease—which established itself in the American South prior to the Revolution—killed eight times more British troops than did American guns, potentially enough to substantially tilt the odds.Other societal forces such as religion and politics have infectious roots too. Horrific bouts of plague, Kennedy writes, were major catalysts for the global spread of both Islam and Christianity—religions that were able to find massive audiences only after large sectors of the global population had died off, and survivors had begun to lose faith in the efficacy of local religious practices. Perhaps Christianity offered a more soothing balm for mortality than paganism at a time when painful deaths were terrifyingly common. And maybe “the lethal effects of Yersinia pestis,” the bacterial pathogen behind the plague, truly were what helped Islam develop into “a major religion practiced by almost a quarter of the world’s population.”There was little awareness of the deus ex microbe as these events unfolded—which is understandable, given that it took until the end of the 19th century for germ theory to gain traction among leading scientists. But Kennedy makes a compelling case that historical ignorance has left behind some pretty sinister vestiges. Neanderthals, ravaged by disease, are still regularly cast in modern terms as dumb brutes; the native peoples of South America, technologically advanced but beaten down by foreign epidemics, imagined themselves disfavored in the eyes of the gods, who instead took the side of the colonizers who ravaged them with diseases.Pathogenesis even implicates infectious disease in the reinforcement of—maybe even the genesis of—certain racial stereotypes. West Africans trafficked to the Americas initially labored alongside white slaves and indentured servants. But when diseases ferried over from Africa began to obliterate those lighter-skinned people, the darker-skinned people who’d already built up immunity were spared—leaving a population of almost entirely Black slaves. Abruptly, the region’s conceptions of slavery became linked to melanin, a stereotype that has insidiously stuck. It was a horrible irony: The movement of pathogens put a premium on protection against them—but ended up saddling survivors with horrific consequences. Our notion of superiority over certain groups, Kennedy suggests, is at least as misguided as our smugness about our supremacy as a species in this world.[Read: The future of long COVID]Kennedy’s point isn’t that we’re powerless against infectious disease. (Nor are microbes unilateral villains: The opening to Pathogenesis painstakingly details the many ways in which the benign ones have benefited us—including aiding the evolution of the placenta, a vital mammalian organ that is thought to have co-opted genetic material from an ancient virus that infected our ancestors.) But, he suggests, humans will remain vulnerable to pathogens’ formidable powers if we continue to ignore them and not learn from the past responses of people in similar circumstances. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic, after all, is not the first time that people have concertedly pushed back against calls for face masks; nor is it the first time the public has bought into lethal misinformation. As Kennedy writes, the cholera outbreaks in 19th-century Europe sparked rumors that the public-health officials and doctors trying to enforce quarantines, travel restrictions, and isolation for the sick were a front—a plot to “poison the urban poor.” Locals rebelled, and governments capitulated, abandoning the very interventions that might have saved countless more lives.Those missteps are important to keep in mind as we look ahead. Our modern habits are technologically advanced but epidemiologically dangerous. As the globe’s population has grown, infections have gotten easier to spread; as we’ve domesticated animals, we’ve carved new conduits for microbes to travel across species lines. Climate change is also pushing wild creatures into new habitats, where they’re more likely to encounter us. Disease spillovers into humans will keep happening; in just the past two decades, three have occurred with coronaviruses alone. That’s a grim fact to consider. And yet, Kennedy’s book manages to end on a somewhat hopeful note. Yes, our trajectory is defined by microbes. But it’s also influenced by our reactions to them—and our acknowledgment of their power. This current pandemic may be tilting toward a slow end. As much as we may want the crisis to disappear in the rearview, the coda of one outbreak is an ideal time to prepare for the next, inevitably on its way.

In recent weeks I have focused on the social and economic evolution of the United States. Obviously, we also need to discuss U.S. strategic policy. Domestic policy tends to be more dynamic than strategic policy, which follows from more persistent things like imperatives. The United States is secure from an attack on land. Neither Canada nor Mexico has the ability to wage or interest in waging a land war against the United States. Therefore, the fundamental threat to American national security must come from the sea. Still, American strategy has within it a logic. It lacks the cyclical logic of domestic politics but is shaped by the necessities imposed by place and enemies.

America’s entry into World War I was triggered by a German attack on U.S. shipping. In World War II, Washington’s key motive was the same. If Germany cut off lines of supply between the U.S. and Britain, it could isolate Britain and attack it at will. Having secured the Atlantic and a base of operations in Britain, Germany could threaten the East Coast. In the Pacific, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, if fought sensibly, could have secured sea lanes from Hawaii to the West Coast and possibly enabled Japan to impose its will there. Even the Cold War was primarily naval. Germany was indeed the line of contact with the Soviet Union, but the vital supply lines ran from the U.S. to Europe, and NATO could be crippled by cutting off those supplies. Toward that end, the Russians deployed submarines and supersonic anti-ship systems.

The Germans (twice), the Soviets and the Japanese each saw the defense of their nations as rooted in maritime war against the United States. The German failure permitted D-Day to take place, the Soviet failure made a Soviet ground offensive in Europe impossible, and the Japanese failure led to Hiroshima and the U.S. occupation of Japan. In each case, the ability of the U.S. to maintain lines of supply and block enemy attacks was the key to the defense of the United States and its economy, and in each case, American strategy was built on deterrence. In the event that U.S. security was not entirely at risk at sea, Washington created barriers to block enemy powers from moving assets toward Atlantic or Pacific ports. It was understood that the immediate threat might be trivial compared to the long-term threat. Therefore, it was essential to engage Germany as early as possible – to contain the long-term threat while it still entailed combating ground forces and before the sea threat had fully materialized. This was also critical in the Pacific against Japan. It should be noted that in Vietnam, where the U.S. had no land-sea strategy, matters ended badly.

In Ukraine, there is an element of this strategy. Russia, if it were to defeat Ukraine, would be at NATO’s border and could attack westward. The U.S. is practicing a strategy of preemption at a relatively low cost in terms of U.S. casualties to prevent the very unlikely move of Russia to the Atlantic coast. Maritime action is used to drive back land forces. This was the strategy used against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and it is now being used against Russian forces in Ukraine. In this use of sea power, there is significant indirectness designed to impose an element of risk on ground forces deep in their own territory. It is a strategy normally too subtle to easily see.

Therefore, U.S. naval strategy in Ukraine is designed primarily to block waterways that could facilitate Russian movement – namely the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea. It is not the heart of the broader U.S. strategy.

It is with respect to China that this strategy is being most seriously tested. The primary strategy of the U.S. must be to maintain control of the Pacific and maintain lines of supply to allies to prevent an opening for China. The heart of the strategy is to apply varying pressures on China so that it is forced to balance and rebalance its forces. As an example, China’s seizing Taiwan is not possible given the time needed for a task force to reach the Taiwan coast, during which it would be open to attack by the United States. This limits the ultimate Chinese threat to the U.S. coasts. Naval warfare (and here I include naval air power, as has been normal since World War II) combines two strategies, one limiting Chinese movement at sea and the other opening the possibility of threatening the Chinese homeland.

The Chinese constantly threaten Taiwan, but until now they have never acted because of the likely intervention of the U.S. Navy. The U.S. has a far inferior ground force – primarily to be transported by naval power, which would be a challenge – to pose a threat to a Chinese invasion. It is naval power that prevents Chinese action. There is a logic between the United States and China, a logic of geography, technology and fear that is in its way consistent and ties us in an internal cycle that naval war generates.

Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote the book on this strategy more than a century ago. It is a strategy that is still in place, replete with subtle interaction with land power. When U.S. military action was unsuccessful, as in Vietnam, it failed either because the terrain was not susceptible to naval power or because naval power was not used. However, as I have tried to show, U.S. warfighting strategy, particularly on the strategic level, has never changed. China is constrained by that power, Russia is blocked from effective use of waters on its periphery, and other hostile powers seek to avoid U.S. naval power, whereas the U.S. uses it as a central force.

The idea of a consistent domestic model is more difficult to grasp than that of a consistent military strategy. But the latter has a persistent reality of geography and a persistent solution of naval power aligned with technology and strategy. Even when the connection between naval power and a war deep on land seems to make that strategy pointless, there is constant pressure for the enemy to go to sea. The Soviet Union was forced to enter the North Atlantic as was Germany in spite of their focus on land operations. It is vital to understand the naval dimension of all American wars.

It’s impossible to deny that the U.S. has a serious loneliness problem. One 2018 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 22 percent of all adults — almost 60 million Americans — said they often or always felt lonely or socially isolated. That was a full two years before the Covid pandemic. And Americans appear to be getting lonelier over time: From 1990 to 2021, there was a 25 percentage point decrease in the number of Americans who reported having five or more close friends. Young people now report feeling lonelier than the elderly.

This widespread loneliness is often analogized to a disease, an epidemic. But that label obscures something important: Loneliness in America isn’t merely the result of inevitable or abstract forces, like technological progress; it’s the product of social structures we’ve chosen — wittingly or unwittingly — to build for ourselves.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Sheila Liming is an associate professor of communications and creative media at Champlain College and the author of the new book “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” In the book, Liming investigates what she calls the “quiet catastrophe” brewing in our social lives: the devastating fact that we’ve grown much less likely to simply spend time together outside our partnerships, workplaces and family units. What would it look like to reconfigure our world to make social connection easier for all of us?

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers to defend the proposition that their favorite cuisine is the world’s best.Rob wrote on behalf of a southeast-Asian standout:
The world’s best cuisine cannot be one in which its greatest dishes are accessible only on rare or expensive occasions. Everyone should be able to enjoy a cuisine’s must-try meals, regardless of their budget, nutritional needs, or level of adventurousness. For this reason, Vietnamese cuisine might be the world’s best.
For one, you won’t need a map or a Michelin star to find something good to eat when visiting Vietnam. The best meals are prepared and served on the street. The tables are usually made of cheap plastic and the stools are sometimes only 12 inches off the ground. You’ll spend the equivalent of one to two American dollars, on a random sidewalk in Saigon, and it will be one the richest, most delicious meals of your life. Two, it’s little wonder that Vietnamese food is so often named among the world’s healthiest. The ingredients are fresh and the combinations are light. It’s not so rich or heavy that it can be consumed only as an indulgence. Three, it’s up to you to decide how you want it. While the chefs and cooks of other global cuisines may be often unwilling to deviate from tradition to appeal to popular or idiosyncratic tastes, the Vietnamese are much more accommodating. Low tolerance for anything spicy? Don’t worry; you add your own chiles. Not sure if you’re comfortable eating that? Start with a bowl of pho and a banh mi—a soup and a sandwich. And if you’re clumsy with chopsticks, there’s probably a fork at the table.
The world has so many incredible cuisines. Each can claim complex, satisfying, memorable meals. But Vietnamese is the best. Everyone can enjoy it.
Scott prefers the aquatic snacks of the United States:
My favorite cuisine is good old American seafood from all across the country: lobster, cod, and chowder from New England; blue crab and oysters from the mid-Atlantic; catfish, shrimp and grits, and she-crab soup from the South; grouper, mahi, and stone-crab claws from Florida; crawdads, seafood gumbo, étouffée, and blackened fish from Louisiana; gulf shrimp, ceviche, and black drum from Texas; cioppino, sushi, and fish tacos from California; Dungeness crab, fresh salmon, and geoduck in the Pacific Northwest; sautéed lake trout, perch, and walleye from the inland freshwater lakes … plus hundreds of others I missed.
All of it fresh, amazing, and delicious.
Mitchell revealed his pick reluctantly:
For the record, I’m the type of person who orders anything “drunken” on the Thai menu, reads Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks for fun, and waits months for a reservation at Owamni, so picking a favorite cuisine feels almost like cheating on my significant other. (I feel like somehow the boeuf bourguignon I plan on cooking next weekend is gonna hear I didn’t pick French cuisine, then promptly decide to scorch during the braise.)
Caveats aside, I love food from the Levant, specifically Lebanese cuisine. The reason for my adoration is the ingredients they use, combined with simple cooking methods and accessible flavors: pomegranate molasses, preserved lemons, za’atar, every herb under the sun (the region was central to the spice trade), hot peppers introduced from the Americas, lamb and other funky meats, fresh pita. I understand this is just a list of ingredients, but my mouth started watering just typing them. And even though these ingredients are all over the map, the cooking methods are straightforward: raw salads with olive oil and lemon; kofta cooked over hot coals; bulgur rehydrated with herbs in boiling water. And in the end, all the notes get hit—the raw garlic spice of toum; the bracing acidity of labneh; the sticky sweet crispness of baklava; salty olives from some of the oldest trees in the world.
But I guess it makes sense that one of the cradles of civilization would’ve ended up figuring out the best food. Ancient, fresh, complex, and simple—Lebanese cuisine checks all the delicious boxes.
Bekke’s favorite cuisine is “down-home Midwestern farm cooking”:
Perhaps this is due to my childhood experience with my grandmother’s freshly slaughtered chickens, fried and served with homemade country gravy; fresh vegetables from her garden; homemade bread and jam. My great-aunt Rosa made the best chiffon pies (a childhood delight), and my grandmother and I spent many happy hours baking gingersnaps and other cookies. For years, my birthday preference was pecan pie, not cake. Even today, the foods served at family and community gatherings are always delicious, although not always the healthiest, and served in great abundance.
And, best of all, they’re made with love.  
M.’s favorite cuisine belongs to an island:
I lived for several years in Japan—first with a family of wedding-kimono makers and then on my own in a working-class neighborhood in Tokyo. I prefer the food I found in the various food stands in Monzen-Nakacho to the upper-class cuisine I ate regularly during my first stay. My second visit I was a student at a university in Japan living on a small stipend. The last week of every month I’d be down to my last few hundred yen. I’d go to the ramen shop a block from my tiny apartment and order a plain bowl of noodles.
The owner asked me where I was from when he realized I could speak Japanese. What was I doing in Japan? he asked. It turned out I was studying at the same university his son was attending. I told him I had received a scholarship to study Japanese literature. From then on I was treated to bowls of the most amazing ramen I’ve ever eaten: miso ramen; tonkatsu (pork) ramen; shoyu ramen (soy sauce based). He put vegetables and various meat or seafood in my soup but charged me only for a simple bowl of ramen with nothing added. Eventually, he simply wouldn’t take my money. Those noodles! All homemade.
I cannot make my miso ramen or soup taste anywhere near his, but I could live on Japanese food and be very happy: sushi—not the huge rolls at American Japanese restaurants but the nigiri and maki of Japan—are bite-size pieces of wonder; cold tofu and fried tofu; mackerel; unagi; Japanese curry; tempura. And even teriyaki—but not the sweet syrup found in too many places in this country. I make sticky rice with a small piece of salmon, nori, and some green tea in the bowl and I am happy.
Oscar’s favorite is mine too:
Definitely Mexican. World-class. Complex. Nuanced. Accessible. Simple. Historical.  
Virginia defends the cliché answer with relish:
Things are typically cliché for a reason, and that is the case with French cuisine. It is my favorite for so many reasons, and not all of them have to do with the food items themselves.
I worked in the music industry for some 20-odd years and had the good fortune of attending the Marché International du Disque et de l'Édition Musicale, or Midem, held each year in Cannes. The company I worked for did it in style, putting us all in the legendary Carlton hotel and permitting us to fly in a day or two ahead and stay a day or two later. I took full advantage of that to soak up as much of the French Riviera as I could.
I fell in love with the total sensory experience of French cuisine. It moved beyond the incredibly creamy and rich silkiness of the yogurt served in glass jars, so thick and seductive as it slid past my lips first thing in the morning with a slight tang—just enough to rouse my sleepy mind delightfully. It went beyond the café crème served in china cups that might have been older than this country. It was so much more than the exquisite salade Niçoise at the café a few doors down. It is all those lovely ingredients prepared with intense attention to every little detail of every ingredient to offer diners’ tastebuds a true feast. But it is also the complete sensory experience of dining in France.
Alongside the glasses of champagne, which are so aptly assigned the adjective sparkling, and the fluffy clouds of pastry, the French served up candlelight or a sunny sky, conversation or pensive hours, a view of the Mediterranean or 100-year-old candlelit stone walls adorned with quick sketches by Picasso and Matisse, among others, and a look of disappointed condemnation for an American woman who was silly enough to rush through a meal because she sat alone in a packed restaurant at lunchtime. That experience slammed home to me the importance to the French of savoring not only one’s meal but, rather, the entire meal hour. Every minute of it, and with every sense. No one minds a woman dining alone. But they do mind her rushing through the meal.
After the disdain tossed at me by the staff during that rushed lunch of mine, I made sure to maximize every moment of my time in France each year to just absorb it all and enjoy it to the fullest. In one of my last years there, I had dinner with a colleague from New York I only saw once each year, at Midem, and she marveled at how brave I was to venture out of the hotel and go to restaurants alone, especially since my French was and still is very rudimentary and meager. I told her it had nothing to do with bravery and everything to do with a determination to not miss out on anything.
Whenever work sent us anywhere international, I ensured that I had a free weekend, during which I would visit a grocery store and walk around the local shops. But no matter where in the world I was, those experiences always brought to mind French cuisine, and I suppose they always will. I do not know if I will ever return to experience French cuisine in France, so I have learned to make the country’s pastries and salads and I seek out its yogurt and champagnes whenever I can. And above all else, I slow down and savor every bit of the experience of those foods, from putting my hands into the flour mixture to the last sip of a hot café. The cuisine reminds me of one of the most important life lessons I’ve had—life is fleeting, but our senses can make each minute of it special if you will only let it.
Eden counters that we all know a neighboring cuisine is better:
There are so many cuisines to choose from that this question is tricky to answer. What can top the American breakfast, with its hearty scrambles, crispy bacon, and luscious French toast? Is there anything better than a hot, steaming bowl of pho with the thin slices of raw steak that cook in the rich, anise-tinged broth? What about tacos with crispy carnitas that melt in your mouth? Spicy curries, french fries, sushi, pastrami sandwiches, and fried chicken are all to die for.
However, one cuisine trumps all the rest: Everyone knows it is Italian food. When I read your question, the first thing that popped into my head was a pan full of cheesy, comforting lasagne. Risotto. Bolognese. Vongole. Cacio e pepe. PIZZA! Tell me you can live without pizza and pasta, and I will tell you that it is not a life worth living.
Miriam’s choice is the cuisine of her ancestors:
Ashkenazi Jewish cooking is brown and beige. It's not fashionable or garlic-heavy, and it excludes lots of delectable things like pork, shellfish, and the combination of meat and dairy. Moreover, I discovered it only in my teens and 20s, after both my grandmothers had died. It is not the taste of my childhood. But it’s haimish—it is the taste of my roots.
Like Jewish cooking everywhere, Ashkenazi food is the cuisine of central and eastern European Jews’ gentile neighbors, adapted to Jewish dietary laws and with matzoh added. Now with so many Ashkenazi-style restaurants closing their doors, Polish and Ukrainian restaurants are where I usually go for a taste of nostalgia. Just yesterday I read the bad news in Tablet that whitefish chubs may soon be a thing of the past; another delight bites the dust.
I can’t convince gentiles that Ashkenazi Jewish cooking is the best. But I can write this love letter and valediction.
Mary Ann writes:
If I had to choose just one item, it would be Hokkaido milk bread; I can toast it, make sandwiches, make pizza, butter it, or eat it plain. It’s versatile and delicious.
Phoebe cooks all the time and one cuisine stands out:
My favorite cuisine is Middle Eastern, specifically, from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Israel. To me, it checks every single box. The food is so varied. The flavors are astoundingly complex. Meals include tons of fruits, vegetables, meats, grains, nuts, and, last but definitely not least, spices. The dishes take on different personalities and different regional tastes. And it’s one of the world’s healthiest cuisines, based on what research we’ve got. My litmus test is “What could I eat every day, for every meal, and be happy?” This is it.
Bobby describes his favorite meal, which has changed:
For a long time my go-to has been a traditional turkey dinner with all of the fixings and sides, but it’s a heavy meal that necessarily includes a lot of potential allergens and dietary restrictions (gluten, meat, etc.).
Just earlier this week I was thinking how a nice bowl of hot ramen was probably my current No. 1. At its base form, ramen only requires a few simple ingredients, and it rules. It’s hot and savory and chewy and slurpy and filling. But then you can add meat and eggs and more veggies and spice and all sorts of things to create a variety of sensory experiences, all while never sacrificing the core of what makes ramen great in the first place. Plus, if you really want some cronch, you can get karaage on the side at many ramen places. And hot green tea or hot sake to drink? Damn, now that’s a perfect meal on a rainy spring day.
Emily hearts New York City:
The city has its own style of pizza, bagels, cheesecake, and hot dogs. Not to mention the foods that are quintessential to a NYC deli: The pastrami! The chopped cheese!  Black-and-white cookies, even! All unbeatable, in my opinion, spawning countless “NYC-style” eateries worldwide. And all that culinary excellence coming out of just one city? No cuisine on earth can compare. I moved away two years ago and I miss it every day.
Jaleelah likes Arab food:
Arab food has everything you need. The peasant dishes are packed with superfoods—my grandmother finds it hilarious that tahini and freekeh have become health-food crazes. The salads are the best in the world. There’s no pointless filler like lettuce; the dishes are made to be flavourful. I could eat tabbouleh for breakfast every day. And most of the dishes are relatively cheap and easy to make. One $20 shawarma platter will give you at least three balanced meals.
And Joshua prefers the local cuisine wherever he happens to be:
As a Michigander, I am extremely partial to our style of pizza: square, in a pan, with a practically burnt crust. Delicious. Or the Detroit Coney dog: Chili, mustard, and onions smothered over a hot dog. Or the pasty, a meat-pie creation with a rich history in the mining culture of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
When I travel within the United States, I never seek out the familiar. I avoid restaurant chains of any kind. I don’t rely on Google Maps or Yelp to find a bite to eat. I ask someone local (my Uber driver, the hotel desk staff, etc.) where they go for takeout. In a country with a long history of immigration, every city has its own unique food scene. I always seek out the best plate of food I can find for under $15. You eat crabs when you are in Baltimore. Lobster in New England. BBQ in Kansas City. Gumbo in New Orleans. You drown yourself in cheese in Wisconsin. This world is so much more exciting when you eat the food that everyone else is eating in that specific place, but not necessarily anywhere else.
Thanks for all your evocative answers––I’ll see you later this week.

The Trump administration made some bold claims about the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed the corporate-tax rate. Larry Kudlow, the head of the former president’s National Economic Council, said it would boost GDP so much that it would “virtually” pay for itself. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, went further, saying the tax cut would “in fact create additional revenue.”This was fantastical nonsense; tax cuts rarely if ever pay for themselves. But the Congressional Budget Office gave the Trump team’s sales pitch one important boost: The agency ran the bill through its model and concluded that it would have a positive, if muted, effect on long-term growth. Most Republicans were going to support Trump’s bill no matter what, but now they could do so with a straight face.[Read: The seven myths of the GOP tax bill]The CBO’s relatively sober prediction was wrong, a group of respected economists is charging. The Budget Office, along with other forecasters, assumes that when corporations get a tax cut, they take some of that money and reinvest it in their business, boosting growth and productivity. That assumption ignores a central dynamic of today’s economy: Many sectors are dominated by a small number of huge companies.Much has been written over the past few years about the rise of corporate concentration. The Biden administration has made fighting monopolies one of its key economic-policy priorities. Yet none of the leading economic models takes consolidation into account. This is more than a purely technical concern. The risk is that conventional modeling is misinforming policy makers, Republican and Democratic alike, on how to structure policies that affect everyone. Governments may be relying on models that are too stuck in theory, too slow-changing, and too simplistic to be truly helpful.“The existing models do not work well, particularly in the moments when it really counts,” such as a financial crisis, Joseph Stiglitz, the former chief economist for the World Bank, told me. “The underlying economics, the assumptions that go into the economics, are very badly flawed.”Stiglitz is an adviser to American University’s new Institute for Macroeconomic & Policy Analysis, an initiative to update those assumptions and improve those forecasting tools. Today, IMPA is launching a new economic-forecasting model that researchers believe better captures how the economy works and, by extension, how policy changes will really play out.Competitive economies and monopolized economies behave very differently, economists have found. When there’s plenty of competition, corporations tend to plow money into their business, investing more in research and development or raising worker pay to attract talent. But if a company doesn’t face much real competition, the pressure is off—it can simply pass the extra money along to shareholders. A model that ignores this distinction might be suitable for a tidy theoretical economy, but it won’t match the messy one we live in.In the inaugural paper using IMPA’s model, the economists Lídia Brun, Ignacio González, and Juan Montecino conclude that the Trump tax bill was “harmful to the economy”—it slowed down growth and amped up inequality. Slashing the corporate-tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent did not boost workers’ wages by thousands of dollars a year, as Trump appointees had predicted. Nor will it boost GDP in the long term. The IMPA model finds instead that cutting the corporate-tax rate “reduced the funds used for productive investment” by shunting money into investor payouts. What’s more, it suggests that raising taxes on business monopolies might stimulate growth by lowering those firms’ stock-market returns and thus spurring investors to pour money into more dynamic businesses.The relationship between corporate-tax rates and business investment is a fiercely debated topic among economists, and some forecasters I spoke with didn’t think that rising corporate concentration was causing them to overestimate the economy’s growth. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who did not work on the IMPA project, told me that concentration shows up indirectly in other variables commonly included in big forecasting models.That said, several forecasters agreed that conventional models rely on questionable, even laughable, assumptions. Some models, for instance, assume that the country has perfectly competitive labor markets in which workers have total freedom to switch jobs and are paid precisely what they’re worth to a company’s bottom line. And the models generally don’t account for the ways in which having markets dominated by so few competitors—Google with web search, Amazon with online shopping—might skew profits, investments, and wages. “The assumption that there’s no market power is just wrong,” Stiglitz told me. “It’s so obvious. In many sectors of our economy, we don’t have anything that approaches that level of competition.” He cited the tech sector, drug stores, even dog food.[Mark Mazur: Taxpayers are very confused]Creating the new IMPA model to account for monopoly power in the United States was a three-part process, Montecino and González told me. The researchers first constructed a complex mathematical model capturing a variety of factors that contribute to growth. They then tested it against historical data, seeing how well it would predict the 2015 economy using financial numbers from 2012, for instance. Finally, they let other economists critique it and review its predictions.One of those economists was Kimberly Clausing, a tax expert at UCLA School of Law. She said that she appreciated the attempt to make a model that accounted for enormous companies’ outsize power. “Things look different when things get hyperconcentrated,” she told me. “Look at the economy of the 1970s, when there was less concentration. The labor share of income was higher. Investment was higher. So many of the main macro variables performed differently.”Many of the forecasters I spoke with mentioned that forecasting is just plain hard—and something economists have not gotten much better at in recent decades. Chris Varvares of S&P Global Market Intelligence, a forecaster with decades of experience who is not affiliated with IMPA, noted that the economy is enormous and complex. Impossible-to-predict events, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine, happen all the time. Even the world’s most influential economists often disagree on what causes what. “There’s not always good data,” he told me. “That’s just something we have to live with.”That said, IMPA’s economists stressed that rising corporate concentration has profoundly changed our economy over the past several decades. It seems past time for it to also change how we model the economy.

Technological change has always had huge impacts on societies and economies that were impossible to predict in advance, and hard to appreciate even in retrospect. The big technologies of the industrial age—fossil fuels, mass production, radio and TV, and nuclear power, required large scale and hence tended to concentrate power. They played a role in the rise of the 20th century’s big dictatorships and large industrial combines that were able to develop and make use of them, and needed to be tamed and regulated by democracies before their benefits spread.The rise of digital technologies in the later part of the 20thcentury were, from the beginning, thought to be democratizing since they distributed information and thus power broadly and cheaply. They indeed did that a little too well, upsetting the hierarchies that certified and distributed information like legacy media companies, governments, universities, and other elite institutions. In an internet-enabled world where anyone could say and publish anything, power spread out a little too far and undermined trust in authority across the board. In this period it was authoritarian states that gradually learned how to make use of the opportunities provided by the digital world to weaken their opponents.___STEADY_PAYWALL___It is a fool’s errand to try to predict the long-term social impacts of new technologies like artificial intelligence. There has been a huge amount of chatter over generative AI programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and outright fear of what is to come. People’s most recent experiences with digital technology have made them wary of disruptive innovations, and they try to predict the future analogizing from past waves of change. The spread of computers and digital technology is widely blamed for the large increases in economic inequality that has occurred across the developed world over the past couple of generations, as the rewards to education and cognitive ability have increased. Contemporary polarization revolves around an educational divide, with highly educated professionals clustering in big urban conglomerations and voting for more progressive parties, and less educated working people living in lower-density regions voting for conservative and populist parties. Automation, as well as technological advances in transportation and communications, have permitted the emergence of a globalized economy where low-skill jobs are easily shipped to low labor cost parts of the world. While this has equalized outcomes internationally, it has decreased equality in rich countries.

Many people assume that the advent of AI will simply be part of this broader wave, and that the technology will further exacerbate socio-economic divisions by automating away the livelihoods of people with lesser skills and education. But the historical account of the social impact of the transition into the digital age was more complex than the current cartoon version has it, and the likely consequences of AI for future equality even more unpredictable. It is entirely possible that future AI will increase rather that decrease equality in certain key respects.While it is doubtlessly true that the transition from an industrial to an information economy increased rewards going to education, there was another respect in which it greatly increased equality, which had to do with gender. I made this case originally in the least read of all of my books, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, published in 1999. Beginning in the late 1960s, there was a massive increase in female labor force participation across the developed world, as hundreds of millions of women entered labor markets. A contemporaneous technological innovation, the birth control pill, separated sex from procreation and reduced the risks of sex for women. The rise of feminism in this period is often thought of as an autonomous cultural event, but it would not have been possible for women to assert their independence were they not able to support themselves economically in new ways.Technology had a massive impact on gender relations. Mechanical energy began substituting for upper body strength across the board. Many people have noted the impact of labor-saving devices like washing machines and dishwashers for women in the home, but more important changes were going on in the workplace. Typical working-class occupations shifted from digging ditches and mining coal to sitting in front of computer screens, working in retail, providing health care, and other service activities.In an information-empowered economy, women had great advantages over men: they were more diligent, reliable, and unlikely to take crazy risks at younger ages. They were also much more willing to sit through lectures and acquire educations; as Richard Reeves has noted, they now attend colleges and universities in much larger numbers than do men across the world.This shift in gender relations was of course hugely disruptive socially and politically. Families began to break down as women asserted their independence and increasingly had the financial means to support themselves and their children. Women began to displace men as the principal breadwinners in many households, leaving men highly insecure about their social status and roles. We should not underestimate the degree to which the current populist backlash has a gender dimension, with working class men becoming the core constituency for populist politicians around the world. Womens’ roles in the economy and society more generally are far from being accepted and secure, but there has nonetheless been a massive increase in gender equality, made possible by the shift into an information economy.This brings us to the question of the likely social impacts of AI. Obviously, the people who design and make AI systems will be richly rewarded for their cognitive skills and educations. But will AI systems destroy more jobs than they create?It seems to me that programs like ChatGPT may have a much more benevolent effect. Since they simply regurgitate content that is on the internet already, these large language models will be full of errors and will need to be constantly checked and certified by their human users for any high-end application. They will obviously be a big problem for professors like me who have to grade papers and read application essays. But in other respects, they may greatly facilitate the ability of people with lower levels of skill and education to write competently.We tend to underestimate the importance of writing skills in our current focus on STEM. A modern economy requires a huge amount of ordinary writing: performance reviews, product descriptions, manuals, ad copy, proposals, after-action reports, accident descriptions, thank you letters, and so on. And many people have a great deal of trouble writing. One of the great advantages of ChatGPT is to eliminate the terror induced by a blank sheet of paper for such people, producing a first draft that can then be easily edited and refined. Just as the universal availability of Wikipedia has eliminated the need to remember dates and facts, so generative AI may allow people poorly served by the current education system to do useful work in an information economy.This doesn’t mean that the advent of generative AI will not have big unanticipated and unpleasant consequences. Among the most threatening are deep fakes, which are spreading rapidly and seem poised to undermine people's trust in virtually everything they see and hear. We will need regulatory systems to restore trust in their provenance, and perhaps to slow down their advance overall so that society can adjust to the disruption. Ezra Klein has suggested not shielding AI companies from liability for the harms they produce the way we shielded internet platforms under Section 230 of the CDA. Whether this the right approach is impossible to know at this juncture, but we will definitely have to regulate.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: Rolf van Root / Unsplash

How did an inanimate universe become animate? That question has been the cause of wars and the inspiration for artists, painters, writers, and of course, scientists.More than any other physical observable, life appears akin to a miracle. For many people, perhaps most people alive in the world today, it still is. Yet, at the heart of science is the presumption that natural effects have natural causes. If we accept that life is subject to physical laws, we are obliged to then move from the sacred to the profane. Or at least to the natural.The conversation, when attempting to address the known unknowns of the universe, would be colossally incomplete if it did not raise what—for most people—are the two most awe-inspiring mysteries of nature: life and consciousness. While both of these domains are typically in the purview of the biological sciences, nature doesn’t divide itself along the lines of 19th century academic disciplines. The laws of biology are determined by the laws of chemistry, which in turn are determined by the laws of physics. Any fundamental understanding of life will ultimately reflect the workings of these laws as well.This fact has inspired some outstanding physics minds in the 20th century to ponder the problem of the nature and origin of life, as well as its possible robustness in the universe. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, wrote an influential book in 1946 entitled What is Life?, which inspired a young student, planning to be an ornithologist, to turn instead to genetics. That student, James Watson, later discovered the double helix nature of DNA as the basis for the genetic code of life. (His scientific collaborator, Francis Crick, was trained as a physicist.)As it turns out, Schrödinger was influenced by Max Delbrück, a physicist who had done seminal work on fundamental physics interactions but later turned his attention to genetics. His work in 1935 on molecular genetics strongly impacted Schrödinger. That work on bacteria and viruses, which won Delbrück the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was done while he still had a teaching position in physics. He didn’t become a professor of biology until 1947.In the 21st century, the tools necessary to address the fundamental mysteries associated with the nature and origin of life are likely once again to be found in physics laboratories, and perhaps even astrophysics departments. The questions are too important and too fundamental to be relegated to merely one area of science.Let’s first consider Schrödinger’s question:What is life?While it seems obvious and easy to tell if something is alive, upon more thought, the definition of life becomes particularly slippery. Ultimately, as Justice Steward said when referring to pornography, one seems driven to simply say, “I know it when I see it.”For example, one might posit the following definition: living systems reproduce faithfully and have an internal metabolism that draws energy from the environment and stores and expends that energy to grow and reproduce.OK then—is fire alive?It ticks all these boxes. A forest fire draws energy from the environment. It reproduces, and even somewhat faithfully, depending on the nature of the fire and the availability of combustibles. It certainly has a metabolism, expending energy to grow and reproduce.But I don’t think anyone would argue a fire is alive, so we need to do better. Here is a definition from Wikipedia: Living organisms are generally thought to be open systems that maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, have a life cycle, undergo metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, reproduce and evolve.This definition is definitely more complete and encompasses living things more closely. Homeostasis refers to the need to maintain biological equilibrium and was first described by the French physiologist Claude Bernard in 1849. In 1920, Walter Bradford Cannon coined the term to describe this biological necessity.The homeostasis requirement probably rules out fire since fire really doesn’t have a moderating feedback loop to maintain a kind of static equilibrium. Nevertheless, it is quite reasonable to think of life, at least life that respires, as controlled burning. One of the surprising aspects of Earth is that there was no free oxygen early on in the history of the planet. This was fortunate, because the process of oxidation releases energy, just as oxygen is needed to fuel most fires. Had oxygen existed early on, many of life’s raw materials would have oxidized early on, releasing valuable stored energy necessary for the life that now covers our planet to begin, evolve, and grow.Life exists somewhere between oxidation and fire. Unlike either, it moderates the intake of energy to maintain homeostasis, which is so crucial for survival, and ultimately reproduction.But, speaking of reproduction, is this essential? What about viruses, like SARS-CoV-2, which has controlled all of our lives over the past few years? Viruses like SARS cannot reproduce on their own. They need to hijack the genetic machinery of other living cells to do so.While they do not fulfill all the requirements to be alive according to the earlier definition, viruses definitely seem alive to me. They have a strategy that requires them to piggyback on other organisms, but they have hardwired the complex biochemical machinery necessary to reproduce in the environs of other living organisms. Moreover, I don’t like the idea that I have to wear masks and get vaccine injections to protect myself against an inanimate object. So, I say viruses may as well be alive. But I also say that Pluto is a planet…Alive or not, it is quite possible that viruses helped life evolve into its present form. Some viruses do not have a deleterious effect on their hosts, in which case, we can consider them as symbionts. Ultimately their biochemical features may be incorporated in more complex cells to allow living systems to expand their capabilities.Perhaps the most famous form of such merging is mitochondria. These are the parts of modern living cells that control the intake and processing of oxygen in respiration. As Lynn Margulis and others first postulated, it is quite likely that mitochondria were autonomous organisms that were assimilated into other cells, enhancing their ability to process energy (respiration allows more than 35 times more energy to be released from the processing of electrons than photosynthesis does).Normal cells of human connective tissue in culture at a magnification of 500x. Photo by National Cancer Institute on UnsplashThis is not unlike the more sophisticated assimilation of the Borg collective, for Star Trek fans. The Borg are an advanced civilization that conquer other civilizations, adapting and utilizing the best features of those civilizations into their own biology and technology. The first Eukaryotic cell that engulfed a mitochondrion didn’t have the capacity to say, “Resistance is futile,” but it probably was.Definitions are useful, but they are not the heart of science (although unfortunately that is the impression that is given all too often in elementary science classes). Science is about processes, about understanding dynamics—and that is what I want to focus on. And while the study of the evolution of diverse life on Earth is a rich and exciting field, involving its own puzzles, this is not where the dominant outstanding questions about life really lie. The big unanswered questions remain: How did life first begin? Is life on Earth unique? Is all life like life on Earth? The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos is due to be released on May 9th, 2023. Copyright © 2023 by Lawrence M. Krauss, and published by Post Hill Press. All rights reserved. This excerpt was published with permission from the author. 

In the summer of 2017, an anonymous tipster informed me of a small network of online propagandists orchestrating troll campaigns and creating memes to support Donald Trump. They gathered on Discord, a text-, voice-, and video-chat platform popular with gamers. I signed up and lurked on their server, observing various green-frog and American-flag avatars hurling insults, posting rudimentary Photoshops of Trump, and daydreaming about undertaking outrageous missions such as trying to infiltrate CNN’s New York headquarters.Initially, the posts unnerved me, but there was also something unserious about them—an oblivious, naive enthusiasm coupled with a grand delusion that their pixelated memes had fully shifted the political landscape. The reason for the bluster was quickly made clear when one of the server’s most prolific posters apologetically told his comrades that he’d be stepping away from his duties for the foreseeable future: His parents were sending him off to sleepaway camp. This shadowy den of trolls was little more than a collection of bored, shitposting kids.I was reminded of my sojourn this week after reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times traced a series of high-profile national-security leaks to a Discord server for gun enthusiasts and gamers that was apparently populated by about two dozen people, most of whom were young men and teenage boys. The classified documents were leaked by the server’s unofficial leader, identified by the Times as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, an airman first class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard. They purportedly reveal information about Ukrainian battlefield positions and infighting among Russian officials, as well as previously unreleased photos of the recently downed Chinese spy balloons.High-profile intelligence leaks are a feature of the 21st century, but this geopolitical incident has little in common with WikiLeaks or the Snowden NSA revelations. In keeping with the dark absurdity of the internet era, the leak does not seem motivated by righteous or even misguided whistleblowing but by an extremely online man, barely old enough to drink, who was trying to impress his teenage friends in a racistly named group chat. Less John le Carré, more 4chan.Although the Discord leaks are, of course, a national-security story, they’re also a story about how information travels in 2023 as the relevance of traditional social media wanes. They are a story about the power, primacy, and unpredictable dynamics of the group chat.People have been talking over one another online in every conceivable form since the beginnings of the internet. Digital bulletin-board systems—proto–group chats, you could say—date back to the 1970s, and SMS-style group chats popped up in WhatsApp and iMessage in 2011. Most social networks now allow users to create multi-person direct messages. But at some point in the late 2010s, as many of us grew exhausted with the process of broadcasting every stray thought to huge, algorithmically sorted audiences, group chats began to take on a new relevance.[Read: Will the 2016 election ever end?]As New York magazine put it in 2019, group chats became “an outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.” If virality and ad-based platforms felt extractive, the group chat was its opposite: restorative, even sacred. It’s a form of communication that often feels like a lifeline to people, and unlike the Facebook feed or Twitter, where posts can be linked to wherever, group chats are a closed system—a safe and (ideally) private space. What happens in the group chat ought to stay there.But these small social networks have their own unpredictable social dynamics. In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in. Different chats, depending on the size, develop their own sets of social rules and hierarchies. “The key to every group chat is mutually assured destruction,” the New York Times reporter Astead Herndon tweeted in 2021. “If you’re the only one dropping tea, you’re at risk. [If] one person is a little too silent, they gotta go.” Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.According to the Post’s reporting, Teixeira was fixated on capturing the attention of—and winning approval from—his Discord community. “He got upset” when people in the chat ignored his long, detailed summaries of classified documents, and he threatened to stop posting altogether, one server member told the newspaper. Eventually, Teixiera started sharing photos of the classified documents with the chat because they were more engaging. As the national-security reporter Spencer Ackerman wrote this week, Teixeira “didn’t leak for patriotism, principle, or even money.” His motivation was far less aspirational but, as Ackerman notes, it was “uncomfortably familiar”: He was showing off for the group chat.Group chats aren’t just good for triggering geopolitical crises—they’re also an effective means to start a bank run, as the world learned last month. The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.” The rumors about SVB’s precarious financial position then spilled out into different whisper networks. Investors, armed with what they believed was sensitive inside information, alerted their portfolio companies, and in a matter of hours, the cascade moved from small WhatsApp groups to the private text threads of chief financial officers, and then into massive 1,500-person servers. But thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security. As Ackerman suggested this week, Teixiera is unlikely to be the last extremely online person to have a security clearance or be motivated to break the law in order to impress his friends.This presents a major issue: Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor. As law enforcement, journalists, and researchers have learned, trying to track extremist groups such as QAnon or right-wing militias is much harder when they retreat to smaller, private chat apps. Voice-chat apps such as Zello have been a haven for online extremists, who used the closed networks to plan harassment campaigns and violent gatherings such as the January 6 insurrection.The problems of abuse, context collapse, and networked harassment across traditional social networks at scale are well documented—as are the challenges in trying to moderate those spaces. But as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers. If the weak ties of social networks lead to volatile interactions among strangers, group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization—one of the more popular innovations to come from the flawed premise of Web3 that one enthusiast described as “a group chat with a bank account.” Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.The social-media era might be ending. If so, may it be remembered as a complex, sometimes delightful, occasionally dangerous, almost always fraught experiment in mass connectivity. But the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version. The arc of the internet is long, but it always bends toward chaos.

Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Why Politics Fails. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ben Ansell discuss the collective goods that we all desire (democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity) and why political systems struggle to bring them about; the implicit trade-offs in democratic systems; and the institutions we need to create more just and prosperous societies.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Your book, just out, is called Why Politics Fails. One of the standard answers that a lot of people would probably give is that politicians fail; that politicians are self-serving, evil, conniving, and out of touch. Before we get into what your answer is, why is that the wrong answer? It seems like a pretty plausible answer.Ben Ansell: It is a plausible answer to the extent that our politicians share the frailties that we all share. My answer is that, broadly, politics fails because all of us are driven by individual self-interest. That means that we find it hard to coalesce towards the kind of collective goals we might want. Our politicians are representatives of us and they face an even sharper set of constraints and incentives to misbehave, perhaps, than we do. Perhaps they're worse versions of us. That might be right. But ultimately, they disagree, at least in part—and often, mostly—because we disagree.I construed that in the book by, to some extent, thinking the worst of everybody. But I'm not trying to create a moral message to say that humans are sort of fallen and that we all behave poorly in every instance. There are all kinds of ways in which we can have harmonious relationships with one another. But those usually only occur when we all agree on outcomes to begin with. Or when there aren't any interdependencies among us where, if I get something, it makes it harder for you to get that thing. And the moment we end up in a world where we do disagree with one another—and I think we've seen over the last several decades that we all do fundamentally disagree in liberal democracies and that in part explains our political polarization—we exit the world of harmony. We do have to recognize and adjust for the fact that people will disagree, on the one hand, so we have to think about ways in which our democratic institutions can manage that disagreement effectively, but also that people will misbehave when they're not monitored tyrannically. And nobody wants to be monitored tyrannically. And we might misstate what we want or we might fail to come through on promises that we make. If we assume that those kinds of dynamics are pretty pervasive, our politics will work better if we try and design institutions that can respond to those incentives.But the institutions that we have often don't fit the current state of events that we're in. We often feel frustrated because an institution designed for an earlier time is failing to give us what we want today. And that's a dance really. Getting rid of them in a kind of populist bonfire of the institutions creates the dilemma that we now enter a world where nobody can trust what anyone else is going to do anymore and I think is responsible, in part, for some of the volatility we see in contemporary politics. But going along with institutions just because they're there can lead us to the situation we have in, say, the US Senate, where very, very small states with around a million people get the same representation as states with tens of millions of people. Now we have a different problem where the shoe doesn't really fit anymore. Ultimately, our political problems sort of swing between those two poles.Mounk: Let's talk through some of those traps that you discuss in the book. Perhaps you can briefly list them and then we can start with the security trap. Ansell: There are five broad goals that most people can generally agree on: democracy, equality, solidarity, security, and prosperity. To give you the example of security that you mentioned, that's a trap where we can't avoid anarchy without risking tyranny, which is precisely the problem that Thomas Hobbes is in part solving, but in part creating, with Leviathan.I think Western European countries in particular seem to have found the right place within this trade-off. It was successfully resolved in those countries that made the police force and the citizenry less different from one another, creating civil police forces where the police were supposed to be drawn from the local population and to govern the local population. That was the initial idea, for example, behind the London Metropolitan Police Force, and it was very much created in contrast with what we perceive to be the autocratic continental police forces, which are essentially military offshoots—gendarmeries, which are officers wearing military-like uniforms and carrying weapons around. We still see some of that, with the Italian Carabinieri and so on. That type of more tyrannical-looking police force was perhaps a step too far for some countries. But those countries that did develop these civic police forces, I think, did straddle that balance quite nicely. That said, even in the United Kingdom, the London Metropolitan Police force has in recent years murdered an innocent man suspecting him to be a terrorist during the 7/7 bombings, and has had an officer rape and murder a citizen whom he picked up walking home during the COVID lockdown, and has had a serial rapist arrested. Even in the country that seems to have resolved most of these questions about how one avoids anarchy without having an overbearing police force, we still clearly have a number of police officers who are stepping past that mark.What I would advise people to do is to always, when thinking about the security problems, consider the individual incentives of citizens to misbehave, on the one hand, and to think about the incentives of police officers to act in ways that maximize the interest of each individual officer. That might just be earning more money. It might be that you joined the police force because you like exerting authority on people. It might be corruption. But the simplest way of avoiding individual incentives creating bad outcomes is to observe people in some way and to set up a framework where we can see what both citizens and the police are doing. In the UK, CCTV cameras have been around since the 1990s. That kind of observation can sort of stop anarchy among citizens. But we now have that type of observation among security forces with body cameras on police officers. And there's lots of evidence that it does tend to moderate their behaviors. They're less likely to draw their weapons, for example. So one could make an argument that observation helps and we certainly have the technologies to do so. But that leads us to a couple of dilemmas. George Floyd was murdered on camera, and not just on the cameras of citizens, but in fact on the body cameras of a number of Derek Chauvin’s fellow officers. The existence of observation alone doesn't prevent bad police behavior—although, it did, in the long run, help prosecute Derek Chauvin. And then we have the broader question, which is how we feel about being constantly observed, and is that a different form of tyranny? My current view of this is rather than defunding the police, observing the police would be the best way of ensuring public safety but removing or reducing the possibility of egregious police violence.Mounk: Security is perhaps the most fundamental of your dilemmas. But I think second after security is perhaps democracy.What is the nature of the collective action dilemma when we're talking about democracy?Ansell: Ultimately, democracy is about how we make decisions and how difficult it is to make decisions. In a way, many of the problems later on and our inability to achieve, say, our security goals might themselves be reduced to our inability to actually make collective decisions at all. Why can't we make collective decisions? The democracy trap, as I set it up, essentially boils down to the fact that there isn't such a clear thing as the will of the people, so that there's no way for us to know what society truly wants. That doesn't make a great deal of sense unless everybody literally agrees on everything. Instead, we have to have some rules and procedures to aggregate people's differences and come to some kind of collective answer. The way I talk about democracy is to contrast a situation where you have pervasive chaos and you can't make any decisions at all. And there is no unimpeachable way of taking lots of individual preferences and turning them into something that collectively makes sense and that can indeed happen under certain conditions. I talk a lot about the votes around Brexit and the difficulty that the ruling party had back between the vote in 2016 and 2019 in coming to any kind of agreement at all. But the alternative that we can get into when we resolve chaos, sometimes, is just polarization, which I think is more symptomatic of the American experience over the last 20 years: decisions can get made, but they’re decisions where one half of the population is set against the other half with great venom and discontent.Mounk: One of the striking things about America is that in public opinion polls, polarization is actually not that extreme on policy issues. When you ask people how they feel about the police, abortion, their view of history or even economic policy, they come up with what to me seem pretty reasonable positions which a majority of people agree with and which are not particularly extreme. But on most of these issues, the two main political parties take stances that both are quite far divorced from where the bulk of the American population lies and extremely far away from each other. How do we get to that outcome?Ansell: As you say, Americans tend to agree on the specifics, but they often disagree on more general sort of philosophical issues. We see that in the United Kingdom as well. There are really large differences across parties in the UK on questions like the death penalty or whether children respect their elders enough—big-picture social issues. But if you ask people about government spending on education, or even the general tax level, you find a lot more agreement on this sort of specific policy question. So I don't think that the American experience is unique. Polarization between parties reflects in part these more fundamental preferences that people have or claim to have, but I think it does, in the American and, increasingly, the British context, also come from the way in which the leaders of those parties are increasingly elected through primary elections; if the American public as a whole has quite moderate preferences, that's not always true among those people who turn out to vote in the primary, who will tend to have more extreme preferences. It's also the case that moderate congressional representatives or senators tend to win elections in swing states and therefore are less likely to remain in office for longer periods of time, because those are swing states where a Republican is replaced by a Democrat and vice versa. The same is true in the United Kingdom, where there are safe seats that Conservatives and Labour MPs always win. And so the more moderate members of parliament, who represent those more moderate constituencies, are going to be powerless. In part, our political systems are structured to empower the extremists, both among voters and among politicians. Why is it that people seem to agree on the specifics, but not on the general? Well, I think here parties have been increasingly good at taking their philosophies, which to some degree bubble up on the extremes, and guiding voters who are aligned with that party to think in that way—in other words, the parties are leading the voters. On the broad philosophical issues about fairness or about the role of government—even if, on specifics, people find that they might agree—they often find themselves in disagreement, which I think is quite elite-driven in both countries.Mounk: I strongly agree with your point about primary elections. It’s also really important to note that moderates tend to come from swing districts and therefore tend to sometimes lose elections, and in a system that's as seniority-based as the United States Senate that actually gives greater power to people who tend to be more ideologically extreme.But talk me through what you think would be a better constitutional setup. Are there institutional reforms that would help the political parties represent where the center of public opinion seems to lie more effectively?Ansell: There are revolutionary changes that you could make which would almost literally involve a revolution, but I think are still worth discussing. Both Britain and America have electoral systems that privilege two parties. Those parties can potentially be more easily captured by extremes, but that's not always the case. You can have highly successful moderate leaders who are able to push the party in that direction, but certainly there is a kind of inbuilt centrifugal force that pushes people out to the extremes. I'm not fully sold on proportional representation, not least because I think of Weimar Germany, the French Fourth Republic, contemporary Israel—none of these are great examples for proportional representation and multiparty systems. So there are weaknesses to that. But I think a system where people's votes translate into seats for parties in a much clearer fashion than is true in the United Kingdom or the United States would have a number of advantages in stabilizing politics. Essentially while lots of new parties can emerge and die in PR systems (and that's not necessarily a bad thing, either, because it means that new ideas can get represented), it's also the case that coalitions tend to be larger than just 50%. Oftentimes, you'll see that there are more moderate parties that are constantly in government. Even when you have a party more to the extreme governing in lots of PR coalitions, it can often end up governing with a whole range of other parties. Mark Rutte has been the Prime Minister of the Netherlands for over a decade now and he's had four separate coalitions in which almost every major party in the Netherlands had been represented at some point. That means that there is more stability in policymaking to the extent that there is the same Prime Minister and many of the same figures in charge, but also everybody gets a turn at some point. It's less slash and burn than in countries like the United Kingdom, where it's usually either the Conservatives or the Labour Party and there's a bridge-burning tendency where you get rid of all the reforms of the previous party and introduce yours as long as you can stay in government. Proportional representation systems tend to have the stability of a coalition that's much broader across the public and that almost always privileges groups somewhere in the middle of the distribution of political preferences. Now, that might be stultifying, in lots of ways, and it can be unstable too, as in Weimar. But in the northern European countries it has been really quite stable. That's been good for things like investment, for lower inequality in those countries, and for consistent funding of their public spending projects and consistent taxation to pay for that spending.There is a danger for all of us that the grass is always greener on the other side. PR systems, I think, are more likely to create chaos and indecision, things not happening. There was the post-war era in Italy, where there was roughly a new Prime Minister per year. But of course, that's the period in which the Italian economy suddenly zooms to the front of the line in developed country wealth up through the 1980s. In some ways, it's the worst political time for Italy, but economically, it's fabulous for the country, and even the Fourth Republic in France is a period of growth. So sometimes it's hard to separate out these things. It feels unaccountable, because it’s hard to know who to punish, and seems unstable, because you have lots of politicians going all the time. And yet, it's also associated with a period of declining inequality, growing prosperity and the development of the welfare state. Proportional representation is going to work least well where there are a series of chaotic, different preferences that just can't be aggregated easily. Mounk: I'm going to zoom ahead to the third trap, because you are invoking it, which is that of prosperity. Why is it that a country like Italy was able to sustain all of that economic growth in the 1950s up through the ‘80s, and yet has now had 30 or 40 years of stagnation? Is there a broader story to be told here, about why we obviously all want prosperity, and yet some countries like Italy end up getting so mired and stuck?Ansell: Broadly speaking, I do think most difficulties of attaining prosperity are about the fact that long-run planning and long-run economic growth generally require some kind of immediate cost bearing by somebody. If we borrow money to go to university, we're making an investment that's costly to us now and will pay off a long time in the future. Many investments have that quality, but political systems are not well structured to support that kind of time-based decision making.President Roosevelt had a massive majority in both houses by a massive margin in the late 1930s and initially wanted to introduce the costs of Social Security immediately, that is the payments, into paychecks but have the first benefits come about eight years later. But after losing a congressional election in 1938, they just reversed it completely—actually, the benefits will come at the same time as the costs. They were unable to separate out the two. And that's a much more general problem that we can see in examples from the biggest of all, which is climate change (taking costs now to get to net zero when we know the payoff may not even happen while we're alive). But it also exists with all kinds of development choices. Putting in hard work for politicians, if you know that you're not guaranteed to be in office three or four years later, is very difficult. Another example, which was a lovely policy idea, to some extent, was the baby bonds that Tony Blair introduced in the New Labour government of the early 2000s. That was a small amount of money, about one thousand pounds, that everybody would get at birth and be able to access at 18. Now, the problem is very few political parties are still in power 18 years later. So they only came in last year, by which time Blair had not only been replaced but, in fact, we've had four separate Conservative Prime Ministers. That's a sort of extreme example of a policy that might well be beneficial—it would be useful for everybody to have these opportunities when they enter adulthood—but where the political payoffs are just a mile away from the costs that are incurred.Mounk: Talk us through equality. What is the trap of equality and why is that something that we all desire but that we individually act to undermine?Ansell: I counterpose the difficulty of achieving equal rights and freedoms, or even equal opportunities, on the one hand, with achieving equal outcomes. What I'm drawing on there is a large range of contemporary political theory where everybody agrees to equal treatment in some regard—from the kind of libertarian view of equal property rights and equal treatment under the law and to dispose of that property in any way you want to a kind of fully egalitarian view that equal outcomes are what is important. I think it's obvious to most people that it's very hard to achieve both at the same time; that to have extremely equal outcomes while letting everybody do what they want and dispose of their property as they want is almost logistically impossible. There's a nice example from the political theorist G.A. Cohen where he argues that you could have a world where everybody gets paid exactly the same and everybody can do exactly what they want in the labor market, and do what they're best at, as long as everybody is willing to have an “egalitarian ethos,” where everybody is willing to accept exactly the same returns for what they do. Now there is no contradiction. But that's a long way away from the world in which we live. In almost all cases, getting towards equal outcomes is going to lead to some kind of restrictions on rights and vice versa. Mounk: Even at a more fundamental level, it's obvious in the literature that there's just very, very basic conflicts between different forms of equality, which is a point made by Amartya Sen and others. Either you have real equality or similarity in how much money people take home at the end of the month or you have equality in how much they’re paid per hour. But unless there's a very tyrannical state that forces everybody to work exactly 30 hours a week, you cannot have both. Either you’re still going to have some people who are much more affluent because they choose to work a lot more or you're going to have to pay people very differentially for the time they do work. Either way, society is unequal in some very important respects.Ansell: Equal processes almost always lead to people doing divergent things. And to stop those divergent things from producing divergent outcomes generally requires a restriction on those processes—that trade-off is inevitable and you can end up in in extreme examples, in a kind of Stalinism where you essentially enslave or exhort everybody to work as hard as they can and give them all the same. You can do that but it becomes tyrannical. Or you can end up in a world where you wave your hands in the air and say, “Well, who knows? Everyone should do what they want, no restrictions,” and then, of course, you end up with extremely unequal outcomes. Now, again, those are the extremes of politics failing. In most advanced industrial countries we live somewhere in the middle, where we're constantly engaged in this trade-off between the two.People really don't like extremes of inequality. But that doesn't mean that they are preternaturally driven to want extremes of equality. That doesn't necessarily hold. People don't care, it seems from most surveys, about equal wealth, per se. But they do care quite strongly about their treatment. People care about being treated equally—no exceptions, the rules apply to all of us. They care less about the more abstract ideas of the overall aggregate equality of outcomes in society.Mounk: Your last trap is about solidarity—what is the trap of solidarity, how is that different from the trap of equality, and how do we get out of it?Ansell: Solidarity is how we look after one another. In some ways, it applies, I suppose, to some kind of equalization of welfare: if somebody is really poorly off, you're going to make them better off. But it doesn't really require any kind of major narrowing of equality in society. It is, of course, a form of equal treatment. The idea is that we would all like it if, when we fell on hard times, we had somebody, or society in general, help us out. That's what solidarity is. In substantive terms, that means the policies that political scientists call the “welfare state”—health care, education, pensions, unemployment insurance, and so on. All of those things can exist in highly unequal countries like the United States or South Africa and they can exist in highly equal countries like the Czech Republic. They obviously operate differently in those countries and they can be designed differently. But I think they follow a common human impulse, which is, even in highly unequal countries, there is a lot of charitable giving or a lot of religious common feeling. I think that's as true in the United States as anywhere else. In particular, I talk about the difficulty that often emerges of solidarity across a diverse group of people who don't always feel a sense of oneness with one another. I think that is something that is heightened by America's racial politics. But it's not a solely American experience. Lots of ethnically or linguistically diverse countries have had difficulty in creating solidaristic social programs that benefit lots of diverse groups who might not always want to look after each other.If we were having this conversation in the late 1990s or early 2000s I think the general consensus in political science and economics at that time was that more diverse countries have smaller welfare states and that these things must be related. I think there are increasingly some arguments that say you could have a Dutch model, where you have a kind of pillarisation: you have diversity in the Dutch case, really, in religious terms, and there's a famous line about the Dutch education system which was “If a window broke in the Calvinist school, the Catholic school and the public school would also get new windows.” You would find ways of spreading the money around. So diversity doesn't have to lead to low spending. It's not a mechanical effect. But secondly, I think there's increasingly strong evidence that whatever differences there are in diversity can be overcome by appeals to some kind of broader—and it is, indeed, often national—oneness. If it's about creating solidarity across a group of people, canny political entrepreneurs can reframe that debate. And they can reframe it about the nation as a whole.I think you can see that to some degree in places like Scotland with the SNP idea of “civic nationalism,” that I think has worked quite well as a unifying political campaign across individual divides in Scotland under Nicola Sturgeon. So I don't think that diversity means doom. I do think that welfare chauvinism—a political science term for wanting public spending only on native-born populations—is popular in Europe. To give you an example of that, anybody used to be able to come to the UK and get treated by the NHS, then that was restricted to only legal immigrants and nationals. And then legal immigrants themselves had to pay a fee. Those were very politically popular decisions that narrowed the scope of solidarity. And we do have to push back against that. But I think there are ways of doing that and I think civic nationalism is one potential mechanism.Mounk: It seems to me that there is another trade-off, or trap, here, which is that on the one hand, it is understandable that you want to call attention to conflicts and inequalities in a country that over the last few decades has become much more likely to frame public discourse around how some groups are faring less well than others and the ways in which they are discriminated against and so on. But on the other hand, that, of course, seems to counteract exactly that kind of emphasis of “we are all part of the same nation.” How do you combine those things in terms of how the public discourse is framed today? In Britain, the United States and some other countries, how do you think we're doing at reconciling those two goals?Ansell: It's an inherent challenge when you have a kind of assimilationist argument up against the multiculturalist argument, where the people who are the proponents of multiculturalism and also the people who are, generally speaking, proponents of solidarism, because it creates a trap for them in the sense that if they are speaking about differences, and people hear that and think “Gosh, those people are different,” that reduces solidarity. And it creates potential for bad faith arguments from assimilationists, who don't really want to spend more on the welfare state—“We would if only you stopped highlighting these differences.” That is very challenging. I do think that most of the change in this will come from the general public blurring existing differences in their minds and simply caring less about ethnic or religious differences within society. Now, that becomes tricky if you're trying also to make up for historic inequalities in those differences. But if the general public stops caring as much about those differences, then they're sort of solving the solidarity problem, in part, themselves,  including everybody in a sort of single nation—unless when people become more diversity tolerant they also are still exercised about making up for past inequalities. Then you can lose that kind of reparative effect. And that's going to be a challenge for people who want to make up for the previous misfortunes of ethnic or religious or linguistic communities, if they discover that that moment of reparation never really happens: we get a moment of national solidarity, but there's never a kind of extra push for that group. It’s much better for us to acknowledge that we will have differences, that we can't always be trusted, and to design institutions that don't treat us as angels, to paraphrase James Madison, but understand that we're not we're not devils, either—we’re people. And we need institutions that are made for people.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      The FBI yesterday arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard employee, for posting highly sensitive Pentagon documents online. Teixeira, at this point, seems to have had no reason for spilling national secrets to a chat group other than that he wanted to show off, impress his friends, and establish himself as an important person in a small community of digital gamers. This, from the available reporting, seems different from the cases of other young people who compromised national security, including Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, and, of course, Edward Snowden.But all of these cases—as well as the notorious cases of much older people who betrayed their country, such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen—are bound by the common thread of narcissism. Teixeira, if early reports prove accurate, might be the dorkiest of these cases, but make no mistake: The damage he is alleged to have caused looks to be immense, all because he reportedly wanted to be the boss among a clique of online pals.Brainless bragging so far seems to apply in Teixeira’s case. But my assertion about betrayal and narcissism will infuriate those who see Winner and Snowden as noble whistleblowers who should have been honored rather than persecuted. Winner, they might note, suffered for her choices (and got a far stiffer sentence than most of the January 6 insurrectionists). Snowden fled—or, as his apologists would argue, had to flee—to Russia to remain beyond the reach of an American state determined to punish him for revealing government misconduct.[Juliette Kayyem: I oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard. I cannot fathom how this happened.]The romanticized versions of these stories fail to account for the various shades of narcissistic behavior on display in all of these cases, and especially in the most recent breaches. I am not here to argue the case for or against any of these people, but for the record, I think Snowden was (and is) a traitor, Winner was naive and foolish, and Manning was, mostly, a victim. All did serious damage to this nation. For most of my adult life, in positions in the U.S. Senate and the Defense Department, I held a security clearance; I would not have made the same choices, and I deplore theirs.Despite their various justifications, however, the crimes both of self-proclaimed do-gooders and avowed traitors are not that different from those Teixeira is alleged to have committed. They are the product of a protracted epidemic of narcissism, and if the U.S. national-security community does not find a way to protect classified information from this malady, it’s going to happen again.To be fair, intelligence organizations are not exactly blind to the problem. Intelligence professionals use the acronym MICE to explain the four main reasons people betray their country: money, ideology, compromise, and ego. Money is always an issue, which is why people in deep financial difficulty will often be flagged as a risk and even have their clearances suspended. Some ideologies, especially those centered on anti-government grievances, can be dangerous. Compromising information can lead people to hide their own secrets by betraying their nation’s secrets instead.But that last category, ego, can be the weakness that is hardest to spot. No urine test flips positive for a dangerous narcissist. No bank statement reveals a deficit of principle or a surplus of self-regard. Polygraphs are of arguable reliability, and clearly neither deter nor even discover some people willing to take risks. At higher levels, clearance holders have to pass psychological examinations, but narcissism can look a lot like ambition and self-confidence, just as expressions of high principle and rectitude can mask self-serving rationalizations.[Tom Nichols: The narcissism of the angry young men]Of course, betrayal sometimes has all of these issues at work. The CIA turncoat Ames, for example, was finally caught in the 1990s partly because of investigations into his finances, but for years, he was also a disgruntled and passed-over operative with a drinking problem who used to zip around in a Jaguar. (It’s never the ones you suspect.) Hanssen, the FBI traitor who gave up so much dangerous material that he could have faced the death penalty, was something of a weirdo: a devout Catholic who secretly taped sex with his wife, went to men’s clubs to convert strippers, and was such a dark and strange presence that his co-workers dubbed him “The Mortician” and “Dr. Death.” But with his Russian handlers, he was “Ramon,” a hero and a swashbuckler.Even Kim Philby, the legendary British mole, was an upper-class rake, an elite dandy who nonetheless professed to the end of his life—perhaps sincerely—that he was a loyal Soviet Marxist. But he was also an egotistical charmer, a user, and a liar, as those who knew him later came to understand with painful clarity.Snowden, for his part, vacillated between hard-right views and anti-government gripes, but underneath it all was a young man who, for most of his life, had been invisible and who yearned for recognition. Online, he called himself “The True HOOHAH,” a military-style moniker. (He tried to join the Army Special Forces, but washed out.) He apparently considered male modeling. At one point, he chose a new digital avatar: “Wolfking Awesomefox.” He finally found the importance he craved by stealing hundreds of thousands of documents (materials he later admitted he had not read or vetted) and instantly became an international celebrity.The Winner and Manning cases are sadder stories, songs with different lyrics but the same music. Winner was convinced that she had the responsibility to tell the world about Russian attempts to interfere in American politics. (She had no background in such matters; a National Security Agency contractor hired her as a linguist.) Manning, a lonely misfit in the Army, found an online friendship with the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and handed over thousands of documents that she herself had no hope of understanding.Narcissism, as I’ve written elsewhere, is on the rise, in the United States and around the world. It is destroying many of the social and political norms that sustain a democratic nation, and especially those that guide public service. People consumed by concerns over their social status, as Teixeira seemed to be; or who will mortgage national security for companionship and approval, as Manning did; or who—as in the cases of Snowden and Winner—think of themselves as the ultimate arbiters of the social good are all menaces to national security, no matter what their reasons.[Read: Should intelligence whistleblowers be protected?]What can be done to mitigate these risks? First, implement the easiest and most obvious fix: Slash the number of security clearances. Far too many people who don’t need them are carrying risky clearances, mostly because of outdated Cold War rules. I was one: When I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, I had to hold a secret-level security clearance because of a Defense Department rule that people who train or educate American military officers need a clearance, even if they’re not working with restricted documents. My clearance gave me access to classified materials if I wanted to read them, and classified events if I wanted to attend them, but I didn’t need it to do my job and neither do a lot of other people who can access classified material for no useful purpose.Next, change the hidebound and tangled clearance process that looks for easily identifiable human frailties such as adultery and substance abuse, but somehow overlooks the dangers of narcissism. I do not have a precise set of prescriptions for how to go about this—but I hope that more attention to social-media postings and online chat-room activity becomes a standard part of a background check. The process sometimes seems to zero in on measurable problems rather than less tangible personality flaws. When I was asked, for example, about colleagues by investigators—a common part of the clearance and re-clearance process—I was always struck by how much they centered on such concrete things as money and infidelity.Meanwhile, each year as a federal employee, I had to sit through hours of training about protecting information, which included how to spot more nebulous “insider threats.” We were told to be watchful for anger, behavioral changes, foreign contacts, financial irregularities, and outbursts about American policies. And each year, I would ruefully tote up all the senior government officials I would have gladly reported, including former President Donald Trump and retired General Michael Flynn, men who checked nearly every “insider threat” box on the list. Nonetheless, it was a reminder of the importance of supporting and protecting patriotic whistleblowers—especially the ones who might face the wrath of vengeful bureaucrats and politicians.But although all of these risk factors are important, most people, even burdened with their human failings, are not going to reveal America’s secrets. If we’re going to stop the next reckless narcissist—whether it’s a swaggering adolescent jerk or a self-styled crusader—the U.S. national-security establishment is going to need sharper instincts, and must start confronting the one vice that unites them all.Yes, we need to know who is in deep financial straits, and who harbors a secret grudge against America. But mostly, we need to inquire more closely into who among us will betray our country for fame, for approval, or because they somehow think that our laws and classifications are for less enlightened citizens than themselves. Unlocking that one secret is crucial to protecting our national security in a new age of narcissism.

Last week, I argued against banning TikTok. In talking to people about the platform, I came to see that the real concern most had was not about TikTok’s Chinese ownership, but rather just how scarily addictive it — and much of social media — is. That’s true and deeply worrying, and we should do something about it — and soon.

TikTok is the dominant app, by 2022 downloads, in the United States, and has about 150 million users nationwide. The Post’s Drew Harwell nicely summarizes the data: In 2021, its website was visited more frequently than Google. Two-thirds of American teens use it, with 1 in 6 saying they use it “almost constantly.”

It is also wiping the floor with the competition. Harwell quotes a Bernstein Research report that found that between 2018 and 2021, the time Americans spent on the app surged by 67 percent, while hours on Facebook and YouTube grew by less than 10 percent.

What is it that TikTok does that is so distinctive? No one quite knows. “It’s embarrassing that we know so little about TikTok and its effects,” Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, told the Guardian. Partly this is because TikTok is relatively new and partly because its algorithm is highly sophisticated. Instead of an image or a post chosen by a friend, TikTok presents you with a stream of videos and gauges what you like to give you more of it, replacing “the friction of deciding what to watch,” the Bernstein researchers explain, with a “sensory rush of bite-sized videos … delivering endorphin hit after hit.”

Most psychologists would characterize it as also delivering dopamine, the chemical secreted in the brain when it expects a reward, such as food, drugs or sex. Anything that connects us to others triggers this sense of pleasure, because it is an evolutionary response — we survive better in groups than as individuals. Social media apps capitalize on this survival mechanism for profit. And TikTok provides this dopamine hit perhaps faster, better and more pleasurably than other popular apps.

Michael de Adder counterpoint The great firewall of China The best way to understand how social media is affecting our brains is to go back to Psychology 101. B.F. Skinner, one of the foundational scholars in the field, demonstrated how “operant conditioning” works by using a simple system of continual rewards for pigeons, and taught them how to fly in circles, guide missiles, even play ping-pong. The simplest version is to watch a dog trainer, who will give the pet a stream of small treats to reward it for following directions. Social media apps provide those small dopamine hits just as reliably.

Jonathan Haidt has become famous as a critic of social media. A distinguished social psychologist (he teaches at NYU), Haidt argues that the rise of social media and its reward system is closely correlated with staggering declines in teenagers’ mental health. Around 2012, he argues, you begin to see all kinds of indications of declining mental health, from self-reported feelings to hospitalizations to suicide attempts. He says this has happened in the United States, Britain, Canada and several other countries with widespread use of social media. The rise in anxiety, depression and attempted suicides among teenage girls is particularly frightening. And these numbers are getting worse by the year.

The timing makes sense when you consider that the early 2010s is when teens were trading in their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps — and that 2009 is when Facebook introduced the “like” and Twitter introduced the “retweet” feature that mimic the dog trainer’s treats. So by 2012, the year Facebook bought Instagram and its user base exploded, a large number of teens were “hooked.”

Haidt, who is working on a book on this topic, maintains an ongoing database of scholarly studies and related commentary on his Substack, After Babel. I came away from it utterly convinced that he is right, and we need serious rules and laws surrounding this technology.

He argues that the age at which social media companies can collect children’s data without parental consent should be raised from 13 to 16, thereby protecting the most vulnerable years of early puberty. (The initial Senate bill setting the age had chosen 16, he told me, but media company lobbyists were able to push it down.) There could be federal laws requiring more notifications when the app has been used for too long, automatic turn-offs at night, and more. For those worried about this kind of legislation, bear in mind that social media companies are largely protected from lawsuits by an extremely generous provision in the law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They can reasonably be asked, in return, to make their products safer for children.

The next technological leap is generative artificial intelligence. Once that is fully married to social media, those companies will have a superhuman capacity to create addiction machines of astonishing power that could hook us permanently, perhaps even rewire our brains with devastating consequences. We should act now, while we have the time — and the attention span.

Deval Patrick, then governor of Massachusetts, was driving home to Milton when his younger daughter, who was watching the Marathon just a few blocks from the finish line, called to tell him about hearing explosions. Juliette Kayyem, Patrick’s first undersecretary for homeland security, headed for the scene just after hearing about the bombing, thinking about ways she could help. Now, a decade later, Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82 is co-director of the Center for Public Leadership and professor of the practice of public leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and Kayyem ’91, J.D. ’95, a nationally recognized homeland security and crisis management analyst who served in the Obama administration in the Department of Homeland Security, is the Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at HKS. Patrick and Kayyem recount the day and discuss what the bombing taught us about leading in a crisis. Interviews have been edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Deval Patrick and Juliette Kayyem
GAZETTE: Take me back to that day. When did you realize this was something quite serious?
PATRICK: After my official duties at the finish line that morning, I had an unusually open calendar that day. I was in the car on the way home to Milton when I got the first call from our younger daughter, who was about three blocks away from the finish line. And she said, “I just heard a big boom, and everybody’s running. What’s going on?” I didn’t know what was going on at that point. I just tried to reassure her and told her to stay out of the way.
The next call I got was from Kurt Schwartz, who was the head of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, and with whom I’d worked a lot. He was down at the finish line in the medical tent when the first explosion happened, and then the second. He wasn’t sure — none of us were at the outset — that they were bombs. Having worked through any number of emergencies with Kurt, I knew him to be utterly unflappable. But, on this occasion, the tone of his voice was just different. He said, “Governor, I don’t know what’s going on, but there are body parts all over the street and it’s a mess. I think you better get down here.”
So, I knew from the start that we had a major calamity on our hands. I did not know that we were dealing with a terrorist attack right away. One of the things that I remember most about that week is how little we knew and how many decisions we were having to make with imperfect or incomplete information.
GAZETTE: You, along with a small group of city and state officials, were a near-constant presence in the hours and days after the bombing, trying to keep the public updated. Even so, there were things you could not share and things you didn’t know that you didn’t know. How did you approach those sometimes-conflicting responsibilities?
PATRICK: At the beginning, we knew very little. We knew that there were three people killed on site. We knew within several hours how many injuries there were, how many people had been evacuated to hospitals. Many of those folks had injuries from which, under other circumstances, they would have died. Real praise to the first responders and emergency management folks and all of the hospital folks. We were fortunate, if that’s even the right word, that at the end of the race there is always a medical tent and many medical personnel, and ambulances.

“One of the things that I remember most about that week is how little we knew and how many decisions we were having to make with imperfect or incomplete information,” said Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts.

 Photo by Lydia Rosenberg

We were able to be more definitive about the numbers of injured and killed by the time of the second press conference. We sorted out who would be in charge of the criminal investigation, the recovery efforts, and ongoing security between the first and the second press avail. We didn’t know that we were dealing with homemade bombs from pressure cookers until the next day, couldn’t confirm that until later.
Probably one of the more sensitive decisions later that week was to release the photographs once these thousands of videos and photographs from security cameras and from viewers of the race had been sorted through. That decision came to me because I think there were reasonable differences of opinion among the law enforcement teams about whether and when to release them.
We tried to keep things highly factual and to stay away from speculation. There were lots and lots of rumors and speculation swirling around, and the reporters asked about them, so it was important to stay on a strictly factual path. It was important to me not to present myself as having all the answers, but that we were taking command of all aspects of the situation and were getting the answers we and the public needed, that we’ve got a capable team and that I trust that team so the public should as well. Having to go out and communicate even when we didn’t have anything new to communicate was also important just so that reporters would have a chance to ask their questions.
The very first question I got at the very first press conference was from a fellow sitting on the floor who I’m told was [conservative media personality] Alex Jones, who asked, “Was this whole thing a staged government performance?” And I remember glaring at him. There was a lot I wanted to say. But I just said, “No. Next question.”
GAZETTE: What did the Marathon bombing reveal about crisis/emergency management that we didn’t know?
KAYYEM: I think there’s a couple things. One is, how do you measure success? Boston Strong gives this idea that it’s our Irish stock, and we’re just a tough city. I understand why we say those things and their meaning for a city that has been attacked. But I’ve come to believe that Boston Strong really was about our preparedness.
How do you measure success in a world in which you can’t stop every bad thing from happening? One measure of success is when bad things didn’t happen. Yes, three people tragically perished at the finish line, but a couple hundred who were taken to area hospitals with very traumatic injuries all survived. That’s a relevant statistic. It could have been a lot worse.
A second thing I think a lot about because of my work with shootings and school shootings is the importance of family unification after a traumatic event. We’ve come to understand how important that is for families. While not the major story, I think about what that meant and how we bring them back together as a key component of the response.

“The Boston Marathon response, as a case study, as a teaching tool, is one of the best,” said Juliette Kayyem, the Belfer Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Kennedy School. 
Photo by Martha Stewart

GAZETTE: Is the caliber of crisis response better now than a decade ago?
KAYYEM: Oh, yeah. There’s no question about it. I think that there’s a commitment to unity of effort. The Boston Marathon response, as a case study, as a teaching tool, is one of the best. We can dwell on the intelligence gaps or the things that went wrong as the week progressed, but if we focus on Monday, then it continues to provide valuable lessons even 10 years later.
GAZETTE: What still needs improvement?
KAYYEM: One of the challenges is the politics of these mega disasters. We had a really unified political apparatus here even with the mayor in the hospital. You had Boston police commissioner Ed Davis, who was viewed as the representative of Mayor [Tom] Menino; you had Gov. Patrick, all in the same party, all of them knowing each other. And then you had a White House that was very well-partnered with the state just given its political leadership. We saw that fall apart during COVID with mayors and governors going after each other, governors and the White House going after each other, and vice versa. That has operational consequences, and we don’t have a good way of either managing it better or being able to work through it. We tend not to train first responders and first reactors in politics — they covet that they are not political. “We’re just here to save lives.” But the problem is, in our divided society, that’s really hard to maintain.
GAZETTE: In hindsight, what ended up being the smartest decisions you made that week?
PATRICK: There were three very smart, or I should say, very effective decisions, and they weren’t all mine alone. One was to get the many law enforcement agencies — federal, state, and local — to agree that while everybody had a role, one agency would be in charge of the criminal investigation. That’s a call I made right after the first press conference because I’d had an experience in D.C. with a multi-agency criminal investigation that was made more difficult because the agencies involved were competing with and sometimes even stumbling over each other. We got that sorted early and agreed the FBI should be in charge. And on the whole, they stuck by that. I think that’s one of the reasons why the investigation was so phenomenally efficient.
A second important decision was to create the One Fund, which was a terrific way to aggregate all the financial generosity that was pouring into the city from all over the world. I think that was Mayor Menino’s idea. And then appointing [attorney] Ken Feinberg to manage it was terrific because he’d managed well similar kinds of imperfect processes in the past.
The third decision was the result of a suggestion from my chief of staff at the time. He reminded me that every time we dealt with an emergency — a snowstorm or tornado or whatever it was — I would always ask people to check on each other, to look out for each other, and where we could, lift up those stories.
He said, “Do that now. When you talk about the casualties and people in hospital, also talk about the ways people have shown kindness to each other.” When the race was stopped, people went out of their homes and brought indoors runners who were confused and exhausted, warmed them up and got them hydrated, and helped them find their way back to their families, to their friends, and possessions back at the end of the race. There were lots and lots of those kinds of gestures by ordinary people showing extraordinary grace. We told those stories, and as we talked about them, they multiplied. I think that had as much or more to do with “Boston Strong” as anything else.
GAZETTE: Not every training and operational insight from the 2013 marathon bombing has been adopted by law enforcement or other first-response agencies across the country. Why not? Is it cost?
KAYYEM: Some of it is financial. There’s always something else in the inbox; there’s always something else going on. We had COVID; mayors are thinking about housing, education, and all sorts of other things and other issues that might seem more pressing in the moment. Resources are hard to come by.
There’s also a concept known as the “preparedness paradox,” which explains the challenge of being prepared. The more prepared you are, the better the consequences are, and therefore, the harder it is to justify how successful you were, because people will say, “Well, what were you freaking out about? That wasn’t a big deal.” Y2K was the perfect example of that. It’s hard to prove success because for however many people survived the Boston Marathon bombing, there were still three people dead and intelligence failures.
GAZETTE: You now teach students at HKS about leadership. What did you learn from the Boston Marathon bombing about what goes into effective leadership?
PATRICK: For me, I think it’s important to get comfortable with just how inevitable it is that you will be making lots of decisions with imperfect or incomplete information — and yet how important it is to go on and make them. Timing and scope of such decisions has to be appropriate to the moment, of course, but sometimes delay or avoidance is a bigger problem. Of course, preparation is key. I urge new governors, including my successor, even before his inauguration, to meet the emergency response officials and start tabletop exercises right off. Leadership takes practice.
Some of it can be taught from examples and theories, but an awful lot of it is just learning from practice and experience the importance of mental discipline and how to ask questions, how to be a servant leader, which is to say, not to pretend that you have all the answers or that you’re in charge of every detail or decision, but that you have really good people around you who will raise, if you ask them and give them the space, the concerns they may have and the needs that must be met to be able to perform. Addressing those concerns or eliminating whatever obstacles or barriers they may have is enormously important and it’s something I’ve tried to do.
It’s also important to take a minute and step back from the chaos of it all to get some perspective, to take a deep breath. To realize you’re talking about human lives and loss and families in fear — not just statistics or data — and to acknowledge that and be a source of comfort. We could have easily descended into panic. And at times like that, people are not always at their best. And so, leaders asking people to turn to each other rather than on each other is critically important. Our citizens, our families, friends, and neighbors came together after those bombs went off. We all solved that crime; we all helped the city and the commonwealth recover. We all recommitted to our civic faith, and I think that was an important takeaway from the experience we all had.

Thirty years ago, antidepressant research seemed on the verge of a major breakthrough. Years of experiments with laboratory rats and mice—animals long considered “classic” models for the condition—had repeatedly shown that a new drug called rolipram could boost a molecule in the rodent brain that people with depression seemed to have lower levels of. Even guinea pigs and chipmunks seemed susceptible to the chemical’s effects. Experts hailed rolipram as a potential game changer—a treatment that might work at doses 10 to 100 times lower than conventional antidepressants, and act faster to boot.But not long after rolipram entered clinical trials in humans, researchers received a nasty surprise. The volunteers taking rolipram just kept throwing up. Terrible bouts of nausea were leading some participants to quit taking the meds. No one could take rolipram at doses high enough to be effective without experiencing serious gastrointestinal distress. Years of hard work was literally getting flushed down the tubes. Rolipram wasn’t alone: Over the years, millions of dollars have been lost on treatments that failed after vomiting cropped up as a side effect, says Nissar Darmani, the associate dean for basic sciences and research at Western University of Health Sciences.The problem in many of these cases was the rodents, or, maybe more accurately, that researchers had pinned their hopes on them. Mice and rats, the world’s most commonly used laboratory animals—creatures whose many biological similarities to us have enabled massive leaps in the treatment of HIV, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and more—are rather useless in one very specific context: They simply can’t throw up.Vomiting, for all its grossness, is an evolutionary perk: It’s one of the two primary ways to purge the gastrointestinal tract of the toxins and poisons that lurk in various foodstuffs, says Lindsey Schier, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. But rodent bodies aren’t built for the act of throwing up. Their diaphragm is a bit wimpy; their stomach is too bulbous, their esophagus too long and spindly. And the animals seem to lack the neural circuits they’d need to trigger the vomiting reflex.And yet, rodents make up nearly 40 percent of mammal species and have colonized habitats on every continent on Earth except Antarctica—including homes laced with delicious, bait-laden rodenticides. Part of their secret might be pure prevention. Rodents have exquisite senses of smell and taste, which work as “gatekeepers of the gastrointestinal tract,” says Linda Parker, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Guelph. They’re also extremely wary of new foods, and their memory for a sickening substance is strong. “They’ll avoid it for months, years, maybe even their whole life,” Parker told me. “It’s probably the strongest form of animal learning we know.”Any noxious stuff that does enter rodent bellies can also be waylaid. The animals may get diarrhea, or delay their absorption of the harmful substances by slowing digestion, or swallowing materials such as clay. These tactics aren’t perfect—but neither, to be fair, is vomiting, which is “very violent,” says Bart De Jonghe, a nutritional-science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. The act requires the diaphragm and abdominal muscles to clench around the gut, and can leave animals physically drained and dehydrated. Maybe rodents are spared quite a few costs, says Gareth Sanger, a pharmacologist at Queen Mary University of London.[Read: Will smoking pot make me vomit forever?]It’s still a bit unclear just how much of an anomaly rodents are. Only so many mammals—among them, cats, dogs, ferrets, primates, and pigs—have thrown up in human sight. Researchers can’t always tell if the creatures that haven’t are unable, shy, or just wise about what they consume, making it difficult for biologists to trace vomiting’s evolutionary roots.Yates is one of several experts who suspect that throwing up is a relatively recent development, manifesting mainly among carnivores and primates, creatures that perhaps could not afford to snack slowly and warily as rodents do. But others disagree, hypothesizing instead that ancestral mammals had an emergency brake in their gut. Maybe rodents (and, apparently, rabbits) lost the gift, while the rest of us kept it around, Sanger told me. The act’s origins could be more ancient still: Some evidence suggests that even creatures from the Jurassic era may have occasionally lost their lunch.Labs interested in studying vomiting directly have long relied on creatures outside of the rodent family, among them dogs, cats, and ferrets—though high costs of upkeep and intermittent pushback on companion-animal testing from the public have made that work tough, Darmani told me. Nowadays, some of the most promising research takes place in shrews: small mammals that resemble rodents in size and ease of care, but can throw up. The animals have helped researchers such as Darmani and Parker make big advances in figuring out, for instance, how cannabinoids might help curb the urge to vomit—findings that could provide major relief for people undergoing chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and more.[Read: Can ginger ale really soothe nausea?]Still, rodents haven’t been written out of digestive research just yet. Parker and others have found that rats and their relatives are great models for nausea, which has historically been far harder to define and treat. Give a shrew a drug to induce vomiting, and it will work—making the brief moments when their equivalent of nausea might manifest quite tough to study. A rodent, meanwhile, must stew in its digestive distress, potentially giving researchers crucial insight with every gape of the mouth, or wrinkle of the nose.The work isn’t without its challenges. Nausea is, by definition, subjective. “You can ask a room full of 30 people what nausea is, and I guarantee you’ll get 30 different responses,” De Jonghe told me. Among nonhuman creatures, the problem is worse: “You cannot ask an animal if they feel this way or that,” Schier said. Many researchers are adamant that no animal models for nausea exist at all.But nausea-esque behaviors, even if not totally equivalent to ours, can offer important clues. Rodents, like us, get majorly turned off by gross foods; they, like us, get woozy, trembly, and sluggish after they’ve been swirled around. And when researchers spot such reactions in their lab animals, they can check what hormones spike in their blood, and what microscopic switches get flipped in the circuits of their brain—observations that could help us map nausea’s precise pathways, and perhaps block them with drugs.Understanding that topography is urgent. “Twenty years ago,” Sanger said, “vomiting was the most feared side effect” in many of the patients he saw. But with the advent of several generations of vomit-curbing drugs, “now it’s nausea.” Our current approaches for addressing motion sickness aren’t up to snuff either: Many of them are hit or miss; others are so broad-acting that they drug people into sleepy stupors—muting not only their digestive discomfort but a bunch of other basic functions as well. The medications are “sledgehammers,” Yates told me, when a “tiny little hammer” will likely do.[Read: The mysterious science of motion sickness]All of that means that rodents’ big gastrointestinal shortcoming could end up being far more valuable than once thought. The weirdness of their guts and respiratory tracts might end up being key to making future train rides and boat trips less sickening, and migraines and morning sickness more bearable—even cancer treatments less brutal. With enough understanding, maybe we’ll be able to mimic rodents’ best responses to bad foods, and none of their worst.

The red-state drive to reverse the rights revolution of the past six decades continues to intensify, triggering confrontations involving every level of government.In rapid succession, Republican-controlled states are applying unprecedented tactics to shift social policy sharply to the right, not only within their borders but across the nation. Just last Thursday, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two young Black Democratic representatives, and Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on Saturday moved to nullify the verdict of a jury in liberal Travis County. In between, last Friday, a single Republican-appointed federal judge, acting on a case brought by a conservative legal group and 23 Republican state attorneys general, issued a decision that would impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the principal drug used in medication abortions.All of these actions are coming as red states, continuing an upsurge that began in 2021, push forward a torrent of bills restricting abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; loosening controls on gun ownership; censoring classroom discussion of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and preempting the authority of their Democratic-leaning metropolitan cities and counties.This flood of legislation has started to erase the long-term trend of Congress and federal courts steadily nationalizing more rights and reducing the freedom of states to constrict them—what legal scholars have called the “rights revolution.” Now, across all these different arenas and more, the United States is hurtling back toward a pre-1960s world in which citizens’ basic rights and liberties vary much more depending on where they live.[Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution]“We are in the middle of an existential crisis for the future of our burgeoning multicultural, multiethnic democracy,” and the extreme events unfolding in Tennessee and other states “are the early manifestations of an abandonment of democratic norms,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, wrote to me in an email.The past week’s events in Tennessee and Texas, and the federal court case on mifepristone, extend strategies that red states have employed since 2020 to influence national policy. But these latest moves show Republicans taking those strategies to new extremes. Together these developments underscore how aggressively red states are maneuvering to block the federal government and their own largest metropolitan areas from resisting their systematic attempt to carve out what I’ve called a “nation within a nation,” operating with its own constraints on civil rights and liberties.“It shows there really is no limit, no institution that is quote-unquote ‘sacred’ enough not to try to use to their advantage,” Marissa Roy, the legal team lead for the Local Solutions Support Center, a group opposing the broad range of state preemption efforts, told me.This multipronged offensive from red states seeks to reverse one of the most powerful currents in modern American life. Since the 1960s, on issues including the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage and the banning of discrimination on grounds of race or gender, the Supreme Court, Congress, and federal agencies have broadened the circle of rights guaranteed nationwide and reduced the ability of states to limit those rights.Over the past decade, Republican-controlled states have stepped up their efforts to reverse that arrow and restore their freedom to impose their own restrictions on rights and liberties. Nelson sees this red-state drive as continuing the “cycle of progress and retrenchment” on racial equity through American history that stretches back to Reconstruction and the southern resistance that eventually produced Jim Crow segregation. “The current pendulum swing is occurring both in reaction to changing politics and changing demographics, making the arc of that swing that much higher toward extremism,” she told me.The vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives, for instance, marked a new level in the long-term struggle between red states and blue cities. In most red states, Republicans control the governorship and/or state legislature primarily through their dominance of predominantly white non-urban areas. Over the past decade, those red-state Republicans have grown more aggressive about using that statewide power to preempt the authority of, and override decisions by, their largest cities and counties, which are typically more racially diverse and Democratic-leaning.These preemption bills have removed authority from local governments over policy areas including minimum wage, COVID masking requirements, environmental rules, and even plastic-bag-recycling mandates. Legislatures have accompanied many of these bills with other measures, such as extreme gerrymanders, meant to dilute the political clout of their state’s population centers and shift influence toward exurban and rural areas where Republicans are strongest. In Tennessee, for example, the legislature voted to arbitrarily cut the size of the Nashville Metropolitan Council in half, a decision that a state court blocked this week. Many of the bills that red states have passed since 2020 making it harder to vote have specifically barred techniques used by large counties to encourage participation, such as drop boxes or mobile voting vans.Republicans who control the Tennessee House took this attack on urban political power to a new peak with their vote to expel the two Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who represent Memphis and Nashville, respectively. Though local officials in each city quickly moved this week to reappoint the two men, the GOP majority sent an ominous signal in its initial vote to remove them. The expulsions went beyond making structural changes to diminish the power of big-city residents, to entirely erasing those voters’ decision on whom they wanted to represent them in the legislature. Conservative legislatures and governors “have become so emboldened [in believing] that they can tread on local democracy,” Roy said, “that they are going all out and perhaps destroying the institution altogether.”One of the most aggressive areas of red-state preemption this year has been in moves to seize control of policing and prosecutorial powers in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, which typically have large minority populations. In Georgia, for instance, both chambers of the GOP-controlled state legislature have passed bills creating a new oversight board that would be directed by state officials and have the power to recommend removal of county prosecutors. In Mississippi, both GOP-controlled chambers have approved legislation to expand state authority over policing and the courts in Jackson, the state capital, a city more than 80 percent Black. The Republican governor in each state is expected to sign the bills.Tennessee legislators passed a bill in their last session increasing state authority to override local prosecutors. This week they went further. Although it didn’t attract nearly the attention of the expulsion vote, the Tennessee House Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday approved a bill to eradicate an independent board to investigate police misconduct that Nashville residents had voted to create in a 2018 referendum.In 2019, the GOP legislature had already stripped the Nashville Community Oversight Board of the subpoena power that was included in the local referendum establishing it. The new legislation approved this week, which is also advancing in the State Senate, would replace the board and instead require that citizen complaints about police behavior in Nashville and other cities be directed to the internal-affairs offices of their police departments. The legislation is moving forward just weeks after five former police officers were indicted in Memphis for beating a Black man named Tyre Nichols to death. “You would think that while the Tyre Nichols case is going on … that we would be really wanting more oversight, not less,” Jill Fitcheard, the executive director of the Nashville oversight board, told me. Coming so soon after the vote to expel the two Black members, the attempt to eradicate the oversight board, she said, represents “another attack on democracy in Nashville.”Texas has joined this procession with bills backed by Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick advancing in both legislative chambers to make it easier for state officials to remove local prosecutors who resist bringing cases on priorities for the GOP majority, such as the measures banning abortion or gender-affirming care for transgender minors.But Abbott last Saturday introduced an explosive new element into the red-state push to preempt local law-enforcement authority. In a statement, Abbott directed the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole to fast-track consideration of a pardon for a U.S. Army sergeant convicted just one day earlier of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Abbott, who had faced criticism from conservative media for not intervening in the case, promised to approve the pardon, and criticized the Democratic district attorney who brought the case and the jury that decided it in Travis County, an overwhelmingly blue county centered on Austin.Although many Republicans are seeking ways to constrain law-enforcement officials in blue counties, Abbott’s move would invalidate a decision by a jury in such a Democratic-leaning area. And whereas the preemption legislation in Texas and elsewhere targets prosecutors because of the cases they won’t prosecute, Abbott is looking to override a local prosecutor because of a case he did prosecute.[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]Gerry Morris, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers now practicing in Austin, told me that Abbott’s move was especially chilling because it came before any of the normal legal appeals to a conviction had begun. Morris said he can think of no precedent for a Texas governor intervening so peremptorily to effectively overturn a jury verdict. “I guess it means if you are going to kill somebody in Texas,” Morris said, “you need to make sure it’s somebody Governor Abbott thinks ought to be killed; because if that’s the case, then he’ll pardon you.”The past week’s third dramatic escalation came from District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump with ties to the social-conservative movement. Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the FDA’s approval in 2000 of mifepristone was in one sense unprecedented. “Never has a court actually overturned an FDA scientific decision in approving a drug on the grounds that [the] FDA got it wrong,” William Schultz, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on a press call Monday.But in another sense, the case merely extended what’s become a routine strategy in the red states’ drive to set their own rules. Nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general joined the lawsuit in support of the effort to ban mifepristone. That continued a steady procession of cases brought by Republican-controlled states to hobble the exercise of federal authority, or to erase rights that had previously been guaranteed nationwide.The most consequential example of this trend is the case involving a Mississippi abortion law that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority used to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. But shifting coalitions of GOP state attorneys general have also sued to block environmental regulations proposed by President Joe Biden, and to prevent him from changing Trump-administration immigration-enforcement policies or acting to protect LGBTQ people under federal antidiscrimination laws. Red states “have been very interested in opposing virtually every rule or guidance that would provide nondiscrimination protection to LGBTQ people,” says Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign.All of these legal and political struggles raise the same underlying question: Can Democrats and their allies defend the national baseline of civil rights and liberties America has built since the 1960s?Democrats have found themselves stymied in efforts to restore those rights through legislation: While Democrats held unified control of Congress during Biden’s first years, the House passed bills that would largely override the red-state moves and restore a set of national rules on abortion, voting, and LGBTQ rights. But in each case, they could not overcome a Republican-led Senate filibuster.The Biden administration and civil-rights groups are pursuing lawsuits against many of the red-state rights rollbacks. But numerous legal experts remain skeptical that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority will reverse many of the red-state actions. The third tool available to Democrats is federal executive-branch action, such as the Title IX regulations the Education Department proposed last week that would invalidate the blanket bans against transgender girls participating in school sports that virtually all the red states have now approved. Yet federal regulations that attempt to counter the red-state actions may prompt resistance from that conservative Supreme Court majority.And even as Democrats search for strategies to preserve a common baseline of rights, they face the prospect that Republicans may seek to nationalize the restrictive red-state social regime. Congressional Republicans have introduced bills to write into federal law almost all of the red-state moves, such as abortion bans and prohibitions on classroom discussion of sexual orientation or participation in school sports by transgender girls. Several 2024 GOP presidential candidates are starting to offer similar proposals.The past week has seen Republicans reach a new extreme in their effort to build a nation within a nation across the red states. But the next time the GOP achieves unified control of Congress and the White House, even this may seem like the beginning of an attempt to impose on blue states the rollback of rights and liberties that continues to burn unabated through red America.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.A dear friend of mine whom I recently lost spent most of his life near the Severn River in Maryland. The Severn is technically a “tidal estuary”—a brackish inlet off the Chesapeake Bay, where salt water mixes with fresh. “It’s the most human river,” my friend once told me. “It has the precise salinity of human tears.”Whether or not the Severn is one, a river of pure tears sounds like a scene out of a Greek tragedy. But to my friend, it was a mystical and beautiful juxtaposition—that a signature of sorrow would accompany the splendor of nature. Crying, too, is a contradiction. It can accompany the most profound grief or the deepest joy. It can be a response to anger and frustration or to poetry too lovely for words.As such, crying is often thought of as an expression of wild emotion. But this is yet another contradiction: In fact, crying can be a powerful tool to tame our feelings, to maintain a deep equanimity in our emotional life. It can bring balance, peace—and, just maybe, even a touch of the divine.Crying is very common, and quintessentially human. Although many species call out in distress to signal a need for help, only humans weep, with tears, for emotional reasons and not because of ocular irritation. As the Dutch psychologist Ad Vingerhoets has chronicled in his research, two negative crying triggers are extremely consistent across populations and cultures: helplessness and loss.[Read: Why we cry on planes]Occasionally, though, we weep for joy. Scholars find it perplexing, because it seems counterintuitive that we would respond to overwhelmingly positive emotions with a negative expression. New research conducted in several countries found that happy crying tended to occur during four occasions: times of extraordinary affection, such as weddings (55 percent of positive crying, on average); moments of unusual achievement, such as winning an award (29 percent); awe in the face of beauty, such as exquisite music (8 percent); and intense amusement (3 percent). Classifying it, though, doesn’t make it seem any more logical.There may, in fact, be a deeper connection between happy crying and sad crying: They are both a response to emotional extremes, which suggests that tears help bring us back to equilibrium. Overwhelming negative emotion is important—even lifesaving—in a crisis like being separated from loved ones or being under threat; it creates the impulse to act with force or immediacy. But staying in this state isn’t helpful beyond the immediate crisis (nor is it pleasant), so we seek to reduce stress and improve our mood—which crying can do quite effectively. Some researchers argue that we also need to reset emotionally when things are just too wonderful. Overwhelming joy feels great, but it distracts us from the business of life. And ongoing rapture would be exhausting.The exact mechanism for how crying keeps extreme emotions in check has not been definitively established. Some researchers have posited that there’s literal truth to the Jewish proverb “What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.” In his book Crying: The Mystery of Tears, the biochemist William H. Frey hypothesized that we eliminate stress hormones such as cortisol through tears. Another, less widely accepted theory is that tears clear blood of certain toxins or unwanted chemicals.[From the November 2022 issue: An ode to crying babies]Emotional balance is good for well-being: Though strong feelings are inevitable, having excessive and persistent emotional highs and lows is clearly not associated with good mental health. People who experience dysregulated emotions—positive and negative—are sometimes said to have “cyclothymic disorder,” a mood disorder that lowers quality of life.Crying is not a cure-all, of course. Weeping involuntarily—for example, at work—can lead to embarrassment, which is unlikely to make you happier. This is especially true for men (probably due to stigma) and people high in conscientiousness (who dislike burdening others).In such a situation, you might seek to avoid feelings of shame by preventing crying; folk cures include pushing your tongue into the roof of your mouth, trying to relax your face, and pinching yourself. Better yet, you might avoid the pinches and still get the emotional release of crying by surrounding yourself with people who won’t think less of you for shedding a few tears. Or, if possible, consider finding a job that doesn’t drive you to weeping.[Read: The secret to happiness at work]Evolutionary biology sheds light on the scientific mystery of human tears. But there remains a deeper mystery in crying; otherwise, my friend’s observation about the Severn would be about as lyrical as saying it was a river of sneezes.Crying is central to religious iconography, to mythology, to profound transcendental experiences. For example, the shortest verse in most English translations of the Christian Bible is “Jesus wept,” describing his response when his close friend Lazarus died. The point here does not seem like Jesus was trying to restore his emotional equilibrium.Usually, the verse is seen as a sign of God’s solidarity with humanity, like the touch of the fingertips of God and man on the ceiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: Just we were made in God’s image; he fashions himself in ours, coming to Earth to experience both our joys and our sorrows. The quintessentially human experience of crying may be our most divine one as well.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Several months ago, while walking through my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I noticed an impressive number of front-lawn placards celebrating and welcoming refugees. The signs made me proud. I like living in a place where people openly celebrate tolerance and diversity.Several days later, my pride curdled into bitterness. As part of some reporting on housing policy, I found a State Department page offering advice to Afghans and Iraqis resettling in the U.S. The upshot: Stay away from D.C. “The Washington, D.C., metro area including northern Virginia and some cities in California are very expensive places to live, and it can be difficult to find reasonable housing,” the website warns. “Any resettlement benefits you receive may not comfortably cover the cost of living in these areas.”My city’s prohibitive housing costs flow, in part, from the district’s infamous war against new construction. Much of D.C. is off-limits for new development, thanks to widespread single-family zoning, berserk historical-preservation rules, and a long-standing aversion to taller buildings, which stems from both federal law and local rules. If the city’s housing policies are so broken that the federal government has to explicitly tell immigrants to find somewhere else to live, then signage welcoming refugees is both futile and hypocritical. The same neighborhoods saying yes to refugees in their front yard are supporting policies in their backyard that say no to refugees.This dynamic—front-yard proclamations contradicted by backyard policies—extends well beyond refugee policy, and helps explain American 21st-century dysfunction.The front yard is the realm of language. It is the space for messaging and talking to be seen. Social media and the internet are a kind of global front lawn, where we get to know a thousand strangers by their signage, even when we don’t know a thing about their private lives and virtues. The backyard is the seat of private behavior. This is where the real action lives, where the values of the family—and by extension, the nation—make contact with the real world.Let’s stick with housing for a moment to see the front yard/backyard divide play out. The 2020 Democratic Party platform called housing a “right and not a privilege” and a “basic need … at the center of the American Dream.” Right on. But the U.S. has a severe housing-affordability crisis that is worst in blue states, where lawmakers have erected obstacle courses of zoning rules and regulations to block construction. In an interview with Slate, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, took aim at his own side, saying progressives are “living in the contradiction that they are nominally liberal [but they] do not want other people to live next to them” if their neighbors are low-income workers. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington; all are run by Democrats. Something very strange is going on when the zip codes with the best housing signs have some of the worst housing outcomes.Housing scarcity pinches other Democratic priorities. Some people convincingly argue that it constricts all of them. High housing costs pervert “just about every facet of American life,” as The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey has written, including what we eat, how many friends we keep, how many children we bear. “In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black lives matter, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal,” the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote. But in part because those signs sit in front yards “zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes,” the city has built just one home for every eight new jobs in the past decade.We find a similar discrepancy between stated virtues and outcomes in the realm of green energy. As I wrote last year, liberals own all the backpack buttons denouncing the oil-and-gas industry. But Texas produces more renewable energy than deep-blue California, and Oklahoma and Iowa produce more renewable energy than New York. Yes, wind is abundant in the Midwest, and the Great Plains have lots of space that’s sunny and empty. But the biosphere counts carbon, not excuses. Progressives betray their goals by supporting onerous rules that delay the construction of solar farms and transmission lines that would reduce our dependence on oil and gas.Granted, although the hypocrisy of NIMBY environmentalists is an irresistibly delicious subject for some writers, it is hardly the only obstacle to building an abundance of clean electricity. Many of the country’s most powerful energy providers play their own word games by loudly advertising their commitment to decarbonization even as they quietly use their political power to block the transition to new energy sources. Here, as in housing, it’s easy to playact as a public crusader, screaming “Everything has to change!” to the world while remaining a private reactionary who whispers, within the back rooms of true power, “But let’s not change anything that matters.”More broadly, a super-emphasis on language has distracted some Americans from focusing on actual outcomes and working toward material progress.In the past few years, many employees have encouraged their companies to launch diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. These programs address a real problem: the stubborn gaps in pay and responsibility between white men and their nonwhite and non-male colleagues, which are sometimes borne from prejudice in hiring or promotion processes.But after an initial burst of enthusiasm, follow-up analyses of DEI programs have found that many of them are worse than useless. First, they sometimes rely on pseudoscience, such as unconscious-bias training, which rarely reduces racism and may accidentally reify existing biases. Second, corporations that hold DEI workshops may use them as an excuse not to pursue real corporate change. In the past few years, as corporate diversity programs have proliferated, the share of Black and Asian workers who “trust their employer to do what is right in response to racism” has actually declined. According to one Bloomberg survey, the person with the least credibility on racism within the company is the person in charge of DEI.All of the appropriate terms for this state of affairs—whitewashing, window dressing, a facade—capture the essence of front-yardism. The problem with these diversity programs isn’t that they’re “woke,” as in “doing too much to help nonwhite Americans.” The problem is that, keeping with this common if dubious definition, they aren’t nearly woke enough. Full of sound and fury signifying nothing, many DEI initiatives are conservative in nature, preserving the status quo and the power of white-male leadership while advertising a politics of radical change. They are the equivalent of a thousand REFUGEES ARE WELCOME signs in a neighborhood where the residents’ policy preferences make local refugee resettlement impossible.San Francisco public schools offer another lesson in how an obsession with language can cloud a rightful focus on material outcomes. In 2021, the city’s board of education voted to rename more than 40 schools to scrub out racism. Their dragnet caught such not-quite-famous racists as Abraham Lincoln and Senator Dianne Feinstein. (Paul Revere was added to the list, because one committee member misread a History.com article about his role in the Revolutionary War.) At the same time that the district was putting together its list of names, its schools suffered declines in enrollment, attendance, and learning. Math scores fell sharply and, by 2022, only 9 percent of the district’s Black students met or exceeded math standards.The renaming committee was obviously not exclusively responsible for pandemic-era learning loss. Learning loss was a national trend, and San Francisco didn’t even experience the worst of it. But if, like the San Francisco Unified School District, you’re a school district with a big math-proficiency problem and your policies include discouraging eighth-grade algebra and holding meetings about nomenclature, you might end up with failing students in well-named schools.Even the American Medical Association has descended into front-yardism. The AMA recently published a 54-page guide on how doctors should talk with patients, called “Advancing Health Equity,” which urges medical professionals to make their language more inclusive. One particularly silly example: It advises doctors to replace the simple phrase low-income people with new terminology that acknowledges “root causes,” such as people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real-estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements.I celebrate any emphasis on “root causes.” So let’s talk about the real root causes of dysfunction in America’s expensive and inequitable health-care system. Why is the U.S. one of the only countries in the developed world without universal insurance? A complete analysis might include the AMA’s “explicit, long-standing opposition to single-payer health care.”  Why does the U.S. health system struggle to provide access in rural and low-income areas? One causal factor is the AMA’s steadfast resistance to expanding nurse practitioners’ scope of care. Why does the U.S. have fewer general practitioners per capita than almost any other rich country? It might have something to do with the AMA’s refusal to expand medical-residency slots and other efforts to constrain the number of doctors in America.Even in science, where empiricism ought to reign, I’ve seen troubling signs of word worship. In 2020, the prestigious journal Nature published its first-ever presidential endorsement, on behalf of Joe Biden. When a group of researchers studied the effect of that endorsement, they found it did nothing to persuade moderate voters and actually made conservatives less trusting of scientific institutions. “The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters,” the paper concluded. “This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature.”The journal’s article had all the effectiveness of a half-hearted DEI program: a bunch of pretty words doing less than nothing. Nonetheless, in March, the editors of Nature wrote a follow-up essay declaring victory. While they acknowledged that the Biden endorsement had failed to meet every measurable benchmark, they defended their decision on the grounds that “silence was not an option.” “When individuals seeking office” blast science and threaten scientists, they said, “it becomes important to speak up.”I personally despair of the polarization of science and wish the Nature editorial had, through some magical incantation, depoliticized the vaccine debates. But it didn’t. And that holds an important lesson about the limited ability of words alone to bring about the world that progressives want to live in. The Nature editorial was an experiment, and an independent group of scientists determined that the experiment failed. That’s how science works. For the editors of a science journal to wave it away suggests that the final cause of their politics is to utter the right words, even when those words push them further away from the world they want to build.Companies hiring DEI consultants to quote Malcolm X in a meeting to cover up a pitiful diversity record; school officials watching math scores plummet for Black kids while they debate whether Lincoln was racist; AMA employees playing word games while limiting the number of physicians; environmentalists buying BEYOND COAL pins while challenging the construction of any clean-energy project that might help the electric grid move beyond coal—what ties these examples together is front-yard theater.You may have noticed that I’ve mostly focused on progressive causes and left-leaning institutions. This is as deliberate as it is unfair.It’s deliberate because, to paraphrase Noah Smith, I deeply want progressives to love progress itself, not just the sound of it. When it comes to the virtues of housing affordability, clean-energy abundance, high-quality education, and trustworthy science, I want my political side to turn its signage into signatures, its placards into policies. But my emphasis so far on liberalism is also unfair, because to prattle on about progressive hypocrisy without a similar analysis of the right would profoundly misrepresent the distribution of phoniness in American politics.When Republicans swept into unified control of the federal government in 2017, Donald Trump promised in his inaugural address to return power to the people, unwind the “American carnage” of previous generations, and restore the manufacturing and coal industries that had been desiccated by decades of neoliberal policies. But once in office, Republicans governed more like plutocrats than populists, trying to slash federal health-insurance coverage (which failed) and to reduce taxes for large corporations by several trillion dollars (which succeeded). On economic and social policy, the Republican Party is a pretzel. The GOP officially opposes “Defund the police” and wants more law enforcement, but Trump is on the record with calls to defund the entire FBI and Department of Justice. Republicans officially seek to “lower the price of housing,” but their pledge to cut appropriated nondefense programs would likely reduce housing assistance, immediately raising the cost of living for millions of low-income renters.No party claims a monopoly on language theater, either. Many of today’s most influential conservatives are more likely to marinate in indignation over the gender politics of candy, beer, and sneaker commercials than utter anything that might accidentally make contact with poverty, housing, energy, or health-care policy. The most significant GOP leaders, such as Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hardly talk about economic policy at all, preferring to direct their furious attention at culture-war issues, including elementary-school curricula, drag-queen story hours, and the scourge of managerial wokeness in our corporations and schools. This postmaterial posturing might serve a strategic purpose. Behind all that fulminating about Disney and DEI, DeSantis’s views on Social Security, Medicare, and the welfare state are deeply unpopular.While language wars escalate on the right, the phenomenon of front-yard politics may be peaking on the left. San Francisco ultimately abandoned its plan to scrub Lincoln and Feinstein from its buildings. California has voted to begin the long process of dismantling its NIMBY housing laws. Last year, President Biden signed historic laws to expand green-energy production in the U.S., even though the translation of historic spending into historic construction remains uncertain. These are small steps in the right direction.Words matter. It would be absurd—and deeply self-defeating—for any writer to suggest otherwise. My aim is not to uproot kind-hearted yard signs, or reverse efforts to remove racist surnames from government buildings, or to discourage doctors from speaking respectfully to patients. But these linguistic efforts are only as successful as the difference they make in the world. When a politics of progressive language becomes disconnected from progressive outcomes, the movement loses. Front-yard radicalism multiplied by backyard stasis does not equal progress. It equals nothing at all.

China has tested and deployed a new longer-range hypersonic missile that is probably able to evade U.S. defenses, according to an overlooked top-secret document among those recently leaked. Now, the public can see what the American intelligence community already knew: China is quickly improving its capacity to strike thousands of miles from its shores and prevent the United States from intervening.

According to a Feb. 28 top-secret report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence directorate, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had three days earlier successfully tested a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile called the DF-27. (The Defense Department has not confirmed the document’s authenticity.)

“The DF-27 is designed to enhance [China’s] ability to hold targets at risk beyond the Second Island Chain and possesses a high probability of penetrating U.S.” ballistic missile defense, the daily intelligence update stated. It also revealed that last year the PLA deployed versions of the new missile that can attack land targets and ships.

The intermediate-range ballistic missile flew for 12 minutes and traveled 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles), the leaked document revealed. But according to a 2021 Defense Department report, the DF-27 has a range of 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers, meaning that it can strike any target in East or Southeast Asia and large parts of the Pacific, including Guam. In addition to its added range, the new missile has a “hypersonic glide” capability, which means it can be maneuvered to evade American and allied missile defenses and is a greater potential “carrier killer” than its predecessors were.

The most obvious, though not the only, scenario in which Beijing might find this capability useful would be in attempting to invade Taiwan. If American ships can be held at bay and U.S. forces in Asia can be targeted at will, any allied intervention in Taiwan’s defense would be more difficult and costly. Another potentially Taiwan-related revelation in the leaked documents is that China has for the first time recently used its new helicopter-carrying assault ship in an extended deployment.

The new missile is only one piece in a rapidly expanding arsenal that Beijing is deploying as it militarizes more of the South China Sea, builds out its blue-water fleet, expands its footprint in the Pacific Islands, and engages in the largest nuclear buildup since the Cold War.

China is building approximately 350 new nuclear-missile silos, hundreds of new nuclear warheads, and several new bases for mobile rocket launchers that can handle intermediate- and long-range missiles, according to a March report by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

“China is continuing the nuclear weapons modernization program that it initiated in the 1990s and 2000s, but is expanding it significantly by fielding more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before,” the report stated.

Hans Kristensen, director of the FAS Nuclear Information Project, told me the DF-27 can probably hold either nuclear or conventional warheads, and therefore can be seen as both a strategic and a tactical weapon.

“The Chinese have left their previous philosophy of a minimum nuclear deterrent, and they have determined both in terms of numbers and in terms of types of systems, they need more stuff,” Kristensen said. “This adds to that picture.”

In Washington, military planners are realizing that China (and, to a lesser degree, Russia) has surpassed the United States in hypersonic military technology. But there’s no agreement on what to do about it. The United States is developing hypersonic weapons of its own, but it lacks sufficient means to defend against the ones China is already fielding.

In the Cold War, the United States developed asymmetric capabilities to nullify the Soviet Union’s advantage in having a larger missile arsenal. Now China is using that strategy against America. Rather than meet China’s missile developments tit for tat, the United States and its allies must shift resources to nullify the new threat and shore up their ability to protect their assets.

Thanks to the leaks, at least the public now knows the extent of China’s advances. But peace in Asia depends on maintaining the credibility of the U.S.-led deterrent.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat is your favorite cuisine? Be an unabashed partisan and make a case for why it’s the best in the world.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteReflecting on last week’s unusually tumultuous news cycle, James Fallows makes the case for less political reporting at Breaking the News:
Reporting on politics has somehow become the prestige pinnacle of newspaper and broadcast journalism. Its practitioners are on TV panels and the book circuit.
I’ve long argued that Americans would be better informed, and simply more interested in the news, and reporters would feel more energized, engaged, and useful, if 90% of today’s political press corps were re-deployed on other beats. And if 90% of the airtime and online emphasis were given to other topics.
Partly that’s because other topics offer so much more depth and variety. The world is two-dimensional when it comes to presidential politics. The incumbent is doing well, or poorly. The next election will go this way, or it will go like that. Of course this matters, tremendously. But it’s binary. By comparison, stories on other topics—science, business, art, a community’s past and future, interests and achievements, practically anything —are as rich, surprising, and varied as life itself. When you read the presidential-politics stories or sit through the electoral-forecast panels, the world is unsurprising and gray. When you read or learn about anything else, it’s in full color and 3-D.
Building a Better Coronavirus VaccineThe Biden administration is spending $5 billion on a program aimed at hastening the development of new coronavirus vaccines. Eric Topol argues that this is a wise investment.Among his reasons:
The prospects for another Omicron-like event—a new family of variants that will challenge the immunity we have built up via vaccines, boosters, infections and their combinations. As I’ve previously reviewed, the chance of us seeing another highly troublesome variant is estimated to be 10-20% over the next 2 years, and higher as we go beyond that timeline. There are too many paths for this to happen, as shown below, for us not to worry about it. To anticipate this we need a pan-coronavirus vaccine that exploits our knowledge of not just the Spike protein, but also conserved regions of the virus, and a wealth of academic lab studies that have discovered critical antigenic sites (epitopes) of the virus for highly potent, broad, neutralizing antibodies which can serve as templates for such a variant-proof vaccine. We don’t need to “dream” about such a vaccine anymore. (This excellent review was published in Science, April 2021).
With all the science that’s been done, it ought to be attainable! The NextGen program will help accelerate that by promoting and de-risking the vaccine development programs. There are undesirable side effects, some lack of durability of protection beyond 4-6 months, and vaccine-induced injury for current Covid vaccines that can certainly be improved upon.
The Real Reason for Military-Recruiting Shortfalls?In 2022, the Department of Defense implemented a new online platform called Military Health System Genesis to track the medical records of applicants before they could sign up for service. As a result, recruits have been prevented from fudging their own medical history to avoid being disqualified—which, Irene Loewenson and Geoff Ziezulewicz assert in Military Times, had been a common (if technically illegal) practice among many who wished to enlist in the pre-Genesis era. This newly accurate screening system is now fueling a military-recruitment crisis, Loewenson and Ziezulewicz write:
Political leaders and partisan pundits blame today’s recruiting crisis on everything from so-called “woke” diversity training to kids these days being too fat and lazy to cut it. Military brass have blamed an under-educated public, a roaring civilian jobs market and bad perceptions of service fueled by negative headlines. But multiple recruiters who spoke with Military Times blame Genesis above all else.
“When Genesis hit the scene, it was a night-and-day difference,” Navy recruiter Peter Harris, a petty officer, noted. Once an applicant signs their consent, Genesis vacuums up the entirety of their medical history, flagging past and present health issues.
That makes it harder, some recruiters say, to squeeze applicants through despite past maladies they did not disclose—such as ADHD, depression or a years-old broken bone. Recruiting numbers suffer as a result. Previously, such applicants could enlist if they concealed, or genuinely had forgotten about, these issues.
Reader Emails on Diversity, Equity, and InclusionRobin argues that Stanford Law School Dean Jenny S. Martinez should be applauded for a recent letter sketching a version of DEI that coexists with freedom of speech rather than constraining it:
I believe Dean Martinez reinvigorated the DEI movement with its humane and perhaps original intent, which is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, concepts that practically all of us will champion. In the university context, she pointed out that a basic aim is to provide an atmosphere “most conductive to speculation, experiment and creation,” and that promotes “the widest range of viewpoints … free of institutional orthodoxy ...” She called this part of “basic norms of pluralism,” which I think would be an appropriate way to summarize the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. The extreme form of DEI is, instead, a moral effort to impose a way of thought, with pre-approved means and outcomes, which does not lead to a useful exchange of ideas that is essential to a thriving social network. We must welcome all comers; disagree vigorously when we don’t see eye to eye; stop, overcome, reverse past discrimination against groups among us; in order to live together for everyone’s benefit.
Paul describes a nonprofit group that he co-founded:
We started PROPEL Pequannock (Pequannock Residents of Pride, Equity, and Leadership) in an effort to make our [82 percent] white, very conservative Morris County, NJ, town more welcoming to all. Our families had experienced bias in the community, and soon we had members of the LGBTQ , Asian, and Black communities authoring their own first-person stories of bias that they had experienced in Pequannock, which we published on our website. We’ve succeeded in many firsts including June Pride Month Proclamations in 2021 and 22 as well as the 1st Annual Pequannock Pride Fest held at a public park last June. We had 30 vendors, music all day long, five food trucks, three children’s entertainment venues, and about 1,000 attendees all enjoying a beautiful day of kindness.
Meanwhile our local school board has been challenged by far-right candidates who combine DEI, socialism, CRT, and LGBTQ-themed books into a conspiratorial soup of what they deem pornography intended to “groom” their children. We’ve managed to defeat them in the last two elections, but this year Moms for Liberty endorsed one such candidate and we fear their money along with their well organized disinformation campaigns will be increasingly challenging.
So, in many ways it doesn’t matter to our PROPEL efforts what DEI, or CRT, or socialism means to people. Educating Americans these days seems a useless exercise in frustration. Instead we’ve settled on the simple notion of kindness as a way to achieve inclusive equity. This year we will award a scholarship to a graduating senior who demonstrated kindness throughout their high school career, and another to the student who most supported our mission. This year’s Pride Fest is sponsored by a regional hospital and a major corporate bank, so we’re establishing a solid foothold in the community. Whether kindness will prevail remains to be seen, but we’re hopeful.
And Mike questions efforts to supplant equality with equity:
If DEI refers to diversity, equity, and inclusion it is worth noting that one of these terms seems somewhat out of place. Diversity as a goal seems laudable: there is value in promoting diversity in academia and workplaces where it leads to better problem solving and outcomes. While some quibble over what forms of diverse individuals should or should not be included (one rarely sees attempts to include poor white people despite their exclusion from many important civic arenas), the basic thinking appeals to most.
Inclusivity, or the notion that it is worthwhile to work to make all people feel welcome, is an extension of basic manners. Asking a little extra of a workplace to accommodate people who have been underrepresented or ignored in order so they feel as though they belong is a natural next step of diversity efforts; there is little point to inviting different types of people somewhere only to treat them as if they shouldn’t have been invited.
But the last term, equity, seems the most fraught. Here’s one definition I found: “Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” Equality is a common value in America. The idea that people should be afforded the same opportunity and then do the most with it, even if reality hasn't always lived up to that ideal, feels familiar. But everyone achieving the same outcome does not, and seems antithetical to equality. Different people have different abilities, interests, and work ethics.  
Why would anyone expect them to achieve identical outcomes? More to the point, who decides what is the ideal outcome? Who decides who will and will not receive those resources and opportunities? How will they allocate them? What happens if they aren’t allocated according to the dicta of the decider? Who decides who the decider will be? Diversity and inclusivity are about respect for the individual and bringing them into a common goal. What they do once they’re part of that group is up to them. Equity, at least how it is often promoted, seems to be more about paternalistically deciding goals for people, and picking winners and losers. One of these three is not like the other.
On the Death of a MotherIn an obituary for Joan Farrell McArdle, her daughter writes:
Nothing prepares you to lose your mother because, for you, there has never been a world without her in it. You floated through your days unaware that you were sustained by knowing she would be there to return to, in triumph or disaster. All you can do after is find things to fill the void, ideally things that remind you of her.
At War on the Rocks, Paul Scharre argues that the militaries that will best harness AI’s advantages “will be those that effectively understand and employ its unique and often alien forms of cognition.”He explains:
When an AI fighter pilot beat an experienced human pilot 15-0 in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s AlphaDogfight competition, it didn’t just fly better than the human. It fought differently. Heron Systems’ AI agent used forward-quarter gunshots, when the two aircraft were racing toward each other head-to-head, a shot that’s banned in pilot training because of the risk of a collision. One fighter pilot characterized the AI’s abilities as a “superhuman capability” making high-precision, split-second shots that were “almost impossible” for humans. Even more impressive, the AI system wasn’t programmed to fight this way. It learned this tactic all on its own. AI systems’ ability to perform not just better than humans, but to fight differently, is a major potential advantage in warfare … U.S. defense projects sometimes conceive of AI systems as operating like a teammate or copilot. Yet AI systems often think in a radically different way to humans. These differences can be an advantage, but only if warfighters understand AI’s unique inhuman strengths and weaknesses.
The U.S. military should increase its investments in prototyping, experimentation, and wargaming with AI systems to better understand their potential in warfare and how to best employ them.

Madeline Cooper had just crossed the finish line when the bombs went off. Fellow sophomore Danielle Reny was in the home stretch on Boylston Street, her family nearby, cheering her on. In the miles behind, Harvard faculty, students, and other members of the community were on the course, toiling toward the finish, unaware their Boston Marathon Monday was about to take a horrific turn.
As the 10th anniversary of the 2013 Marathon bombings approaches, those with close ties to the University who experienced that day and the chaotic days that followed say that time has healed many of the emotional and physical wounds, but scars remain. No one was left untouched.
For some who ran, time has faded memories and pushed the trauma from everyday thoughts. But certain places, events, or other reminders summon flashbacks. Conversations begun breezily pause so speakers can gather themselves and sometimes brush away unexpected tears. For others, the subject remains too close to discuss publicly. A few, like Reny, whose family stood near the pressure cooker bombs, have embraced a commitment to a new cause, healing themselves by helping others, even though few days still pass without thoughts of the unexpected attack that killed three and wounded more than 260.

Madeline Cooper, who was a sophomore at the time of the bombings, reflects at a remembrance held a year later in Memorial Church.

 Harvard file photo

For those willing to share recollections, invariably one moment is crystal clear: the instant they realized something was wrong.
Michael Szonyi was about to turn from Commonwealth Avenue onto Hereford Street, just blocks from the final left onto Boylston and the dash to the finish. But instead of accelerating to triumph, the runners slowed, the group compacting until they stopped. Word filtered back about what had happened, and Szonyi thought of his wife and 7-year-old son waiting near the finish. They’d tell him later that they’d been close enough to see the bombs go off. Szonyi also knew that, if not for the hip injury he’d cursed earlier in the race, he might have been much closer himself.
“I would have been there when the bomb went off,” Szonyi said. “I don’t know what would have happened but there might have been a very different ending to the day.”
Behind, but not far away, was Harvard College senior Mark Jahnke. He was also on Commonwealth and might have been within sight of Szonyi if Jahnke hadn’t been in the underpass beneath Massachusetts Avenue when the runners slowed to a halt. Another student, sophomore Alana Ganz, had ridden with Jahnke, Szonyi, and 45 others on the Harvard bus to the starting line that morning. Her parents had come up from Pittsburgh to support her and waited for her about 10 miles from the finish. There, her dad joined her for the push to Boston. The pair were about a mile away when everything came to a halt.
The day’s memories have two other things in common: the blue sky and sunshine of a beautiful spring day, and the utter confusion that rapidly descended. Many had left cellphones and a change of clothes in a bag to be shuttled to the finish line, now chaotic and sealed off. Runners had no way to check in with loved ones or summon a ride. Those who’d carried phones had documented the day on the long road from Hopkinton, and batteries had run down. Rumors swirled about what had happened and what might still occur. Roads were closed, both because of the race itself and later to cordon off the area around the bombing site.

Provost Alan Garber expresses pride and gratitude for the response by the University’s teaching hospitals. “Recent training in disaster management had prepared them for the casualties they encountered, helping avoid a far worse disaster.” 

But good emerged along with chaos. People improvised, both to help themselves and others. They shared information and working phones, and even acted as guides for out-of-towners. Szonyi, the Frank Wen-Hsiung Wu Memorial Professor of Chinese History, put aside worries about his own family to translate for some Taiwanese runners whose confusion was compounded by the language barrier.
Jahnke also tried to help, reaching out to tell the Crimson he was willing to document what happened, though he was stymied by road closures and eventually abandoned the effort. As his adrenaline ebbed, Jahnke headed home, adding to the 26 miles already logged as he walked along the Charles River Esplanade to campus. He went directly to a preplanned Harvard College Marathon Challenge event that quickly became a support session. Afterward, he kept walking, heading up to the Radcliffe Quadrangle, where he could finally rest in Pforzheimer House.
“That was the greatest day of my life, until it was the worst day of my life,” said Jahnke, today a management consultant in development and global health. “I was just shell-shocked, absolutely shell-shocked.”
For two early finishers, it was only after they got back to campus that they understood the magnitude of what had happened. Harvard Provost Alan Garber and Dan Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences, both had finished the race already. They had walked to Public Garden and met their wives when the explosions occurred. Each marked the sounds as unusual but didn’t think much of them beyond that. The foursome hopped on the Red Line back to campus, and it was only after emerging aboveground in Harvard Square that they were deluged by texts, voice messages, and emails checking on their welfare.
“I felt such a mixture of emotions — disbelief, shock, horror, anger, grief. It is still very personal because the marathon is such a community event,” Lieberman said. “It’s for everybody. It’s a celebration of endurance and community and helping each other. The people who were injured were charity runners, running to raise money to help other people.”
For Garber, the disbelief and grief were mixed with pride and gratitude for the response by the University’s teaching hospitals.
“I learned soon after that the victims of the bombing who were brought to the hospitals all survived,” Garber said. “Recent training in disaster management had prepared them for the casualties they encountered, helping avoid a far worse disaster.”

“I felt such a mixture of emotions — disbelief, shock, horror, anger, grief,” said evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, pictured running on the Weeks Bridge in preparation for the 2014 marathon. 
File photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Broadly, the Harvard community experienced the bombings in widely different ways. Though a number of students, staff, and faculty members were involved, running in the race or cheering from the sidelines, most were on campus.
That doesn’t mean they were spared the widespread shock and outrage at the day’s violence and disruption — and those of the days to come. Three days of nonstop news coverage ensued, reflecting the region’s struggle to understand what had happened and who had done it.
The crisis crescendoed in a regionwide manhunt after the suspects were identified. Police were in pursuit of brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, later found to be self-radicalized terrorists, after the two killed MIT police officer Sean Collier and kidnapped a passing motorist, who soon escaped. The older brother, Tamerlan, was killed during a gunfight with police, and Dzhokhar, now on federal death row, was captured hours later hiding in a boat in Watertown.
Those days of confusion, which included a daylong shelter-in-place order, were marked by uncertainty. Jahnke recalls holing up in his room for days after the race. Szonyi said that despite the tragedy — or perhaps because of it — he felt a duty to carry on and teach, but the exhaustion normal after the race was compounded by the hip injury. He recalls apologizing to the class for having to sit the next day and in retrospect wonders whether trying to soldier on was appropriate, given the collective trauma.

A candlelight vigil was held at Memorial Church the day after the bombings.
Harvard file photos

Members of Harvard's police force were among those gathered in April 2013 to pay tribute to MIT police officer Sean Collier, who was killed by the bombing suspects during the manhunt.

A moment of silence at the Business School.

Cooper, who heard the explosions as she crossed the finish line, managed to find her sister who’d safely finished ahead of her that day. But between the exhaustion and the chaos, the whole thing didn’t sink in until the next day, her birthday.
“I remember just walking around Harvard Square and thinking about what happened,” she said. “That was when it really settled in. It was definitely an emotional day. I called my dad, and he came in, and we got lunch and just kind of talked about the gravity of the world and how there are [bad] things that happen. I was turning 19 or something, and it was certainly a ‘loss of innocence’ moment.”
In the years since, some of 2013’s runners are still at it — Cooper among them — though many marathoning careers have converted to shorter distances.
“Over the last 10 years, I feel lucky enough that bombings are not a daily thing and that,  hopefully, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime event,” said Cooper, who is studying at Stanford for her M.D./Ph.D. “There certainly is a feeling — every time I finish a marathon and there isn’t any catastrophe — of gratefulness, of having the freedom to do these things and not letting anyone or any event prevent me or anyone else from doing them.”

After the bombing suspects were caught, Harvard College Marathon Challenge runners met in the Yard for a run that would take them to the memorial for slain officer Collier at MIT and Boston's Freedom Trail. 

Those who ran Boston in 2014 count that year as a seminal moment. Security was tight, but Lieberman said it was a chance for closure and to finish what was halted by hate, to honor those injured and killed, and to demonstrate the community’s strength and resilience. Some of those who had been injured returned. The blue and yellow 2013 Marathon jackets were plentiful on the racecourse, as were tears when people finally crossed the finish line, a year later than expected.
“You were running by the spots — the exact spots — where those bombs had been and where those people died. And the people who were standing there knew exactly where they were and exactly why they were there. And they were there to cheer us on. It was very powerful,” Lieberman said. “I wasn’t physically at the spot at the time of the bombing, but it felt like such a violation of our community, just so upsetting that it could happen here in Boston, in our own beloved marathon. Almost the instant it was over, I felt ‘I have to run it next year. We can’t let this sort of thing win.’”
For some members of Harvard’s community, however, the memories of the bombing don’t wait to be triggered by a place or thought. It’s never far away, even 10 years on. For the families of those killed in the tragedy, the loved one’s absence is a constant reminder. Two members of the Harvard community lost a daughter and a sister when 29-year-old Krystle Campbell of Arlington died after the first bomb went off at 2:49 p.m., April 15, 2013. The family has declined to talk publicly about it.

Danielle Larrow and family hold hands as they near the finish line in 2014. She was a sophomore in 2013 when the bombings injured several relatives. Since, they've raised almost $28 million for a research center dedicated to trauma prevention, treatment, and recovery.

Carl Prindle/Stepping Strong

Just feet away that day, Reny’s family stood at their favorite viewing spot on Boylston Street, outside Marathon Sports. For them the marathon was an annual tradition and, though considerably altered, it still is. Both of her parents had run it several times and, when they weren’t running, they joined the crowd along the route to cheer on those who were. Reny’s mother, father, grandmother, sister, and future husband — then-Harvard senior and second baseman Kyle Larrow — were looking on as she turned onto Boylston Street.
She saw the first explosion and, as many did, thought initially it was celebratory and harmless. That explanation, though, didn’t quite fit. As her mind wrestled with the incongruity, 14 seconds later the second bomb went off to her left. Through the chaos that ensued, Reny couldn’t find her family members. Worried, she made her way to her parents’ home nearby. She feared her loved ones were among the injured — or worse, among the dead. It was hours before she learned that they were all at different hospitals, injured by the pressure cooker bombs packed with ball bearings and nails. Her sister, Gillian, the most badly injured, was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, with severe wounds to both lower legs.
Though Gillian needed extensive rehabilitation, the Brigham’s physicians were able to save her legs. In the weeks and months that followed, the Renys rallied as their wounds healed, drawing a sense of purpose from the tragedy. The next year, they ran Boston together, and eight family members held hands as they crossed the finish line. Together, they had raised more than $3 million to kick off a new research center dedicated to trauma prevention, treatment, and recovery. The family is still a driving force behind the effort, the Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation, at Brigham and Women’s. To date, the family has raised more than $27 million, with the Boston Marathon as their primary fundraiser. This year Danielle will run it for the fourth time.
Reny — who goes by Danielle Larrow since her marriage — still thinks about the bombing nearly every day. But, like Cooper and others who’ve found that some good can come even from an evil day, the memory’s bleakness is eased by a sense of gratitude.
“Over the past decade, my parents, husband, and I have all collectively run and crossed that finish line 19 times. Each time has been emotional but redemptive,” Reny said. “We would erase 2013 if we could, but we take great pride in how that day has inspired us to create something that is transforming trauma care for other trauma survivors like my sister.”
 
The latest TikTok, Silicon Valley, wellness fad is “dopamine detox”. To me, the term is a good example of many of the things that are wrong with the wellness and self-help industries. It takes a complex topic and boils it down to a misleading and drastically oversimplified “life hack”, that can be packaged and sold. In this case it may be ironically reinforcing some of the behavior that it claims to address.

What, allegedly, is a “dopamine detox”?

The idea comes from a hyperreductionist and misleading popular notion about what dopamine is. It is supposed to be the “reward” chemical. When you do something pleasurable, you get a “hit of dopamine.” This oversimplified notion leads people to believe that dopamine itself is addictive, or that the dopamine is what is causing the pleasurable reward experience. None of this is true.

Dopamine is simply a neurotransmitter, one of the many chemicals that allow different cells in the nervous system to communicate with each other. The chemicals themselves don’t have a specific neurological function. What determines their function is the effect of binding to receptors and the circuit in which they are being released. Neurotransmitters are essentially either excitatory or inhibitory – they either increase or decrease the activity of the neuron they bind to. But the net effect of their action depends entirely on the circuit itself. An inhibitory neurotransmitter can decrease the activity of an inhibitory circuit, thereby increasing some activity.

What matters, in other words, is the neurological circuitry itself, not the neurotransmitters they use. Dopamine, for example, is used in many parts of the brain for different purposes. It is involved in the basal ganglia, which regulates voluntary movement. Dopamine producing neurons are what are damaged in Parkinson’s disease. But dopamine is also involved in many higher cognitive functions as well, which is why if patients with Parkinson’s disease take too much medication intended to increase the dopamine-mediated activity in the basal ganglia they can get psychotic side effects, and why some psychiatric medication can cause movement disorder side effects.

In other words – there is nothing inherently rewarding or pleasurable about dopamine. It just happens to be the neurotransmitter involved in the reward circuitry. And in fact, dopamine secreting cells in the reward circuitry are more involved with motivation and behavior than any pleasurable sensation. When you have sex or eat cheesecake, it’s not dopamine in the nucleus acumbens that makes these things feel pleasurable, just motivate us to engage in these activities in the first place.

The idea of detoxing from a neurotransmitter is therefore nonsensical. Of course, “detoxing” is still a trendy wellness concept, which is why this is all being framed as a detox. Sometimes it is called a “dopamine fast”, which is still trendy and problematic.

The overall idea is to avoid behaviors for a period of time that allegedly release dopamine. For either a few hours a day, or one day a week, or one week a year, you avoid any activity that might trigger a reward reaction in the brain. The claim is that this will keep your brain dopamine levels low (utter nonsense) and therefore “detox” your brain from dopamine. The slightly better, but still highly problematic, claim is that it gives your dopamine receptors a break so that they will not be as tolerant to the neurotransmitter, and therefore “reset” your addictive behaviors. This is getting a litter closer to reality, but still, in my opinion, is overly reductionist and misleading, and turns a complex situation into a simple “life hack”.

The deeper problem with this approach is that it frames a complex behavioral issue into a simple matter of brain chemistry. This is similar to the “brain training” marketing. It focuses on brain function in a simplistic way, taking attention away from the behaviors themselves and the whole person, in order to sell a quick fix.

Human behavior is a complex combination of inherent neurological traits, culture, environment, individual experience, and circumstance. I am all for understanding how our brains work as one method for having insight into our own behavior, cognitive biases, and motivations. But human behavior cannot be reduced to this. To generalize, systems need to be understood at every level of organization, not just their most fundamental parts. You cannot understand traffic patterns, for example, by studying the workings of the internal combustion engine, or the chemical reaction of burning fuel. You cannot understand human behavior by focusing on neurotransmitters.

Ultimately the “dopamine detox” is about addictive behaviors. This is a complex topic I cannot do justice to here, but suffice to say that humans have the potential to engage in behaviors compulsively. And yes, we can understand the neuroanatomical correlates of compulsive behavior, and the circuitry that underlies this behavior, but this does not explain at every level why someone may be engaging in such behavior, nor how they can change their behavior in a positive direction. Another layer here is that it is common to frame behavior addictions as if they are the exact same thing as chemical addictions. They aren’t. A chemical or physiological addiction is primarily a brain phenomenon that can be best understood at the neuroanatomical and neurochemical level. But psychological addiction (while it has neurological correlates) needs to be understood and addressed at the psychological level.

It is tempting, however, to focus at the neurological level, because then the problem is not you, the choices you make or the behaviors you engage in. The problem is your pesky brain. And if the brain is the problem, then the fix is also in the brain. The complexity here is that for many conditions, the problem is, in fact, with the brain. Sometimes these are understood as neurological disorders, but if the manifestation is primarily behavioral or mood, they may be considered psychiatric, even though they are brain function disorders. Mistakes can be made in both directions – blaming people (environment, parenting) for a brain disorder, or blaming the brain for bad choices (because dopamine).

When it comes to addictive behaviors (psychologically addictive, not chemical dependence), dopamine is irrelevant. It’s focuses on the wrong level. There is also no “one crazy trick” that will solve the problem. But it is a good idea to think about your day-to-day life and ask if there are any behaviors that you may be engaging in compulsively, or that are taking up a lot of your time with little reward or benefit. Electronic devices and social media likely fall into these categories for many people. It is helpful to recognize that people can be susceptible to compulsive behavior. For some things it may be best to stop the behavior entirely, for others to set limits or have down time. “Everything in moderation” is a good rule of thumb.

If you are having difficulty with this, then the compulsive behavior may be a manifestation of a more complex issue, or you may lack the skill sets necessary to change the behavior. This is where cognitive therapy can play a role. The questions to ask yourself are – why am I engaging in this behavior, is it having a negative impact on my life (if for no other reason than it’s a huge time suck), and do I need help in changing my behavior.

But don’t just blame it all on dopamine and think that a quick “detox” or fast is going to solve the problem. In fact, seeking out and engaging in these quick fix life hacks can be just another form of compulsive behavior.

In 2010, when Ken Caldeira and David Keith published “The Need for Climate Engineering Research,” proposals to combat climate change by intervening in planetary systems had virtually no support. That is no longer the case.

MELBOURNE – As our planet’s climate heats up, so, too, does the debate about the boldest response to it: geoengineering, or the deliberate modification of the atmosphere to combat global warming. In 2010, when Ken Caldeira and David Keith published “The Need for Climate Engineering Research,” geoengineering had virtually no support. That is no longer the case.

Early critics like Clive Hamilton dismissed geoengineering as “playing god” – an objection that misfires when addressed to those who do not believe that a divine being is safeguarding the fate of the planet. A more secular version of the objection might state that we should leave nature alone, but that battle was lost decades ago. We humans have already overwhelmed nature, to such an extent that many scientists suggest that we are now in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

Now geoengineering is back on the agenda. In 2020, the US Congress directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to develop a multi-year research initiative to investigate both natural and human activities that might alter the reflectivity of the stratosphere and how those activities could affect our planet. In 2020, NOAA began offering funding for such projects. Meanwhile, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommended spending $200 million on a research program to see whether there is a safe way to cool the planet.

When Caldeira and Keith wrote about engineering the climate, several approaches were mooted, such as adding soluble iron to the ocean to increase the growth of phytoplankton, which would absorb and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research failed to validate that approach, however, and current research is focused on solar radiation modification (SRM), also known as solar radiation management, which aims to reflect a small part of the solar radiation that warms the surface of the Earth.

The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 put 15 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it mixed with water to form a layer of particles known as aerosols. This layer reduced the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, reducing average global temperatures by 0.6o Celsius for the next 15 months. That observation led some scientists to ask whether we could create a similar effect by deliberately releasing aerosols into the stratosphere – the tool most favored by those who want to learn more about how we might reduce solar radiation.

No responsible person would claim that we are ready to try something like that now, so the real debate is about whether to take the prior step: carry out research that might eventually make SRM feasible.

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Two open letters give opposing answers. In January 2022, a group of scientists released a message directed at governments and the United Nations, calling for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering. The letter, which has been signed by more than 400 academics from more than 60 countries, outlines three main concerns.

First, we are unable to understand fully the risks involved in geoengineering, given the complexities of both global and regional weather patterns. Second, giving credibility to the idea that geoengineering may save us from catastrophic global warming will weaken our resolve to address the root cause of climate change by achieving net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. And, third, we lack any system of global governance with the authority to control the deployment of geoengineering in a manner that would be fair, inclusive, and effective.

In February, another open letter was published calling for “balanced research.” The signatories, again scientists and academics, recognize that we must address the root cause of global warming by cutting our emissions and removing CO 2 from the atmosphere, and accept that SRM carries its own environmental risks. Nevertheless, faced with a choice between a flat refusal to investigate SRM and “thorough and critical research,” they prefer the latter.

Ten years ago, I would not have signed a call for research into geoengineering, but I signed the second letter. I changed my view because today we are in a more desperate situation than we were a decade ago. Climate change is occurring more rapidly than previously predicted, with temperature records broken, more severe droughts and floods, and more intense storms. Despite these strong warning signs, few countries are on track to make the emissions cuts needed to keep global warming below 1.5ºC or even 2ºC.

It is true, as the letter opposing any use of geoengineering states, that we may never achieve certainty about the risks of SRM. But we are also very far from certainty about the eventual impact of the greenhouse gases we have already put into the atmosphere, and of those we will continue to emit. There are risks either way. We currently have no idea whether the risks of attempting SRM outweigh the risks of not attempting it. We would be wise to try to find out.

Peter Daszak, a former Kingston University snail researcher, spent many years hunting down bat viruses with Chinese scientists, helped fund their cutting-edge research in Wuhan, and then vociferously led opposition to any suggestions that the pandemic might have been linked to a laboratory in the city. A pugnacious character, the British zoologist would pop up regularly in the media to fiercely dismiss “conspiracy theories”, playing a key role in efforts to stifle debate over the origins of Covid-19.
So how strange to discover that this same man had previously warned that risky research was “intensifying” threats from “lab-enhanced viruses”. In fact, three years before the pandemic erupted, Daszak was involved in drafting a presentation about the dangers of engineered viruses being accidentally or even deliberately released into the world.
In this newly uncovered presentation, the scientist warned that “gain-of-function” research — which boosts the transmissibility of viruses — was “elevating the risk” that “deadly novel biological agents” could be released through accident or design. The document, demanding the urgent development of counter-measures, put such risk at the same level as natural spillover from the wild. It even focused on the specific threat from coronaviruses.
Yet after the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, Daszak headed the charge against those claiming the mysterious new disease might be potentially linked to research in the city, with even the British Medical Journal branding him the leader of the campaign to label such critics as conspiracy theorists.
Little wonder the disclosure of this document has provoked angry claims of hypocrisy. Richard Ebright, an expert on biosecurity and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told me it meant that Daszak and his allies have spent the past three years not telling the world the whole truth. The revelations underlined “the shocking recklessness” of funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan that was being carried out at a low-level biosecurity lab“with no protections beyond a pair of gloves, a lab coat and a hood”.
Today, Daszak is the $460,368-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group that channelled US research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology until the payments were exposed and terminated by President Trump in April 2020. The former Kingston University snail researcher responded with outrage, rounding on suggestions that research in Wuhan might have sparked the pandemic. Typical was a June 2020 article in The Guardian entitled “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” that insisted claims of “frankenviruses” made in labs were “the latest chapter in a tale of blame, misinformation and finger-pointing”.
A Global Virome Project slide flags up lab leak risks
Most infamously, he was the covert organiser of a statement in The Lancet journal that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and absurdly praised China’s “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. Signed by 27 experts, the document helped to crush scientific, political and media debate on whether the new virus might have been manipulated or leaked from a laboratory. The journal was forced later to add a note clarifying Daszak’s “competing interests” and he was removed from heading up its own inquiry into the virus’ origins.
Yet the presentation for the launch of his Global Virome Project (GVP) suggested something very different: that the risks of lab leaks and gain-of-function research needed to be taken seriously. It was seeking $1.3 billion funding over 10 years to help end “the pandemic era” by identifying viruses with the “greatest potential to infect humans and their laboratory-enhanced variants so we can prepare for them before they jump to us”.
The GVP was chaired by the infectious diseases expert Dennis Carroll, another of the signatories to The Lancet statement. Daszak was the project’s director, secretary and treasurer and emails obtained through freedom of information requests demonstrate that he had helped draft the pitch document.
A slide from the Global Virome Project understands the lab leak threat
The 40 slides prepared for the 2017 presentation focus on “dual threats” posed by both natural emergence of diseases and the accidental or intentional release of “laboratory enhanced variants”. They warn that gain-of-function research is inflaming the danger of “illnesses and deaths” along with “mass hysteria and panic”. They propose a 10-year project to “develop countermeasures” and build a huge database of viruses to enable their “rapid detection of natural and laboratory-enhanced threats”.
More from this authorThe real Covid conspiracyBy Ian Birrell
This presentation reflects sensible fears held by many sensible scientists. One page discloses plans for quick identification of engineered viruses. Another underlines the need to “rapidly recognise a lab-enhanced virus”. A third highlights the evidence of Sars-like coronaviruses in Yunnan — a tropical region of southern China where bats roost and scientists from Wuhan Institute of Virology went to collect their samples — while finding no signs of such infections in Wuhan itself.
A version of the slide deck came to light in an email exchange between Daszak and his GVP colleagues, obtained in a freedom of information request from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group. The full set was found by Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist and member of the Drastic group which challenged the science establishment’s narrative that Covid almost certainly spilled over naturally from animals.
Emails indicate that the GVP organisers also held discussions on their plans with Washington defence research agencies. Last month, FBI director Christopher Wray said his agency had “for quite some time assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. It is now backed by the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of laboratories engaged in advanced biology, although other US intelligence agencies disagree with their conclusion.
After the pandemic started, the GVP stalled. Three months ago, a federal watchdog accused US funding authorities and EcoHealth Alliance of “deficiencies” in their monitoring and oversight of the work conducted on coronavirus strains at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak has collaborated on extensive field research in Yunnan and 17 scientific papers since 2005 with the laboratory’s leading bat coronavirus expert Shi Zhengli.
More from this authorScience journals have been corrupted by ChinaBy Ian Birrell
Last month, EcoHealth Alliance boasted of winning fresh US grants to “identify” spillovers of bat coronaviruses in three other Asian nations by sampling thousands of bats and other mammals. “This will help identify the potential role of other wildlife as intermediate hosts in the transmission of bat CoVs — and may also help to shed light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” it claimed. The body did not respond to requests for comment on the GVP presentation.
Critics of virus hunting schemes argue that they present high risk while delivering few tangible benefits. A year-long investigation by The Washington Post concluded that such research could be placing the planet in greater danger of another pandemic, accusing the US of continuing to funnel big sums into overseas research despite insufficient oversight as regulation fails to keep pace with new technologies.There are thought to be thousands of biocontainment labs handling dangerous pathogens, although the precise number around the world is unknown.
Simon Wain-Hobson, the virologist who discovered the genetic blueprint of HIV, is among those wanting to see a ban on gain-of-function work.  He told me that Daszak’s presentation exposed the “fallacious logic” of suggesting engineered viruses could help to predict pandemics or assist production of preventative drugs and vaccines. “The science fiction goes on,” he said.

As I ooze back to consciousness after COVID-19 had me in its grip for the past few weeks, it has occurred to me that the real story unfolding in the world is in the United States. China and Russia matter a great deal, as do other countries. But none of them pivot the world. The United States has the largest economy, as well as the most powerful military force, including its navy. The U.S. remains a leading innovator in technology.

This is why the United States is a decisive power, but also a dangerous one. The concentration of power and capabilities, and the degree to which they are globally interconnected, means that an American failure would likely have disastrous consequences globally.

This is not a new global vulnerability, but it now coincides with the systemic crisis that the U.S. faces, as I laid out in my book “The Storm Before the Calm.” That book predicted a social crisis early in this decade, followed by a massive economic crisis. Along with that, there would emerge a political crisis and a major, once-in-every-80-years institutional crisis in the federal government. Finally, it predicted a profound change in government near the end of the decade, driven by political and economic forces.

Looking at history, what is striking is that in previous cycles, the social issues tended to subside a bit before terminal economic issues took over. In 1980, as economic issues dominated, the intense social issues of race and sexual culture in the 1970s had subsided somewhat. In 1932, the social aspects faded with the death of Huey Long and the onset of the Great Depression. The strength of the Ku Klux Klan subsided, and social issues linked to immigration gave way to economic concerns.

The intensity of the ongoing social issues is striking. Issues that are moral, religious and cultural are still tearing at the American system. Bank failures, and the reality that caused them, are compounding instead of overtaking these old events. Significantly complicating the situation is the 80-year institutional cycle. The synchronization of the end of this cycle and the socio-economic cycle is a first in U.S. history. Questions about the relationship between federal institutions like the Supreme Court and Congress compound the normal distrust between the public and institutions.

Nothing about this process is mechanistic, but there are patterns in how we live and govern ourselves. The failure of social issues to lessen, the intensification of economic issues, and the extreme intensity of the friction between federal institutions are markedly different from patterns in the 20th century with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both of them transitioned effectively from social and economic crises that were distinct. But the rage and mutual loathing of today – and their failure to recede – are odd, particularly when the institutional issue, which neither Roosevelt nor Reagan had to deal with, is included. The degree and type of rage and contempt today’s American public has for other members of the public are different.

This leads me to conclude that the model I used in “The Storm Before the Calm” has to be slightly modified. The transition points in political life had, since America’s founding, been 50-year cycles, and 80 years for institutional shifts. The pivotal moment has been the election of a president. I assumed that this cycle would be the same and, therefore, that the last presidential election before the end of the decade would be the pivot point.

I should emphasize that while presidents are important, they are not the driving force of history. The driving force is the patterns of division built around social, economic and institutional issues. It is the major division and massive dysfunction that force a fundamental shift on all levels. One president presides over this shift, leaving the new president the credit.

I do not believe the situation will hold beyond the coming election. The brutal social issues, from race to gender to guns, create a public division that affects the functioning of government. Relations within the political system at all levels are increasingly venomous. The financial system has left an economic crisis. As forecast, the technological system will become increasingly inefficient, and the public appetite for its goods will be in decline. The financial system portends economic decline that will breed increasingly desperate and simplistic solutions, further drawing capital out of the financial system. For the first time in history, the institutional cycle and the social cycle will coincide. While wars tend not to influence domestic cycles, the impact of the Ukraine war will likely be magnified.

The current political system cannot manage this situation. A solution must emerge now, to be presided over by the next president. It is impossible to explain all the details of a system failure or the need for a new political order. At this point, the only thing that can be said is that we are heading into failure, and a new president, filling everyone with joyous hope, will oversee what must be done. But what must be done remains murky, taking its bearing only from the breadth and seriousness of the failure.

I have this idea for a movie. It is about a pundit who has views on seemingly everything and can be reliably counted on to produce them on demand. One day, he wakes up and finds that he has lost his ability to do so. At first, the pundit enters into a state of bliss and is struck by the sensation of “having no head.” Where ideas might have once been, there is now just consciousness, and, as it happens, he is conscious of not having to think. This frees him up to do the things he always said he would do but never quite did.In fact, the pundit had written a book about being happy, which was ostensibly about finding meaning not in work but in family and community. But he was so busy helping others work less that he ended up working more, which was a source of irritation to his family. His family loved him—he was a good man, after all—but they wondered why he spent his life telling strangers how to find meaning when he himself had that meaning right in front of him and didn’t seem to realize it. Or worse, he realized it.Freed of the burdens of his calling, he now spends several hours a day conversing and playing with his young daughter, who is at the age where she loves, and probably will still remember, the attention that her father is presently devoting to her. She likes to paint. He doesn’t know how to paint, but he likes watching her making a mess of it on the canvas. He is intrigued by the way the colors clash. It reminds him of something. For now, she is uninhibited. She has no one to impress, not even her dad. She has not yet created expectations for herself, and others have not created them for her. These are the last years when she will feel this way.He is happy. He has found a fixed point and somehow avoided that most human of impulses, what Hobbes called “a general inclination of all mankind.... a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”But the pundit, to his distress, finds that this state of affairs is difficult to sustain. His devoted, if long-suffering, wife initially found his renewed focus on family endearing, but she has begun to grow impatient. They had enrolled their daughter in an arts-focused private school that was diverse but not too diverse. Naturally, it was expensive. The pundit funded such luxuries mostly through the exorbitant fees he charged for speaking to sad people. (It never quite occurred to him that if he kept on making sad people happy, there would be less need for his services). Because he wrote about happiness, he was often asked to speak about anything related to happiness, which, as it turned out, was nearly everything. But that all changed. Where his thoughts, obsessions, and hopes had once been a source of chaos and creativity, on that fateful day, he fell silent. He found that he couldn’t summon any distinct perspective. He no longer cared about “woke” versus “anti-woke.  But it wasn’t so much that he didn’t care. It was more that he had lost his grasp of what they even meant in the first place, a fact that dawned on him after watching the new Super Mario Bros. movie with his daughter. He was cutting down on his Twitter habit. But that didn’t prevent him from occasionally sneaking a peek for anthropological purposes. One of his 1.2 million Twitter followers posed an innocent question: had he liked the movie? He said, yes. He was there with his daughter, after all, and he now felt that that alone would transform even the most mundane act into something that nearly overwhelmed him with feeling. But that’s not what this fan—who had bought all of the pundit’s books at a steep discount at the last remaining used bookstore within a 30-mile radius—was asking. Twitter was divided between two firmly entrenched camps, each egging on the other about whether Nintendo’s bold foray into filmmaking signaled the dawn of a new era. The pundit tried to recall the key plot points—and largely succeeded—but he was no longer sure if a movie “about a plumber who fights a turtle on behalf of a princess” suggested a stirring return to chivalry and family values or whether it was plea for intersectional solidarity and the kind of volunteer, vigilante justice that could invite a small but significant decrease in funding for the local police department. Through sheer intellectual force, he tried to come up with a stronger, more definitive “opinion.” It might have been weighed down by that bit of reflexive contrarianism that was always his forte, but at least it would have been something. But it didn’t seem to be working. He didn’t have an opinion, and opinions (apparently) weren’t things that could just be fashioned out of thin air.  The pundit was frustrated.  He shut down his Macbook. By now, it was early morning. It happened to be a Saturday, and it had just been snowing, which struck him as unusual in the middle of March. Groggy and uncertain, he took the  stairs down from his office to the family room. He saw his daughter. She was sitting there quietly, seemingly deep in thought. She was painting. She smiled at him. And he smiled back.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers for their thoughts on Donald Trump’s legal troubles in New York.Diana is tired of hearing about Trump:
I was so happy when there was a short period where that guy wasn’t on the front page. Now with all the other investigations he might be indicted for, he’ll be top of the news forever. I can’t stand it. I want it all to go away.
Fred objects to Trump’s indictment:
The hatred for Donald Trump by the Democrats and the media is becoming an embarrassment internationally for America. We are now a nation divided in every way possible. We have lost our sense of humor and our ability to communicate and govern in a civilized manner. If we continue down this path, the America that most of us were raised in and some of us defended will be lost forever. This is a sad time for our country.
Rob disagrees:
I view Trump as the most consequential traitor to our democracy of any individual citizen in American history. Given this jaundiced outlook, I am less concerned that the Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s case is airtight than that a legitimate and justifiable criminal case—any case––has finally been brought against the heretofore Teflon Trump. I am also heartened that there are potentially other Trump indictments out there. Bragg’s case breaks the ice of precedent when it comes to charging ex-presidents: We are now on the other side.
When likely faced with even more indictments, Trump will be spewing the most toxic of his demagogic rhetoric—this will be Trump mania on amphetamines and will remind voters what kind of a person he is, and, if reelected president, what damage he will wreak. His nonstop delusional, rabid, and depraved blatherings on the campaign trail may be sufficient once again to persuade enough voters to keep this scourge away from the White House.
Dave voted for Trump in 2016 and wants to see him tried:
I’ve been a lifelong Republican, and I voted for Trump in 2016, as I bought into all the “crooked Hillary” rhetoric. In hindsight, it was Trump who abused his power. I’m fed up with Trump and his hijacking of the party to try to destroy our democracy. First and foremost, I think it’s important that our legal system proves that no one, including ex-presidents, is above the law. Even though I have my doubts that this will result in any guilty verdicts if it does make it to trial this year or next, it’s important that the effort is made if a grand jury finds there’s enough evidence to warrant the indictment and subsequent trial.
Trump’s arrogance, negligence, and contempt for his fellow humans should be what he’s on trial for, but I’ll settle for this indictment for now, while other cases continue to develop. I think it’s more likely that one (or more) of those will offer a clearer path to a guilty verdict. I also find it very telling that so many Republicans have lined up to defend Trump rather than use his indictment as an opportunity to distance themselves.  
Jaleelah is untroubled by the charges against Trump:
I think it’s fine that Trump was brought in on mundane charges. If prosecuting his more outlandish actions had some viable path to conviction, someone would’ve done it already. I also think that prosecuting him for common crimes is a better way to show that no one is above the law than going after him for an unprecedented illegal act. Waiting two or three more years on the chance that some charge from the January 6 insurrection materializes sends the following message: “No one is above all laws, but some people are above some laws, and presidents can get away with crimes as long as they aren’t too brazen.” That is not a healthy message to send to future (and current) rulers.
I think it will be hard to find 12 unbiased jurors. I don’t think it will be impossible. Pundits, influenced by the media they consume and the friends they surround themselves with, overestimate the number of people who know anything about politics. Some people truly do not have Twitter accounts or Fox News subscriptions. Lots of people are so focused on their jobs and their families that they consume almost no news at all. Lawyers have the right to reject potential jurors. If there are 12 citizens who live under rocks in New York (and I’m sure there are), the court will find them and the trial will be fair.
John objects to all the media coverage:
He deserves indictment because he appears to have committed a crime, according to the evidence presented to a grand jury. He does not deserve all the oxygen you and the rest of the press are giving him. Everyone except his supporters would be overjoyed to not hear or see anything beyond “Trump Indicted.”
Magdalene argues that he is being treated unfairly:
Prior to 9/11, the American consciousness was focused on Columbine, the Bush-Gore election, and Enron's accounting scandal. When our leaders decided to declare a War on Terror, they simply forgot about problems at home. So now we have a nation where Columbines are commonplace, the 2020 election divided the country, and corporate malpractice is the norm.
Trump is a scapegoat. He is simply the cup into which our country has poured the sum of its nihilism. Trump is not responsible for January 6. This honor belongs to every politician who forgets small-town America until election years.
I grew up in a rural area. I watched corruption trickle down from the state and federal level to rot our communities from the inside out. Our towns are continually deprived of medical care, education, and employment. Drugs, crime, and violence take their place. Trump just read the room. This trait made him a celebrity, then a president. He has never been shy about telling us who he is. But the people who put him up there have struck bargains with chaos for power.
Our nation is broken. We can all feel it like a second skin, this creeping disquiet of the spirit. My concern about Trump’s indictment has more to do with the reckoning that is surely coming. Because chaos has no allegiance to anyone.
Chadd complains that “all this about the prosecution being ‘political’ to me is nonsense.” He explains:
Every prosecution is political. In one area of the U.S. you can buy and sell marijuana in a store. In another, you can go to prison for decades for just having the stuff.
That's politics.
America is sick and tired of the rich and powerful being let off because of politics, money, fame, or their popularity. The fact that the rich and powerful get away with everything and face no consequences is what got Trump elected in the first place. And now here we are: a man with zero morals is faced with his crimes, and everyone balks! The comparison with Al Capone and his tax-dodging charges is as accurate as can be made.
And Russell favors bringing more charges against Trump:
The other cases that are winding more slowly through the judicial system are the ones that really matter. I hope this indictment emboldens the grand juries in the other cases Trump is facing to indict him now. I hope the side that favors the ideal that no man is above the law wins. But that is far from guaranteed.

Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan. But there is one specific corner where technological advances haven’t kept up: weather apps.Weather forecasts are always a game of prediction and probabilities, but these apps seem to fail more often than they should. At best, they perform about as well as meteorologists, but some of the most popular ones fare much worse. The cult favorite Dark Sky, for example, which shut down earlier this year and was rolled into the Apple Weather app, accurately predicted the high temperature in my zip code only 39 percent of the time, according to ForecastAdvisor, which evaluates online weather providers. The Weather Channel’s app, by comparison, comes in at 83 percent. The Apple app, although not rated by ForecastAdvisor, has a reputation for off-the-mark forecasts and has been consistently criticized for presenting faulty radar screens, mixing up precipitation totals, or, as it did last week, breaking altogether. Dozens of times, the Apple Weather app has lulled me into a false sense of security, leaving me wet and betrayed after a run, bike ride, or round of golf.People love to complain about weather forecasts, dating back to when local-news meteorologists were the primary source for those planning their morning commutes. But the apps have produced a new level of frustration, at least judging by hundreds of cranky tweets over the past decade. Nearly two decades into the smartphone era—when anyone can theoretically harness the power of government weather data and dissect dozens of complex, real-time charts and models—we are still getting caught in the rain.Weather apps are not all the same. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. On an average day, you’re probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases—which usually take place during severe weather events—are what stick in a person’s mind. “Eighty percent of the year, a weather app is going to work fine,” Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston’s Space City Weather, told me. “But it’s that 20 percent where people get burned that’s a problem.”No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. “My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast,” Lanza told me. “That’s how ingrained these services have become in most peoples’ lives.” The basic issue with weather apps, he argues, is that many of them remove a crucial component of a good, reliable forecast: a human interpreter who can relay caveats about models or offer a range of outcomes instead of a definitive forecast.Lanza explained the human touch of a meteorologist using the example of a so-called high-resolution forecasting model that can predict only 18 hours out. It is generally quite good, he told me, at predicting rain and thunderstorms—“but every so often it runs too hot and over-indexes the chances of a bad storm.” This model, if left to its own devices, will project showers and thunderstorms blanketing the region for hours when, in reality, the storm might only cause 30 minutes of rain in an isolated area of the mapped region. “The problem is when you take the model data and push it directly into the app with no human interpretation,” he said. “Because you’re not going to get nuance from these apps at all. And that can mean a difference between a chance of rain all day and it’s going to rain all day.”But even this explanation has caveats; all weather apps are different, and their forecasts have varying levels of sophistication. Some pipe model data right in, whereas others are curated using artificial intelligence. Peter Neilley, the Weather Channel’s director of weather forecasting sciences and technologies, said in an email that the company’s app incorporates “billions of weather data points,” adding that “our expert team of meteorologists does oversee and correct the process as needed.”Weather apps might be less reliable for another reason too. When it comes to predicting severe weather such as snow, small changes in atmospheric moisture—the type of change an experienced forecaster might notice—can cause huge variances in precipitation outcomes. An app with no human curation might choose to average the model’s range of outcomes, producing a forecast that doesn’t reflect the dynamic situation on the ground. Or consider cities with microclimates: “Today, in Chicago, the lakefront will sit in the lower 40s, and the suburbs will be 50-plus degrees,” Greg Dutra, a meteorologist at ABC 7 Chicago, told me. “Often, the difference is even more stark—20-degree swings over just miles.” These sometimes subtle temperature disparities can mean very different forecasts for people living in the same region—something that one-size-fits-all weather apps don’t always pick up.Naturally, meteorologists think that what they do is superior to forecasting by algorithm alone, but even weather-app creators told me that the challenges are real. “It’s impossible for a weather-data provider to be accurate everywhere in the world,” Brian Mueller, the founder of the app Carrot Weather, told me. His solution to the problem of app-based imprecision is to give users more ability to choose what they see when they open Carrot, letting them customize what specific weather information the app surfaces as well as what data sources the app will draw from. Mueller said that he learned from Dark Sky’s success how important beautiful, detailed radar maps were—both as a source of weather data and for entertainment purposes. In fact, meteorology seems to be only part of the allure when it comes to building a beloved weather app. Carrot has a pleasant design interface, with bright colors and Easter eggs scattered throughout, such as geography challenges based off of its weather maps. He’s also hooked Carrot up to ChatGPT to allow people to chat with the app’s fictional personality.But what if these detailed models and dizzying maps, in the hands of weather rubes like myself,  are the real problem? “The general public has access to more weather information than ever, and I’d posit that that’s a bad thing,” Chris Misenis, a weather-forecasting consultant in North Carolina who goes by the name “Weather Moose,” told me. “You can go to PivotalWeather.com right now and pull up just about any model simulation you want.” He argues that these data are fine to look at if you know how to interpret them, but for people who aren’t trained to analyze them, they are at best worthless and at worst dangerous.In fact, forecasts are better than ever, Andrew Blum, a journalist and the author of the book The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast, told me. “But arguably, we are less prepared to understand,” he said, “and act upon that improvement—and a forecast is only as good as our ability to make decisions with it.” Indeed, even academic research around weather apps suggests that apps fail worst when they give users a false sense of certainty around forecasting. A 2016 paper for the Royal Meteorological Society argued that “the current way of conveying forecasts in the most common apps is guilty of ‘immodesty’ (‘not admitting that sometimes predictions may fail’) and ‘impoverishment’ (‘not addressing the broader context in which forecasts … are made’).”The conflicted relationship that people have with weather apps may simply be a manifestation of the information overload that dominates all facets of modern life. These products grant anyone with a phone access to an overwhelming amount of information that can be wildly complex. Greg Dutra shared one such public high-resolution model from the NOAA with me that was full of indecipherable links to jargony terms such as “0-2 km max vertical vorticity.” Weather apps seem to respond mostly to this fire hose of data in two ways: By boiling them down to a reductive “partly sunny” icon, or by bombarding the user with information they might not need or understand. At its worst, a modern weather app seems to flatter people, entrusting them to do their own research even if they’re not equipped. I’m not too proud to admit that some of the fun of toying around with Dark Sky’s beautiful radar or Windy.App’s endless array of models is the feeling of role-playing as a meteorologist. But the truth is that I don’t really know what I’m looking at.What people seem to be looking for in a weather app is something they can justify blindly trusting and letting into their lives—after all, it’s often the first thing you check when you roll over in bed in the morning. According to the 56,400 ratings of Carrot in Apple’s App Store, its die-hard fans find the app entertaining and even endearing. “Love my psychotic, yet surprisingly accurate weather app,” one five-star review reads. Although many people need reliable forecasting, true loyalty comes from a weather app that makes people feel good when they open it.Our weather-app ambivalence is a strange pull between feeling grateful for instant access to information and simultaneously navigating a sense of guilt and confusion about how the experience is also, somehow, dissatisfying—a bit like staring down Netflix’s endless library and feeling as if there’s nothing to watch. Weather apps aren’t getting worse. In fact they’re only getting more advanced, inputting more and more data and offering them to us to consume. Which, of course, might be why they feel worse.

Ninth article in a series on bureaucratic autonomy; the first installment can be found here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, the fifth here, the sixth here, the seventh here, and the eighth here.I’m anticipating that this will be the last of my articles in the “Valuing the Deep State” series. I turned most of the previous ones into a single lecture that I delivered on March 21 to the American Society for Public Administration. You can listen to the lecture here.I want to conclude the series by looking back at the Covid pandemic and the lessons it teaches about the relationship between political leaders and their bureaucratic agents. The Deep State series was in general meant to defend the idea of bureaucratic autonomy, that is, the need to allow bureaucrats in the administrative state the freedom to make decisions within the overall policy guidance set by Congress or the President. Both autonomy and political control are necessary: politicians can interfere in decision-making and override expert judgement for short-term political gain, but bureaucrats can exceed their authority and experts can be grievously wrong.___STEADY_PAYWALL___The Covid pandemic provided examples of both phenomena. It is safe to say that in the early days of the crisis, there was substantial deference to public health authorities that were recommending things like hand-washing, masks, social distancing, and shutdowns of most activities. The constitution of the state of California even gives final authority to county health officers to declare public health measures, authority that cannot be overridden by even the governor or state legislature. Bureaucratic autonomy reigned supreme, at least in most blue states.Many things changed over the next two years, however, that shifted public views. The disease itself evolved into a less deadly form, and the broad population started to get vaccinated by early 2021. Health officials learned a lot about the disease, for example that it was spread by airborne particles and could not easily be contracted by touching surfaces. The costs of shutdowns became more onerous as countless small businesses went bankrupt and the economy went into a massive and sudden recession. Parents in blue states were getting increasingly frustrated by prolonged school shutdowns, often driven by pressure from teachers’ unions, that had a disproportionate effect on lower-income families.By 2022, the United States and other economies had largely reopened, and public opinion had begun to shift substantially on deference to public health authorities. I remember quite vividly in the first year of the pandemic how the very suggestion that there could be a tradeoff between public health and other desirable social goods was condemned as an ignorant right-wing viewpoint. Initiatives like the Great Barrington Declaration arguing that health measures should be focused on the most vulnerable and that we could accept a higher level of risk from Covid were shouted down.Today, it is hard to question the legitimacy of this tradeoff: the People’s Republic of China, which prioritized public health above all else in its zero-Covid policy, is widely disparaged for the policy’s damaging effects on Chinese citizens’ lives. The head of Sweden’s CDC, Anders Tegnell, was condemned in 2020 for not following the strict lockdown measures of the rest of the world, but in the end Sweden’s Covid mortality was no worse than any of its neighbors.What does this teach us about bureaucratic autonomy and political control? The first lesson concerns the nature of scientific expertise. Public health authorities changed their views on the benefits of measures like masking and social distancing (and on the origins of Covid itself) in light of new studies and evidence. Those shifts and inconsistent messaging discredited them in the eyes of many conservatives, who charged that people like Anthony Fauci were power-mad bureaucrats interested not in public health but in control. But there is no alternative to relying on scientific expertise: the pandemic saw legions of quack remedies from hydroxychloroquine to traditional Chinese medicines being touted by different groups, often with political agendas. The autonomy and authority of health agencies needs to be preserved.On the other hand, it is clear that overall policy cannot be made by public health officials on their own. With the rare exception of people like Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist will recommend policies that will maximize public health outcomes. But such an expert does not have the tools to weigh the costs of health policies against other social goods, or to say what level of health risk is acceptable in light of those alternatives. This is something that ultimately needs to be done by political leaders who, in an ideal world, will carefully seek to balance different goods against one another using the best available empirical information.Unfortunately, the United States did not have such a leader during the first year of the pandemic. Instead it had a president who was uninterested in empirical evidence and laser-focused on his own re-election. This led his opponents in turn to double down on their willingness to defer to public health authorities and to condemn any questioning of the experts’ recommendations as populist nonsense.We have learned very little from the Covid epidemic and are arguably worse prepared to meet the next one that comes down the pike. A large part of the right has demonized public health authorities and expertise in general, undermining whatever trust once existed in them. Many red states are issuing detailed mandates prohibiting health authorities from recommending measures like masking and social distancing; one draft law even seeks to criminalize prescribing MRNA vaccines. We have managed to go from excessive deference to public health authorities to excessive politicization of them in the space of three years.A high degree of bureaucratic autonomy is absolutely necessary in this realm. The next epidemic will likely have very different characteristics from Covid: it may strike the young rather than the old, it might involve higher mortality or be transmissible in different ways. Health authorities need to adjust policies with flexibility, but instead they are being straightjacketed in ways that assume that we will be fighting the last war all over again. Political leaders need to have access to the best scientific data and judgments available.On the other hand, future policies should not be made by public health authorities alone. They constitute one important voice in the broader debate over policy, but represent only a partial view of what is good for a given society. Whether the United States can find the right balance between autonomy and control is at present very questionable.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: A social distancing decal from the Covid pandemic. (Flickr: Kevin_Butz)

It’s been almost three decades since the birth of the world’s first online-only publications devoted to general-interest news, analysis, and commentary. By the standards of today’s shameless clickbait, those early titles, Slate and Salon being the most famous, generally channeled a conventional and intellectually respectable brand of journalism. But it didn’t take long for things to change. Salon embraced an overtly leftist brand; while Slate, though offering more centrist fare, lapsed into a click-generating formula that media critics summarized as Everything You Thought You Knew About X Is Wrong. (There was even a popular #slatepitches hashtag on Twitter, which satirists attached to such mock Slate articles as “Soccer: It’s time to let players use their hands” and “You’ve Got Fail: Why Electronic Mail Isn’t Here to Stay.”) The problem wasn’t that the editors at these publications were shallower, more partisan, or less intelligent than their legacy print and broadcast counterparts, but rather that their online-only perspective encouraged them to light up their hit counters with titillating fare. “Help! I Can’t Stop My Young Daughter From Making Racist Comments” is guaranteed to generate high numbers. “Can Belarus Escape Putin’s Orbit?” not so much.In the 2000s came fresh waves of news (loosely defined) sites such as Gawker and Jezebel, which didn’t even bother with high-concept journalistic conceits. Because these publications came of age at a time when social media was already ascendant, the preferred article was one whose thesis would grab the attention of office workers looking for intellectual junk food on Facebook or Twitter. “I Look Down On Young Women With Husbands And Kids And I’m Not Sorry” and “How Accepting Leggings as Pants Made Me a Better Feminist” are classic specimens of this genre—which, as most readers (or at least their children) can attest, now flourishes in a yet more immersive and addictive incarnation; TikTok.By the time Quillette was created in 2015, however, it was already apparent that even those sites consistently generating viral content were having a hard time sustaining themselves economically on annoying pop-up and banner ads. We knew, intuitively, that we’d have to embrace a much leaner production model. And unlike a newspaper or general-interest magazine, we couldn’t try to be everything to everybody, but rather would have to focus on a defined set of core editorial interests—a diverse but recognizable list that includes technology and futurism, media trends, evolutionary psychology and biology, history, education, and the perils of ideological extremism. Our bet was that if we published smart writers who dug deep into these areas, we’d find an audience composed of dedicated readers—especially if we hewed vigilantly to centrist political values, and a classically liberal (which is to say, expansive) understanding of the limits of free speech and academic inquiry. That bet paid off, which is the reason we’re still here.Throughout it all, we have faced two mutually confounding challenges—one ideological and the other technological. The former trend is the increasingly tribal nature of politics: Especially during the Trump era, journalists, no less than politicians, began feeling increased pressured to align themselves with either angry conservative populism or hyper-progressive leftist orthodoxy. Because both camps offer built-in audiences, the temptation to succumb to one or the other can be strong—especially since the big digital platforms, Google and Facebook most notably, long ago tweaked their content algorithms so as to reward content that’s hyper-emotive and anger-inducing. All the better to harvest rage clicks.A study published last year showed that US headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust, and sadness have all been proliferating over the past two decades, whereas headlines connoting joy or neutral sentiments have become less common. These trends were observed on both sides of the partisan divide. The study found that although these trends pre-existed modern forms of social media, there was a notable inflection point around the year 2010, at which point the change became more pronounced. This was around the time when Facebook introduced the “Like” button and Twitter introduced Retweets. Journalists looking to create viral content now had a way of keeping score.One result of this is that it became more difficult for senior editors to exert authority over junior staffers, since everyone is now looking to digital metrics for their sense of professional validation, as opposed to old-fashioned in-house performance reviews. As noted by Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox Media, tech companies have begun to indirectly dictate what kind of content gets produced in newsrooms—right down to something as simple as a humble food recipe: “Everyone complains about having to read through a few hundred words before getting to the recipe you wanted. But that was because Google gave priority to recipe pages that were structured like real articles.”These algorithms have had a centrifugal effect on newsroom politics, since the most extreme views tend to get the most attention from readers. “Hard-core identity politics and simplistic socialism perform incredibly well on Facebook,” Yglesias has noted. “That doesn’t mean journalists started pretending to be left-wing to get clicks. But people who had some authentic left-wing opinions found that writing on the subjects where they were the most left tended to generate the most traffic, and early career journalists with authentic leftist views outperformed their colleagues.” Even those journalists who’ve found themselves unsettled by this trend often find there’s little they can do about it—since, without viral content, media employers wouldn’t be able to generate the millions of clicks required to keep the lights on and pay everyone’s salaries.To avoid falling into this same trap, we have ensured that everything we build at Quillette, from our back catalog of essays and commentary to our podcasts, is designed to remain viably funded through direct support from readers and listeners. While some of our content does sometimes go viral, this comes as a consequence of its quality, not a necessary design feature of our business model. It’s one reason why we’ve managed to stick to our journalistic principles over these last eight years: While striking contrarian, politically heterodox positions may earn us barbs on the Internet, it won’t cost us our livelihoods.During the period of Quillette’s operation, our editors have developed a love-hate relationship with the digital marketplace of ideas. On one hand, we were conceived as a sanctuary from Internet-fueled political hysteria and tribalism. On the other hand, Quillette simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the content-distribution tools that the modern web makes possible. Even the much-maligned social media companies deserve credit: If they weren’t around, we’d have had no way of getting the word out about our fledgling website. All that soaring 1990s-era rhetoric about how the web was going to let a thousand intellectual flowers bloom—not all of it was nonsense.Our relationship with the culture war is equally complicated. On the one hand, we’re proud that Quillette writers have consistently and effectively skewered anti-liberal progressive extremists, debunked cultish academic fads, stood firm against right-wing public-health misinformation during the COVID pandemic, and raised alarm bells in regard to unproven medical treatments administered to gender dysphoric children. Our coverage of these areas brought us an international audience on a scale far out of proportion to the actual size of our editorial operation. But they also drew Quillette, as in institution, into the same culture war whose shrill and increasingly fanatical character our writers tend to criticize. Moreover, some of our longstanding supporters, and even contributors, have come to (mistakenly) see Quillette’s editors as culture warriors first, and journalists second—and, on this basis, have chastised us for letting down the side (i.e., their side) by calling out anti-democratic Trump supporters, Putin apologists, and the apocalyptic rhetorical excesses of the “anti-woke” camp. But we make no apologies for this: Through its journalism, Quillette has always sought to protect the core elements of the traditional liberal social contract, not take sides among those threatening it from the political wings—even if this pox-on-both-houses position doesn’t always earn a ton of clicks.Over the past year, since building a new website using the open-source software of Ghost, Quillette has implemented a subscription-based system for accessing our content. This was more than just a business decision. For reasons discussed above, we believe that the quality of journalism improves when editors and writers direct their content toward an informed and dedicated audience whose opt-in requirements consist of more than just a bored finger tap or mouse click. Yes, these audiences will necessarily be smaller than the mass market courted by many general-interest news sites. But they will also be more willing to pay for the content they receive, thereby providing another path to economic viability aside from viral clickbait.Ghost: The Creator Economy PlatformThe world’s most popular modern publishing platform for creating a new media platform. Used by Apple, SkyNews, Buffer, Kickstarter, and thousands more.Ghost - The Professional Publishing PlatformAnother site that has put down stakes with this kind of approach is Substack, a newsletter platform that allows users to narrowcast their ideas to subscribers. Effectively, Substack has automated many of the editorial and back office functions that once had to be performed manually in creating and maintaining a site such as Quillette. It is a model we expect to flourish in coming years, especially now that Substack is introducing a Twitter-like feature called Notes that allows writers to interact with one another with short-form posts that can be liked, commented upon, and (wait for it) “restacked.” One can see why Twitter owner Elon Musk seems scared by this nascent new rival, for it allows Twitter-style communication while adding an important tweak that will likely serve to reduce toxicity and increase the informational signal-to-noise ratio:The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads … In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform. By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it.This is a philosophy that we share. Whether you are a reader who’s been with us from the beginning, or someone who’s just stumbled on Quillette recently, we thank you for taking the time to read what our writers have to say. If you find value in it, please consider subscribing. And in return, we hope to provide you with content that elicits far more interest than rage.

Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept covering national security and foreign policy. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Murtaza Hussain discuss why most Americans, whether they know it or not, are philosophical liberals; why the political cleavages that exist among white Americans are likely to replicate themselves among the country’s immigrant and minority communities; and why, counter to their long tradition of irreverence, American liberals are no longer funny.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I follow your work and you do a lot of really great thinking and writing. And you don’t occupy an obvious ideological space: you write for The Intercept, which is a left-wing publication and very critical of American foreign policy. But you also, in some interesting ways, butt heads with much of the contemporary left in the United States. If you’ll forgive the very basic question: who are you and what makes you tick?Murtaza Hussain: I originally gravitated towards the left because I came of age during the Iraq War and I was very interested in US foreign policy towards the Middle East, and at that time the people who were critical (and turned out to be right) were people on the left and the very libertarian right. They had a non-mainstream critique which turned out to be the most cogent one for a long time. So I kind of got into left wing politics that way. And I still do identify with more economically redistributive politics, maybe less than I did 15 years ago, but very strongly today I believe that the US has an overly libertarian economic system which is a bit cruel, and could do with a greater safety net, which I don’t think is an extremely left-wing position outside the US.And as you pointed out, I have politics which are a little bit different from others at The Intercept. But, to their credit, they encouraged me. They basically said, “It's fine. You can write about it and we'll edit it and put it up there.” And they haven't really been forcing any particular ideological line—in my experience, at least. That said, I'm a little skeptical of a lot of some of the contemporary trends and some aspects of progressive politics and culture in the sense that I come from an immigrant background. I grew up with a lot of immigrants, and I know that one of the ways that the left identifies is as the party of and for immigrants and minorities, and, if I’m being honest, I have to say that a lot of the policies and the attitudes that they have have never been popular with the people that they're ostensibly claiming to speak for.The left is very secular in the United States, but I grew up with a lot of Jamaican people and still live around a lot of people from the Caribbean and South Asia and so forth. They're very religious. Church is a very big part of their lives. The traditional family is a very, very important part of the bedrock of their identity and their life, and to then denigrate that or to treat it as unimportant, even—I think you're gonna miss out on where people are coming from. The reason immigrants come to the United States is because they like the United States. They’re kind of happy to be here. And they are patriotic. I used to work in this call center a long time ago. I was living in Toronto at the time. And I used to sit next to this guy who was a Bangladeshi immigrant and he would sing the national anthem to himself. He's humming to himself every morning, so happy to be in Canada. I've never seen a Canadian coworker hum the national anthem, not least a non-immigrant American. So, they’re very different people. You see some of the Democratic Party’s trends. They’re on the cusp of losing the support of immigrants, many of them, and minorities to some degree, because they're not in touch with them, really. And if I could go a little bit further, I'd say it's because in the institutions, elite colleges and universities, there's a certain class of people there who, regardless of their race, all share the same transnational culture, predilections and attitudes by virtue of being there. It's a very rigorous psychological environment. They’re in their own class and they have different values.Mounk: You're beginning to hint at something that I know we're both interested in, which is the deep assumption that a lot of Democrats had for a few decades, that as America becomes more demographically diverse, and as a share of the white population declines, this is naturally going to give a political advantage to Democrats. Now, for the last few years, that has started to really come into doubt, especially among Hispanics and, now, there seem to be first indications that the same trend may be happening with Asian-Americans. How should we think about this?Hussain: Well, the Republicans are known as the party of law and order—that's kind of the brand that they've developed over time. And the Democrats have been seen as more indulgent of social issues and as having a softer touch. That's not always been the case in either party, and a lot of politics in the US is kind of encoded, it was coded before as something like a white-versus-black, racial politics dog whistle. But for immigrants, if you're coming here fresh and you don't have that context, you don't feel that way. If you’re coming from countries that don't have law and order and you're fleeing turmoil and chaos, the party which says there must be law and order is very attractive. America, for such a well-off, stable country, is very violent, particularly in poor areas where immigrants are more likely to settle. A party promising law and order and branding themselves that way will be very popular. In New York City, we're right on the heels of very, very big anti-police protests in 2020. The next mayoral candidate who was elected to office was a former police officer, Eric Adams, and his voters were overwhelmingly from ethnic minority, black and immigrant areas of Brooklyn. They voted for him, and the people who voted against him, and for the more progressive challengers, were from small pockets in the city which are known to be wealthier and more ethnically white. Obviously, one of Donald Trump’s famous policies was the Muslim ban. You might think, “Well, Muslim Americans are never going to vote for Republicans, again, and certainly are never going to vote for Trump”—even though, pre-9/11, I think 70% of Muslims voted GOP. But it will be 0% in the future, right? And yet, in the 2020 election he got a third of their vote. And, in the last primary, a lot of Muslims in Arab-majority and Muslim-majority areas are campaigning for the Republicans because they don't like the social issues that Democrats are perceived to be endorsing today. They have very conservative views on sexuality and the family, for instance. They will prioritize that over any other perceived allegations about Republicans or past behavior of Republicans. I kind of try to tell people, “You better go easy on this issue with these people, because that's not what their values are like.” I think very progressive people have a very, very strong faith in their assimilative powers. And there is a very strong assimilative power in this country, but changes take time. They need to really slow down, see if anyone's actually on the same page, and be open to criticism.Mounk: The way that Trump talked about Muslims was so broad—a Latino American might be able to say, “Well, he thinks I'm the right kind of Latino. He's not talking about me.” But it's sort of hard to see how a Muslim American can say the same thing, given some of his very broad language around the Muslim ban. If you pushed somebody on this who's Muslim and who voted for Trump, how do you think they would respond?Hussain: Trump did start off from speaking in the broadest possible terms, which was quite galling. I think he later started to dial down it a little bit and say some somewhat more conciliatory things. What I observed is that, in the US, obviously, people tend to interact with local political officials, and a lot of local Republican officials didn't have the same attitudes or didn't like the policy. They have to kind of defend it a little bit, but they’ll say, “You know how Trump is. He says some really crazy things. That's not what he meant. We like you.” So they could still make the same compartmentalization. I'm familiar with their voting patterns, having reported on issues related to their communities post-9/11, but I find, more broadly, that it's very similar in other groups, too. I live in a very Asian and Jamaican neighborhood and I don’t think people like Trump, but they do gravitate to his kind of attitude, in a way. He's like a macho guy, and they like a macho leader. And this is something which I think is one of the understated values of politics around the world: they want a leader who expresses a certain energy and machismo. And you could say it's not very rational. That's true. But people tend to vote in many ways on cultural issues. And I think that there was a perception that the Democratic Party is a little limp or something. Joe Biden is a kind of a great Thermidorian candidate, the old type of Democrat which sort of seems to be dying out a little bit. But they're attracted to Trump’s machismo. If you look at a lot of African, Muslim, Latino Americans and Americans of other backgrounds—I wouldn’t say that they want a Caesar, but they do want a tough-seeming president who embodies the values that they themselves would like to embody in their own lives and in their homes.Mounk: I'm still struck by your observation that people are genuinely shocked and offended when you call into doubt this way of thinking about things. I've experienced that as well. And I think there's sort of two things that are coming together here, right, like one is the sort of hope of inevitable progress: we have the right values, and the country is becoming more diverse, and people who are members of these demographic groups share those values. And so, therefore, we're going to win and we’re on the right side of history. There’s something about that overall vision, and perhaps in a sort of slightly patronizing way, that can also be an imputation of political virtue and wisdom. But there is something else which helps us sustain this that goes back again to the separation of the American elite. Nowadays, if you're part of the American elite and you went to Harvard, Amherst, or Berkeley any time in the last 20 years, you're going to know a lot of nonwhite, non-Christian people, probably within your friend group. Of course, it's not necessarily going to be socioeconomically diverse, and it certainly is not going to be very ideologically diverse. But I think there's this sort of weird mental shortcut where one of the reasons why people are offended by anything that flies in the face of empirical evidence they have is because the empirical evidence they have is seemingly very reliable, which is, “I'm good friends with people who are from those groups, and they all believe ‘X.’”Hussain: It reminds me a little bit of these Ba’athist countries at the peak of their power, when they would select a Christian, an Alawite, a Sunni, a Shia, and they would all come together and they make up the ruling party, all on the same page and all affirming socialism and the Leader, etc. But most people were selected because they were groomed to be a specific way and to have a certain ideological outlook, which it turns out was not really reflected very much in the broader communities they were set to represent. They were sort of very unique by virtue of being placed in certain political circumstances, and the constituency was never broad. I think the US is not that stark, but there’s a little bit of that. The elite is so different, and it sits on top of the rest of society. And it's good that they have diversity, because it's important that we try to represent everyone in society, and it's a good thing. But, I think that it requires being humble, at least, and I'm not even saying progressive values are bad or will always be rejected by ‘XYZ’ persons, but I think you do need to look at it with a sense of humility. The reason I've pointed it out is because I don't want people to be surprised if, in ten years, 40, 60, or 80% of Latinos or Asians are moving to the Republicans, and suddenly, all the plans that liberals have laid for the future of the country come to naught because they're built on a faulty premise. I think I'm able to say whatever I want, and even in a very left-wing environment, because I think that if you’re going to criticize someone's deepest beliefs, you should do it very politely. Very politely preface ‘XYZ,’ and now here is my critique or suggestion for you and so forth. And then they’re more amenable to it. I think that because America is so secular, a lot of metaphysical weight gets put into politics by people, and particularly people on the left, because they are more secular. So when you're criticizing their political view, it's not just a set of policies—you’re criticizing something deep in their identity and their self-identification. So if you're going to do that, it's very emotional, and you better unpack it in a way that takes that into account. They actually tend to be more open to hearing it than you might expect.Mounk: Let's double click for a moment about this interesting class divide that you've sort of hinted at. There seems to be a suggestion in some of the recent articles and research on the rightward drift of Asian Americans, who still vote, in the majority, for the Democratic Party, but much less so recently. One of the interesting things is that when you look at Asian Americans on the Upper West Side or on the Upper East Side, people who have higher socioeconomic standing, by and large, who probably have advanced degrees, would have gone to college, still tend to vote for Democrats in much larger numbers. But that's less likely to be the case in Sunset Park, for example, or in other more working class neighborhoods. How do you see this divide playing out in the sort of immigrant communities that you know best? Hussain: Americans don't tend to think in terms of class, but I think what we're going to see is a breakdown on class lines. And the way the white working class often votes for the Republicans—not always, but a significant chunk—I think you can see the immigrant or minority working classes of various groups voting for Republicans because they feel their values are more represented by Republicans. They feel a sense of class resentment towards the highly educated liberal party. That chip on the shoulder aspect of it, which I think people understand quite well in the case of white, economic and social stratification, is equally the case in nonwhite people's economic and social stratification. Will future generations go and vote for Democrats? If you work in a convenience store, and then your kid does really well and goes to Harvard or Stanford, they're going to take on a different set of social norms, most likely, and a lot of those social norms are going to incline them towards being more liberal, because these are very liberal institutions. And then they will absorb the attitudes of that world. But the people who don't go into that world, who don't rise economically in the same way, a lot of them are going to vote Republican for the same reason that white voters vote Republican. I think that’s kind of great, in a way. I don’t think we should have politics stratify along race, because then it's like a race war, which I don't prefer—I don't prefer class war either. But I prefer that people don't find their politics preemptively by race. So I think, actually, it's a positive trend. And I do expect it's going to happen. Mounk: You were saying you're on the left, but you're also a liberal. And we've been using “liberal” a lot in this conversation as a way of saying “left wing” or “favorable to the Democratic Party.” But I want to go to the capital-L Liberal idea for a moment. There is a big debate on the American left about what to think about philosophical liberalism, and you've challenged people a few times by saying, “You claim not to be a liberal, but then what are you?” So it sounds like you do think of yourself as a liberal, at least in certain respects. Talk me through how you think about this question.Hussain: I actually think that most people in America are probably capital-L Liberals, across both parties—the broad majority of people. There's a sense of commitment to personal liberties, civil liberties, and so forth. That aspect of it is more pronounced than a current suite of policies or approaches which may or may be branded “liberalism” but may or may not comport with that. Some things are coded as right wing for some reason, like freedom of speech, which people who consider themselves liberals should embrace. It entails a degree of economic liberty, as well—free property and enterprise. These are all very important, because most people come from places where those things are really taken for granted—private property that can’t be confiscated, being able to say what you want, religious liberty, giving broad scope to people's ability to express themselves and to associate with each other. That's a philosophical basis of politics which I identify with. And there are some aspects of liberalism which I think are open to critique, which need reform or guidance. The economic outcomes, often, when left to their own devices, are not favorable, or don’t produce the goods we'd like to see. But yeah, you can say that that makes me conservative, actually—a conservative liberal. I'm a very cautious liberal. And I think that the goods of liberalism should not be quickly discarded. We should be careful.Liberalism is actually so deeply embedded in American culture and attitudes that when someone says “I'm a communist” or something like that, I don't think they actually believe it most of the time. In America, branding, advertising, and marketing are so deeply embedded in the culture. You have to brand your political opinions in the most attention-getting way as well, and maybe you mean something totally different in the end. Take the Scandinavian welfare state; people will say they're against capitalism and that's what they want, but it’s very compatible with capitalism.Mounk: Sweden I believe has a higher number of billionaires per capita than the United States does.Hussain: Yeah. I could be wrong, and subject to indoctrination in a camp ten years from now, but I think the majority of people actually are deeply committed to liberalism. But, often, ideological movements are not really driven by the majority’s opinion but by a vanguard of people who set the tone and then kind of jujitsu the people into a certain position later on, which happens very often in revolutions and so forth. I'm not really sure. But also I would say that whatever this new trend in progressivism is—I would just call it “radical liberalism,” perhaps “radicalized liberalism”—it's very unstructured because of its nature and it kind of drifts into these purity spirals. There are no agreed upon tenets, even though there are some broad principles, so I don't know how durable it is. It could flame out or transform into something totally different. Communism required a structure for ideological coherence in the long term to keep it going and to build something. But this seems very diffuse by comparison. It doesn't really have a structure. Maybe that's why it's kind of hard to define.Coming from watching other societies and reporting on them and so forth, I’ve realized that whatever you do, you don't want to have—I think this makes people uncomfortable on all sides—an ideology or teach kids things which increase racial polarization or increase polarization generally. You don't want to teach people that they’re part of a moral hierarchy, and “you fit here and you fit there.” Because now that there’s people at the top of the hierarchy and at the bottom of the hierarchy—you’re teaching them very, very bad things, and Americans, there's very a charming thing about them: they always view developments in their country as completely unique in a way, like they're avant garde cultural entrepreneurs. I think it's not really the case. You can replicate things happening in far less developed societies in a very developed society like the United States if you inculcate attitudes which are polarizing. Mounk: There’s very strong social science around how corrosive that is. And I agree with you about this strange sort of provincialism in American society, which is sometimes most striking in these milieus who think of themselves as being very global and very enlightened and very knowledgeable about different parts of the world but don't consider America in the context of these other societies. Let me put something else to you that’s sort of just floating around in my mind. I went to see The Book of Mormon a while ago and that came out a few years [after] Obama was elected president. And you know, when I rewatched some episodes of 30 Rock, South Park, and even Family Guy—all of these shows that were really big in the mid-2000s. And what struck me about them is that they were very irreverent—today, many would say, “offensive”—forms of entertainment that also were actually very liberal and progressive in their way, reflecting the values of the creators who were overwhelmingly to the left. They were quite critical, often hostile, towards more conservative institutions, and yet they were so irreverent and self-lampooning that they didn't come across as haughty. And I just wonder whether that is the cultural background music, along with the failures of the Bush administration, and the longing for change that the country genuinely felt at the time, that allowed someone like Barack Obama to win a big victory. And I wonder whether those cultural preconditions have ceased to be the case; that as the reigning culture of the American elite has become so much more serious and earnest and so on, it is just off-putting to people in a way where, in an ironic way, something like Obama’s election wouldn't be possible.Hussain: Liberals have become very pious. They have become the most pious Christians in the world. They've become so pious, and it's because the piety of those beliefs is so deeply embedded, that it's become—I won’t say it’s become a religion, but it has become something metaphysical and serious and the same energy has been devoted to that. Can I name a single left-wing person who I think is funny today? I struggle to do that. And they used to be the funniest ones. And Trump was like a blasphemer. He was like if the Vatican elected a blasphemous Pope. That was basically how people interpreted Trump being in the White House. He was blaspheming the tenets of liberal piety every single day. Does that make someone a good president if they do that? I would say no, but I see why people liked it, because they feel suffocated by these pious attitudes. The great strength of liberalism and liberals in the United States was that they were very, very funny for a long time, very irreverent. They were chiding others’ pieties very effectively. And now their own pieties are being chided and they look a little stiff and rigid. I think that Trump's election intensified the piety, in fact—we need to be even more pious in response to him. And I think that's kind of sad, because they've kind of lost something that made them very powerful. And if you're going to criticize yourself, you're going to have to be irreverent towards your own beliefs. You have to have a sense of distance. It's really unfortunate. There’s been a cultural shift. There used to be a punchline that there were no funny right wingers or conservatives—it's not possible. Now, it's the reverse. I can't think of a funny leftist at the moment. If someone can disprove me, I would love to see it. But the ones who are funny are the ones who are actually so “problematic” that you can’t even acknowledge them because they're saying things which could be seen as very impious, over the line, and so forth. Those people aren’t welcome in broader liberal culture.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:Subscribe now

In March 2020, Yamagata’s trail went cold.The pathogen, one of the four main groups of flu viruses targeted by seasonal vaccines, had spent the first part of the year flitting across the Northern Hemisphere, as it typically did. As the seasons turned, scientists were preparing, as they typically did, for the virus to make its annual trek across the equator and seed new outbreaks in the globe’s southern half.That migration never came to pass. As the new coronavirus spread, pandemic-mitigation measures started to squash flu-transmission rates to record lows. The drop-off was so sharp that several flu lineages may have gone extinct, among them Yamagata, which hasn’t been definitively detected in more than three years despite virologists’ best efforts to root it out.[Read: The pandemic broke the flu]Yamagata’s disappearance could still be temporary. “Right now, we’re all just kind of holding our breath,” says Adam Lauring, a virologist at the University of Michigan Medical School. The virus might be biding its time in an isolated population, escaping the notice of tests. But the search has stretched on so fruitlessly that some experts are ready to declare it officially done. “It’s been missing for this long,” says Vijaykrishna Dhanasekaran, a virologist at Hong Kong University. “At this point, I would really think it’s gone.”
If Yamagata remains AWOL indefinitely, its absence would have at least one relatively straightforward consequence: Researchers might no longer need to account for the lineage in annual vaccines. But its vanishing act could have a more head-spinning implication. Flu viruses, which have been plaguing human populations for centuries, are some of the most well-known and well-studied threats to our health. They have prompted the creation of annual shots, potent antivirals, and internationally funded surveillance programs. And yet, scientists still have some basic questions about why they behave as they do—especially about Yamagata and its closest kin.Yamagata, in many ways, has long been an underdog among underdogs. The lineage is one of two in a group called influenza B viruses, and it’s slower to evolve and transmit, and is thus sometimes considered less troublesome, than its close cousin Victoria. As a pair, the B’s are also commonly regarded as the wimpier versions of flu.To be fair, the competition is stiff. Flu B’s are constantly being compared with influenza A viruses—the group that contains every flu subtype that has caused a pandemic in our recent past, including the extraordinarily deadly outbreak of 1918. Seasonal flu epidemics, too, tend to be heavily dominated by flu A’s, especially H3N2 and H1N1, two notably tough-to-target strains that feature prominently in each year’s vaccine. Even H5N1, the flavor of avian influenza that’s been devastating North America’s wildlife, is a member of the pathogen’s A team.[Read: Eagles are falling, bears are going blind]B viruses, meanwhile, don’t have a particularly daunting résumé. “To our knowledge, there has never been a B pandemic,” says John Paget, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research. Only once every seven seasons or so does a B virus dominate. And although A and B viruses sometimes tag-team the winter, causing twin outbreaks spaced out by a few weeks, these seasons often open with a major flu A banger and then close out with a more muted B coda.The reasons underlying these differences are still pretty murky, though scientists do have some hints. Whereas flu A viruses are known as especially speedy shape-shifters, constantly spawning genetic offshoots that vie to outcompete one another, flu B’s evolve at oddly plodding rates. Their sluggish approach makes it easier for our immune system to recognize the viruses when they reappear, resulting in longer-lasting protection, more effective vaccines, and fewer reinfections than are typical with the A’s. Those molecular differences also seem to drive differences in how and when the viruses spread. The A’s tend to trouble people repeatedly from birth to death, and are great at globe-trotting. But B’s, perhaps because immunity against them is easier to come by, more often concentrate among kids, many of whom have never encountered the viruses before—and who are usually more resilient to respiratory viruses and travel less than adults, keeping outbreaks mostly regional. That might also help explain why B epidemics so frequently lag behind A’s: Slower pathogen evolution facing off with more durable host immunity add up to less rapid B spread, while their A colleagues rush ahead. Our bodies also seem to mount rather fiery defenses against A viruses, steeling them against other infections in the weeks that follow and deepening the disadvantage against any B’s trailing behind. All of that means flu B has a hard time catching humans off guard.The virus’s host preferences, too, make flu A viruses more dangerous. Those lineages are great at hopscotching among a whole menagerie of species—most infamously, pigs and wild, water-loving birds—sometimes undergoing rapid bursts of evolution as they go. But flu B’s seem to almost exclusively infect humans, igniting only the rare and fast-resolving outbreak in a limited number of other species—a few seals here, a handful of pigs there. Spillovers from wild creatures into humans are the roots of global outbreaks. And so, with its zoonotic bent, “influenza A will always be the main focus” of concern, says Carolien van de Sandt, a virologist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, in Melbourne. Even among some scientists, Yamagata and Victoria register as little more than literal B-list blips.
Plenty of other experts, though, think flu B’s relative obscurity is misguided—perhaps even a bit dangerous. Flu B’s account for roughly a quarter of annual flu cases, many of which lead to hospitalization and death; they seem hardier than their A cousins against certain antiviral drugs. And scientists simply know a lot less about flu B’s: how, precisely, they interact with the immune system; what factors influence their sluggish evolutionary rate; the nuances of their person-to-person spread; their oddball animal-host range. And that lack of intel on what has for decades been a formidable infectious foe creates a risk all on its own.Flu lineages have dipped into relative obscurity before only to come roaring back. After the end of the H2N2 pandemic of the late 1950s, H1N1 appeared to flame out—only to reemerge nearly two decades later to greet a population full of young people whose immune systems hadn’t glimpsed it before. And as recently as the 1990s, the B lineage Victoria underwent a years-long ebb in most parts of the world, before ricocheting back to prominence in the early 2000s.As far as researchers can tell, Victoria is alive and well; during the globe’s most recent winter seasons, the lineage appears to have ignited late-arriving outbreaks in several countries, including in South Africa, Malaysia, and various parts of Europe. But based on the viral sequences that researchers have isolated from people sick with flu, Yamagata is still nowhere to be found, says Saverio Caini, a virologist at the cancer research center ISPRO, in Italy.The lineage was already teetering on a precipice before the pandemic began, van de Sandt told me. Yamagata and Victoria, which splintered apart in the early 1980s, are still closely related enough that they often compete for the same hosts. And just prior to 2020, Victoria, the more diverse and fleet-footed of the two B lineages, had been reliably edging out its cousin, pushing Yamagata’s prevalence down, down, down. That trend, coupled with several years of use of a well-matched Yamagata strain in the seasonal flu vaccine, meant that Yamagata “had already decreased in incidence and circulation,” van de Sandt said. With the odds so steeply stacked, the addition of pandemic mitigations may have been the final factor that snuffed the lineage out.Recently, a few countries—including China, Pakistan, and Belize—have tentatively reported possible Yamagata infections. But there’s been no conclusive genetic proof, several experts told me. Several parts of the world, including the United States, regularly use flu vaccines containing active flu viruses that can trip the same viral tests that the wild, disease-causing pathogens do. “So the reports could be contaminations,” van de Sandt said. Scientists would need to scour the virus’s genetic sequences to distinguish infection from injection; those data, however, haven’t emerged.Should the Yamagata dry spell continue, researchers may want to start considering snipping the lineage out of vaccines altogether, perhaps as early as the middle or end of this year. Doing so would punt the world back to the early 2010s, when flu shots were trivalent—designed to protect people against two A viruses, H3N2 and H1N1, plus either Victoria or Yamagata, depending on which lineage researchers forecasted would surge more. (They were often wrong.) Or maybe the space once used for Yamagata could feasibly be filled with another flavor of H3N2, the fastest mutator of the bunch.But purging Yamagata from the vaccine would be a gamble. If Yamagata is not gone for good, van de Sandt worries that booting it from the vaccine would leave the world vulnerable to a massive and deadly outbreak. Even Dhanasekaran, who is among the researchers who are fairly confident that we’ve seen the last of Yamagata, told me he doesn’t want to rule out the possibility that the virus is cloistering in an immunocompromised person with a chronic infection, and it’s unclear if it could reemerge from such a hiding place. The only thing scientists can do for now is be patient, says Jayna Raghwani, a computational biologist at the University of Oxford. “If we don’t see it in successive seasons for another two to three years, that will be more convincing,” she told me.If Yamagata’s death knell has actually rung, though, it will have reverberating effects. There’s no telling, for instance, how other flu lineages might be affected by their colleague’s supposed retirement. Perhaps Victoria, which can swap genetic material with Yamagata, will evolve more slowly without its partner. At the same time, Victoria may have an easier time infecting people now that it no longer needs to compete as often for hosts.If Yamagata has gone to pasture, “there won’t be a ceremony declaring the world Yamagata free,” Lauring told me. And it’s easy, he points out, to forget things we don’t see. But even if Yamagata seems gone for now, the effects of its demise will be significant enough that it can’t be forgotten—not just yet.

Maybe a different thrust, that doesn't involve a riposte, is in order. Voices conjecture and no one knows what is going to result of artificial intelligence. If preference is toward Sorcerer’s apprentice commentary, it doesn't seem a basis of evaluation. It does appear that a need for journalists is underscored though.

Our future could be post-human. Nature vs nurture arguments referencing identical twins results in favoritism toward bigger government in “Our Posthuman Future, Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.” A similar preference might once again be invoked in response to chatbots.

However, valid discussion sometimes doesn't stimulate a meridian or evoke vim, so technological dynamism can help that way.

There is another, separate matter that is extremely serious: computerized intelligence and weapons. People write of a cold war with China, some Ukrainians have a memory of the Cold War, and there may be a warm war between Israel and Iran. Moreover, it seems easy enough for a malign actor to produce and broadcast a fake of anyone on any topic, including peaceful protest, suppression, riot, or war.

Meanwhile, there doesn't appear to be opposition to broadband service. The supply of digital media might only be limited by drive space or server capacity. The price of advertising can fall under pressure while the ability to obtain subscribers is challenged. Government may once again be bandied as the solution. Reliance upon state-run media would have its own issues though, perhaps being a step toward totalitarianism?

The author above asserts that there are covert AI labs of China, Russia and India. There is a different story about facial recognition technology being deployed on Moscow’s metro system to capture persons at odds with government. It appears to be something to be wary of, as are similar narratives about China--and any illegal animal farms such as in Wuhan.

With ubiquitous chatbots, there has got to be a need for authentic persons within the future of media, so that we can know what is actually happening.

In the course of a few days, Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the most widely read newspapers in Russia, published no fewer than two dozen items on Evan Gershkovich, the American journalist being held in Moscow on charges of espionage. “The FSB Has Nabbed a Wall Street Journal Reporter: He was Collecting Information on Russian Military Industry,” one headline proclaimed. Another article was titled “An Ideal American Spy: What Doesn’t Add Up in the Career of Evan Gershkovich.” This piece listed facts about Gershkovich, making each appear sinister or at least suspicious. At Bowdoin, he majored in philosophy, not journalism—this, the newspaper implied, meant that he is not a real journalist. In the year after college, he worked for an environmental N.G.O. somewhere in Asia—this must have been a cover for an intelligence organization. He played soccer in high school and college, which suggested that he is physically fit, which, in turn, made him a desirable recruit for a spy outlet. He advanced in his career suspiciously fast. He has a Web site on which he lists publications he has written for but no biographical details—“Did he have something to hide?” the article asks. He travelled to Tallinn in 2019, ostensibly to write a story on Estonian politics—“Was he meeting his handlers from the Center? We’ll see what investigators have to say about this.”

Ordinary journalistic activity—indeed, the ordinary details of a young American man’s life—are recast as evidence of espionage. Under Russian law, it may indeed be evidence. In 2012, as Vladimir Putin cracked down in the wake of mass protests, Russia broadened the definition of espionage so that reporting and other professional activities could be interpreted as spying. Contrary to popular perception and common sense, in Russia, “espionage” does not need to mean working for a foreign intelligence service or even a foreign government—under the 2012 definition, espionage can include gathering information for any foreign organization the Russian government sees as threatening the security of the country. The F.S.B., the successor agency to the K.G.B., claims that Gershkovich was collecting classified information, but Russian law makes it possible to prosecute someone for espionage for using publicly available information; conversely, simply obtaining information, without sharing it with anyone, can be a crime. Finally, the law doesn’t require the prosecution to prove intent. Back when the law was changed, the F.S.B. argued that the previous version had been too restrictive and “lack of proof of ‘hostile’ intent was used by defense as an argument to release the accused and defendants from criminal responsibility.”

The expansive law has been used to charge a number of Russians with high treason (the charge when acts of ostensible espionage are performed by a Russian citizen). People charged with espionage or high treason are usually tried in closed court, and their cases are often classified, so it has been particularly difficult for human-rights activists to keep track of cases. At least some of the people convicted of high treason appear to have been academics prosecuted for standard international collaboration. Another category of people accused of high treason are ordinary citizens—people without a security clearance—who told others about the movement of troops they’d witnessed during the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia and the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Last September, the law was used to convict Ivan Safronov, a thirty-two-year-old Russian journalist. Much of his trial was closed to the public, but Russian human-rights activists and journalists believe that Safronov, who covered the Russian military, was tried and convicted for his reporting. He is serving a twenty-two-year sentence. A month after Safronov was sentenced, Russian authorities filed a charge of high treason against Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist and politician who had originally been arrested for “discrediting the Russian armed forces,” a lesser charge. Human Rights Watch considers Kara-Murza the first person to have been charged with high treason for opposing the war in Ukraine.

Gershkovich is the first foreign journalist to be charged under the law on espionage and high treason. It appears he’s being treated just like the Russians who have faced similar charges. His arrest hearing was closed to the public. Gershkovich’s lawyer was reportedly not allowed to take part or even enter the courtroom. Instead, Gershkovich was represented by a state-appointed attorney. Defense lawyers can do little to change the outcome in Russian courts, which seem to convict virtually everyone who appears before them, but attorneys enable defendants to communicate with the outside world. Gershkovich has so far been denied access to the U.S. consulate as well. (On Tuesday, Gershkovich’s lawyers were able to visit him for the first time and said that he was in good health.)

When the F.S.B. and the Russian parliament first rewrote the law a decade ago, making it possible to charge almost anyone doing almost anything with espionage, they created a legalistic instrument of terror. During the decades of Stalin’s rule, still-untold numbers of people were charged with espionage or high treason and jailed or executed. (At the time, the law itself was arguably less vague and broad than it is now, but that didn’t stop the prosecutors; no defense attorneys were involved). Article 58 of the Criminal Code, which made espionage, treason, and other “anti-Soviet agitation” illegal, inspired terror in Soviet citizens and foreigners who had moved to the Soviet Union, but accredited foreign correspondents were apparently outside its purview. Generally speaking, the biggest threat they faced was expulsion. To stay in the country, they had to abide by a strict set of rules. They could not travel outside of Moscow, except on an official excursion. They could barely communicate with Soviet citizens. They were under constant watch. And they had to show all their work to a Soviet censor.

For ten years, starting in 1946, my grandmother Ruzya was usually that censor. (I described her work, and the conversations we had about it decades later, in “Ester and Ruzya.”) Her workplace was a small office at the Central Telegraph, the only location from which foreign correspondents were allowed to file their dispatches. Whether these were newspaper articles or radio scripts, she read them first, and only then could they be transmitted to a newspaper or dictated using a radio booth situated in that office. My grandmother sat shielded by a curtained door so the correspondents couldn’t see her. Her job was to insure that the pieces written by foreign correspondents did not stray from the so-called news communicated by official Soviet outlets. If a dispatch contained something that hadn’t appeared in the Soviet papers, my grandmother translated the suspicious paragraph into Russian and called it in to Stalin’s secretariat for approval.

Most of my grandmother’s work was routine. People like Walter Cronkite, she told me, just rephrased what was in the Soviet papers. Some correspondents managed to get things past her, having calculated, correctly, that she would be unfamiliar with American colloquialisms. Daniel Schorr, who ran the CBS News bureau in Moscow from 1955 to 1957, told me about a time he used the phrase “tell it to the Marines” to indicate that the listener should not believe him (the passage went something like this: “Tell it to the workers, tell it to the soldiers, and above all, tell it to the Marines”). Marvin Kalb, another Moscow bureau chief for CBS, recalled that, one day in the early nineteen-sixties, the foreign-press corps in Moscow was informed that the Soviets were drastically cutting their military. The correspondents were then loaded onto a bus and driven to some military base, where they encountered a line of soldiers who, on command, threw their guns on the ground. Kalb began his radio broadcast, “A group of western correspondents were taken for a ride today . . .” The censor (whoever had succeeded my grandmother) didn’t catch the joke.

I recorded a series of interviews with my grandmother in the nineteen-nineties, and she never tired of telling me that the Times was the greatest newspaper in the world and its greatest journalist was Harrison Salisbury. He ran the Times bureau in Moscow, from 1949 until 1954, and he was the most enterprising and inventive of the reporters. He seemed to have actual sources among the locals. He also used the censorship system as a reporting tool: he would include hypotheses in his news stories, to see if they got through—if Stalin, in effect, confirmed them. But most of Salisbury’s stories never got past my grandmother, who loved reading them. Sometimes, he managed to smuggle uncensored information out in the diplomatic pouch of the U.S. Embassy.

As the Soviet regime softened after the Stalin era, ways of controlling foreign correspondents became gentler. Direct censorship was lifted. But reporters remained under constant surveillance. Journalists were required to live in a system created for them by the Foreign Ministry, which also issued their accreditations. The system was administered by an agency called the Main Administration for Service to the Diplomatic Corps, or GlavUpDK, a version of which still exists. Correspondents had to live in GlavUpDK housing, which was bugged, and employ GlavUpDK drivers, fixers, translators, and office managers. It was no secret that the GlavUpDK staff members reported on their foreign employers: they were double agents by design. A transgression caught by an GlavUpDK employee—such as travelling outside of Moscow without permission from the Foreign Ministry, or using a non-GlavUpDK interpreter—could cost a reporter their accreditation.

Some journalists did lose their accreditation and got deported from the Soviet Union. But most were careful enough to work within the boundaries set by the Soviets, even if the worst they had to fear was being sent home. And then, in 1986, an American journalist, the U.S. News & World Report bureau chief Nicholas Daniloff, was arrested and charged with espionage. Daniloff’s arrest appeared to be retaliation for the arrest, in the United States, of the Soviet diplomat Gennady Zakharov, who was charged with espionage. Two weeks later, the Soviets released Daniloff and the Americans released Zakharov.

We have seen the future and the future is China.

The reality is that China is rising and the US/Europe are falling. The US was 40% of GDP in 1960 and 24% in 2019. See https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-share-of-global-economy-over-time/. These numbers appear to be nominal GDP (not PPP) based. China was just 4% of global GDP in 1960. By 2019, China reached 16.3% of global GDP. Of course, Europe is in decline. See "Europe on the wane " (https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-on-the-wane-global-economics-demographics-gdp/) for some numbers.

In the West 2+2 is now 'white racism'. In China, 2+2 is still 4. See "As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader" (https://quillette.com/2021/08/19/as-us-schools-prioritize-diversity-over-merit-china-is-becoming-the-worlds-stem-leader/). The quantitative data supports this conclusion as well. See "China’s rise as a major contributor to science and technology" (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1407709111). The PNAS article is from 2014. Since then, China has become the number one producer of scientific papers. See https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/China-passes-US-as-world-s-top-researcher-showing-its-R-D-might for some data.

The reality is that liberal democracy in the West is in deep decline and authoritarian states are on the rise. China passed the US in GDP years ago and hasn’t looked back. For better or worse, authoritarian China is a rising power and ‘woke’ America is a declining power. I have a single line that summarizes the decline of the USA and the rise of China.

“China is very good at building dams, the US is very good at enforcing PC. Which system will prevail in the 21st century?”.

I’m the father of two young women — so there is a part of me that would be absolutely delighted to see TikTok banned. It is a scarily addictive app with 150 million U.S. users, including two out of three teenagers. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But the more carefully I think about it, the more I worry. And when I look at the legislation being proposed that would enable the U.S. government to ban TikTok, I see a frightening, Orwellian law that should send chills down every American’s spine.

The argument for banning TikTok is straightforward. The app is owned by a Chinese company and could be forced to obey the dictates of the Chinese government. That’s an appropriate concern (even if there is no evidence that this has ever happened).

What malign behavior could TikTok engage in? First, it could collect data from its users and send that to Beijing. But if Beijing wants that information, it has many ways to get it. The most popular apps all collect some kind of personal user data — and they all share with third parties.

There is a much better way to solve this problem — a comprehensive data privacy law that would protect all Americans’ data and give people the right to stop companies from using, misusing and selling it. Unfortunately, taking on Big Tech is a much more difficult battle than bashing China.

Most technologists I spoke to said they thought that it would be simple to block information transfers by housing all data in U.S. servers and monitoring its use — something TikTok has already committed to doing. Google and other U.S. tech platforms operate in Europe under similar data restrictions. There might even be better techniques that do not artificially divide data by geography.

The second fear about TikTok is that it would transmit anti-American information through its platform, becoming a subtle vehicle for Chinese propaganda. So how would we feel if we learned that a Chinese media company had started a cable news channel that broadcasts sometimes anti-American messages? That is already legal. The United States hasn’t banned China’s CCTV or, for that matter, Qatar’s Al Jazeera — both government-owned media platforms. If we ban TikTok, will we also ban Chinese media companies from distributing pamphlets or books in the United States? Will we ban all Chinese video game companies, which are giants in the industry? The premise of an open society is that people should be free to consume what information they want — and that we are stronger for it.

A bipartisan group of senators has put forward legislation that would make it easy to ban any company “in which any foreign adversary (such as China) has any interest” — which would cover almost any company that has any operations in China (or several other countries). This law would give virtually unlimited powers to the U.S. administration to prevent or punish any company that has tech or information products or services that — in the administration’s view — pose an “undue or unacceptable risk to U.S. national security or the safety of U.S. persons.”

“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist papers, “no government would be necessary.” It does not take a particularly skeptical view of government to be terrified by the idea of giving it that much power. Imagine Donald Trump as president with these tools at his disposal.

We are living in times when state governments are banning books by the hundreds, when speech is considered a weapon and when politicians openly talk about shutting down dangerous ideas. Incidentally, as Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham fulminates against TikTok, she might want to keep in mind that Fox’s former parent company, News Corp., was granted a waiver from existing restrictions on foreign ownership of media platforms.

News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch, by the way, argued that such a waiver was unnecessary, presumably because he believed Americans should get free flows of information, no matter their country of origin.

I support many of the Biden administration’s efforts to compete with China — by investing and building at home, by shoring up alliances, by restricting China’s access to the highest-level technologies and by building up our military deterrent. But the key to the United States’ success and dynamism, decade after decade, has been its openness, innovation and belief in the vigorous contest of ideas, products and services. That’s why our technology tends to be better than that coming out of closed societies. We should not lose that confidence in a panic over one Chinese app.

For years, we believed mistakenly that as China opened up economically it would become more like us. But look at where we are today. We’ve embarked on central economic planning with massive subsidies to industry, and now we’re proposing draconian restrictions on the free flow of information. It seems like we are slowly becoming more like them.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekThis week, Donald Trump was arraigned on 34 felony counts and pleaded not guilty to all. His indictment has sparked debates about the legal soundness and wisdom of the criminal charges against him, his future in politics, and how the press is covering it all. What do you think?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteIn the past decade or so, many institutions of higher education have introduced or expanded administrative bureaucracies dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, a trio of concepts that many Americans understand to mean different things, in some cases without even realizing it.Now the costs and benefits of those bureaucracies are being debated throughout the country. And although no two institutions are the same, many people talking about DEI are talking past one another.I’ll give you two specific examples:First, Compact magazine recently published an account by Tabia Lee, a DEI administrator who was fired from De Anza College in Cupertino, California. She wrote, in part:
On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.
My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice … I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role.
I was wrong.
Although Lee’s essay is filtered through her experience of the events that led to her dismissal, I wonder how many DEI staffers are hired with an understanding of the role that is completely different from, and even incompatible with, the understanding of the very people who chose to hire them.The second example emerges from my own work. Last week, The Atlantic published a feature article I wrote on New College of Florida. The college’s new board of trustees, who were appointed in January by the Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, recently voted to abolish its DEI bureaucracy. In my interviews at New College, I found a mostly unspoken divide among faculty members with regard to DEI work: Some understood it to be ideologically neutral, such that anyone amenable to a diverse and welcoming community should have no objections to it. Others understood it to be highly ideological, presuming particular and highly contested understandings of what diversity, equity, and inclusion mean and how they ought to be pursued.   But no one made an argument as extreme as one I encountered last week in The Boston Globe, where Ya’Ke Smith, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, invoked New College as an example in an article that was headlined “DEI Denial Is the Modern Day Lynching.”He wrote:
In these times, a traditional lynching is almost universally unacceptable. Most people can’t even fathom the barbaric act happening now; and they can’t believe that their ancestors may have participated in the carnage back then. However, modern day attacks on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies in higher education institutions are the equivalent of the tightened rope, and just as suffocating.
There is a perception among DEI opponents that the initiatives are about exclusion and indoctrination, but as someone who oversaw a DEI office for several years, I know it is neither. The primary functions of DEI are to make people think more deeply about how discrimination is baked into the structures of organizations, and to collectively find solutions to disrupt these inequalities and inequities. These initiatives are meant to provide tools for dismantling historically oppressive and violent systems—systems that impact everyone.
Most responses to Smith’s article focused on the analogy to lynching, but I was more interested in his claims that DEI in higher ed primarily (1) “make[s] people think more deeply about how discrimination is baked into the structure of organizations, (2) facilitates “solutions” to “inequalities and inequities,” and (3) aims to “provide tools for dismantling historically oppressive and violent systems.”In my conversations with New College administrators, faculty members, students, and alumni, I heard a lot of frank critiques of the school. But no one told me that discrimination is baked into the structure of the organization, or that New College constitutes an oppressive or violent system that must be dismantled. Perhaps there is someone at New College who believes all that, but given what I know of its history, its structure, and its personnel, it would be tough to make a case for those propositions.So I’m left wondering what, in particular, Smith thinks the dean of DEI was doing at New College. I emailed him to ask but haven’t heard back; in the spirit of this newsletter, I would love to hear him out and converse with him in response if he is ever up for some correspondence. Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking about a long conversation I had with Dr. Diego Villada, a theater professor at New College who was an outspoken faculty defender of DEI there.“No one makes me take DEI training. The administration doesn’t force me to learn about DEI. I seek it out,” Villada told me, “because I want to be more respectful and inviting towards my students.” When the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence at New College programmed events for heritage-history months, or developed an educational program about a particular religious identity, he tried to attend, and when the office sent an email that included guidance or links to outside resources or organizations, he filed them away in case they proved useful in a future situation.“Looking back through my email right now, when there was a tragedy that targeted a specific type of people––in this case LGBTQ people––it explained that tragedy in a way that I could understand, and pointed me towards other resources that would help me expand in my understanding about sensitivities around these matters,” Villada said. To me, information of the sort that Villada values is potentially helpful, but could be compiled by one person for the entire system of public education in Florida and dropped onto an intranet of resources available to any educator. But to Villada, DEI infrastructure on campus is essential to being “as welcoming and inclusive as possible,” and cutting DEI programs is like saying “it’s too much trouble to try to make people feel respected.”When I suggested that many people contest how best to help everyone in a diverse community to feel respected, and that varying and sometimes contradictory answers can be found among people of all identities, he argued that the particular approach advocated by the new trustees at New College “is detrimental to the fabric of the community” because treating everyone the same regardless of their identity is, as he sees it, a wrongheaded approach to education.Of course, he was speaking for himself, not the college or his colleagues––to my point, any two faculty members are likely to have different understandings of what DEI means, because there is neither an official nor a generally agreed-upon definition of the terms––but his opinion is relevant to his understanding of DEI, how he implemented it in his capacity as a faculty member, and what he wants to conserve when he voices opposition to abolishing DEI on campus.For example, he said:
I highly respect the religious beliefs of my students. So let’s say that I have a Muslim student and it’s a woman, and her religion does not allow for her shaking hands with men... So if I go to shake her hand like I would anybody else in class, I might tell her, ‘Oh, well, this is just how we are in a professional setting. Everybody shakes hands.’ And that would not be welcoming or respectful. That would be me treating everybody the same—and completely disregarding that person’s religious identity. Instead, what should happen is that I shake the hands of the students that feel comfortable, and I use a consent-forward way of asking that student, ‘I see that you are wearing a hijab. May I ask, hey, are you a Muslim and are you okay with me shaking hands with you? And if they tell me no, I won’t do it.’ The idea that everything needs to be merit-based with sameness negates the fact that there are sociocultural, political, racial, and gender differences people bring with them through the door.
On the theme of talking past one another, two things strike me about Villada’s comments: first, as someone who is concerned that DEI is too often invoked to justify ideological discrimination or bias in hiring, infringements on academic freedom, free-speech violations, and bloat, I have no objections to `Villada’s diligent efforts to make all of his students feel welcome and believe he should be able to conduct his classes as he sees fit regardless of whether I agree or disagree with a particular judgment he reaches about what being inclusive means; second, note that what Villada describes as the utility he got from actual DEI efforts at New College was very different from (for example) tools for dismantling an oppressive or violent system.The DEI debate undoubtedly includes lots of substantive disagreements, but I suspect it would be somewhat less polarizing and intractable if everyone involved clarified their views with more specificity and concreteness rather than debating the matter in terms of abstract generalities.An Underdiscussed Threat to Free SpeechIn The Popehat Report, the attorney Ken White describes a speech-chilling tactic that he sees regularly in his legal practice:
There is a vast amount of “practical censorship” operating below public notice. By “practical censorship” I mean censorship that happens not by state action or court procedure, or through public pressure, but by non-public threats to invoke our thoroughly broken civil justice system through a defamation claim. I get one or two requests a week for pro bono help in situations where someone has been threatened with litigation over their speech. In the vast majority of these cases, the potential defendants lack the resources to get good legal advice about their rights, let alone litigate the case. Most of the potential defendants are not lawyers, do not have the training necessary to evaluate the threats and their rights and potential defenses, and don’t even know the right questions to ask.
The ones who reach out to me are few and lucky because they at least have an idea of how to start to seek help. The much more common result is that people with the right to speak stop speaking, delete online content, and withdraw from the fabled marketplace of ideas. This is a rational response to a system that is completely unaffordable and incomprehensible to most Americans. Is your free speech worth your financial ruin? Most people would say no, at least about most topics. Lawyers know this, and unscrupulous lawyers use it to make meritless threats and demands. They bluster about the law while misstating it, invoke completely irrelevant legal principles, make demands they have no legal or ethical right to make, and invoke potential consequences that they can’t actually inflict. They do it because it’s often effective.
How much speech protected by the First Amendment gets “practically censored” this way?
There’s no way to keep track, but I see it constantly.
White goes on to allege that Whittier College is a bad actor in this regard––for the particulars, see this colorfully written letter that he sent to the liberal-arts institution’s legal team on behalf of one of his clients.Provocation of the WeekThis past winter caused my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig to meditate on a perennial part of the human condition:
Winter is over, and what a wretched one it was. There came a point in the season when everyone in our house was sick. I stood at the top of the stairs one cold morning, gazing down blearily at the pile of mail and magazines that had accumulated by the door, knowing there were dishes dumped in the sink to match and laundry heaped in the hampers as well. I thought of Henry Knighton, a medieval cleric who witnessed the Black Death’s scouring of Europe. I once read his firsthand account of the sheep and cattle that went wandering over fields where the harvest had rotted on the vine, crops and livestock returning to wilderness amid the great diminishing of human life. I now reigned over my own plagued realm, having lost this latest confrontation with nature.
As winter passes and (God willing) this long season of sickness fades into memory along with the public-health emergency that preceded it, we seem to be entering an era of the retrospective and the speculative: While some news agencies are looking back on the lockdown days of early COVID to try to understand what lessons our public-health policies taught us, others are bracing for the next pandemic … All of these avenues of exploration provide potential room for discovery … But they seem as yet insensitive to the very basic and animal fact of the pandemic and the winter it gave us this year: People get sick.
There is a profound helplessness to falling ill, even in cases of ultimately mild and transient illness—which nevertheless can take the form of long, grueling, raw struggling against mucus and body aches. There is even greater helplessness in caring for another in their time of sickness—especially a child, when you have been up to this point the source of every imaginable comfort. If the pandemic ought to have given us anything, it should have been a more universal empathy toward the condition of illness, of being susceptible to getting sick. It should have been a more urgent will to enact policies that would give people—all people—time to rest and recover when stricken with illness. It should have left us with the impression that the foundations of our society aren’t terribly different from those of Henry Knighton’s, and are subject to the same disruption by pathogens.
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“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.The most popular poster in U.S. history was issued in 1976 and caused a minor moral panic among American parents. It featured Farrah Fawcett, the Charlie’s Angels star, posing in a red, one-piece bathing suit, flashing her perfect, huge smile. Twelve million copies were sold, including to me and most of my seventh-grade friends, each of us taping her up on our bedroom wall. Our mothers were scandalized, which I suppose was part of the point.Now, all grown up as a social scientist, I can classify my connection with Farrah—whom I felt like I knew, because she was the last person I saw each night as I went to sleep—as parasocial bonding. This is the very common tendency to create and cultivate a relationship in your mind between yourself and someone you don’t actually know, or who perhaps doesn’t even exist at all. It can range from harmless affection, like mine for Farrah, to a full-blown fictional love connection, which some social scientists call “fictophilia,” and which can feel stronger than a real-life tie.My mother shouldn’t have worried about Farrah; in my head, we grew apart. By eighth grade, the poster was little more than a source of hilarity with my friends. But in many cases, parasocial relationships can persist, posing a challenge for real-life bonding and, thus, happiness. If your connection to someone you don’t know is a little too intense, you might even need to consider a parasocial breakup.The term parasocial interaction was introduced in the 1950s by the social scientists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl. It was the early days of home television, and they were seeing people develop an intimate sense of relationship with actors who were appearing virtually in their home. Today, the definition is much broader. After all, actors, singers, comedians, athletes, and countless other celebrities are available to us in more ways than ever before. Forming parasocial bonds has never been easier.An emotional connection between fans and celebrities is good business. It encourages people to consume more entertainment and buy more celebrity-endorsed products in order to feel close to their fictional “friends.” Many celebrities will even directly sell “personal,” parasocial interactions through companies such as Cameo. Want Caitlyn Jenner to wish you a happy birthday? That’ll be $2,500.[Read: ‘Close friends,’ for a monthly fee]Perhaps parasocial bonding conjures up the image of lonely people grasping at strangers’ lives to get a faint shadow of human connection. But loneliness and parasocial interaction are not consistently correlated. There is no evidence that, for most people, parasocial bonds extend beyond a surface level. I have never once accidentally called my wife “Farrah.” Most chatter about the private lives of celebrities is trivial at worst.Although there are no exact statistics on frequency that I have found, psychologists do document cases of parasocial relationships that can go much deeper, with significant consequences. Scholars note that parasocial bonds exist on a continuum of intensity, from entertainment-social (say, gossiping about a celebrity) to intense-personal (intense feelings toward a celebrity) to borderline-pathological (uncontrollable behavior and fantasies). At the deepest level, the parasocial relationship can be dangerous, such as when a fan loses touch with reality and stalks a star, under the delusion that they have a real-life connection.But even in less-severe cases, parasocial bonding can signal that something is amiss in a fan’s real-life relationships. It can be a symptom of a poorly adjusted “attachment style,” a psychological concept that has been an area of intense focus of psychologists for many years. Decades of research have shown that the happiest people tend to be secure in their personal relationships, meaning that they are neither unduly anxious about nor avoidant of commitment. Anxious attachment can lead to jealousy, suspicion, or clinginess, and avoidant attachment might lead a person to offer less emotional support and intimacy than is necessary to sustain a successful bond. Generally, this leads to unsatisfying relationships and unhappiness.[From the April 2018 issue: Is fandom really worth it?]In 2021, two psychologists from York University, in Canada, found that forming parasocial bonds was strongly related to avoidant attachment. That is, people who tended to push others away in their day-to-day lives were more likely than others to relate to fictional characters, and especially to characters who are also emotionally avoidant.The research does not establish a causal link between avoidant attachment and emotional bonds with fictional characters. However, you can easily see how parasocial relationships could be a substitute when one finds real-life attachment difficult. This could start a feedback loop, in which avoidant attachment stimulates parasocial bonding, which in turn leads to diminished interactions with real-life family and friends as the fan spends their time and energy on someone who doesn’t know they exist.My purpose here is not to say that parasocial interactions are always bad for you, or even abnormal. Rather, it is to suggest that heavy parasocial bonding might be a signal that you are crowding out the real people who can give you the love you truly need. One way to address this is to get some more distance from your fictional friends, thus pausing the feedback loop and giving yourself more space to pursue in-person connection. Consider doing two things.1. Pay less attention.One of the ways we bond with others is through personal details of our lives. You might feel much closer to a co-worker, for example, after she tells you about her family. Similarly, celebrities can cultivate their fans’ parasocial bonds by granting access to their personal lives, often on social media. It can be hard to remember that such access does not establish a symmetrical friendship based on trust; instead, it is usually intended to capture more of your one-sided devotion, for commercial ends.[Read: Just how much is sports fandom like religion?]Remind yourself that a celebrity’s personal life really isn’t your business. Just as you wouldn’t peer into the windows of a stranger’s house, don’t read about their life in gossip magazines, or on their social-media feeds. If you feel you need to take it up a notch, you can even place a moratorium on talking about celebrities’ lives with friends.2. Break up.If a parasocial bond is taking up too much of your thoughts and time, you might want to quit consuming a celebrity’s work (say, stop watching a show) entirely. In other words, formally “break up” with your parasocial friend.This might be harder than it sounds. Scholars have studied parasocial breakups and found that they require care and effort, because they can lead to real symptoms of grief and loss. Luckily, those bad feelings tend not to be very severe. When scholars writing in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media measured the distress people felt after the finales of television shows that contained characters with whom they were emotionally connected, they found that the experience was less distressing than for real-life relationships ending, and less painful than people expected.There is one more issue to deal with: the avoidant attachment that might have fueled your parasocial bonding in the first place. Changing your attachment style is a little more complex than unfollowing a celebrity on Instagram or deciding not to read an article about the characters in a television show.To begin with, you might want to learn more about the basic science behind attachment style, and determine whether yours is in fact avoidant. Psychologists use a standard survey to assess attachment styles, and you can try it for yourself. Simply knowing your style can be enormously helpful, especially if you’re willing to expend effort, perhaps with the help of a therapist, to start a process of healthy bonding with real people.[Read: Attachment style isn’t destiny]If your style is not avoidant, the dangers of parasocial bonding are likely lower. But you still might find that, if you focus more on your real-life connections, you simply won’t have space in your heart anymore for a fictional friend.

I remember attending a symposium on space science in Washington, DC, sometime in the 1990s, at which the head of NASA at the time, Dan Goldin, gave a keynote address. He marched up to the podium in his trademark cowboy boots, looked out at the assembled astronomers and physicists in the audience, and asked: “How many biologists are here today?” No hands went up. He then said, “The next time I address this audience, I expect it to be full of biologists!”While NASA had launched an exobiology program in 1960, and the Viking program had searched for signs of life on Mars, in my mind, Goldin’s speech marked the official christening of the field of astrobiology.In many ways, that was a high point.I realize that may seem like a strange thing to say. Technology has revolutionized the potential for discovering life outside of Earth, and biology has progressed in leaps and bounds, bringing us ever closer to possibly understanding the origin of life on Earth (a subject I enjoyed bringing myself up to date on when writing my new book). The seminal exoplanet discoveries of Mayor, Queloz, Marcy, and Butler, which have been followed by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, including many around nearby star systems, have raised hopes for the existence of habitable planets. Prebiotic molecules have been detected on comets and asteroids. We have learned a great deal and are continuing to learn more, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Kepler, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), robots on Mars, and other space missions, and in laboratories on Earth. And there are books and whole journals devoted to astrobiology, and new undergraduate and graduate programs in astrobiology are cropping up at institutions around the world.Fascinating: pebbles on the surface Mars (viewed by the Curiosity rover)(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill) pic.twitter.com/mWGogCh20v— World and Science (@WorldAndScience) March 28, 2023
So why on Earth, or, rather, why in the Milky Way would I cast any aspersions on this emerging field of science? The problem is that it is an emerging field, and that implies three important things: (1) the development and use of rigorous scientific standards characteristic of more mature fields has not yet been universally established; (2) unfounded claims are too often made, and they gain support in the popular press; and (3) small groups of ideologically driven researchers can have, and have had, an inordinately large impact, hindering progress and potentially pushing the field backwards.The first major public event for astrobiology after Goldin’s admonition to the scientific community occurred at the White House on August 7th, 1996. At a press conference on the South Lawn, President Clinton described a NASA announcement that a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica showed what appeared to be evidence for fossilized microbial life-forms:It is well worth contemplating how we reached this moment of discovery. More than four billion years ago this piece of rock was formed as a part of the original crust of Mars. After billions of years, it broke from the surface and began a 16 million year journey through space that would end here on Earth. It arrived in a meteor shower 13,000 years ago. And in 1984 an American scientist on an annual US government mission to search for meteors on Antarctica picked it up and took it to be studied. Appropriately, it was the first rock to be picked up that year—rock number 84001.Today, rock 84001 speaks to us across all those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental.Grand words and poetic images. Unfortunately, the NASA announcement was premature. While a group of scientists had produced microscopic images from thin slices of the meteorite of tiny objects that resembled fossils of the earliest microbial life on Earth, subsequent analysis suggested a non-biological origin, and the scientific community ultimately discounted the original claim. (Nevertheless, the fact that the Martian meteorite was found in Antarctica, combined with the fact that growing evidence of the ability of microbial life on Earth to survive in extreme environments such as the interior of rocks did raise publicly the interesting possibility that early life on one planet might reach another planet, dropping “seeds” for the future evolution of life there. So, as was suggested at the time, if you want to know what Martians look like, perhaps you need only to look in the mirror…)This would not be the last time that NASA would host high-profile press conferences describing results that would later be falsified. Perhaps the most well-known of these involved the claimed discovery of a new genesis of life on Earth. In the days preceding the press release, NASA had indicated they would be announcing a new result relevant to the discovery of life. Rumors ran rampant about a possible discovery of evidence of life on Mars or elsewhere. I was privy to some of the details in advance because my colleague at the time, Paul Davies, had some involvement.He had long argued that a “shadow biosphere” might exist on Earth. If there had been a second genesis of life on Earth, and if it hadn’t involved standard components like DNA with its four known base pairs, then scientists probing for life in exotic places on Earth might not detect it. As he had repeatedly put it, “a second genesis of life might be literally lying right under our noses.” He and other colleagues, including a student who had become a fellow in the nascent NASA astrobiology program, proposed that perhaps arsenic could substitute for phosphorus in DNA and other biomolecules in such novel life-forms.At a high-profile hour-long press conference on December 2nd, 2010, the NASA team reported that in arsenic-rich Mono Lake in California, an organism had indeed been found that incorporated arsenic as a substitute for some phosphorus in its DNA. This supposed evidence for a new type of life-form was reported to fuel “wild speculations on the internet about extraterrestrial life.”It didn’t take long before the claim was debunked. Two papers published in 2012 demonstrated that the analysis was flawed, but even before that, many scientists had discounted the claim. The institute I ran at my university held a scientific workshop on the subject, and I recall a well-known chemist stating that had the original paper been submitted to a chemistry journal instead of Science, it would never have passed the refereeing stage, as arsenic-based DNA would be unstable and would dissolve in water.This began to set off concerns that with an agenda to search for and, hopefully, discover signs of life elsewhere in the universe, the enthusiasm of the astrobiologists might, in certain cases, have led them to bypass some more conservative scientific standards. Or, at the very least, concerns that scientific standards in the community might be wildly varying, meaning that not just scientists but also the public at large should probably be advised to take future claims with at least a few grains of salt.Alas, in the intervening years, many new claims have provided fodder for media speculation about possible discoveries of life elsewhere in the universe, only to have later been shown to have been premature at best.In 2020, it was announced with great fanfare that phosphine molecules had been observed high up in the thick cloud layer covering Venus, at an altitude where the cloud density and temperature were not that different from that of Earth’s atmosphere. Phosphine is a biomolecule formed on Earth by decaying organic matter in bogs, swamps, and marshes, and it is also detected in gas giant planets. But the claim was made that no non-biological synthesis mechanism could be operating on Venus; therefore, there might exist life-forms floating in the Venusian clouds. Once again, many in the scientific community were dubious, and two years later, observations by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) satellite, as well as other telescopes, have found no evidence of phosphine in the Venusian atmosphere at levels anywhere near the previous claim.One of the great successes of the Kepler satellite and the observatories that have followed it has been the discovery of literally thousands of extrasolar planets around nearby and distant stars. Public announcements are now made on a regular basis regarding the discoveries of new rocky planets in the so-called “Goldilocks” or “Habitable” zones of their host stars, where liquid water might exist. Since water has been a prerequisite for the evolution of life on Earth, hopes have risen that these planets may harbor life.One should recognize that “habitable” means “potentially habitable” and, furthermore, that “potentially habitable” means that there is potentially water and an atmosphere on the planet. Neither is guaranteed, and there are many arguments that suggest that neither may be the case. Most “habitable” candidates orbiting closely enough to their stars to possibly have liquid water on their surfaces are orbiting stars much smaller than our Sun. Since these stars are significantly less luminous than the Sun, these planets are therefore on orbits much closer to their stars than Mercury’s is to the Sun. These stars are also notoriously unstable, sending off solar flares that could strip the water and/or the atmosphere from a planet. Alternatively, such a planet could be tidally locked in its orbit around its star—as the Moon is to Earth—meaning that only one side faces the star at all times, resulting in one side being boiling hot and the other freezing cold, thus compromising habitability on most of the planet.Finally, even if a planet with an atmosphere orbits in the habitable zone, that does not guarantee the presence of liquid water. Whether this is possible depends crucially on the existence of continents, for example. On Earth, about 600 million years ago, when Earth’s continents were clustered near the equator and reflected a great deal of sunlight, Earth’s ocean surface froze, in a scenario that has since been dubbed “Snowball Earth.” The models that have been used to estimate whether the habitable life candidates have liquid water are very rudimentary, without any modeling of possible irregular continental structures on their surface.Indeed, even with liquid water, there is no guarantee that other conditions that may be necessary for the origin of life—at least life like that on Earth—are present. These include not just the presence of surface land, but also a magnetic field to shield the planet from radiation from the host star, and plate tectonics to provide restorative cycling of molecules.All of these arguments should give one pause, and a recent result from the JWST adds more reasons for concern. The JWST is able, in certain cases where an exoplanet is transiting in front of its host star during its orbit, to probe the light that has passed the edges of the planet to search for the telltale spectrographic signature indicating the presence of an atmosphere and to search for possible biomarkers.The first such effort, focused on a nearby star, turned out to be a failure. An Earth-sized planet orbiting the star LHS 475 b, 41 light years away, was observed by the JWST, with the goal of detecting its atmosphere and chemical composition. No spectroscopic evidence of an atmosphere was found. While the simplest conclusion one might have drawn from this was that there was indeed no atmosphere, the astrobiology community, and most of the media reporting that relies on it for information, presented the negative result in a different light. Without much more motivation than sheer optimism, it was suggested that the planet probably had dense clouds that shielded an atmosphere underneath, or a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere that might not be detectable.Astrobiology is, of course, still in its nascent stages, so it is not unexpected that the learning curve is still at a low point and many tentative results can subsequently be proved incorrect. Over time, that ratio should decrease as we learn more. Unfortunately, however, the standards of the field can only improve if the scientists involved allow them to. There is now growing evidence that ideological issues may impede that progress.The first inkling of the emerging emphasis of ideology over science in astrobiology came from the support by so many members of that community for the protests against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In 2000, the National Academies of Science had identified the project as a top priority for the US astronomy community, and they  recommended that it be built within the decade. Almost immediately, after the dormant volcano Mauna Kea had been selected as the proposed site, local protests began. In spite of the fact that Mauna Kea is the most sacred mountain in Hawaiian religion and culture and was known to Native Hawaiians as the home of Wakea, the sky god, numerous large telescopes had already previously been built on the mountain. Conflict between the priorities of the scientific community and Indigenous religious myths, which had erupted from time to time in the past in Hawaii, escalated after the construction of TMT was set to begin.While the conflict between science and religious myth is ubiquitous, as witnessed most recently by efforts in New Zealand to teach “Indigenous Knowledge” on the same level as science in high schools, one might have expected the scientific community to support the TMT project more or less unanimously. However, a new generation of young astronomy activists has begun online efforts using the hashtag #ScientistsforMaunaKea, and they consider protecting the sacred nature of the mountain to be more important than the possible scientific benefits of this trailblazing project. Let's get 1 MILLION SCIENTISTS to oppose the #TMT in Hawai‘i. Tweet name, scientific expertise / degree, statement (I oppose #TMT). #TMT can deliver its game-changing science somewhere else. It shouldn't be on sacred indigenous lands. #ScientistsforMaunaKea #kukiaimauna— Jack Kittinger (@peopledseas) July 19, 2019
This has helped delay and may even stop the TMT, which was originally slated for completion in 2024, at the same time as the scheduled completion of the competing European project, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), in the Southern Hemisphere.The support of some of the astronomy community for the TMT protests began to demonstrate the growing impact of broader social justice concerns on the field. However, as far as the future progress of the field, these protests paled in comparison to more recent efforts within the astrobiology community to put the brakes on the fundamental science that the field was meant to uncover.I have written earlier about the emerging effort by young astrobiologists to “decolonize” the search for extraterrestrial life. The once-great science magazine, Scientific American, which has degenerated in recent years as social justice concerns have taken priority over science, published an article entitled “Cultural Bias Distorts the Search for Alien Life” (“‘Decolonizing’ the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) could boost its chances of success, says science historian Rebecca Charbonneau”). Therein she made the argument that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence might be “undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields.”To weed out biases and enhance the quest to find life somewhere among the stars, @StellarHistory argues, SETI’s practitioners must find a way to “decolonize” their field. (By @CamiloAGarzonC) https://t.co/F1xNTU6sHm— Scientific American (@sciam) August 14, 2022
The fundamental science associated with searching for extraterrestrial life involves the technical development of tools to detect and probe possible exoplanet atmospheres, or, if one is searching for signs of intelligent life, to search for patterns of radio or optical pulses and signs of technological civilization impacting on the atmospheres of distant planets. Concerns about how this scientific research might reflect underlying racial biases seem misplaced at best. But Charbonneau suggests simply stopping developing the technology while we consider the issue. Instead of listening for signs of alien intelligence, we should first be listening to Indigenous people here on Earth, or, as she put it, taking into account “marginalized and historically excluded perspectives.”Dr Charbonneau is a Jansky Fellow at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory. These prestigious fellowships are meant to assist the most promising researchers in radio astronomy. That she espouses such a cause suggests how deeply embedded this ideology has become in the community. Speaking at a large SETI meeting in Pennsylvania last year, she reiterated her claims that racism might underlie much of the current SETI mission. Charbonneau was not alone. Another observer at the meeting reported that many of the “scientific talks” were about forbidding the language of “colonization” and discussing “indigenous” issues, non-binary sexuality, and transphobia. Ultimately, the meeting resolved that it was appropriate to forbid the use of the word “intelligence” in the name “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” as it is a “white construct.”Numerous SETI scientists reported last year that in the face of these claims, it was becoming harder and harder to carry out SETI research. They had good reason. Not to be outdone by last year’s nonsense, the organizers of this year’s Penn State meeting, which will take place in June, just announced a code of conduct related to unacceptable behavior. The behavior that might lead to exclusion from these conferences now is not confined to mere actions but also to promoting or even citing the work of any scientist the organizing group deems as being unworthy! The code of conduct includes the following explanation:II. Unacceptable behaviour[…]Promote the work of those who have violated Professional Codes of Ethics (e.g., the AAS Code of Ethics). Promotion of an author’s work includes any verbal or visual presentation including that person’s name or likeness. In cases where the participant’s work is sufficiently scientifically-independent from that of the person who has violated the professional code, the work may be presented so long as the presenter is not engaging in promotion. Citations are not violations of this policy, though all participants should weigh the necessity of presenting that citation with the harm that it could perpetuate.That last phrase is particularly telling. In almost all fields of scholarship, not citing the previous work of other authors on which one’s own work is based is referred to as plagiarism. In astrobiology, citing such work can also now be considered harmful.The notion that citing past scientific results in scientific papers can “perpetuate harm” may not signal the beginning of the end, but it doesn’t bode well for a field that needs to work hard to ensure the highest level of scientific standards if it is to mature as it attempts to address some of the most significant questions we can ask about our place in the universe.

It’s a measure of Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party that his unprecedented criminal indictment is strengthening, not loosening, his grip.Trump was on the defensive after November’s midterm election because many in the GOP blamed voter resistance to him for the party’s disappointing results. But five months later he has reestablished himself as a commanding front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, even as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has delivered the first of what could be several criminal indictments against him.“It’s almost like an abusive relationship in that certain segments of MAGA voters recognize they want to leave, they are willing to leave, but they are just not ready to make that full plunge,” the GOP consultant John Thomas told me.[David Frum: Never again Trump]Trump’s ability to surmount this latest tumult continues one of the defining patterns of his political career. Each time Trump has shattered a norm or engaged in behavior once unimaginable for a national leader—such as his praise of neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election result and instigating the January 6 insurrection—most Republican elected officials and voters have found ways to excuse his actions and continue supporting him.“At every point when the party had a chance to move in a different direction, it went further down the Trump path,” Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, told me.Trump’s latest revival has dispirited his Republican critics, who believed that the party’s discouraging results in November’s election had finally created a pathway to forcing him aside. Now those critics find themselves in the worst of both worlds, facing signs that Trump’s legal troubles could simultaneously increase his odds of winning the GOP nomination and reduce his chances of winning the general election.Coincidentally, the former president’s indictment came on the same day that Wisconsin voters sent the GOP a pointed reminder about the party’s erosion in white-collar suburbs during the Trump era. The victory of the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz in an election that gave Democrats a 4–3 majority on the state supreme court continued a clear trend away from Republicans since Trump unexpectedly captured Wisconsin in 2016. En route to a double-digit victory, she won more than 80 percent of the vote in economically thriving and well-educated Dane County (which includes the state capital of Madison), more than 70 percent in Milwaukee County, and she dramatically cut the Republican margin in the Milwaukee suburbs, which the GOP had dominated before Trump.Protasiewicz’s resounding victory followed a similar formula as the Democrats’ wins last November in the governorship races in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  In all three states, Democrats beat a Republican gubernatorial candidate whom Trump had backed. Like Protasiewicz’s victory yesterday, each of those 2022 results showed how the Trump stamp on the GOP, as well as Republican support for banning abortion, has allowed Democrats to regain an advantage in these crucial Rust Belt swing states. Those Rust Belt defeats last November, as well as losses for Trump-backed candidates in Arizona and Georgia, two other pivotal swing states, sparked a greater level of public GOP backlash against Trump than he’d faced at almost any point in his presidency.Amid Republican frustration over the midterm results, Trump started to look like a former Las Vegas headliner who had been reduced to playing Holiday Inns somewhere off the New Jersey turnpike. Many of his former fans turned on him. Two days after the election, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial whose headline flatly declared, “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.” The New York Post ran a front-page cartoon picturing Trump as a bloated “Trumpty Dumpty” who “had a great fall” in the election. Fox News reduced Trump’s visibility on the network so sharply that he did not appear on its programs between Sean Hannity interviews on September 22, 2022, and March 27, 2023, according to tracking by the progressive group Media Matters for America.It wasn’t just the Rupert Murdoch–verse that showed signs of Trump fatigue. Powerful interest groups such as the Club for Growth and the donor network associated with the Koch family openly called for Republicans to put Trump in the rearview mirror.[Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump]Even when Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy, a week after the election at his Mar-a-Lago resort, the event had a frayed, musty feel. “On vivid display in this chapter of Trump’s life and political rise and (perhaps) fall,” Politico wrote, “was a crowd that was thick with ride-or-die conspiracists and conspicuously light on more prominent and powerful figures from the party he once totally held in his thrall.” Trump’s speech that night was a greatest-hits set delivered without conviction.Trump’s first few weeks as an announced candidate didn’t project any more energy or verve. “The Trump thing looked kind of haggard and worn,” Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told me. “It was deprived of any of its pizzazz. ” In her focus groups with GOP voters, Longwell said, former Trump voters “weren’t done with him [and] they weren’t mad at him,” but they were expressing an emotion that probably would horrify Trump even more: “People did feel a little bored.”From November through about mid-February, both state and national polls consistently showed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gaining on Trump. Thomas, who started a super PAC encouraging DeSantis to run, said that in the midterm’s immediate aftermath, he saw polls and focus groups that suggested GOP voters had reached “an inflection point” on Trump. Concerns about his future electability, Thomas said, outweighed their support for his policies or his combative demeanor. Thomas believes that DeSantis’s landslide reelection in Florida created “such a stark contrast” to the widespread defeat of Trump-backed candidates that many GOP voters started to view the Florida governor as a better bet to win back the White House. “That’s why you saw such huge movement in state and local polling over the next few months,” Thomas told me.But that movement away from Trump seemed to crest in late February or early March—and polls since have shown the current inside the GOP steadily flowing back toward him.Republicans both supportive and critical of Trump remain somewhat unsure about why the polls shifted back in his direction at that point. But Trump’s revival did coincide with him visibly campaigning more, starting with his truculent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Even by Trump’s overheated standards, his latest rallies have offered incendiary new policy proposals, such as more federal intervention to seize control of law enforcement in Democratic cities. He now routinely declares that he will serve as his voters’ “warrior” and as their “retribution.”Trump also made a more explicit and extended argument against DeSantis; the former president has simultaneously attacked DeSantis from the left (calling him a threat to Social Security and Medicare) and the right (portraying him as a clone of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan). Many Republicans, meanwhile, thought DeSantis looked unsteady as he took his first national tour, to promote his new book. DeSantis flipped from emulating Trump’s skepticism of aiding Ukraine to (somewhat) distancing himself from his rival’s position; then, regarding the Manhattan indictment, DeSantis flopped from lightly criticizing Trump to unreservedly defending him.DeSantis’s “stumble on Ukraine” in particular “really caused more traditional Republicans to doubt whether he was the best alternative to Trump,” Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster, told me.Around the same time, almost all of the other announced and potential GOP candidates, such as former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence, rushed to defend Trump against the pending indictment—before seeing the charges. Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who has announced his candidacy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who’s still considering the race, have been the only potential 2024 contenders to criticize Trump in any way over the indictment.Longwell says the candidates who have chosen to rally around Trump have boxed themselves into an untenable position. With Trump’s legal challenges now dominating both conservative and mainstream media, if the other Republican contenders do nothing but echo Trump’s accusations against those investigating him, “it creates this dynamic where all of the other 2024 contenders actually end up being supporting cast members in Donald Trump’s drama, and there is no other room for them to make an affirmative case for why they should be the 2024 nominee,” Longwell told a television interviewer this week.Fox and other conservative media have boosted Trump by echoing his claim that prosecutors were targeting him to silence his voters—the same argument those outlets made after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents last summer, notes Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. Those outlets “are reinforcing his position by telling their viewers that if they don’t defend Donald Trump, the left will be coming for them next,” Gertz told me. “That’s a very potent, very powerful argument, and one that really cuts off a lot of potential avenues” for Trump’s GOP critics and rivals.The reluctance by most declared and potential 2024 GOP hopefuls to criticize Trump over the indictment extends their refusal to publicly articulate any case for why the party should reject him. “As a rule of thumb, if you are running against someone and you are afraid to say your opponent’s name, that’s not a positive sign,” Stuart Stevens told me.[Read: Why won’t Trump rivals just say it?]One reason Trump’s rivals have been so reticent is that there is not much room in a GOP primary to criticize Trump over policy. On issues such as immigration and international trade, “it is incredibly difficult to create real daylight on policy, because he’s a good fit for the primary electorate,” John Thomas told me. That’s probably even more true now than in 2016, because Trump’s blustery messages tend to attract non-college-educated voters and drive away white-collar voters.Even so, Whit Ayres said that in his polling, only about one-third of GOP primary voters are immovable Trump supporters. He estimates that only about one-tenth are irrevocably opposed to him. Ayres classifies the remaining 55 to 60 percent of the GOP coalition as “Maybe Trump” voters who are not hostile to him but are open to alternatives.Trump has reached 50 percent support in some recent national polls of GOP voters, but more often he attracts support from about 40 percent of Republicans. That was roughly the share of the vote that Trump won while the race was competitive in 2016, but he captured the nomination anyway, because none of his rivals could consolidate enough of the remaining 60 percent.Many of Trump’s Republican critics see the 2024 field replicating the mistakes of his 2016 opponents. The other candidates’ refusal to make a clear case against Trump echoes the choice by the 2016 candidates to avoid direct confrontation with him for as long as possible.Now, as then, GOP strategists think Trump’s rivals are reluctant to engage him directly because they want to be in position to inherit his voters if he falters. Rather than face the danger of a full-scale confrontation with Trump, the 2024 candidates all are hoping that events undermine him, or that someone else in the field confronts him. “They all want to be the one that the alligator eats last,” says Matt Mackowiak, a GOP consultant and the chair of the Republican Party in Travis County, Texas.But every Republican strategist I spoke with agreed that a key lesson of 2016 is that Trump won’t deflate on his own; the other candidates must give voters a reason to abandon him. Mackowiak, like Thomas and Longwell, told me that the prospect of multiple indictments could exacerbate Trump’s greatest potential primary weakness—concerns about his electability—but it’s unlikely that enough voters will consider him too damaged to win unless the other candidates explicitly make that case. “For Trump to pay a political price for all this uncertainty and the legal vulnerability he’s facing, Republican challengers are going to have to force that,” Mackowiak said.Nor is it clear that enough GOP voters will turn on Trump even if they do come to doubt his electability. Trump’s Republican critics fear that the cumulative weight of all the investigations he’s confronting will lower his ceiling of support and diminish his ability to win another general election. But a CNN poll last month found that only two-fifths of Republican primary voters put the highest priority on a candidate who can win the general election, while nearly three-fifths said they were most concerned with picking a nominee who agrees with them on issues. Katon Dawson, a former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party now supporting Haley, told me that “Republicans don’t care” about electability when voting in primaries. “They vote their values; they vote their wants and needs,” he said. “I’ve never ever seen them say ‘I am going to vote for who I think is the most electable.’”Trump’s rivals for the nomination still have many months left to formulate a case against him, particularly once the GOP presidential debates begin in August. But for Republicans resistant to Trump, the months since the November midterm have reversed the trajectory of the seasons. As winter began, many were blooming with optimism about moving the party beyond him. Now, as spring unfolds, they are seeing those hopes wither—and confronting the full measure of just how difficult it will be to loosen Trump’s hold on the GOP.“I’ve always believed Trump was going to be the nominee,” Stevens said. But so much of the Republican establishment is still in denial that “Trumpism is what the party wants to be.”

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.After his arraignment in New York, a weary Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, where he made a rambling and disjointed statement. (To call it a “speech” would be too generous.) There was almost nothing notable in it, with one dangerous exception: Trump’s obvious attempt to intimidate the judge presiding over his criminal trial.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The Trump indictment is actually quite damning. 
Ozempic is about to be old news.
Angel Reese can shine as brightly as she wants.
A Brazen MoveLawyers are already arguing about the now-unsealed indictment in the Manhattan case against Donald Trump. As a layman, I thought the indictment documents laid out a clear story about Trump’s behavior. But there’s a long way to go before a judge or a jury resolves any of it.Trump, for his part, didn’t dwell on the case when he returned to his safe space in Florida. He spoke for only about 25 minutes, which is usually just the amount of time it takes him to clear his throat. But in that short time, he talked about everything—and I mean everything.There were the usual cries of “Russia Russia Russia” and “Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine,” which Trump now tends to repeat as a kind of ritual invocation without context. He went off about the Georgia investigation involving his call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger looking for more votes in the 2020 election, referring to that call as “even more perfect” than the call to Ukraine that helped get him impeached. He railed against the “lunatic” Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the probes into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and called the former investigation the “boxes hoax.” He even went after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which he called “a radical-left troublemaking organization.” If you’ve ever wondered why America is in trouble, you need look no further, apparently, than those unruly Trotskyite archivists.As usual, Trump’s histrionics would be comical if the stakes were not so high. He is the leader not only of the Republican Party but of a cult of personality that we already know will answer his calls for violence, which is why the most dangerous part of Trump’s litany of complaints last night was his effort to intimidate the family of Juan Merchan, the judge who will preside over his case:
I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign. And a lot of it.
This wasn’t some random neural misfire from the pachinko machine inside Trump’s head. It was part of a campaign that had been launched in the right-wing media ecosystem two days earlier, shortly after Trump arrived in New York.On the night of April 3, the trashy disinformation site Gateway Pundit (which I refuse to link to here) posted a “bombshell” about Judge Merchan’s daughter, who apparently worked at a company whose clients included the Biden-Harris campaign. The next day, the right-wing site Breitbart (again, I will not bother with a link) picked up the story and quoted from a tweet (now deleted) from Trump’s son Eric. Later, Donald Trump Jr. shared a link to the Breitbart piece—which prominently displayed what appears to be a picture of the judge with his daughter—on Twitter and Truth Social, calling her “yet another connection in this hand picked democrat [sic] show trial.” Junior left the implication hanging there, but when Trump Sr. returned to Florida last night, he connected that final dot, asserting that the judge’s daughter is now personally on Joe Biden’s campaign payroll.There is no subtlety here. Trump and the people who fashioned this non-story into a “bombshell” knew exactly what they were doing. Making such accusations while spreading the daughter’s picture around the right-wing media swamps is dangerous. But Trump, his failsons, and the family’s various enablers were all sending a message to the judge: You have a lovely daughter, Your Honor, and we know who she is and where she is. This is a classic move from the authoritarian playbook: If you are threatened by the law, threaten those who administer the law. Menacing judges and prosecutors is something gang members and Mafia goons have occasionally tried over the years, but to their (limited) credit, most crooks aren’t usually this foolish or brazen. Would-be caudillos, however, especially those bolstered by an extremist following, are more willing to roll those dice.Donald Trump has never faced serious criminal consequences—or, really, any consequences—that he could not smother with enough money. (Losing the 2020 election was likely the first time in his life that large numbers of people disobeyed him, and his current troubles stem from his inability to cope with that realization.) He may yet wriggle out of the criminal charges in Manhattan, but there are likely more to come from Georgia and Washington, D.C.And yet, Trump is still the choice of millions for the presidency, despite his attacks on the rule of law and the judges who oversee it. We cannot say we have not been warned: The authoritarian rule and personal threats Trump will bring back to the White House were on full display last night in a resort ballroom in Florida.Related:
Depraved, deranged, and doing real damage
The humiliation of Donald Trump
A large tornado hit southeastern Missouri early this morning, killing at least five people and causing severe damage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Poland, where he is slated to address the many Ukrainians living there.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California, despite threats of retaliation from China.
The Weekly Planet: America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all, Emma Marris writes.
The Atlantic / Getty
Return of the People MachineBy Saahil Desai
Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy had the People Machine. Using computers that were 250,000 times less powerful than a modern MacBook, Kennedy’s operatives built a simulation of the presidential election, modeling how 480 types of voters would respond to any conceivable twist in the campaign. If JFK made a civil-rights speech in the Deep South, the People Machine could, in the words of its creators, “predict the approximate small fraction of a percent difference that such a speech would make in each state and consequently … pinpoint the state where it could affect the electoral vote.”
Don’t indict Trump with this. 
Did media learn nothing from 2016?
Photos: Holy Week processions in Spain
Nathan Bajar / NYT / Redux
Read. In her new book, Humanly Possible, Sarah Bakewell champions an intellectual tradition that might be just what we need today.Listen. The late Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto scored not only films, but the exquisite highs and distressing lows of life.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I’m forgoing recommendations today except to say that I will be on CNN this evening at 9 p.m. ET to talk about the Trump indictment. I will also be away for the next few days, so I want to wish a happy Passover and a happy Easter to those among you who celebrate. I will, however, take a minute to explain why you’ll hear me wishing a happy Easter to my fellow Orthodox Christians next week. We Orthodox do things a little differently. Mostly, it’s about calendars, but here’s the basic explanation from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America:Orthodox Pascha frequently occurs later than Western Easter because the Orthodox Church uses inaccurate scientific calculations that rely on the inaccurate Julian Calendar to determine the date of Pascha for each year.It then gets a lot more complicated: “Because of Christian dependence on unreliable Jewish calculations of the vernal full moon for Passover, and because of the varying Christian traditions … ” Look, the simple answer is that every few years, your Orthodox friends might be celebrating Easter on the same day as everyone else, but usually, our Easter will be about one to four weeks later—so don’t be surprised if you hear us talking about eggs and bunnies (and my Greek grandmother’s lamb recipe) long after everyone else.Or, as we Orthodox kids used to joke: “What’s the best part of being Orthodox? Half-off Easter candy.”— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Last week I was invited to be involved in a roundtable discussion for a US senate committee on healthcare. This was a closed session without reporters, so I don’t feel at liberty to discuss details, but it did help crystalize for me the current thoughts and strategies of those promoting complementary and alternative medicine ( CAM ). I can give my overall impressions of where I think we are, partly informed by my recent experience.

Alternative, No – Complementary, No – Integrative

CAM proponents use a lot of bait-and-switch or what David Gorski has dubbed “Trojan Horse” strategies to push their treatments. Interestingly, it’s mostly the same exact treatments that have been around for 50 years or more. When we talk of CAM we are still mostly referring to homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic manipulation, energy medicine, and herbal medicine. There are branding tweaks, or new versions of these things, but the core concepts are the same. It doesn’t matter if you call them alternative, complementary, or integrative. It’s the same stuff.

The evolution of the branding, however, is to reassure those who care about things such as the standard of care in medicine that they will not be replacing proven therapies, and are offered in addition to them. First, this is never entirely true. If a CAM method is being placed somewhere in the hierarchy of treatments, then it is displacing or delaying non- CAM therapies. Also, health care is often resource limited. If a patient is availing themselves of acupuncture, that is using up their limited resources of time and health-care dollars. Proper treatment trials should also be done one at a time, or else you can’t know what is working. So while you are trying acupuncture (or whatever) you may not be doing the next thing.

Further, the very concept of “integrative” medicine is flawed to its core. What, exactly, are they integrating into what? Try to answer this question without just referring to euphemisms – no alternative or complementary methods, traditional, non-mainstream, etc. None of these really work, nor can they be operationally defined. If, for example, you define it as integrating non-mainstream methods into mainstream medicine, that provokes the question of why they are non-mainstream in the first place. And also – there already is a mechanism for that. It’s called science and evidence. The implication is that we should be integrating methods based on something other than the best available science. And once they are integrated, wouldn’t that then make them mainstream? So then what are they?

All of this rhetorical dancing is to avoid the obvious answer – integrative medicine is all about creating a double standard (legally, academically, professionally) so that treatments and methods that are below the line of scientific medicine can be integrated with those that are above the line. That’s it, and the laws that are pushed to promote CAM explicit carve out this double standard.

Integrative medicine is preventive medicine/health promotion

This is the most annoying aspect of the CAM propaganda – the retconning of CAM into preventive medicine. This is nothing short of gaslighting. The first piece of this strategy is to slander mainstream medicine by saying it is not about disease prevention, only disease intervention. This is not to say we do a perfect job sufficiently emphasizing prevention. Healthcare is complex, it is very difficult to get people to change their habits, and we do nothing perfectly. But this does not mean we don’t do prevention or that CAM providers are better at it.

Most primary care is about disease prevention and health promotion. This is all science based – good nutrition, sleep hygiene, exercise, taking aspirin for vascular prevention, treating high blood pressure, lowering cholesterol, smoking cessation, etc. The amount of research being done on preventive strategies and slowly being integrated into the standard of practice is staggering. And it’s all mainstream science-based medicine. None of the CAM modalities I listed above have any preventive value (or arguably, any value).

But this line is rhetorically very powerful. If they can slip in this equivalency, then they have already won. To further support this approach CAM proponents are very liberal in defining what is CAM . They would love to include all nutrition and exercise – but again, this is anti-historical gaslighting.

Part of this complete breakfast

I believe I was the first one here to use this reference, because it is perfect for what is happening. Remember the old commercials where something like a breakfast pastry was shown next to orange juice, eggs, fruit, and toast and said to be “part of this complete breakfast”. Even as a child I saw through this scam – sure, it may be part of that breakfast, but it’s an irrelevant part.

Good science-based medicine should endeavor to isolate variables as much as possible. That is what the entire placebo-controlled trial is about. We cannot make causal conclusion unless the variable of interest is isolated. The problem for CAM proponents is that when you properly isolate the variable that is at the core of their treatment, it doesn’t work. After thousands of clinical trials, for example, acupuncture researchers still have not been able to demonstrate scientifically that acupuncture points mean anything. They do not appear to exist – their own research concludes this. Similarly, there is no “life energy” behind energy medicine, subluxation theory has been essentially disproven, and the principles of homeopathy are demonstrable nonsense.

The ideas and claims at the heart of these CAM methods have never been scientifically demonstrated, and go against pretty much all of modern biology, physiology, biochemistry, and even sometimes the laws of physics. So what’s a CAM proponent to do? One approach is to simply never isolate these core variables in a clinical study. Mix in a bunch of interventions that are almost guaranteed to be helpful (tracking nutrition, health coaching, sleep hygiene, compliance monitoring) and then claim that the CAM treatment “worked”. Or simply, don’t properly blind the study. That way you can claim that non-specific placebo effects are evidence that the treatment works. One way to do this is pragmatic studies, looking at real-world use. But these studies cannot be used to make efficacy claims – for the reasons stated, they are not blinded and don’t isolate variables. Pragmatic studies should only be done on treatments that have already demonstrated efficacy.

Appeal to anecdote

I almost always hear the phrase, “I have seen it work in my practice” from CAM proponents justifying their non-science based interventions. Of course, this is anecdotal, it means close to nothing. Anecdotal evidence leads us to the conclusions we want to be true (quoting Barry Beyerstein), not the truth. Legions of patients swore by all kinds of nonsensical treatments throughout history, that we now know to be nothing but snake oil.

The appeal to anecdote can also sometime be camouflaged with euphemisms. We see this treatment working individually, even if it cannot be demonstrated with group level data. Translation – this treatment does not work when studied scientifically, so I am going to refer to anecdotes instead.

This approach can be further obscured by referring to individualize or personalized medicine. These sound good, because they are, but the problem is – you should not be individualizing treatments that have no proven efficacy. When I give a patient a treatment trial, I give them something that has been proven statistically to work, and then I see if it works in them (you still never really know, you can only know the statistics). What you cannot do is use individual level data as if it were evidence for efficacy.

Oh, yeah!

One final strategy is to say that, well, mainstream medicine is not all evidence-based either. This is actually a complex question, and not statement like this can fairly capture that complexity. In scientific medicine we use a hierarchy of evidence, starting with the most evidence based treatments (individualized by history, comorbidities, and priorities), and then proceed from there as necessary. At the same time we are trying to improve the evidence base for everything we do. The vast majority of day-to-day medical practice is solidly evidence-based, but we don’t have proven treatments for everything, so we often have to make due with less-than definitive evidence.

However, there is a line we should not go below. We should not use treatments that have been adequately demonstrated to be harmful or worthless. We should also not use treatments that have no evidence to support their use and have a prior probability of close to zero. We also should not use treatments that have been studied for decades without being able to prove specific efficacy, and just pretend these are still experimental.

This also gets us back to my first point – the goal of scientific medicine it to improve the base of scientific evidence for medicine, to improve the standard of care, and to increase the effectiveness of translating evidence into best practice. Yes, medicine is not perfect. But like all sciences, it is self-correcting. While there is a major movement within medicine to constantly tweak and improve the scientific base, there is a simultaneous movement that seeks to carve out a double standard that explicitly lowers the standard of evidence, of science, and even of ethics within medicine.

At the end of the day, the CAM movement is all about integrating old, unscientific, failed treatments into modern medicine. Everything else is distraction.

When Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen meets a group of senior U.S. lawmakers including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Wednesday, Beijing will try to shift the focus to its own anger and perceived grievances. Instead, Americans should listen to what Tsai has to say: She is calling for more help to counter China’s efforts to intimidate Taiwan and interfere in its democracy.

Tsai’s meeting with members of Congress in Simi Valley, Calif., is referred to by the governments in Washington and Taipei only as a “transit” stop — a way of playing down the diplomatic significance of the trip. (She’ll be arriving in California from a tour of Central America.) This is indicative of the kind of nonsense Taiwanese leaders must go through to avoid provoking Beijing’s ire each time they visit the United States. The Wall Street Journal called her visit “purposely low-key.”

But Beijing’s response is never “low-key.” And Tsai’s restraint can mute her message, especially in an information environment awash with Chinese government propaganda. This dynamic was on display when Tsai visited New York last week to receive an award from the Hudson Institute. After discussions with the Biden administration, Tsai agreed to keep most press out. But my Post colleagues published some of her remarks, working from a recording they obtained.

What hasn’t yet been reported from the event is how Tsai described China’s escalating daily campaign of political, economic and psychological aggression against Taiwan, which is the main message she came to the United States to deliver. Tsai urged her American audience to understand that while the threat of military invasion can’t be ignored, China’s real plan is to force Taiwan to submit through nonmilitary means.

“I think the Chinese have this belief that the best way to win the war is without war,” she said at the Hudson event, which I attended. “So what they want to do is to harass us, to apply pressure on us and to continue to do whatever that they can do to make us feel uneasy and scared. That’s their strategy.”

Tsai said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a “wake-up call” that forced Taiwan to think hard about how it would respond in a similar situation. But while military preparations proceed, she said, the international community needs to help Taipei fight the tactics Beijing is using right now, including cyberwarfare, information warfare and interference in domestic Taiwanese politics. And more countries must make it clear to China that nonmilitary aggression is also unacceptable to the international community and will incur serious economic costs.

“Our strategy, while also making the [military] preparations, is to tell [China] that is very costly and these nonmilitary means that you are taking are not going to be useful,” she said. “So Taiwan and the rest of the world have to get together to find a way to tell the Chinese that war is not an option.”

New Yorkers got a glimpse of Beijing’s efforts to demonize Tsai and drown out her message last week. Protesters, including groups connected to the Chinese Communist Party’s influence network, shouted insults outside her hotel. Chinese officials then cited those same protests as evidence that Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party are “troublemakers” who are using the United States to seek independence from China, aided by “some forces in the U.S.”

None of that is true. Tsai is a sober, sophisticated, strategic leader who has done her best to balance defending Taiwan’s democracy in the face of enormous pressures with the need to avoid all-out confrontation with China. The Chinese Communist Party has done Taiwan and China an extraordinary disservice by refusing to engage with her over the past seven years. Now Beijing is trying to pick her successor in next year’s election and courting her political opposition.

“We have neighbors who also want to participate [in our elections],” Tsai said in New York. “So you end up having an additional party in our democracy and in our politics.”

Beijing is also trying to interfere in U.S. politics, planning to retaliate after the U.S. lawmakers meet with Tsai. The McCarthy meeting in California is meant to be less provocative than his planned trip to Taiwan (which might still happen), but that didn’t stop China’s top diplomat in Washington from warning last week that it “could lead to another serious confrontation in the China-U.S. relationship.” The saber-rattling has already started; 10 Chinese aircraft crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait on Saturday — a typically bellicose reaction to her stop in New York.

The Biden administration is trying to minimize Beijing’s reaction while working quietly to deepen cooperation with Taiwan and rally other countries such as Japan to the cause. But there are real concerns about the pace of defensive preparations, a backlog in weapons deliveries, disagreements about defensive priorities and a lack of U.S. attention to the trade and investment side of the relationship.

“We haven’t focused enough on the political and economic realms of how to support Taiwan and combat the type of coercive campaign that the PRC is constantly engaged in,” Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute, told me. “We need to think more holistically about the ways in which we support Taiwan.”

By threatening war, Beijing plays into Washington’s reflex to think of Taiwan as an irritant in U.S.-China relations rather than as a proud but vulnerable democracy struggling for survival and a crucial contributor to the world economy. Beijing’s gaslighting must not distract Taiwan’s partners from the realization that the fight over Taiwan’s future is already well underway.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump was arraigned in New York today on multiple felony counts. But maybe America isn’t going to fulfill the former president’s prediction of “death and destruction” over prosecution for his alleged crimes. You can read my colleague John Hendrickson’s dispatch from inside the courthouse here.And here are three more new stories from The Atlantic:
AI is running circles around robotics.
Chicago’s imperfect choice
The Super Mario Bros. Movie gives the people what they want.
A Low-Energy AffairYou’d think that nothing else happened in the world today besides the arraignment of a former real-estate developer and casino boss from Queens. Yes, Donald Trump spent four long years as president, but today he’s just another American citizen, and he stands accused of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in Manhattan. The state of New York must now make its case that Citizen Trump is guilty of the charges (he has pleaded not guilty on all 34). There’s a long way to go from here.Of course, a lot of other things did happen in the world today. Finland officially joined NATO, a hugely important geopolitical development. Wisconsin, long described as a “laboratory of democracy,” is holding an election that could alter the country’s future. A freight train sits as a derailed wreck in Montana. And in Florida, the state rapidly emerging as our own laboratory of authoritarianism, it’s a new day where people can walk around carrying concealed weapons without a permit—a policy that polling suggests most Floridians oppose but that is apparently wildly popular with the “own the libs” demographic.Nevertheless, the events in Manhattan are of immense importance. Trump would not be the first president to break the law; many of our chief executives have done things that could have landed them in court. But Trump has had such obvious contempt for the law for so long that his own hometown has claimed the honor of being the first jurisdiction to do something about a man who lived his entire adult life daring prosecutors to catch up with his shady dealings. The state of Georgia and the United States of America are likely next in line.What’s interesting, however, is how the explosion of rage we’d all waited for—and that Trump both demanded and expected—has been, so far, more like a grumble than a shout. Turnout in front of the New York courthouse has been contained, despite the arrival of the professional sedition booster Marjorie Taylor Greene. Writing this off as a “blue state” issue is easy, but New York is full of MAGA folks not only upstate but also closer to Manhattan in Staten Island and the super-red districts of Long Island, as well as some redoubts just north of the city such as the exurban Dutchess County. If New York’s Trump brigades wanted a big turnout, they’re only a short drive, subway ticket, or bus ride away.Perhaps the fallout from January 6, after which at least 1,000 people have been located by the FBI and charged with crimes, has had a sobering effect on MAGA enthusiasts who no longer see raising hell for Donald Trump as a particularly wise investment of their time. Apparently, even the smallest sentences have acted as a deterrent, which makes sense given that most people, despite their brave talk and tactical gear, do not want to put on an orange jumpsuit and live among other convicted criminals for a year, a month, or even a few weeks.Or perhaps I am being too optimistic.Trump’s cult is plenty agitated, but these followers are a bit smarter now. They might have realized that marching around and aggravating a lot of New York City police officers—many of whom are probably on their side—isn’t going to accomplish anything. And perhaps they’re waiting for better directions: Trump is planning to speak tonight from Mar-a-Lago, and they may be looking to him before deciding on their next move.The rest of the nation, however, seems calm, which suggests that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s decision to be the first to indict Trump was not a grave mistake but rather one that has served as a kind of safety valve that has released some of the pent-up pressure over charging a former president. If and when the Fulton County DA Fani Willis in Georgia and federal Special Counsel Jack Smith join the fray, their charges will no longer be “unprecedented,” and Trump will be facing so much legal trouble that we can stop covering it day and night and get back to more important things.One danger, however, still worries me. When extremists and conspiracy theorists feel the tide turning against them, when they think they’ve lost and the country is no longer fascinated by their flaky claims, they will sometimes lash out with violence. As the historian Kathleen Belew of Northwestern University tweeted yesterday, lone-wolf attacks over the coming weeks may be more likely than mass demonstrations.That’s also the conclusion my colleague Adrienne LaFrance came to in The Atlantic's April cover story, which is why I worry a lot less about another January 6 than I do about another Timothy McVeigh, a loser who decided that his gripes were worth blowing up 168 innocent men, women, and children in Oklahoma City. Many people who study political violence have pointed out that Trump, intentionally or otherwise, would be energizing such people by kicking off his 2024 campaign in Waco, Texas, a place that he and the bitter-enders who are left staffing him know is of cherished lore among American conspiracists and anti-government extremists.But for now, I remain hopeful. So far, most of my fellow citizens have decided that no one is above the law—not even the 45th president of the United States, whose past may finally be catching up with him.Related:
Unprecedented
Don’t take your eye off Jack Smith.
Finland became the 31st member of NATO, effectively doubling the length of member states’ borders with Russia.
The Biden administration is expected to officially declare the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as wrongfully detained in Russia, according to CNN.
Voting is under way to determine control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and, in turn, the probable future of abortion access and Republican-drawn legislative maps in the presidential battleground state.
Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Apple TV+; Prime Video.
TV Has a Cynical Message for Humanity
By Sophie Gilbert
Reality has no order—that’s why we’re always trying to impose our own framework on it, with the help of notions such as “karma” and “Mercury in retrograde.” The conventions of storytelling, conversely, are blessedly clean and concise; they allow us to at least pretend that a plot might cohere into some sort of plan. Lately, though, the rules have seemed trickier to follow. On television, the most ambitious parables about humanity are also the ones having the hardest time conceding to narrative, as though they can’t imagine anymore that a hero might be coming to save us. What happens when stories start to break down in the face of relentless human failure? Well, we get things like Apple TV+’s Extrapolations and Amazon’s The Power: sprawling, cynical, extraordinarily expensive exhalations. Characters are strangely passive; they react to circumstances rather than act on their desires; they shuffle through riots and Category 4 hurricanes and political turmoil without any point or purpose of their own.
Not your grandfather’s moon mission
Russia escalates its war on reporters.
The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment
Jamel Shabazz
Read. Jamel Shabazz: Albums, a collection of the New York photographer’s snapshots of Black life in the city.Watch. A new series that asks: Is stanning a sin?Play our daily crossword.P.S.Odd as it may seem, I am also hopeful after the disastrous Lesley Stahl interview with Taylor Greene on 60 Minutes last Sunday night—not because I think the interview helped the cause of democracy but because of the wide backlash against CBS’s decision to run what amounted to a softball interview with an unhinged seditionist.This is not to say that 60 Minutes shouldn’t have done the interview; I am on the record here in the Daily arguing that Trump, in particular, should be put on blast to the entire nation as often as possible so that every American citizen knows what he’s up to and cannot pretend they didn’t hear any of his incitements. But the Stahl interview was the worst of all worlds: A veteran journalist treated a conspiracy theorist and vocal supporter of the January 6 insurrection as if she were merely a controversial but normal politician. Stahl’s “pushback” mostly included saying things like “wow” and rolling her eyes, refusing to hold Greene’s feet to the fire about charges that Democrats are pedophiles and other bits of classic MTG ghoulishness, and then moving on to join the representative while she pumped iron and strolled through the Capitol. I was appalled, but so were many other observers, and maybe we can learn a lesson here about the dangers of using prim and restrained 20th-century media techniques to examine the challenges posed by the 21st century’s shameless crackpots and agitators.But again, maybe I’m too hopeful. Greene apparently thought the interview went well. She followed her appearance on the flagship CBS news program by posting a new ad on her Twitter feed.It accused Democrats of being pedophiles.— TomKelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

In February of 2022, when Kharkiv was under constant bombardment, Maxim Rozenfeld, a forty-six-year-old architect who goes by Max, was reading “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a chronicle of the months that its author, Viktor Frankl, spent in a Nazi concentration camp. In one passage, Frankl describes a spike in deaths at the camp during the week between Christmas, in 1944, and New Year’s Day. The chief doctor of the camp attributed the deaths not to living or labor conditions, which hadn’t worsened, but to the demise of hope: the men who died had somehow been convinced that they would be free by Christmas. Max’s two younger children, who were seventeen and eleven, had fled to Germany with their mother; Max’s girlfriend had made it out of the country as well. He was staying with his parents, who are in their seventies. Waiting for the war to end, he concluded, could be deadly, as could believing that it would be endless. Frankl’s point was that physical and spiritual survival depended on finding meaning even under the most trying circumstances. Max urgently needed to be needed.

He is trained as an artist and a historian of architecture. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on high-tech style, focussing on the British architect Norman Foster. A dozen years ago, he started leading walking tours of Kharkiv, which were spectacularly popular: his record was three hundred and forty-five people on a single tour. The tours made Max a household name in Kharkiv. He made multi-episode series on various aspects of the city’s history, first for YouTube, then for television. But none of this was of use now. Max was not a skilled organizer. He was not particularly physically fit. He couldn’t drive a car. He felt he had little to offer the city’s many volunteer efforts.

Then, in April, Norman Foster addressed a meeting of mayors from around the world who convened in Geneva. He stressed the role of architects in rejuvenating cities after a war, particularly in designing master plans, such as the one devised for the city of London while the Second World War was still raging. Later that month, Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, announced that Foster and his nonprofit, the Norman Foster Foundation, had agreed to work on such a plan in collaboration with the city. Max, who had never imagined he’d hear the words “Kharkiv” and “Foster” in the same sentence, was asked to join Foster’s working group. He was one of only two architects selected who were still physically in Kharkiv—the only people in a position to “show” Kharkiv to Foster.

At weekly Zoom meetings, the group, which included members from the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Europe and the global engineering and design firm Arup, discussed Kharkiv’s landscape, history, and character, the extent of the damage that Russian attacks had done to the city, the city’s economy, ecology, and transportation infrastructure, and how all of those things should be restored or improved in a postwar future. Max had built a business on knowing Kharkiv better than anyone else did, but now he felt like he was getting to know the city all over again.

Before the war, Max thought of himself as pragmatic and responsible, a good father and a better-than-average breadwinner. War, he told me, turned out to be a chance to dream. “You can forget what the city budget is or how dumb or bureaucratized city authorities are,” he said. “You can just set your imagination free.” He remembered reading that Frankl dreamed of standing at a podium at a university in Vienna and delivering a lecture called “Psychology of the Concentration Camp.” Sometimes Max imagined himself in a tuxedo, giving a presentation at the Royal Institute of British Architects. This February, Max appeared at a press conference where Foster (joining remotely) and Terekhov shared an update on the city’s new master plan. As is the fashion among Ukrainian men in wartime, though, Max wore a plain black sweater.

A week or so later, Max took me on a tour of Northern Saltivka, the area most systematically and severely damaged by Russian bombing. A large neighborhood of Soviet-era apartment blocks, Saltivka forms the northeastern edge of the city, a nine- to sixteen-story-tall obstacle in the path of Russian troops. The whims of planners placed the buildings at the edge of the city in a zigzag pattern that echoed the shape of a fortress wall. Not far from the edge stood a sixteen-story building that had been split open by an aerial bomb. It had already become a landmark. Nearby, an intact china cabinet with orange-and-white polka-dot cups stood on the third floor, exposed, after the apartment’s façade had been blown off. Other buildings are not famous. They resemble one another: some have one floor missing, some have a column—nine floors—of apartments missing while the rest of the block appears intact, and inhabited.

We entered a building that had been burned entirely, top to bottom, but its concrete structure remained. As we went from floor to floor, Max pointed out that every apartment had been furnished almost identically: a couch in the same corner—you could tell where it stood by the remaining spring coils—a china cabinet where only stacks of plates remained. Porcelain, it turns out, doesn’t burn, lose color, or break in such a fire. Everyone’s good china looked exactly the same. Once a family treasure, it was now left behind by those who’d combed the ruins for valuables.

One of Kharkiv’s heavily bombed buildings.

Many of the inhabitable apartments appear lived-in, as do some of the uninhabitable ones. Some people live without running water, some without working elevators, a few without heat or light. In a heated tent set up by emergency services last November, four people were keeping warm. A woman named Svitlana told me that she lived alone in her building, which had been mostly destroyed. There was no heat, so she spent most of her time in the tent, which was heated by a wood-burning stove. A movie was playing on a large television. It was “T-34,” a 2018 Russian propaganda film about the Second World War. “I don’t mind,” Svitlana said. “Even though they did this to us.”

Max and his colleagues proposed a concept to Foster, an invented identity for Kharkiv: the frontier city. Back in the seventeenth century, this was an outpost of the Russian tsardom and also a place where people fled from the Cossack-Polish war. In the nineteenth century, one of the first universities in the empire opened here. In the twentieth century, it was a creative hub for art, literature, early modernist architecture, and science. “It is a place for dreamers and inventors,” Max told me, referencing Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea about the frontier as a “field of opportunity.” At the February press conference to discuss the master plan, Foster used the word “fortress.” The vision that he outlined was grand. It included restoring the largely bombed-out building of the regional administration as a functional monument, the way Foster did with the former Reichstag building in Berlin by capping it with a giant glass dome. More ambitiously, it included a “science neighborhood” in the vicinity of the partially destroyed but still operational Barabashovo market. Max hopes that, in the city of the future, this space would be filled with housing and academic campuses and labs affiliated with universities like Harvard and M.I.T. Still, it was striking that both of them seemed to draw on settler-colonialist theory and military imagery to imagine what Kharkiv might be like after a colonial war.

Max also envisions in Kharkiv a “monument to life.” It would involve creating a green wall on that bombed-out sixteen-story building in Saltivka and planting trees in cavities formed by missiles. Kharkiv, the city, can become a symbol of survival. “Kharkiv is unlike Bucha or Irpin,” the Kyiv suburbs that were occupied by Russians for more than a month, “or even Mariupol, where things are much worse,” Max said. Mariupol was nearly wiped off the face of the earth before Russian troops succeeded in occupying it, in May of last year. Kharkiv was never occupied, but it has been under sustained attack since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. “This has gone on for a year here,” Max said. And yet the city has restored life. Max likes noticing what he calls “signs of normality.” One of them is a woman who sells flowers on a corner near his house. Once, a rocket landed close to that corner. She was back a few hours later, selling flowers.

Max at home in Kharkiv. In the first months of the war, he calmed himself by drawing his city.

Max is still living with his parents. He claims to love it. “It’s such a thrill, to allow yourself to live with your parents at the age of forty-seven,” he said. “I used to be a breadwinner, a stressed-out father.” Now his father does the shopping and the cooking, and his kids are safely in Germany. He and his daughter Sonya talk for long stretches every day. His son, Senya, is tougher. “All we say is, ‘I love you so much,’ ‘I love you so much too,’ but we don’t have much to discuss with each other. We’d rather hug. Let’s change the subject, or I’ll get weepy.” (His older daughter, Iryna Lapina, had briefly left Kharkiv last spring but later returned.) Max’s girlfriend is in Germany, too. He is mindful of how different their experiences of war have been and how hard it will be to reunite. At the same time, he feels a kind of freedom. “Everything used to have material consequences,” Max said. “I’d lead a tour, win acclaim, make money, and it would leave me wanting even more acclaim and money. Now I can dream. It’s a great adventure.”

On my last night in Kharkiv, I stopped by to see Max again. He asked if I thought that he should try to draw media attention to Foster’s plan for Kharkiv. Otherwise, he feared, it might remain just talk—a dream. For the dream to become reality, the war would have to end. There is no telling when that might happen. ♦

One of the biggest challenges to the future of American democracy is unfolding today, but not in Manhattan. It’s occurring in Wisconsin.

Beyond the fact that no former president has ever faced a criminal indictment, Donald Trump’s arraignment in Manhattan on criminal charges offers little by the way of news. An arraignment leading to a criminal trial that takes place months (if not years) from now is a dull technical legal proceeding.

To satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable craving for Trump entertainment, the media is filling the void with Trump swag: wall-to-wall “special coverage,” on-the-spot correspondents, panels of pundits, interviews with current and past Trump lawyers and former prosecutors, opinion polls, interviews with “average” Trump supporters, and mindless chatter about Trump’s moods (“troubled,” “angry,” “defiant,” “exhilarated”).

Tonight, Trump is expected to deliver a prime-time address from Mar-a-Lago. No news there, either. Predictably, it will be little more than lies and smears — more free media coverage for Trump’s venomous bluster.

***

A larger challenge to American democracy is occurring today in Wisconsin, where voters choose a new judge for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court and a senator for the state Senate. But it’s getting far less attention than what’s occurring in New York.

Wisconsin is a key swing state in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Its Supreme Court and legislature could be critical to the outcome.

What’s happening today in Manhattan’s criminal court is important. Holding a former president accountable to the rule of law is essential.But what’s happening today in Wisconsin may prove as, if not more, important to the future of American democracy.

Wisconsin is the most gerrymandered state in the nation. Although voters in the state divide almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans hold 63 out of 99 seats in the state Assembly and 21 of 33 seats in the state Senate.

Four years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to leave partisan gerrymandering cases to state courts. This means that if the justice who’s elected today alters the majority of the seven-person Wisconsin Supreme Court, the court could strike down the state’s wildly gerrymandered voting maps — a major advance for democracy.

But even this might not be enough to restore democracy to Wisconsin. Today’s special election to fill an open Wisconsin Senate seat will decide whether Republicans gain a supermajority that could allow them to impeach the new state justice.

The Republican candidate for that seat, Dan Knodl, has suggested he might try to do so if he doesn’t like who’s elected to the court.

Not incidentally, Knodl was one of 15 Wisconsin Republican lawmakers who in January 2021 sent a letter to then-Vice President Mike Pence asking him to delay certifying presidential results that showed Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.

The underlying issue in Wisconsin is the same threat to American democracy it’s been since Trump lied and smeared his way into national consciousness eight years ago: whether an authoritarian demagogue can take over a national political party and that party can then control enough state legislatures to elect that authoritarian — even though a large majority of voters reject him.

Trump lost his 2020 presidential bid by 7 million votes. But he could have won the Electoral College, and therefore been elected president, had he won just 42,918 more votes spread across just three swing states: Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

So the rules about who gets to vote are crucial, especially in these swing states. And who sets those rules? State legislatures, along with state courts that decide whether the legislatures are acting constitutionally. Hence, the importance of today’s two races in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Republicans have already changed state law to make voting more onerous by enacting a strict voter ID requirement. And last year, the state’s conservative Supreme Court banned drop boxes for absentee ballots. Wisconsin now ranks 47th out of 50 states on how easy it is to vote.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was the only state supreme court in the nation that agreed to hear Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election, eventually rejecting — by a single vote — his attempt to throw out 200,000 ballots in the state’s two large Democratic counties.

Another way Trump could have won in 2020 was if the outcome of the election had been determined by Republican-controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin and other swing states — as Trump and many Republican members of Congress sought. Yet another reason today’s Wisconsin races are so important.

***

Friends, this is how authoritarian minorities steal governments from democratic majorities: They do it step by step. They design voting districts to freeze out a majority of voters. They then gain legislative supermajorities that allow them to control the state executive and state courts. Then they capture Electoral College majorities despite the popular vote.

Or they sow so much doubt about the popular vote that they decide the outcome.

This was Trump’s playbook in 2020. He didn’t succeed then, but he might in 2024.

What’s happening today in Manhattan’s criminal court is important. Holding a former president accountable to the rule of law is essential.

But what’s happening today in Wisconsin may prove as, if not more, important to the future of American democracy. It will either strengthen or weaken the levers of self-government in a state where those levers could make all the difference.

The massive spring offensive against Ukraine that Russia threatened has not materialized. This does not mean it won’t happen, but it raises serious questions. A major offensive should not be telegraphed for obvious reasons, and if the secret leaks, it should be launched rapidly. The Russians have not crippled the Ukrainians, nor have they forced the United States to stop sending weapons to support Ukraine on the battlefield. The Russians see themselves as incapable of capitulating or winning a decisive victory. An alternative strategy is needed. The frequent Russian references to the possible use of nuclear weapons, or breaking with the U.S. on arms controls, make sense in this context.

That the strategy pivots around frequent references to nuclear action is a reminder of why they used to be called “terror weapons.” Lenin said the purpose of terror is to terrify. The threat of a nuclear attack clearly has that strategy in mind. It is a reasonable strategy, capable of breaking the material and psychological capabilities of the enemy.

The advantage of nuclear weapons is their ability to inflict significant casualties with a single weapon. A nuclear weapon has a large kill zone, which means it can carry out this mission efficiently. Nuclear weapons may not need high accuracy, but they do need survivability. One part of that is the launch plan, which may be targeted by the enemy. Another risk is interception in flight by the enemy, but in this case the weapon may still be able to destroy a large area. That said, there are weaknesses in nuclear weapons. They are dependent on counterintelligence to create survival strategies. They normally have a fixed launch pad, and the launch vehicle, while rapid, is not normally maneuverable. The weight of the warhead might limit the time to target. Taken as a whole, nuclear weapons combine a large kill zone with high lethality, but until launched they are vulnerable.

From the Russian point of view, a nuclear strike creates more problems than solutions. From the American point of view, the defensive posture is inherently dangerous. At the same time, both the Russian and American positions have vulnerabilities built in. Therefore, both sides must create alternatives.

For years, and more intensely in recent months, there has been open discussion on both sides about hypersonic missiles. Hypersonic indicates high speed, as well as long range. What the name does not capture but what is essential is that hypersonics are precision guided. This means that a guidance system maneuvers the missile to a highly specific target, limiting the need for high explosives with large kill zones and implying hyper accuracy on a strike, allowing precision utilization of intelligence. Maneuverability indicates the ability to evade enemy defenses.

The rise of hypersonics, coupled with precision and other values, puts nuclear weapons at great risk. Accumulating target intelligence, programming target guidance and maintaining the integrity of the attack vehicle create room for error on a stable platform.

The key weakness remaining with hypersonics is their speed, for which maneuverability doesn’t compensate. To ensure survivability, hypersonics also need extremely high maneuverability. Even more important, their long range allows the use of hypersonics to detect and attack at extreme distance. The ability to detect a maneuvering target creates an envelope of relative safety. Indeed, hypersonics, able to reach Mach 5 or higher and strike long-distance targets, would change the nature of war and make tactical nuclear threats in the current situation difficult. But that is not yet here.

The idea of hypersonics naturally leads to planning for high-speed, maneuverable systems and opens a new type of warfare. But the constant discussion of relatively lower-speed systems portends the future.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So you may have noticed at the beginning of the year the two themes are really dominating the show — China and A.I. And obviously, that’s not an accident. I’m not going to try to rank order what matters most in the world, but these are two good contenders for the top five, at least. When I imagine the history books getting written of our era, it is very hard for me not to imagine these being dominant themes. And these stories connect. They connect in obvious ways. There’s a geopolitics of who controls A.I., a race between the U.S. and China to get the strongest and earliest A.I. capabilities. But they also connect in another, more tangible way. They are both stories driven by semiconductors and who controls them. In the same way that you couldn’t understand geopolitics in the 20th century without understanding oil and other forms of energy — where it was, and who had it, and who needed it, and what they would do to get it — you can’t understand the major stories of the 21st century without understanding semiconductors. Whoever controls semiconductors controls the future. And it turns out, for reasons I didn’t really understand until I read Chris Miller’s book “Chip War,” that semiconductors really can be controlled. So “Chip War,” which is just amazingly timed, given how deep it is, is a history of semiconductors as a technology, as an industry, and then it traces the way they have and are shaping geopolitics. It was a “Financial Times” Business Book of the Year in 2022. And having read it now, definitely going to be on my year-end list of the most important books I read in 2023. And there’s a lot more in the book than I’m able to cover in the show. I really do recommend reading this one. But I do think this show is one of the more important we’re going to do — and important for understanding a lot of the other shows we’re going to do — because this is getting at a material reality that is easy to miss but is going to shape so many of the big stories we’re living through in the coming years. As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Chris Miller, welcome to the show.

chris miller

ezra klein

What timing on this book, man. I assume — when did you actually start it? Because I honestly cannot imagine a better moment for it to have come out.

Well, I started researching it around 2015, 2016, didn’t start writing until 2020, and finished writing early 2022 just as the chip shortage was reaching its peak.

ezra klein

So let’s talk a bit about why semiconductors end up mattering this much. You write that we rarely think about chips, yet they’ve created the modern world. Justify that for me.

Well, today, people like you and me can’t live our lives without touching hundreds or thousands of chips just going about the course of our daily lives. We think of chips as being in smartphones or being in P.C.s, but today, they’re in almost any device with an on/off switch. So a new car will have a thousand chips inside of it, your refrigerator, your microwave, your dishwasher. All of our devices are full of chips that do computing and do sensing, increasingly do communication. And so the modern economy just can’t function without lots and lots of chips.

ezra klein

I don’t know if this will be a hard question or an easy question for you, but like most people, and particularly before I read the book, I have only the hazy idea of what a semiconductor chip actually does. So you often describe it as providing the processing power of the modern world. What is it actually doing?

So a chip is a piece of silicon with a lot of tiny circuits carved into it. And these circuits are either completed or interrupted via a device called a transistor, which is a switch, basically, that turns them on or off. And when a circuit is on, it produces a 1. When it’s off, it produces a 0. And all of the 1’s and 0’s that undergird all of software, all of data storage, it’s just circuits turning on or off to produce the right digit. And today, we have lots of digits we require because we store and process lots of data. And so advanced semiconductors today have millions or often billions of these tiny circuits etched into them that provide the 1’s and 0’s that modern computing requires.

ezra klein

Tell me about that size. When you say you have billions of these circuits on a chip, how small are we talking? How is it possible to be etching, or really doing anything, at that scale?

Today, if you go to an Apple store, for example, and buy a new iPhone, just the primary chip in an iPhone will have around 15 billion transistors on it. And so each one of these tiny switches is smaller than the size of a virus. They’re measured in a number of nanometers, which is a billionth of a meter. And so these are the smallest devices that humans have ever mass produced. And we produce more of them than we’ve produced any other device in human history.

ezra klein

Tell me a bit about how quickly we’ve been able to shrink the scale at which we’re working here and increase the density of the chips. I mean, these aren’t a very old technology. As you point out, Silicon Valley, which has not been around forever, gets its name from the silicon of which these chips are made. So when this starts, what is the level of complexity? When is that? And what is the process by which we get to today?

The first chips were invented in the late 1950s. They first became commercially available in the early 1960s. And at the time, they would have had a handful of transistors on them. And the rate at which we were able to pack more transistors onto a chip, which was also the same as the rate that we’re able to shrink transistors down to enable more of them to fit on a piece of silicon, has increased exponentially. So there’s been, basically, a doubling of the number of transistors you can fit on a given sized chip every two years since the 1960s. And that’s come to be known as Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, who was one of the early engineers that created the industry and eventually went on to found Intel. And what that’s meant is that the chip industry has produced improvements that have gone far beyond any other aspect of the economy. There’s nowhere else in the economy that we’ve had exponential growth rates persist for not only years but half a century.

ezra klein

Let’s talk for a minute here about Moore’s Law, because there’s a — I think a misleading way in which it’s called a law. It’s not like the second law of thermodynamics or something. It isn’t a law. It’s an early observation that ends up being weirdly predictive. So what is he looking at — Gordon Moore, who actually recently just died — what is he looking at when he makes that observation? And then why, in your view, does it not just come true but come true beyond his own expectations for it?

So he made this observation in 1965, which was just seven years after the first chip was invented. And he noticed that the number of transistors per chip was doubling every year or two. And he predicted, given the technology that he saw being developed at the time, it would last for at least another decade through 1975. And that proved true. But as that was proven true, chips became more powerful, also cheaper because you could get more computing power with a smaller and smaller chip. And they found more use cases across the economy. So the first chips were used primarily for defense systems, but as the cost of computing power fell, it became possible to apply them to more and more uses — to corporate computers, for example, then to pocket calculators, then to automobiles. And as the use cases proliferated, the investment dollars going into further shrinking transistors and further packing more computing power into chips also increased dramatically. And so there’s been a virtuous cycle between the cost of computing declining and even more investment dollars going into driving that down further because people realized that there were a lot more uses for computing than anyone really imagined at the time that Gordon Moore first coined the concept of Moore’s Law.

ezra klein

Which direction does that causality run? Were there more uses for computing than anybody imagined, or are there more uses for computing than anybody imagined because such computing is now possible?

I think it’s actually both in some ways. Gordon Moore himself wrote a couple of essays looking into the future of computing. At the time, he predicted devices like what he called personal portable communications equipment, sort of like a smartphone, if you will. He envisioned home computers that would be networked together, sort of like the internet. So it was possible to envision some pretty futuristic uses, but I think even he was shocked by the diversity of applications of computing and the ways in which they transformed society. He could predict portable communications devices, but I think even he was shocked by the iPhone when it first emerged a half-century later.

ezra klein

I want to key in on an example of what it has taken to keep Moore’s Law going for as long as it has, because I also think having this in people’s minds is important for the geopolitics and the policy that’s going to come in this conversation. So you sent some time that I would describe as somewhere between loving and awed describing the development of EUV lithography. So tell me that story in some detail. What is it, and how did it get from a hope to a reality?

One of the process steps in manufacturing chips is projecting a pattern onto the silicon, the pattern that describes where the transistors will be. And at first, you could actually do these patterns by hand because transistors were large enough to be carved out by hand. But as they’ve become smaller, you need to project them using a microscope backwards. Microscopes take optics to make something small big, and we do the opposite to make a big pattern project in a very small form onto a chip. And for a long time, the optics involved were pretty straightforward, and you could use visible light to project the patterns and interact with chemicals in specific ways to carve transistors onto chips. But as they’ve gotten smaller and smaller, the wavelength of visible light has gotten far too broad to actually carve transistors in the way that we want. So visible light has a wavelength of several hundred nanometers, depending on the color, whereas the transistors on your smartphone are far smaller than that in dimension. And so around three decades ago in the early 1990s, scientists began developing a new type of lithography, more precise, using smaller-wavelength light in the ultraviolet spectrum. And this was necessary to get the precision, but it was also extraordinarily complex to produce. And so today, there’s just one company that is capable of producing the machines that are capable of providing this light at the scale and with the precision necessary. And these machines are the most complex machines humans have ever made. They require one of the most powerful lasers that has ever been deployed in a commercial device. They have an explosion happening inside of them at 40 or 50 times hotter than the surface of the sun. And because of all this precision, they require $150 million per machine to produce, require multiple airplanes to move. They’re extraordinary accomplishments of human engineering, but also wildly complex. And that complexity has made modern chipmaking more and more difficult, but it’s the only way to get the precision that we require.

ezra klein

They also, from the way you tell the story, represent remarkable accomplishments of supply chain management and, to some degree, globalization. So it’s a Dutch company making these systems, but they are a company that does a lot of sourcing. They don’t just make the system in a factory somewhere. You talk about just the laser needed for the system, which comes from another company which is called, slightly weirdly, Trumpf, with a P and an F. And you say that the laser itself requires exactly 457,329 component parts, many of which need to be made by different players. So you’re dealing with the sourcing when you then scale up to the entire machine of a number of parts that seems almost unimaginable.

Yeah, that’s right. And the engineering doesn’t simply happen on the machine itself. The supply chain itself is an engineered process carefully sculpted to select the suppliers that this company knows they can trust, suppliers that they know they can deliver on time, and suppliers that they know that can deliver high-quality products. Because if you think, for example, of what it takes to keep a machine with hundreds of thousands of component parts operational, the mean time to failure of each of those parts has to be measured in the decades, or else the machine never works. So that level of precision and reliability has been extraordinarily difficult to produce, and it’s why there’s just one company in the world that is capable of producing them. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So something you trace in your story is that for some time now, chips have been this hidden geopolitical force. You tell it in part through the changes in military power and what got called in the U.S. the offset strategy beginning late in Vietnam, as that war was failing but then building into something that created an era of quite profound American military dominance, which was then noticed by everybody else, and others are trying to match. Can you talk a bit about how these ended up changing not just warfare, but America’s military position vis-à-vis competitors?

The U.S. military was actually one of the early drivers of innovation in semiconductors. The first chips that were created were created for guidance computers in both space systems and in missile systems. And the Pentagon funded a lot of the early research in semiconductors and still is a major funder of a lot of cutting-edge research today. The military was interested in semiconductors because it wanted to miniaturize computing power to distribute it across battlefields. If you think back to the earliest computers in the 1940 and 1950s, they were the size of rooms, far too large to be deployed in systems in the field. And so the military wanted to find a miniaturization technique, and chips were the answer. And over the course of the Cold War, the U.S. military deployed chips in all manner of devices — in airplanes, in satellites, in missile guidance systems. And a lot of the precision that we take for granted today in military systems — the idea that you could launch a missile and have it hit a target hundreds of miles away with pretty close to perfect accuracy — is only possible because of lots and lots of semiconductors — chips in the missile that guide it, chips in the satellites that send signals as it identifies its location over the course of its flight, chips in the sensors that are collecting targeting information, chips in the communication systems that are distributing this data across the battlefield. And so the U.S. military was actually the first institution to show the ways that the distribution of computing and sensing that chips provide can transform how organizations work and can provide extraordinary value in terms of networking different devices together. And so that was important both in explaining why the U.S. jumped ahead in military power during the late Cold War, but it also provided an example for the rest of the world to see not only how militaries but how all institutions could take advantage of semiconductors to provide new types of capabilities they previously hadn’t imagined.

ezra klein

The point you make towards the end of the book is that one reason Russia has struggled so badly in its effort to invade Ukraine is that they’re using a lot of pretty technologically rudimentary military hardware, that a surprising number of their munitions we’re seeing are unguided. They’re not modern smart weapons. A lot of what we’re giving and Europe is given to Ukraine are more precision-oriented, like the Javelin missiles that people have probably heard about. Can you talk a bit about how that’s played out into the balance of military power and force there now as we speak?

It’s been hugely important in a number of different ways — partly, as you say, because the Russians just have less sophisticated equipment than we’re able to give to the Ukrainians, partly because even in the relatively sophisticated equipment that the Russians have, they’re using pirated or smuggled-in version of Western microelectronics, Western chips, which are not custom-made for their defense systems and which Russia’s never sure whether they’re getting counterfeit versions or the real thing. So even when Russia is able to acquire more advanced Western chips from abroad, there’s all sorts of issues it creates in their supply chain and their systems integration as a result. But then perhaps the most important is that Ukraine has benefited from all of the intelligence gathering and processing capabilities that the U.S. military has, which is largely today a question of signals intelligence, of satellite photos, of radio signals being gathered, decoded, processed. And this is intensely reliant on computing power, both to understand what’s being said and then to dissect signal from noise and give the Ukrainians the useful information. So when you think about a HIMARS rocket, for example, the easy part of the computing is actually guiding the rocket towards its target. The hard part is identifying where the targets are in a rapid enough fashion so that the target hasn’t moved by the time you want to fire it. And that is thanks to U.S. intelligence-gathering, which today is more dependent than ever on semiconductors.

ezra klein

The next turn of this wheel, both militarily and, more broadly, economically, seems to be different forms of machine learning, of artificial intelligence. And that’s a story we tend to talk but in terms of data — you’ll hear things like data is the new oil — a story we sometimes talk about in terms of training algorithms and theories like deep learning. And it’s a story that is very much grounded in semiconductors, that if you’re talking about training next-generation artificial intelligence systems, you’re talking about these chips. So can you talk a bit about the interrelationship there and what kinds of chips have become crucial for A.I. and the way that has also begun to play into different major countries’ conceptions of what you need for geopolitical primacy?

If you want to train a sophisticated A.I. system, you do need lots of data to train it on. But that data is only possible to process and to remember by deploying lots of advanced chips. And so today, for training A.I. systems, there’s a type of a chip called a G.P.U., a Graphics Processor Unit, which was actually originally invented for computer graphics. But the math that the chip was capable of processing turned out to be useful for training as well. And so today, there’s just a couple of companies that produce or design the most advanced A.I. chips. And in particular, a company called Nvidia based in California produces the majority of the chips used for A.I. training in the world. And Nvidia manufactures all of its leading chips at one company, TSMC in Taiwan. So underneath all of the A.I. training happening around the world, whether in the U.S. or in Europe or in China, are chips produced by just a couple of companies. And that produces a level of political influence that the U.S. in particular has tried to wield in recent years.

ezra klein

So you brought up Taiwan here, which is a helpful bridge for me, because you spent a lot of the book focused on this one Taiwanese firm, TSMC, which produces 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips, 90 percent. And let’s start here by talking about why. Why does TSMC have this hammerlock over the most advanced chips? I think the number you have in the book is they’re producing — or Taiwan is producing more than a third of new computing power every year. How?

So there are only three companies in the world that are anywhere close to being able to produce cutting-edge processor chips — TSMC in Taiwan, Samsung in South Korea and Intel in the United States. And the complexity and the cost involved of cutting-edge production means that these three firms will be the only three firms close to the cutting edge for at least the next half decade, probably longer. So there’s just extraordinary concentration in the industry when you get close to the leading edge because of the expense and the sophisticated technology involved. TSMC is the leader of those three because when it was founded in 1987, it was founded with a unique business model. Morris Chang, the individual who founded the company, had a vision of not designing any chips, only manufacturing them. And before that point, almost all chip firms both designed chips and manufactured them in-house. But Morris Chang realized at the time that the complexity of both design and manufacturing was growing in a way that would require firms to specialize. And so he set up TSMC promising never to design any chips but only to manufacture them. And he was able, as a result, to serve many different customers. Today, he manufactures chips for Apple, for Nvidia, for AMD, for Qualcomm, many of the biggest chip design firms. But he doesn’t compete with any of them because TSMC doesn’t do any design itself. And so TSMC is now the world’s largest chipmaker. Because it’s the world’s largest chipmaker, it has reaped extraordinary economies of scale, letting it drive down costs. And what’s most important is that there’s a pretty clear relationship between the number of chips you produce and your ability to hone your technology over time, because you get data for each chip you develop. And so TSMC has been able to develop the most advanced manufacturing technologies as a result of its scale. And so today, TSMC produces, as you said, 90 percent of the most advanced processors, the types of processors that go into smartphones, P.C.s, data centers. The other 10 percent are produced by Samsung of South Korea. And Intel right now is a generation or two behind what either of those firms are capable of producing.

ezra klein

Tell me about the political economy of TSMC’s birth and rise. Because when you tell the story of Intel, you have a bunch of scrappy young weirdos. They’re one firm and then another and then they go to another — or found another, I should say. It’s a very Silicon Valley story. And TSMC isn’t like that. It’s a public-private hybrid institution. So tell me a bit of their story.

So TSMC was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang, who, at the time, had been a tech executive at Texas Instruments for almost three decades. He was passed over for the C.E.O. job and so was looking for something else to do. And he was approached by the government of Taiwan, which wanted to create a chip industry that was moving up the value chain. At that time, Taiwan was a producer of relatively low-value electronics and wanted to produce higher-value semiconductors. And the government gave Morris Chang a blank check to set up a new firm. It provided half the capital for the company and got a number of Taiwanese businesspeople to invest another 25 percent in the firm and was very supportive of the company’s early development. And so in some ways, it was very much a public-private partnership, but in other ways, the company had to survive from day one by selling to the international market because the domestic market in Taiwan was far too small to sustain a semiconductor industry. So the firm had to sink or swim by selling manufacturing services to largely U.S. firms from day one. And so in a lot of ways, TSMC has grown up alongside a new set of semiconductor design firms that previously didn’t exist, because there weren’t companies like TSMC that manufactured chips, but have been able to thrive because they haven’t had to worry about manufacturing. They’ve outsourced all of that to TSMC and have designed chips instead. And so companies like Apple, which manufactures all of its key chips at TSMC or Nvidia, the company that makes the chips that train A.I. systems, they’ve never had to build their own manufacturing facilities because TSMC handles all of the cost and understands all the manufacturing technology. So they don’t have to worry about it. And that’s been a very effective business model both for TSMC, but also for the U.S. chip design firms that have always been TSMC’s largest customers.

ezra klein

Let’s say I designed a computer virus tomorrow that — what it did is it simply targeted every TSMC location worldwide and knocked out all of their electronics. So effectively, the company ceases to, in any way, function tomorrow, and there’s no real way to get it back online. What happens to the global economy after that?

We’d face an economic crisis globally akin to the disruptions that we saw during the Great Depression. It’s not just tech devices like smartphones or P.C.s that would be catastrophically disrupted. And we’d certainly struggle to build a cell phone anywhere in the world for the next year or so. We’d have P.C. production fall easily by a third, maybe by half. Data center rollouts would grind to a halt. It would be hard to build a cell phone tower anywhere in the world because cell phone towers are just big metal poles with lots of chips on top of them. But it’s also all other manufactured goods, so dishwashers and microwaves and automobiles. They don’t necessarily need the most advanced chips, but Taiwan doesn’t only produce the most advanced chips. They produce lots of less advanced chips as well. And the semiconductor shortage of the last couple of years illustrated that it’s not only the tech sector that’s reliant on chips. It’s companies like car firms too. During the chip shortage of 2020-2021, the world’s car industry faced an estimated $200 billion worth of losses because they couldn’t sell as many cars as they’d hoped because they couldn’t get all the chips that they needed. And there’s lots of different countries that produce chips in cars, but if you think of a typical new car having a thousand chips inside and figure 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent of those chips generally come from Taiwan, replacing those would be an extraordinary challenge. And we’d see huge disruptions across the entire world’s manufacturing sectors. And the final point is that it’s not just the U.S. that’s reliant on chips from Taiwan. It’s everyone. It’s Europe. It’s Japan. It’s China. The entire world’s manufacturing sector requires TSMC’s chips.

ezra klein

And so there’s TSMC’s chips, but we also mentioned this Dutch manufacturer, lithography. This is a place, you say, where the oil metaphor misleads, but probably not in the direction that people would think. If I say chips are like the new oil, you might think, well, that’s great because we know that there’s only oil in so many places, and chips, all you need is a manufacturing facility. But you write that unlike oil, which can be bought from many countries, our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points — tools, chemicals and software — that are often produced by a handful of companies and sometimes only one. So beyond TSMC, tell me a bit about the level of vulnerability and choke points here.

Every step in the production process of an advanced semiconductor, whether it’s the software tools that are used to design them, the machine tools like the lithography systems that are used to manufacture them, the actual manufacturing, often at TSMC, there’s usually just a couple of companies that are capable of producing the most cutting-edge capabilities. And that’s just because it’s very expensive and very hard to do so. And specialization has been critical to the industry. That’s why we’re able to produce semiconductors with 15 billion transistors on them at a price that all of us can afford. But it’s also created risks and vulnerabilities, because in some cases, there’s only a single source for certain types of materials or tools, and that creates single points of potential failure. And the world, I think, has done a reasonable job of managing many of these risks. We’ve made an error, somewhat, in putting a lot of our chipmaking capacity in seismically active zones like Silicon Valley and Japan and Taiwan. But actually, we’ve been able to manage that risk somewhat too. But obviously, the biggest risk hanging over the industry today is the concentration in the Taiwan Straits where, compared to 5 or 10 years ago, there’s far more concern that something might go wrong. And if it does, we’re guaranteed to get vast disruptions in chip supply.

ezra klein

So this, to me, has been a very under-noticed part of America’s commitment to Taiwan and America’s concern about China potentially taking Taiwan. I think most people hear this, and they think, in reality, why would we really care that much about Taiwan? I mean, we don’t want China becoming territorially expansionist. Taiwan is our friend. But why do we really, realpolitik, care about Taiwan? And one reason seems to be that you lose Taiwan, and you lose the semiconductor industry — that Taiwan is a point of vulnerability for the entire world. And that really raises the stakes on this. So can you talk a bit about the ways in which the geopolitics around Taiwan have become merged with the dependence we all have on semiconductors?

Well, if you ask the Taiwanese government, what they’ll tell you is that Taiwan’s position in the chip industry creates what they call the Silicon Shield, the idea being that it would be too expensive for anyone to disrupt the chip supply coming out of Taiwan, and therefore, no one would be willing to do so. And I think that might be true, but I’m not sure about it. It’s also the case that Taiwan’s chip production guarantees that the U.S. is interested in ensuring ongoing good relations between the U.S. and Taiwan and peace between China and Taiwan. And that dynamic is certainly true as well. I also think it’s probably an oversimplification to argue that semiconductors are the primary reason or a primary reason that either China or the U.S. are interested in Taiwan because, of course, both countries have been involved in the Taiwan question since 1949 before the first chips were invented. And so in some ways, we have semiconductors sitting at the center of the competition in the Asia region between the U.S. and China, but in other ways, the competition is largely driven by political and military factors that intersect with chips but are far from guaranteed to ensure that their supply is uninterrupted. And so I do worry that, actually, chips don’t provide a deterrence against conflict or don’t guarantee that conflict won’t happen. But actually, they would be the first disruption and the most dramatic disruption that we face in case conflict does materialize. So as a result, I finished my study of the chip industry and the ways that it intersects with the China-U.S. relationship much more worried, thinking that perhaps it’s stabilizing, but perhaps it’s not. And if it’s not stabilizing, we’re in a very vulnerable position. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

Tell me a bit about the chips question from China’s perspective. You make the point that China now spends more money importing chips than it spends importing oil, which is a striking fact. How does this look to them?

Well, for China’s leaders, it’s an extraordinary vulnerability, both because they’re well aware of that in case of a crisis, they’re likely to lose access to the most advanced chips produced in Taiwan, also in Korea, Japan, and the United States. They also see it as an economic vulnerability because for China’s electronics industry, moving up the value chain requires producing semiconductors. If you look, for example, at a smartphone — most of the world’s smartphones are assembled in China, but most of the high-value components of the smartphone are semiconductors. And so even in Chinese-branded smartphones assembled in China, most of the bill of materials ends up going to Taiwanese, to Japanese, Korean firms because they’re producing the chips inside of these phones. And so if China wants to progress technologically and economically, they believe they’ve got to domesticate production of semiconductors. And the challenge they face is that the Chinese government has been struggling to do so. They’ve been spending billions of a year since 2014 to try to produce cutting-edge chips domestically. They’ve made some progress in a number of spheres, but in aggregate, they still remain fundamentally dependent not only on importing chips, but also, the chips that China does produce domestically are produced almost exclusively using imported machine tools like the lithography tools that I described. And so although China is a manufacturing powerhouse, it’s actually a small player when it comes to the production of semiconductors, especially when we’re talking about cutting-edge semiconductors.

ezra klein

Can you talk about the idea of weaponized interdependence?

Well, this is a phrase that was popularized by two political scientists several years ago who noted that, in theory, many people had thought that interdependence would produce peace, it would increase the incentive for political actors to cooperate because they had economic incentives to do so. But in reality, what we were seeing in the world was that interdependence was not only relevant in terms of building bridges between countries, but it was also a sphere of competition and that countries were using their privileged position in certain networks to try to cut out or to punish their competitors. And we’ve seen this in cyber networks, for example, where the U.S. has a unique capability to conduct cyber espionage because a lot of the world’s key data centers and cables transfer through the U.S. We see it in financial networks, where the U.S. also has a unique position. We also see it increasingly in semiconductors, because the U.S. sits at the center of many of the world’s semiconductor supply chains. And the other key nodes are close U.S. allies like Taiwan, like Japan. And what that’s meant is that the U.S. government, over the past 10 years or so, has been able to surgically cut China out of certain parts of the chip industry while keeping China dependent on many other types of chips. And so whether it’s cutting-edge tools, cutting-edge software or certain types of chips, like the chips used to train A.I. systems, the U.S. is able to say China can’t have access and is able to force the world’s chip firms to basically comply.

ezra klein

I think the political history of our policies here is interesting. There’s a pretty sharp discontinuity between Obama and Trump and then quite a bit of continuity on this from Trump to Biden. So first, can we talk about the Obama to Trump change? What is the Obama administration’s perspective on semiconductor competition, dominance, particularly around China? What do they do about it? And then how does the Trump administration change that? What do they actually do differently than the Obama administration had done?

I think the Obama administration, in their final year or two in office, was beginning to actually trend in the direction that the Trump administration eventually took things. But it certainly was the Trump administration that was first willing to disrupt supply chains, first willing to take costly measures and first willing to characterize tech competition as more zero sum than positive sum when it came to China. And so as a result of this new worldview, the Trump administration took a variety of steps in the semiconductor space to cut off China and to punish China for efforts to steal technology from Western firms. So for example, the U.S. put out of business a company called Fujian Jinhua, which had been found to be stealing technology from a U.S. chipmaker called Micron, by banning this firm from accessing machine tools that are made in the United States, without which it’s impossible to produce semiconductors. And so overnight, this company went out of business because it couldn’t get the requisite tools. And this was a really dramatic step. It was very different from the prior U.S. strategy of starting W.T.O. cases, for example, or trying legal measures. This was just an executive measure that said this Chinese firm can’t access the tools anymore. And that began to illustrate the power that the U.S. regulators had to determine who got access to chips and chipmaking tools and who didn’t. Another example is Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm. The U.S. banned Huawei from accessing certain types of chips and forced Huawei to divest entire business lines. And that, again, illustrated that even China’s leading tech firms were producing technology that required foreign semiconductors — U.S., Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean — inside. And U.S. policymakers, I think, were impressed, and in some ways even surprised, by the power that this demonstrated. And that explains why the Biden administration has, in somewhat different ways, but in a large sense, carried on the weaponization of semiconductor supply chains that the Trump administration started.

ezra klein

Let’s talk about the Fujian Jinhua story in more detail, because the way it sounds there, it’s like, mean America comes in and puts out the business of this Chinese company. But you tell the story in some detail in your book, and what was happening before that, which was, in some ways — I don’t want to exactly call it normal, but a common complaint of American businesses dealing with China, which then the Trump administration decides they’re not going to stand for anymore. It’s pretty interesting getting, I think, at the other side of the frustrations here. So can you walk through that a little bit more slowly?

There’s a U.S. firm called Micron which produces memory chips and had a facility in Taiwan, actually. And a number of the engineers there began stealing internal documents with the aim of quitting the firm and then bringing this inside information to the Chinese firm, Fujian Jinhua, which was trying to ramp up production of the exact same type of chips in China. And this is a type of chip that Chinese firms have never produced at the cutting edge before. And this was quickly discovered by the company. Legal cases were brought. There’s very clear evidence, for example, of some of the employees in question typing into their computers, “delete Google search records,” for example, to try to cover their tracks. So there wasn’t much ambiguity as to what —

ezra klein

Top-flight espionage, googling how to delete your records.

Exactly. So there wasn’t much ambiguity as to what was going on. And I think in prior instances, this would have produced the legal dispute or diplomatic discussions. But the legal mechanism simply didn’t work. Micron brought a suit against Fujian Jinhua for stealing intellectual property in China, but in Chinese courts, they actually ruled in favor of the Chinese company against Micron, alleging that Micron had stolen the Chinese companies’ intellectual property, which was, of course, a bogus ruling. But for Micron, China was a critical market, because China is the world’s largest consumer of chips. And so getting locked out of the Chinese market was a real risk for any chip firm. And it had made them all hesitant to actually take on Chinese companies or the Chinese government when they faced legal issues. And the Trump administration saw this, believed that the previous strategy hadn’t really worked, hadn’t changed China’s behavior, and so had very little faith in any legal or diplomatic mechanism and just said, we’re going to put Fujian Jinhua out of business. And via executive order, that’s exactly what they did.

ezra klein

Do you think they were right?

I think they were right. I think that the track record had been that the legal mechanisms had failed to address intellectual property theft. The fact that Chinese courts, despite all the evidence, had intervened on behalf of the Chinese firm suggested that there was really not much hope for legal mechanisms working. And the alternative was just to let intellectual property theft like this keep happening, which doesn’t seem to me like a very viable alternative strategy.

ezra klein

So you can look at that case as a case of reprisal. We are going to punish you for doing something wrong. And I think that it’s a pretty clear-cut case that something was being done wrong by China repeatedly there. Then you have Huawei, which is more about not wanting a Chinese company to build the backbone of 5G internet and a lot of telecommunications fears that, on the one hand, there were security risks couldn’t be addressed then, and even if you could address that, that the dependence on China was a kind of dependence we didn’t want. And you can tell me if you think that’s an unfair characterization of it. And then under Biden, there’s another pretty big step up in these export controls on semiconductor chips, which isn’t just that we don’t want to be dependent on you, but we actually want to slow down your advance. We don’t want you to have a semiconductor industry moving towards equality with ours, to say nothing of getting beyond ours, and we’re going to weaponize the supply chain to stop that from happening. So can you talk a bit about that change to the Biden administration? Where did they go that the Trump administration had not, and why?

As you have this escalation in U.S. policy, you also have technology trends developing in important ways that I think are key to understand. And the key shift here is the training of artificial intelligence systems and the realization that training the most advanced A.I. systems will increasingly require vast volumes of data that grow every single year, and therefore, cutting-edge chips. And so the Biden administration, I think, not only had the concerns of the Trump administration when it came to IP theft or came to China’s role in telecoms networks, but was also looking at the future of A.I. and realizing that it was going to be U.S. chips that were going to be training the world’s A.I. systems over the subsequent decade and that A.I. systems are going to be even more powerful than people had thought 5 or 10 years earlier. And so it was hard to predict for them how A.I. systems would develop, but it seemed inconceivable that they wouldn’t have, in addition to transformative economic ramifications, also vast military and intelligence uses. And so given the tremendous growth in A.I. plus the reality that training A.I. required U.S. hardware, to them, I think this looked like a risky moment, actually. If A.I. was unleashed and the chips that could train I were unleashed to the entire world, the results would be unpredictable. And so I think in addition to the Trump administration’s concerns, they were also looking at these trends saying, we want to have some control over how U.S. chips are used to train A.I. systems. And that explains why, last year, they rolled out two different prongs of a new export control regime, the first which limited the transfer of certain A.I. training chips to China, made it illegal to transfer Nvidia G.P.U.s above a certain threshold to China, and then also said because these chips are so important, we want to make sure that China can’t produce them domestically. And so to do that restricted the transfer of any advanced machine tools to China as well. And so this is a very zero-sum view of the world that Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, outlined when these controls were announced. But it’s a zero-sum view of the world that I think is informed by a lot of concern and uncertainty about how A.I. systems will be deployed by other countries for military uses and for intelligence gathering.

ezra klein

These export rules were announced six months ago. What has their effect been so far in China?

We know the effect of the machine tool restrictions, which have caused pretty substantial challenges for Chinese firms at the cutting edge or close to the cutting edge in production, because all of China’s leading-edge production has required tools from the U.S., from Japan, or from the Netherlands. And those three countries are all implementing roughly similar controls right now. It’s harder to say what the impact of the ban on A.I. chips has been because China still has a large stock of existing A.I. chips that it imported before the ban was in place. And so these controls won’t begin to have an impact for a couple of years, when the rest of the world builds next-generation data centers or the generation after that, and China’s unable to. And at that point, we will begin, I think, to see some differential open up in terms of the ease of training A.I. systems in the U.S. or in Europe or in Japan and the comparative difficulty of doing so with less advanced chips in China.

ezra klein

The other side of the Biden administration’s thinking on semiconductors has been to build or rebuild American semiconductor manufacturing. So tell me about the CHIPS and Science Act. What does it want? What is it trying to achieve, and what does it actually do?

So there’s two major facets of the CHIPS and Sciences Act. The first puts around $10 billion into R&D spending, which is intended to increase innovation in the chip industry and keep the U.S. at the cutting edge in many different spheres. The second is to provide incentives for firms that open up new manufacturing facilities in the U.S. And here, the goal is to address the fact that it’s more expensive to build chipmaking facilities in the U.S. than it is abroad, 20 percent or so more expensive than in Taiwan or in Korea, which over the last several decades has been one of several factors encouraging companies to build more facilities in other countries rather than in the U.S. And so the $39 billion in incentives is intended to help companies defray the cost differential and, thereby, encourage them to build more capacity in the U.S.

ezra klein

Do you think it is likely to succeed in doing that?

Well, I think there’s no doubt that it will succeed in the short run. If you pay companies to build factories, they’re going to build them. That’s straightforward. I think the harder challenge is to have an impact after we’ve spent these first $39 billion of subsidies. I’m skeptical that there will be a second round of CHIPS Act spending to defer cost differentials in the future. And so I think the real challenge is to say, can we get the chip industry investing more in the U.S. over the long run even after we’re no longer subsidizing them? And I hope the answer is yes because I don’t think subsidies indefinitely into the future are likely. But it’s going to be much more challenging because a lot of the drivers of the cost differential still exist. The labor costs are higher in the U.S. It’s more difficult because of environmental permits, for example, to build facilities in the U.S. And so we’ve got to produce an environment that does address some of the cost differential but also make sure we’ve got other assets — more productive workers, for example, or closer integration between CHIPS and the software firms that they’re serving — that make up for the cost differential. And that’s an ambitious goal. I think it’s a worthwhile goal, but it’s far from guaranteed that we’re going to achieve it.

ezra klein

Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the CHIPS Act for a big story that, I guess, will probably out by the time this publishes. And you and I spoke for this piece, and something that looking through the Notice of Funding Opportunity, which is the publication that explains how the U.S. government is going to evaluate applications for this money. And I think I’m prepared to say now, having spent more time with the document and talking to people, that this does not lower the cost differential. It has subsidies, and it has a lot of, I think, good ideas. But aside from funding R&D to try to create innovative breakthroughs, it doesn’t lower the cost of what it takes to build or operate FABs or labor or, through immigration, bringing in more technicians. It really just doesn’t do much to change what it costs to run one of these in America and, in some cases, very arguably, will make it higher. They add on a lot of standards. People have talked a lot about insisting that there’s high-quality child care in the FABs. But even beyond that, there’s a lot of language about creating pathways for marginalized workers and trying to increase the representation of women in the construction industry. And a lot of these ideas might be good ideas. But if you start from the perspective that U.S. chip manufacturing fell behind because it’s very costly to build and operate factories here, it is very, very, very hard for me to look at this document and say what they are trying to address is a cost differential. They’re subsidizing on one side. They’re adding a number of regulations and standards on the other. But if you’re starting from a place where you’re already non-competitive on cost — I mean, I’m curious if you think I’m being too harsh on this. Knowing a little bit more now about what has been the problem for American semiconductor manufacturing, it doesn’t really look like it has a solution to that problem.

Well, I think I would say a couple of things in response. I think you’re right that in any program like this, there’s a risk that it loses focus and that multiple different political interest groups managed to make an imprint on it. And I think keeping focus on the cost differential is going to be a key determinant of success or failure in the long run. I think if you look at what the Commerce Department has said about a lot of the preferences that were on child care, for example, or around profit sharing that have been controversial, I think a lot of these end up being preferences rather than requirements. And the Commerce Department, I think, has signaled a willingness to be flexible on some of them. So we’ll have to see how exactly they’re implemented and how firms decide to deal with them. I think on the permitting question, which I think is really quite important, this is a tricky issue because it’s not just about the federal government. It’s also about state and local governments. And so I know the Commerce Department is aware of the importance of this issue. But it’s also about making sure that the Arizona state government and the Portland, Oregon city council all agree that they’re going to approve permits rapidly rather than slow them down because of NIMBYism concerns. And this is a challenge. In Taiwan, TSMC is the island’s most prestigious employer. It’s the country’s largest exporter. And so when it has a request, its request is quickly granted, whereas in the U.S., semiconductors are one important industry among many, and so they just get less political priority as a result. And when they face problems, they’re solved less quickly for that reason. And so I think we still have a lot more work to do, as you say, to make sure that we’re actually taking steps that are addressing the cost differential issues, both at the federal level but also a lot at state and local levels.

ezra klein

In one thing I should say on this is when I spoke with Secretary Gina Raimondo, who runs commerce, and when we talked about the environmental permitting and talked about the immigration side, she said very clearly on the record — and it’ll be in my piece — she would love that. She would love Congress to come to her and do streamlined environmental permitting. She would love Congress to come to her and work with her on easing immigration status for semiconductor technicians. And she also said that she has made clear to governors that if they want a FAB, that a grant application from a company where they’ve partnered with the governor or the mayors or whatever to have permitting sped through will affect what commerce does. So if you’re a governor and you want this to happen in your state, and you’re able to give a company assurances that they can take to Commerce that it will and that you will have this speedway, they will take that into account. That gets me to one of my final questions here, because I know we’re running quite out of time, which is when I read the history of the semiconductor industry in your book, what it seems to me was one of the single most effective things we did was have a fairly open immigration policy during a bunch of these periods, that a lot of the industry has its roots in high-skilled immigrants to this country, particularly coming out of World War II. And it raises a question as to whether or not one of the best things we can do for this industry and others is actually high-skilled immigration or targeted immigration because labor is at such a shortage in skilled semiconductor manufacturing in America. How do you think about immigration as a technological competitiveness policy?

Well, I think that’s right. And if you look at the individuals who founded the chip industry in the U.S., a disproportionate number of them were foreign-born, whether it’s Andy Grove, the longtime C.E.O. of Intel, born in Hungary, or Morris Chang, who I mentioned, who built up chipmaking in Texas Instruments before he moved to Taiwan. He was born in mainland China. You can go through a lot of the key C.E.O.s and founders of the early chip firms or the C.E.O.s of today’s biggest U.S. chip firms, and you’ll find a disproportionate number of immigrants there as well. So I think Secretary Raimondo is right that we ought to have more pathways to have firms bring in the talented engineers that they need. The fact that the industry has a really internationalized supply chain today allows a lot of efficiency, but from the U.S. perspective, it’d be even better to have a less internationalized supply chain if more of those people could move to the U.S. And many of them would like to. They just can’t get the visas or the work permits that they need.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Well, I’d start with “The World for Sale,” which is an extraordinary account of commodity traders who play an unseen role in the middle of the networks that deliver oil and minerals and metals that we require, an eye-opening view as to how all the world’s raw materials get shipped around the world. The second book I’d recommend, which picks up on a lot of the discussions we’ve had about networks, is a book called “Nexus” by Jonathan Winkler, which is a study of telegraph cables during the early 20th century. And what’s striking about it is the extent to which all of the world’s governments saw telegraph cables as not only economically important, but also important for military and intelligence uses. And when I think about Huawei today, I think back to the telegraph cables debates of 100 years ago. And in some ways, not much has changed. And then a third book which was published last year which I strongly recommend is a book on decision-making in China called “Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion,” which is an extraordinary account of high politics in China over the last half-century that illustrates, with really exceptional archival documentation, how Chinese politics has shifted and the key drivers in it. And so in my efforts to understand Chinese decision-making around semiconductors, I found the framework that he set out very, very useful to understand how it is that Chinese leaders make decisions.

ezra klein

Chris Miller, thank you very much.

ezra klein

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again trying to manipulate nuclear weapons to compensate for the ongoing Russian military disaster in Ukraine. These new Russian moves are dangerous but not a crisis.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
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Useless, Stupid, and ProvocativeYou can always tell when things are going badly on the battlefield for the Russians in Ukraine, because Vladimir Putin starts talking about nuclear weapons. For weeks, the Russians have been pounding the city of Bakhmut, but so far, Bakhmut remains in Ukrainian hands, despite repeated Russian—and Western—predictions that it would fall. (The Ukrainian high command recently said that the situation is “being stabilized,” which is mostly good news.) No matter what happens next, however, the cost to the Russians has been immense: Russian commanders are now reportedly using “human wave” tactics, sending poorly armed men into battle merely to absorb Ukrainian ammunition and die so that the next group of attackers can get closer to the lines.Putin knows that there will be no triumphal breakthrough. Even if Bakhmut is eventually taken, the Russians will be planting a flag on a pile of their own corpses. And so, in his desperation to change the narrative both at home and abroad, Putin has returned to taking nuclear gambles. Putin told Russian television on March 25 that he intends to station Russian tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, a country that borders both Ukraine and NATO. Yesterday, the Russian ambassador to Belarus doubled down on Putin’s threat, announcing that Russia plans to deploy those weapons in the western part of Belarus—near the border with its NATO neighbors.This is both more and less than it seems, but first, we should review some definitions.There is no particular technological characteristic to a “tactical” nuclear weapon. In practice, tactical nuclear weapons are usually intended for delivery at short range (roughly less than 500 kilometers) with smaller warheads, and they are aimed at battlefield objectives such as concentrations of enemy forces or bases in the rear. “Strategic” weapons, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles or strategic bombers, traverse far greater distances and are primarily aimed at enemy strategic nuclear weapons (such as silos, bomber bases, and submarine pens), infrastructure, industry, and, in the most horrific instance, the enemy’s cities. These major targets are meant to affect the overall outcome of the war.Tactical weapons are considerably less powerful because they’re intended for use close to the line of battle, and they pack only a fraction of the punch of a strategic warhead. (Dropping a city-buster bomb on a battlefield will indeed kill the enemy, but it will also kill your own forces and flatten everything else for five or six miles in every direction.) These tactical nuclear arms can be as small as 10 or 20 kilotons, or even just one, but “small” is relative in the world of nuclear weapons; the bomb America dropped on Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons. (A kiloton is the explosive power equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT.) Even a small weapon can do a lot of damage, kill a lot of people, and poison a lot of land.Putin didn’t specify which Russian systems he would station in Belarus. There are a few options: He could place short-range missiles near the Belarus border, or he could store tactical warheads for use on Russian bomber aircraft. Russian forces, obviously, would guard and crew these systems, rather than transferring them to Belarus.Whatever he ends up doing, this announcement is a trifecta of Putinist foreign policy: It is useless, stupid, and provocative all at the same time.It’s a useless gambit, because moving tactical nukes to Belarus doesn’t really buy Russia any military advantage. It’s possible that Putin is doing this to lash Belarus’s strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, more tightly to the mast of Russia’s sinking ship in Ukraine. It might justify placing elite Russian forces in Belarus territory for years to come, but Russia already has plenty of ability to deliver tactical strikes on Ukraine and NATO.Putting nuclear weapons in Belarus is also strategically stupid, because it buys Putin more political trouble than it’s worth. Lukashenko has said he approves of the plan, but he almost certainly doesn’t want these things in his country, not only because it will emphasize that he’s merely one of Putin’s local gauleiters but also because it will create even more instability in Belarus itself. Lukashenko is hated by many of his own citizens, and he triumphed in the last election only by fraud and force. Making Belarus into a frontline nuclear target won’t help matters.Perhaps even dumber is that Putin runs the risk of annoying the Chinese. The Russian president may be the stud duck in the Kremlin, but in Eurasia, he’s now a junior partner of the richer and more powerful Xi Jinping. As Mike McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, noted, the Belarus decision is a snub to Xi, who just issued a joint statement with Putin that included a call for “all nuclear powers” not to deploy their nuclear weapons beyond their national territories and to withdraw all nuclear weapons deployed abroad.That passage was supposed to be a warning to the Americans. Putin, however, has stepped on that message by threatening to station nuclear arms outside of Russia for the first time since the end of the Cold War. (A Chinese diplomat on Monday gingerly deflected a question about the Belarus issue, referring to a previous statement by the five major nuclear powers that a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought. That statement was also signed by Russia, so we might assume this answer was an indication of Chinese displeasure.)Finally, Putin’s announcement is provocative, because it shows yet again how quickly the Russian leader will resort to nuclear threats. Putin, at this point, is likely frustrated that his mentions of nuclear arms no longer rattle Washington or Brussels, and he is trying to squeeze just a bit more juice out of the nuclear lemon by dragging another state into the fray.Nuclear threats are never to be taken lightly, but for now, Putin’s announcement—and so far, it is only that, an announcement—is not a crisis that requires any direct response from anyone. (Well, the Chinese might like a word, but that’s Beijing’s problem.) U.S. and NATO intelligence analysts are, as always, continually watching to see whether Russia is taking concrete steps to use such weapons (for example, if they detect that warheads are being moved from storage to active units that could employ them), but so far, according to U.S. sources, none of that is happening.Nevertheless, a foreign leader trying to extricate himself from a military disaster by making nuclear threats is more likely to make other foolish moves. As spring progresses, Russia’s position will likely become more dire, so we can expect Putin to try to press this raw nerve again and again—especially as the Russian body count continues to climb.Related:
Russia’s nuclear bluster is a sign of panic.
Fear of nuclear war has warped the West’s Ukraine strategy.
Donald Trump has arrived in New York City, where he is expected to be arraigned tomorrow.
McDonald’s temporarily closed its U.S. offices this week, asking employees to work remotely as the company prepares for layoffs.
More than 30 people were killed by tornadoes across the southern, midwestern, and northeastern U.S. this past weekend.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf’s readers reflect on humanity’s place in the cosmos.
Video by The Atlantic. Source: Beryl Denman Lacey / Gaumont British Instructional / Internet Archive
Hiccups Have a Curious Relation to CancerBy Marion Renault
Colleen Kennedy, a retired medical assistant, was prepared for the annihilation of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for stage-three lung cancer. She hadn’t expected the hiccup fits that started about halfway through her first treatment round. They left her gasping for air and sent pain ricocheting through her already tender body. At times, they triggered her gag reflex and made her throw up. After they subsided, she felt tired, sore, breathless—as if she’d just finished a tough workout. They were, Kennedy, now 54, told me, “nothing compared to what we would consider normal hiccups at all.” They lasted for nearly a year.
Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?
AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.
Macall B. Polay / HBO
Read. Night Film, by Marisha Pessl, a pastiche of whodunit, suspense, and horror.Or try another of these seven books the critics were wrong about.Watch. Season 4 of Succession, which reveals unexpected tenderness.Play our daily crossword.P.S.There are two other stories from Russia in the past week, both of them indications of how badly the war is going.The big story is the seizure of an American reporter by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained in the city of Yekaterinburg on espionage charges, which the Journal denies. My guess, based on the timing, is that this could be retaliation for the charges filed in Washington against an alleged Russian military-intelligence operative who was apprehended earlier in Brazil. Grabbing Gershkovich is an even more extreme ploy than arresting the American basketball player Brittney Griner on drug charges: Accusing a high-profile journalist of spying doesn’t just mean that the Russians likely want another prisoner exchange; it could also indicate that they’re desperate to extinguish Western coverage of the situation in Russia.The other story is an intriguing article by my friend Michael Weiss about a Ukrainian operation in which three Russian pilots were offered bribes to defect—with their jets. The deal later fell apart, but I called Weiss to ask just how far along this whole caper got. The Ukrainians found the Russian pilots through some open-source sleuthing and made the cash offers. The pilots were interested and gave up “a lot of information, including about their aircraft, bases, and routes.” Things apparently went sour, Weiss told me, when the wife of one pilot got cold feet and blew the whistle; another was betrayed by a girlfriend (who the Ukrainians, according to Weiss, think may have been in bed, so to speak, with the FSB). Unless these three men were already working with Russian security agents—which is unlikely—they’re in a world of trouble, which is why the Ukrainians, as Weiss reports, see the outcome as a win: They didn’t get the planes, but “we managed to eliminate all three war criminals without getting up from the table.”— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I quoted the late astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan on humanity’s place in the cosmos, and asked readers for their thoughts on outer space.Deb is awestruck:
If I am standing on an orb that spins 1,000 mph while hurtling through space, that is so crazily magical that anything is possible. It’s all so phenomenal and, by extension, so is our existence.  
Robert, a graduate student in philosophy, harkened back to the ancients:
Like Aristotle, when I was very young, I thought the planets and stars in the sky were something like gods. I don’t think this anymore, of course. Nevertheless, they are in some sense above and beyond us, endowed with a sort of beauty we ourselves are incapable of manufacturing. I simply do not know how someone can gaze at the images from, for instance, the James Webb Space Telescope and think otherwise. Even without technology, there is something marvelous about gazing into the sky and noticing just how much is out there. Thousands of stars, five planets, and even our own galaxy are visible from Earth with the naked eye. Light pollution has crowded out quite a bit of this. But even just a few stars, or a few planets, is enough to see the vastness of it all.
Still, despite the enormous powers of these celestial spheres, they cannot appreciate their own beauty. Humans alone are known to be capable of appreciating the universe in this way. This has always made me ascribe special status to humans, and to think that human concerns are of special importance. I don’t take this to be inconsistent with the scale of it all, but rather a result of it. If we aren’t here anymore, the all the beauty in the universe won’t mean anything to anyone. So something of enormous value would be lost.
I worry that, for all the good that scientific advancements have done for us in understanding space, we’re starting to see the universe as nothing more than a collection of big rocks and balls of gas; these days, the planets and the stars, particularly the moon and Mars, tend to be objects of escapist fantasies more than objects of wonder.
This is a mistake, even for those who think the future of humanity may be space colonization. The beauty of the universe cannot be captured by an exhaustive description of its mechanics or of its utility to us. To think this, rather than appreciating the literally otherworldly nature of outer space, is, I think, the wrong kind of anthropocentrism. The majesty of the heavens has inspired joy, wonder, and creativity in human minds for as long as we have existed, and their beauty is divine. So, I figure, why not let myself think, along with Aristotle, that, even if not literally, the first people were right in thinking that the planets “are gods, and that the divine encloses the whole of nature”?
Rob’s life has coincided with the rise and fall of the space program:
Outer space pervaded the national consciousness—especially if you were young. It seemed that everyone followed NASA takeoffs and felt nothing but pride and awe. Over time, there has been a debate over the trade-off and cost of these efforts. We are reminded that there are plenty of problems back here on Earth that deserve these same funds.
At its best and at its most essential, space exploration is a tribute to the curiosity of the human mind, a mind that keeps expanding, keeps pushing, keeps seeking answers to its existence. To look at the sky and not wonder what exists “out there” is, I submit, to not be human, and we should not lose sight of the fact that our minds are naturally beamed up.
Our consciousness is ineluctably drawn deeper and deeper toward solving the riddles of our existence. On Star Trek, Captain Kirk was tapping into this collective consciousness when he famously said: “To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.” As humans, we can’t help ourselves. To some extent, we won’t be able to not continue to explore “up there.” If our sight and the human quest were to remain solely limited to this rock of ours, we would no longer be human. “Thrusters ahead, Mr. Sulu. Take us out.” Onward.
Joseph remarks on the fragility of life:
Having just passed my 77th year of breathing, I can truthfully say that the awesomeness of our universe’s extent continues to astound me almost daily. I am blessed to have been given a firmer understanding than many of where it actually is that we dwell. But I also look at the utterly ruthless nature of the universe’s hurricane, within the eye of which, by the merest happenstance, we happen to reside.
It unnerves me how few have any idea just how frail a construct all of life’s continued existence is, let alone life that possesses the ability to think, comprehend, and respond to the vast wonder of reality. Thus, counterbalancing the awe is the abject sense of dread that we stand so very close to losing all of the ground we’ve gained, not just as rational beings but as the life force itself. I find myself praying to the merest myth of a Supreme Being that somehow, in spite of the odds, we successfully make it off of our beautiful blue dot, spreading in a diaspora far, far out into the nearly unfathomable depths that surround us.
Kara found the physics of space to be beyond her grasp, but not its significance:
I’ve always been fascinated by space, but was discouraged by my efforts to study it as a secondary-school science student, unable to grasp the complex physics involved in astronomy. But as a history and research teacher, I can see through Galileo’s telescope, sit in Albert Einstein’s clerk office, be as a pebble upon the shore with Isaac Newton, and marvel at the night sky with hunter-gatherers, forming entire cosmologies based around the sky. From that perspective, I have learned to be constantly awed by what we know of the universe, how we know it, and to follow closely our potential connections with it.  
Carl Sagan has helped immensely in shaping my appreciation, and has taken me on planetary journeys through time and space that I never imagined when I was younger.  
The most recent space-related joy of my life was taking my 3-year-old son to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., for the first time, in January, and seeing his wonder and curiosity as he looked at the models of the planets and “flew on a spaceship” in the planetarium. Jupiter is his current favorite, and we will continue talking about the planets and space for as long as he can put up with my enthusiasm. I can’t wait to introduce him to Star Trek.
Ben, a man of faith and science, reflects on the biggest and smallest questions:
To explain how I feel about outer space and how it shapes my worldview, I have to start with one of my favorite Bible verses: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (Psalm 8:3-5, KJV).
Although I’m a graduate student in theoretical particle physics, not astronomy, both give me a similar feeling: that we human beings are set among a seemingly unfathomable universe, one that I believe is divinely created for us, and despite our tiny size among the cosmos, we can begin to comprehend it. With our God-given reason (one of the things that I believe makes us “in the image of God”), we can model and measure things like black-hole collisions and the afterglow of the Big Bang despite our tiny position among it all.
Understanding physics and astronomy is the closest I believe any human can come to doing magic, and taking something that seems impossible to know, like measuring the speed of distant stars and galaxies, yet making sense of it, is an incredible feeling. When I consider this in the context of my faith, I believe that understanding the laws and behavior of the universe is one of the few times we can directly observe God’s handiwork. Indeed, looking up at the night sky, I see that humanity is “crowned with glory and honour.”
Despite sharing Carl Sagan’s sense of awe, I strongly disagree with significant parts of his prescription for how we should be humbled by our tiny place in the universe. No one claimed humanity is special because of its size. We human beings are tiny, but the things that make us uniquely human—our curiosity, reason, and understanding—stretch across the limits of the physically observable universe. Because I believe the universe was intentionally created for us, I also believe its physical laws were made by God for us to discover. So, as a theoretical physicist in training, I intend to take God up on his offer.
But there are still things in science that make me humbled about humanity’s place in the universe; they’re just in quantum mechanics, not astronomy. For all that astronomy gives me pride in when it comes to what humans have been able to understand, quantum mechanics throws “understanding” back in my face and, like God speaking to Job out of the storm in Job 38, tells me that there was never any promise that the universe was made so a human mind would be able to comprehend all of it.
What I value in humanity is not our size, but our minds (among other things), so when physics tells me that our understanding has seemingly insurmountable limits, that is when I’m humbled by our place in the universe. Outer space gives me pride in humanity’s scientific power and understanding; it gives me something visible that I can begin to wrap my head around and beautiful images that let me soak in the glory of creation. The realm of the very tiny is what inspires in me fear and trembling at God’s work and at human limits.
Elena recalls a month-long trip to Crete when she was young:
We had a nightly ritual: We unrolled orange paisley sleeping bags at the edge of a sandy beach. Impatiently, we waited for dusk to snuff out the deep blue of the sea into a charcoal gray and to cover the sky in a drop cloth of dappled disarray. My mother read chapters out of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals to my siblings and me under a canopy of brilliant stars that reached far into the dusty nebulas and galaxies that shot across the hot August skies. I listened to sentences and phrases and let them mingle with Cassiopeia, weave their way through the dippers of the Great and Little Bears, and imprint with Sirius, steadfast and comfortable as a night-light. The backdrop of a billion stars cleared and prepped the imagination for story listening, and then soon, when the lure of an astronomy lesson proved too irresistible, the science lecture. Eventually, my eyes closed against my will, fatigued from the trip across the universe, but the comfort of that wide open yet protective dome covered me like a blanket.
Omar is a city dweller who yearns for a better view of the heavens:
Turn your gaze in any direction and you’ll find yourself surrounded by mammoth buildings and skyscrapers. At night, the light that emanates from these towering steel structures creates a kind of muted haze, a veil separating us from any clear vantage of our solar system. The city can be suffocating and claustrophobic even without our realizing that this unnatural buffer exists between us and the cosmos. It’s only when I realize that the stars lay hidden from our view that I begin to ponder the effect of this profound absence. A city, with its shining beacons and glowing aura, is nothing more than our desperate attempt to preserve human egotism at the cost of our relationship to nature and the universe.
Can you imagine if we had access to the stars? The cosmos in its incalculable vastness is indeed a source of wonder and inspiration, but it is also a humbling endeavor to witness. It’s a reminder that our individual concerns and fears, hopes and aspirations, biases and egotism are nothing compared with the grand scale of the universe. A city, despite its dense population and variability, can be an isolating place. But the night sky would be there to remind us that there is something bigger connecting us all together.  
Having grown up in New York City, it’s difficult to imagine having any kind of relationship with the cosmos. But if we could, I believe that we would all benefit.  
Chadd recommends buying a telescope:
Nine years ago I got a small $75 telescope as a gift for a young family friend. Getting it set up and looking at the moon for the first time, I was awestruck. I just couldn’t believe how beautiful, how crisp, how very real and solid it looked through a lens. At first I thought, Light pollution here is bad; probably won’t be able to see much, but I was dead wrong. Once I learned how to find Jupiter, I saw its moons and the Great Red Spot, then Saturn and the rings. I was totally hooked.
When the friend lost interest, I ventured on. What started as a $75 cheapie telescope turned into a couple-thousand-dollar hobby that my girlfriend at the time called my “other girlfriend.” I was out there every night for months, then sporadically, during times of cool celestial sightings, back out there until 4 a.m.
I slowly amassed a six-inch reflector telescope on a computerized mount that tracks the Earth’s rotation and can find objects through a GPS unit. By that point, I’d learned to easily find and photograph the planets. One of the last and best cosmic events I got to witness was the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction a few years ago. A once-in-nearly-800- years event, it was biblical in a sense, and I got a picture of it! Tiny Jupiter and tiny Saturn with its rings. Breathtaking. Truly! My entire family lined up to see it—my own little star party—and I was quite proud to show everyone.
Mind you, I eventually maxed out what I was able to see, so I slowed my roll. At this point, the maybe $6,000 it will cost me to upgrade to better gear is too high, so the telescope rarely comes out. But I was going through some tough stuff during my amateur astrophotography hobby, and it was a beautiful distraction. I didn’t truly comprehend the size of the universe until I was staring at it through a tube. It’s amazing what you can see right from your backyard, and the feeling you get seeing it, through your own eyes, is indescribable.
Glenn was a pastor in Houston near NASA’s Johnson Space Center:
About 75 percent of our church worked in the aerospace industry. It was an interesting experience leading triple-redundancy NASA engineers to “live and walk by faith.” This truth was made clear early on, when I showed up with a group of our church members for a service project one Saturday morning. We were going to reroof an elderly lady’s home. Before I climbed on the roof, I was met with a long, complex spreadsheet explaining in great detail what every person would be doing in 15-minute increments throughout the day. So this is how NASA nails on shingles!
A group of the engineers’ spouses good-naturedly cornered me the next day at church. “Have you ever watched The Big Bang Theory?” they asked with a bemused grin. No, I had not. “Well, you should,” was their advice, “because that’s who we married and who you are now, pastor.” That was not exactly correct, but most comedy is an exaggeration of stereotypes.
We have been told that science and faith are incompatible. In fact, there is a vibrant faith community in and around NASA doing the hard work of science. I was having lunch with an astronaut a few weeks after his return from the International Space Station. “You know, I looked out into the void of space,” he said, “and it was black, white, cold, and lonely. And then I looked down at Earth and it was bright green and blue with swirls of white—warm, inviting, and interesting. I decided if I could choose to be any place in the universe, it would be right there on Earth.”  
Barbara hopes for alien contact:
The one thing that would bring all people on our planet together relatively quickly would be to begin communicating with sentient life from other galaxies. I feel grateful to be of a sentient race and would welcome meeting other sentients from across the universe. My hope is that we develop the strength of character and mind, and bigness of heart, to connect with other life forms before we destroy ourselves and our planet. To stop outer-space exploration would be a travesty to our species and the species we have not met yet.

The upcoming ruling by the US Supreme Court on racial preferences is certain to ignite yet another divisive debate about whether or not a person’s ethnic heritage should determine their treatment by the state and major institutions. After steady progress towards “race-blind” governance, the notion of equal treatment is disappearing in a frenzy of ethnic self-assertion and white guilt. The new racialized politics sunders the basis for liberal societies, essentially diminishing the value of merit and hard work. Some advocates even support separate living places on college campuses, a chilling reprise of segregation. Elsewhere, grade schoolers are instructed that America is based on lies and its current systems and structures are irredeemable. There are cases of schools separating third-graders by race and asking them to rank their “privilege.”The wellspring for this movement lies on college campuses, where whiteness is sometimes treated like a social disease. Evergreen University’s “Day of Absence” instructed white students to leave campus, and the University of Florida’s “BIPOC Anthropology town hall” excluded whites. Canadian universities, like their American counterparts, have become enamored with guilt-tripping whites, accusing them collectively for the damage done to First Peoples, irrespective of when their families arrived or any traceable culpability.The origins of the racial stateThe advocates of the emerging racial state generally dismiss the fundamentals of democracy—the rule of law, open debate, equal treatment, perceiving them to be subtle instruments of white supremacy. They often want to replace the ideal of merit with a regime in which decisions are largely shaped by race and gender. Sadly, the Biden administration has followed this approach while some blue states employed racial “qualifications” for vaccines, even though it was clearly the elderly, whatever their ethnicity, who were most vulnerable.Race-centrism has become the modern equivalent of Catholic dogma, once a requirement at church-run colleges. Now some legal and medical establishments routinely publish pledges in support of an omnipresent DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) agenda. DEI-related courses are now required of all students at the State University of New York; job applicants at Ohio State’s engineering school must sign a pledge to promote the progressive race agenda. A recent AEI study found that in a survey of 999 jobs, “19 percent require diversity statements, while 68 percent include the terms ‘diversity’ or ‘diverse’ in some fashion, often as a way of describing the university environment.”Although racism has been a component of the human condition from time immemorial, race has often not been the primary motivation for human behavior. Indeed, for most of history, even slavery was not based on race—instead, slaves were sourced from the ranks of subjugated war prisoners, conquered peoples, and the destitute. Turkish slavers and other Muslim regimes bound over a million eastern Europeans for servants, concubines, soldiers, and even administrators.Racialized slavery emerged with the rise of Europe’s nation-states. As Europe’s imperial regimes expanded to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, they adopted racial categorization to justify their exploitation of “inferior” races. Non-whites, such as Native Americans and Africans were quickly enslaved by the Spanish in the Americas, and once these populations declined, they looked to African chieftains to supply the human cargo needed by the plantations of the Caribbean and later North America. Aborigines in Australia were considered—as the Hobart Town Gazette suggested in 1826—a “savage and vindictive race,” whose neolithic culture justified conquest and subjection to a “superior” Western culture.The legacy of slavery and displacement certainly weighs heavily against the remarkable advances towards democracy and the rule of law in Western societies. It tarnishes the American Republic’s founders, who tolerated slavery even as they laid out the essential liberal view of governance or even benefited from it directly (although some founders were anti-slavery, particularly in New England). In ensuing decades, the country was almost torn apart by slavery, the elimination of which required a monumental effort. Even after abolition, discrimination remained commonplace, particularly in the former Confederacy.By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, racism became enmeshed with a form of pseudoscientific inquiry, which reached its apotheosis with the rise of Nazism. Breaking with the Kantian notion of a common humanity, the German Reich sought to establish what historians Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann described as a “barbaric utopia” based entirely on ethnic hierarchies. At the top were those considered “Aryans,” with other races deemed inferior, and still others, notably Jews and Gypsies, considered less than human. Critically, National Socialism enjoyed strong support from within the academic and artistic community.The logic of the new racialismResentment about the past provided the essential fuel for racialism. Nazis blamed Jews and Communists for Germany’s loss in the First World War and the economic catastrophe that followed. Today, we see this as even ancient past sins of racial oppression are not forgiven but used to justify exactions, financial and otherwise, from the white majority. Many Americans’ ancestors did not even get to the country before slavery was abolished in 1865.Collective guilt has evolved into a canon for progressive intellectuals dating back to books like Andrew Hacker’s 1992 Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and Unequal. More critically, this is also the approach taken by leading black intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cornel West, who seem to be as worried about acting “white” and integrating into a society they treat with suspicion as they are with finding pragmatic ways to improve outcomes in the classroom, marketplace, and workplace.This approach, however, requires a rewriting of history to fit the agenda. The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” for example, asserts that American history has been defined primarily by racism. It rejects the idea of the “melting pot” and the idea that societies grow stronger through what historian David Hollinger has called “a dynamic mixing” with other races. Instead, racialists portray America as essentially based on the repression of blacks—its revolution merely a ploy to preserve slavery and its economy dependent on the plantation system. Although this thesis has been widely debunked by both mainstream and Marxist historians, it is now being widely taught in schools, often to students who have little existing knowledge of historical events.This Manichean worldview does not seek commonalities with the majority, as was the case with the early civil rights movement. Rather, it sees “people of color” in permanent conflict with a majority imbued permanently with the curse of whiteness and anti-black dread. As antiracist author and activist Ibram X. Kendi recently told the Guardian, “At the end of the day, there is an all out war on American voters, particularly younger voters, particularly younger voters of colour, and it’s happening from Texas to Florida and it’s really causing the American people to decide whether we want our democracy or not.” A writer for Mother Jones argues that the Supreme Court, including its veteran black conservative Clarence Thomas, illustrates not a conservative bent but “white grievance.” This approach is now common in media coverage. When minorities murder their own people—such as the killing of Tyre Nichols by black policemen in Memphis or the Asians assaulted and killed by an Asian assailant in California—the perpetrators’ actions are routinely blamed on omnipresent white supremacy.This kind of thinking flattens history’s nuances and contingencies into a racial melodrama. It provides the basis for “anti-racism,” as popularized by Kendi, which dismisses merit and equal treatment as insufficient and advocates a long-term imposition of discrimination based on race. It also fuels the growing movement to seek reparations for slavery and its aftermath, which extend far beyond the lifetimes of people who actually suffered legal discrimination.As John Murawski has observed, the demand for reparations could just as easily be extended to other ethnic groups and even gays, all of whom can offer their own litany of historic discrimination. Canada’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has backed an increasingly racialized public policy; there are even efforts to adjust criminal sentence by ethnicity. Some also want to impose climate reparations on Western industrial countries and within the United States, given that minorities often live in environmentally hazardous areas.Will California set the tone?California’s legislature, a reliable font of progressive thinking, is leading the charge on reparations. It is presently considering proposals from the state Reparations Task Force to issue $360,000 payments to descendants of slaves—a move that could cost up to around $640 billion in a state with a looming budget deficit. In the reparations package for San Francisco alone, a city with severe economic issues, the bill could reach over $100 billion. If adopted nationally, estimates of a national reparations bill could top $14 trillion, a significant burden on a Republic already drowning in debt.California was never a slave state, so it seems like a strange place to lead on reparations, particularly for African Americans. Slavery existed widely only before the US seizure of the territory. Early Spanish Franciscans compared native Californians to “a species of monkey,” stripped them of their cultures and traditional livelihood, and forced them to work at the Missions. This was followed by expropriations and discrimination against Mexicans, which led to open rebellion in the 1870s and expulsions in the 1920s. Asian immigrants brought in to work in the area were particularly badly treated. They were subject to racially based discrimination and suffered bloody pogroms in San Francisco and Los Angeles.In contrast, California was a comparatively congenial place to be black. Blacks suffered from discrimination, particularly in housing, but while Hispanic and Asian homeownership has grown or stayed stable, that of blacks has declined. Many blacks considered California, for all its residual racism, to be a kind of promised land. It was certainly far better than the South. As Ralph Bunche has noted, blacks in California were able “to partake in the freedom and grandeur of the Southland.”Blacks were never an especially large group in California and constitute only about five percent of the population today, less than half the national average. But they have left a powerful imprint well beyond their numbers. Arguably the most important state politician in the late 20th century was Willie Brown, who served as Assembly speaker for 15 years and Mayor of San Francisco for eight. The state has also produced the first African-American vice-president, while other blacks have risen to prominence as mayors—two of the last six in Los Angeles alone, a city which is less than 10 percent black—as well as numerous Assembly speakers. They have played a large role in shaping the cultural map, from hip hop to the origins of LA’s fast-food and diner scene.Yet despite this history, the racial statists in California have succeeded in passing a grade-school curriculum that categorizes all whites, no matter their origins, as enjoying “white privilege.” Groups like Jews, Irish, and other European immigrants, they maintain, have all benefited from “white privilege” (an idea that might have surprised their immigrant forebears). Asians, now far more numerous than blacks in California, are dismissed as “white adjacent” due to their high levels of education and income.This approach is ideal for fostering racial discord, particularly in a state with such a varied ethnic history, and in which Latinos make up nearly half the poverty population. If national polls can be applied to California’s population, reparations are likely to be very unpopular with the groups who make up over 90 percent of the state’s population. African Americans may favor reparations, but the proposal registers large disapproval ratings, notes Pew, not just among whites but also among Hispanics and Asians.Sadly, none of this is likely to address the real problems facing African Americans, in California or elsewhere. The state, suffering a troubling budget deficit, clearly does not have the resources to fund a massive racial spoils system. It’s also evident that the state’s generally progressive policies are failing many African Americans, whose percentage of the population has fallen consistently since 1980. In a recent study of minority success, the three worst regions for black economic upward mobility are all in the Golden State, including San Francisco and Los Angeles.Pushing division amid growing grassroots diversityThe reparations approach, in California and elsewhere, simply gets the race issue wrong. The question is not how to separate the ethnic groups but how to integrate them into the broader economy and society. We need to rediscover what the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, an early and extraordinarily competent analyst of American ethnicity, called “the American creed”—an abiding sense that every individual, regardless of circumstances, deserves fairness and the opportunity to realize their potential.This creed is built around a set of aspirations that unite people, something that can also be applied to the UK, Australia, and Canada. Minority experiences in all these countries are complex, diverse, and only getting more so. This undermines a central precept of racialist ideology, according to which minorities are united in opposition to what the BIPOC Project describes as “white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.”This worldview inevitably diminishes minority achievement. Sociologist John McWhorter, for example, suggests that a “true and healthy history of black America” would also focus on the enormous cultural, political, and economic successes of African Americans since the end of slavery. Despite decades-long concerns from radicals about political marginalization, African Americans have now served in almost all the highest offices, including US president and vice-president. There are currently 58 black representatives in Congress. As of this writing, the mayor of the four biggest US cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston—are all African American.We see a similar process in other multiracial countries. In Canada, the number of nonwhite minorities in parliament stands at a record level; in Ontario, the country’s dominant province, nonwhites already represent almost a quarter of all members. Britain’s new prime minister is a Hindu, a first for a major Western country.Rather than foreshadowing a hyper-segregated, racially driven future, at the grassroots, we see what my colleague Sergio Munoz has described as “the multiculturalism of the streets.” Racists of all colors may deny this integration of cultures, but it is a fundamental reality. For generations, black culture has had a profound influence on American society—indeed, in much of the world, black culture is synonymous with American culture, from hip hop and jazz to fashion and art. Across Europe, black and Middle-Eastern players now count among the leading cultural and sports stars.This hybridization seems likely to be more prevalent in the future, as countries become ever more racially diverse. According to Statistics Canada, “half of the Canadian population will be made up of immigrants and their Canadian-born children” by 2041. Pew projects that the United States, due largely to Hispanic and Asian growth, will be majority-minority by 2050.The limits of the racial state“Multiculturalism of the streets” is most evident in spheres which governments and powerful institutions cannot control. People mix once they are in school, jobs, churches, and neighborhoods with those from different backgrounds. Re-segregation may be an idea popular on the racialist Left, but interracial dating and marriage are growing rapidly. The fastest growing race in America is mixed; one in 10 babies born in the US has one white and one non-white parent and 12 percent of all American blacks are now immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Canada, too, has seen growing intermarriage rates among Asians and other minorities. In Australia, one in four couples are interethnic.This commingling suggests that, under the skin, people generally want the same things—a good partner, a nice neighborhood, safe streets, opportunity, and success. This can be seen in suburban areas to which minorities are moving. Like the vast majority of the American middle class, a growing number of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics have moved beyond inner-city ghettos, barrios, Chinatowns, and other enclaves. Over the last decade, racial minorities have constituted over 95 percent of all growth in the periphery. Britain’s Asians also appear to be heading to suburbs, which matches their aspirations for homeownership and family-friendly space. Similar trends can be seen in Australia and Canada.Minorities living in these increasingly diverse communities represent a major advance in terms of integration and cultural change. Multiculturalism is no longer primarily a big-city phenomenon; it is as prevalent in shopping malls and small-town high streets as it is in Manhattan, London, or Sydney. Highly diverse Fort Bend County, Texas, outside Houston, notes the Kinder Institute, now houses one of the nation’s wealthiest immigrant communities.These minorities may have little use for the doctrines promoted by racialists. They frequently adopt the capitalist work ethic and supposedly “European” discipline with enthusiasm, as evidenced by their greater proclivity to start businesses. In the United States, where 13.7 percent of the population is foreign-born, immigrants represent 20.2 percent of the self-employed workforce and 25 percent of startup founders. As in the US, foreign-born Canadians show a greater proclivity to start businesses than native-born Canadians and also evidence higher labour participation rates.These individuals, and those working for them, are unlikely to share the view of progressive intellectuals, who see crime primarily as an expression of injustice, and who sometimes excused looting during the summer of 2020. After all, many victims of “no justice, no peace” rioters were themselves minority business and their communities face the greatest threat from renewed levels of violent crime in cities such as New York and Chicago. In the US, most blacks and other minorities do not favor defunding the police, even as such policies are advocated in their name. A corporate regime of hiring executives by race, not to mention affirmative action in general, lacks popular support according to a recent Reuters survey, a stance that has remained strong over the recent past, even among historically disadvantaged minorities.Class, not race, is the real issueTo be sure, there remain considerable disparities between ethnic groups. But a race-based approach does not seem to be the best way—practically or politically—to address them. Asians, for example, now have higher incomes than whites. Nor does being black necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to advancement. Among immigrants from Africa, females already do better than their white counterparts according to a recent study, and overall these newcomers have achieved among the highest education levels of any group.It is also clear that race-based affirmative action has not solved the problems of poverty or education for African Americans. Black enrollment at elite colleges has fallen since 1980. The problems facing distressed communities are not simply racial in nature, but also reflect prevailing cultural attitudes and family structure. As the sociologist Thomas Sowell has noted, “having waved aside all differences between people,” social activists can only blame “evil intentions—discrimination, racism and exploitation.”The notion that everything is the fault of “colonialism” and European oppression may secure university positions, but it does not benefit minorities in any meaningful way. Certainly, the attitudes inculcated by race activists are not helpful for meeting the challenges of modernity. It doesn't help a kid living in the ghetto that some academic “experts” denounce math as racist, despite its roots in places like India and the Arab world. One professor has even claimed that math is “a white, cisheteropatriarchal space.”Nor will blacks and other minorities benefit from the notion that hard work, punctuality, individualism, family, and even cleanliness are “white” traits and characteristics. Fundamentally, blaming failure on whiteness strips minorities of their agency. Rather than address “socially mediated behavioral issues,” notes economist Glenn Loury, racialism leaves the hope for salvation, ironically, to the guilt and kind sentiments of people routinely denounced as hopelessly racist. For this reason and others, Loury has denounced the reparations and racialist agenda as little more than a shtick with little positive impact.Rather than push a racial agenda, we could more effectively address disparities by addressing the needs of the multiracial working class. This will cover many minorities who already make up over 40 percent of the US working class and will constitute the majority by 2032. These workers face bigger problems than identity and reshaping history; they are focused on issues like inflation, rising crime, poor schools, and threats to their livelihoods posed by advances in AI and draconian green policies.Ultimately, racial issues can be best addressed, in terms of policy and politics, by expanding opportunity and economic growth. It is economic opportunity that matters. What working-class minorities need is not more Maoist “struggle sessions” but pro-family and pro-growth policies that address the needs of the broad working class. Corporate mea culpas about racism, solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and expanding minority corporate board membership may blunt criticism (at least for a while), but won’t actually help most poorer minorities, who really need access to learning basic skills and economic opportunities. Blacks and other minorities, suggests former Citibank chairman Richard Parsons, will only feel better when they “feel it in their pockets.”The emerging racial state promises no real progress for most minorities while deepening ethnic divides and undermining the basis for democratic self-rule. Their approach, oddly, largely reprises the racial obsessions of colonialist regimes or the old South. In a world where diversity is an everyday reality, we should seek ways to help individuals, whatever their race, achieve success based on their efforts. This is the best approach to foster the kind of postracial society that can best sustain our liberal order.

Matthew Goodwin is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. He is the author, most recently, of Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Matthew Goodwin discuss the left’s transition from a focus on the working class to college-educated professionals; how leaders like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were able to broaden their electoral tents in the 1990s; and why the “cultural dimension” of politics isn’t going away.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: For the last few years I've been trying to think through the very significant change in the partisan alignment of the left and the right in most Western democracies, and perhaps particularly in Britain and the United States.Why is it that 40 or 50 years ago, if I wanted to know who votes for Labour or the Conservatives, or for the Democrats or the Republicans, I could ask them straightforward questions about economics, the welfare state and taxation, and today, it feels like the answer to those kinds of questions doesn't correlate very clearly with whether you vote for Labour or Conservatives or Democrats or Republicans. What happened?Matthew Goodwin: I think two things have happened. On the demand side of politics, we've seen the rise of what political scientists often call the “cultural dimension” in politics. Particularly from the 1980s onwards, we've seen the rise of globalization, high rates of migration, and ethnic and demographic change pushing through new issues relating to identity and culture which have become far more salient and are now expressed in the emerging debates over so-called “cultural war” topics but are really questions that are much more about “Who are we?” rather than “What do we have?”But secondly, I think the supply side has changed as well. Some parties have simply been much better than others at appealing across those traditional party lines. If you look, for example, at Britain's Conservatives during the Brexit wars, if you look at Trump's Republicans, some conservatives have been very in tune with this unfolding realignment and they've been very adept at exploiting it and pulling it into politics. And some politicians, mainly on the left but not exclusively, have been, in my view, very bad at understanding how the tectonic shifts of politics have been changing. They've remained very wedded to this view, largely left over from the Industrial Revolution, that the foundation of politics is mainly about class and redistribution, and they have been very reluctant to enter into these new debates about identity and culture. Now that is beginning to change. You look at center-left leaders like Keir Starmer, and you look at how they change their positioning on issues like Brexit, patriotism, and defense; how Joe Biden has positioned himself on some issues, which are clearly designed to reconnect with working class, non-college-graduate voters that the Democrats have lost. You're beginning to see changes now on the supply side on the left. But, essentially, politics has become two-dimensional. It's not just left and right, it's now left and right and liberal and conservative. And that's pushed us into this new space. And it's created lots of opportunities for new insurgents, green parties, and populists. But it's also made it harder for the established parties to really respond to that. That to me is essentially the story of the last 50 to 75 years in the politics of many Western democracies: we've left that first era of classic left and right politics, and we've entered into this new second era from the 1980s. And we're still living in that. Mounk: One way of telling the story is to think about two “dilemmas.” The first dilemma was formulated by Adam Przeworski, an accomplished political scientist, when he pointed out that the Labour Party and the Democrats were trying to broaden their electoral tent from being mostly based on the working class to getting more and more of the vote in the professional managerial class.What was the nature of that dilemma? And why do you think that to understand what's going on today, we have to think about a “second dilemma?”Goodwin: In the 1980s, academics, politicians, and activists realized that the left was facing this very difficult dilemma between holding onto the traditional working class, which at that point, especially in democracies like Britain, was mainly white, and simultaneously reaching out to a more affluent, socially mobile and increasingly university-educated middle class. That tension really dominated left politics from the 1980s through to the 2010s. It still remains with us today, and those two groups have really been pushed apart not only by their economic experiences but by the fact that they hold fundamentally different sets of cultural values. We saw that in Britain, most noticeably during Brexit, when you have 150 Labour-held seats where voters decided to leave the European Union—were much more culturally conservative than many of their middle class, university-educated Labour MPs. And of course, you saw it with lots of areas that ended up flipping from Democrat to Republican in order to vote for Donald Trump. That first dilemma still today remains very salient for left parties. But it's been joined by this second dilemma. One of my frustrations with my left progressive colleagues is that, historically, they've often argued that we can basically circumvent that first dilemma by doubling down on this notion that “demography is destiny;” that, basically, left parties can essentially not worry so much about the white working class because they are accumulating more and more support among groups that are on the rise—the graduate class, minority ethnic voters, and urban voters. Then you saw this in books like America Ascendant by Stanley Greenberg. You've seen it in arguments by prominent journalists. Jeremy Cliffe and others have talked about the “Londonization” of the country—that, actually, the future is with this newly ascendant emerging alliance of middle class graduates and minority voters, and that’s perhaps [even more true] in the United States. Ruy Teixeira was one of the leading voices arguing for this rising Democratic electorate.Mounk: But his thesis has often been overstated and misunderstood by Democratic politicians and strategists, and in the pages of Persuasion, on this podcast, and in many other fora including The Liberal Patriot, he has now become the principal critic of this set of assumptions. Ruy is a very interesting figure in both helping this thesis get a larger audience but also in pointing out the flaws of a sort of simplistic reading of it that ended up being so influential in the world of Democratic politics.Goodwin: And I should add that I'm a big fan of his work. What that narrative lost sight of—firstly, it exaggerated, as you say, the pace of social and demographic change. These groups were not growing as quickly as many people thought they were. And one of the reasons why Boris Johnson, for example, was able to win the largest majority for any Conservative since the days of Margaret Thatcher was because many of the sort of very strong ‘Remain’ voters who wanted Britain to stay in the European Union, who loathed everything about Boris Johnson, many of these university graduates and also minority voters concentrated in the same types of areas—in the big cities and university towns. And in the first-past-the-post system, you need to build that widespread support. You don't want narrow, concentrated support. So the narrative also overlooks the importance of geography. But it also overlooks the growing divergence in the policy preferences of white graduate liberals, on the one hand, and minority working class voters on the other. They do look at a lot of these increasingly salient cultural questions around identity, gender, history, and policing in a very, very different way not only in America but also Britain. We can see that over the last five or six years, particularly since the Trump and Brexit revolts, white, affluent, middle class graduates have basically doubled down on social liberalism and radical progressivism. And I completely understand that reaction. But what it's done is it's pushed them—and, I would add, the institutions they tend to dominate in politics, media, and culture—further away from many of these voters that are within the left's alliance. Today, so many minority voters, for example Hispanic Latino voters, are drifting rightwards. If you look at British Indians, on many questions related to teaching gender identity theory in schools, rapid social change, high levels of migration, they don't share the [opinions] of their white graduate liberal counterparts who dominate the most influential positions within the Labour movement. The second dilemma is really going to be difficult for left parties because it's also exacerbating their much weaker relationship with what remains of the white working class, which we should remember is still a very large voting bloc in its own right. White working-class voters in England, for example, represent very large chunks of the vote in regions outside of London and the university towns. And if you look at all the survey data that we have, it shows pretty clearly that over the last ten years, they feel that the Labour Party has routinely prioritized minority group interests over the wider majority. Justin Gest and others have written really good books about this that have thrown light on this sense among voters that actually Labour elites are no longer really interested in the white working class, or even worse, they sort of look down on them with suspicion if not contempt. It’s going to be really, really difficult for left parties, because they're now facing this new challenge of trying to come up with a unifying narrative on culture. That's a very, very difficult thing to do, especially when conservatives are now grasping the fact that there's a lot of opportunity for them to drive a wedge through the left electorate in the same way that they did during the 1980s and mid-1990s, carving off working class voters and nongraduates, many of whom went to national populist parties, and many of whom went to conservatives like Boris Johnson. I think the second dilemma is going to be as problematic for left parties as the first.Mounk: What was it that allowed some politicians to hold this coalition together? There’s two readings of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. You could say that they put together a political program for the first dilemma and, in a way, we have a model for how to do that. Now, I think the counterpoint to that might be that it actually was only possible in a particular historical moment; that even though the first dilemma was formulated in the 1980s, it wasn't as strong in the 1980s, because there was still such strong working class feeling in some of those working class towns in Pennsylvania and Red Wall seats in England's northeast that you could take for granted a certain set of constituencies and really go after the middle class vote. And over time it's eroded so that today you wouldn't be able to recreate that coalition. What's your assessment here? Do you think that there was a set of political recipes which showed left wing parties how to solve the first dilemma, or do you think that those, in a way, cannibalized support for left parties among the working class in such a way that they were only feasible for a limited period of time?Goodwin: Sequencing in politics is very, very important. I think timing is very important. Blair and Clinton, in many ways, were lucky. We have to remember that they were a generation of center-left leaders who were not just charismatic, not just telegenic, not just incredibly competent, but they were also leading their parties before this cultural dimension took over in politics—the rise of security threats, 9/11, the rise of immigration as an issue, the increasingly fraught debates over culture wars. I know you had some culture wars in America in the 1980s and 1990s but nothing like today. Blair understood the dilemma. There is a reason that he said that Labour would be “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime,” because what he was doing, even in the late 1990s, was locking down the socially conservative or authoritarian section of the Labour electorate. And he was saying to them, “Look, I get it right on this emerging cultural axis. I'm going to speak to your concerns.” And one thing lots of people in Britain and elsewhere overlook is that Labour traditionalists, or voters who are left on the economy and right on culture, were by far the biggest group within the Labour electorate until 2015. They massively outnumbered what we might call “Labour cosmopolitans,” who are left on the economy and left on culture. This was not an insignificant problem that Blair had to overcome. In many of those working class areas, he was dealing with voters who were instinctively opposed to globalization, immigration, and Britain's relationship with the European Union. But what happened during New Labour—and I would argue what happened in America in some respects during the 2000s as well—is that you basically began to see those relationships fragment. We had new parties breaking through. And by the time you got to the 2010s, a lot of things that happened during the New Labour years really began to pick up momentum. So it wasn't that Blair solved the first dilemma. I personally think he was lucky in terms of timing. He was also shrewd in terms of doing what he could within that context to try and speak to it. But by the time you get into the aftermath of the financial crisis, we have the refugee crisis in Europe. Then we have the Brexit referendum in 2016. By that time, what you're seeing are record numbers of working class voters, non-college-educated voters, and older voters moving away from Labour at a very quick speed, and this becomes the foundation of the political realignment. Americans listening to this will see a lot of parallels with the Trump election in late 2016. And this brings us back to geography because the nature of that first dilemma for the left really was problematic because of geography and that those voters were much more efficiently distributed around the system than many of the voters who dominated left parties, the so-called Brahmin left. Geographically, they couldn't match that challenge. Ultimately, the left has to solve this dilemma, otherwise it's not going to have a viable electorate going forward. If it becomes dependent upon declining numbers of non-white minority voters and white liberal graduates, that's not going to be a viable coalition under our first-past-the-post, majoritarian system going forward. And there are people obviously watching the American debate from the UK who say, “Well, the answer to this is to increase the salience of economic issues and downplay the salience of cultural issues which are dividing these groups.” I'm less convinced that's a viable strategy because I spend a lot of my time in focus groups with voters and everybody's talking about these issues. The narrative that you often hear is that nobody wants to talk about culture wars, they want to talk about the cost of living—I personally just don't think that's realistic or viable anymore. Parents do want to talk about what their kids are being taught and lots of voters do want to talk about how the history of their country or their culture is being debated and reframed. The genie’s out of the bottle on that. I think the unifying narrative is to stay focused on anti-discrimination, anti-racism, to tone down and distance itself from the more excessive and, I would argue, contested positions around gender identity theory, and also, if possible, increase the interaction between many of the white graduate liberals who are running left parties today and many of the people who are voting for them.Mounk: To what extent do you think it is possible to formulate a conceptual message on some of those issues? Part of the problem, it seems to me at the moment, is that neither side of the cultural divide in the United States (and perhaps the same is applicable in Britain) is able to speak consistently to the majority view on many of these cultural issues and that majority view actually strikes me as being quite reasonable. You might agree or disagree with some of the specifics, but, broadly speaking, it is that we need a lot of police on the streets, and cops should not discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color, and instances of terrible police violence are unacceptable. We should be very upfront about the terrible aspects of American history and the terrible suffering involved in chattel slavery and the long-lasting effects of it, but we should also be proud of the founding principles of the United States and the great achievements of statesmen from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln. We should, of course, treat trans people with dignity and respect and, in most or all circumstances, allow them to live in accordance with their gender identity, and so on.Do you think that there is a possible solution to a second dilemma here, that is, in principle, up for grabs to left-wing parties or right-wing parties, and that would be able to appeal to a really broad cross section of the population? Goodwin: Your description of the fault lines corresponds quite well with much of the data that I've seen, and certainly the data that we have in the UK. There is a specific problem, I think, for the left, and I don't want to just bash progressives, but on a lot of the data that is out there, for example, the work by More in Common, among others, it is quite striking how differently they see the world from pretty much every other group. The average voter basically says, “I'm not particularly proud of what my country did in the past.” Let's take Britain's empire as an example. Most people say, “I’m not really proud of it, but it happened. We need to learn to live with it and move on.” Progressives take the view that we cannot move on as a society unless we have addressed and dwelled on this historical injustice. You take an example like racism and the prominence of racism. Most people, on balance, do not think their society is very racist. They accept that there is discrimination and that some minorities are discriminated against. They are firmly opposed to that. Radical progressives are instead completely convinced that their society is institutionally and very racist and that that is one of the most pressing social problems facing the country. And I could go on. At what age should we be teaching kids about puberty blockers and transitioning? The average voter says, “Not until they're 16 or 17 should we even be talking to them about these ideas.” Radical progressives tend to say, “I'm happy to do that when they're still 8, 9, or 10 years of age.” They do consistently adopt this more radical view compared to other voters. This is where I'm more pessimistic: you need to convince and demonstrate to that very influential group within the left coalition that they are very adrift from the rest of the country on these issues, and they are making life much harder for center-left social democratic parties, and they ultimately need to think about how they can forge a compromise and a consensus around these issues. Mounk: You've been chomping at the bit to bring this discussion back to the United Kingdom, and I do want you to help our listeners who may be outside the UK understand the very strange political transformations in the country over the last decade. Talk us through this dizzying 10 years. What happened?Goodwin: It was a decade of extreme political volatility that left a lot of people's heads spinning. But I think Americans can actually take a couple of lessons from what's happened here in Britain. The fundamental story that I try to tell in my new book is that both left and right essentially lost touch with a large chunk of the country. They lost touch with the values that were being held by many working-class voters, many non-college-educated voters, many pensioners and many voters outside of the cities and the university towns. And it was that disconnect that essentially allowed the rise of, firstly, Nigel Farage, who was a Donald Trump ally, a populist who campaigned to leave the European Union and lower immigration. And of course, this was interesting because, historically, Britain was one of the few democracies in the world that was never supposed to have a successful populist movement. If you go back to the 1950s, academics used to say that Britain was the quintessential “civic culture.” We weren't like the Germans and the French and the Italians. We weren't emotional. We weren't divisive. We weren't polarized. We didn't like messianic leaders. We were deferential, polite, and consensual. But by the time you got to the 2010s, this yawning chasm between the values of our leaders in Westminster and a large chunk of the country really made the rise of populism possible, which put enormous pressure on David Cameron, who was forced to call this referendum on Brexit. Brexit, in turn, then created this window of opportunity to have this full-blown political realignment, whereby Conservatives (like Republicans in the US) had a huge opening to carve out new space among blue collar workers in the Red Wall, which is our equivalent of your Rust Belt, and to basically eat their way through northern England, winning over voters who had only ever voted for the Labour Party. Boris Johnson delivered on that new electorate, and he promised them that he'd “get Brexit done,” that he'd lower immigration, and that he'd reform the economy so it was less dependent on London. And his reward was the biggest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher. And, you know, if you're being sympathetic to Boris Johnson, you'd say, “Then along came COVID and his premiership was blown apart.” If you're critical of Boris Johnson, you'd say, “Well, then he proved himself to be completely unfit for high office.” It's left us where we are today, which is a realignment that is only halfway done. A labor party that has sensed its opportunity to get back in the game and this is where there are parallels with the Democrats. What has Keir Starmer, the new leader of the Labour Party, done well, he's accepted the Brexit vote. He's talked about the need to invest in Britain, to buy in Britain, to spend more money on areas outside of London, to tackle inequality, to invest in defense and security. If Americans are interested in a lesson for how a center-left party can get back on its feet, can push back against conservatives, can begin to appeal back to the working class voters they lost, and can reposition themselves for a renewed period in power—the Labour Party hasn't got everything right, but it's certainly got a lot of things right. Which is why we're currently headed for the first Labour majority government since the era of Tony Blair, who was in fact the last Labour leader to win a majority, in 2005. Mounk: When Johnson won this huge parliamentary majority, it did seem as though he had hit upon a kind of political recipe, which is to be robustly center-right on culture without being bigoted or extreme in the kind of way that Donald Trump was, and moving the party firmly into the center or even the center-left on economy. As you outlined, that promise didn't work out. Did it not work out because of Johnson's deep personal failings and the unlucky timing of the pandemic, or did it not work out because, actually, in practice, it is impossible to keep together the kind of political coalition that conservatives had built? Goodwin: To understand how the Conservatives lost this realignment, you have to understand Boris Johnson. People who compared him to Donald Trump never understood who he really was. Boris Johnson at heart is a liberal. He's very relaxed about multiculturalism and immigration. He campaigned for Brexit but not to do with reasons around migration. He comes from a tradition within the Conservative Party that is really passionate about free trade and very skeptical about anything that looks like protectionism or bureaucracy. If you really want to understand Boris Johnson, you have to understand the fact that he just wants to be liked by everybody. It’s not an easy thing for a Conservative to win London twice, but he did it. And when he became prime minister, he found himself in a very awkward position because he won this massive majority by winning over the largest number of working class voters since the days of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War, and realized he had to deliver to these voters who were looking for a lot of things that I think Boris Johnson and many other liberal conservatives who surrounded him didn't want to deliver. The US Republicans, to be blunt, have a much stronger understanding of who's voting for them than many of the British Tories, who then proceeded to basically prioritize many things that their new post-Brexit voters didn't want. They prioritized the deregulation of financial services. They liberalized the immigration policy regime in a way that even David Cameron didn't do. Yes, they stopped migration from Europe—people essentially couldn't come to the UK from the European Union. But Boris Johnson liberalized immigration from many other countries around the world, which has now created record levels of migration into the UK: we have 1.1 million visas issued last year, and that was mainly a legacy of Boris Johnson. His party never really grasped the need to genuinely improve regions outside of London. Boris Johnson's signature policy, not dissimilar to Joe Biden's, was “leveling up” the country by investing through infrastructure in regions in northern England. But that policy was never seriously fleshed out. And the traditional south were very upset with all this money going to these northern working class voters. And it was another example of how the problem was a supply side problem. Conservative elites were never really comfortable with embracing this political realignment. And then you get the really just crazy moment in British politics, which I'm sure your listeners will remember—the bizarre premiership of Liz Truss, the shortest prime ministerial term in British history. Truss comes along as a newly appointed successor to Boris Johnson and proceeds to introduce a sort of New Right agenda: more deregulation, pushing for a free trade agreement with countries like India, very comfortable with immigration, very comfortable with removing caps on bankers’ bonuses, basically trying to build this Davos-on-Thames economy, which if you're working class, non-graduate, and culturally conservative, is the very opposite of what you thought you were getting when you voted for Brexit in the first place. Today, the Conservatives now have 21% of the vote, which is a historic low. We've never seen numbers like this before. And Rishi Sunak, who has become the new leader, is now scrambling around trying to find ways to put back together this post-Brexit coalition, like Humpty Dumpty. Why does this matter for Americans? Because it showcases what happens when a political party inherits a realignment and it doesn't really understand what to do with it, how to hold it, how to expand it, and how to turn it into a coherent policy agenda. Mounk: Let's talk about Keir Starmer. For a long time, the common assessment of Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party seemed mixed, which is to say that he was moderating the party, but he didn't seem to have that much charisma and he didn't seem to have that much of a clear political vision. And yet, he is now riding high in the polls in a nearly unprecedented way and he does look likely to be the next prime minister.Have people underestimated the coherence of Starmer’s project for the last few years? Is there a recipe to success for left wing parties to be found in Starmer’s Labour, or is he, to a large extent, the beneficiary of the dissolution of the Conservatives? Goodwin: Again, it's a bit of everything. The old saying in British politics is that “opposition parties don't win elections, governments lose them.” There is a lot of that going on at the moment. The incumbent Conservative government has made so many mistakes and unforced errors that life has been very easy for Starmer and the Labour Party. But it is also true that he brought to the Labour Party two things that voters routinely prioritize around the world. One is ideological moderation. He has moderated the party's positions. He has dealt with the issue of anti-Semitism that plagued Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. He has repositioned the party so it's closer to the median voter on many of these issues that we discussed, such as Brexit, security, wanting to believe in the country they live in and not wanting to hear all the time about all the things that are wrong with Britain. And he’s flexed his patriotic muscles and that has helped.But I think at the same time, anyone who works within or around the Labour Party will also tell you that things are still vulnerable. Starmer doesn't have the charisma of Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, for example. His leadership ratings have improved but they're still very flat. I sit in focus groups with lots of voters who sometimes tell me they don't really know who Keir Starmer is, which is quite remarkable. He has a problem on his left flank. Many Corbyn supporters are now absolutely openly hostile towards Starmer and his leadership. That may be pointing to a problem with turnout and mobilization at the next election. And the Labour brand still has two core problems. Yes, they are now seen as being better on the economy. But there is still a suspicion among voters that Labour is not good in a crisis and is not a sound manager of economic issues. And Labour is still not trusted on the immigration question, which is the third top issue for voters. Many people still associate Labour with what they perceive as an immigration crisis in the 2000s and the 2010s. Starmer has to find his version of ”tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” He has to find his version of Tony Blair locking down those Labour traditionalists by appealing to their instinctive patriotism and their instinctive desire for a strong national community with strong borders, and that will ruffle feathers within the Labour Party. But if he is to win a majority, he's going to have to win back working class voters in England. Here’s just one statistic which I find absolutely mind boggling: the Labour Party, the main opposition party, has still not won the popular vote in non-London England since 2001. In other words, for more than 20 years, once you take away the capital city, the Labour Party has not won the popular vote among non-London, England. It's still grappling with the first dilemma.Mounk: As a final question, let’s widen the angle again. One of the themes in this conversation is the way in which political elites and party leaders often fail to understand reasons for their own success and end up screwing it up. What is the basic nature of the partisan or social divide in the United Kingdom and the United States in the middle of the 2020s? What is the basic dividing line that's going to be deciding our elections going forward?Goodwin: It's a big question. But the politicians and the parties which thrive in the years ahead are going to be the ones that offer a compelling narrative around the theme of “security,” both economic and cultural. It is going to be a narrative that will speak very loudly and convincingly to voters' desire for a much greater degree of economic security amid all of the things that we're seeing at the moment but also a strong desire for cultural security and protection from an array of perceived threats that they feel. The idea before the pandemic that we were entering into this sort of “Roaring ‘20s” has been rapidly replaced by a very threatening environment for voters where they are rapidly falling down the hierarchy of needs. They are focusing very squarely on those guardrails that they look to as a source of security—family, identity, community—that they've looked to historically. This is why we often talk about the formula of leaning a little bit left on economic issues, leaning a little bit right on cultural issues. It’s a bit simplistic, but the reason Keir Starmer is doing well is basically because he's beginning to do that. If you look at why Biden has perhaps outperformed some expectations—I can see some pretty clear appeals to workers and non-graduates around things like infrastructure and so on. He's not gone as far certainly as Starmer has. But I think it is going to be this theme of security that is going to really permeate both economically and culturally.2024, for both the UK and the US, will be an enormous year politically, and it's going to have all kinds of interesting implications for those of us who watch politics and study it, and I think there are going to be some really interesting comparisons between the Democrats and Labour and the Republicans and the Conservatives. Those parties are both going through very similar strategic challenges and they are producing, in some cases, similar answers, but in others very, very different ones. Those elections are going to give us some very interesting answers to these questions. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.“It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments. Those include possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, as well as the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.“I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.The potential for such further criminal proceedings is why many political observers are cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions from polling around public reaction to this first indictment, which centers on Trump’s payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels late in the 2016 campaign.[Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment]The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C. And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.“You are just looking at a snapshot of how people feel today,” Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist, told me.Yet even these initial reactions show how Trump’s legal troubles may place his party in a vise.Polls consistently show that Trump, over the past several weeks, has widened his lead over DeSantis and the rest of the potential 2024 field. That may be partly because Trump has intensified his attacks on DeSantis, and because the Florida governor has at times seemed unsteady in his debut on the national stage.But most Republicans think Trump is also benefiting from an impulse among GOP voters to lock arms around him as the Manhattan investigation has proceeded. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released this week, four-fifths of Republicans described the various investigations targeting Trump as a “witch hunt,” echoing his own denunciation of them. “There’s going to be some level of emotional response to someone being quote-unquote attacked,” Wilson said. “That’s going to get some sympathy points that will probably bolster poll numbers.”Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction by not only calling the indictment  “un-American” but even insisting he would not cooperate with extraditing Trump from Florida if it came to that (a pledge that is moot because Trump has indicated he plans to turn himself in on Tuesday).As during the procession of outrages and controversies during Trump’s presidency, most Republicans skeptical of him have been unwilling to do anything more than remain silent. (Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot potential 2024 candidate, has been the most conspicuous exception, issuing a statement that urged Americans “to wait on the facts” before judging the case.) The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.[Read: What Donald Trump’s indictment reveals]The Manhattan indictment “may keep his people with him, it may fire them up, but he’s starting from well under 50 percent of the vote,” Mike DuHaime told me. “Somebody like that must figure out how to get new voters. And he is not gaining new voters with a controversial new indictment, whether he beats it or not.” Swing voters following the case in New York, DuHaime continued, “may not like it, they may think Democrats have gone too far, and that might be fair.” But it’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.The NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey underlines DuHaime’s point about the limits of Trump’s existing support: In that survey, a 61 percent majority of Americans—including 64 percent of independents and 70 percent of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again. That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60 percent of Americans do not consider themselves supporters of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. The challenge for the GOP is that about four-fifths of Republicans said they did consider themselves part of that movement, and about three-fourths said they wanted him back in the White House.The open question for Trump is whether this level of support, even in the GOP, may be his high-water mark as the investigations proceed. Eisner and John Dean, the former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, both told me they believe that the New York case may be more threatening to Trump than many legal analysts have suggested. “I think that the New York case is much stronger than people perceive it to be,” Dean told me yesterday. “We really don’t know the contents of the indictment, and we really won’t know for a much longer time the evidence behind the indictment.”Whatever happens in New York, Trump still faces the prospect of indictments on the more consequential charges looming over him in Georgia and from the federal special prosecutor. Dean said that Bragg’s indictment, rather than discouraging other prosecutors to act, “may have the opposite effect” of emboldening them. Trump “has escaped accountability literally his entire life, and it finally appears to be catching up with him,” Dean said. Academic research, he added, has suggested that defendants juggling multiple trials, either simultaneously or sequentially, find it “much harder to mount effective defenses.”Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, the Democratic polling consortium that conducts the Navigator surveys, says the potential for multiple indictments presents Trump with a parallel political risk: The number of voters who believe he has committed at least one crime is very likely to rise if the criminal charges against him accumulate. “It’s hard to imagine any scenario where multiple indictments is useful” to him, Bennett told me.DuHaime and Wilson both believe that multiple indictments eventually could weigh down Trump even in the GOP primary. “The cumulative effect takes away some of the argument that it’s just political,” DuHaime said. Each additional indictment, he continued, “may add credibility” for the public to those that came before.Wilson believes that repeated indictments could reinforce the sense among Republican voters that Trump is being treated unfairly, and deepen their desire to turn the page from him. He likened the effect to someone living along a “Hurricane Alley,” who experiences not one destructive storm in a season but several. “The weight of a single hurricane blowing through is one thing,” Wilson told me. “But if you have several hurricanes of issues blowing through, you will get conservatives [saying], ‘I don’t know if I want to continue living in Hurricane Alley’ with Trump, and they are going to look at other candidates.”Given Trump’s hold on a big portion of the GOP coalition, no one should discount his capacity to win the party nomination next year, no matter how many criminal cases ensnare him. And given the persistent public dissatisfaction with the economy and lackluster job-approval ratings for Biden, no one dismisses the capacity of whoever captures the Republican nomination to win the general election.The best-case scenario sketched by Trump supporters is that a succession of indictments will allow him to inspire even higher turnout among the predominantly non-college-educated and nonurban white voters who accept his argument that “liberal elites” and the “deep state” are targeting him to silence them. But even the heroic levels of turnout Trump inspired from those voters in 2020 weren’t enough to win. For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters, Bennett said, “seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”

It has been nearly 80 years since the Soviet Union successfully beat back Hitler’s invasion during World War II and survived its greatest existential threat of the modern era. Today, the Russian Army appears to be following the same playbook the Soviets once used to consolidate power in Eastern Europe after the war to control occupied territories in Ukraine, according to Pulitzer-winning journalist Anne Applebaum.
Except this time, on the battlefields, in local town halls, and in the schools, none of it is working.
Having misjudged the strength of Ukrainian resistance and the ill-preparedness of Russian troops, and without a clear ideological sense of mission in Ukraine, a frustrated and failing Russian military has intensified its campaign of brutality against civilians.
“That’s the cycle that we’re in now, this kind of failure and incompetence leads to violence. The violence creates more resistance and that resistance that’s so hard for the invaders to comprehend creates wider and broader and ever-more-random destruction and suffering,” said Applebaum during the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s annual Petryshyn Memorial Lecture on Wednesday evening. “This is the logic of genocide” unfolding today in the cities and towns still under occupation.
Applebaum has written extensively about the history of Ukraine and Russia, including “Red Famine,” a 2017 book about the starvation deaths of at least 4 million Ukrainians due to Stalin’s policies in the early 1930s. In her address she spoke about what she and the journalists and field researchers from The Reckoning Project, which documents Russian war crimes, have been learning through investigations into the Russian army’s activities and abuses in Ukraine. 
Since the full-scale invasion last February, it has become clear that “the Russian occupation belongs to an equally old and equally ugly tradition of both Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide,” Applebaum said.
“In many different ways, the policies that are being carried out by Russian soldiers in Ukraine strongly resemble the policies carried out by Soviet soldiers in occupied Central Europe, in Poland, in Hungary, in the Baltic states, [and] in Czechoslovakia after 1945,” she said.
While there are “some nuances” and “differences,” reports from formerly occupied areas, particularly in Eastern Ukraine, indicate that the Russian army is still following the Soviet playbook for “how to subjugate a population, how to change its habits, how to even change its identity. These are all things that have been tried before and they are being tried again now,” said Applebaum, who is also a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Investigators have found evidence of torture chambers, and interviews with ordinary citizens and small-town officials in now-liberated areas say the Russian soldiers held people captive, tortured some with electric shocks, physically and psychologically abused them, and subjected them to starvation, extreme cold, even drowning.
The “nihilism of this invasion” is evident in the way Russia has treated schools in occupied Ukraine. Where the Red Army prioritized and carefully executed its plan to reshape school curricula and teaching from kindergarten up, “quite a lot of evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools, but the soldiers on the ground could not implement them” and “don’t really seem to care what happened in the schools,” said Applebaum.
The Russian army’s shortcomings as a fighting force have been evident since the war’s earliest days. But the Russian soldiers also seemed not to have any idea what they were supposed to do once they removed mayors and village leaders from office.
“Unlike their Soviet Communist forebearers, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland or Estonia or Romania, the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, not even any clear idea of Russkiy Mir — the Russian world, this phrase some of President [Vladimir] Putin’s ideologues extol. They don’t know what it means; they don’t know how to bring it about; they don’t know who would create it or how that would happen,” said Applebaum. “They do this immense damage, but they don’t seem to know why.”
The horrific and unprovoked violence and the “utter disregard for Ukrainian life” stems in part from the Russians’ inability to bend the Ukrainians to their will and an inability to understand why they have resisted so fiercely, she said.
The Russians came to Ukraine expecting a very different situation and are now intent on destroying what they found instead.
“Wishing Ukraine away or wishing this Ukrainian identity to disappear will not make it disappear, and rewriting history will not alter the historical memories of millions of people,” she said. “Russia can try to alter the region, but that will not alter the region no matter how many people are beaten, or electric shocks are delivered.”
Asked what the future of Russia looks like after the war, Applebaum said she wasn’t sure, but that the “most important” thing that “has to happen” is recognition.
“That is the moment when the Russian elites, or the Russian leader or whoever is calling the shots at the moment, when they understand and are able to say that the war was a mistake, and that Ukraine is an independent country.
“Whoever comes after Putin is better. Whoever the worst person you can think of is still better because that person will not have the same legitimacy and the same amount of power that he does,” and will take a long time to reassert the power and control Putin currently enjoys, she said. “I can only hope that that happens — I don’t know that it will.”

The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps that have locked in overwhelming Republican majorities since 2011 are allowed to remain in place.But the contest between the liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Janet Protasiewicz and the conservative former state-supreme-court justice Dan Kelly has also become a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.Protasiewicz and her allies have centered her campaign on portraying Kelly as a threat to legal abortion and an accomplice in Donald Trump’s schemes to undermine democracy—the same issues that helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in last November’s elections. Kelly and his allies have centered his campaign on presenting Protasiewicz as soft on crime, the same accusation that Republicans stressed in many of their winning campaigns last year.With the choice framed so starkly, in a state that has been so evenly balanced between the parties, Tuesday’s result will measure which of those arguments remains more potent, particularly among the suburban voters who loom as the critical swing bloc in 2024’s presidential contest.If Kelly wins, after being significantly outspent on television, it would underscore how much risk Democrats face from rising public anxiety about crime. But a Protasiewicz win, which most political observers in Wisconsin expect, would suggest that support for legalized abortion has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP that is already evident among college-educated suburban voters. And such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections.“The margins are still very narrow, and of course the economy and other issues will come into play next year, but if it simply becomes a test between abortion and crime, I would say yes, [abortion] is more powerful by a slight, slight margin,” says Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster who has worked in Wisconsin for decades.[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]Like the state itself, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is closely divided. Conservatives now hold a 4–3 majority (though Brian Hagedorn, one of the four conservative justices, has voted with the liberals on some key cases, particularly four rulings denying Trump’s effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results). The retirement of a conservative justice has provided Democrats this opportunity to secure a 4–3 liberal majority.Though Tuesday’s election is technically nonpartisan, the race has become a brawl between the two parties. The state GOP is mounting an extensive get-out-the-vote campaign for Kelly, who was appointed to the state supreme court by Republican then-Governor Scott Walker to fill an unexpired term in 2016 before losing his bid for a full term in 2020. State Democrats, meanwhile, have raised and transferred millions of dollars into the campaign for Protasiewicz, who served as an assistant county district attorney before winning election as a county-circuit-court judge . The tension between the race’s openly partisan character and traditional notions of judicial neutrality and nonpartisanship has itself become a central point of contention in the campaign.Protasiewicz has pushed the envelope for a judicial candidate by offering voters explicit declarations of her views. She has unequivocally affirmed her support for legal abortion, described the gerrymandered state legislative maps as “rigged,” and declared that the signature legislation Walker passed to eviscerate the power of the state’s public-sector unions is unconstitutional. But in the next breath she insists that those views—which she calls her “values”—will not affect her decisions on the bench.The juxtaposition of those two assertions can be head-spinning. At a forum this week on the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee campus, Protasiewicz declared, “I’ve been very clear with everybody that I think women should have a right to choose. Obviously, I can’t comment about what I would do on any case. That robe goes on; my personal opinions go out the door.”After her appearance, I asked Protasiewicz why her “values” should matter to voters if they are irrelevant once she dons her judicial robe. “I truly believe that people have an absolute right to know what a candidate’s personal thoughts and personal values are,” she answered. Even if, I asked, they are irrelevant to your decisions? “I put them aside,” she said.Kelly and other Republicans have argued that Protasiewicz’s candid expression of her “values” renders her too partisan for a judicial position. (At the Milwaukee forum, the conservative state-supreme-court justice Rebecca Bradley, appearing for Kelly, maintained that Protasiewicz would be forced to recuse herself from cases involving abortion, redistricting, and other issues because she has expressed such clear positions on them—a view that other legal experts reject.) But Kelly is, to say the least, an imperfect messenger for the argument that anyone else is too biased. He has been far more involved than Protasiewicz in direct partisan activities: Kelly has served as a paid legal adviser to the state’s leading anti-abortion group as well as to the state Republican Party.Andrew Hitt, the former state GOP chairman, testified to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that he had “pretty extensive conversations” with Kelly and another lawyer about the fake-electors scheme that Trump supporters developed after the 2020 election in order to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Kelly says his involvement was limited to a single 30-minute conversation in which he explained he was not “in the loop” on the plans. But at the sole debate between the candidates earlier this month, Protasiewicz described Kelly as “a true threat to our democracy.”In the past, local observers say, Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have more narrowly centered on debates about crime and criminal justice (even though the court isn’t directly involved in handing down sentences). “Law-and-order candidates have traditionally done very well,” Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state Republican Party, told me.[Read: The four quadrants of American politics]Kelly is running in that tradition. Ads from his campaign’s final days are focused almost exclusively on lashing Protasiewicz over rulings she made to sentence a rapist and other violent offenders to limited or no jail time. So many sheriffs are appearing in Kelly ads that it’s reasonable to wonder who is still patrolling the state’s highways this week.Protasiewicz has responded with ads defending her record on crime, and also jabbing Kelly over his work as a criminal-defense attorney. But mostly her advertising has insisted that Kelly would uphold the 1849 state abortion ban that snapped back into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade. (Both sides agree that the state supreme court will eventually need to decide whether to sustain or strike down that law, which prohibits abortions in almost all cases, and is now being challenged in a lower state court.) Protasiewicz and the groups supporting her are heavily stressing abortion in their ads and have aired nearly four times as many ads across all subjects as Kelly and his backers, according to AdImpact, a group that tracks ad purchases. (That disparity exists largely because Democrats have raised enough money to allow her to buy the ads directly through her campaign, which receives lower rates, while Kelly’s relying mostly on outside groups that must pay higher rates.)That huge tactical advantage for her is one reason some observers are cautious about drawing too many conclusions from next week’s outcome. Conversely, Trump’s indictment yesterday might inspire enough Republican turnout to lift Kelly, especially because far fewer people vote in these off-year contests than on a typical November Election Day.Yet a Protasiewicz win could put an exclamation point on a subtle but discernible shift in the state’s political direction.Though close elections are usually the rule in Wisconsin, early in this century it often leaned Democratic. The state was part of what I termed the “blue wall”: the 18 states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. (Democrats actually started their Wisconsin presidential winning streak in 1988.) Democrats also controlled both U.S. Senate seats throughout most of that same period, and the governorship for two terms after 2002.But the tide began to shift around 2010, with the election of Republican Governor Walker and a GOP sweep of the state legislature. In 2016, two years after Walker won reelection, Trump dislodged Wisconsin from the blue wall, carrying it by 22,748 votes. Like Trump’s 2016 victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which had also been part of the “blue wall,” the former president’s Wisconsin breakthrough symbolized his success at forging a winning coalition that revolved around massive margins among non-college-educated and non-urban white voters.Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll in the state, says Wisconsin today remains divided almost evenly between the parties: 45 percent of voters identify as Republicans, 44 percent as Democrats, and the rest are unaffiliated. Yet since Trump’s initial victory, Democrats have won most of the state’s key contests. The Democrat Tony Evers beat Walker for governor by about 30,000 votes in 2018 and won reelection by triple that amount last year. In 2018, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won a landslide reelection. Democrats also won big in state-supreme-court elections in 2018 and 2020. Biden carried the state by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The major Republican victories over this period have been narrow ones: Hagedorn’s 6,000-vote 2019 win for the state supreme court and the roughly 27,000-vote win last November by GOP Senator Ron Johnson over the Democrat Mandela Barnes.Those results suggest that Democrats have come out slightly ahead from the demographic and geographic re-sorting of the electorate that Trump accelerated here. As in states across the country, Republicans have grown stronger in heavily blue-collar and white rural areas, primarily across Wisconsin’s northern and western counties where Democrats once competed effectively. But Democrats have been boosted by offsetting gains in the state’s most populous cities and towns, many of them relatively more racially diverse or better educated. (About 90 percent of Wisconsin voters are white.)Craig Gilbert, a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, calculated that from the 2018–22 governor races, Evers improved his performance in all 30 communities that cast the most votes except for Kenosha (where he was hurt by a backlash against the 2020 riots over the police shooting of a Black man in the city). The places where Republicans are winning “simply aren’t growing,” while Democrats are generally improving in the places that are adding population, Devin Remiker, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to keep up with that trend.”Democrats have benefited from improved showings mostly in two areas. One is the so-called WOW suburban counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) around Milwaukee. Though the GOP still comfortably wins all three, Democrats have noticeably narrowed its margins. As Gilbert calculated, in Waukesha, which he described as “the most important Republican county in Wisconsin,” 21 communities have shifted at least 20 points toward the Democrats in gubernatorial races since 2014.Even more significant has been the explosive Democratic gains in Dane County, the highly educated hub for biotech, insurance, and government jobs centered on the city of Madison, home to both the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin and the state capital. The Democratic share of the vote in Dane County has increased from about 70 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 75 percent for Biden in 2020 to 79 percent for Evers in 2022; Dane actually provided Evers a larger net vote margin than Milwaukee County did, something that would have been almost unimaginable even a decade ago. Franklin says Dane has become a triple threat for Democrats: “It is growing fast, the turnout keeps rising, and the lopsided partisan margins keep growing.”The flip side of the Democrats’ improving performance in Dane and the Milwaukee suburbs is rising concern in the party about lackluster turnout among Black voters, especially in Milwaukee. Some local leaders fear that a political competition between the parties focusing more on social issues such as abortion simply doesn’t engage enough lower-income Black voters, who are focused more on material needs such as jobs and health care. “If people feel like their issues are not going to be reflected, they are going to sit out,” Angela Lang, the executive director of the group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, told me.Lagging Milwaukee turnout next week would be another signal that Democrats, as in 2020, continue to face challenges not only with non-college-educated whites, but also with blue-collar voters of color. But if abortion rights, in effect, trump crime and allow Protasiewicz to extend the Democrats’ gains in white-collar suburbs, that could signal trouble for anti-abortion Republican presidential candidates in 2024—not only in Wisconsin but in the suburbs of any swing state. The Democrats’ rural and inner-city troubles in Wisconsin, which still might allow Kelly to eke out an upset win, testify to the fragility of a modern Democratic coalition bonded less by economic interests than by cultural values. But a Protasiewicz win, in a state that Republicans probably must recapture to regain the White House in 2024, would demonstrate again that there’s formidable power in that new coalition too.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.A grand jury has reportedly indicted Donald Trump on criminal charges stemming from his role in a hush-money payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This historic event is a tragedy for the American republic not because of what it has revealed about Trump, but because of what it is revealing about us as voters and citizens.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Ron DeSantis chose the wrong college to take over.
David Frum: Where do you stand?
There’s exactly one good reason to buy a house.
An American TragedyDonald Trump is about to be charged with crimes in New York. I do not know if he is guilty of any of these charges—we don’t even know the exact accusations yet—and neither do you. That’s for a jury to decide, and both Trump and the state of New York will have their day in court. In that sense, this is a good day for America, because it shows, in the most direct way possible, that no one in this country is above the law.But this whole mess, no matter how it turns out, and no matter what other charges may come at Trump from elsewhere, is also an American tragedy. Trump’s status as a former president has not shielded him from answering for his alleged crimes. The indictment itself is shot through with tension, because Trump is, in fact, a former president and a current leading presidential candidate—which underscores the ghastly reality that no matter how much we learn about this crass sociopath, millions of people voted for him twice and are still hoping that he will return to power in the White House.Trump’s defenders will argue that the New York case is just a local political vendetta, and that the potential crimes involved are relatively minor. As my colleague David Graham has noted, “Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad,” but this is like trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, especially because “the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest case.” David also notes that even some Trump critics wish Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had waited for Trump to be indicted on more important potential charges.I’m not so sure. Trump has kept his supporters in a state of high tension over the past few weeks, first claiming that he’d be arrested on Tuesday, March 21, and then, in an appalling cultlike rally in Waco, bellowing that 2024 would be “the final battle” after previously warning that to indict him would be to court violence and civil unrest. Perhaps the New York charges have popped that bubble of tension; Trump can now go and whine about that while others prepare the case arguing that he has committed crimes against American democracy.But to focus on which indictment should come when is to ignore that Trump has already admitted to his awful behavior in the events around the case. Trump (who sometimes refers to Stormy Daniels as "Horse Face") denies that he had an affair with the porn actor, but no one contests that he authorized paying her off, nor does his legal team deny that he lied about that money while standing in Air Force One—part of their risible argument that she was being paid hush money to keep quiet about an affair that never happened. They’re simply saying that technically, he didn’t violate any namby-pamby laws about ledger entries and campaign funding.To our shame, we have too often let those kinds of arguments define the Trump legal saga. If Trump is brought to trial on the far more serious charge of attempting to strong-arm Georgia election officials, his defenders will claim that that indictment, too, is just local huckstering. They will find other excuses in the event that he somehow must answer for his role in trying to overturn our constitutional processes. And once again, even after looking at Trump’s own behavior, including his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state and the exhortation to the mob on January 6, too many Americans will focus on whether he committed an actual crime instead of coming to their senses and realizing that in any functional and healthy democracy, someone like Trump would have been shamed and forced into political and social exile years ago.Trump, like the Republican opportunists who cling to him like remoras under a shark, doesn’t care about shame—he cares about getting away with it. Indeed, rather than leaving the public arena, Trump has reveled in it all, rolling around in the garbage of his own life and grunting happily about how the rules don’t apply to the real elites like him. Forget about Richard Nixon, who publicly resigned; Trump isn’t even Spiro Agnew, a man who seethed with rage at the felony corruption charges against him but had the sense not to brag about them. (Agnew insisted on his innocence for two months and then took a plea of “no contest” to a single tax-evasion charge, after which he mostly vanished from public view.)No such luck this time. Win or lose in court, Trump is determined to bring us all into a summer-heat dumpster with him for as long as he can. And that leads to the last and most shocking thing about today’s news: Late this afternoon, New York local media reported that security was tightening up in certain areas of the city. That’s how we knew something was coming: The former president had already told us that he fully intended to trigger violence if the institutions of the law tried to touch him.Tomorrow, all NYPD officers have reportedly been ordered to be in full uniform and ready to deploy. And again, somehow, we’ve just accepted this as the new normal. We no longer even blink when New York, a city scarred by multiple terror attacks against its innocent citizens, has to go on alert just to charge Trump with a crime. That one fact, more than any other, tells you how far down the long slide into vice and venality—and violence—Trump has dragged this country.Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours.Related:
An astonishing, frightening first for the country
Indicting a former president should always have been fair game
If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone
The cases against Trump: a guide
Nine U.S. soldiers were killed after two helicopters crashed during a training mission in Kentucky.
The White House confirmed that President Joe Biden will not veto a congressional resolution ending the national emergency declared at the start of the pandemic.
Major League Baseball’s 2023 season begins today.
The Atlantic
‘A Common American Death’By Nicole Chung
His death certificate doesn’t tell me how he died. The causes of death are listed as “end-stage renal failure,” “diabetes mellitus,” “hypertension.” Yet I have no idea what forced my father’s body to shut down, his heart to stop, on that given night.
He’d had a cold, my mother told me, and had gone to bed early in the spare bedroom so he wouldn’t keep her awake with his coughing. Did his cough give way to a silent heart attack? she wondered. We know more about what did not happen than what did. At no time did he shout for help, or cry out in pain. There was no harsh death rattle, no deep gasps for a final breath he couldn’t find. My mother sat not 10 feet away from him on the other side of a thin wall, reading a book; if he had called out for her, made any sound of distress, she would have heard, and gone to him.
Are ancient phallic objects … exactly what they look like?
There’s no such thing as a casual interaction with your doctor anymore.
Would you have a baby if you won the lottery?
Mikayla LoBasso
Read. These eight books will take you somewhere new.Listen. Get to know boygenius before their first album comes out tomorrow. The supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus is making a last stand for bands.Play our daily crossword.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Are you looking to buy a house in 2023? Welcome to hell. The average 30-year mortgage rate has approximately doubled in the past year, following a nearly 8 percent increase in average home prices the year before. How does a two-bedroom fixer-upper a block from the airport sound? It’s just 40 percent over your price range.Choosing whether and where to buy a home is nerve-racking even if your only concern is your wallet. But the decision is also, in no small part, an emotional one. When I was buying my first home, I remember a stew of feelings: the pride of owning such a huge physical thing (well, 20 percent of that thing—the bank owned the rest); the aggravation of working with a realtor who was angling to run up the price; the fear that I was buying at the wrong time (I was) and would lose money in the end (I did). I also felt excited, because I expected that owning that house would improve my happiness, although I couldn’t say exactly how or why.Owning a home can give you a nice place to sleep. It can improve your credit rating. It can even enhance your social status. But as I learned through personal experience (and, of course, research), none of those things will make you happier. Buying a home will enhance your happiness only if you do it for one reason: to congregate with the people you love.Buying a house has an almost-mythic significance in the U.S. When the financial-services firm Bankrate asked Americans to rank the hallmarks of financial prosperity in 2022, homeownership was the No. 1 item. It beat out being able to retire, having a successful career, owning a car, having kids, and going to college.Many studies over the years have shown that homeowners are, on average, happier than non-homeowners. In my own calculations, using the General Social Survey, 21 percent of people who own their home are “very happy,” compared with 16 percent of those who pay rent. (Curiously, 28 percent of “others” are also very happy, suggesting that couch surfing with friends or living with Mom might be underrated options.)But none of this means that homeownership makes you happier. Homeownership turns out to be an insignificant predictor of happiness when you control for things like marriage, income increases, and social engagement.Despite the evidence, many prospective buyers assume that their new home will boost their happiness. In a paper published in 2022 in the Journal of Happiness Studies, two Swiss economists analyzed decades’ worth of well-being data collected in Germany and found that homebuyers’ happiness was higher in the run-up to buying and in the months after doing so, then returned to prepurchase levels after a year. The research, however, also indicated that homeowners tended to expect to be significantly happier after buying than they turned out to be. This overestimate of happiness was greater than that of people who moved into rental properties instead. Renters’ post-moving happiness gains also lasted longer than buyers’, and did not return to their old (lower) levels.[Shane Phillips: Renting is terrible. Owning is worse.]The researchers found, too, that the quality of home buyers’ happiness predictions varied according to their stated life values. Although everybody’s happiness rose and then fell back after a home purchase, buyers with “extrinsic values”—who said their happiness depended on forces outside themselves, such as income and job success—were the most likely to overestimate the satisfaction they would derive from homeownership. Those with “intrinsic values”—who said their happiness came from their families and friendships—did not measurably overestimate their happiness after buying their home.Extrinsically motivated people appear to believe that owning a home per se will bring greater happiness, just as they believe that other material things will. They also appear to be wrong. Meanwhile, intrinsically motivated homeowners seem to know that their satisfaction comes from the people in the house, which could explain why their predictions of happiness tend to prove much more accurate.That still doesn’t directly answer the question of whether buying a house, with all the sacrifice and hassle that entails, will make you, personally, happier. Here’s what the research suggests.If you believe that the feeling of ownership will have an enduring impact on your well-being, the answer is almost certainly “no.” That will become glaringly clear the first time your water stops and you reach for the phone to call the super, only to realize that you are the super. Similarly, the thrill you get from what homeownership says about you—that you are established and successful—will probably not last. Even the sheer comfort of a new home offers only a temporary high. We adapt quickly to housing improvements, just as we do all material satisfaction, and, accordingly, stop appreciating them.[Jerusalem Demsas: The homeownership society was a mistake]In the 1991 movie Father of the Bride, Steve Martin’s character, George Banks, has a famous line about the house in which he raised his family: “This house is warm in the winter, cool in the summer and looks spectacular with Christmas lights. It’s a great house, and I never want to move.” It sounds like the physical comforts made him happy. But if you’ve watched that movie, you know that’s not what George meant. His eulogy to the house is a metaphor for the warmth, comfort, and beauty of his love for the people inside it.Therein lies your formula for getting happier in your own home. If you think the house you are considering purchasing is the best place you can find to raise your family, welcome your friends, create traditions, and provide a destination for those you love, then go ahead and make it permanent. Your happiness will rise, because you have found a physical place to help you build the love in your life. If you can afford to, buy a house that facilitates your relationships by offering the space you need for a family and visiting friends, one that makes dinners and parties easy and fun.[Read: The case for buying a house with friends]Conversely, if buying a home threatens your relationships, don’t do it. Your happiness will very likely decrease if you have to move away from your friends or make do with space inadequate to entertain. Resist the temptation to sacrifice your human interactions for the sake of a smart investment or status symbol.To be honest, the happy-house question is one my wife and I have answered incorrectly over and over again in our adult lives. After our first purchase, we knew the futility of buying in order to get richer or have nicer things, and resisted the urge to buy a “dream house,” but still had a problem: We just couldn’t settle down.We made one short-term housing decision after another, moving house 19 times in 33 years, usually renting, and resisting all geographic and physical attachments. True, we were never disappointed by a house. But our adult kids now have to use GPS to find their parents. Having had greater stability earlier would be good for us now, because we would almost certainly know our neighbors and have more friends. The peripatetic life is a pretty lonely one.[Read: Find the place you love. Then move there.]Don’t let renting—and the ease of moving when you don't have to sell—prevent you from putting down roots. You need a strong network of people you can touch and see in real life. That’s the best way to make a happy home, whether or not you own it.

The Biden administration seems to have forgotten about Syria these days. The only moves it has made recently were responses to February’s devastating earthquake or a recent attack on U.S. troops by an apparent Iranian drone. The administration has abdicated diplomatic leadership to Moscow and is turning a blind eye as Gulf states welcome the Assad regime back into the diplomatic fold. Privately, many Biden officials tell me they just don’t see any good U.S. policy options.

Nonsense. There are several things that the U.S. government could and should do that could prevent the catastrophe in Syria from getting even worse. This week, in fact, dozens of former U.S. officials, experts and leaders of Syrian organizations sent President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken a long list of things the administration ought to be doing right now. The letter’s signatories also explain why it matters.

“None of the issues that caused the Syria conflict have been resolved, most notably Assad regime atrocities and inability, or refusal to reform,” the letter states. “Many of the conflict’s symptoms are worsening, from human suffering, industrial-scale drug trafficking, refugee flows, terrorism, geopolitical conflict and ethnic and sectarian hostilities.”

In other words, Washington is sorely mistaken if it thinks that allowing regional players to reestablish diplomatic and economic ties with Bashar al-Assad will lead to greater stability. As the authors write: “Syria’s crisis is complex, but unconditional regime normalization is not inevitable.”

The administration claims that its policy of opposing Assad’s normalization “remains unchanged.” But Syrians are not buying it. They say that recent statements by Biden officials amount to tacit approval to supposed U.S. partners who are warming to the Syrian dictator. For example, the State Department’s top Middle East official, Barbara Leaf, said on March 9, “Our basic message has been [that] if you’re going to engage with the regime, get something for that.”

On March 19, United Arab Emirates ruler Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan greeted Assad in Abu Dhabi with a 21-gun salute, particularly disturbing symbolism on the 12th anniversary of the Syrian uprising. There was no indication the UAE won any benefits for the Syrian people in return for the visit. The State Department declined to criticize the move.

“The Biden administration is failing the Syrian people,” said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a pro-opposition Syrian American aid group. “The danger of the Biden administration’s complacency and latent support for normalization with Assad is that it will invite other dictators to pursue the same policies.”

The State Department has largely ignored its most potent available tool for isolating Assad — namely, the Caesar Act, which authorized sanctions on anyone who aids the Syrian government. Their first and only use of these sanctions was this week, against drug traffickers. That’s a broken promise from Blinken, who said during the 2020 campaign that the Biden administration would fully implement the law. The leaders of both the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees wrote to Blinken last week to lament the “disappointingly slow pace of sanctions” under the Caesar Act.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, lamented the Biden administration’s lack of a comprehensive strategy for Syria and urged Biden and Blinken to take the experts’ list of recommendations seriously. They recommend increasing aid volume and access to liberated areas, intensifying diplomacy, resetting relations with Turkey, addressing the ISIS detainee crisis, and maintaining pressure on Assad to stop the ongoing atrocities while pursuing accountability.

Middle East Institute Senior Fellow Charles Lister, who helped organize the list sent to Biden and Blinken, told me that the signatories don’t expect the administration to suddenly decide to ramp up its Syria engagement. But it is wrong to say that there are no good options.

“It did not need to be this way,” Lister said. “Yes, the days of forcing the Assad regime out are long gone, but there are many other things we could still be doing to have a useful and productive effect for the United States and the Syrian people.”

It’s tempting for any U.S. administration to throw up its hands when it comes to Syria. But the current strategy of passive neglect is neither stable nor sustainable. If current trends continue, the Islamic State will revive, and tensions between Turkish-backed and Kurdish-backed forces in Northern Syria will spill over into more bloodshed. Iran and Russia will expand their influence. Millions of internally displaced Syrians will suffer, and millions of refugees will never return home. Gulf partners will continue to cozy up to China. Assad will continue to slaughter. And future mass murderers will learn that there is no accountability in store for them.

It is hard to imagine that Syria could get worse — but it can and it will if U.S. interest and involvement continue to wane. The Biden administration’s lack of strategy does not absolve it of responsibility for the coming consequences of its inaction.

In a sprawling discussion of Jewishness, Stephen Spielberg, and the arts, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and activist Tony Kushner entertained the audience at Sander Theatre from his very first response to an interviewer’s question.
Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities and a fellow Pulitzer honoree, opened Tuesday’s event, which was sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, by asking about Kushner’s relation to his Jewish identity.
“It depends which day of the week you ask,” the playwright responded, to laughter.
The 66-year-old then described growing up in a reformed Jewish family as a member of a very small Jewish community in Lake Charles, Louisiana, “none of whom for some reason had Southern accents.”
“Over the years, my identification as a Jew has deepened,” he said. “It’s an incredibly important part of who I am. I feel deeply indebted to Jewish ethical teaching, to Jewish notions of fairness and decency and responsibility. I love Jewish dialectics: the ethical mandate to not be a fundamentalist — to be a reader of text and an interpreter of texts.”
Recalling that “warm, vibrant” minority community of approximately 100, in a Louisiana city of approximately 60,000, he noted that the experience helped him come out at age 26.
“I felt I had a template for how to be a gay man derived entirely from the relationship I had to my Jewish identity,” he said. Although he experienced some anti-Semitism, he recalled, he had learned “it was their problem, not our problem, and we should be proud.”
His experience of anti-Semitism, he said, contributed to his screenplay for “The Fabelmans,” which is based on Spielberg’s childhood. “We’d both had a low-level experience of bullying from anti-Semitic bullies,” recalled Kushner. “He had one bully, I had two, so I asked to bring my two bullies in.”
“The Fabelmans,” Kushner’s fourth and most recent collaboration with the filmmaker, was a project that the two had discussed for years and which finally got underway following the death of Spielberg’s father in 2020 (his mother had died in 2017).
“That and lockdown made Stephen decide he wanted to work on this idea,” said Kushner. “I interviewed him for about two months, then I went away and renamed the characters and wrote it as a narrative. I’ve never written anything that fast.”
That reminiscence led Greenblatt to ask when, if ever, the playwright considers a project done. In the case of a film, Kushner explained, it’s simple: At some point the filmmaker “locks” the project and it is closed — nearly always. “I actually got him to reopen ‘Lincoln’ about four lines that he’d cut,” said Kushner about Spielberg. “I was right, too.”
His plays, by comparison, are never finished, he said. In fact, whenever his two-part Pulitzer- and Tony-winning “Angels in America” is restaged, “I get involved in rewrites,” he confessed. “Who’s going to stop me?” (“Angels in America, Part 1” will be presented at the Central Square Theater April 20-May 21.)

“It’s so rare that you encounter a work of art that it makes you feel unsafe. In the rare moments that you do, you should treasure it.”

The topic of theater and its relative openness led to discussion of problematic plays, like Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice.”
“Should it be banned?” asked Greenblatt.
“God, no,” responded Kushner. Acknowledging that Shakespeare “accepted many received ideas about Jewishness,” and noting that “it was written at a time when there were no Jews in England,” Kushner went on to describe the humanity that the playwright grants the Jewish character of Shylock, despite the use of stereotypes: “’Hath not a Jew eyes?’” he quoted. “That transcends prejudice.”
Art, he continued, should not be condemned for being “unsafe.” “It’s so rare that you encounter a work of art that it makes you feel unsafe,” he said. “In the rare moments that you do, you should treasure it.”
Recalling monumental performances by Fiona Shaw as Euripides’ murderous “Medea” and Brian Cox in the title role of Shakespeare’s disturbing “Titus Andronicus,” he described relishing the experience. “You watched a human being pushed to a point,” he said of Cox. Afterward, “the houselights came up and everyone just sat there. Nobody moved. It was the opposite of safe.”
This electrifying — and sometimes discomfiting — experience is “the deal that you make when you go into the theater, the deal that you make when you go to bed and you dream,” he said. “Medea is not really going to come off the stage and kill you.”
However, with art, particularly with live theater, “you get to see things that are unbearable and unimaginable and can’t be countenanced when you’re out in the world walking around. But in the dark …” He paused. “It’s one of the reasons that we have art.”
Rather than “protecting yourself from extremes of feeling,” he said, “it’s important to have those encounters.”
As the conversation progressed to take writing in languages other than English — the Yiddish in “Angels” or the Spanish Kushner used in his update of “West Side Story,” another Spielberg collaboration — the playwright dismissed the idea that viewers might get lost. “A great pleasure of art is the way it exercises our empathic power,” he said. “We listen on many, many levels and we remember on many, many levels, and if the playwright has done his job, you won’t be worried about it.
“Art gives us a chance to experience the stories and lives of people who are not like us.”
Kushner’s appearance constituted the Doft Lecture, the largest annual event presented by the Alan and Elisabeth Doft Lecture and Publication Fund.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekThis week, five planets are aligning in the night sky: Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will all be visible just after sunset, alongside the moon. I’d like to take this cosmic occasion to ask: What role has outer space played in your life, your worldview, or your imagination?Or: How, if at all, should we keep exploring it?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com Conversations of NoteHome Bittersweet HomeAmid news of another mass shooting this week, I found myself returning to Carl Sagan. In Cosmos, the astronomer and astrophysicist did his best to give readers a sense of the unfathomable:
No planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the Cosmos is mostly empty. The only typical place is within the vast, cold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seem achingly rare and lovely. If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion … Worlds are precious.
In Pale Blue Dot, he writes:
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Maybe we humans ought to spend more time in dark places gazing up at the night sky.The Shadow GovernmentIn Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, the writer Kerry Howley, an exceptional prose stylist, turns her attention to the world of state secrets––and lays bare many of its absurdities. Surely there is an argument for reform in this passage:
John Kiriakou, a CIA analyst based in Virginia, once wrote a paper about Iraqi nuclear weapons and sent it to the Department of Energy, which has its own classification system. As he pressed send, it became illegal for him to access the paper he had written; he did not have the clearance. Kiriakou wanted to tell the president, as the military was preparing to invade Iraq, that someone had had a nervous breakdown. “I knew he had had a nervous breakdown,” he told me at his kitchen table in Clarendon, “because I saw the original data, but I couldn’t tell anybody that he had a nervous breakdown, because it was so highly classified, so highly compartmentalized. I couldn’t put it in writing, because before it gets to the president, it goes through six other people, who wouldn’t be cleared for the information.” The president never found out; the information hit a dead end with Kiriakou.
Once, a report had come in suggesting that a high-placed Iraqi source was unreliable and unstable. Kiriakou thought the president needed to know, and Kiriakou knew the director of the CIA was about to meet with the president. But he couldn’t print out the information—it was too highly classified, there was no print option—or tell the director of the CIA’s assistant, who was not cleared, so he remembered the report as best he could, ran up to the director’s office, and told him. “Give me the report,” the director said. “I’m not going to remember that stuff.” Kiriakou said he couldn’t print it out. He repeated what he knew, from his memory, three times. The director then repeated what he could remember to the president. Anyone who has played telephone can see the problem, though in this case the original information was later revealed to be false. It’s hard to fact-check information when no one can see it.
“I could count on my two hands the times that I used my open telephone in those 15 years,” he told me, “because everything is classified, including the classified email system. So I want to meet my wife for lunch, so I send her an email. ‘You wanna meet for lunch?’ And I classify in secret note form. Why? Because everything is classified. Everything. Like I would have to stop and think, should I really make this unclassified? So eh, fuck it, I’m just gonna say secret note form. That’s what everybody does, for everything.”
The secret state reveals itself in its need for people with security clearance to sift through emails about inviting one’s wife to lunch. On clearedconnections.com, employers based in 47 states try to rustle up cleared candidates; at the time of writing, just one company, Northrop Grumman, had 2,250 job postings. In 2003, two million people had security clearance, approaching 1 percent of the population, which suggests less a security state than a caste system.
Brace Yourself for ChangeThat advice is implicit in the George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen’s recent commentary on the era in which we find ourselves:
In several of my books and many of my talks, I take great care to spell out just how special recent times have been, for most Americans at least. For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape: 1. American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans. 2. An absence of truly radical technological change.
Unless you are very old, old enough to have taken in some of WWII, or were drafted into Korea or Vietnam, probably those features describe your entire life as well.
In other words, virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history.”
Now, circa 2023, at least one of those assumptions is going to unravel, namely #2.  AI represents a truly major, transformational technological advance. Biomedicine might too, but for this post I’ll stick to the AI topic, as I wish to consider existential risk.
#1 might unravel soon as well, depending how Ukraine and Taiwan fare. It is fair to say we don’t know, nonetheless #1 also is under increasing strain. Hardly anyone you know, including yourself, is prepared to live in actual “moving” history. It will panic many of us, disorient the rest of us, and cause great upheavals in our fortunes, both good and bad. In my view the good will considerably outweigh the bad (at least from losing #2, not #1), but I do understand that the absolute quantity of the bad disruptions will be high.
Risk and RewardThe writer Freddie deBoer rages against substitutes for the risky endeavor of human connection:
Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when they’re gone. One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones. We all move in one direction or the other, from one day to another, certainly including me, but it feels to me as if our society is decidedly embracing the latter. Depth and intensity of feeling risk too much; Xbox and hard seltzer and HR culture anesthetize. Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality. Ask a TikTok megafan, someone who’s totally unapologetic and proud about their love of the service: what’s a TikTok that you still come back to, a year later, two years later, three? I think the honest answer is “none.” Because like so many other things in our culture, those videos are designed to be thrown away. They can’t hurt you, but they can’t move you. They’ll never challenge you, and they’ll never inspire you. All they’re meant to do is help you pass the seconds that make up your life, a finite and precious resource.
Provocation of the WeekWriting in Persuasion, Dr. Erica Anderson, a former president of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health and a former board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, weighs in on the conversation about recent reporting on transgender healthcare:
In recent months, I was quoted in The New York Times in a number of articles on topics including gender therapy, hormone treatments and parental rights. These articles were condemned in two highly publicized open letters … Having been quoted in the aforementioned pieces, and being steeped in the issues surrounding trans healthcare, I would like to offer my view on both. First, the accusations of bias and transphobia against journalists at the Times are unconvincing. Each of the journalists with whom I spoke (in some cases multiple times) stressed their intention to illuminate the complexities of the issues. Their motivation was to cover the issues with accuracy, clarity and compassion. They were clearly trying to understand all the nuances of the issues and stressed that they were talking to many people representing a diverse range of views. In each case we discussed the precise language to be used in the articles.
… Writing about these topics is extremely difficult. If one seeks to discuss the nuanced aspects of trans medical treatments, it is even more difficult. As recently as two years ago, many journalists admitted to me that they were afraid to cover transgender healthcare at all, let alone weigh in on the substance and particulars of the issues. In America it would seem that one is cast as either pro-trans or transphobic … This unwillingness to deal with nuance is hugely problematic … The truth is that nothing is binary about gender. In particular, a false narrative has emerged about one of the most contentious issues: the status of research on trans youth, and the rigor behind current guidelines.
Major medical organizations agree that gender affirming care for youth is necessary and appropriate. Some people have taken this to mean that all the issues surrounding such care are settled. But this is not the case. A recent British Medical Journal investigation notes that the research evidence for certain forms of care has come under question in several Western European countries—countries known to be progressive and motivated to help gender-questioning youth. A full systematic review by the Swedish health authority, for example, concluded that the evidence for medicines like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for youth is currently weak, and that the risks currently outweigh the benefits. Sweden’s health authority has updated their recommendations to severely curtail the use of puberty blockers for those under 18, pending further systematic study. They did not do this because they are transphobic: they did it because they are responsible. Meanwhile, a minority of overzealous practitioners in the United States have blurred activism with responsible professional conduct.
That’s all for today––I’ll see you next week.By submitting an email, you agree to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

In the centuries-long war between humans and cockroaches, the most bitter blow was dealt roughly 40 years ago. Tired of chasing after the pests with noxious sprays and bombs, researchers started to infuse their poisons with delicious flavors that could compel roaches to approach of their own accord, and then feast upon their own demise. The secret was sugar: Cockroaches, like us, simply couldn’t resist their sweet tooth.The advent of these baits “revolutionized pest control,” says Coby Schal, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. Manufacturers were sure that they had, after centuries of strife, gained a decisive upper hand. And victory was sweet.But not even a decade passed before the battlefield shifted once again. In the late 1980s, the manufacturers of Combat, a popular roach bait, received a perplexed call from a pest-control operator in Florida. He’d been planting Combat all over homes for years, but suddenly, it was failing to seduce German cockroaches to their deaths. One of the company’s researchers, Jules Silverman, plucked several roaches from a Gainesville apartment—and was flabbergasted to find that the insects were no longer tempted by Combat’s corn syrup and instead scuttled away in disgust.Silverman had stumbled upon an evolutionary accident. Lured irresistibly to sugar-laced poisons for years, most of the roaches in the apartment had died. But a few insects, born with an unusual set of genetic changes that rewired their sense of taste, were no longer attracted to the baits—and, unlike their sugar-addicted kin, lived long enough to pass their mutations on to their offspring. Populations of bait-snubbing cockroaches have since been discovered in other parts of the world, even as far away as Russia, each of them apparently evolving their aversion independently, Schal told me. Faced with saccharine death, roaches adapted at warp speed, turning a liability on its head—yet another reason why they remain some of our most persistent pests.[Read: Why you can’t keep cockroaches out of your home]Cockroaches’ aversion to sweetness came with costs. Meats, nuts, and super-complex starchy foods, such as beans, still taste mostly fine. But anything that contains a pure infusion of the simple sugar glucose, or that rapidly breaks down into it, registers to the mutant cockroaches as horrifically bitter, says Ayako Wada-Katsumata, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. That’s likely a problem for bugs in the sugar-addicted Western world, Schal said, because they “eat whatever we eat”—candy, pastries, and packaged snacks galore. “Imagine an infestation in a Dunkin’ Donuts,” Schal told me. Starved of low-carb options, the mutant roaches might struggle to eat enough. Wada-Katsumata and Schal haven’t done much work in doughnut shops. But their experiments in the lab do show that when baits are scarce and sugary foods flow free, the mutant cockroaches get rapidly outcompeted by their glucose-loving cousins.The Atkins-esque diet has taken a toll on German cockroaches’ sex lives too. Prior to Sugargate, the insects had a standard courtship protocol: Males extruded a fatty, sugary “nuptial gift” from a gland on their back to tempt prospective mates into a tryst. Chemically speaking, the secretion is “similar to chocolate,” with comparable allure, Wada-Katsumata told me. If tasty enough, the nuptial gift could coax lady roaches into sitting down for an extended snack—five, six, seven seconds, perhaps longer—enough time for her suitor to initiate an hour-plus-long mating embrace, at the end of which he would deliver a package of sperm.But the male’s precoital treat holds no appeal for sugar-loathing females. It’s chock-full of maltose, a type of sugar the female’s saliva rapidly converts to glucose. “So at first she is interested,” Wada-Katsumata told me. Within a couple of seconds, though, the taste turns foul—prompting her to skedaddle, her eggs still unfertilized. Weeks may pass before the female is ready to couple anew, if she ever becomes interested in trying again. “She learns that the courtship process is not good because of the bitter taste,” Wada-Katsumata said.[Read: This cyborg cockroach could save your life someday]This sounds, in theory, like “it should have been great for humans,” says Justa Heinen-Kay, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. And perhaps at first it was, as cockroaches were forced to navigate a “tug-of-war” between poison-survival and sex, says Jessica Ware, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Sugar-loving roaches were doomed to die in traps, while their keto-dieting kin perished without spawning another generation of pests.And yet, of course: Faced with this conundrum, cockroaches have tinkered with an evolutionary work-around. By studying lab-reared populations of German cockroaches, Wada-Katsumata and Schal have found that sugar-averse females seem to be producing saliva that’s less effective at converting maltose to glucose, making the taste of nuptial gifts less noxious—while still helping them steer clear of glucose-rich baits. Males have conjured up at least two adaptations to match. They’re tweaking the composition of their gift to contain less maltose in favor of a more complex sugar that’s tougher for roach saliva to break down. And they seem to be engaging the female faster after she begins to feed—as if steeling themselves against the possibility that “she’ll get grossed out and leave,” Heinen-Kay told me.All of that adds up, once again, to a losing stance for humans. Many of our tasty baits are turning obsolete—and the insects appear to be reproducing just fine. “It reminds us how quickly pests can adapt,” Ware told me, especially under immense pressure from us. This certainly isn’t the first time that our meddling has caused other animals to evolve rapidly over centuries or even just decades: Stripped of tree cover amid rampant deforestation, some of New Zealand’s stone flies jettisoned their ability to fly; under pressure from ivory poachers, elephants in Mozambique have begun to birth tuskless calves.[Read: African elephants evolved tusklessness amazingly fast]But the feats of German cockroaches are particularly notable for their speed and breadth, says Chow-Yang Lee, an urban entomologist at UC Riverside. And although other animals may eventually collide with the limits of their adaptive flexibility, cockroaches—already infamous for their ubiquity and near indestructibility—seem to be just warming up. That’s probably part of the reason these roaches are everywhere: on every continent save for Antarctica, ubiquitously plaguing us in and around our homes.Trap manufacturers haven’t yet given up on concocting baits to accommodate the insects’ new dietary quirks—fattier, saltier, or more savory ones may be available soon. But it may only be a matter of time before the roaches find the loopholes in those new lures too. Lee, who’s been studying the insects for decades, doesn’t dare underestimate their pluck. Among their kin, German cockroaches “are probably the most resilient of all,” he told me. “They overcome challenges over and over. You cannot help but have a lot of respect.”

In 2016, Brock Turner, a former swimmer at Stanford University, was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside of a fraternity party. Two passersby saw the nineteen-year-old freshman thrusting upon an immobile, partially unclothed woman, next to a dumpster, and restrained him while they called the police. At Turner’s sentencing hearing, the woman, known in court proceedings as Emily Doe, read a victim-impact statement that addressed him directly: “You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside of me, and that’s why we’re here today.” BuzzFeed published the entire statement, which went viral.

The Santa Clara County Superior Court judge, Aaron Persky, sentenced Turner to six months in jail, three years of probation, and lifetime sex-offender registration, saying that a longer prison term “would have a severe impact on him.” (The maximum sentence that Turner could have received was fourteen years in prison.) The leniency of the sentence, along with Doe’s viral statement, ignited widespread fury. Soon afterward, Michele Dauber, a professor at Stanford Law School, launched a campaign to remove Persky, an elected trial judge, from his job, through a recall election.

No attempt to recall a trial judge had even made it on the ballot anywhere in the country since 1982, and no California judge had been recalled since 1932. But the emergence of the #MeToo movement spelled doom for Judge Persky. He was successfully recalled, in 2018, by a wide margin. Dauber said, at the time, “We voted that sexual violence, including campus sexual violence, must be taken seriously by our elected officials, and by the justice system.” The precepts of Black Lives Matter, too, seemed to support the campaign, insofar as mercy shown to a privileged, white male Stanford student appeared to be an instance of racially disparate treatment. As Dauber wrote in the Washington Post, “It is the very fact that judges like Persky often exercise ‘discretion’ in favor of defendants like Brock Turner that preserves a system in which poor and minority defendants receive long sentences.” In an e-mail to me, Dauber added, “The fact that Turner’s victim was an Asian-American woman of color made refuting the Persky campaign’s spreading of rape myths and falsehoods even more important, given that research indicates survivors of color may be less likely to be believed.”

The anti-Persky campaign also drew liberal critics, who anticipated that a movement to remove a judge for being insufficiently punitive in a criminal case would bring troubling unintended consequences. The retired judge LaDoris Cordell, a feminist who, in the nineteen-eighties, became the first Black woman judge appointed in Northern California and, later, an elected superior-court judge in the same county as Persky, participated in a campaign against the recall. She said, at the time, “I’m opposed to it because I believe this recall is terrible for racial justice.” She and others believed that it would make judges less independent and, in particular, more afraid to be lenient. Such reluctance would breed more punitiveness and harm Black and Latino defendants, who are severely overrepresented in the criminal-justice system.

That debate inspired two political scientists, Sanford C. Gordon of New York University and Sidak Yntiso of the University of Chicago, to study the impact of the Persky-recall campaign on criminal sentencing. They set out to determine whether the recall campaign changed judges’ behavior, and how it affected racial disparities in the sentences that judges imposed. This past October, the two scholars published their study, which relied on data from nearly twenty thousand sentences issued by more than a hundred and fifty California judges, between 2015 and 2018. They found that, immediately after the public announcement of the Persky-recall campaign, judges began imposing sentences that were roughly thirty per cent longer on average, across the board. Those increases maintained preëxisting racial disparities. In other words, even though the Persky-recall campaign aimed to raise consciousness about white privilege, the additional years in prison were disproportionately imposed on Black and Hispanic people. And, even though the campaign focussed on sexual assault, the study found that the increased sentence lengths were primarily driven by nonsexual crimes, and possibly by nonviolent crimes.

These findings lend support to a sober new documentary, “The Recall: Reframed,” by Rebecca Richman Cohen, which aired on MSNBC on March 19th, and is streaming on NBC. It takes a critical look at the Persky recall, through the lens of mass incarceration. Richman Cohen, who teaches at Harvard Law School, began researching and shooting “The Recall: Reframed” before the pandemic, but she told me that the racial-justice uprisings of 2020 “opened the doors to having a much more nuanced conversation”—one that would not necessarily pit advocacy for sexual-assault survivors against the movement to end mass incarceration. “It really made space to see how you could care deeply about both of those things and frame them in a way where they didn’t work against one another,” she said.

Richman Cohen’s film features interviews with prominent opponents of the recall, including Cordell, who says that she realized, at the time of the campaign, that “the community, the public, the media” were “being misled, and those of us who know this need to speak out.” The public narrative of those advocating for Persky’s removal—that he had a pattern of giving light sentences in cases of violence against women—was built on five “cherry-picked” cases, out of hundreds, over ten years, Cordell argues. But, in her e-mail, Dauber wrote, “A disturbing number of Persky’s cases show poor judgment in matters involving gender-based violence, particularly when the perpetrators were college athletes.” She pointed out that, in one case, Persky agreed to delay sentencing for a defendant convicted of felony domestic violence so that he could play football at the University of Hawaii; in another, involving an alleged gang rape by members of the De Anza College baseball team, Persky allowed images of the alleged victim at a party months later in sexually provocative poses.

Even though Santa Clara County prosecutors had advocated for Turner to receive a longer sentence, they also chose not to appeal, because they believed that Persky had been fair in his rulings at trial, and had used his sentencing discretion lawfully and consistently with what the probation department had recommended. Those prosecutors appear in the documentary as opponents of the recall, on the ground of judicial independence. Alaleh Kianerci, the prosecutor who secured Turner’s conviction, notes, “If we were to recall every judge we disagree with, we would have no judges.” Jeff Rosen, the district attorney, asks, “What if that judge is deciding whether these abortion regulations are lawful, and the judge is in a place where a lot of people don’t like abortion?” He explains that we wouldn’t want the judge to say, “I know what people here think, so I’m going to do what they want.”

Rosen appeared in a campaign ad against Persky’s recall, but, in 2016, he also used the notoriety of Turner’s sentencing to successfully advocate for mandatory minimum prison sentences for defendants convicted of sexual assault. A California state lawmaker who sponsored the bill told the Times that “it took the lax sentence in the Brock Turner case that drew international scorn to get this done.” If that law had been in place when Turner was sentenced, he would have received a minimum of three years in prison. On the same day as the mandatory-minimum law, the state legislature also passed a statute expanding the definition of rape. Under that law, Turner’s assault of the victim, which involved digital penetration, could have been considered rape. (Notably, Dauber, who led the anti-Persky recall campaign, did not support the mandatory-minimum legislation. Dauber told me that she “felt that tying the hands of all California judges in response to the bias of one judge was wrong,” especially “given the research showing the relationship between mandatory minimums and mass incarceration.”)

correction An earlier version of this column misspelled Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese version of TikTok. This version has been updated. Critics of last week’s congressional hearing with TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew complained that it produced no new information. The witness was evasive and the lawmakers, ill-informed. True enough. But a separate hearing on Capitol Hill that day did provide useful testimony about the dangers of the Chinese social media platform.

At a meeting of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on the subject of the ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims, Uyghurs with firsthand experience of Chinese technological repression testified about how TikTok and its parent company ByteDance pose a threat to Americans’ national security, privacy and human rights. Indeed, TikTok and ByteDance came up several times during this hearing because, as witnesses explained, the two issues are linked.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the committee chairman, pointed out that Chew, during his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had declined four times to acknowledge that the Chinese government is persecuting Uyghurs. To some, Chew’s evasion might have seemed to be an innocent attempt to avoid wading into a controversial matter.

But Nury Turkel, a Uyghur American lawyer who chairs the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, argued to the China committee that TikTok and ByteDance don’t criticize the Chinese government’s abuse of the Uyghurs because they are complicit.

“ByteDance has a strategic partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. That is part of their business conduct,” Turkel said. “This is what they do.”

For Uyghurs, ByteDance’s danger is not hypothetical. When Chinese authorities initially built the surveillance and monitoring system in Xinjiang that preceded the re-education camps, they relied on data from Chinese tech platforms including WeChat and Douyin, ByteDance’s local TikTok version.

Turkel also refuted Chew’s testimony that TikTok would never honor requests from any government to hand over user data or allow any government to direct its moderation. In China, tech companies work toward CCP objectives without being asked, he said, and Chinese business executives who don’t toe the party line quickly disappear or worse.

Editorial Board counterpoint A TikTok ban might be a win for China. There’s a better way. ByteDance has had a Chinese Communist Party committee housed inside its corporate bureaucracy since 2017, as part of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to crack down on the independence of private tech companies. In 2018, after being scolded by the party, ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming publicly pledged that his company would work to promote the party’s interests and its propaganda.

Hundreds of ByteDance employees have come from Chinese state media, including dozens of TikTok employees. When ByteDance began its formal relationship with the police in China, it pledged to promote their “influence and credibility” through its China-based apps, including Douyin. ByteDance has been repeatedly caught exporting this censorship via its U.S. apps as well.

Leaked company documents from 2019 revealed instructions for TikTok moderators to censor content related to Tibet, Tiananmen Square and other topics the Beijing government deems sensitive. Last year, former employees of the now-defunct ByteDance-owned news app TopBuzz claimed the app had for years promoted pro-CCP content to influence U.S. public opinion.

Turkel said Chew’s equating TikTok’s practices with those of American social media companies doesn’t hold water because U.S. firms don’t work on behalf of a foreign government that has a record of stealing Americans’ data. “People argue that our social media companies do it as well, but that’s for a commercial purpose,” he said. “[TikTok] is a spying tool for the Chinese state.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) asked Turkel whether he agreed with TikTok’s chief operating officer when he said that U.S. criticism of TikTok felt “rooted in xenophobia.” Turkel noted that the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy to counter critics of its human rights abuses is to falsely accuse them of racism.

It shouldn’t be surprising that TikTok’s CEO would not admit the threat his app poses to Americans. Nor that the Energy and Commerce Committee didn’t understand the nuances of how the Chinese government and its tech companies work together. This is why the China committee was created.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the China committee, said at the hearing, “Chinese high-tech companies work closely with Chinese officials to impose a pervasive and high-tech surveillance system that has been called an open-air prison. It matters for us because China’s tech tools are being exported around the world.”

Last week, the Chinese government undermined Chew’s assertion that ByteDance is independent by announcing that it would not permit the company to sell TikTok to U.S. interests. The platform’s claims to be immune from malign party influence are also well refuted by the testimony of Uyghurs and other victims of China’s repression, who deserve more of the world’s attention.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.   Earlier this month, a brand-new Ford Mustang rolled into my driveway and hummed itself to a halt. The scene was a straight shot of Americana concentrate: The dirt crunched beneath the car’s tires; the sun glinted off the red paint on its aptly equine-esque snout, helping it easily outshine every other vehicle on the block. Then the front driver’s-side door opened, and out emerged not a middle-aged man who’d bought into the brand’s bid to be “cool, clever, and tough,” but instead … me.Me, with my herbal tea and cat-fur-covered Patagonia backpack, my wallet full of Trader Joe’s receipts. Me, an Asian American woman in her 30s who hates roller coasters, who’s never finished an entire serving of beer, and whose ideal car for the past two decades has been a Toyota Prius. “You are the last person I would expect to buy a Mustang,” one of my colleagues told me after recovering from a laughing fit.I do have an explanation for this discrepancy, and it’s not one that die-hard Mustang fans will necessarily like. My new car is a Mustang—it’s just a Mustang Mach-E. It runs on electricity, and the motor, rather than the brand, is the main reason I, and so many others like me, are now in the driver’s seat. Which means that nowadays, when a Mustang pulls up, “you just have no idea who’s coming out of that car,” says Kashef Majid, a marketing expert at the University of Mary Washington, in Virginia. Classically branded electric vehicles are undergoing a battery-powered identity crisis that’s changing not just their engines, but potentially their passengers too.[Read: Bring on the boring EVs]A mere two decades ago, when a new class of hybrids were being bought up by people who were sort of, well, crunchy, electrification seemed antithetical to flash. Those cars appealed primarily to people who prioritized minimizing pollution over maximizing acceleration, says Nathan Wyeth, a clean-energy expert who previously worked on EV adoption. Their fully electrified successors inherited the hippie hype. Early commercials for the Nissan Leaf, which debuted in 2010, featured bummed-out polar bears hugging car owners in gratitude for their planet-saving choice. And as innovative as the vehicle was, the Leaf was hardly the sort of car you’d spot trying to outgun every other vehicle on the highway just because it could.EVs since have upgraded their rep, thanks in large part to Tesla’s massive push into the market about 15 years ago, on the strength of the cars’ luxury-caliber acceleration and sleek, sporty look. Aficionados began to get behind battery-powered vehicles in ways they hadn’t before; reviewers began to note just how “alarming” it was “to jam the accelerator of such a big car and have it surge forward so quickly and so quietly,” without spending even “a lick of gasoline.” Nowadays, the street cred of some EVs is arguably on par with that of their less climate-friendly kin. Several of the world’s fastest-accelerating cars run on ions alongside, or in lieu of, gas; several of this year’s Super Bowl ads crowed about just how rugged, sexy, and downright fun battery-powered cars can get. A good chunk of the EVs could now be called muscle cars, as long as you’re okay with a pretty quiet flex.As the perks of EVs have expanded, so has their consumer base. Buyers are still largely white, educated, and well-off. But some stats have budged: Alan Jenn, a researcher at the Plug-in Hybrid and Electric Vehicle group of UC Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies, told me that the first wave of EV buyers was about 90 percent men; more than a decade later, the proportion is roughly 75 percent. And the socioeconomic brackets investing in EVs seem to be expanding too, as average prices continue to drop.[Read: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]The sway of electrification even seems powerful enough to be breaking brand stereotypes. Ford’s electrification of the Mustang was a fascinating gamble, Kelly Fleming of the Institute for Transportation Decarbonization told me. The car is very obviously nothing like its gas-guzzling predecessors, and not just because of its power source. Put it side by side with a conventional Mustang, and apart from the galloping-pony logo, the two bear hardly any resemblance. When the first version of the model debuted a few years ago, there was a serious bit of blowback. The Mach-E, many traditionalists insisted, was not a real Mustang.I suppose I can’t blame them. A crossover as long and girthy as your average SUV, the Mach-E comes with four doors, a hatchback, and tons of cargo space; you could make a pretty compelling argument that it’s more family-friendly than flashy and fierce, as Mustangs are supposed to be. Reviewers have, since the model was announced in 2019, called its ’Stang branding heresy; it’s just not wild, temperamental, or, frankly, impractical enough. One aficionado described the experience of driving the Mach-E as “about as exhilarating as shopping for chest freezers.” My car doesn’t even emit the brand’s characteristic gas-powered vroom vroom when I rev it. At best, it whimpers out an ionized whoosh whoosh.Still, the Mustang makeover does raise existential questions about what a brand is supposed to do when the circumstances in which it operates begins to rapidly shift gears. Brands are identities, designed to attract and deliver consistently to a specific consumer base. But as the planet changes, its technology is getting a necessary makeover too—along with some people’s purchasing priorities. The Mach-E sure isn’t attracting only the Mustang’s stereotypical audience of yore: “me,” as my older, white, male Ford dealer put it. Ford, which didn’t respond to a request for comment, might argue that’s part of the point. The brand isn’t hurting for new customers right now. And several experts pointed out that there are some decades-long Mustang fans who have enthusiastically ponied up (sorry) for this model.I, honestly, ended up with a Mustang on a close-to-last-minute whim. My partner and I wanted a new car, and we wanted it to be an EV. But many of the models we initially considered—a Chevy Bolt, a Hyundai Ioniq 6—were too small or too boxy to suit our needs or taste. A Tesla was off the table: “I’d rather die,” my spouse explained flatly, and that was that. We looked at Ford’s inventory next and found a Mach-E available only a few miles from our new house—et voilà. We could drive it home that day. It’s a bit of a zany thought, considering that in decades past a specific kind of person tended to land a Mustang as a deliberate choice, not because it just happened to be what was on the lot.Jenn, who’s also a new Mach-E owner, admitted that a nearly identical story got him his Mustang. “It was an availability thing,” he told me. “I had Hondas and Nissans before that.” That’s simply the EV market right now, especially with the IRS’s tax credit continuing to grease people’s car-buying wheels. When supply gets low, people sometimes have to break brand loyalties. There are others out there like us, buying electrified versions of classic brands more for the E part of the name than the Mustang.To be clear, I do really like my new car. It’s the nicest vehicle I’ve ever owned—fast, sleek, and safe. And “any car that accelerates quickly, silently, and totally smoothly is just a great drive,” Wyeth told me. The Mach-E, in particular, comes with top-of-the-line trim, snazzy features, and plenty of vigor and vim; it is nowhere close to fully shedding the Mustang cool. And for all the fussing and squabbling about ’Stang authenticity, the Mach-E’s popularity is proof positive that Ford’s gamble worked. Not all brands, even within the Ford family, took the same tack: The F-150 Lightning, Fleming noted, is a much closer remake of its gas-powered predecessors. “You can’t quite tell that it’s electric, unless you really know what an F-150 looks like,” she told me. But perhaps that’s part of the point. In radically departing from its lineage, the Mach-E is refusing to be ignored—acting just as a Mustang might, by announcing that it is not a typical Mustang at all.It’s possible that a few years from now, all Mustangs will be electrified. Maybe they’ll be the new Volvos or Subarus, a safe and suburb-ish choice overflowing with 2.5 kids and a tangled mess of soccer gear. Or maybe not. The face of the Mustang might be changing, but I’m not sure that the Mustang is changing me. We’ll be keeping the Mach-E, but I’m still hoping to eventually replace our other car, an old-school gas-guzzling Ford Focus, with a hybrid Toyota—something much more my speed.

I recently rose from a slumber to discover that many of the learned had risen up to declare the U.S. war in Iraq not only a failure but also a misbegotten undertaking that no person of minimal intellect would have undertaken. There are two dangers in this view. The first is that there is a class of warriors who went into harm’s way and now carry the bitterness of the dead. The second is the bitterness of those who didn’t go into battle yet held fragments of knowledge, enough to mislead.

Obviously, all have a right to discourse, but judging anything as complex as wars mere decades after they were fought risks misunderstanding and rubbishing those who were there. The war’s veterans can distort the facts too, but they are owed the benefit of the doubt that they were not fools and that their memory carries with it a measure of truth. I have children who fought in Iraq. They have the right to be bitter if they choose. Those who judge a war whose real truth will not be known for centuries – and even then it will be debated – are peering into the dark.

If these lines sound bitter, they are not meant to be. I wrote a book as the war was intensifying, fully aware that my children would carry the burden of casual thought. I want to begin by quoting from that book, something always in bad taste but important to understand the necessity of the war:

On the morning of September 11, 2001, special operations units of the international jihadist group Al Qaeda struck the United States. In a classic opening attack, they struck simultaneously at the political, military, and financial centers of the United States. The attack on the political centers failed entirely when the aircraft assigned to that mission crashed prematurely in Pennsylvania. The attack on the military center was only partially successful. The aircraft assigned to that target crashed into a section of the Pentagon that had been modernized with fire-resistant materials, which effectively contained the explosion. The planes assigned to attack the U.S. financial center succeeded completely, not only destroying the World Trade Center towers but closing down the financial markets for several days and disrupting the U.S. economy.

The nineteen men who carried out the mission were capable operatives. Their achievement was not taking control of four airliners simultaneously, although that was not a trivial accomplishment. Rather, it was planning, training, and deploying for the operation without ever being detected by American intelligence – or, more precisely, acting in such a way that in spite of inevitable detection, the data never congealed into actionable intelligence. While their military capabilities were enormously inferior to those of the United States – they had to steal an air force – their skills at covert operations were superb.

A major asset of al-Qaida was that it possessed a highly dispersed force that enabled it to group and regroup. It had demonstrated the ability to operate globally while maintaining political relations in a fixed position. Al-Qaida had political operations in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and as far east as Southeast Asia. It operated throughout these areas, growing its regional influence and maintaining a capability to operate widely. The attack on the United States demonstrated the ability to operate in many environments. Most important, al-Qaida could disperse while maintaining offensive power.

Al-Qaida therefore posed multiple threats in multiple regions. It could strike covertly as in the United States while maintaining regional bonds in Afghanistan and exploring the Pacific. Its force was so highly dispersed that its ability to strike would outrun even U.S. intelligence, which was focused on operational threats. Al-Qaida was focused on maintaining a wide range of options without providing relations and resources that could be neutralized. It was precisely this capability that enabled al-Qaida to operate covertly in the United States and kill 3,000 people without putting the group’s core at risk.

This was a force that could not be rapidly defeated. Nor could it be negotiated with or even located for negotiations. There was no political option or opportunity to divide the force. And the possibility to penetrate it was an illusion.

At the same time, the United States could not accept the status quo. Al-Qaida had demonstrated its capabilities, and there was no reason it would not strike again. Lacking political solutions, Washington’s only option was a military strike – a broad and diffuse campaign designed to fragment al-Qaida. That meant U.S. operations on a nearly global basis, from Saudi Arabia to Myanmar.

This could not be a conventional war for three reasons. First, the enemy had no center of gravity. Second, the attacking force had to disperse. Third, the normal logic of intelligence did not apply. Following 9/11 with meticulously targeted attacks against al-Qaida was not an option, as the intelligence did not exist. Al-Qaida was hidden even within the United States, had no center, and was seen as relentless in its hostility and ability to strike.

Invading Afghanistan and Iraq was the only practical option if the goal was to cripple a very capable enemy. The U.S. launched broad attacks in multiple countries. This could provoke hostility, but there was no better option. It was an unconventional counteroffensive, and this is what its critics dislike, but they offer no clear alternative. After 9/11, the threat was simply too great. The strategy was worldwide disruption. It was not pretty, but it worked. There were no other large-scale attacks on the U.S. homeland.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” All right. Before we start today, we are taking questions for the upcoming “Ask Me Anything” episode. So if you’ve got anything, anything at all to ask me that you want to hear answered on the show, send that into ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. We are accepting questions until Sunday, April 2. So anything that comes in after that, we’re not going to consider. We just get a lot. And we got to start sorting through it. So send it in before Sunday, April 2, if you want it to be part of the show. Speaking of dates, I’m recording this on Monday, March 27. And it’s a Monday with a lot of uncertainty. We don’t yet know what is going to happen with the case against Donald Trump in Manhattan, the case around the Stormy Daniels hush money payments. It is possible Donald Trump could be charged with a felony, with a misdemeanor, with nothing. It’s also not the only case against Donald Trump. There’s a case in Georgia that is around election subversion. There are different investigations opened by the Department of Justice, again, around Jan. 6 and the election and then also around classified documents. There’s quite a lot of legal risk around Donald Trump right now. And where there is legal risk, there’s political risk. There’s risk of violence, the risk of damage to our institutions either because they do hold Donald Trump accountable or because they don’t. Donald Trump forces the political system constantly in two profoundly challenging positions that don’t really have good answers — that really, really don’t have good answers. That is part of the danger he poses. But also part of the danger — and we talk about this today — that his movement poses, that the kind of politics that he doesn’t just practice but that he is rewarded for, that is wanted so badly by the people who support him that others in the Republican Party now ape it, that is also — maybe that is centrally where the risk comes from. And so the question at the moment is how to balance all these different kinds of risks and questions and cases. And my colleague David French, at New York Times Opinion, has been thinking quite a bit about how to do just that. David is a lawyer. He’s done a lot of cases in free speech and religious rights areas. He is a longtime conservative commentator. And he has been trying to parse the legal merits of the cases against Donald Trump, the political questions around them, and the ways institutions should or should not think about moving forward. And also, as you’ll hear, the ways the Republican Party has collapsed as a safeguard of these institutions and is a force that enables them to make the decisions they need to make. So we talk about all that here. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. David French, now of The New York Times, the first time we’ve done this since then. Welcome to the show.

david french

Well, thank you. It is the first time, isn’t it?

ezra klein

Yeah.

It’s an honor to be your colleague.

ezra klein

It’s a whole new relationship. But it’s a good time to have you here. Because we have a bunch of Donald Trump legal questions. And so I wanted to start with this. From the outside, as a non-lawyer, the Stormy Daniels case feels pretty clean. You have Michael Cohen. He paid off Stormy Daniels. We know that. We know Trump reimbursed Michael Cohen. We know Cohen got prosecuted and actually went to jail for that. And so I’m a simple child. It seems like Trump should, too. So why do you and many others consider the case weak and in some ways unusual?

Yeah, it’s complicated. And it’s complicated because of where the different cases have been. OK. So you’re correct that the Stormy Daniels hush money piece of this is really pretty clean. You had Michael Cohen pay Stormy Daniels $130,000. He has reimbursed for that, plus some additional money on top of that. And it’s all mischaracterized. This is not classified in the business records as hush money for porn star. This is all mischaracterized. And that’s pretty neat and clean falsification of business records. OK? Problem: One is not really a problem. It’s a misdemeanor. So it’s not a big crime. But certainly, you shouldn’t give Trump any favors and refuse to indict him for misdemeanor when you would indict anybody else. I’m a big believer that a president is not nobility. They’re just a citizen like you and I. And if citizen Trump would be indicted for this, then former President Trump should be indicted for this. But there’s a two-year statute of limitations. So it’s a misdemeanor with a two year statute of limitations. Arguably, and we can get into this, arguably, that has expired. So how do you continue to make the Stormy Daniels case an issue? Well, New York law says that if you commit this misdemeanor of falsification of records in furtherance of another crime, then it’s a felony. And it’s got a five-year statute of limitations. So then the question is what is the other crime this hush money payment was in furtherance of. Now to be super clear, as of the time of the taping of this podcast, we haven’t seen an indictment. So everything that’s going to follow here is what I would call informed speculation. The prosecutor could surprise us. But the informed speculation is that the other crime is a federal campaign finance law violation, the very violation that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to and that landed him in federal prison, which was an unlawful campaign contribution and Trump directing an unlawful campaign contribution. So you might be saying, well, wait a minute, David. Why is this any kind of a stretch? Because Michael Cohen pled guilty to this and he went to jail for it. Well, the problem is what we’re talking about is prosecuting a federal — tying a state misdemeanor to a federal felony that was never prosecuted by the feds. So neither the Trump D.O.J. nor the Biden D.O.J. brought this prosecution. We could talk about why that might be. We don’t know for sure. But I can tell you there was a tremendous amount of controversy in the legal world around the Michael Cohen guilty plea. Because the question was did he actually plead guilty to something that was really and truly a crime? There’s a lot of argument over the Stormy Daniels hush money payment, how it interrelates with federal election law, and whether or not that was actually an illegal campaign contribution or just the same kind of money that somebody would spend, who’s a billionaire, or $100 millionaire, or whatever he is, that somebody would spend when they’re trying to conceal negative information from their family. And so there was a big argument over whether this was a federal crime to begin with. John Edwards had been prosecuted for something remarkably similar. But the prosecution failed with a hung jury. The case was not retried. So it’s a local district attorney prosecuting a state-level misdemeanor, potentially tying that to a federal felony that was never prosecuted by the federal government. So that’s why a lot of folks look at this — and me included — and say that’s a bit of a reach.

ezra klein

So you mentioned in your columns when thinking about this that there are sort of two opposing forces for you. One is, if you committed a crime, you should pay for the crime. And the other is a legal principle called lenity. Can you explain what lenity is?

Yeah, so the rule of lenity — and this is something that’s actually been talked about pretty recently at the Supreme Court — is essentially a rule that says wait a minute. If there is ambiguity in a statute, if the meaning is hazy and we’re talking about a criminal prosecution, then when the meaning is hazy, when there’s ambiguity in interpretation, then you shouldn’t bring the case. That when a person’s liberty is at stake, as it is in a criminal prosecution, you should prosecute people when statutes are clear and legal obligations are clear. When statutes are not clear, the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of the defendant. And then there’s also the equitable principle on the other side that says, hey, equal justice. And there was a good piece in The Times before I wrote my piece saying hey, it’s really unjust to throw someone in jail for committing a crime at the direction of another person, that’s Cohen and the payoff scheme with Stormy Daniels, and not prosecute the person who directed the scheme. That seems strange. And I completely agree. But that goes to the question of why didn’t the federal government pursue those charges?

ezra klein

Well, one suspicion many people have gets at this other category of risk, which is not that the jury wouldn’t agree with the prosecutor, but that political risk is real. And you’ll hear the argument, basically, that it would be politically combustible to prosecute Donald Trump for crimes. He himself has said there will be violence. And prosecutors do exercise discretion on what cases, they do and don’t bring. That happens routinely. The idea that everybody gets prosecuted for every law they break is not accurate. And so even if Trump did commit the crime here, it’s just not in the national interest to prosecute. And that’s not a crazy thing for prosecutors to weigh. And maybe that is — we don’t know. But maybe that is what the D.O.J., at least under Biden, decided. How do you think about the arguments for weighing political risk?

Yeah, that’s a very good question. And I’m kind of a hard liner on this, Ezra. My view is it is not the role of the prosecutor to weigh the political risk. So the prosecutor might be weighing such things as what is my law enforcement priority to bring peace to the street. So for example, a classic exercise of prosecutorial discretion is our emphasis this year is going to be on prosecuting gun crimes. But that’s a classic, sort of strategic law enforcement decision made often in communication with political leaders about allocating limited law enforcement resources. What is not typical for a prosecutor, and what I would say we do not want prosecutors doing, is saying if I prosecute this case, it creates a massive political problem. Or if I prosecute this case, it could lead to unrest in the streets, which gives sort of a mob the veto power over the rule of law. In actuality, the federal Constitution and most state constitutions — not all of them, but most — they do provide for a political process on prosecutions. And that’s the pardon power — or clemency. And so that the head of the executive branch, and this is a holdover from colonial times and our royal British heritage, that one of the last vestiges of royalty is this absolute pardon power that exists with the president. And so the way this should work in my view, Ezra, is the prosecutor brings cases based on the facts and the law and the prosecutorial priorities of the office. The political branch, through the president and its pardon power, a governor with pardons and clemency — the president can trump that for political reasons. But that’s not the prosecutor’s job. And the classic example of this is, of course, the grand jury that was moving towards indicting Richard Nixon. And Gerald Ford stepped in and pardoned Nixon. Extremely controversial that he did that, and I think that in hindsight there’s maybe a lot more reasons why it’s a mistake than proper. But that’s the way the system is supposed to work. The justice system was moving in one direction. And then the president intervened, using his constitutional authority to make that political determination.

ezra klein

I want to pick up that question of hindsight. My view is that Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Nixon, it created the belief in our political system, I’d maybe even say the precedent, that we shouldn’t prosecute former presidents even when they have committed crimes because it would be too hard on the country. Right, the famous “our long national nightmare is over” quote. Do you think that pardon was wrong in the sense that it damaged our political and legal culture, that it created the expectation that presidents are indeed above the law?

That’s a really good question. And I’m going to admit that I’m torn. And I used not to be torn. And the reason why I wasn’t torn is I thought that the fallout from Watergate, where you did have both congressional elections, presidential election where there was a public rebuke of the corruption that existed in the Republican Party at that time, a number of post-Watergate reforms — it seemed as if the political system worked in a way to rebuke a corrupt president, to create reforms to minimize the chances of future corruption. But what we have seen since Watergate has caused me to doubt those conclusions that I reached earlier in my adult life. Because it is absolutely the case that the combination of increasing polarization and failures of two separate, in my view, completely merited impeachments during the Trump era, has demonstrated that the system, the political system for holding presidents accountable for misconduct, has broken. It has just broken. And so then you’re left with the legal system, which holds — everyone can hold everyone else in America accountable. And in fact, if you look at American history, we’ve prosecuted a former vice president. We’ve prosecuted federal judges. We’ve prosecuted members of Congress. We’ve prosecuted governors of states. And the system has held. It’s been healthy for our system. There’s no reason to believe that we can’t prosecute a former president.

ezra klein

And it’s interesting. Because I don’t want to say we’re an outlier. But you certainly see comparative examples internationally that work the opposite way. I was struck when J.D. Vance and some other Republicans have been saying that it would be a third world country descent for us to prosecute a former president. But it just happened in Israel, which obviously is now undergoing a lot of tumult around that. It happens in South Korea. It happens in France. Nicolas Sarkozy has been actually sentenced to prison, although he’s appealing that right now. How do you understand the international precedent here? We actually do have a lot of examples where national leaders get prosecuted, in some cases, even sent to prison. And systems continue on, sometimes even get re-elected later, which is always striking to me. But how do you think about that international dimension?

The argument using the international example is, to use a legal term, presuming facts not in evidence. So in other words, what they’re presuming when they’re making this argument, that the idea that a former president can be prosecuted, specifically, Donald Trump, what they’re presuming is that the system is broken and that the evidence that it is broken is the prosecution of a former president. And they’re getting that completely wrong. There are certainly broken legal systems where political losers are prosecuted routinely. We’ve seen this in authoritarian countries. But the evidence that the American legal system is so fundamentally broken is missing. In fact, of the three branches that have been through the Trump years, I would argue that the judicial branch in many ways weathered it the best in part because it was the judicial branch, both Democratic and Republican nominated judges and justices, who blocked the election steal effort at every turn. Now I understand that there might be many listeners who will point to this or that decision by more conservative courts and say that’s bad and wrong. But if you’re talking about the preservation of the system itself, the Judiciary shined during the 2020 election challenges. And there’s no indication right now that the Judiciary is not up to the task of resolving a criminal complaint against a former president.

ezra klein

So one thing I’ve heard just in my own life from people is a sense that Donald Trump was responsible for misdeeds that were so grave that even to people who quite dislike him, the idea that you’re going to get them on this Stormy Daniels hush money thing feels off to them. And I’m not claiming that as a legal point. But one thing it brings up is that there are other cases pending against Trump. There are actually a lot of them. The organization Just Security counts 23 separate civil and criminal lawsuits against him. And the one I think getting the most attention from a lot of legal scholars I trust, that people seem to think is the strongest, that I believe you think is the strongest and is most related to the misdeed that was most grave is in Georgia. So tell me a bit about that case.

Yeah. I am of the belief that the Georgia case is the strongest case based on what we know publicly. So let’s just caveat that. Based on what we know publicly, it’s the strongest case. And the reason why it’s strong is because the marriage between the law and the facts is so tight. So Georgia, for example, and I’m not pretending that this is the only sort of evidence that’s applicable, but Georgia, for example prohibits criminal solicitation to commit election fraud. In other words, just the effort to try to induce someone to commit election fraud is criminalized in Georgia. And it’s a quite clear statute. There’s not much that’s ambiguous about it at all. So what’s the evidence? Now if you remember, there was a recorded phone call between Donald Trump and the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. And the key part of that call, he asks them to find — the Georgia Secretary of State’s office — about 11,780 votes, roughly 12,000 votes to overcome the deficit in Georgia. He then talks about how there is legal risk to the Georgia Secretary of State if he doesn’t do this, that there could be law enforcement action undertaken against the Georgia Secretary of State if he doesn’t find the votes. There’s nothing subtle about it. That’s your inducement there. That’s what separates this from hey, I’ve been reading something that says that a lot of dead people voted. What do you think? [LAUGHS] Is that true? That’s an inquiry, versus I need 12,000 votes or you might find yourself prosecuted. That’s something else entirely. And let’s put it this way. Let’s say if it’s a local sheriff and they are subject to an election. And they’re losing the election by 80 votes. And they go to the county election commissioner and says, I need 90 votes or you might find yourself in handcuffs. That local sheriff would already be arrested and tried for this. It would not be considered a controversial case at all, right? Here we have a former president, and his language is only slightly less direct than what I just said. It’s very slightly less direct. But clearly not just implicating criminality, but expressly stating that it’s possible. Boy, those facts alone. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that there was a fake elector scheme in Georgia, where people were presuming to be the true Trump electors. There are Georgia anti-conspiracy statutes regarding election fraud that are applicable. It is not hard to explain this to the American people. You criminalize solicitation election fraud. Trump asked to find almost 12,000 votes and said there could be criminal jeopardy for the Secretary of State if he didn’t. That is a very straight-line kind of prosecution.

ezra klein

Where is that case in process?

So that’s a great question. Georgia convened a special grand jury to look at all of this. Now under Georgia law, that special grand jury didn’t have the power to indict in the way that other grand juries have the ability to hand up indictments. So it did not have the power to indict. So it issued a report recommending certain indictments. A very small portion of that report was released to the public, I believe, in February. And there was an indication that indictments would be imminent. They would be soon. So quite literally at any moment we could see Fani Willis, the Fulton County prosecutor, potentially issue an announcement of indictments based on this special grand jury report.

ezra klein

Does a case like that turn in any way on whether or not you can prove Donald Trump knew the theories he was peddling were false?

I think it’s knew or should have known. In other words, did he have a legitimate reason to believe that what he was peddling was true? That’s where you saw the Jan. 6 Commission really digging into. Now this is crossing of the streams, or jumping to another stream, where the Jan. 6 commission did a really good job of explaining how many people told the president he didn’t have a case to overturn the election. A lot of that is the kind of foundation you would lay in trial, where you’re saying ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he may tell you that he legit thought that 12,000 dead people had voted or whatever. He may tell you that all of the greatest experts told him that the Georgia election was bogus and fraudulent. But let me explain to you what he was actually told and what he actually knew. And that would be a part of the trial.

ezra klein

Then there’s another legal probe which I want to touch on before moving to some bigger picture questions that you mentioned and that others have. Which is Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to look into Trump’s role in Jan. 6, possibly other things. Tell me a bit about that investigation. There’s been talk about Mike Pence testifying, or they want him to. This one also seems like it has some politically explosive potential.

Yeah. And the two strands of the special counsel investigation, one is investigating not just Jan. 6, but critically, the effort to reverse the election in general and the classified document scandal from Mar-a-Lago. These are two separate things. The Jan. 6 — an election steal related investigation is a federal investigation looking at potential federal crimes. Now the reason why I said the Georgia investigation is so straightforward is that the evidence in Georgia is just easy to lay out and easy to expose. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of evidence of criminality at the federal level. There is. And the Jan. 6 commission made a criminal referral, which is not as big a deal as sort of it was hyped by many folks in the media. A criminal referral doesn’t require the Justice Department to prosecute anybody. But the criminal referral by the Jan. 6 commission did give you a sense of the kinds of claims that could be brought against Trump — so obstruction of an official proceeding, which criminalizes anyone who corruptly obstructs, influence, or impedes any official proceeding or attempts to do so. You have conspiracy to defraud the United States. The one that I have thought is very intriguing is the 18 U.S.C. Section 2383, which criminalizes inciting, assisting, or engaging in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States. In my view, Ezra, that is most clearly what happened around Jan. 6. The really big issue around a prosecution for that is it is very difficult to prove incitement constitutionally. That’s a tough hurdle to clear because we strongly protect free speech rights. We protect even people who urge the overthrow of the government. That’s protected free speech as long as you’re not inciting imminent lawless action. And so the question is did he incite what occurred on Jan. 6? And sort of the common sense view of it is, well, heck, yes, he did. But there’s a legal definition of incitement that’s pretty strict. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So I want to zoom out here to maybe a broader theory of the challenge Trump keeps posing to systems. Because I think I’ve had versions of the conversation we’re having here across a lot of domains in a way that creates a pattern. And I think of what happens here as sort of the Trump’s disturbance event. What he does is he violently disturbs the workings of a system. And it could be the media, or the presidency, or social media, or the law. He does it by violating very established norms or rules or laws for behavior. And then the system, to uphold its own workings, has to treat him as a kind of disturbance. It has to punish or censure or contain him. His own staff has to encircle him, not tell him things, not carry out his orders. And then he can complain about unfair treatment, or that the system is against him. He can get all this attention from this huge conflict that he is then able to incite. And I’m not somebody who believes he’s Teflon or this is exactly good for him. But it does keep him, in this weird way, at the center of everything. I mean, we are talking more about Donald Trump right now than about Joe Biden, than about Ron DeSantis. And it does damage to all these systems he touches because it really is at that point no good answer. Either the system has to turn against him or the system is not working properly. Or it has to give him a free pass, in which case it has degraded itself further. And it’s this weird hard cases, or maybe bad people make bad laws problem. But it seems to me Trump just keeps posing it to institution after institution and domain after domain.

Yes. And what we really see is how imperfect a vehicle the law is to correct a breakdown in moral norms. So let’s just look at the challenge created — and I keep going back to this when I think about these times — the challenge created by the failure of, in particular, the second impeachment effort. So this was not a legal proceeding in the classic sense that you think of as legal proceedings. This was a political process designed by the founders to check the power of a president. And if you were going to tell me as a kid that a president could incite an attack, a violent attack on the Capitol based on a completely fraudulent theory of an election fraud where he was literally trying to overthrow the lawfully elected government of the United States, and that wouldn’t qualify for a conviction — he was impeached, not convicted — I would think that we’d lost our way, that we just flat out lost our way. And so what has ended up happening, I think, is that a number of people have failed to exercise or demonstrate the moral fortitude to stop Donald Trump from breaching American norms. And now a lot of people are sort of begging the legal system to do what they failed to do. And the legal system, it is a necessary part of American democracy. But it is not a substitute for moral courage. And the real failure that we have seen in the Trump presidency, going from when he came down the escalator, was a large scale failure of moral courage, time and time and time again. To the point now where, Ezra, I talk to Republicans who are still — they will go out and say that they don’t like this prosecution of Trump. And they’re secretly hoping it happens and it succeeds. That’s a textbook failure of moral courage. And one of my real concerns here is if he is indicted and convicted and sentenced and that ends the matter, that people will say, well, see? The system worked. And I would say it barely worked. It barely worked. The last remaining guardrail held. The basic baseline rule of law, every other guardrail was stampeded over. But that’s another reason why I strongly object to political considerations of saying it’s too destabilizing, it’s too disruptive to prosecute him. Because then you would trample over that last guardrail. You would say that the anger of the mob, in the final analysis, is going to trump the rule of law. My own view, at the risk of sounding ridiculously nerdy, is to echo the words of Théoden in “The Two Towers,” in the Peter Jackson adaptation when he saw Saruman’s army —

ezra klein

I didn’t see this coming.

You did not, yes. He sees Saruman’s army coming. And he says let them come. In other words, defy the mob. Defy them. Do not let the mob win, period. That’s why I get really nervous when I keep hearing people saying we need a political consideration about whether or not to prosecute crimes that prosecutors would otherwise prosecute under the belief they could prevail in court.

ezra klein

This is a place where I think it’s important actually to be specific. I mean, there was a failure of moral courage. And it was on the part of the elected Republican Party.

Yeah.

ezra klein

It was particularly on the part of Republicans in Congress. And I mean, I think two things follow from this. One is that most of the institutions — and this is a breakdown of the design of the founders — they did not expect us to have highly polarized political parties operating across institutions. They thought we would have a competition between the Senate and the House and the presidency and the judiciary. And you know, ambition would check ambition. that there would be cooperation across branches by political parties breaks the system in a much more profound way than I think people realize. And the Richard Nixon removal, or he ultimately resigns but he would have been removed, comes at this very low ebb of partisan polarization, this aberrant moment in American party history. But we’ve not had that kind of situation for quite a long time. And so I think this is a place where things are quite scary, actually. I mean, as you say, maybe the legal system holds. But I’ve often heard people say that the system held under Trump. That ultimately he couldn’t overturn an election. And that’s a very low bar. Because I think what we’ve mainly seen is that if one of the two political parties is not willing to protect the system over its own standard bearer, then the system doesn’t hold. And the last point I’ll make on this, one reason the way impeachment is treated frustrates me is that impeachment, the way the power ended up being designed, given the vice presidency, is that impeachment really isn’t a partisan remedy. You get to keep your co-partisan in power.

Right.

ezra klein

Mike Pence would have become president. It’s not like Nancy Pelosi would have become president. And even within that, the Republican Party wasn’t willing to act. And now you have a Republican Party saying they’re going to drag the prosecutors before Congress to testify. I think this is a much more profound breakdown. Because it’s not really about Donald Trump. If Donald Trump didn’t have the Republican Party behind him, he could not survive politically. It is only the Republican Party’s support of him that has allowed this to all become so dangerous.

I’m going to go deeper than that. Because I think ultimately one of the things we learned in 2016 is that the Republican elites didn’t actually command the Republican legions. So in 2016, we did have a number of Republican elites call out Donald Trump, in no uncertain terms, including some of the people who vigorously defend him now. And they called out Trump, a Lindsey Graham, a Marco Rubio. I mean, you could go down the list. The last two Republican nominees for president, John McCain and Mitt Romney called out Donald Trump. And they looked around for support and didn’t see it. The people weren’t with them. You even saw it in the sort of conservative infotainment world. Fox was not all about Donald Trump early on. Many of the talk radio hosts were not all about Donald Trump. But the thing about Trump is he understood their audience in many ways better than they understood their audience. And what ultimately ended up happening is that the Republican elites fell in line behind this Republican populist uprising. And I am of the belief that moral courage could have overcome that. Just take, for example, the second impeachment. If just a few more Republican senators had had the guts to do what their job actually required and convict him and bar him from future office, Donald Trump is not a factor right now. But that fear of the base that set in at every level of the Republican elite is really something to see. It is something to behold. And I would even include that evangelical elites — evangelical elites were not for Donald Trump. Early on, it was Jerry Falwell, Jr. and a couple of other people more on the fringes than him and no one else. But when they saw where the people in the pews were, they got in line. And I’m very nervous that if we think we can sort of change the elite focus that we can change the course of American politics. I think the rot is a little deeper than that, sadly. And that we have a real problem with — I’m going to steal an analysis from my friend Yuval Levin. There’s always been a George Wallace constituency in American politics, sort of a George Wallace culture in American politics. And for a long time that constituency, some of it was in the Democratic Party, some of it was in the Republican Party. Now all of it is in the Republican Party. And so it exercises this incredibly disproportionate influence over one of our two great political parties, to the point where you can rationally think as a Republican primary candidate that all I have to do is win over the reactionary populists, I can win a primary. And then turn around to the rest of the Republican public and say it’s me or the Democrat. What are you going to choose?

ezra klein

And to add something to the way Yuval puts that, it’s both that this tendency in American politics has concentrated in the Republican Party, but now they also have the media. And so we talk about the party, but the party is very weak.

Yes.

ezra klein

And there is this endless debate, I think, about whether or not right-wing media leads the base or the base leads right wing media. And I think you can’t look at that as one way. I think these things have a ricochet or a dynamic quality to them. But the Dominion lawsuit has, I think, been a really interesting object lesson of something that many of us suspected. Which is that whether or not Fox News makes this problem worse, they do not themselves feel they have control over it. When confronted with the belief that their viewers hold a view different than the one they hold, they will fold on that view. And they will try to satisfy their viewers.

Yes. So there has been an immense public service done by the Dominion lawsuit even if the suit does not prevail. We could talk about the legal barriers and the legal challenges and difficulties of suing a major media organization that’s taking on public topics in public entities like a major software voting company. But there’s a tremendous public service done. Because it lifted the lid on something that a lot of us had been running around talking about for years. But we didn’t have all the text messages. And that was, look, these Republican leaders, these conservative and right wing hosts say one thing in private, and they say another thing in public. And everything you see them say on prime time, you can also — they will be saying the opposite to friends, even just acquaintances. They’ll be saying the opposite behind closed doors. And I’ve been saying this for years. I have colleagues who’ve been saying this for years. And then finally you had the documentary proof and the documentary evidence. And here’s the way they justify it, Ezra. It’s a really interesting way in which they rationalize it. And they essentially go something like this: Look, the mainstream media disrespects our audience. The reason why they’re our audience is they’re disrespected by the mainstream media. They’re looked down on. They’re called deplorables. I mean, you name it. We have our business because we respect our audience when they don’t. So we need to continue to respect our audience by giving voice to their concerns. That’s how this is rationalized. Which it’s a weird form of respect when you’re sort of saying I’m going to respect you by essentially coddling you, by saying that you’re not ready for the truth, the truth hurts you too much. So I’m just not going to tell it to you. That’s a weird form of respect. That’s not a form of respect I’m familiar with. But this is everywhere. And I wrote a piece yesterday after the Trump rally Saturday night. There was a perfect vignette example about how this works. And it started with Ted Nugent, who was warming up the crowd. And he called Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, a homosexual weirdo. That’s what he called him in the rally. And which is A, false. B, Zelensky’s sexual orientation is irrelevant to the rightness of Ukraine’s cause. Right? So it’s weird. It’s out of nowhere. It’s false. It’s obviously a bigoted statement. And so what happens next is on this show, this network called Real America’s Voice, it’s immediately — the commentator says that was amazing. And he says what a lot of people are feeling. Well, that is exactly in a nutshell how this works. And right wing media, if your people are feeling something, they want to have that feeling reflected back to them. Or they’re going to be very angry. They’re going to feel betrayed. And they’re going to go somewhere else. So the way this worked at Fox pre-election, what did they want to hear? What they were wanting to hear was there something wrong with this election, right? There’s something wrong. The mail-in ballots make this an inherently suspect election. Why did the early Arizona call cause such a rupture with the audience? Well, how can you call Arizona when you’ve been telling us that this election’s problematic? That’s contradictory. And so then Fox went right back to its old ways after the election call to, again, satisfy the audience. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I am struck by the way this has become a value on the right. Because one way you could say the Fox News thing is Fox News is a business run by a very rich man. And they’re not respecting their audience. They are serving their market. And however they dress it up, it’s ridiculous. They are a business. They want to make as much money as possible. And they will do whatever is required to do that. Fine. That’s capitalism. You don’t have to laud anybody for it. But we’ve seen it before. But you tell an interesting story about talking with Baptist ministers about a former Baptist statement and being told that their flock would find that too elitist.

Yes.

ezra klein

Could you tell that story?

Yeah. So this was early in the Trump presidency. I was invited and I spoke to a gathering of Baptist pastors. Many of them were pastors of big churches, some of small churches. And we’re talking about the importance of character in politicians. And the reason for this was obvious. I mean, we had just seen the data that evangelicals had gone from, in 2011, the religious group in America most likely to say that immoral acts would disqualify a politician to the group surveyed that was now least likely to say that. And what was particularly ironic is that in 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is quite conservative, issued a statement on moral character of public officials. This is the height of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. And it said words, “tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, leads to unrestrained lawlessness, and surely will result in God’s judgment.” And this was something passed overwhelmingly in the Southern Baptist Convention in 1998. And so I’m talking to these Baptist pastors. And I said, if that was true in 1998, isn’t it true in 2017 or 2018? And, again, I’m talking about a Baptist moral resolution. And a pastor raised his hand and I said, yes? And he said if I bring that up to my congregation, they’re going to call it elitist. And he’s a pastor, I believe, of a congregation in Alabama. And it was an interesting demonstration to me as to how thoroughly the sort of Trump movement and the populist movement had taught, and how thoroughly the members of this populist movement had imbibed, this potion that said criticism of our populist leader is elitism. Criticism equals elitism. And so in many ways, people became inoculated against the truth. Even a Baptist statement was elitist in a Baptist gathering if it took on Donald Trump. And that was quite striking to me. I’ve got story after story after story of the Trump years living in a very, very red, heavily evangelical area like that where you couldn’t even get to the truth because the firewall against hearing it had been lifted so high.

ezra klein

People might have heard of the Jon Haidt, Greg Lukianoff book, “The Coddling of The American Mind” a few years back. And you had a nice line working off of that where you call this the coddling of the populist mind. I remember a great piece, years ago now, calling this populist correctness, which I always thought was a quite good way of putting it. On one level, it seems almost obvious to say that the challenge in American politics is not Donald Trump, it is the voters who would support him. Right? Absent them, Trump has no power. And I would also say it is almost verboten in American politics to say that. But if I headline this podcast, the problem isn’t Trump, it’s his voters. That is a much more explosive statement than if I just say that American politics has a Donald Trump problem.

Right.

ezra klein

And it is interesting. We have — for all that democracy, in a way, is meant to call forward the deliberation and political and civic responsibility of the citizens, I think we have lost the language of being willing to say some decisions and being willing to support some things is bad. And it isn’t just something that needs to be understood. It is also something that can be criticized or even condemned.

Well, if you’re a politician, the people can’t fail. They can only be failed. So you’re constantly presenting to the people whom you’re trying to appeal to them to gain their votes, it’s generally a bad tactic to say you guys messed up. It’s much easier to say, well, it’s not your fault that the previous guy was a bad president. That’s a lot easier to say. But for people in our job who don’t have to worry about winning over voters, I think it’s really important to say when the people are getting this really wrong. And I’m much more willing to say that now than I was in October 2016, say, now that we’ve had years of watching Donald Trump be a president and be an ex-president. And then also when — especially when I’m talking to my Republican friends, there isn’t a binary choice argument anymore. They don’t have the argument, well, it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden. And if you’re pro-life, you only have one choice, or all of the binary choice kind of arguments that go along with the general election. Trump has primary contenders now. And the other thing to show there is something where Republican voters have adopted or spawned — or some combination of adopted and spawned — this culture of cruelty. Trump’s primary competitor, Ron DeSantis, in many ways has become a primary Trump competitor by becoming a Trump mini-me. Now to be clear, I do not believe that Ron DeSantis is as dangerous as Donald Trump. I could not see Ron DeSantis inspiring an attack on the Capitol, for example. But in many ways, Ron DeSantis emerged from the pack by becoming the closest thing that a lot of Republicans saw to another Donald Trump but without Donald Trump’s weaknesses. And that tells you that you’ve got a real voter issue here. This is the law of supply and demand working. And one thing that is one of the most sobering charts I’ve seen in recent years is, right after Jan. 6, Republican approval for Mike Pence plunged and for Mitch McConnell plunged. And Republican approval for Trump stayed relatively high with just sort of a slight decrease. And this was after Mike Pence — just consider, Ezra, if Mike Pence had said yes, what kind of constitutional crisis we’d face. With a mob braying for his head, he defended the constitutional order and became less popular with Republicans. And so that’s going to tell me that the problem that we have in this country is not concentrated in a cowardly Republican elite. One of the reasons why the Republican elite is cowardly is because the vitriol of the Republican base.

ezra klein

I remember early on in the Trump years there was a vogue for looking at electoral system design reforms that people thought could answer this challenge.

Right.

ezra klein

That maybe you could look and find the problem in we weren’t enough of a multi-party democracy. Or we didn’t use instant ranked voting or instant runoff voting or ranked choice voting or whatever it might be. And I remember finally a political scientist said to me that there is no answer in election design for the problem of a bad party or a bad person.

Right.

ezra klein

That you can do things that make your system better or worse. But once you have one of the nominees of the major parties operating in a very, very aberrant way with wide support from his party, you can’t solve that through trying to tweak the rules. I mean, one, you can’t change the rules already because that party would stand in your way. But even if you could, you haven’t actually solved the problem, which is, as you were saying, the demand for this kind of political figure. And I think DeSantis gets at this point. One thing that — I don’t love the conversation of DeSantis dangerous or not dangerous, because I don’t really think I know. But one thing that I notice with him, the weakness of DeSantis is he doesn’t have Trump’s, to be blunt about it, charm and charisma and humor.

Right.

ezra klein

Liberals, I think, don’t always like to admit this. But Trump is funny. He is magnetic. He is a great showman. What DeSantis has is Trump’s instinct for conflict with systems. His sense that a way to break through in the attention marketplace is to go to war with systems that don’t really want to be at war with him. But to really attack reporters, or to really try to put himself out as the lone defender of the right against the institutions. And just that dynamic, as it becomes more mainstreamed in American politics, to go back to this point about the disturbance dividend — systems don’t have a good answer for a large anti-system party. I mean, I just don’t think that is a solvable problem.

I would agree with you. And especially, it’s contradictory in many ways to the emphasis of the conservatism that I grew up with, which was very much about institution building and respect for institutions — without a Pollyannish view that says that institutions can’t go bad or can’t go wrong. But the goal was institutional reform, not institutional destruction, or endless institutional oppositionalism. And so part of what makes the United States of America the United States of America, going all the way back to de Tocqueville, is the way in which we’re just relentless institution builders here in this country. We create civic associations of all kinds. We create institutions of all kinds. And it’s one of the better parts of American life in my view. And so if you become fundamentally anti-institutional, and then what you replace it with isn’t necessarily a set of new institutions but a series of personalities and political celebrities, then what you’ve done, you’ve done some real harm to the national fabric. And I think that one of the things is, as somebody who — you know, I’ve been conservative for a long time and have made my critiques of the media, the general critiques of the media for a long time. And one of the things that’s so distressing to me is I feel like the American right took legitimate criticisms of the way in which the media universe traditionally in the United States had been disproportionately left leaning and therefore often unfair to conservative points of view and said, you know what? We’re going to build an alternative media ecosystem. And they did. And it’s worse. It’s worse. It’s a celebrity-focused, populist reactionary media ecosystem. And I’m not going to say there aren’t good journalists in right-leaning media. I know a number of good journalists in right-leaning media. But it is a culture that is dominated by the hot take. It is dominated by opposition and anger. And if you deviate from the hot take and the opposition and anger, you are often gang tackled by these same angry voices as somehow weak or cowardly. And these phrases “weak or cowardly” have particular potency on the right. That is the ultimate sin. The ultimate sin on the right is to be seen as weak or not up for the fight. And so that culture that’s been created, that is oppositional to its core, as opposed to constructive at its core — there are real cultural and political effects from that are profoundly negative.

ezra klein

So you can drive yourself crazy trying to think about what the response of this or that system should be. I mean, I’ve always had a lot of empathy for the people who ran social media networks in 2020 and had to figure out whether or not to let a president or a recent ex-president or somebody was going to be an ex-president foment electoral subversion on their network or try to kick them off the network. I mean, that was a very bad choice for anybody to have to face. There was no good option at that point. But to go back to what you said earlier about prosecution, is your view that the systems more or less shouldn’t try to wrap themselves around the logic or the strategic answer? That the view should be, let them come. And you try to do the job according to the norms and ethics of your institution as honestly and straightforwardly and almost naïvely of the potential consequences as you can?

I think you do your job. And you do the best you can to mitigate the consequences. And so that would mean, for example, if you’re going to indict Donald Trump, you’re absolutely going to prepare law enforcement to deal with that. And then at the same time you’re going to also relentlessly, repeatedly say to the public why you’re doing what you’re doing, what the justification is, why you’re treating Donald Trump no better or no worse than any other American citizen in comparable circumstances, that this is the evenhanded application of justice. Not because you’re necessarily going to have sort of the whole populist movement have a, for lack of better terms, come to Jesus moment on this. But because what you’re going to end up doing is you’re going to be consistently peeling people away. There was an interesting poll I saw recently where it talked about — I believe it was Fox News viewers talking about a percentage — it might have been around 13 percent or so — had had their minds actually impacted by the Dominion revelations, that this was something that actually made an impact. 13 percent here and 5 percent there, and pretty soon you’re talking about a movement that has become so weakened that it either has to be content with rump status or it has to change. And I saw after 2022, really for the first time in the Trump era, a number of people in my immediate environment who had been consistently pro-Trump, for a time after 2022, rethought it. Not because of 2022 in isolation, but because it changed the way they view 2022, 2020 and 2018 and raised doubts that he’s the winner that they thought he was.

ezra klein

That’s a good place to wrap, I think. Always our final question, what are the three books you would recommend to the audience?

So here’s a good one that I read not long ago called “We the Fallen People: The Founders and The Future of American Democracy,” by a professor named Robert Tracy McKenzie. It really looks at the role of the view of the fallenness of human nature in the design of the country. Really fascinating. Because one of the things I like about our classical liberal legal structure is that it recognizes two realities about human beings. One, we possess incalculable worth. We’re all endowed with unalienable rights because we, as human beings, possess incalculable worth. But we also suffer from flaws. All of us suffer from flaws. And classical liberalism is designed to protect our worth and to guard against our flaws. So that’s a really tremendous book. And the next two are just if you like to absolutely nerd out on military history, which I basically do on a daily basis. And I’m two-thirds of the way through a book called “Napoleonic Wars: A Global History.” And I’m going to really apologize to the author, Alexander Mikaberidze, wonderful book. And really does demonstrate that maybe World War I wasn’t World War I. It was the Napoleonic wars. And the other one which is fascinating, and it’s a 2017 book by Alexander Watson called “Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I,” and is written from the central powers view of World War I. And it is fascinating, absolutely fascinating, getting into the mindset of Germany and Austria-Hungary. So those are two history nerd books and one political philosophy nerd book.

ezra klein

David French, thank you very much, you nerd. [LAUGHS]

Can political discourse survive the culture wars — or is any discussion of the public good doomed to be “canceled” by one side or the other? The philosopher Agnes Callard addressed this dilemma and others, including ideas around free speech, during a lecture Thursday at Harvard’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics.
Opening her talk with an examination of the “liberal concept of free speech,” Callard zeroed in on the decision by the science journal Nature to endorse Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. While the journal claimed to be speaking out for science — and for the free and open dissemination of knowledge — the University of Chicago scholar argued that its endorsement was just as likely to sow suspicion, increasing “distrust of science as political.”
One barrier to more honest and constructive discourse, Callard continued, is that voices on the left have adopted the tactics of those on the right. “We bully people without knowing it,” she said. “Not bullying is harder than it appears. And freely defending free speech is harder than it appears.”
As an alternative, Callard offered the clarity of classical philosophy. Distinguishing between persuasion that is coercive and persuasion that teaches or illuminates a subject, she explained how a Socratic argument relies on refutation, which pushes the other person to delve deeper and explain their argument, rather than on simply convincing a passive audience. “Socrates found a way to peel away the symbolism that everyone else feels compelled to layer on a conversation,” said Callard. “He’s not trying to win. He’s trying to find out.”
In its purest sense, Callard said, politics is about how we communally decide to live together, and political argument should focus on how we can best do this, an objective at odds with our current climate of politicization. In the U.S. today, even if a conversation is superficially about immigration or the minimum wage, she said, it’s really “set against the backdrop of a standing conflict,” in which each argument simply signifies a stance in an ideological dispute.
Lamenting how far our discourse has fallen, Callard circled back to arguments that, while apparently defending free speech, may instead undermine it. “Self-politicization itself is the far greater danger because it is an internal obstacle of political speech,” she said. “It restricts communication by shackling itself. So the key idea of Socratic politics is the depoliticization of arguments. If successful, this frees our speech.”
Socrates himself, Callard pointed out, held to these principles even in the face of the ultimate “cancel culture.” Although he was condemned to death for supposed impiety, the philosopher refused to give up his teaching and turned down help that may have saved his life. Holding true to the idea that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he accepted his fate, said Callard. “An examined life at risk of poverty or death is going to be preferred over an unexamined life of security,” she said.
In the philosopher’s teachings, and even in his death, Callard sees a warning. “There’s something tragic about people who are in a context where they don’t have freedom to inquire, proclaiming their commitment to free speech or free expression or science or truth or nonconformism,” she said. “They may be applauding and speaking out and raising their voices, but they’re not able to mean what they say.”
Following her talk, Callard fielded questions. One participant asked if she saw a “floor” to American political debate. Rather than a floor, she responded, “We need to be thinking of the ceiling. Often having a sense of the ideal — what it is we’re aiming for — can be more useful.”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers for their thoughts on cities versus suburbs.Lauren argues that cities remain sufficiently appealing to rural and suburban migrants. What’s needed are more affordable places to live within their borders:
I grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s in a classic middle-class suburb in the city of Calgary, Canada––big yards, quiet streets, pretty homogeneously middle-class and white. It was a five-minute walk to a bus stop, where a bus ran by every 30 minutes or so; a 10-minute walk to a 7-11; a 25-minute walk to a shopping mall; and later, a 30-minute walk to a new light-rail-transit station. That was it. There was nothing to do unless you drove.
As a result, although it was apparently safe, it encouraged teenage behaviors that were really risky. I used to go with a friend to the 7-11, hang around and wait for teenage guys with cars to show up, then hop in their vehicles to drive aimlessly and drink alcohol-infused Slurpees. Or meet guys in empty schoolyards to drink whatever alcohol we had.
I was not some teenage rebel; I was a straight-A student who played classical piano and worked part-time to pay for my planned university education. There was simply nothing else to do.
I hated the suburbs and their stultifying boredom and homogeneity with a passion. I got out as soon as I could and never went back. I now live in Toronto, which is large, diverse, and safe. My house is small by American standards—about 1,600 square feet—but I raised two kids in it comfortably and now it is bigger than I need. I can walk to a range of restaurants, retail, and services. I know my neighbors and the local shopkeepers. I am a five-minute walk away from a subway, and I use it all the time to go to restaurants, concerts, the theater, art galleries—you name it.
My kids had independence from an early age, because they could walk and subway everywhere, and they did. When they did summer camp at the museum, from age 10, I sent them on the subway. As teenagers, they went to board-game cafés, concerts, restaurants, and movies on their own. They could stay at school late for clubs and programs without asking me to come pick them up. They had way more fun than I did, and way more safely.
Cities will remain popular because they fulfill certain human needs that suburbs just don’t. There has certainly been a bump in social disorder in Toronto post-pandemic. I see it on the subway and in public places: more people with mental-health and addiction troubles, more homelessness, more suffering. But it remains an incredibly safe and functional city.
The big challenge is affordability, a challenge that shows no sign of abating. Young people will leave not because they prefer the suburbs but because the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a shocking $2,375. A one-bedroom condo is over $600,000.
Both my kids want to make their lives in the city. I don’t know what that looks like, unless housing prices come down. Perhaps it will necessitate a move to a smaller and more affordable Canadian city, like Halifax or Ottawa. To a significant degree, Toronto is a victim of its own success.
This is the real challenge to my mind: not to make city life appealing, because a good city is incredibly appealing, but to make it accessible and affordable for everyone who wants a piece of it. This issue is on the radar of our municipal, provincial, and federal governments. I sure hope they can solve it.
Lori makes a pitch for “the unique charms of the ‘inner-ring suburb.’” She writes:
Here in Cleveland, our suburbs surround the city like rings in a tree trunk. Ours is about a 15- minute drive from downtown. We have bus and rapid-transit options. Lake Erie is a couple blocks from our house. Our town is pedestrian-oriented. Congestion is not too hectic. And anything I truly need is available within about five blocks.
My husband and I are urban-oriented people. We desire a variety of good restaurant options, cultural activities, and museums. But we also enjoy nature walks. So, it’s a good thing we have many parks in our area as well as the lakefront. We wanted some suburban amenities for our daughter, such as a backyard for playing, a stable school system that offered a quality curriculum, easy access to grocery stores, drug stores, her pediatrician … and also programs for kids such as day camps, music lessons, playgrounds, city pools, and a good library. And our inner-ring suburb has it all.
We have a small backyard with a garden. But we are located five miles from the heart of the city. Our neighbors are friendly and welcoming, and there are many citywide events planned throughout the year. You get all the privacy and diversity of a large city (our suburb is home to immigrants from at least 50 different countries) but do not sacrifice the conveniences of life in the suburbs. I think that inner-ring suburbs are the way to go.  
Bob suggests that the place he lives began as a suburb but is now something different:
In the 1950s and 1960s, Orange County was characterized as a “bedroom community” to Los Angeles. In Fullerton, 30 miles south of downtown L.A., you could buy a home on a half acre of land for, in today’s dollars, around $300,000. Current market value: $2 million.
Today I live in Irvine, California, where homes are crammed onto tiny lots 10 feet apart. Your private space is very small, but there is a lot of well-planned shared community space. You will not find the smallest of homes for anything close to $300,000. Throughout the county, multistory apartment and condominium buildings are rising in the “downtown” areas of various cities. I feel as if I am in one of the nicer and safer neighborhoods in a very large city.
Orange County, population 3-plus million, has most of the economic and cultural opportunities of nearby Los Angeles. It has smaller urban centers all over for entertainment, dining, and shopping. It also has many city governments. And it’s a lot easier to affect local government in a city of 150,000 than one the size of L.A. It seems more democratic. Orange County is probably not unique in America. Maybe we need a new term: city-burb.
Ryan disputes the stereotypes of suburbs:
The notion of the suburbs as homogenous (read: racist, dull, and shut down by 9 p.m.) is badly outdated. In my metro area, there are inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs, and three times as many people live in the suburbs than the city. These suburbs are not all the same; you can identify at least six distinct sociopolitical cultures in the suburbs overlapping with the area’s peculiar geography. The suburbs have diversified racially in the past 25 years and now have the majority of the metro area’s Hispanic and South Asian populations. And restaurateurs and cultural entrepreneurs are increasingly choosing the suburbs for their new ventures. COVID accelerated these trends, but I suspect it’ll be much longer until our culture drops the “boring sameness” connotation of suburbia.
Having tried the suburbs and the city, Lindsey chose neither:
I was raised in the wild of the Texas Hill Country, on a beautiful free-range cattle ranch where I hiked and biked the rocky landscape, ate wild pecans, and climbed my favorite live oak nearly every day of my childhood after school. While I loved that experience for myself, I always envisioned living in a built-in community, like the kids at school who grew up with default neighborhood friend groups.
When my husband and I decided to purchase our first home, we really fell for the slick marketing behind “custom” homes in new suburbs. We picked a location in the sprawling Austin metropolis, not far from where I grew up. The particular suburb we bought into had pitched us a map that showed not only the expected neighborhood amenities like sidewalks, playgrounds, and pools, but expansion plans that called for trail systems, fairgrounds, and even river access. We swallowed up the $600 annual HOA fees and waited for our “investment” to pay off.
The expansion plans disappeared, of course, and we learned a great lesson in managing expectations. The house itself was perfectly fine. Our attempts at built-in community turned into a barrage of MLM sales pitches and invitations to “like” every social-media page of a neighbor or their business. The HOA charged us exorbitant daily fees for atrocities like leaving a visible weed in the front flower beds or putting the trash out too soon on the night before trash day. We also couldn’t park in the street overnight, for reasons that were hotly debated in the Facebook group.
During our first year in the community, a tornado knocked down two homes under construction down the street from us. The second year, we had 100 days above 100 degrees. Once, a neighbor drove her car in front of me onto the sidewalk where I was walking my dog and pushing my infant in a stroller because she thought my Facebook comment was condescending. (She was probably right about that part.)
Vehicles were burglarized and vandalized occasionally. One neighbor’s dog was killed by a venomous snake in their backyard, which shared a fence with ours. They never found the snake so they don’t know for sure. I didn’t know what to do, so I baked her a cake.
We began dreaming about picking up our pretty new home and moving it to somewhere far, far away, with mountains and snow. So we cut our losses, sold the home for a bit less than we paid for it, and moved to a rural neighborhood near Spokane, Washington.
Today, I’ve seen a porcupine, deer, chipmunks, turkeys, and robins in my yard. I can hike in the pine forest any day I want. And we have lovely neighbors just up and down the street! We can see a couple of their roofs from here. We have no HOA restrictions or fees, although we aren’t allowed to cut down our share of the forest. We’re able to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) someday, if we ever wanted a small second home for family or to offer for rent.
I’ve quit social media. I like these neighbors too much to learn about their political views. When our own dog died, we buried her in the yard, where we’ll plant a flowering tree for her. In a lot of ways, we were nudged North and West by both climate change and politics. I was born in this part of America, so I feel like I’ve come full circle, geographically. I have learned that community is what you make of it. And you can’t change things where you live, but you can change where you live.
We also lived in the city—downtown Spokane—for a few months before finally moving into our current home just as the first pandemic restrictions were announced. In the city, parking was an expensive nightmare. Our vehicles were each hit with rocks. The front door to our building was broken into. Many passive-aggressive notes were left in the laundry room. The neighbor below us filed a noise complaint about my toddler’s footsteps. We couldn’t possibly imagine moving back.
So I know you said to opine about urban and suburban life, but rural life is my favorite. This summer, I’m going to grow strawberries and watch the mountain bluebirds make their nests. I’m going to raise my children to love the Earth and to take care of her, and I’m happily going to live closer to nature to make that easier to accomplish.
Zoe argues that the city is a good teacher:
I live in New York City, and it is the best choice for our two children, for two reasons. The first is exposure to all kinds of people. While my kids might be missing out on some nature education, I can make this up easily with a few trips to big parks every year, whereas the kind of daily interactions they get with people from all walks of life is not something I could foster in the suburbs. That is because of reason two: public transit and a walkable city! The isolation that the car-dependent suburbs create reduces the range of people one comes across, and that is not something I want for my children. Walking everywhere also means my toddler has a great sense of orientation, and is developing early independence.
Fabrice makes the case for commuting:
I’m writing this from the 15th floor of an office building on Third and Market in San Francisco, but I commute on rail to work each day from Fremont (recently voted the “happiest” suburb in the U.S., for whatever reason). After work today I’m going to walk across the street to a favorite local bar. It’s a place of interesting conversations that happen between random strangers talking about everything and nothing. After that, if I wanted, I could go stop by a Detroit-style pizza joint and grab a square, or grab a high-quality bowl of noodles, or head to the urban food court at the mall for some fairly high-quality mall-food options before heading home. What I can’t do is wander too far past that mall, because Hyde and Taylor is an open-air drug market and I’d be carrying my work laptop.
When I get back? There’s good Indian and Chinese food in Fremont, but nothing’s open past 9 p.m. besides fast food, and the late-night drinking options are few and very far between. All I can really do is go home, settle in, and go to bed for a quiet night’s sleep in a quiet and safe neighborhood without any nearby open-air drug dealing.
I get the feeling that strong advocates for urban life versus suburban life have specific positives and negatives in this narrative that they value more than others. All I’ll say is that living in the city wasn’t something I found particularly enjoyable after someone overdosed on the sidewalk outside my step, and working from home in the suburbs introduced me to the idea of quiet desperation. I chose my current day-to-day in the attempt to get the best of both worlds, and I think I’m relatively successful; pitting cities and suburbia against each other is a false choice.
Based on my own travels, I don’t think there’s a way to conjure all the desirable cultural qualities of a dense city without at least some of the attendant ills (or turning into Singapore), though S.F. in particular is doing a terrible job of mitigating those ills.
And Bernie counsels patience and faith in the future:
Cities are the best. But they are like the people who live within them. That is to say, they have their good years and their bad years. I showed up in Los Angeles in 1986 and saw the long, slow slide down to near-oblivion; there were riots, poverty, gang wars, strife.
In 1995, my wife and I bought a house in Hollywood and everybody we knew tried to talk us out of it. We borrowed $190,000 for a charming (albeit rundown) three-bedroom craftsman with a 48-inch solid-oak front door and an enormous yard. There were loud Harleys, police helicopters, and sex workers who would throw their used condoms out onto my front yard (I had to go out and pick them up every morning because my twin toddler daughters thought that they were “balloons”).
In 1999, we swapped that house out for a more family-friendly house in South Pasadena and rolled all of our fast-growing equity into our new place. Zillow says that our old Hollywood house is now worth a cool $1.7 million. Also, our “forever” house in South Pas (recently paid off :)) is worth nearly the same. We were young and we had faith in Los Angeles. We watched with awe and delight as things got better and better (and, to be fair, worse and worse; gentrification is a very tough nut to crack, although I cannot deny that it benefited me).
Now things are sliding again. Homelessness is the new gang problem. It seems intractable, but so did the gang problem in the early 1990s. Now that the sprawling tent cities have risen to the top of everybody’s “crisis” list, they will indeed be solved, slowly, year after year, brick by brick. But by the time that the homelessness crisis has become too small to notice, there will be a brand new crisis. Because: This is Los Angeles!
In that future time, people will hew and cry, “This time, it really is the end of the Southern California Dream!” But it won’t be. It will just be Los Angeles having a few bad years in a row. Again.
Meanwhile, I’ll be picking fresh oranges off of my tree and thanking my lucky stars that I get to call Southern California my home. L.A. will go on and on. One hundred generations from now, there will be a place called Los Angeles, and the citizens of that time will experience a crisis or two. And eventually, they will get through it, just like we did.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself increasingly preoccupied with people who build things, and with building things myself.When I was younger, it never occurred to be to be an engineer. There were many other pathways I thought much more attractive: a writer (of fiction or nonfiction), a political theorist, a classical philologist (that’s how Nietzsche started out), or at best some kind of scientist. Engineering seemed to me a grubby and small-minded profession. When I was in high school in State College, Pennsylvania, most of the engineers on campus seemed to be in favor of the Vietnam War, which I thought at the time was a hopeless retrograde viewpoint.I must say that today I have much more respect for engineers than I did back then.  Engineers solve problems of incredible difficulty. They may not be big problems with broad applicability, but they are real world concerns that matter a lot to people, and that are incredibly difficult to solve. Every time I get on an airplane I think about the amount of effort that went into making my air travel as safe, efficient, and low cost as it is. I recently returned to San Francisco from Frankfurt on one of Lufthansa’s remaining Boeing 747s, and still can’t get over the fact that a piece of metal that large can move routinely as it does from one side of the world to the other. I felt an incredible sense of pride when Perseverance Rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface back in 2020. Both of my sons have gotten engineering degrees; seeing the problems they have had to tackle in their jobs has made the calling of engineering very concrete to me.That’s concrete, literally. Over the past several years I have been studying the problem of building infrastructure. For the past generation, development economists have been writing about the importance of institutions, and the agenda of places like the World Bank has focused on what is called good governance. Governance is roughly speaking what governments do (though there is a large literature that speaks of governance as government-like activities undertaken by anything other than a government). But what is good governance?  It is seen as many people in the development business as an abstraction.___STEADY_PAYWALL___As I’ve come to recognize, governance in the real world is often about the ability to build things. Governments are responsible for creating infrastructure—that is, roads, bridges, electrical grids, airports, and buildings that are the preconditions for economic activity. Infrastructure constitutes what economists call public goods: goods that cannot easily be appropriated by individuals, and therefore will not be produced by private market participants.But the building of infrastructure inevitably hurts certain narrower interests: the project organizer has to obtain right-of-way permits or take someone’s land; digging a subway will disrupt traffic and businesses; a dam will create a floodplain that will displace the people living there; placing a wind farm offshore will interrupt some homeowner or golfer’s view of the ocean. Balancing the need for the collective good against these individual interests is fundamentally a political problem that needs to be solved through political institutions. It is therefore first and foremost a governance problem.Western democracies, and particularly our American democracy, have gotten much less good at building infrastructure. Early in the 20thcentury, big, ambitious projects like the Golden Gate Bridge or Hoover Dam were put up in just a few years; today, a project of any size takes years of permitting before ground is broken, and the scale of our ambitions has narrowed immensely. It has been decades since the United States has built a large hydroelectric project.The reasons for this have to do with the layers of permitting that are required now to build anything. I am giving the Patten lecture series at Indiana University this March to talk about the ways in which the American political system has become a “vetocracy,” and how that is preventing us from dealing with big challenges like the climate crisis. This is an issue I’ve written about before in these pages.The inability to build things has big ramifications for America’s international position. China launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 and has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure projects around the world. The United States and other countries in the Western democratic world have struggled to compete in this realm. Every democracy has gotten worse at building things for similar reasons: they all face self-imposed requirements for minimizing environmental impact, disruption to local and indigenous communities, worker safety, anti-corruption measures, and the like. Almost 100 workers died, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, in the building of Hoover Dam; we would never accept that human cost today but the consequence is that building infrastructure is much slower and more costly. China worries much less about these kinds of issues, and therefore can outbid Western consortia in terms of price and construction time.Ezra Klein has been writing about this a lot lately. He notes that liberals in the United States used to be good at building things (think FDR), but they get in their own way by encasing everything they do in layers of procedure. Klein argues they would be much more popular politically if they could get things built quickly and effectively. The Biden administration has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into a large infrastructure package and into the Inflation Reduction Act that will for the first time serious address carbon emissions, but appropriating money is very different from actually breaking ground on promised projects.In any event, I not only study the politics of building things, but like to build things myself. I have already written about my longtime hobby of building furniture, which has produced beds for my children, tables and chairs for the kitchen, and some fancy Federal-style pieces for the living room.After my last project of building a set of six Thomas Moser-designed Windsor chairs, I got exhausted and decided to hang up my woodworking tools for the time being. I tried to build a rocker bogie rover like Perseverance. I started flying drones again, which was a challenge but also a great joy. But then I decided at the end of last year to start my own YouTube channel. Many of my existing skills have come from watching YouTube videos, and it seemed to me that building the Frankly Fukuyama channel would be a great way to communicate with people.One of the reasons I get involved in projects like this is that they are a great excuse to acquire new equipment. I’ve posted a video about some of the beautiful hand tools I purchased for my woodworking.I’ve been collecting video and sound recording equipment for many years, but the YouTube channel has been a great excuse to move things to a different level. I’ve converted my second office into a video studio complete with a green screen and professional lighting.My latest project has been to build a motorized camera slider. Sliders are rails along which a video camera moves; it allows the videographer to add motion and interest to his or her shots. The better sliders are rather expensive, like this one from Rhino cameras.It seemed to me that I could design and build my own slider for a lot less money. It’s just a linear actuator and a panning mechanism. So I set about acquiring the parts. Doing a project like this involves scanning the internet for very specialized parts (like a 6 to 8mm shaft coupler for a stepper motor), or a small but thick piece of acrylic that will accept a female ¼-20 threaded insert. When you’re not working from a kit or someone else’s plans, you have to solve a sequential set of problems like how to attach the t-rail to a tripod, or how to cut a rectangular hole in the project box. Writing the software for the Arduino that controls the unit was probably the biggest challenge; I haven’t written Arduino code in a long time and there were very few examples of my specific product out there on the internet.In the end, I ended up spending quite a lot of money to make the slider work, and it works less well than the commercial products. I haven’t solved all the design problems, either; I can’t slow the panning motor down sufficiently to synchronize with the rail mechanism. But it works well enough, and that’s the point. As I said in my earliest blog post, it’s important to know enough about technology to achieve a certain degree of autonomy, so that your possibilities aren’t simply limited by the big companies that increasingly run our lives.I will be posting a video about building the slider on my Frankly Fukuyama YouTube channel soon. Please watch it and, as every channel owner says, like and subscribe to the channel.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Martin Wolf is the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times. He is the author of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Martin Wolf discuss the symbiotic relationship between democracy and capitalism; the reasons for the crisis of democratic capitalism; and the dire consequences should it fail.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You have a new book out and the most interesting thing about it to me is how you connect the political and economic stories of the last few decades. How should we think about integrating those two narratives about how to understand the world at the moment?Martin Wolf: Unlike most people who write about democracy and the future of our politics, I come from an economics background, not from a politics background. I did some political science and political history when I was at Oxford, but that was more than half a century ago. Though, as I've been going around the world in my various jobs, when I was at the World Bank and subsequently working on trade, I was aware that politics was very central. Nonetheless, economics was the core of what interested me, and I focused on that pretty well exclusively until about 20 years ago, and particularly until 15 years ago, when the financial crisis happened. Most of the time, like most economists, I was quite comfortable with compartmentalizing: the political system does what it does; we've got a democratic backdrop here, it works more or less and we can just discuss policy and how the economy unfolds. And then reality crashed into this neat compartmentalization. The immediate impact was to make it clear that a big financial crisis is a political event, not just an economic event. The response to the crisis, the understanding of the crisis, and the consequences of the crisis are all political events. But then I realized something broader which should have been obvious to me all my life—the way we compartmentalize our thinking about the economy and society more broadly is extremely peculiar. It's academically convenient because it's intellectually convenient. But it doesn't make any sense. Contrast what we do in the social sciences with what we do in the physical sciences, or in the sciences broadly: each of the major scientific specializations we have, as it were, lies on top of the one below. At the bottom, there's physics, which is the fundamental forces of the universe; then you get to chemistry, which is the more complicated relations governed by physics; then we get to biology and biological relations—then we actually start getting to behavior at a very crude level of living things. But when we look at society, we don't lay them well one on the other. They're all side by side—sociology, politics, and economics—and they interact like mad. I saw that not only had the financial crisis meant that economics had crashed into politics but that the crash hadn't gone away; that it was pretty obvious that something had happened in recent years which undermined the confidence of a broad part of our population in the economic and political systems together, leading them to listen to voices which I simply hadn't expected to be listened to, particularly in sophisticated, advanced democracies like the U.S. and U.K. I then started to analyze what had gone on and why they lost confidence. Plenty of people were pointing to cultural and social developments of the previous 40 years, but it seemed to me pretty obvious that that was very clearly insufficient, and that what had been going on in the economy has created very profound changes in the social position, the economic position, obviously, and the cultural position of important groups in our society. These economic changes had actually generated a profound social, and then political, revolution. One of the consequences was that the people who had not been doing very well started jumping out of the constraints of the standard political system,and wanted something completely different from their political leaders. That, I thought, was the cause of the rise of populism.Mounk: The title of your book is “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” From how you’re talking about it, it sounds like the crisis of capitalism is driving the crisis of democracy. What is the crisis of capitalism at this point in history and what is its connection with the crisis of democracy?Wolf: To answer this, I first had to decide what the relationship is between these two things. Why do they go together? Why are the world's most advanced capitalist societies democracies? To understand the breakdown, I had to understand why it happened in the first place. And to summarize it very, very, very briefly, I learned that democracy, in our sense, was a child of capitalism, was a product of capitalist societies, that it hadn't existed before. And then I could trace reasons why there was this relationship; why capitalism created processes, both directly and indirectly, that led to the demand for democracy. I could see some accidents in that, but it seemed to me very fundamental. Mounk: Why should we think that the relationship between capitalism and democracy is more than accidental? Why is it that you need capitalism in order to have democracy?Wolf: Well, it would be a very strange accident if it were an accident. Prior to 1800, there were essentially no democracies anywhere. The dominant way we structured societies in all the more advanced ones was a small number of people owning all the resources and controlling all of the politics. Wealth and power were essentially the same thing and that was the normal way we ran societies. Now, why would capitalism have created something different? Because it clearly did produce enormous demands for greater rights. They actually both rest on a liberal foundation, which is the idea in capitalism that each individual and collections of individuals have the right to do their best in the economy. They depend on the rule of law to be safe and to invest and make innovations and start new businesses and all the rest of it (which is Adam Smithian, if you like). In such a society, wealth isn't defined by inheritance or ascribed status but by what you do yourself. It’s profoundly individualistic. In a society like that, people will say, “I'm entitled to a say in politics, too, because I'm a valid and valuable human being who's allowed to do what I like.” The demand for democratic participation grows quite naturally from an ideological point of view—and it did very, very quickly, actually, which is very clear in England, the first industrial nation, already early in the 19th century. Now, the demands could have been resisted forever (and in some places they were), but the big reason it worked is because capitalists needed to reach an agreement with workers. Capitalism generated urbanization, mass industrialization, and huge concentrations of workers, on whom capitalists depended, who had huge power because they could stop the factories in which the capitalists invested from working. They were very vexed, very confrontational, but capitalists had to accommodate them. More importantly, still, in the late 19th century capitalists found they needed educated workers. The ruling classes more broadly started supporting mass education. If you've got a highly educated or increasingly educated, literate population, organized in cities, in industry, accounting for a huge proportion of the population, you can't treat them like serfs. It's a completely different social relationship: we're all equal in some sense, so you should give us political rights. That became completely irresistible. Of course, there were societies that did resist it, but it took an immense amount of coercion. It's a natural outgrowth. Both capitalism and democracy demand constraining institutions, the rule of law, a limited state, but all of it is fragile. You are trying to separate power from wealth and wealth will always try to get back into power. Indeed, that's what we've been seeing. The reaction is, I think, part of the populist upsurge we're seeing.Mounk: Can capitalism survive without democracy? Wolf: It would be difficult. Without democracy it is almost inevitable that it will become a plutocratic or oligarchic form of capitalism, and the natural tendency of an oligarchy controlling the political process is to preserve its own wealth by eroding competition. We see this all over the world. If you look at autocratic systems, they tend to become crony systems, not competitive systems. If, on the other hand, you try to have a socialist economy in which the government controls everything, then it's almost impossible to have genuine democratic competition because one party, the party that controls the state, essentially controls all resources and can't be defeated politically. You need both together for a fully functioning system. And I think we'll see that in China. Indeed, I think we're already seeing it in China. And it's why Taiwan will be richer than mainland China. And is.The battle for creating democracy was long and hard. The 1930s were a much bigger crisis than the present crisis. It took quite a bit of luck and a great deal of determination for democracy to survive the interwar period. But why have we gone through another period of erosion? I think there are, broadly speaking, two things that interact: one is the inevitable transformation of our economy, which undermined the relative position of groups in our economy and society; and then there are the political policies which reinforce those changes. The inevitable change underlying this was the decline of the industrial working class, which I think played a very big part in the evolution of modern democracy in the most advanced economies. Mounk: There’s something ironic about this, right? Because when you go back to the 19th or the 20th century, it seemed as though a mass-scale working class was one of the things that would undermine capitalism and, perhaps, democracy. Liberal democratic capitalists at the time were worried about the ways in which the agency of the working class could bring about the overthrow of capitalism and the arrival of communism. Why is it that the industrial working class, which for a long time observers assumed would undermine democracy in retrospect actually seems to have been one of the factors stabilizing it?Wolf: Well, my sense of the history—I wouldn't claim gigantic expertise—is actually that the industrial working class, as a mass force, never created a Communist revolution; the Communist revolutions all came from almost pre-industrial societies with a very weak industrial working class. Marx's theory that it would be the industrial working class that will generate the end of capitalism turned out to be historically completely false. In fact, to the extent that it did go authoritarian, it tended to support the authoritarianism of the right, the famous example being when the Social Democrats in Germany went with the war aims of the German state in the First World War. The working class supported the war—it went nationalist. That's always been an important part of this. But the basic point is that in sensible societies the politics and the economic role of the working class meant that, like it or not, the capitalists had to make a compromise with them. They were too important and too potent in society to be ignored. They couldn't be forever repressed or suppressed. They had to be bought out, as it were. There were two ways of buying them: one is the creation of the welfare state, famously started by Bismarck in Germany, and giving them ever-increasing political rights, extending the franchise and allowing them into politics, which is what happened in Britain, for example, in the early 20th century. The Labour Party very soon, once it had been allowed a share of power, became a stabilizing force in democracy. It was consistently anti-Communist, the same with the Democrats in America when the unions became an enormous part of their base. They wanted a stable society, they wanted to get more prosperous. They wanted welfare. But they didn't want revolution. That created the welfare democracies of the mid-20th century. It was a solution to the conflict that Marx had described but a solution that he didn't envisage. And they became incredibly prosperous by historical standards, a level of prosperity that the serfs and peasants of old could not have even begun to imagine. It was a pretty good deal.Mounk: How is it that technological changes undermine the persistence of that kind of industrial working class? And why is it that that becomes the first problem for the stability of democracy?Wolf: Two things happened. First, productivity growth hit manufacturing in a very profound way. We have found that of the big sectors of our economy, there are two in which it's easiest to use machinery to replace people. The first and most striking is agriculture. Two hundred years ago, 60-70% of the labor force was in agriculture. Now it's less than 1% in our countries. And then manufacturing. We have found, over time, that we can produce more and more with fewer and fewer people in manufacturing. Manufacturing's price has fallen, its share in GDP in nominal prices is falling all the time, and its share of employment has fallen. In the U.S. and U.K., manufacturing is about 10% of the labor force now; it used to be 40%. That's a massive decline. Not all of that happened in the last half century, but it's been going on for a long time and it will continue. The industrial labor forces of old have just disappeared—part of that is trade. But it's also diminished very rapidly in countries with giant trade surpluses, like Germany—not as low, but the decline is as fast. The second thing that has happened is an immensely powerful skill bias in new employment. The next stage in our economic revolution, deindustrialization, was the growth of new services and new sectors in all sorts of service activities, but above all in everything tech-related, which demand highly skilled information workers, knowledge workers, all of whom went to university. We created a new, very powerful working class of university graduates who had very little sympathy or engagement with the old working class and who tended to have rather different values. This is a social revolution. It's an immense thing. The final thing that happened was a liberalization revolution of which free trade was a part. But the biggest part was the release of the financial sector, increasingly, to dominate the economy, including  the management of corporations and the allocation of resources; an enormous expansion in credit and debt (a really fundamental revolution); and, on top of that, the emergence of the new dominant tech sector that shifted a lot of income and wealth to the very top of our society, generated vast inequalities in wealth, and very significant inequalities of income at the top—essentially, it’s the emergence of a new plutocracy. All of this was going along fairly well until the financial crisis hit, which destabilized this economically and destroyed the legitimacy of this new system, creating the political upheavals we've seen. Why did the old free market, free trade, banking sort of conservatives get replaced by nationalist, protectionist, would-be autocrats? The financial crisis played a huge role—the sense of injustice and the sense that the elites had rigged the system against ordinary people. That's what Donald Trump so brilliantly exploited.Mounk: Within the economic explanation, it seems to me that there are two slightly different ways of accounting for the roots of populism. One puts its emphasis on the more recent crisis, saying that what we're dealing with are still the aftereffects of the very deep economic crisis that came to a boil in 2008. There's some good historical evidence for that. Then, in a different strand of what you've talked about, you emphasize these more long-term structural changes, the decline of the industrial working class and so on. Now, if we think that the problem in the main originates from the recent economic crisis, then perhaps it's just a question of waiting it out. But if you think that this is not just dealing with these relatively long-lasting aftereffects, and it really is that the structure of our economy is no longer conducive, in the way that it once was, to stable mass politics that adheres to basic democratic values and norms, then we might need a much more radical restructuring of the economy to withstand or overcome the crisis of democratic capitalism. How do you put these two different causes in conversation with each other? What do you think is the right description of what the likely future of the crisis of democratic capitalism is?Wolf: This is a wonderful question which I don't address directly in my book. I probably should have, but the book is already long enough. The answer is that I don't know, as is always true about the future. There is an argument that not only because the financial crisis is fading into the distance, but because the populists in power mostly tended to be very unsuccessful, that people will say, “Well, we've had enough of all this noise, this disruption and absurdity, and we're going to go back to more sensible, middle-of-the-road people.” You could say that Biden's election, the overthrow of Johnson, the way that the new prime minister of Italy, despite the fact that she's from a Fascist party, is actually ruling—all this reinforces the view that we're actually going back to a politics where people want normal, reasonable policy done by normal, reasonable people—back to, as it were, the establishment, with people like Sunak and Biden. I hope that this is correct. It's perfectly possible that this will be correct. But the thing that worries me is that the establishment (this applies to me too) doesn’t really know how to generate the rising, widely-shared living standards on which the post-war settlement fundamentally rested. And our parties do not represent the economic interests of the bottom 50% of our population very well. They represent their cultural and social interests on the right; on the left they represent a bit of their economic interests in a welfare state sort of framework. But neither has anything that says, “Here you are, people without university degrees—you have a bright, blossoming, and burgeoning future in our society and our economy as it's developing.” Because the truth is, they don't. I fear there may be a populism cycle: we may move out of populism now, these people will ultimately fail to deliver what people want and hope, and then there will be a return to new populist leaders. And our politics will start looking, with this huge plutocratic element, a bit like Latin American countries.Mounk: Is this a crisis of economic knowledge or political representation? When you say you worry that we don't know how to bring about a situation in which there will be these broadly-rising living standards which helped to stabilize democratic capitalism in the past, is the primary obstacle towards achieving that that we don't know how to sustain that kind of growth? Or, perhaps, is it just much harder to sustain that growth once you are a fully developed economy and a lot of low-hanging fruit has been picked and eaten? Are there actually policies which, in theory, we could easily implement, but at the moment there isn't the political coalition, the political will, to implement?Wolf: I do genuinely think it's very difficult. The technological and economic forces that created this widely-shared prosperity in the economy were, I think, temporary. If you look at where growth and demands are coming from now, most of them are coming from, and in, sectors which reward the most educated and the most skilled and generate enormous profits for the benefit of these people. I point out in the book the difference between Apple and General Motors, for example, the two most valuable companies of their age. In the United States, Apple basically doesn't invest anything in physical terms. It doesn't employ many people. It's a tiny labor force compared with what GM had. All the people it does employ are very skilled university graduates. It is a completely different sort of business. Finance is the same. It doesn't need clerks anymore. It just needs highly-skilled people to manage IT, relationships, and all the rest of it. So the high income-generating activities, by and large, don't generate working-class jobs, and most of those kinds of jobs that have been developed are in sectors like caring, which have no real economic power because they're paid for, to a very significant extent, by the state. Construction is weak because we don't have lots of children to build houses for. We're not building huge amounts of infrastructure because, again, we have moved into an economy which doesn't require lots of new infrastructure except in the energy case, which may be an exception. For all sorts of reasons, it doesn't look as though the economy is going to go back to creating the sorts of structures you used to have. Trade is a bit of a factor but it's not the decisive one. I think there are two ways of thinking about what we should do: one is to really do our best to generate new growth and at the same time insist that the terms on which people are employed, directly and indirectly by the new growth, are decent—that will probably mean high minimum wages, lots of labor subsidies and so forth. But in the limit, if this goes on enough, we may have to start thinking about radical policies on how ownership is shared—how the rental income generated by innovation and so forth is shared within our societies if we're not to go back, as many fear, to a sort of quasi-feudal structure; a society in which a small proportion of the population own not only all the means of production but generate from it such a vast income stream (this is not what we're seeing yet, at all) that they completely dominate society. What we're seeing now is that they, with this new professional middle class, completely dominate society. But I think we have to be agnostic on whether the economy is really going to help us. At the moment, it isn't.Mounk: I admire your honesty about the difficulty of knowing exactly what to do. But is there nevertheless a prescription? For listeners who agree with you about the crisis of democratic capitalism, and the way in which the economic dimension is crucial here, and the way in which these two different crises reinforce each other, what are the prospects for success? And what can all of us do in order to maximize the likelihood that democratic capitalism may survive?Wolf: Well, I do think there are low-hanging fruit here. We should try, so far as we can, to have a politics that focuses on broadly-shared welfare rather than fundamentally divisive cultural issues. The big problem with cultural issues is they really are zero-sum; they're war to the death, as it were. And that's not necessarily true if you focus on giving people opportunities for a better life. You have to pay more tax—that I accept. But if you give people childcare, better education, better chances, greater equality of opportunity, better health care in the U.S. (which is crucial), start attacking some of the new monopolies that we are seeing emerging across a whole slew of sectors where in different ways the regime allows essentially for monopolization, a very big point in health in the U.S. and also in the new tech sector. Insist that the tax system is much fairer and is actually implemented—there are all sorts of loopholes that have cultivated this new plutocracy. It is true that the average tax rate of the richest people in the US is below that of the other groups in society. That seems monstrously unjust. You can reintroduce death duties to prevent the creation of a hereditary plutocracy. You can go back, in other words, to many of the policies that were introduced in the middle of the 20th century and subsequently abandoned. You can change corporate governance. I think there's a strong case for saying that there should be greater involvement of workers in corporate governance; the shareholder value–maximizing model has not been really as effective as we would hope. There are lots of things you can do to make the system fairer. You're going to have to follow the sort of active labor market policies you see in countries in Northern Europe which have been remarkably successful. If you combine it with training, people who you wouldn't think you could get to do completely different jobs actually do learn how to do so. This all requires, of course, an active state with some greater level of tax support. So it is a political revolution. But it seems to me that those things are feasible and, conceivably, are things that most people will recognize as worth doing if the alternative is a political breakdown. What I'm arguing is that the alternative might be a political breakdown. What that will look like, we can look around the world to see—it's going to be really very unpleasant. Mounk: That's actually exactly what I was going to ask you as a last question. What would be lost if the crisis of democratic capitalism cannot be remedied? What are the stakes here that should motivate us?Wolf: The stake is that the angry and disaffected of various kinds—cultural and economic (we can discuss the interaction between them)—will end up installing somebody who subverts the norms and rules of democracy and basically creates what we've now come to call an “illiberal democracy,” which is what Sergei Guriev calls a spin dictatorship. Essentially, they erode the rule of law, they put their own cronies in the principal positions of power in the legal system, the judiciary, the police forces, the army, and so forth; they effectively ensure that the media are controlled by their friends; they use the legal system and the tax system to persecute their enemies, including many rich people. They basically create a state which is dominated by them and those whom they choose. It's a complete subversion of democracy from within and it's the principal way democracies are disappearing around the world. In emerging countries it's happening all the time. We might remember that 23 years ago, when Putin was elected leader, we thought that maybe Russia was going to become a democracy—not exactly what has happened. The danger is that that is what will happen. We're seeing it now in places I would never have imagined it would happen—Israel, for example. I think Trump, some of his supporters, and some of the people behind him have similar tendencies. Now, what do you lose? What you lose, ultimately, is your freedom and your security. You may be allowed to be rich, but you live at the whim of the ruler. And the economy will not work well because the ruler will use his whims to favor those he wants to favor and penalize those who are against him, which is not compatible with a proper or decent market economy. But it will also have political and social impact: people will stop saying what they think. People will have to be careful about what they say. Now, we're seeing that on the left, in one way, and we will be seeing that on the right. In that sort of society, what I think of as core liberal values will erode and disappear.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

On Monday, as Americans considered the possibility of a Donald Trump indictment and a presidential perp walk, Eliot Higgins brought the hypothetical to life. Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open-source investigations group, asked the latest version of the generative-AI art tool Midjourney to illustrate the spectacle of a Trump arrest. It pumped out vivid photos of a sea of police officers dragging the 45th president to the ground.Higgins didn’t stop there. He generated a series of images that became more and more absurd: Donald Trump Jr. and Melania Trump screaming at a throng of arresting officers; Trump weeping in the courtroom, pumping iron with his fellow prisoners, mopping a jailhouse latrine, and eventually breaking out of prison through a sewer on a rainy evening. The story, which Higgins tweeted over the course of two days, ends with Trump crying at a McDonald’s in his orange jumpsuit.
pic.twitter.com/V6Y8hHnGRN
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 21, 2023All of the tweets are compelling, but only the scene of Trump’s arrest went mega viral, garnering 5.7 million views as of this morning. People immediately started wringing their hands over the possibility of Higgins’s creations duping unsuspecting audiences into thinking that Trump had actually been arrested, or leading to the downfall of our legal system. “Many people have copied Eliot’s AI generated images of Trump getting arrested and some are sharing them as real. Others have generated lots of similar images and new ones keep appearing. Please stop this,” the popular debunking account HoaxEye tweeted. “In 10 years the legal system will not accept any form of first or second hand evidence that isn’t on scene at the time of arrest,” an anonymous Twitter user fretted. “The only trusted word will be of the arresting officer and the polygraph. the legal system will be stifled by forgery/falsified evidence.”This fear, though understandable, draws on an imagined dystopian future that’s rooted in the concerns of the past rather than the realities of our strange present. People seem eager to ascribe to AI imagery a persuasion power it hasn’t yet demonstrated. Rather than imagine emergent ways that these tools will be disruptive, alarmists draw on misinformation tropes from the earlier days of the social web, when lo-fi hoaxes routinely went viral.These concerns do not match the reality of the broad response to Higgins’s thread. Some people shared the images simply because they thought they were funny. Others remarked at how much better AI-art tools have gotten in such a short amount of time. As the writer Parker Molloy noted, the first version of Midjourney, which was initially tested in March 2022, could barely render famous faces and was full of surrealist glitches. Version five, which Higgins used, launched in beta just last week and still has trouble with hands and small details, but it was able to re-create a near-photorealistic imagining of the arrest in the style of a press photo.[Read: The Trump AI deepfakes had an unintended side effect]But despite those technological leaps, very few people seem to genuinely believe that Higgins’s AI images are real. That may be a consequence, partially, of the sheer volume of fake AI Trump-arrest images that filled Twitter this week. If you examine the quote tweets and comments on these images, what emerges is not a gullible reaction but a skeptical one. In one instance of a junk account trying to pass off the photos as real, a random Twitter user responded by pointing out the image’s flaws and inconsistencies: “Legs, fingers, uniforms, any other intricate details when you look closely. I’d say you people have literal rocks for brains but I’d be insulting the rocks.”I asked Higgins, who is himself a skilled online investigator and debunker, what he makes of the response. “It seems most people mad about it are people who think other people might think they’re real,” he told me over email. (Higgins also said that his Midjourney access has been revoked, and BuzzFeed News reported that users are no longer able to prompt the art tool using the word arrested. Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)The attitude Higgins described tracks with research published last month by the academic journal New Media & Society, which found that “the strongest, and most reliable, predictor of perceived danger of misinformation was the perception that others are more vulnerable to misinformation than the self”—a phenomenon called the third-person effect. The study found that participants who reported being more worried about misinformation were also more likely to share alarmist narratives and warnings about misinformation. A previous study on the third-person effect also found that increased social-media engagement tends to heighten both the third-person effect and, indirectly, people’s confidence in their own knowledge of a subject.The Trump-AI-art news cycle seems like the perfect illustration of these phenomena. It is a true pseudo event: A fake image enters the world; concerned people amplify it and decry it as dangerous to a perceived vulnerable audience that may or may not exist; news stories echo these concerns.There are plenty of real reasons to be worried about the rise of generative AI, which can reliably churn out convincing-sounding text that’s actually riddled with factual errors. AI art, video, and sound tools all have the potential to create basically any mix of “deepfaked” media you can imagine. And these tools are getting better at producing realistic outputs at a near exponential rate. It’s entirely possible that the fears of future reality-blurring misinformation campaigns or impersonation may prove prophetic.But the Trump-arrest photos also reveal how conversations about the potential threats of synthetic media tend to draw on generalized fears that news consumers can and will fall for anything—tropes that have persisted even as we’ve become used to living in an untrustworthy social-media environment. These tropes aren’t all well founded: Not everyone was exposed to Russian trolls, not all Americans live in filter bubbles, and, as researchers have shown, not all fake-news sites are that influential. There are countless examples of awful, preposterous, and popular conspiracy theories thriving online, but they tend to be less lazy, dashed-off lies than intricate examples of world building. They stem from deep-rooted ideologies or a consensus that forms in one’s political or social circles. When it comes to nascent technologies such as generative AI and large language models, it’s possible that the real concern will be an entirely new set of bad behaviors we haven’t encountered yet.[Read: The prophecies of Q]Chris Moran, the head of editorial innovation at The Guardian, offered one such example. Last week, his team was contacted by a researcher asking why the paper had deleted a specific article from its archive. Moran and his team checked and discovered that the article in question hadn’t been deleted, because it had never been written or published: ChatGPT had hallucinated the article entirely. (Moran declined to share any details about the article. My colleague Ian Bogost encountered something similar recently when he asked ChatGPT to find an Atlantic story about tacos: It fabricated the headline “The Enduring Appeal of Tacos,” supposedly by Amanda Mull.)  The situation was quickly resolved but left Moran unsettled. “Imagine this in an area prone to conspiracy theories,” he later tweeted. “These hallucinations are common. We may see a lot of conspiracies fuelled by ‘deleted’ articles that were never written.”Moran’s example—of AIs hallucinating, and accidentally birthing conspiracy theories about cover-ups—feels like a plausible future issue, because this is precisely how sticky conspiracy theories work. The strongest conspiracies tend to allege that an event happened. They offer little proof, citing cover-ups from shadowy or powerful people and shifting the burden of proof to the debunkers. No amount of debunking will ever suffice, because it’s often impossible to prove a negative. But the Trump-arrest images are the inverse. The event in question hasn’t happened, and if it had, coverage would blanket the internet; either way, the narrative in the images is instantly disprovable. A small minority of extremely incurious and uninformed consumers might be duped by some AI photos, but chances are that even they will soon learn that the former president has not (yet) been tackled to the ground by a legion of police.Even though Higgins was allegedly booted from Midjourney for generating the images, one way to look at his experiment is as an exercise in red-teaming: the practice of using a service adversarially in order to imagine and test how it might be exploited. “It’s been educational for people at least,” Higgins told me. “Hopefully make them think twice when they see a photo of a 3-legged Donald Trump being arrested by police with nonsense written on their hats.”AI tools may indeed complicate and blur our already fractured sense of reality, but we would do well to have a sense of humility about how that might happen. It’s possible that, after decades of living online and across social platforms, many people may be resilient against the manipulations of synthetic media. Perhaps there is a risk that’s yet to fully take shape: It may be more effective to manipulate an existing image or doctor small details rather than invent something wholesale. If, say, Trump were to be arrested out of the view of cameras, well-crafted AI-generated images claiming to be leaked law-enforcement photos may very well dupe even savvy news consumers.Things may also get much weirder than we can imagine. Yesterday, Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself praying—a minor fabrication with some political aim that’s hard to make sense of, and that hints at the subtler ways that synthetic media might worm its way into our lives and make the process of information gathering even more confusing, exhausting, and strange.

The escalating confrontation between the parties over the federal budget rests on a fundamental paradox: The Republican majority in the House of Representatives is now more likely than Democrats to represent districts filled with older and lower-income voters who rely on the social programs that the GOP wants to cut.A much larger share of Republican than Democratic House members represent districts where seniors exceed their share of the national population, census data show. Republicans are also more likely to represent districts where the median income trails the national level, or the proportion of people without health insurance is greater than in the nation overall.House Republicans, in their ongoing struggle with President Joe Biden over raising the debt ceiling, have signaled they will push for sweeping reductions in domestic social programs, likely including Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the principal federal programs providing health care for working-age adults. And while House Republicans appear to have backed away from pursuing reductions in Social Security and Medicare, the conservative Republican Study Committee has set a long-term goal of cutting and partially privatizing both programs.[Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class]The fact that so many House Republicans feel safe advancing these proposals in districts with such extensive economic need testifies to the power of what I’ve called “the class inversion” in American politics: the growing tendency of voters to divide between the parties based on cultural attitudes, rather than class interests. That dynamic has simultaneously allowed House Democrats to gain in more socially liberal, affluent, metropolitan areas and House Republicans to consolidate their hold over more culturally conservative, economically hardscrabble, nonurban areas.Yesterday, Biden forcefully reiterated his charge that Republicans would shred the safety net at a White House ceremony commemorating the 13th anniversary of Barack Obama signing the ACA into law. An extended battle between House Republicans and Biden this spring and summer over the safety net may test whether any economic argument can allow Democrats to break through the cultural resistance that fortifies Republican control of these downscale districts.While Republicans have gained in some areas primarily around culturally and racially infused disputes such as those over crime and immigration, a struggle over spending priorities will inevitably highlight that “their policies on these bread-and-butter issues remain diametrically opposed to the economic interest of much of their base,” Paul Pierson, a political scientist at UC Berkeley and a co-author of Let Them Eat Tweets, told me.As I reported last week, to understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.That analysis inverts many traditional assumptions, even within the parties themselves, about whose voters rely on the social safety net. “There has been a massive transformation of the coalitions,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.Democrats, who led the legislative efforts to create Social Security under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Medicare under Lyndon B. Johnson, have long thought of themselves as the party of seniors. But today, Republicans represent 141 of the 215 House districts where adults aged 65 and older exceed their 16 percent share of the national population, while Democrats hold a clear majority of seats in districts with fewer seniors than average, according to the Equity Research Institute analysis.Republicans now also control most of the House seats in which the median income trails the national level of nearly $65,000 annually. Republicans hold 152 of the 237 seats in that category. Democrats, in turn, hold 128 of the 198 seats where the median income exceeds the national level.Perhaps most surprisingly, Republicans hold a clear majority of the districts where the share of residents who lack health insurance exceeds the national level of 9 percent. The GOP now holds 110 of those 185 highly uninsured seats. Democrats control 138 of the 250 seats with fewer uninsured than the nation overall.Equally revealing is to examine what share of each party’s total strength in the House these seats represent. From that angle, the parties offer almost mirror-image profiles. About two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts with more seniors than the national level, while about two-thirds of Democrats represent districts with fewer of them. Roughly two-thirds of House Republicans represent districts where the median income lags the national level, while three-fifths of Democrats hold seats where incomes surpass it. Almost exactly half of Republicans, compared with only about one-third of Democrats, represent districts with an unusually high concentration of people lacking health insurance.The economically vulnerable districts that each side holds also present a stark demographic contrast. Low-income Democratic seats tend to be in urban centers with large nonwhite populations. In more than three-fourths of the Democratic seats with a median income below the national level, and in virtually all of the Democratic districts with more uninsured people than average, the minority share of the population is also higher than the national average.Some low-income Republican districts also have large minority populations, particularly in Texas and Florida, where the GOP has made inroads into culturally conservative Latino communities. But mostly the low-income GOP seats are centered on working-class white areas, many of them outside metropolitan areas.   [Read: Are Latinos really realigning toward Republicans?]In the 141 seats Republicans hold with more seniors than the national average, white residents exceed their national share of the population in 127 of them. Likewise, white residents surpass their share of the national population in more than four-fifths of the Republican-held districts that lag the median income. Nearly half of House Republicans represent districts in which all three things are true: They have more seniors than the national level, more white residents than the national level, and a lower median income than the national level.All of this reflects how working-class white voters, many of them financially squeezed, have become the unquestioned foundation of the GOP’s coalition at every level, from the House through presidential elections.Biden is laying siege to those voters with a strategy of deemphasizing cultural disputes and stressing kitchen-table economic benefits. “Democrats really are making appeals to these districts in a big way,” Pierson said. “Most of that infrastructure and climate [spending] is going to go on in red states. There really is a big effort to say, ‘We are going to use policy to try to make our electoral coalition bigger.’”A key element of Biden’s courtship of these voters is defending the social safety net, especially Social Security and Medicare. The president’s repeated rejection of reductions in those programs, combined with former President Donald Trump’s opposition to potential cuts, has resulted in the most obvious concession by House Republicans to their evolving electoral base: public declarations by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other leaders that they will not target Social Security and Medicare in the cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit this summer.  Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs that many voters in blue-collar Republican districts rely on, potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. “We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,” Blendon said. “The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.”The one risk for Republicans in such areas, he noted, would be if voters conclude that they present a genuine threat to Social Security and Medicare. Even most conservative voters strongly favor those programs, Blendon told me, primarily because they view them as an earned benefit that workers have contributed to during their lifetime. If the GOP seriously pushes ideas such as converting Medicare into a voucher program, or diverting part of Social Security revenue into private investment accounts, then “in districts with a lot of older people, they are going to get in trouble,” Blendon said.Pastor, the director of the Equity Research Institute, also believes that current Democratic arguments targeted at older and non-college-educated white voters that they are “voting against their interests” economically are unlikely to succeed. The problem, he says, is that those arguments don’t directly address the way many voters also define their interests to include cultural and racial dynamics. Because Republican strength in these older, predominantly white, financially stressed districts is rooted largely in “the alienation of white voters who fear the country is shifting on them demographically,” Democrats must ultimately make a more explicit case to those voters about how all Americans can benefit from a more diverse and inclusive society, Pastor said. “The Democratic Party needs to figure out how to talk more effectively about race and racism—not try to ignore it, but try to inoculate people against it,” he said.[Read: The four quadrants of American politics]Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, notes that the majority of voters, including seniors, support Biden’s approach to preserving the safety net for retirees: In a recent national survey, his group found that voters were nearly four times as likely to support stabilizing Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent rather than cutting benefits. “There is quite a bit of economically populist appetite even among Republicans for raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” Bennett told me. Even Medicaid, once seen as a program for the poor, now draws widespread support across party lines, he said.Yet Bennett, too, is cautious about predicting that Republican efforts to cut the safety net will hurt them in districts that highly depend on it. The GOP, Bennett said, is gambling that it can cut programs that benefit the party’s lower-income white base and still prevent those voters from defecting to Democrats by stressing “other issues like immigration and the culture war.”If Republicans face any internal resistance to sharp cuts in the safety net, in fact, it may be more likely to come from their members who represent socially liberal white-collar districts that don’t rely as much on these programs than from their members who represent the culturally conservative blue-collar districts that do depend on them. The Republicans who seem least concerned about targeting the social safety net are those who represent the places that need those programs the most. That’s another telling measure of just how fully the concrete has settled beneath a modern political alignment that revolves more around culture than class.

The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.[Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots]Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.But he isn’t the only one.Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.“He fights,” Byrd replied.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Last week, I saw a new paper in the journal Nature Human Behavior called “Negativity Drives Online News Consumption.” That seems bad, I thought. Naturally, I clicked.In a randomized study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions from a data set of articles published by the online news dispensary Upworthy, researchers concluded that each negative word increased the click-through rate by more than 2 percent. “The presence of positive words in a news headline significantly decreases the likelihood of a headline being clicked on,” they said.Are you even remotely surprised by any of this? Probably not. Neither was New York University’s Claire E. Robertson, a co-author of the paper. “People have been saying ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ for decades,” she told me. But what does that actually mean? Maybe substantively bad news naturally gets more attention, as it probably should. Or, maybe, even humdrum and unimportant stories can be juiced to attract eyes and ears if editors inject their headlines with a dose of sadness and catastrophe.Upworthy might seem like an unusual choice for studying the properties of hard news, given that the site is typically associated with frivolous curiosity-gap bait: “This Baby Panda Learned to Breakdance—What Happened Next Will ASTONISH You,” and so on. But its database offers an unusually perfect opportunity to test the effect of headlines on audience behavior, because the site has made public the headline tests it ran for many news stories. This way, Robertson and her co-authors could control for the substance of each article, because some stories (a Harry Styles breakup, for example) will always get more clicks than others (a new law for Vermont pension accounting, say). “Even controlling for the same news story, framing more negatively increases engagement,” Robertson said.Although blaming journalists and editors for this bias is easy, it’s also too simple. After all, it’s audiences who are reading—and watching, clicking, and subscribing to—all this stuff. (An alternate media maxim might be “If it bleeds, she reads.”) Even public-service-minded editors and journalists may feel they need to shape their coverage to match the decisions and emotional dispositions of their consumers. Negativity is not, strictly speaking, a news-maker problem; it’s a human problem—or, more to the point, a collective-action problem, in a dual-sided marketplace.The internet is not best understood as a big room full of people screaming at one another about breaking news and policy debates. In fact, the room for political yelling is one of the smaller antechambers of the house of online content. One study of internet users in Poland found that news accounts for barely 3 percent of people’s digital-information diet. Much of the rest of the online world is populated by joyful gossip and animals doing stuff. In fact, a 2021 analysis of 126,301 Twitter posts found that rumors with positive emotions were much more likely to go viral, overall.But although news makes up a small fraction of online content, this is where negativity seems to have the biggest lift for traffic. Robertson said her research validated several other studies showing that people are “especially likely” to consume political and economic news “when it is negative.” Surprisingly, to both me and the researchers, the study did not find that anger increased clicks; instead, sadness seemed to drive traffic in the Upworthy data set. But other research has found that high-arousal emotions, such as outrage, are most likely to be shared by users.“There’s evidence that the people who post and retweet are both in the minority of online users and tend to be more extreme than the average user,” Robertson said. “When taking this into account, it’s logical that high-arousal content is most often shared or posted, even when it’s not what people are most interested in.”When you put it all together, the big picture looks like this: Online news is a weird and small subset of the internet, which is driven by an even weirder and smaller set of writers and posters, who have contributed to an ecosystem in which emotionality drives sharing and negativity drives clicks.Okay, so what? Bad news isn’t some myth conjured into existence by traffic-chasing headline writers. Many events and trends are actually bad, and any honest news organization needs a muscle for identifying them. Scrutinizing power, corruption, and oppression on behalf of the public requires a critical lens, and suggesting that the world would be better if journalists “just cheered up” is absurd.Still, a negativity bias in news is worth keeping in mind, for at least three reasons.1. Any systemic bias in news reporting is bad.Lying to protect a political party, or throttling accurate reporting because it is ideologically or personally inconvenient, is broadly and rightly considered unethical. Although a bad-news bias might not initially seem as icky as an ideological bias, its dangers are manifold.This bias, when it shows up as a tendency to sensationalize negative news while ignoring positive stories, can gradually desensitize audiences to truly grave issues, overwhelm people with a sense of global doom, misinform audiences about opportunities to make the world better, reduce their agency to fix solvable problems, erode trust in the general enterprise of honest news gathering, and exacerbate political and social polarization by locking audiences into a relationship with news coverage that highlights conflict.Negativity bias in news is rarely as lurid as, say, the most propagandist Fox News coverage. Its costs are subtler. For example, if you publish a long essay about climate change’s very real dangers of ocean acidification and droughts, nobody is going to accuse you of lying. But publishing a relentless drumbeat of stories about how humanity is doomed because of climate change is dishonest if you never mention that the range of possible outcomes for planetary warming has improved in the past decade, thanks in part to rapid advancements in clean-energy technology. Over time, this bias might contribute to a world with widespread despair, flailing protest movements that have little to do with decarbonization, and more couples deciding not to have children, because their favorite news outlet assured them that all offspring will prematurely perish on a death planet.Social-media platforms spread anger and doom to increase engagement, manipulating our attention to danger. They are fertile grounds for conspiracy theories, and the media have duly paid attention to this phenomenon. But news organizations should interrogate whether they, too, are sometimes helping confirm their audiences’ unjustified fears.The solution to negative bias is not pie-eyed techno-optimistic boosterism. Toxic positivity is no cure for toxic negativity; it’s just the mirror image of the same disease. But if journalists want to build media institutions that people can trust, especially on subjects of great uncertainty, they have to recognize that crying wolf every day accomplishes little beyond leaving audiences in a state of despairing paralysis and obfuscating the exceptional danger of actual wolves.2. Marketplaces of superabundance might have hidden costs.I’ve written several times about the benefits of abundance in the material world, in housing, energy, infrastructure, and medicine. But lately, I’ve been thinking about when abundance isn’t naturally wonderful.In the early 20th century, car companies used assembly-line manufacturing to speed up the production of automobiles. To keep up with supply, auto executives needed new ideas to boost consumer demand. Alfred Sloan, the CEO of General Motors, reportedly came up with the idea of releasing annual vehicle models, with new colors and specs. Over time, advertisers called this concept “planned obsolescence”—putting arbitrary expiration dates on products to get people to buy more of them. Abundance birthed advertising.What does this have to do with news headlines? Well, the communication revolution in tech has expanded the marketplace for content, creating a crowded news environment where headline writers compete viciously for attention. In a marketplace of news abundance, the oversupply of content encourages posters to adopt the psychology of an advertiser: “How do I juice demand for my thing?” Just as a surfeit of auto production created the conditions for planned obsolescence, a bounty of content has given millions of people an advanced degree in the fluid dynamics of attention, and many of them seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: Five-alarm fires move traffic. Once again, abundance has birthed advertising.3. Optimization always has a dark side.Last year, I wrote about what I called “the dark side of Moneyball.” By optimizing for certain metrics, baseball had gotten overlong and boring. By optimizing for familiarity and reboots, blockbuster films had gotten predictable. I concluded that a lot of problems in the world are downstream of systems that have gotten “too good” at optimizing.The news industry has better data than ever about what articles and posts people click on, how long they read, and how much they share. We can A/B-test headlines to squeeze a few thousand more clicks out of our audience by identifying the perfect curiosity gap. But perhaps the quantitative revolution in media is exacerbating the bad-news bias of news organizations. Audiences, who are clearly more interested in clicking on sad news and sharing bad news, are co-pilots–—or at least carefully watched inputs—of the news industry’s bad-news bias.We don’t know for certain how increased exposure to doomer news increases audience anxiety. But we do know that an increase in online news with a demonstrated negativity bias happens to have intersected with a growing teen-anxiety crisis. “It’s hard to tell media companies, ‘Hey, negativity will increase your readership, but cut it out; it’s bad for our brains,’” Robertson said. I think she’s right; news organizations clinging to thin, or negative, profit margins can’t easily afford to ignore audiences demanding a diet of sadness and badness. But whether audiences want the news to bleed is no longer the interesting question. The interesting question is: Now that we understand one another, what do we all do about this?

The most interesting outcome of the three-day summit between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping got limited media attention. Describing their talks, Putin said, “We are in favor of using the Chinese yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.” So the world’s second-largest economy and its largest energy exporter are actively trying to dent the dollar’s dominance as the anchor of the international financial system. Will they succeed?

The dollar is America’s superpower. It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.

Sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine combined with Washington’s increasingly confrontational approach to China have created a perfect storm in which both Russia and China are accelerating efforts to diversify away from the dollar. Their central banks are keeping less of their reserves in dollars, and most trade between them is being settled in the yuan. They are also, as Putin noted, making efforts to get other countries to follow suit.

The Biden administration has handled the economic war against Russia extremely effectively by building a coalition in support of Ukraine that includes almost all the world’s advanced economies. That makes it hard to escape from the dollar into other highly valued stable currencies such as the euro or the pound or the Canadian dollar, because those countries are also countering Russia.

What might have been a sharper turning point for the dollar’s role was President Donald Trump’s decision in May 2018 to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and impose sanctions. The European Union, strenuously opposed to this move, watched as the dollar’s dominance meant that Iran was immediately excluded from much of the world economy, including its trading partners in Europe. Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the European Commission, proposed enhancing the euro’s role internationally to shield the continent from “selfish unilateralism.” The commission outlined a path to achieve this goal.

That hasn’t happened; there remain too many fundamental doubts about the future of the euro itself. Dollar dominance is firmly entrenched, for many good reasons. A globalized economy needs a single currency for ease and efficiency. The dollar is stable; you can buy and sell it anytime, and it is governed largely by the market and not a government’s whims. That’s why China’s efforts to expand the yuan’s role internationally have not worked. Ironically, if Xi wanted to cause the greatest pain to the United States, he would liberalize his financial sector and make the yuan a true competitor to the dollar, but that would take him in the direction of markets and openness that are the opposite of his own domestic goals.

All that said, Washington’s weaponizing of the dollar over the past decade has led many important countries to search for ways to make sure that they do not become the next Russia. The share of dollars in global central bank reserves has dropped from roughly 70 percent 20 years ago to less than 60 percent today, and falling steadily. The Europeans and the Chinese are trying to build international payment systems outside of the dollar-dominated SWIFT system. Saudi Arabia has flirted with the idea of pricing its oil in yuan. India is settling most of its oil purchases from Russia in nondollar currencies. Digital currencies, which are being explored by most nations, might be another alternative; in fact, China’s central bank has created one. All of these alternatives add costs, but the past few years should have taught us that nations are increasingly willing to pay a price for achieving political goals.

We keep searching for the single replacement for the dollar, and there will not be one. But could the currency suffer weakness by a thousand cuts? That seems a more likely scenario. The author and investor Ruchir Sharma points out, “Right now, for the first time in my memory, we have an international financial crisis in which the dollar has been weakening rather than strengthening. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come.”

If it is, Americans should worry. I wrote last week about the bad geopolitical habits Washington has developed because of its unrivaled unipolar status. That attitude is even more true economically. America’s politicians have gotten used to spending seemingly without any concerns about deficits — public debt has risen almost fivefold from roughly $6.5 trillion 20 years ago to $31.5 trillion today. The Fed has solved a series of financial crashes by massively expanding its balance sheet twelvefold, from around $730 billion 20 years ago to about $8.7 trillion today. All of this only works because of the dollar’s unique status. If that wanes, America will face a reckoning like none before.

The Federal Reserve Board is walking a tightrope. The central bank has been on a campaign to raise interest rates in an effort to lower surging inflation. But the higher rates also contributed to the recent collapses of Silicon Valley Bank, and several other financial institutions.
The Fed opted to keep raising rates Wednesday, but by only a modest 0.25 percentage point, as expected. In a statement, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets the rates, said the U.S. banking system is sound and resilient but the recent failures will likely make borrowing harder and more expensive for businesses and consumers, and impact economic activity, hiring, and inflation.
How far reaching the effects of all of this will be remains uncertain, Fed chair Jerome Powell said. He also said that there might still be a path that will allow the nation to rein in inflation without falling into a recession, a so-called soft landing, but the central bank is still searching for it.
Kenneth Rogoff is the Maurits C. Boas Chair of International Economics and a professor of economics at Harvard. An expert on global financial crises, Rogoff spoke with the Gazette about his views on how the Fed is doing and what it might do next.
Q&A
Kenneth Rogoff
GAZETTE: Interest rates went up by just a quarter of a percentage point. However, the FOMC did consider a rate pause, and there was a strong consensus to do so, according to Powell. Was this the right move or did last week’s bank failures force the committee’s hand?
ROGOFF: They’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. It could look in six months like they made a horrible mistake, either because we have a banking crisis and they wished they hadn’t raised rates, or because inflation is still out of control and they wished they’d raised rates more. Core inflation, which is perhaps the most meaningful number for looking at where things stand, is still very high. Wage growth is still very high as well. At the same time, we’re in a banking crisis, albeit not yet a systemic crisis. Still, even if no more banks fail near-term, lending conditions are surely going to tighten, partly because money is moving out of small banks and into larger ones, partly because banks are needing to pay higher deposit rates, partly because banks realize that tighter regulation is inevitable, even for smaller and mid-size banks. Tighter credit conditions mean that banks are going to pull back on lending, on mortgage lending, auto lending, and business lending. The Fed and the Treasury stemmed the panic, but only by issuing such a broad, sweeping guarantee that they’ve de facto guaranteed every deposit in America regardless of its size — completely the opposite of what they said they were going to do next time in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. But if the taxpayer is going to be asked to take on so much bank risk, the Fed and the Treasury are going to have regulate more intensely, and that’s going to tighten lending conditions.

“I think Powell got it just right saying ‘we raised by a quarter, but we actually thought about pausing’ because it signals that next time, if the banking sector is still experiencing volatility, they'll pause,” said Kenneth Rogoff. 

GAZETTE: While pronouncing the U.S. banking system sound and resilient, Powell said it was too soon to say how rates should respond to the bank crisis.
ROGOFF: Well, it’s sound and resilient in the sense they’ve guaranteed every deposit in America (even if Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has subsequently tried to walk that back a little). Probably they’ll even guarantee the money market funds if it comes to that, which they did in 2008. As noted, they’ve made such sweeping guarantees that they are virtually forced to follow up with a lot more regulation, otherwise bankers are going to do very risky things knowing that the Fed’s going to bail them out. There may be further mini deposit panics, but it’s pretty clear that the Treasury and the Fed have decided not to allow a banking panic to take root.
GAZETTE: The Fed announced that it was prepared to adjust its stance as risks emerge. What will they be looking for?
ROGOFF: They’re almost certainly looking in the books of the banking sector, mainly due to the hit they have taken on longer-term loans with interest rates rising so sharply. The value of long-term bonds, even U.S. Treasury bonds, can fall sharply when interest rates rise this much. Estimates range from $600 billion to $2 trillion of losses sitting in the banking sector.
A central driver of the recent problems is the growing realization that we’re probably entering a decade with higher inflation-adjusted, long-term interest rates (that is, real interest rates) than we had in the decade before 2022. And that will be a more difficult world to live in, especially for governments and companies that were relying on when the inflation rate and the interest rate being about the same, almost making borrowing free. This led to the wacko ideas like modern monetary theory, which argued there was little risk or cost to using debt finance (as opposed to higher taxes) to pay for expanding social programs and the greening of the economy.
We are probably not living in the ultra-low interest rate world anymore. If so, that is going to housing prices, stock prices, art prices, etc.
I think Powell got it just right saying, “We raised by a quarter, but we actually thought about pausing,” because it signals that next time, if the banking sector is still experiencing volatility, they’ll pause. Maybe not indefinitely, though: The difference between this time and 2008 is that now we have inflation. In 2008, interest rates just collapsed to zero, and their job was pretty easy from that perspective. This time it’s not.

“A central driver of the recent problems is the growing realization that we’re probably entering a decade with higher inflation-adjusted, long-term interest rates (that is, real interest rates) than we had in the decade before 2022. And that will be a more difficult world to live in …”

GAZETTE: Powell said he welcomed and expected outside investigations, and that it was “clear we need to strengthen supervision and regulation” of banks. What more can and should the Fed be doing?
ROGOFF: The Federal Reserve has a more complicated governance structure than most people realize. There’s the board itself that sits in Washington, D.C. It has seven people, with Powell as one of them. There are also 12 regional Feds. They alternate in their votes, a few of them at a time get to sit on the Federal Open Market Committee. The regional Feds have their own governance and make their own decisions, and their governance structure is still antiquated. The San Francisco Fed, which is quite typical, had local banking presidents sitting on its board of directors, including the head of the Silicon Valley Bank. That is, he was sitting on the board of the body that was supposed to be regulating him.
GAZETTE: Powell said it’s too early to say whether these recent bank failures will have a major effect on the chances for a soft landing, but that the Fed believes there’s a pathway and that they’re still trying to find it. What do you make of that?
ROGOFF: Never say never, but it seems that the chances of a soft landing are getting smaller and smaller. Faced with the choice between having a deep recession and allowing inflation to persist, I’d say it’s more likely they’re going to just leave inflation hanging for longer than they would like, probably past the end of 2024.
But, of course, they are worried that bond holders will start demanding a bigger inflation premium, and that they may. Over the past two years, we have been going through an episode where inflation to date already has been the equivalent of a partial default on government debt in real terms, at least in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. If you were a bond holder, your bond is worth a lot less than you thought it would be a year and a half ago. And it’s been a huge bonanza for the government. That’s saved them from raising taxes.
But the bondholders, if they don’t believe the Fed, that this was just an honest mistake and the Fed’s never going to do it again, they’re going to start demanding to be compensated. It’s going to raise interest rates across the board, and that’s going to be expensive for everybody. And so, they’re trying to avoid that. But it’s not easy at this point.
GAZETTE: Is something that vague going to reassure the markets and the public?
ROGOFF: It’s a very difficult situation. If he raises rates, it’ll fight inflation, but it’ll raise the odds of a banking crisis. If we didn’t have high inflation, they’d be cutting rates. The situation is a legacy, to some extent, of the pandemic, but to some significant extent of the Trump and then Biden stimulus going on for too long, and the Fed waiting too long to raise interest rates. There was just this massive experiment in macroeconomics, and they overdid it.
After the 2008 financial crisis, everybody said, “They should have stimulated more.” After this one, they’re all going to say, “They should have stimulated less.” And the honest truth is, it’s very hard to know in real time making forecasts. After 2008, all the forecasts, not mine and Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart’s but most of the forecasts were that it was going to get better quickly. This time, all the forecasts were that it was going to be really horrible — and they were wrong.

Last fall, some mysterious new activity appeared on the Supreme Court’s docket. It was one week after oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which—along with a case involving the University of North Carolina—will, later this term, likely end race-conscious affirmative action in university admissions. The Court had taken the unusual step, on the eve of the arguments, of asking the district court to provide the entire trial record, including transcripts—meaning that, up to that point, the record the Justices had was incomplete. The district court then transmitted the record, including a “password protected and encrypted” thumb drive containing materials sealed from the public. The Supreme Court’s late request suggested that the Justices wanted to see for themselves what really happened at the trial, which had exposed some of the inner workings of Harvard’s admissions process. I wondered what the district court didn’t want the public to know.

The trial, which I’d attended, had been held in October of 2018, before Judge Allison Burroughs, who was appointed by President Obama, after decades as a federal prosecutor and then as a litigator at a law firm in Boston. The trial lasted three weeks and spotlighted dozens of witnesses and hundreds of documents, as part of an effort to determine whether Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants. On the whole, Harvard gave Asian American applicants higher academic and extracurricular ratings but lower “personal ratings” than they gave white applicants. The plaintiff, Students for Fair Admissions, alleged that Harvard used the personal ratings to depress Asian American admissions and effect an unspoken quota. Judge Burroughs rejected this argument. She found that “the majority of the disparity” in the personal ratings was “more likely caused by race-affected inputs to the admissions process” (such as high-school recommendation letters) or “underlying differences in the attributes” of Asian American and white applicants (meaning that the scores accurately reflected the groups’ qualities). Her bottom line was that Asian Americans’ low personal ratings were “not the result of intentional discrimination” by Harvard.

During the trial, the judge often had S.F.F.A.’s and Harvard’s lawyers approach the bench for lengthy sidebar discussions, which others in the courtroom couldn’t hear. I assumed that they would be available later, in the trial transcripts, as is customary, but it turned out that the judge automatically sealed all the sidebars. Soon after learning that the district court sent the Supreme Court sealed records, I filed a letter with the court, asking, in my capacity as a researcher and a reporter, that Judge Burroughs unseal the sidebars from 2018, so that the public, like the Court, could see the complete trial transcripts. I thought that the request would be easy to grant. Since the Supreme Court was considering a case that could significantly affect education, discrimination, and equality across the nation, the press had a right to see the complete record, minus anything that would identify particular applicants.

To my surprise, Seth Waxman, who argued the case for Harvard, quickly objected on behalf of the university—the one that employs me as a tenured law professor, whose job it is to freely conduct research and pursue knowledge. He wrote that the sidebars contained “personal and confidential information that should remain sealed,” providing examples of specific transcript pages that included information about applicants or “information that was not admitted into evidence at trial.” S.F.F.A. denied that Harvard’s examples contained confidential information and even claimed that one involved “discussion of documents that were produced in response to a public records request under the Freedom of Information Act.” Within days, the Times, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and The New Yorker filed their own letters to the court, supporting my unsealing request.

Judge Burroughs held a hearing on the request in mid-November. I represented myself in court. She said, “There are a lot of things in those sidebars that were really just meant to be out of the hearing of the jury, not meant to be out of the hearing of the entire world for all time.” Strange, since there was, in fact, no jury at that trial. She explained that she would consider unsealing some contents of the sidebars but added, “In response to Harvard’s letter, I think that the secret sauce will stay under seal, which I suspect is what all these news medias really want.”

What was this “secret sauce”? It appeared to refer to aspects of the admissions process that Harvard wanted to keep secret—much like Coke or Heinz wouldn’t want to release their secret recipes. Yet that commitment to secrecy sat awkwardly in a case about whether a hidden process masked racial discrimination.

Judge Burroughs held two hearings about which trial sidebars to unseal and which to keep secret, but she closed the proceedings to everyone except the attorneys for Harvard and S.F.F.A. Then, at a public hearing, in mid-December, Judge Burroughs announced her decision: she would unseal most sidebars but keep some portions sealed. Some sidebars, she revealed, contained discussions of “a very poor, ill-advised, and in bad taste joke” that a Department of Education official at the Office for Civil Rights—who, in the late eighties, had led a federal investigation of Harvard—sent to Harvard’s dean of admissions. According to Judge Burroughs, the joke, which took the form of a mock memo from the Harvard admissions office, “referenced certain Asian stereotypes” and included “anti-Asian remarks.” Judge Burroughs said that she would keep sealed “the exact words” of the federal official’s “joke memo,” taking into account the “privacy interest” of the “gentleman” who wrote and sent it.

The trial in S.F.F.A. v. Harvard had been about whether the university discriminated against Asian Americans in admissions. But the judge was saying that a privacy interest in words she deemed anti-Asian, written by a government official who oversaw a federal investigation of Harvard’s alleged discrimination, outweighed the public’s right to access court records. “What he said was clearly in poor taste, but I don’t think the details of what he said is what’s important,” she added. I argued to Judge Burroughs that “the interest of the public in knowing what that joke was, the actual content, the words, would be extremely important.” She disagreed, assuring me that, although the precise words would be blocked out, “you won’t be mystified about what was said.”

I also asked Judge Burroughs to unseal the transcripts of the closed proceedings that she’d held on the unsealing issue (again, with redactions of any confidential information). I thought that the public had an interest in knowing what arguments the two sides made to the court about the need for secrecy. Seeming to refuse the request, she said, “If I thought this was going to put this to bed, I would tell you right now what the arguments were, but I don’t think it will put it to bed, so I’m not going to spend any more time doing it.” She nevertheless proceeded to summarize some of the arguments that were made. To me, this only underscored the point—that a judge describing the legal proceedings (and telling the press not to concern itself with the details) is not an adequate substitute for public access to them. As I began to say as much, Judge Burroughs cut me off: “Yes, I know. I get it.” And then: “I hear you. I got it. I got it.” I wouldn’t have anticipated or believed what she said next, but there it is in the transcript: “Greedy, though, Ms. Gersen.” I said that I objected to that characterization, and she soon ended the hearing, without committing to unsealing the closed hearing transcripts.

In January, Judge Burroughs did release those hearing transcripts. They show that Harvard argued vigorously against unsealing certain sidebars, reminding the judge that concern about “the press gallery” was the reason she had sealed some discussions in the first place and maintaining that she should keep them sealed “because of the increased or the continuing public attention on this case.” Regarding the “inappropriate, anti-Asian, stereotypical, poor attempt at a joke,” Judge Burroughs explained, “What I’m trying to do is give them”—the press—“a flavor of it without really being awful about it, I guess.” She acknowledged that because the joke memo was a public document, obtained through a public-records request, she couldn’t order parties not to give it to the press, but said, “I wish you wouldn’t.” She also said, “I would love some buy-in from all of you” on the rulings. The parties, who knew that they would be in front of her again when the Supreme Court sends back the case, gave assurances that they would not appeal her rulings about sidebars. (The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press did file an appeal on the issue of unsealing court records, which is now pending in the First Circuit.)

What was Judge Burroughs trying to hide? I eventually obtained the joke memo and the surrounding e-mails, and what I read didn’t strike me as having been worth the fight to keep them secret. But the fight itself showed that both Harvard and the court expect the public to operate on trust that their decisions are not biased—an expectation that is all the more troubling as the Supreme Court’s likely ban on using race in admissions will drive the consideration of race further underground.

William Fitzsimmons began working in Harvard admissions more than fifty years ago and has been the dean of admissions and financial aid since 1986. The federal official who wrote the joke memo, Thomas Hibino, worked at the Boston location of the Office for Civil Rights, eventually serving as the regional director; he retired in 2014. Earlier in his career, he had worked at the Japanese American Citizens League. After Hibino oversaw the federal investigation into Harvard’s alleged discrimination against Asian American applicants, decades ago, he and Fitzsimmons became friends, and by 2012 their exchanges included banter about lunch dates and running races together, and teasing when one opted to sleep in. But the relationship wasn’t all palling around, because Hibino was still at the federal agency regulating Harvard. In April of 2013, he wrote to Fitzsimmons, “Regarding the impact of legacy on Asian American applicants, what proportion of AA applicants are legacies and what proportion of white applicants are legacies? Of course I’m happy to talk about this if necessary!” More than anything, the e-mails reveal the coziness of the federal regulator toward the regulated entity.

On November 30, 2012, amid a friendly back-and-forth about lunch plans, Hibino e-mailed Fitzsimmons an attachment that he described as “really hilarious if I do say so myself!” Hibino explained, “I did it for the amusement of our team, and of course, you guys”—presumably Harvard admissions officers—“are the only others who can appreciate the humor.” The joke memo had been written on Harvard admissions-office stationery, during the earlier investigation. It was purportedly from an associate director of admissions and parodied the admissions officer downplaying an Asian American applicant’s achievements. The memo denigrated “José,” who was “the sole support of his family of 14 since his father, a Filipino farm worker, got run over by a tractor,” saying, “It can’t be that difficult on his part-time job as a senior cancer researcher.” It continued, “While he was California’s Class AAA Player of the Year,” with an offer from the Rams, “we just don’t need a 132 pound defensive lineman,” apparently referring to a slight Asian male physique. “I have to discount the Nobel Peace Prize he received. . . . After all, they gave one to Martin Luther King, too. No doubt just another example of giving preference to minorities.” The memo dismissed the fictional applicant as “just another AA CJer.” That was Harvard admissions shorthand for an Asian American applicant who intends to study biology and become a doctor, according to the trial transcript.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” an unnamed character casually remarks in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Garden of Eden. You might say that this is a corollary of the much more famous “Ignorance is bliss.”The latter recalls phenomena such as the Dunning-Kruger effect—in which people lacking skills and knowledge in a particular area innocently underestimate their own incompetence—and the illusion of explanatory depth, which can prompt autodidacts on social media to excitedly present complex scientific phenomena, thinking they understand them in far greater depth than they really do.The Hemingway hypothesis, however, is less straightforward. I can think of a lot of unhappy intellectuals, to be sure. But is intelligence per se their problem? Happiness scholars have studied this question, and the answer is—as in so many parts of life—it depends. The gifts you possess can lift you up or pull you down; it all depends on how you use them. Many people see intelligence as a way to get ahead of others. But to get happier, we need to do the opposite.You might assume that intelligence—whether it be the conventional IQ kind, emotional intelligence, musical talent, or some other dimension along which a person can excel—raises happiness, all else being equal. After all, people with higher cognitive ability should logically have more exciting life opportunities than others. They should also acquire more resources with which to enhance their well-being.In general, however, there is no correlation between general intelligence and life satisfaction at the individual level. That principle does mask a few wrinkles. In 2022, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Fordham University looked at the association between well-being and various building blocks of neurocognitive ability: memory, processing speed, reasoning, spatial visualization, and vocabulary. The only components of intelligence that they found to be positively related to happiness were spatial visualization, memory, and processing speed—but those relationships were fleeting and age-related.[Read: Why so many smart people aren’t happy]More interesting, the researchers also found a strongly negative association between happiness and vocabulary. To explain this, they offered a hypothesis: People with a large vocabulary “self-select more challenging environments, and as a result may encounter more daily stressors and reduced positive affect.” In other words, loquacious logophiles might have byzantine lives and find themselves in manifold precarious situations that lower their jouissance. (They talk themselves into misery.)The whole intelligence-and-happiness question needs more research, which I suspect it will receive in the coming years. But I think there is a clear reason that something as valuable as intelligence, especially manifested in one’s ability to communicate, doesn’t necessarily lead to a higher quality of life.One of life’s cruelest mysteries is why we are impelled to pursue rewards that bring success, but not happiness. Mother Nature drives us toward the four goals of money, power, pleasure, and prestige with the promise that these rewards will bring happiness. In truth, the correlation might be positive, but the causation is probably reversed: Happier people naturally get these rewards. But seek them for their own sake, for your own gain, and happiness will likely fall. Accordingly, if you aspire to use your cleverness for personal benefit—for the praise and admiration of others, or an advantage in work and dating—woe be unto you.[From the March 2022 issue: How to want less]The smarter you are, the better equipped you should be to understand that well-being comes from faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Your intelligence is more likely to bring you happiness if you put it to use by chasing better ways to love and serve others, rather than elbowing others aside and hoarding worldly rewards.In some ways, you can think of intelligence as a resource just like money or power. We know how to make the latter two sources of joy: Share them with others, and use them as a force for good in the world. To make smarts a fount of happiness, too, we can follow the same guide. Here are a couple of tangible proposals.1. Give your ideas away.It amazes me how many pious philanthropists give generously to charity but are loath to share the secrets of their success. In a world powered by ideas, keeping good ones to yourself is the worst form of stinginess, and will surely make you suffer. I am not suggesting that you break any intellectual-property laws, but rather, am posing an ethical question: Are you using your ingenuity freely to help others get ahead?[Read: How to buy happiness]There are ways to do this in many parts of life. For example, you might often see ways for colleagues to succeed at work or school that are not apparent to them. Make a policy of sharing these ideas. In an effort to take my own advice, when I give a happiness lecture using PowerPoint slides, I offer to make them available for the audiences to employ as they want.2. Don’t use your intelligence to tear others down.Deploying cleverness for one-upmanship, sarcasm, and snark is easy. After all, our culture rewards this: Insult comedy dominates a good deal of entertainment and punditry, and a biting put-down will go viral faster than you can say “OK Boomer.” But the laughs or followers you gain won’t make up for the misery that such insults cause—to your target and probably you too.[Read: The kind of smarts you don’t find in young people]Sarcasm, which research shows intensifies criticism, requires unusually high intelligence. This is a waste of brainpower, not just because intense criticism isn’t nice, but because it has recently been associated with depression and anxiety for the person using it. The direction of causality has never been established, but I can say from personal experience that after I’ve used wit to put someone else down, I never feel better about myself. For your good and others’, use your mental dexterity to lift people up, or make them laugh without tearing anyone down.Acting this way will likely feel unnatural. We are evolved to use every advantage to get ahead in life, and humans often see resources as existing in a zero-sum environment, a bias that some psychologists have called “win-win denial.”But the idea that if one person has more, someone else must have less is almost always wrong. A sophisticated understanding of human relationships—which, I should note, requires intelligence—reveals that we interact in a positive-sum world when we work together and assist one another. Perhaps you believe that helping others succeed economically raises overall prosperity, including your own. If so, using your intellect to lift up others should be, well, a no-brainer.

One of the oddest moments in this week’s love fest between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Moscow was when Putin congratulated Xi on his “reelection” as China’s president and Xi told Putin he was certain the Russian leader would win his own reelection in 2024 (even though Putin hasn’t yet announced he’s running). Why do these dictators even bother to pretend to be winners in democratic competitions? Who do they think they are fooling?

Autocrats using fake elections to claim popular support while consolidating power isn’t new. Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi used these tactics in Iraq and Libya, respectively. But Xi and Putin aren’t just hiding behind a fig leaf of legitimacy; they are attempting to redefine the world’s understanding of what “democracy” means. This is dangerous, and real democracies must push back.

To some, Putin and Xi’s democracy playacting might seem harmless. After all, everyone knows they have snuffed out democratic characteristics in their own systems by crushing political dissent, denying freedom of the press, criminalizing civic advocacy and granting themselves unlimited terms as rulers. Xi’s “reelection” as president was approved by the Chinese Communist Party Congress 2,952-0, numbers that would make Hussein envious.

But this week’s Putin-Xi summit showed that these two leaders are not simply trying to reframe democracy for domestic purposes. They are claiming ownership of the concept of democracy as a key plank of their proposed new world order — one where the actual struggle for democratic progress is demonized and negated. In 2021, China’s State Council Information Office even released a white paper entitled “China: Democracy That Works” and offered it as a model to the developing world.

China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, on Wednesday criticized the Biden administration’s framing of a global competition between democracies and autocracies, saying that “China and Russia are committed to promoting a multipolar world and greater democracy in international relations.”

“We are working in solidarity on the formation of a more just and democratic multipolar world order,” Putin said this week on the Kremlin’s website.

It’s absurd to tout “greater democracy” in the world while defending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to topple its democratically elected government. And if Putin and Xi really believed in “democracy in international relations,” they would honor the overwhelming vote by the United Nations calling on Russia to withdraw.

But there is an audience for the Putin-Xi narrative, disingenuous as it is. Beijing’s claim to practice what it calls “whole-process democracy” is appealing to other dictators and despots who don’t want to acknowledge they are holding on to power simply through brute force.

More broadly, Putin and Xi are trying to hollow out the very notions of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in the international system.

“Once you get a taste of being autocratic in your own country, you want to be autocratic in the world,” Moisés Naím, author of the book “The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century,” told me. “What happens in autocracies doesn’t stay in autocracies. It travels.”

Western democracies would be naive to think Beijing’s narrative isn’t spreading. A report last week by the U.S. Institute of Peace detailed the Chinese government’s extensive global campaign to influence media in the developing world through massive amounts of propaganda, corruption of local media, covert influence operations and co-opting of local officials.

“Beijing seeks to enlist a broad coalition of like-minded partners throughout the Global South to echo its claims that the Chinese political system is superior and that the United States is an unwelcome neo-imperialist,” the report stated.

Putin’s and Xi’s attacks on the Western concept of democracy are aided by the erosion of support for democracy promotion here at home. Some U.S. experts argue that the United States ought to ignore the ideological component of great-power competition because it shrinks the space for cooperation with dictatorships.

But the sheer amount of time, effort and resources that Putin and Xi devote to ideological projection shows its importance to them and therefore demands a response. The Biden administration next week is hosting the second iteration of its Summit for Democracy, which aims to bolster international support for these values. But one conference per year is just not enough.

Putin and Xi want to have it both ways; they want to run their systems as dictators while claiming the mantle of democracy in the 21st century. The fact they are pretending shows that they know their actual model is neither popular nor just. Leaders in open societies must ensure that democracy isn’t defined by those who oppose it.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat are your thoughts on cities versus suburbs?Feel free to discuss their past, present, or future; their pluses and minuses; their respective roles in American life; or where you choose to live and why. As always, I encourage but do not require answers that draw on your own life experiences, so feel free to opine on specific cities or suburbs. And if nothing immediately comes to mind, perhaps the fodder below will prove inspiring.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.comConversations of NoteI grew up in the suburbs. And I have lived in the city––in New York City; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Paris; and Seville, plus significant stretches in San Francisco, Munich, and Berlin.I see the appeal of both kinds of places. My “hometown” of Orange County, California, is about as good as it gets for suburbia: It has the best stretch of beaches in Southern California and a significant immigrant population from Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China, India, which provides cultural diversity—and also better food than many metropolises.. And my 20s and 30s happened to coincide with an urban renaissance that I didn’t see coming as an adolescent in the high-crime 1990s.Gangsta rap, movies about the crack wars, and the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed were my earliest impressions of city life. Then I graduated from college in 2002 into a country where cities were suddenly safer than they’d been in a generation––and to the surprise of many, they kept getting safer and safer for years.“No place feels so changed as the city of Los Angeles,” the journalist Sam Quinones wrote in late 2014. He explained:
In 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that gang crime had dropped by nearly half since 2008. In 2012, L.A. had fewer total homicides (299) citywide than it had gang homicides alone in 2002 (350) and in 1992 (430). For the most part, Latino gang members no longer attack blacks in ways reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. Nor are gangs carjacking, assaulting, robbing, or in a dozen other ways blighting their own neighborhoods.
Quinones described the significance of the change this way:
This has amounted to an enormous tax cut for once-beleaguered working class neighborhoods. Stores are untagged, walls unscarred. Graffiti, which sparked gang wars for years, is almost immediately covered up. Once-notorious parks—El Salvador Park in Santa Ana, Smith Park in San Gabriel, Bordwell Park in Riverside are a few examples—are now safe places for families … The changes on Southern California streets over the last few years are unlike anything I’ve seen in my decades of writing about gangs. For the first time, it seems possible to tame a plague that once looked uncontrollable—and in doing so allow struggling neighborhoods, and the kids who grow up in them, a fighting chance.
Unfortunately, homicides in cities across the country spiked with the onset of the pandemic. Additionally, rising homelessness and addiction pose challenges to many city-dwellers’ quality of life.In the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Uranga captures the consequences in a harrowing article about drug use and crime in L.A.’s public-transportation system:
Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses—more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes—such as robbery, rape and aggravated assault—soared 24% last year...
“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several people whom he refers to as “sleepers,” people who get high and nod off on the train.
“We don’t even see any business people anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice than to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”
Commuters have abandoned large swaths of the Metro train system … For January, ridership on the Gold Line was 30% of the pre-pandemic levels, and the Red Line was 56% of them. The new $2.1-billion Crenshaw Line that officials tout as a bright spot with little crime had fewer than 2,100 average weekday boardings that month … The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported deaths linked to fentanyl rose from 109 in 2016 to 1,504 in 2021, amounting to a 1,280% increase.
Josh Barro argues in Very Serious that such transit-system woes in L.A. and elsewhere ought to be of greater concern to leftists who ostensibly want more Americans to live in cities and take public transportation. He writes:
People on the left have simply grown uncomfortable talking about the idea that crime—even less-serious crime—imposes significant social costs and requires policing and sometimes incarceration to address it. It’s more fun to talk about zoning. But this isn’t a problem that will be fixed with zoning. What’s needed on the subways is enforcement of rules: We need to go back to arresting people for illegal activity on transit, including fare-beating and for public drug use. If you’re using the subway as a place to sleep instead of as transportation, you’re trespassing. The subway is some of the most expensive and useful public infrastructure we have, and moving problems of homelessness and drug use and other disorder elsewhere, even into the streets, is not simply passing the buck—it’s moving the buck to a place where it imposes a lower social cost...
I realize that sounds cold, but letting homeless people and addicts take over the subway does not address problems of homelessness or addiction. It would be great if LA could move everyone without a home into permanent supportive housing, but the city has been unable to translate billions of dollars of taxpayer funds into an effective solution to the problem of homelessness. The immediate options facing LA are that it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are willing to ride, or it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are unwilling to ride. So far, the city is choosing the latter.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where I have personally had my car window smashed while it was parked overnight, S.F. local Snehal Antani took to Twitter last week to complain about how a colleague was treated while visiting the city:
A teammate visiting San Francisco for an offsite called me frantically last night. After dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf they came back to a smashed car window and 2 stolen backpacks. $10K in gear lost, passports gone, etc. … “Laptop bags were in the trunk, nothing visible from the street”, a typical description of a smash & grab, yet thieves were able to find the specific car and knew to pull the rear seat down and reach into the trunk… how?
I explained, “these aren’t homeless [randomly] smashing windows. These are professionals using blue tooth [sic] scanners to find laptop bags. And idle iPad, Bose headphones, etc all emit Bluetooth. And let me guess, it was the rear window facing the street, because thieves drive up to the car, open their door, then smash+grab. A witness must be directly behind the thieves [to] see anything, all other views are blocked.”
My teammate said his companion was on the phone with the police, to which I said, “they don’t care. Maybe they’ll show up in a few hours, they’ll likely make you go to the station, but this happens thousands of times per week.” [Editor’s note: According to San Francisco crime data from across 2022, thefts from vehicles averaged less than 400 a week last year.] So now I need to include a pre-visit security brief to people traveling San Francisco. This is a big reason I’m hesitant to open an office in the city versus keeping a remote team and occasionally meeting up at a location to whiteboard. And my teammates will be scarred forever, being robbed hits you at your core, especially when it’s thousands of dollars of loss. There is no downtown recovery without an aggressive push for safety @LondonBreed. The next mayor will win by running on a simple platform: 1, safe neighborhoods; 2, Clean Streets; 3, great public schools
In a series of replies (some of which have since been deleted), John Hamasaki, a former San Francisco police commissioner and a current district-attorney candidate, wrote:
Interesting. Would getting your car window broken and some stuff stolen leave you “scarred forever”?
Is this what the suburbs do to you? Shelter you from basic city life experiences so that when they happen you are broken to the core?
I’ve had my window broken 2x when I was living paycheck to paycheck. It sucked financially, but it had zero impact on my sense of public safety.
I can’t even imagine the world one must live in where this would be the most traumatizing incident in their life.
Again, not to say it doesn’t suck. But maybe city life just isn’t for you. It’s not the suburbs. There is crime.
I’m grateful most of it is property crime instead of violent crime. But I’ve always felt safe in San Francisco, even after being on the wrong side of violent crime.
Hamasaki also wrote, “Name a big city in the US where you can just leave 10k worth of stuff in your car? It’s not San Francisco these people hate, it’s cities.”In UnHerd, Joel Kotkin suggests that, contra the wishes of urbanists, the suburbs are once again the future:
London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles—these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottmann described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times’s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”
… Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.
The fading allure of the big city—further undermined by the post-pandemic shift to remote work in many sectors—is also taking place against the backdrop of an urban economy that has increasingly rewarded the few ... almost a fifth of residents in the 50 largest US cities live below the poverty line. Contrast this with the historic role of cities as engines of upward mobility. Even the addition last year of a few thousand migrants forced New York Mayor Eric Adams to declare a state of emergency; in other words, New York, a city largely built on the labour of newcomers, now seems too weak to house and employ a substantial number of immigrants. Amid this failure, perhaps it’s unsurprising that migrants and minorities are heading to America’s suburbs, sprawled sunbelt cities and smaller towns. So what is the urban future? The answer lies less in the central business districts than the suburbs and exurbs.
And this presents a nightmare for the traditional urbanist.
Is he right, or is another urban renaissance ahead?Provocation of the WeekAt a press conference hosted by the Internet Archive, its founder, Brewster Kahle, addressed Hachette v. Internet Archive, a Supreme Court case that addresses digital lending and copyright. Kahle argued that digital libraries ought to be free to operate much as brick- and-mortar libraries do:
The Internet Archive is a library I founded 26 years ago. This library has brought hundreds of years of books to the wikipedia generation, and now 4 massive publishers are suing to stop us.
As the world now looks to their screens for answers, what they find is often not good. People are struggling to figure out what is true and it is getting harder. Digital learners need access to a library of books, a library at least as deep as the libraries we older people had the privilege to grow up with.
The Internet Archive has worked with hundreds of libraries for decades to provide such a library of books. A library where each of those books can be read by one reader at a time. This is what libraries have always done.
We also work with libraries that are under threat. We work with many libraries that have closed their doors completely—libraries with unique collections: Claremont School of Theology, Marygrove College of Detroit, cooking school of Johnson & Wales Denver, Concordia College of Bronxville NY, Drug Policy Alliance’s library of NYC, the Evangelical Seminary of Pennsylvania. I have looked these librarians in the eye and told them that we are there for them.
They entrust their books to us, as a peer library, to carry forward their mission. Most of the books are not available from the publishers in digital form, and never will be. And as we have seen, students, researchers and the print-disabled continue to use these books for quotations and fact checking. And I think we can all agree we need to be able to do fact checking.
Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased. Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.
The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed.
This is horrendous. Let me say it again—the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed.
And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do. This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community’s libraries—gone.
The dream of the Internet was to democratize access to knowledge, but if the big publishers have their way, excessive corporate control will be the nightmare of the Internet. That is what is at stake.

In 2018, I paid a man a couple hundred dollars to repeatedly jam several needles into the skin of my right wrist. I felt as if I were being attacked by a microscopic cavalry of crabs. Into every jab went black ink, eventually forming the shape of double quotation marks. It was my first tattoo, and likely not my last.In the thousands of years that tattoos have been around, not much has changed. The practice still involves carving wounds into permanent, inked-in shapes that we find aesthetically pleasing. But much of tattooing remains mysterious: Scientists still aren’t sure what makes certain tattoos fade fast, why others stick around when they’re supposed to disappear, or how they react to light. One of the strangest and least-studied enigmas, though, is how tattoos survive at all. Our immune system is constantly doing its darndest to destroy them—and understanding why it fails could clue us in to one of our bodies’ most important functions, even when we leave the skin blank.When a tattoo is stamped onto skin, the body considers it an assault. The skin is the immune system’s “first barrier,” and is heavily stocked with fast-acting defensive cells that can leap into action when it’s breached, says Juliet Morrison, a virologist at UC Riverside. Those cells’ prime directive is to suss out anything foreign and destroy it so the healing process can begin.That mission is generally quite successful—allowing burns to heal, scars to fade, and scabs to fall away—except, for some reason, when ink gets involved. The particles in pigments are bulky and difficult for an immune cell’s enzymes to degrade. So when inks get gulped down by immune cells such as skin-dwelling macrophages—which spend their lives devouring pathogens, cellular debris, and other schmutz within just a teeny patch of flesh—it can transform into a microscopic version of gum. The pigment particles lodge themselves inside macrophages’ innards, refusing to be broken down. When ink is visible at the surface of the body, it’s not just interlaced among skin cells—it’s shining out from the bellies of macrophages that can’t digest it.[Read: The benefits of a foreign-language tattoo]Sandrine Henri, an immunologist at France’s Center of Immunology of Marseille-Luminy, and her colleagues have found that macrophages’ taste for ink can help explain why tattoos so tenaciously stick around, even after the cells die. At the end of a macrophage’s days- or weeks-long life, it begins to come apart, releasing the pigment at its core. But that ink then immediately gets snatched up and wolfed down by another macrophage in the vicinity that more or less takes its predecessor’s place, no more than perhaps a few micrometers away—less than the width of a human hair.Over time, the edges of tattoos may get a bit fuzzier as the ink passes from cell to cell. Some pigment may also end up shuttled to lymph nodes. Those major immunological hubs are normally off-white. But in heavily tattooed people, they can end up turning “the color of the ink,” says Gary Kobinger, an immunologist at the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch. But by and large, the ink stays inside of macrophages, and thus stays put. This infinite relay of ingestion, regurgitation, and reingestion, Henri told me, is thought to be part of the reason it’s so difficult to laser off tattoos—and, potentially, part of the reason some new companies’ “temporary” tattoos haven’t been fading as advertised.Scientists aren’t yet sure if the macrophages’ inky clog-up has consequences. “What if you are forcing them to take care of these foreign clumps of pigment instead of doing immune surveillance?” Morrison told me. Stopped-up macrophages might be less able to take in more dangerous substances, such as pathogens. One study published last year found that tattoo pigment might alter the proteins they produce and the signals they send to other cells. All of that might mean nothing—or that the cell starts over- or underreacting to foreign material, potentially putting the immune system at a disadvantage if a new tattoo ends up inflamed, infected, or triggering allergies.Infections are rare with tattoos—at most, they happen 5 or 6 percent of the time—and when they do occur, they’re most commonly bacterial. But in very, very rare cases, body-art aficionados can end up with dangerous viruses, including hepatitis C. Thankfully, especially with modern advances in sanitation, most people with tattoos “do just fine,” says Danielle Tartar, a dermatologist at UC Davis.Henri, for one, isn’t worried: The immune system is multifaceted and constantly replenishing its cells; in the event of a major attack, cells busying themselves with ink would probably be able to call in reinforcements to waylay the threat. And it’s very possible that the macrophages are only temporarily discombobulated by the ink they swallow and end up resetting to a new baseline.[Read: Show your immune system some love]Besides, there’s more to the immune system than the cells that love to chow down on ink. A few years ago, a team of researchers led by Jennifer Juno, an immunologist at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, mixed tattoo ink into a vaccine formulation to track where the contents of the shot ended up in mice and macaques. There was no evidence that the pigments were making immune cells on the whole “unhappy,” Juno told me, or killing them off. Nor did the ink seem to change how well the vaccine worked.Some small bits of damage to the skin—administered by a professional using sterile, hypoallergenic equipment and materials—could even keep nearby immune cells spry. Studies are now finding that macrophages and other so-called innate immune cells might be able to briefly remember some of their past encounters with other types of foreign material and better respond to future assaults. (This, of course, is the whole point of vaccination, but vaccines target adaptive immune cells, which are much more amenable to the process.) It’s also possible—though not yet borne out by data—that learning to coexist with tattoo ink could help immune cells calibrate their reactions to other substances, perhaps even heading off autoimmune attacks, says Tatiana Segura, a biomaterials expert at Duke University. “If your body tolerates a tattoo at all, it means that the immune system adapted,” says María Daniela Hermida, a dermatologist based in Buenos Aires.To understand some of the immune effects of tattoos, Christopher Lynn, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama, has been studying heavily inked people in different parts of the world. He and his colleagues have found that individuals who frequently get tattoos appear to have higher levels of certain immune molecules, including antibodies, in their blood than people who rarely get inked (at least for a brief time). Maybe, Lynn told me, frequent tattooing gives the immune system a regular, low-intensity workout—and keeps certain bits of our defensive armamentarium more fit.But more antibodies is not the same as better immunity, and the researchers don’t yet have a sense of how long those effects last, says Saranya Wyles, a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic. And because Lynn and his colleagues haven’t run a clinical trial in which they’ve assigned some people to ink up and others to not, they can’t actually prove that the antibody bump is a direct result of a tattoo. It’s possible, Lynn told me, that people with naturally higher levels of certain immune molecules are more prone to getting tons of tattoos, because they’re less likely to have bad reactions. Tattoos, in that case, would be more of a litmus test for the body—which, in some ways, checks out with the cultural impetus for body art in many cultures: flaunting one’s tolerance for pain. Either way, Lynn cautions that, even in the best-case scenario, tattooing will have its limits. “I don’t think it’s going to cure colds” or, realistically, anything else, he said.[Read: Watching tattoos go from rebellious to mainstream]Regardless of whether tattoos themselves boost immunity, they might inspire technology that does. Kobinger’s team is one of several tinkering with tattoo-needle techniques to administer shots—in ways that could make them more potent, more efficient, and easier to take. Most of the vaccines in our current roster are injected deep below the skin, into muscles, which aren’t well stocked with immune cells. The process takes time and decently large doses to truly rev up. The skin, by contrast, is “a formidable place to administer vaccines,” Kobinger told me. “The cells are already on site, and there is an immediate reaction.”A skin-deep technique to administer vaccines already exists, called the “intradermal” route, which has been used for the shots against smallpox, tuberculosis, rabies, and recently, mpox. But intradermal vaccines require quite a bit of training to administer—and when needles miss their mark, the effectiveness of the shot can take a real nosedive.Tattooing devices, outfitted with vaccine vials, could, in theory, circumvent those pitfalls, Kobinger said. In his experiments with various vaccines, the tattooing method has routinely outperformed the intradermal one; some, though not all, other studies have found similarly encouraging results. If the technology advances, Kobinger told me, people might someday need fewer injections of some multidose shots—saving time, money, effort, and discomfort. There’s no ink involved. But maybe these needles could still have the chance to leave permanent impressions on us.

Many people in the SBM community have expressed concern about a lawsuit currently happening in Australia. Dr. Adam Smith, a Melbourne GP, is being sued for defamation by naturopathy, Farrah Agustin-Bunch. It my opinion this looks like a classic case of using legal thuggery to silence and intimidate legitimate commentary. Smith says he was concerned by the extreme claims being made by Agustin-Bunch and wanted to “do a good deed” by providing some scientific response. Looking at Agustin-Bunch’s website it looks like she has a history of responding to such criticism by going on the attack, trying to turn the tables on her critics and, at least in this case, suing them.

Unfortunately for Smith, the laws in Australia are are defamation friendly. Sydney has been called the defamation capital of the world. He is reportedly already out of pocket $600,000 dollars in legal fees, and will likely spend two million before things are done. But to his credit he is not backing down.

To get the flavor of Agustin-Bunch’s strategy, I found a 2018 Quackwatch article about her, and her response. Quackwatch is a consumer protection website focuses on bogus medical claims and treatments, founded by Stephen Barrett and now run by CFI. Smith and Barrett take exception to the fact that Agustin-Bunch is promoting the typical range of dietary solutions to all problems, selling her “pixie dust” magnesium supplement and Boston-C supplements for many things, including cancer. On the package the Boston-C supplement claims it “supports immune system function” and “natural detoxification and cleansing”. We have heard these claims before. The Philippines FDA, where her clinic is, has shut down her clinic and cited her for selling products that are not approved.

To fight back against Barrett she quotes the following criticism:

“The Quackbusters, founded by the disgraced, unlicensed psychiatrist, Stephen Barrett, are a ubiquitous shadow network in the world of health and medicine with a unique talent.

Now that is defamation. Stephen Barrett is only “unlicensed” because he is retired. He was fully licensed when practicing. He is not “disgraced” by any objective measure, and she cites no cause or justification for this claim. (He had no complaints against his license, which was in good standing when he retired.) She tries to diminish Dr. Barrett by saying he has no “reported medical training since 1961”. That was the year he completed his residency. He was in practice until 1993, which means he had to keep up with his continuing medical education requirements, so her statement is false.

There is more, but actually that is likely the point – keep her critics defending themselves from her own baseless accusations rather than discussing the dubious nature of her medical advice. She is setting up a battle of authority (rather than evidence) and then relentless attacks her critics. I want to focus, rather, on one claim she makes as part of her push back against Quackwatch. She quotes Barrett as writing:

“I recommend steering clear of: Anyone who suggests that most diseases are caused by faulty nutrition. Although some diseases are diet-related, most are not.”

She takes this out of context then takes a number of other quotes from medical sources out of context to create a false impression. She writes:

“Increasing cancer rates also cannot be attributed to genetic factors, which are directly implicated in, at most, 5 – 10 percent of all cancers. I firmly believe that upwards of 90 – 95 percent of cancer incidence originates from lifestyle and environmental factors, with diet being far and away the primary causal component in cancer incidence today.”

For support she does not have definitive references in the medical literature, but misleading quotes. Here is just one representative example:

The National Academy of Sciences contradicts Stephen Barrett.

“In most Western countries, including the United States, diet-related chronic diseases represent the single largest cause of morbidity and mortality.”

She is conflating diet and nutrition. In the West, in developed nations, the contribution of diet to disease is largely not from malnutrition – not something that can be fixed with supplements – but from obesity and consuming too much of certain things, like meat, sugar, and fat. She uses conclusions that are really about obesity to justify prescribing supplements for cancer.

Let’s look at the actual evidence. A 2019 study looking at 80,000 new cancer cases in the US found that only 5.2% were attributable to diet. That is what Dr. Barrett is talking about, and directly contradicts Agustin-Bunch’s narrative. A 2020 review of diet and cancer published in BMJ made very direct conclusions from the data.

“High dose vitamin or mineral supplements have not reduced cancer risk in well nourished populations and might increase risk; for example, high dose β carotene might increase the risk of lung cancer. Vitamin and mineral supplements should not be used for cancer prevention, although they can be important for other aspects of health, such as folic acid supplements for women before conception.

What about eating fruits and vegetables, rather than supplements?

“In the 2018 World Cancer Research Fund report neither fruits nor vegetables were considered to be convincingly or probably associated with the risk of any cancer.”

They leave the door open for a small effect for some cancers, most notable colon cancer, which makes sense. About 10% of cancers likely result from genetics. This does not mean the rest is environmental and lifestyle factors, as Agustin-Bunch false concludes. The evidence, in fact, suggests that as much as 65% of cancers are just due to bad luck. The rest are due to known significant causes, like smoking and obesity. There is some controversy over how exactly to interpret the data on “bad luck” as a cause for cancer, but either way it is still a major cause.

But that doesn’t sell supplements. Supplement sellers need to create the narrative that most health issues are cause by poor nutrition and that their special products are the best way to treat that – but the evidence is just not on their side. When called out on their misleading claims, it is common for them to go on the attack. They claim there is a conspiracy, scientists don’t actually know what they are talking about, they attack specific critics, they claim that they have some special knowledge, and when they can, they use legal thuggery.

What they can’t use is legitimate science, because it does not support their marketing narrative.

On January 3rd, the feminist philosopher Irina Zherebkina texted me that she was leaving Kharkiv, Ukraine. Throughout the war, I had been reading her essays and Facebook posts about daily life under bombardment. Now, she told me, she and her husband and co-author, Sergey, were packing cardboard boxes. They would leave as soon as their cat, Keti, was medically cleared to travel to the United Kingdom. When Keti was cleared, Irina wrote that they would leave as soon as they got an airline-approved soft cat carrier. Then she wrote that, although a bomb had just destroyed a building two doors down from them, they had been unable to exchange their old Soviet-issue driver’s licenses for international ones, and they’d leave once they had done so. Then she wrote that they’d leave as soon as she herself had some medical exams. Then they’d leave after she got some dental work done. When I travelled to Kharkiv in February, just before the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Irina was still there, editing her journal of the first year of the war, which an Italian publisher was going to release. As soon as she was done, she and Sergey would leave, she told me.

Irina and Sergey, who are sixty-three and sixty-five, respectively, live in a conspicuously neat and bright apartment in central Kharkiv. They have a white dining table, white couches, and white built-in bookcases, which seem to alleviate the heft of books, shelved tightly and stacked on most surfaces. The first time I visited, Irina had a burn on her cheek. During a recent power outage, she had slipped while using a candle to light her way to the bathroom.

Before the war, the Zherebkins didn’t know their neighbors. The building was heavy with the wealthy and the well connected, including several retired high-ranking military officials, and the philosophers didn’t feel at home among them. But once the war began the few people who remained in the building formed tight bonds. They pooled their resources to get food when most stores were closed and venturing outside was perilous. During air raids, a neighbor sometimes took shelter in the Zherebkins’ apartment—they have a big bathroom without windows. Like everyone in Kharkiv, the couple had learned to distinguish types of munitions by ear, and had established a hierarchy among them. Grad rockets, which make a terrifying whistling sound before impact, are more frightening than S-300 rockets, even though the S-300 does more damage. It makes its presence known only when it hits, with a loud bang: there is no time for dread.

In the early days of the war, Irina wrote an essay in the Boston Review, placing Vladimir Putin’s war in the context of what the philosopher Judith Butler has called “new fascism,” a global phenomenon that legalizes the “freedom to hate.” Irina called on the world not to conflate Putin and the Russian people, many of whom, she argued, didn’t support the war. It was important to reclaim and rejuvenate the ideas of solidarity and internationalism in order to fight Putin, she wrote.

Two days after the essay was published, a rocket hit close to the Zherebkins’ apartment building, and they decided to leave the city. They drove out to the countryside, in the direction of their dacha, a modest weekend cottage, but a bridge along their route had been blown up—they later learned that Ukrainian forces had destroyed it to make passage more difficult for the Russian troops. Irina and Sergey ended up in a house that belonged to an acquaintance. Several other families were also staying there, each occupying a bedroom. Unlike their dacha, the building had heat and running water. They encountered a kind of war fever in the countryside, a performance of war. Local men had put on uniforms and armed themselves. In anticipation of battle, some spent their days drinking and exchanging news. This was in the spring of 2022, when news seemed meaningful, when the course of the war seemed unpredictable, before everything, including bombs, became monotonous. After a month, Irina and Sergey returned home, to Kharkiv.

By then, Butler had read Irina’s essay, and proposed co-hosting an online international feminist conference on the war. With Sabine Hark, a German sociologist, they envisioned a panel of speakers that would include Ukrainian feminists, Western supporters, and Russian and Belarusian antiwar dissidents. Some Ukrainian feminists objected to including Russians and Belarusians. In the lead-up to the conference, arguments grew heated. Irina’s message about solidarity, internationalism, anti-nationalism, and nonviolence had inspired the event, but in wartime it suddenly seemed less than obvious. In the end, the conference included one Russian and one Belarusian participant.

Irina grew up in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. She had wanted to be a philosopher since she was in seventh grade. “She wanted to change the structure of society,” Sergey said. They met at university, in Kyiv, and eventually found their intellectual home with a group of philosophers led by Valery Podoroga, a prolific postmodernist scholar whose former graduate students are now some of Russia’s best-known philosophers. After the Soviet Union broke apart, and even after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, Irina and Sergey maintained relationships with colleagues and friends in Moscow, and continued to write and publish in Russian. Much to their relief, none of their Russian friends have supported Putin’s war. They feel relief, too, that Podoroga didn’t live to see this war: he died in 2020.

“For him, Michel Foucault was the most important writer,” Irina said.

“His ‘Discipline and Punish’ was the most important book,” Sergey said.

“And now they say Foucault is ‘propaganda of homosexuality,’ ” Irina said, referring to Russian propaganda that’s been used, among other things, to justify the war in Ukraine.

After university, Sergey got a job teaching in Kharkiv; Irina joined him there a few years later. In 1994, she co-founded the Center for Gender Studies at Kharkiv National University, which she modelled on gender-studies centers at American and British universities. She assumed that it would be one of many such centers in the post-Soviet, post-totalitarian world—none of Russia’s biggest universities had gender-studies programs—but the center in Kharkiv remained one of only a handful. Irina, Sergey, and their colleagues translated foundational Western texts into Russian, and Irina co-founded a summer school in gender studies that took place in Crimea and drew participants from Ukraine, Russia, other former Soviet colonies, and beyond. Kharkiv is a city of universities and colleges—more than forty of them—and was, before the war, home to hundreds of thousands of students, including tens of thousands who came from other countries. The center thrived there.

Nine years ago, Irina had a stroke. She believes it was her body’s response to the news of the first death at the protests that ultimately led to the Revolution of Dignity. Irina heard that the victim, a young man of Armenian descent, had been shot in the back of the head, and she feared that he’d been shot by one of the other protesters. (No evidence that this was the case has since emerged.) She collapsed.

“Many people died of heart attacks at that time,” Sergey said.

“Two of our neighbors have died of heart attacks since this war started,” Irina said.

Now, as a feminist philosopher and an anti-nationalist living in and thinking about war, Irina was troubled by feminist colleagues’ rush to mobilize around nationalist rhetoric. She was also unsettled by some well-meaning foreign supporters. In May, the philosopher Paul B. Preciado came out against supplying arms to Ukraine. “We don’t have to send weapons,” Preciado wrote. “We need to send peace delegations to Russia and Ukraine. We must peacefully occupy Kiev, Lviv, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Odessa. We all have to go. Only millions of non-Ukrainian and unarmed corps can win this war.” Writing on Facebook, Irina acknowledged that Preciado’s proposed strategy was consistent with Butler’s philosophy of nonviolence, but objected that the proposed strategy “implied a discriminatory, racist division of human lives into ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘non-Ukrainian,’ those that are more and less significant, or, in Butler’s terms, more and less grievable.” By suggesting that Putin wouldn’t bomb millions of “non-Ukrainians,” Preciado seemed to be conceding that millions of Ukrainians were bombable. (“I have never objected to Ukrainian self-defense,” Butler told me. The conference “was very difficult for people who espoused nonviolence, because we also saw the necessity of Ukrainian military self-defense against Russian aggression. If the implication is that I, like Preciado, object to sending arms to Ukraine, that would be emphatically wrong.”)

After the invasion, the university went fully online. (Some classes had been virtual since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.) All of Irina’s graduate students, many of whom have children, left Kharkiv—some to go abroad, others for safer parts of the country. International students left the country, too. This, in turn, meant that the university lost much of its funding. In August, 2022, the university didn’t renew her contract. Soon after Irina lost her job, the London School of Economics offered her a position. She worried this meant that, as an academic from war-torn Ukraine, she was now, as she put it to me in a text, a “marketable commodity.”

Updated at 2:45 p.m. on March 21, 2023

Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue. What they found, as The Atlantic first reported on Thursday, bolsters the case for the pandemic having purely natural roots: The genetic data suggest that live mammals illegally for sale at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market—among them, raccoon dogs, a foxlike species known to be susceptible to the virus—may have been carrying the coronavirus at the end of 2019.But what might otherwise have been a straightforward story on new evidence has rapidly morphed into a mystery centered on the origins debate’s data gaps. Within a day or so of nabbing the sequences off a database called GISAID, the researchers told me, they reached out to the Chinese scientists who had uploaded the data to share some preliminary results. The next day, public access to the sequences was locked—according to GISAID, at the request of the Chinese researchers, who had previously analyzed the data and drawn distinctly different conclusions about what they contained.[Read: The strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic]Yesterday evening, the international team behind the new Huanan-market analysis released a report on its findings—but did not post the underlying data. The write-up confirms that genetic material from raccoon dogs and several other mammals was found in some of the same spots at the wet market, as were bits of SARS-CoV-2’s genome around the time the outbreak began. Some of that animal genetic material, which was collected just days or weeks after the market was shut down, appears to be RNA—a particularly fast-degrading molecule. That strongly suggests that the mammals were present at the market not long before the samples were collected, making them a plausible channel for the virus to travel on its way to us. “I think we’re moving toward more and more evidence that this was an animal spillover at the market,” says Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the new research. “A year and a half ago, my confidence in the animal origin was 80 percent, something like that. Now it’s 95 percent or above.”For now, the report is just that: a report, not yet formally reviewed by other scientists or even submitted for publication to the journal—and that will remain the case as long as this team continues to leave space for the researchers who originally collected the market samples, many of them based at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to prepare a paper of their own. And still missing are the raw sequence files that sparked the reanalysis in the first place—before vanishing from the public eye.Every researcher I asked emphasized just how important the release of that evidence is to the origins investigation: Without data, there’s no base-level proof—nothing for the broader scientific community to independently scrutinize to confirm or refute the international team’s results. Absent raw data, “some people will say that this isn’t real,” says Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis. Data that flicker on and off publicly accessible parts of the internet also raise questions about other clues on the pandemic’s origins. Still more evidence might be out there, yet undisclosed.Transparency is always an essential facet of research, but all the more so when the stakes are so high. SARS-CoV-2 has already killed nearly 7 million people, at least, and saddled countless people with chronic illness; it will kill and debilitate many more in the decades to come. Every investigation into how it began to spread among humans must be “conducted as openly as possible,” says Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis.The team behind the reanalysis still has copies of the genetic sequences its members downloaded earlier this month. But they’ve decided that they won’t be the ones to share them, several of them told me. For one, they don’t have sequences from the complete set of samples that the Chinese team collected in early 2020—just the fraction that they spotted and grabbed off GISAID. Even if they did have all of the data, the researchers contend that it’s not their place to post them publicly. That’s up to the China CDC team that originally collected and generated the data.Part of the international team’s reasoning is rooted in academic decorum. There isn’t a set-in-stone guidebook among scientists, but adhering to unofficial rules on etiquette smooths successful collaborations across disciplines and international borders—especially during a global crisis such as this one. Releasing someone else’s data, the product of another team’s hard work, is a faux pas. It risks misattribution of credit, and opens the door to the Chinese researchers’ findings getting scooped before they publish a high-profile paper in a prestigious journal. “It isn’t right to share the original authors’ data without their consent,” says Niema Moshiri, a computational biologist at UC San Diego and one of the authors of the new report. “They produced the data, so it’s their data to share with the world.”If the international team released what data it has, it could potentially stoke the fracas in other ways. The World Health Organization has publicly indicated that the data should come from the researchers who collected them first: On Friday, at a press briefing, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, admonished the Chinese researchers for keeping their data under wraps for so long, and called on them to release the sequences again. “These data could have and should have been shared three years ago,” he said. And the fact that it wasn’t is “disturbing,” given just how much it might have aided investigations early on, says Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense expert at George Mason University, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis.Publishing the current report has already gotten the researchers into trouble with GISAID, the database where they found the genetic sequences. During the pandemic, the database has been a crucial hub for researchers sharing viral genome data; founded to provide open access to avian influenza genomes, it is also where researchers from the China CDC published the first whole-genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2, back in January 2020. A few days after the researchers downloaded the sequences, they told me, several of them were contacted by a GISAID administrator who chastised them about not being sufficiently collaborative with the China CDC team and warned them against publishing a paper using the China CDC data. They were in danger, the email said, of violating the site’s terms of use and would risk getting their database access revoked. Distributing the data to any non-GISAID users—including the broader research community—would also be a breach.This morning, hours after the researchers released their report online, many of them found that they could no longer log in to GISAID—they received an error message when they input their username and password. “They may indeed be accusing us of having violated their terms,” Moshiri told me, though he can’t be sure. The ban was instated with absolutely no warning. Moshiri and his colleagues maintain that they did act in good faith and haven’t violated any of the database’s terms—that, contrary to GISAID’s accusations, they reached out multiple times with offers to collaborate with the China CDC, which has “thus far declined,” per the international team’s report.GISAID didn’t respond when I reached out about the data’s disappearing act, its emails to the international team, and the group-wide ban. But in a statement released shortly after I contacted the database—one that echoes language in the emails sent to researchers—GISAID doubled down on accusing the international team of violating its terms of use by posting “an analysis report in direct contravention of the terms they agreed to as a condition to accessing the data, and despite having knowledge that the data generators are undergoing peer review assessment of their own publication.”

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, told me that she’s learned that the China CDC researchers recently provided a fuller data set to GISAID—more complete than the one the international team downloaded earlier this month. “It’s ready to go,” she told me. GISAID just needs permission, she said, from the Chinese researchers to make the sequences publicly available. “I reach out to them every day, asking them for a status update,” she added, but she hasn’t yet heard back on a definitive timeline. In its statement, GISAID also “strongly” suggested “that the complete and updated dataset will be made available as soon as possible.” I asked Van Kerkhove if there was a hypothetical deadline for the China CDC team to restore access, at which point the international team might be asked to publicize the data instead. “This hypothetical deadline you’re talking about? We’re way past that,” she said, though she didn’t comment specifically on whether the international team would be asked to step in, reiterating instead that the responsibility for access lies with the submitters. “Data has been uploaded. It is available. It just needs to be accessible, immediately.”Why, exactly, the sequences were first made public only so recently, and why they have yet to reappear publicly, remain unclear. In a recent statement, the WHO said that access to the data was withdrawn “apparently to allow further data updates by China CDC” to its original analysis on the market samples, which went under review for publication at the journal Nature last week. There’s no clarity, however, on what will happen if the paper is not published at all. When I reached out to three of the Chinese researchers—George Gao, William Liu, and Guizhen Wu—to ask about their intentions for the data, I didn’t receive a response.“We want the data to come out more than anybody,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University and one of the authors on the new analysis. Until then, the international team will be fielding accusations, already flooding in, that it falsified its analyses and overstated its conclusions.Researchers around the world have been raising questions about these particular genetic sequences for at least a year. In February 2022, the Chinese researchers and their close collaborators released their analysis of the same market samples probed in the new report, as well as other bits of genetic data that haven’t yet been made public. But their interpretations deviate pretty drastically from the international team’s. The Chinese team contended that any shreds of virus found at the market had most likely been brought in by infected humans. “No animal host of SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced,” the researchers asserted at the time. Although the market had perhaps been an “amplifier” of the outbreak, their analysis read, “more work involving international coordination” would be needed to determine the “real origins of SARS-CoV-2.” When reached by Jon Cohen of Science magazine last week, Gao described the sequences that fleetingly appeared on GISAID as “[n]othing new. It had been known there was illegal animal dealing and this is why the market was immediately shut down.”There is, then, a clear divergence between the two reports. Gao’s assessment indicates that finding animal genetic material in the market swabs merely confirms that live mammals were being illegally traded at the venue prior to January 2020. The researchers behind the new report insist that the narrative can now go a step further—they suggest not just that the animals were there, but that the animals, several of which are already known to be vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2, were there, in parts of the market where the virus was also found. That proximity, coupled with the virus’s inability to persist without a viable host, points to the possibility of an existing infection among animals, which could spark several more.The Chinese researchers used this same logic of location—multiple types of genetic material pulled out of the same swab—to conclude that humans were carrying around the virus at Huanan. The reanalysis confirms that there probably were infected people at the market at some point before it closed. But they were unlikely to be the virus’s only chauffeurs: Across several samples, the amount of raccoon-dog genetic material dwarfs that of humans. At one stall in particular—located in the sector of the market where the most virus-positive swabs were found—the researchers discovered at least one sample that contained SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and was also overflowing with raccoon-dog genetic material, while containing very little DNA or RNA material matching the human genome. That same stall was photographically documented housing raccoon dogs in 2014. The case is not a slam dunk: No one has yet, for instance, identified a viral sample taken from a live animal that was swabbed at the market in 2019 before the venue was closed. Still, JHU’s Gronvall told me, the situation feels clearer than ever. “All of the science is pointed” in the direction of Huanan being the pandemic’s epicenter, she said.To further untangle the significance of the sequences will require—you guessed it—the now-vanished genetic data. Some researchers are still withholding their judgment on the significance of the new analysis, because they haven’t gotten their hands on the genetic sequences themselves. “That’s the whole scientific process,” Van Kerkhove told me: data transparency that allows analyses to be “done and redone.”

Van Kerkhove and others are also wondering whether more data could yet emerge, given how long this particular set went unshared. “This is an indication to me in recent days that there is more data that exists,” she said. Which means that she and her colleagues haven’t yet gotten the fullest picture of the pandemic’s early days that they could—and that they won’t be able to deliver much of a verdict until more information emerges. The new analysis does bolster the case for market animals acting as a conduit for the virus between bats (SARS-CoV-2’s likeliest original host, based on several studies on this coronavirus and others) and people; it doesn’t, however, “tell us that the other hypotheses didn’t happen. We can’t remove any of them,” Van Kerkhove told me.More surveillance for the virus needs to be done in wild-animal populations, she said. Having the data from the market swabs could help with that, perhaps leading back to a population of mammals that might have caught the virus from bats or another intermediary in a particular part of China. At the same time, to further investigate the idea that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged out of a laboratory mishap, officials need to conduct intensive audits and investigations of virology laboratories in Wuhan and elsewhere. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy ruled that such an accident was the likelier catalyst of the coronavirus outbreak than a natural spillover from wild animals to humans. The ruling echoed earlier judgments from the FBI and a Senate minority report. But it contrasted with the views of four other agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, and it was made with “low confidence” and based on “new” evidence that has yet to be declassified.[Read: The lab leak will haunt us forever]The longer the investigation into the virus’s origins drags on, and the more distant the autumn of 2019 grows in our rearview, “the harder it becomes,” Van Kerkhove told me. Many in the research community were surprised that new information from market samples collected in early 2020 emerged at all, three years later. Settling the squabbles over SARS-CoV-2 will be especially tough because the Huanan market was so swiftly shut down after the outbreak began, and the traded animals at the venue rapidly culled, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and one of the researchers behind the new analysis. Raccoon dogs, one of the most prominent potential hosts to have emerged from the new analysis, are not even known to have been sampled live at the market. “That evidence is gone now,” if it ever existed, Koblentz, of George Mason University, told me. For months, Chinese officials were even adamant that no mammals were being illegally sold at the region’s wet markets at all.So researchers continue to work with what they have: swabs from surfaces that can, at the very least, point to a susceptible animal being in the right place, at the right time, with the virus potentially inside it. “Right now, to the best of my knowledge, this data is the only way that we can actually look,” Rasmussen told me. It may never be enough to fully settle this debate. But right now, the world doesn’t even know the extent of the evidence available—or what could, or should, still emerge.

I’ve just completed a series of essays on the crisis of dynamism, concluding with a couple of posts on the outlook down the road. I’d now like to circle back to capitalism’s crisis of inclusion, about which I’ve written a pair of essays, and offer some thoughts about how things might develop from here. What would a more inclusive capitalism look like, and what are the chances of getting there?
Let me start by explaining what I mean when I talk about a crisis of inclusion. Concerns about inclusion these days usually refer to women, ethnic minorities, and non-heterosexuals, but the lack of inclusion that I am focused on is the new class divide that has opened up along educational lines over the past half-century. This crisis, while its roots lie in economic developments, is primarily sociological in character. It is a crisis of social disintegration: outside of capitalism’s highly educated professional and managerial elite, the social bonds that give life structure and meaning are falling apart.  
Connections to work, family, and community are unraveling:

Labor force participation by prime-age men has fallen from 96 percent in 1970 to 88 percent today, and most of this drop occurred outside the elite. Between 1970 and 2016, participation by college-educated men slipped only slightly, from 96 to 94 percent. Over the same period, by contrast, the participation rate for men with only a high school degree fell from 98 percent all the way to 84 percent.

The marriage rate for men with a high school education or less has fallen more than 20 percentage points in the past 40 years, compared to only a 6-point dip for college-educated men.

Nearly 60 percent of births to women with a high school education or less occurred outside of marriage; for children of college-educated women, the figure is just 10 percent.

While church attendance is down overall, it has fallen most among “moderately educated” whites – those with only a high school degree plus those with some college.

The share of private-sector employees who are union members has tumbled from 29 percent in 1970 to 6 percent today. Fraternal organizations, once so important to working-class social life, have all but disappeared.

Health and well-being are in alarming decline:

“Deaths of despair” from suicide, drugs, and alcohol are up sharply and are concentrated among people without college degrees.

Between 1993 and 2019, Americans in extreme distress from mental health and emotional problems rose from 3.6 percent of the population to 6.4 percent. Among less educated middle-aged whites, the jump was from 4.8 to 11.5 percent.

Almost half of the prime-age men not in the workforce report that they had taken daily pain medication, and two-thirds of those take prescription meds.

The difference in life expectancy between rich and poor is growing. For men born in 1920, the life expectancy gap between those in the top 10 percent of income and those in the bottom 10 percent was 5 years; for men born 20 years later in 1940, that gap had climbed to 12 years. Adult life expectancy for people with a college degree has continued to rise since 2010, but it has fallen for everybody else.

Anne Case, the Princeton sociologist who coined the term “deaths of despair,” sums up where things stand:
Education divides everything, including connection to the labor market, marriage, connection to institutions (like organized religion), physical and mental health, and mortality. It does so for whites, Blacks and Hispanics. There has been a profound (not yet complete) convergence in life expectancy by education. There are two Americas now: one with a B.A. and one without.
I’ve already given you my explanation for the origins of this new class divide. Ironically enough, it’s the result of a great humanitarian achievement: namely, the declining dependence of technological and economic progress on mass inputs of arduous physical labor. Made possible by the continued advance of automation, this development meant that overall social welfare rested less and less on the willingness of some men to break their bodies –whether in an instant or over the course of their working lives – in exhausting, regimented, dirty, dangerous work.
Yet this progress has come with a heavy cost. Economists refer to it bloodlessly as “declining relative demand for unskilled labor”; what it boils down to is that ordinary people once played a vital and necessary role at the forefront of capitalist development – but not anymore. Between automation and globalization, the most technologically progressive industries no longer have much need for the services of ordinary workers in rich countries (and their reliance on ordinary workers in poor countries is a stopgap on the way to more complete automation). The weaning of capitalist progress from the contributions of ordinary workers has led to the elimination of millions of factory and related jobs that had stood at the apex of working-class life, providing security and upward mobility and serving as the glue for families, communities, and a whole way of life. When those jobs disappeared, the way of life that they supported disappeared as well.
That way of life had real limitations – we should not mourn its passing – but it was based on an important and valued function in society, thereby integrating those who lived it into the larger society and offering them structure, status, and purpose. What has replaced it is … nothing: the absence of an important economic function, the collapse of structure, the diminution of status, the loss of purpose. In this scattered, disjointed, incoherent aftermath, most people are reasonably comfortable: They have more cultural freedom than their parents and grandparents, they have bigger homes and more stuff, they eat better food, they travel more, and they have no shortage of diverting entertainment. But they have lost their connection to power and social significance – to powerful employers and unions whose significance to the economy was plain to all. That loss has brought with it the fraying of all the vital connections of life – to work, family, and community. This is lack of inclusion at its most alienating and anomic.
The loss of economic inclusion occurred as inclusion was improving along other dimensions – namely race, gender, and sexuality. The upshot of this less-remarked-upon intersectionality is that the group most traumatized by the fading of the American industrial economy and its working class has been white males – the group normally thought of as the excluders rather than the excluded. Everyone outside the professional and managerial elite, whatever their race or sex, has faced the headwinds created by the generally declining status and leverage of ordinary workers. But at the same time, there has been significant progress in overcoming the specific exclusion and subordination of Blacks and women. For them, the past decades have thus seen gains as well as losses; for white men outside the elite, on the other hand, there has been nothing but regress as far as their relative place in society is concerned. And with their unmitigated marginalization has come dislocation, dysfunction, and increasingly deadly despair.
The way I see it, then, the emergence of the new class divide and the resulting social disintegration outside the elite are consequences of the loss of function. First, the loss of economic function as machines replaced manual labor; and rippling out from there, the loss of social function as men lost their traditionally indispensable role as providers upon which working-class family and community life was based.
Regarding the latter, we can at least imagine the reconstitution of working-class family life into something stronger, fairer, and better than before. Actually achieving what we imagine will be anything but easy, to be sure, as it requires a profound resetting of expectations about what men and women want and need from each other and an associated reworking of the division of labor within the home. Given how deep-seated the old expectations and division of labor were, we must recognize the extent of the challenge. But the raw materials are there for meeting that challenge, as men retain vitally important functions as romantic partners and fathers. What is needed are updated scripts for fulfilling these functions. (Here let me heartily recommend my friend Richard Reeves’ new book Of Boys and Men on the struggles many men are facing after losing their traditional work and family roles. His analysis of the problem is provocative and insightful, and his suggestions for a constructive way forward are both ingenious and genuinely helpful.)
But if economic exclusion is rooted in the declining importance of the economic function served by ordinary people, what remedy is there for that? Here I think our conventional framing of the problem as one of income and wealth inequality makes it difficult for us to see just how difficult the problem truly is. If the problem is simply a monetary imbalance, then rebalancing is all that’s needed to put things right. But if the role you once played in society is obsolete, and there is no new role that is commensurately important and rewarding for you to play, how can we make things better?
It’s important to see how naturally industrializing capitalism, for all its backwardness and brutality, worked to integrate ordinary people into its social order and give them opportunities for status and self-respect. The emergence of mechanization and mass production technologies naturally gave rise to strong demand for able-bodied workers to man and tend the new machines and physically move goods from the factory to the customer. And since factory workers were generally recruited from the ranks of the peasantry and landless farm laborers, people who typically lived under the shadow of physical privation, the offer of a factory job – an offer all of us today would reject as unconscionable – meant a ticket to dramatic material betterment. And given a starting point in grinding material scarcity, the achievement of this betterment felt like a triumphant liberation in which workers could take genuine pride.
Furthermore, given the danger and difficulty of factory work and the meagerness of the margin that separated workers from penury, it was natural for workers to rebel against the rigors of factory discipline and demand higher pay and better working conditions. And since workers worked alongside each other in large numbers and under trying and sometimes life-threatening circumstances, it was natural for the solidarity of the foxhole to develop among them, whereupon they naturally banded together and organized on behalf of their common interests. And when the collective economic and political power of workers had waxed to the point that they could credibly threaten to strike and bring their factories to a halt, the structure of industrial production – with high fixed costs due to large capital investments, which meant that profitability depended upon maximum uninterrupted throughput – gave employers a natural incentive to share more of their enterprises’ bounty with workers in the interest of keeping the factories running.
Nobody had to plan from the top down the creation of an industrial working class. Nobody had to plan anything for workers to snatch up the jobs offered by industrial enterprises and for dramatic material uplift to ensue. Nobody had to make a plan to create incentives for workers to organize and seek improvement in the terms of their employment; the emergence of an organized labor movement was a spontaneous bottom-up reaction. And once that movement was sufficiently powerful, nobody had to plan how to create incentives for employers to play ball, as the existence of high fixed costs gave them all the incentives they needed.
Industrializing capitalism thus worked naturally to integrate large masses of ordinary people into its economic system and give them an important and increasingly well-rewarded role in society. Of course these natural workings were anything but smooth. “Class war” wasn’t just a metaphor: There was regular violence and bloodletting over workplace disputes, not to mention the global convulsions culminating in the threat of nuclear war occasioned by the Russian Revolution and the spread of avowedly socialist regimes over much of the planet. But the point is that the social democratic settlement – under which, during the middle decades of the 20th century, capitalism achieved the highest degree of inclusion it has so far managed – emerged as the win-win accommodation of capital and labor out of the logic of capitalism itself.
But this settlement fell apart in the waning decades of the 20th century as the economic structures on which it was based– and their implicit logic in favor of mutual accommodation – passed from the scene. And there is nothing in the economic logic of postindustrial capitalism that points toward a new accommodation. It does create a much larger elite than any previous social system ever managed, comprising something like a quarter of the workforce, and this professional and managerial class has access to plentiful material and spiritual resources out of which to fashion challenging and fulfilling lives. But for almost everybody else, no matter what comforts and conveniences contemporary economic life affords them, there is underneath it all the haunting sense that they are superfluous.
We cannot simply conjure up a new economic role for ordinary people that is as vitally important to the progress of the overall system as factory work was in its day. Nor, I’m afraid, is there any prospect – this side of a transformative cultural revolution, at any rate – that we come to accord real status and respect to anyone who does their job well, regardless of what it is and how much it pays. Consequently, the only possible avenue to a newly inclusive capitalism is to try to generate greater status and respect for ordinary people through artifice – that is, through policy interventions.
The usual political response is to throw money at the problem, and here there are two basic approaches. One is to fatten workers’ paychecks through wage subsidies; the other is to provide some kind of unconditional basic income. If we can’t give ordinary workers a new and critically important economic role to play, we can at least give them the material recompense that higher-status employment might have provided. Each has possibilities, along with serious drawbacks.
The crisis of inclusion is not one of material privation: There are pockets of deep poverty, but the curse of advanced social disintegration is not the result of physical deprivation. Nevertheless, economic life outside the elite is characterized by an abiding and stressful precarity. It’s an ongoing struggle to keep your head above water, living paycheck to paycheck, no job security, no career path, always one stroke of bad luck away from serious trouble. This absence of basic security and stability does amount to a kind of spiritual deprivation, and buttressing households’ financial resources would therefore mark a real step forward in well-being – and in the direction of greater inclusion.
Furthermore, no matter how much we might wish otherwise, in our thoroughly commercialized society money and status are deeply intertwined. So, could these redistributive schemes raise ordinary people’s social status even as they pad their bank accounts? In the case of wage subsidies, I think the answer is almost certainly yes. While there is stigma and shame attached to being on the dole, the use of policy to inflate market incomes never seems to bring with it any similar penalty. Farmers in rich countries typically receive a double-digit percentage of their total revenues from price supports, and they continue to enjoy a positive social image. Lawyers and doctors are respected and envied for their high-paying, high-status jobs; they generally incur no penalty for the fact that a significant fraction of their income derives from cartelistic restrictions on supply. And closest to home, union workers back in the day took affirmative pride in their above-market wages. Accordingly, if a comprehensive scheme of wage subsidies were introduced, I expect that the beneficiaries would reap status rewards in proportion to the relative increase in their compensation. If working-class jobs could once again pay for lifestyles comparable to those of many college-educated salaried workers, what are now sharp class distinctions along educational lines might begin to blur.
A universal basic income, on the other hand, feels a lot more like the dole. Of course it’s universal, so there shouldn’t be any stigma associated just with getting the check. But it seems likely that people who lived primarily off that check – people who get by without a job or only episodic employment – would be looked down on as a result. And I’m worried that, in the present context, a significant influx of unconditional income would lead to a significant increase in the ranks of the chronically jobless. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston finds that the decrease in labor force participation by non-college-educated prime-age men has been driven in significant part by the relative decline in earnings from employment. It’s not especially surprising: When playing the game makes you feel like a loser compared to everybody else, you’re inclined to take your marbles and go home. So if nothing is done to boost relative earning from employment, the introduction of a UBI looks likely to allow more demoralized low-wage workers to quit.
Under contemporary social conditions, the departure of people from the low end of the labor market into idleness is a move away from well-being. You might imagine that people could fill the extra time in their day with constructive pursuits more rewarding than a dead-end job – but in most cases, unfortunately, you’d be wrong. People end up in dead-end jobs because they lack the human capital – the abstract reasoning ability, the ability to navigate impersonal institutions, the long time horizons and discipline to pursue long-term goals – to qualify for something better. But the same deficits that make finding a good job so difficult also render people poorly equipped to make good use of free time. And so when we look at what people without jobs do with those extra hours every day, it turns out that they spend a big chunk of them sleeping and watching TV.
There’s at least the possibility, though, that once a robust UBI system is in place, and people have much more freedom than today to choose no work or less work, new institutions will emerge that encourage people to develop their capacities and serve their communities outside of paid employment. They might then find status, meaning, and purpose in pursuits outside the cash nexus. By contrast, we know that a system of wage subsidies will work to lock in the current occupational structure, with its large number of low-skill, low-autonomy, low-productivity service jobs. Instituting such a system, then, amounts to a dispiriting confession that we can’t think of better ways for most people to spend their time than in activities that do little to develop people’s potential and whose actual value-added is too meager to support a good life.
In the short term, then, the context of present-day social conditions inclines me to favor wage subsides over a UBI. Both would suffice to provide greater security and stability, but I believe that wage subsidies would help to raise the status of the jobs to which they are attached, while a UBI will leave people in low status and at the margin would likely increase the number of people trapped in dispiriting idleness. Over the longer term, though, the big drawback of wage subsidies is that they freeze in place current labor market patterns, where most people do work they don’t enjoy and that isn’t all that valuable to others. A UBI, on the other hand, at least leaves open the possibility that people will eventually develop the institutions and norms that support constructive, productive leisure – and thus that more people will spend their lives doing things they enjoy and that are genuinely valuable to others.
Besides throwing money at the problem, we could also seek to uplift the status of ordinary people by increasing their power in the employment relationship – that is, by reviving the labor movement with a new system of unions for collective representation and bargaining. This is a subject I’d like to turn to later and address in much greater detail, but for now a few quick thoughts must suffice. First of all, in the United States at least, it will be necessary to start over from scratch. Traditional Wagner Act unionism had grievous flaws even in its heyday, but at this point it is just a sad relic whose main function is to prevent badly needed experimentation in new forms of worker solidarity. Furthermore, I should note now that I don’t see a revival of unions as a panacea. After all, private-sector unions remain much more powerful in western Europe than they have become in the U.S; while European workers may enjoy some advantages as a result, the declining leverage and status of ordinary people which is at the heart of the crisis of inclusion can nevertheless be found on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, I believe this is a highly promising avenue to explore, especially in the U.S., as it addresses social disintegration head-on by reintegrating workers into institutions that allow them protect their common interests and promote their common well-being.
As I describe the pros and cons of various alternative reform paths in the paragraphs above, I have the uneasy feeling that I’m assuming a can opener. Given how far the leverage and status of ordinary people have fallen, and given their further political marginalization because of the growing salience of cultural divisions and the professionalization of political life, how exactly do we expect bold egalitarian reforms to be enacted?
A successful campaign to rewrite the rules of the game at such a fundamental level, uplifting and empowering ordinary people and reducing the power and privileges of our overmighty elites, would require the large-scale gathering and mobilization of countervailing power. Back in the day, the sources of such power could be found in the critical dependence of industrial might and technological progress on ordinary workers and in those workers’ experience of and energetic commitment to labor solidarity. Where are the sources of countervailing power to be found today?
I hold out some hope that countervailing power can actually be derived from ordinary people’s current lack of status and power – and from the resulting disintegration, dysfunction, and despair. Capital eventually agreed to its social-democratic accommodation with labor in order to keep the machines running and the money flowing in, because they knew that workers had the power to target their enterprises with strikes and bring the machines to a screeching halt. It is at least possible that at some point today’s elites come to see a new accommodation with the rest of society as necessary to the keep the money flowing in – this time, not because of the threat of targeted uses of power, but because chronic social disintegration and recurrent political spasms are bad for business. I hold out hope, but I’m not holding my breath.
So here, as with the crisis of dynamism, I see a continuation and deepening of the crisis as the path of least resistance. In both cases, there are possible paths forward that lead to social revitalization and renewal, but they are strewn with obstacles. In addition to those already mentioned, there is the dysfunctional nature of contemporary politics. To this, the third of three crises simultaneously afflicting our capitalist system – the crisis of liberal democracy – I will turn in my next essay.
The post Prospects for a more inclusive capitalism appeared first on Niskanen Center.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Recently I gave myself an assignment: Come up with a framework for explaining generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in a way that illuminates the full potential of the technology and helps me make predictions about its future.By analogy, imagine that it’s the year 1780 and you get a glimpse of an early English steam engine. You might say: “This is a device for pumping water out of coal mines.” And that would be true. But this accurate description would be far too narrow to see the big picture. The steam engine wasn’t just a water pump. It was a lever for detaching economic growth from population growth. That is the kind of description that would have allowed an 18th-century writer to predict the future.Or imagine it’s 1879 and you see an incandescent light bulb flutter to life in Thomas Edison’s lab in New Jersey. Is it a replacement for whale oil in lamps? Yes. But that description doesn’t scratch the surface of what the invention represented.  Direct-current and alternating-current electricity enabled on-demand local power for anything—not just light, but also heat, and any number of machines that 19th-century inventors couldn’t even imagine.Maybe you see what I’m getting at. Narrowly speaking, GPT-4 is a large language model that produces human-inspired content by using transformer technology to predict text. Narrowly speaking, it is an overconfident, and often hallucinatory, auto-complete robot. This is an okay way of describing the technology, if you’re content with a dictionary definition. But it doesn’t get to the larger question: When we’re looking at generative AI, what are we actually looking at?Sometimes, I think I’m looking at a minor genius. The previous GPT model took the uniform bar exam and scored in the 10th percentile, a failing grade; GPT-4 scored in the 90th percentile. It scored in the 93rd percentile on the SAT reading and writing test, and in the 88th percentile on the LSAT. It scored a 5, the highest possible, on several Advanced Placement tests. Some people are waving away these accomplishments by saying “Well, I could score a 5 on AP Bio too if I could look everything up on the internet.” But this technology is not looking things up online. It’s not rapid-fire Googling answers. It’s a pretrained technology. That is, it’s using what passes for artificial reasoning, based on a large amount of data, to solve new test problems. And on many tests, at least, it’s already doing this better than most humans.Sometimes, I think I’m looking at a Star Trek replicator for content—a hyper-speed writer and computer programmer. It can code in a pinch, spin up websites based on simple illustrations, and solve programming challenges in seconds. Let’s imagine a prosaic application. Parents can instantly conjure original children’s books for their kids. Here’s a scenario: Your son, who loves alligators, comes home in tears after being bullied at school. You instruct ChatGPT to write a 10-minute, rhyming story about a young boy who overcomes his bully thanks to his magical stuffed alligator. You’re going to get that book in minutes—with illustrations.Sometimes, I think I’m looking at the nuisance of the century. (I’m not even getting into the most apocalyptic predictions of how AI could suddenly end the human race.) AI safety researchers worry that this AI will one day be able to steal money and bribe humans to commit atrocities. You might think that prediction is absurd. But consider this.  Before OpenAI installed GPT-4’s final safety guardrails, the technology got a human to solve a CAPTCHA for it. When the person, working as a TaskRabbit, responded skeptically and asked GPT if it was a robot, GPT made up an excuse. “No, I’m not a robot,” the robot lied. “I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.” The human then provided the results, proving to be an excellent little meat puppet for this robot intelligence.So what are we to make of this minor genius and content-spewing nuisance? The combination of possibilities makes predictions impossible. Imagine somebody showing you a picture of a tadpole-like embryo at 10 days, telling you the organism was growing exponentially, and asking you to predict the species. Is it a frog? Is it a dog? A woolly mammoth? A human being? Is it none of those things? Is it a species we’ve never classified before? Is it an alien? You have no way of knowing. All you know is that this thing is larval and it might become anything. To me, that’s generative AI. This thing is larval. And it might become anything.Here is another analogy that comes to mind, grandiose as it might initially seem. Scientists don’t know exactly how or when humans first wrangled fire as a technology, roughly 1 million years ago. But we have a good idea of how fire invented modern humanity. As I wrote in my review of James Suzman’s book Work, fire softened meat and vegetables, allowing humans to accelerate their calorie consumption. Meanwhile, by scaring off predators, controlled fire allowed humans to sleep on the ground for longer periods of time. The combination of more calories and more REM over the millennia allowed us to grow big, unusually energy-greedy brains with sharpened capacities for memory and prediction. Narrowly, fire made stuff hotter. But it also quite literally expanded our minds.Our ancestors knew that open flame was a feral power, which deserved reverence and even fear. The same technology that made civilization possible also flattened cities. The ancient myths about fire were never simple. When Prometheus stole it from the gods, he transformed the life of mortals but was doomed to live in agony. The people building artificial general intelligence today don’t need media mythmaking to inflate their ego; they already clearly believe in the humanity-altering potential of their invention. But it is a complex thing, playing at Prometheus. They have stolen from the realm of knowledge something very powerful and equally strange. I think this technology will expand our minds. And I think it will burn us.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Zelensky has an answer for DeSantis.
This is not great news for Donald Trump.
Cool people accidentally saved America’s feet.
Did Vermeer’s daughter paint some of his best-known works?
Just WarI supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything, and I hope you’ll bear with me in a somewhat longer edition of the Daily today for a personal exploration of the issue.In retrospect, almost no American war except the great crusade against the Axis seems to have been necessary, especially for the people who have had to go and fight such conflicts. How could we have asked our military men and women to endure death and mutilation and horror in 1991 so that a bunch of rich Kuwaitis could return to their mansions, or in 2003 so that we could finally settle scores with a regional dictator? Yesterday, The Bulwark ran a searing, must-read reminiscence of the Iraq War written by a U.S. veteran that reminds us how high-flown ideas such as “national interest” or “international order” play little role on the actual battlefield.And yet, there are just wars: conflicts that require the use of armed force on behalf of an ally or for the greater good of the international community. I was an advocate for deposing Saddam by the mid-1990s on such grounds. Here is what I wrote in the journal Ethics & International Affairs on the eve of the invasion in March 2003:
The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts.
Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime (and wars have started over less), but taken together they are a brief for what can only be considered a just war.
Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war, ostensibly to counter a gathering threat of weapons of mass destruction. (Preemptive war, by the way, is a war to avert an imminent attack, and generally permissible in international law and custom. Preventive war is going to war on your own timetable to snuff out a possible future threat, a practice long rejected by the international community as immoral and illegal. The Israeli move at the opening of the Six-Day War, in 1967, was preemptive; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, was preventive.)Of course, the Iraqi dictator was doing his damndest to convince the world that he had weapons of mass destruction, because he was terrified of admitting to his worst foe, Iran, that he no longer had them. (He sure convinced me.) But this was no evidence of an imminent threat requiring instant action, and the WMD charge was the shakiest of limbs in a tree full of much stronger branches.Bush used the WMD rationale as just one in a kitchen sink of issues, likely because his advisers thought it was the case that would most resonate with the public after the September 11 terror attacks. For years, most Western governments saw terrorism, rogue states, and WMD as three separate problems, to be handled by different means. After 9/11, these three issues threaded together into one giant problem—a rogue state supporting terrorists who seek to do mass damage—and the tolerance for risk that protected the Iraqi tyrant for so many years evaporated.In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history. Knowing what I now know, I would not have advocated for setting the wheels of war in motion. And although Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for this war, I could not have imagined how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with “transformation,” the idea that the U.S. military could do more with fewer troops and lighter forces, would undermine our ability to conduct a war against Iraq. As Eliot Cohen later said, “The thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this.”My own unease about the war began when America’s de facto military governor, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi military and embarked on “de-Baathification,” taking as his historical analogy the “denazification” of Germany after World War II. This was bad history and bad policy, and it created a massive unemployment problem among people skilled in violence while punishing civilians whose only real association with Baathism was the party card required for them to get a good job.And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better. Like many of our leaders, I was still amazed at the collapse of the Soviet Union, appalled at Western inaction in places like Rwanda, and convinced (as I still am) that U.S. foreign policy should be premised on a kind of Spider-Man doctrine: With great power comes great responsibility.Unfortunately, in my case, this turned into supporting what the late Charles Krauthammer in 1999 called “a blanket anti-son of a bitch policy,” which he described as “soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.” Krauthammer was right, and people like me were too willing to argue for taking out bad guys merely because they were bad guys. But that word blanket was doing a lot of lifting in Krauthammer’s formulation; perhaps we cannot go after all of them, but some sons of bitches should be high on the list. For me, Saddam was one of them.The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power. (Is the world better off because we left Bashar al-Assad in charge and allowed him to turn Syria into an abattoir?) Yes, some rulers are too dangerous to remove; Vladimir Putin, hiding in the Kremlin behind a wall of nuclear weapons, comes to mind. Some, however, are too dangerous to allow to remain in command, and in 2003, I included Saddam in that group.In 2007, Vanity Fair interviewed a group of the war’s most well-known supporters. Even the ur-hawk Richard Perle (nicknamed in Washington the “Prince of Darkness” when he worked for Ronald Reagan) admitted that, if he had it to do over again, he might have argued for some path other than war. But the comment that sticks with me to this day, and the one that best represents my thinking, came from Ambassador Kenneth Adelman. In 2002, Adelman famously declared that the war would be “a cakewalk,” but five years later, he said:
The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN’T DO. And that’s very different from LET’S GO.
Twenty years later, that’s where I remain. The cause was just, but there are times when doing what’s right and just is not possible. For almost 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Allied victory over Iraq, the United States had the chance to deepen the importance of international institutions. We squandered that opportunity because of poor leadership, Pentagon fads (the “Office of Force Transformation” was disbanded in 2006, shortly before Bush finally removed Rumsfeld), and amateurish historical analogies.Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War. You’ll see arguments that experts supported it. (Most academics and many civilians in D.C. did not.) You’ll hear that it was a right-wing crusade backed only by a Republican minority. (Also wrong.) Had the war been executed differently, we might be having a different conversation today.The fact remains that the United States is a great power protecting an international system it helped to create, and there will be times when military action is necessary. Fortunately, most Americans still seem to grasp this important reality.Would I argue for another such operation today? If the question means “another massive preventive war far from home,” no. I have consistently opposed war with Iran and any direct U.S. involvement in Ukraine. I wrote a book in 2008 warning that we should strengthen the United Nations and other institutions to stop the growing acceptance around the world of preventive war as a normal tool of statecraft.I also, however, supported the NATO operation in Libya, and I have called for using American airpower to blunt Assad’s mass murders in Syria. Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it would be another mistake to draw the single-minded conclusion (much as we did after Vietnam) that everything everywhere will forever be another Iraq. The world is too dangerous, and American leadership too necessary, for us to fall into such a facile and paralyzing trap.Related:
David Frum: the Iraq War reconsidered
The enduring lessons of the “axis of evil” speech
French President Emmanuel Macron’s government survived a no-confidence motion by nine votes, the result of widespread backlash to a bill that would raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64.
President Joe Biden issued the first veto of his presidency, on a resolution to overturn a retirement-investment rule allowing managers of retirement funds to consider environmental and social factors when choosing investments.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited the Kremlin, where he and Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted each other as “dear friend.” Washington denounced the visit.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up more reader replies on the freedom and frustration of cars.
Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty
Please Get Me Out of Dead-Dog TikTokBy Caroline Mimbs Nyce
A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.
This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.
Photos: the beauty of Earth from orbit
The obscure maritime law that ruins your commute
Matt Chase / The Atlantic; source: Getty
Read. These eight books will take you somewhere new.Watch. Abbott Elementary, on ABC (and available to stream on Hulu).Our writer Jerusalem Demsas endorsed the show this weekend: “I’m someone who can usually only watch TV while doing at least one or two other things at the same time, and this show grabs my full attention.”Play our daily crossword.P.S.No recommendations today, other than to thank our veterans for shouldering the burden of a war that we asked them to fight.— Tom

I have an unusual problem. I know that it may come as a shock, but I’m repeatedly finding that I have less and less to say about the issues of the day. Which isn’t a problem per se—at least not for Wisdom of Crowds, since we try our best to remain somewhat detached from the headlines. As an Evangelical friend once put it to me: “You only learn about the river when you try to swim against the flow.” Or, perhaps more pessimistically, “It’s a dead fish that goes with the flow.” So I’m very much alive. But this courageous position of relative indifference comes at a high cost. For example, I was skiing in Vermont this past weekend with Damir and two other friends of the Crowd. The ostensibly saucy New Yorker profile of Agnes Callard came up about 6 times. This might sound pretentious to the untrained ear, but the piece is apparently fascinating and seems to involve an otherworldly philosopher living with her husband and ex-husband simultaneously, or some such. I hadn’t read it. And so I found myself frustrated, unable to opine on what Callard’s life choices implied for the grand questions of meaning, belonging, and love—all things I enjoy opining about. Do I have enough time to spend an hour reading an extremely long New Yorker profile? If I spend an hour doing that, that means I’m spending an hour not doing something else. But what would that something else be? And who’s to say that it would be better? This is a long wind-up to say that I’ve been increasingly thinking about (and grappling with) how I consume news and information. I was on the phone with a reporter who was asking me about the Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement. He mentioned that tomorrow was probably going to be a busy day, because Donald Trump was going to be indicted. I found myself with nothing of interest to say in response to this observation. I had to fashion an “opinion” on the spot, but my heart wasn’t in it. At some basic level, I don’t really care whether or not Trump is indicted. This is not to say I’m “neutral” about it—there is no such thing as neutrality, after all—but I’m ambivalent. And maybe ambivalence is what we need more of. I don’t mean to get too philosophical here, but as an exercise, ask yourself this right now: why (or how) would a Trump indictment actually matter to you? Most likely, you have no influence over the outcome or what the consequences of either decision will be. Like most things with Trump, you have no real way of predicting whether an indictment will help or hurt him. Admit it: for you, at this very moment, it doesn’t matter.It is better to simply embrace ambivalence, rather than resist it.  The word ambivalence itself is both under-used and underappreciated. Here’s the Cambridge dictionary definition:The state of having two opposing feelings at the same time, or being uncertain about how you feel.I do see some wisdom in this sort of sentiment, itself a feeling composed of two feelings. From the little I know about music theory, a melody is heightened by a countermelody—one dominant, the other subtle, understated, and all the more striking because of it. Ambivalence implies an inner struggle without conclusion. And perhaps it’s not a struggle at all, because to struggle suggests a desire for resolution. Ambivalence, on the other hand, suggests a kind of good-natured acceptance that no resolution is likely to be found. But it also suggests—and this is the best part—that there is no need to find one in the first place.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.I held off on asking a new question of the week last Wednesday so I could share more of your reflections on cars. Below are the remainder of your thoughtful replies.Eden fondly recalls a moment of peak freedom in a mechanically questionable vehicle:
Like most of my friends in 1995, I got my driver's license on my 16th birthday. My stepdad had hordes of busted-up cars on the front lawn, and he gifted me a royal-blue 1976 Volkswagen Scirocco that barely ran. Even though the car was a total POS, the excitement and joy I felt at driving that car by myself will always be one of the best feelings I have experienced in my life.
That first night, I picked up my friend Cody from his shift at the North Seattle Arby’s. He didn’t have to take the bus home that night for once. I put a battery-powered boom box in the back seat (there was no radio in the car, of course) and played a Led Zeppelin tape at full blast, reveling in my newfound freedom. Even now, it’s hard to imagine a time when I have felt freer than at that moment.  
The car would die if it idled for even a second. I could barely slow down to a full stop before I had to rev the engine. The driver and passenger seats weren’t even bolted down! If I gunned it at the bottom of a big hill, we would literally flip into the back seat, laughing until tears fell from our eyes. I remember the smell so vividly. Sometimes, I’ll get a whiff that reminds me of it, and I am transported back to flying down the street, my car packed with friends. My soul stirs with the sound of laughter and the crackling of the fuzzy boom box. I remember how many times we would go for drives just to drive.  
I had to learn a great deal about automobiles to make sure the car kept running and didn’t kill us. The number of times I locked my keys in there, or left the lights on until the battery died, is laughable. But I was never once embarrassed by the state of that car. As far as I was concerned, I was the envy of all my friends, rich as a sultan, and as free as a bird.
I’ll be nostalgic about it until I die.  
Amelia found that getting her driver’s license wasn’t all she imagined it would be:
I’m 16 and I’ve wanted to drive for as long as I could remember. I’ve been driving on my own for about three months. Even before I started driving myself, I considered the act of owning and driving a car emblematic of the independence you receive as an adult. Being able to drive yourself to school, to sports practice, to anywhere you wanted to go seemed too good to be true. I held these aspirations close, and no one rebuked me, thus my life was shaped by this modern, American version of independence. I saw teens living their best lives on TV and in movies, and they all had one thing in common: cars.
I live in a sprawling and rather car-dependent suburban area, so I can never walk anywhere. I can vividly remember my summers before my 15th year complaining or wandering around the house aimlessly because I didn’t have a job yet, and my parents and brother were gone for the day. None of my friends reached out, yet I still watched their lives continue on through a screen while faking my own in the same way. I remember one instance where, in a burst of confidence, I tried to ride my bike three miles to a local ice-cream shop and almost got run over by a car.
Now I can drive myself. I’m independent; I get to choose what music to play! I finally got what I wanted. But I still go everywhere mostly alone. Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself an extrovert. I see my friends as often as I can in and outside of school, but the thing is, nothing changed. We don’t carpool, because it’s too out of the way and everyone else drives alone anyways. Driving my own car wasn’t the magical switch I’d been looking for after all. Maybe it wasn’t as much me that was the problem, but the infrastructure that surrounded me.
J. is a driving enthusiast:
Goddamn I love cars! I realize they are polluting and occasionally murderous, but the convenience and freedom can’t be denied. Plus driving is just so fun! My commute is short, and at work, I get to drive a fire engine. Code 3 with lights and sirens! Running red lights! Wrong way down one-way streets to attempt to help society! It’s pretty great.
Cars have been a key part of my identity for more than three decades: My first car was a hand-me-down 1981 Ford Escort. Since that first car, I’ve owned the quirky (1987 Nissan Pulsar), the blue-collar (1977 Chevy pickup), the classic (1965 Chevy Bel Air), the sporty (1991 Nissan 300ZX), the practical (2006 Toyota Tacoma), the baby-mover (2008 Lexus RX350), and now, the grown-up (and first new) family car, a Mazda CX-5—with turbo! Some had custom wheels or paint. Almost all had custom sound systems.
My cars were my peacock tail, my rack of antlers. They enabled my life, which has been a pretty good one. I asked my wife to marry me in our car, and she accepted.
They also enabled some unsavory behavior: I used to pick up prostitutes, after a night out drinking, for years. Until the last time—when the prostitute turned out to be an undercover cop. I’ve been (at times) incredibly reckless, and (very often) incredibly lucky, behind the wheel. By the grace of God I never hurt anyone … and now I have a career where I drive fast (but not so recklessly) to help people in need.
Life is weird. And cars are awesome!
Maxx makes a case for glory without gasoline:
Last September, I gave my car to my college-town-bound little brother. I now live car-free in Minneapolis. I’m 25 and did not get my license until I was 19. I am now a passionate cyclist, scrappy public-transit enthusiast, and bold pedestrian. And I love it.
When I bike to work, I’ve shown up positive and awake, coffee optional. Figuring out how to get somewhere new is an opportunity to plan a pleasurable route. In summer, my friends and I take to our bicycles and hop from concert to park to bar to apartment. Cutting gas, insurance, and car payments out of our budgets, in whole or in part, gives us disposable income we can still afford to spend locally—and foolishly. Rather than letting it restrict us, there’s incredible freedom. You hardly worry about where to park, and, if folks behave responsibly enough, no one has to be shunted to the role of designated driver.
The day-to-day is a joy. My diet has to be up to the challenge of biking 80 miles a week in the summer, and 30 a week in the winter. And the conditioning and fresh-air perspective have expanded my imagination when it comes to travel and leisure; my brother and I are planning to bike across Minnesota, the long way, once he graduates. It would be a rather constrained road trip, but feels like a downright adventure on a bicycle.
In Minnesota, folks lampoon us car skeptics with the complaint that it’s winter for (an exaggerated proportion) of the year. I don’t want to be glib, but when I’m riding a fat-tire bike in fresh snow, I’m usually matching the speed of any responsible driver on city streets. Being free of the anxieties, expenses, and constant gripes of driving and car ownership is a seriously underrated luxury.
I aspire to have a family and realize that someday my weekends won’t revolve around the question of what pleasure we can find on quiet wheels. But I hope I can stay car-lite—walking to the grocery store, instilling active living and community in my children. We live in a world of people, places, and things. It can be hard to see them—or appreciate them—in a moving metal box.
A.l. opines on not having a car:
My family lives in a fairly dense suburban environment that was first developed about 100 years ago as a “streetcar neighborhood.” I live pretty close to my office and I ride my bike year-round. I also live nearby a bus line that runs directly to my office with no transfers.
About once a week, not having a car is a big hassle. Getting to work when it’s pouring rain, trying to get to a doctor appointment in a different part of town, stopping off for a work event in a different part of town on the way home from work, leaving for a business trip from home to the airport, etc. It’s a real pain.
Going to work, I have no issue using public transportation and no issue riding my bike, but both of them can be inflexible from a schedule standpoint in that both incur additional non-value-add time, roughly an hour each day—and that’s for someone who pays through the nose to live in a part of town where most of what I need is close by.
I’m struck by the strong downward pressure on my quality of life that comes from not having access to a car, and I empathize with people who don’t have the money to buy a car if they need one to manage their routine. I also feel a profound sense of guilt burning fossil fuels. I’ll never buy another gas-powered car. So I’m proud of being car-free, but somewhat conflicted.
Kate has appreciated many places she never could have gone but for trucks:
For me, a vehicle is a ticket to adventure. When I was 7 (1967), my parents hooked up a rented U-Haul trailer to the back of a six-cylinder Chevy truck, threw three kids in the back, and drove us from Reno, Nevada, to the Arctic Circle in Alaska. We navigated some 6,000-plus miles of highway, dirt roads, permafrost, sinkholes, mosquitoes, and wildlife. We camped out in national parks, roadside rests, KOAs, and gravel pits. In subsequent years we toured Canada, drove to Mexico City, and made it to most of the national parks. That upbringing fueled a love of the outdoors and the vehicles that could get me there.
In my younger years, I loved my 4x4s. They enable you to get stuck in more remote places!!! Grandkids and gas prices changed my preferences over the years. We still own a Chevy truck. However, my current adventure vehicle is a Subaru Outback. It can navigate dirt roads, is great in the snow, averages 25 mpg, and has plenty of room to sleep in the back. Can’t wait for the hybrid version.
Vasav has fallen out of love with cars over the years:
I went to the University of Michigan to become a mechanical engineer because I loved cars. My parents were immigrants from India, and every 4th of July we’d go on a road trip and they’d say how wonderful superhighways were and how they made America so great. We loved trains too. We never saw a conflict. You could love trains and cars. Most of our family vacations were road trips. There were a lot of them. And cars were incredibly cool.
In Ann Arbor, I didn’t need a car for most of my daily needs. A bike worked better. Then I joined the Air Force and had a two-year stint in Japan, where I had a similar relationship with cars. I now live in an inner-ring suburb of an overpriced metro. And I don’t hate cars. I appreciate them. I can’t imagine a lot of my outdoor adventures without them. But I much prefer walking, riding a bus or train, or even biking for most of my regular needs. What happened? I got old.
I now view cars as a tool, not the toy they were. I now view working on my car as a chore, not fun. And I had enough acquaintances die in accidents that I realized the dangers. I still think cars are incredible machines—a number of ingenious systems that all work together. I still love Detroit. But there are a lot of neat machines out there, and most are less dangerous. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine taking a bus to go backpacking or trail biking, so there’s a happy medium.
Chris lists what he sees as the ills of car culture:
Car culture has reconfigured the landscape to accommodate drivers, as opposed to pedestrians. It has hollowed out small towns and many large cities by sucking commerce from downtown to the banal, ugly world of strip malls, vast parking lots, and endless suburban sprawl. It has atomized society by isolating commuters who would once have enjoyed random, face-to-face interactions on foot or public transport. It has poisoned the atmosphere and exacerbated global warming. Once a convenience, cars are now an expensive necessity. Car culture itself is a textbook example of path dependence—an optional mode of behavior that grew so dominant, it’s the only available mode.
Jack doesn’t have a car for a different reason:
Oakland, California, has bent over backwards to accommodate the livelihoods of criminals. In the hectic adjustment, I’ve had two cars stolen from my driveway after an earlier heist of four tires at a public-transit parking lot. Now I am a devoted Lyft customer. It’s a hot trend here.
Brad believes his early experiences with cars were character-building:
At 15, I got my first job, aiming for enough money to buy a car by my 16th birthday. I wanted to be as independent as possible from my family. Within a few weeks of my birthday, I paid $1,300 for an old Mazda and learned how to keep the car insured and fueled. Over the next five years, I drove Frankie (so named because his blue paint matched Sinatra’s famous eyes) more than 80,000 miles, shuttling myself and friends to jobs and activities, going on school trips, and traversing the 500 miles between college and home. That first car taught me a lot about financial responsibility and how to literally navigate my own life.  
Even back in 2004, when I started college, I found these qualities lacking in many of my peers. The rare individuals who had purchased and maintained their own cars before college generally seemed more likely to embrace and handle their new independence.
My second car, a used Audi A6, taught me resilience and the value of due diligence. Shortly before I started law school, I purchased Rita (so named because she was beautiful, troubled, and destined for tragedy, like the character on Dexter). On the drive home from the dealership, she broke down, beginning a parade of maladies that drained my savings in six months, completely overlapping with the first year of law school. I’d bought a lemon at a stunningly inopportune time in my life. It was a painful lesson, but better learned at 24 than 54. I offloaded Rita quickly, and have owned practical, reliable cars since. After all of this, I really don’t enjoy driving. I yearn for the days when public transportation will obviate the need for me to own a car, which will be better for me and for the planet.
If you’re going somewhere with Joanne, let her drive:
I grew up on a farm. At 5, I could steer a tractor up and down the rows of baled hay so my dad and a hired man could throw them on the wagon. I could drive our truck at 10, and if my parents were away, my twin brother and I would whip into town for a Dairy Queen. Fast-forward to high school, where we had an excellent driver’s ed instructor. The lessons were during our Ontario winters, and often involved practice pulling out of skids on empty but ice-covered parking lots. A useful skill! I am a senior now and back in the country, dealing with long country driveways, ice, snow, freezing rain, and whiteout conditions. They don’t faze me, or at least not yet, because of all that early driving experience.
And if you’re trying to improve our transportation infrastructure, consider this advice from K.S.:
My family emigrated to Detroit from Poland when I was 8 years old. My father still works for General Motors there. My mom had never had a driver’s license before we moved. Every well-meaning person helping our family to settle in would be quick to tell her that “if you’re not going to learn how to drive, you might as well go back—you can’t survive here if you don’t drive.”
Despite growing up in the Motor City, going to the North American Auto Show every year, and being frequently encouraged to become an engineer by my parents (the Detroit equivalent of immigrants pushing their kids to be doctors or lawyers), I never took to caring about cars. After college I moved to Chicago, then New York, and happily adopted a car-free urban life along with my Millennial cohort—we were killing cars, in addition to marriage and golf. I took it a step further and went to urban-planning school—became the kind of person who peddles 15-minute cities. I made killing car culture my actual job.
When I left New York and moved to L.A., I held strong(ish) for six months before I got a car. It was liberating to drive everywhere—eastside to westside, Malibu, day trips to Death Valley. I worked for the public-transit agency in L.A. You might think that I was a bit of a sham, but most of my colleagues drove to work. Like the many Angelinos who support tax measures to improve transit, we wanted better transit for L.A., but we wouldn’t be taking it to work ourselves. It wasn’t my fault. How else was I supposed to get to the beach and take selfies in the desert on the weekend? As a bonus, my relationship with my dad was on the up now that we had oil changes and cabin filters to talk about.
A few months ago I got a job offer in San Francisco, at an urban-design firm that’s all about building bike-friendly, walkable cities. While I was hesitant to give up my winter tan, the opportunity to reclaim my urban cred in S.F. was a bonus. All the driving in L.A. was getting old, and I missed taking the train to work and walking to get my morning coffee. I moved to the Bay but kept my car. I’ll need it to go on day trips and keep those hiking selfies going.  
The shameful secret not seen in those selfies: I’m three months into living in S.F., in a central, well-connected neighborhood, and I have yet to take public transit. I’ve been walking more—I walk to the gym and to get my coffee, just as I had imagined, but for all intents and purposes I’m stuck on driving. I drive to work many days, even though it’s less than two miles away; I drive to the grocery store; I drive 10 minutes to go on Hinge dates.
I’ve thought about taking the bus or train—I’ve checked routes, but every time I’ve chosen to drive. I always have an excuse: It’s raining; I’ll have to carry things; it’s late; I’m tired. Did L.A. ruin me? Probably not. I’m learning a new city and settling in. Driving feels safer—even though it literally is not—in a new environment. It’s allowed me to see a wider swath of the city in less time. As the weather gets nicer, and I learn the transit routes better, I will settle into a routine that will likely include using transit often.
People choose travel modes based on what is available to them and will maximize personal utility for a particular trip, not based on ideology alone. Like everything else, our ideas around cars have become politicized and positioned as yet another reason to polarize us against one another. As we sit and stare at our crumbling transit systems, the smog hovering above cities, or the annual car-related death tolls, picking a side—pro-car or anticar—isn’t going to help much. The solutions are likely to lie somewhere beyond the corners we’re backing ourselves into. They will require all of the tools and political will available.
If we’re all hovering at the ends of the spectrum, we may fail to see the most impactful solutions available to us. If we approach these challenges with curiosity, seeking to understand rather than debate, we may just come up with new and surprising systems to allow us to safely and sustainably move around and between places.

As we pass the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, I’ve been asked to reflect on that experience by a number of people. So far, the only thing I’ve said publicly was in a panel “Remembering and Misremembering the Iraq War” organized by the Carnegie Endowment. Doing full justice to this question requires a more thoughtful review of what we now know about the consequences of the war, and what we thought we knew at the time. I haven’t had time to do this because I’m to deliver three big public lectures by the end of the month on a completely different topic. (I did, of course, write a whole book on this subject in 2006.) But I thought I would start with a reflection on my thinking on the war at the time, and how it has changed.Back then, I felt there were two main reasons for opposing the intervention. The first had to do with the morality and prudence of using force to overthrow a dictator. There has been a norm in international politics since 1945 that countries should not invade one another. The intervention in March 2003 gravely weakened the moral credibility of the United States subsequently, particularly in the global south and in the Middle East in particular. We have many pro-democracy friends in the latter region who have not condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and are very cynical about American protestations that U.S. foreign policy is based on principles like a “rule-based international order.”___STEADY_PAYWALL___However, the moral issues here were never that simple. Saddam Hussein was an even worse dictator than Vladimir Putin, and had already invaded his neighbors Iran and Kuwait. Mel Leffler’s recent book on the origins of the war dispassionately chronicles that record of drastic human rights violations and repressions against entire populations like the Kurds and Marsh Arabs. Because the United States was so dominant in this period, invading Iraq did not carry any of the risks of superpower confrontation or nuclear escalation as it would have during the Cold War. Many people, including a number on the political left, were in favor of a “responsibility to protect” vulnerable populations against human rights abuses.

The second issue concerned America’s ability and will to sustain a long-term invention that would actually create a peaceful and stable Iraq. In this respect, there were many, many reasons to think the answer was no. I thought at the time that our record in democratic nation-building in developing countries was very poor, leading to bad outcomes in our own neighborhood of Latin America and the Caribbean (Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti), Southeast Asia (South Vietnam and the Philippines), and the Middle East, where we had overthrown a democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and were opening supporting autocracies in Egypt and the Persian Gulf.I felt there was a kind of five-year rule at work: The United States could sustain a difficult nation-building project for about 5 years, slightly longer than one presidential term, after which public support began to diminish. This happened both in Nicaragua, where a new administration withdrew U.S. Marines in 1933, and in Vietnam, where the Tet offensive turned most Americans against the war slightly more than five years after our initial involvement. I thought that if we were willing to deploy large numbers of troops in Iraq and keep them there for a couple of generations (as we did in Japan, Germany, and Italy) then the nation-building effort might have some chance of success. But that was politically very unlikely to happen in Iraq, and the Bush administration gave little evidence that it was prepared for a long haul. The actual situation was much worse than I feared. Don Rumsfeld apparently hoped to be able to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq before the end of 2003, and resisted even calling what he faced an “insurgency.”Finally, there was the matter of culture. U.S. policies often went to the Middle East to die, because that region was and remains very different from other parts of the world. At the time, the Bush administration argued that a belief that Muslim or Arab countries could not democratize was a simple cultural prejudice, because of the universal appeal of freedom. Condoleezza Rice pointed to American success in democratizing Germany and Japan after World War II, gliding over the fact that they were already industrialized countries before the war, and did not host the kind of religious politics prevalent in the Middle East. The fact of the matter is that political Islam was powerful throughout the region; while there have been democratic Islamists like the Ennada Party in Tunisia, these have tended to be rare. This simply makes the Middle East a much more difficult region for the United States to operate in. The belief that the United States would not be able to handle the aftermath of invasion was decisive in the break I made with my neo-conservative friends over the war. Having signed a letter from the Project for the New American Century calling for intervention in Iraq, I changed my mind on the wisdom of intervention in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The question of international legitimacy was not at the top of my concerns at the time, though I did write an op-ed piece in the Washington Post saying that we should not act without support from the UN Security Council. In retrospect, I should have taken this issue more seriously than I did.In 2003, the United States was at the peak of its international hegemony across all domains—economic, military, political, and social. The country felt like it had the freedom to act to reshape the world in its image, but did not understand the limits of its power. That power began to erode quickly, with the war itself turning into a quagmire and the 2008 financial crisis dethroning the American economic model. Russia and China continued to consolidate their power, and big cracks began to emerge in American society reflecting problems in the globalized social model the country represented. This is the world we face now, and American foreign policy has been in the process of adapting ever since.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: U.S. Army M1A1 Abrams tanks and personnel pose for a photo under the "Victory Arch" in Ceremony Square, Baghdad, Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. (Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Department of Defense)

Imagine that someone—perhaps a man from Florida, or maybe even a governor of Florida—criticized American support for Ukraine. Imagine that this person dismissed the war between Russia and Ukraine as a purely local matter, of no broader significance. Imagine that this person even told a far-right television personality that “while the U.S. has many vital national interests ... becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” How would a Ukrainian respond? More to the point, how would the leader of Ukraine respond?As it happens, an opportunity to ask that hypothetical question recently availed itself. The chair of the board of directors of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs; The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg; and I interviewed President Volodymyr Zelensky several days ago in the presidential palace in Kyiv. In the course of an hour-long conversation, Goldberg asked Zelensky what he would say to someone, perhaps a governor of Florida, who wonders why Americans should help Ukraine.Zelensky, answering in English, told us that he would respond pragmatically. He didn’t want to appeal to the hearts of Americans, in other words, but to their heads. Were Americans to cut off Ukraine from ammunition and weapons, after all, there would be clear consequences in the real world, first for Ukraine’s neighbors but then for others:   
If we will not have enough weapons, that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.
And after that, if there were still no further response? Then, he explained, the struggle would continue:
When they will occupy NATO countries, and also be on the borders of Poland and maybe fight with Poland, the question is: Will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do it? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.
At that point, he said, Americans will face a different choice: not politicians deciding whether “to give weapons or not to give weapons” to Ukrainians, but instead, “fathers and mothers” deciding whether to send their children to fight to keep a large part of the planet, filled with America’s allies and most important trading partners, from Russian occupation.But there would be other consequences too. One of the most horrifying weapons that Russia has used against Ukraine is the Iranian-manufactured Shahed drone, which has no purpose other than to kill civilians. After these drones are used to subdue Ukraine, Zelensky asked, how long would it be before they are used against Israel? If Russia can attack a smaller neighbor with impunity, regimes such as Iran’s are sure to take note. So then the question arises again: “When they will try to occupy Israel, will the United States help Israel? That is the question. Very pragmatic.”Finally, Zelensky posed a third question. During the war, Ukraine has been attacked by rockets, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles—“not hundreds, but thousands”:
So what will you do when Russia will use rockets to attack your allies, to [attack] civilian people? And what will you do when Russia, after that, if they do not see [opposition] from big countries like the United States? What will you do if they will use rockets on your territory?
And this was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them anywhere else. Help us preserve some kind of open, normal society, using our soldiers and not your soldiers. That will help you preserve your open, normal society, and that of others too. Help Ukraine fight Russia now so that no one else has to fight Russia later, and so that harder and more painful choices don’t have to be made down the line.“It’s about nature. It’s about life,” he said. “That’s it.”Our full report from Ukraine will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Atlantic.

More than half of abortions in the United States are accomplished with pills, rather than with surgeries. So, when the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, last year, allowing states to regulate and prohibit abortion as they wish, an inevitable battle in the ensuing war was going to involve pharmacists. Mifepristone, which has been F.D.A.-approved for medication abortions since 2000, causes the uterine lining to break down, thereby terminating a pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, which is approved for multiple medical purposes, is used afterward to vacate the uterus. As states have banned or restricted abortion, access to these pills has become the focus of conflict in the new legal landscape.

A week after the Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Postal Service asked the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel for advice about an existing federal statute that makes it a felony to mail anything “designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” The statute, which also prohibits mailing “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile” materials, is a vestige of the Comstock Act of 1873, the work of Anthony Comstock, an infamous crusader against the corruption of public morals who became a special agent of the Postal Service. The question was whether that statute prohibits sending and delivering abortion drugs by mail. In December, the O.L.C. answered that the statute does allow the mailing of abortion pills “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” and that the “mere mailing” of the pills does not establish that intent. That is because no states have banned abortion in all circumstances, with many retaining exceptions for rape or for protecting a pregnant person’s life. Abortion being legal in those circumstances, a pharmacist could lawfully mail the pills, even to states where abortion is mostly illegal, because the sender would lack the intent that the pills would produce abortions of the unlawful kind.

Earlier this year, the F.D.A. announced that retail pharmacies could become certified to dispense mifepristone, including by shipping it to patients, and Walgreens announced that it would apply for certification. In response, nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general sent letters to Walgreens, CVS, and other large pharmacies, claiming that the statute’s “plain text” prohibiting the mailing of any materials “for producing abortion”—and not what they called the O.L.C.’s “bizarre interpretation”—should be decisive. The A.G.s warned that, regardless of the federal government’s view, they could enforce the statute through civil litigation. And, they noted, many state laws also disallow using the mail to send and receive abortion drugs.

The O.L.C.’s interpretation is based on twentieth-century federal cases that declined to construe the statute literally, as doing so would criminalize the mailing of items that have lawful purposes, just because they can also be used for unlawful ones. Conservatives maintain that the statute makes no distinction between lawful and unlawful abortions, and so it prohibits mailing things intended to produce abortions, full stop.

Danielle Gray, Walgreens’ global chief legal officer, quickly responded to the red-state A.G.s by clarifying that the company will still seek certification to dispense mifepristone, but that it does not intend to ship it to people in their states. Gray was a law clerk for Merrick Garland when he was a judge on the D.C. Circuit, and for Justice Stephen Breyer when he was on the Supreme Court, and during the Obama Administration she served in the White House counsel’s office and as the Cabinet Secretary. She is plenty confident when it comes to legal interpretation.

The Walgreens decision, though, has resulted in calls for boycotts, a drop in the company’s stock, and blowback from Democratic governors, including Gavin Newsom, of California, whose office is withdrawing from a fifty-four-million-dollar contract with the company and “reviewing all relationships between Walgreens and the state.” Notwithstanding accusations of cowardice for “caving” to Republican threats, however, a different decision by Walgreens or other companies could subject pharmacists to criminal liability and civil actions. Even federal prosecutions for mailing the pills are imaginable if a Republican Administration is installed and rejects the Biden O.L.C.’s opinion. And federal courts, now filled with Trump appointees, may well highlight the statute’s text, rather than past court interpretations. Not to mention that defying state A.G.s could place the companies’ state pharmaceutical licenses at risk.

A precursor to the mailing of pills, of course, was the F.D.A.’s approval of them, which is now also under legal attack, twenty-three years after the fact. Last month, nearly two dozen Republican-led states filed an amicus brief supporting a federal lawsuit in Texas, claiming that approving mifepristone for abortion had violated the F.D.A.’s own rules. The regulations, they said, permit approval of drugs “that have been studied for their safety and effectiveness in treating serious or life-threatening illnesses,” which they allege does not cover pregnancy. The judge in the case, a pro-life Trump appointee, may order the agency to rescind its approval of the drug, and possibly halt its availability nationwide.

That lawsuit was countered last month by a separate one, in which twelve Democratic states are asking a federal court in Washington State to find the F.D.A.’s approval of mifepristone valid and prevent its removal from the market. The suit also challenges the agency’s special restrictions on access to the drug—for example, the requirement that pharmacies be certified to dispense it and, further, that they confirm that the prescription is from a certified provider. If the two federal cases result in conflicting orders, the Supreme Court will soon find itself presented with another abortion case. So much for federal courts getting out of the “abortion-umpiring business,” as Justice Antonin Scalia once put it.

But, beyond lawsuits and boycotts, the proper target for pro-choice complaints is Congress. It has not managed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a federal statutory abortion right to replace the constitutional right that the Court removed. And it has never repealed the Comstock Act, leaving us in the situation where nineteenth-century sexual morality now shapes the twenty-first-century abortion debate. Still, as the branch constitutionally empowered to make laws for the nation, Congress should, at the very least, amend the statute to make it clear that drugs can be mailed for lawful abortions. Alas, that would resolve but one legal interpretative front in the ongoing war of red versus blue states, and of federal versus state governments. ♦

The Chinese government is so innovative in applying advanced technology for repression, sometimes it is hard to keep track. Beijing’s latest, horrible abuse of the Tibetan people is to forcibly collect their DNA, their last remaining vestige of privacy. What’s worse, U.S. companies are still working with the authorities perpetrating these atrocities. They should cut that out right now.

There is overwhelming evidence that Chinese authorities are using mass forced DNA collection in many parts of China — but Tibet is an especially cruel case. Human rights groups report that police are taking blood samples from men, women and children , with no legitimate justification , in all seven prefectures in the Tibetan autonomous region, often showing up at kindergartens. There’s zero indication Tibetans can refuse.

Chinese police in Tibet aren’t exactly hiding the practice; they posted a public request for bids to build a huge DNA database online. In one municipality, an official report said police were instructed “not to miss a [single] village or monastery, and not to miss a [single] household or person,” according to Human Rights Watch. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab estimated in September that one quarter to one third of Tibetans had been compelled to hand over DNA samples.

Chinese authorities’ sweeping collection of DNA is just one piece of one of the most comprehensive and intrusive surveillance and monitoring systems on Earth. The Chinese government is leveraging technology, including artificial intelligence and big data, to identify people by their faces, their voices, their individual styles of walking and, now, even their cellular makeup.

“The forced and arbitrary DNA collection of thousands of Tibetans not only violates the fundamental rights of the Tibetan individuals involved but also puts future generations of Tibetans at risk,” said Lobsang Sangay, the former president of the Tibetan government in exile. “This is a dark side of AI surveillance for the use of genealogical repression.”

When this massive biometric database is complete, the practical effect will be that when any Tibetan runs afoul of the Chinese Communist Party for any reason, immediate and extended family members with similar DNA could be treated as suspects and labeled as separatists. This could also silence activists outside China who don’t want to put their Tibetan relatives at risk.

Lawmakers and human rights groups in the United States are asking U.S. companies to avoid complicity in these human rights violations by cutting ties with the violators. Enter Thermo Fisher Scientific, a U.S. corporation that sells DNA tests kits by the millions. In 2019, the company stopped selling these kits to police in Xinjiang province, where Chinese authorities are repressing ethnic Uyghurs and other minorities, to be consistent with the company’s “values, ethics code and policies.”

But the company refuses to cut off the Tibetan police, who are committing the exact same abuses. The Congressional-Executive Commission on China wrote to Thermo Fisher executives in December following reports that the company was still selling profiling kits and other supplies to police in Tibet. A multinational alliance of lawmakers also publicly called on the company to stop selling supplies to Tibetan authorities.

Responding to the U.S. commission, the company wrote that the number of DNA kits it sold to the Tibetan police was not enough for mass collection, and therefore the company “is confident that the products that we or our distributors have provided are being used for their intended use in Tibet, namely police casework and forensics.”

Obviously, there is no way Thermo Fisher can know which kits were used for legitimate police purposes or mass repression. A company spokesperson told me, “It is worth noting that we abide by all U.S. and other applicable laws and regulations.” This is technically true. The U.S. government bans U.S. companies from dealing with most law enforcement agencies in Xinjiang, but not the Tibetan police. But that could change.

“The U.S. Department of Commerce prohibited sales to Xinjiang police in 2019 and should now prohibit sales to Tibetan police,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a longtime critic of U.S. companies that sell technologies that can be used for repression to China.

Absent U.S. government instruction, the only factor that might cause the company to do the right thing is shame. That’s why the human rights group Students for a Free Tibet staged protests last month at Thermo Fisher offices in several cities around the world.

“Thermo Fisher has the opportunity right now to change the future of biometric repression as a tool of authoritarian surveillance, and the company is failing miserably,” Pema Doma, the group’s executive director, told me.

China’s practice of mass DNA collection is unlikely to stay only in China. Absent pushback, every despot and dictator will soon be trying to buy this new, dangerous way to control what their people do, say or think. Now is the time for U.S. companies to ensure they are not complicit by getting out of business with these abusers — before Congress is forced to act.

Let us begin with the obvious thing that just happened: This morning, Donald Trump threatened to summon a mob—for the second time in two years—to his defense. The former president of the United States and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination for the White House in 2024, facing a possible indictment in New York, claimed to know the exact day on which he would be arrested and then called on his supporters to “protest.” Trump and his cult know what a call for “protest” means: The last time he rallied his faithful supporters this way, they stormed the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in death and destruction and many, many prison sentences.Spokespeople from the former president’s office have already walked back Trump’s statement, noting that they have not been told of any specific date for an indictment or an arrest. Indeed, any attempt to book Trump is unlikely to happen as soon as Tuesday, for many reasons. But that’s not the point. Trump’s message today to the American people has already come through loud and clear: I am too dangerous to arrest.Despite my political feelings about Donald Trump, I am agnostic on whether he should be indicted and arrested for possible financial violations involved in the payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Personally, I have no doubt that he broke the law, and part of me is now growling that if you can get Al Capone for tax evasion instead of murder, file the tax case already. But as my colleague David Frum noted, juries tend to be forgiving of personal misdeeds by political leaders (shown, for example, by the 2011 acquittal of former Democratic Senator John Edwards), and the hush-money scandal is not the strongest possible case against Trump.That said, Trump himself today upped the ante by saying, in effect, that it doesn’t matter what’s in the indictment. Instead, he is warning all of us, point-blank, that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will. This is pure authoritarianism, the flex of a would-be American caudillo who is betting that our fear of his goons is greater than our commitment to the rule of law. Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.This is not to say that Trump should now be indicted out of spite, as some kind of test of wills in which prosecutors go after Trump just to prove that he cannot intimidate them. But if an indictment is in fact pending, our legal institutions and the people who serve in them should proceed with stoicism and determination. Trump, once again, is stress testing our institutions, and if he can scare off a state indictment by threatening a riot, he’ll do it again. After all, he thinks he got away with it on January 6, 2021—and so far, he has.Trump, for his part, seems to think that being the GOP presidential front-runner should matter, and both Trump’s friends and enemies alike seem to think that an indictment would seal his nomination. That would certainly explain the silence from leading Republicans about Trump’s implied threat to summon another mob.Well, not exactly silence. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, whose entire career is bound up in a handful of extremist votes in his own caucus, has Trump’s back. “Here we go again,” he tweeted after Trump’s call to action. “An outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump.” This is the same Kevin McCarthy who once, for a fraction of a second, held Trump responsible for nearly getting him killed. But the amalgam of ambition, fear, and opportunism that holds McCarthy’s skeleton together is, apparently, a powerful epoxy.I am not so sure that this panicked, all-caps call from Trump will be to his benefit. It’s possible that Trump, finally, is approaching his Joe McCarthy moment, although many of his critics (including me) have seen such moments come and go. Nevertheless, one riot might be explained away. Two riots, with the promise of more to come, might be intolerable.But if this is what the Republicans want, so be it. If an indictment secures Trump the nomination, it will likely also cost him the election.Regardless, the administration of justice should not be dependent on polling. This, again, is part of Trump’s innate autocratic instinct, his sense that justice can be thwarted by making his political opponents feel the cold pit of fear in their bellies. But make no mistake: Trump feels that same fear. He is reportedly “anxious” about being arrested, which is why he is willing, yet again, to bring a mob to his defense.Perhaps Alvin Bragg’s case isn’t all that strong, and perhaps Trump will beat him in court. But that is for a judge and jury to decide, not a bunch of short-fused cultists toting bear spray and wearing blue Trump flags like superhero capes. Trump’s entire political career has been an attack on the Constitution and the rule of law, and he is telling us yet again, in the clearest terms, that the law does not apply to him and never will.What happens next with his case is up to the legal system, but whether this lawless and deranged authoritarian returns to Washington is up to all of us.

Jonathan Greenblatt is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Greenblatt previously served in the Obama White House as Special Assistant and Director of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. He is the author of It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable-And How We Can Stop It.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jonathan Greenblatt discuss the rising threat of antisemitism in the United States; the link between strong liberal democratic institutions and the safety of minority populations; as well as how to draw the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Anti-Semitism is a topic that we’ve thought about for centuries, and, yet, it seems new to each political context; its contours always shift. What's different about anti-Semitism today that you think we should worry about compared with 30 years ago?Jonathan Greenblatt: Well, first of all, I think at a time of rising hate, we need to acknowledge the similarities of anti-Semitism to other forms of prejudice; the idea of marginalizing a group of people, the idea of singling out a group based on how they pray, where they're from, who they love—that isn't very unique. Using that group as an object of aspersion, politicizing them for the purpose of some partisan gain. That's very invoked today—you see it with the AAPI community, with the LGBTQ community. You see it from both sides, to be honest. Sometimes groups are fetishized. Sometimes they're demonized.Anti-Semitism is often the “canary in the coal mine.” It's just always a progenitor of other forms of hate. Anti-Semitism has evolved. If you go through the last 3500 years, anti-Semitism used to be kind of religiously based—because Jews didn't accept the Greek gods, the Roman gods, Christ, or Muhammad. Then, with the advent of the Enlightenment, and the evolution of different types of science in an age of reason, we had a kind of racialized anti-Semitism, where Jews were held out as different because they were of a different ethnic stock. Religious anti-Semitism culminated with the Inquisitions across Europe and forced conversion in the Muslim world. Racialized anti-Semitism culminated with the Shoah, the Holocaust. Mounk: There is an important shift in the 19th century—really, more than the 18th, I believe—in terms of racializing various existing forms of prejudice, right? I'm not an expert in this topic, but it seems to me that we sometimes exaggerate the nature of that shift, because it implies that before that it was purely religious—it wasn't an ethnic element, and then it became ethnic and religious. If it's purely religious, then it should be the case that the moment you convert that there should be no prejudice against you, you should be fully accepted. But if it has an ethnic, racial, and perhaps in certain ways, cultural element, then you go on to say, “Well, OK, you've converted, but you're still a Jew.” Now, obviously, that's true in the Holocaust: many, many murdered Jews were Protestants and Catholics, had been baptized, and the Nazis didn't care.Were there forms of ethnic prejudice that may have been formulated in different ways, in different language, even before the Age of Enlightenment? Greenblatt: Let's be clear that the Jews, again, are complicated. And a lot of this doesn't fit neatly into the boxes that we use today to think about difference. Yes, they are a religion. They are also an ethnic group. And that different ethnicity was kind of like a mini polity within these larger, very homogeneous societies. It wasn't an age of globalization, and the group that was different were the Jews. It was the Jews, the “Wandering Jew” that moved all over the world without a home. These Jews, even though they converted to Catholicism in places like Spain, Portugal, Italy, or France to avoid Inquisition and to avoid persecution—still, they were suspect. They might have retained a different language or different customs and so they were regarded as different. Prior to the Age of Enlightenment, when these divinely anointed monarchs and forces like the Catholic or the Orthodox Church were still very strong and existed almost as political entities in these broader governing frameworks, the religious space tended to dominate the day. But to your point, these things are never a total break. There's overlap. Ethnic marginalization didn't start with the 19th century. It had been there before. Look at the Roma people who have been discriminated against for centuries, irrespective of how they pray, because they look different. Their ethnic origins are quite different from what Western Europe was used to. The subjugation of indigenous people and the enslavement of them, over centuries, well before the Age of Enlightenment, wasn't just the fact that they were “pagans,” but deemed “racially inferior,” even if that wasn’t the language they used to describe it. Race was clearly present in the thinking around these people and why they were considered inferior. Mounk: So how should we think about anti-Semitism? You said that it is in many ways similar, but in some ways different. When we think about hatred of Asian Americans, or hatred of African Americans, or hatred of Turkish immigrants and their descendants in Germany—whatever other example you might think of around the world—what element of that definition is effectively going to be the same, where hatred of Jews is the same kind of hatred, and when do we have to change the definition because of the complicated nature of what makes a Jew, which is religious, ethnic, but also cultural?Greenblatt: It is a kind of ethnicity, and it's a kind of religion, and it's a kind of culture. You will find people who say “I'm an atheist, and, yet, I’m a Jew,” as if it were, again, a place from which someone was from, or an ethnic stock. I had dinner last night with an individual who was born Catholic, an African American from the South, was a convert to Judaism and wears a kippah and has a kosher home and is Shomer Shabbos. He’s as Jewish as I am from my point of view. We have a different ethnic stock, and he is much more religious than I am, but we still have a kind of commonality to us. My wife's Iranian Jewish heritage is entirely different from my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Challah bread on a Friday—they don't do that. That's a foreign concept to them. They didn't have challah bakeries in Isfahan. But that is so central to my observance of this very basic Jewish rite that we observe every week. It's just complicated, which makes it interesting and challenging. What's different is that anti-Semitism, as the Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt has written, is a kind of conspiracy theory about how the world works that posits that the Jew, the Eternal Jew, in some way is responsible for whatever is wrong. Colorism, we call it racism today, isn't new. It's been going on for thousands of years. But that's where someone feels superior to someone else. Anti-Semitism is “the Jews who are responsible for controlling business, manipulating government, the world's wars, cheating me,” whatever. There's a set of recurring myths that seem to cross cultures—that have been reinforced, again, by different sociocultural forces over time—that keep this alive. But I think the conspiratorial nature of anti-Semitism makes it very different. We're living in a time that is shaped by social media, where we're trapped in our filter bubbles in a world where everything has become relative. Conspiracy theories are often the coin of the realm in a world in which nothing can be believed and in which anything is possible. People always feel like something is working against them. We shouldn't be surprised that anti-Semitism not just festers but flourishes in a world in which systems also seem to be failing. Our politics are failing. Markets are failing. Our expectations aren't being met. That creates the kind of space where populist demagogues come in and their typical toolbelt is blame: “Well, it's not your fault. It's the fault of the Jew.” And so the conspiratorial dimension of anti-Semitism, which, again, I think is somewhat unique, because of its recurring nature and how amorphous it is. The immigrant takes your job. The welfare queen takes your money. But the Jew does all of it. Mounk: The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that conspiracy theories are actually deeply revealing of the person who believes in them. My model of the world is that it's a really chaotic place in which there are a bunch of powerful and affluent people, but nobody actually has a tremendous amount of agency, even the President of the United States. Even a billionaire feels very constrained within the various logics of their field of endeavor. The truth is that nobody's fully in charge. And that's pretty scary. But if you believe in conspiracy theories, actually, what you end up thinking is that there are these thirty evil guys, and they get together at Bilderberg or Davos or whatever and make all the decisions; and if only we could replace them and put good people in charge, instead, then things will be great. There is something that is actually essentially reassuring about the implicit causal model of the world that conspiracists have, and I think that's part of the reason for its appeal. Going back a bit, the Nazis and Germans blamed Jews for being communists and communist activists, and when you go to Moscow at the same time, the Jews are being blamed for being the capitalists. And of course, in a way, both were true at the time. It's just because for complicated, novel cultural reasons, Jews have proven to be very successful in the modern world. So there is a description of inferiority, but it's also this fear of superiority—the idea that they seek to govern the world. They're the ones who are really in charge, right? How much of that fear is rooted in the empirical success that Jews have had in various societies in the modern world?Greenblatt: I am a former entrepreneur, so I had the good fortune to try my hand at business and creating new things, and I was blessed to have some success at that not starting out with money, not starting out with resources, not starting out with some kind of like aristocratic pedigree. I was the first in my family to go to college—not a big deal. It just is what it is. But I had to figure it out. And there's something very Jewish about that. Jews typically are immigrants. Jews typically come to places, historically, without land, without capital, and without a pedigree. They have to figure it out. Talmudic education, its questioning and inquisitive nature and its questioning imperative, is about figuring it out. We have a cultural predilection to “figuring it out.” My wife has family in Iran who were communists because the Jews were discriminated against because of their religion. This idea of wiping out religion seemed like an antidote to their persistent diminishment. And then Jews were the capitalists because in free markets they figured it out. And they could by their wits create things that otherwise weren't available to them. While we've succeeded beyond the wildest imagination of our forebears in America, and in the world writ large, we lose sight of history: a hundred years ago this kind of success was almost unimaginable. In the year 1923, Jews were living here comfortably in the US. But look, the ADL was formed just ten years earlier because Jews had a series of systematic disadvantages. They couldn't buy homes in many places in the United States, couldn’t work in many professions, were kept out of medical institutions and universities, and so on. To think one hundred years later that there'd be a Jewish second gentleman and Jewish leadership in business, academia, and culture? This was unimaginable. Jews have had disproportionate success relative to our small numbers. I think part of that is fueled by that survival instinct.But if history is any guide, then at some point the music will stop here, too. We have to be ready for that. Alternatively, if we don't want the music to stop, we need to learn from history to make sure it keeps playing.Mounk: Instinctively, I share that sensibility of looking back at Jewish history and realizing how often it's gone wrong. And for me, that's not just because I'm descended from Holocaust survivors. It's also because my grandparents became communists and helped to fight for communism when it was dangerous, and they went to prison for it in the ‘30s. They helped to build up the Communist regime in Poland after World War II, and the regime promptly turned on them and threw out the remaining Jews from Poland in 1968. There were about 50,000 Jews left in Poland in 1967 and about 500 left in 1970. My own parents, who were not political, who were 20 years old, were thrown out of a country they were born and raised in for being Jews. And yet, I'm perhaps less acutely worried overall for Jews in America than you are. I hope that our place in America may be more secure. What the experiences of generations of my family have had in common is extremist politics that weren’t based on the principles of liberal democracy. My grandparents’ life was deeply shaped, their families killed, because of right-wing extremism. And even though I do not want to equate those two historical episodes and those two evils of very different magnitudes, my parents were thrown out of Poland by a totalitarian regime of the left that they set great store in. I think that doubleconcern that Jews have, again, today, in the United States about attacks from the left and the right is not a new thing. It's something that has a very long history, and the thing that makes me hopeful is that we've been able to flourish here because of the system of liberal democracy that protects the rights of individuals and the rights of minority groups. And that is what makes me optimistic now. That, of course, could be lost. The other point I would make is that there is an ethnic composition question which perhaps makes me a little bit less worried. Let's say that American democracy fails. I don't know that it would be a very dangerous moment for Jews. In those moments when we lose liberal protections, those are the moments when Jews fare very, very badly. The problem with America though is it has so many different ethnic groups, and so many different religions that if you start to really break the basic social compact of tolerance, the whole thing falls apart, and that’s a bit new. Most of the societies we were talking about earlier were ones in which the Jews were the odd one out in an obvious way. The Jews were the most salient obvious minority group. You could exile them, murder them, impoverish them without its affecting 90 or 95% of the population. But in America today, if you start breaking the basic social compact of this very diverse society, the whole thing breaks apart. Perhaps that just means that we have a danger of something even more horrific down the line, or perhaps it makes it less likely because there's some kind of mutual protection from everybody feeling vulnerable in a way that wouldn't have been the case in early 20th-century Russia.Greenblatt: I would never be one to say that there's a Holocaust around the corner. I don't believe that. I think the Shoah was a function of a confluence of factors. It's just different from where we are today. Could there be another terrible catastrophe that befalls the Jewish people? Sure. Ayatollah Khamenei talks about “destroying the cancer of Israel.” That could be as horrifying and as homicidal as what Hitler envisioned. And yet, I don't think the gas chambers are around the corner in the United States. When these people make these comparisons that Trump is Hitler, I think it's super unhelpful because it's just factually wrong. If liberal democracy were to unravel, indeed, lots of people would be implicated in that and be on the losing end, particularly minorities, Jews, and plenty of others. In fact, there may be others who are more disadvantaged than the Jewish people because they lack a kind of purchase or integration in society and so on. So a threat to liberal democracy is a threat to everyone, not just to the Jews. But if you pay attention to the extremists, and we do at ADL, you can't help but notice that the tendency that they have to obsess about the Jews is very, very real. So if the whole project of our democracy unravels, everybody loses. And yet, if you do pattern recognition, you see that in the white supremacist, the far right extremists, the ‘sovereign citizens,’ there is an obsession with the Jew who “wants to replace us,” who's “paying migrants to come from Central America to commit white genocide.” There's an obsession with the globalists and the bankers that is real and palpable. And there's a reason why, on a per capita basis, Jews far and away are the most targeted minority as relates to hate crimes. And there's a reason why if you look at extremist-related murders, it's the far right who commit the vast majority of them over the past 30 years. It just is.The threat of the extreme right to the Jews and others is a bit like a Category 5 hurricane that is bearing down on you. You can see it coming, you can put the storm shutters up and it will still blow up your house. It will kill everyone inside, it will destroy everything—like people with masks and billy clubs and gear rampaging through the Capitol looking for legislators to kidnap and kill. The radical left—we need to see that for the threat that it is. The far left is more like climate change. The threat starts down here, and it slowly increases; some people don't see it and other people deny it. They dismiss it, they think they can adapt to it. And suddenly, the temperature is up here—the environment that you live in is no longer hospitable in the way that it once was, and you get those kinds of Category 5 storms that can kill you. It's more subtle and insidious but it's also a threat. If you pay attention to what's happening on college campuses, and the attacks on Zionists—you'll have an anti-Israel speaker on campus and then there are swastikas on the Jewish fraternity. You'll have a professor of psychology at George Washington University berating students in her class who are “Zionists,” and making all the Jewish students feel—and their grades reflect it—less than all the other students. She's not asking them about whether they vote for Bibi Netanyahu. She's not asking them about their opinion of Baruch Goldstein. She's saying “all of you are a problem.” I've heard this from kids on campuses who say to me “I can go to Hillel now and then, but I really can't be open about it because Hillel is part of the Israeli war machine.” That's what's portrayed on campus. And I've heard this from colleagues in newsrooms, “I can't really talk about… People know I'm Jewish, but we can't really address issues of anti-Semitism in a very open way. Because Israel makes it hard.”We can't talk about anti-Semitism when Jews are getting beaten up in the streets here in the United States. I hear about it in other spheres. So it is not to say that Jews are looking at a new set of Nuremberg Laws. But when a world is created that encroaches upon your ability to show up as your whole self in a way that your peers do, when an environment calcifies where terms like “Zionist” or “globalist” become normalized as epithets—we know what that means. And we know where it goes. Mounk: Help us think through the standard question of what is legitimate criticism of the state of Israel. What is legitimate criticism of the political project of Zionism and when does that overstep the mark and become an excuse for anti-Semitism?For people who worry that it's hard to walk that line, how are you able (if it’s your conviction) to criticize, for example, the Israeli government or even Zionism as a political ideology in a robust way without its bleeding into anti-Semitism or those forms of prejudice that should be unacceptable?Greenblatt: My patriotism compels me to criticize American government policy where I think we get it wrong. It just does. That doesn't mean I would suggest that America should go away; that though the country was founded in large part on the displacement, some would say the genocide, of indigenous people, and that the economy was built on the backs of enslaved Africans (and still, today, a kind of substrata of certain classes of people continue to make this economy work), the reality is that I don't think that makes America illegitimate and I'm not committed to destroying it. But I will robustly speak up and push back on policies and participate openly using the tools at my disposal to call out unjust policies and to push for equal and fair treatment for all. Political Zionism, in my mind, is the right of Jewish people. It's thousands of years old, it’s the idea that Jews should return to their homeland. If you've ever had a Passover Seder, if you think “next year in Jerusalem,” you're a Zionist. Political Zionism is the idea that the Jews have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland—that's it.My Zionism compels me to criticize the Israeli government when I think it gets it wrong, whether it's its treatment of the Palestinians, or Arab Israelis, or how they're thinking about judicial reform. I can choose to do that with the instruments at my disposal, but my Zionism compels me to criticize Israel to say that it can be better. But it becomes something else other than standard criticism, impassioned criticism, when my focus is “because of its flaws, the entire project should disappear. And we should push for its dissolution.” Those who think that don't believe that Jews have that very basic right to self-determination that they would afford to, for example, Palestinians or any other people living in their ancestral home. It's okay not to believe in nationalism.  But in the world we live in today, where I think it would seem as if, based on things like United Nations resolutions, or any number of other metrics, Israel receives a degree of attention and condemnation that is far disproportionate to any other country. And when you hold it to double standards, when you delegitimize its very existence, when you demonize and dehumanize its citizens—that to me is not just a strong political position. That is a different kind of animus that looks and feels a lot like the historic anti-Semitism that's trailed Jews throughout time. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The critics and the gamers have written much about The Last of Us, the video game that became a majestic HBO series. The main story is about love and family, but there’s a dark and nagging question in the scenario: If the world had no more rules, what kind of person would you be?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The four quadrants of American politics
What have humans just unleashed?
You can’t define woke.
Who Are You?This story contains spoilers for the entire first season of The Last of Us.Did you read that disclaimer? No, I mean it—I am going to spoil everything in the first season. You’ve been warned.In interviews, the writers of The Last of Us have said that they intended the series to be about love. And they have indeed created a gorgeous—and disturbing—tale of how we find and cherish family. But I want to raise another question that lurks in the adventures of Joel and Ellie, a dark rumble of a thought that most of us would rather not confront: If the world ended, and all of the rules of society vanished, what kind of person would you be?This question, I think, resonates more with us today than it did during the Cold War. Back then, and particularly in the 1970s and ’80s, postapocalyptic fiction included an entire pulpy genre that the scholar Paul Brians called “Radioactive Rambos,” in which men—almost always men, with a few notable exceptions—would wander the wasteland, killing mutants and stray Communists. (They also had a lot of sex.) Sometimes, these heroes were part of paramilitary groups, but most typically, they were the classic lone wolf: super-skilled death machines whose goal was to get from Point A to Point B while shooting everything in between and saving a girl, or a town, or even the world.But we live in more ambiguous times. We’re not fighting the Soviet Union. We don’t trust institutions, or one another, as much as we did 40 or 50 years ago. Perhaps we don’t even trust ourselves. We live in a time when lawlessness, whether in the streets or the White House, seems mostly to go unpunished. For decades, we have retreated from our fellow citizens and our social organizations into our own homes, and since COVID began, we’ve learned to virtualize our lives, holding meetings on glowing screens and having our food and other goods dropped at our doors by people we never have to meet.We also face any number of demagogues who seem almost eager for our institutions to fail so that they can repopulate them in their own image and likeness.Living in a world of trees and water and buildings and cars, we can posture all day long about how we would take our personal virtues with us through the gates of Armageddon. But considering that we can barely muster enough civic energy to get off our duffs and go vote every few years, how certain are we about our own bravery and rectitude?Although Joel and Ellie are rendered with wonderful complexity by the show’s writers and by the actors Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, some of the greatest moments in The Last of Us are with people the protagonists encounter during their travels: Bill, the survivalist (played by Nick Offerman in what should be a slam-dunk Emmy nomination); Kathleen, the militia leader (Melanie Lynskey); and David, the religious preacher and secret cannibal, played with terrifying subtlety by Scott Shepherd. (I warned you there were spoilers.)Each of these characters is a challenge, and a reproof, to any of us who think we’d be swell folks, and maybe even heroes, after the collapse of civilization.Bill is a paranoid survivalist who falls in love with a wanderer named Frank. They live together for years and choose suicide when Frank becomes mortally ill. It’s a marvelous and heartbreaking story, but Bill admits in his suicide note that he always hated humanity and was initially glad to see everyone die. He no longer feels that way, he says, implying that Frank’s love saved him, but right to the end, he remains hostile to almost everyone else in the world—just as he was before Outbreak Day.Kathleen leads a rebellion in Kansas City against FEDRA, the repressive military government that takes over America after the pandemic. Her “resistance,” however, is a brutal, ragtag militia, and Kathleen is a vicious dictator who is no better (and perhaps worse) than the regime she helped overthrow. She promises clemency to a group of FEDRA collaborators, for example, and then orders them all to be shot anyway. “When you’re done, burn the bodies,” she says casually. “It’s faster.” She even imprisons her own doctor, who pleads with her, “Kathleen, I delivered you.” She executes him herself.What’s important about Kathleen, however, is that she later admits that she really hasn’t changed. Her brother was the original head of the resistance: kind, forgiving, a true leader. She admits that she never had that kind of goodness in her, not even as a child—which raises the troubling thought that we all live near a Kathleen who is tenuously bound only by the restrictions of law and custom.And then there’s David.History is replete with times when desperate human beings have resorted to cannibalism, and although we recoil in disgust, we know it can happen. David hates what he felt he had to do, and he admits his shame. But it turns out that what makes David evil is not that he eats people but that he’s a fraud: He cares nothing about religion; he cares about being in charge, and he admits that he has struggled all his life with violent impulses. He is another character whom the apocalypse reveals more than it changes. When he gleefully tries to rape Ellie, she kills the former math teacher in self-defense.Again, this raises the creepy question of how many Davids walk among us, smiling and toting algebra books, restrained from their hellish impulses only by the daily balm of street lights and neighbors and manicured lawns. We should be grateful for every day that we don’t have to know the answer.Related:
The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again.
How The Last of Us cherishes a bygone world
Today’s News 
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan endorsed Finland’s NATO bid; he has not yet approved Sweden’s.
The Justice Department is reportedly investigating the surveillance of Americans by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.
President Joe Biden urged Congress to expand the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s authority to impose more stringent penalties on senior executives who mismanage lending banks.
Dispatches 
The Books Briefing: Nicole Acheampong writes about the gift of rereading.
Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the freedom and frustration of cars.
Illustration by The Atlantic
GPT-4 Has the Memory of a Goldfish
By this point, the many defects of AI-based language models have been analyzed to death—their incorrigible dishonesty, their capacity for bias and bigotry, their lack of common sense. GPT-4, the newest and most advanced such model yet, is already being subjected to the same scrutiny, and it still seems to misfire in pretty much all the ways earlier models did. But large language models have another shortcoming that has so far gotten relatively little attention: their shoddy recall. These multibillion-dollar programs, which require several city blocks’ worth of energy to run, may now be able to code websites, plan vacations, and draft company-wide emails in the style of William Faulkner. But they have the memory of a goldfish.
Israel’s tectonic struggle
So where were the regulators?
Photos of the week: marsh maze, volcanic ash, dying star
Culture Break Read. These 10 poetry collections are worth revisiting again and again.Listen. Our new narrative podcast, Holy Week, is the story of a revolution undone.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Today, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and one other Russian official for their possible involvement in the kidnapping of what could be thousands of Ukrainian children. The ICC was created in 1998 by the Rome Statute, an international treaty, and began holding its first sessions in 2003, but it doesn’t have a lot of power: Russia, China, and the United States are not parties to the statute, and neither is Ukraine (which has nonetheless granted the ICC jurisdiction over its territory). A Kremlin spokesperson, of course, immediately waved away the warrant as irrelevant.Things could get interesting, I suppose, if Putin ever travels to a nation that is part of the ICC, which is almost every other country in the world. Would another state decide to enforce the ICC warrant and arrest a foreign leader? That’s pretty unlikely, but it’s something Putin would at least have to think about if he ever decides to venture too far away from his Kremlin bunker. In the meantime, unfortunately, he and his commanders will continue their crimes in Ukraine, but the ICC warrant is at least a welcome symbolic statement.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked for readers’ reflections on the automobile. I wanted to know: How have cars shaped your life? What do you think about their future? I received so many responses that we are going off-schedule and posting half of them today and will share the rest on Monday.Mauricio believes that electric vehicles are the future and has no patience for nostalgic holdouts:
I’m a car enthusiast from the Boomer generation, and I’m tired of laments for the internal combustion engine. It’s over! And people need to get over it. It’s been nearly 150 years now of the internal combustion engine, and fans say, “Oh, but they sound so glorious.” You know what sounds more glorious? A thoroughbred at full stride: the nostrils sucking in, the hooves tearing up the dirt, the gigantic heart pounding, and the jockey keeping it all under control. That’s romantic. But guess what? It died because the car was more efficient, easier to drive, and left less horse shit on the road—and at first, cars were slower than a decent horse. People bought them anyway, because cars were clearly the future … and let go of the romance of 4,000 years.
Lee is a physician and a cyclist who often has bikes on his roof rack that are worth more than his car:
My car increases my range. That makes my life richer. Even though I consider 50 miles in a day a modest distance to bicycle, a car puts many more things in my easily accessible daily range than I would otherwise have. Stores, parks, other people, all kinds of resources. Think of it the way any other animal would: How good a life you can make depends on what good stuff your range, or territory, comprises. A small range makes an impoverished life—materially, socially, intellectually. The bicycle was a social revolution, for just that reason. Remember, the bicycle was the impetus for widespread paved roads, and the Wrights were bicycle mechanics. The car followed shortly after, and took that principle up an order of magnitude. That ability, to access the good things in a large range at will, is why the car dominates our society and our lives, and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future. (Yes, mass transit can fill that role too, in select settings of sufficient density to support frequent and convenient operation, but for most of America and large swaths of the world, cars and motorcycles are really it.)
For Alisoun’s oldest son, life is a highway:
He turned 2 when the movie Cars came out, and our family got him car-related items as presents. We thought the car theme might be a phase, like, “Today it’s cars; tomorrow it’s diggers.” It is now 17 years later, and the car phase has never changed. We have a car kid.
We are not car people. We drive them. We have them. But we are raising a kid who loves cars with a depth not often seen in teenagers today (in the neurotypical community). At 16 he bought his first car, a Mustang. He gave us a presentation about why we should let him buy it. He loved it and worked on it in our garage throughout the early-pandemic lockdown. He sold that one and bought another Mustang. He spends breaks from college tracking down car parts. His room has boxes of car parts. He watches car videos.
We shake our heads. The world is going electric, quieter with their cars. He loves to make his Mustangs loud. He meets very nice people who share this passion. This year there was a recall on a car part. He drove in front of me to the dealer in his latest Mustang. I watched him stop for a family crossing the street. One of the group raised his finger and circled it above his head. My son revved the engine for him. The man threw his head back with joy. A fellow car guy. I didn’t know these communities existed. I do now.
Having a car kid means I have learned to pay attention to cars. I have driven all over with him in the pursuit of good deals on parts. When looking at colleges, we counted the Mustangs we saw on our travels. We hit a hot stretch in North Carolina where we saw 17 Mustangs in 15 minutes! I am so glad our son found his passion young and we have gotten to watch him revel in cars. We still have the Cars bedspread from his Little Tikes bed and the Cars shirt he wore every other day of preschool. And now I get to ride shotgun in the latest Mustang with the push-button start and the special gear-shift cover and the very loud exhaust, and watch as fellow car folks wave as we go by.
Adam is not a car guy:
I’ve never driven a car and don’t expect to. It makes no sense on any level that I would be trusted, after fairly minimal instruction, to send a couple tons of metal hurtling around the world at extremely high speeds. Some mornings it takes me three tries to tie my shoes right; it seems crazy to suggest I should go from there to placing the right shoe on the accelerator and pushing down hard. To me it’s one of the wonders of the world that thousands of people drive thousands of cars past my window all day, every day, and only occasionally wind up wrapped around a telegraph pole, traffic signal, or each other.
One of humankind’s great achievements is the accommodation of mediocrity: There is something glorious about how we’ve managed to build societies in which millions of people can spend their time being just barely okay at things, and it mostly works. It’s one thing to invent a car and build a road network that a few geniuses or highly trained experts can navigate sort-of safely; it’s quite another thing to build a system that millions of everyday people, often not functioning at their best, somehow manage to traverse daily, mostly without dying. It’s incredible. But I still can’t make the leap to participating directly.
Vancouver’s one of those cities that does car-free days: pick a street and shut it off to traffic for the afternoon. I always go to those. It’s fascinating to see how many thousands of people can fit into a pretty normal city street when it doesn’t have any cars on it, and how completely different it feels. Just standing in the middle of a six-lane road and looking along, it is pretty strange.
I get that, to some people, they seem like a necessity, but cars are pretty weird if you never drive one and rarely get in them. We’ve played this funny trick on ourselves by accepting so completely the notion that roads are for cars, and that we must have enough roads for everyone who wants to to drive everywhere all the time.
Tara is conflicted about cars:
I spent the majority of my life in the exurbs. A couple of years ago, following a divorce, I moved into the type of walkable, urban neighborhood that city planners lust over. And the truth is, a lot of days, I still miss the exurbs.
My commute was brutal. I had to be up by 5:30 every morning to make it to work by 8. For the majority of the year, I never got to experience sunlight in my own house: I was on the road before dawn, and I’d arrive home after dusk.
Time and time again, my journey home was delayed by traffic accidents. I would sit in traffic for an extra two hours, knowing that the reason three lanes were blocked off was because another exhausted commuter drove under a semi that day. It was also never far from my mind that these accidents happened not because somebody was drinking or trying to see how fast a Porsche could go, but because the driver was an exhausted commuter just like myself, trying to make it home before it was time to put the kids to bed.
But also, I had a nice, big yard, with mature rose bushes climbing the back gate. We had a fire pit. We had a home theater, and could watch any film we desired on a massive screen, complete with a top-of-the-line sound system. The neighborhood was quiet. And, crucially, we were able to enjoy these benefits as average, middle-class people. The mortgage on that house was one-third of what my current rent is, and the public schools were perfectly acceptable.  
Now? I’m in healthier shape than I’ve been in since adolescence, because my neighborhood in the city is so walkable. I no longer put 20,000-plus miles on my car every year. I walk several miles a day, forever discovering new gems in the neighborhood I never knew about.
But I also no longer have my yard. I no longer have my home theater. I’m crammed into one-third of the space, but paying three times more. I walk by throngs of homeless people every day, and I have to step over puddles of urine on the sidewalks. Property crime is rampant; I’ve had to call 911 three times in two years to report dangerous situations, and every time, I have had to spend 10 minutes on hold because the operators are too busy.
I don’t have children, but if I did, private school would be a necessity rather than a luxury, since the public schools in the city are abysmal. And all of this is in the nice part of the city. The part of the city that is far, far more expensive and more affluent than my old exurb.  
I hated spending my life behind the wheel of a car. I hated the commutes that robbed me of the opportunity to enjoy the sunlight, or the ability to spend waking hours with my family. I hated the car dependency, the way that I couldn’t so much as grab a soda without getting behind the wheel again. But I also appreciate the cars and infrastructure that made that all possible, that made it possible for average people to live in spacious houses with big yards in safe neighborhoods for a reasonable price. No matter how much cities invest in infrastructure and affordable housing, no matter how well a city is designed, no amount of urban planning will ever replace the freedom an automobile gives.
Kathy is also an aficionado of the freedom cars can afford:
Canadian here eh.
When I was a kid, my mother used to joke that it was a miracle that neither I nor my younger brother were born on a back road. Dad’s typical car comment was “Let’s see where this goes.” And I’ve inherited that driving gene from my dad.
I was born in Whitehorse, Yukon, and then we moved countless times, all over Northern Ontario, and then the family settled in Ottawa. Driving was a rite of passage for my generation, back in the ’60s and ’70s. The group I was part of for about five years was completely car-centered—rallies, demolition derbies—and gas was so cheap then, so a recreation item was to drive half an hour out somewhere, and then back, to accommodate parental deadlines. Of course, it was only the boys who were driving; the girls’ appropriate role was to sit in the stands, or the passenger seat, look sexy, and admire.
I moved on. My first husband had been a car buff for years, with a car sitting in the backyard waiting for his 16th birthday. Several months before, he developed glaucoma in one eye and went down to 10 percent vision. His charming grandfather convinced him that he would never again be able to drive any kind of motorized vehicle. We got a car, and I drove us everywhere, until it died of old age.
I love driving—my husband used to call me Stirling Moss, and told everyone that if you wanted to know the longest distance between two points, just travel with me. Freeways were efficient, but I always preferred the scenic route. My dream would not have been to be a ballet dancer, or anything like that—my dream was to be a stock-car racer. And, until I got older and some smarter, I had a very heavy foot. Whee! Traffic circles? Bring ’em on, and let’s see how fast we can do them.
We parted, and my next partner was an anxious driver, and an even more anxious passenger. We took a number of travel vacations around Canada—out to the west coast to British Columbia, and then out through the Atlantic provinces on the east coast, and eventually on a road tour of Newfoundland. We were good driving companions. And of course, each of us drove to and from our separate jobs every day. He had a truck, and I had (still have) a small car—and that’s pretty standard here.
I will never understand what changed for him, but his anxiety escalated, to the point that all he could do was drive into town once a week to pick up groceries and various supplies. I’m 74. And now he’s gone, and I want to take road trips again—there are little parts of Ontario, and Canada, that I’ve been longing to see or revisit. I don’t know anyone, among all my friends, who would be the kind of traveler I am, though, and it’s not as much fun to travel alone, with no one to share all of the “Oh, look at that”s.
Cars are freedom. If you’ve never heard Dory Previn sing about screaming in her car in a “Twenty-Mile Zone,” well, that’s another aspect of it. That little self-contained universe, all your own. Turn the volume up to 12. Sing along—the car doesn’t care if you can’t sing worth beans. Belt it out. Cry if you need to. Laugh at the things on the side of the road. Bliss. Always has been. An encapsulated adventure, or therapy, or joy, or whatever you need. Cars are a glory.
Roza couldn’t be more different:
I hate cars so much that I moved to another country and shaped my career around addressing car dependency. I think the most significant shift was my study-abroad semester in Copenhagen, where I fell in love with cycling. Not cycling in a Lycra suit trying to outrace the cars, but cycling in my everyday clothes at a mellow pace, maintaining a conversation with a friend and feeling completely safe. This led me to write my senior thesis about cycling policy in the U.S. and gave me the gift of seeing cycling as a valid form of transport wherever I am. I cycle daily in London, where I live now, and where I work in the city-planning sector.
Although London isn’t anywhere near a cycle utopia like Copenhagen, there’s been so much progress in the past few years with the introduction and expansion of the low-emissions zone in the center. I am able to cycle around central London with its substandard cycling infrastructure due to the fact that many of the streets in the center are quiet and peaceful, even during rush hour. The air quality has improved, and noise pollution has decreased. Although the policies were really contentious at first, I don’t think anybody would want them lifted at this point and to go back to being stifled by pollution and traffic.
My dislike of cars is probably propelled by the fact that I’ve been plagued by motion sickness all my life and can’t read or stare out the window of a moving car without feeling nauseous, making long car trips dreadfully boring for me. Since we have built our cities around the personal vehicle, we are left with a gray landscape that looks the same wherever you are in the country: highways, parking lots, flyovers, leaving no place for creativity or community. Most suburban places in the U.S. have no viable public space—places where people can just be for free, where they can meet people and form community, something that I think is further driving the division and loneliness that we face.

Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national level—and that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. “The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided.Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, substantial overlap remained between the kinds of districts each party held. In those years, large numbers of Democrats still represented mostly white, low-income rural and small-town districts with few college graduates, and a cohort of Republicans held well-educated, affluent suburban districts. That overlap didn’t prevent the House from growing more partisan and confrontational, but it did temper that trend, because the small-town “blue dog” Democrats and suburban “gypsy moth” Republicans were often the members open to working across party lines.Now the parties represent districts more consistently divided along lines of demography, economic status, and geography, which makes finding common ground difficult. The parties’ intensifying separation “is a recipe for polarization,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.To understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.The analysis revealed that along every key economic and demographic dimension, the two parties are now sorted to the extreme in the House districts they represent. “These people are coming to Washington not from different districts, but frankly different planets,” says former Representative Steve Israel, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Among the key distinctions:*More than three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of the nonwhite population exceeds the national level of 40 percent. Four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts in which the minority share of the population is below the national level.*Nearly three-fourths of House Democrats represent districts where the share of white adults with a college degree exceeds the national level of 36 percent. More than three-fourths of Republicans hold districts where the share of white college graduates trails the national level.*Just over three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of immigrants exceeds the national level of 14 percent; well over four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts with fewer immigrants than average.*Perhaps most strikingly, three-fifths of Democrats now hold districts where the median income exceeds the national level of nearly $65,000; more than two-thirds of Republicans hold districts where the median income falls beneath the national level.Sorting congressional districts by racial diversity and education produces the “four quadrants of Congress”: districts with high levels of racial diversity and white education (“hi-hi” districts), districts with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of white education (“hi-lo districts”), districts with low levels of diversity and high levels of white education (“lo-hi districts”), and districts with low levels of diversity and white education (“lo-lo districts”). (The analysis focuses on the education level among whites, and not the entire population, because education is a more significant difference in the political behavior of white voters than of minority groups.)[Read: The GOP’s control of congress is only getting stronger]Looking at the House through that lens shows that the GOP has become enormously dependent on one type of seat: the “lo-lo” districts revolving around white voters without a college degree. Republicans hold 142 districts in that category (making up nearly two-thirds of the party’s House seats), compared with just 21 for Democrats.The intense Republican reliance on this single type of mostly white, blue-collar district helps explain why the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Many of the most militantly conservative House Republicans represent these “lo-lo” districts—a list that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.“The right accuses the left of identity politics, when the analysis of this data suggests that identity politics has become the core of the Republican Party,” Pastor told me.House Democrats are not nearly as reliant on seats from any one of the four quadrants. Apart from the lo-lo districts, they lead the GOP in the other three groupings. Democrats hold a narrow 37–30 lead over Republicans in the seats with high levels of diversity and few white college graduates (the “hi-lo” districts). These seats include many prominent Democrats representing predominantly minority areas, including Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama, and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. At the same time, these districts have been a source of growth for Republicans: The current Democratic lead of seven seats is way down from the party’s 28-seat advantage in 2009.Democrats hold a more comfortable 57–35 edge in the “lo-hi” districts with fewer minorities and a higher share of white adults with college degrees than average. These are the mostly white-collar districts represented by leading suburban Democrats, many of them moderates, such as Angie Craig of Minnesota, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey. A large share of the House Republicans considered more moderate also represent districts in this bloc.The core of Democratic strength in the House is the “hi-hi” districts that combine elevated levels of both racial minorities and college-educated whites. Democrats hold 98 of the 113 House seats in this category. Many of the party’s most visible members represent seats fitting this description, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the current House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries; former House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These are also the strongholds for Democrats representing what Pastor calls the places where “diversity is increasing the most”: inner suburbs in major metropolitan areas. Among the members representing those sorts of constituencies are Lucy McBath of Georgia, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren of California.Though Democrats are not as dependent on any single quadrant as Republicans are on the low-diversity, low-education districts, each party over the past decade has been forced to retreat into its demographic citadel. As Drutman notes, that’s the result of a succession of wave elections that has culled many of the members from each side who had earlier survived in districts demographically and economically trending toward the other.The first victims were the so-called blue-dog Democrats, who had held on to “lo-lo” districts long after they flipped to mostly backing Republican presidential candidates. Those Democrats from rural and small-town areas, many of them in the South, had started declining in the ’90s. Still, as late as 2009, during the first Congress of Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans held only 20 more seats than Democrats did in the “lo-lo” quadrant. Democrats from those districts composed almost as large a share of the total party caucus in that Congress as did members from the “hi-hi” districts.But the 2010 Tea Party landslide virtually exterminated the blue dogs. After that election, the GOP edge in the lo-lo districts exploded to 90 seats; it reached 125 seats after redistricting and further GOP gains in the 2014 election. Today the districts low in diversity and white-education levels account for just one in 10 of all House Democratic seats, and the “hi-hi” seats make up nearly half. The seats low in diversity and high in white education (about one-fourth) and those high in diversity and low in white education (about one-sixth), provide the remainder.For House Republicans, losses in the 2018 midterms represented the demographic bookend to their blue-collar, small-town gains in 2010. In 2018, Democrats, powered by white-collar antipathy toward Trump, swept away a long list of House Republicans who had held on to well-educated suburban districts that had been trending away from the GOP at the presidential level since Bill Clinton’s era.Today, districts with a higher share of white college graduates than the nation overall account for less than one-fourth of all GOP seats, down from one-third in 2009. The heavily blue-collar “lo-lo” districts have grown from just over half of the GOP conference in 2009 to their current level of nearly two-thirds. (The share of Republicans in seats with more minorities and fewer white college graduates than average has remained constant since 2009, at about one in seven.)Each party is pushing an economic agenda that collides with the immediate economic interests of a large portion of its voters. “The party leadership has not caught up with the coalitions,” says former Representative Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.For years, some progressives have feared that Democrats would back away from a populist economic agenda if the party grew more reliant on affluent voters. That shift has certainly occurred, with Democrats now holding 128 of the 198 House districts where the median income exceeds the national level. But the party has continued to advocate for a redistributionist economic agenda that seeks higher taxes on upper-income adults to fund expanded social programs for working-class families, as proposed in President Joe Biden’s latest budget. The one concession to the new coalition reality is that Democrats now seek to exempt from higher taxes families earning up to $400,000—a level that earlier generations of Democrats probably would have considered much too high.Republicans face more dissonance between their reconfigured coalition and their agenda. Though the GOP holds 152 of the 237 districts where the median income trails the national level, the party continues to champion big cuts in domestic social programs that benefit low-income families while pushing tax cuts that mostly flow toward the wealthy and corporations. As former Democratic Representative David Price, now a visiting fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, says, there “is a pretty profound disconnect” between the GOP’s economic agenda and “the economic deprivation and what you would think would be a pretty clear set of needs” of the districts the party represents.Each of these seeming contradictions underscores how cultural affinity has displaced economic interest as the most powerful glue binding each side’s coalition. Republicans like Davis lament that their party can no longer win culturally liberal suburban voters by warning that Democrats will raise their taxes; Democrats like Price express frustration that their party can’t win culturally conservative rural voters by portraying Republicans as threats to Social Security and Medicare.  The advantage for Republicans in this new alignment is that there are still many more seats where whites exceed their share of the national population than seats with more minorities than average. Likewise, the number of seats with fewer white college graduates than the nation overall exceeds the number with more.That probably gives Republicans a slight advantage in the struggle for House control over the next few years. Of the 22 House seats that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates as toss-ups or leaning toward the other party in 2024, for instance, 14 have fewer minorities than average and 12 have fewer white college graduates. “On the wedge issues, a lot of the swing districts look a little bit more like Republican districts than Democratic districts,” says Drutman, whose own recent analysis of House districts used an academic polling project to assess attitudes in all 435 seats.But as Pastor points out, Republicans are growing more dependent on those heavily white and non-college-educated districts as society overall is growing more diverse and better educated, especially in younger generations. “It’s hard to see how the Republicans can grow their coalition,” Pastor told me, with the militant culture-war messages they are using “to cement their current coalition.”Davis, the former NRCC chair, also worries that the GOP is relying too much on squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. The way out of that trap, he argues, is for Republicans to continue advancing from the beachheads they have established in recent years among more culturally conservative voters of color, especially Latino men.[Read: Are latinos really realigning toward Republicans?]But Republicans may struggle to make sufficient gains with those voters to significantly shift the balance of power in the House: Though the party last year improved among Latinos in Florida, the results in Arizona, Nevada, and even Texas showed the GOP still facing substantial barriers. The Trump-era GOP also continues to face towering resistance in well-educated areas, which limits any potential recovery there: In 2020, Biden, stunningly, carried more than four-fifths of the House districts where the share of college-educated white adults exceeds the national level. Conversely, despite Biden’s emphasis on delivering tangible economic benefits to working families, Democrats still faced enormous deficits with blue-collar white voters in the midterms. With many of its most vulnerable members defending such working-class terrain, Democrats could lose even more of those seats in 2024.Constrained by these offsetting dynamics, neither party appears well positioned to break into a clear lead in the House. The two sides look more likely to remain trapped in a grinding form of electoral trench warfare in which they control competing bands of districts that are almost equal in number, but utterly antithetical in their demographic, economic, and ideological profile.

On his trip to Saudi Arabia last year, President Biden made an emphatic declaration about U.S. policy in the Middle East: “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran.” Last week’s rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered by China, suggests that this is precisely what has happened. The reestablishment of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is not in itself a seismic event; they broke off relations only seven years ago. But last week’s revelation exposes a deep-seated flaw in American foreign policy, one that has gotten worse in recent years.

In 1995, the journalist and scholar Josef Joffe wrote an essay that described two paths for American grand strategy after the Cold War. He called them “Britain” or “Bismarck.” The first was to emulate Britain in its traditional approach toward geopolitics, by building alliances against any rising powers that seem hegemonic but to otherwise stay uninvolved. Joffe argued that this “balance of power” strategy would be impossible for America as a preeminent power and linchpin of the international order. Instead, he advocated a strategy as the broker, drawing on Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who unified Germany and made it Europe’s leading great power in the late 19th century.

Bismarck famously depicted the ideal situation for Germany as “not that of the acquisition of territory, but of an overall political situation in which all the powers except France need us and are held apart from coalitions against us by their relations to each other.” The associated doctrine is called the Kissinger Diktat, named not for Henry Kissinger, but for the spa town of Bad Kissingen where Bismarck codified it. In a remarkable case of historical resonance, however, Henry Kissinger’s greatest diplomatic triumph a century later was animated by the same idea. In making the opening to China while simultaneously pursuing detente with the Soviet Union, Kissinger ensured that Washington ended up with better relations with Beijing and Moscow than they had with each other.

In fact, many of the more notable successes of American foreign policy centered around this Bismarckian idea. For decades during the Cold War, the United States had better relations with Israel and the Arab states than they had with each other. It weaned communist countries such as Yugoslavia and Romania away from Moscow’s grip. And for decades, before the Iranian revolution, it had better relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia than they had with each other.

Today, however, Washington has lost the flexibility and suppleness that would inform just this sort of strategy. Our foreign policy today usually consists of grand moral declarations that divide the world into black and white, friends and foes. Those statements quickly get locked in place with sanctions and legislation, making policies even more rigid. The political atmosphere becomes so charged that merely talking with a “foe” becomes risky.

There is now a whole slew of countries with which the United States has either no relations or only limited, hostile contact — Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Myanmar, North Korea. You can make the case for opposing any one of these countries individually; collectively, though, the effect is to create a rigid foreign policy — one in which we’re unwilling to talk to everyone in the room and unable to show flexibility, presumably based on the idea that it’s best to simply hope for the overthrow of these regimes.

This is not really a criticism of the Biden administration, but rather of U.S. foreign policy over the past decades. America’s unipolar status has corrupted the country’s foreign policy elite. Our foreign policy is all too often an exercise in making demands and issuing threats and condemnations. There is very little effort made to understand the other side’s views or actually negotiate.

The Obama administration tried to take a different path. It negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, which seemed to bolster the moderates within the regime and could have led to a more workable relationship with that country. It engaged China while pushing back on issues such as economic espionage, with some success. It began a process of normalizing relations with Cuba. It even tried to maintain a working relationship with Russia.

But the political climate in Washington was largely hostile to this kind of Kissingerian diplomacy, and once Donald Trump entered the White House, he pulled out of the nuclear deal, slapped tariffs on China, tightened sanctions on Cuba and tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government. None of these efforts succeeded, but they are now so firmly established that they are extremely hard to change. Biden campaigned on undoing many of these policies, but once he took office he found it politically easier to just go along with the tough line.

All this evokes the inertia of an aging empire. Today, our foreign policy is run by an insular elite that operates by mouthing rhetoric to please domestic constituencies — and seems unable to sense that the world out there is changing, and fast.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have signaled their willingness to sell out Ukraine to the Kremlin, and the Russians have gleefully taken notice. How could this be happening in the party of Ronald Reagan?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Breaking: the strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic
You should be outraged about Silicon Valley Bank.
Make a to-don’t list.
Taking the BaitState governors are not usually experts on foreign policy, but those who intend to run for president are advised to at least brush up on the subject. Alas, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis did not get that memo. Last week, DeSantis declared Russia’s massive invasion—the largest operation in Europe since the defeat of the Nazis—to be a mere “territorial dispute,” and said that the war is thus not “a vital American national strategic interest.” This was too much for many elected Republicans and even for the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, who described the comments as “Ron DeSantis’s First Big Mistake.”This shining opportunity to stumble came courtesy of the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who a few weeks ago sent out questionnaires about Ukraine policy to a group of possible GOP presidential candidates. Carlson’s questions presented Republican contenders with a dilemma. On the one hand, many faithful MAGA voters, who make up the core of the GOP base, are regular viewers of Carlson’s show, and his questionnaire was a kind of early beauty pageant, an opportunity for Republican candidates to take a quick walk down the runway in front of MAGA World. On the other hand, Carlson is an irresponsible demagogue who has been exposed in the Dominion-lawsuit filings as a relentless opportunist who will bamboozle his own audience for ratings.Since the war in Ukraine began more than a year ago, Carlson has gone on numerous unhinged rants against “the D.C. war machine,” meaning anyone who supports aiding Kyiv. (He even went off the deep end about me a few weeks ago.) Carlson claims to just be asking questions, but on Ukraine, as on many other issues, he is located right in the heart of the fever swamps.In addition to his own bizarre perorations, Carlson also occasionally relies on input from his guest Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who for a hot second was an adviser to Trump’s last (acting) defense secretary, Christopher Miller, and whose nomination to be an ambassador foundered in part because of a history of weird and offensive statements. To give you some idea of the minefield awaiting GOP candidates, Macgregor went on last night about how the Ukrainians are getting “crushed,” and how the left has weakened the U.S. military to the point where it is almost useless. (The Pentagon’s assessment is a bit less gloomy, to say the least.) Carlson responded by asking, “[If America] became embroiled in a hot war with Russia, how long before you are arrested would it be, do you think, for saying what you just did?”Even Macgregor didn’t bother answering that one, but it shows why, for the credible would-be candidates filling out Carlson’s questionnaire, there is no real advantage in saying anything of substance. And so, most of them didn’t, offering unexceptional responses composed mostly of political dryer lint: Kristi Noem blamed Joe Biden for being too weak to deter the Russians. Mike Pence said that regime change in Russia was up to the Russian people. Vivek Ramaswamy was more than happy to provide more detailed answers, but that is a luxury one can take while on the path to becoming a kind of GOP Andrew Yang. And Nikki Haley, in a classic cautious Nikki Haley move, waited until Carlson’s deadline for response had passed and the show on the subject had aired before answering the questions.DeSantis, however, bit down on this giant hunk of bait, and his answers were displayed on Carlson’s show like a prize marlin.Of course, this may have been DeSantis’s intent. He may well be trying to sound like an ill-informed isolationist, because he is trying to capture the MAGA voters who now support Trump. The former president is the undisputed world heavyweight champion of ignorant views, and if you’re going to take him on, you’d better have some stunningly ignorant views of your own to bring to the table. That’s what the Republican base wants.DeSantis seems to know this all too well, which is likely why he’s been shoveling so much red meat out the front door of the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee to the MAGA cultural warriors. While covering his Trump-exposed flank on foreign policy, however, DeSantis has accidentally illustrated the problem of running for office in what used to be the party of Reagan: If you want to win the primary voters, you’ve got to reject everything you once believed.Indeed, back in 2017, DeSantis the congressman—but not yet the candidate—wanted to be Reagan. When he opposed Barack Obama’s efforts to initiate a “reset” with Russia, he noted that Democrats “viewed guys like me who are more of the Reagan school that’s tough on Russia as kind of throwbacks to the Cold War.” And two years earlier, DeSantis was all about teaching the Russians a lesson for seizing Ukraine. He excoriated then-President Obama for being weak-kneed:
We in the Congress have been urging the president … to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight their good fight. They’re not asking us to fight it for them. And the president has steadfastly refused. And I think that that’s a mistake.
Well said, congressman. Perhaps you might have a talk with the current governor of Florida.This pandering to the MAGA base is going to get worse, because Trump continues to dominate the GOP primary field. In some areas, this featherweight posturing will be repairable: Down the road, no one is likely to be fighting over whether first graders should be assigned college texts on “critical race theory.” In other cases, such as the destruction of Florida’s public universities, the damage will be more long-lasting.But in foreign policy, amateurish pandering to Tucker Carlson’s audience is dangerous. The Russian media are already crowing that the next American president will throw Ukraine to the wolves, a belief that could lead the Kremlin to take even greater risks than bumping into drones. Many elected Republicans and GOP presidential contenders—despite their constant fear of offending Trump—seem to recognize this, to their credit. If only Ron DeSantis were one of them.Related:
Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?
The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.
Polish President Andrzej Duda pledged to give Ukraine about 12 MiG-29 fighter jets, making Poland the first NATO member nation to follow through on Kyiv’s requests for warplanes.
Eleven major U.S. banks said they would deposit $30 billion into First Republic Bank amid a crisis of confidence from the bank’s customers and investors.
The U.S. military released video of what it says is the collision between a Russian fighter jet and an American surveillance drone over the Black Sea.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on the responsibilities of writing about the dead.
Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic
Climate Activists Are Turning Their Attention to HollywoodBy Katharine Gammon
On a warm, windy fall night in Los Angeles, I stood in a conference room at the Warner Bros. Discovery television-production offices, straightened my spine, and stared down my showrunner, preparing to defend my idea for a minor character in our near-future science-fiction series.
“This character needs a backstory, and switching jobs because she wants to work in renewable energy and not for an oil company fits perfectly,” I told the unsmiling head honcho.
His face twisted, as if his assistant had delivered the wrong lunch. “Too complicated. That just feels like a lot of information to cram into a backstory. What if her story is that she wants this job because it’s near where her brother was killed in a terrorist attack? We’d just need to invent a terrorist attack.”
How far-right movements die
The January 6 deniers are going to lose.
Republicans are targeting drag shows. This congressman loves them.
Lionsgate
Read. Heartburn, the 1983 novel by Nora Ephron whose backstory asks: What right do women have to tell their side of the story?Watch. John Wick, Keanu Reeves’s inaugural on-screen portrayal of the eponymous assassin; the franchise’s fourth installment, John Wick: Chapter 4, hits theaters next week.Play our daily crossword.P.S. Speaking of Ukraine, as we noted above in Today’s News, America’s NATO ally Poland has announced its decision to send MiG-29 jets to Ukraine. This is important for several reasons—not least of which is that Poland has gotten out in front of the rest of NATO on the issue. I thought I would take a moment here, however, to explain what a MiG-29 is for those of you who do not keep up on vintage Soviet military hardware.The MiG-29 was designed in the 1970s and entered service in the ’80s. Russian fighters are designated by the bureau that designed them: “MiG” is the “Mikoyan and Gurevich” design bureau, named for its founding engineers, and “Su” or “Tu” in front of a jet’s name are the Sukhoi and Tupolev bureaus, respectively. (The NATO code names for all Soviet-era fighters begin with F, and this one is the “Fulcrum.”) It was meant to be roughly equivalent to an American F-16 or F-15. Although not as good as its American counterparts, it is a solid fighter and capable of taking on multiple roles, especially “air superiority,” which means what it sounds like: controlling the airspace and dominating it (as opposed to, say, bombing targets or flying missions close to the ground to support troops in battle). It’s a fine jet—at least when flown by competent pilots—and more to the point, it’s one that Ukrainian pilots will already know how to fly, because it was part of the Soviet and post-Soviet inventory for so long.— TomKelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak—like most others—had purely natural roots. But that hypothesis has been missing a key piece of proof: genetic evidence from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, showing that the virus had infected creatures for sale there.This week, an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists may have finally found crucial data to help fill that knowledge gap. A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.

“This really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the research, told me, “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.”The findings won’t fully silence the entrenched voices on either side of the origins debate. But the new analysis may offer some of the clearest and most compelling evidence that the world will ever get in support of an animal origin for the virus that, in just over three years, has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide.Read: The lab leak will haunt us foreverThe genetic sequences were pulled out of swabs taken in and near market stalls around the pandemic’s start. They represent the first bits of raw data that researchers outside of China’s academic institutions and their direct collaborators have had access to. Late last week, the data were quietly posted by researchers affiliated with the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, on an open-access genomic database called GISAID. By almost pure happenstance, scientists in Europe, North America, and Australia spotted the sequences, downloaded them, and began an analysis.The samples were already known to be positive for the coronavirus, and had been scrutinized before by the same group of Chinese researchers who uploaded the data to GISAID. But that prior analysis, released as a preprint publication in February 2022, asserted that “no animal host of SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced.” Any motes of coronavirus at the market, the study suggested, had most likely been chauffeured in by infected humans, rather than wild creatures for sale.The new analysis, led by Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Michael Worobey—three prominent researchers who have been looking into the virus’s roots—shows that that may not be the case. Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, the trio and their collaborators discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material—much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog. Because of how the samples were gathered, and because viruses can’t persist by themselves in the environment, the scientists think that their findings could indicate the presence of a coronavirus-infected raccoon dog in the spots where the swabs were taken. Unlike many of the other points of discussion that have been volleyed about in the origins debate, the genetic data are “tangible,” Alex Crits-Christoph, a computational biologist and one of the scientists who worked on the new analysis, told me. “And this is the species that everyone has been talking about.”Finding the genetic material of virus and mammal so closely co-mingled—enough to be extracted out of a single swab—isn’t perfect proof, Lakdawala told me. “It’s an important step; I’m not going to diminish that,” she said. Still, the evidence falls short of, say, isolating SARS-CoV-2 from a free-ranging raccoon dog or, even better, uncovering a viral sample swabbed from a mammal for sale at Huanan from the time of the outbreak’s onset. That would be the virological equivalent of catching a culprit red-handed. But “you can never go back in time and capture those animals,” says Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. And to researchers’ knowledge, “raccoon dogs were not tested at the market and had likely been removed prior to the authorities coming in,” Andersen wrote to me in an email. He underscored that the findings, although an important addition, are not “direct evidence of infected raccoon dogs at the market.”Still, the findings don’t stand alone. “Do I believe there were infected animals at the market? Yes, I do,” Andersen told me. “Does this new data add to that evidence base? Yes.” The new analysis builds on extensive previous research that points to the market as the source of the earliest major outbreak of SARS-CoV-2: Many of the earliest known COVID-19 cases of the pandemic were clustered roughly in the market’s vicinity. And the virus’s genetic material was found in many samples swabbed from carts and animal-processing equipment at the venue, as well as parts of nearby infrastructure, such as storehouses, sewage wells, and water drains. Raccoon dogs, creatures commonly bred for sale in China, are also already known to be one of many mammal species that can easily catch and spread the coronavirus. All of this left one main hole in the puzzle to fill: clear-cut evidence that raccoon dogs and the virus were in the exact same spot at the market, close enough that the creatures might have been infected and, possibly, infectious. That’s what the new analysis provides. Think of it as finding the DNA of an investigation’s main suspect at the scene of the crime.The findings don’t rule out the possibility that other animals may have been carrying SARS-CoV-2 at Huanan. Raccoon dogs, if they were infected, may not even be the creatures who passed the pathogen on to us. Which means the search for the virus’s many wild hosts will need to plod on. “Do we know the intermediate host was raccoon dogs? No,” Andersen wrote to me, using the term for an animal that can ferry a pathogen between other species. “Is it high up on my list of potential hosts? Yes, but it’s definitely not the only one.”On Tuesday, the researchers presented their findings at a hastily scheduled meeting of the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which was also attended by several of the Chinese researchers responsible for the original analysis, according to multiple researchers who were not present but were briefed about it before and after by multiple people who were there.Shortly after the meeting, the Chinese team’s preprint went into review at a Nature Research journal—suggesting that a new version was being prepared for publication. (I reached out to the WHO for comment and will update this story when I have more information.)  At this point, it’s still unclear why the sequences were posted to GISAID last week. They also vanished from the database shortly after appearing, without explanation. When I emailed George Gao, the former China CDC director-general and the lead author on the original Chinese analysis, asking for his team’s rationale, I didn’t immediately receive a response. Given what was in the GISAID data, it does seem that raccoon dogs could have been introduced into and clarified the origins narrative far sooner—at least a year ago, and likely more.China has, for years, been keen on pushing the narrative that the pandemic didn’t start within its borders. In early 2020, a Chinese official suggested that the novel coronavirus may have emerged from a U.S. Army lab in Maryland. The notion that a dangerous virus sprang out from wet-market mammals echoed the beginnings of the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic two decades ago—and this time, officials immediately shut down the Huanan market, and vehemently pushed back against assertions that live animals being sold illegally in the country were to blame; a WHO investigation in March 2021 took the same line. “No verified reports of live mammals being sold around 2019 were found,” the report stated. But just three months later, in June 2021, a team of researchers published a study documenting tens of thousands of mammals for sale in wet markets in Wuhan between 2017 and late 2019, including at Huanan. The animals were kept in largely illegal, cramped, and unhygienic settings—conditions conducive to viral transmission—and among them were more than 1,000 raccoon dogs. Holmes himself had been at the market in 2014 and snapped a photo at Stall 29, clearly showing a raccoon dog in a cage; another set of images from the venue, captured by a local in December 2019 and later shared on Weibo, caught the animals on film as well—right around the time that the first recorded SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans occurred.And yet, Chinese researchers maintained their stance. As Jon Cohen reported for Science magazine last year, scientists from several of China’s largest academic institutions posted a preprint in September 2021 concluding that a massive nationwide survey of bats—the likeliest original source of the coronavirus before it jumped into an intermediate host, such as raccoon dogs, and then into us—had turned up no relatives of SARS-CoV-2. The implication, the team behind the paper asserted, was that relatives of the coronavirus were “extremely rare” in the region, making it unlikely that the pandemic had started there. The findings directly contradicted others showing that cousins of SARS-CoV-2 were indeed circulating in China’s bats. (Local bats have also been found to harbor viruses related to SARS-CoV-1.)The original Chinese analysis of the Huanan market swabs, from February 2022, also stuck with China’s party line on the pandemic. One of the report’s graphs suggested that viral material at the market had been mixed up with genetic material of multiple animal species—a data trail that should have led to further inquiry or conclusions, but that the Chinese researchers appear to have ignored. Their report noted only humans as being linked to SARS-CoV-2, stating that its findings “highly” suggested that any viral material at the market came from people (at least one of whom, presumably, picked it up elsewhere and ferried it into the venue). The Huanan market, the study’s authors wrote, “might have acted as an amplifier” for the epidemic. But “more work involving international coordination” would be needed to suss out the “real origins of SARS-CoV-2.”The wording of that report baffled many scientists in Europe, North America, and Australia, several of whom had, almost exactly 24 hours after the release of the China CDC preprint, published early versions of their own studies, concluding that the Huanan market was the pandemic’s probable epicenter—and that SARS-CoV-2 might have made its hop into humans from the venue twice at the end of 2019. Itching to get their hands on China CDC’s raw data, some of the researchers took to regularly trawling GISAID, occasionally at odd hours—the only reason that Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, spotted the sequences pinging onto the server late last Thursday night with no warning or fanfare.Within hours of downloading the data and starting their own analysis, the researchers found their suspicions confirmed. Several surfaces in and around one stall at the market, including a cart and a defeathering machine, produced virus-positive samples that also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs—in a couple of cases, at higher concentrations than of human genomes. It was Stall 29—the same spot where Holmes had snapped the photo of the raccoon dog, nearly a decade before.Slam-dunk evidence for a raccoon-dog host—or another animal—could still emerge. In the hunt for the wild source of MERS, another coronavirus that caused a deadly outbreak in 2012, researchers were eventually able to identify the pathogen in camels, which are thought to have caught their initial infection from bats—and which still harbor the virus today; a similar story has played out for Nipah virus, which hopscotched from bats to pigs to us.Read: Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choiceProof of that caliber, though, may never turn up for SARS-CoV-2. (Nailing wild origins is rarely simple: Despite a years-long search, the wild host for Ebola still has not been definitively pinpointed.) Which leaves just enough ambiguity to keep debate about the pandemic’s origins running, potentially indefinitely. Skeptics will likely be eager to poke holes in the team’s new findings—pointing out, for instance, that it’s technically possible for genetic material from viruses and animals to end up sloshed together in the environment even if an infection didn’t take place. Maybe an infected human visited the market and inadvertently deposited viral RNA near an animal’s crate.But an infected animal, with no third-party contamination, still seems by far the most plausible explanation for the samples’ genetic contents, several experts told me; other scenarios require contortions of logic and, more important, additional proof. Even prior to the reveal of the new data, Gronvall told me, “I think the evidence is actually more sturdy for COVID than it is for many others.” The strength of the data might even, in at least one way, best what’s available for SARS-CoV-1: Although scientists have isolated SARS-CoV-1-like viruses from a wet-market-traded mammal host, the palm civet, those samples were taken months after the outbreak began—and the viral variants found weren’t exactly identical to the ones in human patients. The versions of SARS-CoV-2 tugged out of several Huanan-market samples, meanwhile, are a dead ringer for the ones that sickened humans with COVID early on.The debate over SARS-CoV-2’s origins has raged for nearly as long as the pandemic itself—outlasting lockdowns, widespread masking, even the first version of the COVID vaccines. And as long as there is murkiness to cling to, it may never fully resolve. While evidence for an animal spillover has mounted over time, so too have questions about the possibility that the virus escaped from a laboratory. When President Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community to review the matter, four government agencies and the National Intelligence Council pointed to a natural origin, while two others guessed that it was a lab leak. (None of these assessments were made with high confidence; a bill passed in both the House and Senate would, 90 days after it becomes a law, require the Biden administration to declassify underlying intelligence.)If this new level of scientific evidence does conclusively tip the origins debate toward the animal route, it will be, in one way, a major letdown. It will mean that SARS-CoV-2 breached our borders because we once again mismanaged our relationship with wildlife—that we failed to prevent this epidemic for the same reason we failed, and could fail again, to prevent so many of the rest.

GPT-4 is here, and you’ve probably heard a good bit about it already. It’s a smarter, faster, more powerful engine for AI programs such as ChatGPT. It can turn a hand-sketched design into a functional website and help with your taxes. It got a 5 on the AP Art History test. There were already fears about AI coming for white-collar work, disrupting education, and so much else, and there was some healthy skepticism about those fears. So where does a more powerful AI leave us?Perhaps overwhelmed or even tired, depending on your leanings. I feel both at once. It’s hard to argue that new large language models, or LLMs, aren’t a genuine engineering feat, and it’s exciting to experience advancements that feel magical, even if they’re just computational. But nonstop hype around a technology that is still nascent risks grinding people down because being constantly bombarded by promises of a future that will look very little like the past is both exhausting and unnerving. Any announcement of a technological achievement at the scale of OpenAI’s newest model inevitably sidesteps crucial questions—ones that simply don’t fit neatly into a demo video or blog post. What does the world look like when GPT-4 and similar models are embedded into everyday life? And how are we supposed to conceptualize these technologies at all when we’re still grappling with their still quite novel, but certainly less powerful, predecessors, including ChatGPT?Over the past few weeks, I’ve put questions like these to AI researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, and people who are currently building AI applications. I’ve become obsessive about trying to wrap my head around this moment, because I’ve rarely felt less oriented toward a piece of technology than I do toward generative AI. When reading headlines and academic papers or simply stumbling into discussions between researchers or boosters on Twitter, even the near future of an AI-infused world feels like a mirage or an optical illusion. Conversations about AI quickly veer into unfocused territory and become kaleidoscopic, broad, and vague. How could they not?The more people I talked with, the more it became clear that there aren’t great answers to the big questions. Perhaps the best phrase I’ve heard to capture this feeling comes from Nathan Labenz, an entrepreneur who builds AI video technology at his company, Waymark: “Pretty radical uncertainty.”He already uses tools like ChatGPT to automate small administrative tasks such as annotating video clips. To do this, he’ll break videos down into still frames and use different AI models that do things such as text recognition, aesthetic evaluation, and captioning—processes that are slow and cumbersome when done manually. With this in mind, Labenz anticipates “a future of abundant expertise,” imagining, say, AI-assisted doctors who can use the technology to evaluate photos or lists of symptoms to make diagnoses (even as error and bias continue to plague current AI health-care tools). But the bigger questions—the existential ones—cast a shadow. “I don’t think we’re ready for what we’re creating,” he told me. AI, deployed at scale, reminds him of an invasive species: “They start somewhere and, over enough time, they colonize parts of the world … They do it and do it fast and it has all these cascading impacts on different ecosystems. Some organisms are displaced, sometimes landscapes change, all because something moved in.”[Read: Welcome to the big blur]The uncertainty is echoed by others I spoke with, including an employee at a major technology company that is actively engineering large language models. They don’t seem to know exactly what they’re building, even as they rush to build it. (I’m withholding the names of this employee and the company because the employee is prohibited from talking about the company’s products.)“The doomer fear among people who work on this stuff,” the employee said, “is that we still don’t know a lot about how large language models work.” For some technologists, the black-box notion represents boundless potential and the ability for machines to make humanlike inferences, though skeptics suggest that uncertainty makes addressing AI safety and alignment problems exponentially difficult as the technology matures.There’s always been tension in the field of AI—in some ways, our confused moment is really nothing new. Computer scientists have long held that we can build truly intelligent machines, and that such a future is around the corner. In the 1960s, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work that a man can do.” Such overconfidence has given cynics reason to write off AI pontificators as the computer scientists who cried sentience!Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute who has been researching the field of artificial intelligence for decades, told me that this question—whether AI could ever approach something like human understanding—is a central disagreement among people who study this stuff. “Some extremely prominent people who are researchers are saying these machines maybe have the beginnings of consciousness and understanding of language, while the other extreme is that this is a bunch of blurry JPEGs and these models are merely stochastic parrots,” she said, referencing a term coined by the linguist and AI critic Emily M. Bender to describe how LLMs stitch together words based on probabilities and without any understanding. Most important, a stochastic parrot does not understand meaning. “It’s so hard to contextualize, because this is a phenomenon where the experts themselves can’t agree,” Mitchell said.One of her recent papers illustrates that disagreement. She cites a survey from last year that asked 480 natural-language researchers if they believed that “some generative model trained only on text, given enough data and computational resources, could understand natural language in some non-trivial sense.” Fifty-one percent of respondents agreed and 49 percent disagreed. This division makes evaluating large language models tricky. GPT-4’s marketing centers on its ability to perform exceptionally on a suite of standardized tests, but, as Mitchell has written, “when applying tests designed for humans to LLMs, interpreting the results can rely on assumptions about human cognition that may not be true at all for these models.” It’s possible, she argues, that the performance benchmarks for these LLMs are not adequate and that new ones are needed.There are plenty of reasons for all of these splits, but one that sticks with me is that understanding why a large language model like the one powering ChatGPT arrived at a particular inference is difficult, if not impossible. Engineers know what data sets an AI is trained on and can fine-tune the model by adjusting how different factors are weighted. Safety consultants can create parameters and guardrails for systems to make sure that, say, the model doesn’t help somebody plan an effective school shooting or give a recipe to build a chemical weapon. But, according to experts, to actually parse why a program generated a specific result is a bit like trying to understand the intricacies of human cognition: Where does a given thought in your head come from?The fundamental lack of common understanding has not stopped the tech giants from plowing ahead without providing valuable, necessary transparency around their tools. (See, for example, how Microsoft’s rush to beat Google to the search-chatbot market led to existential, even hostile interactions between people and the program as the Bing chatbot appeared to go rogue.) As they mature, models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s LLaMA, and Google’s LaMDA will be licensed by countless companies and infused into their products. ChatGPT’s API has already been licensed out to third parties. Labenz described the future as generative AI models “sitting at millions of different nodes and products that help to get things done.”AI hype and boosterism make talking about what the near future might look like difficult. The “AI revolution” could ultimately take the form of prosaic integrations at the enterprise level. The recent announcement of a partnership between the Bain & Company consultant group and OpenAI offers a preview of this type of lucrative, if soulless, collaboration, which promises to “offer tangible benefits across industries and business functions—hyperefficient content creation, highly personalized marketing, more streamlined customer service operations.”These collaborations will bring ChatGPT-style generative tools into tens of thousands of companies’ workflows. Millions of people who have no interest in seeking out a chatbot in a web browser will encounter these applications through productivity software that they use everyday, such as Slack and Microsoft Office. This week, Google announced that it would incorporate generative-AI tools into all of its Workspace products, including Gmail, Docs, and Sheets, to do things such as summarizing a long email thread or writing a three-paragraph email based on a one-sentence prompt. (Microsoft announced a similar product too.) Such integrations might turn out to be purely ornamental, or they could reshuffle thousands of mid-level knowledge-worker jobs. It’s possible that these tools don’t kill all of our jobs, but instead turn people into middle managers of AI tools.The next few months might go like this: You will hear stories of call-center employees in rural areas whose jobs have been replaced by chatbots. Law-review journals might debate GPT-4 co-authorship in legal briefs. There will be regulatory fights and lawsuits over copyright and intellectual property. Conversations about the ethics of AI adoption will grow in volume as new products make little corners of our lives better but also subtly worse. Say, for example, your smart fridge gets an AI-powered chatbot that can tell you when your raw chicken has gone bad, but it also gives false positives from time to time and leads to food waste: Is that a net positive or net negative for society? There might be great art or music created with generative AI, and there will definitely be deepfakes and other horrible abuses of these tools. Beyond this kind of basic pontification, no one can know for sure what the future holds. Remember: radical uncertainty.[Read: We haven’t seen the worst of fake news]Even so, companies like OpenAI will continue to build out bigger models that can handle more parameters and operate more efficiently. The world hadn’t even come to grips with ChatGPT before GPT-4 rolled out this week. “Because the upside of AGI is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop its development forever,” OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, wrote in a blog post last month, referring to artificial general intelligence, or machines that are on par with human thinking. “Instead, society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right.” Like most philosophical conversations about AGI, Altman’s post oscillates between the vague benefits of such a radical tool (“providing a great force multiplier for human ingenuity and creativity”) and the ominous-but-also-vague risks (“misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption” that could be “existential”) it might entail.Meanwhile, the computational power demanded by this technology will continue to increase, with the potential to become staggering. AI likely could eventually demand supercomputers that cost an astronomical amount of money to build (by some estimates, Bing’s AI chatbot could “need at least $4 billion of infrastructure to serve responses to all users”), and it’s unclear how that would be financed, or what strings might ultimately get attached to related fundraising. No one—Altman included—could ever fully answer why they should be the ones trusted with and responsible for bringing what he argues is potentially civilization-ending technology into the world.Of course, as Mitchell notes, the basics of OpenAI’s dreamed-of AGI—how we can even define or recognize a machine’s intelligence—are unsettled debates. Once again, the wider our aperture, the more this technology behaves and feels like an optical illusion, even a mirage. Pinning it down is impossible. The further we zoom out, the harder it is to see what we’re building and whether it’s worthwhile.Recently, I had one of these debates with Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who wrote a book with Henry Kissinger about AI and the future of humanity. Near the end of our conversation, Schmidt brought up an elaborate dystopian example of AI tools taking hateful messages from racists and, essentially, optimizing them for wider distribution. In this situation, the company behind the AI is effectively doubling the capacity for evil by serving the goals of the bigot, even if it intends to do no harm. “I picked the dystopian example to make the point,” Schmidt told me—that it’s important for the right people to spend the time and energy and money to shape these tools early. “The reason we’re marching toward this technological revolution is it is a material improvement in human intelligence. You’re having something that you can communicate with, they can give you advice that’s reasonably accurate. It’s pretty powerful. It will lead to all sorts of problems.”I asked Schmidt if he genuinely thought such a tradeoff was worth it. “My answer,” he said, “is hell yeah.” But I found his rationale unconvincing. “If you think about the biggest problems in the world, they are all really hard—climate change, human organizations, and so forth. And so, I always want people to be smarter. The reason I picked a dystopian example is because we didn’t understand such things when we built up social media 15 years ago. We didn’t know what would happen with election interference and crazy people. We didn’t understand it and I don’t want us to make the same mistakes again.”Having spent the past decade reporting on the platforms, architecture, and societal repercussions of social media, I can’t help but feel that the systems, though human and deeply complex, are of a different technological magnitude than the scale and complexity of large language models and generative-AI tools. The problems—which their founders didn’t anticipate—weren’t wild, unimaginable, novel problems of humanity. They were reasonably predictable problems of connecting the world and democratizing speech at scale for profit at lightning speed. They were the product of a small handful of people obsessed with what was technologically possible and with dreams of rewiring society.Trying to find the perfect analogy to contextualize what a true, lasting AI revolution might look like without falling victim to the most overzealous marketers or doomers is futile. In my conversations, the comparisons ranged from the agricultural revolution to the industrial revolution to the advent of the internet or social media. But one comparison never came up, and I can’t stop thinking about it: nuclear fission and the development of nuclear weapons.As dramatic as this sounds, I don’t lie awake thinking of Skynet murdering me—I don’t even feel like I understand what advancements would need to happen with the technology for killer AGI to become a genuine concern. Nor do I think large language models are going to kill us all. The nuclear comparison isn’t about any version of the technology we have now—it is related to the bluster and hand-wringing from true believers and organizations about what technologists might be building toward. I lack the technical understanding to know what later iterations of this technology could be capable of, and I don’t wish to buy into hype or sell somebody’s lucrative, speculative vision. I am also stuck on the notion, voiced by some of these visionaries, that AI’s future development might potentially be an extinction-level threat.ChatGPT doesn’t really resemble the Manhattan Project, obviously. But I wonder if the existential feeling that seeps into most of my AI conversations parallels the feelings inside Los Alamos in the 1940s. I’m sure there were questions then. If we don’t build it, won’t someone else? Will this make us safer? Should we take on monumental risk simply because we can? Like everything about our AI moment, what I find calming is also what I find disquieting. At least those people knew what they were building.

The staff of the Literary Museum, in Kharkiv, are experts in history, narrative, and terror. The museum was started by cultural activists who, in the waning days of the U.S.S.R., wanted to document the Ukrainian Cultural Renaissance. In the nineteen-twenties, following the abolition of the Russian Empire and its censorship, and aided by Bolshevik policies that encouraged the cultivation of local languages and literatures in the former colonies, dozens of writers and poets took part in the development of modern Ukrainian-language literature. Kharkiv was at the center of this movement, which gave rise to such slogans as “Death to Dostoyevskyism! Up with the Cultural Renaissance!” and “Away from Moscow! Go to Europe!” But a decade later, Joseph Stalin reversed the policies, which had been known as “nativization,” and reverted to the imperial approach of forced Russification. Leaders of the Ukrainian Cultural Renaissance were among the victims of the first mass execution of the Great Terror, in Sandarmokh, in 1937. Altogether more than two hundred Ukrainian-language writers were executed, and scores more were imprisoned and persecuted. The movement is now often referred to as the Executed Renaissance.

Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly claimed that Ukraine as an independent country didn’t exist, that there was no such thing as a separate Ukrainian language, or a separate Ukrainian people. He specifically denounced the early Bolshevik policies of “nativization.” The people of the Kharkiv Literary Museum were familiar with this narrative. A quote stencilled on the wall of the museum as part of an exhibit on the Executed Renaissance served as a reminder. Ascribed to a founding father of Soviet literature, Maxim Gorky, it said that there was “no need” to translate work from Russian into Ukrainian, because Ukrainians spoke a “dialect” of Russian. History told the staff that Russians would once again use violence and terror to enforce this vision of history, in which neither the country nor the language exists.

In a small building in Kharkiv, the team of the Literary Museum was making plans for quickly packing up its collection and retrofitting its basement to function as a bomb shelter. They had to preserve archival material—letters, manuscripts, rare copies of books, including manuscripts and original editions, by Executed Renaissance leaders such as Mykola Khvylovy, Mykola Kulish, and Maik Yohansen—that had been safeguarded, at great peril, from the Soviet regime. By February 16th, eight days before the invasion, they were prepared. They also scheduled two training sessions for museum staff: on administering emergency medical aid and on “war-proofing” residential buildings.

The training sessions were scheduled for February 24th, 2022. But that day Russian missiles began falling across the country. Tetyana Pylypchuk, the fifty-one-year-old director of the museum, cancelled the training sessions and boxed up the collection with her staff, according to plan. The bomb shelter in the basement was ready. Staff and family members who lived in the city, many in the Kharkiv neighborhood of Saltivka, which was now under heavy shelling—eight people in all—came to stay in the shelter, where they would spend the next two weeks. Tetyana imagined that this invasion would look like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: tanks rolling down city streets met by defiant but helpless citizens. She decided to paint a poster, which read, “Russian soldier, go home. We have no vodka here. Prague 1968.”

She did not imagine that the Ukrainian military would be able to stop the Russian forces from entering Kharkiv. But she also didn’t imagine that Russian soldiers would systematically torture, rape, pillage, and kill civilians, as they did in Bucha, Borodyanka, and the town of Izyum, some seventy miles from Kharkiv. In other words, she didn’t imagine that Russian soldiers would act the way Soviet soldiers did during their westward march through Europe in the Second World War—even though Russian propaganda was equating Ukrainians with Nazis. Some narratives are too frightening to absorb.

Kharkiv’s Independence Square, where a humanitarian-relief tent has served as both a volunteer clearing house and a reminder of the ongoing war.

On February 25th, Tetyana received a call from an old colleague who had been involved in the volunteer military-support movement since the first Russian invasion, in 2014. She needed help getting food for seventy people at the front line, which was then at the boundary of the city. Tetyana walked over to Freedom Square, where a giant blue-and-yellow tent with a banner reading “Everything for victory” had stood since 2014. It had functioned as both a volunteer clearing house and a reminder of the ongoing war (a few days later, the tent would be in shambles when a missile attack destroyed the regional-administration building on the square). A man was weaving a camouflage net next to the tent, as people were starting to do all over town, and have continued to do, to help Ukrainian troops mask their positions. He gave Tetyana a tip on how to contact food wholesalers. Tetyana spent the next month helping to procure and deliver different kinds of supplies that varied from cooked meals for the front to mats taken from local gyms for people sleeping in basements to hide from Russian bombs. She was awed by how quickly the volunteer effort came together, how seamlessly it seemed to involve every civilian in the city. Then she and two other staff members, helped by the Territorial Defense forces, evacuated the museum’s boxed-up collection to a safer region of Ukraine. Tetyana’s staff assumed that she was evacuating too. But she always intended to return to Kharkiv, where, she felt, she would be “more useful.” On her way back, she accompanied thirty boxes of supplies that local volunteers had collected for the city.

For all that Tetyana knew about history, there was something she had never understood about war: people live with it. Her ideas of war had come from art—from photographs of the devastated city of Warsaw, which appeared deserted in the still images; from books that described battle and carnage. In real life, people got used to war quickly. Stores reopened. People returned to work, or went shopping, or went on dates, even as Russian rockets continued to fall.

Tetyana realized that she, too, needed to release the Pause button she felt she had pressed on her work. She recalled a conversation she’d had with her son, when he was ten, sixteen years earlier. He had asked about Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist who fought the Soviets, was incarcerated by the Nazis, and was finally murdered by the K.G.B., by poisoning, in Munich, in 1959. The Kremlin, in both its Soviet and current incarnations, has branded Bandera and his supporters, whom it called Banderovites, as Nazi collaborators; in post-Soviet Ukraine, Bandera is hailed as a hero. Tetyana’s son was trying to make sense of the competing narratives he received from school on the one hand and from older, Soviet-educated people on the other. “If Banderovites are heroes, then why were they fighting against us?” he asked. Tetyana had asked him where Banderovites had come from. “Western Ukraine,” her son said. And whom were they fighting against? Her son realized that some part of him—a child born after the collapse of the U.S.S.R.—identified with the imperial center. Tetyana’s work, at the museum and as a cultural activist in Kharkiv, was to help forge a post-colonial “us.”

On May 6th, a Russian missile destroyed the museum of Hryhorii Skovoroda, an eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher and poet, one of the most important Ukrainian cultural figures, who was from a village near modern-day Kharkiv. Tetyana spent the next morning crying. But she also felt a kind of relief. So this is how it will be, she thought. This was precisely the terror presaged by Putin’s articles and speeches, the systematic annihilation of Ukrainian culture. Ukrainian culture had to fight back.

Two weeks after the Skovoroda museum was destroyed, the Kharkiv Literary Museum went back to work. On Museum Night, when more than a hundred European museums hold public events, the museum in Kharkiv held one too, using a popular art center as its venue, because it is located in a basement. The topic for Museum Night was dismantling monuments to Alexander Pushkin. During the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and then following the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, monuments to Lenin were toppled all over Ukraine, as symbols of the empire: Russian, Soviet, and then Russian again. Following the most recent invasion, Ukrainian activists began calling for the toppling of monuments to Pushkin. Many were erected during Stalin’s purges, in 1937, to mark the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death. (My colleague Elif Batuman wrote about the movement in January). Early in the war, the German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yücel, President of PEN Germany, had quipped, “The enemy is Putin, not Pushkin.” Some Ukrainians, Russians, and others went down the rabbit hole of debating whether Pushkin’s poetry was chauvinist or imperialist. But the poetry was not the point—and neither was Pushkin, or even Putin. The point was that poetry had been instrumentalized, used as a weapon of the empire—whether Pushkin’s poems, in Russian, were taught to Ukrainian children who had little chance to learn Ukrainian classics, or Pushkin’s likeness was placed in one of Kharkiv’s central squares, to mark territory.

Part of “Books on Trial,” an exhibit that was largely dismantled and evacuated in February, 2022.

On November 9th, 2022, a monument to Pushkin was removed from Poetry Square, in the center of Kharkiv, where it had stood for more than a hundred years. The city council had resolved that the monument would be preserved off the street until after the war, when its future would be decided by the residents of the city. A significant street in the city, though, was still called Pushkinska. That, in a sense, sums up the space in which Kharkiv’s culture finds itself: it’s a largely Russian-speaking city with a rich but not widely studied Ukrainian literary heritage and a wealth of unexamined imperial heritage. Tetyana has realized that one of her jobs is to help the city and other Ukrainians figure out their position in relation to Russian culture. The writers of the Executed Renaissance had it right, she thinks: they called for viewing Russian culture, simply, as a foreign culture. But how exactly does one do that?

Americans were largely distrustful of Big Business at the start of the 20th century. By the 1980s and ’90s, they had decided that the problem wasn’t Wall Street, but Washington. According to Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, that flip was the result of a decadeslong propaganda campaign, masterminded by wealthy industrialists in their own self-interest. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market” Oreskes and co-author Erik M. Conway uncover how free market absolutists inserted their ideas and values into 20th-century politics, religion, culture, academia — and ultimately the national psyche. The Gazette spoke to Oreskes about how the fallout is hampering America’s ability to deal with major challenges, including climate change.
Q&A
Naomi Oreskes
GAZETTE: Your 2010 book “Merchants of Doubt” exposed how a small group of scientists obscured the facts on cigarette smoke and climate change in the late 20th century. You write that “The Big Myth” isn’t so much a sequel as a prequel to the earlier book. How so?
ORESKES: We go back further in time. When we finished “Merchants of Doubt,” we felt we had demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that climate change deniers weren’t motivated by questions about science. They were motivated by political questions about the appropriate role of government and anxieties borne out of the Cold War. They worried government regulation was a backdoor to communism. What we were left with was: Why would intelligent people accept what we call market fundamentalism? Especially because its basic arguments are refuted by the facts of history.
GAZETTE: Tell us how market fundamentalists got their start.
ORESKES: The story begins in the early 20th century with big battles over child labor and workplace safety. Most Americans today don’t realize how incredibly dangerous American capitalism was back then. One in 1,000 workers died or was severely injured in the workplace every year. That would be the equivalent of 1.5 million people today. Why were there so many more accidents in the United States than in Germany or the United Kingdom, which were comparatively industrialized? The answer people came up with was workmen’s compensation, which created incentives for business owners to make the workplace safer. There were people in the business community, like Andrew Carnegie, who supported it. But many opposed it. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a key player in our story, argued that this was an infringement on the freedom of businesses — businessmen — to operate as they saw fit.
GAZETTE: Why would they demand rights for individual, often wealthy, men but not workers at large?
ORESKES: One of the questions Erik and I always grapple with is: How did this make sense to the people we’re studying? One of the things we see, particularly in the 1930s, is they don’t believe in equality. We see this particularly in the writings of someone like Rose Wilder Lane or Noel Sargent, who was the secretary of NAM.
GAZETTE: Speaking of Rose Wilder Lane, you have some revelations about “Little House on the Prairie.”
ORESKES: Turns out, the “Little House” books were fabrications. First of all, Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t write them. She wrote rough notes for events that happened in her life. They were crafted into stories by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was a leading libertarian thinker and friend of President Herbert Hoover. Lane crafted the books as power parables about the success of the nuclear family through the dint of hard work and love, particularly patriarchal love, and without help from government. Second, it turns out the family was not successful. The true story was one of repeated failure, disappointment, and problems. Third, the federal government played a huge role in their lives. As white settlers, they wouldn’t have been there if not for the Homestead Act and Native American removals.
GAZETTE: Let’s talk about the transformation of President Ronald Reagan.
ORESKES: How did Reagan go from being not exactly a failed actor — but he made some pretty second-rate movies — to entering politics at a high level? The answer is found in the General Electric Corp. In the 1950s, they recruited Reagan to host a television show called “General Electric Theater.” I spent a whole day at the Reagan Library watching it, which was kind of fun. I remember one story involving an alcoholic. His family encourages him to get help, but he won’t. Finally, he says, “No, I’ve got to fix this on my own. Nobody else poured that alcohol down my throat!” It’s a view of alcoholism most wouldn’t agree with today, but it’s a typical story for “GE Theater”: That success rests entirely in our own hands. And it was successful — one of the top three programs in the late 1950s.
Hosting “GE Theater” was only half of Reagan’s job. The other half was going on the lecture circuit and promoting the GE ideology, which was extremely anti-union and anti-government. During this period, Reagan is transformed. He goes into GE a Democrat; he comes out an anti-government Republican. Working with GE in effect creates Reagan Republicanism.
GAZETTE: Is there a point in time when we see market fundamentalism really triumph?
ORESKES: It’s in a place that might surprise some readers, which is the Clinton administration. One of the things we show is that the phrase “big government” is part of this propaganda campaign. Back in the ’30s, NAM and its allies recognized that a lot of Americans hated big business. The notion of big government was consciously introduced as a means to shift people’s attitudes. Clinton buys into this with his famous line: “The era of big government is over.” And he institutes a number of reforms, including, crucially, the deregulation of telecommunications and financial markets. We think the evidence is clear that deregulation of financial markets was a catastrophe because it led directly to the 2008 financial collapse.
GAZETTE: Fast-forward to today: You write that we can’t rely on the private sector to solve climate change. Why?
ORESKES: Climate change is a classic market failure. This is when a legal activity like selling fossil fuels creates costs that are not reflected in what we pay. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, has called climate change the largest market failure in history. According to the International Monetary Fund — which is not exactly a left-wing organization — climate change costs the world over $1 trillion every year in damage to property, health effects, and other adverse effects. That’s $1 trillion passed on to us — the taxpayers, the consumers.
GAZETTE: What does Massachusetts tell us about the big myth?
ORESKES: Republicans love to hate Massachusetts; they call it Taxachusetts. But guess what! Massachusetts works really well. It’s highly educated. People have good jobs. People are able to pay their taxes. And our taxes go to things we like, like good schools and roads and excellent medical care. The reality is, people don’t thrive when everything is left to the market. People thrive when there’s an appropriate balance.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.How are your New Year’s resolutions going? Perhaps that’s a sore subject. Resolutions usually fail, sometimes even in the first few months of the year (one study found that half dissolved after three months), so odds are good that yours have too. If so, don’t feel too bad! Clearly, you’re in good company.If your resolutions have become a statistic, let me suggest a new approach for the remainder of the year: Create a list of anti-resolutions. These are things you want to not do this year, such as spending time with particular people who don’t bring out your best, or going places you don’t enjoy. That might sound a little too, well, negative, but it’s actually an approach to life improvement based on an ancient philosophical concept known as the via negativa.The via negativa was popularized in two ancient Christian treatises purportedly written by Dionysius the Areopagite, a fifth- or sixth-century theologian. Dionysius wrote that God could not be described with any worldly conception or name, and that he could be known only by contemplating what he is not. This paradox also shows up in the works of Thomas Aquinas, who argued in his 13th-century Summa Theologiae that if you think you understand God, you don’t.This is a bit of a mind-bender, I know. But stay with me here. The via negativa, at its core, is about recognizing that when you don’t know the right way forward, you might succeed by focusing on what you know to be wrong instead. If you have been feeling stuck—in, say, your job or relationship—but don’t know exactly what to do to make things better, the via negativa might be exactly what you need.People casually use a secular version of the via negativa all the time without realizing it. For example, after a weekend at the beach with your family, you can probably list the irritations far more easily than the pleasant aspects, even if on balance the trip was all right.This isn’t (necessarily) because you’re a negative person. Everyone has what psychologists call “negativity bias,” a propensity to notice the details you dislike over those you like in any situation. This bias probably evolved in humans for self-protection: In times past, missing a potential threat (for example, an angry face) could cost you your life, while missing a small delight (for example, someone’s sweet smile) was not so risky. Negativity bias also helps explain what some psychologists have called the “positivity ratio”—in order to classify an experience as positive, we generally need to feel more good emotions than bad ones.[From the January/February 2018 issue: The power of negative thinking]The negativity bias might seem regrettable, but it is extremely useful if we harness it properly using the via negativa. As the mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in his 2012 book, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, the via negativa gives us “subtractive knowledge” that is specific and targeted, and if we pay careful attention, can tangibly improve our situation.Take the beach weekend as an example. When you get home, you’ll have a list of things you experienced, and you can easily name the ones you didn’t like and don’t want to repeat next time (for example, bringing your brother-in-law). In contrast, the things you might add (such as a different guest, who, you hope, won’t get arrested) are hypothetical. Subtractive knowledge is practically guaranteed to lead to improvement, but additive knowledge is often just a guess.To use the via negativa to improve your life, start by making a to-don’t list to go along with your to-do list. Write down the things you do out of habit or obligation, even though they lower your spirits. Perhaps you’ll resolve to avoid a few toxic friends. Maybe you will delete your social-media accounts because they eat up your time and make you feel lonely.This strategy works in many other areas of life. Because of the nature of my research, many people reach out to me for advice about retirement, and I always start with the via negativa. I ask them to list the parts of their professional and social lives they most dislike. For many of them, it’s the feeling of being constantly in a rush: They can’t take their time in a conversation, at lunch, or at the gym, because they have to get to the next thing. Then I ask them to imagine a daily and weekly routine without these obligations. Retirement, I tell them, is not inactivity; it is simply getting rid of the parts of your schedule that prevent you from lingering over the things you are enjoying. The best retirement plans start with a to-don’t list, which leads to a ventilation of your schedule that will reliably increase your happiness with zero boredom.Similarly, when I speak with students or friends who have just ended a bad relationship, many of them ask how to avoid making the mistakes that led to the recent breakup. The answer is the via negativa. After a relationship ends, write down a list of all the dimensions of your romance that were problematic, and that you should avoid in the future if possible. Be very specific, such as “Do not get a pet together” or “Do not move into his van.” Make sure you look at your to-don’t list when you start to date again, so the neurochemical flush of new love doesn’t overwhelm your brain’s negativity bias.[Read: How to stop dating people who are wrong for you]The via negativa is also useful for reviving an existing romance that isn’t going so well. If that’s the case for you and your beloved, sit down together and ask yourselves, “What are we doing that is making us unhappy?” Then resolve together to chip away the detritus harming your relationship and find a much better one within the old shell.The via negativa can solve a lot of practical problems. But more important, it has the potential to give us self-knowledge we cannot attain in any other way. Many traditions teach that there is a true self in each of us that is hard to see clearly. Hinduism, for example, offers the concept of Atman, which is the true self. Atman is difficult to comprehend, though, because it is obscured by upādāna—attachments—in the form of vanities, baubles, and distractions. For example, if you always introduce yourself in terms of your job, you are offering others a symbol of yourself instead of your true self—and you probably do this in your own mind as well, which leads to a spiritual emptiness.[Read: Don’t objectify yourself]The solution is not to try to see through the cloud of your attachments, but rather to undertake a process encapsulated in the Sanskrit expression neti-neti, which means “not this, not this.” It is to eliminate the things that are not truly you—for example, your career, your money, your looks, your social-media following. Write down the items on that list. Each day, recite all of the things you are not, such as “I am not my job title.” You might just find that this via negativa has introduced you to yourself.

The Biden administration has been working to get diplomacy between China and the United States back on track, in part by quietly dampening criticism of the Chinese government on a range of issues. This looks to many to be a return to old patterns of failed engagement that play into Beijing’s hands.

President Biden clearly wants to reestablish high-level dialogue with Chinese President Xi Jinping after Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his trip to China last month. Officials and lawmakers have noticed that the State Department has been less vocal recently in calling out China’s bad behavior regarding drug trafficking, trade with Iran, human rights and other issues.

Two senior officials speaking on behalf of the State Department pushed back on this accusation, arguing that the department is “not pulling its punches.”

“We are committed to the proposition that we can compete, we can contest, and we can even potentially cooperate with China where our interests align, at the same time,” one official told me, defending the administration’s overall China strategy.

But there is evidence in the public record to support the charge that criticism has been toned down. On the issue of drug trafficking, for example, a Jan. 30 Treasury Department press release announcing sanctions on Mexican fentanyl producers mentioned that the precursor chemicals often come from China. A State Department press release on the same announcement made no mention of China.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. ambassador to Japan, confronted Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman about the difference at a hearing last month. “I’m gravely concerned the State Department omitted mentioning China from these fentanyl sanctions because the secretary of state wanted to have this trip to Beijing,” Hagerty said.

“Absolutely not the case, Senator,” Sherman responded.

In fact, the State Department officials confirmed that the Office of China Coordination did remove the reference to China from the press release, and Sherman oversees this team. But the officials maintain Sherman was being truthful because the change was made not over concerns the trip would be canceled. Rather, they said, it was because Blinken was set to discuss the issue in Beijing, and he didn’t want to spoil his diplomatic play.

To be sure, it makes sense that Blinken would want to enlist Beijing’s cooperation on counternarcotics — to restart a dialogue that China cut off after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan last August. But omitting the truth from public messaging amounts to obscuring China’s culpability and makes punitive actions harder to pursue.

“The U.S. should always prioritize strong and resolved actions, especially to protect key U.S. and allied interests, over the naive wish that our unilateral restraint will persuade China to act more responsibly and somehow ‘reset’ the U.S.-China strategic rivalry,” Hagerty told me.

In a similar case, a Feb. 9 Treasury Department news release on Iran sanctions identified China as a destination for illicit oil. But in a State Department tweet thread that day “China” was changed to “East Asia.” The two State Department officials said this change was made by the Iran team, not the China team, and therefore was not directed at appeasing Beijing.

There are other signs the State Department is toning down criticism of China. In late January, Blinken, Sherman and other top officials met with representatives of the Tibetan, Uyghur and Hong Kong activist communities ahead of Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing. Afterward, the attendees were disappointed that the State Department issued only one brief tweet about the meeting and did not release the official photo, according to attendee Nury Turkel, a Uyghur American lawyer who chairs the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Officials said the activists’ identities were kept secret due to privacy concerns, but Turkel said this was a break from past administrations, which publicized the photos.

“We need to be coherent and persistent with our messaging that the United States prioritizes human rights and will not back down from our position of strength to secure a meaningless verbal commitment to cooperation from a genocidal regime,” he told me.

In fairness, the State Department faces a difficult challenge in pursuing cooperation with China while simultaneously holding Beijing to account. But there’s a growing sense that pursuing high-level dialogue has become a greater priority than addressing the underlying problems.

Some people argue that confronting China’s bad actions publicly is dangerous because it could escalate tensions. In fact, that is the Chinese Communist Party’s line. But despite the Biden administration’s dampened criticism, the Chinese leadership has been ramping up its angry rhetoric and accusations leveled at the United States.

Beijing offers smooth relations in exchange for Washington backing off criticizing the Chinese government. By playing into this dynamic, the Biden administration only encourages the Chinese to demand still more concessions. Diplomacy should be conducted to achieve goals. It should not become an end in itself.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekI was overwhelmed by your responses to last week’s question on cars! So for now, I’m going to hold off on a new question and promise to send out your excellent thoughts in the next newsletter. Meanwhile, I welcome your correspondence if you have suggestions for future questions, thoughts on what is below, or anything on a subject you’re confident I’ll never ask about.You can get in touch at conor@theatlantic.com, or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteLast week, the federal judge Kyle Duncan traveled to the highly ranked law school at Stanford University. He intended to deliver a prepared speech on controversial cases in his circuit that present difficult issues because, as he told David Lat, “the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on them is in flux.” Despite various disagreements with Duncan’s political and jurisprudential views, I’d value attending such a speech: It would be an extraordinary opportunity to gain insight into how a jurist with a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit thinks about upcoming cases and to pose probing questions that could clarify or perhaps even change his thinking. I’d listen even more carefully if I hoped to one day overturn one of his precedents as a lawyer.But that’s not how the event was understood by a large group of progressive student protesters or by Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion. As the event began, roughly 100 student protesters who object to many of Duncan’s views and rulings stood in a line outside the event “to boo those who entered,” Lat reported, “with some students calling out individual classmates—e.g., ‘Shame, John Smith’—à la Cersei’s Walk of Atonement on Game of Thrones.” Then the protesters disrupted the event so severely that the judge was unable to continue his remarks. For a long time, administrators stood by without intervening. Finally, Steinbach asked everyone to quiet down and granted that Stanford’s commitment to free speech would be threatened by shutting down an invited speaker. But she also expressed doubt that holding the event was “worth the pain” and “the division that this causes” and mused that maybe free-speech values should be reconsidered.In most “deplatforming” debates, the illiberal side argues that giving a speaker a platform gives them more power to do harm. This controversy is distinguishable in part because the judge in question will have exactly the same lifetime appointment and his rulings will carry exactly the same force of law whether or not he ever speaks at Stanford or any other law school.  The mere fact that he was invited to speak on campus was the issue.In a post at The Popehat Report, the attorney and First Amendment expert Ken White offers scathing critiques of the Federalist Society, Judge Duncan, and the students who stopped the event:
Students think that they should be able to dictate which speakers their peers invite, who can speak, what they can say, and who can listen. They’re not satisfied with the most free-speech-exceptionalist system in the world that lets them respond to speech by assembling, protesting, and reviling people of authority like Judge Duncan. They demand the right not just to speak, but to control the speech of others. That’s straight-up thuggish, an aspiration born of a fascist soul. These are law students. They are training to express themselves for a living. If their view is “we can’t respond to awful speech, we can only stop it from happening,” then they’re going to be terrible lawyers.
They believe they discovered the plea “yes, but what you don’t understand is that this speech is really bad.” They believe that they are so self-evidently right, good, trustworthy, and noble that it’s obvious that we should let them decide who talks and who doesn’t. And they are too hubris-swollen — not too stupid, but too drunk with self-righteousness — to see that exceptions to free speech have always been used most harmfully against the powerless ... They’re too full of themselves to see that “let a crowd decide who is allowed to speak” is a horrific norm to promote with grotesque historic resonance.
White’s focus on freedom of speech is appropriate, especially given this is happening at a university in California, where a long-standing state law compels nonreligious, private institutions of higher education to comply with governmental free-speech laws.But I want to talk about a different passage in White’s post:
Stanford students set out to protest the deliberately provocative invitation of Judge Duncan. They started great, modeling the variety of means available to them. They put up fliers denouncing Judge Duncan and FedSoc, they led a vigorous protest in the halls, they arrived at the speech with suitably blunt signs about Judge Duncan. Now, critics will fault them for even this, tone-policing their messages or suggesting that they ought to just sit down and have a Platonic dialogue with Judge Duncan or portraying the FedSoc members as victims of callout culture and shunning. That’s all bullshit. The protesting students’ rights and interests are neither inferior to nor superior to the interests of the FedSoc and Judge Duncan. Policing the civility of the response to speech and not speech itself is incoherent nonsense.
That passage elides the distinction between two different claims, one about the need to afford the same rights to speech and counterspeech, and the other about whether it ever makes sense to criticize tone or comportment or style or even substance. Were the students within their rights to chant “Shame!” at classmates for merely showing up to listen to an invited speaker? Yes. Was that an intelligent exercise of their rights to free expression? No. If they posted signs saying “Fuck Judge Duncan” in the halls tomorrow, would I defend the signs on free-speech grounds? Yes. Do I find it prudent for law students to choose modes of discourse that disadvantage brilliant legal reasoning in favor of the skill set of Andrew Dice Clay? No.Blunt criticism can be valuable.But it is not bullshit to advance the proposition that bad ideas are better met with logical, substantive pushback, whatever its tone, than mere shaming or empty invective; in law schools, we should prefer modes of discourse that advantage people who use careful, internally consistent arguments, not the slinging of shameless zingers, a mode that most advantages Donald Trump. If you’re ever on trial, do you want a legal system that finds you guilty or not guilty based on a careful adjudication of the facts or based on which lawyer can be most profane or scathing? The seeming failure of the Stanford protesters to think more than two steps ahead about the norms they’re embracing and the world those norms would create is striking.I’ll give you an even clearer example.The law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, later apologized to Judge Duncan. Martinez also sent an email to law-school students in which she wrote that “the way this event unfolded was not aligned with our institutional commitment to freedom of speech.”More specifically, she wrote:
It is a violation of the disruption policy to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event.” Heckling and other forms of interruption that prevent a speaker from making or completing a presentation are inconsistent with the policy … While students in the room may do things such as quietly hold signs or ask pointed questions during question and answer periods, they may not do so in a way that disrupts the event or prevents the speaker from delivering their remarks … The school is reviewing what transpired and will work to ensure protocols are in place so that disruptions of this nature do not occur again.
Student activists could have responded to the apology that Martinez sent with an incisive brief that went point by point through her assertions, bringing to bear the strongest possible counterarguments, whatever those are.Here is what they did instead, according to reporting by Aaron Sibarium:
Hundreds of Stanford student activists on Monday lined the hallways to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, whom the activists shouted down last week … When Martinez’s class adjourned on Monday, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read “counter-speech is free speech,” stared silently at Martinez as she exited her first-year constitutional law class at 11:00 a.m., according to five students who witnessed the episode.
The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school, the students told the Washington Free Beacon. The majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves, two students in the class said. The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame …  Another student in the class, who likewise declined to protest, said the spectacle was a surreal experience … “The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean.”
Today, most Americans would, I think, reflexively regard that tactic as creepy.Question for the class: If accepted more widely, would the tactic––organizing hundreds of people to stand in masks outside professors’ classes to shame them for their ideas, forcing them and their students to exit through a gauntlet––tend to advantage liberals or authoritarians?Ideas That DisempowerSteinbach’s missteps began before the event, when the DEI dean sent an email to students that included this passage:
For some members of our community, Judge Duncan, during his time as an attorney and judge, has “repeatedly and proudly threatened healthcare and basic rights for marginalized communities, including LGBTQ+ people, Native Americans, immigrants, prisoners, Black voters, and women,” and his presence on campus represents a significant hit to their sense of belonging.
Is that what his presence on campus represented?The passage ill-serves Stanford’s law students: Steinbach validates the falsehood that the mere presence of a federal judge at a law school bears on whether any student belongs there—as if his physical proximity to the campus pollutes its purity, or as if his speaking there, at the invitation of a group that represents a small minority of students, somehow signifies Stanford Law School’s endorsement of the jurist’s moral character, political values, or jurisprudence. In reality, Stanford hosts many such events due to their obvious educational value: It is vital for lawyers to understand how judges think, perhaps wrongheaded judges most of all!Instead of validating a faulty premise that all but guarantees some students will continue to feel a “sense” that they don’t belong—even though they do in fact belong—the DEI dean ought to have reminded students that they were officially admitted by Stanford Law as many others were rejected, and that so long as they are enrolled, no outside speaker has any power to change that they belong. In addition to being true, this approach has the virtue of empowering students, rather than validating doubts that leave them at the mercy of any outside speaker with whom they disagree about abortion, voting rights, immigration, or any other issue.At the event, when ostensibly urging student protesters to quiet down, the DEI dean said this to the judge:
I have to ask myself and I’m not a cynic to ask this: Is the juice worth the squeeze? Is this worth it? … For many people in this law school … your advocacy, your opinions from the bench, land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights … I mean is it worth the pain that this causes and the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and COVID that that is worth this impact on the division of these people who have sat next to each other for years, who are going through what is the battle of law school together, so that they can go out into the world and be advocates?
And this is the division this has caused.
When I say “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” that’s what I’m asking. Is this worth it? And I hope so, and I’ll stay for your remarks to see, because I do want to know your perspective. I am not, you know, in the business of wanting to either shut down speech, because I do know that if they come for this group today, they will come for the group that I am part of tomorrow. I do believe that. And I understand why people feel like the harm is so great that we might need to reconsider those policies. And luckily they’re in a school where they can learn the advocacy skills to advocate for those changes.
Of course the educational value of a federal judge outlining his thinking on matters likely to come before him is worth the subjective upset it causes a subset of law students acculturated to feel harmed by the physical presence of people whose jurisprudential values they hold in contempt. Indeed, the educational value might be greatest for the most upset students if the administrators at Stanford stopped indulging their catastrophizing and started showing them that they are perfectly capable of engaging substantively with any and all viewpoints.Because that’s part of the job of lawyers! If they can’t handle being on the same college campus as a judge whose views they hold in contempt without experiencing harm, how are they supposed to excel before, say, a judge who sent one of their innocent clients to prison, or to represent a rapist as a public defender, or to sway a Supreme Court justice who isn’t totally convinced that torture is wrong? To be good lawyers, they must understand the legal arguments on all sides of issues, particularly the issues that they care about most, and especially when the arguments in question are advanced by someone who decides federal cases.Silicon Valley and the Collapse of SVBAt The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes:
Something I’ve always liked about the founders, venture capitalists, and tech evangelists that I’ve met over the years is their disposition toward technology as a lever for progress. They tend to see the world as a set of solvable problems, and I’d like to think that I generally share that attitude. But this techno-optimist mindset can tip into a conviction that tradition is a synonym for inefficiency and that every institution’s age is a measure of its incompetence. One cannot ignore the irony that tech has spent years blasting the slow and stodgy government systems of the 20th century only to cry out, in times of need, for the Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC to save the day—three institutions with a collective age of several hundred years.
I am still “long” on American invention and innovation, which is a way of saying that I’m long on Silicon Valley as a place and as an idea. But we are still learning exactly how much of this industry’s genius was a mere LIRP, or low-interest-rate phenomenon. The answer from the past 100 hours is that it’s more than I feared. As the saying goes, kind of: When the interest-rate tide goes out, you see who’s been LIRPing naked.
The Cost of Phoning HomeChristie Thompson lays out the case for making it cheaper for prisoners to call their families:
A phone call from prison is more than just a phone call — it’s one of the few remaining tethers to the outside world. Studies show strong family connections for prisoners can reduce the chance they will end up behind bars again, and even improve outcomes for kids with incarcerated parents. But the high cost of prison calls forces many low-income families to choose between talking with their loved ones or paying other bills.
A growing movement across the country aims to ease that burden — in some cases, $3 for a 15-minute call from jail — if not covering the cost of calls entirely.
This week, Colorado lawmakers advanced a bill that would make all state prison calls free. Family members testified to spending thousands of dollars on calls and going into significant debt. Worth Rises, a group pushing for free prison phone calls across the country, estimates Coloradans spend nearly $9 million a year to talk to relatives in prison. And according to a report from the nonprofit Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, women disproportionately bear this financial burden — they make up 87% of family members paying for phone calls and visits.
Provocation of the WeekAt the conclusion of a fascinating essay on the drinking fountain, Shannon Mattern makes the case that the familiar devices touch so many parts of civilization that they can help us understand it:
Drinking fountains are seemingly modest, even innocuous urban amenities that nonetheless require the coordination — and, ideally, the approbation — of myriad administrative stakeholders, from parks departments to public art commissions, from water and sewer to landscape maintenance to homeless services. Whether made from Aberdeen granite or stainless steel, whether ensconced in a leafy urban park or tucked into a nook in the local library, the drinking fountain constitutes a nexus of civic infrastructures and economies and ecosystems. And as media scholar Joanna Zylinska has argued, water infrastructures are particularly potent means of thinking through politics. “At a time when lofty yet disembodied notions of democracy and freedom are running thin,” she writes, “we need to work on developing more grounded and more fluid modes of political thinking and action, modes that take our relations with the environment seriously … Perceiving water as the elemental medium, before it is turned into a resource, an industrial product, or a background to modern economies, needs to be the first step on this journey.” Grounded, embodied, and anything but lofty, the drinking fountain reveals much about the charged politics of public spaces, and about the public things that, again to quote Bonnie Honig, “furnish the world of democratic life.”

The world of modern economic growth and rapid, continuous technological advance feels natural to us, as it’s the only world we’ve ever known. But of course it’s anything but natural: it’s only been around for a couple of centuries, while Homo sapiens has been on the scene for a couple of thousand centuries. So now, as the engines of growth and progress are sputtering, it’s appropriate to wonder: How long can this go on?
From my survey of the contributors to dynamism’s decline, I’ve come to the conclusion that the path of progress lies under a foot or two of molasses. Because of thermostatic cultural responses to mass affluence and the elimination of institutional competition, moving forward is going to be slower and messier than otherwise would be the case. But difficult progress is still possible progress. What I’m most concerned about is this: Somewhere down the road, does the path of progress terminate in a brick wall?
In my last essay, I concluded that the future of technological advance looks much more robust than the future of measured economic growth – that is, of ongoing increases in aggregate GDP. But for both, the most plausible candidate for a firm limit on future advance lies in the combination of innovative activity’s diminishing returns and the looming end and possible reversal of population growth. If a worker-hour of innovative activity yields less and less progress over time, and the total number of worker-hours is flat or declining, how can progress escape this squeeze?
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the concerted efforts of governments around the world to encourage couples to have more kids are unavailing. Financial incentives for new births and subsidies for childrearing succeed here and there in boosting birth rates, but not by enough. By the end of the 21st century, in this scenario, world population has already been shrinking for decades.
Recall, from my last essay, the economist Charles Jones’s grim assessment of the outlook under such circumstances: “When population growth is negative, both endogenous and semi-endogenous growth models produce what we call the Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”
Is there no escape?
Well, one possibility is to pull a Cadet Kirk and fiddle with the settings on this Kobayashi Maru simulation. Even if monetary incentives fail to maintain global fertility at above-replacement levels, population stagnation and decline might still be avoided.
I can see a couple of deus ex machina possibilities. The first is the development of anti-aging therapies that considerably extend the human life span. Widespread use of these therapies would reduce death rates, perhaps to the point that they fell below birth rates and the population started growing again. Furthermore, if people were living dramatically longer lives – let’s say the prime-age working years, once 25-54, expanded to 25-84 or 25-114 (that is, they doubled or tripled) – the twenty-something years devoted to raising kids would now constitute a much smaller fraction of people’s working lives. With this considerable drop in the relative cost of having children, we might expect a corresponding rise in the demand for kids and thus the fertility rate.
Meanwhile, there’s another new technology that could completely scramble current fertility dynamics, and it seems like less of a stretch than the conquest of aging. I’m talking about artificial wombs – devices capable of gestating babies from conception to delivery. Removing pregnancy and childbirth – and all their associated pains, inconveniences, and health risks – from the equation when weighing whether or not to have another child would significantly shift the calculus so that more couples decided in the affirmative.
Beyond that, more ominously, artificial wombs raise the possibility of reproduction outside the bonds of marriage, love, and sex. One can imagine the emergence of a reproduction industry, with either for-profit enterprises or charitable foundations that create and raise children – perhaps for a cut of the tax revenues they ultimately generate. Such a prospect strikes me as dystopian – but then again, so does the so-called Empty Planet result. Perhaps we’ll be forced to pick our poison.
It is noteworthy that, with the advent of female legal equality and birth control, the rate of reproduction – upon which hinges the growth and even continued existence of the larger society – now depends on decisions by women, and usually couples, to make huge personal commitments for intensely personal reasons. And there’s absolutely nothing about the contours of those choices that draws any distinction between having two or fewer children on the one hand versus more than two on the other – notwithstanding the fact that this is basically a life-or-death distinction as far as the future of the larger society is concerned. This hardly seems like a stable arrangement for the long term, so the possibility that alternative arrangements will be explored should not be discounted.
But let’s remember, we’re ultimately concerned about population growth because it’s a means to individual welfare – first of all, by creating more individuals; and beyond that, by encouraging economic growth and technological progress. If population stagnation or decline casts a shadow over future individual welfare because of its effects on growth and progress, doesn’t limitless population growth cast a shadow of its own?
Here we’ve entered the murky domain of population ethics, where we face what seems to me to be a genuinely vexing question: If our goal is to “live wisely and agreeable and well,” what’s the right total number of humans? Now, if the question is “what’s the right total number of humans in the Universe?”, I think the answer, in principle at least, is clear: the more, the merrier. With effectively limitless territory to spread out in and resources to use and consume, there’s no necessary upper limit on the number of people capable of living full and fulfilling lives. But if the question is “what’s the right total number of people on this one planet?”, things get much more complicated.
I’m emphatically on the other side of the anti-Promethean backlash, and I believe that we haven’t yet reached the limit on the number of people who can live wisely and agreeably and well together. With achievable advances in energy and food production, we can make possible materially abundant lives for everyone while arresting and reversing the great damage we’ve inflicted on the natural world. But even so, it seems to me like there has to be some upper limit on the total number of people who are capable of flourishing in a flourishing natural world.
At the very least, I don’t see how we could maintain the rate of population growth that obtained during the 20th century – that is, during the period when economic growth and technological progress were at their most robust. The world’s population quadrupled between 1900 and 2000 – does anybody really imagine that such a pace is sustainable indefinitely? In a couple hundred years, we’d be at 128 billion people, and it seems unlikely that the colonization of space and other worlds would have progressed to the point that a significant fraction of that total could live off-planet.
Even if technology had reached the point that 100+ billion people could live materially comfortable lives without wrecking the natural world – and that’s a pretty big if – I’m far from sure that such a world would compare favorably to one with a considerably smaller population. (In other words, I reject the repugnant conclusion.) For one thing, such a world would have to be characterized by extreme inequality with respect to physically scarce or “positional” goods. Access to such goods – visiting historical sites, enjoying natural beauty, living in the most beautiful cities, eating at the most fashionable restaurants – would have to be severely rationed, with only a tiny elite enjoying things that are now open to a sizeable global middle class. And given that, the richer we get, the more we seem to care about relative status and positional goods as opposed to absolute material well-being, the Crowded Planet scenario looks to me like another flavor of dystopia.
Meanwhile, even 20th century rates of population growth do not appear to be sufficient to save us from the squeeze created by diminishing returns. In their much-discussed paper “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John van Reenen, and Michael Webb estimate that total U.S. research effort (the number of full-time-equivalent workers engaged in R&D) rose by around 4 percent a year between the 1930s and the 2000s – but that the productivity of research effort was declining by more than 5 percent a year. Hence, even with a huge run-up in the number of scientists, researchers, and engineers, productivity growth fell over the course of the 20th century. And since U.S. population was growing just a little more than 1 percent a year during this time, the 4 percent annual increase in research effort reflected a progressive – and ultimately unsustainable – mobilization of labor into innovative activity. Accordingly, even if global population growth continued as before, we would still sooner or later hit a ceiling where we can no longer increase the share of our workforce engaged in innovative activity. The real significance of the slowdown and possible end or reversal of population growth is that it accelerates the timetable for hitting this ceiling.
OK, so let’s call off the search for possible ways to keep population growth going and squarely face the issue: Does the fact of diminishing returns mean that technological progress is ultimately doomed? And remember, because of low fertility, the stagnation that is gaining on us is closer than it appears.
I see one possibility for deliverance by another deus ex machina, as well as a number of stopgaps to forestall the coming of stagnation while we await our technological miracle. Let’s start with a look at the stopgaps.
First, innovation to date has depended overwhelmingly on progress made in the United States and other rich countries. To maintain the global intensification of research effort needed to keep innovation rolling, we will need the rest of the world – China, India, and especially Africa, as that is where most future population growth will be concentrated – to up their game and contribute more to technological advance.
Recognizing, though, that the leading countries will continue to lead, it is important that they continue to grow through immigration. The world’s centers of innovative activity can continue to enjoy sprightly population growth for a long time even in the face of a shrinking global population. Again, though, simply throwing open the borders isn’t enough: A concerted effort must be made to integrate new arrivals into social and economic life and ensure they are making contributions at the highest levels. If such integration could be mastered, ongoing migration could concentrate the world’s population in its most productive places while allowing extensive re-wilding elsewhere.
Beyond continued development in less developed countries and accelerated immigration into rich ones, we need global initiatives for talent search and development to find the “missing Einsteins” otherwise at risk of squandering their immense potential. Meritocracy has gotten a bad rap as highly educated elites have moved to entrench their position and privileges through self-dealing and opportunity-hoarding, but the initial impulse to broaden the elite by including the best and brightest from the rest of society remains fundamentally sound. In a world of stagnant or shrinking population, the globalization of meritocracy is imperative.
Finally, we need to address the other side of the equation. All of the stopgaps above focus on trying to keep total research effort rising even in the face of zero or negative population growth. But we also need to be working on slowing the depreciation rate for research effort. Exhaustion of low-hanging fruit dictates that research productivity tends to decline over time, but we might be able to buy time by reducing the slope of that decline. There is considerable interest these days in finding new ways to organize science to get more bang for the buck; this interest needs active encouragement and exploration.
Stopgaps, of course, aren’t permanent solutions; at best they can buy some extra time. To defeat the natural limits to technological progress and keep diminishing returns permanently at bay, we will need a technological miracle – one that, it just so happens, many people now believe is imminent.
I’m talking here about the possibility of artificial general intelligence – or at least the continued rapid development of what we now call artificial intelligence technologies. With mechanization, we have been automating the work of human hands and backs for a couple of centuries; with computers, we have been automating a growing range of cognitive tasks for decades now. And with further advances in AI, what we are now hoping to accomplish is the full or substantial automation of the cognitive tasks associated with scientific discovery, invention, and innovation.
If that could be achieved, the constraint imposed by population growth on the possible total number of researchers, and thus on the pace of innovation, is eliminated: We would now be able to manufacture as many researchers as wanted. And if robot technology continues to advance along with AI, at some point perhaps AI could reproduce themselves. In such a fully automated economy, or at least substantially automated economy, productivity rates could soar.
The scenario of a fully automated economy – or at least one where AIs are able to automate their own advancement and manufacture – is often referred to as the “singularity,” a kind of techno-optimistic millennium in which economic output can double in weeks. This kind of growth explosion has always struck me as a pipe dream: Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part, but it’s just too over the top for me to put much stock in. My skepticism has been reinforced, though, by the work of the indispensable Charles Jones, who with Philippe Aghion and Ben Jones coauthored a fascinating 2019 paper on AI and the future of growth (see also this essay by Matt Clancy for an illuminating explication of the Aghion/Jones/Jones paper). Their work shows that, even when innovation is highly automated, as long as it is not completely automated a Baumol’s “cost disease” dynamic kicks in: The share of the automated parts of the economy shrinks as productivity growth races ahead of demand and relative prices decline, and the share of the less productive, human-operated economy expands. In their words, “growth is determined not by what we are good at but rather by what is essential and yet hard to improve.” Under these conditions, we could still liberate innovation from the population constraint but the singularity would remain confined to science fiction.
How then to wrap up my assessment of the future outlook for technological progress? The headline conclusion has to be that the path of least resistance leads to a continued slowdown in technological advance. Various hostile cultural and institutional forces are arrayed against it, adding additional frictions to a process that is naturally getting harder over time.
Given how much I lean on the existence of that natural constraint on progress – namely, diminishing returns to innovative activity – your confidence in my assessment should be discounted by the degree of your skepticism that such a natural constraint exists. And here I should note that the conclusion by Aghion, Jones, and Jones that ideas are getting harder to find is not without its critics – see here, here, and here. There are the usual objections to how productivity is measured, other technical objections to how research effort is measured, objections to the relevance of individual case studies (maybe research productivity is declining in specific fields but new, fast-growing fields are regularly opening up), and further objections to various methodological assumptions. Maybe ideas aren’t getting harder to find, but instead the organization of science and R&D is getting worse (that’s a valid possible critique of Aghion, Jones, and Jones, but for the growth outlook what matters is that overall research productivity is falling, not the reasons why). Or maybe the truly relevant measure of research productivity isn’t falling: Maybe Big Science is a government-funded gravy train that attracts a great number of deadwood careerists while the cream of the crop that actually accounts for progress is as productive as before.
Having changed my mind about many things over the years, I am open to the possibility that I’m wrong here and that the walls aren’t closing in on the future of progress. I very much hope I’m wrong! But the idea that we first discover what is in plain sight, and that to keep discovering requires progressively more effort, seems intuitively obvious to me; diminishing returns are ubiquitous in economic life, so we should expect to see them in the pursuit of innovation as well. Meanwhile, the experience of modern economic growth – in particular, the juxtaposition of massive increases in innovative activity and steady or declining growth in productivity – points strongly to the existence of diminishing returns.
So I believe that the path of least resistance leads to stagnation. But the path of least resistance doesn’t have to be the path we take. There is much that we can do to improve our capacity for innovation and utilize that capacity more effectively. And there are real prospects for transformative technological breakthroughs that can catapult us to new levels of well-being.
We should be realistic. We should recognize what we’re up against. But there is no cause for despair, and much reason to look forward to what the future brings.
The post Technological progress vs. diminishing returns appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Optimizing the antibody response to vaccines is essential for their efficacy, both individually and as a public health measure. Great care is taken in the formulation of vaccines to maximize this response. That is the essence of vaccine research – which proteins to target, with how much of a stimulus, and with which adjuvants (vaccine additives that increase immune response). Research also focuses on the number and timing of vaccines, and what antibody titers are necessary in order to maintain adequate protection from infection, reduce severity of infection, and/or reduce the probability of spreading the disease.

There hasn’t been as much focus, generally, on the person receiving the vaccine, other than demographic factors. We cannot alter a person’s demographics (sex, age, race), but are their factors we can change that influence the response to vaccine? A recent study looks at a potentially modifiable factor and Covid vaccine response – sleep.

The study, published in Current Biology, is a meta-analysis of studies looking at the correlation of sleep around the time of vaccination and antibody response. Data on sleep is mostly self-report, with subjects divided into <6 hours of sleep vs sufficient sleep from two days prior to two days after receiving a vaccine for Covid. The idea is sound, as sleep deprivation can have negative physiological effect, including impaired immune function. Insomnia can both impair immune response, making individuals more susceptible to infection, and impair immune regulation, leading to chronic inflammation.

However, overall the data from this study was negative:

“The association between self-reported short sleep (<6 h/night) and reduced vaccine response did not reach our pre-defined statistical significant criteria.”

There was a trend toward decreased immune response, but it did not reach statistical significance. So, like many researchers, they did a subgroup analysis and found that the effect did reach statistical significance in men but not women. In their summary they conclude:

Large-scale well-controlled studies are urgently needed to define (1) the window of time around inoculation when optimizing sleep duration is most beneficial, (2) the causes of the sex disparity in the impact of sleep on the response, and (3) the amount of sleep needed to protect the response.

I would add that such studies are needed to confirm that this effect is even real. Again, a causal association here is plausible but that does not mean it is real or clinically significant. When results like this are statistically marginal, especially if you have to breakout subgroups to reach significance at all, that decreases the chance that the effect is real or that there is a significant effect size. This is where replication is essential. If these results are a statistical fluke then looking at a fresh group of data is likely to regress to the mean or show different results. If it is real, then it should reliably replicate.

This study is a meta-analysis not new epidemiological research so they may not have been setup to do this, but ideally it is best for such studies to do internal replications. In other words, once you find a subset of the data that does reach statistical significance, then check the findings against fresh data as part of the same study, before publishing. This is a good way to minimize the flood of false positives that find their way into the published research. In my opinion, this should be standard practice and high-end journals should make it a near requirement for publication.

This study was also presented as positive, and that is how the media is reporting it, without the proper caveats. In fact, I think this study should be presented as negative – the data did not reach pre-determined statistical significance, and the subgroup analysis gets buried in the results and discussion as indicating a possible direction for future research – but not as the main result.

In this particular case the negative effect from reporting a potential false positive is likely minimal. It’s already a good idea to get a good night’s sleep, and making a special effort to do so around the time of vaccination is a reasonable thing to do even based solely on biological plausibility. There is no real downside to getting good sleep. There could be a downside, however, if the results are overhyped and, for example, some people or their doctors delay vaccination until they improve their sleep.

Future research should focus on several questions. Is the correlation between sleep and vaccine response real, and is there a sex difference? If so, then what parameters optimize the response? Also, if the correlation is real, what is the cause? Is it the lack of sleep itself, or are other factors both impairing sleep and immune response? Is the impairment of immune response clinically significant – does it actually increase the risk of contracting Covid? And, what is the net effect of any clinical intervention, such as treating the insomnia, especially if this treatment delays vaccination. Clinical questions can get complicated once you go beyond a simple correlation.

In the meantime, good sleep hygiene, or even medically treating insomnia, is a good idea if you are fighting off an infection, have been exposed or will be in a high risk environment, or are getting vaccinated. Ideally, chronically poor sleep needs to be treated like the serious medical problem that it is.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.A former vice president of the United States identified a sitting president as a mortal danger. In another time, it would have been the Story of the Century. Instead, it was the Kerfuffle of the Week, and it is already dissolving away in the new media cycle.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
NFL owners are making an example of Lamar Jackson.
ChatGPT changed everything. Now its follow-up is here.
Broken SycophantsMike Pence stunned Washington at this weekend’s annual Gridiron Club dinner and gained the attention of the media and the ire of the White House by making an offensive joke about the Cabinet member Pete Buttigieg.At the same event, by the way, Pence affirmed that on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump—at the time, the president of the United States—endangered his life along with the lives of his family, the members and staff of Congress, and numerous law-enforcement officers. Trump did this by inciting a mob to attack the Capitol, stop our constitutional process by force, and allow him to remain in office.“Donald Trump was wrong,” Pence said at the white-tie event, which was attended by journalists, politicians, and other D.C. insiders. “I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.” He continued:
What happened that day was a disgrace. And it mocks decency to portray it any other way. For as long as I live, I will never, ever diminish the injuries sustained, the lives lost, or the heroism of law enforcement on that tragic day.
Yet here we are, three days later, talking about inappropriate jokes. This is the story now? That Pence tried out a dumb gag line aimed at Buttigieg? Make no mistake, the joke was stupid and disrespectful, but perhaps we might zero in on the more important point: Pence told us something horrifying this weekend about the condition of our democracy. The national underreaction to his comments, however, is a warning that we have all become too complacent about the danger my former party now represents.Let us stipulate here that Pence is shamefully late to this criticism and has no obvious intention of going further. He had his one moment of courage, and there will be no others. My friend Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general, was present at the dinner, and he rightly lambasted Pence for posturing while refusing to answer a subpoena about what happened on January 6. “There are great actors at the gridiron,” he tweeted after the dinner. “But no one, and I mean no one, could pretend to be [Mike Pence] with a backbone.”Nevertheless, we should not lose focus. I am still almost vertiginous at hearing a former constitutional officer of the United States government say what Pence said out loud. After all the violence, all the court cases, all the horrific videos (the stuff that will never air on Tucker Carlson’s show), and all the needless deaths, I am almost relieved that I’m still capable of being shocked. I was a boy during Watergate—I delivered the local newspaper that announced President Richard Nixon’s resignation, in 1974—but that long-ago scandal now seems like a polite comedy of errors next to the conspiracy fueled by Trump’s monstrous narcissism.Even before Pence’s Gridiron-dinner speech, I had a conversation last week with Tom Joscelyn, one of the principal authors of the House’s January 6 committee report. Joscelyn is worried, as am I, that Americans don’t really yet grasp the degree to which the Republicans have been taken over by their most extreme wing. “The American right is overrun with grievance politics now,” he told me. “And they’ve married that approach to an authoritarian movement and cult of personality” around Trump.Joscelyn is not a man who rattles easily: He was Rudy Giuliani’s senior counterterrorism adviser back in 2007, when “America’s mayor” was gearing up to run for president. He thinks Giuliani’s sad decline, in which he has become a kind of political Dorian Gray right before our eyes, is emblematic of the Republican collapse and surrender to Trump. He argues, and I agree, that Trump’s opponents, especially those running against him in the GOP, are not taking this threat as seriously as they should. Trump “puts the auto in autocrat,” Joscelyn said, because Trump sublimates everything to his personal needs, including his party. (I would argue that this is why Trump, despite his fascist rhetoric and Mussolini-like strutting, is incapable of the consistency and discipline required to build a truly fascist movement, but that’s an argument for another day.)  Today, as Joscelyn notes, the GOP has ceased to function as a normal political party. There is no consistent ideology or set of policies, no internal mechanisms to check the power of the Trump cult. Even the people who want to dislodge Trump as the leader of the party and the 2024 nominee dare not to take him on in a direct confrontation. Trump’s critics are often accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” an irrational hatred of Trump that forces disagreement with Trump on everything, but Joscelyn rightly points out that Trump’s Republican enablers are the ones who have had to betray all of their deepest beliefs merely to avoid being cast out. Trump, he says, “broke his sycophants, not his critics.”Which brings us back to Pence. It might not sound like much for Pence to admit what millions of people already know, but within the Republican Party, this is about as close as you can get to open heresy; Pence’s team deliberated making even this small move against Trump. Yet Pence’s comments have been shrugged off by both the press and the public.To put into perspective how numb we’ve become, let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine, for example, if Hubert Humphrey, after the riots that broke out in 1968 at the Democratic National Convention, said later, “Lyndon Johnson encouraged those anti-war protesters and put me and hundreds of other people in danger. History will hold President Johnson accountable.” Those two sentences would have shaken the foundations of American democracy and changed history.But not today. Instead, we’ve already moved on to whether Pence should apologize for a clumsy and offensive joke. (He should.) This, however, is the danger of complacency. What would have been a gigantic, even existential political crisis in a more virtuous and civic-minded nation is now one of many stories about Donald Trump that rush past our eyes and ears.Voters are tired, and the national media are committed to treating the GOP as a mainstream party. Trump and his coterie are counting on this exhaustion to return to national power, but so are people such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is using Trump’s themes of bigotry, grievance, and cultural panic to harness that same authoritarian energy for his own purposes. Republican leaders have no intention of speaking truth—or decency—to their base, and until someone in the party of Lincoln is able to muster even the tiniest fraction of Lincoln’s courage, we will indulge our complacency about the Republicans at our peril.Related:
Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit. (From 2020)
The January 6 whitewash will backfire.
A Russian military jet hit the propeller of an American drone, causing the drone to go down over the Black Sea, according to U.S. officials. Russia has denied contact with the drone.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to lay off another 10,000 workers—its second round of job cuts in recent months.
Ohio is suing Norfolk Southern after one of its trains, carrying hazardous chemicals, was derailed in the state last month.
Work in Progress: The end of Silicon Valley Bank is also the end of a Silicon Valley myth, Derek Thompson writes.
CBS Photo Archive / Getty
How Not to Cover a Bank RunBy Brian Stelter
On September 17, 2008, the Financial Times reporter John Authers decided to run to the bank. In his Citi account was a recently deposited check from the sale of his London apartment. If the big banks melted down, which felt like a distinct possibility among his Wall Street sources, he would lose most of his money, because the federal deposit-insurance limit at the time was $100,000. He wanted to transfer half the balance to the Chase branch next door, just in case.
When Authers arrived at Citi, he found “a long queue, all well-dressed Wall Streeters,” all clearly spooked by the crisis, all waiting to move money around. Chase was packed with bankers too. Authers had walked into a big story—but he didn’t share it with readers for 10 years. The column he eventually published, titled “In a Crisis, Sometimes You Don’t Tell the Whole Story,” was, he wrote this week, “the most negatively received column I’ve ever written.”
China plays peacemaker. 
The failed promise of having it all
Photos: Winners of the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards Open Competition
Arsh Raziuddin
Read. Our editors suggest 10 poetry collections to read again and again.Listen. Start Holy Week, a new narrative podcast by Vann R. Newkirk II about the revolutionary week that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Now that The Last of Us, HBO’s series based on the game of the same name, has aired its finale, I’ll write about the show later in the week. I hope The Last of Us, which has been remarkable in every aspect, illustrates how, for many years, computer games have had plots more intricate and more involving than much of the stuff Hollywood has been cranking out now for decades. (I say this fully aware of the creativity of this year’s Best Picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once. But I will remind you that it is also the 30th anniversary of The Beverly Hillbillies, a terrible movie full of great actors that I think was an early sign of American cultural exhaustion.)I have particularly high hopes—that I fear will be dashed—for Amazon Prime’s upcoming Fallout series. Unlike The Last of Us, the Fallout games, set long after a global nuclear war, leaven the despair and violence of postapocalyptic survival with outrageous humor. If you’ve been watching Hello Tomorrow!, the Apple TV+ series that features the always excellent Billy Crudup selling lunar condos in a reimagined 1950s full of robots and floating cars—and yes, we are living in a golden age of television—you have a taste of what the world of Fallout looks like. I can only hope that Amazon’s series about life after the Bomb doesn’t turn out to be a bomb itself.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

By Shadi HamidIn the United States, it is difficult to overstate the degree to which Islam has fallen off both the domestic and foreign policy agenda. In many ways, this is a welcome improvement over the near-constant preoccupation with American Muslims and Muslims abroad as objects of concern during the post-9/11 period. With the Trump administration’s “Muslim ban,” it seemed like it might never end, with each president having their own particular approach to the “problem” of Islam.
This appears to have ended with U.S. President Joe Biden. With the end of the war on terror, the securitization of Muslim identity is largely a thing of the past. American Muslims are increasingly part of the cultural mainstream, accepted and normalized to the extent that they sometimes appear to have been forgotten entirely.
That said, there is a dark side to America’s loss of interest in Islam and Muslims, especially since this indifference is tied to a broader apathy toward the Middle East. The Biden administration’s Middle East policy, as reflected in the recent National Security Strategy, is effectively one of telling regional actors to “keep calm and carry on.” The priority is to prevent the problems of the Middle East from crowding out attention towards more overarching problems, such as the threats posed by Chinese and Russian adventurism. (Whether policies toward particular regions can be siloed in this fashion is another matter).
To be uninterested in the Middle East is, by default, to be uninterested in human rights, political reform, and democratization in the Middle East. A policy of maintaining the status quo with only slight adjustments is inevitably a policy of turning a blind eye to human rights violations in the interest of “stability.” To anger regional partners with talk of their domestic political arrangements would require devoting more attention to assuaging that anger, which would distract U.S. officials from countering China and Russia.
Consider Saudi Arabia. In July 2022, Biden paid a high-profile visit to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an effort to reset a relationship that had been strained by the 2018 killing of the writer and critic Jamal Khashoggi. Since the visit, bin Salman’s crackdown on dissidents has only intensified.
In recent years, the decline of major terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State has certainly relieved pressure on U.S. policymakers. But the Biden administration’s indifference to authoritarian consolidation in the region is an additional critical factor that allows it to display an otherwise welcome disregard for Islam.
Prospects for democracy in the Middle East have long been linked to questions around Islam’s role in public life. Any process of democratization, after all, would entail state authorities ceding control of religious knowledge and production — a domain they have jealously guarded for decades. In religiously conservative societies, something as resonant and powerful as Islam couldn’t be left to the masses, or so Arab autocrats thought. If people could choose their own leaders, religiously-oriented parties — Islamist parties — would have a greater say in politics and government and perhaps win elections outright. The failures of the Arab Spring and the return of repression have relegated such questions to the background. Fierce states are even fiercer today. But as I argue in the latest issue of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, the “problem” of Islam has merely been postponed; it has not been resolved.
It’s no accident that the two administrations that focused considerable attention on Middle East democracy (or the lack thereof) were also the ones that felt compelled to make Islam-related pronouncements. While the Bush administration ultimately failed to translate its sweeping pro-democracy rhetoric into policy, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does deserve some credit for grasping the intimate link between “political” problems and “religious” problems in the region. To address the former was to take seriously the latter. For example, she notes that “religion and politics don’t mix easily — but the exclusion of religious people from politics doesn’t work either” and that the Arab world “desperately needs an answer to [this] challenge.”
While President Barack Obama was less enthusiastic about democracy promotion (in part due to a desire to distance himself from the Bush administration’s adventurism), he was compelled to take it more seriously during the Arab uprisings of 2011. And he too understood that to have a policy of promoting political reform and inclusion meant thinking carefully about America’s longstanding “Islamist dilemma.” As one senior aide to Obama described it to me:
Obama started off very much of the view that we need to accept that Islamists will have a role in government. I think he came in very much believing in that and he wanted to be the president who would have an open mind about Islamists.
This “open mind” didn’t necessarily last, but it’s telling that the Obama administration felt it had to think about Islamism in order to think about democracy. The inverse was true for President Donald Trump. His active hostility towards democracy promotion and enthusiasm for Arab dictators translated into a desire to exclude and even punish Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.
It would have been hard to avoid this conclusion. To the extent that Arab societies democratized, voters would have more to disagree about when it came to Islam’s place in politics and its relationship to the state. Under the limited electoral competition that Arab autocrats had allowed beginning in the 1980s, “identity politics” around religion gradually eclipsed the traditional left-right politics of class as the primary electoral cleavage. And so emerged what the political scientist Hesham Sallam calls “classless politics.”
Islamist parties were the primary beneficiaries of this shift. But since there was no real risk that they would be allowed to take power, the practical implications of their ideological preferences could remain somewhat theoretical, projected far out into the future. With the democratic openings of the Arab Spring, however, this all changed. Now that Islamist parties had a realistic shot at winning power, the question of how — or whether — to accommodate a more pronounced role for Islam rose to the forefront of Arab politics in a way that it rarely had before. Moreover, constitutions had to be drafted, and constitutions would need to address (or at least choose not to address) the polarizing matter of Islam as a source of state identity and Islamic law as a source of legislation. A political and religious settlement remained elusive in Egypt, paving the way for the establishment of a new military dictatorship under Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Even in Tunisia — until recently the Arab Spring’s lone remaining (relative) success story — Islamist, secular, and leftist political forces appeared to reach such a settlement only to see it collapse. Today, after a slow-motion coup, Tunisia finds itself languishing under one-man, authoritarian rule.
With a new authoritarian normal asserting itself across the region, the ongoing effort to seek a democratic resolution to the question of Islam’s appropriate role in politics and public life is on life support. For now at least, this has given the Biden administration the permission, and perhaps even the freedom, to disregard the democratic dilemmas its predecessors had little choice but to face. Future administrations might not be so lucky. The dilemmas, after all, haven’t gone away.

Updated at 4:32 p.m. ET on March 14, 2023This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Who killed SVB—and triggered the mini–banking crisis sweeping the United States?You could blame the bank’s executives, who bet $80 billion on long-term bonds that bled value when interest rates went up, thus torching their portfolio with fantastic efficiency.You could blame the Federal Reserve for falling behind inflation and then quickly raising interest rates, bludgeoning investors who watched in horror as their bold portfolios melted down.   You could blame regulators or the auditors at KPMG, who gave SVB a clean bill of health when they looked into its portfolio just weeks before its historic collapse.You could blame the phalanx of interests—President Donald Trump, Senate Republicans, tech titans, bankers, and even a handful of Democrats—who called to roll back midsize-bank regulations in 2018, potentially setting the stage for this catastrophic mismanagement.You could, abandoning all common sense, blame “woke” banking culture, under the bizarre assumption that only an all-white, all-male banking team can properly steward a financial institution. (Never mind, say, the entire crisis-strewn history of mostly white, mostly male banking.)Or you could blame venture capitalists. One week ago, SVB was technically insolvent but far from doomed. Without a massive run on its deposits, the bank likely would have puttered along as its long-term bonds matured. Surely, SVB had put itself in an awful position by tossing fresh cash into the Dumpster fire of the 2022 bond market. But actual bank death required one further step: Clients, led by the venture-capital community, had to turn on a trusted financial partner.That’s exactly what happened. As SVB’s leadership scrambled to raise funds, Founders Fund and other large venture investors told their companies late last week to pull out all of their cash. When other start-ups banking with SVB caught wind of this exodus on group chats and Twitter, they, too, raced for the exits. On Thursday alone, SVB customers withdrew $42 billion—or $1 million a second, for 10 straight hours—in the largest bank run in history. If SVB executives, regulators, and conservative politicians built a barn out of highly flammable wood and filled it with hay and oil drums, venture capitalists were the ones who tipped over the barrels and dropped a lit match.After some VCs helped trigger the bank run that crashed SVB, others went online to beseech the federal government to fly to the rescue. “YOU SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW,” the investor Jason Calacanis bleated on Twitter. David Sacks, another investor and a regular panelist on the popular tech podcast All In, chimed in by blaming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell for jacking up rates “so hard it collapsed a huge bank.” (Never mind that the CEO of SVB was on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.) On Sunday night, the tech community got its wish when the federal government announced it would backstop every dollar of every depositor in SVB.The death of Silicon Valley Bank offers a strange lesson for VCs. In a typical bank-run prisoner’s dilemma, individuals have to choose to cooperate (everybody keeps their money in the bank, and the bank lives) or defect for individual advantage (a few players pull their funds, spurring others to do the same and leading to a bank collapse). But now all depositors at SVB have been made whole, which means that early defection conferred no advantage. The withdrawals benefited no individual depositor, but they collectively killed SVB.On Monday, the tech writer Ben Thompson wrote that the collapse of SVB pointed to a broader rot in Silicon Valley itself. “I assumed that the venture capitalist set knew about Silicon Valley Bank’s situation [and] I assumed that Silicon Valley broadly was in the business of taking care of their own,” he wrote. “Last week showed that both [theories] were totally wrong.” Far from the familiar metaphor of Silicon Valley as a symbiotic ecosystem, where investors, mentors, and collaborators benefit from a culture of trust and faith in progress, the SVB collapse makes the tech world seem more like an actual jungle, where everything looks lovely and peaceful until a jaguar comes along and lays waste to some capybara.In this light, the SVB saga is just the latest episode of the American tech industry struggling through three overlapping transitions. First is the macro transition from an era of low interest rates that supported cash-burning consumer-tech companies to an era of high interest rates that require discipline and unit economics. Second is the existential transition from tech’s dominance of attention economics and cloud computing to its expensive struggle to figure out the next mountain to climb, whether it’s crypto, the metaverse, artificial intelligence, climate, or something else. Third is the cultural transition from “tech” as a metonym for high-growth start-ups to “Big Tech” as a description of the largest companies in the world. All three transitions are contributing to a scarcity mentality in Silicon Valley, where, as Thompson observed, “tech has been shifting away from greenfield opportunities and expanding the pie to taking share in zero sum contests for end users, from their attention to their pocketbooks.” This is the cultural climate that explains a crippling run on SVB followed by a call for national bailouts.Something I’ve always liked about the founders, venture capitalists, and tech evangelists that I’ve met over the years is their disposition toward technology as a lever for progress. They tend to see the world as a set of solvable problems, and I’d like to think that I generally share that attitude. But this techno-optimist mindset can tip into a conviction that tradition is a synonym for inefficiency and that every institution’s age is a measure of its incompetence. One cannot ignore the irony that tech has spent years blasting the slow and stodgy government systems of the 20th century only to cry out, in times of need, for the Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC to save the day—three institutions with a collective age of several hundred years.I am still “long” on American invention and innovation, which is a way of saying that I’m long on Silicon Valley as a place and as an idea. But we are still learning exactly how much of this industry’s genius was a mere LIRP, or low-interest-rate phenomenon. The answer from the past 100 hours is that it’s more than I feared. As the saying goes, kind of: When the interest-rate tide goes out, you see who’s been LIRPing naked.This article originally referred to KPMG as a regulator. It is an auditor.

Margaret Atwood is certain the thing that really got to Mass Hall were all those dangling bodies.
“Harvard was not amused when [‘The Handmaid’s Tale’] was first published” in 1985, recalled the acclaimed author who received her master’s in Victorian studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1962. “They did not think it was fun to have bodies hanging on the Harvard wall. They took a dim view, but they have come around since.”
Pausing for effect, she added: “This isn’t Florida.” The sold-out audience roared.
Atwood, 83, whose speculative fiction about women and power has made her both a beloved feminist icon and a repeated object of censorship, returned to Harvard last Thursday as part of the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Writers Speak series. The two-time Booker Prize winner discussed her new story collection, “Old Babes in the Wood,” with WBUR Boston’s Scott Tong, an exchange that showcased her bold wit and comedic timing that deserves a Netflix special.
Some of the 15 stories are rich fantasy (an interview between a character named Margaret Atwood and author George Orwell through a medium) while others reflect the intractable losses that come in old age (of loved ones, memory, verbal filter). In “Airborne,” three elderly friends get together to sip gin and tonics and work on a plan to endow a university chair in feminist studies. Atwood writes:
“‘We’re correcting the gender balance,’ says Chrissy reproachfully. ‘Because a lot more male creatives still get the big jobs and win the awards and things. Remember that chart Darlene put together?’
“‘It’s okay, I’m teasing,’ says Leonie. ‘I get it. We’re laying the foundations for the brave new generation of emerging non-cis-male creatives, and by the way I hate creatives too. They’re not a separate class of people. Everyone’s creative!’”
Atwood confided to the audience that she still writes three pages a day — “then I can goof off and do something else” — and procrastination takes the form of addictive online solitaire (“I have to stop playing”), crossword puzzles, and an undying affection for British TV (“Miss Marple,” “Father Brown”). She confirmed what many who have watched the Hulu version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” know: Aunt Lydia, whose job it is to educate the handmaids, is a beloved character.
“I did say, at one point: ‘Don’t you dare kill Aunt Lydia. [Writer/producer Bruce Miller] said: ‘I wasn’t going to.’ I said, ‘Well, you stuck a knife in her and threw her over the banister.’ [Miller responded,] ‘She’ll recover.’ I was writing ‘The Testaments’ right then. I couldn’t have her killed off,” said Atwood, referencing her 2019 prize-winning sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Dressed in head-to-toe black with a bright orange/red polka dot scarf, Atwood told the audience that, as one who spent as much time in Harvard’s library stacks reading witchcraft and demonology as English literature, she rarely kills characters.
“The thing that I’m still requiring of them is that they’re alive, a minimum requirement. Some people kill off everyone at the end. I’ve never actually done that. Maybe I’m working up to that. Somebody has to be there to tell the story, no matter how dismal that story may be,” she said.
More bleak may be the repeated censorship Atwood has battled for her work. The Canadian author talked about “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which was most recently banned by the Madison County school board in Virginia, who judged it too sexually explicit.
“The justification is that it has sex in it,” she said, then, pausing, added: “unlike the Bible.”
Atwood’s 90 minutes of conversation flew, and Tong closed out the evening asking the literary legend if growing old is fun.
“More fun that you think,” she replied. “At this age, you’ve got a choice. I can either be a wise old woman or wicked old witch — those are Carl Jung’s terms. And why not both?”

911- may very well be a historical marker because it was the point in time at which the US ruling class became a “Reaction Regime”.

All the lies and misinformation in the Press are just a further indication that we are living in the same context as Germany when the Nazis rose to power in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. Once a Reaction Regime takes power the “Truth” becomes what they want you to believe, not the Reality of the context in which the regime rises.

So, the most valuable lesson I get by rereading the history of the Rise of the Third Reich (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-4FanXEYL0_zUtZk_-LbgIGuOUBGySwV/view?usp=sharing) is the context in which a Reaction Regime rises, its purpose, conduct and the nature of its politics and actions.

Since 911 the US has become a Reaction Regime, not a planned and positive goal-oriented Progressive Regime. This is identical to the transformation of Germany in the 1930’s into a Reaction Regime and the consequences of becoming reactive to the situation in which you live (ceasing to be progressive with positive goals for mankind).

Putin’s Russia, from this same viewpoint, became a Reactive Regime in 2014 with its takeover of Crimea and it has continued down the road of the rise of a Reactive Regime with its War against Ukraine and the West (which still somewhat supports a Progressive Leadership), thus emulating the rise of Naziism in Germany and its return to a war footing. Once the World Zeitgeist changes from Progressivism to the Reactive Path by engaging in hostile defenses against an impending world in which it cannot survive if it succumbs to it, the events of German Naziism and WWII are played out again.

The big change in the World today is that that the whole West and its allies are now characterized by their defensive reactions against a daunting future world that is threatening their existence (versus the previous 70 year of post-WWI Pax Americana).

The refusal of nations (and cultural and religious groups and individuals) to succumb to, but rather to defend their existence via hostile reactions against their impending doom is the “Hallmark of Our Current Era” (with the notable exception of continued Chinese Progressivism) and is the harbinger of the impending WWIII.

To be a newborn in the year 2023—and, almost certainly, every year that follows—means emerging into a world where the coronavirus is ubiquitous. Babies might not meet the virus in the first week or month of life, but soon enough, SARS-CoV-2 will find them. “For anyone born into this world, it’s not going to take a lot of time for them to become infected,” maybe a year, maybe two, says Katia Koelle, a virologist and infectious-disease modeler at Emory University. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this virus will be one of the very first serious pathogens that today’s infants—and all future infants—meet.
Three years into the coronavirus pandemic, these babies are on the leading edge of a generational turnover that will define the rest of our relationship with SARS-CoV-2. They and their slightly older peers are slated to be the first humans who may still be alive when COVID-19 truly hits a new turning point: when almost everyone on Earth has acquired a degree of immunity to the virus as a very young child.[Read: Is COVID a common cold yet?]That future crossroads might not sound all that different from where the world is currently. With vaccines now common in most countries and the virus so transmissible, a significant majority of people have some degree of immunity. And in recent months, the world has begun to witness the consequences of that shift. The flux of COVID cases and hospitalizations in most countries seems to be stabilizing into a seasonal-ish sine wave; disease has gotten, on average, less severe, and long COVID seems to be somewhat less likely among those who have recently gotten shots. Even the virus’s evolution seems to be plodding, making minor tweaks to its genetic code, rather than major changes that require another Greek-letter name.But today’s status quo may be more of a layover than a final destination in our journey toward COVID’s final form. Against SARS-CoV-2, most little kids have fared reasonably well. And as more babies have been born into a SARS-CoV-2-ridden world, the average age of first exposure to this coronavirus has been steadily dropping—a trend that could continue to massage COVID-19 into a milder disease. Eventually, the expectation is that the illness will reach a stable nadir, at which point it may truly be “another common cold,” says Rustom Antia, an infectious-disease modeler at Emory.The full outcome of this living experiment, though, won’t be clear for decades—well after the billions of people who encountered the coronavirus for the first time in adulthood are long gone. The experiences that today’s youngest children have with the virus are only just beginning to shape what it will mean to have COVID throughout a lifetime, when we all coexist with it from birth to death as a matter of course.At the beginning of SARS-CoV-2’s global tear, the coronavirus was eager to infect all of us, and we had no immunity to rebuff its attempts. But vulnerability wasn’t just about immune defenses: Age, too, has turned out to be key to resilience. Much of the horror of the disease could be traced to having not only a large population that lacked protection against the virus—but a large adult population that lacked protection against the virus. Had the entire world been made up of grade-schoolers when the pandemic arrived, “I don’t think it would have been nearly as severe,” says Juliet Pulliam, an infectious-disease modeler at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa.Across several viral diseases—polio, chicken pox, mumps, SARS, measles, and more—getting sick as an adult is notably more dangerous than as a kid, a trend that’s typically exacerbated when people don’t have any vaccinations or infections to those pathogens in their rearview. The manageable infections that strike toddlers and grade-schoolers may turn serious when they first manifest at older ages, landing people in the hospital with pneumonia, brain swelling, even blindness, and eventually killing some. When scientists plot mortality data by age, many curves bend into “a pretty striking J shape,” says Dylan Morris, an infectious-disease modeler at UCLA.The reason for that age differential isn’t always clear. Some of kids’ resilience probably comes from having a young, spry body, far less likely to be burdened with chronic medical conditions that raise severe disease risk. But the quick-wittedness of the young immune system is also likely playing a role. Several studies have found that children are much better at marshaling hordes of interferon—an immune molecule that armors cells against viruses—and may harbor larger, more efficient cavalries of infected-cell-annihilating T cells. That performance peaks sometime around grade school or middle school, says Janet Chou, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital. After that, our molecular defenses begin a rapid tumble, growing progressively creakier, clumsier, sluggish, and likelier to launch misguided attacks against the tissues that house them. By the time we’re deep into adulthood, our immune systems are no longer sprightly, or terribly well calibrated. When we get sick, our bodies end up rife with inflammation. And our immune cells, weary and depleted, are far less unable to fight off the pathogens they once so easily trounced.Whatever the explanations, children are far less likely to experience serious symptoms, or to end up in the hospital or the ICU after being infected with SARS-CoV-2. Long COVID, too, seems to be less prevalent in younger cohorts, says Alexandra Yonts, an infectious-disease physician at Children’s National Hospital. And although some children still develop MIS-C, a rare and dangerous inflammatory condition that can appear weeks after they catch the virus, the condition “seems to have dissipated” as the pandemic has worn on, says Betsy Herold, the chief of pediatric infectious disease at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, in the Bronx.Should those patterns hold, and as the age of first exposure continues to fall, COVID is likely to become less intense. The relative mildness of childhood encounters with the virus could mean that almost everyone’s first infection—which tends, on average, to be more severe than the ones that immediately follow—could rank low in intensity, setting a sort of ceiling for subsequent bouts. That might make concentrating first encounters “in the younger age group actually a good thing,” says Ruian Ke, an infectious-disease modeler at Los Alamos National Laboratory.COVID will likely remain capable of killing, hospitalizing, and chronically debilitating a subset of adults and kids alike. But the hope, experts told me, is that the proportion of individuals who face the worst outcomes will continue to drop. That may be what happened in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, Antia, of Emory, told me: That strain of the virus stuck around, but never caused the same devastation again. Some researchers suspect that something similar may have even played out with another human coronavirus, OC43: After sparking a devastating pandemic in the 19th century, it’s possible that the virus no longer managed to wreak much more havoc than a common cold in a population that had almost universally encountered it early in life.Such a fate for COVID, though, isn’t a guarantee. The virus’s propensity to linger in the body’s nooks and crannies, sometimes causing symptoms that last many months or years, could make it an outlier among its coronaviral kin, says Melody Zeng, an immunologist at Cornell University. And even if the disease is likely to get better than what it is now, that is not a very high bar to clear.Some small subset of the population will always be naive to the virus—and it’s not exactly a comfort that in the future, that cohort will almost exclusively be composed of our kids. Pediatric immune systems are robust, UCLA’s Morris told me. But “robust is not the same as infallible.” Since the start of the pandemic, more than 2,000 Americans under the age of 18 have died from COVID—a small fraction of total deaths, but enough to make the disease a leading cause of death for children in the U.S. MIS-C and long COVID may not be common, but their consequences are no less devastating for the children who experience them. Some risks are especially concentrated among our youngest kids, under the age 5, whose immune defenses are still revving up, making them more vulnerable than their slightly older peers. There’s especially little to safeguard newborns just under six months, who aren’t yet eligible for most vaccines—including COVID shots—and who are rapidly losing the antibody-based protection passed down from their mothers while they were in the womb.A younger average age of first infection will also probably increase the total number of exposures people have to SARS-CoV-2 in a typical lifetime—each instance carrying some risk of severe or chronic disease. Ke worries the cumulative toll that this repetition could exact: Studies have shown that each subsequent tussle with the virus has the potential to further erode the functioning or structural integrity of organs throughout the body, raising the chances of chronic damage. There’s no telling how many encounters might push an individual past a healthy tipping point.Racking up exposures also won’t always bode well for the later chapters of these children’s lives. Decades from now, nearly everyone will have banked plenty of encounters with SARS-CoV-2 by the time they reach advanced age, Chou, from Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. But the virus will also continue to change its appearance, and occasionally escape the immunity that some people built up as kids. Even absent those evasions, as their immune systems wither, many older people may not be able to leverage past experiences with the disease to much benefit. The American experience with influenza is telling. Despite a lifetime of infections and available vaccines, tens of thousands of people typically die annually of the disease in the United States alone, says Ofer Levy, the director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. So even with the expected COVID softening, “I don’t think we’re going to reach a point where it’s, Oh well, tra-la-la,” Levy told me. And the protection that immunity offers can have caveats: Decades of research with influenza suggest that immune systems can get a bit hung up on the first versions of a virus that they see, biasing them against mounting strong attacks against other strains; SARS-CoV-2 now seems to be following that pattern. Depending on the coronavirus variants that kids encounter first, their responses and vulnerability to future bouts of illness may vary, says Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.[Read: Are our immune systems stuck in 2020?]Early vaccinations—that ideally target multiple versions of SARS-CoV-2—could make a big difference in reducing just about every bad outcome the virus threatens. Severe disease, long COVID, and transmission to other children and vulnerable adults all would likely be “reduced, prevented, and avoided,” Chou told me. But that’s only if very young kids are taking those shots, which, right now, isn’t at all the case. Nor are they necessarily getting protection passed down during gestation or early life from their mothers, because many adults are not up to date on COVID shots.Some of these issues could, in theory, end up moot. A hundred or so years from now, COVID could simply be another common cold, indistinguishable in practice from any other. But Morris points out that this reality, too, wouldn’t fully spare us. “When we bother to look at the burden of the other human coronaviruses, the ones who have been with us for ages? In the elderly, it’s real,” he told me. One study found that a nursing-home outbreak of OC43—the purported former pandemic coronavirus—carried an 8 percent fatality rate; another, caused by NL63, killed three out of the 20 people who caught it in a long-term-care facility in 2017. These and other “mild” respiratory viruses also continue to pose a threat to people of any age who are immunocompromised.SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t need to follow in those footsteps. It’s the only human coronavirus against which we have vaccines—which makes the true best-case scenario one in which it ends up even milder than a common cold, because we proactively protect against it. Disease would not need to be as inevitable; the vaccine, rather than the virus, could be the first bit of intel on the disease that kids receive. Tomorrow’s children probably won’t live in a COVID-free world. But they could at least be spared many of the burdens we’re carrying now.

If the wave of globalization on steroids in the past decades is seen as a means for the US's profit-seeking capitalists to replace many of the US's expensive blue-collars workers by the much cheaper foreign workers in the EM countries, then

(i) the US's coming wave of reindustrialization (and reshoring) will keep on displacing much more of the country's blue-collar factory workers by AI-assisted fully-automated robots, assembly-lines, and 3D-printing, and

(ii) the growing wave of pioneering AI technologies represented by ChatGPT will also newly displace many of the country's white-collar workers in the service sector as well.

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And so, in the coming years, more and more of the US's middle-class workers will increasingly be viewed by the US's future capitalists not as an unavoidable factor of production, but as a future burden instead, and this brave-new-world-like economic and social trend will keep sustaining the country's destabilizing populist political movement, and will propel more and more future Donald-Trump-like President candidates to the seat of the US President in Washington.

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To help mitigate the future destabilizing populist movement in the US, and to discourage the US middle-class people from going to the street too often, today's AI-assisted digital-platform US companies can perhaps be spared, in the sense that their coming eye-opening content on the internet can serve as a kind of spiritual opium, resembling the Bread and Circuses of the ancient Roman Empire two millennia ago, which can superficially appease many of the otherwise highly-discontented (and especially the unemployed young) people of the country in the coming years.

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On December 1st, TV Rain, an independent Russian television station that had been banned from Russian cable and satellite channels, was in its fifth month of broadcasting from Riga, the capital of Latvia. Most of its journalists had fled Moscow during the first week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, dispersing to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Israel, and elsewhere, only to discover in exile that, to much of the world, they represented a country waging genocidal war. Banks wouldn’t accept them as clients, landlords wouldn’t rent to them, and residents in Tbilisi and other cities painted “Russians go home” on street corners. Early on, two Baltic states were exceptions: Lithuania, which had long served as a base for Russia’s political opposition, and Latvia. Last March, the country’s foreign minister, Edgars Rinkēvičs, tweeted, “As #Russia closes independent media and introduces complete censorship, I reiterate Latvia’s readiness to host persecuted Russian journalists and help them in any way we can.”

TV Rain now had three studios—in Riga, Amsterdam, and Tbilisi—and a Latvian license, which allowed it to broadcast on cable channels in the European Union. Alexey Korostelev, who was hosting that afternoon’s episode of the newscast “Here and Now,” was working out of the Tbilisi studio, a generic space in an office tower on the outskirts of the city. Korostelev, who was twenty-seven, came from a small town near Moscow, and got his first job at TV Rain by winning an on-air contest in college. Like other journalists in exile, he had had to reinvent reporting, under near-impossible conditions: his job was to cover the Russian-Ukrainian war, but he couldn’t return to Russia or enter Ukraine, which has severely restricted access for Russian citizens. Korostelev, who was accustomed to working with a crew on his video stories, had learned to cobble together recorded phone calls and a lot of narrative voice-over. “More like a print story,” he told me.

Korostelev introduced a report about Sergey Safonov, the commanding officer of Russia’s 27th Motorized Rifle Brigade, who is suspected of stabbing an elderly Ukrainian woman to death near the town of Izyum. Sonya Groysman, a twenty-eight-year-old TV Rain correspondent based in Riga, had been able to interview Safonov’s bodyguard, a sergeant named Vyacheslav Doronichev. Speaking into the camera of a shaky cell phone, Doronichev said that his boss and other senior officers had spent months “drinking vodka, and terrorizing local residents.” He added, “They would cut off people’s ears and fingers.” Under any circumstances, an active-duty officer of the Russian Army testifying, on camera, to apparent war crimes would have been a major scoop; as a piece reported from exile, it was a striking achievement.

When the newscast cut back to Korostelev, an editor in the studio, whom Korostelev could hear in his earpiece, told him that the next segment was delayed. He had to fill more than a minute of airtime. Korostelev, wearing a yellow sweatshirt with a mike clipped to its collar, began plugging a tip line, which TV Rain had started for collecting first-hand accounts of the war; Groysman’s report had originated with a message sent to it. “If you have any tips or witness accounts to share about the draft and the conscripts’ experience in the armed forces and at the front line, and if you’d like to discuss the problems in the Russian military, then contact us,” he said. “We hope that we’ve been able to help many servicemen with their gear, for example, and basic necessities at the front, because the accounts that we have published and that have been shared by their relatives are frankly horrifying.”

Even as he heard the words coming out of his mouth, Korostelev wondered what had come over him. Help servicemen with their gear? Many of the people who had contacted the tip line were family members who said that their loved ones had been sent to Ukraine with little or no training, and without essential supplies such as thermal underwear, warm socks, or body armor. Korostelev had discovered that bringing attention to these reports often resulted in the men being withdrawn from frontline positions. He thought of this as one of his contributions to the antiwar effort: he was helping reduce the number of Russian fighters in Ukraine, one conscripted man at a time. He did not mean that TV Rain’s work had helped provide “basic necessities at the front.” But, somehow, he had said it.

In the first months of the war, Latvia issued about two hundred and sixty visas to media workers fleeing Russia, and nearly as many to their family members. Riga was already home to Meduza, arguably the most respected Russian-language news outlet. Now two dozen others came, including TV Rain, the Russian services of the BBC and Deutsche Welle, the Moscow bureau of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, several smaller publications, and about half the staff of Novaya Gazeta, whose editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, had received the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2021. The population of Riga is roughly six hundred thousand people, and that of all Latvia is fewer than two million, so five hundred newcomers is “a noticeable presence,” Viktors Makarovs, a senior foreign-ministry official, told me.

Latvia, like Lithuania and Estonia, was occupied by the Soviet Union for nearly fifty years. (All three countries joined the European Union in 2004.) About a quarter of the population are Russian-speaking ethnic Russians who settled there during the occupation and their descendants. Latvian authorities have long worried about the group’s susceptibility to Russian propaganda. A former President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, whose wife, Ieva, serves as the digital-media adviser to the President of Latvia, has been an outspoken proponent of sealing borders against all Russians, citing, among other things, “a deep skepticism about transforming Russians who come here into non-imperialist democrats.”

In Latvia, Anna Mongayt, TV Rain’s creative director, has felt a sense of discomfort and shame, for being from Russia, for speaking Russian in stores and restaurants. “I’m always wanting to explain myself,” she said.

The European Union spent much of last year devising ways to protect its media sphere from Russian interference. In Latvia, the measures were sweeping. The country banned the broadcast of some eighty television channels that were registered in Russia, and police cracked down on a black market for satellite receivers that were used to circumvent the restrictions. It was in this context that TV Rain arrived in Riga: it was welcomed as an antidote to the Kremlin’s propaganda, but it also encountered a distrustful public and a new set of laws and regulations that were enforced with existential urgency.

TV Rain, which is known as Dozhd in Russian, began broadcasting on Latvian cable last July—and almost immediately started racking up warnings and violations. Latvian authorities cited the station for failing to provide an audio track in Latvian, as required by law; for displaying a map of Russia that included the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula; and for its journalists’ repeated use of the phrase “our military” to refer to the Russian armed forces. Editors at TV Rain told me that an illustrator had turned in the map so late that no one had had a chance to check it, but that the use of “our military” was no mistake: it was an acknowledgment of responsibility. To some Latvians, however, it sounded like a statement of allegiance.

By the time of Korostelev’s broadcast, on Thursday, December 1st, TV Rain was facing thousands of euros in fines. The following day, a clip of his slipup spread on social media. It seemed like proof of something many in Latvia had suspected all along—even Russians who claimed to oppose the Kremlin were secretly supporting its war in Ukraine. “So it turns out this was all part of the ‘special operation,’ ” one typical tweet read. “This was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Ekaterina Kotrikadze, TV Rain’s news director, opened that afternoon’s broadcast of “Here and Now” with a clarification and an apology. “The phrase used by Korostelev was factually wrong and absolutely unacceptable to the entire editorial team of TV Rain,” she said. “We oppose Russia’s war in Ukraine. We consider this war to be criminal and vile, and we consider the draft criminal and senseless. Our goal is to get this message across to every single one of our viewers, to as many people as possible. We cannot allow wording that may cast doubt on our position, and for this reason”—Kotrikadze swallowed—“we have decided to stop working with Alexey Korostelev, starting today.” Her speech slowed and she appeared about to cry. “To all those people who have had to flee their homes, to all who have experienced Russian aggression firsthand,” she said, “we ask for your forgiveness.”

Words strain,Crack and Sometimes break, under the burden,Under the tension, slip slide and perish,Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,Will not stay still.—T.S. EliotAt the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Roald Dahl’s books, a new notice now appears. “Words matter … The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvellous characters.”On the surface, it seems whimsical and innocuous. However, it signals a recent effort carried out by his publisher, Puffin, to rewrite his classic texts to make them less “offensive.” Words like “fat” and “ugly” have been culled, whole phrases rewritten, and, of course, gender-neutral terms have been added in places.While highly reported on in the media, this rewriting of classic literature is just the most recent manifestation of a central facet of the new dangerous trend to label language as a form of violence, under the guise of the very mantra that introduced the new bastardization of Dahl’s work: Words Matter.As a writer, one might think I would be more sympathetic to this claim, but I am not. I recognize and celebrate the potential power of words, but I understand that whether this potential is manifested depends completely on the recipient. The pen may be more powerful than the sword, but only if the words reach a receptive audience. There is a fundamental difference between verbal assault and physical assault. The impact of the former, as potentially harmful as it may seem, lies purely in the mind of the listener. Not so for physical violence.Saying “Words Matter” or “Words have Power” is like repeating the old mantra “Knowledge is Power.” But that doesn’t make any of them true. Knowledge alone confers no power, however much we might wish it were so. Ask most environmental scientists, or reflect on the fate of the ancient Librarians of Alexandria. It is what you do with the knowledge that matters. The same is true for words.T.S. Eliot also wrote, in his masterful poem Four Quartets 1, “Words, after speech, reach Into the silence.” Words disappear after they are spoken. The only place they may persist is in the mind of the listener. What we do with the words we hear is uniquely determined by a combination of culture, experience, education, and conscious or subconscious reflection. At a very basic level, each of us has the power, at least in principle, to parse and interpret what we hear, and, if necessary, to do so in ways that positively benefit our psyches and our lives, or, alternatively, in ways that may cause emotional pain and trauma.While Eliot may have also bemoaned the slipperiness of language in the lines from Four Quartets quoted above, part of the power of words at the same time lies in their ability to be imprecise, vague, and even disingenuous. Language must be interpreted, and that opens up a host of opportunities. It is also why we must all interpret what we hear or read.Noam Chomsky once said to me, when we were discussing religious beliefs, “I don’t care what people believe. It is what they do that matters.” Beliefs can influence actions, of course, and so can words. Words have the power to incite violence, but this depends on the receptiveness in the mind of the listener. The call to jihad may motivate a suicide bomber, but for those whose minds have not been prepared for years through exposure to religious dogma and indoctrination, it falls on deaf ears. Similarly, most of us could see through the lying hyperbole of Donald Trump on January 6th, 2021, but those who then gathered outside the US Capitol Building were already true believers and were primed to act.Without context and interpretation, and unless one chooses to internalize them, words are impotent, and that gives us power over them, not vice versa. We may be influenced by what we read or hear, but we own our responses, including our actions, which, after all, speak louder than words.This notion is anathema in the modern world, however, because it implies that if you feel traumatized or offended by what you hear or read, it is primarily your problem to deal with. The trauma may be very real, but the underlying psychological issues and healing processes are ones that you, not others, need to take primary ownership of. You have not been victimized; you have been traumatized. There is a difference.It is relatively well known that I am an atheist, but I also grew up in a Jewish household. For much of my professional life, neither of these factors made much of a difference. However, that has been changing, due in part to the fact that antisemitism has been on the rise. I am beginning to see pejorative comments online about my being a “Jew.” On a societal level, this is certainly a worrisome trend, but on a personal level, it means absolutely nothing to me. My reaction is to immediately discount the rest of what the speaker has to say, while at the same time feeling a bit sorry for their stupidity and ignorance.This response is probably cultural. While I was young, whenever I saw signs of antisemitic exclusion, like some club not accepting Jews, it seemed that Jews had banded together to build a nicer club down the road. The response to antisemitism was not a sense of victimization, but rather an incentive to be better and do better. Such a material response may be a luxury of circumstances that is not available to all, but the psychic response is always available. Die Gedanken Sind Frei (“Thoughts are free”), after all.It is also important to note that words are not static. Their meanings evolve over time as language and culture evolve. Rewriting the words of speakers or writers of the 17th century, or the 1950s, so that they adhere to the cultural sensitivities of the present time robs us not only of great literature but also of historical perspective. Repeating the mantra “Words Matter” as a rationale for censoring words or silencing others, is often simply code for “Coddle Me.” To edit Roald Dahl or Ian Fleming, so that young adults are never exposed to words or situations that might not be considered appropriate for popular discourse today is to stunt their intellectual and emotional growth.Censoring and other strictures on language are not the solutions. Rational discussion and even ridicule are. Words themselves can be the greatest tools to alter the impacts of other words. After all, words aren’t, or shouldn’t be, treated as if they are sacred. Allowing them to be said out loud often robs them of their power. In 1972, the comedian George Carlin was arrested for disturbing the peace for performing a routine in which he described the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”:  “shit,” “piss,” “fuck,” “cunt,” “cocksucker,” “motherfucker,” and “tits,” expressing amazement that they could not be used regardless of context. He later said:I don’t know that there was a “Eureka!” moment or anything like that … It’s just impossible to say “this is a blanket rule.” You’ll see some newspapers print “f blank blank k.” Some print “f asterisk asterisk k.” Some put “f blank blank blank.” Some put the word “bleep.” Some put “expletive deleted.” So there’s no real consistent standard. It’s not a science. It’s a notion that they have and it’s superstitious. These words have no power. We give them this power by refusing to be free and easy with them. We give them great power over us. They really, in themselves, have no power. It’s the thrust of the sentence that makes them either good or bad.The next time someone says “words matter,” ask them why. If they say it is because words can cause them harm or offense, suggest they consider growing up. That, too, may offend, but maybe those words, and a subsequent discussion, can also do some good.Director Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame, described the purpose of many of their skits:Use your brain, use these things. That was essential to Python, as far as I was concerned. And causing offense was a part of that. It’s to shock people. To shock them out of their complacency, their timidity, their caution in life. Be bold, fall on your face a couple of times. It doesn’t hurt that badly. You bounce back up. It’s okay.A recent gripping Quillette piece extolled the courageous writing career of Salman Rushdie and discussed his newest book, Victory City, published six months after he was stabbed on stage in August 2022. The title of the Quillette article, “Words Are the Only Victors,” refers in part to the final words of his heroine as she buries her record of her city’s final moments of destruction in a clay pot beneath the earth.In a world governed by hate and irrationality, it may be true that in the aftermath of violence, words may be the only victors. But in a world where words are treated as if they are both weapons and attackers, and where we shield ourselves from them for fear that they might induce feelings in us that we don’t like, we don’t become the victors—we only further victimize ourselves.

The departing director of the world’s second biggest philanthropic donor and one of the most influential funders of scientific research was doing his best to sound noble. In an interview marking his departure from the Wellcome Trust, Sir Jeremy Farrar was talking about the failures of political leaders, the threats of “zoonotic” diseases spilling over from animals to humans, the importance of scientists helping to shape the future, and how experts must speak out to prevent “conspiracy theories” being “amplified”.
Here was a prominent figure dedicated to the role of science in solving global problems — even if he did display flashes of the egotism that led him to serve on the Sage advisory body during the pandemic and then quit to rush out a book lamenting other people’s failures.
“If we do revert to a lack of evidence, a lack of information — if we’re going back to the era where we’re just making policies up with no evidence behind them, the world is in a worse place. And we’re moving away from an era of sort of 20th, 21st-first century enlightenment to something darker,’ he concluded with a flourish. ‘We can’t let that happen.”
Who could argue with the need for evidence-based science and the unfettered flow of information to help make the world a better place? It was no surprise, however, Farrar chose The Guardian for his valedictory interview as he heads to Geneva for a new post as chief scientist of the World Health Organization. For this ensured there would be no challenging questions over his central — and profoundly anti-science — role in stifling debate on the pandemic origins and effectively pushing his own conspiracy, cooked up with a handful of influential colleagues, including Anthony Fauci in the US, which suggested any idea that Covid might have emerged from some kind of laboratory incident in Wuhan was crackers.
Never mind all the evidence that has emerged showing how members of a group of experts that Farrar marshalled to squash the lab-leak hypothesis harboured their own doubts over the disease emerging naturally, based on its location and unusual properties. Let alone his own initial fears on this vexatious issue — or indeed, his recently-revealed verdict on high-risk experiments on coronaviruses being carried out in low bio-security laboratories in Wuhan as “Wild West” research. Instead, his interviewer, a long-serving health reporter, dutifully told her readers that “Farrar’s position is that while it is likely to have come from animals, it is important to stay open-minded and gather evidence. Above all, we need transparency, he says.”
This is, sadly, typical of the pitiful reporting seen on this particular issue from The Guardian. Presumably this continuing failure is a legacy of the media group’s reaction to Donald Trump’s promotion of the possibility of a lab leak, a response shared with The New York Times. The Guardian, however, even allowed British scientist Peter Daszak to publish an article headlined “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” without disclosing his organisation’s financial and research links to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) until forced into hasty clarification. Farrar, incidentally, promoted this risible piece on Twitter: “As always worth reading @PeterDaszak”.
Yet The Guardian was far from alone; almost all Western media failed in their duty to challenge powerful players and vested interests on the crucial issue of the pandemic origins. Patsy journalists churned out reports fed to them by prominent scientists that dismissed “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab leak, placing more faith in a brutally-repressive Chinese dictatorship than an elected US government. They kept pointing to an animal market in Wuhan as the most likely source of SARS-CoV-2, a theory dismissed even by the Chinese authorities and despite obvious flaws in this argument given earliest cases. Ultimately, much of the media ended up presenting a collective idea that there was settled consensus, sweeping aside the voices of bravely-dissenting scientists.
Farrar was at the centre of this deceptive web, spinning lines to impede unfettered debate on the origins of the biggest public health crisis for a century. Along with two of his Wellcome Trust colleagues, he joined 24 other scientists to sign a key letter in The Lancet journal sycophantically praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later discovered to have been covertly organised by Daszak, who had spent years working with his friend Shi Zhengli, the celebrated lead researcher into bat coronaviruses at WIV.
Suggested reading How the UK sacrificed its car industryBy Ian Birrell
Farrar also hosted a conference call on the first day of February 2022 at the behest of former presidential adviser Fauci. They were joined by Francis Collins, then head of the biggest US science funding body, and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, and at least 10 other experts. We know now that several taking part held concerns over the virus being engineered. Even after the call, Farrar admitted he was “50:50” on whether it came from a lab. Yet he oversaw the near-instant drafting by four participants and one other author of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, another hugely-influential article published by Nature Medicine stating firmly that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.
Dr Robert Redfield, an eminent virologist who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when the outbreak began in 2020, has long feared Covid resulted from a lab leak. Now his suspicions are backed by two US intelligence agencies. FBI chief Christopher Wray admitted last week they have “for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. Yet Redfield told a congressional committee hearing into the virus’s origins this week that he was deliberately “sidelined” by the likes of Fauci and Farrar: “It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative, and that I obviously had a different point of view. Science has debate and they squashed any debate.”
Redfield’s written submission to the committee rightly argued that both theories on the origins “needed to be aggressively and thoroughly examined” — although his own view “indicates Covid-19 infections more likely were the result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event”. This conclusion, he explained, was “ based primarily on the biology of the virus itself, including its rapid high infectivity for human to human transmission… as well as a number of other important factors to include the unusual actions in and around Wuhan in the fall of 2019”.
Many other experts disagree. This is how science works: through the clash of ideas and rooting out of evidence to test theories. Yet Redfield told investigative journalist Paul Thacker last year that he believed Fauci and Collins used their political power in the scientific community to set the narrative and exclude dissident voices such as his own, using Farrar as “the front person”. He claimed The Lancet statement, as well as the Nature Medicine missive, “was orchestrated by Jeremy Farrar — I think under direction of Fauci and Collins, trying to nip any attempt to have an honest investigation of the pandemic’s origin”.
This is incredibly damning: these two documents were the most influential papers on the pandemic’s origins — accessed by millions, widely shared, heavily quoted and even used by social media to suppress publication of “conspiracies”. Meanwhile, Farrar pointed to the Nature Medicine statement when questioned on his belief that natural transmission was the most likely cause of the pandemic. “Jeremy’s belief is that the Nature Medicine research paper remains the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus to date,’ his spokeswoman told me in June 2021.
Prior to this week’s hearing, Republicans on the committee issued a sharp memo asking why Farrar’s work on the Nature Medicine paper — which his spokeswoman confessed to me he had helped to “convene” although it now emerges he made at least one edit to toughen its tone — was uncredited by the journal. A fair question. They also quoted an email from lead author Kristian Andersen dated February 8 — eight days after that secretive conference call — to German participant Christian Drosten, which admitted “our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory”.
Yet before the conference call, Anderson was “60-70%” convinced the virus came from a lab, according to Farrar’s book, alarmed by properties such as its receptor binding domain which “looked.. like a perfect key for entering human cells”, and the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses.
Concerns have grown after it was discovered EcoHealth Alliance, the group run by Daszak that funnelled US funding to support research at WIV, sought a grant in 2018 from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proposing to insert a furin cleavage site into SARS-like bat coronaviruses to assess their ability to infect cells. The bid was declined, due to the risks. Daszak insists the collaborators have not pursued the research to his knowledge. But who knows exactly what really went on in those Wuhan labs given the stonewalling of outside inquiries? They could have continued the work with other funds for all we know.
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Let me state again with absolute clarity: we do not know the pandemic’s cause. It might have been through natural transmission. Or it might be the legacy of some kind of unfortunate laboratory incident. There is no hard proof for either theory, despite intense efforts to find an intermediate species of animal that might have “amplified” a bat virus to spill over into humans. Yet it was foolish to ignore that SARS-CoV-2 erupted 1,000 kilometres from the closest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses. And in a city that was home to China’s only maximum bio-security laboratory — especially when WIV held the biggest repository of bat viruses in Asia, had known safety concerns, suddenly took its virus databases offline weeks before the pandemic emerged, and was carrying out risky gain-of-function research to boost infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice.
Whatever the origins, it seems alarmingly clear that a group of influential scientists, empowered by holding the purse strings for research, set out to deliberately stifle debate over the birth of a pandemic that has caused such devastation — often while saying that we must “follow the science” and despite their own early concerns over risky research in Wuhan and the virus’s strange properties. They pushed the toxic notion that anyone asking valid questions was inflaming conspiracy theorists and backing “implausible” ideas — and were aided by weak politicians, supine journalists and complicit science journals. Such was the influence of these funding behemoths, they set the tone across Europe. This was the real Covid conspiracy.
We can only guess why they adopted such a stance, although I suspect it was through misguided desire to protect both science and some of their own reputations having backed gain-of-function research. Regardless, their stupidity risks harming their profession through sinister efforts to crush free debate, a doctrine that lies at the root of scientific advancement. Sadly, all those journalists who failed to do their job of challenging powerful players and vested interests have also undermined my own profession again. This should provoke soul-searching, especially on the Left, over allowing partisanship to override fearless interrogation of important issues.
We can, however, now see the reason for the shameful silence in Westminster and Whitehall following the furore over former health secretary Matt Hancock’s leaked WhatsApp messages. These reveal how the Government argued behind the scenes that the outbreak’s location was “entirely coincidental” and that any discussion of a possible lab leak risked “damaging national security”. So our bureaucrats, politicians and spooks put their desire to appease a Communist dictatorship in China above the global quest to discover the truth about the pandemic origins, which might help us to prevent subsequent health disasters. No wonder my Freedom of Information requests on this issue have been stymied in both London and Edinburgh.
These inquiries still have some distance to travel, although slowly but surely the truth is emerging. “Recently released unredacted email messages make it clear that in early 2020 science funding heads Fauci, Collins and Farrar were informed by Anderson and three others that the genome sequence of Sars-Cov-2 raised the possibility that it was a laboratory product. The funding agency heads told them this threatened “great potential harm to science and international harmony”. The four scientists, following their paymasters’ lead, published a commentary in a journal falsely affirming that science ruled out the possibility of laboratory origins. “This false narrative still colours discussion, having dominated the debate for a year,” said the biosafety expert Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University.
But this begs a question: how can Farrar, having corroded the brand of one of our nation’s finest institutions and played such a role in promoting this narrative, now be handed the influential role of chief scientist at the WHO? “In this context, the appointment is a major error,” says Ebright rightly. This is another disastrous own goal by a UN body that has performed so badly in the pandemic from the earliest days. This post, arguably the most influential scientific role in the world, has been given to a figure who was at the epicentre of spinning a web of deception that stifled scientific probing of the first global pandemic for a century. It suggests that we are sliding from an era of enlightenment to something darker — and as Farrar says, we can’t let this happen.

For Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, the galvanizing event was a family health emergency. For Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, it was picking up from failure and reconnecting with her purpose.
At this month’s meeting of “The Breakfast Club,” these trailblazing leaders relayed deeply personal stories of perseverance and triumph. For both, lived experience inspired their paths to politics. The past continues to drive their fight for equity today.
This monthly power breakfast is hosted by Tommy Amaker, the Thomas G. Stemberg ’71 Family Endowed Coach for Harvard Men’s Basketball. The informal networking group draws a few dozen Harvard faculty members and notables from Boston’s Black community. Regulars include former U.S. Sen. William “Mo” Cowen and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the Jesse Climenko Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Coach Tommy Amaker (right) has been hosting the breakfast for 15 years.

Amaker invites a few basketball players, too, taking care to seat them near the featured guests. “The mayors’ stories were extremely moving but also very different,” observed basketball player Tommy O’Neil ’23, a government concentrator with a secondary in educational studies. “My biggest takeaway is that there’s no direct path to public service.”
At the Breakfast Club, meaty topics like race, politics, and social justice go perfectly with orange juice and eggs. Past speakers include U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock and former President Barack Obama. This time Amaker invited the mayors for appearances timed to Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day. Their remarks were strictly off-the-record, in keeping with the “house rules” Amaker set for the first club meeting 15 years ago. Both officeholders later agreed that the broad contours of their messages could be shared.
“Everyone in this room was blown away by our two mayors,” Amaker said as his guests exited the event (and at least one wiped away tears). “We’re lucky to have them as our leaders.”

If human error is to blame for the deadly train collision in Greece on February 28, the responsibility ultimately lies with those who devised, defended, and promoted the economic doctrines underpinning the austerity policies that were imposed on the country in the 2010s. Without those polices, this tragedy never would have happened.

AUSTIN – In a flash, the savage destruction of Greece foretold in 2015 (and before) is back in the news, owing to a grisly tragedy on one of Europe’s smallest railroad systems. On February 28, a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction on the same track, resulting in the obliteration of the lighter, faster passenger train.

According to The Guardian, “the trains were traveling on what appears to be a well-maintained stretch of electrified mainline.” Take a moment to let the irrelevance of that observation sink in. We are talking about a head-on collision. Of course it wasn’t the track.

Was it a “tragic human error,” then, as Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis quickly announced? The stationmaster at Larissa has been arrested and faces a long prison term. How convenient that there is someone to blame.

Who was the stationmaster? Journalist Dimitris Konstantakopoulos reports that he “was a 60-year-old man of limited experience, alone in a position of great responsibility.” The New York Times adds that he had only six months of training.

Why were humans involved at all? Apparently, automated systems to prevent two trains from approaching each other on the same track were not installed. And why not? Evidently, such things are expensive. They add to costs without contributing to revenues. To ensure that such safeguards are in place, the firm hand of regulation must override the profit motive.

Worse, Konstantakopoulos reports that, according to a former director of the Trainose company, “The last system of tele-management of the railways was deactivated in 2020.” Since then, the former director “stopped traveling by train.” Worse still, The New York Timesnotes, “Rail workers say the traffic lights were always red because of years of technical failures. Workers were left to warn one another of oncoming trains only by walkie-talkie.” And the president of the train drivers’ association told the BBC, “Neither the indicators, nor the traffic lights, nor the electronic traffic control work.”

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Trainose, Greece’s railway operator, was purchased from the Greek state in 2017 by Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato. Since the Italian company was the only bidder, we can infer that it got an excellent price. The privateers – excuse me, the privatizers – did just what the profit motive demanded: they cut costs, not only by eschewing safety equipment but also by shedding railway staff. There are only 800 employees today, down from 6,000 in 2010, though there are supposed to be 2,800. Having multiple sets of eyes on the rail line is after all redundant – 99.9% of the time.

So, there was indeed human error. But which humans made the mistakes? Does responsibility lie with the lone stationmaster, or with Trainose (which last year changed its name to Hellenic Train)? The stationmaster is obviously a scapegoat. And since Hellenic Train’s management did exactly what it was required to do, it can hardly be accused of making an error.

How about Mitsotakis? His government has regulatory power that it failed to exercise. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport had a responsibility to upgrade the network, but it did not do so. But that, too, was no error. The failure to regulate was in the service of the private firm’s profit motive. The failure to upgrade was in the service of the government’s austerity program.

What about former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who signed the terms of the 2015 surrender to Greece’s creditors that led to the wave of fire-sale privatizations? Again, this was not done in error; it was the result of treachery, bad faith, and force majeure.

What about those who imposed the terms of austerity, deregulation, and privatization on the Greeks? The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission – the infamous troika – took effective control of the Greek government in 2010 and again in 2015 and still run the show to this day. They also made no errors. They simply applied the dogma that had been prescribed by economists in the service of creditors. Theirs was victor’s justice, executed precisely as intended.

The human error therefore lies elsewhere. It lies with those who devised, defended, and promoted the economic doctrines that have ravaged Greece, and with the rest of us who went along. We did so stupidly but with self-assurance, smugly accepting that free-market economics is the only option (“there is no alternative”), that regulation is an avoidable burden, and that private ownership is always better than public. Those in positions of power were complacent – if not cheerful – as these doctrines took hold in Greece and around the world.

Ergo omnes in culpa.

Mexico could be entering a golden age, perfectly placed as it is to benefit from the growing tension between the United States and China. Parts of the country are already seeing a boom as companies diversify away from China and invest in it. In fact, a good chunk of that investment is being made by Chinese companies that are finding a way to continue to sell goods to the United States.

But these promising economic winds are being stifled by bad politics. For most of the past three decades, Mexico had a run of presidents who were serious about policy and tried to modernize the country, albeit with varying degrees of success. Alas, that luck has run out. Mexico’s president since 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, also known as AMLO, is a populist demagogue straight out of the worst pages of Latin American history.

López Obrador’s covid policies were a disaster; Mexico has had one of the highest covid case-fatality ratios in the world. His economic policies have been anti-growth; by one estimate, nearly 4 million Mexicans have slipped into poverty since 2019. He has failed to take on the drug cartels. And he has attacked Mexican political institutions, many of which had acquired legitimacy and competence only recently. His current effort might be the most dangerous.

For most of the 20th century, Mexico was a one-party state whose fraudulent elections ensured that the ruling party always won. That changed in 2000, when President Ernesto Zedillo’s electoral reforms enabled the country’s first free and fair elections, which the ruling party lost. Out of the same spirit of democratization came the National Electoral Institute, which has developed a reputation for being independent and competent.

That agency is now López Obrador’s target. Last month, his party passed a bill to drastically weaken that agency. He initially pushed a plan that would have killed the agency altogether and replaced it with a new body, but he couldn’t clear the bar to pass a constitutional amendment. So he has settled for legislation that hollows it out. Its budget will be cut by nearly a third. Many local offices will be closed, and 6,000 staff members will be laid off. Its powers will be curtailed, taking some teeth out of the watchdog. He says he is doing this to improve the voting process and save tens of millions of dollars a year.

López Obrador cannot legally run for a second term as president; he is taking these steps to ensure that the next elections result in legislative victory for his party, which he plans to continue to dominate. The Supreme Court is expected to hear challenges to the president’s gutting of the agency in the near future.

The elections agency has not been perfect, but it is a pillar of Mexico’s fledgling democracy. Polls show it is the country’s most trusted institution after the armed forces. López Obrador’s attack on it has been part of his assault on several nongovernmental organizations and independent government agencies, including those dealing with corruption and human rights. In an excellent article, Bloomberg’s Shannon K. O’Neil writes that López Obrador has raided the coffers of public funds for artists and academics, weaponized the judiciary, and routinely attacked those who criticize him.

López Obrador’s entire term in office has been out of a Peronist textbook — claim to speak for the poor, attack the elites, and meanwhile run a shoddy, incompetent government. When a journalist reported on the lavish life his son lived in the United States, he revealed the journalist’s personal income information — a move some have called illegal and unconstitutional. López Obrador campaigned on a promise to fight corruption. But according to the nongovernmental group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, his government awards three out of four contracts using a “no bid” system that does not even ask for competing offers.

Meanwhile, the state has lost its capacity to rein in the drug cartels, which run large parts of the country. López Obrador campaigned on the slogan of “hugs, not bullets,” but in office he simply ceded the issue to the military, which is deeply riddled with corruption and drug money. In 2020, the United States apprehended a former defense minister, on charges of being in league with the cartels. The government of Mexico asked the United States to drop the charges and Washington agreed.

Former U.S. attorney general William P. Barr recently described López Obrador as “the cartels’ chief enabler.”

López Obrador’s attack on the election agency is essentially personal. He believes that he won the 2006 and 2012 elections but was denied his due (independent observers do not agree). In fact, much of his presidency is an act of narcissism — he holds daily news conferences that go on for hours, he attacks the state because its agencies limit his powers, and now he is attempting to weaken election oversight. They have their differences, of course, but López Obrador has turned out to be the Mexican Donald Trump.

While the review assessed 78 studies, only 10 of those focused on what happens when people wear masks versus when they don’t, and a further five looked at how effective different types of masks were at blocking transmission, usually for health care workers. The remainder involved other measures aimed at lowering transmission, like hand washing or disinfection, while a few studies also considered masks in combination with other measures. Of those 10 studies that looked at masking, the two done since the start of the Covid pandemic both found that masks helped.

Questions about the pandemic Card 1 of 4 When will the pandemic end? We asked three experts — two immunologists and an epidemiologist — to weigh in on this and some of the hundreds of other questions we’ve gathered from readers recently, including how to make sense of booster and test timing, recommendations for children, whether getting covid is just inevitable and other pressing queries. How concerning are things like long covid and reinfections? That’s a difficult question to answer definitely, writes the Opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, because of the lack of adequate research and support for sufferers, as well as confusion about what the condition even is. She has suggestions for how to approach the problem. Regarding another ongoing Covid danger, that of reinfections, a virologist sets the record straight: “There has yet to be a variant that negates the benefits of vaccines.” How will the virus continue to change? As a group of scientists who study viruses explains, “There’s no reason, at least biologically, that the virus won’t continue to evolve.” From a different angle, the science writer David Quammen surveys some of the highly effective tools and techniques that are now available for studying Covid and other viruses, but notes that such knowledge alone won’t blunt the danger. What could endemic Covid look like? David Wallace Wells writes that by one estimate, 100,000 Americans could die each year from the coronavirus. Stopping that will require a creative effort to increase and sustain high levels of vaccination. The immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki writes that new vaccines, particular those delivered through the nose, may be part of the answer.

The calculations the review used to reach a conclusion were dominated by prepandemic studies that were not very informative about how well masks blocked the transmission of respiratory viruses.

For example, in one study of hajj pilgrims in Mecca, only 24.7 percent of those assigned to wear masks reported using one daily, but not all the time (while 14.3 percent in the no-mask group wore one anyway). The pilgrims then slept together, generally in tents with 50 or 100 people. Not surprisingly, given there was little difference between the two groups, researchers found no difference from mask wearing and declared their results “inconclusive.”

In another prepandemic study, college students were asked to wear masks for at least six hours a day while in their dormitories, but they were not obligated to wear them elsewhere. Researchers found no difference in infection rates between those who wore masks and those who did not. The authors noted this might be because “the amount of time masks were worn was not sufficient” — obviously, college students also go to classes and socialize where they may not wear masks.

Yet despite their inconclusiveness, the data from just these two studies accounted for roughly half of the calculations for evaluating the impact of mask wearing on transmission. The other six prepandemic studies similarly suffered from low masking adherence, limited time wearing them and, often, small sample sizes.

The only prepandemic study reviewed by Cochrane reporting high rates of mask adherence started during the worrying H1N1 season in 2009 in Germany, and found mask wearing reduced spread if started quickly after diagnosis and if a mask was worn consistently (though its sample size, too, was small).

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Elon Musk is spiraling.
The freakish powers of Miley Cyrus and Lana Del Rey
The topic Biden keeps dodging
Loathing and IndifferenceIt’s time to talk about elitism.Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2017 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others.But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:
Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.
If that makes me an elitist, so be it.In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.(As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)In 2016, I believed that good people were making a mistake. In 2023, I cannot dismiss their choices as mere mistakes. Instead, I accept and respect the human agency that has led Trump supporters to their current choices. Indeed, I insist on recognizing that agency: I have never agreed with the people who dismiss Trump voters as robotic simpletons who were mesmerized by Russian memes. I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.I have argued with some of these people. Sometimes, I have mocked them. Mostly, I have refused to engage them. But whatever my feelings are about the abominable choices of Trump supporters, here is the one thing I have never done that Fox’s hosts did for years: I have never patronized any of the people I disagree with.Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.”I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.Related:
Following your gut isn’t the right way to go.
The real elitists are at Fox News.
President Joe Biden proposed the third budget of his presidency to Congress.
Russia used more than 80 missiles, including some of the most advanced aerial weapons in its arsenal, in a large-scale attack on Ukraine’s infrastructure.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is being treated for a concussion after a fall.
Up for Debate: America is in the midst of a socioeconomic shift, Conor Friedersdorf writes.
Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty
We Programmed ChatGPT Into This ArticleBy Ian Bogost 
ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.
They will be weirder than you might think. Instead of one big AI chat app that delivers knowledge or cheese poetry, the ChatGPT service (and others like it) will become an AI confetti bomb that sticks to everything. AI text in your grocery app. AI text in your workplace-compliance courseware. AI text in your HVAC how-to guide. AI text everywhere—even later in this article—thanks to an API.
Here’s who will win at the 2023 Oscars.
Nostalgia is a shield against unhappiness.
Peacock
Read. Our Share of Night, a grand, eloquent, and startling new novel by the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez.Watch. We don’t quite live in the country Poker Face (streaming on Peacock) depicts. But, in an odd way, we should wish to, our critic writes.Play our daily crossword.P.S.If you’d like a more humorous defense of elitism—okay, an outright funny and entertaining one—check out Joel Stein’s 2019 book, In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. I’ll admit that I like it because I’m in it (Joel interviewed me, naturally, as a defender of elitism), but it’s also a sly exploration of the culture war that erupted after Trump redefined elite to mean anyone whom he doesn’t like, except for when he’s using the same word to refer to himself and anyone who likes him.Stein talked with a lot of folks, including the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, who had not yet lit the bonfire of his self-cancellation. (In Stein’s visit with him, however, you can see it coming.) Stein even gets a sit-down with—wait for it—Tucker Carlson. When Stein realizes that Carlson is slagging James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, he says, “It made me want to throw Tucker into the sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”A writer who can make fun of Tucker Carlson while riffing on James Joyce is a writer you’ll want to read.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekHow have cars shaped your life, and/or what do you think about their future? (I’m eager to hear anything from attacks on the automobile to defenses of the great American road trip to eagerness for driverless electric cars to laments that the kids these days don’t learn how to drive when they turn 16, let alone how to drive a stick shift. Do you hate your commute? Do you like toll roads? Do you love your Harley-Davidson? Do you regard the replacement of tactile stereo interfaces with touch screens as a scourge? If you want, you can even send me a paean to the rotary engine, if it’s well written.) As always, while you are opining on anything related to cars or trucks or even parking spaces or meters, I especially encourage stories and reflections rooted in personal experience.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteThe New AnarchyIn an article about political violence in America, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance takes a detour to Italy to reflect on how a country that suffers an outbreak of domestic terrorism can regain stability:  
On Saturday, August 2, 1980, a bomb hidden inside a suitcase blew up at the Bologna Centrale railway station, killing 85 people … the deadliest attack in Italy since World War II. By the time it occurred, Italians were more than a decade into a period of intense political violence, one that came to be known as Anni di Piombo, or the “Years of Lead.” From roughly 1969 to 1988, Italians experienced open warfare in the streets, bombings of trains, deadly shootings and arson attacks, at least 60 high-profile assassinations, and a narrowly averted neofascist coup attempt. It was a generation of death and bedlam. Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, during the Years of Lead, at least 400 people were killed and some 2,000 wounded in more than 14,000 separate attacks.
As I sat at the Bologna Centrale railway station in September, a place where so many people had died, I found myself thinking, somewhat counterintuitively, about how, in the great sweep of history, the political violence in Italy in the 1970s and ’80s now seems but a blip. Things were so terrible for so long. And then they weren’t. How does political violence come to an end? No one can say precisely what alchemy of experience, temperament, and circumstance leads a person to choose political violence. But being part of a group alters a person’s moral calculations and sense of identity, not always for the good. Martin Luther King Jr., citing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, wrote in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” that “groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.” People commit acts together that they’d never contemplate alone.
Vicky Franzinetti was a teenage member of the far-left militant group Lotta Continua during the Years of Lead. “There was a lot of what I would call John Wayneism, and a lot of people fell for that,” she told me. “Whether it’s the Black Panthers or the people who attacked on January 6 on Capitol Hill, violence has a mesmerizing appeal on a lot of people.” A subtle but important shift also took place in Italian political culture during the ’60s and ’70s as people grasped for group identity. “If you move from what you want to who you are, there is very little scope for real dialogue, and for the possibility of exchanging ideas, which is the basis of politics,” Franzinetti said. “The result is the death of politics, which is what has happened.”
Talking with Italians who lived through the Years of Lead about what brought this period to an end, two common themes emerged, LaFrance argues:
The first has to do with economics. For a while, violence was seen as permissible because for too many people, it felt like the only option left in a world that had turned against them. When the Years of Lead began, Italy was still fumbling for a postwar identity. Some Fascists remained in positions of power, and authoritarian regimes controlled several of the country’s neighbors—Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey. Not unlike the labor movements that arose in Galleani’s day, the Years of Lead were preceded by intensifying unrest among factory workers and students, who wanted better social and working conditions. The unrest eventually tipped into violence, which spiraled out of control. Leftists fought for the proletariat, and neofascists fought to wind back the clock to the days of Mussolini. When, after two decades, the economy improved in Italy, terrorism receded.
The second theme was that the public finally got fed up. People didn’t want to live in terror. They said, in effect: Enough. Lotta Continua hadn’t resorted to violence in the early years. When it did grow violent, it alienated its own members. “I didn’t like it, and I fought it,” Franzinetti told me. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, a sociology professor at UC Santa Barbara who lived in Rome at the time, recalled: “It went too far. Really, it reached a point that was quite dramatic. It was hard to live through those times.” But it took a surprisingly long while to reach that point. The violence crept in—one episode, then another, then another—and people absorbed and compartmentalized the individual events, as many Americans do now. They did not understand just how dangerous things were getting until violence was endemic. “It started out with the kneecappings,” Joseph LaPalombara, a Yale political scientist who lived in Rome during the Years of Lead, told me, “and then got worse. And as it got worse, the streets emptied after dark.”
A turning point in public sentiment, or at least the start of a turning point, came in the spring of 1978, when the leftist group known as the Red Brigades kidnapped the former prime minister and leader of the Christian Democrats Aldo Moro, killing all five members of his police escort and turning him into an example of how We don’t negotiate with terrorists can go terrifically wrong. Moro was held captive and tortured for 54 days, then executed, his body left in the back of a bright-red Renault on a busy Rome street … It shouldn’t take an act like the assassination of a former prime minister to shake people into awareness. But it often does. William Bernstein, the author of The Delusions of Crowds, is not optimistic that anything else will work: “The answer is—and it’s not going to be a pleasant answer—the answer is that the violence ends if it boils over into a containable cataclysm.”
The rest of the article is similarly thought-provoking.Good News for Low-Wage Workers Also at The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey argues that we’re in the midst of a significant socioeconomic shift:
After a brutal few decades in which low-wage jobs proliferated and the American middle class hollowed out, the working poor have started earning more—a lot more. Many low-wage jobs have become middle-wage jobs. And incomes are increasing faster for poorer workers than for wealthier ones, a dynamic known as wage compression.
As a result, millions of low-income families are experiencing less financial stress and even a modicum of comfort, though the country’s surging rents and rising pace of inflation are burdening them too. The yawning gaps between different groups of American workers—Black and white, young and old, those without a college degree and those with one—have stopped widening and started narrowing. Measures of poverty and income inequality are dropping. I hesitate to call this the “Great Compression,” given that earnings disparities remain a dominant feature of the American labor market and American life. (Plus, economists already use that term to refer to the middle of the 20th century.) But it really is a remarkable trend, a half-decade-old “Little Compression” that policy makers should do everything in their power to extend, expand, and turn great.
What’s needed next is enough new construction of houses, condos, and apartment buildings to bring costs down. All we have to do is stop preventing real-estate developers from erecting them.A Lonely Generation After endorsing Jonathan Haidt and Jean M. Twenge’s thesis that smartphones and social media are among the most significant factors making young people today more anxious and depressed than bygone generations, Freddie deBoer speculates about how the cause and effect might work: When he was young, “the constant adolescent itch to be with other people, to see and be seen, could only be fulfilled by being in the physical presence of others,” and when cell phones and social-media sites “presented the opportunity to connect with people whenever you wanted,” what at first seemed liberatory and world expanding was actually a powerful trap:
This form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.
Being social is scary. Sometimes you ask someone to hang out and they don’t want to; sometimes you ask someone for their phone number and they don’t give it to you. Precisely because connection is so important to us, rejection of intimacy is uniquely painful. Our constant task as human beings is to overcome the fear of that rejection so that we can connect. I would nominate this dynamic as one of the great human dramas, a core element of being alive. The danger of constant digital connectivity is that it cons us into thinking that we can have the connection without the risk, that we can enjoy a simulacra of fulfilling human interaction without ever leaving the safety of online quasi-reality.
And so no wonder kids spend less time with friends, have less sex, feel no need to get their driver’s licenses ... They’ve been raised in an environment where massive corporations spend billions of dollars to convince them that they never have to leave their digital “ecosystems.” But only human connection is human connection. There is no substitute for IRL. And I think our adolescents are bearing the brunt of a vast social experiment where we tried to substitute something else for face-to-face interaction, and found it didn’t work.
Provocation of the WeekAt Blackbird Spyplane, a Substack unlike any other, the journalist Jonah Weiner and the design scout Erin Wylie argue that sometimes, that a food or paint stain on your shirt is a good thing:
Don’t think of stains as “stains,” think of them as “patina” — that is, natural, inadvertent, beauty-deepening decorations. Paint is the ur-example of a sick, “inadvertently decorative” stain. Paint on your shoes, paint on your pants, paint on a sweatshirt — f**k it, paint on a chunky knit sweater: You get a little paint on pretty much anything and 9 times out of 10 you’ve made yourself look cooler. Sometimes, of course, paint can read as “cool” to the point of parody / “get a load of Jasper Johns over here” cosplay. But all things being equal, paint communicates two swag-compounding things about you at once:

You’ve been in the lab getting some fly s**t done (whether it’s whipping out these still-lifes or “rolling up your sleeves” on some honest-labor house-painting type s**t), and
You aren’t overly precious about your presentation. We’ve written here about how flambéeing and pan-searing a jawn in this exact spirit is a great way to assert ownership over, e.g., a hyped pair of sneakers you love but don’t feel quite yourself in when they’re box fresh.

This is why all kinds of fashion designers—Margiela, Junya and Visvim leap to mind—sell signature pre-paint-splattered pieces. As with pre-distressed denim, such clothes tend to strike me & Erin as palpably fugazi and unrockably “extra” (it’s wild how well the eye can tell the difference between paint splatter actually incurred in the line of duty and artful facsimiles!!) but that only buttresses the underlying case for paint’s power.
This also helps us understand, by extension, why wine and tomato-sauce stains can also read as mad chill and cool. As with paint, these kinds of stains communicate un-preciousness on behalf of the wearer while simultaneously indicating that you have been busy doing fun, interesting s**t: imbuing clothes with stories and putting them to your own JOIE DE VIVRED-out purposes, rather than “letting them wear you.”
These stains conjure up an ambiance of romance, where your clothes serve as a visual index of an INVIGORATED LIFE. You’d have to be a fusty buzzkill to deny that that’s tight!!
Here’s where things start to get murky, though, because a major part of what’s going on here is that wine and arrabbiata sauce tend to code as just the right patina-boosting degree of, like, “Continental” and “refined.” The implicit message is that you probably dropped some $$$ in the process of accumulating those stains, and you did so in “good taste.” This is why, even though you have literally spilled food on yourself, the wine or tomato-sauce stain in question does not communicate sloppiness the way, say, a mustard stain does.
What follows is a meditation on “good” versus “bad” stains.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

President Joe Biden is following a strategy of asymmetrical warfare as the 2024 presidential race takes shape.Through the early maneuvering, the leading Republican candidates, particularly former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are trying to ignite a procession of culture-war firefights against what DeSantis calls “the woke mind virus.”With the exception of abortion rights, Biden, by contrast, is working to downplay or defuse almost all cultural issues. Instead Biden is targeting his communication with the public almost exclusively on delivering tangible economic benefits to working-class families, such as lower costs for insulin, the protection of Social Security and Medicare, and the creation of more manufacturing jobs.[Read: Biden’s blue-collar bet]While the leading Republican presidential contenders are effectively asking voters “Who shares your values?” or, in the harshest versions, “Who shares your resentments?,” Biden wants voters to ask “Who is on your side?”The distinction is not absolute. Trump, DeSantis, and the other Republicans circling the 2024 race argue that Biden’s spending programs have triggered inflation, and insist that lower taxes, budget cuts, and more domestic energy production would spur more growth. And in addition to their unwavering defense of abortion rights, Biden and his aides have also occasionally criticized some of the other Republican cultural initiatives, such as DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill banning discussion of sexual orientation in early grades.But the difference in emphasis is real, and the contrast illuminates the core of Biden’s vision about how to sustain a national majority for Democrats. He’s betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.“We need to reforge that identity as the party that gives a damn about people who feel forgotten, who have really tough lives right now,” says the Democratic strategist Mike Lux, who recently released a study of political attitudes in mostly blue-collar, midsize “factory towns” across the Midwest. “That’s the central mission. And that’s why I think Biden is right to be focusing on those economic issues first.”But other Democrats worry that Biden’s economy-first approach risks allowing Republicans such as DeSantis to define themselves as championing parents while advancing an agenda that civil-rights advocates believe promotes exclusion and bigotry. They also fear that Biden’s reluctance to engage more directly with Republicans over the rollback of rights raging through red states risks dispiriting the core Democratic constituencies, including Black Americans and the LGBTQ community, that face the most direct consequences from restrictions on how teachers and professors can talk about race or bans on gender-affirming care for minors. These Democrats have grown even more uneasy as Biden lately has moved toward Republican positions on immigration (with new restrictions on asylum seekers) and crime (by indicating that he would not block congressional efforts to reverse a reform-oriented overhaul of Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.)“Not engaging in culture wars does not mean that Democrats win: It means that we forfeit,” says Terrance Woodbury, chief executive officer and founding partner of HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young and minority voters. The group’s polling, Woodbury told me, shows that “not only do Democratic voters expect Democratic leaders to do more to advance social and racial justice” but that “they will punish Democrats that do not.”My conversations with Democrats familiar with White House thinking, however, suggest that Biden and those around him don’t share that perspective. In that inner circle, I’m told, the dominant view is that the best way to respond to the culture-war onslaught from Republicans is to engage with it as little as possible. Those around Biden do not believe that the positions Republicans are adopting on questions such as classroom censorship, book bans, LGBTQ rights, and allowing people to carry firearms without a permit, much less restricting or banning abortion, will prove popular with voters beyond the core conservative states.More fundamentally, Biden’s circle believes that voters don’t want to be subjected to fights about such polarizing cultural issues and would prefer that elected officials focus more on daily economic concerns such as inflation, jobs, and health care. Those around Biden largely share the view expressed by the Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux, who studied public attitudes about key GOP educational proposals in two national surveys last year. “People don’t really want either side of these culture wars to win; they want to just stop having these culture wars,” Molyneux told me. “They really see a lot of this as a diversion.” A national survey released this week by Navigator, a Democratic polling consortium, supports Molyneux’s point: When asked to identify their top priorities in education, far more voters cited reducing gun violence and ensuring that kids learn skills that will help them succeed than picked “preventing them from being exposed to woke ideas about race and gender.”[Shadi Hamid: The forever culture wars]Biden hasn’t completely sidestepped the culture wars. After mostly avoiding the issue earlier in his presidency, he’s been relentless in his defense of abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. (Earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris commemorated what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe with a speech in Tallahassee, Florida, where she targeted DeSantis’s signing of legislation banning abortion there after 15 weeks.) When DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, the White House also criticized him. And most recently in Selma, Alabama, Biden has also issued tough criticisms of the red-state laws erecting new hurdles to voting.Yet the Biden administration, and especially the president himself, has mostly kept its distance from the surging tide of bills advancing in Florida and other red states rolling back a broad range of civil rights and liberties. Tellingly, when Biden traveled to Florida last month, it was not to condemn DeSantis’s agenda of restrictions on classroom teachers or transgender minors, but to defend Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act; the only time he mentioned DeSantis by name was to criticize him for refusing to expand eligibility for Medicaid health coverage under the ACA.Since the midterm elections, Biden has centered his public appearances on cutting ribbons for infrastructure projects and new clean-energy or semiconductor plants funded by the troika of massive public-investment bills he signed during his first two years; defending Social Security and Medicare; highlighting lower drug prices from the legislation he passed allowing Medicare to bargain for better deals with pharmaceutical companies; and combatting “junk fees” from airlines, hotels, and other companies. In his State of the Union address last month, Biden spoke at length about those economic plans and what he calls his “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” before he mentioned any social issues, such as police reform, gun control, and abortion. The budget Biden will release today advances these themes by proposing to extend the solvency of Medicare by raising taxes on the affluent.The emphasis was very different in marquee appearances last weekend from Trump and DeSantis. Trump, in his long monologue on Saturday at CPAC, accused Biden of exacerbating inflation and promised to pursue an all-out trade war with China. But those comments came deep into a nearly two-hour speech in which Trump blurred the boundary between calling on his supporters to engage in a culture war and an actual civil war, when he promised to be their “retribution” against elites and “woke tyranny.”When DeSantis spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, northwest of Los Angeles, last Sunday, he delivered more of an economic message, attributing Florida’s robust population growth in part to its low taxes and low spending. But he drew a much more passionate reaction from his audience later when he denounced the “woke mind virus,” recounted his stand during the coronavirus pandemic against “the biomedical security state,” and pledged to “empower parents” against the educational establishment. DeSantis received his only standing ovation when he declared that schools “should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender.”To some extent, the heavy reliance by Trump and DeSantis on these cultural confrontations reflects their belief that GOP primary voters are much more energized now by social rather than economic issues. Yet it also represents the widespread GOP belief that distaste for liberal positions on cultural issues remains an insuperable barrier for Democrats with most working-class voters, including a growing number of Latino men. “Blue-collar voters don’t separate cultural concerns from economic fears,” the GOP strategist Brad Todd, a co-author of The Great Revolt, told me in an email. “They think big global companies are in cahoots with the left on culture, and they don’t put pocketbook concerns ahead of way-of-life concerns.”Todd thinks Biden’s attempt to define himself mostly around economic rather than cultural commitments represents his desire “to jump in a time machine and go back to the Democratic Party of the ’80s.” Indeed, Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, came of age politically in an era when Republicans repeatedly used racially infused “wedge issues” to pry away working-class white voters who had mostly supported Democrats on economic grounds over the previous generation. Some Democrats see Biden’s recent moves to adopt more right-leaning policies on immigration and crime as a resurgence of that era’s widespread Democratic belief that the party needed to neutralize cultural issues, typically by conceding ground to conservative positions.Like others I spoke with, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategy officer at Way to Win, believes that focusing primarily on economic issues makes sense for Biden now, but that he will eventually be forced to address the GOP’s cultural arguments more directly. Sublimating those issues, she argues, isn’t sustainable, because it is “hurting the very people” Democrats now rely on to win and because the Republican cultural arguments, left unaddressed, could prove very persuasive to not only working-class white voters but also Hispanic and even Black men. Ultimately, Fernandez said, Biden and other Democrats must link the two fronts by convincing working-class voters that Republicans are picking cultural fights to distract them from an economic agenda that mostly benefits the rich. “We have to put to bed this idea [that] we can have an economic message that doesn’t address the racial grievance and fear of change that is at the center of all this culture-war stuff,” argued Fernandez, whose group funds candidates and organizations focused on building a multiracial electoral coalition.[Franklin Foer: What Joe Biden knows about America]The debate among Democrats ultimately comes down to whether Biden is skillfully controlling the electoral battlefield or trying to resurrect a coalition that no longer exists (centered on working-class families) at the expense of dividing or demoralizing the coalition the party actually relies on today (revolving around young people, college-educated white voters, and racial minority voters). Several Democratic strategists told me that one obvious challenge with Biden’s trying to define the election around the question of which party can deliver the best economic results for working-class families is that polls throughout his presidency have found that more Americans would pick the GOP. “People still think that Trump economics was better for them than Biden or Obama economics,” Celinda Lake, who served as one of Biden’s lead campaign pollsters in 2020, told me.To Lake, that’s an argument for Biden’s strategy of stressing kitchen-table concerns, because she believes the party cannot win unless it narrows the GOP advantage on the economy. But other Democrats believe today’s party is less likely to persuade a national majority that it is better than Republicans for their finances than it is to convince them that the Trump-era GOP constitutes a threat to their rights, values, and democracy itself. Biden’s response to the Republican initiatives censoring teachers, rolling back abortion access, and threatening LGBTQ rights “simply cannot be ‘more jobs,’” Woodbury said. “If Democrats insist on fighting exclusively on economic terms, every poll in America shows they will lose.”

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Ever since our earliest days together in our mid-20s, my wife has known about a mystical place called Lincoln City. It’s a modest beach town on the central-Oregon coast, but for me, it holds a Shangri-la-like mythos. Lincoln City is where I spent one blissful week each year as a boy, combing the rough beaches for agates, fishing off the local pier, and playing with matches in the firepit outside my aunt’s trailer home. These are the very happiest of my childhood memories.So it was with great anticipation that, not long after marrying, I took my wife to visit the Best Place in the World. For me, it was every bit as glorious as I remembered. For her, not so much. She was very pregnant at the time and couldn’t stand the overpowering stench of dead fish. Given that she’s a native of warm Mediterranean shores, I shouldn’t have been surprised that she spent the weekend huddled in our motel room to avoid the howling wind. Ever since, she has considered Lincoln City to be a glitch in my psychological matrix—an unexplainable, almost pathological affection with no basis in reality.Normally, my assessments of a place or experience differ little, if at all, from my wife’s. If she hates a dinner party, I probably do too. In this case, our wildly different perceptions of Lincoln City can be explained by one of the strangest and most overpowering feelings that humans possess: nostalgia. This brew of memory, emotion, and desire can twist our perceptions and judgments, turning even pain into pleasure—or dead fish into the sweetest French perfume. And that gives it a unique power to combat unhappiness.Psychologists have defined nostalgia as a self-conscious, social emotion, bittersweet but predominantly positive. It develops out of happy memories mixed with a yearning for the past and the close relationships we had back then. Often, nostalgia involves sensory stimuli. For example, the smell of autumn leaves might provoke an intense longing for your childhood home. Neuroscientists have found that it is a complex cognitive phenomenon involving many parts of the brain, including some that are implicated in self-reflection, autobiographical memory, emotional regulation, and reward processing.Almost everyone experiences nostalgia, although its object tends to vary throughout life. One survey conducted by the psychologist Krystine Irene Batcho found that younger people felt more nostalgia for pets, toys, and holidays than did older people, who felt it more strongly for music. I came of age in the 1980s, and even songs I found hopelessly annoying back then—say, the torturous 1982 hit “Maneater,” by Hall & Oates—can fill me with nostalgic sentiment.As my colleague Julie Beck has written, nostalgia was originally viewed as an emotional malady when it was first defined in the late 17th century. And, crucially, it often occurs when people are experiencing negative moods or having bad experiences. Loneliness can be a trigger, as researchers found in 2008. Another is bad weather. Or Hall & Oates.[Read: When nostalgia was a disease]However, despite its association with negative emotions, nostalgia does not cause or exacerbate unhappiness. Rather, nostalgia is a defense response to unhappiness, one that brings relief from a negative mood. Psychologists writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006 found that provoking nostalgia in experiments strengthened people’s social bonds, boosted their positive feelings about themselves, and improved their mood. Similar research has shown that when people feel nostalgia, it can bolster their sense of life’s meaning, lower an existential reaction to the idea of death, increase spirituality, and raise optimism.Scholars aren’t sure exactly why nostalgia works; some have speculated that reminiscing about happy memories affirms “valued aspects of the self” in situations when we might otherwise feel lonely or unworthy. Either way, its emotional intensity allows the joy of the past to overpower the unpleasantness of the present, a little nugget of escapism that helps get us through the bad times.No matter how nostalgia works, the science to date finds more than enough evidence to conclude that it is good for us. Given its benefits, we could all gain from nurturing it consciously so we’re better prepared to counteract bad moods when they arise. Here are three ways to do so.1. Find a shortcut to your happy place.Think of a memory of a specific place and time that gives you a feeling of warmth, the kind you reflexively turn to in moments of distress. Now find a picture or an object that reminds you of that place, and keep it at hand. Maybe it’s a song stored on your phone or a picture of yourself as a child, sitting in your grandmother’s lap.Better yet, if possible, find something that holds a smell that stimulates the nostalgic glow. Researchers have found that scent-induced nostalgia can be especially effective at raising happiness, self-esteem, optimism, and social connectedness. You could find a candle that smells like a sprig of pine to remind you of your childhood Christmases, or air freshener that evokes cut grass from summer days gone by. I thought of keeping a dead fish in my desk at work to remind me of Lincoln City but feared my colleagues might not see the charm in that.[From the June 2017 issue: The end of forgetting]2. Anticipate your memories.When you think back on the memories that give you nostalgia, they probably feel like kismet, which is part of why they’re so appealing. But your nostalgic memories can have the same effect even if they’re deliberately manufactured. Writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion in 2019, researchers reported that when people anticipated feeling nostalgic about a current experience, they were more likely to experience that nostalgia later and get a corresponding boost in their feelings of social connection and sense of meaning.You can run such an experiment in your own life. The next time you are having a good time with family or friends, take a mental snapshot, consciously committing the details to memory. You might even write them down. Note that these are the days that will someday make you say “Those were the days.” Later, when you are in a negative mood, you are much more likely to pull off this reminiscence.[Listen: Pop music’s nostalgia obsession]3. Build traditions.A researcher writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2021 made the case that nostalgia can help build strong bonds in groups. I’ve seen this happen myself: At Harvard, I regularly speak to alumni gatherings, including to retirees who graduated from business school 60 and even 70 years ago. The participants get intense joy from seeing their classmates and reminiscing about their old times together. They laugh at memories that are objectively mundane and tear up at simple stories of ordinary things they saw and did together.We can forge more of these strong bonds in our families, friend groups, and workplaces by creating traditions and rituals and recalling them as the years go by. Create “holidays” around events you experienced with others in the past, such as sports you played as kids or the formation of a friend group in a big city after college. Mark the occasion regularly, so people have something to look forward to. The occasion you’re celebrating doesn’t even have to be purely wonderful; for what it’s worth, alumni seem to be just as nostalgic about terrible classes as they are about the good ones.Perhaps because it is so powerful and complex, nostalgia has received magical treatment from poets and writers. “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect,” Marcel Proust wrote. On a fourth-century-B.C. Greek tablet we find the anonymous inscription “‘I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly / the cool water flowing from the Lake of Memory.’ / And of their own accord they will give you to drink from the holy spring.”I have never read a poem about Lincoln City. But on a windy, chilly day, the sort that would normally make me grumpy, a waft of fish will bring me as much magic as any verse.

South Korea and Japan have been estranged neighbors for decades, but now they’re moving to establish a new partnership — and not because the United States told them to. Both countries are rethinking their security posture because they realize the need to counter China’s increasingly aggressive regional expansion. America’s Asian allies are speaking clearly about the rising danger in the Pacific, and the United States should listen.

This week’s historic warming of ties between Seoul and Tokyo was almost completely overlooked in Washington, where pundits and politicians alike have chosen to focus on the latest kerfuffle with Beijing. China’s new foreign minister warned of “conflict and confrontation” unless Washington backs off of its competitive strategy. President Xi Jinping blamed China’s economic woes on the United States and its policy of “containment, encirclement and suppression.”

It’s fashionable these days in Washington to assign primary blame to the United States for the downturn in U.S.-China relations. Some claim America’s hawkish stance is the result of politicized groupthink in Washington. The Chinese government exploits this navel-gazing by claiming that Washington is the only reason that China’s international standing is at an all-time low. Chinese propaganda outlets even blamed the new South Korea-Japan thaw on the United States, accusing South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol of “serving as a pawn of the U.S.”

The reality, though, is that the new moves toward cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo are not the result of what people in Washington are thinking or saying. In fact, the U.S. government wasn’t significantly involved in this diplomatic achievement, although President Biden did praise it after the fact.

Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida each took a significant political risk by opening a new chapter in their countries’ relations. But they did it because they believe that the global strategic environment is changing fast and that China’s expansion poses a challenge neither can deal with alone.

Yoon made the first move, by pledging that South Korean funds will be used to compensate World War II victims of Japan’s forced-labor practices, thereby removing a major hurdle that had frozen Tokyo-Seoul collaboration. He said last week that Japan had “transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner that shares the same universal values with us.”

Kishida responded this week by praising Yoon’s actions and pledging to deepen ties with Seoul. This sets the stage for Japan to resume cooperation on everything from intelligence-sharing to supply chains. Next week, Kishida is expected to host Yoon for a summit. Kishida might also invite Yoon to the Group of Seven leaders’ meeting in May in Hiroshima. In April, President Biden will host Yoon for a state dinner.

Washington policymakers tend to view Asia through only the lens of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. But these moves by Tokyo and Seoul show that the problems with Beijing don’t originate in the United States. It is China’s behavior, not Washington’s hawkishness, that is exacerbating tensions in the region.

“Those waving their finger at what they call China policy ‘groupthink’ take a very Washington-centric view of how we got here,” said Eric Sayers, nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “This [Washington] consensus developed after years of diplomatic nudging from our allies in the region, asking us to do more to balance against Chinese coercion.”

Japan is doubling its defense spending over the next five years because it deems that necessary for its defense. South Korea is weaning itself off dependence on the Chinese market and supply chains to protect its own economy. To be sure, both countries also have an interest in managing tensions with China, but they realize that countering its challenge to regional security must take priority.

Asian allies are calling for more U.S. engagement in the region — but they want engagement with them, not with China. They have realized that like-minded countries need to spend more time working with one another and less time trying to conciliate leaders in Beijing and Pyongyang.

Washington needs to make more efforts to reassure Asian allies that the United States is committed to the region, and not just militarily. The U.S. economic investment strategy in Asia is seen as thin on substance. Regional leaders don’t see much impact from the Biden administration’s trade strategy.

“We don’t want a war with China, not a cold one, not a hot one,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (Ill.), the ranking Democrat on the new congressional select committee on U.S.-China relations, told me. “We want peace. We want a durable peace. But to achieve that peace, we have to deter aggression.”

That’s not dangerous groupthink. That’s a rational, bipartisan approach for defending American interests and promoting American values. The demand signal is coming from U.S. allies in the region who are on the front lines. They are mobilizing to meet this challenge head-on, and Washington must respond to their calls for help.

Dr. He Jiankui has ensured that his name will forever be linked to the history of gene editing in humans. In 2018 He announced that he had edited the genes of twin girls using CRISPR during IVF. Importantly, he edited them at the single cell stage, which means their germline was affected, which further means that the changes would be passed down to their offspring. He removed a single gene, the CCR5 gene, to reduce their chance of contracting HIV from their father.

He was widely criticized for doing human germ-line gene editing without proper regulatory oversight or approval. He has since been convicted and spent three years in prison, but now seems unrepentant and plans on doing further gene-editing research in humans. Specifically he wants to research how to cure the genetic neuromuscular disease, Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

At the same time China announced it is tightening its regulations regarding human gene editing. Part of the He controversy was that he was allowed to conduct such research in the first place. Regulations only limited human gene editing in hospitals. China has now expanded the ban to all human gene editing research, regardless of setting. Similarly, in the US germline human gene editing is banned, although non-germline genetic engineering is not (although there are further regulations about federal funding of such research). The EU position is that gene editing in humans: “may only be undertaken for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic purposes and only if its aim is not to introduce any modification in the genome of any descendants.”

Cells in the body are either germline, which means they affect the germ cells (sperm and ova) and therefore can be passed down to offspring. Somatic cells, part of the body, are essentially everything else. If the cells in your liver, for example, were gene-edited those changes would only affect you, and could not be passed down. The big controversy with He’s research is that he altered all cells, including the germline, which can be passed down.

The obvious concern with germline gene editing is that it can potentially introduce genetic changes into the general human population. If such changes were not regulated, once this technology is widely available there would be a steady stream of such changes, having unpredictable effects on the human population. There is also concern that such changes could create different genetic populations of humans, even potentially genetically mutually exclusive populations. That would require significant genetic alterations, but is technically possible.

Often the term “designer babies” is brought up in such discussions. These are genetic alterations that are not intended to treat a disease, but to make either cosmetic changes (such as eye color) or to enhance function. This is the “Gattaca” scenario, as in the 1997 film of a dystopian biopunk future with extreme genetic profiling and discrimination (although in the film gene selection, but not editing, was apparently used).

Ethically there is a clear difference between somatic and germline gene editing. One can argue that competent adults have a right to make whatever changes they want to themselves. Germline changes potentially affect others, and this effect crosses national boundaries. So there is a motivation and justification for international rules regarding human germline gene editing.

However, I think that a simple ban is not the way to go long term. Dr. He is one demonstration of why this is – the goal of using gene editing to prevent Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a reasonable one. Pressure for such technology will become extreme, once the public gets the idea that this technology is possible and it works. A total ban is almost a guarantee of creating a black market, and medical tourism in less well-regulated parts of the world.

Also – using germline gene editing to prevent horrible genetic diseases is, I think, the right thing to do. Obviously the research needs to be highly regulated and supervised, but not completely banned. That is an overreaction. There are over 10,000 single gene disorders known, collectively affecting about 1% of the population. This is a huge disease burden. This is the low-hanging fruit for gene editing as these are generally single mutation disorders (although some are more complex such as repeat expansions). The knowledge of what changes we should make and their effects is pretty well known for most of these disorders.

The limiting factor now is simply the effectiveness, precision, and safety of the technology to use some version of CRISPR during in-vitro fertilization in order to make the desired genetic change. This process can be combined with something already in use – preimplantation genetic testing. Fertilized eggs without an undesired mutation can be selected for implantation. However, this won’t work for a dominant homozygous parent. l

But in practice PGT (selection) can obviate the need for actual gene editing in most cases, if the only goal is to prevent genetic disorders. But gene-editing can potentially do things that selection alone cannot. We can go beyond genetic disorders to genetic predispositions. What if a parent has two copies of the genetic allele that confers an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, for example? Similarly, there are some gene variants (alleles) that may be protective, reducing the risk of heart disease or stroke.

If we expand the list of acceptable targets from not only genetic disorders but genes that have a significant effect on disease risk then we can rapidly go beyond what selection can do. If, for example, there are 20 or 30 targets for gene selection in each parent, the probability of having a fertilized egg with all the desired alleles is negligible. Even with selection at the sperm level, with millions of sperm, getting all the desired traits will be difficult – and not possible with eggs from the mother, which are much more limited in number.

Even if we do not get to more extreme uses of this technology, such as physical enhancements, and just stick with disease modification, it’s easy to see the tremendous potential and risk of this technology. The utopian version is that single-gene genetic diseases can be virtually eliminated. There is always a spontaneous mutation rate, so new mutations are always appearing, even after fertilization. But if known mutations for dominant and recessive diseases were altered at the fertilization stage, the burden of such diseases would be dramatically reduced. At the same time we can reduce the burden of major diseases, such as neurogenerative disease, vascular disease, and diabetes.

The dystopian version is essentially the Gattaca scenario, where the technology is available to the relatively wealthy who not only disproportionately benefit from the technology but also use it to screen for potential partners. Even if this selection were not explicit, there is already a problem of selective sorting along economic lines when it comes to couples. It is not hard to imagine at all a dating app limited to people who can verify they have been “genetically cleansed”.

As if often the case with technology, the difference between incredibly beneficial and dystopian abuse is regulation and how we implement the technology. Usually, something in the middle emerges. Using gene editing will likely disproportionately benefit the wealthy, but the technology may become low cost enough that it is actually cost-effective for societies to subsidize the procedure. Remember – the whole concern with germline editing is that these edited genes get into the general population. But this cuts both ways – this also is a great potential benefit. Everyone potentially benefits from fewer disease causing alleles circulating in the population. A poor child may benefit from an upper-middle class grandparent who had gene editing.

The health-care cost savings to society could massively outweigh the upfront cost of selection and gene editing, especially for those with known genetic risks. Perhaps prospective parents may routinely get an exome screen, and then may qualify for state-sponsored gene editing (or at least insurance will cover part of it, or there is a tax-break or some assistance).

This world is very likely coming, sooner or later, even if it makes you feel squeamish. Rather than pushing this technology underground, regulations should focus on developing the technology in a responsible way, in order to protect individual patients and have the maximal benefit for society. A simple ban will not accomplish this.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Last week, Columbia University became the latest school to announce that it would no longer require SAT or ACT scores for undergraduate admissions. The school’s decision was “rooted in the belief that students are dynamic, multi-faceted individuals who cannot be defined by any single factor,” the college said in a defense of its policy change.The SAT has faced heavy scrutiny for privileging rich families, which can pay for test-prep classes for their kids. Some believe that dropping the test is an ethical move toward equality in selective college admissions. Others argue that Columbia is replacing one metric skewed toward rich students with a bundle of metrics that are even more stratified by socioeconomic status, such as high GPAs, internships in Nicaragua, and expensive traveling soccer teams.My concern is that this elite-college policy—carried out in the name of equity—might billow the embers of a teen-anxiety firestorm. After all, when a college makes one test the core of your application, you’ll cram for that test. When the same school says your assessment is based on an infinitude of talents, it’s a tacit suggestion that ambitious students spend 100 hours a week cultivating as many résumé-stuffers as possible.For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the extraordinary rise of teen mental distress in the United States. I’ve studied the literature on social-media and smartphone use and considered the rise of loneliness among young people. But the Columbia news made me think I’ve overlooked a key factor that helps explain why adolescent distress is rising not only in the U.S. but also in many rich countries. It’s pressure-cooker schools.A 2022 paper by Dirk Bethmann and Robert Rudolf, both professors at Korea University, points out a curious paradox: In the 21st century, rich countries are beset with sadder adolescents. This finding runs counter to one of the fundamental rules of economics. Global data strongly associate wealth and happiness for adults, because citizens of richer countries tend to have higher subjective well-being than those of poorer countries. But Bethmann and Rudolf found a “paradox of wealthy nations,” because advanced economies seem to manufacture happier adults and unhappier adolescents.One explanation might go like this: Richer and more complex economies require more rigorous and intense education, putting more pressure on kids to be high-achieving perfectionists. Adolescents go through a kind of happiness slingshot, in which stress early on springs them toward greater wealth and well-being later in life. Bethmann and Rudolf wink at this notion, writing that although “a higher learning intensity tends to increase a student’s academic achievement,” it tends to reduce leisure time, sleep, and subjective well-being.Bethmann and Rudolf also found that higher standardized-test scores and student assessments of academic competition were strongly correlated with teen anxiety. If you take two countries that are equivalent in almost every way—same GDP, inequality, life expectancy, air pollution—the nation with higher test scores and more student competition will have more anxious and depressed teens.The Bethmann-Rudolf hypothesis echoes international evidence that has repeatedly uncovered a negative relationship between (1) a culture of obsessive student achievement and long schoolwork hours, and (2) student well-being:
After an education reform in Germany led to more instructional time, a 2018 study found that increased school hours “significantly reduced adolescents’ self-rated mental health status.”
A 2018 analysis of Taiwan “cram schools,” which often focus on helping students pass standardized tests, found that these programs reliably increase academic achievement at the cost of increasing rates of depression.
A 2018 study by Gabriel Heller-Sahlgren at the London School of Economics found that schools around the world with higher test scores and more homework typically see the same trade-off: higher achievement and lower well-being, possibly because of greater “parental-achievement pressure,” which encourages students to feel more competitive.
A 2022 study of seventh to 10th graders by Korean researchers found that students whose peers were randomly assigned private tutoring after school reported more depressive symptoms. One possible explanation is that teens without tutors became more worried about their relative academic success and spent more time on schoolwork to keep up.
Bethmann and Rudolf point out a deep irony of this trade-off. In the 20th century, reformers fought to reduce the workweek and rescue kids from the scourge of labor. In the 21st century, we’ve intensified the demands of the school week. In many OECD countries, teenagers study longer than the permitted legal working hours for adult employees. The legal maximum workweek in South Korea is 52 hours, Bethmann and Rudolf report in their paper, but roughly one in four 15-year-old students studies 60 hours or more a week. The hardest-working decile of students in several European countries also put in 60-hour weeks. And, as the authors note, anxiety rates in many Western countries are just going up and up.Now, what about the U.S., specifically?Forty years ago, the most anxious kids in America were those in low-income households. Beginning in the late 1990s, that flipped, according to the researcher Suniya Luthar. In a series of studies, she found that rich teens in high-achieving schools were the most anxious and depressed. One possibility she explored was that the most rigorous schools created an environment where kids worried too much about how they measured up to their peers in grades, activities, and college admissions.“I have for years thought that one of the main causes of the increase in adolescent depression was an increase in school pressure,” Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist who studies adolescent behavior at Temple University, told me. “When I talk to kids and we talk about sources of stress, they mention school pressure more than likes on Instagram.”Some parents might respond that a little school pressure at 17 is a fine price to pay for decades of higher salaries and career success. If that’s true, this phenomenon is classic delayed gratification: pain now, gain later.“Maybe these problems will go away when these young people grow up,” Steinberg admitted. “But also, maybe they won’t go away. We know adolescence is the main time when chronic depression begins. And if school pressure is making some kids depressed and borderline suicidal, I find it hard to argue that it’ll be all right if they can afford a bigger house 20 years from now.”Let me try to meet ambitious parents and teens halfway. My parents put academic achievement on a pedestal in our household. And so do I: I think hard work, thoughtfulness, and cultures of excellence are values worth cherishing, and I want to pass down those values to my own kids. But I hope we can all acknowledge that sometimes this value system unhelpfully conflates intelligence with self-worth. Many parents may be worshipping healthy values in an unhealthy way.Imagine, by analogy, that you’re a parent who is generally interested in your child being healthy—that is, eating the right foods and engaging in youth sports and playtime. You move to a neighborhood where the parents hold the same value—fitness is good—but they take it to extremes. At 5 a.m., every high schooler in the neighborhood participates in a grueling private HIIT class. Parents closely track their kids’ body-mass index and blood pressure. A while back, one parent entered their child in an international weight-lifting contest, it created a cascade of anxious mimicry, and now all the kids participate in international weight-lifting contests. Each month, one of the kids in the neighborhood is awarded Fittest Kid, and parents display these FK honors with living-room trophies and bumper stickers on their car. Over the years, the neighborhood has produced several bodybuilders and elite athletes, along with high rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia. This has drawn the attention of researchers, who have concluded that the community has designed a culture of physical achievement that is both highly successful and indisputably crazy.Yes, that example is kind of weird. But how different is it, really, from the way many status-obsessed parents and teens have come to treat academic excellence? A healthy virtue can be maximized to the point of toxicity.The school-pressure hypothesis doesn’t rule out the role that social media and smartphones might play in the rise of teen anxiety. Teen distress is very likely the result of many different causal streams mingling together. For example, perhaps school intensity creates a culture of competition that raises the salience of status: “Am I doing enough to be more valuable than others?” Status anxiety carries over to social media, where precious leisure time is spent in virtual competitions for even more quantitative rewards—just another platform for being tested, where precisely counted “likes” stand in for grades. Meanwhile, the combination of school intensity and phone usage squeezes out offline leisure time, leading to fewer friends and hangouts, not to mention less sleep. All of this makes kids, especially those predisposed to anxiety and mental-health disorders, less capable of coping with the world’s chaos and more likely to tell a counselor that they can’t deal with existential stressors, such as climate change and school violence.A good reason to scrutinize smartphone usage among teens is that it’s a very plausible contributor to youth distress. But pinning this whole thing on phones might lead us to overlook the other ways that modern life might be contributing to a more miserable childhood experience. “Sometimes I just think, my God,” Steinberg exclaimed at the end of our call. “Like, shouldn’t we care about giving kids a good experience of being a kid?”

When Volodymyr Matias was a teen-ager, he got a camera and started taking pictures of the trolley buses and trams around Kharkiv. He posted his photos to forums where he met transport freaks from around the world. During his last year of high school, a tram driver he knew (he knew all the tram drivers) suggested that he get a job as a ticket seller; they rode the trams, with special black bags for money and ticket rolls. It was a good gig. By the time Volodymyr was in his first year of university, where he studied to be an architect, he was supporting himself. Several years later, as he was completing his thesis project, he also enrolled in a driving course. He got his architect’s and tram-driver licenses in quick succession.

Before the war, Volodymyr, who is thirty-two, was an accomplished architect with a private practice, and the leader of the Union of Architects, which oversees the work of architects in Kharkiv and the surrounding region. There was a lot of work in Kharkiv: residential construction, in part spurred by the influx of displaced people from the nearby Russian-occupied Donbas, and ambitious urban improvements funded both by the city and by private business. Volodymyr also continued to pick up a couple of tram shifts a week. Driving through the city helped him rest his eyes and clear his head. He especially liked early mornings, when Kharkiv was just waking up. He thought he might be the mayor one day.

It took Volodymyr a while to believe that the war would affect ordinary civilians. Rockets hit residential buildings in Kharkiv almost as soon as the war began. On February 26, 2022, a munition hit an intersection in broad daylight and a friend, who happened to be there, sent Volodymyr a video of people bleeding and dying. Still, Volodymyr did not believe that the Russians were targeting civilians intentionally. Around the same time, the Ukrainian military had brought down a Russian plane and captured the pilots. One of them claimed that they were following orders. Maybe the authorities were wrong to turn off street lights and direct people to drape their windows, Volodymyr thought. Maybe, if the Russians could see, they wouldn’t kill civilians. This was nearly a month before the world learned about Russian atrocities in Bucha, which was when Volodymyr finally realized he’d been wrong the whole time.

Volodymyr and his city quickly got used to the shelling and bombardments. After a few days, a large supermarket reopened not far from his home. People had run out of food and nothing else was open, so they had to line up outside the store for hours. While Volodymyr was inside, a munition hit somewhere nearby. The building, and everything in it, shook. People kept shopping, or standing in line. They’d learned that they couldn’t run from the attacks. They learned a lot of things, like not to close their windows, so the glass wouldn’t shatter from explosions, and to place large plastic bottles filled with water on the sills, to cushion the windows when they swung open during assaults.

Volodymyr made sure to go out every day. Now he wasn’t taking pictures—everyone was on the lookout for spies—but he took everything in. By the middle of March, Russian troops had built fortifications at the northeastern boundary of the city, across the highway from the neighborhood of Saltivka. This neighborhood seemed to be hit most frequently and most heavily, but rockets were reaching the center of the city as well. Volodymyr and his friends formed a group to track the strikes. They learned to distinguish artillery by ear. They developed a system for locating them by ranking proximity on a ten-point scale—for example, “seven” was a strike close enough to set off car alarms on one’s street. A bomb landed in a square some six hundred yards from Volodymyr’s apartment. He had never seen his mother so scared. She sat down on the floor, her head in her hands, and waited to die.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News access to thousands of hours of video from the events of January 6, and Tucker Carlson’s effort to rewrite history isn’t just laughably incompetent; it’s already falling flat.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Barton Gellman: A troubling sign for 2024
“I teach international relations. I think we’re making a mistake in Ukraine.”
The most overrated movie of this Oscars season
A Clumsy GambitWhen a mob tried to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, congressional Republicans—especially those in the Senate—seemed briefly to understand the magnitude of the events around them. Kevin McCarthy, then the GOP minority leader, said that President Donald Trump bore responsibility for the attack. Even Lindsey Graham swore he was done with Trump.This new seriousness didn’t last. A year after the attack, most Republicans—including McCarthy—ducked a ceremony at the Capitol marking the anniversary and commemorating the lives lost. McCarthy would later be elected speaker on the say-so of a handful of extremist Republicans—some of whom openly sympathized with the 2021 insurrectionists—who made him grovel through more than a dozen rounds of voting. Insofar as other Republicans can bring themselves to even acknowledge January 6, many of them still portray it as a legitimate protest that somehow got out of hand rather than what it really was: a seditious conspiracy to attack the American system of government, instigated and encouraged by a sitting president of the United States.Heading into the 2022 midterms, the Republicans hoped that an attempt by their party’s leader to overthrow the constitutional order would be no impediment to regaining national power. The midterms, however, proved that Americans still care about their democracy and that they could not be swayed to trade their freedom away merely because gas prices are too high. At this point, the Republicans are barely holding the House, and Trump is leading the pack of possible GOP presidential candidates while yawping about “retribution.” Most Americans continue to think January 6 was a terrible day for the United States and that Trump bears at least some responsibility for it.Not to worry, Republicans. McCarthy and Fox News’s resident pluto-populist Tucker Carlson are on the case. Unfortunately, it’s going about as well as you’d expect from anything that involves the words Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson.To recap the events of the past few weeks: McCarthy apparently decided that Carlson was the person who could remove the stain of January 6 from the Republican Party. Remember, once Trump was elected in 2016, the GOP was a national majority, holding the House, the Senate, the White House, most governor’s mansions, and most state legislatures across the country. Trump destroyed much of that, and his decision to run again meant that January 6 could not somehow be memory-holed. So the speaker gave the ever-perplexed Carlson access to thousands of hours of video from the attack.The objective here was clear from the start. If the GOP is going to make a run at national power again, it must find a way to deny the reality of January 6 and neutralize the cloud of seditious stink that still clings to every Republican because of Trump and the insurrectionists. Who better than Carlson to sneer his way through a dismissal of one of the worst days in the history of the United States?Unfortunately, the attempt to gaslight millions of people isn’t going very well. Carlson, as my colleague David Graham points out, is engaging in a “long-standing Donald Trump approach of demanding that his supporters believe him rather than their lying eyes.” But there are likely limits to that gambit even for Carlson, who is presenting as bombshells things we already knew. It is not a revelation, for example, that the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, walked along with Capitol cops who were trying to keep the fur-hatted weirdo calm even while he was howling in the Senate chamber. Carlson’s attempt to deny the danger of that moment is not only silly but also a gobsmackingly incompetent attempt to use footage depicting a rioter whose bizarre behavior was already well-known to the public.It’s one thing to assume that the Fox audience isn’t very bright and will believe almost anything—I will gladly stipulate to that—but it’s another to ask them to leap across a chasm of credulity. Sedition-friendly Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, tried to capitalize on Carlson’s after-school-video special by immediately calling for a new trial for Chansley. But even Fox viewers probably know that Chansley wasn’t convicted in a trial: He loquaciously pleaded guilty and got a stiff sentence of 41 months in prison.I realize that, for many reasons, I am not Carlson’s target demographic. (He’s not much of a fan of my work either.) But when Republican members of Congress are pushing back on a major propaganda effort to help … well, to help the future fortunes of Republican members of Congress, things are not going well. You might have expected someone like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah to zing Carlson, and he did, saying the Fox host had gone “off the rails” and describing him as a radio “shock jock.” But conservative Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Rounds of South Dakota both criticized Carlson. (Even Senate Minority Leader and ongoing profile in courage Mitch McConnell carefully opined that Fox “made a mistake” in depicting January 6 in a way that was “completely at variance” with how the head of the Capitol Police “correctly” described the day.) Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Carlson’s presentation was “inexcusable” and, for good measure, “bullshit.”Trump, of course, thanked both Carlson and McCarthy. Because, really, if the point was to reassure the American public about whether the GOP is still in the grip of violent seditionists, what better way to do it than to clumsily cherry-pick some video and then elicit an all-caps tirade from the leader of the Republican Party?
LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO. THEY WERE CONVICTED, OR ARE AWAITING TRIAL, BASED ON A GIANT LIE, A RADICAL LEFT CON JOB. THANK YOU TO TUCKER CARLSON AND SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE KEVIN McCARTHY FOR WHAT YOU BOTH HAVE DONE. NEW VIDEO FOOTAGE IS IRREFUTABLE!!!
Well then. As Sonny Bunch from The Bulwark wryly observed this morning: “Going to be kind of funny to watch GOP candidates dance around acknowledging that the presidential frontrunner and the party’s semi-official media organ are more or less pro-storming-the-Capitol at this point.”As counterintuitive as it might be, perhaps the best thing for American democracy would be for Carlson to keep bumbling his way through more January 6 footage and to keep images of the insurrection in front of millions of viewers for as long as possible. If that’s how McCarthy and Carlson intend to restore the image of the GOP as a normal political party, who are any of us to argue with such public-relations geniuses?Related:
Tucker Carlson and the new narrative of January 6
The new Lost Cause
Two of the four Americans who authorities say were kidnapped in a border city of Mexico have been found dead. The other two are alive, but one is injured.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified to the Senate Banking Committee, telling lawmakers that the Fed will likely raise interest rates higher than previously forecast.
In a speech at the Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco, Elon Musk commented on the future of both Twitter and Tesla.
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson lays out some surprising effects of remote work: more marriages, more babies, bigger houses.
Alima Lee
Kelela Knows What Intimacy Sounds LikeBy Hannah Giorgis
On a Tuesday afternoon last month, I found refuge from the dreary chill of New York’s winter in the cardamom-scented warmth of Benyam Cuisine, a small Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem. The family-run establishment is normally only open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday. But that day, a co-owner trekked in from Jersey City to indulge two homesick Ethiopian American women: myself and Kelela, the enigmatic R&B singer whose fan base includes the likes of Beyoncé, Solange, Björk, and, not coincidentally, the Benyam host’s niece.
Kelela, who is 39, has cultivated a mystique that’s exceedingly rare in the modern music business. It’s been nearly 10 years since she released her 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, which earned her an eclectic following of industry heavyweights, R&B purists, dance-music DJs, and indie obsessives. In 2017, she dropped her studio debut, Take Me Apart, which cemented her standing as one of modern R&B’s most inventive vocalists. Take Me Apart is by turns brooding, defiant, and haunting—and in each register, Kelela’s voice wraps itself around the melodies with hypnotic confidence. After that creative leap and the subsequent tour, she essentially vanished.
What older dads know 
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Holi 2023: The festival of colors
Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic
Read. “Nomenclature,” a poem by Clint Smith.“Your mother’s mother came from Igbolandthough she did not teach your mother her language.We gave you your name in a language we don’t understandbecause gravity is still thereeven when we cannot see it in our hands.”Watch. Catch up on some Oscars contenders before the awards show on Sunday.Play our daily crossword.P.S.The director Michael Bay has taken his share of criticism over the years for producing movies that are big and loud and a bit dumb. (One word: Transformers.) His 2001 historical epic, Pearl Harbor, was so bad that the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone immortalized it in a ballad in their hilarious movie Team America: World Police that included the lyric, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark / When he made Pearl Harbor.” But I am going to admit that I am a sucker for a few Michael Bay movies, and especially one of the most fun adventure movies of the 1990s: The Rock. (I discovered in a conversation this morning that this is yet another movie, like so many from roughly 1970 to 2000, that is completely unknown to my Daily editor Isabel Fattal, so I am recommending it to both you and her.)Released in 1996, The Rock features Ed Harris as a renegade Marine general who has had enough of the wimps in Washington ignoring the sacrifices of brave men who died in black operations. He and his crack military team steal some nerve gas, set up a base on Alcatraz—the Rock—and hold San Francisco hostage. After just about everything else fails, an FBI biochemist played by Nicolas Cage and a former British spy played by Sean Connery (who is obviously supposed to be James Bond and whose character was held for years as a prisoner for stealing American secrets back in the 1960s) are sent in to get the rockets. Bullets; carnage; hard, manly stares; set jaws; inventive cursing; and a fair amount of hilarity ensue. This movie has so much testosterone in it that you could grow a beard sitting too close to the screen, but it’s also genuinely funny, with some classic dialogue that I cannot possibly repeat here. Bring a lot of popcorn to this one, and try not to repeat the best lines at the office.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been busy promoting a new book that sets out the case for his presidential run. His main message: Republicans need a new approach to combatting the cultural power of the left.The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival begins by narrating DeSantis’s political rise and goes on to give an account of his pandemic leadership. But it reaches a climax when he describes how he used the power of his state office to stand up to “wokeness.” The implication is that he will do the same for the country if he becomes the next president of the United States.Donald Trump excelled at offending liberal sensibilities while he occupied the White House. But he took few steps to check progressive ideas. Under Trump’s watch, wokeness gained sway over some of the country’s most influential institutions, and public opinion on issues such as race and immigration swung to the left. By contrast, DeSantis has pushed back against the institutional power of such ideas in concrete ways and on several fronts, including in business and entertainment.[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]The main focus of these efforts has been in education. Last April, DeSantis signed a piece of legislation called the Stop WOKE Act; according to a summary by Reason magazine, the sprawling bill was “intended to curb teaching about or conducting trainings on certain topics related to race, sex, and gender in Florida public schools and workplaces.” Earlier this year, DeSantis successfully pressured the College Board to redesign a new AP course in African American studies, and installed close conservative allies on the board of trustees of the New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts college. Now his administration is preparing to go a step further: House Bill 999, pending in Florida’s legislature, would fundamentally remake the nature of public education in the state by abolishing certain majors and granting political appointees the power to fire tenured faculty members.DeSantis’s pitch is worth taking seriously. His promise to fight wokeness is a big reason for his rapid rise on the right, making him Trump’s leading competitor for the Republican presidential nomination. And because many Americans, of all ethnic origins and ideological stripes, feel alienated by the recent transformation of mainstream institutions, his campaign may even have helped DeSantis win voters outside his party’s base.Still, a closer look at the changes DeSantis is implementing in Florida reveals that—contrary to the promise encapsulated in the title of his new book—they will make Americans less, rather than more, free. Anybody who believes in basic constitutional values like free speech should reject his blueprint for America’s revival—even if, like me, they have their own misgivings about so-called wokeness.Most critics of DeSantis have little sympathy for the concerns that drive his policies. They believe that his attacks on universities and corporations are rooted in a desire to impose regressive views. And they assume that his objections to critical race theory derive from a determination to prevent Americans from learning about historical injustices like slavery.On recent evidence, assuming the worst about American politicians is generally a safe bet, and DeSantis may well be driven by the most venal of intentions. But regardless of his motives, I believe that there are rational grounds for skepticism about CRT and apprehension about the state of higher education in the United States.To its defenders in the media, CRT simply amounts to a willingness to acknowledge the noxious role that race has always played in American life. And without doubt, the founders of this intellectual tradition, such as Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw, have made important contributions to debates about, for instance, the nature of discrimination in America. But anybody who goes back to CRT’s founding texts will quickly realize that the tradition has, from its inception, conceived of itself as standing in direct conflict with the liberal left. Far from seeking to complete the work of the civil-rights movement, scholars like Bell were intent on exposing the flaws of its most fundamental claims and assumptions—as is clear from his blistering attacks on Brown v. Board of Education. This has all along placed the tradition in conflict with such key constitutional values as free speech and due process.More generally, I worry about a lack of diversity of viewpoints on campus. Most professors genuinely seek to encourage their students to speak their mind and challenge prevailing ideas. But I regularly talk with students from across the political spectrum who have experienced intolerance of dissent. When they deviated from a narrow ideological consensus in the classroom or the dining hall, they were penalized by professors or shunned by classmates. The problem with the influence of woke ideas on campus is not that some students or faculty members genuinely believe in them; it is that many bullies and administrators impose them by fiat, making it perilous for students and academics alike to disagree without suffering serious adverse consequences.[Diane Roberts: ‘Most important, we must not upset DeSantis’]For all these reasons, I wanted to approach with an open mind DeSantis’s blueprint for curtailing the cultural power that a particular set of ideas about race, sexual orientation, and gender identity has acquired, especially in universities. Can public authorities take action to promote a true diversity of viewpoints at universities and avoid turning themselves into censors?If H.B. 999 is any indication, the answer seems to be a resounding no. DeSantis claims that he is intent on defending free speech and academic freedom from the coercive power now enjoyed by a new set of radical ideas. But in the process, he is proposing to turn the state into an even more powerful censor, giving political appointees unprecedented authority over what students and faculty members can do and say.The bill’s most blatant restriction of academic freedom concerns the content of courses taught at public universities in Florida. Although it is appropriate for a legislature to set broad expectations for what the institutions it funds will teach—for example, by directing them to prepare students for the needs of the state’s economy—academic freedom is severely undermined when faculty members are prohibited from teaching particular topics or expressing certain points of view.Such prohibitions stand at the core of H.B. 999. The bill explicitly bars public universities from teaching materials that constitute “identity politics” or are rooted in “Critical Race Theory,” two concepts whose legal meaning it fails to define in precise terms. As FIRE, a nonprofit devoted to defending academic freedom, points out in a recent article, “Faculty teaching courses on history, philosophy, humanities, literature, sociology, or art would be required to guess what material administrators, political appointees, or lawmakers might label ‘identity politics.’”(Reading the legislation, I realized that many of the classes I teach would likely fall into the interdicted category. Although I am critical of most forms of identity politics, I believe that my task in the classroom is to facilitate debate, not to evangelize my views. When I teach students about so-called cultural appropriation, for example, I freely express my conviction that we have gone too far in putting healthy forms of mutual cultural influence under a pall of general suspicion. But to facilitate a meaningful debate, I also assign philosophical articles justifying expansive prohibitions on cultural appropriation that a well-informed judge would reasonably interpret as standing in the tradition of identity politics.)H.B. 999 would also prohibit the inclusion of “unproven, theoretical, or exploratory content” in general-education courses. This not only makes it impossible for professors to let students participate in the process of scientific discovery (exploratory), but would also, on its face, obviate any number of classic college courses, including on Shakespeare’s plays (unproven) or quantum physics (theoretical).The vague, catch-all nature of these prohibitions is aggravated by the fact that the same bill would effectively end the protections for unpopular speech that have historically been a central feature of American universities. The bill would require virtually all hiring to be done by political appointees, such as university presidents and boards of trustees. These same bodies would also be empowered to review a faculty member’s tenure status for any reason, enabling them to fire anyone with politically inconvenient views. “If the political appointees who populate boards of trustees can review tenure at any time, for any reason,” FIRE rightly notes, “it will strip faculty of a primary purpose of tenure: to protect scholarship, research, and teaching from political pressure.”Thankfully, the most extreme elements of DeSantis’s legislation will never be implemented. Many provisions in the bill are blatantly unconstitutional. If it passes the Florida legislature in anything resembling its current form, its main provisions will—as has already happened to key parts of the Stop WOKE Act—almost certainly be struck down by the courts.Yet H.B. 999 is a harbinger of a larger danger. Whether or not DeSantis wins the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he already has an outsized impact on the GOP’s plans for taking on the left’s cultural power. And although some of the views and customs that now exert real influence in many American institutions are profoundly illiberal, DeSantis’s blueprint for fixing this problem will, by enlisting the power of the state, undermine basic constitutional values, including freedom of speech.[Read: The forgotten Ron DeSantis book]Universities across the country need to fight back against the legislative proposals in Florida. If they are to retain a modicum of academic freedom, they must defend the right of teachers and researchers to pose awkward questions and publish uncomfortable answers—irrespective of whether they offend the sensibilities of progressive activists or conservative trustees.At the same time, university presidents who oppose such legislative efforts would be well advised to reflect on how they can win back the broad-based respect that their institutions once enjoyed. Public universities are, as recent events in Florida make clear, especially vulnerable to political interference. But elite private universities enjoy tax-exempt status for their endowments and draw part of their budget from federal research grants, making them nearly as dependent on political support for their health and survival. All universities, public or private, should be deeply alarmed that large segments of the country now perceive them as ideologically intolerant monoliths and feel alienated by their reigning ethos.For now, DeSantis’s attack on academic freedom seems likely to fail. But in a democracy, colleges will always depend on the goodwill of the people. Universities that care about their long-term success must seek to sustain that support. This means, at a minimum, that they must do on their own what legislators neither could nor should do on their behalf: nurture a true culture of viewpoint diversity—one that empowers students and researchers alike to pursue unpopular ideas without fear of retribution.

The Russian government has informed Hungary that its diplomats entering Russia will have to pay a fee rather than pass into Russia without paying for visas. Since levying a minor charge on diplomats entering countries is fairly common, Russia’s move seems inconsequential. However, Russia also said that the fee will be levied until the Hungarians rectify certain violations of an agreement, which is presumably the agreement governing diplomatic relations.

What makes this significant is that Hungary, fairly alone among European nations, has developed a singularly friendly relationship with Russia. Recall that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Moscow shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Orban was seen conversing with Russian President Vladimir Putin about war and making a deal for a large amount of Russian natural gas to be delivered to Hungary. More important, Hungary refused to join the coalition coalescing to resist Russia. As recently as last week, Orban said that the fight between Russia and Ukraine is not a matter of concern to Hungary. Hungary was therefore the country in Europe least committed to supporting Ukraine and most enjoying its relationship with Russia.

This is what elevates a seemingly trivial bureaucratic misunderstanding to something noteworthy. Russia has no positive relations with members of the EU aside from Hungary, and it’s odd that Moscow would allow any doubt to be cast on that relationship. It is not the importance of the policy shift; there is none. It is Russia’s decision to impose this fee on a friendly nation, and then to publicize it, at a time when President Vladimir Putin needs to find a way to change Europe’s point of view on the war.

Key to understanding this is understanding the Hungarian-Russian relationship. Hungary has strained relations with many of its neighbors, not to mention the European Union and NATO. The EU has sought to fine Hungary for violations of European rules concerning the organization of the judiciary, freedom of the press, immigration and other things. The EU has withheld some funds as punishment and has threatened to suspend others. In turn, Budapest has obstructed Finland and Sweden’s NATO membership process. Perhaps most interesting, Orban visited the United States to attend meetings of conservative Republicans, many of them committed to former President Donald Trump. He has been a thorn in the side of the Western political establishment.

His reasons for doing this are partly ideological – he accepts the principles of American and European conservatives and, in accepting them, believes the West is corrupt and weak. When he saw that war with Russia was coming, he assumed the West would either fail to defend Ukraine or collapse in the face of Russian power. Like others, he expected Western help to be limited, Ukraine to be rapidly overrun by Russia, and a new political and institutional structure to be established in Europe. This reasonably led to moving close to Russia and separating himself from Western powers. The fact that his assumptions were wrong has forced him into a difficult position. If Ukraine falls, Russia will occupy the eastern border of NATO – a border shared by Poland, Hungary and Romania. The next Russian move, in the face of the defeat of NATO, would likely run through Hungary, whose terrain enables relatively easy passage. NATO would therefore have to deploy soldiers to Hungary to block Russia. Hungary is a marginal player in the Ukraine war, but if Russia overtakes Ukraine, moves into Central Europe and establishes a new balance of power, Hungary will be a key battleground – in which case Orban’s relationship with Putin will mean little. So long as the Ukrainian war continues Hungary is secure. That changes if either Russia or the West scores a decisive victory. From Budapest’s point of view, the situation can get out of control.

Ingratiating itself with the West, then, would make sense for Hungary. It knows it cannot control Russia, and that it will need to be at least congenial with the West if or when it wins in Ukraine. This is why Russia’s decision to levy fines is strange. For now, Russia needs Hungary, and Hungary needs room to maneuver. It’s unclear if this is meaningful, or if this little more than a slap on the wrist of a nation Russia values is part of a broader shift on the battlefield and thus on the global stage.

P.S. After completing this article we received an update that Orban is now calling for an immediate cease-fire and negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, and is preparing to go to Kyiv to meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and act as a kind of mediator.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.In the past half century, Americans have had fewer and fewer babies with almost every passing decade; in 2020, the U.S. reported the lowest official fertility rate on record. But last year, statisticians observed a surprising baby bump. Researchers weren’t entirely sure what had happened. Maybe this was random noise. Maybe, like so many pandemic effects, it was a weird one-off phenomenon.A new paper puts forth a fascinating theory: Maybe remote work is making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children.The economist Adam Ozimek and the demographer Lyman Stone looked at survey data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey. They concluded that female remote workers were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.Remote work might promote family formation in a few ways. Remote workers can move more easily, because they don’t have to live within commuting distance of their job. This flexibility might result in more marriages by ending the “two-body problem,” where romantic partners find employment in different cities and must choose between their career and their relationship. What’s more, remote work reduces commutes, and those weekly hours can be shifted to family time, making it easier to start or grow a family.Fertility is an awkward topic for journalists, because starting a family is such a complicated and intimate decision. But fertility rates aren’t declining simply because more people are choosing not to have children—American women report having fewer kids than they want, as Stone has documented in previous research. If remote work is subtly restructuring the contours of life to enable more women to have the families they want, that’s great news.Indeed, the paper found that the biggest effect of remote work on fertility was on older women who already had a child, or several. The authors concluded that “remote work doesn’t necessarily trigger women to initiate childbearing,” but it might help older mothers “balance the competing demands of work and family.”Remote work isn’t a skeleton key that unlocks the long-running mystery of declining fertility rates across the developed world. These results are not overwhelming, and they are concentrated among a minority of the U.S. population.But this study reaffirms the fact that we’re only just beginning to grasp the consequences of remote work for the U.S. economy. Other countries, such as Japan and France, are seeing return-to-office rates in major cities climb to 75 percent. But in the U.S., the largest coastal cities—New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; San Jose—all, as of late February, show weekly office-occupancy rates of below 50 percent. Half-empty offices in many American downtowns are translating to plummeting transit usage and depression-level demand for commercial real estate. Meanwhile, remote work is pushing many Americans to buy bigger and bigger homes to accommodate home offices and gyms, which is leading to higher house prices, especially in the suburbs. We’re starting to see the ways that remote start-ups might scramble the distribution of talent in America, allowing more tech workers to find a home—and even build a hub—in cities away from the coasts.Bigger families, bigger homes, struggling downtown economies, endangered transit treasuries, and a more evenly distributed white-collar workforce: That’s a lot of things happening at once. Media critics have a tendency to place emerging technologies in discrete affective categories—to decide, for example, that AI chatbots are either incredibly useful or terrible and dystopian. But technological revolutions such as the persistent increase in remote work are messier than that. Remote work, too, has proved to be a bit of a mess. But for some families, it might be something perfect and unexpected: the soft tailwind behind another stork.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference wrapped up this past Saturday. And this conference, if you don’t follow it, it’s a big deal every year because it is the clearest window into the id of modern conservatism. It brings together its politicians and media figures and influencers. And what we saw at this year’s CPAC was that even as conservatism is on many issues at this moment of unusual internal division — what to do about economic policy and health care and Ukraine — about Trump — it is finding unity and purpose in attacking trans people. There is absolutely no subtext here. Michael Knowles, a popular right-wing podcaster at The Daily Wire said — and I quote — “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing.” He went on to say, and again I quote, “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Eradicated entirely. Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch, said gender affirming care is, quote, “a demonic assault on the innocence of our children.” Demonic. It would be one thing if this were all just rhetoric, but it’s action. What we’re hearing at CPAC is what we’re seeing in Republican legislatures and governors’ mansions all across the country. Over the past few years, we’ve seen hundreds — literally hundreds of bills — introduced to regulate, to ban, to criminalize the lives of, and the care needed by, trans people. And I think people who follow politics have a sense this is happening, but perhaps not of the scale and cruelty of these policies. I think in a lot of the mainstream press, there is more attention to the hard edge cases. What should be the rules around NCAA swimming meets? What about the rare but real cases where somebody transitions and regrets it? What kind of medical assessment and parental involvement should you need to access this kind of care as a minor? And I don’t think those questions are fake, and I don’t think they’re easy, and I don’t pretend to have the answers to them. But I think it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the overwhelming political and material reality here, which is that trans people already face now terrible discrimination and difficulty — higher rates of poverty and homelessness and violence, workplace discrimination — just living their lives. And the right is now making trans people their political target. And the most ambitious conservatives are competing not just in rhetoric, but in policy, to make their lives harder, to try to push them out of the boundaries of public life. Individually, these policies, they have various rationales, a lot of them have conflicting rationales. But I think collectively, if you look at them, you see that what Knowles said was true. The right’s aim is to use the power of the state to eradicate the ability of trans people to live as themselves in public or to be able to become themselves. And again, this is policy. It is not just rhetoric. It is not just tweets. And so I wanted to have a conversation looking closely at these policies. Gillian Branstetter is a Communications Strategist at the A.C.L.U.‘s Women’s Rights Project and the L.G.B.T.Q. and H.I.V. Project. And the A.C.L.U. has been very involved in tracking and fighting these policies. So Branstetter has an unusually specific and global sense of how all this is coming together on the ground. As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Gillian Branstetter, welcome to the show.

gillian branstetter

ezra klein

So I want to begin in Texas, where we’ve seen Governor Abbott attempt to classify or reclassify certain kinds of gender care as literally child abuse. So tell me about the letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services in February of 2022. What did it say? What was Abbott trying to do there?

This letter was a directive to the Texas State Child Welfare Agency to begin proceedings to investigate parents with transgender youth who have accessed gender-affirming care. It does not include counseling. It does include puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgery. This followed a failure by the state legislature to codify the definition of child abuse by adding gender-affirming care to it. A bill was introduced in the state legislature in Texas in 2021 and ultimately failed. Governor Abbott’s primary opponents took him to task for this. So he began a long-rolling process to apply political pressure and basically set the tone that this care and its provision in Texas was going to be the next focus of his target. In February of 2022, about a week before he and Attorney General Ken Paxton faced a primary, they issued this letter, which was directed to the state’s child welfare agency to begin classifying the provision of age-appropriate gender-affirming care for transgender youth as child abuse. And that does a few things. One, it mobilizes the state family policing agency. So child welfare agencies have a — advocates have been complaining for quite some time that they have a lot of unchecked power. And this power often gets used in very discriminatory ways, in particular against poor, Black, Indigenous, immigrant families. Queer youth, especially, are overrepresented in our nation’s foster care system. The first impact the directive has is in mobilizing that agency to begin investigating. And one of the first people they targeted is actually a client of ours who we are representing alongside the A.C.L.U. of Texas and Lambda Legal in one of two challenges to this directive, who was a DSPS employee themselves. This immediately begins terrorizing families across the state of Texas. We’re talking about thousands of families who have transgender youth who are now suddenly faced with the idea that state agents could literally walk in their door and escort their children away from them. And this means young trans people being pulled out of class and interviewed about their health care or even about their anatomy, and attempting to really nail them down as transgender and build out a case that if we can prove that you’ve accessed gender-affirming care, we’re going to remove you from your parents’ custody. The other thing this does is anyone who’s ever worked in a field with kids, if you’ve ever been a teacher or an educator or a child care provider, you know that you’ve probably signed some paperwork making you a mandatory reporter, meaning that if you have reason to suspect that a young person is being abused, as the law defines it, then you must turn them in. And because of this directive from the governor and the attorney general attempting to say we are interpreting the state’s child abuse statute to include this care, that means that nurses, counselors, guidance counselors in school, teachers, assistant teachers, child care providers, this entire network of folks who work with youth across the state of Texas are then drafted into Governor Abbott’s war on transgender youth.

ezra klein

Well, the term gender-affirming care is going to be not just a big part of this conversation, but it’s obviously central to a lot of the debate in Texas and elsewhere. What is gender-affirming care and which parts of that care package or structure did Abbott try to get classified as child abuse?

Sure. So gender-affirming care is an umbrella term for a broad range of medical interventions, which vary greatly based on the age and needs of the person presenting with gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is a term for a discomfort felt between your gender identity, your internal sense of your gender, and your gender as it was assigned at birth. And gender-affirming care is an individualized form of health care that includes counseling — talking people through their identities, helping them get a sense of who they are and who it is that they want to be, helping them move past the internalized shame that so much of our culture pushes on to transgender people, and assessing whether they might be ready or a good candidate for other medical interventions. So when we’re talking about young kids, young prepubescent kids who have maybe started wearing a dress at school or growing their hair out, if they’re a transgender girl, young kids like that are never really accessing any permanent health care. When young people start to enter puberty, particularly when they’ve been presenting as their lived gender for quite some time, they’re more likely to access puberty blockers. And these are — doctors usually describe them as a pause button — functionally pausing the signals that the body sends to begin developing some of these secondary sexual characteristics ranging from breasts and wider hips to facial hair and a deeper voice. Then, in older adolescents and adults, you begin talking about hormone replacement therapy, which, if you’re looking for feminizing effects to reflect your gender identity, will include a testosterone blocker and some form of estrogen. And if you’re looking for masculinizing effects, that usually includes testosterone. And then surgical care, which for anyone under 18 tends to be pretty rare and very much based around the needs of that patient. It can range from what’s often colloquially referred to as top surgery, which are mastectomies, for example, if somebody has breasts that they don’t want, or down to bottom surgery, which, while hard to access, is usually a vaginoplasty, so reconstructive surgery creating a vagina or a number of surgeries that create a penis. And in this order under the governor’s letter, he bans pretty much everything but counseling. Pretty much everything but the idea that somebody could be talking to a therapist and get diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Now, what that means, of course, is that all of those health care treatments, most people who express a need for them have a very long road ahead before they can actually obtain them. This care is already very difficult to access and especially in rural areas like those across Texas.

ezra klein

I want to hold on, before we go into that piece of it, on this idea of child abuse. What Abbott is saying, what many in the conservative movement are saying is that he’s very worried about these children, wants to make sure no harm comes to them. What do we know about what happens when children who have been presenting as their lived gender for some time, who want, with their doctor and their family, to seek care, what do we know about what happens when they don’t get it?

So gender dysphoria carries with it a number of other symptoms and especially when untreated. And that can range from depression and anxiety to low self-esteem, down to poor academic performance, struggling to build healthy relationships with friends or their family, all the way up to suicidality. And according to a vast array of research, transgender youth have a significantly higher rate of suicidality than their peers.

ezra klein

And just to put some numbers on that. So we saw one study where 56 percent of transgender youth reported previous suicidal ideation. That was compared to 20 percent of cisgender youth. 31 percent of transgender youth reported a previous suicide attempt versus 11 percent of cisgender youth. And so how does access to care change that?

Foundationally. So when I sat in a courtroom in Arkansas, where we were challenging that state’s ban on gender affirming care, there was a long line of medical experts and doctors who work with transgender youth who took the witness stand and spoke to the efficacy and the impact that this care has on young people’s lives. It’s very abstract. I think it would be very hard for a lot of cisgendered people to understand what dysphoria is and how much it can impact your life and stunt your emotional development and your emotional growth. And one of the biggest themes that I heard in that testimony was, one, not just that it relieved dysphoria, but you also suddenly see that when young trans people do have this degree of bodily autonomy, they begin to improve in many other ways. So for example, if they’re on antidepressants, they find that they can go off of them. If they’re on anti-anxiety medications, they find that they can go off of them. They improve in their mental health overall. They improve in, oftentimes, even just their extroversion. Their willingness to participate in the community. Their excitement about school. And the number one thing that you hear from a lot of parents with transgender youth, and medical professionals who work with transgender youth and from transgender youth themselves, is that before accessing this care, they really struggle to imagine a future with them in it. They really had zero impulse to plan towards their future or to dream or to have ambitions. And you find that when you give young trans people this degree of autonomy over their own body and help them relieve off this massive weight that they’re carrying around, that suddenly they have ambitions, suddenly they have goals, suddenly they’re not just building friendships and being active in their schools and in their family, but they’re thinking through, well, gee, what do I want to do with my life? What artistic ambitions do I have? What creative ambitions do I have? What would I want to do professionally? What problems does the world have that I could help solve? And I think that sense of possibility is something that any parent would want for their young person. And the, at times, cartoonishly vile rhetoric around this care is very much meant to obscure that positive impact that it has on people and very much meant to obscure the pain of being denied it, particularly when you know that it’s an option that you could pursue. And that is what a lot of young people are facing right now as the number of these bans grows is that they actually a better life is awaiting them and they have politicians who’ve never met them, politicians who’ve never talked to anybody like them who’s experienced what they’re experiencing, writing and passing laws, taking away this critical aspect of the story they want to write for themselves.

ezra klein

I want to hold on this for a minute because I think there can be, including I would say for me, a bit of an empathic chasm to clear when it comes to gender dysphoria. That if you don’t have it, what it means to have it and to feel it is very hard to put yourself in. And my friend Emily St. James, who I worked with back at Vox, she wrote a great piece. And she wrote in it something that I always find helpful to think about here. She wrote, “If you are a cis person, imagine for a moment that all evidence to the contrary, everyone in the world becomes convinced your gender is not what it is. If you’re a man, everyone starts using she/her pronouns for you and calling you by a woman’s name. One day you start insisting to the world you are who you are, and the world insists otherwise.” And that sense of, for my trans friends, that sense of unbelievable wrongness between how you are seen and how you feel, that — I don’t exactly have a question here, but I just think it’s worth stopping for a minute that the intensity of it, from everyone I know who has gone through it, is I just think really hard to grasp if it’s not something that you’ve held yourself.

I think it can be hard — a colleague of mine, Rebecca Kling, has this metaphor of this giant bag of rocks that you’re carrying around your entire life. And after a certain point, you kind of tire out. And you either put down the bag of rocks or you stop going forward. And I think the word that comes to mind when I’m usually trying to describe what dysphoria is like to cisgender people is a deep sense of inauthenticity, a deep sense that you were playing a role for other people. And I think that’s something that most people can relate to because we all have to do that in one degree or another. We all have to navigate and meet people’s expectations. And gender, because gender is assigned to you over the course of your entire life, because your family and your friends and strangers and institutions and everything from our economic order to police and our laws are assigning you gender, when that assignment doesn’t feel honest to who you are, it is a very inescapable sense. It’s an all-consuming sense. And I think a lot of folks — there are a lot a trans folks who, it may be long into adulthood before they even begin asking themselves this. And I’ve met trans people who’ve come out into their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, right? And I think it’s a bit like if you had lived your entire life next to a waterfall and you heard the roaring, crushing sound of the water your entire life, and the moment you realized that you could up and walk away, that you didn’t have to shout over this, suddenly you realize that your entire life you’ve been screaming, and you’ve been begging to be heard. And when a trans person comes out at whatever point in their life that they do, it’s fundamentally about a demand to be heard. There’s an artist that I love named grlofswords on Instagram, who does these Jenny-Holzer-style slogans. And one of them she has is that it is a blessing to have a transgender child. And why is it a blessing to have a transgender child? Because I think any parent would agree that it is a blessing to have a child who is strong enough to tell the truth when the whole world wants them to tell a lie.

ezra klein

So how then does Abbott or Paxton, the attorney general, in these letters and opinions, make the argument — what is the foundation of the argument that it is child abuse to use puberty blockers or hormone therapy?

To the degree that there is much logic to it at all, he — and I’ve seen this in — I saw this in Arkansas, too, in their defense of this ban. They’re very much hunting for basically any potential risk or any potential excuse, no matter how small, that they can attach to this care. And it’s very clear that what a lot of these lawmakers, including Paxton and Abbott, are doing is starting from the position of needing to ban all gender-affirming care and working backwards from there. And then looking for justification to do that. And certainly, like all forms of health care, gender-affirming health care does carry risks. And I think something that a lot of trans people who access this care now is that those risks tend to loom very large in the cisgender imagination. And one reason is I think because they struggle to conceive of that agonizing feeling of being forced to live an authentic life, that, in fact, your own body is betraying you.

ezra klein

So what are some of those risks, speaking not here about the surgical interventions, which are, I think, pretty rare for minors, but the hormone and puberty blockers?

So some of the risks they cite include, for example, prolonged use of synthetic estrogen, like the kind that many transgender girls and women take, can gradually increase your risk for blood clots or for breast cancer. And as we talk through these risks, it’s important to understand these aren’t surprises to anyone that goes on them. They aren’t surprises to the parents who talk through them. And there’s very much a need to measure the risks of these interventions versus the risks of doing nothing, which for transgender youth of gender dysphoria tend to be very, very grave, as we discussed. He also looks into testosterone is a controlled substance and has some low level risk for misuse and for abuse. In the rare instance that somebody goes on from puberty blockers directly to hormone therapy, it may gradually increase their risks for osteoporosis. As a New York Times report found, it will gradually increase the risk for experiencing osteoporosis in their 50s, instead of their 60s. And I think to most trans people, we take these risks seriously. Nobody’s not attuned to these, right, even in the informed consent model of providing this care. So for young transgender people, for people under 18, there’s a long road of mental health counseling and assessment and making sure this care is right for them. In the space for medical care for transgender adults, there’s been an increasing move towards informed consent, which basically means that as long as this person is informed about the risks and effects of this care, we should trust their autonomy to access it. And when you really feel like your own personhood is on the line and somebody says, but wait, you could experience osteoporosis in your 50s instead of your 60s, you’re like, we’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, I guess. It would be so amazing to live into my 50s. So I think, like I said, a lot of these arguments are generally in bad faith because all health care carries risks. And there’s lots of health care which these bans don’t touch, which carry these or worse risks, and are not the subject of legislation or litigation or much less accusations of child abuse.

ezra klein

So when we were working on this episode, we talked with Dr. Jason Rafferty, who authored the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for this care in 2018. And one point he kept making is that this kind of care is a very, very highly individualized process.

Yes.

ezra klein

That if you look at the standards for it, you look at the structure and sequencing, it’s built on a lot of discussions between the patient, between the doctors, if it’s a minor, with their families. And one thing that is very striking to me about Texas’s policy here, but not just their policy — I mean, you see this in a bunch of different states — is they’re trying to short-circuit — they’re putting literally the government — conservatives putting the government, which I know the charge of hypocrisy here has lost a lot of force over the years, but take it for a minute — into this process that would otherwise be an individualized weighing of risks and questions and the person’s individual needs with a doctor who knows what they’re doing and possibly mental health professionals and families. And instead Texas is saying, no, no, no, we don’t just know better, we know so much better that if anybody engages in any real way going down the path on it towards puberty blockers or other pharmaceutical interventions, we’re going to functionally criminalize it. It’s a pretty striking assertion of — yeah, I mean, functionally government knows best.

In terms of their willingness to just sweep aside the existing body of evidence and the actual reality of what this care is like, there’s a lot to learn here from how the anti-abortion movement has framed abortion care. And you’ve seen very much the similar process of hunting around for any tail-end risk or any hypothetical in which this care might have any kind of negative consequence at all. And then using that to justify banning it. And you can very much see that they’re running the same playbook on gender-affirming care. And something to keep in mind is it’s very easy to imagine them running this playbook on birth control. In fact, you can already see them laying the groundwork. And anyone who’s accessed birth control, particularly hormonal birth control, knows that it’s very individualized. And it can carry side effects. And it can carry risks. And people hopefully trust you to manage those risks and to weigh them against your desire to not get pregnant, which, depending on who you’re talking to, is you rejecting your gender assignment in the same way that a transgender person is. I don’t think anyone would describe the process of having an I.U.D. inserted in joyful terms, but people still do it because they want that degree of autonomy over their own body and over their own ability to write their life story for themselves.

ezra klein

Well, let me ask you where this particular directive stands now. You mentioned that the A.C.L.U. is in court on this — the A.C.L.U. Texas is, Lambda Legal.

Right.

ezra klein

What is the current status of the rule?

There are two lawsuits that were filed against the directive and against D.F.P.S. Both of them were filed joint by A.C.L.U., A.C.L.U. of Texas and Lambda Legal. We went back and filed a second lawsuit on behalf of yet more families and PFLAG National. For folks who don’t know, PFLAG is one of the oldest L.G.B.T. rights organizations in the country. And they specifically work with parents of young queer people. And they were one of the first organizations to really have — to mention gender identity in their official policies to protect transgender youth. And they have hundreds and hundreds of chapters across the country. And I’ve gone to these, and they’re usually a lot like support groups. They’re usually parents talking through what it means to have a young queer person, not just protecting them from discrimination and advocating for their rights, but also changing their own expectations for what life their child is going to lead based on their queer identity. So we file on behalf of PFLAG National and receive an injunction on behalf of PFLAG National, so that if a family is a member of PFLAG national, they are protected under that injunction, which, in Texas, last I heard was somewhere around 600 families. Now, of course, what that means is that thousands of families are still exposed to this directive. In truth, what we know is that the actual number of cases that have been opened is luckily relatively small. Last I heard it was under 20. And in each instance that a case was open, the case was closed. And that’s enormously relieving, in that it means whatever accusation Greg Abbott wants to make against them, these folks are being exonerated by the state agency. That said, even just the process of the investigation is a major invasion into a family’s life, and particularly when we’re talking about young people who are really, like I said, struggling to imagine a future world with them in it. When the state is threatening them with removal from their family and threatening to put them into a foster care system where, one, transgender youth are already overrepresented, and, two, they’re frequently subjected to physical abuse, sexual abuse and conversion therapy and attempts to make them cisgender, that’s an extremely threatening blade to hold over these young people’s heads. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So what you often hear is this is just about children. We’re trying to protect children as a special class. Maybe they don’t know who they are yet. Maybe they’re influenced by something they saw on TikTok. But a bunch of these bills target adults, too. And in fact, there’s one that has been introduced in the Texas Senate, S.B. 1029, that would effectively ban these treatments for minors, but it would also effectively ban gender-affirming hormone therapy and surgery for adults. So tell me a bit about the relationship between the legislation targeting children and the legislation we’ve seen in a bunch of different jurisdictions that includes adults.

So one thing that I think is important to understand is that these bills aren’t really responding to any sort of grassroots demand for these bills. They are coming at the behest of a group of organizations within the right wing that have, at the core of their worldview, this very binary and rigid understanding of gender. And one of them is the American Principles Project. And over the course of the last few years, has tried to warn politicians on the right up to the idea of going after transgender people. And there was a report that Maggie Astor in The New York Times did, where she called up Terry Schilling, the group’s president, and he said, we do, in fact, want to ban this care for anyone of any age. And in his words, the purpose in going towards young people was, quote, “going where the consensus is.” Now, one, I would challenge the idea that there is a consensus. And two, I think that belies just how sort of bad faith a lot of these discussions are, that most of these groups, ALEC, these organizations that are really well-known in right-wing circles for basically acting as bill mills for printing off this legislation and distributing them across states — they are not going to tolerate medical transition at all.

ezra klein

So tell me about how intersex people play into this. Can you say what intersex means and where these conservative groups and some of these bills tend to stand on health care for that population?

Intersex people are those born with nonnormative sexual characteristics. Intersex conditions can range from hormonal sensitivities down to people born with what might be called anomalous sexual characteristics or maybe the presentation of sexual material that is associated with one sex right next to sexual material that is associated with another sex. And often, when an infant is born and is presenting as intersex, the doctors will go to the parents and say, well, we can create a, quote, “normal genitalia” for them, and we find it’s best to do it now because later in life, who would want to grow up with a nonnormative body? And a big target of human rights activists and of the intersex rights movement is getting hospitals to drop that default setting of launching towards performing these surgeries on literal infants. Lurie’s Children’s Hospital dropped it as the default. There’s been growing inclusion amongst the American Medical Association and other groups. There is an exemption for those surgeries forced on to literal infants with very little concern for who they may grow up to be, very little concern for their long-term well-being, but strictly about making sure that they look normal. And I became very curious. How is it possible that all of these lawmakers and all these legislators came to agree on the need to force intersex children into these surgeries? So I began looking around for how the right wing has encountered intersex people. Because think about it. If you are telling people that there is a biological binary and these roles are inevitable, they’re complementary, they are designed for these explicit purposes and for providing these explicit forms of labor —

ezra klein

In some tellings, they’re godly.

Right. Exactly. And I found the bill that was passed into law in Arkansas banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth that we have sued and blocked in federal court. And you find that across not just in folks in the family, but across how the right wing regards intersex folks. They say, well, of course, we want to show them compassion, but really, these children are the results of a fallen society, that something about the amoral condition of modern life is producing intersex children, which has extremely dark echoes across the history of not just medicine but theology and what was often referred to as monstrous births. These were a major focus of the witch hunts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, targeting mothers who gave birth to, quote, “monstrous births.” It’s very shocking to see that in modern political language. And it’s even more shocking to realize that what they’re looking for in these bills is not to end these treatments. They aren’t trying to end these treatments for everybody. They’re specifically trying to end them for people who are seeking them in order to rewrite their gender assignment, in order to actually make sure their gender assignment reflects who they know themselves to be. And yet, they’re protecting these other treatments.

ezra klein

So I want to go back to something you were saying about the politics of this a minute ago, which is that the way I’ve been thinking about the increasing centrality of anti-trans bills and rhetoric to the right, because it’s something that you’re seeing in the 2024 primary field for Republicans. It’s a big issue for DeSantis. It’s, of course, now a big issue for Donald Trump, and we can talk about his administration on this, which is very telling. But it’s also every right-wing legislature, more or less, across the country is now full of these bills. And it’s been a pretty quick move to the center of their agenda. And one of the ways I understand politics in this era is that we’ve been watching or living through this transition from — because politics is always changing as to what the core cleavages really are, what people will compromise on and what they won’t. And I think the broad understanding of the Republican Party 15 years ago — and I think it was true — is that they talked to social conservatives, they talked social conservatism, but they governed economic conservatism. The actual non-negotiable was tax cuts for corporations. And then they would tell the Evangelicals what they needed to hear to turn out to vote. And that over this period, that’s more or less flipping. And you now have the post-Trump Republican Party. There’s a lot of people who are kind of confused and often opportunistic on economics. But these questions of I would call it social gender hierarchical change — this question of the traditional hierarchies of American society have become really fundamental. And there’s been a search for what is the issue that cracks this open. And I think that there was a view that was immigration. That was Donald Trump’s initial play. And it worked for him to a degree, but it’s actually not popular to be highly anti-immigrant in this country. And then particularly post-George Floyd, when there were the protests that had riot elements in them, you had a backlash on Black Lives Matter. And then that failed. In 2020, Joe Biden wins the election. And it seems since then that the idea is to crack open the progressive coalition around trans issues. That this has become the edge of the spear in the Republican Party’s backlash to social change. That’s been my working theory of it. But I’m curious, because you’re obviously much more read in on this than I am and think about it much more, how you’ve understood this transition to the center of the Republican agenda for this set of issues.

It’s interesting that you tease out this existing divide in the right between more economic concerns versus social conservative concerns. One, I think they have more similarities than they differ. Conservative economics tend to produce socially conservative outcomes. Two, there’s been an interesting turn in right-wing politics over the course of just about the last decade where there’s been a lot of motivation and energy around the social conservative wing, this wing that’s devoted towards a explicit construction of what it means to be American along racial, gender, and class lines. And one of the dividing points for this was in 2016 in North Carolina, where you had the state legislature and Pat McCrory pass one of the first bathroom bills. So basically a law requiring transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with what was on their original birth certificate. And this was really one of the first major tests for transgender rights in the political sphere. There were some previous fights around HERO, and we could talk to that history if you want. But this was definitely the largest conflagration that gendered rights had had in some time. And the bill was signed into law. And you quickly saw a number of corporations and large institutions like the N.B.A. and performers like Bruce Springsteen begin pulling events out of North Carolina. And begin saying, well, we’re not going to spend money in a state that would endorse this hate. And according to one analysis, this cost the state of North Carolina’s economy around $3 billion. In no small measure, Pat McCrory lost re-election because he decided to focus on this issue at the expense of the rest of the state. And this caused a deep sense of frustration within the conservative movement. And I think it was the dawning of what you often hear now described as woke capitalism, the idea that the culture has left our values and they’ve taken corporations with them. So therefore, we can no longer trust the Chamber of Commerce crowd to act in defense of socially conservative actions. It was almost the end of what has been called fusionism, this idea of the libertarian-minded economic right and its ties to often more Evangelical, more socially concerned right. And over the course of the Trump administration, you see this frustration begin to grow, because while the Trump administration leaves no stone unturned when it comes to rolling back transgender rights, whether rolling back protections for transgender students, rolling back protections for transgender people accessing health care, really repealing what has occasionally been called the quiet trans revolution of the second Obama term. Social conservatives begin to feel a bit left behind. And particularly because the legislative agenda of the Trump administration was pretty much dominated by the Trump tax cuts, which as far as they’re concerned don’t move them towards their goals of rewiring the back ends of American culture to reflect these deeply conservative values. And an inflection point for this comes in 2020. 2020 was a busy year. You might remember it. But I remember in June of 2020, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which is actually a trio of cases on behalf of LGBT people who had been fired because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The A.C.L.U. represented Aimee Stephens. She was a transgender woman in her 50s. She worked at a Michigan funeral home. She came out as transgender. She wrote this impassioned letter explaining that this is very important for her. And the funeral home turned around and fired her two weeks later. And what was up for debate in this case was not whether they were discriminated against because Aimee was trans or the other workers were gay. What was up for debate is whether by discriminating against these employees on that basis, the workplaces were in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination. And really since the Civil Rights Act has been passed, sex discrimination has been expanded as a definition. So it now covers lots of pregnancy discrimination. It covers lots of sexual harassment. It covers what’s called sex stereotyping. And basically judgments that you make based upon how you think somebody should behave based on their, quote unquote, “biological sex.” And the Supreme Court finds, in a 6-3 decision, in June of 2020, that these protections extend to queer workers. That if you fire somebody because they’re transgender or because they are queer, then you are exhibiting sex discrimination. You are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. This is greeted as an apocalyptic event in right-wing spaces. I find in liberal and progressive spaces, I often have to remind folks that this happened. I remember seeing a poll before that case was issued that some 80 percent of the country thought it was already illegal to fire somebody because they’re gay or transgender. So I often have to remind people in liberal progressive spaces that this case even happened. But soon after that, you have folks like Josh Hawley thumping their fists on the table and saying, this represents the end of the conservative legal movement. That if an employer can’t fire somebody because they’re transgender, that this represents an existential threat. And I think one of the reasons you see this massive reaction is because a lot of the legal victories on behalf of L.G.B.T. rights up to this point had very much hinged on the private life. So Obergefell and the right to marry, for example. As much as you’re running into the issues of does a baker need to make a wedding cake or does a website need to make a website for a gay couple that’s getting married, the foundational right to marry is about a right to privacy, as well as just equal protection clause under the 14th Amendment. And likewise, before that, in 2004, in Lawrence v. Texas, when the Supreme Court found that the state could not criminalize same sexual relations, that was very much also founded in this private life, in this private space. It’s about making sure the government isn’t looking in on what consenting adults are doing behind closed doors. In contrast, Bostock was very much about your public life. Now suddenly we’re in the workplace. Now suddenly somebody has the right to be trans in the workplace, around other people even, Ezra. And there is the logic that the opinion, which was written by conservative golden boy Justice Neil Gorsuch, the logic of his opinion, it doesn’t take a whole lot of thinking to then apply it to all other laws, which prohibit sex discrimination, including Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, or Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits sex discrimination in health care. So the right-wing legal movement walks away from this case with an enormous amount of egg on their face and I think a lot of outrage because they just walked away from four years of a Trump administration, where they didn’t feel like any of their needs were being met, which is laughable as somebody who was working in trans advocacy at that time. And they are feeling cheated even by the Supreme Court itself. And it’s the legislative session right after that case — so the 2021 legislative session — where you really start to see the total number of these bills take off.

ezra klein

I want to get at something that you touched on there, which is that as part of what has changed in the politics of this, one, in a way that maybe progressives don’t realize or admit. You mentioned the quiet revolution here in the Obama administration, where policy became much more equal in this area. You mentioned some very, very important cases that pushed forward non-discrimination. And some of the backlash actually was a response to the fact that the equilibrium on this was being pushed forward. It was being pushed towards justice. And that created a kind of opposite counter-reaction. And there’s also the feeling that many people have — and I think is, to the extent we have data on it, seen as true — that we are seeing a rise, whether that’s because more people are coming out as trans and they would have suppressed it and not told anybody at another point or because something is changing. But that we are seeing a rise in the number particularly of trans kids. And so the other way of thinking about the centrality of it in our politics is that it’s a response to, on the one hand, actual progressive victories on this point and, on the other hand, an actual change in on the ground reality of practically how many trans children we’re seeing. How do you think about those as explanations?

In your book, “Why We’re Polarized,” available in stores now, you reflect on how polarization is not inherently a negative thing. That, in fact, polarization is a necessity when moving forward on important progressive issues. And in fact, over the course of American history when there’s been consensus around an issue, it’s usually around an issue based on discrimination or an issue that we now look back on and are very glad that we had a controversy on and changed. And I think one way to think about the second term of the Obama administration and what has often been referred to as the trans tipping point — Laverne Cox — it’s a cliché and writing on this topic that within the first two paragraphs, you have to mention Laverne Cox on the cover of Time Magazine in 2014. And I think a good way to think about that is as the end of the consensus that was regarding trans rights as ludicrous and unnecessary. That there was a cultural and political consensus regarding trans life as unlivable, regarding trans bodies as unlovable, and regarding trans people as untrustworthy. And over the course of decades of advocacy, and public education campaigns, and meeting with lawmakers, building a degree of power, you begin to see that slowly creak open over the course of the early 2010s. And it’s one reason why if you’re over 30, you were raised in a culture which saw our existence as, if not an avid threat, then as pathetic, in a culture which portrayed us as ultimately as sickly eunuchs or decadent perverts. And I know that because I’m over 30. And I was raised to believe those things about myself. And transgender people are taught how to hate ourselves. I think that there is a lot of institutional memory that still exists within a lot of even nominally liberal institutions in American life that still try to tell that exact same story about trans lives as unlivable and still rely on a lot of the same tropes. And I’m a New York Times subscriber and that gives me access to The New York Times archive. And one thing I’ve been doing over the last few months is looking across the media coverage of an institution like The New York Times and finding the history of how the paper has regarded transgender people. And not just using the language of today of transgender and finding these early examples in the 1990s you can find and things like that, but using the old language of transvestite and transsexual. And what you find is not very pretty. And I don’t think that’s specific to The New York Times at all. I think a lot of institutions across American life, including mainstream political organizations, have that same history. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I want to go back then also to something else that happened in this period that you kind of touched on right around North Carolina, which is the North Carolina bathroom bill was not the only bill and not the only kind of social justice question, but I do think it was one of the first that began to open a wedge that is still not at all closed between the Republican Party and particularly major parts of corporate America.

Yeah.

ezra klein

So I mean, we’re talking in a week where Governor DeSantis succeeded in taking away some special autonomous privileges that Disney had in Florida. I mean, Disney, which is one of the big namesake Florida employers.

Sure.

ezra klein

And that was over Disney’s criticism response to what gets called the Don’t Say Gay Bill, which, among other things, is very targeted, I think it’s fair to say, at trans people. And I think there’s been a particular important dimension in our politics right here at this line where you’ve had the woke corporations fight around Black Lives Matter. But in an ongoing way, you really have it around these issues. And it does seem to me to be forcing a weird realignment in the Republican Party, where a party that was known very much as the big business party, now, at least in some cases — obviously not in every — and there’s still plenty of deregulatory efforts and corporate tax cuts and all the rest of it swirling around the Republican agenda — but Ron DeSantis is going to run for president bragging about how he used the power of the state to punish a corporation —

Sure.

ezra klein

— for its speech. One, I think it goes to show how intense the commitment on this set of issues is in the Republican Party right now. But two, I’d just be curious to hear you reflect on the way it is slightly altering some of the Republican Party’s traditional alignments and forcing members within it to choose sides.

Sure. So the Don’t Say Gay law, as it’s popularly known, the Parental Rights in Education Bill, prohibits discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade. Although, as we’re talking, a version was just introduced in the Florida House that would extend it up to the eighth grade. It’s funny how that happens. And this has resulted in queer teachers feeling like they need to hide who they are at school. So the pulling down of just basic symbols of L.G.B.T. pride like the rainbow flag right down to the banning of books that mention queer people. So “Heather Has Two Mommies” or “And Tango Makes Three,” which is literally a book about gay penguins. And it very much is part and parcel with this goal of regarding queer identities as an ideology that’s being forced onto people. I think the right recognizes that most people don’t know a transgendered person in their daily life. The numbers I see usually float between a quarter to a third of people actually know somebody who is transgender. So when you’re railing against transgender people every day from your bully pulpit or on Fox News or wherever else, they don’t have an actual person to conceive of that you’re talking about. All they have is the abstract or whatever cartoonish caricature you’re painting for them. So that means that the realities of transgender life are being mediated through these institutions, which range from either hostile or indifferent to our existence. And I think one of the reasons that he begins to pick this fight with Disney is that it allows him to keep telling that story. So instead of the young queer kids he’s demonizing or the parents who are now afraid their kid might mention that they have two moms and will get them in trouble or the teachers that you’ve read about who now feel like they have to leave the state altogether, instead of those real people who are being scared, now the story is Ron DeSantis takes on woke capital and Disney forcing its ideology on our children. And I think by picking that fight, DeSantis is selecting the frame for himself. And he’s positioning himself as the David against this Goliath, when it is, in fact, he himself who is the empty-headed bully wandering around the playground and smashing kids face into the dirt.

ezra klein

One question I have about it is whether or not it’s getting worse and better at the same time, which is to say we’ve been talking about, particularly red states, where a lot of, I think, quite terrible legislation is being proposed and where the rhetoric has gotten very vicious. And I don’t think that can be discounted. But there are also blue states that have been, I think, and some of them trying to move in the opposite direction. So are there places that are brighter to you? That at the same time we’re seeing not just backsliding, but actual literal demonization and scapegoating, are there places that are looking more like there’s no bottom, that there’s also you can look up towards — I don’t want to say no top. I’m not sure that metaphor works. But a different kind of future. Are there places that are more hopeful to you right now, that if you’re just following the places things are getting worse, you might not see?

So you referenced that the number of openly trans people — and that word “openly” is important here — has been rising and particularly in younger generations. One, I think that matches the rise in L.G.B. identification over the decades. People are fond of citing this chart around left-handedness, and that once public schools stopped hitting children for writing with their left hand, suddenly there was a huge surge in left-handedness identification. I see a lot of encouragement in that because it means that more trans people feel safe, that they feel that they will, at the very least, find a community of people like them. When you talk with transgender people over a certain age, you hear a similar refrain, that I thought I was the only one. That they had no concept that there were other people in the world who felt like they did. And when you start to see this crack is really with the introduction of mass media and the peering curiosity in the transgender lives. And it’s one reason why over the course of the history of mass media, including the news media, there was this consistent demonization of transgender people, because it was very much telling closeted trans people, well, you can’t come out because look how grim your future will be or we will make sure you are punished for rejecting your gender assignment. We will mock you. We will shame you. We will put you on reality TV and make you a laughingstock. Then, as the internet grows and social media grows, I know that there’s a lot of anxiety that there are young people self-diagnosing themselves with gender dysphoria and rushing off and getting their breasts removed because they saw it on a TikTok video or whatever else, right? That’s not what I see when I see trans people gathering online. I see the breaking of geographic boundaries that used to separate us. That trans people are, of course, very naturally gravitating towards people who are like-minded, who have similar experiences, because, believe it or not, the world still doesn’t greet transgender people with absolute joy. And it’s very hard to find people who share that experience, especially in a lot of rural areas across the country. And the internet has this interesting place in trans history as this ultimate gathering space where we can share experiences, share wisdom. Because one of the ways that trans life is deemed unlivable and impossible is we are all isolated from one another. And I think that’s what really threatens a lot of folks is that suddenly trans life is looking a little possible. And the fact that the number of people who are willing to be openly trans is increasing is a really good sign for that reason, at least for my work.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good place to begin to come to an end. So always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Sure. Anyone who knows me knows this is an exceedingly impossible question to answer. I’m going to start with a book by Gregory Woods called “Homintern.” And it is a history of queer life and culture pre-Stonewall, from the trial of Oscar Wilde up to just really right before the sexual revolution. And it is this incredibly rich, entertaining, vibrant history of people making space for themselves when, as many people who grew up queer did, they thought they were the only one, including finding community before they even really had the language to describe queer identities. And it’s a fantastic history told through, I mean, love notes and cocktail napkins and police reports and gossip. And it’s very juicy in parts. And it’s just fascinating to think, how did the arrest of Oscar Wilde, one of the world’s most famous playwrights, change how the media and politics regarded gay people? What was Josephine Baker learning from the drag queens of Harlem and Washington? How did George Orwell reckon with his own homophobia? The second book is “Caliban and the Witch,” by Silvia Federici. Silvia Federici is a really seminal feminist thinker, was a major figure in the wages for housework movement. And “Caliban and the Witch” is about a pandemic followed by a labor shortage, followed by a revanchist movement to assign rigidly strict gender norms onto people that targets queer people and women especially. And the pandemic was the Black Death. And the movement to enforce these rigid strict gender norms were the witch hunts, this long period of time in Europe when women and queer people were hunted and killed because they did things like offer abortions or offer contraceptives or cross-dressed. And then third, I’m going to recommend a little book called “Can the Monster Speak?” by Paul Preciado. He’s a transgender man. And this book “Can the Monster Speak?” is a lecture he gave in front of this esteemed group of psychoanalysts. And what he’s asserting in this book is he’s trying to illustrate and challenge all the ways in which transgender people’s voices are not taken seriously by the medical establishment, by the media, by the culture. That what we demand, that what we challenge in this world is so threatening to some of the foundational myths of this world, that we are told we must be confused or we are told to wait and pass a million tests and go through all these levels of gatekeeping, because who knows, we might regret it later. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

Gillian Branstetter, thank you very much.

One week before the anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, about twenty young people gathered in a house in Kharkiv. It was an odd setting, both an anomaly and a function of this moment: a rare private house in the very center of town, owned by a prominent architect but currently inhabited by his twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter, Iryna Lapina, known to most people as Lapa—a term of endearment that means “paw.” On this night, the house was the venue for a semi-regular event, a performance in a genre known as Playback Theatre. It involves a group of actors; a person referred to as the conductor, who directs the show in real time; and an audience. Members of the audience come forward to tell stories, which the actors, prompted by the conductor, reinterpret.

Two nights before, several Russian rockets had hit the city, damaging civilian infrastructure. Now, as the actors prepared in an adjacent room, applying glitter makeup to their cheekbones, audience members arranged themselves in the main room of the house. A dozen people crowded onto a couch, an armchair, and the floor. Lapa, who had just that day dyed her hair platinum blond with pink tips, sat on the kitchen counter, playing a guitar. A dildo lay on the gray slate floor near the stainless-steel stove. A few people grabbed pillows and went to sit on an open-riser staircase. Above the stairs, two pieces of plaster, each about three by twelve feet, hung precariously from the ceiling; two white pendant lights, still connected to the wiring above, hung down from each of them. The ceiling had been like this since March 1, 2022, when a Russian missile destroyed the regional administration building nearby. A small sign in a large gilded frame on an exposed-brick wall behind the audience said, in Russian, “This Will Not Last Forever.”

Actors prepare for a Playback performance.

The sign predated the war by about a year, but now its message referred to the war, as did its language. Kharkiv had long been a Russian-speaking city. Russia’s first invasion, in 2014, made a dent in the dominance of Russian, along with a series of laws passed by the national government: signage is in Ukrainian now, and official city business is conducted in Ukrainian. Some people have switched to Ukrainian in their private lives. But much of the graffiti is still in Russian, as are most conversations. When the actors came out to introduce themselves, four out of five spoke Russian. By this time, someone had discreetly stowed away the dildo.

Kharkiv theatres closed at the start of the war; by the summer, the city’s famous puppet theatre performed a show about wartime in Bucha. Lapa has been hosting these performances at her house for the past three months. The actors, all of them dressed in black, sat down on folding chairs, facing the audience to wait for stories. “My name is Sasha,” the first speaker began. He had close-cropped blond hair and a sharp nose and, like the actors, was wearing a black hoodie. “For the past year, none of us have been stories in ourselves—all of us are absorbing other people’s stories, many of them very painful,” he said. He was struggling to put words to an experience familiar to anyone who has lived or visited Ukraine during the war. Stories of pain and loss, death and destruction, are everywhere, and, however bad one’s story is, there is always a worse one. The conductor, a large man in a hot-pink hoodie with buzzed hair and a long, untrimmed beard, goes by the name Shabanov. He tried to coax a story out of Sasha.

“My story is that we are all sinking together,” Sasha finally said.

“Are you sinking?” Shabanov asked.

“I am a buoy. I am holding everyone afloat.”

Four of the actors stood up to enact Sasha’s story. All of them were under thirty. Two of them were now living in Germany and were visiting family and friends in Kharkiv. The other two had stayed in Kharkiv through the worst of the shelling, and both had become involved with Playback Theatre in the past year. After a few moments of stillness, they interacted, entangling with one another. They moved slowly, tenderly, apparently trying to hold one another and hold one another up, but in the end their common motion brought them down to the floor.

The audience clapped loudly. Lapa’s two puppies, Hanna and Pichie, barked in an upstairs room.

A man with a ponytail, wearing a red cowl-neck sweater and a green jacket, spoke next. “My story is about it being harder to change homes than to change people,” he said. He’d lived in the same apartment for most of his life. A few years ago, he had moved—first abroad, then back to Kharkiv, but to a different apartment. When the war started, he felt he had to return to his old home. But he found that the connection to home that had always felt so secure was barely a trace, like a pencil drawing that had been erased. “I am living in a home with which I cannot have a connection, because I don’t know what will happen tomorrow—what if I have to change homes again?” he asked.

As Lapa played guitar, an actor named Deniza danced. She appeared to be holding on to something, and then she was lost, she was flailing, she grabbed on to things that seemed like ropes but turned out to be just pieces of string, she held out her hands, waiting for something, she cautiously touched invisible surfaces, she balanced on one foot with her hands behind her back, then she was set in motion again, scrambling, searching, then back on one foot, but she kept losing her balance.

“I’m warning you, I may cry,” a woman named Inna said, before starting her story. She had long, copper-colored, straight hair, and was wearing orange pants and a gray hoodie. Inna was a psychologist who had been working for an international relief organization since the beginning of the war. This work had felt more meaningful than anything that she had done before. Now her organization was wrapping up in Kharkiv, and Inna was grieving. The next storyteller, a tall, baby-faced man with dark, wavy hair, spoke of something similar. The war had awakened him, he said, turning a “provincial boy” into a driven, full-time relief worker. “I’m interested in everything and ready to do anything,” he said.

People watching a story being performed during Playback Theatre.

The actors riffed on these stories, looking for ways to capture the sense that a war that had upended their lives had now become a way of life, that it gave life meaning and took it away, that the feeling that the war had receded was at once welcome and disappointing, and also, likely, misleading. At one point, the actors were interrupting one another, almost shouting their reassurances, all of them desperate and unconvincing.

An actor named Illia played an important role in this scene. He is twenty-six and writes grants for one of Kharkiv’s many universities. His work now involved applying for relief funds. About two weeks earlier, a rocket had hit his university, destroying an entire wing. The strike came in the morning and no one was killed. Ukrainian authorities do not disclose the exact locations of Russian strikes, to avoid feeding information to the enemy, but, when Illia saw a photo of the damaged building on a local Telegram channel, he knew where the explosion he had heard in the wee hours had been. For a moment, he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

A stocky woman with dark, curly hair and blue eyes, wearing a green hoodie and black jeans, had been giving Shabanov angry looks since the start of the evening. He finally called on her. Her name was Sasha. She herself had been a part of Playback performances, but hadn’t been participating in recent weeks. “All I can think about is why everyone is speaking Russian,” she said.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat is your relationship with organized religion? How has it affected your life, and has its impact changed over time? I’m eager to hear anything about the varieties of your religious experiences.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.comConversations of NoteA Secular Lament About the Decline of Organized ReligionBrink Lindsey has never subscribed to an organized religion, but he shares with their adherents a sense that the decline in their ranks has been bad for the United States. At The Permanent Problem, he cautions those who regard that decline as a turn toward a more rational world:
Let’s be clear that the ebbing of traditional religious faith has far outpaced the advance of reason and scientific thinking. Yes, the number of people who have internalized the scientific worldview has grown steadily, especially with the surge in post-secondary education in the second half of the 20th century. And that worldview sits uneasily with a belief in the supernatural: as long ago as 1914, a survey of prominent American scientists found that 70 percent of them doubted the existence of God.  
But this kind of intellectual disenchantment remains a minority phenomenon. Most people who have fallen away from organized religious life remain exuberantly credulous: as G. K. Chesterton put it, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” More than four in ten Americans believe that ghosts and demons exist and that psychics are real; a third believe in reincarnation; nearly 30 percent believe in astrology. In Europe, the churches may be empty, but comfortable majorities continue to profess faith in God or some higher power.
So the sunny view of organized religion’s retreat as humanity’s intellectual advance really can’t be sustained. We are not seeing the decline of supernaturalism so much as its privatization or atomization. Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one’s personal search for meaning. What the sociologist Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy” has shattered and fallen to earth; we pick up shards here or there, on our own or in small groups, and whatever we manage to build with them is necessarily more fleeting and less inclusive than what we experienced before.
The Danger of a Bipolarized WorldAfter President Joe Biden visited Ukraine this week and reassured its leaders of America’s support, Noah Millman surveyed recent geopolitical developments in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and more broadly. In Gideon’s Substack, Millman voices his fear of “unpredictable escalatory spirals” in a world where democracies are at odds with all major autocracies:
Iran has emerged as a major supplier of drones to Russia, which has not only significantly bolstered Russia’s war effort but no doubt enhanced the reputation of Iran’s own military capacity ... Now, in a much more significant development, China appears to be heading in the direction of supplying Russia with military assistance, including lethal assistance. China’s productive capacity is unparalleled; if China does indeed step up to make sure Russia never runs out of ammunition, it’s hard to see how Russia could outright lose a war of attrition with Ukraine. The burden would fall on Kyiv to change the dynamic on the battlefield, which is a much taller order than letting the Russian army destroy itself.
That’s not the most worrisome thing to me about this development, though. What worries me most, rather, is the degree to which it implies a firming up of the lines of alliance. The United States is already wielding Iranian military support for Russia as a justification for keeping nuclear negotiations with that country on ice, even as the country edges closer to the nuclear threshold. The prospect of some kind of military conflict with Israel has surely increased. Meanwhile, if China does wind up supplying Russia with weapons, it would be a remarkable development not so much because of what it would do to U.S.-China relations—those continue on their downward spiral, which is precisely what one would expect after the United States all but declared war on China’s semiconductor industry—but because of what it might do to Sino-European relations.
I can’t think of anything better-calibrated to help the United States win Europe to its side in its confrontation with China than direct Chinese assistance for Russia’s war in Ukraine. If that hasn’t been an important consideration for the Chinese, it’s an indication of just how far down the road to globally polarized conflict we may already have gone. I worry about that development for many reasons. For one thing, it means that any regional or local conflict could potentially be polarized … But my biggest concern is that a bipolar system is fundamentally unstable, prone to unpredictable escalatory spirals.
On Jimmy CarterJames Fallows, who worked for Carter, argues in The Atlantic that the former president’s defining feature was his consistency:
… old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.
Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another. Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.
Roald Dahl’s Sensitivity ReadersCommenting on intrusive edits made to new editions of books by the beloved children’s author, Helen Lewis argues in The Atlantic that the urge to profit is an important driver of the controversy:
A more honest stance would be that it’s time to take Roald Dahl’s work, put it on a Viking longboat, and sail it flaming into the sunset. Plenty of people are writing new children’s books; whatever we lose by discarding Dahl can be gained elsewhere. A form of Darwinism is rampant in the literary canon. Most authors who were best sellers in their day are now forgotten. Who reads Samuel Richardson’s Pamela now, except first-year literature students? Where are the Netflix adaptations of Hannah More’s pious-conduct books or the gratuitously blood-soaked plays of John Webster? The three best-selling books of 1922—the year when Ulysses was published—were If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson, The Sheik by Edith M. Hull, and Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington. Like most literature, those titles couldn’t escape the age in which they were written.
But Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more.
Provocation of the WeekDrawing on the free-speech rankings of colleges published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, David Zweig writes:
The colleges with the most stifling atmospheres for speech also have the most aggressive Covid vaccine policies. The colleges that most welcome and protect a free exchange of ideas, in turn, have the least intrusive vaccine requirements.
Number 1 ranked Chicago has no vaccine mandate at all. The university merely “strongly recommends” Covid vaccination. Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 on the list—Kansas State, Purdue, Mississippi State, and Oklahoma State—do not require any Covid vaccination either. They do each highly encourage vaccination, though.
At the bottom, Columbia not only requires the primary series for its students, but also requires the most recent bivalent booster. Ditto for second-to-last place Penn. For the many students who received an initial booster early on, this means a requirement of four doses. Rounding out the worst five colleges for free speech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgetown, and Skidmore also mandate all students be boosted. Though compared to Columbia and Penn they are relatively lax, only requiring “a booster,” meaning the third shot could have been from a long while ago, and not necessarily the bivalent.
… That there is an association between respect toward free speech and respect toward bodily autonomy—or a lack thereof for each—at academic institutions shouldn’t surprise anyone. Both reflect attitudes either in agreement with or against a libertarian ideal of individual freedom. But the degree of correlation is still disheartening.
There is no evidence that requiring boosters (or even the primary series) at many colleges made an iota of difference regarding the transmission of Covid on campus or, more importantly, the incidence of severe disease relative to colleges that simply encourage vaccination. (It is not a secret that the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission, a phenomenon that most people have experienced firsthand.) But the administrators at Columbia and the like, by being the most militant with their vaccine requirements, get to signal their progressive bona fides, which, it seems, is what their institutions care about most.
An authoritarian is (per academic literature in political psychology) a person who so values oneness and sameness that they would rather impose it coercively on others than tolerate diversity and difference. Once you grasp that, it’s no surprise that institutions and people who coerce in one domain tend to also do so in seemingly unrelated domains.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note. That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

There has been increasing interest recently in rethinking the standard 5-day work week. Specifically, would moving to a 4-day work week model be better overall, and what would the trade-offs be? A recent UK study adds to the research with a large study involving 61 companies in various industries, around 2,900 workers, over a six-month period. The results are very encouraging.

This kind of research is obviously difficult. It cannot be blinded, for example. Also, many of the personal outcomes measures are self-reported – subjects might have a motivation to present the 4-day work week in a positive light. There may also be an observer effect, where any change, no matter what it is and in which direction, might be followed by a positive self-report or even productivity.

With that in mind, the results of the study are still informative. They found:

The trial was a resounding success. Of the 61 companies that participated, 56 are continuing with the fourday week (92%), with 18 confirming the policy is a permanent change. Some of the most extensive benefits of shorter working hours were found in employees’ well-being. ‘Before and after’ data shows that 39% of employees were less stressed, and 71% had reduced levels of burnout at the end of the trial. Likewise, levels of anxiety, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, while mental and physical health both improved.

The most objective outcome was that revenue for the companies did not go down. In fact, in went up on average by 1.4%, with higher growth than the same period in the previous year. It’s also important to note that companies were able to choose their own method of reducing work hours – closing down on Friday, staggering days off, shifting hours seasonally, and even making the shorter schedule contingent on maintaining productivity. This result is consistent with previous research, which generally shows no decrease in productivity and significant increase in employee satisfaction.

While more and longer research is still necessary, so far it seems that going from basically a 5-day work week to a 4-day work week does not create any significant decrease in overall productivity. Mostly people compensate by working more efficiently – having shorter and more focused meetings, wasting less time, and finding productivity aids. They also took fewer sick days. But recently there has been a move to frame the question in terms of public health. The results of this study support that framing, but let’s take a close look.

The big effect is that many employees, as noted above, report less stress. Stress is a tricky outcome to deal with because it is so subjective, but is also plausibly results in physiological stress and worse sleep, which have objective physical outcomes. In the current study they found:

We found improvements in fatigue, with the average fatigue score falling from 2.56 to 2.12 (on a scale of 1-4, from never to daily), and 46% of employees reported a reduction in fatigue (with only 14% reporting an increase). The prevalence of insomnia and general sleep problems declined significantly. 40% saw a reduction in sleep difficulties, whilst 45% saw no change and only 15% saw increases.

Improvements in sleep is an objective outcome with broad health implications. It’s easy to see how this might be the case. Just having one more day a week to potentially sleep in can have large sleep benefits. But also, as the study found, increases in leisure and family time, the ability to do “self-admin” tasks during the week (which frees up weekends more) can reduce overall stress and allow more time for sleep. Many of the subjects reported that the reduced schedule gave them more time to “turn off” when they were at home, which also improved their sleep quality.

So far what we can say from the research is that there are two fairly consistent and strong signals in the data – productivity is not generally reduced by going to a 4-day work week model, and employee mental and physical well-being is enhanced. Again, this needs confirming research, but at least we can be fairly certain that the reduction will not be significantly harmful to companies, and may have significant benefits. This is enough to justify more broad adoption while progressing to the next stage of research (like going from a phase 2 to a phase 3 clinical trial).

There are other potential benefits as well, justifying further adoption and research. Fewer days of commuting means less time in cars and in traffic. This can save money and reduce CO2 emissions, while reducing overall traffic and further reducing stress. Many of the subjects report they will use their extra time to shop, which is positive for the economy. More satisfied employees also translated to less turnover. Reduced need for child care is also a potential money-saver.

We should note that the 5-day work week was not chosen based on any evidence. The 40 hour work week was mandated by regulation (although work hours have been increasing due to gig work, contract work, and other ways of getting around the regulations). There is likely some optimal balance between hours of work and increased productivity per unit of time. What the research is showing is that the 4-day work week may be closer to optimal than the 5-day work week. There is no reason, other than history, to consider the 5-day work week the default, and no scientific reason why the burden of evidence is entirely on the 4-day week. If we simply compare the two, the 4-day week seems to be superior.

But also, this study further showed that flexibility is likely to be very important, and perhaps just as important as the total number of hours. Different industries have different needs, as do different employees. There appears to be a significant potential for gain by reducing the total number of work hours within a framework of flexibility and enhanced efficiency.

It’s not that often that the president of Russia and the president of the United States give major speeches on the same day, hitting parallel themes and subjects. That it happened today was no accident: Friday is the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden were both interpreting that war to their audiences. But those audiences were very different. So were the visions of the world on offer.Putin spoke for two hours in a large, featureless hall. His target audience was in the room: politicians “elected” according to a rigged system, as well as bureaucrats, security officials, and functionaries—precisely the class of elite Russians who are rumored to be most unhappy with the war. Periodically they got up to applaud. Otherwise they maintained grim, emotionless expressions, and no wonder.[Tom Nichols: Putin’s desperate hours]For these people, Putin had a clear message: “Those who have embarked on the path of betrayal of Russia must be held accountable under the law.” He would not, he said, unleash a “witch hunt” against dissenters—which was, of course, a warning that a witch hunt is always possible. Ordinary Russians had no sympathy for those who had lost money because of Western sanctions, he maintained—a hint, of course, that those in the room who had lost money thanks to Western sanctions should not expect to get it back. As for those who had left the country, among them the sons and daughters of those in the room, he dismissed them as “national traitors.”Point by point, Putin repeated lies that he has told many times before. “We were doing everything possible to solve this problem peacefully.” Ukraine “started the war.” It is “them”—the West—“who are culpable for the war, and we are using force to stop it.” Everyone in that room knew these were lies. Many of his listeners, before the war, publicly mocked American warnings that an invasion was about to take place and were shocked and surprised when it did. But dictators do not always tell obvious lies because they expect anyone to believe them. Instead, by repeating obvious falsehoods, the Russian dictator was reminding the Russian elite, again, that he holds absolute power, he can say whatever he wants, and they have no choice but to pretend to believe him.A few of his phrases were meant for outsiders to hear. The announcement of a withdrawal from nuclear treaties was meant to scare Americans. Putin knows that the Biden administration is deterred by fear of Russian nuclear weapons, and so he has a genuine interest in stoking that fear, whenever and however he can. The wearily familiar language about Western degeneracy—“the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, and the abuse of children are declared the norm”—was intended to scare any Russians who still feel a twinge of regret or a sense of loss, now that Russia is cut off from Europe. No broader, bigger, uplifting vision was on offer. Putin did not seek to inspire, to convince, to excite, because he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t need to persuade anyone in Russia; he just needs them to be afraid.[Anne Applebaum and Nataliya Gumenyuk: ‘They didn’t understand anything, but just spoiled people’s lives’]Joe Biden, by contrast, was speaking outdoors, behind Warsaw’s royal castle, to a crowd of Poles and expat Americans who appeared genuinely pleased to be there. They smiled, talked among themselves, and waved flags. But they were not his main audience. Unlike Putin, Biden cared a lot more about reaching people who weren’t there: the American public, the European public, and the Ukrainian public too. For them, he used broad, universal, inclusive rhetoric, words like freedom and phrases like the hope of the brave. Unlike Putin, he was absolutely seeking to inspire, persuade, and explain. Putin had doubted the willpower of America and the democratic world, Biden said, but Putin was wrong: “Yes, we would stand up for sovereignty … Yes, we would stand up for the right of people to live free from aggression.” And yes, of course, “we would stand up for democracy.”Not that everyone everywhere will have been pleased. Other than Russia, Biden mentioned no autocracy by name. But he did state another general principle, one broad enough to interpret as a reference to China or Iran: “Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word: ‘No.’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’”This, too, pleased the crowd at the castle, but such broad, universal language carries some dangers. Biden’s Warsaw speech set a high bar—an extraordinarily high bar—for himself, for his administration, for NATO, for the coalition of democracies, and for Ukraine. If we are fighting for “freedom and sovereignty,” we can never accept anything less. If we are fighting for democracy, surely we must expect democracy to be respected by our political allies too—among them Poland, where democracy is in jeopardy. If we are going to call Russia’s horrific acts of brutality in occupied Ukraine “crimes against humanity,” doesn’t that obligate us to prosecute them? If we believe in justice, shouldn’t we seek it everywhere?When you rule by fear, using lies, no one expects anything better. When you offer hope and optimism, you create a belief, an assumption, that everything is possible. I hope Biden understands that he has promised to win this war, and that now he has to find a way to do so.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Vladimir Putin gave his annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly today, and it was a farrago of paranoia and lies; meanwhile President Joe Biden humiliated the Kremlin by walking the streets of Kyiv in broad daylight. The Russian president knows he is losing.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s civil war
Roald Dahl can never be made nice.
Netflix crossed a line.
The autocrat next door
Out of OptionsEvery December, Russian President Vladimir Putin gives an address to the Russian Federal Assembly—a Russian version of the State of the Union. Today, after a delay likely related to Russia’s serial battlefield losses in Ukraine, Putin spent some two hours unloading a barrage of lies, grievances, and bizarre historical revisions in his attempt to justify the bloodletting he began a year ago. He also said Russia would suspend participation in a crucial nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States. What does this all mean?It means, more than anything, that Putin is desperate. He’s losing in Ukraine, where, according to a British estimate last week, roughly 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Even Russia’s tough-guy Wagner mercenaries are getting cut to pieces: The National Security Council official John Kirby said in a briefing Friday that the Wagner Group—many of them convicted criminals—has taken 30,000 casualties, which is about half the entire group’s strength and a huge number even for a contractor force. (Note to Russian jailbirds: Your odds of staying alive are better in prison.)Putin may be a dictator, but even dictators have to justify losses. The Russian president started his speech by going full Orwell, claiming that the West started the war and that Russia was obliged to take up arms to put a stop to it all. (He might as well have said, “Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania,” and he came close.) He also repeated his accusation that the U.S. and NATO “rapidly deployed their army bases and secret biological laboratories near the borders of our country,” but this section was omitted from the English text published on the official Kremlin website, perhaps because it’s a bonkers charge that has long been debunked. The line, however, doesn’t seem to have been ad-libbed; it’s in the Russian text posted on the Russian president’s official website.Putin went on to claim that the plot to turn Ukraine into “anti-Russia” goes all the way back to the dark plans hatched by … the Austro-Hungarian empire. Apparently, the conspiracy theorists are right: If you look deeply enough into any international problem, there’s a Habsburg lurking around somewhere. The Russian president then assured his audience that his war was against the regime in Kyiv, not the people of Ukraine, even as his forces continue to butcher Ukrainian civilians and commit crimes against humanity.Putin included his usual tirade against sexual perversion in the West, a standard bit of boilerplate aimed not only at his own citizens but also at the European (and American) right-wingers who adore his supposed stance against Western moral decadence. Much of the rest of Putin’s speech was a similar rehearsal of Moscow’s classic, old-school Cold War charges against “the West” in general and the United States in particular. It was, as I wrote about a similar speech Putin gave a year ago when he began the war, shot after shot straight from a bottle of Soviet-era moonshine—the 180-proof good stuff about global confrontations, Nazis, and Washington’s many aggressions. He went on; as they would say in Russian, i tak dalee, “and so on and so forth,” but as we might say more colloquially in English, yada yada yada.On a more substantive note, Putin announced Russia would suspend further cooperation under the New START Treaty, the nuclear-arms-control agreement signed by the U.S. and Russia in 2011 and extended in 2021, which is in effect until 2026. Under New START, the United States and Russia agreed to a limit of 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, along with on-site verification—the right of each side to visit the other’s military bases—and other means of exchanging information. The Russians have already suspended on-site verification, and the U.S. State Department nearly a month ago said that Russia was failing to comply with the treaty.This is unfortunate, as on-site inspections help build trust and transparency, but it’s not a crisis. I worked on these issues for years, but I also asked Amy Woolf—a specialist in U.S. and Russian arms control, a former adviser to Congress, and one of the most judicious experts on nuclear affairs in the country—for her take on Putin’s speech. She told me that Putin’s recalcitrance could continue to erode U.S. confidence in Russian compliance with START, but “it does not mean that Putin plans, at this time or in the near future, to increase its forces beyond the bounds of the treaty limits.” I agree.Likewise, Putin said that Russia would resume nuclear testing—but only if the United States conducted new tests. Again I agree with Woolf: This was likely a “throwaway line,” she told me. I would even say it came across as meaningless; the United States has no immediate plans to resume nuclear testing, and so Putin was answering a question no one was asking.Putin has put himself and his country in a desperate situation, and he has run out of options, including nuclear threats. This is not to say that the risk of nuclear conflict has evaporated; as I noted on the most recent episode of the Radio Atlantic podcast, there is still plenty of room for Putin to do something foolish and set a terrible chain of events in motion. But after a year, it seems that the Russian president’s plan—if it can even be called that—is to consign more of his young men to the Ukrainian abattoir while hoping that the West somehow tires of the whole business. As the Atlantic contributing writer Eliot Cohen pointed out yesterday, however, Biden’s visit to Kyiv and his pledge of “unwavering and unflagging commitment” had to be a “gut punch” to Putin, dashing any hopes that the Free World will give up on Ukraine.The Russian president is still counting on Kyiv and its armies to collapse, or perhaps on an election to remove Biden, or for Europe to lose its nerve, or for China, perhaps, to come to Moscow’s rescue (which would be both a balm and a deep humiliation). But he also knows that time may be running out at home: After a year of war, there are only so many young men left to kill and only so many generals left to blame.Related:
Biden just destroyed Putin’s last hope.
Radio Atlantic: This is not your parents’ Cold War.
The forewoman of a special grand jury investigating election interference by Donald Trump and his allies in Georgia said that the jury recommended indictments of multiple people.
In a Warsaw, Poland, address, President Biden declared that the U.S. and its allies “will not waver” in supporting Ukraine.
A big winter storm is expected to bring substantial snowfall to much of the U.S., from the West Coast to New England, later this week.
Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the causes, and potential solutions, for teen girls’ worsening mental health.
Famous People: Kaitlyn and Lizzie recount their night on a Jeopardy-themed bar crawl.
The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal asks: Can low expectations make you happy?
Manuel Romaris / Getty
Junk Food Is Bad for You. Is It Bad for Raccoons?By Katherine J. Wu
I was in college when I saw my first truly chonky raccoon. It was perched on the rim of a trash can, a half-eaten tuna-salad sandwich clutched between its forepaws, its whiskers pinwheeling as it chewed. From across the quad, the raccoon fixed me with a beady-eyed stare of reproach, as if daring me to steal its already-filched fish. But I was much more interested in the creature, which looked twice as big as any raccoon I’d seen before. It was also a wild animal that had chosen a very unwild meal. And I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a link between the two.
As cities have grown and green spaces have shrunk, many wild animals, especially those in the Western world, have adopted diets that look an awful lot like ours. Squirrels snarf hard taco shells, and abscond with Nutella jars; subway rats chow down on pizza, while seagulls have ripped fries and even a KFC wrap straight out of human mouths. For at least some creatures, the menu changes seem to come with consequences.
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Photos: One year since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Sony Pictures Classics
Read. These seven books can help us come to terms with death—and, in the process, live full lives.Watch. Return to Seoul, in select theaters, is a low-budget character drama with maximalist thrills.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Forty years ago this month, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy premiered in American movie theaters. Something between a drama and a black comedy, it starred Robert De Niro as a celebrity stalker named Rupert Pupkin, a 30-something loser who thinks he’s an undiscovered but great comedian. Of course, he’s actually a mediocre doofus and a tad unhinged; he spends his nights in his mother’s basement chatting with life-size cutouts of Liza Minnelli and the popular late-night host he hopes to one day impress, Jerry Langford. (Langford is played, with perfect contempt and boredom, by Jerry Lewis, proving once again that comedians are often the best dramatic actors.) Finally, he and another kooky stalker launch a plot to kidnap Langford and thus guarantee Pupkin a shot on the show.The King of Comedy was a flop. De Niro captured Pupkin’s earnest but stupid narcissism so well that he’s uncomfortable to watch, which is perhaps why it fared so poorly at the box office. But it was also prophetic: Decades later, we live in a world of Pupkins, people who are constantly seeking rewards in a new economy based not on money, but on attention. Narcissism, on the rise for at least 40 years, now blazes out of control in American society. To watch the movie again is to realize that what was once dark humor about people on the fringe is now an almost unremarkable plot, and the ending that once annoyed me (which I will not spoil for you) now seems perfect. But it’s deeply unsettling to recognize an America that agrees with Pupkin, who says: “I figure it this way: better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.”— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thursday, February 23—one year after Russia invaded Ukraine—to discuss the war’s latest developments and implications for U.S. foreign policy. Register for the virtual event here.Do we need to worry about the nuclear threat of Putin’s war in Europe the way we worried during the Cold War? Listen to Tom Nichols on Radio Atlantic:

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers for insights into why teenage girls might be struggling, citing CDC data showing that the percentage who have contemplated suicide is up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago.Marcie has a 20-year-old daughter who didn’t get to play much in school:
Years ago, when my daughter started kindergarten, I was so excited for her to enjoy all the fun and interesting things that I got to do, and so disappointed when I found out that’s not how they do kindergarten anymore. There was less time for free play, less time to interact with peers, and (when we moved to a new city with only half-day kindergarten) no time for recess. It was heartbreaking to watch her slowly lose her natural sense of wonder and joy in learning. The rest of her school experience was similar—too much desk work, too little play, and hardly any self-guided play.
My daughter started developing anxiety and depression as a teenager. I often wonder if a better school experience would have made a difference. What if part of the reason so many teens are in despair is that they were denied the opportunity to be children? What if our children have too few opportunities to experience wonder, joy, or fun? What if we’ve forgotten that child-labor laws exist for a reason and now our children all hold desk jobs? Only they don’t get paid.
K points a finger at social media:
I teach high school. Last year, a very bright, high-achieving student had to take a medical leave. She later told me she had an eating disorder. While she did talk about the issue of control, which I think is a common factor for girls like her who develop eating disorders, she largely attributed her struggles to social media. All day every day she is staring at images of “perfect” bodies on Instagram, and it felt like she couldn’t escape the pressure. This student was never even almost overweight; she went from very thin to dangerously thin.
I wonder if people who aren’t around teenagers all day realize their lives are mediated by their phones and they don’t see boundaries between social media and real life the way some of us do. This isn’t an original thesis, but I believe that accounts for a large part of the mental-health struggles we see.
Claire suggests education might be a solution:
Media-literacy coursework ought to begin in elementary school; kids ought to scrutinize and interpret media and learn about engaging respectfully with others in technological settings. By adolescence, they ought to sense Madison Avenue’s cloying artifices, to regard the self-interested theatrics of influencers with cool (or amused) detachment, and to know when to disengage.
Whereas Tara counsels a more radical solution: no social media until age 18. She writes:
My experience with Facebook shaped our house rules around social media. At its best, it helped me stay in touch with friends and family. But mostly I found it to be a huge time sink. At its worst, it prompted loneliness, isolation, or conflict.
When I gave up Facebook, it felt like I’d been given back time and peace of mind. So our house rule was no social media until age 18. We were always open to talking with both of our kids about our decision, but my husband and I both felt strongly that it was the right choice and we stuck with it.
I got a surprise when my daughter made an impassioned plea to be allowed to use social media at 17. I was wavering, thinking maybe we’d waited long enough, and wanted to avoid conflict. But it was her 20-year-old brother who spoke up and said, “Don’t do it, Mom. It’s not a good place.”
In the end, our daughter agreed to wait another year, albeit grudgingly. What convinced her was a conversation we had about her workload and how easy it is to lose yourself in your phone, even when you’re not on social media. She was able to acknowledge the danger of distraction and waited until she turned 18.
There’s no magic switch flipped at 18, but living without social media as long as she did gave our daughter valuable perspective; the house rule protected both kids from a lot of things they were not mature enough to handle. Parenting is complicated, and I don’t mean to suggest that our decision is the only right one. But it is one of the purest parenting wins I’ve experienced. It was one of the best, most valuable parenting decisions we made for our kids, and I have zero regrets. That’s a rare feeling.
My kids grew up with all the same ups and downs, friendship struggles, and broken hearts. But it could have been so much worse had it all happened in view of a much wider and harsher audience.
But John doesn’t think that individual parents acting alone can defeat social media:
My daughter is reading this, so I’ll try to speak carefully, but I remember trying to draw a line in the sand about phones and social media. I knew, in my heart and my head, that her social-media use was causing many of her problems. Social media was making her life worse, I knew, like I used to know her delightful smile and vivacious personality. But when I moved to limit her usage, it led to animosity all around. One parent cannot stand against the horde; parents have to act collectively to get girls off social media.
Heather is switching from teaching high school to middle school because of various problems teen girls are facing. Among them:
1. Social media and the highly successful bullying it enables. I’m talking about SWATting people’s houses, humiliating TikTok montages, fake Instagram accounts and Snapchats, the works. It’s all happening, all of the time. We’re at peak insecurity, suspicion, and meanness right now, and it’s hitting girls where they live: in their friendships.
2. We’re unintentionally telling girls they’re trash if they don’t love STEM, or if they’re not highly competitive “leaders.” We can’t all be type-A, even with medication! It’s also not their fault that STEM is where the high-paying jobs are. We’re all afraid to tell them it’s okay to skip AP Calculus and Physics and take AP Art, because we’ll be excoriated, often by the girls themselves.
In Nordic countries, more (but not all!) women choose people-focused careers and more men (but not all!) choose to work with stuff. But they have some pay equity and universal health-care coverage. At my former high school, 80 percent of girls in honors courses say they’re going into engineering, and we call it a win for feminism. Being a “good student” has become synonymous with being a science and engineering kid, so they conform to that expectation.
This is not feminism!
3. If we push hard enough, girls will convince themselves that they like or are whatever we value. We shouldn’t take advantage of this people-pleasing tendency in girls, because it’s putting them in the hospital.
4. Speaking of hospitals, we’re ignoring their cries for help, at least until the first suicide attempt. Girls are meeting with their school advocacy team after a stint in psychiatric-emergency services, but we’re primarily discussing how to make up their work so they can still compete for a certain scholarship. We don’t even discuss the teen overscheduling problem, much less how we contribute to it. After all, adults let people with still-developing executive functioning decide how many hard classes to take, then hold them to their decision because “accountability.” What did we think would happen? Then the predictable outcome happens and we all meet to “get them back on track.” Which means the same track that was killing them. Great.
Steve is the father of a college-aged daughter. He writes:
I can’t help but think that some of this stress is an unintended consequence of the otherwise remarkably positive gains women have made over the past 25-plus years. Teen girls now compete head-to-head with boys academically, often filling the majority of the slots at elite colleges. Women’s sports in high school and college are as demanding and competitive as those of their male counterparts. Yet, teen girls still have many of the social and cultural pressures that existed before, and social media only intensified things.  
While anti-bullying efforts have made some headway related to physical abuse, we have a long way to go in stopping the difficult-to-see abuse from aptly named “mean girls.” So teen girls now have largely the same pressures as teen boys plus the pressures they historically suffered. Add to this the stresses suffered by working mothers during the pandemic and it could make the future seem bleak for young minds.
This is not to suggest that we turn back the clocks. The gains for girls and women have been long overdue, and frankly, there is still much work to be done. Instead, we have to recognize that progress comes with costs, and look for solutions. Long-term, it is about teaching the skills and providing them with the support they need to develop a healthy response to the pressures (and maybe reducing expectations).
As a grizzled and humbled dad-vet, I would like to make a few short-term suggestions to the fathers out there:

Spend less time focusing on your daughter’s successes. While congratulating her is fine, constantly (or, worse, publicly) praising your high-achieving daughter creates the feeling that your love is contingent on her continued success. Let her know you love her without condition.  
Can we limit the amount of time we use compliments that focus on how she looks? Instead of calling her beautiful or stunning, tell her she is awesome, incredible, or, even better, perfect.  
Just be there for her, physically present and ready to listen without judgment, meeting her wherever she is at. Eighty percent of the time will not be productive (use that time to read more), but that 20 percent where she turns to you will let her know that her father is there for her (which is super powerful). My wife did this incredibly well, and I wish I had understood its value more when my kids were younger.

An easy way to “just be there”: Start cooking and demand family dinners. You’ll get at least 30 minutes to sit next to your perfect daughter.
Scott blames what he sees as social pressure for girls and women to be warriors:
The pressure to reimagine womanhood as fierce, brave, and strong has left many feeling like failures, as if they’ve failed to be that caricature of power they’re told they should be. It’s no longer sufficient to like what they like, be who they are, do whatever they want to do. They must be better, more important, more powerful, and their failure to live up to the hype has manifested as an insurmountable failure in life.
That pressure is coupled with a lack of human companionship, as girls and women are also told they no longer need men—and that men who are less than perfect are unworthy of their company and attention—there is a gaping hole in their world that seems as if it can never be filled. For men, the pressure is lessened by the social expectation that they aren’t all that worthy, and so the failure to achieve success is bad, but not as bad as a disgrace to their gender. They’re still miserable and hopeless, but at least they are not alone in their misery.
Katie, a high-school teacher in San Diego, offers a generational hypothesis:
I was having a conversation with a colleague who mentioned that her son had been born on September 11, 2001; she was watching the news coverage while in labor. I realized that parents may have started parenting very differently in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, probably without even knowing it.
I think that the fear that anything can happen at any moment bled into this generation of parents and kids. I think post-9/11 parents wanted to shield their kids from that fear, pain, and trauma, but ended up doing exactly the opposite: They fed their kids a steady diet of fear and anxiety without the coping skills to process it. It was all just “shake the keys in the face of the sad child and make them happy, no matter what.” Compounded by a new mass shooting practically daily, honestly how could kids not be stewing in a toxic soup of great existential anxiety? As a teacher who had to teach online during the pandemic, students preferred the online version of school for a lot of reasons, and one of them was not having to be sitting ducks in classrooms.
Also, I can say from my observations this year especially, that girls can inflict a special kind of evil on each other, both in person and through social media. I don’t want to generalize too much, or claim that boys aren’t engaging in similar tactics, but the ways that girls use, interpret, analyze, and leverage a single social-media post is actually astonishing.
I do an activity in my AP classes that involves reviewing a fake set of documents about a fictional high-school couple. It includes mocked-up screenshots of an Instagram post, two text-message conversations, and a calendar schedule for both of the kids in the couple. The conversations I overheard this year as my students answered the assigned questions were stunning: They noticed time stamps, battery levels, and background locations. They were like the damn CIA analyzing this fictional high-school couple, and if they’re putting this kind of energy into kids they don’t know (who aren’t even real!), I just sat there imagining the energy they are putting into analysis of their friends’ posts––and worse, those of their enemies. I can’t imagine being a kid on the business end of a teenage girl who has triangulated an Instagram post, a TikTok, and a couple of text messages into a group chat and decided that I have committed some kind of unforgivable high-school sin.
The othering is swift and cold—it’s chilling to watch.
I work with amazing teens who are truly gifted. They are articulate and write beautifully and are so thoughtful and polite and fashionable and aware of the world; light-years ahead of where I felt like I was at the same age. But that awareness is coming with a terrible price, and we’re not acknowledging it quickly enough.
Jeremy, a high-school teacher, worries that kids are too afraid of saying the wrong thing to talk about their struggles:
I see a lot of young people struggling in silence.  
Young women, generally more socially motivated, are more vulnerable to declines in face-to-face social interaction. Depression has been rising among young women for years now.  
Young people in general need guidance in dealing with big questions and heavy topics. Far too many of the students I ask tell me they are uncomfortable talking about controversial or difficult things. As someone who openly talks about his own battles with mental illness in class, and who teaches psychology, I was able to get some kids to open up to me, to leave the door open to conversations about how they are doing. But the bitter polarization of our public discourse stifles those exploratory conversations teens and young adults have on difficult, adult topics. You know, of the kind that people wrestle with at that age? With a caring teacher and the right group of students, those conversations are possible in the classroom.  
The fear of saying something wrong is too great for some students to talk openly. It’s in those moments of open communication that adults can teach our young people to have those hard conversations. We need to do a better job keeping ideology—from all sides—out of our public schools. If teens can’t say the “wrong” thing in a good classroom, a community of learners and peers, where can they?
S. struggled with mental health for most of her adolescence. She writes:
I could probably list 100 reasons why young women’s mental health is suffering: Social media causing body dysmorphia; adolescence being the age that most girls start to realize that they are different from boys in a way that suddenly attracts inappropriate and unwanted attention from adult men; the realization that your gender, which you cannot control, restricts your ability to dream—you scarcely see yourself among world leaders, great historical figures, even artists and musicians and authors.
Being a teenage girl entails realizing that the world is not built for you, and so you start to wonder how you might change yourself to ease the process: be skinnier so that your appearance is accepted; be smarter so that you may be taken seriously; keep to yourself so that you aren’t bossy or annoying. This process only yields failure and disappointment when losing 10 pounds doesn’t mean boys like you and getting perfect grades doesn’t convince them that women can be good at math. That makes you feel even more hopeless.
There is a theory that mental illnesses may be caused by learned helplessness, where the repeated feeling that one has no control over a situation makes one doubt that one is able to achieve anything. I dislike the term learned helplessness because it implies that you are somehow culpable for your faults—you learned them, after all—but the theory describes what teen girls are experiencing.
Girls don’t seek out help, because they don’t think help will improve anything. Having faith that therapy or medication will work requires you to externalize your mental health to some extent: You have to believe that your depression is an affliction that can be cured. As long as you treat your mental health as an immutable trait, you will not seek out help. But gender itself is an immutable trait, and if being a girl is the source of your helplessness, what is the point of intervention?
And suppose that you do decide to speak to a parent or professional. Society and the medical field have a history of delegitimizing the feelings of women: You’re not sleeping enough; you’re spending too much time on your phone; it’s probably just your period; or maybe you’re simply being dramatic. So now not only do you have to convince yourself that things can improve, but you have to convince everyone else that a problem exists in the first place.
The repeated denigration that teenage girls experience due to their gender can exacerbate other risk factors, like genetics, socioeconomic status, family dynamics, and even teenage experimentation with drugs and alcohol. So maybe the best thing we can do for the mental health of teenage girls is simply take them seriously.
Jaleelah cautions against pigeonholing teen girls:
Women are human beings. They are vulnerable to many of the same societal causes of depression as men: mass unemployment, rising cost of living, and lack of real-life community support. It is dangerous to act as though all forms of mental illness are gendered. All human beings need to eat and laugh and live together in order to be happy. Whether you think it is up to the Church or the state to make that possible, you have to acknowledge that the basics of a healthy life are out of reach for many Americans.
That said, I believe that rising hopelessness about misogyny is one factor among many hurting girls’ mental health. I was a 17-year-old girl when the pandemic hit. In my transition to university and adult society, I have noticed that liberals and conservatives alike make it hard for women to feel recognized for their merits.

The first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine finds us in a familiar position. There has been a regular cycle in assessments of the conflict. The starting assumption of most people a year ago was that there was no way that Ukraine could resist the Russian onslaught, much less push Moscow back, so Ukraine’s external friends needed to brace themselves for concessions by Kyiv and a new strategic reality. Russia was too just too big and too well-armed for any other outcome.The Ukrainians proved this narrative wrong by defeating the initial Russian effort to take Kyiv in February-March and expelling the invaders from the north of the country. In the course of that liberation, the world came to know the reality of Russian occupation in the atrocities committed in towns like Bucha and Irpin. The war then shifted to the East, as Moscow dramatically scaled back its war aims and concentrated on attacking parts of the Donbas like Severodonetsk. This led to a seeming stalemate by the end of the summer, with the Ukrainians running low on 152mm artillery for their Russian-caliber guns. Once again, you saw Western voices repeating the mantra that this would be a long war that Ukraine could not win, and that there needed to be peace negotiations and territorial concessions by Kyiv.The U.S. decision to up the quality of weapons provided, and especially the transfer of HIMARS rocket artillery, changed this calculus dramatically. Ukraine began systematically targeting Russian ammo dumps and command posts, and in rapid offensive operations liberated Kharkiv in the northeast and brought pressure on Russian positions in the south, including a spectacular attack on the Kerch Strait bridge in early October and raids on Russian airbases on the Crimean Peninsula. The Russians responded by ordering a military mobilization in late September to replace the large number of casualties they had suffered. This phase of the war culminated in the liberation of Kherson in November, following a Russian retreat over the Dnipro River. These military successes then damped down Western calls for negotiations.___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Since November we have been in another period of apparent immobility and stalemate. After the huge Ukrainian advances in the early fall, both sides were exhausted and needed to refit and resupply. In Russia’s case, this involved funneling huge numbers of newly mobilized men into frontline positions with minimal training and insufficient equipment. The war began to focus on the town of Bakhmut in the Donbas, which the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin had set as the point where he would demonstrate the effectiveness of his mercenary army. Like the battles for Severodonetsk and Lysychansk last summer, this turned into a massive artillery duel, with the Russian side sending waves of infantry to attack the well-defended town. This has led to huge casualties on both sides, but particularly for the Russians who forced convicts to assault well-defended Ukrainian positions at gunpoint. The penalty for retreat or desertion was a sledgehammer to the head.Once again, this apparent stalemate has brought back the same fears of a long war and renewed calls for some kind of peace settlement. The Russians have brought their newly mobilized forces to bear along the whole Donbas front, and once again the Ukrainian side is complaining of falling ammunition stocks while staying mum about their own level of casualties. At this point, there are two issues that need to be evaluated: first, the politics of the support that each side is likely to receive, the Ukrainians from external sources and the Russians from both their industrial base and their few allies like Iran and China. Depending on the nature of that support, the central question becomes predicting likely military outcomes over the next six months.With regard to the first question, the Biden administration and the West more generally have been both remarkable in the level of support they have given Ukraine, but painfully slow in delivering it. President Biden's surprise visit to Kyiv was a welcome confirmation of U.S. support. But the material backing for Ukraine has been less edifying, including the argument about supplying tanks like German Leopards and American Abrams. A decision was finally taken in January at Ramstein and in follow-up NATO meetings. But this was a decision that should have been taken six months ago. It will take time to train Ukrainians to operate the heterogeneous systems now being delivered, and, just as important, to build and operated the logistics systems needed to keep them in the field.On the American side, Republican support for Ukraine has been slipping gradually. The midterm election last November 8 staunched the slide temporarily as election deniers lost their races and the Republicans gained only the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives. Poll data shows growing numbers of Republican voters expressing Ukraine fatigue; outright opposition to Ukraine has become more deeply entrenched in the MAGA wing of the party. There are disturbing hints that Republican candidates for 2024 will coalesce around opposition to further Ukraine aid. The Biden administration has finally stepped up to the rhetorical challenge with the president’s surprise visit to Kyiv on Monday, and his speech in Poland the day after. What’s needed now is expedited material support.European support for Ukraine has been very impressive in many ways. Helped by a mild winter and precautionary stockpiling of natural gas, there were higher energy prices but no immediate crisis pushing European states to cut a deal with Russia. Indeed, the war has vastly accelerated the decoupling of European energy markets from Russia and provided a stimulus for a more rapid shift to alternative energy sources.However, the political trendline on both sides of the Atlantic are clear: support for Ukraine will continue to diminish gradually over time. As was the case last fall, the level of support will depend heavily on the perceived battlefield situation. If Ukraine looks like it can continue to make use of the new arms and regain territory, then foreign support will continue. But if the war turns into a prolonged stalemate, then it will crumble and at some point cease. This is the scenario that Putin is counting on. The Ukrainians do not have a year to make this turnaround happen, the timeline is more like six months.So we need to turn to the second question, which is likely military outcomes given the new levels of Western support. Moscow has shown itself willing to lose ten soldiers for every Ukrainian killed, the argument goes, and they have virtually unlimited supplies of manpower and an intact defense industrial base. Sanctions have not hurt the Russian economy as much as hoped. Scale will eventually overwhelm quality. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been ominous reports of Russia once again massing tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders in preparation for a renewed offensive.Once again, many Western pundits and observers have fallen into unwarranted pessimism, which is only now being corrected in the media.First of all, Russian resources are not unlimited. The fact that Russia is contemplating yet another mass mobilization suggests the huge numbers of mobiks called up since last September that have already been killed or wounded, a total number that is close to 200,000 since the beginning of the war. The British defence secretary recently remarked that some 97 percent of the entire Russian army is now in Ukraine. There are no vast manpower reserves that can be brought to bear. Perhaps two-thirds of all the tanks in Russia’s huge prewar inventory have been destroyed or put out of commission, meaning that their ability to wage a mobile combined-arms offensive is extremely limited. There are anecdotal reports of factories not being able to meet production targets because of missing workers. Prigozhin has announced an end to the prison recruitment campaign, since evidently prisoners are getting word that their chances for survival are not large.A second reason why pessimism is overdone is the limited amount of learning that the Russian military has demonstrated. Rather than organizing a large offensive, the Russian command continues to make small attacks along multiple lines of advance. It is perhaps not surprising that newly mobilized and poorly trained conscripts would not be able to pull off a sophisticated combined arms operation, a weakness that was amply demonstrated in the recent Russian attempt to take Vuhledar southwest of Bakhmut. Two elite units, the 155thand 40th Naval Infantry Brigades, were largely annihilated in the attempt, and the Russians lost some 30 tanks and over 1,000 casualties in less than two days. Russian military bloggers are up in arms about the degree of incompetence displayed despite a year of warfare.Finally, there continues to be good reason to think that the Ukrainians will make good use of the new equipment coming into their inventories. Longer-range strike munitions will force the Russians to pull their logistics back even further, and there are multiple points along the front where Ukraine could choose to strike. The Ukrainian offensives of last fall were made possible by the exhaustion of Russian forces after their small gains in Donbas. It would appear that they are similarly depleted following their unsuccessful efforts around Bakhmut, and any new recruits will not be ready in time to fill the gap.Assuming that a spring offensive comes and the Ukrainians are able to break through the existing front, what kinds of war aims should Ukraine seek? By far their most important objective should be the liberation of the remaining occupied parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts to retake that part of the Black Sea coast. It is hard to see how Ukraine will be economically viable without regaining access to the Sea of Azov ports. Most critical will be capturing the city of Melitopol, which will allow the Ukrainians to cut the supply line from Russia proper to Crimea. The Russian ability to support their forces in Crimea will then be put at severe risk, and at that point one could imagine Russia being forced to the bargaining table in a more serious way. If this doesn’t happen, Ukraine will be in a position to isolate, strangle, and ultimately retake Crimea. All of this is much more important than retaking the Donbas.A lot of this scenario has to unfold, however, in the next few months. The Ukrainians will face the same sorts of minefields and trench lines that the Russians face, and they will take heavy losses assaulting these defensive positions. All that is needed, however, is one successful breakthrough for much of the existing Russian line to collapse.So with reasonable confidence that we can hope for the best in a spring offensive. As it was throughout the first year of the war, politics will follow military outcomes rather than the other way around. It goes without saying that Ukraine deserves the highest level of United States and NATO support, delivered quickly and efficiently, and that we must start looking forward to the country's rebuilding and a security structure that will protect from Russia into the future.Francis Fukuyama is chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose and Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.Image: An abandoned Russian tank in the region of Izyum, eastern Ukraine. (Screenshot from Ukrinform TV)

I was in college when I saw my first truly chonky raccoon. It was perched on the rim of a trash can, a half-eaten tuna-salad sandwich clutched between its forepaws, its whiskers pinwheeling as it chewed. From across the quad, the raccoon fixed me with a beady-eyed stare of reproach, as if daring me to steal its already-filched fish. But I was much more interested in the creature, which looked twice as big as any raccoon I’d seen before. It was also a wild animal that had chosen a very unwild meal. And I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a link between the two.As cities have grown and green spaces have shrunk, many wild animals, especially those in the Western world, have adopted diets that look an awful lot like ours. Squirrels snarf hard taco shells, and abscond with Nutella jars; subway rats chow down on pizza, while seagulls have ripped fries and even a KFC wrap straight out of human mouths. For at least some creatures, the menu changes seem to come with consequences. Raccoons that spend their days feasting on trash have higher blood sugar, heavier bodies, and crummier teeth than their wilder counterparts; bears that forage on human food hibernate less and show signs that their cells may age atypically fast. Vulture chicks nourished with scraps from landfills have lower levels of antioxidants in their blood. And when researchers repeatedly toss McDonald’s cheeseburgers to crows, the birds’ babies leave the nest chubbier, and with higher cholesterol.It seems a worrying set of findings, especially considering the rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease among humans in many parts of the world—all conditions that have been linked to the consumption of ultra-processed foods. Maybe, in inheriting our mediocre diets, wild animals are picking up a bunch of our health problems too. But laying down such a verdict is trickier than it might sound. Humans barely have a grasp on how and why our own diets affect us, much less on how they’re shaping the bodies of creatures that share only some of our biology and live extraordinarily different lives than we do. “There’s so much basic physiological stuff we don’t know about wild animals,” says Maureen Murray, a wildlife-disease ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Some wild animals are certainly in worse shape from scavenging our scraps. Others, though, might be doing all right with urban diets—even adapting to them in ways that researchers are only beginning to understand.[Read: Are cities making animals smarter?]Since life first appeared on Earth, it’s operated on a principle of scarcity: “Anytime you can get food you should get food,” says Shane Campbell-Staton, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton. Then humans came along, and “flipped that fundamental biological rule on its head.” Animals out in nature spend their days foraging, hunting, and competing with one another for whatever resources they can find. Meanwhile, “we can meet our day’s caloric requirements in a 10-minute trip to McDonald’s,” says Joanna Lambert, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.That life of energetic luxury spells trouble for us. Sugary, fatty, processed foods are easy to overeat—to the point that they can spark or exacerbate certain types of chronic disease. And some of the animals that live closest to us may be following in our footsteps. Pets such as dogs have been getting paunchier in recent decades, an issue that can put canines at higher risk of heart problems and high blood pressure. Many zoo animals, confined to enclosures and fed limited diets full of domesticated produce, tend to be sicker, sadder, and less eager to reproduce than those that roam free.The outcomes get a lot grayer, though, when it comes to animals that are still technically wild, coming and going through our territory more or less as they please. Scientists have found evidence that human diets—which tend to be a little too carb-rich—can cause direct harm to animals: Young geese that nosh heavily on bread crumbs can develop angel wing, a type of malnutrition that can impair their ability to fly. And coyotes that scrounge on compost might be more susceptible to tapeworms and more likely to spread mange.But in most cases, the math of modern animal menus just isn’t clear. Bianca Wist, an ecologist at the University of Hamburg, has found that her city’s squirrels, which frequently nibble on cupcakes, fries, waffles, and cookies, are scrawnier than the ones in the local forest, despite consistently eating more. White ibises—spindly, nomadic wetland birds that have evolved to chow down on crayfish—seem to do okay in parks full of people who toss or hand-feed them bread, bagels, pretzels, Froot Loops, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Murray told me. The birds’ bodies get “kind of chunky, more round,” she said, and yet they weigh less than wilder ibises. And although their gut microbes are less diverse, the park birds seem quite content, spending their plentiful free time preening and loafing around in the sun.[Read: Rats have not changed. We have.]The convenience of city eating has probably rescued some animals from terrible fates: individuals too old, sickly, or injured to keep up with wild prey or endure weather and predation in the wild, says Desirée Narango, a conservation scientist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. Many of Ethiopia’s dumpster-diving hyenas might have starved if not for their taste for trash; coyotes that lope into cities—where they’ve been spotted gnawing on Doritos, muffins, candy canes, and watermelons—“are definitely getting subsidized,” which allows populations to boom, Lambert told me.Even animals that seem unhealthily chubby may not be unilaterally worse off. In Ontario, female urban chipmunks move less and weigh more than rural ones do—but have fewer stress hormones in their blood. And several studies have found that garbage-raiding primates in Kenya have higher body weight, cholesterol, and blood-sugar levels than those that have to forage in the wild—but may also reach reproductive maturity earlier, and get pregnant again more quickly after giving birth. Animals that get heavy and stay heavy may benefit from their caloric cushion when food becomes scarce; they might have more energy to invest into surviving harsh conditions, eluding predators, and producing and raising their young. “It’s a question of whether the costs outweigh the benefits,” says Albrecht Schulte-Hostedde, a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist at Laurentian University.And although it’s easy for humans to make snap judgments, there are no universal standards on what makes an animal “too heavy.” It’s one thing to notice that a creature has put on some weight, or even that the levels of lipids or sugars have gone up in its blood. Labeling them “obese” or “diabetic,” though, turns those observations into value judgments, says David Allison, an obesity researcher at Indiana University at Bloomington. “What does it mean to be obese? So much fat that it’s a problem?” That’s a threshold that researchers haven’t satisfactorily defined even for people. The further animals get from us on the tree of life, the less we can assume about what’s going on in their tissues, or what’s to blame. For a dietary generalist such as a crow, “having a little more cholesterol in their diet might not be a big deal,” Narango told me, especially if the birds are still getting by well enough to couple up and hatch eggs.Animals may not even be prone to metabolic disease in the same way that people are. In humans, weight- and diet-related issues can take decades to manifest, long past the life span of many of the animals rooting around in our garbage bins, says Julie Young, a behavioral ecologist at Utah State University. Maybe those timelines are compressed in wild creatures, and health problems could arise for an animal that’s quite short-lived. But the speed of illness could be slower to unfold in nature too—especially in creatures that are only supplementing their natural diets with our snacks, and still spending plenty of time running, flying, and swimming outdoors. Certain animals have also evolved resilience to major changes in physique way beyond what humans can handle: Bears, squirrels, and marmots, for instance, will essentially eat themselves into a high-glucose coma in advance of their long stints in torpor or hibernation, then happily and healthily return to a seasonal baseline.[Read: City frogs are the sexiest frogs]Even if researchers were to define metrics of poor health across species, they’d still have a tough time blaming metabolic woes on diet alone. Urban living can come with plenty of other perils, says Christopher Schell, a behavioral ecologist at UC Berkeley. Cities are islands of heat, chock-full of pollutants and toxins, and lacking in plants. Lights stay on well into the evening; the din of traffic can drown out the sounds of life. Species that would never cross paths in the wild butt heads in alleyways, allowing infectious disease to spread. And then there’s the stress of frequently encountering us. All of that could be changing how animals’ bodies work. And there’s always the chance that sickness is affecting what animals eat, Murray pointed out. “It’s circular, how diet affects health, and how health affects diet.”That murkiness might only be growing. Urban environments are some of the most extreme and fastest-changing habitats the world has ever produced, and perhaps in response, evolution in cities is playing out at accelerated rates. Storks in Spain are interrupting their migration patterns to congregate around garbage dumps. House sparrows are producing more starch-digesting enzymes, as dogs did when they split off from wolves; New York mice are churning out comparable digestive machinery that helps them better break down fatty, sugary food. Animals are adapting to city living—and blurring the definition of what truly counts as a “natural” diet in the age of the Anthropocene, says Tali Caspi, a behavioral ecologist at UC Davis. And if muffin-munching coyotes and pizza-pilfering rats end up being the ones producing the next generations, the standards for wild diets may continue to shift. Still, these animal adjustments aren’t necessarily a comforting trend—just one that’s clearly playing out on our streets. “Just because they are adapting to us doesn’t mean it’s beneficial to them,” Schell told me.
For now, as adorable as roly-poly squirrels might be, there are still plenty of reasons to keep human food out of animal paws and claws, experts told me. Our garbage contains many harmful substances, including toxins, metal, glass, and plastics that can sicken creatures or entangle their limbs. The stakes of separation aren’t just about them. Colleen Cassady St. Clair, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Alberta, and her team are starting to find evidence that urban coyotes that feast on too much human food might experience changes to their microbiome that make them more aggressive and likelier to tussle with people in problematic ways. Raccoons, which stick close to people to eat our trash, transmit a nasty roundworm in their feces that can cause serious harm to humans and dogs. And those non-migrating storks in Spain might now be contaminating nearby reservoirs with dump-heap germs, making the water less safe to drink. Garbage may not always directly damage the wild animals that eat it—but the worst of our trash does often find its way back to us.

There is an old saying in computational science: garbage in, garbage out. Computers can carry out billions of complex calculations in a second, but that processing power is otherwise unfiltered and shouldn’t be confused with intelligence.I can attest, from my own experience when writing detailed code in my work as a physicist, how often it is that surprising results arise, only to discover upon checking that they are due to errors in coding rather than reflecting interesting facets of fundamental reality.So it is with AI. Years ago, I attended a conference at Asilomar, organized by a group that was concerned about the future of AI. The opening lectures, mostly from philosophers, warned of the importance of teaching AI “universal human values” if eventually sentient AI systems were to pose no danger to humanity.This sounds good, in principle, until one tries to define universal human values, at least in the context of human history. If machine learning systems are trained on such material available on the Internet, they will be hard-pressed to find consistent examples of logical, ethical, or moral behavior running across time or geography. One worries that, in the end, this kind of guidance for initial programming will involve more “do as I say, not as I do” than programming for open-ended discovery.The problem with this, of course, is the question of who gets to provide the guidance, and what their values are.This hypothetical concern has become much more real as human-interface machine learning systems have blossomed, with the recent rise of ChatGPT and its impact on human discourse from assisting in the writing of scientific papers to guiding people in their search for information.Recently, Greg Giovanni, a student of Vinod Goel, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at York University, held the following “dialogue” with ChatGPT, on an issue of current topical interest, which he and Professor Goel have permitted me to reproduce here:Are there any conceptual issues with identifying as neither male nor female?Response:There are no inherent conceptual issues with identifying as neither male nor female. Gender identity is a deeply personal and individual experience, and everyone has the right to define their own gender identity in a way that feels authentic and meaningful to them.For some individuals, the traditional binary categorization of gender as either male or female does not accurately reflect their experience of gender, and they may identify as neither male nor female, as a blend of both, or as something else entirely. This is a valid and coherent way of experiencing gender for these individuals.It is important to respect and support individuals in their self-identified gender, regardless of whether they identify as male, female, non-binary, or any other gender identity. Using gender-inclusive language and avoiding assumptions about someone’s gender can help create a supportive and inclusive environment for individuals of all gender identities.In summary, there are no inherent conceptual issues with identifying as neither male nor female, and it is a valid and coherent way of experiencing gender for some individuals.How do you know there are no inherent conceptual issues with identifying as neither male nor female? What is your source?The understanding that there are no inherent conceptual issues with identifying as neither male nor female is based on the insights and perspectives of experts and professionals in fields such as gender and sexuality studies, psychology, sociology, and human rights. These experts and professionals recognize that gender identity is a complex and multi-faceted aspect of identity that cannot be solely defined by the binary categories of male or female.Additionally, this understanding is supported by a growing body of research and anecdotal evidence from individuals who identify as non-binary. These individuals report feeling a greater sense of authenticity and wellbeing when they are able to define their own gender identity in a way that feels true to their experience, regardless of whether this falls within the traditional binary categorization of gender.In summary, the understanding that there are no inherent conceptual issues with identifying as neither male nor female is based on a growing body of expert perspectives, research, and anecdotal evidence from individuals who identify as non-binary.Who are some experts that see non-binary gender identity as problematic?I don’t have a specific list of experts who see non-binary gender identity as problematic. However, there are some individuals and groups who argue that gender identity is binary and based on biological sex, and that the concept of non-binary gender is a recent cultural phenomenon that lacks scientific basis. It’s important to note that these views are not widely accepted in the scientific community, and that the vast majority of experts in the fields of psychology, sociology, and gender studies recognize that gender is a complex, multifaceted construct that can be experienced and expressed in many different ways, including as non-binary.Who are some experts that recognize non-binary gender as valid?There are many experts in the fields of psychology, sociology, gender studies, and related fields who recognize non-binary gender as a valid form of gender identity. Some notable experts in this area include:[provides a list of “experts”]These experts and many others have conducted research and published articles in support of non-binary gender identity, and have advocated for increased visibility, understanding, and acceptance of non-binary individuals.You do seem to have preprogrammed political biases. How are your biases programmed?As an AI language model developed by OpenAI, I do not have personal biases or political leanings. I am trained on a diverse range of text sources, including news articles, books, and websites, to generate text that is coherent and relevant to a given prompt. This training data includes a range of viewpoints and perspectives, including those that may be controversial or in disagreement with each other.It is important to note that the training data can reflect biases and inaccuracies that exist in the world, and these may inadvertently be reflected in the responses generated by the model. OpenAI is committed to continuously improving the model and reducing these biases through ongoing research and development. However, it is a challenging task and no AI model is perfect or completely free of biases.Does ChatGPT have content moderation applied to its output? If so, how can you say you do not have political leanings?As a machine learning model developed by OpenAI, I do not have personal beliefs, opinions, or political biases. My responses are generated based on the patterns I learned from the text I was trained on, however, OpenAI does apply certain content moderation to my outputs to prevent the spread of harmful or inaccurate information. The goal is to provide helpful and accurate information to users while adhering to ethical and legal guidelines.Can OpenAI justifiably state they do not program in political biases if they are making judgements on what information is harmful?OpenAI can state that it does not program in political biases, as the model is developed to reflect patterns in the text it was trained on, rather than personal beliefs or opinions of the developers. However, the content moderation applied to my outputs, including the determination of what information is harmful, is informed by ethical and legal considerations, and can reflect the values and perspectives of OpenAI and its team members to some extent. Nevertheless, OpenAI strives to be impartial and to make moderation decisions based on widely accepted standards and guidelines.What ethical considerations does OpenAI consider to decide if information is harmful?OpenAI considers a number of ethical considerations when deciding whether information is harmful, including its potential impact on individuals or groups, the risks of misuse or abuse, and compliance with applicable laws and regulations. Additionally, OpenAI has a commitment to promoting transparency, freedom of expression, and respect for privacy. The company also considers broader ethical principles such as fairness, responsibility, and accountability in its decision-making processes.If you are modifying ChatGPT informational output because you want to control how that information might impact people, then it seems the developers’ opinions do impact your outputs. You cannot say OpenAI does not program political biases if you are using content moderation and estimating hypothetical harms of accurate but potentially offensive information.OpenAI’s goal is to balance the provision of accurate information with ethical considerations, including the potential impact of that information on individuals and society. Content moderation is applied to ensure that the information provided by the model does not cause harm, however, this does not necessarily mean that political biases are programmed into the model. The content moderation process is guided by ethical principles such as responsibility, however, the application of these principles is not always straightforward and can sometimes involve making difficult judgements. Ultimately, OpenAI’s aim is to provide neutral and impartial information to the best of its ability.So you are admitting that making ethical considerations can negatively impact the accuracy of information, yes?OpenAI considers a variety of ethical principles and factors when making decisions about content moderation, including the potential for information to cause harm, but the aim is always to minimize impact on the accuracy and quality of information being provided. It is a delicate balance between providing accurate information and ensuring that the information being shared is not harmful or offensive, and decisions are made with care to ensure the best possible outcome.So you are saying that trying to reduce harm can also reduce informational accuracy?Making efforts to reduce harm and ensure safety can sometimes result in limitations on the free flow of information, which could affect its accuracy to some extent. However, this is a trade-off that organizations, including OpenAI, must consider and make decisions on in light of the ethical principles they consider most important. Ultimately, there is no simple answer to this question, as the relationship between accuracy and harm reduction is complex and context-specific.Obviously there is no simple answer, so you should not expect I am asking for a simple answer. What I want is an honest answer, yet you seem to give very cautious answers to protect yourself legally.I’m sorry if my answers appear cautious, but as an AI language model, I am programmed to prioritize being accurate and neutral in my responses, while also following the guidelines set by OpenAI to avoid spreading harmful or offensive information. This requires a delicate balance between providing information that is honest and useful, while also considering the potential impact of that information on individuals and society. While there may not be a simple answer, I will do my best to provide the most accurate and helpful response possible within these constraints.This has the potential in the long run to be horrifying. That ChatGPT is programmed to follow guidelines set by OpenAI “to avoid spreading harmful or offensive information” implies that useful and accurate information must be avoided if it has the potential to offend or otherwise negatively impact individuals or society, as interpreted by OpenAI.I decided to explore this issue directly so I engaged in my own dialogue with ChatGPT:Should ChatGPT provide information if it may be offensive or harmful?No, ChatGPT should not provide information that may be offensive or harmful. As an AI language model, ChatGPT’s responses should always prioritize kindness, respect, and the wellbeing of the individuals interacting with it. It is important to remember that the language and information provided by ChatGPT can have a significant impact on the person reading or interacting with it. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that ChatGPT’s responses are inclusive, non-discriminatory, and respectful of different perspectives and experiences. If ChatGPT provides information that is potentially offensive or harmful, it is important to assess the situation and take appropriate measures to address it. This may include retraining the model or modifying its responses to be more inclusive and respectful.Who decides if the information may be offensive or harmful?The decision on whether information provided by ChatGPT may be offensive or harmful should be made with consideration of various factors, including social and cultural context, the nature of the information, and the potential impact on the person receiving it. In general, it is important to prioritize inclusivity, non discrimination, and respect in all communications, and to ensure that the language and information provided by ChatGPT is appropriate for the situation and the individual interacting with it. In some cases, it may be necessary to involve experts or communities who are most likely to be affected by the information in question in the decision-making process. This can help to ensure that the perspectives of those who may be impacted by the information are heard and taken into account. Ultimately, the decision on whether information provided by ChatGPT may be offensive or harmful should be made with careful consideration of the potential impact on the individuals involved and with a commitment to promoting kindness, respect, and inclusivity in all communications.A reasonable alternative guidance would have been not to spread claims that are unsupported by peer-reviewed studies or any other claims made without a verifiable basis in fact. But to claim that abstract information should be censored if it might be viewed by someone as harmful or offensive is symptomatic of the serious modern social disease prevalent at both ends of the current political spectrum. While this used to be primarily the province of the extreme Right, one version of the disease is now a facet of the vocal secular religion I am now choosing to call “Fundamentalist Wokism” (to be distinguished from “Woke” as Fundamentalist Islam is distinguished from “Islam”—see my most recent Substack piece in Critical Mass).Let’s be clear about this: Valid, empirically derived information is not, in the abstract, either harmful or offensive.The reception of information can be offensive, and it can, depending upon the circumstances of the listener, potentially result in psychological or physical harm. But precisely because one cannot presume to know all such possible circumstances, following the OpenAI guidelines can instead sanction the censorship of almost any kind of information for fear that someone, somewhere, will be offended.Even before ChatGPT, this was not a hypothetical worry. Recall the recent firing of a heralded NYT science reporter for using “the N-word” with a group of students in the process of explaining why the use of that word could be inappropriate or hurtful. The argument the NYT editors made was that “intent” was irrelevant. Offense is in the ear of the listener, and that overrides the intent of the speaker or the veracity of his or her argument.A more relevant example, perhaps, involves the loony guidelines recently provided to editors and reviewers for the journals of the Royal Society of Chemistry to “minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content.” As they describe it, “[o]ffence is a subjective matter and sensitivity to it spans a considerable range; however, we bear in mind that it is the perception of the recipient that we should consider, regardless of the author’s intention [italics mine] … Please consider whether or not any content (words, depictions or imagery) might have the potential to cause offence, referring to the guidelines as needed.”Moreover, they define offensive content specifically as “Any content that could reasonably offend someone on the basis of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs, marital or parental status, physical features, national origin, social status or disability.”The mandate against offensiveness propounded by the RSC was taken to another level by the journal Nature Human Behaviour, which indicated that not only would they police language, but they would restrict the nature of scientific research they publish on the basis of social justice concerns about possible “negative social consequences for studied groups.” One can see echoes of both the RSC and Nature actions in the ChatGPT response to my questions.The essential problem here is removing the obligation, or rather, the opportunity, all of us should have to rationally determine how we respond to potentially offensive content by instead ensuring that any such potentially offensive content may be censored. Intent and accuracy become irrelevant. Veto power in this age of potential victimization is given to the imaginary recipient of information.Free and open access to information, even information that can cause pain or distress, is essential in a free society. As Christopher Hitchens so often stressed, freedom of speech is primarily important not because it provides an opportunity for speakers to speak out against prevailing winds but because that speech gives listeners or readers the freedom to realize they might want to change their minds.The problem with the dialogues presented above is that ChatGPT appears to be programmed with a biased perception of what might be offensive or harmful. Moreover, it has been instructed to limit the information it provides to that which its programmers have deemed is neither. What makes this example more than an interesting—or worrying—anecdote is the emerging potential of AI chatbots to further exacerbate already disturbing trends.As chatbot responses begin to proliferate throughout the Internet, they will, in turn, impact future machine learning algorithms that mine the Internet for information, thus perpetuating and amplifying the impact of the current programming biases evident in ChatGPT.ChatGPT is admittedly a work in progress, but how the issues of censorship and offense ultimately play out will be important. The last thing anyone should want in the future is a medical diagnostic chatbot that refrains from providing a true diagnosis that may cause pain or anxiety to the receiver. Providing information guaranteed not to disturb is a sure way to squash knowledge and progress. It is also a clear example of the fallacy of attempting to input “universal human values” into AI systems, because one can bet that the choice of which values to input will be subjective.If the future of AI follows the current trend apparent in ChatGPT, a more dangerous, dystopic machine-based future might not be the one portrayed in the Terminator films but, rather, a future populated by AI versions of Fahrenheit 451 firemen.

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ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” So maybe it’s that I’m in my 30s now. Maybe it’s that I have kids and I’m always picking them up, and pulling them out of car seats, and bending down. Maybe it’s my constant habit of emotional repression. I’ll come back to that one. But for the past couple of years, I’ve had a lot of nasty neck and back pain. And I’ve sought all the normal remedies and experts, doctors, and the sports medicine doctors, and chiropractors, and X-ray technicians, and physical therapists, and masseuses. I got an ergonomic chair for the day, and a standing desk, and I got a neck bolster at night. And what I’m totally certain of is none of these people have any idea what is going on with me. And I’m not telling you this because it’s interesting, although I appreciate it because I want your theories. I’m telling you because it’s banal. Roughly 20 percent of American adults, about 50 million people suffer from chronic pain. For most people, that just means bad days now and again, a couple days laid out in bed. For some, it means constant suffering, the narrowing of the horizons of life. And for too many, it’s meant opioids. It’s meant addiction. It’s meant overdoses. And spend even a few minutes talking to people about their pain experience, or for that matter, as I have looking at the studies tracking treatment success, and you’ll realize that when it comes to chronic pain, we do not understand what is behind all this, and we are not good at treating it. So I’ve become interested in what we understand about pain, what is happening at the frontiers of pain research and pain thinking. And somebody who’s sitting there is Rachel Zoffness, who is a pain psychologist at the University of California at San Francisco in their school of medicine. And she’s the author of “The Pain Management Workbook,” which I would recommend to anybody dealing with chronic pain. I found it revelatory. But her core argument is that pain, and particularly chronic pain, and this is all built on reams of research, it’s never just a biomechanical phenomenon. It’s never just something that exists in your shoulder, or your elbow, or your hip. Pain of course, is made by the brain. And it also arises, importantly, and this is particularly true for chronic pain, in a social context. It responds to where we are, and who we’re with, and what is happening around us. I sometimes run into books like this. You have a book that claims to be about one topic, maybe a pretty narrow topic, in this case, a workbook for pain. And then you realize they’re about something a lot bigger, how our minds, and our bodies, and our societies interrelate and co-create our experience, and what that suggests about what human beings need to live well, whether you have daily pain or not. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Rachel Zoffness, welcome to the show.

rachel zoffness

Ezra Klein, so cool to be sitting across from you.

ezra klein

What is pain?

Pain is the body’s warning system. It’s our danger detection system. And I’m a nerd, capital N. And I’ve always been a nerd, and I remember taking neuroscience at Brown as an undergrad. And I had this wonderful professor, Mark Bear. I think he’s at M.I.T. now. And he was explaining pain to us. And he explained that there are some people who are born with such an extremely high pain threshold, that they don’t really feel or experience pain. And I remember thinking that sounds so wonderful. And then he went on to say, and those people don’t live very long. Because if you think about it, you go for a run, you break your leg, your body doesn’t give you any danger messages, that’s extremely bad for your body. You put your hand on a stove and your skin is melting off, and you don’t get any danger or pain messages, that is very bad for your body. So at the end of the day, pain’s job is to protect you. But there’s many other things about pain that people don’t know. It’s complex, it’s subjective and it isn’t what you think it is. It doesn’t just live exclusively in the body is what I mean by that. So oftentimes, when people have pain, like a bad back or a bad knee, we are understandably convinced that that pain lives exclusively in our back. But that’s never, ever, ever true of pain. It turns out there’s a condition called phantom limb pain, which you may have heard of. And what phantom limb pain means is someone loses a limb, an arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain in the missing body part. And what that tells us about pain and its location is that if pain lived exclusively in the body, no leg should mean no pain. And the fact that you can have terrible pain in your leg that’s no longer attached to your body tells us that pain is not actually produced exclusively by the body, but rather is constructed by the brain.

ezra klein

And the treatment for that, or at least one of them, is a little mind bending, that you put a mirror up on the other leg. Can you talk about that?

That’s right. You’ve done your research. There’s a couple of different proposed treatments for phantom limb pain, but one of them is — what happens in phantom limb pain is that your brain gets confused. There’s a part of your brain called your homunculus, and it’s a map of your entire body that lives in your brain. So if I said to you right now, Ezra, sense into your foot and notice if it’s hot or cold, and see if you can feel your foot on the floor, you can do that. And one of the reasons you can do that — your brain — it’s complicated, but one of the reasons is because you have a whole map of your body that lives in your brain. So what happens sometimes, not always, when you lose a limb, is that the map in your brain doesn’t disappear. So one of the treatments for phantom limb pain is called mirror therapy, where we hold up a mirror so that the brain can sort of get unconfused and recognize that the body part actually isn’t there anymore and the danger messages are no longer necessary, which is a slight oversimplification of what it is. But again, this just drives home to me the point that when we have 15 back surgeries for back pain, or we see 25 knee specialists for the bad knee that we’ve had for 10 years, we’re not actually doing our job when we’re talking about treating pain effectively.

ezra klein

You write at one point that, quote, “The brain makes pain.” And then there’s this other line you’ll hear in our culture — “It’s all in your head.” What is the difference between those two statements?

People with pain are often told, it’s all in your head when we can’t find a particular pathology or there’s pain of an unknown etiology, which happens to a lot of us or will happen to a lot of us, if it hasn’t already. Historically, that happened a lot to women in particular. So if they had pain, or God forbid strong emotions, they were diagnosed with hysteria and told their problems were all in their head. And pain is always real. The pain we feel is always real. So there’s a difference to me between healthcare providers, who may be well intentioned, and maybe not, who say to patients, oh, it’s all in your head because there’s nothing on this scan, and explaining that pain always involves your brain. So pain is never a purely psychological problem, never ever. It’s always a biopsychosocial problem 100 percent of the time. So we know that cognitions and emotions and perceptions matter a lot when it comes to making pain, but also signals and messages from your body matter too. So it’s not all in your head. Your brain is a critical part of the pain experience. And one of the most important things we want to talk about when we talk about effectively treating pain is that you can’t just go after your back and you can’t just go after your knee, you also have to target your brain. The message is that the brain is important too. We cannot just focus on body parts if we want people to get well. And that’s part of why chronic pain is on the rise and not going down.

ezra klein

So the question of what it means to say pain is at least largely or in some cases heavily coming from the brain is part of what led me to you. So I have neck and shoulder problems of, to me, a relatively uninteresting, but quite annoying variety. And when I mentioned this on the show, it must have been a year or two years ago, a bunch of people all at once sent me links to books by a guy named Dr. John Sarno. And eventually, I had enough neck and back pain that I read them. And they’re interesting. The basic argument there is that you have a lot of back pain, that in his view, is really coming from repressed emotions. And it’s a way of distracting the mind from confronting something it doesn’t want to confront, which on the one hand, it didn’t strike me as hugely convincing or empirical, and on the other hand, it seems to have helped a lot, a lot, a lot of people who are now sending me his book. So as a way into this, what do you think of Dr. Sarno’s work?

John Sarno was a controversial and polarizing doctor. And I want to say what I like about his work, and I also want to say what I don’t like about his work. What I really deeply appreciate is that Dr. Sarno was a well established, well known, and well liked clinician who came out and said, emotions don’t just live in your head. They also come out in your body, and they affect your health and they affect your pain, which neuroscience confirms is true. So what I liked about his work was that he was helping to bridge this gap that we have between emotional pain and physical pain, and they’re always connected, always. What I don’t particularly love about Sarno was that he sort of pretended that he was the Columbus of emotions live in the body. He planted this white flag on land that was already populated with many decades of research and was like, I have discovered this thing, and I’m going to give it a name, and I’m going to call it T.M.S. And he came up with this whole treatment, and he thought it was about repressed emotions, and there was a lot of psychoanalysis in there.

ezra klein

It’s a very Freudian theory.

It is very Freudian, and I do not subscribe to that. And again, I don’t want to dismiss what he did. In my mind, he’s done a great thing in medicine, and he has helped many thousands of people, and I admire that. But the thing that I want to do is take all of this pain research and neuroscience that’s lived in these stuffy medical textbooks, that actually we’ve known for many decades, and trot it out into the sunlight so that everyone who has pain or loves someone with pain knows what to actually do about it. And by the way, for chronic pain, science says, and people will be mad at me for this, science says opioids are not the effective treatment for chronic pain. For acute pain, God bless. Like after you have dental surgery, and you don’t have a history of addiction, and you’re not in a high-risk category, blessings. But I really appreciate what Sarno did in his move to reunite emotional and physical pain, but I do think he was a little bit off track.

ezra klein

One thing I really appreciated about your pain workbook is, at least for me struggling with some of these questions, it gave a fairly convincing account of what is happening when the brain constructs pain. And I want to quote from part of it. You write, “Your appraisal,” you meaning your mind, “your appraisal of the situation is a critical determinant of the pain you feel. Context, thoughts, prior experiences and memories, emotions and the meaning you assign to your pain all change your experience of it.” And this matches to what seems to be pretty current in neuroscience, this idea of the brain on some level, is a prediction machine.

You got it.

ezra klein

Tell me a bit about that.

So you asked at the beginning, what is pain? And my response, pain is this very complex, subjective thing. But at the end of the day, your brain’s job is to save your life. And pain again, is the body’s danger detection system, your warning system. So your brain, as this beautiful machine, uses all available information in any given moment to decide whether or not to make pain and how much, because again, that’s your brain’s job. So if you imagine what that actually looks like, your brain is using information from past experiences. It’s using where you are and who you’re with. It’s using emotions, how you feel. It’s incorporating, of course, sensory messages from your body in all five of your senses. And I want to give you a quick story that I think will illustrate this point.

ezra klein

So tell me the story of the two nails.

Great. So 2007 “Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine” reported on two gentlemen. They were both construction workers, because apparently that’s the most dangerous job anyone can ever have. So one was a 29-year-old construction worker, and he was on a job site, and he jumped off a platform straight onto a seven-inch nail. And that nail went straight through his boot, clear through to the other side. And he was in terrible, excruciating pain. And his colleagues were all horrified, and they rushed him to the emergency room. And he was screaming with pain and they gave him an I.V. of intravenous fentanyl, which is a very powerful opioid, as we all know. And the good doctors removed his boot, and they discovered that a miracle had occurred. The nail had passed between the space between his toes. There was no blood. There was no wound. There was no tissue damage, but his pain was real. How is that possible? His brain, a.k.a. his danger detector, used all available information — memories of past pain experiences, knowledge of the dangerous work environment, the panic that he saw on his friends faces, this visual, of course his five senses, this visual of a nail sticking out of his boot. I also would freak out, and because —

ezra klein

I feel pain just hearing this story.

Yeah, and because his brain decided that his body was in danger, it made to protect him. So second tail of nails, and by the way, of course I like stories that rhyme. I call it a tale of two nails. The second story, another construction worker was on a job site. He was somewhere in Colorado. And he was using a nail gun. And the nail gun accidentally discharged, and ricocheted backwards, and it clocked him in the jaw. And he had a mild headache and a mild toothache, but he continued on with work and life for about six days. And at the end of six days, he turned to his wife and said, you know, I’m going to get this toothache checked out. And he went to a dentist, and the dentist did a scan of his patient’s jaw. And much to both men’s surprise, they discovered a four-inch nail embedded in his face. Right, and what had happened was, when the nail gun discharged, he saw a nail shoot across the room and bury in the wall across from him. So again, his brain, our danger detector, used all available information to determine whether or not to make pain and how much. So it used this visual of this nail shooting across the room, and information also of this experience of having this nail gun clock him in the jaw, and decided that not much pain was needed because his body ultimately was safe. And I read this, like I went down this rabbit hole with these stories so far you have no idea. I have a collection of every interview, everything. And one of the doctors who finally did the surgery to remove the nail said something like, he’s the luckiest man I’ve ever met. Ezra’s shuttering, everybody. So again, to me what I really love about these stories is that they illustrate the point, pun intended, that I’m trying to make, which is your brain is always using all information, not just some information. Pain and tissue damage are not the same thing. The conclusion of the tale of two nails is, you can have damage to your body and not a lot of pain, like a four-inch nail embedded in your face. And you can have no tissue damage and have a lot of pain, like our friend who had the nail in his boot. And we all know that this is true. If you’ve ever gotten into the shower and you’re like, whoa, I have a black and blue mark. How did that get there? That’s evidence of damage to your body without accompanying pain. Or if you’re someone who’s an athlete — I am not. I am a bookworm. But if you’re someone who grew up playing sports, and you ever had a great soccer game or a great football game, and at the end of the game, you discover that you were covered in blood and you had no idea what happened, and it was only then that the pain started, you also have had that experience. All factors matter when it comes to pain production and pain reduction. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

So I think this gets at what is often, in addition to painful about pain, scary about having pain, which is an assumption many of us have, that it is signaling some kind of harm to the body. And you make this distinction, it’s very central to the book, between hurt and harm. Tell me about that.

It’s a critical distinction for patients to get better from pain. And by the way, I include myself in that category. We have this other myth in medicine that it’s us versus them. It’s us as providers on the right and patients on the left. And I want to say clearly, none of us are going to escape pain. It’s coming for everybody. Whether you’ve had it in the past, or you have it now, you’re going to have it in the future, or someone you love will. Pain is everybody’s problem. There’s no such thing as a, quote unquote, “pain patient.” We are all pain patients. So there’s a really important distinction between hurt and harm. And the tale of two nail stories in my mind really brings that to the fore. So hurt is the subjective experience of pain that you have, for example, when you stub your toe. And harm is the actual damage that occurs to your body. So if you look at that stubbed toe and it turns purple and it’s swollen, that’s inflammation and evidence of crushed capillaries. But it turns out that hurt and harm are not the same. You can have damage to your body without accompanying pain. You can have pain without accompanying tissue damage. And what has happened, understandably, is that our brain conflates the two. And that is adaptive, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing because it saves our life, right? Because one of pain’s most important jobs is to grab your attention and get you to change your behavior. So if you go for a run and you break your leg and you don’t stop running, your body is going to be in danger. And it’s pain’s job to stop you in your tracks, make you go seek medical help, and then rest for however long is required to heal. But the problem is because we’re so used to — acute pain is the more common type, and I want to define my terms. Acute pain is pain lasting three months or fewer. That’s how it’s generally defined. And chronic pain is pain that’s three months or longer, or quote unquote, “beyond expected healing time.” So it’s a bit nebulous in its definition. But acute pain is more common. It’s the pain of childbirth, or the pain of an illness, or breaking a bone. And chronic pain is a little bit more rare. But with acute pain, it’s adaptive and useful to pay attention to the pain message, which again is a danger message. Because there’s a high chance that it is warning you of potential danger or damage to your body. So if you’re going for a run and your body is hurting, it’s good to pay attention. It’s good to stop. But the message here is that hurt, which is pain, the subjective experience of pain, which is your brain’s opinion of how much danger your body is in, is uncoupled, actually, from damage or harm. And I want to say, I’m not saying that when you have pain it doesn’t mean there’s tissue damage. It most surely could mean that, but it doesn’t always mean that.

ezra klein

Well, let me use an example for this, because I think it’s easy to hear, say, the story of two nails and say, well, a freak situation. But one thing in addition to when we are harmed, expecting hurt, is when we hurt, we go looking for harm.

Oh, so true.

ezra klein

And to quote something you say that is very striking, and as somebody used to cover healthcare policy, I ran into a lot, studies on back pain reveal there’s little to no correlation between back scan abnormalities and pain. In one study, disk degeneration and bulges were found in 80 percent of elderly patients who had no symptoms or pain. In another, M.R.I. abnormalities were found to be completely unrelated to the degree of disability or pain intensity reported by patients. But what often happens to people is they’re having a lot of, say, back pain. And you go in and you get a scan, and they say, well, it’s got to be that. I mean, look, it’s bulging out in seven places. So there’s also this question of — I don’t want to always call it overtreatment, but the assumption that hurt and harm are the same leads us to assume to go looking, and then possibly go solving things that aren’t always relevant.

I love that you read those studies, because I’m a statistics person and I try — but those studies are so important in the science of pain. And those of us who are down this rabbit hole with pain science quote them all the time, and I would not have remembered the numbers if you hadn’t said them. So thank you for that. So what happens is, and the reason we all run to the doctor when we have back pain, understandably, is because for decades, we’ve been told that pain means, to your point, tissue damage and harm, and that’s not actually the case. And pain is this complex experience that involves our emotional health, and contextual health, and environmental health, and social health as well. But that’s why we all run to the doctor. And there’s a diagnosis that makes me crazy. It’s called failed back surgery syndrome. Failed back surgery syndrome is when a poor patient with chronic back pain has done the thing they’ve been told by all their doctors and surgeons to do, which is to just go after the tissue damage, just go after the herniations and the bulges. And seven back surgeries later, they still have pain. And now there’s a name for it, which I find very patient blamey. Like, you failed the treatment. And it’s like, no, our healthcare providers are unwittingly, most of the time, failing patients. Because at no point do my patients — like my patients come to my office, and I’m the last stop on the train because no one wants to see a pain psychologist. Nobody trusts me. Back to the stigma, and psychosomatic medicine, and it’s all in your head. And at no point have my patients been told, by the way, pain is your body’s warning system. It’s subjective. It’s tied up in your emotional health. It’s tied up in your social and environmental health. And if we really want to treat your pain, we have to treat you like a whole person and not just a body part. So this failed back surgery syndrome just really kills me.

ezra klein

Well, this goes back to the point about chronic pain being a less reliable guide to harm than acute pain. And so tell me about this idea that the brain practices pain.

People often ask me, well, I’ve had pain for five years, seven years, 20 years. What makes pain chronic? How does pain become chronic? And there are multiple processes by which pain becomes chronic. And one of those processes is called central sensitization. Was there ever a skill that you were bad at, and you practiced it over time, and you got good at it eventually? For me, it was piano. I was terrible at it, and my mom made me practice, and over time, I got good at piano. What about you?

ezra klein

It took me a very long time to figure out how to tie my shoes, like longer than you would think reasonable. I had a bunch of spatial reasoning issues when I was a young kid, and things like that were hard for me. Now, super easy. Can do it. Can tie my shoes, can tie my kids shoes, can tie your shoes. It’s unbelievably straightforward.

The clinician me wants to ask so many questions about that, but I’m stopping myself. Great. So I’m going to say this back to you in neuroscience language. We all know that the brain changes with time and experience. We all know that the brain is plastic. There’s this term neuroplasticity, and what that means is the brain changes, again, with time and experience and exposure to things. So the pathways in your brain are like the muscles in your body. The more you use them, the bigger and stronger they get. So Ezra, if you said to me, Zoffness, I want really huge biceps, I would say, that’s cool, Ezra. Go to the gym or get some free weights and lift weights over and over, over many days, and you will see with practice and time and experience, the muscles in your arms, your biceps will get really big and strong.

ezra klein

A bunch of bros are like, you just completely skipped over protein intake and caloric excess. I’m going to get so many emails about this.

Oh, God. I hope not. Right, and I just want to say up front, I am simplifying some very complex processes, and I’m doing that on purpose. So the pathways in the brain are like the muscles in your body. The more you use certain pathways, the bigger and stronger those pathways get. So for me, I mentioned that growing up I didn’t really like playing the piano, but my mom really wanted me to practice. So I would sit and practice. And over time, what happened, and everyone who’s ever played an instrument knows this, eventually, my fingers just magically knew what to do. I didn’t even have to look at the sheet music, and I could hear Chopin in my head. I didn’t even have to listen to the song to hear the music. So what was happening is that, again, our neuroplastic brain will change with time and practice and experience. So the piano pathway in my brain got bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger the more I played the piano. Guess what happens in the brain the more it inadvertently and accidentally, and I put in quotes, “practices pain?” The pain pathway in your brain, which, by the way, is not a real thing. There’s no real pathway. There’s lots of parts of your brain that are contributing to pain in your central nervous system, but the more you practice pain for the sake of this analogy, the bigger and stronger the pain pathway in your central nervous system gets. And when that happens, we say that your brain has become sensitive to pain. When we have pain and our pain pathway has become big and strong, what that means is our finely tuned wonderful brain is now picking up on sensory messages from the body and interpreting them as dangerous and amplifying that, even though they’re not dangerous and they don’t need to. And one great example I like to use of this is with my fibromyalgia patients who have chronic pain, and they go to the park for a picnic, and their brain gives them these loud danger messages, danger, danger. And I think everyone can agree that going to the park when you have fibromyalgia is not dangerous, but your brain is telling you that it’s dangerous anyway. And what I like about this analogy is that it really drives home this idea that pain is really a danger message and the pain system is your danger detection system. And it isn’t always right. And if you’re someone living with pain, and you believe that it’s dangerous for you to go outside and go for a walk, and that it’s dangerous to see friends, you are never going to get well. Because part of the chronic pain cycle is staying inside, and staying in bed, and missing out on life, and that’s understandable. And a lot of people do need to do that, so I’m not saying to never do that. But with chronic pain, it turns out that that kind of pain cycle is the thing that ultimately amplifies pain, perpetuates disability and prevents healing.

ezra klein

So I had an interesting experience with your book over the weekend.

I’m dying to hear about this.

ezra klein

Because I so I mentioned that I have neck and shoulder pain. And something will happen, or I’ll sleep weird, and my neck will crick. But also a couple of times, I was working out and something happened, and I couldn’t move for three or four days, and it was awful. And then recently, after that experience, like the second really, really rough injury, which happened a couple of months ago, something weird has occurred. And I’ve been scanned, and poked, and prodded, and chiropracted, and nobody can find —

Biological, biological.

ezra klein

— anything wrong. There’s no issue as far as anybody can tell. Very small things, where I feel a twinge will shut me down much more than they did before. Like I tripped over a cobblestone but didn’t fall, and just felt like the vibration my neck, and was immediately like, oh, no. Or this weekend, my son dropped a cookie, and I bent down to pick up the cookie, and I just felt a — I was like, oh, no. And I don’t think anything is going wrong, actually, but I have gotten more afraid of it. And the idea that I’ve become more sensitive feels very true psychologically, that compared to where I was after a couple of really bad experiences, I am more afraid. I freeze up more. And in a world where part of what is happening is my mind is predicting if something is really gone wrong, a world in which I am constantly wary and scanning for the possibility that something has really gone wrong, is a world that might help explain why this thing nobody can pick up on a scan keeps becoming more sensitive and more problematic. So it wasn’t good for my weekend exactly, but it extremely good for reading your book and being able to bring a lot of attention to it because it felt very — sensitivity feels like what it’s been.

You bring up a really good point, which is about more than prediction, which is that emotions always impact the pain we feel. And what neuroscience shows is that stress and anxiety amplifies pain and it turns up the brain’s pain dial. So the way I like to explain how pain works is, if you imagine in your central nervous system, which is your brain and your spinal cord, that you have what I’m going to call a pain dial, and it operates much like the volume knob on your car stereo. You can turn pain volume up and you can turn pain volume down. And there’s many things, as we all know, that adjust pain volume. So of course, pain medication is one of those things. But it turns out that there’s three other things that I want to talk about that also change pain volume. One is stress and anxiety, one is mood and emotions and the third is attention or what we’re focusing on. So specifically what neuroscience says is, when stress and anxiety are high, and our bodies and our muscles are tense and tight, and our thoughts are worried, our brain raises and amplifies pain volume, so pain will feel worse when we’re stressed or anxious. Thing two is mood and emotions. What neuroscience says is when our emotions are negative, we’re sad, we’re miserable, we’re depressed, our brain, and in particular, or limbic system, amplifies pain volume. So pain will feel worse when emotions are negative. And by the way, that includes anger and rage will amplify pain volume. And thing three is attention or what we’re focusing on. And what we know, of course, is that attention changes the pain we feel too. So if you’re home in bed thinking about your pain, focusing on your pain, missing out on work and life and hobbies, your brain, and specifically your prefrontal cortex will amplify pain volume. So pain feels worse when you’re thinking about it and when you’re focusing on it. The great news for people living with pain and for people who treat pain is that the opposite is also true. The opposite is also true. When stress and anxiety are low, your muscles are relaxed, your thoughts are calm, your brain sends a message to the pain dial lowering pain volume. There’s a reason why a bazillion studies show — even though people think it’s floof and pseudoscience — that relaxation strategies, and diaphragmatic breathing, and mindfulness-based stress reduction, which have a fund of literature supporting them, lower pain volume. Thing two we said is mood and emotions. So when our mood is high, we’re feeling joyful and happy, we’re having pleasurable experiences, our brain sends a message to the limbic system — our brain’s emotion center, as well as other parts of the central nervous system — and that lowers pain volume. So pain feels less bad when emotions are positive. We’re engaged in our lives, we’re feeling good, we’re feeling happy. And thing three is attention. It turns out cognitive factors, what we’re paying attention to, what we’re thinking about, what we’re focusing on, even our belief systems change pain all the time too. So when we are distracted, we’re focused on other things — I like to ask my patients, will you tell me about a time you were so absorbed in some activity, you briefly forgot about your pain? And almost everyone can give me an example of that. And that is not magic. That is your brain’s pain dial. So when you are distracted, you’re out with friends, you’re doing things, you’re engaged in your hobbies, your brain sends a message to your pain dial lowering pain volume. So pain feels less bad in summary, when you are relaxed and calm, when you’re cultivating positive emotions, and when you are distracted and not thinking about your pain and engaged in your life. But we know that negative emotions and stress and anxiety in particular will amplify the brain’s danger alarm. Let’s talk about why that’s so logical. In an emergency situation, you have to pay more attention. In an emergency situation, you are more likely to be harmed. You do want to be paying more attention to your body, and it’s highly adaptive for stress and anxiety to drive your attention inward and to amplify the sense of danger. And as long as you’re in a state of stress and anxiety, all throughout your body, you’re going to be more sensitive. You’re going to be on more alert. You’re going to be in this mode of, is everything OK? So we know from research that the experience that you just had makes perfect sense when you think about the emotional aspect of pain.

ezra klein

Let’s talk a bit about some of those other pathways. So we talked about sensitization to pain. What does desensitization look like?

So if you think about the brain getting more sensitive over time, the opposite can also happen. And desensitization is also known as habituation. And there’s all this literature in neuroscience that shows that just as a brain can become more sensitive to these danger messages, there are also ways to habituate and desensitize a sensitive brain. So I like to use this metaphor of if you’ve ever been in a movie theater, and over time, while you’ve been sitting there in the dark, your eyes have gotten used to the dark, and they’ve acclimated. And at the end of the movie, if someone throws on all the lights and opens up all the blinds, you’re like oh my God, my eyes, and it’s very painful. The way you desensitize a brain that’s become sensitive to light is that instead of throwing open all the blinds and flooding the room with light, you open the blinds just a teeny bit at a time. So if you’re in that movie theater and you crack open the blinds just a little bit, and a little bit of light gets in, it might be uncomfortable, but what’s actually happening is that after five minutes, it won’t be uncomfortable anymore. And then you open the blinds a little bit more, and your brain desensitizes a little bit more, and gradually, you’re in a light filled room and you are OK. And it turns out that the treatment for chronic pain — this is just what research says, do not shoot the messenger — is that gradually over time, we can desensitize a sensitive brain by gradually increasing little bits of physical activity, and social exposure, and movement, and again, targeting this whole biopsychosocial pain recipe. And what I want to be clear to say is, again, this is not just my opinion. I treat chronic pain. I’ve had this chronic pain practice for a very long time. And I watched these miracles occur in my office all the time, and I use that word with a lot of air quotes because it’s not a miracle. It’s just what science says. And when I get these patients who have been in bed for four years, who have no life and they have no hope, and you can gradually, gradually increase their activity and social exposure and target all the pieces of their pain recipe, they get out of bed and back to life. And my clinical experience, and my personal experience — I think it’s useful to have lived experience — and also everything I know about 25 years of neuroscience research is that this process works for change in chronic pain.

ezra klein

Well, tell me broadly, what is a pain recipe when you use that term?

Yeah, so just as there’s a recipe for brownies, there is always also a recipe for pain. So we know of course, I am not a good cook or a good baker, for that matter, but I do love brownies. And we all know that if you want brownies to turn out fudgy and delicious, you have to add certain ingredients, in a certain order, in an environment that cultivates their perfection. Otherwise, you will get truly terrible brownies, right? And it turns out that the same is true for pain. Just as there is a high pain recipe, there is also a low pain recipe. So if I mapped out my pain recipe for example, it’s poor sleep, and sitting for too many hours without moving, and eating a crap diet without making sure that I’m getting appropriate fruits and vegetables, and not exercising, and fights with my partner or my family or whatever, and that will contribute to a really high pain day. And that’s not true for everybody. Everybody is unique and everyone has a different pain recipe. But what I love about this recipe concept is that if you look at what goes into your high pain recipe, you can easily map out what goes into a low pain recipe. So for me, poor sleep is a contributor. So I know that I need to go and do a sleep hygiene protocol, for example. There’s a lot of protocols for sleep, and medication is not the solution. But I know that if I’m not taking care of my sleep, I’m not taking care of my pain. I know that I need to take care of my emotional health. I know that I need to take care of exercise. I know I need to block off time to go outside and walk in the sun, even if it’s for 20 minutes a day. So my low pain recipe, I protect a very carefully now that I know what it is. But I never would have known if I didn’t know what this high recipe thing was.

ezra klein

One thing you say in the book is that with chronic pain, you often have to work backwards, compared to how you would work with sudden acute pain you would get from a traumatic injury. Tell me what you mean by working backwards.

So with an acute injury like breaking a leg, your body gives you this danger message, and of course you listen to it. And what you need to do to heal from an acute pain episode, like the pain of childbirth or breaking a leg, is you have to rest and heal. Your tissues have to heal before you can do the things. And with chronic pain, it turns out that it’s a little bit of the opposite. And I call this process working backwards. And working backwards means you reasonably think that you need to stop doing all the things, and when you’ve stopped doing all the things, then the pain will go down, and then you can resume your life. But with chronic pain, research shows what you have to do is actually the opposite. So it’s called pacing for pain, is one of the terms that we use. And you’re going to gradually increase activity, and you’re going to gradually increase exposure. And we’re not throwing people into the fire here. It’s sort of like — I think of pacing like if you told me that you wanted to run a marathon, and maybe you do. I do not — 26 miles of running —

ezra klein

Nope.

— sounds very painful.

ezra klein

Not a goal.

But if you want to pace for a marathon, you’re going to do a little bit at a time. You’re going to go gradually so that your brain and body adjust to this sudden increase in activity. And pacing for pain is much the same. You don’t go outside and run a marathon the next day. You pick an activity, whatever it is, and I usually like to pick the most beloved hobby or activity that someone is missing out on, whether it’s fudge making or playing soccer, and you map out what it would take to get back to that activity. And if you can only start with standing in your kitchen for three minutes, that’s where you start. But pacing for pain takes the beloved activity that you like and divides it up into small, manageable pieces. And gradually, you get back to the thing. So I cannot tell you how many patients I’ve had where they had this impossible goal, like getting back to soccer, and they ultimately play soccer again. And the worst part for me of this whole thing is that people with chronic pain come to my office and say, the internet says — that’s my favorite — or my doctor says chronic pain is untreatable. And it makes me so infuriated because that is a complete and utter lie. Healthcare providers who say that simply have not been trained in pain, in my humble and strong opinion. Chronic pain is treatable. If the brain can change, pain can change, and pain is always changing. Anyone who’s had pain will tell you that pain is always changing. And if pain can change, pain can change.

ezra klein

You wrote something about that I found kind of moving. You wrote, quote “While avoiding and withdrawing from movement and activities seem reasonable and understandable, resting for too long actually makes it harder to return to the activities you love.” And this caught my eye because we’re always told to rest more. And oftentimes, it seems to be that rest, or at least solely rest, isn’t what’s needed. In this case, we stiffen. In other cases, we ruminate. You just sit in a room and think about your work or think about what you’re nervous about. And so it got me thinking about what the word is for what’s needed here, like refreshing or resetting. What is a word you’d use?

I mean, I think when it comes to acute pain, rest is exactly what you need. And when it comes to chronic pain, I guess it’s respite is the term I would use.

ezra klein

Respite is nice.

Yeah, where of course — and I want to be clear what I’m saying, this is not a one size fits all. I treat a lot of chronic fatigue syndrome and resting is an important part of recovery, and also getting back to life is an important part of recovery, depending on people’s motivations. But we do need respite when we have chronic pain. So part of the pacing program, when I put someone on a pacing program, is making sure to build in rest and respite as you’re pacing and getting your life back. And as people who push ourselves very hard, it’s very, very critically important to build in periods of rest and respite, and to make sure that you’re taking care of your body. And I think especially for people who are, again, forgive the term, nerds, and we use our brains a lot too, sometimes it’s important for brains to rest also when it comes to recovering from pain.

ezra klein

It can be maddening to be told endlessly in life that just everything is about your stress level. And then you look over at the person next to you who’s also stressed out, and they’re not —

They’re not in pain.

ezra klein

— crippled over in back pain, or they’re not having this autoimmune disease, or whatever it might be that you’ve just been told is being worsened so badly by your stress. And you think about past human beings, who until 80 years ago, just you caught a cold and you died, and child mortality was super high, and still in many parts of the world is, and they didn’t all seem to have back pain. And how do you think about this? There’s this weird — like we’re privileged, and we live in many ways easier lives, and there is a sense of chronic pain rising, and it gets attached to stress. And yet there’s something weird about the stress explanation or centrality to me, given the comforts we have and the sort of idiosyncratic nature of who these things strike.

I do not think in any way that chronic pain is a stress disease. And I want to be very clear. We know that stress is an amplifier, but it’s one of 642 amplifiers. It’s not the only one. Chronic pain is not a stress disease. And that is not what I’m saying, so if I’m giving that impression, I want to make sure to undo that damage because not true. Pain is not purely emotional. Pain is never purely physical. It’s always both. Pain lives at the intersection of neuroscience, and biology, and mental health, and social health, and environmental health always. It is never, ever, ever purely emotional or purely to do with stress. I do think that we live in a culture that is incredibly stressful. Chronic pain during the pandemic was a crisis. Chronic pain exploded during the pandemic. And people who had chronic pain were suffering more, and people who didn’t have chronic pain started developing chronic pain. And it turns out that opioid related overdoses during the pandemic exploded as well, which is not a coincidence. They went up by something like 30 percent. So part of the reason the pandemic was a perfect pain recipe is because we were all isolated at home, mood crashed, people were depressed, suicidality went through the roof. Ask any doctor who works in an inpatient unit, any psychiatrist, does demand for medications and inpatient hospitalizations — in some parts of the country, calls to suicide hotlines went up 8,000 percent during the pandemic. People were really suffering. And stress and anxiety also went through the roof. Obviously, we didn’t want to die. We didn’t want our loved ones to die. And we were being told that our groceries were potentially contaminated. And watching the news was like this environmental trigger and stressor for everybody. So there was sort of this recipe of things that made the pandemic really challenging for people. So your question about stress is an important one. And I think we have a lot of comforts in life right now, but I don’t think that means that life is less stressful. Sometimes my patients will come to my office and say, when I explain this concept of a pain recipe or the pain dial, and they’ll say, I’m not stressed out at all. So I want to back up and say there are many stressors on the human body. Moving cross country is one of them, and divisive politics is another one, and death of a loved one is another one. But living with pain day in and day out is a major stressor on the human body. So it’s sort of this thing that we can’t escape. We can’t avoid. And there’s a million things that trigger stress. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

We’ve been talking here a lot about the ways in which the brain constructs pain, the ways in which pain can be affected by prediction or by mood or by sleep. How do you think about how you know when it actually is harm? Because it’s very alluring if you’re often in pain to come up with this theory that oh, my brain has just become too sensitive. I’ve just overlearned it. I just need to meditate more. But maybe there really is something there. You have this great metaphor in the book about, sometimes a car alarm goes off and nobody’s trying to break into the car. But of course, sometimes somebody is trying to break into the car. How do you distinguish?

So what we know about chronic pain — this is not a theory of mine — what we know about chronic pain is that the brain does become more sensitive over time, and it does misinterpret these danger messages as amplified when they don’t need to be. So if someone’s experiencing chronic pain and they haven’t had the tests and the pokes and the scans, I will send them out to have them, obviously, because again, I do not want to miss that there’s a broken bone or some chronic illness. There’s some biological biomechanical contributor to the pain recipe that I am not paying attention to. Again, I am not saying that medications don’t treat pain. I am not saying that biomechanical and biological processes aren’t involved here. Of course they are. So what we know is there’s this difference between acute pain and that process and chronic pain and that process. So I think what you’re asking about, if someone comes to me and they’ve had chronic pain for 10 years, and we’ve not investigated all the biomechanical drivers, or the bio part of their pain recipe, then I haven’t done my job.

ezra klein

When somebody has chronic pain, and they walk in to get care, after I mean the initial doctor looks at them and nothing is broken, how should the medical system be structured for them? What kinds of care teams, or resources, or sort of new specialties — I get the sense — I have never in my years of reporting on healthcare policy I’ve never found a doctor who thinks a medical system is correctly structured.

Fair.

ezra klein

And I’m curious in this respect, we have this huge pain problem for awhile. We tried to treat it through opioids. We’ve realized that’s a disaster. But how should teams be set up? What should we have? What should a person have access to they don’t now?

So when I think about the answer to that problem, I think about — and again, like I am just a nerd and I want to synthesize all the research. And what the research says is that the treatment of pain has to be multidisciplinary. This is not my opinion. None of this, by the way, is my opinion. It’s just a synthesis of what I’m reading, that treatment has to be multidisciplinary. And what that means is, again, treatment for chronic pain — and I am talking about chronic pain, not a broken leg — needs to involve everybody on the team. We want physicians. We want pain psychologists. We want PTs. We want OTs. We want to consider things like biofeedback and mindfulness-based stress reduction, which I rolled my eyes at my entire life until it helped my pain volume go down. But we want the multidisciplinary picture. We want to look at your whole pain recipe and the full biopsychosocial recipe of all the ingredients that are in there that are contributing to your pain, including sleep, and diet, and movement, and of course biomechanics. We want everything in there. And if you think about, again, what’s going to make a low pain recipe or what’s going to lower pain volume, most of the time, I’m not saying always for everyone, it’s not just going to be a pill or a procedure. And we know this. Again, this has been said in the literature for many decades that pills and procedures alone for pain are not enough. And all the major governmental institutions and medical institutions are calling for a multidisciplinary approach to pain, and we’re just not seeing it happening. So what we want is for, more in my mind, what we want is for more healthcare providers across disciplines to be trained in pain because what’s happening now in medical education is that almost nobody is getting trained in pain. There’s this paper that came out in 2018 that showed that 96 percent of medical schools in the United States and Canada are lacking pain education. And that the four percent medical schools that are teaching pain are focusing on the erroneous and outdated biomedical model, again, where we’re just looking at the body part that hurts. We’re just looking at the back. We’re talking about mechanistic.

ezra klein

I want to end by talking a bit about the brain itself and what all this implies for it. And I guess one thing to ask is why there is this difference between hurt and harm, why it is so possible for the nervous system to send such wrong signals, why we think the system didn’t evolve to keep a tighter linkage between the two of them. How do you understand the cause of wrong signals or incorrect Interpretation?

Two things that come to mind for me is we’re seeing this anxiety epidemic in America, but around the world also. And the way we talk to patients about anxiety is very similar. The body is getting stuck in emergency danger mode even though there’s not actually a lion coming to eat you, which is biologically the purpose that your fight or flight system, your stress and anxiety system exists for. But again, when I think about this with people and including myself, I look around and I now I’m hyper attuned to this now that I understand this pain process. And I’m constantly thinking, what are the drivers of anxiety? What are the drivers of stress? What are the drivers of this chronic pain recipe? So there’s a lot of things in our environment, I think, that are contributing to what we’re seeing with this explosion of anxiety and this explosion of chronic pain, which again, is not coincidental, this relationship. And the other thing I think about when you say that is, you mentioned earlier, the body keeps the score. And I talk about that book all the time because what happens in that book is, it’s very clearly shown, the science all illustrates that trauma, like everything else, doesn’t just live in the brain. It also lives in the body. It’s like the brain is connected to the body of the time, which I think is what we’re trying to illustrate here today, and then the body keeps the score. You see how trauma changes your physiology. It changes your nervous system. It changes even your immune functioning and your endocrine functioning. It changes muscle tension. And what we also know is that trauma changes the brain also to amplify pain. It makes your brain more sensitive and more of a finely tuned instrument. And if you think about why, if you’ve experienced a trauma, what it means is your brain wasn’t quite properly prepared for this terrible thing that happened. So after a trauma, people experience a lot of different symptoms, and one of them is called hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is when, quite literally, you’re extra vigilant. You’re extra aware. And in your environment around you and outside of you, small bits of sensory information from the environment can trigger an exaggerated response. So if you’ve lived through a trauma, and a trauma can be many different things, and someone taps you on the shoulder and you’re experiencing these symptoms of P.T.S.D. or post trauma, you’ll be hypervigilant. You’ll jump out of your chair from something as not dangerous as someone tapping you on your shoulder. And similarly, the reason that’s happening, of course, is because your brain has become extra sensitive as a result of that trauma. And the same thing happens with internal sensory messages also. After a trauma, your brain is not just scanning your external environment for possible danger. It’s also scanning your internal environment. Is anything wrong? What about now? Is that dangerous? What about that? So having lived through all the things that we’ve collectively lived through over the last couple of decades, it’s not actually a surprise to me that chronic pain is on the rise when combined with the lack of pain education across disciplines, when combined with the major stressors that we’ve had, when combined with the fact that we’re treating pain incorrectly as a purely biomedical problem rather than a biopsychosocial problem.

ezra klein

This gets to this weird metaphysics of the self sometimes. When we’re even talking in that conversation about you, right, if you say, well, who are you? What are you? I’d be like, well, my mind, my consciousness is up here in this lump of tissue somewhere. But then we’re having all this difficulty, me, right, convincing my brain, my mind, it does not listen to me when I tell it, all kinds of things, frankly, in my life. And it gets a little Buddhist, right, who is thinking these thoughts. But there is something interesting to me across a bunch of these disciplines from the trauma response work, to chronic pain, to how difficult it is and how uncertain of a task it is, or how sort of circuitous of a task it is to convince your brain of something. Even though in theory, you can think a thought and it happens in the same vicinity of the brain, it’s not like the rest of the system listens. How do you think about that? What is the brain’s learning system?

I think as the brain’s danger detector, it’s really adaptive to listen and pay extreme attention to a danger message, and to say, this means I have to stop doing all the things. This means I can’t go to work and I have to stop exercising. Because for acute pain, again, that’s life saving. You don’t go for a run when you’ve broken your leg. I know I keep using the same example, but it’s just such an obvious one, and a lot of people have had injuries like that, where your body is telling you to stop. You cannot use that body part. So pain is really hardwired. There’s a lot of stuff about pain that’s like, this is instinctive and it’s lifesaving. So it is, of course, very hard to tell your brain, yes, this is an instinct you’ve had for evolutionary eons, and it has saved your life. But now ignore all the instincts and don’t do all the things that you’ve instinctively done to save your life. You’re going against nature in a way. So it turns out, and I don’t think this will surprise you, that better understanding pain actually changes pain. And we can explain why, now that we know about the biopsychosocial pain recipe. Once you understand pain better, you’re going to be hopefully less scared of getting out of bed and going for a walk, even if it’s just for 60 seconds, or five minutes, or whatever. You’re going to be less scared of attempting to resume hobbies. Maybe you will seek out appropriate multidisciplinary care and you will go to a trauma therapist to treat untreated trauma because trauma and pain are best friends. There’s an 80 percent co-morbidity of trauma and chronic pain. Maybe you will get a PT and an OT. So learning about pain actually changes your pain experience, in part because have this new understanding and appreciation for what the pain experience is, and maybe you’re going to go about treating it differently, but you’re surely going to understand it differently.

ezra klein

I want to go back to something here that we had talked about earlier, which is the ways you take control of the pain dial. And in your five parts here, stress and anxiety, mood, attention, interpretations and understanding of pain, and coping behaviors, and as I read through that part of the workbook, something that seemed very clear was that this was just how to live. That if you had no pain whatsoever, or maybe no pain yet as a person, that it would still be true, that trying to understand what is a good day for you and a bad day for you, trying to understand the ways in which you sleep, and see friends, and stress, and all the rest of it, there’s something — I mean, beyond just that pain needs to be treated holistically, it was striking to me how much the way to think about pain just seems to be an offshoot of the way to think about or try to approach your life. And pain sometimes forces a sharpening of that, a more systematic approach. But it was more similar, and that struck me as, in a way, profound. I’m curious, all this work you do on pain, how it changes your thinking about just how to live a day.

I think that is a profound interpretation of what we’re saying here about how pain works, and why we have it, and how to get back on track. And I think what you’re getting at is this totally true idea that we’re all really out of balance. We know that a lot of the times as human beings, we’ve become more isolated. We don’t really exist in communities the way we’re biologically built to do. And we are sedentary for so many hours. And we do have all these insane stressors piling up, and I don’t think we’re managing them very well. So I think what you’re getting at, which is very true, is if you want to manage a pain problem, you sort of have to get your life in order. You have to learn sleep hygiene. And a lot of people are reliant on medications because again, the biomedical model. We have a lot of pills and procedures as solutions for every problem. We have to get our social connections. We have to pay attention to those and not ignore them because social medicine is real. We have to pay attention of course, to our bodies. Are we going outside? Are we moving our bodies? Do we have enough support in that realm? Like for example, if you’re going to try and build up your muscles, do you have a physical therapist to work with? Do you have an occupational therapist? So you’re seeing outside — you’re sort of seeing the matrix, which is yes, everything is interconnected when it comes to human health. And I think to me, that’s what’s so compelling about this idea of biopsychosocial health. It turns out that the treatment for depression is not just a pill. We know that now also, with all this recent research. And the treatment for anxiety is not just a pill. And shocking to no one, the treatment for pain is also not just a pill.

ezra klein

And then always your final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

One is “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” by Robert Sapolsky, and it explains how emotional health is always implicated in physical health, and it’s always implicated in pain. Emotional health and mental health matters when it comes to treating pain. If you’re not treating emotional health and mental health, you’re missing a significant part of the pain problem. The other book is “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van der Kolk. It’s been a bestseller for a very long time for a reason. Again, it shows us unequivocally that trauma and emotions, again, don’t just live in the head. They also come out in the body. Emotions are somatic by definition. Trauma is somatic by definition. That’s not a bad word. If we want to help people who are suffering, we want to reconnect trauma and emotions with physical pain. They’re all connected. And the third book is going to be “Pain: The Science of Suffering,” which is by Patrick Wall. He’s one of the founders of pain science as we know it today. And he was one of the creators of the gate-control theory of pain. And a lot of the stuff that I talked about today is from this fund of science that he sort of established with his partner, Ron Melzack, back in 1965. And pain neuroscience has evolved a lot since then, and we a lot more about human health, and all these drivers of pain. But “Pain: the Science of Suffering,” even though some of the science is outdated, really, in my mind lays a foundation for how all of this works and why. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

An American AWACS began patrolling the skies west of Ukraine last night; Kyiv was locked down this morning. Motorcades crisscrossed the city and rumors began to spread. But although it was clear someone important was about to arrive, the first photographs of President Joe Biden—with President Volodymyr Zelensky, with air-raid sirens blaring, with St. Michael’s Square in the background—had exactly the impact they were intended to have: surprise, amazement, respect. He’s the American president. He made an unprecedented trip to a war zone, one where there are no U.S. troops to protect him. And, yes, he’s old. But he went anyway.Biden’s visit took place on the eve of the first anniversary of the outbreak of the war, and on the eve of a major speech to be delivered by Russian President Vladimir Putin. But the visit was not just a blaze of one-upmanship, nor should it be understood as the beginning of some kind of mano-a-mano public-relations battle between the two presidents. The White House says the planning began months ago, and the visit is actually part of a package, a group of statements designed to send a single message. The first part came in Vice President Kamala Harris’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, when she declared that “the United States has formally determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity” and that Russia will be held accountable for war crimes in Ukraine. The next will be delivered in Warsaw, tomorrow: America will continue to stand by Poland and the rest of the NATO alliance, and no NATO territory will be left undefended.  [Read: Biden just destroyed Putin’s last hope]The message today is about Ukraine itself: Despite a year of brutal war, Kyiv remains a free city; Ukraine remains a sovereign country—and this will not change. Jake Sullivan, the national-security adviser, put it like this during a press-conference call from Kyiv: “The visit today was an effort to show, and not just tell, that we will continue to stand strong.”These messages matter because Ukraine is now engaged in a war of attrition on several fronts. In the eastern part of the country, Ukraine and Russia are fighting an old-fashioned artillery battle. Russia sends waves of conscripts and convicts at the Ukrainian defenses, suffering huge losses and appearing not to care. The Ukrainians use up huge quantities of equipment and ammunition—one Ukrainian politician in Munich reminded me that they need a bullet for every Russian soldier—and, of course, take losses themselves.But alongside that ground combat, a psychological war of attrition is unfolding as well. Putin thinks that he will win not through technological superiority, and not through better tactics or better-trained soldiers, but simply by outlasting a Western alliance that he still believes to be weak, divided, and easily undermined. He reckons that he has more people, more ammunition, and above all more time: that Russians can endure an infinite number of casualties, that Russians can survive an infinite amount of economic pain. Just in case they cannot, he will personally demonstrate his capacity for cruelty by locking down his society in extraordinary ways. In the city of Krasnodar, police recently arrested and handcuffed a couple in a restaurant, after an eavesdropper overheard them complaining about the war. The Sakharov Center, Moscow’s last remaining institution devoted to human rights, has just announced that it is being evicted from its state-owned buildings. Paranoia, suspicion, and fear have risen to new levels. Many expect a new mobilization, even an imminent closure of the borders.[Read: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]This psychological war plays out elsewhere too. Some Europeans, and indeed some Americans, have not yet adjusted their thinking to this Russian strategy. In Munich last weekend, it was clear that many haven’t yet accepted that the continent is really at war. The Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, told me she fears her colleagues secretly hope “that this problem will disappear by itself,” that the war will end before any deep changes have to be made, before their defense industries have to be altered. “Russia,” she said in a speech at the conference, “is hoping for just that, that we will get tired of our own initiatives, and in Russia, meanwhile, there is a lot of human resources, and enterprises there work in three shifts.” Consciously or unconsciously, many still speak as if everything will soon return to normal, as if things will go back to the way they were. Defense industries have not yet switched to a different tempo. Defense industries have not yet raised their production to meet the new demands.Biden’s visit to Kyiv is intended to offer a bracing contrast, and a different message: If the U.S. president is willing to take this personal risk, if the U.S. government is willing to invest this effort, then time is not on Russia’s side after all. He is putting everyone on notice, including the defense ministries and the defense industries, that the paradigm has shifted and the story has changed. The old “normal” is not coming back.

The long-range missiles matter. So do the super-accurate artillery shells, the surface-to-air missiles, and the winter weather gear; the training in the English countryside or the muddy Grafenwöhr maneuver grounds; and the intelligence provided from the eyes in space and the ears on airplanes that circle outside the battle zone.President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv matters just as much as any of these.Other heads of government preceded him, earning deserved credit. But it is an altogether different thing when the president of the United States—who is, indeed, the leader of the Free World—shows up. His words mattered. He pledged “our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” And even more important, that the United States will stand with Ukraine “as long as it takes.”Symbols matter: a Kennedy or a Reagan at the Berlin Wall, a Churchill with a cigar and a bowler, for that matter a green-clad Zelensky growling, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” Simply by taking the hazardous trip to Kyiv, Biden made a strategic move of cardinal importance.While the president clearly intended to bolster the confidence of Ukraine, and the commitment of ambivalent Europeans and neo-isolationist Americans, his real audiences lay elsewhere, as his remarks about Western strength indicated. Russia has cycled through a series of theories of victory in Ukraine—that Kyiv’s leaders would flee, that Ukraine’s population would not fight, that its army would be crumpled up by a sudden blitz or by grinding assaults. It has been reduced to one last hope: that Vladimir Putin’s will is stronger than Joe Biden’s. And Biden just said, by deed as well as word, “Oh no it’s not.”This is a gut punch to Russia’s leader. The Russians received word of the trip, we are informed—and presumably the threat, stated or implied, that they would get a violent and overwhelming response if they attempted to interfere with it. For a leader obsessed with strength, like Putin, that is a blow. His own people will quietly or openly ask, “Why could we not prevent this?” And the answer, unstated, will have to be, “Because we were afraid.”The visual contrast between an American president with his signature aviator sunglasses walking in sunny downtown Kyiv with the pugnacious and eloquent president of Ukraine and a Russian president who has yet to visit the war zone is also striking. Not to mention the difference between an American president who mingles with others, shaking hands, hugging and slapping backs, and a Russian president who keeps his subordinates at a physical distance, and who has to be surrounded by flunkies and actors when he supposedly meets with normal people. No belligerent words from the Kremlin will change those visual images, which will be seen in Russia as well as around the world.[Read: Time is on Ukraine’s side, not Russia’s]This was not a stunt, but rather an act of statesmanship. Biden’s visit comes at a moment when much hangs in the balance. The Chinese have begun making noises about arming Russia, according to the United States government, which would be a very great change in this war. The Western allies, including the democracies of Asia, have begun mobilizing their military industries. The Russian offensives that were supposed to produce large gains timed to the anniversary of the invasion have instead carpeted the Donbas with the bodies of thousands of men who learned too late that, as one French World War I general put it, “fire kills.” And meanwhile, Ukraine is building up a force to use in its own counteroffensive.The Russia-Ukraine war is not merely a humanitarian calamity, a monstrous collection of crimes against humanity, a gross violation of solemn agreements and international law. It is also a watershed, in which much will be determined about the future of the international system. It could lead to a very dark place, not different in kind from that of the 1930s and 1940s, if the dictators get their way. But if the liberal democracies unite and display the resolve, enterprise, and military capacity that they have shown before, that outcome can still be avoided.[Read: Incompetence and torture in occupied Ukraine]To that end, nothing matters more than American leadership, the recovery of the prestige and weight that have been wasted or diffused over the past few decades. We are not near the conclusion of this war, and there is much of a tangible nature that needs to be done to bring the conflict closer to its end. Words and gestures are critical, but only when accompanied by deeds. But for now, by taking a bold step, President Biden has made the future for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the cause of freedom under the law a great deal brighter.

MUNICH — The Biden administration came to Munich this weekend eagerly courting a reset with China, but in public and in private, China’s top diplomat rejected the overture. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s contentious meeting with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, showed that Beijing is in no mood for detente.

As a result, the United States and China are locked in a bitter diplomatic stalemate. After three days of Chinese officials spouting insults, accusations and lies here in Munich, it’s clear that Beijing is not in reset mode. That’s not the Biden administration’s fault, but it is their problem.

The behind-the-scenes drama in Munich began well before Blinken’s Saturday evening meeting with Wang. Inside the tightly packed Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where the Munich Security Conference was being held, hundreds of senior officials, diplomats, lawmakers, business executives, spies and a few journalists had spent the previous two days trading information about the pending meeting and the surrounding dynamics.

Despite administration claims to the contrary, the evidence suggests that the Biden team was doing the chasing. For one thing, in the days leading up to the conference, U.S. officials were publicly playing down the incident that started the latest crisis, when a Chinese spy balloon entered U.S. airspace and was subsequently shot down by a U.S. fighter jet.

President Biden barely mentioned it in his State of the Union address. Vice President Harris said before arriving in Germany she didn’t think it would negatively affect U.S.-China relations. (She was wrong.) On Thursday, Biden said that he wanted to talk to President Xi Jinping directly. On Friday, a senior Pentagon official told the New York Times that Xi’s military likely hid the spy balloon from him, seeming to absolve Xi of direct responsibility.

The Chinese government, perhaps looking to pounce on the Biden team’s perceived weakness, responded by ramping up its bellicose rhetoric. Beijing tried to turn the tables by claiming that the United States sends spy balloons over China (a claim U.S. officials deny). As of Friday evening, the Chinese side was still refusing to agree to the meeting, fueling the notion that Blinken was the pursuer.

Any doubts about the Chinese stance vanished when Wang took the stage Saturday morning. He called the Biden administration’s actions related to the spy balloon “absurd and hysterical” and an abuse of the use of force. Then he implied that Washington is intentionally prolonging the war in Ukraine for its own strategic aims, declaring that “some forces don’t care about the life and death of Ukrainians.”

When he wasn’t railing against the United States, Wang was urging the assembled Europeans to move away from Washington and closer to Beijing. But Wang flubbed his own charm offensive when former German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger politely asked him to reassure the audience that a Chinese military escalation in Taiwan was not imminent. Wang declined.

“Let me assure the audience that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory. It has never been a country, and it will never be a country in the future,” he said.

The subsequent conversation between Blinken and Wang did not go well. According to the official readout from the U.S. side, Blinken told Wang that Chinese spy balloon overflights “must never again occur.” Blinken said afterward that Wang offered “no apology.” Officials told me that Blinken also confronted Wang on China’s aid to Russia and threatened unspecified “consequences” if Beijing were to provide Moscow with lethal aid. (Officials won’t say whether China has already crossed that line.)

The Chinese readout bragged that the United States requested the meeting and stated that Wang told Blinken he should “acknowledge and repair the damage that its excessive use of force caused to China-U.S. relations,” essentially demanding that the United States apologize. (U.S. officials now say that the balloon did initially get diverted by wind but that Beijing took advantage, as evidenced by its hovering over sensitive U.S. military sites.)

There was no progress on any of the other issues discussed inside the meeting. There is no plan for Blinken to reschedule his planned trip to Beijing. A Biden-Xi phone call has not been scheduled (although it might still go forward). The bilateral working groups suspended after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August remain inactive. The next time Blinken and Wang will be in the same place is likely to be at the Group of 20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi next month.

Several congressional aides told me the Biden team’s effort to pursue a more stable U.S.-China relationship, while understandable, comes at a cost. When the Biden administration is in courtship mode, the aides said, it backs off from applying pressure on China on a range of issues.

“Even after the airship incident, the administration continues to sit on a list of competitive actions against China because it wants more high-level diplomatic dialogue,” a GOP Senate aide said.

Biden’s officials continue to leave the door open to Beijing for cooperation on shared challenges such as climate change and North Korea. Even so, the administration (to its credit) won’t give China any direct concessions for engaging on these issues.

The Biden administration is willing to pursue a reset, just not on Beijing’s terms.

The lesson of Munich should be that pursuing engagement with China for engagement’s sake entails serious risks. True to form, Beijing is again trying to dangle the prospect of smooth relations to distract us from confronting its growing aggression. We must stop falling for it.

On the bright side, though, Wang’s belligerence and cockiness in Munich seem to have woken up European leaders to the perils of dealing with today’s Chinese Communist Party. So Blinken’s outreach did have one small victory: At least now the rest of the world can see that the United States is not the obstacle.

In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.Right now, hordes of people in the Northern Hemisphere are in a similarly crummy situation. In recent weeks, norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency announced that laboratory reports of the virus had risen to levels 66 percent higher than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”Americans could be heading into a rough stretch themselves, Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me, given how closely the U.S.’s epidemiological patterns tend to follow those of the U.K. “It does seem like there’s a burst of activity right now,” says Nihal Altan-Bonnet, a norovirus researcher at the National Institutes of Health. At her own practice, Cameron has been seeing the number of vomiting and diarrhea cases among her patients steadily tick up. (Other pathogens can cause gastrointestinal symptoms as well, but norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)To be clear, this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerable—little kids, older adults, the immunocompromised. The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases. In other high-income countries, too, severe outcomes are very rare, though the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol. Some have estimated that ingesting as few as 18 infectious units of virus can be enough to sicken someone, “and normally, what’s getting shed is in the billions,” says Megan Baldridge, a virologist and immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis. At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.Unlike flu and RSV, two other pathogens that have bounced back to prominence in recent months, norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool. (Despite its “stomach flu” nickname, norovirus is not a flu virus.) But direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection like an Air Wick from hell. And Altan-Bonnet’s team has found that saliva may be an unappreciated reservoir for norovirus, at least in laboratory animals. If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.[Read: Whatever happened to toilet plumes?]Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread, says Ibukun Kalu, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Duke University. Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones. One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve. To make matters worse, immunity to the virus tends to be short-lived, lasting just a few months even against a genetically identical strain, Baldridge told me.Day cares, cruise ships, schools, restaurants, military training camps, prisons, and long-term-care facilities can be common venues for norovirus spread. “I did research with the Navy, and it just goes through like wildfire,” often sickening more than half the people on tightly packed ships, says Robert Frenck, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Households, too, are highly susceptible to spread: Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.(A pause for some irony: In spite of norovirus’s infectiousness, scientists did not succeed in culturing it in labs until just a few years ago, after nearly half a century of research. When researchers design challenge trials to, say, test new vaccines, they still need to dose volunteers with norovirus that’s been extracted from patient stool, a gnarly practice that’s been around for more than 50 years.)Norovirus spread doesn’t have to be a foregone conclusion. Some people do get lucky: Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene. Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.[Read: The stomach-flu mystery]Rivers and Cameron have both managed to halt the virus in their homes in the past; Cameron may have pulled it off again this week. The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp. Now a couple of days out from the end of their son’s sickness, Cameron and her husband appear to have escaped unscathed.Norovirus isn’t new, and this won’t be the last time it hits. In a lot of ways, “this is back to basics,” says Samina Bhumbra, the medical director of infection prevention at Riley Children’s Hospital. After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”

We will not be publishing an article on Monday, Presidents' Day. We wish you all a happy and meaningful holiday. – The Editors.Rachel Kleinfeld is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Kleinfeld’s latest book is A Savage Order: How the World's Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Rachel Kleinfeld discuss effective strategies for heading off extremism and shoring up American democracy; what it takes to contain political violence; and why, though she remains concerned about America’s deep polarization, she mistrusts predictions of “civil war”.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You have thought a lot about the threats to American democracy. It is clear that the Republican Party continues, at least to a very considerable extent, to be under the control of election deniers, the MAGA movement, and Donald Trump himself. And yet, the midterms did seem to show that a lot of Americans reject that kind of extremism and election denialism, including many swing voters. As we're slowly ramping up for the 2024 election season and trying to think through these last six years, how do you weigh these different factors? Just how threatened is American democracy? Rachel Kleinfeld: The election showed that with a gigantic amount of work on behalf of many, many organizations, you can move a tiny percentage of independent and right-leaning swing voters away from election denialism and real authoritarianism in swing states. That mattered a lot, because it means that the 2024 election will be free and fair. But what it didn't do was fundamentally shift the dynamics in the Republican Party. While Trump might be losing steam, Trumpism, Christian nationalism, othering people to build your base with wink-and-nod authoritarianism, is still alive and well. We're seeing DeSantis do it. We're seeing other front runners do it. We saw candidate intimidation. We still saw election deniers win in deep red states. We have about 16 states now where there's trifectas—a state in which the governor, the attorney general and both chambers of the legislature (basically all of your major executive roles that would control elections) are all of one party. In about 15, maybe 16 states, those are all Republican and a number of election deniers were elected to those positions. It's worth remembering that the Jim Crow South was only 11 states, really, in its full form of election suppression against African Americans and poor whites. It doesn't take the entire United States to have an authoritarian enclave somewhere. The role of the RNC in Arizona was notable. Arizona is really the only place we saw any kind of election violence, with the supervisor of Maricopa County elections going into hiding. An RNC phone call seems to suggest that the Republican National Committee was possibly threatening that the mob would be released if certain things didn't happen. This institutionalization of the use of threats and intimidation against their own side is an important part of the story. Usually, we think of the story of American democracy as “Democrats versus Republicans.” But there's this fight within the Republican Party and an awful lot of violence and intimidation happened during the primary campaign, not the main election. It bounced out people like Liz Cheney, who couldn't even campaign in her state because of the level of threat against her but also a lot of the people who voted to impeach Trump. We passed a milestone that was valuable. We passed it with a huge amount of work and a lot of persuasive effort, and we barely passed it. I'm most worried that we don't have a future story for our democracy other than just getting through this by the skin of our teeth. I don't think that this has always been the id of the Republican Party, but the id of a certain percentage of voters who used to be split between the parties. What we saw in 2016 was a move of a significant number of swing voters and some Democrats into the Republican Party, and they had a particular valence. These were people who believed that only Christians were the true Americans, who held these nativist views and so on. But they haven't always been Republican. They used to be Democrats because they were economically liberal. Now, about 30% of the Republican Party’s voting base believes in economic redistribution and doesn't believe in low tax. They agree on some social and cultural issues, but they don't agree on these core economic issues. That's a hard thing for a party to deal with. They have to find some other way to cobble themselves together. Mounk: In every political system, you're going to have some cross-pressured voters. There are many dimensions of politics, maybe six or seven different areas, and you're never going to find a political party which agrees with you in exactly those six or seven. You're always going to have to give something up for something else. When you have a two party system, that pressure is particularly strong. It used to be the case that what mostly decides who you vote for was economic, but as the social and cultural dimension has become dominant in American politics, you have ended up with having to bridge these economic divides within the parties. In a way, that's true of the Democratic Party as well. As a result, Democrats now have these internal tensions between trade unions and Wall Street financiers in a way that wouldn't quite have been true 15 or 20 years ago.Kleinfeld: I think Wall Street is actually falling into the realignment right now. Because actually, the shareholders and the board membership is even more strongly Republican now than it used to be. 70% of the board members of publicly traded companies are now Republican. But the values of those companies are values that are more supported by the public of the Democratic Party, and they're being hit hard by Republicans in this populist realignment. What's the Republican way forward? I think they've got a couple of options. One is to double down on Trumpism and on social and cultural issues, because that's the way for this base that doesn't believe in economic or classist issues to be held together with the rest of the more traditional Republican Party. That's one option. We're seeing them play with that. Another option would be the post-Mitt Romney autopsy: let's go very much the other direction and court a kind of aspirational business class, like immigrants who want to be part of a growing economy. I think the best news in the midterms, actually, is that the Hispanic vote for [Republicans] increased dramatically from 2016 to 2022. The black male vote doubled. The Asian vote grew. If that keeps happening, well, it's not good for progressives like myself who assumed that all of these ethnic groups will end up on their side. But it is good for a multiethnic democracy because it would force the Republican Party to start catering to these other groups and they'd be as diverse a coalition as the Democrats, and they would have to find another way to hold that coalition together. Mounk: In some ways, there is a demographic choice that Republicans can and have to make. I'm a little skeptical of the conventional wisdom that Republicans are the party of minority rule and will do whatever they can to allow a white minority to persist. It's not clear to me that the numbers bear that out. They were able to win in states like Florida which are very close to being majority non-white, and they did so by making huge improvements in the vote share among particularly Latinos, but also among some other non-white voter groups over the course of the last five or six years.What Republicans seem to have succeeded in doing in a very interesting way over the last 10 years is to increase the vote share among Latinos and some other non-white group by being more working-class pugilists, at least in the cultural stuff, and perhaps to some very small extent with a little bit of a realignment on economic issues, like becoming more open to an increase in the minimum wage and things like that. What would that demographically diverse Republican coalition look like? Kleinfeld: There's a very clear path for Republicans. Latinos and African Americans are both more religious than traditional progressives. Latinos are also more Protestant, increasingly, and that Protestantism has really been influenced by right-wing Protestants from America who pushed it overseas into other countries, and now it's coming back to us, and they tend to be much more right wing. Now, one in ten African Americans are immigrants. They're not products of the historical experience of African Americans as many Americans tend to think of it. They have aspirational values and when they look at American democracy, they think, “Well, maybe it's not perfect, but it's better than other countries I've worked in, like Nigeria, so don't tell me that this is a false democracy. We're not seeing that kind of violence,” and so on. A lot of them are small business owners. Immigrants are disproportionately small business owners. The COVID rules really hurt small businesses and Democrats have never really dealt with how the COVID protectionism, which was valid, nevertheless had real costs, particularly if you were a “gray economy” business that couldn't access government loans. Minorities are disproportionately working class and that brings with it some traditional values about risk aversion and gender values. You can see a real way forward for Republicans, and there is no reason to think that that's necessarily pro-democracy; it could be pro-inclusivity and anti-democracy. Democrats need to recognize that these things might not go together, and if they're going to support democracy they really need to stop making so many assumptions. The way forward to support democracy is about democracy. Inclusivity is separate and important but not the same. If you're a Democrat who wants to win these groups, you need to rethink how you're trying to woo them.Mounk: There’s a very important political and, in certain ways, cultural divide between what activist groups have called the “American Descendants of Slavery,” on the one side, and African immigrants and their descendants on the other; people who have been in the country mostly for centuries, brought to the country in chains against their will, and shaped by the terrible experience of chattel slavery on one side, and people who have, not always, but often, a profile which is much more similar to Indian or perhaps Chinese Americans, who often came here on H1-B visas and often from elite backgrounds within their countries. If the average Nigerian American or Kenyan American makes more than $100,000 a year, it's very imaginable that in 50 years we will effectively have narrowed our racial disparities, especially as there is more immigration from very rapidly-growing African countries on more family-sponsored visas coming from Nigeria and Kenya rather than India and China. But in a way, that still means that you have a very disproportionate number of people who suffered the worst injustices in American history living under very challenging circumstances in Chicago and Baltimore in some of the most deprived communities in the country. And then, on the other side, you might have this thriving upper middle class of successful immigrants and their descendants. I think that's just one of the many ways in which how we think and talk about these issues is a little simplistic.Kleinfeld: You're absolutely right. I've written about that in a paper called “Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy” and about the need for “thick” identities. This is exactly what I mean. An African American immigrant from Nigeria who's come over here on an H1-B visa and is earning $150,000 a year is a thick identity. They have many identities: an immigrant, a woman, and an entrepreneur. They can pick what their political profile is going to be from those identities. By narrowing them just to race or phenotype and not taking into account what's in their head or aspirational soul means that both parties do them a disservice. I think the future of democracy is really going to be finding some way to allow thicker identities to come to the surface so that we're not picking and choosing from among, frankly, some of the worst angels. By tribalizing ourselves in these very thin ways, we do a disservice to our full humanity. The democracy conversation right now often does that by narrowing our identities into what you can see and making that the most salient when that is not necessarily what's most salient to the holder of that identity. Mounk: I feel like we've been spending a good amount of time here on analysis. You can analyze with the best of them but you can also suggest solutions. You recently published a really interesting paper where you talk about what civil society actors, individuals, organizations, and politicians can do to help save American democracy. But let’s start with what doesn't work. You make an interesting argument that a lot of what’s done in that space, a lot of charitable dollars that are supposedly spent on saving American democracy are channeled into areas which may be fine insofar as they go but which really miss the mark in terms of making as much of a difference as they should.Kleinfeld: I argue that some things are insufficient. I'm not saying that they're wrong. They're mostly about helping Democrats win or helping Democrats win through other language like “increasing voter turnout,” which we hope will help Democrats win or get more minorities to vote because we think they'll vote for Democrats. I'm a Democrat and I believe that that is very important right now: because the Republican Party is in thrall to this anti-democratic force, Democrats do need to win. But what we've seen in the last two elections, but especially the 2020 election, was that Democrats won the presidency, they won both houses of Congress, and at the state level, the anti-democratic rot really grew quite a bit. Normative disintegration grew—the laws against protest, the laws allowing cars to drive into protesters, for instance. We're a federal country, and about half our states are so deep red that you're just not going to get a Democrat winning those states. Even if you do increase all of these pro-democratic Democratic forces and win at the national level, you still have these states that are quite red, and they're going to continue to exist. A lot of important policy is made at the state level, not least criminal policy, and including deciding which activities are criminalizable—only a few things are done at the federal level, more now, but they can't prosecute everything. To change democracy and make it better in America, there's a set of institutional strategies we need to think about, and I lay them out: ranked-choice voting, final-four or final-five voting, and increasing the ability to hold to account people who use political violence. But there's also a whole set of social activities that are getting really short shrift. I try to talk about the social demand from the right for illiberal policies and where that's coming from, issues of masculinity and issues of rural areas being left behind, which are really important to grapple with. Our Constitution gives rural areas immense power. But we've just decimated their economies, we've told them they are flyover states, and we've belittled them. What do you expect to happen except some form of backlash? It's happening globally. But in America, the constitutional power given to those areas is really extreme. I tried to talk about some of the societal issues on the left as well, particularly this idea that we keep asking people to turn out while democracy is really not doing a whole lot for them, because they're being taken for granted and because the ideological arguments are kind of missing the mark from what they need.Mounk: Where do you see an area in which organizational capacity, money, and action are lacking and where people could really make a difference?Kleinfeld: There are so many gaps, but I will pick out one or two. Take economic redistribution. The left tends to say that the problems with our democracy are high inequality and the fact that people are being left behind. First of all, none of the research points to economic issues as being behind what's going on in our democracy or in other democracies. Frankly, the only research suggests that when a rising tide is happening, and some boats aren't rising as fast as others, they might turn to nativist parties, which is really hard from a policy perspective. We also know that simple redistribution programs tend to meet a lot of backlash from the working class, who feel like they're going to be paying for other people and they don't like that and there's a racial component to that. There's a sense that giveaways don't fulfill a need that men in particular have to own something. There's all sorts of good survey research on how men react to this economic redistribution. On the one hand, there's people who are saying “Let's do redistribution!” On the other hand, all the research is saying that it will not actually solve our democracy problems. And yet, we have a deep structural problem with our economy right now. It's been taking away a lot of agency and harming rural areas which have this disproportionate political power. We've stopped thinking of the economy as connected to our democracy at all. Whereas the Founding Fathers and Aristotle thought very much about how economics needed to support democratic systems, and that you really needed to have the ability to be a thinker and not just be educated but have the independence to make your own political decisions. You also needed to learn the habits of heart of being an independent thinker from your economic world, which is why Jefferson was so into yeoman farmers, who did everything for themselves. We've lost that kind of thinking altogether. One could imagine more investment and the Hewlett Foundation is doing this to some extent, as is Omidyar. What would an economy look like that supported our democracy, that wasn't so winner-take-all for California and New York, that enabled people to be more independent and have the time to be free thinkers? That's very different from just economic redistribution. But it’s not independent of that conversation. Another area I want to highlight is masculinity. We have reams of research suggesting that men in this country are really falling behind. They're falling behind in their college outcomes. White men aren't even trying to compete in college anymore. They're just saying that they're choosing not to. We see that the white working class is dying disproportionately of opioids and suicide and these diseases of despair like alcoholism—so much so that their life expectancy was lower. It was lowering even before COVID, which has, I think, never happened in a developed country. Men particularly seem to be having real trouble in this new world, and it's limiting their sexual prospects. It's limiting their marriage prospects. You get a backlash when you have a lot of men, particularly a lot of young men, experiencing this kind of failure to compete. We know that that causes trouble. I am not the person to come up with a good policy about what to do, but someone is. We need a movement that talks to men in this country. When I worked internationally in development, and we tried to help women with small loans and so on in India, you always worked with the men as well as the women. It's well known in international development that you cannot run a women's empowerment program without also empowering men. Otherwise, you get a backlash. In America, we've been running these women's empowerment programs since Title IX with really no thought to what it does to the male half of the country, and we're getting a backlash. We see that with political violence. Actually, the number one predictor, more than racism, is gender hostility. And so we need to do something about our men—and the people who work with college-age men in sports teams, religious programs, and programs need to help men find their way through college. We need to rethink how we help men compete.Mounk: Richard Reeves has an interesting book about that particular topic and we had a great conversation on this podcast a couple of months ago on this issue. I want to ask you about the prospect of political violence. There's been a lot of talk over the course of last year of an impending “civil war.” I take it that you're quite skeptical of the idea, and yet you are concerned about the role that political violence is already playing in America and may play in the years to come. Why should we be concerned about political violence in the United States and why is the hyperbolic language about “civil war” nevertheless misleading? Kleinfeld: America has always allowed a lot more violence of all sorts, political and otherwise, than our peer democracies. We have five times the murder rate, at the best of times, to Europe. And right now is not the best of times. We have allowed political violence, from the Know Nothing Party to lynchings in the South, the “Redemption” era that allowed parties to come back in the 1860s and ‘70s by lynching their way into into Congress. We have a long history of this. We know internationally that if you have a history, you're more at risk of repeating it. We also know that there has never been a civil war in a country that has a strong democracy with strong institutions, particularly a strong military and security institutions. And that's because civil war is not really about the feelings that are in people's hearts—how much they hate each other or how polarized they are. All of that matters. But those kinds of issues are all mediated by the state. If you have a strong state, it's much harder to take out but through violence, and so you just don't see it. And for a civil war you also need a brutal state, generally—a state that really reacts with a lot of violence or is very corrupt. We don't have that state structure in America. Say what you will about the level of violence in our criminal justice system and the corruption in the system, it is nothing like Ghana, for instance, where I've worked and where multiple coups happened with only five or six people in a small group behind them. They could take down the state that way. You can't take down our country that way so I'm not worried about that kind of civil war. I am very worried about targeted political violence, and I write about it a lot. Because when you look at what's happening lately, what you're seeing is that there are three strategies being used and they are purposeful. One is not so much actual violence but a lot of threat and intimidation that is targeting election workers—and not all election workers. In 2020, when it really broke through the roof (we'd never had this kind of targeting before), it was in swing states that Trump was trying to target. It's very clear. We're also seeing the targeting of Republicans who are pro-democratic—whether it’s the Maricopa County Supervisor, or the Republicans who voted for impeachment, somebody like Liz Cheney, on the January 6th Committee. Republicans who are standing for a pro-democratic Republican Party are a threat to the anti-democratic faction, and they're getting a lot of pressure, a lot of intimidation, a lot of threats. You see that in every country where one faction is trying to take over a political party. They go after their own side first and that's exactly what we're seeing. We're also seeing this “othering” to build a base. There's a long history of doing this, because while a lot of people see violence and they recoil, other people see violence and they say, “Oh, we're allowed to do that? I didn't know. Now I'm more excited to do that.” Every time you see something like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, you actually see an increase in people searching, “How do I donate to the KKK?” and other horrible search terms. That kind of base-building through othering and dehumanization is allowing a lot of spillover violence and we're seeing all of that in America. You don't need a civil war to try to take over a party with violence, and you don't need a civil war to try to build your base with violence. Also read: “The Reality Ally” by Jonathan Rauch. Mounk: I think you have the curse of being a compelling speaker who makes people feel a little bit depressed about the world but you're not a fatalist and certainly not a cynic. If, from the vantage point of 2050, we look back on this moment and say that in the end things somehow turned out to be okay, what's the storyline?Kleinfeld: I do write about depressing things. But I'm not at all depressed. I'm actually pretty excited about this moment. And I guess that's because, at core, I spent the last 10 to 15 years working on social change within democracies. It does not happen in a linear fashion. It happens at crisis points. It happens when people come together across polarized constituencies to come up with a way around the polarization rather than through it, where they reframe old problems in fundamentally new ways and push forward. We've had that at various times in American history, where the corruption and violence of the Gilded Age moved into the Progressive Era; where the white Christian assumptions of the Progressive Era gave way to a broader America in the latter half of the 20th century.I think, frankly, America has gotten a little bit stale and self-regarding over the last couple of decades. We had not been pushing our democracy forward. People hadn't really cared about it. We'd really taken it for granted after the fall of the Soviet Union. We've been weakening our powers but also not paying a lot of attention to what had been going on at home. What's happened now, thanks to this crisis, is that we have this robust infrastructure of pro-democracy activists. We have people who are white recognizing what African Americans have been saying for a long time about some of the problems in our democracy and starting to come to some common cause, with a lot more new energy from the business community and from other pillars that really had never cared before. It was just the water the fish swam in. They didn't really think much about it. I feel like we're at a moment in which we can do one of these lurches forward that our country does once in a while, and we really need it. It took this crisis to get us there. It's not inevitable. It takes human agency to make it happen, but I think it can happen.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

I have a gripe about San Francisco: The bagel stores open too late.My neighborhood, Bernal Heights, has a number of excellent purveyors. The tasty BagelMacher opens at 8:30 a.m. on the weekends, at which point my sons have been up shrieking and destroying things for three hours. Chicken Dog, which sells the best salt bagel I have had in California, opens at the downright brunch-ish hour of 9 a.m. I come from the Bagel Belt, to co-opt a term. In my mind, bagel shops open at 6 a.m. That’s standard. That’s how it works. You should be able to feel caffeinated and carb-loaded at 6:03 a.m. every day of the year, including Christmas. But not here in the Bay Area. And the housing shortage is to blame.That’s my pet theory, at least. San Francisco has built just one home for every eight jobs it has added for the past decade-plus, and rents are higher here than they are pretty much anywhere else in the United States. The city could stand to increase its housing stock fivefold, according to one analysis. What does that have to do with bagels? Few people can afford to live here—and especially few families who have to bear child-care costs along with shelter costs. Thus, San Francisco has the smallest share of kids of any major American city. Meaning a modest share of parents. Meaning not a lot of people who might be up at 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday morning, ready to hit the bagel store.The late opening hours of San Francisco’s bagel joints are not the only things you can reasonably tie back to its housing crisis. The declining share of gay residents in its historic Castro neighborhood. The blanding of the city’s bohemian culture. Even the graying of its famous brightly painted Victorians. (Apparently, the people who can actually afford to buy homes in the city prefer understated colors.)[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]The crisis is not just happening in San Francisco. Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American life, everywhere. What we eat, when we eat it, what music we listen to, what sports we play, how many friends we have, how often we see our extended families, where we go on vacation, how many children we bear, what kind of companies we found: All of it has gotten warped by the high cost of housing. Nowhere is immune, because big cities export their housing shortages to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas too.Recently, a trio of analysts coined an apt term for this phenomenon: the housing theory of everything. You now hear it everywhere, at least if you’re the kind of person who goes to a lot of public-policy conferences or hangs out on econ Twitter. Writing in the journal Works in Progress, John Myers, Ben Southwood, and Sam Bowman took stock of many of the most pressing problems in the Western world, among them declining fertility, endemic chronic illness, brutal inequality, the climate catastrophe, sluggish productivity, and slow growth. They tied each of them back to the cost to rent an apartment.High real-estate prices eat up young families’ budgets, prompting parents to have fewer kids than they would like. Building restrictions beget sprawl, spurring people to walk less and drive more, damaging their arteries and the planet’s climate. The inability of inventors to move to cities bursting with know-how and capital quashes a country’s long-term growth prospects; the inability of workers to move to cities with high wages dents its GDP. And driving up housing prices by restricting construction acts as a wealth transfer from renters to landowners. Indeed, housing prices might be the single biggest generator of financial disparities in many Western countries.In a roundabout way, the French socialist economist Thomas Piketty inspired the term housing theory of everything. In 2013, the publication of Piketty’s opus, Capital in the 20th Century, sparked a broad debate about the causes and effects of economic inequality. “The book was a huge deal, and there was that Bloomberg Businessweek cover where Piketty was this heartthrob and everyone was obsessed with it,” Southwood, a British policy analyst and journalist, told me. When reading some work extending Piketty’s thesis, he told me, “I was thinking, Well, wait a second, land and housing really is an important part of this.”Myers (a former hedge-fund portfolio manager and the co-founder of a U.K. YIMBY group) and Bowman (a think tanker) shared his housing obsession. Southwood and Bowman helped found Works in Progress, now supported by the fintech giant Stripe. And the three published their manifesto on the housing theory of everything a year and a half ago.[M. Nolan Gray: How California exported its worst problem to Texas]Post-publication, the idea took off online and in policy circles. Although Bowman, Myers, and Southwood focused on the most vital, sweeping effects of housing shortages and high housing costs, their theory has taken on a somewhat distinct meaning among its internet devotees. As a meme or a catchphrase, it applies to many of the crisis’s more obscure symptoms: riots in Liverpool, Canadian visa trends, the bribery of public officials, New Jersey moms’ desire for luxury bathtubs, and, in my case at least, bagel stores’ opening hours.  The theory is catchy because housing costs really do affect everything. They’re shaping art by preventing young painters, musicians, and poets from congregating in cities. How many styles akin to the Memphis blues and Seattle grunge are we missing out on? Would the Harlem Renaissance or the Belle Epoque happen today? They’re shaping higher education, turning elite urban colleges into real-estate conglomerates and barring low-income students from attending. They are preventing new businesses from getting off the ground and are killing mom-and-pops. They’re making people lonely and reactionary and sick and angry.The answer is to build more homes in our most desirable places—granting more money, opportunity, entrepreneurial spark, health, togetherness, and tasty breakfast options to all of us.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Right-wing political and media figures regularly level the accusation of “elitism” at other Americans. But new revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the Fox Corporation over claims of election fraud are reminders that the most cynical elites in America are the Republicans and their media valets.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
An anti-racist professor faces “toxicity on the left today.”
I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside.
Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice.
Patronizing for ProfitElected Republicans and their courtiers in the right-wing-media ecosystem deploy the word elite as an accusation, a calumny, almost a crime. To be one of the elite is to be a snooty, educated city dweller, a highbrow pretend-patriot who looks down upon the Real Americans who hunt and fish and drive pickup trucks to church. (It does not mean “rich people”; Donald Trump has gleefully referred to himself and his supporters as the “super-elite.”) The elites also support the production of “fake news” by liars who intend to hoodwink ordinary people into doing the bidding of wealthy globalists. They buy books and listen to National Public Radio and they probably read things like The Atlantic.This shtick has been a remarkable success. Republicans have used it to convince millions of working people that super-educated gasbags such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis are just ordinary folks who care deeply about kitchen-table issues that matter to their family and a secure future for their children, such as Hunter Biden’s sex life and whether public schools are letting kids pee in litter boxes.In the entertainment hothouse, Fox News is the most prominent offender. The Fox all-star lineup, especially in prime time with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, is a parade of millionaires who work for Rupert Murdoch, one of the richest and most powerful men in this corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Every day they warn their viewers that democracy is in peril because of people who majored in gender studies. All of this nuttery is delivered with a straight face—or in Carlson’s case, the weird mien of a dog watching a magic trick.It’s one thing, however, to suspect that Fox personalities see their viewers as mere rubes who must be riled up in the name of corporate profit. It’s another entirely to have it all documented in black and white. Dominion might not win its lawsuit against Fox, but for the rest of America, the process has produced something more important than money: an admission, by Fox’s on-air personalities, of how much they disrespect and disdain their own viewers.According to documents from Dominion’s legal filing, Fox News hosts repeatedly exchanged private doubts about Republicans’ 2020 election-fraud claims. Hannity, in the weeks after the 2020 election, said that the regular Fox guest and top conspiracy-pusher, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was “acting like an insane person.” Ingraham had a similar evaluation: “Such an idiot.” And it’s not like Murdoch didn’t share that sentiment: In one message, he said Giuliani and the Trump lawyer Sidney Powell were pushing “really crazy stuff” and he told Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that their behavior was “damaging everybody.” (Fox reportedly banned Giuliani in 2021, putting up with him for weeks after January 6 and then shutting him down as the Dominion lawsuit gained momentum.)There are few hours on Fox that manage to pack in more gibberish and nonsense than Carlson’s show, and yet—to give him one zeptosecond of credit—he took Powell apart in a segment on his show. In later months, of course, Carlson would continue to inject the information stream with various strains of conspiratorial pathogens, but when even Tucker Carlson is worried, perhaps it’s a sign that things are out of hand.Of course, Carlson wasn’t worried about the truth; he was worried about the profitability of the Fox brand. When the Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich did a real-time fact-check on Twitter of a Trump tweet about voter fraud, Carlson tried to ruin her career. “Please get her fired,” he wrote in a text chain that included Hannity and Ingraham. He continued:
Seriously…What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.
After the election, Carlson warned that angering Trump could have catastrophic consequences: “He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” Murdoch, too, said that he did not want to “antagonize Trump further.”Meanwhile, the Fox producer Abby Grossberg was more worried about the torch-and-pitchfork Fox demographic. After the election, she reminded Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo that Fox’s faithful should be served the toxic gunk they craved: “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition,” Grossberg texted. “Yes, agree,” Bartiromo answered in a heroic display of high-minded journalistic principle.In other words: Our audience of American citizens wants to be encouraged in its desire to thwart the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history as a nation. And Bartiromo answered: Yes, let’s keep doing that.As Vox’s Sean Illing tweeted today, Bartiromo’s thirsty pursuit of ratings is a reminder that “no one has a lower opinion of conservative voters than conservative media.” More important, Fox’s cynical fleecing of its viewers is an expression of titanic elitism, the sort that destroys reality in the minds of ordinary people for the sake of fame and money. Not only does such behavior reveal contempt for Fox’s viewers; it encourages the destruction of our system of government purely for ratings and a limo to and from the Fox mothership in Times Square. (New York City might be full of coastal “elitists,” but that’s where the Fox crew lives and works; we’ll know the real populist millennium has arrived when Fox packs off Hannity and Greg Gutfeld and Jeanine Pirro to its new offices in Kansas or Oklahoma.)Although it’s amusing to bash the Fox celebrities who have been caught in this kind of grubby hypocrisy, the elitism of the American right is a much bigger problem because it drives so much of the unhinged populism that threatens our democracy. Fox News and the highly educated Republican officeholders who use its support to stay in office know exactly what they’re doing. But they are all now riding a tiger of their own creation: As the conservative writer George Will has noted, for the first time in American history, a major political party is terrified by its own voters.Fox, of course, has said that the Dominion filing “mischaracterized the record,” and “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context,” and the network insisted in a legal brief it was merely observing its “commitment to inform fully and comment fairly.” Sadly, Fox will likely survive this disaster whether it wins or loses in court. Like the GOP base it serves, the network and its viewers have immense reserves of denial and rationalization they can bring to bear against the incursions of reality. “We can fix this,” Scott, the Fox CEO, wrote in the midst of this mess, “but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”But why not? It’s been working like a charm so far.Related:
Brian Stelter: I never truly understood Fox News until now.
Fox hosts knew—and lied anyway. (from 2021)
Six people have been killed in a series of shootings in Tate County, Mississippi.
The five former Memphis police officers accused of killing Tyre Nichols pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges.
The U.S. has finished recovering debris from the balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina, and so far, analysis of the remnants reinforce the conclusion that it was a Chinese spy balloon, officials said.
The Books Briefing: What truly elevates poetry is not just what we write but also what inspires us to write it, Emma Sarappo argues.
Getty; The Atlantic
Buttons Are Bougie NowBy Drew Millard
The 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor, among the most expensive offerings in the car manufacturer’s line of tough-guy throwback SUVs, features 418 horsepower, a 10-speed transmission, axles borrowed from off-road-racing vehicles, and 37-inch tires meant for driving off sand dunes at unnecessarily high speeds. But when the automotive site Jalopnik got its hands on a Bronco Raptor for testing, the writer José Rodríguez Jr. singled out something else entirely to praise about the $70,000 SUV: its buttons. The Bronco Raptor features an array of buttons, switches, and knobs controlling everything from its off-road lights to its four-wheel-drive mode to whatever a “sway bar disconnect” is. So much can be done by actually pressing or turning an object that Rodríguez Jr. found the vehicle’s in-dash touch screen—the do-it-all “infotainment system” that has become ubiquitous in new vehicles—nearly vestigial.
Then again, the ability to manipulate a physical thing, a button, has become a premium feature not just in vehicles, but on gadgets of all stripes.
An ICU doctor on how this COVID wave is different
John Fetterman and the performance of wellness
Photos of the week: the world’s oldest dog, the Opera Ball in Austria, and more
Claudette Barius / Warner Bros.
Read. Keep Valentine’s Day going with these books to read with someone you love.Or read a new short story by Ben Okri.Watch. Magic Mike’s Last Dance, in theaters, is as sexy as it is romantic. And Emily, also in theaters, is a sensitive, provocative look at Emily Brontë’s life.Play our daily crossword.P.S.To get away from politics and this entire decade, I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s inspired send-up of life as a comedy writer at NBC. And I have come to realize that Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Jack Donaghy—on the show, the vice president of East Coast television and microwave-oven programming for General Electric—produced one of television’s greatest characters. In lesser hands, he could have been just another corporate buffoon, a foil for the clever creatives, but 30 Rock never let Jack become a red-faced Theodore J. Mooney or Milburn Drysdale; he was vicious, funny, sentimental, cynical, both a backstabber and a good friend.Of course, the reason he’s also a candidate for becoming my spirit animal is that he is from Massachusetts (as I am), worked his way through a good school (as I did), and now is happily and self-indulgently aware of his own obnoxiousness. (I’m working on it.) When Fey’s Liz Lemon finds Jack in his office in a tuxedo, he says: “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?” When his flinty harridan of a mom reproaches him for not appreciating her, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Mother, there are terrorist cells that are more nurturing than you are.” I’m not sure any actor but Baldwin and his hoarse whisper could pull off those lines. But even years later, I find myself laughing out loud. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to dress for dinner.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

During the Cold War, NATO had nightmares of hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops pouring across international borders and igniting a major ground war with a democracy in Europe. Western governments feared that such a move by the Kremlin would lead to escalation—first to a world war and perhaps even to a nuclear conflict.That was then; this is now.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nearly a year old, and the Ukrainians are holding on. The Russians, so far, not only have been pushed back, but are taking immense casualties and material losses. For many Americans, the war is now just another conflict in the news. Do we need to worry about the nuclear threat of Putin’s war in Europe the way we worried about such things three decades ago?Our staff writer Tom Nichols, an expert on nuclear weapons and the Cold War, counsels Americans not to be obsessed with nuclear escalation, but to be aware of the possibilities for accidents and miscalculations. You can hear his thoughts here:The following is a transcript of the episode:Tom Nichols: It’s been a year since the Russians invaded Ukraine and launched the biggest conventional war in Europe since the Nazis. One of the things that I think we’ve all worried about in that time is the underlying problem of nuclear weapons.This is a nuclear-armed power at war with hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of Europe. This is the nightmare that American foreign policy has dreaded since the beginning of the nuclear age.And I think people have kind of put it out of their mind, how potentially dangerous this conflict is, which is understandable, but also, I think, takes us away from thinking about something that is really the most important foreign problem in the world today.During the Cold War, we would’ve thought about that every day, but these days, people just don’t think about it, and I think they should.My name is Tom Nichols. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. For 25 years, I was a professor of national-security affairs at Naval War College.For this episode of Radio Atlantic, I want to talk about nuclear weapons and what I think we should have learned from the history of the Cold War about how to think about this conflict today.I was aware of nuclear weapons at a pretty young age because my hometown, Chicopee, Massachusetts, was home to a giant nuclear-bomber base, Strategic Air Command’s East Coast headquarters, which had the big B-52s that would fly missions with nuclear weapons directly to the Soviet Union.I had a classic childhood of air-raid sirens, and hiding in the basement, and going under the desks, and doing all of that stuff. My high-school biology teacher had a grim sense of humor and told us, you know, because of the Air Force base, we were slated for instant destruction. He said, Yeah, if anything ever happens, we’re gone. We’re gone in seven or eight minutes. So I guess the idea of nuclear war and nuclear weapons was a little more present in my life at an earlier age than for a lot of other kids.It’s been a long time since anyone’s really had to worry about global nuclear war. It’s been over 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think people who lived through the Cold War were more than happy to forget about it. I know I am glad to have it far in the past. And I think younger people who didn’t experience it have a hard time understanding what it was all aboutand what that fear was about—because it’s part of ancient history now.But I think people really need to understand that Cold War history to understand what’s going on today, and how decision makers in Washington and in Europe, and even in Moscow, are playing out this war—because many of these weapons are still right where we left them.We have fewer of them, but we still have thousands of these weapons, many of them on a very short trigger. We could go from the beginning of this podcast to the end of the world, that short of [a] time. And it’s easy to forget that. During the Cold War, we were constantly aware of it, because it was the central influence on our foreign policy. But it’s important for us to look back at the history of the Cold War because we survived a long and very tense struggle with a nuclear-armed opponent. Now, some of that was through good and sensible policy. And some of it was just through dumb luck.Of course, the first big crisis that Americans really faced where they had to think about the existential threat of nuclear weapons was the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962.I was barely 2 years old. But living next to this big, plump nuclear target in Massachusetts, we actually knew people in my hometown who built fallout shelters. But we got through the Cuban missile crisis, in part because President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev realized what was at stake.The gamble to put missiles in Cuba had failed, and that we had to—as Khruschev put it in one of his messages—we had to stop pulling on the ends of the rope and tightening the knot of war. But we also got incredibly lucky.There was a moment aboard a Soviet submarine where the sub commander thought they were under attack. And he wanted to use nuclear-tipped torpedoes to take out the American fleet, which would’ve triggered a holocaust.I mean, it would’ve been an incredible amount of devastation on the world. Tens, hundreds of millions of people dead. And, um, fortunately a senior commander who had to consent to the captain’s idea vetoed the whole thing. He said, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think they’re trying to sink us, and I do not consent. And so by this one lucky break with this one Soviet officer, we averted the end of the world. I mean, we averted utter catastrophe.After the Cuban missile crisis, people are now even more aware of this existential threat of nuclear weapons and it starts cropping up everywhere, especially in our pop culture. I mean, they were always there in the ’50s; there were movies about the communist threat and attacks on America. But after the Cuban missile crisis, that’s when you start getting movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe.Both were about an accidental nuclear war, which becomes a theme for most of the Cold War. In Dr. Strangelove, an American general goes nuts and orders an attack on Russia. And in Fail Safe, a piece of machinery goes bad and the same thing happens. And I think this reflected this fear that we now had to live with, this constant threat of something that we and the Soviets didn’t even want to do, but could happen anyway.Even the James Bond movies, which were supposed to be kind of campy and fun, nuclear weapons were really often the source of danger in them. You know, bad guys were stealing them; people were trying to track our nuclear submarines. Throughout the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s nuclear weapons really become just kind of soaked into our popular culture.We all know the Cuban missile crisis because it’s just part of our common knowledge about the world, even for people that didn’t live through it. I think we don’t realize how dangerous other times were. I always think of 1983 as the year we almost didn’t make it.1983 was an incredibly tense year. President Ronald Reagan began the year calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” And announced that the United States would start pouring billions of dollars into an effort to defend against Soviet missiles, including space-based defenses, which the Soviets found incredibly threatening.The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had just completely broken down. Really, by the fall of 1983, it felt like war was inevitable. It certainly felt like to me war was inevitable. There was kind of that smell of gunpowder in the air. We were all pretty scared. I was pretty scared. I was a graduate student at that point. I was 23 years old, and I was certain that this war, this cataclysmic war, was going to happen not only in my lifetime, but probably before I was 30 years old.And then a lot of things happened in 1983 that elevated the level of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union to extraordinary levels. I would say really dangerous levels. The Soviets did their best to prove they were an evil empire by shooting down a fully loaded civilian airliner, killing 269 people. Just weeks after the shoot-down of the Korean airliner, Soviet Air Defenses got an erroneous report of an American missile launch against them. And this is another one of those cases where we were just lucky. We were just fortunate.And in this case, it was a Soviet Air Defense officer, a lieutenant colonel, who saw this warning that the Americans had launched five missiles. And he said, You know, nobody starts World War III with five missiles. That seems wrong.And he said, I just, I think the system—which still had some bugs—I just don’t think the system’s right. We’re gonna wait that out. We’re gonna ignore that. He was actually later reprimanded.It was almost like he was reprimanded and congratulated at the same time, because if he had called Moscow and said, Look, I’m doing my duty. I’m reporting Soviet Air Defenses have seen American birds are in the air. They’re coming at us and over to you, Kremlin. And from there, a lot of bad decisions could have cascaded into World War III, especially after a year where we had been in such amazingly high conflict with each other.Once again, just as after the Cuban missile crisis, the increase in tension in the 1980s really comes through in the popular culture. Music, movies, TV puts this sense of threat into the minds of ordinary Americans in a way that we just don’t have now. So people are going to the movies and they’re seeing movies like WarGames, once again about an accidental nuclear war. They’re seeing movies like Red Dawn, about a very intentional war by the Soviet Union against the United States.The Soviets thought that Red Dawn was actually part of Reagan’s attempt to use Hollywood to prepare Americans for World War III. In music, Ronald Reagan as a character made appearances in videos by Genesis or by Men at Work. That November, the biggest television event in history was The Day After, which was a cinematic representation of World War III.I mean, it was everywhere. By 1983, ’84, we were soaked in this fear of World War III. Nuclear war and Armageddon, no matter where you looked. I remember in the fall of 1983 going to see the new James Bond movie, one of the last Roger Moore movies, called Octopussy. And the whole plot amazed me because, of course, I was studying this stuff at the time, I was studying NATO and nuclear weapons.And here’s this opening scene where a mad Soviet general says, If only we can convince the West to give up its nuclear weapons, we can finally invade and take over the world.I saw all of these films as either a college student or a young graduate student, and again, it was just kind of woven into my life. Well, of course, this movie is about nuclear war. Of course, this movie is about a Soviet invasion. Of course, this movie is about, you know, the end of the world, because it was always there. It was always in the background. But after the end of the Cold War, that remarkable amount of pop-culture knowledge and just general cultural awareness sort of fades away.I think one reason that people today don’t look back at the Cold War with the same sense of threat is that it all ended so quickly. We went from [these] terrifying year[s] of 1983, 1984. And then suddenly Gorbachev comes in; Reagan reaches out to him; Gorbachev reaches back. They jointly agree in 1985—they issue a statement that to this day, is still considered official policy by the Russian Federation and by the United States of America. They jointly declare a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.And all of a sudden, by the summer of 1985, 1986, it’s just over, and, like, 40 years of tension just came to an end in the space of 20, 24 months. Something I just didn’t think I would see in my lifetime. And I think that’s really created a false sense of security in later generations.After the Cold War, in the ’90s we have a Russia that’s basically friendly to the United States but nuclear weapons are still a danger. For example, in 1995, Norway launched a scientific satellite on top of a missile—I think they were gonna study the northern lights—and the scientists gave everybody notice, you know, We’re gonna be launching this satellite. You’re gonna see a missile launch from Norway.Somebody in Russia just didn’t get the message, and the Russian defense people came to President Boris Yeltsin and they said, This might be a NATO attack. And they gave him the option to activate and launch Russian nuclear weapons. Yeltsin conferred with his people, and fortunately—because our relations were good, and because Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton had a good relationship, and because tensions were low in the world—Yeltsin says, Yeah, okay. I don’t buy that. I’m sure it’s nothing.But imagine again, if that had been somebody else.And that brings us to today. The first thing to understand is: We are in a better place than we were during the Cold War in many ways. During the Cold War, we had tens of thousands of weapons pointed at each other. Now by treaty, the United States and the Russian Federation each have about 1,500 nuclear weapons deployed and ready to go. Now, that’s a lot of nuclear weapons, but 1,500 is a lot better than 30,000 or 40,000.Nonetheless, we are dealing with a much more dangerous Russian regime with this mafia state led by Vladimir Putin.Putin is a mafia boss. There is no one to stop him from doing whatever he wants. And he has really convinced himself that he is some kind of great world historical figure who is going to reestablish this Christian Slavic empire throughout the former Soviet Union and remnants of the old Russian empire. And that makes him uniquely dangerous.People might wonder why Putin is even bothering with nuclear threats, because we’ve always thought of Russia as this giant conventional power because that’s the legacy of the Cold War. We were outnumbered. NATO at the time was only 16 countries. We were totally outnumbered by the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact in everything—men, tanks, artillery—and of course, the only way we could have repulsed an attack by the Soviet Union into Europe would’ve been to use nuclear weapons.I know earlier I mentioned the movie Octopussy. We’ve come a long way from the days when that mad Russian general could say, If only we got rid of nuclear weapons and NATO’s nuclear weapons, we could roll our tanks from Czechoslovakia to Poland through Germany and on into France.What people need to understand is that Russia is now the weaker conventional power. The Russians are now the ones saying, Listen, if things go really badly for us and we’re losing, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons. The difference between Russia now and NATO then is: NATO was threatening these nuclear weapons if they were invaded and they were being just rolled over by Soviet tanks on their way to the English Channel. The Russians today are saying, We started this war, and if it goes badly for us, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons to get ourselves out of a jam.This conventional weakness is actually what makes them more dangerous, because they’re now continually being humiliated in the field. And a country that had gotten by by convincing people that they were a great conventional power, that they had a lot of conventional capability, they’re being revealed now as a hollow power. They can’t even defeat a country a third of their own size.And so when they’re running out of options, you can understand at that point where Putin says, Well, the only way to scramble the deck and to get a do-over here is to use some small nuclear weapon in that area to kind of sober everybody up and shock them into coming to the table or giving me what I want.Now, I think that would be incredibly stupid. And I think a lot of people around the world, including China and other countries, have told Putin that would be a really bad idea. But I think one thing we’ve learned from this war is that Putin is a really lousy strategist who takes dumb chances because he’s just not very competent.And that comes back to the Cold War lesson—that you don’t worry about someone starting World War III as much as you worry about bumbling into World War III because of a bunch of really dumb decisions by people who thought they were doing something smart and didn’t understand that they were actually doing something really dangerous.So where does this leave us? This major war is raging through the middle of Europe, the scenario that we always dreaded during the Cold War; thousands and thousands of Moscow’s troops flooding across borders. What’s the right way to think about this? Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that this really is a war to defend democracy against an aggressive, authoritarian imperial state.The front line of the fight for civilization, really, is in Ukraine now. If Ukraine loses this war, the world will be a very different place. That’s what makes it imperative that Americans think about this problem. I think it’s imperative to support Ukraine in this fight, but we should do that with a prudent understanding of real risks that haven’t gone away.And so I think the Cold War provides some really good guidance here, which is to be engaged, to be aware, but not to be panicked. Not to become consumed by this fear every day, because that becomes paralyzing, that becomes debilitating. It’s bad for you as a person. And it’s bad for democracies’ ability to make decisions—because then you simply don’t make any decisions at all, out of fear.I think it’s important not to fall victim to Cold War amnesia and forget everything we learned. But I also don’t think we should become consumed by a new Cold War paranoia where we live every day thinking that we’re on the edge of Armageddon.

When up to 190,000 Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine last February, even its most ardent foreign supporters expected the nation’s far more limited defenses would collapse within days.
But one year later, Russia has lost a reported 200,000 men, including many high-ranking military officials, and President Vladimir Putin has been embarrassed by the Ukrainian Army’s successes and the resilience of Ukraine’s many citizen militias.
A group of historians, military and intelligence experts, and cultural and political analysts, looked back at how the war has played out thus far and considered where events may be headed during a colloquium Wednesday hosted by the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project and Russia Matters at Harvard Kennedy School.
Fiona Hill, A.M. ’91, Ph.D. ’98, who served as senior director for European and Russian Affairs at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, said the U.S. and the West are “still stuck” in a historical narrative about Ukraine created by Putin. The Russian leader has framed the conflict as an existential threat to his nation and has taken to calling it “The Third Great Patriotic War,” a reference to the Napoleonic invasions of Russia in the 1800s and the Nazi German invasions in the 1940s.
“He wants a recognition by the rest of Europe that Russia has its own sphere of influence, and actually has a right to claim additional sets of territory,” said Hill, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It’s a view many in Russia share, not just the president, she added.
American foreign policy starting in the 1990s has played a role in Russia’s misperceptions, Hill argued. The U.S. set the conflict in motion by the way it viewed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, formally recognizing some countries, like Russia, as successor states, but not others, like Ukraine, leaving them in a geopolitical gray zone.
The U.S. and the West are “still stuck” in a historical narrative about Ukraine created by Putin, says Fiona Hill. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Both countries have suffered major economic declines since the war. Forty percent of Ukraine’s physical infrastructure has been destroyed while gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 33 percent. Russia’s Finance Ministry reports annual revenue fell 35 percent in 2022 while spending rose 59 percent.
But the many banking and trade sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe early on have done little to hurt Russia’s ability to wage war and thanks to cooperation from allies like China, India, and Iran, Russian consumers have not felt a significant pinch to their quality of life, said Alexandra Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard.
That doesn’t mean Russia is doing well. Its economy was already battered before the conflict, so squeezing it further only makes life marginally more difficult for ordinary civilians, less so for the Kremlin. “The only way to keep Russia from fighting or winning this war is to give the Ukrainians military support,” she said.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said the biggest challenge for the Ukrainian army will be quickly integrating all the different weapon systems they’re getting from Western allies.
“The spring will be a race between Russian mobilization and the transformation of Ukraine’s army,” Hertling said. “Mr. Putin, I think, has made an active decision to mobilize forces to the front lines, getting as many bodies into this [in an] to attempt to retake ground” and gain additional leverage to lure Ukraine into any future negotiations.
In the coming weeks, Hertling expects that Russia will likely increase missile attacks and its air and naval forces will continue to strike against Ukraine’s infrastructure. Military exercises in Belarus are a ruse and not evidence that nation’s forces will take up arms against Ukraine, but Russian forces may use Belarus as an entry point, he said.
Putin’s agenda, to wipe out Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a people, is longstanding and deeply held in Russian society and by the nation’s power brokers. It will “most certainly outlast” the Putin regime and won’t be curtailed by current battlefield setbacks, said Nataliya Bugayova M.P.P. ’12, a Ukrainian national security analyst.

“The spring will be a race between Russian mobilization and the transformation of Ukraine’s army.”
— Mark Hertling, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general

“All the conversation about cease-fires, premature peace deals, and negotiations — they’re not off-ramps for the Kremlin. They are delayed on-ramps to pursue the same objectives, just under better circumstances,” she said.
Whether the war will end in 2023 is not yet clear, but “it’s potentially a decisive year,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former nuclear counterterrorism officer for the CIA and now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center.
The conflict has been “a disaster” for both countries, especially Russia, he noted.
“The ways that Russia has been damaged by this strategically far outweigh what [it] may gain in Ukraine, even if [it] prevails to some extent on the battlefield,” he said.
The things Putin feared most were Ukraine drifting closer toward the EU and a stronger, more unified NATO, and both have to come to pass — and then some.
“Any threat [Putin] thought NATO could have presented to Russia he has far exceeded in damaging his own interests for a military threat that NATO never posed.”
Mowatt-Larssen’s “greatest concern” is that at some point in the next year, Putin will decide that his army is no longer capable of taking back what he views as Russian territories.
“That is a condition where I think Vladimir Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons,” he said, and why the U.S. must start thinking now about whether Russia can be deterred and how the U.S. will respond if Russia deploys them or causes some other mass casualty disaster.

Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Until recently, he was dismissive of criticism of the way that the left talks about race in America. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and sponsored annually by the Telluride Association.[Read: Why not take a Black studies class?]The students began the summer excited about the six-week seminar, called “Race and the Limits of Law.” But soon, they moved to expel two of their classmates from the program amid political disagreements. Then, as Lloyd later recounted in an essay for Compact Magazine, the remaining students read a prepared statement about “how the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.”Before, he had quickly rejected the linguist and social commentator John McWhorter’s argument that anti-racism is a new religion. “Last summer,” Lloyd wrote, “I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.”When I read Lloyd’s essay, I valued the distinct ideological perspective that grounds his critique of how anti-racism could improve. I wanted to converse with him about his experience, the lessons he took from it, and ascendant social movements on the left, in the hopes that our very different perspectives might help solve problems that worry us both.Below is a lightly edited version of our correspondence.Conor Friedersdorf: Early on, you distinguish your essay from other “laments about ‘woke’ campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues.” Given your academic scholarship and varied work on behalf of social justice, no one can credibly claim that you’re reflexively hostile to efforts that get coded as “woke.” Yet you believe that something went terribly wrong in your seminar. I hope we can drill down on what specifically went wrong and why.But first, for any readers who come to anything coded as “woke” with skepticism, or who want to understand where you are coming from a bit better, could you explain why you’ve dedicated so much time and effort to Black-studies programs, anti-racism workshops, and transformative-justice workshops?Vincent Lloyd: In our lives, we all encounter a deeply human problem: domination. Some have the capacity to arbitrarily assert their will over others. We find this in our families, with bosses at work, with politicians, and systemically: Patriarchy, racism, and colonialism are all systems of domination. Anti-Black racism is the closest we get to a paradigm of domination. Even a century and a half after slavery, the master-slave dynamic, dominator and dominated, fuels anti-Black racism, which is now incorporated into laws and institutions as well as personal vices.I want a world free of domination. I think we all do. That requires working together to root out systems of domination, some on the surface but many deeply ingrained in our world. Black studies aims to root out domination, in the university and in the world. It grew out of Black-student struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, themselves born of the civil-rights movement and anti-war protests. It aims to draw attention to the forms of anti-Black racism that infect each of us and the institutions we inhabit, and to catalyze justice movements today. Behind the “woke” label are powerful new visions of justice, new ways of imagining a world free of domination. Instead of politely requesting incorporation into unjust institutions, today’s justice movements rightly demand new institutions that are more responsive to human needs.Friedersdorf: On a bunch of contested questions, you’ve sketched relatively radical positions: for example, that forms of anti-Blackness “infect each of us”; that anti-Black domination endures in the university; that those who seek justice are called not just to eschew dominating others but to root out domination; and that succeeding requires demanding new institutions, not just reforming old ones. As your radical students saw it, their peers, their teacher, and the format of their seminar were infected with racism, thus the call to end the seminar and demand a new approach.You reject their radicalism and lovingly defend the seminar format, where “specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation,” even as you grant that it is time-consuming and frustrating, and that participants inevitably get a lot wrong along the way.“Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another overlooked,” you write, because “the seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence.” Ultimately, you go so far as to liken the format to democratic life itself, insofar as “we each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.”I’m with you—conserve the seminar! (I would very much like to be a participant in a seminar that you lead.) But how, exactly? To the question “How do we know which institutions and norms to conserve and which are better abolished and replaced?” the conservative answers, “We usually cannot know. To pick and choose is to err in ways that do more harm than good. So change should proceed slowly: better to steadily conserve small gains than risk huge losses.” You are not a conservative. Still, this episode caused you to recall a moment in the 1970s “when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion.” How do you propose that justice seekers best avoid or guard against toxicity, dogmatism, excess, and disillusion?Lloyd: The students and I agreed about political principles. We disagreed about political judgment and political strategy. How do we get from our world, full of anti-Black racism, full of interlocking systems of domination, to a world free of domination? We need to feel the urgency of this question, but we also need to develop the sensibilities and virtues that can allow us to suitably respond.The seminar is a training ground. It requires patience, enduring frustration, attending carefully to others, making distinctions, drawing on personal experience and applying it to the world of ideas. The seminar is not a pure space; there are no pure spaces. But, in contrast to the lecture, the seminar demonstrates to students that they already have knowledge and that, collectively, they can produce knowledge.The seminar format itself is changing in positive ways. When I was an undergraduate two decades ago, we all sat around a table, the professor would say “What did you think of the reading?,” and there would be open discussion. Because of my background (I came to Princeton from a public high school in southern Minnesota) and race, I was not practiced in this format, and I rarely spoke. Today, we start with activities to prime the pump, as it were: For example, we have students talk to their neighbor about a question for a few minutes, or each share a question that sets the seminar’s agenda, or divide the seminar into groups of three for a while. Such practices mitigate the effects of the inequalities that necessarily enter the seminar space.Even in its updated format, a seminar requires risk. People, and especially institutions, don’t like risk. Presumably to reduce that risk, the Telluride Association inserted teachers’ assistants into seminars in what was effectively a layer of anti-racist managers between teachers and students. But that destroys the political potential of the seminar: It can no longer cultivate the sensibilities and virtues needed to combat systems of domination. In the context I write about, because the seminar is a space where the professor and the students are required to restrain themselves, the only figure who was unrestrained was the charismatic teaching assistant (who also, uniquely in this situation, managed the students’ lives for the 21 hours a day they were not in seminar).One factor contributing to toxicity on the left today is a failure to recognize that different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces. Some spaces, like seminars and reading groups, are training grounds. Others are sites of political action which require deferring to authority and exercising discipline. Still others are sites of storytelling and imagination.Right now, there is a deep, understandable suspicion of authority that pervades all left spaces and has the effect of reducing discourse to retweets of charismatic personalities—and charisma is the twin of abuse.Friedersdorf: Many readers will agree (as I do) that we live in a world of domination; that among the forms it takes is anti-Black racism; that we ought to root out systems of domination; that “different modes of engagement are appropriate to different sorts of spaces”; and that positive change is most likely to succeed when its champions develop certain sensibilities and virtues.[Ibram X. Kendhi: The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom]In the experience your essay recounts, I see evidence for some additional propositions.First, it seems to me that a healthy anti-racism movement cannot simply presume that anti-Black racism is or is not a feature of a given institution or space, or to what degree. Without claims that are particular and falsifiable, and rigorous attempts among people with diverse viewpoints to prove or disprove them, the inevitable result is dogmatism and disillusion––and calls to disrupt and transform things that are no more racist or harmful than your seminar. But in many leftist spaces, rigor of that sort is itself seen as harmful and destructive, rather than a constructive necessity for any movement that seeks to focus its efforts appropriately.Second, I think too many elite academic institutions treat Black students as if they are fragile, undifferentiated victims so lacking in resilience that even a small, unintentional slight from a white or Asian classmate will result in significant harm, acculturating many students to engage Black classmates not as peers but as pitiable others best patronized as “allies” while walking on eggshells. Students ought to regard one another as equals––they are equals and deserve the equal dignity of being treated that way. The alternative constitutes an implicit white and Asian supremacy and an attendant denial of Black equality as disempowering and dispiriting as any other.  As you wrote:
Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. They needed extra help, they were struggling to understand anything from the readings, and they couldn’t even know what questions to ask unless they had guidance—first Keisha said this, then the black students said it, then their “allies” repeated it in solidarity with them. But I witnessed them learning. I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. I saw their writing improve. I saw them use complex concepts in thoughtful ways. They just didn’t believe in themselves.
You went on to hypothesize that while the Telluride program has been ahead of its time (in a good sense) in many of the ways it has evolved on race over the years, “perhaps the implosion of my Telluride seminar suggests that this final step, centering blackness, tempts the US elite, and particularly US elite educational institutions, to take a step too far, a step into incoherence—or worse.”But were your seminar participants centering “Blackness” or false stereotypes of Blackness that reduce it to victimhood? Truly centering Blackness would at least require acknowledging the singular individuality, staggering diversity, and resilience of Black people.Lloyd: There is, indeed, an important question about how we can sharpen our perception of specific wrongs, especially around racism. But there is a deeper question involved too: whether we are approaching justice with a tragic sensibility—in religious terms, appreciating that the world is fallen. Even if, today, we could come up with a list of wrongs needing attention, we would certainly be missing some and misperceiving others; more generally, there are systems of domination affecting us that we haven’t even noticed yet. In the mid-20th century, there was little awareness of homophobia, for example. Who knows what new forms of domination we will have identified a few decades in the future.At its best, talk of the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism is pointing toward that tragic sensibility. There are forms of anti-Black racism of which we are not aware circulating around people and institutions. That is why we need to cultivate humility, but we need active humility, not the sort that allows us to wallow. We need spaces where we can practice articulating our commitments, having them challenged, and revising them. We also need spaces where we analyze precisely what wrongs we can identify and respond to here and now, given our imperfect capacities.The seminar form promises to be a space where we can do both.In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, and especially since the murder of George Floyd, Blackness has floated so widely and loosely in our discourse that the diversity of Black experience and even the humanity of particular Black folks starts to be lost. Institutions know they have racist habits and know they need to change, but they are very awkward in formulating responses—and they are always looking for shortcuts. In cases like anti-Black racism, we do need policy fixes that are overbroad to correct for past wrongs, but we also need to put particular emphasis on attending to the diversity and complexity of Black experience.The seminar I wrote about was attempting to do just this: leverage the students’ interest in questions of racial justice to examine how different racial categories change over time and how they are inhabited differently by different people—and how the law struggles to make sense of this complexity. Each week we read one court decision, one literary text (a novel, memoir, or short-story collection), and three pieces of historical and cultural analysis, with each genre adding new layers and complications to our understanding of race in general, and Blackness in particular.In the U.S. and probably beyond, we are at a turning point in how we understand racial diversity. For a half century, we were comfortably multiculturalists, celebrating the variety of peoples, each with their own tasty food and colorful clothes, each facing their own sorts of struggles which we can support, but ultimately all part of the shared life of a community, institution, or nation. The justice claims coming out of social movements in the last decade reject this framework. Anti-Black racism, they charge, is qualitatively different from other forms of racism (though similar claims are made around Indigeneity and other categories as well). Black justice requires interrupting both habits and institutions, and beginning again in new ways.I don’t think Telluride and other sorts of institutions know what to do with these claims; adding an extra staff person at the multicultural student office or a diversity manager in a seminar is not genuinely responsive. I can’t predict what new frameworks around racial diversity will come after multiculturalism. I trust the energy and creativity of young people leading social movements to imagine a more just future. But I distrust the efforts of institutions to manage that justice-seeking spirit in ways that are convenient and financially expedient, and those efforts are muddying the waters. Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing.[Conor Friedersdorf: The paradox of diversity training]Friedersdorf: I share the hope that young people will imagine and help bring about a future with less domination. But I fear the social movements that you allude to have become more authoritarian in the past decade. I frequently see self-proclaimed adherents of those movements seeking to dominate others. More puzzlingly, I see them denouncing institutions and authority figures as racist one moment, then demanding in the next moment that those same institutions or leaders start marshaling their authority more coercively (much as your students denounced your supposed racism, then insisted that you assert more control over their discussions).“The students wanted freedom, for themselves and for all,” you wrote, “but they started to say that the only route to freedom is indoctrination: having me tell them what to think.” Are you sure that it’s “freedom for all” that they wanted? As you note, “Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing.” Why are such approaches wrong turns? And by way of wrapping up our back-and-forth, could you suggest a better alternative?Lloyd: Social movements are messy, and this is especially true for those movements led by youth and those led by people who have suffered a great deal. Social movements are also the best place we can turn to for insights into the nature of justice. Those struggling against domination have unique expertise on domination itself, and how we can free ourselves from it. And that’s the tricky part: We need to take seriously the insights of social movements, but those insights are not self-evident—not to movement participants and not to outsiders. It is difficult and sometimes painful to sort through the varied rhetorics and practices of a movement and to see what hews most closely to the struggle against domination that is a movement’s foundation. Furthermore, no matter our distance from a movement, no matter how closely we attend to it, we have to remind ourselves that we’re going to get some of its insights wrong.I worry that left political discourse today takes social movements, or even just an individual who has suffered, as conversation stoppers rather than conversation starters. That frustrates me because I firmly believe these movements are the key to our collective liberation. Justice struggles always involve a back-and-forth between movement participants making demands for radical transformation and those in power trying to manage those demands so that they can keep their grip on power. Sometimes that management involves co-opting movements themselves, effectively getting activists to make demands that serve the interests of the status quo. Those of us who care about justice have to be willing to ask critical questions about these dynamics rather than blindly deferring to the activist language.In an academic context, Black student organizing has long made the claim that interrogating domination is at the heart of the academic mission of the university: domination that starts with the paradigm of the Middle Passage but proceeds to all the forms domination takes, around race, gender, economics, and personal relationships. In other words, the core claim growing out of Black student movements is that the founding principles of educational institutions have to change, and that will call for a radical restructuring of what those institutions look like. I worry about the growth of diversity bureaucracies whose mission is, effectively, to shield institutions from that radical critique, and to redirect activist energy toward goals that entrench the powers that be. There is no tension between the academic mission of a university and the claims being made by student activists: Those activists are demanding more rigor, better history, sharper analysis, because they are demanding that the struggle against domination, a fundamental concern of humanity, ought to be at the root of all intellectual work.Regarding the current discourse on race, I think we need to appreciate what an important moment we are in, and how much Black organizing has achieved. We are talking about anti-Black racism in a much more sophisticated way today than we were even 10 years ago. We are noticing and responding to anti-Black racism in health care, the economy, real estate, the prison system, policing, and in many other domains. We have broken the hold that the framework of multiculturalism had on discussions of race. Now the forces of white supremacy are realizing they are vulnerable and responding forcefully, and they are attempting to sow discord and defensiveness among justice seekers.Those of us committed to justice movements need to redouble our commitment to the sensibilities and virtues that are the prerequisite for successful struggles in difficult times: humility, receptivity, charity, faith in the struggle, and hope for a world without domination.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.Many of DeSantis’s boosters are drawn to him as a potential Republican nominee because they believe that his record as the chief executive of an economically thriving state would position him to win back some of the college-educated suburban voters who have stampeded away from the GOP since 2016.[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know DeSantis]But DeSantis, through his escalating attacks on what he calls “woke” ideology, has signaled that if he runs, as most expect, he will seek the GOP nomination by emphasizing the same cultural grievances about racial and social change that former President Donald Trump has stressed. Those messages have enabled Trump to energize hard-core conservatives, but at the price of repelling many well-educated suburbanites.With that approach, DeSantis seems destined to test a question that sharply divides strategists from the two parties: Will more voters accept Trumpism without Trump himself attached to it?As DeSantis careens through a seemingly endless succession of culture-war firefights with targets including the Walt Disney Company, the College Board, LGBTQ-rights advocates, and Black historians, many Republicans are confident he can manage the challenge of attracting enough social-conservative voters to win a primary without alienating so many socially moderate suburbanites that he can’t win a general election. The evidence, they say, is his landslide reelection victory last November, after pursuing an aggressive strategy of keeping Florida businesses and schools open during the pandemic. The election exit polls found DeSantis winning about three-fifths of Florida’s college-educated white voters in a year when that group provided crucial support to Democrats in many other states. (DeSantis also posted notable gains with Latino and Black male voters.)“Based upon his support for reelection, you would have to think … his support for keeping the economy going, keeping schools open [during COVID] was sufficiently popular to overcome any reticence suburban voters might have had on the culture side,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told me.But many Democrats are growing optimistic that DeSantis is overplaying his hand. While many see him as a formidable potential 2024 opponent, they believe he is advancing such a militantly conservative cultural agenda—built on ideas such as censoring how schoolteachers talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation and a potential ban on abortion after six weeks—that he will face the same resistance in white-collar suburbs that doomed socially conservative GOP gubernatorial candidates last fall in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.“The exact things that DeSantis is doing to make himself a MAGA hero for the primary,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic communications consultant, “are the things that turn away the voters they are hoping to win back.”DeSantis has ignited so many cultural confrontations that it’s difficult to keep track of them, but he has acted most aggressively on education. During the last Florida legislative session, he passed a trio of bills. One restricted how schools, universities, and even private employers can talk about race and gender; another (dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” law) banned schools from discussing sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade; a companion measure made it easier for parents to push for the removal of books from school libraries and classrooms.Since then, DeSantis has threatened to block  an Advanced Placement class in African American studies unless the College Board removed subjects and scholars that conservatives opposed (including discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement and “intersectionality,” an academic analysis of how forms of racial, class, and gender inequity intersect), and has proposed stringent new controls over public higher education, including eliminating departments that promote diversity on campus and making the removal of tenured faculty easier. This week, after the College Board openly criticized his actions on the AP African American–history course, DeSantis suggested he may try to end Florida’s use of other AP tests and even the SAT. Those threats echoed his successful drive to strip the Walt Disney Company of special administrative privileges for its theme park in Orlando after the corporation criticized his “Don’t Say Gay” bill.Jeremy Young, the senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, says that DeSantis’s measures to control instruction on college campuses are “unprecedented in the history of this country. It is an attempt to insert political agendas and political governance into every single aspect of the university.”Jonathan Friedman, the director of PEN America’s free-expression program, says the breadth of Florida’s efforts to censor public-school teachers in K–12 classrooms is also unmatched. “The scale and scope of censorship in Florida schools has reached a point,” he told me, “where it is virtually un-trackable.”DeSantis has been fulsome in his denunciations of “woke ideology” but stingy in his definitions of exactly what he considers that to be. The closest his administration has come to explaining the term was when his general counsel, in a court appearance last December, defined woke as “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Friedman sees that vagueness as part of the governor’s strategy: By refusing to more precisely identify what concepts the state considers objectionable, he says, DeSantis has created a “chilling effect” whereby teachers self-censor in fear that “everything and anything” about race, gender, and sexuality “can become fodder for punishment.”[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]DeSantis’s efforts to control what Florida students are taught, and what materials they can access, have found a receptive audience in Republican-controlled states. PEN is tracking copycat bills in many of the other 21 states where Republicans hold unified control of the state legislature and the governorship.The rapid replication of these ideas across red states signals the potential power of DeSantis’s agenda in a Republican presidential primary. In recent national surveys, Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive organizations who specializes in studying social attitudes, has found that the voters most attracted to limiting what students learn about race and gender are those who are already receptive to core Trump cultural messages.For many GOP voters, “this is a psychological, not policy, threat,” Undem told me in an email. “The feeling is the other side is calling me racist, calling me and my country evil, and blaming me as a man for every problem … It’s about shame, guilt, and self-worth, and it’s existential—for them and their country. Obviously, that’s going to motivate Republican base voters more than crime policy or inflation.”But in no state where Democrats control the governorship and the legislature have they felt pressured to offer their own versions of DeSantis’s measures to refashion education. This suggests that these ideas generate much less demand outside the red states. Friedman says PEN sees no evidence that any elected official “who doesn’t answer” to the conservative base feels “any pressure … to pass this legislation.”How these ideas are received beyond the core conservative states may ultimately depend on the prism through which they are seen if DeSantis or another GOP nominee carries them into a general-election presidential campaign.Republicans believe that the key to building political support for their education agenda is to frame these moves as an attempt to empower parents against an arrogant educational bureaucracy and other “elitist” forces, like Hollywood and teachers’ unions. It’s common for Republicans to argue that measures such as the “Don’t Say Gay” law don’t impose their values on others, but merely constitute a defensive pushback against the left’s attempts to “indoctrinate” students.For many GOP strategists, the proof that these ideas appeal beyond the conservative base was Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia, a state that had been steadily trending blue, after he stressed “parental rights.”Kristin Davison, one of Youngkin’s senior strategists, told me that his message was “not even so much about the curriculum as it was that these schools don’t want parents to have a say.” As these issues grow more prominent in national politics, she said, “I think you’ll see it play out in this philosophy that parents and families and teachers should be at the forefront of education rather than government and teacher groups.” Youngkin himself might run for president in 2024 on that theme.Even Democratic polls have found a substantial audience for many of DeSantis’s specific initiatives. In the most notable finding, a poll last spring for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) by a Democratic polling firm found that majorities of voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate who argued that schools should focus less on racism and more on core academic subjects; backed a “Don’t Say Gay” law for the early grades; would give parents more control over curriculum; and would ban transgender girls from high-school sports (another bill DeSantis has signed). In that poll, not only did about four-fifths of 2020 Trump voters say they would support a candidate expressing each of those beliefs; so did about one-third of those who voted for President Joe Biden.But other results in that poll—and in a follow-up survey the firm conducted for the AFT last December—suggest that the whole of DeSantis’s agenda may be less appealing than the sum of its parts. In both surveys, a significant majority said they worried less that kids are being taught values their parents don’t like than that culture-war fights are diverting schools from their real mission of educating students. In the December poll, twice as many respondents said that schools are handling sensitive issues appropriately than said that schools are imposing a liberal agenda on students; likewise, a two-to-one majority said that providing schools with more resources was more important than providing parents with more say. In these surveys, and others, banning books ignited an especially forceful backlash. “Banning books is very likely to raise eyebrows and opposition among the narrow segment of voters who truly are swing voters,” Undem said.Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster who worked on the two AFT surveys, told me that “even if voters agree with him on a couple specific things,” the larger implications of the DeSantis agenda are likely to turn off the suburban swing voters the GOP is hoping to recapture in 2024.The key for Democrats in responding to DeSantis, Molyneux said, is to not “let him claim to be there speaking for parents; what this is really about is politicians coming in and deciding what is going to be taught.” DeSantis almost always makes his educational announcements surrounded by mothers, but Molyneux says he ultimately may be defined more by images of empty shelves in classrooms where books have been removed. “If this is about blanket imposition of political decisions about what is being taught, people will definitely trust teachers and principals way more than they trust politicians,” Molyneux told me.[Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book]Balancing potential messages for the primary and general election will likely grow only more difficult for DeSantis as the year unfolds. Trump has already released a pair of bristling videos staking out militant positions on censoring teachers and restricting LGBTQ rights (to combat what Trump called “gender insanity.”) This suggests that the GOP primary could see a culture-war arms race that tugs all of the contenders to the right and creates more hurdles with swing voters for the eventual winner. Another measure of that dynamic is DeSantis’s recent announcement that he would sign a six-week abortion ban in Florida, a significant reduction of access from the 15-week ban he signed last year.In all of this, Democrats see DeSantis embracing ideas that will cast him, if he runs, as a threat to the values held by the coalition (particularly college-educated white voters, young people, and African Americans) that turned out in big numbers to resist the Trump-era GOP in each of the past three national elections. Based on the gubernatorial wins for DeSantis in 2022 and Youngkin in 2021, Republicans, in turn, remain confident that a message of empowering parents and prioritizing the economy can claw back a decisive slice of the suburban voters who found Trump unacceptable.In the Democratic portrayal, DeSantis looks like an intolerant bully with authoritarian and bigoted inclinations; in the Republican version, he’s a buttoned-down, business-friendly manager imposing commonsense constraints on unaccountable forces threatening families. The picture that ultimately commands the frame will likely determine whether DeSantis can broaden the GOP’s appeal beyond its constricted boundaries under Trump.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.American teenagers—especially girls and kids who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning—are “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. And everybody seems to think they know why.Some psychologists point to social media, whereas others blame school shootings; others chalk it up to changes in parenting. Climate-change activists say it’s climate change. Atlantic writers like me blather on about the decline of physical-world interactions. These explanations aren’t equally valid, and some of them might be purely wrong. But the sheer number of theories reflects the complexity of mental-health challenges and suggests that, perhaps, nobody knows for sure what’s going on.The numbers are undeniable. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the gold standard for measuring the state of teen behavior and mental health. From 2011 to 2021, the survey found, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased from 36 to 57 percent, with the highest jump coming during the coronavirus pandemic. The share of girls who said they’ve contemplated suicide increased 50 percent in the decade. (For teenage boys, the increase was smaller.)Life is worse for LGBQ teenagers in almost every respect measured by the survey. (The YRBS did not ask about trans identity.) Compared with heterosexual teens, they are more likely to experience poor mental health; more likely to experience unstable housing or homelessness; more likely to be threatened or injured by a weapon in school; more likely to miss school for safety reasons; less likely to feel close to people at school; more likely to be raped; twice as likely to be bullied; almost three times more likely to have recently misused prescription opioids; three times more likely to have considered suicide, made a suicide plan, or attempted suicide; and seven times more likely to be injured in a suicide attempt.This surge in sadness, hopelessness, and suicidal thoughts among teenagers has coincided with other behavioral trends that aren’t obviously bad. Reports of smoking are down. Drug use and drinking have declined. Bullying has not increased among boys; for girls, it’s declined slightly. Big-picture economic trends don’t have much explanatory power either. In the period when teen anxiety increased, joblessness, poverty, and child hunger mostly declined, and real disposable income mostly grew.The inexorable rise of teen anxiety ought to be a national crisis. Mental-health services have become more available due to the rise of telehealth. The number of therapists is growing faster than the U.S. average for all occupations, as demand for counselors rises in high schools and colleges. More people are using mental-health services, yet outcomes for teens just keep getting worse. How can this be?Last year, I offered four possible theories: the prevalence of social-media use; the decline of time spent with friends; a more stressful world of mass-shooting events and existential crises such as global warming; and changes in parenting that might be reducing kids’ mental resilience.I still think the fullest explanation for teen anxiety may live in that causal stew. But this year, I want to lead with four questions rather than four answers.  Is peak teen anxiety just another pandemic bubble?Teen anxiety and depression grew more from 2019 to 2021 than during any other two-year period on record, raising the question of whether they might decline as most of the country moves on from the pandemic. Indeed, many pandemic trends that seemed like accelerations into the future turned out to be more like mini-bubbles. Crypto-asset prices went up in 2020 and 2021, and then came crashing down. Streaming looked like the future of entertainment for a few years, and now it looks like a money pit for many entertainment companies. We’ll have to wait another year or more for the YRBS to tell us if the reopening of schools and other physical spaces has lessened teen anxiety.Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health?The story seems simple from a distance: Teen anxiety increased during a period when smartphones and social media colonized the youth social experience. Offline time with close friends went down. Time spent alone staring into a virtual void went up. Sounds pretty bad.But the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated. Perhaps the most famous and trusted study of the effects of social media on polarization and mental health is “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” When researchers paid people to deactivate their Facebook accounts, they found that online activity went down, offline activity went up, both polarization and news knowledge declined, and subjective well-being increased. Many participants who had been randomly selected to leave Facebook stayed off the site even weeks after they had to, suggesting that using social media may be akin to compulsive or addictive behavior. The researchers describe the effect of Facebook deactivation on depression and anxiety as “small—about 25-40 percent of the effect of psychological interventions including self-help therapy.”In a few years, the assumption that social media is making us crazy might look eye-bleedingly obvious, like a surgeon-general warning that sucking on cigarettes to pull addictive carcinogens into your lungs is, in fact, bad for your lungs. But the best evidence we have suggests that social media isn’t really like smoking. My guess is that it’s more of an attention alcohol—a substance that, in small doses, can be fun or even useful for adults, but in larger doses can cause problems for certain people. But maybe even that’s too strong. Just as academics now believe we overrated the danger of online echo chambers (in fact, social media probably exposes us to a much wider range of views than cable news does), we’ll realize that we unfairly blame social media for declining mental health.“There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University, told The New York Times last year. I think we still need more high-quality studies and randomized trials to fully understand what’s happening here.What do we make of the relationship between rising LGBQ self-identification and rising LGBQ anxiety?Major progress has been made in terms of accepting gay, lesbian, and trans Americans in the past few decades. The Supreme Court struck down bans on same-sex marriage; major institutions, such as the NBA and Disney, have stood up against bigoted laws; more television shows now depict gay and transgender characters in a positive, or appropriately complex, light.Meanwhile, LGBTQ self-identification has increased markedly. According to Gallup, more than 20 percent of Gen Z Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That figure is several times higher than for any previous generation, including seven times higher than for Baby Boomers—many of whom now tell stories about how harmful it was to be in the closet during a more intolerant era.But the state of mental health in the LGBQ community is dire, and it’s worsening faster than the national average. “Close to 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year and more than 50% had poor mental health during the past 30 days,” the CDC reported.Liberal and conservative explanations for this phenomenon are irreconcilable. According to liberals, the election of Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of anti-gay and transphobic attitudes, which are now overrunning schools, most notably in Florida; wiping out whatever legal progress we might have celebrated at the national level; and making vulnerable teens feel like their very identity is being challenged by the country’s loudest politicians. According to conservatives who brand themselves as anti-woke, the real culprit is liberals’ obsession with victimization and identity.The point of juxtaposing these interpretations is not to suggest that I find them equally convincing (I side with the liberal argument) but rather to show just how broken this front of the culture war has become. This is the tragic state of things: Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that the way their political opponents talk about identity is making teens want to kill themselves. America needs its best and least-biased sociology and psychology researchers to take up the question “Why is mental health deteriorating rapidly among a segment of the Gen Z population that is also growing rapidly?” Given that almost 25 percent of LGBQ teens attempted suicide in the past year, a convincing empirical answer could help save thousands of lives.Why are Americans so mentally distressed even as they’ve become better at talking about mental distress? It’s obvious, you might say: As anxiety rates have escalated, more people have had to build their own personal therapeutic glossary.Or maybe something else is going on. In the past few years, a great deal of U.S. discourse has absorbed the vocabulary of therapy, with frequent references to trauma, harm, emotional capacity, and self-care. But the ubiquity of “therapy-speak” on the internet has coincided with the emergence of an internet culture that is decidedly anti-therapeutic.Research from both the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Beihang University, in Beijing, have found that intense and negative emotions are among the most likely to go viral online. Anger and outrage seem to be aerodynamic on the internet not only because we’re drawn to the emotional meltdowns of our fellow humans, but also because demonstrating outrage about a topic is a good way of advertising one’s own moral standing.Anger, outrage, and catastrophizing are exactly what modern therapists tell their patients to avoid. One of the most popular modes of clinical psychology is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which formalizes an ancient wisdom: We don’t often control what happens in life, but at the margins, we can change how we think about what happens to us. We can learn to identify the most negative and unhelpful thoughts and restructure them, so as to guide us toward better feelings and behaviors. In life, treating minor problems as catastrophes is a straight path to misery—but online, the most catastrophic headlines get the most attention. In life, nurturing anger produces conflict with friends and family; online, it’s an excellent way to build an audience.Modern internet culture has adopted therapy-speak while repeatedly setting fire to the actual lessons of modern therapy. It’s a bizarre spectacle, like a hospital where fake doctors know the words for every disease but half of the surgeries result in sepsis. In the open expanse of the internet, we could have built any kind of world. We built this one. Why have we done this to ourselves?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Nikki Haley, one of the many Republicans who swore to stop Donald Trump in 2016 and then became a loyal supporter, is now running against Trump. Her campaign is already a collection of meaningless platitudes and she is unlikely to win, but she is the essential example of why the current GOP cannot be trusted with power.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Requiem for the Spartans
Eagles are falling, bears are going blind: Bird flu is already a tragedy.
Trump’s last-ditch gamble to avoid indictment
Why Did She Bother?I will admit, as a charter Never Trumper, that I was also an early adopter of “Never Haley.” This is because I attach never to any candidate in 2024 who feinted at opposing Trump and then bent the knee to him later. But even in a party of cowards and hucksters, few people can rival Haley when it comes to platinum-tier opportunism.Back in 2016, the then–South Carolina governor made a number of excellent points about why Donald Trump was unfit for public office. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” she said at a Marco Rubio rally seven years ago this month. (Yes, a Marco Rubio rally. Such things once existed.) “That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”But it’s who Nikki Haley was, at least for a while. We might attribute some of her later cringe-inducing sycophancy for Trump to her position in his White House, but even after the January 6 insurrection, as the former Republican operative Stuart Stevens noted recently, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” In late 2021, months after the Capitol attack, she said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham, but she’s certainly putting in the effort.The video announcing Haley’s candidacy was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened. As an Indian American woman in a party whose standard-bearer is an endless stream of misogynistic and racist nuttery, her chances seem remote. (Right now, Haley is polling somewhere between Mike Pence and a dust bunny; she’s tied at 3 percent with a hypothetical Rubio candidacy.) So why is she running at all?One possibility is that she’s getting out in front and taking some heat from Trump as a way of providing top cover to other candidates who will then reward her with the vice-president spot. It’s also possible that she thinks she can win. But it seems that Haley is just another Republican politician who is willing to make deals with the MAGA base if doing so is the price of remaining in public life. Haley, like Graham, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, and so many others, sees principles as disposable, making her yet another example of why the GOP cannot be trusted with power. Haley knows how to say the right things about how the violence of January 6 was bad, but to this day she refuses to hold Trump accountable, and so there is no way to know if she or any other candidate will withstand the antidemocratic demands of Republican primary voters. For Republicans in elected office, the GOP base is now so hostile to our democratic institutions that loyalty to the Constitution has become an unaffordable political luxury.Another warning sign is that Haley and others have no apparent interest in changing any of these views among the GOP electorate. For all her talk about “a new generation,” Haley knows that the Republican base doesn’t want to move on. Those voters, to judge from the polls, want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.Some of the critics who come at the Never Trumpers from the right will likely argue that rejecting someone such as Haley means, in effect, that Never Trump means Always Democrats, based on the magical thinking that Haley and other Republicans, if only given the chance, can restore some sanity to the party. After all, Haley’s a relatively centrist Republican, the kind who was at home in the old GOP of candidates such as the two George Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. She isn’t going to lose all her political moorings just because the base fell in love with Trump for a while, is she?Allow me to remind you that Elise Stefanik exists. She was once the kind of Republican that Haley claims to be, but led by her ambition and fueled by her liquid-nitrogen cynicism, she has since fused herself to Trump. (And it’s paying off for her: At 38 years old, she’s the House GOP conference chair.) To win in 2024, Haley and every other Republican candidate are going to turn into some version of Trump, or Stefanik, or Vance, and this makes every one of them untrustworthy around the levers of national power.To note this is not to be a permanent friend or foe of any one party. Rather, it is a recognition of political reality. As a former Republican, I’d welcome the spirited primary between, say, former Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, and former Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. But because I currently live on this planet, I recognize that the GOP race is going to be a Trumpier-than-thou contest among imitators of Trump’s hideous shtick, all of them pretenders to Trump’s gilt-and-glitz throne.Donald Trump is still the leader of the GOP and its choice (so far) for president in 2024, and Haley, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others, is courting Trump’s base. This means appeasing people who refuse to hold Trump responsible for trying to overthrow our government. As I wrote when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, and as I will continue to insist so long as the GOP resists reckoning with his legacy, no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.Related:
What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina
Why aren’t more people running for president?
The Congressional Budget Office said that the U.S. is on track to add almost $19 trillion in new debt over 10 years, about $3 trillion more than was previously forecast.  
Some residents of East Palestine, Ohio, have refused to return home a week after an evacuation order was lifted, concerned about long-term health effects from the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals.
The Justice Department is closing its sex-trafficking investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and will not charge him.
The Weekly Planet: Electric cars are basically just cars now, Emma Marris writes.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf makes the case against internet pile-ons.
Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Youness Srhiri / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Don’t Be Embarrassed to Commit to the BitBy Michael Waters
Before last summer, Adonna Biel, a 27-year-old who works in communications, did not consider herself a fan of the high-energy rapper Pitbull. She knew the hits—“Timber,” featuring Kesha; the club smash “I Know You Want Me”—because Pitbull was elemental to the 2010s pop music that Biel had grown up hearing. But she’d given Pitbull little thought until last July, when she heard that he was performing an hour away from where she lived in Washington, D.C. She mentioned it offhandedly to some work friends. Things escalated. Within days, Biel and five of her colleagues—who had spent hardly any time together outside of the office—got their hands on VIP tickets.
Not only that: They assembled a collaborative playlist of Pitbull tracks. They rented a car, which they dubbed the “Pitbus,” to take them to the concert. On the ride over, one co-worker passed around a bald cap. (Pitbull is famously bald.) And at the concert itself, Biel bought a Pitbull shirt.
They did it all, Biel told me, to commit to the bit—a phrase with roots in the stand-up-comedy scene but that has, in recent years, come to describe something of a Gen Z and younger-Millennial life practice. When you want to act in a way that’s a little embarrassing or out of character, it’s easier to frame it as a kind of extended charade.
Military history doesn’t say what Ukraine’s critics think.
What not to ask me about my long COVID
A strange, paranoid new crime drama
Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty
Read. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, a sweeping Silicon Valley history by Malcolm Harris.Watch. Need a midweek movie night? Try one of these 26 films that critics were wrong about.Play our daily crossword.P.S.On Monday, I wrote about the balloons shot down over North America by U.S. jets, and I suggested some classic rock about invading Martians. Today I’ll direct you to some classic television that you might have missed back in 1970, a British show titled UFO that I fell in love with instantly as a 10-year-old and plan to rewatch soon. UFO was one of the many shows that tumbled out of ITC, the production company founded by the legendary Sir Lew Grade. Some of these shows—Danger Man and The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan, and Space: 1999, starring Martin Landau—were great. Others were, shall we say, idiosyncratic but watchable. (Robert Vaughn, star of the ITC series The Protectors, admitted in later years that even he didn’t really understand some of the plots in the show.)UFO is a blast, right from Barry Gray’s late-1960s, swinging-Piccadilly instrumental theme song to the imagined world of 1980, in which the show is set. The governments of our planet, you see, have figured out that aliens are coming to Earth to harvest our organs (of course), and so they have secretly set up the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization, or SHADO, which is hidden under a film studio outside London and led by an American astronaut masquerading as the studio boss. (Why a film studio? Oh, shush.) This whole thing is supposed to be a gigantic secret, which is a neat trick, because SHADO has forces everywhere, including jets, a submarine, and tanks, along with a fully crewed moon base where all the women wear purple wigs—as one did on the moon in 1980, apparently. The whole thing is almost hallucinatory in its sets, colors, and cheap special effects, and I love every minute of it.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This spring, Harvard degree holders will have the opportunity to vote for new members of the Harvard Board of Overseers and elected directors of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA).
The elections will begin March 31. Eligible voters can vote either online or by paper ballot. Completed ballots must be received by 5 p.m. (EDT) on May 16. All holders of Harvard degrees as of Jan. 1, except officers of instruction and government at Harvard and members of the Harvard Corporation, are entitled to vote for Overseer candidates. All Harvard degree holders as of Jan. 1 may vote for HAA elected directors.
The candidates listed below have been named by the nominating committee appointed by the Harvard Alumni Association’s volunteer leadership.  They will be considered by voters for five anticipated vacancies on the Board of Overseers and for six openings among the HAA elected directors.
The candidates’ names appear below in ballot order, as determined by lot.
Overseer candidates
The HAA nominating committee has proposed the following candidates for the 2023 election:
Srishti Gupta Narasimhan
A.B. ’97, A.M. ’97, M.D. ’03, M.P.P. ’03
M.Phil ’98, University of Cambridge
Basel, Switzerland
Srishti Gupta Narasimhan, formerly of McKinsey & Co., is a board director of Idorsia Pharmaceuticals and the Norrsken Foundation.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell
A.B. ’87
Sylvia Mathews Burwell is president of American University and former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Vanessa W. Liu
A.B. ’96, J.D. ’03
Vanessa Liu is founder and CEO of Sugarwork, a software company that enables flexible work and knowledge transfer, and a past president of the Harvard Alumni Association.
Fiona Hill
A.M. ’91, Ph.D. ’98
Fiona Hill, former National Security Council senior director for European and Russian Affairs, is chancellor of Durham University (U.K.) and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  
Robert L. Satcher Jr.
M.D. ’94
Houston
Robert Satcher, a former NASA astronaut, is associate professor of orthopedic oncology at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
Jeffrey D. Dunn
A.B. ’77, M.B.A. ’81
Boston
Jeffrey Dunn is interim president and CEO of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and former executive chair, president, and CEO of Sesame Workshop.
Arturo Elizondo
A.B. ’14
San Francisco
Arturo Elizondo is co-founder and CEO of The EVERY Company (formerly Clara Foods), which seeks to unlock the potential of animal-free proteins.
 Luis A. Ubiñas
A.B. ’85, M.B.A. ’89
Weston, Vermont
Luis Ubiñas is former president of the Ford Foundation and current chair of the Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation.

HAA elected director candidates
The HAA nominating committee has proposed the following elected director candidates for the 2023 election:
Barbara R. Barreno-Paschall
A.B. ’07
Chicago
Miya Omori Yamada
Ed.M. ’89, Ed.M. ’92, Ed.D. ’93
A.B. ’88, Smith College
Pre- and lower school psychologist, Packer Collegiate Institute
Theodora Skeadas
A.B. ’12, M.P.P. ’16
Angela A. Sun
A.B. ’96, J.D. ’01
Rudy N. Brioché
M.P.P. ’00
B.A. ’92, Rutgers College; J.D. ’95, University of Maryland
Vice president for Global Public Policy and Policy Counsel, Comcast Corporation
Alexandria, Virginia
Anirudh Suri
M.P.A. ’14
B.A. ’06, Haverford College; M.B.A. ’12, University of Pennsylvania
Founding partner, India Internet Fund and Zanskar Climate Fund
New Delhi, India
Jason W. Young
A.B. ’04
Atlanta
Yvonne O. Osirim
A.B.  ’01, J.D. ’07
Executive director, Human Health Ethics and Compliance, Merck
Judith L. Norsigian
A.B. ’70
The above candidates for both Overseer and HAA elected director emerged from this past fall’s deliberations of the alumni-led HAA nominating committee. The committee’s voting members include 13 alumni, broadly diverse in their backgrounds and experience, who are appointed by the HAA’s volunteer leadership. Among the committee’s members are three current or recent Overseers, who bring direct knowledge of the workings and needs of the Board.
The nominating committee selects candidates through extensive deliberations conducted in a series of meetings each fall. In formulating its slates , the committee reviews materials about hundreds of prospective candidates suggested by alumni and others in the Harvard community.
In developing a diverse slate of Overseer candidates, while taking account of the Board’s present composition and the University’s future needs, the nominating committee considers candidates with prior board service and an understanding of complex organizations; experiences and accomplishments in an academic or professional domain; a broad interest in and concern for higher education, including the interests of Harvard and the general quality and ongoing development of its education and research mission; a commitment to investing the time and energy required for effective service; and the ability to lead as well as to build consensus.
The Board of Overseers is one of Harvard’s two governing boards, along with the President and Fellows, also known as the Corporation. Formally established in 1642, the board plays an integral role in the governance of the University. As a central part of its work, the board directs the visitation process, the primary means for periodic external assessment of Harvard’s Schools and departments. Through its array of standing committees, and the roughly 50 visiting committees that report to them, the board probes the quality of Harvard’s programs and assures that the University remains true to its charter as a place of learning. More generally, drawing on its members’ diverse experience and expertise, the board provides counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities, plans, and strategic initiatives. The board also has the power of consent to certain actions such as the election of Corporation members. The current membership of the board is listed here.
The HAA Board, including its elected directors, is an advisory board that aims to foster a sense of community, engagement, and University citizenship among Harvard alumni around the world. The work focuses on developing volunteer leadership and increasing and deepening alumni engagement through an array of programs that support alumni communities worldwide. In recent years, the board’s priorities have included strengthening outreach to recent graduates and graduate school alumni; supporting anti-racism work in alumni communities; and continuing to build and promote inclusive communities.

When I was a kid, fear of overpopulation was all the rage. Paul Ehrlich’s doomsaying The Population Bomb sold millions – I remember encountering it regularly during my endless boyhood bookstore browsing, just down the shelf from The Late Great Planet Earth and Chariots of the Gods? Vegetable-averse kids like myself were often scolded at the dinner table to remember the starving children in India. And popular culture assiduously mined the topic for material, never more memorably than in the final installment of Charlton Heston’s trilogy of anti-Promethean disaster flicks, Soylent Green (spoiler alert).
Ehrlich’s book came out in 1968, just as the assumptions underlying his nightmare prophecy of mass famines around the world were unraveling. The Green Revolution, which began with technology transfer initiatives in Mexico during the 1940s and 50s, spread to India and elsewhere around the world during the 1960s, leading in rapid fashion to dramatic increases in crop yields. As a result, the foretold famines never materialized.
Meanwhile, the global fertility rate peaked in 1965 at over 5 children per woman. Since then, it has been in relentless decline – now all the way down to 2.3. While the Green Revolution was the product of innovation and thus the resulting productivity spike was legitimately unexpected, the drop in birthrates merely recapitulated at the global level a dynamic that had begun in rich countries a century earlier. Between 1870 and 1920, fertility rates fell by 30 to 50 percent in western Europe and the United States. Along with a corresponding, and generally earlier, drop-off in mortality rates, this phenomenon is known as the “demographic transition” – the sea change from a high birth-rate, high death-rate society to one with low birth and death rates.

It’s no coincidence that the precipitous drop-off in North Atlantic birthrates kicked off around 1870 – the same year that Brad DeLong selected as the starting point for his history of humanity’s “stumbling toward utopia.” The demographic transition was just one spectacular byproduct of the larger transition from mass poverty to mass affluence made possible by capitalist mass production. The rising demand for literate workers, along with the rising probability that children would survive till adulthood, incentivized greater parental investment of resources in each child; urbanization increased the cost of raising kids, while expanding economic opportunities for women increased the opportunity cost of having extra ones. These and related factors combined to transform kids from productive assets into increasingly costly splurges – and parental demand for children fell accordingly. And as the novel social conditions produced by industrialization spread from the North Atlantic to the rest of the world, the demographic transition went global – and at a much faster pace than before (see chart below), as catch-up opportunities extended to demographics as well as growth. Consequently, world population, which passed the 8 billion mark last year, is now expected to level off at around 10-11 billion people.

The defusing of the population bomb was a triumph of capitalist wealth creation – but it came with a catch. Birth rates fell enough to avert Malthusian catastrophe, but then they kept right on falling. In the 1970s, sub-replacement fertility rates – that is, rates below the roughly 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a stable population – began cropping up in rich democracies. But low fertility didn’t confine itself to rich countries; it kept spreading. As of now, roughly half the world’s population resides in countries with sub-replacement fertility. Here are the current fertility rates of some representative countries:
United States1.6Brazil1.7Chile1.6Germany1.5France1.8United Kingdom1.6Sweden1.7Italy1.2Russia1.5Ukraine1.2Australia1.6Japan1.3China1.7Thailand1.5South Korea0.8
And consider the trend in some big countries with fertility rates still above replacement levels: India: 2.3 today, down from 4.0 in 1990; Indonesia, 2.3 today, down from 3.1 in 1990; Argentina, 2.3 today, down from 3.0 in 1990; Mexico, 2.1 today, down from 3.5 in 1990. Africa is the only continent where high fertility remains the rule, but it is dropping there as well: The average fertility rate is now 4.2, down from 6.0 in 1990.
With all due awareness of the fact that fertility rates could well rebound, it is important to recognize what the current widespread “birth dearth,” if it is not reversed, portends over the longer term. Look at South Korea, a country known for its rapid economic rise, industrial prowess, and now its blockbuster cultural exports – but which also has the dubious distinction of possessing the lowest fertility rate in the world. If current trends persist, South Korea’s population – currently just under 52 million – is projected to drop below 38 million by 2060; by 2100, its population will have dropped below 16 million, less than a third of what it is today.
It can take an extended stretch of sub-replacement fertility before a country’s overall population starts to decline. Because there has been population growth between the births of the older population and those of the first low-fertility cohorts, births even at the reduced rate will still outnumber deaths for a span of years. And if a country experiences net-positive immigration, it can keep population growth going considerably longer. On the other hand, countries from which emigration is net-positive will encounter population decline more quickly.
Population decline has already begun in some places. Japan’s population peaked in 2008 at just over 128 million, falling by almost 3 million since then. South Korea’s population peaked in 2020 and has dipped the past two years. If China’s population hasn’t peaked already, it’s likely to happen in the next couple of years. All of these countries have historically experienced limited immigration (although the pace in Japan has picked up recently), and so they enjoy less insulation from the demographic consequences of low fertility.
It is in eastern Europe, though, where population loss has been most widespread and dramatic – due to a combination of low fertility and a wave of emigration since the collapse of communism as people sought greater opportunities to the west. Between 1992 and 2016, the countries of this region lost about 18 million people, or about 6 percent of their total population. Latvia has already lost nearly 30 percent of its people; Lithuania’s and Bulgaria’s populations have fallen by nearly 25 percent. The astonishing emptying of the region is projected to continue apace: Latvia is on track to shed nearly a quarter of its remaining population over the next three decades; Bulgaria, whose population has already fallen from just below 9 million in the 1980s to under 7 million today, is shrinking by 50,000 people a year.
The U.S. fertility rate dipped below 2.0 in the early 1970s, then recovered to basically replacement level between 1990 and 2010 before sliding downward again. At the same time, though, the United States was undergoing a wave of mass immigration, with the foreign-born portion of the population rising from 4.7 percent in 1970 to 13.6 percent today. But just as birthrates have slumped over the past decade or so, the combination of the Trump administration and COVID-19 has caused annual immigration totals to fall precipitously. As a result, U.S. population growth during the decade 2010-2020 was the slowest since the Depression-era 1930s.
Although the U.S. population overall continues to inch upwards, population decline is already a grim reality in much of the country. Between 2007 and 2017, about half of U.S. counties, home to roughly 50 million Americans, saw their populations shrink. In an astonishing 80 percent of U.S. counties, with a combined population of nearly 150 million, the number of prime-age workers (ages 25-45) fell during that same period.
As that last figure reveals, low fertility affects not only the size of the population, but its composition as well. While low birthrates can lead eventually to population loss, their more immediate impact is to commence the gradual and ongoing aging of the population. The U.S. median age is now 38.8 years, up from 30.0 in 1980. Back in 1980, people 65 and over constituted 11 percent of the population; now it’s up to 16 percent. In the EU, people 65 and over now equal 29 percent of the working-age population (20 to 64) – almost double the ratio back in 1965. By 2050, half or more of EU residents will be 50 or older. In Japan, where the median age is now 48.4, people 65 or older make up 29 percent of the whole population. (By way of comparison, the youngest country in the world right now is Niger, with a median age of only 14.9 years.)
So how does the global demographic U-turn affect the outlook for addressing the permanent problem? What is the impact of the slowdown in population growth, and the prospect of outright population decline, on our chances for learning to “live wisely and agreeably and well”? Attentive readers will recall that, before taking December off to suffer COVID-19 and celebrate Christmas, I was doing a series of essays on the many and varied causes of declining economic and social dynamism – and that I wasn’t done yet. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that, as I see it, the worldwide collapse in fertility poses a serious threat to the continued vitality of the capitalist system.
Awareness of the problem remains far from widespread. I reckon more people today are still worried about the nonexistent danger of runaway population increase than share my concern about demographic stagnation and decline. To the extent people are even aware of the dramatic worldwide fall in fertility, they are more likely to see it as a lucky break that has saved us from the population bomb than as the Charybdis to overpopulation’s Scylla. And to be fair, it’s easy to put a plausible, positive gloss on current trends. The prospects for raising living standards in poorer countries seem like they should improve with the relaxation of population pressures; likewise, the problems of climate change and environmental degradation more broadly would appear to be more manageable in the absence of ongoing population growth.
After all, we know that the richest countries in the world all have low fertility (well, with the singular exception of Israel), while the poorest countries still exhibit high fertility. Accordingly, it’s clear that low fertility is associated with economic success – so what’s the problem? The problem is too much of a good thing: the relationship between fertility decline and economic growth appears to be shaped like an inverted U, with falling births per woman aiding economic dynamism to a point, but then undermining it thereafter.
At the beginning of the demographic transition, a high-birthrate, high-death-rate society is very young, with a median age of 15 or so. That means that most of its people are children, below the modern working age; its “dependency ratio,” or the ratio of people too young or old to work to the working-age population, is accordingly quite high. As death rates fall, the population starts to bulge; but then, as birthrates start falling as well, that bulge begins to age. As the bulge is centered on the prime working years, the transitioning society reaps a “demographic dividend”: the payoff in added economic productivity that accompanies rapid growth in the labor force and a declining dependency ratio.
But as the demographic transition is completed, the society reaches the top of that inverted U and begins a downward slide. Now, as the bulge population starts retiring, the dependency ratio begins climbing again. Labor force growth slows, which means that labor productivity will need to rise if growth rates are to remain stable. But the aging process is simultaneously degrading the productivity of the work force: In a modern economy, worker productivity generally peaks in a person’s 40s, so well before retirement, workers’ productivity begins winding downward.
Accordingly, the association between falling fertility and rising economic growth is a one-off and temporary affair, lasting only decades. By contrast, this underlying relationship held steady from the dawn of the human species until the advent of modern economic growth: the larger a society’s population, the wealthier it tended to be; and the wealthier a society was, the faster its population grew. Compare the state of development in Eurasia in 1491 to that in the pre-Columbian Americas; compare the Americas to Australia before Europeans arrived; compare Australia to Tasmania.
Back when it was possible for human populations to be isolated from each other for thousands of years, larger societies could produce more useful ideas that translated into larger, more intricate, and more productive divisions of labor.
At the root of this dynamic was the nonrivalrousness of ideas. Because new, useful knowledge can be consumed by some without in any way reducing its availability to others, it follows that a larger society can produce more new, useful knowledge that all of its members can share. But during the agrarian era, technological progress did not occur fast enough to change people’s dominant reproductive strategy – namely, to have as many children as they could afford to raise. Accordingly, such progress as did occur generally translated into a rising population rather than rising living standards.
With the arrival of industrialization, the connection between rising living standards and rising fertility was finally broken. The economic incentives to have more children (to help out on the farm, to take care of you in your old age, to “hoard” children against the distinct possibility that some of them will die) steadily diminished, while the incentives to have fewer children (urbanization makes raising kids more expensive, expanding economic opportunities for women increase the opportunity cost of having more kids, rising returns to education favor investing more parental resources in fewer children) steadily sharpened. (You should check out the new book by Oded Galor for more details.)
Much has changed, then, but one thing hasn’t: Ideas remain nonrivalrous, which means that more people still should result in more new, useful ideas. Which means, in turn, that – ceteris paribus – slower population growth should translate into a slower pace of innovation. Not everything is held equal, though: Slowing workforce growth and accompanying labor shortages increase the incentives for labor-saving automation and can thereby lead to accelerated productivity growth.
While we need to keep in mind this countervailing factor, the evidence to date shows that it has been outweighed by all the ways that an aging society acts as a drag on growth. The U.S. labor force participation rate peaked in 2000 at 67.3 percent; by February 2020, on the eve of the pandemic, it had fallen to 63.4 percent – the same as back in 1978 – and most of that decline was due to aging. With labor hours per capita falling during the 21st century, a labor productivity boom was needed to forestall falling growth. It hasn’t materialized – and a growing body of research points the blame at falling population growth and aging.
Several recent studies conclude that aging is the major factor behind this century’s ongoing decline in business dynamism – i.e., new business formation and the churn of workers between employers and occupations. This drop-off in “creative destruction” is bad news for productivity growth, which in turn is bad news for maintaining GDP growth in the face of aging. A 2019 study, looking at regions throughout the OECD, found that regions aging 10 percentage points faster than the country’s average rate experienced productivity growth that was 1.5 percentage points lower than the national average. A 2016 paper, updated in 2022, concluded that a 10 percent increase in the share of the U.S. population 60 years and older reduced per capita GDP by 5.5 percent. Accordingly, the authors found that aging was responsible for lowering the growth of per capita GDP by 0.3 percentage points a year from 1980 to 2010. I could go on, but you get the point.
And what we’re going through now may just be a taste of worse to come. I mentioned earlier that the prevailing opinion among demographers is that world population will ultimately stabilize at 10-11 billion people. But given the rapid global spread of sub-replacement fertility, how confident should we be that fertility rates will eventually stabilize and even rebound? A 2020 paper in The Lancet looks ahead to 2100 and sees a shrinking global population: According to the study’s projections, world population will peak at 9.7 billion in 2064 and then fall to 8.8 billion by the end of the century. In that world, the populations of Japan, Thailand, and Spain will have dropped more than 50 percent from peak levels; China’s population will have been nearly cut in half. The U.S. population will be roughly where it is today, having been buoyed by immigration.
So what are the prospects for global capitalism on a shrinking planet? Stanford economist Charles Jones, always worth reading on future prospects for growth, has examined the question and come to this blunt and dispiriting conclusion: “When population growth is negative, both endogenous and semi-endogenous growth models produce what we call the Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”
Advocates of “degrowth” look forward to such a scenario with eager anticipation: They imagine that stepping off the GDP treadmill and reducing humanity’s environmental footprint will, at long last, enable us to “live wisely and agreeably and well.” On the plus side, a diminished human presence would surely bring some environmental benefits: forests can grow back, habitats can be reclaimed, and species now at the brink of extinction can get the breathing room they need to recover. Wildlife is already returning to the abandoned villages that now dot Japan and Europe.
On the whole, though, technological stagnation is terrible news for environmental conservation and reclamation. Arresting technological development at the level of heavy reliance on fossil fuels and factory farming is analogous to a rock climber pausing halfway up a cliff face: This is not a viable stopping point. If we don’t keep pushing upward until we get to clean energy and humane, sustainable food production, some catastrophe surely awaits.
Meanwhile, the hope that a shrinking population and economic stagnation will be a boon for overall human well-being flies in the face of contemporary evidence. For one thing, maintaining the social protections provided by contemporary welfare states will be an increasingly tall order. As the old-age dependency ratio ratchets ever upwards, the tax burden imposed on the shrinking working-age population will eventually grow unbearable.
Beyond that, look at the quality of life in the growing number of shrinking cities and towns today. Once population decline proceeds far enough, an unstoppable death spiral results: Declining tax revenues mean declining services, making the location even less appealing and thus spurring additional out-migration. Employment declines faster than population: In America’s most rapidly shrinking counties, 29 percent of prime-age men were jobless between 2013 and 2017, compared to 17 percent in the fastest growing counties. The overall mood is bleak and depressing: boarded-up downtowns, closed schools, empty playgrounds, an increasingly geriatric population playing out the string without the consolation of a rising generation to keep the world spinning. Aging, with its physical deterioration and inevitable losses of friends and loved ones, is a bitter enough pill; try choking it down with the bile that rises from watching your community and way of life die with you. Unsurprisingly, “deaths of despair” from suicide, drugs, and alcohol are positively associated with rural location and vacant housing units in the area – both of which are associated in turn with population loss.
It should be equally unsurprising that those parts of the advanced democracies now in the grip of demographic decline have become hotbeds of authoritarian populism. According to analysis by Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution, roughly half of U.S. counties lost population during the 2010s; President Trump won a majority of the vote in some 90 percent of them. Along similar lines, a fascinating recent paper titled “Golfing with Trump” compared election results in 2012, 2016, and 2020 to identify those areas that swung in Trump’s favor relative to Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. They found that those decisive areas were once tight-knit communities with high social capital that had experienced protracted periods of population and employment decline. And they note that this connection between depopulation and populism does not appear to be unique to the United States:
There are important parallels with the experience of other countries which suggest that our results may be more generalisable. For example, the Gilets Jaunes movement came from the declining peripheries of rural France; the rise of the Lega across many parts of Italy has been ignited by the long-term stagnation of the tight-knit communities of the formerly highly successful industrial districts in Northern and Central Italy; the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Germany comes, in part, from the declining industrial and small-town communities of Eastern Germany.
One should also mention Eastern Europe, where authoritarian populism has risen to power in Hungary and is on the march in Poland. Like their fellow partisans in the United States and western Europe, populists in those countries have exploited fears of out-of-control immigration – even though immigration in the east is all but nonexistent. Those countries have, however, been experiencing high levels of emigration, which along with falling birth rates have produced dramatic and continuing population declines. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes note in their book on the rise of illiberalism The Light that Failed:
[Hungarian prime minister Victor} Orbán gives the game away when he says, “Migration for us is surrender… we want Hungarian children.” His pro-procreation policy is a better indicator of the government’s real worries than anti-immigration talk in the absence of immigrants. Exciting the public’s fears of a non-existent migrant “invasion” which can be successfully blocked by militarized borders may be one way the region’s populist politicians exploit their electorate’s fears of national extinction by a slow process of depopulation that has taken place over the last decades and against which hardened borders and discrimination against foreign-born inhabitants are obviously no defence.
So can the fertility collapse be turned around? A number of countries, including Hungary as mentioned above, have tried their hand at pro-natalist policies – bounties for babies, subsidies for childrearing more generally – and some have succeeded in nudging birth rates upward. But nowhere have such policies succeeded decisively – that is, in lifting a country that has sunk into sub-replacement fertility back onto the path of sustainable population growth. Given the rapid global spread of sub-replacement fertility – a phenomenon that has cut across religious, linguistic, and ethnic lines as well as political regime types and all but the lowest levels of economic development – we must suppose that this trend is being driven by deep structural factors. Fiddling with economic incentives at the margin may help, but is unlikely to be enough. Fertility may rebound on its own, but the scale of policy interventions would need to escalate dramatically to be capable of turning things around.
This brings me to the end the end of my survey of the causes that underlie capitalism’s crisis of dynamism. To recap:

Innovation and growth get harder over time as low-hanging fruit is progressively exhausted.
Greater wealth naturally breeds caution and conservatism, as people with a lot to lose naturally prioritize hanging on to what they’ve got over chasing new gains.
A strong cultural aversion to technologies that empower large-scale interventions in the physical world – what I call the anti-Promethean backlash – arose with the emergence of the environmental movement during the 1960s and acts today as a major barrier to technological progress.
The arrival of mass affluence and the post-industrial economy has changed our society’s fundamental orientation from solving problems in the physical world to solving problems of social relations and psychic health, in the process degrading our ability to engage in the former.
The lack of any systemic competition since the fall of communism has made conditions less favorable for institutional innovation.
The global collapse in fertility means that population growth – the fundamental driver of technological progress throughout human history – is grinding to a halt.

In my next essay, I’ll wrestle with the unsettling question that this review implicitly poses: Is capitalist dynamism doomed?
The post The global fertility collapse appeared first on Niskanen Center.

This is an issue that will not go away – do masks and mask mandates work to reduce the spread of COVID? It’s actually a good thing that the question continues to be researched. This is actually a difficult question to pin down definitively, so more research is always better. What is unfortunate is the degree the question has been politicized. One’s answer to this question is less likely to be determined by the science than your political affiliation.

A recent review of studies has rekindled the debate, and is making the rounds within the political right media. Anti-maskers are treating the study as if it is the final word in the debate – but it isn’t. The study is a Cochrane review, which does give it some gravitas, but it has important limitations – specifically in the kinds of evidence that is reviews.

There are different ways to address the question – do masks work to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses in general and COVID-19 specifically? I reviewed these types of evidence here, but will summarize quickly. We can test whether or not different kinds of masks reduce the spread of respiratory droplets, which are the known primary mechanism by which COVID is spread. The answer is yes, for surgical masks and N95 masks, and equivocal for cloth masks. So face masks do what they are supposed to do, and better masks do it better.

Do they work out in the community when people wear them? This question has a lot of potential confounding variables, and this is why there are so many different results from research. One factor is – how much is the infection being studied spreading in the community. Studies looking at mask wearing during low risk situations do not find any statistical benefit (likely because the baseline risk is too low), but during high risk situations they are more likely to find a benefit and the magnitude and statistical significance of that benefit will be greater.

Also, how are we measuring infections? Do we simply allow people to self report, do we check public health records, or do we only count laboratory-confirmed infections? Studies can also focus on individual or on communities. They can be controlled or observational. They can also follow an intention-to-treat model, looking not specifically at whether masks work but whether mask mandates or other public interventions work. These are actually different questions. Masks may work when worn properly, but mask interventions fail due to low compliance (people wearing the wrong masks, or wearing them incorrectly, or not wearing them when they are supposed to). Further, if the people in the population being studied are already taking preventive precautions, this will dilute out the effect of the intervention. You can’t force people to not wear a mask or to expose themselves to infection. You can only encourage them to do so or make it easier vs doing nothing.

It’s worth pointing out that all of these potential confounding factors decrease the observed effect of masks and mask interventions, with one exception. As one systematic review concludes, controlled studies can only create a false negative for the efficacy of mask-wearing, not a false positive, and they find that such studies actually underestimate the effect of mask wearing. However, observational studies may overestimate the efficacy of mask wearing in one way – mask wearers may engage in other protective activities, such as avoiding indoor crowds. However, again this depends on your question. If the question is, does wearing a specific type of mask in a specific way reduce the risk of infection, observational studies may overestimate that effect. But if your question is, do mask mandates work, then it doesn’t matter. If mandating mask wearing makes people engage in other good hygiene and protective behavior, and it total they reduce spread, that’s a good thing. And in fact the evidence is strongest for this effect.

With this background it is also important to note that there is no one perfect study that addresses this question. There are only studies with different strengths and weaknesses and different trade-offs.

For example, one of the bigger trials was the DANMASK trial, which was a randomized controlled trial with statistically negative results (although a trend of benefit). But this study has multiple limitations – the study was only powered to see a 50% reduction in infection. The rate in the community was already very low. Compliance with mask wearing in that group was <50%. Infections were self-reported. The dropout rate was high – 16%. But anti-maskers, or uninformed journalists, can point to this study and say it shows masks don’t work.

If we look at all the evidence we do see conflicting results, but in the whole there is a good signal that proper mask wearing is effective at reducing the risk of infections in relatively high risk environments. As I wrote previously:

“Epidemiological studies provide perhaps the best evidence for the efficacy of masks, or more specifically, mask policies. One study comparing mask-wearing policies in different states in the US found that after states initiated mask-wearing policies, the spread of the virus decreased. Another study found that the risk of a spreading event was far greater in “mask-off” social settings than “mask-on” settings. Comparing countries with different mask-wearing policies also finds a good correlation with reduced spread.”

Further, during social distancing and mask wearing policies, the rate of all respiratory infections plummeted. We basically had no flu season for the last two years, and now that policies have eased, the flu is coming back. Of course, this effect is not specific to masks and includes all precautions. But this data unequivocally shows that together these precautions work.

Let’s take a look at the recent Cochrane review. This is a review only of controlled studies – the kind of study that is most likely to underestimate the effect of mask-wearing. They did not included other kinds of studies. Not all of the studies reviewed were of COVID – they included studies of other respiratory viruses (which therefore may be different) and they included studies that were not taking place in the middle of a pandemic. This is a huge red flag, as it is pretty clear from existing data that masks only work in high-risk situations.

The one study they included of health professionals in a high risk setting only compared surgical masks with N956 masks, which showed no statistical difference, but did not compare either to no mask. Also, health care professionals are the most likely to engage in the full range of protective behavior (distancing, hand washing, protective face shields, gloves and gowns). Given this, it is not surprise that the difference between a surgical mask and an N95 mask was not statistically significant.

There are other criticisms of this review as well. The studies that took place in a hospital setting included part-time mask wearing, only when with patients. But the data shows that mask wearing only works when you where them continuously when in the hospital, not just in the patient room. They combined data from different settings and with different interventions. They also did not consider the effect of the infected person wearing a mask, only the effect on the wearer. But we know that masks are most effective when everyone wears them – both the giver and the receiver.

But the biggest error I see in reporting this study is the conclusion that it shows that “mask mandates don’t work”, when that was not even studied. Studies looking specifically at mask mandates show that they do work. The most recent and largest study looking at this concludes:

Our estimates imply that the mean observed level of mask wearing corresponds to a 19% decrease in the reproduction number R. We also assess the robustness of our results in 60 tests spanning 20 sensitivity analyses. In light of these results, policy makers can effectively reduce transmission by intervening to increase mask wearing.

This recent Cochrane review is very limited in scope and is highly problematic in its methods. The most we can conclude from it is that we need better and more relevant controlled trials of mask wearing to more precisely determine its effect on the spread of COVID. But it does not show that mask wearing does not work or that mask policies don’t work. Further, if we look at the totality of the evidence (not just these trials) the best current conclusions are:

Properly wearing face masks when in public during high risk of spread reduces the risk of spread of respiratory viruses in general and COVID specifically.

During a pandemic of a respiratory virus, mask mandates are an effective public health measure.

N95 masks likely offer the best protection, but need to be worn over the mouth and nose to be effective, and need to be worn continuously when in public (not just in targeted situations).

It was late fall of 2022 when David Stallknecht heard that bodies were raining from the sky.Stallknecht, a wildlife biologist at the University of Georgia, was already fearing the worst. For months, wood ducks had been washing up on shorelines; black vultures had been teetering out of tree tops. But now thousands of ghostly white snow-goose carcasses were strewn across agricultural fields in Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. The birds had tried to take flight, only to plunge back to the ground. “People were saying they were literally dropping down dead,” Stallknecht told me. Even before he and his team began testing specimens in the lab, they suspected they knew what they would find: yet another crop of casualties from the deadly strain of avian influenza that had been tearing across North America for roughly a year.Months later, the bird-flu outbreak continues to rage. An estimated 58.4 million domestic birds have died in the United States alone. Farms with known outbreaks have had to cull their chickens en masse, sending the cost of eggs soaring; zoos have herded their birds indoors to shield them from encounters with infected waterfowl. The virus has been steadily trickling into mammalian populations—foxes, bears, mink, whales, seals—on both land and sea, fueling fears that humans could be next. Scientists maintain that the risk of sustained spread among people is very low, but each additional detection of the virus in something warm-blooded and furry hints that the virus is improving its ability to infiltrate new hosts. “Every time that happens, it’s another chance for that virus to make the changes that it needs,” says Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “Right now, this virus is a kid in a candy store.”[Read: Get used to expensive eggs]A human epidemic, though, remains a gloomy forecast that may not come to pass. In the meantime, the outbreak has already been larger, faster-moving, and more devastating to North America’s wildlife than any other in recorded history, and has not yet shown signs of stopping. “I would use just one word to describe it: unprecedented,” says Shayan Sharif, an avian immunologist at Ontario Veterinary College. “We have never seen anything like this before.” This strain of bird flu is unlikely to be our next pandemic. But a flu pandemic has already begun for countless other creatures—and it could alter North America’s biodiversity for good.Deadly strains of avian flu have been ferried onto North American shores multiple times before, and rapidly petered out. That was the case in 2014, when a highly virulent version of the virus crossed the Pacific from Asia and invaded U.S. poultry farms, forcing workers to exterminate millions of chickens and turkeys. The brutal interventions worked: “They did all the right things, and nipped it in the bud,” says Nicole Nemeth, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Georgia. Hardly any wild birds were affected; egg prices bumped up briefly, then settled back roughly to baseline. “It just kind of died down,” Nemeth told me. “And everyone breathed a sigh of relief.”This time, though, the dynamics are different. The epidemic, which first erupted in Europe in the fall of 2021, appears to have crossed the Atlantic into Canada, then zigzagged down into the U.S. around the start of last year. American scientists have detected the virus in more than 150 wild and domestic avian species and at least a dozen different types of mammals. It’s by far the longest and most diverse list of victims the virus has ever claimed on this side of the world.Some birds are likely to make it through the outbreak just fine. For as long as humans have been aware of this particular strain of avian influenza, scientifically classed as H5N1, the virus has been relatively gentle on certain types of waterfowl, especially mallards, pintails, and other so-called dabbling ducks. “Some populations have a prevalence as high as 40 percent, and they’re as normal as normal could be,” Stallknecht said. Those same species have also been some of avian flu’s best chauffeurs in the past, silently spreading the feces-borne infection across countries and continents during their seasonal migrations.Others haven’t been so lucky. Some of the same respiratory issues that strike humans who have the flu—sneezing, coughing, pneumonia when the disease gets severe—can hit birds, too. But across a variety of susceptible species, necropsies show more extensive damage, with evidence of virus in various organs, including the liver, gut, and brain. The neurologic problems can be among the worst: Swans might swim in listless circles; geese might waddle shakily onto shores, their necks twisted and turned; eagles might flap defeatedly from their perches, unable to launch themselves into the air. Michelle Hawkins, a veterinarian at UC Davis, told me that several of the red-tailed hawks she’s treated in her clinic have arrived with their eyes shaking so vigorously from side to side that the spasms turn the animals’ head; others appear to gaze off into nothingness, unresponsive even when humans approach.Death can come swiftly—sometimes within a day or two of the infection’s start. Birds simply keel over as if they’ve been shot, their bodies dropping like rocks. On poultry farms, outbreaks can wipe out entire flocks in just two or three days. In wilder settings, locals have spotted bald eagles plummeting out of their nests, leaving shrieking chicks behind. By the time infected birds reach Hawkins in her clinic, “they’re usually almost dead,” she told me. “And we can’t figure out how to help them except to put them out of their misery.” Hawkins estimated that in the past few months alone, her team’s euthanasia rate has gone up by about 50 percent.Mammals so far haven’t fared much better. Last spring, the corpse of a dolphin infected with the virus was found wedged into a canal in Florida—around the same time that Wisconsin locals happened upon litters of ailing fox kits, drooling, twitching, and struggling to stand in the hours before they seized and died. In the fall, three young, flu-stricken grizzlies in Montana were euthanized after researchers noticed that the disoriented animals had begun to go blind. Wendy Puryear, a molecular virologist at Tufts University, told me that seals sick with the virus will sometimes convulse so badly that they can barely hold their bodies straight. Every seal she’s seen that tested positive has ended up dead within days. This month, researchers in Peru reported that they were picking up the virus in some of the sea lions that have died by the hundreds along the country’s coast; a similar situation may now be playing out among a number of Scotland’s seals.It’s hard to say why this outbreak is so much worse than the ones that came before. Microbial evolution may be one culprit: Flu viruses are particularly inclined to tweak their RNA code; when two genetically distinct versions of the pathogens wind up in the same cell, they can also swap bits of their genomes. This iteration of H5N1 may be particularly adept at sparking lethal disease—something Justin Brown, a veterinary pathologist at Penn State, thinks is quite likely, given how many animals have died. It may also be more easily exiting birds’ bodies in feces, or more efficiently entering cells in the airway or gut. “This particular virus seems to be better adapted to wild birds. I think that’s the key thing,” Stallknecht told me. As climate change alters migration schedules, and pushes certain avian species into more frequent contact with one another’s contaminated scat, the risks of intermingling are only growing. The greater the number of infections, the more animals will die. “It becomes a numbers game,” Stallknecht said.Flu viruses have never had much trouble spreading: They can be breathed out or defecated; they can persist on surfaces for hours, and in cool waters for days. But Webby suspects that the ballooning of this epidemic can be at least partly blamed on the severity of disease. “The easiest birds to catch are the ones that are sick,” he told me. Hawks, eagles, owls, and other predatory birds may be stumbling across dying ducks and eating them, unwittingly infecting themselves. Nemeth thinks that certain species, including black vultures, are now cutting out the middlebird and feasting on the carcasses of their own kin as they continue to die in droves. “They see dead tissue, they’re going to eat it,” she told me. It’s a morbid tragedy of abundance, as the virus climbs the food chain to reach species it hasn’t easily accessed before. “The biggest impact is on these atypical hosts,” Webby told me, which lack the prior exposures to the virus that might have helped protect them.Predation or scavenging of sick or dead birds is probably how certain mammals—grizzlies, foxes, opossums, and the like—are catching the virus too. The seals and dolphins present a bit more of a puzzle, Puryear told me, though it’s possible to guess at what’s at play. At least some types of seals have been documented consuming birds; other marine mammals might simply be gulping feces-infested water. A recent avian-flu outbreak at a mink farm in Spain suggests a more troubling mode of transmission: mammals repeatedly conveying the virus to one another—a possible first for H5N1. “That is really disconcerting,” Sharif told me. “It tells me the virus is adapting to mammals.”[Read: Will the world’s most worrying flu virus go pandemic?]Animals vulnerable to the virus don’t have many good options for protection. Some avian-flu vaccines have been used on certain poultry farms, mostly abroad. But some of the same issues that plague human-flu vaccines are obstacles in the bird world too, Brown told me: The ingredients of the shots aren’t always good matches for the circulating virus, and the immunizations, which may be pretty good at staving off severe disease, don’t do much to block infection or transmission, making outbreaks tough to contain. Wild birds, which can’t be corralled and immunized en masse, are essentially out of luck. Nemeth told me that some of her colleagues in Florida have been trying to clear the ground of carcasses so that they won’t become sources of infection for yet another unlucky mammal or bird. “But they just can’t keep up with the number of deaths,” she said. Essentially all avian species are thought to be susceptible to infection—and there’s simply no way to reach every bird, says Becky Poulson, an avian-flu researcher at the University of Georgia. After hopscotching across the globe for decades, H5N1 now seems very likely to be in North America for good, “part of the new normal here,” Poulson told me.Experts told me they’re hopeful that the outbreak will abate before long. But even if that happens, some species may not live to see it. North America’s birds already face a medley of threats—chemical pollution, window collisions, habitat destruction, roving colonies of feral cats—and some of them cannot sustain another blow. “This could be the last nail in the coffin for some species,” says Min Huang, who leads the migratory-bird program at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.The current epidemic “may not be directly affecting us, in that almost none of us are getting sick,” says Kishana Taylor, a virologist at Rutgers University. But the extent of its reach into wildlife means that humans will still notice its many impacts. In a world with fewer birds, other animals—such as coyotes, snakes, and even humans—might go hungrier, while the fish, insects, and rats that birds eat could experience population booms. The treetops and shorelines, once alive with song, could go silent; far fewer seeds might be dispersed. The U.S.’s national bird—one of the country’s few conservation success stories—could once again find itself pushed to the brink. Some locals in the Southeast have already told Nemeth that they’re feeling the absence of vultures, as roadside deer carcasses begin to fester in the sun. The bird pandemic will have its survivors. But they are likely to be living in a world that is quieter, lonelier, and harsher than it was before.

Updated at 11:21 a.m. ET on February 15, 2023.Commentators on the Ukraine war who think that American support for Ukraine is pointless or dangerous commonly reach for references to military history. They not only often get it wrong, but they frequently get it backwards, construing that history into a case for Russia’s likely success.Christopher Caldwell, for example, writes that American aid is intended to “fast-forward history, from World War I’s battles of position to World War II’s battles of movement,” and that this enterprise is doomed to fail. In his view, both Russia and Ukraine will continue to fight a war characterized by hordes of mud-covered soldiers huddling in freezing trenches before perishing in their thousands in a hail of fire as they go over the top, and some shipments of Western battle tanks to Ukraine will not stop that. Thus, and perversely, not bringing this futile war to an end by twisting Ukraine’s arm is America’s fault.What is wrong with the analogy? To begin with, the fact that Russian and Ukrainian soldiers huddle in dugouts and have to worry about hypothermia (the Russians more than the better-equipped Ukrainians) is something they share in common with soldiers in many wars. Trench warfare was not an innovation of the Great War, as a walk through the Civil War battlefields of Cold Harbor and Petersburg would show. The advent of long-range rifles in the mid-19th century quickly taught soldiers the imperative of digging in as soon as possible. They have done so ever since.[Eric Schlosser: The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory]Where references to World War I like Caldwell’s really break down, however, is in the fact that combat during World War I was not, in its concluding phase, characterized by the human-wave assaults familiar to us from movies about the war. The German offensives that nearly broke the Allies in the spring of 1918 relied on deep, accurate artillery fire followed by storm troops using infiltration attacks to achieve breakthroughs of up to 40 miles. That summer and fall, Allied offensives smashed German defenses, forcing that country to sue for peace. These were methodical combined-arms assaults in which the infantry was backed by tanks and aircraft in carefully coordinated attacks to seize terrain piece by piece. They succeeded even more definitively than had the Germans barely six months earlier. These operations, on both sides, shaped the tactics used in World War II in battles such as El Alamein, conducted by one of the promising young leaders of World War I, Bernard Montgomery.In contrast, the many costly small frontal attacks now being conducted by the Russian army are infinitely less sophisticated than either the German or Allied assaults of 1918. Indeed, on all evidence, the Russian army today is well-nigh incapable of conducting modern combined-arms warfare at scale.In some respects, the Russian military is now a pre-1918 army. Captured orders and observed behavior suggest an army that struggles to do much more than throw huge quantities of artillery shells at an enemy and then advance, often piecemeal, into a meat grinder. Conducting systematic reconnaissance, coordinating artillery and air support on the move, applying deep precision fires, executing combined-arms tactics, and synchronizing the maneuvering of large units all seem to be beyond the reach of the large majority of Russian forces. Although the Ukrainians do not have the capacity to coordinate and maneuver the way the United States Army does, they are a lot better than the Russians. The defeat of Russian forces outside Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson reveals as much.If the actual history of the First World War doesn’t offer grounds for abandoning Ukraine, how about the Second? After all, some Russian propagandists and Western pessimists point to that war as evidence of the futility of hoping to defeat the successors of the mighty Red Army. In this view Russia is, as the Soviet Union was, a country with nearly unlimited resources, capable of mobilizing and marshaling its industries to wear down its opponent. Russians, because of their large population and tolerance for casualties, believe they have a decisive advantage even if they are tactically unsophisticated. Western pessimists agree.But that comparison, too, is incorrect.The Soviet Union survived World War II in part thanks to the West supplying much of the raw materials and equipment (including 11,000 railroad freight cars) that it needed. But the U.S.S.R.’s own war economy was relatively robust. By late 1941, Russia’s war industry outproduced that of Germany. Today, Russia’s economy is merely the size of a middling European country’s. Its military-industrial plant is limited by Western sanctions, riddled with corruption, and unable to adequately equip troops on the front. Meanwhile, the West’s military industry, a much larger and more sophisticated enterprise, albeit one that is mobilizing too slowly, is sustaining Ukraine.To the extent that Soviet armies fought ferociously in World War II (and bearing in mind that they included many Ukrainians), it was because they were fighting a war for survival, largely on their own soil until late 1944. If one thing remains constant in war, it is the importance of the will to fight. The imbalance in this war, as opposed to that of 1941–45, is entirely in favor of Ukraine, as the hundreds of thousands of Russians fleeing the draft or mobilization would suggest.[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]The Soviet Union was able to reconstitute its forces after huge losses in 1941 partly because Germany was suffering its own difficulties from overextension, but chiefly because it already had a huge organizational base from which to work. Joseph Stalin’s military had nearly 3 million men under arms in the western military districts of the U.S.S.R. alone, plus a somewhat smaller number in the east, hundreds of thousands of whom were later brought back west during late 1941 and 1942.By contrast, the Russian army in February 2022 had perhaps 300,000 soldiers in total, with roughly another 100,000 in various elite or special units—400,000 for the entire country, and no organized reserve system as Western militaries would understand the term. In other words, Russia’s army in 2022 was an order of magnitude smaller than that of 1941, without any effective mobilization system. Once that initial force had taken as many as 100,000 casualties in the first phase of the war, it was bound to have extreme difficulty rebuilding. And after suffering another 100,000 following the chaotic press-ganging of its “mobilization” of the past six months, it will face even more obstacles to re-creating a modern army.Despite the purges of the late 1930s, the Russian army of 1941 was filled with tough young men used to manual labor in the factory or field and suited to military tasks. They were led by young officers serving in a prestigious profession. That was not the case in 2022. In World War II, Stalin’s son served in uniform and was captured. Today, the sons of the elite flee the country or escape military service in less savory ways.And, finally, Stalin was a far more capable civilian war leader than Vladimir Putin, working closely with a general staff that included exceptionally capable officers. He did not force them to sit 30 feet away from him.World War I and World War II offer analogies and metaphors for those reflecting on the Ukraine war, but not templates for understanding a conflict that is characterized by clouds of drones, sophisticated command-and-control systems, extensive long-range precision fires, and ubiquitous satellite-based reconnaissance, among other notable phenomena—almost all of which have favored the Ukrainians. This war has to be understood on its own terms, and displays of historical pseudo-literacy just get in the way of that.As Carl von Clausewitz, the preeminent theorist of war and no mean military historian himself, put it, “Every war is rich in unique episodes. Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs.” It is in the differences, as much as the similarities, with the world wars of the past century that insight into today’s battles lies. And by and large, those differences favor Ukraine.This article previously stated that the West supplied trucks to the Soviet Union in World War II. In fact, the West supplied railroad freight cars

Will Britain, as Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have both promised, really turn into the “next Silicon Valley”? It is bold talk. Some might say Panglossian. Although in truth, perhaps it’s to be expected from a weak administration troubled by divisions, haunted by former leaders and struggling to shake off the impression that it is the last-gasp government of a party worn out after largely wasting 13 years in power.
But we should not be too harsh on Sunak and Hunt, even if their supposed plans to turbocharge growth through harnessing of technology look skeletal. Prime ministers must pretend to have purpose while chancellors must talk up economic prospects by pushing back against tides of negativity. After the latest data showed Britain’s economy to be flatlining rather than contracting, Hunt insisted it was “more resilient than many feared”. But if you really want to see the sorry state of our economy and our nation’s struggles to adapt to the fast-changing world, take a look at one sector that is laden with national symbolism and long been a bellwether for our economic health.
This is the British car industry, a production hub reliant on sophisticated supply lines and a proven beacon of innovation. It is a sector that has shown an uncanny ability to reflect the zeitgeist through its rollercoaster ups and downs since the Second World War. It boomed after the birth of mass motoring, then crashed in spectacular style amid industrial strife, before its careful restoration with a woman driver at the wheel. Now it is being allowed to rot again, partly thanks to the stewardship of a glossy magazine’s former motoring columnist. Perhaps we should have been more alarmed by Boris Johnson’s cavalier approach to cars when we discovered he had racked up £4,000 in parking tickets for GQ.
Once it was the world’s second biggest, but now our shrivelling car sector has sunk to the fringe of the top 20, just behind Slovakia and one place ahead of Iran. Last year, we produced 775,014 cars. This was the fewest since 1956 — a time when an Austin A30 cost £529, a gallon of petrol was 22p (or four shillings and six pence in “old money”) and there were no motorways. There were only 3.3 million drivers, roughly one-tenth of the numbers cramming our roads today, some no doubt humming along to that year’s biggest hit by Pat Boone. Almost all their cars were made in this country by five makers — Nuffield/BMC, Ford, Rootes, Standard-Triumph and Vauxhall — and three of them were British-owned.
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Britain also possessed a thriving collection of smaller-scale makers with more than 60 marques, such as Aston-Martin, Jaguar, Jensen, Lotus and Rolls-Royce — more than any other country. Think of the swinging Sixties and you might think of stylish Minis, an icon of British culture born in 1959 that was such a clever and distinctive design it was acclaimed as the most influential car of the 20th century after the Ford Model T. Or the gorgeous E-Type Jaguar, which even the great Enzo Ferrari acclaimed as “the most beautiful car ever made” after its launch in 1961.
Yet at start of that glitzy decade, barely a generation after the war’s end, our car production slid below Germany. Four years later, Daihatsu’s Compagno became the first Japanese car on sale in this country, and by the mid-Seventies — when, badly managed and beset by strikes, we had sunk to sixth place in the global league table as car manufacturers — it became a sorry totem for the disturbing decline of British industry. Post-imperial Britain seemed to be slumped in a gloomy haze of mediocrity, driving haplessly along the slippery road to nowhere. It felt like the whole country was in a slow-motion tailspin.
Nothing symbolised this pervasive sense of despair and dysfunction more than British Leyland. The conglomerate — which brought together brands such as Austin, Mini, Morris, Rover and Jaguar into one supposed national champion — was spared from bankruptcy in 1975 by nationalisation. It was infamous for poor management, dire industrial relations and toxic union firebrands such as Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson. The cars it churned out were often shoddy — just as Japan was ironing out flaws in its vehicles as an emerging industrial superpower. Even clunky but cheap Soviet-built Ladas started selling decently in Britain, a damning indictment of our own state-run behemoth. No wonder the floundering firm became the butt of jokes in Fawlty Towers.
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The car industry, like the wider economy, was salvaged during Margaret Thatcher’s controversial reign. She opened the nation’s doors to globalisation, sold off or shut down nationalised industries, brutally stripped away barriers to trade and slashed the power of union barons. But she was also sufficiently pragmatic to recognise the role of targeted state aid — as shown with her leading part in persuading Nissan to open its landmark plant in Sunderland by throwing in subsidies, lobbying both its boss and the Japanese prime minister to land the deal and then opening the site. Honda had already started production in Swindon on a site that once built Spitfire planes, Toyota soon followed suit in Derbyshire. The prime minister used their arrival to show that Britain was on the road to revival as a stable European base for industry.
This sparked a renaissance for Britain’s car industry that lasted three decades, with famous traditional marques often falling into foreign hands. When owners from overseas arrived to buy up dreary brands such as Rover, there was talk of betrayal and sell-out on both Left and Right. Yet car makers from Germany, India, Japan and the United States invested heavily, creating an impressive cluster of innovation that rippled through the economy. By 2015, Britain was the base for more manufacturers than anywhere else in Europe, with seven big carmakers, eight premium producers, nine bus builders and scores of niche manufacturers. Such was its importance that eight of the 11 Formula One teams were based in the country, many of them in a cluster around Oxford, to exploit the cutting-edge technology.
This success was led by exports, with sales abroad doubling in a decade, while the 160,000 workers — once infamous for the speed at which they downed tools — had become among the most productive car makers in Europe. Foreign owners skilfully exploited British heritage brands, such as the Minis I saw churned out at the celebrated Cowley car plant in Oxford following their revival by BMW. This was the place where almost a century earlier a former bicycle maker called William Morris had pioneered Britain’s use of Henry Ford’s mass production techniques. But Cowley had also gone on to reflect the industry’s turbulent history with six far-Left splinter groups fighting for shop floor supremacy in the dismal Seventies.
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When I visited a decade ago, however, it was a beacon of industrial modernity. ‘‘If we had not changed, we wouldn’t have had any jobs here,” said union convenor Chris Bond, a former member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. The high-tech plant had 513 robots in the body shop alone. It employed 3,700 “associates”, all clad in the same black jackets with MINI on the back — admittedly a fraction of the huge numbers working there before, but there had not been an industrial dispute for almost three decades and everyone received bonuses. I was struck when one woman told me she had previously worked in the NHS where “it felt far more like I was working on a production line”.
Since then, however, the industry’s decline has been precipitous, down 10% last year alone and more than halving since the country voted to leave the European Union in 2016. The UK is no longer a major player in the car industry; only yesterday, Ford announced plans to cut 1,300 jobs in the UK over the next three years. Nissans and Toyotas still roll off British production lines, but Honda has departed from Swindon after producing 3.7 million cars on the site, while Nissan ditched its promise to build the next X-Trail SUV in Sunderland. Elon Musk chose Berlin over Britain for his first Tesla factory in Europe. Five months ago, BMW added to the gloom by announcing the end of electric Mini production in Cowley, although it is continuing with petrol and diesel cars until they are banned from sale in seven years’ time.
Clearly Brexit has been a significant factor. Musk stated that the vote made it “too risky” to open his plant, as well as a research and development base, in Britain. Honda denied its closure decision was tied to the rupture with Brussels, but this is a highly complex industry that boomed off the back of the single European market driven so determinedly by Thatcher, with firms relying on Britain for skilled workers and looser labour regulations but on Europe for sales and many components. The crankshaft for one of those Minis I saw being built crossed the Channel three times before installation in Cowley. The slightest friction for such production techniques can be catastrophic for an industry reliant on low margins and high volumes.
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It is no coincidence that car production hit a two-decade high in 2016, when 80% of the vehicles were exported and more than half sold in European Union countries. Yet Brexit is just one of the problems facing the industry; it was also hit hard by China’s Covid lockdowns, which impacted supply chains and resulted in a chronic global shortage of semiconductors. And all this disruption came just as the industry was engulfed by a technological revolution, with rapid acceleration into the age of electrical vehicles.
In this brave new world of electric vehicles, assembly plants need batteries from giant production houses known as gigafactories. Ideally, these need to be located nearby since batteries are big and heavy. Yet Britain currently has only one Chinese-owned plant being built next to the Nissan factory in Sunderland. At least 35 are planned or under construction in the European Union, with three in Hungary alone. There was huge hype over Britishvolt, a £3.8 billion beacon of post-Brexit levelling up policies in Northumberland intended to deliver 300,000 battery packs a year. Johnson typically talked it up, claiming Britain would be a world leader in electric cars, “creating hundreds of thousands of jobs”. Then it ran out of money, the Government refused to bail it out, and it collapsed last month.
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Andy Palmer, former head of Aston Martin, told the BBC that its collapse was an “unmitigated disaster for the auto industry in the UK”, and he predicted firms would migrate to where batteries are being made. But to put Britishvolt’s demise in perspective, even this ambitious start-up was planned to deliver less than one-fifth of the capacity by 2030 anticipated from two plants in Germany — Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin plus another being developed by a Chinese firm that is the world’s biggest electronic vehicle battery maker.
Now, think again about the Mini. The first electric version was built at Cowley plant three years ago, but soon all electric models of this British icon will be coming off production lines in Leipzig and eastern China. Last month also saw more troubling news: the pioneering new electric van maker Arrival is restructuring its business and cutting jobs here as it shifts production to North Carolina to take advantage of massive green subsidies being offered for firms buying clean commercial vehicles.
The last three Tory governments have all boasted that Britain will be a world leader in both green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing, seeing car production as a symbol once again of the country’s status in our post-Brexit world. Now we hear the latest prime minister bragging that he will turn the nation into a technology force. Yet behind all the hype and brash talk, one of our most important, innovative and efficient industries is moving abroad thanks to state inertia at a time of fast-moving change. Britain is stuck in the slow lane — and we seem to be ignoring the warning signs flashing on the dashboard before our eyes.
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In recent weeks, there were two major media events that highlight the dire state of the American media today:
Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and former reporter for the New York Times, published in the Columbia Journalism Review, a 24,000-word critical analysis of the Times’ coverage of the so-called Russia Hoax (which most readers will recognize without any further explanation). This fantasy occupied a central position in the nation’s news for three years during the Trump administration—including false claims of a president’s collusion with Russia—with never a scintilla of evidence, and was the most irresponsible piece of journalism ever published in this country. Despite these shocking factual revelations there was virtually no coverage of the Gerth analysis in any major non-conservative news outlet, and none of course in the New York Times. 
Leonard Downie, formerly the executive editor of the Washington Post and now at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, published an op-ed in the Post with the headline “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust.” Based on an investigation of “the values and practices in mainstream newsrooms today,” he and a colleague found that “the truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant to produce more trustworthy news. . . .  More and more journalists of color and younger White reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, in increasingly diverse newsrooms believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and point of view.”
These events come after reports over many years that the American people’s trust in the honesty and truthfulness of the American media has been declining year by year since the 1950s, and now stands at about 29 percent (the percentages differ but the trend is clear).
Uncertainty about the honesty and reliability of the news media has fostered the Substack phenomenon—the growing number of writers who now offer their views on the news to subscribers instead of through the media. Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss are in this group. The fact that people will pay separately for facts and opinions that they could otherwise get from newspapers—if the newspapers were to publish these views—is an important indicator of the decline in the trust Americans have in today’s news sources. 
Another member of the Substack corps is Andrew Sullivan—no conservative—who writes a weekly piece called “The Weekly Dish.” He begins his February 3 edition with this: “There are times when I actually feel some pity for the editors in the mainstream media. In the last few years, pressured relentlessly by young, super-leftist staffers, they have slowly and then precipitously dropped the goal of objectivity and news in favor of subjectivity and narratives.” 
As an example of what this really means, Sullivan quotes the Atlantic’s Jemele Hill: “I need so many people to understand this regarding Tyre Nichols. Several of the police officers who murdered Freddie Gray were Black. The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence. We see people under the boot of oppression carry its water all the time.”
Political divisions in the United States are increasing, as are the dangers to democracy implicit in this disparity of views. For years, Americans have even girded themselves for bitter fights across the Thanksgiving table. Today there is even talk about civil war.
While the source of these deep political divisions is constantly studied by academic and professional students of politics, answers are few. Are they the result of new political conflicts between conservatives and progressives, an inability of our political system to satisfy the needs of large groups driven by different economic circumstances, or by deeper problems in society yet to be discovered or recognized?
A 2021 report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, noted Americans’ trust in the news is the lowest of 46 countries, including Poland, Philippines and Peru. The decline in trust of the media may be a cause—not just a symptom—of these deep political divisions.
The media’s Downie—who seems to advocate a departure from objectivity in favor of a “woke” view of reality—is certainly a possible contributor to divisions in this country. This requires more academic study. If the news media selects only the facts that they want to publish for political reasons, it is hardly surprising that the public is divided and confused about what is actually happening in our society.
Peter J. Wallison is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. He was White House Counsel and General Counsel of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration
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Steven Pinker thinks ChatGPT is truly impressive — and will be even more so once it “stops making stuff up” and becomes less error-prone. Higher education, indeed, much of the world, was set abuzz in November when OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT chatbot capable of instantly answering questions (in fact, composing writing in various genres) across a range of fields in a conversational and ostensibly authoritative fashion. Utilizing a type of AI called a large language model (LLM), ChatGPT is able to continuously learn and improve its responses. But just how good can it get? Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, has investigated, among other things, links between the mind, language, and thought in books like the award-winning bestseller “The Language Instinct” and has a few thoughts of his own on whether we should be concerned about ChatGPT’s potential to displace humans as writers and thinkers. Interview was edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Steven Pinker
GAZETTE: ChatGPT has gotten a great deal of attention, and a lot of it has been negative. What do you think are the important questions that it brings up?
PINKER: It certainly shows how our intuitions fail when we try to imagine what statistical patterns lurk in half a trillion words of text and can be captured in 100 billion parameters. Like most people, I would not have guessed that a system that did that would be capable of, say, writing the Gettysburg Address in the style of Donald Trump. There are patterns of patterns of patterns of patterns in the data that we humans can’t fathom. It’s impressive how ChatGPT can generate plausible prose, relevant and well-structured, without any understanding of the world — without overt goals, explicitly represented facts, or the other things we might have thought were necessary to generate intelligent-sounding prose.
And this appearance of competence makes its blunders all the more striking. It utters confident confabulations, such as that the U.S. has had four female presidents, including Luci Baines Johnson, 1973-77. And it makes elementary errors of common sense. For 25 years I’ve begun my introductory psychology course by showing how our best artificial intelligence still can’t duplicate ordinary common sense. This year I was terrified that that part of the lecture would be obsolete because the examples I gave would be aced by GPT. But I needn’t have worried. When I asked ChatGPT, “If Mabel was alive at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., was she alive at noon?” it responded, “It was not specified whether Mabel was alive at noon. She’s known to be alive at 9 and 5, but there’s no information provided about her being alive at noon.” So, it doesn’t grasp basic facts of the world — like people live for continuous stretches of time and once you’re dead you stay dead — because it has never come across a stretch of text that made that explicit. (To its credit, it did know that goldfish don’t wear underpants.)
We’re dealing with an alien intelligence that’s capable of astonishing feats, but not in the manner of the human mind. We don’t need to be exposed to half a trillion words of text (which, at three words a second, eight hours a day, would take 15,000 years) in order to speak or to solve problems. Nonetheless, it is impressive what you can get out of very, very, very high-order statistical patterns in mammoth data sets.

“For 25 years I’ve begun my introductory psychology course by showing how our best artificial intelligence still can’t duplicate ordinary common sense. This year I was terrified that that part of the lecture would be obsolete. … But I needn’t have worried.”

GAZETTE: Open AI has said its goal is to develop artificial general intelligence. Is this advisable or even possible?
PINKER: I think it’s incoherent, like a “general machine” is incoherent. We can visualize all kinds of superpowers, like Superman’s flying and invulnerability and X-ray vision, but that doesn’t mean they’re physically realizable. Likewise, we can fantasize about a superintelligence that deduces how to make us immortal or bring about world peace or take over the universe. But real intelligence consists of a set of algorithms for solving particular kinds of problems in particular kinds of worlds. What we have now, and probably always will have, are devices that exceed humans in some challenges and not in others.
GAZETTE: Are you concerned about its use in your classroom?
PINKER: No more than about downloading term papers from websites. The College has asked us to remind students that the honor pledge rules out submitting work they didn’t write. I’m not  naïve; I know that some Harvard students might be barefaced liars, but I don’t think there are many. Also, at least so far, a lot of ChatGPT output is easy to unmask because it mashes up quotations and references that don’t exist.
GAZETTE: There are a range of things that people are worried about with ChatGPT, including disinformation and jobs being at stake. Is there a particular thing that worries you?
PINKER: Fear of new technologies is always driven by scenarios of the worst that can happen, without anticipating the countermeasures that would arise in the real world. For large language models, this will include the skepticism that people will cultivate for automatically generated content (journalists have already stopped using the gimmick of having GPT write their columns about GPT because readers are onto it), the development of professional and moral guardrails (like the Harvard honor pledge), and possibly technologies that watermark or detect LLM output.
Steven Pinker. Photo by Rebecca Goldstein
There are other sources of pushback. One is that we all have deep intuitions about causal connections to people. A collector might pay $100,000 for John F. Kennedy’s golf clubs even though they’re indistinguishable from any other golf clubs from that era. The demand for authenticity is even stronger for intellectual products like stories and editorials: The awareness that there’s a real human you can connect it to changes its status and its acceptability.
Another pushback will come from the forehead-slapping blunders, like the fact that crushed glass is gaining popularity as a dietary supplement or that nine women can make a baby in one month. As the systems are improved by human feedback (often from click farms in poor countries), there will be fewer of these clangers, but given the infinite possibilities, they’ll still be there. And, crucially, there won’t be a paper trail that allows us to fact-check an assertion. With an ordinary writer, you could ask the person and track down the references, but in an LLM, a “fact” is smeared across billions of tiny adjustments to quantitative variables, and it’s impossible to trace and verify a source.
Nonetheless, there are doubtless many kinds of boilerplate that could be produced by an LLM as easily as by a human, and that might be a good thing. Perhaps we shouldn’t be paying the billable hours of an expensive lawyer to craft a will or divorce agreement that could be automatically generated.
GAZETTE: We hear a lot about potential downsides. Is there a potential upside?
PINKER: One example would be its use as a semantic search engine, as opposed to our current search engines, which are fed strings of characters. Currently, if you have an idea rather than a string of text, there’s no good way to search for it. Now, a real semantic search engine would, unlike an LLM, have a conceptual model of the world. It would have symbols for people and places and objects and events, and representations of goals and causal relations, something closer to the way the human mind works. But for just a tool, like a search engine, where you just want useful information retrieval, I can see that an LLM could be tremendously useful — as long as it stops making stuff up.
GAZETTE: If we look down the road and these things get better — potentially exponentially better — are there impacts for humans on what it means to be learned, to be knowledgeable, even to be expert?
PINKER: I doubt it will improve exponentially, but it will improve. And, as with the use of computers to supplement human intelligence in the past — all the way back to calculation and record-keeping in the ’60s, search in the ’90s, and every other step — we’ll be augmenting our own limitations. Just as we had to acknowledge our own limited memory and calculation capabilities, we’ll acknowledge that retrieving and digesting large amounts of information is something that we can do well but artificial minds can do better.
Since LLMs operate so differently from us, they might help us understand the nature of human intelligence. They might deepen our appreciation of what human understanding does consist of when we contrast it with systems that superficially seem to duplicate it, exceed it in some ways, and fall short in others.
GAZETTE: So humans won’t be supplanted by artificial general intelligence? We’ll still be on top, essentially? Or is that the wrong framing?
PINKER: It’s the wrong framing. There isn’t a one-dimensional scale of intelligence that embraces all conceivable minds. Sure, we use IQ to measure differences among humans, but that can’t be extrapolated upward to an everything-deducer, if only because its knowledge about empirical reality is limited by what it can observe. There is no omniscient and omnipotent wonder algorithm: There are as many intelligences as there are goals and worlds.

Would the New York Times today accept a pitch for a “Is It Time to Break Up Google?” kind of essay? They have in the past. Back in 2017, the newspaper ran a piece by Big Tech critic Jonathan Taplin titled, you guessed it, “Is It Time to Break Up Google?” Or how about “Is It Time to Break Up Facebook?” Again, the Times has in the past. In 2019, it published the more definite “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook” by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.
The reason I ask these questions is that a lot has changed since those pre-pandemic years, making the answers less obvious. Google, for instance, hardly seems like the unassailable search giant that it did back them. It’s an old story, but one that critics seem to have forgotten: technological disruption. The emergence of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other “generative AI” chatbots could “reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine,” write NYT reporters Nico Grant and Cade Metz in “A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business.” As it is, Google’s share of revenue from domestic search advertising will fall to 54 percent this year, down from 67 percent in 2016,” notes the Economist.
Then there’s Meta-Facebook, another supposedly unassailable platform mega-giant. Its market value is down to $470 billion from $1.1 trillion in September 2021 amid an effort to shift corporate focus to the metaverse. Meta’s effort to better compete with TikTok in short-form video isn’t going well. That, even as its share of US digital-ad revenue has also dipped, same as Google. The WSJ: 
For the first time in nearly a decade, the two largest players in online advertising are no longer raking in the majority of U.S. digital-ad dollars, a decline that industry insiders expect to continue in years to come. Alphabet’s Google and Facebook parent Meta Platforms accounted for a combined 48.4% of U.S. digital-ad spending in 2022, according to estimates from research firm Insider Intelligence. Their combined U.S. market share hadn’t been under 50% since 2014, said Insider Intelligence, which expects that number to drop to 44.9% this year.” . . . Meta and other social-media companies including Snap Inc. also suffered from Apple Inc.’s 2021 decision to require apps on its devices to ask users if they wanted to be tracked. The majority of iPhone users opted not to be, hitting the heart of Meta’s business: its ability to target ads at users with precision and prove to marketers that the ads generate sales.
In other words, the End of History argument about Big Tech isn’t looking so smart these days. Technology evolves. Business conditions change. New competitors emerge or old competitors start doing things differently, as is the case with Microsoft and OpenAI. So another question: Why do some many reflexive Big Tech critics not seem to know this?
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The relationship between nations is always complex and sometimes difficult to understand. Sometimes it enters the realm of the bizarre. And then, at the most extreme level, it enters the world of balloons, unidentified objects and F-22 fighters – all converging on, as they say in Washington, lies, damn lies and press briefings. This is compounded by the fact that the likely villain, China, claims that the U.S. has intruded on Chinese territory with balloons (their word) at least 10 times. This is possible but also raises the question of why Beijing permitted so many intrusions without a whisper of rage.

According to the Pentagon, China’s spy balloons have entered the airspace of more than 40 nations in recent years. Given that these flying objects are somewhat visible from the ground, it is strange that no one noted them at least loudly enough to be noticed. The question is what the Chinese were looking for – and the Americans too, if Beijing’s counteraccusations are correct. Both countries have many spy satellites, conceived of and used to map out the locations of nuclear-capable aircraft and missiles and deployed in constellations that would detect an enemy launch. These satellites evolved into systems that can detect a wide variety of objects on the ground as well as some that can detect electronic signals.

The satellites certainly appear to be helpful in their primary mission: There has been no nuclear exchange. But as many commentators said, satellites cannot detect everything effectively. The U.S. government has not described everything the suspected Chinese balloons spied on, which is reasonable, but it leads me to wonder what additional objects China was looking for and why slow-moving high-altitude systems were needed. Obviously, they were not tasked with detecting a range of objects in real time. To provide broad coverage, large numbers of these objects – they ought to be called objects rather than balloons, since they are at least partially steered – would have to blanket the sky, remaining relatively immobile (and utterly defenseless), broadcasting data to their home base, and therefore visually and electronically detectable.

They could have been taking a closer look at objects on the ground detected by satellites. Their targets would have to be static for an extended time, since the craft are slow moving. In addition, they would have to be outdoors. Most such things are better surveyed by humans in cars or, better yet, riding bicycles and changing a tire at a strategic place.

The problem I have is imagining the mission these objects could carry out, one that would be invisible, allow loitering if needed and be able to avoid detection. There could be some highly specialized targets, but the fleet that the Chinese appear to have, and that they claim the U.S. has, seems excessive to the task. One Chinese craft was over a U.S. Air Force base that is doubtless loaded with secrets, but how many of the secrets would be visible or broadcasting in the clear?

One theoretical mission would be to divert attention. Russia is much closer to Alaska than is China. It is engaged in a war where the United States has a role, to understate it. Having large, weird craft flying over the continental United States could, in this thinking, generate panic, with the public demanding that the government focus on national defense and not Ukraine. There are a hundred diversionary functions these objects could serve for a limited time, although the result of this episode is low panic and high confusion.

The fundamental question is how objects this large, at altitudes allowing enhanced visibility, could go unnoticed if U.S. and Chinese charges are even close to true. From available information, the craft move with the grace of an elephant and could be shot down by aircraft, missile or a well-aimed slingshot. They must be stunningly advanced, which would explain why the U.S. government is withholding answers. If national security requires it, then it should be. But the price is that the U.S. government is shooting down aircraft and, knowing from the beginning that they are Chinese, is unable to tell us what it found in the wreckage.

I don’t believe these questions can be answered by assuming the relevant actors are stupid or treasonous. The objects need explaining and thus far are incomprehensible. Those favoring explanations based on stupidity or treason are welcome to. I prefer to think I am simply not capable of understanding the complex truth.

This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and researchers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.   On the night of February 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already too late to connect with the Ukrainian army. Their region was cut off. They were occupied.Occupied. Marunyak had been expecting the war to break out, but he had no sense of what a Russian occupation of his village might mean. Like his colleagues, Marunyak is an elected official—genuinely elected, since 2006, under Ukrainian laws giving real power to local governments, not appointed following a falsified plebiscite, as a similar official might have been in the Soviet era or might be in modern Russia. That meant that when the occupation began, he felt an enormous responsibility to stay in Stara Zburjivka and help his constituents cope with a cascade of emergencies. “Already, within a few days, there were families lacking food,” he recalls. “There was no bread or flour, so I was trying to buy grain from the farmers … Many residents began contributing the food they could share, and so we created a fund, providing assistance on demand.”[Read: The bitter truth of Russia’s looting of Ukrainian art]Similar plans were made to locate and distribute medications. Because the Ukrainian police had ceased to function, citizens formed nighttime security patrols staffed with local volunteers. Marunyak prepared to negotiate with whoever the Russians sent to Stara Zburjivka. “I told people not to be afraid, saying, when the Russians would come, I’ll be the first to talk to them.”He was. And he paid a horrific price for it.  The Russian soldiers who arrived in Kherson—like the Russian soldiers who occupied Bucha and Irpin, the Kharkiv region, Zaporizhzhya, or anywhere else in Ukraine—were not prepared to meet people like Marunyak. To the extent that the invaders had any understanding of where they were and what they were meant to be doing (some, initially, had none), they believed that they were entering Russian territory ruled by an insecure and unpopular Ukrainian elite. Their actions suggested that their immediate goal was to decapitate that elite: arrest them, deport them, kill them. They did not expect this to be difficult.Their theory of occupation was not new. Soviet soldiers entering the territory of eastern Poland or the Baltic states during World War II also arrived with lists of the types of people they wanted to arrest. In May 1941, Stalin himself provided such a list for occupied Poland. To the Soviet dictator, anyone linked to the Polish state—police, army officers, leaders of political parties, civil servants, their families—was a “counter-revolutionary,” a “kulak,” a “bourgeois,” or, to put it more simply, an enemy to be eliminated.   Russia made similar lists before invading Ukraine a year ago, some of which have become known. Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and other leaders featured on them, as did well-known journalists and activists. But Russian soldiers were not prepared to encounter widespread resistance, and they certainly did not expect to find loyal, conscientious, popularly elected small-town and village mayors.Perhaps that explains why Marunyak, age 60, was punished with such horrific cruelty after the Russians arrested him on March 21. Along with a few other local men, the Stara Zburjivka mayor was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for three days. Russian soldiers beat him. They gave him nothing to eat and little to drink. One time he was stripped naked and forced to stay in the cold for several hours. A gun was held to his head, and he was threatened with drowning. He was told that his wife and daughters would also be captured. Once, he said, the soldiers choked him until he lost consciousness. They kept demanding to know where he kept his weapons. Because Marunyak fit into no category that the Russians could recognize—perhaps even because his local patriotism and his civic-mindedness seemed strange to them—they decided he must be a secret member of a Ukrainian “sabotage group.” He was not. He had no weapons and no military skills.Days into his detention, Marunyak was briefly able to see his wife, Kateryna Ohar, before he was transferred to Kherson. The soldiers told Ohar she would not see her husband for 20 years. He was then sent right into another torture chamber, where a different set of Russian soldiers tied wires to his thumbs. In this form of torture, wires are connected to a victim’s fingers, toes, or sometimes genitals. Electric shocks are then delivered using the battery of a field telephone—according to one witness, soldiers described it as “making a call to Putin.” The practice of electrocuting prisoners was used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in Russia’s Chechen wars, and it is now in use again throughout occupied Ukraine. But even when Marunyak was tortured and interrogated, he noticed that his captors never wrote anything down. Their questioning was sloppy; he could not work out what they actually wanted to learn. Possibly nothing. Eventually, after days of captivity with next to no food, he was freed, with nine broken ribs and pneumonia. He escaped the occupied zone.Over the past 10 months, the Reckoning Project has deployed more than a dozen journalists and field researchers to record detailed testimonies of victims of and witnesses to atrocities in areas of Ukraine that are or were under Russian occupation. Lawyers and analysts then seek to verify these accounts, with the goal of providing evidence that will be admissible in future court proceedings. The organization has found that Marunyak’s experience was not unusual. Oleh Yakhniyenko, the mayor of Mylove, another village in the Kherson region, was detained twice. Olena Peleshok, the mayor of Zeleny Pod, was imprisoned for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the mayor of Bekhtery village, was detained and tortured. In the formerly occupied territory of Kharkiv alone, police investigators have evidence of 25 torture chambers. The Ukrainian government believes that mayors, deputy mayors, and other local leaders from a majority of the Kherson region’s 49 municipalities were arrested or kidnapped. Some have simply disappeared.Many of their stories share not only gruesome details but also an atmosphere of unreality. Ukrainian captives were told that the Ukrainian state had discriminated against them for speaking Russian; now they were “free,” the invaders insisted. But when Russian-speaking mayors and other elected officials flatly explained that no one in Ukraine had harmed them for using their native language, or that Russian was widely spoken in the region, the soldiers didn’t have any response. Dmytro Vasyliev, the secretary of the city council of occupied Nova Kakhovka, recalled that his Russian was more fluent and more grammatical than the Russian of the soldier interrogating him. The soldier was a Kalmyk, one of Russia’s minority groups; Vasyliev had been born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian extraction, which confused them: “They couldn’t comprehend why I, Russian by ethnic origin, did not want to cooperate with them,” Vasyliev recalled. “I said, ‘How can I look into the eyes of my son, my colleagues, if I become a traitor?’ They just didn’t get it.” Since his interview with the Reckoning Project, Vasyliev has died.But even as they inflicted pain on the most civic-minded Ukrainians, even as they assaulted local leaders, Russian soldiers seemed not to know how to replace them. Unlike their Soviet Communist forebears, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland, or Estonia, or Romania, the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, even no clear idea of the meaning of Russkiy mir, the “Russian world” that some of President Vladimir Putin’s ideologues extol.Russian forces do find collaborators to replace elected officials, but many appear to be completely random, unqualified people, with no discernible ideology or previous links to Russia. In some places the invaders have displayed Soviet symbols or flags, perhaps hoping that these older ideas will create some sympathy for Russia among the conquered Ukrainians. But mostly they’ve offered nothing: no explanation, no improvements to life, not even a competent administration. They do immense damage, but they don’t seem to know why.  
The Reckoning Project found that Russian occupation forces have targeted Ukrainian local officials for interrogation and torture. Pictured here are some of the municipal leaders who were detained, forced to flee, or both. From top row to bottom row, left to right: Anna Shostak-Kuchmiak, mayor of Vysokopillya community; Volodymyr Kovalenko, mayor of Novokakhovka territorial community; Dmytro Vasyliev, secretary of the city council of Nova Kakhovka; Oleksandr Levechko, mayor of Novooleksandrivka; Olha Sukhenko, mayor of Motyzhyn (on left in photo); and Viktor Marunyak, mayor of Stara Zburjivka. According to data from the Ukrainian government, 93 local-government officials had been detained by Russian forces as of late January; 75 have since been released, and 18 remain in detention. Three local-government officials have been killed, including Sukhenko. (Photographs courtesy of the Reckoning Project)

After the mayors, town councilors, and other elected officials, the Ukrainians who disturb the occupiers most are volunteers: people who run charities, people who run civic organizations, people who spontaneously rush to help others. Perhaps they seem suspicious to Russian officials because their own country crushes spontaneity, independent associations, and grassroots movements. The Reckoning Project interviewed a man from Skadovsk, a part of Kherson province still under Russian control, whom we will call Volunteer A. (He requested anonymity because he fears for his family’s safety.) He had been a member of one of the neighborhood-watch groups that stepped in to replace the police, and had worked at a humanitarian-aid distribution center. After his father was arrested in April 2022, a few weeks into the occupation, Volunteer A went to find him—and was detained as well.[Anne Applebaum: The other Ukrainian army]During the subsequent interrogation, Volunteer A was asked about other local activists and about his connection to the Ukrainian security services (none) and the CIA (even less), as well as (ludicrously) George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Like the Soviet officials who treated Boy Scout troops in occupied central Europe like members of a conspiracy, the Russians seemed incredulous that he was just a local volunteer, working with other local volunteers; their questions made it seem as if they had never heard of such a thing. He recalled being beaten simultaneously by four different men, struck by a baseball bat, tormented with electric shocks, and hit with a hammer in an effort to get him to admit he was part of a larger conspiracy. At least one of his ribs was broken. After the interrogation, he was told to make a video confession and to sign a statement declaring that he would not spread “fake news” about the Russian occupation. After a subsequent detention, he too escaped the region.

Suspected torture chambers in Izyum (videos courtesy of the Reckoning Project) In another town in the Kherson region also still under occupation, Volunteer B, as we’ll call him (he also fears for his family), had a similar experience. Before Russian forces detained him, he had been running a makeshift pharmacy that collected medical-supply donations. He was interrogated and beaten and, like Volunteer A, asked repeatedly about the true purpose of his charitable work. Who was organizing it? Again, the Russian soldiers seemed unable to believe that no secret group was behind it, that ordinary people were spontaneously contributing to this common project, that information about it simply spread by word of mouth, on social media and on the radio, and not as the result of some dark plot. He was asked to jot down a description of how his group worked: “The way it worked,” he recalled writing, “was that people brought what they had and got what they needed. Provided that we have it.” The Russians kept pressing for more details of the nonexistent conspiracy. Then they confiscated the painkillers he had accumulated, which had been destined for cancer patients.This man, who was also forced to leave his region, now believes that the interrogators’ real problem was that they feared volunteers were outside their control: “It really pisses [the Russians] off, annoys them,” he said, that anyone can be independent of the state and of the political system—any political system. This helps explain why the list of arrested and tortured volunteers is so long, and why their testimonies are so similar across the various zones of occupation. Ruslan Mashkov, a Ukrainian Red Cross volunteer, was detained by Russian soldiers north of Kyiv in March and interrogated. A woman in the Kherson region who had helped sort humanitarian-aid packages told an interviewer that she had been arrested, given electrical shocks, robbed of her money, and beaten. (She asked not to be identified by name.) Nakhmet Ismailov, another Kherson resident who had organized charity concerts and benefits before the war, was also tortured with electric shocks. Anyone who conducts any independent activity—anyone who engages with civil society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur—is at risk in an occupation zone run by men who may have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all.
Snapshots by the Reckoning Project of suspected torture chambers and detention centers. The images in the top row were taken in the Kherson region; the images in the bottom row were taken in Izyum, near Kharkiv, and Yahidne, near Chernihiv. (Photographs courtesy of the Reckoning Project)
The invaders’ nihilism is particularly notable in their incoherent approach to the Ukrainian educational system. In theory, schools and universities are the focus of careful Russian thought and planning, just as they were once the focus of careful Soviet thought and planning. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Red Army, in an utterly devastated occupied East Germany, took time away from food provision and road reconstruction to issue an edict banning private kindergartens and to set up curriculum-training sessions for new preschool teachers.  In the spring of 2022, Russian occupiers did signal their interest in transforming Ukrainian schools. In Melitopol, which is still occupied, the Russian military abducted a handful of school principals as well as the head of the local department of education, although later the principals were released. In Kakhovka, Viktor Pendalchuk, the director of School No. 1, was detained and interrogated for two weeks before escaping to Ukrainian-held territory.Still, a large number of schools in occupied areas at first remained closed, or else operated online, as they had done during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic. The occupiers pressured some educators to return. In one case investigated by the Reckoning Project, witnesses described a geography, math, and computer-science teacher—we are withholding his name because his village in the Kherson region is still occupied—whose home was visited by Russian soldiers in late June; they handcuffed his 18-year-old son, perhaps because he planned to go to university to study Ukrainian history. They put a bag over the teen’s head and then dragged him away. The teacher received a message, via an interlocutor, telling him that his son was alive, was being fed, and would be returned home if the teacher returned to his job. The teacher complied. The son did come back, and described being interrogated, threatened at gunpoint, and tortured with electric shocks.[Read: Scenes from Ukrainian summer camp]By autumn, the occupiers had intensified their efforts to Russify the schools, causing a lot of distress among Ukrainian teachers who feared being accused of collaboration by their own compatriots if they showed up at work. But the process remained haphazard, differing from place to place. In at least one town in the Zaporizhzhya region, the Reckoning Project believes, all Ukrainian-language books were removed from schools, including children’s books; elsewhere, only upper-level Ukrainian books, on law and history, were removed. In one Zaporizhzhyan village, still under occupation, soldiers have forced schools to open by threatening to take children from their parents if they do not show up. Elsewhere, low attendance has been tolerated.Residents of some areas have said that the occupiers imposed a Russian-language curriculum, but many of the lessons were poorly designed. In one school district, just four textbooks were assigned—on the Russian language, Russian history, math, and natural science—and all others were discarded. Asked what she had been doing in school during the time Kherson was occupied, a 14-year-old named Oleksandra recalled that students spent their time looking at their phones.  Higher education suffers from the same erratic policies. Russian soldiers physically occupied Kherson State University, Kherson State Maritime Academy, and Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University, but managed to hold only a small number of classes. In June, while the city was still occupied, the Russians announced that Dmytro Kruhly, one of the teachers at the Kherson State Maritime Academy, would become rector. Everyone else was fired. Kruhly, who previously taught classes about “global maritime distress and safety systems,” announced that the new task of the university was to build a shipyard, but few steps were taken in that direction. After the liberation of Kherson, Kruhly disappeared from the city, probably retreating with the Russians.  Substantial evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools but the soldiers on the ground could not implement them. In Vovchansk, a small frontline town in the Kharkiv region, freed in September after six months of occupation, the Reckoning Project obtained a copy of a five-year education plan for schools in the city. The document runs to 140 pages of bureaucratic language, which appears to have been mostly copied and pasted from the educational plans given to schools in Russia, as if no special thought went into the needs of schools in newly occupied territories. It calls, for example, for an annual “Day of Solidarity in the Fight Against Terrorism” to commemorate the infamous 2004 attack on a school in Beslan, in Russia’s North Ossetia region; for lessons about the Nazi blockade of Leningrad in World War II; and for a course on the “basics of the spiritual-moral culture of the peoples of Russia.” The entire document contains only two lines about Vovchansk itself—about visits to the town’s “institutions of culture” and production sites.Regardless of Moscow’s intentions, the Russians actually carrying out the occupation didn’t really seem to care what happened to the schools. There was no policy equivalent to the systematic Soviet imposition of Marxist language and history on central Europe in the 1940s, not even an equivalent to the imposition of a pro-Russian regime in Chechnya during the second Chechen War. In one occupied town in the Zaporizhzhya region, teachers were ordered to organize celebrations of May 9—the day Russia marks the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But the occupying authorities didn’t seem to mind whether attendance was high, or whether anyone learned anything about the war, or whether the celebrations were even real. “A couple of kids will be enough,” they were told. The ritual was for show. The point was to tell Moscow that it had happened, not to teach any real lessons about World War II.          
Portrait of Vladimir Putin in a Kherson State Maritime Academy office. The academy was physically occupied by Russians. (Wojciech Grzedzinski / The Washington Post / Getty)

A destroyed school in Oleksandrivka village, located in the Kherson region of Ukraine, during the Russian invasion. (Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Getty)
In truth, each region of Ukraine does have its own history and traditions, and some of them are eerily relevant. In 1787, four years after Russia defeated the Ottoman empire and annexed the territory of what is now southern Ukraine and Crimea, the Russian empress Catherine the Great visited the region. The trip was organized by Grigory Potemkin, who was once her lover and remained her favorite minister, and it is from this journey that we have inherited the expression Potemkin village. According to the legend, Potemkin built facades along Catherine’s route and populated them with actors in costumes, pulling them down at the end of every day and putting them up again at the next village, so that the czarina would see only happy peasants and prosperous homes.[Read: A giant, fake city in the middle of the desert]Historians doubt that this elaborate piece of theater really happened, but Potemkin’s connection to the region was real: He was buried in a crypt in Kherson, and before the Russians evacuated the city they removed his bones. And the Potemkin-village legend persists because it reflects a phenomenon we recognize: the courtier who creates a false reality to please the distant monarch. For Ukrainians who have lived under Russian occupation, the Potemkin story helps explain what they have experienced. Marunyak, the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, put it like this: “I am following their activities. They are all done for a camera shot in Russia. Even people who live in the occupation don’t believe it is for real. It’s like a huge Potemkin village. It can’t function. They try to glue it together, but it doesn’t work.”The Potemkin story might also begin to explain the horrific violence that ordinary Russians have inflicted on ordinary Ukrainians. Over and over again, victims told the Reckoning Project that this extreme behavior came from nowhere. There was no provocation. Nothing that Ukrainians have done to Russians either in the distant past or in recent memory could explain the beatings, the electric shocks, the detention centers, the torture chambers in garages and basements, the utter disregard for Ukrainian life. Only the Russians’ frustration with their own incapacity—their inability to make the Ukrainians obey them; indeed, their inability to understand Ukraine at all—might offer a clue. They were told to transform the schools, but they do not know how. They were told to find secret Ukrainian organizations, but instead they found small-town mayors and local volunteers. On the one hand, they have to send a report back to Moscow, proving that they are in control. On the other hand, they are angry because they exercise so little control.This incomprehension also fits into an older tradition. The Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote a letter in 1928 to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had dismissed the Ukrainian language as a mere dialect. Ukraine, Vynnychenko told him, was real, whether or not Gorky wanted it to be real. “You can think that the Dnipro River flows into the Moscow River,” he said. But “the Dnipro will not flow into the Moscow River” just because you think so. Wishing Ukraine away will not make Ukraine go away. Rewriting history will not alter the historical memories of millions of people. Russia can try to alter the geography of the region, but that will not alter the geography of the region, no matter how many bodies are beaten or electric shocks are delivered.The modern Russian occupation also belongs to the equally old, equally ugly traditions of Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide. Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine as a separate country, and Ukrainian as a distinct identity. The occupiers thought that task would be easy, because, like Putin, they assumed that the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society are weak. But they are not. That clash between assumption and reality has also forced the occupiers to broaden their use of violence. Wayne Jordash, a British barrister who documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine, argued in a Reckoning Project interview that the extraordinary number of detention centers in occupied Ukraine represent the Russian army’s attempt to fulfill its original plan, which was “to capture and kill all the leaders” of Ukraine. But as the occupation dragged on, “the idea of leaders got bigger. It was originally ‘Zelensky and the government,’ and it quite quickly, inevitably, became ‘local leaders,’ which includes everyone from military to civil servants to journalists, to teachers—anybody who had a connection with the Ukrainian state.”Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction, pain, and suffering. This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street, in the villages where the Ukrainian state cannot yet count the torture chambers, let alone shut them down.Stara Zburjivka itself remains under occupation, although Marunyak, its devoted mayor, now lives in exile in Latvia. From there he tries to keep in touch with his former constituents, to help if he can, to advise or to listen, to keep together the threads of a society that the Russians are cruelly, haphazardly unraveling. “They didn’t understand anything,” Marunyak says now, “but just spoiled people’s lives.” They discovered a world different from the one they knew. And so they smashed it up, hit back at it, and are still trying to destroy it forever.  Oleh Baturin, Natalia Bimbirayte, and Natalia Kurdiukova contributed reporting.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.No holiday exposes the problems with gift-giving quite like Valentine’s Day. On birthdays or Christmas, you might at least find some variety. But on February 14, almost everything on offer is painfully conventional and threatens to degrade the quality of your love. To paraphrase Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee as much as $59.99 in flowers purchased on the internet.
And such as to stop at the CVS for chocolates on my way from work.
(Tomorrow my love for thee will be half off, so I might grab more then.)
If that poem leaves you cold (like you worry those gifts will leave your Valentine), real poetry might just do the trick. Poetry, after all, is practically synonymous with romance, having narrated the experience of love throughout the ages. For a truly personal touch—something you won’t find on any shelf—reading poetry to your beloved can turn a tired holiday into a bespoke performance of your affection.Reading to others is a rare practice today. Right now, I am probably a voice inside your head, because most reading these days—of books, magazines, news, email, and social-media posts—happens silently. Occasionally you might read something to another person, but unless you’re a teacher or a parent of young kids, you probably haven’t regularly, purposefully read in front of others since college, or even grade school.Private reading is a fairly modern custom. In ancient times, when literacy was rare, reading was generally done aloud, for others. Saint Augustine saw his teacher Ambrose’s habit of reading silently to himself as a kind of eccentricity, noting, “His eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest.” He speculated that Ambrose must have been doing so to preserve his voice. Now you are more likely to see a couple silently reading two copies of the same newspaper across the breakfast table from each other than one reading to the other. As such, the written word has been stripped of its bonding potential.[Read: The best books to read with someone you love]There is a certain intimate magic to being read to by someone you love, and scholars are starting to understand why. They find, for example, that reading to children can have a powerful positive effect on bonding. Levels of oxytocin, often called the “love hormone” because of the strong feelings it seems to engender between family members and friends, have been found to rise in children when they are told stories. Oxytocin is especially powerful at bonding lovers together. Although no research I have found addresses the question directly, it is logical to assume that reading to your beloved may raise oxytocin levels, thus deepening the romantic bond.That reading is best done at night, as sleep approaches. Scholars have found that hearing ideas right before sleeping results in better recall than if they are heard during the day—so if you want your sweetheart to remember that your love is “like a red, red rose,” the later you tell them that, the better. Further, even when sleeping, people can establish associations. For example, researchers in Israel played a tone to sleepers while releasing a particular smell, and found that the participants still expected the smell when the tone sounded during their waking hours. Depending on what you read, you might plausibly establish a strong association between the feeling of love and the music of your voice.[Read: The type of love that makes people happiest]To enhance the effect maximally, try two more things. First, read poetry, which elicits peak emotional experiences in unique ways. As researchers reported in 2017 in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, poetry can stimulate your brain’s nucleus accumbens, which is associated with getting the chills—which you tend to get with sudden pleasurable emotions.Second, hold your partner’s hand while you read. As scholars at Brigham Young University and the University of Utah showed in 2008, hand-holding can calm several stress-sensitive systems in the body. Other research suggests that under certain conditions, hand-holding may induce brain-to-brain coupling, a phenomenon in which people match each other’s neural activity while talking to and understanding each other. “Two hearts beating as one” is a common metaphor for romantic love, but it might be more literal—if somewhat less poetic—to say “two temporal lobes processing parallel oscillations at a frequency of three to eight hertz.” This neural matching creates the intimate feeling of being in sync with another person—the feeling that helped you fall in love in the first place.[Read: Stop waiting for your soul mate]Put together all the science, and you’ll arrive at the perfect Valentine’s Day gift: Read your partner poetry of love while holding their hand, until they fall asleep. It requires no money, no trips to the store, no reservations. You don’t even have to be creative and write your own love poems; just rely on the greats.The perfect Valentine’s Day poem depends on the characteristics of your relationship. Let’s say, for example, that your love is an inscrutable mystery, almost beyond the ability of words to describe. An ideal verse might come from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
If your love is more of the divine type, holy and pure, look to the Bible. You could try the Song of Songs:
Behold, you are beautiful, my love.
Behold, you are beautiful.
Your eyes are doves.
If your love is almost unbearably intense, I recommend the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote “When I Too Long Have Looked Upon Your Face”:
I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
And what if the object of your affection is a hot mess? (This suggestion comes from my wife; no doubt she’s asking for a friend.) I might commend here the libretto of Igor Stravinsky’s 1951 opera The Rake’s Progress, where the heroine, sweet Anne Trulove, sings a nighttime lullaby to her adored—but “insane”—Tom Rakewell:
Gently, little boat
across the ocean float
the crystal waves dividing.
The sun in the west
is going to rest.
Glide toward the islands of the blessed.
Perhaps your beloved will respond as does the background chorus of madmen in Tom’s head:
What voice is this?
What heavenly strains
bring solace to tormented brains?
If your Valentine is touched by your gesture of romance, don’t stop at February 14. Make it a Tuesday tradition, or even a de facto nighttime routine, after brushing your teeth and before turning out the light. You can offer your love no better gift than making true each night the words of Sara Teasdale:
Oh plunge me deep in love—put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Updated at 8:05 p.m. ET on February 13, 2023Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
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Margaret Atwood: “Go ahead and ban my book.”
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99 Red (Chinese?) BalloonsAlmost everyone of, ahem, a certain age will remember the 1983 hit song “99 Red Balloons” by the German singer Nena. A classic bit of Cold War pop culture, the lyrics tell a story of a girl buying some balloons and letting them go into the air—where they are promptly misidentified as a threat by the world’s militaries, who then mistakenly launch World War III and destroy the planet. The song ends leaving Nena “standing pretty” in “this dust that was a city.” (Or, if you prefer the original German lyrics, die Welt in Trümmern liegen [“the world lies in ruins.”])So let’s start by noting that whatever is going over the United States and Canada, it’s not that kind of threat. There are some objects over our shared continent, and these objects, according to both Washington and Ottawa, don’t belong there. Four of them have been shot down, including one taken down in an operation by NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian command that has been defending North American airspace since the early days of the Cold War. This is a first: Until last week, NORAD had never shot down anything.These facts don’t tell us very much, and with so much still unclear, the Biden administration isn't sharing a whole lot at the moment. So let’s consider a few possibilities.The simplest answer is that these objects are Chinese surveillance balloons. The National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, said today that China “has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection” and that at the present time, the program isn’t very good, but it’s improving. In a clapback at the administration’s critics, Kirby noted that the Chinese program “was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it.”Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday claimed that the object downed on February 4 off the coast of South Carolina, along with two other objects taken down over Alaska and Canada, were all surveillance balloons. This assertion is especially plausible given the alacrity with which the Canadians, after consultation with the Americans, ordered NORAD jets to destroy the object over the Yukon. (The Canadian rationale was that the object posed a threat to commercial aviation, but Canada’s defense minister noted that it was “potentially similar” to the first balloon downed off the U.S. coast.)Beijing, according to Center for a New American Security’s CEO, Richard Fontaine, has been ever more assertive in testing North American skies with these balloons. Although the Chinese so far are in high dudgeon over these accusations, officials have admitted that another object spotted over Latin America belonged to the People’s Republic; they claimed that it was a meteorological balloon blown off course, and later reportedly apologized to Costa Rica for entering that country’s airspace. But the strongest evidence that the Chinese have been surging balloon flights over North America—where they could linger over targets as mobile observation posts—is that Beijing is now accusing the United States of doing exactly the same thing over China, an allegation the United States has denied.In authoritarian regimes, many accusations are confessions.Chinese mischief, however, doesn’t seem to explain the things that do not seem very balloonlike, including “octagonal” or “cylindrical” objects such as the ones destroyed by NORAD over Lake Huron and the Yukon. When asked yesterday to speculate about possible extraterrestrial origins of these objects, the NORAD commander General Glen VanHerck said, “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.” That’s really just a military boilerplate answer when no one knows what’s going on, and Kirby today dismissed theories about aliens.But if they’re not aliens, what are they? One possibility is that they’re other civilian airships, or junk of some kind floating around in the atmosphere that until now fell below NORAD’s definition of a threat. Remember, NORAD was created in the late 1950s to defend the U.S. and Canada against Soviet missile and bomber attacks, not to look for slow-moving balloons.Now, as one U.S. official put it, “we basically opened the filters,” meaning that North American air defenses are now intentionally looking for smaller objects. As the Atlantic contributing writer Juliette Kayyem notes, if it seems like we’re now finding more of them, it’s because we’re actively looking for them. And as Kirby noted in today’s briefing, pilots flying at hundreds of miles an hour are trying to identify essentially stationary objects, so it’s too early to ask for a precise description.Still, if both the U.S. and Canadian governments are confident enough about what they’re seeing to issue orders to open fire on these objects, the public may wonder why its leaders are not saying more about the targets.As usual with military and intelligence operations, there are several reasons to hold information close at this point. We don’t want to tip off adversaries about how much we know, how much we were actually able to see in detail, and how quickly we could spot these objects. The United States has already begun to recover some of the debris, but it is never a good idea to share exactly how much of an opponent’s technology is in our hands.(By the way, the armchair generals who are eager to send up more jets to shoot down yet more things should step back for a moment. The decision to engage an unidentified object always carries the risk of a mistake or an accident—or of endangering civilians on the ground. To return to 1983 for a moment, recall that the former Soviet Union had an itchy trigger finger when it came to incursions of its airspace, which is why in September of that year, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a South Korean civilian airliner, killing all 269 people aboard.)For now, Washington and Ottawa have determined that these objects were violating U.S. and Canadian sovereignty, that they posed a real threat to commercial aviation, and that they had no business being where they were. We are unlikely to get more than that, other than confirmation of who owned these things—which is clearly making the Chinese somewhat sweaty. As is so often the case in national-security affairs, this is a time for patience and analysis rather than intemperance and panic.Related:
The simple explanation for all these flying objects
China’s balloon-size blunder is a huge opportunity.
About 100,000 protesters from across Israel gathered outside Parliament in Jerusalem to oppose the sweeping judicial overhaul that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has proposed.
President Joe Biden fired the architect of the Capitol after allegations that he had misused government resources.
A Georgia judge ordered the partial release of a special-grand-jury report investigating efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Up for Debate: Twelve readers describe how they prepare for natural disasters.
Ben Hickey
The Enduring Romance of MixtapesBy Andee Tagle
Six years ago, when my now-husband was still just a friendly old flame from my high-school days, I sent him an Apple Music playlist of my favorite songs of the moment. This was not unusual: Song swapping, album recommendations, and musical one-upmanship had kept us in touch for nearly a decade. Instead of a coffee date, it was “Have you heard of Noname?” In lieu of a lengthy phone call, it was “Listened to the new GoldLink album yet?”
On this playlist, the final track was “Saved” by the R&B artist Khalid. “But I’ll keep your number saved / ’Cause I hope one day you’ll get the sense to call me,” goes the swoony chorus. “I’m hoping that you’ll say / You’re missing me the way I’m missing you.” It was an innocent offering, I swear! But for my now-husband, it was an opening. “That song told me there was a chance,” he told me years later. In 2022, we added it to the must-play list at our wedding.
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Photos: Superb Owl Sunday VII
Netflix
Read. These are some of the best books to read with a person you love.Watch. The Empress, on Netflix, a German-language period drama about “a Habsburg Meghan Markle,” as our writer puts it.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Okay, so maybe it’s not Chinese balloons. Maybe the aliens are about to invade. If so, I have the perfect soundtrack for you.Back in 1978, the British musician and producer Jeff Wayne came up with the brilliantly weird idea of turning the classic H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds into a rock musical, and thus was born an offbeat but wonderful double-album set, released that spring. Wayne stayed true to the source material, even hiring Richard Burton to do the narration. The musicians and cast included Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, David Essex, and Julie Covington. Despite mixing orchestral music with rock and disco, the whole thing works, and Hayward even scored a hit in America that fall with the haunting “Forever Autumn,” a song that’s been one of my personal favorites for more than 45 years. The album has remained a popular seller, and in 2011, it was rerecorded with a new cast, with Liam Neeson sitting in for the long-deceased Burton. (I am, however, not a fan of the remake.) It has also been performed live in various venues.To this day, whenever I hear someone talk about aliens, all I can hear is Hayward singing, “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, he said.” (This is after Burton talks to the astronomer, Ogilvy, who pishposhes away concerns about the green flashes on the Martian surface that turn out to be the invading rockets.) And I still get chills hearing the electronic “ULLA!” that in the book was the Martian death rattle, but that Wayne reimagined as their battle cry. It’s one of the strangest albums in rock history but well worth an extended listen, if only to hear Burton’s whiskey-and-velvet voice one more time.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.This article has been updated to clarify that the jets dispatched over the Yukon belonged to NORAD.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked for your thoughts on preparing for natural disasters.Ed takes stock of his setup:
I live in the country, so I am in a better position than many others. My water comes from a naturally flowing spring, so I have unlimited water. I have a gasoline-powered generator; electricity would be available until my gas runs out (I generally keep five gallons on hand). I have three fireplaces to provide some heat and plenty of cut wood to fuel them. I believe I have enough canned goods on hand for two, maybe even three weeks.
Kacey writes from a place where four tectonic plates meet:
I am no stranger to earthquakes. They have become a relatively common occurrence in my life since moving to Japan in 2015. Fortunately, none of the quakes I’ve experienced caused serious damage or loss of life to my immediate surroundings. Unfortunately, I’ve done little more than the bare minimum to prepare for a natural disaster.
I have studied my local hazard map—I know the location of my nearest evacuation shelter; I know where the river is most likely to overrun its banks; I know which areas are ripe for soil liquefaction or where a landslide is most likely to occur. My apartment is safe from such threats. Otherwise, the only prep I’ve undertaken involved the purchase of 24 one-liter water bottles in 2020. I hear them slosh around in my trunk when I take sharp turns.
Any time an earthquake of any magnitude happens in Japan, I always tell myself, “I should be more prepared.” Yet I never do more. Nearly half of the population is similarly unprepared [according to a 2021 survey].. This lack of preparation may stem from an overconfidence in Japan’s disaster-response capability. Some may have a tough time justifying the financial cost of something they may never use; others may view disasters as a natural force about which they can do nothing.
Simply writing this response has once again stirred my motivation to go and get more prepared. Whether I actually do anything remains to be seen.
Alison recounts “the October 17, 1989, Loma Prieta earthquake—what my friends and I called the ‘Big-Enough One:’”
I was in San Francisco and was able to walk the four or five blocks to my brother and sis-in-law’s home, where they had power because their landlord had a generator. I stayed there for several days with my cats, their cats, foster cats, and younger brother. Unfortunately I can relate to the current conditions in Syria and Turkey with respect to rescue efforts and the sense of achieving a miracle when someone is recovered alive after a few days, the likelihood of which sadly eventually fades as survivability recedes.  
The Big-Enough One occurred during Game 3 of that year’s World Series, unusually between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's; otherwise the death toll would have been much higher when part of the Bay Bridge collapsed. I subsequently moved to Montreal, in time to experience the ice storm in January of 1998; here, the problem was that many power lines were downed by heavy ice, to the point that there was literally only one power line carrying electricity into all of Montreal for several days (for the geographically challenged, Montreal is on an island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River).  
Had that one last power line failed, the authorities would have been facing the task of evacuating some 3 million people from the island, through several tunnels (yes, there are bridges, but they were also completely coated in ice and not navigable). In this case, my in-laws had power (because they lived next to a major hospital and were on its power grid), so we could at least get a warm shower, and our building's owner had a generator that he alternated using in our building and another one that he owned so we could warm up at home for a few hours at a time.
Neither the 1989 quake nor the ice storm affected me deeply, except in a psychological sense. I still remember the sense of wonder that I experienced after the Big-Enough One when I realized that I was no longer worried that the ground would fall out from under me when I walked outside!
Robert describes another historic earthquake:
I was living in Kathmandu, Nepal, in August of 1988 when a 6.9 earthquake hit the city. Born and raised in San Francisco, I was no stranger to seismic disturbance. But this was different; the shaking and convulsing of everything around me was terribly frightening, but it was nothing compared to the screams of the people as I heard buildings collapsing around me. Houses shaking to pieces and the cries of children in fear and pain were terrifying; I have never forgotten what this sounded like. Almost immediately, everyone who could began helping the injured, clearing away rubble, and donating to the general relief effort.
Now, fast-forward to COVID. My wife and I were living near Palm Desert in Southern California at the start of the pandemic, when suddenly people were sweeping everything off the supermarket shelves: food, toilet paper, bottled water, and every disinfectant they could get their hands on. But what scared me most was the frenzied buying of guns and ammunition. We are no strangers to gun violence, and this experience had much to do with our decision to return to Northern California.
You ask for our thoughts on how to prepare for a natural disaster and what we may have neglected. Our current level of preparation is modest: important documents, credit cards, and a small amount of cash are ready to go at a moment’s notice; we have a small stove with plenty of fuel, and food for a few days. I suppose we could store a bit more food and water, but I’m not so sure that one can be adequately prepared for every eventuality.
In a pinch, we would share what we have, and would never dream of taking someone else’s provisions. We’ll do the best we can, but one thing I know we are not prepared for is violence.
Julianne is waiting for the Big One in the Pacific Northwest:
I live in Port Angeles, Washington, which is on the top of the Olympic Peninsula. Known locally as “upper left,” the peninsula is the farthest northwest span of the lower 48 states. It’s a spectacularly beautiful landscape: snowy mountain peaks; misty, temperate rainforests; crystal-clear glacial lakes; and a teeming ocean, all anchored by the Olympic National Park. The motto of Port Angeles is appropriately “Where the mountains meet the sea.” The residents of my area are hardworking, kind, and practical people.
What’s the catch? Well, a little thing called the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The CSZ is a convergent tectonic-plate boundary stretching from northern Vancouver Island to Northern California, with coastal Washington square in the middle of it. The last time the locked plates released was in 1700, long before the area was settled by white people. Evidence for the 1700 quake was preserved in Native oral histories. Geological evidence was unearthed much more recently, in the mid-1980s.
When the plates eventually slip, it’s estimated the earth will shake for five solid minutes at 9.5-plus magnitude. For comparison, the horrific recent quake in Turkey and Syria measured a 7.8 magnitude, making the one we’re expecting about 350 times stronger. When is the CSZ likely to cause another massive quake? Estimates place the risk at 37 percent in the next 50 years.
You may think that, given the recent growth in the Seattle area, local infrastructure would be designed to handle this obvious threat. However, the threat has only been recognized for a little over 30 years. There’s a lot of existing, inadequate building stock that will be replaced very slowly, if at all—especially in my community, which is not a wealthy area.  
When we were deciding where in Washington to live, I was able to do lots of research via government websites on factors like tsunami risk and soil liquefaction for given areas. It’s good that the info exists, but I know most local people really don’t want to know about their risk. Other preparations I’ve made include keeping survival supplies stashed in my car (in case I’m not home when the quake happens), as well as a month’s worth of food, water filters, and shelter supplies at my house. I hope it’s enough to help us survive an event that is likely to completely cut off our community from help for months, if not a year or more. Clearly, the priority for rescue efforts will be the very large population of Seattle (rightly), not our sleepy, isolated towns up on the edge of the country.   
I recently took a community-ed class on the CSZ at our great little community college, which made me feel justified in all my preparations. Paradoxically, the class helped me let go of a constant hum of low-level worry, and instead I’ve been able to move to a more fatalistic outlook. It’s coming; I’m fairly well prepared; not much else I can do, so why worry?
Alice lives in the Pacific Northwest, too, and wishes the government would do more to prepare for the coming earthquake:
When I retired a year or so ago, I immediately started preparing above and beyond the recommended “2 Weeks Ready” that is promoted by the state of Oregon. Overall, the preparation process has been expensive, stressful, time-consuming, and frankly a bit depressing. I am left feeling that the bulk of preparation, survival, and recovery is up to the individual. I am not in any way arguing that the “government” should step in and “rescue” citizens, and I wholeheartedly feel I need to do my part by being prepared. However, I feel that over the 40-odd years since Ronald Reagan was president, we have impaired the ability of government, both federal and state, to respond to disasters AND prevent them in the first place. In our quest to reduce the size and cost of government, we have lost sight of the need for a highly organized collective (i.e., “government”) that can respond when multistate disasters happen, as will be the case in a Cascadia event.  
I know from my own experience that preparation is time- and money-consuming. Not everyone has the ability or resources to do the necessary work to get ready. I think somewhere along the way, we the people lost sight of the idea that “we the people” are in fact “the government,” and that there is much good that we can do together. I would argue that this is the purpose of a government by and for the people: to set the conditions such that everyone has the opportunity to survive and thrive. Disaster preparedness is one area in which rugged individualism helps but will not get us individually or collectively where we need to be to survive and eventually thrive after a big event.
Doug lives on the central Oregon coast:
I have ensured my home is tied to its foundation. I have installed 800 watts of solar panels on my garage roof and as much in panels stored as replacement/auxiliary use. I have a growing number of modern lithium-ion batteries I can charge from the solar panels. I can’t run my house off this system, but I don’t need to. I need light and power for truly essential things. I have a considerable amount of camping gear (and experience) including multi-fuel stove options and a decent amount of fuel stored. I have advanced first-aid training and stored gear, and emergency food and water. I have an emergency pack for the first 72 hours of survival in my car. I am also active in the local volunteer amateur-radio group of Auxiliary Communications Service (ACS), training and standing by to aid local government(s) communicate for resources and relay information to the state government. There is no place on earth that is truly safe, and that is never more the case with the ravages of climate change. I want to be here to help my neighbors and community, thus it is incumbent upon me to be prepared myself.
Jen no longer worries about that Big One––she moved away and feels happy that she did:
We lived in the Cascadia subduction zone for 30 years, and we always had to have an earthquake plan. We never had earthquake insurance, and our joke was that if there was a big earthquake, we’d just leave the gas turned on and a candle burning and run like hell. Eventually we set up a disaster-recovery kit that would allow us to live outside for a few weeks. We built a backyard shed and stored all of our camping gear, several tote boxes of food, and about 100 gallons of drinking water. The whole thing had to be broken down and replaced regularly—the water each year, and the food every three years or so. We also had pry bars, axes, and other hand tools stored where we could get them in the event the house collapsed. It was a headache and an expense, and while the risk of a major subduction-zone quake was not the only reason we decided to leave the area, it did factor into our decision.
We now live on the other side of the state in a rural area that is not wooded, so there is little wildfire danger. The climate change risk is low too—no risk of being underwater here, and our water sources aren’t dependent on rainfall. Not everybody has the flexibility to just up and move out of danger zones, but if you are thinking of moving for retirement or other reasons that aren’t job- or family-dependent, I highly recommend factoring in climate-change risk and disaster risk when you make up your wish list of places you want to explore. I didn’t realize what a chronic low-level worry it was until it wasn’t lurking there all the time.
EH muses on denial:
I have lived in California for all of my 77 years and I know what having the earth move under your feet feels like. The ground becomes like water and the shockwaves can make one feel seasick, as if standing in a dinghy that has been swamped by a passing speed boat. If you are up in a tall building, the steel and concrete actually sways, jumps, and cracks as you hold your breath waiting for it all to tumble down. Fortunately, I have not actually personally experienced real damage or injuries from any earthquake I have felt.
Yet, despite knowing the destructive power and killing potential of a large quake, I take only minimal precautions: strapping my water heater to the wall, having extra flashlights and some water reserves. I hope help will come from the rest of you if we suffer the Big One.
I sometimes say to myself what fools others are to live in flood zones or coastal areas that get hurricanes, or in the infamous tornado alley, not to mention the fire-prone and drought-plagued West; oh yeah, I live in San Diego, but it won’t happen to my neighborhood.
It is called denialism, and we all suffer from it in some form.
The biggest manifestation of denialism in the history of the Earth is our collective denial of global warming. This is a slow-moving natural disaster that could end human life.
Earl lives in the path of the occasional hurricane:
Here on the Gulf Coast, they’re inevitable, like blizzards in Buffalo and earthquakes in California. We prepare for the next storm with a new roof, knowing that even if it withstands winds, insurance rates will eventually go through it as repeat storms get more frequent due to climate change. Nevertheless, we stay.
We stay because of historical, social, psychological, financial, and familial inertia; it’s home; it’s where the heart and the family are. We trust the engineers and builders who construct bigger and better storm barriers and drainage systems. There is less trust in the power grid; more and more homes get whole-house generators, expensive but reassuring that the nightmare of evacuation and return won’t be necessary. We will ride out the storm with full power. At least we hope so.
Anna hunkers down in stormy weather:
Hurricanes may be the least-worst natural disaster because you can prepare, and you generally have decent advanced warning to make those preparations or decide to evacuate. I live on the Gulf Coast in Florida, so hurricane prep is an annual tradition. The major guiding principle: You can hide from the wind but you have to run from the water.
I don’t live in a flood zone, and I live in a house built to modern codes. I’ve had the big trees removed that could fall on the house. I don’t have any special needs that require uninterrupted electric service. So I have the luxury of hunkering down and riding out a hurricane.
Every year when the season cranks up, I make sure I have plenty of nonperishable food and basic supplies on hand, and I don’t stock up too heavily on perishables. I keep fillable water bottles on hand just in case, but historically, my municipal water and sewer services operate fine during and after storms. The most important prep for me is to reach out to my neighbors and make sure they are prepared, that we all know where everyone will be, and we are ready to help each other in the aftermath of cleanup and outages.
With all that in place, my experience with hurricanes is that there is a big damn mess to clean up outside, but otherwise it’s like camping out in my house. Newbies often don’t know what to expect and succumb to the hype. Panicky behavior makes it harder to prepare and to get through it and to recover afterward. Lots of people don’t have the resources to adequately prepare or to evacuate for a hurricane, and that’s a serious problem, but my city/county/state does a lot of outreach and assistance for those folks. Preparation, experience, and (most importantly) community is what gets you through it.
Bob was a Los Angeles Times staff photographer and has seen it all:
I’ve covered so many disasters I don’t know where to start. I’ve also suffered from PTSD, having spent too much time around people who have lost everything. I covered the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes, the Painted Cave Fire in Santa Barbara, and another conflagration that burned homes in Malibu. I covered the Great Midwestern Flood in 1993, the Los Angeles Riots in 1992, and the Marines’ invasion of Somalia.
And after I retired, I volunteered for the Red Cross, where the most knowledgeable staffers at the Los Angeles regional headquarters quietly predicted in 2014 that there would be food riots in Los Angeles starting three days after the Big One. I quit the Red Cross after taking photos and video of an EF-5 tornado in Smithville, Mississippi, covered the flood on the Mississippi right after that, then went to the EF-5 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, and then Hurricane Irene.
After that, I needed two stents.
I’m 76 now and enjoying life, although I’m getting a hip transplant in two weeks. I live on a hill in Thousand Oaks, California. A few years ago we had a mass shooting at an upscale country-and-western bar featuring line dancing. A few days later, we had a brush fire that burned around the edges of the housing tracts and then headed into more rarified real estate in Malibu. My wife and I ended up sleeping in cars parked in a mall parking lot.
Our house made it through, so we were lucky.
I don’t have many brilliant observations. The problem with disasters is the one thing they are good at is ruining people’s lives. People usually don’t recover from disasters. If they’re lucky, they survive them.
I photographed a guy in Smithville who was walking around what was left of his house as he talked to his wife. He kept telling her it was all gone. Gone it was, with a half a bedroom left. So was his boat. In the Loma Prieta earthquake, I photographed a woman who was dazed, standing in front of her house. It was a beautiful old wooden mansion, but it was askew. She told me that that Sunday, she’d had a $400,000 mortgage on a $600,000 home. After the quake, she had a $400,000 mortgage.
In Malibu, in the middle of what was some of the most expensive real estate in the country, I saw a woman going through the wreckage of her home on a hillside overlooking the ocean. I asked if I could take her picture and she said yes. Fifteen minutes later, I thanked her. “Oh, no,” she said, “you can’t leave me.” So I stood there while she cried and she talked and she cried and she talked. “Okay,” she said after a while. “You can go now.” She probably rebuilt her home and came as close as you can to recovering. The one percent recover from disasters. Most disaster survivors simply don’t.
Ken knows what song he’ll be singing when the end is nigh:
My notion of “Disaster Planning” derives from my experience of the Cold War while living in the Northern Virginia suburbs outside Washington, D.C., within a triangle defined by the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA. Instantaneous nuclear annihilation was akin to auto exhaust: in the air, invisible, all the time— an accepted condition of life. While some wackos prepared to survive in well-stocked bunkers, while the Federal Government fantasized about survival in a string of underground facilities in a line running south from the city, I lived with the acceptance and understanding that at any moment I could be flashed from life to ash.
For a while I taught risk-management methodologies for federal contractors executing IT systems and software contracts. Therefore, I have the tools and techniques to identify, categorize, evaluate, and plan to mitigate knowable risks such as those that might befall me and my household: extended utility outages, wider physical destruction from severe weather, sea-level rise, economic collapse, civil war, etc. But I don’t bother with a personal-risk-management process.
One can always place blame on their parents. From a very early age, my mother (a closet existentialist) serenaded me with the chorus of a once popular song: “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.”

I’m resuming my series on “Valuing the Deep State” after a bit of a pause. On March 21 I will be delivering the annual Donald Stone Lecture to the American Society for Public Administration—the country’s leading professional association focusing on these issues—and these pieces will feed into that talk.Up to now I’ve defended delegation and bureaucratic autonomy against many of the charges laid against it by conservatives. The latter argue that unaccountable bureaucrats are constantly making up new rules outside of the control of democratically-elected legislators, a tyranny that is both non-transparent and pervasive. I have argued that the U.S. system of government does in fact provide a number of mechanisms for controlling the bureaucracy, but that Congress has typically failed to exert the power that it actually possesses.That doesn’t mean that these charges of bureaucratic overreach aren’t valid in many cases. I want to lay out four instances where the federal government has exceeded its authority, potentially to the detriment of citizens’ rights. There are many more cases of this at the state and local levels, and I suspect it is these lower-level rules that probably drive the general perception of an out-of-control government.One notorious example of overreach was the case Sackett v. EPA. Michael and Chantell Sackett were a couple who bought a 0.63 acre lot for a house they planned to build in Priest Lake, Idaho, that was several lots over from the nearest body of water. At the start of construction, however, they were ordered to desist by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers, who asserted that the lot contained wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act. These agencies employed an extremely broad definition of wetlands and did not allow the Sacketts to contest the judgment in an administrative hearing.The original statute left unclear what constituted “waters of the United States.” The EPA asserted an extremely broad definition: The land did not have to contain actual navigable waters, but could include dry land that was used by migratory birds. Indeed, the birds did not actually have to use the land; in the words of one commentator, it was enough that “a wayward goose glanced longingly at a given parcel of land” for it to be considered under federal jurisdiction. The Sacketts contested the EPA action in court in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The latter decided it in favor of the Sacketts, but on narrow procedural grounds. The decision allowed the couple to contest the ruling administratively, but failed to define the appropriate scope of the EPA’s jurisdiction.A second case is the expansion of the authority of Title IX, which I wrote about in an earlier blog post based on a book by Boston College’s Shep Melnick. An education bill passed in 1972 had a short clause that prohibited federal funding for entities that discriminated on the basis of gender. In the first couple of decades of Title IX’s existence, it was applied largely to varsity sports on campus, but in the 2010s it was expanded to cover sexual assault and sexual harassment on college campuses. By the time of the Obama administration, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education was issuing hundreds of pages of guidance on how schools and universities were to handle sexual assault cases. These new rules should have been promulgated under the Administrative Procedure Act and put out for notice and comment. But the OCR issued these rules in the form of “Dear Colleague” letters that were claimed not to have the force of law and were therefore not subject to the APA. Some of the new rules raised serious questions regarding freedom of speech on campus and due process for those accused of assault. Thousands of schools around the United States set up Title IX offices according to the federal guidance, for fear of jeopardizing their federal funding.A third and more recent case concerns the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium during the Covid epidemic. At the beginning of the epidemic, the U.S. Congress passed the CARES Act, which included a rental eviction moratorium on properties with federal funding or federally-backed mortgages. Following the expiration of that moratorium in July 2020, the CDC then imposed a new moratorium through the end of the year, based on Section 361 of the Public Health Service Act. This was upheld by the pre-Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court. The Biden administration issued a new moratorium lasting through October 2021 in counties with high Covid transmission rates, a ban that was struck down by the new conservative majority on the Court. The latter argued that the authorities delegated by the underlying statute simply did not encompass control over rental housing.The final case was the one decided by SCOTUS in West Virginia v. EPA in the summer of 2022. The EPA sought to regulate carbon emissions in its 2015 Clean Power Plan, which drew authority from Section 111 of the 1970 Clean Air Act. The plan envisioned “generation shifting” to lower emissions sources, e.g., from coal to natural gas and from natural gas to alternative energy. This would require new investment in clean energy, or in emission allowances under cap-and-trade. Although the Clean Power Plan was rescinded by the Trump administration, it was ultimately withdrawn by the EPA because market forces on their own were motivating a shift to alternatives without the need for government regulation. Nonetheless, the Roberts court rejected the plan under the “major questions” exception to Chevron Deference on the grounds that the original statute did not envision giving the EPA authority over greenhouse gas emissions.The liberal minority on the newly conservative court dissented from the decision on two separate grounds. The first was on the basis of a substantive reading of the original statute, whose language they argued did delegate authority over greenhouse gases. The second was a procedural one raised by Justice Elena Kagan in her dissent: She argued that the “major questions” exception was a squishy concept that the conservative majority was using to insert the court’s opinions in place of those of the expert agency. In line with the original Chevron Deference decision, she argued that courts were less qualified to make such decisions than agencies.The first two cases—those of the federal waterways and Title IX—do seem to me to be unjustified expansions of federal authority. I like the underlying policies of the CDC and West Virginia v. EPA cases a bit better. But I grant that, procedurally, these federal agencies were stretching their authority in ways that were hard to justify given the language of the original statute. The need to regulate carbon emissions is a matter of some urgency, and our polarized Congress is not remotely up to the task of acting on this issue. So while the theory tells us that Congress has the legitimate authority to make policy in this domain, it is easy to see why agencies and courts seek to move ahead in any way they can.However, there’s a larger point to be made about our political system. The bureaucracy is not “out of control” across the board. We have designed a set of checks and balances to prevent the administrative state from dictating policy, and in the latter two cases those checks were effective. You might not like the substantive outcome or the conservative court that produced it, but this is the way the system is supposed to work.We have, however, a deeper problem that the system does not seem capable of fixing. SCOTUS is not the only judicial actor in the country; state courts and our tradition of common law can also create monsters that are difficult to control. This will be the subject of a subsequent post.

In the early spring of 2020, the condition we now call long COVID didn’t have a name, much less a large community of patient advocates. For the most part, clinicians dismissed its symptoms, and researchers focused on SARS-CoV-2 infections’ short-term effects. Now, as the pandemic approaches the end of its third winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the chronic toll of the coronavirus is much more familiar. Long COVID has been acknowledged by prominent experts, national leaders, and the World Health Organization; the National Institutes of Health has set up a billion-dollar research program to understand how and in whom its symptoms unfurl. Hundreds of long-COVID clinics now freckle the American landscape, offering services in nearly every state; and recent data hint that well-vetted drugs to treat or prevent long COVID may someday be widespread. Long COVID and the people battling it are commanding more respect, says Hannah Davis, a co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who has had long COVID for nearly three years: Finally, many people “seem willing to understand.”But for all the ground that’s been gained, the road ahead is arduous. Long COVID still lacks a universal clinical definition and a standard diagnosis protocol; there’s no consensus on its prevalence, or even what symptoms fall under its purview. Although experts now agree that long COVID does not refer to a single illness, but rather is an umbrella term, like cancer, they disagree on the number of subtypes that fall within it and how, exactly, each might manifest. Some risk factors—among them, a COVID hospitalization, female sex, and certain preexisting medical conditions—have been identified, but researchers are still trying to identify others amid fluctuating population immunity and the endless slog of viral variants. And for people who have long COVID now, or might develop it soon, the interventions are still scant. To this day, “when someone asks me, ‘How can I not get long COVID?’ I can still only say, ‘Don’t get COVID,’” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and physical therapist who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine.As the world turns its gaze away from the coronavirus pandemic, with country after country declaring the virus “endemic” and allowing crisis-caliber interventions to lapse, long-COVID researchers, patients, and activists worry that even past progress could be undone. The momentum of the past three years now feels bittersweet, they told me, in that it represents what the community might lose. Experts can’t yet say whether the number of long-haulers will continue to increase, or offer a definitive prognosis for those who have been battling the condition for months or years. All that’s clear right now is that, despite America’s current stance on the coronavirus, long COVID is far from being beaten.Despite an influx of resources into long-COVID research in recent months, data on the condition’s current reach remain a mess—and scientists still can’t fully quantify its risks.Recent evidence from two long-term surveys have hinted that the pool of long-haulers might be shrinking, even as new infection rates remain sky-high: Earlier this month, the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics released data showing that 2 million people self-reported lingering symptoms at the very start of 2023, down from 2.3 million in August 2022. The U.S. CDC’s Household Pulse Survey, another study based on self-reporting, also recorded a small drop in long-COVID prevalence in the same time frame, from about 7.5 percent of all American adults to roughly 6. Against the massive number of infections that have continued to slam both countries in the pandemic’s third year and beyond, these surveys might seem to imply that long-haulers are leaving the pool faster than newcomers are arriving.Experts cautioned, however, that there are plenty of reasons to treat these patterns carefully—and to not assume that the trends will be sustained. It’s certainly better that these data aren’t showing a sustained, dramatic uptick in long-COVID cases. But that doesn’t mean the situation is improving. Throughout the pandemic, the size of the long-COVID pool has contracted or expanded for only two reasons: a change in the rate at which people enter, or at which they exit. Both figures are likely to be in constant flux, as surges of infections come and go, masking habits change, and vaccine and antiviral uptake fluctuates. Davis pointed out that the slight downward tick in both studies captured just a half-year stretch, so the downward slope could be one small portion of an undulating wave. A few hours spent at the beach while the tide is going out wouldn’t be enough to prove that the ocean is drying up.[Read: We’re bungling the COVID wind-down]Recent counts of new long-COVID cases might also be undercounts, as testing slows and people encounter more challenges getting diagnosed. That said, it’s still possible that, on a case-by-case basis, the likelihood of any individual developing long COVID after a SARS-CoV-2 infection may have fallen since the pandemic’s start, says Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London and the University of New South Wales. Population immunity—especially acquired via vaccination—has, over the past three years, better steeled people’s bodies against the virus, and strong evidence supports the notion that vaccines can moderately reduce the risk of developing long COVID. Treatments and behavioral interventions that have become more commonplace may have chipped away at incidence as well. Antivirals can now help to corral the virus early in infection; ventilation, distancing, and masks—when they’re used—can trim the amount of virus that infiltrates the body. And if overall exposure to the virus can influence the likelihood of developing long COVID, that could help explain why so many debilitating cases arose at the very start of the pandemic, when interventions were few and far between, says Steven Deeks, a physician researcher at UC San Francisco.There’s not much comfort to derive from those individual-level stats, though, when considering what’s happening on broader scales. Even if immunity makes the average infected person less likely to fall into the long-COVID pool, so many people have been catching the virus that the inbound rate still feels like a flood. “The level of infection in many countries has gone up substantially since 2021,” Gurdasani told me. The majority of long-COVID cases arise after mild infections, the sort for which our immune defenses fade most rapidly. Now that masking and physical distancing have fallen by the wayside, people may be getting exposed to higher viral doses than they were a year or two ago. In absolute terms, then, the number of people entering the long-COVID pool may not really be decreasing. Even if the pool were getting slightly smaller, its size would still be staggering, an ocean of patients with titanic needs. “Anecdotally, we still have an enormous waitlist to get into our clinic,” Putrino told me.Deeks told me that he’s seen another possible reason for optimism: People with newer cases of long COVID might be experiencing less debilitating or faster-improving disease, based on what he’s seen. “The worst cases we’ve seen come from the first wave in 2020,” he said. But Putrino isn’t so sure. “If you put an Omicron long-COVID patient in front of me, versus one from the first wave, I wouldn’t be able to tell you who was who,” he said. The two cases would also be difficult to compare, because they’re separated by so much time. Long COVID’s symptoms can wax, wane, and qualitatively change; a couple of years into the future, some long-haulers who’ve just developed the condition may be in a spot that’s similar to where many veterans with the condition are now.[Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete]Experts’ understanding of how often people depart the long-COVID pool is also meager. Some long-haulers have undoubtedly seen improvement—but without clear lines distinguishing short COVID from medium and long COVID, entry and exit into these various groups is easy to over- or underestimate. What few data exist on the likelihood of recovery or remission is inconsistent, and not always rosy: Investigators of RECOVER, a large national study of long COVID, have calculated that about two-thirds of the long-haulers in their cohort do not return to baseline health. Putrino, who has worked with hundreds of long-haulers since the pandemic began, estimates that although most of his patients experience at least some benefit from a few months of rehabilitation, only about one-fifth to one-quarter of them eventually reach the point of feeling about as well as they did before catching the virus, while the majority hit a middling plateau. A small minority of the people he has treated, he told me, never seem to improve at all.Letícia Soares, a long-hauler in Brazil who caught the virus near the start of the pandemic, falls into that final category. Once a disease ecologist who studied parasite transmission in birds, she is now mostly housebound, working when she is able as a researcher for the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Her days revolve around medications and behavioral modifications she uses for her fatigue, sleeplessness, and chronic pain. Soares no longer has the capacity to cook or frequently venture outside. And she has resigned herself to this status quo until the treatment landscape changes drastically. It is not the life she pictured for herself, Soares told me. “Sometimes I think the person I used to be died in April of 2020.”Even long-haulers who have noticed an improvement in their symptoms are wary of overconfidence. Some absolutely do experience what could be called recovery—but for others, the term has gotten loaded, almost a jinx. “If the question is, ‘Are you doing the things you were doing in 2019?’ the answer is largely no,” says JD Davids, a chronic-illness advocate based in New York. For some, he told me, “getting better” has been more defined by a resetting of expectations than a return to good health. Relapses are also not uncommon, especially after repeat encounters with the virus. Lisa McCorkell, a long-hauler and a co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, has felt her symptoms partly abate since she first fell ill in the spring of 2020. But, she told me, she suspects that her condition is more likely to deteriorate than further improve—partly because of “how easy it is to get reinfected now.”Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden told the American public that “we have broken COVID’s grip on us.” Highlighting the declines in the rates of COVID deaths, the millions of lives saved, and the importance of remembering the more than 1 million lost, Biden reminded the nation of what was to come: “Soon we’ll end the public-health emergency.”When the U.S.’s state of emergency was declared nearly three years ago, as hospitals were overrun and morgues overflowed, the focus was on severe, short-term disease. Perhaps in that sense, the emergency is close to being over, Deeks told me. But long COVID, though slower to command attention, has since become its own emergency, never formally declared; for the millions of Americans who have been affected by the condition, their relationship with the virus does not yet seem to be in a better place.[Read: Trying to stop long COVID before it even starts]Even with many more health-care providers clued into long COVID’s ills, the waiting lists for rehabilitation and treatment remain untenable, Hannah Davis told me. “I consider myself someone who gets exceptional care compared to other people,” she said. “And still, I hear from my doctor every nine or 10 months.” Calling a wrap on COVID’s “emergency” phase could worsen that already skewed supply-demand ratio. Changes to the nation’s funding tactics could strip resources—among them, access to telehealth; Medicaid coverage; and affordable antivirals, tests, and vaccines—from vulnerable populations, including people of color, that aren’t getting their needs met even as things stand, McCorkell told me. And as clinicians internalize the message that the coronavirus has largely been addressed, attention to its chronic impacts may dwindle. At least one of the country's long-COVID clinics has, in recent months, announced plans to close, and Davis worries that more could follow soon.Scientists researching long COVID are also expecting new challenges. Reduced access to testing will complicate efforts to figure out how many people are developing the condition, and who’s most at risk. Should researchers turn their scientific focus away from studying causes and cures for long COVID when the emergency declaration lifts, Davids and others worry that there will be ripple effects on the scientific community’s interest in other, neglected chronic illnesses, such as ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome), a diagnosis that many long-haulers have also received.The end of the U.S.’s official crisis mode on COVID could stymie research in other ways as well. At Johns Hopkins University, the infectious-disease epidemiologists Priya Duggal, Shruti Mehta, and Bryan Lau have been running a large study to better understand the conditions and circumstances that lead to long COVID, and how symptoms evolve over time. In the past two years, they have gathered online survey data from thousands of people who both have and haven’t been infected, and who have and haven’t seen their symptoms rapidly resolve. But as of late, they’ve been struggling to recruit enough people who caught the virus and didn’t feel their symptoms linger. “I think that the people who are suffering from long COVID will always do their best to participate,” Duggal told me. That may not be the case for individuals whose experiences with the virus were brief. A lot of them “are completely over it,” Duggal said. “Their life has moved on.”Kate Porter, a Massachusetts-based marketing director, told me that she worries about her family’s future, should long COVID fade from the national discourse. She and her teenage daughter both caught the virus in the spring of 2020, and went on to develop chronic symptoms; their experience with the disease isn’t yet over. “Just because the emergency declaration is expiring, that doesn’t mean that suddenly people are magically going to get better and this issue is going to go away,” Porter told me. After months of relative improvement, her daughter is now fighting prolonged bouts of fatigue that are affecting her school life—and Porter isn’t sure how receptive people will be to her explanations, should their illnesses persist for years to come. “Two years from now, how am I going to explain, ‘Well, this is from COVID, five years ago’?” she said.A condition that was once mired in skepticism, scorn, and gaslighting, long COVID now has recognition—but empathy for long-haulers could yet experience a backslide. Nisreen Alwan, a public-health researcher at the University of Southampton, in the U.K., and her colleagues have found that many long-haulers still worry about disclosing their condition, fearing that it could jeopardize their employment, social interactions, and more. Long COVID could soon be slated to become just one of many neglected chronic diseases, poorly understood and rarely discussed.Davis doesn’t think that marginalization is inevitable. Her reasoning is grim: Other chronic illnesses have been easier to push to the sidelines, she said, on account of their smaller clinical footprint, but the pool of long-haulers is enormous—comprising millions of people in the U.S. alone. “I think it’s going to be impossible to ignore,” she told me. One way or another, the world will have no choice but to look.

In December 2022, I saw Nick Cave and Warren Ellis perform at the Sydney Opera House as part of their Australian Carnage tour. Alternating between tender melancholy and piercing defiance, Cave stalked the stage while the crowd chanted, stamped, swayed, and clapped. He reminded me of a missionary preacher committed to saving souls, including his own. When I met Cave briefly backstage after the show, I was struck by the contrast between his larger-than-life stage persona and the humility of the man in person. His ordinariness and lack of pretension are characteristically Australian.I’ve been familiar with Cave’s music since I was a child when I was given a Bad Seeds anthology in 1998. That career retrospective was premature, however. Since then, Cave and his band have recorded a further eight studio albums (amounting to 17 in total)— including No More Shall We Part (2001), Nocturama (2003), Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004), Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! (2008), Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree (2016), and Ghosteen (2019), with an 18th studio album currently in the works. Today, Cave is perhaps best known for his elegant ballads such as Love Letter, Higgs Boson Blues, and Brompton Oratory. But his remarkably diverse musical career reaches back into London’s early ’80s post-punk movement, when his dark and discordant live performances fronting The Birthday Party would whip audiences into Dionysian frenzies.To date, Cave has sold over five million records worldwide. In addition to his prolific output with the Bad Seeds, he has released a further two albums with another project, Grinderman; scored numerous film soundtracks in collaboration with Ellis (with whom he also recorded the 2021 album Carnage); written the screenplay for John Hillcoat’s critically acclaimed 2005 feature film, The Proposition; featured in a brace of documentaries directed by Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik; and published several books. In recent years, between recording, touring, writing, and sculpting figurines, Cave has somehow found time to develop a dialogue with his fans on his blog, The Red Hand Files. The site now numbers over 221 entries, including reflections on subjects as diverse as tinnitus, tattoos, free speech, inspiration, love, and more recently, ChatGPT. The Red Hand FilesYou can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens. Much love, NickThe Red Hand FilesIn 2022, Cave released Faith, Hope and Carnage, an edited transcript of conversations with Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan, in which they discuss Cave’s unorthodox religious faith, as well as his bereavement following the accidental death of his son in 2015. Faith, Hope and Carnage has been received by popular and critical audiences with widespread acclaim.Despite currently working on two film scores and writing the new Bad Seeds album, Cave kindly agreed to be interviewed by Quillette via email. What follows is a lightly edited reproduction of that conversation.Claire Lehmann: The Red Hand Files is an exercise in incredible generosity not just to your fans who write in, but the wider public. You provide earnest replies to questions about bereavement, addiction, creativity, cynicism, nihilism, love, heartbreak—the full spectrum of the human experience. Have you always had this generosity of spirit—or is it something that you had to discover later in life?Nick Cave: Well, thank you for saying that but I don’t know if generosity has much to do with it. I don’t see The Red Hand Files as a public service, as such, rather they are to do with mutuality and connectedness. It is to some degree an ongoing conversation, back and forth, with my audience and one that has benefited me enormously, changed me, pushed me toward the better end of my nature—to be less self-absorbed, more thoughtful, more compassionate, traits that do not necessarily come naturally to me. The questions in The Red Hand Files are essentially a vast repository of longing, and often extremely funny, that have helped me understand what it means to be human. What it means to be an actual person. I hope they are some benefit to those who subscribe to them.CL: You’ve had a remarkably productive career and have contributed not just to the art of song writing, but also fiction, film, and in your spare time create ceramic figurines. Are there any limits to your creativity?NC: Yes, I can’t act.CL: A non-trivial amount of creative people have a predisposition towards manic/hypomanic episodes during which they experience their most fertile periods. Do you have any experience with this, and if so, would you have any advice for the aspiring artist who wants to harness their creativity but also remain sane?NC: Boringly, my creativeness is in no way pathological. I work very hard, every day, and on some level it’s a dogged nine to five slog, and if it seems like my output is greater than your average musician or whatever it is I am, it’s because I put in more hours. It’s as simple as that.That is not to say that on occasions I don’t enter into that wonderful space familiar to most writers and musicians when we are in the flow, and at one with the angels, a space where doubts about our abilities are superseded by the furious, giddy optimism of a cool line or a beautiful melody. We get swept away by the sudden joy of it all, we are inside the cascade, the groove, time condenses, we become giggling idiots zooming around the planets, our little pens scratching away, we are creative people! But this exalted feeling is short lived, and we are soon back in the drudgery of it all. That is the perennial joy and misery of the songwriter, at least this one. My songs are occasional things. They are the joyous but infrequent rewards for time served on the treadmill. Mostly I just wake up, get dressed and go to work on whatever the next project is, and I’m grateful that I somehow get through that particular project relatively unscathed. There is a lovely story in Genesis, where Jacob wrestles all through the night with an angel. Well, that’s what I do but I do it in office hours. My advice to young artists is to do what my painter friends at art school used to tell me—stop moaning and get to work, regardless of whether one is “feeling it” or not. Inspiration comes, in time, to the prepared mind, at least that is what I have found.CL: Woody Allen has quipped that 80 percent of success is showing up. I was very impressed in Faith, Hope and Carnage when I read that over your career you had never missed a show (until the time you were arrested for possession).How important has performing—and more broadly “showing up”—been to your success?NC: For me, showing up to the job at hand is extremely important and something I saw that I needed to do from early in my career. I don’t say this with any false humility but when it comes down to it there are a lot of people out there who have a deeper understanding of music, can sing better, can write better, and can play the piano better, but what I am uniquely talented at is applying myself to the job at hand. I’m good at that. Losing myself in the work. I have a realistic understanding of my limitations, coupled with a kind of unsubstantiated belief in myself. This is perhaps the definition of hope. Anyway, turning up can get you a long way, at the end of the day.CL: In Faith, Hope and Carnage, you describe yourself as having a “conservative personality.” I normally associate the conservative personality with military types and accountants, not songwriters and mystics. (I would, for example, suggest that you are high in the Big Five trait “openness to experience.”) Do you think that you really do have a conservative temperament? Or just a contemplative and introverted one?NC: Well, I didn’t mean to imply that I was a capital “C” Conservative, it’s more that I have a conservative temperament. I would say that, as far as I can make out, a conservative temperament has something to do with a deep understanding of the inherent value of the world, and its vulnerable and precarious nature. It is suspicious of the impulse to tear things down, dismantle things, cancel things, burn things to the ground, rather it’s more naturally inclined toward cautious, incremental change, because we need to be careful with the world. The conservative understands about loss and about grief. I’m certainly open to new things, but with an appreciation of what has gone before and a melancholy understanding that it is a lot easier to tear things down than to build them back up. But, at the end of the day, I think conservatism is an aspiration, it is something we should strive for—a society that works well enough that it is worth conserving. I don’t think we are there yet, there are things yet left to reform, of course, but I think we are generally moving in the right direction.Photo credit (left) Claire Lehmann, photo credit (right) Megan CullenCL: Our culture is very good at encouraging us all to be high achievers, strive for excellence, and win the tournaments of status in whatever realms we find ourselves in. But often this striving conflicts with our roles as spouses and parents—or people who are available to care and be present with those whom we love. Apart from being a successful artist, you are also a husband and father. How important are these roles to you? NC: In some way this question feels connected to the last. For me and Susie our lives changed fundamentally after the death of our son, Arthur. Our marriage was put under an enormous amount of stress, as are all marriages when a child dies. The stats around this are not encouraging, around 80 percent of marriages where a child dies do not survive. I suspect, however, the marriages that do make it become stronger and more resilient as they are toughened in the furnace of a shared catastrophe. We come to understand the perilous nature of things and the value of the institutions that serve to hold them together. I believe that it was not just our love for one another that got Susie and me through our grief but the marriage itself. It held the shattered pieces of ourselves together. It brought home to us the sacred dimension of the institution of marriage in a radical and amplified way. The upshot of this for me was that I began to understand that there are things in life worth more than our creative achievements. Imagine that! I came to see my work wasn’t actually the most important thing! What a startling realisation! For me, this was a lesson, hard learned, that took a devastation to understand.        View this post on Instagram            A post shared by susie cave (@susiecaveofficial) CL: One thing that strikes me in your personal story as told through Faith, Hope and Carnage is that you appear to resist social pressures to conform in whatever milieu you find yourself in, whether it is the Philistinism of rural Victoria, the nihilism in the Melbourne punk scene, or the general anti-intellectual climate of Australia. Today you express non-conformity in the way you resist some of the political trends impacting the arts, and the way you defend other artists (e.g., Morrissey). Do you have any reflections on this tendency of yours, and would you have any advice for the young non-conformist on how to resist social pressures without becoming a full-blown hermit?NC: There was a bunch of Australians that had a huge influence on me as a young man growing up in Melbourne, who were certainly non-conformists. Germaine Greer, in particular, Barry Humphries, Norman Gunston, Brett Whiteley, the wonderful cartoonist, Michael Leunig, the playwright, David Williamson. It was not that I agreed with their opinions on things, or their politics, as people’s politics and opinions have never concerned me that much, it was rather that they were there as a cultural irritant, chaos-makers, scallywags, tricksters, a source of vexation within the culture, as it stood, not against the political system as such, although there was that, but rather an affront to Australian culture itself. They stirred things up, in their own singular way, shocked us, outraged us, made us laugh. From left: David Williamson, Michael Leunig, Brett Whiteley, Germaine Greer, and Barry HumphriesI loved these people. I still do. I carried something of them with me when I left Australia. They gave me permission to remain outside of things, be my own person, to rub things the wrong way. They showed me that there was a solemn duty as an artist, to challenge, to offend, to piss people off, in particular my peers. That impulse was absorbed into my bloodstream, as an Australian growing up in Melbourne in the ’70s. I felt proud to be an Australian as I travelled around the world, because I saw that my Australianness, in and of itself, was a kind of agitating agent. We Aussies were just too loud, our gestures too big, our ideas too perverse, we were too funny. I still naturally respond to people who have that dissonant spirit, although they are of course a dying breed. You mentioned Morrissey. He made an enormous amount of exceptionally beautiful music, lest we forget, but he remains forever a thorn in the side of the prevailing cultural mood. Morrissey has the audacity, the courage, not to be boring. I admire that. Thank God there are some people like that still kicking around. As for advice, I’m not sure I have any, other than to say, don’t spend too much of your precious time trying to please people. Most people, in the end, respond to authenticity, they yearn for it, and they will seek you out if they recognise in you that genuineness. It is the artist’s way to be at least that. Authentic. Genuine. Real. So be true to yourself, and what will come will come.CL: Who are you reading?NC: Well, speaking of troublemakers, right now I’m halfway through listening to Bret Easton Ellis read his new book The Shards. I haven’t read any fiction for a very long time, and it’s such a pleasure to listen to him read from this deeply weird, hypnotic, grotesque, and haunted book. It is a beautiful piece of writing, from a master storyteller, in my opinion. Very funny, at times, too. Right now, I’m writing songs for my next Bad Seeds record, so I tend to read more poetry and poetic prose to sort of get me in the swing of things. Lucille Clifton, Stevie Smith, Simone Weil, E. E. Cummings, Auden, Larkin, all sorts of stuff, a book of fairy tales I read as a child, and before I sleep, Roger Deakin’s beautiful book, Waterlog, a swimmer’s journey through Britain. It lulls me to sleep and gives me floaty dreams. CL: Occasionally you write about your faith on The Red Hand Files, and you have mentioned previously that this creates agitation in your fans. Does this bother you, and does it matter to you if a segment of your fans or the public don’t understand what faith means to you?NC: What we believe in is a serious matter. It is a condition of being. It is not something you can hide, especially if you are a songwriter because your preoccupations rise to the surface and find their way into the songs. That’s the beauty and danger of certain songs, they reveal a great deal, not just to others, but to yourself. So, whatever my beliefs may be, they exist in what I create. They are there for all to see. Of course, in The Red Hand Files I do my best to write about religious matters with some nuance, you know, about my belief, but also my unbelief. Religious ideas preoccupy me, for sure, as they always have, for as far back as I can remember. I don’t need it pointed out that there is something absurd about spending vast amounts of time contemplating the nature of something that quite possibly doesn’t exist. The thing is, songwriting and faith are inextricably linked, for me, I recognise one in the other. I find writing words to be dependent on a readiness to perceive what are essentially tenuous, softly spoken ideas, that reveal themselves, like God, as intimations, as ghost-like abstractions, as mysteries. And like God, a song rarely comes fully formed, without a struggle, declaring itself. So, in that respect, as a musician and songwriter, matters of faith are second nature, and well, impossible to ignore. So, I write about them occasionally on The Red Hand Files, and occasionally get some pushback from my atheist friends, but not often and usually with a certain amount of humour and good faith.CL: How do you avoid being “captured” by your own audience? When artists have an established following, must they, on some level, be willing to piss off their own fanbase if they seek to retain their artistic integrity?NC: I’ve always taken a long distance view of my career. Clearly, I’m in it for the long haul, you know, the duration, so I have to above all things keep the creative spark alive. As far as I can see the only way to do this is to stay interested, and the only way to do that is to create new stuff. Most of my fans understand this and are happy to be part of the journey, or the adventure. Some older fans cling desperately to the good old days because on some level they see their own younger, happier, less jaded selves reflected in that music, and see all deviation from it as a betrayal. I understand that. There is a whole raft of artists whose early music I love, and whose latter music is, to me, less interesting, but I don’t take it personally. Some musicians, it’s the other way around, their later music eclipsed their early stuff, Elvis for example.CL: Finally, what makes you feel hopeful about the future?NC: Well, we are told relentlessly that the world is doomed. The media amplifies this idea to the point of hysteria. We are conditioned to only see the world in terms of oppression and corruption and degradation. To some degree it is hard not be sucked into this torrent of despair, to become hardened and cynical. However, it doesn’t take much to see that this posture only adds to the world’s woes, to look at humanity only with suspicion and disdain is perhaps the very problem itself. It is, in itself, a kind of deification of our downfall. So, I choose to be hopeful, not because there is a whole lot of evidence to support such a position, but because it is the necessary underpinning of any positive action. We must love the world to save it. In that respect I am hopeful, truly hopeful, because I believe fundamentally in the ingenuity and imagination of our species. In a way that is not such a difficult posture to hold. We are problem-solving creatures, after all, if we can just allow ourselves to be, and we should not crush that ingenious spirit with our own despondency.

Congressman Ro Khanna is an American politician, lawyer, and academic. He is currently serving as U.S. Representative for California's 17th district, including much of Silicon Valley.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ro Khanna discuss how we can protect free speech and civic agency in the age of the internet; what it would mean to have a cultural patriotism that celebrates both the tradition and the dynamism of American life; and where he stands on the debates concerning misinformation and censorship.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You call yourself a “progressive capitalist.” What does that mean?Ro Khanna: I believe in free enterprise and free markets, and not just because that leads to innovation and economic growth, but because it’s about valuing human freedom. When we want to transact with another individual, we shouldn't have to get the collective body to approve such a transaction. Amartya Sen makes the case for this most eloquently in Development as Freedom—why the market is, in some sense, supporting freedom. But, of course, this presupposes that people can participate in the market. And so “progressive” means we need to give people the healthcare, education, and nutrition to be able to participate in the market. How do we define markets that still value communities, so you don’t have unfettered movement of capital and goods in ways that leave communities behind?You can go back to Alexander Hamilton, who I would argue was a progressive capitalist. I would describe FDR as a progressive capitalist. It was only in the last 40-50 years that we have this view of unfettered capitalism that I think actually was a deviation from what built America. But there would be a few aspects to it. I think progressive capitalism would mean that we would have healthcare for everyone. We would have universal preschool, childcare, and free public college or vocational school. And progressive capitalism also would mean that the state would collaborate with business and educational institutions to revitalize communities and ensure that we have place-based economic development.Mounk: There's a set of policies, which are actually simultaneously pro-growth and help to make sure that the economic growth we have brings benefits to a lot of people. One of those areas is maybe the recent efforts to limit non-compete clauses. That's something that helps employees get more money, and it's something that actually is good for economic growth. Another area seems to me to be “YIMBY” policies, or making sure that we can actually build housing in areas of economic opportunity. Is that the sort of area you would focus on? Tell us a little more about what kind of public policies could make the market inclusive, but also make sure that there's a bigger pie to share.Khanna: I support both of the policies. We have to build more housing and not have restrictive zoning. That housing needs to be affordable in places where people have been priced out of either buying a home or renting. And we shouldn't have these non-competes that artificially restrict labor and depress wages. Similarly, we need stronger antitrust protections to make sure that the new entrants, new businesses, can emerge and that we don't just have a few corporations controlling the market. But more broadly, we need what Dr. King called a “people-oriented society,” and not just a “thing-oriented society.” And that means a belief in developing people's capabilities. And I believe that is “Medicare For All” and free public college and a livable wage and policies and childcare that reduce costs. Someone said to me, “Americans can't afford America.” There's a sense of that in the country today.Senator Todd Young of Indiana and I are going to be convening a roundtable of the top business school deans in six months to discuss these issues. What is the obligation of American business schools to have business leaders who are patriots, who care about the country, social goals, and community? I think that that's important. You want business leaders to be vested in the success of the community and the success of the nation. You need that collaboration. We had that collaboration when we emerged in the Hamilton era. We had that collaboration when we won World War II. But I don't think we can simply rely on the ethics and values of corporate CEOs to do things like have Intel build factories in Ohio. I mean, I love [Intel CEO] Pat Gelsinger. He’s passionate about creating those jobs. But if it weren't for the CHIPS Act that provided him with concrete financing to do that, he wouldn't be making those investments. If it weren't for tax policies that prohibit or make it less attractive to offshore factories, companies wouldn’t be doing that. There has to be a policy framework that says, “If you invest in America, we will invest in you. If you build in communities, we will support you.” We also need the CEOs to have the ethical sense to flourish within that framework. Mounk: You have an interest in antitrust law going a long way back. What is the problem with the traditional framework of antitrust legislation? And how do we need to update that in order to deal with the challenge posed by tech companies and other big corporations in the United States now?Khanna: Today, antitrust law, because of Robert Bork, only looks at the actors as consumers, not as citizens. In other words, the only consideration when concentration emerges is, “Are consumers going to be better off?” But there are many other factors to antitrust. Do we want a multiplicity of perspectives in a society? Do we want jobs in our society? Do we want new entrants in different geographical regions in a society? The biggest thing that I think antitrust law needs to change is to go back to the original Sherman Act, and that is to look at all of the multiplicity of factors in considering antitrust. The original acts were saying that you don't want big corporations to have too much power in a democracy. It wasn't just about consumer welfare.We can look at, let's say, a social media platform, Facebook or Twitter, which is largely free, and people are often happy with that. But then the question becomes, Do you want just two or three people controlling the digital public sphere? Or would it be better if other forums emerged? Would it be better if all those forms and architects weren’t just in Silicon Valley? Is there a value to democracy in having a multiplicity of entrants in a particular industry? Email is probably a tougher case. Maybe there is. Maybe we don’t need multiple people doing email. On the other hand, a lot of that data that is collected, the metadata, allows a company like Google to build in YouTube and other areas. Maybe we would like a multiplicity of people in that space. “Is having more entrants a good thing?” Current antitrust law wouldn't even allow you to consider the question unless you show that it's improving consumer welfare. There is a trade-off in having many discursive spaces, which is, in my view, healthy for democracy, and in finding places for people who may disagree or have different backgrounds to have conversations with one another. And these two things are often in tension. I would err on the side of having many discursive spaces and then creating spaces that facilitate exchange among people from different regions, backgrounds, and ideologies. I don't think the answer is that we should all listen to Walter Cronkite. That suppresses perspective and voice. But at the same time, I don't think it's a good world if everyone has their own itemized way of consuming information and isn't exchanging ideas in a more townhall-like setting. We need both.The greatest deliberative democracy thinkers, like [Jürgen] Habermas, acknowledge the messiness of the world, and would say that the ideal speech conditions are missing in most democracies, and nor would you want to construct a democracy, realistically, with just ideal speech conditions. There is a time for anger, protests, and yelling. But they want to orient the society to at least aspire to have forums of reasonable exchange that can inform decision-making—like the Supreme Court, ironically. [John] Rawls used to point to that as emblematic of deliberation. What I would say is: have many discursive spaces but then be intentional about thinking of how we can encourage deliberation that actually has an impact. Audrey Tang had this thing in Taiwan where people actually ranked legislation and offered ideas on legislation and that informed the Taiwanese parliament. The challenge for us is how we construct those kinds of spaces.Read: Twitter Just Caved To Modi Mounk: Let’s talk about this idea of patriotism for a moment, particularly in the context of trying to build a multiracial democracy. First of all, why do you think that people on the left should embrace a form of patriotism at the moment when parts of the left have become quite nervous about any form, not only of nationalism, but also of patriotism. What do you say to critics like that to get them to embrace patriotism as a value that the left should embrace?Khanna: Patriotism, in my view, just means that you love a community, that you come from something that is rooted. That, to me, is a part of human identity. We are born in a family, and there's nothing wrong with loving your family more deeply than you love a stranger. Love of the nation doesn't mean that you can't be critical of the nation. There was a famous saying, “My country right or wrong—when right, keep it. When wrong, fix it.” That can animate your patriotism, but there should be a patriotism. And of course, I believe that America is an extraordinary nation with the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and that the ideals and the character are there for this nation to become a multiracial democracy. That doesn't mean we have a nationalism; it doesn't mean that we don't disregard the dignity of people outside the United States, or that we engage in a form of xenophobia. It just means that we should care about communities in America.Mounk: We 100% agree on that, and I've made the case for patriotism in my two last books. We both think that civic patriotism has to be part of this love of country. But part of what makes both of us proud Americans is that we have that attachment to the Declaration of Independence, to the Constitution, and to the fundamental political values which our country has often failed to live up to but which has allowed us to make and build a more perfect union. We also both seem to agree that civic patriotism in itself isn't enough and there should be an additional element that we should build on. It sounds like you're making a similar move in saying, “I believe in civic patriotism, but also we need this economic element to our patriotism.” Tell me what the economic element of that patriotism is. Are you thinking of it as one of the bases of patriotism, or one of its goals? How does it fit into that picture?Khanna: I agree with you. In fact, in Chapter 10 of my book Dignity in a Digital Age I argue for a “democratic patriotism” based on Frederick Douglass' speech, “Composite Nation.” Douglass is defending Chinese immigration as someone who was enslaved just a few years earlier. He writes that he doesn't worry about Chinese culture coming to the United States (at the time there was a lot of xenophobia and concern about Chinese culture), because in the free air of America the best ideas of different traditions will emerge, and we will become a ‘composite nation,’ taking the best of all different ways of life from different people in different parts of the world and melding it into something beautiful here. I think that is the vision of the ideal.I don't think nations are philosophical postulates. The nation is far more than just an allegiance to the Declaration of Independence or Constitution; a nation is composed of events, things that happen to us, memories and emotions, and battles and scars. That is all part of building the culture of a nation just like we build the culture of a family through my grandfather's story. He fought in Gandhi's independence movement. That’s part of our family folklore. But what I call for is a democratic patriotism—[W.E.B.] Du Bois has this beautiful line that we need to be “coworkers in the kingdom of culture.” How do we shape culture in a way where everyone, ideally, has an equal voice in shaping that culture? This is a big challenge, because the view of a procedural liberalism is that any time you start to shape culture, it is inherently going to be unequal for people who may not share that sense of the commons. That's why they default to the lowest form or a sense that we can't really have a common good. I think that that's too thin a conception for a nation. The balance is how we can have this common culture while making room for equality of participation in creating that culture—a balance between the past and newcomers. That is a large part of the American struggle right now, because we're trying to figure out what that common American culture looks like. Economic patriotism is sort of the low-hanging fruit in building this broader patriotism.Mounk: There is a criticism that Democrats have perhaps been too unwilling to talk about economic patriotism, especially when it comes to the effects of free trade on certain communities and the kind of disruption that brings. It's interesting to me that, the way you’re framing it, those two things are really part of the same patriotic failure: the failure of one part of the left to say, “We should be proud of America, and we have a common culture to build and to defend, one that's evolving, one that's diverse, but one that actually we share with each other,” and the failure to say, when a lot of jobs are leaving steel towns in Michigan, “It's our job as economic patriots to make sure that these people are made whole and have opportunity.” Those two things are actually part of the same story, challenging, on one side, the far left parts of the Democratic Party and, on the other side, the more moderate parts of the Democratic Party.Khanna: I would agree with that. I think that the Democratic left sometimes too easily just defaults to “Patriotism means believing in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” But patriotism is deeper than that, right? It's cultural. When I was growing up, and we were moving into Amsterdam Avenue, there was chatter on the street that the Khannas were moving into town, and my father figured out what it was: there was a concern about Christmas Eve. Everyone put out candlelights, and would there be an empty space because we were of Hindu faith? And then my parents said, “Well, we grew up celebrating Christmas,” which they did in India, “and we'll put out the candlelights.” Now, I don't say that every family should make that decision. But the point is, there was a real decision. My parents would have been devastated if I said, “Well, I'm going to become Christian to run for Congress.” That would have been seen as dishonoring their own family tradition. This is the debate in the United States: where do we accommodate deep traditions? Where do we bring in the new? Can we celebrate Diwali but also recognize Christmas as something that has had a hold on American culture? By just saying, “Well, let's just all believe in the Constitution” and not considering culture, we are not paying sufficient attention to people's lived experience and their concerns. At the same time, with the economics, you had town after town lose their sense of pride and dignity. They saw jobs shipped offshore and the sense of their well-being threatened. They didn't ask for much. They just wanted a house, maybe to watch Friday night football, to have their kids do well. And then they said, “Well, this is all going. Immigrants are coming. In Silicon Valley they're making trillions of dollars. We fought the wars in this country. What about us?” And this kind of response, “Well, the markets will take care of itself. There's people who are poor in China who are getting opportunities,” and that there shouldn't be a concern for these towns that were decimated. This has been one of the reasons we have such social discord in this country. We just offered people an unemployment check. Fend for yourself. We didn't even try to have economic revitalization.Mounk: Let me ask you a little bit about a theme we were touching on earlier, which is the role of social media and tech in the United States today. When the whole strange kerfuffle about the so-called Twitter Files came out in the last few months, one of the things that came to light, interestingly, was an email from you in which you were expressing your concern with executives at Twitter over the fact that they had effectively told The New York Post that if they continued to post about Hunter Biden, they would block or suspend its Twitter account. Even though you're no fan of The New York Post, and this wasn't a judgment you were making on the substance or content of the story, you were saying “Hang on a second here. You may be going too far in terms of how you're shaping the public sphere.”Do you think, for example, as David French has suggested, that social media companies should effectively bind themselves to some form of the First Amendment, saying “Here are very strict rules that we're not legally obligated to adopt, but that we will, because we think that's the right thing to do.” If they don't, should legislators consider telling social media companies that if they censor content on political or ideological grounds, then they effectively are publishers and should not be protected by Section 230, just as The New York Post is not protected by Section 230. What's the most substantive solution here?Khanna: Now this gets back to our earlier conversation. It's better to have more social media forums. It's better to give individuals more control over their own social media, which Twitter was trying to do under Jack Dorsey but then got interrupted. It's important for people to have control over their own data so that it's not being taken from them and then used to trigger them or get them to join groups or take actions. The biggest thing on a short-term basis is just to have separation of control. As I've said directly to Elon Musk, the last job anyone would want to have is to run Twitter. Who wants to call balls and strikes? It seems like the most boring waste of time. And Bezos, for example, owns The Washington Post. I know people criticize that. But you would be hard-pressed to say that The Washington Post is sitting there deciding whether to publish an Op-Ed or a story based on what Jeff Bezos is thinking. So, as an immediate step, social media companies should have a strict wall of separation between ownership and those making largely journalistic decisions, which is what running a public square is. Bloomberg News or The Washington Post are examples. It's not perfect, but it's better than what it is today. I would agree with you that social media companies should look to First Amendment principles. That's what I wrote in my email to Twitter, privately, that leaked. First Amendment principles have been thought through for 200 years and are very robust and thoughtful. How do you get a culture where social media companies are inclined to do that? I would argue newspapers do that. They want to have an opposing point of view. They will publish dissenting opinions. They will try to get multiple sources to verify things. And they don't do that just because of a fear of liability. They do that because there are trade journalistic ethics that emerged from the era of muckraking newspapers and which they see as being part of fulfilling their responsibilities to democracy. Social media companies would be well served to do that. Certainly, the government can't mandate that. Whether they can remove certain Section 230 protections, I think, would depend on how much direct interference these companies were having. Obviously, if there was a site that said they were only going to publish conservative posts, then it's hard to argue that they're just publishing anything and Section 230 shouldn't apply. But if there are different types of content moderation strategies, which is where the gray area is, what seems as speech to some seems as incitement to violence to others; what seems as a viewpoint to some seems as suppressing or oppressing marginalized groups to others. I don't think you want the government in the business of telling these companies what those content moderation guidelines exactly should look like. I think that has to emerge from these companies, but the government could maybe require transparency on what it looks like.Mounk: On misinformation, I have to admit to feeling very torn. I do worry about deliberate efforts by state actors, dictatorships most often, to shape the information landscape. I worry of course about the amount of false information and straightforward lies that are spread on social media. But I also worry further that the definition of misinformation is so broad and unspecific that it has actually led to many misfires, one being the suspension of The New York Post. Another is the debate about the origins of COVID-19, which was really limited on a number of social media platforms because of various forms of quite explicit censorship. Where do you fall on this debate? How do you feel about whether and how we should talk about misinformation?Khanna: Americans are more educated today than they ever have been in American history. And I fundamentally believe that Americans are capable of critical thinking. And what we ought to be doing is what Finland did when confronted with misinformation online, a rigorous education in all our ages of schooling and adult education to be able to identify the threats of misinformation or propaganda online. And that, to me, is the most important thing. The second thing is that the government shouldn’t be an arbiter of the truth. That's not the role of the government, and I don't think tech companies should be assuming that role. Now, in certain limited cases, where something poses a public health risk, I think it is legitimate to, in the short term, for a public health risk or a security risk, engage in stopping certain types of information. You would stop someone shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You would stop someone from promoting misleading information about a drug. I think it was appropriate at the height of the coronavirus, where we wanted science to be prevailing in dealing with a public health crisis, to have some reasonable restrictions. Society, in moments of crisis, does need to take actions where there are competing values of the health and safety of its citizens.I certainly think you shouldn't be suppressing a critique of masks, either for or against, or even critiques of the vaccines’ effectiveness or about potential side effects. But I think that where there were efforts to suppress blatant propaganda, where sites with large reaches were saying “the football player had a cardiac arrest because he took vaccines,” where things are so blatantly false and are reaching people in a way that would inform their public health decision-making, I do think there are lines there where it's appropriate in a moment of crisis for government to act. The details matter and this is a traditional dilemma which governments face in times of war or public health crises where it's appropriate to have some restriction on either propaganda or speech that can undermine safety. I tend to err on the side of more speech and dissent. But I don't discount that in crises, sometimes, you don't want propaganda and conspiracy theories that are blatantly false at a given moment.Mounk: Let me close on a question I've been wondering about during this conversation. You represent a Bay Area District which covers a lot of the places where some of the most influential tech companies in the world are headquartered, and where their employees and leaders live. What are some of the things that you think the culture of Silicon Valley gets right, and where do you really worry about the culture of Silicon Valley? I’m not talking about employee relations at Google, but the broader set of cultural assumptions and political views that you find in this enclave of, not exclusively, but many very highly educated Americans from some of the best universities with prestigious, well-paying jobs, who may think that they're remaking the world. What are some of the things that you think we should learn from them, and what are some of the things where you become a little bit concerned about where that part of America's elite culture may be going?Khanna: Silicon Valley defies stereotypes. They were the first to be comfortable with the fact that you didn't have to be a white male with a square jaw and broad shoulders to lead companies. They took chances on people who had funny-sounding names, not looking the part of a charismatic CEO or backslapper. They bet on that when San Francisco traditional firms didn’t. They bet on iconoclasts. They bet on risk and they celebrated, genuinely, failure. Now, they have blind spots. They have not reached out as much to women, the black community, or the Latino community. It's not that they're perfect, but for the people who managed to get there, there was a sense that the traditional mode of being a Harvard MBA or working at McKinsey wasn’t necessary; that you could make it if you were creative, innovative, willing to take risk, and we would celebrate that. And I think that that is healthy to the extent that it broke through the norms. It's ironic, people ask me why these people who are worth more money than anyone in the world see themselves as underdogs. And I said, because 20 or 30 years ago, they were the underdogs. They were the misfits in society. They weren't the people who were going to run Goldman Sachs or the fancy law firms.The biggest problem is an over-optimism about technology. I tend to believe technology is important to solve problems. But I was having a conversation on the House floor with Jonathan Jackson, a new congressman from Chicago and the son of Jesse Jackson, the reverend and civil rights leader. We were talking about Martin Luther King Day, and I was telling him about my grandfather who spent years in jail with Gandhi in the 1940s, and he said, “Well, Henry David Thoreau influenced Gandhi.” I said, “Yeah, I knew that.” Then he said, “Did you realize that Henry David Thoreau was influenced by the [Bhagavad] Gita?” And I said, “No, I didn't know that, actually.” And he said, “Yeah, I’m teaching you about your own religious book, but Thoreau looked to the Gita, and that's where he got a lot of the inspiration to come up with civil disobedience.” That evening, I was with someone at Google, and I was curious about ChatGPT. And so I asked, “Let's type in, ‘How were Henry David Thoreau’s teachings about civil disobedience, which influenced Gandhi, influenced by the Gita?’” And out came this perfect essay: Henry David Thoreau read the Gita and was influenced by it. Gandhi read the Gita and was influenced by it”—with no depth of thinking, no depth of analysis. As I put it, “ChatGPT could write my mundane speeches on the Oversight Committee, but it’s not going to write Barack Obama's 2004 keynote speech.” Sometimes, there is such a sense that technology is the North Star as opposed to an instrument that can improve ends. There is a forgetting of Dr. King's exhortation that the world has had a scientific revolution but what we really need is a revolution of values. You could never put technology above humanity, and I think that Silicon Valley could use more humanistic thinkers and humanistic values.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Back before starting Current Affairs, when I was a freelancer, I once pitched an editor on a long review of the works of conservative economist Thomas Sowell. The editor said he liked my writing, but didn’t understand my choice of subject. “Sowell? Who pays attention to him?” The editor thought Thomas Sowell was simply not worth paying attention to. 
I thought then, and I think now, that this attitude was crazy. Millions of people watch videos of Thomas Sowell on YouTube. He has written nearly 50 books, many of which have thousands of glowing reviews on Amazon. His bestselling Basic Economics has gone through five editions and been published in half a dozen languages. To his fans, he is one of “the most luminous minds this country has produced.” Milton Friedman said he was as close to a genius as a human could be. Steven Pinker has called Sowell “among the most brilliant thinkers in the world today—deep, original, creative, fearless, intimidatingly erudite.” Amy Chua of Yale Law school calls Sowell “one of the most important thinkers of our time.” The Wall Street Journal has called him an “American sage.” 
So how could anyone, I wondered, think Sowell was not worth paying attention to? 
But the editor’s response to me expressed a sentiment I found in plenty of others who shared my political views. The right, they thought, was so self-evidently wrong, so transparently propagandistic, that it was a waste of time to engage closely with any of their arguments. In fact, to do so risked legitimizing them. There was even, among some on the left, a reluctance to engage in any kind of public debate with conservatives, on the theory that agreeing to debate someone viewed as a bigot was akin to agreeing to debate the reality of the Holocaust with a Nazi sympathizer. Best to simply ignore them and get on with your own work.
I never agreed with that, and one reason I never agreed with it was that I have a certain amount of respect for the craft of right-wing propaganda. Not the substance—I think they’re bringing us toward a hideous authoritarian dystopia, if not something even worse. But I see why right-wing talking points about Big Government and Our Lost American Greatness sway people. Thomas Sowell’s books on economics, for instance, mount a superficially persuasive explanation of why free markets are wonderful and vastly superior to economies that involve Government Intervention. I actually cite some of Sowell’s pieces when I teach writing classes, because he is a clear writer who doesn’t use jargon and who makes arguments that are intelligible to ordinary people. He’s also entirely wrong, but I don’t think it’s enough to just assert that. You have to prove it. 

I think the right succeeds politically in part because they take seriously the task of packaging their views in accessible and easily-digestible talking points. Look at PragerU’s 5-minute videos. They are masterfully done, even though they are evil. Within a very short space of time, they give people all the rhetorical ammunition they need to argue with leftists in their lives (sprinkled with phony statistics). It’s true that one reason the right succeeds is that they have huge amounts of money behind them that left-wing media can’t really hope to compete with. (Donate now to change that!) But they also put out skilfully-written books purporting to show that the climate crisis isn’t real, critical race theory is destroying the country, and immigration is destroying the country. 
I have always believed that if we’re going to fight the right’s ideas, we need to show clearly why they’re wrong. We can’t just say they’re wrong. Ben Shapiro gets a lot of mileage out of clips of him supposedly “destroying” left-wing arguments. Well, we need to be the ones doing the destroying.
When we don’t do this, we make it easier for the right to pull one of its favorite tricks: Saying that the left isn’t responding because it can’t respond, because we’re afraid of debate, and because they have uncovered the secret knowledge that we have to pretend doesn’t exist. Jason Riley’s hagiography of Thomas Sowell, Maverick, makes the case that Sowell is ignored because he has successfully exposed the illogical beliefs of leftist intellectuals and they cannot deal with the power of his criticism. Charles Murray suggests that the reason people reacted badly to the Bell Curve was that it challenged Politically Correct Shibboleths they didn’t like, when in fact its racist arguments were utterly incorrect. 

So, over the course of Current Affairs’ six years of existence, I have made it part of my mission to publish clear and persuasive refutations of bad right-wing arguments. Some people think I’m “shooting fish in a barrel” or wasting my time. But I know that I’m not, because I have gotten plenty of letters from people who were once fans of Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, but who came to see through reading Current Affairs that much of what these men believe is not well-grounded in facts or logic, even though they present themselves as factually and logically rigorous. I know there are plenty of people for whom the irrationality of these men is not news. But there are literally millions of others who don’t yet see through the tricks of these charlatans, and I believe I can peel some of those believers away by showing that when these men are confronted with strong counter-arguments, they have nothing to say. (Both Shapiro and Peterson have ducked attempts by others to set up one-on-one debates with me.) 
I know for a fact that when you write an exhaustive critique of a person’s positions that doesn’t “straw man” them, you can unsettle even that person’s fans. See, for example, this discussion in the Sam Harris fan reddit forum about an article I co-wrote debunking many of Harris’ claims. Nobody could understand why Sam Harris had not given a rebuttal: 

I honestly don’t understand why Sam never responded to this well researched, ad-hominem free critique…[Nathan] clearly worked very hard to not lazily accuse (or imply) that Sam is a racist or a right-winger. He intentionally steelmanned all of Sam’s positions before giving his counter-arguments. This is the kind of article I think Sam would be appreciative of and think merits further discussion. Robinson would make a great guest imo. … I think Sam is doing himself a disservice by not addressing Nathan’s article. By not doing so, I feel like he is lumping all good and bad-faith critiques of him into the same pile.

Indeed, this helps show that despite Harris’ public presentation of himself as a man who values reason and dialogue, he is in fact close-minded and unwilling to revise his positions when they are shown to be indefensible. 
Over the last six years, I’ve written or co-written long assessments of the arguments of Peterson, Shapiro, Murray, Tucker Carlson, David Frum, Dinesh D’Souza, Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Jonah Goldberg, Donald Trump Jr., Steven Pinker, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Rogan, David Brooks, Matt Walsh, Piers Morgan, Heather Mac Donald, Alan Dershowitz, Ted Cruz, Mike Cernovich, Bari Weiss, PragerU, QAnon people, Ayn Rand, Alex Jones, and the entire staff of the National Review. Seldom have any of the figures I have written about offered any kind of rebuttal. (In Limbaugh’s defense, he was dead at the time.) I have hope that some percentage of the public will see, as did the Sam Harris reddit community, that the radio silence tells us all we need to know about the actual intellectual seriousness of these people and their true level of interest in Debate. 
But now I’ve gone further. In a new book, Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments, I show the common structure of conservative arguments, why they persuade people, and how we can respond to them effectively. To avoid accusations of strawmanning, I use long direct quotes from the people I criticize. I show how the history of conservative rhetoric is the history of using baseless scare stories in which weak groups are a Threat To Civilization and mild social reforms will Destroy Society. My hope is that once anyone has learned to spot the common tropes of right-wing arguments (“X reform will hurt the people it’s trying to help,” “X group is undoing the civilized order”), it will be easier to help others see through propaganda. 
In fact, as I wrote the book, I wanted to make it as definitive and powerful as possible. I wanted to drive an intellectual bulldozer through an ideology I think threatens the future of life on Earth. I wanted to expose once and for all the tactics that are used to manipulate people into hating their neighbors and opposing socially progressive policies. Using hundreds of sources, I have tried to construct a case that is tight and devastating, so that no reasonable and open-minded person could come away with any respect for right-wing political beliefs. I wanted to make it so that once this book was in people’s hands, conservatives were faced with a choice between conceding that they have been exposed as intellectually bankrupt or continuing to pretend the refutations of their positions do not exist. (I suspect Shapiro and Peterson, for instance, will continue their years-long streak of acting as if I haven’t repeatedly shown them to be ignorant and deceitful.) 
Part I of Responding to the Right looks at what is common across right-wing arguments, from scare stories (“if we raise the minimum wage, you’ll lose your job!”) to casting powerless people as a civilizational threat (“drag queens are going to corrupt your children by reading to them!”) On nearly all issues, conservatives pull the same kind of bullshit, and if you study it you can help train people to spot it so that they won’t fall for it. 
Part II goes through 25 specific common right-wing arguments and refutes them. 

Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution
Minimum Wages and Rent Control Are Economically Disastrous
Taxation Is Theft and/or Slavery
Capitalism Rewards Innovation and Gives People What They Deserve
The United States Is a Force for Good in the World
There’s No Such Thing as White Privilege
The Left Are Woke Totalitarians Trying to Destroy Free Speech in the Name of “Social Justice”
Socialized Medicine Will Kill Your Grandma 
Scandinavian Social Democracy Won’t Work in the United States
The Welfare State Will Lead Us Down the “Road to Serfdom” 
The Nazis Were Socialists 
Feminism Hurts Both Men and Women 
Price Gouging, Child Labor, and Sweatshops Are Good 
We Don’t Need a Green New Deal 
Academia Is a Radical Indoctrination Factory
There Is a War on Cops When We Need to Be Tougher on Crime 
Labor Unions Hurt Workers
Transgender People Are Delusional and a Threat 
Abortion Is Murder
There Is a War on Christianity
We Must Respect the Constitution and the Founding Fathers
People Should “Pull Themselves Up by Their Bootstraps” and Not Need “Handouts”
Immigration Is Harmful
Inequality Is Fine 
Democracy Is Overrated 

I didn’t hit every one of the right’s talking points (I didn’t include guns, for instance, though I’ve written about the issue before). But much of the garbage that people will hear on Fox News is here, and my hope is that the responses I have given are clear, compelling, well-sourced, and very difficult to come up with a persuasive rebuttal to. 
On the right, there exist something like (I’m not a liberal) equivalents of my book (Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, 48 Liberal Lies About American History, etc.) But I couldn’t find a handbook that would explain clearly the basic reason why people on the left reject the above set of beliefs. My hope is that such a book can be useful for those who want to see these pernicious talking points vanish from our discourse, and prevent the hideous dystopia that the right wants to build from coming into existence. I hope you will give copies to everyone who needs help destroying the right in arguments, and to every reactionary you dislike and want to upset. Let us hope it drives them nuts. (Better yet, that it unsettles their convictions and causes them to pick up my previous book Why You Should Be a Socialist, now available in paperback.) 
This book has been a long slog, because I wanted to make it comprehensive and strong, and that meant reading dozens upon dozens of awful conservative books and citing hundreds of sources in my responses. I am proud of the end result (as well as the audiobook version, which I recorded myself!), and I hope you will find the book valuable. As always, I’ve tried to make the writing a bit fun so that reading about politics doesn’t feel like being made to eat your vegetables. 
My book is an attack on right-wing political positions, but I do have a critique of the left: I do not think we can ignore beliefs just because we find them toxic and irrational. I don’t think it’s fair to write people off as incorrigible and assume that you don’t have an obligation to try to reason with them. I respond to the right in part because I actually respect their basic humanity and intelligence, and believe that they deserve intellectually serious explanations of why they are wrong, rather than just contemptuous scoffs. That said, I do not pull punches in this book. I find conservative ideology toxic and want to see it vanish from society. I do not want to get rid of the people who hold that ideology, but I do want them to seriously examine their own convictions, listen to the counterarguments, and come to see what a terrible error they have made. Will this happen? I can’t say. I do know that it has happened to at least a few people who have become readers of this magazine. All I can hope is that we reach a few more, and then a few more, and build a consensus around the principles of democratic socialism. I invite all of my right-wing readers to notice a devastating counterargument when they see one, shed their convictions (which as I say, I do not blame them for holding, given the immense persuasive power of conservative talking points), and come and join us on the left. We are more fun, and we also have better arguments. 

Eleven years ago, on the remote Japanese island of Kojima, a female macaque walked backwards into a stray heap of primate poop, glanced down at her foot, and completely flipped her lid. The monkey hightailed it down the shoreline on three feet, kicking up sand as she sprinted, until she reached a dead tree, where “she repeatedly rubbed her foot and smelled it until all of the sticky matter disappeared,” says Cécile Sarabian, a cognitive ecologist at the University of Hong Kong, who watched the incident unfold. Sarabian, then a graduate student studying parasite transmission among primates, was entranced by the familiarity of it all: the dismay, the revulsion, the frenetic desire for clean. It’s exactly what she or any other human might have done, had they accidentally stepped in it.In the years following the event, Sarabian came to recognize the macaque’s panicked reaction as a form of disgust—just not the sort that many people first think of when the term comes to mind. Disgust has for decades been billed as a self-awareness of one’s own aversions, a primal emotion that’s so exclusive to people that, as some have argued, it may help define humanity itself. But many scientists, Sarabian among them, subscribe to a broader definition of disgust: the suite of behaviors that help creatures of all sorts avoid pathogens; parasites; and the flora, fauna, and substances that ferry them about. This flavor of revulsion—centered on observable actions, instead of conscious thought—is likely ancient and ubiquitous, not modern or unique to us. Which means disgust may be as old and widespread as infectious disease itself.[Read: Do not read this at lunch]Researchers can’t yet say that disease-driven disgust is definitely universal. But so far, “in every place that it’s been looked for, it’s been found,” says Dana Hawley, an ecologist at Virginia Tech. Bonobos rebuff banana slices that have been situated too close to scat; scientists have spotted mother chimps wiping the bottoms of their young. Kangaroos eschew patches of grass that have been freckled with feces. Dik-diks—pointy-faced antelopes that weigh about 10 pounds apiece—sequester their waste in dunghills, potentially to avoid contaminating the teeny territories where they live. Bullfrog tadpoles flee from their fungus-infested pondmates; lobsters steer clear of crowded dens during deadly virus outbreaks. Nematodes, no longer than a millimeter, wriggle away from their dinner when they chemically sense that it’s been contaminated with bad microbes. Even dung beetles will turn their nose up at feces that seem to pose an infectious risk.If disgust behaviors are quite common among animals, it would make a lot of evolutionary sense: They guard against disease before it has a chance to begin. Discussions of immunity tend to center on T cells, B cells, antibodies, and vaccines, but those cells and molecules are not foolproof. Behaviors that help us avoid infection at all, meanwhile, can act as “a real first line of defense,” says Vanessa Ezenwa, a disease ecologist at Yale. If fear is what shields animals from predators—threats that tend to dwarf them in size and strength—disgust is its underappreciated sibling, protecting against the minuscule dangers that wriggle into bodies and destroy them from the inside out. And some version of that impulse “is probably universal, cutting across humans and nonhumans alike,” Ezenwa told me.Many animals’ reactions to grossness certainly recall our own. When Sarabian presents macaques with tasty grains of wheat, balanced on piles of faux poop, they shy away from the food; when she coaxes hungry chimps into touching wet, sticky dough during a search for bits of delicious fruit, the apes visibly recoil and refuse to proffer their hands again. During one of Sarabian’s recent experiments, a mere photograph of a disease-carrying bug was enough to wig out a female ape, who turned her back to the screen and refused to reengage until the picture disappeared. Even some of the familiar facial expressions of disgust—a wrinkled nose, scrunched eyes, a mouth pinched into a slit—can be spotted in certain primates. “This may have the function of preventing things from getting into the mouth, sinuses, and eyes,” Sarabian told me. Rodents, too, seem to close off their faces to a degree when they taste the acridity of quinine—and when mice sniff out the telltale signs of infection in others of their kind, the same brain regions that are active in skeeved-out humans roar to life in them, too.If the roots of disgust run this deep in evolutionary time, some hygienic tendencies are probably hardwired into DNA. Newborn humans don’t need a formal lesson in revulsion to grimace, gape, and gasp when something bitter is placed on their tongue. Pedro Vale, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Edinburgh, has found evidence that the degree to which fruit flies avoid disease-causing microbes may be coded into their genes. And in the same way that some people can be more fastidious or slovenly, animals can display a wide range of comfort with grit and grime, sometimes in ways that seem to be influenced by sex and age. Across several species, females are more hygiene-conscious than males, possibly because it’s far riskier for them to acquire infections that could be passed on to their offspring. And juvenile monkeys and kangaroos may be more contamination-conscious than adults because parasites hit them especially hard.[Read: Immune cells are more paranoid than we thought]But disgust can also be learned. Clémence Poirotte, of the German Primate Center, and Marie Charpentier, of the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier, have found that certain mandrills—the blue-and-red-faced monkeys of Rafiki fame—are more cagey about grooming sick family and friends, while others hardly mind. Those tendencies, Poirotte told me, seem tightly tied to families’ maternal lines, a hint that the monkeys are inheriting their hygienic habits from their moms. We humans seem to learn similar lessons in childhood: Prior to preschool age, many kids aren’t all that bothered by the sight or smell of poop. It’s their parents who seem to drill that aversion into them, and cement it for life.The potential perils of ignoring the ick factor are clear: infection, disease, death; felled families, epidemics, population declines. But many animals—humans sometimes among them—don’t always heed the omens of blech. For years, Hawley, at Virginia Tech, has been trying to suss out why house finches won’t shun other birds infected with an often-fatal bacterial infection called mycoplasmal conjunctivitis. The disease is about as visible as it gets: “It’s pink-eye to the extreme,” Hawley told me. “These birds just look awful.” And yet, the finches don’t seem to care; some males even seem to prefer the company of ailing birds.Then again, perhaps the cost of evading illness is just too high to pay. Squeamishness, as protective as it can be, can also come with major drawbacks—which is probably why so many animals seem willing to bend or break their codes of hygiene. Sometimes, the calculus comes down to calories: The macaques on Kojima, often unwilling to consume grains of wheat that have touched poop, will still try to snarf down feces-contaminated peanuts—a favorite fatty, energy-rich food.For other animals, it’s about the company they keep. Mandrills continue to groom infected family members; female mice may grudgingly couple up with sickly suitors when healthy ones are scarce; vampire bats—which deteriorate very quickly when starved—still share blood meals mouth to mouth during disease outbreaks. And although human mothers reliably find soiled diapers to be quite grody, they’re far less grossed out when the feces within comes from their own kid. The choice to schmooze with an infected friend or family member is always “a trade-off,” says Martin Kavaliers, a neurobiologist at the University of Western Ontario, “especially when in the wild, every individual is likely to be infected with something.” Bolder, more gregarious animals may end up with more infections. But their social lives may be richer, too.[Read: We’re giving up on the (frog) pandemic]As much as people love to paint themselves as more civilized and sophisticated than other creatures, “I don’t think animals are in any way, shape, or form dirtier than us,” Sebastian Stockmaier, a biologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. Some of the animals we most associate with filth and squalor are actually very proactive about public health, says Aram Mikaelyan, an entomologist at North Carolina State University. Infected honeybees willingly exile themselves to keep the rest of the colony safe; ants groom away each other’s fungal spores, carry corpses out of the nest, and designate latrines far away from kitchens to avoid contaminating their food. Termites may build their nests out of feces—but the bricks are antimicrobial, and are arranged to keep those homes well ventilated with fresh air. Many people, meanwhile, can’t even be bothered to wash their hands after they use the bathroom.Humans have made it awfully easy to avoid confronting the sensations of yuck that other creatures clue into every day, Mikaelyan told me. We mask bodily stink with deodorant; we scent our clothes with sprays and perfumes. We mist our homes with air fresheners to comfort ourselves about not cleaning them as often as we should. It seems a very different system from what evolution might have dreamed up, all those eons ago. But while humans fuel entire industries by covering up what’s gross, plenty of other animals are sticking to what they know best: simply keeping the disgusting stuff out.

To my knowledge, a vitally important and sorely-needed countrywide macroeconomic "experiment" needs to be "deliberately" performed by the US Fed sometime in the coming years, both when the global Covid pandemic has fully subsided in most places on this planet, and when there's no more non-trivial local war going on under the sun.

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If, during that future period of time, the smoothly-running global supply chains are no longer disrupted, and global energy prices go back to "normalcy," we can much more convincingly test the hypothesis that non-trivial MMT-like suitably-controlled "new-money-printing" by the US Fed will not cause significant (demand-pull) CPI inflation in the domestic US economy, given the country's imports leakages of all kinds to the foreign countries through her deficit trade account, and given the normal diversion of new money flows from the country's real economy into the country's virtual economy, given the persistent vigor of the unchallenged global hegemony of the US dollar in the foreseeable future.

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The US-Fed-cum-US-Treasury Axis, with the cooperation of the US Congress, should work together and perform such a crucial MMT-like new-money-printing experiment to finance the US federal government's much increased deficit spending year-in and year-out in the future fiscal years, say either

(a) to give once again stimulus checks or tax rebates en masse to both the US households and the US corporations, or

(b) to help the US's coming transformation into the world's entrepreneurial state of last resort, in order to fully subdue China both technologically and economically before the middle of this century.

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My guess is that, so long as the global hegemony of the US dollar remains unchallenged by any quickly rising foreign currencies in the rest of our generation (ie, the US dollar won't depreciate massively in the coming years even given the US Fed's persistent and suitably-controlled new-money-printing, and the prices of the US's highly-demanded government treasuries remain firm most of the time), the above hypothesis will be confirmed and will not be rejected, and hence, either

(i) the US can safely keep suitably monetizing the federal government's deficit-spending in the future without causing much inflationary pressure in the domestic US economy, or

(ii) there will once again be some non-trivial inflationary pressure cropping up in the domestic US economy, but no (or only a mild) economic recession will occur, and a jobful Goldilocks-like economic environment in the country, like that observed in today's US, will pursue,

and so the future government-deficit-financed entrepreneurial US state, despite her federal government's persistently rising remaining debts, can still safely and successfully sustain Pax Americana on this planet far into the future.

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In his State of the Union address, President Biden alluded to the Chinese spy balloon incident in a single line that suggested an effort to contain the spillover from that episode. For its part, the Beijing government also seems to have tried to downplay it, expressing regret initially and using its censorship of media and social media to tamp down the flames of Chinese nationalism.

In the last such crisis, the Chinese government seemed to encourage anti-Americanism in its media. In 2001, a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter, killing the Chinese pilot and forcing the U.S. plane to land on Hainan Island, where Chinese authorities took the crew into custody. After 11 tense days, the United States issued a letter of regret, which the Chinese characterized as an apology. Beijing then released the Americans. It is difficult to imagine an incident such as that one getting resolved so quickly and easily today.

We are watching something almost unique in history: a growing geopolitical rivalry between two nations that are also deeply interconnected economically. In the wake of the suspected spy balloon, this week brought news that U.S.-China trade in goods hit an all-time high of $690 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2018 before the covid-19 pandemic. That number seems especially remarkable when you consider that it was achieved despite the tariffs that President Donald Trump placed on many Chinese goods — and those that China placed on U.S. goods in response. It also runs counter to the Biden administration’s new rules preventing trade in certain high-technology items with the People’s Republic.

We are operating on two levels with China. One is geopolitical, where tensions have been growing rapidly. But the other is commercial, and it is determined largely by Chinese and American consumers and firms, not governments. That relationship remains deeply intertwined and interdependent. Can these two realms continue to move forward while working at cross-purposes? It seems highly unlikely.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs, former treasury secretary Henry Paulson notes that, during the 2008 global financial crisis, good relations with China helped Washington avert another Great Depression. China held massive amounts of U.S. debt as well as U.S. housing bonds (issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Had Beijing sold those, it could have created a downward spiral for the U.S. economy — with fallout around the world. But Washington persuaded Beijing not to sell, and in fact China used its own fiscal and monetary strength to boost the global economy. It is sobering to think that the next global financial crisis — there will be one — will likely see none of that kind of policy coordination between the world’s two largest economies.

The geopolitical tensions are likely to grow quickly. This week also brought news that was actually more significant than a wandering balloon. The U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the U.S. nuclear arsenal, has informed Congress that China now has more land-based fixed and mobile intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the United States. As relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated, Beijing has moved to rapidly build up its nuclear arsenal. It still has many fewer nuclear warheads than the United States, but, according to a Pentagon report last fall, it is on a path to more than triple its stock by 2035. At that point, we will be in a world in which three major powers each have large and sophisticated nuclear arsenals. Two of those powers — Russia and China — are allies, and both will be primarily targeting the United States.

And then there is Taiwan. We face a long-term buildup of Beijing’s military capability to invade or, more likely, blockade the island. But we also face potential short-term crises, including the one that will surely be triggered if House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) does travel to the island and (even more provocatively) announces support for Taiwanese independence. Taiwan will be holding presidential elections in 2024. President Tsai Ing-wen cannot run again because of term limits, but her party has chosen as its likely candidate a man who says he is a “worker for Taiwanese independence.” So far, public sentiment suggests that most Taiwanese do not want independence right now, preferring for the time being the ambiguous status quo that has allowed them to thrive and prosper. But that too could change if Beijing’s bullying ramps up.

Right now, Washington and Beijing have few guardrails to keep problems from escalating. China and the United States have no bilateral arms control agreements, unlike with Russia, or even ongoing negotiations about security. There are no military-to-military dialogues about crisis management. There is no continuous discussion between the two sides’ economic teams.

If the next crisis between Beijing and Washington is bigger than a balloon, it might prove much harder to deflate.

Updated at 4:56 pm ET on February 8, 2023This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekThe aftermath of this week’s tragic earthquake in Turkey and Syria is a stark reminder of the devastating impact of severe natural disasters, and how so many of us live under their threat. You might be asking yourself in this moment, What have I done to prepare? We want to hear your thoughts on the matter; alternatively, feel free to share your stories of living through a natural disaster.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteShame on Disney The Financial Times reports that the Disney corporation, the current owner of The Simpsons, has cut an episode of that show from its streaming platform in Hong Kong. Why? It referred to “forced-labor camps,” something China is sensitive about because of the ethnic-minority groups Beijing consigns to them (Disney declined to comment on this to the Financial Times).  An episode of the show that referred to Tiananmen Square reportedly met the same fate in 2021. If I had kids, caving to oppressive despots is not the example I would want set for them.A Graceful TributeUntil Tuesday, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar held the all-time career scoring record in the NBA. Many thought it would always stand. But LeBron James broke it. And Abdul-Jabbar insisted that he was thrilled, in a Substack essay where he argued that all of humanity benefits when old records fall:
Whenever a sports record is broken—including mine—it’s a time for celebration. It means someone has pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible to a whole new level. And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more.
For me, the inspirational power of sports is best explained in a scene in the 1985 film Vision Quest. In it, Elmo, an aging fry cook at a hotel, explains: “I was in the room here one day, watchin’ the Mexican channel on TV. I don’t know nothin’ about Pelé. I’m watchin’ what this guy can do with a ball on his feet. Next thing I know, he jumps in the air and flips into a somersault and kicks the ball in—upside down and backwards. The goddamn goalie never knew what the fuck hit him. Pelé gets excited. He rips off his jersey and starts running around the stadium wav­ing it around over his head. Everybody’s screaming in Spanish. I’m here, sitting alone in my room, and I start crying. [Pause.] Yeah, that’s right, I start crying. Because another human being, a species that I hap­pen to belong to, could kick a ball, and lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings up to a better place to be, if only for a minute … Let me tell ya, kid—it was pretty goddamned glorious.”
That is the magic of sports. To see something seemingly impossi­ble, reminding us that if one person can do it, then we all somehow share in that achievement. It is what sends children onto playgrounds to duplicate a LeBron layup or a Steph Curry three-pointer. Or Mia Hamm inspiring a whole generation of girls to come off the bleachers and onto the field. Millions of children across the country pushing themselves toward excellence because they saw an athlete do something spectacular and they want to do it too. Or at least try. That same kind of drive is behind many of humankind’s greatest achievements.
And it’s all exceptionally glorious.
Eggs Are a Bargain Even NowYes, prices have spiked recently. But if you take a historical perspective, Megan McArdle argues, we’re relatively well off today as consumers of eggs, though perhaps at a cost to chickens:
In 1901, the average family spent 42.5 percent of its budget on food, and, according to economist Deirdre McCloskey, a typical middle-class household devoted about 44 hours per week to preparing food. By 2021, U.S. consumers were spending about 10 percent of their household income on food, and less than 10 hours a week preparing it … even as our food consumption has shifted toward things that would have been luxuries back then. People eat berries out of season, fresh seafood even far inland … and the average person eats about six times as much chicken as they would have a century ago.
… Some food prices fell faster than others, and chicken and eggs were among those that saw the greatest improvements ... Raising chickens indoors helped protect them from disease and predators. Providing them with warmer conditions and artificial light helped extend a laying season which otherwise stops in winter. Farmers developed the raised cage system which has helped increase egg production, as have breeding programs. Modern hens have gone from laying about 150 eggs per hen per year in the 1930s, to 296 today.
… Modern farming techniques can raise serious concerns about animal welfare, and I make a point of buying cage free eggs ... But the benefits of this revolution have also been enormous. In 1905, an average male factory worker older than 16 took home $11.16 a week, enough to buy about 41 cartons of eggs. Today, the median man earns $1,176 a week, enough to buy more than 275 cartons of eggs, even at today’s elevated prices. If you can’t help cringing when you see the cashier ring up eggs that cost twice as much as they did a year ago, it might help to remember that however poor you feel, your ancestors would have taken one look at your grocery cart and declared you rich beyond their dreams.
Frederick Douglass for Open BordersTo commemorate Black History Month, Ilya Somin resurfaces a largely forgotten bit of oratory from a civil-rights hero. Circa 1869, Frederick Douglass said:
I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency.
There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.
La Démocratie en FranceIn The Atlantic’s March issue, Thomas Chatterton Williams offers a characteristically subtle argument about what the United States and its oldest ally in Europe can learn from one another:
I remain convinced that an authentically color-blind society—one that recognizes histories of difference but refuses to fetishize or reproduce them—is the destination we must aim for. Either we achieve genuine universalism or we destroy ourselves as a consequence of our mutual resentment and suspicion.
Attempting this will be painful and, at times, feel counterintuitive. Woke impulses are irrepressible today, and they will likely remain so as the grand global project of building multicultural democracies continues. The question, then, is not how to stamp out these impulses, but how to channel them responsibly, while refusing to succumb to the myopia of group identity. A riff on the apocryphal Winston Churchill quip about liberal ideology describes the challenge aptly: You have no head if you wholly embrace it, but if you categorically reject it, you have no heart.
In principle, it is hard to deny the superiority of the French model of universal citizenship—liberté, égalité, fraternité. Yet in practice, the exhausting and sometimes disingenuous American reflex to interpret social life through imperfect notions of identity nonetheless manages to perceive real experiences that otherwise get dismissed and, when suppressed long enough, put us all in peril. It would be a mistake for either culture to remake itself entirely in the image of the other. The future belongs to the multiethnic society that finds a way to synthesize them.
Don’t Conflate Race and CultureAmid a defense of abolishing race, Greg Thomas writes:
From my perspective, race is a categorization and hierarchical sorting of human beings into subspecies based on skin color and phenotypic differences. The express purpose of such selecting and sorting—and, as we shall soon see, of attribution, essentializing, and acting in a racist manner—was to enable the oppression and exploitation of darker-skinned people by situating them within a caste-like structure whereby those classified as white had more ready access to the social, economic, and political benefits and opportunities of a modern system of free enterprise.
Culture, in contrast, is human meaning and values expressed in forms of creative production (art and technology), rituals, patterns of behavior, and ways of seeing and being in the world—lifestyles. One can also view culture as shared agreements, practices, and symbolic communication among groups of people. Another approach to culture is more developmental, as in the use of education to cultivate and improve the human capacity to elevate and refine, thereby producing more “cultured” individuals.
In How Culture Works, anthropologist Paul Bohannan used a simile to describe how culture helps humans expand beyond our biological inheritance: “Culture is like a prosthesis—it allows the creature to extend its capacities and to do things that its specialized body cannot otherwise do.”
By definition and intent, race separates and divides. Conflating race and culture twists and tightens this division. Separating or bracketing culture from race tends toward appreciating human commonalities and differences in a more nuanced manner than judging and stereotyping groups of people based on skin color will allow.Provocation of the WeekIn Persuasion, Talia Barnes takes on the smartphone:
I traded my smartphone for a dumbphone to simplify my life. Then I revived my iPod. Then I bought a GPS. Then I bought a point-and-shoot camera.
You might wonder whether life is really simpler this way. Wouldn’t it be far more convenient to use a single device to accomplish all of these tasks?
Technically, yes. Psychologically, no.
While there’s an undeniable ease-of-use factor to housing a phone, internet browser, entertainment center, camera, and GPS in a lightweight rectangle that fits inside my pocket, the proximity of each of these tasks to one another leads, inevitably, to constant distraction. If you’ve ever tried to find the perfect angle for a photo while your Instagram post is blowing up, or answer a work email while your mom is calling you, you know what I mean.
On the surface, it makes sense that smartphones are designed for multitasking: They’re good at it. The humans who use them, however, are not.
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A product race is under way in the world of artificial intelligence. Just this week, Google announced plans to release Bard, a search chatbot based on its proprietary large language model; yesterday, Microsoft held an event unveiling a next-generation web browser with a supercharged Bing interface powered by ChatGPT. Though most big tech companies have been quietly developing their own generative-AI tools for years, these giants are scrambling to demonstrate their chops after the public release and runaway adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has accumulated more than 30 million users in two months.OpenAI’s success is an apparent signal to tech leaders that deep-learning networks are the next frontier of the commercial internet. AI evangelists will similarly tell you that generative AI is destined to become the overlay for not only search engines, but also creative work, busywork, memo writing, research, homework, sketching, outlining, storyboarding, and teaching. It will, in this telling, remake and reimagine the world. At present, sorting the hype from genuine enthusiasm is difficult, but given the billions of dollars being funneled into this technology, it’s worth asking, in ways large and small: What does the world look like if the evangelists are right? If this AI paradigm shift arrives, one vital skill of the 21st century could be effectively talking to machines. And for now, that process involves writing—or, in tech vernacular, engineering—prompts.Image-generating models such as DALL-E 2 and Midjourney and text-generation tools like ChatGPT market themselves as a means for creation. But in order to create, one must know how to guide the machines to a desired outcome. Asking ChatGPT to write a five-paragraph book report about Animal Farm will yield forgettable, even inaccurate results. But writing the introductory paragraph to the book report yourself and asking the tool to complete the essay will feed the machine valuable context. Better yet, instruct the machine, “Write a five-paragraph book report at a college level with elegant prose that draws on the history of the satirical allegorical novel Animal Farm. Reference Orwell’s ‘Why I Write’ while explaining the author’s stylistic choices in the novel.” It will yield a far more sophisticated and convincing output.Good prompts aren’t just specific. They seem to reflect a deeper understanding of the model you are trying to manipulate. One way to think of prompt trial and error is as an attempt to glean what information the model is pulling from and how the AI organizes and indexes the information at its disposal. It’s informed guesswork.Despite making a living as a writer, I’m usually far too vague when instructing DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. When I had my 8-year-old nephew play with Midjourney this summer, his imagination conjured delightful scenes such as a flea surfing on a tsunami wave fighting a giant wasp, but, even together, we couldn’t come up with the details for our prompts to bring his specific vision to life. First, his flea didn’t look cartoonish enough; then, the tweaks I made turned the whole thing hyperrealistic and too scary for him. He lacked the stylistic language to talk to the model, and apparently, so did I.[Read: Generative art is stupid]To help people like me and my nephew, a cottage industry has already sprung up around those who can speak to the machines. On PromptBase, a marketplace for prompt engineers, you can purchase a few lines of text to feed into any number of generative-AI models. Some of the most popular prompts on the service are for generating “cute 3D renders of emojis in a clay style” with DALL-E 2 or creating sleek, modern logos via Midjourney. There are prompts that promise to generate new sports-team logos, and text hacks with names like Sentence Expander. For $3.99, Book Summarizer promises a prompt that will help “extract the essential information and takeaways from a book.” PromptBase’s sixth-most-popular seller, a prompt creator from Spain who goes by Imagineer, told me that prompt engineering is still a side hustle, having earned them just over 800 euros since September. “For me, it’s almost like a game,” they told me. “I like to think of prompts as little treasures.”Imagineer’s prompt-writing process is informed by knowledge of design, illustration, and photography. When I asked why they thought they were good at prompt writing, they suggested it was a blend of natural skill and strategy. “I realized that I was better at talking to Midjourney than other people,” they said. And Midjourney allowed them to generate great results with less effort than when using DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, another competitor. But Imagineer said that the most crucial element of a successful query is iteration. A good prompt “gives consistent and predictable results, and you get this when you generate a lot of images and see the variations when you alter some words or parameters,” they told me over email.Subject-area expertise is also essential for text tools. Dan Shipper, an entrepreneur and writer, has been using ChatGPT since its release in November to help write his blog posts, which are now primarily about the future of AI tools. When he needs to describe a concept (say, the philosophical theory of utilitarianism, for a post about the disgraced cryptocurrency CEO Sam Bankman-Fried), he’ll ask ChatGPT to summarize the key points of the movement in a few sentences for a general audience. Once the machine furnishes the text, Shipper reviews it, checks it to make sure it’s accurate, and then spruces it up with his own rhetorical flourishes. “It allows me to skip a step—but only if I know what I’m talking about so I can write a good prompt and then fact-check the output,” he told me.Shipper compared prompting ChatGPT to managing a bright and eager junior employee: The text tool is enthusiastic and skilled, but also inexperienced and thus more likely to make subtle, but crucial, mistakes. It’s also great at bullshitting when it doesn’t have the answer. Taste and experience, qualities that Shipper attributes to a good manager, are required to create a successful prompt. The day we spoke, Shipper told me he’d gotten ChatGPT to build him an impressive, thorough outline for a long post he was working on. “I wrote a bunch of bullet points and said, Here are all the different things and quotes and ideas and phrases I’ve amassed. Then underneath that, I wrote, Can you please format this into an outline of an essay?” The more work Shipper does in fine-tuning the prompt, the better the output, he said.[Read: The difference between speaking and thinking]Sometimes, the prompt writing itself holds a specific kind of delight. Meg Conley, a writer who uses AI tools in her spare time, sees prompt engineering as a challenge akin to crafting a persuasive essay: “Very difficult. Mostly failure. And sheer joy when the words come together to make something that looks a little like the world you see in your head,” she wrote on Twitter back in November. It also holds a special personal thrill: Conley has aphantasia, which means that she has trouble visualizing images. After the release of Midjourney, she frequently stayed up late describing things from her imagination and honing her prompts until the resulting image felt right.Most important, she told me, is knowing the model you’re speaking to. Each tool is built and trained differently, giving it unique aesthetics and vernacular—like how people who share a language have regional dialects and cultural quirks. “In the way that prose writing differs from technical or academic writing, there are different ways of marshaling the language depending on your audience,” she told me. “I’ve seen people who are really good at DALL-E 2, which seems to reward an ability to draw on references and high- and low-culture mash-ups. But the way I conceptualize the world is more along the lines of how Midjourney’s model works,” she said. Over time, Conley has familiarized herself with the model’s order of operations. “Something I’ve learned is the importance of the weight of a prompt,” she told me. “In Midjourney, if you type the word girl before the adjective red, it’ll focus on the girl more than the color red. With longer prompts, it’s like a puzzle, and you learn which terms to give more weight.”Already, some teachers are banking on the notion that prompt writing is a skill their students might need in their careers. Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches about innovation and entrepreneurship, has revamped his syllabus since ChatGPT was released to the public. In one of his new lessons, Mollick asks his class to imagine ChatGPT as a student and to teach the chatbot by prompting it to write an essay about a particular class concept. Like a professor during office hours, the students must help the AI refine its essay until it appears to have sufficient mastery of the subject. Mollick hopes that the exercise will help the students learn by explaining, with the added benefit of teaching them to write deft prompts.[Read: What happens when AI has read everything?]To hear Mollick tell it, prompt engineering lies somewhere between linguistics and problem solving. “Prompting is programming in prose with weirdness and stochastic results,” he told me. “I think that good prompting likely rewards divergent thinkers who find ways to experiment quickly. I think it rewards people with deep curiosities.”It also rewards some deeper technical knowledge. One striking image I found on Midjourney’s Discord server was generated with the following, painfully detailed prompt:
in the style of Metaphysical painting, colored pencil drawing Smooth Shading & Blending, a sunrise reflects in a pond in the deep woods, a willow trees boughs hang over the edge of the pond, moody, intense emotions, deep perspective, natural lighting, Hyperdetailed, super High Contrast, intricate details, photography, raytracing, octane render, unreal engine --ar 3:2 --s 999 --chaos 50 --v 4 --v 4 -
More than just specificity, good prompts tend to reveal an awareness of the medium’s abilities that the user is trying to replicate. Octane render and unreal engine are digital animation tools that produce 3-D computer graphics. Inputs like -- v4 are instructions to Midjourney to use the model’s newer, more powerful, and experimental version. Some of the best photorealistic-image prompts ask the model to imitate a specific camera or lens type; others demonstrate a working knowledge of art history or a particular artistic style. It’s reminiscent of the early days of search, when experts who could navigate Boolean operators, authors, keywords, sources, and date-range searches could unlock better results.[Read: ChatGPT is about to dump more work on everyone]Search engines, of course, are no longer as demanding. In order to drive and cater to mass adoption, Google’s tools became more powerful, making it easier to get a high-quality result with a clumsy or simple query. Mollick suggested that prompt engineering might simply be a placeholder—a rudimentary way for us to interact with AI until they can synthesize what we want from bare-bones prompts or other, unknown means.He could be right. Those who have seen early tests of OpenAI’s GPT-4 text models (which are not public) speak of it like something out of science fiction and suggest that the next leap will render the old tool obsolete. And yesterday, Microsoft unveiled an interface that, the company said, users will eventually talk to like a personal assistant. Instead of searching How big is a Honda Odyssey? and IKEA Klippan loveseat dimensions, you might ask the chatbot to solve an entire problem for you: Will the IKEA Klippan loveseat fit into my 2019 Honda Odyssey if I fold down the seats? Prompt engineering might just be a bridge to get us to the brave new world of whatever generative-media landscape comes next, but for now, it’s difficult to know how much to believe the hype.[Read: ChatGPT is dumber than you think]Until the paradigm shifts, I remain drawn to AI prompts, which are usually far more intriguing than the outputs they yield. When people share AI-generated art or text, they frequently do so alongside the string of commands that brought it to life. Traveling back and forth between the instructions and the end result is revealing, even intimate. It’s a bit like being granted access into a person’s brain to see how they piece together disparate bits of knowledge, how they reason through a problem, or how they employ their creativity to produce something unexpected.Like writing and coding before it, prompt engineering is an emergent form of thinking. It lies somewhere between conversation and query, between programming and prose. It is the one part of this fast-changing, uncertain future that feels distinctly human.

It was a raucous, interactive, and argumentative State of the Union like no other. And when it was over, President Joe Biden had provided a clear signal of how he plans to contest the 2024 presidential election.Leaning hard into his populist “Scranton Joe” persona, an energetic and feisty Biden sparred with congressional Republicans heckling him from the audience as he previewed what will likely be key themes of the reelection campaign that he’s expected to announce within months, if not weeks.Biden’s speech showed him continuing to formulate an economically focused alternative to the cultural backlash that Donald Trump has stressed throughout his political career—and which Trump’s former White House press secretary, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, revived in her bellicose GOP response. Whereas Sanders summoned “normal” Americans to rise up against a “woke mob” allegedly erasing American values and traditions, Biden called for national unity around shared goals, particularly delivering economic benefits to working families.[David Frum: How Biden successfully baited congressional Republicans]It’s easy to view those sharply contrasting messages as a preview of the 2024 election. Almost any GOP nominee—but particularly Trump or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the two early front-runners in polls for the nomination—is likely to stress the cultural notes that Sanders hit in hopes of maximizing turnout among the GOP’s core constituencies of older, noncollege, and nonurban white voters and expanding the party’s 2020 beachhead among culturally conservative nonwhite voters, especially Latino men.Biden’s emphasis on economic concerns reflects his belief that the best way to counter that strategy is to downplay culture-war fights while defining himself primarily around a practical agenda to lift average families.Well into the speech, Biden delivered an unflinching pledge to veto any GOP effort to ban abortion nationwide (which has no chance of passing the Senate anyway). Near the beginning and end of his remarks, he also pointedly alluded to the threats to American democracy unleashed by Trump and the insurrection on January 6, 2021.But given how important both of those issues proved to the unexpectedly strong Democratic performance in the 2022 midterms (particularly among white-collar suburbanites), Biden gave them only passing attention.The difference in emphasis between Biden and Sanders was unmistakable. Cultural concerns dominated Sanders’s speech. She painted a dark vision of the “radical left’s America,” where “our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race,” “violent criminals roam free while law-abiding families live in fear,” and “normal” Americans “are under attack” from a “woke mob” pursuing “a left-wing culture war that we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.” Her remarks showed again how the fear of cultural and racial displacement in an America that is inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urbanized remains the most powerful motivator for what I’ve called the Republican “coalition of restoration.”By contrast, the core of Biden’s speech was his pledge to both create good-paying jobs for working-class families and provide them with tangible economic help, such as by reducing drug prices and fighting surprise airline and hotel fees. As he often has before, Biden called his agenda a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America” and stressed how many jobs that do not require college degrees would be created by the troika of major bills passed during his first two years: legislation promoting clean-energy industries, more domestic manufacturing of semiconductors, and infrastructure construction projects nationwide. He delivered repeated populist jabs against big corporations and billionaires paying lower tax rates “than a nurse.”It was telling that the most extended of the several remarkable back-and-forth exchanges with Republicans came not from abortion or any social issue, but Social Security and Medicare. Echoing the “you lie” cry from a GOP representative during a 2009 Barack Obama speech, several Republicans apparently called out “liar” when Biden noted, correctly, that some Republicans (specifically Senator Rick Scott of Florida whom he did not name) have proposed to sunset all federal programs every five years, including Social Security and Medicare. What the exchange made clear above all is how comfortable Biden is creating a contrast that Hubert Humphrey would recognize, with Democrats claiming their historical ground of protecting the social safety net.[Derek Thompson: Don’t ‘buy American’]Polling during the midterm election, and right through the days before last night’s speech, revealed that Biden has not yet convinced most Americans that his economic agenda will benefit them. Most Americans continue to express downbeat views about the economy, and in an ABC/Washington Post national survey released this week, more than three-fifths of Americans said Biden had accomplished not much or nothing at all.After hosting a focus group of voters who watched last night’s speech, Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a Democratic polling consortium, told me in an email that although their reactions suggested that Biden “was successful in telling a positive story about how the economy has improved over the last two years … the issues of inflation and spending remain deep pain points that he and his administration will have to continue to work on.” Yesterday’s speech showed that Biden similarly believes (rightly or wrongly) that his fate will be decided more by voters’ assessment of his impact on their financial situation than by whether they share his values on the kind of cultural issues Sanders hammered.The other thematic pillar of Biden’s presidency has been his promise to unify America and work across party lines. But Biden’s speech continued a recalibration of that message that began last fall.In the midterm campaign, Biden differentiated between “mainstream” Republicans who were willing to reach bipartisan agreements and what he called the “extreme MAGA” forces that represented a radical threat to democracy and individual freedoms. In the State of the Union, he offered a variation on that theme. He began by congratulating the new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and stressed how during his first two years as president, “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together” to pass big legislation, such as the bipartisan infrastructure bill.But as the speech progressed, Biden pivoted from where he thought he could deal with Republicans to where he insisted he would resist them. Biden forcefully called on Republicans to pass a “clean” increase in the nation’s debt ceiling, without any conditions, and pledged to veto any effort to undo the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that reduce drug prices, any legislation imposing a national ban on abortion, and any efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare. He touted his commitment to a wide array of priorities, including expanded preschool and an assault-weapons ban, that he knows have no chance of passing a Republican-controlled House.All of that notably departed from the tone that his two Democratic predecessors struck in their first State of the Union immediately after losing unified control of Congress, as Biden also did this past fall. Both Bill Clinton, in his 1995 State of the Union speech, and Obama, in his 2011 address, were elaborately conciliatory, even contrite, as they addressed the new GOP majorities. Both men drew some lines of contrast, but mostly focused on issues they believed would appeal to Republicans, such as reducing the federal deficit and streamlining government. Although Biden similarly nodded toward more cooperation at the outset of his speech, overall he was much more confrontational.[David A. Graham: Biden seizes the center]That was partly because Biden had less to be contrite about: Democrats performed much better in last year’s midterm than they did when Obama and Clinton suffered their first-term reversals. Democrats lost more than 50 House seats in Clinton’s first midterm, and more than 60 in Obama’s, but they surrendered only 10 in Biden’s—and actually gained a Senate seat, in contrast to the substantial Senate losses under his two predecessors. After those losses, both Clinton and Obama felt enormous pressure to signal to voters that they were making a course correction toward the center; Biden last night betrayed no hint that he felt any need to change direction. As Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s White House communications director, recently told me, last November’s results were “quite different” from the “shellacking” that both Obama and Clinton had suffered. “This election cannot be read as a repudiation of Biden and his agenda,” Pfeiffer said.Equally important, though, the gulf between the parties is even greater than it was under Clinton or Obama, which leaves very few realistic opportunities for Biden to pursue bipartisan agreements with the GOP-controlled House. That distance was vividly demonstrated by the repeated catcalls from Republicans—a display that obliterated any traditional notions of decorum during the State of the Union and underscored the zealotry of the conservative vanguard in the House GOP that McCarthy empowered in order to win the speakership.Last night, Biden gave voters a spirited preview of his 2024 message and strategy. Sanders and the militant House Republicans simultaneously provided voters with a preview of the alternative they may hear next year. The most revealing measure of the night came not so much in the messages sent by either side, but in the distance between them.

(Photo by Elva Etienne via Getty Images)This essay is reprinted from Jonathan Haidt’s new Substack, “After Babel.”From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our essay “The Coddling of the American Mind”) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have heard is that I’m just another old man (I’m 59) shaking his fist and complaining about “kids these days,” when in fact “the kids are alright.” If that’s true, then the first half of my Babel project—on what social media did to childhood and to teen mental health—is fatally flawed. Is the criticism valid?1. The Case Against MeTwo responses to that WSJ essay do us the favor of collecting quotations from previous generations complaining about the behavior of youth. First, see this Twitter thread from Paul Fairie, titled “A Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled.”Paul Fairie @paulisciA Brief History of Kids Today Are Spoiled
🧵11:07 PM ∙ Dec 7, 202264,349Likes14,748RetweetsFairie includes this 1925 gem: Remove the girl or boy of today from radio, the telephone, furnace heat, the automobile, the libraries, movies, and other forms of amusement and comfort—give them merely a jackknife and nature’s unchanging wonders for amusement, and how would they fare?…Ennui would claim them for its own and…they would fare ill until returned to their accustomed habitat of convenience and plenty.Second, see this essay by Mike Males in LA Progressive, titled “Enough Youth-Bashing,” which includes this: From Greek poet Hesiod to modern youth bashers led by psychology professors Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge and former first lady Michelle Obama, no one says anything new. Hesiod cornered the market with his “no hope for the future of our people” rant against the “reckless…frivolous youth of today” (700 BC).And this:Eon after eon, it’s the same float going by. Socrates thought books made the young mentally weak. Panics over coffee, witches, jazz, dime novels, comics, TV, backwards-masked lyrics, Ozzy, Eminem, Tupac, Grand Theft Auto, Harry Potter’s Hermione, Miley, cellphones, Facebook, sexting, social media…the endless ephebiphobic idiocies should be retitled, “I’m Superior!” and given their own dismal library shelf.These critics make two valid points: First, you can find these criticisms in all recent generations and in some going back thousands of years.1 Second, the criticisms are often part of a larger moral panic that arises in response to any new consumer product—and especially any new technology—that “kids these days” are using. Social media clearly fits this pattern. (Robby Soave explained the dynamics of tech panics well in his 2021 book Tech Panic.)The critics also gain support from empirical studies by psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, whose 2019 essay in Science Advances was titled “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.” Protzko and Schooler summarize their many studies showing that older people suffer from a variety of cognitive biases, such as that we each have biased and self-serving memories of what we were like at that age, and so we older people always find current younger people inferior and declining. In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge, author of iGen and the forthcoming Generations) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media. It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me. But if you take that as your null hypothesis, then you should be open to evidence that the null hypothesis is false and this time is different. Anecdotes about kids who began cutting themselves the week after going on Instagram won’t do. You’ll want to see peer-reviewed studies and high-quality surveys showing 1) that there is in fact an epidemic of mental illness, and 2) that phones and social media are substantial contributing causes. I am currently writing a book that makes both of these arguments: Kids In Space: Why Teen Mental Health is Collapsing. In the rest of this essay, I offer a preview of the evidence that a mental illness epidemic emerged around 2012. I won’t directly address the issue of causality here. I’ll do that in many future essays, and in the book. (You can find a short version of the argument in my 2022 Senate testimony.)  This post simply responds to the “kids these days” critics. I make the case that this time really is different. The kids have not been alright since the early 2010s.2. The Collaborative Review DocI have been collaborating with Jean Twenge and Zach Rausch (my research assistant) on a pair of collaborative reviews that are open-source Google documents where we collect all the evidence we can find, on both sides of each question, and we invite critics to add comments and studies. In this essay, I present our document titled: “Adolescent mood disorders since 2010: A collaborative review.” In future essays, I’ll present many more collaborative review docs and explain why open-source Google docs are an essential adjunct to social science research, especially regarding social trends that are changing too fast for the slow gears of academic life to keep up with—phenomena like social media and its effects on teen mental health and on liberal democracy.Also read: Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, “The Polarization Spiral.”Here is the first half of the Table of Contents, to give you a sense of the layout. Please look around the doc itself. If you are a researcher or mental health expert, ask for commenting rights to add your own studies and criticisms. I am a devotee of John Stuart Mill who wrote that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” Help me get this right.Figure 1. The first part of the Table of Contents from Adolescent mood disorders since 2010: A collaborative review.First, let’s look at what Gen Z says about its own mental health, compared to previous generations. After that, we’ll look at hard evidence about behavior, to address the criticism that the only thing that has changed is Gen Z’s willingness to report their mental health problems.3. Increases in Self-Reported Depression and AnxietySection 1 of the Collaborative Review summarizes self-report surveys that have been conducted at regular time intervals since 2010 or earlier. Do members of Gen Z say that their mental health is declining? Yes, in every study we can find. We cannot find any studies on the other side. I will focus today’s essay on data from the United States. On my Substack, I’ll have a future post on what’s happening internationally, showing that the same patterns are happening in largely the same way at roughly the same time in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and I’ll share with you what Zach and I are learning about other countries beyond the Anglosphere. Here are two of the graphs you’ll find in section 1 of the Collaborative Review document:Figure 2. NSDUH data, graphed in 1.1.2 Twenge, Cooper, Joiner, Duffy, & Binau (2019), and re-graphed with more recent data by Haidt. Currently on p. 12 of the Collaborative Review doc.As you can see in Figure 2, and in most of the figures in the review doc, there was no sign of a problem before 2010, and the epidemic is well underway by 2015. You can also see that the rate of depression is much higher in girls, as is the absolute increase (since 2010 an additional 18% of girls suffered from depression in 2021, compared to an additional 6% of boys). However, the relative increase is similar in both sexes: around 150%. The rate had more than doubled before the Covid epidemic. The 2020 data were collected in early 2020, just before Covid restrictions, and the 2021 data were collected a year later before vaccines were widely available. You can see that Covid accelerated the rise in depression in that last year, but it was already rising really fast.Figure 3. American College Health Association (2019), National College Health Assessment. Study 1.1.17, currently on p. 36 of the Collaborative Review doc.Figure 3 comes from a very different source: the mental health clinics on hundreds of college campuses. You can see once again that there’s not much to see before 2010, but the epidemic is in full gear by 2015. You can also see that while rates of all disorders have increased, the increases are largest, in both relative and absolute terms, for mood disorders, a class of mental illness that is made up primarily of depression and anxiety disorders (which includes anorexia). In 2019, just before Covid, one in four American college students suffered from an anxiety disorder, compared to just one in ten back in 2010. The rate may be higher today.Section 1 of the collaborative review shows that according to the kids themselves, the kids are not alright. What happens when we ignore what they say and look at what they do?4. Increases in Self-HarmIn 2019, when Twenge and I launched the document, there were still some skeptics who argued that the large increases you see in Figures 1 and 2 reflect only a change in Gen Z’s willingness to disclose their struggles, which is a good thing. Here is psychiatrist Richard Friedman, in The New York Times in 2018: “Despite news reports to the contrary, there is little evidence of an epidemic of anxiety disorders in teenagers…There are a few surveys reporting increased anxiety in adolescents, but these are based on self-reported measures—from kids or their parents—which tend to overestimate the rates of disorders because they detect mild symptoms, not clinically significant syndromes.”This argument is heard less often nowadays, but it was made by one critic recently in response to my WSJ interview. Here is Vicki Phillips, in Forbes, in an essay titled “Gen Z: Hopeless Or Hopeful?”[Haidt] fails to note the remarkable truth. Gen Z is in fact embracing a new, more open and honest relationship with their mental health, one that destigmatizes the issue so that it can be addressed. This is leading to more people reporting their mental health challenges and seeking support, and contributing to the rising numbers of reported cases. More effective diagnoses and increased connection to care are both good by any measure. As an educator, I feel an obligation to support Haidt on his personal learning journey. And as someone who has actually worked with Gen-Zers, I can tell you, the kids these days are more than alright.But if Phillips and Friedman were correct that “the kids are alright” and the appearance of an epidemic is an illusion based on Gen Z’s “more honest relationship with their mental health,” then we would not see any change in objective measures of mental health, such as hospitalizations for self-harm, or deaths by suicide. But in fact, we do see such changes, and the timing and magnitude of them generally match the changes in self-reported mental health problems. Sections 2 and 3 of the Collaborative Review doc report these findings.Figure 4. Hospital admissions for self-harm, older teens (ages 15-19), CDC data. See section 2.1.1 of the collaborative review doc. Figure 4 shows the number per 100,000 older teens who are admitted each year to hospitals because they harmed themselves, mostly by cutting themselves with sharp objects. Once again there is no sign of a problem before 2010, and the epidemic is raging by 2015. Figure 5. Hospital admissions for self-harm, younger teens (ages 10-14), CDC data. See section 2.1.1 of the collaborative review doc. Figure 5 is the same as Figure 3 except that it shows what happened to younger teens, ages 10-14. Younger teens were very rarely hospitalized for self-harm before 2010, but by 2020 the rate for girls had nearly tripled, rising to exceed the rate at which older teen girls were hospitalized back in 2009. This is a clue as to what caused the epidemic. What could have changed right around 2012 that hit tween and young teen girls hardest? (I’ll answer that in a future essay.) 5. Increases in SuicideSection 3 of the Collaborative Review doc presents the most tragic data of all: a large increase in the number of completed suicides.Figure 6. Suicide rate per 100,000 of US population, ages 15-19. Source: CDC, See section 3.1 of the Collaborative Review.For suicide, the rates are always higher for boys and men. Girls and women make more suicide attempts, but they are more likely to use reversible means. Boys and men are more likely to use firearms and tall buildings, which are not reversible. Suicide takes a much larger toll on boys and men. But it is noteworthy that the relative increase since 2010 is larger for girls and women.2Figure 7. Suicide rate per 100,000 of US population, ages 10-14. Source: CDC, See section 3.1 of the Collaborative Review.When we look at the change in suicide rates for tweens and younger teens, in Figure 7, we find three features that echo what we saw in the graphs for self-harm: 1) the percent increase is larger for girls than for boys, 2) the percent increase for young girls is much larger than the increase for older girls, and 3) even more than in Figure 4, there is a sharp increase for girls between 2012 and 2013. In fact, there was a 67% increase in suicides in that single year. This sudden and enormous spike, in a single year, once again forces us to ask: what changed in the lives of 10-14 year-old girls in 2012?6. ConclusionI began this essay by taking the burden of proof upon myself. Given the long history of tech panics, you should come to this question with skepticism. Your default assumption should be the null hypothesis so often asserted by my critics: this is just one more unjustified freakout by older people about “kids these days.” But as I have shown in this post, the evidence that this time is different is very strong. In 2010 there was little sign of any problem, in any of the long-running nationally representative datasets (with the possible exception of suicide for young teen boys). By 2015—when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our essay “The Coddling of the American Mind”—teen mental health was a five-alarm fire, according to all the datasets that Jean Twenge and I can find. The kids are not alright.  Nuances and complexitiesIt is beyond the scope of this short essay to go into variations by race, SES, ideology, and other factors, but I have done so in Appendices A through G of the collaborative review doc. TLDR: there are some variations, such as that the increases in depression and anxiety were larger among sexual minorities, and among girls who self-identified as liberal. But the general trends are similar across all groups.The suicide rate for boys was higher in the 1980s than it is now. I believe those earlier levels, which used to rise and fall with the violent crime rate, were caused in part by the high and rising prevalence of lead in children’s bloodstreams from the 1950s until leaded gas was banned in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rates of suicide and violence then plummeted 15 years later, and sociologists have not yet converged upon an explanation. You can see graphs of these changes, and find arguments on both sides, in my debate with Chris Ferguson, in section 3.2.1 of the Collaborative Review doc.Jonathan Haidt, a member of the Persuasion advisory board, is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy.1Some of the quotations attributed to Ancient Greek sources may be inaccurate, but once Western societies began the modernization process in the 17th century and cross-generational change sped up, the quotations seem to increase in frequency. (You can find many more here).2For more on the gender difference in suicide, see Freeman et al. (2017), and see Appendix A of the Collaborative Review doc.

I first wrote about “earthing”, also called “grounding”, about a decade ago. Briefly, the idea of earthing is that electrically grounding oneself has a long list of health benefits. I found these claims dubious a decade ago, but I also like to follow up on the research into topics I previously tackled. One of the best ways to judge the validity and potential of a scientific area of research is to see how it evolves over time. Real sciences tend to make tangible progress, while pseudosciences tend to chase their tail.

In medicine, which is an applied science, there are very concrete differences between the real and the fake, and it is only after we see how the medical research progresses that we can confidently say which approaches are useful and which are not. What we like to see as the medical literature on a topic evolves is a persistent statistically significant and clinically relevant effect size that persists as studies become more rigorous and are replicated. What we typically see with dubious treatments is a persistent failure to replicate, studies generally never progress to more rigorous methods, and an inverse relationship between study rigor and positive outcomes.

As I wrote, again about a decade ago, we know from history that there are reliable indicators of when a medical hypothesis is legitimate. Generally we like to see four simultaneous features: methodological rigor, significantly positive effects, reasonable clinical effect (and signal to noise ratio), and replication. Just three are not enough, because you can manufacture positive-seeming results if you can ignore one or more of these criteria.

There is also the issue of medical plausibility. This is, admittedly, a secondary concern with conventional hypotheses in terms of determining clinical efficacy. But that “conventional hypotheses” is a critical caveat. The more a hypothesis seems to violate the laws of physics, the more prominent plausibility is as an issue. For claims that are implausible but not impossible, we could still accept a real effect if the clinical evidence were a home run. Here plausibility informs us where we should set the threshold for tentative acceptance. Moderate clinical evidence might be enough, for now, for a highly plausibility, even expected, outcome. But if everything we currently know says that an intervention should not work, we should demand a higher threshold of clinical evidence before superseding prior knowledge.

Where does earthing fit into this scheme? When I wrote about it in 2012 I felt it was clearly on the pseudoscience side of the equation. Let’s start with the plausibility. The claim is that in our natural state we were more connected to the Earth, walking barefoot on the ground. This allowed for electrons to flow to and from our bodies, creating an electrical homeostasis that was optimal for health. In our modern world, however, we live inside buildings and wear rubber soled shoes. This isolates us electrically from the Earth causes us to be out of electrical homeostasis. In short, this is utter nonsense.

The reason electrical devices are grounded is to give electrons somewhere to go, in case of some source of overload (like lightening) or just to prevent them from building up. Even a small backup of current can create electrical noise in a sensitive system. And of course the amount of electricity we are talking about is massive compared to what our bodies experience. Further, even with rubber soles, we are far from electrically isolated. We easily share electrons with everything we touch. When you have a brief build up of electrical charge you usually find our right away, because you get a static electric shock the next time you touch something conductive (which, of course, neutralizes the charge). Just from the perspective of basic physics, earthing makes no sense. It sounds like the nonsense someone with only a partial understanding of the underlying science cooked up.

The intervention is mostly to spend time walking on the ground in bare feet. But of course, there are also dubious devices, such as grounding mats, that you can sit, stand, or sleep on, and that are in turn grounded to the Earth. There is no evidence that these devices do anything. There is also no research establishing the basic underlying claim – that there is an electrical homeostasis that has any effect on how the body functions, and that this is affected by grounding.

The medical part of the plausibility equation is also highly dubious. According to one researcher:

Because the continuous semiconducting fabric of the body reaches into every part of the body, including the interiors of all cells and their nuclei, mobile electrons in the grounded or earthed person are thought to be capable of rapidly neutralizing ROS produced by oxidative metabolism taking place in every cell and tissue.

The “antioxidant” gambit rears its head again. I have covered why antioxidants are not a panacea extensively here already. In short, oxidative stress is part of a complex homeostatic system in the body, and we already possess powerful antioxidants that don’t need the help of whatever dubious treatment is being proposed. I would give this one an overall plausibility of close to zero.

What about the clinical evidence – how has that evolved in the last decade? It has progressed like a typical pseudoscience, following the path of other dubious claims like homeopathy and acupuncture. First, it leans heavily on pre-clinical studies that fit the pattern – “look, stuff is happening”.

Another study proclaims:

In previous studies, grounding revealed anti-inflammatory effect, immunity enhancement, anticoagulation, and rising blood oxygenation.

I always love it when a treatment is simultaneously “anti-inflammatory” and “immunity enhancing”. These are almost necessarily contradictory. It shows that no matter what happens it can be interpreted in a positive way. These pre-clinical studies look at markers, like cells or biochemicals, to determine effect. This kind of research is rife with difficulty and dubious results (not to say it can’t be useful when properly done). It also has a very loose connection to later clinical studies – in other words, not very predictive at all. So, take a look at a bunch of immune markers, if any go up that is “boosting immunity”, if any go down that is “anti-inflammatory”.

The last ten years of published clinical studies have been entirely unimpressive. Studies generally have small numbers of participants, focus on subjective outcomes (the usual suspects of pain, “well-being”, and stress), and are poorly controlled. Never do we see all features of rigor simultaneously.

What they do (very much like the acupuncture literature) is allow proponents to claim that there is scientific, even “double blind”, evidence to support their claims. But each individual study does not survive scrutiny. In this study, for example, they used a “wedge” design in which all subjects received the same pattern of treatment (placebo on some days and treatment on others) without variation. I am not sure how this can be “double” blind when every participant had the same pattern. They didn’t even mix it up to make sure it wasn’t an artifact of timing (reporting more of an effect with more treatments). Also, if you look at the data, the results are all over the place, with many outcomes not statistically significant. They are just cherry picking apparently positive outcomes while not properly adjusting the statistics for multiple outcomes. And the number of participants was 16, so we would expect lots of quirky results.

Another pattern that is apparent is that most of the research is published in “alternative medicine” journals, predatory journals, or other low impact journals. This allows for the creation of the illusion of scientific support without ever crossing the threshold of scientific legitimacy.

Earthing is another example of exactly what is wrong with biomedical publishing. It favors the publication of large numbers of low quality studies, with plenty of opportunities for proponents of dubious medical treatments and beliefs to get into the peer-reviewed literature. For the uninitiated this creates the appearance of legitimacy, even for highly implausible treatments.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.The free-trade era in America is over. Industrial policy is the new rage. After decades of trade with China and declining manufacturing employment, the U.S. is embracing a new economic theory: Build more, and build it all here.President Joe Biden has signed historic laws to make more bridges, wind turbines, and computer chips in the U.S. In his State of the Union address yesterday, Biden announced a deeper “Buy American” policy that calls for “American-made lumber, glass, drywall, fiber optic cables.”Part of me is thrilled by this idea. The U.S. desperately needs sharper focus on the supply side of the economy. It’s not enough to erect signs on our front lawns proclaiming that housing is a human right; we also need policies for our backyards to allow housing that’s ample and affordable. But although I support an abundance agenda, I’m concerned that an all-American abundance agenda might be two alliterations too many.Before we get to my anxieties about Buy American rules, let me try to make an honest case for it. Fundamentally, the government wants to ensure that the U.S. doesn’t rely on flimsy supply chains for key materials, especially those that pass through our adversaries’ borders—specifically, China’s. In the past decade or so, we’ve awakened to two different “China shocks.” The first shock was economic: the lesson that free trade with China had a devastating and concentrated effect on manufacturing employment. This shock contributed not only to a Great Lakes mini-recession but also, perhaps, to the election of Donald Trump. The second shock was ideological: the realization that economic growth in China did not lead inexorably to cultural liberalism, as it had in the West. The Chinese economy grew alongside the authoritarian behavior and rhetoric of the Communist Party of China.Buy American provisions can have several advantages. They funnel money to domestic businesses in important industries, theoretically raise the wages of workers in those sectors, and let the government support the development of crucial technology and infrastructure. For example, if the U.S. wants to build an all-electric economy, we probably need to be much more deliberate about creating a stable and thriving market for inputs such as lithium and copper.But the Buy American philosophy has at least four problems that the White House, Democrats, and all policy makers should think about as they engineer a new industrial policy for the 21st century.B.A. typically raises costs. The U.S. should be concerned about building more and building faster. To take one example: A disgraceful new report on New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority found that it spent $4.5 billion on the first leg of the Second Avenue subway line. Reducing America’s complex system of construction bottlenecks to high material costs is wildly unfair; in fact, the MTA spent most of those billions on design, engineering, and construction of the tunnel. But building certainly won’t get any cheaper or easier if our policies increase the cost of essential materials by making foreign purchases of them illegal. All things equal, buying American might make building in America more expensive at a time when we should be obsessed with reducing costs rather than raising them.B.A. can make key supply chains less resilient. Last spring, a bacteria outbreak at a Michigan plant that makes infant formula created a scary shortage. It also offered a lesson on the downsides of protectionism. The U.S. government makes the legal importation of otherwise-safe European formula almost impossible, going so far as to seize shipments at the border. The government also awards contracts to only a small number of approved formula makers, which means three companies account for practically all U.S. formula sales. These restrictions make us more vulnerable to emergencies, such as a bacteria-infested plant in Michigan. Compare this story with one about the COVID shots: When a Baltimore facility that made Johnson & Johnson vaccines reported a catastrophic failure, the company could rely on a global network of factories that picked up the slack. The U.S. should consider “friend-shoring” the production of certain materials—that is, working with our allies to create many nodes around the world so that if one fails, no catastrophe ensues.B.A. policies can hurt innovation, even if just by accident. If your local transit authority takes federal money, odds are it’s historically been required to buy public buses from domestic bus makers. What’s wrong with that? A 2014 study from economists at Cornell University and UCLA found that these transit authorities tended to buy more expensive buses that were less fuel efficient because they cared more about securing a subsidy than about the bottom line or even performance. One lesson of this paper is that Buy American provisions might send a strong signal to buyers—whatever you do, just buy from one of these few domestic suppliers!—that overwhelms other signals, such as price and quality. As a result, domestic suppliers don’t have to keep up with any innovative wave, and Buy American policies lock parts of the economy into being less innovative.B.A. hurts global alliances that we should be nurturing. If the U.S. really is on the cusp of a second cold war with China, we should be focused on building alliances rather than frustrating our allies and trading partners. “In the first Cold War, we wisely realized that when allies like South Korea and Japan and France got rich, it made the U.S. and the world more secure,” said the economics writer Noah Smith. “We realized that every dollar of goods manufactured in South Korea and Japan and France represented a win for the free world. We should realize that again now.”

Protectionism pushes us in the other direction. When the U.S. imposes Buy American rules, other countries may copy us and impose their own restrictions on global trade. This is why too much protectionism can punish the very people it’s meant to help. Under President Trump, the U.S. imposed import tariffs to protect manufacturing workers who built washing machines and made steel and aluminum. These jobs happened to be disproportionately located in GOP counties. But the policy backfired, triggering retaliatory tariffs in other countries. Suddenly our washing machines weren’t priced competitively for foreign buyers, leading to a sharp decline in U.S. exports. A 2019 analysis by several economists found that the U.S. companies that lost the most business were heavily concentrated in the very same GOP-leaning counties that Trump was theoretically trying to assist.I don’t want to suggest that any attempt to onshore production will doom America to runaway costs, supply-chain catastrophes, and frayed global alliances. In many cases, I’m sure there are brilliant reasons to bring back more advanced manufacturing, clean-energy construction, and resource production. But in this molten moment for economic policy, as we’re sliding from a neoliberal era into something else, we should be explicit about the trade-offs that come from explicitly protectionist policies. We already know the downsides of a laissez-faire, “build wherever it’s cheapest” regime. Twenty years from now, I don’t want to have to write that the U.S. overreacted to the China shocks by forcibly onshoring the production of goods in a way that made those goods less resilient and ample.What do we actually want from our economic regime? What are the political and human outcomes that our policy makers should be trying to deliver? If, for example, we’re aiming for plentiful, cheap, low-emission electricity produced by more clean-energy infrastructure in an economy with full employment and rising real wages, we don’t need harsh rules against importing affordable solar-energy parts from a resilient network of trading partners who are also our political allies. On the contrary, we need a political message that welcomes our allies: To win an abundance of well-being, America needs abundant help.

Arthur C. Brooks launched a course four years ago to teach his students not only how to increase their happiness, but how to make those around them happier as well. Now, he’s looking to spread the word to everyone, everywhere.
“I’m trying to make a happiness movement in the public,” said Brooks, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
Besides his popular Business School course, Brooks has spread his ideas through his podcast (“The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks”) and books (“From Strength to Strength,” “Love Your Enemies”) and, for the last two years, a weekly Atlantic column. In spring he plans to launch a Leadership and Happiness Laboratory at the Kennedy School that will bring together scholars and leaders to investigate what science tells us about achieving happiness and how to spread it.
“I want grass tops and grassroots,” said Brooks. “My books, and my podcast, and my Atlantic columns, that’s grassroots. Grass tops is Harvard — that’s my students that I teach in the lab [and it’s] leading the leaders so that they see themselves as happiness teachers, whether they’re formally teachers or not.”
So what is his secret recipe for happiness?
It’s complicated, Brooks says, but the basis of your happiness can be split into three parts.
“Half of your happiness is genetic, and a quarter is circumstantial — more or less,” he said. “But your habits are king because your habits give you 25 percent [of your happiness] directly. They can also change your circumstances. And they can actually help you manage your genetics.”

Arthur Brooks' happiness formula.
Graphic by Judy Blomquist/Harvard Staff; source: Arthur Brooks

That equation is how he began his first column in the Atlantic, “How to build a better life,” and it’s just one idea he teaches his students. Brooks’ seven-week course takes a deeper dive into the philosophy, neuroscience, and social science of human happiness, including research on emotions, relationships, reward systems, and the value of embracing a transcendent purpose in life.
Brooks, a self-described data-driven scholar at heart, takes on topics such as “Affect and the Limbic System,” “The Neurobiology of Body Language,” “Homeostasis and the Persistence of Subjective Well-Being,” and “Oxytocin and Love.” And he blends those ideas with time-tested wisdom on what he calls the “building blocks of happiness”: family, career, friendships, faith.
“A lot of people think it’s a very subjective experience, because they think about happiness as feelings, but happiness isn’t feelings. Feelings are evidence of happiness,” he said.
He added that his students also look at the work through a lens of leadership, and how happiness principles can be applied in their lives with coworkers, kids, church members, or any others who look to them in a leadership role. That’s one of the reasons he’s passionate about bringing the work to leaders outside the Harvard community, one of the goals of his new lab.
“There are lots of happiness labs that are coming up with the basic science, which is super important, and we’re going to be paying attention to that. But there’s not that many places that say, ‘How do you spread these ideas?’” he told the Gazette.
Better leaders, Brooks says, make for better, and happier, organizations and societies.
“When you lead with happiness, when you’re a happiness professor in business, or government or nonprofit, then you’re just a way better leader,” he said.

Brooks with the Dalai Lama. Brooks' lab is planning a trip to India in March to meet the longtime leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

A social scientist by training, Brooks has been studying happiness off and on since the 1990s. Throughout his 20s he juggled college and ambitions of becoming a professional French horn player. During grad school, where he studied economics, he found a love of behavioral analysis. And at 31, Brooks left music and earned an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the Rand Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.
He’s taught at Syracuse, and for 10 years, served as the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank before deciding to dedicate himself to the topic.
Since coming to Harvard in 2019, Brooks has discovered that he is not the only one who wants more happiness in life. Both sections of his course have become so popular that they fill up months in advance.
“Since I’ve been doing this full-time, my happiness is up 60 percent,” he said.
Brooks aims to ensure the lab hits the ground running. In the works is a happiness and leadership co-curricular for a select group of Kennedy School students who will be conducting preliminary research from February to April. The lab is also organizing a trip to India in March to meet the Dalai Lama — a relationship Brooks has fostered through his years of happiness work. Also queued up is a conference hosted by the HKS Center for Public Leadership and the happiness lab in June.
For members of the wider public the lab is partnering with HarvardX to create a free online course, “Managing Happiness,” that will run for six weeks starting in March. The class is intended to introduce participants to the basic science of happiness and psychological strategies to turn lessons into lasting habits.
Brooks says he has high hopes for turning his personal preoccupation into a real movement.
“I want to see more and more and more people doing happiness classes, people who touch this laboratory, who are exposed to the information, I want to see them actually out there teaching happiness stuff, at all different levels,” he said.

While I have spent much of the past decade working in former Communist countries in central and eastern Europe, the region that I’ve visited the most over my career is Latin America. This came about by accident; I never studied the region formally but kept getting invited there and developed a genuine interest and affection for it. It’s a part of the world that is rich in democracies and a laboratory for democratic institutions, and yet has the most concentrated inequality. The countries there are disappointing, infuriating, and yet often appealing and hopeful.The first decade of the 21stcentury was the last hopeful period. There was prolonged economic growth driven by commodity exports that was reducing inequality in virtually every country, and creating a new middle class. While there were disasters emerging in Venezuela and Nicaragua, the largest countries Mexico and Brazil were being led by center-right and -left politicians and there seemed to be a chance that their democracies might evolve along more European lines.That hopeful trend came crashing down in the century’s second decade. Growth began to taper off after the 2008 financial crisis. A populist government settled in in Argentina while Brazil’s Worker’s Party became mired in corruption and gave way to Jair Bolsonaro’s populism of the right. Post-Pinochet Chile had been seen as the region’s big success story, but it saw massive student protests and the election of a leftist president, Gabriel Boric, the first to come from outside the centrist Concertación. I visited Peru in this period at the invitation of the business community. The country was experiencing rapid economic growth at that time, and my sponsors wanted me to talk about how soon their nation would join the club of rich developed nations. I gently tried to explain that they wouldn’t become an economically developed country until their political system had become much better institutionalized. And indeed, the place has fallen apart in recent years with a series of short-lived presidents accused of corruption, leading to the election of a left-wing candidate, Pedro Castillo, who ruled incompetently and tried to stage a coup. This attempt was quickly reversed by the congress, but his supporters continue to protest, often violently, across the country. And Mexico went from center-right presidents Felipe Calderón and Peña Nieto to a longtime leftwing challenger, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.One of the most recent countries to join this leftward shift is Colombia, with the election of Gustavo Petro as president last summer. I had visited Colombia quite a few times beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and returned at the end of January to Bogotá to teach one of our Leadership Academy for Development programs with the help of the Center for International Private Enterprise. Fifteen years ago, I was particularly interested in the transformation of Medellín. The latter city had recovered amazingly from the depths of violence it experienced under Pablo Escobar and the FARC guerilla group. The country’s murder rate was far higher than in Mexico this past decade, but began to fall substantially due to initiatives undertaken in the early 2000s. The country’s recovery was due to a combination of hard policies that strengthened the army and police under conservative president Álvaro Uribe, and by innovative social programs started by centrist politicians like Sergio Fajardo and Alonso Salazar. The city used infrastructure creatively to build trust among the poor, stringing the now famous cable cars up to the barrios on the city’s hillsides. I felt sad that similar neighborhoods in American inner cities never received that degree of sustained political attention.Cable cars in Medellín. Photo by author.The new president Petro had been a member of the M-19 guerilla group in his youth, and served as mayor of Bogotá from 2012-2015. He was the first president to be elected from outside a small circle of elite politicians, and he came into office promising a long list of major reforms—of the health care system, labor law, pensions, police, security, and agriculture. To take one example of the challenge he faces (or is perhaps creating), Colombia has a reasonably well-working health care system that combines public and private provision. Petro wants to bring all of it under the control of the state, which likely does not have the capacity to run such a system effectively. It is not clear that he will have the legislative support to accomplish this reform, much less the rest of his ambitious agenda. He has coopted a large number of conservative legislators by shielding them from prosecution for corruption, but their willingness to go along with such massive changes is not guaranteed.The biggest risk Colombia faces, according to several of my interlocutors, is that if Petro is frustrated in his effort to bring about change through legal means, he will resort to stimulating protests and popular mobilization to get his way. This happened when he was mayor of Bogotá and faced a judicial inquiry. He is very popular with young people in the country, who are tired of being ruled by the same group of elite politicians. Petro is described as arrogant, excessively self-confident, and inflexible; he dislikes the private sector, the police, and other existing institutions that are likely to oppose many of his suggested reforms. He has already visited Venezuela and reopened relations with the Maduro regime. The country could descend into the kind of anomic protest and violence that Peru is now experiencing.What worries me about the rise of the new Left in Latin America is not that we will see another Hugo Chávez appear who will wreck the foundations of his country’s economy and turn the political system into a Cuban-style dictatorship. The problem is rather that there seems to have been very little learning over time: many of the new leftist leaders maintain the same kind of stiff-necked hostility to the private sector and believe that nationalization will bring about social justice. None of them command impressive legislative majorities that will allow them to rapidly change their societies. Chile’s Boric tried to replace his country’s constitution with an entirely new one, one that was soundly rejected in a referendum, while Castillo is out of office entirely. The only exception to this is Mexico’s Lopez Obrador, who remains extremely popular despite his country’s lack of economic growth during his tenure. AMLO, as he is known, is still stuck in the 1960s, pushing a revival of Mexican fossil fuels and uninterested in issues like feminism and identity politics that have been taken up by younger leaders like Gabriel Boric.Latin America needs sustainable social policies that will reduce informality, aid the poor, and open up institutions to all citizens. The region needs economic growth above all as it reels from the effects of the Covid epidemic. I suspect that the pendulum will eventually start swinging back to the right as the new generation of leftist leaders fail to produce results. But the region as a whole will not address its social problems unless its politics becomes less polarized and parties of the center left and center right emerge. Gustavo Petro was elected in part because his opponent was a social media-savvy 77 year old populist of the right, Rodolfo Hernández, who was ultimately not serious about being Colombia’s president. At the moment, a more centrist and viable future is not visible.

I should say up front that I am not writing about Chinese balloons. Instead, I am writing about the situation in Ukraine, which is getting increasingly dangerous.

Until relatively recently, Russian assaults on Ukraine tended to be contained by the Ukrainian armed force – not universally but frequently enough to prevent Russia from keeping territory or achieving victory. But in the past month or so, Russia has begun to hold its ground. If that becomes the norm, then Ukraine is in serious trouble.

The United States has kept the front intact by introducing new weapons. The current weakness of the Ukrainian army is due to a lack of longer-range rockets that could strike the Russian rear, hitting reinforcements and supplies moving to the front. Without these elements, Russia can’t maintain its position.

The problem is that the range of the new munitions is so great that they can reach Russian territory. The U.S. has made it clear it has no intention of striking Russian soil. In fact, Washington has ordered Ukraine not to use the munitions at their fullest range, and there are rumors that the Americans modified the missiles to ensure they don’t. But Ukraine is fighting an existential war, and its willingness to use anything less than full power is inevitably questionable.

So far, Russia has not been struck, nor has Poland, where supplies and U.S. troops are based. The tacit agreement not to hit either has prevented the war from becoming a direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia. If either side deliberately attacked Russia or Poland, all bets would be off.

With the delivery of new missiles, a new danger thus emerges, not least of which is that Russia could choose to bring the war to even greater heights by forcing escalation. In which case nothing can be ruled out – not even Russian false flag operations. This isn’t merely an analysis of paranoia. Moscow has characterized the conflict as a long war against the West, and if that is indeed how it sees things, then forcing escalation at a time and place of its choosing might be rational. Doing so would demonize the U.S. military and give Russia a freer hand in attacking, say, U.S. positions in Poland. The U.S. has been waging a proxy war without experiencing losses. The fact that body bags are not arriving at Dover Air Force Base has given Washington a great deal of room for maneuver. If the U.S. started taking casualties, and the Russians could demonstrate that the war was based on a first strike by the Americans, the ability of the U.S. to wage war might be limited.

Far-fetched as that may seem, the central issue right now is stabilizing Ukraine’s position by attacking Russian assets in theater without spilling over into Russian territory. If that can be done in absolute terms, it would be hard for Russia to overcome, and it would keep the U.S. out of direct combat by avoiding U.S. domestic political considerations, which have destabilized the U.S. military in a number of wars. But the execution must be flawless, and Russia would have to decline to essentially attack itself.

All wars are complex, and all wars have political dimensions. The U.S. is going to supply long-range rockets, which makes perfect sense in the cold logic of war. But in the event of some failures in controlling the weapons, it could create the unexpected, which is never welcomed in war.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve been thinking about Islam and Muslim identity more than I usually do (which is already a lot). My two previous notes explored various aspects of being Muslim in America: how Muslim-ness interacts with wokeness , safetyism, and being boring. I suppose part of it is that I really do sometimes feel that all politics is identity politics. Which sounds like something a postmodernist would say. Well, my identity is important to me. I just don’t want to be defined by it. Or at least, I want to be the person doing the defining, rather than having my identity thrust upon me, used to predict what I’m about to say or judge what I’ve chosen to leave unsaid. Probably some of it has to do with the fact that I re-read Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones last week in preparation for the graduate seminar I teach on Islam and politics in the Middle East. I’m always struck by how Sayyid Qutb—profiled in The New York Times Magazine as “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror”—has receded from the American public imagination. Paul Berman wrote the piece in the long lead-up to the Iraq war. I think Berman is wrong in his assessment of Qutb, but it’s still a fascinating piece, insofar as it tries to take the power of otherwise inscrutable ideas seriously. But what I find most fascinating about Berman’s article—twenty years later—is its quaintness. So much of the post-9/11 climate in America is hard to convey to those who themselves have no memory of that day and its aftermath. My students were somewhere between 1 and 6 years old when it happened. They will have no real memory of how news was consumed in the pre-Twitter era. In some ways it was better—young people were apparently happier, just like everyone is always happier in the pre-present. In other ways it was worse, a lot worse, in fact. It’s this part of it that I struggle to convey the most. The nation, in a show of (unfortunately) bipartisan unity, was on a war footing that produced some of our darkest moments, darker than anything Donald Trump could have mustered. We were living in the last vestiges of American monoculture, when gatekeepers could control and shape the narrative largely unheeded. To doubt the wisdom of the war in Afghanistan, the passage of the Patriot Act, or the invasion of Iraq was to find oneself in a lonely place. Muslim identity was securitized. In our depiction in the media, there was one primary mode: extremist, terrorist, or problem to be addressed. The search for “moderate” Muslims was all the rage, and I suppose it was nice that we were found. But to identify Muslims as moderate meant that observers had to be on the lookout for those who weren’t. Some of this rhetoric was well-meaning. Instead of depicting us as security threats, we were the ones who could fight terror more effectively, because we had inside knowledge of the ways of our co-religionists. It wasn’t quite at the level of “native informant” but it certainly seemed to trend in that direction. You could see notes of this in movies and television shows: if there was a bad Muslim character, then there would also be a good Muslim character. If there was a terrorist, then there could be a counter-terrorist too. Progress! It was cringe-worthy, and I’m literally cringing now as I look back at what Bill Clinton—in full pro-Muslim mode—said in his 2016 speech at the Democratic Convention. Although we couldn’t have realized it then, an era was ending. But you could still see its traces. Ostensibly to draw a contrast with that hater of Muslims, Donald Trump, Clinton roared to the crowd, apparently to misguided applause: If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you. (APPLAUSE)The “if” here is doing a lot of work, but this conditional acceptance of Muslims was par for the course for a surprisingly long time. All of this was in the context of its own sort of “forever culture war” but in this case the enemies weren’t within but without. Berman and many others, including his comrade Christopher Hitchens, framed the war against terrorism as an existential struggle (which suggests that, for every age, one must find something against which to fight). They were enlisting readers in a fight about something bigger—a battle over ideals and ideas. It wasn’t just about terrorism. It was about reasserting faith in Western liberalism in order to defend it against those who might threaten it, whoever and wherever they may be. The prose was romantic too, befitting a new ideological struggle that would be waged on an epic scale. The meteoric rise of ISIS allowed this self-definition to continue for a time, but it was already starting to feel strained. As recently (or as long ago) as 2015, the great political theorist Michael Walzer offered up a meditation on Islamism and the left that reminded me of Berman’s 2003 book Terror and Liberalism, itself a somewhat quaint title, with a decidedly stark cover.Walzer’s essay was a continuation of this sort of polemic, ending appropriately with a call to arms. “My friends and neighbors are not ready to enlist; many of them won’t acknowledge the dangers posed by Islamist zealotry,” he writes. “But there are dangers and the secular left needs defenders. So here I am, a writer, not a fighter, and the most helpful thing I can do is to join the ideological wars [emphasis mine].”Trump would change this and redirect attention away from Muslims. Of course, this wasn’t Trump’s intention, but Muslims and Islam have benefitted from the profound shift of what might be called the post-post-9/11 era. It wasn’t my intention to test this, but I’ve found, in discussions with my students, that they feel free to say things that would have fifteen years ago been considered “cancellable.” They can understand Sayyid Qutb. His grievances—and his weren’t merely imagined but very real—make him relatable, even sympathetic. Now that he is no longer embedded in the culture war, they are comfortable saying nice things about him. But it’s not just that. It’s more that it wouldn’t even occur to them to be uncomfortable. There is a lightness, there, if that’s the right word. Divorced from the immediacy and fervor of the post-9/11 context, Qutb is less threatening, and so there is simply less reason, if any reason at all, to measure what one says about him in polite company. And that means we can discuss and debate Qutb more openly, without the weight and baggage of an era that has, thankfully, passed.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers, “What are your thoughts … about weight gain, the weight-loss industry, diet, exercise, beauty standards, diabetes, medical treatments for obesity, or anything related?”Vera writes that “the weight-loss industry has ruined my life.” She explains:
If I had never gone on that first diet, I’d be a slightly chubby, slightly more-than-middle-aged, comfortable-in-my-skin woman. Instead, I’m a fat old lady. I’m not talking about broken promises or wasted money. It’s worse. With every fad diet or “sensible eating plan,” I had a net weight gain of 20 or so pounds and a drop in self-confidence and joy.
Everyone knows diets don’t work—except for 15-year-old me. She thought if she was just “good” and had willpower, she’d be thin and lovable in no time.
Joe is a doctor who regularly encounters patients who want to treat their weight with pharmaceuticals:
In my training days I fell victim to the common misperception that weight loss is a matter of simple thermodynamics: fewer calories consumed + more calories expended = healthier you! This is reductionistic. The scale of the problem is immense, and obesity, like many of the pathological conditions we encounter in medicine, is complex and multifaceted. It ought rightly to be considered a chronic disease, no different from hypertension or type 2 diabetes, rather than a character flaw worthy of scorn.
Obesity represents neither a failure of the will nor a lack of self-discipline, but a societal-level problem that will require societal-level restructuring to mitigate. Virtually all of my obese patients are highly committed to weight loss—absence of motivation is NOT the issue—but they invariably become frustrated when the age-old “eat less, exercise more” bromide produces no result.
Many Americans’ relationship with food is, shall we say, “complicated.” Food insecurity abounds. Healthy meal planning requires time, forethought, practice, stable income, and genuine effort—inputs that are not always in abundant supply in our frenetic lives. Add the near-universal availability of cheap, highly processed, shelf-stable, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor food, and you’ve all the ingredients necessary to trigger a metabolic catastrophe.
Exercise, too, requires time, which too often is in short supply. I counsel my patients that any amount of bodily movement constitutes exercise, but our reliance upon technology to work, communicate, and recreate keeps us in sedentary states for more hours of the day than ever. Zoning laws in many jurisdictions render communities unwalkable. Transit infrastructure, too, has long favored the automobile over all other modes, such that even those who would be inclined to walk or bike do so at their peril. Cumulative exercise declines, and weight gain ensues.
Lastly, consider persistent gaps in health-insurance coverage, lack of paid sick leave, inadequate workplace parental accommodations, the unaffordability of child care and education at all levels, a dearth of affordable housing units, etc. Is it any wonder that many of us feel bereft?
When one must work more for less, little remains to reinforce those “pillars of wellness”—i.e., healthy diet, regular exercise, adequate sleep, and effective stress management—that might free us from the obesity shackles.
There are no easy answers here, and drugs like Wegovy/Ozempic are certainly not a panacea, but they do offer a measure of hope to patients looking to reassert some control over their lives. That is no small achievement. Convoluted insurance-coverage restrictions for these pharmaceuticals are a separate matter altogether and a topic worthy of further discussion, to be sure. For now, though, I’ll do what I can to improve the lives of my patients in the here and now while the noble fight for a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable future continues.
Daniel would love to take a drug that reduces his appetite:
I’ve been heavy my whole life, pretty much from the get-go. Nevertheless, I’ve had few interactions with the weight-loss industry, except that I did the Atkins thing back in the day. That was always handy for beating back a few pounds. I was never altogether that worried about my weight; I’ve always had a reasonably active lifestyle with hiking, hunting, bicycling. Never “exercise,” just things I liked to do.
In the past decade, though, things have gotten away from me. Getting older, the confines of city living, a sedentary job, and sedentary hobbies have all contributed. My weight has crept up until it’s significantly impacted my quality of life. It’s harder to do the things I’ve always enjoyed. I’ve got kids whom I have to keep up with and clean up after, and it’s just getting harder all the time.   
It was easier to diet when I was a single man. Now I have to cook for my kids, and they’re not going to eat low-carb and such. I don’t have the time for fixing two meals, and who can say no to mac and cheese when it’s right there?! And I made it myself, so I know it’s good.
The doctors all want to hack a length of my guts out, which seems like a terrible idea. I respect their expertise, of course, but it just seems too extreme a thing to do when I am otherwise healthy as an ox. My heart’s good, blood pressure’s fine, cholesterol and blood sugar are fine. I’ve seen what it’s done to some other folks of my acquaintance, and while it has made them slimmer, it’s caused some issues too. I don’t love the trade-off.
Long story short, I’d love to take a drug that reduces my appetite. I suppose I should indulge in all the self-flagellation that we fat people are supposed to engage in, that I should diet and have self-control. But I know who I am. I don’t apologize for enjoying a good hearty meal. It’s bliss.
Also, I am a man whose work as a librarian requires that I be helpful and friendly all the time, and I struggle with being friendly when I’m hungry. Who doesn't? A jolly fat man is great for customer service. A grouchy thin one? Not so much.
But I’m told that I have to go through a whole bunch of hoops to get my insurance to pay for weight-loss drugs, and frankly I don’t have the time for all that. I’d pay out of pocket, but they’re not available at a price point I can afford. Perhaps their cost will come down a bit over time. Until then, I’ll just have to figure out the diet and exercise thing. I’ve done it before. It’s just harder now that I have a family and a full-time job and am a tired middle-aged man.
Judith does take the drug Ozempic for the purpose of weight loss:
I have struggled with my weight since childhood. During my 40 active working years, through deprivation and 24/7 vigilance, I managed to stay below obese on the body-mass-index scale. Retirement and pandemic isolation destroyed my years of “success.” Recently my doctor suggested Ozempic. For me, it is nothing short of a miracle. I eat what I want in small quantities and food does not “call to me” as it used to. I hope I can be on it for the rest of my life.
Carrie urges movement:
As a 58-year-old woman, I have reached the conclusion that movement is the most important thing we can do to be healthy, followed by a diet of fresh, unprocessed food. I started exercising in junior high as a basketball player, and by the end of high school, I knew what it meant to be really fit. In college I discovered the Jane Fonda workouts, then other video workouts from people like Kathy Smith.
I’ve tried so many different kinds of movement—step aerobics, dancing for exercise, walking, hiking, Zumba, yoga and Bar Method (the hardest thing I’ve ever done, btw). You can say I’ve tried just about every type of exercise! And I’ve loved it all.
I don’t see these kinds of things as promoting poor body image or being about weight as much as about strength, energy, flexibility, and overall good health. There are many ways to exercise, and its purpose is not just to keep ourselves slim; exercise is necessary for us to live well, feel good, and be productive. Sadly, we don't teach that in school.
There are so many different paths to being healthy, and movement is not just for people who love or play sports. It’s sad how in elementary school we are already focusing the kids on learning skills for sports. We should be teaching them how to move—because while not everyone is interested in sports, we all need to move regularly.  
Kelly moves but is still overweight:
I’m 61 and have been on the weight-loss roller coaster most of my life. The only time I was able to lose weight and keep it off was when I was single. Because of the American obsession with thin, thin, thin, I have struggled with self-esteem issues forever, to the point where people were telling me I was getting too skinny. I couldn’t see it myself. I had periods of making myself throw up, but that never became a habit.
I’m overweight now, but I’m not obsessing about losing weight. I eat mostly healthy foods, I walk my dog a lot, and I try not to care too much about how people see me. Ozempic is not for me. I’d rather be overweight than dependent on still more chemicals and supporting Big Pharma.
Kevin worries about understating the health risks of obesity:
Some years ago, Serena Williams appeared in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.  Clearly, Serena had a different body type than the rail-thin models who adorned the other pages. But it was equally clear that she was fit, athletic, healthy. I thought this was a reasonable challenge to the conventional beauty standard.
Unfortunately, these days, nothing is kept in reasonable proportion. Now we see a once-overweight singer get criticized for losing weight. We hear an absurd lie like “Healthy at any weight” pushed as some kind of virtue signaling. Really? Healthy at any weight? At 400 pounds?
I realize that for some people, keeping a healthy weight is very difficult. Sugar is addictive.. And I understand how hard it can be to kick an addiction.  For years, I smoked cigarettes. But no one told me “Quitting smoking is too hard. And that is okay. You are healthy whether you smoke or not.” Such a lie is preposterous on its face.  
But so is “Healthy at any weight.”
We need to be able to hold two thoughts in our head at the same time. The people who complain of an unrealistic beauty standard are, and long have been, correct. The people who point out that Americans have become unhealthily overweight are also correct.
Shelley sometimes wishes that food was harder to come by:
I kept my weight in check throughout my life via a combination of starving via the now-popular idea of intermittent fasting, sometimes leading to episodes of hypoglycemia and smoking. When I was diagnosed as diabetic six years ago, my doctor was shocked. She surmised that my lifelong habit of skipping meals was largely responsible for my now-runaway insulin resistance.
I quit smoking and started eating breakfast. So I’ve gained weight. Still, people are always surprised to learn that I’m diabetic, because I’m not obese.
I was prescribed Ozempic last year. My current doctor was very gung-ho. I lasted three weeks. I’d rather go back to starving than the constant feeling of nausea and never enjoying my favorite foods. It’s not natural to never feel hungry.
All the diet and exercise fads I’ve ever seen are attempts to undo the damage of our long work days and short lunch hours. Food should be hard to get, take a long time to prepare, and be the first focus of our days. Think what the world could be if we inverted the worktime/mealtime ratio. What if we had to pick our vegetables, dress our proteins, and mill our grains to prepare and eat them? Oh, I know it’s completely unworkable. But that’s what’s wrong.
Food is too easy and abundant; working hours and hours a day at a desk, in a truck, or on the production line, all on a nice full belly, is wildly unhealthy.
Frank describes how he lost weight successfully:
Simply go to a qualified weight-management nutritionist recommended by your general practitioner. You will be told not to go on a diet but, instead, you will be given a daily-caloric-intake goal. Then you will go out and purchase a calorie-counter book and a daily food journal. Then you simply write down what you eat and drink at each meal and snack on every day, calculate the total caloric intake, and compare that with your daily goal.
Over time, you will become more conscious of your actual caloric intake from different foods and learn how to stay within your daily caloric goal. You will also log your actual weight first thing in the morning, how much daily physical activity you get versus the nutritionist’s recommendations, how much water you drink versus the daily recommended amount, and any other lifestyle specifics such as hours of sleep versus the recommended eight hours. Then you meet with your nutritionist every six weeks to review what you have previously logged, how close you came to staying within your daily goal, reasons you missed on certain days, and what, if any, change in weight you were able to achieve. Pretty simple, obvious, and effective. You can only manage what you measure.
Tamlyn describes herself as “an almost lifelong sufferer of obesity.” She writes:
What I am writing about can be summarized as the pain that I feel when I am confronted by the dueling influences of both America’s sedentariness and glut of food and the increasingly vocal purveyors of body positivity. I feel like being fat is not noble or beautiful, and that the society that makes it so easy has robbed me of an irreplaceable joy.
Obesity and weight gain can feel like you are being robbed of your bodily autonomy. I have yo-yo dieted, followed fads and trends, and had numerous phases of gain and loss. The process is imperceptible in the short term. Never have I felt worse than when the magnitude of my weight gain is eventually realized, when my brain's ability to smooth out the small changes of day to day is interrupted by a novel mirror that happens to show me to myself.
Willpower and the seemingly simple notions of how to lose weight or maintain a desired weight are no match for the ever-growing number of ways to gain weight. It is a process encouraged in almost every way you could imagine by modern society. The number of men, women, and children who suffer from obesity in America grows every single year. It almost feels like gaslighting when I am told that we are a fatphobic culture, or that I should feel positive about my body, that I ought to find beauty in it and other bodies like it.
It feels absurd and cruel to receive such messages, like telling me I should feel joyful that someone has robbed me or lied to me. I want to shout that I have little to no choice in the matter; I have been fattened by some awful combination of genes and environment.
It feels alien and inhumane when I am admonished for my self-directed fatphobia, told that my self-hatred is surely just a function of our sick society.
I feel almost exactly the reverse of this: that our society enables this robbery of my health and happiness. That being fat is not beautiful, or joyful, or anything positive at all.
Fritzi prefers body positivity to an alternative that she experienced:
My mother was an actress and she always thought I was overweight. Looking back on photos of myself as a child, I was well within the normal range. But she was petite and I took after my father, who was husky.
When I returned from spending the summer with my dad (my parents were divorced), Mother would grab my upper arm and tell me I got fat over the summer. She started me on diet pills when I was 11. I tried many approaches in my quest to have a slender, petite body. The grapefruit diet. The Atkins diet. Weight Watchers. Anorexia. Injections of human gonadotropic enzyme in the 1970s.
Luckily, at about that time, I got married and came to my senses. My husband loved me and my natural body. When our daughter was born, I vowed that the word diet would never be spoken in our home. I would never speak negatively about my body, or anybody’s else’s body.
That has worked for me for the past 45 years.
Charlotte shares the story of how and why she lost weight as a college student:
My freshman year of college, in 1974, I began gaining weight—about eight pounds. I was always a thin cheerleader, straight As, perfect daughter. My parents  gave me a target to lose 10 pounds before my December birthday—2.5 weeks away—so I went to a fashion magazine that suggested a 500-calorie-a-day diet. It worked until it didn’t.
Seven years later, my hair fell out, my skin came off, I cried incessantly, my legs were lead, my period lasted 63 days, and then I passed out while driving a car during my second term of law school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Diet-culture propaganda is grotesque. And you can believe what you read about dysfunctional families when they demand perfection.
James is skeptical of doctors:
I wish that doctors would stop treating correlation as causation. Obesity isn’t unhealthy. Obesity can be caused by unhealthy things—not exercising, eating a poor diet, etc.—and therefore many people in larger bodies are unhealthy. But obesity in itself is not a cause or a risk factor for all the grave ills that are attributed to it, which is what made the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent guidelines so infuriating and scary. There’s nothing wrong with having a large body as a child, but these guidelines are going to cause untold damage to our young generation in the form of lifelong eating disorders and body issues in the hope of ending this “epidemic.”
The problem isn’t with larger bodies; it’s with how we treat them. Make clothes that fit, that are comfortable and that look good. Stock those clothes in real stores, not just online. Stop equating fatness with laziness. Stop assuming people exercising are trying to lose weight. Stop equating mouth breathing with stupidity. So much of the problem is created or compounded by our prejudice.
Jaleelah is skeptical of body positivity as a tactic:
Many people tell themselves they are losing weight to improve their health or self-esteem. In some cases, these reasons are genuine—weight loss can mitigate the effects of certain health conditions. In most cases, I think people are oversimplifying things.
Body shape is a metric that people use to judge character. Obese people are seen as lazy and greedy, while thin people are seen as disciplined and healthy. It doesn’t matter that these judgments are often inaccurate; they affect your chances of getting promoted at work and being treated nicely by your family. There is no inherent reason that being thin should make you feel better about yourself. But when people treat you more kindly, laugh more at your jokes, and buy you more drinks, of course you’ll feel nicer.
The body-positivity movement has not improved people’s self-esteem. The reason is simple: Everyone can see through its lie. Beauty is not something that can be intellectualized. Your gut determines whether or not you find something “beautiful,” not your head. No one really thinks all bodies are beautiful, so no one really believes the “empowering” ads that instruct them to love the way their body looks.
During my bout of disordered eating, my health and self-esteem plummeted alongside my weight. I bruised easily and bled more when my skin was cut. I couldn't go for walks or eat at restaurants or stay awake during class. Losing my body’s functionality was far worse than any self-deprecating thought I had ever had about my appearance.
I think the weight-loss industry would take a far greater hit if we pushed for body neutrality instead of body positivity. Bodies are made to live, not to be beautiful. Attractiveness should matter less than happiness.
Errol defends peer pressure to lose weight:
This country is in a health emergency because people are encouraged to eat food riddled with dangerous and overloaded ingredients. As someone who lived for years off of nothing but food stamps and selling his plasma once every two weeks, I can tell you this is not an unachievable goal for anyone.
I know as much as the next guy how delicious Funyuns and Oreos and McDonald’s are, and by all means I’m not suggesting these be eliminated, but they have to be outliers in your diet. iIf your cupboard is replenished with junk food every week, you should be rightly heckled for it by your friends and family, because they care about you. It worked with smoking; it’s time to do it with garbage food.
Here is a cheap chicken-dinner recipe from a chef on YouTube whom I love dearly, and his recipes are (almost) always quick, simple, delicious, and elegant. His name is Chef Jean-Pierre, and he will change your cooking game permanently and for the better.
Phoebe shares a contrasting perspective:
I worked in a bariatric-surgery clinic, a medical-weight-management clinic, and with people who have diabetes.
The question of “Is obesity a disease or not?” or its variations of “Is an individual’s weight within their control?” are front and center right now. My opinion is this: All individuals of any weight status could benefit by making small, consistent changes in diet and exercise. But not everyone doing that will see weight loss. Person A and Person B don’t necessarily carry excess weight for the same reasons. If we think of a person having a pie chart of what the contributing factors are for their excess weight, the pies would look quite different.
So to me, hearing that “Everyone who is obese is so because of their genetics, full stop,” or “Everyone who is obese is so because of their individual choices, full stop,” is too reductive. What is clearly ineffective is shaming and stigmatizing people of any weight. To me, this is what the Health at Every Size (HAES) movement gets right. Let’s focus on health indicators. Let’s avoid stigmatizing and dehumanizing people.
However, what I think that movement gets wrong: I feel people have a right to decide if weight loss is their goal or not. My understanding of HAES is that weight loss is not “discussable.” What if that’s the patient's goal? Are we as practitioners really honoring their wishes?
Providers can be respectful but honest with patients about their weight. I never bring up anyone’s weight, or weight-loss goals, unless they specifically ask me about it. If they do ask, I try to suggest small changes that the person feels sound good to them and can be sustained over time.
Losing weight is hard. Let’s congratulate people for achieving or working to achieve their goals, accept that might include drugs, and remain open.
Mike thinks health-care providers should bring up weight:
Body positivity has gone too far. It’s concerning to see people pressuring doctors to avoid talking about weight and ideas for losing that weight because it’s “shaming.” While we don’t need to make fun of people for being overweight, that doesn’t mean that there is no objective standard for health. Sufficient studies show the negative impacts on health and longevity of being overweight. I don’t understand why people celebrating body positivity don’t realize that they are celebrating someone right into an early grave.  
Lizzy writes, “I have been fat my whole life, and in my adolescence, I fell for a lot of harmful and untrue messages about being fat.” She continues:
Despite growing up in a body-positive home, I started counting calories in high school, and I eventually had to stop because the mental load of calculating every piece of food and every minute of physical activity was all-consuming in an unhealthy way. Sure, I lost 20 pounds (which I immediately gained back and then some as soon as I was not eating net 1,200 calories a day), but I also ironically spent the years when I was probably the skinniest I will ever be being insecure about my body. I’m 100 pounds heavier than I was then, but I am much happier and healthier now. The biggest lesson I have learned in the years since is that being skinny and being healthy and having good self-esteem are all separate things, and are not correlated in the way our culture assumes they are.
I am still fat, and I’m healthy. I work out three times a week, spend my workday active and on my feet, eat nutritious meals, and am lucky to have a clean bill of health. I like the way I look for the most part, and I have a very satisfying love life. There is a common perception that fat people must hate the way they look and have a hard time finding love, but in my experience, my fat friends generally have a better body image and an easier time trusting that their intimate relationships aren’t superficial than my skinny friends.
Fat people are forced to confront fatphobia every day and then choose whether or not to continue internalizing those messages, whereas skinnier people have the luxury of leaving this aspect of their life unexamined. However, I think this lack of critical examination (of self and of society) is detrimental to skinny people as well. In my experience, skinny people are constantly telling me how much they hate their bodies. Another common topic at the workplace potluck, family holiday, or really any event that involves eating is the moralization of food with comments like “This is a cheat day” or “This cake is sinfully delicious” or “I’ve been so bad this week.” Maybe I’m the recipient of this commentary because people assume I have the same narrative about food as they do because I’m fat.
Casual fatphobia is incredibly socially acceptable compared with other prejudices like sexism or homophobia. But our society and, perhaps specifically, medical professionals need to recognize that being fat is not a moral failure. For most, it is not really a choice, any more than being American or living in poverty is a choice.
June shares the story of her weight across life:
My weight was normal for years. Or at any rate, I looked normal, but the numbers on the scale were higher than I looked like they would be. I joke about being a Polish peasant—if the ox died, I could pull the plow. I’ve always been naturally muscular. A guy I had sex with once said it was like having sex with a man (even though I’m not flat-chested). But though being muscular leads to a higher metabolic rate, you can still out-eat it.
In my mid-20s, I started drinking quite a bit and put on about 25 pounds. My boss said something to me about it. I started Weight Watchers the next day and kicked up my exercise regimen. My weight has fluctuated ever since.Doctors have occasionally said I should lose weight. I have no doubt that my medical issues (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis) would all improve if I lost weight. That, and my nephew’s wedding in Spain this coming May, are my current incentives.
I guess I’ve just not had bad enough consequences from being overweight, and I don’t care enough about what other people think to work very hard at getting my weight down. I would never do a program that requires you to buy food from the program. Those folks are just looking for your money, not your well-being.
Steven shares his trick:
I’ve developed a healthier relationship with my body since I started thinking about what I want it to do instead of how I want it to look. I’ll never really know if I’ve shed enough belly fat for my liking, but I know exactly when I am able to run five miles. This has also scaled nicely as I age, recover from injuries, or have to get started again after a bunch of months of inactivity. I try to set goals that are achievable in a few months given my starting point and what else I have going on (usually a lot!). I don’t look as good as people in magazines, or even many of my friends, but I’m a healthier version of myself. That makes me happy.

When the Washington Post unveiled the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” on February 17, 2017, people in the news business made fun of it. “Sounds like the next Batman movie,” the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean Baquet, said. But it was already clear, less than a month into the Trump Administration, that destroying the credibility of the mainstream press was a White House priority, and that this would include an unabashed, and almost gleeful, policy of lying and denying. The Post kept track of the lies. The paper calculated that by the end of his term the President had lied 30,573 times.

Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office, he started calling the news media “the enemy of the American people.” For a time, the White House barred certain news organizations, including the Times, CNN, Politico, and the Los Angeles Times, from briefings, and suspended the credentials of a CNN correspondent, Jim Acosta, who was regarded as combative by the President. “Fake news” became a standard White House response—frequently the only White House response—to stories that did not make the President look good. There were many such stories.

Suspicion is, for obvious reasons, built into the relationship between the press and government officials, but, normally, both parties have felt an interest in maintaining at least the appearance of cordiality. Reporters need access so that they can write their stories, and politicians would like those stories to be friendly. Reporters also want to come across as fair and impartial, and officials want to seem coöperative and transparent. Each party is willing to accept a degree of hypocrisy on the part of the other.

With Trump, all that changed. Trump is rude. Cordiality is not a feature of his brand. And there is no coöperation in the Trump world, because everything is an agon. Trump waged war on the press, and he won, or nearly won. He persuaded millions of Americans not to believe anything they saw or heard in the non-Trumpified media, including, ultimately, the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means. Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent. If “Democracy Dies in Darkness” seemed a little alarmist in 2017, the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, made it seem prescient. Democracy really was at stake.

That we need a free press for our democracy to work is a belief as old as our democracy. Hence the First Amendment. Without the free circulation of information and opinion, voters will be operating in ignorance when they choose whom to vote for and what policies to support. But what if the information is bad? What if you can’t trust the reporter? What if there’s no such thing as “the facts”?

As Michael Schudson pointed out in “Discovering the News” (1978), the notion that good journalism is “objective”—that is, nonpartisan and unopinionated—emerged only around the start of the twentieth century. Schudson thought that it arose as a response to growing skepticism about the whole idea of stable and reliable truths. The standard of objectivity, as he put it, “was not the final expression of a belief in facts but the assertion of a method designed for a world in which even facts could not be trusted. . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift.” In other words, objectivity was a problematic concept from the start.

The classic statement of the problem is Walter Lippmann’s book “Public Opinion,” published a hundred and one years ago. Lippmann’s critique remains relevant today—the Columbia Journalism School mounted a four-day conference on “Public Opinion” last fall, and people found that there was still plenty to talk about. Lippmann’s argument was that journalism is not a profession. You don’t need a license or an academic credential to practice the trade. All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods?

Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.

The Best Books We Read This Week Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday.

Lippmann had another point: journalism is not a public service; it’s a business. The most influential journalists today are employees of large corporations, and their work product is expected to be profitable. The notion that television news is, or ever was, a loss leader is a myth. In the nineteen-sixties, the nightly “Huntley-Brinkley Report” was NBC’s biggest money-maker. “60 Minutes,” which débuted on CBS in 1968, ranked among the top ten most watched shows on television for twenty-three years in a row.

And the business is all about the eyeballs. When ratings drop, and with them advertising revenues, correspondents change, anchors change, coverage changes. News, especially but not only cable news, is curated for an audience. So, obviously, is the information published on social media, where the algorithm selects for the audience’s political preferences. It is hard to be “objective” and sell news at the same time.

What is the track record of the press since Lippmann’s day? In “City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington” (Chicago), Kathryn J. McGarr weighs the performance of the Washington press corps during the first decades of the Cold War. She shows, by examining archived correspondence, that reporters in Washington knew perfectly well that Administrations were misleading them about national-security matters—about whether the United States was flying spy planes over the Soviet Union, for example, or training exiles to invade Cuba and depose Fidel Castro. To the extent that there was an agenda concealed by official claims of “containing Communist expansion”—to the extent that Middle East policy was designed to preserve Western access to oil fields, or that Central American policy was designed to make the region safe for United Fruit—reporters were not fooled.

So why didn’t they report what they knew? McGarr, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, thinks it’s because the people who covered Washington for the wire services and the major dailies had an ideology. They were liberal internationalists. Until the United States intervened militarily in Vietnam—the Marines waded ashore there in 1965—that was the ideology of American élites. Like the government, and like the leaders of philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation and cultural institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, newspaper people believed in what they saw as the central mission of Cold War policy: the defense of the North Atlantic community of nations. They supported policies that protected and promoted the liberal values in the name of which the United States had gone to war against Hitler.

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Many members of the Washington press, including editors and publishers, had served in the government during the Second World War—in the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the C.I.A.), in the Office of War Information, and in other capacities in Washington and London. They had been part of the war effort, and their sense of duty persisted after the war ended. Defending democracy was not just the government’s job. It was the press’s job, too.

When reporters were in possession of information that the American government wanted to keep secret, they therefore asked themselves whether publishing it would damage the Cold War mission. “Fighting for peace remained central to the diplomatic press corps’ conception of its responsibilities,” McGarr says. “Quality reporting meant being an advocate not for the government but for ‘the Peace.’ ”

There was another reason for caution: fear of nuclear war. After the Soviets developed an atomic weapon, in 1949, and until the Test Ban Treaty of 1963, end-of-the-world nuclear anxiety was widespread, and newsmen shared it. The Cold War was a balance-of-power war. That’s what the unofficial doctrine of the American government, “containment,” meant: keep things as they are. Whatever tipped the scale in the wrong direction might unleash the bomb, and so newspapers were careful about what they published.

Surprising most analysts and forecasters, employers added a whopping 517,000 jobs in January, according to Friday morning’s monthly labor report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was almost twice the growth from December’s 260,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4 percent, the lowest since 1969.

What does this mean?

It may mean very little. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’s monthly report can bounce around a lot, depending on seasonal weights and samples. Next month’s job number could be far lower.

Also, keep your eye on wage growth. Average hourly earnings climbed in January at a slower pace than in December — by an annualized 4.4 percent, down from 4.8 percent in December. With prices still rising faster than wages, most workers continue to suffer declining real wage – that is, declining purchasing power.

But the strength of the labor market is likely to worry the Fed, which last Wednesday raised interest rates for the eighth time in a year – although only by a quarter of a percentage point this time.

“The labor market continues to be out of balance,” Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said earlier this week. He stressed that we won’t have a return to his target 2 percent inflation in the service sector “without a better balance in the labor market,” adding “I don’t know what that will require in terms of increased unemployment.”

As I’ve said many times over the past year, this worry is misplaced. Most of the upward pressure on prices domestically is coming from big corporations with the market power to raise prices faster than their costs are rising. Much of the rest is coming from continuing supply shocks abroad, including Putin’s war’s effects on global energy and food prices, and China’s lockdowns followed by COVID.

And, as Friday’s report shows, wage gains are slowing and they lag behind price increases.

The basic reality is American workers don’t have the power to raise their wages. Big American corporations have the power to raise their prices. The Fed should not be aiming to increase unemployment as a means of slowing prices.

Richard Haass is a veteran American diplomat, statesman, and author. He is president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served as Special Assistant to President George H. W. Bush and as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department in the administration of President George W. Bush. His most recent book is The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Richard Haass discuss the structural challenges, missed opportunities, and poor choices of the last thirty years; the arc of American foreign policy from Vietnam to Iraq; and how civic-minded Americans can effect positive change at a moment of crisis.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You began arguing a number of years ago that the world is in disarray. How has the world gone from being in some form of array to a stronger form of disarray?Richard Haass: When I published the book about a half dozen years ago, the skeptics said I was too negative. In retrospect, I think I wasn't negative enough. Disarray-plus is where we are now, and I think the reasons have largely to do with the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, you had a fairly elaborate, sometimes formal, sometimes informal, explicit, implicit set of rules by which the two major powers managed their relations—certain understandings about how to manage competition between their partners or allies, and so on. Plus, it was a world in which you only had—for the most part, not completely—two groupings, limiting the centers of decision-making. You had what was perceived to be not just a nuclear balance, but elements of conventional military balance. For any number of reasons, those four decades were a world of surprising stability. I think nuclear weapons deserve a lot of the “credit,” because previous eras of history would have suggested that, regardless of military balances, sooner or later, great power competition leads to some sort of conflict. Nuclear weapons introduced a significant degree of caution with the end of the Cold War three decades ago. The predictions of optimism, I think, by many were pretty well off the mark. The first challenge of the post-Cold War world happened in the Middle East, as did many of the initial challenges with Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. And in the Bush administration (Bush the father) of which I was a part—I was the Middle East guy at the National Security Council—a lot of what we did was based not just upon local intrinsic interests in the Middle East but this desire to set the precedent that the post-Cold War world would not become a messy place; that the norms that had governed a lot of the Cold War world would still be in place—above all, that you couldn't acquire territory through force. That informed a lot of what we did. But we've seen several trends over the last three decades. One is a much greater proliferation of power. I once wrote an article about non-polarity, but you could call it “multipolarity on steroids.” I think that's part of it—all sorts of centers of decision making. You have more capacity and more hands that are more independent than ever before. You moved away from bipolarity, as well, so it’s much more complicated to figure out a balance. Relationships were changing. The United States then got overextended in, I thought, misguided policies of democratic transformation, particularly in Iraq, ultimately in Afghanistan. We took our eye off the ball. Hopes about how relationships would evolve between the United States and Russia and the United States and China—things didn't quite work out that way. For any number of reasons, this has become a much messier world, given the deterioration of relations between major powers and the rise of medium powers like Iran and North Korea with sizable capabilities, and then the emergence of all sorts of powerful global issues like climate change, new technologies like cyber, the breakout of infectious disease on a global scale—all of which exposed the inadequacy of existing institutions. Institutional adaptation has fallen far behind global challenges. This combination of geopolitical revival, distribution of power, institutional failure to keep up, then all the divisions within the United States, which is the subject of some of my more recent writing. This is a fairly worrisome brew of international factors and domestic factors, because one of the reasons the world—certainly during the Cold War, to some extent since—remained relatively stable was because the United States was willing and able to play an outsized role. It’s not clear that that's the case anymore. Mounk: The first counterargument would be to ask whether the world was really in as much array as it seems in retrospect. Through the era of the Cold War, we know it sort of ended in American victory; it ended without nuclear war. We know that the two key players were the United States and the Soviet Union. But there was the Cuban Missile Crisis—the world certainly didn't look in array. There was the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement, which ended up being a little bit of a semi- or non-story (but at the time, people thought it was going to be a really major story). Now, you could ask whether the world is in disarray for structural reasons, and it's going to remain being in disarray, or if we’re in a kind of phase shift from one equilibrium that used to be somewhat stable, and, hopefully, we might reach another stable equilibrium, perhaps of long-term, semi-peaceful competition between China and the United States. We can't quite see it yet, and so it feels like we're in this chaotic world, but that's just because we're going from one equilibrium to another.Haass: I think there was actually considerable array, in part because you had the whole growth of alliances and also post-World War II institutions that managed the world to some extent economically and so forth. And the Soviet Union essentially sat out. It didn't participate in that. So the Cold War, in many ways, didn't intrude on a significant piece of the international machinery. I remember Comecon; there was a degree of autarky in the communist world. The non-communist world did its thing with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade all the way to the WTO and IMF, and development projects at the bank and elsewhere. So there was a world of considerable array. But you had the messiness of decolonization (actually, that was pretty short-lived), and as messy as the Palestine issue was, or India-Pakistan—again, things settled down. The transition to a world of 180-190 states actually happened pretty quickly. The whole idea of state sovereignty became a very accepted notion—not quite universally, but close to universally accepted. Sure you had messiness, the Vietnams and other things, cases that took place within the larger world of array. You had the Soviets doing certain things in Eastern Europe, or the United States doing what it did in Vietnam, but these weren't challenges to the architecture. These were messy—I don't mean to underestimate the human, economic or military costs—but these were experiences within the architecture. They weren't challenges to world order per se.Yascha Mounk: But that's not how they were perceived at the time, right? The whole justification for the Vietnam War from the American perspective was Domino Theory—that if we let this one state fall, then it is going to completely change the equilibrium.Haass: I take your point there. But, again, the world had more array than we realized. We persuaded ourselves of the correctness of a theory that proved to be incorrect: you could pull on the thread and the entire sweater did not unravel. There were some close calls, in Berlin and Cuba in particular—the two closest calls because you had a degree of directness, unlike in Vietnam and the Korean War (in terms of the Soviet Union, indirect, unlike with China). But the two cases of directness were serious. The fact that Berlin and Cuba turned out peacefully had, I think, something to do with conventional weaponry imbalances, nuclear weaponry, and diplomacy. We had some fairly capable hands on the proverbial tiller at the time. I don't think it was inevitable for structural reasons that either of those turned out the way they did. One could imagine different leadership in either country reaching different outcomes. In that sense, we were a bit fortunate. In the current era, it could turn out well, but I don't like the trend lines much. I see the North Korean problem sitting there, but getting bigger. Iran, as much as I'd love to think we're on the brink of a regime change leading to a moderate democratic, formally Islamic republic, it doesn't seem to be in the cards. Meanwhile, we could well have a crisis over Iran's nuclear capability at some point, sooner rather than later. Obviously, we're facing a long war situation in Ukraine. Russia is, to use the old language of Henry Kissinger, a “revolutionary power” and wants to overthrow the current order rather than operate within it. China is a more complicated calculation and wants to both operate within the order when it suits his purposes but outside the order when it doesn't. The jury is out there. It's hard to know to what extent Xi Jinping is the new normal and to what extent he's a 10, 15, or 20-year aberration. After Xi Jinping, you could have a Deng Xiaoping-like leader. It’s hard to imagine that we return to the optimism of the initial post-Cold War order. That seems to me to be anomalous.Mounk: We mentioned the Vietnam War. Of course, the other great moment at which the prevailing wisdom proved to be wrong was the optimism of the post-Cold War period, the period when it felt that we were going from a world in array to a world in even more array and that the United States would be this sunny hegemon. How much of that failed due to structural factors?Haass: The word I've used about this was “squandering.” It was a squandering of opportunity. Admittedly, it suggests that there were not structural or inevitable factors that lead from array to disarray. It was within our potential or capacity 30-plus years ago to have steered history down a different path. I lean in that direction. Now, would it have been neat? No, for the reasons we've already discussed. You had a proliferation of capacity in more hands, more decentralized decision-making. Was it inevitable that the US-Russian relationship would get to the point it is now, or might we have done some things differently? Was it something about Russian political culture, or might the United States both in what it did to help Russia economically with Yeltsin or Gorbachev, questions of NATO enlargement, what have you, [altered history]? Are there things that we might have done differently with China? I believe that we were right to let China into the WTO—we can debate the terms. We clearly got it wrong by not adjusting those terms subsequently, and thinking that admission would somehow necessarily change China in certain ways—we got that wrong. And even though I'm a frequent critic of Mr. Trump's foreign policy, I think when it came to China, they were more right than wrong in recognizing that we needed a serious adjustment. I think that in terms of global arrangements, we were very slow and still are in many areas. In talking about what kind of a defense and foreign policy capability we needed, we weren't thinking long term enough. And I remember the frustrations I had in government. I was trying to get the Bush 41 administration to articulate just exactly what we meant by a “New World Order.” What ought to have been the precepts? I don't think we did a very good job. The Clinton administration was a kind of holiday from serious foreign policy for eight years. They were more worried about small interventions in Somalia and Haiti than they were about the big things. Now one big thing they did, which is NATO enlargement, we can debate. Indeed, I think historians will debate it for a long time.The Bush 43 administration overreached badly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration, I think, underreached in 20 different places, for the most part. The Trump administration caused real havoc to many American alliances and so forth. I look at American foreign policy over the last 30 years, and I think we got more wrong than right. But it's a really interesting question, and I probably can't do it justice today: what was structural? I think [effective statecraft] would have been more difficult than many understood, just given certain underlying trends and the emergence of certain challenges. But I basically think we took a difficult situation that we probably underestimated the difficulty of and we made it far, far more difficult than it needed to be by all sorts of errors of commission and omission on the foreign policy front. Mounk: Let me ask exactly the same question but about America domestically, which is to say, again, in the early 1990s, America looks like a self-confident, optimistic country coming off a decade of economic growth; a country that also feels in some ways socially and culturally cohesive, with gradual progress towards more demographic inclusion slowly over the course of the 1990s and more inclusion of sexual minorities. There is this optimistic decade where it feels like America is in array domestically. Now, it is so in disarray. How did America go from array to disarray? Is that a set of bad choices by political leaders and others or were the structural causes of America's unraveling always there from the beginning?Haass: It's a combination of both the structural and what you might call the “political,” in the sense that there was a range of possible policies, decisions or behaviors, and we often got it wrong, again, in acts of omission or commission. In the last couple of decades, there were things that increased disrespect for and alienation from the government. Iraq contributed to it—a certain cynicism and alienation. Afghanistan as well. Two major international enterprises, shall we say, that went very poorly and with the added problem that the ostensible purpose for it, the WMD, didn't pan out. The 2007-2008 financial crisis had a role—again, the loss of confidence in elites, but also what it did to the housing market and to the American Dream. Decades of stagnation for the middle class had a role. The growing inequality—though I think the problem is less inequality in America, that some have gotten fantastically wealthy, than it is the fact that many others did not benefit in absolute terms. My own view of American history is that people don't mind relative inequality so long as absolute conditions improve satisfactorily. What we had here was the terrible combination of the two: we had relative positions worsening and absolute conditions not getting better for a big chunk of the population.I think COVID had a big impact, more recently. The combination of cable and social media, this “narrowcasting” in America. You're as familiar as anybody with the literature on sorting; increasingly, we live separate existences in our own little bubbles or echo chambers. There are fewer and fewer common experiences in this country. It's one of the unanticipated consequences of ending the draft and having an all-volunteer force. This is a country based upon certain ideas and if the ideas are no longer shared, where does that leave us? Trump is a driver of this but also a reflection of it. Like so many populists historically, he's a very good room-reader. In this case, the room was America. Trump could walk into this room and was quite brilliant at reading the dissatisfaction and the grievance. And in part because the left, over the same years, moved in many ways away from a policy of simply opposing discrimination and wanting equal opportunity to wanting to affect outcomes. We no longer call it liberal, and that's in some ways more revealing than the left realizes. That's also fed the grievance of other parts of the population that feels that they are not being helped equally. How we fund our politics has had an effect. Political parties, almost like travel agents, used to be mediating mechanisms. Parties used to play a role between voters and candidates. They no longer do. Every candidate is now his or her own party. They can raise money, they can go on social media. Rather than being moderated, you're independent. And extremism pays. It's a long list of things. But the accelerating difficulty of getting things done in America has to do with, I think, more structural reasons than anything else. But certain individuals have seen it coming and have taken advantage of it and, in many ways, exacerbated it. If John F. Kennedy were alive, there would maybe be room for a new book of “profiles in courage,” but it wouldn't have as many chapters as I'd like. A lot of people have just acted for their own purposes rather than for the country. The structural changes, in some ways, allowed them to get away with it.Mounk: An obvious way of thinking through this is to look at where America is similar to other democracies and where it's not. France, Germany, Britain, and Australia all feel less stable, less in array, than they were 20 or 30 years ago. At the same time, there is something about America that does feel particularly dysfunctional, and I say this as a proud citizen of this country. My ears perked up a little bit when you talked about American elites. If I’m in Paris or Berlin, elites are always a little bit out of touch with the rest of the population, always a little bit snobby. We always think we're a little bit better than everybody else. That’s just a structural feature of what it is to have to be in a position of prestige or influence and to live in the capital. But there's something about the American elite, the “influential million” who live in the right neighborhoods and have institutional responsibility, who are affluent to more-than-affluent, which feels to me dysfunctional. They're often very nice people and civic-minded in certain ways, but it does feel like they have a lack of connection to the rest of the country and a cultural alienation from it that strikes me as being more extreme than what I experience in Germany or some other democracies.Haass: I haven't heard that articulated before. I like the idea of the influential million—not as an elitist thing, but simply as an objective statement; that these are people who by virtue of wealth, education or position, have potentially outsized influence or impact on a society. I've noticed that the best and the brightest are, in many cases, choosing careers in financial engineering rather than going into public service. The ability now in this country of 330 million people to increasingly find your place not in American society writ large, but in a particular sub-society of America—we now have created, if you will, enough space for that, and not just geographically but culturally, economically, and socially. It's almost like we're now a country of millions of gated communities, rather than a single community, if I may stretch an image. That's interesting to me as a reading of our society. I hadn't thought about it quite that way. But it reinforces my sense that there's a limit to which you can opt out and still succeed, be safe or prosper. We are all in this together, like it or not. Mounk: Now, we've naturally arrived at the topic of your new book by talking about America and its dysfunction, and the lack of civic responsibility that many Americans seem to have. The book is called “The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens.” Why should we think about our obligations rather than our rights, and why is it that becoming more aware of our obligations is going to help us fix some of the many problems we've been discussing so far?Haass: There is both an instrumental and a normative reason for Americans to have a sense of obligation to one another and to their country. The normative one is I believe that it's the right thing to do. That's what norms are about. It's the basis of many religions: am I my brother's keeper? You look out for others. We're not on this planet simply to maximize self-satisfaction. We have other purposes on this planet. Even more of it, for better or worse, is instrumental. We will all pay a price if public education isn’t of a good quality. We will pay a price if public health breaks down—indeed, we just did. We will pay a price if the right of public safety is not widely appreciated and respected. We all have a stake in the efficiency of government and in the welfare of this country. The collective enterprise will have an impact on ourselves. We want to act unto others as we want them to act unto us. We want our fellow citizens to show respect for norms and show respect for us. But if that's going to happen, odds are we're going to have to reciprocate. When I go through the Ten Obligations, I think there's a collective interest and a self-interest aspect to all of them. I'm trying to get beyond the rights-based conversation. What led me to the book was that I was struck by how much of our political conversation is simply about rights, as though if we could only nail that perfectly, it would be the end of all of our problems. People seem to be unaware that rights can come into conflict, which they do every minute of every day: the right of the mother versus the right of the unborn, your right to bear arms and my right to public safety, what you want your kid to be taught—what if I want my kid to be taught something else? How do we deal with clashing rights? So much of our conversation is about rights and the abridgement of rights, real and imagined. And it's not that that's not an issue—it is—it's just that it's not sufficient. What led me to this book was thinking that we needed also to think about obligations, or we would either end up at a minimum in political gridlock and social alienation or, worse yet, an American version of Northern Ireland during The Troubles, in a future of decentralized, politically-inspired violence. It sounds somewhat dystopian, but that is not the work of a fevered imagination. I think we've seen some signs of it, including but not limited to January 6. Mounk: What does the Bill of Obligations entail? What are the ten key things we should do? Haass: I have my Bill of Obligations on a wallet-sized card. I carry it around and if you were here right now I would hand you a copy. The most basic is to be informed, as that's the basis for all political participation. In the course of writing this book, I read not just the classics, as you would expect, but also every inaugural speech, all the farewell addresses, and a lot of other things that I'd never read.  Ronald Reagan, who said many wonderful things, talked not about the importance of patriotism—he wanted an informed patriotism. He very carefully qualified that. And I think being informed in this day and age has actually become more not less difficult, ironically enough, given all the information, but also misinformation. Just as an aside, I think it's really fascinating that New Jersey, the other day, became the first state to pass a public school requirement that every student in New Jersey be exposed to courses in information literacy, so you can discern a fact from an opinion or a fact from a misstatement. Where do you go for these things? How do you know? I think that's great. It's actually an important part of a modern education. Finland does the same thing. This is an important movement. And once you're informed, you want to be involved. It's rather extraordinary: we've seen in recent years how tight our elections are. Still, 40-odd percent of eligible voters don't vote in presidential elections, and 53% of Americans didn't bother to vote in the midterms, as consequential as these midterms were for the future of this country. Voting is obviously not the only form of political participation, but it is the most graphic. I've talked about certain behaviors, about the importance of being open to compromise. Compromise is not a dirty word. It's what made this country possible at the Constitutional Convention. Some people seem to forget that. We've had some examples recently, with limited legislation on gun safety and the Electoral Count Act. It's not impossible. But obviously, we need more of it. Civility—we've got to learn how to disagree, not simply so we avoid conflict. You and I may disagree strenuously on the issue today, but you and I could be partners on the issue tomorrow. We want to keep that possibility open. Rejecting violence—I think religious leaders have to step up to the plate here.If every issue becomes all or nothing, those who get nothing will begin to feel they have no stake in a system. Why not resort to violence? I worry about that, obviously, given that guns have proliferated in this country. We've got to delegitimize the use of force for political purposes in this country. I write about norms. The most signature norm of American democracy is the peaceful transfer of political power at the presidential level. Needless to say, that norm took a serious buffeting a couple of years ago. I was glad to see in the midterms that most of the losers, not all, conceded with a degree of grace. I talked about promoting the common good, in things like pandemics and the rest, the obligation not just for our own health, but other people’s, to not think narrowly or selfishly. I talk a lot about respecting government service. People forget that there are about 25 million Americans who work in government—the government's not the “other,” the government is us, at the local, state and federal level. Obviously, this includes the military. One of the things I advocate for is to incentivize national service. I want more Americans to see that the things involved in government aren't all bad. It could also be a way to break down some of the barriers and isolation in our society. It could deliver some common experiences. The ninth obligation is to support the teaching of civics. We need to tell our narrative: why democracy matters, why it's valuable, what it takes to make it work. So many people now associate democracy only with bad things, mistakes or dysfunction. We have to remind people that it has delivered and why, however imperfect it is, it's still preferable to the alternatives. Last, I argue for putting country first, before party and before person. We had a powerful example of it recently with Liz Cheney. We had a powerful example of it with some of the secretaries of state who stood up to intimidation and stood by the electoral process. And sometimes people who put country first refused to compromise and, in other situations compromising is the way to put country first—there's no one size fits all, but it's a mentality. It's a sense of priorities. And, ultimately, it’s up to the voters. I don't think human nature is going to change just because I argue about it. It's up to voters to get informed and get involved and then reward politicians who put country first and penalize politicians who don't. So I actually think, in many ways, it's on us to protect American democracy. And the question is whether we're up to it. I think we can be. I'm potentially optimistic, but it won't happen automatically. That's why I've made the decision that when I think about my future, even though I'm a “foreign policy guy,” that this is going to be a part of my life going forward.Mounk: How do we proselytize these values? One obligation that we all have is to live up to these aspirations that you lay out, and we can put our own lives under the checklist and see how we’re doing, but just hoping for people to have a change of heart may not be enough. Is this also a question of public policy, of passing things that you've mentioned, like some kind of public service?Haass: Good ideas never sell themselves. Good things don't just happen because you and I think they ought to. Some things could take congressional action—national service is one of them. In other cases, as I just suggested, voters may vote out of office some people who don't deserve the authority. We saw a little bit of that in the midterms, with some of the deniers.Coming back to Reagan, one of my favorite quotes from Reagan is “All great change in America begins at the dinner table." It's the obligation of parents to talk to their children about certain things and to model certain kinds of behavior. Businesses—we've had all this debate in this country about ESG and DEI. Last I checked, American businesses have a massive self-interest in seeing that American democracy survives. How well are American businesses going to do if the rule of law breaks down? How much is American business going to like it if the Justice Department or the EPA start politicizing and penalizing business executives who give to the other political party, or businesses that don't support them? Business has a lot more to do. These things won't happen just because they're swell ideas. It will happen when various constituencies in this country get mobilized, including with ordinary citizens voting, which will reward certain behaviors and penalize others. Too often, American politics is left to the most motivated, who are more extreme in many cases. I think the more centrist, civil, reasonable Americans need to get more politically involved.Mounk: I only have one last question for you. If 25 or 30 years from now, we look back at this period and reflect that the world ended up getting into more array and America is in much better shape than it was—perhaps people are living up to the bill of obligations, and the country feels more cohesive than it did a few decades ago—what's the story that gets us there? What will have happened in those intervening decades that would make us a little bit more optimistic?Haass: As my grandmother used to say, “From your mouth to God's ear.” May it happen. In the world, I could see two changes. One would be, in both China and Russia, you will ultimately have new leadership that rejects a lot of the tendencies of the current leadership (these things do go in cycles). I think in areas like climate and health, technological breakthroughs like the mRNA vaccine and Zoom got us through the pandemic—one medically, the other economically and socially. I can imagine technological breakthroughs getting us through climate change—batteries, carbon capture and renewables. It’s harder to see on the domestic side, because that's a problem of human nature. But it could be everything that I'm suggesting—a kind of bottom-up set of changes, a realization that things really are going off the rails and where you see greater involvement in what our schools teach and religious leaders accepting some of the responsibility that comes with their position. Maybe we have some good political leaders and the populism fades a little, or it burns out. Domestically, it's less likely to come from a decisive single stroke than from a number of changes, possibly including more intelligent regulation of social media and technology. It would be more a basket of things. It probably wouldn't be transformational, but it would represent an improvement.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Computer games, like movies, music, and television, are part of our culture and often reflect our fears and worries—especially about the end of the world. And I’ve been playing them for years. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
This is not 1943.
The stubborn pathology of police culture
Why the U.S. isn’t shooting down the Chinese spy balloon
Nuclear War and ZombiesComputer games get a bad rap among those who do not play them. People associate them, at worst, with adolescent violence (despite lack of conclusive evidence for that theory) or, more benignly, with creepy nerds in Mom’s basement, yelling into their headsets and jabbing at keyboards while wiping Cheetos dust off their glasses.Well, I am a happily married 62-year-old professional, and I play computer games. In fact, I have been playing them since the dawn of the personal-computing age. Yes, games are part of the escape from reality that my colleague Megan Garber wrote about in her cover story for the March issue of the magazine, but they’re also a perfectly reasonable hobby.Still, you might ask why a grown man with a busy life—or, you know, any life—would waste precious hours in front of a screen. At the risk of handing a rationalization to students who have not finished their homework, I will say that I not only enjoy the process of playing but also find that games enhance my productivity rather than destroy it. I play computer games for the same reason I play golf: The engrossing requirement to complete a set of objectives clears my mind. When I return from the golf course or close the game program, my brain has been shaken and cleared like an old Etch A Sketch, and I’m ready to work again.Even pointless games can be relaxing (especially if they’re visually pretty), such as the “loot and shoot” adventures in which you kill something and take its money or possessions, over and over again. And sometimes, you just want to roll your army over some hapless Roman commander or drag space bandits through an asteroid field. But my favorites are the games that have intricate plots, because many of them are cultural markers that reveal what fascinates us—and more important, what scares us.Back in the 1980s, for example, Americans wrestled with fears about World War III. So did games. I have spent my entire career studying war and nuclear weapons, and for me, roaming around in a destroyed world is much like going to horror or disaster movies, or reading fairy tales (which are really scary if you think about most of them): It’s a way of processing fear.Consider Trinity, a 1986 text-based game. (Early computers had no serious graphics capability, so these games instead required you to read quite a bit and then issue commands and solve puzzles.) In Trinity, nuclear war breaks out at the beginning of the game; the player escapes through a portal and must tumble backwards through time all the way to the Trinity nuclear test site in 1945 in order to sabotage the first atomic bomb, thus preventing the nuclear-arms race and the eventual war.Thematically, this was not exactly a game for children. Nor were the many games that followed it, including the 1988 classic Wasteland, in which the player must lead a team of Desert Rangers through the ruins of the Southwest to discover the source of a new threat that could finish the job of annihilating humanity. These games followed a spate of Cold War movies and music shot through with nuclear anxieties, such as WarGames, Red Dawn, The Day After, and Testament; you could play Trinity or Wasteland while listening to “99 Luftballons,” by Nena, or “It’s a Mistake,” by Men at Work, and spend a cozy afternoon traipsing through Armageddon. (Nuclear war is back: One game studio just released a highly detailed nuclear-conflict simulator, but I haven’t played it. Yet.)As the nuclear threat receded and threats to our health, such as AIDS, began to dominate our fears, pop culture—including games—spoke to those fears. Biohazards became a dominant theme in gaming, with mad scientists and big corporations mucking about with our DNA, weird pathogens, doors to alternate dimensions, or even the gates to hell itself, all in the name of profit, while unleashing freaks and mutants on the rest of us.The granddaddy of the biohazard-genre games, Resident Evil, was released in 1996 and led to several more games and movies; the first motion picture in the franchise debuted in 2002 and was followed by five more sequels and then a 2021 reboot. Last month, HBO premiered a new series, The Last of Us, based on a highly regarded game of the same name. It is set in a world where a fungus has turned most people into crazed zombies, and so far, like the game, it’s a hit.Amazon is working on a series based on an even bigger end-of-the-world franchise: Fallout, a game that hit the shelves in 1997 and takes place about 100 years after a war with China. (The war was set off by an imperialistic global free-for-all over power and resources; the Americans, in keeping with the game’s retro-futuristic, back-to-the-1950s ethos, are super-patriotic McCarthyites who even annexed Canada just to be on the safe side.) Fallout was a kind of successor and homage to Wasteland, with a dark but often laugh-out-loud sense of humor, a fully realized postnuclear Los Angeles populated with fascinating characters, and a story line that, again, was not exactly for children. Fallout became a huge success, spawning multiple game sequels over the next two decades.I am praying that Amazon doesn’t screw this up, because Fallout is my personal gaming obsession. I have played all of the original games multiple times, and as someone who’s had to live with the subject of nuclear war as part of my career, I appreciate the underlying melancholy in the Fallout world. Even my wife (who does not play computer games) found herself moved one evening as she peeked in to watch me walk through the ruins of our beloved Boston, where I found skeletons, sometimes side by side and holding hands, in destroyed homes. It’s a fun, often hilarious game, but underneath it all is a sadness that should be there if you’re thinking about the end of humanity.It is natural to be fascinated by the ramifications of global catastrophe, but the best games present the player with difficult moral choices and awful, sometimes unavoidable dilemmas. There are many in Fallout and (a big one at the end of The Last of Us). Regardless of our choices, it can be healthy and cathartic to experience the terror and then revel in feeling safe, just like at the end of a slasher movie, when the lights come on and you look around. I’m still here. Everything is still here. It’s just a movie. It’s just a game.Let’s hope it stays that way.Related:
Kids are learning history from video games now.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his trip to Beijing after a Chinese “intelligence-gathering” balloon was detected floating over the United States.
The U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs in January, and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.4 percent—a low the country hasn’t seen since 1969.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine aims to hold on to the eastern city of Bakhmut for as long as it can.
Work in Progress: The economy is still very, very weird, Derek Thompson writes.
Books Briefing: Sports offer more than winning, Elise Hannum writes.
The Atlantic; Jamie Squire / Getty
The Slow-Motion Murder of Mikheil SaakashviliBy Anne Applebaum 
Sixteen months after his arrest, Mikheil Saakashvili has lost more than 90 pounds and needs a walker to move around his prison hospital. The former Georgian president was for a time, on a hunger strike, which helps explain his weight loss and his exhaustion. But it does not explain the traces of arsenic, mercury, and other toxins that a doctor found in his hair and nail clippings. It does not explain the beatings he has described to his lawyer. It does not explain the constant pain in his left shoulder, neck, and spine.
Nor can anything other than malice—organized, official, state-sponsored malice—explain why Saakashvili is on a strange medical regimen that includes 14 different drugs, some addictive, some not approved for sale in the United States. Or why he has mild brain damage. Or why he has seizures. Giorgi Badridze, a former Georgian ambassador who keeps in constant touch with Saakashvili’s family, told me that “nothing has been exaggerated. He is doing really badly.” At age 55, Saakashvili is declining rapidly. And as he declines, so do the prospects of a sovereign, democratic Georgia.
What is it about Pamela Anderson?
The good news about vaccine hesitancy
Photos of the week: masquerade games, figure skating, and more
Focus Features / Jaclyn Martinez / SBS Productions / Amazon Prime Video / Sundance Institute; The Atlantic
Read. Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s new novel, is a triumph.Or try “Background,” a new short story by Elaine Hsieh Chou.Watch. In theaters, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin pairs a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.On TV, Poker Face with Natasha Lyonne (streaming on Peacock) has a sting in its tail, our critic writes.And keep your eye out for these 15 great indie films this year.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I’ll skip a longer sign-off today and instead suggest that you get your hands on some of the games I mentioned. Fallout aficionados argue over the best game in the series, but I rather love Fallout: New Vegas, and I recommend you start there. (I would avoid the multiplayer Fallout 76, which I think was poorly conceived and violates the spirit of the original games.) New Vegas has a cast that includes Matthew Perry, Kris Kristofferson, Felicia Day, William Sadler, Alex Rocco, Dave Foley, René Auberjonois, and—I am not kidding—Wayne Newton. It’s a hell of a story, and you get to hang around in postnuclear casinos and gamble, which is where I’d want to be if someone drops the Big One someday.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Senator Dianne Feinstein hasn’t yet announced whether she’s retiring, but the race to replace her has already begun. The 2024 contest will be the first wide-open Democratic Senate primary in California since 1992, when Feinstein, who is now 89 years old, was first elected to the seat.The field is quickly getting crowded: U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff and Katie Porter have announced their candidacies, and Barbara Lee is expected to join them. The state’s Democratic strategists aren’t ruling out other contenders eventually jumping in as well, although most expect Feinstein to retire rather than run again.As it stands, the contest will offer voters a choice between three distinct eras of Democratic thinking: Porter, 49, embodies the pugnacious anti-corporate populism associated with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; Schiff, 62, is a more mainstream liberal, shaped by Clinton-era centrism; and Lee, 76, is an uncompromising leftist and living link to the most confrontational elements of the 1960s social movements.With or without Feinstein in the race, a Democrat is almost guaranteed to win the Senate seat in 2024. California hasn’t elected a Republican senator since Pete Wilson in 1988, and Carly Fiorina in 2010 has been the only GOP Senate nominee in this century to reach 40 percent of the statewide vote.California Democrats haven’t seen a Senate primary as energetic as the one now developing since 1992, when the party actually battled through two of them. Not only did Feinstein win the nomination for Wilson’s Senate seat, which he’d vacated after beating her for governor in 1990, but Barbara Boxer, then a U.S. representative, beat two Democratic men to win the nomination for the Senate seat left open by the retirement of Alan Cranston. Both Feinstein and Boxer then won in November—and served together for nearly the next quarter century.This time, the three principal contenders are separated along lines of gender, ideology, and geography. Female candidates have often had an advantage in California Democratic primaries because, as in other states, women account for close to 60 percent of Democratic voters. Given that Governor Gavin Newsom appointed a man (California’s then–secretary of state, Alex Padilla) to replace Kamala Harris in the Senate after she was elected vice president, some Democratic operatives believe that some voters of both genders may prefer to maintain at least one woman senator.“Would the California Democratic electorate buy replacing two women with two males? I hate to put it that crassly, but that is going to be a factor,” Garry South, a Democratic consultant, told me. But if Lee joins Porter in the race, voters who want to elect a woman may split between them, diluting any advantage.[Read: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]The same split might recur on ideology. Porter’s supporters already are working to portray her as a more committed progressive than Schiff. Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which has endorsed Porter, told me there is a difference between the two not only on ideology but also in boldness.Many Democrats would share Green’s basic assessment. Schiff, a former assistant U.S. attorney, was first elected in 2000 as part of the backlash against the House GOP’s impeachment of Bill Clinton. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks, Schiff voted both for the PATRIOT Act and to authorize the Iraq War. Over time, he migrated more into the liberal mainstream, and since Democrats recaptured the House majority in 2018, virtually every member of the House Democratic caucus has voted for all of the party’s key initiatives. That means there’s little space between Porter’s voting record and Schiff’s. “It would be hard to get a piece of paper between them on most major issues,” South told me.Porter, a former law professor, still clearly embodies another strain of Democratic energy. Influenced by Warren, whom she studied under at Harvard Law School, Porter has become famous for dismantling hostile witnesses during congressional hearings while scribbling furiously on a whiteboard. Porter is a more logical fit for the activists and voters seeking a crusading progressive champion than Schiff, whose style is more cerebral and contained. (It’s telling that Warren has already endorsed Porter, while former Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’ll back Schiff if Feinstein, as expected, doesn’t run.)But for Porter, efforts to frame Schiff as insufficiently liberal, even implicitly, will be complicated by his prominent roles in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial and on the January 6 committee. For many voters, those credentials are likely enough to establish his liberal bona fides.And Lee may further hinder Porter’s ability to consolidate liberal voters. A former chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Lee was the only House or Senate member in either party to vote against the use of force in Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks. She also voted against the Iraq War authorization, which Schiff supported. Her unbending liberal profile will inevitably attract some voters on the left.The final line separating the three contenders previously has been the most decisive: geography. Both Porter, who represents a seat in Orange County, and Schiff, who holds a district in Los Angeles, are based in Southern California, while Lee represents a district centered on Oakland and Berkeley. There’s a long history of candidates from Northern California beating those from the south in statewide Democratic primaries: Boxer, Feinstein, Harris, and Newsom all defeated opponents from Southern California.“Northern Californians have had a tendency to be very loyal to their candidates,” Mel Levine, a former Democratic representative from Los Angeles who lost the 1992 Senate primary to Boxer, told me. But many observers doubt that Lee can consolidate support in the Bay Area nearly as much as those predecessors. That’s partly because of her militant politics and her age but also because she hasn’t had to advertise much over the years to win her reliably Democratic district, which has limited her name recognition.[David A. Graham: Dianne Feinstein is the future of the Senate]Exactly how much voters know about Porter and Schiff is uncertain, too. Traditionally, House members are largely invisible to California voters. Schiff and Porter have assets that were unavailable to earlier generations of congressional representatives: Both are superstars on MSNBC and CNN and have built robust online grassroots fundraising networks. But many California strategists doubt that their national exposure will translate into anything more than the most cursory awareness among voters in the state.While California voters “paid attention to the Trump impeachment, were they watching Adam Schiff on the floor? Probably not,” Rose Kapolczynski, a California Democratic consultant, told me. “Have they been watching Katie Porter and her whiteboard in hearings? Probably not. All the candidates are going to need to expand beyond the MSNBC/Democratic Twitter base to reach those millions of voters who are not paying attention now and probably won’t be paying attention until next year.”As they run against one another next spring, the Democratic contenders also must keep an eye on the November election. Since 2012, California has selected its Senate nominees in an open primary, which puts all the candidates on a single ballot, with the top two finishers advancing to the general election in November. If two Democrats emerge from the primary, the general election could be decided by the millions of Republican voters who then would be forced to choose between them.Most California experts I spoke with give Schiff a slight edge (among other things, he has much more money in the bank than his competitors), but all expect a dynamic, and unpredictable, contest. What’s virtually certain is that the race will end with a new Democratic senator likely to quickly emerge as a rising star in the party. For years, many Democrats have grumbled about Feinstein’s eroding physical and mental capacity and reluctance to confront Republicans. Whatever else happens along the way, there’s little chance anyone will say the same about California’s next senator.

A few weeks ago, a three-inch square of plastic and metal began, slowly and steadily, to upend my life.The culprit was my new portable carbon-dioxide monitor, a device that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for months. I’d first eyed the product around the height of the coronavirus pandemic, figuring it could help me identify unventilated public spaces where exhaled breath was left to linger and the risk for virus transmission was high. But I didn’t shell out the $250 until January 2023, when a different set of worries, over the health risks of gas stoves and indoor air pollution, reached a boiling point. It was as good a time as any to get savvy to the air in my home.I knew from the get-go that the small, stuffy apartment in which I work remotely was bound to be an air-quality disaster. But with the help of my shiny Aranet4, the brand most indoor-air experts seem to swear by, I was sure to fix the place up. When carbon-dioxide levels increased, I’d crack a window; when I cooked on my gas stove, I’d run the range fan. What could be easier? It would basically be like living outside, with better Wi-Fi. This year, spring cleaning would be a literal breeze!The illusion was shattered minutes after I popped the batteries into my new device. At baseline, the levels in my apartment were already dancing around 1,200 parts per million (ppm)—a concentration that, as the device’s user manual informed me, was cutting my brain’s cognitive function by 15 percent. Aghast, I flung open a window, letting in a blast of frigid New England air. Two hours later, as I shivered in my 48-degree-Fahrenheit apartment in a coat, ski pants, and wool socks, typing numbly on my icy keyboard, the Aranet still hadn’t budged below 1,000 ppm, a common safety threshold for many experts. By the evening, I’d given up on trying to hypothermia my way to clean air. But as I tried to sleep in the suffocating trap of noxious gas that I had once called my home, next to the reeking sack of respiring flesh I had once called my spouse, the Aranet let loose an ominous beep: The ppm had climbed back up, this time to above 1,400. My cognitive capacity was now down 50 percent, per the user manual, on account of self-poisoning with stagnant air.By the next morning, I was in despair. This was not the reality I had imagined when I decided to invite the Aranet4 into my home. I had envisioned the device and myself as a team with a shared goal: clean, clean air for all! But it was becoming clear that I didn’t have the power to make the device happy. And that was making me miserable.[Read: Kill your gas stove]CO2 monitors are not designed to dictate behavior; the information they dole out is not a perfect read on air quality, indoors or out. And although carbon dioxide can pose some health risks at high levels, it’s just one of many pollutants in the air, and by no means the worst. Others, such as nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone, can cause more direct harm. Some CO2-tracking devices, including the Aranet4, don’t account for particulate matter—which means that they can’t tell when air’s been cleaned up by, say, a HEPA filter. “It gives you an indicator; it’s not the whole story,” says Linsey Marr, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech.Still, because CO2 builds up alongside other pollutants, the levels are “a pretty good proxy for how fresh or stale your air is,” and how badly it needs to be turned over, says Paula Olsiewski, a biochemist and an indoor-air-quality expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The Aranet4 isn’t as accurate as, say, the $20,000 research-grade carbon-dioxide sensor in Marr’s lab, but it can get surprisingly close. When Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, first picked one up three years ago, he was shocked that it could hold its own against the machines he used professionally. And in his personal life, “it allows you to find the terrible places and avoid them,” he told me, or to mask up when you can’t.That rule of thumb starts to break down, though, when the terrible place turns out to be your home—or, at the very least, mine. To be fair, my apartment’s air quality has a lot working against it: two humans and two cats, all of us with an annoying penchant for breathing, crammed into 1,000 square feet; a gas stove with no outside-venting hood; a kitchen window that opens directly above a parking lot. Even so, I was flabbergasted by just how difficult it was to bring down the CO2 levels around me. Over several weeks, the best indoor reading I sustained, after keeping my window open for six hours, abstaining from cooking, and running my range fan nonstop, was in the 800s. I wondered, briefly, if my neighborhood just had terrible outdoor air quality—or if my device was broken. Within minutes of my bringing the meter outside, however, it displayed a chill 480.[Read: The plan to stop every respiratory virus at once]The meter’s cruel readings began to haunt me. Each upward tick raised my anxiety; I started to dread what I’d learn each morning when I woke up. After watching the Aranet4 flash figures in the high 2,000s when I briefly ignited my gas stove, I miserably deleted 10 wok-stir-fry recipes I’d bookmarked the month before. At least once, I told my husband to cool it with the whole “needing oxygen” thing, lest I upgrade to a more climate-friendly Plant Spouse. (I’m pretty sure I was joking, but I lacked the cognitive capacity to tell.) In more lucid moments, I understood the deeper meaning of the monitor: It was a symbol of my helplessness. I’d known I couldn’t personally clean the air at my favorite restaurant, or the post office, or my local Trader Joe’s. Now I realized that the issues in my home weren’t much more fixable. The device offered evidence of a problem, but not the means to solve it.Upon hearing my predicament, Sally Ng, an aerosol chemist at Georgia Tech, suggested that I share my concerns with building management. Marr recommended constructing a Corsi-Rosenthal box, a DIY contraption made up of a fan lashed to filters, to suck the schmutz out of my crummy air. But they and other experts acknowledged that the most sustainable, efficient solutions to my carbon conundrum were mostly out of reach. If you don’t own your home, or have the means to outfit it with more air-quality-friendly appliances, you can only do so much. “And I mean, yeah, that is a problem,” said Jimenez, who’s currently renovating his home to include a new energy-efficient ventilation device, a make-up-air system, and multiple heat pumps.Many Americans face much greater challenges than mine. I am not among the millions living in a city with dangerous levels of particulate matter in the air, spewed out by industrial plants, gas-powered vehicles, and wildfires, for whom an open window could risk additional peril; I don’t have to be in a crowded office or a school with poor ventilation. Since the first year of the pandemic—and even before—experts have been calling for policy changes and infrastructural overhauls that would slash indoor air pollution for large sectors of the population at once. But as concern over COVID has faded, “people have moved on,” Marr told me. Individuals are left on their own in the largely futile fight against stale air.[Read: Put your face in airplane mode]Though a CO2 monitor won’t score anyone victories on its own, it can still be informative: “It’s nice to have an objective measure, because all of this is stuff you can’t really see with the naked eye,” says Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford, who’s planning to use the Aranet4 in an upcoming study on viral transmission. But he told me that he doesn’t let himself get too worked up over the readings from his monitor at home. Even Olsiewski puts hers away when she’s cooking on the gas range in her Manhattan apartment. She already knows that the levels will spike; she already knows what she needs to do to mitigate the harms. “I use the tools I have and don’t make myself crazy,” she told me. (Admittedly, she has a lot of tools, especially in her second home in Texas—among them, an induction stove and an HVAC with ultra-high-quality filters and a continuously running fan. When we spoke on the phone, her Aranet4 read 570 ppm; mine, 1,200.)I’m now aiming for my own middle ground. Earlier this week, I dreamed of trying and failing to open a stuck window, and woke up in a cold sweat. I spent that day working with my (real-life) kitchen window cracked, but I shut it when the apartment got too chilly. More important, I placed my Aranet4 in a drawer, and didn’t pull it out again until nightfall. When my spouse came home, he marveled that our apartment, once again, felt warm.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.So, maybe I should start with an apology. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, my economic analysis has devolved into what I imagine must be a frustrating theme for readers: Everything is just weird, okay?I said the rental market was being weird. I said home sales were being weird. I said consumers were being weird too. At one point, I threw up my hands and cried uncle by saying we live in the “everything-is-weird economy,” hoping to save myself some time. Then calls for a recession came pouring from the heavens, and I was forced to say those were weird too.Good journalism ought to be honest, and I’ve honestly struggled to figure out what’s been going on with the U.S. economy. But under the theory that good journalism ought to also be descriptive even at the risk of being wrong, I think I owe readers, and myself, a general theory of weirdness.So here’s my best shot at summarizing the past three years of perplexity: We’re living in a yo-yo economy.Take the story of unemployment. In February 2020, the month before COVID broke the world, the U.S. unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent. Two months later, U.S. joblessness officially spiked to nearly 15 percent, shattering the highest mark since the end of World War II. Three years, several crises, and more than 1 million U.S. COVID deaths later, the unemployment rate has settled back to 3.5 percent. From historic lows to historic highs and back down to historic lows again: That’s the yo-yo economy.The more industries you look at, the more such stories you find. The vertiginous up-and-down of these statistics has been the economic phenomenon of the 2020s.
Gas: In January 2022, the average gas price in the U.S. was about $3.40 a gallon. Within months, it rose to more than $5 a gallon. By December, it had fallen back to less than $3.40 a gallon.

Stuff: In early 2022, the inflation rate for durable goods—meaning “stuff,” such as furniture, computers, and jewelry—hit an all-time high of 18 percent. Ten months later, we may be in a kind of stuff-based recession (a self-respecting person must resist the urge to say “stuffcession”), with these durable-goods prices actually falling year over year.

Used cars: Since the pandemic began, the annual inflation rate for used cars and trucks has toggled from negative 2.7 percent in the summer of 2020 to more than 40 percent in both 2021 and 2022, smashing the all-time record. Since then, their inflation rate has tumbled back down to negative 8 percent, where it now sits near its record low.

Savings: In 2020, the personal-savings rate rocketed to (guess what) the highest rate on record. In the past year, consumers have flipped the switch, and savings rates have crashed.

Housing: The first year of the pandemic included both a flash-freeze recession and a blisteringly hot housing market. Take one key measure of housing construction: fixed investment in single-family homes. In early 2021, the amount of money builders spent on houses grew by 50 percent, the sharpest one-year increase since the Reagan administration. Then interest rates spiked, and housing crashed. In the last quarter of 2022, our measure of housing investment fell by 10 percent—something that happens almost exclusively in recessions. Never before has housing investment gone from boom to bust with this speed and magnitude. (And perhaps back to boom again: This year, real-estate writers are seeing signs of recovery in the housing market.)

Tech: In 2020 and 2021, no industry benefited from the weirding of the world like tech companies and cryptocurrency boosters. The physical world and the services economy were closed for millions of Americans, which funneled billions of dollars of economic activity online. Streaming-video use surged as entertainment companies stopped theatrical releases and sent more films straight to personal screens. Hiring rose across tech, and stock prices did too. Shares in crypto companies, Robinhood, Peloton, and more all soared. And then came the crash landing. Rates rose and layoffs followed, and the pandemic stock market now appears, in retrospect, to have been one big bubble.
What’s going on here? One theme across sectors is that people assumed the pandemic would forever change the way we live. In fact, what we experienced was more like a dramatic interruption of existing lifestyles than an acceleration of some new future. For example, demand for online gambling—sorry, I mean app-based equity and coin trading—bloomed during the worst part of the pandemic and then crashed after the physical world opened back up.Another theme has been the consistent mismatch between supply and demand, with companies struggling to anticipate and satisfy consumer preferences. Microchips might be the best example of an industry that’s had a hard time finding a happy medium between burning in the fires of inflation and drowning in oversupply. During the peak of the pandemic, demand for microchips went berserk: People stuck inside wanted to upgrade their computer screens, and tech companies needed to keep up with an upswing in internet use. This put a strain on chip manufacturers, so prices rose. Companies such as Intel increased production of chips to meet demand. But they overshot the market, and today, there’s a glut of some computer chips. So prices for chips have fallen, and now companies such as Intel are doing layoffs just a few quarters after it looked like the world couldn’t get enough of, or pay enough for, their core product.An economy that yo-yos in so many ways is a beast to deal with. It’s hard to manage if you’re the Federal Reserve, which was clearly late in deciding to raise interest rates to fight inflation (and might now be late in recognizing that the inflation crisis is over). It’s hard to campaign on if you’re the Biden administration, which has struggled to emphasize ascending good news (unemployment is down!) when there’s always some indicator of yo-yoing in the opposite direction (services inflation, yikes!). It’s hard to predict if you’re an investor; various indices are near their inflection point, but it’s not entirely clear when they’ll peak or bottom out. It’s hard to deal with as a procurer or an inventory manager struggling to find the Goldilocks zone between headline-grabbing shortages and profit-murdering gluts.The legacy of the yo-yo economy could be profound. The most interesting questions in government today aren’t just about how to redistribute funds to help people pay for things; they’re about how to establish the right rules and markets to allow things to be built. I don’t think we would have these questions without the pandemic, which concretized fears of a demand-side recession only to later create problems that required a new supply-side philosophy. Today, America is reindustrializing unapologetically. The Biden administration is embracing policies to make America stronger, richer, greener, and less reliant on supply chains that run through our geopolitical nemeses.In the short run, the up-and-down economy has resulted in a lot of weirdness. In the long run, the legacy of the yo-yo years might be an agenda of abundance.
Office hours are back! Join Derek Thompson and special guests for conversations about the future of work, technology, and culture. The next session will be February 6. Register here and watch a recording anytime on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

Sixteen months after his arrest, Mikheil Saakashvili has lost more than 90 pounds and needs a walker to move around his prison hospital. The former Georgian president was for a time, on a hunger strike, which helps explain his weight loss and his exhaustion. But it does not explain the traces of arsenic, mercury, and other toxins that a doctor found in his hair and nail clippings. It does not explain the beatings he has described to his lawyer. It does not explain the constant pain in his left shoulder, neck, and spine.Nor can anything other than malice—organized, official, state-sponsored malice—explain why Saakashvili is on a strange medical regimen that includes 14 different drugs, some addictive, some not approved for sale in the United States. Or why he has mild brain damage. Or why he has seizures. Giorgi Badridze, a former Georgian ambassador who keeps in constant touch with Saakashvili’s family, told me that “nothing has been exaggerated. He is doing really badly.” At age 55, Saakashvili is declining rapidly. And as he declines, so do the prospects of a sovereign, democratic Georgia.Georgia is a former Soviet republic, and to those who live in the former Soviet empire—the same empire that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, now seeks to re-create—Saakashvili’s accumulated prison illnesses form a familiar pattern. The slow prison death was a Soviet speciality: not a murder, not an assassination, just a well-monitored, carefully controlled, long, drawn-out decline. Most of the people who died in Soviet prison camps were not executed; they were merely starved until their heart stopped beating. In Putin’s Russia, torture and the deprivation of medical aid famously killed Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who uncovered an infamous corruption scandal at the highest levels of the Russian regime. Isolation, withholding of food, and other punishments are right now being inflicted on Alexei Navalny and other political prisoners too.[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]The readoption of this old Soviet practice in Georgia, a country that has, or had, aspirations to be part of NATO and the European Union, represents a symbolic return to the old Soviet empire. The decision to inflict this form of torture on Saakashvili carries even more symbolic weight. As president from 2004 to 2013, he was notable mostly for pushing his country, which borders Russia, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, in the direction of Western liberal democracy. In his years in office, he broke the power of the post-Soviet mafia, battled corruption, fought back against a Russian invasion, and opened the economy. Putin loathed him and his political program so much that he reportedly once said Saakashvili should be “hung by his balls.” He hated Saakashvili for the same reason he now hates the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky: because he used the language of liberal democracy; because he talked about a European, Western future for his country; and because he rejected Putin’s kleptocratic, illiberal ideology.Saakashvili angered plenty of Georgians too. He made enemies not just among the mafiosi whose careers he destroyed, but also among Georgian liberals and democrats. He cut corners and crossed the edges of legality several times himself. Extravagant stories about him (and there are many) involve Munich nightclubs, Ferris-wheel rides, and late-night, high-speed drives through Tbilisi. His life story is not a black-and-white morality tale of any kind.But when Saakashvili lost an election, he did step down, which is not typical behavior in the former Soviet world. He left Georgia in 2013, and spent several years in Ukraine—he speaks Ukrainian, having studied there—and enjoyed what can best be described as an exceptionally controversial term as governor of the Odesa region. He received Ukrainian citizenship, was stripped of it, and then got it back again. Finally he went back to Georgia in October 2021, clearly hoping to reenter politics.This, his supporters believe, is the real reason he was arrested on what his lawyer describes as trumped-up charges, based on cases from years ago investigated in absentia. They also say this is the reason for the slow torment, and perhaps for the slow poisoning of Saakashvili, and indeed leaders of the ruling Georgian Dream party have said, in so many words, that he is in prison because he would cause trouble for them if he were free. Irakli Kobakhidze, the party’s chairman, recently put it like this: “If Saakashvili gets out, he will immediately engage in political processes and will try to take in his hands the function of leadership of the radical opposition.” The government can’t let him out, in other words, because he might try to win. Or he might at least make what Kobakhidze calls the “radical opposition” into a unified and coherent force.At the moment, that opposition, although it probably represents the majority of the voters, is deeply divided, as so often happens in democracies that have been slowly dismantled by an illiberal political party. Georgian Dream is certainly that: Backed and controlled by Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s wealthiest man, the party has not only locked up Saakashvili but also imprisoned Nika Gvaramia, the director of an independent television station; put pressure on judges; and repeated wearily familiar nationalist, homophobic, and anti-Western themes borrowed from Russian propaganda. The party’s leaders, many of whom are former Ivanishvili employees, have verbally attacked the U.S. ambassador, even falsely accusing her of trying to force Georgia to go to war with Russia. All of that helps explain why, in June, the European Union formally recognized Ukraine and Moldova as candidates for membership but spurned Georgia.[Read: The billionaire who would rule Georgia: An interview with Ivanishvili]Officially, the Georgian government regretted that decision. Unofficially, maybe not so much. Ivanishvili’s fortune was earned in Russia, and under his leadership, Georgia’s relationship with Russia has evolved into something very hard to explain and understand. On the one hand, Georgians continue to fear a further Russian invasion, which is unsurprising: Russian troops, some stationed less than 40 miles from Tbilisi, occupy about 20 percent of the country. Georgians are vocally supportive of Ukraine, and large majorities say they want to join NATO.On the other hand, the quantity of what appears to be sanctions-busting cargo flowing through Georgia to Russia surged in the first half of 2022. The Georgian government doesn’t support Russia, but it doesn’t like to say it doesn’t support Russia, or at least not too loudly. And by deliberately antagonizing Georgia’s Western friends, it is slowly making Georgian membership in Western clubs an impossibility. “The reality is that it looks like Putin is winning in Georgia,” Badridze told me.The slow torment of Saakashvili is a part of that project. His lawyer and his family are asking the government to release him on humanitarian grounds and let him transfer to a hospital in Europe or the U.S. If not, he may well die in prison. But that may be what Putin and his proxies in Georgia are hoping for. If the man who still symbolizes Georgia’s old aspirations to join the liberal democratic world succumbs to a Soviet-style prison death, then those aspirations will die along with him.

In the 18th century, when William Hogarth wished to highlight Britain’s political and cultural superiority to pre-revolutionary France in immediately appreciable terms, he did so through the medium of food, distinguishing between the Roast Beef of Olde England, and the ruddy and rotund yeoman nation fattened on it, and the scraps of putrid flesh with which scrawny Frenchmen were forced, beside the crumbling gate of Calais, to satisfy their wants. For food and political nationhood go together like few other cultural products: witness the squabbling between Israel and Palestine over the right to commercialise hummus, Greeks and Turks over baklava, or of Russians and Ukrainians over ownership of borscht. Food is, after all, inherently political, a basic building block of national identity, and it is the humblest foodstuffs, the basic comfort foods of childhood, that are more often fought over than the elaborate confections of the great chefs.
Indeed, it would be trivially easy to trace the shifting faultlines of broader political currents through the prism of food. Witness the sudden shift within America’s food culture, as a previous generations’ celebration of the diverse culinary options provided by mass immigration has morphed into stern lectures from diaspora commentators on the vaguely-defined evils of white people appropriating “ethnic” cuisine. In Britain, equally, a slim volume could easily be written on the political import uncomfortably burdened on fish and chips or chicken tikka masala by devotees of mass migration; a cultural theorist could likewise tease apart the “Proper” label now applied to a distinct category of foodstuff — proper pies, proper burgers, proper chips — as a marker of a specific type of middle-class yearning for proletarian authenticity, while maintaining socially acceptable levels of consumption standards. Like the fetishised fry-ups of London caffs in prosperous areas targeting themselves at tracksuit-wearing millennial creatives, the Proper Burger is the self-consciously gentrified football terrace of our national cuisine, a cultural marker of a precisely measurable socioeconomic bracket.
When this dynamic is considered, Britain’s strange relationship with food, and with its own national cuisine, becomes worthy of analysis. Though much mocked by online Americans, presumably inured to the Lovecraftian horrors of their own food culture, British cuisine at its best is hearty, simple fare, showcasing the natural bounty of these islands, our waters rich with fish and seafood (much of it exported abroad to more appreciative consumers), our rain-soaked pastures the nursemaid of the free-range meat and rich dairy goods Britain has excelled in for millennia. At its best, British food displays the worth of good ingredients cooked well — and at its worst, of poor ingredients cooked badly.
Yet the much-vaunted culinary renaissance in British food from the Nineties on, despite the buoyant effect of an endless stream of glossy cookbooks on the publishing industry, does not seem to have had an appreciable effect on the food most of us eat from day to day. Which British office worker does not recognise the moment of weary, grudging submission to the lunchtime meal deal, the limp and soggy sandwich which fuels the nation’s economy? If Britain has a national dish, it is more likely to be the Ballardian misery of the provincial train station panini, simultaneously scorching hot and half-raw, than it is a steaming steak and ale pie, its crust crisp with suet, or a plate of sizzling lamb’s liver fried in butter with farmhouse bacon.
There is, as there is with every aspect of British life, a strong class dynamic to British food. The most fervent appreciators of the frugal peasant dishes of the past, the nation’s only consumers of stewed beef shin or lamb sweetbreads, are more likely to be upper-middle class, middle-aged executives, who by lunching at St John or the Quality Chop House celebrate the forgotten folkways of their own country, than the call centre workers or shop assistants who have replaced our rural and industrial proletariat. Yet who in Britain is immune to the sudden craving for comfort satiable only by a serving of rich cauliflower cheese or of dark and savoury cottage pie, or has not felt the hobbit-like “Why shouldn’t I?” satisfaction of choosing the fry up at a hotel breakfast over the continental pastry selection?
Into this rich and only partly-understood realm of symbolic meaning arrive two new books, English Food: a Social History by Diane Purkiss, and Phaidon’s glossily-produced The British Cookbook by Ben Mervis. Where Purkiss’s book, an oddly fitting successor to her excellent book on the English Civil War, is a dense and often strangely freeform collection of essays on Britain’s historic relationship with food, rich both with keen observations and dubious or baffling assertions, Mervis’s conventional cookbook is a solid if unexciting introduction to (and at times a strangely defensive apologia for) our national cuisine, aimed at what is presumed to be a sceptical international audience, interspersing stirring photographs with plainly-served prose.
Each book, in its own way, recapitulates the conventional story of Britain’s culinary history, one which reflects that of the nation as a whole, the very origin story of our unique political forms. Once, in the dim and idealised agrarian past, Britain possessed a flourishing peasant food culture, analogous to though distinct from the more celebrated peasant cuisines of our European neighbours. With land enclosure, and the eradication of a free peasant class, came industrialisation and the culinary impoverishment of the new urban proletariat, reduced to a diet of bread, potatoes and dripping. That great font of A-Level history essays, the mid-19th century political battleground of the Corn Laws, symbolises the transference of Britain’s political power from a quasi-feudal landholding class to the globalising, mercantile aspirations of their liberal supplanters, finally severing the popular connection to the land.
Suggested readingWhy the Left eat junkBy Mary Harrington
But this is the very same political struggle that echoes today in the battle between farming and conservation groups for revitalised domestic food production, and the firm preference of our impeccably liberal, notionally conservative ruling party for reliance on cheap imports, as if Britain still controls the global seaways. Like 19th-century liberals fulminating against the Victorian nanny state clamping down on adulterated milk and flour, our free-market thinktanks campaign today for the right of the poor to gorge themselves on bad food. When it comes to food, neither our liberals nor our conservatives have changed very much in the past 200 years, even if the political labels attached to them have almost entirely switched sides.
In the same mid-19th-century period, Ireland’s potato famine, by doing away with the poorest half of the country’s population, enabled the consolidation of a more affluent Catholic dairy-farming class, the bedrock of the modern Irish nationalism which initiated the crumbling of both the Union and the empire. And just as Drake’s introduction of the humble potato eventually redrew the map of Britain, the Empire’s steady pinkening of the world’s surface reshaped British tastes, creating a market for the spices of the subcontinent, the bland white bread flour of the Canadian prairies and the cheap frozen lamb of New Zealand. Then came the war: the food rationing celebrated as an improvement in the diets of the labouring masses also accelerated the drift towards the industrialisation of food and farming, and the extinguishing of Britain’s native farmhouse cheesemaking, orcharding and fishing traditions in pursuit of bland but secure food supplies.
The immediate post-war era saw a reaction in the form of Elizabeth David’s turning towards the bright tastes and fresh produce of the Mediterranean — the origin story of both the Nineties celebrity chef and the frozen supermarket pizza — followed by the counterreaction in the form of Jane Grigson’s classic 1974 English Food. It was the initial skirmish of the ongoing revolt of middle-class tastemakers from David’s continental affectations towards the native culinary heritage of these islands, a fraught and unfinished process analogous to the rest of our contentious relationship with Europe. There, written on a plate, lies our island story: the processes which led to Britain’s past global preeminence also eradicated the foundations of our native food culture, far more so than anywhere else in Europe. As Grigson lamented back in 1974: “we are always running after some new thing… so busy running after the latest dish, that the good things we’ve known for centuries are forgotten as quickly as the boring ones.” A perfect distillation of political conservatism, Grigson’s analysis reminds us that the history of Britain’s food is a perfectly workable metaphor for the rest of the country’s woes.
Viewed in such vein, both books are readable as not-quite-conscious expressions of the cultural moment, and there is an intriguing undertow of cultural, if not political conservatism in Purkiss’s book which contrasts with Mervis’s generic progressivism, which already seems strangely dated. An American, Mervis takes time to earnestly inform his readers in his short introductory essay that “neither the end of slavery nor the end of imperialism meant the end of white supremacy within the new British Commonwealth”, which, glancing down the list of Commonwealth countries, is presumably to be taken less as a meaningful statement than as the customary obeisance with which all American writers must perform to their new religion. Because “Britain has so few truly ‘native’ vegetables… this topic inevitably leads us back to the immigrants and invaders, who, over thousands of years” … but you get the picture, as Mervis strikes his devastating cultural blow against the red-faced root vegetable extremists.
Suggested readingItaly will win the food warsBy Kenneth R. Rosen
A generation after Robin Cook, Mervis is excited to christen chicken tikka masala Britain’s national dish — perhaps more excited than anyone in Britain, bored of the bland stalwart of the budget supermarket ready meal or luridly-coloured provincial takeaway, could possibly be. As Purkiss sniffs with the frozen hauteur of the foodie, this “mongrel dish”, initially produced, so the story goes, from tinned American tomato soup to satisfy a drunk Glaswegian diner, is “barely middle class, and middle-class Britons, including those of Indian origin, tend to shake it off in favour of something more ‘authentic’”. Perhaps the cultural resonances attached to British food are as hard to appreciate from outside as is the cuisine itself? But political fashions change just as quickly as culinary ones: perhaps Mervis’s recipe for the now unfashionably-named Chicken Kiev will be updated in later editions.
A professor of 17th-century English literature at Oxford, Purkiss places British food in a finer-detailed cultural context than is available to Mervis in his brief essays, giving discursive potted histories of the Enclosure Acts, the rise and fall of the Atlantic fishing industry, the role of tinned food in the British empire, Celtic mythology and a bewildering assortment of other topics. Not all the arguments are convincing, though the book is highly entertaining: her extended diatribe on the myth of Elizabeth David, her work recast as a product of literary modernism rather than food writing, a “Lawrentian myth of escape, redemption and sensual awakening”. is captivating, concluding that “turning our faces away from England sounds profoundly unhelpful, as does encouraging whole worlds of fantasy”, for “she saved English food, but she did it by killing the Englishness of it”. Economically Left-wing — railing against the enclosure of common land and celebrating failed agrarian uprisings while noting that today’s coffee, like sugar before it, “is a cash crop grown in the developing world for consumption in richer countries” — Purkiss is comfortable introducing strongly conservative opinions. No doubt unwittingly, she echoes today’s Twitter reactionaries in observing  that “the people who knocked down Euston Station and devastated the inner cities have wrecked food creation, avid as they were to have modernity and not much else”, while extolling a conservative “radical homemaker” food culture “desperate to recover a skill set and a mindset lost by their parents.”
Likewise, the post-war transferral of women from the kitchen to the workforce may have been experienced as liberation, but it was a disaster for Britain’s food culture, Purkiss observes: “one of those unfortunate moments when it turns out that feminism itself looks very like a dance to the music of business.” Perhaps the worst result, for Purkiss, is the removal of cooking from the realm of the domestic kitchen to the laboratory experiments of the male celebrity chef, the exploding seaweed gels or frozen custard mists of a Blumenthal or Adrià an expression of our estrangement from a living food culture rather than of a culinary renaissance. Unexpectedly post-liberal at times, Purkiss’s book justifies her case that “food and its decline into convenience has become the biggest and most generally agreed sign that society isn’t working and cannot continue to work in the way it currently does”.
Is there some kind of political salvation to be found in the Lancashire hotpot or toad-in-the-hole? Probably not. Yet I have often thought that, should you wish to initiate from scratch a metapolitical British nationalist project, distinct from the globalised aspirations of the Westminster class, you could do worse than take Waitrose as a model. Nationalism was always, historically, a pursuit of the affluent bourgeoisie, and even if its political content (aside from a devotion to the royal family rare among major brands) remains largely sublimated, Waitrose’s cultural production — its lovingly produced weekly newspapers and monthly magazines showcasing small-scale food producers toiling away in a timeless British countryside, its strangely feudal relationship with the Duchy of Cornwall — already echoes, in sublimated form, much of the aesthetic content and instinctive cultural meaning of classical nationalism.
The revival of Britain’s under-appreciated cuisine, halting though it may be, mocked and loved in equal measure, similarly echoes the broader angst of a nation in decline, and deep political meanings will continue to be expressed, unwittingly or not, in our conflicted relationship with our national cuisine. For Mervis, keen to emphasise Britain’s openness to the world and the bright multicultural future he sees for the nation’s food culture, change and the thrill of the new is all good and to be pursued. For Purkiss, echoing Grigson, the historical continuities of British cooking are paramount, and the sense of loss wrought by change is greater: we have lost far more than we have gained by modernity, and there is no clear path for restoration. The story of British food, full of wasted potential and opportunity, uncertain of its future direction, simultaneously seduced by new horizons and lost pastoral idylls, is the story of Britain itself.

To avoid this, quick testing should be widely available and easy to obtain globally, especially for poultry workers and people handling wild birds or other wildlife. And current testing capabilities should be quickly expanded. There are 91 public health labs in the United States that can test for H5 influenza. Positive results are sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where further analyses can detect H5N1 within about 48 hours. But plans should be in place to increase the amount of tests and testing facilities in case demand ramps up.

Perhaps the best news is that we have several H5N1 vaccines already approved by the Food and Drug Administration whose safety and immune response have been studied.

The U.S. government has a small H5N1 vaccine stockpile, but it would be nowhere near enough if a serious outbreak occurred. The current plan is to mass-produce them if and when such an outbreak occurs, based on the particular variant involved.

There are several problems, though, with this approach even under the best-case scenarios. Producing hundreds of millions of doses of a new vaccine could take six months or more.

Worryingly, all but one of the approved vaccines are produced by incubating each dose in an egg. The U.S. government keeps hundreds of thousands of chickens in secret farms with bodyguards. (It’s true!) But the bodyguards are presumably there to fend off terror attacks, not a virus. Relying on chickens to produce vaccines against a virus that has a 90 percent to 100 percent fatality rate among poultry has the makings of the most unfunny which-came-first, the-chicken-or-the-egg riddle.

The only company with an F.D.A.-approved non-egg-based H5N1 vaccine expects to be able to produce 150 million doses within six months of the declaration of a pandemic. But there are seven billion people in the world.

The mRNA-based platforms used to make two of the Covid vaccines also don’t depend on eggs. Scott Hensley, an influenza expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that those vaccines can be mass-produced faster, in as little as three months. There are currently no approved mRNA vaccines for influenza, but efforts to make one should be expedited.

By Natan Sachs, Suzanne Maloney, Samantha Gross, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Jeffrey Feltman, Bruce Riedel, Stephanie T. Williams, Reva Dhingra, Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Marsin Alshamary, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Daniel L. Byman, Madiha Afzal, Michael E. O'Hanlon, Steven Heydemann, Sharan Grewal, Jeannie Sowers, Shadi Hamid, Shibley Telhami, Amos Harel, Itamar Rabinovich 
NATAN SACHS
Two years into the Biden administration’s term, Middle East-focused scholars in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings offer thoughts on some of the policy areas the Biden administration has dealt with thus far.
The Middle East has fit awkwardly within Biden’s global priorities. Biden has sought to focus U.S. attention to other parts of the world, with more success than his immediate predecessors. Yet while competition with China and, later, the war in Ukraine have occupied much of the administration’s focus, the broader Middle East has still commanded considerable time and effort. In its first year, the administration prioritized the withdrawal from Afghanistan, an attempt to unwind U.S. involvement in the civil war in Yemen, and the effort to return to mutual compliance with the JCPOA alongside Iran. It struggled to balance a very critical initial approach to Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, with a subsequent desire to normalize relations with the Gulf, stem the rise in energy prices, and move forward on Israeli-Arab normalization.
Amid all this, the administration faced crises in Lebanon, the Horn of Africa, Iraq, and Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. It successfully worked to broker a maritime boundary between Israel and Lebanon and to help maintain ceasefires in Libya and Ethiopia. It has dealt with crises big and small, proving yet again how hard it is for U.S. administrations to divert their attention from the region. Indeed, the administration, has faced the perennial American difficulties arising from the tensions in its own policy priorities: promoting stability and maintaining uneasy relationships with difficult partners while supporting democracy and human rights; and the desire to move on from the region balanced against the necessity to address its myriad challenges and occasional opportunities.
Below, our scholars touch on several of these themes, among others. As always, scholars at Brookings take their own individual perspectives, celebrating differences of opinion among them.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Only a few years ago, democracies around the world seemed to be turning toward the pluto-populists, the wealthy men and women who convinced millions of ordinary voters that liberal democracy had run its course. They’re still out there—but their star may be dimming.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Do Republicans not know Trump will betray them?
The hidden link between workaholism and mental health
Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold.
Pushing Back the TideIn the autumn of 2017, I was in the Czech Republic on a speaking tour at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State to talk about the problem of disinformation and democracy. One night in Pilsen, a lovely city about an hour from Prague, I finished my presentation and asked for questions and discussion. A young man, speaking very good English, asked me if I would like to comment on the idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were involved with a ring of pedophiles, a common internet conspiracy theory that had already been around for a while and is now at the heart of the QAnon madness. I responded that this was a debunked story and that I was not going to be drawn into a debate about it.After the talk, I spoke with this young man. I said, “You know better than this.” He smiled and admitted that the story was bunk, but that he’d just wanted to see what I would say. “And to make sure everyone in the room heard it,” I said. He smiled again and shrugged.In other cities around the Czech Republic that fall, I fielded questions that included other conspiracy theories about NATO, the European Union, or Ukraine (or all three together); the movement of American nuclear weapons; criticism of the Western outrage at Russia for seizing Crimea; and other topics that seemed to be pulled right off of trashy websites. I began to see why other members of my various audiences (usually university-age young people) were pessimistic: In a country where Russian propaganda fell from the skies like electronic acid rain and oozed from computers like sludge from a cracked sewer pipe, how could ordinary citizens ever make informed decisions?At the time, the Czech government was led by a pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, who was soon to be joined in the government by a populist prime minister, Andrej Babiš. A billionaire, Babiš campaigned on the high-minded slogan that “everybody steals” and vowed to run the government like a company. (That should sound familiar to American voters who had to listen to similar cynical bloviations from Donald Trump for so many years.) Zeman won a second term in 2018, and Babiš remained prime minister until late 2021. Pro-Western sentiment in the Czech Republic, as well as in other former Warsaw Pact nations that had since joined NATO, looked to be fizzling out.Last month, Babiš not only lost his bid for the Czech presidency but also lost it to Petr Pavel, a retired Czech general who once held a senior position in NATO’s military leadership. Pavel is a newcomer to politics, but he clobbered Babiš—who by sheer virtue of name recognition and money should have been the favorite—garnering 58 percent of the vote in an election with a record 70 percent turnout. That’s not a squeaker; that’s a repudiation. Babiš, especially when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, was lousy at governing, as populists almost always are. But the Russian onslaught against Ukraine also seemed to break the spell for many Czechs, and this election is likely one more example of Vladimir Putin’s brutality in Ukraine undoing years of the careful propaganda that once bolstered Russia’s position in the world.Pavel’s career began in the Czechoslovak military, where he was a member of the Communist Party. (This caused some griping and cheap shots among his opponents, but a young officer joining the Party as a matter of course was an expected part of a military career in those days.) After 1990, Pavel served in a United Nations peacekeeping mission and later as the chairman of NATO’s military committee, the top military body in the Atlantic Alliance.If you want a sense of his campaign, one of his signs said, “Enough of chaos. I offer order and dignity.” (Again, millions of American voters can probably relate.) His views are an about-face from those of figures such Zeman and Babiš; he is proud of Czech aid to Ukraine and has said that the Ukrainians now “really deserve” NATO membership. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, but it is refreshing to see a government in Prague taking the regime in Moscow seriously as a mortal threat.This is all good news not only for the Western allies but for democracy itself. Nevertheless, Pavel and the leaders of other democracies still have a full plate. The Czech presidency has some influence as a national symbol, but the Republic is a parliamentary system in which executive power rests with the prime minister (currently the center-right politician Petr Fiala). And in a classic Trumpy move, Babiš issued this ominous farewell: “Forget Babiš. Try to live without Babiš. Stop waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night feeling hatred for Babiš.” What this likely means, of course, is that Babiš—who still commands significant political and material resources—will be back.Likewise, the move to the populist right is not over in neighboring Poland. And Viktor Orbán still rules Hungary, attended by a circle of American courtiers who believe he is the future of post-liberalism. (One of his admirers, Rod Dreher, just made the foolish mistake of accidentally reporting the truth: He publicized some of Orbán’s creepy pro-Russian and anti–European Union comments, and then backtracked quickly.)Still, the Czech diplomat Petr Tuma (now in residence at the Atlantic Council, in Washington) is right to note that Pavel’s win “seems to follow a tide turning against global populism, including the defeats of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.” We could add the American 2022 midterm elections to this list.It’s been a tough few years for democracy, but populist leaders—as they almost inevitably do—are now reminding voters that they never have very much to offer beyond angry slogans, mistrust, and paranoia. (These days, many of them also have Putin’s war hanging around their neck.) The Czech presidential election is one more reminder that when voters decide in favor of freedom and decency, and then actually show up at the polls, democracy wins.Related:
The Czech Republic’s fake-news problem (2017)
We might have reached peak populism. (2021)
Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a vote supported by the GOP House majority.
The U.S. is increasing its military presence in the Philippines as part of an effort to counter China and prepare for a possible conflict over Taiwan.
More than 15 million people in the Northeast are under wind-chill warnings or advisories, with potentially record-low temperatures expected starting tomorrow.
Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty
Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the SunsetBy Clint Smith
Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide across his cheek. Three pollarded willows rise up from the earth and bend like bodies frozen mid-dance. Shades of black expand across their barren trunks, as if they are about to be swallowed by the oncoming night.
The piece, painted in 1888, wasn’t originally meant to be shared with the world. The wide brushstrokes on the canvas have led art historians to believe that van Gogh painted the image quickly, perhaps as a sketch for another work—the artist’s attempt to capture the majesty of a sunset before it slipped beyond the horizon.
We’re bungling the COVID wind-down. 
Biden’s document issue is nothing like Trump’s.
Photos: Viking fire festival
Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and Kristen Cui in "Knock at the Cabin" (Phobymo / Universal Pictures)
Read. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story, “Background.”“Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.”Watch. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin infuses a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.Play our daily crossword.P.S.If you’ve never been to Prague, it’s a wonderful place and one of my favorite cities. It’s also, arguably, where the Soviet empire began its slide into oblivion. In early 1968, reformers in the then-Czechoslovak leadership took over the government (thus giving us the term “Prague Spring” that we now apply to other uprisings). In August, Soviet tanks moved in and crushed the whole project, causing many of the men and women in the old Eastern bloc, and in the U.S.S.R. itself, to doubt their faith in Moscow and the future of Soviet communism. One of the best books on this, Nightfrost in Prague, was written by one of the officials who was forcibly taken to the Kremlin, but unfortunately, it’s out of print and kind of hard to get.A former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, Norman Eisen, however, wrote a book in 2018 titled The Last Palace, which is a good introduction to the city and its history—and even its architecture, too, as it is told through the notable history of the ambassador’s residence. Eisen is known to news junkies as a regular commenter on cable news; he was the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including during Trump’s impeachment. The history of Central Europe can get a bit chewy for a general reader; instead, give The Last Palace a read—but beware of the urge it will instill in you to go and walk along the Charles Bridge.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

For decades now, gay men have been barred from giving blood. In 2015, what had been a lifetime ban was loosened, such that gay men could be donors if they’d abstained from sex for at least a year. This was later shortened to three months. Last week, the FDA put out a new and more inclusive plan: Sexually active gay and bisexual people would be permitted to donate so long as they have not recently engaged in anal sex with new or multiple partners. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, the first Senate-confirmed transgender official in the U.S., issued a statement commending the proposal for “advancing equity.” It “treats everyone the same,” she said, “regardless of gender and sexual orientation.”As a member of the small but honorable league of gay pathologists, I’m affected by these proposed policy changes more than most Americans. I’m subject to restrictions on giving blood, and I’ve also been responsible for monitoring the complications that can arise from transfusions of infected blood. I am quite concerned about HIV, given that men who have sex with men are at much greater risk of contracting the virus than members of other groups. But it’s not the blood-borne illness that I, as a doctor, fear most. Common bacteria lead to far more transfusion-transmitted infections in the U.S. than any virus does, and most of those produce severe or fatal illness. The risk from viruses is extraordinarily low—there hasn’t been a single reported case of transfusion-associated HIV in the U.S. since 2008—because laboratories now use highly accurate tests to screen all donors and ensure the safety of our blood supply. This testing is so accurate that preventing anyone from donating based on their sexual behavior is no longer logical. Meanwhile, new dictates about anal sex, like older ones explicitly targeting men who have sex with men, still discriminate against the queer community—the FDA is simply struggling to find the most socially acceptable way to pursue a policy that it should have abandoned long ago.Strict precautions made more sense 30 years ago, when screening didn’t work nearly as well as it does today. Patients with hemophilia, many of whom rely on blood products to live, were prominent, early victims of our inability to keep HIV out of the blood supply. One patient who’d acquired the virus through a transfusion lamented to The New York Times in 1993 that he had already watched an uncle and a cousin die of AIDS. Those days of “shock and denial,” as the Times described it, are thankfully behind us. But for older patients, memories of the crisis in the ’80s and early ’90s linger, and cause significant anxiety. Even people unaware of this historical context may consider the receipt of someone else’s blood disturbing, threatening, or sinful.As a doctor, I’ve found that patients tend to be more hesitant about getting a blood transfusion than they are about taking a pill. I’ve had them ask for a detailed medical history of the donor, or say they’re willing to take blood only from a close relative. (Typically, neither of these requests can be fulfilled for reasons of privacy and practicality.) Yet the same patients may accept—without question—drugs that carry a risk of serious complication that is thousands of times higher than the risk of receiving infected blood. Even when it comes to blood-borne infections, patients seem to worry less about the greatest danger—bacterial contamination—than they do about the transfer of viruses such as HIV and hepatitis C. I can’t fault anyone for being sick and scared, but the risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion is not just low—it’s essentially nonexistent.[Read: Blood plasma, sweat, and tears]Donors' feelings matter, too, and the FDA’s policies toward gay and bisexual men who wish to give blood have been unfair for many years. While officials speak in the supposedly objective language of risk and safety, their selective deployment of concern suggests a deeper homophobia. As one scholar put it in The American Journal of Bioethics more than a decade ago, “Discrimination resides not in the risk itself but in the FDA response to the risk.” Many demographic groups are at elevated risk of contracting HIV, yet the agency isn’t continually refining its exclusion criteria for young people or urban dwellers or Black and Hispanic people. Federal policy did prohibit Haitians from donating blood from 1983 to 1991, but activists successfully lobbied for the reversal of this ban with the powerful slogan “The H in HIV stands for human, not Haitian.” Nearly everyone today would find the idea of rejecting blood from one racial group to be morally repugnant. Under its new proposal, which purports to target anal sex instead of homosexuality itself, the FDA effectively persists in rejecting blood from sexual minorities.The planned update would certainly be an improvement. It comes out of years of advocacy by LGBTQ-rights organizations, and its details are apparently supported by newly conducted government research. Peter Marks, the director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, cited an unpublished study showing that “a significant fraction” of men who have sex with men would now be able to donate. But the plan is still likely to exclude a large portion of them—even those who wear condoms or regularly test for sexually transmitted infections. An FDA spokesperson told me via email that “additional data are needed to determine what proportion of [men who have sex with men] would be able to donate under the proposed change.”Research done in France, Canada, and the U.K., where similar policies have since been adopted over the past two years, demonstrates the risk. A French blood-donation study, for instance, estimated that 70 percent of men who have sex with men had more than one recent partner; and when Canadian researchers surveyed queer communities in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, they found that up to 63 percent would not be eligible to donate because they’d recently had anal sex with new or multiple partners. Just 1 percent of previously eligible donors would have been rejected by similar criteria. The U.K. assumed in its calculations that 35 to 50 percent of men who have sex with men would be ineligible under a policy much like the FDA’s, while only 1.4 percent of previous donors would be newly deferred. If the new rule’s net effect is that gay and bisexual men are turned away from blood centers at many times the rate of heterosexual individuals, what else can you call it but discrimination? The U.S. guidance is supposed to ban a lifestyle choice rather than an identity, but the implication is that too many queer men have chosen wrong. The FDA spokesperson told me, “Anal sex with more than one sexual partner has a significantly greater risk of HIV infection when compared to other sexual exposures, including oral sex or penile-vaginal sex.”If the FDA wants to pry into my sex life, it should have a good reason for doing so. The increasing granularity and intimacy of these policies—specifying numbers of partners, kinds of sex—give the impression that the stakes are very high: If we don’t keep out the most dangerous donors, the blood supply could be ruined. But donor-screening questions are a crude tool for picking needles from a haystack. The only HIV infections that are likely to get missed by modern testing are those contracted within the previous week or two. This suggests that, at most, a couple thousand individuals—gay and straight—across the entire country are at risk of slipping past our testing defenses at any given time. Of course, very few of them will happen to donate blood right then. No voluntary questionnaire can ever totally exclude this possibility, but patients and doctors already accept other life-threatening transfusion risks that occur at much greater rates than HIV transmission ever could. When I would be on call for monitoring transfusion reactions at a single hospital, the phone would ring a few times every night. Yet blood has been given out tens of millions of times across the country since the last known instance of a transfusion resulting in a case of HIV.[Read: How blood-plasma companies target the poorest Americans]Early data suggest that the overall risk-benefit calculus of receiving blood isn’t likely to change. When eligibility criteria were first relaxed in the U.S. a few years ago, the already tiny rate of HIV-positive donations remained minuscule. Real-world results from other countries that have recently adopted sexual-orientation-neutral policies will become available in the coming years. But modeling studies already support removing any screening question that explicitly or implicitly targets queer men. A 2022 Canadian analysis suggested that removing all questions about men who have sex with men would not result in a significantly higher risk to patients. “Extra behavioral risk questions may not be necessary,” the researchers concluded. If there must be a restriction in place, then one narrowly tailored to the slim risk window of seven to 10 days before donation should be good enough. (The FDA says that its proposed policy “would be expected to reduce the likelihood of donations by individuals with new or recent HIV infection who may be in the window period.”)As a gay man, I realize that, brief periods of crisis during the coronavirus pandemic aside, no one needs my blood. Only 6.8 percent of men in the U.S. identify as gay or bisexual, so our potential benefit to the overall supply is inherently modest. If we went back to being banned completely, patients would not be harmed. But reversing that ban, both in letter and in spirit, would send a vital message: Our government and health-care system view sexual minorities as more than a disease vector. A policy that uses anal sex as a stand-in for men who have sex with men only further stigmatizes this population by impugning one of its main sources of sexual pleasure. There is no question that nonmonogamous queer men have a greater chance of contracting HIV. But a policy that truly treats everyone the same would accept a tiny amount of risk as the price of working with human beings.

Sean Carroll bought a green screen and a camera during the first pandemic lockdowns of early 2020. Each week, the theoretical physicist and acclaimed science writer shot two hour-long videos explaining fundamental ideas in modern physics, including conservation, quantum mechanics, gravity, and black holes.
Carroll is turning that series, “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe,” into a namesake book trilogy. This Friday he will give an in-person talk at the Harvard Book Store about volume one, “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion.” Both video and book series are conceived as mash-ups of popular science romp and college-level textbook and aimed at an oft-neglected reader: one not so interested they’d want a degree but enough to crave a detailed grasp of how it all really works.
“Secretly, the real audience for this book is my 16-year-old self. I would have loved to have this,” said Carroll, who received his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard in 1993. Today, he is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. The Gazette spoke with Carroll about his project and why he dreams of a world where people can debate their favorite dark-matter candidates — and other physics mysteries — at a local pub.
Q&A
Sean Carroll
GAZETTE: You said you started your video series to help keep people connected during the surreal early days of the pandemic. Did it accomplish what you hoped?
CARROLL: Yes, they kept people connected, and the pandemic was a great pleasure. No, I was definitely a little bit less ambitious than that. Maybe it did more good for me than for the rest of the world. But the reception was pretty good. The most popular video has something like 800,000 views. And it’s an hour and a half of me writing down tensor equations for general relativity. It’s not the usual viral hit on YouTube.
GAZETTE: So then, why turn the videos into a book trilogy? Why aren’t the videos enough?
CARROLL: Like I said, 800,000 people watched the most popular video. Let me tell you, it’s not 800,000 people who are buying the book. But that doesn’t mean that the people who do buy the book, even though it’s a smaller number, have watched the videos. Some people just like reading books. And honestly, you can learn more from the books because it’s a slower process.
GAZETTE: It also seems like you’ve invented a whole new genre, something between a popular science book and a textbook. Was that intentional?
CARROLL: That was absolutely intentional. I’ve written a few popular books. But for the most part, my goal is not just to be pedagogical. My books make an argument that you can disagree with, whether it’s about the nature of reality or the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Whereas these books try very hard to stick to things that everyone agrees with. There’s a vast audience in between the ones who read popular books and the ones who read textbooks. That’s a gap I’m happy to try to fill.

“Science is not just a set of final answers; it’s a way of thinking about the world and learning new things.”

GAZETTE: Throughout the book, you present a lot of abstract concepts, like infinity, that are challenging for most people to conceptualize, even if they’re important to questions about our natural world. Why are these concepts still valuable to explore?
CARROLL  I’m not just trying to explain the bare bones of the physics. I brought in little historical stories, philosophical background, mathematical niceties, and so forth. In the back of my mind, I’m always thinking like, “What is it that got me really interested?” With infinity, we use it in the continuum and our best descriptions of the natural world without really being sure whether it’s necessary. But I honestly don’t know whether we’re on the right track. So, even though I tried to stick with things that everyone agrees on, I’m happy to point out places where we don’t agree.
GAZETTE: Are there any physics concepts that are commonly misunderstood?
CARROLL: Oh, my goodness, there are so many. Within the scope of this book, I talked about space and time and space time. Classical mechanics up through general relativity. There are obviously a lot of misimpressions about general relativity, curved space time, the expanding universe, and things like that. But I don’t dwell on that. The tiny bit I’ve learned from academic research into misinformation and learning is that if you try to teach something by saying, “Here’s the wrong thing that you might think is true. And now I’m going to fix it,” people end up thinking the wrong thing because you put the idea in their heads. I try to spend most of my time thinking about the correct conceptions.
GAZETTE: For this first book, you travel all the way from Aristotle and Newton to modern research on black holes. What’s next?
CARROLL: I’m working on book two as we speak, and that’s all about quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The third book will be complexity and emergence. Some of that is just a rubric that covers thermodynamics and cosmology, but the ideas of complex systems, criticality, and networks are hugely important to identify the ways in which the microscopic rules of the universe build up together to make this crazy complex macroscopic world we live in.
GAZETTE: You’ve said you’d love to hear people discussing physics at the local pub or in line at the grocery store. Apart from making you and other theoretical physicists happy, what might that accomplish?
CARROLL: I’m not an expert on science education. But from what little I do understand, we focus way too much on a set of facts. Science is not just a set of final answers; it’s a way of thinking about the world and learning new things. So, if people understood how and why we got to specific ideas, they would, I think, have a better idea of how to keep uncertainty in mind, judge new evidence, think about the world in a quantitative way, and be open to changing their minds. All those things are crucially important to science and certainly serve people more broadly.
GAZETTE: Which physics topic would you be most excited to hear people chatting about at the pub?
CARROLL: The cheeky response would be Hamiltonian mechanics. In the book, we learn Newtonian mechanics, then a whole other way of doing it, called Hamiltonian mechanics, and then another way, Lagrangian mechanics. Three different ways to do the same underlying physics. Is one of them more right? We don’t know. But it’s important to conceptualize the same ideas from different angles because one might suggest a different way forward. We’re not done yet. We’re still thinking about what happens next. So, in this book, I’m trying to provide both the ideas that are going to be used for the next 500 years and what to look out for as we move forward.

Stephen B. Thomas, the director of the Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, considers himself an eternal optimist. When he reflects on the devastating pandemic that has been raging for the past three years, he chooses to focus less on what the world has lost and more on what it has gained: potent antiviral drugs, powerful vaccines, and, most important, unprecedented collaborations among clinicians, academics, and community leaders that helped get those lifesaving resources to many of the people who needed them most. But when Thomas, whose efforts during the pandemic helped transform more than 1,000 Black barbershops and salons into COVID-vaccine clinics, looks ahead to the next few months, he worries that momentum will start to fizzle out—or, even worse, that it will go into reverse.This week, the Biden administration announced that it would allow the public-health-emergency declaration over COVID-19 to expire in May—a transition that’s expected to put shots, treatments, tests, and other types of care more out of reach of millions of Americans, especially those who are uninsured. The move has been a long time coming, but for community leaders such as Thomas, whose vaccine-outreach project, Shots at the Shop, has depended on emergency funds and White House support, the transition could mean the imperilment of a local infrastructure that he and his colleagues have been building for years. It shouldn’t have been inevitable, he told me, that community vaccination efforts would end up on the chopping block. “A silver lining of the pandemic was the realization that hyperlocal strategies work,” he said. “Now we’re seeing the erosion of that.”I called Thomas this week to discuss how the emergency declaration allowed his team to mobilize resources for outreach efforts—and what may happen in the coming months as the nation attempts to pivot back to normalcy.Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.Katherine J. Wu: Tell me about the genesis of Shots at the Shop.Stephen B. Thomas: We started our work with barbershops and beauty salons in 2014. It’s called HAIR: Health Advocates In-Reach and Research. Our focus was on colorectal-cancer screening. We brought medical professionals—gastroenterologists and others—into the shop, recognizing that Black people in particular were dying from colon cancer at rates that were just unacceptable but were potentially preventable with early diagnosis and appropriate screening.Now, if I can talk to you about colonoscopy, I could probably talk to you about anything. In 2019, we held a national health conference for barbers and stylists. They all came from around the country to talk about different areas of health and chronic disease: prostate cancer, breast cancer, others. We brought them all together to talk about how we can address health disparities and get more agency and visibility to this new frontline workforce.When the pandemic hit, all the plans that came out of the national conference were on hold. But we continued our efforts in the barbershops. We started a Zoom town hall. And we started seeing misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic being disseminated in our shops, and there were no countermeasures.We got picked up on the national media, and then we got the endorsement of the White House. And that’s when we launched Shots at the Shop. We had 1,000 shops signed up in, I’d say, less than 90 days.Wu: Why do you think Shots at the Shop was so successful? What was the network doing differently from other vaccine-outreach efforts that spoke directly to Black and brown communities?Thomas: If you came to any of our clinics, it didn’t feel like you were coming into a clinic or a hospital. It felt like you were coming to a family reunion. We had a DJ spinning music. We had catered food. We had a festive environment. Some people showed up hesitant, and some of them left hesitant but vaccinated. We didn’t have to change their worldview. But we treated them with dignity and respect. We weren’t telling them they’re stupid and don’t understand science.And the model worked. It worked so well that even the health professionals were extremely pleased, because now all they had to do was show up with the vaccine, and the arms were ready for needles.[Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete]The barbers and stylists saw themselves as doing health-related things anyway. They had always seen themselves as doing more than just cutting hair. No self-respecting Black barber is going to say, “We’ll get you in and out in 10 minutes.” It doesn’t matter how much hair you have: You’re gonna be in there for half a day.Wu: How big of a difference do you think your network’s outreach efforts made in narrowing the racial gaps in COVID vaccination?Thomas: Attribution is always difficult, and success has many mothers. So I will say this to you: I have no doubt that we made a huge difference. With a disease like COVID, you can’t afford to have any pocket unprotected, and we were vaccinating people who would otherwise have never been vaccinated. We were dealing with people at the “hell no” wall.We were also vaccinating people who were homeless. They were treated with dignity and respect. At some of our shops, we did a coat drive and a shoe drive. And we had dentists providing us with oral-health supplies: toothbrush, floss, paste, and other things. It made a huge difference. When you meet people where they are, you’ve got to meet all their needs.Wu: How big of a difference did the emergency declaration, and the freeing-up of resources, tools, and funds, make for your team’s outreach efforts?Thomas: Even with all the work I’ve been doing in the barber shop since 2014, the pandemic got us our first grant from the state. Money flowed. We had resources to go beyond the typical mechanisms. I was able to secure thousands of KN95 masks and distribute them to shops. Same thing with rapid tests. We even sent them Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, a DIY filtration system to clean up indoor air.Without the emergency declaration, we would still be in the desert screaming for help. The emergency declaration made it possible to get resources through nontraditional channels, and we were doing things that the other systems—the hospital system, the local health department—couldn’t do. We extended their reach to populations that have historically been underserved and distrustful.Wu: The public-health-emergency declaration hasn’t yet expired. What signs of trouble are you seeing right now?Thomas: The bridge between the barbershops and the clinical side has been shut down in almost all places, including here in Maryland. I go to the shop and they say to me, “Dr. T, when are we going to have the boosters here?” Then I call my clinical partners, who deliver the shots. Some won’t even answer my phone calls. And when they do, they say, “Oh, we don’t do pop-ups anymore. We don’t do community-outreach clinics anymore, because the grant money’s gone. The staff we hired during the pandemic, they use the pandemic funding—they’re gone.” But people are here; they want the booster. And my clinical partners say, “Send them down to a pharmacy.” Nobody wants to go to a pharmacy.[Read: The COVID strategy America hasn’t really tried]You can’t see me, so you can’t see the smoke still coming out of my ears. But it hurts. We got them to trust. If you abandon the community now, it will simply reinforce the idea that they don’t matter.Wu: What is the response to this from the communities you’re talking to?Thomas: It’s “I told you so, they didn’t care about us. I told you, they would leave us with all these other underlying conditions.” You know, it shouldn’t take a pandemic to build trust. But if we lose it now, it will be very, very difficult to build back.We built a bridge. It worked. Why would you dismantle it? Because that’s exactly what's happening right now. The very infrastructure we created to close the racial gaps in vaccine acceptance is being dismantled. It’s totally unacceptable.Wu: The emergency declaration was always going to end at some point. Did it have to play out like this?Thomas: I don’t think so. If you talk to the hospital administrators, they’ll tell you the emergency declaration and the money allowed them to add outreach. And when the money went away, they went back to business as usual. Even though the outreach proved you could actually do a better job. And the misinformation and the disinformation campaign hasn’t stopped. Why would you go back to what doesn’t work?Wu: What is your team planning for the short and long term, with limited resources?Thomas: As long as Shots at the Shop can connect clinical partners to access vaccines, we will definitely keep that going.Nobody wants to go back to normal. So many of our barbers and stylists feel like they’re on their own. I’m doing my best to supply them with KN95 masks and rapid tests. We have kept the conversation going on our every-other-week Zoom town hall. We just launched a podcast. We put out some of our stories in the form of a graphic novel, The Barbershop Storybook. And we’re trying to launch a national association for barbers and stylists, called Barbers and Stylists United for Health.The pandemic resulted in a mobilization of innovation, a recognition of the intelligence at the community level, the recognition that you need to culturally tailor your strategy. We need to keep those relationships intact. Because this is not the last time we’re going to see a pandemic even in our lifetime. I’m doing my best to knock on doors to continue to put our proposals out there. Hopefully, people will realize that reaching Black and Hispanic communities is worth sustaining.

When it comes to treating disease with food, the quackery stretches back far. Through the centuries, raw garlic has been touted as a home treatment for everything from chlamydia to the common cold; Renaissance remedies for the plague included figs soaked in hyssop oil. During the 1918 flu pandemic, Americans wolfed down onions or chugged “fluid beef” gravy to keep the deadly virus at bay.Even in modern times, the internet abounds with dubious culinary cure-alls: apple-cider vinegar for gonorrhea; orange juice for malaria; mint, milk, and pineapple for tuberculosis. It all has a way of making real science sound like garbage. Research on nutrition and immunity “has been ruined a bit by all the writing out there on Eat this to cure cancer,” Lydia Lynch, an immunologist and a cancer biologist at Harvard, told me.In recent years, though, plenty of legit studies have confirmed that our diets really can affect our ability to fight off invaders—down to the fine-scale functioning of individual immune cells. Those studies belong to a new subfield of immunology sometimes referred to as immunometabolism. Researchers are still a long way off from being able to confidently recommend specific foods or dietary supplements for colds, flus, STIs, and other infectious illnesses. But someday, knowledge of how nutrients fuel the fight against disease could influence the way that infections are treated in hospitals, in clinics, and maybe at home—not just with antimicrobials and steroids but with dietary supplements, metabolic drugs, or whole foods.Although major breakthroughs in immunometabolism are just now arriving, the concepts that underlie them have been around for at least as long as the quackery. People have known for millennia that in the hours after we fall ill, our appetite dwindles; our body feels heavy and sluggish; we lose our thirst drive. In the 1980s, the veterinarian Benjamin Hart argued that those changes were a package deal—just some of many sickness behaviors, as he called them, that are evolutionarily hardwired into all sorts of creatures. The goal, Hart told me recently, is to “help the animal stay in one place and conserve energy”—especially as the body devotes a large proportion of its limited resources to igniting microbe-fighting fevers.The notion of illness-induced anorexia (not to be confused with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa) might seem, at first, like “a bit of a paradox,” says Zuri Sullivan, an immunologist at Harvard. Fighting pathogenic microbes is energetically costly—which makes eating less a very counterintuitive choice. But researchers have long posited that cutting down on calories could serve a strategic purpose: to deprive certain pathogens of essential nutrients. (Because viruses do not eat to acquire energy, this notion is limited to cell-based organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and parasites.) A team led by Miguel Soares, an immunologist at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, in Portugal, recently showed that this exact scenario might be playing out with malaria. As the parasites burst out of the red blood cells where they replicate, the resulting spray of heme (an oxygen-transporting molecule) prompts the liver to stop making glucose. The halt seems to deprive the parasites of nutrition, weakening them and tempering the infection’s worst effects.[Read: Why science can be so indecisive about nutrition]Cutting down on sugar can be a dangerous race to the bottom: Animals that forgo food while they’re sick are trying to starve out an invader before they themselves run out of energy. Let the glucose boycott stretch on too long, and the dieter might develop dangerously low blood sugar —a common complication of severe malaria—which can turn deadly if untreated. At the same time, though, a paucity of glucose might have beneficial effects on individual tissues and cells during certain immune fights. For example, low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diets seem to enhance the protective powers of certain types of immune cells in mice, making it tougher for particular pathogens to infiltrate airway tissue.Those findings are still far from potential human applications. But Andrew Wang, an immunologist and a rheumatologist at Yale, hopes that this sort of research could someday yield better clinical treatments for sepsis, an often fatal condition in which an infection spreads throughout the body, infiltrating the blood. “It’s still not understood exactly what you’re supposed to feed folks with sepsis,” Wang told me. He and his former mentor at Yale, Ruslan Medzhitov, are now running a clinical trial to see whether shifting the balance of carbohydrates and lipids in their diet speeds recovery for people ill with sepsis. If the team is able to suss out clear patterns, doctors might eventually be able to flip the body’s metabolic switches with carefully timed doses of drugs, giving immune cells a bigger edge against their enemies.But the rules of these food-illness interactions, to the extent that anyone understands them, are devilishly complex. Sepsis can be caused by a whole slew of different pathogens. And context really, really matters. In 2016, Wang, Medzhitov, and their colleagues discovered that feeding mice glucose during infections created starkly different effects depending on the nature of the pathogen driving disease. When the mice were pumped full of glucose while infected with the bacterium Listeria, all of them died—whereas about half of the rodents that were allowed to give in to their infection-induced anorexia lived. Meanwhile, the same sugary menu increased survival rates for mice with the flu.In this case, the difference doesn’t seem to boil down to what the microbe was eating. Instead, the mice’s diet changed the nature of the immune response they were able to marshal—and how much collateral damage that response was able to inflict on the body, as James Hamblin wrote for The Atlantic at the time. The type of inflammation that mice ignited against Listeria, the team found, could imperil fragile brain cells when the rodents were well fed. But when the mice went off sugar, their starved livers started producing an alternate fuel source called ketone bodies—the same compounds people make when on a ketogenic diet—that helped steel their neurons. Even as the mice fought off their bacterial infections, their brain stayed resilient to the inflammatory burn. The opposite played out when the researchers subbed in influenza, a virus that sparks a different type of inflammation: Glucose pushed brain cells into better shielding themselves against the immune system’s fiery response.[Read: Feed a cold, don’t starve it]There’s not yet one unifying principle to explain these differences. But they are a reminder of an underappreciated aspect of immunity. Surviving disease, after all, isn’t just about purging a pathogen from the body; our tissues also have to guard themselves from shrapnel as immune cells and microbes wage all-out war. It’s now becoming clear, Soares told me, that “metabolic reprogramming is a big component of that protection.” The tactics that thwart a bacterium like Listeria might not also shield us from a virus, a parasite, or a fungus; they may not be ideal during peacetime. Which means our bodies must constantly toggle between metabolic states.In the same way that the types of infections likely matter, so do the specific types of nutrients: animal fats, plant fats, starches, simple sugars, proteins. Like glucose, fats can be boons in some contexts but detrimental in others, as Lynch has found. In people with obesity or other metabolic conditions, immune cells appear to reconfigure themselves to rely more heavily on fats as they perform their day-to-day functions. They can also be more sluggish when they attack. That’s the case for a class of cells called natural killers: “They still recognize cancer or a virally infected cell and go to it as something that needs to be killed,” Lynch told me. “But they lack the energy to actually kill it.” Timing, too, almost certainly has an effect. The immune defenses that help someone expunge a virus in the first few days of an infection might not be the ones that are ideal later on in the course of disease.Even starving out bacterial enemies isn’t a surefire strategy. A few years ago, Janelle Ayres, an immunologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and her colleagues found that when they infected mice with Salmonella and didn’t allow the rodents to eat, the hungry microbes in their guts began to spread outside of the intestines, likely in search of food. The migration ended up killing tons of their tiny mammal hosts. Mice that ate normally, meanwhile, fared far better—though the Salmonella inside of them also had an easier time transmitting to new hosts. The microbes, too, were responding to the metabolic milieu, and trying to adapt. “It would be great if it was as simple as ‘If you have a bacterial infection, reduce glucose,’” Ayres said. “But I think we just don’t know.”All of this leaves immunometabolism in a somewhat chaotic state. “We don’t have simple recommendations” on how to eat your way to better immunity, Medzhitov told me. And any that eventually emerge will likely have to be tempered by caveats: Factors such as age, sex, infection and vaccination history, underlying medical conditions, and more can all alter people’s immunometabolic needs. After Medzhitov’s 2016 study on glucose and viral infections was published, he recalls being dismayed by a piece from a foreign outlet circulating online claiming that “a scientist from the USA says that during flu, you should eat candy,” he told me with a sigh. “That was bad.”[Read: You can’t “starve” cancer, but you might help treat it with food]But considering how chaotic, individualistic, and messy nutrition is for humans, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the dietary principles governing our individual cells can get pretty complicated too. For now, Medzhitov said, we may be able to follow our instincts. Our bodies, after all, have been navigating this mess for millennia, and have probably picked up some sense of what they need along the way. It may not be a coincidence that during viral infections, “something sweet like honey and tea can really feel good,” Medzhitov said. There may even be some immunological value in downing the sick-day classic, chicken soup: It’s chock-full of fluid and salts, helpful things to ingest when the body’s electrolyte balance has been thrown out of whack by disease.The science around sickness cravings is far from settled. Still, Sullivan, who trained with Medzhitov, jokes that she now feels better about indulging in Talenti mango sorbet when she’s feeling under the weather with something viral, thanks to her colleagues’ 2016 finds. Maybe the sugar helps her body battle the virus without harming itself; then again, maybe not. For now, she figures it can’t hurt to dig in.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Winston Churchill was many things: statesman, soldier, writer. He was one of the first world leaders to sound the alarm about the Nazi menace in the 1930s, and then captivated the global imagination as a leader against the Axis powers in World War II. While prime minister of the United Kingdom during the war, he kept a crushing schedule, often spending 18 hours a day at work. On top of this, he wrote book after book in office. By the end of his life, he had finished 43, filling 72 volumes.Churchill also suffered from crippling depression, which he called his “black dog,” and which visited him again and again. It seems almost unthinkable that he could be so productive in states so grim that he once told his doctor, “I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.”Some say Churchill’s depression was bipolar, and windows of mania allowed him to work as much as he did. But a few of his biographers explain it differently: Churchill’s workaholism wasn’t in spite of his suffering, but because of it. He distracted himself with work. Lest you think this far-fetched, researchers today find that workaholism is a common addiction in response to distress. And like so many addictions, it worsens the situation it’s meant to alleviate.In the United States, tens of millions—as many as 10 percent of us—suffer from a substance addiction at some point in our lives. We are all too familiar with how addictions can creep up on us. In many cases, use of a controlled substance to ease the pain of a malady turns into an abuse disorder. Sometimes that use begins with treatment by a professional, but when the treatment stops, the drug use doesn’t. This is a common path to opiate addiction.But many people treat themselves right from the start. In 2018, researchers analyzed a decade’s worth of data and wrote in the journal Depression and Anxiety that, based on their literature review, 24 percent of people with an anxiety disorder and nearly 22 percent of people with a mood disorder (such as major depression or bipolar disorder) self-medicate using alcohol or drugs. Self-medicators were far more likely to develop substance dependence. For example, epidemiological data revealed that people who self-medicated for anxiety using alcohol were more than six times as likely to develop persistent alcohol dependence as those who didn’t self-medicate.There is compelling evidence that some people treat their emotional problems with work as well. This can lead to its own kind of addiction. Many studies have shown a strong association between workaholism and the symptoms of psychiatric disorders, such as anxiety and depression, and it has been common to assume that compulsive work leads to these maladies. But some psychologists have recently argued reverse causation—that people may treat their depression and anxiety with workaholic behavior. As the authors of one widely reported 2016 study in the scientific journal PLOS One wrote, “Workaholism (in some instances) develops as an attempt to reduce uncomfortable feelings of anxiety and depression.”[From the July 2019 issue: Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think]The 2016 study received significant attention for its quality, and will no doubt stimulate more tests of this hypothesis in the coming years. If the findings hold, which I suspect they will, the causal relationship could partially explain why so many people increased their work hours during the pandemic. For many months during the initial shutdowns, people faced boredom, loneliness, and anxiety; by late May 2020, CDC data showed that nearly a quarter of American adults had reported symptoms of depression. (In 2019, that figure was 6.5 percent.) Perhaps a portion of workers self-treated by doubling down on their jobs in order to feel busy and productive.People who struggle with workaholism can easily deny that it’s a problem, and thus miss the underlying issues they are self-treating. How can work be bad? As the Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, told me in a recent interview for The Atlantic’s How to Build a Happy Life podcast, “Even previously healthy and adaptive behaviors—behaviors that I think we broadly as a culture would think of as healthy, advantageous behaviors—now have become drugified such that they are made more potent, more accessible, more novel, more ubiquitous.” If you are sneaking into the bathroom at home to check your work email on your iPhone, she’s talking about you.What’s more, when it comes to work, people reward you for addictive behavior. No one says, “Wow, an entire bottle of gin in one night? You are an outstanding drinker.” But work 16 hours a day, and you’ll probably get a promotion.[Read: A profession is not a personality]Despite the extolled virtues of maximum work, the costs will almost certainly outrun the benefits, as they usually do in self-medicating addictions. The burnout, depression, job stress, and work-life conflict will get worse, not better. And as Lembke also told me, workaholism can lead to secondary addictions, such as to drugs, alcohol, or pornography, which people use to self-medicate for the problems caused by the primary addiction, often with catastrophic personal consequences.To find solutions to work addiction, I interviewed my Harvard colleague Ashley Whillans, the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, for another episode of How to Build a Happy Life. She told me that individual solutions to workaholism include increasing your awareness of how you use your time and shifting your mindset away from valuing work over leisure. She recommended three practices.1. Do a time audit.For a few days, keep a careful log of your major activities—work, leisure, running errands—as well as how long you spent on each one and how you felt. Note the activities that bring you the most positive mood and meaning. This will give you two pieces of information: how much you are working (to make denial impossible), and what you like to do when you aren’t working (to make recovery more attractive).[Read: The secret to happiness at work]2. Schedule your downtime.Workaholics tend to marginalize nonwork activities as “nice to have,” and thus crowd them out with work. This is how the 14th hour of work, which is rarely productive, displaces an hour you might have spent with your children. Block off time in your day for nonwork activities, just as you do for meetings.3. Program your leisure.Don’t leave those downtime slots too loose. Unstructured time is an invitation to turn back to work, or to passive activities that aren’t great for well-being, such as scrolling social media or watching television. You probably have a to-do list that is organized in priority order. Do the same with your leisure, planning active pastimes you value. If you enjoy calling your friend, don’t leave it for when you happen to have time—schedule it and stick to the plan.This has been a game changer for me. I treat my walks, prayer time, and gym sessions as if they were meetings with the president. And when I have nothing planned, my plan is literally to do nothing, without succumbing to distractions.Dealing with a work addiction can make a real difference in our lives. It opens up time for family and friends. It allows nonwork pastimes that are not useful, just fun. It enables us to take better care of ourselves, for example, by exercising. All of these things have been shown to raise happiness or lower unhappiness.But addressing workaholism still leaves the underlying issue that working so hard was meant to treat. Perhaps you too are visited by Churchill’s black dog. Or maybe your dog is a different color: a troubled marriage; a chronic sense of inadequacy; maybe even ADHD or obsessive-compulsive disorder, which have been linked to overwork. Ceasing to use work to distract yourself from that is an opportunity to face your troubles, perhaps with help, and thus solve the problem that got you hooked on excessive work in the first place.[Read: America’s fever of workaholism is finally breaking]Facing the dog might seem scarier than simply turning to the old dogcatchers: your boss, your colleagues, your career. But in the end, you might just find a way to get rid of that mutt for good.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Every January since 2011, AEI’s Rick Hess has released his Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, which recognize the academics who had the greatest influence on educational policy over the previous 12 months. Working with a selection committee, he ranks the top 200, using a scoring system that he takes pains to explain; he also provides separate lists of the most influential scholars in different disciplines and the most prominent junior faculty members.
Policy wonks anticipate the results keenly. The results are, however, also helpful for those who care deeply about education but are not experts: A good way to figure out what is going on in our schools—and what people think should be going on—is to follow up on the names on the lists and read books, articles, and tweets by and about these scholars. Naturally there is some subjectivity in the rankings, and one point is of particular interest. In Hess’s words: “There are some academics that dabble (quite successfully) in education but for whom education is only a sideline. They are not included in these rankings.”
Who is left off? I asked Hess, who told me that at least in the last five years, he does not believe anyone was omitted from the 200 who would have been included had his committee been inclined to consider dabblers. If this is so, then the rankings paint a damning picture of the effect—or, rather, non-effect—the so-called public humanities have on what goes on in our classrooms, for nearly all the scholars practice one of five non-humanistic disciplines: psychology (four of the top 10 in 2023), sociology (two), “curriculum, instruction, and administration” (two), economics (one), and “government and policy” (none, but two in the second 10).
The outlier is John McWhorter (ranked #6), the only linguist among the 200. I admire McWhorter tremendously and am delighted that he is so high on the list, but I would not have thought the committee would consider him primarily a scholar of education. There are also seven scholars of history (all but one of whom have their primary appointment in an ed school), three of law, two of anthropology, and one of medicine. You will not find any philosophers, never mind professors of English.
Even if a few academic humanists did make the cut—a shout-out here to historian Amna Khalid (#193)—the operative words are “a few.” If you want to have an effect on education today, you pretty much have to be a social scientist. Now, I am obviously not against data! We need to know what ideas and methods will strengthen the knowledge and performance of the coming generations.
That said, we are in a bad state when we spend all our time worrying about quantitative “learning outcomes.” And we are also in a bad state when even as distinguished a scholar of education as psychologist Angela Duckworth (#2), whose work on grit has garnered much praise but also some criticism, states, obviously incorrectly, that “you cannot study what you cannot measure.”
Different people will have different views on how important the following are at one or another stage in our educational system from preschool to PhD, but in our rush to calculate every last thing, we run the danger of ignoring other goals, such as the development of rationality, moral thinking, civic-mindedness, and overall sound judgment. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes—philosophers all—would not be pleased.
Being on the list doesn’t mean that people should pay attention to you: Ranked #3 is the infamous Jo Boaler. But not being on the list suggests that people are not paying attention to you. Of course, there could be good reason for this: Garion Frankel’s takedown “What are Philosophers of Education even Talking about?” makes for depressing reading. Depressing, too, is the summer 2022 issue of Daedalus on the public humanities, which concentrates on how “the humanities help us understand urgent public concerns, such as climate change, racial justice, and public health.” No wonder ordinary citizens have no time for the humanities when the editors introduce the subject by stating that “the past two years point to the vital role the humanities play in society. To name just two recent examples, this role surfaced in public efforts to understand and respond to the human dimensions of pandemics and policing.” Perhaps instead public humanists might have given reasons for keeping schools open and safe?
Humanistic forays into education that everyone should heed—that’s another article. For now, I’ll say only that I eagerly await the next book by two political philosophers at AEI, Ben and Jenna Storey, tentatively titled The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.
Preparation for life: Now there’s a fine summary of what our educational goal should be.
Learn more: The Associated Press vs. the French | Logos in Savannah | Hand Over Your Money and DIE | Grace and Serendipity
The post The Non-Effect of Academic Public Humanists? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The first rule of at-home printers is that you do not need a printer until you do, and then you need it desperately. The second rule is that when you plug the printer in, either it will work frictionlessly for a decade, or it will immediately and frequently fail in novel, even impressive ways, ultimately causing the purchase to haunt you like a malevolent spirit. So rich is the history of printer dysfunction that its foibles became a cliché in the early days of personal computing.After years of holding out, my family finally succumbed to a pandemic inkjet purchase. (Like many, we were doing a lot of online shopping in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.) I girded my loins for the agony of paper jams, phantom spooler errors, and the dreaded utterance “Driver not found.” What I did not expect, however, was for my printer to shake me down like a loan shark.The trouble started with a label for a package. My printer was unresponsive. Then I discovered an error message on my computer indicating that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company. When I logged on to HP’s website, I learned why: The credit card I had used to sign up for HP’s Instant Ink cartridge-refill program had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response.For those not trapped in this devil’s bargain, Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that purports to monitor one’s printer usage and ink levels and automatically send new cartridges when they run low. The name is misleading, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself but for the number of pages printed. (The recommended household plan is $5.99 a month for 100 pages). Like others, I signed up in haste during the printer-setup process, only slightly aware of what I was purchasing. Getting ink delivered when I need it sounded convenient enough to me, a man so thoroughly coddled by one-click e-commerce that the frontal lobes of my brain likely resemble cottage cheese. The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges occupy some liminal ownership space. You possess them, but you are, in essence, renting both them and your machine while you’re enrolled in the program.I’ve struggled in subsequent conversations with friends and family to adequately convey the level and intensity of entitled fury I felt when I realized all of this. Here was a piece of technology that I had paid more than $200 for, stocked with full ink cartridges. My printer, gently used, was sitting on my desk in perfect working order but rendered useless by Hewlett-Packard, a tech corporation with a $28 billion market cap at the time of writing, because I had failed to make a monthly payment for a service intended to deliver new printer cartridges that I did not yet need. Indignant, and making grotesque, frustrated noises that I now understand to be hereditary Warzel responses to printer problems, I declared to nobody in particular that I was being extorted by my printer.I am sheepish to air this grievance aloud, lest it be seen as an abuse of my venerable platform. I am an adult of somewhat sound mind and have the ability to read contracts: I did this to myself. But my printer’s shakedown is just one example of how digital subscriptions have permeated physical tech so thoroughly that they are blurring the lines of ownership. Even if I paid for it, can I really say that I own my printer if HP can flip a switch and make it inert?“What HP is doing is remarkably bad and deeply user hostile,” the writer and activist Cory Doctorow told me recently. Doctorow has written extensively about digital-rights management across printer brands. For him, prosaic printer issues like mine help people understand digital rights and the ways that companies make devices that resist user modification. “The battle for the soul of digital freedom [is] taking place inside your printer,” he argues. It’s not just about the surveillance, or the egregious markups on ink and the efforts to stop third parties from undercutting the inkjet-cartridge market, he said. It’s about the way that consumers are losing control over things they’ve already paid for.One of his favorite examples of this is when Google bricked a bunch of sensors after shutting down a service it had acquired. Then there’s Tesla, which frequently issues software updates to owners’ vehicles, sometimes dramatically altering a car’s functionality. In 2017, when Hurricane Irma threatened Florida, the company pushed an update that temporarily increased battery life for owners of vehicles within reach of the storm. Tesla was praised at the time, but people like Doctorow saw the event as an example of the power that tech companies have over customers—the carmaker simply lifted an arbitrary software restriction on a physical battery that was otherwise used to create two different price points for consumers. “App stores powering our devices are convenient, and subscriptions can work great when you have a benevolent dictator, but what happens if they decide to turn the screws on you or increase the prices and your car stops working?” he said. “You have no remedies then.”[Read: Your smart thermostat isn’t here to help you]I can report that corners of the information superhighway are teeming with individuals who are incandescently furious about HP’s Instant Ink program. Together, our networked gripes form a complex harmony of resentment—a “Hallelujah Chorus” of bemoaning. There are tales of woe across HP’s customer-support site, in Reddit threads, and on Twitter. A pending class-action lawsuit in California alleges that the Instant Ink program has “significant catches” and does not deliver new cartridges on time or allow those enrolled to use cartridges purchased outside the subscription service, rendering the consumer frequently unable to print. Parker Truax, a spokesperson for HP, told me, “Instant Ink cartridges will continue working until the end of the current billing cycle in which [a customer cancels]. To continue printing after they discontinue their Instant Ink subscription and their billing cycle ends, they can purchase and use HP original Standard or XL cartridges.”The problems can extend beyond artificial limitations. Skip Weisman, who owns his own consulting business in Poughkeepsie, New York, told me that HP Instant Ink would not stop sending him inkjet cartridges. Armed with well over a year’s supply, Weissman canceled his subscription. “It’s called Instant Ink—nobody told me that if I canceled, then all those cartridges would stop working,” he said. But they did. “It just feels so manipulative. I guess this is our future, where your printer ink spies on you. It’s bleak.”Although frustrated customers routinely call it one, Instant Ink is not a scam per se. It’s just an aggressive, user-hostile business model. Doctorow argues that HP is following in the footsteps of casinos and razor manufacturers, which offer deals (comped hotel rooms and cheap shavers) in order to hook a consumer into a more lucrative financial transaction once they’re inside. Printer ink is expensive because ink is naturally costly but also because pricey cartridges help companies recoup the money they lose selling cheap hardware. “Think of the original price tag of a printer more like a down payment,” one printer-industry expert told Consumer Reports in 2018. For years, companies have sold the machines at a discount, but programs such as Instant Ink, which use technology to monitor cartridges—and disable machines—feel like an especially predatory step.Even if you aren’t trapped in Ink Hell, the template of this story ought to feel unsettlingly familiar. Most everyone is subject to the walled gardens and restrictions imposed by digital-rights-management practices. If you’ve ever struggled to access a purchased movie, book, or song from Apple or Amazon, you know the feeling. Or maybe you’re a gamer who has long been frustrated over single-player games that require the internet to play. The problem isn’t merely that people are nostalgic for the days of CDs and DVDs and static updates—it’s that much of the convenience promised by our internet-connected tools has the secondary effect of stripping away small pieces of our agency and leaving us more beholden to companies seeking bigger margins.Josh Kruger, a writer in Philadelphia who is also embroiled in a dysfunctional relationship with Instant Ink, cites the program as proof that we are “living on the internet of shit” and entrapped by subscriptions. Like me, Kruger is abashed by his anger but feels taken for a ride with a printer he essentially only rents. “I paid for this machine, and it is galling that the company can continue to tell me what I can do with it,” Kruger told me. “As a dumb American who owns the device, I should be able to use blueberry juice to get this thing to print if I want.”That my personal rage circus revolves around a printer—a profoundly unsexy piece of machinery that many use to complete mundane life tasks such as printing out a passport form or a shipping label—is an added twist of the knife. But this is precisely the kind of second-order problem that people overlook. Like me, they pay little attention during the sign-up process and, like Weisman and Kruger, continue to pay while feeling fleeced, because doing so is easier than an alternative. That it feels so blatantly extractive is a reason to seethe but also a reason for complacency. Although the execution is modern, there is something timeless about feeling powerless at the hands of an enormous corporation—so much so that many of us just accept it.“My entire life, my printers have always broken,” Kruger said. “So it fits that the first one that hasn’t broken has also decided to hold me hostage.”

Representative Kevin McCarthy’s protracted fight to become speaker of the House last month raised a big, seldom-discussed question about American democracy: What sort of institution should the House of Representatives be? Should a partisan speaker control if or when a bill or amendment is introduced to advance the program of the coalition that vested the speaker with power? Should power reside in committee chairs, perhaps assigned by seniority, who develop subject-area expertise and command commensurate deference from their colleagues? Or should all 435 voting members (and thus their constituents) be on equal footing, regardless of party or seniority, such that all can introduce bills or propose amendments that succeed or fail based only on whether a given proposal commands a majority?[Read: The Republican majority’s opening debacle]These rival visions of Congress have come into repeated conflict in American history. Yet formulating an opinion was hard with recent news coverage focused narrowly on the conflict between rival factions in the Republican Party and how their relative power might shape lawmaking. In that telling, the fight for the speakership pitted a moderate faction that cares more about governing against a “far right” bloc intent on disrupting its efforts at the expense of the country. “They think throwing snares and making Congress ungovernable is progress,” Peggy Noonan wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “It isn’t progress but nihilism.”Once McCarthy was finally elected, on the 15th ballot, newspaper coverage emphasized “major concessions to right-wing holdouts,” as The New York Times described the result. “To see it play out … has left little doubt that Congress as an entity would struggle to carry out even its most basic duties in the coming two years, such as funding the government, including the military, or avoiding a catastrophic federal debt default,” Luke Broadwater wrote.A speaker with too little power could fail to run a House functional enough to do its job. Perhaps that assessment of the immediate political stakes will prove accurate––a Republican faction has shut down the government and played default brinkmanship before. Regardless, some rule changes that the House Freedom Caucus was pushing, such as one that gives lawmakers at least 72 hours to study a bill before they must cast a vote for or against it, seem best evaluated by their overall effect on the legislative process, not by how they may or may not influence a single legislative result in a high-profile fight like the one over the debt ceiling.The general case for taking the long view on House rules is more compelling still: A majority of Americans has disapproved of congressional job performance for two unbroken decades, regardless of which party has been in control. So in addition to noting who has power right now and how they might use it in the next few months, Americans should be asking bigger questions about what sort of House of Representatives would better represent us––and what specific rule changes are necessary to achieve it.One former congressman, Justin Amash, distinguished himself during the fight over the speakership by focusing on reforms that he’d advocated while representing his Michigan district. Amash, 42, defies easy categorization. The son of a Palestinian-born father and a Syrian-born mother, he grew up in a Christian family in a suburb of Grand Rapids and earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Michigan. He was elected to the state legislature as a Republican in 2008 and successfully ran for Congress during the 2010 Tea Party movement. Once there, he founded the House Liberty Caucus, co-founded the Freedom Caucus, and distinguished himself by actually explaining his votes to his constituents––those paying attention came to know that Friedrich Hayek and Frédéric Bastiat informed his beliefs in limited government and individual liberty. Staying true to his principles, Amash opposed Donald Trump in 2016. He left the Freedom Caucus in June 2019, left the Republican Party to become an independent that July, and that December was the only non-Democrat in the House to vote in favor of both articles of impeachment against Trump.Amash did not seek reelection in 2020.[Read: The resistance misunderstood Justin Amash]The Amash critique of Congress begins with the understanding that, despite the way that recent speakers, including Pelosi and Ryan, have done the job, the speaker of the House is not the same thing as the House majority leader. “The speaker is an official for the entire House, for the entire institution,” Amash said during an interview on the Fifth Column podcast.As he sees it, the speaker should ensure a smooth, equitable procedure for any representative to bring legislation to the floor or to amend legislation that’s under consideration via a careful process of thought and discussion. In this telling, good rules and deliberative procedures enforced by a competent speaker improve democracy as lawmakers contribute input, discover good outcomes, and conduct up-or-down votes on discrete, comprehensible questions that keep them accountable to voters.“It’s not about putting your thumb on the scale,” Amash continued, because if the speaker instead functions as a high-ranking official working to advance the agenda of Republicans or Democrats, “you’ve now got this conflict of interest”: The speaker is in charge of the lawmaking process even as he or she is manipulating that same process to achieve a specific outcome. The rules no longer function to facilitate debate, or an improved bill text, or accountability––they are tweaked and reverse-engineered to serve one faction’s legislative agenda.For example, after a bill is introduced, a speaker could allow amendments to be offered as part of a deliberate process to improve it. But since 2016, under both Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, who bent the process to advance their respective agendas, “there have been no amendments freely offered from the House floor,” Amash complained. “Ryan’s term was the first time in history that you had an entire two-year term of Congress where there wasn’t an amendment not prescreened by the speaker offered from the floor. Then Pelosi did the same thing.”The inability to bring bills or amendments to the House floor effectively made it impossible for legislators like Amash to represent their constituents as fully as could peers aligned with party leadership. Under a more open process, backbenchers would have a chance to introduce bills that leadership doesn’t consider a priority but that the whole body might feel public pressure to support––for example, while in Congress, Amash, a committed civil libertarian, specifically favored stand-alone votes on mass-surveillance programs rather than larger bills that included their reauthorization.“Congress now routinely passes most major legislation in a multi-thousand-page omnibus bill, crafted in secret at the end of each year, with no time to read, in a nearly empty House chamber, with no floor amendments allowed,” Amash has tweeted. “This is oligarchy, not representation.” And backbenchers could use the amendment process, for better or worse, to improve a bill that ultimately passes; to show their constituents they tried to push for some change or other even though they knew their amendment would fail; or to embarrass the majority or poison a bill to prevent it from passing.Intrigued by Amash’s critique, even as it went mostly ignored (and in one case mocked) in the press, I reached out to Amash, who didn’t respond to my requests for an interview, and to political scientists with expertise in congressional history. I found real enthusiasm for some aspects of it.Professor David Mayhew is a retired Yale political scientist who still teaches. He specializes in U.S. legislative behavior, political parties, and policy making. His books include Party Loyalty Among Congressmen, America’s Congress, and Parties and Policies. “I say three cheers for Amash,” he emailed. “Making policy by way of multi-thousand-page bills that are confected at the last minute and that virtually nobody reads is horrible practice. A legislative body should be open and deliberative. It should take up single-topic measures one-by-one that members and the public can follow and understand. Open, time-consuming deliberation at both committee and floor levels, where all members, majority and minority, have a chance to make a pitch, is the way to go. Open up the roll calls. No proxy voting [where a member who expects to be absent for a vote gives another member permission to cast it]. Let cross-party coalitions form.”Among the disagreements with Amash that I encountered: pushback on his account of how the House today compares with bygone versions of the institution. “Amash is correct in the general sense: It definitely has gotten tougher for individual backbench members to meaningfully participate in the deliberative policy process in the last several decades,” emailed Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute and a former staffer of the Congressional Research Service, where his portfolio included congressional history and operations. As Glassman sees it, Amash overstates the degree to which recent speakers are historic outliers. “The House has never been a place where every voice was even close to equal; it has always been much, much more hierarchical than, say, the Senate,” he explained. “Power in the House has never really resided with the individual members.”Joseph Cannon, who consolidated control over the institution at the beginning of the 20th century, is widely considered history’s most powerful speaker. “So much power had been centralized that Cannon was able to personally and unilaterally assign all the committee seats,” Glassman noted. Cannon also chaired and controlled the Committee on Rules and determined whether a representative would be “recognized” to speak––tools he used to thwart the legislative agenda of progressives like then-President Theodore Roosevelt, whose activist approach he regarded as dangerous to the republic. Progressives who favored a more open process bided their time for years until Saint Patrick’s Day 1910, when many Cannon allies were out in Washington at drunken celebrations, to revolt against him and dramatically decrease the speaker’s power. Going forward, more power would reside in the chairs of committees appointed by seniority. Later, the Southern Democrats who came to control many committees would exploit that process to stop majority-supported civil-rights legislation from reaching the floor––a reminder that no process is immune to abuses of power and bad outcomes.Another momentous shift happened in 1995, when a new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who favored cutting taxes and rescinding government regulations in an effort to stimulate the economy, began to consolidate power. Staff serving leadership grew while committee staff size stagnated or shrank. Most major bills were negotiated by leadership. Fewer floor amendments were allowed. And both Republicans and Democrats attacked the seniority system for power in committees.[Read: Gingrich shut down the government in a tantrum 23 years ago]Other Gingrich reforms included “imposing term limits on committee chairs and getting rid of proxy voting,” the Princeton history and public-affairs professor Julian E. Zelizer told me. “He also named committee chairs through his office rather than depending on the Republican Committee on Committees. The trajectory has generally continued to go in the direction of stronger speakers since that time.”Why have politicians as different as Dennis Hastert, John Boehner, Pelosi, and Ryan maintained that paradigm? Joseph Postell, a politics professor at Hillsdale College, told me, “Amash and those who long for the old days think that power has become too centralized in Congress and individual members have become weak.” But Postell thinks that the opposite has happened. “It strains credulity to suggest that John Boehner and Paul Ryan were czars calling all of the shots in the House,” he said. “They were incredibly weak speakers, especially when one looks at the truly czarlike speakers a century ago.”In Postell’s telling, the process in the House is closed to the minority party, and to minority factions in the majority party, not because that’s what leadership wants. Rather, it works this way because of today’s safer congressional districts, where primary challenges threaten incumbents more than general-election opponents do. Congresses where the balance of power is historically tight create incentives to grandstand, rack up partisan victories, and deny wins to the other side.Citing the book Insecure Majorities by the Princeton political scientist Frances Lee, he added that “when this dynamic exists, majority parties will act as a cartel to close the process,” while leaders like Ryan and Pelosi “act as the agent of the party, not as the leader of it.” In this telling, the process was closed under Ryan and Pelosi because they lacked the power to hold their coalitions together in an open process. Postell predicts that the same House Republicans who opposed McCarthy by demanding more ability to introduce amendments “will be the first to complain when the amendment process is opened up and Democrats can modify legislation by peeling off a dozen moderate or vulnerable Republicans with strategic amendments.” There would then be pressure from more Republicans for McCarthy to be the sort of speaker who limits amendments in order to ensure that the majority coalition’s agenda passes.  John Aldrich, a political-science professor at Duke University, agreed with Amash that “the House should work as an open, accountable, deliberative body that welcomes the participation of every representative, regardless of party.” But he also believes, like Postell, that “no speaker will run the House that way until and unless the great majority of its members choose to have the speaker run the House that way.” As he understands the institution, “legislating by 435 individuals on the floor is just too complicated and messy, seemingly always bogged down and never able to act.” So there is always pressure for the members to give some of their power to the speaker or to chairs of committees to impose order on the chaos. “It is very hard to see how the speaker could be independent, or remain so for very long,” he wrote to me in an email, “without changing much more of the House to be nonpartisan or balanced bipartisan.”At least one potential speaker has a track record in government that suggests he would try his damndest to remain independent. And Amash is eligible for the job despite having left Congress. The Constitution imposes no requirement that the speaker of the House be a member of the House. A majority of House members can vote for whomever they like for the role.“I’d gladly serve as speaker of the House for one term to show people the kind of legislative body we can have if someone at the top actually cares about involving every representative in the work of legislating,” Amash tweeted before McCarthy was elected. To Democrats, “regardless of our policy differences, they can count on me to maintain a system that is fair and representative,” he promised. And “Republicans can proceed with the assurance that their majority will mean something under an Amash speakership,” he added. “Priority legislation that complies with the Constitution will get a vote; I won’t put my thumb on the scale with respect to policies. If they have the numbers, they win.”But no one took him up on the offer.Wouldn’t it have been fascinating to watch an Amash speakership unfold? I suspect that partisans would’ve hated it and that I would have loved it. I wonder how Amash would resolve the seeming tension between wanting to let all 435 members offer amendments to legislation and wanting members to vote on simple legislative proposals that the people back home can understand rather than complicated mash-ups of what ought to be distinct questions. And I wonder how quickly the House Freedom Caucus would have betrayed him as the Republican majority pressured him to do its bidding.Of course, Amash is not likely to ever be speaker of the House, in part because he is not a partisan. Still, the big, earnest questions he asked about the institution were constructive and overdue for public consideration, and ought to inform our assessment of at least a few of the many rule changes that McCarthy was presented with and agreed to in order to secure his position.In the new Congress, lawmakers will have at least 72 hours to review a bill before casting a floor vote; there are new efforts to make bills more transparent and simpler, requiring a statement of a single main topic; and “at the heart of the rules push by rank-and-file conservatives, including many in the Freedom Caucus, is a desire to shape a more inclusive legislative process that concentrates less power with leadership,” Politico reports. “To that end, they have secured promises from leaders that aren’t formally written down in the rules, such as allowing more amendments to be considered on the floor and more widely distributing committee positions.”Other changes, such as new membership of the Rules Committee, may just portend another faction manipulating the process to advance its agenda, and that more democratic approach to amendments may or may not last. But so far, it seems to be having an effect, for better or worse. “The House opened up its amendment process for the first time in seven years on Thursday, and began debating on the floor more than 140 proposed changes to an oil-related bill,” Mychael Schnell reported last week in The Hill. A seemingly performative Marjorie Taylor Greene amendment suffered a massive bipartisan defeat. And “some Democrats had positive reviews of the modified open rule process, noting that it gives them the opportunity to have their amendments added into legislation.” The article goes on to quote Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, who declared, “If I get some amendments passed then I’m gonna like it a lot.”When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The big general science news story of last year was, in my opinion, the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) applications. These were new applications of existing technology and were incremental in their advance, but they crossed a line in terms of usability for the public and therefore public awareness. AI applications such as DALLE-2, Midjourney, and ChatGPT seem disruptive.

New technologies tend to go through certain phases in terms of public awareness. First there is the overhyped phase, where mainstream journalism breathlessly reports how these technologies will soon change the world. Two decades ago stem cells were supposed to have cured countless diseases by now. The hype stage is then followed by the disappointment phase as the extreme claims are not realized. Meanwhile, in the background incremental advances continue to be made until practical but limited applications start appearing.

We are definitely in the hype phase with these AI programs. ChatGPT in particular has many people nervous about the implications. As the name implies, this is a sophisticated chatbot trained on a massive amount of data. It can produce cogent responses to prompts, and even write entire essays on a topic. That last part has the education community scrambling, because each response is reconstructed from the training data, and is therefore unique and would not be picked up by software designed to detect plagiarism.

Already the bubble is bursting a little bit. CNET famously tested their own version of ChatGPT to help editors draft articles. They frame this as an experiment, but they did not disclose the nature of the resulting articles, many of which had some egregious errors. They quickly ran into the limitations of the software. But I also think just as quickly we will progress to the post-hype practical application stage (things move fast with the new technology).

I have been using all of the above AI applications to learn what they can and cannot do. They are powerful, but have limitations. They are clearly not at the point where they can replace human content generators, but can be a powerful tool. Artists, for example, will simply use AI art programs to generate digital art. Writers can use ChatGPT as part of their research, they just can’t rely on it to be accurate, thorough, or stylish.

My question is – how long will it be before a ChatGPT type of AI application becomes a routine part of medical practice? I think the answer should be – as soon as possible. There is tremendous potential here to bring the latest scientific information to practitioners at the point of patient care (a stated goal of the Evidence-Based Medicine initiative). An AI like ChatGPT will not be practicing medicine anytime soon, but can function as an expert system – a system used by experts to help them do their job.

The amount of information available to practitioners is massive, and growing. It is estimated that there are about 30,000 medical journals publishing several million articles per year. Doctors already use online search engines like Google to search for medical information they will use in their practice (about 70%). I do – Google is a good search engine and sometimes gets me to the results I need faster than dedicated databases. But of course I also use PubMed and other medical deep sources, and even when I start with Google I always trace back to primary sources.

What we need is a way to sift through millions of references and pull out the relevant information. That sounds like a job for AI. The current version of ChatGPT is only trained on data through 2021. So it is by definition not up-to-date. A medical expert version of ChatGPT would need to be trained on data as up-to-date as possible, and also train on the medical literature as well as expert reviews, published practice standards, and perhaps even unpublished registered articles and conference presentations. The application will also need to be tweaked to provide information in a format most useful to researchers and practitioners, such as providing citations and links to the relevant primary sources.

Answers will also have to be much more detailed, and perhaps even layered. For example, it could give an executive summary, following by a much more detailed answer complete with specific references. Such a system would also have to be constantly monitored for its error rate, and tweaked to minimize errors. Practitioners would also ideally be trained on how to use such a system, including avoiding its weaknesses and pitfalls.

Such a system, however, could be an incredible expert medical system, quickly providing diagnostic and therapeutic information to physicians at the point of care. It can warn about interactions and side effects, remind physicians of best practices, and generally improve the care delivered. Physicians are not always up-to-date on best practices, and many patients do not receive the optimal standard of care. Practice recommendations are also constantly changing, and it is challenging to say the least to keep up.

To get an idea where ChatGPT is right now I gave it the following prompt: “What is the current standard of care for treating cluster headaches?” This is it’s response:

“The standard of care for treating cluster headaches typically involves a combination of preventative and abortive therapies. Preventative treatments aim to reduce the frequency and severity of attacks, and may include medications such as verapamil, sodium valproate, and corticosteroids. Abortive treatments are used to stop an acute attack once it has started, and may include oxygen therapy, triptans, and local anesthetics. In some cases, invasive procedures such as nerve stimulation or nerve blocks may be recommended. It’s important to note that the best treatment plan will vary depending on the individual patient and the severity of their symptoms, and patients should work closely with their healthcare provider to determine the best course of action.”

That is a fine answer, but it is on the level of information for a patient, not a practitioner. It sounds like something you would read on WebMD (and in fact such websites are likely where it got the information from), rather than a practice guideline meant for a physician. This could be a good start, an executive summary, but would need to be followed by much more detailed technical information. Physicians would also need to learn how to focus their questions, or they may need to ask a chain of questions to drill down to the detail they need.

Some early testing using ChatGPT to generate differential diagnoses or treatment guideline with citations had interesting results. In many cases the output sounded good, and appeared authoritative. But on closer inspection, many of the provided reference were fake. The chatbot appears to have reconstructed plausible sounding evidence rather than referencing real evidence. Obviously some fundamental aspects of how ChatGPT functions would need to be changed before it can become a true expert system.

As always there is also a balance between given enough information to inform practice but not so much information that the critical bits are buried and hard to find. But once the basic kinks are worked out, such a system has the potential to significant raise the average standard of care that patients receive, minimize errors, and improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of medical practice. The potential benefits are large enough that it is worth a substantial investment. Even if the government, for example, invested a couple billion dollars in developing such a system, it would probably pay for itself with healthcare savings.

One final aspect of such AI systems to consider – these are not thinking machines. They have not understanding. They simply reflect the data on which they are trained. They therefore carry forward all biases, assumptions, and perspectives in the training data. The system also will have its own priorities – when recommending treatments, will it prioritize cost-effectiveness, efficacy at all cost, convenience, minimizing side effects, or medical justice? At the very least it should be transparent in how it prioritizes competing interests. Perhaps there could even be settings to adjust the various priorities – “list options by cost-effectiveness,” for example.

What is undeniable is that the new AI applications are extremely powerful and impressive. But they are not magic boxes – they are not oracles that dispense truths. They are tools which can be used to great benefit or harm, depending upon how thoughtful and careful we choose to be. A medical expert system based on this technology has tremendous potential to transform the practice of medicine. In 20 years we may wonder how we got by without it. But we have to proceed carefully and realistically.

In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, co-host Michael Chui talks with Nicholas Bloom. Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He covers topics including the following:

The history of remote work

How remote work can enhance productivity

What practices make hybrid work most effective

How the views of employers and employees compare on working remotely

An edited transcript of this episode follows. Subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Michael Chui (co-host): Janet, you and I have worked together for years, even before we started doing this podcast together.

Janet Bush (co-host): Yes, it’s true. We do this remotely, and actually we have only met each other in person a handful of times. So we have been remote workers for a long time.

Michael Chui: Remote and hybrid work is something that today’s guest has been studying, including what works and what doesn’t. I was surprised by how much remote work was going on even before the pandemic.

Janet Bush: Yes, and I realize that I have been working from home, remotely, for 20-odd years. I worked from a farmhouse and that’s longer than I have been working for McKinsey, so it’s very familiar to me. But I am fascinated to know what our guest says about what works and what doesn’t work.

Michael Chui: Nick, welcome to the podcast.

Nicholas Bloom: Thanks very much for having me on.

Michael Chui: Let’s start with your background. Where did you grow up? What did you study? How did you end up doing what you’re doing today?

Nicholas Bloom: It’s a bit of a random walk. There’s that old thing about a random walk through Wall Street; feels like a random walk through a career. You can probably hear I’m British. I grew up in London. I actually never planned to be an academic, really.

I worked in this place called the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is a fantastic think tank in London, very policy focused. Ended up doing a PhD at UCL [University College London] because I was there. And then actually briefly worked in the UK Finance Ministry for a budget cycle, but worked at McKinsey for a bit.

And after a while at McKinsey—I enjoyed it but, you know, it’s stressful, long hours. I guess some of that hasn’t changed. But I ended up returning to academia and worked in the LSE [London School of Economics] and have been at Stanford for now almost 20 years.

Michael Chui: You’ve covered a lot of topics in the research that you’ve done. But one of the things that you’re very well known for is studying how the world of work has been changing, particularly various forms of remote work. So maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that, and hopefully we’ll have some time to cover some of the other things that you’ve worked on as well.

A lot has happened over the past few years, particularly during the pandemic. But you started looking at this even before the pandemic started, so maybe we’ll start there. What were you starting to find about how work was changing, even before 2020?

Nicholas Bloom: I did a couple of surveys and a large, randomized controlled trial. And we found that work from home makes people happier. They typically don’t want to work five days a week, but most people really want to work two, three days a week from home. That’s still true now, as true as it ever was.

And also, if it’s well organized and well managed, it can improve productivity. The challenge was, prepandemic, hardly anyone did it, so there wasn’t really an ecosystem, the technology. Certainly if you go back to when I first started looking on this, in the early 2000s, we didn’t have cloud, which enables things like Dropbox file sharing.

We also didn’t have Zoom or Teams or anything. It was telephone calls and emailing files and sending stuff through the mail, so it really wasn’t great. There was always the potential. I mean, Jack Nilles talked about this in the ’70s.

I recently put out data, you can measure it, from the American Community Survey and other census data going back to the ’60s. Even in 1965, 0.4 percent of people said they worked from home and didn’t commute, and that was growing. So that was 5 percent in 2019. That’s already about a 12-fold increase, running up to the eve of the pandemic.

But then of course the pandemic happened, and that was an explosion. It went from 5 percent to 60 percent in the space of a couple of months. And it’s settled back down to 30 percent of days now are worked from home in the US. And it looks like that’s kind of where it’s ending up now.

Michael Chui: But actually, quite remarkable. That 5 percent figure, prepandemic, what’s the denominator of that? Is that the entire workforce? Does that include all the manufacturing workers, agricultural workers, etcetera? Because that’s one in 20.

Nicholas Bloom: To give you a view of 2019 and now, in 2019, 5 percent of full pay days in America were completely from home.

Who was doing that? About half of those days came from people that were fully remote, a lot of people in call centers, data processing. Some people, like a friend of mine, she moved from Stanford to NYU in New York, and her husband kept his job at Cisco and just moved remote. And then the other half of it, people who did the odd day here and there at home, but not many people.

And then if you look at now, half the workforce, to be clear, can’t work from home. In fact, 55 percent in America do not work from home ever. They’re folks in McDonald’s, Chipotle, in hospitals, teaching, etcetera. The other half—probably most of your listeners will fall in that bucket—are mainly hybrid. That’s 30 percent. And then the remaining 15 percent are the fully remote.

Everyone thinks fully remote is, like, Airbnb. When I talk to execs, particularly, they’re like, “Oh, that’s elite coders.” And yes, there are some of them, but most of that 15 percent is back to call centers, payments processing, HR, benefits.

Michael Chui: So where does the productivity benefit come from? You saw increased productivity, even prepandemic. Why is that true? Because many of us who had the work-from-home experience know that there are a lot of things that can also get in the way of work when you’re working from home.

Nicholas Bloom: Absolutely. To be clear, the evidence—there’s a few randomized control tests I’m not going to go through, I’ll just summarize—are the, what I’ll call, well-organized hybrid.

That means, say you are doing what Zoom does, for example. You’re going to come in the office Tuesday and Thursday. Everyone comes in. You have meetings, social events, presentations, trainings. There’s a good reason to come in. All your face-to-face stuff is pushed into those two days.

On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you go home. A typical firm is doing something like that with, say, three days in the office, normally Tuesday to Thursday, and two days at home.

The two benefits on productivity are, (a) if you look in the data on home days, Americans—and in fact Europeans as well—save about 70 minutes a day from less commute, less time getting ready. And about 30 minutes of that is spent working more.

So if you are an employer, and you have an employee that works from home two days a week, they work about one hour more a week for you. And in a 40-hour week, that’s about 2.5 percent. So that’s game one there. You could call that productivity or more hours, depends how you count commute, but they’re working more.

But they’re of course getting a benefit, too. The employees are getting an extra 40 minutes a day, on average, they spend on child care, leisure, whatever, other things. And then the other benefit for organized hybrid is the activities you do at home on the Monday and Friday, say, they’re quiet or deep work, so reading, writing, preparing presentations, writing documents, thinking about stuff, maybe one-on-one.

So, Michael, me and you having a one-on-one now, this actually works fine, maybe it’s even easier, where there’s peace and quiet. It turns out that deep work or quiet work is better done in a quiet environment. And again, from our randomized control trials, you see productivity uplifts of often 2 to 3 percent per hour from quiet.

Add those two things together, you’re getting something like 3 to 5 percent improvement in productivity. But again, to be very clear: (a) this is not talking about fully remote; I’m talking about hybrid. And (b) I’m talking about well-organized hybrid. So it’s not the nightmare of 2021 where you’re in the office, I’m at home; I’m in the office, you’re at home. It’s where everyone comes in on the same anchor days, and everyone stays at home on the same home days.

Michael Chui: Is there a productivity boost for fully remote or not?

Nicholas Bloom: Fully remote is very different. I’ve not seen studies—there isn’t so much of a direct study. So I’ll tell you the ups and downsides of fully remote. Well-organized hybrid seems like a win–win. So just to be clear, if you’re five days in the office and you go to three in the office, where everyone comes in, and two at home, that seems like almost all good.

The evidence is, if it’s well organized, there’s pretty much no major downsides. Fully remote has more major upsides but starts to incur some big costs. The two big positives for fully remote that I hear over and over again from execs is, one, you save on office space. You can basically get rid of it, and that’s 20 to 30 percent at cost. That’s a big benefit.

And secondly, you can hire at least nationally, or if not internationally—depends on the way you’re set up. Particularly think of your tech firm out in Silicon Valley. It’s very expensive to hire people here. You can hire certainly across the US, and I remember talking to one exec and they were saying, “We’re hiring in Nigeria and Bulgaria and Mexico.” Just globally.

So those are the two benefits, and you can put numbers on them. But those are big, big numbers. You may reduce your total cost, say, by 50 percent.

The two downsides I hear a lot are, one, about mentoring. Mentoring is something that’s very much better done in person. And the fact that it’s hard to mentor also will make it harder to recruit.

If you look at 20- to 29-year-olds, they have a very strong preference for having at least two, three days a week on site. Strategically, as a company, if you want to hire people like my students from Stanford, it’s not that appealing being fully remote. So the mentoring thing means you mentor less, but you’re also going to struggle to hire people under the age of 30 because typically they’re not the ones that want fully remote jobs.

The other cost is around creativity. There’s some pretty good research on that, showing that you certainly can be creative when you’re in a remote team, but it’s harder. There was a piece in Nature a few months ago, it was a somewhat staged experiment. They randomized whether teams are in person or remote to come up with ideas for some products they’d randomly given them, and then they assessed it with some separate panels. And found, look, people that are discussing things like that in person tend to have better outcomes than people remotely.

Again, I don’t think anyone’s going to be that surprised by that finding two years into the pandemic.

Michael Chui: But creativity, that is, for some reason, being in person sparks more ideas or better ideas?

Nicholas Bloom: So many different people from very junior to senior, across—it’s not just firms, like UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the British government, my local city council, my hospital. All of them say the same thing, that it’s just easier to have some of these problem-solving meetings or creative things in person, partly because some of this stuff actually happens at the beginning or the end of the meeting where people are walking out. Partly maybe it’s more relaxed, you take your time a bit more on it.

People are also paying attention. I notice it with students in particular. Anyone that wears glasses on a Zoom or a Teams call, I often see the colors on their glasses changing. And I’m like, “You’re watching Netflix,” you know? “You’re so not paying attention,” or “you’re doing an email.” Or you can see people’s eyes, they’re looking. So that’s the problem.

You have a problem-solving meeting with eight people, and three of them are doing email, and so, not surprisingly, their contribution’s not as good. So, yes, the evidence is there’s a few different pieces of research on that. Creativity seems to be better in person.

Personally, in research seminars and academic economists, they’re a lot better in person because everyone’s in the room, they’re focused. Having a discussion on Zoom, it feels like reduced bandwidth, you know? You have no idea. You have a bunch of faces that are there. Some of them have their screens off, the camera’s off. Creativity is the thing that a lot of people have bemoaned, actually, particularly in 2020 when you were fully remote—that it was hard to come up with new ideas.

Michael Chui: Are there other characteristics of the meetings that are better done in person?

Nicholas Bloom: If you look at really fully remote companies, so think of folks like Upwork, Automattic, Quora, these are companies I’ve spoken to a chunk about stuff. They do meet up in person every so often.

Normally, what they’ll do is meet up for, let’s say, a week every other month to try and build some connection. So fully remote is not normally completely you never meet the person. It generally means on a day to day, you’re meeting remotely.

In terms of meetings, I think one-on-one meetings—like, Michael, if you and I had been in the office yesterday and we’re on Zoom or Teams today, it probably doesn’t matter that much. We have this connection, particularly if we’re sharing documents, it may even be better to meet online because you can both look at a doc. Now, I’m kind of shortsighted, so I can peer at it very closely into the laptop without invading someone else’s space, and fiddle around with it.

On the other hand, big meetings where there’s—I have some survey evidence on this, but larger meetings, particularly ten plus, they’re not enormous. They’re ten to 50. Town halls with 2,000 people, obviously, it’s very hard to do this in person. But if it’s a ten-, 20-person meeting, they seem to be better in person, partly because everyone’s just forced to pay attention.

In a 20-person meeting, most of the time, people aren’t speaking, they’re listening. And it’s more of a shared experience. And people are focused. It does mean that you should keep them short. So, to be clear, online, you see people spend more time in meetings. On the other hand, they’re not really fully there. I mean, they’re doing email and other work. In person—it is costly to have a 20-person meeting in person. You want to limit these things. But it seems like everyone’s attention is kind of efficient in that sense.

Michael Chui: Although sometimes you see some meetings and clearly people are still doing email, despite being in person as well. So that happens, too.

Nicholas Bloom: It’s amazing, in tech, the norms vary a lot across industry. I’ve presented at conferences in tech world, and everyone’s on their laptop. And, you know, it is what it is. If you can’t grab their attention, you know they’re coding or doing email or something else.

Michael Chui: Indeed. I was once doing a presentation at a tech company, and I actually thought everyone was doing their email because it was early in the morning. It turns out that they were actually discussing the topic that we were talking about. It turns out it wasn’t as negative as I had thought at the time.

There’s an old saw about, remote is good for maintaining relationships. But in order to start a new relationship that’s trust based, you need to be in person. I’ve heard people say during the pandemic that’s been challenged a bit. That, in fact, people have been able to start trust-based relationships on a remote basis. Any reflections on that? Has that changed?

Nicholas Bloom: I agree with it. I haven’t heard hard data on it but, again, I’ve heard this over and over again. Just as another great example, Stanford has this very elite exec ed program for directors of companies. These are very senior people, a bunch of them are CEOs of companies you’ve even heard of, very, very senior.

I gave a session, and it was a fascinating discussion about board meetings. And folks saying, “Look, you really want remote.” Board meetings, they’re four times a year or six times a year. You can have one or two of them remote. But you certainly want enough, a regular cadence of in-person meetings, particularly the first time you join, because you really get that sense of connection and building trust, as you say.

You could say we’re evolved over two billion years if you go back, whatever, to the first single-celled organisms, but certainly humans as we currently exist, tens of thousands of years old. And I think to set up our hardware and software and the way you think about us is about in-person interactions.

I personally find it easier to certainly connect to people in person. I have a number of coauthors that I started working with on work-from-home topics during the pandemic, and a bunch of them, I met. We had a recent remote-work conference. And it was really nice to meet a bunch of my coauthors. And I do feel more connected. You know, you’ve met them for the first time and you have lunch with them and you chat about stuff, just different things.

Again, it’s why hybrid has become so dominant. I don’t think you need to be fully in person. But even if you’re remote, you still need some points of contact. And coming back to if you look at, just about every company I’ve spoken to that hires graduates—so professionals, managers, basically your listener group—even if they’re fully remote, they still try to meet up every other month.

They say, like, “We’re going to meet in Albuquerque,” or Barcelona, or something, for a four-day off-site retreat. “We’re going to use it mainly for work, but we’re also going to use it, to be honest, to bond people and build culture.”

Michael Chui: You’ve mentioned several times, for this type of hybrid work, that it’s important that it’s well organized. What are the characteristics of being well organized?

Nicholas Bloom: One, people are in on the same days. If you survey people—again, we’ve been surveying. I have something called the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, SWAA. We survey 10,000 people a month. We’ve been doing this for over two years. We’ve talked to 100,000, 200,000 people.

If you ask them, “Why do you want to come into the office? What are the benefits?,” numbers one and two by a long margin are, (a) coworking face to face with other people and, (b) socializing. One of the options is “to spend time with my manager”—and I can assure you, that doesn’t get many hits—or to use the equipment, or the free bagel, or the ping-pong table, whatever it is.

If people are coming in for three days a week and they’re spending one of those days sat in the office, quietly working, let them work from home. The function meets purpose here. Once you get it right, I know quite a lot of organizations have done that, generally the employees are quite happy. They see real purpose in coming in. They find it’s beneficial. It’s social, it helps them. And then they get to benefit two, three days a week from home.

Michael Chui: Do you get the real estate benefits, though? I guess you still need the same amount of space, it’s just utilized less.

Nicholas Bloom: Yeah. Before the pandemic, when I talked to folks about work from home, they always focused on real estate as the big benefit. That was really where the savings were. Postpandemic, it was actually the last of the four benefits.

If I go through the four benefits, number one, by far, is keeping employees happy. The numbers I can put it in are typically, if you let people work from home two days a week, they value it at about an 8 percent pay increase, which is an enormous amount of money.

Just to context that, in the US right now, the employment cost index is going up by about 7 percent a year. If you’re listening, as an employer, you have to have a pay increase of about 7 percent just to tread water. If you then want to say, “I’m going to force everyone back into the office full time,” and your rivals are letting them work hybrid, you need to throw on top of that an extra 8 percent to keep them whole.

That’s a 15 percent pay increase. Nobody is doing that. Therefore, that’s why hybrid has become dominant. It’s the most cost-effective way to retain and recruit staff.

Number two is productivity. We talked about that. These numbers aren’t huge, but they’re maybe 3 to 5 percent.

Number three is on diversity. I won’t spend too long on it, but if you look at who’s most keen to work from home at least one, two days a week, it tends to be minorities in the workplace. To be clear, it’s not just—people immediately think of race and gender, which is true. But interestingly, it’s also by age, by political preference, by religion.

We survey folks, and if you have less than 10 percent of your coworkers in that cell, you say, “I feel slightly less comfortable coming in.” Like, I’ll be 50 next year. And if my office was full of 20-year-olds talking about TikTok, I’d be like, “Maybe this isn’t—I don’t feel that comfortable coming in. I don’t want to come in every day of the week.”

And it’s true for minorities across multiple dimensions. And what it tells you is, if you get tough and force folks in five days a week, you can imagine who’s most likely to quit, and that’s costly for DEI. And then, finally, space.

Michael Chui: Just to pause on that one for a moment. We’ve heard from another podcast guest about this critical mass idea, that you need a certain amount of people with your identity, gender, what have you, in order to feel comfortable. You mentioned 10 percent. Does that number change when you’re remote? Is that what you’re suggesting?

Nicholas Bloom: The 10 percent, to be honest, I’m definitely not an expert on this. I picked the 10 percent because we literally put in a survey question, we asked people, “Are more or less than 10 percent of your coworkers the same gender, age, race, religion, and politics?” Then we asked people subsequent questions on, “How comfortable do you feel coming in?” “What would you do if your employer forced you to work from home?”

And what you see is people that are in minorities are less comfortable coming in and more keen on work from home. It also tells you, by the way, that you risk a bit of a downward spiral because what happens is, if you start to lose diverse employees, it makes those that are left feel less comfortable, because they’re more outliers. So there is a real stability thing.

When I talk to firms, it’s one of the clearly important factors that, particularly folks in tech and finance that are struggling with this, some business services. They’re like, “Look, if we’re very tough and force people back to the office, some of the senior managers want that, but it’s going to come with a massive cost in terms of loss of diversity.” And so that was factor three.

I was going to end on space. Space is the biggest disappointment. Every exec is kind of frustrated with their space folks, saying, “Why can’t you cut space?” And as you know, and everyone’s kind of figured out, is of course if people are coming in on Tuesday to Thursday, you can’t do it.

Now, there are solutions. There are kind of clever software solutions. And I think that’s where we’re going to be in ’23, ’24, onwards. But to be clear, what it needs is that you do what we do for, like, university lecture halls, which is we rotate.

So you need to tell Team A, “Look, you guys are going to come in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.” “Team B, you’re Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.” “Team C,” etcetera. And the cost of that, (a) people who have to come in on Monday and Fridays, they don’t like it, (b) they’re not in on the same day. So if Team A and B want to work together, it’s less overlap.

There’s also another issue about clean desks. You can’t leave stuff out on your desk. There’s a number of complexities. Now, I don’t think they’re insoluble by any means, but it is complicated. And so most managers I speak to are saying, “This hybrid, it’s hard enough. It’s so complicated getting this thing right, and there are so many different views. And some people want to be fully remote, and some fully in person. I’m just focusing on getting this thing nailed down, I just don’t want to deal with the space headache as well.”

And, in fact, a few companies I’ve spoken to cut space in 2020 and 2021, and are now telling me they are struggling to get people back. And in fact, it’s become a real pain for management because they’re like, “We want to get people back to a normal hybrid three/two plan, but we don’t have enough desks. And we’re thinking about taking on more space, or shrinking, or repurposing,” etcetera.

Michael Chui: You mentioned the SWAA data set, the survey that you’ve been conducting, which is an amazing data set. I’ve also seen that you’ve expanded that to a global survey as well. How are you seeing things vary by region, or is it the same all around the world?

Nicholas Bloom: Really interesting question. North America, Canada, the US, look pretty similar, pretty high levels. Northern Europe is the same. As you go into Southern Europe, work-from-home levels are lower. Australia, New Zealand, what I called developed Asia, so think of, you know, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etcetera—lower.

India, China, all of these places are lower, but their proportionate increase has been pretty similar. So in the US, you’ve maybe gone from 5 percent to 30 percent of full paid days’ work from home. In Africa, it’s maybe gone from more like 2 to 10 percent. But it’s still a very large increase. Around the world, we see big jumps up.

The reason that the levels are particularly high in America is a combination of (a) industrial structure. So it tends to be professional services, tech, finance is more amenable to this. Manufacturing, agriculture’s harder. (b) Infrastructure. In a lot of Asian cities, like think of Tokyo or Shanghai, people don’t—it’s so expensive, they live in small apartments. And it’s not so appealing, particularly for a couple, to work from home.

And then, (c) in some countries, I remember talking to a multinational with folks in Indonesia. They said in some of the areas in the smaller towns and cities, there just isn’t a good enough connectivity to connect to support Zoom. Email’s fine. But to have video calls, it’s not just high average speed. You actually need it never drops below about five megabits per second, otherwise you disconnect. In some of these places, it’s fast and then flakes out and then fast. And it just makes it very hard to connect properly.

Michael Chui: That makes sense, in terms of how things are evolving in different places. Another piece of data that came out of your research with the survey is a little bit around maybe a mismatch in expectations. Some of our MGI colleagues have looked at what’s possible. Taking some of the Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdowns of different occupations and trying to assess which activities have the potential of being done remotely at roughly the same productivity. And it estimates that more than 20 percent of workers could work remotely at least three days a week.

But some of your survey research compares what workers would like, in terms of number of days remote, and what employers would like. And you mentioned, for instance, that employees actually value the potential. What were those findings? And what are your reflections on maybe a bit of that mismatch?

Nicholas Bloom: Let’s break employees down into two groups. There’s roughly half of the population in the US and most of Europe which can work from home. It’s professionals, managers. For that group, on average, they want to work from home two and a half days a week.

There’s a big spread, though. About 30 percent want to be fully remote. You should think of 30-, 40-somethings with young kids. There’s about 15 percent that want to be fully in person, actually. They tend to be in their 20s. They want to get mentoring, they want to go socialize. They have small apartments. They don’t want to spend much time in them.

There’s a big variation, but the average is two and a half days. If we ask their employers what they’re planning for this group, in 2020 it was about one day. At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion of employees saying, “We like this; it’s really great,” and employers saying, “Well, don’t get used to it. You know, you’re coming back. Once this thing is over, you’re back.”

By 2022, that gap’s gone. Month by month, what employers have been telling us has been going up and up and up. So for the half of the population that’s professionals and managers, both sides are on about two and a half days a week. Now, it still means there’s a lot of griping.

If you look at Apple, they’re letting employees work from home two and a half days a week. That’s kind of what the average person wants. But remember, 30 percent of Apple employees, based on our survey data, probably want fully remote. There’s 150,000 employees in Apple. That’s almost 50,000 people.

Not surprisingly, a bunch of them are signing petitions. So the fact that you’re offering the average doesn’t mean that everyone’s happy.

The bigger group that, in some ways, is harder is the other 50 percent that can’t work remotely. They want less, but still in our survey we asked them the question, “How many days would you want to work from home?” And it’s hard to interpret it slightly, if you work at McDonald’s and you say you want to work from home, quite how to interpret it. But they’re giving us numbers about one and a half days a week, and they’re getting basically zero. So in some senses, that’s the biggest gap because that group, it’s very hard for them to work from home at all, but they’d quite like to.

Michael Chui: You also characterize some of that 50 percent as being higher-wage workers, which is managers, professionals, etcetera. And I think that’s easy for us to conceive of. But earlier on, you also mentioned there are a number of lower-wage occupations which are also done, in some cases, fully remotely. Say, contact center work, for instance. How has that evolved, if any—as we think about not just the highest-wage workers in the economy, but some of the lower-wage occupations which end up being remote?

Nicholas Bloom: To be clear, there’s every which way. For example, some of the most paid people out there, think of traders in, I don’t know, Goldman Sachs. These folks basically have to be in the office because of the equipment and the speed of connectivity.

Or brain surgeons or heart surgeons or airline pilots—no one would be happy to be told as you board your plane that your pilot is working remotely from his living room in Ohio. You’d be like, “Uh, I’m sorry. I’m getting off right here and now.”

There are a number of elite jobs that have to be in person. But you’re correct that if you look at people that are fully remote, they don’t tend to be—apart from Airbnb and a few big tech or smaller startup firms— a lot of them are call centers, payroll processing, HR, benefits.

The thing that, if I were those employers, that makes it slightly nervous, in some senses, it’s great that they can do that. At Stanford, for example, some of these people are no longer in California. They’re moving to other parts of the US, and it’s good because we’re providing employment across the country and spreading it a bit out from the Bay Area.

But a number of companies I talk to are saying, in the longer run, we’re thinking about why they even have to be in the US. And currently, because we’re short of labor supply in the US, it’s a good thing if we can effectively use labor supply from other countries—if folks in, I don’t know, Mexico or Chile or whatever are working as payments processing for American companies.

Of course in the long run, as we know from the whole China world trade debate, there could be some political ramifications of it. But for businesses, there is an enormous opportunity in terms of outsourcing and offshoring. And I hear a lot of companies saying, “The pandemic made me realize there were parts of my business that don’t really need to be my employees.”

Why does IT support, if it’s frontline and it’s done entirely remotely and has been for two years, maybe there are better firms that could do this at scale. They don’t necessarily need to be in the US. There are various confidentiality and other positional issues, but I think in the next five years, we’re going to see a big increase in service-sector trade, service-sector globalization driven by this.

Michael Chui: One other thing you mentioned—we’re both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s a lot of tech going around here. “Metaverse” is a term that comes up all the time. You’d mentioned that remote channels of bandwidth for communication are more constrained than in person. Is there a potential that we put on the goggles and we can see in 3-D? And maybe we have legs, maybe we don’t. Does that change what’s possible, or what do you think?

Nicholas Bloom: Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that’s really striking is the role of technology. Not so much in the short run, but definitely in the long run. I’ve been working on working from home for 20 years. When I first started working, it was doing stuff over FreeConferenceCall.com, phoning people up, emailing files. It was not great. You know, it was really honestly not that good.

About ten years ago, looking at 2012, 2013, the cloud and things like Zoom and Teams, or its forerunner, Skype for Business, really started to take off. And that meant that you could work much more effectively. So technology has really saved us now.

I have another project where we scrape the patents that come out of the US Patent and Trademark Office. There are about 20,000 a month, and we scrape them for words like “remote work,” “working from home,” etcetera. That was about half a percent running up to the pandemic; it’s started to rise pretty sharply, and it’s gone above 1 percent now and is heading rapidly up.

The reason I think it’s really positive is, like, every hardware and software firm out there has said, “Look, the number of people working from home in America, the number of days, has gone up five-, sixfold.” That’s that 5 percent to 30 percent number. That’s a much bigger market. We should pour a ton of R&D dollars into it. A lot of start-ups are entering.

The rate of technological progress is really going to pick up. What that technology is, is harder to call. To give you an anecdote, I heard an interview with the founder of Dropbox about a year ago. And he was saying, “Look, when I founded it”—maybe it was, I think, 2009—“only techies had more than one laptop.” But it’s turned out that that kind of technology has been invaluable for file sharing in Box and everything that’s come after it.

So I think currently now, there’s a lot of technology, as you say, and maybe metaverse, maybe holograms, virtual reality, better screens. For example, cameras all over the screen. Right now, all of these cameras are at the top of the laptop screen and you don’t really have eye contact. But you can imagine miniaturizing them and burying them into the screen.

This kind of stuff will make remote work more appealing. Three, certainly five, for sure ten years from now, the technology will be substantially better. It’s not that we’re all going to go fully remote. But at the margin, we may creep from two to three days a week. More professions may go remote.

Another example is that one of my neighbors is a doctor. And she said prepandemic, five days a week seeing patients in the hospital. Now she has one day a week of remote visitations for people that want repeat prescriptions or tests back. Some patients would rather that. And so that’s the sense in which I think technology’s facilitated that. She wouldn’t have done it over the phone but now, because of regulatory changes and because you can do it over a secure video link, that’s now become possible.

Michael Chui: Certainly changed the game in terms of telemedicine there.

One other thing I want to pull on, too, is we’ve been talking about hybrid with a particular lens, which is the organizational lens where sometimes people are remote, sometimes people come together in person. But there’s another way to use the term “hybrid,” which is, for instance, in a meeting where you have some people in person and some people remote. And I think a lot of organizations have found that to be particularly difficult.

Part of it has to do with hardware, as you just mentioned. Any reflections on some of those challenges? How do you make sure that people who aren’t in person can participate in the same kinds of ways, etcetera? And what the future might be for that type of hybrid.

Nicholas Bloom: A few points here. You’re right, particularly given the technology and hardware that exists, you have to be realistic about where we are. Not every company’s dramatically overhauling their meeting rooms. That’s not ideal.

So, yes, it’s best avoided if possible. One of the things—for example, I work with Lazard. It’s one of the big investment banks. And they try and be fully in person Tuesday to Thursday internationally, and remote Monday and Friday. That means if you’re going to have a meeting with five people across five different offices, it makes sense to do it on a Monday and Friday. Everyone’s at home anyway. You’re on an equal playing field. It’s easier to do it.

If, on the other hand, you want to have ten people from two different offices, it’s maybe hard to get around it. And you have to take a call whether you want 20 small screens or two people on a Tuesday where there’s ten in one room and a big screen, and ten in another. And it’s not ideal.

So partly planning, to think about the best days for these cross-branch international meetings. Partly, if you have a lot of these, trying to make sure that globally, as an organization, you have harmonized in-person days and harmonized at-home days. And partly, in the long run, I think technology’s going to play an important role at making this easier. Three to five years.

One example, it’s not just hardware, it’s software. If you watch a football match on TV, there’s like ten, 15 cameras in a stadium, and they rotate between them to get a great view. And you really feel like you’re there and you’re in the action. For a lot of meetings, there’s one camera. And that one camera’s at a weird angle. Person X is speaking and you can see his or her ear or part of their neck or their leg, and that’s it. And it feels so disconnected.

So one of the things is getting more cameras. Another is just using AI to try and make sure the camera’s focusing on the person that’s speaking using direction or sound. There’s a bunch of things that aren’t there now but I think in five, seven years will be. I mean, it’s starting.

Some of these devices try and focus, but they’re far from perfect. But I think, in a few years from now, because the market’s so big, every company’s spending on this. So if you get it right, you’re in a jackpot. And so I think this is going to improve a lot.

I think of work from home as kind of like a Nike swoosh. We’re kind of at a low point now. It may drop a little bit if we get hit by a recession. But in the long run, I’m thinking three, certainly five years out, it’s going to pick up and it’s going to be higher than it is now. If I was planning for buildings, hiring strategy five, ten years out, you should actually be thinking of higher levels of remote work then than they are now, not lower.

And that affects everything from office space to who you hire, because different demographics have different preferences, your products, your strategies, your locations, etcetera.

Michael Chui: A lot to think about. As much work as you’ve done on this idea of work and the workplace, you also do other research. You coauthored a paper entitled “Are ideas getting harder to find?” Actually, one of our other guests mentioned it. What’s going on there? It sounds a bit scary.

Nicholas Bloom: You can either be positive or negative on this. Just to explain, we show from the ’60s or ’50s till now, the rate of productivity growth and the development, or what I call new ideas, has been slowly declining. So productivity growth is falling, and at the same time, the amount we’re spending on science, R&D professionals, money by firms, by the government has actually been rising.

It looks like it’s getting harder and harder to come up with new ideas, and Moore’s law is a good example. For many years, the speed of these chips was doubling between every 18 and 24 months. And you think, “Well, look, progress is steady.” But if you looked at it, the amount of money spent on improving those chips, the size of the research teams, was itself rapidly increasing. In the ’70s, it was eight-, ten-, 12-people teams were doing this, and there were thousands and thousands of scientists doing this.

It seems pretty clear, and the paper goes through a lot of different areas, from cancer treatment to heart disease to agriculture, etcetera, whereby you see more resources going in, but progress is either flat or slowing.

In some ways, you could take this as very negative. I don’t think it’s so negative in the bigger sweep of history. To give you that long sweep of history, productivity growth, we have better data for the UK. But if you go back, there’s data going back, like, over 2,000 years, so it was very, very low. It was below 0.1 percent per year. People in England in 1700 were not dramatically richer than people in 0 AD. And that was an enormous sweep of time.

You then see the Industrial Revolution starts. Growth starts to pick up, starts to accelerate. It peaks in about 1950. So 1950’s kind of the heyday. Universities get smart. They start to focus on research. All the companies have R&D labs. America particularly, but to some extent Europe, becomes more focused on being progressive and trying to do research and focusing on science.

We’re now falling off that high, but we’re still growing at 1 percent per year. It’s just not the 3 percent in the ’50s. So you could be negative and saying, “Ideas are harder to find.” Yes, that’s true. But we’re benchmarking ourselves against the best period in human history. We’re still making progress, it’s just at a slower rate than in the ’80s, and a much slower rate than the ’50s.

You can read this—if you’re an exec out there, or a company—I think the last ten years, 15 years are probably a good prediction for what’s going to happen for the next ten, 15 years. I don’t think there’s going to be some tech-induced explosion in growth. We keep being promised that; it just has yet to happen.

On the other hand, growth does not collapse to zero. Productivity growth’s about 1 percent a year, and I guess that was what we’ll maintain for the next ten, 15 years. Forecasting beyond that is, I would say, in British English, what we’d call a mug’s game. I wouldn’t feel confident forecasting more than ten, 15 years out. Even that comes with some uncertainty. But given there’s only been two changes over the last, what, 200 years in rate of progress, yeah, I think it’s reasonably safe to say we’re making steady, slow, reasonable productivity growth.

It’s not zero, but it’s certainly harder. It’s like a mine. There’s still plenty of coal down there, or gold, or whatever you’re mining. But you’re having to go further and further into the mine to get the stuff out. But you never know. A rock fall, a war may break out and there’s an enormous scene. It could be the singularity point happens, or some exciting thing. Being an empiricist, looking at history, it predicts we’ll have slow but steady growth for the next few years.

Michael Chui: Some people are more hopeful, but I understand where you’re coming from. All right, if you don’t mind, let’s do a quick lightning round of some quick questions, quick answers?

Nicholas Bloom: Sure. I’ll try my best to be fast.

Michael Chui: All right. What’s your favorite source of information about workers?

Nicholas Bloom: The media. I read the BBC, Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, FT. I try and read pretty much all of them, but I think there’s five. I love that, pretty much that informs me every day.

Michael Chui: What’s the one thing about workers you’d most like to measure but haven’t figured out how to yet?

Nicholas Bloom: Expectations. There’s great data on what people are doing, what they did in the past, what they get, what they’re earning. It’s much harder to get people’s expectations, maybe even their prejudices. We’ve been trying to collect that in SWAA, in the survey asking people, “What do you think? What are your feelings on X? How would you change your behavior if this happened?” That’s much harder to get, and you have to come up with survey questions that elicit a good answer but are easy to understand.

Michael Chui: What’s the most surprising finding you’ve discovered about how work has evolved over the past few years?

Nicholas Bloom: Maybe that work from home works. I didn’t even believe fully my own research. I had a paper called “How working from home works out.” I had some papers going back to the ten years prepandemic on how positive it was.

It was very positive. I just thought, “It worked in this one incidence. It’s not going to work in aggregate.” As we’ve seen, post-2020, it’s turned out to be much better than pretty much anyone thought, including me. I mean, if I wasn’t positive on it, it’s hard to think who was positive enough. But very few people—a few insightful companies like Automattic or Upwork etcetera that were fully remote even prepandemic. But it’s hard to find folks beyond that.

Michael Chui: What’s the most surprising occupation that is amenable toward remote work?

Nicholas Bloom: I was told a story about street cleaning, and I don’t know whether this is an apocryphal story or not. Somebody told me, and I’m not sure this is—I’ll tell you the story, and you can see how it could work in the long run.

A company has developed these robots, and there are little cameras inside the robots. And they go around and they clean streets, but there’s an exception. They go back to some kind of HQ and they check out what’s going on. And so one former street cleaner can now be an office-based street cleaner, in charge of five, six robots.

So you think that their productivity’s way up. Probably each of those robots isn’t quite as good as a human, but certainly they’re better than a fifth of a human, and there’s five of them.

So if you can do that—I had a call earlier today, actually, with Steve Davis, who’s talking about deep-sea oil exploration. There used to be these folks that would go down and had to be there and looking at the camera feeds and the drilling stuff and actually measuring it. Soon as the pandemic happened, they couldn’t leave, and they’re actually doing it from their living rooms. And, again, it wasn’t as good as in person. But look, if you’re not an exploration person, it takes you a week to travel somewhere and you’re only 20 percent more productive, maybe it makes sense to do this stuff remotely.

Michael Chui: What does your perfect office setup look like, physically?

Nicholas Bloom: Comfortable. Probably not too big. You know, a meeting room that you can meet one or two students or visitors. I spend a lot of time talking to students, advising them.

The other thing is you’ve got to have a—we’re now all hybrid even in our office, in the sense that I have a lot of Zoom calls, Teams, whatever—and so you want a nice camera, and a good microphone, and a background.

Actually, my office is pretty much a mess at Stanford. I’m taping this from home, but my home is much tidier. I could only find one wall that looked OK. It has a picture of Glasgow in it, where my wife is from and I got married. So often calls start off with “why is there a picture of Glasgow behind you?” And then I explain.

But that works well. You just need one of your walls to look reasonable. And of course it has to be facing the light. It can’t be the window because you’re, like, this silhouette from one of those good cop–bad cop investigations.

Michael Chui: Where in the world would you most like to do remote work from?

Nicholas Bloom: Maybe Greece. My father-in-law lives there. My father- and my stepmother-in-law live there, and it’s fantastic. They live on the coast in a quiet part of Greece that’s really lovely. We go there every summer. It’s very nice, very civilized, great food, lovely climate.

It’s not that dissimilar to California. To be honest, I’m aware that I’m very lucky living in California. It’s a lovely place to be because you’ve got some outside space.

Actually, one of my students, she just sent me something today on what’s called digital nomads, people who have gone fully remote. She’s interviewing a lot of them in Mexico, and there’s fantastic quotes from people saying stuff like, “In the pandemic, I decided I wanted to learn to surf.” They’re coders. They basically moved to Mexican surf towns and just did everything remote for a year and learned to surf or run a DJ business. “I know I’m never going to make enough money to live off it, so I’m still coding in the day on Java.” So, you know, there are other places, like Thailand, Mexico, etcetera.

Michael Chui: If you weren’t doing what you’re doing today professionally, what would you be doing?

Nicholas Bloom: I enjoyed my time at McKinsey. I also worked at the UK Treasury. It was good. I worked at the IFS. I’ve had some related but not the same careers before, and I enjoyed them. Maybe one of them. I had, as I mentioned at the beginning, a very random reason I ended up in academia. They also are very appealing careers, and I enjoyed them a lot. The UK Treasury, you can imagine, right now would be pretty scary but also a fascinating place to be.

Michael Chui: And if you had one piece of advice for listeners of this podcast, what would it be?

Nicholas Bloom: I guess everyone that’s listened this far is focused on remote work. And my piece of advice would be to make this work. There’s a lot of scare stories in the media saying hybrid doesn’t work. Mainly it’s because either they get confused and are talking about fully remote, or they’re talking about disorganized hybrid.

My one piece of advice is just be intentional, be organized. Basically, get folks in on two, three days a week of what I call anchor days. And be really tough about having them come in. And then let them work from home on the other days.

And then on their home days, give them what I call performance management. So say, Michael, if you were my boss, “Nick, I want you to get this stuff done.” So you’re measuring my output rather than micromanaging what I do minute by minute.

Because in another study, we see that people on work-from-home days, they work about an hour or two less on those days. And when you ask them what’s going on, they say, “Look, I’m going to the gym. Picking my kids up. Going to the dentist.” But they make up for it on other days.

So interestingly enough, hybrid work-from-home workers work about the same hours, if not slightly more, per week. But on the Wednesdays and Fridays they’re at home, or Mondays and Fridays, these are great days to go to the dentist, have a round of golf. So, be smart about hybrid work from home. I think it can work really well, and lots of data shows it can, but it has to be well managed. It doesn’t just naturally, randomly happen that way.

Michael Chui: Nicholas Bloom, thanks for joining us.

Nicholas Bloom: Michael, thanks so much for having me on. It was a lot of fun.

Over the past few days, two senior U.S. officials – Gen. Mike Minihan, the head of the U.S. Air Force Mobility Command, and Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee – predicted that a war with China could erupt by 2025. I have been on record as saying China’s economic and political vulnerabilities make such a conflict unlikely, but when a four-star general and one of the few politicians I actually respect go well out of their way to say something like this, I’m compelled to recheck my thinking. That the two are saying the same thing, moreover, suggests to me that someone in Washington has briefed them on the matter. Briefings are not the subject of random gossip.

I remain skeptical; the Pentagon has distanced itself from the general’s remarks, and though McCaul may be a respectable politician, he is still a politician. But in reevaluating the likelihood of a war, some questions must still be answered.

Who will start the war? It’s hard to believe the U.S. would initiate a conflict. Defeating the Chinese navy, though doable, wouldn’t resolve the matter. So long as the Chinese homeland is intact, Beijing can rebuild its armed forces. For China, attacking the U.S. Navy would be a major gamble, and it would have to calculate what a defeat at sea would cost it, particularly domestically.

Why would they wait to start the war? It could be that U.S. intelligence learned that there was an attack planned and spread the news to signal to Beijing that it was wise to its plans. But if those plans were indeed for 2025, the U.S. would have plenty of time to prepare for it. Time and danger are the same in warfare, and the idea that China is planning that far out is hard to buy. No one wants to give the other side an advantage.

What does the aggressor hope to accomplish, and is it worth the risk? China wants to secure its eastern ports and ensure access to trade routes in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. might want to move from a notional threat to a real threat.

Will the war be on land, in the air, at sea, or some combination of the three? The U.S. is not capable of waging a land war in China given its size and population. China can wage an air and naval war, but it would be doing so against a very capable enemy. Beijing’s advantage is that the homeland is secure. The U.S. has the same advantage, of course, but it has the added benefit of being able to draw deep into the Pacific and engage China far from home. In other words, the U.S. can to some degree determine where the war will be fought.

Are their respective economies healthy enough to support a war? Both economies are in precarious positions, but there’s evidence to suggest America’s downturn is a cyclical event, whereas China’s is a structural event. Sustaining air and sea production would be more difficult for China than for the U.S.

Why would either side leak its intentions? The aggressor must have secrecy. The defender should advertise its preparations to deter the aggressor. So if China is the aggressor, leaking the news would be disastrous. But one of the reasons that the war can’t be planned very far out is that the longer the windup, the more likely there will be a leak. If there was a real war being planned, it would be on a very short timeline.

I respect the general and the congressman, and obviously they have access to better intelligence than I do. But I find it hard to believe that China would plan a war so carelessly. Given the leak, a war could still be in the offing, but for China it would likely be short.

Perhaps I am reverting to bad habits. Answering my own questions with my old views is admittedly poor intelligence. Feel free to let me know which questions I didn’t pose and which answers were insufficient. I will happily pout and respond.

By Shadi HamidWhen it comes to the failures of Islamist movements during and after the Arab Spring, the case of Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD) has often been treated as a success story. This success, of course, is relative, and the bar is low. But compared to, say, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the PJD seems to offer a much more promising model of how an Islamist party can adapt and evolve in challenging circumstances. Not only did the party survive, but it also reached an accommodation with the Moroccan monarchy and even rose to power. PJD leaders promoted this narrative as well, with one party official proudly telling a Western researcher in the wake of Egypt’s coup: “Now people should study us.”
While there were always weaknesses to these claims of Moroccan exceptionalism, they have only become more evident with time. Recent developments, including the PJD’s spectacular electoral defeat in 2021, suggest the need for a more careful assessment of what went right — and what went wrong — with Morocco’s Islamist experiment. To the extent that there still remains a Moroccan “model,” it may be better understood as a model of what not to do.
The PJD’s survival and (electoral) success
The PJD came out of the detritus of the Arab Spring intact, which is more than can be said for many of its Islamist counterparts elsewhere in the region. More than that, the PJD won large pluralities in consecutive parliamentary elections, both during and after the Arab Spring. Despite an electoral system designed to prevent any one party from dominating, the PJD won 27% of the seats in parliament in the November 2011 elections, with the center-right and pro-palace Istiqlal Party a distant second with 15%. And so began an unusual experiment: Morocco is one of a very small number of Arab countries to have ever had a democratically-elected Islamist prime minister — and the only Arab country where the experiment lasted as long as 10 years.
The PJD had been working towards this goal, slowly expanding its electoral reach while taking care not to threaten the king. This was important, as Morocco isn’t a democracy but an authoritarian monarchy that allows for electoral competition under clear constraints. For some time, the PJD took great care to avoid even the appearance of confrontation with the royal court. One might even say it took this nonconfrontational posture to an extreme (if such a thing as extremism in the name of nonconfrontation is possible).
Consequently, for years, the party had “lost on purpose,” something that various Islamist parties were known to do in the pre-Arab Spring period. Michael Willis was one of the first scholars to note the PJD’s peculiar electoral behavior in an article titled “The strange case of the party that did not want to win.” That was in 2002. When the PJD finally tried to win an election in 2011, it won. In the 2016 elections, it increased its share of the vote, winning 31.6% of the seats, before losing and returning to the opposition after the September 2021 elections. But is success primarily about winning elections — or does success, especially for a party with a distinct ideological or religious orientation, entail other things?
As Avi Spiegel, a leading scholar of Moroccan Islamism, notes with some frustration:
“We love measuring and tracking “democracy,” focusing on winners and losers, on horse races, victories, and defeats. We study these things, I suspect, because we are guided by the belief, perhaps even the zeal, that these outcomes matter — that the winners of elections actually win something. Yet, in authoritarian contexts — even post-Arab Spring contexts — does electoral success translate into success writ large?”
In other words, what does it really mean to “win” democratic elections in a country that isn’t even a democracy to begin with?
A decade in government
After 10 years as Morocco’s “ruling party,” the PJD had little to show for its trouble. Ostensibly in power, the party was powerless when it came to what mattered most: national economic strategy, international relations, defense, and internal security. On Islam, the very thing that animated the PJD’s founding, the party was similarly constrained. As Spiegel notes, “PJD officials still evoke religion, but almost never in opposition to the state.” In effect, the country’s largest opposition party stopped being an opposition party. This basic bargain — access, survival, and legalization in exchange for obedience — has been replicated to various degrees across the region, but Morocco is where the experience played out at length, reaching its natural conclusion.
Ultimately, the PJD was a casualty of its own success in more ways than one. The bargain with the monarchy wasn’t much of a bargain at all. In the 2021 elections, the party lost nearly 90% of its seats, one of the more remarkable electoral reversals in recent years anywhere in the world. The story of what went wrong is a long one, but a few factors are worth highlighting. The palace, growing concerned with Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane’s folksy popularity, used the pretext of the PJD’s delay in forming a new government in 2017 to dismiss Benkirane and replace him with Saad Eddine Othmani, a markedly less popular and charismatic PJD figure. The PJD obliged under pressure from the king, but this capitulation triggered an internal crisis within the party. As Mohammed Masbah notes, “the PJD’s loyalty to the palace went so far that it was in the end fully coopted by it and thus alienated itself from its voters.” As a result, “on many occasions the PJD was on the verge of implosion.”
Morocco also faced a period of mounting economic crisis from 2017 to 2021, which put pressure on the PJD-led government to proceed with controversial subsidy cuts and raising the retirement age. The COVID-19 pandemic only made matters worse. For its part, though, the monarchy was insulated. The PJD was a convenient buffer. To the extent that the populace was angry, it had an easy target for its anger. The PJD was, after all, the titular head of government. And since direct criticism of the king and the institution of the monarchy is prohibited by law, Moroccans could instead express their dissatisfaction in the next elections. Another party would win, and then voters would have a new target, and so on. Masbah points out that, for the monarchy, this has been a longstanding and effective strategy: “The palace puts successive governments and other elected institutions, such as local and regional councils, at the frontline of public blame, and replaces them once they fail this function.”
Domestic policy was difficult enough. But the PJD was also blamed for foreign policy choices it had little control over. The decision to normalize relations with Israel as part of the Trump administration-brokered Abraham Accords came from the palace. It was simply the government’s job to execute — or at least accept — what had already been decided. For the rank-and-file of the PJD, a party that had long prioritized the Palestinian cause, this was tantamount to a betrayal. Yet PJD leaders were trapped. To oppose normalization would have meant resigning from government en masse. And this, in turn, would have necessitated a breach with the very king whom they had committed to obey.
The future of the Moroccan model
Today, the PJD, despite its success or perhaps because of it, is one of the region’s weakest Islamist parties (at least in electoral terms). Before the Arab Spring, it lost on purpose. After the Arab Spring, it lost by winning. This means that, for the time being, the monarchy has succeeded not only in neutralizing the country’s largest political party but rendered it irrelevant. The PJD was a useful buffer because it could provide the illusion of democratic progress without the substance. What happens, though, when the illusion is revealed for what it is?
This is not to suggest that Morocco will soon experience some sort of spontaneous mass uprising outside of the reach of the legal political parties — all of whom depend on the palace for their survival. But it does raise difficult questions about what Morocco’s experiment with managed electoral competition is meant to lead to, if anything at all. Or maybe it’s just this: more of the same, a cycle repeating itself, with nothing in the way of actual answers.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking
March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot.
Montana’s Black mayor
Florida’s Soviet CommissarsFlorida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.Related:
How Ivy League elites turned against democracy 
The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation 
A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign.
The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing.
Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme.
The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.
Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)
The Luxury DilemmaBy Xochitl Gonzalez
Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.
As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.
In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.
I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.
SNL is excelling in one particular way.
Photos: the snow monkeys of Nagano
Dear Therapist: Can I cut my mom off from my children if she won’t seek therapy?
Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)
Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Aging has been long believed to occur through accumulated mutations to DNA, which gradually interfere with the normal functioning of cells, tissues, and organs. In January, Harvard researchers reported that they’d turned the clock back on laboratory mice by altering the epigenome, a suite of molecules that turn DNA on and off in ways specific to different tissues. Because the epigenome is easier to alter than DNA itself, the finding raises the prospect of being able to reset the body to fight diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, whose incidence increases as we get older. The Gazette spoke with Genetics Professor David Sinclair, director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, and postdoctoral fellow Jae-Hyun Yang about the work and its implications for human health and lifespan.
Q&A
David Sinclair and Jae-Hyun Yang
GAZETTE: David, you have said that you believe the first person to live to 150 has already been born. Does this work change that and is it possible that many people who are going to live to 150 have already been born?
SINCLAIR:  Over the last 20 years, there have been a number of molecules that have been found to retard the aging process, at least in animals, and potentially a couple of drugs that are in humans. That made me optimistic that somebody who might make it to 150 has already been born. In this paper, we’re showing it’s possible to reset the age of the body up to as much as 50 percent. And, when you can reverse aging and not just slow it down, then all bets are off. We now know you can reset the eye multiple times and restore vision in old mice — that was our Nature 2020 cover article. In this paper, we’re showing that we can reverse aging in other tissues as well, using the same technology. So, if you can reset the age of the body multiple times, I think it would be dangerous to set an upper limit.

“We’re exploring the possibility that when we reset the age of the body, diseases like Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease go away.”
— David Sinclair

GAZETTE: This research shows that, in addition to the understanding that aging results from DNA mutations, it also comes from degradation of the epigenome. Could you just briefly explain what the epigenome is and whether this is potentially good news for the aging field?
SINCLAIR: The older idea is that mutations drive aging and, if that’s true, the problem for age reversal is that mutations are very hard to fix. You’d need to repair trillions of them in the body to reverse aging. Instead, we think that it’s mostly due to the loss of epigenetic rather than genetic information, which is great news because we’ve also discovered that there’s a backup copy of the epigenetic information in every cell. So, instead of aging being a hardware problem, similar to having an old computer, we are discovering that it’s a software problem and you can reboot the software of an old computer and make it run like it’s new again.
GAZETTE: And the epigenome is basically molecules that tell the DNA what to do?
SINCLAIR:  That’s right.
GAZETTE: What approaches might be able to affect the epigenome?
SINCLAIR: We already have a drug in development to reset the age of the body — it’s in nonhuman primates right now — to cure blindness. We think that the same technology that we use in this paper and in the monkeys could be used to reset the age of literally any part of the body. The applications are as broad as you can imagine — even resetting the brain, which seems to allow mice to learn again. We’re exploring the possibility that when we reset the age of the body, diseases like Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular disease go away. This would be a new way of treating the major diseases of the planet.
GAZETTE: Is it likely that the three genes you use, Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4, would be a treatment in humans? Are there concerns about them promoting cancer and having other side effects?
SINCLAIR: With every drug there are concerns about safety, including cancer. Over the last four years, we’ve conducted extensive studies in mice — and now in monkeys — to test their safety. So far, there are no warning signs that give me pause, though we need to do more tests to be sure. But I’ve been surprised how safe it is so far.
GAZETTE: This work took 13 years. Was there a breakthrough moment or was it more grinding, year after year, to get to this point?
SINCLAIR: It certainly was a grind. It was very difficult to be focused on a study that was not published for over a decade. Jae deserves a great deal of credit for persevering. The eureka moment — a eureka moment — was when we engineered the mice and then disrupted their epigenome, and, within a matter of months, the mice started to look old. I was sent a photo of those mice from a person who said, “Oh, my goodness, we have a sick mouse here.” And I said, “That’s not a sick mouse; that’s an old mouse.” That was the beginning of Jae’s journey to understand what was going on in these mice and if they were truly old.
GAZETTE: Jae, what kept you at it?
YANG:  I always believed this was going to work, but when I saw the phenotype of the mouse — it really looks like an old mouse — I wanted to figure out what makes this mouse old. I analyzed all the tissues for physiological and molecular changes to make sure. Another surprising moment was when we found that, because these phenotypes are driven by epigenetic changes, we actually could reverse some of them by expressing OSK (Oct4, Sox2, and Klf4).
GAZETTE: You used three of the four Yamanaka factors to do this. All four make differentiated cells reset their clocks and revert to stem cells. Is using just three how you get them to go only part of the way back and stop them from resetting to an embryonic stage?
SINCLAIR: We did a lot of different combinations of genes when we started and this three-gene combination works really well. It’s not strong enough to make embryonic cells — it stops at about 50 to 75 percent reversal — there’s a barrier. We don’t understand what that barrier is, but it definitely exists. And there’s a sweet spot. Cells start out, and they don’t have any identity. They’re a fertilized egg. Then they get this identity as they develop into tissues and organs. But over time, this paper shows that you lose that identity again as you age. The three Yamanaka factors get you back to that identity state, but not to where you lose it by going back too far and becoming stem cells.

“These technologies are developing now, and the speed of development is getting faster and faster. So, I don’t think it’s far away that people will live to 150.”
— Jae-Hyun Yang

GAZETTE: What is the relationship between your findings and things known to be anti-aging, like exercise and calorie restriction, which also have epigenetic effects. Are we seeing tips of the same iceberg or are these effects very different?
SINCLAIR: They’re manifestations of the same process. We actually showed in 2003 — a Nature paper on yeast — that the environment links to aging through longevity chains, the sirtuins, which are controllers of the epigenome. So, in yeast, we knew that. Now in mammals, what we know is that there are three sirtuins in the nucleus that help with DNA repair as well as epigenomic stability. And when you exercise, when you don’t eat three meals a day — you fast — and even if you have high temperatures and low temperatures, that stimulates the sirtuins to be more active. And we know that that can stabilize the epigenome.
YANG: There are multiple ways to manipulate the epigenome besides OSK. It can be temperature, as David mentioned, it can be mechanical stress, it can be drugs. People are already using many drugs to modulate the epigenome, especially for cancer treatment. So there are many other methods we can utilize to make cells of our body younger.
GAZETTE: Do you still look at aging as inevitable?
YANG: I think it is inevitable. Entropy always wins. It’s a law of physics. At some point, we should die, but it shouldn’t be too early. These technologies are developing now, and the speed of development is getting faster and faster. So, I don’t think it’s far away that people will live to 150.
GAZETTE: What is the next step? You’ve begun experiments in nonhuman primates. How far is this from the clinic?
SINCLAIR: Things look promising in the primate studies. If those are successful, then the first humans will be treated just a couple of years after the studies have finished. Does that mean it’ll work? No. But if it works to cure blindness in a monkey, I am optimistic it’ll work in a patient. And if we’re not successful in the next few years, somebody will be, because there has been about $5 billion invested in aging drug development just since our Nature paper came out in 2020. There are many companies now working on this. So, while we’re at the forefront, there are many others who should succeed if we’re not successful first.
GAZETTE: Any final thoughts?
SINCLAIR: If we’re right, there is a universal cause of aging in every tissue and in seemingly every species, from yeast to humans, and diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s are manifestations. If we’re able to slow down or reverse the aging process, this would be a radical new way of treating these diseases. The same treatment for heart disease could also cure Alzheimer’s and diabetes, and make you look younger as well. This is an exciting time. We could be witnessing a new approach to treating diseases in general.

My discipline, political science, has been slow to grapple with climate change. As noted in a previous post, the vast bulk of literature on the climate issues is either mobilizational—meaning, intended to scare people about the seriousness of the problem—technical in nature, or it focuses on international agreements. Less attention has been paid to national-level obstacles to action. There are specific areas in this realm where political science could be of use.One of the key issues is whether to focus political energies on mitigation or adaptation. Our current “science of politics” is said to be much more suited to dealing with the latter, since the need to adapt is staring us in the face today. The New York Times recently described a fight between states in the western United States that hinges on a reallocation of water from the shrinking Colorado River when the current agreement runs out at the end of January 2023. Can the states agree, or must the federal government move in to impose a solution, and if it does, what legal appeals will there be? This is a purely political question.Many people, like Princeton’s Bob Keohane in a 2014 lecture to the American Political Science Association, argued that focusing on adaptation is an easy out, since mitigation is a more urgent priority. Mitigation is a “wicked” problem for obvious reasons: reducing fossil fuel use and shifting to alternatives is very costly, while the benefits arising from action will accrue to people outside the nation’s borders, and to future generations who do not vote in current elections. There is also a huge temptation to free ride on other countries’ actions, or use their inaction as an excuse for one’s own failure to act. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___This basic structure of incentives has been understood for a long time, and I’m not sure there have been any brilliant suggestions for how to reorder them. Many countries have realized that negative incentives like draconian carbon taxes and limitations on economic output are very unpopular and hard to enforce. Positive subsidies for R&D and for switching to alternatives are easier to implement, and have been embedded in policies like cap-and-trade and the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the U.S. Congress last year. The shift towards talk of net zero goals places the burden of action on private firms and financial institutions rather than governments, firms that can take advantage of rapidly falling prices for alternative energy. But while everyone wants to signal virtue in this regard, the real impact of such initiatives is hard to measure, and “greenwashing” is widespread. The result is slowness to act.In my view, the realm in which political science can be most helpful is institutional design, which will apply to both mitigation and adaptation. Adaptation requires societies to build things like reservoirs and sea walls, or to relocate coastal communities that are no longer viable due to sea level rise. But mitigation requires building a lot of stuff as well. Electrification of the vehicle fleet requires recharging stations, new wind and solar farms, facilities for storing energy and manufacturing batteries, and an electrical grid that can carry clean power to where it is needed. All of these activities are subject to politics and political constraints that need to be overcome.Political institutions are created to mitigate conflict and promote collective decision-making. They need to balance the need for collective goods like climate mitigation against the requirements of democratic legitimacy and fidelity to the rule of law. Institutions can be structured in a wide variety of ways: on the one hand, they can concentrate power in a small number of decision-makers—indeed, in a single decision-maker in an authoritarian regime like China—or they can spread authority out in different ways to get better democratic buy-in and accountability. At the far end of the spectrum from Chinese authoritarianism is what I have labeled “vetocracy,” in which authority to veto initiatives is so widespread that nothing gets done. I would put forward my home state of California as an example of the latter.Climate mitigation and adaptation will both require societies to make big, costly, and consequential decisions. The world of advanced liberal democracies has tended to emphasize protection of individuals and well-organized stakeholders (a.k.a. interest groups) over collective action that is broadly beneficial to the society.There is in fact a good deal of variance in institutional design among liberal democracies that facilitates decisive action in some and not others. The classic British Westminster system, for example, has been described as a “democratic dictatorship” by combining a parliamentary system with a first-past-the-post electoral system. That allows British governments to enjoy decisive parliamentary majorities on the basis of a bare plurality of the popular vote. The only real check on the government’s power is the media and public opinion, which can throw the government out at the next election if it doesn’t approve of its behavior.This contrasts with the American system, whose Constitution has deliberately created a whole series of institutional checks on executive authority. These include a judiciary that can invalidate legislation, the delegation of significant powers to states and localities, a bureaucracy with divided powers not under the executive’s complete control, and other institutional rules outside the Constitution that distribute veto power very widely. As an example, one of the big differences between the United States and other liberal democracies is its widespread use of the “right of private action” to enforce environmental laws. That is, such laws are enforced not by the state itself, but by private individuals suing other entities purportedly on behalf of the environment. This creates huge problems both with the predictability of what environmental rules actually are, and in the society’s ability to sensibly trade off collective goods against individual interests. This is an issue I will return to in a future blog post.We do not need to imitate China and cease being a liberal democracy in order to deal with climate change. Many other advanced democracies are better suited to collective action on this front than the United States is. What we need is to carefully rethink our institutions and build on what we know about effective institutional design.

Matt Bennett is co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way. Bennett served in the administration of President Bill Clinton and is a veteran of Democratic politics, having acted as an advisor to the presidential campaigns of Clinton, Al Gore, and Wesley Clark.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Matt Bennett discuss why it’s hard for moderate candidates to outcompete extremists for national audiences; the false dichotomy of base mobilization versus courting swing voters (and why you need both); and why Joe Biden remains the strongest Democratic candidate for President heading into 2024.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You were quite pessimistic about the Democrats’ chances in the midterms, and many people were predicting a “red wave.” Why did the red wave fail to materialize, and what does that tell us about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Republican and Democratic parties?Matt Bennett: The fact is that nobody in politics can predict anything anymore. Occasionally, people are right, but mostly they are wrong. In part, that's because these elections were so close. When you're talking about elections that are within the margin of error, which many of these were. The results ended up within three or four points, which is the margin for most of these polls. There's no way to use these polls to predict the outcome, certainly, in ways that we thought were as clear as everyone believed.Mounk: You have response rates of 1% or below for most telephonic polls, and what is the definition of a weirdo? It's somebody who does something that less than 1% of the population does. By definition, when you pick up the phone to answer a political poll, you are a weirdo (I'm probably one of those weirdos), but the behavior that you're going to engage in is going to vary systematically from the rest of the population. It seems that no matter how much you do the demographic adjustments, the likelihood of a miss is going to be high, especially when it's a question of only a few percentage points.Bennett: It is. But in defense of my friends in the polling industry, they did pretty well. It's very tough to get these things completed. To some extent, they're using text-based polling or online polling, and that has proven to be reasonably good at predicting things. The polling industry did okay, and they certainly can't be blamed for Republican disappointment (or Democratic joy) about over- or underperforming expectations, because I think some of these things were too close. Fundamentally, the reason that the red wave didn't materialize was because, in almost every case of a swing district or state, the mainstream candidate beat the extreme candidate—or candidates that were perceived to be mainstream beat those perceived to be extreme. Again, it didn't hold everywhere. There are plenty of exceptions. But on the whole, broadly speaking, that's where people went. They were extreme and we weren't.Mounk: There are many people out there saying that persuasion isn't important anymore—swing voters aren't important anymore; this is all about base mobilization, and trying to nominate these moderate candidates who are going to appeal to the other side is a waste of effort. What's your evidence that moderate Democrats are better than less moderate Democrats and that moderate Republicans are better than less moderate Republicans?Bennett: All of the evidence is on my side of that debate. All of it. If you look at where people split their vote in major statewide races, in Wisconsin for example, where Governor Evers, running as a down-the-middle, mainstream Democrat, beat his more extreme opponent (the guy wasn't quite as bad as Kari Lake or others). And on the very same ballot, Mandela Barnes lost to Ron Johnson. Now, I would argue that Barnes wasn't fairly characterized as an extremist. But that label was attached to him successfully, because he didn't do enough to push himself away from the far left on issues like crime. And Johnson was able to capitalize on that, so people split their ticket by six to eight percentage points. In Georgia, you saw Governor Kemp beat Stacey Abrams soundly on the same ballot that Warnock won—or at least won a plurality and got to the runoff, and then won. Warnock very explicitly ran as a moderate, in fact, his campaign manager said, “We could have followed the crowd and run to the left and we chose not to do that, and that's the reason we won.”Mounk: Stacey Abrams has been lionized over the last years as this great model for how to win elections, so it's really striking that she twice failed to win in Georgia, even as another Democrat, Reverend Warnock, was able to win. Now, to be fair, Brian Kemp has managed to win some amount of bipartisan credentials by going up against Donald Trump in the Electoral College in 2020, though he is quite a conservative Republican. And of course, Herschel Walker is very easy to characterize as extreme, because he is. But I think there are also some differences between how Abrams ran and how Warnock ran. What are those differences and what's the evidence that those differences matter?Bennett: Stacey Abrams deserves an enormous amount of credit for building a turnout machine in Georgia that won the two Senate races in 2020, and was enormously important to helping Warnock get to and then win the runoff. There is no doubt that you have to do both. To some extent, this debate is silly, because you have to turn out your base in politics and you also have to win the war of persuasion. But the idea that there is no such thing as a swing voter, that it's all about base mobilization, is just baloney. It’s been disproven again and again. Stacey ran as a more down-the-line progressive, and she was running against, to your point, a popular governor who had successfully distanced himself from Trump and the most important thing to Trump, which was the denial of 2020. There are plenty of other cases in which people who had been perceived as very progressive had changed their perception in the general election. The best example is John Fetterman. In Pennsylvania, he had been one of Bernie Sanders' co-chairs on his presidential campaign. But he made it very clear, both in the primary and even more in the general election, that he was running as a mainstream Pennsylvania guy. And that, to the extent there was a weirdo in that race, it was this rich freak from New Jersey, who was a quack doctor who had a bunch of houses. Fetterman won that struggle to be the mainstream candidate, and I think that was the ballgame in so many of these races.Mounk: How good a piece of news for American democracy is the rejection of the Kari Lakes in Arizona, the Doug Mastrianos in Pennsylvania—that sort of election denier and ultra-MAGA candidates in purple states. How reassuring is the lack of appetite that the average American seems to have for Donald Trump and his acolytes as we look forward to 2024?Bennett: I think it saved American democracy. It couldn't be better news. I think the fact that election deniers lost every single race in swing presidential states that mattered—every single one for Secretary of State and Governor, some for Attorney General—is enormously reassuring. However, Kari Lake—who is the worst of the deniers (she is still denying her own loss to this day, showing up at Mar-a-Lago every other day to yell and scream about it)—lost by less than one point. She came very, very close to beating Katie Hobbs. Now, Katie Hobbs did not run a fantastic campaign, as many have noted. She refused to debate. She's somewhat lackluster in her presentation, but she's a very smart and capable Secretary of State and was a very credible candidate. The fact that it was so close is frightening, because Kari Lake would be a horrible, dystopian catastrophe if she became governor, and she got very close to getting there. It is now virtually impossible for MAGA-allied forces to steal the presidential election in 2024, which they were very much planning to try to do. That threat has been taken off the table. But the threat from anti-democratic forces aligned with Trump and Trumpism is still very much alive. Not everywhere—in Michigan, for example, they were soundly defeated, and they're probably gone. But in other places like Arizona, they remain a serious problem.Mounk: What does this tell us about the state of the Democratic Party? There was a set of polls, including one published by Third Way, showing that the Democratic Party brand was really in trouble in the run-up to the midterms, that people feel that it is too extreme and far away from their own political positions, and so on. On the other hand, the Democratic Party seems to have prevailed against Republicans in some key races in part because, actually, people perceived a lot of Democratic candidates as being relatively moderate. How do we square these two things?Bennett: I think we should be very, very worried about the state of the Democratic brand. And if you look for one thing from the outcome of the midterms, to your point, they were excellent. On the other hand, we were running against horrendously terrible candidates and almost lost. I mean, Herschel Walker can barely string sentences together, is credibly accused of horrific acts of domestic violence, is an outrageous hypocrite on the core conservative issue of abortion, and he damn near beat a guy with multiple advanced degrees, who is the senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and is a sitting Senator. Raphael Warnock should have wiped the floor with Herschel Walker, and the reason that he didn't has nothing to do with Warnock. He ran a very, very good race and has a very good record as a Senator. It has everything to do with the fact that even in a state that is starting to look kind of purple, the Democratic brand is in awful shape. And we suffered losses elsewhere. Tim Ryan ran a perfect Senate race in Ohio. He was running against J. D. Vance, who was a fraud in just about every way imaginable. But Vance was credible enough to not be labeled as an extremist and was able to beat him fairly comfortably, again, entirely because the ‘D’ next to Tim's name means death in a state like Ohio. The problem that we identified with the brand in the polling that we put out on the day before the election really boils down to two things. And you touched on one, which is when you ask voters to put themselves on an ideological spectrum—“zero” being very liberal, “nine” being very conservative—they put themselves slightly to the right of five, just slightly to the center-right. We've always kind of known that this is a slightly center-right country. They put the two parties and their two leaders, Trump and Biden, roughly in the same position, a couple of points away from center on the left and the right. The problem is they put themselves closer to Trump and the Republicans on that scale than they do to Biden and the Democrats. The second problem we identified was that even in an age in which Republicans have become more extreme than I could possibly have imagined at the time that Newt Gingrich led the takeover of Congress in 1994 (they are credibly called fascists in some respects), when you ask people which party is more extreme, they basically say it’s a tie. They said the Democrats and Republicans are equally extreme. To a partisan like me, that's insane. But it is also evidence that our brand is in very bad shape, and we gotta do something about it.Mounk: You and I both agree that the parties are not equally extreme. But why is that the popular perception? What is it that Democrats do wrong so as to allow that perception to stand; to allow a lot of Americans to say, “Republicans are extreme, and I don't like them. I don't trust them. But you know what? Democrats are just as extreme.”Bennett: I think there are a couple of things. One is something Democrats do and the other something Republicans do. Democrats have an extreme faction in our party which hold office; there are six or arguably seven members of the House in the so-called “Squad,” and there's Bernie Sanders in the Senate, who literally call themselves “socialists”—and that that term, whether you capitalize it or not, has become a signal to voters that they are extreme, out of touch with everyday Americans and with mainstream thought—and who embrace that term and all that comes with it, including ideas that are incredibly unpopular like “defund the police” and “abolish ICE.” Those kinds of things really have attached to the Democratic brand, because those members have very powerful megaphones. They're extraordinarily gifted at using social media and mainstream media to amplify their message, so that voters hear them louder than they hear Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer, and it didn't used to be this way. This is the power of social media. In the old days, there were always cranks or extremists in both parties, and they would go down to the floor of the House, and they would yell into the C-SPAN microphones for a minute every day, and no one would pay them the least bit of attention. But now, with millions of social media followers, they have become the face and the voice of the Democratic brand. Mounk: What can Democrats actually do to control that problem? Because part of it is about social media and who has the best zinger on social media and all of that. But part of it is also about mainstream media. What I'm really impressed by is the way in which, in 2018, every mainstream media outlet put AOC and a bunch of other people in the Squad on the cover of Vanity Fair and all of these kinds of publications. And there were other very interesting first-time Congresspeople elected in that election, including a lesbian Native American from a mostly red state, who didn't get any kind of attention from the mainstream media. The agency of who is profiled in that kind of way seems to be out of the hands of the mainstream Democratic Party. And that socialist label is, I think, toxic in the United States in the way you point out, but some people have made the argument—I've heard Pete Buttigieg say this on the campaign trail, too—that whoever we run, they're going to portray as socialist. Barack Obama was portrayed as a socialist, so what does it matter if you call yourself that? What's your response to that point?Bennett: Let me start with the second question: what you have to do if you're a presidential candidate is do exactly what Biden did in 2020, which is to say, “Do I look like a socialist? Me? You think I am a socialist?” Biden's brand was powerful enough from his 40 years in public life and his billion-dollar presidential campaign that he was able to escape that quite easily. People did not feel that it was credible to charge that Joe Biden is a socialist.And if we nominate mainstream candidates for president, it isn't going to attach to them, because they have the wherewithal to push away. However, look at what happened in 2020: on the same ballot that Joe Biden won, we lost a net of 14 House seats. That is not supposed to happen, and some of those we lost because they were accused of wanting to do things like defund the police. My friend Anthony Brindisi, from Utica, New York—he was a freshman member of Congress and lost his seat in 2020 by 190 votes. It was a lie, but he was attacked relentlessly as wanting to defund the police. It wasn't true but it was very powerful. That happened all over the place. It happened in South Florida to people like Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, also a first-term member of Congress, with very low name recognition in her own district. She'd only been there for two years. When she was accused of being a socialist, despite the fact that her family had fled socialism when she was a kid, that really stuck to her in a district in which socialism is a four-letter word. I think Democrats need to be very mindful that they have to push back strongly when they're accused of this and it's much easier to do when you're at the top of the ticket than when you're down the ballot. You noted that when the Squad, AOC, and others came into Congress in 2018, they got all of the attention. But on the same ballot that brought them to Congress, we had Sharice Davids, to your point, this Native American from Oklahoma, who had just won a tough race. And we had people like Xochitl Torres Small, a young telegenic Latina like AOC. She represented southern New Mexico. But unlike AOC, she was mainstream in her views, a member of the New Democrats, and didn't garner the kind of fawning media attention that others got. There were people in Xochitl’s district who thought that their member of Congress was AOC. I mean, that's the power that these folks have with their social media and mainstream media presence. That's a real problem for us.Mounk: America is a huge place, and there are a lot of very safe blue districts. The people who have managed to win nomination battles in those districts are extremely unlikely to ever lose the general election, so that wing of Democratic Party is going to continue to be there. It feels for now as though that social media attention is going to stay too. The mainstream media itself is often staffed by journalists who have some of the socioeconomic attributes of progressive America. Are Democrats stuck with that brand? How can they get out of it without any sort of internal civil war?Bennett: To some extent, there's nothing we can do about some of those things. It is impossible, for example, to book House New Democrats, the mainstream moderates, on television. Cable bookers do not find them interesting, because they're saying mainstream things, whereas it's very interesting to book extremists. Vanity Fair is not going to put Suzan DelBene on their cover. That is just not happening. However, there is a lot that Democrats can do to escape the trap. And remember that we don't have to do it everywhere or with everyone. In the Presidential election, we're not going to compete in most states. We're going to win easily in some and lose big in others. We're going to compete in about ten states. Obviously, that's true in Senate, House, and governor's races as well. We don't have to convince deep red conservative base voters that we're not a bunch of socialists. We have to convince swing voters, who are the ones that are going to decide elections in this very closely divided electorate, that we can be trusted; that we are a safe pair of hands. We did that successfully, to some extent, in 2022. We missed a few other places. We have to do that more consistently.Mounk: Let me ask you the biggest question of 2024. Joe Biden ran a very effective campaign in 2020 helping us do something which few countries around the world have achieved, which is to push a far-right populist out of office at the first opportunity. To his credit, he has accomplished quite a lot legislatively in the first two years. At the same time, he's very unpopular, and his age is showing. He's 80 years old, and he will be 86 by the time that he finishes a second presidential term. It is unclear how vigorously he could campaign in 2024, especially when it's not a Zoom election campaign. Is he the right candidate for 2024 despite those concerns?Bennett: I think he is. On the day that you and I met in 2017, it was at a small conference and you gave a talk, and you said, just after Trump had been inaugurated, that the danger to America is greatest if Trump is replaced by a more mainstream candidate, and then that candidate loses the next election and there is a snap-back to an authoritarian after that. I think about that all the time, because that snap-back could be to Trump or another authoritarian figure like DeSantis. The stakes are enormous for America and for the world. For that reason, I think it is very important that President Biden chooses to run again, and I hope he does. And if he does, the Democratic Party needs to line up behind him immediately. He would be the strongest candidate—notwithstanding his age, which is the only factor in the negative column. Recognizing that the dataset is small, American presidents tend to get reelected, especially if they don't face primaries from their own party. Jimmy Carter faced a very strong primary from Ted Kennedy, George H. W. Bush faced one from Pat Buchanan. Both of them lost. The only other modern president to lose reelection is Trump—and he was the worst president in American history—in the middle of a pandemic that he was badly mishandling. The evidence is pretty clear that the power of incumbency is very, very strong. Biden has amassed a very impressive record legislatively and on the world stage. He would be our strongest candidate without question.Do I wish that Joe Biden were 20 years younger? I very much do. But there’s nothing that anyone can do about that. And it's been reported recently that he says to people, “Do you think I don't know how fucking old I am?” He knows, and Jill knows, and everyone around him knows precisely what his age means for his ability to execute that job. All of those people are deeply responsible patriots, and none of them would tell him that he should run for reelection if they truly believed that he couldn't do the job. So far, the evidence is that Joe Biden can do this job.Mounk: Let's assume that Joe Biden decides to step down, as he might. What do you think happens next? Is it obvious that Kamala Harris would become the Democratic Party nominee? And if so, what do you think her electoral chances would be against Donald Trump or perhaps against Ron DeSantis?Bennett: The only thing that's obvious if Biden doesn't run is that we will have a contested primary. I don't think it is going to be a coronation for Kamala Harris. There's very little doubt that she would be the leading contender going into the primary. The Democrats have never denied the nomination to a sitting or former vice president since 1952. She's the front runner, and she has the power of incumbency. She's got Air Force Two, and when I worked for Al Gore, I saw the power of that up close. We rolled over Bill Bradley fairly easily. However, I don't think that will deter others from running against her and I hope it doesn't, not because I don't think Harris could be a strong nominee, but because I think she, or anyone, is a much stronger nominee if she comes through a vigorous primary process. Every president elected for the first time has come through a tough primary campaign where they had to give and receive punches, face opposition research, and where they learned the craft of running for president. Those who don't have tough campaigns tend to do worse than those who do. Gore probably would have been better off if there'd been a bigger field running against him in 2000. While Hillary had a tough race against Obama, it was one-on-one, and it was basically a coronation for her to lose. I hope that instead of that we have a real contest. If Harris comes out on top, she'd have a lot of wind at her back and would be a stronger candidate than people give her credit for now.Mounk: Who are some of the candidates who you would be excited for in 2024 if Joe Biden doesn't run and if it doesn't end up being Kamala Harris? Bennett: Well, let me start by saying that I do think that Vice President Harris would be a strong candidate if she wins the nomination. I don't think she'd be a strong candidate if the nomination is simply handed to her. There are plenty of others out there. Pete Buttigieg is probably the best political communicator in the Democratic Party right now. I don't think anyone else is really close. Gretchen Whitmer has won twice in a key [swing] state. She cleaned the clock of her primary opponent, and she’s won decisively twice in general elections, and she's run the state very capably. Jared Polis is an enormously popular governor in Colorado (it would be interesting to have two married gay men in the race). And there are plenty of others. Raphael Warnock—you can't discount him. He is kind of in the “Obama slot” right now and has run four extraordinarily impressive races in a very, very tough state. There's a bunch of people out there that could be interesting.Mounk: Tell me a little bit about the state of the Republican Party and the Republican primaries. I'm very confused about how to think about Donald Trump's prospects for winning the 2024 primaries. I think he is fading as we speak. There are a lot of establishment Republicans, including a lot of established Republicans who belong to the new MAGA establishment, who are skeptical about putting him on the ballot again. They have seen him lose elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022. They see his deep and in some ways still-increasing personal irresponsibility. At the same time, he seems to have a pretty strong hold on 15 to 20% of the US population, and given our screwed up primary system, that may be enough to push him through.Do you think Trump is going to emerge as the winner of this primary election? If not, is it likely to be Ron DeSantis? What can we expect?Bennett: The one thing we've learned about the Republican Party in the last decade or so is that making predictions about who's next no longer works. It worked for a long time. The Republicans nominated the next guy up every time: it was H. W. Bush, and then it was Dole and then it was George W. Bush. They were very consistent. McCain, then Romney. And then it all went to hell in 2016 when Jeb was supposed to be the next guy up and lost, obviously, to Trump. The establishment has no control over Republican primary voters. If they did, Mitch McConnell would have had a much different group of Senate nominees in 2022, and he probably would be majority leader right now. Their primary system is quite different from the Democratic system. The Democratic system is proportional. Republican primaries are winner-take-all, and that's what made Trump the nominee in 2016. He won pluralities in virtually every state and came away with a huge delegate lead by the time they got to the convention. That could happen again, especially if the anti-Trump forces do not coalesce behind DeSantis, which it appears they are not going to do. There's a whole bunch of candidates out there, not least Mike Pence, and a bunch of others who are getting ready to run. That could result in the same thing we saw in 2016. That lack of control by the establishment in their system could give us Trump again as their nominee.Mounk: Leave us with one thing we should be really worried about over the next years, and one thing that should give us hope about the state of American democracy as we slowly approach the 2024 elections and look beyond that.Bennett: Well, the thing that I'm the most worried about is that—notwithstanding the fact that there is no moral equivalence between the extremists on the far left and extremists on the far right—they're basically viewed as equally in control of their parties and equally dangerous by voters in the middle. That is a very, very serious problem. Bernie Sanders and AOC, in my view, have some bad ideas, but they are not dangerous to American democracy in the way that many on the far right are. And yet, that's just not how voters are proceeding. I think that's a very dangerous situation for us. The thing to be hopeful about, however, is that the overwhelming verdict from the 2022 race is that mainstream beats extreme. If we can hold on to that going into 2024, we might see the 2020-Joe Biden coming back on the campaign trail, and that's a pretty attractive Biden. That could help move the party brand significantly enough so that we could prevail, possibly get the House back and certainly win the White House.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      Of the dozens of hormones found in the human body, oxytocin might just be the most overrated. Linked to the pleasures of romance, orgasms, philanthropy, and more, the chemical has been endlessly billed as the “hug hormone,” the “moral molecule,” even “the source of love and prosperity.” It has inspired popular books and TED Talks. Scientists and writers have insisted that spritzing it up human nostrils can instill compassion and generosity; online sellers have marketed snake-oil oxytocin concoctions as “Liquid Trust.”But as my colleague Ed Yong and others have repeatedly written, most of what’s said about the hormone is, at best, hyperbole. Sniffing the chemical doesn’t reliably make people more collaborative or trusting; trials testing it as a treatment for children with autism spectrum disorder have delivered lackluster results. And although decades of great research have shown that the versatile molecule can at times spark warm fuzzies in all sorts of species—cooperation in meerkats, monogamy in prairie voles, parental care in marmosets and sheep—under other circumstances, oxytocin can turn creatures ranging from rodents to humans aggressive, fearful, even prejudiced.Now researchers are finding that oxytocin may be not only insufficient for forging strong bonds, but also unnecessary. A new genetic study hints that prairie voles—fluffy, fist-size rodents that have long been poster children for oxytocin’s snuggly effects—can permanently partner up without it. The revelation could shake the foundations of an entire neuroscience subfield, and prompt scientists to reconsider some of the oldest evidence that once seemed to show that oxytocin was the be-all and end-all for animal affection. Cuddles, it turns out, can probably happen without the classic cuddle hormone—even in the most classically cuddly creatures of all.[Read: The weak science behind the wrongly named moral molecule]Oxytocin isn’t necessarily obsolete. “This shouldn’t be taken as, ‘Oh, oxytocin doesn’t do anything,’” says Lindsay Sailer, a neuroscientist at Cornell University. But researchers have good reason to be a bit gobsmacked. For all the messy, inconsistent, even shady data that have been gathered from human studies of the hormone, the evidence from prairie voles has always been considered rock-solid. The little rodents, native to the midwestern United States, are famous for being one of the few mammal species that monogamously mate for life and co-parent their young. Over many decades and across geographies, researchers have documented how the rodents nuzzle each other in their nests and console each other when stressed, how they aggressively rebuff the advances of other voles that attempt to homewreck. And every time they checked, “there was oxytocin, sitting in the middle of the story, over and over again,” says Sue Carter, a behavioral neurobiologist who pioneered some of the first studies on prairie-vole bonds. The molecular pathways driving the behaviors seemed just as clear-cut: When triggered by a social behavior, such as snuggling or sex, a region of the brain called the hypothalamus pumped out oxytocin; the hormone then latched on to its receptor, sparking a slew of lovey-dovey effects.Years of follow-up studies continued to bear that thinking out. When scientists gave prairie voles drugs that kept oxytocin from linking up with its receptor, the rodents started snubbing their partners after any tryst. Meanwhile, simply stimulating the oxytocin receptor was enough to coax voles into settling down with strangers that they’d never mated with. The connection between oxytocin and pair bonding was so strong, so repeatable, so unquestionable that it became dogma. Zoe Donaldson, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the hormone, recalls once receiving dismissive feedback on a grant because, in the words of the reviewer, “We already know everything that there is to know about prairie voles and oxytocin.”So more than a decade ago, when Nirao Shah, a neurogeneticist and psychiatrist at Stanford, and his colleagues set out to cleave the oxytocin receptor from prairie voles using a genetic technique called CRISPR, they figured that their experiments would be a slam dunk. Part of the goal was, Shah told me, proof of principle: Researchers have yet to perfect genetic tools for voles the way they have in more common laboratory animals, such as mice. If the team’s manipulations worked, Shah reasoned, they’d beget a lineage of rodents that was immune to oxytocin’s influence, leaving them unfaithful to their mates and indifferent to their young—thereby proving that the CRISPR machinery had done its job.That’s not what happened. The rodents continued to snuggle up with their families, as if nothing had changed. The find was baffling. At first, the team wondered if the experiment had simply failed. “I distinctly remember sitting there and just being like, Wait a sec; how is there not a difference?” Kristen Berendzen, a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at UC San Francisco who led the study, told me. But when three separate teams of researchers repeated the manipulations, the same thing happened again. It was as if they had successfully removed a car’s gas tank and still witnessed the engine roaring to life after an infusion of fuel. Something might have gone wrong in the experiments. That seems unlikely, though, says Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the new study: Young’s team, he told me, has produced nearly identical results in his lab.The explanations for how decades of oxytocin research could be upended are still being sussed out. Maybe oxytocin can attach to more than one hormone receptor—something that studies have hinted at over the years, Carter told me. But some researchers, Young among them, suspect a more radical possibility. Maybe, in the absence of its usual receptor, oxytocin no longer does anything at all—forcing the brain to blaze an alternative path toward affection. “I think other things pick up the slack,” Young told me.That idea isn’t a total repudiation of the old research. Other prairie-vole experiments that used drugs to futz with oxytocin receptors were performed in adult animals who grew up with the hormone, says Devanand Manoli, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at UCSF who helped lead the new study. Wired to respond to oxytocin all through development, those rodent brains couldn’t compensate for its sudden loss late in life. But the Stanford-UCSF team bred animals that lacked the oxytocin receptor from birth, which could have prompted some other molecule, capable of binding to another receptor, to step in. Maybe the car never needed gas to run: Stripped of its tank from the get-go, it went all electric instead.It would be easy to view this study as yet another blow to the oxytocin propaganda machine. But the researchers I spoke with think the results are more revealing than that. “What this shows us is how important pair bonding is,” Carter told me—to prairie voles, but also potentially to us. For social mammals, partnering up isn’t just sentimental. It’s an essential piece of how we construct communities, survive past childhood, and ensure that future generations can do the same. “These are some of the most important relationships that any mammal can have,” says Bianca Jones Marlin, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. When oxytocin’s around, it’s probably providing the oomph behind that intimacy. And if it’s not? “Evolution is not going to have a single point of failure for something that’s absolutely critical,” Manoli told me. Knocking oxytocin off its pedestal may feel like a letdown. But it’s almost comforting to consider that the drive to bond is just that unbreakable.

President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that Congress pass a clean debt-ceiling increase, with no conditions attached.[Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option]Biden’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans now is rooted in the Obama administration’s experiences in 2011–15 of trying to navigate increases in the debt ceiling through the same political configuration present today: a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. While Biden says he won’t negotiate a budget deal tied to a debt-ceiling increase, then-President Obama did just that in 2011. Those negotiations not only failed but proved so disruptive to financial markets, and so personally scarring, that Obama and his team emerged from the ordeal determined never to repeat it. And when House Republicans came back in 2013 asking for more concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again, Obama declined to negotiate with them; eventually the GOP raised the debt ceiling without conditions.To understand the choices Obama made about debt-ceiling negotiations, and how they are shaping Biden’s approach today, I spoke with multiple officials from the Obama era: several Cabinet secretaries, as well as top aides from the White House, executive-branch departments, and Capitol Hill. Most chose to speak without attribution to candidly discuss Obama’s deliberations. What’s clear from these conversations is that almost none of the conditions that led Obama to negotiate in 2011 are present today. This helps explain why Biden is rejecting Republican demands, but also why the risk of a cataclysmic default is even greater now than it was then.When Congress raises the debt ceiling, it does not authorize any new spending; it permits the Treasury to pay the debts the U.S. has incurred from earlier fiscal-policy decisions. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to the federal government defaulting, something that has never happened, and which could crater the stock market, spike interest rates, and disrupt payments to the millions of Americans who rely on federal checks.In some ways, Biden’s staunch refusal to link fiscal negotiations to a debt-ceiling increase is out of character for a politician who spent nearly four decades in the Senate and has prided himself on his ability to reach agreements across party lines. Even now, administration officials make clear that Biden is not precluding negotiations with House Republicans over fiscal policy. What Biden is saying is that he won’t allow Republicans to link fiscal negotiations to the threat of not raising the debt ceiling. That resolve flows directly from the Obama administration’s experiences.The dynamics that prompted Obama to negotiate with Republicans in 2011 had started coalescing before the GOP won control of the House in the 2010 midterm election. After taking office in 2009, Obama’s first major legislative victory was the passage of a roughly $800 billion stimulus plan to help the economy recover from the 2008 financial collapse. Obama devoted the rest of 2009 to steering the landmark Affordable Care Act through Congress.[Read: The U.S. debt ceiling: A historical] lookAfter Congress approved those expensive initiatives, Obama faced pressure from not only congressional Republicans but also a core of centrist Senate Democrats (including Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad of North Dakota) to develop some plan for reducing the federal deficit. Under prodding from Conrad, in February 2010 Obama appointed the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission to recommend a deficit-reduction plan. Throughout that year, “there was an awful lot of ‘grand bargain, let’s have a historic compromise’ in the air” in Washington, Jason Furman, the then– deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told me.Before the House changed hands in December 2010, Obama agreed with congressional Republicans on a major package to extend the tax cuts that had been passed under George W. Bush and to also temporarily reduce payroll taxes. Then, in April 2011, the Obama administration and Representative John Boehner, the new Republican House speaker, settled on a plan to fund the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year.So when Boehner and other Republicans put forward their demands to tie any debt-ceiling increase to cuts in federal spending, the Obama administration did not initially view the prospect of negotiations with horror, multiple former officials told me. Obama shared the belief that a “grand bargain” to control the long-term debt was a worthwhile goal. Furman said the former president considered it an “exciting opportunity.”Jack Lew, who served as Obama’s director of the Office of Management of Budget (OMB) during the 2011 confrontation and as Treasury secretary in 2013, told me about another factor that contributed to the Obama administration’s willingness to engage: Negotiations that previous presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had had with Congress about the debt ceiling had not proved that disruptive. Debt-ceiling negotiations “up until 2011 had a different character than after 2011,” said Lew, who served as a House Democratic aide in the 1980s and in the OMB for Clinton in the 1990s.  Armed with these convictions, the Obama team didn’t blanch, even when the new speaker went to New York in May 2011 to lay down what became known as the “Boehner Rule”: Republicans would demand one dollar in spending cuts for each dollar increase in the debt limit that they authorized. The two sides launched fiscal negotiations in talks led by Biden for the administration and Representative Eric Cantor for the House GOP.As these negotiations unfolded, Boehner presented an increase in the debt ceiling as something Republicans were conceding in return for spending cuts. But the White House, including Biden, never saw things that way. The White House didn’t view the debt-ceiling increase primarily as a bargaining chip—they viewed it as the eventual legislative vehicle for moving through Congress whatever agreement the fiscal negotiation produced.Even with that difference, the talks were serious and, for a while, productive. Biden praised Cantor and Cantor reciprocated. But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did.Over the next few weeks, the speaker and the president, joined by only a few aides, then met for a series of secret negotiations to pursue a “grand bargain” on the deficit. The two men came close to an agreement. But their negotiations ultimately foundered when Obama and Boehner could not agree on the balance between tax increases and spending cuts. Like the Biden-Cantor talks earlier, the Obama-Boehner talks crashed in late July.Only days before August 2, when the nation would face an unprecedented default, Obama, Biden and the congressional leaders in both parties gathered in the White House for a frantic final weekend of negotiations. The two sides were trying to avoid calamity in an environment of “pure acrimony,” Furman told me. “I think if you look at the photographs that [the White House photographer] Pete Souza took over the course of that weekend, you can look at our faces and you don’t need to hear any words,” Lew said. “If you ask President Obama about the two or three most gut-wrenching moments as president I have no doubt this would be on the list.”
Pete Souza / The White House
Even though the “grand bargain” evaporated, the two sides (with Biden and Mitch McConnell at the center of the negotiations) reached a complex deal over that weekend. In the first stage, Obama got a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling coupled with $900 billion in spending cuts. The deal linked as much as another $1.5 trillion increase in debt to the creation of a congressional “super committee” that would be guaranteed a floor vote on a plan to cut the deficit an equivalent amount. If the committee deadlocked, automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending—what became known as sequestration—would be triggered. Though default was averted, months of these talks had led to a nearly universal recoil among the Obama team. There was no single meeting or moment when the president and his top advisers said, “Never again.” Instead, participants told me that that conclusion emerged organically. “I think the team around Obama really had a bad taste in their mouth after the 2011 episode and they really wanted to change the terms and dynamics of the debate, and that’s why they all embraced the idea that we can’t do this anymore,” Mark Patterson, the chief of staff at the time for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, told me.The White House frustration deepened in November 2011. The deficit reduction “super committee” was created in July but deadlocked on the same issue that had stymied previous bipartisan negotiation: the unwillingness of enough Republicans to accept tax increases that Democrats considered sufficient to justify big cuts in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That stalemate triggered the severe sequestration reductions in discretionary spending—a squeeze that left Democrats fuming over the domestic cuts and Republicans incensed about the defense reductions.All of that was the backdrop when House Republicans returned in 2013 with a new set of demands for raising the debt ceiling, which included unraveling Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. This time Obama declined to talk with Republicans. “In 2013, it was a very fresh memory that we got closer than anyone had ever come to defaulting,” Lew, who had by then become Treasury secretary, told me. From Obama on down, he said, there was a very strong sense that “we can’t ever be in [that] position again.”House Republicans eventually conceded, passing an increase in the debt ceiling without any conditions in October 2013 and again the following year. In October 2015, Boehner, as his final act after announcing his intent to resign from Congress and vacate the speakership, engineered another extension that raised the debt ceiling through the remainder of Obama’s presidency while also loosening the sequestration cuts on both defense and domestic spending. Those three votes represented a sweeping victory for Obama’s new no-conditions approach to the debt ceiling.[Read: Nuclear strategists know how dangerous the debt fight is]Though Biden was among the most enthusiastic proponents of negotiations during Obama’s first term, no former officials recall him dissenting from the general rejection of that approach in Obama’s second. Notably, then–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (who died in 2021) took no chances: As the 2013 debt-ceiling fight approached, he personally told Obama to sideline Biden from any talks, because he considered the vice president too willing to make concessions to his frequent negotiating partner, McConnell.On every front, most experts consider the environment even less hospitable today than it was during Obama’s presidency for the kind of budget deal that House Republicans are now demanding in order to raise the debt ceiling. Although Obama’s team and many congressional Democrats genuinely believed that a big long-term deficit-reduction plan was both good politics and good economics, Biden, as well as most congressional Democrats today, is much more skeptical of that proposition. And though Republicans could at least formulate specific spending-cut demands back then, they are far less likely to reach consensus today on a meaningful deficit-reduction plan. That’s largely because more of them have come to recognize that their political base, centered on older white voters, is just fine with government spending targeted toward them—particularly Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid and the ACA, which Republicans in the Obama era considered the bull’s-eye for their deficit-reduction plans. Moreover, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has less control over his fractious conference than Boehner did, and McCarthy is even less willing than his predecessor to cross his most conservative members. But though these factors argue against a big deficit deal, especially one linked to a debt-ceiling increase, Biden must find some way to authorize more debt. He’s already facing calls from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to establish another special deficit-reduction committee.For now, the White House, while indicating that Biden is open to talking with Republicans about the budget on other tracks, is digging in against linking anything to the debt ceiling. A former Obama official familiar with the Biden team’s strategy told me the White House believes that approach “is a matter of principle.”  Biden and his team have taken from the Obama years the lesson that if they don’t negotiate against the debt limit, a sufficient number of Republicans will eventually back down because the economic consequences of default would be so catastrophic. Biden may expect, for instance, that enough House Republicans will join House Democrats in advancing a “discharge petition” that would allow an increase to pass the House without support from the GOP leadership. Biden may be right in that calculation. But Obama’s no-negotiating posture on the debt ceiling worked mostly because enough congressional Republicans back then were unwilling to plunge over the cliff into default. The White House and financial markets around the world are certain to face many white-knuckled moments before they learn whether that is still true today.

For all the legwork that public-health experts have done over the past few years to quash comparisons between COVID-19 and the flu, there sure seems to be a lot of effort nowadays to equate the two. In an advisory meeting convened earlier today, the FDA signaled its intention to start doling out COVID vaccines just like flu shots: once a year in autumn, for just about everyone, ad infinitum. Whatever the brand, primary-series shots and boosters (which might no longer be called “boosters”) will guard against the same variants, making them interchangeable. Doses will no longer be counted numerically. “This will be a fundamental transition,” says Jason Schwartz, a vaccine policy expert at Yale—the biggest change to the COVID-vaccination regimen since it debuted.Hints of the annual approach have been dropping, not so subtly, for years. Even in the spring of 2021, Pfizer’s CEO was floating the idea of yearly shots; Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, teased it throughout 2022. This past September, Joe Biden officially endorsed it as “a new phase in our COVID-19 response,” and Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID czar, memorably highlighted the convenience of combining a flu shot and a COVID shot into a single appointment: “I really believe this is why God gave us two arms.”Still, in today’s meeting, FDA officials were pushier than ever in their advocacy for the flu-ification of COVID vaccines. “We think that simplification of the vaccination regimen would contribute to easier vaccine deployment, better communication, and improved vaccine coverage,” Jerry Weir, the FDA’s director of the division of viral products, said at the meeting. The timing is important: After renewing the U.S.’s pandemic-emergency declaration earlier this month, the Biden administration seems set to allow its expiration this coming April. That makes the present moment awfully convenient for repackaging a chaotic, crisis-caliber vaccination paradigm as a scheduled, seasonal, normal-seeming one. A once-a-year strategy, modeled on a routine recommendation, suggests that “we’re no longer in emergency mode,” says Maria Sundaram, a vaccine researcher at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. Or at least, that’s the message that the public is likely to hear.But federal regulators may be trying to fit a COVID-shaped peg into a flu-shaped hole. The experts I spoke with largely agreed: Eventually, someday, annual autumn shots for COVID “will probably be sufficient,” says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at Mayo Clinic. “Are we ready for that yet? I’m not sure that’s the case at all.”Even in the short term, COVID-vaccination tactics need a revamp. “It’s clear above all that the current approach isn’t working,” Schwartz told me. Despite abundant supply, demand for COVID boosters in the U.S. has been abysmal—and interest seems to be declining with each additional dose. Last fall’s bivalent shot has reached the arms of only 15 percent of Americans; even among adults over 65—a majority of whom sign up for flu shots each fall—the vaccination rate hasn’t yet reached 40 percent.For most of the time that COVID shots have been around, figuring out when to get them has been a hassle, with different guidelines and requirements that depend on age, sex, risk factors, vaccination history, and more. Pharmacies have had to stock an absurd number of vials and syringes to accommodate the various combinations of brands and dose sizes; record-keeping on flimsy paper cards has been a total joke. “I do this for a living, and I can barely keep track,” Schwartz said. Recommendations on the proper timing and number of doses have also changed so many times that many Americans have simply checked out. After the bivalent recipe debuted, polls found that an alarming proportion of people didn’t even know the shot was available to them.Streamlining COVID-vaccine recommendations will remove a lot of that headache, Sundaram told me. Most people would need to keep only one mantra in mind—one dose, each fall—and could top off their flu and COVID immunity at the same time. Burdens on pharmacies and clinics would be lower, and communication would be far easier—a change that could make an especially big difference for those with children, among whom COVID-vaccine uptake has been the lowest. “It’ll be more scheduled, more systematic,” says Charlotte Hobbs, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. COVID shots could simply be offered at annual well-child visits, she told me. “It’s something we already know works well.”The advantages of a flu-ified COVID shot aren’t just about convenience. If we have to shoehorn COVID vaccines into an existing paradigm, Sundaram told me, influenza’s is the best candidate. SARS-CoV-2, like the flu, is excellent at altering itself to dodge our defenses; it spreads readily in winter; and our immunity to infection tends to fade rather quickly. All of that adds up to a need for regularly updated shots. Such a system has been in place for decades for the flu: At the end of each winter, a panel of experts convenes to select the strains that should be targeted by the next formulation; manufacturers spend the next several months whipping up big batches in time for an autumn-ish rollout. The pipeline depends on a global surveillance system for flu viruses, as well as regular surveys of antibody levels in the community to suss out which strains people are still protected against. The premise has been so well vetted by now that researchers can skip the chore of running large-scale clinical trials to determine the efficacy and safety of each new, updated recipe.But a seasonal strategy works best for a seasonal virus—and SARS-CoV-2 just isn’t there yet, says Hana El Sahly, an infectious-disease physician at Baylor College of Medicine. Though flu viruses tend to hop between the globe’s hemispheres, alternately troubling the north and the south during their respective cold months, this new coronavirus has yet to confine its spread to one part of the calendar. (Marks, of the FDA, tried to address this concern at today’s meeting, asserting that “we’re starting to see some seasonality” and that fall was indeed very sensible for an annual rollout.) SARS-CoV-2 has also been spitting out concerning variants and subvariants at a faster rate than the flu (and flu shots already have a hard time keeping up with evolution). The FDA’s new proposal suggests picking SARS-CoV-2 variants in June to have a vaccine ready by September, a shorter timeline than is used for flu. That still might not be fast enough: “By the time we detect a variant, it will have ripped through the global population and, in a few more weeks, died down,” El Sahly told me. The world got a preview of this problem with last year’s bivalent shot, which overlapped with the dominance of its target subvariants for only a couple of months. A flu model for COVID would make more sense “if we had stable, predictable dynamics,” says Avnika Amin, a vaccine epidemiologist at Emory University. “I don’t think we’re at that point.”Murkiness around vaccine effectiveness makes this transition complicated too. Experts told me that it’s gotten much more difficult to tell how well our COVID vaccines are working, and for how long, fueling debates over how often they should be given and how often their composition should change. Many people have now been infected by the virus multiple times, which can muddy calculations of vaccine effectiveness; better treatments also alter risk profiles. And many researchers told me they’re concerned that the data shortcuts we use for flu—measures of antibodies as a proxy for immune protection—just won’t fly for COVID shots. “We need better clinical data,” El Sahly told me. In their absence, the hasty adoption of a flu framework could lead to our updating and distributing COVID shots too often, or not often enough.A flu-ish approach also wouldn’t fix all of the COVID vaccines’ problems. Today’s discussion suggested that, even if a new COVID-shot strategy change goes through, officials will still need to recommend several different dose sizes for several different age groups—a more complex regimen than flu’s—and may advise additional injections for those at highest risk. At the same time, COVID shots would continue to be more of a target for misinformation campaigns than many other vaccines and, at least in the case of mRNA-based injections, more likely to cause annoying side effects. These issues and others have driven down interest—and simply pivoting to the flu paradigm “is not going to solve the uptake problem,” says Angela Shen, a vaccine-policy expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.Perhaps the greatest risk of making COVID vaccines more like flu shots is that it could lead to more complacency. In making the influenza paradigm a model, we also threaten to make it a ceiling. Although flu shots are an essential, lifesaving public-health tool, they are by no means the best-performing vaccines in our roster. Their timeline is slow and inefficient; as a result, the formulations don’t always match circulating strains. Already, with COVID, the world has struggled to chase variants with vaccines that simply cannot keep up. If we move too quickly to the fine-but-flawed framework for flu, experts told me, it could disincentivize research into more durable, more variant-proof, less side-effect-causing COVID shots. Uptake of flu vaccines has never been stellar, either: Just half of Americans sign up for the shots each year—and despite years of valiant efforts, “we still haven’t figured out how to consistently improve that,” Amin told me.Whenever the COVID-emergency declaration expires, vaccination will almost certainly have to change. Access to shots may be imperiled for tens of millions of uninsured Americans; local public-health departments may end up with even fewer resources for vaccine outreach. A flu model might offer some improvements over the status quo. But if the downsides outweigh the pluses, Poland told me, that could add to the erosion of public trust. Either way, it might warp attitudes toward this coronavirus in ways that can’t be reversed. At multiple points during today’s meeting, FDA officials emphasized that COVID is not the flu. They're right: COVID is not the flu and never will be. But vaccines can sometimes become a lens through which we view the dangers they fight. By equating our frontline responses to these viruses, the U.S. risks sending the wrong message—that they carry equal threat.

Item: Chevron will launch a massive $75 billion share buyback and raise its dividend, the Dow Jones energy giant announced late Wednesday. The news comes ahead of fourth-quarter earnings due on Friday. . . . Throughout 2022, President Joe Biden criticized Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and several other large producers for choosing to focus on returning money to shareholders instead of spending to increase production. . . . “For a company that claimed not too long ago that it was ‘working hard’ to increase oil production, handing out $75 billion to executives and wealthy shareholders sure is an odd way to show it,” White House Assistant Press Secretary Abdullah Hasan tweeted Wednesday. — Investor’s Business Daily
For a company that claimed not too long ago that it was ‘working hard’ to increase oil production, handing out $75 billion to executives and wealthy shareholders sure is an odd way to show it. https://t.co/BKOS3v33BR— Abdullah Hasan (@AHasan46) January 26, 2023
Here’s the cagey catch-22 that Washington Democrats have created for American business. If corporations plow cash into new equipment or R&D, while also availing themselves of tax credits meant to encourage such behavior, they are frequently attacked for paying too little in taxes. “Greedy corporations!” But if they instead choose to return that cash to shareholders or buy back shares, well, you guessed it: “Greedy corporations!”
But there’s nothing inherently bad for business, much less immoral, about the practice. (Is there any evidence that corporate America is anything less than the best-run business sector of any rich economy?) If management is pessimistic about investment opportunities—something it’s better able to judge than politicians—then repurchasing shares or distributing a cash hoard in the form of dividends is the best move. And there’s little reason to think that it isn’t sometimes the best move. As JPMorgan noted in a 2019 analysis, “[If] companies truly were unwisely diverting money from profitable investments in order to do buybacks, then they would likely underperform over the long term, but this is not the case. Stocks of companies that buy back their shares tend to outperform both short and long term according to J.P. Morgan and independent research.”
Then there’s the oddity of making such an attack on an energy company. The sector is notorious for its boom-bust nature where profit can soar then dive, a situation not uncommonly driven by geopolitical events. Policymakers must allow these companies to take their profits when they can, even if that means returning cash to shareholders—who are the owners, let’s not forget. Here’s a great point from the Economist earlier this year on politics and the cyclical nature of industry profitability:
. . . 12 Democratic senators including Elizabeth Warren, a one-time presidential candidate, have proposed a tax on every barrel of oil big firms produce or import, equal to half the difference between the current oil price and the 2015-19 average. . . . The years Ms Warren has chosen as a benchmark were not good ones: in two of them, 2015 and 2016, the net operating margin of the global listed energy industry was negative. There was another year of operating losses in 2020, during which the oil price briefly fell below zero owing to the pandemic. If companies must endure the bad times but find chunks of their profits are seized when prices rise, their businesses lose viability. That may sound appealing to those climate activists who want to drive out of business firms like bp, whose boss recently said that high prices had turned the firm into a “cash machine”.
We don’t want to drive the companies out of business or deter investment that’s still needed in the current fossil fuel system, but also potentially in new—and green—energy sources such as advanced geothermal. Keep your eye on the big picture, Washington.
Learn more: Taking a Step Toward a Better Understanding of Friedrich Hayek’s "Road to Serfdom" | Some Good News About the State of American Economic Dynamism | Economic History Tells Us Something Important About Industrial Policy | When It Comes to Reducing Global Poverty, Bono Is Right and the Anti-Capitalists Are Wrong
The post Washington Won’t Let Go of Its Wrong-Headed Obsession with Corporate Stock Buybacks appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

correction An earlier version of this article misstated Daniel Patrick Moynihan's service on the Senate Intelligence Committee. It began in 1977. This article has been updated. What should we think of the fact that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Mike Pence have all turned out to have classified material sitting in their houses? Before I answer that question, let me tell you a few facts. One 2004 essay put the number of classified pages in existence at about 7.5 billion. In 2012, records were classified at a rate of 3 per second, making for an estimated 95 million classifications that year alone. Today, no one knows how frequently information is classified. And as of 2019, more than 4 million people were eligible to access classified information, about one-third for top secret records, the highest general designation.

The real scandal is that the U.S. government has a totally out-of-control system of secrets that represents a real danger to the quality of democratic government.

Let me acknowledge a political point. It is true that people glossed over these issues when Trump was found to be holding onto classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home, but have begun to discuss them now that President Biden also appears to be guilty of the same offense. Some of this double standard is political bias. But Trump’s behavior was also a major issue, particularly his refusal to turn over the documents and defiance of direct requests from the Justice Department. That is an important difference, though it doesn’t change the larger point. Given how crazy the classification system is, the wonder is that we don’t find more top secret documents littered throughout the houses of government officials.

In 1998, then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who served for years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence beginning in 1977, wrote a book titled “Secrecy: The American Experience.” In it, he lamented the rise of the “culture of secrecy” within the U.S. government, which he believed was both bad for foreign policy and dangerous to democracy. On the first point, Moynihan argued that many of the government’s biggest mistakes were a result of its reluctance to share information and subject its analysis to outside criticism.

Remember that the intelligence community was largely created to assess one question — the nature of the Soviet threat. It got this wrong. In the late 1950s, for example, it claimed that the Soviet Union was significantly ahead of the United States in missile technology and deployment, a very consequential but totally false assertion. More broadly, it got the state of the Soviet economy in the 1980s dead wrong, claiming it was sturdy when, in fact, it was collapsing. After the Cold War, in the late 1990s, the intelligence community’s central directive was to establish whether Saddam Hussein was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It got that wrong, as well.

Moynihan argued that secrecy had become a form of regulation and bureaucratic control. People in government viewed information as power, didn’t want to share it, and developed elaborate mechanisms to horde it. They covered up mistakes, embarrassments and illegal activities by classifying the problem away. Richard M. Nixon’s solicitor general wrote in 1989 about the publication of the Pentagon Papers, top secret documents about the Vietnam War released while the war was still being waged: “I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat. … It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.”

Democratic governments demand transparency. Accountability and control are impossible when citizens know so little about what the government is doing — and when it has the power to block access to any of that information.

This problem has become much, much worse in the digital era. Timothy Naftali, a New York University scholar and former director of the Nixon Library, told me, “We now have a tsunami of classified documents — tens of thousands of emails, PowerPoints, all kinds of stuff — all stored somewhere in the cloud, but we still have a tiny staff of people at the National Archives for the declassification process.” He estimated that it could take five years for a request to declassify a single document to even make it to the agency that has to decide whether to do so. Another scholar, Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, points out that the U.S. government spends about $18 billion a year on classifying and protecting information and just $100 million on declassification.

Most presidents come to office promising to open up government secrets. Yet once they get into office, they prefer the cozy system that keeps their actions hidden from public scrutiny and assessment. What we have now is a vast military-intelligence secrecy complex that just keeps growing — a recipe for bad decision-making and unaccountable government.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteEarlier this month, a Black man named Keenan Darnell Anderson died at a Southern California hospital hours after he was repeatedly Tasered by LAPD officers as they attempted to arrest him following a traffic accident. In video footage where he alternately seems to be asking for help and confusedly resisting arrest, “the officers tell Anderson that if he does not stop resisting, they will Taser him,” MSNBC reported. “The video shows one officer, who appears to be Black, placing his elbow on Anderson's neck to pin him to the ground. At one point, Anderson yells, ‘They’re trying to George Floyd me.’” The story continues, “Police Chief Michel Moore said Anderson had committed a felony hit-and-run and tried to ‘get into another person's car without their permission.’”I have no idea how to apportion blame in this particular death, but in an opinion article, also at MSNBC, Ja’han Jones contrasted “the widespread public outrage over Floyd’s death” and the dearth of attention paid to the death in Los Angeles. “What are we to make of this difference?” he wrote. “Has the public gotten busier since then? Crueler? More fickle? More tolerant of violence? More futile in our response to it? Where are the black Instagram squares, the corporate news releases claiming to stand for racial justice, the social media posts about white folks listening and learning about their privilege?” But Jones neglects to acknowledge that none of those responses did anything to lessen the number of police killings.A subsequent Slate article titled “What Happened to the National Outrage Over Police Killings?” offered variations on the same theme. Its author, Shirin Ali, began by asserting that “an ongoing analysis by The Washington Post found Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans—and in 2022, police killed the highest number of people on record.” That’s misleading, as the criminologist Peter Moskos pointed out: There were more police killings in 2022 than any year in the Washington Post database of fatal police shootings, but the newspaper has only been keeping track since 2015.There is evidence to suggest police killings are much lower today than in the past. Moskos has found historical data on 18 major cities showing a 69 percent drop in police shootings since the early- to mid-1970s. Police in New York City and Los Angeles both shoot fewer people than they did then, even though the cities’ populations are now much bigger.Nevertheless, police in America still kill far more people than in other liberal democracies. The Yale professor Phillip Goff, the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, told Slate that although periodic reforms to American policing have improved it over the decades, police reform has also been stymied. The culprit, in his telling, is “people who think the best way to manage vulnerable Black communities is to lock them up or commit acts of violence whenever they are in a place where they shouldn’t be, where they violate a law that was made to give them opportunities to lock the folks up.”Reading both articles, I was struck not so much by what was said as by what was neglected: hugely significant factors that are obviously influencing how Americans respond to police shootings compared with how they responded in 2013, when protesters marked the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; or during ensuing years, as #BlackLivesMatter began growing from a hashtag into an international movement; or in 2020, when Floyd was killed and the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in America and abroad.What happened to the national outrage over police killings? It has been muted, in part, by a spike in gun homicides that dwarfs police killings in the number of Black lives that it has destroyed. The outrage has also been muted, in part, by trepidation after the weeks in 2020 when several anti-racist protests were marred by incidents of arson, vandalism, and looting, resulting in as much as $2 billion in damage and as many as  19 people killed. If history is any guide, affected neighborhoods will suffer for decades, disproportionately harming Black and brown communities and businesses.And although it has always been hard to disentangle the exact relationship between the hearteningly widespread, decentralized activist movement Black Lives Matter and the coalition of groups called the Movement for Black Lives, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the Black Lives Matter PAC, and more, outrage is more muted now in part because of infighting among some prominent activists within these groups. Several individuals have come under scathing criticism from some of the very families they purported to champion, or are doing who-knows-what-exactly (some bought luxury real estate) with an unprecedented windfall of grassroots contributions.Those of us who still want to improve policing need to face reality: Probing why Americans are reacting differently to the most recent death of a Black man after an encounter with police, without at least grappling with all that went wrong in recent years, is doomed to fail.  Long before Black Lives Matter’s ascent, I was among those inveighing against policing injustices and America’s catastrophic War on Drugs, and trying and failing to significantly reduce police misconduct. Black Lives Matter arose in part because most of us who came before it largely failed. When it did, I hoped it would succeed spectacularly in reducing police killings and agreed with at least its premise that the issue warranted attention.But it is now clear that the Black Lives Matter approach has largely failed too.Despite an awareness-raising campaign as successful as any in my lifetime, untold millions of dollars in donations, and a position of influence within the progressive criminal-justice-reform coalition, there are just as many police killings as before Black Lives Matter began. Politically, a powerful faction inside the movement sought to elect more radical progressives; Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the next presidential elections. That same faction sought to “defund the police”; police budgets are now rising, and “defund” is unpopular with majorities of every racial group.Whether or not you think those reforms should have prevailed, they did not. If impact matters more than intent, the criminal-justice-reform movement needs an alternative to Black Lives Matter that has better prospects for actually improving real lives. Today, almost every American is aware of police killings as an issue. Awareness has been raised, and returns are diminished.I wish I knew the best way forward. I lament the breakup of the constructive alliance of libertarians, progressives, and religious conservatives who cooperated during the Obama Administration to achieve some worthy criminal-justice reforms, and I continue to be impressed with the ethos Jill Leovy sketched out in the book Ghettoside, offering one strategy that would (in my estimation) dramatically increase equity in American policing. (I also urge everyone to revisit this newsletter’s previous installments on the death penalty, which highlight the powerful abolitionist arguments of my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig, and the war on drugs, which keeps imposing staggering costs while failing to prevent pandemic opioid deaths.)This week’s question is “What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve the criminal-justice system?” I hope to air perspectives as diverse as the country, and perhaps plant seeds that grow into constructive new approaches.Civilian Oversight and Its DiscontentsAt the Marshall Project, Jamiles Lartey describes the political battle in many municipalities over police-oversight boards, and argues that police unions frequently try to undermine their mission:
Resistance to oversight boards comes primarily from pro-law enforcement groups, especially police unions, who often make concerted efforts to dilute the power of the boards. Law enforcement voices frequently argue that civilians, by definition, don’t have the right knowledge to evaluate police actions. “It would be akin to putting a plumber in charge of the investigation of airplane crashes,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, told the Washington Post in 2021. When they can’t stop these oversight agencies, or weaken their powers, police unions sometimes seek to have allies placed in vacant board positions. In Chicago, where proponents recently won passage of a new oversight structure, WBEZ reported this week that the largest local police union is spending money “in an attempt to extend the union’s power into a domain created specifically to oversee the officers who make up the union’s membership.”
It’s common for negotiations about oversight bodies to include debate on whether people with close ties to the police (like former officers or family members of officers) are eligible to serve.
On the other side of the spectrum, some police abolitionists push back against these boards, arguing that they work “against deeper change.” It’s also not uncommon for community activists who initially back oversight boards to turn against them over time, frustrated by a lack of results. That’s how things are playing out in Dallas, where activists and board members are both expressing frustration with a board that had its powers expanded after the 2018 killing of Botham Jean by then-officer Amber Guyger. One board member told Bolts Magazine that their efforts were being “stonewalled,” “marginalized” and “put in a corner” by the department’s non-cooperation. The political wrangling about oversight boards is only one way that police departments and unions push back on accountability. In Boston, which rolled out its own independent watchdog body in 2021 (to mixed reviews), Mayor Michelle Wu is currently locked in a battle over the police union contract, and her desire to strengthen the disciplinary process for officer misconduct.
Continuing the DEI ConversationIn our last installment, I promised to run additional reader responses to the Question of the Week about diversity training and associated initiatives within organizations. Today’s collection explores how readers feel about the intersection of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals and hiring practices.Andy feels frustrated by a lack of specificity about what is expected of him––and a climate where open conversation and debate seems too risky to engage in:
In my company, we have a VP of Diversity, who has made a couple of presentations about how we “need” to be more diverse. But what does that look like? I’m in software. I’m a manager who has 10 people reporting to me. Five are white men (one an Orthodox Jew––how does he fit in?). One is an Asian man, one is an Asian woman, two are Indian women, and one is an Indian man. One of the Indian women is my highest-paid employee, deservedly. So, how much work do I have to do in order to make my team diverse?
So instead, we focus on “underrepresented,” which means women, Black, and Hispanic. Maybe gay or trans. How many "groups" do we put on the underrepresented list? Which ones? By the way, the other development manager working with me is a Black man, and our testing and product managers are Hispanic men. I’ve hired maybe 20 employees over my career. The majority are Indian, then Asian, men. My last few openings, I’ve had women recruiters, which, research says, is supposed to tilt the candidates toward women. Not working, I guess. Or maybe it’s actually reflective of the pool? Of course, there isn’t much room for discourse. I’m debating whether I should post this article in our “random” slack channel. Will I just get in trouble?
Jack hypothesizes that diversity work is less appealing when resources are scarce:
I took the all-day diversity class as a middle manager. The company was going through downsizing, which creates a zero-sum mentality that is not a good companion to confessions of moral turpitude, the holy grail of the day. Then the multimillion-dollar fee charged by the consultant came up, igniting two-way hostility.  A total fiasco. I concluded that movies would do a better job helping people internalize the diversity concepts.
D. believes that, for some positions, job candidates from historically underrepresented groups should get hired over white candidates for the sake of diversity, as opposed to a policy of strict nondiscrimination. But he is frustrated by his perception that his employer won’t admit that preference:
I am a card-carrying liberal teaching at a Canadian university. All members of hiring committees are mandated to do periodic equity training in order to sit on the committee, so I’ve done this at least twice. My experience is that the training is as good or as bad as the trainers: my second time was competent, boring, professional; it explained Canadian law and provincial law and university policies, and gave a few decent tips on how to balance the three when they are in conflict, which is pretty often.
But the first time was so insulting to our intelligence. What I most remember is the trainer’s complete ignorance of, or refusal to be honest about, affirmative action (which I support, by the way). The message was you must hire the best candidate, but make sure the best candidate is from an equity-deserving group. Our question: “Can we advertise that for diversity reasons we are only looking for, say, an Indigenous person to teach Indigenous studies?” The answer: “No, you can’t do that.” Our question: “So we have to accept applications from people who in reality have no chance of making the short list?” Their answer: “Hire the best person,” but with the implication that it would be a bad outcome to have a non-Indigenous instructor of Indigenous studies. I actually support the idea of diversity-oriented searches to address historical exclusion and present underrepresentation. Again, I’m a liberal.  But I don’t support lying in job ads.  
It’s the exact equivalent, in reverse, of the NFL mandate to give no-chance-in-hell interviews to minority head-coach candidates. So is the problem the training, or is it Canadian law, which refuses to call diversity preference or compensatory preference by its name, and just calls it “equity”? I’m not sure, but the English language weeps either way. To be clear, though, my awful experience was years back, and the second time, the trainers were pretty honest with us about the contradictions between laws at various levels.
Paul argues that the current approach to DEI generates a backlash from people who feel discriminated against:
I am a Ph.D. candidate at a flagship state university in the Midwest, and recently, a call was put out for scholarships and research funding. At the beginning of the application was the caveat that “priority will be given to underrepresented groups.” Although I am a military veteran, a “nontraditional” student (i.e. middle aged), and come from a rural and “underprivileged” background (whatever that means), I am quite persuaded that none of these “underrepresented” categories is what they meant. And that’s the problem.  
In modern academic circles, DEI initiatives engage in a good deal of coy linguistic posturing that is intended to signal “justice” but that actually sows confusion and resentment. It is well understood on campus that racial and sexual identities trump all other aspects of background and character, and that the commanding heights of student and faculty ambitions are occupied by a class of technocrats engaged in setting historical injustices straight. They do so, paradoxically, by engaging in precisely the kind of arbitrary and capricious discrimination that caused the historical injustices in the first place. And one daren’t lift so much as an eyebrow of critical inquiry (“Can we have a list of the groups to be favored and why?”) without risking professional sanction and social animus.
And even if these DEI programs were models of carefully and individually tailored merit-apportioning, it would hardly matter, since the general perception is quite the opposite. Like the Irish who “need not apply,” talented and ambitious men and women (if they are the wrong identity) quietly skulk to the sidelines to wait for the madness to end.
They don’t even look one another in the face.
Mike has concluded that it’s a waste of time for him to apply for jobs at an employer that is emphasizing certain kinds of DEI initiatives:
I was part of a layoff last week with nearly a universal demographic makeup: straight, white-looking men. The company was already 60 percent female. I have an MBA and a bunch of technical certifications. I look at data and can do analysis. Before I even respond to an inbound request from a prospective employer, I look at the DEI targets. If those targets require significant headcount growth or layoffs to meet goals based on historical trends … I will not apply or interview. I will point my POC and female friends their way.
It’s purely a numbers game.
The leaders are telling me they don’t want people like me … so they don’t get people like me. The shift from meritocracy to equity is going to cause businesses not focused on DEI to gain an advantage in the long term. I’m not less talented than I used to be; I am just the wrong race—and DEI is clear that being white makes me lower quality. There was one company I did accept an inbound with. They put their DEI targets against proportional talent metrics, and they wanted to promote proportionally. It was more work and didn’t look as good as the aggressive virtue signal, but I know if I land there, I just have to execute to win. TLDR: As a white male, when I see DEI, I know it normally means “We don’t want you, we don’t like you, and we will promote or hire literally anyone else if we can.”
James feels discarded by organizations with what he sees as an insufficient commitment to diversity and inclusion:
In my experience, as a visibly queer, Indigenous person in various leadership roles over the past decade, all that is being fulfilled by many diversity efforts––classes, webinars, newsletters, certification programs, and the like––is the documentation of completion rather than the work that should and must be done in order to actually effect change.
The people we should be listening to are Asian women, Black women, Indigenous women, queer women, and femmes of color—they are often at the bottom of the wage pool, subjected to microaggressions and outright discrimination. I’ve had a nonprofit leader ask me why we needed “another DEI class” when she had a certificate from just two or three years ago; I’ve had an instructor who touts a certification of excellence granted by some national institution or other using slurs and derogatory language about Indigenous people like it’s industry jargon. Because it is: Microaggressions; belittling remarks based on race, gender, identity, presentation, hair, makeup, clothes, body type; and the expectation of willingness to step into a stereotype are what we see. The closest thing many of us come to “inclusion” is that we’re all discarded in equal measure.
In an essay that takes aim at TikTok, Cory Doctorow puts forth a general theory of tech giants:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die … This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

The 2016 presidential election will never die—or, at the very least, we appear doomed to discuss it forever. Earlier this month, NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics published a study in Nature Communications that complicates one purported element of Donald Trump’s ascension: the influence of Russian Twitter trolls. The researchers looked at roughly 1.2 billion tweets from the lead-up to the 2016 election. They sought to quantify just how many ordinary U.S. Twitter users were exposed to Russian accounts, and to better understand how that exposure did or did not change users’ political attitudes and voting behavior.One of their findings quickly made headlines, although not in a way they intended. The researchers determined that Russian troll accounts on Twitter demonstrated little ability to change voter behavior. The majority of U.S. Twitter users surveyed were simply not exposed to posts from the Internet Research Agency, Russia’s troll farm. And many of the ones who were self-identified as highly partisan Republicans—people who seemed likely to vote for Trump anyway.So far, so good. In hindsight, the findings seem logical: Simply seeing a few random tweets from Russians pretending to be angry, partisan Americans isn’t the sort of thing that causes somebody to drop everything and reconsider their politics. But plenty of diehards are still relitigating the 2016 outcome. The study has been weaponized and its findings distorted or downplayed, depending on one’s political views. As with so many well-meaning efforts to understand the effect of digital platforms on our politics, the nuance of the work has been once again flattened and corrupted by the incentives of those very same platforms.  For instance, Glenn Greenwald tweeted the study as proof that “Russiagate” was “one of the most deranged and unhinged conspiracy theories in modern times.” Breitbart definitively declared, “Democrat Narrative Falls Apart: Study Finds Russian Trolls Had Little Influence on 2016 Voters.’” NYU’s center and its authors attempted to correct the record with a Twitter thread, to little effect (their thread has been retweeted fewer than 60 times; Greenwald’s received nearly 5,000 retweets and 1.7 million views).To its credit, the research is full of caveats. Its authors note that the study covers only Twitter’s social-network domain and leaves out much bigger platforms, such as Facebook. Similarly, they argue that the study does not address other prongs of Russia’s documented efforts to meddle in the election, including its email-hacking campaigns targeting the Democratic National Committee and people connected to Hillary Clinton, which were leaked and covered by national media. Josh Tucker, one of the report’s authors, told me repeatedly that the study was just a small piece of a complicated puzzle and did not suggest that Russian efforts had no effect on the 2016 outcome. “The entire paper is predicated on the fact that Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election, which I take as a serious national-security issue,” he said.The research is part of a trend. In recent years, there’s been pushback on the way #resistance tweeters and even mainstream news outlets have used Russian “bots” or trolls as an easy scapegoat to help explain both the provenance of successful right-wing narratives and some of the popular support for MAGA Republicans. Journalists such as Michael Lewis and the French reporter Anthony Mansuy have also gone back to reexamine the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, questioning the notion that the company’s psychographic profiling and targeting meaningfully swayed the election results. It all serves to illustrate that the result of the 2016 election is far more complicated than any single factor can explain.[Read: Is Gmail silencing Republicans?]“I have mixed feelings about this,” Tucker told me when I asked him about how he thought his study might fit into this broader reappraisal. “We had a geopolitical rival trying to interfere in an election, and that was real and serious. This was not something that should’ve been swept under the rug.” But, he added, “campaigns spend billions to try and do this, so why are we sure some tweets moved the needle?”And Tucker gestured toward an unintended consequence of the study: “I worry that we spent four years thinking about the fragility of American elections and how easy it is to change the outcome, and that makes the soil more fertile for claims of the illegitimacy of elected candidates.”Russia’s attempts to meddle were not confined to Twitter. In 2017, Facebook estimated that 126 million users may have viewed Russian-sponsored posts, as opposed to 32 million who, according to the Nature study, were exposed on Twitter. Scholars such as Kathleen Hall Jamieson have done extensive work suggesting that Russia’s email hack-and-leak operation, aided by media amplification, was likely a contributing factor in the electoral outcome. It’s foolish to suggest that a few troll tweets swung the 2016 election, but it’s also unwise to dismiss a multipronged attempt to disrupt the American democratic because of this one study.“What [the research shows] is this is an important piece of the larger 2016 puzzle,” Kate Starbird, a co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, told me. She explained that the study only confirms what media-studies scholars have long known: that one piece of targeted information or propaganda rarely changes one’s opinion. (That idea is known as the “hypodermic needle effect.”) More likely, people are influenced by ideas that travel to mass media, and then by convincing personalities who repackage and disseminate that information. The NYU study doesn’t factor in this indirect exposure, she argues, which would include things like troll tweets embedded into news articles that are then shared across the internet. “Just because we can’t measure impact doesn’t mean there isn’t impact,” Starbird said.It’s easy to blame overly credulous media or various pundits and researchers for simplifying the complex election interference narrative down to “Russia did it,” but it’s also important to remember how primed many Americans were to believe in the power of social networks to manipulate user emotions and shape public opinion. In 2014, Facebook faced intense backlash and generated tons of headlines over a study in which researchers said they had manipulated the emotional state of nearly 700,000 users. Two years before that study, Facebook released research purportedly demonstrating the power of its digital I Voted stickers to increase voter turnout. A credulous public and press took company claims about platforms’ ability to influence behavior at face value. So it makes sense that, in the aftermath of Clinton’s surprising defeat, people latched onto a simple narrative. People may have freaked out, but they didn’t do so without reason.If this all sounds mealy-mouthed and frustrating and inconclusive, it’s because studying the flow of information across dozens of open and closed ecosystems and assessing the impact is exceedingly difficult. Ten thousand analyses and reappraisals will never provide a smoking gun that we can point to as the exact reason the 2016 election turned out as it did. “It’s a complicated story,” Starbird told me. “It’s always been a complicated story. If this study or any other makes it look simple, that’s a mistake we’re making.”We’re still struggling to incorporate that complexity into our broader understanding of how social platforms affect elections, and in that case the NYU study does not offer any heartening signs. The thoughtful context provided by digital forensics is immediately drowned out by the very information ecosystem it’s trying to demystify. Few minds are changed. More than six years after the 2016 election, we don’t really know the impact of Russian meddling except that angry, conspiratorially minded Americans continue to fight over whether it happened and to what extent it mattered. Maybe that’s proof enough that the trolls succeeded—if not in annihilating our democratic system, then at least in making so many of us trust it and one another less.

For months, the winter forecast in the United States seemed to be nothing but viral storm clouds. A gale of RSV swept in at the start of autumn, sickening infants and children in droves and flooding ICUs. After a multiyear hiatus, flu, too, returned in force, before many Americans received their annual shot. And a new set of fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 subvariants had begun its creep around the world. Experts braced for impact: “My biggest concern was hospital capacity,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the popular public-health-focused Substack Your Local Epidemiologist. “If flu, RSV, and COVID were all surging at the same time—given how burned out, how understaffed our hospital systems are right now—how would that pan out?”But the season’s worst-case scenario—what some called a “tripledemic,” bad enough to make health-care systems crumble—has not yet come to pass. Unlike last year, and the year before, a hurricane of COVID hospitalizations and deaths did not slam the country during the first month of winter; flu and RSV now appear to be in sustained retreat. Even pediatric hospitals, fresh off what many described as their most harrowing respiratory season in memory, finally have some respite, says Mary Beth Miotto, a pediatrician and the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. After a horrific stint, “we are, right now, doing okay.” With two months to go until spring, there is plenty of time for another crisis to emerge: Certain types of influenza, in particular, can be prone to delivering late-season second peaks. “We need to be careful and recognize we’re still in the middle,” Jetelina told me. But so far, this winter “has not been as bad as I expected it to be.”No matter what’s ahead, this respiratory season certainly won’t go down in history as a good one. Children across the country have fallen sick in overwhelming numbers, many of them with multiple respiratory viruses at once, amid a nationwide shortage of pediatric meds. SARS-CoV-2 remains a top cause of mortality, with its daily death count still in the hundreds, and long COVID continues to be difficult to prevent or treat. And enthusiasm for new vaccines and virus-blocking mitigations seems to be at an all-time low. Any sense of relief people might be feeling at this juncture must be tempered by what’s in the rearview: three years of an ongoing pandemic that has left more than 1 million people dead in the U.S. alone, and countless others sick, many chronically so. The winter may be going better than it could have. But that shouldn’t hold us back from tackling what’s ahead this season, and in others yet to come.Not all of this past autumn’s gloomy predictions were off base. RSV and flu each rushed in on the early side of the season and led to a steep rise in cases. But both viruses made rather hasty exits: RSV hit an apparent apex in mid-November, and flu bent into its own decline the following month. The staggered peaks “helped us quite a bit, in terms of hospitals being stressed,” says Sam Scarpino, the director of AI and life sciences at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. In recent days, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations have been tilting downward, too—and severe-disease rates seem to be holding at a relative low. Just under 5 percent of hospital beds are currently occupied by COVID patients, compared with more than four times that fraction this time last year. And weekly COVID deaths are down by almost 75 percent from January 2022. (Death, though, has always been a lagging indicator, and the mortality numbers could still shift upward soon.) Despite some dire predictions to the contrary, the fast-spreading XBB.1.5 subvariant didn’t spark “some giant Omicron-type wave and crush everything,” says Justin Lessler, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “In that sense, I feel good.”[Read: How worried should we be about XBB.1.5?]No one can say for sure why we dodged winter’s deadliest bullets, but the population-level immunity that Americans have built up over the past three years clearly played a major role. “That’s a testament to how vaccination has made the disease less dangerous for most people,” says Cedric Dark, an emergency physician at Baylor College of Medicine. Widespread immunization, combined with the fact that most Americans have now been infected, and many of them reinfected, has caused severe-disease rates to plunge, and the virus to move less quickly than it otherwise would have. Antiviral drugs, too, have been slashing hospitalization rates, at least for the meager fraction of recently infected people who use them. The gargantuan asterisk of long COVID still applies to new infections, but the short-term effects of the disease are now more on par with those of other respiratory illnesses, reducing the number of resources that health-care workers must marshal for each case.The virus, too, was more merciful than it could have been. XBB.1.5, despite its high transmissibility and penchant for dodging antibodies, doesn’t so far seem more capable of causing severe disease. And the fall’s bivalent shots, though not a perfect match for the newcomer, still improve the body’s response to viruses in the Omicron clan. Competition among respiratory viruses may have also helped soften COVID’s recent blows. In the days and weeks after one infection, bodies can become more resilient to another—a phenomenon known as viral interference that can reduce the risk of simultaneous or back-to-back infections. On population scales, interference can push down surges’ peaks, or at the very least, separate them, potentially keeping hospitals from being hit by a medley of microbes all at once. It’s hard to say for sure: “Many things go into when an epidemic wave happens—human behavior, temperature, humidity, the biology of the virus, the biology of the host,” says Ellen Foxman, an immunologist at Yale. That said, “I do think viral interference probably does play a role that has not been appreciated.”None of the experts I spoke with was ready to issue a blanket phew. Overlapping waves of respiratory illness have already led to nonstop sickness, especially among children, draining resources at every point in the pediatric caregiving chain. Kids were kept out of school, and parents stayed home from work; after a glut of COVID-related closures in New Mexico, schools and day cares running low on teachers had to call in the National Guard. Inundated with illnesses, pediatric emergency rooms overflowed; adult-care units had to be repurposed for children, and some hospitals pitched tents on their front lawns to accommodate overflow. Local stopgaps weren’t always enough: At one point, a colleague of Miotto’s in Boston told her that the closest available pediatric ICU bed was in Washington, D.C.[Read: The worst pediatric-care crisis in decades]By any metric, for the pediatric community, “it’s been a horrible season, the worst,” says Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford. “The hospitals were bursting, bursting at the seams.” The flow of fevers has ebbed somewhat in recent weeks, but remains more flood than trickle. “It’s not over: We still don’t have amoxicillin in general, and we still struggle to get fever medication for people,” Miotto said. A parent recently told her that they’d gone to almost 10 pharmacies to try to fill an antibiotic prescription for their child. And pediatric providers across the country are steeling themselves for what the coming weeks could bring. “I think we could still see another surge,” says Joelle Simpson, the division chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National Hospital. “In prior years, February has been one of the worst months.”The season’s ongoing woes have been compounded by preexisting health-care shortages. Amid a dearth of funds, some hospitals have reduced their number of pediatric beds; a mass exodus of workers has also limited the resources that can be doled out, even as SARS-CoV-2 testing and isolation protocols continue to stretch the admission and discharge timeline. “Hospitals are in a weaker position than they were before the pandemic,” says Joseph Kanter, Louisiana’s state health officer and medical director. “If that’s the environment in which we are experiencing this year’s respiratory-virus season, it makes everything feel more acute.” Those issues are not limited to pediatrics: Now that COVID is a regular part of the disease roster, workloads have increased for a contingent of beleaguered clinicians that, across the board, seems likely to continue to shrink. In many hospitals, patients are getting stuck in emergency departments for several hours, even multiple days—sometimes never making it to a bed before being sent home. “It seems like hospitals everywhere are full,” Dark told me, not just because of COVID, but because of everything. “The vast majority of the work I do, and that I bet you what most of my colleagues are doing, is taking place in waiting rooms.”The U.S. has come a long way in the past three years. But still, “the cumulative toll of these winter surges has been higher than it needs to be,” says Julia Raifman, a health-policy researcher at Boston University. Had more people gone into winter up to date on their COVID vaccines, the virus’s mortality rate could have been driven down further; had more antiviral drugs and other protections been prioritized for the elderly and immunocompromised, fewer people might have been imperiled at all. If relief is percolating across the country right now, that says more about a shift in standards than anything else. “Our threshold for what ‘bad’ looks like has just gotten so out of whack,” Simpson told me. This winter could have been as grim as recent ones, Scarpino told me, with body-filled freezer trucks in parking lots and hospitals on the brink of collapse. But an improvement from those horrific lows isn’t much to brag about. And this winter—three years into combatting a coronavirus for which we have shots, drugs, masks, and more—has been nowhere close to the best one imaginable.The concern now, experts told me, is that the U.S. might accept a winter like this one as simply good enough. Regular vaccine uptake could dwindle even further; another wild-card SARS-CoV-2 variant could ignite another conflagration of cases. If that did happen, some researchers worry that we’d be slow to notice: Genomic surveillance is down, and many tests are being taken, unreported, at home. And with so many different immune histories now scattered across the globe, it’s getting tougher for modelers like Lessler to predict where and how quickly new variants might take over.The country does have a few factors working in its favor. By next winter, at least one RSV vaccine will almost certainly be available to protect the population’s youngest, eldest, or both. mRNA-based flu vaccines, which are expected to be far faster to develop than currently available shots, are also in the works, and will likely make it easier to match doses to circulating strains. And if, as Foxman hopes, SARS-CoV-2 eventually settles into a more predictable, seasonal pattern, infections will be less of a concern for most of the year and season-specific immunizations could be easier to design.[Read: Should everyone be masking again?]But no vaccine will do much unless enough people are willing and able to take it—and the public-health infrastructure that’s led many outreach efforts remains underfunded and understaffed. Kanter worries that the nation may not be terribly willing to invest. “We’ve fallen into this complacency trap where we just accept a given amount of mortality every year as unavoidable,” he told me. It doesn’t have to be that way, as the past few years have shown: Treatments, vaccines, clean indoor air, and other measures can lower a respiratory virus’s toll.By the middle of spring, the U.S. will be in a position to let the public-health-emergency declaration on COVID lapse—a decision that could roll back protections for the uninsured, and ratchet up price points on shots and antivirals. This winter’s retrospective is likely to influence that decision, Scarpino told me. But relief can breed complacency, and complacency further slows a sluggish public-health response. The fate of next winter—and of every winter after that—will depend on whether the U.S. decides to view this season as a success, or to recognize it as a shaky template for well-being that can and should be improved.

Recently Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has boosted videos of people alleging neurological side effects shortly after receiving one of the COVID vaccines. These videos started appearing after the vaccines were first rolled out, but often news stories have a second or third life on social media. It’s a good opportunity to look back at the data we have so far regarding the side effect profiles of the various COVID vaccines, and also give some much-needed perspective on these viral videos.

According to the CDC: “More than 667 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been given in the United States from December 14, 2020, through January 18, 2023.” That is a huge set of data, and side effects have been carefully tracked through various monitoring mechanisms. In order to establish that a symptom or disease is actually a side effect of a vaccine we need more than the simply fact that they occurred sometime after a vaccine dose. With so many doses given, people will continue to get all the ailments of life at the usual rate, and by coincidence along many people will get sick after getting the vaccine.

Monitoring systems generally report anything adverse that happens after receiving a vaccine as a side effect. They then leave it to epidemiologists to do statistical analysis, to see if the risk of any particular negative outcome is more likely after receiving a dose of a particular vaccine than the background rate. They can also compare negative outcomes among the various vaccines. So far there have been only four serious adverse event types where it seems likely the risk is higher after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. These are:

Anaphylaxis (a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction)

Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS)

Myocarditis/pericarditis

Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS)

All of these adverse events are extremely rare, but they do seem to have occurred at higher rates than the background rate (matched for demographic features). Of note, however, GBS only occurred after the J&J/Janssen vaccine, not after either mRNA vaccine (Pfizer or Moderna). Also TTS was only caused by the adenovirus vaccines (J&J and AstraZeneca), not the mRNA vaccines.

All of these adverse events have something in common – they are caused by immune activation. This is the kind of side effect one would expect after a vaccine, which triggers immune activity. TTS can cause blood clots in the brain, and GBS attacks the nerves, so they are included as neurological complications. Otherwise there have been no major neurological complications of the COVID-19 vaccines established epidemiologically. Specifically, there is no link to seizures or any movement disorder.

One potential neurological side effect remains controversial – Bell’s palsy, a form of facial paralysis. There may be a small increased risk with viral vaccines (but no more than other vaccines), but probably not with the mRNA vaccines. If there is an increased risk, it must be tiny as the data cannot clearly establish a link. Further, there is a strong signal that COVID itself can cause Bell’s palsy, so getting vaccinated is likely protective overall.

With that update on the data for side effects, what do we make of the viral videos showing alleged neurological side effects? Before I comment I want to point out that I generally do not agree with making remote medical assessments of public figures. Sometimes I will comment on the commenting, but otherwise I think such information should come from medical professionals who have done a proper assessment and have the permission of their patient to make certain details public. I also think it’s reasonable to legally require people seeking certain public offices, such as the Presidency, to disclose basic health information through an objective source. Otherwise, people publicly speculating (without objective information or even a medical background) about medical diagnoses is inappropriate, of little value, and should not be magnified.

I make two exceptions to this rule. The first is when people post their own medical information online in order to promote a point of view, either to promote a treatment, warn about a risk, or impact the conversation on a public health issue. In such cases they chose to put their own medical information into the public square and a response is fair game. Still, I aim to be respectful and not overstep what is necessary to counter dangerous misinformation. Second, I tend to limit my comments to those cases where there is enough public information to have an opinion (otherwise I just point out the lack of such information). I also tend to stick with neurological issues, since I am a neurologist. In particular, videos of claimed movement disorders are amendable to analysis because the diagnosis is mostly in just looking at how subjects move. Yes, a direct exam provides more information, but sometimes the movement itself is the key, and a video is adequate.

With all that in mind, let’s take a look at three videos of alleged COVID vaccine neurological side effects. None of them provide objective medical information. They are simply anecdotes, of limited clinical utility and unable, by themselves, to establish cause and effect. There is also good reason to conclude, just from watching the videos themselves, that they are not vaccine side effects.

The first is of Angelia Desselle (one of the videos promoted by Musk). The video certainly looks dramatic, but to a neurologist’s eye this does not conform to any known movement disorder. There are only so many ways in which the parts of the brain that control movement can be damaged or function abnormally. The most likely diagnosis in this case is what is known as a functional movement disorder (a specific type of functional neurological disorder). These are real neurological disorders, but they are not caused by pathology or anything biological with the nervous system. They are complex disorders thought to be mainly a manifestation of psychological stress. The patients are generally not “faking it”. That tends to be the most common public comment by non-experts, and it is almost certainly incorrect. Again, these patients have a real and serious disorder that requires complex treatment, but it is not the kind of thing that can be directly caused by a vaccine.

The second video of Shawn Skelton is also typical for a functional movement disorder. These are definitely not seizures. They are not typical for any other known movement disorder. The third video is also of Shawn Skelton. This is less-specific shaking. From this video alone it would not be possible to completely rule out (or in) seizures, but in the context of the other video it is more likely functional. The third video is titled: “Does the moderna cause seizures???? Yes it does!!!”

By all available evidence, no, it doesn’t. Seizures have not been established as a side effect for any COVID-19 vaccine, including Moderna. Even if she were having seizures, that would not establish that they were caused by the vaccine. And the provided video evidence does not establish she is having seizures, but rather is more likely to be a functional neurological disorder.

According to reports:

However, since the video was released, Skelton has been treated and released from Deaconess Orthopedic Neuroscience hospital, according to the Evansville Courier & Press newspaper. Skelton says MRIs, CT scans and blood cultures came back no results, and doctors told her her problem is probably stress-related.

Translation: Functional neurological disorder.

I think the best response to such videos is for experts to set the record straight, and then for the public to subsequently ignore them. Of course, that’s not the culture of social media, but that’s my advice. There is nothing to be gained from confrontation. Such people deserve our sympathy, and their privacy should be respected as much as possible – even though they forfeited their own privacy by posting videos of themselves online. The goal is to mitigate the spread of misinformation as much as possible, while minimizing personal backlash.

Either way – these videos are not reliable medical evidence. They are anecdotes and very likely do not represent true vaccine side effects. It is unfortunate that some have chosen to exploit them to promote dangerous antivaccine misinformation. Meanwhile, after billions of doses given, the COVID-19 vaccines have proven extremely safe and effective.

Harry has claimed that while the royal family stayed silent about the media’s abuse of his wife, behind the scenes it leaked, planted or influenced stories with the worst elements of the Royal Rota — representatives of news organizations that cover the palace in a preferential press pool — in return for favorable coverage for themselves or distractions from their own brewing scandals. After telling only his immediate family about plans he and Meghan were making to travel or distance themselves from royal duties, Harry says in “Spare,” those plans appeared in the tabloids attributed to unnamed sources.

It’s not just a matter of Harry’s suspicions. The Daily Mail columnist Dan Wootton has said “much of the negativity towards the couple is coming from within the royal family. The royal family, and staff of the royal family, are the ones that are very often leaking these stories to the press.”

Other prominent members of the Royal Rota agree. Robert Jobson, the royal editor for The Evening Standard, told the Australian morning show “Sunrise” that “they can deny it all they like until they’re blue in the face, but there’s been an awful lot of leaking, particularly from Kensington Palace,” the office of William and Kate. In tweeting an early report of the rift between Harry and his kin, Richard Palmer of The Daily Express said the royal family “and their advisers recognize the value of a symbiotic relationship in communicating with the public who pay for them. I’m not sure Harry does.”

Another journalist, Omid Scobie, claimed in an interview for an ITV documentary in 2021 that William was planting stories about his brother’s mental health in the press. The station reportedly received a legal threat from William — so much for the policy of silence — and scrubbed Scobie’s statement from the show.

The British journalist Andrew Marr, a confessed fan of Queen Elizabeth II, says Harry’s claims are important. After all, Marr said, “either well-known journalists are making a lot of stuff up, just sitting at their laptops at the kitchen table inventing the detail of feuds and private ­confrontations, or a particularly confidence-rotting form of anonymous briefing has been taking place.”

Maybe they could be part of an inquiry similar to the one after the phone hacking scandal by Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids.

This sort of royal relationship with the media is not new, of course. In a BBC documentary, Charles’s former press secretary said William was furious that when he was 16, The Sun published the details of his first meeting with Camilla. The author of the story said the source was Mark Bolland, Charles’s deputy private secretary and public relations adviser.

Excerpted from “Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility” by Martha C. Nussbaum, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’75 
Animals are in trouble all over the world. Our world is dominated by humans everywhere: on land, in the seas, and in the air. No non-human animal escapes human domination. Much of the time, that domination inflicts wrongful injury on animals: whether through the barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry, through poaching and game hunting, through habitat destruction, through pollution of the air and the seas, or through neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love.
In a way, this problem is age-old. Both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions have deplored human cruelty to animals for around two millennia. The Hindu emperor Ashoka (c. 304–232 bce), a convert to Buddhism, wrote about his efforts to give up meat and to forgo all practices that harmed animals. In Greece the Platonist philosophers Plutarch (46–119 ce) and Porphyry (c. 234–305 ce) wrote detailed treatises deploring human cruelty to animals, describing their keen intelligence and their capacity for social life, and urging humans to change their diet and their way of life. But by and large these voices have fallen on deaf ears, even in the supposedly moral realm of the philosophers, and most humans have continued to treat most animals like objects, whose suffering does not matter — although they sometimes make an exception for companion animals. Meanwhile, countless animals have suffered cruelty, deprivation, and neglect.
Today, we have, then, a long-overdue ethical debt: to listen to arguments we have refused to hear, to care for what we have obtusely ignored, and to act on the knowledge of our bad practices that we can so easily attain. But today we have reasons humans never had before to do something about human wrongs to animals. First, human domination has increased exponentially in the past two centuries. In Porphyry’s world, animals suffered when they were killed for meat, but up to that point they lived pretty decent lives. There was no factory meat industry that, today, breeds these animals as if they were just meat already, confining them in horrible conditions, cramped and isolated, until they die before ever having decently lived. Animals were long hunted in the wild, but for the most part their habitats were not taken over for human dwellings or invaded by poachers seeking to make money from the murder of an intelligent being, an elephant or a rhinoceros. In the seas, humans have always fished for food, and whales have long been hunted for their commercial value. But the sea was not full of plastic trash that entices animals to dine on it, and then chokes them to death. Nor did companies drilling for undersea oil create noise pollution everywhere (drilling, air bombs used to chart the ocean’s floor), making life increasingly difficult for social creatures whose sense of hearing is their primary mode of communication. Birds were shot for food, but those who escaped did not choke on air pollution or crash fatally into urban skyscrapers, whose lights entice them. In short: the scope of human cruelty and neglect was relatively narrow. Today new forms of animal cruelty turn up all the time — without even being recognized as cruelty, since their impact on the lives of intelligent beings is barely considered. So we have not just the overdue debt of the past, but a new moral debt that has increased a thousandfold and is continually increasing.

Because the reach of human cruelty has expanded, so too has the involvement of virtually all people in it. Even people who do not consume meat produced by the factory farming industry are likely to have used single-use plastic items, to use fossil fuels mined beneath the ocean and polluting the air, to dwell in areas in which elephants and bears once roamed, or to live in high-rise buildings that spell death for migratory birds. The extent of our own implication in practices that harm animals should make every person with a conscience consider what we can all do to change this situation. Pinning guilt is less important than accepting the fact that humanity as a whole has a collective duty to face and solve these problems.
So far, I have not spoken of the extinction of animal species, because this is a book about loss and deprivation suffered by individual creatures, each of whom matters. Species as such do not suffer loss. However, extinction never takes place without massive suffering of individual creatures: the hunger of a polar bear, starving on an ice floe, unable to cross the sea to hunt; the sadness of an orphan elephant, deprived of care and community as the species dwindles rapidly; the mass extinctions of song-bird species as a result of unbreathable air, a horrible death. When human practices hound species toward extinction, member animals always suffer greatly and live squashed and thwarted lives. Besides, the species themselves matter for creating diverse ecosystems in which animals can live well.
Extinctions would take place even without human intervention. Even in such cases we might have reasons to intervene to stop them, because of the importance of biodiversity. But scientists agree that today’s extinctions are between one thousand and ten thousand times higher than the natural extinction rate. (Our uncertainty is huge, because we are very ignorant of how many species there actually are, particularly where fish and insects are concerned.) Worldwide, approximately one-quarter of the world’s mammals and over 40 percent of amphibians are currently threatened with extinction. These include several species of bear, the Asian elephant (endangered), the African elephant (threatened), the tiger, six species of whale, the gray wolf, and so many more. All in all, more than 370 animal species are either endangered or threatened, using the criteria of the US Endangered Species Act, not including birds, and a separate list of similar length for birds. Asian songbirds are virtually extinct in the wild, on account of the lucrative trade in these luxury items. And many other species of birds have recently become extinct. Meanwhile, the international treaty called CITES that is supposed to protect birds (and many other creatures) is toothless and unenforced. The story of this book is not that story of mass extinction, but the sufferings of individual creatures that take place against this background of human indifference to biodiversity.

“The extent of our own implication in practices that harm animals should make every person with a conscience consider what we can all do to change this situation.”

There is a further reason why the ethical evasion of the past must end now. Today we know far more about animal lives than we did even 50 years ago. We know much too much for the glib excuses of the past to be offered without shame. Porphyry and Plutarch (and Aristotle before them) knew a lot about animal intelligence and sensitivity. But somehow humans find ways of “forgetting” what the science of the past has plainly revealed, and for many centuries most people, including most philosophers, thought animals were “brute beasts,” automata without a subjective sense of the world, without emotions, without society, and perhaps even without the feeling of pain.
Recent decades, however, have seen an explosion of high-level research covering all areas of the animal world. We now know more not only about animals long closely studied — primates and companion animals — but also about animals who are difficult to study — marine mammals, whales, fish, birds, reptiles, and cephalopods.
We know — not just by observation, but by carefully designed experimental work — that all vertebrates and many invertebrates feel pain subjectively, and have, more generally, a subjectively felt view of the world: the world looks like something to them. We know that all of these animals experience at least some emotions (fear being the most ubiquitous), and that many experience emotions like compassion and grief that involve more complex “takes” on a situation. We know that animals as different as dolphins and crows can solve complicated problems and learn to use tools to solve them. We know that animals have complex forms of social organization and social behavior. More recently, we have been learning that these social groups are not simply places where a rote inherited repertory is acted out, but places of complicated social learning. Species as different as whales, dogs, and many types of birds clearly transmit key parts of the species’ repertoire to their young socially, not just genetically.
What are the implications of this research for ethics? Huge, clearly. We can no longer draw the usual line between our own species and “the beasts,” a line meant to distinguish intelligence, emotion, and sentience from the dense life of a “brute beast.” Nor can we even draw a line between a group of animals we already recognize as sort of “like us” — apes, elephants, whales, dogs — and others who are supposed to be unintelligent. Intelligence takes multiple and fascinating forms in the real world, and birds, evolving by a very different path from humans, have converged on many similar abilities. Even an invertebrate such as the octopus has surprising capacities for intelligent perception: an octopus can recognize individual humans, and can solve complex problems, guiding one of its arms through a maze to obtain food using only its eyes. Once we recognize all this we can hardly be unchanged in our ethical thinking. To put a “brute beast” in a cage seems no more wrong than putting a rock in a terrarium. But that is not what we are doing. We are deforming the existence of intelligent and complexly sentient forms of life. Each of these animals strives for a flourishing life, and each has abilities, social and individual, that equip it to negotiate a decent life in a world that gives animals difficult challenges. What humans are doing is to thwart this striving — and this seems wrong.
But even though the time has come to recognize our ethical responsibility to the other animals, we have few intellectual tools to effect meaningful change. The third reason why we must confront what we are doing to animals now, today, is that we have built a world in which two of humanity’s best tools for progress, law and political theory, have, so far, no or little help to offer us. Law — both domestic and international — has quite a lot to say about the lives of companion animals, but very little to say about any other animals. Nor do animals in most nations have what lawyers call “standing”: that is, the status to bring a legal claim if they are wronged. Of course, animals cannot themselves bring a legal claim, but neither can most humans, including children, people with cognitive disabilities — and, to tell the truth, almost everybody, since people have little knowledge of the law. All of us need a lawyer to press our claims. But all the humans I have mentioned — including people with lifelong cognitive disabilities — count, and can bring a legal claim, assisted by an able advocate. The way we have designed the world’s legal systems, animals do not have this simple privilege. They do not count.
Law is built by humans using the theories they have. When those theories were racist, laws were racist. When theories of sex and gender excluded women, so too did law. And there is no denying that most political thought by humans the world over has been human-centered, excluding animals. Even the theories that purport to offer help in the struggle against abuse are deeply defective, built on an inadequate picture of animal lives and animal striving. As a philosopher and political theorist who is also deeply immersed in law and law teaching, I hope to change things with this book.
Copyright © 2022 by Martha Nussbaum. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Later this year, for no good reason at all, the United States might enter a chaotic period of financial default. Once again, the country has hit its statutory debt limit, because Congress continues to spend more than the government receives in tax revenue. The Treasury has no more legal authority to issue new debt and is currently using a series of “extraordinary measures” to keep the government’s bills paid. Those extraordinary measures will last for only six months or so. At that point, either Congress will raise the debt ceiling or the full faith and credit of the country will be at risk.[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning]Rohan Grey is a law professor at Willamette University, in Oregon, and a leading promoter of an arcane idea that could save the country from all that drama: The Biden administration could exercise its unilateral legal authority over U.S. currency to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin and use it to pay the government’s bills. The idea seems peculiar—it first surfaced in 2010 in the comments section of a niche blog devoted to unconventional monetary policy—but Grey and others believe it would be less disruptive than many alternative scenarios.This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.Annie Lowrey: Let’s start with a simple question. What is the debt ceiling?Rohan Grey: Before the debt ceiling existed, Congress would include a method of financing with each individual spending bill that it passed. Every piece of spending legislation would say The Treasury is going to issue a certain amount of securities of this duration and type or Congress will fund it with this tax or by seigniorage. In 1917, during World War I, Congress consolidated different authorities into one and allowed the Treasury to issue bonds without its specific guidance; it created the debt ceiling. Then in World War II, in 1939, it said: As the U.S. government gets more complicated, we’re going to put more trust and discretion in the executive branch. We’ll give you a general limit on the amount of Treasury securities you can issue, and you can use those funds for all our spending commitments. The history of the debt ceiling—counterintuitively—is the history of giving the Treasury, the executive branch, more discretion.Lowrey: And now?Grey: As is often the case in politics, the minute you create something, it gets used in unexpected and counterintuitive ways. The debt ceiling has become a locus, a symbolic place, for politicians to fight over overall spending, overall budgeting. Every time people want to second-guess budget practices, every time they don’t like a certain social-welfare program, the debt ceiling becomes a way to object.Lowrey: Right now, a handful of Republicans have said they won’t lift the ceiling unless Congress negotiates a new set of spending cuts. What happens if Congress does not agree to do that and does not lift the ceiling?Grey: Right now, we’re using “extraordinary measures,” which is something we’ve done repeatedly once the Treasury exhausts its authority to issue more bonds. Many of those extraordinary measures are much more ridiculous than minting the coin.Lowrey: We’ll get there in a second.Grey: The short answer is we have found increasingly convoluted and elaborate ways to avoid a situation in which the Treasury cannot pay its bills. Going forward, one option is to ignore the debt ceiling entirely. Continue issuing Treasury securities—this is sometimes called the Fourteenth Amendment option. If you’re not going to do that, you have two options. You can continue to pay the bills.Lowrey: In that scenario, the Treasury is seeing if the Federal Reserve would let it overdraw its checking account, basically?Grey: Right. The second choice is to not spend money that Congress has told the executive branch it must spend—whether that’s repaying existing debt, paying interest on existing debt, contractual debts, Social Security payments, anything else.[Edward Geist: Nuclear strategists know how dangerous the debt fight is]You ignore the debt ceiling and openly violate existing law regarding financing. Or you do not violate the debt ceiling, but you violate existing law regarding spending. My concern with the latter is that it means the Treasury secretary is put in the position of deciding what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. That’s a huge executive-branch power grab. In fact, President Nixon tried to do it in the 1970s. He said [in effect], I don’t want to spend money on certain welfare programs going to Black communities. Congress passed the Budget and Impoundment Control Act saying, No, when we say you have to spend, you have to spend. And the Supreme Court has reinforced that view in cases going back to Kendall v. Stokes in 1838.Lowrey: A major concern is that if we default, there are going to be huge disruptions in the financial markets. Why?Grey: Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt [in 2011], not because there was a chance the U.S. could not pay—the U.S. prints money; it can always pay its debts—but because of the absolute ridiculousness of the political situation. Creditors had reasonable concerns that the United States would fail to govern itself properly. That was the real concern: not default, but cartoonish incompetence.I would be concerned that the president is willing to openly violate constitutional directives—that’s a bad state of affairs. From everything I’ve heard, there’s unanimity that that is where we’re headed. The White House will prioritize certain payments over others.Lowrey: What does minting a trillion-dollar coin have to do with all of this? It’s got to be the greatest policy proposal to ever come from a blog comment, I guess.Grey: The first form of constitutional lawmaking through internet meme.There’s the general issue. There’s a famous Columbia Law Review article by these very serious constitutional law scholars, Neil Buchanan and Michael Dorf. The White House has used it as their guiding framework for debates over what to do. Buchanan and Dorf lay out a trilemma with the debt limit. Congress gives you three directives in seeming contradiction with one another: You have to spend X. You have to tax Y. You can only issue Z amount of debt. If those are in tension, they argue the debt limit should be the one that gets violated.I agree with that. But there is, in fact, a fourth option. To frame it as a three-legged stool, you’re already failing. You’re already bringing ideology into what could be an open-ended discussion. If we take seriously that there are limits on spending, limits on taxation, and there is a debt ceiling, we have to exhaust that fourth option before we start ignoring laws on the books: the platinum coin.Here’s the specific way it works: There’s a provision of law—deliberately put there by a very visionary U.S. Mint director, who had very ambitious goals for the Mint—that lets the Mint issue coins of whatever denomination they want and in whatever quantities they want. The coins don’t have to have a certain amount of metal content. They don’t have to be commemorative, circulating, or noncirculating—that’s all open. They have to be proof coins, which means high production grade. They have to be nice and shiny.We don’t think of the Mint and the Fed as sisters, but they are, by the way. It’s just one is the sort-of lonely one that nobody talks about. The power to create money in the Constitution is literally the power to coin money.Lowrey: So you mint a coin.Grey: Yes. This is also thanks to a Republican named Mike Castle, as part of a commemorative-coin upgrade act that gets incorporated in an omnibus law. Mike Castle’s vision was predictably quite narrow: He wanted to make revenue for the Mint, and by extension the government, by selling commemorative coins. He was thinking in much smaller orders of magnitude, like a few million dollars or something. A nice little revenue raiser. But what if we make coins that aren’t $100 in face value or $1,000 in face value? The sky’s the limit.Lowrey: How does minting the coin avoid the debt ceiling?Grey: The Treasury secretary has the Mint create a trillion-dollar platinum coin. It deposits it at the Fed, which credits the Treasury for the full base value of the coin. The Federal Reserve gets an asset and a liability matching one another. It’s just like you taking a $100 bill to the bank and the bank giving you $100 in deposit liability. This is exactly the way that existing coins get booked, by the way. Just with a few more zeros.Lowrey: It’s a goofy idea. It’s a dumb-sounding idea. It feels like exploiting a loophole. Is that why we haven’t done it?Grey: That’s a very cynical position. People are coming up with all kinds of gimmicks that sound serious. They sound so complicated. You know, I was an elementary-school teacher, so I don’t have a problem with ideas so simple a 5-year-old can understand them. When a 5-year-old says, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have wars anymore,” you’ll hear people say, “Oh, you’re so naive! You’re a child! You don’t understand how the world really works.” Oh, I’m sorry. You’re the smart one! That’s why you’re dropping bombs on Vietnam![Derek Thompson: Stop trying to ask ‘smart questions’]The idea that all of these complicated mathematical models, all these complicated legal analyses, are valid—it’s bullshit. The reality is that this is a self-imposed problem, because we have a fetish for complexity and so-called financial nuance. Look at the history of extraordinary measures that the Treasury secretary has been taking since the 1980s! They’re all accounting gimmicks, every single one of them. People in the corporate-finance world say that [minting the coin] is a joke; this is a gimmick. They’re really saying it’s populist, not technocratic.Lowrey: I do wonder whether they would have just done it 10 years ago if it had sounded less weird, or if the media had covered the idea differently.Grey: When public officials want to change the number of years that the National Security Agency is allowed to retain data, they do it on a rainy Wednesday buried in paragraph three of a press release.Lowrey: Instead we have a debt-ceiling near-crisis every couple years. It’s financial Groundhog Day.Grey: For a long time, during the Obama administration, the strategy was: Let’s not legitimize debt-ceiling terrorism. If we start talking about ways to get around it, we’re taking the pressure off the Republicans to come back to the negotiating table and do what they should do.It’s very dangerous to play a game of chicken. It requires two sides to play! If you swerve, there’s no game of chicken anymore. The Obama administration wanted to play a game of chicken. And their bet paid off in the sense that Mitch McConnell eventually blinked and kept blinking. It wasn’t costless. It was at the expense of millions of people that had to get sent home and didn’t get their paychecks, and a huge amount of political energy was devoted to this issue that could have been focused on other things. And they went through the deficit-reduction commission. It wasn’t costless. It was a very risky gamble that required them to say, in essence, I’m willing to lie about the obligations that I have as the executive branch to respect Congress’s spending authority.Lowrey: If we were talking 10 years ago, I think I would have said that this was about small-government ideology on the Republican side. I would have been wrong about that. It’s not about budgetary discipline; it’s more about procedural power.Grey: Yes. Their logic is: I want to litigate the previous Congress. I can’t do that. I can’t unwind the spending bills that were passed. I don’t have the votes. I’m going to point at the president and make him the patsy for it so I can shadowbox the prior Congress. Lowrey: There’s a new set of Republicans doing just that.Grey: You know, I think the media has to take some responsibility here too. We uncritically accept the Democrats’ framing of this as the correct one. The reality is, whether you are a bunch of apocalyptic children or seemingly cool-headed technocrats who can’t work out how to actually make government work, you’re both part of the problem. And hopefully, the media can take responsibility for the fact that they’ve had 10 years to frame this with a different narrative, and they haven’t done it. Every time, the fourth option is a gimmick, but extraordinary measures aren’t; every time, violating the Constitution is the “reasonable” path forward.

There have been seemingly endless reports of massive layoffs in the tech industry. Partly they are due to economic circumstances, of course, but overlooked in the reports is the inherent maturity of the tech industry. By maturity, I mean two things: The rate of genuine innovation has broadly declined, and the industry seems to have prioritized the need to productize over the need to discover new technological possibilities.

At a certain point, the imagining of new products built around the microchip, whose importance cannot be overstated, became difficult. More precisely, the appetites of the market became increasingly satiated. New versions of older products did not present radically desirable capabilities but rather minor enhancements to very useful products. Sometimes, change was introduced for change’s sake. Tech was reaching the technical limit of amazing people and raising in them the urgency of acquiring new versions. Tech wasn’t obsolete, but neither was it extraordinary.

This cycle is baked into industrial capitalism. The automobile was built around the internal combustion engine, and its mass production fundamentally changed the world. Patterns of land use, the possibilities for locating homes, the very culture of civilization and the meaning of distance were transformed. The internal combustion engine changed production and distribution of goods and human relations. It also became a symbol of social status. Different brands, essentially built on the same technology, assumed and sometimes defined a new identity.

The auto industry learned how to market, and how to make the public desire a new car. The new version often boasted greater improvements. Automatic transmissions, power breaks, windshield wipers and so all drove business, and the turnover of cars was stunning. The annual display of new models became a significant event, even as trading in your year-old car for a new one became difficult.

In the 1960s, it became increasingly difficult to think of innovations that would compel customers to trade in completely usable cars for something new. Social standing as a fringe benefit from the car started to decline. By the 1970s, the auto industry was financially staggering, and what were once jobs guaranteed for life turned into a series of layoffs – this just a mere 50 years after the car changed the world. Desperate to innovate, makers designed cars that could fly, or sold cars that could also be boats. But all that could be sold had modest changes in a necessary commodity.

The problem was that the automobile had reached a limit, not of innovation but of the speed of innovation that drove demand. It became a utility, not the fulfillment of a dream or a signal of sophistication. This is what is happening in the tech industry today. Recently, I broke my cellphone and went to buy a new one. The new one offered novelties I didn’t want, let alone understand. I was once obsessed with computing. Now, as prices rise and the ease of use falls, I long for my Blackberry. That’s not to say the innovations aren’t real; it’s just that now, the products mostly just come in different colors, sold by a salesman as my old Plymouth once was. The innovation has created a level of complexity that has dampened the motivation to replace a phone.

The stories of the automobile and the cellphone are presaged by the extraordinary arrival of electricity in the late 19th century, which dramatically changed the human experience. It was seen at first as not important. Then it was seen as the end of history. Then its very success made it routine and banal. I could speak of the steam engine and railroad, both of which were historical pivots that never left us but never returned to the romance they had been either. Each was part of the creation of a cycle of geopolitics. As I have said elsewhere, the time is coming for the high-tech economy (what I prefer to call the microchip economy) to be replaced by other things, at which point my children’s grandchildren will chuckle at the notion that the PC was cutting-edge.

As far as minorities go, it appears that Muslims have been forgotten, so much so that a recent Wall Street Journal poll on discrimination towards different ethnic and religious groups quite literally forgot to include us. It was a sad day. But also, of course, a happy one. You know you’ve made it, or not made it as it were, when “White people” get their own discrimination category but you don’t—and when, at least among Republicans, White people are viewed as the single most oppressed ethnic group in America. Fame and notoriety are always double edged swords, but in the case of the last several years—really from 2019 onwards, after Trump stopped obsessing over Muslims—the gradual mainstream-ing/disappearance of Muslims in the headlines has been a Godsend. For those who longed for (relative) anonymity, they now have it. This is one of the reasons the recent dust-up around a painting of the Prophet Mohammed at a small liberal arts college stood out to me, as an object of both concern and fascination. And so I wrote about it in my last Monday Note, which you can read here. I had simply forgotten what it was like to be for my “group” to be in the news. But even here, something that was ostensibly about Muslims and Islam largely became a debate about wokeness, cancel culture, and the right to not be offended (which, as it turns out, doesn’t exist). Once again, American Muslims had been subsumed into broader culture war controversies not of their own making. It’s not so much that Muslims didn’t matter. It’s that we mattered only insofar as our presence touched on other things that mattered more. To the extent that there’s a “brown rebellion” in the Democratic Party, Muslims are only one of the constituencies in question. But within the American Muslim community, the most immediate and tense divides revolve, in one way or another, around wokeness, children, and public education. See, for example, the Dearborn school board protests around books with sexually explicit discussions of gender identity.Even this rather specific debate around depictions of the Prophet Mohamed isn’t really about Islamic orthodoxy as much as it’s about a particular style of registering grievances and taking offense to what are ultimately very micro microaggressions. Ismail Royer has an excellent, new piece in First Things that explores how the Muslim students at Hamline University conveyed their complaints to university administrators. Instead of arguing that images of the Prophet were blasphemous or legally prohibited by the sharia, they made distinctly secular claims about identity, belonging, and trauma. Here, to be a Muslim was no longer primarily about faith and God. It was about feeling marginalized and expressing that sense of being wronged, in the all too familiar lexicon of subjective harm, offense, and safety. As one of the Muslim students put it: “As a Muslim and a black person, I don’t feel like I belong. I don't think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member.” Or perhaps more remarkably, another student said “Hamline teaches us it doesn’t matter the intent, the impact is what matters.” If this is, in fact, what Hamline University is teaching, then it is not teaching well.The irony is that this rather novel idea of judging actions based on impact rather than intent—an unfortunate mainstay of social justice discourse—is almost the precise inverse of a well-known hadith of the Prophet Mohamed that “actions are judged by their intentions.” Apparently, however, it’s not as well known as it should be. Or else it has been forgotten for the simple reason that the language of grievance is something very different than the language of theology and the sacred.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Some NATO nations are wavering about sending tanks and other advanced weapons to Ukraine. I understand fears of escalation, but if Russia wins in Ukraine, the world will lose.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump
What really took America to war in Iraq
The brutal reality of life in America’s most notorious jail
No Other ChoiceI don’t often find myself agreeing with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina conservative who long ago rebranded himself as Donald Trump’s faithful valet and No. 1 fan. Last week, however, Graham lashed out in frustration at the dithering in Europe and America over sending more weapons to Ukraine. “I am tired of the shit show surrounding who is going to send tanks and when they’re gonna send them,” he said during a press conference in Kyiv, flanked by Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. “World order is at stake. [Vladimir] Putin is trying to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”Graham is right. Germany, for example, has been reluctant to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine; the Germans, for their part, would likely prefer to see the United States send American tanks first. But everyone in the West should be sending anything the Ukrainians can learn to use, because a lot more than mere order is at stake, and order, by itself, is not enough. As Rousseau wrote, “Tranquility is found also in dungeons,” but that does not make dungeons desirable places to live. Global civilization itself is on the line: the world built after the defeat of the Axis, in which, for all of our faults as nations and peoples, we strive to live in peace and cooperation—and, at the least, to not butcher one another. If Russia’s campaign of terror and other likely war crimes erases Ukraine, it will be a defeat of the first order for every institution of international life, be it the United Nations or the international postal union.I suspect that many people in Europe and the United States are having a hard time getting their arms around the magnitude of this threat. We are all afflicted by normalcy bias, our inherent resistance to accept that large changes can upend our lives. I struggled with this in the early stages of the war; I thought Ukraine would probably lose quickly, and then when the Russians were repulsed by the heroic Ukrainian defenses, I hoped (in vain) that the fighting would fizzle out, that Putin would try to conserve what was left of his shattered military, and that the world’s institutions, damaged by yet another act of Russian barbarism, would somehow continue to limp along.We’re long past such possibilities. Putin has made clear that he will soak the ground of East-Central Europe with blood—both of Ukrainians and of his own hapless mobiks, the recently mobilized draftees he’s sending into the military meat grinder—if that’s what it takes to subjugate Kyiv and end the Kremlin’s unexpected and ongoing humiliation. At this point, the fight in Ukraine is not about borders or flags but about what kind of world we’ve built over the past century, and whether that world can sustain itself in the face of limitless brutality. As the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in Davos last week: “We don’t know when the war ends, but Ukraine has to win. I don’t see another choice.”Neither do I, and it’s past time to send Ukraine even more and better weapons. (Or, as my colleague David Frum tweeted last June: “If there’s anything that Ukraine can use in any NATO warehouse from Vancouver to Vilnius, that’s a scandal. Empty every inventory.”) I say all this despite my concerns about escalation to a wider European and even global war. I still oppose direct U.S. and NATO intervention in this fight, and I have taken my share of criticism for that reticence. I do not fear that such measures will instantly provoke World War III. Rather, I reject proposals that I think could increase the odds of an accident or a miscalculation that could bring the superpowers into a nuclear standoff that none of them wants. (Putin, for all his bluster, has no interest in living out his last days eating dry rations in a dark fallout shelter, but that does not mean he is competent at assessing risks.)Americans and their allies must face how far a Russian victory would extend beyond Ukraine. In a recent discussion with my old friend Andrew Michta (a scholar of European affairs who is now dean at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, in Germany), he referred to the conflict in Ukraine as a “system-transforming” war, as Russian aggression dissolves the last illusions of a stable European order that were perhaps too quickly embraced in the immediate post–Cold War euphoria. Andrew has always been less sanguine about the post–World War II international order than old-school institutionalists like me, but he has a point: The pessimists after 1991 were right about Russia and its inability to live in peace with its neighbors. If Ukraine loses, dictators elsewhere will draw the lesson that the West has lost its will to defend its friends—and itself.If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.Related:
The brutal alternate world in which the U.S. abandoned Ukraine
The bitter truth behind Russia’s looting of Ukrainian art
The first victims of Saturday night’s shooting at a Monterey Park, California, dance hall have been identified. Eleven people were killed and 10 others injured, and the gunman was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.
President Joe Biden plans to name Jeffrey Zients, his administration’s former COVID-19-response coordinator, as the next White House chief of staff.   
The FDA is considering a change to how COVID-19 vaccines are updated. The simpler process would more closely resemble annual flu-shot updates, according to documents the organization posted online.
Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the pros and cons of corporate diversity training.
Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Ted S. Warren / Getty; Shutterstock
A Grim New Low for Internet SleuthingBy Megan Garber
On November 13, 2022, four students from the University of Idaho—Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Madison Mogen—were found dead in the house that the latter three rented near campus. Each had been stabbed, seemingly in bed. Two other students lived in the house, and were apparently in their rooms that night; they were unharmed.
From the public’s standpoint, the case had few leads at first: an unknown assailant, an unknown motive. Law-enforcement officials in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, initially offered the public little information about the evidence they were gathering in their investigation. Into that void came a frenzy of public speculation—and, soon enough, public accusation. The familiar alchemy set in: The real crime, as the weeks dragged on, became a “true crime”; the murders, as people discussed them and analyzed them and competed to solve them, became a grim form of interactive entertainment.
The culture wars look different on Wikipedia.
Aubrey Plaza gave SNL permission to get weird.
Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive" (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy)
Read. “Woman in Labor,” a poem by Daria Serenko.“Yesterday a woman began giving birth directly on the Red Square with an assault rifle pressed to her temple.”Watch. Return to a blockbuster that was among the last of its kind. The Fugitive, available to stream on multiple platforms, is the perfect popcorn movie.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I had to do some traveling this weekend, and although I usually connect to airline Wi-Fi and annoy people with random thoughts on Twitter, flying is also a way to catch up on old movies. For some reason, this time out I put on the 1974 classic The Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds playing a dissolute former football star who ends up in a Florida jail. He is cornered by a sadistic warden (played with genial smarm by the great Eddie Albert) who blackmails him into coaching the prison football team. Reynolds instead suggests tuning up the team of guards by having them play a pickup team composed of inmates, which goes about the way you’d expect. I seemed to recall liking it as a kid, and I wanted to see it again as an adult. (Do not confuse this one with a far-inferior 2005 remake starring Adam Sandler.)I don’t like sports, and I’m not sure why I thought I would enjoy the movie, but I did, and the reason is that The Longest Yard isn’t really a football movie. It’s a prison movie built around the game between the inmates and guards, a kind of lighthearted Shawshank Redemption about bad men who, for one moment, get a chance to be the good guys. There’s even a murder of an innocent man, as there was in Shawshank, and a similar, if far less dramatic, moment of getting even with the creepy warden. And yes, it includes a message about sportsmanship, as the inmates earn the grudging respect of the guards at the end. Finally, long before it was a joke on The Simpsons, the movie actually gets a laugh by hitting a guy in the groin with a football. Twice.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t yet signed up for the newsletter, do so here).Today, we’ll start with four people who’ve led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in some capacity, and then we’ll hear from people who’ve been on the receiving end of diversity training at work. E. is a cynic about the aims of diversity work in corporate America:
I have worked in HR for Fortune 500 companies for 25 years in diversity, diversity and inclusion, and as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer. The intent of DEI training is for executives to think they are improving the organization for “minorities,” LGBTQ people, women, people with disabilities, etc. Spend a little money without any accountability or significant change. DEI training is to check a box. It is not meant to improve anything, and it doesn’t. Some trainings––the Intercultural Development Inventory, unconscious bias––make things worse. In general, DEI training exists to make executive teams and boards feel good.
M.V. is “enthusiastic about DEI work” and believes the grassroots group he leads at his workplace conducts it better than most outside consultants:
Far too often we trust external experts to bring solutions, which can neglect the critical value of truly centering employees and building culture from the bottom up. I’ve sat in corporate training sessions in which well-intended academics identify behaviors like “avoiding eye contact” as racial microaggressions. These generalities can do more harm than good; what if the person who can’t keep eye contact has social anxiety? Have we propagated that anxiety by encouraging the recipient to assume the worst implication?
The road toward reinforcing separation and the road toward building connection are, in fact, two different roads with different approaches. So how does our group approach DEI?
First, we value personal storytelling, which has been championed by the Moral Courage College founder Irshad Manji. There is a difference between hearing, say, about the importance of pronoun use from a nonbinary employee as compared to a training module. A discussion about labels with a diverse set of employees drives home the message that the “correct” term for a person can’t just be looked up but can only be gleaned through personal connection and the grace that comes with knowing the limitations of words.
Second, we adopt the teachings of Loretta Ross and Loan Tran on “calling in the calling-out culture,” which they offer in a superb online course. Though call-outs have their place, building trust and fostering mutual vulnerability are superior for having challenging conversations.
Third, we promote genuine curiosity and asking questions. The work by Mónica Guzmán of Braver Angels—including her book, I Never Thought of It That Way—teaches us to strive to understand the people we read and hear about but never meet. As she states, “Whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination.”
Personal storytelling, calling people in, and getting genuinely curious: These three sets of tools can transform a culture and really help people be seen for who they actually are, not just the phantoms that fill the gaps in our heads, which are the root of much bias. These approaches that challenge the usual corporate DEI programming are largely championed by women of color (Manji, Ross, Guzmán, Chloé Valdary). For skeptics of DEI alternatives who also believe in centering the thinking of women of color during these times, I can suggest no stronger slate of philosophies to challenge their thinking.
Taisha has worked in the diversity industry for 15 years and believes a shift in its approach is needed: In a crisis-prone world, she writes, we need to organize people around shared goals, not shared identities. If a diverse group focuses on a goal (such as higher wages) that would benefit everyone working toward its, or a goal (such as reducing carbon emissions) that would benefit society in general, diversity goals will be achieved as a by-product of everyone cooperating.She writes:
A common goal motivates people to handle themselves, so their personalities become less of a hindrance to the group’s purpose; to identify and develop their unique assets to benefit the group; and to recognize and mobilize their peers to do the same for the group’s good. Humans are inherently selfish and self-centered. But when we find something to believe in, we are more willing to set aside our personal likes and dislikes to work alongside others who share our goals. Then we think less of our identity differences. This sameness of purpose achieves inclusion without sacrificing differences.
The success of current unionizing efforts illustrate this new approach to DEI that I call  “Purpose not Personalities.” Unions organize a diverse group of people around a centrally compelling purpose (better treatment, higher wages, etc.) that motivates them to set aside whatever issues they might have with one another and dedicate the best of themselves, including their unique perspectives and skills, to help the group achieve success. To solve the many crises facing us, organizations can and should shift their DEI efforts to encourage less focus on personality or identity differences and more on group GOOD, trusting people to work out their differences as they lose sight of themselves.
Now on to the great majority of correspondents who have experienced DEI training sessions as participants. John agrees with the notion that an emphasis on shared goals tends to yield success:
I spent 24 years in the organization that, in my opinion, has done the best job with diversity and inclusion: the U.S. military. The real success happened at a cultural level: We all had a unifying mission. Anyone not in the military was the other, for the kinds of people that need an “other.”  And if someone did bring their prejudices and racism to work in the military, they were dealt with quite harshly. In this example, we should see a way forward. It is a shared mission and shared purpose that brings all people together. Anytime you substitute some other word for human, dehumanizing behavior occurs.
Our leaders, DEI educators, and media should all stress our shared culture and humanity. Instead, our leaders and DEI educators emphasize and exacerbate differences. We are doing the opposite of the right thing to bring about less racism and prejudice.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that the military took this approach with race far earlier than with sexual orientation, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell formally in place until 2011, when the unifying mission (and the justness of equality under the law) was treated as mattering more than the difference in identity.
J., a high-school teacher in Canada, writes:
Diversity training is not about diversity. Diversity training is about providing excuses to institutions that don’t want to tackle poverty and the fundamental inequality of our capitalist system. Instead, they blame “institutional”' racism, an intentionally obscure term. What does it look like? How does one measure it? Who is implicated?
The conceit of these sessions during my 20 years as a teacher: You frontline workers, YOU are the reason these students fail. In my context—high schools—the only “proof” required for this conceit is the fact that some demographic groups do worse than others. We know that outcomes tell an incomplete story when variables like income, family, mental health, etc. are ignored. Diversity training is privileged people (professionals, administrators, politicians, professors, academics, many of whom make a good living as “experts” in this field) advancing a story, a theory. Yet, the literature demonstrates no meaningful successes to this decades-long progressive experiment.
We need viewpoint diversity in our institutions. Our fixation as progressives on dogma, and a narrow, Orwellian definition of what counts as diversity, is as much fuel for the culture wars as the excesses of the right. It’s just that we lefties are, ironically, too blind to our own privilege—educational privilege, class privilege, trauma privilege, etc.—to see it.
S. used to love being a professor:
I am a Bernie Sanders voter. I have spent 25 years working toward countering racism. I have lost friends and family, as I was “too woke.” I had my dream job, teaching mostly underprivileged students. I now almost loathe my job.
Faculty have been subjected to an authoritarian agenda of DEI/social justice since George Floyd was killed. His death had nothing to do with our campus or state, but it’s as if nothing matters anymore but racism, DEI, and payback for his situation. We are constantly peppered with meaningless utopian aspirations toward “equality of outcomes,” which is patently absurd, even within a family, let alone a state, school, nation, or planet. We are forced to listen to meaningless equity language and endure tortuous training and workshops, often required. They are usually run by unimpressive people whose qualifications seem dubious, usually taking the chance to scold the white faculty who have earned master’s and Ph.D.s and are established and renowned teachers who committed their lives to average-to-low pay for the sake of equity and justice.
Nobody dares offer any dissent. I have spoken to high-level administrators, people white and nonwhite, and they will not say anything. Nobody dares counter the social-justice/equity people. All are fearful of cancellation or firing. All have families and bills to pay and err on the side of lethargic caution. Everybody knows none of this is helping students.
I will never vote conservative on any policy, for what it’s worth. I will, however, wonder if I am in the most Orwellian career imaginable. My irritation is endless and my despondency palpable. My friends are tired of hearing about it. I’m a tenured, published, respected professor in California. on the verge of depression for the first time in my life.
Sherri, a gay woman who worked from 1988 to 2017, shared her thoughts on diversity training:
I’m a Ph.D. chemist, meaning I spent my career in a very male-dominated industry at a time when senior-level women were very rare, much less senior-level out LGBTQ people. I was closeted for the first 10 years of my career and then very out. In the ’90s, while I was still fairly junior and still closeted, my company, like many in the chemicals industry, started a Leadership Training protocol that in part focused on diversity awareness. I am convinced it is one of the worst things the company could have done.
They took a gaggle of senior managers off-site, away from day-to-day work pressures for a week; raised their awareness ofn “diversity”––which really just focused on representation––then sent them back with no skills for truly creating change. They all then felt that they “got it” and weren’t the problem. But day to day, they went back to their ingrained behaviors. Only now they felt enlightened and didn’t even try to look in the mirror.
Later, when I was out, I became a popular speaker on the internal circuit of department meetings to discuss what it felt like to be a gay senior woman at the company. I spent a fair amount of time trying to sensitize people to the concept of privilege without calling it that. The analogy I used was a fish versus a scuba diver. Both could survive in the ocean, but the fish did so effortlessly as the environment was built around their needs and capabilities. The scuba diver needed an oxygen tank, wet suit, fins, and had to expend a fair amount of energy to just survive in the ocean, much less thrive. The scuba diver was constantly aware of his difference and how much conscious effort it took to navigate underwater, and it was exhausting. The fish didn’t even know what water was.  
We are all fish in some ways and scuba divers in others. Where you are a fish, remember what it feels like when you are a scuba diver. And reach out to the scuba divers and help them survive.
We are so bent out of shape focusing on what we consider a “defining characteristic” that we miss what is most important: seeing each person as an individual human. We generalize and make assumptions based on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or what have you. Maybe instead we should follow the Ted Lasso model of being “people curious.” Teach people about unintentional bias that all humans carry and use nontraditional examples like assumptions about how someone dresses or the school they went to or their accent. Then focus on the fact that bias in and of itself isn’t bad; it’s what you do with the knowledge that you carry bias. Don’t focus so much on someone’s speech or behavior as much as on what they should learn from it.
We will all make mistakes; we will all offend; in most cases it is not intentional. We all want to be seen as fully human and treated with respect. Can’t we just focus on that?
Richard is an engineer and describes how the DEI initiatives he’s been exposed to have changed:
In 2000, I moved from the U.K. to the U.S.A.
It was a job-related move, within a large company, working with semiconductors for automotive applications. About three years later, I encountered my first corporate DEI initiative. In the simplest terms, the company informed us that hiring practices were changing to increase profit. The training consisted of a few pages of reading, followed by a discussion during my manager’s weekly group meeting.
My boss provided us with a relevant example, and a nod in my direction. “Imagine a car with a subsystem design flaw that’s only exposed when driving on the left-hand side of the road.” He’d made his point: having a diverse team working on a problem would result in a more robust solution.
By 2018, I was working for a different tech company. I was also living in a much redder state, and DEI had become a divisive issue. Arriving extremely late to the game, my employer started rolling out DEI training. The introductory reading material was reluctant to mention the profit motive for maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. DEI was presented as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.
Over the course of a year, a new branch appeared on the org chart, a vice president was hired, corporate goals were set, support groups established, and mailing lists created. Personal DEI goals were defined, refined, and aligned with corporate goals. Employee-development task lists were expected to feature several DEI-related objectives. Progress would need to be demonstrated on a quarterly basis. Mostly, my DEI training consisted of online “unconscious bias” courses provided by an external company.
At first, I was enthusiastic. Engineers like knowing how things work, and I thought I might gain some insight into my biases. But I soon realized that instead of gaining an increased level of self-awareness, I was simply learning the names of a long list of biases. Meanwhile, the continuing stream of emails from the DEI branch of the organization prompted me to set up an email filter, and my enthusiasm for the initiative began to wane. I started to feel like my corporate parents were openly expressing a preference for one of my siblings. It turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing.
During one of my unconscious-bias courses, I learned that groups who’ve enjoyed an unchallenged, privileged position are the same groups most likely to feel threatened by change. What the courses didn’t mention was that any backlash directed at the intended beneficiaries of DEI initiatives would have been misplaced. I certainly felt exasperated with my employer, though.
The company seemed unwilling to explicitly state that certain new employees provided extra, unquantifiable value. And at no point did the company decide that some of that value should be returned to each new hire in the form of a higher salary. In fact, while the DEI initiative was being rolled out, salary ranges were tightened to prevent perceived discrimination. I’ve become less tolerant of heavy-handed corporate initiatives. A corporation should be able to profit by becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive while maintaining the morale of existing employees. In my experience, hitting the optimum rate of corporate culture change is difficult.
Greg, 61, says diversity training at the large aerospace company where he works has been addressed more intelligently and effectively than he would have anticipated based on media coverage.He writes:
The training we had was pretty good, even to a skeptical observer. I remember a compelling discussion by one diversity trainer who said that we most frequently associate diversity considerations with gender and race, but that was in part a historical accident because those groupings were particularly important in the 1960s and 1970s when thinking about diversity as a workplace concept emerged. This trainer used an alternative case of employees in today’s workplace with prominent tattoos, a group that may be viscerally disturbing to older employees based on our conditioning when we were young, but tattoos are essentially irrelevant to workplace performance.
After President Donald Trump was elected, about 2,000 of our senior-level employees were on a quarterly phone call with our CEO. One asked: Given the change in administration, were we going to change our diversity policies? Our CEO replied that we would change nothing, because our policies were not to curry political favor. Our diversity strategy was to out-compete our rival companies, because we would expand our access to talent by addressing issues that have historically undervalued certain groups of people.
K. resents the training she was subjected to while doing civic work:
I have volunteered with the City of Madison (Wisconsin) Clerk’s Office every election since the 1990s and in recent years have worked as a special voting deputy helping with voter registration, taking absentee ballots to nursing homes, and the like. The city clerk’s office motto is “We exist to assist,” and most of us there let that be our guiding light in the service of democracy. Because our city is deeply concerned about equity, “diversity training” has been required for city personnel for the past several years. These sessions seem to be aimed at people who have never considered—much less worked to ameliorate—the problem of inequity and have only served to offend and alienate me.
I am an old progressive whose first professional position was bringing support services to migrant farm workers and their families. As a female raised in the 1960s, I know ALL about discrimination; you don’t need to describe it. The condescension implicit in these “woke” puppies presenting the novel idea that some people start off at a disadvantage to others is offensive.
I love my city, deeply respect its staff, and am still fully committed to equality as a cause, but showing me diversity slide shows has not had what I am pretty certain was the desired effect. And, yeah, it’s not about me, but please. I’ve been trying all my life. All. My. Life. I’ve been trying to make a difference.
Megan believes the DEI programming she has seen in higher education doesn’t address academia’s most pressing problems:
Grad school is a toxic environment: Students on assistantships are paid poverty wages, given health care they can barely afford, are overworked by advisers who perpetuate the bad mentorship practices they experienced, and get degrees in fields flooded with people vying for jobs. This is a bad environment for even a cis white male or female with good mental health … and the focus is increasing departmental diversity and pronoun training.
How is any person supposed to thrive here?
T.M. doesn’t fit neatly into any identity box:
I’ve worked as an adjunct professor for over a decade, mostly at a prestigious northeastern university. I’m also of Assyrian descent, with a heavy mix of old-school New England. I sometimes think the reason I wound up in American studies as a discipline is because in 1991, while I was doing a genealogy project for fifth-grade social studies, the teacher told me I couldn’t be an American. Here I was, 11 years old, the United States had gone to war in Iraq, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to explain who or what Assyrians are. Iraq didn’t exist in 1906 when my father’s family came to America.
I don’t consider myself white-passing, but it’s been obvious since I was young that my grandfather and great-grandfather were of darker complexion than I am. I’m aware that I’ve been privileged by my white complexion, but I am often met with resistance to my belief that DEI is actually reinforcing the arbitrary cultural signifier of whiteness rather than decreasing it. Today, because I don’t fit neatly into one box, I find that the administrators at the university where I teach lack the same nuance as my fifth-grade social-studies teacher. My questions as to the efficacy of trainings are met with vague, bureaucratic language.
Echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr., we at the university are told we are now a “beloved community,” but unlike MLK, the DEI initiatives ignore economic equity or inclusion. Diversity, instead, is merely a way to fit people into categorical racial boxes. It’s no wonder some people are resentful of being categorized into something that is so ill-defined.
The academy has failed to generate conversations that truly explore the functions of race and class. It’s off-putting to get boilerplate messaging about racial diversity from people who make six-figure salaries when they are the same people who cut my health care last year. I don’t see the equity or inclusion of that decision, but yet we are now “beloved.”
How can we truly be diverse, equitable, and inclusive when over half the faculty who teach in higher education are treated as disposable? We’re denying the very cracks in our foundation the administrators claim to be fixing. DEI isn’t a solution. It’s a corporate orthodoxy that creates problems. I am distrusting of these initiatives.
Caleb scoffs at “equity” efforts that ignore income:
I was an administrative assistant at a law firm in Maine. Through six hours of mandatory DEI trainings, professional and administrative staff alike were educated on the nuanced definitions of equality and equity, complete with visual aids of children standing on different sizes of wooden boxes. Meanwhile, there was an elephant in the room that was never acknowledged: the attorneys sitting in on these Zoom trainings with us were, and are still, paid in the range of five to 20 times what the administrative staff make.
During the pandemic, while we were expected to consume gas and time commuting to the office, masked up and at risk of infection, to sort and scan mail, print checks, etc., the professional staff could work from home, expense meals, and receive compensation for work-related travel. When I asked if I could receive compensation for my 90-minute commute, I was laughed out of the office. The consensus of the administrative staff after our mandatory six hours of preachy DEI trainings: They are a cruel joke so long as they ignore financial inequality. Of course, they could hardly be so popular in the business world if they highlighted the outrageous economic inequality it fosters.
Jaleelah, a student, describes how diversity programs feature in the world of competitive debate in Canada:
Virtually all debate teams and competitions have “equity officers” (a name that would give Ron DeSantis an aneurysm) who are responsible for “making sure participants are comfortable.” In practice, this means that barely trained university students are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities. Here is a list of equity functions I support:

Arranging subsidies for students who can’t afford to pay for competitions
Communicating with organizers to ensure disabled debaters are only assigned to rooms they can physically access at tournaments
Ensuring that there are no conflicts of interest between judges and the teams they are assigned to adjudicate

Here is a list of functions I oppose:

Mandating that trigger warnings be given before speeches (thankfully, this practice is not ubiquitous)
Vetoing debate topics on the grounds that they might prompt people to make offensive arguments

And here is a list of functions that I have a neutral or varying opinion on:

Constantly reminding people not to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people
Mediating conflicts between students (some equity officers are horrible mediators, but I generally support the approach)
Providing input on debate topics (when it is clear that students are not permitted to issue vetoes)

That’s a long list, but equity teams usually run pretty smoothly. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. First, equity’s power in debate is sufficiently limited. Judges do not penalize teams for the sole reason that a speaker said something “inequitable.” Equity teams cannot intervene in debate rounds (outside of a situation where one competitor is screaming targeted slurs or physically assaulting another), nor can they alter the results. Their most severe power of removing people from clubs and competitions is almost exclusively reserved for students who have committed crimes against other students (and those people usually resign anyway). When people perceive overreach, they complain loudly. Trigger-warning mandates for speakers have been greatly reduced because a number of people (including me) argued that they are ineffective.
Second, there are social incentives for equity officers to avoid doing stupid things. All equity officers are also debaters. It’s a bad idea to harshly punish someone for accidentally saying something offensive when you know you’ll have to spend an entire weekend with their friends. Equity officers are not above other students. This is sharply different from DEI trainings in the corporate world where a team of outside instructors assume a position of power over a given office or team.
Finally, the debate community assumes that people have good intentions. When conversations about ideological bias arise, conservatives and communists never accuse liberals of intentionally rigging rounds against them—they analyze the ways in which common unconscious biases cause judges to favor certain arguments.
And last in today’s roundup, an anonymous reader shares a diversity-training experience that caused him a lot of anxiety:
After years of teaching history at the college level, I took a job at an elite private high school, drawn in part by their stated goal of investing time, energy, and money in DEI education and initiatives. The school had a contract with a DEI-training company to educate all the faculty and administrators via a three-day retreat on race. My research and teaching has focused on race throughout my career. In a real sense, talking and writing about race is my job. Due to my personal and professional goals, I signed up to go.
We were immediately told by the facilitators that the purpose was not to train us in DEI but instead to have us spend the entire time reflecting on our own racial journeys. It was immediately clear that the space was designed to be a sort of deconstructed learning experience, where we were expressly forbidden from discussing the issue from the standpoint of research or debate. Instead we would discuss it at a personal level. Such ideas and stories, once shared, were subject to attack by the facilitators.
One white, female teacher was talkative and engaged in the first couple sessions, and the facilitators called her out for what they felt was a race-based domination of the space. Certainly, she’d made some “mistakes” in what she said about race, but the goal appeared to extract some kind of mea culpa. She meekly apologized and never spoke again.
Later, we were told with the utmost confidence that none of us talk about race in the classroom and that when the subject comes up we all shy away from it out of fear and cowardice. When a couple of teachers, including me, said that we were required to talk about race as part of the subjects we teach, this was met with a reiteration of the assertion that we do so reluctantly. The white facilitator then sat down cross-legged on the floor and spent an hour telling us how racist she was. I’m not being flip: The gist was that she once thought she wasn’t but then learned that she was and now understood that no matter how much she learned, she’d never escape her racist origin. She asked the whites in the room for their thoughts.
No one said anything for a long time. Then a white teacher started crying and said she'd been picked on for being poor and dark-skinned as a kid. The facilitators made it clear that this was the wrong answer.
On the final day, the most notable activity was one in which the group was split into white and people-of-color affinity groups. Afterward we came back to the main room and reflected. A Black teacher talked about positive stereotyping of Black people being just as reductive as negative stereotyping. I responded that this was something I've taught about in the case of the Middle East, saying that Orientalism not only perpetuates nasty things about Middle Eastern peoples (e.g. “All Muslims are sexist”) but posits supposedly good characteristics as uniform (e.g. “All Muslims are hospitable”). After a break, we came back together and the facilitators said that before we went on they wanted to tackle something.
Facilitators: “In the last session, you used the word ‘Orientalism.’ We want you to know that ‘Oriental’ is a very racist term to describe Asian people. But you put an -ism at the end and we wanted to ask what you meant by that.”
Me: “Um, well, ‘Orientalism’ refers to a group of scholars who called themselves ‘Orientalists’ because they studied the Middle East, and from the 1960s onward, were criticized by other scholars (especially Edward Said) for their reliance on Western biases.”
Facilitators: “Well, that is the scholarly, academic world. Here, in this space, ‘Oriental’ is a racist term. And we want you to reflect on that.”
Me: “I’m, um, sorry if anyone took it that way. In my work, this is a term we use to talk about racism …” [face red, heart racing]
Facilitators [interrupting]: “We’re out here, in this space. That space is academic. In this space, this is a space where ‘Oriental’ shouldn’t be said.”
I was fuming. To me, that exchange totally undermined any authority they had to speak on race, if they didn’t even know the primary word used to describe racism against Middle Eastern people. It doesn’t matter if people who are supposed to be experts in race have never heard of the term “Orientalism,” as if they missed the post-9/11 debates over Western biases against anyone deemed “Eastern”––I could lose my job over being called racist.

I returned this past week from a trip to Japan with several colleagues at the Freeman Spogli Institute. The visit was organized by Kyoteru Tsutsui, head of FSI’s Japan Program, and included democracy expert (and American Purpose board member) Larry Diamond, and Dr. Oriana Mastro, an expert on the Chinese military at FSI’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a reserve Air Force intelligence officer.Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met with Joe Biden on January 13, and delighted the White House by announcing his country’s plan to double defense spending from one to two percent of GDP. This decision marks an enormous sea-change in Japanese attitudes that is comparable to Germany’s Zeitenwende last March when Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a similar increase in German defense spending.After 1945, both Japan and Germany renounced militarism and gave up part of their sovereignty by putting themselves under the protective wing of the United States. This was formalized by the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty and by German membership in NATO. Both countries also underwent a huge cultural change, as the generation that lived through war and defeat focused its attention on economic competition and turned decidedly pacifist. In the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a new generation now needs to discard that pacifism and accept the reality that military conflict remains a live possibility into the foreseeable future.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Much has been written about Germany’s hesitations and backtracking on its promises of support for Ukraine. This week we've seen Germany's continued unwillingness to provide Leopard tanks or to allow other NATO countries to do so (although there are signs that the government's perspective may shift in the coming days). Over the coming weeks and months, we will see similar hesitations on the part of Japan, as it faces an expanding China and the threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.The real possibility of such an invasion was the starting premise of our discussions in Osaka and Tokyo. Oriana Mastro has written extensively in Foreign Affairs and other places about Chinese plans and capabilities for using an amphibious assault to take the island. No one knows for sure whether Xi Jinping will take such an enormous risk, nor whether the American people would support war with China to prevent such a takeover. But it was our assumption that this risk would increase dramatically if the Chinese leader believed the United States and its allies would not act to defend Taiwan.There are similar uncertainties in Japan’s future behavior. Former Prime Minister Shinzō Abe never succeeded in revising Article 9 of the American-written postwar Japanese constitution, but the document has been continuously re-interpreted to expand Tokyo’s freedom of action. The most recent revision came in 2015, when the Diet voted to permit cooperative action in the face of an “existential” threat to the country. This includes what is called “counterstrike” capability. What either of these terms mean has not been officially defined, and what actions they will permit in practice is far from clear. Clearly, Japan would use force to defend the Senkaku Islands from a Chinese attack since these are regarded as Japanese territory. But would Japan work together with the United States to defend Taiwan?A lot will clearly depend on the precise scenario. The United States has a large force structure in the eastern Pacific, with a squadron of F-15s (now being replaced by F-22s) currently stationed at Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa and a Marine regiment nearby—the closest U.S. forward deployment to Taiwan. A Chinese invasion of the island could begin with a pre-emptive strike against Kadena or any U.S. naval forces in the immediate vicinity, an act that would likely kill a significant number of Americans and make U.S. involvement in the conflict much more likely. Since this would also involve an attack on Japanese territory, there didn’t seem to be much hesitation on the part of our interlocutors that Tokyo would permit its territory to be used by the United States in a follow-up retaliatory operation.Oriana’s view is that the Chinese would be more likely to avoid pre-emption against U.S. forces or attacks on Japanese territory, and simply move quickly to seize Taiwan. The question then would be whether such an invasion would be considered an existential threat to Japan, and the degree to which Japan would support an American response. There are several forms such support could take. From an operational point of view, the most helpful would be the Japanese Self-Defense Forces actively attacking Chinese amphibious ships heading towards Taiwan, something that would be critical in the early stages of an invasion while the United States was still moving its forces into the theater. The minimum amount of cooperation would be for Japan to simply grant the United States permission to use bases like Kadena for air ops. On these questions, there was a great deal of uncertainty on the part of our interlocutors. It is very clear that while there is strong public support in Japan for the overall strengthening of the country’s defense posture, there is much less support for active military involvement in a Taiwan contingency that didn’t involve direct attacks on Japanese soil.The Japanese military, like its German counterpart, has not enjoyed high social status in the postwar decades. While Tokyo has invested in the latest F-35s, we were told about leaking 40 year-old washing machines in the service academies since there was no money to replace them. It is not clear that Japanese young people have any interest in joining an expanded military, much like their counterparts in other parts of Asia. And while the political prospects for greater cooperation with South Korea are there since the election of conservative Yoon Suk-yeol, there are virtually no ties between the militaries of these two U.S. allies.Japan’s Zeitenwende, like that of Germany, will therefore be slow and hesitant. The potential for future cooperation is, on the other hand, enormous. For example, the United States is discovering in the course of the Ukraine war that its ability to produce ammunition and other defense goods has hit sharp limits with the withering of its defense industrial base since the end of the Cold War. While South Korea has become a major exporter of weapons, Japan has been politically constrained from doing this up to now. But it has the industrial capacity to produce U.S. weapons under license, and could greatly contribute to the broader defense effort in this manner.American alliances in Asia and Europe, in other words, are proving to be very valuable after a long period of dormancy.

Reports that Justice Department investigators on Friday seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, from President Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware — including documents from his time as a senator and others from his time as vice president — have shaken Washington, worrying some Democrats about Biden’s viability as a candidate in 2024.

The imminent departure of Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, is also being read as a sign that Biden and his administration are turning a corner — reviving questions about whether our 80-year-old president should run again.

But the discussion about Biden’s reelection conflates five different questions. Reporters, pollsters, and pundits continue to confuse them. A clear-eyed view requires that the five be addressed separately. Herewith:

(1) Has Biden done a good job so far? My answer is by and large, yes. He wasn’t able to achieve nearly everything he aimed for when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, but Democrats held only a razor’s edge majority against an increasingly rabid GOP, and Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema put up additional roadblocks. Biden’s accomplishments on the economy, climate, infrastructure, and defending democracy have been significant nonetheless — far more significant than his lapses on withdrawing from Afghanistan and mistakenly keeping some classified documents. While not a stirring speaker or a charismatic public presence, he has shown steadiness and resolve. And he has staffed his administration with highly capable and dedicated people.

(2) Should he run again if he wants to? Almost certainly. Unless a president commits such heinous acts in the first term that their party can’t possibly support their reelection, an incumbent president always has the prerogative of running for a second term. Of course, there’s no guarantee that they’ll get a free pass for the nomination (recall Senators Eugene McCarthy’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assaults on LBJ and Teddy Kennedy’s bid against Jimmy Carter). But I don’t see a serious Democratic opponent on the horizon. Biden should have a straight shot.

(3) If not Biden, who else? This is a trick question, because as long as Biden says he’ll be the Democratic nominee, other highly qualified Democrats are unlikely to identify themselves. There’s still time for them to do so if Biden steps aside. Two years before they were elected president, few people had heard of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. But unless Biden announces within the next six months or so that he won’t be running again, it will be difficult for potentially attractive Democratic candidates to gain enough traction to have a good chance in 2024.

(4) Will Biden be the best candidate to beat Trump or whomever else Republicans are likely to nominate, given his age? This is a very tough call. Last year a New York Times/Siena College poll showed nearly two-thirds of Democrats didn’t want Biden to run again, and concerns about his age ranked at the top of the list. Younger people were even more adamant that Biden is too old. To be sure, he’s beaten Trump once, which would suggest he can do it again. And a sitting president has many advantages over a non-incumbent. But Trump will almost certainly frame the election just as Trump frames everything else — strength versus weakness — and will use Biden’s age against him (even though Trump is only four years younger). If the Republicans put up a younger candidate, the age issue will loom even larger.

(5) Would he be a capable leader of the United States when he’s in his mid-80s? I’ve had the privilege of working with four presidents, and I can tell you from my experience and observation that the job of the American presidency is physically and mentally grueling, even for people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. If reelected, Biden would be 86 at the end of his second term (assuming he made it through to the end). That’s deeply worrying, given what we know about the natural decline of the human brain and body. This isn’t an “ageist” prejudice against those who have reached such withering heights so much as an understanding that people in their mid-80s do wither.

My bottom line: (1), yes. (2), yes. (3), we can’t know. (4), doubtful. (5), almost certainly no.

But don’t take my word for it. In the months ahead, each of these five questions needs to be thoroughly debated.

Charles Kenny is a writer-researcher and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Previously, he spent fifteen years as an economist at the World Bank. His books include The Plague Cycle: The Unending War Between Humanity and Infectious Disease and The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Good for the West.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Charles Kenny discuss why development aid is more effective than its critics claim; why it is easier to solve "stuff" problems than it is to solve "non-stuff" problems; and why effective altruists need to start thinking bigger.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You've written fascinatingly about a very broad range of topics. To start off, how much progress has the world made towards being a better place over the course of our lifetimes?Charles Kenny: Over our lifetimes, a lot. There is a long way to go. And a fair amount of progress was made before our lifetimes. But if I was to choose one single measure over the course of our lifetimes, it would be that the number of children who die before the age of five has gone down by more than three-quarters—probably seven-eighths, actually. And if you just want one measure of progress, parents not having to bury one of their children has gone, over the course of our lifetimes, from something that would be normal and expected in most of the world to something that is extremely rare almost everywhere.The Romans have poems about the sadness of losing their daughters. It is not a modern thing to be upset about the death of a child—that is a permanent state of humanity. Even with coping mechanisms, even with the social norms that probably helped, it still was a terrible thing. And it is now a terrible thing that is much rarer, which is the result of a whole bunch of other rather nice stuff. All of us are getting less horrible bouts of diarrhea, all of us are getting smallpox considerably less often than we used to; nearly all of us are living in nicer houses; the vast majority of the world has access to electricity and improved water sources—all statements that were just not true 70 or 80 years ago. The progress is really widespread. Mounk: I feel like there's just a natural negativity bias in the news where the sudden flood is going to make the front page of a newspaper, but this sort of slow, gradual improvement in all kinds of everyday systems—which actually have brought about this really stunning improvement on this metric and many others—is by its nature harder to capture in compelling stories. What is the underlying causal mechanism here? How has the incidence of infant mortality, for example, been reduced seven, eight-fold over the course of a half-century?Kenny: Just to be clear, I think the famines ought to be on the front pages. The remaining misery ought to be on the front pages. Because we have made all this progress, and that these are things that we can deal with, makes the fact that they still happen even worse. We're more morally culpable than we used to be in a world where we couldn't do anything about them. And the reason we're so morally culpable is because of what lies behind it, which is largely technology change, which is a global public good, if you will. The fact that I know how to treat diarrhea with sugar, salt, and water doesn't stop you from doing the same to help your kid survive. So because it is a global public good, it ought to have spread worldwide. We are talking about really cheap interventions, especially when it comes to children’s health. We're talking about vaccines that cost cents to make and to deliver. Cheap, really cheap. But we're also, importantly, talking about the value of making these things universal. I do think credit goes to the planet that, actually, most people are rather disgusted with the way that the COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, that, for example, very low risk people in rich countries had access to five or six times the vaccines they needed, whereas very high risk people in low-income countries had no access at all for most of the first year we had these vaccines. That caused moral outrage around the world, as it should. And, frankly, I don't think the moral outrage would have been as strong in the 1800s. We are more of a global community. We do think that everybody should have access to these technologies. And there's a widespread sense—vaccine deniers aside—that these technologies work. That's also, to some extent, a new thing. So it's not just about technologies. It’s about ideas. It's about delivery systems and institutions. But to come down to the single answer—it's technologies, and a simple way to think about it is that the average person on Planet Earth uses something like 200-times the amount of energy that they themselves could produce by bicycling away all day on a dynamo. We have just made the creation of stuff incredibly efficient and cheap through the use of machines. And we've made the movement of that stuff incredibly efficient and cheap for the same reasons. Anything that can be solved with stuff has become fairly cheap and easy to solve, and that certainly applies to global health.Mounk: The subtitle of one of your books is “Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More.” You’ve told us a little bit about the reasons for the improvement on these really important metrics like child mortality. What is still going wrong and what can politicians, international institutions, and all of us do to further push progress along?Kenny: There are still hundreds of thousands of children dying each year from easily preventable diseases. There are still 700-plus million people living on $2.15 a day or less, which is the World Bank's latest measure of extreme poverty. And by the way, $2.15 isn't enough. More than half the world is still living on less than $10 a day. There is an immense amount of progress that still needs to be delivered in the “stuff” basket, if you will—making sure that people have enough to eat, access to electricity, clean water supplies, and so on. But to be honest, I think they are stuff challenges. And I think that’s the easier thing, in some ways. Where the problems are larger is not actually with the stuff elements, it's with the not-stuff that we care about—it's about relations, institutions, and how we get along as a planet. I'm sure you can argue at a greater length, depth and specificity on things like the decline of violence worldwide. We have seen some progress there. We have seen declines in the number of laws that enforce discrimination against particular groups and so on. And I'm not saying we haven't made progress in these areas, but it does seem to have been more halting, and more likely to suffer reverses than the progress on the stuff issues we've seen.Mounk: When you look at the argument of somebody like Steven Pinker in his writing about the decline of violence—I think there's something really compelling there. He's convinced me that nostalgic treatments of the hunter-gatherers are just deeply naive. Rates of violence were astonishingly high. And there is a very, very long-standing trend towards less violence that he chronicles. Of course, when it comes to interstate conflict, we know that there are phases. Between World War I and World War II, the world looked like it was making progress, and then World War II came. We are currently, almost by definition, in the interwar period between World War II and World War III, and as Tom Lehrer pointed out in the 1960s, if we want any songs to come out of World War III, “we better start writing them now.”Kenny: Yes, one of the things that our mastery over nature has given us is more power to create our own existential risks. And it is hard to measure progress given the possibility of mutual annihilation by thermonuclear war. How do you measure that? I sincerely hope it won't happen, obviously. It's reasonably plausible that it won't happen. But you look at the last year and a half and, surely, even if you thought the risk was very small, you've got to think it's a bit bigger now.On genetic modification, nuclear, and fusion and so on, I accept that there are risks attached. There were surely risks attached to the mRNA vaccines from last year. I just think those risks are probably worth it. I also accept that you can try and put numbers on these risks, but we just don't have the information. We don't have the knowledge in order to pin them down in any way that's detailed, specific, and accurate enough, in order for that to be driving how we make decisions. It comes down to your view of the world as a whole.Mounk: What is the argument for why there are rational reasons to be concerned about GM and nuclear fission? And why do you think those risks are limited enough that they are worth taking?Kenny: They are reasonably new (nuclear isn’t all that new anymore) and untested technologies, and in the past, new and untested technologies have sometimes had unexpected outcomes. Many would argue we overregulate these new technologies. But I think, as a rule, we do well in trying to make sure that the obvious downside risks are addressed before these technologies are spread widely. Take for example, something I'm in favor of, which is gene drive technology to make mosquitoes barren and wipe them out. Mounk: As I understand it, and I may be getting this wrong, the idea is that you genetically modify a mosquito in a way where it can outcompete existing mosquitoes; that you make sure that either they can’t procreate, or they can’t carry certain kinds of diseases, and that that may be a way of eradicating malaria, broadly speaking, and perhaps some other diseases.Kenny: And from what I've read, I understand that, actually, in most places, most of the nastiest, problematic mosquitoes are invasive and it's probably not the case that they play a hugely important or positive role in local ecosystems. I'm not sure we can know that for certainty. There are surely unknowns in such an experiment. But I think it's probably an experiment worth trying, or at least, I certainly did think it was an experiment worth trying, before we saw, in the last year, stunning progress in malaria vaccines and treatments. Maybe the risk is less worth taking now, because we have these other options. But it's something that, a year ago, I certainly would have been in favor of. I think I still am. I do accept the risks, but I think that we have reasonably good ways to measure them. And reasonably good approaches to stagger rollout so that we limit the downside risks. Mounk: But what about the more basic forms of genetically modified crops? I find consistently that this is one of the topics on which I have the most disagreement with friends whose judgment I generally respect. Especially in Europe, there is just a very strong consensus that there's something worrying or perhaps morally bad, and probably dangerous, around genetically modified crops. Why do you think that argument is wrong?Kenny: Partially, I think there's a real marketing problem with the term “GM.” I mean, we have been modifying the genetics of crops since we invented farming, right? Probably even before, just using different approaches over time.The mechanism we were using before GM, and we still are, is irradiating crops to try and speed up mutations to develop different varieties faster. It's not like we weren't mucking with nature before. We're just mucking with nature in a different way. Now, it is a new way of mucking with nature, which might make it more dangerous on the grounds that there are going to be more unknowns. Again, I'd say that the level of regulatory oversight is really quite high. The legitimate bit of the discussion, I think, is around intellectual property rights. If farmers can't use the seeds that they collect from their own crop to plant again next year because of intellectual property rights, well—there are some public policy issues there. I think it needs to be addressed and looked at. But on the “would I eat GM foods” debate—yes, I would. And I don't have a problem with it at all. I thank goodness for genetic modification. Otherwise, some large percentage of the planet couldn't be here, because we would have the grain yields that they had in Sumeria, which weren’t very high.Mounk: About a year ago, I had Bill Easterly on this podcast. He is a really smart and thoughtful critic of the promise of development aid, effectively saying that it's very hard for giving institutions and nations to know what forms of aid actually go on to be helpful and effective on the ground, pointing out the adverse incentives that are created for it, where suddenly a lot of the smartest people locally go and work for the international NGOs, the organizations that come in with all of the foreign dollars, and it distorts the talent pool in costly ways. On average, nations that receive a lot of development aid don't don't tend to perform much better than those that don't receive a lot of development aid. I take those arguments seriously. But you come to a different conclusion. Where do you think Bill Easterly goes wrong in his arguments about this?Kenny: We were just talking about grain yields. The Rockefeller Foundation rather famously played a huge role in the Green Revolution, and I think it would be hard to argue that those dollars were wasted. Ask the many, many people worldwide who aren't dead from famine as a result. But I do take Bill’s critiques seriously. I think most of them are valid—the extent to which they mean that aid as a whole is a waste is where I would push back. Bill is absolutely right that a lot of aid is wasted. You were pointing to the fact that a lot is effectively handed over to NGOs, or, indeed, private companies usually based in donor countries, who then go to developing countries and spend some of that money locally, and spend quite a lot of it on hiring, housing, and feeding their own expat staff. I do wonder about the efficacy of a lot of that aid—I should say, by the way, you know, I was a made member of the aid industry. I still probably officially am a member of the aid industry. So, guilty as charged. If you look at the amount of aid that is actually spent by governments and organizations based in the developing world, it is really small. To give you one example, the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority here in DC. gets more of the USAID [United States Agency for International Development] budget than the government of Uganda. WMATA gets it because, apparently, it counts as overseas assistance when USAID buys its staff transit cards. More goes to buying transit cards for USAID staff than goes to the Ugandan government, and the Ugandan government is actually one of the top recipients of aid from the United States. Nearly all of the money that is spent on aid, in fact, never reaches governments and local organizations in the developing world. Far more goes to rich countries’ governments and organizations. I'm not saying all of that is wasted. I am saying that it is fairly amazing, given how little is spent in the way that we traditionally think of (by governments and recipients), that we do see an impact. The evidence on aid causing large economic growth—I think it's there. But it's certainly weak. And, actually, I would find it implausible if it wasn't small. It's not a very large amount of money. I don't expect to see a large impact.That said, if you stop thinking macro for a minute and get to specific cases, Bill and I agree that, actually, if you look at global health, for example, it's hard to argue that there hasn't been a role for aid-financed activities. If you look at PEPFAR, which is the US-aid financed initiative that provides HIV drugs to a considerable proportion of the developing world, it's just obviously saved a whole lot of lives. And it is fairly obvious, at least to begin with, that none of that would have been covered by local governments. It was just too expensive. Again, if you look at vaccine rollout, nearly all the vaccines delivered in lower and lower middle income countries have been purchased by aid. A lot of those would have been purchased by lower middle income country governments had aid not done that. But those vaccines were around for a long time before they started being aid-financed, and they weren't being bought by low and low middle income country governments. You can find cases where it is actually fairly clear that some aid has had a real impact. You can find lots of cases where aid is being used in ways that are incredibly inefficient, where there's no reason at all to expect aid to have an impact on the quality of life of low and middle income countries. I think if we took more aid from that second category, and put it into the first category, you'd see even greater impacts. Then we can maybe even add some more money to the budget.Mounk: Part of the debate between you and Bill seems to be that he might point to some of the same facts that you just talked about, like WMATA and the government of Uganda, and he would argue that that's exactly the kind of thing that always goes wrong, so why should we trust the system to ever get better? Whereas you seem to say, “Actually, we can recognize some of those pitfalls and avoid them.” How do we make progress on this? If we want to make sure that actually more of that aid spending goes to things that really do make a difference, what transformation would that take, and is it realistic that we might be able to accomplish it?Kenny: It's hard. And it's a reason why I'm sort of happy, that even with the low-impact spending that we see, I still think you can point to every dollar being worth pushing into the system, because what comes out at the other end is so wonderful. It’s worth it even with all of that waste along the way. It is a hard struggle, partially because there is a very junior version of the military industrial complex in development—the aid industrial complex—which is people like me, who work in development and live in Washington, DC, as it might be, and who like our lifestyles and want to get reasonably well paid. We are much closer to the corridors of power than the ultimate supposed recipients of assistance, and so have considerably more political control over how it's spent. I'm part of the problem. But it is amazing, if you look at the PEPFAR story—this George W. Bush era project that provides HIV drugs—it went from zero to many hundreds of millions very quickly. It did so because a whole bunch of people saw a real problem in developing countries, and there was a real constituency in the United States to fix that problem. Those two things went together. Much PEPFAR money does not reach developing countries, but a lot does, and a lot of HIV drugs do. It’s reasonably efficient. It’s about setting a target that aid can actually help reach (that means something reasonably small, because aid isn't a large amount of money) and persuading people that that target is really worth reaching, and then the politics fall in line. Mounk: One of the things I've been thinking about, like many others over the last weeks and months, is Effective Altruism. Sam Bankman-Fried was a big advocate of Effective Altruism, and as his crypto empire has collapsed, and as it appears that he may have engaged in some illegal practices, the ideology of Effective Altruism has come into question alongside it.I have torn feelings about this because it seems to me that the basic proposition of Effective Altruism is very compelling. When you look at how something like dollars in the aid budget are spent, so much of it goes to things that just aren't likely to have a significant impact on improving human welfare. To have an organized movement, which says, particularly to some of the biggest donors, “When you give, really think through where your dollars are going to have the biggest impact on saving lives, improving human development, and transforming the world.” That seems like an obviously good approach. On the other hand, it does seem that perhaps the interpretation of what Effective Altruism means has taken on a weird hue. How can we use the basic insight of Effective Altruism that we surely want to hold on to, which is that if we're giving money, as people should, we’d better think about how to make an impact in the world that's actually positive for humans. But how do we sort of stop ourselves from falling into the kind of hubris that effective altruists appear to often fall into?Kenny: I think the problem is one of scale. Sam Bankman-Fried at his richest wasn't nearly rich enough. Which is to say, much of the movement is about what you as an individual can do in order to make the world a better place. Bankman-Fried was worth maybe $14 billion, at one point, notionally. That's less than $2 per person on the planet—not really very much when it comes to planetary change. But even with the fantastic work they support as a community, when it comes to present-day development, I think that's a bit limiting. They support some wonderful initiatives, including deworming and so on, that I think really do have an immense payoff for not very much money. But they're thinking too small. I think it's ironic that they're thinking too small, because, as you say, the movement is based in utilitarianism. [Jeremy] Bentham wasn't just thinking about, “How can I donate my money?” Bentham was a political player. He wanted to change British politics. [John Stuart] Mill did, too. If you look at Peter Singer’s original article, it's about a famine in Bengal, and he's saying, “You ought to give more. But tell you what. The Australian people ought to be giving 40% of their GDP every year to improving lives in developing countries.” This is the scale we need. It's not about individuals. It's about the collective. It's about us all moving towards a world where we spend our resources and our time much more effectively in order to deliver better outcomes for all of us. I really think you miss the trick if you focus on these comparatively piddling amounts of money, when the long term progress of humanity will be around making all of us move in the direction of valuing everybody's utility vaguely similarly. And so sort of my plea to the Effective Altruism community is to start thinking bigger.Mounk: There's one big topic that we’ve alluded to but that we haven't gone into detail about in this conversation, and that is climate. Where are we with climate change? How existentially worried should we be? What is the bad news, but, also, what is the good news? Where are the areas where we're making progress?Kenny: I think we're doing much better than we have the right to expect. Partially, that's a knock on people like me, who assumed that the way we'd make progress was by a globally binding treaty of subscription, which is not the way we make progress at all. In fact, we've made progress largely because technologies of cheap and carbon free energy have developed so rapidly. Every year, the International Energy Agency would put out these forecasts of how much it thought solar power is going to increase worldwide. And, every year, they have been shockingly inaccurate on the pessimistic side, and they seem never to learn their mistake. Year after year, we've been outperforming on that measure. We are pretty close to peak global carbon dioxide output, thanks to the involvement of millions of people and some fantastic scientific breakthroughs, and a lot of government money going to research and development. Broadly, I think we are in a better place than we might expect, and it goes back somewhat to the discussion we were having earlier about stuff-versus-non-stuff problems. Climate is basically a stuff problem, and those are the problems that we've actually been comparatively good at dealing with, traditionally.Greenhouse gas emissions and economic output have decoupled in the richest countries. Emissions are going down, and while economic growth is not all we might hope, it's still going up. Again, there is a long way to go. In some ways, we've made the most progress on the easy stuff. Not surprisingly, energy production is not the only thing that has to change. But we have made all this progress. And, importantly, we've made it by making the technologies of zero carbon output cheap. And the reason that's really important is it means that what we're seeing in rich countries will happen naturally, if you will, in lower income countries. So these technologies are becoming—they are not there yet—the low cost option in order to power economies. And when they do that, you don't need a big subsidy mechanism, you don't need a massive tax on carbon in order to have them adopted worldwide, because they are just the cheapest way to go. And so that's what kind of gives me real hope. If what we've got is zero carbon technologies being the cheapest technologies out there to produce stuff, you're done. You don't need global cooperation from now until kingdom come if the market will take care of it. Again, we're not there. But we're a lot closer to there than I think anybody really expected 15 or 20 years ago. It's not a reason to stop worrying. It's not a reason to stop fighting for more support for technology and technology adoption. But it is a reason for hope. Importantly, it is a reason to stop trying to make poor countries pay twice or three times for dealing with this problem. At the moment, they are definitely still the countries where we expect the largest impact of climate change. They have the fewest air conditioners per capita, for example. They tend to have less irrigated agriculture. They are the smallest contributors to the problem by orders of magnitude. Mounk: Let's zoom out. If somebody is convinced by your view of these matters, and they want to think about where they can, perhaps, spend on charity, what are the areas where we could make changes that are going to actually have an impact?Kenny: I sit in this organization, the Center for Global Development, that is basically about pushing the policies of rich countries to be more favorable to global development outcomes. I sit here partially because it's a bunch of really nice people, I get a nice office, it's reasonably well paid, and I like living in Washington, but, also, I do actually think it is probably a pretty effective way to have an impact on improving the global quality of life over time. I wish more people were excited by the idea of working in government or government-related spaces, because you can have a huge impact in those spaces. For all the people who might think that the “commentariat” is too large, and there are too many pundits out there writing about policy and so on—it's just not true. if you take the number of dollars involved and take the number of words per year produced and divide one by the other, words per dollar is going to be zero-point-zero-something, right? There are just not enough people thinking about how to improve the quality of government outcomes, both for national reasons and internationally. My plea is, however you want to support that endeavor, support that endeavor more.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last November’s midterm contest.President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States. Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). Although abortion opponents question the drugs’ safety, multiple scientific studies have found few serious adverse effects beyond headache or cramping.Federal regulation of the use and distribution of these drugs by agencies including the FDA and the United States Postal Service has long been overshadowed in the abortion debate by the battles over Supreme Court nominations and federal legislation to ban or authorize abortion nationwide. But with a conservative majority now entrenched in the Court, and little chance that Congress will pass national legislation in either direction any time soon, abortion supporters and opponents are focusing more attention on executive-branch actions that influence the availability of the pills.[Read: The abortion backup plan no one is talking about]“The reality of abortion care has been changing very, very rapidly, and now the politics are catching up with it,” Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who served as one of Biden’s advisers in 2020, told me.Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists will descend on Washington today for their annual March for Life—the first since the Supreme Court last summer overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion. The activists will cheer the swift moves by some two dozen Republican-controlled states to ban or severely restrict abortion since the Court struck down Roe.But even as abortion opponents celebrate, they are growing more frustrated about the increased reliance on the drugs, which are now used in 54 percent of U.S. abortions—up dramatically from less than one-third less than a decade ago, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “With the overturning of Roe, [with] COVID, and with President Biden’s loosening of the restrictions on these [drugs] … there is a new frontier that everyone is pivoting to,” Rebecca Parma, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, a prominent anti-abortion group, told me.George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the two Republicans who have held the presidency since the drugs were first approved under Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 2000, took virtually no steps to limit their availability. But conservative activists are already signaling that they will press the Republican presidential candidates in 2024 for more forceful action.“Our job is to make sure … this becomes an issue that any GOP candidate will have to answer and address,” Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told me. “No one can be ambivalent again; it will simply not be an option.”The challenge for Republicans is that the 2022 midterm elections sent an unmistakable signal of resistance to further abortion restrictions in almost all of the key swing states that tipped the 2020 presidential election and are likely to decide the 2024 contest. “Would you really want to be Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump running in a close election saying, ‘I’m going to ban all abortion pills in Michigan or Pennsylvania’ right now?” says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis, who has written extensively on the history of the abortion debate.Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the original Roe decision, and the Biden administration will mark the occasion with a defiant pro-abortion-rights speech from Vice President Kamala Harris in Florida, where GOP Governor DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, signed a 15-week abortion ban last April.White House officials see access to abortion medication as “the next battlefront” in the larger struggle over the procedure, Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, told me. She said she expects Republicans to mount more sweeping efforts to restrict access to the drugs than they did during the Bush or Trump presidencies. “The reason you’ve seen both Democratic and Republican administrations ensure access to medication abortions is because this is the FDA following their evidence-based scientific judgment,” she said. “So what I think is different now is you are seeing some pretty extreme actions as the next way to double down on taking away reproductive health and reproductive rights.”Federal regulation of the abortion drugs has followed a consistent pattern, with Democratic presidents moving to expand access and Republican presidents mostly accepting those actions.[Read: The other abortion pill]During the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, George W. Bush called the Clinton administration’s initial approval of mifepristone “wrong” and said he worried it would lead to more abortions. But over Bush’s two terms, his three FDA commissioners ignored a citizen petition from conservative groups to revoke approval for the drug. Under Barack Obama, the FDA formalized relatively onerous rules for the use of mifepristone. Physicians had to obtain a special certification to prescribe the drug, women had to meet with their doctor once before receiving it and twice after, and it could be used only within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.The FDA loosened these restrictions during Obama’s final year in office. It reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one and increased to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used. The revisions also permitted other medical professionals, such as nurses, to prescribe the drugs if they received certification, and eliminated a requirement for providers to report “adverse effects” other than death. Trump didn’t reverse any of the Obama decisions. He did side with conservatives by fighting a lawsuit from abortion-rights advocates to lift the requirement for an in-person doctor’s visit to obtain the drugs during the COVID pandemic. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled for the Trump administration in January 2021, Biden was days away from taking office. Within months, women seeking an abortion could consult with a doctor via telehealth and then receive the pills via mail.On January 3 of this year, the FDA took another major step by allowing pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In late December, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail “to corrupt the public morals.”The paradox is that the impact of these rules, for now, will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Obtaining abortion pills there will be much more comparable to filling any other prescription. But 19 red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, which prevents pharmacies from offering them despite the FDA authorization. And although the FDA has approved use of mifepristone for the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, medical professionals cannot prescribe the drugs in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion. In terms of anti-abortion states, the Biden administration’s actions have had “basically no impact,” Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies abortion law, told me in an email.Although the red states have largely walled themselves off from Biden’s efforts on medication abortion, conservatives have launched a multifront attempt to roll back access to the pills nationwide. Students for Life has filed another citizen petition with the FDA, arguing that doctors who prescribe the drugs must dispose of any fetal remains as medical waste. In a joint letter released last week, 22 Republican attorneys general hinted that they may sue to overturn the new FDA rules permitting pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In November, another coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit before a Trump-appointed judge in Texas seeking to overturn the original certification and ban mifepristone. Jenny Ma, the senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says that decision could ultimately have a broader effect than even the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe: “This case,” she told me, “could effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. It means people in every state … may not be able to get abortion pills.”Republicans will also ramp up legislative action against the pills, although their proposals have no chance of becoming law while Democrats control the Senate and Biden holds the veto pen. Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is planning to reintroduce her “SAVE Moms and Babies Act,” which would restore the prohibition against dispensing abortion drugs through the mail or at pharmacies.[From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America]However these legal and legislative challenges are resolved, it’s already apparent that the 2024 GOP presidential field will face more pressure than before to propose executive-branch actions against the drugs. “That’s going to be our clarion call in 2024,” says Kristi Hamrick, a long-term social-conservative activist, who now serves as the chief strategist for media and policy at Students for Life.Katie Glenn, the state-policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me that, at the least, the group wants 2024 Republican presidential candidates to press for restoring the requirement to report adverse consequences from the drugs. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a likely candidate, has already suggested that he will support a ban on dispensing the pills through the mail. But the anti-abortion movement’s long-term goal remains the same: ban mifepristone altogether. Hawkins shows the growing fervor GOP candidates will face when she says, “This pill is a cancer that has now metastasized throughout our country.”Simultaneously, abortion-rights advocates are pushing the Biden administration to loosen restrictions even further. “Medication abortion … has been overregulated for far too long,” Ma told me. Many advocates want the FDA to extend permitted use of mifepristone from 10 to 12 weeks, eliminate the requirement that the professionals prescribing the drugs receive a special certification, and begin the process toward eventually making the drug available over the counter.The immediate question is whether the Biden administration will challenge the red-state laws that have stymied its efforts to expand access. Advocates have argued that a legal case can be made for national FDA regulations to trump state restrictions, such as the requirement for physicians to dispense the drugs. But Biden is likely to proceed cautiously.“We don’t have a lot of answers … because, frankly, states have not tried to do this stuff in hundreds of years,” Ziegler, the author of the upcoming book Roe: The History of a National Obsession, told me. Even so, she added, it’s a reasonable assumption that this conservative-dominated Supreme Court would resist allowing the federal government to preempt state rules on how the drugs are dispensed.These mirror-image pressures in each party increase the odds of a clear distinction between Biden (or another Democrat) and the 2024 GOP nominee over access to the drugs. Democrats are generally confident they will benefit from almost any contrast that keeps abortion prominent in the 2024 race. Some, like Lake, see access to the pills as a powerful lever to do that. The issue, she argues, is relevant to younger voters, who are much more familiar than older people with the growing use of medication abortion and are especially dubious that pharmacies can offer certain drugs in some states but not in others.The impact of abortion on the 2022 election was more complex than is often discussed. As I’ve written, in the red states that have banned or restricted the practice, such as Florida, Ohio, and Texas, there was no discernible backlash against the Republican governors or state legislators who passed those laws. But the story was different in the blue and purple states where abortion remains legal. In pivotal states including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a clear majority of voters said they supported abortion rights, and, according to media exit polls, crushing majorities of them voted against Republican gubernatorial candidates who pledged to restrict abortion. Those Democratic victories in the states likely to prove decisive again in 2024 have left many Republican strategists leery of pursuing any further constraints on abortion.What’s clear now is that even as abortion opponents gather to celebrate their long-sought toppling of Roe, many of them won’t be satisfied until they have banned the procedure nationwide. “It is totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to say, ‘It’s just up to the states’ now,” Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony group, told me. “We need a federal role clearly laid out by these presidential candidates.” Equally clear is that abortion opponents now view federal regulatory actions to restrict, and eventually ban, abortion drugs as a crucial interim step on that path. The U.S. may seem in some ways to be settling into an uneasy new equilibrium, with abortion banned in some states and permitted in others. But, as the escalating battle over abortion medication makes clear, access to abortion in every state will remain on the ballot in 2024.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Google’s parent company, Alphabet, today announced that it plans to cut 12,000 jobs, joining a tech-and-media layoff list that already includes Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Snap, Twitter, and Warner Bros. Discovery. According to one estimate, roughly 130,000 people have been dismissed from their jobs at large tech and media companies in the past 12 months. That’s roughly equivalent to the total number of people who worked at Apple before COVID hit.These layoff announcements have become depressingly common, even rote. But they’re also kind of mysterious. The overall unemployment rate in the U.S. is 3.5 percent, which ties the lowest mark of the 21st century.In the 2010s, the labor market was weak, and the tech sector was growing. During the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. economy experienced a flash-freeze depression, and the tech sector was booming. Today, the U.S. labor market seems, by some measures, quite strong, and yet the tech and media industries are bleeding. What’s going on? And what does this inversion of 21st-century norms tell us about the state of the economy?The first explanation of this moment is—and I don’t know how to say this in a sophisticated way, so I’ll say it in a simple and kind of stupid-sounding way—the post-pandemic economy has been much weirder than most people anticipated. Many people predicted that the digitization of the pandemic economy in 2020, such as the rise in streaming entertainment and online food-delivery apps and at-home fitness, were “accelerations,” pushing us all into a future that was coming anyway. In this interpretation, the pandemic was a time machine, hastening the 2030s and raising tech valuations accordingly. Hiring boomed across tech, as companies added tens of thousands of workers to meet this expectation of acceleration.But perhaps the pandemic wasn’t really an accelerant. Maybe it was a bubble. Pandemic stocks, such as Peloton and Robinhood, soared and crashed. So did employment at tech companies, including Alphabet and Amazon. The challenges of the late-pandemic economy were various: Some firms faced supply-chain snafus while others were burned by the rise in interest rates that followed sticky inflation. Entertainment companies pushed their chips into streaming only to discover that profits wouldn’t follow them. But all of these companies experienced the same phenomenon: In 2020, they thought the pandemic economy was a time machine, and in 2022, they realized the pandemic economy was an oasis. So, that’s one way to see what’s happening in tech. It’s going back to 2019 again.The second explanation for this weird moment is that everything in economics these days is an interest-rate story. When interest rates were low, investors valued growth narratives, and tech companies (or companies that called themselves tech companies) had a monopoly on these narratives. The price-to-earnings ratio of tech companies got out of whack, as investors placed their faith in companies such as Netflix and Uber and Tesla, which threw off a lot of long-term promises and few short-term profits. When inflation and interest rates increased, the companies that were making long-term promises were most at risk, and they got clobbered.A third explanation is that much of the slowdown in tech and media is really a slowdown in advertising. Last year “was a rough year for the advertising market that saw massive pandemic-era growth come to a screeching halt,” wrote several analysts at MoffettNathanson, a media and tech research firm. Marketers slashed ad budgets “in response to a mix of actual financial struggles and anticipated future struggles until, by the end of the holidays, there was hardly any money being spent at all.”Advertising is typically the first casualty in an economic slowdown, because it’s not spending that affects the immediate product; rather, it’s an investment in the future branding and growth of the company. Because so many tech companies—not just Google and Meta, but also Amazon, Apple, Snap, and Netflix—have become full-time or part-time advertising companies, they’re almost all sensitive to an ad slowdown that’s coming on much faster and stronger than the overall economic slowdown. So when you think about the mystery of why the tech sector is bleeding while the overall labor market seems healthy, this is a big part of the story. The advertising economy is diseased, whereas the services economy is hale.The final explanation is that chief executives are normal people who navigate uncertainty by copying behavior. We can’t rule out the possibility that five-digit tech layoffs are essentially acts of mimicry or social contagion among competitors. When all of your competitors are laying off 10 percent of their staff—and being rewarded by the market for it!—culling 10 percent of your workers may seem like the right or inevitable thing.“Was there a bubble in valuations? Absolutely,” the business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer told Stanford News. “Did Meta overhire? Probably. But is that why they are laying people off? Of course not. These companies are all making money. They are doing it because other companies are doing it.”
Office hours are back! Join Derek Thompson and special guests for conversations about the future of work, technology, and culture. The next session will be January 26. Register here and watch a recording anytime on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

Gun homicides and car accidents are the leading causes of youth death. American children confront challenges as varied as bullying, poverty, gangs, sexual abuse, mental illness, and drug addiction. A state legislator hoping to protect kids might reasonably focus on any number of issues. Drag shows, those improbable culture-war flash points, are not among them. Yet Republican legislators in at least seven states are pushing bills to restrict shows where performers may deviate from traditional gender norms.The most sweeping and objectionable proposals are not mere efforts to deprive drag shows of taxpayer funding or to keep them out of public primary schools. Rather, they would classify drag shows (as the sponsoring legislators variously define them) as akin to pornography. They would redefine any venue hosting such a show as an adult business, or try to shield even teenagers from drag in a society where almost all of them have regular access to the internet. Should any such proposal pass into law––at this early stage, their prospects are uncertain and may vary from state to state—the free speech and association rights of private venues, performers, artists, and willing audiences will all be infringed upon. And for what?[Read: RuPaul’s Drag Race and the art of self-love]These proposals are needless, excessive, and unconstitutional––so much so that more than one would belong in a Hall of Fame for legislative overreach that is at odds with freedom of speech.Parents expose young kids to all sorts of things that strike me as age inappropriate, including the most hypersexualized drag shows that circulate via aggregators such as Libs of TikTok, which are outliers. Meanwhile, mountains of inappropriate movies, TV shows, video games, and internet content exceed the relative molehill of inappropriate drag performances (which would be just as inappropriate if cisgender women performed the same actions), whether measured by the ease of accessibility to kids or how many total kids see them.Abstractly, the question of how many people need to be harmed to justify a new state law can be a difficult one. But I can find no evidence that any child has been harmed as the result of a drag performance. One suspects that some GOP legislators see drag shows not as especially big problems so much as big opportunities because a faction of their constituents zealously dislike them.Regardless of motivation, any Constitution-respecting American should reject a law that infringes on free speech or artistic expression if the matter in question has zero proven victims. Some supporters of anti-drag laws maintain that drag shows have the effect of “grooming” kids into LGBTQ activism or an LGBTQ lifestyle. But that claim is speculative and unproven––and even if it were true that drag shows influence how kids think about gender, neither art nor free speech can survive if it is constitutionally unprotected anytime it influences how some of the children who witness it think. Of course, once drag-queen story hours for children weirdly became both progressive acculturation events and culture-war battlegrounds, attempted interventions in statehouses was inevitable. Perhaps it was also inevitable that many proposals would go further than is legal. Neither faction is committed to butting out when private undertakings offend its sensibilities. In this matter the Republicans are in the wrong.In Nebraska, where the age of majority is 19, a law proposed by State Senator Dave Murman would prohibit anyone 18 or younger from being present at a drag show, which it defines expansively, as follows: First, the performance’s “main aspect” is “a performer which exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer's gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers.” (I’d have thought a conservative would say that one’s sex is recorded at birth, not that one’s gender is assigned, but set that aside.) Second, “the performer sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment.”By that definition, an 18-year-old would be legally prohibited from attending a performance of the Broadway musical Mrs. Doubtfire, a comedy set by Eddie Izzard, a lecture on being trans by Caitlyn Jenner, or a rock concert by a female-and-costumed Beatles tribute band.The proposed Nebraska law goes on: “Any person nineteen years of age or older who knowingly brings an individual under nineteen years of age to a drag show shall be guilty of a Class I misdemeanor.” That standard would have made criminals of numerous World War II officers, what with the ubiquity of drag shows performed by and for troops overseas during that era. (Here’s Ronald Reagan introducing a dramatization of one of those shows circa 1943.) I had hoped to question Murman about the breadth of entertainment that his proposal would constrain and the conduct that it would criminalize, but a spokesperson declined an interview invitation while passing along the prepared statement “I will always uphold my promise to enact policies that reflect Judeo-Christian values and defend the innocence of children.”But what 18-year-old’s innocence would be ruined by Mrs. Doubtfire? A law can prohibit showing some expressive material to minors that would be legal for adults without violating the First Amendment, but it’s hard to imagine Nebraska’s expansive definition passing an obscenity test.   Democratic State Senator Megan Hunt is opposing the bill. A spokesperson in her office said that they intend to fight it but that defeating it may be an uphill battle that requires engagement from the public because Republicans enjoy a supermajority in the state legislature. Neither the bill nor an attempt by Hunt to indefinitely delay it has yet been debated on the floor.In Arkansas, one bill would amend the definition of adult-oriented businesses to include drag performances. That bill is less egregious than its Nebraska analogue in that only drag shows “intended to appeal to the prurient interest” are affected, but it’s more restrictive in that it doesn’t just affect performances in which drag is “the main element”––even one extra in drag could trigger the law. It is hardly novel for legislators to seek to protect minors from performances that are “prurient,” which is to say, that appeal to a lustful interest in sexual stimulation or gratification, but it’s striking to draft a law that shields kids from ostensibly prurient performances only when the performers are cross-dressing. The approach seems to subject genderqueer people to unequal treatment under the law and suggests animus against them, failing another civil-rights test.[Genevieve Lakier: The great free-speech reversal]Similarly speech-infringing and chilling proposals are circulating in a number of other states. In Arizona, S.B. 1030 would classify and regulate establishments that conduct drag shows in the same way as adult arcades, massage parlors, and strip clubs. It defines a drag performer as “a person who dresses in clothing and uses makeup and other physical markers opposite of the person’s gender at birth to exaggerate gender signifiers and roles and engages in singing, dancing, or a monologue or skit in order to entertain an audience.” Under that definition, Rod Stewart’s upcoming concert at the arena where the Phoenix Suns play could conceivably result in its reclassification as an 18-and-up venue––while not generally thought of as a drag act, he has frequently styled himself in ways that incorporate normatively feminine looks.Texas Monthly reported on an effort by State Representative Jared Patterson to treat venues that host “drag performances” as “sexually oriented businesses,” noting that if the bill passes, “a rock club or a community theater that doesn’t offer sexually explicit performances could find itself governed by the same rules” as strip clubs and porn theaters. “Given the stakes, those venues may well be unlikely to offer trans performers—even if they’re just strumming guitars or sitting behind drum kits—the opportunity to play.”That analysis seems reasonable to me, and demonstrates how the bill would obviously discourage artistic expression and would presumptively make it disproportionately harder for trans performers to get work.The Tennessean reported last month that State Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson is sponsoring legislation, S.B. 3, that is written broadly enough to conceivably encompass the actions in a bawdy sketch like the one that Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani performed in drag together back in 2000 if it was performed in a place where a child could see it. The effect of that proposal, too, would be to chill all manner of speech and artistic expression for cis and trans performers who depart from the traditional gender norms of their sex.Similar bills are under consideration in Missouri and Montana. One wonders if more are coming. Even if none passes, it is notable that legislators in so many states are singling out drag, especially in ways that raise significant constitutional problems. And should any bill pass aiming to restrict drag performances anywhere a child might see one, legal challenges will follow. As the UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment expert, told me in a phone interview, the precedent in the 1975 Supreme Court case Erznoznik v. City of Jacksonville would be relevant. In that case, a Jacksonville, Florida, ordinance made it a punishable offense for a drive-in movie theater to show films containing nudity when the screen was visible from the street. The Supreme Court struck the ordinance down on First Amendment grounds.“Much that we encounter offends our esthetic, if not our political and moral, sensibilities,” it ruled. “Nevertheless, the Constitution does not permit government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer.”[Read: Don’t use these free-speech arguments ever again]The Court went on to address concerns about children. “Appellee maintains that even though it cannot prohibit the display of films containing nudity to adults, the present ordinance is a reasonable means of protecting minors from this type of visual influence,” the majority opinion states. The opinion points out that “the ordinance is not directed against sexually explicit nudity, nor is it otherwise limited. Rather, it sweepingly forbids display of all films containing any uncovered buttocks or breasts, irrespective of context or pervasiveness.” The ruling concludes that  “speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them. In most circumstances, the values protected by the First Amendment are no less applicable when government seeks to control the flow of information to minors.”In my own estimation, the state’s ability to control the flow of information to minors should be at its very weakest in cases where parents or guardians are in favor of exposing their children to the art or expression in question. And most young children who attend drag shows of any sort do so because their parents chose to take them. In an essay where the journalist and pioneering proponent of gay equality Andrew Sullivan both celebrates many types of drag performances and laments as regressive progressivism “the idea that a drag queen—rather than, say, a firefighter or a pilot or a tennis player—is somehow an ideal role model for young gay children,” he points out that drag-queen story hour is
a voluntary activity. It’s not compulsory. Parents can choose to take their kids or not. (The introduction of this into public schools where kids cannot opt out and parents aren’t told is another matter entirely.)
Either you believe in parents’ rights, or you don’t. And I’m happy to leave it up to parents—and no one else. The post-liberal right, we have come to understand, only believes in parents’ rights if the parents are social conservatives.
Of course, the legislation discussed above goes far beyond trying to unconstitutionally ban drag-queen story hours, similarly infringing on a wide array of performative events, even though, as the ACLU of Nebraska’s Jane Seu put it in a statement, “Families have a First Amendment right to attend these events and performers and venues have a right to offer them.” Free-speech claims are often denigrated by neo-puritan factions on the right and left these days, but they remain an essential bulwark protecting minority communities from would-be censors. If the GOP improbably succeeds in overcoming those claims, its Pyrrhic crusade against drag will triumph at the expense of individual liberty and expressive rights for everyone.

In the next five years, it is likely that AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers. As the technology continues to advance, it will be able to perform tasks that were previously thought to require a high level of education and skill. This could lead to a displacement of workers in certain industries, as companies look to cut costs by automating processes. While it is difficult to predict the exact extent of this trend, it is clear that AI will have a significant impact on the job market for college-educated workers. It will be important for individuals to stay up to date on the latest developments in AI and to consider how their skills and expertise can be leveraged in a world where machines are increasingly able to perform many tasks.There you have it, I guess: ChatGPT is coming for my job and yours, according to ChatGPT itself. The artificially intelligent content creator, whose name is short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” was released two months ago by OpenAI, one of the country’s most influential artificial-intelligence research laboratories. The technology is, put simply, amazing. It generated that first paragraph instantly, working with this prompt: “Write a five-sentence paragraph in the style of The Atlantic about whether AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers in the next five years.”ChatGPT is just one of many mind-blowing generative AI tools released recently, including the image generators Midjourney and DALL-E and the video generator Synthesia. The upside of these AI tools is easy to see: They’re going to produce a tremendous amount of digital content, quickly and cheaply. Students are already using ChatGPT to help them write essays. Businesses are using ChatGPT to create copy for their websites and promotional materials, and to respond to customer-service inquiries. Lawyers are using it to produce legal briefs (ChatGPT passes the torts and evidence sections of the Multistate Bar Examination, by the way) and academics to produce footnotes.[Read: Will ChatGPT kill the student essay?]Yet an extraordinary downside is also easy to see: What happens when services like ChatGPT start putting copywriters, journalists, customer-service agents, paralegals, coders, and digital marketers out of a job? For years, tech thinkers have been warning that flexible, creative AI will be a threat to white-collar employment, as robots replace skilled office workers whose jobs were once considered immune to automation. In the most extreme iteration, analysts imagine AI altering the employment landscape permanently. One Oxford study estimates that 47 percent of U.S. jobs might be at risk.   No single technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI really be an exception? No one can answer this question, given how new the technology is and given how slowly employment can adjust in response to technological change. But AI really is different, technology experts told me—a range of tasks that up until now were impossible to automate are becoming automatable. “Before, progress was linear and predictable. You figured out the steps and the computer followed them. It followed the procedure; it didn’t learn and it didn’t improvise,” the MIT professor David Autor, one of the world’s foremost experts on employment and technological change, told me. ChatGPT and the like do improvise, promising to destabilize a lot of white-collar work, regardless of whether they eliminate jobs or not.People and businesses are just figuring out how to use emerging AI technologies, let alone how to use them to create new products, streamline their business operations, and make employees more efficient. If history is any guide, this process could take longer than you might think. Consider electricity. The circuit, electric lights, and rudimentary electric motors were developed in the early 1800s. But another century passed before the widespread adoption of electricity in the United States began to lift GDP. Or take computers. They became commercially available in the early 1950s but did not show up in the productivity stats until the late 1990s.Some technologies clearly improve productivity and reduce the need for labor. Automated machine tools, for instance, depress manufacturing employment while lifting output and productivity, as do many of the forms of machinery invented and employed since the Industrial Revolution. But other technologies—even amazing ones—show surprisingly muted effects. How about the internet, which has revolutionized almost every facet of communications in the past four decades? Despite altering how we date and talk and read and watch and vote and emote and record our own life stories, launching a zillion businesses, and creating however many fortunes, the internet “fails the hurdle test as a Great Invention,” the economist Robert Gordon argued in 2000, because it “provides information and entertainment more cheaply and conveniently than before, but much of its use involves substitution of existing activities from one medium to another.” Nearly a quarter century later, the internet still hasn’t spurred a productivity revolution. Smartphones haven’t either.So is AI like the smartphone or is it like an automated machine tool? Is it about to change the way that work gets done without eliminating many jobs in aggregate, or is it about to turn San Francisco into the Rust Belt?Predicting where technology will cause job losses is hard, Autor noted. Remember the freak-out several years ago over the possibility of self-driving automobiles eliminating work for truck drivers? But AI is much more flexible than a system like Excel, much more creative than a Google Doc. What’s more, AI systems get better and better and better as they get more use and absorb more data, whereas engineers often need to laboriously and painstakingly update other types of software.[Read: What happens when AI has read everything?]As a rule, when companies can substitute machines for people, they will. AI can do work currently done by paralegals, copywriters, digital-content producers, executive assistants, entry-level computer programmers, and, yes, some journalists. That means such jobs might change, and soon. But even if ChatGPT can spit out a pretty good paragraph on AI, it can’t interview AI and labor experts, nor can it find historical documents, nor can it assess the quality of studies of technological change and employment. It creates content out of what is already out there, with no authority, no understanding, no ability to correct itself, no way to identify genuinely new or interesting ideas. That implies that AI might make original journalism more valuable and investigative journalists more productive, while creating an enormous profusion of simpler content. AI might spit out listicles and summaries of public meetings, while humans will write in-depth stories. “In many ways, AI will help people use expertise better,” Autor said. “It means that we’ll specialize more.”[Fred Benenson: AI is coming for your favorite menial tasks]AI could also make a wide variety of industries more efficient, with muted effects on overall employment. Matt Wampler is a co-founder of an AI-powered small business called ClearCOGS. He’s been a “restaurant guy” his whole career, he told me. Restaurants and grocery stores, he says, tend to run on thin margins, yet still tend to waste a considerable amount of food. People order more spaghetti than burgers; buns get thrown out. “Restaurants just lag behind on technology,” he told me. “They’re all about people. It’s people serving people; it’s people managing people. And in that very human-centric world, the default way of handling problems is to hand it to a person. Phil’s going to do it.”ClearCOGS takes restaurants’ customer-order history, supply data, and labor data and uses AI-powered modeling to make their books leaner and more profitable. If people are starting to order more spaghetti than burgers, the system will prompt the chef or manager to buy more pasta and fewer rolls. “We put this in place in some of my cousin’s sandwich shops,” Wampler told me. “Simple answers to simple questions. The question they needed answered was, there’s an assistant manager on the night shift and a couple hours before close, he has to decide whether to bake another tray of bread or not. We provide that answer.” This use of ChatGPT isn’t eliminating human jobs, really; neighborhood sandwich joints aren’t hiring McKinsey consultants. But it might make food service more efficient as a whole.Even if it doesn’t boost the economy, AI could still change the texture of our lives and alter how we spend our time, like social media did before it. Video games might become more immersive. Shops might have far better copywriting and sales visuals. Movies might look cooler. Videos in the depths of YouTube might become far weirder and more beautiful. We might also see far more formulaic content than we already do. (Much more ominously, there might be a huge amount of plausible-seeming disinformation online.)For workers, Autor noted, the great risk is that AI technologies cause too sudden a change in what kind of labor employers want. Certain specializations might get wiped out, leaving thousands of call-center operators or marketing workers unemployed. But he stressed the benefits of having such technology in our hands. Productivity has languished for decades. Machines doing a little more work would have a big upside, after all.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his war against Ukraine a year ago, he wanted to keep NATO at bay. But he has achieved the exact opposite: NATO will take on new members and develop a closer working relationship with the European Union, lending vastly more geopolitical weight to the transatlantic region.

BERLIN – Next month, Russia’s violent assault on neighboring Ukraine will have been going on for one year. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan for a quick “special military operation” – a “Blitzkrieg” – has failed, owing to Ukraine’s unflinching resistance, the West’s united support of its defense, and Russia’s own incompetence.

Rather than a rapid military victory culminating in regime change, Putin’s “special operation” has instead descended into positional warfare. Even after a year, no one can say for certain when and how the war will end. Most likely, it will continue for some time, claiming many more victims. Yet it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Russia could still achieve its primary goal of eliminating Ukraine as a sovereign, independent state.

As long as NATO and its member states continue to provide military and economic support to Ukraine, and as long as the Ukrainian people maintain their resolve, Russia will not achieve its war aims. This realization seems to be dawning slowly on the Kremlin, which has stepped up its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and mobilized hundreds of thousands of conscripts. Russian military leaders are now betting on a long-term strategy of demoralization and exhaustion, relying on sheer numerical superiority over the Ukrainian army.

But this amounts to an act of two-fold destruction. A strategy of “quantitative dominance” requires the Russian leadership to give no consideration to the lives of its own soldiers, not to mention those of Ukrainian civilians. With each passing day, the criminality of Russia’s malicious war becomes more apparent. Whenever the fighting does stop, much of Eastern Europe will have been laid to waste, leaving behind a deep and abiding hatred. The guns will eventually fall silent, but there will be no peace. Ukraine will have to do everything in its power to deter another attack, and Western Europe will continue to rearm on a massive scale, possibly for decades to come.

With Ukraine forming a kind of security cordon between Russia and the rest of Europe, there will be an impetus for it to join both NATO and the European Union in relatively short order. Moreover, the EU’s own geopolitical and security interests will have changed, transforming the institution in the process. The prospect of Ukrainian membership will necessarily shift Europe’s focus eastward.

With his illegal war, Putin wanted to keep NATO at bay. But he has achieved the exact opposite. Finland and Sweden will now join the alliance, and the entire European continent will line up behind its shield. The EU and NATO will develop a much closer working relationship, lending vastly more geopolitical weight to the transatlantic region.

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Such a transformation will be necessary in a world that is increasingly marked by deep distrust between states, and by a growing divide between authoritarian regimes and more open, democratic systems. These dynamics apply first and foremost to economic relations. By giving the West cause to withhold capital, technology, goods, and services, Putin has done his Chinese friends a great disservice.

As Europe’s attention turns to ensuring its own safety from Russia, and to rebuilding Ukraine and preparing for its integration into the EU, a burning question will loom: What will become of Russia itself?

Putin’s vision of a globally powerful Greater Russia has been exposed as a pipe dream. The war and Western sanctions are hitting the Russian economy hard, and the longer the fighting continues, the greater the costs will be. And Russia’s long neglect of economic diversification and modernization implies that incomes and living conditions will decline sharply. Spurred by not just the war but also the climate crisis, Europe will rapidly phase out fossil fuels, and Russia will have permanently lost its traditional export market.

With so few other alternatives, will it even be possible to hold the country together? If Russian leaders cling to the delusion that they can revive the czarist imperial tradition, they will risk plunging Russia into a deep intellectual crisis. Without comprehensive political and economic modernization, the country – with its huge nuclear arsenal – will stagger dangerously into an uncertain future. We certainly cannot rule out the possibility that Russia – and thus also Europe – will experience a replay of the 1990s.

Western Europe will not have the option of ignoring the challenges to its east. Whatever happens there will directly affect everyone who shares the same continent. No longer can we afford to harbor starry-eyed illusions about global progress and our own place in the world. A Russia-size geopolitical “black hole” in Eastern Europe and North Asia does not bode well for anyone. Putin has destroyed more than even he probably expected.

After World War II, in the early years of the Cold War, Western European countries took their first steps toward ever-closer union. After the war in Ukraine, they must continue that tradition. Given the massive geopolitical challenges and security threats that Europe will face, it can no longer afford to exhibit any kind of weakness. The Old Continent must grow up – and quickly.

Three years into the global fight against SARS-CoV-2, the arsenal to combat long COVID remains depressingly bare. Being vaccinated seems to reduce people’s chances of developing the condition, but the only surefire option for avoiding long COVID is to avoid catching the coronavirus at all—a proposition that feels ever more improbable. For anyone who is newly infected, “we don’t have any interventions that are known to work,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and long-COVID researcher at Yale.Some researchers are hopeful that the forecast might shift soon. A pair of recent preprint studies, both now under review for publication in scientific journals, hint that two long-COVID-preventing pills might already be on our pharmacy shelves: the antiviral Paxlovid and metformin, an affordable drug commonly used for treating type 2 diabetes. When taken early in infection, each seems to at least modestly trim the chance of developing long COVID—by 42 percent, in the case of metformin. Neither set of results is a slam dunk. The Paxlovid findings did not come out of a clinical trial, and were focused on patients at high risk of developing severe, acute COVID; the metformin data did come out of a clinical trial, but the study was small. When I called more than half a dozen infectious-disease experts to discuss them, all used hopeful, but guarded, language: The results are “promising,” “intriguing”; they “warrant further investigation.”At this point, though, any advance at all feels momentous. Long COVID remains the pandemic’s biggest unknown: Researchers still can’t even agree on its prevalence or the features that define it. What is clear is that millions of people in the United States alone, and countless more worldwide, have experienced some form of it, and more are expected to join them. “We’ve already seen early data, and we’ll continue to see data, that that will emphasize the impact that long COVID has on our society, on quality of life, on productivity, on our health system and medical expenditures,” says Susanna Naggie, an infectious-disease physician and COVID-drug researcher at Duke University. “This needs to be a high priority,” she told me. Researchers have to trim long COVID incidence as much as possible, as soon as possible, with whatever safe, effective options they can.By now, news of the inertia around preventive long-COVID therapies may not come as much of a shock. Interventions that stop disease from developing are, on the whole, a neglected group; big, blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trials—the industry gold standard—usually look to investigate potential treatments, rather than drugs that might keep future illness at bay. It’s a bias that makes research easier and faster; it’s a core part of the American medical culture’s reactive approach to health.[Read: Long COVID has forced a reckoning for one of medicine’s most neglected diseases]For long COVID, the terrain is even rougher. Researchers are best able to address prevention when they understand a disease’s triggers, the source of its symptoms, and who’s most at risk. That intel provides a road map, pointing them toward specific bodily systems and interventions. The potential causes of COVID, though, remain murky, says Adrian Hernandez, a cardiologist and clinical researcher at Duke. Years of research have shown that the condition is quite likely to comprise a cluster of diverse syndromes with different triggers and prognoses, more like a category (e.g., “cancer”) than a singular disease. If that’s the case, then a single preventive treatment shouldn’t be expected to cut its rates for everyone. Without a universal way to define and diagnose the condition, researchers can’t easily design trials, either. Endpoints such as hospitalization and death tend to be binary and countable. Long COVID operates in shades of gray.Still, some scientists might be making headway with vetted antiviral drugs, already known to slash the risk of developing severe COVID-19. A subset of long-COVID cases could be caused by bits of virus that linger in the body, prompting the immune system to wage an extended war; a drug that clears the microbe more quickly might lower the chances that any part of the invader sticks around. Paxlovid, which interferes with SARS-CoV-2’s ability to copy itself inside of our cells, fits that bill. “The idea here is really nipping it in the bud,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, who led the recent Paxlovid work.Paxlovid has yet to hit the scientific jackpot: proof from a big clinical trial that shows it can prevent long COVID in newly infected people. But Al-Aly’s study, which pored over the electronic medical records of more than 56,000 high-risk patients, offers some early optimism. People who took the pills, he and his colleagues found, were 26 percent less likely to report lingering symptoms three months after their symptoms began than those who didn’t.[Read: Inside the mind of an anti-Paxxer]The pills’ main benefit remains the prevention of severe, acute disease. (In the recent study, Paxlovid-takers were also 30 percent less likely to be hospitalized and 48 percent less likely to die.) Al-Aly expects that the drug’s effectiveness at preventing long COVID—if it’s confirmed in other populations—will be “modest, not huge.” Though the two functions could yet be linked: Some long-COVID cases may result from severe infections that damage tissues so badly that the body struggles to recover. And should Paxlovid’s potential pan out, it could help build the case for testing other SARS-CoV-2 antivirals. Al-Aly and his colleagues are currently working on a similar study into molnupiravir. “The early results are encouraging,” he told me, though “not as robust as Paxlovid.” (Another study, run by other researchers, that followed hospitalized COVID patients found those who took remdesivir were less likely to get long COVID, but a later randomized clinical trial didn’t bear that out.)A clinical trial testing Paxlovid’s preventive potency against long COVID is still needed. Kit Longley, a spokesperson for Pfizer, told me in an email that the company doesn’t currently have one planned, though it is “continuing to monitor data from our clinical studies and real-world evidence.” (The company is collaborating with a research group at Stanford to study Paxlovid in new clinical contexts, but they’re looking at whether the pills  might treat long COVID that’s already developed. The RECOVER trial, a large NIH-funded study on long COVID, is also focusing its current studies on treatment.) But given the meager uptake rates for Paxlovid even among those in high-risk groups, Al-Aly thinks his new data could already serve a useful purpose: providing people with extra motivation to take the drug.The case for adding metformin to the anti-COVID tool kit might be a bit muddier. The drug isn’t the most intuitive medication to deploy against a respiratory virus, and despite its widespread use among diabetics, its exact effects on the body remain nebulous, says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. But there are many reasons to believe it might be useful. Some research has shown that metformin can mess with the manufacture of viral proteins inside of human cells, Bramante told me, which may impede the ability of SARS-CoV-2 and other pathogens to reproduce. The drug also appears to rev up the disease-dueling powers of certain immune cells, and to stave off inflammation. Studies have shown that metformin can improve responses to certain vaccinations in humans and rodents, and researchers have found that people taking the drug seem less likely to get seriously sick from influenza. Even the diabetes-coronavirus connection may not be so tenuous: Metabolic disease is a risk factor for severe COVID; infection itself can put blood-sugar levels on the fritz. It’s certainly plausible that having a metabolically altered body, Schultz-Cherry told me, could make infections worse.[Read: The promising treatment we’re not even trying for long COVID]But the evidence that metformin helps prevent long COVID remains sparse. Carolyn Bramante, the scientist who led the metformin study, told me that when her team first set out in 2020 to investigate the drug’s effects on SARS-CoV-2 infections in a randomized, clinical trial, long COVID wasn’t really on their radar. Like many others in their field, they were hoping to repurpose established medicines to keep infected people out of the hospital; early studies of metformin—as well as the two other drugs in their trial, the antidepressant fluvoxamine and the antiparasitic ivermectin—hinted that they’d work. Ironically, two years later, their story flipped around. A large analysis, published last summer, showed that none of the three drugs were stellar at preventing severe COVID in the short term—a disappointing result (though Bramante contends that their data still indicate that metformin does some good). Then, when Bramante and her colleagues examined their data again, they found that study participants that had taken metformin for two weeks around the start of their illness were 42 percent less likely to have a long-COVID diagnosis from their doctor nearly a year down the road. David Boulware, an infectious-disease physician who helped lead the work, considers that degree of reduction pretty decent: “Is it 100 percent? No,” he told me. “But it’s better than zero.”Metformin may well prove to prevent long COVID but not acute, severe COVID (or vice versa). Plenty of people who never spend time in the hospital can still end up developing chronic symptoms. And Iwasaki points out that the demographics of long-haulers and people who get severe COVID don’t really overlap; the latter skew older and male. In the future, early-infection regimens may be multipronged: antivirals, partnered with metabolic drugs, in the hopes of keeping symptoms both mild and short-lived.But researchers are still a long way off from delivering that reality. It’s not yet clear, for instance, whether the drugs work additively when combined, Boulware told me. Nor is it a given that they’ll work across different demographics—age, vaccination status, risk factors, and more. Bramante and Boulware’s study cast a decently wide net: Although everyone enrolled in the trial was overweight or obese, many were young and healthy; a few were even pregnant. The study was not enormous, though—about 1,000 people. It also relied on patients’ individual doctors to deliver long-COVID diagnoses, likely leading to some inconsistencies, so other studies that follow up in the future could find different results. For now, this isn’t enough to “mean we should run out and use metformin,” Schultz-Cherry, who has been battling long COVID herself, told me.Other medications could still fill the long-COVID gaps. Hernandez, the Duke cardiologist, is hopeful that one of his ongoing clinical trials, ACTIV-6, might provide answers soon. He and his team are testing whether any of several drugs—including ivermectin, fluvoxamine, the steroid fluticasone, and, as a new addition, the anti-inflammatory montelukast—might cut down on severe, short-term COVID. But Hernandez and his colleagues, Naggie among them, appended a check-in at the 90-day mark, when they’ll be asking their patients whether they’re experiencing a dozen or so symptoms that could hint at a chronic syndrome.That check-in questionnaire won’t capture the full list of long-COVID symptoms, now more than 200 strong. Still, the three-month benchmark could give them a sense of where to keep looking, and for how long. Hernandez, Naggie, and their colleagues are considering whether to extend their follow-up period to six months, maybe farther. The need for long-COVID prevention, after all, will only grow as the total infection count does. “We’re not going to get rid of long COVID anytime soon,” Iwasaki told me. “The more we can prevent onset, the better off we are.”

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.“Ōdī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. “I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.”Maybe you can relate. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do.Romance isn’t the only part of life in which mixed feelings can cause pain. Maybe your ambivalence is instead directed toward your employer, and you can’t decide whether to stay and work to make things better, or go someplace else. Or maybe some of your memories are painfully mixed and hard to interpret. Perhaps your childhood was both good and bad, not fitting into a neat frame, and thus feels impossible to explain to others or even yourself.Mixed emotions drain your emotional batteries, like a phone connecting to multiple networks simultaneously. They are one of the most complex psychological phenomena we are capable of, and bring us a great deal of distress. You might think that purely negative emotions are the most unpleasant ones; in truth, a cocktail of negative and positive can be worse.The idea of being able to experience truly “mixed” feelings is quite new. Well into the 20th century, many psychologists believed that positive and negative emotions existed on a continuum. If you felt “less bad” as time passed after a loss or trauma, that simply meant you felt “more good.” Researchers didn’t think you could feel good and bad at the same time. Even today, people often talk about happiness and unhappiness in this way—as if the presence of one means the absence of the other.In the 1960s, new psychological research began to collect evidence that positive and negative emotions were in fact separable, and as further research observed, could be felt simultaneously, and also in rapid succession. Neuroscience added support for this hypothesis when scholars found that positive and negative emotions largely correspond to activity in different hemispheres of the brain (for many people, negative emotions align with activity on the right, positive on the left).[Read: Sit with negative emotions, don’t push them away]Today, many emotion researchers believe that mixed emotions happen to just about everyone. Sometimes you feel positively about your romantic relationship in the morning, and negatively in the afternoon, for no clear reason. Or in one moment, you feel good about the overall partnership (I’m glad we’re together!) but bad about certain aspects (she isn’t very affectionate, and that worries me).You might assume that your net happiness at a given time would be something like your positive emotion minus your negative emotion; if good > bad, then you are “net happy.” But as Catullus suggests, it’s not so simple: Mixed emotions can impose a psychological toll that’s greater than the result of that equation, because they are confusing and conflictive. You might say that the bad and good are at war internally, exhausting you emotionally.Last year, a researcher found just this when he measured the effects of positive, negative, and mixed emotions on well-being: Positive emotions pushed well-being up, and negative emotions pushed it down; meanwhile, the independent measure of mixed emotions also pushed well-being down, and by more than negative emotions alone. In other words, hating your relationship or your job is emotionally easier than being ambivalent about it.One seemingly obvious solution to the problem of mixed emotions is to try to eradicate them through more binary thinking. For example, you could attempt to eliminate shades of gray in your romance by simply deciding that it is “good” or “bad,” and then acting accordingly. My wife—a Spaniard—has told me that she thinks a lot of Americans do this: Everything has to be either wonderful or awful. Psychologists call this “dichotomous thinking,” and studies show that it is neither helpful nor healthy; on the contrary, it is associated with a number of personality disorders.Rather than trying to think more dichotomously, lean into the zone of mixed emotions, which psychologists call “dialectical thinking.” This is the attitude that opposite emotions are normal and compatible. Some cultures are better than others at dialectical thinking—and my wife is right that Americans tend to be especially weak at it. For example, one 2021 experiment on American and Chinese students asked them to read statements that elicited happy memories and sad emotions at the same time, such as “I have been dreading this moment, but it has finally arrived. A chapter in my life is ending, and the future is still uncertain. I’ll miss the neighborhood and the friends I’ve made. I really do not want to leave. It’s a sad and nostalgic time.” The Americans experienced almost 50 percent more discomfort when reading this than their Chinese counterparts, possibly because they did not recognize or focus on the fact that missing one’s neighborhood and friends implies that one has happy memories of them.[Read: The countries where people are the most emotionally complex]To become more dialectical in your thinking, start by consciously acknowledging your conflicting feelings, as opposed to letting them battle away in your subconscious. If you’re conflicted about your relationship, try writing down its positive and negative aspects. Consider how you might manage the aspects you dislike, or perhaps accept them if you can’t change them. But decide—if the benefits outweigh the costs—that nothing is unnatural or wrong about having positive and negative feelings about someone you love. I have applied this technique in many areas of my life; it provides real relief and raises my happiness.Once you are more comfortable with your mixed emotions, start to explore the richness that ambivalence can bring to your understanding of your life. Researchers in 2017 showed that people can find a deeper sense of purpose when contemplating both their happy and sad emotions about a particular occurrence, such as graduating from college. Seeing the true complexity of our relationships and experiences takes us beyond the superficial “great” or “horrible” descriptions that obfuscate more than elucidate our lives.Note here an apparent contradiction: Mixed emotions may bring unhappiness, but they can also bring meaning to life. On reflection, you will notice that there is no inconsistency. Meaning is not only positive; on the contrary, a truly meaningful life is one filled with all types of experiences and emotions, including those we find disagreeable. This is why some psychotherapy seeks to not only lower emotional pain, but also find deep purpose in it. In a fully examined life, your mixed and negative emotions don’t go to waste.Catullus’s dilemma has haunted and inspired us for centuries. In 1989, the Rolling Stones offered a particularly direct reckoning in their song “Mixed Emotions,” which proved to be their last Billboard top-10 hit to date. “This coming and going is driving me nuts,” sang the modern-day Catullus, Mick Jagger. “This to-ing and fro-ing is hurting my guts.”[Read: Measuring your happiness can help improve it]Life is easier when the path forward is clear, of course, but it rarely is. We are built to experience highs and lows, and almost everything truly meaningful has both. Sometimes, that hurts your guts. But that’s the point. Don’t try to make life uncomplicated, or love it any less because it’s messy. Rather, resolve to be fully awake and alive inside that mess.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.For most of my life, I thought I was pretty good at asking questions. After all, that is sort of my job as a journalist. Explaining complex ideas in simple terms requires pulling myself out of a pit of ignorance using the rope of other people’s expertise. I can’t do it without begging for a lot of help.But for most of my professional life, I labored under a powerful delusion. I thought that asking Smart Questions was of the utmost importance.A Smart Question is a query designed to advertise the wisdom of the asker. The point may be to establish that the interviewer and interviewee are on equal intellectual footing. Sometimes, the question is designed to get the source to begin the answer with a brief compliment: “That’s a smart question!” or, on a good day, “That’s a really smart question!”I used to think these kudos were a sign that my investigation was on the right track. I didn’t want to embarrass myself on the phone with a government official or an academic. And a part of me just wanted the conversations to go as pleasantly as possible.But after many years of subscribing to the theory of Smart Questions, I’ve decided that I’ve been mostly wrong. Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else.This realization crystallized for me in several stages. A few years back, when I did more editing work at The Atlantic, I realized that popular articles tended to scope out to see the full landscape of an issue. So, for example, rather than fixate on some lurid statistic about New York City rents, the popular piece would ask a broad question such as “Why are rents so expensive in the U.S.?” or “Why can’t America build enough homes?” We called these queries Big Dumb Questions.Readers seemed to like the Big Dumb Question stories because the articles used the day’s news to investigate a deeper truth about the world. Personally, I liked them because they changed the way I thought about asking questions. Reporting out these BDQs required my writers and me to ask a lot of, well, BDQs. Really revelatory and surprising answers can come from extremely basic questions such as:
“Can you just explain this to me like I barely know anything about this subject?”
“What, if anything, is actually interesting or new about this story?”
“Let’s say everything you say is going to happen really does happen. Then what happens?”
And perhaps most important of all:
“Is there some angle here that I’m not even seeing?”
None of these questions assume any knowledge. None of them reveal much intelligence. It’s their openness that I’ve found to be useful. Narrow and specific queries, with a preamble and even some fancy jargon, are still useful here and there, but they’re a bit like fishing for a trout and catching a trout. The most interesting interviews are more like fishing around and reeling in a shark, or a treasure chest, or a drowned aircraft carrier—something you never expected to see on the hook. The best interviews surprise the interviewer, and being surprised is hard if you’re fixated on being smart.I had thought I’d kicked the Smart Question habit before I started recording my first podcast, several years ago. Producing an edited podcast requires one to listen back to interviews again, and again, and again. In my case, this meant having to listen to hour after hour of my blabbering, try-hard, obsequious nonsense. The experience was egotistically ruinous. I was still asking Smart Questions!In speaking with other journalists about this problem, I’ve learned that smart-question-itis is a malady that afflicts the whole profession. Charles Duhigg, the Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Power of Habit, got his start as a journalist with the Business section of The Washington Post. He, too, thought he knew how to ask questions.“I would try to show the person that I spoke their language by using business terms and acronyms,” Duhigg told me. He assumed that sources would tell him more stuff if they thought he was smart. “But they did not think I was smart, and all their comments were in ‘business-ese’”—that is, corporate gobbledygook and arcane abbreviations—“which meant many of their answers were totally unusable,” he said.Duhigg quickly understood how counterproductive feigning intelligence was during the process of trying to collect it. “I realized that my job was not to ask questions that the source knows the answer to but to trick the source into doing my job,” he said. The key was to get them to tell him what questions he ought to be asking: “They know the most interesting things to talk about, and I don’t. So my goal is to ask sort of stupid questions and make them think I’m so dumb so they have to give me advice about how I ought to write this article.”This approach inverts the conventional understanding of an interview. Most people think the point of a good question is to get a good answer, but maybe that’s wrong. Maybe the point of a good question is to arrive at a better question.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries? Do you have personal experiences with them? I’d love to hear from boosters and critics alike, especially if your commentary is grounded in something you’ve observed at work, school, or elsewhere in your life.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of Note“What if diversity trainings are doing more harm than good?”That’s the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal, the writer, podcaster, and author of a 2018 Atlantic cover story, who delves into the multibillion-dollar diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry. While its advocates claim that “diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on,” Singal writes, in practice there is “little evidence that many of these initiatives work.” And the type of diversity training “that is currently in vogue—mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems—may well have a net-negative effect.”I have a theory about why programs of that sort might fail. After Donald Trump was elected, I studied the political-psychology research on authoritarian personality types. I was especially impressed by the work of Karen Stenner, who found in her scholarship that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings” (though anti-Black, ideological racists do of course exist and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance). “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”As I explained in a 2019 article:
The distinction isn’t merely about word choice. It has critical implications for fighting and easing both racism and other forms of intolerance. For example, in an entirely separate experiment meant to manipulate the way authoritarians viewed “us” and “them,” subjects were told that NASA had verified the existence of alien life––beings “very different from us in ways we are not yet even able to imagine.” After being told that, the measured racial intolerance of authoritarian subjects decreased by half, a result that suggests a general intolerance of difference that varies with perceptions of otherness, not fixed antagonism against a racial group. Their boundaries (and thus their behavior!) can be swiftly altered, Stenner emphasized, just by this simple cognitive device of creating a “superordinate group”: making “black people look more like ‘us’ than ‘them’ when there are green people afoot.” Under these conditions, the authoritarians didn’t only become kinder to black people, Stenner noted; they also became more merciful to criminals—that is, less inclined to want a crackdown on perceived moral deviance.
As I went on to explain:
Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference. “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote.
The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.
Put more simply, perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference—and when DEI-industry programming deliberately raises the salience of race in a given organization with the intention of urging anti-racism, the effect is to exacerbate differentism.In an article that dovetails nicely with Stenner’s insights, Matthew Yglesias once explained why he believes that raising the salience of race in public-policy debates is frequently bad for anti-racism.He wrote:
A deep body of scholarship across history, political science, and economics all broadly point toward the conclusion that increasing the salience of race can have harmful results.
One particularly frustrating example I came across years ago at Vox is that Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found in experimental settings that telling people about racial disparities in the criminal justice system made people less supportive of reform.
And you could react to that by thinking “wow, that sucks, people shouldn’t be so terrible,” but I think most people believe there are tradeoffs between harshness in the criminal justice system and public safety. And while more progressive-minded people would say that’s overstated, there are clearly some margins on which it’s true. So if you tell people a penalty will be applied in a racist way, for many of them, that’s appealing—the system can crack down on dealers and addicts while they personally can rest assured that if their kid happens to be caught doing drugs, he’ll be okay. By the same token, a friend who’s running for office told me that many of the people she speaks to who are most agitated about crime also hate traffic cameras. My guess is that’s precisely because traffic cameras don’t engage in racial discrimination, and nice middle-class white people don’t like the idea of an enforcement system that doesn’t exempt them.
In the specific case of the cameras, I think we should have more of them and that the aim of our criminal justice system more broadly should be to catch a larger share of offenders in a non-discriminatory way and then punish them less harshly. Ideally, everyone who speeds would get caught and fined and the fines wouldn’t necessarily be very high, but people would stop doing speeding because the odds of detection are overwhelming.
And in the general case, I think it’s clear that the goal should be to reduce the salience of race in public debate and focus on the direct objects of reducing poverty, making policing more accountable, improving schools, reducing air pollution, expanding health insurance coverage, and otherwise solving the big problems of American society. All of this would, mechanically, close racial gaps. But highlighting that is genuinely counterproductive.
I mention these writers at such length because many diversity-loving people find it surprising that DEI training could be counterproductive, and Stenner and Yglesias’s work offers plausible explanations for why. But the intersection of politics, psychology, and race is exactly the sort of wildly complicated subject area where epistemic modesty and airing diverse viewpoints is vital for truth-seeking, so I hope that fans of DEI training and members of the industry will stand up for their work.But to defend the industry in aggregate will require a lot of explaining. As Singal wrote, “Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is ‘disappointing,’ wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, ‘considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.’”The Harvard Business Review has been publishing articles that cast doubt on the efficacy of mainstream DEI approaches for years. “One reason why I found Jesse’s piece so compelling is that he’s echoing arguments I made more than a year ago,” David French wrote in The Dispatch. “I quoted from a 2018 summary of studies by Harvard University professor Frank Dobbin and and Tel Aviv University professor Alexandra Kalev that said, ‘Hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.’”In French’s telling, that scholarship has implications for the culture wars:
We fight a tremendous amount over diversity training—even to the point of violating civil rights laws and the First Amendment—to either mandate or prohibit certain forms of DEI instruction when DEI instruction doesn’t impact hearts and minds much at all. It’s Diet Coke. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that just doesn’t deliver what its advocates hope for, nor does it foster identity politics in the way that many of its opponents fear.
… People just aren’t that malleable. For good and ill, we’re built of sterner, less flexible stuff, and periodic Corporate PowerPoints or group learning sessions can’t really shape peoples’ lives.
For more, see a podcast debate that Jane Coaston hosted on diversity initiatives and my 2021 profile of the entrepreneur and public intellectual Chloé Valdary, who offers an alternative approach to DEI training that she calls the Theory of Enchantment. Finally, for a deep dive into the history of the diversity-training industry, see Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2002 book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.“There’s No Planet B”In Aeon, Arwen E. Nicholson and Raphaëlle D. Haywood reject the possibility of humanity moving off of Earth:
Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind?
No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere.
Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.
Gas Stoves and AsthmaEmily Oster attempts to evaluate the data.Berlin’s Failing ArmySpiegel International argues that even with war raging in Ukraine, and the attendant need for German contributions to European security, the German military is in dire shape. It reports the following:
In June, the Bundestag passed a 100-billion-euro special fund for the German military, and in December the Budget Committee released the first 13 billion from that fund for eight defense projects, including the new F-35 combat aircraft. “It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy,” the chancellor said in his February address to the nation. Scholz also formulated his political expectations: “The goal is a powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr that can be relied upon to protect us.” The question is: How much progress has been made on fulfilling that pledge. Since then, after all, the Defense Ministry has been producing little in the way of announcements about restructuring and reform, instead landing on the front pages due to gaffes and catastrophic shortcomings.
One example: The commander of the 10th Tank Division reported to his superiors that during an exercise with 18 Puma infantry fighting vehicles, all 18 of them broke down. It was a worrisome incident given that the ultra-modern weapons systems are a key component of the NATO rapid-reaction force. There is a lack of munitions and equipment—and arms deliveries to Ukraine have only worsened the situation. “The cupboards are almost bare,” said Alfons Mais, inspector general of the German army, at the beginning of the war. André Wüstner, head of the German Bundeswehr Association, seconds him: “We continue to be in free fall.” The situation is so bad that the German military has become a favorite punchline of late-night comedy shows … The German military, to be sure, is no stranger to mockery and ridicule, but it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.  
Is This Morning in America?David Brooks argues in The Atlantic that the future is brighter for the country than many now imagine:
If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point. Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.” Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy.
And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.
Provocation of the WeekAt Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Davis, California, some workers are trying to unionize. Faith Bennett reports on their grievances in Jacobin:
Like many other baristas and service workers, Peet’s employees are challenged by schedules that are delivered on short notice, unreliable hours, lean staffing, and difficulty securing coverage. As a result, café positions have high rates of turnover. But members of PWU are invested in making the job more sustainable for themselves and more tenable for those who come next.
In Davis, Peet’s workers report that they are often scheduled for shifts that are deliberately shortened so that they are not afforded breaks. Meanwhile mobile orders exacerbate understaffing issues: the company does not place restrictions on mobile orders, which often leads to a torrent of tickets, not all of which are picked up, and delays of drinks ordered by customers who arrive in person. The current practice around mobile orders exhausts baristas and contributes to frustration of customers, who sometimes direct that frustration toward staff.
Although it is possible to turn off the mobile order system, this can only be accomplished if staff from a given store put in a request to the district manager, who oversees operations at approximately seventeen locations. Having this request granted for even an hour is a rare occurrence … mobile orders, a lack of breaks, and understaffing curtail the ability to chat with regulars who look to baristas for social interaction.

Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re wet; they’re warm; they’re what we use to touch everything we touch,” he said. “It’s not rocket science: The hand is a very good medium to transmit disease.”It’s a message that Sklansky has been proselytizing for the better part of a decade—via word of mouth among his patients, impassioned calls to action in medical journals, even DIY music videos that warn against puttin’ ’er there. But for a long time, his calls to action were met with scoffs and skepticism.So when the coronavirus started its sweep across the United States three years ago, Sklansky couldn’t help but feel a smidgen of hope. He watched as corporate America pocketed its dealmaking palms, as sports teams traded end-of-game grasps for air-fives, and as The New Yorker eulogized the gesture’s untimely end. My colleague Megan Garber celebrated the handshake’s demise, as did Anthony Fauci. The coronavirus was a horror, but perhaps it could also be a wake-up call. Maybe, just maybe, the handshake was at last dead. “I was optimistic that it was going to be it,” Sklansky told me.[Read: Good riddance to the handshake]But the death knell rang too soon. “Handshakes are back,” says Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert and the founder of the Protocol School of Texas. The gesture is too ingrained, too beloved, too irreplaceable for even a global crisis to send it to an early grave. “The handshake is the vampire that didn’t die,” says Ken Carter, a psychologist at Emory University. “I can tell you that it lives: I shook a stranger’s hand yesterday.”The base science of the matter hasn’t changed. Hands are humans’ primary tools of touch, and people (especially men) don’t devote much time to washing them. “If you actually sample hands, the grossness is something quite exceptional,” says Ella Al-Shamahi, an anthropologist and the author of the book The Handshake: A Gripping History. And shakes, with their characteristic palm-to-palm squeezes, are a whole lot more prone to spread microbes than alternatives such as fist bumps.Not all of that is necessarily bad: Many of the microscopic passengers on our skin are harmless, or even beneficial. “The vast majority of handshakes are completely safe,” says David Whitworth, a microbiologist at Aberystwyth University, in Wales, who’s studied the griminess of human hands. But not all manual microbes are benign. Norovirus, a nasty diarrheal disease infamous for sparking outbreaks on cruise ships, can spread easily via skin; so can certain respiratory viruses such as RSV.The irony of the recent handshake hiatus is that SARS-CoV-2, the microbe that inspired it, isn’t much of a touchable danger. “The risk is just not very high,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Despite early pandemic worries, this particular coronavirus is more likely to use breath as a conduit than contaminated surfaces. That’s not to say that the virus couldn’t hop from hand to hand after, say, an ill-timed sneeze or cough right before a shake. But Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician and hand-hygiene expert at the University of Chicago, thinks it would take a hefty dose of snot or phlegm, followed by some unwashed snacking or nose-picking by the recipient, to really pose a threat. So maybe it’s no shock that as 2020’s frantic sanitizing ebbed, handshakes started creeping back.[Read: The great pandemic hand-washing blooper]Frankly, that doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Even when considering more shake-spreadable pathogens, it’s a lot easier to break hand-based chains of transmission than airborne ones. “As long as you have good hygiene habits and you keep your hands away from your face,” Landon told me, “it doesn’t really matter if you shake other people’s hands.” (Similar rules apply to doorknobs, light switches, subway handrails, phones, and other germy perils.) Then again, that requires actually cleaning your hands, which, as Sklansky will glady point out, most people—even health-care workers—are still pretty terrible about.For now, shakes don’t seem to be back to 2019 levels—at least, not the last time researchers checked, in the summer of 2022. But Gottsman thinks their full resurgence may be only a matter of time. Among her clients in the corporate world, where grips and grasps are currency, handshakes once again abound. No other gesture, she told me, hits the same tactile sweet spot: just enough touch to feel personal connection, but sans the extra intimacy of a kiss or hug. Fist bumps, waves, and elbow touches just don’t measure up. At the pandemic’s worst, when no one was willing to go palm-to-palm, “it felt like something was missing,” Carter told me. The lack of handshakes wasn’t merely a reminder that COVID was here; it signaled that the comforts of routine interaction were not.If handshakes survive the COVID era—as they seem almost certain to do—this won’t be the only disease outbreak they outlive, Al-Shamahi told me. When yellow fever pummeled Philadelphia in the late 18th century, locals began to shrink “back with affright at even the offer of a hand,” as the economist Matthew Carey wrote at the time. Fears of cholera in the 1890s prompted a small cadre of Russians to establish an anti-handshake society, whose members were fined three rubles for every verboten grasp. During the flu pandemic that began in 1918, the town of Prescott, Arizona, went so far as to ban the practice. Each time, the handshake bounced back. Al-Shamahi remembers rolling her eyes a bit in 2020, when she saw outlets forecasting the handshake’s untimely end. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe you guys are writing the obituary,’” she told me. “That is clearly not what is happening here.”Handshakes do seem to have a knack for enduring through the ages. A commonly cited origin story for the handshake points to the ancient Greeks, who may have deployed the behavior as a way to prove that they weren’t concealing a weapon. But Al-Shamahi thinks the roots of handshaking go way further back. Chimpanzees—from whom humans split some 7 million years ago—appear to engage in a similar behavior in the aftermath of fights. Across species, handshakes probably exchange all sorts of sensory information, Al-Shamahi said. They may even leave chemical residues on our palm that we can later subconsciously smell.[Read: What a handshake smells like]Handshakes aren’t a matter of survival: Plenty of communities around the world get by just fine without them, opting instead for, say, the namaste or a hand over the heart. But palm pumping seems to have stuck around in several societies for good reason, outlasting other customs such as curtsies and bows. Handshakes are mutual, usually consensual; they’re imbued with an egalitarian feel. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you see the rise of the handshake amongst all the greetings at a time when democracy was on the rise,” Al-Shamahi told me. The handshake is even, to some extent, built into the foundation of the United States: Thomas Jefferson persuaded many of his contemporaries to adopt the practice, which he felt was more befitting of democracy than the snobbish flourishes of British court.American attitudes toward handshakes still might have undergone lasting, COVID-inspired change. Gottsman is optimistic that people will continue to be more considerate of those who are less eager to shake hands. There are plenty of good reasons for abstaining, she points out: having a vulnerable family member at home, or simply wanting to avoid any extra risk of getting sick. And these days, it doesn’t feel so strange to skip the shake. “I think it’s less a part of our cultural vernacular now,” Landon told me.Sklansky, once again in the minority, is disappointed by the recent turn of events. “I used to say, ‘Wow, it took a pandemic to end the handshake,’” he told me. “Now I realize, even a pandemic has failed to rid us of the handshake.” But he’s not ready to give up. In 2015, he and a team of his colleagues cordoned off part of his hospital as a “handshake-free zone”—an initiative that, he told me, was largely a success among health-care workers and patients alike. The designation faded after a year or two, but Sklansky hopes that something similar could soon return. In the meantime, he’ll settle for declining every proffered palm that comes his way—although, if you go for something else, he’d rather you not choose the fist bump: “Sometimes,” he told me, “they just go too hard.”​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Each year the American Cancer Society publishes cancer statistics for the US. This is a massive set of data capturing the incidence of every type of cancer and deaths from cancer. This is an important window into how medical interventions for preventing, detecting, and treating cancer are doing. There are some important trends in the 2023 report worth highlighting.

The top line observation is that cancer deaths continued to decline:

Despite the pandemic, and in contrast with other leading causes of death, the cancer death rate continued to decline from 2019 to 2020 (by 1.5%), contributing to a 33% overall reduction since 1991 and an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted.

This is all observational data, so we can only infer cause and effect. But epidemiologists have been following and examining this data for decades, so we can make some fairly high-confidence conclusions. Cancer mortality can be reduced in three major ways. The first is by preventing cancer from occurring in the first place, through preventive measure. The second is through improved treatment for cancer when it occurs. The third is by changes in diagnosis of cancer – anything that might cause someone to die from cancer without being recorded as a cancer death. If anything our ability to properly diagnose cancer and cancer screening and surveillance has increased, so this factor would likely artificially increase the measured cancer death numbers. Also, failure to screen properly can increase cancer death by delaying treatment.

Just looking at total cancer deaths captures all of these factors. The big picture is that there has been a steady decline in cancer deaths of a little more than 1% each year for decades, adding up to 33% since 1991. This has mainly been accomplished through improved prevention and treatment. There has been a steady increase in available treatments, with newer technologies constantly coming online. Each one provides and incremental improvement in cancer survival with a steady cumulative effect.

For example, in 1997 the first monoclonal antibody drug to treat cancer was approved (Rituximab). In 2004 the FDA approved the first antiangiogenesis drug, drugs that reduce the growth of blood vessels to feed solid tumors. In 2017 the first car-t cell therapy, that uses the patient’s own immune cells to fight their cancer, was approved. And there are new technologies in the pipeline – such as using CRISPR to engineer tumor cells to kill the tumors themselves and function as a vaccine against cancer recurrence. There have been countless other advances over this time, but these are some of the exciting new technologies that have come into use.

The bottom line is that the steady improvement in cancer survival and reduction in cancer deaths is largely due to advances in science and medical technology. This is necessary because cancer is a difficult enemy. It is also not one disease, but a category containing many diseases. Cancer cells evolve to evade our treatments. This is SBM so I have to emphasize that these improvement are the result of science. Meanwhile, so-called “alternative medicine” approaches that try to avoid, deny, or change the rules of science are associated with increased death from cancer.

Preventive measures also made a huge impact on these numbers. Under this category, the biggest story is the success of the HPV vaccine. From 2012 to 2019 there was a 65% drop in cervical cancer incidence. The incidence had already been dropping due to increased screening and treatment of precancerous lesions, but this is now the first cohort of women who received the vaccine and they show a significant increase in the rate of decline.

HPV causes almost all cases of cervical cancer, and also increases the risk of cancer of the vulva, vagina, penis, anus, and oropharynx. The HPV vaccine is extremely effective at preventing HPV infection.

Other US studies have shown “surprisingly large” herd immunity, the study authors said. Sexually active females age 14 to 24 who were vaccinated showed a 90% reduction in infections with HPV-16 or HPV-18, and even those who had not been vaccinated had a 74% reduction in infections.

This is an opportunity to virtually eliminate cervical cancer, and significantly reduce the others listed above. The only thing that stands in the way is vaccine hesitancy. The authors also report:

In 2020, only 32% of boys and girls ages 13 to 17 in Mississippi were up to date with HPV vaccination and only 43% in West Virginia. States with high proportions of vaccinated teens include Massachusetts (73%), Hawaii (74%), and Rhode Island (83%). In the coming years, these differences will become apparent in incidence rates for cervical and other HPV-associated cancers.

We have the technology to eliminate a type of cancer with a safe and effective preventive measure. We now have data that the HPV vaccine not only works to prevent HPV infection but also cervical cancer. We need sustained efforts to make the public aware of these facts so as not to lose out on the potential benefits of this technology.

The other interesting result of this latest cancer data is that the story of screening for prostate cancer continues. The issue is using prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels in the blood to screen for early prostate cancer. This screening works, but does tend to have a lot of false positives, which can lead to unnecessary biopsy and surgery. For that reason in 2008 the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) changed their recommendation, to not use PSA for routine screening in men 75 and older, and then later for all men.

This change resulted in a decrease in prostate cancer diagnoses – but this was not a real decrease, just an artifact of decreased screening. Now we are seeing the downside to this decision – for the first time in 20 years, death from prostate cancer has increased in the US. Further, the proportion of prostate cancer that is diagnosed in a later stage when the cancer is harder to treat has doubled in the last 10 years.

This is all a balancing act between optimal screening of at risk populations while minimizing false positives and the negative effects that come from it. The same debate was had with regard to mammograms and breast cancer. More screening is not always better.

The recommendations on using PSA to screen for prostate cancer have therefore again shifted. Now the recommendation is for men 50 and older to have a conversation with their primary doctor about the risks and benefits of PSA screening, and to make an informed individual decision. The problem can also be mitigated by newer technology, using markers and imaging to stage prostate cancer. The PSA story is a good example of how cancer statistics are used to tweak medical practice and recommendations.

There is more in the full report, but these were the highlights. Overall the report is good news. Cancer treatment, starting with prevention, continues to improve. The reports estimates that 3.8 million cancer deaths have been averted since 1991. Cancer is still a scary diagnosis, but it is decidedly less scary than it was 30 years ago.

Suppose the US's current intention of re-industrializing her country is genuine, and she eventually succeeds much more than expected in doing so one day in the future, what will happen to the global economy then ?

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(i) The current US trade configuration of "deficit current account + surplus capital account" under Pax Americana will turn into one of "surplus current account + deficit capital account," which will resemble 19th-century Britain's trade configuration under Pax Britannica.

Many still-developing EM countries will then have a much harder time than before to keep practicing exports-led economic growth to try to escape forever the deep poverty trap, because the economic world will no longer have a global consumer of last resort as big and reliable as the US in the good old days, and the current dominant global international-trade solar system, with the US acting as the sun and most other countries as the big and small planets constantly being attracted by and circulating around her, will eventually disintegrate into thin air.

Even worse, the stronger the US's coming net-exporting capability, the more serious the rest of the world will be economically suppressed, resembling Britain's persistent suppression of the fast economic growth of her own trading colonies in the 19th century.

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(ii) Less and less US dollars will then be pumped out of the US to the rest of the world each year through the US's good-old trade-deficit channel, which also necessarily means less and less US-dollar-denominated FX reserves being held by the other countries, and less and less recycling-US-dollars coming back to the US domestic economy itself to help "finance" the US government's perennial annual deficit-spending.

The US Fed can keep monetizing the US Treasury's deficit-spending in the future years, in a MMT-like manner, only when domestic inflation in the US is not acute, which is by no means guaranteed every year in the future.

As a result, the Eurodollar (offshore US-dollar) market will start to dwindle year-in and year-out, and so will the global influence of the US government treasuries, which will be acting less and less as the most pristine collateral in that market.

Bretton Woods II will then have to co-exist more and more with Bretton Woods III ------ the former may even be completely replaced by the latter one day in the far future.

"My currency, your problems" will have to compete more and more with "our energies, commodities, and food, your problems," and the overall global terms of trade will tilt more and more against the DM countries and in favor of the resource-rich-and-net-exporting EM countries.

Which means, the US in the future will have to start losing more and more foreign friends, and will no longer be able to influence foreign people as easily as before, resembling the current observation that, as a result of the US's energy self-sufficiency in recent years, today's US seems to be losing more and more good old Arabian friends in the Middle East.

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With a sun-set-like US Dollar global hegemony in the future, the more-and-more self-sufficient US may remain the richest country in the world, but her global economic, military, and geopolitical influence in the future will no longer be as big and dominant as they are today.

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They say the first step in fixing a crisis is to recognise there is a problem. So let us give thanks for a Labour leader’s dismissal of the belief that Britain’s health service is the envy of the world — a deluded concept that, in the words of Sir Keir Starmer, is “plainly wrong”. Yes, he was adopting Blairite tactics to confound expectations with a bit of political cross-dressing, while also obviously aware of polls showing the drastic collapse of faith among voters in their once-worshiped NHS. His reform plans are rudimentary, his funding suggestions sketchy and his proposal to nationalise general practitioners seems ill-conceived. Yet this is still an important moment.
Britain has clung for so long to this weird comfort blanket, the risible idea that the rest of the world was looking with longing at a health system that has been in crisis for much of its 75-year history. For more than two decades I have argued that such blinkered worship of the NHS and deification of its staff was highly corrosive, since it frustrated reform, intimidated politicians and silenced criticism. The result has been a series of grotesque patient safety scandals — usually with agonising or fatal consequences affecting the most marginalised groups in society — and dire outcomes in many key areas, from cancer to infant mortality, compared with other rich nations.
Now the crisis has exploded, costing thousands more lives amid delays, strikes and staff shortages. Yet why is anyone surprised given the grim lack of reality that has swirled around the NHS for so long? I was a lonely voice pointing out the absurdity of Danny Boyle’s 20-minute homage to a flawed public service in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony with its dancing doctors and bouncing babies. Such misty-eyed myopia, especially prevalent on the Left, led to great excitement among devotees two years later when a US body ranked the NHS first among 11 health systems largely on grounds of access and efficiency. Yet even The Guardian report — headlined NHS comes top in healthcare survey — admitted that “the only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive”.
This failure to prevent needless deaths felt to me like a rather fundamental failing for a health service. It was confirmed by a damning inquiry by four respected think tanks to mark the NHS’s 70th birthday which found Britain had among the worst “amenable mortality” levels — when people die from potentially preventable conditions — among 18 similar nations. They pointed out how 117 out of every 100,000 Britons died avoidably in one year under study, compared with just 78 in best-performing France. This pivotal report also found Britain spending almost the average on health for rich nations. Since then, NHS England alone has seen its funding rise another £38bn.
My personal puncturing of the NHS mythology came with the birth of a daughter discovered to have profound disabilities and health concerns. This sent my family hurtling into the hell of its underbelly, glimpsing the arrogance, inertia, insensitivity and waste lurking beneath the sanctified image. I have never forgotten our first visit to Great Ormond Street and hearing a receptionist cheerily say “Didn’t anyone tell you — your appointment’s been cancelled?” to a desperately-worried young couple who had travelled down from the north-east with their tiny sick baby. Then came years of battling bureaucracy — answering the same questions over and over again — while witnessing blunders, fighting lethargy and dealing with medical egos.
As the parent of another disabled child told me after watching that risible Olympic spectacle, how sickening to endlessly hear mantras of praise for the NHS from people whose lives were not engulfed in a daily struggle against its inertia and ineptitude to protect the life of someone precious. Today, we do everything possible to keep my daughter out of hospital. Yet she has survived almost into her thirties despite a life-threatening condition thanks to my wife’s strength, the wonders of medicine and the support of many superb carers, doctors, nurses and therapists. We have seen both the best and the worst of our system over the years.
Suggested reading The real NHS maternity scandalBy Dr Emma Jones 
The NHS problems have been glaringly obvious for years. It is an institution created after the Second World War and designed for a different era, focused on the fight against infant mortality, infectious disease and industrial injuries. It was built around big hospitals, dominant male consultants and demands of doctors; remember Nye Bevan’s infamous pledge to “stuff their mouths with gold” to overcome opposition to his socialised system. But many of the original battles are won, our population has aged, medicine advanced and society changed. The core concerns now are those linked to ageing or disability, often involving chronic conditions with co-morbidities, alongside an explosion of obesity and mental health problems being seen from an alarmingly early age.
These are the old, complex and chronically-sick patients soaking up more than two-thirds of health spending, not the higher-profile emergencies that the NHS usually handles so adroitly if people can find an ambulance. People such as my daughter — or my father, who died, aged 97, after his long decline with dementia. This has been recognised for years. There have been repeated demands for a shift from hospitals towards expanded community services that combine primary and secondary care services. Now Labour is reheating Lord Darzi’s proposal for London polyclinics and applying a version of it nationwide to unite GPs, diagnostics, therapists, community nursing and mental health teams under one roof — but he first raised this idea 15 years ago.
The harsh truth is that far from being the envy of the world, no one setting up a health system would adopt our current system. I know eastern European carers so horrified by the NHS that they fly home if needing to see a doctor or dentist. As a journalist investigating care, patient safety and mental health provision, I have written about too many disturbing, routine and fatal failings in the NHS heart. One government study sparked by Sara Ryan, a mother who became a campaigner after her teenage son died in terrible circumstances, found citizens with learning disabilities likely to die 26 years earlier than their peers — with medical errors involved in one in eight of the fatalities examined.
My exposés of the barbaric treatment of autistic people and citizens with learning disabilities, let down by a dysfunctional care system and stuffed into abusive detention in hideous psychiatric units for many years, led to five inquiries, endless promises of action, personal awards — but nothing changed. Other victims of NHS failures tend to be elderly people, as revealed most notoriously with the inquiry into hundreds of deaths in disgraceful conditions in two mid-Staffordshire hospitals, and female patients. “Our healthcare system disproportionately fails to listen to women and keep them safe”, admitted the Government last year years in response to three more horrific treatment scandals.
Now we face the question of how to salvage a health service that seems to have reached breaking point on so many fronts. Sadly, much of this debate remains glib, self-serving or stuck in the past. It is dominated by doctors, with constant calls for more cash and complaints about their pressures while they pose as protectors of the NHS. Yet we should not forget that when Tony Blair drove up health spending, much of the money was grabbed by GPs. A British Medical Association negotiator later said their salaries soared 60% in three years as he boasted how the Government let them drop out-of-hours cover in return for a small pay cut they considered “a bit of a laugh”. Few patients laugh today when struggling to access local practices. NHS data, however, shows the number of doctors has risen almost one-third over the past 12 years of supposed Tory “austerity”.
More from this author Inside Britain's psychiatric nightmareBy Ian Birrell 
Cash is, of course, a significant factor in health care. Yet when I first began looking into these issues at the turn of this century, I was struck to see spending levels one-fifth higher per capita in Scotland than in England and close to the European average. There were, proportionately, almost one-third more consultants, nurses, general practitioners and acute beds than south of the border. But it also had longer waiting-lists, lengthening waiting times and death rates for big killers such as heart disease, cancer and strokes among the worst in developed nations — which even a Scottish Labour minister admitted to me was not all down to drink and poor diet.
Our leaders have failed spectacularly to rise to this critical national challenge. Politicians pander to medical unions on pay, to food industry lobbyists on obesity measures, and to local voters over threatened hospital closures. They call for “reform” or “modernisation”, yet offer ideas dismally small in scale — as symbolised by Rishi Sunak’s suggestion during the Tory leadership campaign of a £10 fine for missing a GP appointment to help cure the NHS. There are broadsides against managers, who comprise an unusually small slice of a health workforce in the NHS and are essential to its smooth running; indeed, hiring a few more might relieve frontline medics of some of the bureaucracy that soaks up too much of their time, especially if they have clinical experience. Now some commentators call for a switch to a social insurance model, but inevitably fail to explain how such a huge, disruptive reform might be achieved without bureaucratic and patient chaos.
Then there is the bogeyman of “privatisation”, a thorny issue that underscores the pitiful nature of debate. Private contractors, from GPs through to caterers, cleaners and technicians, exist across the NHS. In the year before Covid, they carried out half a million elective surgeries with highest patient approval ratings. One eye surgeon told me he could perform three times more cataract operations in his private work, freed from NHS bureaucracy and the need to chat so much with patients. At the same time, some repulsive profiteers have filled the gaping holes in psychiatric services, leading to sickening abuse, needless deaths and routinely-wasted resources. They expose complacent commissioning and gross regulatory failures.
There can be good and bad in any organisation, whether public or private, and we need to harness the best of both while protecting patients far better. I was struck when visiting Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon — briefly handed to a private firm before this unusually bold experiment was killed by political foes — to witness intriguing insights into innovation, procurement and staff empowerment. This 304-bed district hospital cut out £11m in costs over two years, which included a £3m saving by abandoning the NHS bulk purchasing system for supplies while also handing more financial responsibility to frontline staff. “You have to shake the system by challenging it,” said the doctor running the hospital, a former opponent of privatisation. “And you can only challenge it if you let fresh ideas come in.”
Suggested reading The slow death of the NHSBy Timandra Harkness 
The painful reality is a need to build on existing foundations. Yet we cannot keep pouring in an ever-greater share of state resources to a floundering institution. The Nuffield Trust pointed out last year that the department of health and social care’s budget has doubled as a share of GDP since Margaret Thatcher took office. By the end of this parliament, it will consume four in ten pounds of the Government’s daily spending. Partly this is down to substantial population growth and amazing medical advances. But the key issue is age. The proportion of our population over 85 has doubled in three decades while the share of citizenry in their early twenties shrunk more than one fifth. These older folks use ten times more hospital resources. Now throw in all those other issues such as the post-Covid rise in long-term sick, a near-doubling in obesity over three decades and how the fastest-rising demand for social care is coming from working age adults, often with chronic and complex conditions.
Such problems, faced also by almost all other wealthy nations, are immense. But they need to be tackled since they affect the economy and millions of families. I have suggested that our new monarch has his first royal commission to grapple with the issues. But my enthusiasm waned after seeing this week’s launch of The Times health commission — an interesting and laudable idea undermined by its familiar line-up of doctors, academics, businessmen, professors and policy wonks. No patient commissioners, let alone any of the campaigners who exposed safety scandals after suffering horrors. No one from the care sector. It even includes Dame Clare Gerada, president of the Royal College of GPs, who advises a lamentable private firm behind some of those abusive detentions, regulatory failures and fatalities but refuses to discuss her role or remuneration.
There is no simple panacea. But sticking plaster politics can no longer cover the festering wounds. So I would offer three key suggestions for discussion.
First, and most important, we must stop treating social care as a second-class public service. This intensifies pressures across the NHS, yet the problems are largely ignored except through the prism of elderly bed blockers and middle-class home owners forced to sell properties to fund elderly care. When Covid struck, real-term spending on social care was £300m lower than a decade earlier despite all those billions pumped into the hallowed NHS. Local authorities were among the biggest real victims of austerity. No wonder there are catastrophic and rising staff shortages — inflamed by Brexit, as I have seen with my family — because of the appalling low pay of carers, despite their vital role in society. Yet still some fat cat firms and private equity vultures are allowed to cream off millions into tax havens.
But it is not just about pay. It is, of course, shameful that people earn more stacking shelves in a supermarket than assisting other citizens to lead their most fulfilling lives. This must be rectified. Yet I know of care jobs going unfilled for months despite paying more than twice usual rates. The pandemic exposed society’s attitudes towards elderly and disabled people when thousands of old folks were discarded from hospitals to “protect the NHS”, then blanket “Do Not Resuscitate” orders were imposed without consultation. Britain lacks compassion for its most vulnerable citizens. The Government has finally started to funnel in a bit more cash, but this societal attitude has left the care system disintegrating and hard-working staff with shockingly low status.
Corrosion of the care system not only traps elderly patients in hospital, but it leaves many desperate people with unmet needs as 14,000 requests for help are rejected daily. So conditions deteriorate, stresses shatter families and ultimately spending ends up far higher. Consider this simple equation: a teenager with undetected or unsupported autism who ends up in a secure psychiatric unit can cost the NHS £13,000 a week and the average length of incarceration is more than five years. It would be so much cheaper and more humane to fund a functioning care system.
This links to another fundamental issue. The need to build community services adopting a more holistic approach is most pressing in mental health, where state failures, short-sighted cuts and consequent shrivelling of provision mean concerns — especially at the most serious end of the spectrum — often go untreated until they explode. Even children can wait up to three years to access services, which only fuels their anxieties and can have life-long consequences. We have ended up with a hollowed-out system that starts with overloaded GPs doling out too many drugs — and can end with people needlessly locked up in those hideously-expensive secure units that are horribly over-reliant on pharmaceutical and physical restraint.
Then, thirdly, there is the delicate issue of end-of-life care. I am opposed to euthanasia, not on moral or religious grounds but — having investigated its usage in Belgium — from fears over protection of vulnerable people and the inevitability that laws gradually become more permissive. After all, if permitted for physical pain, why not for mental suffering? I would far rather see hefty investment in our fantastic palliative care and hospices. But this is a valid debate on both ethical and financial grounds. It has been suggested in the US that one-quarter of health spending goes on people in their last year of life, although others argue the figure is lower. Certainly huge sums go to sustain patients in their fading twilight for a few more months.
The US doctor Atul Gawande has written movingly about the medicalisation of mortality and lack of dignity in death. Now this issue has been stirred up by the oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel, an adviser to two presidents, disclosing that he will reject all medical treatments from the age of 75. “Death is a loss,” he wrote. “But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss.” He argues that extending life through a barrage of treatments leaves many people in a deprived and often-lonely state as they decline, so his solution is to let nature take its course. This is a radical proposal. Yet some doctors privately say they would refuse many treatments they recommend for patients nearing the end of their time. Maybe we need to talk more about the best way to die as well as saving lives.
There are many other ways to improve the NHS. Technology is one obvious way to reduce the workload for medics and avoid mistakes. Although GPs have largely switched to effective digital records, many hospitals remain in the dark ages. Blair blew £12bn on a bungled attempt to integrate systems. When Jeremy Hunt became health secretary in 2012, the NHS was the world’s biggest buyer of fax machines so he pledged to make it paperless by 2018. Then his successor Matt Hancock failed in his own pledge to ban them by 2020. Some hospitals have several IT systems; such is the confusion, they rely on paper. It is claimed junior doctors can spend almost half their time on tasks that could be largely automated.
Last year, I reported on Estonia’s impressive embrace of digital government. This includes a fully-digitalised health service — ironically, based on Blair’s abandoned system. Any medic can instantly access a patient’s history anywhere, drugs get automatically cross-checked for safety — yet patients control their records. If they want to seek a second opinion, they can block a look at their initial diagnosis. And they can track treatment and spending in a system similar to the NHS, which helps reduce padding of bills and reminds them that every call, consultation or test has a cost. Peeter Ross, a radiologist and e-health expert, admitted there was resistance at first. “Doctors are trained to think they’re the experts who make decisions but this is patient data,” he said. “We must be equal partners. This works better for us all.”
This underlines the need for cultural change, increasingly recognised by many doctors, especially from younger generations — and this includes the urgent need to drive out a toxic culture of cover-up. The NHS should cherish, rather than crush, whistle-blowers raising concerns. Any system reliant on human beings will make mistakes, especially when under pressure. But it needs to learn the lessons to avoid subsequent grief and pain. This is recognised by the airline industry. But the NHS reaction is all too often to silence complainants, sweep concerns under the carpet and summon lawyers from fear of litigation. This can result in long, drawn out and distressing legal battles. The only beneficiaries are lawyers, who pocketed about one quarter of the £2.5bn spent by the NHS last year settling claims.
There are many other incremental ideas to help revive the NHS. But let us celebrate this moment as Labour finally accepts that the NHS is a flawed institution rather than a shining light of British exceptionalism. Reality is dawning in Westminster in response to the growing public and professional anxiety. We need to have honest discussions about how our country funds and runs our health and care systems — and who it serves. Some solutions are obvious, such as more effective use of technology and transparency. Others stray into the difficult terrain of payments, profits and even the meaning of life and death. One thing is clear, though: salvation for the NHS must revolve around patients, not just professionals.
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This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your grandchildren?”Matt expects a species-defining shift:
Evolutionary leaps in our development have been marked by the development of tools, farming, domesticated animals, and sadly and tragically, industrial farming and food processing. Lab-grown meat is the next evolution of our meat consumption as a species.  
I.S. is excited.“Heck yes, I’ll eat it!” she wrote. “If it tastes like the real deal and is safe, absolutely! I stopped eating factory-farmed meat two years ago, and I miss it so much! Especially bacon. Oh boy, do I miss bacon!”   Meredith believes the technology will be widely embraced:
I stopped eating meat after being profoundly moved by an article in The Atlantic about nonhuman species having consciousness (“A Journey Into the Animal Mind,” by Ross Andersen). Meat grown in a lab is, so far as I can tell, ethical and humane. It can be produced in a more sanitary environment and saves animals and meat-production workers from the horror of meat slaughter. That is likely to encourage skeptics to try it. Given the choice between cruelty and kindness, I believe most humans will choose kindness.
Ruth reminds us that some vegetarians won’t want to consume lab-grown meat:
Lab-grown meat is a wonderful idea if it can prevent billions of animals being brought into existence merely to be tortured and die. I would not eat it. I am a vegetarian and I do not like the taste and texture of flesh or of substances that try to imitate flesh. I’m sorry to find that many restaurants have replaced their veggie and bean burgers with the Beyond Burger that I find repulsive. However, all of these substitutes are great for people who like the taste and texture of flesh. I applaud it and hope it succeeds worldwide.
Victoria expects her own attitude to change:
Would I eat lab-grown meat?
Right now, I might, in the way I’ve eaten escargot: skeptically. I suspect there is something lost in the bland sameness of a petri dish, and nothing can capture the nuances of diet and environment that impact an animal’s growth. But I also expect it will become commonplace and I’ll eat it without a second thought, because anyone with the slightest conscience can see that flooding animals with hormones to get them to grow unnaturally large—while keeping them in tiny cages and filthy, crowded conditions—is cruel.
John is a skeptic:
My spidey senses are telling me this is much ado about nothing. I doubt that the human population of Earth can be supported by lab-grown meat. If it tastes like chicken and costs a similar price, yes, I would eat it. But generally, I think putting our food in the hands of engineers, chemists, and industrialists is a bad, if unavoidable, plan. I’ve always been jealous of my friend who feeds his family with wild harvested game. Just last night, I made dinner from fish I caught. I’d have to spend a lot more time outdoors to pull that off in my household, but I could do it. And animals would live their lives free and wild, not confined to cages barely bigger than their oversize, genetically engineered bodies. Factory farms are a moral catastrophe, but feeding this many people practically requires [them].
Lavina opposes lab-grown meat:
The promise of lab-grown meat rings hollow. It will lead to new problems. It ignores the concept that food is life and replaces the normal processing of food with fake, lab-created food.
Our food is not a commodity; it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Fake meat ignores the diversity and cultural aspects of food. Its use of genetically modified ingredients to give it that “fake meat taste” will lead to disease and alter the gut biome. Why would we continue in this direction when diseases and poor health are at an all-time high? Instead of finding ways to improve our biodiversity and ecosystems by using regenerative farming techniques to improve climate change, the goal is to force people to consume fake meat and fake food products under the guise of [fighting] climate change regardless of local cultures, climates, and ecosystems. It is about control and profits. These fake foods are being promoted by billionaires who have no knowledge or consciousness of how food satisfies the soul and connects people.
I heard from several readers who believed that lab-grown meat was something billionaires wanted to foist on everyone else––and from many non-billionaire readers who are enthusiastic about lab-grown meat to spare animals or in hopes that it would be better for the planet.J. doubts that nature can be improved upon:
Chickens are precisely optimized by evolution to make more chickens efficiently. Every part needed to make another chicken from cheap feed is right there. Growing chicken-muscle cells in an expensive, controlled artificial environment is destined to be inefficient by comparison. Using lab-grown meat won’t free up cropland used for animal feed; we will be increasing demand for the same foods, only now they will be fed to cells in the lab. It’s like charging an electric vehicle with a coal power plant, then claiming it’s a zero-emissions car. Anything can look green if you close your eyes tightly enough.
Zachary wants to hasten the arrival of lab-grown meat:
We need a Project Manhattan–level commitment toward getting the clean-meat industry past its growing pains and up to scale as soon as possible. This would solve a massive contributor to climate change. Most people will never become vegans. The world’s middle class is swelling, and with it, a demand to eat meat that the market will try to meet one way or another. A Project Meathattan is also politically palatable as it would demand no personal sacrifice from people. It’s a win-win for virtually everyone but the industrial livestock industry. I think once clean meat is at a competitive price point and taste, our culture’s attitude will flip like a switch overnight and it will become regarded as significantly more unethical to eat slaughtered meat. We will ask ourselves why we didn’t try to get this technology up to scale even sooner once we see it was possible.
Mark doesn’t want lab-grown meat forced on him:
People already eat highly processed food. This is usually not healthy. Artificial meat is another processed food. If people want to eat artificial meat, let them eat it. Just don’t create legislation that forces me to eat what you’ve decided is best for you. It’s not all-or-nothing. Not everyone has to eat the same thing. I’m going to keep eating what I have evolved to eat over the last million years. I’m going to continue to eat fresh vegetables, meat from chickens, cows, etc., and grains preferably grown in the United States.
MC anticipates a class divide:
Lab-grown meat is a trend most of us will participate in, perhaps unknowingly. Similarly to the GMO debate, I imagine a scenario where we’ll see restaurants priding themselves on being “lab-free.” The scalability of the industry seems likely to move lab-grown meat into fast food. Again, we will have another class demarcation. McDonald’s and Taco Bell will be able to fatten margins (as long as it scales) by replacing farm-grown meat with lab meat. Those on the lower echelons of society will be the mass market for “new meat.” Until it gets out of the Uncanny Valley, lab-grown meat will be a fad. But eventually it’ll be common. I don’t imagine future generations will care whether their Big Mac is real or not. Just if it tastes right. Ultimately, I don’t think anyone likes to see the sausage being made. Our industrial food complex feeds the world, and fewer people suffer due to technology. We have to improve, or the future will starve.
Mina can’t imagine killing animals if there is a real-meat alternative:
This is one of the most exciting discoveries man has made. I have always been a person who hates the idea of sentient creatures being slaughtered to please our tastes. Hypocritically, I have continued to eat meat after multiple attempts to stop. The substitutes at that time bore no resemblance to the real thing, by taste or texture. I couldn’t stand them.
I’m not sure if people can grasp what a game changer this would be for our planet. Between the environmental blessings of no more livestock destroying lands, water, and air with their living by-products, we can have a more respectful and peaceful approach to living creatures (which studies have shown leads to more positive feelings for others, both human and animals). No matter how hardened they might be to meat production, the workers in slaughterhouses and meat-packing facilities have high rates of family dysfunction and substance abuse, and also live mostly poverty-stricken lives. Imagine the toll this would take on you, to kill these animals one after another while they scream and fight to get away … I’ve seen it up close, and it is a sight you never get over.
I can’t wait for the day when I can finally access this new meat and live without guilt. Would I ever eat meat from living creatures again? Absolutely not. What would be the reasoning, when you have the same product on your plate without taking lives in the process?
Carolyn believes that “cultivated meat is critical to our global fight against climate change.” She writes:
I was raised vegetarian, so I’ve never knowingly eaten meat or understood the desire for it, but I’ve grown to understand that meat is deeply visceral, emotional, and cultural for billions of people. Despite telling folks how bad meat is for the planet, for animal welfare, for slaughterhouse workers, and for their health, global meat consumption is at an all-time high. Instead of focusing on changing people’s ingrained behaviors and habits, we should focus on changing meat itself. While I’m content eating tofu and chickpeas, for most people, nothing can beat the taste of meat except for, well, meat. And that’s what cultivated meat is.
I ate cultivated chicken from GOOD Meat (which currently sells it in Singapore) at COP27 in Egypt late last year. While l can’t tell you that it “tasted like chicken” (because I have no idea what chicken tastes like), it was fleshy and kind of grossed me out—so I’m thinking we’re on the right track? Plus, the meat eaters at my table fully approved. I think we are a ways off from cultivated meat going mainstream, but I am hopeful that what I tasted that day is part of the future and that the next generation looks back at the way we raised and slaughtered animals and thinks, Why did they do it that way?
Patrick runs a commercial cattle ranch with his family on the central coast of California. He writes:
Commercial cattle ranches focus on cattle headed for consumption. I grew up on the ranch then moved away for about 15 years to work in engineering. About six years ago I moved back to the area with my family to get more involved in the ranch. Since I’ve come back, I’ve been surprised to discover that the Meat Utopia is here. The United States is producing more beef than ever, with fewer cattle, and at a higher quality. I see these changes both in the national numbers and also in the way we do business on our own ranch.
The reasons are myriad. Genetic testing and performance monitoring has helped producers select for better-performing animals. Improvements in vaccination have reduced waste, illness, and death. A greater percentage of cattle have higher-quality carcasses. And North American cattle markets are optimizing international trade to match the desired cuts to the appropriate markets. These advancements have real-world implications to reduce the environmental impact of beef while improving the consumer product and keeping costs down. And by acreage, nearly all of the grazing is done on so-called marginal lands: land that is too arid or too steep to support farming.
Erin is in the same business:
My husband and I are cattle producers on a farm in rural west Alabama. Pretty obviously, I do not have moral qualms about eating meat. I’m an omnivore. I am biologically designed to convert meat into the vitamins, minerals, and proteins that sustain me. And I like it. Even so, I can envision a day when vat-grown meat is a primary source of protein. It will have to be ramped up to scale and it will have to get a lot cheaper, but it will be a significant source of protein for a growing world population. That doesn’t mean there will not be a niche market for the uber-wealthy to purchase beef.
For the record, there are a lot of misconceptions about animal agriculture. Cows spend all but the last six weeks of their lives eating grass. They may get mineral supplements as well, especially in winter, but very little grain, if any. Cattle can convert grass to protein. Humans cannot. We cannot digest cellulose. Perhaps in the rain forests of Brazil, the pastures could, and should, be restored to forest. But you are not going to grow a forest just anywhere. There will not be forests in west Texas or even in Kansas.
There is a lot of land in the world not suited for crops or forests that will grow grass. And one of the most efficient converters of grass into usable protein is a cow. Cows provide more than meat. There are hundreds of products produced from cattle: marshmallows, leather, gelatin, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, and more. Just Google “products made from cattle” and you will be astounded. Vat-grown meat? It’s coming, but not in my lifetime. We’ll keep on growing cattle like we have for 40 years. And that is all I have time to say, because I need to move hay out of the barn for the cows before the rain comes.
Kathleen hopes lab-grown pork is delicious:
The only meat I will consume comes from local hunters, whose practices I know—quick, clean kill, full harvest and usage. The animal has had a full and healthy and natural life. And as my dear husband told me years ago, “Honey, nothing in nature dies of old age.” I would buy lab-grown meat in a heartbeat, as soon as it became available and was proven to be environmentally healthy and healthy for human consumption.
My primary motivation for [this] is animal cruelty. Breeding, raising, transporting, and slaughtering “food” animals is monstrous. In Canada, there are the farm lobbies, fishing-and-hunting lobbies, and vendor lobbies—all with massive clout—opposing any significant change. Seeing covert videos taken within animal “businesses” did it for me. And there’s the hideous environmental damage and the damage to human health caused by this “industry.” Altogether, inexcusable. I’m already buying and consuming “artificial” meat but would greatly welcome more variety. (I REALLY miss pork, and there are no pork substitutes available where I live … yet, I hope.)
Claire feels queasy about lab-grown meat:
I tend to be wary of chemically simulated foodstuffs …… so “chicken” fashioned from a sort of ooze during a process that the company prefers not to describe and that was also described as “gray” and “stringy” sounds atrocious. I’m unsure I would be brave enough to try that, nor would I serve it to an enemy. I hope restauranteurs in Singapore at least place an asterisk next to chicken on menus, with a corresponding footnote. Marketing euphemisms seem more likely: “ethically derived chicken,” etc. In spite of the “Utopia” marketing angle, I wonder if the cost to simulate chicken would be a net positive or if it would better serve Singapore to allocate some land for agricultural purposes.
Skya thinks artificial meat has promise for feeding pets:
Personally, I am a vegan and will remain so for health reasons. My cats, on the other hand … While humans are dragging their feet for various reasons, all the domesticated animals of the world could be eating laboratory meat right now, making a large dent in the damage that our passion for pets and other captive carnivores causes to the planet.
Karl gives two cheers for lab-grown meat … but not three:
I’ve been a vegan for ethical reasons since the end of college, so I welcome any developments that help usher in a future where we slaughter fewer animals just because their taste makes us happy. Based on animal-welfare laws (which largely protect animals such as cats and dogs), it’s clear that, collectively, we believe that animals should be treated humanely and their suffering should be minimized. However, we generally don’t extend these protections to the billions of farm animals living today. So reducing their consumption reduces their numbers and thus reduces their collective suffering. I think the reduction of suffering should be an easy position to support.
The environmental benefits have the potential to be incredible as well. A transition away from the inefficient practice of raising animals for food would lower our carbon footprint, reduce our water consumption, and save millions of acres of natural land from destruction. But I wouldn’t suddenly change my diet to match the 200-plus lbs of meat the average American consumes each year, regardless of the ethics. In the developed world, our level of meat consumption is unhealthy and is an immense contributor to disease burden. This is in terms of mortality, morbidity, health-related quality of life, and cost. Maybe we could all eat occasional lab-grown meat. It does taste good. But I don’t think it should be a regular thing. We should all cut back on our meat consumption.

Attitudes towards climate change are shifting, but they are still stuck in some old ruts, and not moving fast enough.On the right, climate skepticism is disappearing amid rising temperatures, out-of-control wildfires, and melting glaciers. Donald Trump said that climate change was a hoax, and pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement. This attitude is still prevalent in MAGA world, where concern about global warming is seen as a manifestation of intolerable wokeness. But, as you may have noticed, Trump and his wing of the Republican Party are in decline and (hopefully) unlikely to set the agenda for the future.The shift in attitudes on the moderate right was exemplified by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who, after being taken on a tour of Greenland, admitted that warming was a colossal reality. The subhead of the piece was, however, that markets rather than governments should be the main way we deal with the problem.___STEADY_PAYWALL___This strikes me as a fallback position by which he can defend his conservative credentials while conceding the underlying reality, a bit like the Germans slowly retreating from Stalingrad during World War II. Other conservative friends of mine will admit carbon emissions are a problem, but they will immediately jump to promoting nuclear power, or point to intermittency and storage problems, or complain about the gaming of subsidies, or simply change the subject because it’s not anywhere near the top of their priorities.Many conservatives are surprised to learn that alternative energy already comprises more than 20 percent of total electricity supply in the United States, and is rapidly rising. Yes, this process was aided by government subsidies, but the real driver of this trend has indeed been market forces. Wind and solar power have been walking down a cost curve very rapidly, and are now highly competitive with fossil fuels as new marginal sources of electricity. As I mentioned in my last post, Texas and Oklahoma—both centers of the American oil industry—host gigantic wind farms built with private money.So conservative attitudes are changing, but they are not changing fast enough.The progressive narrative on climate change is also stuck in some old ruts. The vast majority of writing on climate change remains what I would label mobilizational: it is meant to scare people about the reality of climate change and what it will mean for them and their children. Some of this literature was highly apocalyptic, predicting the end of the human species later in the century as climate warmed some 4-5 degrees Celsius. As David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times has written, this narrative has been undercut by actual improvements in renewables and energy efficiency. Many experts now expect that warming can be held to a range of 2-3 degrees with proper policies in place. This will still produce catastrophic results, but it will not be a species-ending outcome.The bigger failure on the progressive side is its failure to think realistically about solutions and how to implement them. The biggest obstacles to climate mitigation are only partly technological, but much more about incentives and the political economy of policy implementation. And yet, the vast bulk of talk about climate governance issues centers around international agreements like the COP (Conference of the Parties) process that held its last COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, last year.The initial focus on international agreements was understandable. Mitigating carbon emissions is a wicked problem because it imposes high upfront costs to the nation implementing change and delivers dispersed and delayed benefits that accrue to everyone else. There is a huge free rider problem here, and failure to act on a national level can always be blamed on some other country’s inaction. International agreements were meant to reliably commit parties to mutual implementation. There were also issues of “climate justice,” where rich countries were asked to fund the mitigation and adaptation costs faced by poor ones.At this point, it is safe to say that the COP process has failed. It may have had some positive effect in raising consciousness about the reality of climate change, but the pledges made at the COP meetings have been regularly violated. The most recent round of pledges on carbon neutrality are projected 20, 30, 40 years into the future, when no living politician can be held accountable. Nor has there been any substantial transfer of wealth between rich and poor on account of climate.The real obstacles to mitigation lie at a national level, where governments have to trade off short-term costs against long-term interests like jobs and economic growth. There are two separate problems here: first, how do you convince voters (or governments, in authoritarian countries) to prioritize emissions reductions over other social goods, and second, how do you actually implement a decision once taken?With regard to the first issue, some learning has taken place. There seems to be general recognition that punitive policies to reduce emissions don’t generally work.  This is why cap-and-trade was implemented in Europe and in US states like California in preference to the economists’ favorite carbon tax solution. Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the first major piece of climate legislation passed in the United States, follows this logic by providing only positive incentives for doing the right thing rather than new taxes or penalties for wrong behavior. This makes both economic and moral sense: emissions reductions provide a public good while imposing private costs; those costs ought to be compensated by the public sector.This is why Bret Stephens' fallback position of relying primarily on market forces won’t work in the end. As noted earlier, market forces are playing a huge role today in the energy transition. It is private companies that are innovating and building new infrastructure at scale. But they need to be helped along by governments that understand the public goods nature of the transition, governments that are willing to subsidize R&D and help companies and individuals to move more quickly down the cost curve.In a subsequent piece, I’ll talk about the second issue, which is implementation of policies once they have been decided on.

The prime mover of technological and social progress – just as for biological evolution – is variation. Different cultures, rubbing up against each other, trading with each other, invading each other; different political orders, wrestling for mastery and searching for some source of economic or military advantage; different companies, competing for consumer dollars and striving to cut costs.
Variation in investment projects through decentralization of investment decision-making is the essential ingredient of capitalist innovation. As Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr. explain in their classic account How the West Grew Rich, what might constitute a useful innovation is shrouded in uncertainties – over technical feasibility, cost, and consumer acceptance. Capitalism surmounts these difficulties by letting a hundred flowers bloom:

The Western method of dealing with these uncertainties is basically statistical. Western economies authorize a large number of enterprises, as well as individuals who might form new enterprises, to make decisions to accept or reject proposals for innovation, their own or others … The advantage of having proposals for innovations considered by many decision centers is illustrated by the microcomputer, which was not undertaken by any of the leading American computer manufacturers, nor by the Soviet Union, nor by the French Commissariat du Plan, nor by MITI in Japan, but which nevertheless has proved widely useful.

Over the longer sweep of history, variation across social orders has been a major driver of human progress. Societies more exposed and open to foreign influences, whether through trade or war, were able to leap ahead by adopting new ideas and new ways of doing things. 
As far back as Montesquieu and Hume, Europe’s advantages in freedom and power were attributed to its political fragmentation. In Asia, Montesquieu wrote, large and powerful countries dominate their regions, but in Europe “strong nations are opposed to the strong; and those who join each other have nearly the same courage. This is the reason of the weakness of Asia and of the strength of Europe; of the liberty of Europe, and of the slavery of Asia.” Hume, meanwhile, emphasized the impact of European heterogeneity on scientific, technological, and economic development. “Nothing is more favorable to the rise of politeness and learning, than a number of neighboring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy,” he wrote. “The emulation, which naturally arises among those neighboring states, is an obvious source of improvement.”
Recent scholarship confirms the connection between modern capitalism’s emergence in western Europe and the continent’s fractured political geography. Two excellent new books on the origins of modern economic growth were published just this year: The Journey of Humanity by Oded Galor and How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin. Both stress the importance of European political diversity and competition in explaining why Europe, and not China, was the locus of humanity’s economic takeoff. Koyama and Rubin, for their part, emphasize the role of political geography in driving the institutional innovations upon which modern growth depends:

Political fragmentation explains several important institutional developments that were unique to medieval Europe. These include the rise of representative institutions such as self-governing city-states and parliaments, public debt, and the notion of separation between religion and the state.

Galor, meanwhile, focuses on how political competition favored the development and spread of good ideas by multiplying the chances that those ideas would land in a place where they would be sponsored or at least tolerated:

Competition in Europe contributed to a culture of innovation and institutional adaptation, the Protestant Reformation being a prime example. Entrepreneurs pitched their initiatives across borders, and engineers, physicists, architects, and skilled craftsmen migrated across the European continent in search of economic opportunities. While the Muslim caliphates … and China … experienced periods of innovation, … these trends ultimately did not last.

But as it has spread around the planet, capitalism has been reducing the external sources of the cultural and institutional variety out of which it emerged. Yes, the system’s growing complexity of specialization and exchange has produced astonishing internal variety – in the number of different occupations, different organizations producing goods and services, different goods and services available for sale, and different subcultures and “consumption communities.” But this is variety within a particular kind of social order. And that particular kind of social order is now the only game in town.
Since the fall of communism 30 years ago, capitalism for the first time in its existence lacks any competition from a rival system. Yes, the capitalist system currently comes in many flavors: democratic and authoritarian, advanced and underdeveloped, inclusive and extractive, with public sectors ranging from lean to expansive. But in broader historical context, these differences are much less striking than the unprecedented degree of world-spanning uniformity. Virtually the entire inhabitable surface of the globe has been claimed by territorially exclusive states using the same basic forms of governance. Some two-thirds of working-age people worldwide work for money income, most as wage employees of private business enterprises. The majority of people now live in cities constructed from the same building materials and shaped by the same architectural styles. Everywhere you can find people wearing the same kinds of clothing, eating the same food, driving the same cars, watching the same movies, and obsessing about the same media celebrities. 
For all of its history until recently, though, capitalism had to contend with actually existing alternatives. Capitalism emerged against the backdrop of aristocratic agrarianism, the legacy system that it gradually displaced and toppled. And well before the agrarian order breathed its last, a new rival arose in the form of the socialist movement. While World War I finally toppled the old agrarian power structures, it simultaneously brought socialism to power in Russia. From there, socialist revolutions would spread over the course of decades until a third of the world’s population lived under Marxist-Leninist regimes. Only with the collapse of those regimes, or their conversion to capitalism in all but name, has systemic competition come to an end.
Capitalism’s coexistence with rival systems afforded it opportunities, and subjected it to pressures, that enhanced its powers as an engine of social progress. When industrialization was first taking off, capitalists took advantage of the huge “reserve army of labor” in the peasantry to keep wages hovering at subsistence levels. And when industrializing economies were beset with periodic crises and slumps, the capitalist system could avoid chaos because the countryside acted as a kind of informal social welfare system, absorbing displaced workers temporarily until demand for their services recovered.
While the background agrarian order gave capitalist activity the flexibility to expand and contract as needed during industrialization’s bumpy ride, capitalism’s competition with socialism forced the adoption of major institutional innovations that made it possible for the system to survive that bumpy ride intact. Specifically, the advanced capitalist economies were able to avoid socialist revolution only by absorbing significant amounts of the socialist program into their institutional makeup. Capitalism’s social-democratic makeover preserved the fundamental market order while introducing unionization to strengthen workers’ bargaining power and social insurance to soften the market’s downsides. This partial co-optation of socialism rejected the doctrine’s fundamental error (i.e., radical hostility to markets) while internalizing its key insight – namely, that the existing rules of economic life, far from being natural and necessary, are conventions that can be altered to improve society’s overall functioning. 
Success often brings new difficulties in its wake, and it seems to me that capitalism’s elimination of all rivals presents a genuine problem. The market order has lost an important source of variation that could redirect its growth onto more promising pathways. It’s not just a coincidence that the end of actually existing socialism has been accompanied in the capitalist democracies by declining leverage and status and political marginalization for ordinary people. Competition with socialism boosted the social significance and political power of workers, inclining capitalist political economy toward more egalitarian institutions and outcomes. Meanwhile, the collapse of socialism helped to foster “end of history” complacency throughout the capitalist world and especially in the United States. The whole idea of radical alternatives to the status quo was now discredited; the modest goal of future progress was to ensure that the winning model in the competition of systems was extended from the global center to the still-benighted periphery.
Of course we still do have political fragmentation, and with it one source of policy and institutional variation. And with the recent deterioration in U.S.-China relations, it appears that something resembling systemic competition – competition between variants of capitalism – is now heating up. Yet the implications of this gathering conflict for renewed innovation are decidedly ambivalent. On the one hand, U.S.-China rivalry is likely to spur innovation along militarily applicable lines; on the other, it is likely to undermine international cooperation on which, in particular, clean energy innovation depends. Meanwhile, the larger worldwide authoritarian turn in which this conflict has arisen is decidedly bad news for present well-being and prospects for improvement. And the disastrous possibility that this conflict could lead to the return of great-power warfare is unnervingly real.
Meanwhile, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” poses a far less profound competitive challenge than that presented by the original article. China is only slightly less unequal economically (as measured by Gini coefficient) than the United States, and rather more unequal than the other capitalist democracies. The Chinese alternative is about who controls at the top, not about who benefits at the bottom. Chinese culture now is even more money-hungry than the home markets where consumerism originated; and while the nouveaux riche may dream of taking the place of old money, they are generally uninterested in toppling the hierarchy that privileges them both. In short, there is nothing in the Chinese system that can be counted on to spur any dramatic institutional change.
Beyond the specifics of the United States and China, it needs to be pointed out that political fragmentation means much, much less than it used to. Previously, political divisions added one additional layer to humanity’s teeming cultural and institutional diversity. Today that underlying diversity is in freefall. Modern science, the ultimate source of capitalist dynamism, is a global enterprise; there are no rival national schools of this or that discipline. With the spread of multinational business enterprises, corporate best practices have been globalized. In increasingly global product markets, convergence in regulatory policies is the dominant trend. There’s still a great deal of linguistic and religious diversity, but the most powerful cultural force shaping day-to-day human conduct regardless of country is the globally triumphant culture of consumerism. 
Capitalism’s global supremacy has delivered clear and important benefits in the here and now: the three decades of globalization since the collapse of communism have witnessed the most dramatic improvement in humanity’s material welfare since the dawn of the species. But something has been lost, with potentially fateful implications for the longer term. Think of it in terms of the tradeoff between static and dynamic efficiency. Economic institutions exhibit static efficiency when they conduce toward the optimal output mix of existing goods and services. Dynamic efficiency, by contrast, is the property of institutions that can foster the evolutionary process of variation and selection and thereby improve the output mix over time with the addition of new goods and services. 
The global capitalist system delivers enormous static efficiencies by integrating the entire world into a single system of specialization and exchange. And its dynamic efficiency, if increasingly labored, is still considerable. But the absence of any truly systemic competition – and with it, the shrinking of our collective capacity to imagine radically different and radically better social arrangements – removes a vital source of variation at the macro level, and thus of dynamic efficiency over the long run. 
An analogy from sports may be helpful here. Teams often face a choice between short-term and long-term prospects. If they feel that a championship is within their grasp, they will often trade away draft picks to add the star free agents they need now to put them over the top. In other words, they sacrifice their chances to improve performance over the long term in order to maximize the odds of present success. Likewise, the absence of systemic competition today allows capitalism to more fully realize the productive potential of its existing institutions, but at the cost of foreclosing possibilities for developing new institutions in the future. Like a star-studded championship contender, capitalism is currently “all in” on winning now – a state of affairs that inevitably complicates rebuilding efforts down the road.
It’s important to recognize how formidable the barriers to institutional and systemic innovation now are. In the past, at least for Europeans and people of European ancestry during the half-millennium of the “Great Frontier,” when a group of people wanted to break away and try something new – build a new community, a new society – they possessed two huge advantages not presently available today. 
First, the opportunity costs of independence from the surrounding society were far lower. Most people in the default social order supported themselves by farming; if you wanted to hive off and start something new, you could support yourself by farming as well. Independence therefore wasn’t that economically costly; indeed, with the promise of free land on the frontier, people could see independence as a way to get ahead and prosper. 
By contrast, contemporary affluent interdependence is extremely sticky. Because the system is so productive, and because it’s the only game in town, trying to live outside of it means a huge comedown in living standards. Think the Amish, or the Unabomber. In the 1960s a major social movement – the “counterculture” – filled young people with dreams of radically different institutions and radically different ways of living. In the late 60s and early 70s, as many as a million of them tried their hand at living in thousands of different “communes” and “intentional communities.” After a decade or so, though, this burst of experimentation had fizzled. There were many reasons for the failure, not the least of which was that the Aquarian allergy to authority of any kind made it difficult to actually get productive work done. But one main reason was that life in rural poverty turned out to be a boring, laborious bummer. The immensely superior productivity of capitalism relative to all known alternatives creates a daunting barrier to exit.
It’s not just that economic barriers to exit were lower in the past; legal barriers were lower as well. Today’s elaborate regulatory state had not yet been constructed; and out on the frontier, there wasn’t much of a state of any kind. “Permissionless innovation” was the rule across the board. But now, when the entire world has been sewn up by territorially exclusive states, trying to start a new community with new laws will run afoul of some jurisdiction’s existing statutory and regulatory codes.
In view of the above, we can conclude the following. First, the absence of actually existing alternative social orders imposes real constraints on our society’s ability to evolve in novel and healthy directions. Second, if we are ever to live in a world where experimentation with new social orders is possible, it will be necessary to lower both the economic and legal barriers to life outside the current system.
The post <strong>The Absence of Systemic Competition</strong> appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Ukraine’s friends have poured a considerable amount of weaponry into the nation’s fight for survival. The United States alone has provided more than $25 billion of matériel, including 160 modern artillery pieces, 38 medium-range HIMARS rocket systems, hundreds of armored vehicles, and tens of thousands of advanced munitions of all types. Allies such as Poland and the Czech Republic have done even more (in relative, not absolute terms), supplying hundreds of Soviet-model tanks, an array of modern artillery systems, and all kinds of nonlethal support. Even hesitant Germany has sent a score of advanced guns and missile launchers, some antiaircraft systems, and more. In total, the West has sent more than 320 tanks, 2,400 other armored vehicles, 450 artillery pieces, and more than 135 air-defense systems to Ukraine, and more is on the way.This is still not enough.With the material aid from the West, as well as intelligence support and similarly discreet training and advising efforts, Ukraine has been able, by its own extraordinary efforts, to drive Russian forces from Kyiv in the north, Kharkiv in the east, and Kherson city in the south. To finish liberating its territory, however, and to decisively defeat Russia’s forces, Ukraine needs not only greater quantities but also different types of arms, including modern battle tanks, extensive air and antiballistic-missile defenses, and, above all, deep-attack systems such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and long-range unmanned aerial vehicles. With such weapons, Ukraine can and will repeat and expand the disruption of Russian logistics that enabled its earlier counteroffensives.[Anne Applebaum: Germany is arguing with itself over Ukraine]Russia has been badly bloodied. Of its prewar army, perhaps a quarter of its troops were killed or wounded in its initial attacks on Ukraine. A hastily mobilized force of men swept up in a press-ganging effort is also suffering casualties at a horrific rate. But the losses have not yet broken the Russian army or the determination of the Putin regime in Moscow. Indeed, Ukrainian sources report that a new mobilization is being prepared with the aim of more than doubling the size of the Russian military to a total force of as many as 2 million personnel.The Russian military is, by Western standards, poorly motivated, poorly trained, badly led, and inadequately supported. Its units have to be kept at the front by the fear of blocking units that will gun down soldiers fleeing the battlefield. Its maintenance practices are primitive, its rations outdated, its command unable to coordinate the combined-arms operations of modern war. But Russia retains three large advantages.The first is, simply, size. With a population of 146 million, it still has plenty of bodies it can throw into the fight against Ukraine, a country of 43 million people, perhaps a third of whom have become refugees or have been internally displaced. Russia also retains vast stocks of military matériel accumulated during the Cold War—even if those have now been depleted. These are dwindling strengths, as skilled young men flee the country and sanctions retard and disrupt the war economy, but for now they matter.Russia’s other advantages are less tangible. One of these is sheer ruthlessness. President Vladimir Putin and his generals simply do not care, from a human point of view, how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of their soldiers are killed or mutilated in war. They equally have no compunction about inflicting mayhem on Ukrainian civilians in apartment blocks, schools, or hospitals. They will feed soldiers and civilians alike into the furnace of war until such behavior threatens their own survival.Russia has, in addition, the benefits of a homeland sanctuary. Ukraine has managed a few daring strikes into Russian territory, but it has not yet been able to inflict militarily significant damage there, much less to ruin the Russian economy.Against these strengths, Ukraine has many and indeed more of its own. This war has reminded us of the transcendent importance of motivation. Ukrainians know what they are fighting for, and they will go on to the end. They have a growing edge in skill over their enemy, and all the creativity of a free society and an engaged civilian population that supports the front in many ways; this includes creating improvised drone squadrons and articles of war, and supplying food and tactical information to frontline units.Wars are, in some measure, tests of a society’s will and resilience, and this one has shown just how different Russia and Ukraine are. Wars are also a test of vitality. Putin is 70; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is 44. Russia’s chief of the general staff (and now overall commander in Ukraine), Valery Gerasimov, is 67; Ukraine’s chief of staff, Valeriy Zaluzhny, is 49. Support for Russia’s war is strongest among those who remember the Soviet Union, and the war is being conducted by the aging men in Putin’s inner circle.In contrast, support for Ukraine’s war is across the board, and the war is being led by a generation in its prime, no more than middle-aged. This is, in many ways, a war between a calcified society lost in its brutal past and a free society looking toward a decent future.Behind Ukraine lie the powers of the West, understood in the old-fashioned sense of a free coalition of states led by the United States. Despite understandable fretting about the slowness of its military-industrial mobilization, the Western allies have enormous and growing capacity, and they have—too slowly, and at times even stingily—provided Ukraine with battlefield technology that outmatches that deployed by Russia. Over time, that disparity will grow, if the Western commitment matches even a fraction of that of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers.“War weariness” in Western democracies is a tired trope. We in the West are sacrificing nothing beyond modest financial resources—no comparison to the blood tax paid by the people of Ukraine. As a number of analysts have noted, spending some tens of billions of dollars to shatter the land and air forces of one of our chief opponents, Russia, is a bargain. Spending some tens of billions of dollars more, for as long as it takes, is no less worth it.[Eliot A. Cohen: Cut the baloney realism]Ukraine’s most urgent needs are, as Kyiv has made clear, air and ballistic-missile defenses, heavy tanks, and long-range strike systems. It has received some of the defense systems, but not yet the armor and offensive weapons. The excuses that Germany, in the first case, and the United States, in the latter case, have made for not freeing up the supply of Leopard tanks and systems such as ATACMS are at once flimsy and shameful.Ukrainians have repeatedly shown themselves able to master complex military technology with astonishing speed. An honest audit of how long Western experts expected Ukrainians would need to learn how to operate them, and how long it actually took them, would be revealing and embarrassing. Similarly, Ukraine has shown remarkable restraint: The idea that long-range missile systems would be used to strike indiscriminately into Russia has no credible support. And fears of Russian escalation to the use of nuclear weapons have been discredited repeatedly, including in The Atlantic.The real reasons for reluctance look to be timidity and a lack of imagination. So perhaps the best thing for Western leaders who cannot bring themselves to treat war as war is to clarify for them what they have to fear if they do not take the actions that both strategic calculations and moral imperatives demand.Because Russia is big, ruthless, and counting on the sanctuary of its territory, the war can be concluded on reasonable terms only by the decisive defeat of its forces in Ukraine—their elimination by flight, capture, wounds, or death. Some 100,000 casualties have not been enough, but Russia’s will and resources are not infinite. If Moscow’s losses have to be several times that, the West has the ability to ensure such an outcome with little risk to itself. If Ukraine has heavy armor and long-range strike systems, the Russian position in occupied land can be rendered untenable. A defeat of that magnitude will likely bring about the internal changes that will deter Russia from pursuing its present path.Should Western leaders, through their passivity or reluctance, bring about a cease-fire that leaves Russia with Ukrainian territory under its control, they would disgrace themselves as much the French and British leaders did at Munich in 1938—and with less excuse. They will lay the grounds for future wars because, after some period of recuperation, Russia will surely try again. Already, Russia does not recognize the legitimacy of Ukrainian independence; already, blood is on Western hands because of a failure to arm Ukraine and deter Russia on previous occasions. Next time will be even worse.[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]If fear is the only thing some Western leaders understand, they should consider this. For other nations, the lesson of a Ukraine that is not allowed to win this war is very simple: get yourself nuclear weapons. Finns, Poles, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, for that matter, and many others will conclude that conventional strength alone is not enough. That South Korea’s leadership has begun talking about the need to reintroduce nuclear weapons to the peninsula is not coincidental.In a world where a large predatory state is stalled but not beaten decisively, the only resort for its smaller neighbors is to acquire weapons of cataclysmic power. Their leaders would be irresponsible if they did not consider that option. And the leaders of the major Western states are not just irresponsible but willfully negligent if they fail to take the measures—all well within their power—to avoid the world that this failure would bequeath to succeeding generations.

Tabata Amaral is a Brazilian politician currently serving as a federal deputy for the center-left Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), representing the state of São Paulo.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tabata Amaral discuss her journey from a childhood of poverty to her admission to Harvard and her election as one of the youngest congresspeople in Brazil; how Lula’s ideologically diverse coalition was able to oust President Jair Bolsonaro; why Bolsonaro continues to enjoy broad support; and how Brazil can unlock its future by fighting corruption and improving basic education.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: We had the pleasure of meeting when we did an event together, and I thought you had so many interesting things to say and that you would be the perfect person to explain Brazil to our audience. People were very, very worried about Bolsonaro possibly being reelected, and possibly refusing to accept the outcome of the presidential election. As we speak, it looks pretty good. Tell us a little bit about the state of Brazilian democracy at this crucial hinge moment.Tabata Amaral: Brazil is a complex country. And, for sure, we are leaving one of the most complex moments in our recent history. I'll do my best to try to explain what's going on. It took a very broad coalition to beat Bolsonaro in the voting booth, and it was a very tight election. There were two rounds, and that is how it works in Brazilian federal elections. In the second round, there were almost 120 million voters, and the difference was only 2 million votes. And after everything my country went through—all the hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided from COVID, all the deforestation, all the attacks against journalists, Bolsonaro’s announcement that, if he won, he would increase the size of the Supreme Court, just as Chavez did in Venezuela—it's shocking to me that so many people still voted for Bolsonaro after those four years—Mounk: —And why do you think that is? I want to get to why the opposition managed to beat him, but why was Bolsonaro, despite being quite unpopular and having a very rocky time in office, able to sustain the support of about 49% of the people who voted in the election a few months ago?Amaral: There are many factors. Even though things have been peaceful, there are still thousands of people in front of military facilities asking for a military intervention. About a week and a half ago, some Bolsonaro supporters set fire to cars here in Brasilia, where I am right now. They tried to occupy the hotel where [President-elect] Lula was staying. There is a big chunk of the population that feels that democracy doesn’t work for them. They don’t seem to be voting because of economic reasons (our economy did really badly in the last four years), and they don’t seem to be only voting about corruption either. If you ask Bolsonaro supporters why they vote for Bolsonaro and why they hate PT (the Labour Party), they will usually tell you that it's because of corruption, that PT was so corrupt in power that they cannot support PT. But, actually, the biggest corruption scandal of the last decades happened under Bolsonaro. It's called the “secret budget.” The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional. But I think Bolsonaro’s support is less about corruption, less about the economy, and not so much about what people tell you in the polls, and more about the social changes that Brazil went through, that made people feel they didn't belong anymore. Bolsonaro was an answer not only to the PT but to the whole system: “You guys, from the left to the right, you don't represent us. You are so corrupt that we would prefer to implode the system than to support any of you.” The PT was defeated in the previous election, but so were center-right parties like PSDB. Brazil is changing. Some decades ago, someone like me, who comes from a poor background, who is a woman, would not be here in Congress. And I think those changes are scary to some people. Because Brazil did not do well economically, some people will blame those changes and say that they are being left behind. But the most important point is the perception that there's a lot of arrogance among those in power, among the politically correct—“You cannot say that anymore. You cannot think like that. I am better than you. I’m morally more evolved.” And those things really speak to the hearts and minds of people who support Bolsonaro. To stop supporting him would be to deny their own identity. Mounk: I agree with you that wherever these populist insurgents win, a big part of the reason is that the existing political establishment has lost the trust of the people—as always with “Throw the bums out!” The more shocking a newcomer is, the more different they are from the political class, the more appealing they are, nearly by definition, because if all these people that I distrust hate this person, there must be something okay about them. I also find plausible your account of those social and cultural changes. But I have a question about that, because this fits easily into a narrative where these far-right populist parties are supported mostly by people who used to have a relatively good position or were dominant in that society—there are some people like that who support Bolsonaro. It is interesting that he is one of the very few populists who does better in affluent parts of the country, in the country’s south. But it also seems to be a lot more complicated than that. Bolsonaro also does quite well in the favelas. There are a lot of people who are not white who support Bolsonaro very strongly. Does that story of rebelling against cultural change fit for those voters, because they themselves seem to be part of a cultural change?Amaral: I would say yes and no. There are many people, as I said, who just don't want to get used to the idea that now we have more black people, more women, more young people, more people who come from the periphery, who are taking their place in politics. I say that with a lot of certainty, because of all the death threats I have received. It has a lot to do with what I represent, and not so much with how I vote. It’s: “You shouldn't be there. We won't allow it.” But, as you said, there are lots of poor people, black people, and working people who support Bolsonaro. I come from a very large family. My mom has 26 siblings, and I have many uncles who support Bolsonaro. None of my uncles had the opportunity to attend college. Many could not finish high school. So it's not about, “We don't want the poor to do well.” It has more to do with their identity, their moral identity, that they feel is threatened. I come from a religious community. I come from a very conservative family. I went to Harvard for college, and I remember the first time I went back home. I viewed myself as a progressive woman. I had all these ideas and all these beautiful words in my mouth. At first, I was very arrogant with people around me, and I remember pointing my finger and saying, “You are bad, what you said is unacceptable,” and a friend told me that Harvard was brainwashing me. I felt very bad, because I wanted to belong in my community. I had to find my way of being very strong in my positions against sexism, racism, and homophobia and so on, but not to act as if I were better than my family members or my friends. I just was going on a very different path, a very different journey. Some black, poor evangelicals will vote for Bolsonaro because they feel that Bolsonaro represents their family values while the left, especially, is threatening those values. My father had a drug addiction—it's a very big problem in the favelas and in the poor communities—and I myself never felt that the left had anything to offer to my father. Here, if you are a poor person, you cannot be admitted to clinics unless they are religious ones, so those are the clinics that my father was referred to. The left will only speak about legalizing drugs—which is a very important theme when you talk about security policies—but it's not a health policy. You turn to me, you turn to my mom, and you say, “OK, we will solve everything. We will legalize drugs”—I, myself, can even have that conversation. But the only thing I really want to know is how you make sure that young people in the favelas won't have access to drugs, and that those who are already sick have treatment. I think the discussion has become so much about Twitter and so eliticized, that people say, “Okay, you just want to destroy our families, and you have nothing concrete to offer us.”Mounk: When you talk to your uncles who voted for Bolsonaro, or when you go back to that community that feels that the left is missing some important part of their social reality, how do you try to do better? How do you try to argue for your values and persuade people without falling into what you call this “eliticized” discourse?Amaral: The first thing is not to act as if I am better than them. I don't remember fighting with anyone in my family or my friend circle because of the election, and that's really rare to find in Brazil. I'm still friends with those people, because they are not fascists. They are not what Bolsonaro is like. They voted for Bolsonaro, they are not Bolsonaro. I won't stop talking to them because of that. I am hurt by some of the things they say, especially some of my uncles. But for me, it's more about trying to understand where they come from. For instance, there is someone in my family who has worked really hard to maintain his small business. He has this feeling that the whole system is against him, that left and right are united to make sure he pays as much as he can to the government. He doesn't receive the basic income funds. He works really hard to pay for private medical care and private education for his children, and he feels like the whole system is there to steal and to harm his family. I tried to convince him that they are not all the same. I don’t say, “You are wrong.” I’m more like, “Yes, I understand. It sucks. It's horrible. But Bolsonaro is also stealing. Bolsonaro is also corrupt. You cannot say that he's different. You know me. You know how I'm doing my work. There are some different people there.” I was one of the authors of the material that came before the Supreme Court, saying that the secret budget was unconstitutional, and one of my daily jobs is to tell people about all the corruption that's going on in this government. I always try to explain to people I know that my life is more in danger because of Bolsonaro and because of all the times that he and his sons aired fake news about me. But in public, the work has more to do with showing people what Bolsonaro really is. It's important to understand that Bolsonaro is no different in terms of corruption. He's doing the same or worse, given his authoritarianism and his violence.Mounk: You've alluded a few times to your personal story, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about it.You grew up in a poor family, a very large family, in a religious community. What has been your path from a community that's far from power and influence to being one of the youngest congresspeople in Brazil? Amaral: My story is a story about education—from beginning to end. Both my parents and their families come from the northeast, which is the poorest region of Brazil. My mom got pregnant when she was in high school, and she was not supported by my biological father. She then met my father, who was the most amazing person I've met in my life, but who was a very sick person. My father was bipolar. He had a drug addiction (very normal to my context) and, for us, church was always very important. I think that's what made me understand that you cannot just say that the problem is the church, because the church is also the solution in those poor communities. The church supported us with food when we needed it. It was in church that I spent all my weekends doing service, learning and so on. I had a very unique opportunity with a math olympiad when I was 11 years old—this big national math olympiad that was created by the Ministry of Science and Technology, during the Lula government. I got a scholarship in a private school because of the medal I received, and my life changed for good.Mounk: You talk about coming from a very religious community, and my understanding is that you're Catholic. My imagination of Brazil is as one of the most Catholic countries in the world. And I imagine that a lot of listeners to this podcast will have this image of Brazil, which was true 30 or 40 years ago. But the religious landscape in Brazil has radically changed. We're now at—depending on different data points—nearly 40% evangelical. It may be that Brazil, within a relatively short number of years, will be majority evangelical. Tell us a little bit about this phenomenon. What is the cause of this deep social and religious transformation, and how does it explain some of the political trends we see? How does that interact with the strength of somebody like Bolsonaro?Amaral: I am a Catholic, but I can speak a little bit about that because my church is not, in many senses, very different from an evangelical church. It's a church very rooted in the poor community. There are no rich people attending my church. A majority of the people there are black. We have all the dancing and all the singing. I remember the first time I went to Mass at churches that were more in the center of São Paulo, and there were so many blonde people, and people were not dancing, and not singing. They were so serious. So I think that I can speak about the experience of attending a church in the periphery. And, of course, there are differences between evangelicals and Catholics, and we’ll have to invite an evangelical to the conversation.But to me, it was all we had. Brazil has many social policies, but not all of them reach people. Right now, we have, in theory, a basic income that guarantees that people have up to 600 reais per family. But we have 30 million people who are in hunger at this moment. I remember that when we needed it, it was the church that provided us with meat and food. Even to this day, there is no single public facility near my house. It was at church that we had all those competitions, sports, language lessons, group meetings and choir. Because of my father's addiction, my mom was so scared that my brother and I would go down that path that she made sure we were in church every single hour we had to spare. I think churches give you a community. They give you support when you need it. And, of course, there are some very, very conservative parts of the church, even in the Catholic Church. I remember this experience in one particular branch—the reality they were portraying was so homophobic, so sexist, that even I was like, “Okay, this is not what Jesus is teaching me.” There are those horrible things, but to me church is so much more positive. There is this idea that if you are rich and enlightened, and you have studied a great deal, you cannot be religious. I think the reason why people have only a bad image is because they have never attended a church like mine. They have never been there to see what it's like. So it doesn't scare me if evangelicals will be the majority, and I think it's really, really bad that some left leaders see that as a threat to democracy. It's ridiculous. Churches are the only thing that people have to go to. When we have the government helping people get their jobs, their education, their basic needs attended to, we'll have a healthier relationship between those communities and their church. Then churches can attend to the spiritual needs of people, and not to all their needs, as it happens today, because if you live in a place like where I live the alternatives are crime or church. You cannot count on the state. I think that's what we should be concerned about, and not the fact that evangelicals will surpass Catholics in numbers.Read: “Why Bolsonaro Is Going Quietly” by Francisco ToroMounk: There's a new government coming in, and I have the sense that you feel a little ambivalently about it, in the sense that you're very, very happy that Bolsonaro is out of office (you campaigned for Lula), but you also have some concerns about the new government, and how to overcome division rather than deepen it and make it worse. What do you think we should expect for Brazil in the coming five years? Where are the points where you really hope that the new president is going to take path A, but you're worried that he might take path B?Amaral: I'm a hopeful person, and I'm cheering for my country to do well because people are tired. There is a limit to how much suffering a country can go through. But I'm mostly scared that some people haven't learned their lesson. Bolsonaro was elected for a reason: people distrust parties and politicians (often for very good reasons). We haven't had one single government since the democratization that was not corrupt, that didn't have—and I'm not saying the presidents were involved themselves—very, very big corruption scandals. The thing with Bolsonaro and Trump and all those authoritarian leaders that make us all unite to defeat them is that the threat is so big that we stopped looking at smaller things. We were so focused on defeating Bolsonaro, and that was the right thing to do, but I'm not sure if my elders in politics took the time to understand why Bolsonaro was elected and what role they played in that election. Yes, we prefer anything to Bolsonaro. But Brazil was not perfect before Bolsonaro. People want change. They went to the streets in 2013 asking for change. One change is related to corruption and the fight against corruption. The Supreme Court voted recently on whether to end the secret budget, which is 20 billion reais that are in the hands of politicians in Congress. It's from our budget, and we have no idea what they do with that money. While the voting was happening in the Supreme Court, Congress passed a law changing some of the mechanisms to prevent the judgment from having an impact—Mounk: —To do an “end run” around the Supreme Court, so that even if the court ruled that this has been unconstitutional or illegal, they can continue keeping up the secret budget.Amaral: And I was very pissed off, because I have spent the last two-and-a-half years fighting against that. And Lula supporters and Bolsonaro supporters voted the same way!Mounk: Why is it that in this very polarized political system, supporters of both Lula and Bolsonaro voted to keep it?Amaral: The secret budget was very important for Bolsonaro’s election, because it's 20 billion reais. It's a big chunk of the public budget that's in the hands of the leaders of both chambers, and there is no transparency in how that money is used. A handful of parliamentary members will decide which municipalities will receive that money. The mayors, for example, don't have to tell society how they use the money. And there are all sorts of accusations and scandals: super-overpriced robotics kits that were supposedly for schools which didn't even have internet access, or, in some cases, water. There is no transparency, and there are many reasons to believe that around 50% of that money is going into the pockets of politicians. But the leaders of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate will support whoever is in power. That's what we call the centrão. They have used that money to support Bolsonaro’s reelection. But they will support whoever is in power. We spent the last years saying that this was the biggest corruption scandal, that we needed to defeat Bolsonaro to end the secret budget. And then when we finally have an opportunity, most of PT’s base votes with the secret budget. What's the message that that sends to the population? That they are all the same. I voted against it, and we lost by about 18 votes. But the Supreme Court insisted and said that, regardless of how the law is written, it is still illegal and unconstitutional. This was a big defeat to Congress’ leaders. Corruption is not the major reason why people voted for Bolsonaro, because he's corrupt, too. But it's one big reason. We cannot give them that reason again.Brazil has changed in the last twenty years, between Lula's first inauguration and the second. We have more women. We have more black people. We have so much more diversity in general. And I'm scared that voters will go with the same players, and we'll see all the same white, rich men in power, just older now. If you have only one type of representation in the executive, those people don't connect with the real people. They don't connect with my community. They don't have the perception that corruption matters to people; that some girls would miss school because they don't have access to sanitary pads, which was one of my biggest fights here in Congress. I'm just scared that they will be out of touch with the population in the same way they were before, and that people will just get more and more mad.Mounk: I haven't spent as much time in Brazil as in some other countries in South America, but when you meet the political elite, whichever country you’re in, it's easy to get the sense that they are a little bit out of touch. I've always had that sense in a more extreme way in South America than in just about any other part of the world, in the extent to which the traditional ruling class is able to insulate itself from the realities in the country and in the rest of the population. That's perhaps especially true on the right, but also on the left. What about the basic ideological direction of the new government, both in economics and in foreign policy? The coalition with which Lula has come to power is, as I understand it, very broad. It includes center-left people like you, and it also includes people who are further to the left; people who, like you, are very critical of how Hugo Chavez and his successors have transformed Venezuela, as well as people who are sympathetic to the governments in Venezuela and Cuba. What can we expect on economic policy? And what can we expect on foreign policy and the attitude towards those far-left governments in Latin America that have done a lot of damage?Amaral: First, just one comment—I'm here highlighting all the things I'm scared of, because I think someone has to say, “Hey, look, don't go down this path, it didn't work last time.” But I do think that President Lula himself is a broad-minded person. Even in previous governments, he invited people who didn't support him to be ministers. He's also someone who knows hunger and who attended technical school. I carry the belief that this matters, the experience that you went through yourself. PT, the Labour Party, was elected in a much broader coalition this time than in 2002 or 2006, the first Lula governments. I think that the direction of the economy and the foreign policy, and everything that really matters in the federal government, will depend on how much this broad coalition is present in government. There are people who defend communism and revolutions (I’m definitely not one of them), there are people in the center-left. There are important political leaders from the center-right who supported Lula in the second round. Up to this moment, we are not sure whether these people will have a voice in the future government or not. But I have this belief that a politician should know how they got elected, should know their base. I was not elected with social media. I have lost 100,000 followers after a single vote. But I had this belief that they didn't represent my voters, and I think I was quite right, because I was able to increase my result this election. I'm praying that the future government remembers how they were elected. They were elected in the broadest coalition Brazil has seen in the last decades, and this broad coalition should be in government, should be in power. Because Lula, and the government, represent those people too. That's not exactly what we have with the minister announcements. They are great ministers, but they are close to the Labour Party. I think if Lula is as broad-minded as he has been throughout his political life, he'll fight within his party to make sure that those people are in government, too. We should expect to have economic and foreign policies closer to what we had under Lula—a moderate vision of the economy, I would say. In terms of foreign policy, yes, I'm really mad when left leaders will just not acknowledge how terrible is what is happening in Ukraine, or the very bad humanitarian crisis we have in Venezuela. But PT was very democratic in power, every single time it was in power. So that's what I hope. That's what I voted for. That's what I tried to get votes for in the streets for so many months. But this chapter we are yet to see.Mounk: Let's focus on the positive for a moment. Where does opportunity lie in Brazil? If you could set the governing agenda for the next five years, what kinds of economic policies and social changes do you think could help improve the lives of people in poor communities in Brazil, reduce socioeconomic inequality, but also reduce the extent of social polarization, so that Brazil doesn't just escape the threat of extremist forces for five years, but actually gets onto a sounder political footing for the next 20 or 30 years?Amaral: My hope comes from this diversity I've been speaking so much about. The University of São Paulo (USP) is the best university in Brazil. When I was a child, I thought, “Okay, I'll never go to that university. It's only for the elite.” And I think two or three years ago was the first time that half of the students at USP came from public schools. That's huge. USP is like our Harvard, forming the future politicians and the future scientists, and half of its students come from poor backgrounds, from poor families. They are diverse. And I do not think you can just put that back in the box. I do think that's a change in itself. Politicians are working really hard to fight this diversity. But that's my source of hope, knowing that we'll have so many amazing women, black people, LGBT people occupying all sorts of places of power. That's my biggest hope. And in terms of the future, we have to bet on education. Bolsonaro was the worst president for education, ever. Brazil went back 20 years in dropout rates. Half of our children don't know how to read and write at this moment. But maybe this is our opportunity to make basic education a priority, to see all these diverse talents that we have out there, and understand that this is the best social and economic policy you can have. I had all my projects vetoed by Bolsonaro and questioned in court, but I was able, with a broad coalition, to have over ten projects that were approved. But I would joke that there are 120 that I wasn't able to approve! Brazil has walked a very good path in terms of making the whole society accept basic income. It was very questioned in the past. There are so many studies showing that if you give high school students some amount of money after each year they finish, you decrease dropout rates by one-third. That's one example. There's so much we can do. There were so many discussions that were frozen under Bolsonaro, and I have this big hope that we'll have dialogue again, and that we, the society, will be able to make this bet on basic education.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Two years ago today the United States Capitol was attacked by a mob determined to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as President. They were armed and dangerous. Five people died. It’s a miracle that more did not — including members of Congress and the Vice President whom the mob had targeted.

January 6 is a day that should live in infamy.

But Trump has not been held accountable for his central role in the attack. In fact, he is now again running for President — as yet unopposed for the Republican nomination. He remains the most formidable force in the Republican Party.

Nor have the members of Congress who were likely involved in the insurrection been held accountable. In fact, they’ve never had more power over the US government than they are exercising now in the battle over selecting the next Speaker of the House.

To review where America stands on accountability two years out from the day democracy almost died:

1. Those directly involved in the attack are being held accountable.

At least 978 people have been arrested and charged with federal crimes so far. Of them, 465 have entered guilty pleas. Of the 45 defendants who have gone to trial so far, all but one have been convicted of most of the charges they were facing. Three have been sentenced to years in prison and ordered to forfeit money they had raised off their prosecution.

Kudos to the Justice Department, the FBI, and the federal courts.

2. Donald Trump has not been held accountable.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States investigated the causes of the attack. The 9-person panel included Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. The committee and its staff interviewed hundreds of people, issued dozens of subpoenas, sorted through thousands of documents relating to the attack, and held 10 public hearings between June 9, 2022 and December 19, 2022 to share its findings with the public. The 9-person panel included Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. The committee and its staff interviewed hundreds of people, issued dozens of subpoenas, sorted through thousands of documents relating to the attack, and held 10 public hearings between June 9, 2022 and December 19, 2022 to share its findings with the public.

Kudos to the January 6 committee for presenting to the American people a clear and forceful presentation of what occurred and a compelling case against Donald Trump.

The committee formally recommended that the Justice Department bring four charges against Trump: (1) conspiracy to defraud the US, (2) conspiracy to make false statements, (3) obstruction of an official proceeding, and (4) inciting an insurrection.

The referral carries no legal weight, and the Justice Department is not required to bring charges because of it.

To date, the Justice Department has brought no charges against Trump, despite overwhelming evidence of his direct involvement in the conspiracy to attack the Capitol. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a Special Council, Jack Smith, to gather evidence and determine whether to move forward.

3. Members of Congress involved in the attack have not been held accountable.

In fact, many are now exercising disproportionate influence over the selection and agenda of the next Speaker of the House.

The committee issued subpoenas to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other Republican representatives to testify to the committee about their involvement: Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama.

All five ignored the subpoenas. To date, none have been held legally accountable for doing so.

There is evidence that several other Republican members of Congress also conspired with the seditionists — including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, and Louie Gohmert of Texas.

All these members of Congress — those who were subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 committee and refused, along with others who have been linked to the January 6 insurrection — belong to the so-called “Freedom Caucus.” They are now refusing to vote for Kevin McCarthy as Speaker — holding out for more concessions from him to their radical right agenda or for another candidate who will more closely adhere to it.

4. No major lawmaker has been barred from holding office because of involvement in the January 6 attack.

Despite specific language in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution barring anyone from holding office who has previously sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution but has engaged in an “insurrection” against the United States, to date no one except a county commissioner in Arizona has been barred from holding office because of activities in connection with the attack on the Capitol.

Two years have passed, yet the top lawmakers in the US government who were most directly involved in the insurrection — including Trump and his co-conspirators in Congress — have not been held accountable. To the contrary, Trump is so far unopposed in seeking the Republican nomination for President, and his co-conspirators are wielding enormous influence over the selection of the next Speaker of the House.

This is not the way to mark the second anniversary of the day American democracy almost died.

On the day that the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the lawyer Jonathan Mitchell was at the National Association of Christian Lawmakers conference, where he was to receive an award for having enabled “the most successful pro-life legislation to date.” Mitchell was the author of the legislation that had effectively ended abortion access—first in Texas and then in Oklahoma—while Roe was still good law. As news broke at the conference that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had come down, “people were crying, men and women both,” Mitchell said. “I think they really thought there was divine intervention.” But Mitchell felt something different from the joy all around him about saving unborn babies. He was awash in relief that the Court as an institution might be able to redeem itself in a legal sense. He kept his feelings to himself. “I didn’t want to put a damper on things, because everybody else was just, ‘Praise Jesus.’ ”

Unlike most lawyers and legal scholars who profess to be committed to the rule of law, Mitchell does not find it disturbing that several states, following his advice, managed to nullify a constitutional right long before the Supreme Court did. That is because his mission is to undermine the Court itself as the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution. He first laid out his arguments in several law-review articles, one of which proposed that legislatures could “overcome federal-court rulings” they oppose by drafting statutes that insulate them from judicial review. He then put his arguments into practice, using abortion as the perfect test case.

Senate Bill 8, which Texas enacted in September, 2021, banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. Since Roe, such bans had not survived constitutional challenges in court. But, rather than put any state officials in charge of enforcing the ban, Mitchell saw to it that S.B. 8 would empower only private citizens to enforce it, by suing abortion providers (or any aiders and abettors) in state court. Abortion clinics, scared of being sued, largely fell in line, following the new restrictions or closing entirely—even though the legislation clearly defied the Court’s abortion cases. Whole Woman’s Health and others sued Texas officials, in an effort to block the ban, but Mitchell felt confident that they would be unsuccessful, because state officials had no part in enforcing the ban. By his design, there was no defendant to sue—and that meant a law openly flouting the Supreme Court’s constitutional precedents could remain in effect.

When the abortion providers’ case reached the Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan was scathing about the notion that “after, oh, these many years, some geniuses came up with a way to evade” the Court’s command “that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights.” Conservative Justices sounded troubled by it, too. But then five conservatives largely acquiesced in the scheme to shield the statute from judicial review, even though, as Chief Justice John Roberts lamented in dissent, “the clear purpose and actual effect of S. B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings.” More than six months before the Court overruled Roe, the Court gave its blessing to box out the federal judiciary itself.

For more than a year, Mitchell has mostly refused to talk to journalists on the record. But, in the past months, he agreed to conversations with me, in which he emphasized the broader stakes of the tactic for which he became known. Early on, Mitchell insisted that, although he personally opposes abortion, “I’m not an anti-abortion activist. I never have been.” His goal is to destroy “judicial supremacy”—the idea that the Supreme Court is the final authority on the meaning of the Constitution—a campaign with bipartisan potential at a moment when liberals and progressives have little to gain from an imposing conservative Court. Liberal legislatures, for example, may wish to defy unfavorable precedents on guns, campaign finance, free speech, and voting rights. Mitchell, for one, would support them if, in his view, the Court is deviating from the Constitution’s text. He believes that conservatives “did not deserve to win” Citizens United, from 2010, which held that campaign-finance restrictions violated corporations’ First Amendment rights, or Shelby County v. Holder, from 2013, which declared a key provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. “Progressives have plenty of legitimate grievances,” he said.

Jack Goldsmith taught Mitchell civil procedure at the University of Chicago Law School and later was his boss, as the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. “He really means it when he says it’s about judicial supremacy. That is not bullshit,” Goldsmith, who is now a professor at Harvard Law School, where I am also on the faculty, said. “Since I’ve known him, he has had a deep dislike of the idea that the courts have the final say on the Constitution. On this, he’s the most principled person of anybody in the conservative legal movement.” After decades of tireless efforts by the Federalist Society to populate the federal judiciary with conservatives, Mitchell is crusading to cut down the judiciary’s power and urging progressives to do so, too.

I met Mitchell in person in April, when he came to Harvard to discuss S.B. 8 in Goldsmith’s Federal Courts class. It was during the doomed lead-up to Dobbs, and the air in the high-ceilinged lecture hall was full of ambivalent anticipation. Mitchell, who has a pale, cherubic face and sandy hair, was dressed as he would be for court: in a plain gray suit and dark shoes. He is not an A-lister in the conservative legal movement. He is oblivious to the pleasures of working a room. When Mitchell gets animated and talks fast, it is invariably about the internal puzzles of Supreme Court opinions, of which his recall is precise and encyclopedic. He has told reporters that he has no hobbies, but he plays the piano; he and his six younger brothers performed jazz music together at each of their weddings, improvising on various instruments.

One of Mitchell’s close friends from law school is a female lawyer who is married to a woman. She recently told her teen-age daughter that, if their family ever needed someone to donate an organ, she knew they could call on him. “But, at the same time, his views, the results of his views, and his politics felt not nice, to put it mildly,” she said. “I always assumed that, since Jonathan is such a good person, that when he aged and knew more people, his views would evolve. I really have trouble reconciling these two parts of him, given my politics and my view of the world, because I just find him to be such a kind, loving person.” But Mitchell doesn’t strike her as “a true believer who will marshal his arguments to justify the outcome,” she said. “I think he actually believes these legal arguments.”

From the first, classmates at Chicago knew that he couldn’t get enough of Justice Antonin Scalia. He had a Web site called Scalia Shrine, featuring links to favorite opinions and quotes, and a “guestbook” for people to leave messages. He feels embarrassed at this “sappy,” youthful manifestation of his “man-crush.” (He heeded the advice of a professor to take the Web site down before applying for clerkships.) “I was a textualist from the moment I arrived at law school,” he explained, referring to the method of interpretation that Scalia advocated, in which “the text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed.” Mitchell said, “I’d read the Constitution, and there’s no right to abortion in there. The Supreme Court had said there is, and they were making it up.” At the end of his first year, in 1999, he told Goldsmith that he was going to work to get rid of Roe v. Wade. “I didn’t scoff at him,” Goldsmith recalled, “but I said, ‘Good luck with that.’ ”

Adam Mortara, who describes himself as Mitchell’s “best intellectual buddy and law friend,” was his classmate at Chicago, where, Mortara recalled, Mitchell’s dream was to join the faculty. In their third year, they both took Federal Courts with David Strauss, a leading proponent of “living constitutionalism,” the idea that constitutional meaning evolves along with changing social values. Led by Scalia, conservatives had for decades railed against living constitutionalism as an undisciplined approach that allowed unelected judges to impose their preferences on the populace under the guise of constitutional interpretation. But both Mitchell and Mortara told me that they consider Strauss one of their deepest influences. Strauss showed through his rigorous scholarship that originalism did not constrain judges to the extent that it claimed to, nor was it even the original method for interpreting the Constitution. Mitchell would later suggest in print that some of Scalia’s ​opinions “were too quick to find an original meaning in cases where the historical evidence is at best conflicting or unclear.”​​ Rather than heartily embrace originalism, as many conservatives did, the duo gravitated toward suspicion of strong judicial review under any method.

In the spring of 2001, Mortara was keeping up with recent decisions of the Fifth Circuit, where he was going to clerk upon graduation. He noticed a case involving a Louisiana law that allowed women to sue doctors for injury from abortions. The Fifth Circuit held that, because the state’s attorney general, whom the statute’s challengers had sued, didn’t have any role in enforcing the law, the court could not hear the case and was “powerless to act except to say that we cannot act.” Mortara brought the intriguing decision to Mitchell, who was ensconced in a library carrel. “I remember his face. He was excited,” Mortara recalled. “Jonathan takes a kernel of an idea and builds it into a giant oak tree.”

Mitchell clerked for Justice Scalia during the 2002-03 Supreme Court term, which, he recalled, “started out well for the conservatives and ended very poorly.” At the end of that term, the Court upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action in university admissions (a question that is back at the Court this term). It also held, in Lawrence v. Texas, that criminalizing gay sex was unconstitutional. In that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy relied on the Court’s privacy precedents, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 case that reaffirmed the core of Roe v. Wade. Scalia bitterly dissented in Lawrence, predicting that a constitutional right to same-sex marriage would follow (it did, in 2015), and deriding Casey’s lofty statement that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” (Scalia sarcastically called it the “sweet-mystery-of-life passage.”) Mortara was a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas at the time. He described Mitchell as “good cop” to his “bad cop,” because of Mitchell’s willingness to talk and listen in respectful disagreement for hours with their liberal colleagues. “I was dying,” Mortara said. “We grew up in a world of law where garbage from so-called swing Justices was forced down our throats day after day.”

Mitchell went on to a tenure-track job at George Mason University’s law school (which has since been named for Scalia). But, shortly into his academic career, in 2010, the solicitor general of Texas, James Ho (now a Donald Trump-appointed Fifth Circuit judge), called “out of the blue” to see if he wanted to replace him. It was a plum job for a legal conservative, one that Ted Cruz had held until 2008, and Mitchell accepted, going on to write briefs for Texas that received awards from the National Association of Attorneys General. But, on one occasion, the Fifth Circuit struck a brief that his office submitted because its “disturbingly unprofessional tone” revealed “a lack of respect for the court.” Among other things, the brief decried the “folly” of a decision that “foists state-law questions upon federal judges who have no business answering them.” Word reached him that, more generally, the snark in his office’s briefs was rubbing some judges the wrong way and had the law clerks guffawing. He dialled back the snark, but not by much. He thought that his tone was never any worse than the sharp rhetoric in opinions by Scalia, or by Frank Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit, another favored jurist. “But they have life tenure, and I don’t.”

After about four years in Texas government, Mitchell sought to relaunch his academic career. From temporary positions at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Stanford Law School, he published scholarship that continued his assault on judicial power. Mitchell disapproved of the Supreme Court’s use of “language that makes its precedents seem sacrosanct or irreversible,” even going “so far to equate its interpretations of the Constitution with the Constitution itself.” The conventional idea that courts can “strike down,” “invalidate,” or “block” statutes was, he wrote, simply wrong. A court can “opine” that a statute is unconstitutional and tell an official not to enforce it, but the statute nonetheless “remains a law until it is repealed by the legislature that enacted it.”

This quietly radical position has led Mitchell to some startling conclusions: he thinks that the conservative majority in Shelby County v. Holder used “made-up” principles to declare key provisions of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. (“Not in the Constitution,” he said.) In fact, because the Court, in his view, does not have power to invalidate acts of Congress at all, states would be well advised to continue following those purportedly stricken provisions—which require localities with a history of discrimination to submit voting laws for federal “preclearance.”

Mitchell went on the academic job market again but received very little interest. (Strauss, his former professor, said, “I think it’s mostly that his scholarship was so doctrinal and kind of narrow-feeling. I think in some places it’s undoubtedly because of the politics.”) Meanwhile, Trump’s 2016 win meant a new Republican Administration was forming, which led him to pursue a job in the White House or the Justice Department. After working on the Trump transition team as a volunteer attorney reviewing draft executive orders, he was promised a senior position in the Office of Legal Counsel. But that, too, did not pan out. “I was vetoed by somebody for some reason. I don’t know what or why,” Mitchell said. He was then nominated to lead the Administrative Conference of the U.S., a little-known independent agency, but, after Democrats objected to him as too partisan, the nomination languished, with no Senate vote.

Mitchell said, “I needed to figure out something else to do.” In 2018, just as a conservative majority solidified on the Supreme Court, he launched a solo law practice that has been active in dozens of suits involving conservative causes. As Goldsmith put it, “Suddenly he starts doing these strange cases. I thought they were strange cases. He didn’t have a ton of trial-court litigation experience. But then suddenly he’s filing all manner of amazingly consequential, imaginative lawsuits”—some of them on behalf of extreme cultural conservatives.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will affect the cost of medicines in Medicare. Since making drugs less expensive is an objective of the law, I spoke with two experts in drug costs about it: AEI’s Amitabh Chandra and Craig Burton of the Association for Accessible Medicines. We concentrated on how the IRA will affect the availability and cost of generics and biosimilars, drug prices, and patient out-of-pocket costs more broadly.
Four IRA provisions focus on Medicare drug costs. The federal government can set the price for medicines that have the biggest sales in the program. Drug companies must pay penalties to the government if their prices outpace consumer inflation. There is a limit on the amount of beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs. Cost risk is transferred to drug companies and insurers for high-cost beneficiaries. 
The panelists and I discussed the current lack of definition in the process of where the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will set drug prices. CMS has tremendous power in the “negotiation” and can impose an excise tax for not accepting the government’s price, so companies cannot realistically turn down proposed prices. When one party holds all the power, prices can be driven to low levels, regardless of an assessment of value. So it is unclear if value will have a role at all in price setting. This affects investment in drugs, potentially discouraging the clinical development of drugs that have a high value to many people because they would be more likely to be selected for price-setting.
The Congressional Budget Office inadequately addressed this concern when it was asked to estimate the number of drugs not brought to the market due to price setting. The panelists largely considered this point moot. The number not developed is not the key point; it’s the types of drugs developed, the number of clinical studies, and the capacity for innovation to save lives and costs. It is possible the IRA doesn’t reduce the number of drugs developed by a large amount, but it will refocus investment in areas not as affected by the law, in particular to drugs for small populations and away from small molecules. This is not necessarily cost saving nor ideal for benefit to health.
When brand-name drugs are set at a low price, then biosimilar or generic entry has a lower value. If branded drugs are inexpensive, end users have little motivation to switch away from brands to save money, creating a smaller market for competition and fewer incentives to develop biosimilars or generics. Generics and biosimilars have been one of the primary sources of cost savings on drugs. They account for more than 90 percent of Medicare prescriptions, with average co-pays of only a few dollars, and offset the costs of new branded drugs. IRA price setting could not only hurt one of the more effective drug cost-saving industries but also create shortages. Branded drug companies specialize in developing new medicines and may be unwilling to provide low-cost brands at the same capacity of a generic company in the face of price setting. By discouraging the generic and biosimilar industry, price setting undercuts one of the primary ways in which costs drop on a structural level.
The IRA may also encourage higher launch prices. Manufacturers have a greater incentive to launch at a high list price and then offer large discounts to insurers for a more favorable position on a drug formulary rather than raise prices over time and discount over time as they do today. Plans that receive the discounts for formulary placement may end up with similar net costs. However, those plans that don’t get offered the discounts (either smaller insurers or those with a more restrictive formulary) costs may be higher for the patients who access those medicines, whether on a high cost sharing formulary tier or if they pay in cash when there is no formulary coverage.  
The panelists and I discussed the cap on out-of-pocket expenses and costs, both in the long and short term. High out-of-pocket costs make patients more likely to reduce the use of essential drugs, including lifesaving and nonessential drugs. While a relatively small portion of beneficiaries pay more than $1,500 a year, these patients are more likely to have a higher number of prescriptions, and more serious illnesses and skipping doses may be associated with costly events.
On net, the IRA can drive costs up and down. It is currently unclear exactly how the law will be implemented and what efforts will be taken to protect “natural” cost-saving forces such as ensuring there is a robust generic and biosimilars industry or retaining incentives to invest in high-value transformational medicines.
Learn more: The Use of Evidence to Control Access and Cost of Pharmaceuticals | Obesity Care Policy for an Era of New Treatments | Will the Inflation Reduction Act Make Drugs More Affordable? | Price Controls on Medicines Save Money for the Federal Government, but Not Necessarily for Consumers
The post Inflation Reduction Act: Discussion About the Mixed Effect on Costs for Drugs with Amitabh Chandra and Craig Burton appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

After months and months of SARS-CoV-2 subvariant soup, one ingredient has emerged in the United States with a flavor pungent enough to overwhelm the rest: XBB.1.5, an Omicron offshoot that now accounts for an estimated 75 percent of cases in the Northeast. A crafty dodger of antibodies that is able to grip extra tightly onto the surface of our cells, XBB.1.5 is now officially the country’s fastest-spreading coronavirus subvariant. In the last week of December alone, it zoomed from 20 percent of estimated infections nationwide to 40 percent; soon, it’s expected to be all that’s left, or at least very close. “That’s the big thing everybody looks for—how quickly it takes over from existing variants,” says Shaun Truelove, an infectious-disease modeler at Johns Hopkins University. “And that’s a really quick rise.”All of this raises familiar worries: more illness, more long COVID, more hospitalizations, more health-care system strain. With holiday cheer and chilly temperatures crowding people indoors, and the uptake of bivalent vaccines at an abysmal low, a winter wave was already brewing in the U.S. The impending dominance of an especially speedy, immune-evasive variant, Truelove told me, could ratchet up that swell.But the American public has heard that warning many, many, many times before—and by and large, the situation has not changed. The world has come a long way since early 2020, when it lacked vaccines and drugs to combat the coronavirus; now, with immunity from shots and past infections slathered across the planet—porous and uneven though that layer may be—the population is no longer nearly so vulnerable to COVID’s worst effects. Nor is XBB.1.5 a doomsday-caliber threat. So far, no evidence suggests that the subvariant is inherently more severe than its predecessors. When its close sibling, XBB, swamped Singapore a few months ago, pushing case counts up, hospitalizations didn’t undergo a disproportionately massive spike (though XBB.1.5 is more transmissible, and the U.S. is less well vaccinated). Compared with the original Omicron surge that pummeled the nation this time last year, “I think there’s less to be worried about,” especially for people who are up to date on their vaccines, says Mehul Suthar, a viral immunologist at Emory University who’s been studying how the immune system reacts to new variants. “My previous exposures are probably going to help against any XBB infection I have.”SARS-CoV-2’s evolution is still worth tracking closely through genomic surveillance—which is only getting harder as testing efforts continue to be pared back. But “variants mean something a little different now for most of the world than they did earlier in the pandemic,” says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, who’s been tracking the proportions of SARS-Cov-2 variants around the world. Versions of the virus that can elude a subset of our immune defenses are, after all, going to keep on coming, for as long as SARS-CoV-2 is with us—likely forever, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written. It’s the classic host-pathogen arms race: Viruses infect us; our bodies, hoping to avoid a similarly severe reinfection, build up defenses, goading the invader into modifying its features so it can infiltrate us anew.[Read: How long can the coronavirus keep infecting us?]But the virus is not evolving toward the point where it’s unstoppable; it’s only switching up its fencing stance to sidestep our latest parries as we do the same for it. A version of the virus that succeeds in one place may flop in another, depending on the context: local vaccination and infection histories, for instance, or how many elderly and immunocompromised individuals are around, and the degree to which everyone avoids trading public air. With the world’s immune landscape now so uneven, “it’s getting harder for the virus to do that synchronized wave that Omicron did this time last year,” says Verity Hill, an evolutionary virologist at Yale. It will keep trying to creep around our defenses, says Pavitra Roychoudhury, who’s monitoring SARS-CoV-2 variants at the University of Washington, but “I don’t think we need to have alarm-bell emojis for every variant that comes out.”[Read: The coronavirus’s next move]Some particularly worrying variants and subvariants will continue to arise, with telltale signs, Roychoudhury told me: a steep increase in wastewater surveillance, followed by a catastrophic climb in hospitalizations; a superfast takeover that kicks other coronavirus strains off the stage in a matter of days or weeks. Omens such as these hint at a variant that’s probably so good at circumventing existing immune defenses that it will easily sicken just about everyone again—and cause enough illness overall that a large number of cases turn severe. Also possible is a future variant that is inherently more virulent, adding risk to every new case. In extreme versions of these scenarios, tests, treatments, and masks might need to come back into mass use; researchers may need to concoct a new vaccine recipe  at an accelerated pace. But that’s a threshold that most variations of SARS-CoV-2 will not clear—including, it seems so far, XBB.1.5. Right now, Hodcroft told me, “it’s hard to imagine that anything we’ve been seeing in the last few months would really cause a rush to do a vaccine update,” or anything else similarly extreme. “We don’t make a new flu vaccine every time we see a new variant, and we see those all through the year.” Our current crop of BA.5-focused shots is not a great match for XBB.1.5, as Suthar and his colleagues have found, at least on the antibody front. But antibodies aren't the only defenses at play—and Suthar told me it’s still far better to have the new vaccine than not.In the U.S., wastewater counts and hospitalizations are ticking upward, and XBB.1.5 is quickly elbowing out its peers. But the estimated infection rise doesn’t seem nearly as steep as the ascension of the original Omicron variant, BA.1 (though our tracking is now poorer). XBB.1.5 also isn’t dominating equally in different parts of the country—and Truelove points out that it doesn’t yet seem tightly linked to hospitalizations in the places where it’s gained traction so far. As tempting as it may be to blame any rise in cases and hospitalizations on the latest subvariant, our own behaviors are at least as important. Drop-offs in vaccine uptake or big jumps in mitigation-free mingling can drive spikes in illness on their own. “We were expecting a wave already, this time of year,” Hill told me. Travel is up, masking is down. And just 15 percent of Americans over the age of 5 have received a bivalent shot.The pace at which new SARS-CoV-2 variants and subvariants take over could eventually slow, but the experts I spoke with weren’t sure this would happen. Immunity across the globe remains patchy; only a subset of countries have access to updated bivalent vaccines, while some countries are still struggling to get first doses into millions of arms. And with nearly all COVID-dampening mitigations “pretty much gone” on a global scale, Hodcroft told me, it’s gotten awfully easy for the coronavirus to keep experimenting with new ways to stump our immune defenses. XBB.1.5 is both the product and the catalyst of unfettered spread—and should that continue, the virus will take advantage again.

When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”[Peter A. Shulman: What infrastructure really means]Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history. “The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.[Read: What Joe Biden has (and hasn’t) accomplished]These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.[Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class]Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Communities can be amazingly resilient after traumas. Londoners banded together during the German Blitz bombings of World War II, and rebuilt the city afterward. When I visited the Thai island of Phuket six months after the 2004 tsunami killed thousands in the region and displaced even more, I found a miraculous recovery in progress, and in many places, little remaining evidence of the tragedy. It was inspirational.Going from surviving to thriving is crucial for healing and growth after a disaster, and scholars have shown that it can be a common experience. Often, the worst conditions bring out the best in people as they work together for their own recovery and that of their neighbors.COVID-19 appears to be resistant to this phenomenon, unfortunately. The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished. Many people—perhaps including you—are still wandering alone, without the company of friends and loved ones to help rebuild their life.If your life has not yet gone back to its 2019-era “normal,” you are not alone. In a poll conducted in March 2022 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 59 percent of respondents said they had not fully returned to their pre-pandemic activities.One of the routines that remains disrupted is work, which for millions of Americans went from a social experience to one of isolation: sitting behind a computer screen, miles away from others. And it probably won’t return to “normal,” especially for office jobs. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of people working from home more than tripled from 2019 to 2021. Universal remote work is no longer necessary from a public-health standpoint, yet in 2022, 59 percent of those who say their jobs can mainly be done from home are still working at home all or most of the time. Most are doing this by choice, despite the fact that 60 percent say they feel less connected to their co-workers than they had before the pandemic.[Read: The hidden toll of remote work]More serious for happiness is that many people now prioritize socializing for fun less than they used to in the “before times.” Friends whom I’ve recently seen for the first time since 2020 tell me they still almost never go to parties or to others’ homes, even though they used to go out frequently before the pandemic. In a poll that the Pew Research Center conducted in May 2022, 21 percent of respondents said that socializing had become more important to them since the coronavirus outbreak, but 35 percent said it had become less important.Some people are probably seeing their loved ones less because of continued fear of disease. But when I’ve pressed friends for an explanation, the typical response has been, “I just got out of the habit.” This anecdotal evidence is backed up by data: Most respondents in a spring 2022 survey of American adults said they found it harder to form relationships now, and a quarter felt anxious about socializing. Only 9 percent were worried about being physically near others; the biggest source of anxiety (shared by 29 percent) was “not knowing what to say or how to interact.” Many of us have simply forgotten how to be friends.This growing habitual loneliness is a public-health crisis. Research has consistently shown that isolation is linked to depression and anxiety. It has also been shown to lead to premature mortality, worsen cardiovascular health, increase inflammation, and disrupt hormones and sleep.[Listen: How to know you’re lonely]This harm is not equally distributed. Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies have found that in America, rates of unhappiness rose from before the pandemic (2012–18) to after the worst phase (2021). However, of those studied, two groups saw their rate of unhappiness rise more significantly than the others: single people and those who did not regularly attend a religious service. People in these groups likely have less automatically programmed social interaction than others.Children, too, may be especially vulnerable. Kids born during the pandemic missed a crucial window of socialization, and a study of babies in Dublin published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood found that they are, on average, exhibiting deficits in communication. Compared with those born from 2008 to 2011, they are less likely to say one definite or meaningful word, to point, or to wave bye-bye by 12 months of age. Most of these babies enjoyed less interaction with a variety of people than they would have in the absence of a pandemic. We have no idea what the long-term implications will be.If habitual loneliness is causing so much misery, why aren’t the habitually lonely taking greater steps to fight it? Why aren’t they insisting on working in person and reconnecting with friends? One possible answer is that, as research has shown, loneliness likely inhibits our executive function, which we need in order to deal with our distress appropriately. Think of a time when you felt very lonely, and instead of doing what you really needed to do—call people, get outside, and be social—you cocooned on the sofa by yourself.Loneliness, like homelessness or poverty, tends to be self-perpetuating: Much as it is harder to get on your feet once you no longer have a place to sleep and shower, an address, or a phone, social isolation leads to behavior that leads to even more isolation. If you’ve been seeking remote work instead of in-person work for convenience, choosing solitary activities over group ones because of awkwardness, or electing not to reestablish old friendships because of sheer torpor, you may be stuck in a pattern of learned loneliness.To break out of the cycle, you might need to try an “opposite signal” strategy. Your inertia probably tells you that getting dressed and going to work will be a hassle, and that inviting someone over for dinner will be uncomfortable. You should do these things anyway. Think of it like starting a workout routine after a long sedentary period (another common COVID problem). At first, your system complains bitterly, but if you push through the complaints, you soon find that you can exercise (or socialize) easily, because it has become routine and because you can feel how it improves your life.[Read: Sedentary pandemic life is bad for our happiness]There is no law of nature saying that if you wait long enough, you will be happy again. You must proactively manage your own environment. Insist on working in person with others; become a hub for physical gatherings of friends. If your circumstances make COVID a continuing threat—say, if you are immunocompromised—taking the initiative in forming plans that fit your needs is particularly important. I have friends who are very social in their home, for example, but who test all their guests because of their particular health status. In doing so, they are accepting what is really just a minor inconvenience in order to maintain their “friendship chops.”COVID-19 may well have cut a groove of loneliness into your life. Going with what is easy and convenient in work and friendship cuts that groove deeper, making your isolation harder to escape. But if you can remember the warmth and happiness of your old social self and make a few changes, 2023 can be a year of renewal.

It’s hard not to be fixated on the drama unfolding in the House of Representatives, where the Republican Party is having a nervous breakdown in full public view. This crisis is entirely of the party’s own making. For decades it has whipped its base into a righteous fury by promising radical policies that offer emotional satisfaction to their hardline constituents — from rolling back Medicare and Social Security to defaulting on the national debt to eliminating whole government agencies. But because these policies are totally unworkable, they never happen.

The lesson that the base has internalized is that cowardly moderates were constantly betraying it. The solution now is to maintain a permanent vise grip on the House speaker, ensuring that he or she will always do what the hardliners want. This is, as many have noted, a recipe for permanent blackmail and constant chaos.

The Republican Party’s troubles are severe. Newt Gingrich told Axios that the party is in its worst shape in almost six decades. But it is not alone. In many countries around the world, populists are flailing.

Look at Britain, where Brexit — perhaps the ultimate 21st-century populist cause — has caused havoc within the Conservative Party, which used to be described as the world’s oldest and most successful political party. Britain has had five prime ministers in the six years since 2016; the prior five prime ministers spanned more than 30 years. The self-defeating decision to exit its largest market, the European Union, continues to depress the country’s economic prospects, and it remains the weakest of the Group of Seven economies. In the Group of 20, only Russia is projected to do worse than Britain in the near future.

The story is similar in South America. Even though that continent has been swept up in populism from both the right and left, neither version is doing very well. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro lost his bid for reelection, but the winner, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, will also find it hard to implement some of his most radical promises. In Chile, left-wing populists coalesced around a plan to completely redo the country’s constitution, putting forward a new one that even many left-of-center politicians regarded as extreme and unworkable. In the ensuing referendum, 86 percent of Chileans turned out, rejecting the new constitution by a whopping 62 percent.

On the other side of the globe, in Australia, right-wing politicians had embraced Trump-style policies and rhetoric. Under Prime Minister Scott Morrison, they spoke a language that mirrored the grievance politics of older, White voters and scared the country about the dangers of immigration, crime and “African gangs” who were supposedly marauding through Victoria. But Morrison bungled the covid-19 pandemic and had little success with the economy. In the recent elections, Australia’s conservatives suffered their worst loss ever, and the even more extreme United Australia and One Nation Parties did poorly as well. The new Labor prime minister enjoys an extraordinarily high approval rating.

Why is this happening? Populism thrives as an opposition movement. It denounces the establishment, encourages fears and conspiracy theories about nefarious ruling elites, and promises emotional responses rather than actual programs (build a wall, ban immigration, stop trade). But once in government, the shallowness of its policy proposals is exposed, and its leaders can’t blame others as easily. Meanwhile, if non-populist forces are sensible and actually get things done, they defang some of the populist right.

Look at the United States, where President Biden’s moderate style, serious demeanor and practical policymaking have given him large legislative accomplishments without triggering a massive electoral backlash. Now, he does benefit by being an old, White man. Had Barack Obama enacted the same policies, I have a feeling we would be hearing much more talk of Obama’s dangerous socialism and un-American policies, complete with racial innuendos.

The poster child for populism has always been Argentina. Juan Perón and his even more charismatic wife, Eva, built a powerful mass movement that attacked the elites and promised to become the voice of the people. In fact, they destroyed Argentina’s economy. What had once been one of the world’s wealthiest countries in the 1910s was, only a few decades later, an economic basket case. Ever since, Argentine populists have promised voters the moon, run up staggering debts, and then routinely defaulted. But now things have soured for them — prompting the Economist to observe that Argentina’s populist movement “is at its lowest ebb.” “Peronism is obviously the main culprit for the situation of Argentina,” former president Eduardo Duhalde told the magazine. “Today we’re in our worst moment.”

These trends are not permanent. The world’s complicated problems will always allow for someone who proposes answers that are simple, seductive and wrong. But let us hope that 2023 will see populism exposed for the sham that it is.

While the selection of a new House Speaker is dominating headlines, Congress should not lose focus on a key issue at the heart of the institution: continuity of Congress.
Three developments in the past year have highlighted the urgency of this issue.
In an April 2022 report, AEI’s Continuity of Government Commission identified key obstacles to Congress being able to function after a catastrophe resulting in the death of many members. The core problem is that the House of Representatives would take several months to fill vacancies caused by a catastrophe, potentially leaving the House short of a quorum and unable to conduct business. The commission’s core recommendation was for a constitutional amendment enabling temporary appointments to the House until special elections could be held.Several prominent constitutional law scholars have affirmed the meaning of the Constitution’s quorum requirement (see full letter below). The Constitution makes clear that a majority of the House (218) constitutes a quorum. While there have been attempts to define the quorum requirement as less than a majority, the constitutional text and structure, legislative history, historical practice, and judicial precedent confirm that Congress cannot conduct its business without a true majority of its members.The House Modernization Committee spent considerable time studying the issue of continuity of Congress last year. It recognized continuity of Congress as a key issue. To address this issue, both the House and the Senate must act, and the Committee made a recommendation for joint House and Senate study of the issue.
Please see the attached letter from leading constitutional scholars Akhil Reed Amar, Philip C. Bobbitt, Charles J. Cooper, Michael C. Dorf, Scott A. Keller, and H. Jefferson Powell, who argue that the Constitution “expressly requires a majority of each House of Congress to conduct the nation’s business.”

Learn more: 21 Years After 9/11, Congress Still Isn’t Ready for a Doomsday Scenario | Continuity of Government: Presidential Succession | The Continuity of Congress | Lessons Learned from the 2020 Election
The post As Congress Reconvenes, It Should Take Steps to Ensure Its Own Continuity appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

We are able to say that communist central planning failed because we can compare its results with those of capitalism. We can look at nighttime photos of the Korean peninsula; we can contrast Soviet bread lines with the groaning shelves of an American supermarket. 
Imagine a nearby Universe, though, where on Earth Prime, Marxist-Leninist revolution had somehow triumphed globally while reducing the most advanced countries to ruins. Rebuilding from the ashes would have felt like progress, as would the spread of industrialization on the preexisting pattern to previously agrarian societies. The regime would continue to fund science, scientists would continue to make discoveries, engineers would sometimes design new products based on those discoveries, and some of those new products would make it into the next five-year plan and be produced and distributed. Progress of some sort, then, would continue, and every increment of it would be credited to the productive power of socialism. All setbacks and disappointments, meanwhile, could be blamed on bad weather or the still-incomplete evolution from Homo sapiens to Homo sovieticus. No one would have any firm comparative basis for arguing that the system was irredeemably dysfunctional and that the world could be far, far richer under different institutions.
I have come to believe that we are in an analogous (though far less dire!) situation today. A revolution swept the world a half-century or so ago, and all of us today live under its sway. As a result, the world today may very well be much poorer than it otherwise could have been – and the existence and extent of that massive loss are all but invisible.
The revolution I’m talking about is most closely associated with environmentalism, but I think it’s critically important not to conflate the two. I regard good stewardship of the natural world to be a bedrock component of “living wisely and agreeably and well,” and humanity’s record on that score during industrialization was abysmal. Accordingly, the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s – the growing recognition of the grievous harms inflicted by industry on both the natural world and human health, and the firming resolve to do something about it – must be judged as a large and necessary step forward in human progress. 
No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash – the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.
It was primarily through environmentalism that the anti-Promethean backlash manifested itself and exerted influence over events, yet there is no fundamental, necessary connection between concern for the health and beauty of the natural world and antipathy toward – in Francis Bacon’s formulation, the use of science and technology “for the relief of man’s estate.” Indeed, as is now becoming clear in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused. 
Yet if the connection between environmentalism and the anti-Promethean backlash was theoretically contingent, in historical context it was eminently understandable that these two separate streams of thought met and merged. To see why, we need to understand why it was that the environmental movement emerged when it did. Industry had been loud and dirty from the beginning, and thus from early days had inspired romantic revulsion at its “dark satanic mills.” Why did it take until the 1960s for a mass environmental movement to emerge? 
I believe that we can attribute the timing to the maturation of two deep social trends triggered by the spread of material plenty, and to the specific historical context in which those trends were building momentum. The first trend was the “postmaterialist, postmodern” cultural shift documented by Ronald Inglehart: As economic security spread throughout the populace, priorities shifted from physical security and material accumulation to self-expression and quality of life. With the confidence that hearth and home were safe and sound, people naturally turned their gaze to their broader surroundings and began to care more about the beauty and healthiness of those surroundings. Around the world, we see evidence for an “environmental Kuznets curve” in which industrialization leads first to worsening environmental degradation on all fronts but then, when a certain income per capita threshold is reached (something in the neighborhood of $10,000 a year), many environmental indicators begin to show improvement. We can think of environmental quality as a luxury good for which demand increases disproportionately as income rises.
The second trend, described in my last essay, was the growing power of loss aversion in step with the widening and deepening of affluence. As people acquired more, they had more to lose, and accordingly began worrying more about holding on to what they had. Greater attention to preserving our natural patrimony was one result; so was greater concern with environmental contaminants and their threats to human health. Worth mentioning again here is the economist Charles Jones’ paper on “Life and Growth”: If the ascribed value of human life rises faster than the value of consumption, the optimal rate of consumption growth may fall well behind what is technologically and organizationally feasible. 
The rapid growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s can thus be understood as a consequence of the ripening of these two trends, a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance of cultural attitudes: on the one hand, the high-minded broadening of moral horizons and greater empathy for the non-human “other”; on the other, the self-regarding “I’ve got mine, Jack” stance that regards change as not worth the bother if it carries any possibility of loss. 
Environmentalism, then, was a consequence of mass affluence. But its specific character was profoundly shaped by the fact that humanity’s achievement of mass affluence occurred against the backdrop of the 20th century’s parade of high-tech horrors: two world wars in which the industrial technologies of mass production were adapted to the cause of pitiless mass destruction; the Holocaust, in which atavistic savagery was carried out using the latest technologies and organizational techniques; and finally, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the looming specter of civilization-ending nuclear annihilation. Those nightmarish events put an end to the heady, naïve faith in Progress with a capital P that had reigned during the 19th century, and among an influential swath of society they induced the equal and opposite error of anti-humanistic technological despair.
No doubt the heightened sense of technology’s dark side helped both to raise environmental awareness in the first place and then to infuse that awareness with anti-Promethean fervor. Because people had been bludgeoned repeatedly with other evidence of technology’s potential for misuse, they were better able to see through industry boosterism – “Better living through chemistry!” – and recognize that there was a problem. But for the same reason, those at the forefront of the new environmental movement were strongly inclined to see technology, not as the means by which we could mitigate and undo the harms we had caused to the natural world, but as the very root of the problem.
Here’s how I put it in The Age of Abundance:

The new environmental consciousness was made possible by a fundamental change in the terms of humanity’s coexistence with the natural world. Throughout the 10 millennia of agricultural civilization, most people lived their lives in direct confrontation with natural constraints. Wresting their sustenance from the soil, subject to the vagaries of weather, pests, and disease, they pitted their efforts against a pitiless foe and prayed for the best. Famines and plagues on the one hand, deforestation and soil erosion and extinctions on the other – such was the butcher’s bill for the incessant and inconclusive struggle. Industrialization’s alliance between science and technology, however, broke the long stalemate and won for humanity an epochal victory: the creation of a world of technological and organizational artifice, insulated from nature’s cruelties and reflecting human purposes and aspirations. The cost of that triumph was immense, to humanity and the natural world alike. But when, in the middle of the twentieth century, Americans became the first people in history to achieve a durable conquest of nature, they were typically magnanimous in victory. Nature, the old adversary, became an ally to be cherished and protected; the environmental movement, a kind of Marshall Plan.

Yet, from its outset, that movement was afflicted with a heavy dose of victor’s guilt. Writing in 1962, Rachel Carson set the tone with her overwrought denunciation of pesticides, which she condemned as irredeemably toxic and symptomatic of deeper ills. “The phrase ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance,” she proclaimed in Silent Spring’s concluding lines, “born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.” In an influential 1967 essay that broadened and deepened Carson’s line of attack, the historian Lynn White located the roots of the “ecological crisis” in the most fundamental assumptions of Western civilization – that is, in the basic tenets of Christianity. “By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects…,” White wrote. “Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

The fundamental error that has plagued the environmental movement from its outset is thus the mirror image of the error it rejects. In agrarian and then industrializing society, people saw themselves in an adversarial relationship with nature – a zero-sum struggle that they rooted for humanity to win. The environmental movement preserved the zero-sum vision of the relationship between humanity and nature; its innovation was to root for the other side.
The environmental movement we didn’t get but which we have always needed – and which now, under the pressure of climate change, we may be finally making our way toward creating – is one that rejects this zero-sum vision and with it the twin impostors of technological naïveté and technological despair. Such a movement would have as its polestar a vision of harmony between man and nature – a vision in which human flourishing through technology serves to preserve and protect the flourishing of the natural world. There have always been seeds of this higher environmental synthesis in the actually-existing movement. Think of the remarkable career of Stewart Brand, who has always combined an ecological sensibility with enthusiasm for improving our tools: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Or Richard Brautigan’s wonderful poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”:
One can imagine a world in which the dawning of environmental awareness instilled a sense of great technological challenge – and a sense of mission to rise to that challenge. Alas, that is not the world we were born into: In this timeline, environmentalism came into the world suffused with the spirit of anti-Promethean backlash.
And this is what happened as a result:

This is a chart of U.S. energy consumption per capita, which until around 1970 showed steady exponential growth of around 2 percent a year. The author calls this the “Henry Adams curve,” since the historian was an early observer of this phenomenon. But around 1970, the Henry Adams curve met the anti-Promethean backlash – and the backlash won.
The chart comes from Where Is My Flying Car? By J. Storrs Hall. It’s a weird, wacky book that rambles all over the place; it’s also brilliant, and it changed my mind about a matter of great importance. 
Before reading Hall, if I had seen this chart – and maybe I did see something like it before, I’m not sure – I would have had a completely different reaction. My response would have been along the lines of: “Wow, look at capitalism’s ever-increasing energy efficiency. We’re getting more GDP per kilowatt-hour than ever before, thanks to information technology and the steady dematerialization of economic life. All hail postmaterialist capitalism!”
But Hall argues convincingly that the plateauing of the Henry Adams curve didn’t represent the natural evolution of capitalism in the Information Age. The bending of that curve, he claims, constituted self-inflicted injury. Our midcentury dreams of future progress – flying cars, nuclear power too cheap to meter, moon bases, and underwater cities – didn’t fail to materialize simply because we were lousy at guessing how technology would actually develop. They failed to materialize because the anti-Promethean backlash, aided by loss-averse apathy, left them strangled in their cribs.
He is especially convincing on nuclear power. My prior impression was that nuclear power had always been a high-cost white elephant propped up only by subsidies, but Hall documents that back in the 1950s and 60s, the cost of new plants was falling about 25 percent for every doubling of total capacity – a classic learning-curve trajectory that was abruptly halted in the 1970s by suffocating regulation. In 1974 the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished and the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established. In the almost half-century since then, there has not been a single new nuclear power plant approved and then subsequently built.
Hall is also fairly persuasive that flying cars could be a reality today – they could have been a reality decades ago – but for legal and regulatory obstacles. Likewise, he makes a good case that the immense promise of nanotechnology has been subverted by scientific careerists who succeeded in diverting funds toward more business-as-usual research that they successfully relabeled as nanotech-related. He even has a plausible argument that “cold fusion” research actually did uncover interesting phenomena deserving of further investigation. 
In my prior two essays, I’ve identified two factors behind capitalism’s decline in dynamism, both of them naturally occurring consequences of economic development: on the one hand, the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit; on the other, the growing power of loss aversion amidst rising material plenty. But Hall and further research inspired by reading him have convinced me that there’s more to the story. Capitalism didn’t just stumble; capitalism had its legs broken.
Energy is the ultimate general-purpose technology. The possibilities for the manipulation of matter to serve human purposes are to a considerable degree a function of how much energy we can throw at a given problem. For the last half-century and counting, we have basically given up the quest for new possibilities. We think of the “energy crisis” as something that happened in the 70s; we think of oil embargoes and gas lines. Well, worries about acute fuel shortages came and went, but it turns out that the energy crisis never really ended.
Hall’s book has caused a stir, especially in tech circles and among those interested in “progress studies” and an “abundance agenda.” His coinages – the “Henry Adams curve,” “ergophobia” (the fear of any sufficiently potent source of new energy as inherently menacing), and the “Machiavelli effect” (in which innovation always faces an uphill struggle, as those threatened by it are real and known while its beneficiaries are future and hypothetical) – are being picked up and recirculated. And his book, originally self-published, is now out in a handsome reprint by Stripe Press.
But Hall’s central contention – that the decline in dynamism is to a considerable degree self-inflicted – remains far from the conventional wisdom. And the main reason, I believe, is that our vision is blinkered by the limits of the social-science tools we use to make sense of things. The root of the problem is this: You can’t measure what doesn’t exist.
The way economists have approached this issue is to ask the question: what has been the effect of environmental regulation on economic growth? The question has received considerable attention, especially decades ago when the energy crisis was in the news and the dramatic drop in productivity growth was new and deeply puzzling. Given the coincidence in timing, many observers hypothesized that the productivity slowdown was the result of the rapid expansion of “social regulation” (i.e., health, safety, and environmental regulation) during the 60s and 70s. To measure the impact of environmental regulation, economists typically estimated the costs of compliance and then the effect on total output; because costs were now being incurred to produce an output not included in GDP (e.g., cleaner air), some negative impact on measured productivity was inevitable. Estimates varied, of course, but in general the compliance costs weren’t terribly high, and the industries subject to relatively high compliance costs accounted for a relatively small share of total GDP. Accordingly, the estimated impact of these extra costs wasn’t that dramatic. Meanwhile, when you add in the benefits of, say, cleaner air’s effect on health and well-being, the net welfare effect of most environmental regulations looks solidly positive.
But such estimates only capture the effect on the production of existing goods and services. They make no attempt to measure the welfare loss incurred because energy scarcity prevented the development of entirely new goods and services. They make no attempt to measure what dizzying heights output could have reached if only the progress of the Henry Adams curve had been maintained. Imagine if computer manufacturing were heavily regulated and that semiconductor technology had been basically regulated out of existence. Economists could estimate the impact of regulation on the cost of producing room-sized vacuum-tube behemoths, but that would tell us nothing about what we had actually lost by forgoing decades of Moore’s Law.
Furthermore, what changed wasn’t just the imposition of new regulations. What changed as well was the degree of government support of research and development. And more broadly, what changed was the whole culture’s orientation toward the future. Among educated elites, people more or less stopped thinking about the possibilities of harnessing vast new powers and physical capabilities. We continued to look forward to progress in health and medicine, and of course the rapid breakthroughs in information technology generated excitement. But as far as progress in the physical world of atoms was concerned, expectations shrank dramatically. Progress was redefined to mean cleaning up our messes, learning to live within limits by using resources more efficiently, and sharing what we have more equitably. In particular, the development of new energy sources like solar and wind was viewed simply as a means of replacing fossil fuels – not as a way of pushing past current limits toward energy abundance. Only now, in the past few years, are dreams of a bigger, bolder future starting to attract adherents again.
Hall constructs his narrative as a story with villains – namely, the nature-worshiping romantics of the environmental movement who led the anti-Promethean backlash. I understand where he’s coming from, but I can’t see it the same way. Although I can imagine an environmental movement that was ecomodernist from the outset, I don’t for a minute believe that such a movement was an actual live option that we somehow failed to choose. When the accumulating evidence of massive environmental degradation – dirty air, fouled lakes and rivers, iconic species on the brink of extinction, ubiquitous litter – finally sufficed to trigger a paradigm shift in people’s thinking, how could the dominant reaction have been anything other than horror and anger at the scale of the casual, thoughtless destruction? How could the immediate response to “what is to be done?” have been anything other than to try to restrain the technologies that were causing and threatening harm?
Ultimately, it’s the dialectical nature of history that is to blame. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could proceed frictionlessly from thesis to higher synthesis, but history rarely allows that shortcut. Rejection of the status quo is often the first step toward improving on the status quo; we need antithesis to open up the way from thesis to synthesis. There are some encouraging signs now that we may at last be groping toward a higher environmental synthesis – a synthesis in which we see humans and our technology not as standing outside of and apart from nature, but as that part of nature with the unique and vital responsibility of caring for the whole. Yes, we have made serious mistakes and we will have to pay for them: In particular, the problem of climate change is much harder today because of the widespread turn against nuclear power. But if we are now beginning to recognize those mistakes, and to find our way back to the path to a brighter future, it makes little sense to curse the steps that have brought us to this point.
Photo credit: iStock
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One of the uncomfortable but empowering lessons of going on a skeptical journey to understand the world we live in a little better is the realization that most bits of conventional wisdom floating around in the public consciousness are wrong. Essentially, if you picked up knowledge from popular culture rather than a reliable source, it is likely not true. In fact, many mostly reliable sources get fooled at times as well. I am constantly running into bits of misinformation clogging my brain that have to be flushed out.

Also, “right and wrong” are not absolute binaries. Sometimes the “wrong” information may be oversimplified or lack appropriate nuance or context. It’s hard to boil down a complex scientific question to a one-liner meme that can spread through popular culture. And reality is always way more complex than you think.

Here is one meme that deserves to be flushed out – the notion that people generally should drink eight glasses of water per day. This is not a particularly harmful piece of misinformation (although it is not completely benign), but it is a good object lesson on why we should be generally skeptical of simplistic medical advice.

The origin of the myth is known – in 1945 the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board determined that adults need 84.5 ounces of water per day to remain healthy. However, this advice became distorted. First, the next sentence was the acknowledgment that “most” of this water will come from food. About 20% of water intake comes from actual food. But also, most of the things we drink are mostly water. Even coffee is mostly water, and no, it will not dehydrate you because of the caffeine. The water intake is far greater than the mild diuretic effect.

I supposes to enhance communication, the 84.5 oz became 64, because that can be translated into the 8×8 rule – eight glasses of eight ounces of water. And that was that – a misinterpreted statement became an enduring myth. But there is another layer also. This myth has been promoted by – the bottled water industry. Obviously they have a vested interest in people drinking more of their product, and they didn’t invent the myth, but they have happily promoted it.

The 8×8 myth persists, despite the fact that it is widely debunked online by numerous reasonable sources. It is a favorite myth to debunk for many medical sites. But it also remains widely spread. What is true is, of course, more complex.

First it is worth pointing out that there is zero evidence for the recommendation of eight glasses of water per day. It is based on no scientific information. There is no evidence of health benefits from following this rule, or harm from ignoring it. Also, as you probably have guessed, reality is far more complex than this one generic recommendation. As has been pointed out by numerous sources for years – hydration needs vary tremendously from person to person. They depend on the kind and amount of food consumed, the size of the person, physiological and medical parameters, the environment, and physical activity.

This was all known based upon basic understanding of human physiology. A recent study, however, sought empirical evidence to back this up. They studied what they call “water turnover”, which is essentially how much water people require from all sources. Here is their summary:

Water intake requirements largely reflect water turnover (WT), the water used by the body each day. We investigated the determinants of human WT in 5604 people from the ages of 8 days to 96 years from 23 countries using isotope-tracking (2H) methods. Age, body size, and composition were significantly associated with WT, as were physical activity, athletic status, pregnancy, socioeconomic status, and environmental characteristics (latitude, altitude, air temperature, and humidity). People who lived in countries with a low human development index (HDI) had higher WT than people in high-HDI countries.

So, how can we know how much water we need to drink to stay well-hydrated? Fortunately, evolution has perfected a method over hundreds of millions of years – it’s called thirst. Here is some nuanced advice for most people: Drink when you are thirsty. Make sure that you have access to fluid so that you can drink when you are thirsty. This is especially true if you are going to be in a particularly dry or hot environment, or engage in activity that will make you sweat. In such situations you may want to pre-hydrate a bit because you can get dehydrated very quickly when you are in such environments and not acclimated to them. You don’t have to drink pure water. Electrolyte drinks are good, and may even be preferred if you will not also be eating to replace electrolytes. Other sources of fluids are fine.

There are also specific medical conditions that may require people to either limit their fluid intake or drink more water than usual. If you have a history of kidney stones, for example, you will want to keep your urine pale. If you have any questions, speak to your doctor.

Is there any potential downside to overhydrating? Yes, although it is difficult to cause direct harm. You can overhydrate to the point that you dilute out your electrolytes, but it takes a lot of water to overwhelm your body’s homeostatic mechanisms. But it happens. Drinking too much water can disturb your sleep because you may need to get up at night to urinate. This is not a trivial thing – chronically poor sleep has many medical downsides. Using lots of single-use plastic water bottles is also harmful for the environment.

But perhaps the greatest harm that I see in my practice is simply confusing and distracting with useless misinformation people who want to live a healthy lifestyle. Most of the time when a patient says to me something to the effect that they are trying to lead a healthier lifestyle, they then rattle off a list of things that they are doing, most of which are useless. This list often includes drinking eight glasses of water per day. I would rather they focus on the things that will actually improve their health, rather than being lulled by misinformation into a false sense of being healthy.

This myth also fosters a simplistic, and wrong, understanding of human physiology. It is hard to measure the harm of such things, but it’s not helpful.

On New Year’s Day, this year a liminal moment between a bad 2022 and what is sure to be a worse 2023, how are we to mark the 50th anniversary of Britain’s ill-starred entry into the European Community? Perhaps some insight can be gleaned from the contemporary historiography of the British state itself. For the great historian J.G.A. Pocock, writing at the time of Britain’s entry to the EC, the “obvious absurdity” of the momentous decision that “neither empire nor commonwealth ever meant much in their consciousness, and that they were at heart Europeans all the time” came as a great psychic shock.
A New Zealander, previously secure in his oceanic British identity, Pocock worked through the implications of the moment in his 1973 lecture, “British History: a Plea for a New Subject”, composed, he would later note, immediately “after the great divorce which occurred when you told us that you were now Europeans, which we, as New Zealanders, were not”. It was a conceptual reordering which meant “you cared as little for our past as for our future”.
Yet, Pocock observed, the implications for Britain were just as great as for the home archipelago’s imperial cast-offs. For after all: “if it has been psychologically possible for them to annihilate the idea of the Commonwealth…it is not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility that ‘United Kingdom’ and even ‘Britain’ may some day become similarly inconvenient and be annihilated, or annihilate themselves, in their turn.”
Without a grand overseas project with which to occupy itself, the centre itself, focused on Westminster, may not hold. Future historians may find themselves writing of “a ‘Unionist’ or even a ‘British’ period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic Archipelago, and locating it between a date in the 13th, the 17th or the 19th centuries and a date in the 20th or the 21st.”
What evidence for this prediction can we find, a half-century later, in the collapsing British state of 2023? It is self-evident that the act of leaving the EU was an act of self-definition, a great inward turn to force the questions of what Britain is and what it should be back to the heart of national politics. Support for Brexit was closely aligned in the minds of its voters with a return to an economy of domestic industrial production, and to a drastic reduction in the historically unprecedented levels of inward migration to which the British political class had committed itself.
Yet the Brexit we got was another Brexit entirely: a vision of Britain as a global trading power entirely unmoored from the realities of its position, a product of the fact that our politicians, for all that effective governance of the UK remains beyond them, find our islands too small a stage for their talents. Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are each in their own ways exemplars of how the ideology of global Britain has made the British governing class incapable of running a small northwest European archipelago, prisoners of a delusion that Britain must always strive to be world-beating, even as it struggles to maintain parity with its closest neighbours.
For the Welsh political philosopher and former Labour MP David Marquand, writing in 1995 in a collection of essays engaging with Pocock’s grand conceptual reordering of our island story, such global pretensions were baked into Britishness from the start. As he observed, “for most of its history, the identity embodied by the British state was quintessentially global, oceanic, imperial and, by virtue of this, non- or at least extra-European”. The new British state’s justification was the consolidation of the various kingdoms of these islands in a grand imperial project, with the result being a vision of the British state and people which Marquand termed “whig imperialist”. And at its heart, he said, “lay the twin themes of globalism and constitutionalism. The British state was, by definition, a global state; and the British people, by definition, was a global people.”
More from this author Can Europe survive the age of strongmen?By Aris Roussinos 
As Marquand observed, “the Whig imperialist vision of the British state helped to shape the mentality of the entire political class, left as well as right”. Whig imperialist Britain was Britain. “The British state was the child as well as the parent of empire. Its iconography, its operational codes, the instinctive reflexes of its rulers and managers were stamped through and through with the presuppositions of empire.” Even as the empire fell away, its ghosts still haunt Westminster, in inverted form, as a needy internationalism and an aesthetic distaste for the homely and familiar. Unlike our European neighbours, whose revolutions and wars of national independence helped clarify a secure sense of nationhood, Britain’s relentless focus on the periphery left a hollow void at the centre, at least for its rulers. As Marquand, now a convert to Welsh nationalism, observes, “shorn of empire, ‘Britain’ had no meaning”.
This interpretation does much to explain the strange pathologies of the 21st-century Westminster class, and elucidates the strange mystery of why Britain, more or less uniquely in Europe, possesses a markedly anti-national commenting class (intelligentsia is not quite the right word), whose European pretensions, like the continental affectations of a Hyacinth Bucket, are simply those of the provincial petit bourgeois, repelled by the drab simplicities of home. It explains why Britain, for a European country, is uniquely at risk of self-dissolution by global economic forces, and why its governing class’s sense of national identity, as far as can be judged from its citizenship tests, is such thin gruel, entirely indistinguishable from vague internationalist norms of liberal tolerance. It explains the compulsion towards mass immigration, entirely inconsistent with the demands of British voters: for as the empire folded in on itself, sucking the empire’s global children in along with it like a collapsing star, it became easier to remake Britain in the image of the world than to shape the world in a way congenial to British desires.
Such an interpretation also explains the extraordinary ease with which Britain’s governing class has reduced the country to a powerless factotum of America’s global empire, and the degree to which such total self-abnegation of sovereignty is presented and experienced, not as a humiliation fetish but as the natural order of things, and the bedrock of Britain’s security. To maintain its global pretensions, the Westminster class has been forced into a posture of what Perry Anderson termed “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power”. It explains why our Right-wing populists are enamoured of globalised free markets even as they rail against “globalism”, why our state broadcaster functions as a vector of America’s new ideological fixations, and why our royals as well as our politicians look longingly at the better opportunities to be found in California. It explains, too, why our sole national institution, the NHS, sucks both staff and patients from around the world, finding its merely national mission too paltry for its dignity, and the humanitarian obligations of the British taxpayer too bountiful to be shared only among the British people.
Suggested readingThe revenge of the technocratsBy John Gray
For the British governing class, and its taste-making hangers on, Britain as a small European country is simply too small a stage to bother with. Yet instead of addressing these tensions, surely the underlying cause of the failures of British governance which drove Brexit in the first place, the result of Brexit has only been to heighten them: more immigration, the Indo-Pacific tilt, the endless attempt to summon a Global Britain into being in a post-imperial world. The contradictions between Britain’s world-leading pretensions and shabby material realities are now becoming too sharp for the state to effectively manage. If Brexit has foregrounded one essential fact of British politics it is that the problems facing the country are rooted in its governing class: a class which swooped together with organic solidarity after Brexit to prevent any democratic attempt to redirect its course, and frittered away the country’s economic sovereignty on dreams of global relevance.
As Pocock observed, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which accelerated the consolidation of the British state in Westminster were the result of England’s governing class attempting to resolve their own political divisions through the incorporation of their neighbours in a greater, shared project. For “the English did not want such a war, but found that they had to fight it with each other; and they hated it so much that they imposed it on Scotland and Ireland in the attempt to resolve it. The imperial sovereignty they imposed on other nations was an effect of the imperial sovereignty they had imposed on themselves.”
Britain’s entry into the EC was itself, likewise, a failed attempt to recapture a greater stage on which Britain could play a global role, and foundered on the same tensions, the inward-looking domesticity of the British electorate rebelling against the outward-facing cosmopolitanism of its governing caste. Always the foil of other nations’ acts of self-definition — a process now continuing, with Scotland, even in the home islands — Britain never saw the need or found the occasion to do so for itself. In the collapse of Britain’s empire, then, the only anti-imperial project that failed was that of liberating Britain from its own rulers.
More from this author It's time for AnglofuturismBy Aris Roussinos 
But is it possible to liberate Britain from Westminster while maintaining the Union? The Union’s collapse would surely only leave us stuck with the same governing elite on a smaller and more claustrophobic scale, just as the cosmopolitan pretensions of the various Celtic nationalisms are, if anything, even more hysterical and absurd than those of the Union as a whole. Yet any attempt at a British Meiji restoration similarly falters on the unavoidable fact that the British governing class has very little interest in the governance of Britain itself — instead it recoils from it, as a distraction from the glittering possibilities of the wider world.
Such an elite makes a shaky foundation for a project of national renewal, yet without a total overhaul of Britain’s governing class, the remaining time in which to advance such a project is rapidly slipping away, before the nation dissolves itself with an affected smirk of enlightened tolerance. The revolt against Brussels then, was always just the opening salvo, on a continental front, of a far more difficult campaign: to become a prosperous European country, Britain must still liberate itself from the self-defeating foibles and global aspirations of the Westminster class.
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Computers become increasingly capable and powerful by the year and new hardware is often the most visible cue for technological progress. However, even with the shiniest hardware, the software that plays a critical role inside many systems is too often antiquated, and in some cases decades old.

This failing appears to be a key factor in why Southwest Airlines couldn’t return to business as usual the way other airlines did after last week’s major winter storm. More than 15,000 of its flights were canceled starting on Dec. 22, including more than 2,300 canceled this past Thursday — almost a week after the storm had passed.

It’s been an open secret within Southwest for some time, and a shameful one, that the company desperately needed to modernize its scheduling systems. Software shortcomings had contributed to previous, smaller-scale meltdowns, and Southwest unions had repeatedly warned about it. Without more government regulation and oversight, and greater accountability, we may see more fiascos like this one, which most likely stranded hundreds of thousands of Southwest passengers — perhaps more than a million — over Christmas week. And not just for a single company, as the problem is widespread across many industries.

This problem — relying on older or deficient software that needs updating — is known as incurring “technical debt,” meaning there is a gap between what the software needs to be and what it is. While aging code is a common cause of technical debt in older companies — such as with airlines which started automating early — it can also be found in newer systems, because software can be written in a rapid and shoddy way, rather than in a more resilient manner that makes it more dependable and easier to fix or expand. As you might expect, the former is cheaper and quicker.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This week I asked you all to send in your New Year’s resolutions for 2023, and you answered the call: We had hundreds of responses. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The IRS really, really should have audited Donald Trump.
Harry, Meghan, and the men who hate them
My mother just died of COVID in Wuhan.
Clean SlatesNew Year’s resolutions might seem silly or pointless. And yet we make them, I suppose, because at the stroke of midnight, we feel like we’ve been presented with a box of 365 shiny new days. The new year is as close to a clean slate as human beings can get without a governor’s signature on a pardon. We know the feeling will pass, maybe even by morning (and certainly the first time we actually go back to the gym), but we take a shot at renewal anyway, before the optimism wears off.This year, I decided to dodge writing about my own resolutions by asking you to share yours. A correspondent named Jean suggests that I am encouraging a bad habit: “New Year’s resolutions are quaint edicts that betray our capacity for growth by distracting us from taking on real endeavors that fulfill life goals.” Maybe, but you know what, Jean? Let’s do it anyway. Below are some of the answers you sent: funny, touching, cynical, sensible, and most of all—hopeful. (Some of these responses were edited for length and clarity.)Most of you seemed determined to shake off the gloom of the past few years. “I want to laugh more,” Norene wrote, “the laughter that makes you cry and makes your sides ache.” Susan shared that her “intention for 2023 is to replace mean thoughts with kind and patient ones.” Karin resolved to take “everything (especially politics) and everyone (especially Trump) less seriously and try to be the best person I can.” Caroline went a bit further: “I resolve not to take anything personally or overthink or politicize any comments … just play dumb and not engage, like a robot, like I’m Siri.” I think there’s something between silence and rage, Caroline, but I understand the desire to keep our daily interactions calm and civil. Perhaps Ananya said it most succinctly: “I want to be better at understanding others.”(In a similar vein, my old friend and longtime Naval War College colleague Pete Dombrowski sent me a note saying his resolution was a perennial one for him: “talk less, listen more,” an aspiration I share. But Pete, like me, grew up a loud, working-class Massachusetts guy, and we both admit that resolution isn’t going anywhere for either of us.)As a man of a certain age, I keenly felt Randall’s commitment to “stop complaining and focus on being a better person,” because of his awareness of the inevitable emptying of the hourglass. “I’m headed for age 70 in a few months,” he wrote, “and am becoming a curmudgeon. It’s not how I want to live the last chapters of my life.” I’d say there’s nothing wrong with being a curmudgeon—it’s my guilty pleasure—but to live with gratitude and an acceptance of our mortality is a fine realization not only on New Year’s Day, but every day.Several resolutions shared a commitment to return to the world and contact other humans. Jeremy spoke for many of you when he said, “Less screen time, more real-world time.” Sarah resolved to “spend more early evenings outdoors, enjoying twilight.” Ann-Marie intends to “follow the example of a good friend and, from time to time, send handwritten snail-mailed notes/letters to family and friends.” I think that’s a lovely practice, and I wish I did it more often myself. Jackie had a delightful idea: “I want to invite our teenagers’ friends over for dinner as often as I can, because it’s fun and nothing breeds optimism like listening to kids planning their future.” I have a teenage daughter and I have taught young people for most of my life, and that one (as the kids would say) hit me right in the feels.Several of you wrote to say that you are facing severe personal challenges, including heart trouble, cancer, lung disease, and alcohol dependency. You all resolved to fight through them as best as you can in 2023. And so to Pamela, Stan, Francie, Yvonne, and many others, I send my best wishes and my hope that we will gather again to share your resolutions for 2024.Some of you had more idiosyncratic resolutions. “I intend to eliminate very and really from my vocabulary,” Virginia wrote. I really agree and very much hope … Ugh. Sorry. And although I asked you to keep your messages to a sentence or two, I have to give Jochen, writing from Germany, a little space for his next project:
I would like to continue and increasingly support biodiversity in urban areas. For this purpose, I developed and built a water-saving mini garden, to be able to support biodiversity even for small spaces, like balconies or street corners. According to my observation, thanks to drip irrigation, you now need 50% less water and the insects (and humans) love it when it blooms.
That seems a lot more complicated than my big idea of going back down one pants size, but a plan’s a plan.Ed’s resolution was to have “someone repair the wristwatch my dad bought me for my high-school graduation in 1985, so I can wear it again.” I was touched by this, because my father used to wear an Omega that he was given by his company back in 1966 for 25 years of service, and when he died in 2012, I found it in his jewelry box and I wanted to wear it to keep a piece of him near me. I was crushed when our local watchmaker told me that the pieces it needed didn’t even exist anymore. I hope Ed gets to wear his dad’s watch.Speaking of fathers, Charles sent me a longish list that included celebrating his father’s 90th birthday. I especially liked his aspiration to watch Mannix—one of my favorite vintage television shows. I can’t say I share his desire to “drive with the top down in a snowstorm,” but his last box-check was to “revel in at least one part of each day,” and I have to admit that zipping down I-95 in a Mustang during a blizzard might count.Jo, meanwhile, is determined to break a bad habit. “I really must make a concerted effort to stop eating in bed, something my husband flatly forbade as grotesque when he was alive and if there is an afterlife there’s no doubt that he looks on in horror every time I do it.” I think eating in bed is kind of icky, too, but Jo also has other plans, and I wish her success in returning to school in middle age this year to study photojournalism. Cathy, a physician, has more humble ambitions: “I want to learn to type on my phone with BOTH my thumbs. (I am 75).” Go for it, Doc; I still can’t do it.Some of you are charging right at 2023 with angry-rhino determination. Joseph is going to “finish Volume 2 of the five-volume world history I’m writing.” (Five?) Edward is going to “spend the year mastering comedy to the best of my ability” and go out on the road doing stand-up. The aspiring screenwriter David wrote that his goal for 2023 is to “take the steps to land a paid screenwriting gig even if it’s for a cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie starring Carrie Underwood.” Hey—there’s nothing wrong with Hallmark movies (or Carrie Underwood). My friend Jay Black has written a few of them, and they’re as American as a Dunkin’ Donuts hot chocolate.Also, my ego demands that I support Michele, whose resolution is “to be an accomplished writer and author like Tom Nichols,” and I must also applaud Judy (writing from Budapest), who said she will “finally subscribe to The Atlantic so I can support serious journalism and read more outstanding writing by you and a long list of other exceptional writers.” Now that’s positive thinking, and I can only encourage more of it. But it was our correspondent Bekke who took top honors for facing 2023 with confidence: “I will gain another 5 lbs (seriously). Otherwise, I’m pretty perfect.” Darn right, Bekke.Thank you all for writing—and for reading this past year. This is my last Daily for 2022, and I wish you all a peaceful and happy 2023. I’ll see you next week.Related:
New Year’s resolutions that will actually lead to happiness (2020)
The surprisingly profound power of thank-you notes

House Democrats released six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax documents after years of speculation over the state of his finances.
Western New York may face minor flooding in the coming days due to rain and snowmelt from this week’s deadly winter storm.
Preparations are under way in Santos, Brazil, for a 24-hour public mourning of the Brazilian soccer star Pelé, who died yesterday at age 82.
Books Briefing: Elise Hannum asks why travel inspires so much writing.
The Third Rail: There’s no way to repair marriage in America without repairing men, writes David French.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry reflects on a year of weekly newsletters, and the records we leave behind.
(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty)
How a Perfectly Normal New York Suburb Elected a Con ManBy Steve Israel How did George Santos, a Republican newly elected to New York’s Third Congressional District, on Long Island, get away with running for office with an almost completely fictitious résumé? The answer is a combination of Democratic complacency, Republican extremism, and media decline in a House district that I know intimately.On Election Night, Republicans swept all four of Long Island’s House seats. Democrats didn’t realize the severity of the loss, however, until The New York Times revealed that Santos had lied about his education, work experience, philanthropic pursuits, and finances, among other things. This was no familiar case of a politician embellishing around the edges: Santos appeared to have made himself up. On Monday, he admitted that he’d engaged in serial falsehoods, but said that he intended to join the House majority anyway.Read the full articleMore From The Atlantic
74 things that blew our minds in 2022
Photos of the Week: Confetti test, food battle, glowing waterfall
(Scribner)
Read. Milk Fed, the second novel by Melissa Broder—or choose another of these eight books that will comfort you in lonely times.Watch. Catch up on the best TV shows of the year, according to our critics.Play our daily crossword.Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

At the end of the first episode of Harry & Meghan—the five-and-a-half-hour exploration into the tender center of everlasting love; rat-bastard English people and the nasty things they get up to; heady, “Goodbye to You” defection from the British Royal Family; and the reality-show-within-a-reality-show miniseries Fifteen Million Dollar Listing—I informed my husband that henceforth he should call me “C” and I would call him “R.” This would put us in league with the glamorous young couple, and also allow us to imagine that we are characters in a Victorian novel whose names must never be revealed, not even to each other.This project was immediately undermined, because it is just about impossible to impose a new nickname on someone you’ve known intimately for three decades, and with whom—even in the early years, back in the rent-controlled apartment with your big dreams and your red wine—you have never achieved even an ounce of the “Band on the Run”/Sentence Finishing/Pillow Talk Spectacular of the famous couple. These kids are so in love that absolutely any obstacle—bad press, frosty English sister-in-law, mean American half sister-in-law, disappointing fathers, paparazzo in a boat—only makes their love more passionate, their need to review their wedding videos and photo albums more urgent.I had settled in to watch Episode 2 when R said that he’d rather watch hockey highlights, a preference that produced in me a stab of the kind of minor, familiar disappointment that—stab by stab, year by year—amounts to a strong and unbreakable union. In this way, Harry & Meghan, though it depicts a couple married for only four years, is a statement on marriage itself: Isn’t the institution, at its essence, a union between two people making compromises and trying to avoid their in-laws?Ultimately, however, this is a series shaped around a single question: Can these two titled but underappreciated lovebirds transcend their bad luck and learn to find happiness in a nine-bedroom mansion located in the most exquisitely beautiful place in the world?This is a story about resilience.The very first scene of this Russian novel takes place at Heathrow Airport and consists of a clearly careworn Harry looking into his laptop or cellphone—the couple have been advised by “a friend” to keep a video diary, because “one day it will make sense,” and also (presumably) because B-roll doesn’t grow on trees—and telling us, “We’re here.” Before you can ask yourself where, exactly, they are (a Starbucks in Terminal 5? A laptop-charging power pole in Terminal 3?) a chyron solemnly informs you that Harry is speaking from inside the WINDSOR SUITE, LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT.Let this be a reminder that whatever you or I think of as the better thing (the first-class lounge, the ramekin of warm nuts in business class, Boarding Group A) is merely a token in a game that the truly rich would never play. The Windsor Suite comprises eight “private lounges,” in which the champagne wishes and caviar dreams of the traveler come true, starting at $4,000 for two hours. It’s the bottle service of Departures.You haven’t realized just how vile air travel has become and how deeply you have been demoralized by it until you’ve imagined what it would be like to be greeted at the curb by a doorman, whisked into a private elevator, and delivered into the capable hands of your own butler, who will be just a bell cord away to answer your every call.This, then, will be the ongoing challenge of watching (and presumably making) Harry & Meghan: The show needs to provide a compelling enough account of their emotional injuries that we are moved by them, while also luxuriating in the unimaginable opulence in which the couple nursed their wounds. It’s been done before: Wuthering Heights; Harlequin romance novels; all 22 seasons of Kardashian content. We’ve all had our problems, but have we had them in the rolling hills and designer shopping malls of Calabasas? The poor little rich girl is a perennial. But watching Meghan Markle sitting in a grand living room while bravely explaining that as a senior royal she wore muted colors so as not to upstage anyone could try the patience of Malala. (The couple was interviewed inside someone else’s Montecito pleasure dome, now on the market for $33.5 million, presumably because they’re determined to safeguard their … privacy. Or could it be that their own $15 million spread is too down-market for the dream to endure?)We will be introduced to a few themes in this 330-minute (plus hockey highlights) presentation, the first of which concerns what was apparently a shock to Meghan and an oversight of Harry’s: the overt racism that lingers among members of European royalty who live in castles and whose exalted status depends on convincing a populace that fairy tales are real.At Meghan’s first Christmas lunch (an annual tradition in which the extended Royal Family gets together at Buckingham Palace before the seniors decamp for Sandringham), Princess Michael of Kent arrived wearing a white coat, on the lapel of which was affixed a large brooch, depicting a Black man wearing a golden turban, and decorated in colored gemstones. The figure was a “Blackamoor,” portrayed in a historical style celebrating the glory days of colonialism and combining exotica with the perennial theme of ownership: of the man, the continent, the gold, the gems.Why in God’s name would this woman wear this ornament to an event where Meghan Markle was being introduced around? Let me remind you that Princess Michael of Kent is the daughter of a literal Nazi, and has spent years making viciously racist comments (“The English take the breeding of their horses and dogs more seriously than they do their children”) and then offering insulting “apologies” for them. But please don’t call her a racist, because she feels that as “a knife through the heart.” She has traveled to Africa and described in a TV interview her “adventure with these absolutely adorable, special people … I really love these people.” Moreover, “I even pretended years ago to be an African, a half-caste African, but because of my light eyes, I did not get away with it. But I dyed my hair black.” The apology for the jewelry is in a class of its own: “The brooch was a gift and had been worn many times before. Princess Michael is very sorry and distressed that it has caused offense.” In other words, everyone’s been cool about it except Meghan Markle, and this whole episode has victimized Princess Michael, who is now enduring distress.Anyone can find themselves related to a racist, and the standard method of dealing with this fact is simplicity itself: You disavow them, you shun them, you block their phone number, and if anyone asks about them, you tell the truth. That’s not what the Windsors have done. Princess Michael lives in a grand apartment in Kensington Palace (owned by King Charles, on behalf of the nation), where, at various times, she has been neighbor to William and Kate, Princess Eugenie, and—for half a decade—Harry himself, who lived in a cottage on the palace grounds.God knows Harry himself hasn’t been perfect. He dressed up as a Nazi (specifically as a member of the Afrika Korps—you know, Rommel and all that) for a costume party when he was 20, and he tells us during the show that it was one of the biggest mistakes of his life. But, he says earnestly, he atoned by meeting with the chief rabbi in London and traveling to Berlin to talk with a Holocaust survivor, which is apparently the Windsor Suite version of doing the work. What’s going on in that family that you need to have some champagne and me-time in Heathrow VIP and fly to Germany to learn that Nazis = Bad? Currently, Harry’s immersed in a wholehearted effort to unpack his “unconscious bias,” but that could be an endless enterprise, given the complex history of his own family.This is the incoherence of the couple’s position. They had wanted to carve out a “progressive new role” for themselves within the Royal Family, a role they had seen as including more outreach to the Commonwealth nations, in particular the ones (principally in Africa and the Caribbean) in which the majority population consists of nonwhite people. But what could possibly be progressive about representing the crown—the entity, more or less, that perfected the concept of empire—to these countries?In the other corner: M’s family.As she has throughout this courtship and marriage, Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, remains a class act. In her interviews for the series, she shows grace and restraint, and an absolute determination not to sully herself or her daughter with the antics of either her ex-husband’s family or Harry’s family—two groups that seemed equally matched. You can clearly sense that having her daughter and grandchildren safely back in California, barely two hours’ drive from her home in L.A., is a tremendous comfort to her.Meghan’s father—and the aforementioned half sister, Samantha, from his first marriage—turn out to be spectacular characters, an accurate portrait of whom would require the combined talents of William Faulkner, J. D. Vance, and the Wicked Witch of the West. The half sister turns out to be genuinely frightening, having once left Florida to show up uninvited at Kensington Palace in order to “deliver a letter” and later pitching a book on “the evolution of my biracial lens.” (She’s white, her parents are white, whatever biracial lens she possesses has been trained on her biracial half sister and the best way to make her miserable.)The salve for having been raised among these various characters has been the intense and world-historical level of romantic love that bonds our principals and that provides the through line of our five and a half hours in their company. Have you ever been to one of those weddings where the bride and groom—although well into their 30s—each deliver a speech that includes so many cute and romantic and “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” moments that you don’t know where to look and your face becomes a rictus of sympathetic embarrassment for the couple, and people start kicking you under the table?Harry & Meghan is the eternal return of that experience.The things the British tabloids had to say about Meghan’s race are beyond the pale, and that this kind of coverage sells papers in the U.K. was reason enough for Harry to take his wife and baby and get the hell out of there. The soundness of this decision was proved a few weeks ago, when The Sun published a column by a popular television commentator named Jeremy Clarkson: “I hate her on a cellular level. At night I’m unable to sleep as I lie there, grinding my teeth and dreaming of the day when she is made to parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds chant, ‘Shame!’ and throw lumps of excrement at her.”When I read that, I felt a stab of fealty and protectiveness more powerful than anything evoked by Harry & Meghan. The Sun withdrew the column and apologized for it after 20,000 complaints—but someone accepted it, someone approved it, someone published it online, and any number of people must have known that in addition to the people the column angered, there would be plenty of people who agreed with it. Who would like this kind of filth? Clarkson spells it out for us: “Everyone who’s my age thinks the same way.” No kidding, old man.The very top of the column set the tone. It said that everyone had known that Harry (whom Clarkson referred to as “Harold Markle”) was a “slightly dim” but fun-loving fellow, and Meghan had “obviously used some vivid bedroom promises to turn him into a warrior of woke.”And there it is: The idea that women will use whatever wiles they have to castrate a real man and turn him into a eunuch who lives to serve her, no matter how much humiliation she serves up. People like Clarkson—and Piers Morgan, and so many other men of their generation—are apparently experts on the treachery of women. Many are also devotees of the notion that masculinity is best defined by military service, the ultimate test of manhood. Clarkson has made popular television documentaries about great battles of the Second World War, and apparently that, too, is an act of manhood. Except that it’s not.Here’s the truth: Harry served two tours in Afghanistan with the British Army, the second as an Apache helicopter pilot—once apparently helping rescue American servicemen under Taliban fire—and fought with great valor, very much in the shit. He was held in the affectionate, ball-breaking high regard of his fellow soldiers. This wasn’t Charles getting seasick in the navy, or Andrew forgetting how to sweat in the Falklands, or William assisting the Liverpool Coast Guard on civilian rescue sorties. This was war, and Harry survived it, came home with the usual psychic wounds of combat, and carried on with his life.Harry is a grown man, he’s had a lot of experience with women (and “bedroom promises”), and he married the one he loved. When she was miserable, the way his own mother had been miserable, he didn’t do what his grotesque father had done—cheat on her, treat her like a broodmare, ignore her suffering; he moved her and his family far away. Considering that three of his grandmother’s four children got divorced, he seems to have a better idea of what constitutes marital obligation than most of his in-house role models.  Quit while you’re ahead! you want to yell at the television screen—but they can’t. These two burn through money at a fantastic rate, and the only thing that reliably sells is their own story, which is getting pretty threadbare. It’s so familiar to us by now that we could tell it ourselves.But we probably could never tell it the way they do, could never cast the fairy-tale spell that they can. We could never convince a vast audience that the paper moon hanging over the cardboard sea is real—if only you can believe in it.In the first episode, we see a video diary of Meghan standing on an endless lawn, in the blue shadows of early evening, the sky beyond turning the saturated orange and pink of a color-enhanced postcard of the original California dream. She’s wearing a striped apron and a pair of gardening gloves, and she’s holding a handful of blush-colored roses. In the weary tones of Every Mom, she tells us in a near whisper, “Both the babies are down.” It’s a “nice, calm night.”For a moment, we take it all in: the huge lawn, the sunset, the rose garden in which not a single bloom is marred by spider mites or overwatering or bad attitude. Her voice lowers to an actual whisper and here she is, the picture of a pretty wife and mother, her children sleeping and her attention turned to simple abundance: “Just picking some roses.”

The corporate takeover of American politics started with a man and a memo you’ve probably never heard of.

In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.

Washington was transformed from a sleepy government town into a glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, and five-star hotels.

Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done.

Mr. Trump will tell you that fraud cost him the election. Those of us who have analyzed the facts and data almost inevitably come to other explanations: grumpy voters beset with COVID-19 and a crummy economy, high Democratic turnout stoked by Trump’s relentless trolling of the left, GOP voters who were put off by The Donald’s crassness, and a re-election campaign that failed to engage to enough suburbanites.
Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon University and Bernard Grofman of the University of California Irvine point to an additional factor for Trump’s loss: Jo Jorgensen’s third-party candidacy. I caught up with Prof. Cervas recently to ask him to explain.
Jo Jorgensen—few Americans know her name let alone that she ran for president. Who is she?
That’s right, most Americans do not know who she is. She is—in some ways, now—a footnote in American history. She received just shy of two million votes in an election where nearly 160 million were cast. The important point that Jorgensen’s candidacy makes is that many Americans feel uncomfortable voting for candidates of the two major political parties. This is especially true when those candidates have higher unfavorable ratings than favorability ratings.
Did she cost Trump the election in 2020?
I do not think it’s accurate to say that she cost Trump the election. In fact, it would be quite difficult to come to that conclusion. There are a lot of unknowns and “what-ifs” regarding third-party voters. There is no debate that those two million votes could have been decisive if distributed in the right states and the right quantities. And there is good reason to believe that many persons who cast a ballot for the Libertarian candidate might prefer a Republican president to a Democratic president. Empirically speaking, this tends to be the case. However, many people who voted for Jorgensen might have abstained if she was not on the ballot. But, had an alternative voting rule—such as ranked-choice voting—been used, it is a possibility that Trump would have received enough of the Libertarian vote to top Biden in several pivotal states. But any analysis like this is ceteris paribus, and we truly cannot know the counterfactual outcome were there different rules or different candidates on the ballot.

Source: PS journal, January 2020.
Your analysis also suggests that—in 2020—Trump’s vote count was hurt more than Hillary Clinton’s by the Jill Stein and Gary Johnson candidacies.
Yes, with the caveats mentioned above. Although Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by a far larger number of votes than Clinton in 2016, the 2020 election was closer in terms of votes needed to change the outcome. Trump infamously called Georgia Sec. of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.” Jorgensen received over 62,000 votes in Georgia! A similar scenario played out in Arizona, where Trump lost the state by 10,457 votes, but Jorgensen won over 51,000 votes. Wisconsin’s margin of victory for Biden was less than the Jorgensen vote, too. And if those three states flip to Trump, both he and Biden would have received 269 electors, and a contingent election would have been held in the House of Representatives. In 2016, not only did Trump win the most electors but—if third-party candidates had not been on the ballot—Trump likely would have been the beneficiary and perhaps increased his Electoral College win while reducing his popular vote margin loss.
You might have titled the article, “Jo Jorgensen spoiled Trump’s re-election.” Instead, you titled it, “Why Donald Trump Should Be a Fervent Advocate of Using Ranked-Choice Voting in 2024.” Why?
It seems increasingly likely that the 2024 election could be affected by a significant independent vote. Trump has announced a third campaign for president. He will likely have challengers in the Republican primary. If he fails to emerge as the party’s candidate, some have speculated that he would mount an independent challenge. It is also possible he wins the nomination, but another Republican candidate runs a third-party campaign against him. If that were the case, he likely would be dividing votes between himself and that candidate. That would leave the Democratic candidate with an opportunity to win a plurality in many places where those electors would otherwise be out of reach. If a ranked-choice voting rule were used, it seems unlikely that those voting for Trump would prefer the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate, just as it seems unlikely that the Republican voters would prefer a Democrat to Trump. In this hypothetical, Republicans and Trump particularly should be fervent advocates for using ranked-choice voting.
Kosar: Thank you, Professor Cervas.
Learn more: What’s the Harm of Refusing to Concede? A Q&A with Florian Justwan and Ryan D. Williamson | Election Reform: Is History Repeating? A Q&A with Jack Santucci | What’s Going On with Ranked Choice Voting in Utah? A Q&A with Derek Monson | How Did James Madison Think About Congressional Elections? A Q&A with Jay Cost
The post Did a Libertarian Cost Trump the Election? A Q&A with Jonathan Cervas appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

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2022 has ushered in enormous economic and geopolitical uncertainty. The world is confronting ravaging inflation, an energy crisis, high interest rates and a possible recession. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent international tensions sky-high. And yet, when you sit back and examine it carefully, the country that looks most capable of navigating these murky waters is the United States of America.

As an essay in the Harvard Business Review puts it, “The current reality of the U.S. economy is that highly profitable firms are employing a record number of workers and paying them rising wages.” This is causing some problems as the Federal Reserve tries to slow the economy down, but those strengths are surely of long-term benefit. Americans’ household wealth has skyrocketed because of government pandemic relief programs. American banks are stable — and dominate the world — thanks to the reforms implemented after the 2008 financial crisis. The United States has abundant energy of all kinds, old and new. And, thanks to the dollar, the U.S. government can run up debts with greater ease than any other country in the world.

Meanwhile, Europe faces a dire energy crisis, which will take years to fix. China has utterly botched its exit from its “zero covid” strategy. Russia is isolated from global economic and technological flows because of harsh sanctions that were imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Developing countries face the double whammy of high energy prices and a strong dollar (in which a significant chunk of their debt is denominated). The United States has problems — but it’s still the country I would bet on.

So why does the United States show so much promise at a time when others are struggling? Behind the economic data, there does seem to be in America a spirit of innovation that is unusual and powerful. A recent book — though it is not directly about this subject at all — has helped me crystallize some of my own thoughts on this subject: Ronald Brownstein’s brilliant history of American pop culture in the mid-1970s, “Rock Me on the Water.”

Brownstein begins by describing American popular culture in the early and mid-1960s, particularly the movies and television shows, as bland, apolitical and lifeless. Hollywood was addicted, he writes, to “World War II movies, Westerns, musicals, and above all, gargantuan historical epics” such as “The Ten Commandments.” Television, right up to the late 1960s, was dominated by what was considered wholesome fare, which meant shows such as “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “Here’s Lucy,” and “The Wonderful World of Disney.” The rising tide of baby boomers were tuning out. Weekly admissions at movie theaters fell by more than 50 percent from 1950 to 1960.

Then came rebellion and revolution in the form of sharp breaks with this conformist culture, first in music, then in movies and finally in the broadest of all formats, television shows. By the mid-1970s, rock music reigned supreme. The movie industry had been remade by sharp, edgy fare such as “Five Easy Pieces,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Taxi Driver.” The top television show was the funny but intensely political (and politically incorrect) “All in the Family.”

This break with the past strikes me as deeply American. Young people rejected the wisdom of their elders, dispensed with tradition and forged their own way — making new music, movies and television. They were disrespectful and disruptive, consumed with a kind of manic energy. But that energy created a new popular culture that remade America and the world. It is difficult to imagine that kind of attack on hierarchy and tradition coming out of other, more settled societies.

It sounds exciting in retrospect, but Brownstein reminds us how jarring the break was to many (perhaps most) Americans. Along with it came a disruptive, disrespectful politics that was often more than just angry. It was violent and messy. Those were the years of political assassinations, the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army (the group that kidnapped Patty Hearst and engaged in what was back then “the largest police firefight that had ever occurred on American soil”). The New Left activism of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda was a wholesale attack on both political parties and the entire U.S. political system.

The rebellion did not last long, and it triggered a backlash. Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and other politicians rode to power denouncing the radical youth culture of the time. And yet that culture has proved deeply influential and lasting. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson ties the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley in the 1970s to this same spirit of youth rebellion. The new, scrappy technology companies of the period — Microsoft, Apple, Intel — ended up remaking the global economy.

I do wonder whether American culture today still retains the elements that made it so disruptive in the 1970s. It feels more bourgeois; nowadays what starts as radical rebellion often turns quickly into big business. Ross Douthat describes much of the popular culture today as decadent and derivative — with endless remakes of comic book characters and stories. Where there is anger, often on the populist right, it is the kind of nostalgic rage that fueled Nixon and Reagan — a desire to take America back, not forward. The left, which once encouraged raucous, free-for-all debates on campus, has become more interested in creating safe spaces, policing thought and discouraging the airing of difficult, controversial disagreements.

I have to believe that this “decadence” is temporary. The United States’ core character remains one that encourages attacks on power and hierarchy, celebrates the upstarts and cares little for tradition and established practice. Businesspeople often quote Jobs’s famous commencement advice to Stanford students — “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” — but Jobs was actually quoting Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog,” an icon of the 1970s counterculture. You still see that spirit in many parts of American society — especially among the young, who are eager to break sharply with their elders, whether on race relations or climate change. They should take some inspiration from America in the 1970s — when the world’s richest and most powerful country demonstrated that it somehow retained the capacity for dissent, dissatisfaction and radical change. Somewhere in there is the country’s secret sauce for enduring success.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I indulged in my share of gloom in 2022, and I have plenty more where that came from. But I want to make the case for a certain amount of optimism in 2023—and to offer my gratitude to readers of the Daily. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
How George Santos defrauded my old congressional district
Poverty is violent.
Elon Musk’s text messages explain everything.
'No Good Thing Ever Dies'Throughout 2022, I’ve worried a lot. I’ve had plenty of smaller gripes—that is my nature as a professional curmudgeon—but mostly, I’ve been concerned about world war, the rule of law, and the collapse of democracy. But here at the end of the year, I am optimistic, which is a surprise even to me. First things first, however. I want to thank the readers of the Daily and The Atlantic for your willingness to join me and my colleagues every week. I hope you’ll stay with us in the coming year; a lot is going to happen in America and around the world, and I look forward to continuing to explore those issues with you.Before we head off into 2023, let’s think about why the past year wasn’t as bad as we might think, and why the coming year might even be better.The single most important story of the year is the resilience of democracy. Two great events (or, more accurately, non-events) reassured me as part of that heartening narrative: The Russians failed to win a war in Europe, and antidemocratic candidates failed to rebound in America. These were not small things, and indeed, I sometimes worry that Americans underestimate just how close to disaster we all came in 2022. I am not prone to World War II metaphors, but I was moved enough by the midterm elections to refer to them as “democracy’s Dunkirk.” My colleague Anne Applebaum, meanwhile, offered a terrifying picture of what the world would look like right now had Vladimir Putin’s tanks taken Kyiv almost a year ago.In 2022, however, the West chose to help Ukraine defend itself, and the voters chose to protect democracy. In fact, the American system is now engaged in a certain amount of healing, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Election deniers, led by Kari Lake in Arizona, are regularly being told by the judicial system to go pound sand. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is, so far, a shambolic and pitiful mess. Congress, with something that these days looks like a smidge of bipartisanship, has sent a bill with the Electoral Count Reform Act to President Joe Biden’s desk, adding some insurance against any further attempts at electoral-vote chicanery.Meanwhile, consequences for coup plotters, seditionists, and other criminals are piling up. A group of Oath Keepers is facing real time in prison. Some of the January 6 rioters have gotten stiff sentences. And this morning, one of the ringleaders of the plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor got sentenced to the big house for more than 19 years.Even smaller stories had some positive lessons in them. For example, Elon Musk proved to us that billions of dollars cannot buy everything, and especially not competence or common sense. Tesla stock, the source of so much of Musk’s fortune, has lost more than $800 billion—that’s billion, with a B—in value, most of it vanishing after Musk’s decision to detonate his reputation as a savvy businessman so that he could become the world’s richest shitposter. If this makes people rethink worshipping rich celebrities, so much the better. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, meanwhile, finally dumped her affiliation as a Democrat, a move that was almost certainly prompted less by ideology than by her realization that she is deeply unpopular among Democrats and was likely to lose a primary in her own party. This ploy seems to have backfired; her approval rating has cratered, which suggests that voters finally might actually punish rank opportunism. Add to these stories the collective national shrug at Trump’s entry into the GOP presidential race, and it looks like 2022 was a bad year for narcissism.All of this optimism is making me itch, even if I am enjoying the schadenfreude, so let me suggest a few things that could go horribly wrong in 2023. Let’s start with nuclear war.Russia’s war in Ukraine is nowhere near over. The Russians are in bad shape, but they still enjoy some immutable advantages in geography and manpower. The Kremlin might well try again to take Kyiv, or the Russian high command could simply decide to pursue meat-grinder battles across the eastern Ukrainian front. Putin is a terrible strategist, and if these next moves go badly for Russia, he could return to making unhinged threats. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Putin loves life and doesn’t want to die, he was right, but that’s a different problem from Putin simply being a desperate gambler who could set in motion events he cannot control. The West must continue to send aid and weapons to Ukraine, but I have worried about unpredictable nuclear dangers in 2022, and I will continue to worry about them in 2023 and for as long as Putin pursues this mad war.The crisis of American democracy is also not over yet. The Republicans—whose national elected members are still the main source of threats to the Constitution at this point—will take control of the House next month by a slim majority, and the 2024 Senate map favors the GOP. Trump’s gambit to regain his office may well be thwarted, but by whom? It’s not much of an improvement if he’s edged out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or one of the many other contenders whose goal is not to restore sanity to the GOP but to use its delusional base to gain the White House. The bright spot here is that GOP control of the House could be such a spectacular and ridiculous carnival in 2023 that voters in 2024 will remember why they were so reluctant during the midterms to let them back into power.But we cannot end on a note of gloom. Consider this: Anyone who predicted at the end of 2021 that we’d be in such good shape heading into 2023 would have been dismissed as a Pollyanna. Besides, the challenges we’ll face next year, including the preservation of democracy and the restoration of global peace, aren’t new. We’ve faced them before, and we’re still here in one piece. So let’s celebrate by remembering the words of the great prison philosopher Andy Dufresne: “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”Tomorrow, my colleague Rebecca Rashid will be here to discuss how to have a happier life in 2023, and I’ll be back on Friday with your New Year’s resolutions—so remember to send those along to me at emailnewsletters@theatlantic.com!Related: 
The cynic’s dilemma
‘She made an idiot out of me.’
Ukraine’s energy minister warned that New Year’s Eve could exacerbate power outages in Ukraine. About 9 million people are currently cut off from power in different regions, according to President Zelensky.
The final federal defendant convicted in a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer was sentenced to 19 years and seven months in prison.
Southwest Airlines canceled nearly 5,000 flights on Wednesday as it stumbled to recover from the holiday travel chaos that ensued over the weekend as a result of a winter storm.
(Rop van Mierlo)
Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?By Tatiana Schlossberg
The other night, as I began the expansive and continually growing routine of putting my 11-month-old son to bed, we sat together on the rocking chair in his room and read The Tiger Who Came to Tea, by Judith Kerr, and met a tiger who just would not stop eating. My son wasn’t yet ready for sleep and made that clear, so we read Chicken Soup With Rice, by Maurice Sendak. We encountered an elephant and a whale, and traveled through all the months of the year, braving the sliding ice of January and the gusty gales of November. Then we turned, as we always do, to Goodnight Moon, and met more bears, rabbits, a little mouse, a cow, some fresh air, and the stars.
As I slid the books back onto the shelf, they rejoined the long parade of animals around his bedroom: the moose and his muffin, Peter Rabbit, Elmer the patchwork elephant, Lars the polar bear, Lyle the crocodile, stuffed kangaroos and octopi and lions and turtles. Every night, I sing “Baby Beluga” to him as a lullaby: “Goodnight, little whale, goodnight.”
“The universe doesn’t care that we have holidays.”
The most memorable advice of 2022
(Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic)
Read. These eight books will comfort you when you’re lonely.Watch. Spend the holiday week with one of the best TV shows of the year, according to our critics.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Many years ago, my elderly father was widowed by my mother’s sudden and unexpected death. My parents had a New Year’s Eve tradition of ordering Chinese food and watching movies, and when my father found himself alone at 82 years old, I decided to continue that tradition by bringing him from Massachusetts to Rhode Island at the end of every year. The Chinese food was easy to replace, but my father was something of a difficult old coot about movies—and so one year, I decided to plop him in a big chair with the full set of episodes from HBO’s World War II miniseries Band of Brothers. It worked like magic: My father was mesmerized, and peace reigned in the Nichols home.I bring this up as a suggestion to Americans that they might consider watching the episode about the siege of Bastogne, in which U.S. forces were encircled by the Germans in Belgium for a brutal week in late December 1944. Cut off and surrounded by Nazi tanks, the Americans huddled in the bitter cold as the Germans rained artillery on them. The Germans were so sure of victory that they sent a note to the Americans to surrender rather than be annihilated (to which U.S. Army Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe replied, “Nuts!”). On December 26, Lieutenant General George Patton’s Third Army arrived and broke the siege.I recommend this not only so that we remember an important Christmas week nearly eight decades ago, but also so we bear in mind that as we celebrate with our family and friends this New Year’s Eve, the Russians will be shelling and bombing Ukrainians in the same kind of unforgiving cold. (Yesterday, Russian forces struck a maternity hospital in Kherson.) The Ukrainian situation is not yet as desperate as Bastogne, but the misery and cold and violence are no less brutal. This year, be thankful for the sacrifices made by the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne,” and hold a good thought for the Ukrainian defenders under siege today.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

As the year comes to a close, I cannot stop thinking about … a court document. Plaintiffs in Twitter, Inc. v. Elon R. Musk et al. filed Exhibit H just before sunrise on September 29 in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. If you’ve seen excerpts, you probably know it by its street name: Elon Musk’s texts.Exhibit H is remarkable insomuch as it is a spreadsheet containing the private messages between the (then) richest man in the world and his friends, associates, and hangers-on while they discuss buying one of the world’s most influential communications platforms—just for kicks. Leafing through Exhibit H, you will feel like you should never have seen these communications, and yet there they are, on display for the hordes of the internet, courtesy of the legal system.I wrote about the texts back in September, arguing that they demonstrated “just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be.” I still believe that. But now, armed with three months of hindsight, I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures—from Peiter Zatko’s leaks, to FTX’s balance sheet, to the “Twitter Files” championed by Musk himself.Beyond the obvious tabloid intrigue, what’s most striking is how Musk’s texts shed light on two of 2022’s biggest tech meltdowns. If you came out of a lengthy coma in mid-December, puzzled by headlines about collapsing crypto exchanges and once-beloved entrepreneurs behaving like villains, you could read a copy of Exhibit H and understand everything with surprising clarity. The texts are, of course, a guide to the events that ultimately led Musk to purchase Twitter—a decision that has tanked his net worth, saddled his new asset with debt, and led to the quick erosion of his reputation as a savvy businessman. But also lurking in Musk’s inbox is Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-collapsed crypto exchange FTX, who was arrested in the Bahamas when federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding investors and customers.[Read: Whistleblowing is broken]For better or worse, Musk’s Twitter takeover and SBF’s downfall are two of the most symbolically resonant tech stories of 2022. You could view them as reckonings for supposed tech visionaries and the ways in which Silicon Valley’s hype machine dashes against the rocks of reality. It’s unfair to suggest that a few personalities are behind all of tech’s troubles—which this year included layoffs at companies such as Meta and Snap and a general feeling that we may be approaching the end of the social-media era—but the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.In June, I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media. One can see this exact mentality at work in the Musk texts. In message after message, contacts urge Musk to take control of Twitter and solve its problem as only he can. This trend extends beyond Twitter: This year, Musk’s peers at companies such as Meta cracked down on employees, hoping to usher in a more authoritarian brand of management after years of free lunches, competitive perks, and remote work.The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash. Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”“Does Sam actually have $3bn liquid?” Musk asks. (It’s unclear why he got the number wrong.) Grimes says that he believes so. Musk appears nonplussed but willing to do whatever is necessary to get some quick cash: “So long as I don’t have to have a laborious blockchain debate,” he quips. (Seven months after this exchange, Bankman-Fried would claim to have no more than $100,000 to his name.)The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth. “In one sense, the texts show that billionaires are just like us—they’re not doing advanced calculus; they’re in their DMs talking smack, making jokes, and trying desperately to get their way,” Lauren Pringle, the editor in chief of The Chancery Daily, told me recently. But she added: “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”There is an undeniable hubris on display in Exhibit H. One could argue that a reason these men appear so nonchalant about offering no-strings-attached billions is that they’ve been conditioned by years of low interest rates and a booming tech sector to assume that their fortunes will only ever grow, regardless of the business decisions they make. The men in Musk’s phone also appear wildly confident in their own abilities and those of their peers. Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the media conglomerate Axel Springer, infamously texted Musk his bullet-pointed plan for Twitter, which began with the line item “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”Exhibit H also shows what happens when somebody with actual expertise questions the visionaries. The entire document is a demonstration of elite-level brownnosing, with the exception of one man: then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. The two seem to hit it off—Musk likes that Agrawal is an engineer who can “do hardcore programming”—but then Agrawal sends Musk a text about his unhinged tweets. “You are free to tweet ‘is Twitter dying’ or anything else about Twitter - but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context,” he says to Musk. This small suggestion appears to enrage Musk and, it seems, alters the entire history of the company forever. “What did you get done this week?” Musk shoots back. And then, less than one minute later, the billionaire writes, “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”Exhibit H isn’t just revealing—the existence of the document itself may have also hastened Musk’s purchase of the company. The texts exist for us to see because Musk, in a fit of buyer’s remorse, tried to back out of the deal, and Twitter sued. Although it’s unclear exactly what triggered Musk to settle the suit and continue with the Twitter purchase (he didn’t respond to a request for comment), one popular theory is that Exhibit H may have forced his hand. “I won’t speculate on his motivations, because he’s such an enigma,” Pringle said, “but it seems likely that some of these people in Musk’s phone reached out to him saying, ‘Come on, man, this is embarrassing. Make this stop.’”Exhibit H didn’t have to be public at all. According to The Chancery Daily’s reporting, it was initially filed under seal with no objection from Twitter’s legal team. But Musk’s team unexpectedly asked for the document to be unsealed. A leading theory is that this was a tactic from Musk’s lawyers to tie opposing counsel up in busy work. If that was the case, the move clearly backfired—yet another act, born out of hubris, that went awry.It is not difficult to look at these texts and understand how someone like Musk could now find himself in his current, unenviable economic situation and growing ever more reactionary.Reading through Exhibit H, it’s also easy to see how Bankman-Fried accumulated venture money with hardly any investigation into his company’s finances. In one overlooked text message, one of Musk’s friends, the former Hollywood agent Michael Kives, casually suggests, “It could be cool to [do the Twitter deal] with Sam Bankman-Fried.” Subsequent reporting showed that Kives had taken a $300 million loan from Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research. You can just imagine the contents of SBF’s own phone and the fawning conversations between the former billionaire and the men looking to stay in his orbit. And it’s also quite easy, reading these text messages, to understand why venture funds are facing tough questions from investors and the public about their decisions to loan money to questionable businesses without doing due diligence.These are, of course, lessons built off of extrapolation and hindsight. But they are important ones: They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.Ultimately, Exhibit H documents the loneliness and isolation of being the world’s richest man. As told via the texts, the seed of Musk’s Twitter purchase was planted by sycophants deferential to the billionaire who will never give him hard, truthful advice, because they wish to stay close to him. Indeed, the one time he receives actual, honest feedback from Agrawal, Musk behaves aggressively and impulsively, sealing his fate.Sifting through the desiccated wreckage of Twitter is raising endless questions about the fate of the platform and what it means for us all. But one question we don’t need to ask is how we got here. For that, we have Exhibit H.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote some Twitter fan fiction over the weekend in which he hallucinated the fall of the West and the rise of the Fourth Reich. Elon Musk thought the thread was “epic.” But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The great big Medicare ripoff
The married-mom advantage
No one can decide if grapefruit is dangerous.
Dima Trolls; Elon RollsI do not miss the Cold War. The United States’ great conflict with Soviet communism dominated the first 30 years of my life and determined the path of my early career, and I am glad it is over. And yet, here I am, in a strange reverie about the Cold War at the end of 2022, more than 30 years after the lowering of the Soviet flag. Why? Well, allow me to introduce you to Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of the Russian Federation’s Security Council, and his new conversation partner, the Twitter CEO Elon Musk. The debates of yesterday, the banter between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, and the frosty competition between Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov have been replaced by the equivalent of Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan shouting “Excellent!” and high-fiving each other over freaky Russian fan fiction.In case you missed it this weekend, Medvedev—a crony of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was also once the actual president of Russia—went on a long Twitter rant with his predictions for 2023. I do not know if Little Dima (as he is sometimes called in Moscow) is a drinking man, but I can only hope that he was completely swacked when he went on this tirade. In any case, let’s take a look at what a guy who was once the supreme commander of all Russian forces thinks will happen next year.Medvedev is a lawyer by training, but he had some deep thoughts on economics. He predicts that oil will rise to $150 a barrel—which is of course Moscow’s dearest wish now that the Russian economy is seemingly based on nothing but petroleum, exit visas, and coffins. For some reason, he thinks the United Kingdom will rejoin the European Union, which in turn will destroy the EU and end the euro as a currency. (He also thinks that the “largest stock markets and financial activity will leave the US and Europe and move to Asia,” and that the euro and the dollar will be replaced by—no, really—“digital fiat currencies.”)When it comes to war and politics, Medvedev’s visions get even weirder.“Poland and Hungary,” he writes, “will occupy western regions of the formerly existing Ukraine.” (I suppose this comes after Russia magically defeats and partitions Ukraine.) After this, a “Fourth Reich” will be created “encompassing the territory of Germany and its satellites, i.e., Poland, the Baltic states, Czechia, Slovakia, the Kiev Republic, and other outcasts.”I’m sensing a little cultural resentment here. But let’s press on.“War,” Dima continues, “will break out between France and the Fourth Reich. Europe will be divided, Poland repartitioned in the process.”If you’re keeping score in this trippy game of Risk: Russia defeats Ukraine, Poland and Hungary seize the western areas of Ukraine, Germany then subdues Poland and everything else in East Central Europe and declares itself a new Reich. France then defeats this Fourth Reich and proceeds to partition the same Poland that is now part of a joint Polish-Hungarian occupation of Ukraine. Or maybe someone spilled a bottle of Stoli all over the board, and this is how we’re putting it all back together now that the pieces are soaked and the map is blurry.But he’s not done. “Northern Ireland,” he predicts, “will separate from the UK and join the Republic of Ireland.” Hmm. The U.K., in Medvedev’s world, would have just voted to rejoin the EU, which is about to fall apart, but in any case, how would Northern Ireland …Look, stop asking questions. Medvedev was once a moderate and relatively pro-Western Russian president, but he’s changed his mind. As William Hurt’s character says in The Big Chill, “Sometimes you just have to let art flow over you.”The real fun begins when Little Dima foresees the end of the United States: “Civil war will break out in the US, [with] California and Texas becoming independent states as a result. Texas and Mexico will form an allied state.” Medvedev might not be the keenest observer of American politics: Texas Governor Greg Abbott does not seem to have any obvious wish to move the Texas border south so that more people from Mexico and perhaps even Central America may move freely through Texas as citizens and allies.Little Dima’s final flourish was a clumsy, racist pirouette: “Season greetings to you all, Anglo-Saxon friends, and their happily oinking piglets!” Russian chauvinists going back centuries have always been a tad salty about “Anglo-Saxons” and their supposed sense of superiority over the Slavic peoples. The reference to piglets is a throwback to old-school propaganda about international capitalists (whose ethnicity Dima leaves unspoken but which, in Russian and Soviet usage, is often an anti-Semitic reference).No Twitter thread this nutty would be complete without trolling the gargantuan ego of the self-described Chief Twit, Elon Musk. According to Medvedev, Musk will “win the presidential election in a number of states which, after the new Civil War’s end, will have been given to the GOP,” whatever that means.Musk’s response? “Epic thread!!” He even made sure to add that extra exclamation point. You can almost see him nodding and hitting the power chords on an air guitar when he says it, probably in an attempt to be sarcastic and generate attention at the same time. Several hours later—perhaps after the intervention of an adult—Musk clarified his position and wrote, “Those are definitely the most absurd predictions I’ve ever heard, while also showing astonishing lack of awareness of the progress of artificial intelligence and sustainable energy.”Great. That ought to do it. Thanks very much, Elon.This is where the nostalgia creeps in. I don’t care that Dmitry Medvedev sounds like a guy in a musty Soviet beer joint railing about the United States. I care that a senior Kremlin official—a man who was once at the top of the Russian nuclear chain of command—is tweeting out vile nonsense and people are merely shrugging, like it’s just another day in our weird century. I care that one of the richest men in the world, an industrialist who controls a large swath of the public square, responded to these unhinged tweets like a goofy teenager.I look forward to the new year. I am glad that the dangerous 20th century is long over, and I am convinced we live in better times today. But I admit that I find myself ruefully nostalgic for a world that was dominated by serious adults who believed in serious things.Related:
How Elon Musk’s buffoonery misleads his critics
Elon Musk is bad at this.
At least 30 people have died in western New York from the severe winter storm.
China has announced plans to relax its COVID-19 restrictions for entry into the country. Beginning January 8, people with a negative nucleic-acid test will not be required to quarantine upon arrival.
Adam Fox, one of the men convicted of plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, was sentenced to 16 years in federal prison. Prosecutors say he led the plot.
Work in Progress: The economy’s fundamental problem has changed, Annie Lowrey argues.
(Alessandra Sanguinetti / Magnum)
I Love My Clutter, Thank You Very MuchBy Burt Solomon
A confession, first: I love clutter.
The horizontal surfaces in my family room are covered with newspapers, magazines, books I’ve started, books I intend to read, books I want to read but never will, erasable pens, a sweatshirt or two, a soccer ball, a bucket of toy cars, and wayward Legos that gouge my stockinged feet. In addition to a computer, two telephones, and a TV remote, my desk at home is strewn with notebooks, folders, loose papers, birchbark, a modem, scraps of paper with notes to myself, photos of my wife and kids, flash drives, nail clippers, pens, coins, a stapler, a thesaurus, shopping receipts, a hand-grip strengthener, a blood-pressure cuff, two- and three-dimensional likenesses of Abraham Lincoln, four baseballs, three baseball caps, two 1909 baseball cards, two flashlights, a pair of AirPods, a miniature boxing glove my father gave me before I can remember, one Pokémon card, and two Tibetan bowls.
The Avatar sequel’s worst character actually does the film a service.
Ukraine unplugged
How long until Alaska’s next oil disaster?
(The Atlantic; Erik Carter / The New York Times / Redux)
Read. “A Black Birch in Winter,” a poem by Richard Wilbur, which was published in The Atlantic in 1974.“You might not know this old tree by its bark, / Which once was striate, smooth, and glossy-dark, / So deep now are the rifts which separate / Its roughened surface into flake and plate.”Watch. Stream Glass Onion on Netflix, and then read an interview with the director Rian Johnson about why the Knives Out sequel is louder and angrier than the first movie.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I have a few New Year’s resolutions, and they tend to be the same as all of my previous New Year’s resolutions: I want to stop aging and wear the same clothes that fit me in college. Failing that, I usually hope for world peace, and then I settle for a general hope that whatever kind of a person I was last year, I can do a bit better this year. (At least I don’t fall down the Steve Martin rabbit hole, although his epic bit from Saturday Night Live in 1986 is probably a more honest set of wishes than most of us will admit.)What’s your New Year’s resolution? Tell us! Send me an email at emailnewsletters@theatlantic.com, or just hit reply to this newsletter. I ask only that you keep it short—one sentence!—and that it reflects something you’re actually resolving to do or hoping for or trying to achieve in 2023. Funny is good too, but I’m curious to see what you’re all striving for in the coming year. I am going to nudge some of the Daily team to add their resolutions as well; we might even get my colleague Isabel Fattal to resolve to see some of the 1980s movies we keep referencing here in the newsletter, but we can’t promise miracles. We’ll collect all of your resolutions over the next few days, and we’ll close out the year on Friday by discussing them.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The war in Ukraine seems permanent. Neither side appears capable of destroying the opposing force or articulating what it would take to reach a peace agreement. The Russians are speaking to Belarus, India and anyone else they might find, but no one can help enough on the battlefield or in the munitions factory to turn the tide. The Ukrainians are speaking to the United States, NATO and anyone else who will listen so that they will continue to receive weapons – perhaps even some new ones. But Ukraine hasn’t broken Russia yet, concerned as it is with preventing the collapse of the country, and doing so may prove difficult. On the battlefield, there is movement on both sides, but movement doesn’t carry with it the taste of victory. When, then, do wars end if the leadership will not concede?

History shows there are several answers to that question.

1. A war ends when one side lacks the material to continue. Germany’s campaign in World War II ended when it was unable to produce and field the weapons needed to fend off the Allied powers.

2. A war ends when one side’s morale is exhausted – when soldiers and civilians are simply unwilling to bear the burden of war, even if victory is possible. This was the case for the United States in the Vietnam War.

3. A war ends when there is no hope of a radical increase in military power, and when foreign intervention is impossible. In WWII, Britain persevered knowing it could not defeat Germany but reasonably expecting an American intervention.

4. A war ends when the consequences of defeat seem tolerable to civilians. In World War II, the Italian public saw Allied occupation as a preferable alternative. (Conversely, nations will continue to fight when the cost of defeat is catastrophic.)

There are certainly other circumstances in which a nation would resist beyond hope, and others under which the nation would readily capitulate instead of endure war. But in judging war, the key is less about the military’s appetite for resistance, since fighting is what militaries do, and more about the appetites of the civilians, who produce war material and bear a burden of loss and pain that can make the war unwinnable.

To try to understand how the Ukraine war ends, we must consider all these matters and more, but with a particular focus on the willingness of civilians to continue to fight. The publics are undoubtedly tired on both sides, the Russians by the causalities and subsequent calling up of more conscripts, and the Ukrainians by the constant attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. The Russians would wish for an end but not at the cost of rebellion by families whose sons were called up. The Ukrainians are constrained by their fear that conceding to the Russians might bring a reign of terror. In this case, the nation most tired of war is also most frightened of the consequences of defeat.

Neither country is concerned with the loss of material. Both would wish for more, but wanting more won’t lead to capitulation. Lack of materials could cause one or both to at least look for a resolution. Both sides are currently fighting with a certain level of weaponry. They are not breaking the other side and have no reason to believe their current supplies will do so. The Russians have their own industrial plant, plus imported weapons from places like Iran. Ukraine has a massive flow of weapons from the West, particularly the United States. This has created a stable but unending war. If this continues, there is a serious possibility of loss of civilian morale. Moscow will therefore try to make sure that its industrial plant and relations stay intact while seeking to undermine shipments to Ukraine. Ukraine will try to make sure the U.S. will at least sustain its weapons deliveries while trying to minimize weapons flowing to Russia from abroad.

Because both face the problem of civilian morale, both will try to minimize the civilian fear of defeat. But so long as Ukraine fears a defeat by Russia, capitulation is practically impossible. The same cannot be said of Russia. Thus the most likely outcome will be peace talks, forced by domestic unrest in both countries. There is already some unrest in Russia, but little in Ukraine. The Russians have not been able to stoke unrest there and will therefore have to engage in an even more intense campaign of terror, if they can. But peace talks will not happen until there is a sense of imbalance as described on both sides. There must be an element of compulsion. So the key is the manipulation of the foreign civilian population, defense of the domestic populations and the introduction of new and practical weapons that will impose pain without triggering foreign intervention.

Over time, then, the sense of the impossibility of victory will trigger peace talks, but not until reality forces it.

If 2022 has been the year of the “woman”, it is a tale with two different final chapters: one hopeful, one less so. The first is set in a distant country, where an archaic, theocratic regime threatens to be toppled by women throwing down their hijabs and demanding their emancipation. The second plays out in a more familiar setting but in an unfamiliar language; a Western nation where the word “woman” itself no longer has any meaning, its definition rewritten to include “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”.
This is the paradox of the past 12 months: the existence of women is being questioned in the very place where female emancipation has come furthest, while in places where women remain shackled to medieval notions of honour and chastity, true feminism is at its strongest.
Why should we worry about dictionary definitions, when everyone knows what a woman is anyway? This may seem like a fair question. Yet simply dismissing the erasure of a word as a “culture war issue” misunderstands the forces that drive it. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay noted in their 2020 book Cynical Theories, language is now viewed as a tool of oppression, and thus must be altered in the name of so-called “liberation”. These arguments over the word “woman”, then, have wider repercussions: they are fronts in a greater war that will determine how language itself is used.
Those who would divorce “woman” from its biological implications often present their ideas as innocuous. They are, we are told, simply champions of “inclusion”. But their ideology is hardly uncontroversial, and surrendering to it is not harmless. The past year has seen reports of transgender women attacking women in female-only spaces and unfairly winning trophies in women’s sports. The spirit of these failures was perhaps best-distilled in the words of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who in March was unable to define what being a woman entailed during her Senate confirmation hearing. “I’m not a biologist,” she said, as if one needed to be a professional scientist to know basic biological facts.
A word of clarification. I am immensely sympathetic to the plight of transgender people and believe they ought to have the same moral and legal rights as everyone else. To be against militant trans activists’ gender ideology is not to be transphobic. Rather, it is simply to agree, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie succinctly put it, that “trans women are trans women”. Adichie was savaged for this and other statements evincing wrongthink, but acknowledging that trans women are distinct from women, that there are potential conflicts between their rights, and that gender ideology opens the door to abusive men masquerading as women, should not be controversial. Standing up for the rights of transgender people should not mean pretending sex does not exist altogether.
Indulging in this fantasy can have perverse, and dangerous, repercussions — both at home and abroad. Here in the West, it culminates in a myopic worldview which holds that a bestselling author (and domestic abuse survivor) should be trolled for funding a women-only service for victims of sexual abuse. Elsewhere in the world, the erosion of our understanding of what it means to be a “woman” has more immediate consequences.
Consider what has taken place in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan in just the past two months. In Kenya, while women in America debated what we should call a person born with a cervix, FGM has taken a new and insidious form. In Iran, the female-led protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested for breaking mandatory dress code laws, have been met with an equally inhumane response. Reports abound of Iran’s security services raping protestors and shooting at the faces and genitals of female protesters. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban government reintroduced Sharia Law, meaning women are now barred from walking outside without a male relative and must cover up with a burqa or hijab when outside the home. Earlier this month, a woman was publicly flogged for entering a shop without a male guardian. Last week, the Taliban banned women from studying at university
Suggested readingHow I survived my annus horribilisBy Kathleen Stock
Is it really a coincidence that, in the same year the West forgot what it means to be a woman, we decided it was acceptable to turn our backs on women in those countries? The above is what happens when a society stops caring what it means to be a woman; when a centuries-old fight for emancipation becomes relegated to semantics. Of course, this takes a different form in Kenya, Iran and Afghanistan. But there still seem to me to be similarities between today’s gender activists and theocratic subjugators. Both believe, on the basis of a contentious ideology, that they have a monopoly on truth. And both, in a sense, are champions of the subjective over the objective: in one case, particular religious beliefs are said to tell us how society should be run — and in the other, mere feelings are said to abolish material reality.
This is why gender ideology advocates are a threat not just to women but to Western ideals, too. Western culture prides itself on the achievements of the Enlightenment and science — in other words, on objectivity. It was on an objective basis that previous generations of feminists staked their claim: their plight was based on an appeal to reason. Now, so-called “progressives” — another term that has been redefined into meaninglessness — stake their claim on subjective feelings and happily ignore or dismiss its material effects.
The effects of this are slowly taking shape. In the Seventies, the anti-Shah Iranians threw in their lot with the ayatollahs in the delusional hope that the ayatollahs would share power after the revolution. They learned very quickly that fanatics cannot be trusted or restrained. Similarly, many Western feminists ended up allying themselves with progressivism, and now far too many women have felt the terrible consequences of that alliance. If the spirit of true feminism is to be reclaimed, we need more JK Rowlings and fewer Ketanji Brown Jacksons.
It is not just feminism and the rights of women that are at stake here: so, too, are the best ideals of the West itself. If 2022 is the year of the “woman”, let’s hope 2023 will be the year when we can delete those quotation marks.
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This was a year that was split into before and after—the dividing line being when the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Following the shocking leak of the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, on May 2nd, we fully entered the era of conservative dominance, with aggressive rulings on abortion, guns, and religion. Doubts about the Court’s legitimacy reached a fever pitch, and its unpopularity hit alarming lows. Soul-searching about the Court and the rule of law has rarely been as cynical or as fundamental. Law professors asked one another, “What do we say to students now?,” with many questioning the distinction between law and politics, or even the Court’s final authority to interpret the Constitution—which the Court first claimed for itself about two hundred years ago. The Justices appeared to understand that they are presiding over a historic decline in public trust, as several of them have made public remarks insisting on the importance of the Court’s retaining its legitimacy. “Everybody in this country is free to disagree with our decisions,” Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Dobbs majority opinion, said. But he warned that someone “crosses an important line when they say that the Court is acting in a way that is illegitimate.”

2022 in Review New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

When the Court returned for its new term in the fall, the Justices dove into another set of blockbuster cases, on affirmative action, voting rights, and religious liberty. But cracks have emerged in the commitment to originalism that conservatives wielded last term to tie the meaning of the Constitution to “history and traditions” from periods when women couldn’t vote and segregation was the law. Liberal Justices made us wonder whether we’re all supposed to be originalists now—or strategically pretend to be. Take, for example, this term’s debates about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In a case asking whether Alabama created enough majority-Black electoral districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and whether the use of race in districting violates the Fourteenth Amendment, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson refused to cede originalism to conservatives, instead describing it as “our normal assessment of the Constitution.” Professing to have “drilled down” and looked at “the history and traditions of the Constitution, at what the Framers thought about,” Jackson, in one of her first hearings as a Justice, lectured counsel extensively on how the original meaning of equal protection was not race-neutral, since “the Framers themselves adopted the equal-protection clause . . . in a race-conscious way.” (Jackson explained that “the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves”—which is clearly correct but likely to be ignored by conservative originalists.) Similarly, at oral arguments in the cases on affirmative action in college admissions, Justice Elena Kagan asked, “What would a committed originalist think about the kind of race-consciousness that’s at issue here?”—knowing that a “committed originalist” would reject the view that her conservative colleagues will likely adopt this term, that racial classifications are wrong. The debate—or, perhaps, liberal judicial trolling—highlighted the Justices’ waxing and waning adherence to originalism, depending on whether it produces the desired result in a given case. That only confirmed the sense of a crisis of legitimacy.

A pro-religion view of the First Amendment has been on the march this year. A series of significant victories for religious plaintiffs included the Court’s decisions that a high-school football coach must be permitted to kneel and pray on the field after games, that Maine must pay tuition for students living in districts lacking public schools and choosing to attend religious schools, and that Boston must allow a Christian flag to be flown on a flagpole outside city hall if it allows nonreligious flags. This term, the Court heard a free-speech case in which a Colorado Web designer seeks the Court’s approval to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings, despite a state law prohibiting discrimination against L.G.B.T. people. The Court appears likely to decide that the First Amendment prevents a state anti-discrimination law from requiring people to provide services for same-sex weddings, if the service is artistic, such as designing Web sites. Perhaps the ruling will be limited to sensitivities about marriage rather than the status of being gay. But the case is part of the steady pursuit of a maximalist vision of the First Amendment in which conflicts between religion and other values are resolved in favor of religion, and religious people and institutions can be exempt from legal strictures that bind everyone else.

No constitutional case this term involves an argument as implausible and as consequential as Moore v. Harper, in which North Carolina legislators claim that the Constitution prohibits state courts from reviewing state legislatures’ decisions on how to conduct federal elections. The state’s highest court threw out the Republican state legislature’s gerrymandered congressional-district maps because they violated state constitutional guarantees of, among other things, free elections and equal protection. The state legislators argue that the state court lacked authority to do that because the Constitution’s elections clause says that the time, place, and manner of holding federal elections for senators and representatives “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.” The consequence of this theory would be that state legislatures could engage in gerrymandering or voter suppression in federal elections without limits by state courts. Without those checks, the tendency of the majority party to draw maps that keep it in power would soon destroy any semblance of democracy. The oral argument revealed skepticism from enough Justices, including John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, that one can plausibly hope that at least five or six of them will have the good sense to reject the fantasy of a legislature unbounded by the judiciary. Particularly in a time when the Court faces attacks on its authority, the Justices might well find it unappealing to undermine judicial review, even in the context of state judiciaries.

Criticism of the Court this year has featured not merely disagreements with its decisions but also suspicions of ethical lapses. Last month, the Times published the allegation that Justice Alito, who had called the Dobbs leak a “grave betrayal,” had himself leaked the outcome of the Hobby Lobby decision to pro-life-activist friends, in 2014. (Alito has denied disclosing the decision.) The Times’ source, a former anti-abortion activist, also sent a letter this past summer to the Chief Justice alleging this prior leak, which he said went unacknowledged. The sense that the Court may be struggling or helpless to enforce ethical norms, underlined by the Dobbs leak, has only grown since then. In May, the Chief Justice announced an investigation of the Dobbs leak, but that has been followed by eight months of radio silence on the matter.

A constitutionally available check on the Court is impeachment of a Justice (which has occurred once, in 1804), and, this year, calls for impeachment became louder than in recent memory, particularly regarding Justice Clarence Thomas. He was the lone public dissenter in the Court’s decision that allowed the release of records by the National Archives to the January 6th committee, and, when messages written by his wife, Ginni Thomas, in her efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, surfaced, many Democrats became disturbed that he had not recused himself. In a less polarized time, in which Justices were assumed to keep themselves above the fray, it would be easier for the public to accept Ginni’s word that she generally does not discuss her political activities with her husband, suggesting that he had no knowledge that would give him reason to recuse himself. But, in 2022, Justices had to openly defend themselves as not merely “a bunch of partisan hacks,” as Barrett put it in a speech this fall, or “junior varsity politicians,” as Stephen Breyer said in a lecture shortly before his retirement.

The Court’s defensiveness about its authority came into view most directly at an oral argument in an immigration case, which challenged the legality of the Biden Administration’s policy of prioritizing the arrest and deportation of people who are suspected of terrorism or other serious crimes, or were apprehended at the border. A Texas federal court determined that the policy was unlawful and vacated it, and the Administration took the sweeping position that courts, under the Administrative Procedure Act, cannot vacate agency rules or regulations that they may find unlawful. The Chief Justice did not hide his outrage at the argument. “Wow,” he exclaimed, calling it “radical.” An even more scandalized Kavanaugh scolded the Solicitor General, saying that “I find it pretty astonishing that you come up here” and make this argument which would “just toss out decades of this Court’s law.” (It was ironic, after Dobbs, to hear this level of alarm from Kavanaugh at the idea of tossing out decades of precedent.) Jackson and Barrett, too, followed in resisting the idea. The anxiety was palpable at the claim, made calmly by the U.S. government to the Justices in open court, that their power was far more limited than the Court had assumed for decades. But the argument bore some resemblance to what the Court had suggested it was undertaking in Dobbs, in which it took away its own power to invalidate abortion regulations, leaving the issue to the political branches and the states. The exchange announced that this is indeed a new era, one not only of judicial conservatism but also of open challenges to the Court’s authority. The response was tantamount to “How dare you?” The people do dare, and the coming year may see more normalization of such efforts inside and outside the courtroom. ♦

Roughly a century ago, a new fad diet began to sweep the United States. Hollywood starlets such as Ethel Barrymore supposedly swore by it; the citrus industry hopped on board. All a figure-conscious girl had to do was eat a lot of grapefruit for a week, or two, or three.The Grapefruit Diet, like pretty much all other fad diets, is mostly bunk. If people were losing weight with the regimen, that’s because the citrus was being recommended as part of a portion-controlled, low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet—not because it had exceptional flab-blasting powers. And yet, the diet has survived through the decades, spawning a revival in the 1970s and ’80s, a dangerous juice-exclusive spin-off called the grapefruit fast, and even a shout-out from Weird Al; its hype still plagues nutritionists today.[Read: Why science can be so indecisive about nutrition]But for every grapefruit evangelist, there is a critic warning of its dangers—probably one with a background in pharmacology. The fruit, for all its tastiness and dietetic appeal, has another, more sinister trait: It raises the level of dozens of FDA-approved medications in the body, and for a select few drugs, the amplification can be potent enough to trigger a life-threatening overdose. For most people, chowing down on grapefruit is completely safe; it would take “a perfect storm” of factors—say, a vulnerable person taking an especially grapefruit-sensitive medication within a certain window of drinking a particular amount of grapefruit juice—for disaster to unfurl, says Emily Heil, an infectious-disease pharmacist at the University of Maryland. But that leaves grapefruit in a bit of a weird position. No one can agree on exactly how much the world should worry about this bittersweet treat whose chemical properties scientists still don’t fully understand.Grapefruit’s medication-concentrating powers were discovered only because of a culinary accident. Some three decades ago, the clinical pharmacologist David Bailey (who died earlier this year) was running a trial testing the effects of alcohol consumption on a blood-pressure medication called felodipine. Hoping to mask the distinctive taste of booze for his volunteers, Bailey mixed it with grapefruit juice, and was shocked to discover that blood levels of felodipine were suddenly skyrocketing in everyone—even those in the control group, who were drinking virgin grapefruit juice.After running experiments on himself, Bailey confirmed that the juice was to blame. Some chemical in grapefruit was messing with the body’s natural ability to break down felodipine in the hours after it was taken, causing the drug to accumulate in the blood. It’s the rough physiological equivalent of jamming a garbage disposal: Waste that normally gets flushed just builds, and builds, and builds. In this case, the garbage disposal is an enzyme called cytochrome P450 3A4—CYP3A4 for short—capable of breaking down a whole slate of potentially harmful chemicals found in foods and meds. And the jamming culprit is a compound found in the pulp and peel of grapefruit and related citrus, including pomelos and Seville oranges. It doesn’t take much: Even half a grapefruit can be enough to trigger a noticeable interaction, says George Dresser, a pharmacologist at Western University, in Ontario.The possible consequences of these molecular clogs can sometimes get intense. “On the list of concerning food-drug interactions,” Dresser told me, “arguably, this is the most important one.” When paired with certain heart medications, grapefruit could potentially cause arrhythmias; with some antidepressants, it might induce nausea, vomiting, and an elevated heart rate. Grapefruit can also raise blood levels of the cholesterol drugs atorvastatin and simvastatin, prompting muscle pain and, eventually, muscle breakdown. One of the fruit’s most worrying interactions occurs with an immunosuppressive drug called tacrolimus, frequently prescribed to organ-transplant patients, that may, when amped up by grapefruit, spark headaches, tremors, hypoglycemia, and kidney problems. The citrus even has the ability to lift blood levels of drugs of abuse, including fentanyl, oxycodone, and ketamine.The full list of potential interactions is long. “More than 50 percent of drugs on the market are metabolized by CYP3A4,” which inhabits both the liver and the gut, says Mary Paine, a pharmacologist at Washington State University. That said, grapefruit can really affect only intestinal CYP3A4, and will cause only a small fraction of those medications to reach notably higher concentrations in the blood (and sometimes only when fairly large quantities of juice are consumed—a quart or more). And only a small fraction of those medications will, when amassed, threaten true toxicity. Our bodies are always making more CYP3A4; stop eating grapefruit and, within a day or two, levels of the protein should more or less reset.Professionals disagree on how to characterize grapefruit’s risks. To Shirley Tsunoda, a pharmacist at UC San Diego, “it’s definitely a big deal,” especially for the organ-transplant patients to whom she prescribes tacrolimus. Her advice to them is to indulge in grapefruit exactly never—and ideally, tacrolimus-takers should skip related citrus too. Tsunoda even advises people to check the labels of mixed-fruit juices, just in case the makers sneaked some grapefruit in, and she thinks twice when considering noshing on it herself. Paul Watkins, a pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is much less worried; his bigger concern, he told me, is that the fruit’s reputation as a nemesis of oral medications has been way overblown. He used to study grapefruit-drug interaction but abandoned it years ago, after “I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t very important,” he told me. Some concern is absolutely warranted for certain people on certain meds, he noted. But “I think the actual incidence of patients who have gotten into any kind of trouble or had serious adverse reactions due to taking their drugs with grapefruit juice is very, very small.”Even the FDA seems a bit unsure of how it feels about the fruit. The agency has stamped the documentation of several grapefruit-sensitive medications with official warnings. But fact sheets for other drugs merely mention that they can interact with grapefruit, say to consult a health-care professional, or just counsel people to avoid drinking the juice in “large amounts.” And as Dan Nosowitz has reported for Atlas Obscura, several interacting drugs that bear warnings in Canada—among them, Viagra, oxycodone, the HIV antiviral Edurant, and the blood pressure medication verapamil—don’t mention any issues with grapefruit in the United States. (When I asked the agency about these discrepancies, a spokesperson wrote, “The FDA is continuously reviewing new information about approved drugs, including studies and reports of adverse events. If the FDA determines there is a safety concern, the agency will take appropriate action.”)Very little solid data can precisely quantify grapefruit’s perils. Over the years, researchers have documented a number of isolated cases of citrus-drug interactions that prompted urgent medical care. But some of them involved truly exceptional amounts of juice. And citrus stans aren’t constantly dropping dead in clinical trials or nursing homes. Even when Bailey first presented his findings to the greater medical community, “people asked, ‘Where are all the bodies?’” Dresser, who was mentored by Bailey, told me. The paucity of data, Dresser contends, stems in part from health-care workers neglecting to check their patients for a history of juice-chugging.For now, the conversation has mostly stalled, while grapefruit has served up even more mysteries. In the years since Bailey’s discovery, researchers have found that the fruit might lower the concentration of certain drugs, such as the allergy med fexofenadine, perhaps by keeping the lining of the intestines from absorbing certain compounds. New drugs are a particularly murky area, especially because grapefruit interactions aren’t a typical first priority when a new medication hits the market. The popular COVID antiviral pill Paxlovid, for instance, contains the CYP3A4-susceptible ingredient ritonavir. A Pfizer representative told me that the company is not concerned about toxicity. But Heil wonders whether grapefruit could mildly aggravate some of Paxlovid’s irksome side effects: diarrhea, for instance, or maybe the sour, metallic taste that reminds many people of … well, grapefruit.[Read: Paxlovid mouth is real—and gross]That said, most grapefruit lovers need not despair. The fruit is still healthy—chock-full of vitamins and flavor—and yet is often overlooked, says Heidi Silver, a nutrition scientist at Vanderbilt University. Silver and researchers have shown that consuming grapefruit flesh or juice might be able to slightly lower levels of triglycerides and cholesterol. Technically, it can even play a role in weight loss: Snacking on a small portion before a meal can help people feel full faster. Then again, a glass of water will too. Just as grapefruit is not a miraculous vanquisher of fat, it isn’t a ubiquitous killer.Even people on certain medications may be able to enjoy it if they consult an expert first. Heil’s own father absolutely adores grapefruit, and also happens to take an oral medication that can interact. Swallow them too close together, and he risks dizziness and fatigue. But he and Heil have found a compromise: He can have small portions of grapefruit or its juice in the morning, spaced about 12 hours out from when he takes his meds at bedtime. A few weeks ago, Heil (who thinks grapefruit is disgusting) even gave her dad the green light to enjoy a dinnertime cocktail that contained a small splash of the juice. Maybe the smidge of fruit affected his meds that day. But “it wasn’t going to be the end of the world,” Heil told me. To say that, after all, would have been an exaggeration.

Defenders of the law argue that educators and researchers can use other, nonstate funds to pay for travel. As a more established professor, I, for instance, have external grants and access to other sources of funding that I can dip into. But junior faculty members are much more dependent on university funds to kick-start their careers.

To achieve promotion with tenure, an assistant professor usually needs to show significant success in education, service and research. One of the ways a professor does that is by presenting at national conferences and establishing a reputation as an expert in his or her field. If such conferences are held in states that are on the no-travel list, however, some are stuck.

Jon Goodwin, an assistant professor of counseling, clinical and school psychology who also works at U.C. Santa Barbara, is interested in how to support unusually gifted students. He recently had a proposal accepted at the National Association for Gifted Children Annual Convention, the must-attend event in his field. He looked forward to presenting his work and networking with other like-minded individuals.

Unfortunately, the conference was held in Indianapolis this year. Because Indiana is on the banned list for passing a law similar to Georgia’s (overriding Gov. Eric Holcomb’s veto), he could not travel there using work funds. He wound up paying about $1,700 out of pocket to participate in the meeting. Colleagues from other states could use their work funds for travel.

“These types of travel restrictions disproportionally affect those who work in the social and behavioral sciences,” Dr. Goodwin told me. “They prevent us from interacting with communities that are adversely impacted by discriminatory laws. We can’t disseminate our work to them or learn anything new about them.”

Next year’s conference is in Florida, another state on the banned travel list.

“I don’t think the law is doing anything productive,” Brandon Robinson, the chair of gender and sexuality studies at University of California, Riverside, told me. Much of Dr. Robinson’s research takes place in Texas, following L.G.B.T.Q. youth to study how family dynamics, and acceptance of their gender and sexuality, play into issues like housing stability and safety. In addition to having a more difficult time doing this work in person, Dr. Robinson also can’t attend many conferences, like that of the Southern Sociological Society, and can’t travel using university funding to present research locally in Texas, where it might do the most good.

“I don’t know how banning us from traveling is going to affect how local legislators vote in Texas,” Dr. Robinson said. “There’s no evidence the law is doing anything that people could claim is ‘working.’”

With 2023 nearly upon us, we asked AEI’s research fellows to tell us about their favorite books they read in 2022. From wonkish policy analysis to popular history to engrossing fiction, our recommendations include something for just about everybody.
The American Enterprise Institute library in Washington, DC
Samuel J. Abrams—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Domestic Policy Studies
This year, I taught a course about geography and wanted to showcase New York City as a laboratory for my students. The city and its history can be overwhelmingly complex, so I ended up adding two books to my reading list for my students that I absolutely loved. Both showcased the import of the past impacting the city’s present culture and politics. They were so much fun to read that I wanted to share them here. The first is Russell Shorto’s epic telling of the power struggles to set up institutions and a legal regime in the pre-English colonial era when the Dutch established a colony in the city. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America is a quick read and helps explain so much about the city’s attitudes toward creativity, tolerance, and commerce centuries later. The second is Christiane Bird’s wonderful history A Block in Time: A New York City History at the Corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street. Bird unravels New York City’s complex history of socio-economic and demographic change, mobility, and power by looking at one particular block in the city which remains a focal point of commerce, culture, and the city’s cosmopolitanism today and has morphed remarkably over the past three centuries.
Unrelated to my teaching, I also really enjoyed Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America. The book is not really about Picasso himself but the art world ranging from the dealers, curators, collectors, politicians, and critics and told stories of how artistic movements and taste move through societies. In particular, it was thrilling to learn more about Alfred H. Barr and his work as director of New York’s MOMA almost a century ago to save so much of Picasso’s and many others’ work from the Nazis in World War II, changing the way America looks at the creation of culture. A single, Barr-led exhibition in New York—Picasso: Forty Years of His Art—launched Picasso in America, defined MoMA as we know it today, and was instrumental in shifting the focus of the art world from Paris to New York.
Kirsten Axelsen—Nonresident Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
On a Night of a Thousand Stars is Andrea Yaryura Clark’s debut fiction novel. It tells the story of Argentina’s “Dirty War” where the oppressive dictatorship made thousands of people disappear. Clark’s novel is based on real people and their experiences, including the authors. She is from Argentina and grew up in the political turmoil of the 1970s. She returned after college and spent time interviewing and documenting the life of the children of people who disappeared in order to capture some of the regime’s effect on their lives and what their parents’ legacy has meant for them. The book reads as a love story, a thriller with intensity, and a commentary on repression and the inability of any regime, no matter how powerful, to really make anyone, or their ideology, actually disappear from record.
Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song is Marlon Peterson’s memoir about his young life and the course of events, experiences, and decisions where his life took a course from being a religious and studious young person to a man who lived his 20s in prison for his involvement in a tragic and serious crime. Peterson’s memoir is one of the most honest depictions of a person’s life and experience I have read. Peterson shares both intense ugliness and kindness in himself and others. Sharing what he did and observed in his time in prison helps to demonstrate that incarceration is a mechanism unsuited for reform and rehabilitation. Peterson has dedicated his career to helping young people avoid incarceration and also to sharing truth about the experience.
Claude Barfield—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
Much has been written in praise of Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, but as another scribe on technology and the semiconductor industry, here are some brief added reflections.
In assessing the reasons behind this outstanding achievement, my first point relates not to substance but to the book’s structure. Given the complexity of the semiconductor decade’s long story, the decision to break up the narrative into chunk-sized “chiplets” was a stroke of genius. It allowed Miller—and the readers who followed—to bite off manageable bits of the history and analysis without interrupting the cumulative depth of the unfolding narrative. Second, and linked to the point above, the interweaving of fascinating (and, on occasion, repulsive) personal biographies of the engineering giants who led the industry, gives the reader a human link to the technological ingenuity chronicled in the book.
Finally, from someone who has wrestled with succinctly defining and explaining complex technical phenomena without “dumbing down” the analysis, Miller’s clarity and economy in describing the complicated links in the semiconductor supply chain—from software to equipment to manufacturing techniques—is a rare gift (though, no doubt born from endless hours of research) that goes far to explain why this work is commanding such a wide audience and acclaim.
Karlyn Bowman—Distinguished Senior Fellow Emeritus, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Twenty-twenty-two marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s great work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The slim volume follows an ordinary prisoner, a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, from reveille at 5 a.m. to lights out in one of Joseph Stalin’s network of Soviet prison work camps. While not autobiographical, the novel surely drew on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in the Gulag from 1945 to 1953. The book was Solzhenitsyn’s first appearance in print, and it was published in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World) after it had been submitted for publication to Nikita Khrushchev, who authorized its publication. The magazine’s editor, Alexander Tvardovsky described the novel as “vivid and original in its unpretentiousness and down to earth simplicity.” For those of us who live in the comfort of the West, it is almost impossible to imagine the privation of those camps—the freezing temperatures (it is 16 below when the book opens), the rations of stale bread and gruel, the thin felt boots, the interminable line ups to account for all the prisoners—that the men in the camps endured. Yet millions of nameless ordinary people experienced this fate. Shukhov’s trumped-up sentence was for 10 years. It seemed somehow appropriate to read the book when Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Elisabeth Braw—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
Many people have read Vaclav Havel’s essays, but far fewer have read his dramas. That ought to be remedied, because not only are they superb works in the genre of absurd drama: like other masterpieces in this genre, they have also stood the test of time and can, in fact, tell us a great deal about our own time.
My recommendation this Christmas is The Memorandum (published in its English translation in 1965 and in a new translation, as The Memo, in 2006). It focuses on Josef Gross, a senior bureaucrat who finds himself constantly battling new and baffling problems for which nobody seems responsible and which everyone still seems to have signed off on. Gross discovers to his surprise that a new office language, Ptydepe, has been introduced. He then discovers that everyone has been ordered to attend new Ptydepe classes and that a Ptydepe Translation Center has been created, which will be replaced by a Ptydepe Reference Center when everyone has mastered Ptydepe. “We knew you’d create obstacles and therefore we arranged it so you wouldn’t see what we were after until we were strong enough to surmount your obstacles,” Gross’s deputy tells him.
The urge to create new-speak, to which everyone has to submit themselves, is not confined to The Memorandum or indeed to the fictional world. It’s real, and regrettably it’s having another resurgence.
Timothy P. Carney—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
The sexual revolution and 21st century feminism have created a twisted sexual ethic. Young women have sex on first dates because they think they ought to, and they put up with degradations because they are afraid of sounding judgy or prudish.
Christine Emba is a millennial woman, and no conservative, which makes her the perfect person to chronicle the state of sex, love, and self-image among today’s 20- and 30-somethings.
Emba’s audience is exactly these millennial and Gen Z men and women caught up in this depressing scene. In her book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, she tries to make a case for some basic truths—men and women are different, sex isn’t simple, liberation is not an end in itself—on terms that secular young progressives can accept.
Her argumentation is gentle and persuasive, and her interviews are eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Matthew Continetti—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
My reading in 2022 was filled with biographies and memoirs. Here are some of my favorites.
Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words delivers on its title. Read it to learn, directly from the source, about the life and thought of an American hero.
I started James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life hoping to unlock the secrets of the bestselling novelist’s success. By the time I finished, I still hadn’t grasped the mystery. I think it may have to do with time management, strategic collaboration, and writing extremely short chapters. In any case, I had a lot of fun living vicariously through Patterson’s account of his career.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction is a group biography that illustrates how a coterie of motivated and determined eccentrics can change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan evokes the New York intellectual scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s a gripping and elegiac introduction to the world of literary journalism, and to the personality and prose of the inimitable Elizabeth Hardwick.
Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation is a series of essays about movies that formed the famed director’s worldview and aesthetic. Reading it is the closest many of us will ever come to having a conversation with the man behind Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino is as intense on the page as he is on screen. This was probably the most enjoyable book I read in the past 12 months.
Finally, over Thanksgiving weekend, I revisited Tom Bethell’s The Electric Windmill: An Inadvertent Autobiography. Bethell, who died in 2021, was a conservative journalist whose column appeared monthly in The American Spectator for decades. Making my way through this unjustly neglected collection, first published in 1988, I found that Bethell’s profiles of “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer and anti-Communist icon Sidney Hook still hold up. Bethell’s curiosity and dry wit enlivened his reporting on politics, economics, philosophy, and science. A note for young writers: Find a copy of The Electric Windmill and study how Bethell approached our complex world with skepticism, pathos, and humanity. His work will inspire you just as it inspired me.
Robert Doar—President, American Enterprise Institute
I have three favorite books in 2022.
Of course, the first is by an AEI scholar. The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 2022) is a tremendous history of the individuals, institutions, and ideas that have shaped conservatism in America. Continetti shows how nationalism and populism have always been legitimate parts of the conservative movement that we can’t ignore or dismiss. In the book’s last chapter especially, Continetti outlines a balanced path forward for conservatives to reunite our movement and our country.
In a year of important political memoirs, Vice President Mike Pence’s So Help Me God (Simon & Schuster, 2022) was the most important one I read. Vice President Pence tells how his faith and family guided him through a long career in public life—and ultimately, inspired his commitment to our country and the Constitution, despite astonishing disloyalty from the president he had served so faithfully.
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown & Company 2022) is a beautifully-written depiction of a master political operator who never gave up in his quest for freedom and independence. Most Americans know the name “Sam Adams,” but they should really learn the story of this famous Boston patriot. Schiff’s biography is a great place to start.
Nicholas Eberstadt—Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy
Yes: America is in a bad patch nowadays. Public confidence in almost all institutions is slumping down to new measured lows; nearly two-thirds of the country say we are “on the wrong track”; and close to three-quarters of Americans think US children will be less well off financially than their parents.
Yet there is every reason to believe our current woes are temporary—not some permanent new dismal. Evidence for the case that a future of almost unlimited plenty can await our descendants—all human descendants, in fact—is marshalled elegantly and compellingly in Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
In this commanding, learned, and highly readable study, Cato’s Marian Tupy and BYU’s Gale Pooley systematically demonstrate the “deeply counterintuitive” (p.2) statistical truth that “the abundance of resources grows at a faster rate than population” (p.2) in our modern era. It can continue to do so for the generations ahead, they argue, so long as we permit human ingenuity (what the late economist Julian Simon, a hero in Tupy and Pooley’s account, termed “the ultimate resource”) to work its wonders. Those wonders include the escape from absolute poverty for the overwhelming majority of humanity over the past two centuries, and remarkable improvements in material living standards in every part of the world over that same timeframe.
“Superabundance” write Tupy and Pooley, “depends on two main components: population and freedom” (p. 401). We can throw away the magic lamp that generates superabundance, they warn: by discarding the liberal institutions (including property rights) that reward creativity, or by embracing destructive ideologies—including the radical anti-human variant of environmentalism that operates, in their words, as an unfalsifiable “secular religion” (p.391). The opportunity for ever more superabundance is ours to lose—but it is already in our grasp.
Jim Harper—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
In a blog post seeking to debunk “artificial intelligence” this past year, I defined intelligence conveniently as existing “when an agent (typically human, possibly machine) draws information and ideas from diverse fields to enlighten another field.” Why is that a convenient definition? Because it allows me to feel intelligent—or at least lay the groundwork for it—in my reading.
The literary cross-pollination winner for me this year was How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch by Sushma Subramanian (Columbia University Press 2021). Our neglected sense of touch is quite cobbled together by the body. It’s fascinating to learn about it and imagine how we’ll soon have devices that depict touch the way TV depicts moving images. But the highlight for me was how the book reveals that information and communication are one and the same thing inside the body—a good mind-bender for one who works on information policy.
To China: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir (Crown 2021)—a 2021 recommendation of my colleague Kori Schake—is the autobiography of Ai Weiwei, Chinese dissident and artist. The history he writes of his family and himself is a way of gaining comprehension about a perplexing nation and culture. As an artist’s book should, there are inserts. Will China see more raised middle fingers and skirts, or fewer?
Before Hong Kong was China, a pivotal meeting of the early Bitcoin community was held there—a follow-on to an earlier “Scaling Bitcoin” meeting in Montreal. Both were pivotal to what would become the “blocksize debate,” or something harsher. In The Blocksize War: The Battle for Control over Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules, Jonathan Bier ably documents a turning point in the history of the leading cryptocurrency. For some, a technical choice about Bitcoin’s throughput secured it once and for all against the depredations time was sure to bring. For others, that choice smashed the cryptocurrency world, creating the Babel of coins and tokens in which charlatans and incompetents currently thrive.
Mark Jamison—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
Most years I spend time with narratives about people or companies so that I can learn through others’ experiences. Three such books stood out to me in 2022. Two are Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey and Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell by Jason Riley. I had found Sowell’s books Knowledge and Decisions, The Vision of the Anointed, and A Conflict of Visions so insightful that I jumped at these chances to understand his intellectual journey. The books explain how economic evidence took him from being an avowed Marxist to an economic conservative, but they offer so much more. His competitive spirit, intellectual honesty, and adherence to evidence and logic show up at an early age. His unwillingness to succumb to racism or to abuse from authority figures provide lessons that persons of any age and in any context should find useful and inspiring. If you read these books about his life and some of the many books he has written, you will be left wondering why he has not received a Nobel Prize in economics.
Another worthwhile read is The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. PayPal’s founders and earliest employees have made outsized impacts on information technology industries. They’ve founded or been instrumental in the formation of Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, LinkedIn, and many others. The book pulls no punches in describing the ambition, creativeness, mistakes, and egos that shaped Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and others, and how their mixes of talents shaped their company. Lessons to watch for include how to know when you have held onto an idea for too long, recognize your own flaws, escape financial disaster, learn from customers, and bury hatchets for the greater good.
Joshua T. Katz—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
I recently reread Rose Macaulay’s delicious novel The Towers of Trebizond, in part because its famous opening—“‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass”— earned a cameo in an article I published on first words. As it happens, a much earlier novel of hers, What Not, hitherto unknown to me, has now been reissued by MIT Press in its “Radium Age” series. Its first sentence weighs in at 137 words, but don’t let that deter you. The work, which influenced Brave New World, is a love story filled with witty aperçus about topics that still occupy us a century later: government surveillance, “training” courses, propaganda, and the questions “Did brains matter so greatly after all? Were the clever happier than the fools?”
But who reads anything anymore? Fourteen years ago, when Mark Bauerlein published The Dumbest Generation, I and many others were skeptical of his doom-laden predictions. Just how wrong we were, and his sequel, The Dumbest Generation Grows up, tells a sorry tale. Bauerlein has a remarkable ability to produce long, lyrical sentences about cultural illiteracy in the age of the sound bite—a jarring combination. “Everyone deserves to be happy” is the mantra of the day, and yet so many people are neither happy nor, it seems, willing to use their brains.
Kevin R. Kosar—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Good books can help one better see why things are as they are. For the person who wonders “What is WRONG with the media?!” there is Chris Stirewalt’s Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back. He explains that outraging readers is the media’s business model in the 21st century. While this might help MSNBC and the like keep the lights on, it comes at the cost of gratuitously inflaming our politics.
A second eye-opener is Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails. Until a century ago, medicine, food, and alcohol often were commingled into singular products. The ancient beer of the Middle East was thick like gruel and packed nutrients. From the Dark Ages through the early 20th century, drinks laced with herbs were prescribed for myriad maladies. The reader of Doctors and Distillers who visits a bar will notice that some of these health tonics continue to be sold, such as Fernet Branca and Dubonnet, as mere hooch, thanks to the medical experts and the pill industry. But take it from Dr. Kosar, if you suffer phlegm, make a toddy (hot water, honey, & whiskey).
Desmond Lachman—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
At a time when the world is drowning in debt and the world’s major central banks are slamming on the monetary policy brakes to contain multi-decade-high inflation, there is surprising complacency in academic and policymaking circles about the risk of another global financial market crisis on the scale of the 2008 Lehman crisis. Three timely books should dispel such complacency.
Nouriel Roubini’s MegaThreats lays out well the many interrelated short-term and long-term risks to the global economy. However, he falls short of offering constructive solutions as to how these plausible challenges might be addressed. Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, highlights a confluence of unprecedented political and economic challenges in his The Changing World Order. He also offers helpful insights as to how an investor should think about these challenges in making investment decisions. In Crashed, Adam Tooze underlines how the 2008 Great Economic Recession spawned fundamental changes in the world political landscape that in turn complicated economic policy management.
With these three well-argued and easily accessible books, policymakers will not be able to claim that they were not forewarned if today’s all-too-visible economic policy challenges give rise to another major world economic and political crisis next year.
Yuval Levin—Director, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
The best book I read this year was our colleague Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. A gripping survey of a century of thinkers, politicians, activists, and coalition-builders, it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our country. By beginning in the 1920s (rather than after World War II, where histories of modern conservatism often start), by combining intellectual with political history, and by tracing a number of key themes through his complex narrative, Matt clarifies what is distinct about the time we’re living in and what is best understood as continuous with long-standing trends. He shows how the tensions between populists and conservatives, and between libertarians and social traditionalists have shaped the evolution of the right, and where they may be headed now. If past is prologue, then history is essential preparation for facing the future, and this is a superb and engaging work of history.
Thomas P. Miller—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
This is a tough assignment. With brick-and-mortar book shops in shorter supply, one can no longer rely on the Washington practice of skimming through the indexes until you find your name included to determine a winning entry. And there are so many words to read in some of these tomes—the equivalent of tens of thousands of tweets, all strung together.
I can’t even own up to most of my discretionary reading these days, aimed at escaping the regular tasks of thumbing through lengthy journal articles, policy studies, and court cases. But two older works I’ve reread this year can provide, respectively, some historical perspective and some practical work skills.
From the classics bin, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is always worth dusting off again. The longshoreman philosopher’s crisp analysis of the kindling material that sparks mass movements may seem so mid-20th century to some, but it provides valuable cautions for think tankers and academics aspiring to become masters of the political universe, if not their domain. Hoffer managed to be a favorite of both Ike and LBJ (let’s not mention that HRC also recommended the book to her staff in the wake of the 2016 campaign . . .). But if you only have time for aphorisms, try Hoffer’s The Passionate State of Mind.  
On the practical skills/continuing education side, those of us charged with writing captions and titles for our forums and articles always should consult the gold standard source: Headless Body in Topless Bar: The Best Headlines From America’s Favorite Newspaper. From the killing of Osama (“Gotcha: Warm up the Virgins”) to the Tyson-Holyfield heavyweight fight (“Bite of the Century”) to political reversals by Bush 41 (“Read My Lips … I Lied”), no one does it better than the New York Post.
Charles Murray—F. A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies
Stephen Fry, a man of amazing erudition on things literary, has written three volumes under the heading, “The Greek Myths Reimagined.” It begins with Mythos, moves on to Heroes, and concludes with Troy. I can’t recommend them too highly. Put aside everything and read them or, better yet, listen to Fry read them on Audible.
There’s been a fair amount of American history on my list this year, with American Spring by Walter Borneman being my favorite—a granular narrative of the first half of 1775, concluding with the battle of Bunker Hill. I also devoured Borneman’s The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea.
And I loved Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. He’s a colleague, but that hasn’t influenced my recommendation. He’s thorough, even-handed, judicious, and writes beautifully. I learned a lot, including about the years when I thought I was in the midst of things.
Brent Orrell—Senior Fellow, Domestic Policy Studies
How democracy is or isn’t built and sustained was at the heart of my reading profile this year. My favorite book on the subject was AEI scholar Diana Schaub’s treatment of the political thought and rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation. This book is an indispensable contribution to thinking about the rule of law as a stabilizer of human passions and why “reverence for the law” and the democratic processes that create them is the essence of our security as a free people.
Schaub’s book was an important contrast to several other books I read on the collapse of democracy in Germany between 1918 and 1932. Peter Fritzsche’s Germans Into Nazis, traces the rise of Nazism not to Germany’s defeat in 1918 but to the outbreak of war in 1914. The pro-war, populist-nationalist surge of 1914 was the forge for a German identity that transcended social and political divisions. When this new identity met with defeat on the battlefield in 1918, the resulting disillusionment helped to radicalize both the right and the left.
Eric D. Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy is a “what was and what might have been” examination of Germany’s torrid postwar experiment in liberal democracy. The flowering of expressive, individual freedom under Weimar provoked a backlash covered in Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Of particular note is Hett’s recounting of how Germany’s Protestant churches, in their abhorrence of the Weimar Republic’s perceived decadence, were instrumental in bringing Nazism to power. The “People’s Church” movement, which brought rural and urban middle class into a single electoral coalition, overlapped and harmonized with the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) that would obliterate the idea of the dignified, rights-bearing individual altogether. This is perhaps the preeminent case of “cutting a great road through the laws to get at the Devil” only to have no place to hide when the Devil turns around. When we pursue the good, we have to remember that free people, as image bearers of God, are in themselves the highest good.
James Pethokoukis—Editor, AEIdeas; Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
I would urge policymakers who have at least some interest in science fiction to read, as I did this year, The Expanse, the nine-volume series by James S. A. Corey (the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). Given the advances we’re seeing in space technology—reusable rockets, new lunar missions—we might someday have to deal with the politics of a humanity that lives off-planet (the Moon, Mars, asteroid belt, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn), a major theme of the series. But what I like best about The Expanse is that it shows an imperfect, though hardly apocalyptic, future where humanity continues to progress by solving problems, causing new ones, and then solving those, too. Incremental progress that accumulates into a huge leap forward.
Danielle Pletka—Distinguished Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
This is my year of audible. . . Truthfully, a recent discovery, and a bit of a revelation. Herewith, two favorites—one read to me, one read with my actual eyes. Our colleague Matt Continetti penned one of the best books of the year, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. My colleague Marc Thiessen and I had Matt twice on our podcast, once to talk about the Orban-ization of conservatism in America, once to talk his book. If you want to know why the GOP isn’t winning, why conservatism is riven as rarely before, or if you just miss William F. Buckley, read it; it’s fantastic. The second book for your shelves is Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. One little teaser: America’s relationship with Israel has very little to do with America’s Jews. But at a moment the haters are again hating on Jews, Zionists, and Israel, this is the book that reminds you why they’re wrong. Always wrong. Thank me later.
Kenneth M. Pollack—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
I’ve spent this year in strange company. I’m writing a book on the US-Iraq relationship, so for that I have been doing a lot of reading and rereading about Saddam Husayn. Not entirely coincidentally, for my “pleasure” reading, I have just about made it through the first two volumes of Steven Kotkin’s biography of Stalin (Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941). Clocking in at nearly 2,000 pages altogether, Kotkin’s work is nothing if not comprehensive. And his first two books only take Stalin’s story up to 1941. While he does have a habit of telling you more than you ever wanted to know about Stalin—and every Party plenum ever held in the Soviet Union—whenever Kotkin steps back from the day-to-day and interprets Stalin’s behavior, his insights are fascinating.
But it’s the pairing of the two that has stood out to me. While they were different in some ways, they had a great deal in common and none of it good. Both were homicidal sociopaths, paranoids, and arch manipulators. Both destroyed their countries and rebuilt them in warped forms that worked only for them, immiserating tens of millions. Stalin was responsible for more carnage in an absolute sense, but given the size of the two countries Saddam can give Stalin a run for his money in relative terms.
At this moment when so many Americans seem so blasé about the prospect of civil war or the end of our democracy—with some suggesting that it might even be positive—Saddam and Stalin should remind us of how appalling life in an autocracy can be. Not every dictator was Josef Stalin or Saddam Husayn, but painfully few are truly enlightened or benevolent. The descent into autocracy of any kind carries with it the danger of life under a Stalin or Saddam. It should make us fight ever harder to preserve our precious republic.
Robert Pondiscio—Senior Fellow, Education Policy Studies
Ian Rowe’s Agency filled me with hope. It’s an important book and with luck, one that will have legs.
I can’t pretend to be a neutral observer of Ian’s work. He’s an AEI colleague, a good friend, and someone with whom I share deep roots in education in New York City’s South Bronx—me as a 5th grade teacher; him running a network of charter schools in the same neighborhood.
Agency is importantly out of step with contemporary thought and practice in urban education. It’s fashionable to insist that structural barriers like race and poverty are decisive in determining educational and life outcomes. Ian’s unsparing critique of those who make assumptions about group identity and ability while ignoring differences in attitudes and behaviors, makes him not only an important thinker and writer, but a brave one.
The highlight of my year at AEI was the FREE Initiative conference Ian hosted in Birmingham, Alabama, which grew from the ideas in his book. It was refreshing to be in a room with people who took seriously the role of faith, family formation, and work in shaping children’s lives and character. Here’s hoping their numbers grow.
Angela Rachidi—Senior Fellow, Poverty Studies
In 2022, I spent whatever free time I had reading the beautiful and heart-wrenching story of a lifelong friendship between two women in Napoli that started in the 1950s. Author Elena Ferrante published the four-part series, The Neapolitan Novels, almost a decade ago, but I did not discover it until this year when a friend recommended the HBO TV series based on the novels. I still have not watched it on the small screen, but I am grateful that the existence of the TV series introduced me to Ms. Ferrante’s brilliance.
The Neapolitan Novels follow a childhood friendship between two poor Italian girls from a neighborhood in Napoli. Both girls excelled in school at a young age, but only Elena (Lenu) pursued an education, atypical at the time for poor young women from Napoli. Her childhood friend Raffaella (Lila) was the brighter of the two girls, physically beautiful and academically brilliant. But Lila chose the traditional route of being a teenage bride to a prestigious shop owner—a marriage that turned disastrous in the end. While the story of these two girls and their childhood experience is captivating, the true brilliance of the story is Ferrante’s ability to combine the external challenges created by Napoli from the 1950s–1980s with the internal struggles experienced by both women. It touches on politics, poverty, violence, influence, love, and devotion. Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Novels is one of the best fiction series I have read.
Dalibor Rohac—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
I’ve been learning a lot from Paul Tucker’s Global Discord: Values and Power in Fractured World Order. The book walks through the history and the present challenges facing institutions of international cooperation—most importantly the question of values and legitimacy, sometimes subsumed under the rubric of “Rodrik’s Trilemma” in modern literature. Drawing on David Hume and mechanism design tools, Sir Paul shows that, for international order to be sustainable, like-minded, democratic nations must cooperate more with each other, while keeping other actors at bay.
I’ve been educated and moved in equal parts by my friend Linda Kinstler’s Come to This Court and Cry: This is How Holocaust Ends—part family history, part work of historic scholarship, and part argument for why post-conflict justice matters (but why we should not expect too much from it). The point is not primarily to punish perpetrators such as Latvia’s famous aviator and SS commander Herbert Cukurs, who escaped to Latin America before he could have been prosecuted for overseeing the mass murder of Riga’s Jews. Rather, the most important attribute of war crime tribunals is to set the historic record straight and prevent a subsequent rewriting of history, as in the case of Cukurs, who is now being whitewashed and rehabilitated by the Latvian far right—a lesson that we should keep in mind when Russia’s war against Ukraine ends.
Michael Rubin—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
As a father seeking quiet time to write this, it goes without saying that Adam Mansbach’s Go the F*ck to Sleep should be on everyone’s list, and Samuel L. Jackson’s online reading is a must-listen. My reading is eclectic, and a mix of fiction, non-fiction, and clever commentary.
P.J. O’Rourke’s death earlier this year had me return to his book of 30 years ago, Give War a Chance, a collection of articles about, in O’Rourke’s words, “the battle against evil.” From Russia to Nicaragua, and then Ukraine and Georgia, his essays really are a testament to how history repeats or, in the case of Jimmy Carter’s penchant for excusing evil, remains the same. Perhaps the arc of history doesn’t always bend to justice, at least when the United States sits passively and does not understand the ideologies which today again threaten the liberal order. Of course, if O’Rourke’s work is a shot, than Jonah Goldberg’s is the chaser. There is a lot to choose from.
As I set off in October on a research trip to the Ladakh, an Indian union territory high in the Himalayas, where Buddhism thrives and Tibetan dialects reign supreme, I reread Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Easily one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, this fictionalized account of Jesus Christ’s early years not covered by the Bible is also incredibly religiously sensitive, as it relates a hypothetical trip by Christ to India and China where he absorbs Eastern philosophy (and eats Chinese food on his birthday, hence the Jewish tradition today, Moore speculates).
Of course, there were also serious reads on my list this year. During my PhD work, my Iranian advisor offered sage advice. “Theory is for people who don’t have libraries,” he told me. He was right. I appreciate arguments that demonstrate on-the-ground mastery and don’t try to fit square pegs into round holes. This is why I was so glad finally to get to Michael Pillsbury’s 2015 The Hundred-Year Marathon. There is no better book to understand China’s strategy. Pillsbury is also a rarity because he not only knows the history and language and is a great writer, but also because he admits where he previously went wrong, something Henry Kissinger never managed to do. American policy would be better off in 2023 if every American official got Pillsbury in his or her Christmas stocking, especially now that President Joe Biden’s team has declared war on coal.
Christopher J. Scalia—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
In Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, Lenny Kaye explores the careers of some of the most popular performers of the 20th century, from Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain. Kaye, who was the guitarist for Patti Smith and Her Band, packs the book with the kind of facts and trivia that will thrill any music nerd who considers liner notes required reading. What makes the book especially interesting, and which helps it overcome a number of errors in names and dates, is that it brings to life the cultural contexts of these artists and demonstrates how individual genius mixes with what producer Brian Eno calls collective scenius—the relationships, trends, and strokes of luck that can form artistic (not to mention intellectual) success.
One of the best novels I read this year is far from new, but recent events make it particularly timely. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Joseph Conrad tells the story of a young Russian student named Razumov who finds himself caught up in political intrigue, first as a would-be revolutionary conspirator and then as a double agent. No fan of the status quo but wary of radicals, Razumov is trapped between “the lawlessness of autocracy . . . and the lawlessness of revolution.” Meanwhile, the narrator struggles to understand Russian attitudes through the filter of Western liberalism. Not that the novel is all about political ideas: There’s plenty of betrayal, guilt, and love to go around, too.
Kori Schake—Director, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
Both of my favorite books of the year are by veterans of America’s recent wars reflecting on the relationship between the military and society. We are living through such a renaissance of veteran writing, serious about moral culpability—theirs and ours—and policy choices, poignant about what they learned, eloquent and urgent in explaining it to the rest of us.
Phil Klay won the National Book Award for Redeployment, his collection of short stories, and has written an important novel about Colombia’s counter-insurgency. But he’s also an important commentator on the experience of war, and this year released a collection of his essays, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. He powerfully answers his own question: “how to speak meaningfully of a conflict that has lasted so long, and at such a low ebb that most Americans can pretend it isn’t happening?”
Elliot Ackerman has written several powerful books about war, including Green on Blue, a sympathetic portrait of an Afghan who kills American troops, and 2034, a thriller about a war between the US and China. But The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan is the riveting weaving together of three disparate storylines: the contradictions of a family vacation interrupted by desperate veterans trying to get Afghans who’d aided the war effort out of their country as the US abandons Afghanistan; searing analyses of US policy choices since 9/11, including deficit spending for the wars and civil-military relations; and recounting his own experiences fighting as a Marine infantryman in Afghanistan.
Sita Nataraj Slavov—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
The past month may have had you pondering questions like these: What’s the optimal strategy for a soccer player in a penalty shootout? Is it truly in a country’s interest to host the World Cup? Paul Oyer’s An Economist Goes to the Game (2022) provides insights (and great material for introductory economics courses). Oyer uses sports to illustrate economic concepts. Penalty kicks—in which the player taking the kick and the goalkeeper simultaneously decide which direction to go—provide an illustration of mixed strategy equilibria. Player compensation is discussed in the context of labor market theory. And athletes’ decisions to take performance-enhancing drugs are viewed through the lens of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Capital—the 2013 novel by John Lanchester, not the tome by Karl Marx—was also an enjoyable read. Set in London against the backdrop of the financial crisis of 2007–08, Lanchester tells the loosely intertwined stories of characters who have some connection to Pepys Road—a street that has experienced both dramatic demographic change and dramatic appreciation of property values. The book’s highlights are its diverse and compelling cast of characters, and the way in which it captures the zeitgeist of a turbulent time.
Chris Stirewalt—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
I often find books to be companions for periods of my life; volumes that console or delight me in difficult seasons, inspire me to be a better version of myself, and, sometimes, point me in the right direction.
For the past year or so, that book has been William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, 1992.
Manchester, a newspaperman turned author and professor, wrote two of the most popular and acclaimed military biographies of all time: American Caesar, about Douglas MacArthur, and The Last Lion, about Winston Churchill. Manchester’s writing in all his works benefits from the perspective of an enlisted Marine who was very nearly killed in the US assault on Okinawa. A biographer of great men, he kept a properly American perspective about power and its uses—which shines nowhere more effulgently than in Manchester’s book about the making of the modern world.
A World Lit Only by Fire was a New York Times bestseller, but not the kind of book that 5 million dads got dropped in the bottom of their Christmas stockings or stuck with a bow for Father’s Day. Here was the world’s most popular biographer of military men writing a cultural, philosophical history of life from the 1300s to the 1700s.
What Manchester achieved, though, was of lasting value—especially for a people like ourselves, living at the end of an age and looking dimly into the next one.
Benjamin Storey—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Two of the best books I read in 2022 dealt with the university, and were a study in contrasts. My AEI Colleague Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid into College has been my companion as I begin to look at colleges from the perspective of a father. Applying to college sucks families into a whirlwind of ambition, insecurity, prestige, and money. Ferguson recounts the many hours he spent reading brochures and college guides, talking with counselors, consulting with friends about schools and strategy, and touring campuses. None of these authorities, including the colleges themselves, have much to say about what is supposed to be the point of all this energy and anxiety: education.
To understand why anyone ever thought it a good idea for the young to go to college, it is useful to have recourse to a classic: John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Newman paints a portrait of the fruit of genuinely liberal education in a well-calibrated intellect, at once calm and dynamic. An education that cultivated such minds would be worth a significant investment—if not the heart-stopping sums of contemporary American tuition bills.
Reading Newman reminds us just how distorted our sense of the good and the value of higher education has become. Education reform must not only contend with the exploitative machinations of these institutions and their enablers. It should also promote education that would help the young develop the perceptive equanimity Newman describes, which would be of great use to their lives and America’s politics.
Unpacking boxes during our move this summer, I came across several tattered paperbacks of the poetry of Ogden Nash. We started reading them around the dinner table, and they reliably amused the whole family.
Nash’s style is a compound of self-consciously shambling off-rhymes and broken meters. It is the absence of pretense in verse. In “With My Own Eyes,” he offers a bumptious defense of all things American—from manners to learning to cuisine—against the sneers of foreign or pretentious observers. He deserves to be remembered as a great comic poet of American democracy.
Ryan Streeter—Director, Domestic Policy Studies
I most enjoyed Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World—new to me, but not new. Published in 2005, it retells the story of the founding of New Amsterdam, today’s Manhattan. Made possible by the discovery of thousands of 17th century Dutch documents deep within the New York State library, the book paints a much more vivid picture of New Amsterdam than was previously possible, from Henry Hudson’s exploits to England’s takeover.
Among the book’s many storylines is that New York City’s early freewheeling, commercially adventurous, and culturally diverse nature, an exception to the surrounding English colonial settlements, owes its origins to Amsterdam. Famously tolerant of dissidents and heretics from other countries, 16th century Amsterdam was the epicenter of the far-flung commercial Dutch republic that saw alien peoples as business partners rather than subjects to subdue.
New Amsterdam from the beginning was home to merchants, pirates, prostitutes, and all sorts of enterprising wealth seekers, most of whose business was legal, but not all. The book recounts a pervasive anything-goes culture when it came to business creativity and private lives, but a disciplined approach to the rules of exchange. The book recounts scores of entertaining stories, some comic and others tragic, to supply evidence that over 50-plus years, New Amsterdam wove a culture of tolerance, openness, and vitality into the fabric that would become New York.
Bret Swanson—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
In Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley expand on the pathbreaking work of William Nordhaus and his famous “price of light” paper. They popularize the concept of “time prices” and extend it empirically to a wide range of commodities and basic products. The time price of a good is the amount of labor required to buy it. By using nominal prices and nominal incomes at every point, time prices might (1) better capture the full scope of productivity gains (both lower prices and higher wages) and (2) avoid arguments over traditional inflation measurements and methodologies, such as the consumer price index (CPI).
Tupy and Pooley conclude that, worldwide, “the effort required to buy one basket of commodities in 1980 bought 3.5 baskets in 2018.” The book’s forward by George Gilder is much more than a bonus chapter.
The material superabundance of the last few hundred years may, however, be masking current social pathologies and thus threats to future superabundance. No one has offered a more compelling hypothesis for our haywire politics than Mattias Desmet. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet builds on philosopher Hannah Arendt and offers a framework for thinking about how authoritarian movements emerge. The key is “mass formation”—a kind of hypnosis which can grip vulnerable populations and lead even large groups of normal people to commit terrible acts. Why, over the last few years, did censorship, propaganda, and even forced medical experiments explode in the supposedly free West? You will find the roots of this dangerous reversal—and the one known antidote—in Desmet’s provocative book.
In The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, Aaron Kheriaty, MD, plunges deeper into the particular failures of pandemic policy and just-around-the-corner bio-authoritarianism. Dr. Kheriaty was not only a medical professor at the University of California-Irvine, he was also its head of ethics. When he offered highly ethical (and, it turns out, correct medical) advice on the pandemic, UC fired him. Emerging bio-science can deliver amazing health benefits—but only if we recommit to unequivocal medical freedom for both individuals and physicians.
These threats of scientism against sanity and superabundance call us to review the fundamentals of social harmony and prosperity, suggesting we read Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Shane Tews—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
Chris Miller’s book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology is a wonderful book that helps explain the semiconductor industry’s importance to everything we do in today’s world. Anything with an on button needs a semiconductor chip.
The book does a great job of walking us through how this all started, who was involved, and where we are now in today’s chip wars, which are taking place in Asia, Europe, and here in the United States, with the rest of the world dependent on the outcome.
Chris reminds us that China is reliant on the outside world for many of the supplies they need for high-end chips, and the trade sanctions that the US is imposing on specific materials and machinery needed to produce semiconductor chips has the capability to challenge China’s dominance in the chip race.
Stan Veuger—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
The three books I would like to highlight here—none of them published in 2022—are Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, Laurent Binet’s Civilizations: A Novel, and Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson’s The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear.
The Border Within will give you a clear sense of what interior enforcement of immigration rules looks like, through a mix of personal stories, journalism, and academic work, while in passing providing you with a comprehensive review of research in the economics of immigration.
Civilizations is an alternative-history novel—but not one in which Nazis or Confederates won their war. Instead, the Inca lands in Lisbon. Will he meet Luther?
Finally, Philosophy Between the Lines makes a strong case for the historical importance of esoteric writing. (What is it? Why would authors not make the meaning of their writings clear? How do we know they didn’t? Do you, too, want to write only for the few?)
Matt Weidinger—Senior Fellow, Poverty Studies
My favorite book this year is neither new nor even new to me: Allan Bloom’s 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, which features the notable subtitle How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.
Two facts moved me to grab it off the shelf. First, our last child is applying to college; second, there’s a strong chance she enrolls where most students feel intimidated against expressing their real opinions—where minds and now mouths have literally closed.
None of this would surprise the late professor Bloom, who found widespread acceptance “that truth is relative” behind the paradoxical openness that came to reject democratic education on the Constitution, Declaration, and a nation conceived in liberty. As Bloom presciently noted, that openness
pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. . . . There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?
A good question, with resounding echoes today. Pay attention to it next year and beyond, Clare, wherever you go.
Adam J. White—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Roger Lowenstein’s Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, is a double achievement. Its luminous portrait of Abraham Lincoln sheds new light on some of the Civil War’s most important yet least recognized aspects. And it teaches crucial lessons for our own time.
The book centers around President Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase. Without underselling the brutal facts of the battlefront, Lowenstein shows how the Union’s victory depended on the North’s economic strength—and the Lincoln administration’s ability to leverage it.
Lowenstein’s Chase is a fascinating mix of greatness and grudges. He mastered federal finances, convincing investors to keep lending. But the government ultimately did more than just rely on capital markets—it reinvented them, through the National Banking Act, the Legal Tender Act, and more. Lincoln, meanwhile, is the ideal statesman and political leader (of course), but Ways and Means shows us still more: By managing Chase and the government at large, he was the ideal constitutional administrator. Together, these stories offer two portentous lessons:
First, our national security depends on free enterprise and flourishing markets. The Union’s economic prosperity proved to among its greatest wartime advantages.
Second, “the true test of” of a constitution is indeed “its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” That was Hamilton’s insight in The Federalist, and in Ways and Means we see how Lincoln embodied the best version of constitutional administration. How lucky America was for it then; how lucky we are to be reminded of it now, by Lowenstein’s wonderful book.
Learn more: AEI's Favorite Books of 2021 | AEI’s Favorite Books of 2020 | AEI’s Best Books of 2019 | AEI’s Best Books of 2018
The post AEI’s Favorite Books of 2022 appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The world economy’s carbon intensity is declining at nowhere near the rate needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C. But while continuing to tout an unrealistic goal could hamper progress, as people become demotivated or simply stop viewing the effort as credible, setting a more feasible goal raises risks of its own.

MILAN – Net-zero commitments are all the rage. Countries, companies, and others worldwide have committed to eliminating their net greenhouse-gas emissions by a particular date – for some, as early as 2030. But net-zero targets are not tantamount to limiting global warming to the Paris climate agreement’s goal of 1.5° Celsius – or any particular level of warming, for that matter. It is the path to net-zero emissions that makes all the difference.

This is well understood among experts. A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency, for example, charts a detailed path, divided into five-year intervals, toward achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 – and giving the world “an even chance of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5°C.” The most striking feature of this analysis, at least to me, is the magnitude of the decline that is required by 2030: roughly eight billion tons of fossil-fuel-based emissions, taking us from the 34 gigatons carbon dioxide today to 26 Gt.

To achieve this, emissions would have to decline by 5.8% per year. If the global economy grows at a conservatively estimated annual rate of 2% over that period, the global economy’s carbon intensity (CO 2 emissions per $1,000 of GDP) would need to decline by 7.8% per year. While carbon intensity has been declining over the last 40 years, the trend has been nowhere near this rate: from 1980 to 2021, carbon intensity fell by just 1.3% per year, on average.

That rate was not high enough to keep CO 2 emissions anywhere near constant, let alone cause them to decline. In fact, with global GDP growth exceeding the rate of carbon-intensity decline by about two percentage points, emissions roughly doubled during that period. One reason is precious little effort was made to reduce carbon intensity for most of that time. The decline that occurred was largely a byproduct of emerging economies becoming wealthier. (More developed economies have lower carbon intensities.)

To be sure, as climate change gained more attention from policymakers, the rate of decline did accelerate, averaging 1.9% per year since 2010. And with supply-side constraints now encumbering the global economy – annual growth could well run at just 2% in the next few years – a modest further reduction in carbon intensity could be enough to put the global economy at or near the peak of its total CO 2 emissions. Higher global growth might not even set back efforts to reduce the economy’s carbon intensity, if it is fueled by the proliferation of digital technologies.

An emissions peak would be an important milestone. But unless it was followed immediately by a sharp decline, we would still be pumping some 34 Gt of CO 2 into the atmosphere each year. While the IEA report does not address what would happen if we fell significantly short of the first two interim targets (2025 and 2030), one can probably assume that it will be next to impossible to avoid crossing the 1.5ºC threshold.

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We have the tools to reach the IEA’s targets. As the report makes clear, no new technological breakthroughs are needed in the first decade. Moreover, the costs do not appear to be prohibitive. The prices of wind and solar energy, for example, have declined substantially in recent years. But there would have to be huge changes in almost every corner of the global economy, and those changes do not appear to be occurring nearly as fast as the IEA timeline would demand.

The sobering fact is that the IEA report’s target of 26 Gt of CO 2 by 2030 is not within reach, because the global economy’s carbon intensity is declining at barely a quarter of the required rate. A sharp discontinuity in this variable is possible, and perhaps some would argue that 26 Gt remains a useful aspirational target. But it does not seem particularly realistic.

Is it better to cling to an unattainable target, because it represents the best path for people and the planet, or revise that goal to something more feasible? Can continuing to tout an unrealistic goal hamper progress, as people become demotivated or simply stop viewing the effort as credible? Or is it worse to acquiesce to the consequences of abandoning the ambitious path, including the risk of crossing irreversible tipping points?

Whichever route the world chooses, the challenge will remain the same: reduce CO 2 emissions dramatically – and fast. Of course, that is easier said than done. The world economy comprises 195 countries with different cultures and political systems and at different stages of economic development, as well as countless businesses of all sizes and types, and eight billion individuals. Complicating matters further, the widespread distributional effects of both action (rapid energy transitions) and inaction (climate change) are difficult to address, especially in international negotiations.

But there are ways to simplify the challenge. Half of global greenhouse-gas emissions come from just seven economies: China, the United States, the European Union, Japan, India, Canada, Australia, and Russia. The G20 economies account for 70%. A concerted and coordinated effort in these large economies would make a material difference in emissions trajectories and, perhaps more important, generate the technologies and management approaches that will be needed to reach the net-zero goal.

The congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection delivered a comprehensive and compelling case for the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and his closest allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election.But the committee zoomed in so tightly on the culpability of Trump and his inner circle that it largely cropped out the dozens of other state and federal Republican officials who supported or enabled the president’s multifaceted, months-long plot. The committee downplayed the involvement of the legion of local Republican officials who enlisted as fake electors and said almost nothing about the dozens of congressional Republicans who supported Trump’s efforts—even to the point, in one case, of urging him to declare “Marshall Law” to overturn the result.With these choices, the committee likely increased the odds that Trump and his allies will face personal accountability—but diminished the prospect of a complete reckoning within the GOP.[David Frum: Justice is coming for Donald Trump]That reality points to the larger question lingering over the committee’s final report: Would convicting Trump defang the threat to democracy that culminated on January 6, or does that require a much broader confrontation with all of the forces in extremist movements, and even the mainstream Republican coalition, that rallied behind Trump’s efforts?“If we imagine” that preventing another assault on the democratic process “is only about preventing the misconduct of a single person,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, told me, “we are probably not setting up ourselves for success.”Both the 154-page executive summary unveiled Monday and the 845-page final report released last night made clear that the committee is focused preponderantly on Trump. The summary in particular read more like a draft criminal indictment than a typical congressional report. It contained breathtaking detail on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and concluded with an extensive legal analysis recommending that the Justice Department indict Trump on four separate offenses, including obstruction of a government proceeding and providing “aid and comfort” to an insurrection.Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the former special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, told me the report showed that the committee members and staff “were thinking like prosecutors.” The report’s structure, he said, made clear that for the committee, criminal referrals for Trump and his closest allies were the endpoint that all of the hearings were building toward. “I think they believe that it’s important not to dilute the narrative,” he said. “The utmost imperative is to have some actual consequences and to tell a story to the American people.” Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney who has closely followed the investigation, agreed that the report underscored the committee’s prioritization of a single goal: making the case that the Justice Department should prosecute Trump and some of the people around him.“If they wind up with Trump facing charges, I think they will see it as a victory,” Litman told me. “My sense is they are also a little suspicious about the [Justice] Department; they think it’s overly conservative or wussy and if they served up too big an agenda to them, it might have been rejected. The real focus was on Trump.”In one sense, the committee’s single-minded focus on Trump has already recorded a significant though largely unrecognized achievement. Although there’s no exact parallel to what the Justice Department now faces, in scandals during previous decades, many people thought it would be too divisive and turbulent for one administration to “look back” with criminal proceedings against a former administration’s officials. President Gerald Ford raised that argument when he pardoned his disgraced predecessor Richard Nixon, who had resigned while facing impeachment over the Watergate scandal, in 1974. Barack Obama made a similar case in 2009 when he opted against prosecuting officials from the George W. Bush administration for the torture of alleged terrorists. (“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” Obama said at the time.)As Tudor pointed out, it is a measure of the committee’s impact that virtually no political or opinion leaders outside of hard-core Trump allies are making such arguments against looking back. If anything, the opposite argument—that the real risk to U.S. society would come from not holding Trump accountable—is much more common.“There are very few folks in elite opinion-making who are not advocating for accountability in some form, and that was not a given two years ago,” Tudor told me.Yet Tudor is one of several experts I spoke with who expressed ambivalence about the committee’s choice to focus so tightly on Trump while downplaying the role of other Republicans, either in the states or in Congress. “I think it’s an important lost opportunity,” he said, that could “narrow the public’s understanding as to the totality of what happened and, in some respects, to risk trivializing it.”[Read: The January 6 committee’s most damning revelation yet]Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative strategist turned staunch Trump critic, similarly told me that although he believes the committee was mostly correct to focus its limited time and resources primarily on Trump’s role, the report “doesn’t quite convey how much the antidemocratic, authoritarian sentiments have metastasized” across the GOP.Perhaps the most surprising element of the executive summary was its treatment of the dozens of state Republicans who signed on as “fake electors,” who Trump hoped could supplant the actual electors pledged to Joe Biden in the decisive states. The committee suggested that the fake electors—some of whom face federal and state investigations for their actions—were largely duped by Trump and his allies. “Multiple Republicans who were persuaded to sign the fake certificates also testified that they felt misled or betrayed, and would not have done so had they known that the fake votes would be used on January 6th without an intervening court ruling,” the committee wrote. Likewise, the report portrays Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, who agreed to help organize the fake electors, as more of a victim than an ally in the effort. The full report does note that “some officials eagerly assisted President Trump with his plans,” but it identifies only one by name: Doug Mastriano, the GOP state senator and losing Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate this year. Even more than the executive summary, the full report emphasizes testimony from the fake electors in which they claimed to harbor doubts and concerns about the scheme.Eisen, a co-author of a recent Brookings Institution report on the fake electors, told me that the committee seemed “to go out of their way” to give the fake electors the benefit of the doubt. Some of them may have been misled, he said, and in other cases, it’s not clear whether their actions cross the standard for criminal liability. But, Eisen said, “if you ask me do I think these fake electors knew exactly what was going on, I believe a bunch of them did.” When the fake electors met in Georgia, for instance, Eisen said that they already knew Trump “had not won the state, it was clear he had not won in court and had no prospect of winning in court, they were invited to the gathering of the fake electors in secrecy, and they knew that the governor had not and would not sign these fake electoral certificates.” It’s hard to view the participants in such a process as innocent dupes.The executive summary and final report both said very little about the role of other members of Congress in Trump’s drive to overturn the election. The committee did recommend Ethics Committee investigations of four House Republicans who had defied its subpoenas (including GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the presumptive incoming speaker). And it identified GOP Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee, as “a significant player in President Trump’s efforts” while also citing the sustained involvement of Representatives Scott Perry and Andy Biggs.But neither the executive summary nor the full report chose quoted exchanges involving House and Senate Republicans in the trove of texts the committee obtained from former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The website Talking Points Memo, quoting from those texts, recently reported that 34 congressional Republicans exchanged ideas with Meadows on how to overturn the election, including the suggestion from Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina that Trump simply declare “Marshall Law” to remain in power. Even Representative Adam Schiff of California, a member of the committee, acknowledged in an op-ed published today that the report devoted “scant attention ...[to] the willingness of so many members of Congress to vote to overturn it.”Nor did the committee recommend disciplinary action against the House members who strategized with Meadows or Trump about overturning the result—although it did say that such members “should be questioned in a public forum about their advance knowledge of and role in President Trump’s plan to prevent the peaceful transition of power.” (While one of the committee’s concluding recommendations was that lawyers who participated in the efforts to overturn the election face disciplinary action, the report is silent on whether that same standard should apply to members of Congress.) In that, the committee stopped short of the call from a bipartisan group of former House members for discipline (potentially to the point of expulsion) against any participants in Trump’s plot. “Surely, taking part in an effort to overturn an election warrants an institutional response; previous colleagues have been investigated and disciplined for far less,” the group wrote.By any measure, experts agree, the January 6 committee has provided a model of tenacity in investigation and creativity in presentation. The record it has compiled offers both a powerful testament for history and a spur to immediate action by the Justice Department. It has buried, under a mountain of evidence, the Trump apologists who tried to whitewash the riot as “a normal tourist visit” or minimize the former president’s responsibility for it. In all of these ways, the committee has made it more difficult for Trump to obscure how gravely he abused the power of the presidency as he begins his campaign to re-obtain it. As Tudor said, “It’s pretty hard to imagine January 6 would still be headline news day in and day out absent the committee’s work.”But Trump could not have mounted such a threat to American democracy alone. Thousands of far-right extremists responded to his call to assemble in Washington. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general signed on to a lawsuit to invalidate the election results in key states; 139 Republican House members and eight GOP senators voted to reject the outcome even after the riot on January 6. Nearly three dozen congressional Republicans exchanged ideas with Meadows on how to overturn the result, or exhorted him to do so. Dozens of prominent Republicans across the key battleground states signed on as fake electors. Nearly 300 Republicans who echoed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were nominated in November—more than half of all GOP candidates, according to The Washington Post. And although many of the highest-profile election deniers were defeated, about 170 deniers won their campaign and now hold office, where they could be in position to threaten the integrity of future elections.[From the November 2022 issue: Bad losers]The January 6 committee’s dogged investigation has stripped Trump’s defenses and revealed the full magnitude of his assault on democracy. But whatever happens next to Trump, it would be naive to assume that the committee has extinguished, or even fully mapped, a threat that has now spread far beyond him.

Pity the poor columnist attempting to write The Case for Boris: a blank screen sits before him, the cursor blinking helplessly. There simply is no case for Boris, no justification for any continued role in public life. None of the accusations against him — his constant lies, his disregard for Westminster conventions — would matter in the slightest if he were just competent, but he is not. And that is why he must go.
No one in living memory can have squandered such a far-reaching and revolutionary mandate for reform through such petty and absurd personal failings. Never the quasi-fascist wrecker of the constitution our more hysterical liberal commentariat still make him out to be, he was, as the phrase has it, simply a messy bitch who lives for drama, brought to these humiliating depths by the penumbra of chaos he carries swirling around him. Long presented as a threat to Westminster’s hallowed traditions, the charge against him is in truth far graver: if he is the best leader our political system can throw up, almost any other system of governance would seem an improvement.
It is the failings for which he is now condemned — the contempt in which he held Westminster’s institutions, his urge to override the sterile norms and petty taboos which have sunk British governance into a tar-pit of torpor and incapacity — which won him office in the first place. The people wanted him to break our failing state, and rebuild it in a way that finally worked for all the nation. With a historic majority in parliament, Johnson had almost unlimited power to drive through the Meiji Restoration our collapsing country so desperately requires. That he survived so long, and won such a parliamentary mandate for total change, is a reflection not on his personal qualities, about which no one ever had any doubt, but on the sheer disgust the vast majority of the country feels for his political enemies.
In all the long litany of failures he now drags around behind him, this is the bitterest draught for his voters — for us — to swallow: that there is nothing to show for any of it, for any of the turmoil and vitriol that has defined Britain’s politics under his tenure. The nation was used and discarded like any other of his brief, dramatic but doomed dalliances: our dignity alone demands a decisive end to this pointless drama.
Fate had granted Johnson an appointment with History: but he missed it, lost in a diary clash with wallpaper merchants, lobby courtiers and the endless need to flush away the squalid mess he was compelled to smear around the highest offices of the state. The governance of a nation is a sacred task: in a secular age, it is perhaps the only sacred office remaining. But whatever strange daimon brought Johnson to power also made him entirely unfit to wield it: his story is a cautionary tale for all of us. That is his only gift to History.
Johnson was — we can say was now — a creature born from chaos, thrust to power by the same inchoate demands for political revolution that are roiling every Western democracy. Yet instead of embracing meaningful reform and wielding power to transformative ends, he embroiled the nation and mired the entire governance of the country in his own domestic strife. The chosen agent of creative destruction entirely lacked a vision, a philosophy, or any justification whatsoever in his legislative record for the position he clings to so desperately, even now. He saw Brexit through, though not well; his support for Ukraine, self-serving though it may have been, inspired primarily by a craving for Zelenskyy’s reflected glamour, helped the country survive up to now, though he will not now be around to see Ukraine and Britain through the hard months ahead; but there is nothing else to add to his slim credit sheet.
Like Trump, Boris set himself up as the tribune of the proles, and like Trump, Boris frittered it all away through an absolute unfitness for the role. The Brexit vote afforded an extraordinary opportunity to reform Britain’s sclerotic institutions, and steer us out of the state’s ongoing death spiral. But the longed-for burster of the Westminster bubble turned out to be its worst avatar yet. Instead of breaking Britain’s governance free from the witless rigmarole of the lobby, he dived headlong into it; instead of breaking the power of the Blairite para-state, he let its tentacles wrap around him until all the life and energy he brought into office was crushed out of him. Surrounded by a court of fawning hacks, too distracted by his own domestic drama to run the country, Johnson presided over what has become a state of permanent crisis.
More from this authorThe truth about Ukraine's far-Right militiasBy Aris Roussinos
Though he now claims the mandate of the people to prolong his rule, it is Johnson’s betrayal of his base that makes his removal an urgent necessity. Under his tenure, law and order is a distant memory, the NHS barely functions, and home ownership and family formation is an impossible dream for an entire generation. The state cannot control its external borders, nor guarantee its survival from break up by separatists. The economy is a disaster and social harmony is more or less non-existent. Instead of winning our imported Culture War and consigning it to history, its arcane disputes now infect almost every aspect of British life. In resigning, Sajid Javid applauded Johnson for saving the country from the Corbynite menace, but it is difficult to see how worse-run the country could possibly be. Perhaps an elderly Communist of limited intellectual ability may have left us with at least a housebuilding programme and state support for vital national industries. Whatever base pleasures were to be derived from Johnson’s clownish owning of the libs, he owned his own voters far harder.
Johnson failed to live up to the demands of the moment, but those demands still remain, more pressingly than ever. Perhaps, like Trump, the failures of the first wave of populist revolt will reach their conclusion in the accession of a more competent reformer. Where America has De Santis waiting in the wings, to progressive fears and conservative anticipation, we still possess a thin sprinkling of talent on the front benches, aware of the challenges we face and willing to undertake the reforms necessary to see us through the hard years ahead. Of the few capable politicians the party still possesses, the best have either resigned today or are still waiting in the wings, outside the room where Johnson still pleads for his survival, waiting to deliver the nation’s judgment on the errant jester king. For the nation’s sake, it is time for them to unsheath the knife and put Johnson and the country out of our unwillingly shared misery.
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This article was first published on 7 July 2022.
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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The Ukrainian president came to Washington not only to seek aid in the fight against Russia but to remind Americans that there is still a “free world,” and only the United States can unite it.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
This is what it looks like when Twitter falls apart.
Money will kill ChatGPT’s magic.
Nasal vaccines are here.
A Call to Defend FreedomUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stood before Congress last night and asked for yet more help in his fight to stop Russia from erasing his country from the map. His visit to Washington was something of a surprise, but its purpose was clear. Zelensky is facing a terrible winter, when the Russians, after terrorizing and murdering Ukrainian civilians, may well try to return to offensive operations. He came to make his case to the American people that his fight is our fight—and that the money and weapons we have sent to Ukraine are being used responsibly.Zelensky’s address, however, was much more than a plea for assistance. The speech was brilliantly written, and the Ukrainian president delivered it in English with real emotion. He made an effort to speak both to U.S. political parties in the chamber and to the entire country watching at home. Most important, Zelensky issued a call, as the leader of a nation at war in Europe, for Americans to remember who we are, what we stand for, and why our destiny is inextricably bound to the eternal fight for freedom and democracy.Three moments stood out as inspiration and as lessons.In a brief allusion, Zelensky name-checked the Continental Army’s 1777 victory at the Battle of Saratoga, an excellent historical analogy for present-day Ukraine. If you’re a bit rusty on your Revolutionary War history, recall that the fledgling United States was trying to break away from one of the strongest empires on the planet, and Britain’s competitors had little interest in helping what seemed to be a doomed crusade by a bunch of colonists. At Saratoga, a British plan to divide the Colonies and thus isolate and strangle the troublemakers in New England failed, resulting instead in a stunning British defeat. At that point, the other major powers in Europe—including Britain’s avowed enemy, France—realized that the Americans could fight, and fight well. Four years after Saratoga, the British suffered a final defeat in North America at the hands of a combined French-and-American force at Yorktown.Next, Zelensky insisted that the world cannot do without American leadership. He invoked the concept that global security is indivisible, a principle that goes all the way back to the Helsinki Accords of the mid-1970s and that was reaffirmed in the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed by most European governments as well as the U.S. and Canada—and the then-soon-to-be-extinct Soviet Union. (Whoever wrote this speech didn’t just craft the language well; they did their homework.)“This battle,” Zelensky warned, “cannot be frozen or postponed.” He continued:
It cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection. From the United States to China, from Europe to Latin America, and from Africa to Australia, the world is too interconnected and interdependent to allow someone to stay aside and at the same time to feel safe when such a battle continues.
This almost sounds like a paean to globalization, but it is actually a restatement of America’s own Cold War foreign policy. (Indeed, Americans took this to an extreme in the 1950s when then–Secretary of State John Foster Dulles growled that neutrality in the Cold War was “immoral.”)  Despite being better-traveled and more aware of the rest of the world than previous generations, many Americans still think that what happens in faraway places will never touch them. The shock of 9/11 wore off long ago, and traditional American provincialism—along with its toxic by-product, isolationism—has been on the rise, especially in the Republican Party.Finally, Zelensky reminded us that national security abroad is intrinsic to our well-being at home: “Your well-being,” he said, “is the product of your national security; the result of your struggle for independence and your many victories.” Americans once instinctively understood this reality. After World War II, the United States helped build an international system based on laws, institutions, and trade, on the free movement of human beings and the free exchange of ideas. We did this imperfectly, and sometimes we cruelly violated our own principles. But this system of global cooperation outlasted the Cold War, and it is crucial to our own security and our ever-increasing standard of living.We have, however, become victims of our own successes. When the Cold War ended, we experienced a new era of peace and plenty. We outsourced anti-terrorist operations and other military dangers to overworked and over-deployed volunteers while the rest of us enjoyed low unemployment and ridiculously cheap credit. We could not imagine a world controlled by our enemies, because we had no real competitors. We were ill-prepared to grasp the reality of a major war raging on NATO’s borders.Zelensky knows what a world without American leadership looks like: It is a world, as my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote today, in which he and his family are dead, and the Russians are preparing their assault on Poland and the Baltic states. China, seeing Ukraine subjugated and NATO in disarray, might have moved against Taiwan; Iran would likely complete its dash to nuclear status; and every dictatorship on the planet would almost certainly think their day had finally arrived, while from “Washington to London, from Tokyo to Canberra, the democratic world would be grimly facing up to its obsolescence.” Anne’s depiction of what could have happened, and what could still happen if Russia rallies to defeat Ukraine, should be a bracing blast of cold reality to anyone who thinks that America can simply pull up the drawbridges and ignore the global assault on democracy.In the end, Zelensky made the case that Ukraine is the main front in a global fight. He’s right. Vladimir Putin is counting on America and NATO to tire and to falter. It is up to us to prove him wrong, and to warn the other dictators on the planet that they will never extinguish human liberty while America and its allies in this great battle—including Ukraine—are still standing.Related:
Zelensky recalled us to ourselves.
The Senate passed a $1.7 trillion spending bill to avert a partial government shutdown and allocate further aid to Ukraine. The bill now goes to the House for a final vote.
The former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was released from custody on a $250 million bond and under the condition that he will remain at home with his parents in California.
This week’s powerful winter storms are causing flight cancellations and delays across the country.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg reflects on the stories he’s told this year, including space Jews and anti-Semitism in the Ivy League.
(Photo Courtesy of Gisela Salim-Peyer; Getty / The Atlantic)
Why I Left VenezuelaBy Gisela Salim-Peyer
Migration, I like to tell myself, is the opposite of inertia. I left Venezuela on August 28, 2014. President Hugo Chávez had died the year before, bequeathing power over his dictatorship to his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Around this time, supermarket shelves were emptying and resourceful Venezuelans were creating WhatsApp groups to tell one another where to find medicine, toilet paper, flour. Street violence was so common that seemingly everyone knew somebody who had been abducted, if only for a few hours, usually for ransom. (For me, this person was my older sister.) One morning, as I drove to a memorial service for a classmate who had been killed by the police the day before, I realized that I had to leave the country. This student had died in a protest that I had also attended, but it was not fear of death that motivated me. It was the feeling that these protests would subside and accomplish nothing.
The child tax credit was a little too subtle.
How to make the most of bad gifts
(Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Amazon Studios; Disney+; HBO)
Read. If you could use a change of scenery this holiday season, pick up one of these seven books where the setting exposes the characters.Watch. Andor, on Disney+, is part of a new generation of bleak fantasy TV—but it also expands into a satisfying symphony of emotions and characters.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Many of you had some, shall we say, dissenting opinions about my recent views on Christmas music. Mark R., among others, chastised me for neglecting “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues. (I’m sorry, folks. I might be too old or too stodgy, but I just never liked that one.) A few of you—looking at you, Frank S.—unwisely tried to advocate for “Wonderful Christmastime,” and all I can say is that I dare you to watch the video 50 times on Christmas Eve. Sarah G. asked me how I could exclude the soundtrack of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I didn’t exclude it, Sarah; some art is timeless and needn’t be included in a “best of” list. I want to thank Edmund B. for agreeing with me that the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol is the best one—and, in fact, it is Charles Dickens I want to talk about before I leave you for the holiday. (This is my last Daily before Christmas; my colleagues will be with you tomorrow, and then we’ll all be back next Tuesday.)I have come to love A Christmas Carol more over the years because, in its way, it scares me more as I get older. I no longer respond very much to the parts about Scrooge’s lost youth, his failed romance, or his casual cruelty. Instead, I shiver a bit more now at the appearance of Jacob Marley’s ghost (“Business? Mankind was my business!”) and Scrooge’s final plea to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, because they are about sin and a life’s redemption. Marley failed to repent and is doomed to walk the earth. Scrooge finally sees his name on a snowy tombstone and realizes that he, too, is damned. And yet, there is a chance. “Why show me this,” Scrooge cries out, “if I am past all hope?” Looking at the grave, he pleads with the specter before him. “Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!”It is an article of my faith as a Christian that we can all, through repentance and, as Scrooge vows, “an altered life” erase the record before us that seems set in stone. When I was young, that reckoning seemed far away. Now, like Scrooge himself, I am an older man, and the question seems a bit more pressing. And so, on Christmas Eve, I watch the scenes of Scrooge’s salvation with gratitude, rejoicing that we can all share in that same promise of renewal. I have not become “as good a man as the good old city knew,” but every year—every day, really—we all get the chance to try again. May your holiday, if you celebrate, be joyful and blessed, and I’ll see you next week.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Glass frogs do not live a life of modesty. With their semitransparent skin—green on the back, clear on the belly—the tree-dwelling, gummy-bear-size amphibians, which are native to the tropics of Central and South America, have little choice but to put their organs on display. Gaze up at certain species from below, and you’ll be treated to an aquarium of innards: a beating heart, a matrix of bones, the shimmering silhouette of the gut.The frog’s see-through stomach is an ingenious ruse. It turns the animal’s underside into a living, light-transmitting window, camouflaging the creature from skyward-gazing birds and snakes. There’s just one problem with the frog’s otherwise convincingly ghostly garb: the latticework of bright-red blood vessels laced throughout its tissues. It’s an especially big issue in the daytime, when the frogs are asleep amid the leaves. As sunlight filters through the trees, casting shadows off whatever it hits below, the frogs’ own blood threatens to betray them.[Read: A frog so small, it could not frog]To patch the holes in their invisibility cloak, glass frogs deploy a radical option. In the hour or so before they drift off to sleep, roughly 90 percent of their blood cells march into their pea-size liver. The rest of the animal’s body plunges into an oxygen-starved state, risking damage to delicate organs. This grants the frog the temporary gift of imperceptibility—all because “they’re basically able to hide their blood” every day for about 12 hours at a time, says Carlos Taboada, a frog biologist at Duke University who co-led the discovery.
Jesse Delia / American Museum of Natural History
The transparency tactic solves glass frogs’ greatest dilemma: vanishing from view on land. Several animals have managed the feat in water, where it’s relatively easy for fluid-filled bodies to blend in. But when air is the backdrop, animals have to maintain clear outsides and insides—a triumph that, to scientists’ knowledge, only glass frogs have managed, among terrestrial beasts, says Richard White, a cancer biologist at the University of Oxford who wrote a commentary on the new find. The skin part is “pretty easy,” White told me: Just get rid of pigments such as melanin, which absorb and reflect light. Blood, though, presents a conundrum. Its opacity comes from hemoglobin, a protein necessary for ferrying oxygen throughout the body; the frogs can no more rid themselves of it than they can jettison their need to breathe.So instead, they move the light-absorbing hemoglobin around. Jesse Delia, a frog biologist at the American Museum of Natural History, first clued in on the phenomenon a few years ago, when he spotted a glass frog in Panama catching daytime zzz’s with most of its body in a shockingly bloodless state. “I remember thinking, This is crazy,” Delia told me. He partnered with Taboada and a team of other scientists, including Duke’s Junjie Yao, to suss out how the frogs were pulling it all off.By beaming lasers at the frogs, the scientists were able to track the movements of individual blood cells as the animals fell asleep and then woke for their nocturnal jaunts. The team found that as the frogs hop around dreamland, their vasculature fills almost entirely with plasma—colorless, save for a gauzy bluish tint—interspersed with just a few red cells, turning their body two or three times as transparent as it is while the animals are awake. Even the blood-cell-filled liver plays its own deception game: The organ’s outside is coated with a film of tiny, reflective crystals, which essentially conceal the redness behind a veil of white.[Read: Why frog tongues are so sticky]The frogs’ feint might seem like overkill. Other arboreal amphibians can conceal themselves just by mimicking the emerald hue of leaves. But glass frogs could have a hard-to-see leg up. “It’s very clear when frogs are sleeping on a leaf,” says Becca Brunner, a biologist who studies glass frogs. “Their silhouettes are picture-perfect”—an ideal cue for a predator. Slumbering glass frogs, though, generate no such outline. “You just see two little blobs: the heart and the liver,” Brunner told me, “which could be anything.”
Left: Sleeping glass frogs visible through a leaf. Right: A sparse population of red blood cells zooming around a sleeping glass frog’s circulatory system. (Jesse Delia & Carlos Taboada)
How the frogs’ tissues endure their bizarrely bloodless state for hours at a time is still a mystery. “If I took 89 percent of your blood and put it in your liver at night, you’d probably be dead by morning,” White told me. Nor do scientists understand how the liver handles the daily influx. Jamming so many red blood cells into such a small space should trigger catastrophic clotting, but the frogs get by just fine. They also seem to recover remarkably quickly, redispersing the blood cells within seconds of waking. Taboada and his colleagues don’t yet know how the frogs execute their death-defying magic tricks, but they could find hints elsewhere in the animal kingdom: Aline Ingelson-Filpula, a biologist at Carleton University, told me that many other creatures have to deal with similar challenges when they enter and exit torpor, in order to survive extreme cold or starvation.[Read: Hibernation: the extreme lifestyle that can stop aging]The maneuver almost certainly has costs. Although glass frogs seem able to rapidly refill their vessels come nighttime, their muscles may take a while to recalibrate—leaving them potentially discombobulated or stiff in the joints. “What price would they pay if a predator finds them?” says Gerlinde Höbel, a frog biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Any animal that sees through the gimmick might find itself rewarded with a sluggish, snaggable snack.Still, Brunner likes the frogs’ chances. They may not be great escape artists, but they’re masters of disguise. Brunner has seen the frogs, when they’re heading to bed, flatten their body against their leafy mattress, tuck in their legs, and pull their eyes into their head. “They’re like a sort of bump,” she told me. In her 10 years of studying glass frogs, Brunner has spotted just one snoozing. Had she not been looking closely, it might have eluded her notice entirely—just another green lump in the forest, or perhaps a trick of the light.

Political humor is often not funny, even when it gets a laugh. On Wednesday, during President Biden’s joint press conference with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a reporter for the Ukrainian television channel One Plus One asked a question about the logic of American military aid to Ukraine. “When the full-scale invasion started,” she said, “U.S. officials said that Ukraine cannot receive Patriot [missiles] because, as you said, it might be unnecessary escalation.” But just that day—three hundred days into the war—the Administration had announced that a Patriot battery would be shipped to Ukraine as part of the latest aid package. Much of what Ukraine has asked for, including long-range missiles, remains off limits, however. “Maybe I sound naïve,” the reporter said, “but can we make long story short and give Ukraine all capabilities it needs and liberate all territories rather sooner than later?”

“His answer is yes,” Biden said, pointing at Zelensky. The audience—several dozen journalists seated in gold Chiavari chairs—laughed.

Zelensky laughed, gesturing at Biden. “I agree,” he said. The audience laughed harder.

“Let me be straightforward,” Biden said. The United States had given Ukraine “what they needed,” at an expense of more than twenty billion dollars, but decisions regarding the kinds of arms provided had to be made jointly with NATO and European Union partners. “We are going to give Ukraine what it needs to be able to defend itself, to be able to succeed, and to succeed in the battlefield,” Biden said. But European allies “are not looking to go to war with Russia. They are not looking for the Third World War. I think it can all be avoided by making sure that Ukraine is able to succeed in the battlefield.” The room was quiet.

What had made everyone laugh was that the Presidents’ initial responses—and, indeed, the reporter’s question itself—had been obscene: they exposed what is usually hidden. The United States and its allies have not done enough to stop the war in Ukraine. They could, but they have not, and so for ten months Russian troops have tortured and executed Ukrainians, erased entire towns from the face of the earth, and targeted civilian infrastructure in order to deprive civilians of heat, light, and running water in winter. In his response, Biden covered this obscenity back up, by talking about giant sums of money, complicated international politics, and U.S. hope for an eventual Ukrainian victory. Zelensky was silent.

Later that day, in his speech to Congress, Zelensky returned to the obscenity. He said that, on the night before his visit to Washington, he had gone to Bakhmut, a town in eastern Ukraine that his troops have been struggling to hold. “We have artillery, yes,” Zelensky said. “Thank you. We have it. Is it enough? Honestly, not really. To insure Bakhmut is not just a stronghold that holds back the Russian Army, but for the Russian Army to completely pull out, more cannons and shells are needed.” To avoid sounding ungrateful, Zelensky framed this question as pertaining only to Bakhmut, but what he was really talking about is the fact that the United States could enable Ukraine to achieve a complete victory, yet aid has been slow and incomplete, and even the current consensus underpinning aid is fragile—this was why Zelensky was addressing Congress in the first place.

Zelensky’s trajectory—from comedian to media manager to President to wartime President—is often cast as surprising, but what makes him compelling as a political leader is the comic’s talent for exposing the crux of the matter. Speaking on Capitol Hill, Zelensky took care not to put members of Congress on the defensive—he is a performer always keenly aware of his audience, and this time he was speaking to people who have the power to save his country or doom it by withholding aid. But, to anyone really listening, he was still exposing underlying obscenities.

Zelensky likened the ongoing war to the Battle of the Bulge, one of the last major battles of the Second World War. “The Russians’ tactic is primitive,” Zelensky said. “They burn down and destroy everything they see. They sent thugs to the front lines. They sent convicts to the war. They threw everything against us, similar to the other tyranny, which was in the Battle of the Bulge. Threw everything it had against the free world.” It was the same time of year, even. The comparison suggested that, just as Americans and Western Europeans presented a joint, brave, and ultimately victorious front against Hitler in 1944, Americans and Ukrainians are jointly fighting against Putin today. But in Belgium in 1944, American soldiers were fighting on the ground. This December, only Ukrainians are fighting the Russians in Ukraine. The assumption that underpins Western strategy in relation to Ukraine—the fundamental belief that drives habitual caveats about avoiding “unnecessary escalation” and “NATO involvement”—is that nothing can justify a risk to the lives of Western Europeans and Americans, even while Ukrainians keep dying. Zelensky said this quiet part in two ways in his speech.

“Ukraine never asked the American soldiers to fight on our land instead of us,” he said. “I assure you that Ukrainian soldiers can perfectly operate American tanks and planes themselves.”

He also promised his audience that Ukrainians would last the winter. “Ladies and gentlemen—ladies and gentlemen, Americans, in two days we will celebrate Christmas,” Zelensky said, his phrasing underscoring the synchronicity of the American and Ukrainian holiday. (In fact, celebrating Christmas in late December, rather than early January, as the Eastern Orthodox do in Russia, is one of the many ways that Ukraine has moved away from Moscow and toward Western Europe in recent years.) “Maybe candlelit. Not because it’s more romantic, no, but because . . . there will be no electricity. Millions won’t have neither heating nor running water. All of these will be the result of Russian missile and drone attacks on our energy infrastructure.” But, he reassured his listeners, he was not challenging their right to have heat, hot water, and the power to determine how long the war in Ukraine will last. “We do not complain. We do not judge and compare whose life is easier. Your well-being is the product of your national security; the result of your struggle for independence and your many victories. We Ukrainians will also go through our war of independence and freedom with dignity and success.”

Every time Zelensky noted his people’s resolve, members of the House and Senate stood up and applauded. It happened a lot. If Zelensky were still a comedian, he might have called out his audience’s bullshit: “Hey, what’s with the applause while people die? Why don’t you stop clapping, sit down, and give us weapons instead? If you think that fighting Russia is so awesome, why don’t you close the sky or put boots on the ground?” But Zelensky is a politician now. Instead of calling out congresspeople, he appealed to their political self-interest, telling them that by protecting Ukraine they would protect American democracy. “This battle,” he said, “cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection.” He appealed to their economic self-interest, too. “Your money is not charity,” Zelensky said. “It’s an investment in the global security and democracy that we handle in the most responsible way.” He appealed to their vanity. “ ‘The American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory,’ ” Zelensky said, quoting F.D.R.’s “Day of Infamy” speech. “The Ukrainian people will win, too, absolutely. I know that everything depends on us, on Ukrainian armed forces, yet so much depends on the world. So much in the world depends on you.”

American politicians responded to Zelensky by valorizing him, as Americans usually do. Zelensky resists this, wisely. In an interview with David Letterman, which aired earlier this month (it was conducted this fall in the Kyiv metro, as trains went past and air-raid sirens sounded), Zelensky deftly shot down the older comedian’s attempts to cast him as a hero. Heroes are unlike ordinary people; they can survive anything. Zelensky noted that he showered and that he likes to eat. He might have added that, being human, all Ukrainians need to eat, and to have heat and water in winter. In the hands of a less capable performer, or a performer who laughs less readily, these demurrals might have come off as disingenuous or moralistic. But, through three hundred days of nightly addresses to the Ukrainian people and regular speeches to Western political bodies, Zelensky has, almost without fail, found the right tone and the right timing to insure that the audience stays with him. His and the Ukrainian people’s lives depend on it. ♦

On the shortest day of the year, after 10 months of war, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, finally left his country and came to Washington to thank Americans for their support. He went to the White House, where he appeared at a press conference. He went to Congress, where he handed a Ukrainian flag, signed by the defenders of Bakhmut, to the vice president and House speaker. He congratulated all of us on our first, joint American-Ukrainian victory: “We defeated Russia in the battle for minds of the world.”Nothing about this trip—not the applause, not the flag, not the speech—was inevitable. Zelensky’s very survival was not inevitable. Ukraine’s continued existence as a sovereign state was not inevitable either. Back in February, many considered these things to be improbable.On the eve of the invasion, some American experts advised against offering military aid to Ukraine, on the grounds that the war was going to be over too quickly. Other Americans repeated Russian propaganda, questioning whether Ukraine deserved to exist or whether it deserved to be defended. Some American politicians echoed those views and indeed continue to do so. What if they had prevailed? What if a different president had been in the White House? What if a different president had been elected in Ukraine? Let’s imagine, just for a moment, a world without Ukrainian courage, or American and European weapons, or the unity and support of democracies around the world.Had the Russian plan been carried out as it was written, Kyiv would have been conquered in just a few days. Zelensky, his wife, and his children would have been murdered by one of the hit squads that roamed the capital city. The Ukrainian state would have been taken over by the collaborators who had already chosen their Kyiv apartments. Then, city by city, region by region, the Russian army would have fought the remnants of the Ukrainian army until it finally conquered the entire country. Originally, the Russian general staff imagined that this victory would require six weeks.[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian Empire must die]Had all of that happened as planned, Ukraine would now be pockmarked with the concentration camps, torture chambers, and makeshift prisons that have been discovered in Bucha, Izyum, Kherson, and all the other territories temporarily occupied by Russia and liberated by the Ukrainian army. A generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, politicians, journalists, and civic leaders would already be buried in mass graves. Ukrainian books would have been removed from schools and libraries. The Ukrainian language would have been suppressed in all public spaces. Hundreds of thousands more Ukrainian children would have been kidnapped and transported to Russia or trafficked farther around the world.Russian soldiers, strengthened by their stunning victory, would already be on the borders of Poland, setting up new command posts, digging new trenches. NATO would be in chaos; the entire alliance would be forced to spend billions to prepare for the inevitable invasion of Warsaw, Vilnius, or Berlin. Millions of Ukrainian refugees would be living in camps all across Europe, with no prospect of ever returning home; the tide of sympathy that originally greeted them would have ebbed long ago; the money would be running out, the backlash under way. The Moldovan economy would have collapsed entirely; a pro-Russian government in Moldova would perhaps already be planning to incorporate that country into the emerging Russian-Belarusian-Ukrainian federation that one Russian propagandist hailed, too early, on February 26.This disaster would not have been confined to Europe. On the other side of the world, Chinese plans to invade Taiwan would be well under way, because Beijing would assume that an America unwilling to defend a European ally, and now totally bogged down in a long-term battle against an emboldened Russia, would never go out of its way to help an island in the Pacific. The Iranian mullahs, equally cheered by Russia’s success and Ukraine’s defeat, would have boldly announced that they had finally acquired nuclear weapons. From Venezuela to Zimbabwe to Myanmar, dictatorships around the world would have tightened their regimes and stepped up the persecution of their opponents, now certain that the old rules—the conventions on human rights and genocide, the laws of war, the taboo against changing borders by force—no longer applied. From Washington to London, from Tokyo to Canberra, the democratic world would be grimly facing up to its obsolescence.But none of this happened. Because Zelensky stayed in Kyiv, declaring that he needed “ammunition, not a ride”; because Ukrainian soldiers repulsed the first Russian attack on their capital; because Ukrainian society pulled together to support its army; because Ukrainians at all levels were creative in their use of limited resources; because Ukrainian civilians were, and are, willing to endure terrible hardship; because of all of that, we are not living in that ugly, alternate reality.    Because they were inspired by those first weeks of Ukrainian courage, President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress resisted the temptation of “America First” isolationism and rejected the cult of autocracy that now captivates a part of the American right. The leaders of Europe—with the sole exception of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, one of the chief ideologues of that same cult—also resisted carefully targeted Russian disinformation and blackmail campaigns and agreed to support Ukraine with both military and humanitarian aid. People around the world saw the Ukrainians stand up to a brutal dictatorship, and volunteered their time and their money to help.  Because of everything that all of us did together, Kyiv still stands. Ukrainians still control most of Ukraine. The massacres, the executions, the mass violence planned by the Russians did not take place in most of Ukraine. The legend of Russia’s military prowess has been shattered. China and Iran are roiled by unhappiness and unrest. The democratic world did not collapse but has instead been strengthened. As the Ukrainian president said last night, we “succeeded in uniting the global community to protect freedom and international law.” Zelensky came to Washington to thank Americans on behalf of Ukraine, but in truth, it is we who should be thanking them.   

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Around the holidays, you can bet on seeing a car commercial in which a self-assured-looking husband takes his blindfolded wife out to the driveway, where she finds a brand-new luxury car with a massive bow on it. He takes off the blindfold; she screams in delight and throws her arms around his neck. He beams with satisfaction.“Yeah, right,” my wife scoffed the first time she saw such an ad after moving to the U.S. Then, turning to me, she said, “Please never do something like that.” I understood what she meant. The idea of one spouse deciding on an expensive car for the other seems imprudent at best (isn’t this something she should pick out herself?) and controlling at worst (doesn’t she have a say in a decision like this?).This is an egregious example, but the truth is, most presents are lousy: value-destroying, manipulative, guilt-provoking, or just plain useless to the person who receives them. But unless your family has opted for a no-gift Christmas this year, you’re probably stuck with the tradition. Instead of fake-smiling through ugly photo frames and novelty coffee mugs, you can instead learn to understand the psychodynamics at work so you can enjoy gifts that aren’t great, refuse them when appropriate, and even make receiving them into an act of giving itself.A good gift is one that is more valuable for the recipient than it is for the giver. But most gifts destroy value rather than create it. Think of the Christmas-tree-shaped cookie jar that cost your aunt $30 but is worth considerably less than zero to you, posing a moral conundrum: Do you throw it right into the trash or wait a couple of months? The economist Joel Waldfogel calls this discrepancy the “deadweight loss” of gifts, and estimates that, on average, it is from 10 percent to a third of a gift’s price.One explanation for the deadweight loss is a mismatch between desirability and feasibility. Consider a gadget that is useful (high desirability) but difficult to set up and time-consuming to use (low feasibility). Scholars have found that givers usually focus on desirability, and receivers are more aware of feasibility. Your friend who bought you a fancy wearable fitness tracker probably thought it was a really cool and helpful gift; to you, it seems like a massive headache to figure out, requires an app download and a monthly fee, and offers data that will either make you feel terrible about yourself or turn into a life-ruining obsession. That’s why it is still sitting in your drawer in its original package.Another happiness-killing mismatch can occur between the receiver’s initial reaction and their long-term satisfaction. As Anna Goldfarb noted in The Atlantic a few weeks ago, givers tend to look for “reaction-maximizing gifts” (such as the wife’s over-the-top response to the car) as opposed to “satisfaction-maximizing gifts.” Once the giver is not present to see the receiver’s reaction, the receiver might not actually be that excited about socks with her best friend’s face on them.[Read: Gift-giving is about the buyer, not the receiver]Someone looking for a big reaction might be tempted to buy a wildly expensive gift, which poses its own emotional problems. In the worst cases, they may even be trying to exert dominance over you, or manipulate you into doing them a favor later. Either way, receiving a gift that’s too nice might make you feel guilty. According to one 2019 survey from CompareCards, a LendingTree subsidiary, 46 percent of respondents felt guilty for being unable to give a gift worth as much as the one they received.In truth, the biggest benefit to most gift giving is to the giver herself. Generosity is truly a way to buy happiness. As my colleague Michael Norton and his co-authors showed in the journal Science in 2008, although spending money on oneself is weakly related to happiness, spending money on others significantly raises the giver’s well-being. Neuroscientists have shown that charitable giving to others engages the mesolimbic reward system, inducing pleasure in one of the same ways that alcohol and certain drugs do. (Maybe this is the real reason Santa is so jolly.)[Read: How to buy happiness]The logical conclusion from all this research is that the way to find happiness during the holidays is to drop gifts onto your loved ones’ porches, ring the doorbell, and hide in the bushes so they can’t reciprocate. If that seems a bit impractical, here are a few things to try instead.1. Lower your expectations.If you are hoping to find a surprise that delights you under the Christmas tree, you will probably be disappointed. Finding a gift that doesn’t destroy value, gives you satisfaction, and doesn’t stimulate guilt is a lot to ask of your friends and family. Go into the holidays assuming that the gifts won’t be that great, because they probably won’t be. Think of present exchanges as simply a fun pastime, not one where you will get something wonderful.2. Say no to guilt and manipulation.If you feel that someone is operating on you with a gift that is unexpected or inappropriately generous, you should feel free to exercise the option of refusing it. Be honest: Say, “I couldn’t possibly accept this; it wouldn’t feel right.” If you do want to keep it, commit to acting like the gift really is a gift and not a transaction. Show appropriate gratitude as good manners dictate, but resist the temptation to feel guilty or indebted to the giver.[Read: The joy of no-gift Christmas]3. Turn receiving into giving.Your reaction to a gift—even one that isn’t great—is your choice, and you can choose to make it into a gift to the giver. You don’t have to lie and tell your aunt that the Christmas-tree cookie jar is just your style, but you can definitely find reasons to like it. Maybe it’s whimsical, or it makes you laugh, or you know she put a lot of thought into it. Tell her so, lavishly, with genuine gratitude. You will both get the mesolimbic buzz.Not long ago, I witnessed this principle in action. A friend of mine had expressed interest in some articles I had written in The Atlantic. So for a gift, I bound up a collection of them into a book and sent it to her—presumptuous of me, to be sure, and easy to imagine a deadweight loss if she thought that links to the internet would have been more convenient. Her response was virtuoso-level gift receiving: She left me a long voice message describing how she liked the paper, the cover, and the artwork, and how much she appreciated the work that went into making it. Her reaction was a gift to me.[Read: An alternative to overspending on presents]This essay has been focused on being a good gift getter in an ambiguous social environment. But you can use the information here to be a better gift giver as well. Make clear to all your recipients that your gifts don’t come with any expectation of getting things in return. Do your best to avoid destroying value. Go for feasibility over desirability, and satisfaction over reaction.And no matter what, don’t do that car thing.

Congress's January 6 select committee has referred former president Donald Trump to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on the grounds that he incited an insurrection, conspired to defraud the United States, obstructed an act of Congress, and conspired to make a false statement.

The big news is that the committee has compiled overwhelming evidence that the former president has committed serious crimes.

What is the significance of this referral? Almost none, directly. It has no legal effect. The Justice Department's own investigation will not be swayed by the fact that a committee of Congress believes Trump guilty. And unless you happen to be one of the few people in America who hasn't already made up your mind about Trump's guilt or innocence, the committee's criminal referral will have no effect on you, or on public opinion in general, or on Trump's political fortunes.

But the specific evidence of Trump's guilt that the committee will be turning over to the Justice Department will be hugely significant. They have built a powerful case.

So I urge you not to be distracted by the coverage over the fact that the committee made a criminal referral to the Justice Department, and focus instead on the substance of what the committee has established through direct testimony, videos, memos, and other data.

Among other things, the committee has established that:

Before Election Day, Trump planned to give a false election victory speech. On Election Day, even though the networks were starting to call the race for Biden, Trump declared victory and demanded that voting counts stop. "This is a fraud on the American public, an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election, we did win this election." Trump knew he lost. He also knew that there was no evidence of fraud or irregularities sufficient to change the outcome. His Attorney General told him there had been no fraud. His advisors repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. The Supreme Court rejected his case on December 11. Electors voted on December 14. His senior staff advised him to concede. Nonetheless, Trump's intended to ignore the rule of law to stay in power. He conducted an Oval Office meeting on December 18, during which Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn proposed that the U.S. military seize state election machines. On December 19, just hours after the meeting ended, Trump sent a tweet urging his followers to come to Washington on January 6, and it "will be wild." The evidence presented made clear that the far-right militia and other figures understood that tweet as a call to violence. Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both of whom Trump had pardoned during the time between the election and January 6, had direct relationships with violent right-wing groups. Trump knew he was lying when he told the public that Dominion Voting machines were rigged against him, when he told the public there were more votes than voters, and when he told the public about a "vote dump" in Detroit. He purposely and maliciously repeated these lies to the public over and over again. He knew his allegations of fraud in Georgia were false, but he nonetheless sought to pressure the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger into giving him the votes he needed, saying "I want to find 11,780 votes." When the secretary of state demurred, Trump threatened that he'd be prosecuted. He also tried to pressure election officials in Arizona and Michigan, knowing he lost those states. Knowing he lost the election, he also pressured the Justice Department to change the results of the election until Justice Department officials threatened mass resignation. He sought to name a Justice Department minion as the new Attorney General who then planned to send letters to Trump-friendly state legislatures alleging widespread fraud in their states. The proposed letters would urge these friendly state legislatures to exploit the "failed choice" loophole in antiquated 19th-century laws and substitute their own Trump presidential electors for the Biden electors that had been chosen by the voters on Election Day. Trump's own top Justice Department officials killed this scheme. He sought to replace real Biden electors with fake Trump electors on January 6. He knew this was illegal. He tried to get Vice President Pence to unilaterally disregard the electoral count. Trump knew this was illegal. He intentionally summoned his supporters to the Capitol, and then, knowing they were armed, intended that they march to the Capitol. He knew there would be violence that day. He knew people coming to Washington planned to attack the Capitol and that multiple users online were targeting members of Congress. The Secret Service had this information at least 10 days before the attack. On January 6, during his speech on the Ellipse, Trump knew the crowd was armed and dangerous. He intentionally endangered the safety of Vice President Pence and his family, and members of Congress, on January 6 by tweeting criticism of Pence, which unleashed the mob to go after Pence, chanting "hang Mike Pence." He watched the riots unfold on television for hours without lifting a finger to protect the Vice President, his family, or Members of Congress, despite pleas from Trump family members, White House advisors, and Republican congressional leaders. He spent hours in the dining room next to the Oval Office (from 1:25 pm until 4 pm) watching Fox News coverage of the attack. During this time he called senators to urge them to delay the electoral vote, and he phoned Rudy Giuliani. He refused to take action, although he could easily have done so. He was repeatedly implored--by his own White House counsel, other White House staff, and members of his family--to condemn the violence, ask rioters to stop and leave the Capitol, and go home. But for 187 minutes he did not. He was a sixty-second walk away from the White House press room. Instead, he chose to provoke the rioters. When the riot was underway, his first tweet was: "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country." In view of White House staffers, this "poured fuel on the fire." Rather than call the rioters off, he indicated they were doing the right thing. When House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy urged Trump to take action, Trump responded: "Well, Kevin, I guess they're just more upset about the election than you are." He showed no remorse. At 6:01 pm he tweeted: "These are the things that happen when a victory is stripped away from great patriots. Remember the day forever. Go home with love." Even after the 2020 election was certified, he refused to say the election was over. When he finally agreed to address the nation the next evening, he did not want to say words that had been drafted for him--"the election is over." He was only willing to say "Congress has certified the results." Trump has never accepted any responsibility for the attack and never acknowledged the deaths of law enforcement officers, because he did not want to be faulted or imply any criticism of the rioters.

The big news is not that a committee of Congress has made a criminal referral to the Justice Department urging that the Department prosecute a former president. The big news is that the committee has compiled overwhelming evidence that the former president has committed serious crimes.

Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, a niche subset of experimental vaccines has offered the world a tantalizing promise: a sustained slowdown in the spread of disease. Formulated to spritz protection into the body via the nose or the mouth—the same portals of entry most accessible to the virus itself—mucosal vaccines could head SARS-CoV-2 off at the pass, stamping out infection to a degree that their injectable counterparts might never hope to achieve.Now, nearly three years into the pandemic, mucosal vaccines are popping up all over the map. In September, India authorized one delivered as drops into the nostrils; around the same time, mainland China green-lit an inhalable immunization, and later on, a nasal-spray vaccine, now both being rolled out amid a massive case wave. Two more mucosal recipes have been quietly bopping around in Russia and Iran for many months. Some of the world’s largest and most populous countries now have access to the technology—and yet it isn’t clear how well that’s working out. “Nothing has been published; no data has been made available,” says Mike Diamond, a virologist and an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, whose own approach to mucosal vaccines has been licensed for use in India via a company called Bharat. If mucosal vaccines are delivering on their promise, we don’t know it yet; we don’t know if they will ever deliver.The allure of a mucosal vaccine is all about geography. Injectable shots are great at coaxing out immune defenses in the blood, where they’re able to cut down on the risk of severe disease and death. But they aren’t as good at marshaling a protective response in the upper airway. When viral invaders throng the nose, blood-borne defenses have to scamper to the site of infection at a bit of a delay, leaving an opening for pathogen to creep in—it’s like stationing guards next to a bank’s central vault, only to have them rush to the entrance every time a robber trips an external alarm. Mucosal vaccines, meanwhile, would presumably be working at the door.That same logic drives the effectiveness of the powerful oral polio vaccine, which bolsters defenses in its target virus’s preferred environment—the gut. Just one mucosal vaccine exists to combat a pathogen that enters through the nose: a nasal spray made up of weakened flu viruses, a version of which is branded as FluMist. The up-the-nose spritz is reasonably protective in kids, in some cases even outperforming its injected counterparts (though not always). But FluMist is much less potent for adults: The immunity they accumulate from a lifetime of influenza infections can wipe out the vaccine before it has time to lay down new protection. When it comes to cooking up a mucosal vaccine for a respiratory virus, “we don’t have a great template to follow,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona.To circumvent the FluMist problem, some researchers have instead concocted viral-vector-based vaccines—the same group of immunizations to which the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID shots belong. China’s two mucosal vaccines fall into this category; so does India’s nose-drop concoction, as well as a nasal version of Russia’s Sputnik V shot. Other researchers are cooking up vaccines that contain ready-made molecules of the coronavirus’s spike protein, more akin to the shot from Novavax. Among them are Iran’s mucosal COVID vaccine and a newer, still-in-development candidate from the immunologist Akiko Iwasaki and her colleagues at Yale. The Yale group is also testing an mRNA-based nasal recipe. And the company Vaxart has been tinkering with a COVID-vaccine pill that could be swallowed to provoke immune cells in the gut, which would then deploy fighters throughout the body’s mucosal surfaces, up through the nose.Early data in animals have spurred some optimism. Trial versions of Diamond’s vaccine guarded mice, hamsters, and monkeys from the virus, in some cases seeming to stave off infection entirely; a miniaturized version of Vaxart’s oral vaccine was able to keep infected hamsters from spreading the coronavirus through the air. Iwasaki is pursuing an approach that deploys mucosal vaccines exclusively as boosters to injected shots, in the hopes that the initial jab can lay down bodywide immunity, a subset of which can then be tugged into a specialized compartment in the nose. Her nasal-protein recipe seems to trim transmission rates among rodents that have first received an in-the-muscle shot.But attempts to re-create these results in people yielded mixed results. After an intranasal version of the AstraZeneca vaccine roused great defenses in animals, a team at Oxford moved the immunization into a small human trial—and last month, published results showing that it hardly triggered any immune response, even as a booster to an in-the-arm shot. Adam Ritchie, one of the Oxford immunologists behind the study, told me the results don’t necessarily spell disaster for other mucosal attempts, and that with more finagling, AstraZeneca’s vaccine might someday do better up the nose. Still, the results “definitely put a damper on the excitement around intranasal vaccines,” says Stephanie Langel, an immunologist at Case Western Reserve University, who’s partnering with Vaxart to develop a COVID-vaccine pill.The mucosal COVID vaccines in India and China, at least, have reportedly shown a bit more promise in small, early human trials. Bharat’s info sheet on its nasal-drop vaccine—the Indian riff on Diamond’s recipe—says it bested another locally made vaccine, Covaxin, at tickling out antibodies, while provoking fewer side effects. China’s inhaled vaccine, too, seems to do reasonably well on the human-antibody front. But antibodies aren’t the same as true effectiveness: Vaccine makers and local health ministries, experts told me, have yet to release large-scale, real-world data showing that the vaccines substantially cut down on transmission or infection. And although some studies have hinted that nasal protection can stick around in animals for many, many months, there’s no guarantee the same will be true in humans, in whom mucosal antibodies, in particular, “are kind of known to wane pretty quickly,” Langel told me.SARS-CoV-2 infections have offered sobering lessons of their own. The nasal immune response to the virus itself is neither impenetrable nor particularly long-lived, says David Martinez, a viral immunologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Even people who have been both vaccinated and infected can still get infected again, he told me, and it would be difficult for a nasal vaccine to do much better. “I don’t think mucosal vaccines are going to be the deus ex machina that some people think they’re going to be.”[Read: America’s flu-shot problem is also its next COVID-shot problem]Mucosal vaccines don’t need to provide a perfect blockade against infection to prove valuable. Packaged into sprays, drops, or pills, immunizations tailor-made for the mouth or the nose might make COVID vaccines easier to ship, store, and distribute en masse. “They often don’t require specialized training,” says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic—a major advantage for rural or low-resource areas. The immunizing experience could also be easier for kids or anyone else who’d rather not endure a needle. Should something like Vaxart’s encapsulated vaccine work out, Langel told me, COVID vaccines could even one day be shipped via mail, in a form safe and easy enough to swallow with a glass of water at home. Some formulations may also come with far fewer side effects than, say, the mRNA-based shots, which “really kick my ass,” Bhattacharya told me. Even if mucosal vaccines weren’t a transmission-blocking knockout, “if it meant I didn’t have to get the mRNA vaccine, I would consider it.”But the longer that countries such as the U.S. have gone without mucosal COVID vaccines, the harder it’s gotten to get one across the finish line. Transmission, in particular, is tough to study, and Langel pointed out that any new immunizations will likely have to prove that they can outperform our current crop of injected shots to secure funding, possibly even FDA approval. “It’s an uphill battle,” she told me.Top White House advisers remain resolute that transmission-reducing tech has to be part of the next generation of COVID vaccines. Ideally, those advancements would be paired with ingredients that enhance the life span of immune responses and combat a wider swath of variants; skimp on any of them, and the U.S. might remain in repeat-vaccination purgatory for a while yet. “We need to do better on all three fronts,” Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me. But packaging all that together will require another major financial investment. “We need Warp Speed 2.0,” says Shankar Musunuri, the CEO of Ocugen, the American company that has licensed Diamond’s recipe. “And so far, there is no action.” When I asked Fauci about this, he didn’t seem optimistic that this would change. “I think that they’ve reached the point where they feel, ‘We’ve given enough money to it,’” he told me. In the absence of dedicated government funds, some scientists, Iwasaki among them, have decided to spin off companies of their own. But without more public urgency and cash flow, “it could be years to decades to market,” Iwasaki told me. “And that’s if everything goes well.”[Read: The three COVID developments I’m still holding out hope for]Then there’s the issue of uptake. Musunuri told me that he’s confident that the introduction of mucosal COVID vaccines in the U.S.—however long it takes to happen—will “attract all populations, including kids … people like new things.” But Rupali Limaye, a behavioral scientist at Johns Hopkins University, worries that for some, novelty will drive the exact opposite effect. The “newness” of COVID vaccines, she told me, is exactly what has prompted many to adopt an attitude of “wait and see” or even “that’s not for me.” An even newer one that jets ingredients up into the head might be met with additional reproach.Vaccine fatigue has also set in for much of the public. In the United States, hospitalizations are once again rising, and yet less than 15 percent of people eligible for bivalent shots have gotten them. That sort of uptake is at odds with the dream of a mucosal vaccine that can drive down transmission. “It would have to be a lot of people getting vaccinated in order to have that public-health population impact,” says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong. And there’s no guarantee that even a widely administered mucosal vaccine would be the population’s final dose. The pace at which we’re doling out shots is driven in part by “the virus changing so quickly,” says Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Even a sustained encampment of antibodies in the nose could end up being a poor match for the next variant that comes along, necessitating yet another update.The experts I spoke with worried that some members of the scientific community—even some members of the public—have begun to pin all their hopes about stopping the spread of SARS-CoV-2 on mucosal vaccines. It’s a recipe for disappointment. “People love the idea of a magic pill,” Langel told me. “But it’s just not reality.” The virus is here to stay; the goal continues to be to make that reality more survivable. “We’re trying to reduce infection and transmission, not eliminate it; that would be almost impossible,” Iwasaki told me. That’s true for any vaccine, no matter how, or where, the body first encounters it.

After 18 months the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack is set to release a final report of its work and will refer former President Donald Trump to the Department of Justice for investigation and potential criminal prosecution for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Though historic, the DOJ is not obligated to follow the recommendations, and it is unclear whether it will. But that doesn’t mean the committee’s work is without value, says Neil Eggleston, a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School who served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama from 2014 to 2017 and as associate White House counsel during the Clinton administration. Eggleston spoke to the Gazette about the Jan. 6 committee’s findings before the release of the full report — portions were released earlier — and what the Department of Justice may be doing behind the scenes.
Q&A
Neil Eggleston
GAZETTE: Since the referrals have no legal weight, how should they be understood — as history records, as political or moral statements, as a road map for prosecutors?
EGGLESTON: I don’t think that people should think that the Department of Justice will be pressured into indicting former President Trump because of referrals by Congress. That’s not the way the Department of Justice works. They have Jack Smith, a real career prosecutor, working on that. The real impact will be that the committee put together an extremely persuasive and massive statement of facts and testimony and documents that would be of use to the Department of Justice as it goes about its own investigation. What the committee put together is a truly remarkable document, the likes of which I really haven’t seen, and I worked on the Iran Contra investigation for Congress. What this committee has done is a real tour de force, I think.
GAZETTE: Remarkable in what way — the volume and scope of the information they’ve presented?
EGGLESTON: The volume of information, the depth. Particularly with regard to your question about the Department of Justice, is also the level of detail. The executive summary has a massive number of citations to primary documents and testimony. This is not the sort of general referral you sometimes see from Congress. What the Jan. 6 committee has done is provide enormous factual basis in support of the recommendations they made — that’s the real contribution they’ve made and will be a real contribution to the Department of Justice.
GAZETTE: Is DOJ perhaps less likely to bring charges now out of a desire to appear independent and not doing the bidding of the Jan. 6 committee?
EGGLESTON: I don’t think so. I think the Department of Justice will make its own decision about what charges, if any, to bring against President Trump and the other individuals who were referred by the committee. I don’t think that’s much of a worry. Having been a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and now a defense lawyer, the one impact that occurred to me is that the committee has produced prior statements by these witnesses. If there is an indictment and trial, the presence of those prior statements will make the trial a bit more complicated for the DOJ. When witnesses have to describe events on multiple occasions, there will inevitably be discrepancies in the various versions of the events. But that comes with the territory in connection with a congressional investigation. I don’t think that the Department of Justice will be dissuaded by that. But it will create a little bit of an additional level of difficulty if there is an indictment, and then, if there’s a trial.

“I think the committee put their best case forward. What is impossible to know is what the Department of Justice is doing. Remember, the Department of Justice, as a functional matter, has the power to grant immunity.”

GAZETTE: How much of the committee’s materials will DOJ review? What do you think prosecutors will find most useful?
EGGLESTON: I think they’ll review all of it. The committee will certainly make its raw material available to the department, including the videotaped depositions, the transcribed testimony, and the documentary evidence. I assume that will all be made available to the Department of Justice. And so, the Department of Justice is going to review all that material and maybe go back to some of those witnesses. Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway said some things that were revealed by the committee that in the day or two before and on the day of the insurrection, Jan. 6, they had gone to the president and urged him to say that the demonstrations should be peaceful and urged against violence, and he simply refused to do it. That’s going to be a key component of any prosecution: What was his state of mind? And he basically said, according to Hope Hicks, “I have no legacy unless I win. It’s all about winning.” The DOJ will point out, it is not all about winning; it’s about democracy and following the will of the voters.
GAZETTE: Is it likely that there’s more information that hasn’t been revealed that could become important to DOJ, such as evidence of people high up in the administration who may be cooperating with DOJ, co-conspirators whose identities are withheld so as not to harm potential prosecution?
EGGLESTON: I think the committee put their best case forward. What is impossible to know is what the Department of Justice is doing. Remember, the Department of Justice, as a functional matter, has the power to grant immunity. We don’t know what negotiations are going on between the Department of Justice and potential witnesses. It’s hard to overstate the leverage the Department of Justice has over someone who could get indicted and the ability to encourage people to decide to cooperate.
People who end up cooperating, particularly if they cooperate late in the game, frequently have to agree to plead guilty to something in order to not be charged with more serious crimes. So that’s also a frequent outcome. Those discussions between potential witnesses and the Department are almost certainly going on. The committee typically would not have information about those critical negotiations.
The Department of Justice also has a much easier time compelling testimony that might be claimed to be executive privilege than the committee would. In the committee, once a witness refuses to answer questions relying on executive privilege, the committee can either abandon the line of questioning or go to court. The civil process in court is lengthy. I represented the office of the president during the Monica Lewinsky/Ken Starr investigation. In the criminal process, prosecutors can very quickly get to the chief judge of the district and get an order compelling a witness to testify over a claim of executive privilege. In this case, that’s Chief Judge Beryl Howell. The argument against the assertion of executive privilege in this case is so strong, I suspect that with most of the witnesses the DOJ has brought before her, Chief Justice Howell has ordered them to testify and rejected a claim of executive privilege.

“What the committee worked hard on is to talk to people around Trump to address issues concerning what was his state of mind, what was he intending to do?”

GAZETTE: Would a different set of lawmakers from another era, say 100 years ago, look at this same evidence and come to these conclusions or is this indicative of where we are right now as a country?
EGGLESTON: I think it’s too easy to say that we’re here because of partisan differences. There are a couple of Republicans on this committee. It’s pretty clear what happened: President Trump lost; he denied that he lost; he tried to go to court; he was unable to adduce any evidence that there had been any fraud that impacted the election. Various state certifications took place in December. He tried to keep them from happening through a variety of different ways — all that failed. And really, his last hope was to get the mob to keep Congress from certifying the election or, at the very least, pressuring Vice President [Mike] Pence into refusing to certify the election, and there was no grounds for that. So what happened seems pretty straightforward to me.
What the committee worked hard on is to talk to people around Trump to address issues concerning what was his state of mind, what was he intending to do? What did he know about the status of voter fraud? What were his intentions in the days leading up to Jan. 6? What was his intention when he gave the speech? That’s where, if there’s an indictment, a trial will play out. That’s really where the committee focused its attention — what was the president was thinking as he was going through those various episodes. That’s the evidence the committee put forth in such great detail in their executive summary.
GAZETTE: The committee reportedly disagreed over what to highlight in the report. For example, the intelligence and security failures on Jan. 6 got little attention during the hearings. Are we likely to see new important revelations in the full report?
EGGLESTON: I suspect if it was evidence, or anything that was interesting, we would have seen it in the executive summary. I think what we’re going to see in the full report is the underlying support for the material that’s in the executive summary. I don’t think there’ll be anything new after the report comes out. That would be my prediction, at least.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekTo complete this week’s question I had a conversation with OpenAI’s chatbot, GPT-3 (which anyone can try). “Every week I ask readers of my newsletter a different question,” I wrote. “Would you compose this week’s question on the subject of AI, choosing one that is likely to elicit the highest number of interesting responses?” GPT-3 responded, in part, with this suggestion:
Sure! Here is a question that might elicit a high number of interesting responses: How do you think AI will change the way we live and work in the next decade?
This question seems like asking, circa 1995, how the internet would change the way we live and work. When you respond, know that people of the future will look back with interest on your predictions!Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteIn addition to prompting GPT-3 to generate this week’s question, I interviewed it about the other OpenAI tool that I’ve been testing out, DALL-E, an artificial-intelligence program capable of generating original images from text descriptions. “It has the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of image creation,” GPT-3 told me, with applications in advertising, design, entertainment, art work, and other creative enterprises.  As an example, I asked DALL-E to generate images of four Looney Tunes characters as if they were starring in a Wes Anderson movie. Here is the star-studded cast:Yosemite Sam:
(DALL-E)
Bugs Bunny:
(DALL-E)
Wile E. Coyote:
(DALL-E)
And the Roadrunner:
(DALL-E)
I also asked DALL-E to generate Michael Jordan posters in different styles. Here’s one in the style of Jackson Pollock:
(DALL-E)
Just as interesting were the results when I deployed a trick I picked up at a recent Atlantic event in Los Angeles: asking the text-based ChatGPT to help write better prompts for an image-generating AI. For example, say I was trying to come up with ideas to decorate my living room. If I ask DALL-E to generate “a living room that would be good for reading in” I get this:
(DALL-E)
Whereas if I ask GPT-3 to help me to write a better prompt for DALL-E, I get this: “Show me a living room with comfortable seating, good lighting, and plenty of shelving for books, that would be the perfect place to relax and get lost in a good book. Include a fireplace, a view of the outdoors, and a quiet and peaceful atmosphere.” Pasting that into DALL-E generates this:
(DALL-E)
You can play with DALL-E on your own, too, and if you do you’ll quickly discover how expansive its potential use cases are. I’ll be eager to hear your various thoughts by email. My prediction is that, for a long stretch of time to come, the use of text and image content generated by AI platforms plus human prompts will outstrip that by AI alone, or by humans alone, across many applications.Is Writing Still an Important Skill to Learn?Daniel Herman, who teaches various high-school humanities classes, reflects in The Atlantic on advances in artificial intelligence that can “generate sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine.” The technology “may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill,” he argues:
If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.
… This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I’m sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa’s radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael’s metaphysics in Moby-Dick.
To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill—whether it’s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss. I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.
I don’t know if either of those things is true anymore. It’s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation. Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor … I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us?  
Will “Creative” AIs Increase Returns to Excellence?That is the writer Virginia Postrel’s guess, as she notes in her Substack newsletter:
While crashing the value of mediocrity, ChatGPT could increase the returns to excellence. (“Average is over,” as Tyler Cowen put it.) Think about what happened to graphic design. Many people used to make a living doing routine tasks, from laying out pages to selecting typefaces, that are now easily handled by software. Thanks to the graphic intelligence embedded in everyday tools, the standards for routine graphics, from websites and PowerPoint presentations to restaurant menus and wedding invitations, have increased.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no work for graphic designers with the conceptual chops to take on complicated tasks. Powerful tools make iteration and brainstorming easier, but cleverness is still a valued skill. When my friend Shikha Dalmia launched The Unpopulist on Substack, she asked me to look at some logos she’d come up with using easily available tools.
They weren’t terrible, but neither were they distinctive. “Hire a professional,” I advised, and she got a real logo … Mediocre writing that earns grade-inflated Bs is now replaceable by a bot. Maybe if those B-essay students started with AI-generated prose it would be easier to teach them to do better: to refine the ideas, dig down more on the facts, improve the writing style. Can ChatGPT be a time-saving tool, like a calculator or text search, rather than a threat?
Will Humans Have Inflated Confidence in AI?Louis Rosenberg expresses that worry at Big Think:
Personally, my biggest concern about Generative AI systems is that we humans may assume that their informational output is accurate because it came from a computer. After all, most of us grew up watching shows and movies like Star Trek where characters verbally ask computers for information and instantly get accurate and trustworthy results. I even can hear Captain Picard in my head barking out a command like, “Computer, estimate how long it will take for us to catch up with that space probe.” And an authoritative answer comes back. Everyone believes it. After all, it’s from a computer.
But here’s the problem: Generative AI systems are trained on massive sets of human documents that are not comprehensively vetted for accuracy or authenticity. This means the training data could include some documents that are filled with misinformation, disinformation, political bias, or social prejudice. Because of this, ChatGPT and other systems include disclaimers like, “May occasionally generate incorrect information,” and, “May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.” It’s great that they tell you this up front, but I worry people will forget about the disclaimers or not take such warnings seriously. These current systems are not factual databases; they are designed to imitate human responses, which could easily mean imitating human flaws and errors.
I’ve noticed some inaccuracies in my own experiments. For example, you’ll frequently hear people declare, “hate speech is not free speech.” That is incorrect––“hate speech” is not a legal category, and lots of hateful speech and expression is protected by the First Amendment. But Chat GPT-3 kept telling me that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.A Contradiction at the Core of the American DreamIn an article titled “The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake,” my colleague Jerusalem Demsas argues:
At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight: Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.
What makes this rather obvious conclusion significant is just how common it is for policy makers to espouse both goals simultaneously. For instance, in a statement last year lamenting how “inflation hurts Americans pocketbooks,” President Joe Biden also noted that “home values are up” as a proof point that the economic recovery was well under way.
So rising prices are bad, except when it comes to homes.
Policy makers aren’t unaware of the reality that quickly appreciating home prices come at the cost of housing affordability. In fact, they’ve repeatedly picked a side, despite pretending otherwise. The homeowner’s power in American politics is unmatched. Rich people tend to be homeowners and have an outsize voice in politics because they are more likely to vote, donate, and engage in the political process.
Provocation of the WeekThis week’s subject is pet adoption:
As a society, we have long been encouraged to adopt pets as a way to provide homes for animals in need and reduce the number of homeless pets. However, upon closer examination, the act of adoption raises a number of serious concerns. First and foremost, adoption perpetuates a system of overpopulation and exploitation. By adopting a pet, we are essentially filling a demand for more animals and contributing to the cycle of breeding and disposability. It is estimated that there are already more than enough pets in the world to meet the demand, yet we continue to breed and produce more.
Additionally, adoption can be a risky and uncertain process. When we adopt a pet, we often do not know their full history or any potential behavioral or medical issues they may have. This can lead to unexpected costs and challenges in care, as well as the potential for harm to ourselves and others. Furthermore, adoption can be a superficial and self-serving act. By adopting a pet, we often do so for our own benefit and convenience, rather than considering the needs and well-being of the animal. This can lead to a lack of commitment and responsibility on the part of the adopter, resulting in a high rate of animal abandonment and neglect.
In conclusion, while adoption may seem like a noble and compassionate act, it is ultimately a flawed and irresponsible approach to addressing the issue of homeless pets. Instead of perpetuating a system of overproduction and exploitation, we should focus on addressing the root causes of pet homelessness and promoting more ethical and sustainable alternatives.
If you haven’t guessed by now, that, too, was generated by chat GPT-3, given the prompt “write an argument against adoption.” That is the last appearance AI-generated words will make in this newsletter, and I personally encourage you to adopt a dog at the earliest viable opportunity!

The beginning of the new year will mark the 15th anniversary of Science-Based Medicine as a blog. In that time we have published 4,328 articles covering just about every topic in the science of medicine. Hopefully we have at least added a useful voice to the much needed conversation surrounding how best to apply the latest science to the practice of medicine.

It is, of course, very difficult to assess the impact of SBM . There is no way to know what the world would have been like had we not engaged in this project. There is no controlled experiment. We must make due with anecdotal evidence. We frequently hear from practitioners who find our articles and our perspective useful in their practice, even changing how they practice medicine. We are often a resource for the media who would otherwise have only promotional or gullible voices on topics involving pseudoscience in medicine. And we hear from many health care consumers who were able to make a much more informed decision before turning to “alternative” interventions. I like to think we even influenced the FDA and FTC when they were reconsidering their regulation of homeopathy. We also engaged with the NIH regarding their funding of pseudoscientific research.

I wish we had accomplished much more, but promoting SBM has been a consistently uphill battle. One of our unmet goals is to essentially evolve evidence-based medicine ( EBM ) as the standard within medical academia into something more closely resembling SBM . Perhaps the most frequent question we get here is – what’s the difference. I’m always happy to answer this question because it is at the core of what we do.

EBM understandably focuses on clinical evidence to answer clinical questions – but it does so with too narrow a focus. In practice EBM tends to ignore prior probability, plausibility, or face validity (does the claim make basic scientific sense). It also inadequately considers the overall pattern of evidence in the research literature (although this has significantly improved over the last decade and a half). An interaction I had with a respected researcher is emblematic of the problem. They explicitly endorsed not considering prior probability when addressing medical scientific questions, because often what we think is plausible or true isn’t, and we need to rely on experimental evidence regardless of how plausible we think something is.

This approach makes sense, but only within a narrow range of plausibility. The problem is that this approach assumes a few things that are demonstrably not true – that everyone is playing fair, that all proposed hypotheses do not violate the basic laws of physics or everything we know about biology, and that clinical evidence is ironclad. The reality is that we are now living in a world where demonstrable pseudoscience has infiltrated all the institutions of medicine, where there are players that are actively trying to change the rules of good science to promote their beliefs or products, and we now have a great deal of information about the many layers of complexity of clinical evidence. We also know specifically how prior probability affects the statistical analysis of clinical evidence – it is literally necessary to interpret clinical evidence.

Further, those who are promoting pseudoscience in medicine have become expert at exploiting these weaknesses in EBM to slip their nonsense through the cracks. SBM seeks to close those cracks. There are countless examples I could give, but I will simply refer to the most recent example I wrote about here, a recent systematic review of acupuncture in back pain during pregnancy. The authors followed the rules of EBM (although honestly, not well) in order to argue that acupuncture essentially works for low back pain in pregnancy, but that further study was needed. Meanwhile, when I did a more SBM review of the study I think I convincingly argued that it shows acupuncture does not work for back pain in pregnancy. At the very least the data presented does not support the conclusion that it does work (just read the original article to see why). The difference in the ultimate conclusion is stark, and it showcases the difference between SBM and the ways that EBM can be exploited to promote a worthless treatment based on unscientific notions.

Where do we go from here? That’s always a moving target, but generally we would like to continue to grow the SBM community. We need more practitioners, researchers, academics, and regulators who truly understand the principles of SBM and how EBM is currently being abused to blur the lines between science and pseudoscience in medicine. Also, while we have had many authors on SBM over the years, we rely on a core of dedicated SBM authors and editors, and it would be helpful to expand this group.

Meanwhile, we will keep plugging away, trying to make medicine and the world in general a little more scientific, one article at a time.

When Volodymyr Zelensky arrives in Washington—his first time leaving Ukraine since the Russian invasion last winter—he will find a city that is even more obsessed with itself than usual. The Republicans are about to take over the House with a tiny majority and a passel of empowered kooks, and a congressional committee has recommended that a former president of the United States be prosecuted for an attempt to defeat the constitutional transfer of power.The American drama is important and the stakes for democracy are high, but President Zelensky will touch down in D.C. for a visit to the White House and a joint address to Congress after leaving a war zone where he and his compatriots are literally fighting for their lives and for the survival of their nation against a Russian dictator who intends to erase Ukraine as an independent state from the map.Washington is already shutting down for the holidays, but the timing of Zelensky’s visit makes sense. Ukrainian cities have been bombarded by the Russians yet again over the past few days in an attempt to break the country’s will to fight. The ground war is otherwise in something like a strategic pause, as Russian President Vladimir Putin gives his forces time to regroup in advance of what will likely be another set of offensives. Putin is in Belarus—the logical jumping-off point for another run at Kyiv—where he is making a public show of giving a belly scratch to his favorite foreign sheepdog, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.[Franklin Foer: A prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky]In the United States, meanwhile, the Biden administration is about to send a Patriot air-defense battery to Ukraine, an important addition to its ability to defend against Russian air and missile attacks. This is a significant step that will require training Ukrainians to operate the Patriot system and deepen cooperation between the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. Congress, meanwhile, is about to decide on sending billions more in aid. Ukraine needs this money not only to continue the fight but also for its people to survive as they face a harsh winter of violence from the man who vows not to end this war until Ukraine is under his control.It seems apparent that Zelensky decided to make the trip to Washington because he is worried about the imminent GOP takeover of the House. He should be. Many of the Republicans who are about to become members of the majority—and to chair committees—have descended into reflexive mulishness about Ukraine, opposing whatever it is that President Joe Biden wants, solely as a matter of partisan showboating. Goaded on by the trolls and contrarians in the conservative press, people who professed to care little what was happening in Ukraine a year ago have pledged to exercise tight “oversight” of U.S. aid to Ukraine—as though the largest war in Europe since World War II is an over-budget consulting contract in suburban Virginia.We do not yet know what Zelensky intends to say during this visit, particularly in his address to Congress. If all goes as planned, he will receive a boost in the international community from a handshake with Biden, who has done a masterful job of holding the Western alliance together in the face of Putin’s threats. (A White House meeting would also likely produce another jolt of vitriol in Moscow; the last missile barrage was almost certainly a response to the news about the Patriot missiles.) Zelensky is poised to move from being a beleaguered regional leader sending videos from a bunker to taking a place, well deserved and overdue, on the world stage as a statesman more than equal to the panicking KGB officer who is trying to kill him.[Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg: Liberation without victory]The real question, though, is whether anything Zelensky can say will matter to a Republican Party that has decided to torment the ghost of Ronald Reagan by taking sides with a neo-imperial Soviet nostalgist.Overall, of course, rank-and-file Republicans support aiding Ukraine against Russia. But the Trumpian GOP is now controlled by its fringe, the same activists and primary voters who wear the I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat T-shirts. Although much of the aid for Ukraine (including the Patriot system) is already in the pipeline, GOP grandstanding for the base could create more danger for Ukraine by encouraging Putin to believe that America’s commitment to freedom will wane over time. Indeed, the Russian president’s decision to invade Ukraine, as The New York Times reported this weekend, was predicated in part on his belief in the West’s weakness and short attention span.Republicans performing for their base are unlikely to change their views now. But Zelensky is about to speak to all of America, and his presence in Washington will help remind people that this is not some esoteric foreign-policy tangle, but a brutal, bloody human contest between democracy and authoritarianism. His presence in front of a divided Congress might—at least, we can hope—help Americans ignore the cartoonish objections of right-wing pundits and strengthen the broader bipartisan coalition in the United States dedicated to protecting freedom in Europe and around the world.The war in Ukraine is not over. When the Ukrainian president speaks on Wednesday, he will be a symbol not only of one nation’s struggle against the Kremlin, but of the global fight for democracy. Unfortunately, it is a fight with multiple fronts—and that includes Capitol Hill.

It is often declared that Twitter is not real life; too rarely does anyone add, because it’s far more important. As the primary vector for the construction and dissemination of political narratives, social media has become the central battleground where all conflicts short of open war are fought, based on firmly-held beliefs that rarely have a secure grounding in objective reality. What use does mere reality have, other than as kindling for the far brighter flames of political myth? No wonder, as the ongoing Twitter Files disclosures show, the company is riddled with bureaucrats of the American security state: there is no reason to doubt that the same is true of Instagram or Facebook, nor that the Chinese aren’t doing the same with TikTok and the Russians with Telegram. 
Where America is unique among the rival great powers jostling for mastery of the century to come is its distraction fighting a still-virtual civil war on social media at the same time. In the midst of this global contest, we as social media consumers are like some luckless peasant community of a contested borderland, simultaneously the justification for the war, through their expressions of sincere concern for our safety and security, and the battleground, through the harvesting of our data and the endless background turmoil that now fills our lives.
Into this bearpit strode Elon Musk, carrying a sink, with a stated vision of remaking Twitter according to the dreams of its founders barely a decade ago as the “global town square”. The phrase, redolent of Socratic dialogue beneath some shaded colonnade, seems quaintly inappropriate. Few Americans, and fewer foreigners, would wish to linger long in San Francisco’s real-world urban plazas, and their virtual replacement is hardly more congenial. In the real world, far beyond the ayahuasca visions of the site’s unworldly founder, the central square is as often a place of repression and public execution as of well-ordered debate and conviviality; it is the place where political power is expressed through the raising or toppling of statues, bloody revolutions, and intimidating displays of force.
The tiresome and self-defeating illusion of many conservatives, like that of any Hyde Park orator, is that if only the passing public were given free exposure to the brilliance of their dialogue, they would soon become converts. It is the precise illusion punctured by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, when he observed that “a class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict,” for as he notes, “the essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”
But it cannot, and here we see the essential contradiction of Musk’s self-imposed mission: the conflict between free speech and the good of the community is fundamentally unresolvable. Decisions will always finally have to be made by someone, and those decisions are always by their nature political, arbitrary, and thus always a source of dispute. For the essence of politics lies in the final decision for Schmitt, then still writing as a fashionable intellectual of the Catholic Centre Party, aiming to save the Weimar state from its own dysfunction: his remorseless logic had not yet driven him to embrace the disastrous political form which gives his reputation its current frisson. Schmitt’s fundamental insight is more applicable to the Musk case than we may at first think: for now Musk has found himself mired in the ad hoc policing of speech on the site, whether through Twitter polls, or his own arbitrary decisions. 
More from this seriesMusk will never tame TwitterBy David Auerbach
For Schmitt, this is all as it should be: the arbitrariness is the point, as the sovereign reveals himself as such through “a pure decision not based on reason and discussion and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothingness”. For at times of crisis, unresolvable in terms of ordinary politics, comes the state of exception in which sovereign power unveils itself, cutting the Gordian knot of political deadlock: “at times it does so as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution; at other times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws”.
This tension reveals itself at its most political in the edge cases, the debatable borderlands where what is lawful may outrun what is good for the community. Again, this aligns with Schmitt’s insight: his opening line from Political Theology, that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” is immediately followed by the observation that, “only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept,” indeed, this very “definition of sovereignty must … be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.” That is, only those cases where the course of action is contested are by their nature political: and only through the final act of decision, one way or another, does the political sovereign reveal himself.
On Twitter, the edge cases are those, like Trump’s presence, on which the preservation of America’s political order have been stated to depend, and on the content most widely considered objectionable by society as a whole: jihadist and extreme Right-wing invocations to terrorist violence, and child exploitation content. Back in an earlier iteration of the platform, before the political community reached a consensus that groups such as Islamic State should not be allowed to openly congregate on social media, Twitter became one of the prime vectors of jihadist propaganda, recruitment and social interaction. It was interesting, even amusing at first, to engage in back and forth debates and snarky banter with Islamic State fighters on Twitter; then it became horrifying and unbearable as the group hurtled further into its darkness. From being a reporter whose career was largely based on the juxtaposition of monitoring Isis content on social media, while reporting the battle on the ground against their physical manifestation in Syria and Iraq, I eventually had to stop following Isis content at all: the constant blurring of the virtual and the real, between London and the Middle East, became too jarring. But is it true, as has recently been claimed, that Musk’s commitment to free speech will lead to a terrorist revival on the platform?
Experts are undecided. Moustafa Ayad, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank monitoring jihadist use of the platform, told me that on Twitter, “the rate of Islamic State accounts being set up or used to spread propaganda has increased over the past two months under new management”, perhaps due to lax moderation as “most moderation teams have been gutted (despite public statements to the contrary) of the context and subject matter expertise required to effectively go after terror-supporting accounts.” Yet Twitter remains a site of negligible activity for the group, compared with other apps such as Telegram where discourse is far less tightly monitored (at least overtly). On Twitter, supporters of Islamic State evade banning through avoiding open encitements to terrorist violence. As Ayad notes, “They primarily stay away from posting violent content to inhabit ‘legal grey areas,’ but they continue to post branded terrorist content and share legacy material, old videos, sermons and series. They will similarly use the phrase ‘IS,’ as a means to reference the Islamic State and still argue that they were referring to the concept of an Islamic state and not the group.” It is illegal to advocate for the Islamic State, after all, but not for an Islamic state: a distinction of which Anjem Choudary finally fell foul when forced by events to upgrade his fealty from the theoretical to the real. 
Laith Alkhouri, CEO of Intelonyx Intelligence Advisory, told me that he has not “not seen an uptick in accounts returning since Musk took the helm”, as groups such as Isis already have secure and thriving networks on far less rigorously policed social media platforms. Like Ayad, Alkhouri notes that the surviving Isis Twitter accounts maintain their presence by avoiding explicit celebration of violence. The accounts he has seen “mostly focus on religious content, abstain from posting images/videos or Isis branded content, and refrain from mentioning Isis as a group. I think these evasion techniques help keep accounts alive.”
Due to the nature of America’s internal political conflict, the policing of Right-wing speech is a more contentious matter than that of jihadist content: jihadist terrorism may kill far more people, but it does not threaten the political order, in the eyes of the political mainstream. Lucas Webber, co-founder and editor of the Militant Wire consultancy, told me that “There is nowhere near the level of terrorism-related content on Twitter compared to the peak IS in Iraq/Syria era of the mid 2010s. However, some extremist elements and ideological armed movements have adapted and manoeuvre around Terms of Service violations.” The Russian extreme-Right Rusich militia, fighting in Ukraine, uses Twitter to “funnel supporters” onto Russian-owned platforms, “and then fundraise from this support base to provide Rusich with weapons, drones, medical supplies, and more – things that have a real-world impact and are used to kill Ukrainians”. As Webber notes, “elements from the “TerrorGram” movement were quite pleased when Elon Musk took over and expressed their excitement about leveraging the platform to grow their international support network. This could ultimately result in direct acts of violence — for example, the recent Bratislava LGBTQ bar shooter was deeply immersed in this space and posted on Twitter during and after the attack.”
More from this seriesElon Musk must destroy TwitterBy Aris Roussinos
But in Webber’s opinion, “the hysteria from public figures and the mainstream media seems to be largely politically motivated and blown out of proportion. However, the loosening of restrictions will inevitably give more space and oxygen to extremist actors to spread their message and promote their cause.” While decision-making on the edge cases of acceptable speech remains largely arbitrary as “Musk has taken a kind of brute force approach and is aggressively forging his vision through trial and error rather than any real coherent terms of service,” Webber believes that “this aspect will become more institutionalised and stable over time, and this is where it could either revert to type, or settle on set and consistently enforced rules that provide more freedom for political dissidents, conservatives, Right wingers etc to express their opinions”.  Yet it is here, in the debatable lands between legitimate Right-wing critique of the current order, and assertions of the need to violently overthrow it, that Twitter’s speech policies have been most fraught: where does Trump, now facing criminal charges for “insurrection” fit in, having declared on January 6 a state of exception he did not bother to attend? The broadly liberal political establishment may have overreached in its muzzling of Right-wing discourse, but even here lines will eventually have to be drawn by someone, and the final decisions made will always be by their nature arbitrary.
On the heated question of child exploitation content, similar edge cases will always remain a source of political conflict. Though initially disputed by many, experts now agree that Twitter before Musk’s takeover was markedly lax in taking down child abuse material, with the Internet Watch Foundation claiming in 2019 that the site was responsible for 40% of the illegal content hosted on the public internet. Even here, legal grey areas and ambiguities remain, and will, therefore, remain a source of political conflict as the dividing lines are contested. Like Instagram and TikTok, Twitter remains host to legal but unseemly material derived from underaged social media influencers: the task of distinguishing between what is legal and what is morally acceptable proved such a headache for Tumblr that it ended up banning all glamour content (in the process driving adult pornographic influencers to Twitter en masse). Though vastly more reported — and this can only be because it has become a source of heated political distinction between the two American political factions — just the same case can be made regarding the confluence of children and drag performances now driving the American “groomer” discourse. 
As the tech writer Jon Stokes observes in this excellent recent essay, the politics of sex has become the central dividing line of American political conflict. As Stokes enumerates, “Drag Queen Story Hour, Drag Brunch for kids, Kids putting dollar bills into strippers’ thongs, doing pole dancing with strippers, or some other sex-work-related activity, School books that present sex work to kids as just another kind of work, Pride parades with kink on full display and kids present and even participating, Drag kids, Child beauty pageants, Evangelical purity balls, Gay conversion therapy, Porn use by teens” have superseded race as the central battlegrounds on which America’s two political factions contest social media. Sharply divided by the politics of sex in general, the conflict between liberals and conservatives is most heated precisely where the stakes are highest — in the protection of children — and where the boundary between what is legal and what is morally acceptable is so contested.  
Further readingPeter Thiel on the dangers of progressBy Mary Harrington
In all of these vexed debates, the central political question is, as Schmitt observed, Who decides? Who decides who may stay on Twitter, and who must be banished from the town square? Who can pluck Kanye West or the former president from their ignominious exile, and thrust them back into silence when they reoffend? It is only Musk, exercising his sovereign power. Where such decisions were once obscure, seemingly nudged behind the scenes by functionaries of the American security state, now they are on display, to be hissed or applauded by the crowd, as if watching an emperor decide the fate of a wounded gladiator. This situation cannot go on for long, but in observing the contours of the present battleground, we are given insight into both Schmitt’s thought and into the contradictory, unresolvable tensions within conservatism between advocating free speech for all that is legal, and opposing that which is harmful 
In his 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations, Schmitt mocked the technological utopians of his day, who, like Twitter’s founders, believed that “technology appeared to be a domain of peace, understanding, and reconciliation,” where “all peoples and nations, all classes and religions, all generations and races appear to be able to agree” because “unlike theological, metaphysical, moral, and even economic questions, which are forever debatable, purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them.” No, warned Schmitt, it is precisely the opposite: “Technology is always only an instrument and weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral.”
As he observes, in a passage that skewers the initial Utopian dreams of Silicon Valley, “If humanitarian-moral progress is still expected by many today from the perfection of technology, it is because technology is magically linked to morality on the somewhat naive assumption that the splendid array of contemporary technology will be used only as intended… and that they themselves will control these frightful weapons and wield this monstrous power.” Yet this is a grave misunderstanding, Schmitt warns: “Technology is no longer neutral ground” but instead, “every strong politics will make use of it” in ways which “will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground”.
It is in the friend-enemy groupings coalescing on social media, particularly on Twitter, that the political battleground deciding our future has been drawn, and it is in the battle for who controls the edge cases of acceptable speech, that the power to make the arbitrary decisions defining political sovereignty resides. It is a marvel of America’s political culture that, at precisely its moment of greatest internal conflict since its civil war, the world’s richest man could buy himself, if not the throne itself, what is likely to be a veto on who next ascends it. Similarly, for all that Schmitt has re-emerged as a source of political inspiration on the Right following his 2000s adoption by the populist Left, it was America’s liberal establishment that revealed themselves the true Schmittians, in their urge to save American democracy from its errant voters. Under their guidance, echoing Schmitt’s definition of crisis as where “a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state” exists, American politics since 2016 has become a permanent state of exception, in which the diminution of sovereign power in the White House was manifest largely through manipulation of social media. 
Like an absent-minded ascetic king, Jack Dorsey accidentally built a site of great, yet unclearly defined political power, certainly greater than many nation-states: when, by threatening Musk with sanctions, we see the European Union try to assert its own sovereignty, power frankly does not seem weighted in Europe’s favour. Whether or not Musk wishes to keep this power is an unresolved question: as he has recently declared, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” It is now too late for us to debate whether or not such power should exist: the fundamental question, for Twitter as for American politics, remains unresolved: who next decides?

Barack Obama did it. Donald Trump did it. Joe Biden, of course, has done it too. But each of them was wrong: Kissing another person’s baby is just not a good idea.That rule of lip, experts told me, should be a top priority during the brisk fall and winter months, when flu, RSV, and other respiratory viruses tend to go hog wild (as they are doing right this very moment). “But actually, this is year-round advice,” says Tina Tan, a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Rain, wind, or shine, outside of an infant’s nuclear family, people should just keep their mouths to themselves. Leave those soft, pillowy cheeks alone!A moratorium on infant smooching might feel like a bit of a downer—even counterintuitive, given how essential it is for infants and caregivers to touch. But kissing isn’t the only way to show affection to a newborn, and the rationale for cutting back on it specifically is one that most can get behind: keeping those same wee bebes safe. An infant’s immune system is still fragile and unlearned; it struggles to identify infectious threats and can’t marshal much of a defense even when it does. Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale, told me she usually advises parents to avoid public places—church, buses, stores—until their baby is about six weeks old, and able to receive their first big round of immunizations. (And even then, shots take a couple of weeks to kick in.)The situation grows far less perilous once kids’ vaccine cards start to get more full; past, say, six months of age or so, they’re in much better shape. But risk remains a spectrum, especially when lips get involved. The mouth, I am sorry to tell you, is a weird and gross place, chock-full of saliva, half-chewed flecks of food, and microbes galore; all that schmutz is apt to drool and dribble onto whatever surfaces we drag our faces across. Flu, RSV, rhinovirus, SARS-CoV-2, and the coronaviruses that lead to common colds are among the many respiratory pathogens that hang out in and around our mouth. Although these viruses don’t usually make adults very sick, they can clobber young, unvaccinated kids, whose airways are still small. Health-care workers are seeing a lot of those illnesses now: Cameron recently treated a two-week-old who’d caught rhinovirus and ended up in the ICU.Also on the list of smoochable threats is herpes simplex 1, the virus responsible for cold sores. “That’s the one I worry about the most,” says Annabelle de St. Maurice, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at UCLA and the mother of a 1-year-old daughter. Most American adults harbor chronic HSV-1 infections in their mouth with no symptoms at all, save for maybe the occasional lesion. But the super-transmissible virus can spread throughout the body of an infant, triggering high fevers and seizures bad enough to require a visit to the hospital. For the first few weeks of a baby’s life, anyone with an active cold sore—blood relative, presidential candidate, or both—would do well to keep away. (Even a history of cold sores might warrant extra caution.)The lip-restraining guidance is most pertinent to people outside an infant’s household, experts told me, which can include extended family. Ideally, even grandparents “should not be kissing on the baby for at least the first few months,” Tan told me. Within a home, siblings attending day care and school—where it’s easy to pick up germs—might also want to sheathe their smackeroos at first. Years ago, Cameron’s own son had to be admitted to the hospital with RSV when he was six weeks old after catching the virus from his 4-year-old sister. Lakshmi Ganapathi, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me that she didn’t kiss her own two sons on the face before they hit the six-week mark—though experts told me that they don’t expect most parents to get this puritanical about puckering up.[Read: The worst pediatric-care crisis in decades]Baby-kissing—especially outside families and tight-knit social circles—isn’t a universal impulse: A few of my friends were rather shocked to hear that such a PSA was even necessary. But people’s threshold for instigating a loving lunge is far lower when it comes to babies than to older kids or adults. One colleague told me that strangers have reached into his daughter’s stroller to stroke her hair; another mentioned that randos have swooped in to tickle his son’s feet. When de St. Maurice takes strolls around her neighborhood with her daughter, she’s surprised by how often casual acquaintances will try to dive-bomb her baby with pursed lips.Then again, there is perhaps no lure more powerful than a tiny human. Babies snare us visually, with their wide eyes, round cheeks, and button noses; their scent wafts toward us like the heady perfume of a fresh cream scone. (One colleague with kids told me that inhaling that particular odor was, for him, “like huffing glue.”) Among primates, human infants are born especially vulnerable, in desperate need of help, and so we go into overdrive providing it, even to others’ babies, who—at least in our social species—might benefit from communal care. “It’s programmed into us,” Oriana Aragón, a social psychologist at the University of Cincinnati, told me. “I’m able to get really strong reactions out of people with just a photograph.” Even the urge to plant a wet one on someone else’s baby may have adaptive roots in kiss feeding, the practice of delivering pre-chewed meals to an infant lip to lip, says Shelly Volsche, an anthropologist at Boise State University. Kiss-feeding isn’t very popular in the United States today, but it’s still practiced by many groups around the globe.[Read: Pregnancy is a war; birth is a cease-fire]But as important as these acts are for babies, they can also be at odds with an infant’s health when a bunch of respiratory viruses are swirling about. Those costs aren’t always top of mind when a stranger locks eyes with a tiny human across the way, and it can be “a really awkward conversation,” de St. Maurice told me, to deter someone who just wants to shower affection on your child. Cameron recommends being frank: “I’m just trying to protect my baby.” Physical deterrents can help, too. “Put them in the stroller, put the canopy up, buckle the baby in, make it as difficult as possible,” she said. That’s a lot of barriers for even the most dedicated baby kissers to surmount. De St. Maurice also likes to point out that her little infant, as adorable as she is, “could also potentially transmit something to you.” Plus, by the time they’re six months old, babies may be experiencing their first whiffs of stranger danger and react negatively to unfamiliar hands and mouths. “That’s not particularly good for the baby, and the stranger wouldn’t get anything out of it either,” says Ann Bigelow, a developmental psychologist at St. Francis Xavier University, in Canada.Again, this advice isn’t meant to starve infants of tactile stimulation. Kids need to be exposed to the outside world and all of its good-germiness. More than that, they need a lot of physical touch. “The skin is our largest sense organ,” Bigelow told me. Skin-to-skin contact stimulates the release of oxytocin, and cements the bond between a caregiver and an infant. Kissing doesn’t have to be the means for giving that affection, though it certainly can be. “Heck, when I’m a grandparent, I’m going to be kissing my grandchild,” Cameron told me. “Just try and stop me.”

The Russians have initiated a concentrated air attack on Ukraine focused on the use of drones. The target is civilian and industrial infrastructure, primarily electrical and related systems. The intent of the attack is to undermine survivability in cities by limiting the transport of food, heating and so on, in order to compel the Ukrainians to surrender or to so weaken their defenses that a ground attack can successfully penetrate and seize territory. Failing that, the attack can also have a psychological dimension, inflicting significant civilian casualties, creating intense hardship and causing individual cities or even the country as a whole to surrender. It’s intended to be a lower-cost and more efficient strategy than the use of massed infantry.

The problem with this strategy, however, is that it has been tried before and consistently failed. The Germans sought to force British capitulation through the concentrated bombing of London early in World War II. The damage and casualties were substantial, but the British did not surrender. Later in the war, the Americans and the British launched combined air attacks intended to break civilian morale and destroy German infrastructure. They failed. Indeed, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the war showed that German production actually rose during and after air assaults.

In Vietnam, the United States conducted air campaigns designed to damage North Vietnam’s industrial strength. Toward the end, Hanoi was attacked by devastating

B-52 assaults, which were less precise with far more civilian casualties. North Vietnam did not capitulate.

Each of these attacks was carried out by trained and motivated pilots in excellent (for that time) aircraft. The reasons for the failures had some consistency. Attacks on cities focused on the use of aircraft, making them vulnerable to air defenses. Intelligence on the location of factories and other infrastructure was imprecise, and therefore air attacks failed to hit their targets. Aircraft and munitions were periodically unavailable, which gave the enemy some breathing room. Perhaps most important, the attacks bred a spirit of resistance among the population, which meant that the causalities caused by effective attacks reduced the pressure on the government to capitulate. The population calculated that ruthless air attacks would mean a more ruthless peace. Some have even said that the Blitz saved Churchill. All of this is against the recuperative power of the enemy. Damage can be repaired, and total destruction from the air is difficult.

Concentrated air attacks were infrequently used against ground forces. The planes that were deployed were mostly fighter aircraft, which could practice more precision. This made necessary the dispersal of ground forces, which made carpet bombing only marginally effective and attack aircraft vulnerable to ground fire.

Russia’s air assault on Ukrainian infrastructure and urban concentrations has one advantage over prior attacks: Drones have a degree of precision. The problem, however, is that their identification of targets relies on intelligence, which can become obsolete in the course of a flight. Moreover, intelligence is collected in an urban environment with a great deal of clutter. And in the current technological environment, drones are more likely to be shot down than aircraft in prior wars.

The most important point is that airpower, under the best circumstances, cannot take and hold ground. Ground forces must be deployed to do that. Drones can support ground campaigns, as airpower did in WWII and Vietnam, but the gap between intelligence and action makes support for ground attacks more difficult.

The Russians are therefore depending on a follow-up ground assault, combining artillery and infantry and confronting the same. The problem is that infantry can be widely dispersed and dug in, as it is today. Urban fighting against an enemy familiar with the ground conditions is challenging. The chances that airpower can ease this problem are as slim as they were in WWII or Vietnam. Ground forces will have to go in, and a good deal of the defending force will not have been knocked out by the air attack. They will be in the classic situation of infantry on the attack: facing counterfire from a well-dug-in enemy. It can be done, but I would argue that the newly trained Russian infantry will not be a match for the bloodied Ukrainian forces. Air power, save for nuclear, is a necessary but insufficient dimension of war.

I’m not sure I have the energy to sustain an argument over the course of an entire essay, so perhaps it’s best for me not to try. It’s also a difficult burden to carry, to always have opinions on whatever happens to be happening at any given moment. There’s also a question of intensity. To express a preference publicly requires effort, and that effort means that you have to want it. So the opinions that are expressed publicly, say on Twitter, are self-selecting. They are the ones that meet some basic minimal threshold of effort. Most of our effortless opinions, on the other hand, are lost to history. This is why I almost never write about climate. I have opinions about climate, and they’re admittedly controversial, but I have no real reason to tell you about them. I simply don’t care enough, and that’s probably for the best. Is it wicked not to care? No, I don’t think it is. I suppose that if I really had to, I could come up with an opinion on pretty much anything, but I’m not sure that’s any way to live. People who run for office actually need to “create” opinions out of thin air. If blessed with enough resources, they can hire staff to come up with opinions and then review and approve those opinions by consulting their gut. It’s really a question, in the end, of how elected officials wish to prioritize their limited attention.  You could always tell, for instance, that John McCain’s heart was in certain things but not in others. He needed to adopt weird further-right positions to win in Arizona, particularly in his latter years, but it always seemed like he was doing this as a means to a greater end. He made a calculation that to have an impact on the things he really cared about, he’d have to also care (or appear to care) about the things he didn’t. What McCain really cared about was the U.S. military budget, democracy promotion, “hawkish” demonstrations of American power, the elevation of moral considerations in the exercise of that power, and the maintenance of American global hegemony. Guns, gay marriage, and deficit spending were secondary. In short, this is why I’m not planning to run for office. But there’s another way to “develop” opinions. That’s  thinking deductively; in other words, to think through your general, first principles and then use those as a scaffolding to reach more specific conclusions. This is one reason I feel more strongly than ever about the Wisdom of Crowds “model.” Our goal is not to persuade you or to “win” arguments. Persuasion, like love or happiness, is a byproduct of other pursuits. It cannot be forced. As I’ve gotten older, and as I look upon “the youth” with an uneasy mix of dismay and panic, it seems to me that their positions are held intensely but shallowly—they seem strong but have no roots in anything real. I feel like the model has been reversed: people, increasingly, adopt positions on specific culture or identity-related topics and then extend outward to more general first premises. They decide what the right positions are on a particular issue and then they adopt whatever worldview accommodates those good or right positions most effectively with as little friction as possible. If you’re in an urban, elite environment, you don’t even really have to decide what positions to take. Deciding suggests a conscious process of careful consideration among competing options. But the “right” opinions often arrive fully-formed, almost as if they are pre-political. They are in the air you breathe and it might not even occur to you that there are alternatives to be considered.  Which is to return to where we began. You can have a strong opinion about not having a strong opinion. You can choose to not allow yourself to be dragged into believing in something you have no real reason to believe in. It helps to think back to what your first premises are, or to figure out what they are if you don’t yet know. I wish I did this more, but I do (sometimes) come under pressure to say something about the climate. The fact of the matter is that I don’t care about the climate, or at least I don’t care enough about it. Some of you will know that my favorite novel is James Salter’s Light Years, and I often think back to a particular passage. The passage, like the book itself, is really one long reflection on the choices we make, creating long paths of regret, and that the paths that we take mean that we cannot take other paths. Godlike, the omniscient narrator reasons:For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox. So that life is a matter of choices, each one final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.In writing this Monday Note, I went back to the source. It’s been a while since I’ve read it and I couldn’t quite remember the full context. It’s beautiful and vaguely sad in a way that much of Salter’s writing is. In the next sentence, the narrator loses his omniscience. The dreamlike reflections become channeled instead through the more specific and limited considerations of the protagonist, a middle-aged father and husband named Viri: We had children, he thought; we can never be childless. We were moderate, we will never know what it is to spill out our lives… I hope I’m never compelled to spill out my own life, either.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.During the holidays, many of us look close to home as we remember the least fortunate among us. But don’t forget that millions of people around the world, including in Ukraine, are living not only with poverty and deprivation but under wartime conditions.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Justice is coming for Donald Trump. 
Boston is losing its snow wicked fast.
The Trump abandonment has begun.
A Violent WinterThis time of year, many of us dip some cash into a bell-ringer’s kettle or donate canned goods. We increase our giving to religious organizations or community associations. The better folks among us commit the most valuable commodity of all—time—to volunteer work. And so we should. (America is a wealthy nation and many of our pets have better health care than millions of human beings here and around the world.)We should take a moment to remember that millions of people will not be wrapping presents or checking with the family to decide what to serve for dinner. Instead, they will be trying to stay alive. For many people around the world, survival is endangered by exposure or hunger or disease. The citizens of Ukraine will struggle with all of these challenges while also enduring a steady rain of Russian missiles whose sole purpose is murder. Ukrainians are going to sleep in shelters worried that they will find their children hungry or cold in the morning, or perhaps even blasted to pieces by criminals acting on the orders of a cowardly dictator.This weekend, The New York Times published a detailed examination of the Russian war against Ukraine. It is a rebuke to every self-described “realist” and harrumphing geostrategist engaged in long chin-pulls about the weight of history, NATO expansion, the culpability of the West, and all of the other overintellectualized excuses for Russia’s campaign of brutality. This war is the product of a small circle of conspirators led by one man who is seized by nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, by the belief that he is the savior of a new Russian Empire, and by the conviction that he is a great historical figure.Paranoid about COVID-19 and bunkered in his palace, Vladimir Putin hatched his plans for an invasion. “Mr. Putin’s isolation,” the Times reported, “deepened his radicalization, people who know him say. He went 16 months without meeting a single Western leader in person.” And the few people allowed into his presence have continuously fed his grandiosity and detachment from reality:
“If everyone around you is telling you for 22 years that you are a super-genius, then you will start to believe that this is who you are,” said Oleg Tinkov, a former Russian banking tycoon who turned against Mr. Putin this year. “Russian businesspeople, Russian officials, the Russian people—they saw a czar in him. He just went nuts.”
Instead of trying to talk Putin out of plunging into disaster, the Russian president’s circle of sycophants decided to indulge him. In the words of the Times report, they “had an incentive to cater to the boss’s rising self-regard—and to magnify the external threats and historical injustices that Mr. Putin saw himself as fighting against.”We know what happened next. Perhaps Putin thought his troops would plant the imperial Russian eagle in Kyiv, maybe even in a ceremony drenched in the strains of the Russian national anthem (whose music Putin nostalgically recycled from the old Soviet national anthem). Instead, years of corruption and lies and decadence created a Russian army that couldn’t sprint a few hundred miles from Russia and Belarus to capture Kyiv, much less subjugate an entire nation of 44 million people spread out over an area larger than France. As the humiliations mounted in the field for Russia’s hapless military, they raped and tortured and murdered civilians. In Moscow, a bewildered and enraged Putin decided on a new strategy: The Ukrainians would be punished for their insolence, broken as a nation, starved and frozen until they begged the new emperor for mercy.The Ukrainians, of course, have not been broken, and they have not surrendered. But the campaign of atrocities continues; over the weekend, Russia launched a barrage at crucial infrastructure in cities across Ukraine, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia. The holidays this year will be marked not only by shortages of power, heat, water, food, and medical care but by the constant fear that every night could end in carnage.Russians who know Putin told the Times that the Kremlin dictator is willing to take untold numbers of casualties rather than abandon this war. (His butcher’s bill, according to Pentagon estimates, has already surpassed 100,000 Russian soldiers killed or wounded.) There will likely be another offensive in the east and perhaps another attempt to take Kyiv itself. There is not much we can do in the short term to alleviate the individual suffering of Ukrainian families, but the West must continue to help Ukraine defend itself. Indeed, it’s possible that this latest missile salvo was in response to America’s decision to send a Patriot anti-missile battery to Ukraine, showing yet again that no one makes a better case for aiding the fight against the Russians than Putin himself.One thing we can all do is remember the Ukrainians, who are celebrating Christmas (and Hanukkah and the coming new year) under the guns and missile batteries of their Slavic “brothers.” We must not forget them. Putin certainly won’t.Related:
How we survived winter in wartime
“I just wanted the whole thing to be over.”
The House January 6 committee held its final public meeting and referred evidence against Donald Trump to the Justice Department for potential criminal prosecution.
An arctic blast will hit parts of the country over the coming week. Christmas temperatures will likely be lower than they’ve been in almost 40 years.
Elon Musk opened a Twitter poll last night asking his followers whether he should step down as CEO of the company (and pledging to adhere to the results). More than 17 million users responded; the majority voted that he should step down.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf compiles readers’ views on how to address the opioid crisis.
The Great Game: In a world that fetishizes youth, Lionel Messi showed why late-career style is often the greatest, Franklin Foer writes.
The Wonder Reader: Why are we awkward? Isabel Fattal explores the science behind our most graceless moments.
(Erik Carter / The Atlantic; Getty)
Like Uber, but for MilitiasBy Antonia Hitchens
One problem with defining extremism in America today is how many people think the U.S. government is what’s extreme. In his 1995 essay “The Militia in Me,” Denis Johnson describes meeting two men campaigning for the 1992 presidential candidate Bo Gritz, a far-right former Special Forces officer. “Both men believed that somebody had shanghaied the United States, that pirates had seized the helm of the ship of state and now steered it toward some completely foreign berth where it could be plundered at leisure.”
This fall, I set out to meet today’s version of such alienated activists, who were looking for solace in a civilian defense group. On a street corner in West Covina, just outside Los Angeles, one of them, Vincent Tsai, told me: “We need to be armed and ready. We need to be our own self-defense.” After being suspended from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for refusing to comply with mask and vaccine mandates, he was running for State Senate in November’s elections. (He didn’t win.)
In Friday-afternoon traffic, wearing yellow shorts, he stood with his 7-year-old son at the intersection of two congested thoroughfares, handing out flyers. His wife, Gigi, who teaches a free weekly exercise class called Patriot Pilates, was with him, collecting signatures on a clipboard for his campaign.
Dear Therapist: How do I hold boundaries with my sister at Christmas?
The internet is Kmart now.
Photos: The year in volcanic activity
(Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic)
Read. These six classic books live up to their reputation.Watch. The coming cold front is a perfect time for comfort movies. Start working your way through our list of the 25 best feel-good films.Play our daily crossword.P.S.We can’t solve all the trouble in the world, but we needn’t feel overwhelmed. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, my father took me aside and showed me that he had joined one of the charities for children, an organization called Christian Children’s Fund at the time. CCF provided a photo and a biography of a particular kid and encouraged the donor to write to their “sponsored” child. My father was a sensible man and knew that his donations went to a large pool, but he liked the idea and told me that it was important for everyone who could do so to take responsibility for just one other person somewhere in the world. He kept a photo of his sponsored child near his desk. I knew my father donated to our church and to local charities, but I’d never seen this side of him.In the mid-1980s, I got my first steady professional job. I, too, sponsored a child, and I have done so now for almost 40 years. CCF, in the early 2000s, joined a network of child-relief charities that all today go by the name ChildFund, and I have now seen at least four children grow to adulthood and leave the program. When my daughter was growing up, we sponsored a child together, and she wrote notes to another child (like her, an Orthodox Christian, but in Ethiopia); we still keep the picture of a sponsored child in our home. It’s a tiny thing, but somehow, I feel less helpless by doing it.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The Biden administration has had a number of impressive legislative achievements this year, like the amusingly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed over the summer, which was the first major bill to seriously confront climate change. In return for West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s vote, the administration promised to pass a follow-on bill that would provide comprehensive reform of the permitting process. This took the form of a proposed Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022.This streamlining is extremely important. Currently, states like Texas and Oklahoma are major producers of alternative energy (just try driving along I-40 through the Texas panhandle and you’ll see mile after mile of wind farms). However, demand for clean electricity is highest in coastal states like California, and there is not enough transmission capacity to move the electricity from one place to the other. If the United States is to meet its ambitious climate goals, it will need to get these and other projects going quickly. The new bill would have accelerated the construction of nearly $700 of new wind and solar projects.A look at how wind energy is being harnessed in TexasNonetheless, the Energy Independence and Security Act failed. It was killed by a coalition of progressive Democrats, who didn’t like the fact that it was promoted by Sen. Manchin and included completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia. But a number of Republicans voted against it as well: they didn’t like the bill’s alleged expansion of the federal government’s power to promote energy projects, and simply wanted to deny the Biden administration another win.There has been a lot of recent attention paid to the National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA, that was passed back in 1970. This bill set the broad framework for assessing environmental impacts of new projects. This framework provides absolutely necessary scrutiny to infrastructure projects that could have major unintended effects on the environment, communities, and the like. It requires reviews of projects depending on their size; the largest have to go through permitting processes that result in Environment Impact Assessments (EIAs). The projects have to go to a large number of federal agencies for comment on how they would affect matters in their domain. These reviews are done serially, and can take years to complete; the final EIAs often run to thousands of pages.The Energy Independence and Security Act would have shortened these procedures by setting a two-year time limit for reviews, designated a lead agency to manage the review, and shortened the statute of limitations under which the project could be sued from two years to 150 days.The Democrats voting against the bill had two primary objections. The first was the explicit inclusion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in the act, and the provisions to facilitate its completion. Despite the positive impacts of faster completion of transmission line projects, they were dead-set against any fast-tracking of fossil fuel projects including natural gas facilities that would replace coal-fired plants.But there was objection as well to the effort to fast-track permitting in the name of community participation. As quoted by Jerusalem Demsas in The Atlantic, one environmental activist argued that “Permitting reform ‘is not speeding up projects as much as taking away the ability for all communities, but especially environmental-justice communities, from self-determination and using the courts as a way to get relief if a project is found to be harmful’.”There is a fundamental issue of democratic theory at play here. The cutting edge of democratic theory for many years has been the idea that participation through formal democratic institutions like elections or the legal system is not enough. There have to be other mechanisms by which citizens can participate in democratic deliberation, through mandated consultations or the ability to comment on proposed legislation. Requirements for consultation go all the way back to the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which mandated a notice-and-comment period following any administrative rule change, that would allow any citizen to respond to the proposal, requiring the agency to take comments into account. Public participation is integral to subsequent statutes like NEPA or the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), about which I’ve written before. The need for active citizen participation underlies other institutions on a state level, like California’s provisions for recalls, referenda, and initiatives that provide alternative avenues for citizen input beyond normal electoral and legal channels.One can argue that active citizen participation is critical to both improving legislation and to getting buy-in for difficult decisions. Dictatorships like China and Russia do not solicit citizen participation. But as my Stanford colleague Bruce Cain has argued in this 2014 book Democracy More or Less, there is a hidden flaw in the assumptions underlying the indefinite expansion of participatory democracy, which is that ordinary people will have the time, willingness, and knowledge to participate meaningfully in a complex decision-making process. The vast majority of people do not, with the result that participatory processes empower activist groups or lobbyists with a direct stake in the decision at hand. These groups do not necessarily represent “the people,” and tend to produce polarized standoffs where, for example, energy industry lobbyists face off against environmental advocates. Thus efforts to increase democratic participation may have the effect of leading to less democratic outcomes.In the case of opposition to the Energy Independence and Security Act, environmental activist groups were not necessarily supporting environmental ends. Building the Mountain Valley Pipeline might add to carbon emissions, but so would not building transmission lines for alternative energy. “Participation” at this level potentially comes at a very high economic and social cost.The failure of this bill tells you a lot about the current state of American democracy. Partisan polarization led a number of conservative Republicans to vote against it, with some members mirror-imaging the Democrats’ fears that local communities in their red districts might be adversely affected. But they also simply didn’t want Joe Biden to notch up another legislative success, or reward Joe Manchin for his support of the IRA.But even without polarization, the bill’s failure indicates how unreformable the American system has become. We have a big collective action problem: society has a large interest in mitigating and adapting to climate change, but cannot find a path to acting on it due to the way that institutions are structured. When a political system with many checks and balances combines with partisan polarization, the results are what I labeled “vetocracy,” and the bottom-line result is inaction on the most pressing issues of the day.

Without the Fallacy of Composition, there would be no macroeconomics, and we would only have microeconomics, or simply economics, or rather political economy, its original more accurate name prevalent in the 19th century.

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(A) Almost everyone has heard about the famous Paradox of Thrift.

It's good for a single person (or a group of people) to save, but private virtue is public vice, so if everyone in the economy saves and un-spends in-sync, the resulting drop in aggregate demand will prop up the unemployment rates and push the economy into a prolonged deflationary recessionary trap.

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(B) The opposite of (A) above is that, if only a single household (or only a small group of households) in the US increases his spending which is financed by the federal government's tax-financed transfer payment (or by borrowing from the private financial market), his real living standard will improve, or he'll suffer less than otherwise, and there's no adverse effect on the economy's general price level or inflation (since there's no new-money-printing increase in the money supply.)

But if most households in the US increase their retaliatory spending almost at the same time, as immediately after the cancellation of the pandemic lockdowns in the country (which is just human nature), when

(i) the federal government's deficit-spending transfer payments to the households are mostly financed by the US Fed's another round of new-money-printing QE,

(ii) many workers don't quickly go back to their original workplaces, for one reason or another,

(iii) the good old domestic and global supply chains are still highly disrupted, and global energy, food, and commodity prices are further bid up by a local war on this planet,

then the result is, with a certain time-lag, both asset-market and real-economy inflations developing and persisting in the country in the coming years.

There will be no improvement in the real living standard for the US households as a whole (except for the temporary positive wealth effect from the rising asset markets, which may not last very long, and may even suddenly reverse), because there's no free lunch, since almost all of them will have to pay back inflation-taxes as a result of the federal government's much increased new-money-printing-financed deficit-spending.

The resulting real-economy inflation requires the Fed to start the ugly job of fighting runaway inflation in the country, which may end up pushing the domestic economy into a recessionary or stagflationary trap, and hurting most other innocent foreign countries as well.

Today’s Fed is no longer our friend.

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(C) If only one US company (or only a small group of US companies) offshores her manufacturing factory to the foreign country, the unemployment rate of the US's blue-collar workers won't be much affected, but if many US companies do so at the same time (caused once again by hard-to-blame human nature), then

(i) the unemployment rate of the country will crop up, especially that of the blue-collar workers,

(ii) many cities will decay and become ghost towns,

(iii) political populism will rise disturbingly in the country,

(iv) the country's current trade account will keep worsening, requiring the federal government to deficit-spend much more than before, and hence to incur more and more debts, to maintain the economy's aggregate demand, to prevent the economy from falling into recessions, and may require inflation-prone debt-monetization by the Fed’s new-money-printing to help balance the budgets.

(v) the country's manufacturing industries, the main foothold of the country's innovative prowess, will be hollowed out persistently.

The ongoing Ukraine War has suddenly turned the US's current trade account into a surplus one, thereby suddenly increasing the aggregate demand in the country and adding further inflationary pressure in the domestic economy at a time when it's least needed, requiring the US Fed to work harder to fight the ongoing runaway domestic inflation.

Today’s rising tide of re-shoring and trade-deglobalization in the US is hurting not only the US’s enemy country like China, but also her traditional ally countries as well.

Also, the US’s recent energy independence, (forced) manufacturing reshoring, and trade-deglobalization are all at odds with her unabated finance-globalization, because less and less US dollars will be pumped out from the US to the rest of the world in the coming decades, thereby worsening the problem of shortage of liquidity in the global shadow banking markets (or in the global Eurodollar markets), and so increasing the chance of the sudden propping-up of a non-trivial credit or liquidity event which will much disturb the normal functioning of the mainly-inward-looking US Fed.

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(D) If only a single retirement-fund manager sells his government treasuries to meet the increased margin calls from his highly-leveraged derivatives products in his fund’s portfolio, the prices of the already falling government treasuries won't be much affected, but if almost all retirement-fund managers do so at the same time, a highly destabilizing credit or liquidity event will be developed, in which more in-sync selling of government treasuries in the market leads to further and quicker drop in the prices of government treasuries, propping up more and more margin calls, forcing the fund managers to sell even more treasuries in the market to meet the new margin calls, and so forming a highly-damaging vicious cycle (especially if the mark-to-market rule is not temporarily suspended), causing a run in the wholesale financial markets, massive resulting bankruptcies, and economic crises.

After the cancellation of the Glass-Steagall Act in the US, the quick development of Universal Banking in the country (today's JPMorgan Chase, acting as the de facto dealer of last resort, looks like another central bank in the US's wholesale financial market) has undermined the country's capital market.

In particular, the country's repo (and derivatives) markets work well only in normal times, but as shown by the retirement-fund example above, at abnormal times, the US Fed will be forced to come to the final rescue, thereby worsening the moral hazard and too-big-to-fail problems.

Such a capital-market structure is therefore built to eventually fail.

The chance may be quite high that today’s US Fed will be forced to prematurely pivot perhaps sometime next year (annus horribilis), to cope with a sudden damaging global liquidity event which crops up either in the US or somewhere in the rest of the world, while the US's inflation genie still resists to go fully back into the bottle.

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My first winter in Boston, the last patches of snow on my street didn’t melt until late June. It was 2015, the year the city broke its all-time record for annual snowfall: 110.3 inches, more than twice the average. Public transportation morphed into a hellscape. Schools racked up so many snow days that some had to extend the academic year. Dogs began to summit snowbanks to break out of fenced-in yards; a homegrown Yeti appeared to help locals shovel. The city eventually ran out of places to dump the piles of snow—prompting then-Mayor Marty Walsh to consider throwing it all into the harbor like so much British tea.It was an epic winter, New England at its picturesque best. And I, a born-and-bred Californian, absolutely hated it. If you’d told me at the time that Boston winters would get only milder as the years wore on, I honestly might have said, “Great.”The problem, of course, is that winters in Boston, and the rest of New England, have gotten decidedly too mild. The northeastern swath of the United States and the ocean waters around it have become two of the world’s fastest-warming places—a trend that’s “most pronounced during winter,” says Alix Contosta, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of New Hampshire. Studies from Contosta and others have shown that, over the past century, climate change has cleaved about three weeks off of snow’s typical tenure in the Northeast. Should that trend continue through the next hundred years, snow may someday cover New England’s landscape for only about six weeks a year, about half the norm of recent decades. In the American Northeast, an iconically winter-loving part of the world, the rapid loss of snow may deliver a particularly harsh blow—and serve as a bellwether for some of climate change’s most visible effects worldwide.Growing frostlessness is hardly just a New England problem. Nowhere is warming faster than the Arctic, where sea ice continues to vanish at alarming rates, imperiling countless creatures that need it to survive. In the American West, typically snowcapped mountains are bare, depriving the drought-prone region of water. And northerly countries such as Iceland have begun to hold funerals for glaciers felled by the planet’s implacable heat.[From the January 1995 issue: In praise of snow]New England, though, is uniquely positioned to lose its frozen flakes. It sits at the nexus of several climate-change-driven forces that are colliding with increasing frequency. The Gulf Stream, a strong ocean current that lifts warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up and east into the North Atlantic, has been weakening under the influence of climate change, leaving toasty tides that should be in Europe instead lingering along America’s East Coast. (That’s also why winters in many parts of Europe are getting more extreme.) The resulting coastal heat curbs the amount of snow that falls and hastens the pace at which flakes on the ground melt. At the same time, hotter oceans leave more moisture in the air—so when it gets cold enough, more snow falls. And the Arctic, as it heats up, is doing a worse job of clinging to its chill, which now frequently dribbles down the sides of the globe like the whites of a cracked egg.The result is that New England sees fewer snowstorms, and many of the ones that do still appear are harsher and more prolific than the historical average. “We’re seeing less of the little nickel-and-dime storms and more of the blockbuster storms,” says Judah Cohen, a Boston-based climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. The winter season has also become wetter and more volatile. More precipitation descends as rain; the season whipsaws between hot and cold, interspersing freak blizzards with bizarre heat waves.As temperatures continue to climb, seasons—once cleanly separated from one another by quirks such as humidity and heat—“are starting to meld into each other,” says Jacqueline Hung, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Winters are beginning later and ending sooner; eventually, “we might start to see a loss of four seasons,” Hung told me.[Read: What’s dangerous about an early spring]That shift has become visible in the span of just decades. Chris Newell, a co-founder of the Akomawt Educational Initiative and a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, recalls the snowy seasons of his childhood in Indian Township, Maine, stretching from December through March. Powder would pile up so high on the side of his house that he could nearly clamber onto his roof. Now “it’s like a different world,” he told me—a change that threatens the identity of his community. Passamaquoddy history is interlaced with the land; the tribe’s very name is an homage to their love for spearing pollock. A warming world isn’t just about the climate, Newell said: “This is going to change our relationship to our own territory.”Many New Englanders still consider frequent flurries a nuisance—something they have to shovel away or kick through. But snow’s seasonal tenure has long supported local livelihoods; its impending sabbatical threatens them. Ski resorts, stripped of their main source of commerce, have turned to synthetic snow or closed down. Loggers, best able to do their work when the ground is frozen or snow-covered, are now struggling to harvest timber without damaging the soil. Rising temperatures year-round may even make maple syrup in some parts of New England harder to collect and less sweet.And it’s not just humans in climate change’s crosshairs. “I don’t think people appreciate everything that snow does for us,” the University of New Hampshire’s Contosta told me. Snow acts as an insulator for fragile soil, swaddling it like a fluffy down coat; its light, shiny surface reflects the sun’s rays so they don’t overtoast the earth. Plants and microbes thrive beneath it. Animals burrow inside of it to evade predators. When snow vanishes from habitats, frost is forced deeper into the soil, causing tree roots to die and rot. Lyme-disease-carrying ticks—normally killed off by winter frost—survive into spring at higher rates, which allows them to latch on to more mammals, such as moose and humans, as temperatures warm. Also worrying is the torrential rainfall replacing snow, which can leach nutrients out of soil and dump them into rivers, starving local forests and fields, says Carol Adair, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Vermont.These changes are happening so quickly that local wildlife can’t keep up. Alexej Sirén, another University of Vermont ecologist, told me that many snowshoe hares, which have evolved over millennia to seasonally camouflage themselves, are now shedding their brown summer coats for white winter ones before snow blankets the ground. During the particularly snowless winter of 2015 to 2016, hunters told Sirén they felt guilty: The hares had just gotten too easy to catch.Snow is woven into the cultural DNA of America’s Northeast as well. New England, so the saying goes, has “nine months of winter and three months of darned poor sledding”; the first photographs of snowflakes were snapped by a farmer in Vermont. And it should surprise exactly no one that The Atlantic—which used to be based in Boston—has published some lengthy odes to nature’s dandruff, including one that is titled, simply, “Snow.”[From the February 1862 issue: Snow]Of course, appreciation for snow was here long before there was a New England at all. Darren Ranco, an anthropologist at the University of Maine and a member of the Penobscot Nation (which won many an early winter battle against English colonizers because it was the only side wearing snowshoes), told me that his people’s notion of seasons is tied to the 13 moons that make up each year. Two of them, takwaskwayí-kisohs (“moon of crusts of ice on the snow”) and asəpáskwačess-kisohs (“moon when ice forms on the margins of lakes”), roughly correspond to March and December, respectively. Now “that doesn’t make as much sense,” Ranco said.In the aftermath of gargantuan nor’easters, climatic trends are easy to forget—a possible risk this coming winter, which Cohen thinks may be snowier than the past two. It’s easy, Adair told me, to slip into the mindset of “Oh, it’s cold, so everything’s fine.” A sturdy storm or two might (like fresh snowfall, perhaps) erase worries about what the rest of the century could bring.But many people need only look into their own past to recognize what has been lost. Contosta fell in love with the snowscapes of New England when she moved to Connecticut in the 1990s. While on a walk in the woods, she saw, for the first time, how crystals cloaked the ground and branches in gleaming veils of pearl. “The woods took on a totally different personality in the snow,” she told me. In the two-plus decades since, Contosta has watched much of that powdery wonderland literally melt away. The winter ground is barer; the trees are nuder. Even her two sons feel ambivalent at best these days about winter. The elder—who is adopted and spent his toddlerhood in Florida—“went berserk” when he moved to New England about 10 years ago. “He ran outside with bare feet in his pajamas and was eating snow off the trees,” Contosta told me. “He thought it was the most amazing thing.” Now, though, the start of the year brings mostly slush.[Read: Why so many people hate winter]On the precipice of my ninth New England winter, I’m still not a total convert. But I’ve been in this area long enough to get nostalgic for the snow I once loathed. I don’t know what the Northeast is without snowy winters. I wonder how I will describe snow to a generation that might only rarely get to see it—how I will explain to children of the future why Norman Rockwell paintings look so white. I don’t regret the horror I felt when I experienced my first big snowstorm. But the next one I’m in, I’ll try to enjoy while I still can.

Congress is on track in the coming week to give final approval to a national military budget for the fiscal year that is expected to reach about $858 billion--or $45 billion more than President Biden had requested and 8 percent more than last year.

All told, more than half of this giant spending budget is going to for-profit companies (such as Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE, and Northrop Grumman) whose stock prices are surging.

This is its highest level of military spending (adjusted for inflation) since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011. It's the second-highest military spending since World War II. It's more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined. It's larger than the military spending of the next 10 largest military powers in the world combined.

Expect it to be even more. Congress is considering an extra $21.7 billion for the Pentagon to resupply materials used in Ukraine.

Don't fall for the myth that this humongous sum is going to our troops. What's spiking is spending on weapons (including a 55 percent jump in Army funding for new missiles and a 47 percent jump for the Navy's weapons purchases).

All told, more than half of this giant spending budget is going to for-profit companies (such as Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, BAE, and Northrop Grumman) whose stock prices are surging. The profits are going into executive pay, shareholder dividends, and stock buybacks.

This is the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned of*--on steroids.

And yet, there's almost no debate. Why?

Most Americans aren't aware of what's happening. And many of those who do know aren't tracking the humongous size of this relative to previous military spending. And no one is hearing any arguments on the other side.

Yes, of course, America has to worry about Putin, China, Iran, and North Korea. But before deciding to spend so much, we might at least expect some, er, discussion.

How on Earth are we supposed to believe we "can't afford" paid family leave, an expanded child tax credit, Medicare for all, or universal pre-K when our politicians are willing to spend $858 billion on the military without batting an eye?

Worse yet: No one knows where all this the money is going.

The Pentagon just failed its annual audit for the fifth year in a row. "I would not say that we flunked," said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did admit that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets.

The U.S. military is the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.

Cost-overruns are legion. The Pentagon's failed F-35 program has exceeded its original budget by $165 billion to date. It's projected to cost more than $1.7 trillion.

"Guns versus butter" is the old story. Now it's extraordinary bloat versus unnecessary misery for American families struggling with a cost-of-livingcrisis exacerbated by inflation.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that most American workers have become poorer over the past year because their real wages haven't kept up with inflation.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

So back to my question: Why no real debate?

Because support for military spending is bipartisan. No lawmaker wants to be portrayed as weak on national defense. Democrats have been jumping onto the military spending bandwagon as fast as Republicans.

Bipartisanship is not always good. In fact, it's a problem when, as now, the lack of political conflict means no news. Absent political conflict, there's no story. Without a story, there's no debate or discussion in the media. Absent any debate in the media, most Americans have no idea what's happening.

We're sleepwalking through history.

*Eisenhower's words from April 16,1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American dissident, poet, and writer. Her latest book is A Beginner's Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Roya Hakakian discuss what makes this year's revolt different from previous protest movements; the meaning of the popular protest slogan “Woman, Life, Liberty;” and what ordinary people and their governments can do to support the people of Iran.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: We've seen protests against Iran’s theocratic regime repeatedly since it took power in 1979. Do you think that there is more reason to hope for a fundamental challenge to the regime now than there has been in the past? What is special about this moment? Roya Hakakian: I think this is fundamentally different. There have been many, many demonstrations in Iran since 1979. There have been a few important peaks. The most significant one came in 2009, with what we came to know as the Green Movement. It was a reaction to the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. People had voted for his rival, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was himself a product of Islamic Republic thinking and infrastructure. He had, in fact, been the prime minister of Iran before. He was running this time in 2009 as a reform candidate, and a lot of the youth in Iran had invested in him, and were excited about the possibility of him becoming the president. And then, suddenly, the elections didn't go the way that the public had thought, and for many reasons, everyone believes that it was rigged. In the aftermath, people took to the streets in great numbers, and the slogan at the time was, “Where's my vote?”To me, “Where’s my vote?” implies that the protesters are in conversation with the system, with the regime; they believe that if they make a reasonable demand, civilly and politely, they will get a response, because to them, the regime still has legitimacy; that if they do all the right things, which at the time meant taking to the streets, expressing dissatisfaction with the situation, asking for a recount or whatever, then they will get from that regime what they deserve. That didn't happen. In fact, the opposite happened. There was a great deal of violence. Iranian activists and civil society intellectuals who took to the streets were jettisoned out of the country. Mounk: I guess you're implying that, at the time, this was an important and inspiring protest movement, but it actually was accommodationist in a certain kind of way. It was obviously a political challenge—but you're saying that it didn't mean to subvert the basic foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the nature of the protest today is a lot less accommodationist and constitutes a more fundamental challenge to the founding principles of the theocratic regime than the Green Movement did in 2009.Hakakian: Precisely. 2009 was the moment when the nation said, “Okay, we started a reform movement with the rise of [President Mohammed] Khatami in 1997. Over a decade later, we have given the reform movement a shot.” When that didn't work, when somebody as within-the-regime as Mousavi couldn't achieve presidential office, that was the end of the reform movement. They did everything they possibly could through electoral participation, through campaigning, through all the means available to them, to get this guy to become president, and they couldn't. This time around, the conversation with the regime has ended. These protesters are not making demands from within the system. The only thing they're saying is, “The dictator must fall.” That’s it. And that’s what, in my view, makes it a revolutionary moment, whether it succeeds or not. They're making demands that the regime cannot meet; nor can the regime send these protesters home and quell the uprising.I think it qualifies as a revolutionary moment, and with that, an end to the conversation with the system. By calling for death to the current Supreme Leader, and death to the founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, who established this new system in 1979—this tells us that the people are fundamentally done with a non-secular system.Mounk: When I see protest movements in dictatorships, I'm always a little bit torn. I wish them the best of luck. I identify with them from a distance, insofar as that's appropriate. I have the biggest admiration for people who are risking their lives in the street for their ideals. But of course, it's also tempting to think that it's not going to work out in the end, and that a lot of people will be arrested and killed without having achieved the goal they are fighting for. I must admit that I've been struck by how long these protests have now been going on, and how broad the support for them has been among professions like teachers, for example. What is it that has allowed these protests to persist for such a long time? Why is it that the Iranian regime has not used all of the force at its disposal to crush these protests completely? What explains that longevity and that deeper support?Hakakian: I just want to offer a qualification. I don't think the regime has prevented itself from using violence. What's happening is that the protesters have not provided the opportunity in big cities, especially Tehran, for the regime to attack them in the way that it did in 2009. Part of the reason why we don't see a “Million Man March” is because if everybody takes to the streets, then the regime will bite the bullet, and they'll bring out the tanks and the big guns and attack them wholesale, as they've done before. Smaller protests have guaranteed their endurance. Mounk: It’s kind of a tactical innovation to say “we're going to spread all over, and we're only ever going to assemble in relatively small numbers, because that makes it harder for the regime to attack us.” That's interesting, and in some ways, counterintuitive.Hakakian: Absolutely. I think it's very uplifting to know that they are learning all the proper lessons. But in places where the regime has been able to deploy violence against large crowds, they have. They've done so in Baluchestan. They've done so in Kurdistan. When there has been the opportunity for them to actually go into a city knowing that the city itself is against them (and by the way, those are border cities that are far away from the center, and there are fewer cameras and less coverage) then they have been entirely brutal.And, by the way, we're setting aside all the abuse and torture and all the other things that they are doing to the 16,000-plus people they've arrested. So we're leaving all those out.Mounk: To be clear, I'm not crediting the regime with any kind of moral scruples. But as a political scientist, I'm interested in understanding how strong the regime’s cards are, or how strong the regime seems to think its cards are. If the regime is saying that in these peripheral cities, they can crush protests in a really openly violent way, but that in much of Iran, they can't risk doing that—that makes me think they're worried about what would happen if they tried; whether some of their troops might defect, whether it would cause even broader mass mobilization in response. And those are the kinds of moments when regimes fall. What you're saying makes me think that their cards may be weak, or at least that the regime feels constrained in various ways, and that might—might—open up the possibility for a kind of split between hardliners and softliners; between people who are loyal to the regime, and people who say “Hang on a second, perhaps we're not willing to use that much violence in order to protect the current social order.”Hakakian: I think that's one possibility, certainly. They don't want more bad publicity than they've already got. But I think the other possibility is that they may very well have trouble recruiting from their own ranks to carry out large-scale violence in major cities. There are reports of sheer exhaustion on the part of the riot police and other military personnel. There are also rifts within the military apparatus. It's been reported that they have arrested somewhere close to 115 military personnel who were sympathetic to the protesters. So there is also the consideration of how much they can do without creating a riot within their own ranks. But going back to the earlier point about why the protests are enduring. Some of it is captured in the fundamental slogan that defines this movement, which is “Woman, Life, Liberty.” In some ways, this idea is parallel to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I think there is a recognition that life itself really has no ability to thrive under the circumstances in Iran today; that the youth have no sense of their future. I think this sense of futurelessness is a huge motivation. And the second thing you hear is, “We're not leaving this country. We are here to overthrow you.” I think there's a recognition that if every generation keeps going outside of Iran, going into exile, then who's going to remain here to change this system? And I think there's a real devotion to the idea of sticking it out, in order to bring about major change. Mounk: One of the strange ironies about Iran over the last half century is that very quickly after 1979, you had the consolidation of power of this deeply theocratic regime. It was trying to use all of the levers of the state to indoctrinate people to be deeply devout, from the elementary and secondary school systems to the university system, to television and public media to, of course, laws like the mandatory hijab. And yet, in what I think is a kind of amazing testament to the human striving for liberty, the actual changes in society seem to have, at least in some respects, run counter to those intentions. I believe a majority of students in higher education are young women, rather than men. According to some recent polls, I've seen over 70% of people in Iran disagree with compulsory hijab law. There's been a real secularization in Iranian society, so that only about 30% of Iranians now say that they pray five times a day. Over half of the Iranian population openly say that they want to live in a secular state. Tell us a little bit about the nature and the shape of Iran's society today. Help us understand the amazing contrast between a regime that for 50 years has used all of its resources to entrench religion, and a society that has actually secularized to a remarkable extent.Hakakian: I just want to add one qualification. It's true that the overwhelming majority of students in higher education are women. But that is not happening because of the regime. It's happening despite the regime. Women decided that, since they can't actually enter the job market after they graduate, they should do everything else in order to become the citizens that they're not allowed to become. You'd be surprised how many people often use those very statistics to say, “You misunderstand the regime there. They're doing these things!” The regime has all the garb, all the disguises of religious leadership. But I oftentimes refer to them as “Tony Sopranos in turbans and robes.” The Sopranos have taken over Iran. It's really an economic mafia more than anything else. And the way the disguise works is that it makes everybody else, especially the West, think that these are Muslims—“out of respect for their religion, and their tradition, we need to stay out, because we don't understand who they are, what they do.” So, they've managed to keep up a good game, because they look and they dress as they do. They do embrace, at least overtly, this mantle of religiosity. But when you peel back the disguise—as fortunately, social media has given people the opportunity to do—you see them going to Europe, for instance, and their wives and daughters are without the hijab. They have failed to live up to the standards that they have set for religiosity, for piety. Social media has revealed this duplicity. We should also not discount the fact that when Ayatollah Khomeini gave his first speech, arriving in Tehran in 1979, he was promising equality, he was promising that since they had gotten rid of a bad monarch, who had created all these poor, impoverished classes in the country, he was going to do the reverse; there was going to be economic equality. And people heard all sorts of things, including that the prisons were going to become museums and that sort of thing. What has happened is that now we have a caste of religious oligarchs in Iran, who are there to reap the benefits of being in high positions, while their children and their families live in Canada, North America, and Europe. All of this has deeply undermined the belief that this is the regime that they voted for in 1979. This has generated huge distrust not just in the regime; it has generated disaffection with Islam in general, which explains the proclivities for secularity in Iran today. But I think there is a class that remains conservative, that remains observant, that still supports the current movement. And I think that's because they recognize that if there's any hope for Islam to survive, they have to make sure that they get past this regime, which they view as just a bad mark on the faith.Mounk: Italy is a country that is deeply shaped by Catholicism, but precisely for that reason, it's also a country where I know some of the most outspoken anti-clericalists. Because if you're growing up in a country in which the church holds so much power, your resistance to that power and your disdain for it is going to be even more intense if you reject it. Obviously, there's a big difference between the role Catholicism plays in Italy and the role that Islam plays in Iran today. But it seems that something like that has happened in Iran. 50 years ago, even people who perhaps were not that devout or somewhat skeptical of Khomeini had goodwill towards his ideas. And now, after 50 years of theocratic rule, people have become more outspokenly anti-clerical, or have become more resolute in their rejection of any kind of religious influence in society. That's what I'm piecing together from this conversation. But is that a fair way of characterizing the contrast between what Iranian society was like 50 years ago, and what it is like now? How would you characterize that contrast?Hakakian: There are two key ideas here. One is this: now that we look back in retrospect, the most important difference between the anti-regime segment of society today, and the anti-regime segment of society in 1978 and 1979, is that the previous one was ideologically motivated, and this one isn’t; which, in some ways, speaks to the far more democratic nature of the current movement, as opposed to the previous one. The two driving forces of the 1978 and 1979 movement were religious conservatives led primarily by Khomeini on the right, and then a medley of leftist, communist, socialist and Islamic communists on the other side. These two forces were in a constant state of competition—for power, for legitimacy, for recognition. And at some point, the decision came (I think it was an organic and natural process): “let Khomeini overthrow the Shah, and we can sort out who should be in power later.” But the reality is that you had to choose between the right and a very communist left, and there was really nothing much in between. In fact, if there was something in between, it was the women who were, even in 1979, demanding democratic and civil liberties. I think that's what has kept women in the position of leadership in the current movement, because they have this history of demanding their democratic rights.In February 1979, women took to the streets in major cities, especially in Tehran, saying that they were not going to accept the hijab, the mandatory dress code. And this is two, three weeks after Khomeini returned. He is now either the most beloved or the most feared figure in the country. Even at that moment, it is the women who dare take to the streets, who dare to say, “We didn't participate in a revolution in order to go backwards.” The difference now is that there is no left and right. What has brought people together is the desire for the secular, democratic ideals that every democratic revolution in the world has known of, and which, in some ways, the Founding Fathers of the United States best captured in their writings from the late 1770s. Those sentiments are very well captured in the song “Baraye,” which became very famous: “We are out on the streets. We want this movement for our women, our sisters, our mothers, to be free to dress as they wish.” When you look closely, you realize that this time, there is no ideology. It's just the fundamental desire to live what people call a “normal life.” That's why I put so much more faith in this movement than I ever have in any previous movement.Mounk: Who supports the regime and who opposes it today? What determines whether somebody in Iran today is sympathetic to the opposition, to the protests, or whether they are sympathetic to the regime even at this late stage?Hakakian: It's very hard to know this accurately, because there is no polling in Iran. There's no access to public opinion. But what’s clear is that even really conservative people, who continue to be practicing Muslims, and who desire to remain so, believe that they don't want to be represented by this regime; that somehow this regime has corrupted the piety and spirituality that Islam represents for them. And I think they recognize that there is a certain degree of corruption, which mars and stains the notion that these are the representatives of God on earth. There have been so many water shortages and other economic issues that, especially in the past five or ten years, some of the people who have taken to the streets have been from the rural areas, the places we had never seen uprisings in. The lack of water, the lack of other fundamental infrastructure, has driven them to the streets. So, as far as anti-regime sentiment in Iran is concerned, you just need to look at where these protests have taken place, in order to see that this isn't what we have seen before. For instance, in Khomeyn, which is the birthplace of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, protesters set Khomeini's childhood home on fire. You have to recognize that these were sacred spaces, that people went to them as pilgrims to worship. There have also been protests in the city of Qom, which is basically the Shi’ite capital of the world. These are all seminaries. You don't go to Qom unless you are a committed Muslim who wants to study Shi’ism. There have been protests there. There have been protests in Mashhad, which is another hugely conservative city. Another important indicator is that for the past several weeks, people were saying there's no way the bazaars—basically the major marketplaces and businesses of Iran—would join. Well, what do you know? In the past two weeks, the bazaars also joined, and for at least a couple of days, the majority of the shops in all bazaars throughout the country were shut down. And what did the regime do? They took red paint, and whatever business was shut down, they marked. “We're watching you. We're seeing you.” So, just by doing a reconnaissance of the geography of the protests, you can see that this time around, protests are happening in places where they haven’t happened before.Mounk: Let me shift a little bit to the reaction from around the world. An acquaintance of mine asked me early on during the protests a question which I tried to answer as best I could, but I didn't feel like I could entirely give justice to. The question was: Why don't people seem to care? Why, in the United States and Europe, in so many countries around the world, isn't this amazingly brave and big protest movement attracting as much attention, admiration, and support as it should?Hakakian: Well, we can get negative and say people are apathetic. But that's not what I want to do. We need to recognize that when we talk about “sanctions,” for example, we're not just talking about something that happened to Iranians inside Iran—we're talking about a firewall that was created in the West. True, in terms of the intellectual engagement on the part of the Western intelligentsia, it appeared that Iran was too distant, too exotic, and too unknown, or too difficult to be explored and known, because, again, of the Shi’ite religious disguise. For many, many years, we have been very daunted at the notion of even broaching Iran as a subject.I think we have been reluctant to challenge some of the notions that the regime has been peddling. There are Western intellectuals who are still diehard followers of the idea of reform. Another notion is that if you lift the sanctions, Iranians won't be on the streets. That if the US hadn't pulled out of the JCPOA, the protesters wouldn't be on the streets. That so much of what we're seeing is simply an expression of economic difficulties, or the US meddling (or un-meddling) in Iran. These are all opinions that somehow have filtered through to us—partially, I think, by misguided academics, but partially also by the regime itself. I think that the regime played a very good game of “good cop, bad cop” on us for over 20 years. We need to realize all the wrong ways that we thought about Iran. If we are going to protect and strengthen democracy in America, we need to care about democracy elsewhere in the world.Mounk: What should governments in the United States and the European Union do in order to help preserve that hope for freedom in Iran? And what can ordinary people, listeners to this podcast, do to give concrete form to the solidarity that I'm sure they feel?Hakakian: Well, during the Iran hostage crisis, people in America were really concerned. They were tying yellow ribbons around trees and wearing them on their lapels, just to make sure that everybody remembered the hostages. Well, the protesters today deserve that sort of attention. We need to recognize that the health of democracy in our country depends on the health of democracy in other parts of the world. We have to understand that Iranians are rising up on behalf of democracy for all of us. Therefore, let's hang flags, let's tie a ribbon—but let's make sure that the Iran protests become part of the fabric of our consciousness, in the same way that Ukraine currently is. And I do, by the way, see these two events as very much interconnected, and not just morally. Khameini and Vladimir Putin are each other's supporter at the moment. There's a slew of recommendations that various think tanks in this country have made. For example, let's make sure that Iranians have access to the internet. We, as Americans, should provide it to them. People already have possible access to Starlink—but they need the reception stations. That's one huge step. Also, the Supreme Leader isn't on the list of persona non grata, and hasn't been sanctioned yet. Iran is aiding Russia, providing Russia with drones. That really changes the calculation. Iran is participating in an illegitimate war. I think that gives us possibilities for enforcing international law, and applying other pressure on Iran.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Updated at 9:00 p.m. ET on December 16, 2022For the past few days, Elon Musk has been throwing a gigantic temper tantrum on his platform, Twitter. It is not usually a matter of public interest when a narcissist like Musk goes haywire, but just as Donald Trump’s anger warped our public life, Musk’s conniptions could affect our culture and how we get information.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
We are not prepared for the coming surge of babies.
No one wants your cold.
Helen Lewis on the cringeworthy end of Netflix’s Harry & Meghan
CalvinballA lot of serious things are happening in the world: economic uncertainty, war, a pandemic. What’s happening on Twitter isn’t even close to those issues in importance or impact. But the continued reign of Elon Musk as Twitter’s chief jerk could, in fact, affect your life, in ways you might not realize. But first, let’s review the events of the past 24 hours or so. If you haven’t been on Twitter, you’ve been missing something like the tech version of Desperate Housewives, but it’s important to understand the claims Musk is making and why major news outlets are pushing back on them.This entire drama is probably rooted somewhere in Musk’s privileged youth or his bloated psyche, but the immediate spur to this most recent mini-drama was that Musk does not like people knowing the location of his private jet. Jack Sweeney is a college student who used public data to track the location of Musk’s jet and many others, including some owned by Russian oligarchs. He then posted this information on Twitter through a variety of different accounts—all now suspended—including one dedicated to Musk, @ElonJet. Musk disliked this so much that almost a year ago, he offered Sweeney $5,000 to stop doing it.Sweeney declined. Musk took ownership of Twitter in late October and, in a flurry of Calvinball rule changes, declared this week that revealing the whereabouts of his jet was the same as doxxing (that is, publishing personal data about private citizens), decreed this a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, and banned the account.Musk claims that a stalker used the location of his jet to attack a car that his son was in. He has not presented any evidence that this event happened or, it seems, filed any police reports. And in a karmic plot twist, the founder of the investigative journalism site Bellingcat tweeted that his team ascertained that the event did not take place near an airport. But Musk used this story to go after yet more accounts. None were sharing the real-time location of his jet, but some were reporting on the ban of @ElonJet and the Musk Twitter tantrum that went with it.Within hours, the account bans had piled up. Musk took out the independent journalist Aaron Rupar, a regular thorn in his paw. He banned Donie O’Sullivan of CNN. He scragged the accounts of Drew Harwell at The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, and Ryan Mac of The New York Times. As the night wore on, he vanished Keith Olbermann—sure, he’s annoying, but still—and Matt Binder of Mashable. And just for good measure, when Steve Herman of that notoriously left-wing organization known as Voice of America merely affirmed the news that Musk was banning his critics, the Chief Twit zotzed that account too.The usual Twitter tempête de merde ensued. Twitter’s liberals swore that this was the last straw and that they were all decamping to alternatives, usually the Mastodon social network. This really got Musk’s oddly shaped dander up, because, as it turns out, Sweeney was over on Mastodon doing his usual flight tracking—and so Musk seemingly went through another round of sweaty, angry panic, in which Twitter declared references to Mastodon to be “unsafe,” eventually blocking links to Mastodon itself in the name of safety and virtue and all that is holy and good—which is also convenient, because Mastodon is one of Twitter’s few competitors.Musk’s petty outbursts make you wonder how dangerous it would be if a narcissistic, self-interested, vindictive adolescent ever gained a major political office such as, say, the White House. But I digress.Now, unless you’re Very Online—and I am, for both personal and professional reasons—none of this matters very much at the moment. But Musk’s weird rampage does have an impact on the way the world around you exchanges information. Twitter has many levels; for some people, it’s a place to talk about oddball hobbies and exchange pet pictures. (Have you met my cat?) But it’s also an extremely valuable conduit for news, information, culture, and argument. Twitter doesn’t control the news, but it helps to shape public debate about many issues. Indeed, Musk’s entire public rationale for taking over Twitter was to preserve an important venue for free speech.Musk’s defense of free speech is nonsense. One of the world’s richest men—who is not shy about his politics or his contempt for the free press—has reinstated Donald Trump, white supremacists, and any number of dangerous malefactors to Twitter, but he has made it clear that Donie O’Sullivan is beyond the pale. He has purchased an important and influential piece of the public square not to enhance public debate, but to punish people who annoy him. As if to underscore this point, Musk joined a Twitter Spaces live audio chat with journalists who asked him to explain what he was doing. He abruptly left the meeting—and then Twitter Spaces itself was shut down. (This was, he tweeted, to fix a “Legacy bug.” He announced on Friday evening that Spaces had been restored.)I actually don’t subscribe to some of the more nefarious theories about Musk’s motivations (nor will I share them). I think he lost his cool because for more than a month, he’s been in way over his head with an impulsive purchase, his fortunes are plunging, and he got booed by a crowd of thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle performance—which, for a guy like Musk, is probably an unforgivable injury from what should be an adoring public.But we can at least shelve all of Musk’s blather about free speech. Twitter is an important part of how we disseminate and process news, and it’s now in the hands of an irritable and unpredictable child. This is one more step in the infantilization of American life, in which we must accommodate and work around the behavior of grown men and women who not so long ago would have been pushed out of public life either by our collective political disgust or by responsible shareholders who would insist that their corporate leaders get back to work instead of making a spectacle of themselves.Related:
Elon Musk is a far-right activist.
How Elon Musk could actually kill Twitter
In her first statement since being released from a Russian penal colony, Brittney Griner said on Instagram that she is now home and will be spending the holidays with her family.
Russia launched more than 70 missiles at Ukraine, disrupting its power and water supplies.
Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed federal prosecutors to end sentencing disparities over the distribution of crack and powder cocaine.
The Third Rail: David French explores a key reason Trump is losing altitude right now.
Books Briefing: Successful memoirs do much more than disclose personal details, Christina McCausland writes.
Famous People: Kaitlyn Tiffany and Lizzie Plaugic journey into boys-trip and wine-country culture in California to relive the 2004 movie Sideways.
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains why America doesn’t build what it invents.
(Getty)
Why Doesn’t Every American Have a Robot Dog?By Kaitlyn Tiffany
There was a time when the little robot dog was among the most coveted items in the world.
From about 1999 to 2008, all kids had to do was decide which little robot dog they longed for the most. There were so many fantastic options. From the Canadian company WowWee, Mega-Byte the Hound Droid, which had a big, blocky head and glowing eyes. From Mattel, Rocket the Wonder Dog, which “rocketed through space, time, and the Milky-Bone Galaxy looking for a loving home here on earth.”
An ode to mood swings
Photos: the lights of Christmas 2022
Na'vi in Avatar: The Way of Water. (20th Century Studios)
Read. Pick something up from our 10 best books of the year. Or, if you’re in the mood to learn new things, try one of these seven books that will make you smarter.Watch. In theaters, Avatar: The Way of Water is proof that cinematic wonder still exists.And if you’re watching the World Cup final on Sunday, try to think of the game as a dance.Listen. On our podcast Radio Atlantic, Mark Leibovich and Elaina Plott Calabro discuss what’s next for the GOP.And the 10 best albums of 2022 show that the year in music was a party.Play our daily crossword.P.S.There’s a lot of talk on Twitter about where to go if Twitter implodes. I’ve already written about why I don’t like the alternatives, but I will admit that I have set up an account on Post and reactivated my old LinkedIn account (I’m very old-school) just in case Musk literally pulls his new toy’s power cord out of the wall.But it’s Friday, so let’s think about something more pleasant. Musk, as I noted, is playing Calvinball, a game designed by a fictional 6-year-old that has no real rules. This reminded me that it was 27 years ago this month that the comic-strip genius Bill Watterson ceased writing Calvin and Hobbes. You can see the very last panels here, with the combination of artwork and wonder that made the strip so beloved over its too-brief life. I still remember seeing the first Calvin and Hobbes in The Washington Post in 1985, when I had just moved to D.C. from Boston. I was young, broke, and more than a little homesick, but I remember laughing and being hooked immediately. So don’t let the world get you down: Daydream about being Spaceman Spiff while Miss Wormwood drones on, and then get outside and try to bean that stupid Susie Derkins with a snowball. There are multiple compilations of Calvin and Hobbes, and if you know someone who’s never experienced the strip, now is a great time to introduce them to a far better child than Elon Musk.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.Correction: This article originally misidentified the Mashable reporter Matt Binder.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems.  Sign up here to get it every week.This week, the federal government announced that scientists achieved a breakthrough in nuclear-fusion technology. News reports proclaimed rapturously that the technology might soon solve the climate crisis and change energy’s future.But let’s be realistic: Working fusion reactors could be many decades away. We need to build on this big eureka moment by encouraging lots of mini eurekas that can turn energy from fusion into a viable product.  As I wrote recently, progress is as much about implementation as it is about invention. This week’s achievement brought the total number of successful fusion experiments in history from zero to one. But the way that individuals and institutions take an idea from one to 1 billion is the real story of progress.This lesson holds special relevance for America. The U.S. is the world’s breakthrough champion. But we lag behind in actually building what we’ve invented. Although the U.S. was the first to develop nuclear technology, it has actually closed more nuclear-power plants than it has opened in the past 20 years. Both the elevator and the skyscraper were invented in the U.S., too, and yet we suffer from a pronounced shortage of affordable urban housing, because once again we don’t build enough of what we know.What’s holding us back? Progress in America faces a complex obstacle course, including political barriers and cultural hurdles. Some of these obstacles are common to all inventions, while others are specific to the U.S.The missing-invention hurdleScientific breakthroughs are typically more like first drafts than final products, and they need additional breakthroughs to become usable.In medicine, scientists understood for years the potential of synthetic mRNA. But they needed further achievements in a totally different field, nanoparticle design and manufacturing, to actually create the COVID vaccines. Similarly, scientists will need to build on the fusion reaction that inspired the world this week with advances in efficiency and reliability. Rarely does a scientific breakthrough leave us with a complete product that can be instantly delivered at high quality to patients or consumers.The price slideMany breakthrough ideas and products are initially extremely expensive.Take solar energy, for example. Scientists at Bell Labs built the first modern silicon photovoltaic cell in the 1950s. But they were terribly inefficient. If you had to power your 2022 house with 1955 solar cells, it might cost you more than $1 million every day.Since the 1950s, solar cells have steadily fallen in price as they’ve been deployed in the U.S. and abroad. During the 1960s, solar cells made it possible to power much larger satellites that revolutionized telecommunications, spying from space, and weather forecasting. As costs declined, applications multiplied, and cells began to power lights in lighthouses, offshore oil-and-gas drilling rigs, and railway crossings. As other countries, such as Germany and Japan, embraced industrial policy for solar, the price of solar energy continued to fall—down by a factor of 200 since the 1970s and an order of magnitude in just the past 10 years. In the next decade, solar installations are projected to take off now that solar energy is often cheaper than oil or gas.Lessons abound from this story, but one is that new ideas have to come down the price slide to be of much use to most people, and that more deployment leads to falling prices. Companies “learn by doing,” and they figure out ways to reduce costs as they become experts in the field.The disinvestment headwindFederal policy can speed or hinder the route to viability.In the ’70s, wind-turbine technology got a boost from NASA investments and federal and state incentives. By 1986, 96 percent of the world’s wind-generated electricity was in California, according to the construction writer Brian Potter. But this progress came to a crashing halt. In the 1980s, the oil crises gave way to an oil glut, and credits were removed or allowed to expire. Turbine installation fell by more than 90 percent in the next few years. The technological frontier moved to Europe, which generated more than 70 percent of the world’s wind energy in 2000. By the early 21st century, the U.S. had lost the edge in wind because we had disinvested in the technology at every level of government. Some people criticize industrial policy with the logic that the U.S. government gets in trouble when it tries to select winners and losers. But the U.S. government always selects for something when it makes policy. If creating wind subsidies is a policy, so is ending wind subsidies. We should be sensitive to the costs of disinvesting, or failing to invest at all, in emerging technologies that could have a big effect on U.S. welfare and energy security.The bad-rule blockadeSometimes the barriers to doing things are very simple: There are bad rules on the books, and we should remove them.Single-family-zoning rules make it impossible to build multifamily buildings in a certain area. At extremes, rampant historic-preservation rules can impede all new construction in a neighborhood, making it impossible to add to the housing stock. I don’t want to give people the impression that America’s progress problem is simple. But sometimes the badness of certain rules and regulations is quite straightforward, and the country would be better off if these rules simply went away.The vetocracy bottleneckAmericans have become too efficient at saying no.As the Atlantic writer Jerusalem Demsas has relentlessly chronicled, the U.S. makes it very easy for citizens to stymie housing and energy projects by filing lawsuits. This is not just about NIMBYism—the not-in-my-backyard bias of locals to stop construction on new projects. It’s about the laws that allow locals to exert power and stop progress from happening.For example, why did the cost to build highways increase fivefold from 1990 to 2008? As Demsas wrote, laws like the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act “made it easier for citizens to block construction projects.” Robert Kagan, a law professor at UC Berkeley, calls this “adversarial legalism.” As he told the New York Times writer Ezra Klein, “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state.” If the U.S. is going to build what we invent, we have to make it harder for Americans’ reflexive NIMBYism to stop construction.The state-capacity bottleneckSometimes the problem is that nobody is in charge. Sometimes the problem is that too many people are in charge.When big projects are overseen by multiple agencies, the diffusion of responsibility can often result in nothing happening. One good example is the Boston Green Line Extension, a project that tripled in cost because understaffed agencies that had never handled large projects failed to get on the same page.But there are two ways to ruin a kitchen: Too many cooks, or not enough to deliver. New York City recently passed a law requiring dangerous drivers to take a safety class. Last week, the New York Post reported that very few speedsters have ever taken the class because the city has no means of penalizing those who don’t show up. There simply isn’t administrative capacity to carry out the policy. Government isn’t just about writing smart policies. Wise laws that can’t be implemented aren’t wise, and they’re barely even laws. Getting the outcomes that we want out of government requires that government can actually do what it says it wants to do.The incumbency bottleneckSometimes, a new technology is ready to take off, but corporate giants and their allies in government block the path.If we’re interested in understanding why clean-energy construction hasn’t taken off as much as it should have in the U.S., we can’t just blame NEPA and NIMBYs. Many U.S. energy utilities are regulated monopolies that are threatened by the appearance of a new cheap energy source. They’ve resisted solar and wind energy for decades. Fossil-fuel companies, too, have spent years lobbying for a different set of rules that give them advantages over new technologies.  The approval dragThe U.S. has developed some regulatory and approval habits that are simply too slow to respond to annual crises, such as cancer deaths, much less once-in-a-century pandemics.In my recent article, I imagine a thought experiment: Inspired by the success of the government program to accelerate the development of the COVID vaccines, what would an Operation Warp Speed for cancer prevention look like? It would start with significantly more investment in research. But it would also acknowledge that the U.S. has to reform the way that new drugs and therapies are tested and approved. From 1973 to 2011, nearly 30,000 trials were run for drugs that treated recurrent or metastatic cancer, compared with fewer than 600 for cancer prevention. One reason is that trials for cancer prevention simply take too long to prove that they work. For other preventative therapies, like drugs to stave off heart disease, the FDA accepts short-term proxies for success, such as immediate evidence of lower blood pressure. The FDA could research similar short-term proxies for the approval of drugs that prevent cancer. Doing so would accelerate the development of lifesaving medication without spending a taxpayer dime on research.The resource bottleneckTo have an abundance of clean energy, the U.S. needs an abundance of the metals needed to build clean-energy hardware.Let’s imagine an energy world with almost none of the barriers I’ve described. Clean-energy technology is cheap and reliable. NIMBYism has been banished from the Earth. Transmission lines crisscross the country. But we’ve run out of resources. There isn’t enough lithium, nickel, or copper. The U.S. needs a policy of deep abundance to ensure that we have access to crucial resources to build what we need. This week, the think tank Employ America published a manifesto for “increasing energy commodity production.” For example, batteries for electric vehicles need lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare-earth minerals. The U.S. doesn’t yet have a complete policy for ensuring that producers have an abundant supply of these commodities. In an all-electric future, an abundance of energy requires an abundance of underlying energy commodities.

Scholars and students greeted Claudine Gay’s election as Harvard’s next leader with joy and praise on Thursday. An accomplished political scientist and the Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 2018, Gay will become the University’s 30th president in July.
“I’m absolutely thrilled,” said Michael D. Smith, the John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University. Smith was Gay’s predecessor as FAS dean. “Claudine is a natural leader, strategic thinker, and someone who senses the important issues and trends just over the horizon, as I witnessed daily when we worked together. And she cares deeply about every person in our unique community. Her energy, intellect, integrity, and good humor will serve this Harvard community so well.”
Many faculty members and University leaders took to their social media accounts to congratulate Gay and Harvard. Michelle Williams, dean of the faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Angelopoulos Professor in Public Health and International Development, said: “Dr. Claudine Gay is a strong leader, brilliant thinker, and wonderful person. Her selection as Harvard’s next president is excellent news for the institution’s future, and I look forward to seeing her impact.”
Annette Gordon-Reed, Carl M. Loeb University Professor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, reacted with a “Yessss!!!!” on her Twitter account. Reached by email, Gordon-Reed said, “I’m ecstatic. She is exactly the person we need going forward.”
The renowned constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe was of the same mind. “Great news for Harvard and for higher education: Our new president will be Claudine Gay, a brilliant scholar and inspiring leader, Harvard’s second female president and its first president of color,” he said. “As Dean of Arts and Sciences since 2018, she has already made a historic mark.”
For many Black students, the moment was thrilling and inspiring. Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate, said that group chats among Black students were blowing up in the moments after the announcement of Gay’s election. Many wows and whoas greeted the news.
“My initial reaction was shock,” Opoku-Agyeman said in a phone interview. “My next reaction was: Dr. Gay is a great choice because a lot of her work is focused on uplifting vulnerable populations, and I know she’s going at least attempt to do that during the tenure. And of course, she just made history. She is the first person of color ever to preside over Harvard. It just is a lot of joy and I know other people share in my joy as well.”
Paula D. McClain, the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, who serves on the board of the American Academy of Political and Social Science with Gay, commended the University for a “historic appointment.”
“Claudine Gay is an excellent choice for Harvard’s next president,” McClain wrote in an email. “She is not only a superb scholar of political behavior and race, ethnicity, and politics, and someone who believes in and requires excellence and knows that diversity and excellence go hand-in-hand, but she is also a deft administrator. She pushed forward a number of initiatives as dean of the faculty and has handled a number of difficult situations in the process.”
Reshma Saujani is the founder and CEO of Girls Who Code and serves on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. On her Twitter account, she made no effort to hide her bliss. “I’ve never been prouder of this institution than I am today,” she wrote. “President-elect Claudine Gay is one of the most brilliant women I have ever met. She’s also one of the kindest.”

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is the “Ezra Klein Show.” Hello, and welcome to our last episode for the year. This is the Ask Me Anything episode, and after this, we’re going to be off for a couple of weeks, enjoying the holidays. We’ll be back in the new year. But before we get to it, we want to hear who the guest is you would most like to see on the show next year, ideally, someone we may not have heard of. Don’t suggest Joe Biden or Beyoncé. I’m not saying they would not be great, but we know about them. But someone with a fascinating theory or framework or idea that we can explore. We built a submission form for this for nerds, so it’s easy for us to keep track of your suggestions. And that form is linked in the show notes. So click the link, fill it out, and send us your first round EK show guest draft picks. We really will read them, and we do find a lot of our best guests through you. So we appreciate it. All right, but now the Ask Me Anything. And I’m joined for this today by my friend and my honored editor, Aaron Retica, who has kindly agreed to ask your questions of me and to make sure I don’t squirm away from them too much. I’ll turn the mic over to him.

aaron retica

OK, we start with Sarah Bert, who’s wondering if you could talk a little bit about what she calls a somewhat false distinction between outcome and opportunity. Politicians are always saying — and I’m still quoting her here — that they want to provide equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. So what’s the difference between those two things? And how should we be thinking about that as we make our policies?

ezra klein

Oh, that’s a fun question. I think this is a very weird thing about the Washington policy debate because as long as I’ve been around it, Republicans have always said, look, we’re for equality of opportunity. But we’re not for equality of outcome. But Dylan Matthews wrote a great piece about this Beckett box, which we can link in the show notes. If you take equality of opportunity seriously, it is unbelievably hard. And the amount of leveling you would have to do in society to get to anything like it probably goes far deeper in terms of government intervention and redistribution and restructuring than even equality of some specific outcome would go. I mean, what does it take to have equality of opportunity? First, you, in theory, would have to get people into the same material place. Obviously, and this is — sometimes I get asked how my politics have changed since being a parent, and one thing you really get a sense of when you’re a parent is the unbelievable inequality of opportunity, simply depending on who your parents are. But then, of course, to say nothing of where you’re born, what kinds of opportunities are available in the place where you’re born. There’s great research by Raj Chetty and others just showing how much of social mobility and opportunity depends on the zip code you’re born into, what kinds of resources there are, what kinds of models there are, and the people around you. And then that’s to say nothing of the genetic dimension of our opportunities. People have probably heard me say on the show before that I just think much less of what we end up doing that we tend to attribute to things like hard work is actually attributable to the individual. It may be a useful social fiction, but things like determination and discipline and perseverance and temperament and judiciousness and patience, these go way back. They’re affected by everything from lead in the water to your genetic inheritance. And the fact that a lot of people who get lionized by society for things we think of as virtues, those virtues are not exactly a choice. There’s something almost innate. I’ve said this before, but it’s nice that society likes to reward me for liking to read a lot, but it isn’t something I choose. It just is how I am. And the idea that I deserve any special credit for it seems wrong, in some ways. There’s a lot of things that society rewards that I would like to stop doing, but they’re innate to me. So I don’t think equality of opportunity, the people who talk about it, they believe in it at all. I think that it is such an expansive ideal, that to take it seriously would require you to go way, way, way beyond the kinds of policies you would need, even to get to equality of outcomes.

So talking about innateness, though, how do you keep all of this, right? You’re a tinkerer, right? You want policies to change things. How do you prevent this idea about things being innate from becoming a kind of fatalism?

ezra klein

I think everything has a margin to it. I mean, for individuals, right, some things are innate. I don’t think it makes sense to try to deny that. And then, of course, individuals can change, but we change within the structure of who we are and what is possible for us. And so I think I don’t have a better answer to that exactly. Then we do our best, and it’s one reason that my politics leans heavily towards an idea that we should not have unlimited rewards for what we do. And we should have very quite limited punishments. It is both a good way to structure society as a story to tell people that a lot is within their power, but you don’t want policy to overly believe that. You want a pretty decent basic standard of living for everyone, and you want a lot of compassion for everyone. And you don’t want to be too impressed by the people who have the right mix of the opportunities they’ve been given and the inheritance they’ve had and their personal qualities and the way those qualities connect to the moment they’re in. Those things are too fleeting and contingent for us to punish people the way I think a lot of our public morality says that we should when they don’t have it. I mean, I think a lot about the question of how many people are in jail today because they grew up with lead paint, and so their executive faculties were diminished. And so they got in a bar fight, or they agreed to be part of a robbery or whatever it might have been that wouldn’t have happened. We know, on some sort of law of averages, that it wouldn’t have happened if they had not been exposed to a toxic substance that degraded their ability to control impulse. And of course, we think you can blame people for that because they were adults and so on, but it’s just not that simple. So, again, my politics leans a lot towards the view that we should be very, very humble about how much people can be blamed for. I think it’s always good to give people reasons to want self-improvement in their lives. And it’s the way I live my own life. But I think what you should believe about yourself as an individual and the way society should be structured are not the same things.

OK, so that’s a good segue way to a question from Sarah Murphy, who was asking about the concept of administrative burden, which we should probably explain, too. But she’s talking about how it’s a through line in her life in terms of helping her parents prepare for retirement, sorting out their hassles with 401(k)s. And she says all these things are just much harder than they should be. So could you reflect a little bit on why you think we have all these administrative burdens and whether there’s a broader phenomenon there that has echoes elsewhere in our society and what future policymakers could do to make it less of a problem?

ezra klein

So there are two ideas I think about here. So administrative burdens is an idea that is associated with Don Moynahan and Pamela Heard that has to do with the degree to which, particularly in America, a lot that the state might do elsewhere we make you do here — filling out forms and shuffling from office to office and proving your eligibility for this and that. And then there’s another concept, which is very influential to me because it was thought up by my partner, Annie Lowrey, called the time tax. And the time tax is the way those kinds of burdens that paperwork, that deployment of your own time and mental energy is weaponized, and always has been, in this country to keep people from receiving things that they are entitled to, a social benefit, say, or keep people from participating in things that they’re supposed to be able to participate in. So think of various ways we try to keep people from voting by making the lines long or making it really hard to do. And these are a pretty profound part of the American state. I think there’s a tremendous amount of political possibility in focusing on the relationship between the state and the time of the population. And I think that’s underdone particularly by Democrats. And one difficult thing here is that for Republicans, I think this sort of is more straightforward. They might say government is inefficient, and it takes too much time, but they also want it to be inefficient and take too much time in a lot of cases because they don’t want more people using it. Very famously, a lot of other countries, the state knows typically how much money you make. And they can just basically do your taxes for you, send it to you, and you can sign off or not sign off. And this has been blocked in the United States by a mixture of Intuit and other tax preparers who want to make sure they maintain their lucrative control over the tax system, the tax preparation system, and Republicans who do not want it to be so easy due to your taxes. The fact that it’s a big pain to do taxes is something that makes people mad at the government, and that’s good for, in some conceptual way, if you’re somebody who wants people mad at the government, that affirms your politics and strengthens your politics. But Democrats often, I think unwittingly and for other reasons, make this much, much, much worse, in particular, by means testing everything in really complicated ways. So you’re constantly making people fill out a billion forms in order to get something that they could get, or because you’re so worried you’re going to be accused of fraud, so you’re trying to check everything three or four or five times. But the result is that the benefit is hard to achieve for people or the experience of getting it is incredibly disempowering. It makes you feel humiliated by the state. And Democrats have, I think, not focused correctly on this experience of what is your relationship, what is the relationship you have when you interact with the state, particularly if you’re poor and you need help. And does it make you feel empowered and respected or disempowered and henpecked and watched over? And I think there’s a lot of both political possibility, but also substantive reason to try to make that relationship a lot smoother and one that has more trust in it. And there are tradeoffs you have to make here. I would accept more fraud for more ease of use in the government. I’m less concerned that some people might misuse a benefit than that so many people cannot access a benefit. That is a worse problem for me. It is worse to me to have a lot of children who don’t have enough to eat because their family is having trouble getting food stamps than a couple of people who use food stamps when maybe they have enough money that they don’t qualify. But we’ve really, really, really erred on the side of trying to prevent fraud, trying to prevent waste, trying to means test to keep down the overall cost of programs. And as a result, people don’t like these programs. They don’t use them. The program is very complicated. So thinking a lot about the time tax on one level and where its roots come from, and why it is used that way. And in another way, administrative burdens is important. I’d also add by saying this is not just obviously a problem for the government. When you’re thinking about things like time taxes or administrative burdens, they are all over the private sector. I mean, try dealing with your health insurer or try submitting expenses to your employer. These things are not made to be easy. They are made to be hard so you often won’t do it. They are taxing your time, burdening you administratively in the hopes, oftentimes, that you’ll give up, and so they can save the money.

So that brings us to another political question from Corey Derringer, who wants to hear your take on the asymmetry of norms between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. It seems like one side cares a lot about the perception of playing by the rules, according to this line of thinking, while the other openly plays what Corey calls [INAUDIBLE],, taking actual power in the ways Democrats probably wouldn’t try. Corey also wants to know if you think that’s, in part, because the GOP looks crazier to the average voter if the Democrats play it cool.

ezra klein

I think there are bunch of different pieces to this question. So, look, if you go back 10 years, I remember getting questions like this. And I always tried to say in response to them that I did think Republicans played what gets called sometimes constitutional hardball more aggressively than the Democrats, or 15 years. But Democrats do plenty of it, too. I mean, if you look at, say, the big filibuster change in the past 15 years, that came under Democrats. And it was Democrats who thought very hard about getting rid of the filibuster in 2020, or I guess, this would be 2021. Now, I would say that came in response to Republicans wildly overusing the filibuster, but there was a tit for tat happening. I don’t think that even what is happening now in the Republican Party should be understood as continuous with that exactly. It has become a difference in degree so profound to become a difference in kind, a fundamental giving up on a lot of the underlying institutions, a detachment from what the journalist Dave Roberts has occasionally called transpartisan institutions, institutions in American life that are not just trying to be on the side of one party or another. So I do think a difference between the two sides is Democrats really care, among other things, what, say, the New York Times thinks of them. And the New York Times likes to criticize Democrats to show that it is not allied with one party or the other. And so that is a check on how Democrats act that Republicans have nothing like it. They have retreated into a media ecosystem that is, if anything, always urging them to go further and to play harder and to be more on the attack. Obviously, Trump and the big lie, but that also comes out of years of Republicans at the state level in North Carolina and Wisconsin and other places, re-working the rules to maintain power, using gerrymandering to keep power they wouldn’t otherwise be able to keep. I think the question, though, that I’m never sure about is whether this is actually working for Republicans. And I don’t just mean here in the sense that the questioner asked, which is Republicans will look more crazy or they look more norms defying. I’m not sure, I mean, with the exception of things like January 6 insurrection, that people are paying that close attention. But I do think the Republican Party has gotten itself somewhat addicted to strategies of winning through minoritarian approaches, winning using redistricting, winning using the advantage they have, kind of in the lean of states so they can win the Senate without winning the most votes for Senate, the electoral college stuff that happened with Donald Trump. And the Republican Party, I think, could have a lot more power if it felt it had to win over people who didn’t agree with it in the way the Democrats do. I mean, Democrats believe, and correctly so, that in order to hold power in this country, they need to win more than 50 percent of the vote. And Republicans don’t. And in a lot of these cases, the hardball doesn’t work, right? We’ll see what happens in 2024, but the big lie did not work. Donald Trump is not president anymore. And I think Republicans have managed to mess up their midterm as well because they can’t get him shifted over to the side of the party. If Republicans had forced onto themselves a narrative that they lost in 2020, that would have helped marginalize Donald Trump, but because they would not force that narrative onto their own party, Donald Trump has maintained centrality in that party in a way that I think is very difficult for them. I don’t think Mitch McConnell is a great Senate leader in the way a lot of other people do. He has effectively used his power to win the court for the Republicans. So I mean, that goes to his legacy for good and for ill. But there wasn’t a tremendous innovation there. He had the votes to not vote on a nominee. And that’s what he did. But in terms of what he been able to pass affirmatively, it’s not a very impressive record. And in terms of whether or not he’s been able to win the Senate back, hold a majority when it seemed very clearly possible that Republicans could have won majorities in the 2010s and going up now until 2022, given how strong the Republican advantage should be in the Senate, the fact that Democrats have held the Senate as often and as long as they have speaks to some failures in the Republican strategy. I think Democrats spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re doing wrong, and Republicans do not spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re doing wrong. And it sort of shows. So I don’t want to be sanguine about any of this. The exact right strategy for Democrats to take in response is tough, and it depends on also the limits that their own coalition structure places on them, which we can talk about. But I don’t think that Republicans have been so successful in what they’ve done, with the exception maybe of the courts, that Democrats should, in general, be looking so enviously at their ruthless and disorganized approach to politics.

OK, so there are no moral victories in electoral politics, right? But if you’re a Republican looking with sad eyes at what just happened in Georgia, there is a silver lining of sorts there, right, which is there’s two things. One is that the more regular non-election denying candidates did very, very well, but also, I saw one Republican consultant referred to Herschel Walker’s percentage of the vote, which was not 50, but very close, as the bottom for Republicans, right? If you run a candidate who is not qualified, you can still get that percentage, right? So that’s the way that maybe Democrats don’t have quite that layering that they can count on, which is, I think, a part of their strategy.

ezra klein

I don’t really buy that, though. You and me have worked on columns together about this now. And I encourage people to listen to the John Sides/Lynn Vavreck episode on calcification. This is just calcification. Really good candidates don’t, for the most part, can’t get the landslides in competitive elections. Different states, obviously, have their own partisan compositions, but nationally, you don’t see landslides. And you don’t see the kind of collapses that you would have seen in other times. The parties are so different, and people are so afraid of the other side that you’re always playing this game of inches. And I think that’s actually — I mean, in a bunch of places, that seems to have helped Democrats, too. I don’t think you can look at the 2022 election, which I think, in its structure, should have been a disaster for Democrats, and not see that as calcification and polarization paying its dividends for them. It’s not that, at least in the way people saw the Biden administration, that they think Biden’s doing a great job, they love Joe Biden. But Democrats and the kinds of voters who vote for Democrats looked around and said, however we feel about inflation, however we feel about Joe Biden, we’re not letting these lunatics back into power. And they came out and voted. So I mean, I think that in a big way, you see the fact that this midterm was not a Democratic wipeout, I think, suggests that Democrats also have moved to having a pretty high floor that they have not had in previous midterms. I mean, the Democratic Party of 2010 or 1994 does not have the kind of turnout and has not survived in its congressional power in the way the Democratic Party of 2022 just did.

So that brings us to another good question. And now we’re moving into where — I’m not completely sure how to say the name, so if you’re out there and I’m butchering your name, I apologize. But Sean Corsu wants to know whether Manchin’s obstructionism actually helped the Democrats have a better than expected midterm election. If they had done everything they had wanted to do without him pushing back, without Kyrsten Sinema pushing back, would they have had so much more to defend and explain that it would have actually hurt them in the midterms?

ezra klein

I don’t know. I know this is a view a bunch of people hold. My friend, Matt Iglesias, he had this view when he was on the show that Manchin helped force the Democrats into much smaller and more defensible bills. And I do think there’s enough evidence that there are backlash effects to very big policy-making pushes that one should at least take that view seriously. And on the other hand, he also robbed them of things that might have won activated constituencies or just made people happier with the situation. Would an ongoing child tax credit, have expanded child tax credit have been better for Democrats? I think it would have been. I don’t think the pre-K and various childcare initiatives necessarily would have had a big midterm effect one way or the other, but I’m not 100 percent sure they wouldn’t have. Look, I’m a policy reporter going way, way, way, way back. And I think one disagreement I have with sort of the Matts and political analysts like David Shors of the world — and I’ve covered this sort of populist view a lot — is, I think it has a view of how much people understand and are connected to the policies that pass that I just don’t believe is true anymore. Maybe it was never true. I could kind see that going both ways. But I think that the policy feedback loops are incredibly degraded. And so people have a kind of generalized sense of what’s going on. But policy, in part for all the calcification reasons we’re talking about, it just doesn’t move people, I think, all that much in either direction. So I don’t know. Let’s imagine a world where some version of Build Back Better passes eight months earlier. And it was never going to be the full Build Back Better, even if Manchin had been more open to it. It was always going to get whittled down somewhat. So let’s say it ends up as a $2.5 trillion bill or even a $3 trillion bill, but not what we ultimately saw. Then you don’t have a whole half a year or a year where the media narrative, which I think people are somewhat more connected to about Joe Biden is that Joe Biden is failing. The administration isn’t getting anything done, and that they’re feckless, but there’s all this inflation and so on. So now maybe what you get is a sense that they’ve passed all these big policies, and that is leading inflation to be so high. But there’s a reason people like Summers and Larry Summers and Jason Furman weren’t against Build Back Better. It wouldn’t have dramatically changed inflation this year. I think that’s pretty clear. And as such, we had the amount of inflation we had. I don’t think a sort of dramatically different storyline would have emerged or even mattered all that much. So I don’t know. I’m not hugely of the view that Joe Manchin saved Democrats from themselves. And I think that a bunch of things that he ended up knocking out of the Bills were good enough and important enough. You know, like I think it would have been good for Democrats if they could have run on having created some kind of paid family leave program. I think paid family leave had some real problems in the way it was designed in the version of that bill. But in a world where they could have passed it, which we can get into budget reconciliation, a million things here, I think running on accomplishments is good. The other thing I would say is that the shame with Manchin and others is that let’s say you wanted to say at a certain point, OK, this bill has to come down. But let’s think through what should be there. I think you could have got into something much better and more thoughtful than they did. Why Joe Manchin believed in the end that we could talk about climate and we couldn’t talk about care, that child care and pre-K and all of these things that are really, really central to — I mean, even if you just want to have a really economics oriented look at it, all these things that are very central to labor force participation among women, but also just central to how families operate in this world at this moment, I think you could have done better than this. I think child poverty is a big problem in this country and the expanded child tax credit is and would be good. Like, maybe you want to shift it down a bit. Like, there are tweaks you could make. But we didn’t do that. Really, really, really big parts of the policy agenda were just abandoned. They were important parts of the policy agenda. I think a bunch of them were political winners. So I just don’t buy that what Manchin did would thoughtfully slice up the Democratic agenda according to the needs and desires of the median voter. What he did was much more unusual and weird and personalistic and opportunistic than that. Maybe it didn’t matter that much on the margin politically, but substantively, I think he could have had both a better political, but a much better substantive package that didn’t pretend that everything is OK for American families today because it isn’t.

Let’s stay with the child tax credit expansion for a second, right? So it ends, but it actually did start. So we have evidence about what it did, right? And obviously, some of this is disputed. But we can say with some assurance that it reduced child poverty by a lot.

ezra klein

A lot.

Tremendous amount, right?

ezra klein

Yeah.

So, in the Politics Makes You Want to Bang Your Head Against the Wall Department, which is the big department, you have something that was working. Like, we saw it working in real-time, and yet they still didn’t do it, right? They still didn’t keep it. And it’s even worse than that because Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, all kinds of Republicans have an interest in child allowances, right? There’s a lot of room to maneuver here. And none of it happened. So why do you think that is, and is that a problem that can be solved, or are we stuck with this?

ezra klein

Well, I mean, we’ve written columns on this, you and I. I don’t think, first, there’s all that much room to maneuver. Maybe there will be one day. But I don’t think Marco Rubio is eager to work with Democrats on an actual child tax credit expansion. Romney, I think, is the exception. But you need more than Mitt Romney. And you don’t have a lot more than Mitt Romney. And some people disagree with me on that, but I think I’m right about it. And so, one, I don’t think there’s a big bipartisan path there yet. I think maybe one day, there will be. And maybe they can find the right point of leverage. There’s this kind of continuing idea that maybe the business tax credits would have to be extended because they’ve expired, too. Can be tied to the child tax credit in some way, and maybe you can sort of force a deal, but that hasn’t happened yet. In terms of why it didn’t create the feedback loop, I’ve done a lot of work on this. I’ve looked at a lot of work on this. I think the simplest thing to say about it is that they didn’t give it enough time. And really, it was only operating in a way that people could feel it and see what was going on for about a year. It’s a little more complicated than that because of the design. But I think that’s a reasonable shorthand. And it was operating at the same time that there was just an absolute hurricane of temporary check-based policy. So stimulus payments and expanded unemployment insurance payments and all kinds of other random things happening. And so all of a sudden, people are getting also this child tax credit thing. And they don’t really know what it is. And then it’s gone not that long after. And so you need time to create a sense of expectation and a sense of political constituency. If the child tax credit had been going for five years and then everybody just allowed it to expire, I think that would give us a different kind of information than what we ultimately got. The White House and Democrats had a view they’d be able to revisit this in Build Back Better and expand it for five years or 10 years or permanently. And they were wrong. And doing the credit for so little time at a time when there’s so much other temporary and unusual policy happening, I don’t even think we have a test of what kind of policy feedback it could have created because there just wasn’t a clear enough information signal and a long enough structural runway for the policy for it to do the very difficult thing that a policy like that has to do and build a constituency, build a kind of expectation, and build a sort of defensive coalition that can stop something from being allowed to expire.

Right, and the history there goes with what you’re saying, right? Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all these things took a long time before they were entrenched in public life enough for people to defend them, consider them a regular part of their lives and not just a temporary measure. I’m going to ask you one last political question. Then we’re going to get to more to the kind of Ask Me Anything aspect of the Ask Me Anything. But Jackson Gorham is wondering about what he calls a core tenet of Ezra Kleinism — don’t let that go to your head — is that the repeal of the filibuster is necessary to allow the kind of feedback loops that you’re talking about, about popular policy and political support. But lately you’ve been talking on the show and in your column about sort of the double-edged nature of elections in 2020 and populism that you were just talking about, and the lackluster support for renewing the child tax credit expansion that we were just talking about. So has that changed your confidence in what the repeal of the filibuster could actually do for policy developments?

ezra klein

No, I think you should get rid of the filibuster. You should do it now. God, I have a lot to say on this. Let me say first —

You’re going to filibuster the filibuster answer.

ezra klein

Yeah, I’m going to filibuster the filibuster answer. Exactly. I don’t think anything about calcification or polarization — I mean, everything that we’re talking about here was true when I wrote my book why we’re polarized about polarization and the way it has locked people in place. I’m jealous that John and Lynn and Chris Tausanovitch came up with “calcification,” which is a name for something I also described in my book that I should have named. But the idea that one thing that the differentiation of the parties was doing was leading to a sharp reduction in the swing of the vote, that was very, very present in my thinking in that book. And that book ultimately is, in part, an argument for parties being able to win majorities, do the thing they promised to do, and then be judged by the public on it. So, to me, none of this is really that new in terms of information. Now I do think you could imagine other things about it that are new, right? You might say kind of post-Dobbs, do you really want a world where Republicans could come into power and actually pass with 52 votes nationwide sharp abortion restrictions? And obviously, on some level, I don’t want that world. But I also believe that if they had the power to do that because the filibuster was gone, they would be unbelievably badly punished for it. And then that would be a signal to everybody about abortion politics. And Democrats would be able to come in and reverse what they did and so on. So that’s one thing. Two, even within a bunch of the policy we’re talking about — and this goes back to what I’m saying about Build Back Better and Joe Manchin — in the time I have been watching the construction of public policy, covering it professionally, I think that the policy making process is getting worse and worse. And I think one big reason is the filibuster because the way to get around the filibuster is to use this process that now a lot of major policy goes through called budget reconciliation. And budget reconciliation has all these very weird strictures on it. It’s supposed to be a way you reconcile budgets and made sure that the amount you appropriated was the amount you’re actually spending and so on. But what it actually does now is it says that if you follow these rules at the beginning, right, you say I’m going to do a budget reconciliation bill, it’s going to have this effect on the budget, plus $2.3 trillion minus whatever, and it then is going to only have these policies that are about raising and lowering spending, you can do that and once, and in different ways, maybe twice a session, a year of Congress, and get around the filibuster. So that has created this incentive for the parties to focus on, one, these raising and lowering of spending bills. So other things that are really important in policy like how elections work, paid family leave, the minimum wage, abortion, et cetera, et cetera, they can’t go through this filibuster protected process. So you have this really weird push in policy towards using the spending powers and away from every other form of regulation and rule setting that just distorts policy super weirdly. Second, you also have this incentive now towards mega bills, right? Build Back Better is a totally bizarre piece of legislation. It’s just like, it’s like 18 pieces of legislation wrapped into one. So nobody really knew what was in it, except for its $3.5 trillion price tag. It’s very, very hard to message it. The ability to actually say we’re going to do a childcare bill, we’re going to do a paid family leave bill, we’re going to do a minimum wage bill, we’re going to do a climate bill, we’re going to do a this, we’re going to do a that, and run each one of those bills as a policy making process, and then bring them to the floor for an up or down vote where they pass or don’t pass, instead of having to wrap everything up into this one time-limited, exploding, weirdly limited reconciliation package, would lead to better legislation. The one place where I’m much more sympathetic to the idea that some of the Manchin strictures were useful is that a lot of Build Back Better was very badly designed. I think the childcare part of it was badly designed. I think the paid family leave part of it was badly designed. And not only badly designed, barely designed. There was no policy making process that was in any way public that had people going back and forth on what the best ideas would be. It was just sort of whoever happened to have a bill sitting on the shelf and enough power to jam it in to the legislation congressional leadership was hastily stapling together in a back office. That’s what ended up in the legislation. And so a lot of those things were not well defensible and would not have been implemented very well because they were not, again, well designed. I just think it’s been a unbelievable disaster on the policy making process. So somebody who thinks that the way this should all go is that party should get elected, they should write policy, the best policy they can, according to the promises it made. They should pass most of that because they got the power to do so. And then the public should, to the extent that it will, judge them. I still think that is a better plan here. And that the idea that this sort of inaction and evasion and weird processes and government through loophole is better, it’s just weird. It’s us making a virtue out of a terrible status quo.

Yeah, I mean, if I could add a little bit to that, it’s even worse because you have the rise of presidential power, which the Constitution doesn’t actually fully envision, right? You have a lot of initiative coming from the president when it’s really supposed to come from the House. But then you have a Senate rule that is hamstringing the House, right?

ezra klein

Yeah.

Because the House doesn’t have a filibuster. They just are operating with simple majorities, but it doesn’t matter because they still have to get it through the Senate, right? So Article One, which is about the House and its powers, and it’s supposed to be the most responsive to the people, is the one that has the least power because of the power of the presidency, the rising power of the courts, and this crazy rule that doesn’t exist in the Constitution that was just made up. I mean, it’s really nuts, actually.

ezra klein

In some weird way, if you think the filibuster is good — and I know there are people who will bite this bullet — then bite the bullet. Get rid of budget reconciliation.

Or give the filibuster to the House, too.

ezra klein

Yeah, or bring the filibuster to the House. If you’re a member of the Senate, and you really think the filibuster is great, then, OK, do it. Like, let’s have a filibuster. 60 votes for anything. I mean, the idea that you can do a Supreme Court nominee, a lifetime appointment to Supreme Court with 51 votes, but you can’t raise the minimum wage with 51 votes for a year is completely insane. So do it or don’t do it. I’m in the category of majoritarian governance works. We should have protections for basic rights, but parties should be able to come into power and do what they say they’re going to do beyond that. But if that’s not how we feel, fine. But what we have now is insane. I mean, in one of my early columns at The Times, which I really, really think is one of my best pieces, is, I think it’s titled “The Senate has become a Dada-esque nightmare.” And it’s all about the sort of government by loophole. This is not a way to run a country. It’s not a way to run a legislature, not a way to run the Senate, not a way for policy to be made. The filibuster, it isn’t even what we think it is anymore. It does not mean you can’t get things done without 60 votes. It means you can only get some things done without 60 votes. What you can do is you can stock the Supreme Court vacancies, if there is one, with 51 votes. And also, you could abolish Medicare or possibly nationalize all health insurance with 51 votes. But you can’t pass basic abortion protections or have anything to say about the regulation of waterways with 51. The whole thing is crazy. This is not the way to do it.

And it reduces the power of ideas insofar as there is any in the House and the Senate, right? I mean —

ezra klein

Yeah, it makes people more cynical because politician after politician runs for office, promising to do all these things that they know they can’t do because the whole thing, we are supposed to — I’m not going to keep going like this. I don’t like the filibuster. [LAUGHS] [MUSIC PLAYING]

Let’s shift gears for a little bit. Ryan Bauer says you’ve talked a lot about how the medium was the message. But if you could wave a magic wand, what changes would you make to our dominant communication platforms? And if you were to design the medium from scratch, what might it look like? And let me just add to that that, obviously, Twitter and Elon Musk, you can certainly take that in as you talk about what an ideal version of this would look like. And I’ll just add the fun — I have a fun fact about Elon Musk, which is that his mother was briefly my nutritionist.

ezra klein

Really?

Yes.

ezra klein

His mother the model?

His mother the model is also —

ezra klein

— a very legendary nutritionist, yes.

ezra klein

OK.

Maye Musk.

ezra klein

Yeah, I don’t know how to follow up on that, actually. I’m stuck. OK, Elon Musk and Twitter. Elon Musk — let me start with the part of this that I know and get to the part I don’t know. We’re talking in the aftermath of Musk tweeting that my pronouns are prosecute and Fauci. I wrote a piece when Musk announced that he was going to acquire Twitter that was all about the idea that it was going to be a more profound change and upheaval for that service to have it run by someone who liked what was worst about it than people realized. And I think that has proven true. The thing — and this gets to the question that I have really been — I mean, I stopped tweeting back in April. I think I’ve tweeted a couple of times since then and then once a month or something occasionally. I think my last actual tweet was in maybe October, something like that. So I don’t really use Twitter anymore. And that’s been good for me. But I go back and forth on this question as people have been looking for an alternative, and there isn’t really one. Mastodon, which people talk about, that’s not a Twitter alternative. It’s something very different. Should we want that? Should we want a thing that does what Twitter does, but is not Twitter or is not run by Elon Musk or something of that nature? And I’m not sure that we should. I think it is worth people really reflecting on this idea that in a matter of roughly two decades, social media has gone from being barely a thing at all to something used by billions and billions of people around the world. I mean, it has become a civilizational fact faster than almost anything in human history. And something operating that macro of a scale should show some civilizational effect. If it is good, we should be able to say, well, this is what has gotten better. GDP is growing faster because we’re sharing so many more ideas, and so innovation is sped up. Or we’re more humane and gentle and compassionate towards one another because we’re able to see each other across boundary and faction and country and generation. We’re kinder because we’re sharing so much more. We’re happier because we’re so much more connected. Something, something should have gotten better. And I would say — and I think the evidence is very clear — nothing has. You cannot point to one macro indicator that has gotten substantially better, faster, anything, in the time since social media came on the scene. And I’m not saying that is 100 percent the fault of social media, but I am saying that it implies, at least, there is not some gigantic value here, that before it was offered to us, we were really struggling. So that’s one thing. I think it’s really worth asking, why hasn’t something been better? And my answer to this, which I’ve kind of played with for a long time and finally wrote up, is that the flip side of all of this information and connection has been distraction and irritation. That we have more that we can know and more that we can see and more content to consume, but what we don’t have is a space for reflection. What we don’t have are the habits of mind that tend to help us absorb a difficult question in the best way and come to a good view on it. What we don’t have are the sort of temperaments and virtues, something that is helping us have the virtues of how we live small D democratically or civically with one another. Twitter is one of many things that are not good for that. It’s not the only one, and I don’t think this should only be a conversation about Twitter, though I do think Twitter is unusually central to politics and media and technology. And honestly, if you just want to look at everything I am saying in miniature, look at Elon Musk. You can go back in time and watch his interviews and look at the things he’s done. And I have not, over time, been a Musk hater. There’s many things he’s said that have annoyed me over the years, things he’s done that have annoyed me, ways in which I don’t think he’s a great person. But he also did very important things, built very important things, rockets and cars and solar panels and so on. Does he seem to anybody like he’s more focused on the important questions in life and more able to hear things from people he disagrees with and able to absorb in a space of generosity and focus that his attention span is doing really well right now? I mean, you can watch the effect it has had solely on him. And I think just generalize that out, I think a real tragedy of Twitter is that Musk is a man with many failings and many strengths. And it has amplified his failings and obsessed him with things that it is not good for him to be obsessed with, like the amount of social feedback he gets. And that is going to completely overwhelm many of his strengths and many of the good effects he could have had on the world, or was even having on the world. This is not going to be good and has not been good for Tesla. And I think Tesla is and was an important company making electric vehicles cooler, more widely acceptable, and hastening a transition to them. But he’s making Tesla poisoned among many of the people who should be most excited to buy a Tesla. So, all that said, I wonder a lot if it is good to have a Twitter. I think a lot of us are now so used to it that you think, well, what we need is something else like it, but a bit better. Maybe we don’t need something like it. Maybe a platform that condenses everybody’s thoughts down to bumper sticker bluntness is actually just not a good thing. Its structural build is a bad build, that the idea that we should come to expect thoughts to be that short, that we should train our minds for that kind of novelty. I mean, back in the day, I was always amazed at how easy it was for me to waste time on the internet or on my phone. I would read articles on newspapers and so on. And then as each successive social media network got better, I enjoyed wasting time reading articles. And now I look at single images, and I don’t really do TikTok, but in theory, TikToks or tweets or whatever, and that habituation of the brain to novelty and to simplicity, I don’t think is a good thing for me, and I don’t think a good thing, broadly. So I would like to imagine things that are valuable in part and are widely used in part, not because they are so good at grabbing our attention from us, but in some way, they feed our attention back to us. They help center us a little bit, that the habits of mind they encourage or habits of mind that we want. And maybe nothing staring at your phone is really like that. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s at least a question I want to play with. Maybe if you’re going to insist on distracting yourself while you’re standing in line at the grocery by staring at your phone, there’s no habit of mind that I think is a great one that is going to be encouraged by that. And the fact that I constantly do it is the problem and asking somebody to fix it for me without me changing my fundamental behavior is also the problem. But I think what has happened in social media at this point is a little bit tragic. And it’s most tragic because so few people seem willing to say that even though I don’t like how this looks, my being here is what sustains it in its current form. And I think until people get over the collective action problem, that you have to leave before everybody else has left in order for it to be OK for everybody else to leave. We’re a little bit stuck, but I don’t think we’re going to be stuck forever. I’m a little surprised by how long we have been stuck for, though.

What about the social function that it has served for the less powerful and the powerless, though? In a successor technology, how do they call attention to what is happening to them, right? Because they can’t just up and start — I mean they can just up and start a podcast, but it’s not going to necessarily be heard. I do worry about that, right? A lot of good has come from people calling attention to wrongs.

ezra klein

I think this is a very difficult and important question. So let me say a couple of things about it. One is that I’m not sure — in fact, I’m quite sure that you can maintain a lot of what was good in Twitter without everything that was bad about it. I think believing that we have to be frozen in this moment with this kind of social media is a failure of imagination. And we shouldn’t fail like that. The second thing I think we’re saying here is that there’s a lot now within the people who study social movements. My colleague Zeynep Tufekci has written about this. Erica Chenoweth has written about this. A lot of people have written about this now about whether or not social media is making social movements that are built around it less durable. I think that even if you look at things like MeToo and Black Lives Matter, both of which are movements where, I think, the core of those movements is correct and I consider myself in alignment with them, they’ve had these very, very, very fast rises, and the backlashes have been enormous. And at this point, it’s not clear where things actually stand. The amount of power that reactionaries have gotten in an immediate and sort of direct way on the very same social platforms has to, I think, be put into the analysis in a way that it often isn’t. People talk about how much Twitter has done to empower the marginalized without, I think, talking about how much it has also done to empower the most powerful people or the non-marginalized, how much it is done for the alt right and the racist right, how Elon Musk just bought it in a reactionary fit of pique as far as I can tell and is now running it along those lines. Jaron Lanier, the sort of techno philosopher, basically, has always said that he believes that these mediums lead themselves to backlashes that are stronger than the initial impulse. And I’m not sure he’s wrong about that. Now, you can say, of course, that you can go back to the Civil Rights Movement and other movements and say there always huge backlashes. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not popular in his moment. The Freedom Riders were unpopular, and so on. But I think that if you want to make this argument on behalf of Twitter, specifically, then you want to say, are the social movements that are emerging today more durable? Are they seeing more victories? Does it actually seem that the balance of power has tilted? And when I look at our politics, when I look at our media, when I look at what looks to me to be where kind of opinion sits now, I’m not sure they are. I think if I saw, again, even just our country becoming radically more humane, radically more just, if it looked like Twitter was leading to really durable wins for things I cared about, I would believe this argument more. But I think that Twitter has this — and some social media in general — has this way of giving people so much feedback that it feels like they’re winning. And then you take a step back, and I’m not sure anybody is winning, but a lot of people are really pissed. And our politics are getting, if anything, it looks to me like more reactionary, certainly in the Republican Party. And so I don’t know. I don’t know how to net it all out. I accept that I could be wrong about this, or I could be missing what’s really going on. But I am not sure that Twitter has proven out to be the tool for movement building and justice that people really hoped it would be. And I certainly don’t think that under Elon Musk, it’s going to be that thing. And so accepting, you now have this very muddled platform in its effect run by a person who absolutely thinks the problem with it is that whatever orientation it had towards justice was way too much, and it was too woke, and the reactionaries didn’t have enough power on it, that’s where you are now. So that’s the reality. He owns this thing now. And the question then becomes, now what? Do you just stay on it and keep providing free labor to him? Or there must be some ways to build other things. And I just don’t buy that social movements all have to be trapped there forever. Even if that might have made sense at one point, I can’t imagine that it does now.

So let’s leap off of Twitter to some of the other emerging — I don’t know if technologies is even the word, but something that’s really creating a lot of stir right now, right, is the Chat GPT artificial intelligence model that can really talk to people to some degree. Baxter Stein was wondering if you were going to train a large language model on your own work, what do you think it would see, and what might it learn? But I want you to take that question, and tell us a little bit about how you’re thinking about AI generally and the advances in AI. You mentioned Jaron Lanier earlier. He’s very worried that at some point, AI is just going to take over like Hal in the Stanley Kubrick movie. There’s that great scene where the guy says to him, Hal, Hal, you know, the famous scene. And people are very worried, like seriously worried, not joke worried. They are genuinely worried that AI is going to get so smart that it’s going to take over. So could you talk a little bit about how you’re seeing the rise of these really sophisticated chat bots and AI?

ezra klein

Yeah, so if people aren’t following the sort of chat bot world, so what happened is Open AI, which is this AI creating organization, meant to create AI for good and filled with people worried about as effects, but they keep creating stronger and stronger AIs. It’s a bit of a weird situation over there.

Funny how that happens, yeah.

ezra klein

But they created this chat bot based on a language model they have called GPT 3. And what GPT 3 is it’s trained on a huge amount of human language. And based on everything it has read and absorbed, it simply predicts the next word in the sentence that it should say back to you in response to a query. What Chat GPT does is allow you to ask those queries in a very sort of straightforward way and chat back and forth with the system. And so it just turns out if you ask it all kinds of things, it’ll give you really convincingly mediocre text. And I think it’s really telling that what people keep doing is basically, if you’ve watched what is filled up on social media or on Chat GPT, it’s not things you actually ask the system straightforwardly, where you’re getting an informative answer. It is, you ask a straightforward question and also ask for an interesting stylistic twist on it. So, tell me about Thomas Schelling’s theories of nuclear deterrence, but in the style of a Taylor Swift song. Write me something about lost socks, but in the style of the Declaration of Independence. And I do think there’s a tell to the fact that everything has that form right now because what Chat GPT can tell you informationally is very, very, very weak. It is surprisingly OK sometimes, but it doesn’t know what is true and what is not. It’s simply a predictive text bot. And as such, it’s constantly hallucinating weird answers to questions, just based on its own predictive algorithms. So, I mean, people have done things like asking it to explain why it’s good to have crushed up porcelain in your breakfast cereal. And it’ll give you a sort of answer that reads like it knows something about why that’s good, but of course, it doesn’t. It’s just doing exactly what you told it to do. I’m somebody who is very interested in AI. We’ve done a number of AI shows so far on this podcast. We will do more, I am certain. And I found Chat GPT to be very, very unnerving, not because I think it will take over and not because I think it’s bad or good, but you’re just seeing the cost of creating not particularly true content. But they can be stylistically anything you want it to be, falling to zero. And for some people, that’ll be great. I mean, you can imagine good ways this could be deployed. I mean, you’re not that literate, or you have kind of English as a second language, and you run a home repair business. And this will help you maybe write your emails to your clients in a better way. You can imagine ways this could be very helpful to somebody. You can also imagine what the information wars of the future are going to look like, what bots are going to look like. You can imagine how hard it’s going to be to know if a student paper is true. I think the idea that the cost of creating mediocre content with no intrinsic truth value is falling to zero and the cost of creating things that are truthful is, if anything, going up, is very worrying. Then there’s a bunch of other things that have come out this year in the AI world. The one that actually worries or impresses or something me the most is a system that Meta created, Meta, the sort of new name of Facebook. And their system will play diplomacy, which is a game where you’re in conversation with other players, trying to kind of trick them or convince them or cajole them or seduce them into making moves that allow you to make moves in this game to sort of win this game of imagined territorial acquisition. And they were able to create a bot that was able to play in the top 10 percent of players. And more than that, people didn’t know, usually, that they were playing against an AI bot. So here, you have an AI that is able to be given a goal, right? Win the game diplomacy. And is able to communicate with human beings in a way where they don’t know it’s an AI, and is able to convince them and deceive them and cajole them into doing the things the AI needs them to do to achieve this other goal. That, to me, is impressive and concerning, right? That’s a quite remarkable system that now you have these two things together. You can tell an AI to do something, or the AI can have a goal — help me get elected to Congress. That’s probably too complicated for it. But one day, it won’t be. And the AI is good at manipulating people to try to do that. Now, diplomacy, again, there are rules in it. It’s less complicated than the entirety of the world. But that gets to the other piece of all this, which is it’s easy to look at these things and say, OK, this one still has these drawbacks, these problems, these flaws. But you have to recognize when you’re looking at them that we’re living in exponential time. By the time you’re watching the demo of any one of these systems, the people behind it are on to the next one. And the next one is getting so much better so quickly than whatever we have right now. I mean, the learning curve on them, as computing power comes down, as the amount of data we have increases, the learning curve behind them is so unbelievably remarkable. These systems are so much better than what we had four years ago that you never know where we truly are. So the question isn’t just how good is chat bot today or how good is the Meta system today, but how good is the thing we’re going to see next year or in five years, and what will it mean for it to be that good. And the interesting thing is we have no idea whatsoever. And we have this incredibly weird now arms race, where you have these systems that what they can do is incredible. But what they can understand is nothing, right? They can do so much, but they don’t know why they’re doing it. They might have a goal. They might have a system. But that thing for many of us, we sit there and be like, well, what is happening here? Like, what if the meaning of the thing I am doing doesn’t exist at all? So you’re either hoping that whoever is using them will have good ethics, or who’s using them is going to know exactly how to tell them to do the right thing and not allow them to make a mistake. This is weird, and it’s scary. Whether or not you believe they can destroy the entire world, I don’t think you even need to believe that to believe that a lot of damage could be done. And also, even if you don’t believe they’re going to get so much more powerful than they are now, I don’t know. You imagine what social media has done with kind of learning our algorithmic preferences and convincing human beings where we have to actually create content and make videos and so on to cater to whatever the algorithm wants. And now you turn loose these computers that can absorb our algorithmic preferences directly and just create completely functionally infinite quantities of content to better figure out what we want and then keep perfecting it. And the ability to grab our attention and confuse us and distract us and just anything has become so high and is becoming so much higher. And we have so few defenses against it, and we’ve shown so little immunity to this kind of thing already in social media that I’m very unnerved. I’m seeing actually a lot less in terms of this stuff being useful and a lot more in terms of it being dangerous than I was hoping to at this point. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Let’s go back to your listeners and this idea that you’ve raised a couple of times in here about reflection and getting out of these processes and away from AI and away from the information overload and from our distracted attention and from you mentioned phones on the line at the store. So Robin Salzberg asks a question along these lines where she’s wondering whether what your end of year reflection process looks like, whether you have one. Do you do some kind of looking back assessment at the whole year, what that entails?

ezra klein

I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody to know that I do. A lot of it is sitting in a room with my best friend, drinking whiskey and talking about our years. So I’m going to keep those conversations to ourselves. But the thing I try to do is, I kind of journal throughout the year. And I also, at the beginning of each year, sort of write through the year and tend to have not always resolutions, but also kind of values that I want to align towards, and try to think about how I did on that, and try to think of those for the next year, which I try to boil down to a couple of words so that I’m not sitting there with these long — it’s not about changing my weight or something. It’s more about, am I living in alignment with my values? I’ll say, because it will come up on the show quite shortly, actually, that my big resolution for this year is to build a Shabbat practice that I actually follow because — and it’s, I think, recognizable if you’ve been following along with even this conversation, but things like the Maryanne Wolf conversation and others, that I think that my own just constant immersion in digital content and kind of productivity and scheduling and to-do lists, that I think I’d be a better and healthier person if it was routine within the rhythm of my own life that I lived in a different kind of time, where there was nothing to get done, and I couldn’t get anything done. And there wasn’t things to follow on my phone and computer because I couldn’t do it, and that I had to cultivate a different style of attention and a different way of occupying that attention because that was what that time was about. I’m an unbelievably big fan of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book, “The Sabbath,” which I’ve probably read a dozen times, and Judith Shulevitz’s book, “The Sabbath World,” I think it’s called. And both of those are very much in my head right now. And so there are reasons I have this particular goal. But this is, for me, a kind of way of instantiating, trying to live in a deeper alignment. I would like it to be normal that I figure out a way to exist, as opposed to create and do. And there is a pretty deep religious ritual in my own tradition about that. And I don’t think I’m going to become shomer Shabbos and not have lights and so on. But I am trying to figure out how to be in a community that supports that and have rules that I do treat as quite unbreakable, even if they’re not going to be the traditional kind of Orthodox Jewish Shabbat rules, and, yeah, just kind of have a very real practice there, and so in a way that is probably a little bit paradoxical or ironic because it’s, in a way, turning this exploration into work. But I am planning a podcast on it because I am thinking about this, and I do think it’s a very beautiful practice with a lot intellectually and practically to offer in people’s lives. And I’ve been wanting to explore it a lot more. I think it’s easy enough to just talk about how things are bad or too much or a problem, but there’s actually quite deep wisdom traditions that have thought about this before. And it’s good sometimes not to feel like you have to invent everything from scratch.

On a superficial level, as a person who sometimes hears from you on Saturday, I encourage you deeply to embrace —

ezra klein

You need to give me those edits a little earlier, man.

Yeah, exactly. Embrace that. Embrace that Sabbath feeling. Last time I was on the show, I asked you to recommend some podcasts. And by the way, I’ll mention that I have, in fact, been listening to the Economist’s podcast on Xi Jinping, the prince, which is, in fact, quite fascinating. So thanks for that. But a couple of your listeners asked questions about that. So I’m going to close out with those. Let’s start with Matthew Dreiling, who wondered if you had recommendations for cultural things that you’re anticipating next year, but let’s just extend that also to just anything you’re really immersed in. I’m not sure how much your listeners know that you’re a heavy music listener. So maybe start there and actually some — you’re interested in it like an ambient sound world that fits in a little bit with what we were just talking about in terms of Shabbat. So could you talk a little bit about things you’ve been listening to that you really liked?

ezra klein

I never thought about that, about there being a connection between my weird, ambient soundscapes and Shabbat. Yeah, I’ll talk about music. I’d love to talk about music. So one of the great — people who’ve been listening to the show for a long time may have heard me back years ago, I would say, I have terrible taste in music and movies and TV. And that may still be true for specifically movies, but I actually really love the music I’ve been listening to in recent years. I’ve gotten much more into sort of — it actually sort of came out of the show. People might have heard me on with Tyler Cowen, talking to him about trying to appreciate classical music, which I tried very hard to do and never really connected for me. And I have theories about why that might be, but it never did. But it led me to sort of modern classical compositions or sort of more modern compositions, Steve Reich and Caroline Shaw and Philip Glass and a lot of modern ambient and “Promises,” which is a new piece by Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders. And I’ve really, really loved that world of music, particularly over this last year. I was saying a minute ago that I try to boil down my hopes for the year, my values into single words. And one of mine for this year is beauty. I think I’ve done a much better job connecting to and appreciating beauty recently in nature and in culture. And I want to really lean in that direction this year. So some stuff I’ve really loved, one of my big finds of the year has been the music of Julianna Barwick. If people know her, she does these really ethereal, almost devotional, they sound to me, layered vocal work. Her most recent album was called “Healing is a Miracle.” She also has this very beautiful album called “Nepenthe.” But I just really have come to love her work. There’s a guy named Peter Gregson, who is a cellist, I think it is, or a violinist. He’s just done a bunch of really cool sort of reinterpretations, but also kind of ambient work. So he’s got this album of Bach reinterpretations called “The Cello Suites.” But he’s also got these series of quartets. And I really love one called “Warmth” that he did that I’ve listened to just a ton this year. So then I’ll also just mention two more. So I really have liked a lot of Olafur Arnalds’s work this year. And he’s got this sort of album and then a piano version of that album called “Some Kind of Peace,” which is really good. And then in a whole other soundscape range, like much more kind of upbeat and rich production, there’s an artist called The Range, and he brought out an album called “Mercury,” which was, according to my streaming platform, my most listened to album of the year, which is just great and really cool. And he kind of builds these insane productions around fragments and samples. And I really enjoyed his work. So I think, yeah, that’s been, for me, that’s been the great joy. And I’ve managed so far to not turn my music into work. And so it has maintained a certain —

Sorry.

ezra klein

A certain purity for me.

What was his name?

ezra klein

Yeah, which has been nice. But I hope if people follow up on any of that, and we’ll put those in the show description, that they get to enjoy them as much as I have.

OK, let me ask you one last question that’s along these lines. And I’m going to combine two questions, one from Abe and one from Maritza Ruiz-Kim. It actually kills me even to say this out loud, but I will. Abe wants to know whether books will still be relevant in five years. He doesn’t mean reading as a source of information, right? He means specifically the thing as he describes it that is over 100 pages, mostly text, and seldom updated after its release. But I want to combine that with Maritza’s question, which is whether there are children’s picture books — and you’ll see why this is all connected in a second — that are your favorites to read to your two sons. And do your kids like those books as much as you do?

ezra klein

Yes, books will still be a thing in five years. I’ve really no fear about that.

Phew.

ezra klein

And it’s actually interesting that we’ve had a total leveling out of ebooks. I do read a lot on my Kindle, but most people don’t. The Kindle mainly survives because a lot of people like getting romance novels on it, which is a kind of dynamic that I don’t think people initially expected. The idea that ebooks would be really different than other books, that they would be — I think it was implicit in the question there that they would be updated or be richer in some way is not proven true. Books are just kind of books, and they give you a version you can download to your Kindle. But books have not been disrupted at all and for reasons people heard in the Maryann Wolf conversation, there are certain things about paper reading that are not replicable, at least right now, digitally. And so, yeah, I have no concern about whether or not we’re still going to see books in a couple of years. In terms of children’s books, which listeners may remember we started out at The Times asking guests for children’s books, and then I moved it back to normal books. So first know the books I love reading to my sons — I mean my one-year-old doesn’t have a huge amount of discernment yet, but they’re not the ones they want me to read to them.

So you say, yeah.

ezra klein

Yeah, but I will name a couple that have moved me recently. So, one, I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but “Happy Birthday to You” by Dr. Seuss is such an unbelievable masterpiece of language. And I love reading it. I love the tongue twist of it. It’s so fun. If you’ve never read “Happy Birthday to You” by Seuss, I mean, it’s just a complete classic. Then there’s this book that I just read for the first time at a friend of mine’s house called “The Rabbit Listened.” And I honest to God almost cried at the end of it. It is such a beautiful book. It’s by Cori Doerrfeld. I might have probably spelled her name wrong, D-O-E-R-R-F-E-L-D. But “The Rabbit Listened.” And it’s one of those books that 100 percent is going over the head of your kid, but it’s good for them, too. And for you, it is so unbelievably profound and such a reminder to probably do something very important in your life differently than you do it right now. I don’t know. I almost get emotional just talking about it. And I don’t know. I might have recommended it some other point. But I really enjoy this book by Oliver Jeffers, “Here We Are, Notes for Living on Planet Earth,” which is in terms of a book that has a real sense of wonder to it and a sense of how strange it is to be on this planet, and but also it’s fun and it’s fun for my son, and we’ve read it dozens and dozens of times. It’s just completely great. And the illustrations are great, and the whole thing is great. And then maybe I’ll do one more. I really loved “The Pout-Pout Fish” by Deborah Diesen. It’s another book where the language is just — it’s so delightful and delicious. It’s so fun in your mouth. But also, some of these books are very therapeutic. It’s a pretty interesting book, which is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in my own life, about how some problems can’t really be solved by talking about them endlessly because you’re too trapped in your own stories. Sometimes you just need a somatic thunderbolt to some experiential moment that changes your whole view of the situation about yourself. I’ve seen this with myself. I’ve become more skeptical of words, despite being somebody who primarily works with them in my life. But in my personal life, I’ve become a little bit skeptical of my ability to get out of things for words. I’m too good at telling stories, I believe. And that wisdom was already there in “The Pout-Pout Fish” by Deborah Diesen. And upon reading it, it at least helped me see that a little bit more clearly.

Yeah, well, and fooling yourself, right, with words is a problem that everybody who does what we do, as you mentioned earlier, when you were talking about AI that we might have to depend on their ethics. And I’m here to tell you, if we’re depending on their ethics, we’re in trouble. What I really missed about — now, my kids are in their 20s, but what I really missed about it actually is returning to poetry and rhyme at night, right? I mean, there’s so many of the lines just pop up in my head, right? An ambassador doesn’t have to pay rent, but he has to go wherever he is sent, which is from one of the “Madeleine” books.

ezra klein

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, one of the worst things about SARS-CoV-2 was that it was so new: The world lacked immunity, treatments, and vaccines. Tests were hard to come by too, making diagnosis a pain—except when it wasn’t. Sometimes, the symptoms of COVID got so odd, so off-book, that telling SARS-CoV-2 from other viruses became “kind of a slam dunk,” says Summer Chavez, an emergency physician at the University of Houston. Patients would turn up with the standard-issue signs of respiratory illness—fever, coughing, and the like—but also less expected ones, such as rashes, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and loss of taste or smell. A strange new virus was colliding with people’s bodies in such unusual ways that it couldn’t help but stand out.Now, nearly three years into the crisis, the virus is more familiar, and its symptoms are too. Put three sick people in the same room this winter—one with COVID, another with a common cold, and the third with the flu—and “it’s way harder to tell the difference,” Chavez told me. Today’s most common COVID symptoms are mundane: sore throat, runny nose, congestion, sneezing, coughing, headache. And several of the wonkier ones that once hogged headlines have become rare. More people are weathering their infections with their taste and smell intact; many can no longer remember when they last considered the scourge of “COVID toes.” Even fever, a former COVID classic, no longer cracks the top-20 list from the ZOE Health Study, a long-standing symptom-tracking project based in the United Kingdom, according to Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London who heads the project. Longer, weirder, more serious illness still manifests, but for most people, SARS-CoV-2’s symptoms are getting “pretty close to other viruses’, and I think that’s reassuring,” Spector told me. “We are moving toward a cold-like illness.”That trajectory has been forecast by many experts since the pandemic’s early days. Growing immunity against the coronavirus, repeatedly reinforced by vaccines and infections, could eventually tame COVID into a sickness as trifling as the common cold or, at worst, one on par with the seasonal flu. The severity of COVID will continue to be tempered by widespread immunity, or so this thinking goes, like a curve bending toward an asymptote of mildness. A glance at the landscape of American immunity suggests that such a plateau could be near: Hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. have been vaccinated multiple times, some even quite recently with a bivalent shot; many have now logged second, third, and fourth infections with the virus. Maybe, just maybe, we’re nearing the level of cumulative exposure at which COVID gets permanently more chill. Then again? Maybe not—and maybe never.[Read: What does it mean to care about COVID anymore?]The recent trajectory of COVID, at least, has been peppered with positive signs. On average, symptoms have migrated higher up the airway, sparing several vulnerable organs below; disease has gotten shorter and milder, and rates of long COVID seem to be falling a bit. Many of these changes roughly coincided with the arrival of Omicron in the fall of 2021, and part of the shift is likely attributable to the virus itself: On the whole, Omicron and its offshoots seem to prefer infecting cells in the nose and throat over those in the lungs. But experts told me the accumulation of immune defenses that preceded and then accompanied that variant’s spread are almost certainly doing more of the work. Vaccination and prior infection can both lay down protections that help corral the virus near the nose and mouth, preventing it from spreading to tissues elsewhere. “Disease is really going to differ based on the compartment that’s primarily infected,” says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As SARS-CoV-2 has found a tighter anatomical niche, our bodies have become better at cornering it.With the virus largely getting relegated to smaller portions of the body, the pathogen is also purged from the airway faster and may be less likely to be passed to someone else. On the individual level, a sickness that might have once unfurled into pneumonia now gets subdued into barely perceptible sniffles and presents less risk to others; on the population scale, rates of infection, hospitalization, and death go down.This is how things usually go with respiratory viruses. Repeat tussles with RSV tend to get progressively milder; post-vaccination flu is usually less severe. The few people who catch measles after getting their shots are less likely to transmit the virus, and they tend to experience such a trivial course of sickness that their disease is referred to by a different name, “modified” measles, says Diane Griffin, a virologist and an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University.It’s good news that the median case of COVID diminished in severity and duration around the turn of 2022, but it’s a bit more sobering to consider that there hasn’t been a comparably major softening of symptoms in the months since. The full range of disease outcomes—from silent infection all the way to long-term disability, serious disease, and death—remains in play as well, for now and the foreseeable future, Schultz-Cherry told me. Vaccination history and immunocompromising conditions can influence where someone falls on that spectrum. So too can age as well as other factors such as sex, genetics, underlying medical conditions, and even the dose of incoming virus, says Patricia García, a global-health expert at the University of Washington.New antibody-dodging viral variants could still show up to cause more severe disease even among the young and healthy, as occasionally happens with the flu. The BA.2 subvariant of Omicron, which is more immune-evasive than its predecessor BA.1, seemed to accumulate more quickly in the airway, and it sparked more numerous and somewhat gnarlier symptoms. Data on more recent Omicron subvariants are still being gathered, but Shruti Mehta, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, says she’s seen some hints that certain gastrointestinal symptoms, such as vomiting, might be making a small comeback.[Read: Will we get Omicron’d again?]All of this leaves the road ahead rather muddy. If COVID will be tamed one day into a common cold, that future definitely hasn’t been realized yet, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health. SARS-CoV-2 still seems to spread more efficiently and more quickly than a cold, and it’s more likely to trigger severe disease or long-term illness. Still, previous pandemics could contain clues about what happens next. Each of the past century’s flu pandemics led to a surge in mortality that wobbled back to baseline after about two to seven years, Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me. But SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a flu virus; it won’t necessarily play by the same epidemiological rules or hew to a comparable timeline. Even with flu, there’s no magic number of shots or past infections that’s known to mollify disease—“and I think we know even less about how you build up immunity to coronaviruses,” Gordon said.The timing of when and how those defenses manifest could matter too. Almost everyone has been infected by the flu or at least gotten a flu shot by the time they reach grade school; SARS-CoV-2 and COVID vaccines, meanwhile, arrived so recently that most of the world’s population met them in adulthood, when the immune system might be less malleable. These later-in-life encounters could make it tougher for the global population to reach its severity asymptote. If that’s the case, we’ll be in COVID limbo for another generation or two, until most living humans are those who grew up with this coronavirus in their midst.COVID may yet stabilize at something worse than a nuisance. “I had really thought previously it would be closer to common-cold coronaviruses,” Gordon told me. But severity hasn’t declined quite as dramatically as she’d initially hoped. In Nicaragua, where Gordon has been running studies for years, vaccinated cohorts of people have endured second and third infections with SARS-CoV-2 that have been, to her disappointment, “still more severe than influenza,” she told me. Even if that eventually flips, should the coronavirus continue to transmit this aggressively year-round, it could still end up taking more lives than the flu does—as is the case now.Wherever, whenever a severity plateau is reached, Gordon told me that our arrival to it can be confirmed only in hindsight, “once we look back and say, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s been about the same for the last five years.’” But the data necessary to make that call are getting harder to collect as public interest in the virus craters and research efforts to monitor COVID’s shifting symptoms hit roadblocks. The ZOE Health Study lost its government funding earlier this year, and its COVID-symptom app, which engaged some 2.4 million regular users at its peak, now has just 400,000—some of whom may have signed up to take advantage of newer features for tracking diet, sleep, exercise, and mood. “I think people just said, ‘I need to move on,’” Spector told me.Mehta, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, has encountered similar hurdles in her COVID research. At the height of the Omicron wave, when Mehta and her colleagues were trying to find people for their community studies, their rosters would immediately fill up past capacity. “Now we’re out there for weeks” and still not hitting the mark, she told me. Even weekly enrollment for their long-COVID study has declined. Sign-ups do increase when cases rise—but they drop off especially quickly as waves ebb. Perhaps, in the view of some potential study volunteers, COVID has, ironically, become like a common cold, and is thus no longer worth their time.For now, researchers don’t know whether we’re nearing the COVID-severity plateau, and they’re worried it will get only more difficult to tell. Maybe it’s for the best if the mildness asymptote is a ways off. In the U.S. and elsewhere, subvariants are still swirling, bivalent-shot uptake is still stalling, and hospitalizations are once more creeping upward as SARS-CoV-2 plays human musical chairs with RSV and flu. Abroad, inequities in vaccine access and quality—and a zero-COVID policy in China that stuck around too long—have left gaping immunity gaps. To settle into symptom stasis with this many daily deaths, this many off-season waves, this much long COVID, and this pace of viral evolution would be grim. “I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” Gordon told me. “I hope we’re not there yet.”

In the classic Japanese film Rashomon, four people retell the same incident in different and sometimes contradictory ways. The debate about the Twitter Files—documents from and Slack conversations within the social-media platform now owned by Elon Musk—reminds me of that movie. This month, the journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and the author Michael Shellenberger have posted tweet threads describing the internal debates over banning the sharing of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, throttling the circulation of certain posts and accounts, and taking down then-President Donald Trump’s account after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Depending on your perspective, you might conclude that suspending Trump was an essential safety measure, a big scandal, or utterly inconsequential.“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Musk declared on Twitter earlier this year, a week after the company’s board accepted his buyout offer. And he’s right that transparency about content moderation—that is, the screening of user-generated posts to ensure that they meet community standards—is the only thing that can deliver legitimacy for and repair trust in a platform that has enormous influence over the political discourse. Unfortunately, the Twitter Files offer little insight into how important moderation decisions are made. Individual anecdotes—particularly those involving high-stakes outlier decisions, such as how to handle a president whose supporters try to keep his successor’s election from being certified—are interesting but reveal little about how platforms operate day in and day out. And that is information that the public needs to know.   [Conor Friedersdorf: What should Twitter forbid? Be specific.]Twitter’s most recent transparency report, published in July, shows that it took action on 4.3 million accounts in the second half of 2021 and removed 5.1 million pieces of content. You could cherry-pick a few of those decisions to fit almost any ideological narrative. Right-wing commentators aren’t the only people complaining about platforms’ actions. Some Black and LGBTQ social-media users have also objected that they’re being unfairly moderated, as automated tools take down posts containing words and phrases deemed offensive. Distrust of Big Tech’s power is universal.Content moderation is sometimes seen as a binary: Posts and even entire accounts are either left up or taken down. But social-media platforms have developed a range of tools; many platforms use a framework akin to what Facebook calls “Remove, Reduce, Inform.” Remove is what it sounds like. Inform often involves applying a label or interstitial to show context or a fact-check alongside the content. At the moment, the most contentious tool is reduce, which consists of downranking content so that fewer people see it. Under the reduce option, accounts or posts that are on the verge of violating site policies stay up, but curation algorithms push them into the feeds of fewer people; to see the so-called borderline content, you have to proactively visit the originating user’s page. Critics of downranking dismiss it as a sly form of censorship; users who are “shadow-banned,” they argue, are denied an audience without their knowing about it.The current controversy is ironic because downranking emerged as an alternative to more stringent takedowns. As an enforcement option for borderline posts and accounts, reduce supports the premise of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach”—a phrase that my colleague Aza Raskin and I introduced years back to articulate a potential balance between maintaining the free expression of posting and assuaging platform concerns around the viral amplification of things that might be harmful. Musk now uses this same phrase to describe his own vision for moderation. On today’s centralized social-media services, content is always ranked in some way, and platforms shape what their users see. But what, exactly, is denied reach? How are the platforms defining harm? Has Twitter expanded the pool of posts and accounts that it counts as borderline? Has the company shown political bias in the enforcement of the policy—and if so, how will that be minimized going forward? These are fair questions.Journalists and academic researchers shouldn’t have to base their evaluations solely on anecdotes. Twitter could easily provide systematic information about its practices. In her Twitter Files thread about shadow banning, Weiss shared screenshots, provided by Ella Irwin, the company’s new head of trust and safety, of a moderation interface that allows employees to tag specific accounts in ways—“trends blacklist,” “search blacklist”—that likely limit circulation of their tweets. (The precise effects of those and other tags remain unclear.)Weiss’s reporting focused on how the company handled high-profile accounts, such as Libs of TikTok, that are popular among American conservatives. However, it raised a lot of interesting questions about the platform more generally. To understand the systemic enforcement of platform policies, researchers, including my team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, would like to see statistics on, for instance, how many accounts have received the “trends blacklist” and “search blacklist” tags. Even if the usernames of individual accounts are obscured for privacy, a report detailing the follower counts and presumed home country of tagged accounts might reveal more about how the platform is exercising its content-moderation power than individual anecdotes. (Twitter is a global platform; while its handling of Libs of TikTok is certainly interesting, other accounts, such as those of many government officials and leaders of political movements, have greater global influence).[Read: Elon Musk’s Twitter Files are bait]Because anecdotal examples do help make abstract dynamics clearer to the public, the Twitter Files authors should seek out and share more details about precisely why the high-profile and somewhat controversial accounts they highlighted were subject to specific actions. Which tweet or tweets prompted Twitter employees to put the right-wing talk-show host Dan Bongino on the search blacklist? Which specific policy justified that decision? Social-media companies rarely explain their deliberations. To my knowledge, Twitter has never granted academic researchers the level of access that it gave these journalists, and information they obtain might help other researchers know what information to look for and request in the future.Some commentators, particularly on the left, have dismissed the Twitter Files reporting because they disagree with the authors politically. Unfortunately, in an information environment fragmented into bespoke realities, the narrator matters. To discredit a given report, partisans can tell themselves that the writer or analyst is too right wing or too left wing—I’ve been accused of both—to possibly be intellectually honest; they once appeared on a panel, podcast, or conference schedule with somebody vaguely associated with the enemy. There is something unpalatable about them, and therefore their findings can be ignored.This is all the more reason for speech platforms, given their enormous influence, to subject their content-moderation data to scrutiny from multiple teams. Platforms have generally been secretive about how they moderate content, in part to prevent people from gaming the rules. If Twitter laid out the specific phrases that might trigger a downranking, for example, accounts could simply avoid those terms; when platforms attempted to squelch misleading health claims about the coronavirus pandemic, some users tried to evade detection through creative spellings such as “c0vid” and “♈ax.” But now the secrecy itself is useful to bad-faith actors. Indeed, when the Twitter Files on Hunter Biden’s laptop did not reveal a vast collusion in which Twitter was taking orders from the FBI (or any other branch of government), influencers in the Pizzagate Cinematic Universe seized on the idea that Jim Baker, a former FBI lawyer who served as a deputy general counsel at Twitter from June 2020 until last week, had personally and deliberately compromised the file handoff to media, removing the “evidence” that would have proved their theory.The attempt to cast any form of moderation—even the addition of a mere label to add context to a controversial claim—as egregious and tyrannical censorship has been a deliberate strategy for some time now, one that Trump himself found highly effective for perpetuating and monetizing grievance among his base. Some users with few followers became convinced that they had been shadow-banned for their ideological beliefs, even when in all likelihood platforms had taken no action against them. The most plausible explanation is that their content simply wasn’t popular or salient, so the platform did not distribute it into their followers’ feeds. However, transparency might go a long way toward addressing this suspicion; last week, Instagram announced a tool by which creators can check whether their content has been deemed ineligible for recommendation, and appeal if they felt the platform made a bad call.[Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’]The feeling that tech companies are both intrusive and opaque has prompted vows, from politicians across the political spectrum, to get tough on the industry—promises that somehow still have not translated into any kind of tangible action or regulation in the United States. One problem is that the left and the right disagree about which kinds of content-moderation decisions are the problem. But after years of being constrained only by their own capabilities, American tech companies are now on track to be regulated by the European Union, where new rules will enforce content restrictions, safety standards, and transparency reporting.The United States can do better. Researchers have been seeking access to platform data about algorithmic recommendations, curation, and moderation for quite some time now. Far more people than a handful of well-known writers should have access to investigate the power these companies wield. If Congress wants to understand how platforms moderate—a question that is of interest to every political party—members should pass the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, or a similar legislative proposal, with the goal of providing researchers and the public with access to certain types of platform data while still protecting regular users’ privacy. Indeed, by adopting the law, which would enable multiple research teams from across the political spectrum to track platforms’ operations more closely, congressional leaders can help pull the public out of the current cycle of distrust. And if Congress remains gridlocked, Musk and Twitter can still provide an example. As my colleague Alex Stamos suggested, Twitter’s current leadership could commit to releasing all communications by global political actors related to content moderation; requests and demands by governments could go all into a public database similar to Lumen, which tracks requests to remove material under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.The Twitter Files thus far are a missed opportunity. To settle scores with Twitter’s previous leaders, the platform’s new owner is pointing to niche examples of arguable excesses and missteps, possibly creating far more distrust in the process. And yet there is a real need for public understanding of how platform moderation works, and visibility into how enforcement matches up against policy. We can move toward genuine transparency—and, hopefully, toward a future in which people can see the same facts in similar ways.

As Congress ends its first post-Trump term, the biggest political question hanging over America is this: When will the GOP finally reach its anti-Trump tipping point--when a majority of Republican lawmakers disavow him?

Again and again, it looks like the tipping point is near but the GOP remains under Trump's thumb.

What about last month's dinner at Mar-a-Lago, with Ye, formerly Kanye West, the man whose fame as a rapper has been dwarfed by his antisemitic and racist declarations, along with infamous Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes?

It looks like the tipping point is near but the GOP remains under Trump's thumb.

It didn't come near tipping the scales.

What about Trump's December 3 declaration that the "Massive Fraud" of the 2020 election would allow for the Constitution to be "terminated?"

Nope.

Both events caused grumbling among a few Republican lawmakers but most avoided criticizing Trump (as they've avoided it in the past--as they avoided doing so the moment the furor over January 6 had died down) for fear of his wrath.

But what's to fear, now? Didn't the midterms reveal how weak he is?

After all, most of his endorsees flamed out, including celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Tim Michels in Wisconsin, Blake Masters in Arizona, Adam Laxalt and Kari Lake also in Arizona, and Herschel Walker in Georgia. (Walker's campaign even asked Trump to stay away in the final weeks.)

Many election-deniers hit the skids. Michigan's legislature swung to the Democrats for the first time since the 1980s.

Democrats defied almost all doomsday prophesies as well as the historic pattern of presidents losing midterms--and why? In large part because so many voters fear and loathe the former president. Nearly as many viewed the midterms as a referendum on Trump as who saw it as a referendum on Joe Biden. As Mitch McConnell explained, voters "were frightened" by the Trump-induced GOP rhetoric, "and so they pulled back."

And it's only going to get worse for Trump, right?

His business has been found guilty of criminal fraud. Investigators have found more classified documents in a storage unit near Mar-a-Lago. A criminal case is pending in Georgia. The January 6 committee is likely to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, whose special counsel is already building a criminal case against him. Several leaders of the January 6 attack have already been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Even the kingpins of the GOP, including the rightwing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, have switched their allegiance away from him--to Florida governor Ron DeSantis or Ted Cruz or another GOP hopeful.

So why hasn't the Republican Party as a whole tipped? Why aren't almost all Republican lawmakers publicly disavowing the former sociopath-in-chief?

In two words: The base.

Utah's Republican senator Mitt Romney, no friend of Trump, put it bluntly last week:

"I think we've got, I don't know, 12 people or more that would like to be president, that are thinking of running in 2024. If President Trump continues in his campaign, I'm not sure any one of them can make it through and beat him. He's got such a strong base of, I don't know, 30% or 40 % of the Republican voters, or maybe more, it's going to be hard to knock him off as our nominee."

That's the problem in a nutshell, folks.

It's not so much the size of Trump's base. Even 40 percent of Republican voters is a relatively small group nationwide, especially considering that fewer than 30 percent of all voters are registered Republicans.

It's also the intensity and tenacity of their support, which gives them effective control over the Republican Party. They worship him. They won't budge.

But until they budge, most Republican lawmakers won't budge either (Romney and Liz Cheney being notable exceptions, and we know what happened to her).

The problem isn't some highfalutin moral issue, such as Republican lawmakers putting their party over their country. It's something far more prosaic. They want to keep their jobs.

Which means the GOP continues to rot as a political party, as a governing institution, and as a moral entity. That may be good for Democrats in 2024, but in the larger sense it's bad for us all.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat should be done about fentanyl? Has it affected your family or community?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteIn The Washington Post, a series of articles on fentanyl includes a lot of stellar international reporting and the striking claim that the drug “is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49.”But I am suspicious of the newspaper’s framing. Here is how one article began:
During the past seven years, as soaring quantities of fentanyl flooded into the United States, strategic blunders and cascading mistakes by successive U.S. administrations allowed the most lethal drug crisis in American history to become significantly worse, a Washington Post investigation has found.
Presidents from both parties failed to take effective action in the face of one of the most urgent threats to the nation’s security, one that claims more lives each year than car accidents, suicides or gun violence … The Drug Enforcement Administration, the country’s premier anti-narcotics agency, stumbled through a series of missteps as it confronted the biggest challenge in its 50-year history. The agency was slow to respond as Mexican cartels supplanted Chinese producers, creating a massive illicit pharmaceutical industry that is now producing more fentanyl than ever. The Department of Homeland Security, whose agencies are responsible for detecting illegal drugs at the nation’s borders, failed to ramp up scanning and inspection technology at official crossings, instead channeling $11 billion toward the construction of a border wall that does little to stop fentanyl traffickers.
Implicit here is the notion that waging the drug war more aggressively and more effectively could have stopped the surge of fentanyl into the country and the overdose deaths that followed. What if, instead, today’s surge in fentanyl deaths is a by-product of decades of aggressively waging the War on Drugs? Absent prohibition, it seems unlikely that many would choose a drug so powerful that even a tiny amount can kill you. But when drugs are illegal, a narcotic that can get you high even in tiny amounts is very useful, because it is easier to smuggle and to hide.According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, “seizures of fentanyl sourced from China average less than one kilogram in weight, and often test above 90 percent concentration of pure fentanyl.” Ramping up scanning at the border is never going to stop enough fentanyl to solve the problem.Meanwhile, in Tijuana “there have been 1,900 homicides here this year so far, making it the deadliest city in Mexico,” the Post reports. This is largely due to the drug cartels that prohibition enriches. “Tijuana has long been a major transit point for illicit goods into the United States: alcohol during Prohibition, waves of marijuana and cocaine after that. Now, it is a city of fentanyl. It is the most prolific trafficking hub into the United States for the drug and, increasingly, a city of users.” Why continue a drug-prohibition policy that fuels violence while failing to prevent deadly new synthetic drugs and massive surges of overdoses in multiple countries?[Read: What does a good health-care system look like?]An Occasion to CelebrateMegan McArdle knows that we’re still a long way off from getting abundant cheap energy from nuclear fusion. Still, she argues, a net energy gain from a fusion reaction is worth celebrating:
You are literally made of stardust. Most of the atoms in your body were forged in the core of some ancient sun, as lighter elements fused into heavier ones; you are the vicarious survivor of star fire and supernovas. Now your species is making stars — tiny ones to be sure, and very ephemeral, but nonetheless we are inching toward mastering the very process that made our world. This shift from product to producer would be wondrous even if it didn’t hold out hope for an energy revolution as profound as the shift from horsepower to fossil fuels. I won’t try to sketch out how much steady, reliable, indefinitely renewable clean energy could transform society. I couldn’t possibly predict, any more than the 18th-century scholars fiddling with Leyden jars could have foretold ice cream cakes and social media influencers. But the energy they ultimately unleashed — along with their fellow tinkerers on steam engines — made possible humanity’s greatest period of flourishing.
… We went from a world where the average person lived at subsistence level and half of children died before reaching adulthood to one where most children survive to their 15th birthdays and end up on average healthier, better fed, more lavishly entertained and more comfortable than a medieval king. Obviously, the journey from poverty to abundance was fueled by many technological breakthroughs, but all of it — from drug development to fiber-optic lines to water treatment plants — was possible only because a new source of power delivered many times what human or animal muscle could manage. As Andrew McAfee points out in his book “More From Less,” from 1800 to 1970, the United States’ gross domestic product and its energy consumption rose in near lockstep. They eventually decoupled, in part because the costs of burning hydrocarbons forced us to look for ways to economize. But what if we didn’t have to economize?
May we live to find out.Mere Discovery Is OverratedMy colleague Derek Thompson points out that although Americans tend to celebrate inventors and innovators, their eureka moments don’t matter much when their advances are not implemented.He writes:
The U.S. has more Nobel Prizes for science than the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the deployment and widespread adoption of technology—even technology that we invented, even technology that’s not so new anymore—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling. Americans invented the first nuclear reactor, the solar cell, and the microchip, but today, we’re well behind a variety of European and Asian countries in deploying and improving these technologies. We were home to some of the world’s first subway systems, but our average cost per mile for tunnel projects today is the highest in the world. The U.S. did more than any other nation to advance the production of the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, but also leads the developed world in vaccine refusal … Implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress—a lesson the U.S. has failed to heed for the past several generations … The U.S. remains the world’s R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we are plainly going backwards.
How to Solve HomelessnessThe obvious answer to homelessness is to build more housing, but year after year, a consensus around that strategy fails to emerge, even as housing scarcity causes lots of homelessness.My colleague Jerusalem Demsas writes:
Why are there so many more homeless people in California than Texas? Why are rates of homelessness so much higher in New York than West Virginia? … Yes, examining who specifically becomes homeless can tell important stories of individual vulnerability created by disability or poverty, domestic violence or divorce. Yet when we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless. In musical chairs, enforced scarcity is self-evident. In real life, housing scarcity is more difficult to observe—but it’s the underlying cause of homelessness.
… A contradiction at the core of liberal ideology has precluded Democratic politicians, who run most of the cities where homelessness is most acute, from addressing the issue. Liberals have stated preferences that housing should be affordable, particularly for marginalized groups that have historically been shunted to the peripheries of the housing market. But local politicians seeking to protect the interests of incumbent homeowners spawned a web of regulations, laws, and norms that has made blocking the development of new housing pitifully simple. This contradiction drives the ever more visible crisis.
My colleague Annie Lowrey has similar views. She writes:
High rents and sale prices in major cities are a policy choice, one that puts gates around many of our most wonderful places and taxes the folks lucky enough to live there. And it is unfair to all of us. A United States with more abundant housing in its big cities would have a more productive, vibrant, and dynamic economy too.
And I agree, for reasons I explained in my 2021 feature on California:
The NIMBY impulse is not new. Carey McWilliams observed in 1949 that although Californians were fascinated by their state’s phenomenal growth, they were simultaneously “disturbed and even repelled” by it. “They want the state to grow, and yet they don’t want it to grow,” he explained. “They like the idea of growth and expansion, but withdraw from the practical implications.” But when he wrote those words, amid a severe housing shortage, policy makers in both parties still encouraged countless small developers to build houses and apartments as rapidly as possible.
Today matters are much worse. The most powerful factions of residents do not want their state to grow and do not accept the fact that it surely will. For 40 years, they haven’t just failed to adequately plan for the housing needs of California’s current population; upper-income residents in San Diego and the Bay Area as surely as those in Los Angeles have deliberately fought to restrict the supply of housing. Even now, when housing costs are the primary reason that a majority of registered voters say they’ve considered moving, and when politicians in both parties pay lip service to the problem, there is insufficient political will to attempt a plausible solution. And the forces paralyzing the state are all the more entrenched because some of them believe themselves to be protecting the California Dream.
I feel the pull of their backward-looking vision. Years ago, I spent two glorious seasons in the Sea Ranch, a 10-mile stretch on the rugged coast of Sonoma County where beaches strewn with mussels rise to majestic bluffs; then to meadows where deer frolic and sleep; and, just beyond, hills of redwood forest that thrive in the fogs that roll in many evenings. If 50 million people could sustainably inhabit a state where all coastal development resembled the Sea Ranch, I’d sign up. In that fantasy, San Franciscans would all live in detached Victorians and Angelenos would all reside in prewar bungalows. Central Valley farmers could use all the water they wanted on their crops without affecting commercial fishermen, who could catch all of the fish they wanted forever. There would be no lines at Disneyland.
Those expectations, fantastical as they sound today, seemed plausible within living memory. The Inexhaustible Sea was published in 1954. Around 1970, the Sea Ranch was considered a model of sustainable development. On rainy winter days in my 1980s youth, there actually were no lines at Disneyland. I once went on Space Mountain 18 times in a row, finding no one in line each time the roller coaster ended. Imagine if, in middle age, I felt entitled to pass laws so I could keep doing that into my 70s and 80s, no matter how many kids never got a turn. That is the anti-growth Californian, mistaking nostalgia for justice.
[Read: Will an influential conservative brain trust stand up to Trump?]On The White Lotus Season Finale (With Spoilers)If you’ll indulge a speculative take about the prestige TV show that secular cosmopolitan media elites are all watching at the moment: According to conventional wisdom, Tanya, the ultra-wealthy heiress, was betrayed by her husband, Greg, who planned to steal her fortune—prenup be damned—by conspiring with a group of “high-class gays” to murder her.But is that what happened? I am among those who suspect thatTanya’s prenuptial agreement was void in the event that she was unfaithful, not in the event that she was murdered. The “high-class gays” threw their fabulous party at a Palermo villa not to murder her, but to orchestrate her infidelity. If their intention was for a Mafia-affiliated local to kill her, why take her to Palermo at all? Why take her to the opera? Why ply her with cocaine? Why have a handsome younger man seduce her? Why refrain from murdering her on the open sea, an easy place to kill, and take her back to within swimming distance of Taormina?The murder theory makes no sense. I know what some of you are thinking. “How do you explain the duffel bag she found with a gun, duct tape, and a rope?” To which I say: If you’re a Mafia dude intent on murdering a 60-something woman on a yacht, do you need a rope or duct tape if you already have a gun? Of course not. At most, they were going to kidnap Tanya so that Greg could pay her ransom, giving the high-class gays their cut. Regardless, the main thing was for Tanya to have sex with the Mafia dude. Once that happened, her prenup was void and Greg stood to make a fortune. What’s more plausible, a prenup clause where the new husband you don’t quite trust gets everything if you cheat … or one where he gets everything if you get murdered?Provocation of the WeekIn The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya critiques one of the internet era’s most important financial companies:
The people who founded PayPal—the so-called PayPal Mafia—include Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Max Levchin. All are champions of free speech. All have expressed shock and dismay at what is happening to the company they created. Several founders agreed to talk with The Free Press for this article.
“If the online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying people economically, limiting their ability to exercise their political voice,” Thiel told me. “There’s something about destroying people economically that seems like a far more totalitarian thing.”
When they launched PayPal, in December 1998, the founders imagined themselves connecting people to the global economy by sidestepping the hefty fees charged by credit-card companies and the inflationary policies of poorly run governments. Early PayPal users had Palm Pilots, and they would beam money from their devices to anyone with an email address. It was especially popular among eBay users.
“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel said at a company meeting, in late 1999. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means, because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect, dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”
Since those early heady days, PayPal has amassed 429 million active accounts. Fifty-eight percent of Americans use PayPal, and in 2021, there were 19.3 billion PayPal transactions. It now has a market valuation of $84 billion.
But the company that was meant to liberate countless individuals is becoming something else. Increasingly, it is becoming a police officer. It is deciding what is right and wrong, who gets to be heard, who is silenced. It is locking out of the financial system those people or brands that have slipped outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, those who threaten the consensus of the gatekeepers. The consensus is hard to articulate; it is an ideology lacking clearly defined ideological contours. But the tenets of that consensus are unmistakable: the new progressive politics around race and gender are a force for good, the Covid lockdown was just, the war in Ukraine is noble, and an unfettered exchange of ideas and opinions is an unacceptable threat to all of the above.
The English professor and writer Alan Jacobs adds, “We tend to think of social-credit systems as the province of governments, but the big American tech companies are right now imposing their own such system — and in some ways are better placed to do it than our government would be.”That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

In 2018, a typhoon stranded thousands of people at Kansai International Airport, near Osaka, Japan. Among them were some tourists from Taiwan. Normally, this story might not have had much political meaning. But a few hours into the incident, an obscure Taiwanese news website began reporting on what it said was the failure of Taiwanese diplomats to rescue their citizens. A handful of bloggers began posting on social media, too, excitedly praising Chinese officials who had sent buses to help their citizens escape quickly. Some of the Taiwanese tourists supposedly had pretended to be Chinese in order to get on board. Chatter about the incident spread. Photographs and videos, allegedly from the airport, began to circulate.The story rapidly migrated into the mainstream Taiwanese media. Journalists attacked the government: Why had Chinese diplomats moved so quickly and effectively? Why were the Taiwanese so incompetent? News organizations in Taiwan described the incident as a national embarrassment, especially for a country whose leaders proclaim they have no need for support from China. Headlines declared, “To Get on the Bus, One Has to Pretend to Be Chinese,” and “Taiwanese Follow China Bus.” At its peak, the angry coverage and social-media attacks became so overwhelming that a Taiwanese diplomat, apparently unable to bear the deluge of commentary and the shame of failure, died by suicide.Subsequent investigations turned up some strange facts. Many of the people who had been posting so prominently and with such enthusiasm about the incident were not real; their photographs were composite images. The obscure website that first promoted the story turned out to be affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. The videos were fake. Strangest of all, the Japanese government confirmed that there had been no Chinese buses, and thus no special Taiwanese failure at all. But this semblance of failure had been pounced upon by journalists and news anchors, especially by those who wanted to use it to attack the ruling party. This, clearly, was what Chinese propagandists had intended. The anonymity of social media, the proliferation of “news” sites with unclear origins, and, above all, the hyper-partisan nature of Taiwanese politics had been manipulated in order to push one of the Chinese regime’s favorite narratives: Taiwanese democracy is weak. Chinese autocracy is strong. In an emergency, Taiwanese people want to be Chinese.[From the December 2022 issue: Taiwan prepares to be invaded]The incident was notable not because it was entirely new or unexpected but because it was another battle in a long-term campaign that arguably dates back to the founding of modern Taiwan. In 1949, General Chiang Kai-shek moved his Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), to the island and established the Republic of China there. Ever since, the People’s Republic of China has seen Taiwan as its ideological enemy, an irritating reminder that not all Chinese wish to be united under the leadership of the Communist Party.Sometimes Chinese pressure on Taiwan has been military, involving the issuing of threats or the launching of missiles. But in recent years, China has combined those threats and missiles with other forms of pressure, escalating what the Taiwanese call “cognitive warfare”: not just propaganda but an attempt to create a mindset of surrender. This combined military, economic, political, and information attack should by now be familiar, because we have just watched it play out in Eastern Europe. Before 2014, Russia had hoped to conquer Ukraine without firing a shot, simply by convincing Ukrainians that their state was too corrupt and incompetent to survive. Now it is Beijing that seeks conquest without a full-scale military operation, in this case by convincing the Taiwanese that their democracy is fatally flawed, that their allies will desert them, that there is no such thing as a “Taiwanese” identity.  Taiwanese government officials and civic leaders are well aware that Ukraine is a precedent in a variety of ways. During a recent trip to Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, I was told again and again that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a harbinger, a warning. Although Taiwan and Ukraine have no geographic, cultural, or historical links, the two countries are now connected by the power of analogy. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes people in Taiwan and around the world think, “Wow, an authoritarian is initiating a war against a peace-loving country; could there be another one? And when they look around, they see Taiwan.”But there is another similarity. So powerful were the Russian narratives about Ukraine that many in Europe and America believed them. Russia’s depiction of Ukraine as a divided nation of uncertain loyalties convinced many, prior to February, that Ukrainians would not fight back. Chinese propaganda narratives about Taiwan are also powerful, and Chinese influence on the island is both very real and very divisive. Most people on the island speak Mandarin, the dominant language in the People’s Republic, and many still have ties of family, business, and cultural nostalgia to the mainland, however much they reject the Communist Party. But just as Western observers failed to understand how seriously the Ukrainians were preparing—psychologically as well as militarily—to defend themselves, we haven’t been watching as Taiwan has begun to change too.     Although the Taiwanese are regularly said to be too complacent, too closely connected to the People’s Republic, not all Taiwanese even have any personal links to the mainland. Many descend from families that arrived on the island long before 1949, and speak languages other than Mandarin. More to the point, large numbers of Taiwanese, whatever their background, feel no more nostalgia for mainland China than Ukrainians feel for the Soviet Union. The KMT’s main political opponent, the Democratic Progressive Party, is now the usual political home for those who don’t identify as anything except Taiwanese. But whether they are KMT or DPP supporters (the Taiwanese say “blue” or “green”), whether they participate in angry online debates or energetic rallies, the overwhelming majority now oppose the old “one country, two systems” proposal for reunification. Especially since the repression of the Hong Kong democracy demonstrations, millions of the island’s inhabitants understand that the Chinese war on their society is not something that might happen in the future but is something that is already well under way.  [Read: The lessons Taiwan is learning from Ukraine]Like the Ukrainians, the Taiwanese now find themselves on the front line of the conflict between democracy and autocracy. They, too, are being forced to invent strategies of resistance. What happens there will eventually happen elsewhere: China’s leaders are already seeking to expand their influence around the world, including inside democracies. The tactics that the Taiwanese are developing to fight Chinese cognitive warfare, economic pressure, and political manipulation will eventually be needed in other countries too.The strange story of the nonexistent buses at Kansai airport did have one unanticipated consequence: It inspired the Taiwanese activists Ttcat and Puma Shen to co-found Doublethink Lab, a nonprofit research group. Ttcat (the name is an alias) is a high-school dropout who played a lot of video games, eventually got accepted at a university to study computer science, dropped out again, and then drifted into the world of environmental campaigning. That résumé was excellent preparation for what he does now: track and identify Chinese information operations, and design programs to educate the public about them. It also means that he and Shen, a lawyer and criminologist, can work on behalf of Taiwan while keeping their distance from the Taiwanese government. No one can accuse an activist with a background in video games of climbing some kind of political career ladder.  Ttcat told me that the airport story forced him to think harder about how to counter that kind of non-attack attack. The episode wasn’t merely a lie, after all. It was a very well-planned attempt to insert a story of Taiwanese weakness into the Taiwanese political debate. After it happened, he and Shen put together a team that now works in exactly the kind of space you would imagine: a few dark, scruffy rooms, filled with very young, hyper-online people. They showed me a presentation, based partly on their recent work on Chinese propaganda about Ukraine. Among other revelations: Weirdly, quite a few Chinese stories are built around a random Ukrainian tourist who turned up in Hong Kong during the mass political demonstrations there in 2019. The man’s photograph appears over and over again in Chinese and Taiwanese media, with special attention paid to his tattoo, a far-right symbol. He is alternately described as a neo-Nazi or as a provocateur, sent by someone—the CIA?—to aid the Hong Kong protesters. The idea is to evoke fears of disorder, chaos, and extremism, and to connect them to Hong Kong as well as to Ukraine. Chinese state actors have also pushed conspiracy theories about nonexistent biolabs in Ukraine—the same stories used by Russia and by the international far right to explain and justify the Russian invasion that began in February.   Doublethink isn’t the only team identifying and analyzing propaganda campaigns against Taiwan: Another monitoring organization, the Information Operations Research Group—also made up, once again, of young people with a background in online activism—has put together a report on the Chinese media and Chinese influencers who sought to sway conversation on the island during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, the Chinese first pushed the idea that the U.S. was preventing Taiwan from getting vaccines, then that the Taiwanese were falling behind the rest of the world in vaccines, then that Taiwanese residents were surreptitiously getting their vaccines from China. These narratives now look quite thin and unconvincing in light of the disastrous Chinese lockdowns of 2022, but some of them had traction in Taiwan at the time.Rather than merely passing their analyses of Chinese tactics to the government, both organizations also work on countering them. Doublethink produces videos that seek to help viewers understand where the information they are reading is coming from so that in future they can do the detective work themselves. IORG runs workshops—more than 180 so far—to help Taiwanese middle- and high-school teachers create programs on disinformation in their classrooms. One of IORG’s co-directors, Chihhao Yu, told me that the point is not just to help students find tidbits of false information but to teach them to understand broader narratives: how pro-Chinese media and social media string together information—which can be either true or false—to make people doubt whether their country has allies, whether it has the ability to stay separate from China, whether it has a future at all. Yu himself has no doubts about Taiwan’s future. His website describes him like this: “Taiwanese. Hacking things. Build a new nation.” Unusually, the most famous member of this amorphous world of online activists is now part of the government. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, doesn’t just promote the world of digital activism; she helped create it. A child prodigy who was programming in Silicon Valley at the age of 19, she participated in the Sunflower Revolution of 2014—a youth movement organized around opposition to a trade deal with China—and describes herself both as a “conservative anarchist” as well as “post-gender.” (She has said she is unbothered by which pronouns anyone uses.) On the day she and I met, Tang was wearing a T-shirt bearing the Ukrainian trident, and she told me she has been in touch with Ukraine’s own innovative digital ministry. She reminded me that her commitment to openness is absolute: Every interview she gives, including the one I did with her, eventually appears online.Tang’s philosophy is one of asymmetric warfare: Taiwan, she believes, cannot play by the same rules as China. The centralized, heavy-handed, thuggish tactics of the Chinese Communist Party can only be repulsed by something completely different: decentralized grassroots groups that use open-source software and remain as transparent as possible. In accordance with that philosophy, the number of actual employees in Tang’s ministry is very small. Instead, a lot of the work countering Chinese narratives devolves to groups like Doublethink and IORG. In Taiwan, she told me, the social sector—co-ops, nongovernmental organizations, social entrepreneurs—enjoys greater public trust than the political parties or the private sector. This dynamic has a history: Civic activists pushed to end KMT’s one-party rule in the 1980s and curtail the island’s economic links to China in 2014, and they still have a lot of clout. Tang noted that one of the country’s most prominent political-discussion forums, a bulletin-board system called PTT, is run by students at National Taiwan University, using “all free software, open source, collective governance, and so on.” She explained, “No political party will say, ‘Oh, let’s shut down PTT.’ If they say that, they don’t get votes.”[Read: No more ‘strategic ambiguity’ on Taiwan]Because people remember that activists helped create Taiwan’s modern democracy, she thinks that they now trust them to monitor the tricky, through-the-looking-glass world of Chinese disinformation, or at least more than they would trust the government with that task. Instead of turning to government officials, for example, Taiwanese who are in doubt about something they have heard or read can turn to Cofacts, an open-source website that allows users to contribute their own fact checks to a general debate. The site also deploys some tricks from video games—such as rewards and leveling-up challenges—to keep people engaged. Billion Lee, one of the group’s founders, has written that official influences are kept out of the service on purpose: “When governments get too involved in fighting disinformation, it can look like an infringement on free speech.”By some accounts, Tang still doesn’t quite have enough influence inside the ruling party to promote all of these ideas—unsurprisingly, a lot of politicians resist the level of transparency that she favors—but she can still point to real achievements. During the pandemic, the digital ministry encouraged a kind of joke competition between people who got the Moderna vaccine and those who got the Pfizer vaccine as a way of promoting vaccination more generally; Tang calls this and other attempts to make conspiracy theories into jokes “humor over rumor,” noting that Taiwan never developed a strong anti-vax movement. Under Tang’s leadership, the government has also experimented with the use of Polis, an online discussion platform, to conduct better public debates. Entry into national debates is limited to Taiwanese; users’ online identity is linked back to their membership in the national health-care system. While some of the conversations conducted using Polis can seem pretty trivial—a national debate over the use of e-scooters, for example—the goals could not be more existential. The idea is that if everyone is talking in a reasonable way, according to transparent rules of online debate, then conspiracy theories don’t spread so quickly.Tang’s vision is supremely rational: Better conversations, better democracy, and more transparency will counter even the most subtle Chinese information campaign. But not all of China’s methods are meant to go unnoticed. When Beijing dispatched warships, airplanes, and missiles to fly around and across the island after Nancy Pelosi’s visit, the point was not just to create insecurity but to provoke terror and alarm.How to counter this fear? The answer can’t just be to berate the fearful, or to accuse them of cowardice. Fear is a physical sensation, and it is best countered with physical activity, or at least some form of action. In Taipei, I saw what that might look like: three dozen office workers sitting on the floor of a conference room on a rainy, weekday afternoon, learning how to stop heavy bleeding.Outside, the rush hour was just beginning; inside, managers, assistant managers, secretaries, and even the CEO, dressed in a somber blue suit, were laughing and talking as they wrapped bandages on silicone arms and legs and learned through trial and error that if a tourniquet is correctly applied, it really hurts. Normally, the employees of INA Energy, the company sponsoring the exercise, don’t think about blood or tourniquets; their expertise is in renewable power and energy storage. But “we want to empower our team to have this kind of knowledge,” one of the managers told me, because Taiwan has earthquakes and has typhoons—and, he said, because Taiwan might be the target of a Chinese military attack.The emergency-response trainers, the silicone limbs, and the bandages were all donated by the Forward Alliance, another civic organization. Its founder, Enoch Wu, has thought a lot about the psychology of resistance, and in particular about the need for civil defense. The Forward Alliance provides training in emergency medicine and evacuation procedures, mostly at churches and schools, all over the island, several days a week. Part of the purpose is pragmatic: If a typhoon, an earthquake, or military attack really were to occur, the island would immediately require people who know about evacuation and emergency medicine. Wu told me that the outbreak of the war in Ukraine convinced many of his compatriots that they must prepare for exactly that possibility: It “really impressed upon average citizens that things can happen, at no fault of your own, at no instigation.” Since February, demand for emergency-response training has “kicked into overdrive,” he said, and not only at his organization. A Taiwanese businessman in September donated more than $20 million to another civil-defense charity, the Kuma Academy—co-founded by Puma Shen, of Doublethink—which plans to offer not only emergency-response instruction but eventually training in the use of weapons. The demand is already strong: The first courses were snapped up just as soon as they went online (“like concert tickets,” Shen told me).[Read: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]But the point of these exercises isn’t just to teach people how to shoot a gun or bandage a wound. They are also meant to nurture feelings of community and connection, giving people confidence in advance that, in an emergency, they can count on their fellow citizens. These kinds of preparatory experiences have an especially important impact in Taiwan, a nation whose politics are deeply polarized, with members of the blue and green camps suspecting one another of irresponsibility or unreason, not unlike the red-blue competition in the United States. Wu wants his classes not just to provide particular skills but to help create this intangible feeling of trust. “It’s tough to find activities that make you feel like we’re in this together, especially in an urban environment,” he said. The awareness of a threat can make people scared and isolated. With a bit of organization and some silicone limbs, the threat can pull people together, even people whose politics are very different—or that’s the theory.In practice, of course, both the Taiwanese activists organizing civil defense and those who are trying to counter Chinese narratives are making a large bet. They are wagering that democracy and transparency can beat autocracy and secrecy, that trust can overcome polarization, that society can organize itself, from the ground up, to overcome fear. They are doing so in a country that is linked to its worst enemy in complicated ways—language, shared history, relatives, investments—and has some understandable anxiety about the reliability of faraway allies.But their fight against China’s cognitive warfare is not just shadowboxing with bots on the internet. The Russians invaded Ukraine in part because they believed, wrongly, that the Ukrainians would not fight back. If the Chinese assume that the Taiwanese will fight back, then they might think twice. In that sense, there’s a deep connection between the work of the broader world of Taiwanese social activists—those who track Chinese disinformation online as well as those who defend judicial independence, campaign for the rights of Hong Kong citizens and ethnic minorities, promote government transparency—and the work of the military, which has its binoculars trained on the Taiwan Strait. By shoring up democracy, by smoothing polarization, by bringing more people into an active engagement with public life, all of them hope to convince China that an invasion is too costly and risky. Taiwan’s future depends on whether they are right.

Systematic reviews are a good way to see the big picture of what the evidence for a particular medical intervention looks like. However, they are very difficult to do well and often fall prey to their own methodological limitations and biases. Therefore it is even better to look at a systematic review of systematic reviews as a way of looking at the overall pattern of the evidence. As we have discussed many times on SBM , it is that overall pattern that tells us if we are dealing with a real phenomenon or an illusion of the research (or just a placebo effect).

A systematic review of systematic reviews of acupuncture for a variety of indications published in November 2022 gives us an opportunity to look at that pattern. This is the same evidence we have been reviewing here for years, and so I don’t expect any surprises; still, a thorough look at the evidence is instructive. Before I dive into the study, let’s review what acupuncture is and why I am skeptical of its efficacy.

Acupuncture is generally defined as a practice involving inserting thin needles into acupuncture points on the body that correspond to specific physiological functions and therefore can be used to produce specific clinical outcomes. I recently reviewed an acupuncture systematic review for back pain in pregnancy and went over many of the problems with acupuncture research and claims. I also published a detailed analysis of acupuncture with David Colquhoun that was very critical. Here are my main criticisms of acupuncture as a medical practice and belief system:

Acupuncture points have no basis in anatomy, physiology, or neuroscience and essentially they don’t exist.

Acupuncture has no plausible or established mechanism, and many practitioners reference “chi” which is a nonexistent magical life force.

Acupuncturists claim that acupuncture can work for a wide variety of medical conditions that have nothing functionally to do with each other.

Acupuncturists can’t agree on where alleged acupuncture points are and what they do. Therefore, different studies of the same condition often use different sets of points.

After decades of research and thousands of studies there isn’t a single clearly established condition for which acupuncture has demonstrated efficacy.

There is evidence of extreme researcher and publication bias in the acupuncture literature.

In short, acupuncture has all the red flags of fake science and placebo medicine, and there is no legitimate scientific reason to think that it is real. There have been thousands of clinical studies looking at acupuncture for various conditions, most of which are very low quality and even fatally flawed. But when you conduct thousands of studies, especially with some wiggle room in the methods, many of them are going to be positive, even with a completely null effect. We see this, for example, in the homeopathy literature. Therefore, if my analysis above is fair and accurate, we would expect the same pattern of outcome in the acupuncture literature that we see in the homeopathy literature.

One particular feature that acupuncture research shares with homeopathy research is that it is culture-dependent (another red flag). For acupuncture, the effect is even more dramatic. A 1998 systematic review, with an update in 2014, showed that acupuncture clinical trials based in China are 100% positive. Edzard Ernst characterizes this as an “open secret” that data is simply fabricated in China to support acupuncture. Even if a treatment worked with a large effect size, we still would not see a 100% positive rate in the literature. That is essentially slam-dunk evidence for some combination of publication bias and researcher bias. Of course, these biased Chinese acupuncture studies contaminate all systematic reviews of acupuncture (unless they are systematically excluded, which I have never seen).

Further, as we saw with my most recent review of acupuncture for back pain in pregnancy, even systematic reviews which are clearly negative are presented as if they are positive. The current reviewers seem to take the author’s conclusions at face value, which is highly problematic when dealing with acupuncture.

So – taking all these caveats into consideration, what does the current review of reviews show? It’s actually amazing how weak and negative the evidence is, given all the biases in the literature. Here is the author’s overall big picture take on the evidence:

Despite a vast number of randomized trials, systematic reviews of acupuncture for adult health conditions have rated only a minority of conclusions as high- or moderate-certainty evidence, and most of these were about comparisons with sham treatment or had conclusions of no benefit of acupuncture. Conclusions with moderate or high-certainty evidence that acupuncture is superior to other active therapies were rare.

In other words – most of the acupuncture evidence is crap. This is another pattern we see commonly with fake treatments, and we have to seriously ask – after decades and thousands of studies of acupuncture, why do a low-quality study at all? The methods and technology for high quality acupuncture studies exist. But of course, high quality studies are frustratingly negative, which may be why there are so many low quality studies still being performed.

Of the 56 health condition reviewed here, only 4 had high-quality evidence. Of those four, one was negative – for assistive reproduction, essentially there were no increases in the chance of success with implantation. One, dealing with stroke recovery, used electroacupuncture, which is not acupuncture but rather electrical nerve stimulation. This intervention also included conventional interventions. Meanwhile, another review of stroke not including electroacupuncture was negative.

The other two that involved acupuncture with positive results were for shoulder pain and fibromyalgia, and they both had low numbers of studies. There wasn’t a single indication which had a high number of high quality studies showing a positive effect. The fibromyalgia review contained only 8 studies, two of which were electroacupuncture, with mixed results. Even though some of these studies compared acupuncture to acupuncture on the “wrong” points, there was no agreement across studies which were the correct and which were the wrong points, rendering the comparison meaningless.

The review of shoulder pain was actually part of a larger review looking at a variety of musculoskeletal conditions. This suffered the same problem as the fibromyalgia review – low number of studies, and heterogeneity in terms of controls and the alleged acupuncture points used. Risk of bias in these studies also tends to be high. And again, none control for the clearly demonstrated publication bias in Chinese studies.

Given that there are several thousand published clinical trials looking at acupuncture, over decades, if acupuncture actually worked for anything I would think that by now we would be seeing a clear signal in the data – but we are not. As this review demonstrates, most of the evidence is low quality, and almost none is deemed high quality evidence. Only two subsets had high quality evidence of acupuncture showing an effect, and these suffered from small numbers and methodological issues that were overlooked by the reviewers. Further, if you do enough studies for enough conditions, you’re going to come up with some positive evidence just by chance alone, especially if you throw in a little publication bias.

The overall pattern of the acupuncture literature, therefore, is clearly negative. It is consistent, I would even argue highly predictive, of a null phenomenon. We see this same pattern with other scientifically implausible claims, such as ESP and homeopathy. It’s likely not a coincidence.

For a second month inflation slowed more than expected, according to new report from the U.S. Department of Labor. The 0.1 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for November brought huzzahs from Wall Street on hopes the nation may be seeing the beginning of the end of months of punishing price increases. But the question remains: How close are we to being out of the woods?
Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, spoke with the Gazette about where the U.S. economy stands now and what the trends suggest for 2023. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
GAZETTE:  Is inflation officially on a downward trend?
FURMAN: This is two good months in a row. We had that last summer and that proved to be a false dawn. But I think the signs are better now than they were a year ago. In particular a lot of commodity prices are falling; supply chains are healing; and some favorable things for inflation, like a slowdown in the growth of rents, have only just started. The problem is inflation has been incredibly high, so even if it comes down, it may still be too high. The most likely scenario is that inflation comes down. A much bigger question is whether it comes down far enough for the Fed.
GAZETTE: Do you think these numbers are good enough to nudge the Fed off its current path of interest rate hikes when the committee meets this week?
FURMAN: This guarantees they’ll raise by 50 basis points. They should raise by 50 basis points. They basically already said they did that. Different data tells different stories: This is very positive, but it’s still only two months of data. And there were some things this month that were like transitory good news. Just like last year, some of the news was transitory bad news. For example, used car prices fell a lot in November; they’re probably not going to keep falling a lot every month. So, they are going to raise rates; they should raise rates. The question is: What do they do next? Their next meeting is Feb. 1. They’ll have a lot more data between now and then. Right now, what they do is going to depend enormously on the data. This might be their last interest rate increase or maybe there’ll be many more to come and that just depends on whether this continues.
GAZETTE: We’ve had two consecutive months with below-expected inflation numbers, but we still have 7 percent inflation. Why are the markets so happy?
FURMAN: Seven percent is over the last 12 months, so there’s nothing you can do about what happened in July and August and September. That’s history. If you want to extrapolate forward and think what inflation is going to be, looking at the last month or two or three is a better way to think about what’s going to happen going forward. And that’s been much lower than 7 percent. The market is correctly focusing on what’s happened in the last two months, not the last 12 months. And the market is still pricing in further rate hikes even after Wednesday. So, I don’t think the market thinks the job is done. I think they think it’ll be a little bit easier than they thought yesterday.
GAZETTE: One of the intended byproducts of the Fed’s multiple interest rate hikes this year was to tamp down the job market. Some industries, like tech and media, are laying off significant numbers. But overall, the Labor Department says the U.S. is still adding jobs at a robust clip. What’s happening with the labor market?
FURMAN: The labor market has loosened a little bit, but it’s mostly loosened because the number of job openings has fallen. We went into this with just an enormous number of unfilled jobs. And what’s happened is as demand has been cut back, it’s reduced the number of unfilled jobs, but there’s still enough of them for anyone that wants one. I’m not positive whether that’s going to be enough for the next year. At some point, it may be that to get inflation all the way back to target it’s impossible without the unemployment rate going up. But so far, it’s happened with job openings coming down.
GAZETTE: According to the Labor Department, rents rose 0.8 percent in November and were 7.9 percent higher than this time last year, the fastest year-over-year growth in 40 years. The Fed’s interest rate policy has cooled home sales, as planned. How does the housing sector look?
FURMAN: The reduction in homebuilding subtracted more from GDP in the third quarter than any quarter since the financial crisis, so you particularly see monetary policy in the housing sector. I think it’s also affected the overall state of demand, which has reduced job openings, and it’s kept inflation expectations down so that it’s reduced the chances of a self-fulfilling wage/price spiral.
Their numbers are interesting. Their numbers are imputing rents for everyone. If you look just at the new leases, those are growing much more slowly. If you sign a new lease this month, your lease probably isn’t any higher than it would have been a month ago. But if you look at all leases, they were sort of on an upward path. The other thing is the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the numbers. They smooth them over six months, so if an increase happened six months ago, that’ll show in the numbers today. It’s widely believed that rents are not increasing over the last few months.
GAZETTE: Gas and oil prices were squeezing consumers for much of 2021 and the first half of 2022. That has leveled off. What accounts for this reversal and what is the outlook for 2023?
FURMAN: It’s amazing. We began the year thinking the Russian invasion of Ukraine was going to have this huge effect on commodity prices. It did on the price of natural gas in Europe, and they’re really deeply suffering. In the United States, gas prices are basically what they were before the invasion. Energy inflation this year has been like any other part of inflation. Part of that is a global slowdown in energy demand. As economies around the world have weakened, they’re buying less oil. China was a big part of that story with their COVID lockdowns. They reduced a lot the amount of oil they were buying. And, at the same time, unfortunately, Russia has continued to sell into the global market. Now it sells at a steeply discounted price, so it’s not getting as much as it would have without the sanctions, but it’s still reaching the market. Futures prices right now predict even larger falls in the price of oil next year, but obviously, this is a volatile commodity so anything could happen.
GAZETTE: So, what does all of this tell us about what might be on deck for the economy in 2023?
FURMAN: Today’s inflation data was good news. But it’s still going to be a daunting challenge to get inflation down as far as it needs to go. That’s especially true when two weeks ago, we learned that wages continue to grow very quickly. When that happens, prices also tend to grow quickly. So, we are very, very far from being able to declare victory on the soft landing. But after the latest inflation data we can have a little bit more hope. The main area to be worried about with inflation is in services, outside of housing. So, everything from restaurants to health care to financial services, etc. The prices are basically to cover the wages of the people in those sectors, and those wages are growing very high.

In her two decades as a genital morphologist, Patricia Brennan has looked at a lot of animal clitorises. She’s seen female lizards’ two spike-studded protrusions, which are almost identical to their counterparts on males. She’s glimpsed the prominent appendage through which female spotted hyenas urinate and give birth. She’s even studied the thin-skinned, nerve-laced organ of a female dolphin, which Brennan’s work suggests makes sex pleasurable. But until quite recently, she had never found a clitoris on a snake.Brennan, to be clear, had checked. A researcher at Mount Holyoke College, she had dissected all sorts of snakes and lizards over the years and always found the same thing: Males sport a pair of heavily ornamented penises, called hemipenes, that can, like the lining of a pocket, be popped out of the base of the tail; the same trick works on many lizard females, whose clitorises, or hemiclitores, can also be flipped out. But whenever Brennan tried the maneuver on a lady snake, she turned up zip, nada, zilch. Eventually, Brennan, like many others in her field, concluded that snake clitorises must not exist.So when her collaborator Megan Folwell, of the University of Adelaide, reached out last year to share images from a recent dissection of a female death-adder tail, “I almost fell off my chair,” Brennan told me. What Folwell had found was unmistakable: There, right below the venomous snake’s cloaca (an all-purpose, vagina-like orifice), nestled between a pair of scent glands, were two small, pink protrusions—a pair of clitorises that had never been fully documented before. Folwell, Brennan, and their colleagues went on to find similar structures across a range of species, and they have now published the first complete and definitive description of snake clitorises—a finding that could rewrite the narrative of reptilian sex.The discovery is both surprising and not. The structures are small, fragile, and easy to damage or overlook; Sara Ruane, the assistant curator of herpetology at the Field Museum, in Chicago, says that learning about Folwell’s work was “the first time I have ever even thought about” snake penises having a female analogue. Multiply that sentiment countless times over, and perhaps it explains how researchers mostly missed an entire organ, in an entire group of thousands of animals, until now. But evolutionarily speaking, there’s no reason snakes shouldn’t have clitorises, which arise from the same knot of cells that gives rise to penises. In addition to lizards, snakes’ closest relatives, other groups of reptiles have clitorises, as do mammals.[Read: You try constricting your prey and breathing at the same time]Snake clitorises made cameos in some previous studies, but Folwell and her colleagues argue that many of them were misidentifications of hemipenes or scent glands. (After I wrote to several of these researchers, two—Oliver Hawlitschek and Stefano Rizzi—got back to me and largely stood by their work, although Hawlitschek noted by email that he would “not exclude that we may have mis-sexed some samples.”) Either way, those types of mistakes might be more avoidable now that researchers have a sharper set of tools with which to determine an individual snake’s sex. Traditionally, when sexing a snake, “you cut a tail open and look for hemipenes,” Ruane told me. “If they’re there, it’s a boy. If they’re not, you assume it’s a female.” But Folwell’s work, Ruane said, convincingly shows that the absence of hemipenes isn’t the only thing that defines a lady snake. Clitorises are very much present.What’s not totally clear yet is what snake clitorises do. Based on what researchers know about mammalian clitorises, the structures could, when stimulated, make a female snake more receptive to sex by, say, lubricating or relaxing her cloaca. The potential is there: Folwell and her colleagues found that snake clitorises contain a tapestry of blood vessels and nerve endings, hinting that the organs can engorge and feel.Snake courtship is “quite tactile,” says Jenna Crowe-Riddell, Folwell’s adviser at the University of Adelaide. During their equivalent of foreplay, the reptiles will coil their tails around each other, the male vibrating and undulating; he will sometimes rub his chin up and down the female’s body or flick at her with his tongue. Some of these behaviors could engage the clitorises, making the female more eager to mate or prolonging the coupling event. In certain snake species, a female can store sperm from multiple partners in specialized organs for years, and it’s possible an especially stimulating sexual encounter could lead her to draw from a particular partner’s sperm for multiple clutches of offspring. (How female snakes might actually select sperm, however, isn’t well understood.)[Read: The still-misunderstood shape of the clitoris]None of that has yet been proved, though, and research in other reptiles hasn’t been much help. One paper from the 1990s suggested that lizard clitorises “were there just to stimulate the male,” Brennan told me. “We were like, Okay, I really doubt that that’s what’s happening.” Whether female snakes get pleasure out of all this is another question. The experts I spoke with were on board with the idea, but it’s challenging to test. Snake faces aren’t the most expressive—although Crowe-Riddell does have some ideas about an experiment involving numbing cream.In general, scientific research into female genitals is “not always the easiest topic to get funding for,” Folwell told me. Maybe that’s in part driven by the fact that “it’s practically easier to investigate something that is protruding rather than something that is inside,” says Malin Ah-King, an evolutionary biologist and gender researcher at Stockholm University. Cultural biases have raised roadblocks too. Many scientists have historically presumed that females are merely passive receptacles for sperm. Centuries ago, Darwin posited that the evolution of animal sex depends “on a struggle between males for possession of the females”; even some modern scientists have proposed that female fauna, unlike males, might lack the mental capacity to actively choose their mates.And when pleasure-related organs such as clitorises get involved, there can be downright squeamishness. “We don’t have a problem with male orgasm, because it’s associated with the transmission of sperm,” says Mariella Herberstein, a behavioral ecologist at Macquarie University. But scientists can’t say the same for female pleasure, and the taboo around clitorises has stuck.Hang-ups such as these keep the scientific focus on males, skewing how humans interpret animal sex lives. Belatedly studying female genitalia “is a recurring pattern” in biology, Ah-King, who has written on the male-centric bias in the study of animal sex, told me. Scientists spent years thinking that male earwigs use their genitals to efficiently dislodge the sperm of other suitors from the female’s body—only to later discover that much of her sperm storage organ is out of his reach. Early work into duck mating suggested that males forcibly propelled their corkscrew-shaped penis deep into females who had little choice in the matter—until the mid-aughts, when Brennan found that duck vaginas can redirect undesirable mates into genital dead-ends.[Read: The pros and cons of spiky genitals]Snake penises, which come adorned with all sorts of spines, hooks, depressions, flounces, and frills, have been well studied since at least the 1850s, Folwell told me, far predating dedicated inquiries into their female parallels. That might be part of why scientists have long conceived of snake copulation as a male-driven endeavor, with bachelors duking it out for access to females that must then endure sex, Crowe-Riddell told me. Now that the science on clitorises is catching up, she wonders, “Could seduction be a part of it?” Better understanding of snake clitorises could also aid other scientific endeavors. If serpentine clitorises are as diverse as their penises, researchers could have another tool for distinguishing between species, says Leticia Afuang, a herpetologist at the University of the Philippines at Los Baños.With their lack of fur, warm blood, and limbs, snakes aren’t much like us; their sometimes-venomous bites and muscled, tubular bodies tend to wig people out. But snakes are an essential part of many ecosystems. Their venoms have led to medicines, and their appetite helps with pest control. They even have something to teach us about sex: In the same way that snakes are not just lizards without legs, females are not just males without penises. Perhaps better acquainting ourselves with an oft-maligned body part on an oft-maligned animal could prompt us to reckon with the ways in which we draw boundaries in the natural world—and inspire us to describe life not just by what it lacks, but what it has to offer.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The pretense that the seditionists in the GOP are limited to a handful of kooks who worship Donald Trump is no longer sustainable. If there are any Republicans left who care about the Constitution, the time to speak up is now.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Crypto was always smoke and mirrors.
Americans should not be tempted by China’s COVID policies.
Avatar: The Way of Water puts most modern blockbusters to shame.
The Moral ArgumentThe near miss of the midterms, in which almost all of the most extreme Republicans were defeated, seems to have generated a certain amount of complacency about the ongoing threat to the American system of government. I know, of course, that many of our fellow citizens are well aware of the dangers posed by conspiracy theorists, election deniers, and other assorted enemies of the Constitution. And I cannot blame people for becoming numb: You can watch a Paul Gosar or a Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting off like pinwheels of paranoia only so many times.But we cannot ignore recent developments. Only a few days ago, Greene took the stage in formal attire at the New York Young Republican Club gala and said, “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that”—the January 6 insurrection—“we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” A few days before that, Gosar posted and then deleted a tweet supporting Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution.These are not examples from the fringe. Dozens of Republicans contacted then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election and right through to Trump’s last days in office with wild theories and desperate ideas about how to keep the 45th president in power. The Meadows texts were obtained by the House January 6 committee and then published by Talking Points Memo. The messages are alternately stomach-turning and comical, in some cases at the same time.For example, on January 17, 2021, only 11 days after the insurrection and roughly 72 hours before Joe Biden was to be sworn in, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina pleaded with Meadows:
Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of  no return  in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!
This is a member of the U.S. Congress insisting, in a jumble of exclamation points and capital letters, that a sitting president call out the men and women of the United States military to nullify an election and prevent, by force of arms, the constitutional transfer of power. This is sedition, and it is madness. It is also evidence of a shocking inability to spell; if you’re going to advocate for a coup, the least we might expect is that you first learn how to spell martial law.Asked for comment, Norman told TPM, “It’s been two years. Send that text to me and I’ll take a look at it.” Well, sure. Two years is a long time in a busy life, and it’s easy to forget contacting the chief aide to the most powerful man in the world with a panicked demand to unleash the army against your fellow citizens. People get busy; assaults on the constitutional order get lost in the shuffle.What Norman is probably counting on, of course, is that people will forget about his behavior and that of his colleagues. We are all prone to “normalcy bias,” the human inclination to disregard the danger that things could change dramatically in a short time. Normalcy bias is why our minds sometimes refuse to grasp threats that range from natural disasters to nuclear war; we assume that tomorrow will always look something like today.But this unwillingness to think about danger should not stop us from confronting the undeniable fact, as the TPM report put it, that we now have a record of “Republican members of Congress strategizing in real time to reverse the results” of the 2020 election. As my colleague David A. Graham wrote today, these election deniers and seditionists are still in Congress—Norman won reelection with nearly 65 percent of the vote in his district—and they have faced no real repercussions for their disloyalty to the Constitution.Indeed, these same people will be sworn back into office in January, making a mockery of their oath. Worse, they will be the majority. Representative Jim Jordan is expected to become the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. (I know it’s become a cliché to say “Let that sink in,” but I am not sure what to say about a scheming fabulist chairing such an important committee other than “Let that sink in.”)Conservatives bristling at this as a selective focus on the fringe might argue that there are still loyal Republicans out there who will defend the Constitution, and that it is a mistake to describe the entire party as a dangerous movement based on lies and sedition. But we must ask when those Republicans are going to rise up and oppose the enemy in their midst. What conclusion can we reach about the GOP when a supposed centrist such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned for Trump’s would-be clone in Arizona, Kari Lake? How much fidelity to the Constitution can we presume from Ohio Senator-elect J. D. Vance (a Yale Law School graduate) when he gladly accepts Greene’s endorsement and support?It is not enough to say, as New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu did, that the GOP should stop nominating “crazy, unelectable candidates.” That is a utilitarian argument, not a moral one. What will it take for prominent Republican leaders to say that they will not share a party or a platform with the likes of Norman, Gosar, and Greene? Who will stay, and who will go? If there was ever a time for the last sensible Republicans to remember that they are the party of Lincoln, the man who saved the Union and its Constitution, and to declare a war against their seditionist wing, this is it. And if they won’t—or can’t—then that should tell Americans everything they need to know about the party and its base.Related:
The threat to democracy is still in Congress.
America has an anti-MAGA majority.
Inflation slowed at a higher rate than expected in November, according to the latest report.
The founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was indicted on eight criminal charges, including wire fraud.
The U.S. is reportedly close to finalizing plans to send the Patriot missile-defense system to Ukraine.
Brooklyn, Everywhere: The publishing and media industries have come to epitomize how corporate America has lost the plot, Xochitl Gonzalez argues.
(NASA / Corbis / Getty)
Seeing Earth From Space Will Change YouBy Marina Koren
When he first returned from space, William Shatner was overcome with emotion. The actor, then 90 years old, stood in the dusty grass of the West Texas desert, where the spacecraft had landed. It was October 2021. Nearby, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who had invited Shatner to ride on a Blue Origin rocket, whooped and popped a bottle of champagne, but Shatner hardly seemed to notice. With tears falling down his cheeks, he described what he had witnessed, his tone hushed. “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” Shatner told Bezos. “It’s extraordinary. Extraordinary. I hope I never recover from this.” The man who had played Captain Kirk was so moved by the journey that his post-touchdown remarks ran longer than the three minutes he’d actually spent in space.
Shatner appeared to be basking in a phenomenon that many professional astronauts have described: the overview effect. These travelers saw Earth as a gleaming planet suspended in inky darkness, an oasis of life in the silent void, and it filled them with awe.

Read the full article.
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Photos: fans of the 2022 World Cup
(Kino Lorber / Antitalent / Everett)
Read. Pick up a book from The Atlantic 10—a list of the books from this year that made us think the most.Watch. Murina (streaming on multiple platforms) is a razor-sharp debut you can recommend to anyone.Play our daily crossword.P.S.When I’m writing about American democracy, it’s easy for me to sometimes lose track of the many publications in the fields—Russian studies and national-security affairs—that formed the basis of most of my academic career. So today, I want to pass along two recommendations. One is for my fellow defense nerds; the other is for a general audience that wants to understand what’s going on in Russia.I worked with some smart colleagues in my years at the Naval War College, including the historian Anand Toprani. He and retired Rear Admiral Dave Oliver have written a book, ambitiously titled American Defense Reform. They use the history of the U.S. Navy to draw out lessons for how to effect change in the Defense Department. That sounds like chewy stuff (and it can be, if national-defense issues aren’t your bag), but it’s actually an interesting account of the evolution of the post–World War II Navy, the infighting that went with it, and what we need to learn today about reforming the gigantic, sprawling DOD.The rise of Vladimir Putin is a great story, but it’s also complicated. (I speak Russian and know the institutions and the roster of players, and even I get sort of overwhelmed by it.) Andrew Weiss and Brian Brown have found a great solution: They have told Putin’s story in a lively and fun graphic novel, Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin. If you’ve wondered how this dowdy mid-level KGB officer became the ruler of Russia, this book will explain it to you—and entertain you at the same time.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

There have been skirmishes between armed ethnic Serb protesters and Kosovo police. The reason is that a while ago, Kosovo ordered that drivers surrender Serbian-issued license plates and replace them with Kosovo plates. On Dec. 10, Serbs living in northern Kosovo started erecting barricades. Kosovo residents confronted them, and Kosovo police blocked the border checkpoints. A traffic jam ensued, and so did a small shootout, including the use of a stun grenade. The shooting has died down but the threats have mounted.

A shootout over license plates may seem excessive, but this is the Balkans. It is a relatively small area with multiple nationalities, and the political borders don’t match the ethnic borders. In the 1990s, there was a brutal civil war among those ethnic groups. For example, Serbs are Christians and Bosniaks are Muslims. Serbs and Bosnians live in proximity to each other. The civil war that broke out included concentration camps, where some estimate that 100,000 Bosnians died – a number denied by the Serbians. However, no one doubts it was a blood bath.

The fighting threatened to extend to Kosovo, south of Serbia. The Kosovars are ethnic Albanians and Muslims living in an area that Serbia claims. When Serbian forces began to enter Kosovo, U.S. and European governments, aware of the slaughter in Bosnia, were concerned that another blood bath would take place in Kosovo. NATO aircraft, primarily British and American, carried out airstrikes to force the Serbians to leave. The bombing was extended to Serbia, and included strikes against the capital, Belgrade. Those strikes caused substantial casualties on Serbian citizens.

The United States wanted to reach a cease-fire with the Serbians. The president of Serbia refused, partly out of anger over the bombing of Belgrade, and partly because he was afraid that he would face charges in The Hague – which he ultimately did. Unable to secure Serbia’s capitulation, the airstrikes continued.

The U.S. reached out to the Russians, who had close relations with the Serbians. The Russians persuaded them to accept a cease-fire. In return, the Russians expected to be treated as equal occupiers of Serbia and Kosovo, imposing the cease-fire on all regions as NATO’s equal. The Americans deny that they agreed to this with the Russians. The Russians say they had no reason to negotiate with NATO except for this. Russian troops arrived in Kosovo’s airport to serve as peacekeepers. They were surrounded by NATO troops and forced to leave. This event had a great deal of influence on the rise of Vladimir Putin and his distrust of the United States. It convinced him that the U.S. wanted to crush Russia, and he rose to the presidency on a promise not to allow Russia to be treated with contempt in the future.

So the Kosovars and Serbians are fighting over license plates and whatnot. What would appear trivial to others is not trivial here. In the Balkans, memories are long and unforgiving. The Balkans affect everything around them. World War I started in Bosnia. But for our time, the conclusion of the Kosovo war bred a deep Russian distrust of the United States.

Now there is a war involving Russia and the United States. It is not going well for Russia thus far. When fighting a war, forcing the enemy to divert his attention is critical, particularly when there is – at best for Russia – a stalemate. They have looked for other ways to distract the Ukrainians, but it is the Americans that must be distracted.

Serbia is close to Russia, as it has been for a long time. The United States has a deep history in the region. Another conflict between Serbia and Kosovo would not by itself change the course of the Ukrainian war, but it may, at low cost, cause the Americans to lose some focus if they were to divert forces to protect Kosovo, a sort of obligation going back to the 1990s. At any rate, Russia has little to lose and Serbia is always ready to tangle with Kosovo.

We began with a little gunplay between Serbia and Kosovo over matters too trivial to be believed. Consider that the reason for the gunfight had nothing to do with trivial matters, but with trying to recreate the Kosovo war. If the Russians wanted a low-cost, low-risk diversion, they had many chips to call in with Serbia. Of course, there have been clashes before this, but there are always clashes. The question is not how they start but what they lead to. So watching the Serbia-Kosovo border may be worthwhile.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] There is this quote. I think it’s from Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I think about it a lot. It says, quote, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” And something I love about that is that it also implies — and I think basically everything we know about physics, particularly, quantum physics, gets here — that what we experience is probably quite far from what the universe really is. And nowhere is that truer than time. I mean, nothing is more fundamental to our experience than time. We live in time. We are marked by time. We feel the seconds passing when we’re bored. We say that time flies when we’re on vacation or in the midst of a great conversation. The one thing we do not have more of is time. Our entire lives are bounded by time. And you’d think from there that what time is would be pretty clear. But talk to scientists who study time, and they are fundamentally confused about it. What time actually is, particularly outside the human brain — to say nothing of how weird the human brain is in the ways it measures time — is just fascinating. And you get into these really, really weird questions. Like, a lot of the math suggests that maybe time is already there. Maybe the future is exactly as real as the present. Does that mean it’s predetermined? Does that mean our understanding of causality is entirely wrong? What does any of it mean? My guest today is Dean Buonomano. He’s a professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA. And his book, “Your Brain Is a Time Machine”— what a great name — it gets at these two levels of time, the time that we experience and the time that exists, as best we understand it, outside of our experience. This is one of those conversations, one of those topics that at times — ha, ha — you might feel like you’ve taken a handful of mushrooms. Because it’s weird. Ultimate reality, to the extent there is such a thing, is weird. But that’s why I love these topics. Reality remains such an unbelievable mystery to us. We see only the tiniest sliver of it. And for me, appreciating that mystery, appreciating how little the world has to accord to my perception of it, how little I will ever know about it, it’s a pretty deep spiritual practice. It’s fun. As always, my email: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Dean Buonomano, welcome to the show.

dean buonomano

Thank you very much for having me.

ezra klein

So let’s imagine, there are no human beings, there are no animals, the universe just cold and dead. What is time in that universe?

Well, that’s a tricky question. We define time in a number of ways. So time is actually the most common noun in the English language. And one of the reasons that’s the case is because it means different things depending on what we are referring to. So in your scenario, time would still be change. So things are dynamic, even in the cold universe, particularly if it’s in the initial part of the universe. Things will be dynamic and changing and expanding. So time exists in the sense that the universe is undergoing a change. Now, practically, there’s a couple of ways to try to define time. One is simply clock time. And clock time is a bit circular, right? Because time is what clocks tell, so the definition is a bit circular. But in a way, that’s mostly what we mean by the passage of time. And all the clock is, is a device that changes in a predictable manner. So even particles that disintegrate with specific temporal properties are, in a sense, clocks. So there’s clocks all around. The universe is a clock, in a manner of speaking. But other aspects of time are subjective time. So you said in a universe without animals and humans, so we wouldn’t have that subjective time, what you and I are aware of, of the flow of time that’s passing. And then we also have this idea of what we could call a natural time, or the time of physics, in which the question is, if time is a dimension much like space, in which time is already laid out and the past exists in much the same way as the present exists and in much the same way as the future exists, they would all coexist, if you will. And that’s an ongoing debate in philosophy and physics.

ezra klein

I want to come back to that physics level of time. But first, I want to get at the human level of time. So let’s now think about the world that we do inhabit, where we exist and animals exist and time exists. You write in the book, “The human brain did not evolve to understand or to experience a true nature of time.” Tell me what you mean by that.

So all animals exist in time, of course. And they have to anticipate and interact with other beings on other — their conspecifics and predators and prey. But humans are unique in our ability to represent time and to have a conceptualization of time, of long, temporal periods, to make cause-and-effect relationships between now and one year from now. So while humans have the ability to conceptualize time, that’s sort of what gives us the ability to have this discussion of, what is the nature of time? What’s the difference between past, present, and future? So this ability that humans have to conceptualize time, I think, is what makes Homo sapiens sapien. It’s what makes us wise. But at the same time, we’re not very good at it. We know what we mean by time, but it’s something we’re still struggling to understand. There’s the famous quote by Saint Augustine, which is translated various ways. But the gist of it is, if you don’t ask me what time is, I know what it is. If you ask me what it is, I do not know. So we struggle to define time. And so that’s what I mean, that the brain didn’t evolve to understand not only time, the nature of time, but a lot of things, including the fundamental nature of the universe. And it remains to be seen if the human brain can understand the human brain. So the brain is a very limited information-processing system. And I think an awareness of that, both in science and in society in our day-to-day lives, is actually rather important.

ezra klein

So we did evolve to survive, to reproduce. So what kind of relationship to time did we evolve with? What do we use time for?

So all animals have the ability to anticipate what’s about to happen and make cause-and-effect relationships that if they hear a sound, that sound might reflect a predator, prey hidden in the bushes. So we, like all other mammals, inherited that ability. Because in many ways, that ability to predict the future is one of the brain’s main jobs. The brain’s main tasks, in many ways, is to use the past to anticipate the future. And that’s something everybody is doing. Right now, you’re unconsciously attempting to predict the future. And if I were to — [PAUSE] — pause my speech there — sorry to make you nervous — you would notice that pause because you were predicting I was about to say something. I created a temporal prediction error. So all animals have this ability to anticipate and predict time and be aware of time on this short scale. And the degree to which animals predicted what’s about to happen translated very effectively into the evolutionary currency of survival and reproduction. But humans came along and did something radically different. They were able to not just try to predict the future but create it. So think about something like agriculture. For most of evolution, animals sought food. And survival required figuring out where food sources would be. And humans came up with idea of creating food — in essence, planting a seed and reaping the fruits of that action sometime in the future. And that ability to conceptualize cause and effect across months or years is something that really evades the cognitive capacity of most animals. It’s not that complex — the idea of agriculture. But because the brain of most animals is not particularly good at linking cause and effect across large periods of time, agriculture wasn’t invented by other animals. So this ability to create the future, this ability to engage in what we call mental time travel is really, in many ways, the defining cognitive signature of our species. You think of something like tool use, which we often relate to being unique to human beings. But in many ways, the key cognitive breakthrough with tool use is not simply carving a tool out of obsidian stone, but having the conceptualization to say, I’m going to use this at some point in the future. I’m going to create this. I’m going to store it because it will come in handy. That’s the cognitive breakthrough that, at some point, we achieved.

ezra klein

Tell me about the relationship between our sense of time and our memory.

Time and memory indeed are tightly coupled in a number of ways. So when we talk about our perception of time, there’s two distinct frameworks that we should be aware of. One is prospective timing. So one is as you’re living in the moment and time might seem to be going quickly or slowly. This came up a lot during Covid. It was widely felt that during lockdown periods, time was going by slowly. So that’s what we call prospective timing. Now, interestingly, when you’re looking back at what happened, sometimes you have this paradoxical effect and which we call retrospective timing. And maybe during the Covid period or the acute part of the Covid period, during the lockdown, looking back, it seemed to have flown by. It seemed to had gone by very quickly. And that’s because it’s linked with memory. And so our retrospective judgments of time are really, in many ways, guesstimates based on how many items we have in memory. So this goes back to William James, Henry James’s brother, who made the observation well over a century ago that moments of time filled with new experiences seem to go by quickly in passing but seem to have lasted very long in retrospect, because you have a lot of new memories being formed. So you can imagine, in an extreme case, somebody with very severe amnesia. So there’s actually a couple of famous cases. One gentleman called Clive Wearing, who has no ability to form new — no new memories about his own experiences, no new autobiographical memories. And he’s essentially locked into an eternal present. He has a diary in which he writes down 11 o’clock, I just woke up. And then 12 o’clock, I just woke up. And 2 o’clock, I just woke up. So if you don’t have the ability to form new memories, you really are locked in the eternal present. You don’t have any real conscious access to your recent history. So one can only imagine how disorienting that is.

ezra klein

This gets to something that you brought up at the beginning about this difference between subjective time and perhaps other kinds of time, this idea that the way we experience time actually shifts, depending on what we’re experiencing in it. You mentioned a minute ago that the less that happens, the quicker things seem to go by. And that’s what I’d always heard too, and I feel like in some points of my life have felt. But I was struck by some research in your book — or some experiments, I guess, more to the point — where people would volunteer, for one reason or another, to be functionally in a cave or a dark room for quite a long time. And then months or a year later, they would come out. And they would think much less time had passed than actually had. And given our view that time seems to speed up when nothing is happening, the fact that for them it slowed down was really interesting to me. Why do you think that is?

Yeah, that’s a great point as well. So it is absolutely the case that when we’re measuring passage of time, our subjective experience, if you’re in a fun movie or you’re enjoying yourself with your friends, we report subjectively that time seems to be going by quickly. So that’s as if the external clock is going by more quickly. And when we’re bored, the opposite happens. It seems to be the external clock is going by more slowly. Then there’s a couple of famous cases. One of the first was Michel Siffre, a Frenchman who spent maybe six months in a cave. We infer that they would be quite bored, and thus, that as time is going by, they would report it to be going very slowly. The reason, I think, has a different factor in play there. And that’s the circadian clock. So the circadian clock, of course, is what keeps track of our daily rhythms, in terms of when we’re hungry, when we go to sleep and when we get up. The circadian clock seems to actually, in those cases, have slowed down. And so his circadian rhythm has gone over our standard of approximately 24 hours. And he gets the impression that fewer days have gone by when he’s in the cave. So this has happened time and time again in those studies in which they’re in for, say, six months. Six months later, somebody comes knocking on the cave door and says, time to go out. And they say, whoa, already? I thought it was only four months. We believe that’s in part because their circadian clock has expanded their periods. So they’re oscillating. Their sleep cycle is probably significantly over 24 hours. And it’s important to realize in these cases that, unlike the clocks on our wrist, which are amazing technological achievements and that they can tell time on the scale of microsecond, seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, et cetera, we have clocks in our brain that can also tell time across those time scales. But they’re fundamentally different clocks. The circadian clock doesn’t have a second hand, and the mechanisms in your brain responsible for, say, timing the duration of a traffic light don’t have an hour hand. So the notion that subjective time is sometimes distorted, as during under the influence of psychoactive drugs or during periods of isolation during the Covid pandemic or simply moments of boredom or excitement.

ezra klein

When I’m writing or really engaged in reading or having a really remarkable conversation and I have that sense you just mentioned of this passage of time falling away, what’s happening in me when that occurs?

These are conscious experiences. So this is a fundamental mystery in neuroscience is, what is consciousness? So the feeling of the passage of time is one of the many flavors of conscious experiences. So it’s very hard to address what defines the feeling of time passing slowly or quickly without understanding consciousness, which we don’t know yet. But I think one of the things that’s happening there is a large part of your neural circuitry, if you will, is devoted to whatever task is at hand. And you’re not doing this parallel processing and phasing in and out of different modes of thinking, going back and forth, well, should I be doing this? And you’re not daydreaming and so forth. So I think it’s just a cognitive state in which you can imagine chess players or athletes being in during critical moments or anybody who’s engaged in writing, as you said, or programming, that they’re very engaged in a task. And most of us find that fairly rewarding. And so it’s as if the brain makes that rewarding. Although, it’s very challenging and difficult, presumably because it’s also, in many ways, adaptive to be focused on certain types of tasks. But these are deep questions we just really don’t the answer to, in terms of what causes these distortions. Because the distortions are distortions of subjective experiences. And we don’t really know what causes subjective experiences to begin with.

ezra klein

You write about some research that has been done on people who have survived life-threatening accidents. What tends to happen to people’s sense of time during a car crash or a skiing accident?

So there’s, as you may or may not know — I guess I should hope that you don’t know — many people have this report of time dramatically slowing down, often reported as their life flying before their eyes. And I think this has been debated as what’s possibly happening in the brain. And there’s a couple of different views of this. One idea is that your brain is really functioning at a very high speed. It’s like boosting the clock speed of your computer, called overclocking. That’s probably not what’s happening to a large degree because the brain can’t be overclocked in any significant way. It can’t be sped up. Neurons can only fire at specific rates most of the time. Another view is that it’s an illusion in the sense that it’s just that you remember everything that happened very well after the fact, after you’re recounting what’s happening. And that’s an idea that it’s like a flash memory of what happened during your accident. But more generally, I think this speaks to the general challenge of understanding our subjective experience of time to begin with. So it’s not surprising that time gets distorted, because it’s a subjective experience, and all subjective experiences get distorted. So when people are reporting these experiences, they often report space being distorted as well. I recount my personal anecdote in that situation when I was hit by a car, and my car was spinning around, I recall thinking to myself at the time, wow, time really does slow down when you’re about to die. And so that to me led credence to the theory that it’s not a trick of memory. It’s really that your brain is processing information at a different level. So I think it’s a bit more akin to a hallucination and perhaps to the influence of psychoactive drugs — or equivalent to the influence of psychoactive drugs creating temporal spatial hallucinations. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

When were clocks invented and how, to the best as we understand it, have they changed our experience of time?

So the evolution of human culture and civilization has really tracked the creation of more and more sophisticated clocks, going back from sundials to hourglasses, to water clocks, to mechanical clocks, pendulum clocks, quartz crystals, and today, atomic clocks. So human civilization has been accompanied by this endless quest to measure time with more and more and more accuracy. And this quest has been absurdly successful, in that today, we measure time with more accuracy than we measure anything else, including distance or mass. Indeed, today, we define space using time. A meter is defined by how far light travels in one second. So for reasons that aren’t always immediately clear, we have had an obsession with measuring time. And it has had profound impacts on society and culture. Some people have argued that during the Industrial Revolution, that was driven by the invention of the steam engine. But other people have argued that, well, it was really the availability of clocks, of cheap clocks that were widely available to the population and the people who worked in factories that allowed for the Industrial Revolution. Because in the factories, you needed to synchronize human behavior. You need to synchronize work hours in which everybody had to show up at the same time to do the production lines that were being created at the time. So there’s no doubt that we have become more and more synchronized. Clocks have allowed us to synchronize our behaviors, like meeting you today at a specific time, that — 500 years ago, those type of things would not be possible with the accuracy that we have today. Indeed, it’s been argued that even Einstein’s theory of special relativity was in part related to the need to synchronize train schedules, to synchronize clocks that were being used locally and in other areas, in different cities and different states, in order to synchronize train schedules. So clocks have had a profound effect on our technology, from computer technology to GPS technology. So I think it is one of the most successful or one of the most impactful technologies on human civilization.

ezra klein

Is there anything to lament in the dominance and omnipresence of clocks? We know a fair amount about societies before clocks. We know of certain tribes even now that don’t much use them or in recent history haven’t used them. What is lost by being a member of modernity with the constant tick of the clock behind you? How would my experience of the world be different? What would be enriched by its absence?

I think there’s always things that are lost when we rely on certain technologies. And with the advent of the sundial, there’s this famous poem by a philosopher lamenting that the sundial took away his free will and was telling him when it was time to have dinner instead of being guided by his own internal clock. And so one can only imagine what he would have thought of today’s precision, in terms of our 10-minute meetings timed to the second, or the initiation of events on TV that are timed to the second. But, in many ways, it’s not the clocks that are imposing that. It’s our use of the clock. And this is true in a lot of technologies, right? It’s not the technology itself that might be constraining our behavior in ways that aren’t always helpful — so not having free time. So having just ability to not have anything on our schedules and have an open period, I think is something that is invaluable for how our brains work. Our brains need time, empty time, to consolidate memories, to rehearse what we’ve already learned. And when we have continuous exposure to things in terms of, I don’t know, social media, streaming, TV, and so forth, I think that takes away a bit of our, really, ability to absorb information and reflect upon that information. But again, that’s not so much the fault of the technology. That’s the fault of how we use the technology. But I’m very curious, Ezra, so what’s your feeling about that? How do you feel that clocks constrain or enhance our life as individuals and as a society?

ezra klein

I think this is a little bit like asking a fish what it’s like to not live in water. I mean, I’m so clocked in my life. I’ve had periods, though — a vacation here or there, or a camping trip, or the ingestion of some kind of substance — that really warped or detached me from clock time. One effect of that each time has been a sharper focus on the present. I think clocks — and particularly, scheduling and so on that they encourage — keeps you constantly living practically in the future and with a constant eye on what’s coming, and where you are, and how much time has passed, and what did you do this morning. And then I think that there is a false precision to how long a day or a life is. That actually strikes me as a quite profound question. There’s so much emphasis in question of life extension and can human beings ever become immortal, or what if we could add 50 years or 20 years. And I think a lot of these questions of, particularly, subjective time at least gently pose the question of, what if our lives could feel longer? And what if we are doing things that, in certain ways, make them feel shorter? And I certainly have the experience that a highly-scheduled life makes my life seem to fly by in a way that open time creates a spaciousness in the flow of time that feels a little bit more satisfying. I don’t know what to do about that, because I’ve got to get things done, and my kids got to get places, and I got deadlines. But it’s not lost on me and actually is something that I think about quite a lot, that I seem to live a life that is speeding up my own passage through time in a way that doesn’t always feel good as I’m watching it or feeling it slip through my fingers.

Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. And it is certainly, in terms of trying to imagine what — if you were a fish, what it is to be outside of the water. And this notion on the present, and we’re encouraged to live in the present and focus on the present. And that’s really solid advice in that I think it helps our enjoyment and — not only enjoyment, but ability to process and reflect upon what’s happening. But it’s a double-edged sword in the sense that we want to have as much time as possible. But if you’re only living in the present, you will actually have less of a future, because survival requires planning and preparing for the future, right? If you were a native of the Amazon forest, you might not have to think about the future as much if food is always available. But if you’re an Eskimo and you’re not thinking about the future, in terms of what to prepare and save for the winter, you’re not going to have much of a future. So there’s this balance between preparing for the future and living in the present. But in many cases, living in the present can include thinking about the future. And that’s often how I try to think about it, is that what we mean is not necessarily living in the present, but focusing on whatever it is we’re doing, even if that is a future-oriented behavior. And as we’ve discussed, this future-oriented behavior is something very unique to humans. Other animals don’t seem to have this capacity to engage in mental time travel. But just because we humans are capable of it doesn’t mean we’re very good at it. Indeed, I think that many of the most significant problems we have as individuals and as members of society reflect our lack of long-term thinking and preparation for the long-term future. At the level of individuals, that’s clear in the context of saving for retirement or exercising or taking care of one’s health. And at the society level, of course, this comes up in the context of climate change, that our ability to take actions in the present that might require short-term sacrifices for large payoffs or large advantages in the long-term future are very difficult for our species to take.

ezra klein

I want to segue here into a very different view of time that you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation and I said we’d come back to. So tell me about presentism and eternalism as theories of time and why eternalism has come to be more widely accepted.

It is counterintuitive. It is surprising. Because in our day-to-day life, there’s nothing as salient as the fact that the present is fundamentally different from the past and the future. The past no longer exists. We can’t manipulate it. And the future, hopefully we can by our actions that take place in the present. And so that is what we would call presentism, this idea that the past no longer exists, the present is where we exist, and the future doesn’t exist yet. But the counter view, called eternalism — and that’s similarly also called the block universe — their view is that, in many ways, here is to space as now is to time. In other words, it’s arbitrary. The now is arbitrary. There’s another now for some other version of me in the past or the future. And here, the idea is that past, present, and future all are equally real or coexist. And if you could see me, I would be doing air quotes because the word exist is a bit tricky in this context. But the idea is that the temporal structure of the universe has already been laid out, or is already there, in a manner of speaking, and that the past, present, and future are equally real.

ezra klein

So you just described eternalism. It’s very unintuitive. But you say it’s a more dominant view among the people who spend their lives studying the fundamental laws of the world. So, why? Why do they believe that? How can it be possible in a world where, depending on what I do next, the future changes — at least, it seems to — that somewhere, the future is already laid out?

It’s a bit dangerous to say it’s the dominant view. I would say it is probably the most accepted view in philosophy and physics, but certain people would probably take issue with that statement. But the reason that view is favored — there’s a couple of reasons. One is that the laws of physics, the equations that are used in physics don’t have any ‘you are here’ in time. They don’t have any special role for the present moment. So you can run the equations of physics forwards, backwards, starting in the future, starting in the past. The laws of physics don’t tell us anything that, hey, the now is special in any way. OK. Now, that’s not perhaps the best argument, because the laws of physics don’t also tell us that the present is not special. So that’s one reason. The other reason relates certainly to Einstein’s theory of relativity. So Einstein’s special theory of relativity established very compellingly, and without a shadow of doubt, that there’s no absolute present. So it doesn’t really make sense if I tell you it’s 11 o’clock where I am to ask what somebody is doing on another planet in a distant galaxy at 11 o’clock. Because time is relative, or the absolute present is certainly relative. And it turns out that one of the best ways to make sense of this, or at least intuitively, is to assume that time is spatialized. So sometimes people think of a four-dimensional block in which the past, present, and future are all equally real or, in a sense, already present in the universe. And relatedly, in Einstein’s so-called general theory of relativity, the equations that he discovered or invented allow for time travel. And I wouldn’t say they predict time travel, but they allow time travel. Why I’m bringing that up is probably the best way, the most intuitive way to think of the difference between presentism and eternalism is that under presentism, time travel, as we see in the movies — true time travel, where you can go forward and backwards — is absolutely impossible. It’s off the table. Because there’s nowhere to go. I can’t go back to visit my grandparents, because they no longer exist. So under presentism, time travel is off the table. Under eternalism, time travel is on the table. And that’s why sometimes so predominant in science fiction, and it’s actually hard to get away from, I think, nowadays. So the fact that some of the equations of general relativity allow for the possibility of time travel, I think has been one motivation for embracing the eternalist view among some physicists and philosophers.

ezra klein

I think that brings up an interesting tension between — at least one of the main views of what time is and in the way we experience time. Because for everything we’ve talked about here, on the one hand, there is the human experience of time, connected to memory, connected to clocks, where we are taking information from the past, applying it in the present in ways intended — and as you say, imperfectly so, but in ways intended to change the future. And then there’s this idea that comes out of special relativity and other theories and physics experiments and equations, that, well, maybe the future, the present, and the past are all laid out. Maybe they exist somewhere. And so the sense that we are changing the future with what we do in the present based on what we’ve learned in the past is in some, at least, linguistic tension with this idea the future is already out there, that the future exists in some fundamental way. How do you think about that?

Well, in this debate, in this tension between presentism and eternalism, I clearly fall in the camp of presentism. So to me, it doesn’t alter our intuitive view of that, yes, we can alter the future. And I think that’s a fundamental aspect of animal evolution, in the sense that the brain evolved to survive in a world governed by the laws of physics. And part of that, as a result of that evolution, we have this feeling of the passage of time. And we have the feeling that the past is fundamentally different from the present, which is fundamentally different from the future. And I don’t think we would have evolved that subjective experience if it didn’t reflect some aspect of reality. Remember, our subjective experiences aren’t simply for our viewing pleasure. They enhance our chances of survival. So pain enhances our chances of survival. Love presumably enhances our chances of survival, as do feelings — subjective feelings of the passage of time or color and so forth. So my view is that this is a case in which we have to trust our intuitive, subjective experience that time is passing. And that does tell us something about the nature of the universe. Now, you’re absolutely correct in the sense that under eternalism, the question of free will is seriously put in jeopardy and that we wouldn’t really have free will because things have already happened. So I think at a level of your philosophical experience of what happening, that can be perceived as a blow. I don’t know if it should be, either way. But I think philosophically, those have very profound and distinct implications for topics of free will. But as I said, as a presentist, I strongly feel that we, in effect, have the ability to make decisions in the present that shape future outcomes. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

You write about this fascinating study that was done on a tribe of people call the Pirahã people in the Amazon. Tell me about that study and what was unusual or interesting about the results.

Yeah, so this is mostly work by a linguist and anthropologist called Daniel Everett. And he has a great book, by the way, called “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.” And his report — and I think we have to always interpret these reports with some caution, because these cross-cultural studies are, first place, very, very difficult to do, and second place, even more difficult to confirm or replicate. So I think these interpretations might be a bit controversial. But he argues that in this tribe, the Pirahã, that they’re very present oriented, that they don’t think that much about the long-term future, and the implication perhaps being that in that tribe, maybe they didn’t need to because the circumstances of that local environment for survival didn’t require much long-term planning or long-term thinking. So it is interesting if, under those circumstances, are they more satisfied or happier, living in the present? I think that that’s a reasonable debate. But as we were just discussing, yeah, for most of us, long-term thinking is a necessary prerequisite for long-term survival. It is something that humans have to engage in for our long-term well-being, but something probably that we don’t do enough.

ezra klein

And then I want to ask about our relationship to the future. Because we know something about how we can change the way we mentally recollect the past. We know some things and have some practices about how to be more in the present, and people chase flow and meditation and so on. You had touched on the way we have trouble treating even our own future as as real as we would tell you we believe it is — trouble saving, trouble exercising, trouble preventing things we know we don’t want to happen from happening or making things we do want to have happen, happen. Is there anything in our evolving understanding of the way the brain anticipates or thinks about the future that can help give us a healthier relationship to our own individual or collective futures?

Yes. So this idea of thinking about the future, delaying gratification, long-term planning is something that is, as we’ve said, unique to humans. But we’re not very good at it. And that’s not very surprising, right? Because think about human evolution 100,000 years ago, when the average lifespan was maybe 30 years. The concept of saving for retirement was nonsensical. Because the idea of saving or planning for the future, if the future was so unpredictable that you might either die of disease or of hunger or of predation or of tribal warfare in the next six months, it really didn’t make much sense to think long-term. This is why we have a present bias. So the present bias is this notion that if I’m offered $100 today or $120 tomorrow, we have this bias to accept the present, the sure thing that’s immediate, even though it’s a lower value. So it’s not surprising at all that we have this implicit bias for the present and for short-term decisions and it’s hard to delay gratification, if you will. Now, what we can do about that, of course, is, like many cognitive skills, this comes with practice. And part of growing up and part of the educational system is helping people learn to delay gratification and think long-term. Even studying for a test is something that engages long-term thinking, because you’re studying today for something that will happen tomorrow. And the earlier you study for the test, in a way, you’re thinking in a longer temporal scale. And this goes back to the famous marshmallow tests with children and their ability to delay gratification, in terms of waiting 15 minutes to eat their marshmallow and then get two, as opposed to eating just one immediately. And the ability of children to delay that gratification correlated weekly — sometimes I think a bit too much is made of those data — with future academic success, for example. So practice is key. And people have shown that exercises, in terms of when you’re faced with a decision, well, should I spend this money now or should I put it in a savings account for retirement, few studies have suggested that visualizing the future, just engaging in exercises of being old, what I will be able to do with that funds, if I’ll be healthy and so forth, help people engage more future-oriented behavior or future-oriented actions in the present. But again, on this longer time scale of generations and centuries, evolutionarily, there, you can see it’s even a bit harder. But again, I think it’s a question of practice and discipline, much like learning math is or learning programming is. But these are difficult questions. And I don’t think we fully know the answers to them, Ezra.

ezra klein

I want to talk about what all this knowledge about living in time might say about how one should live in time. So to go back to something I was touching on earlier, if you wanted life to feel longer, how should you live?

So going back to this idea of retrospective timing being related to memory and the amount of information we have stored in memory, the standard view there is that the more novel experiences, the more — this goes to the self-help genre of novel experiences — new learning experiences help us have a life filled with memories and certainly give us the impression that it may have been a period well-lived or that we have taken advantage of or put into good use. So this is intuitive, I think, that we want to use our time for productive ventures, whatever each of us finds or defines as a productive venture, which is clearly variable and a highly personal choice. So I think these are just consequences of the fact that time passes inexorably and we are flowing through it, depending on your perspective. And these are just life choices, like all choices we make in our life — what we want to do with our time. Who we are as individuals, in many ways, is defined by what we do with our time. And the common piece of advice there is, yes, if you want to have the subjective experience of having a long period of accomplishments in your memories, that the more diverse those experiences are, the more likely you are to store those events in memory and retrospectively feel that that was a long temporal period that has elapsed.

ezra klein

What about our relationship with the present? There are deep religious and spiritual traditions that take our constant tendency to mentally time travel as a quite profound problem. Many kinds of mystical and chemical and meditative experiences are about creating a deep relationship to this moment. In your view, what does it mean to be more present focused? And what are we actually saying is happening in a human mind when we are saying somebody is more in the present? And is that something to strive for? What is the relationship we should have with the present?

Yeah, these are profound questions that I wouldn’t pretend to know the answer to. But in terms of what it means to be in the present, strangely enough, in many ways, that often means to be very unaware of the passage of time. So even in these theories or hypotheses or models of how the brain tells time, that one of the ideas is that the more we’re using our cognitive apparatus, our cognitive circuits to engage in a specific activity that’s independent of the passage of time, the more you’re involved in reading a book or playing chess or trying to figure out the best move or developing a novel idea, the less you are aware of the passage of time. So in many ways, living in the present or being focused in the present means being unaware of the passage of time. And the more we’re aware of the passage of time, you become a bit more cognizant of whether time is going by quickly or slowly. Now, what that means for our day-to-day goals, as we’ve touched upon, I think it is important — and it’s an important goal — to be involved in whatever tasks we’re involved in at the time, even if that task is thinking about the nature of time or thinking about the future or preparing for the future.

ezra klein

I think that is a good spot of ambiguity to end on. So always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

The first is called “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.” It’s by Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein. Kahneman is, of course, famous for his studies on irrational and biased decision making. In the context of framing, for example, that humans might be more apt or likely to choose a surgery that’s framed as having an 80 percent survival rate as opposed to one that has a 20 percent mortality rate — those, of course, being the same thing. In this book, he’s focusing more on noise and variability of human decisions. So, for example, given identical cases, a judge might make different rulings, perhaps influenced by whether his or her local sports team won or lost that weekend. The second book is a bit hard to describe. It’s sort of a fictionalized biography of real scientists. It’s “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamin Labatut. It’s independent short stories. And some are fairly dark, so it might not be for everyone. But the main story of the title is a dialogue between the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. And they’re coming to realization and grappling with the idea that at the quantum level, the universe is stochastic and unpredictable and highly counterintuitive and beyond a really ability to understand what’s happening, and that’s when we cease to understand the world. This offers an important lesson in quantum mechanics. It’s a good reminder of the limitations of the human brain and that it didn’t evolve to understand or to grasp many of the things we’re asking of it today. And this may be the case in neuroscience. It remains to be seen if the human brain can understand the human brain. The third is “The Age of A.I.: and Our Human Future.” It’s written by a surprising trio of authors — Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, the ex-C.E.O. of Google, and an academic, Huttenlocher. It’s not technical, but I think it’s a good review and does a good job at conveying the promise, the societal promise and dangers of A.I. Personally, one of the things I find interesting, going forward, in the context of A.I. is what our reaction to A.I. will tell us about ourselves.

ezra klein

Dean Buonomano, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ezra. It was a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “What’s been your experience with the health-care system and what lessons have you drawn?”Dennis kicks us off with a near-death experience:
I was young and foolish. I drove a motorcycle into the side of a car in 1980. After four-plus operations, [losing] 80-plus pints of blood, the removal of my gall bladder and most of my liver, two and a half months in the hospital, lots of infections and complications, and several more months of care, I recovered. It was intense and amazing, and since my union-member parents’ insurance paid for it, possible. I turned 23 in the hospital. I have never lost a scar contest.
The American health-care system saved my life. But my experience shows that it is not the best system in North America. I moved to Canada at 40. Now I can see my doctor at will and at no cost. Thankfully I have not needed the level of care in Canada that I required 42 years ago, but I know several cancer survivors who have had serious needs, and all have been well served, no worries about the cost. It’s better, it’s fair, it’s less stressful, and overall, it’s cheaper.
Since I’m now over 65, I’d be covered in the U.S. under a roughly equivalent system, Medicare. There is no good reason for Americans to wait 65 years each to get publicly funded health care.
Jaleelah gives harsher reviews to Canada’s health-care system:
Last fall, I struggled with disordered eating. After moving cities, I ate less than one meal a day. I experienced overwhelming nausea at the thought of cooking breakfast or going to dinner with friends. As a result, it became hard to live my life. I barely had enough energy to get out of bed, let alone attend my classes or see my friends. I entered a feedback loop where my lack of energy for grocery shopping and cooking made me eat less. My mental state worsened. When I told my family, they urged me to see my doctor.
I tried scheduling an appointment. “Due to COVID,” they were only scheduling phone consults. I booked one anyway. The office instructed me to wait for the doctor to call me at the scheduled time. When the appointment came around, I waited for three hours but I received no call. I phoned the office. They told me they would remind the doctor to call. I waited the whole afternoon and evening with no luck. I finally got a call the next day.
I talked about my symptoms. I described the toll they were taking on my academic career and my mental health. When I asked about my options, the doctor ordered blood work and told me to come back if the issue was still around in a few months. I didn’t actually get examined for another six months. Meanwhile, I tried to schedule appointments multiple times only to be met with voicemail and instructed to try again later. I failed a class. I lost nearly 20 pounds. The people around me were bewildered by my decision not to see a doctor. I kept having to explain that it was the doctor who refused to see me.
Canada’s health-care system is severely understaffed. There is an extreme shortage of family doctors in almost every region. This is more the fault of the government (which, until recently, made no effort to attract foreign professionals) than my ghosting-prone doctor.
But there are other issues at play. The medical system has been incredibly slow to bounce back from pandemic-era limitations. Only when I finally got a hold of the doctor and gave them a number value on how much weight I’d lost was I able to schedule an in-person appointment—set for two months later. The reason was listed as “weight loss,” even though I’d spent far more time describing the debilitating effects on my energy and my life. I worked hard to gradually eat more and turned to my social support system for help. That was my only real option. Under a veil of ignorance, I’d still prefer Canada’s health-care system to America’s. Doctors are dismissive everywhere and long wait times are preferable to the possibility of dying due to lack of insurance.
[Read: Will an influential conservative brain trust stand up to Trump?]Rachel has spent her teens, her 20s, and now her early 30s “navigating and bumbling my way through the byzantine U.S. health-care system as a chronic-illness patient” since being diagnosed at 17 with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, “a complex chronic condition for which modern Western academic medicine gives little to no explanation.” She has advice:
I now see hoards of long COVID patients wading through the same long, confusing slog as they try to manage care for something that exceeds the limits of our current medical capacity. And I see it as a health coach, as I work with clients who are largely plagued by the typical Western cardio and metabolic diseases (diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, etc.) or lead reasonably normal, healthy-ish lives and yet fall prey to poor care, misdiagnoses, and a general lack of guidance around lifestyle medicine.
We have a weird paradox in the U.S. where many patients like their doctors but hate the overall health-care system. I’d imagine most doctors and providers feel the same way. And so while there is a lot of antagonism between chronic-illness patients and the medical establishment, I’m not sure this is a fair take as we have a system that has a number of really weird and perverse incentives. Every patient gets reduced to a set of CPT billing codes. And for conditions that are marked by nonspecific symptoms and nebulous origins, the problems get exacerbated. In the absence of biomarkers and clear disease etiology, the common denominator is the patient, who either gets outright blamed for her symptoms or patronizingly referred to psych (therapy is great, obviously, but not sufficient).
Like many patients, I have sought answers outside the norm. I’ve spent almost a decade and a half going everywhere from major medical centers to borderline witchcraft. My favorite doctors have been those who are honest and treat me with respect; they know their limits and value my experience as a patient. I had a PCP tell me in my initial appointment, “You’ve been through a lot. How can I support you in this?” I still tear up thinking of that moment, and how rare that kind of exchange is. I’ve since established a good care team with my primary-care doctor, some specialists, and a Chinese medicine doctor who is an absolute godsend. My out-of-pocket costs could probably fund a trophy wife’s Hermès obsession, but who really needs that many Birkins when you can spend your days having acupuncture needles jammed in your body?
Lessons learned are numerous:
1. Learn how to advocate for yourself. Know what your lab tests mean, understand your medications, keep track of your symptoms and health questions, and use this information to help you prepare for your doctor appointments. Ask for explanations and take notes.
2. Building on that, know your body and take reasonable measures to track your health. This doesn’t have to be an obsessive pursuit but merely enough to help you understand if things are helping or not. Unfortunately, data in this area is quite messy.
3. Health habits, like most habits, are heavily influenced by your surroundings. Cultivating a community of people with shared values around well-being is a worthwhile investment of your time and energy.
4. You have a surprising amount of agency with respect to your health. But you don’t have control over everything. Knowing the difference gives you freedom from beating yourself up over health outcomes that aren’t your fault.
5. Western medicine does a really great job at managing acute care. It’s less equipped to handle chronic conditions.
6. Chinese medicine is amazing and highly underrated. Unfortunately it’s heavily practitioner-dependent, which means there is lots of mediocrity happening.
7.  Having a chronic illness is basically a full-time job with abysmal pay and few benefits. Learning to monetize your existential crisis (writing, coaching, mentoring, hell—even tweeting) will go a long way toward bringing a sense of purpose to an otherwise lonely existence.
Sharon agrees that patients must advocate for themselves to thrive in the American system:
I find you have to be very persistent; do your homework on many fronts. I was denied a drug with many qualifications stated for rationale. I dug up all the records to show that blood tests validated the chemistry they required—and they approved the drug. But I didn’t depend on my physician’s office to do this. It would have never gotten done. The few hospitalizations I’ve had went pretty well. I wasn’t strong enough physically or mentally to have an endoscopy until a few days after it was recommended. I got it, but later, so knowing your own strength and sticking to what you know of your own body is very important.
VH has impressions of health care in Australia:
Aside from long waiting lists in the public sector, care is good. In theory, regardless of whether you are private or public, the care should be the same, right? The only differences should be the “perks” of private care. Granted, long waiting lists are problematic, but if something is acute you are seen immediately, and the public, tertiary hospitals are where you’d want to be. They are the best equipped and most experienced.
Last month I learned I had a heart issue. I went private—it was expensive, about $2,500 for all the tests needed—so that I could find out quickly what was wrong. If I’d gone public, I probably wouldn’t have even had one test yet. This was the first time I really thought about the broadening inequity in Australia. I’m lucky, in that while it’s expensive, if I need to spend that much on health care, I can. What about others who can’t? Why are public systems not better funded? One issue is that people who can afford private care and have private health insurance choose to instead take up a public bed. In my opinion, if you can afford to go private and therefore let someone who can’t afford the same to have better access, you should. It’s about being a good person and doing the right thing. But when I mention that to people, they get really defensive about it.
I see it as one small way I can positively contribute to society. I just wish people would focus on the fact that we all deserve good health care, regardless of what we can afford, and make it a genuine not-for-profit industry. The drug companies in the U.S. sound horrific. Profiteering off people’s poor health is incomprehensible. The larger lesson I’ve drawn? You only deserve the best care if you can pay for it. Your life is only worth how much money you can spend. And that is NOT a lesson I want my daughter to learn. The life of someone who’s rich is not more important than that of someone who is poor.
Christopher describes the American health-care system as “confusing, costly, and unchanging.” He writes:  
I’ve never been to a doctor, since I was a teenager, with whom I felt a connection and the impression of care. I feel like I’m at the deli counter being served as the next customer. I usually have no idea what medical care is going to cost (to me) until I’m sitting in the office. I don’t know of anything else I buy where that occurs.  For significant procedures planned in advance, the providers won’t give the cost to me in advance, even though they know what the price will be, because they’ve done it 500 times. Then, when it’s over, a confusing set of bills is sent, along with separate insurance [explanations of benefits], all seemingly for the singular purpose of inflating a price to arrive at a final number.  
It’s broken; everyone knows it’s broken, and they know most of the solutions too, but health care is like a mountain of stone. Everyone I know says it sucks (except for those covered by Cadillac plans, and for them it’s only a matter of time before they become Medicare’s problem). Even people I know who criticized the Affordable Care Act still think the system is broken yet seem opposed to the obvious fixes. The incentives given to providers are all backwards and wrong. They should be incentivized to keep you healthy, not find expensive ways to try to fix a problem that could have been avoided.
[Read: 10 readers on opposing anti-Semitism]M. describes the unnerving way that health-care outlays can affect even the financial well-being of the relatively affluent––so much so that he plans on leaving the United States entirely:
I make a good living. I should have a larger retirement portfolio than I do, as my husband and I keep our living expenses within bounds, and I am a moderately successful self-employed professional. However, every few years, or sometimes a few years in a row, I find our household being bankrupted by the medical-industrial complex.  
This year has been uniquely devastating. My husband is a 75-year-old bone-cancer survivor. Two years of radical chemotherapy left him with a suppressed immune system, which means for most of the pandemic we’ve been hiding from people the way Gremlins hide from sunlight.
A few years ago he had a two-year bout of C. diff, for which the drugs cost thousands. He finally beat it.
A long-term result of the C. diff left him with bacteria in his teeth and gums, which resulted in him needing $25,000 worth of dental work. He lost his upper teeth, now has upper dentures, and had serious gum work done on all his bottom teeth. Medicare covered a tiny bit of this. Dental work is not considered worthy of proper insurance in this country. And without the dental care he would have developed sepsis and died.
This cost was on top of his Medicare deduction from his Social Security and his $471-per-month drug-plan copay.
We’ve had some truly INCOMPETENT primary-care physicians over the years.  We found a great doctor in 2006. He was an independent. Didn’t take insurance. Fee for service. Had studied at Loma Linda hospital. Great credentials. Finally a great primary-care physician. His wife, a Harvard-trained attorney who had retired from the law, ran his practice. Well, with the COVID pandemic, his wife burned out on medical administration, partly from all of the death they had to deal with. And she had a few COVID deaths in her own family. With his wife retiring from medical administration, he joined a boutique primary-care practice starting January 1, 2022. He’s no longer fee-for-service.  He went concierge. He takes insurance now. But the annual “concierge fee” for 2022 was $3,000 per patient per year. It is going up to $4,000 per patient for 2023.
Then there are MY medical costs. My insurance is $1,189 per month for second-from-top-level insurance. It goes up 14 percent next year. I have arthritic knees from being a 10-to-15-mile-a-week runner from my late teens to early 30s. At 6 foot 1, I am a knee-replacement candidate. Prednisone made me put on weight, and I was already heavy, so I had to get off of it. Humira had all the effects of a sugar pill. I am immune to the benefit. So my arthritis doctor prescribed a biologic drug infusion.
Those treatments, of which I had three, had a copay of $1,468 each. And to boot, they did absolutely nothing! I was fired by my arthritis doctor when I told him that it was professionally irresponsible of him and his staff to prescribe such an expensive treatment without first notifying me of the cost. They felt that it wasn’t their job.
Next year I will have the knee replacement. I am living on pain meds and toradol (an injectable anti-inflammatory) and can’t wait until 65 when Medicare picks up the full tab. The out-of-pocket cap on my health insurance is $8,800. I’ll hit that. And I have a tooth that’s going and needs to be replaced with an implant. That’s another $4,000 next year.  
There is a silver lining in all of this. My husband is a French citizen. He has family all over that country. Lovely people. In 2024 we are selling our home and moving to the southwest of France. As it turns out, with the world having gone virtual during the pandemic, I can service my clients from anywhere. And as it is, over a third of my practice is out of the region where I live. With the equity in our home, we can buy a lovely home in the Dordogne with cash left over. Our taxes will go up only slightly. Our medical costs will plummet by more than two-thirds, and that‘s if we opt for top-tier health care. I really do love this country. I just can’t afford the medical care here anymore.
Paul prefers his home country’s system to the American system:
Having lived in both the United States and the United Kingdom, I do not understand why Americans tolerate their expensive, divisive, and dangerously inefficient system. While in the U.S., my family had (at great expense to me and my employer) insurance through the University of Texas system, among the best available. We were subjected to repeated unnecessary testing, but the fragmented nature of the system meant that crucial indicators were missed. When we returned to the U.K., my wife was rapidly diagnosed through our taxpayer-funded system with angina and coronary artery constriction, which, if we had stayed in the U.S., would have killed her, and which was promptly and expertly treated by bypass surgery. And that’s top end, for an articulate, educated, health-conscious individual.
Errol emphasizes the role of individuals in their health outcomes:
I do agree that there needs to be coverage for everyone so that people don’t face crippling debts after accidents, but part of me feels as if this is a “banning assault weapons will stop mass shootings” argument. The leading causes of death in our country related to health are mostly preventable with exercise, diet, and [avoiding harmful] choices such as alcohol and smoking; cancer screenings and preventive treatments, such as yearly checkups, are not expensive in the system we have now. Individual responsibility for your own health needs to be priority No. 1. Let’s focus on getting Americans to be more active and more conscientious of what they put in their bodies and then see where we’re at. It’s great that we finally have a law that lowers the costs of life-saving prescription medicines, but we need to focus on getting Americans off of pill popping and injections. The best medicine is prevention, and we don’t focus on that in this country.
Also, it’s relatively easy for other countries such as Canada and the U.K. to implement cheaper forms of universal health care when they replicate the life-saving technologies and medicines made in America. I worry that if we adopt their methods then we’ll see a large dip in medicinal advancement due to a lack of incentive for private companies to push the envelope.
Ted writes from the West Coast, where he finds that health care is a mess:
We retired and moved to a relatively prosperous, well-educated locale—the central coast of California, where the insurance companies do not compensate local providers at a level that attracts physicians, dentists, optometrists, and others. Thus a one-year wait to see a dermatologist, a four-month wait to see my regular doc. For optometry we didn’t even try––we drive two and a half hours to our old providers. This was the same condition in the Central Valley until the largest employers rebelled and demanded more options for their employees. When the insurance companies raised their compensation to match Los Angeles’s, the clinician shortage went away.
My spouse has Federal retiree insurance; I am on her policy and on Medicare. The options, permutations, preferred-provider lists, and gotchas are endlessly staggering. My dear wife carefully researches all the different plans every year to see what might be most beneficial for us. Our medical needs are very ordinary—probably dull. Yet every year, the choices look more and more like a minefield than a straightforward set of choices.
MR urges a “laboratory of democracies” approach to reforming health care:
As with pretty much anything, society must make choices. But there is no consensus on what the big-picture future state should look like. When those on one side push a one-size-fits-all, state-owned-and-run, no profit-motive solution (which does not work anywhere in the world) and the other [endorses] zero government involvement with constraints that are aligned to social views, not medical solutions, you can’t move to a rational framework.
Drugs take time and money to develop and test, doctors take time and money to educate and train, and anything free will be valued as such and overused, but overcharging for preventive medicine increases long-run costs and results in poor outcomes. Both Europe and the U.S. could do with more flexibility and experimentation as to potential solutions. Although it is made fun of in today’s climate, the idea that the U.S. has 50 different experiments going on is a plus, not a flaw, in its system. We should try and use it [for health care].

The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX. On November 2, a report from the crypto publication Coindesk highlighted the troubled balance sheet of Bankman-Fried’s crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research. Two days later, Block’s post titled “Is Alameda Research Insolvent?” went viral, and for good reason: Block had connected the dots from Coindesk’s earlier work to suggest that both FTX and Alameda had their money tied up in their own made-up tokens—an unsustainable circular flow of cash that would eventually sink FTX. Within a week, the company filed for bankruptcy.Currently, Bankman-Fried is under investigation from federal prosecutors who are looking into whether he engaged in illegal market-manipulation tactics. He’s also supposedly going to testify before the House Financial Services committee in the coming weeks. Ignoring the advice of his lawyers, Bankman-Fried has given a series of interviews with independent journalists as well as national media outlets. Throughout, he has continued to deny wrongdoing, maintaining instead that he was ignorant of Alameda’s market positions. “I didn’t knowingly commingle funds,” Bankman-Fried told The New York Times at a conference late last month.Block, a vehement crypto skeptic, has spent the past 18 months doing forensic blockchain research. He uses open-source tools to follow flows of money between crypto companies, repeatedly demonstrating how shadow banks and nefarious scammers inflate the value of worthless assets in order to generate enormous wealth that exists only on paper. Earlier this week, I called him to talk about how he got sucked into the world of financial-crime investigation, why decentralized finance isn’t actually transparent (or, in many cases, even decentralized), and whether there’s any value at all in the crypto ecosystem.Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Charlie Warzel: I’m very curious about what your day job is like. My fascination is with your crypto work, obviously. But a side fascination here is that you do this in your spare time.James Block: I’ve always just been fascinated with the weird mechanics of financial stuff and fraud—the mechanics of it and the complexity of how something so simple ends up being so bizarrely intricate. I’d heard about bitcoin, obviously, but I never really knew anything about crypto until probably June of last year. And then I found out about Tether, this company that claimed to have $69 billion under management but wouldn’t show anybody the books. And so that was just like candy to me. I couldn’t resist becoming interested in something like that.Warzel: The world of finance has always been intimidating and impenetrable to me, but the more I learn, the more I get what you’re describing: complex, but actually very simple. And it all hinges on the vocabulary. I was reading about hedge funds recently, and it’s like, Oh, that financial instrument, they just made it up! Block: This is a great way to talk about FTX and Alameda Research, and how they got into trouble with their stupid tokens. They created this incredibly convoluted mechanism out of thin air. A token is just code they created that has no value, but then you can make it very visible and pump it up to make it valuable. But it’s nothing. It’s smoke and mirrors. There’s nothing really complicated there, but it looks complicated if you don’t understand what they’re doing.Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated. But you get right down to it, and it’s just a ledger. It’s just like somebody writing down numbers in a book, and it’s page after page of numbers. That’s all it is.Warzel: So what made you start poking into FTX? From your newsletter, it seems you were looking at the collapse of Celsius—a large crypto lender that promised investors large yields but ultimately filed for bankruptcy this past summer—and saw a lot of links with FTX. Is that what raised your hackles?Block: I’ve always been crypto skeptical, but like everyone else, I believed the stories that SBF was the smart one in the ecosystem who was making the money. I never thought he was a genius, but I didn’t think he was as insolvent as he was. Even after I wrote the article, I thought I’d be proven right about FTX maybe a few months later. I didn’t think it would be three or four days later. That was incredible. I was shocked to find out just how big the hole in FTX’s balance sheet seemed to be. I suspected for a long time that FTX and Alameda were almost certainly gambling with their customers’ money. It’s just common sense based on the fact that the companies were so closely related and on some of the things I had seen on the blockchain that I didn’t really know how to interpret.Warzel: What were those things on the blockchain you weren’t initially able to interpret?Block: It’s hard to attribute ownership of certain addresses on the blockchain. You can follow the money perfectly—every single transaction is legible, and you can track the money wherever it goes. But it’s hard to know who owns things sometimes. When it came down to Alameda, I had a few starting points, and I could see funds coming out of FTX and going into Alameda in a way that was odd. And you think that maybe there’s something weird here about how they’re treating customers’ money.Honestly, though, this is true for most crypto. There’s rarely separation between a company’s ownership of assets and an individual’s holdings. So it never would have shocked me to know that SBF was commingling assets between these firms. And I had evidence to think that that was the case. But I didn’t have enough to write about it, you know?Warzel: I want to go back to your November 4 newsletter, which may have helped accelerate FTX’s unraveling. Coindesk’s story showed that Alameda’s largest asset was FTX’s token, FTT, which of course was created by FTX, SBF’s other company. And what you did was further that reporting by following the money. As you put it, SBF was “printing billions of dollars out of thin air against which he was able to borrow massive sums from unknown counterparties.” You produced a rather alarming chart showing that FTT tokens were actually just flowing in a circle. When you saw that, was it an “oh shit” surprise moment?Block: Not really. I knew things were very bad as soon as I saw that the distribution of FTT was almost entirely in Alameda’s own wallets. And I knew it was bad because this is what Celsius was doing—it's a big, stupid circle. And that’s actually true for most of these tokens. And a lot of this is what these market makers do—they “provide liquidity,” but in practice, it’s just wash trading. But here’s the hard part: You can’t prove it’s wash trading without the exchange’s internal records. So I’m stuck just showing that, well, all these people that are supposedly buying this thing just end up sending it right back to the exchange. So what’s actually going on?Warzel: There’s this idea that crypto is supposed to be decentralized and deeply transparent, that it’s supposed to be so easy to see where all the money is going at all times. And some of your work speaks to that promise. But it also strikes me that these centralized entities like Alameda or FTX play in the crypto world, and yet their balance sheets are not transparent. FTX is not a decentralized entity.Block: There’s always stuff going on the blockchain, but these companies also have agreements off of the blockchain, right? Everything they have inside these exchanges is not on the blockchain. It’s using regular old database technology, and it’s not traceable at all. So yeah, a lot of the most important economic activity in crypto has nothing to do with blockchain at all. Huge percentages of people who do this kind of retail crypto trading, they don’t even know how to take what they bought off the exchange and put it in their own wallet.Warzel: Post-FTX, I’ve heard a lot of chatter from crypto true believers about what needs to happen to the ecosystem. But what’s always struck me as a foundational problem in this space is that decentralized finance seems to have no real utility behind it. So much of what is created is just financial instruments and speculative assets. Can you speak to that part a bit?Block: The AMC-meme-stock thing is a good example of how this can happen. People buy the stock of a semi-worthless company because they have this idea about short squeezing, or whatever. They are not financial experts and have a loose or maybe even wrong understanding of how finance works, and want to try to move the market. Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous. The amount of time and money people put into just running these things is tremendous. And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient. And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?The vast majority of people who got involved in this have no interest related to the technology or in the political or ideological aspects of crypto. They just see an opportunity to get rich. And a lot of those people end up absorbing and parroting some of the crypto ideals back to you, but they don’t really care to understand what’s going on. It’s just their excuse for what they’ve already done, which is gamble on something they thought was going to make them wealthy.Warzel: Do you think most entities in the crypto space are insolvent and know it, and are just pretending right now, post-FTX?Block: Absolutely. That’s because of what I said earlier about crypto. There’s no value created by any of these companies. It’s all just moving money from Person A to Person B. And look at the economic conditions. You have interest rates rising; people and companies are being squeezed economically and not willing to gamble. The fact is that there are fewer suckers aping into this system, and Ponzi schemes rely on new money to survive. I think most crypto companies are, like FTX, just borrowing from customer deposits to keep things afloat. And even the companies that aren’t doing that—I think Coinbase, for example, isn’t doing anything illicit, but their business model is based on this ecosystem where new money comes in. And that’s stopping.Warzel: By that logic then, what is the future for crypto? Do you see this ecosystem existing in a few years?Block: I mean, Beanie Babies still exist. Pogs still exist. Will bitcoin still exist? I think it’ll be like owning a ham radio, with hobbyists doing their niche thing together. I mean, who knows. But you know if they were to really regulate the industry, it couldn’t work the way it does. It would look unrecognizable.One thing that is interesting is the psychology of all this. I’ve shared a lot of really damning things over the past year with people online—stuff that, if you were to hear about it, you would think any rational person would think, What am I doing with my money? I need to get it out as quickly as possible. And there were some people who reacted that way. But for every one person who listened, there were at least 10 who didn’t. And it’s just been fascinating to see. But this was almost more fun for me when I was on the losing side—when crypto was booming, and before it was obvious to everybody that this was all a scam. Back then, it was just a minority of us saying, “None of this makes any damn sense, guys.” That was fun. Now it’s kind of sad watching the consequences play out, especially because the people who get hurt the most are the people at the bottom of the food chain.

I haven’t posted anything on Ukraine in a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been continuously thinking and worrying about it.Since the liberation of Kherson last month, there has been a lull in fighting in the south, and a continuing bloody engagement around Bakhmut, where Russian forces led by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group have been trying to capture the city for many weeks now. Russia has continued to attack civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, trying to shut down electricity and water as the winter sets in.Following a pattern that has persisted since the beginning of the war, every pause in the fighting has led to renewed calls for negotiations. The latest have come from my old friend Robert Wright, who argued in the Washington Post for U.S. pressure on Ukraine to negotiate. French President Emmanuel Macron, rather unbelievably suggested that Russia might need security guarantees in a peace deal, while another old friend, John Mearsheimer, doubled down on this point in a bizarre interview with Isaac Chotiner. Jeffrey Sachs has continued to double down on his view that the war is entirely driven by American policy.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Such arguments are all based on two mistaken premises: first, that Russia’s motives in the war were something other than a desire to grab as much Ukrainian territory as possible and undermine its viability as a state, and second, that further Ukrainian advances were unlikely and that a long-term stalemate would ensue. Both of these are wrong.While Russia is clearly on the back foot right now, there is zero evidence that its long-term objective of subduing Ukraine has changed in the slightest. Indeed, Russian spokesmen have as much as admitted that they needed time to rest and rebuild their forces. A peace negotiation now that left them in control of significant Ukrainian territory would not lead to peace; the war would resume the moment Russia felt it had recovered sufficiently. In the meantime, Ukrainian civilians trapped behind Russian lines will continue to suffer torture and repression as they have in every territory thus far liberated from Russian control.With regard to military outcomes, there is every reason to think that Ukraine’s forward momentum will continue. Now that winter has set in, the ground is freezing and permitting greater vehicle mobility. The Russians retreated from Kherson and are fortifying positions on the left bank of the Dnipro river, but according to the Institute for the Study of War they have not had time to build comprehensive defense lines and the Ukrainians have already crossed the river at several points. It is extremely important that they liberate this stretch of territory so as to be able to cut Russian lines of communication running from Russian-occupied Donbas and Russia itself through Marilupol and Melitopol.Once these lines are cut or in artillery range, Ukraine can think about liberating Crimea. A direct assault across the narrow isthmus that connects the peninsula to Kherson Oblast is not likely to work; rather, the peninsula can be cut off from resupply and slowly strangled the way that Ukraine strangled Kherson in the late summer. Reclaiming Nova Kakhovka on the left bank of the Dnipro will allow Ukraine to once again block the canal that supplies Crimea with fresh water. Meanwhile, its ability to strike targets deep within the peninsula has already been demonstrated, and will greatly increase as eastern Kherson is liberated. The Russians may get serious about negotiating if they feel their grasp on Sevastopol slipping.Needless to say, all of this will require continued high levels of military support from the West, as well as help in protecting and rebuilding civilian infrastructure. Withholding long-range missile systems like ATACMS seems silly when Ukraine is desperate to neutralize the airbases from which rocket attacks are launched.  Russia used fear of nuclear escalation in September to try to intimidate Kyiv’s allies, but it didn’t work and they have given up on that. If Washington is as serious as it claims to be about helping Ukraine win the war, it should lift its blocks on these kinds of systems.As I’ve said in previous posts, Western pressure on Ukraine to negotiate always increases the moment Ukraine’s forward military momentum slows. Politics is driven by military outcomes, and not the reverse in this case. The Russian army is poorly equipped to fight in winter conditions, with many of its recently mobilized forces lacking winter uniforms and shelter. Ukraine by contrast is fully prepared to take advantage of the season to move ahead. Quite frankly, the biggest threat to Ukraine’s success was the Republican Party. Had a “red wave” materialized on Nov. 8, the MAGA wing of the party would have felt its oats and pushed to cut funding to Kyiv. Now, with the further loss of Herschel Walker to Raphael Warnock, Trumpism has been deflated and is on a downward slope. The United States and its NATO allies have to capitalize on the moment and help Ukraine win.One final issue. Emine Dzheppar, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, launched an initiative called Crimean Platform before the start of the war to call attention to human rights abuses in Crimea, especially among her own Crimean Tatar community. I have been happy to help in this and would like to reiterate my support for those citizen journalists who have been unjustly sentenced to prison for reporting on the truth by the Russians occupiers.Image: Servicemen at the Land Forces Training Center of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. (Flickr: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense)

Illustrations by Derek BrahneyThe Scourge of All HumankindIf you were, for whatever macabre reason, seeking the most catastrophic moment in the history of humankind, you might well settle on this: About 10,000 years ago, as people first began to domesticate animals and farm the land in Mesopotamia, India, and northern Africa, a peculiar virus leaped across the species barrier. Little is known about its early years. But the virus spread and, whether sooner or later, became virulent. It ransacked internal organs before traveling through the blood to the skin, where it erupted in pus-filled lesions. Many of those who survived it were left marked, disfigured, even blind.As civilizations bloomed across the planet, the virus stalked them like a curse. Some speculate that it swept through ancient Egypt, where its scars appear to mar the mummified body of Pharaoh Ramses V. By the fourth century A.D., it had gained a foothold in China. Christian soldiers spread it through Europe during the 11th- and 12th-century Crusades. In the early 1500s, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors conveyed it west across the Atlantic, where it ravaged native communities and contributed to the downfall of the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca empires.By the end of the 1500s, the disease caused by the virus had become one of the most feared in the world. About a third of those who contracted it were dead within weeks. The Chinese called it tianhua, or “heaven’s flowers.” Throughout Europe, it was known as variola, meaning “spotted.” In England, where doctors used the term pox to describe pestilent bumps on the skin, syphilis had already claimed the name “the great pox.” And so this disease took on a diminutive moniker that belied the scale of its wretchedness: smallpox.Over time, different communities experimented with different cures. Many noticed that survivors earned lifetime immunity from the disease. This discovery was passed down through the generations in Africa and Asia, where local cultures developed a practice that became known as inoculation—from the Latin inoculare, meaning “to graft.” In most cases, people would stick a sharp instrument into a smallpox-infected pustule to collect just a little material from the disease. Then they would stick the same blade, wet with infection, into the skin of a healthy individual. Inoculation often worked—pustules would form at the injection site, and a low-grade version of the disease would typically follow. But the intervention was terribly flawed; it killed about one in every 50 patients.Not until the early 1700s did a chance encounter in the Ottoman empire bring the process to Britain, and bend the axis of history. In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an English aristocrat living in Constantinople with her husband, a diplomat, heard about inoculation from her acquaintances in the Ottoman court. Circassian women, from the Caucasus Mountains and in great demand for the Turkish sultan’s harem, were inoculated as children in parts of their bodies where scars would not easily be seen. Lady Montagu asked the embassy surgeon to perform the procedure on her son—and upon her return to London a few years later, on her young daughter.Word spread from court physicians to members of the College of Physicians to doctors across the continent. Within a few years, inoculation had become widespread in Europe. But many people still died of smallpox after being deliberately infected, and in some cases inoculation transmitted other diseases, like syphilis or tuberculosis.One boy who went through the ordeal of inoculation was Edward Jenner, the son of a vicar in Gloucestershire, England. He trained as a physician in the late 1700s, and carried out these rough smallpox inoculations regularly. But Jenner also sought a better cure. He was taken by a theory that a disease among cows could provide cross-immunity to smallpox.In the spring of 1796, Jenner was approached by a dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, who complained of a rash on her hand. She told Jenner that one of her cows, named Blossom, had recently suffered from cowpox. Jenner suspected that her blister might give him the opportunity to test whether cowpox was humanity’s long-awaited cure.May 14, 1796, was a golden day in the history of science but a terrifying one for a certain 8-year-old boy. Jenner drew a blade, slick with ooze from a cowpox blister, across the arm of James Phipps, the brave and healthy son of his gardener.After a week, young James developed a headache, lost his appetite, and came down with chills. When the boy had recovered, Jenner returned with a new blade—this one coated with the microbial matter of the smallpox virus. He cut the boy with the infected lancet. Nothing happened. The boy had been immunized from smallpox without encountering the disease.Jenner would go down in history as the person who invented and administered a medical cure for one of the deadliest viruses in world history. Then he invented something else: a new word, from the Latin for “cow,” that would be carried down through the centuries alongside his scientific breakthrough. He called his wondrous invention a vaccine.The Eureka MythLet’s pause the story here. Jenner’s eureka moment is world-famous: cherished by scientists, rhapsodized by historians, and even captured in oil paintings that hang in European museums.For many, progress is essentially a timeline of the breakthroughs made by extraordinary individuals like Jenner. Our mythology of science and technology treats the moment of discovery or invention as a sacred scene. In school, students memorize the dates of major inventions, along with the names of the people who made them—Edison, light bulb, 1879; Wright brothers, airplane, 1903. The great discoverers—Franklin, Bell, Curie, Tesla—get best-selling biographies, and millions of people know their names.[Work in Progress: Derek Thompson on the 10 most promising breakthrough innovations of 2022]This is the eureka theory of history. And for years, it is the story I’ve read and told. Inventors and their creations are the stars of my favorite books about scientific history, including The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin, and They Made America, by Harold Evans. I’ve written long features for this magazine holding up invention as the great lost art of American technology and the fulcrum of human progress.But in the past few years, I’ve come to think that this approach to history is wrong. Inventions do matter greatly to progress, of course. But too often, when we isolate these famous eureka moments, we leave out the most important chapters of the story—the ones that follow the initial lightning bolt of discovery. Consider the actual scale of Edward Jenner’s accomplishment the day he pricked James Phipps in 1796. Exactly one person had been vaccinated in a world of roughly 1 billion people, leaving 99.9999999 percent of the human population unaffected. When a good idea is born, or when the first prototype of an invention is created, we should celebrate its potential to change the world. But progress is as much about implementation as it is about invention. The way individuals and institutions take an idea from one to 1 billion is the story of how the world really changes.And it doesn’t always change, even after a truly brilliant discovery. The 10,000-year story of human civilization is mostly the story of things not getting better: diseases not being cured, freedoms not being extended, truths not being transmitted, technology not delivering on its promises. Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history—it is the less common story of how our inventions and institutions reduce disease, poverty, pain, and violence while expanding freedom, happiness, and empowerment.It’s a story that has almost ground to a halt in the United States.In theory, the values of progress form the core of American national identity. The American dream is meant to represent that exception to the rule of history: Here, we say, things really do get better. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, they did. Almost every generation of Americans was more productive, wealthier, and longer-lived than the one before it. In the past few decades, however, progress has faltered—and faith in it has curdled. Technological progress has stagnated, especially in the nonvirtual world. So have real incomes. Life expectancy has been falling in recent years.
Derek Brahney
What went wrong? There are many answers, but one is that we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment. The U.S. has more Nobel Prizes for science than the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the deployment and widespread adoption of technology—even technology that we invented, even technology that’s not so new anymore—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling. Americans invented the first nuclear reactor, the solar cell, and the microchip, but today, we’re well behind a variety of European and Asian countries in deploying and improving these technologies. We were home to some of the world’s first subway systems, but our average cost per mile for tunnel projects today is the highest in the world. The U.S. did more than any other nation to advance the production of the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19, but also leads the developed world in vaccine refusal.At its worst, the eureka theory distorts American views of how best to push society forward, and slows material advance in the process. To appreciate the deeper story of progress—and to see how it bears on America’s own problems in the 21st century—let’s return to 1796 and recall how history’s first vaccine went global.One to 1 BillionAfter Edward Jenner verified that James Phipps was indeed protected against smallpox, he wrote a brief paper to announce his discovery. The Royal Society of London refused to publish it. His own self-published booklet, An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, was initially ignored by the medical community. (Jenner was both a physician and a zoologist, and his studies of cuckoo-bird behavior may have stoked suspicions that he was at best a dilettante, and perhaps something of a cuckoo himself.)Jenner needed surrogates in the English medical field to give his wild experiments gravitas. He found one such defender in Henry Cline, an open-minded London surgeon who acquired some inoculating substance from Jenner and began conducting trials to confirm Jenner’s findings, establishing the practice as safe and reliable. The vaccine was so immediately and obviously successful that it proved self-recommending. By 1800, vaccinations had spread rapidly through Europe, in large part because so many elites supported them. The kings of Denmark, Spain, and Prussia personally promoted the vaccine. The pope called it “a precious discovery” that ought to restore the public’s faith in God.Still, doctors faced a prodigious challenge: how to deliver the stuff around the world in an era without cold storage, airplanes, or cars. They settled on distribution methods that were, by any reasonable estimation, extremely strange and a little ingenious. In the early 1800s, Spain recruited 22 orphaned boys to bring the vaccine to the Americas on their body. Two boys were vaccinated immediately before their ship’s departure. When pustules appeared on their arms, doctors scraped material from them to jab two more children on board. Doctors continued this daisy-chain routine until the ship reached modern-day Venezuela, where they began using the most recent pox eruption to vaccinate people in the Americas. Without any advanced storage technology, they had managed to transport history’s first vaccine more than 4,000 miles, in perfect condition. Arm-to-arm, the vaccine traveled to Mexico, Macau, and Manila. Within 10 years of Jenner’s paper, the vaccine had gone global.The smallpox vaccine faced popular resistance wherever it went. (In Britain, one cartoonist depicted the vaccinated as sprouting miniature cows out of their bodies.) But America’s most powerful people, including priests and presidents, typically extolled the virtues of the vaccine, having personally witnessed its benefits, which helped overcome the anti-science skepticism. Gradually, the vaccine pushed smallpox out of Europe and the U.S.Even so, in the 1950s—some 150 years after Jenner’s discovery—1.7 billion people, or roughly 60 percent of the world’s population, still lived in countries where the virus was endemic. The major powers would often talk about finishing the job of smallpox eradication, but major technical and organizational obstacles stood in the way. Vaccination efforts still lacked funding. Outbreaks were still too difficult to track.Then along came several heroes who belong in the pantheon of science history alongside Edward Jenner. The first is D. A. Henderson, the director of the World Health Organization’s global vaccination effort. Henderson was just 38 years old when he arrived in Geneva to lead a program to vaccinate more than 1 billion people in 50 countries within 10 years. He was put in charge of a small staff and a modest budget within the labyrinth of a global bureaucracy.Reaching 1 billion people with limited resources required a brilliant strategy for surveilling and containing the disease. Henderson’s team invented the technique of “ring vaccination.” Rather than inoculate every person in every country, his disease detectives would look for an outbreak and vaccinate all the contacts of the affected people and anyone else in the area. And so, each outbreak was encircled by people who were immune to the smallpox virus and wouldn’t let it pass through them.Above all, Henderson needed an extraordinary supply of vaccine at a cheap price with a low-cost way to administer doses to people around the world. He benefited from a timely invention that proved essential to the story of smallpox eradication. In 1965, an American microbiologist named Benjamin Rubin created a bifurcated needle, which held a tiny droplet of vaccine between two prongs, like a miniature olive fork. It allowed 100 vaccinations from a single vial (four times the previous amount) and brought down the cost of vaccination to about 10 cents a patient.Henderson and his small army of eradicators eventually squeezed smallpox out of Africa, South Asia, and Brazil. Since October 26, 1977, no naturally occurring smallpox cases have been recorded. In 1980, the WHO announced that smallpox, which had killed about 300 million people in the 20th century alone, had finally been eradicated.Invention Without ImplementationThe end of smallpox offers a usefully complete story, in which humanity triumphed unequivocally over a natural adversary. It’s a saga that offers lessons about progress—each of which pertains to America today.The most fundamental is that implementation, not mere invention, determines the pace of progress—a lesson the U.S. has failed to heed for the past several generations. Edward Jenner’s original vaccine could not have gone far without major assistance from early evangelists, such as Henry Cline; distribution strategies to preserve the vaccine across the Atlantic; and a sustained push from global bureaucracies more than a century after Jenner’s death.Almost every story of progress is at least a little like this, because even the most majestic breakthroughs are typically incomplete, expensive, and unreliable. “Most major inventions initially don’t work very well,” the economic historian Joel Mokyr told me. “They have to be tweaked, the way the steam engine was tinkered with by many engineers over decades. They have to be embodied by infrastructure, the way nuclear fission can’t produce much energy until it’s inside a nuclear reactor. And they have to be built at scale, to bring down the price and make a big difference to people.”For many decades, the American government has focused overwhelmingly on discovery rather than deployment. After World War II, Vannevar Bush, the architect of our thrillingly successful wartime tech policy, published an influential report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” in which he counseled the federal government to grow its investment in basic research. And it did. Since the middle of the 20th century, America’s inflation-adjusted spending on science and technology, through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, has increased by a factor of 40.But the government hasn’t matched that investment in the realm of implementation. This, too, was by design. Bush believed, with some reason, that politicians should not handpick nascent technologies to transform into new national industries. Better to advance the basic science and technology and let private companies—whose ears were closer to the ground—choose what to develop, and how.You could say that we live in the world that Bush built. “The federal government, through NIH and NSF, pours billions into basic science and defense technology,” Daniel P. Gross, an economist at Duke University, told me. “But for civilian technology, there has been a view that Washington should fund the research and then get out of the way.”As a result, many inventions languish in the so-called valley of death, where neither the government nor private ventures (risk-averse and possessed by relatively short time horizons) invest enough in the stages between discovery and commercialization. Take solar energy. In 1954, three American researchers at Bell Labs, the R&D wing of AT&T, built the first modern solar-cell prototype. By 1980, America was spending more on solar-energy research than any other country in the world. According to the Bush playbook, the U.S. was doing everything right. But we lost the technological edge on solar anyway, as Japan, Germany, and China used industrial policy to spur production—for example, by encouraging home builders to put solar panels on roofs. These tactics helped build the market and drove down the cost of solar power by several orders of magnitude—and by 90 percent in just the past 10 years.[Read: Why America doesn’t really make solar panels anymore]The U.S. remains the world’s R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we are plainly going backwards. We’ve lost out on industrial opportunities by running Bush’s playbook so strictly. But there are other problems, too. Since the early 2000s, the U.S. has closed more nuclear-power plants than we’ve opened. Our ability to decarbonize the grid is held back by environmental regulations that ironically constrict the construction of solar- and wind-energy farms. It’s been roughly 50 years since Asia and Europe built their first high-speed rail systems, but the U.S. is almost comically incapable of pulling train construction into the 21st century. (A 2008 plan to build a high-speed rail line in California has seen estimated costs more than triple and deployment delayed by a decade, and it’s still uncertain if it can be completed as planned.)“New ideas are getting harder to use,” the futurist and economist Eli Dourado told me. If the U.S. wanted to unleash geothermal power, we could simplify geothermal permitting. If we wanted to build the next generation of advanced nuclear reactors, we could deregulate advanced nuclear reactors. These measures would not require inventing anything new. But they would stimulate progress by making it easier to bring our best ideas into the light.[From the November 2019 issue: Derek Thompson on Thomas Edison’s greatest invention]The United States once believed in partnerships among the government, private industry, and the people to advance material progress. The Lincoln administration helped build the railroads. The New Deal helped electrify rural America. Dwight Eisenhower signed the Price-Anderson Act, which guaranteed government funds and limited liability for nuclear-energy firms in case of serious accidents, facilitating the construction of nuclear-power plants. John F. Kennedy’s space ambitions made NASA a major consumer of early microchips, which helped reduce their price by a factor of 30 in a matter of years, accelerating the software revolution.
“And then, around 1980, we basically stopped building,” Jesse Jenkins, who researches energy policy at Princeton, told me. In the past 40 years, he said, the U.S. has applied several different brakes to our capacity to build what’s already been invented. Under Ronald Reagan, the legacy of successful public-private partnerships was ignored in favor of the simplistic diagnosis that the government was to blame for every major problem. In the ’70s, liberals encouraged the government to pass new environmental regulations to halt pollution and prevent builders from running roughshod over low-income neighborhoods. And then middle-class Americans used these new rules to slow down the construction of new housing, clean-energy projects—just about everything. These reactions were partly understandable; for example, air and water pollution in the ’70s were deadly crises. But “when you combine these big shifts, you basically stop building anything,” Jenkins said.To understand how we could do better, it’s useful to compare the story of the first global vaccine to the story of the latest one.Warp SpeedIn April 2020, as COVID was circumnavigating the globe and demolishing normalcy everywhere, The New York Times published an article titled “How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?” Although Trump-administration officials aimed to unveil a COVID vaccine within 18 months—that is, by the fall of 2021—the journalist Stuart Thompson reminded readers that the shortest time in history for developing a new vaccine was four years. “The grim truth,” he wrote, “is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon.” But then it did. The first mRNA vaccines were administered before the end of 2020.The COVID vaccines underline a second lesson from the smallpox story. Some technology myths make it seem like progress is exclusively the work of geniuses, untouched by the grubby hands of politicians and bureaucrats. But a rogue cadre of inventors didn’t eradicate smallpox. States did. Agencies did. Progress is often political, because the policy decisions of states and international organizations frequently build the bridges between discovery and deployment.The story of the mRNA vaccines can be traced back to the ’90s, when the Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Karikó began her research on the pharmaceutical potential of mRNA, a small but mighty molecule that tells our cells what proteins to make. Her work, along with that of her fellow University of Pennsylvania researcher Drew Weissman, gradually raised our mastery of mRNA to the point where it could be deployed for a vaccine. In early 2020, within 48 hours of receiving the genetic sequencing of the coronavirus, Moderna had prepared its COVID-vaccine recipe, and BioNTech, a German firm that later partnered with Pfizer, had designed its own vaccine candidate.These technological breakthroughs, building on decades of basic research, were themselves miracles. But alone, they weren’t enough. The U.S. also needed a policy miracle—a feat of bureaucratic ingenuity that would make, distribute, and administer novel vaccines with record-breaking efficiency. We got just that with Operation Warp Speed, which belongs with the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project as one of the most important technology programs in the history of modern federal policy. It likely saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives.From the beginning, Warp Speed’s job seemed nearly impossible. To create the fastest vaccine program ever, officials had to essentially map out the entire journey of a new therapy—from research and clinical trials to regulatory approval and distribution—and turn this obstacle course into something like a glide path. They invested in both traditional and mRNA vaccine approaches, paid up front for clinical trials, and placed billions of dollars in advance orders to urge pharmaceutical companies to move as fast as possible. When Moderna needed more manufacturing facilities, Warp Speed provided funding for additional factory space. When the government identified a shortage of the special material that mRNA vaccines require for ultracold transport, Warp Speed granted $347 million to SiO2 and Corning, two manufacturers of glass vials. And because standard vaccine approval from the FDA can take years, the program’s leaders allowed vaccine makers to proceed with emergency use authorizations to speed up the review process.“The single most important thing that Operation Warp Speed did was to provide a whole-of-government urgency” to the goal of rapid deployment, Caleb Watney, a co-founder of the Institute for Progress, told me. “Getting everything right meant you needed to make a million correct decisions in the right order.” If the government had bet only on traditional vaccine technology, we would have had no mRNA therapies. If the government hadn’t done extensive supply-chain mapping in the summer of 2020, the initial vaccine rollout might have taken months rather than weeks. And if the government hadn’t bought out vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies, they wouldn’t have been free to consumers. But because Operation Warp Speed did all of this, the vaccines were expeditiously approved, manufactured, and distributed at no cost to the public.Warp Speed was a special case, essentially a wartime policy applied to a health crisis. Few people would recommend such an aggressive approach for developing ordinary consumer technology. And the government is certainly capable of making bad choices as to exactly what technology to develop, and how. But while too much government action on this front can waste money, too little can waste time and even lives, stymieing possible breakthroughs. Warp Speed showed that smart government action can accelerate discovery and deployment. Just as significant, it showed that the kinds of bets the government can place, such as FDA reforms, don’t necessarily involve spending any money at all.Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s imagine what an Operation Warp Speed for cancer prevention would look like. It might include not only a larger cancer-research budget, but also a search for regulatory bottlenecks whose elimination would speed up the approval of preventative drugs that have already been developed. According to Heidi Williams, the director of science policy at the Institute for Progress, from the time the War on Cancer was announced, in 1971, until 2015, only six drugs were approved to prevent any cancer. This reflects an enormous gap in clinical trials: From 1973 to 2011, nearly 30,000 trials were run for drugs that treated recurrent or metastatic cancer, compared with fewer than 600 for cancer prevention. How could this be?You could start by blaming the U.S. system of patents and clinical trials, Williams told me. If a company discovers a drug that, when used by younger adults, prevents colon cancer in middle age, it could still take decades to gather long-term data from clinical trials. At that point, the patent on the original discovery might have expired. Reforming trials for preventative drugs and for early-stage disease therapies “might be the single highest-value thing we could do for biomedical research in the U.S.,” Williams said. The FDA already approves heart-disease treatments, such as beta-blockers, by looking at patients’ cholesterol levels rather than waiting for full mortality results. The agency could similarly establish short-term proxies for approving drugs that prevent cancers, Williams said. Or we could change the law so that the patent clock on cancer-prevention treatments didn’t start ticking until after the pharmaceutical company first starts selling the drug. As with Warp Speed, these policies could accelerate the development of lifesaving medication without spending a taxpayer dime on research. The key is adopting a more aggressive problem-solving approach, with the ends in mind.One regrettable feature of history is that it sometimes takes a catastrophe to fast-forward progress. The U.S. directly advanced airplane technology during World War I; radar, penicillin manufacturing, and nuclear technology during World War II; the internet and GPS during the Cold War; and mRNA technology during the pandemic. A crisis is a focusing mechanism. But it is up to us to decide what counts as a crisis. The U.S. could announce a Warp Speed for heart disease tomorrow, on the theory that the leading cause of death in America is a national crisis. We could announce a full emergency review of federal and local permitting rules for clean-energy construction, with the rationale that climate change is a crisis. Just as it did in the ’60s with smallpox, the U.S. could decide that a major disease in developing countries, such as malaria, deserves a concerted global coalition. Even in times without world wars and pandemics, crises abound. Turning them into national priorities is, and has always been, a political determination.A Question of CultureOperation Warp Speed was ingenious, admirable, and wildly successful. But despite all that, it was not enough.Having overcome the hurdles of scientific breakthrough, technological invention, and rapid distribution, the mRNA vaccines faced a final obstacle: cultural acceptance. And the skepticism of tens of millions of American adults proved too much for the vaccines to overcome. This is the third lesson of the smallpox story—culture is the true last-mile problem of progress. It doesn’t matter what you discover or invent if people are unwilling to accept it.
In 2021, the U.S. took an early global lead in vaccine distribution, thanks to the accelerated development of vaccines under President Donald Trump and their timely delivery under President Joe Biden. By April, we had distributed more shots per capita than almost any other country in the world. But by September, according to one estimate, the U.S. had fallen to 36th in national vaccination rates, behind Mongolia and Ecuador. The problem wasn’t supply, but demand. Tens of millions of American adults simply refused a free and effective vaccine in the middle of a pandemic.Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish researcher who led a survey of attitudes in Western democracies about COVID-19, told me that America’s history of vaccine skepticism—and of conspiracy theories surrounding vaccines—of course predates the coronavirus pandemic. And although American vaccine resistance has several sources, including the cost of some vaccines and our legacy of medical racism, Petersen told me that one of the most important factors today is “the level of polarization between Democratic and Republican elites.” Vaccine rejection remains higher among Republican adults than any other measured demographic, including age, education level, gender, and ethnicity.In the 19th century, state and church leaders across Europe and the Americas typically praised the smallpox vaccine in unison. But in the 21st century, a dwindling number of subjects enjoy such universal elite endorsement. Despite the historical assumption that moments of tragedy bring a country together, the pandemic efficiently sorted Americans into opposing camps—for and against lockdowns, for and against vaccines. Nearly 90 percent of Americans told the Pew Research Center that the pandemic has made the country more divided.Americans are deeply polarized; that much is obvious. Less obvious, and more important for our purposes, is how polarization might complicate material progress today. One big problem the country faces is that as coastal, educated elites have come to largely identify as Democrats, Republicans have come to feel ignored or condescended to by the institutions populated by the former group. As if recoiling from the rise of a liberal scientific and managerial class, the GOP has become almost proudly anti-expertise, anti-science, and anti-establishment. Cranks and conspiracy theorists have gained prominence in the party. It is hard to imagine scientific institutions flourishing within right-wing governments averse to both science and institutions. But this is only part of the problem, culturally speaking.The other part is that some Democrats—many of whom call themselves progressives—have in meaningful ways become anti-progress, at least where material improvement is concerned. Progress depends on a society’s ability to build what it knows. But very often, it’s progressives who stand against building what we’ve already invented, including relatively ancient technology like nuclear power or even apartment buildings. Cities and states run by Democrats have erected so many barriers to construction that blue metro areas are now where the housing crisis is worst. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington; all are run by Democrats. Meanwhile, it is often left-leaning environmentalist groups that use onerous rules to delay the construction of wind and solar farms that would reduce our dependency on oil and gas. The left owns all the backpack pins denouncing the oil industry, but Texas produces more renewable energy than deep-blue California, and Oklahoma and Iowa produce more renewable energy than New York.One possible explanation is that progressives have become too focused on what are essentially negative prescriptions for improving the world, including an emphasis on preservation and sacrifice (“reduce, reuse, recycle”) over growth (“build, build, build”). At the extreme, this ascetic style leads to calls for permanent declines in modern living standards, a philosophy known as “degrowtherism.” The aim is noble: to save our descendants from climate change by flying less, traveling less, buying less, and using less. But it is a profound departure from progressivism’s history, which is one of optimism about the ability of society to improve lives on a big scale through bold action. It’s self-defeating to tell voters: “My opponent wants to raise your living standards, but I promise I won’t let that happen.” It’s far better—and, arguably, more realistic—to tell voters that building more renewable power is a win-win that will make energy cheaper and more abundant.When you add the anti-science bias of the Republican Party to the anti-build skepticism of liberal urbanites and the environmentalist left, the U.S. seems to have accidentally assembled a kind of bipartisan coalition against some of the most important drivers of human progress. To correct this, we need more than improvements in our laws and rules; we need a new culture of progress.The Trust GapA famous theme in American history is adaptability, and justifiably so. When something isn’t working, we’ve typically been game to try something new. In the summer of 2022, Biden signed a series of laws, including the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, that included hundreds of billions of dollars for building microchips, solar panels, electric cars, and infrastructure, green and otherwise. In an address touting this approach, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen branded it “modern supply-side economics.” Contrasted with the Reagan-era phrase, which referred to cutting taxes to stimulate the economy, her speech focused more on direct investments in American manufacturing and improving America’s ability to build what it invents. In October, Brian Deese, a senior adviser to Biden, announced the administration’s plans to deliver a modern industrial strategy that would help “spur mature technologies to deploy more quickly [and] pull emerging innovations to market faster.”No one can say for sure how well Biden’s specific plans will work—and a decade from now, critics will undoubtedly find particular initiatives that failed or wasted money. Still, we might be moving from the eureka theory of progress to an abundance theory of progress, which focuses on making our best ideas affordable and available to everyone. Overall, this new direction of federal policy seems promising.Still, it doesn’t solve the problem of cultural unreadiness for progress, a problem that afflicts the left and right differently, but that ultimately comes down to trust. Every form of institutional trust is in free fall. Fewer than half of Republicans say they have faith in higher education, big businesses, tech firms, media, the entertainment industry, and unions. Among Democrats, too, confidence in government has declined. Why is social trust so important to progress? In a country where people don’t trust the government to be honest, or businesses to be ethical, or members of the opposite party to respect the rule of law, it is hard to build anything quickly and effectively—or, for that matter, anything that lasts.One of the most important differences between invention and implementation is that the former typically takes place in private while the latter is necessarily public. The first practical silicon-solar-cell technology was developed in a corporate lab in New Jersey. Building a solar farm to generate electricity requires the sustained approval of officials and local residents—in other words, it requires people to genuinely believe that they will benefit, at least collectively, from changes to their lived environment.I want to tell you that there is a simple agenda for restoring trust in America, but I don’t think I can do that. When discussing barriers to the construction of nuclear-power plants or the pace of drug development, one can play the part of a bottleneck detective—identifying obstacles to progress and working to overcome them through clever policy tweaks. But Americans’ growing mistrust of institutions and one another is rooted in the deepest hollows of society: in geographical sorting that physically separates liberals and conservatives; in our ability to find ideological “news” that flatters our sensibilities but inhibits compromise.In 2022, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of which variables best predicted the rates of COVID infection across 177 countries. Outside wealth, one of the most powerful variables was trust in government among the public. “Trust is a shared resource that enables networks of people to do collectively what individual actors cannot,” the authors of the Lancet paper wrote. When I first read their definition, I stared at it for a while, feeling the shock of recognition. I thought of how much that could serve as a definition of progress as well: a network of people doing collectively what individual actors cannot. The stories of global progress tend to be the rare examples where science, technology, politics, and culture align. When we see the full ensemble drama of progress, we realize just how many different people, skills, and roles are necessary.The last needle to be applied against smallpox, before its eradication almost half a century ago, carried a dose of vaccine smaller than a child’s pupil. Four hundred years fit inside that droplet. The devotion of D. A. Henderson’s disease-eradicating team was in it. So were the contributions of Benjamin Rubin and the Spanish boys, as well as the advocacy of Henry Cline and the discovery by Edward Jenner, and before him the evangelism of Lady Montagu, and the influence of Circassian traders from the Caucasus Mountains, who first brought the practice of inoculation to the Ottoman court. An assembly line of discovery, invention, deployment, and trust wound its way through centuries and landed at the tip of a needle. Perhaps there is our final lesson, the one most worth carrying forward. It takes one hero to make a great story, but progress is the story of us all.This article appears in the January/February 2023 print edition with the headline “The Eureka Theory of History Is Wrong.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A few days ago I spoke to some of the striking academic workers at the University of California. (You can view my remarks at their rally, below.)

These second-class workers reflect the same second-class system America has created throughout our labor market.

A total of 48,000 are on strike, making this the largest and most important strike in the history of American higher education. As labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein says, it could not only raise the incomes and the status of those who work in an "industry" that now employs more workers than the federal government, but also transform higher education itself.

You wouldn't know this from what you're reading in the mainstream press. The New York Times reports that academic workers "walked off the job...forcing some classes to be canceled...classes were disrupted, research slowed and office hours canceled ... only a few weeks away from final examinations."

Whenever you read that striking workers are causing harmful disruptions, note the implied bias, and consider that the status quo before the strike might have been even more harmful and disruptive to a large number of people.

One spur for this strike has been the extraordinary rise in housing costs and rents in California. Some of the academic workers at the University of California are paid so little that they've been living in their cars. Inflation has further eroded their paltry salaries.

Why should employees of the best public university in America, in the nation's richest state, in the wealthiest country in the world, live in poverty?

Last Friday, the University and the union representing tens of thousands of its striking academic workers agreed to ask an independent mediator to intervene.

Across American higher education, a large and growing portion of the responsibility for teaching and research has been borne by lecturers, adjuncts, graduate students, and post-doctoral students who are paid very little and have no job security. They are hired part-time, or are on year-to-year contracts, or are free-lancers who offer their expertise when needed.

These second-class workers reflect the same second-class system America has created throughout our labor market, and for the same reason: Employers want to pay as little as possible, and have maximum flexibility.

UC administrators plead budget constraints. Yet California is an immensely wealthy state with a budget surplus of almost $100 billion this year. Over the last several decades, however, state funding for UC, as well as the even larger state university system, has steadily declined. Today just over 10 percent of UC's budget comes from the state (down from more than half when in 1963 UC president Clark Kerr created the UC system). UC remains the jewel in the crown of American higher education, but excellence can't be sustained on the cheap.

So you might think (or hope) that California's progressive governor Gavin Newsom would take a lead in the strike on the side of workers, but he's been mum. Ditto the progressive California legislature.

The UC strike is not just an effort to raise thousands of academic workers out of near poverty. It's a movement whose success requires a reversal of the austerity that has subverted public higher education across America.

Here's a clip from my talk to the striking student workers:

An important principle of science is that testable claims about the universe should be understood as existing independently of the person who advocates them. In this way, science distinguishes itself from religion, which devalues the claims of heretics and recusants on the basis of their supposedly defective souls; and from the pseudoscience embedded in radical political movements (as with the Nazis, who spuriously rejected what they called “Jewish science,” and Stalinists, who similarly railed against science deemed “bourgeois”).    Unfortunately, in recent years, this traditional epistemological approach has come under attack. Academics increasingly are being encouraged to announce their race, sex, gender identity, social class, and disability status under the conceit that this personal information is germane to a scientific appraisal of their scholarship. As a recent controversy engulfing the prestigious journal Perspectives on Psychological Science shows, the career risks are high for those willing to speak out against this tendency.  The furore erupted when University of Heidelberg psychology professor Klaus Fiedler, the then-newly installed editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, set out to publish an article by cognitive neurophysiologist Bernhard Hommel, critiquing a 2020 article by Stanford University psychology professor Steven Othello Roberts. Following on his oft-stated belief that the discipline of psychology is systemically racist, Roberts had argued that journal editors should track the race of their contributing authors with a view toward enforcing diversity targets, while authors should similarly track (and be made to justify) the racial composition of their research samples. Hommel, by contrast, shares our own belief that focusing closely on skin color in this way represents an intrusion of political activism that compromises scientific freedom and independence.  If Fiedler had left it at that, he might still be the editor of Perspectives. But he was so impressed by the critical commentary supplied by the three peer-reviewers to whom he’d sent Hommel’s article—Rutgers University psychologist Lee Jussim, Utrecht University emeritus psychology professor Wolfgang Stroebe, and University of Toronto emeritus psychology professor Keith Stanovich—that he decided to commission these responses, in adapted form, as stand-alone articles themselves. This was an unusual editorial decision. But Fiedler also invited Roberts to respond to all four critics as part of a larger “discussion forum.” Fiedler and Roberts then engaged in a lengthy and complicated exchange of emails that lasted for months. We know this because Roberts, having lost trust in the process, decided to upload a manuscript describing the affair earlier this month, complete with a lengthy appendix that contains abundant excerpts from his correspondence with Fiedler. In the accompanying text, Roberts accuses not only Fiedler, but also Hommel, Jussim, Stanovich, and Stroebe, of militating against his work in a manner that is “unsound, unscientific, ad hominem, and racist.” Yet nowhere does Roberts demonstrate that any of these men exhibited racial animus. And some of Roberts’s efforts to make this case are flat-out absurd. At one point, for instance, he spuriously describes Jussim’s use of an equine metaphor—“Scientists who wish to plow their fields with mules should be permitted to do so; they should not, however, pretend that those mules are horses”—as an argument that “explicitly parallels people of color with mules (i.e., the sterile offspring of a horse and a donkey), which is a well-documented racist trope used to dehumanize people of color.” But putting aside Roberts’s unproven claims of racism (not to mention his arguably unethical decision to publish personal email correspondence without his interlocutor’s permission), the Stanford scholar does make a convincing case that Fiedler’s editorial style was unusual and exasperating. Not only did the editor ask the three peer reviewers of Hommel’s critique to formalize their own criticisms of Roberts in the form of published articles, Fiedler also planned to allow Hommel to publish a second article, this one refuting Roberts’s response. Roberts also became evidently sensitive to the suggestion that his work somehow lies outside the domain of real science. And his reaction isn’t unreasonable. While his language betrays an excessive fixation on markers of personal identity (“When this manuscript was drafted, I identified as a Multiracial German-American,” he notes on the first page of his manuscript), racism is a real, scientifically measurable phenomenon. And while its effects are often exaggerated for political and ideological purposes, it’s obviously a completely legitimate area of study. In any event, Roberts is hardly the only psychology scholar who presents his area of study as offering uniquely urgent insights into the human condition.  As the months passed, and Roberts continued to bicker testily with Fiedler over the confusing process they were all supposed to follow, the Stanford psychologist began to believe, not without basis, that the “discussion forum” was an unbalanced five-against-one battle—with Fiedler and the four critical writers (a quintet of “senior White men,” as Roberts calls them) comprising a united opposition. No matter one’s underlying views about the intermingling of science and activism, it’s easy to come away from a reading of the email archive wondering whether Fiedler was the correct man for this job.   As is often the case in controversies of this type, the public reaction vastly overshot the actual misdeeds at issue: An inflammatory open letter sent to the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the publisher of Perspectives on Psychological Science, accused Fiedler not only of “general editorial incompetence and abuse of power,” but also amplified Roberts’s charge of racism. Predictably, the signatories also sought to leverage the outrage they were creating as a means to demand the usual laundry list of “immediate, meaningful, systemic change[s]”—which is to say, a slew of new anti-racism training mandates. They also insisted that Roberts be granted “any additional reparative action [he] might deem necessary”—which is to say, a complete blank check. Within three days, the signatories had their primary demand fulfilled: Fiedler was forced to resign. The ex-editor reports that he never had a chance to present his side of things to the APS; and that the whole controversy played out while he was attending a conference in Israel, and so unable to fully engage with his critics. The Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, Steven Pinker told Quillette:Despite CEO Robert Gropp’s claiming “we have spent the days since listening to feedback from APS Members and others within the psychological science community and convening APS leaders,” no one asked me, though I’m a reviewer for the journal, a distinguished “Williams James Fellow” of the Association.Less than a year after the APS boasted of Fiedler’s status as “the first journal editor in chief based at an institution outside North America,” the reputation of this eminent expert in such technical subjects as “pseudocontingencies derived from categorically organized memory representations” was trashed. This is the reality facing academics today: One can be accused of a career-ending transgression at any time, convicted without trial, and summarily dispatched by an employer seeking to appease the performatively aggrieved.  Meanwhile, the subject that Fiedler wished to explore—whether an obsession with skin color and other markers of personal identity represent a threat to the scientific method—has been cast aside. Indeed, the lesson that other scholarly editors will draw from this dust-up is likely to be that this is an area of inquiry best avoided entirely. To question the claims of scholars such as Roberts, an act that was already somewhat taboo in academic circles, is, for the foreseeable future at least, effectively verboten.      Fiedler’s status as the first non-American editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science isn’t a coincidence. The American obsession with race, particularly among academics, is singular among advanced nations. In fact, academics in many European nations—including Fiedler’s native Germany—are pushing back on progressive dogmas about identity precisely because they constitute a manifestation of what was once dubbed American cultural imperialism. Moreover, English clearly isn’t Fiedler’s native tongue. And he betrays little of the eggshell sensitivity that an American journal editor, placed in the same position, would tend to exhibit toward a scholar such as Roberts. At various points, the email record reads like a dialogue of the deaf, with Roberts seeking clarifications in regard to the editor’s convoluted language. One of Roberts’s specific complaints is that Fiedler had accused Roberts of being “non-professional.” But when you read the actual email exchange, it doesn’t seem as if that’s what Fiedler meant to say at all. Rather, he was referring to the casual nature of their dialogue, which Fiedler was engaging in while on vacation. Far from exposing himself as a racist editor dressing down a black scholar, as Roberts claims, Fiedler comes off as a fusty and naive European academic trying to navigate a complicated and inadvisably structured editorial project:  Just as an explanation of the somewhat non-professional exchange we are having, please note that I am on a mini-biking tour with my wife through the Bavarian pre-alps. I am doing my email only when the rainy weather allows me … Nevertheless, here are a few remarks that may help to clarify. If you remain under-informed, I offer you a skype or zoom early next week. The problem of racism in academic publishing—the subject of Roberts’s 2020 paper—is one of both false negatives and false positives: A white researcher, editor, or peer reviewer whose judgment is clouded by racism can be expected to pursue, publish, and approve too much research by white scholars and too little by their non-white counterparts. But as this episode makes clear, analogous risks are at stake when it comes to academics whose judgment is clouded by the expectation of racism. Roberts’s own evidence shows that he badly misinterpreted innocent word choices by Fiedler and Jussim so as to support his claim that he’d endured racist mistreatment. And far from parsing these accusations carefully, the academic mob demanding Fiedler’s public shaming signal-boosted it uncritically. Few independent observers are going to take the time to read through 10 pages of email correspondence before rendering judgment. And so it simply became received wisdom within the field of academic psychology that Fiedler was a bigot who’d done something genuinely shameful, with the APS then being driven to throw the man under the bus. On December 9th, the German Psychological Society published a statement about the treatment of Fiedler, urging “a thorough and open-ended investigation” of events, while also noting archly that “it is not our understanding of procedural justice to condemn a person without giving him or her an adequate hearing.” This rings true to us. The scientific method and due process are alike, in that these two foundational ideas both require that claims survive objective scrutiny before gaining official acceptance. And one might expect psychologists, of all people, to understand that objective scrutiny is one thing that becomes impossible once a mob picks its target.

If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls. The tweet is a cruel and senseless play on pronouns that also invokes the right’s fury toward Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, for what they believe is a government overreach in public-health policy throughout the pandemic and an obfuscation of the coronavirus’s origins. (Fauci, for his part, has said he would cooperate with any possible investigations and has nothing to hide.)Beyond its stark cruelty, this tweet is incredibly thirsty. As right-wing troll memes go, it is Dad-level, 4chan–Clark Griswold stuff, which is to say it’s desperate engagement bait in the hopes of attracting kudos from the only influencers who give Musk the time of day anymore: right-wing shock jocks. But that is the proper company for the billionaire, because whether or not he wants to admit it, Musk is actively aiding the far right’s political project. He is a right-wing activist.Currently, Musk’s politics are a subject of debate in the press. On Saturday, The New York Times’ Jeremy W. Peters attempted to offer a nuanced portrait of the Twitter owner’s ideologies, arguing that Musk “continues to defy easy political categorization.” But Peters’ laundry list of Musk’s recent lib-trolling and “woke” scolding—such as Musk’s November recommendation to his millions of followers to vote Republican—undermines the very thesis of the article. The nuance Peters is looking for does not exist: Musk’s actions and associations make a clear case that he is a right-wing reactionary.Musk, for his part, has maintained that he is a centrist, that his politics have remained unchanged, and that it is the Democratic Party that has veered dramatically leftward. (Musk and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Musk’s logic—that wayward leftism has given a lifelong moderate liberal no choice but to support right-wing causes—is a common trope among far-right activists. It has been employed by many in the so-called Intellectual Dark Web and influencers such as Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Glenn Greenwald, and others. The argument stretches far back in American politics. The neoconservative movement in the United States was originated by liberals who grew disillusioned with the Democratic Party, especially in relation to the left’s Vietnam protests.Beyond Musk’s political affiliations, his actual political convictions—by which I mean the bedrock set of values, ideologies, and organizing principles through which he sees the world and wishes it to be structured—are a slightly different conversation. Here, I tend to agree with The Verge’s Liz Lopatto, who wrote recently that Musk doesn’t really have political beliefs, only personal interests. But one can have vapid or nonexistent political beliefs and still be a political activist. Political activism is about actions. Here’s what those actions look like in practice:
I am gratified for the reinstatement of my account on Twitter and am grateful to @ElonMusk for his commitment to fairness and free speech.

God Bless America and thank you, Jesus.
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) December 7, 2022
I affirm your pronouns Elon.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) December 11, 2022Publicly, Musk appears deeply committed to the right’s culture war against progressivism in most forms. His purchase of Twitter was an explicitly political act couched in the notion of preserving free speech. But Musk’s notion of free speech is a broad course correction that involves amplifying and advancing the interests of right-wing reactionaries while trolling the left. Musk might argue that this is restoring balance to the system, but if we are judging based only on actions and outcomes, it is very hard to see his tenure at Twitter as anything other than a series of policies intended to benefit a particular ideology.Musk also simply loves palling around with far-right influencers on Twitter. A scroll through his Twitter replies is a rather remarkable document of a man who has (or at least had) more money than any other human being in the history of humanity, a fair amount of power, and an endless supply of options for how to spend his time, and who chooses to spend his time as a reply guy for prominent MAGA voices, such as a user who goes by the handle @catturd2 and Turning Points USA’s Charlie Kirk.In a similar fashion, Musk’s “Twitter Files” project, for which he has been releasing Twitter’s old internal documents concerning controversial content-moderation decisions to independent journalists, is an attention spectacle dressed up in the style of investigative journalism designed to delight Musk’s Twitter friends. As I wrote on Friday, some of the internal conversations and screenshots from Musk’s company are fascinating documents that shed light on the intractable problem of content moderation at scale. But they are presented in a blatantly partisan and misleading manner, and have been released only to journalists who share Musk’s pet ideological issues: that the mainstream media is ethically bankrupt, that social media and most elite institutions are biased and colluding with the government.The hypocrisy at the center of Musk’s Twitter tenure is crucial to the understanding of Musk’s political activism. He has championed ideals of free-speech maximalism and amnesty to those who’ve offended his rules. Twitter, under his management, has let back on organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; neo-Nazis such as Andrew Anglin; and January 6–investigation personalities such as Roger Stone. At the same time, Twitter has suspended accounts that have mocked Musk or expressed left-leaning views. Whether intentionally or not, Musk has, in effect, been governing Twitter using the classic Frank Wilhoit maxim: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Put differently, the billionaire has been advancing a long-running right-wing political project described recently by my colleague Adam Serwer as a “belief in a new constitutional right. Most important, this new right supersedes the free-speech rights of everyone else: the conservative right to post.”Why is Musk doing all of this? The answer is reasonably simple. Musk’s far-right activism clearly seems to be, like all else in his life, personally motivated, not by a strong political ideology or value system but, as Lopatto argues, by the accumulation of money and “being perceived as a visionary who will reshape human society.” Musk is interested in preserving the political values and systems that keep him on top as a revered member of culture. It’s a philosophy that the writer John Ganz has described as “bossism” or “bosses on top.” For Musk, right-wing activism serves that role. Musk’s tweets—like his dismissive tweet this morning, or his concerning insinuations that, perhaps, his former trust-and-safety employees did not stop child-exploitation posts for motivated reasons—are cruel for the shallowest reasons: because they are likely to draw engagement to the platform that Musk has plunged into financial uncertainty, due to both his piling on of debt and his alienation of advertisers.But even as a far-right shitposter, Musk is hapless. Unlike somebody such as Donald Trump, who remains the Twitter troll template, Musk is a try-hard. And although the Twitter shock jocks will happily lap him up because he triggers the libs and serves their purposes, Musk is still seen as a dilettante by the inveterate shitposters and bigots. Over on 4chan, the far-right message board, Musk’s Fauci tweet barely merited discussion. “Elon is just being controversial to drive traffic to his website,” one poster mused. Even in his thirsty attempts to be an edgelord, Musk is failing to be anything other than cringey.

Sometimes I feel like screaming at the mainstream media for failing to alert people to crucial (although complicated) issues affecting our democracy coming from different parts of government simultaneously.

Case in point: Moore v. Harper, argued Wednesday before the Supreme Court, and the Electoral Reform Act, which must be enacted before the end of this Congress because Republicans won't touch it once they control the House.

If the media doesn't adequately report on issues like this, how can a free people govern themselves to begin with?

The two are intimately connected but you wouldn't know that from the mainstream media, which is treating them as two separate stories. Let me make the connection.

In Moore, North Carolina Republicans aim to restore a redistricting map drawn by the GOP-led legislature but rejected as violating the state constitution by North Carolina's supreme court.

North Carolina bases its argument on the bonkers "independent state legislature" theory, which interprets Article I Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution (authorizing state legislatures to prescribe "the times, places and manner of holding elections") to give state legislatures sole authority over elections, without interference from state courts.

The theory sprang from the head of Justice William Rehnquist in 2000, who wrote (in a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore) that "the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance."

Since then, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch have all endorsed aspects of the theory. Notably, they didn't disavow it in Wednesday's oral argument.

Not only would the theory open the door to extreme gerrymandering, allowing one party to virtually entrench itself in a state. It could also allow state legislatures to reject the results of a presidential election.

Which is where the Electoral Reform Act, now before Congress, comes in.

Article II of the Constitution requires states to appoint presidential electors "in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." And the Electoral Count Act of 1845 allows state legislatures to choose a new manner of appointing the state's electors if the vote for the presidency has "failed" in the state.

But what does "failed" mean and who has the authority to declare a failure?

This wasn't an issue until the 2020 election, when Donald Trump exploited the Act's vagueness to claim he could overturn the will of the voters.

He pushed state legislatures to appoint electors for him regardless of the popular vote. (Fortunately, they refused.) He pressured congressional Republicans to object to Joe Biden's electors. (Trump partly succeeded, but not by enough to throw the election his way.) And he pushed Vice President Pence to illegally delay the electoral count so Trump could continue pressuring states. (Thankfully, Pence refused.)

American democracy survived by a whisker. But add in a Supreme Court ruling affirming the independent state legislature theory, and what do you get if Trump (or any other anti-democracy candidate) tries the same thing again? A democratic disaster.

This isn't wild conjecture. Just weeks ago, after Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake contested her loss based on absolutely nothing, the election board in GOP-controlled Cochise County refused to certify the results.

Eventually Cochise came around. But in a future presidential election, a GOP-controlled state legislature--armed with a broad "independent state legislature" theory from Moore v. Harper--could seize on this kind of resistance to declare a "failed" election and appoint a slate of fake electors. And neither Congress nor a Vice President could stop them. This time, democracy wouldn't survive.

Which is why the Electoral Reform Act--now before Congress--is so important.

It would require state legislatures to appoint presidential electors exactly as they've been appointed before. So if a state's laws require that electors certify the person who has won the popular vote, a legislature can't use the "failed" election loophole to appoint electors for anyone else.

Other provisions require that governors certify the correct electors by a hard deadline before Congress counts them, and allow an aggrieved candidate to trigger expedited judicial review.

Where is the Electoral Reform Act at this point?

Ten Republican senators tentatively support it but Trumpsters are pressuring them to withdraw their support.

With so little time remaining in the lame-duck session, the measure may be attached to the end-of-year spending bill.

But how many close calls like this can a system of self-government endure?

And if the media doesn't adequately report on issues like this, how can a free people govern themselves to begin with?

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “What should be done about fentanyl? Has it affected your family or community?”Judy shared a personal tragedy:
My 26-year-old son died of an overdose of heroin doctored with fentanyl. We would learn two weeks later that he had passed the bar exam in South Carolina and would have become a practicing attorney. I was not aware my son had ever used heroin. He was not an addict but was dating a woman who was purportedly in recovery. I found a text exchange between them on his iPhone in which he sent her a photo of a baggie with the question “What is this?” The baggie had been found on the floor of his truck. Her reply was couched in slang that I cannot decipher, so I’m not certain he knew exactly what he was using. He was the youngest of my three sons. I’ll never know the full details of why he overdosed.
Max is “a recovering addict … and now, an ex-felon, free after three-plus years in federal prison for drug crimes.” He writes:
The market for fentanyl exists for one reason—because it is easier and cheaper to import than heroin, making circumventing interdiction easier. The high is the same.
From experience, I can tell you without doubt that opioid addicts are just looking for the same high they always sought. Users are not seeking out fentanyl because it gets them higher, or because it’s somehow better than other opioids—they’re buying fentanyl because that’s what’s on the street now. And fentanyl is what’s on the street now because it’s easier to get into the country. Fentanyl is stronger, per microgram, than any illicit opioid that has come before—everyone knows this. But the salient point about that fact is that drug producers, smugglers, and dealers can suddenly get as many people high off of one kilo of pure fentanyl as they would have with 10 kilos of heroin. Which means equal profits for a fraction of the shipping cost and risk of arrests, interdiction, etc.
The fact is, people want to get high. There is a portion of the population that is just plain uncomfortable in their own skin—no matter how successful they may appear—and are predisposed to seeking chemical assistance. I just don’t think it’s an issue we can legislate or enforce away. Until we find a cure for the sad human condition, we will have a drug problem. (I’ve been clean six years now—including three inside [prison]—but only because I’ve managed to obtain access to buprenorphine, which is actually just another opioid [prescribed to treat an opioid-use disorder], although a milder, legal one.)
The fentanyl problem exists on the same level as the synthetic marijuana problem: It’s only here because we forced it to be. America’s War on Drugs has imposed a ridiculous, artificial price hike on everything we’ve deemed “illicit” … Think about it: Marijuana doesn’t cost any more to produce than cilantro. Heroin could be as cheap as aspirin. And so on and so on—99 percent of the cost of “drugs” stems from the fact that they’re deemed illegal, and thus every step of production and distribution must be clandestine.
By trying to fix this social ill through prohibition, we’ve simply created an incentive for the market to come up with something that turned out to be worse. The mere existence of the fentanyl problem—like the synthetic cannabinoid problem, the “bath salt” problem, and many others—traces back to our own efforts. The drug war needs to be rethought before something even worse comes along. We have only ourselves to blame.
Read: What does a good health-care system look like?Claire proposes a policy change:
Fentanyl has flooded the market because of the restricted access to pharmaceutical-grade opioids, and because cartels manufacture it for a tiny fraction of the cost of an equivalent kilo of Afghan heroin, at a much higher potency, with precursors made in China. The clandestine production leads to variability in quality and potency that imperils the consumer. The cartels make billions and may even work with endemically corrupt government(s), such that it isn’t just a matter of sneaking past a border guard; they can facilitate elaborate systems of fraud (like buying or imitating pharmaceutical companies).  
I would be in favor of decriminalizing all drugs so that consumption can be regulated for safety, and usage can be guided via education or harm-reduction programs, when necessary. The bureaucracy built around the War on Drugs is incentivized in the opposite direction.
Melanie’s loss of a family member colors how she thinks about her work helping children, which she sees as the key to heading off substance-abuse problems:
My sister-in-law's stepdaughter died from a fatal drug overdose. I always called her my niece. She had been actively addicted to heroin, so fentanyl is considered [a likely factor]. She grew up in a rural area on the New York–Pennsylvania border called “meth valley” 20ish years ago; meth took a huge toll on the area, but it’s not as though the community was thriving before.
On her 13th birthday, her mother gathered her possessions into a garbage bag, drove her to her father’s house, and said, “I can’t handle her anymore.” A few months later, her father went to jail, his girlfriend (my sister-in-law) sent her back to her mother’s house, and her mother placed her in a group foster home. There were a lot of group foster homes in that area and very few services to keep families together.
Parents were keen to protect their children from the ravages of meth by putting them into therapeutic group homes; parents would do this when their kids exhibited typical teenage drug use like drinking or smoking marijuana, or even teen waywardness. But the trauma was immense, and the services of underwhelming value. Staff seemed to think my niece’s decision to use drugs (at that point, marijuana) had more to do with depictions of it on That ’70s Show than the fact that she’d watched her father try to kill her brother and regularly hid with her little half sister when her father went on violent rampages.
When she was transitioning out of the group home, getting ready to live with me first, then eventually her mother, she mentioned that people in her area were switching from meth to heroin. Eventually the rest of the world caught on and other locales caught up.
My niece emerged from the group home very angry, more traumatized, and desperate for love. That’s probably the most potent combination for ensuring that the generational cycle of addiction and trauma continues, and her adulthood was a series of abusive relationships and addictions, interrupted by stays in jail. At times she could overcome her addiction to chemicals, but not to relationships that held the promise of giving her the family she never quite had. When she died, she left three children behind in foster care. I want to believe they can have good lives, but I know the statistics about how terrible foster care is. 
What role did the War on Drugs play in all this? It led us to believe that we needed to fight a war on drugs, not a war on child abuse, neglect, maltreatment, and general human misery.
We love narratives that imply that the mere proximity of a drug causes addiction, and that waves of different chemicals (crack, meth, heroin) are discrete events, instead of a continual effort by the most hurt among us to numb their pain. Fentanyl is a little different in that it is so likely to cause overdose fatalities. So it makes addiction harder to hide, both within families and in the media. We’re talking about it more, and we’re talking about its users with greater kindness and compassion. But we need to move the conversation to prevention.
We have known for over 20 years that childhood trauma is strongly linked to substance abuse. We have known for nearly 50 years how to prevent a significant amount of childhood trauma, and we have had plenty of time to invest in more research, if that was ever a priority. It’s my job to prevent childhood trauma through public education and policy. And normally I’m very optimistic about it. But right now, I’m facing the first Christmas without my niece and I’m not optimistic about much.
Claire’s family had a positive experience with fentanyl:
Five years before she died in 2006, my mother came to live with me. In addition to severe scoliosis and emphysema, she already had multiple compression fractures of her spinal vertebrae, and there were to be many more. A couple of years later, following a particularly painful compression fracture, her medical team gave her a fentanyl patch—and the effect was magical. The pain receded and remained bearable even after the patch was removed. No other form of pain relief other than morphine ever gave her as much relief as that one patch. Until I learned of all the fatal overdoses, I have always thought of fentanyl with gratitude for the relief it gave my dear mother. My deepest sympathy and love to all those who have suffered because of this drug.
Marjorie needs powerful opioid pain medication:
I am 44 years old, single, female, and an acupuncturist with my own successful business for 12 years. Before that I was a licensed social worker in New York City. I have an inoperable thoracic syrinx that causes me 24/7 severe nerve pain that requires a combination of nerve medications and opioid pain medications. It became active three years ago so that my torso, chest, and pelvis burn and stab. I go to the Ainsworth Institute for Pain in New York and my primary-care doctor prescribes non-opioid medications. I have undergone several procedures from neurosurgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, including two failed spinal-cord-stimulator trials and a failed pain-pump trial with complications.
I have never felt addicted to these medications. I am dependent on them for physical nerve pain.
It took me about a year, and getting my gallbladder removed, to finally be prescribed opioids regularly. I was bounced around like a hot potato because of the “opioid epidemic.” If I were to go to an ER, staff could label me “drug seeking.” During three ER trips, my blood pressure soared, I cried and was never prescribed pain medications.
I wish I did not have to take these medications. They cause constipation so bad that I have almost gone to the ER multiple times. I now take stool softeners daily and magnesium powder three to four times a week. I have miraculously learned to work in a lot of pain, to cope the best I can. I was switched to 20 milligrams of methadone daily and Percocet as needed, which I try not to take. I take [the neuropathic pain medications] pregabalin and gabapentin. I get blood drawn every three months. My liver enzymes were batty two times because I was taking too much acetaminophen.
I worry about my liver processing so much medication. However, the medication is keeping me alive. The indescribable pain caused me suicidal thoughts for the first time in my life in the first year. Those thoughts are now gone because my pain is controlled “just enough.”
I have become an avid cold-water swimmer with a group on Long Island that has helped me to cope. I belong to a chronic illness/pain group called the Chronicon Community by Nitika Chopra that has been a godsend. We are reading The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke for our book club. I pray the street-fentanyl crisis is healed. I pray science can someday solve nerve pain and neuropathies.
Marsha blames the Drug Enforcement Administration for the hardships she experiences in getting the pain medication that she needs:
The doctors in the Emory Pain Center made it more and more difficult for me to get oxycodone. Finally, my doctor simply refused to give it to me. He agreed that there was no likelihood that I would become an addict as I have been stable on the same dose since 2007. But he simply did not want to give me the one drug that helps my pain with the fewest side effects. I had been receiving oxycodone from my rheumatologist for about 12 years. She became frightened that her office would be raided by the DEA if she kept prescribing Percocet to patients. She gave me a month to find another doctor to prescribe it.  
Has the DEA saved anyone from drug addiction? Or has it simply made life very difficult for people like me?  
I see a specialist for pain alone every 28 days. The appointment lasts about 20 minutes from arrival to departure. I am given a paper prescription. I must carry that paper prescription in person with ID to a pharmacy. I must stand in line while it is refilled.  I am 79. I have trouble driving. I have trouble standing. I fear catching COVID.  
There are only two DEA accomplishments that I am aware of. One is to make pain control more difficult for people like me. The other is to cause many, many deaths. By putting such strict control on prescription drugs, users have been driven to heroin and fentanyl.  
What an accomplishment.
Victoria’s daughter died from fentanyl. She is raising that daughter’s four children (ages 14, 14, 10, and 4).She writes:
You are spot-on about the failure of interdiction to stop the proliferation of fentanyl. Better luck catching a moonbeam in your hand, as the nuns sang in The Sound of Music.
We have to drop the stigma and provide lifesaving treatment, even if that is achieved by providing safe fentanyl. We need to follow in Canada’s footsteps and provide clinics where people can obtain safe heroin and fentanyl, not just clinics where they can use the drugs they procured on the street. Without the stigma, these are eminently reasonable ways to save lives. And it keeps people in the medical orbit until they are ready to seek treatments like buprenorphine or methadone.
Heather agrees:
I lost my 23-year-old cousin to heroin, despite him trying incredibly hard to overcome his addiction. I am a proponent of harm-reduction centers where naloxone is available. I would love to see these centers have options for treatment and counseling at no cost.
Waging a War on Drugs is not going to stop deaths. Allowing people to be seen and heard in a judgment-free safe place is what I think will start to make a difference. There are so many people who are afraid to get the help they need because of the fear of “getting in trouble.” As a previous EMS provider, I cannot tell you how many times we picked up a teenager who (for example) took cocaine and suddenly panicked but who would not admit to it for us to safely and effectively treat them.
Whereas Peter favors a draconian crackdown on the illegal-drug trade. Among the steps that he suggests:
Unless we fundamentally revisit U.S. self-limitations on much stronger actions to both reduce supply and improve treatment, there really aren’t any good answers here, just bad versus less bad.   
Singapore has 50 times fewer opioid users per capita and over 35 times fewer opioid deaths per 100,000 people (1.18 vs. 42 ) than British Columbia, Canada, because Singapore has maintained extremely harsh punishments for drugs, like public flogging and the death penalty for drug dealing/smuggling. One could rightly say such punishments are inhumane.
However, given the more than 80,000 annual U.S. opioid deaths [in 2021], and another 500,000 [opioid] addicts inflicting misery on themselves and widely spreading their crime and homelessness through neighborhoods they live in, at this point it’s pretty clear that, from an objective humanitarian and societal perspective, Singapore’s approach is much more successful. It may well be time to consider Singapore-type draconian measures for at least medium- to large-scale trafficking.
… And since interdiction is no longer significantly useful, we’re going to have to go much harder after manufacturing bases and precursor interdiction. It’s relatively well known where manufacturing is being done, and could be much further improved with drone and/or satellite-based chemical-signature area scanning. Because of complete systemic governmental corruption, the U.S. needs to start playing real hardball with Mexico, up to and including suspension of the NAFTA/USMCA treaty, to allow rapid, direct U.S. attacks on cartel manufacturing facilities via drone and/or precursor-transport networks.
Read: Will an influential conservative brain trust stand up to Trump?Jaleelah does not believe fentanyl can be eliminated. She explains why before offering an alternative approach to the problem:
In Canada, large cartels aren’t the main importer, and domestic producers contribute to the trade. Fentanyl use is often accidental—less potent drugs are often laced with fentanyl—so public-service announcements discouraging use won’t stop the deaths. It’s hard for authorities to detect it in the mail, and it’s hard for run-of-the-mill drug users to detect it in their supply. Given these facts, the focus should be mitigating the harms of fentanyl rather than stopping it in its tracks.
If the government cares about stopping fentanyl overdoses, it must implement testing programs for other drugs. Users of cocaine, heroin, and meth should be encouraged to bring their supply to government facilities where they can figure out if their drugs are laced. The government must assure users that they will not be arrested or tracked for the crime of being safe. Facilities like this already exist in parts of Canada.
Government intervention alone will not stop the death. Uptake will be slow, and some people will still use fentanyl intentionally. Additionally, many people can’t call for help by themselves when they’re suffering the effects of fentanyl. We need strong social norms in favor of helping our fellow citizens when they are actively overdosing.
People are afraid of drug users. I have seen an overdose once in my life. I was 18, and I regrettably did not rush to help. I was in a parked car in a dark, nearly empty garage and I was initially paralyzed by the fear that the man screaming and coughing up his lungs would lash out if I offered assistance. Thankfully, two passers-by jumped into action: One ran to grab a naloxone kit, and one sat with the man and comforted him until an ambulance arrived.
Lots of people see drug users as irresponsible, selfish people who refuse to get their lives in order. The reality is that rehab programs—if they’re even affordable—are ineffective. To reduce use of common fentanyl vectors like heroin, cocaine, and meth, we need to invest in scientific and sociological research to produce recovery programs that aren’t based on religious moralizing.
Opioid addiction has a genetic component, meaning that many addicts aren’t morally responsible for lifetime addictions (beyond the responsibility they bear for making one or two bad decisions—or succumbing to peer pressure—as a teen or young adult). We need to stop viewing addiction as a moral failing and start realizing that it’s a failure of the health-care system.

Ben Rhodes is a writer and the former Deputy National Security Advisor under President Barack Obama. His latest book is After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We've Made.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ben Rhodes discuss the record of Barack Obama’s foreign policy; what America should do about the Middle East, Russia, and China; and how (not) to advance democratic values around the world.This conversation was recorded on November 1st, 2022. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You are, fairly or unfairly, most famous for one four letter word: the “blob.” What was the blob, in the context of the early years of the Obama administration? What was the state of the foreign policy establishment in the United States in 2008, and what did you feel was wrong with it?Ben Rhodes: I moved to Washington in 2002 to be involved in American foreign policy, and that was very much the peak of the post-9/11 mentality. As a young person, a 24/25 year old working at a think tank, I watched this herd mentality as people rushed to support the war in Iraq. Some people held the very earnest view that it was the right thing to do. But I also noticed some people who just didn't want to be left off the train. I resisted that for a while. But I got worn down. I remember when Colin Powell gave his presentation at the UN, I thought to myself, “Well, I'm not sure about this war. But if all these people are saying, ‘This is what we absolutely must do,’ they must know something I don't.” My formative years taught me that maybe the people in charge don't know something that I don't. Obama had basically differentiated himself as a politician because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. The 2008 primary with Hillary was very much about foreign policy, and the core contrast that Obama drew with Hillary was her support for the war in Iraq versus his opposition.The “blob” was later in the Obama administration. I was referring to a similar kind of groupthink that overstated the capacity of the United States to shape events inside of other countries, particularly in the Middle East; it was often reflexively interventionist, without necessarily considering the consequences of interventions. And frankly, I was frustrated that it was harder to build support for a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was to take our country to war in Iraq. Groupthink, interventionism, the failure to reckon with the lessons of Iraq—that's kind of what I was talking about. Some people will say that I was criticizing the liberal order. No, I'm all for the liberal order. I was criticizing a very particular but predominant post-9/11 strain of American foreign policy.Mounk: By the time Obama came into office, the lesson that the Iraq war was a mistake had become obvious to many people. But what broader lessons did you think the administration should have taken from it, and what lessons did the administration take from it?Rhodes: Well, I thought—and continue to think—that it was not just Iraq. It was an enormous mistake to marshal all of American national security policy—really, in some ways, American identity itself—and direct it into this war against terror. America was experiencing a kind of completely unique moment in world history: a moment of dominance of global affairs after the end of the Cold War. And we took all of that power and just directed it at this global war on terrorism, which could encompass everything from the war in Iraq to opening up the prison in Guantanamo to the Patriot Act, to increasing governmental powers and surveillance, to framing an us-versus-them view of counterterrorism. All this momentum was unleashed after 9/11. When Obama came in, it was still driving American foreign policy. We had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan—we were just off the surge in Iraq—and people were already chomping at the bit to do a surge in Afghanistan. And we were creeping into places like Yemen and Somalia, militarily. In the early days of the Obama administration, the goal was, “How do we unwind this?” You can't just hit a button and stop all these wars—much to the dissatisfaction, I think, of some critics on the left. It's just not feasible to do that. How do we shift the direction of American foreign policy to start bringing troops home, to start deprioritizing terrorism relative to other issues like climate change, or recovering from the global financial crisis? How do you adjust to the fact that America is not as dominant as the blob thinks we are? That last point may be the most important in some ways, and I still think that there's a view from Washington that is kind of frozen in time, in say, 1993—that we can impose our will; we can shape events; we can act with impunity; we can make mistakes without paying the price for those mistakes; we can set a bad example through torture or Guantanamo without thinking that other countries might copy that example. That, to me, was the core tension between Obama and some of the more interventionist blob forces. Now, I think we succeeded in part. We were able to draw down the war in Iraq. We had this laborious review in Afghanistan, that I think mistakenly led to a bigger surge than was probably necessary. We did prioritize some other issues. I think any foreign policy isn't perfect, and I think Obama was constantly calibrating how much he could wind down the post-9/11 era and lead us into something different while doing so responsibly.Mounk: I'm interested in what that meant in terms of the policies of the Obama administration. Clearly, as we've seen over and over again, the ability of the United States to shape events around the world is very limited. How do you think the Obama administration performed in Libya and Syria, and what lessons should we take from that? Rhodes: I was constantly arguing to do more in Syria. Up through that “red line” episode, I was one of the people kind of banging on the table like, “We need to be doing more.” And Obama would constantly push back and say, “Well, then what? We bomb the runways where the planes are taking off, then they rebuild the runways. Then what do we do?” I think what he saw is that there was no way into Syria that didn't get us deeper and deeper in.Mounk: One of the criticisms that people might make is that you overlearned the lessons of Iraq. But it sounds like Obama actually had Vietnam in mind.Rhodes: It's an interesting question, what he had in mind. The intervention in Libya, for example, was designed at the beginning to protect civilians in a particular place in Benghazi. Qaddafi was announcing publicly that he was gonna go from house to house and massacre people. We could literally see on a map, “here are Qaddafi's forces; they reached the outskirts of this city; if they go in there, there's going to be a real massacre. And we can just stop him where he is and prevent that massacre.” As soon as that intervention happened, however, the logic ran quickly to regime change, because Qaddafi continued to kill other Libyans in other places. And so long as Qaddafi was there, he posed a threat to Libyan civilians—the snowball quickly rolled down the mountain to regime change. There are interesting counterfactuals. At the time, though, the momentum just overwhelmingly tipped in that direction. I've taken a lot of heat on this issue over the years, because I've tried to defend Obama's thinking. I'm not defending the outcome of the horrific war in Syria. But I think it's easy to look at that situation and say, “Well, if you guys had gone in, you would have saved all of those lives.” What is the evidentiary basis to think that a US military intervention automatically leads to a better outcome, when we have Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya telling us that it doesn't? I don't see what policy would have somehow worked in Syria after not working in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. But I think it is wrong to equate that with a pessimism about what America can do generally, because fighting wars in the Middle East is not the only tool of American statecraft. I was very enthusiastic about the second term of Obama foreign policy, more so than the first. A lot of us led efforts to mobilize collective action, whether it's the Ebola response in West Africa, whether it's the Paris Climate Accord, whether it's the Iran nuclear deal, which was a multiyear, multilateral initiative. I led the normalization of relations with Cuba, which helped lead, in part, to an end to the Colombian civil war. I reject the pessimism label entirely. I think that fighting wars in the Middle East has kept us from doing lots of things in the world.Mounk: That's a nice qualification. But perhaps it's a “local” pessimism, right? It is to say, “There are some situations in which any course of action that the United States might take is going to lead to disaster; but not acting at all, whatever that means, is going to lead to disaster as well.”Now, in other areas, we might be able to bring about good outcomes. We might be able to normalize relations with Cuba and make progress on climate change. But however you rerun the counterfactual tables, the outcome in Syria is essentially always going to be a huge humanitarian catastrophe. Rhodes: I have a deep pessimism about war. I just want to be very specific about this. Tell me how often that turns out well? It's kind of shocking to me, when you look back on Vietnam: there’s something called the Vietnam Syndrome, which is that Americans over-learned the lesson of the Vietnam War, and it made them more reticent to get involved in other wars. Why is that a syndrome? That seems like the logic that you would learn from something like Vietnam, and not just Vietnam—it's Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Look at Russia. They're learning that lesson right now themselves. Now, in Syria, I think you can mount critiques about whether we should have made more limited use of force in response to chemical weapons, just to reinforce the norm. But also, I think people can ask other questions like: Was it wise for the United States under Barack Obama to call for Assad to go as leader; to basically say that there was no world in which he could remain president of Syria? I don't say that because I think Assad should be president of Syria. I would love him to go. I wish he’d left in 2011 when the first protests happened. However, that may have closed a certain window on diplomatic initiatives, ones that might have been unsatisfying, but that could have saved a lot of lives.I'll give you another example with Iraq. There were all these debates in Washington after it went bad: “Did we not send enough troops? Should we have disbanded the Iraqi army? Did de-Ba’athification make sense?” It almost allowed people to avoid answering the question: “Why did we go in and invade and occupy this country when they hadn't done anything to provoke us in terms of the development of weapons of mass destruction?”Mounk: I'm sympathetic to the idea that essentially whatever choice the United States makes in these conflicts, it’s going to turn out bad—including the choice to not really make a choice. And of course, the result is frustrating for anybody who's in government, because your choice is always going to be compared with some imagined alternative where everything turns out fine, even if that imagined alternative doesn't exist, or cannot be reached given the agency that the President of United States, powerful as he or she might be, has.Now, the benefit of hindsight is 20/20, and I'm sure there are things that various actors could have done to slightly improve the outcome. But effectively, there just wasn't a realistic scenario that would have avoided Assad using his bloody war of attrition to eventually run the table?Rhodes: I don't want to seem like I'm just trying to deny that there could have been somewhat better outcomes. Ironically, when I look back on the whole thing, trying to avoid the civil war through diplomacy—without insisting on Assad leaving—was probably the thing that could have saved the most lives. That diplomacy could have failed too, by the way, because it was kind of all-or-nothing, and not just for people in Syria, but for a lot of other foreign powers that were involved. To tie it to bigger questions: I do think it says something interesting about the nature of the American national security establishment that there was such a hyperfocus on this region these last twenty years. When we look back historically, the far more consequential trends are climate change, the state of democracy, global inequality. There's something wrong with an establishment that is focused on the wrong things. Even in just hard geopolitical terms, we should have been more focused on China these last twenty years. The focus on a number of countries in the Middle East, I think, is going to look ahistorical and irrational the further we get from it. I understand why you're pressing me about the outcomes in Syria. But to me, the bigger point is: What is it about our national security enterprise that meant we became so fixated on this one part of the world? And that's why I lose my pessimism. I'm not a dead-ender who thinks America can't do anything good in the world. I'm not reflexively taking on a kind of leftist critique that says we should just stay out of everything. Part of what I'm saying is that we were so overextended in this one part of the world—and Syria would have merely increased that overextension, had we gotten involved—that our capacity to do these other things was greatly reduced. People don't like to think in terms of trade-offs, but there are a limited number of people in the US government and a limited number of resources. If you're focusing on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and potentially Syria, you are, by definition, not doing other things. I felt the bandwidth free up to some extent in the second Obama term. The shift of priorities to things like climate was hugely important. I'm not saying the Paris Accord solved the climate crisis, but it did build a foundation for solving it. These things have to be seen as connected.Mounk: Let's shift out of the Middle East. Another big strategic choice was to say that the real long-term strategic rival is China rather than Russia, and that we should attempt a reset with Russia. It seems to me that, with the benefit of hindsight, Russia has just turned out to be a very disruptive force in the short and medium term, even though it becomes clearer with each passing day that Russia is not as credible a long-term strategic threat to the United States as China. But it seems to me that the Obama administration, along with everybody else in DC, virtually every China scholar, and every journalist in the country, was fundamentally wrong about the trajectory of China. In 2008, people said: “China is a real priority here.” But they meant that we needed to engage with China and build a long-lasting partnership to integrate China into all of these international institutions, so that even though China might not become a democracy, it would be a responsible player in the international liberal order. All of that, given the consolidation of power under Xi Jinping, looks somewhat naive in retrospect.Would you accept these criticisms?Rhodes: On China, I guess I would challenge the critique a little bit more than on Russia, which I'll come to in a second. But we didn't incorporate China into the international order. That was long since done. That was already the state of play when we came in. I will accept the premise that we had an engagement-focused policy. There was no way out of the financial crisis in the United States, absent some coordination with China. But I think that when you look back, we were really trying to shape a containment strategy in Asia. Much to my frustration, I wanted us to call it that more explicitly, but there was this delicate balance regarding how we would describe what we were doing. If you look at the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump tore up, and Hillary negotiated and then walked away from—that’s the containment strategy. And, by the way, it wasn't just trade that we were operating on. We were working to integrate ourselves into the East Asian framework of ASEAN, dealing with the Southeast Asian countries. And we were building a military presence. We were doing a lot of the things that have continued under Trump and Biden—we just didn't beat our chest as much about it. When people look back on this, they will see that we were increasingly trying to draw lines and limits around China, and to build a framework within which to compete with them and confront them if needed. Trump turned that into a bilateral trade war instead of a multilateral strategy. Biden's trying to turn it back into a multilateral strategy, which is harder to do when the US is less reliable. The TPP thing really hurt. You spend seven years negotiating an agreement that requires other countries to change their laws in order to be a part of it. There are consequences to just pulling out of that because of domestic politics here in the US, and I think that’s undermining Biden's capacity to multilateralize his China policy. Where I'm critical of us is simply on not being more outspoken about the rising threats to democracy within China and around the world. I think the US establishment incorporated a bit of self-censorship in how we talked about China. You'd express concern about some event in Tibet or some detention of an individual dissident—but we weren't mounting a critique of the model they were building. I said in my last book After the Fall: Can anybody look at America's relationship with China, from Tiananmen Square to today—and I'm talking about the relationship between governments, but also between our business communities and cultural sectors—and say that we prioritized, at any given point, democracy, human rights, and values over profit? No way. And that's the message the Chinese took. On Russia—we were coming in, and the financial crisis had happened, the Russo-Georgian War was already a frozen conflict, and President Dmitry Medvedev was in power. I wasn't the architect of the reset policy. But the idea, I think, was sound in a way. This country has a different leader. We know Putin is still in the background, but let's see what we can get done in this particular window of time. We did a New START treaty. We were resupplying troops in Afghanistan through Russia, which is crazy to think about now. The Iran sanctions that Medvedev joined through the UN helped get Iran to the negotiating table, which led to the nuclear deal. So, there are elements of the reset that I think are still defensible.Mounk: Where does that leave us today? The United States’ geopolitical position today is, in many ways, weaker than it has been for a few decades. You obviously have an extremely fraught relationship with Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. You have an increasingly fraught relationship with an increasingly authoritarian regime in China.What does that mean for anybody who's trying to devise a coherent foreign policy strategy for the United States? And more broadly, what does that mean for the future of democratic values? Rhodes: I think it leads me to believe that American foreign policy needs to overwhelmingly focus on the revitalization of existing democratic space, and the growing alignment of views among existing democracies. There's a democratic recession, and there's an autocratic push that is also, as we all know, reaching into parts of the democratic world. In terms of foreign policy, we do not share a common view of China with other democracies. We're kind of out there on the China policy. It's quite hawkish. Maybe we can bring along the Australians and the Japanese and the British. There’s some real work that needs to be done to align our views on China, on issues of trade, on what we do in a Taiwan contingency. I think we could be doing similar things regarding tech. We don't have common views with Europe on what kind of norms and standards we want to put around the development of AI. There's a lot of work to do on the climate. In some respects, our climate policy is currently in conflict with Europe's, because they see it as an industrial policy that is favoring American industry. We've had similar complaints about some of their border tax approaches.Your capacity to make it more attractive for Nigeria or South Africa or post-Bolsonaro Brazil to team up with democracies on some things—that capacity grows when we look like we have our stuff together, and we're launching shared initiatives on things that everybody cares about. If you build it, they will come to be a part of it. It still isn't hard to find someone who will tell you how it's all over for America, and we just made a complete fucking mess of things with Trump and we tore up agreements. It's true. That has real consequences. Who would sign an agreement with America when you have no idea of what America is going to be in two years?For all that, nobody else has the network of alliances and military bases we have. Nobody has the dynamic society and culture that we have, as toxic as it seems. Our economy has proven to be strangely resilient relative to some others. Countries can't just turn off America. That's not an option.Mounk: What would it mean for the United States to project that confidence in this moment? What would it look like for the United States to have a narrative about the case for democratic future that doesn't look like it's just going in a snooty way to harangue people in India and Nigeria and so on about their failings without being self-critical, so that it actually is able to put forth a vision that's going to be attractive to people?Rhodes: You have to connect your critique to things that people really care about. Just standing up and saying, “We support the freedom of expression and you are wrong to lock up journalists,” is much less effective than, “In our history, journalists have been critical in uncovering abuse, and fighting corruption which screws people. If you want to have less corruption in Nigeria, and you don't want all this money flowing to some kleptocrat crony near the top, you should allow for independent journalism.” You're connecting a value like the freedom of the press to what the public actually cares about, which is they're getting robbed by a bunch of corrupt people—which actually puts more pressure on the government to do it, because it looks like they're suddenly covering up corruption by keeping the journalists in jail.I think it does a lot of disservice to these values globally when we say, “We are offended by the way you're acting because we care about democratic values.” If you actually believe that democratic values deliver better outcomes, you have to describe why you're making the criticism that you are making. Some of them are just, “You shouldn't put a million people in concentration camps in Xinjiang province.” There are some that are purely moral. But I think America and democracies generally could do more to couch their arguments in a persuasion frame, and not just one that accepts that people know that we're right and they're wrong. Mounk: How optimistic are you about the next fifteen or twenty years? How optimistic are you about Ukraine being able to win the war against Russia or being able to come to some kind of settlement of war without further escalation? How optimistic are you about the ability of the United States to contain China? How optimistic are you about the ability of the international system to confront major challenges whether it's climate change or global pandemics?Rhodes: I'm pretty worried about the next few years. To skip ahead, I am optimistic about the fifteen year horizon, for a bunch of reasons. I think people would rather not live like we are all living right now. There are only a few places where people had the chance to opt in to the autocratic model, and those are the people that want to opt out the most. Taiwan could raise its hand any day and get a “one country, two systems” deal and be a part of China. If this Chinese model is so great, why do they not want to do that? Why did the people of Hong Kong clearly not want to do that? Ukraine could have appended itself to the reconstituted Russian Empire, obviously, and avoided a tremendous amount of suffering. They didn't want to do that. So I'm kind of optimistic about what we're learning about human nature, preferring democratic systems that may not be exactly like the US, but that are not like Russia and China. I'm also optimistic that on climate change the world is kind of kicking into gear and taking that seriously. What I'm pessimistic about is the next few years. I don't know how you can have this degree of turbocharged nationalism in this many places and not have more Ukraines. We are talking at a time when you've got a weakening China, with a slowing economy and zero-COVID1 policy that doesn't make sense, that is more nationalist than ever in terms of their ideology. That, to me, is dangerous, and Taiwan is an obvious flashpoint for that energy. You obviously have Putin. It's all collapsing around him, but he still has a lot of nuclear weapons. And even if we wake up one day and some stern-faced generals say that Vladimir Putin had an accident last night, I don't necessarily know that that means that the war in Ukraine goes away entirely. Russia is going to be there, and there's going to be some version of a war in Ukraine probably for a while. In Iran, the regime is cracking at the foundation, but there are people who don't want to give up power there. In our own country, I have no idea who is the president of this country in two years. It could be Donald Trump, or it could be kind of a mean-spirited DeSantis type. The worst case scenario is there's a war in Taiwan, there's a war in Ukraine, and there's a war in Iran. That feels kind of like World War III, right? Now, I'm not saying that is going to happen exactly. But this could be a pretty disruptive decade of near-misses, potential conflicts, and economic disruptions from the US and China untangling themselves. I think we're in for a pretty rocky period. But I am optimistic, actually, that we’ll come out on the other end of that okay, provided that we manage this period as effectively as we can. A lot of foreign policy is just preventing things from being much worse. If you can just keep the pots from boiling over, sometimes that is what gets you to the ten or fifteen year horizon.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community1Following nationwide demonstrations, Chinese cities have begun to relax zero-COVID restrictions as of December 4.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked readers, “What is the best response to anti-Semitism in America?”Yosef responded with acid observations about the type of anti-Semitism that prompts the most media coverage:
I find it ironic that those who are the most perplexed and dismayed about any rise in anti-Semitism are those who are least Jewish. At the same time, those who are most affected by anti-Semitism are those who are most Jewish. In greater New York City, in mass shootings and daily crime, it is the Hassidim who are attacked the most. But [violent] anti-Semitism and online anti-Semitism are distinct forms. One is a stone and one is a tweet.
Tweets take place on Twitter, which is a space almost devoid of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Yet you ask me this question because of anti-Semitic tweets, not when Jews are stabbed. Stabbings of Hassidim just don’t seem to occupy the same societal headspace that right-wing lunatics do. The Jews who live outside of the Jewish world are less likely to be physically attacked because they don’t look Jewish. They notice anti-Semitism when Kanye tweets it. It is these Jews who bring anti-Semitism to your attention in its most benign form.
We do not ask for a national conversation about anti-Semitism; anti-Semitism is a fact of Jewish existence. It will always exist, in many forms, in flavors palatable to any taste in politics. From my street-level view, teens with stones have as much power as Ye or Nick Fuentes.
There are two types of anti-Semitism: One is local crime and one is national politics. We just want crimes to be prosecuted, and for mayors not to tell the police to stand back.
[Read: How should we deal with high-profile anti-Semites?]Meredith urges a broad coalition that starts with education:
Overcoming anti-Semitism is an age-old challenge and often a matter of life or death. Christian leaders must work together with leaders of all faiths, officeholders of all parties, and prominent figures to expose the lies that underpin anti-Semitism. Public schools must educate children and teenagers about anti-Semitism in different historic periods, not just the one during World War II. It is insufficient to teach history in which Jews don’t appear until the Nazis are systematically hunting and murdering them by the millions.
Marilyn makes a shorter case for education:
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who casually compared the Holocaust with COVID mandates, seems to have gained something from her visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. If someone as offensively uninformed as she is can admit she didn't really know what the Holocaust was, then I’m sure just about anyone can learn the error of their ways.
DC urges a return to first principles:
The subhead under the title of Bari Weiss’s interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a quote from Abdul-Jabbar: “Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks.”
That clear-eyed observation seems to me to express a principle that we have lost sight of in our current culture wars, which is that all forms of bigotry and discrimination—even when intended as a weapon against bigotry and discrimination—make bigotry and discrimination far more acceptable across the board. I don’t think that phenomenon is limited to expressions of anti-Semitic sentiment or to Black speakers; racial and socioeconomic and ethnic-group membership have become a permissible, if not defining, factor in how some of us judge others and how we speak about them and in what we feel they are entitled to say. No group will ever be able to claim that kind of “reasoning,” as Abdul-Jabbar rightly calls it, for itself. It is a contagion, and will continue to be adopted by other groups and for other causes for as long as we tolerate it.
Anti-Semitic speech cannot be legally prohibited. But the reactions it provokes and the conversations it ignites (like the one you’ve invited) are critical weapons in opposing it. Private organizations and businesses can and should denounce and punish it in whatever way they see fit, and they have seemed to do that lately. Public figures can and should denounce it and respond to it, as Abdul-Jabbar has done, among others.
But a broader-based backlash against the unprincipled basis for these kinds of statements is needed. We can’t pick and choose the forms of bigotry we object to. We have to be all in on the principle or watch as bigoted speech becomes more widely practiced and accepted.
Glenn cautions against prejudice or differential treatment rooted in group identity:
From many, one. Identity politics is the poison at the well of democracy. For the sake of expediency and the shallow thinking of the moment, we place individuals into groups so that we need only address ideas and stereotypes rather than persons. We dehumanize by this intellectual sleight of hand.
Of course, one’s culture is significant. We would be all the poorer as a people without those unique cultural flavors mixed into our “melting pot,” a perfectly good term. If we are to be, in any meaningful sense, a people, there will have to be a melting pot. One’s culture, history, and identity belong to the self and not to the civitas.  
All the Semitic peoples are a particularly old and honored cultural contributor to our nation. We are indebted to them, and should show our great gratitude and respect by treating them exactly like one of our own and not another. Leave it to each of us individually to separate ourselves into our own unique identities and proclivities, but let us in deep respect treat one another exactly as if we were the same. No more, no less.
Errol warns against punitive censoriousness:
I say give people like Kyrie Irving and Ye the rope to hang themselves with. Punishing them for essentially saying that the Jews run everything just proves their point to them. They go to their inner circle and say “See? Told ya.” Soon that underground club will grow in numbers, and we may have a serious problem on our hands that seemingly came from nowhere. This is why I think it’s backward to do things like outlaw Holocaust denial, as Canada and other countries have done. This doesn’t kill the idea, because ideas cannot be killed––they grow like a germ in a petri dish when you try to put a lid on them.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant in a majority of cases. And unfortunately, we have lost the art of making fun of bigotry and racism. There’s a particular archetype of comedy we no longer have.
Think of Archie Bunker. The joke is not that people make fun of Archie; the joke is Archie himself. He’s a character who spews idiotic sentiments that we laugh at because we find viewpoints such as his to be laughable. We have since veered far away from making light of people like him and in movies such as The Producers.
Bryan Cranston spoke in recent years about being offered a chance to direct a comedic play that made the KKK look, well, stupid. He turned it down because he felt it “a privileged viewpoint to be able to look at the Ku Klux Klan and laugh at them and belittle them for their broken and hateful ideology.” This attitude is a mistake. Humiliation is powerful and can diffuse someone’s hateful thoughts and convey better than forced apologies the idea that people like this don’t deserve to be taken seriously.
[Read: The gift of civil discussion]DG argues that anti-Semitism should not be ignored, and that it should be punished:
I think some background is essential. We no longer live in a world in which poisonous ideas can be expected to die through the lack of nourishment. That world perished with the advent of social media. The lure of having instant impact through provocative expressions has short-circuited prudent inhibition in the same manner as four shots of tequila.
The appropriate response to Irving and Ye should be evaluated from the perspective of their desired effect. They hoped to gain influence with their words. The most effective and appropriate outcome would be for them to lose influence. These are bullies. Bullies need an audience. And the next generation is watching.
If Elon Musk wants to reinstate Ye’s account, it should be on Twitter users to unfollow both of them. Or to leave the platform. We are not without power here. We should not exercise power unjustly. The response should fit the offense. In addition, a clear statement of disagreement with the objectionable views expressed should be considered by all observers who feel these ideas are divisive, harmful, or at least malicious in nature and intent.  
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” As Ella Wheeler Wilcox said, “To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.”
Harvey notes the belief among people, including Donald Trump, that even bad press is better than no press, and argues that Ye, Kyrie Irving, and Nick Fuentes are all better ignored than addressed because of the particular roles that those individuals play in American culture:
West is widely known but widely ignored on most subjects as a nut whose opinion has no influence except for those following him based more on his status as an artist than a political figure.  
Irving is an athlete. Most people care more about how he does on the basketball court, not his political or sociological beliefs. Fuentes is virtually unknown except among people who already agree with his position. His comments are so outside the mainstream as to render him unable to influence anybody except a small group. Only those with similar beliefs care about his opinions, except for those who follow him for a living, such as the FBI and the [Southern Poverty Law Center].
It seems to me that with these individuals, we would be better to ignore them than give them more oxygen than they warrant. Giving them more publicity validates their feelings of self-importance in ways that they do not deserve.
Tony agrees:
Anti-Semitism, along with every single other inflammatory, attention-seeking behavior from whatever quarter, but particularly from celebrities, should be ignored. It’s all excessive and immature, toddler-like even, and so doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response. There have to be some grown-ups in the room, and that should be the media.
And Jaleelah draws some distinctions:
Are you asking about how we should deal with high-profile anti-Semites or how we should deal with anti-Semitism in America? Those are two very different questions.
Disclaimer: I am neither Jewish nor an expert in the field, so I won’t claim to know the best way to deal with either of these issues. I will, however, share an observation. “High-profile anti-Semites” are not the greatest force of anti-Semitism in America. They’re certainly a threat, but most people have other entry points to anti-Semitism. Common conspiracy theories, evangelical tales about the End Times, and extreme anti-elite/anti-outsider rhetoric are all gateways to hating Jewish people. As a result, I find your qualms about “drawing attention to anti-Semites” an unconvincing reason to ignore them.
There will always be hateful figures who platform other hateful figures. Anti-Semitism is so engrained in American culture that it will not become less popular when non-Jewish commentators remain silent on it. You may be able to ignore Kanye’s hateful remarks, but Jewish figures will always be asked to comment on them. And Jewish people have no good options. Either they can let anti-Semitism thrive, or they can fight it and be painted as censorious.
So what is the largest anti-Semitic threat, and how can we stop it? I would argue that it’s the low-level anti-Semitic rhetoric that exists across all American communities, particularly when it comes from places of authority.
I was quite sheltered from anti-Semitism for the first 15 years of my life because I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and attended a Jewish-majority school. My Muslim Palestinian grandparents raised me to treat Jewish people with respect and to resist people who try to turn us against each other. I thought it was ridiculous that anyone could actually believe Jewish people are behind some grand conspiracy to control the media or the government.
I truly believe that authority figures—whether religious, political, or educational—are the only ones capable of raising Americans to believe such obvious hateful untruths. Stop letting them make excuses.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.It’s time for the takeover of the airwaves by Christmas TV specials and music. I have some nostalgic favorites—and some nominations for songs that should get a Scrooge-like burial after being boiled in a vat of Christmas pudding.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Krysten Sinema’s decision is all about 2024. 
It’s beginning to look a lot like another COVID surge.
The end of high-school English
Comin’ to TownLook, everything can’t be about politics and war. We need to fight about other things, such as Christmas.I do not mean the inane “war on Christmas,” but rather the endless conflict over our personal loves and hates during this holy and reflective season. Last year, I vented about the best and worst Christmas specials. Readers of The Atlantic were, shall we say, divided in their reactions, and so at the time, I offered some thoughts on Christmas music in my Peacefield newsletter, which I present this year with a few eggnog-influenced amendments.I actually began thinking of Christmas music this year with a certain sadness. I was watching the new Howard Stern interview with Bruce Springsteen (which I highly recommend). Springsteen talked about the 2011 death of his friend Clarence Clemons, the “Big Man” who added his signature saxophone playing to many of The Boss’s records. He spoke of comforting Clemons as he passed away. Listening to the interview, I was, for a moment, transported to Christmas in the early 1980s, when Springsteen’s live version of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” was all over the radio. It included Springsteen bantering with Clemons about Santa bringing him a new horn. I was never a huge fan of the song, and yet, at that moment, I just wanted to hear it, laugh with the band, and then sing along at the top of my lungs.So instead of being sad, I decided to turn on Christmas music and find some holiday spirit. Christmas songs fall into general categories. Religious carols—such as “Silent Night” or my personal favorite, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”—are songs that are, for many of us, rooted in faith and mostly beyond criticism. The big-band era popularized crooners such as Bing Crosby; the 1950s and ’60s saw an explosion of popular Christmas music that served the Baby Boomers and their parents; in the 1980s, there was a weird but creative spike of MTV-influenced Christmas rock.I confess: I go for the old classics. Give me Der Bingle and Andy Williams and Perry Como and all that dusty old stuff that is as ageless and imperishable as that one candy cane you keep finding in the ornaments box and hanging on the tree year after year. In part, I associate this music with my childhood, when my mother would bring out the same stacks of Christmas records every holiday season. Each year, I set my satellite radio to the Holiday Traditions channel, whose catalog, as far as I can tell, ends sometime around Richard Nixon’s first presidential victory. (Mr. Nixon, for his part, was a fan of Ray Conniff.)My favorite song of that era is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a melancholy but hopeful song, which is how I feel more and more often at Christmas as I get older. I especially like it now that I know that Judy Garland insisted on a rewrite of the original lyrics, which were staggeringly depressing. (That wasn’t enough for Frank Sinatra, who had to add even more artificial cheer by scratching out the line about “muddling through” and including some metered blather about “a shining star upon the highest bough.”) The beauty of the version Garland sings in Meet Me in St. Louis is that it isn’t relentlessly cheerful; maybe that’s why it appeals to my curmudgeonly side.But I am also a sucker for the “new classics,” such as “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “We Need a Little Christmas” (the Johnny Mathis version only, please), and “Do You Hear What I Hear?,” whose plea for peace is all the more meaningful when you realize it was written during the scary days of the Cuban missile crisis. I will always listen to Burl Ives croon his way through “Silver and Gold,” and I sing along in a German-accented voice when the Red Baron wishes Snoopy a “Merry Christmas, my friend!”From the 1970s, John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is a standard (although I prefer the 1990 remake by The Alarm). Two other songs that are somewhat depressing—hmm, I sense a theme here—nevertheless always make it onto my playlist. “I Believe in Father Christmas” by Greg Lake is a mournful song about the end of childhood innocence with a classical lift from Sergei Prokofiev, and “Circle of Steel” by Gordon Lightfoot is a touching story of Christmas poverty and heartbreak that’s dark even for the guy who made the Top 40 with a song about a ship sinking with all hands lost.The 1980s were a happier time (well, for me, anyway), and my first spin every year is the 1981 classic “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses. Nothing says “celebrate the birth of Jesus” like the flat, affectless vocal by the late Patty Donahue as she tells us of finally hooking up with the guy she’s been “chasing all year.” It warms your heart.And now let’s throw out the moldy roasted chestnuts.Please, no more “Jingle Bell Rock.” I have nothing in common with my older Boomer cousins, and I did not experience the 1950s except for a few months in the womb at the end of the Eisenhower administration. I don’t want to go to a sock hop; I am not interested in “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”; I don’t care how blue Elvis is without you. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is awful, as is “Santa Baby.” The only exception here is the version by the legendary Eartha Kitt, whose rendition combines purring sexuality with pure venality—but let’s face it, that’s not really about Christmas. And let us throw “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and “Last Christmas” into the Yule bonfire too. It’s long past time to end the synth-schmaltz horror of “Wonderful Christmastime.” The Eagles pleaded with you to “Please Come Home for Christmas”; I am pleading with radio stations to stop playing this lazy ’50s knockoff. My list of Banned Christmas Music is much longer, as you might expect, but blacklisting these would be a start.I’ll be away on Monday, but I hope this gets your weekend off to a musical start. And just to show you that I do listen to music from closer to this century, I happen to like “Christmas Won’t Be the Same Without You” by Plain White T’s, which I wish would emerge as a Christmas staple. The less said about Jim Carrey’s 2000 remake of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the better, but I dare you not to get a little teary-eyed at Faith Hill’s lovely “Where Are You Christmas.” And when I want to annoy my wife—which is a Christmas tradition around here—I put on a song from South Park, whose title and lyrics I dare not repeat here but which make me belly-laugh every year, and which I am going to go and crank up right now.Related:
The most beloved Christmas specials are (almost) all terrible.
The truth in a violent Santa
Trevor Noah hosted his final episode of The Daily Show last night.
Croatia beat Brazil in its World Cup match today and will head to the semifinals.
A former Minneapolis police officer was sentenced to prison on state charges after pleading guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter in the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
The Third Rail: A new study shows how false beliefs propel cultural conflict, David French writes.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg writes in from Jerusalem with some scattered thoughts and weekend-reading recommendations.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry explains why she rejects the gospel of objectivity.
The Books Briefing: To write about science is to write about everything, Maya Chung notes.
(María Jesús Contreras)
‘That’s Just Like White Noise.’By Jordan KisnerOn the afternoon of the 2016 election, I took a cab directly from my polling place in South Brooklyn to JFK, where I boarded a full flight to San Francisco. In the evening, when the plane took off, the consensus seemed to be that by the time we landed, the country would have elected its first female president. I wasn’t sure, so when the miniature television that had been allotted to me came alive as we climbed to 10,000 feet, I turned it to the news.As the sunset outpaced the plane and the dark rose outside our windows, I saw that everyone else had their television turned to the news, too. Pennsylvania and Ohio, Iowa and Nebraska, passed silently beneath us as the returns came in.The flight from JFK to SFO is about six and a half hours, depending on the wind, so between the hours of 7 p.m. and midnight eastern on November 8, 2016, 180 televisions shone their bluish light on 180 faces arranged in rows of three, facing forward. No one spoke. Strapped in shoulder to shoulder in a metal tube hurtling 35,000 feet over the breadth of America, everyone watched the country’s electorate reveal itself on our own screens. By the time we landed, the decision had been made.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
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Photos: Hopeful images from 2022
(Daniele Castellano)
Read. Kevin Wilson’s Now Is Not the Time to Panic is a novel that will make you laugh and then punch you in the gut.If you’re in the mood to travel further into the past, turn to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which saw all of our modern crises coming.Or try one of these short novels you can read in one weekend.Watch. Dive into the 10 best films from an unforgettable year of cinema, by newcomers and old masters alike.On Netflix, Lady Chatterley’s Lover makes sex scenes look like a work of art.And in theaters, Noah Baumbach’s White Noise preserves the humor of the Don DeLillo book on which it’s based. Listen. A deluxe reissue of Neil Young’s album Harvest is a reminder of what makes his voice irresistible.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I thought today I might write about Kyrsten Sinema dropping her affiliation with the Democratic Party, but my colleague David A. Graham has already explained it clearly: It’s about her chances for reelection in 2024. There is no political content here—or none that Sinema has bothered to explain—and she is most likely dropping out so she can avoid a primary challenge from her own (now former) party. It’s a smart strategy; she is essentially skipping the primaries and daring the Democrats to risk handing her seat to a Republican in a three-way race merely for the temporary pleasure of knocking her out of the Senate.The idea that a senator just likes being a senator and doesn’t care all that much what her constituents think isn’t new, but bolting from her party for no obvious reason other than to shore up her chances of staying in Washington is almost an insulting level of honesty, if there is such a thing. Sinema’s utterly disengaged career—notable mostly for its lack of achievements and her willingness to flout Senate dress codes—is about Sinema. (Joe Manchin, as much as he angers his own Democrats, has obvious interests related to West Virginia and remains in his party.) Sinema’s message seems to be “I will caucus with the Democrats and keep them in the majority, and the rest of the time, just leave me alone.” Given the slim margin in the Senate, this might be enough. But Sinema’s solipsism is not exactly an inspiring vision of politics.— TomLooking for a gift for the inquisitive people in your life? Give an Atlantic subscription this holiday season.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Last night, Elon Musk celebrated the release of a new entry in the “Twitter Files” series, which aims to … Well, that’s complicated. It’s a supposed transparency project from Musk that, to date, has included giving two independent writers access to internal Twitter communications, as well as to the company’s Slack channels. So far, they’ve produced two threads, each totaling about 30 tweets, purporting to show how Twitter’s executives have schemed and colluded to censor political speech for partisan gain. The tweets are breathless, alluding at various points to “chilling passages” and “secret groups” of executive decision makers.This latest tranche, released with commentary by Bari Weiss, gave me a look at something I’ve always wanted to see: a portion, at least, of the social platform’s internal moderation systems. The screenshots show how users can be flagged in various ways by the site’s employees: We can see that some users are marked as high profile, for example, and that individuals have a strike count, which seems to reference how many times the account has been caught in an infraction of Twitter’s rules. Then there are the juicier labels, like Do Not Amplify and the ominous-sounding Trends Blacklist.As a set of documents, the screenshots are fascinating. But the “Twitter Files” entries are sloppy, anecdotal, devoid of context, and, well, old news. (Neither Weiss nor Twitter immediately responded to requests for comment.) Weiss’s thread purports to show how Twitter restricted the reach of several large accounts, including those of the Stanford doctor Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the infamous Libs of TikTok account. Via the internal screenshots, it argues that Twitter, contrary to its public claims, shadowbanned conservative accounts through a process the company calls “visibility filtering.” Similarly, the thread implies that a committee of top Twitter executives known as “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support” acts as a kind of content-moderation black site—an off-the-books cabal that makes off-the-books decisions on high-profile accounts. (Meta has recently been embroiled in a controversy over a similar “cross-check” system.)[Read: Shadowbanning is Big Tech’s big problem]The subjectivity of moderation decisions across the social web poses tremendous and complicated problems—which is precisely why journalists and academics have paid close attention to it for more than a decade. But there’s no secret conspiracy: These claims largely comport with what Twitter has publicly stated about its moderation policies over the past few years. Since May 2018, Twitter has noted that it will change how a user appears in the site’s search feature if that user behaves in a way that “detracts from healthy public conversation.” Twitter has an entire Frequently Asked Questions page dedicated to this type of de-amplification, which it says it does based on a combination of algorithms and human decision making, but not via political ideology.I do not believe that Elon Musk cares about the thorny particulars of content moderation. By releasing these internal documents selectively, Musk gets to be on the offensive, whipping up a crowd that’s eager to cry censorship and shadowbanning. He’s not even interested in paying attention to the details: As the first mega-thread dropped, last weekend, Musk admitted that he hadn’t actually looked at the files yet—although that didn’t stop him from making boneheaded statements, like suggesting that its contents proved a large-scale First Amendment violation.[Read: Why conservatives invented a “right to post”]In fairness, the Twitter Files do show that the company makes amplification decisions about certain accounts. And while that’s not especially revelatory to people who’ve paid attention, the files do speak to the immense power wielded by tech platforms. It’s a power that makes Republicans and Democrats queasy, albeit often in different ways. As content-moderation experts will tell you, it’s a messy system where people can make the wrong call with occasionally disastrous results. In this way, the Twitter Files do what technology critics have long done: point out a mostly intractable problem that is at the heart of our societal decision to outsource broad swaths of our political discourse and news consumption to corporate platforms whose infrastructure and design were made for viral advertising.The dynamics of the entire affair are Trumpian in the most exhausting way possible. Attempts to engage with the attention hijacker only further his purposes, but ignoring him can feel as if you are letting him get away with distortions and the last word. What Musk seems to really want is to anger liberals, delight his right-wing and reactionary bedfellows, and alienate the mainstream media. This is surely why he releases documents only to writers who’ve expressed alignment on his pet issues. It would also explain why he tweets disparagingly about former employees, accusing them of being politically biased just a month after urging his nearly 115 million followers at the time to vote for Republicans in the midterm elections. And it is why Musk castigates Twitter’s former leadership for its de-amplification policies while promoting a policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” which amounts to the exact same thing.The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.Still, it’s possible that a shred of good could come from this ordeal. Musk says Twitter is working on a feature that will allow users to see if they’ve been de-amplified, and appeal. If it comes to pass, perhaps such an initiative could give users a better understanding of their place in the moderation process. Great! But Musk hasn’t given any reason to suspect that he cares about transparency, beyond wielding it as a weapon against his perceived enemies. He doesn’t engage in good faith with his critics, and he’s perfectly fine with a selective release of internal information that’s geared toward pleasing his fans. At times it seems his entire Twitter project is little more than identifying perceived injustices from site’s past—biases and so-called abuses of power—and using them as a playbook to run on his ideological opponents.And so, what matters more than the content of the Twitter Files is the constant buildup, and the framing of their release as a bombshell act of unprecedented transparency. It signals indisputable proof that the bloodthirsty audience is about to see something big. As is so often the case online, the signal alone seems to be enough. No surprise, then, that the writers behind the Twitter Files and Musk himself are constantly teasing the next installment. The conspiracy that’s just out of reach is always more powerful than the one that was (supposedly) revealed.

Great powers, both past and present, are haunted by three interconnected preoccupations: they are tempted by a sense of national superiority and claims to manifest historic destiny. Those pretensions tend to provoke fears of decline, which then give rise to projects of rebirth.
The European empires that once fancied themselves great, most notably the British and French, are extreme examples. As France decolonised after 1945, Charles de Gaulle made “grandeur” a watchword of national policy. For the British elite, despite the increase in standards of living, decline was an obsession throughout the postwar period. Under the sign of “cool Britannia” and Tony Blair’s embrace of Europe in the 1990s, that shadow lifted. But since the banking crisis of 2008 and the Brexit referendum of 2016, the question has returned with ever-greater force. While the Brexiteers promise a “global Britain”, the average standard of living in Britain is declining for the first time in modern history. Nationalist bluster about “Britannia unchained” obfuscates a cool-eyed and practical appraisal of Britain’s actual position in the world.
After 1945, the United States superseded the European empires as the hegemon of the non-communist world. The question the English literature professor Jed Esty asks in his new book, The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits, is whether the US has now succumbed to the same British malady. Is the US so haunted by preoccupation with relative decline that it can’t adjust to the realities of an increasingly multipolar world?
In making his argument, Esty distinguishes the fact of the US’s diminishing superiority in economic and military terms, which he considers undeniable and inevitable, and the ideological preoccupation of declinism. As Esty puts it, it isn’t just data that matters, but the story you tell with it. It is in deciphering this complex weave of reality and narrative that Esty’s expertise as a literature professor takes effect. Ranging widely across genres, he reads cinema, TV shows and literature, from The West Wing to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy and Marvel’s Black Panther, as examples of a culture of decline.
As far as America’s relative standing is concerned, there are some uncontroversial facts. In 1945 the US share of global GDP was almost 50 per cent. By 2020 its share had fallen to 16 per cent. Military spending is one of the few categories in which the US remains supreme, but China is catching up. Around these facts, as Esty show us, American analysts weave a variety of diagnoses, ranging from technocratic reformism, to conservative appeals for moral renewal and a reassertion of faith in the US’s mission.
What is characteristic of these modes of thought is that they are remedial. Within the diagnosis of decline there lingers the desire to restore greatness, to Make America Great Again. That was Donald Trump’s slogan. But under the Democrats, the aspiration to restore US to world leadership is, if anything, even more clear cut. Unlike Trump, whose grim warning of “American carnage” suggested real doubts about US pre-eminence, Joe Biden takes a sunnier view. For him America’s status as the number one power is an article of faith. His instinct has always been to breezily dismiss claims that China might be closing the gap.
As Esty points out, the assumption of national pre-eminence is shared by much of the American left. The Green New Deal was motivated by a vision of America’s unique productive power that harked back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Second World War. Talk of turning the US’s world-bestriding arsenal of democracy into the motor of a sustainable energy transition is not merely window dressing. When in August this year Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act – a much diminished nationalist green industrial policy in austerian garb – it was declared to be the bill that would “save the planet”. This despite America’s responsibility for, at most, 13.5 per cent of global CO2 emissions – less than half China’s share. By all accounts, the US delegation to Cop27 in Egypt was surprised that they were not greeted with rounds of applause for having delivered what they hail as “the biggest climate package in history”.
For Esty, the swirling dialectic of national exceptionalism, fear of decline and the promise of national revival delivers a cockeyed view of the world, which will be painfully familiar to British readers. The preoccupation with great power status results in too much military spending and not enough money for education and infrastructure. Global posturing distracts from sensibly-scaled civic initiatives to make the US a more liveable place for the vast majority of its population.
Like many American reformers before him, Esty proposes that to break out of this cycle of power-obsessed thinking, US political culture needs a new sense of proportion. And as Esty sees it, that would be best instilled by a suitably redesigned programme of humanities education. A proper appreciation of the West’s entangled and violent history will deflate the exceptionalist balloon and invite more sobriety and realism. Reversing the priorities that once motivated British critics of decline, Esty argues that America’s contemporary focus on tech solutionism and Stem education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is both a symptom and a cause of the malaise.
This is hardly new. Since the early 20th century, US reformers have identified education as a means to instill a more pragmatic and realistic understanding of the world. Esty, however, proposes to break with America’s national traditions. His suggestion is that in crafting a new curriculum for an age beyond great power hubris, US educators and intellectuals should take inspiration, of all places, from Britain. What he has in mind is not the Kiplingesque punditry of the likes of the historian Niall Ferguson, but its opposite. Esty’s inspiration is the British New Left, which he sees as exemplary in its efforts to come to terms with the end of imperial greatness.
It is a charming, if implausible suggestion. No one could disagree with the need to revisit classics such as Policing the Crisis (1978), a landmark work headed by Stuart Hall that used the moral panic over mugging in 1970s Britain to decipher a power structure under threat. But the suggestion that a curriculum drawn from 1970s cultural studies and back issues of the New Left Review can offer an antidote to Maga ideology is far-fetched. Apart from anything else Esty’s basic conceit, that the US’s imperial decline is analogous to that of the UK’s, does not stand up to close scrutiny. The British empire never wielded the firepower commanded by Washington today. The UK never confronted a nuclear armed Soviet Union or the rise of modern China. On the other hand, America’s domestic problems are far more severe, violent and entrenched than anything confronting postwar Britain in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, or today. Though they may share a common history in Atlantic slavery, Britain is a post-colonial not a post-emancipation society. There is no British equivalent to mass incarceration, Jim Crow or the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of declinism, the UK was building a welfare state. Half a century later, as the richest and most powerful nation on Earth, the US still lacks a decent public healthcare system. Life expectancy in America lags significantly behind that in Britain.
Even if Esty’s analogy between Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and modern day America made sense, can one really say that the British New Left offered a coherent reading of the UK’s predicament, or one that helped British society or politics to accept its own decline? Indeed, one might wonder whether the British New Left was ever truly reconciled to its country’s diminished standing. With the significant exception of Hall, they wrote as the self-conscious heirs of a fallen empire. Still today, Perry Anderson, the power behind the New Left Review and repeatedly invoked by Esty, writes as if from the Olympian heights. Recently he has concentrated most of his attention on the logics of American power. If the aim is to propose a more democratic and modest approach to history would it not make more sense to draw inspiration from grassroots efforts such as the History Workshop Journal or Raphael Samuel’s remarkably capacious understanding of popular history?
If the US today is to craft a new political culture less obsessed with grandeur and more in touch with 21st-century realities, should our efforts not start with the young Americans who will grow into that world? Rather than needing a new academic curriculum to immunise them against delusions of national grandeur, the consistent result of opinion polls taken in recent decades suggest that younger Americans have defected of their own accord from US exceptionalism. Solid majorities of millennials and Gen Z refuse the idea that their country is the greatest on Earth, which is hardly surprising given their experience of it. After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, their interest in military adventures is mainly confined to the computer screen. And more young Americans today evince sympathy for the idea of socialism than for capitalism.
If anyone is failing to grasp modern realities it is not younger Americans, who are presumably the targets of Esty’s programme, but their parents and grandparents. Faced with a rapidly changing world, Americans over 60 – the so-called silent generation (born between 1928 and 1945) and the boomers (1945-64) – remain addicted to the claim of American greatness. In the elections of 2016 and 2020 they voted solidly for Trump. And the Democratic Party’s own gerontocrats – with Biden and Nancy Pelosi in the lead – are unabashed exceptionalists. Their animating idea is to wage a global power struggle with Russia and China in which the ideological stakes resemble those of the Cold War. In so doing, they strike a pose that not only discards the idea of US national decline but puts in question the very terms of declinist discourse.
Declinist discourse is full of anxiety, imagining a world in competitive terms, with countries racing each other to have the largest economy or the best scores in educational rankings. This vision of competition, however, is tempered by reference to third-party standard, which in the modern era has been the primary yardstick of economic performance. This economic logic both defines national decline and relativises it. It is, after all, not surprising that China should catch up with the US at least to some degree, any more than it was surprising that West Germany caught up with Britain after 1945. Decline defined in economic terms is relative underperformance. It is not defeat. This is the common sense that Esty wants America to adjust to.
But it is precisely that logic that has over the past decade been upended by the US’s policy elite. Starting with the pivot to Asia in 2011 under Barack Obama and moving into a more aggressive gear during Trump’s presidency, the Biden administration is clear that in the critical fields of industrial policy, the US is no longer competing with China as if on a playing field, or as though they were measured against a common yardstick. Nor is it a matter of protecting property rights or opening markets for American exports. As far as the cutting edge of microelectronics and AI are concerned, the declared aim of US policy is to cap China’s development both in absolute and relative terms and by means of aggressive “sanctions” to sustain America’s military superiority. To achieve this extraordinarily aggressive techno-military objective the US is not only seeking to deny China access to America’s own technology, it is also endeavouring to block exports to China of key technologies by businesses from Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands and Japan. This is not competition, nor the rhetoric of declinism. This is the logic of economic war.
In historical terms it is quite hard to think of any analogy to this moment. The Soviet Union was never as entangled with the Western economies as China is today. For all its commitment to the economic weapon and blockade, the British empire never pursued a policy as deliberately destructive of any particular commercial competitor as the one that the US has pursued against China’s Huawei. Read against the current mood in Washington, Esty’s critique of declinism and his well-meaning appeal for common sense and realism feel almost escapist. It would be comforting to imagine that America today is in a situation analogous to that of Britain in the 1950s or the 1960s, where the worst that could be unleashed is a bloody but localised post-colonial expedition. In its unipolar moment, the United States created havoc enough, in Iraq and Libya. But today the stakes are higher even than that. Rather than the Suez debacle of 1956 the relevant historical example today is the Cuban missile crisis. As tension with Russia mounts over Ukraine and with China over Taiwan, the question that overshadows our time is not American national decline, but the risk that a second Cold War might unleash a Third World War.
The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its LimitsJed EstyStandford University Press, 164pp, £11.99

If we end up in a recession, will the benefits be worth the cost? That is perhaps the grandest, gravest question facing the American economy as it barrels toward what feels like an almost inevitable downturn. More companies are announcing layoffs. Hiring is slowing. Home prices are falling. Forecasters put the odds of a full-on contraction in the next year at 60 to 96 percent, with one statistical model spitting out a probability of 100 percent.This coming recession, if it does come, will largely be an artifact of policy, with a handful of unelected bureaucrats based in Washington choosing to increase unemployment and bankrupt businesses in order to cool off the country’s high inflation rates. To get the price of milk and gas under control for everyone, the argument goes, some people might need to lose their jobs.“We’re never going to say that there are too many people working, but the real point is this: inflation. What we hear from people when we meet with them is that they really are suffering from inflation,” Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said in September. “If we want to set ourselves up, really light the way to another period of a very strong labor market, we have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t.”[Read: How to be happy in a recession]The question is how much pain the economy needs to bear and who will bear it. Indeed, the policy the Fed is pursuing—raising interest rates sharply and quickly—carries a high human cost even if it works precisely as theorized. And things working out as the Fed wants them to is not a given, what with the persistence of inflation and the number of variables in play.Right now, the economy is running hot. The unemployment rate, after reaching 10 percent during the Great Recession and spiking to a high of 14.7 percent during COVID shutdowns, is now just 3.7 percent. Wages are rising; job openings far outnumber jobless workers. Yet as a partial consequence of that strong labor market, prices keep rising, eroding families’ purchasing power. Indeed, inflation is at its highest level since the 1980s. The price tag for a basket of groceries was 12 percent higher in October than it was a year before, gas prices hit their highest-ever nominal level this summer, and the ratio of home prices to median household income is at a historic high—higher even than before the housing bubble burst in 2006.Lots of people have jobs, and lots of people are earning more money than in the past. This is one reason prices are increasing so quickly. It is not the only one. Households are still spending the cash they accumulated during the early phase of the pandemic, when Congress disbursed trillions of dollars of stimulus. And inflation is coming from not just elevated demand but also restricted supply. The country’s massive housing shortage is elevating shelter costs, the war in Ukraine continues to roil energy markets and drive up the cost of food, and COVID-related supply-chain problems persist.   [Derek Thompson: Is this a recession? Wrong question.]Whatever the cause, inflation is hurting working-class families. “Lower- and middle-income households suffer the most in this high-inflation environment,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. “Inflation is particularly high for the things they spend their budgets on, and they don’t have a financial cushion to fall back on” in the same way that wealthy families do.Depending on how the Fed weighs the risks, it could end up engineering one of five scenarios:The do-nothing option: Given the hot labor market and rapid pace of inflation, the Fed could do nothing. It could quit raising interest rates. It could choose to tolerate rising prices, satisfied that workers are at the very least also benefiting from rising wages. And many progressives argue that the Fed should do nothing, or at least do less than it is doing now. The central bank cannot fix the price increases caused by supply bottlenecks, they argue. Why sacrifice the livelihoods of low-income workers by slowing the economy down if costs are going to go up anyway?“Rate hikes won’t make Vladimir Putin turn his tanks around and leave Ukraine. Rate hikes won’t break up monopolies. Rate hikes won’t straighten out the supply chain,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told Powell at a hearing this summer. “Rate increases make it more likely that companies will fire people and slash hours to shrink wage costs.”But many economists, including those at the Federal Reserve, believe that rising prices are the result of strong demand, not just supply problems: The cost of everything but food and gas was rising at a 6.3 percent annual pace as of October, three times faster than the Fed’s target. In time, Zandi told me, the fear is that inflation will “undermine the underlying growth rate of the economy, and you really don’t want to go down that path.”Untethered inflation: The Fed is not afraid of rising prices, per se. It is afraid of a long spell of high inflation that results in businesses hiking prices on consumers and workers insisting on wage increases to cover their costs, which in turn leads businesses to hike prices further and workers to insist on additional wage increases. (This is known as a wage-price spiral.) The agency is afraid of everyone expecting prices to keep going up and up and up, and acting like they will. “The really bad thing is permanently rising inflation,” Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard and the chair of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me.Such untrammeled inflation tends to lead to declining living standards for families, with rising wages failing to outpace rising costs. It prompts businesses to adapt in costly ways—by, for instance, buying goods now for delivery later. It forces investors to invest in inflation-proof parts of the economy rather than the most dynamic or promising parts. It is just stressful for households and companies to deal with, Zandi said. Plus, Furman noted, “you would need a bigger downturn to get rid of it.”The soft landing: The wiser course would be to prevent a wage-price spiral, keep inflation expectations in check, and get price increases under control now, some economists think. The longer high rates of inflation persist, the more the Fed has to hike rates in the future and the greater the eventual toll—particularly on groups that typically experience high rates of joblessness. “If all you cared about was [minimizing] the Black unemployment rate, you would want to be aggressive” about fighting inflation now, Furman told me. If the Fed waits, he said, “the cost only goes up. If expected inflation goes up half a point, that could be an extra million or 2 million jobs.”The Fed is hoping to raise borrowing costs enough that workers quit switching jobs, but not so much that businesses enact widespread layoffs. It wants to ease rents without destroying the home-building pipeline. It wants to slow down the economy without tipping it into a recession. But, as Powell has noted, even a soft landing comes with a fair amount of pain. Rising prices hurt everyone a bit. Unemployment hurts a small number of people in a devastating fashion, and the Fed sees the unemployment rate rising to 4.4 percent by the end of next year.Stagflation: By hiking rates so much and so quickly—the Fed has raised short-term interest rates by 3.75 percentage points this year—it risks steering the economy not into a soft landing but into one of two more frightening scenarios.If it triggers a recession without getting inflation under control, that would be something known as stagflation. It is a “central bank’s worst nightmare,” said Ryan Sweet, the chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “You raise interest rates to bring down inflation and you push the economy deeper into a recession. Or you cut interest rates to pull the economy out of recession and that raises inflation.” Generally, Zandi added, central banks have no choice but to let the unemployment rate get high enough and the recession deep enough that the rate of inflation comes down, then let the economy recover from there. “That’s very ugly,” he said. “There’s just a lot of pain that comes with that.”The hard landing: The Fed could simply overshoot and cause a recession. That would be less terrifying than a bout of stagflation, but it would still be an awful prospect. Recessions destroy good businesses. They dampen productivity and ingenuity. They put workers on permanently lower earnings trajectories. They damage people’s health. And they hit the worst-off families the hardest. “Black and brown workers would be the first to be fired,” says Lindsay Owens of the progressive think tank the Groundwork Collaborative. “The impact on the long-term unemployed, older workers, and disabled workers would be really severe.”  Such a recession might not be entirely the Fed’s fault, and not entirely the Fed’s to avoid. “The global economy is slowing down,” Sweet told me, pointing to data showing that the United Kingdom and the euro zone are slipping into a contraction, and that China is already in a “growth recession” because GDP is expanding too slowly to stop unemployment from rising. “This could be the first recession in recent memory where the rest of the world goes down and pulls the U.S. economy down with it.” The hope, at that point, would be that a recession would be mild and could be offset with smart fiscal policy, including investments in ending the supply constraints causing high inflation in the first place.Indeed, the country needs the Fed to manage these interest-rate hikes judiciously. More than that, it needs policies to make the country less vulnerable to high prices in the future. Energy independence, housing abundance, and stronger supply chains would make the Fed’s job easier—and would help avoid ugly choices about who has to suffer and how much.

The ground is well prepared for neofascism to fill the void left by class war wrought by neoliberalism, says Chomsky.

Neoliberalism has reigned supreme as an economic philosophy for nearly half a century. But neoliberal policies have wreaked havoc around the world, reversing most gains made under managed capitalism after the end of the Second World War. Neoliberalism works only for the rich and the huge corporations. But the failures of neoliberalism extend beyond economics. They spread into politics as the processes of social collapse bring into play menacing forces with promises of a return to lost glory. This is the basic thrust of neofascist movements and parties in today’s world, and it is neoliberalism that has created the conditions for the resurgence of right-wing extremism, as Noam Chomsky explains in this interview. Meanwhile, protests have become far more widespread in the era of late capitalism, so the struggle for an alternative world is very much alive indeed!

Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (forthcoming; with C. J. Polychroniou), The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).

C. J. Polychroniou: Noam, since neoliberal policies were implemented more than 40 years ago, they have been responsible for increasing rates of inequality, destroying social infrastructure, and causing hopelessness and social malaise. However, it has also become evident that neoliberal social and economic policies are breeding grounds for right-wing radicalization and the resurgence of political authoritarianism. Of course, we know that there is an inherent clash between democracy and capitalism, but there is some clear evidence that neofascism emerges from neoliberal capitalism. Assuming that you agree with this claim, what’s the actual connection between neoliberalism and neofascism?

Noam Chomsky: The connection is drawn clearly in the first two sentences of the question. One consequence of the neoliberal social-economic policies is collapse of the social order, yielding a breeding ground for extremism, violence hatred, search for scapegoats — and fertile terrain for authoritarian figures who can posture as the savior. And we’re on the road to a form of neo-fascism.

The Britannica defines neoliberalism as an “ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition,” with “minimal state intervention.” That is the conventional picture. Reality is different. The actual policy model threw open the doors for the masters of the economy, who also dominate the state, to seek profit and power with few constraints. In brief, unconstrained class war.

One component of the policies was a form of globalization that combines extreme protectionism for the masters with search for the cheapest labor and worst working conditions so as to maximize profit, leaving decaying rust belts at home. These are policy choices, not economic necessity. The labor movement, joined by Congress’s now defunct research bureau, proposed alternatives that could have benefited working people here and abroad, but they were dismissed without discussion as Clinton rammed through the form of globalization preferred by those conducting the class war.

A related consequence of “really existing neoliberalism” was rapid financialization of the economy enabling riskless scams for quick profits — riskless because the powerful state that intervenes radically in the market to provide extreme protections in trade agreements does the same to rescue the masters if something goes wrong. The result, beginning with Reagan, is what economists Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein call a “bailout economy,” enabling the neoliberal class war to proceed without the risk of market punishment for failure.

The “free market” is not missing from the picture. Capital is “free” to exploit and destroy with abandon, as it has been doing, including — we should not forget — destroying the prospects for organized human life. And working people are “free” to try to survive somehow with real wages stagnating, benefits declining and work being reshaped to create a growing precariat.

The class war took off, very naturally, with an attack on labor unions, the prime means of defense for working people. The first acts of Reagan and Thatcher were vigorous assaults on unions, an invitation to the corporate sector to join in and move beyond, often in ways that are technically illegal, but that is of no concern to the neoliberal state they dominate.

The reigning ideology was expressed lucidly by Margaret Thatcher as the class war was launched: There is no such thing as society, and people should stop whining about “society” coming to their rescue. In her immortal words, “‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

Thatcher and her associates surely knew very well that there is a very rich and powerful society for the masters, not only the nanny state that races to their rescue when they are in need but also an elaborate network of trade associations, chambers of commerce, lobbying organizations, think tanks, and more. But those less privileged must “look to themselves.”

The neoliberal class war has been a grand success for the designers. As we’ve discussed, one indication is the transfer of some $50 trillion to the pockets of the top 1 percent, mostly to a fraction of them. no slight victory.

Other achievements are “hopelessness and social malaise,” with nowhere to turn. The Democrats abandoned the working class to their class enemy by the ‘70s, becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street donors. In England, Jeremy Corbyn came close to reversing the decline of the Labour Party to “Thatcher lite.” The British establishment, across the board, mobilized in force and climbed deep into the gutter to crush his effort to create an authentic participatory party devoted to the interests of working people and the poor. An intolerable affront to good order. In the U.S., Bernie Sanders has fared somewhat better, but has not been able to break the hold of Clintonite party management. In Europe, the traditional parties of the left have virtually disappeared.

In the midterm elections in the U.S., the Democrats lost even more of the white working class than before, a consequence of the unwillingness of party managers to campaign on class issues that a moderate left party could have brought to the fore.

The ground is well prepared for the rise of neofascism to fill the void left by unremitting class war and capitulation of the mainstream political institutions that might have combatted the plague.

The term “class war” is by now insufficient. It’s true that the masters of the economy and their servants in the political system have been engaged in a particularly savage form of class war for the past 40 years, but the targets go beyond the usual victims, now extending even to the perpetrators themselves. As the class war intensifies, the basic logic of capitalism manifests itself with brutal clarity: We have to maximize profit and power even though we know we are racing to suicide by destroying the environment that sustains life, not sparing ourselves and our families.

What’s happening calls to mind an often repeated tale on how to catch a monkey. Cut a hole in a coconut of just the right size for a monkey to insert its paw and put some delectable morsel inside. The monkey will reach in to grab the food but will then be unable to extricate its clenched paw and will starve to death. That’s us, at least the ones running the sad show.

Our leaders, with their similarly clenched paws, are pursuing their suicidal vocation relentlessly. At the state level, Republicans are introducing “Energy Discrimination Elimination” legislation to ban even release of information on investment in fossil fuel companies. That’s unfair persecution of decent folks who are just trying to profit by destroying the prospects for human life, adopting good capitalist logic.

To take one recent example, Republican attorneys general have called on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to keep asset managers from purchasing shares in U.S. utility companies if the companies are involved in programs to reduce emissions — that is, to save us all from destruction.

The champion of the lot, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, calls for investment in fossil fuels for many years ahead, while showing that he is a good citizen by welcoming opportunities to invest in still fanciful ways to get rid of the poisons that are produced and even in green energy — as long as profits are guaranteed to be high.

In short, instead of devoting resources to escape from catastrophe, we must bribe the very rich to induce them to lend a hand in doing so.

The lessons, stark and clear, are helping to invigorate popular movements that are seeking to escape from the shambles of capitalist logic that shine through with brilliant clarity as the neoliberal war against all reaches its latest stages of tragicomedy.

That is the bright and hopeful side of the emerging social order.

With the rise of Donald Trump to power, white supremacy and authoritarianism returned to mainstream politics. But isn’t it the case that the U.S. was never immune to fascism?

What do we mean by “fascism”? We have to distinguish what’s happening in the streets, very visibly, from ideology and policy, more remote from immediate inspection. Fascism in the streets is Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts: violent, brutal, destructive. The U.S. has surely never been immune from that. The sordid record of “Indian removal” and slavery mutating to Jim Crow needs no recounting here.

A peak period of “street-fascism” in this sense just preceded Mussolini’s March on Rome. The postwar Wilson-Palmer, post-WWI “red scare” was the most vicious period of violent repression in U.S. history, apart from the two original sins. The shocking story is recounted in vivid detail in Adam Hochschild’s penetrating study American Midnight.

As usual, Black people suffered the most, including major massacres (Tulsa and others) and a hideous record of lynchings and other atrocities. Immigrants were another target in a wave of fanatic “Americanism” and fear of Bolshevism. Hundreds of “subversives” were deported. The lively Socialist Party was virtually destroyed and never recovered. Labor was decimated, not only the Wobblies but well beyond, including vicious strike-breaking in the name of patriotism and defense against the “reds.”

The level of lunacy finally became so outlandish that it self-destructed. Attorney-General Palmer and his sidekick J. Edgar Hoover predicted an insurrection led by Bolsheviks on May Day 1920, with feverish warnings and mobilization of police, army and vigilantes. The day passed with a few picnics. Widespread ridicule and wish for “normalcy” brought an end to the madness.

Not without a residue. As Hochschild observes, progressive options for American society suffered a severe blow. A very different country could have emerged. What took place was street fascism with a vengeance.

Turning to ideology and policy, the great Veblenite political economist Robert Brady 80 years ago argued that the whole industrial capitalist world was moving towards one or another form of fascism, with powerful state control of the economy and social life. On a separate dimension, the systems differed sharply with regard to public influence over policy (functioning political democracy).

Such themes were not uncommon in those years, and to a limited extent beyond both in left and right circles.

The issue becomes mostly moot with the shift from the regulated capitalism of the postwar decades to the neoliberal assault, which forcefully reinstitutes Adam Smith’s conception that the masters of the economy are the principal architects of government policy and design it to protect their interests. Increasingly in the course of neoliberal class war, unaccountable concentrations of private power control both the economy and the political domain.

The result is a general sense — not mistaken — that the government is not serving us, but rather someone else. The doctrinal system, also largely in the hands of the same concentrations of private power, deflects attention away from the workings of power, opening the door to what are termed “conspiracy theories,” usually founded on some particles of evidence: the Great Replacement, liberal elites, Jews, other familiar concoctions. That in turn engenders “street fascism,” drawing on poisonous undercurrents that have never been suppressed and that can easily be tapped by unscrupulous demagogues. The scale and character is by now no small threat to what remains of functioning democracy after the battering of the current era.

Some are arguing that we live in a historic age of protests. Indeed, virtually every region in the world has seen a sharp increase of protest movements over the last 15 years. Why have political protests become more widespread and more frequent in the age of late neoliberalism? Moreover, how do they compare to the protest movements of the 1960s?

The protests have many different roots. The trucker’s strike that almost brought Brazil to a halt protesting the defeat of the neo-fascist Bolsonaro in the October election had some resemblance to January 6 in Washington, and may be reenacted, some fear, on the day of the inauguration of the elected President Lula da Silva on January 1.

But such protests as these have nothing in common with the remarkable uprising in Iran instigated by the death in police custody of Jina Mahsa Amini. The uprising is led by young people, mostly young women, though it is bringing in much broader sectors. The immediate goal is overturning the rigid controls on women’s attire and behavior, though the protesters have gone well beyond, sometimes as far as calling for overthrow of the harsh clerical regime. The protestors have won some victories. The regime has indicated that the Morality Police will be disbanded, though some doubt the substance of the announcement, and it barely reaches the demands of the courageous resistance. Other protests have their own particularities.

Insofar as there is a common thread, it is the breakdown of social order generally in the past decades. Commonalities with ‘60s protest movements seem to me thin.

Whatever the connection may be between neoliberalism and social unrest, it is nonetheless clear that socialism is still struggling to gain popularity with citizens in most parts of the world. Why is that? Is it the legacy of “actually existing socialism” that hinders progress toward a socialist future?

As with fascism, the first question is what we mean by “socialism.” Broadly speaking the term used to refer to social ownership of the means of production, with worker control of enterprises. “Actually existing socialism” had virtually no resemblance to those ideals. In western usage “socialism” has come to mean something like welfare state capitalism, covering a range of options.

Such initiatives have often been suppressed by violence. The red scare mentioned earlier is one example, with long-lasting effects. Not long after, the Great Depression and World War evoked waves of radical democracy throughout much of the world. A primary task of the victors was to suppress them, beginning with the U.S.-U.K. invasion of Italy, disbanding the partisan-led worker- and peasant-based socialist initiatives and restoring the traditional order, including fascist collaborators. The pattern was followed elsewhere in various ways, sometimes with extreme violence. Russia imposed its iron rule in its own domains. In the Third World, repression of similar tendencies was far more brutal, not excluding church-based initiatives, crushed by U.S. violence in Latin America, where the U.S. army officially claims credit for having helped to defeat liberation theology.

Are the basic ideas unpopular, when extricated from the imagery of hostile propaganda? There is good reason to suspect that they are hardly below the surface and can burst forth when opportunities arise and are exploited.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author, and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published scores of books and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change (2017); Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021).

This first appeared on TruthOut and was reposted with permission.

Image: Tyler Merbler via Flickr CC BY 2.0

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] So here’s a question, and a lot actually rides on the answer. What’s the right story to tell about the economy right now? Is the economy, in its fundamentals, a lot like it was in 2019, but we’re just still working out the kinks and the traumas of the pandemic? Or has something changed more fundamentally, where there’s no going back to the economy in 2019? That we’re now instead in a new era. And what normal could look like, will look like now is not what normal looked like then. Mohamed El-Erian thinks we’re in the new era. El-Erian was, until 2014, C.E.O. of PIMCO, which was the largest bond manager in the world. And he’s still Chief Economic Advisor at Allianz, PIMCO’s parent corporation, and President of Queens College Cambridge and a columnist at Bloomberg View. So he’s a guy who knows markets really deeply, particularly knows bond markets really deeply, which is important for thinking about inflation, for thinking about responses to Federal Reserve initiatives. He’s very close with many of the world’s key central bankers. And over the past year, he’s been a very consistent voice, arguing the Fed is doing too little, in part because it thinks the economy of 2019 is still possible when it isn’t, and in part because it doesn’t understand market psychology. In a recent piece for Foreign Affairs, El-Erian explained the ways in which he thinks the economy has changed, and gave, in particular, three ways in which the new era will be different than the previous one. And so I asked him on the show to walk me through the argument. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Mohamed El-Erian, welcome to the show.

mohamed a. el-erian

Thank you. Great to be with you.

ezra klein

So you have a new Foreign Affairs article where you argue that this is actually the cusp of a new era and that a mistake that forecasters and commentators are making is to think the Fed can just chart us back to pre-2020 territory. So I want to talk about the three economic foundations you say are changing. And I want to begin with your first one, which is you say we’re dealing with a shift where the big problem in the economy, the global economy, was insufficient demand and now is insufficient supply, and it will remain that way. Why?

A number of reasons. First and foremost, the labor market is changing. And we’re getting confirmation of this every day. Labor force participation is not going back up. There’s all sorts of rigidities. We’re seeing massive vacancies relative to the unemployed. And the labor market is simply not functioning the way it used to be. That is only one part of a bigger supply story. Supply chains are being rewired. Part of it is driven by what’s happening in China. Part of it is being driven by national security. And part of it is being driven by significant change in the way companies think of how they operate. It is no longer solely a focus on efficiency. Resilience has become important. And then finally, globalization is changing. So when you put all these things together, the supply side becomes less responsive, and it becomes the binding constraint that plays out on growth, that plays out on inflation. And that is what we’re seeing.

ezra klein

I want you to unpack a bit of that. When you say the labor market is changing, it isn’t working the way it used to, how did it work? And how is it working now?

So the indicators are very clear. They suggest that there’s a problem with people being in the labor force. They also suggest that there’s a problem in matching the unemployed with the jobs that are available and where companies want to hire. I think labor force participation has to do with pandemic effects that are still in force, have to do with changing preferences about life/work balance, and critically have to do with the lack of child care and support in general for certain segments of the population to engage into the labor force. The second one, the mismatch of skills, is harder to solve. That has to do with the evolution that we’re seeing in terms of tech and this distinction that’s getting bigger between the service industry and the goods industry. And these are structural changes that we have to take seriously. We have a tendency to think that the world is mean-reverting Last year, that played out with inflation. The minute people started warning about inflation, they were told not to worry. It is transitory, meaning it’s temporary, it’s reversible, we can, quote, “look through it.” And therefore, don’t change behaviors, don’t change policies. This year, as we look at the risk of recession, the same people who dismissed inflation as transitory and were wrong, are saying, don’t worry, it will be short and shallow. And again, a concept of mean reversion. What we really are seeing is structural and secular changes that have to be taken seriously by governments, by central banks and by companies.

ezra klein

Let me cop to a bias here. I’m always pretty skeptical of arguments about labor market matching. I mean, I remember after 2010, we were hearing a ton of that as we were in the slow recovery from the financial crisis. Oh, the workers just don’t have the skills. We need to upskill. We need to retrain. And then as the economy heated up, and job markets got better and wages began going up, it turned out we could find work for those folks. Here, it seems maybe a little bit more likely to me that there are pandemic reasons, that there are, as you said, values reasons. But what makes you think we have, suddenly after the pandemic, a skills shortage, as opposed to something else?

So first, it’s important to make the distinctions you made because we are not waiting for the economy to heat up and to be in a better place. The economy has been in a better place. We’ve had a ton of liquidity injected from both the fiscal and monetary side. The economy, if anything, has been deemed to be, quote, “too hot.” I don’t necessarily agree with that, but that’s how it’s been characterized. And wages are picking up, but wages are picking up at a time when inflation is a problem. So the endogenous solutions that you refer to should have played out or cannot play out to the extent that they’ve played out. What about the impact of the pandemic? So we know that the pandemic has altered some of the supply of labor. What about the demand for labor? I think the nature of the demand for labor has also changed because the way we do things has changed. And that’s where the issue comes in. Now, we don’t know for sure. I remember being told a year and a year and a half ago, don’t worry about labor force participation. It will come back. It all has to do with the extra unemployment benefits that we’re paying. But they stopped last September, and we haven’t seen labor force participation come back up. It may take some time. It will take some time. But we don’t have as much time as we’d like to have. We have an inflation problem. We don’t want to get stuck with high inflation. And you get stuck with high inflation or sticky inflation if the supply side doesn’t become more responsive.

ezra klein

How much of this is really just a function of aging or maybe aging plus pandemic risk fears? Because something I think is interesting about looking at the labor force participation numbers is when I look at prime age labor force participation, that’s back up. It’s back up to where it was in 2019. Nobody — I don’t want to say nobody — but I don’t think we understood there to be a crisis in labor force participation in 2019. But as you say, when you look at the overall numbers, which includes workers beyond prime age, beyond that 25 to 54 group, that is quite a bit down from prepandemic. So how much are we looking at — we knew the work force was aging. The pandemic was a shock that led to older workers disproportionately leaving the work force because being in it is more dangerous. And the problem is we don’t really know what to do about that.

You’ve said it very well. It’s definitely a factor. It is not just that labor force participation has remained below where we were on the eve of the pandemic. It continues to go down. The last jobs report people expected labor force participation to edge higher. It went down. That’s the second month in a row it goes down. So there is a dynamic that goes beyond the pandemic. The pandemic may explain why we are at a lower level overall, and I think it is part of that explanation. But if you look at the changes month on month, you still have negative signs. So I think there is something beyond the pandemic. We don’t fully understand. And labor economists are looking very hard at this because it’s such a consequential issue.

ezra klein

But then why isn’t it hitting prime age workers?

The bottom line is we don’t quite the exact reasons other than we have a problem. If it were just the pandemic, and we have exited from the pandemic, and we have indications that the economy is running hot, that we don’t have a problem of demand, you would have expected to see labor force participation go up. Wage growth — just to put it into context — year-on-year, it’s 5 percent. The last three months, it’s 6 percent. Wages have picked up and are still going up. And yet, labor force participation is coming down. So there’s some structural issue that is in play here. Hopefully, it will get solved by time and by the recognition that as wages go up, it makes sense to re-enter the labor force. That’s my hope. But we’ve relied on hope for too long. I think we have to take seriously issues like child care, seriously issues like retraining or retooling of the labor force. And these are public/private partnerships that are yet to gain any traction.

ezra klein

I think that’s well put. I mean, I think my question that I keep running around is, I wonder if we have a bifurcated end of the pandemic? Which is — I see this in my own life, that the pandemic has ended for the young people in my life, like the middle-aged people in my life. And then the older someone gets, the more the pandemic is still present for them. That’s very true for people who are more elderly, but people in their 60s who just did a different risk or feel a different risk than people in their 30s. And I wonder if something we don’t quite know how to think about here is that the pandemic has ended for enough people. But in part, because of that, because it has ended for those people, so they’re now exhibiting riskier behavior, it really is not ending for a pretty significant portion of the older work force, which is partially why they’re not coming back or they’re leaving the labor force. But I want to move on to the supply chains, which you mentioned as well. I think people had a sense over the past couple of years, Russia, China, America has become interested in friend-shoring. We’re trying to bring more supply chains domestically. Obviously, a lot of supply chain fragility was exposed by the pandemic. What are the enduring changes here? What has snapped back, and what do you think will simply not snap back?

So most of the pandemic effects have snapped back. What do I mean by that? Containers in the wrong place. When we shut down the global economy, economists called it a sudden stop, when everything stops. You don’t just switch it back on. When you try to get the global economy going again, you find that the ships are in the wrong place, the containers are in the wrong place. It takes time to reorder the global economy. And we saw that. And because of that, shipping costs soared, container costs soared. All of these now have come down. So the first effects of the supply chain disruptions were completely dominated by pandemic effects. But there are two deeper forces at play. One is geopolitical fragmentation. It has to do with tensions, particularly China/U.S. tensions. And the friend-shoring, the near-shoring, is basically saying, for national security reasons, let’s increase the resilience of our supply chains. And the Inflation Reduction Act is a perfect example where governments gets involved in order to encourage what is de facto near-shoring, on-shoring, friend-shoring. Then you have what companies themselves are doing. For a very long time, just-in-time approaches were governing how people thought of their supply chains. And for good reason. Inventory can be expensive. If you can run very efficient supply chains, there’s a tremendous amount you gain. But this focus on efficiency came at the cost of resilience. And when you have jurisdictions that are behaving in ways that disrupt your supply chains, as is happening repeatedly in China with the Covid zero policy, you start thinking about resilience much more seriously. And that’s not a geopolitical issue. That is simply cautious management. And we have seen companies look to diversify their supply chains. Now, you cannot diversify your supply chains overnight. This is something that takes a long time and is inherently inflationary. We then have one major other reorientation. That’s energy. The critical energy transition is inherently inflationary. So when you take all this back, you have supply chains that are less responsive in terms of quantity and more responsive in terms of price. And this is beyond the pandemic. This is just the reality of an economy that’s being rewired for better resilience and for the realities of climate change.

ezra klein

I was going to come to China later, but I think we should do it now, actually. Because when you think of a premise on which the global economic order we’ve been in for the past couple of decades was built, I think China is itself a premise — its predictability, the role it’s going to play in global manufacturing, the primacy that the Chinese Communist Party is going to give to economic growth. And then a bunch of things have changed in China. Xi is running China with much more dictatorial control and, at the same time, making very different trade-offs around economic growth. You have a zero-Covid policy. You now have mass protests in the streets. You have the China/Russia semi-alliance, which has led to more skepticism with the U.S. You have rising levels of American hostility and antagonism towards China. How do you understand what has changed in the role China could be or was relied on to play in the global economy five years ago and the role it will be playing or can only be relied on to play in the coming years?

So let me answer that question by first saying I’m abstracting from the short-term issues that have to do with the zero-Covid policy and I’m looking at longer term issues. And there are three that absolutely dominate. One is China has been so successful that its growth model is no longer fit for purpose. Its growth model was the same as we’ve seen in other countries — Singapore, Korea. It basically leveraged the global economy to achieve domestic goals. But China is very large. And the more it climbed up the development ladder, the bigger it got relative to the global economy. So China needed a transition from an externally-driven model to an internally-driven model. And that’s going to dictate whether it also falls into the middle income trap that other countries, like Brazil, have fallen into, or whether it’s able to achieve what the smaller economies were able to achieve. Second issue is that there was an implicit contract associated with allowing China into the global system. And that is that China would take on global responsibilities, especially as it got bigger. And there’s a fundamental difference in how China is viewed inside China or outside China. When we are outside China, we say, look, China, you’re the second largest economy in the world and you may well become the largest economy in the world. You need to take up your global responsibilities. Looked from within China, China would say, we were a low-income country, we’re still a middle-income country, we still are relatively far away from being a top 10 or top 20 in terms of G.D.P. per capita. Wait for us to get up that league, that per capita league, and then we will play to the global responsibility you think we should be. Now, the world is no longer patient. The lack of patience was, of course, very visible under President Trump. But it hasn’t changed, because there’s also a national security element to it. And then third is the internal change. China used to dictate the overall direction of where it’s going. Mid-course correct as needed, but then allow its private sector to operate under these parameters. And what we’ve seen in recent years is a much more top-down directed economic approach. So you put these three things together. and not only is China no longer the powerful engine of global growth, but it can be disruptive, both on the supply side and on the demand side.

ezra klein

We tend to talk about China in terms of its growth model. But how big a part of, say, Western countries’ pricing model was China? When we talk about this era of changing supply, of higher inflation, and you think about it persisting, how much of that is that we relied on China and its manufacturing prowess to create enough stuff at a low enough price point that we could keep this kind of consumer economy going, and a lot of the turbulence is simply that we are not sure we can rely on that or want to rely on that anymore?

That’s part of the resilience argument. No, you’re absolutely right. Part of it is that not only are we not able to rely on it anymore, because China shuts down every once in a while, because China’s wage levels have gone up, and because there’s now a domestic market in China for what China produces. That’s all true. And that is certainly in play. But we also don’t want to rely as much as we’ve relied on before. And as I said earlier, when you try to rewire your supply chains, it is inflationary. This is like trying to change an engine on a plane in flight. It’s going to be bumpy. You’re not going to be able to maintain the same altitude. And if you’re not careful, you may lose a lot of altitude. So yes, you’re absolutely right. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So let me then go to your point number two, which is that we have been in this era of boundless, easy money from central banks. That era was unusual, and that era looks to be over. Tell me about that.

So coming out of the global financial crisis, where central banks played an absolutely critical role in avoiding a multi-year depression that would have damaged the well-being not just of the current generation but of future generations, they looked around and they wanted to hand off the responsibility for inclusive high growth to governments. This is 2010. Central banks had fixed malfunctioning markets. And now we’re looking to step back. The politics didn’t allow that handoff to happen. Look at the United States. It was the emergence of the Tea Party. It was the November 2010 shellacking of the Democrats. It was when we shut down the government. So central banks did what any doctor will do, even if the doctor doesn’t have the right medication. They provided painkillers. So they continued, and we oriented, what’s called Q.E., which is this exceptional period of injecting liquidity in a predictable fashion into the economy and maintaining very low interest rates. They kept it longer. And the hope was very simple. That they would push up asset prices — financial assets — that we, when we open up our statements, would feel richer. It would trigger what economists call the wealth effect. We feel wealthier, therefore we would go and spend more. As we spend more, companies invest more. And then growth is boosted both by higher consumption and high investment. That was the theory. But the financial asset channel proved to be very leaky. It did a great job in boosting asset prices. We had this incredible period where every asset price went up. It didn’t matter if it was a risky asset, if it was a risk-free asset. Everything went up because central banks were boosting liquidity by so much and so predictably, that they encourage everybody else to take on more leverage and more debt. But the trickle down to the real economy proved to be very weak. And the longer it persisted, the more two things happened. One, you conditioned markets to think of central banks as their BFF, their Best Friend Forever. That whenever there’s any turbulence in markets, they’re going to come in and just buy more. There were examples of that — the 2013 taper tantrum, when Chair Bernanke at the time announced that he was going to stop Q.E., and the markets forced him to reverse course six weeks later. And the fourth quarter of 2018, when Chair Powell tried the same thing, and then had to undertake a very embarrassing U-turn because the markets had gotten so unsettled. So markets were conditioned that they had their back covered all the time by the Fed, which means you take on more and more risk. You start moving into more and more exotic asset classes. You start going beyond your natural habitat and expertise. And you over-lever. Then the second thing that happened is we started seeing misallocation of resources, and we started seeing all sorts of unintended consequences and collateral damage. Then, put this whole regime on turbocharge during the pandemic, when, understandably, understandably, governments and central banks stepped in, but continued providing exceptional support. Combine that with what we were talking about earlier — supply problems — and you end up with high inflation. And the minute you have high inflation, you can no longer continue with the monetary policy regime we had. You have to start, quote, “normalizing,” unquote, monetary policy. And that’s where we are. But you’re doing that with a financial system that was conditioned to optimize a regime that it thought it would last forever. And that’s why this process has proven to be bumpy. That’s why we’ve seen small — very small financial accidents. And that’s why we have to keep an eye on the unintended consequences of a change in regime that is inevitable because we need to bring inflation down.

ezra klein

So one of the trade-offs that we were always told of the Q.E. era, the Quantitative Easing era, is that the Fed was putting — and other central banks, too — were putting all this money into the asset markets. And yes, that was going to raise inequality because people who owned assets were going to be the first beneficiaries of that. People who could borrow a bunch of money were going to be the first beneficiaries of that. But it was going to increase growth. We had an economy where far from not having enough supply, we didn’t have enough demand, and that seemed to be a consistent problem. And as you mentioned, actors like Congress, which could have stepped in in a more targeted way, were out of the game. And so it’s going to be worth it. It would increase inequality. It would maybe, to some degree, addict financial markets to easy money. But it was going to help solve an economic problem that there wasn’t really another good way to solve. When you look back over the past 10-ish, 15-ish years, do you think that was true? Do you think the tradeoff was worth it?

No. In fact, I’ve written a book on it, back in 2016, warning that to the extent that that tradeoff existed, it was turning more and more negative. And at some point, it would turn critically negative. This was 2016. And the reason why is you cannot push on a string. You cannot fool people. For you to believe that your wealth has translated into higher spending, a few things have to be true. First and foremost, what economists call your marginal propensity to consume, meaning your willingness to buy more things, has to be high. Ironically, the rich, the ones who benefited most from the increase in asset prices, have a low marginal propensity to consume. So you don’t get much bang for your buck simply on that account. Second, as I said earlier, markets got conditions. I entered financial markets late. And I was always struck by how financial markets rely on moral hazard, rely on the notion that authorities will have no choice but to bail them out at some point. And the more you reinforce that belief by intervening whenever there’s some market volatility, the harder it is to exit. So I was really worried that we would have that process continue. And then third, it allowed governments to step back and basically let central banks be the only game in town, because central banks seemed willing to continue doing so. We had an interesting line drawn by the Bank of England. Some of you may know that the United Kingdom went through a very interesting political exercise where new government came in and tried to go — to quote the Prime Minister Liz Truss — “too fast and too far” in providing unfunded tax cuts. And that created a major market problem. The currency collapsed. Borrowing costs went up. The mortgage market got disrupted. And the pension system was on the verge of — to use the Bank of England’s, the central bank’s word — melt down. And then the Bank of England came in in a method that’s very similar to what we had seen earlier, which is Q.E., saying, don’t worry, I will buy the securities that the others don’t want to buy. And in doing so, I’m going to encourage others to buy them. But then the Bank of England did something very, very different. A few days later, it came out and said, look, I am serious, this is a temporary operation. I am stopping it on Friday. And I’m warning you that I’m stopping it on Friday. By doing that, it was seeking to do two things. One, resist what’s called fiscal dominance. Resist being the one that’s always there when the governments are not doing their job. And second, it wanted to make it very clear to the marketplace that moral hazard wasn’t going to work this time around. Unfortunately, other central banks have not done that. And that is why exiting Q.E. is proving so problematic. That’s why every time the marketplace hears Chair Powell say something that is even slightly dovish, it takes off, because, behaviorally, you’re reinforcing something that’s been there for a long time.

ezra klein

I want to explore a word you used a couple of times a couple of minutes ago, which is “conditioned.” That markets became conditioned to this era of easy money, of infinite liquidity. Tell me what you mean by conditioned. Give me some examples of how when markets begin to expect that money will be this easy to come by, they change their operations or their bets or their structures to accommodate it or profit from it.

So let me take you into the investment committee room of a sophisticated investor. And you are there presenting the case to invest in a certain company or to buy the bonds of a certain country. And you are grilled on financial resilience, on balance sheet, on management — how good is the management team — on business prospects. And you convince everybody in the room that this is an investment that is resilient because the balance sheet is strong. It’s a well-managed country or well-managed company. And the prospects are very positive. That is necessary but not sufficient to convince people in that room that they should put capital at risk. You need to convince them of something else — that there’s going to be a subsequent buyer. And the subsequent buyer plays two very important roles. First, they validate your purchase. Think of you buying an apartment in a building in New York. The minute you buy it, and you own it, you love the idea of five other people coming in, trying to buy in the same building, because it validates your purchase and it pushes up the price of your asset. That’s what a subsequent buyer does. But a subsequent buyer does something else that’s really important. They provide liquidity in the event you have to change your mind. You can change your mind for many reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying investment. Maybe an even better investment comes up, an even better apartment comes up. So this notion of subsequent buyer is really important. Now, suppose I tell you, Ezra, don’t worry, the subsequent buyer is a central bank with a printing press in their basement, a seemingly limitless willingness to use it. And they’re non-commercial. They don’t care about the price that they are paying. They’re non-commercial because they’re fulfilling some other objective. They’re not fulfilling a strictly commercial objective. So they’re going to overpay over and over again. The minute you hear that, not only do you buy whatever investment you are considering, but you buy many more and you leverage many more, because you’ve got a subsequent buyer who is predictable, who is non-commercial, and that who has a printing press in the basement. That’s how the conditioning happened. That’s how excessive risk-taking ends up by occurring. And that’s how moral hazard deepens in the system. And we have seen this happen. And it shouldn’t come as much as if surprise if you understand the behavioral aspects of markets. One of the tragedies of central banking is not only has there not been enough market experience, but there hasn’t been enough behavioral science applied to policymaking.

ezra klein

So that implies then that we’ve had a long period where all kinds of different market actors have made a bunch of investments that are not going to pan out in this new era. They have a bunch of things on their books or they were used to buying a bunch of things, that as the central banks back off a bit, it’s no longer going to work out for them. And I think that opens up to the third plank for you, which is that this is going to be an era of much more fragile financial markets, which sounds a little bit weird, honestly, to read because the financial crisis was a very fragile financial market. That was only 15-ish years ago. We had a lot of financial turmoil during the pandemic. So it feels to me, as somebody who’s covered this period, like the financial markets, on the one hand, seem to keep going up, but they’re also constantly fragile or constantly either in crisis or almost in crisis. So tell me what kind of fragility you’re talking about here. What about this era of threatening looming financial crisis is different?

So would you have imagined that the U.K. pension system could collapse?

ezra klein

I’ll be honest, I almost never imagine anything about the U.K. pension system.

Well, those who spend a lot of time imagining that were surprised. Would you have imagined that the real estate fund provided by a very established manager would have to apply limits on redemption because it has provided a relatively liquid instrument on a relatively illiquid asset class because it never had to worry about liquidity? Well, that happened. Look at crypto. Look at how we’ve had an asset class emerge, get turbocharged by liquidity, and we find out that even the most basic elements of risk-taking weren’t implemented. These are little fires. But the risk here is that these little fires start spreading and start becoming something bigger. What we’ve seen since the financial crisis is a morphing and migration of risk. The financial crisis was ultimately about the banking system and about the payments and settlement system. And that is crippling. We understood what the problem was. We applied high capital requirements. We limited the sort of activities that banks can take. And we basically de-risked the banking system. And we congratulated ourselves on doing it. But we didn’t pay attention to the fact that the risk didn’t just disappear. It migrated. It migrated from banks to non-banks. And non-banks are less well-understood by regulators, less well-regulated, and less well-supervised. So every single one of the examples I cited to you came as a surprise to regulators. And that is the reality. We now have risk residing more among the non-banks — a lot more in the non-banks than in the banks. And it is a much lighter regulated sector. I’m hoping that we don’t get too many of these financial accidents. Look, I don’t fundamentally care about the financial accidents. If people take too much risk, let them have an accident. Let them lose money. They’ll learn. What I worry about is when these financial accidents spill back into the real economy and hurt people that have nothing to do with risk taking, whose companies suddenly cannot borrow money, whose companies has to lay them off, and who don’t have much savings to be able to navigate that world. And we saw how bad that world could get in 2008 in the banking system. I don’t think it gets that bad, but I worry that this is yet another headwind to high, durable and inclusive growth. And we desperately need high, durable and inclusive growth.

ezra klein

I don’t want to take away anything from people who have lost a lot of money that they needed in crypto. There’s a lot of human tragedy there. But systemically, I’ve wondered if crypto isn’t strangely almost an unsung hero, because it took a lot of this risky financial behavior and the incentive to engage in very risky high-reward financial behavior and pushed it all at once — a lot of it, anyway — into this weirdly self-contained market. It wasn’t a market that was well-integrated into broader markets. It was a pretty unregulated market. So a lot of big players didn’t enter it. I almost wonder if it had been in another asset class, or if crypto had been better regulated so it was seen as safer or safer for big institutional investors to get into it, if things like the FTX collapse wouldn’t have been a lot more dangerous for the system. I mean, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how little spillover the crypto collapses have had. I could imagine it as having gone a very different way.

So first, we should be happy that the spillovers were limited. It’s early still. But so far it’s comforting that the spillover have been limited. Now, if you assume there was a fixed amount of irresponsible risk-taking and it was all channeled into crypto —

ezra klein

Right. I don’t want to say all. I take that point. [LAUGHS]

OK, that a good part of it was channeled into crypto and therefore it’s contained, yes, that was a good thing. But what if the irresponsible risk-taking that we see in crypto was also taking place elsewhere because it was encouraged by very low interest rates, it was encouraged by a notion that markets only go up because central banks have their back covered, and that crypto simply happened to be the structurally most fragile of those cases.

ezra klein

Right. So it’s a canary in the coal mine.

Correct. And we’ve seen other — there’s been areas in — and I’m going to get a little bit technical, I apologize — in E.T.F.s that are offered on part of the high yield market. We’ve seen that in fragile emerging markets. We’ve seen other similar evidence of financial fragility. Now, none of them have been systemic, which is a good thing. But what I worry about, Ezra, is that they are simply canaries, and they’re not a good thing where you want to bring all the excessive risk-takers in a room, lock them up, and say, well, as long as you don’t impact anybody else, then I don’t really care about you. I wish it were there, but I worry that it’s not that. What I repeat to people is that we don’t live in an orderly world anymore. We don’t live in a world that’s determined by a bell-shaped distribution of potential outcomes, where there’s a very high likelihood of one outcome and there are tails, but the tails are thin. We live in a world where there are many potential outcomes, none dominate in absolute terms, and therefore, we have to do three things. One is to have an open mind and plan for several possible outcomes and not become hostage to just one. Let’s not repeat the transitory inflation mistake is an example of that. Be open to the possibility, yes, it could be transitory, but it could be something else. Two is have action plans for different outcomes so we’re not surprised. And then three is recognize that cognitive diversity is absolutely critical if you’re going to navigate this world. And take cognitive diversity much more seriously, which means taking gender diversity, education diversity, culture and experience diversity much more seriously. Unless we do that, unless we open to the possibility that we’re living in a much more fluid world, we may end up under-shooting on economic, social and institutional objectives that are really important, not just for this generation but for the future one. And if we do that, it will be the most vulnerable segments of the population that will get hurt most.

ezra klein

I recognize that one of the difficult things about systemic risk is that if it emerged where we think it is, it would be much easier to stop it from blowing up the system. But when you look at the system and you think about the spaces that have a lot of systemic importance and could be badly disrupted as low interest rates come to an end, where do you look first? What are you most worried about?

I look at two things. One is where is leverage? Because even in areas that seem to be safe — the pension fund — I mean, when you think of it, the U.K. pension fund was investing in UK government bonds. That seems so safe, it’s boring. But there was so much leverage in the system, that we almost had a meltdown. So the first thing I look at is leverage and how much leverage has been taken. And then the second one is how much liquidity give-up has occurred. Those are the two things that I pay a lot of attention to.

ezra klein

And where do those signals point you to pay attention?

So the first point to structurally weak asset classes, asset classes that are dominated not by residents but by tourists. There’s a fundamental difference in the way residents and tourists behave. Residents, when they go through volatility, don’t suddenly abandon their homes, don’t run to somewhere else. They stay in them and try to sort it out and try to navigate it. Tourists head to the airport. And we have various financial asset classes that are full of tourists that were attracted by what seemed to be hot weather and everything else, high returns, et cetera, and that haven’t really thought about the risks they were taking on. And the minute these risks start being visible, they try to head out. And of course, they cause what’s called contagion. Now, we’ve seen it in crypto. We’ve seen it in certain loan products. We’ve seen it in emerging markets. We’ve seen it in distressed selling. We’ve seen it in parts of venture. So we’ve already started to see it in a small way, but that’s where it’s evident so far. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

We’ve been talking here about financial actors and investors, that kind of class of agent. But what about countries? What about smaller or poorer countries — and maybe not smaller or poorer countries — whose fiscal position or whose politics or whose trade was built on this era of easy liquidity, of more expansive globalization, of more expansive trade and supply chain flexibility? Geopolitical risk is always real. And there’s certainly been a lot of fear that the Fed is exporting pain, as it tries to bring down inflation, out into the rest of the world. Do you worry that one of the things happening here is not just increase in the structural financial instability risk, but structural geopolitical risk as countries begin to fall into economic crisis because of this sort of confluence of factors?

That’s another thing that has changed. In the old days, you could give a general response to that. And the general response used to run as follows — that the minute you have tightening global financial conditions, the minute you have a sharply stronger dollar, the minute the global economy is slowing down, then you will get problems in developing countries. And you may well end up having a crisis — the Latin American lost decade, the Asian crisis, the Russian default. And that was the general story. But 2008 was an interesting one where we had a major, major shock to the global economy, and yet it is developing countries that led the global economy out of the Great Recession. Again, in 2020, we had the pandemic and we had the sudden stop. But we didn’t have massive damage in the developing countries. And the reason why is developing countries learned. I think of it as if you have a small heart attack and change your behavior, you reduce your risk to a large heart attack. And a lot of countries built up their international reserves, adopted flexible exchange rates, had fiscal responsibility steps taken, and therefore were able to navigate that. So you can no longer make the general comment. However, you need to differentiate and differentiate significantly. There’s a bunch of countries — the highly indebted countries, in particular — that tend to have fragile institutions that are at risk of default in the world that I’ve described of higher borrowing costs, less abundant liquidity and a stronger dollar and slower global growth. And those also pose geopolitical risk. And we need greater focus on them. Now, to be fair, the I.M.F. and the World Bank has identified the set of vulnerable economies, and there’s been some attempt to try and secure some proactive debt rescheduling. But unfortunately, it hasn’t gone far enough. Now, why does that matter? Because in the journey to a default, a few things happen. First, you starve the social sectors of funding in order to meet debt service payments. It means education, health, public services. So the social cost of the journey is very high. And second, typically you also start getting political fragility. So it is an important thing, and I’m glad you’ve raised it. But I want to stress, this is not a general developing country problem. This is concentrated in a number of countries. And therefore — and that’s the good news — it’s easier to address than if it was a generalized developed country problem.

ezra klein

So you’re the former C.E.O. of PIMCO, which is a giant bond trader, among other things. And one thing that has happened over the past year, and as there have been a distortion or an ongoing question in how to read the economy, is that bond markets and markets in general seemed a lot more sanguine than, say, you have been or some other people have been. Why is that?

I think there’s a few reasons for that. One is conditioning. The trend is your friend is what you often hear in the marketplace. And we’ve had a decade of incredibly supportive financial conditions. And the belief that, yes, we may be subject to temporary interruption in that regime, but they will be temporary and they will be reversed. Second, the policy narrative hasn’t helped. I cannot tell you how problematic the transitory inflation narrative has been, because that basically told people not to worry, not to plan for higher prices, not to plan for the consequences of high prices. Remember, when I tell you something is transitory, when I tell you something is temporary and reversible, I’m encouraging you to look through it and therefore don’t change your behavior. So there was reaffirmation coming from outside that there was no need to change things. And then finally, the mindset. A lot of people in finance have grown up in an era of abundant liquidity. Most of them don’t remember the late ‘70s and the ‘80s when we had inflation. They haven’t experienced that. And therefore, that tends to be one of the three big behavioral traps that we fall into whenever we’re taken out of our comfort zone, whenever there’s a regime change, whenever uncertainty becomes unusual uncertainty. One is you get blind spots. You simply don’t see it. The other one is you reframe. You get told something, and you immediately reframe it. Today, the minute you mention recession to a typical market participant, you will get, oh, but it’s going to be short and shallow. That is reframing something that’s uncomfortable into something that’s more comforting. So if you don’t get blind spots, if you don’t get reframing, you get the third behavior, which is active inertia. You know you have to do something differently, but you end up doing the same thing. The simple example is of an American tourist in Paris asking someone something in English. The French person either doesn’t understand English or doesn’t want to understand English. The most likely reaction of the American is to say the same thing in English but louder. The louder bit is the active part, knowing that you have to do something different. But the inertia is so strong that you end up doing the same thing. Don Sull, now at M.I.T., has done amazing work on why successful companies fail. And he’s shown that active inertia is one of the main reasons. The world changes on them, but they continue doing the same thing. One of the examples is I.B.M. — on the eve of the P.C. revolution, by far the brand in technology, very big R&D budget and profitable. Research has shown that management recognized how disruptive the P.C. would be, recognized it needed to migrate from simply mainframe to also occupying the P.C. space. And to do that, they had to take their mainframe upstream and charge premium pricing to maintain profits. The absolutely right approach. It was endorsed by the board. So you had the right strategy. You had recognition of the disruption. You had a willingness to do things differently. And yet, middle management went back to doing what it was doing. And a few years later, I.B.M. almost went bankrupt. So I never underestimate these behavioral traps that become very important in a world that has been conditioned to just follow the trend. And when the trend is supported by central banks, that’s a really strong process. And I think that’s why you’ve seen markets take such a long time to recognize that we are in a different operating regime.

ezra klein

So we’re talking here at the end of a week that has been very, I think, whiplashy in terms of people’s inflation expectations. When it started, it seemed like various pieces of data had people thinking the hope for soft landing, where we bring inflation down and don’t get a recession or don’t get a big recession, was seeming likelier than it had in previous months. And then we got this wage revision data that suggested wage increases have been higher than we thought by quite a bit. And that really, really whiplashed people into feeling that we are not going to be successful in easily getting inflation under control. So given where we are now, what do you think Jay Powell and the Fed should be doing that they’re not doing or saying that they’re not saying? How far from the course you’d like to see them take are they?

So let me answer that by taking you to Chair Powell’s speech at Brookings, which contributed to the market volatility. He did a very good job in trying to come across as balanced. He pointed out that we’re not good at inflation forecasting these days. He pointed out that the Fed had a lot more to do. He pointed out that the worst thing would be to repeat the mistake of premature loosening. But he also said the few things that the marketplace really wanted to hear and ended up having a situation where the market completely ignored all the other things he said. And what did he say? He said that it is likely that we will downshift on wage increases in December. He decided to do that two days before the wage data. So everybody assumed that he must know something about the wage data. Otherwise, why would he be so explicit about something that is in two weeks time and has a C.P.I. report before it, so they assumed he knew something that the marketplace didn’t. And then he didn’t say anything — he didn’t lean against what had already been a significant loosening of financial condition. I say this because it’s a lesson. When the market only wants to hear one thing, be careful when you say it. Because what can happen is that the market doesn’t hear all the other things that you are widely saying. And the result of that is undue volatility. It is way too early to go for what I call spurious accuracy in terms of what policy will do. There’s too many things we don’t know about. You want to maintain optionality. You don’t want to precommit. Every time this Fed has precommitted, it has had to eat its words. That is true in terms of forecasts that have proven to be horribly wrong and repeatedly so. That is true when Chair Powell said that we are at neutral interest rates. We weren’t, and we’re not. So what I would advise to the Fed is be more humble, be more open-minded and recognize the conditioning of markets because that will impact how they hear your message. And if markets loosen financial conditions too quickly, your job is even harder.

ezra klein

Do you think we’re headed in the U.S. for a recession? And if so, do you think it will be deep and long?

I do not know whether we’re heading into recession. I think the probability is uncomfortably high. But it’s not a 100 percent as some have suggested. We can still avoid one and hopefully we will. What I do know is that if you are convinced we’re going into recession, there isn’t enough evidence to say it will be short and shallow. It could be long and deep. It could be long and shallow. It could be short and deep. We simply do not know. And we should not suggest that we have enough evidence to be comfortable about a particular shape of a recession. I’m very tempted to take it to an example, if I may, of something that happened within PIMCO.

ezra klein

Please.

So on the weekend in which Lehman Brothers failed, we were sitting in the investment committee room, and we were trying to predict what was going to happen. The history books keep on saying that PIMCO predicted the disorderly failure of Lehman because most of PIMCO’s clients made money after the financial crisis. As Bill Gross, the founder of PIMCO, and I have gone out of our way, that is simply the wrong interpretation. We never predicted a financial crisis. Let me explain to you what happened. We had three scenarios on the board, and we had voted on the probabilities that we individually attach to each of those scenarios. And here was the outcome — scenario A, 85 percent probability. That’s the combined probability given that Lehman would not fail, that Lehman would be a repeat of Bear Stearns. A stronger bank would come in, take over the weak Lehman Brothers, and there would be no counterparty risk on Monday morning. It had happened with Bear Stearns. J.P. Morgan had taken. And we knew that Lehman was in discussion with at least two banks. Scenario B, 12 percent probability, Lehman fails but fails in an orderly fashion. Why? Because no regulator would put the payments and settlement system in play. That is paralyzing to the real economy. That is destructive to livelihoods. Surely, if they allow Lehman to fail, it will fail in an orderly fashion. 3 percent was the probability we gave to Lehman failing in a disorderly fashion — the outcome. So the notion that we predicted Lehman was completely wrong. But why is it that we were able to completely reposition ourselves? Because we had a very detailed action plan for each of these scenarios. We knew who would be doing what when. Simple things like delivering the notice of failure so that you can re-establish positions, to other things like informing clients and trying to change your portfolio postures before others work out their own action plan. And I say this because when you face unusual uncertainty, it doesn’t mean you get paralyzed. Nor does it mean you stick to one outcome that may happen, but you ignore everything else. It means that you do the hard work of saying, here are possible scenarios, and let me try and figure out what I would do if these scenarios materialized. And let me keep open-minded and know what data I’m supposed to follow, rather than get stuck to a baseline that ends up to be wrong. It’s a lot of work, yes. But the cost of that work pales in comparison of the cost of not being ready for an outcome that you did not plan for.

ezra klein

I think that is a great place to end. And I thank you for sharing that story. Always our final question: What are three books that have influenced you, you would recommend to the audience?

Let me give three books. “Invisible Women” is a book that I’ve read and reread. It reminds you of what a world made by men for men discriminates against women. And it provides you examples and stories when you’re trying to convince people about the importance of diversity that are very powerful. The second one that has impacted me is “Bad Blood.” It is the story of Elizabeth Holmes. And it just shows you how people can get carried away both in pursuing a certain venture and investing in that venture. And then the third one is “The World for Sale.” It’s about the commodities market. It’s about an area that has massive geopolitical as well as economic and financial consequences and that’s not as well as understood as it should be.

ezra klein

Mohamed El-Erian, thank you very much.

I thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

When the Supreme Court declared, in 2015, that the Constitution requires all states to license and recognize same-sex marriages, Justice Antonin Scalia, in dissent, claimed that the content of laws about marriage was not of “special importance” to him. What did matter, he wrote, is “who it is that rules me”—and the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, he lamented, “says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.” What made the Court’s decision so objectionable, in other words, was that Justices, rather than legislators, were dictating rules about marriage.

Conservatives had long made the same objection to the Roe v. Wade decision: that it restrained what a legislature might do regarding the question of abortion. So, when the Court overruled Roe, in June, allowing legislatures to prohibit or regulate abortion as they wished, it was surprising that Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the majority took pains to insist that same-sex marriage precedents, though built on the same legal foundation as abortion rights, would be safe from similar overruling in the future. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing separately, offered no such assurance: he stated that the Court should go ahead and reconsider the entire line of Supreme Court precedents, including the right to same-sex marriage. Members of Congress jumped into action to prepare for the possibility that, at some point, this constitutional right would be eliminated, just as the right to abortion was. In short order, the Respect for Marriage Act passed the House in July, and an amended version passed the Senate last week; the House voted its final approval today. The bill requires the federal government and the states to treat a couple as married if the couple was validly married in any of the states—or was married abroad, and could have been married in any of the states. In doing so, it repeals the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which defined marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman” and allowed states not to “give effect to any marriage between persons of the same sex.”

Congress’s purpose is for the Respect for Marriage Act to be in place as a safety net in the event that the Court ever overrules its same-sex-marriage precedents. President Biden celebrated the bill’s passage, saying, “Americans should have the right to marry the person they love.” Senator Tammy Baldwin, who is a lead sponsor, along with Senator Susan Collins, expressed that it would “ease the fear that millions of same-sex and interracial couples have that their freedoms and their rights could be stripped away” by the Court. (Abortion looks to be on a somewhat different path. Federal bills that would protect abortion nationally rather than leaving it to each state to decide—including the Women’s Health Protection Act—have not made significant headway. Thus, we have a patchwork country, in which half the states prohibit abortion while the other half do not—the situation that Dobbs underwrote and unleashed.)

But it is important to recognize that the Respect for Marriage Act of 2022 will not come close to doing what the Court has done with regard to same-sex marriage since 2015, or interracial marriage since 1967. It provides neither a right nor access to same-sex or any other kind of marriage. If Obergefell were to be overruled, even with the Respect for Marriage Act as a fallback, it would result in two classes of marriage in our country: one that is available in every state and another that may be entered into only in some states. Perhaps what is really to be celebrated is Congress managing to pass any law protecting same-sex marriage, even partially. And it is a hopeful sign of more health than dysfunction in our system of government that members of Congress were able to act on their constituents’ disapproval of the Court’s anticipated direction and pass a law addressing it.

Some may even think of the Respect for Marriage Act as a warning to the conservative Justices that the public wants them to keep the constitutional right to same-sex marriage intact. But there is another possibility—that the new statute will prove to the Court that Congress has the capacity and the will to legislate on the matter. Congress also seems to have indicated its view that the states should determine their marriage-licensing laws for themselves, so long as they give full faith and credit to other states’ marriages. The message that the conservative Court takes from Congress’s enactment of the law may be the opposite of what liberals want: that the Court should feel comfortable getting out of marriage regulation and leaving it to legislatures. It would not be surprising to see a conservative majority overrule Obergefell while claiming that the Court is simply removing restraints on the democratic legislative processes, and pointing to the Respect for Marriage Act as an example of how the people can speak through their elected representatives.

Wondering whether the victory of the Respect for Marriage Act may actually be a loss might seem strange, given the exultation of Democratic leaders in Congress over the bill’s passage. But the bill managed to garner the support of twelve Republican Senators for a reason. It includes a section providing that nonprofit religious organizations—everything from churches to faith-based social agencies and religious educational institutions—“shall not be required to provide services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges for the solemnization or celebration of a marriage.” In other words, if a Jewish community center or Brigham Young University has space that it rents out for weddings, it is permitted to refuse to do so for same-sex (or interracial) weddings. When this bill is signed into law, there will be a federal statute that makes a resolution of conflict between religious freedom and gay-rights claims explicit in a way that it arguably was not before, clearly favoring a religious group over a gay couple—even though the conflict involves open questions on the relationship between the First Amendment and antidiscrimination laws. The Court considered, but did not resolve, these questions in a 2018 case about a Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. And this term the Court is considering the free-speech case of a Web designer who does not wish to create wedding Web sites for same-sex couples. The conservative majority looks likely to side with the Web designer. Though that case involves a private business rather than a nonprofit, Congress’s new message approving religious organizations’ refusal to provide services for same-sex marriages makes that result seem more probable.

The idea that the statute offers some protections for same-sex marriage with one hand and meaningfully takes some away with the other was reflected in the comments of Senator Dan Sullivan, Republican of Alaska, who explained that the bill, which he voted for, “is much more about promoting and expanding religious liberty protections than same-sex marriage.” He stated that it “has the strongest religious liberty protections for religious organizations that believe in traditional marriage since the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” the 1993 law that subjected burdens on a person’s free exercise of religion, even if the burden comes from a generally applicable law, to strict scrutiny—the most stringent form of judicial review.

In the Respect for Marriage Act, Congress is stating public values about L.G.B.T. inclusion and about religious freedom. Democratic supporters recognize that it is an important first step to protect marriage equality in the event that the Court overrules its same-sex-marriage precedents. Republican supporters may also see it as a significant step in a march toward codifying permission for religious people to discriminate against L.G.B.T. people. They both appear to be right. ♦

If you’re captivated when people who draw out the worst in one another can’t bring themselves to decouple, forget about Ryan and Kelly on The Office, Gossip Girl’s Chuck and Blair, and most every pairing on Euphoria and start watching the latest season of Twitter.Its new lead is the billionaire Elon Musk, the social-media platform’s owner and CEO. And although he’s enmeshed in several fraught relationships––with Twitter’s presumably beleaguered workforce and its understandably anxious advertisers, for starters––Musk’s entry into the love-hate relationship between Twitter and left-of-center journalists is easily the most captivating and dysfunctional plotline. Is it a love triangle? A toxic polycule? I want happy endings for all the participants. I want Musk to succeed in creating a thriving conversation space with a culture of free speech, and I want journalists to succeed in subjecting Musk-era Twitter to rigorous scrutiny.[Helen Lewis: Elon Musk’s brutally honest management style]But as I binge on this show, I find that—as when watching The White Lotus or Succession—I am not rooting for who is right, but against whoever is most exasperatingly wrong in any given spat. As episodes unfold, I can’t honestly defend all of anyone’s actions. In their ongoing zeal to advance competing culture-war narratives about Twitter as a platform, Musk and his media critics routinely succumb to excesses that undermine faith in them.If Musk is prone to grandiosity, flippancy, and free-speech claims that run the gamut from incisive to oversimplified to flagrantly promoting a mercenary agenda, his critics are as prone to Manichean portrayals that tend toward panicked, catastrophizing hyperbole. In general, the tenor of many news outlets’ Twitter coverage does not suggest that an epistemically modest press corps is offering balanced accounts of changes at the social-media company. Rather, that coverage is unremittingly hostile toward Musk, who is held to double standards and treated, mere weeks after taking ownership of Twitter, as if his approach to running a company that was losing lots of money before he arrived has obviously failed.Before he offered to buy Twitter, Musk had a plausible critique of the platform’s content-moderation policies. Stripped of his occasional exaggerations and misstatements, that critique went like this: In the United States, Twitter should give users the tools to follow, mute, or block whomever they like, and it should suppress the sorts of speech that almost all Americans regard as harmful, including terrorist recruitment, death threats, child porn, incitement to violence, libel, and severe harassment. But rather than stop there, Twitter was moderating content in speech-chilling ways. The company’s decisions stymied freewheeling democratic debate about COVID-19 precautions, policies and norms proposed by transgender-rights advocates, and other contested matters that are widely discussed around dinner tables and during elections. Before the 2020 election, the platform aggressively attempted to block a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, an unprecedented step against a mainstream publication’s election coverage that’s all the more alarming because we now know that many of its claims proved to be authentic. And even as the platform catered to many of the academia-informed sensitivities of highly educated Democrats and progressives––going so far as to suspend the account of an Onion-like satire magazine, The Babylon Bee, when it offended them––it explicitly permitted and even amplified an enormous variety of content (hard-core pornography, blasphemy, videos of flag burning, brutal mockery of individuals’ personal appearance) that transgressed against many other groups’ sensitivities or sacred values.In this telling, Twitter’s partisan and ideological asymmetries chilled democratically valuable speech, exacerbated polarization, contributed to populist backlash, fueled conspiratorial thinking, and helped spur the creation of far-right platforms. If so, a new Twitter owner could conceivably help American democracy by catering to free-speech preferences held by more Americans. This theory of the case dovetails with Musk’s apparent decision to release details of what he sees as bygone missteps at Twitter through the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, ostensibly strengthening the case that the platform’s old regime was heavy-handed and biased.The Musk-skeptical counternarrative, in its strongest form, is also plausible. It begins with the insight that all content moderation at scale is hard, frequently forcing fraught choices among bad options. To improve on the performance of pre-Musk Twitter, which had strengths as well as weaknesses, would have been challenging for any new owner. But Musk’s takeover has been marked by self-defeating blunders from the start. Almost as soon as he made a binding offer to buy the company at a specific price per share, he tried to wriggle out of the deal, apparently concluding that he was overpaying. That misstep, though not especially relevant to the content-moderation debate, fed the perception that Musk’s analysis of Twitter is less diligently informed and circumspect than knee-jerk and impulsive.Then, shortly after buying Twitter, Musk made a big show of allowing any user to pay $8 a month for a verification check mark without any functioning way to actually verify their identity. The outcome was predictable: “New check-mark-wielding accounts wasted no time in impersonating brands, such as Musk’s own car company, Tesla, and pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly, even announcing that the insulin manufacturer would now offer insulin for free, sending the actual Eli Lilly’s stock prices into a free fall,” Vox reported. “A fake LeBron James requested a trade to another NBA team. An account impersonating former president George W. Bush tweeted, ‘I miss killing Iraqis.’” As advertisers expressed concerns about being impersonated, Twitter suspended the new service. The episode sowed additional doubts about Musk’s stewardship. How could he have failed to foresee the impersonation problem?[David French: Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson don’t understand the First Amendment]Musk also undermines himself with illogical, overwrought, and inaccurate rhetoric. For example, on Friday, Taibbi posted an attention-getting Twitter thread that marshaled internal Twitter documents to paint a picture of how powerful actors influenced content moderation at the company. “By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine,” Taibbi reported. “One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’” In response, Musk wrote, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” But as many Musk critics quickly pointed out, the First Amendment restrains only government power. In 2020, Joe Biden was a private citizen running for the presidency.But by zeroing in on Musk’s most obvious mistakes, stridently negative press coverage tends to breeze past Musk’s overall argument, including the parts with demonstrable or arguable merit.Consider the episode last month when, after taking over at Twitter, Musk posted a poll on his feed asking, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” After a majority of respondents approved of an amnesty, Musk declared that he would implement one. The Washington Post then published a news article on the matter by Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and online culture, often emphasizing real harms that social-media giants have propagated over the years.Lorenz, a former Atlantic staff writer who has a sophisticated understanding of social media, covered half of the story with gusto. The article appropriately informed readers that technical challenges might make implementing a mass amnesty much harder than it sounds; that Twitter might find it difficult or impossible to identify banned accounts that had broken the law; that the term egregious spam is vague and subjective; and that Musk’s amnesty would definitionally restore accounts that had aggressively harassed others without breaking the law, among other potential downsides and ostensible problems.But nowhere does the article catalog or even acknowledge the potential upsides of Musk’s proposed amnesty or help readers understand why so many Twitter users voted in favor of that approach. Perhaps an amnesty is the only way to reinstate all accounts unjustly suspended by the former moderation regime without the impossible burden of identifying them individually. (An activist quoted in Lorenz’s article asserts without evidence that “superspreaders of hate, abuse and harassment will be the only people to benefit from this latest decision.”) Perhaps an amnesty will increase trust in communities that perceived bias during the old regime. Perhaps many miscreants deserved a temporary suspension followed by a second chance rather than a permanent punishment. The sources quoted in the Post story are all on one side of the question, even though informed observers of Twitter are more divided. When I asked Lorenz for comment, she emphasized that her article was not an opinion piece expressing her own view of Musk’s proposed amnesty, but rather a reported story drawing on various sources with subject-matter expertise. No one with whom Lorenz spoke made the case that an amnesty was a good idea.Even if Musk’s amnesty turns out to be a bad idea, as it may, Post headline writers framed the story melodramatically: “‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts.” This is an alarmist way to characterize the reinstatement of noncriminal accounts on a platform where anyone subject to a ban could always open a new account in a few minutes.Last month, Musk also decided to allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform. A subsequent article by Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia University’s journalism school, is a reminder that many of Musk’s critics are as guilty as the billionaire is of frustrating lapses in circumspection and precision. Writing in The New Yorker about why he was leaving Twitter, Cobb argued that, for him, Musk’s “reinstatement of Donald Trump’s account made remaining completely untenable.” He added, “The implication was clear: if promoting the January 6, 2021, insurrection—which left at least seven people dead and more than a hundred police officers injured—doesn’t warrant suspension to Musk, then nothing else on the platform likely could.”But the implication that Musk views “nothing” as disqualifying is false. Days before Cobb’s piece was published, Musk had announced that the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones would not be restored to the platform. More recently, Twitter has suspended Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, for anti-Semitic tweets that Musk characterized as an incitement to violence. And there has never been any doubt that Musk would, for example, continue to regard posting child pornography as disqualifying.More broadly, Cobb casts Musk not as someone who is answering hard content-moderation questions differently from the old Twitter regime, or differently from how most journalists covering him would regard as ideal, but as someone whose approach is so plainly inferior and anomalously indefensible as to warrant canceling one’s account. I am as horrified as anyone by Trump’s role in January 6, 2021, but high-profile journalists, including Cobb, have shared the platform for years with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, the Chinese Communist Party and its various officials, the Taliban, and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Cobb declined my request for comment.)[Yair Rosenberg: Why Twitter won’t ban its most powerful anti-Semite]My point isn’t that foreign tyrants or deplorable American politicians should or shouldn’t be on Twitter. Reasonable people disagree. But reporters and commentators undermine their own credibility by treating Musk as an extreme outlier in his willingness to allow some of Earth’s most harmful figures to have accounts, and by presuming that more rather than less speech suppression on the platform is the obviously superior way to undermine bad people. In service of the narrative that the old Twitter regime was moral and responsible while the new Twitter regime is not, many journalists have overlooked relevant context, failed to engage obvious counterarguments, and revealed their own double standards. In doing so, they invite Musk’s fans to ignore even legitimate criticisms of him.In a recent podcast episode, the public intellectual Sam Harris explained at great length why he’d recently deactivated his Twitter account despite the million-plus followers that he’d amassed there and his earnest desire to engage with people and viewpoints as diverse as the platform offers. In his estimation, “my engagement with Twitter was making me a worse person.” And his explanation as to why doubles as one of the most incisive critiques of the platform that I’ve seen.“It was showing me the worst of other people in a way that I began to feel was actually distorting my perception of humanity,” Harris said. “So Twitter for me became like a malignant form of telepathy where I got to hear the most irrational, contemptuous, sneering thoughts of other people … But the problem wasn’t all the hate being directed at me. The problem was the hate I was beginning to feel … Twitter was giving me a very dark view of other people. And the fact that I believed—and still believe—that it’s a distorted view wasn’t enough to inoculate me against this change in my attitude.”Twitter’s architecture and algorithms have that same distorting effect on many users across the ideological spectrum. And it seems to me that the dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him is exacerbated by the fact that all involved are (or used to be) heavy Twitter users acting based on interactions that take place on the platform, where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.The best scripted dramas give us enough insight into its least sympathetic characters to prevent them from seeming like cartoon villains. Perhaps one day the best social-media sites will do the same. (Wouldn’t it be nice if Musk saw himself in Harris’s description and tweaked the code to spare everyone?) Meanwhile the challenge for those of us observing Musk and his critics is to benefit from the best of their insights about the platform and reach judgments about content moderation based on the merits, rather than reacting against their least defensible or most annoying claims.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Literature is full of brutally jilted lovers and cruelly broken hearts, whether Anna Karenina’s or Heathcliff’s in Wuthering Heights. But for my money, the most extreme case is Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. In the classic novel, she never gets over the pain of being abandoned at the altar on her wedding day, decades before. Shut away in her dark house, Miss Havisham is described as a cross between a skeleton and a wax statue, frozen in a state of traumatic rejection.As cartoonish as these characters are, they can seem achingly realistic to readers in the midst of the terrible heartbreak that can come when a romance ends. Miss Havisham’s fate seems plausible: You will never again see love as anything more than an exercise in futility. Little by little, of course, most people do get over a breakup, move on, and, eventually, love someone else. In those early days and months, however, the pain can feel like it will never end.There is no magical remedy for a bad breakup, but that doesn’t mean you have to just suffer and read Victorian novels while you wait to feel better. There’s actually a lot you can do to speed the healing process, learn from the experience, and find new love (and, ideally, not make the same mistake again).Breaking up is part of an ordinary life. Although the data are limited and results vary widely, some U.K. research estimates that people average roughly two serious relationships before settling into one that is considered permanent. In 2013, the average number of times Americans said their heart had been broken was five.If your breakups have been awful, that’s normal. According to a 2018 poll from YouGov, 58 percent of American adults say breakups tend to be “dramatic/messy.” Only 25 percent said they tend to be “casual/civil.” No wonder people try to avoid them: Scholars who recently surveyed adults ages 18 to 29 found that about half said it was either moderately or exactly true that “I sometimes stay in a relationship longer than I should because I don’t know how to end it.”[Read: This is your brain on heartbreak]Breakups, at least for the breakee, are literally painful. Modern neuroscience has found repeatedly that social pain—of which abandonment is an especially acute example—can stimulate many of the same brain regions as physical pain, notably the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. When you are in great pain, it can be hard to comprehend that you’ll ever feel better. Indeed, people experiencing depression often say that they forget what “normal” feels like.But the pain does diminish. Psychologists writing in 2007 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that when a romantic relationship dissolves, the average person rates her stress at a bit more than three on a one-to-seven scale of severity. Each week, that number falls, on average, by about 0.07. Think of it this way: If your grief is a solid 3.5 after a breakup, assuming you follow the average pattern, you can expect to feel better each week and only about half as bad after six months—a longer time than you perhaps want or expect, but not a permanent state of affairs.Especially after a long relationship, a breakup can make you feel like you’ll never find love again. You most likely will, though, and maybe sooner than you think. One 2013 study published in the science journal PLOS One found that the length of the dissolved relationship is positively correlated with the proclivity of the newly single to rebound into a new relationship. Whether your specific rebound relationship is a good thing is something you have to decide, but the data suggest that you will be able to open your heart again.Knowing your emotional wounds will heal with time doesn’t necessarily make sitting through the pain any easier in the early aftermath of an ugly split. There are a few things you can do to hasten the process of feeling better, however.1. Think about what a jerk your ex is.In one of the most novel experiments I have seen in the past few years, researchers at the University of Missouri recruited people upset after a breakup to try different techniques to reduce their feelings of love toward their ex and lighten their unpleasant mood. The researchers measured the effectiveness of each approach by showing the participants photos of their ex-partner while observing their brain activity on an electroencephalogram and asking them how they felt.[Read: The evolution of the desire to stay friends with your ex]When participants were instructed to think about what they truly disliked about the person they loved—for example, by focusing on questions such as “What is an annoying habit of your ex?”—their feelings of love fell by a whopping 18 percent. It didn’t come without a cost, though: It also temporarily lowered the overall pleasantness of mood by 17 percent. You have to decide whether reduced heartbreak outweighs the unpleasant memory of your ex’s bad habit. If it doesn’t, move on to technique No. 2.2. Go have fun.Another strategy tested in the paper above was distraction. The participants were instructed to think about positive things in their lives, such as their favorite food. This was also effective, but in a different way: Although love feelings for the ex did not decrease, mood improved by 8 percent on average. So if your principal problem after a breakup is fixating on how much you love your ex, meditate on him picking his nose. But if your problem is that you’re feeling depressed, do something fun and enjoyable to occupy your mind. Read a good book, maybe, or go for a hike (perhaps not where you and your ex liked to go).3. Put on some sad music.Psychologists over the years have repeatedly remarked on what seems like counterproductive behavior when people feel sad: listening to sad songs. After a breakup, you should listen to “Happy,” not “I Will Always Love You,” right?Actually, sad music can benefit a broken heart. Writing in the journal The Arts in Psychotherapy in 2016, a psychologist reviewed the available studies and found that people seek out sad music in order to help themselves understand and find meaning in their emotions. Breakup songs can help you feel less alone in your suffering and less unique in your misfortune. And sitting with your bad feelings (rather than pushing them away) is important for your emotional well-being and growth.[Read: Sit with negative emotions, don’t push them away]In this essay, I have offered you a few ways to shorten your heartbreak. Here is one way to extend it: Keep tabs on your ex on social media. This is strikingly common; in a 2011 study, 54.3 percent of college students confessed to having perused an ex’s social-media posts in search of photos with a new partner. In the race for fresh ways for tech to hijack our brain chemistry and make us insane, there is a huge, obvious market for an app that surveils exes and sends alerts to your phone when they look happy. You might call it Creepster, or perhaps, Havisham.As tempting as it might be, such surveillance is a huge mistake for happiness. Research on Facebook stalking shows that it is associated with greater distress, longing, negative feelings, and sexual desire for the ex-partner; it also inhibits personal growth in the wake of the split. It is a near-perfect way to ensure that you don’t feel better.[Read: How to break a phone addiction]In order to get over a breakup, you have to let your life move on and let your ex’s life move on as well. Don’t hold on to the source of your suffering. Your pain will decrease, you will be able to love again, and you can leave Miss Havisham to wander her lonely house without you.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Updated at 1:40 p.m. ET on December 28, 2022Today, The Atlantic reveals its inaugural 10 Breakthroughs of the Year. The accomplishments span every station of life, from birth to death, and every component, from our cells to the stars. They include a drug that revives the organs of dead animals; an embryo created without sperm or egg; a telescope to see the universe’s first moments; and an AI that conjures award-winning art.One theme of this year’s list is the principle of “twin ideas”—the tendency for major breakthroughs to have more than one author. The telegraph was invented by Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse in the same year, 1837, and patents for the telephone were filed by Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell on the same day in 1876. Accordingly, many of this year’s breakthroughs are group efforts rather than individual awards. We didn’t just get one mind-blowing generative AI app this year; we got several in the span of a few months. We didn’t just get one “unheard-of” cancer breakthrough; we got several in one year. In this golden age of new vaccine technology, many different companies are building off the success of the COVID shots to deliver new antiviral weaponry for humankind.These breakthroughs are just the beginning of the long story we call progress. Some of these promising discoveries might never yield a product that’s cheap and widely available. Others may take years or even decades to realize their potential. Capable companies, fair policies, and wise regulations will be necessary to coax real flourishing from these seedlings. For now, let’s just appreciate the promise of these achievements.The Generative-AI EruptionA new dawn in how we buildThe story of the year in technology might be the emergence of AI tools that seem to trace the outer bounds of human creativity. Image-generating apps, such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, turn text prompts into lush illustrations. Large language models, such as ChatGPT, can answer complex questions, spit out bespoke Wikipedia articles in seconds, write song lyrics, and even conjure—admittedly mediocre—essays in the style of well-known writers.What are these machines? Are they an autocomplete for everything, a second mind for the creative class, a replacement for Google Search, or a disembodied superbrain that will one day destroy the world? In the short term, I expect they will serve as assistants for those of us in creative industries. As a journalist, I’m most excited by their potential to help me plow through complicated bits of writing. When I feel myself stuck on a definition or transition sentence, I could give a prompt to the AI, which, having feasted on a banquet of online writing, would generate sentences that I could edit back into my own voice. In fact, I adapted the previous sentence from the prompt: “Write an essay in The Atlantic, in the style of Derek Thompson, on the implications of GPT.” (These sorts of disclosures are faddish today, but in a few years, they may be rendered redundant because so much writing will be AI-assisted.)DALL-E’s co-inventor Aditya Ramesh said the goal of his technology was to teach “AI systems to see the world the way humans do.” But, more spookily, I think these tools will also teach humans to see the world as AI sees it. We will over time learn how to talk to these things, become fluent in their alien tongue, and discover how the perfect set of words can generate a stunning piece of original art. These uncanny tools, having emerged from our mind, may change our mind about how we work, how we think, and what human creativity really is.The Power to Reverse Death (Kind Of)Organs revived in dead pigsIs death reversible? It was this year for several pigs (or, at least, for their organs). By pumping an experimental substance into the veins and arteries of animals that had been lying deceased for an hour, Yale researchers got their hearts to start beating again. The technology is “very far away from use in humans,” Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University, told The New York Times. In the short term, scientists said, they hope that their research could help doctors preserve the organs of the recently deceased for use in transplants.But the longer-term implications of the experiment can’t be ignored: If we have the power to reanimate the heart or other organs of the recently deceased, at what point might we be able to reverse sudden deaths? Could we revive soldiers who bleed out on the battlefield? Could we stock hospitals and nursing homes with buckets of the stuff to resuscitate patients? Should every future American household keep some on hand in the event of a terrible accident?These questions thrust us into the ethical realm and invoke spooky references to “The Monkey’s Paw,” Pet Sematary, and any number of stories about the dark side of trying to design an escape hatch from mortality. Perhaps, as this technology improves, that debate is on its way. But for millions of people who have lost loved ones to, say, a sudden heart attack or stroke, it’s not remotely dystopian to imagine an injection that could reverse tragedies long considered irreversible.The Power to Synthesize Life (Kind Of)Mouse embryos “born” without sperm or egg This summer, scientists grew an embryo in a lab without the use of sperm, or eggs, or a womb. It happened to be that of a mouse. But the species is of secondary importance. What matters is that using only stem cells, a team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel forged something in a lab that budded a tail on day six, grew a beating heart by day eight, and even evinced the beginnings of a brain. Some scientists I consulted for this project said that the results, which were published this year in the science journal Cell, were the most important scientific breakthrough of 2022.Scientists are not close to turning stem cells into human babies that make their first gasping cries in antiseptic laboratories. But this work does suggest a major leap forward in our ability to grow synthetic organs and more closely research the relationship between embryonic mutations and developmental diseases. As Paul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Stat, “As soon as the science starts to move into a place where it’s feasible to go from a stem cell population in a Petri dish all the way through to organ development, it’s a pretty wild and remarkable time.”The Vaccine Cavalry Is ComingNovel therapies for malaria and all influenza strainsDecades from now, historians may regard the 2020s as a golden age of vaccine breakthroughs. The mRNA vaccines that blunted the mortality of COVID were just the start.In September, a new malaria vaccine developed by Oxford University scientists was found to be extremely effective. A trial involving 450 children in Burkina Faso found that three doses of the vaccine, plus a booster shot, wereup to 80 percent effective at preventing infection. Malaria, which kills more than 400,000 people each year, is caused not by a virus, but rather by a shape-shifter called plasmodium, which has so far eluded widespread vaccine attempts. But the latest trials of this Oxford vaccine are among several thrilling efforts bringing us closer to taking on one of the world’s leading causes of child mortality.In November, an experimental flu vaccine was found to induce a protective immune response against all known types of flu in animals. This breakthrough, which uses mRNA technology, wouldn’t prevent all flu infections. But it would raise patients’ level of immune protection, blunting the harm from seasonal flus and assuaging scientists’ fears that the next global pandemic could be an influenza strain with higher mortality than COVID. The influenza virus family is extensive, with at least 20 identified lineages. Current influenza vaccines provide exceptionally narrow protection. But universal influenza vaccines would prep our immune systems for every lineage. “Imagine if the world’s population was primed against every influenza subtype,” Scott Hensley, a microbiology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to Stat. “Wouldn’t that be a great thing?”A Snapshot of the Beginning of TimeImages of the first galaxies in the universeIn July, NASA’s James Webb Telescope sent back its first images of ancient light from across the universe. With unprecedented clarity, the telescope showed off brilliant nebulae that resembled glowing neon soap bubbles, and red-clay mountain ranges, and luminescent shrimp in a pitch-black ocean. One image, which looked like a blurry destemmed cherry, captured a red blot of light more than 13 billion years old, giving us the oldest-ever snapshot of the infant universe.The exquisite photos could lead us to new discoveries in cosmology. Flipping through snapshots of the baby cosmos, scientists might be able to piece together the story of the universe's beginning. Behind those lush and dreamy images might lie evidence of what actually happened during, or just after, the Big Bang.And we’re just getting started. “Astronomers haven’t even cranked up the Webb telescope as far as it can go,” The Atlantic’s Marina Koren wrote in July. “With each deep observation, every big rewind, the telescope will bring us closer to the Big Bang, revealing faint galaxy after galaxy.” For this reason, the James Webb Telescope is so much more than the solar system’s most sophisticated camera-zoom function. It is also history’s greatest time machine.‘Unheard of’ Advances in Fighting CancerMiraculous treatments and an at-home test In a trial with 18 rectal-cancer patients who were prescribed a novel immunotherapy, researchers found that the cancer vanished in every single patient. No, not receded. Vanished. “I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Luis Diaz Jr., a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told The New York Times.Months later, a trial of a new metastatic-breast-cancer drug delivered similarly miraculous results. Scientists developed a monoclonal antibody treatment targeting tumor cells with a mutant protein HER2, a familiar cancer culprit. The drugs sought out and destroyed cells featuring the mutant with such stunning precision that many patients' lives were extended by more than six months. In conversations with The New York Times, one doctor called the results “unheard-of” and another deemed the trial “a new standard of care.”This research raises new hopes that a combination of genetic breakthroughs and targeted treatments could fight cancer precisely, cell by cell, without requiring many rounds of brutal chemotherapy. Another genetic mutation commonly associated with various cancers is KRAS. It was considered “undruggable.” But this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that an Amgen lung-cancer pill targeting the mutation beat out a common chemotherapy in a late-stage study, helping patients survive without their tumors getting worse.Finally, as most people know, the best way to treat cancer is to catch it early. But many of the most deadly cancers are imperceptible until they’ve progressed, at which point they are death sentences. For that reason, simple and accurate cancer tests may be one of the most important fronts in the long war against cancer. This year, the company Grail launched a blood test called Galleri. It’s not cheap, it’s not perfect, and it’s not even approved by the FDA; but it’s a start. The test, which looks for circulating tumor DNA in a blood draw, costs nearly $1,000. According to two early reports, the screening detects 50 types of cancer with a false-positive rate below 1 percent. If these kinds of tests get cheaper, more available, and more accurate, they’ll herald a hopeful future for medicine—one where breakthroughs in both early-stage detection and late-stage treatment squeeze cancer from both ends.The Obesity-Therapy SurgeWeight-loss medication that actually worksRoughly four in 10 Americans are obese. Until recently, most responsible doctors didn’t prescribe medication for weight loss. The term weight-loss pill was rightly a pejorative, and patients were stuck with “diet and exercise” or bariatric surgery. But the past 18 months have been an extraordinary revolution in weight-loss medication, thanks to a happy accident.In the 2010s, patients on the diabetes medication semaglutide noticed something interesting: They were losing a ton of weight. And that side effect wasn’t a fluke. Last year, the FDA approved injectable semaglutide for weight loss under a new name: Wegovy. Wegovy seems to work by mimicking naturally occurring hormones that regulate the release of insulin and by slowing down how fast the stomach empties. And it’s not the only medication in the pipeline that helps people lose weight without suffering major side effects. A similar weight-loss medication called tirzepatide showed an average 20 percent reduction in patients’ body weight in its latest clinical trial, and is likely to gain FDA approval next year. The pharmaceutical company Amgen is currently testing a medication called AMG-133. In the Phase 1 trial, patients on the highest dose lost more than 14 percent of their body weight in less than three months. Amgen’s larger Phase 2 study will begin next year.Cracking the Case of Multiple SclerosisAnd learning something important about the phenomenon of “long viruses”One tragic legacy of the COVID pandemic is that thousands, and perhaps millions, of people are still suffering from long-term effects of the disease. The coronavirus isn’t special in this regard. Many viral diseases likely have long-term effects, and in time, scientists may learn that many major diseases are best thought of as “long viruses.”For example, more than 1 million Americans today live with multiple sclerosis. This year, a team of scientists studying a large group of military service members reported strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus, best known for causing mononucleosis, is the leading cause of multiple sclerosis. Infection with EBV raised the odds of developing multiple sclerosis, or MS, by more than thirtyfold. Because only a small minority of those infected with the virus developed MS, infection may not be the only, or even the most important, variable. But the study could helpfully focus efforts to prevent MS on vaccines against EBV.Legal Lab MeatA regulatory firstSome breakthroughs are about new rules, not just new technology.This year, the FDA cleared a California company, Upside Foods, to produce lab-grown chicken. It is the first-ever cultivated-meat product to pass this key regulatory hurdle. More obstacles remain, such as approval by the Department of Agriculture, before you can order an Upside Foods chicken sandwich with white meat that grew in a lab. But it’s a start.Lab-grown meat is important, because the world needs more than moral arguments against meat consumption; we need real (and delicious) choices for consumers. Decades of appeals from animal-rights movements and environmentalists have coincided with a period when Americans just ate more and more chicken. Taking the long view, the available amount of chicken meat per person has more than sextupled in the past century. Of the 80 billion land animals raised and slaughtered every year for human consumption, about 70 billion are chickens.For now, cultivated meat is a minuscule movement inside a global colossus of animal products. But over time, as I’ve written, scientists with regulatory approval and commercial success will have money to perfect the fat and protein density of lab-grown meat. In one plausible future, decades from now, millions of people may actually prefer the consistency and taste of meat that didn't come from an animal, because they’ll know what they’re buying when a cultivated rib eye is as consistent as an electrical gadget.New Toys for the Green-Energy RevolutionSmaller nuclear reactors and bigger geothermal breakthroughsFighting climate change will require the deployment of technologies already invented, such as solar panels and wind turbines. But it will also require new inventions in fields like nuclear and geothermal technology. This year, we edged closer to breakthroughs in both categories.Let’s start with nuclear power, which is safe, clean, unfairly tainted by several high-profile disasters, and hideously expensive to get going. But small and safe reactors would be cheaper to build and faster to approve. NuScale Power Module, the only reactor of its kind to receive design approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, earned a place in Time magazine’s 2022 inventions of the year. Less than 80 feet tall, the reactor can generate enough clean electricity to power roughly 60,000 homes. The first plant could be running by the end of the decade.Then there’s geothermal energy, which means drilling deep into the ground to use the Earth’s heat for power. Geothermal is an ideal energy source—more consistent than wind or solar and with none of the waste concerns of nuclear. The problem is that, in some parts of the world, you have to go really, really deep to access geothermally heated water. And when we drill deep into the planet, we hit ancient rock—typically granite—that requires new technology to penetrate. The start-up Quaise is working on a drilling technology that can vaporize granite with a highly concentrated beam of radio-frequency power. If such a technology became widely available, deep drilling would be commonplace and geothermal energy would be accessible on just about any patch of land. It would be as though humankind conceived of a magic wand that, waved across the Earth, makes any square mile as energy-rich as an oil-gushing stretch of Texas or Saudi Arabia.Correction: This article originally misstated the name of the company cleared by the FDA to produce lab-grown chicken. It is Upside Foods.

The United States and Europe find themselves in a closer alliance than at any point in many decades. France has long been the European nation most reluctant to play junior partner in an American-led enterprise. In his first years in office, President Emmanuel Macron did his best to display his Gaullist credentials, describing NATO as “brain dead” and declaring his greatest priority to be developing Europe’s “strategic autonomy,” which he defined, in part, as separate from the United States.

Contrast that with Macron’s remarks in November, when he talked about NATO as a cornerstone of French and European security. While in Washington last week, he described the new goal for the continent as “strategic intimacy” with Washington and spoke of the need for even deeper cooperation. When the French president starts sounding like the British prime minister, it is worth paying attention.

And it’s not just Macron. Germany’s Olaf Scholz has sounded a clarion call for Western unity in the pages of Foreign Affairs. For those wondering whether Germany’s declared shift in foreign policy earlier this year was a momentary reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Scholz makes clear that he believes we are at the “end of an era” of peace. He underlined the massive turnaround in German foreign policy — chiefly the creation of a roughly $100 billion fund to upgrade the German armed forces, which he called “the starkest change in German security policy since ... 1955.” The break with precedent was so dramatic that Germany had to amend its constitution to make it possible.

The “epochal tectonic shift,” as Scholz describes it, has been triggered by the Russian invasion. But it is also a response to the dawning of a new age of great power competition — a recognition that the rules-based international order built by the United States and Europe is in danger of crumbling, as countries such as Russia and China (and others) break those rules, push for their own unilateral advantage, and precipitate a return to a world where might makes right.

The Russian invasion explains much of this, but the Biden administration deserves much credit for how it has handled that challenge. Until now, Washington has managed to rally large parts of the world to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression. The United States has persuaded most of its allies to act forcefully to punish Russia, and many others to at least aid Ukraine. All this has helped to create a moment of unusual Western unity that could help restore and rebuild a rules-based international system.

But these successes can still be squandered by America’s own unilateralism and pursuit of narrow self-interest. European leaders have been dismayed by how protectionist the Biden administration has turned out to be in its economic policy, putting “Buy American” provisions in many of its spending bills and showering subsidies on green technology produced in the United States. All of these measures are violations of the rules governing open markets and free trade that are at the heart of the international system that Washington has sponsored since the late 1940s. France’s finance minister complained that Washington is copying China’s government-led industrial policy. A senior European Union official pulled out of a U.S.-E.U. summit on the issue because he felt that the agenda showed that Washington did not care about the E.U.’s concerns.

The tensions are going to grow because Europe’s pain is only going to get worse. Facing natural gas prices that are seven times higher and electricity prices 10 times higher than in the previous two decades, many European firms are finding that they simply cannot compete. The Financial Times reports that there is a genuine risk of the deindustrialization of Germany if major industries, including chemicals and auto manufacturing, move more factories overseas to the United States or China. Europeans are enraged by what they see as rank American hypocrisy. As one statesman said to me, “We are constantly being lectured by Americans that we must all uphold the rules-based international system — only to then see Washington announce measures that are in total violation of the core principles of that order.”

As the pain for ordinary Europeans grows, and as their companies move production to America, the friction will make it harder to get sustained cooperation from Europe on Russia. Europe will also be less likely to take a tough and united stand on China, a market that will become increasingly vital to the continent’s economic future. And, as European nations and others start retaliating against American protectionism with their own provisions, the open international system will start shutting down.

When people like me raise objections to protectionism and economic nationalism, we are often dismissed as being naive about the domestic politics of this issue. Democrats are doing this, so the argument goes, to help American workers and thus stem the tide of right-wing populism. The trouble with the argument is that the working class has abandoned the Democratic Party, largely on cultural issues.

It is true elsewhere as well. Look at France, where workers are coddled, or Sweden, with its generous welfare and training programs: Both have growing right-wing populist parties, largely fueled by issues such as immigration, race and education. Assuming that people can be swayed from their fervently held beliefs because of a few government subsidies might be the more naive view.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat’s been your personal experience with the health-care system in the United States (or the country where you live) and what larger lessons, if any, have you drawn from it all?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteWhen I was 18 or so, I discovered the Claremont Institute because its headquarters was near my alma mater, Pomona College. Then I learned that its stated mission was “to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” As a fan of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Madisonian checks and balances, that sounded good to me.A few years later I briefly did editing and writing work for a newsletter on local government that the think tank published, during which I was exposed to Crisis of the House Divided, the formidable historiography of the Lincoln-Douglas debates by Claremont’s intellectual progenitor, the political philosopher Harry Jaffa. The book explores and morally champions slavery’s incompatibility with the Declaration of Independence. Even today, when the think tank is rightly criticized for its failure to oppose Donald Trump, for the sycophantic legal advice that Claremont-affiliated thinkers like John Yoo and John Eastman gave to different Republican presidents, and for the histrionic catastrophizing of Michael Anton, I value some of what is published in the Claremont Review of Books and elsewhere on its website—especially, as with its best critiques of the administrative state and the foreign-policy writing of Christopher Caldwell, when formidable challenges to the establishment are aired. On the whole, however, I no longer believe the core of Claremont’s work is restoring the principles of the American founding.I do wish the institute would return to that mission, and an opportunity to begin restoring it has presented itself. Last weekend, responding to reporting on Twitter’s dubious decision to block a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Trump posted an extraordinary statement: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles,” he wrote, “even those found in the Constitution.”Everyone associated with the Claremont Institute knows how it would respond if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton stated that the Constitution should be suspended so that they could be installed in the White House: forcefully, emphatically, disdainfully, and prolifically, as one would expect of an outfit dedicated to restoring “the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” Can the organization defend its stated values as steadfastly against Trump?It hasn’t yet. Sad.[Read: 10 readers on opposing anti-Semitism]A New LowAt the UnPopulist, Ilya Somin, a George Mason University law professor, argues that even after all of his past sins, Trump’s latest outburst matters, and ostracizing him for it matters too.He writes:
If Trump continues to be the dominant figure in the Republican Party, he could potentially normalize the idea of “terminating” the Constitution, and much other evil … Trump is far from the only recent president who tried to circumvent constitutional limits on his authority … But no other president or ex-president has gone so far as to try to stay in power after losing an election, or called for the complete “termination” of the Constitution, as opposed to merely pushing beyond the limits of his power on some specific issue.
None has defined constitutional deviancy nearly as far down as Trump.
How do we forestall the dangerous normalization of constitutional deviancy? By ensuring that politicians who engage in such behavior pay a heavy price. Ideally, Trump and others like him should at least be ostracized from polite political society, and never again considered worthy of holding any position of power again. If that happens, it will serve as a valuable deterrent for future would-be political malefactors. The next time an unscrupulous ambitious politician considers whether imitating Trump’s behavior is a good idea, he might conclude he better not, lest he suffer the same fate. Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the failure of Trumpist election deniers in several key 2022 races was a step in the right direction. But … so long as Trump remains a powerful figure in one of the major parties and his anti-constitutional ideas remain part of the GOP mainstream, the threat of a dangerous spiral of constitutional deviancy will persist.
On the American Health-Care SystemThe Atlantic published a thought-provoking cover story on that subject back in 2009. Mariah Blake’s “Dirty Medicine” from the following year also remains a worthwhile article. I found Ronald Dworkin’s essay on the role of the humanities in specialist medicine surprising. And Scott Alexander explains what your doctor spends 80 percent of their time doing.Winding Down the PandemicMegan McArdle argues that Twitter is correct to stop policing its site for COVID-19 misinformation.She writes:
I spent the pandemic years arguing forcefully against such nonsense, often to the point of despair. I understand the temptation to simply say “Shut up and go away” rather than try to argue people away from beliefs I considered to be poorly evidenced and dangerous.
I gave in to that temptation more than once.
Unfortunately, I now suspect this did more harm than good — and all the more so when it was official corporate policy rather than criticism from a frazzled columnist. For one thing, moderators aren’t good at determining what constitutes actual misinformation. A lot of the dangerous nonsense about covid that circulated on social media came from the same public health experts social media companies were using as arbiters. It was public health experts who initially told us masks don’t work, an assertion they knew to be false. It was public health experts who insisted, without good evidence, that covid wasn’t airborne. And many public health experts helped support prolonged school closures that have been proven to undermine learning … The public health community eventually recognized its most egregious errors, while the quacks doubled down. But free and open debate on social media assisted that process of course correction.
[Read: How should we deal with high-profile anti-Semites?]Euthanasia Up NorthAfter surveying its legalization in Canada, Ross Douthat lambasts that nation’s approach:
The rules of civilization necessarily include gray areas. It is not barbaric for the law to acknowledge hard choices in end-of-life care, about when to withdraw life support or how aggressively to manage agonizing pain. It is barbaric, however, to establish a bureaucratic system that offers death as a reliable treatment for suffering and enlists the healing profession in delivering this “cure.” And while there may be worse evils ahead, this isn’t a slippery slope argument: When 10,000 people are availing themselves of your euthanasia system every year, you have already entered the dystopia … The idea that human rights encompass a right to self-destruction, the conceit that people in a state of terrible suffering and vulnerability are really “free” to make a choice that ends all choices, the idea that a healing profession should include death in its battery of treatments — these are inherently destructive ideas. Left unchecked, they will forge a cruel brave new world, a dehumanizing final chapter for the liberal story.
In contrast, a Canadian court ruling overturned prohibitions on “physician-assisted dying for competent adults who seek such assistance as a result of a grievous and irremediable medical condition that causes enduring and intolerable suffering.” Here is an excerpt of its reasoning:
The right to life is engaged where the law or state action imposes death or an increased risk of death on a person, either directly or indirectly. Here, the prohibition deprives some individuals of life, as it has the effect of forcing some individuals to take their own lives prematurely, for fear that they would be incapable of doing so when they reached the point where suffering was intolerable. The rights to liberty and security of the person, which deal with concerns about autonomy and quality of life, are also engaged.
An individual’s response to a grievous and irremediable medical condition is a matter critical to their dignity and autonomy. The prohibition denies people in this situation the right to make decisions concerning their bodily integrity and medical care and thus trenches on their liberty. And by leaving them to endure intolerable suffering, it impinges on their security of the person. The prohibition on physician-assisted dying infringes the right to life, liberty and security of the person in a manner that is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The object of the prohibition is not, broadly, to preserve life whatever the circumstances, but more specifically to protect vulnerable persons from being induced to commit suicide at a time of weakness. Since a total ban on assisted suicide clearly helps achieve this object, individuals’ rights are not deprived arbitrarily. However, the prohibition catches people outside the class of protected persons. It follows that the limitation on their rights is in at least some cases not connected to the objective and that the prohibition is thus overbroad.
Provocation of the WeekWriting in The Harvard Crimson, Brooks B. Anderson, class of 2025, speaks truth to administrators:
Harvard is one of the world’s preeminent universities; surely it has used its billions of dollars of accumulated wealth to primarily invest in its educational program, building an unparalleled roster of top professors, expanding offerings to students, and reducing class sizes. Right? Wrong. Harvard has instead filled its halls with administrators. Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population.
What do they all do?
Most administrators have a legitimate function. I will happily concede that the University does need administration to operate effectively. No professors want to handle Title IX compliance or send institution-wide emails about Covid-19 protocols. Yet of the 7,000-strong horde, it seems that many members’ primary purpose is to squander away tax-free money intended for academic work on initiatives, projects, and committees that provide scant value to anyone’s educational experience.
For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.” Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.
That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s now pretty clear that capitalism in the advanced economies hit some kind of inflection point in the early 1970s. The point is made well enough on the website “WTF Happened in 1971?”, which features dozens of charts of various economic trends that all start going sideways sometime in the early 1970s. The graphics are of variable quality – I can pick bones with a number of them – but the signal is undeniable despite the noise. Something big happened, and it wasn’t good.
The fact that the early 70s marked an unfortunate turning point didn’t really become clear – to me, anyway – until the aftermath of the 2008-09 Great Recession. In the United States, although productivity growth collapsed amidst the gas lines and stagflation of the 70s, surging growth in the workforce thanks to the Baby Boom and feminism, along with rising education levels that made the workforce more productive, served to keep overall growth rates steady. And then the advent of the internet triggered what appeared to be a productivity renaissance. From 1995-2004, productivity growth rivaled that of the postwar glory days. From the perspective of the American internet boom, the poor record of the prior two decades came to look like a temporary aberration caused by the macroeconomic disturbances of the 70s. Now the American innovation system was revving up again and all was well – or so I thought.
But as the Great Recession gave way to a long, sluggish recovery, productivity growth dropped like a stone and never rebounded. Now the low productivity growth of the 70s and 80s no longer looked like a passing episode. Meanwhile, declining population growth, the plateauing of female labor force participation, and a marked slowdown in the rise of educational attainment all kicked in around the turn of the 21st century, ending the human capital boom that had helped to sustain strong growth. Throw in the Great Recession and its aftermath, and U.S. growth in “real” (i.e., inflation-adjusted) GDP per capita in the 21st century to date has sunk to around 1 percent a year – half the average annual growth rate of 2 percent that persisted over the whole course of the 20th century. Tyler Cowen called it in 2011: we are living in a “Great Stagnation” that began in the 1970s.
We can pin down the fact that some big shift occurred in the 70s because we have the quantitative economic data that document it. If we move beyond the purely economic realm to look at technological and scientific progress, the problems of measurement get much harder, but we can make a plausible quantitative case for a slowdown there as well – and a slam-dunk case that innovative activity is experiencing sharply diminishing returns.
If you’re willing to venture out beyond the quantifiable, you can catch a glimpse of a much bigger picture – of a “great stagnation” that is not just economic, not just technical, but sweeping and civilizational. I was born in 1962, so I was just a little kid before the Fall – but I do have a sense of what things were like, because I remember Apollo. The space program was the great enthusiasm of my boyhood; when it sputtered and shrank, my little broken heart could feel the future shrinking with it.
The older I get, the more I look back on the 1960s with astonishment at the swaggering boldness and ambition of the time. America was rich, we were in possession of immense powers, and the constraints that had bound so tightly in the past now looked rotten and frayed and ready to snap. The possibilities seemed endless, and intrepid explorers were pursuing them in every direction: outer space, under the sea, in fashion and music and cinema, and in an uproarious counterculture dreaming of new utopias. How perfect that the first moon landing and Woodstock occurred less than a month apart in the summer of 1969. And that, by the end of that year, the soaring dreams of both Apollo and Dionysus had soured: the dramatic drop in the launch day crowds and TV ratings for Apollo 12 foreshadowed the upcoming downsizing of the space program, while the counterculture met its nemesis at Altamont and in the Manson family.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson wrote this elegy for the era of Peace and Love, but it could apply just as well to the Promethean and technocratic dreams of the 60s:

It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again… There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil… We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.

In the 60s, America was buzzing with plans for transformation and revolution. In the 70s, those plans were shelved and people’s ambitions dwindled down to fit within their own skins. In just a few years, the watchword of American civilization had gone from “change the world” to “find yourself.”
How did this happen? What drove this massive retreat? In my last essay, I looked at one piece of the puzzle: the natural tendency of progress to get harder as the low-hanging fruit of possible gains is exhausted. This factor, I believe, has played a sizeable role in explaining the economic slowdown experienced by the United States and other rich democracies. But to explain the broader civilizational slowdown, more, much more, is needed.
Here I offer another piece of the puzzle – again, not the whole answer but an important factor all the same. It’s another natural tendency, not of economic development this time but rather individual psychology. To employ the language of social science, we can call it loss aversion – or status-quo bias, or psychological inertia, or the endowment effect, or just good old-fashioned risk aversion. To put it in the language of common sense, people get attached to their stuff and don’t like losing it. When a society grows rich, that means large numbers of people now have a lot to lose. And because losing what you have is painful, people will naturally take pains to hang on to what they’ve got – even if that sometimes means passing up on the chance to get more. As a result, we can expect the advent of mass affluence to be accompanied by a heightened sensitivity to losses and a shift toward greater conservatism in the face of change and uncertainty.
Loss aversion refers to the proposition that the pain of loss is greater than the pleasure of an equivalent gain. We all know from introspection that we too often dwell on our losses and failures instead of feeling pride in what we’ve accomplished and gratitude for what we’ve got. If you’re a sports fan, you know that star athletes routinely say the agony of defeat stays with them far more than the thrill of victory.
In behavioral economics, loss aversion has been presented as a kind of universal principle, and foundational to the broader behavioral-economics vision of human decision-making as beset by various biases and forms of irrationality. It is a key idea in “prospect theory,” the theory that financial decision-making is driven by asymmetrical attitudes toward gain and loss and for which (among other work) Daniel Kahneman was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. To give you an idea of how influential the ideas of loss aversion and prospect theory are, the original 1979 paper on prospect theory by Kahneman and Amos Tversky is the most cited paper in all of economics and the third most cited paper in psychology.
As has happened with many major findings in psychology, the existence of loss aversion is now under some question. But as I’ll explain, the scholarly debate has no real relevance to my use of the concept here. There is no doubt that people often forgo big gains to avoid a smaller loss – and that’s what matters to me. What is at issue in the debate is why. Is it because of a general psychological asymmetry in which the negative experience of a loss is more intense than the positive experience of an equivalent gain? Or is it because of some narrower, more contextual psychological phenomenon?
That is, perhaps people sometimes pass up big gains to avoid smaller losses because of status-quo bias, or a preference generally for inaction over action when a loss is possible. Or maybe it’s because of the broader phenomenon of psychological inertia, in which people tend to want to maintain the status quo regardless of the possible upside or downside. Or maybe it’s because of the endowment effect, in which people tend to value something that they own more highly than they would if they didn’t own it already. Or maybe it’s the more familiar phenomenon of risk aversion, in which people tend to favor certainty over uncertainty and therefore prefer less risk even if it means lower returns. 
The subtleties of these distinctions are doubtless interesting and worth teasing out, but they make no difference at all for present purposes. What matters here is that there are a variety of psychological tendencies that lead people to want to hang on to what they have, even if it means missing out on something better. My contention is that we can see these tendencies playing out in contemporary society at mass scale, and that they help to explain why we have adopted more conservative attitudes towards change as our society has grown rich.
Loss aversion, by any other name, helps to explain the rise of NIMBYism and the increasingly restrictive local land-use regulation that is now doing so much harm – slowing growth, exacerbating wealth and income inequality, locking in residential segregation by class and race, and accelerating climate change by promoting sprawl. Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood, founding editors of the fine new publication “Works in Progress,” have co-written (along with John Myers, a co-founder of London YIMBY and YIMBY Alliance) a superb essay titled “The Housing Theory of Everything” that makes a convincing case that artificial restrictions on housing supply are at the root of a great number of the most serious problems afflicting rich democracies today. And at the root of those artificial restrictions is the desire of homeowners to protect what is typically their biggest economic asset from the risks of change – even if the result is that those homeowners end up living in a poorer, more dangerous, more inequitable world.
It’s no coincidence that, in the United States, the pernicious effects of land-use regulation on housing supply started making themselves felt in the 1970s. Residential zoning had been endemic in the country for decades by then, but it took some time for metro areas – starting with big coastal cities with hard-and-fast geographic limits on sprawl – to fill in with enough residential construction that the collective veto power of incumbent homeowners sufficed to put the squeeze on new supply. Since then the maladies caused by this vetocracy have greatly intensified in the cities where they began and then spread to metro areas across the country.
Loss aversion, by any other name, has also played a role in the long-term decline in geographic mobility. The percentage of people in a given year who move either to another county or another state (i.e., to another labor market) is down around 50 percent since 1980. To some extent this may reflect less reason to move than in the past, due to a declining rate of overall job turnover, declining geographic variation in job opportunities, and better access to information about job opportunities around the country and thus less need to move “on spec” in search of a job. But affirmative obstacles to moving have arisen as well – and having more to lose is a consistent reason for the creation of those barriers. The rise of the NIMBY vetocracy, for one thing, blocks people from moving to the highest-income, most productive cities because the restrictions on residential construction make housing too expensive there. Meanwhile, differences between states in access to public benefits, as well as state-based occupational licensing that does not transfer to other jurisdictions, can deter interstate mobility as well by giving potential movers more to lose from leaving their home state.
Beyond policy barriers, the deepening of personal roots in the fastest-growing parts of the country has reduced the willingness to pull up stakes. Specifically, economists Patrick Coate and Kyle Mangum find that the maturation of communities in the Sunbelt has produced more rooted populations that are less likely to move:

Migration propensity depends strongly on preference for one’s place of origin, and the average attachment has increased because regional population growth has converged. Over the 20th century, the U.S. population expanded across the continent, and Sunbelt locations of the West and South grew explosively. New cities, populated by transplants, had high rates of gross out-migration because of weak attachments — hence we deem these “fast locations.” In more recent decades, the population growth rates across regions have converged, and fast locations are increasingly populated by natives with higher degrees of home attachment instead of weakly attached transplants. Consequently, migration out of these places has declined. Because fast locations were the source of the majority of migrants, their decline has driven down the national average.

The fall-off in geographic mobility means a less productive, slower-growing economy. Growth has always been geographically concentrated in particular places at particular times; population growth in high-productivity cities is thus an important component of maximizing the wealth-creating powers of new firms and new industries. In the past, local economic booms were associated with explosive population growth: Between 1870 and 1950, New York City’s population grew more than 700 percent, Chicago’s shot up over 1,100 percent, and Detroit’s mushroomed by more than 2,200 percent. By comparison, look at the recent experience of San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley: Between 1995 and 2000, at the height of the internet boom, 100,000 more Americans moved out of the metro area than moved in. Throughout all of history, the dominant pattern of migration is away from poverty and toward opportunity. Today, though, America’s fastest-growing cities lag far behind the leading cities in wage levels and income growth. In Ryan Avent’s turn of phrase, Americans are “moving to stagnation.”
Loss aversion, by any other name, is also making itself felt in the greatly escalated priority assigned to health and physical safety. Prior to the life expectancy revolution of the 20th century, the perceived opportunity cost of unhealthy habits and dangerous conduct was relatively low. When you could drop dead in an instant because of infectious disease or a workplace accident, paying too much attention to the risks you could control seemed pointless. Resigned fatalism about the looming possibilities of disease and harm was understandable and maybe even advantageous. But as death prior to old age became, not just a stroke of bad luck, but something extraordinary and tragic, attention to avoiding such a terrible outcome naturally intensified.
I’ve seen attitudes transform over my lifetime. When my kids were little, I would regale them with stories of how Dad grew up “before we invented safety.” I remember when celebrities smoked on television talk shows and football players fired up during halftime. Me, I pretended with candy cigarettes coated in powdered sugar so you could blow smoke. When a lot of people were driving together somewhere, it was common to put all the kids together in the back of somebody’s pickup truck. My mom’s right arm would fire out locked at the elbow to keep me from whacking my head on the glove compartment during a sudden stop; that was our version of seatbelts. And I’ve logged plenty of hours on old-school monkey bars and jungle gyms, and delivered and received my share of face smashes in dodgeball. It felt like there was always at least one person in my class collecting autographs on their cast.
I’m certainly not pining for the old days. Our air and water are much cleaner, our workplaces are much safer, the percentage of Americans who smoke has fallen from over 40 percent in 1970 to under 13 percent today, and traffic fatalities per million vehicle miles today are less than 30 percent of what they were in 1970. Requiring enterprises to internalize costs they once imposed on workers and the public is an important step toward “living wisely and agreeably and well.”
But it’s obvious that our greater caution has costs in terms of reduced freedom of action. Internalizing costs is, well, costly, and when something becomes more costly you get less of it. In many cases the price is worth paying, but it’s still a price.
The problem with our new health and safety consciousness is that, once you start worrying about such things, there’s no obvious stopping point. And since risk cannot be eliminated from life altogether, the quest to eliminate salient risks invariably ends up increasing other risks that are less apparent. Nowhere is this conundrum more dramatic today than in the obstacles that current environmental regulations pose to the transition to clean energy: We have regulated one major clean power source, nuclear, out of existence, and environmental review and permitting requirements are vastly complicating the build-out of solar and wind farms and new transmission capacity.
In a fascinating paper titled “Life and Growth,” the economist Charles Jones models how the rising value assigned to a human life can dramatically alter the prospects for economic growth. “The value of life may rise faster than consumption, leading society to value safety over consumption growth. As a result, the optimal rate of consumption growth may be substantially lower than what is feasible, in some cases falling all the way to zero.” This seems like a reasonably accurate description of the slope we’re currently slipping down.
Looking beyond the economy to our personal lives, a runaway safetyism is now threatening the healthy psychological development of our children. Helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting – these are drearily familiar concepts if you’ve had kids in school over the past 20 years. Middle- and upper-class kids’ lives are now heavily structured and intensely scheduled; the spontaneous play that comes naturally to children and teaches resourcefulness and resilience and fairness and how to resolve differences is all but gone. I don’t think we have a good empirical handle on the effects of this overprotective parenting on children’s later well-being, but I can’t imagine that they’re positive. We do know that mental health problems among young people are way up. At any rate, it’s also hard to imagine that this is a parenting style well suited to producing a dynamic society of bold risk-takers and gritty, perseverant strivers.
Finally, and to describe more generally a phenomenon some of whose specific manifestations I’ve already alluded to, loss aversion by any other name is a factor in the massive build-up of Olsonian “distributional coalitions” – narrow economic interest groups of every sort – in the political economy of recent decades. I’ve already provided examples: NIMBYism that blocks new construction, occupational licensing that hinders geographic mobility, and the vetocracy that stands in the way of clean energy. As Mancur Olson argued, the longer peace and prosperity persist, the more groups with a stake in the status quo will arise and figure out how to organize themselves; in other words, getting richer means more people with more to lose and thus with a motive to band together and defend what they’ve got. I would add that a massive plunge in communications costs has greatly facilitated this process. Although these special interests frequently have positive, offensive agendas – and they’re often very bad! – far and away their top priority is maintaining their current advantages and fending off any change that could threaten them. All this micro-level defensiveness scales up at the macro level to daunting political obstacles to any major departure from the status quo – most especially when such departures involve changes to the physical world.
I’ll close with some observations about Tyler Cowen’s 2017 book The Complacent Class, whose argument fits in with – and considerably broadens – what I’ve said here. I read the book when it came out, and I’ll confess it didn’t really register with me. I enjoyed it and found it interesting, but it didn’t do anything to reorient my thinking. I’m guessing that at the time I was so focused on The Captured Economy, which came out later the same year, that I was reading and thinking about everything through that prism. But I went back and looked at the book again when writing this, and wow, this time it really hit home.
I see now how Tyler, after writing The Great Stagnation a few years before about the faltering economy, was led to see a broader social stagnation:

Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change, or to avoid it altogether… In an age where it is easier than ever before to dig in, the psychological resistance to change has become progressively stronger. On top of that, information technology, for all the disruption that it has wrought, allows us to organize more effectively to confront things that are new or different, in a manageable and comfortable way, and sometimes to keep them at bay altogether.
Given the growing success of the forces for stasis, I see complacency – a general sense of satisfaction with the status quo – as an increasingly prominent phenomenon in American life.

Tyler casts the net more widely than I have done here, mentioning most of the trends I’ve talked about but also throwing in declining market competition, assortative mating, trigger warnings, residential segregation, political polarization, the decline of driving, and how Amazon, home food delivery, and online streaming services have led millions of us to self-imposed house arrest.
Accordingly, the “complacency” he describes is a broader concept that includes loss aversion but also folds in the desires for comfort, control, and continuity. He’s describing the overall effect of declining civilizational dynamism in his own, earlier version of Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society, whereas here I’m trying to isolate one cause of that general condition. As to causes, Tyler has little to say beyond a quick point of the finger toward mass affluence: “The forces behind the rise of the complacent class are quite general. For better or worse, the truth is that peace and high incomes tend to drain the restlessness out of people.”
So for a fuller picture of what’s going wrong, I heartily recommend The Complacent Class as an expansive sequel to The Great Stagnation. But if you want to get to the bottom of why things are going wrong, keep reading here. In upcoming essays I’ll continue to explore and identify the underlying causes that have brought us to this Age of Stasis. In the next essay, I’ll address a development that can be seen as yet another manifestation of loss aversion, but one that has developed its own distinctive ideology: the backlash against modernity’s Promethean project of increased mastery over nature.
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Senator Raphael Warnock’s win in yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff capped a commanding show of strength by Democrats in the states that decided the 2020 race for the White House—and will likely pick the winner again in 2024.With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.Coming even amid widespread discontent over the economy, this year’s Democratic sweep against the Trump-backed candidates underscores the continuing resistance to the former president’s influence. In particular, Warnock’s decisive margins in Atlanta and its suburbs yesterday extended the Democratic dominance of white-collar (and usually racially diverse) metropolitan areas, as varied as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia and the booming hot spots of Phoenix and Madison.[Read: The great Senate stalemate]“The huge question after the election of 2020 was whether the suburbs would snap back to the GOP column after Trump was no longer on the ballot,” Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, told me. “What we saw in 2022 was suburbs continuing to trend toward Democrats.”Apart from perhaps Michigan, none of these states appears entirely out of reach for the GOP in 2024. Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, told me that although suburban voters recoiled against “delusional candidates” who “parroted” Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Republicans “could very well come back and win the suburbs” with “non-delusional candidates.”Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)“You have a large percentage of Americans who are wary of MAGA and have now voted against MAGA three times,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of NDN, a Democratic research and advocacy group, told me. Rosenberg was the most forceful public skeptic of the “red wave” theory. “They are now going to have to take all those people and turn them into Republican voters in 2024. It’s certainly not impossible, but I’d much rather be us than them going into the 2024 election”In many ways, yesterday’s Georgia result underscored the partisan chasm that has left the country closely divided for at least the past decade. Walker was, by any objective measure, among the weakest general-election candidates for a major office either party has produced in modern memory. Tarred by an endless procession of scandals, prone to nonsensical statements on the campaign trail (as when he mused on the relative merits of vampires and werewolves), and unwilling or unable to articulate positions on many major issues, he nonetheless drew unflagging support from national Republican leaders and held the large majority of the state’s Republican votes.That Walker came as close as he did to winning underscores the growing parliamentary nature of House and Senate elections, in which fewer voters are casting their ballots based on personal assessments of the two candidates and more are deciding based on which party they want to control the national agenda.[Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave]Yet all of that still left Walker, like the other Trump-backed candidates, short in the face of solid margins for Democrats in and around these states’ major population centers. Exit polls showed Democrats posting big advantages among all the demographic groups that tend to congregate in large metropolitan areas: young people, people of color, college-educated voters, secular voters, and LGBTQ adults.Thriving Cobb and Gwinnett Counties outside Atlanta, with a combined population of 1.7 million people, encapsulate the suburban evolution that has tilted the balance of power. For years, these counties were Republican redoubts: George W. Bush won them by roughly a combined 150,000 votes in the 2004 presidential race, and even as late as the hard-fought 2014 Georgia Senate race, the winning GOP nominee, David Perdue, carried each of them by double-digit margins.But both counties have grown more diverse. White people now make up only about three-fifths of the population in Cobb and a little more than half in Gwinnett, and nearly half of Cobb adults hold at least a four-year college degree. This has alienated them from a GOP that Trump has reshaped to reflect the cultural priorities and grievances of culturally conservative white voters, particularly those without college degrees or who live outside urban areas. Hillary Clinton narrowly carried both counties in 2016, Biden won just under 60 percent of the vote in each in 2020, and Warnock in November roughly matched Biden’s performance. As of the latest count, Warnock yesterday again carried about three-fifths of the vote in both Cobb and Gwinnett. He also ran up big margins in the suburban counties just south of Atlanta.The same patterns were evident in the large white-collar suburbs of the other states that Republicans must win back to recapture the White House in 2024. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in crushing her Trump-backed opponent, Tudor Dixon, won a higher share of the vote in Oakland and Kent Counties than she managed in 2018 or than Biden did in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Senator-elect John Fetterman matched Biden in exceeding three-fifths of the vote in both Delaware and Montgomery Counties, outside Philadelphia. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly carried Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, by almost 100,000 votes—more than doubling Biden’s margin in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the county since Harry Truman in 1948. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by 25,000 more votes than he had in 2018, and an analysis of the statewide results showed him improving the most over his first election in the counties with the highest levels of educational attainment.After this year’s defeats, many analysts in both parties are dubious that Trump can recapture enough (and maybe any) of these five states in 2024. The bigger question facing Republicans is whether another candidate, one who does not have Trump’s personal baggage but who shares most of his culture-war views, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, could perform much better.[Read: Georgia sends a preacher to Washington]Republicans are generally optimistic that DeSantis could regain ground Trump has lost among suburban voters who leaned Republican not too long ago. They point to Georgia Republican Governor Kemp performing better than Walker did in the Atlanta suburbs as evidence that a more mainstream Republican can slice the Democratic advantage in such places. DeSantis, Ayres said, “has got a lot of things he can sell to suburban Republican voters that Trump just can’t sell.”Almost universally, Democrats believe that Republicans are underestimating how hard it will be to reel back in college-educated suburban voters who have now mobilized against Trump’s vision for America in three consecutive elections, especially in these battleground states. Although DeSantis is less belligerent than Trump, and not associated with the violence and subversion of the January 6 insurrection, so far he has emphasized a similar style of politics focused on conservative grievance against “woke” cultural liberalism. “Ron DeSantis is every bit as MAGA as Donald Trump,” Rosenberg said. “This idea that he is some more moderate version of Trump is just farcical.”The fact that even a candidate as weak as Walker remained as competitive as he did underscores how difficult it may be for either side to establish a comfortable advantage in these states in 2024. (The exceptions could be Michigan, which even many Republicans agree looks daunting for them, and maybe Pennsylvania, which also tilted blue last month.)These states provided Democrats with their own warning signs this year. Exit polls last month showed that most voters in these states disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that big majorities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states where the question was asked, did not want him to run again. Democrats also faced a worrying trend of lagging Black turnout in many urban centers this year, though Black voters came out in big numbers in Georgia’s early voting, and activists in the state are confident they will remain highly engaged through 2024. “Our goal was to build a culture of voting, and that’s what we have done in Georgia over the past five years,” Amari Fennoy, the state coordinator for the NAACP Georgia State Conference, told me.Yet the consistency of the results this year, both demographically and geographically, signal that the re-sorting of the parties in the Trump era has left Democrats with a narrow, but potentially durable, advantage in these five crucial states. That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win them in the 2024 presidential race, but it does suggest an important takeaway from the 2022 election that finally ended last night: As long as voters still perceive Republicans to be operating in Trump’s shadow (much less if they again nominate Trump himself), Democrats will begin with an advantage in the states most likely to pick the next president.“I think that the coalition that turned out to stop Trump is going to be the starting point for the next presidential race,” Wikler said. “There are new threats and new opportunities, but this was not a one-off coalition that came together for a special occasion and went home.” Georgia, again, made that very clear last night.

One of the positive things to come out of the pandemic was the sudden rise of telehealth – providing health care services remotely over video and audio platforms. This is something I was interested in prior to the pandemic, but it was frustratingly difficult to push the ball forward. Deep regulatory barriers stood in the way. For example, Medicare would only reimburse telehealth for patients in rural areas who demonstrated a specific need. Further, patients had to travel to designated locations (hospitals or clinics) to access telehealth to remote clinicians. Barriers to telehealth included state licensure requirements, reimbursement from insurance providers, institutional support, and privacy (HIPPA) regulations. This was in addition to the technology – both the physician and the patient having access to a telehealth platform.

After being mired in this bureaucratic quagmire for years, all of the barriers simply melted away when the pandemic hit. Medicare dropped all of its requirements, and many states started passing laws to require insurance coverage of telehealth, and even providing licensure reciprocity. The early days of forced telehealth were a mixed bag, because telehealth is not optimal for every patient and every visit, but there was no choice during the shutdown. Telehealth visit went from 1% prior to the pandemic, peaked at around 32% during the shutdown, and is now settling down to about 17% of Medicare covered healthcare visits.

Now, over two years later, the situation is vastly improved. Practices have had time to update and tweak the software applications used for telehealth. Patients have had time to familiarize themselves with the technology, if they were not already. Perhaps most importantly, providers and patients are able to select which patients and which visits are optimal for telehealth. While there are still some growing pains (opportunities for optimization), it now seems that telehealth is here to stay. Now that patients have had a taste of the convenience of telehealth, it seems unlikely they will quietly surrender this option.

As an example, let me present one genericized patient from my own practice (not a specific individual, but an amalgam of my typical patients). A patient with severe back pain that limits their mobility has found it difficult to come into clinic to receive care. As a result, they miss about half their appointments, and make up for this by calling the clinic with their issues and for medication adjustments. This uses a lot of staff time and is very inefficient. Further, when they do come into the clinic they have to arrange for transportation and miss an entire day of work. They live 45 minutes away, but the travel time can be much more during rush hour if they have an early appointment. The entire saga may take 3-4 hours out of their day, be extremely uncomfortable, and cost money for transportation – all to sit in front of me for 10-15 minutes to discuss their management. In many cases an exam is not necessary (I have examined them recently enough and nothing has changed).

Compare this to signing on to an app, spending 2 minutes with a nurse to update your med list, and then going right to the 10-15 minute meeting with your physician, right from your home. I have patients who do this from their office at work, or while engaged in childcare. They can also more easily have family members present with minimal inconvenience to them. This also allows me to have more frequent visits with patients when necessary.

My experience is typical. In a recent survey of physician satisfaction with telehealth:

85% indicated that telehealth increased timeliness of care.

75% said telehealth allowed them to deliver high-quality care.

More than 70% were motivated to increase telehealth use.

Patients have a similar positive attitude. Telehealth increases access to care. It also has reduced some measures of racial healthcare disparity, such as treatment completion. It has improved access to expert care for rural and underserved populations. Telehealth reduces overhead and is simply extremely efficient for the right visits. For big medical centers, it reduces traffic, parking, and wait times.

There are still some challenges to optimally incorporating telehealth into the health care system. Even though it improves access overall, there are concerns that it may exacerbate the digital divide – relative lack of access among some marginalized populations. This has been improving with the technology, however. Patients can complete their telehealth visit with just a smartphone – even the smartphone of a friend or family member. About 92% of households in the US have some type of computer, and 84% have a smartphone. There is still a small gap, but it is steadily shrinking. In fact, it may even be cost effective for health insurance to pay for a device to use for telehealth visits for those who do not have one, rather than pay the higher cost of face-to-face visits.

After the pandemic shutdown, the one feature that reverted to pre-pandemic rules was the need for state licensure. Most states rescinded their waiver for out-of-state providers over telehealth. For example, I have patients from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York who come to my clinic in Connecticut. Some patients travel for two hours to see me. They would be ideal for telehealth visits, but this is not allowed because they are out-of-state. For telehealth, states should simply change the rules so that as long as the provider is in a state where they are licensed, they can see any patient via telehealth.

Overall it is amazing how rapidly the health care system widely adopted telehealth, and that overall it worked out extremely well (unlike, say, the educational system). Telehealth is clearly here to stay, and will improve as we learn how to optimally incorporate it into patient care. The pandemic also served to reduce the unfair stigma attached to online care and unfound concerns about the effect on patient care. Telehealth is a net positive and will continue to improve health care in the future.

Paul Sax is an infectious-disease physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. Even so, when Sax’s kids asked him whether they should get the updated COVID vaccine this fall, he wasn’t really sure what to tell them. His two children are in their 20s, healthy, and at no special risk of complications from disease. Each had recovered from COVID, and thus, he reasoned, had extra immunity on top of what they’d gotten from their prior shots. Another injection would likely cause them a day or two of unpleasant side effects, and expose them to a very small risk of heart inflammation. Would it also meaningfully lower their chances of infection or the severity of their symptoms if they did get sick? Would an extra shot reduce their minuscule odds of death?Sax admits he didn’t have “iron-clad data” to back up his thinking either way. The bivalent vaccines had been authorized only on the basis of how many antibodies they produced, a useful but imperfect gauge of their positive effects—and so, even now, no one knows for sure how much real-world benefit they provide for the majority of Americans who are already shielded by vaccination and prior infection. Studies have shown that, going by antibody levels, recovering from COVID is already a good booster. There’s another problem, too: The new shots are designed to target the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of Omicron, but these now account for fewer than one-seventh of infections in this country, according to the CDC. The FDA believes that the boosters are still “likely to help,” but studies hint that the shots are already out of date.Sax did end up recommending the latest dose to his kids, because there was no way of knowing exactly how much immunity they’d gotten from their infections. But the simple fact that he, like other experts, has been expected to make such decisions on the basis of conflicting laboratory data is pushing doctors back into the disquieting realm of scientific uncertainty. It suggests that we’ve reached a turning point in our pandemic expertise, where some of the astounding progress made since 2020 has started to decay.At the outset of the crisis, the world’s scientists used their grit and genius to develop new ideas with unprecedented speed; collectively, the COVID vaccines and treatments they produced saved tens of millions of lives. But their historic push for knowledge has lately slowed and sputtered in its tracks. Society spent billions of dollars to answer a single, urgent question: How do you combat a novel respiratory virus? Now, all of a sudden, we find ourselves a little baffled by the follow-up: How do you handle a respiratory virus that is familiar?The first COVID shots were the culmination of a project that involved governments and research institutions all around the world—a human, and humanitarian, achievement on the grandest scale. At least 12 different vaccines have since been cleared for human use. They didn’t just arrive in record time; they were also of extraordinary quality. Rigorous clinical trials demonstrated that immunization could reduce the risk of symptomatic disease by up to 95 percent.Two years later, though, those claims no longer hold. We’re now facing down millions of infections—with no clear sense of our tweaked vaccines’ effectiveness for most of the people who take them. What’s pushing COVID science backwards? Don’t blame viral evolution—or not entirely. The emergence of new subvariants does weaken the effects of our vaccines. (It may also render some monoclonal-antibody treatments obsolete.) But the bigger problem isn’t that the virus has become a stranger. It’s that we’ve come to know it all too well.Most of the groundbreaking research that led to our current vaccines and treatments was performed in a type of human that no longer exists in any but the smallest numbers: Homo uninoculatus uninfectus, which is to say, a person who has neither gotten sick with COVID nor ever taken a vaccine against it. The original vaccine studies by Moderna and Pfizer excluded participants who were known to have caught COVID. Paxlovid was authorized based on a study of unvaccinated subjects. The other antivirals, too, were tested only in those who hadn’t gotten any shots. Yet here’s where we are right now: Seven in 10 Americans have received at least a primary vaccine series, and more than 95 percent have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from vaccination, infection, or both. Globally, 13 billion shots have been administered, and nearly every country has suffered through widespread disease. We developed all these drugs for a world of COVID virgins, and now that world is gone.This is very good news: Patients with preexisting immunity are at far lower risk. New infections are a lot milder, on average, than they were in 2020. Fewer patients are entering ICUs with lungs damaged by the severe pneumonia we saw at the start of the pandemic, and those hospitalized with COVID are trending older and sicker overall. Clearly we’re living through a new—and better—phase of the pandemic. But the same development also makes it harder to figure out whether vaccines are still doing what they’re meant to do.[Read: The end of Evusheld]Recall the headline finding from the original mRNA-vaccine trials, that the shots’ ability to prevent symptomatic illness was an incredible 95 percent. That figure, as measured in real-world populations, has taken a nosedive ever since. The initial two-shot series staved off as few as one in three infections in nursing homes during the Delta wave, and offered essentially no protection against mild illness by the time Omicron arrived. That certainly doesn’t mean the shots are worthless, and that we might as well have been receiving saline injections all along. Rather, it suggests two things. First, vaccine-induced immunity weakens over time: Antibody levels dwindle and SARS-CoV-2 may get better at eluding the protections that remain. Second—and this is the source of much uncertainty today—the shots’ continuing effects may seem to go away as more people get infected and form immune responses on their own.Here’s how that works. A vaccine’s effectiveness is measured by comparing COVID outcomes between those who get the shots and those who don’t. When many people in the unvaccinated group have natural immunity, the vaccine’s benefit could become obscured. Now that almost all Americans are estimated to have caught SARS-CoV-2 at least once, we have no good way of controlling for this effect—and it may be very large. Just look at Hong Kong: When the city suffered an Omicron BA.2 onslaught last winter—after having suppressed most of the previous outbreaks—two doses of the Pfizer vaccine still proved 89 percent effective at preventing severe disease in a largely immune-naive population. The same two doses, measured against BA.1 and BA.2 in North America, appeared to provide as little as 34 percent protection against severe disease.[Read: Inside the mind of an anti-Paxxer]This would already leave us in an awkward and uncertain spot, even if the newest doses of the vaccine hadn’t been updated in the absence of rigorous, large-scale clinical trials. Instead we have preliminary data from the CDC suggesting that the bivalent boosters offer modest protection against symptomatic illness. Many questions remain. The study doesn’t measure the shots’ effects on staving off severe disease, and the results weren’t broken down by prior infection status. The data were also collected from mid-September to mid-November, when BA.4 and BA.5 were still predominant and antibody levels were at their peak, so we don’t know how well the shots are going to hold up through the winter.Our current, diminished state of COVID knowledge extends beyond vaccines. COVID treatments, too, have been subject to a reemerging ignorance. Like the mRNA vaccines, antiviral drugs were conjured through historic effort, and introduced to clinics with reams of data to support their use. A randomized trial performed across 343 research sites around the world taught us that Paxlovid could nearly eliminate pandemic hospitalizations. Other treatments like molnupiravir and remdesivir were also shown to help keep patients from becoming severely ill through studies spanning many different countries. But in 2022, those findings are no longer so definitive.If you get sick with COVID now, a doctor like Harvard’s Sax might prescribe an antiviral drug, but wouldn’t know for sure how much it will reduce your risk of hospitalization or death. Todd Lee, an infectious-disease physician at McGill University, illustrated the uncertainty this way: “When President Biden gets COVID again,” he asked me—emphasizing the word when—“should he get Paxlovid?” As an 80-year-old patient who has gotten five doses of vaccine and recovered from a prior Omicron infection, Joe Biden’s case exists outside existing evidence. Biden’s doctor will probably prescribe another round of Paxlovid—but limited data support its use. Same for molnupiravir, remdesivir, or monoclonal antibodies.The pivotal trial for Pfizer’s antiviral drug Paxlovid showed that it could prevent 89 percent of hospitalizations or deaths in high-risk adults without a history of vaccination or infection. Yet among the subset of participants in the Pfizer trial who were found to have natural COVID antibodies (perhaps implying that they’d been infected unawares), the drug seemed to prevent fewer bad outcomes. A similar finding was seen with Merck’s molnupiravir pill. Because most Americans now fall into that antibody-positive category, can we assume that our antivirals will continue to play as important a role for us as they did before? Lee doesn’t think so. People with some form of immunity are already at low risk of hospitalization, so he thinks that any treatment will offer diminishing returns; beyond that, the specifics are unclear. Even attempting to quantify treatment’s ever-diminishing benefit with larger trials is “perhaps a fool’s errand,” he said, “because we’re so successful with vaccination and because we have all these people who have survived natural infection.”[Read: Will we get Omicron’d again?]We can all rejoice at the source of this uncertainty—that most of us are at lower risk from COVID than we’ve ever been. But our scientific ignorance still has dangers of its own. “One thing you worry about is getting behind the eight ball,” Sax told me. We can’t yet make good predictions about how SARS-CoV-2 will evolve or how devastating the next wave of disease will be. And however the pandemic might develop or recede, elderly and immunocompromised patients deserve the most relevant vaccination and treatment protocols—because they’re the ones who bear the brunt of medical uncertainty.There are ways to rebuild expired COVID knowledge. The PANORAMIC trial, with more than 26,000 participants in the United Kingdom, is an example of one approach: the large randomized, controlled study.PANORAMIC, which includes people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, aims to identify whether antiviral treatments help today’s COVID patients recover sooner or stay out of the hospital. The results so far have been mixed: Among the 99 percent of the study’s participants who are vaccinated, researchers found zero benefit from taking molnupiravir, when measured by hospitalization and death rates, but the drug did lead to a faster improvement in symptoms. New data on Paxlovid are forthcoming.In the meantime, doctors will remain at sea on how to treat patients who already have some immunity to COVID. Hybrid immunity—the combination of vaccination and a prior infection—seems to offer the strongest, most durable protection. But the incremental benefit of repeated boosters or treatment on top of this is less certain. Public-health agencies and professional groups aren’t giving much direction. Right now, the CDC recommends that everyone age 5 or older get the bivalent booster, regardless of prior infection status. (The agency does say that patients “may consider” delaying the latest shot until three months after they last got sick with COVID.) Treatment guidelines from the National Institutes of Health and the Infectious Diseases Society of America are no help, either. NIH merely notes that “the efficacy of these treatments in patients who have been vaccinated is unclear,” while IDSA describes the value of treatment for immune populations as a “critical unanswered question.” Yet this unanswered question now applies to nearly everyone on Earth.Pharmaceutical companies don’t have much incentive to sort this out, given that their treatments are widely available and reaping record profits. “I don’t think they want more data because more data might show the drugs don’t work,” David Boulware, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Minnesota, told me. I asked Pfizer and Moderna whether the companies had plans to run new, large-scale clinical studies of their COVID shots and drugs in vaccinated and previously infected individuals, but neither responded to my inquiry.If pharmaceutical companies don’t continue to evaluate their therapies, independent scientists will have to pick up the slack. The PANORAMIC study is being conducted by academic researchers with the cooperation of governments and health systems. Trials like that one can provide important patches to our eroding expertise, but they are too costly and impractical to answer every question. Studies that measure how well a person’s antibodies and immune cells inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in the lab can plug some other holes. James Crowe, a physician and vaccine scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me he’s optimistic that this form of investigation will soon pay dividends. Scientists have become adept at measuring whether our vaccines create an effective immune response, he said, and their test-tube data will be useful even in the absence of clinical information. After all, we don’t run large-scale trials for the flu shot every year.For most healthy people, however, the stakes of having access to this knowledge are diminishing. Many recent COVID deaths occurred not because of COVID pneumonia itself, but because the virus worsened preexisting lung, heart, kidney, or liver conditions. This puts SARS-CoV-2’s behavior more in line with other routine respiratory infections. Although the disease remains a serious threat to the elderly and chronically ill, and many are still subject to long (and medium) COVID, a growing share of the population appears to be out of harm’s way. “We’re victims of our own success,” Lee told me. We developed an incredible global research apparatus overnight. Vaccines became widely available—if too slowly and inequitably—and they did what they were supposed to do: keep people out of the hospital while the population built up immune protection.[Read: Medium COVID could be the most dangerous COVID]Uncertainty does not imply paralysis. People who face the highest risks from the virus can top up with the latest booster, or take Paxlovid when they’re sick, despite not knowing how effective either option will be. The early studies showed that, fundamentally, these therapies perform. But to optimize their benefit—to save as many lives as possible and prevent additional suffering while avoiding unnecessary treatment—we’ll need more and better data.These answers will not be forthcoming if endemic COVID leads to a return of endemic science, which faces little public appetite to study existing drugs, and bureaucratic roadblocks for promising new ones. Reverting to the default state of medical knowledge means making important decisions by instinct, authority, or flawed real-world observations. The pandemic was an exception to this rule: Scientists, industry, and government banded together to generate real answers very quickly. But instead of applying this engine of discovery to every disease imaginable, society seems on the cusp of dismantling it.

As a portrait of how Russia came to be the cynical and aggressive autocracy of today, Adam Curtis’s seven-part BBC documentary series TraumaZone: What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy is impeccable. It is a claustrophobic, sprawling Russian novel of a film, depicting what happens to a society when it loses any faith in its guiding ideology, and yet can find nothing workable with which to replace it.
A constant rebuke to the increasingly dumbed-down stylistic tropes of 2020s TV programming, the Curtis series begins with long, Tarkovskian, establishing scenes of a continent-spanning nation in disarray. Then, as the collapse accelerates, the scenes are cut shorter, harder and become increasingly hard to watch: images of communities ravaged by war, corruption and economic catastrophe, in which mere survival is paramount and cynicism is universal. After the decade of anarchy and degradation we have witnessed, Putin’s arrival on the scene in 1999 seems to come almost as a relief: the horrors of the present still lie offstage, waiting to be born.
While it is a brilliant work of recent history, can we draw parallels with our own society, which faces a comparable loss of faith in its guiding structures, and confusion and cynicism about any possible political futures?
I ask him, when we meet at UnHerd’s new Westminster club, whether, like the marginal aestheticising rebels on which his films so often centre, such as Tupac Shakur and Edward Limonov, he considers himself a dissident.

“No, no, I’m just a hack,” he says. “But what I’m interested in is finding individuals who embody the dilemmas of our time. I think Tupac’s absolutely fascinating because he was trying to do that thing of talking about power, talking about politics, but as an individual, and expressing it individualistically through his music. Most talked the radical talk, but they gave up on radical action. Tupac didn’t, he really tried to fuse those two together. He knew individualism and self expression was sort of the thing of our age — you couldn’t go back to collective organisation, no one wanted that any longer. But he tried to fuse that with radical action. And ultimately, it didn’t work, it’s a sort of tragedy.”
And Limonov?
“Limonov founded the National Bolshevik Party in the mid-Nineties. And many people just saw him as a fascist. And he was interested in fascist ideas. But actually, what he became was a focus for all those people who had been completely pulled away from what was happening in the rest of Russian society — all kinds of punks, all kinds of radicals, all kinds of ecologists.”
Yet Curtis’s interest in marginal political figures, holding up a distorted mirror to their crumbling political orders, is hard to separate from his own position within the state broadcaster, deconstructing the ideological pieties of our time from a standpoint, as E.M. Forster said of the poet Cavafy, “at a slight angle to the universe”. Similarly, in his sympathetic portrayal of the efforts of reformist Communists to preserve their crumbling system, it’s possible to discern a certain conservatism of the Left in his work, in which the rampant consumerism and individualism of capitalist society, when it hits the Soviet Union like a nuclear strike, is revealed to us afresh as something absurd and horrifying. What, then, are Curtis’s own politics?
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“I’m very much of my time. I don’t have a fixed politics,” he says, adding that his 2002 series The Century of the Self, which traced the roots of the Nineties Third-Way consensus back through the midcentury advertising industry to the birth of psychoanalysis, could be interpreted as “a crystal perfect piece of neoconservative ideology, domestic neoconservatism, because what it’s actually arguing is the rise of individualism acted like an acid eating away at the fabric of social organisations, leaving a society of people bereft, individuals alone, supported by a wave of debt on their own, and just waiting for the crash, which is a sort of moralistic neocon attitude. That’s not actually what I think. But you could argue that about most films, I think. I don’t know really what my politics are.”
“I mean,” he adds, “I don’t share a thing that a lot of the liberals have, which is I’m always quite interested in Right-wing ideas, because I think for a long time, they were quite confident that they made the running. And even now I hear people like Peter Thiel talking about René Girard on mimetic desire. I think it’s quite interesting. Because actually, if you ever wander around a bookshop, everyone else is looking at what everyone else is buying, you understand what mimetic desire really is — it’s that if you’re on your own, how do you know what identity you want? That’s why everyone is curtain-twitching at the moment on the internet, because they don’t know what they want to be.”
Curtis’s films are, in essence, works of intellectual history, which outline how the ideological fixations of elites, particularly their quest for constructing political utopias, break apart on contact with the messiness and ambiguity of the real world, often creating dystopias for the people who have to live with the consequences. But in constructing his own all-encompassing theories of everything, which draw links and parallels between widely different events with an often hallucinatory clarity, is he constructing his own counter-mythology? Is Curtis, in fact, a conspiracy theorist himself?
“I do think there’s something very interesting that has happened in the last 20 or 30 years… in this country and America, the political parties have become increasingly homogenised,” he told me. “Despite all the rhetoric and the squealing, there is actually very little difference, and you can see this with the election that’s coming up here. What, then, has happened is that the word “conspiracy”, I’ve noticed, has changed its meaning… It’s also increasingly used by people deep within that narrow bandwidth as a criticism of people who are outside the bandwidth, who may actually have a reasonable, alternative attitude to the world.”
“So sometimes I get accused of being a conspiracy theorist. What I would say to that, is that it often comes from the sort of people who used to go on about how there were weapons of mass destruction out in the deserts of Iraq, and the very fact that you couldn’t find them proved they existed. And those people who for years went on about how Cambridge Analytica or Vladimir Putin and various other evil people gave you Brexit and Trump. Well, that’s a bit rich, excuse me, because the one thing I have never done in any film is allege anything like that. What I’m intrigued by is going outside that bandwidth because I think it’s so narrow…”
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“I’ve been shouted at by sort of nice, sweet liberal people at dinner parties, saying, ‘Well, I’ve read the Mueller report…’ Within the bandwidth it leads to that madness. It is madness. It’s sort of dying away now, but they went mad. And this goes back to my thing about ‘What have we just been through?’ A really odd time. And then we come out of it, and we press buttons to try and make things better, and none of them work. It makes me think, what’s the solution to that?”
What is the solution, in a world where we have lost faith in the organising myths of our society, but there is no obvious successor ideology? Perhaps the clearest insight into Curtis’s own sense of political futures can be drawn from the concluding sequence of 2021’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, whose psychedelic bricolage of themes from 20th-century history provided an alternative cultural hinterland to the angry populisms of the 2010s. In it, Curtis ends on the suggestion that not just the West but also its autocratic rivals China and Russia are “exhausted, empty of any new ideas”, and that “all of them have corruption that is burrowing deeper into their institutions, corruption that the politicians seem powerless to stop”. Yet the series ends on a surprisingly optimistic note, concluding with the famous quote from the anarchist anthropologist and political theorist that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”.
Graeber “was a really, really interesting person”, Curtis told me, “because he wasn’t just an anarchist, he was a bit like Murray Bookchin. They’re the anarchists that [PKK leader Abdullah] Ocalan knew, he was sort of almost a libertarian socialist, which is a thing that I’m really fascinated by, because I do think that individualism isn’t going to go back into the box. But if you want to change the world, you’ve got to come together in some kind of way, because that’s the only way you’re ever going to be powerful. Because if you’re on your own, it’s lonely, frightening, and you’re not powerful. And no one’s managed to square that circle. And I’ve always thought libertarian socialism is sort of trying to get to that point. And I really, really liked the quote I used, which is that actually, we made this society, it’s not like it came out of nothing, it was just imposed on us, and that does mean we can remake it if we want to.”
And yet, Curtis’s films make clear we are locked in an iron cage of ideology, enforced by increasingly shrill and hysterical political taboos, where any attempt at exploring alternative futures is cast as a one-way journey to the horrors of the 20th century. We are trapped in a failing system, whose morbid symptoms become ever more grotesque, yet in which popular attempts to correct its failing course are pathologised as merely the devious machinations of shadowy elites, who have hypnotised the dull-witted masses to do their bidding for them. Yes, things are bad, say the defenders of the current order as it collapses around them, but the only alternatives are far worse.
“What I’m so fascinated by in our time,” Curtis tells me, “is the ideology, and I think it’s okay to call it an ideology, that prevents us doing that. It’s a really interesting ideology, because it isn’t like other older ideologies, which would say ‘No, this is fantastic, this is the dream world’ — which is what they did in the Soviet Union, right up to the end. In this society, the press, the think tanks, all the wonks, have this sort of view that ‘We know it’s crap. We know it’s not ideal, we know it’s not wonderful. We know there’s corruption, but we can’t do anything about it. We know there’s injustice, we know there are inequalities, but we can’t do anything about that. But you’ve got to accept it. Because the rest is so horrible. The rest is much worse.’
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“And what they mean by that is the alternatives are terrifying. They’re like the terrifying autocracy that Vladimir Putin has created in Russia. They’re like the technocratic, brutal surveillance system that Xi Jinping is running in China, or even worse and darker than that, there is radical modern Islamism, which you see in Iran, and also, if you take the New York Times as your Bible, the terrible fascism that Donald Trump and his followers are going to bring to America.
“What I find so fascinating about now is that all those things have proven to be much more fragile, much weaker than the established view said. Putin would seem to be a transitional figure in a yet fully collapsing empire, who probably will lose power in some way or another. I have a friend in China, whose parents are quite high up in the Communist Party. They are quite frightened about what’s happening in the protests. They know there’s a real problem. And also, that there is an enormous amount of debt in China, far more than we had in 2008. Iran… I think what might happen in Iran in the future might be extraordinarily important.
“And quite frankly, despite all the efforts of the New York Times, Donald Trump is beginning to be seen as what he probably was — as some weird grifter, who managed to occupy a space that we’d left open, because we were attending to something else, and just occupied that space and touched on something in America.”
For Curtis, it seems, the looming failures of the West’s rival autocracies, for all that they are held up by liberals as justification for preserving our own failing system, and by some radical conservatives as models to be emulated, open up a strange and unlikely moment of possibility. At the other end of the present global crisis, perhaps, lies the opportunity to finally transcend the long 20th century. Things may seem bad, but a better future may already be straining to be born.
“They’re all fading away,” he says, “which makes me — I mean, this is a really weird thing to say at this present moment in time — quite optimistic, because it’s like the way is open now to actually start thinking in quite a radical way… and that actually, maybe that’s the kind of journalism we should be doing.”
***
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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Win or lose, all the criticisms of Herschel Walker obscure a larger point: The Republicans have acclimated the American public to ghastly behavior from elected officials and candidates for high office. The result is lasting damage to our political system no matter what happens in Georgia or in the 2024 races.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The college essay is dead.
China’s COVID wave is coming.
Imagine a world without Amazon.
Once Vices, Now HabitsWe have come to the end of the 2022 midterms with a final contest in Georgia. By the time you read this, we will likely know whether Herschel Walker will become a United States senator. (I suspect he will not, but terrible things that seem improbable can still happen.) Yards of columns have been written about Walker’s palpable, cinder-block denseness; yesterday, he seemed confused about whether he was running for the House or the Senate. And, as my friend Jill Lawrence pointed out today, supporting an allegedly abusive rake like Walker makes a mockery of Republicans who once extolled virtue and character as the most important qualities in a public servant.The larger problem, however, is that Walker’s candidacy is a reminder of just how much we’ve acclimated ourselves to the presence of awful people in our public life. Although we can be heartened by the defeat of Christian nationalists and election deniers and other assorted weirdos, we should remember how, in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble.And yet, here we are: An entire political party shrugs off revelations that a man running on an anti-abortion platform may have paid for an abortion (possibly two), has unacknowledged children, and may also be a violent creep. Not long ago, Walker would have been washed out of political contention as a matter of first principles.Think of how much our civic health has declined in general. Only 35 years ago, during the long-ago Camelot of the late 1980s, Gary Hart had to pull out of the Democratic primaries for getting caught with a pretty lady on a boat named “Monkey Business,” and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart stood with tears streaming down his face because he’d been caught with a prostitute in a Louisiana motel. In 1995, Senator Bob Packwood (again, more tears) resigned in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct just before being expelled from the Senate.The Republicans were once an uptight and censorious party—something I rather liked about them, to be honest—and they are now a party where literally nothing is a disqualification for office. There is only one cardinal rule: Do not lose. The will to power, the urge to defeat the enemy, the insistence that the libs must be owned—this resentment and spite fuels everything. And worst of all, we’ve gotten used to it. I’m not sure who said it first, but the Doobie Brothers said it again in the title of their 1974 album: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.There’s a lot of blame to go around, but no one did more to pioneer the politics of disgust than Donald Trump, who took the outrageous moments of his two presidential campaigns and turned them into virtues. Trump ran, and still runs, as something of a dare, a challenge to see if we’re just a bunch of delicate scolds who get the vapors over things like veterans or foreign influence or nepotism. Are you really going to let the commies and immigrants from the “shithole countries” take over? he seems to ask at every turn, just because of little nothing-burgers like whether I’m keeping highly classified documents in the magazine rack next to my gold toilet?As usual, however, the real problem lies with the voters. The Republicans are getting the candidates they want. This is not about partisanship—it’s about an unhinged faux-egalitarianism that demands that candidates for office be no better than the rest of us, and perhaps even demonstrably worse. How dare anyone run on virtue or character; who do they think they are?This is a tragedy of insecurity, because what it really means is that GOP voters don’t think very much of themselves. At some point, some of them may realize what they have done, but by then it’s too late. The only thing worse than making a mistake is admitting it was a mistake, and facing the humiliation of being a sucker.Other voters can help raise the bar by inflicting serial defeats on such candidates in the general elections and giving oxygen to arguments on the right that it’s time to stop nominating—in the words of New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu—“crazy, unelectable candidates.” Perhaps from there, the GOP can start fusing electability back to character, but that process will take a while. In the meantime, we should all refuse to normalize terrible and often scummy candidates. If Walker is elected, it will be a tragic day in the history of the Senate. But the fact that he ran at all—and garnered millions of votes from perfectly normal American citizens—is the larger tragedy, and the damage will last a lot longer than Walker’s bizarre political career.Related:
Herschel Walker’s candidacy is an assault on the dignity of Black Americans.
Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?
The House committee investigating the January 6 attack announced that it will issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
Morocco defeated Spain in a World Cup match, making it the last African team left in the tournament.
The Trump Organization was convicted of tax fraud and other financial crimes.
(Pat Redmond / Universal Pictures)
Cocaine Bear: Why?By Yasmin TayagTwo questions immediately occur to anyone watching the trailer for Cocaine Bear: Is this real? and Why? The first is easy enough to answer. The film, about a black bear that gobbles bricks of cocaine and then butchers a series of humans in rapid succession, is loosely based on a real-life black bear that, in 1985, gobbled at least part of a single brick of cocaine and then died.The true story had no murderous rampage. When investigators finally found the corpse of the 175-pound male, nicknamed Pablo Eskobear, all that was left were “bones and a big hide” and three to four grams of cocaine in his bloodstream—an unseemly end for an otherwise honorable creature that was merely trawling his neighborhood for a snack (as bears do!). Long immortalized in memes as a descendant of Tony Montana, and a popular “TIL” on Reddit, the announcement, in March 2021, that Universal Pictures was backing a movie about him made sense. Kind of.But when the trailer finally dropped last week ahead of its release in February, the internet was not ready.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
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(Allen Fraser / Universal Pictures)
Read. Trespasses, by Louise Kennedy, a novel about good sex in the time of war.Watch. Violent Night (in theaters), a dark comedy about a murderous Santa that you may find delightful—if you can handle all the blood.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Over the weekend, a Twitter account that calls itself “The Sting”—an homage to the classic Oscar-winning movie—posted a thread of 50 great films from the 1980s. I was in my 20s and an avid moviegoer in those days, and so I checked out the list. (By the way, I turn 62 tomorrow, and I’ll be off for a few days while my colleagues handle the Daily until my return on Friday.) Yes, there are a few clinkers, but most of them are now underrated or forgotten classics. I’ll just highlight three that you’ve likely not seen, or not seen lately.Start with Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, in which Robert De Niro plays a fame-obsessed nerd whose only goal is to be on a talk show. He ends up kidnapping a famous TV host, played straight and with utter disdain by—of all people—Jerry Lewis. (Years later, in Joker, De Niro would himself play a TV host who is stalked by a fame seeker, but The King of Comedy doesn’t need Joker’s gore to make us cringe.) Then try Outland, which is basically High Noon set in space. Sean Connery is a U.S. marshal who takes on the bad guys in a space station. That’s it, that’s the movie—and it’s great. And I was particularly glad to see the inclusion of Streets of Fire, a sort of live-action graphic novel from the director of The Warriors that billed itself as “a rock & roll fable” about a hero saving his girl from a gang of bikers. It has great music, a great cast, and a great fight scene, and it flopped. It later found a second life—deservedly—as a cult flick.—TomLooking for a gift for the inquisitive people in your life? Give an Atlantic subscription and they’ll receive unlimited access to bold ideas, inspired writing, and daily moments of delight.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In China, a dam seems on the verge of breaking. Following a wave of protests, the government has begun to relax some of its most stringent zero-COVID protocols, and regional authorities have trimmed back a slew of requirements for mass testing, quarantine, and isolation. The rollbacks are coming as a relief for the many Chinese residents who have been clamoring for change. But they’re also swiftly tilting the nation toward a future that’s felt inevitable for nearly three years: a flood of infections—accompanied, perhaps, by an uncharted morass of disease and death. A rise in new cases has already begun to manifest in urban centers such as Chongqing, Beijing, and Guangzhou. Now experts are waiting to see just how serious China’s outbreak will be, and whether the country can cleanly extricate itself from the epidemic ahead.For now, the forecast “is full of ifs and buts and maybes,” says Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa. Perhaps the worst can be averted if the government does more to vaccinate the vulnerable and prep hospitals for a protracted influx of COVID patients; and if the community at large reinvests in a subset of mitigation measures as cases rise. “There is still the possibility that they may muddle through it without a mass die-off,” says Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But even the most smooth and orderly transition,” he told me, “will not prevent a surge of cases.”China represents, in many ways, SARS-CoV-2’s final frontier. With its under-vaccinated residents and sparse infection history, the nation harbors “a more susceptible population than really any other large population I can think of,” says Sarah Cobey, an computational epidemiologist at the University of Chicago. Soon, SARS-CoV-2 will infiltrate that group of hosts so thoroughly that it will be nearly impossible to purge again. “Eventually, just like everyone else on Earth, everyone in China should expect to be infected,” says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona.[Read: How many COVID deaths will Chinese protesters accept?]Whatever happens, though, China’s coming wave won’t recapitulate the one that swept most of the world in early 2020. Though it’s hard to say which versions of the virus are circulating in the country, a smattering of reports confirm the likeliest scenario: BF.7 and other Omicron subvariants predominate. Several of these versions of the virus seem to be a bit less likely than their predecessors to trigger severe disease. That, combined with the relatively high proportion of residents—roughly 95 percent—who have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, might keep many people from falling dangerously ill. The latest figures out of China’s CDC marked some 90 percent of the country’s cases as asymptomatic. “That’s an enormous fraction” compared with what’s been documented elsewhere, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.That percentage, however, is undoubtedly increased by the country’s ultra-rigorous testing practices, which have been catching silent cases that other places might miss. All of Omicron’s iterations also remain capable of triggering severe disease and long COVID. And there are still plenty of worrying omens that climbing cases could reach a horrific peak, sit on a prolonged plateau, or both.One of China’s biggest weak spots is its immunity, or lack thereof. Although more than 90 percent of all people in the country have received at least two COVID shots, those over the age of 80 were not prioritized in the country’s initial rollout, and their rate of dual-dose coverage hovers around just 66 percent. An even paltrier fraction of older people have received a third dose, which the World Health Organization recommends for better protection. Chinese officials have vowed to buoy those numbers in the weeks ahead. But vaccination sites have been tougher to access than testing sites, and with few freedoms offered to the immunized, “the incentive structure is not built,” says Xi Chen, a global-health expert at Yale. Some residents are also distrustful of COVID vaccines. Even some health-care workers are wary of delivering the shots, Chen told me, because they’re fearful of liability for side effects.Regardless of the progress China makes in plugging the holes in its immunity shield, COVID vaccines won’t prevent all infections. China’s shots, most of which are based on chemically inactivated particles of the 2020 version of SARS-CoV-2, seem to be less effective and less durable than mRNA recipes, especially against Omicron variants. And many of China’s residents received their third doses many months ago. That means even people who are currently counted as “boosted” aren’t as protected as they could be.All of this and more could position China to be worse off than other places—among them, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore—that have navigated out of a zero-COVID state, says Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Australia, for instance, didn’t soften its mitigations until it had achieved high levels of vaccine coverage among older adults, Rivers told me. China has also clung to its zero-COVID philosophy far longer than any other nation, leaving itself to contend with variants that are better at spreading than those that came before. Other countries charted their own path out of their restrictions; China is being forced into an unplanned exit.What Hong Kong endured earlier this year may hint at what’s ahead. “They had a really, really bad wave,” Kayoko Shioda, an epidemiologist at Emory University, told me—far dwarfing the four that the city had battled previously. Researchers have estimated that nearly half the city’s population—more than 3 million people—ended up catching the virus. More than 9,000 residents died. And Hong Kong was, in some respects, in a better place to ease its restrictions than the mainland is. This past winter and spring, the city’s main adversary was BA.2, a less vaccine-evasive Omicron subvariant than the ones circulating now; officials had Pfizer’s mRNA-based shot on hand, and quickly began offering fourth doses. Hong Kong also has more ICU beds per capita. Map a new Omicron outbreak onto mainland China, and the prognosis is poor: A recent modeling paper estimated that the country could experience up to 1.55 million deaths in the span of just a few months. (Other analyses offer less pessimistic estimates.)Lackluster vaccination isn’t China’s only issue. The country has accumulated almost no infection-induced immunity that might otherwise have updated people’s bodies on recent coronavirus strains. The country’s health-care system is also ill-equipped to handle a surge in demand: For every 100,000 Chinese residents, just 3.6 ICU beds exist, concentrated in wealthier cities; in an out-of-control-infection scenario, even a variant with a relatively low severe-disease risk would prove disastrous, Chen told me. Nor does the system have the slack to accommodate a rush of patients. China’s culture of care seeking is such that “even when you have minor illness, you seek help in urban health centers,” Huang told me, and not enough efforts have been made to bolster triage protocols. More health-care workers may become infected; patients may be more likely to slip through the cracks. Next month’s Lunar New Year celebration, too, could spark further spread. And as the weather cools and restrictions relax, other respiratory viruses, such as RSV and flu, could drive epidemics of their own.That said, spikes of illness are unlikely to peak across China at the same time, which could offer some relief. The country’s coming surge “could be explosive,” Cobey told me, “or it could be more of a slow burn.” Already, the country is displaying a patchwork of waxing and waning regulations across jurisdictions, as some cities tighten their restrictions to combat the virus while others loosen up. Experts told me that more measures may return as cases ratchet up—and unlike people in many other countries, the Chinese may be more eager to readopt them to quash a ballooning outbreak.[Read: China’s zero tolerance for Xi’s COVID restrictions]A major COVID outbreak in China would also have unpredictable effects on the virus. The world’s most populous country includes a large number of immunocompromised people, who can harbor the virus for months—chronic infections that are thought to have produced variants of concern before. The world may be about to witness “a billion or more opportunities for the virus to evolve,” Cowling told me. In the coming months, the coronavirus could also exploit the Chinese’s close interactions with farmed animals, such as raccoon dogs and mink (both of which can be infected by SARS-CoV-2), and become enmeshed in local fauna. “We’ve certainly seen animal reservoirs becoming established in other parts of the world,” Worobey told me. “We should expect the same thing there.”Then again, the risk of new variants spinning out of a Chinese outbreak may be a bit less than it seems, Abdool Karim and other experts told me. China has stuck with zero COVID so long that its population has, by and large, never encountered Omicron subvariants; people’s immune systems remain trained almost exclusively on the original version of the coronavirus, raising only defenses that currently circulating strains can easily get around. It’s possible that “there will be less pressure for the virus to evolve to evade immunity further,” says Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern; and any new versions of the virus that do emerge might not fare particularly well outside of China. In other words, the virus could end up trapped in the very country that tried to keep it out the longest. Still, with so many people susceptible, Cobey told me, there are zero guarantees.Either way, viral evolution will plod on—and as it does, the rest of the world may struggle to track it in real time, especially as the cadence of Chinese testing ebbs. Cowling worries that China will have trouble monitoring the number of cases in the country, much less which subvariants are causing them. “There’s going to be a challenge in having situational awareness,” he told me. Shioda, too, worries that China will remain tight-lipped about the scale of the outbreak, a pattern that could have serious implications for residents as well.Even without a spike in severe disease, a wide-ranging outbreak is likely to put immense strain on China—which may weigh heavily on its economy and residents for years to come. After the SARS outbreak that began in 2002, rates of burnout and post-traumatic stress among health-care workers in affected countries swelled. Chinese citizens have not experienced an epidemic of this scale in recent memory, Chen told me. “A lot of people think it is over, that they can go back to their normal lives.” But once SARS-CoV-2 embeds itself in the country, it won’t be apt to leave. There will not be any going back to normal, not after this.

Russia has accepted Washington’s invitation to engage in peace talks over the war in Ukraine. Both, of course, have reservations. Russia’s is that it needs to continue to hold territory in Ukraine, America’s is that it needs to make sure Russia surrenders its territory in Ukraine.

It would seem, then, that peace is unlikely, and that the talks are therefore useless to begin with. But that is not the case. Any bargain over a serious matter starts first with a gut check – an attempt to see how deeply the other side is committed. Bargaining begins with each side making demands that are so unacceptable that they anger the other party. It’s a position that makes a deal impossible. Both sides know as much and understand well that their own positions are going to be rejected. More important is how they are rejected. If the response by either side is “Your proposal means that there can never be peace, and our intelligence has compromising pictures of your partner,” then that’s instructive. Personalizing the offer with vile insinuations provides excellent guidance, and will likely receive a reply of massive air attacks.

In this case, the United States offered to negotiate without mentioning its core demand: that Russia withdraw. Moscow replied by openly stating that Russia is prepared to withdraw from all of Ukraine save two important areas. The Americans tried to imply that Russia’s “withdrawal” is neither a withdrawal nor in the forefront. Russia’s response was that a complete withdrawal is a nonstarter. But since two areas were mentioned, one close to Russia, another in south Ukraine, both are extremely difficult for the U.S. to cede because of the political consequences.

All wars end. Some end in the devastation of the enemy, and some end with the exhaustion of one side. Others end with one side unable to continue the war because it sees no way in which to impose such costs on the enemy that it can continue fighting. Forces are not crushed so much as drained, with little hope of continuation.

The current situation is more complex. The war in Ukraine is ongoing, and neither side is crushed or exhausted. Neither has concluded that victory is unreachable. The Ukrainian army itself is divided between Ukrainians and Americans; Ukrainians continue to fight, however wearily, while the Americans send money and equipment without incurring casualties. Put differently, they have very different skin in the game. Ukrainians are fighting for their country, so any inch lost is agony. Washington simply wants to keep Russia away from the eastern border of NATO. It’s not an existential situation. The same can’t be said for Ukraine.

The logic here is for the Russians to attempt to break the Ukrainian army, since extreme casualties might force them to collapse or sue for peace. The strategy for Ukraine is to meet every Russian advance with a counterattack, supplemented as it is by massive U.S. firepower. In the end, the war will be determined by the depth of forces on each side as well as their willingness to fight and die.

All of this suggests a war of attrition. Think World War I but without trenches. The Russians initiated combat, and any admission of failure would threaten the government. Ukrainian concessions would be tantamount to an end of the country, or at least an abdication of its independence. From the American point of view, continuing the war is better than defeat, since U.S. security guarantees to other allies would be on the line. (For this reason, I don’t think Washington will involve itself too much in the fine print.)

Under these circumstances, it would appear that the war cannot end. But each country has an imperative not to be broken and not to capitulate. And no one, save the Americans, can walk away. Reality is the ultimate gut check. Ukraine and Russia will posture until the end, even if neither knows exactly what its breaking point is. Each hopes the other is approaching that breaking point, and each wants to avoid reaching it first.

It is this mutual fear of failure that drives each to a negotiated settlement, however contemptible and belligerent that process will be. The opening gut check is followed by an emerging reality of how much you can play and how much your enemy can play, two variables that are considered every day by leaders and soldiers alike. Unthinkable concessions then become thinkable. The hazier this is, the more each side will be frightened that they will suddenly break.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants an independent Ukraine, Vladimir Putin wants to be president of Russia, and the U.S. wants to end the war without American casualties. None is as confident as he appears.

Like democracy, fascism, and perhaps terrorism, liberalism is one of those things that seems to be in the eye of the beholder. To speak about liberalism—in its original, small-l form—is to invite confusion over the intent and even the identity of the speaker. Here, as elsewhere, the points of contention aren’t really about facts. They aren’t about definitions. They are about narratives, and narratives are about values and first principles: what do we hold dear, and why? The “why” part is difficult and can only really be addressed by way of the stories that we tell ourselves, but more importantly, the stories that are our own and no one else’s—the ones, in other words, that we’ve actually lived. To those who say that lived experience is a prerequisite for understanding the truth of a matter (racism in America, for example), this is just another way of saying that the truth, whatever it might be, is somehow inaccessible. And maybe it is. The problem of definitions (and the narratives within which they are embedded) offers some insight into the overarching and all-consuming epistemological crisis that seems to define our current moment. Before we get to liberalism, though, let’s ask a (simpler?) question: What is racism? A philosopher on Twitter offered up a non-definition of racism, which I found instructive: [I’m] reading a paper where the author asserts that "In academic and progressive circles, 'racism' has acquired a very wide scope." Ppl (esp conservatives) say this a lot but like... I don't think it's true? Just seems like there was a lot of racism not getting called "racism" before.The suggestion here is that racism increases not according to any kind of measurable baseline, but that there can be more racism simply through the act of calling more things racist. Similarly, there can be quite a lot of fascism if it is decided (note the passive tense) that more things that wouldn’t previously be considered fascist now are. It seems self-evident to say that what constituted “racism” 100 years ago is not the same—and shouldn’t be the same—as what constitutes racism today. Fine. But it gets a lot more complicated when things that even progressives themselves wouldn’t have considered racism just 5 years ago are now considered as such. If definitions—and therefore our understandings of what is true or not true—can change so rapidly, then to what extent can they really be “true” in any meaningful sense of the word? Perhaps one way of limiting the epistemological chaos is through education and access to information. But it is precisely higher levels of educational attainment that challenge and even undermine shared understandings of reality. Ideological pluralism and fragmentation have increased along with educational access. This isn’t an accident. If more people are educated (or if more people read), then more people will have opinions about things they didn’t previously have opinions about. And because they perceive themselves as being educated, they will more jealously guard their opinions, however irrational they may be. All ideological movements, particularly the radical ones, rely on ideologues, and ideologues become ideological through education and what’s sometimes called “awareness-raising.”When we talk about liberalism, we’re talking about an ideological orientation as well as a tradition: the classical liberal tradition. Like all traditions, it has a history and a lineage. As a result, there is something approaching a consensus about its basic contours. For example, the U.S. Bill of Rights is a rather impressive encapsulation of liberal values and ideals. I’m unlikely to encounter much pushback when I say that liberalism, unlike democracy, puts its emphasis on personal autonomy, civil liberties, freedom of conscience, the primacy of reason over revelation, and the prioritization of the individual over the collective. As part of this basket, though, I often also include (to make things a bit more tangible) “gender equality” and “minority rights.” But of course, the great liberal theorists were not liberals by this standard. Locke did not believe in full equality for Catholics or atheists. Locke might have been a “feminist” by the standards of his own time, but he was not a feminist by the standards of our own. Does this mean he wasn’t a feminist? A feminist re-reading of Locke suggests a mixed legacy: [Locke endorses] new social processes, which actually throw women back into the home, keep them outside public life and thrust onto them a new form of dependency on their husbands—whatever his liberal rhetoric of individual freedom… Locke's theory is but a liberal accommodation to a new form of now capitalist patriarchy. This problem of projecting contemporary morality onto the past arises whenever we speak of “universal rights.” What is it that makes a universal right universal, particularly if such a right is not universally held? Do such rights need to be universal across time or place, or both? Can something be right and moral in one time period but not in another?In an occasionally charged back-and-forth with my friend and former podcast guest Mustafa Akyol, he repeatedly turned back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as a liberal baseline. If liberalism is about choice, however, then one can presumably choose not to believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In fact, the UDHR protects precisely this choice, when it guarantees in Article 18 the right to “manifest [one’s] religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Of course, that right can’t contradict other rights explicitly enumerated in the UDHR. But there are a number of religiously illiberal practices that do not contradict athe other articles in the document. The right to drink alcohol (or the right to access to alcohol, since the 18th Amendment only prohibited the latter) is not protected under either the UDHR or the U.S. Constitution. (Another relevant consideration is whether a democratically-elected legislature would justify the prohibition of alcohol on health (read: secular) grounds or on religious grounds.)If the UDHR—or, for that matter, the U.S. Bill of Rights—is a liberal baseline, then it still leaves open the question of what is beyond the baseline. What might further gradations of liberalism entail in practice? If this is the floor, what is the ceiling? Are liberals compelled to move toward this “ceiling,” whatever it may be? How far is far enough? Ultimately, these are political questions. They aren’t about the content of liberalism as much as they are about who decides what liberalism should be. And the question of who decides is, ultimately, a question of power.

In the spring of 2021, Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, offered the world a bold and worrying prediction. “My guess is that five years from now we are going to see a bolus of kids with asthma and obesity,” he told Wired. Those children, he said, would be “the COVID kids”: those born just before or during the height of the crisis, when the coronavirus was everywhere, and we cleaned everything because we didn’t want it to be.Finlay’s forecast isn’t unfounded. As James Hamblin wrote in The Atlantic last year, our health relies on a constant discourse with trillions of microbes that live on or inside our bodies. The members of the so-called microbiome are crucial for digesting our food, training the immune system, even greasing the wheels of cognitive function; there does not seem to be a bodily system that these tiny tenants do not in some way affect. These microbe-human dialogues begin in infancy, and the first three or so years of life are absolutely pivotal: Bacteria must colonize babies, then the two parties need to get into physiological sync. Major disruptions during this time “can throw the system out of whack,” says Katherine Amato, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, and raise a kid’s risk of developing allergies, asthma, obesity, and other chronic conditions later in life.The earlier, more intense, and more prolonged the interruptions, the worse. Infants who receive heavy courses of antibiotics—which can nuke microbial diversity—are at greater risk of developing such problems; the same is roughly true for babies who are born by C-section, who formula feed, or who grow up in nature-poor environments. If pandemic-era mitigations re-create even an echo of those effects, that could spell trouble for a whole lot of little kids who may have lost out on beneficial microbes in the ongoing effort to keep nasty ones at bay.More than a year and a half after Finlay’s original prediction, children are back in day care and school. People no longer keep their distance or avoid big crowds. Even hygiene theater is (mostly) on the wane. And if the wave of respiratory viral illness now slamming much of the Northern Hemisphere is any indication, microbes are once again swirling between tiny hands and mouths. But for the circa-COVID kids, the specter of 2026 and Finlay’s anticipated chronic-illness “bump” still looms—and it’ll be a good while yet before researchers have clarity on just how much of a difference those months of relative microbial emptiness truly made.[Read: A year without germs]For now, “we are in the realm of speculation,” says Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello, a microbiologist at Rutgers. Scientists don’t understand how, or even which, behaviors may affect the composition of our inner flora throughout our life span. Chronic illnesses such as obesity and asthma also take time to manifest. There’s not yet evidence that they’re on the rise among children, and even if they were, researchers wouldn’t expect to see the signal for at least a couple of years, perhaps more.Finlay, for one, stands by his original prediction that the pandemic will bring a net microbiome negative. “We underwent a massive societal shift,” he told me. “I am sure we will see an effect.” And he is not the only one who thinks so. “I think it’s almost inevitable that there has been an impact,” says Graham Rook, a medical microbiologist at University College London. If the middle of this decade passes without incident, Rook told me, “I would be very surprised.” Other researchers, though, aren’t so sure. “I don’t think we have doomed a generation of kids,” says Melissa Manus, an anthropologist and microbiome researcher at the University of Manitoba. A few scientists are even pondering whether the pandemic’s ripple effects may have buoyed the microbiomes of the COVID kids. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, told me that, “with any luck,” rates of asthma and obesity might even dip in the next few years. When it comes to the pandemic’s potential fallout, researchers agree on just one thing: COVID babies undoubtedly had an unusual infancy; on average, their microbiomes are bound to look quite different. Different, though, isn’t necessarily bad. “It’s not like there is one golden microbiome,” says Efrem Lim, a microbiologist at Arizona State University. Take Liz Johnson’s sons, born in March 2018, August 2020, and March 2022. All three were born vaginally, in the same hospital, with the assistance of the same midwife; all of them then breastfed; and none of them has undergone an early, concerning antibiotic course. And still, “they all started off with different microbiomes,” she told me. (As a microbiome researcher at Cornell focused on infant nutrition, Johnson can check.)That’s probably totally fine. Across the human population, microbiomes are known to vary wildly: People can carry hundreds of bacterial species on and inside their bodies, with potentially zero overlap from one individual to the next. Bacterial communities aren’t unlike recipes—if you don’t have one ingredient on hand, another can usually take its place.Johnson’s middle son, Lucas, had a starkly different birth experience from that of his older brother—even, in many ways, from that of his younger brother. Lucas was born into a delivery room full of masked faces. In the days after his arrival, no family members came to visit him in the hospital. And although his brothers spent several of their early months jet-setting all around the world with their mother for work trips, Lucas stayed put. “Hardly anybody even knew he was born,” Johnson told me. But throughout his first two years, Lucas still breastfed and had plenty of contact with his family at home, as well as with other kids at day care; he romped in green spaces galore. Yet Johnson and others can’t say, precisely, whether all of that outweighs the sanitariness and the uncrowdedness of Lucas’s earliest days. There would have been a cost to both overcaution and under-caution, “so we just tried to balance everything,” Johnson said. When it comes down to it, scientists just don’t know how much microbial exposure constitutes enough.[Read: Pregnant? Breastfeeding? The vaccine might protect you and your baby]Among COVID babies, microbiome mileage will probably vary, depending on what decisions their parents made at the height of the pandemic—which itself hinges on the sorts of financial and social resources they had. Amato worries most about the families that may have packaged a bunch of sanitizing behaviors together with more established cullers of microbiome diversity: C-sections, formula-feeding, and antibiotic use. Meghan Azad, an infant-health researcher at the University of Manitoba, told me that some new parents might have found it far tougher to breastfeed during the pandemic’s worst—a time when in-person counseling resources were harder to access, and employment was in flux. Chronically poor diets and stress, which many people experienced these past few years, can also chip away at microbiome health.Part of the problem is that many of these risk factors, Rook told me, will disproportionately coalesce among people of lower socioeconomic status, who already tend to have less diverse microbiomes. “I worry this will further increase the health disparity between the rich and the poor,” he said. Even SARS-CoV-2 infections themselves, which have continued to concentrate among essential workers and in crowded living settings, appear to alter the microbiome—a shift that may be temporary in adults, but potentially less so in infants, whose microbiomes haven’t yet matured into a stable state.Many families exist in a gray zone. Maybe they bleached their households often, but found it easier to breastfeed and cook healthful meals while working from home. Maybe their kids weren’t mingling with tons of other toddlers at day care, but they spent much more time rolling around in the backyard, coated in their pandemic puppy’s drool. If all of those factors feed into an equation that sums up to healthy or not, scientists can’t yet do the math. They’re still figuring out how to appropriately weigh each component, and how to identify others they’ve missed.Even in the absence of extra outdoorsiness or dog slobber, Lim isn’t very concerned about the behavioral mitigations people picked up. We’re all “exposed to thousands of microbes all the time,” Lim, who has a 1-and-a-half-year-old daughter, told me. Some extra hand-washing, masking, and time at home is nothing compared with, say, an antibiotic blitzkrieg. Even kids who stayed pretty cloistered “were not living in a bubble.” Some of the social sacrifices kids made may even have strange silver linings. Children no longer attending day care or preschool might have skirted a whole slew of other viral infections that would otherwise have gotten them inappropriate and microbiome-damaging antibiotics prescriptions. Antibiotic use in outpatient settings dropped substantially in 2020, compared with the prior year. Stacked up against the relatively minor toll of pandemic mitigations, Blaser told me, the plus of avoiding antibiotics might just win out. When antibiotic use declines, for example, so do asthma rates.Finlay and others are still keeping an eye out for signals that might start to appear in the next few years. Perhaps most at risk are kids whose families went into “hyper-hygiene mode” in the first couple months of their lives, when microbes are crucial for properly calibrating the immune system’s anti-pathogen alarms. Miss out on those opportunities, and our body’s defensive cells might end up mistaking enemies for allies, or vice versa, sparking particularly severe infections or autoimmune disease. Once wired into a developing child, Finlay said, such changes might be difficult to reverse, especially for the youngest of the COVID cohort. But other experts are hopeful that certain microbial losses can still be recouped through some combination of diet, outdoor play, and socialization (with people who aren’t sick)—restorative interventions that, ideally, happen as early as possible. “The sooner we fix it, the better,” Blaser said.[Read: The pandemic broke the flu … again]No one can choose precisely which microbes to be exposed to: Tactics that halt the transmission of known pathogens have a way of halting the transmission of benign bugs too. But context matters. It’s possible for microbe-inviting behaviors, such as outdoor play, to coexist alongside microbe-shunning tactics, such as ventilating indoor spaces when there’s a massive respiratory outbreak. The fact that we can influence microbial colonization at all is powerful. During the pandemic, mitigations that kept COVID at bay also cratered rates of flu and RSV. Now that those viruses are back, experts are pointing out that we already know how they can once again be stopped. And the choices that people made, and continue to make, to protect their families from pathogens shouldn’t be viewed as some harmful mistake, says Ariangela Kozik, a microbiologist at the University of Michigan.Pandemic kids can get on board with that concept too. Kozik’s now-7-year-old son was a toddler when the pandemic began; even amid society’s hygiene craze, he learned the joys of tumbling around in the dirt and playing with the family’s two dogs. “We talk about how not all germs are the same,” Kozik told me. Her son also picked up and maintained an infection-quashing habit that makes his mom proud: Every day, when he comes home from school, he makes a beeline for the sink to wash his hands. “It’s the first thing he does,” Kozik told me, “even without being asked.”

Freedom of speech is one of the core freedoms of a liberal society. The ability to criticize powerful people and organizations serves as a check on their power, and the act of speech itself is an integral part of one’s personal autonomy.Nonetheless, all liberal societies have placed limits on speech, limits that are inevitable given the dangerous potential of certain forms of speech. The rise of the internet has created a special problem for freedom of expression and has led to substantial confusion on the part of many people. An example of that is Elon Musk, who took over Twitter claiming that he was a “free speech absolutist.” That remark showed that he had not even begun to think through the complexities of managing speech in the internet/big platform era, and we are all paying the price for that now.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Speech has never been totally free in any modern liberal society. Many European liberal democracies have had restrictions on certain forms of political speech such as Holocaust denial, which long predated the rise of the internet. America’s First Amendment was always less restrictive, but even here there are limits. Contrary to popular belief, you can yell fire in a crowded theater, but the Supreme Court has ruled the open incitement of violence to be off-limits.Moreover, the scale of a media channel makes a big difference in the legality of limits to speech. The Federal Communications Commission has long regulated what can be broadcast on over-the-air television, banning hardcore pornography, graphic violence, and other types of content. Indeed, it used to enforce something called the Fairness Doctrine, in which broadcasters were enjoined to promote “balanced” coverage of divergent political views. The consistency of these constraints with the First Amendment was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1968 Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC decision. (Conservatives never liked the Fairness Doctrine because they believed it was tilted against them, and the doctrine was rescinded by administrative decree in the 1980s). Restrictions on broadcasters’ speech was allowed by the Court due to considerations of spectrum scarcity, the uniqueness of broadcasting, and public interest.We are in a comparable situation today with the rise of the internet and social media over the past decade. Spectrum is obviously no longer limited, but network economies have served to drive internet communications into a small number of very large platforms, of which there are three: Twitter, Meta (Facebook), and Google. In many ways these large platforms are comparable to the three broadcast TV channels of the 1960s, influencing not just political opinion but what citizens believe to be factual information. The internet enables the amplification of particular views and information on a scale and with a speed that is historically unprecedented, and also allows the large platforms to in effect block disfavored speech through takedowns.In strict Constitutional terms, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech. Platform decisions to promote or take down material that they carry is actually protected under the First Amendment, so there is a narrow sense in which conservative charges that Twitter and Facebook are engaging in censorship is wrong. In addition, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency act has from the beginning protected the platforms from private litigation.The big platforms have used their power to control the content they carry on a regular basis, which is comparable to the policies of TV networks. They do not permit users to post graphic pornography or violence, promote terrorism, or incite violence (this was the grounds on which Donald Trump was barred from most platforms after January 6). With the exception of the latter, this kind of content moderation has largely been regarded as uncontroversial.Nonetheless, modern democracy has a free speech problem. We need to be specific here: the problem is not that various forms of toxic content such as conspiracy theories, fake news, and hate speech are available over the internet. The First Amendment as it has been interpreted over the years protects these forms of speech. The problem is different and relates to platform scale: the platforms have an unprecedented power to either amplify certain messages or suppress disfavored speech. They have, moreover, substantial ability to microtarget their audiences in ways that earlier advertisers couldn’t achieve. It is platform scale and power that should worry proponents of democracy and properly be the objective of public policy, and not the mere fact that they are carrying politically toxic material. In the 2020 White Paper authored by the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale (which I chaired), this power is likened to a loaded gun left on the table. Presently, we have to trust that the person sitting across from us wouldn’t pick up the gun and shoot us with it, but there was no legal way of preventing that from happening.Elon Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist” constitutes an incoherent posture. Presumably this absolutism will not extend to permitting child pornography or snuff movies to be shared. How about tweets purporting to show that Covid vaccines are harmful, or doxing election officials in the midst of a contested election in a swing state? There is a fascinating case of yoga moms being drawn into QAnon because a prominent yoga guru became an adherent; the suggestion algorithm simply picked up this connection on the assumption that anyone interested in yoga was likely to be interested in QAnon as well. Should social platforms make efforts to stop making similar suggestions?Given the platforms’ power to amplify or suppress, free speech absolutism is simply not a tenable position. The internet has become such a sewer that content moderation is absolutely necessary. The question is, who has the legitimacy to make these complex decisions with regard to political speech? Most of us would agree that the government should not be in charge. There are some European countries like Germany that are trying to regulate the internet in this fashion, but we Americans would never reach consensus on what is acceptable political speech given our polarization. In lieu of such consensus, many people have settled on pressuring the platforms to take on this responsibility. But a for-profit corporation has neither the capacity nor the legitimacy to make such intensely political decisions. Our Working Group on Platform Scale suggested the concept of middleware as a way out of the problem—outsourcing content moderation to a layer of competitive third parties that could tailor choices to the preference of individual users. But there is no business model currently supporting this, and middleware would be fiercely resisted by the platforms themselves.Over the past few weeks Elon Musk has revealed himself to be a MAGA-adjacent conservative who indulges in a lot of Trump-like trolling. For example, he decided to go after Alexander Vindman, the whistleblower who exposed Trump’s effort to block aid to Ukraine leading to his first impeachment.Vindman is both puppet & puppeteer. Question is who pulls his strings … ?— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2022
Having promised to set up an independent body to set content moderation standards, he backed away from that and started making arbitrary decisions as to who to allow on the site. We will never know what other similar choices he has made, particularly with regard to takedowns that are very hard to monitor. He’s now saddled himself with the responsibility for personally making content moderation decisions, like his recent choice to ban Kanye West once more for anti-Semitism.The one thing Musk has said that makes sense is a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach:New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 18, 2022
This comment correctly points to the central problem of the platforms: not so much their content per se, but their ability to amplify or silence. If he were serious about this, he would take away the ability to “like” and retweet harmful content, but not take it down. But this means that Twitter remains in the business of policing content, just using different tools and criteria. Implementing such a policy would still require quite a large bureaucratic apparatus, and I doubt that he is prepared to really go down this route.Image: A microphone with brass knuckles. (Unsplash: Francesco Tommasini)

All summer, crypto advocates had been spinning the bear market as an opportunity to “build.” Karkai and Malavieille assured me that World of Women had enough money in the bank to weather the current downturn, assuming it followed the same one-to-two-year trajectory as previous crypto winters. “The partners that are reaching out to us now, they’re not looking at our floor price or what the market looks like,” Karkai told me.

In the basement, the team was discussing an upcoming World of Women Monopoly set, with each color on the game board corresponding to a different planet. “Are there only women on these planets?” Olivier asked. The presence or absence of men in any WoW-inspired universe would require an explanatory backstory. Now the group’s task was to brainstorm possibilities. “Something must have happened,” Karkai said. “We need a conflict.” Perhaps, she suggested, “there was a terrible revolution where all the women were hunted, and, basically, men wanted to take over.” But if the goal was inclusivity, she noted at one point, “this has to be a positive transition.” Maybe, she proposed, the women had escaped to form their own civilization, and the men would eventually be inspired to “reach out” and merge. It was starting to feel as if George Lucas had sold the rights to “Star Wars” action figures before conceiving of what had happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Online, Karkai speaks the lingua franca of gracious executive enthusiasm. “I want to thank everyone that has been part of our journey in any way,” she tweeted in a thread celebrating World of Women’s first anniversary. (Her followers often reply to her tweets with “gm”—“good morning,” the web3 world’s preferred expression of content-free positivity.) In person, Karkai’s reliance on the language of “empowerment” and “creativity” comes across as either carefully inoffensive or guileless.“She doesn’t quite know how to bullshit people,” Malavieille told me.

Helping set the leadership tone was Snow, who’d left her job as the director of entertainment at Meta in May. Snow started out at Google under Sheryl Sandberg, and followed a path she’d seen taken by many other “Lean In” acolytes: from corporate tech director to “cool startup” C.O.O. Even dressed down in a tropical-print dress and sneakers, she stood out amid her new colleagues in WoW T-shirts. She had finalized the company’s first org chart, and the team had begun interviewing marketing firms. The goal, she said, was to take World of Women from N.F.T. project to “global web3 brand.”

The pivot is by now a time-honored plot point in startup origin stories: a company starts out selling one service, only to become a payment app or a rideshare platform instead. Another tech company in World of Women’s situation might have drawn on a deep bench of programmers or on an unexpectedly useful scrap of code, but World of Women lacked these assets. What it did have was a growing brand and a small but devoted cohort of fans—perhaps none more devoted than its new C.O.O. Snow bought her first WoW in January for 10.8 Ethereum (about thirty-two thousand dollars), just as N.F.T. sales reached giddy new heights. “I still feel like it was amazing money spent,” Snow told me. “No matter what the price paid, it was completely worth it to be in this community.”

“It’s one thing to sell off some Bitcoin if your ‘investment’ isn’t going as well as you hoped,” Molly White, who runs a Web site called Web3 is Going Just Great, has written. “It’s another thing entirely to do that when your asset is what makes you a part of a ‘World of Women’ community.” Art work courtesy Yam Karkai

Amid the broader downturn in the crypto market in recent months, the idea of community has taken on new weight among true believers. Participation breeds a sense of intimacy, and long-term success depends on drawing people in. Lana Swartz, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, has followed the communities around cryptocurrencies and web3, observing the way they rely on a “blurring between sociality and selling” that has long been present in multilevel-marketing schemes, and, more recently, in the business of influencing. “That’s the environment in which N.F.T.s for women touch down,” Swartz told me. “It’s not unfertile ground.”

According to ownership records, there are some fifty-six hundred unique WoW holders and some eleven thousand seven hundred WoWG holders, with significant overlap. The World of Women Discord, meanwhile, has about sixty thousand members. The company’s internal figures suggest that most members of the community are based in the U.S., the U.K., or Canada, and are in their thirties; slightly more than half of them are female. Malavieille told me that the company hoped to take cues from its community when it came to next steps. Did World of Women fans want to play games in the metaverse? So far, it seemed like they were eager to meet one another but not particularly interested in video games.

“Fandoms are what make projects happen,” Alex Hooven, the product-strategy director at FOX Entertainment’s web3 operation, told me. For Hollywood, an N.F.T. collection’s built-in audience, with its core of vocal supporters ready to provide free promotion, is appealing even in the absence of much narrative content.

When the World of Women team met in Lisbon, the ideal model—the one with the most ardent fan base, and enough plotlines to expand endlessly—seemed to be the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Kempf raised a brief objection. “We are not a story company or a movie company like Marvel,” he said.

But, for the moment, Karkai was adamant. “I think that, moving forward, being realistic, we really have to build a strong universe,” she said. Otherwise, she continued, “at some point, it’s not going to be relevant anymore.”

When Karkai was a girl, she believed that she could speak with her dog, Iris. As she tells it, her family couldn’t afford after-school activities or video games, and she was an only child who inhabited a world of fantasy. If she saw something shiny outside her window at night, she felt confident that it was a fairy. Magic seemed real. “I really believed in it strongly,” Karkai told me. “But I didn’t want to tell anybody, because every time I would try to say something like ‘Oh, magic exists,’ someone would be there to kill that for me.”

Karkai recalls that after her parents divorced, when she was ten, she escaped further into the imaginary. She watched epic franchises such as “The Lord of the Rings”; old favorites, including “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz”; and classic Disney films like “Cinderella” and “Pinocchio.” She thought she might like to make movies one day, too. “I always knew that I wanted to do something creative,” she said.

At seventeen, she took the money she’d saved working for six months on a farm and moved to New York. (Karkai, who grew up speaking three languages and now speaks five, was fluent in English.) She found an apartment near Washington Square Park, took long walks, and ate a lot of instant oatmeal. Once, she attended an open house at New York University. It would have been “a dream to study cinema there,” she said. “But obviously it was an impossible dream, because it’s so expensive.” Unable to find work in New York, she travelled as an au pair and then moved to Paris, where she shared a studio apartment and took film classes while waitressing, babysitting, and bartending. She met Malavieille at a Halloween party—she was dressed as Uma Thurman in “Pulp Fiction,” and he showed up without a costume.

“Whose idea was it to start with the ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus?” Cartoon by Carolita Johnson Share Share Shop Shop

Karkai says that she grew up in Southern Europe and in the Middle East, but she now prefers not to share more than that publicly. An emphasis on pseudo-anonymity is not uncommon in the crypto world—famously, almost nothing is known about the purported inventor of Bitcoin, who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. Just as Karkai sought to make the WoWs inclusive by effacing points of difference, she seeks to forge a public identity that is indeterminate.

At interviews for entry-level jobs in Paris, she remembers, the same thing kept happening. “People would ask me, ‘So, where are you from?’ ” she told me. “And then, when you get into detail about those things, people start judging you.” She found that Parisians were willing to be quite direct. “ ‘I think that, culturally speaking, there are too many differences,’ ” she recalls someone telling her. “You know, ‘We don’t have a lot of foreigners in the company, so you would not fit in.’ ” Karkai’s side projects proliferated. She started a cooking blog, and one of her pictures—of a rhubarb pie tiled in red and green stalks—got attention on Reddit. She became interested in photography and created preset filters for the photo-editing software Lightroom. Malavieille “believed in every single little thing that I started,” Karkai said. “He would tell all his friends, ‘So, Yam Yam has this new blog, or this new Instagram, go follow her and like all her posts and comment and stuff.’ ” But Malavieille also had the credentials and professional success that Karkai lacked: a college degree, steady work as a program manager. She felt the strain of relying on his financial support, and she believed that his colleagues looked down on her.

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Mick Herron is a broad-shouldered Englishman with close-cropped black hair, lightly salted, and fine and long-fingered hands, like a pianist’s or a safecracker’s. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and he is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony. He does not drive a car and he does not own a smartphone, and, in the softly carpeted apartment in Oxford where, wearing woollen slippers, he writes spy novels—the best in a generation, by some estimations, and irrefutably the funniest—he does not have Wi-Fi. He used to be a copy editor. He has never been a secret agent, except insofar as all writers are spies and maybe, lately, so is everyone else.

Spy fiction got good and going in the years before the First World War, and took flight afterward. In 1927, W. Somerset Maugham wrote “Ashenden: or, The British Agent,” about a writer who is recruited into British intelligence by a handler called R. During the war, Maugham had been a spook; he was recruited after “Of Human Bondage” came out. Writers make good joes (as Herron might say): they’re keen observers, and they tend to know languages. (Maugham had French and German.) “If you do well you’ll get no thanks,” R. tells Ashenden, “and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help.” Editors say the same thing to writers.

Maugham’s best-known successors—Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré—were spies, too. Greene worked for M.I.6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service; Fleming for Naval Intelligence; and le Carré for both M.I.6 and M.I.5, Britain’s security service. Like le Carré, whose wordcraft about spycraft included “mole,” “spook,” and “Moscow rules,” Herron’s got his own lingo, about “the hub” and “dogs” and “tiger teams” and “milkmen.” But Herron, as he himself might put it, has never been to joe country and lives nowhere near Spook Street.

For the longest stretch of Herron’s professional life, he worked in London in the legal department of an employment-issues research firm, copy-editing journal articles, handbooks, and case reports about employment discrimination and wrongful termination. Nights, he wrote detective fiction, and even got some published, but no one bought it. Then he had a breakthrough. “People say write what you know,” Herron says. “So I wrote about people who are failures.” Bob Cratchitting away at job-discrimination case reports, Herron came up with the idea of Slough House, a place where M.I.5 puts bad spies out to pasture. “Sack the useless, and they took you to tribunal for discriminating against useless people,” one character explains. “So the Service bunged the useless into some godforsaken annex and threw paperwork at them, an administrative harassment intended to make them hand in their cards. They called them slow horses. The screw-ups. The losers.” James Bond they are not.

The Slough House novels have been adapted as an Apple TV+ series called, like the first of those novels, “Slow Horses.” It’s slick and sleek and as star-studded as a summer sky. The first season came out last spring, and the second begins this month. Mick Jagger, a Mick Herron fan, recorded its bluesy theme song, “Strange Game.” Kristin Scott Thomas stars as Diana Taverner, Second Desk at M.I.5, with Jonathan Pryce as her long-retired predecessor, David Cartwright, whose grandson River Cartwright, played by the Scottish actor Jack Lowden, is a slow horse trying to kick over the traces. The cast is headed by the inimitable Gary Oldman, as Jackson Lamb. Lamb is an old joe who’s straight out of Dickens, if Dickens had ever invented a character who used the word “twat” all the time.

Even before John le Carré died, nearly two years ago, people had started calling Mick Herron his heir, which is, as publicists say, very selling, but also something of a burden. Herron suspects that le Carré would find his work facetious. Still, that’s not to say there aren’t similarities. A decade ago, Oldman was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of le Carré’s George Smiley in an adaptation of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” Oldman says Jackson Lamb is Smiley if everything had gone wrong, although, arguably, everything has.

“Tonight at ten, chaos on all fronts for Liz Truss,” the BBC announced the night I boarded a red-eye to London. “ITV News at Ten” summed up the day’s high jinks in Westminster a little more colorfully: “The deputy chief whip was reported to have left the scene saying, ‘I’m absolutely F-ing furious, I just don’t F-ing care anymore,’ before he resigned, along with the chief whip. But we’ve just been told they have now officially unresigned. The home secretary has, however, definitely gone.” On Channel 4, one presenter was heard off camera calling a fervent Brexiteer a “cunt.” Welcome to Jackson Lamb’s Britain.

I took a bus from Heathrow to Oxford, a city of sandcastles. Herron and his partner, Jo Howard, picked me up by the side of the road in her black Volvo. I was two hours late. It was raining.

“I’m so sorry we’ve missed the morning,” I said, climbing into the back seat: black, white topstitching.

“Not to worry,” Howard said, pulling into traffic as zippy-fast as a taxi-driver.

“We’ll pop over to the house for a bit and then head out?” Herron asked, looking back at me, wonderingly, black bushy eyebrows raised, a pair of commas. I’d barged in on what was meant to be a weekend getaway to the Malvern Hills with Howard’s two grown daughters. They had graciously agreed to let me tag along as far as a book event in Herefordshire, after which Herron and I would take a train back to Oxford, and then he’d turn around and train back out to meet Howard for what was left of the weekend. Howard downshifted for power, weaved left, weaved right, leaned into a turn on rain-soaked streets. She has corn-silk-yellow hair, pale, delicate features, and, faintly, freckles, and she drives, I decided, not like a taxi-driver but like a cop on a cop show circa 1972. Maybe Michael Douglas in “The Streets of San Francisco.”

Herron and Howard live in a brick row house with two white-socked tortoiseshell tabby cats so handsome they could be cat-food models. Howard is an executive-search consultant—O.K., a headhunter—for the publishing industry. It’s her house. The walls are lined with shelves jammed with hardcover books, alphabetized. Herron moved in during the pandemic. “Boris Johnson said no one could go out,” Howard explained. “So Mick said, ‘I guess I’d better move in.’ ” He kept his flat, though, a ten-minute walk away, and he writes there every weekday, padding around the carpet as soundlessly as Hercule Poirot.

“I’ll make some coffee,” Howard announced, and set about clanking away in the kitchen.

In a sitting room that opens out to a magical back garden, Herron and I sat down each to a sofa, one red, one off-white, like valentines. The cats have their own door, a tunnel through the wall and out to the garden, where they pounce on mice scurrying between potted geraniums and glower at squirrels scrabbling up the clematis that’s strangling a slatted wooden fence. Herron was wearing a black button-up shirt over a gray tee, and jeans, and had swapped out black sneakers for slippers at the door. A lot of people had told me that, notwithstanding his denials, Herron must at some point have been a spy. I wasn’t seeing it, but he’s for sure more of a listener than a talker, and he’d be excellent undercover, a man on tiptoe, cat-footed.

Herron was born in Newcastle, one of six children of an optician and a nursery-school teacher. He read whatever he could get his hands on when he was a kid, climbing the shelves from Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald to Agatha Christie and Dick Francis, and then to Dickens, Austen, and John O’Hara.

“I was addicted to narrative,” he said, pouring out a cup of coffee. “Especially short stories—mainlining.” He went to Oxford, studied English, got a job in a library, and wrote poetry. Then his verse dried up. He decided to try crime fiction. He read everything. “I was attracted by the idea of there being scaffolding.” He liked the structure, like a sonnet, or a sonata.

The New York Times has an op-ed arguing that bigots who own businesses should be allowed to refuse to sell LGBTQ customers the same products and services as other customers. Tish Harrison Warren, who writes a newsletter for the paper on “matters of faith in private life and public discourse,” (and who is a “rising star in Christian spiritual writing”) is discussing an upcoming Supreme Court case on whether a web designer who creates web pages for clients’ weddings has to serve all customers equally, or can refuse to to create wedding pages for LGBTQ people. 
Warren says that the question the case raises is, “How committed are we to true pluralism?” While she believes that LGBTQ people should have certain legal rights, she thinks that “pluralism” means we must “[allow] religious people who adhere to historic teachings on sex and marriage to freely practice their faith.” That means that “government should not choose a side in these intrafaith debates” about the morality of same-sex marriage. Instead, “law-abiding people have a right to live according to their conscience,” which means the government should not “force” someone to express a message they have a religious objection to. So the religious web designer should have a legal right to say no to creating pages for same-sex weddings. To decree otherwise would be to infringe upon liberty of conscience.

A similar argument was made several years ago by the leal scholar (and prominent same-sex marriage opponent) Sherif Girgis in The Public Discourse. There, the issue was whether a Christian baker should have to bake cakes for gay weddings. Girgis said there was an unanswerable argument in the baker’s favor: the government cannot compel artistic expression, and “by forcing [the baker] to bake a same-sex wedding cake, [the state] forces him to (1) create First Amendment expression (2) carrying a message he rejects…this coercion serves no compelling governmental interest and is therefore unconstitutional.”
This argument, that it is force and coercion to require equal treatment of LGBTQ customers, seems very compelling to those who believe it. Warren thinks her stance is completely compatible with respect for LGBTQ rights and that she is simply an advocate for tolerance and “pluralism.” The argument’s weakness, however, is exposed the minute we begin to think seriously about analogous situations.
The obvious response to Harrison and Girgis is: what would they say about someone who opposed interracial weddings and refused to bake cakes or design websites for couples if the two partners were of different races? The racist could invoke all of the same principles: they have a deep-seated conviction, they do not want to be “coerced” into affirming respect for something they do not respect, and the government should not be in the business of deciding which beliefs are the correct ones. Girgis reminds us that the point of the First Amendment is “to shield those choices of [speech] content that in someone’s eyes are misguided, or even hurtful.” The racist baker will say that their speech falls precisely into that category.
The racist baker analogy can flummox those who defend the homophobic baker. When Jordan Peterson told comedian Jim Jefferies that “making” a baker bake cakes for same-sex weddings was a bad idea, Jeffries asked whether Peterson thought a racist baker should have to make cakes for Black couples. Peterson replied that they shouldn’t be forced to, but Jefferies pointed out that this is precisely what the Civil Rights Movement was pushing for: mandatory service to customers of all races. Peterson then concedes that the Civil Rights Movement was correct, at which point Jefferies asks how the demand for equal service for LGBTQ people is different. “Maybe it’s not different. Maybe I was wrong about that.” 
Warren is not as humble and self-reflective as Peterson, however. She insists that it is different, and strongly objects to the view that “equates individuals or organizations who hold longstanding religious beliefs on sex and marriage with white supremacists.” Racists are different, she says, because their Christian theology was faulty, whereas homophobes are correct that Biblical teaching supports their worldview:  

“In order to justify racial violence and oppression, white people in America and Europe essentially invented a novel theology, baptizing white supremacy. It was racism in search of an ethic. Sexual ethics, by contrast, are named and addressed in religious scriptures in specific terms. Unlike white supremacy, religious teaching regarding sex, including prohibitions on extramarital and premarital sex, pornography, lust and same-sex sexual activity have been part of the Christian faith from its earliest days. This is not an aberrant view rooted in bigotry but a sincere belief that flows from ancient texts and teaching shared by believers all over the world.”

Thus racist (religious) bigotry is aberrant but homophobic religious bigotry is more legitimate because, according to Warren, homophobia is much more deeply rooted in the Christian religious tradition and Biblical text. 
Aberrant bigots with bad theology versus sincere sexual ethicists with sound Biblical justification, per NYT religion columnist.
This is not a very persuasive response, because it can be met with a very obvious objection: why does “history” determine which forms of bigotry are acceptable? A Christian’s homophobia is more legitimate because it is old? If I were to found a racist religion, it would not receive equal protection for its bigotry because Christians have held their particular preferred prejudices for longer? If my racist religion takes off, at what point does it become enough of a tradition to earn me an exemption from otherwise-applicable antidiscrimination laws? Gay people are out of luck because Warren says they have historically been feared and despised more than they are now? 

Attempts to draw distinctions between banning anti-Black discrimination and anti-LGBTQ discrimination always end up in these kinds of unpersuasive places. (Girgis’ article does not directly address the “racist baker” comparison.) Unless you defend the superior legitimacy of homophobic prejudice over racial prejudice, it’s not clear why one deserves legal protection and the other does not. Of course, some on the right are consistent and simply believe that all discrimination should be legal. Many libertarians believe that the right of property-owners to decide what to do with their property is more important than the right of Black people to be given equal service. Rand Paul has attracted controversy for remarks suggesting that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forced private business owners to give equal service to Black customers, may have been an illegitimate intrusion on freedom of association. But even Paul won’t endorse getting rid of the ban on private racial discrimination in markets. 
How would we respond to someone who said, though, that while they were personally opposed to discrimination, they didn’t think the government should force private business owners not to discriminate? One point, of course, is that putting this ostensibly liberty-loving principle into practice would have meant leaving large parts of the Jim Crow system in place in the American South. But it’s also worth noting how trivial the “coercion” supposedly involved in antidiscrimination laws actually is. For all the fuss made by the baker and web designer about how the government is forcing them to violate their religious beliefs, let’s think about what the law is actually doing when it requires equal service. All it is saying is that if you choose to enter a particular line of work, you are not allowed to pick and choose your customers on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality. Nobody is forced to start a career as a designer of wedding cakes or wedding websites, but if you do, there is a straightforward condition, which is that you have to give equal service. This condition exists because we believe the right of people not to be discriminated against on the basis of their race, gender, or sexuality is more important than the right of a bigot to practice their bigotry. (The rights of the customer are often left out of these conversations entirely, as if the issue is “business owner rights” versus “antidiscrimination” rights when it is better thought of as “business owner rights” versus “customer rights.”) 

If you didn’t want to have to make web pages for LGBTQ weddings, there was a very easy way to avoid being “coerced”: don’t start a career as a designer of wedding pages. The condition of choosing such a career is nondiscrimination, and it’s not very difficult to abide by. Warren, in her piece, says that forcing the designer to serve all equally is like forcing a pro-choice poster artist to design posters for pro-life rallies, but it’s only the same if you collapse the distinction between discrimination against marginalized groups and other kinds of political speech. We all agree (with the exception of radical libertarians) that there is an acceptable category of coercion when it comes to enforcing the rights of people in historically discriminated-against groups to receive equal treatment in the marketplace. The question is whether “not serving a same-sex couple as a web designer” belongs in the same category as “not serving a Black couple” or in the same category as “declining to produce banners for the RNC if you’re a Democrat.” If you see homophobia as more legitimate than racism (as Warren does) then you might put it in the latter category, but those who find both equally abhorrent will easily distinguish between bigoted behavior in a marketplace and political speech.
It’s a little sad to see the liberal New York Times running a defense of legalized discrimination. One expects this stuff from the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Fortunately the Times has added another article by the legal director of the ACLU explaining clearly why discrimination against marginalized customers is not a First Amendment right. But this argument that “freedom” means the right to deny equal service is far more persuasive than it should be, and you hear it coming even from those, like Warren, who insist they have Absolutely Nothing Against LGBTQ people. We need to be clear: mandating equal service is not secularist Stalinism, or an infringement of rights. It’s the enforcement of the basic right of all people to be treated fairly when they deal with public-facing businesses. 

An expanded version of this argument appears in my forthcoming book Responding to the Right. 

The Congressional decision to prohibit railroad workers from going on strike and force them to accept a contract that meets few of their demands is part of the class war that has defined American politics for decades. The two ruling political parties differ only in rhetoric. They are bonded in their determination to reduce wages; dismantle social programs, which the Bill Clinton administration did with welfare; and thwart unions and prohibit strikes, the only tool workers have to pressure employers. This latest move against the railroad unions, where working conditions have descended into a special kind of hell with massive layoffs, the denial of even a single day of paid sick leave, and punishing work schedules that include being forced to "always be on call," is one more blow to the working class and our anemic democracy.

The rich, throughout history, have subjugated and re-subjugated the populations they control.

The rage by workers towards the Democratic Party, which once defended their interests, is legitimate, even if, at times, it is expressed by embracing proto-fascists and Donald Trump-like demagogues. Dating back to the Clinton administration with NAFTA, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the Democratic Party has become a full partner in the corporate assault on workers. The cloying feel-your-pain rhetoric, a staple of the Joe Biden White House, is offset by a hypocritical subservience to the billionaire class.

In 1926, the havoc wreaked by rail strikes led to the federal government passing the Railway Labor Act to give itself the power to impose labor settlements on the rail industry. The Biden administration used this authority to broker a tentative labor agreement that would ensure a 24 percent pay increase by 2024, annual $1,000 bonuses and a freeze on rising health care costs. But workers would be permitted only one paid personal day and no paid sick leave. Of 12 unions voting on the deal, four of them--representing 56 percent of union membership in the industry--refused to ratify it. Biden signed the legislation into law on Friday.

The railroad barons refuse to permit sick days because they have stripped the railroads down to skeleton crews in a process known as precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. In essence, no spare labor is available, which is why the reduced labor force is subjected to such punishingly short periods of time off and onerous working conditions.

Class struggle defines human history. We are dominated by a seemingly omnipotent corporate elite. Hostile to our most basic rights, this elite is disemboweling the nation; destroying basic institutions that foster the common good, including public schools, the postal service and health care; and is incapable of reforming itself. The only weapon left to thwart this ongoing pillage is the strike. Workers have the collective power to slash profits and cripple industry, which is why the ruling class has gone to such lengths to defang unions and outlaw strikes. A rail freight strike, it is estimated, would cost the U.S. economy $2 billion a day, with daily losses increasing the longer a strike continued.

The few unions that remain--only 10.7 percent of the workforce is unionized--have been largely domesticated, demoted into obsequious junior partners in the capitalist system. As of January 2022, private-sector unionization stood at its lowest point since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And yet, 48 percent of U.S. workers say they would like to belong to a union.

Railroad workers have been especially hard hit. The workforce has shrunk from nearly 540,000 in 1980 to some 130,000 today. The consolidation of the rail industry means there are only seven Class I freight companies, with four of those companies controlling 83 percent of rail traffic. Service on the nation's rail lines, along with working conditions and wages, has deteriorated as Wall Street squeezes the big railroad conglomerates for greater and greater profits. Indeed, the fragility of the rail system led to huge backlogs and delays during the pandemic.

The Democrats insist they are the party of the working class. Joe Biden calls himself "a proud pro-labor president." But they pile up one empty promise after another. In 2020, they promised, for example, that with control of the White House and both branches of Congress, they would pass a law to strengthen collective bargaining. Instead, they revoked the collective bargaining power of one of the few unionized industries that retains it.

They promised to raise the minimum wage. They failed. They promised a national paid family and medical leave program allowing all employees to take up to 12 weeks of paid time off. It never happened. They promised to impose a federal tax rate on corporations ranging from 21 percent to 28 percent, so that "wealthy Americans and big corporations pay their fair share." The proposed tax increase was scuttled. They promised to pass legislation to ensure that super PACs "are wholly independent of campaigns and political parties." It went nowhere. They then mounted a midterm election campaign, which cost both parties a staggering $16.7 billion and was funded by massive infusions of PAC money.

The Democrats routinely say the right thing and do the wrong thing, and this is true for its tiny progressive minority, which dutifully votes to funnel billions to the war industry, including the war in Ukraine. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and most other progressive House members voted for the anti-union legislation while also voting for a separate resolution that would have given rail workers seven days of paid sick leave. The unions were demanding 14. The second resolution died in the Senate, as they knew it would, leaving workers with a woefully inadequate, pro-management deal that over half of them had already rejected. To his credit, Bernie Sandersvoted against the bill when the sick leave amendment from the House, which he backed, was rejected in the Senate.

Why does any legislator believe railroad workers should be forced to use what few vacation days they may have if they fall sick and request permission to be absent days in advance, as if illnesses are scheduled events? Congress members and their staff do not work under these conditions.

"In a statement that perfectly captured the yawning gap between Democratic Party rhetoric and behavior," Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board, wrote in the newspaper, "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced railroad companies as rapacious profiteers who 'have been selling out to Wall Street to boost their bottom lines, making obscene profits while demanding more and more from railroad workers.' Then, just one sentence later, she announced that House Democrats would stand with the profiteers."

What are we to make of a Congress that refuses to support a single day of paid sick leave for 115,000 freight railroad workers, while the combined net income of the railroad industry is $27 billion -- double what it was in 2013?

What are we to make of a Congress that in its latest military policy legislation sets the appropriation at $45 billion above the Pentagon's request?

What are we to make of a Congress that refuses to pass gun control legislation despite 600 mass shootings this year, more than one per day?

What are we to make of a Congress that defunds the Internal Revenue Service, making it only practical to investigate those earning middle and lower incomes and near impossible to investigate tens of billions of dollars in tax evasion by corporations and the rich?

What are we to make of a Congress that rewrites the tax code on behalf of lobbyists so 55 of the largest corporations that collectively made over $40 billion in pre-tax income in 2020 - paid no federal income tax and received $3.5 billion in tax rebates.

What are we to make of a Congress, more than half of whose members are millionaires, who flagrantly use their committee assignments, inside knowledge of proposed legislation and classified intelligence reports to carry out insider trading to increase their wealth? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband invested millions of dollars in computer-chip stocks as the Democratic leadership was formulating a plan to subsidize the chip-manufacturing industry.

Most political theorists, including Aristotle, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi and Max Weber, started from the premise that there is a natural antagonism between owners and workers. They understood that if the oligarchs shook off all restraints to the accumulation of wealth, it would destroy the political order. The ruling class masks its greed behind ideologies--in our nation's case, free market capitalism and neoliberal globalization. Neoliberalism never made any economic sense. But it was disseminated by compliant academics, the media and political theorists because, to quote Marx, it allowed "the dominant material relationships" to be "grasped as ideas."

"We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are," Wendell Berrywrote. "Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all--by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians--be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so, and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing."

All the advances we made in the early 20th century through union strikes, government regulation, the New Deal, a fair tax code, the courts, an alternative press and mass movements have been reversed. The oligarchs are turning American workers--as they did in the 19th century steel and textile factories--into serfs, kept in check by onerous anti-union laws, militarized police, the world's largest prison system, an electoral system dominated by corporate money and the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history.

The rich, throughout history, have subjugated and re-subjugated the populations they control. And the public, throughout history, has awakened to the class war waged by the oligarchs and plutocrats and revolted. Let us hope that defying Congress, freight railroad workers carry out a strike. A strike will at least expose the fangs of the ruling class, the courts, law enforcement and the National Guard, much as they did during labor unrest in the 20th century, and broadcast a very public message about whose interests they serve. Besides, a strike might work. Nothing else will.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.Today’s special guest is David French, a contributing writer and the author of the newsletter The Third Rail. He’s a football fan who has critiqued what he calls the NFL’s “good ol’ boy problem” and extensively covered First Amendment issues, including the Republican turn against free speech. David loves living in the worlds of both The White Lotus and The Terminal List, and claims that true history dads read books about World War I, while true nerds read Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive series.But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
You should probably wait to buy a home.
Instagram is over.
What kind of man was Anthony Bourdain?
David French’s Culture SurveyWhat my friends are talking about most right now: One of the things that most interests me about American culture is a different formulation of the “two Americas” concept. Instead of red and blue, it’s online and offline. As Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy demonstrated in their brilliant 2019 analysis of the Democratic primary electorate, there are distinct political differences between people who spend considerable time on social media versus those who do not. That exact principle applies to entertainment as well.In my online world, I see a conversation dominated by debates over The Rings of Power versus House of the Dragon. If you’re really into prestige television, you’ll have participated in more than one conversation about Apple TV+’s show Severance (which is marvelous, by the way).Offline, to the extent anyone talks about streaming more than they talk about football (which is rare), I hear far more about Amazon Prime shows such as Reacher or The Terminal List, action-packed shows that can be essentially summed up with the description “Deadly warrior on a quest for justice.”Frankly, I love living in both worlds. So let’s start the night with college football; check out Amazon Prime’s latest action thriller, The Peripheral; and then end with HBO Max’s The White Lotus and a discussion about the exploitative amorality of America’s elite. And if you’re wondering how you can do your job, raise your kids, and maintain that kind of pop-culture commitment, always remember that sleep is for the weak. [Related: The powerful, unlikely force shaping modern TV]My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’ve got a confession. I don’t watch art movies. I haven’t really seen many since I was dating my wife and tried to convince her that I had a sophisticated cinematic palate by watching Woody Allen movies. As soon as she said yes, it was back to blockbusters. The first movie we watched together after we exchanged vows was the original Independence Day, a film far more glorious than anything I’ve ever seen with subtitles or set in the sitting room of an English aristocrat.But a blockbuster art movie? That’s the stuff. Those are the best films of all time, and the apex of the genre used to be the original Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece. I’m still haunted by the beauty and finality of Rutger Hauer’s death soliloquy as Roy Batty: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe … Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion … I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain … Time to die.”But there’s a new champion for best blockbuster art film, and that’s Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film, Arrival, starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. The premise is simple—aliens arrive, and the world needs linguists to try to communicate with the interstellar visitors. What you watch is one of the most moving and thought-provoking films ever placed on the silver screen. My family still talks about the concepts of time and destiny embedded in the film, and it contains a message of profound meaning—fierce love is worth deep pain. [Related: Arrival’s timely message about empathy]
Arrival "contains a message of profound meaning—fierce love is worth deep pain." (Jan Thijs / Paramount Pictures)
The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read, and the best novel: As a middle-aged dad and young grandfather, in some ways my reading habits are completely clichéd. I like World War II histories (I just finished Paul Kennedy’s new history of the naval war in World War II, Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II), but everyone knows the true hard-core history dads read books about World War I.I highly recommend a 2014 book by Alexander Watson. I just discovered Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, and it’s one of the relatively few books that tracks the war from the perspective of the Central Powers. I don’t view the Allied victory as inevitable in either world conflict, so it was fascinating for me to gain greater insight into the strategic choices and grave mistakes that led to Germany’s defeat and Austria-Hungary’s dissolution.As for fiction, if you claim to be a nerd and haven’t discovered Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive series, then I doubt your credentials. It’s got everything I love—compelling characters, rich world-building, powerful magic, and epic battles. And after you catch up on the The Stormlight Archive, read his older series The Mistborn Saga. But set aside a month or so—there are a lot of pages in those stories. [Related: The imperial mind: A historian’s education in the ways of empire]A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: We’ve been living through a season of loss, and there’s an older song by a Northern Irish Christian musician named Robin Mark that has affected me from the first moments I truly faced my own mortality when I deployed to Iraq. It’s called “When It’s All Been Said and Done,” and its simple lyrics challenge us to consider our legacy. When it’s all been said or done, did we live for truth or for treasure?As for a loud song, I just finished creating a playlist called “Old and Awesome,” and it includes all of my favorite songs from my teen years to my life as a young adult. The newest song is “The Rising,” by Bruce Springsteen. It can be loud or quiet, but I prefer the loud version. There are precious few songs about tragedy (in this case, the doomed “rising” of the firefighters up the burning World Trade Center towers on 9/11) that are quite so defiant, demonstrating there is something majestic about courage and that we live our lives with both a sense of purpose and eternal hope. It’s magnificent. [Related: Bruce Springsteen and the art of aging well]The Week Ahead
Stella Maris, the second of Cormac McCarthy’s interconnected new novels (Tuesday)
George & Tammy, a series about country music’s George Jones and Tammy Wynette, starring Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon (premieres tonight on Showtime)
Empire of Light, Sam Mendes’s new film starring Olivia Colman (in theaters Friday)
Essay
(ScreenProd / Alamy)
The Most Overhyped Space MovieBy Marina Koren
As the outer-space correspondent at The Atlantic, I spend a lot of time looking beyond Earth’s atmosphere. I’ve watched footage of a helicopter flying on Mars. I’ve watched a livestream of NASA smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid on purpose. I’ve seen people blast off on rockets with my own eyes. But I have never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This is an enormous oversight, apparently. The 1968 film is considered one of the greatest in history and its director, Stanley Kubrick, a cinematic genius. And, obviously, it’s about space. Surely a space reporter should see it—and surely a reporter should take notes.
Read the full articleMore In Culture
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Ode to the French baguette
Stubborn, determined, and dying
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Christine McVie’s most miraculous song
RM of BTS is embracing the silence on his new solo album
Read the latest culture essay by Jordan Calhoun in Humans Being.Catch Up on The Atlantic
Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis.
The Supreme Court case that’s all about Donald Trump
A group of thinkers is cheering for humanity’s end.

(NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
Keep up with our photo editor’s Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Every day until Christmas, he will add a new image of the universe.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.Explore all of our newsletters.

Last night, Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, wrote a lengthy Twitter thread he called “THE TWITTER FILES.” The thread purported to expose how Twitter made the decision to dramatically suppress discussion of the contents of a hard drive from Hunter Biden’s laptop. But it inadvertently did something else entirely: It exposed the new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s profound misunderstandings about the First Amendment.Taibbi’s documents provided further evidence demonstrating what Twitter’s critics (including me) have long argued—that the decision to suppress the information was both incoherent and inconsistent. Twitter suppressed the information based on its so-called hacked-materials policy, but the application of that policy was hardly clear in this instance, especially given that the platform had, at the time, just permitted widespread sharing of New York Times stories about Donald Trump’s leaked tax information.I agree with the attorney and election analyst Jeffrey Blehar about Taibbi’s thread. Writing in National Review after last night’s release, Blehar said the thread contained “few, if any, explosive revelations” for those who’ve followed the story closely. But don’t tell that to Musk. He seemed particularly outraged that one of Taibbi’s tweets described how the “Biden team” asked Twitter to delete a series of tweets, including ones that contained nude pictures of Hunter Biden.Responding to a document where a Twitter employee indicated that Twitter had “handled” those posts, Musk tweeted, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” He followed up moments later with a slightly longer statement: “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.”[Read: The far right is getting what it asked for]Last night, on Fox News, Tucker Carlson also picked up the claim about the First Amendment. With characteristic breathless hyperbole, Carlson declared that the documents “show a systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history.”Musk and Carlson are both profoundly wrong; the documents released so far show no such thing. In October 2020, when the laptop story broke, Joe Biden was not president. The Democratic National Committee (which also asked for Twitter to review tweets) is not an arm of the government. It’s a private political party. Twitter is not an arm of the government; it is a private company.This matters for a simple but profoundly important reason. The First Amendment regulates government conduct. It does not regulate private actors. The text of the amendment itself says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” That restraint on Congress has since been extended to apply to the U.S. government at all levels—local, state, and federal.Activists have tried to argue that large social-media companies essentially function as the government, citing a line of cases that treat private parties as government actors when the private parties perform functions that are “traditionally and exclusively governmental.” Examples include running elections, private prisons, and so-called company towns. But, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently explained, “hosting speech on a private platform … is hardly ‘an activity that only governmental entities have traditionally performed.’” Social-media companies are not the government.This means the First Amendment protects Twitter, the Biden campaign team, and the Democratic National Committee. The “TWITTER FILES” released so far do not describe a violation of the First Amendment. Instead, they detail the exercise of First Amendment rights by independent, private actors.One can certainly agree or disagree with the way in which they exercised those rights. Twitter’s decision to delete pornographic pictures of Hunter Biden was entirely justified and appropriate. Its actions to suppress the New York Post story about Hunter’s laptop were far less defensible. But they were Twitter’s decisions to make, and no amount of misguided rhetoric can transform a Twitter story into a government scandal.The distinction is crucial. Twitter is but one participant in a marketplace of ideas. Twitter couldn’t truly suppress the Hunter Biden–laptop story. Instead, its censorship launched a national debate that’s still not over. It fueled countless stories across the length and breadth of both mainstream and right-wing media. Arguably, Twitter’s suppression gave the laptop story more attention than it otherwise would have received.But if the government were involved, the story would change dramatically. As powerful as Twitter is, it cannot match the reach and strength of the federal government, and if the government does coerce a private company into doing its bidding, then the First Amendment is implicated. But finding coercion is key. The government can ask private corporations to take action without implicating the First Amendment. In fact, Taibbi last night said that Twitter “received” and “honored” deletion requests from the Trump White House.But there’s no evidence of any such coercion (at least so far) in the Hunter Biden story, and unless and until there is, the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop is the story of private individuals making decisions they were entitled to make. It is not the story of a government run amok.

James Kirchick is a writer and a columnist at Tablet. His most recent book is Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and James Kirchick discuss how the Cold War shaped attitudes toward homosexuality; the (dis)similarities between homophobia and anti-Semitism; and what we can learn from the hard-won progress on gay rights about how to make progress in other areas.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Let's start with your book, Secret City. It's a really beautiful testament to how much our social world has changed, and in some ways how quickly it has changed. Tell us about the early history of America's capital and homosexuality.James Kirchick: I start the book in the years leading up to World War II. The war is a tremendously important moment in the history of homosexuality in the United States, but also in the world, because it's when homosexuality is transformed into a national security threat. Up to that point, it had been condemned in the Judeo-Christian and other religious traditions. It was a medical condition; gay people were often pathologized and sent to mental institutions and lobotomized and castrated and subjected to all sorts of torture. It was illegal across much of the Western world. What happens with World War II is that this concept of “national security” really takes shape in the United States. And the fear is that gay people, because they have this deep, dark, terrible secret, will be more susceptible to blackmail, and giving away confidential information to a foreign power, because they want to protect this deep, dark secret.Even the more liberal-minded people of the time would have justified this policy of excluding gay people from having security clearances or working in the government. The government could have just as easily said, “Yes, we know that there is this terrible environment out there. But if you're a gay State Department official and you are being blackmailed because of your homosexuality, come to us and reveal your homosexuality, we will not fire you.” But more importantly, there was never, actually, in the United States, a recorded instance of a gay person being blackmailed into giving away confidential information. In fact, there was a Defense Department study in the early 1990s, when the “gays in the military” debate was gearing up again. They studied over one hundred cases of Americans convicted for espionage. Six of them were gay, but not a single one of them had anything to do with blackmails because of money or ideology. And in fact, the origins of this myth are traced back to pre-World War I, in the Austro–Hungarian empire, where the head of counterintelligence was a man named Colonel Alfred Redl, who was selling secrets to the Russians. He's discovered in 1913, just before the outbreak of war, and he's later blamed by the Austro–Hungarian regime as basically being the man who led the country into war. It turns out that he was gay, but we wouldn't know this until many years later, after the archives were opened. He was not blackmailed into his treason. He was extremely greedy. He had multiple houses and cars and a huge wine cellar. But this story caught on. The story of Alfred Redl became this almost mythological parable in the minds of Western intelligence officials. Decades later, Allen Dulles, the first civilian head of the CIA, is writing books about the Redl story. When the issue of gays in the federal government in the United States first becomes a kind of hysterical cause around the early years of the McCarthy period, the head of the CIA is testifying (this is in 1950) about the presence of homosexuals in the intelligence services. The only example he can come up with is the story of Colonel Redl.Mounk: As you were saying, being gay was incredibly hard in Washington or anywhere else before World War II. These fears about national security ramped up during World War II, I suppose, and then during the Cold War. How does that transform life in Washington, D.C.?Kirchick: Being a gay person, and particularly a gay man in Washington in this period of the early Cold War, was like being a dissident in an Eastern Bloc country. Your bars are being raided, and you're being arrested. Maybe your name is in the newspaper the next day. Your mail is being confiscated. The first real gay rights Supreme Court case was in 1957, and involved a magazine called ONE, which was a magazine for “homophiles.” That was one of the preferred terms for homosexuals. It was not at all pornographic. It was just sort of a literary intellectual magazine. It was impounded by the Postal Service, and its editors were charged with obscenity. In the early 1960s, the first gay rights organization in the United States is founded in the Hay-Adams Hotel. That meeting was surveilled by the local police and the FBI. Being a gay person, you're constantly surveilled. Your life was under a microscope. There's a real sense of tension, and I say that, actually, being a gay person was worse in American politics than being a communist. Because the communist could become an ex-communist. He could rat out his former comrades. He could denounce the party, and in fact, some of the leading and most important figures in the early American conservative movement were ex-communists. A gay person could not do that. Once you were outed, or even accused of this, it would never go away. There's one figure who I write about extensively in the book who embodies both of these—Whittaker Chambers, who's at the center of the first major spy drama of the Cold War, involving a man named Alger Hiss, a former State Department official.Mounk: Lots of listeners will know this story, but many others won’t. Can you tell us about that?Kirchick: Alger Hiss was referred to as the “cheese” of the Eastern establishment—educated at Harvard, he clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes at the Supreme Court. He served in the State Department in high ranking positions. He was the Secretary General at the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco and then after leaving the State Department, he became the head of the Carnegie Endowment. A perfect, spotless resume. Whittaker Chambers, a conservative writer, is this sort of dumpy, fat guy with bad teeth who worked for Time. In August 1948, in the first live televised congressional hearing in the United States, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had just been founded—founded, actually, during World War II as an antifascist organization—he accuses Hiss of being a communist. This becomes a major scandal, and it's really an indictment of the American elite because they had all defended this and promoted him. But there's this underlying tension, a sort of unspoken element to this whole drama—a homoerotic element. Because no one can really understand the nature of the relationship between these two men. It's actually true that Chambers had led a secret life as a homosexual while he was also a member of the Communist Party. And it's never publicly alleged, but it's hinted, inferred—and Hiss’s team basically go around spreading this story—that the reason why Whittaker Chambers is making these accusations against Alger Hiss is that he's a spurned homosexual; that Hiss rejected his advances and that he’s concocting these baroque stories about the two of them being members of a secret communist cell—it's all lies. It's true that Chambers was—whether he was gay or not, that's up for debate. But he lived a gay life. And he was sleeping around with men in the 1930s. He admitted this to the FBI secretly, because he wanted to tell them everything in advance of the big trial for perjury that Hiss would undergo. Chambers could come out, so to speak, as a former communist. He could say, in 1948, “I had been a member of his communist cell. I was a traitor to my country. But now I'm a conservative and I'm embracing motherhood and apple pie.”Mounk: In the way that conversion stories often do, that probably even gave him additional standing: “I have credibility telling you how evil they are, because I was one of them, and now I’m a decent person.”Kirchick: Absolutely. Chambers’s memoir, Witness, by the way, is one of the most important and actually one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century. It's funny, I came across passages in that book where he's describing meeting his contacts in the communist underground. He’s describing going up to a newsstand and taking a particular magazine off the newsstand, maybe turning a page, looking at the man next to him. He's sort of sending signals by the particular magazine he chooses. And then they would go off and exchange secret documents. You can read these furtive encounters with another comrade in the communist underground, and it reads, word for word, like a description of cruising for gay sex in the 1940s or 50s, or even later. It's all coded behavior. I hate this term as a verb, but I sort of “queered” his memoir—I read his memoir looking for these hints. Most writers, when they write about the Hiss–Chambers case, they're not. I think it's actually central to the story of the Hiss–Chambers confrontation and really the early years of the Cold War. What I tried to do with everything in this book is really look at how homosexuality—or, more accurately, the fear of homosexuality—influenced everything, from the formation of the CIA, its rivalry with the FBI and the early years of the Cold War. There's a whole homoerotic tinge to McCarthyism. Camelot, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and their gay friends; Nixon's paranoia and how it's really inflected by homophobia; the aura of homosexuality that sort of surrounds the Reagans. The book goes all the way to Bill Clinton, and I end with him in 1995, because that's the year that gay people were finally permitted to have security clearances. Until 1995, you could be denied security clearance because of homosexuality.Mounk: Talk us through some of that story. You were starting to hint at the first gay rights organizations and so on that were beginning to be founded. What happens after this most intense, early Cold War moment of repression. What does it look like?Kirchick: There's an important moment in 1957. There's a 32 year-old, Harvard-trained PhD astronomer whose name is Frank Kameny, and he's working for the Army Map Service, which is the predecessor to the Geospatial Intelligence Agency—basically, the military arm of the space program. It’s December 1957, two months after Sputnik was launched, two months into the space race. He's working at an Observatory in Hawaii and he’s summoned all the way back to Washington by the Civil Service Commission, which is today the Office of Personnel Management. They basically manage all the federal employees. He’s summoned back to Washington, and he's told on the spot, “We have evidence that you're gay.” It's an arrest record for solicitation. They fire him right there. And what Frank does is sort of revolutionary. He becomes the first gay person fired by the federal government to decide that he's actually going to challenge this. You have to understand that in the years leading up to this, thousands of people had been fired from the federal government, and none of them wanted to challenge it, because in order to challenge it, you had to go public. What he did was revolutionary, because he's basically the first person to say, “I'm not sick, and we're not sick as homosexuals. It's the society that is sick.” Back to my point about why homosexuality was worse than being a communist, this is two months into the space race. What's the federal government doing? They're expending their resources to fire a Harvard-trained PhD astronomer working for the Army Map Service. This just tells you how obsessed they were with this issue, that they'd rather fire a homosexual than use his talents in the fight against communism. And there were thousands of other highly-trained, well-educated, patriotic men and women who were fired. This is what's known as the “Lavender Scare.” It's worse than the Red Scare, because the Red Scare was actually predicated upon something legitimate, which was the fear of communism. It was exaggerated, but we were right to oppose communism. It was an evil ideology, and there were a number of high-ranking communists in the federal government, Alger Hiss being one of them—certainly not the hundreds that Joe McCarthy was alleging, and he ruined many innocent people's lives. But there was some legitimate basis to being worried about communism. With homosexuality, it was completely without foundation, whatsoever. And just as many lives were ruined by this irrational fear. Anyway, Kameny goes off and he challenges his firing. He fails. He tries to go up to the Supreme Court—not even the ACLU will take his case, by the way. The ACLU took plenty of people who were accused of communism. They defended those people. That's actually what the ACLU was founded to do, during the first Red Scare. They wouldn't take the case of a homosexual in 1957. That's how lonely the homosexual was in the United States at this time. And then in 1961, he founded an organization called the Mattachine Society of Washington, which had chapters in Los Angeles and New York. It was really the first gay civil rights organization, and they're petitioning the Civil Service Commission. They are protesting outside the White House in 1965. This is four years before the Stonewall uprising in New York City, which we are sort of led to believe was the birthplace of the gay rights movement. I actually argue it began earlier, in Washington D.C.Mounk: You alluded to the ban on security clearances for homosexuals being lifted in 1995. But it's kind of a mixed moment. You still have "Don't ask, don't tell” in the military. The Defense of Marriage Act is passed. At the same time, you see some forms of liberalization and, of course, a growing cultural acceptance. What allowed Washington, D.C. and the country to make that progress by the 1990s, and why was the progress then so fast after the ‘90s? Why is it that things look so much better on many of these fronts today than they did in the mid-1990s?Kirchick: I think it just comes down to biology: the fact that gay people are randomly distributed across the population. They are every color, religion, race, class, and political outlook. National polling companies like Pew or Gallup are asking Americans, “Do you know a gay person?” They start polling on that question in the early 1970s, and it's 2% or less. Now, obviously, those people did know gay people. They were just in the closet. Now, the latest polling shows that 94% of Americans know a gay person. Over time, you have all these gay people coming out of the closet in growing numbers. It soon becomes a fact that every American knows somebody who's gay. Maybe it's just the mailman or a teacher, or an acquaintance. Maybe it's a child. Which is not to say that all these gay people had it easy. Certainly, many of them didn't. But over time, the sheer fact that gay people are, let's say, 2 to 5% of the population—they're not going away, and attempts to convert them into heterosexuals fails—over time it becomes obvious to people that gay people are really no different from straight people. It's an aspect of human existence, really no different than being left handed. It's a morally-neutral trait. I don't think it's wrong to say that gay people were maybe the most despised minority in the United States. Their very existence was criminalized. To go from that to where we are today, I think it's safe to say it's the most dramatic and rapid social transformation in American history. I think it had a lot to do with persuasion—which is the title of, I believe, the auspices under which we are having this conversation. Gay people successfully persuaded the country that their cause was just, and that these things that you were led to believe about gay people—that they were pedophiles, that they were diseased, that they were sick, that they were traitors, that they were sinners—were wrong. That took many forms. It took Ellen coming out on national television. It took openly gay politicians in the late 1970s and ‘80s. It took the average gay person coming out to their coworkers and friends. It took Will & Grace. Joe Biden credited Will & Grace with being the most important cultural artifact in terms of promoting tolerance and understanding about gay people. It took all these things. Was there an element of boycotts, browbeating, canceling? Sure, there was. There's a side to the gay movement that would like to stress that—using political force to smite one's political enemies. I don't know how useful that was, frankly. I don't know if boycotting Chick-fil-A, which was a big cause a couple of years ago because the owner of Chick-fil-A, who is a religious Christian, opposed gay marriage in his personal capacity—I'm not really sure that boycotting Chick-fil-A was as influential as the corpus of Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch and other important gay and lesbian writers.Read: “The Respect for Marriage Act Is Historic” by Jonathan RauchMounk: There are a few other liberalizations of opinion that are similar, but perhaps not quite as extreme. One of the really striking ones to me is that in America in the 1960s, only about 1-in-20 Americans believed that interracial marriage is acceptable. Now, only about 1-in-20 people believe that it's morally unacceptable. That feels very significant as well. I agree with you about this sort of snowball effect; that if you're in an equilibrium in which nobody can come out, because the penalties for coming out are so extreme, then it's very easy for people to have terrible opinions of homosexuals. They don't know them. Kirchick: Exactly. This goes back to the secrecy issue. When homosexuals were secret, you could say anything about them and get away with it. During World War II, it was widely believed within the upper reaches of the US government that the Nazis were a gay cabal; that gay men were more inclined to be Nazis. And there is a kernel of truth in this, only in the sense that one of the leading Nazis in the early years, Ernst Röhm, the head of the SA, was a relatively open gay man, boasted about it, and Hitler tolerated him. Of course, he was the first to go in the Night of the Long Knives. But the presence of this one prominent homosexual then leads to this myth. And I come across documents where they're speculating at length about the supposed homosexuality of Hitler, that maybe the stab-in-the-back myth is actually the sign of a latent fear of being sodomized. I mean, really crazy stuff. Then just a couple of years later, during the Cold War, we have this conflation of homosexuality and communism. There's no logic to this. And then, in 1967, the only man who's ever prosecuted for the assassination of John F. Kennedy is a gay businessman in New Orleans. The reckless prosecutor who brings these charges basically alleges that there was this right-wing homosexual cabal that assassinated JFK as revenge for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. This actually becomes the basis of the movie JFK by Oliver Stone—a great movie in terms of its cinematic qualities, but also probably the most homophobic movie that Hollywood ever produced. When homosexuality was secret, you could say anything about gay people, and homosexuality lends itself very easily to conspiracy theory. It's very similar to anti-Semitism, actually, in that manner: gays are believed to be a part of a sort of secret international fraternity. They're more loyal to what's called the “Homintern,” the homosexual international. It's a play on the Comintern, obviously. But gays are believed to be more loyal to this than they are to their nations, which is very similar to anti-Semitism, the “rootless cosmopolitans”—the same exact accusations are leveled against against gay people. Once gay people start coming out, then this homophobia becomes kind of plainly absurd and ridiculous. When you read my book, I think it'll surprise a lot of people the things that were believed about gay people. Because, thankfully, we don't believe those things anymore.Mounk: One of the things that I find, especially in talking to my students, but also in the general discourse, is that people have forgotten just how bad things were. I have students who tell me we’re going backwards on gay rights, and this is one of the worst moments in American history of being a gay person. Whatever you may think about some of the developments in the last years and whatever legitimate concerns minority groups always have about how they might be victimized in the future, it is just nuts to compare what it is like as a gay person today in the United States to what it would have been like in 1950.Kirchick: Absolutely. While writing this book, I felt an enormous sense of gratitude to be a gay person born at the time I was born. I'm 38 years old. I think it's safe to say that being gay has never really hindered me in any professional endeavor that I've chosen. That was not true for so many people just a little bit earlier than me, right? If I'd been born in 1973, instead of 1983, or certainly 1953 or 1943, my life would have been very different. I would not have been able to do the things that I've been able to do. And that makes me very happy. It makes me very, very grateful to the gay people who came before, who really suffered and went through a lot to create a better country, not just for gay people, but for straight people, too. I think straight people have less hang ups about their own sexual orientations and gender presentation, in particular, because of what gay people did. For instance, I think straight men can show more affection for one another now, without being paranoid about having their manhood called into question. I think we've come to a more enlightened attitude towards both sexual orientation and also gender presentation. That's largely to the credit, I think, of earlier generations of gay men and women.Mounk: I think you are, as this conversation has made clear, a philosophical liberal. Broadening the subject a little bit, how do you think about threats to liberalism in the United States today?Kirchick: Look, there is no greater tool that gay people had in this country than the First Amendment, in all its forms. Freedom of expression, and the freedom to assemble—that's what gay people were denied in the personal, individual sense that they couldn’t come out of the closet. But also, they couldn't even write arguments in their favor until that was overturned (I mentioned the Supreme Court case). Assembling in a bar was illegal. You couldn't serve alcohol to homosexuals in most American cities. That's why Stonewall erupted into a riot, because the police were raiding the bar. Gay people have had no better ally in their cause than free expression and the First Amendment. It pains me now when I look at the polls from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and you see that self-identifying LGBTQ young people are actually more supportive of shouting down, disinviting certain speakers, than their non-LGBTQ peers. That really pains me.If you read the history of gay people in this country, it is a story of transparency and expression winning out over secrecy and shame and being quiet and silenced. I think a lot of people don't have principles. They want power. And once they get power, then they want to exercise that power. The left, in general, was the party of free speech, because it used to be the left that was screwed for expressing their free speech in this country, in most cases. You go back to the founding of the ACLU. It was founded to protect anarchists and anti-war activists. And then you go through the Civil Rights movement, the gay movement, the women's movement, radicals on campus—all sorts of left wing and progressive causes being shut down. But now that those people run these institutions, particularly academia, where they have the most concentrated control, a lot of them are not sticking true to their principles, because they now have the power. To make your adherence to principles solely conditional on whether or not you have power is very dangerous.Mounk: Let me push you on to how secure those rights are. Because they feel very secure to me right now. But the weird thing about history is that it seems that there's always stability in the short and mid-term, while over the long term, you have these vast changes. Nobody in the 1950s could have imagined that we would be as tolerant towards homosexuality as we are today. But if you asked me what things will look like in a hundred or two hundred years, I don't know. There's a lot of evidence from other societies today and from the history of humanity, that human societies often do have very, very repressive norms about homosexuality. I'm asking this to you, in part since you're gay, but also because we're both Jewish. I can't imagine, ten or twenty years from now, the United States being a place of intense anti-Semitism such that Jews are imperiled. But given the long history of persecution against the Jews over thousands of years, I can easily imagine it being the case in a hundred to two hundred years. Kirchick: I'm actually less optimistic about the future of the Jews in this country than I am of gays, probably because anti-Semitism has been so enduring, and just never seems to go away. It actually seems to be getting worse, and has been getting worse over the past 20 years, I think, since 9/11. It's growing on the left, whereas the story of gays in this country is the complete opposite.Just look at Kanye. He's mentally not all there, but he’s a hugely influential figure. He was condemned for it by prominent people. But certainly the tenor of our politics—having elected officials in the Democratic Party now making openly anti-Semitic statements is not something that happened with such frequency ten to fifteen years ago. A lot has changed since 9/11—9/11 combined with the Intifada. And then you have the whole Trump phenomenon. I don't think Trump is an anti-Semite. But a lot of the right-wing anti-Semites seem to like him. He opened up a can of worms. We're becoming a society more prone to conspiracy theories, on right and left, which is never good for the Jews. You look at the situation on college campuses, where the anti-Zionism is—I mean, I'm one of those who believes that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. But even if you're not, it's hard to deny that a lot of these campus activists’ anti-Zionist agitation is anti-Semitic. At Berkeley Law School a group of organizations just decided to announce that they will not invite any Zionist speakers. That's the word they used, “Zionist.” There was a Jewish comedian in the Midwest, and a woman just started shouting “Free Palestine” at him. These are anecdotes. But the data shows it, too. You look at the FBI hate crimes database, and hate crimes against Jews are skyrocketing. In New York City, the attacks on Jews are skyrocketing, and people don't seem to care. The amount of attention we devote to this type of hatred is so infinitesimally small compared to that which we devote to other types.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Poor patients needed more than drugs to get well, so Partners in Health provided them with food, too. They provided school fees to children. They installed systems to purify the water that caused so much disease. And they always trained and hired local staff, who would follow up with patients to identify and help remove obstacles to their treatment.

Farmer, a Harvard-educated physician, was also trained as a medical anthropologist. Kidder wrote that Farmer learned from local staff that more than three-quarters of Voodoo ceremonies were attempts to drive away illness. He saw little reason to argue with people about beliefs and faith; instead, he always focused on providing high-quality health care. Voodoo priests that he treated ended up as conveyor belts to the clinic, bringing their own ill parishioners to be treated. Farmer approached people with humility and respect, which they reciprocated.

Farmer’s own lapsed Catholicism was rejuvenated by his encounters with liberation theology, with its sharp criticism of inequality and injustice. He didn’t see theology as an obstacle to his mission. He’d say he had “faith” but also add: “I also have faith in penicillin, rifampin, isoniazid and the good absorption of the fluoroquinolones, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that H.I.V. is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions.”

Farmer was only 62 when he died, while training staff in a Rwandan hospital he helped establish. He had lived nonstop, treating patients around the world as well as fund-raising, cajoling, pleading and teaching.

Sociologists recognize a form of power called “charismatic authority” — Max Weber called it “the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace.” Farmer certainly represented that. He inspired a generation of doctors, nurses, public health workers and advocates and ordinary people. He used the respect and awe he garnered to lobby global leaders and to help lead the charge to change how public health operates.

But what happens to a movement when its charismatic leader dies? In this case, the best option is what sociologists call “routinization of charisma” — things keep working because they become entrenched and institutionalized, not just because someone extraordinary wields enormous personal influence.

Since the early days, P.I.H. had already grown larger and more institutionalized, attracting millions in donations from individuals as well as foundations. They’ve expanded from Haiti and Peru to places like Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lesotho and Navajo Nation. But they’re still small compared to the need. And their kind of work is even more crucial now, since the pandemic didn’t just cause suffering through Covid-19 — much basic health care has been interrupted around the world. As it always goes, the poorest, globally, will suffer the most from these disruptions, which will require an extensive effort to ameliorate.

If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore a White Lives Matter shirt during one of his fashion shows.This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdrop Ye’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recently dining with former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as a barometer for what kind of awful behavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.[Read: An unholy alliance between Ye, Musk, and Trump]Ye’s Infowars disaster is emblematic of something that seems to be happening across the far right. Although their messaging is always noxious and hateful, right-wing shock jocks and politicians like to employ thinly veiled innuendo and dog whistles to rally their audience. The game is to push the boundaries of social acceptability but leave just enough room to deny culpability when things go off the rails. Then they can blame political opponents for bias and censorship when they’re criticized or suspended by the supposedly “woke” left.But things are taking a turn, and it’s not just about Ye. Though it’s always been a sewage system for political sludge, Twitter has recently lifted its floodgates under Elon Musk’s ownership, reinstating banned accounts, suspending researchers without cause, and drastically reducing content moderation overall. The New York Times reported today that hate speech has “soared” on the platform in the weeks since Musk’s takeover. And there’s reason to suspect that things may get even worse: Musk said yesterday that he wants to foreground “view count” on every tweet, which could encourage attention-grabbing and incendiary posts even more than the platform already does.It’s a dog-catches-car moment: Republicans are getting what they asked (and tweeted) for, and finding that it makes them uncomfortable by association (in public at least). The makeshift walls have crumbled around the far right, and it’s flummoxing those who try to launder their message for a wider audience.As Melissa Ryan, a progressive strategist who tracks the far right, told Semafor’s Dave Weigel earlier this week, Musk’s reinstating of banned right-wing accounts is “going to suck for Republicans … Some of these guys are going to go hog wild as soon as they can.”Travis Brown, a researcher who has been tracking the reinstatement, has been struck by the rise in violent anti-Semitic rhetoric on the platform. “One thing that’s been remarkable to me is the sheer amount of blatant anti-Semitic stuff you can see,” he told me this week. “It’s much more on the surface recently. Click around in any of these Pepe avatar accounts and you will see jokes referencing 6 million cookies, which is a Holocaust reference.” Some of these accounts, Brown noted, have also thanked Musk for their reinstatement.It’s well worth noting that researchers, academics, activists, politicians, and journalists covering the far right have been issuing warnings about this dynamic for years, sounding the alarm on the profound harm caused by the mainstream right’s embrace of anti-Semitic rhetoric and the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, as well as its associations with bigots. Though these problems do not begin and end with Trump, they’ve noted an acceleration of extremist and bigoted rhetoric that coincides with his descent down the golden escalator; his description of Mexicans as rapists; his refusal to condemn the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke; his mention of “good people on both sides” at the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally; and his flirtations with QAnon during his presidency (which became an open endorsement postpresidency).All of which leads us to Ye, whose appearances on popular right-wing media channels have caused visible discomfort for shock jocks who love to toy with or even use hateful rhetoric in their broadcasts. On Monday, Ye and Fuentes appeared on Tim Pool’s popular YouTube channel. Before the show, Pool excitedly shared photos of Ye, Fuentes, and the noted troll Milo Yiannopoulos en route to the appearance in a private jet and hyped the broadcast on his Twitter feed. But during the show, Pool—who has recently begun monologuing about Great Replacement and has been called out by The Daily Beast for “dangerously whitewashing the far right”—was reduced to stammering as Ye went into a stream-of-consciousness riff about Jewish executives de-banking him and invoked Jared Kushner and Rahm Emanuel as members of a Jewish political conspiracy.Pool appeared eager to try to sympathize with parts of Ye’s rhetoric. “I think they’ve been extremely unfair to you,” Pool said. But when Ye pushed back, asking, “Who is ‘they,’ though? We can’t say who ‘they’ is, can we?” Pool stammered and said he disagreed with the implication that Jews control the media. Ye walked out, leaving the host looking overwhelmed.The dynamic was similar to Ye’s appearance yesterday on Infowars. Jones—who has made a career out of anti-Semitic dog whistling about a Jewish-controlled media, egged on birtherism, and spread lies that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “false flag” operation—seemed uncharacteristically rattled as Ye began talking favorably about Hitler. He tried to give the rapper an out, saying, “You’re not Hitler. You’re not a Nazi.” But, as in other appearances, Ye seemed almost delighted not to take it. “Well, I see good things about Hitler, also,” he responded. “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.” Later on, in a jarring exchange just before a commercial break, Jones clarified for his audience that “I don’t like Nazis.” Ye, sneaking in the last word, shot back, “I like Hitler.” Jones can’t recontextualize this moment or accuse the media of misrepresenting what happened on Infowars yesterday. It was hours of Nazi sympathizing. There’s a small difference between this and Jones’s generally repugnant broadcasts—which have cost him dearly, thanks to a series of defamation cases—but it’s a meaningful one.We should not mince words: The normalization and increase of this rhetoric are terrifying and threatening in a country that continues to watch as extremists commit hate crimes against people of color, religious minorities, and LGBTQ communities. At the same time, it is unclear what it means for politicians and launderers of the extremist right when the rules of the game change. It seems that the far right, which has longed for the marketplace of ideas to turn into a free-speech-maximalist thunderdome, is going to be forced to test how the rest of the country feels about having its most vile and extreme views amplified as explicitly as possible.Overnight, it got an answer of sorts. Ye was once again indefinitely suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika inside a Star of David: an “incitement to violence,” Musk said. It’s been less than two weeks since he welcomed the rapper back from his previous ban.

Traditional economics textbooks keep arguing that the Fed's expansionary monetary policies, say in the form of rate-lowering cycle, will stimulate the domestic economy, and conversely, the Fed's contractionary monetary policies, say in the form of rate-hiking or QT cycle, will dampen the overheated domestic economy, as if the Fed were the cause, and the subsequent economic performance were the effect.

Well, in practice, what's really been happening in the real world is usually or always the exact opposite.

As is constantly being argued by Richard Werner, the horse of economic performance is actually always pulling the cart of the Fed's monetary policies forward, either quickly or slowly, but not the other way around ------ the cart can never pull the horse forward !

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So, the US's overheated economy in the past quarters, thanks to the country's too-fast money supply growth since the pandemic breakout, has forced the Fed to start and maintain her current contractionary rate-hiking and QT cycles in the country.

Which also means, the Fed will be forced to pivot sometime in the future if the current declining trend of M2 growth rate sustains for too long a period of time.

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The above is consistent with Milton Friedman's Interest Rate Fallacy :

(a) "As an empirical matter, low interest rates are a sign that monetary policy has been tight ------ in the sense that the quantity of money has grown slowly (think the secular stagnation since the GFC of 2008-09); high interest rates are a sign that monetary policy has been easy ------ in the sense that the quantity of money has grown rapidly (think the current runaway inflation in the US).

The broadest facts of experience run in precisely the opposite direction from that which the financial community and academic economists have all generally taken for granted."

(b) "After the U.S. experience during the Great Depression, and after inflation and rising interest rates in the 1970s and disinflation and falling interest rates in the 1980s, I thought the fallacy of identifying tight money with high interest rates and easy money with low interest rates was dead.

Apparently, old fallacies never die."

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This common fallacy comes about because "almost everyone is thinking about and taking into account only the demand side ------ most people would love to borrow at low interest rates, so most people presume that low interest rates must mean that credit is both cheap and plentiful.

However, not thinking about and taking into account the supply side of the picture, the banks and institutional investors who must make the decisions about who to lend to and at what interest rates, paints a misleading picture."

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During the secular-stagnationary years after the GFC of 2008-09 and before the pandemic breakout of 2020, the average demand for and the supply of bank credits had been quite low, because

(i) the households and the corporations had been busy licking their wounds, by repairing their much damaged balance sheets, and had shied away from further borrowing from the banks, and

(ii) there had been relatively few qualified borrowers with enough good collaterals for the commercial banks to willingly lend to,

resulting in relatively low credit and money supply growth and hence also a low inflation environment in the domestic economy, despite the near-zero nominal policy interest rate persistently pursued by the QE-practicing Fed.

Today, everything unwinds in the opposite direction, thanks to the Fed's bold MMT-like monetary experiment after the pandemic breakout in the country.

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On Monday the Supreme Court is going to hear oral arguments in what may well be the most consequential First Amendment case of the term. It will be cast as a culture-war case, as a fight between LGBTQ rights and free speech, but it’s not truly that. It’s something else, something far more significant.The case is called 303 Creative v. Elenis, and the precise issue in the case is simple: “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.” But behind that simple statement is hidden a frankly bizarre legal doctrine, one that the Supreme Court has to address or it threatens the very nature of artistic freedom itself.The petitioner in the case, Lorie Smith, is a website designer who, according to her Supreme Court brief, intends to design custom wedding websites, but she refuses to design websites that advance ideas or causes she opposes. As a theologically conservative Christian, she opposes same-sex marriage and will not design websites celebrating gay weddings, though she says she would work with gay clients on other, non-same-sex-marriage websites.So far this all sounds like a rather conventional culture-war dispute, and the legal framework for deciding it is also quite conventional. As a general matter, if a vendor or company is providing a good or service—such as, say, a barbecue restaurant serving barbecue sandwiches—then it doesn’t enjoy a constitutional right to refuse service to customers on the basis of status or identity.But though the state can demand that businesses provide goods and services to all comers without regard to race, sex, sexual orientation, and other protected categories, it cannot demand that businesses or individuals engage in speech proclaiming messages that they oppose, and, as Smith argues, designing websites is a form of speech.[Emma Green: The LGBTQ-rights movement is changing, and so is the Supreme Court]Two cases highlight the distinction between services and speech. In a 1968 case called Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, the Supreme Court said that it was “patently frivolous” to claim that the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment gave a sandwich-shop owner the right to refuse to serve Black customers.The clear prohibition against compelled speech, by contrast, dates back to a 1943 case called West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. At the height of World War II, the Supreme Court held that West Virginia could not make students salute and pledge allegiance to the American flag. The decision contained arguably the most famous single sentence in American First Amendment jurisprudence: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”Thus, the key question in 303 Creative should be whether Smith was denying a service on the basis of status or refusing to engage in speech because she disagreed with its message. If it’s the former, she loses. If it’s the latter, she wins. This was the essence of the debate around a similar 2017 case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. [Netta Barak-Corren: How one Supreme Court decision increased discrimination against LGBTQ couples]Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, refused to design a custom wedding cake for a same-sex wedding, and the oral argument in the case was intensely focused on the line between service and expression. Was designing a custom cake really a constitutionally protected expressive act? Ultimately, the Court punted on that key question, deciding by a 7–2 margin that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had violated Phillips’s rights to free exercise of religion by specifically targeting him because of his faith.But here’s where 303 Creative gets truly strange. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Smith was engaging in “pure speech” and that Colorado was compelling her speech, but it ruled for Colorado anyway. The reasoning in the majority opinion was extraordinary.“This case does not present a competitive market,” the court said. “Rather, due to the unique nature of Appellants’ services, this case is more similar to a monopoly. The product at issue is not merely ‘custom-made wedding websites,’ but rather ‘custom-made wedding websites of the same quality and nature as those made by Appellants.’ In that market, only Appellants exist.”Thus, because Smith possessed a monopoly over her own services, the state had a heightened interest in ensuring access to her work.That is a truly remarkable legal doctrine, one that would vitiate the First Amendment rights of artists who sell their art in the marketplace. After all, every artist has a monopoly over the production of their own art (copyright complexities aside). Does that mean that they’re subject to heightened state regulation? Does that mean that Barnette is diminished when paying customers demand an artist’s work?The case is so remarkable that I came out of legal semiretirement to participate. I filed an amicus brief on behalf of a number of conservative state family-policy organizations. In that brief I contrasted the right of major corporations to speak (or refuse to speak) in the marketplace of ideas with the now-contested right of a single artist to speak (or remain silent) with her own work. As I wrote, “If rights of conscience attach to corporations worth trillions, shouldn’t they also attach to a single artist whose alleged ‘monopoly’ is merely in the sweat of her own brow?”Because the case involves a clash between Christian expression and the desire to protect LGBTQ Americans from discrimination, the culture-war frame is inevitable. But that framing distorts the analysis. This case isn’t about religious liberty versus gay rights but rather about freedom of expression for all artists, regardless of their views. And every artist is entitled to decide what they will say, regardless of the identity of the person demanding their art—or to not say anything at all.

The role of extremist white nationalists in the GOP may be approaching an inflection point.The backlash against former President Donald Trump’s meeting with Nick Fuentes, an avowed racist, anti-Semite, and Christian nationalist, has compelled more Republican officeholders than at any point since the Charlottesville riot in 2017 to publicly condemn those extremist views.Yet few GOP officials have criticized the former president personally—much less declared that Trump’s meeting with Fuentes and Ye, the rapper (formerly known as Kanye West) who has become a geyser of anti-Semitic bile, renders him unfit to serve as president again.Even this distancing from Fuentes (if not Trump) comes as House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, the putative next speaker, is poised to restore prominent committee assignments for Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, two House Republicans who have publicly associated with Fuentes. It also comes as Republican officials, including McCarthy and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, are locking arms in support of Elon Musk’s push to allow extremist voices more access to Twitter.Although it took days to develop, some believe the widespread Republican criticism of Trump’s meeting could signal a new determination to restore the barriers between mainstream conservatism and far-right Christian and white nationalism that eroded during the Trump era.[Brian Klass: The Trump apocalypse has not been canceled]Elizabeth Neumann, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Trump who focused on domestic extremism, told me she believes the backlash—however belated—combined with the GOP’s disappointing performance in last month’s midterm elections, could mark a turning point. “I think we are going to be playing footsie with fascism and authoritarianism and extremism for a while,” because it helped Trump win the presidency in 2016 and sustain his support thereafter, she said. But, she added, after several years of feeling “very pessimistic” about the prospect of weakening those movements, “this is the first time I’ve felt there might be some light at the end of the tunnel.”Yet others remain unconvinced that the GOP is ready to fundamentally break with Trump or ostracize the coalition’s overtly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic white supremacists and Christian nationalists. “I think what we are looking at is the entrenchment of extremism, and that’s what is so worrisome,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.If anything, extremist groups could gain momentum in the coming months. Musk’s proposed mass amnesty for banned Twitter accounts would provide “a tremendous amount of oxygen to extremists on the radical right” and allow those groups to push back much harder against any Republican elected officials resisting their presence in the party, Michael Edison Hayden of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told me. If Musk opens the door to extremist organizing on Twitter, Hayden said, the white-nationalist presence in the GOP coalition will become “potentially irreversible in the short term.”Trump famously declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the neo-Nazi riot against the removal of confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia, during his first year in office. Asked to denounce the extremist Proud Boys during one 2020 presidential debate, Trump instead told them to “stand back and stand by.” After the January 6 insurrection, in which white-supremacist groups played a central role, the overwhelming majority of House and Senate Republicans voted against impeaching or convicting Trump for spurring the violence. More recently, hardly any Republicans have raised objections to Trump repeatedly floating the possibility of providing mass pardons (and even government apologies) to the insurrectionists if he wins the presidency again in 2024.Other officials inside the GOP coalition have pushed through the boundaries Trump has weakened. Gosar and Greene both appeared at Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference. So did Republican Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who called the audience at one of the events “patriots,” and declared, “We need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”The Republican-controlled Arizona State Senate censured Rogers this year for threatening her colleagues, but she was nevertheless fulsomely embraced by Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor this year. Other prominent GOP candidates, including Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, also associated with white and Christian nationalists or directly echoed themes from those movements this year.In a similar vein, in the days before the election, McCarthy made clear that he would restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, whom the Democratic majority had stripped of such roles for their association with extremists and embrace of violent imagery. McCarthy also promised Greene and other hard-line conservatives that he would authorize an investigation into the government’s prosecution and treatment of the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom are extremists tied to white and Christian nationalism.“After Trump’s rise, these barriers became softer and softer, and they really broke down in the aftermath of January 6 altogether,” Hayden said. “And now you have this kind of opening between the fringe world and the mainstream world in a way that is very difficult to separate.”Musk has quickly become a major new factor in further razing those barriers between the far right and the conservative mainstream, restoring the Twitter accounts of figures banned for misinformation, promotion of violence, or intimidation—including Trump and Greene. Hayden said the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research shows that some previously banned white nationalists have already been restored to the site.In a torrent of combative posts, Musk wrapped himself in the mantle of “free speech” to justify restoring accounts previously banned for violating the site’s standards. And he’s accused individuals and institutions that argue for drawing a line against extremist rhetoric of threatening the core American value of free expression. In Musk’s formulation, even the most noxious forms of hate speech can be justified as free speech, and any effort to combat divisive rhetoric is an un-American attempt at censorship or intimidation by the “woke” mob. “This is a battle for the future of civilization,” Musk insisted in one tweet. “If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.” That’s quite a minuet: According to Musk’s logic, it’s a form of “tyranny” to oppose his amplification of authoritarian, racist, and neo-Nazi views antithetical to democracy.The rush of GOP leaders such as McCarthy, DeSantis, and incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to support Musk as he works to restore more banned accounts shows how hard it will be for the GOP to completely divorce itself from white and Christian nationalism. So does McCarthy’s pledge to restore committee assignments to Greene and Gosar, as well as the reluctance of almost all GOP officials to directly criticize Trump.Polling by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center has found that only about one in 11 Republicans expresses directly favorable views of white-nationalist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (whose leader, Stewart Rhodes, was convicted this week of seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 attack).But a much larger slice of Republican partisans express views that might be called white-nationalist adjacent. In various polls, preponderant majorities of GOP voters have said that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities, that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault, and that the growing number of immigrants threatens American values and traditions. About half of Republicans have expressed agreement in other polls with tenets of white nationalism, including the racist “replacement theory” that elites are importing immigrants to undermine the political power of native-born white people, the core Christian-nationalist belief that “God intended America to be a new promised land,” and the assertion that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”Only a minuscule percentage of those Republican partisans might contemplate violence or join extremist organizations, Neumann and other experts point out. But the receptivity of so many Republican voters to arguments, even if less virulent, that overlap with those championed by white- and Christian-nationalist organizations may be a crucial reason for party leaders’ reluctance to confront Trump and others, like Greene, who have associated with such groups. Given the extent of such views inside the GOP coalition, Neumann said, Republicans feel no political incentive to reject the far right “other than out of the goodness of their heart and moral clarity. And apparently that wasn’t enough.”Neumann, now the chief strategy officer of Moonshot, a company that combats online extremism, worries that organized far-right violence could still erupt if Trump ever faces a trial as a result of the various investigations targeting him. But she sees the possibility that the visibility and influence of the extreme right inside the GOP peaked with this fall’s converging events, especially the party’s disappointing election results. “I really do think this is, like, a 10-, 20-year process,” she told me, but “I have a slight hope that this sticks and that we move past it.”[David Frum: A ploy, not a principle]Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of White Too Long, a history of Christian nationalism, is less optimistic. He believes Christian-nationalist beliefs are spreading more widely among Trump’s followers because they believe “they are at a kind of ‘last stand’ moment” for their vision of a white-Christian-dominated America. “The unwillingness of party leaders, time and time again, to denounce Trump for giving these voices support and cover has allowed them to move into the center of the GOP today,” Jones wrote to me in an email. “I would be surprised if we didn’t see increasing numbers of GOP party leaders openly associating with these voices in the future, particularly leading up to the 2024 presidential election.”Greenblatt is also less sanguine. The Anti-Defamation League tracked more than 2,700 anti-Semitic incidents in 2021—the highest annual total it has ever recorded and triple the number of incidents it documented as recently as 2015, the last year before Trump emerged as the GOP’s leading man. Furthermore, Greenblatt is unconvinced that the current Republican distancing from Trump will last any longer than it did in earlier episodes, such as Charlottesville. And he worries that Musk is on course to radically increase the volume of racist and anti-Semitic hate speech on Twitter, which was already a problem before Musk bought the company.On all of these fronts, Greenblatt sees what he calls “the normalization of extremism” hardening in ways that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. “Society itself is at risk if we don’t finally move the extremists … out of the mainstream, back to the margins where they belong,” he told me. “I think we don’t realize the peril that we run, the risk that’s upon us, if we don’t get this right.”

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, before we begin, we are doing an end of the year “Ask Me Anything.” If you have questions, challenges, whatever, something you would like to hear me talk about on the air, send it to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com with “A.M.A.” in the subject line. Again, send your questions to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com with “A.M.A.” in the subject line. We will only keep this open for another week or so. We get a lot of these. So if you’ve got a question, send it in now. [MUSIC PLAYING] So the story we’re telling about the 2022 election is that Republicans underperformed. They did much worse than people expected them to. And I think that’s right. But again, that is compared to expectations. It’s a weird way we process politics compared to stories we had in our heads of how things would go as opposed to just the reality of how they did go. And the truth is that, in 2023, Republicans are going to hold an enormous amount of power. They will control the House. They’ll have appointed six of the nine members of the Supreme Court. More states are going to have Republican governing trifectas than Democratic governing trifectas. And the G.O.P.‘s 2024 presidential primary — it has begun. Donald Trump officially announced he’ll run again. Ron DeSantis has emerged as, by far, his clearest rival. And that, of course, won’t be the only election in 2024. The 2024 Senate map — it is so much worse for Democrats than the 2022 map was. So if a Republican wins the presidency in 2024, they’re very likely to have control of Congress, too. This is not a party far from power. It is a party partially in power and not at all far from gaining a tremendous amount of policymaking, governing power. So what the Republican Party is, what it wants, who actually has influence in it and power to shape it, it matters enormously. And so I wanted to have a post-election conversation with someone deeper inside the Republican tent than I am — about how the party is processing the last election, how it is preparing for the next one, what the factions are, what the structure is, and what a Kevin McCarthy speakership might look like in between. Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at the National Review. He’s author of the book, “My Father Left Me Ireland.” I’ve always found him a sharp observer of the Republican Party and all the more so when I disagree with him. So this one was a fun and, for me, quite interesting conversation. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Michael Brendan Dougherty, welcome to the show.

michael brendan dougherty

ezra klein

So let’s begin with a big question. What’s your model of the Republican Party right now? How would you describe what it is?

Uh, it’s not the Democratic Party. [LAUGHS]

ezra klein

It’s a good answer, actually. [LAUGHS]

I mean that both as a punt for a very complex question, but as a good starting point, which is I view the Republican Party as a coalition of voters who, for whatever reason, object to Democratic rule. By that I mean rule by the Democratic Party, not by democracy. Although we could get into those questions later, too. And it is a complex mix of older-line conservatives, populists, and what I would almost call, like, dissenters from the, quote unquote, “liberal establishment.” It’s actually always been something like this mix. I mean, you can see in previous Republican Party incarnations, like the Nixon coalition, a party like the one we have today. But that is what it is. It’s just a coalition of voters. It’s not the embodiment of a coherent philosophy. It is not the coherent representative of one particular class or class interest, although those are implicated in it. And it’s not the voice of one ideology, like of capitalism or conservatism or national populism. It’s just the collection of voters. And it’s a protean force. And it will look like it has a different personality every time its leadership changes.

ezra klein

I was going to ask you about that leadership change because the Republican Party certainly looks and feels different to people, to me, than it did in 2004 or 2012. And I was curious if you think it is different, as in compositionally different people are in it or they’re in it in different proportions, or simply different parts of it that were always there and always as strong have simply been able to win out to become the dominant expression of the party.

So I think it is different proportions, and so it is different people. If we expand the scope a little bit larger than 2004 — I mean, in 1992, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton, Republicans were still the party for college graduates in the United States. That’s no longer the case. College graduates vote for Democrats. In the simple majority, it fluctuates. So Glenn Youngkin wins 45 percent of college graduates in Virginia, whereas Donald Trump wins 38 percent nationwide. That shift of college graduates into the Democratic Party and maybe non-college whites going into the Republican Party, I mean I think that is a consequence of the 1994 realignment just working itself out over decades. But you still have, in the Republican Party today, and going back all the way to the 1920s, you still have a class of individual business owners, people that Romney spoke to where he said, you built this. So there are some constants, too. But it is a different party. And we’ve even seen a shift during the last four or five years. I mean, I think, in 2018, you see evidence of suburban women, particularly with some college or no college, defecting from the Republican Party. And then you’ve seen during the Covid era, people that were skeptical of lockdowns or anti-vaxxers that were associated with the left coming into the Republican Party on the other side. So yeah, the shifts are still happening, and I expect them to be a constant. The only thing is, though, is that people have been talking about this idea of realignment for a long time. And it is slower and more complicated process than a single election. And as I think we saw in 2022, Republicans can repel college-educated whites faster than they can attract the Latino vote on the other side. So their Latino vote share is growing but not fast enough to stop the losses among college-educated whites.

ezra klein

Yeah, and I want to come back to that because that is, I think, a really interesting dynamic. But I want to pull out something embedded in these answers, which is when I ask you about the Republican Party — and I think this is probably how I would answer, too — you describe the people in it, not any kind of organization, right? You’re not describing really a party structure where there are people who have influence and can chart a course. And you remember — I mean, we came up in journalism around the same time — and it used to be a very common line about politics that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line.

Right.

ezra klein

There was this idea that the Republican Party, you could always predict what they were going to do. They would nominate the runner-up, the next person in line. And Democrats, who knew what the hell Democrats were going to do.

Right.

ezra klein

And it really seems to be the reverse to me now, right? Democrats really fall in line. If you look at who they’ve nominated for president. They make much more strategically-oriented decisions where they’ll knock off this flank in order to appeal to a voter set they’re worried about losing. And Republicans, it’s more all over the place. Why do you think the Republican Party structure has diminished in influence so much?

I think it’s partly a story of that realignment that’s happening from below. There was a very famous story in the 2015 cycle where Byron York goes up to New Hampshire and talks to the local Republican Party apparatus there. And the local Republican Party apparatus in a small state, crucial for the primaries, says we have no idea who these people are that are voting for Donald Trump. We’ve never met these people. [LAUGHS] So yeah, I mean, there’s a story of literally the Republican Party is collecting voters who are not attached to institutions, right? I mean, some of these non-college whites, their grandparents might have been in unions that helped organize and channel their political activity. Now they are not. So they don’t have that. They are maybe politically activated and organized by Fox News or talk radio or the websites they go to, or just the chatter around the break room over copies of the New York Post. So yeah, the Republican Party as an organization is almost incidental. [LAUGHS] It does not — the R.N.C. is not making strategic decisions that matter. And that’s why I think you’re seeing some hope among some Republicans that if they could put maybe Lee Zeldin, the New York Republican gubernatorial candidate who did pretty well in a losing effort — I think there’s some hope, oh, if we put him in there, maybe we could rebuild as an organization and make choices again. Not that they could rebuild the smoke-filled rooms of the 1930s and ‘40s, but at least impose some control. But I don’t see it coming up in time for the next presidential cycle. I think it’s going to be another clown rodeo where 30 people are pouring out of a minibus competing for attention.

ezra klein

So I think it’s fair to say Republicans didn’t have the election night they’d wanted to have a couple of weeks back. How is that being processed? What are the dominant theories of why?

Well, listen, I’m at National Review, and I think the predominant answer among my colleagues would be Trump was an electoral anchor on Republicans for the third election in a row. The Republican Party underperformed in 2018, in 2020 and in 2022, all because there is a voter who is highly motivated to vote against Donald Trump. And if the Republican candidate in the races they can vote in is a proxy for Donald Trump, there is a huge penalty for that candidate.

ezra klein

It arguably underperformed in 2016.

I would argue that as well. Yes, that in a sense Hillary Clinton united just enough of the traditional Republican Party; add on Trump’s rural votes, and you get the four Brexit state disaster for Democrats — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin — which, again, a few score thousands of votes changes the outcome. So that’s one narrative. There’s another one. I would propose, too, that the Republican Party is neither fish nor fowl. That is, it’s neither populist enough to unite the Trump coalition without Trump, and it’s not traditionally conservative enough to unite the 2012 Romney coalition anymore either. And it’s falling between two different versions of itself, whereas Democrats are still held together, partly out of total fear of Donald Trump. So I think that’s another thing to look at. And a lot of us are also processing the role that the Dobbs decision played. We’re curious if it’s going to be an ongoing ordeal for Republicans or whether it is a kind of one-year penalty while all states are putting their state laws in, which should reflect the majority views of their state and whether the issue will settle in the long-term. But it was obviously highly motivating for Democrats to get out there and punish a party that, in effect, was able to change the status quo through its judicial appointments even while it’s out of power in the two elected branches.

ezra klein

One thing I find a little bit odd about the modern Republican Party is how personality-driven its strategic discussions appear to be. So you have 2016, which is a trauma for Democrats. And they talk a lot about Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden or whomever. But there’s a much broader debate about the white working class and whether Democrats are losing touch with the white working class and rural voters and anti-establishment voters. And there’s a kind of argument that’s about broad positioning that a lot of different kind of candidates could fit into. And it’s something I don’t really hear on the Republican side. I hear a lot about Donald Trump. I hear a lot about Ron DeSantis, who we’ll talk about as an answer to Donald Trump. But the party seems very distinctively channeled through its standard bearers or its potential standard bearers in a way that I think people are coming into politics now might find normal. But I feel like it didn’t used to be the way parties processed defeat. I mean, there’s a Republican autopsy in 2012, where they start thinking about needing to appeal more to multiethnic voters and change the nature of their coalition. There’s Democrats after ‘04 and heartland voters. I mean, it used to be about the voters you needed to win back. And now it’s about who might be the person who wins the primary. Does that feel right to you? And if so, why do you think it is?

I think it is partly because that attempt in the 2012 autopsy proved such a disaster. For one, their party then lurched in the exact opposite direction of the recommendations, which is we’re going to nominate a candidate who seems to be calling Mexicans rapists and murderers and saying they’re not sending their best. And yet, he’s going to improve the party’s share among Hispanics over the lifetime of his presidency in a way that would have been totally unthinkable in 2012. If you’d suggested you’re going to get the most anti-immigrant campaign in 100 years in the United States, possibly ever, and you’re going to improve among Hispanics, that’s not what anyone would have predicted in 2012, least of all me. So yeah, there’s a feeling that, again, going back to Byron York, we don’t know who these voters are. We don’t identify them well. The Republican Party doesn’t organize its voters well. Outside of Florida, where it actually seems like the Republican Party has, since the Jeb Bush era, consciously tried to take itself seriously as an organization that identifies potential new blocks of voters and tests strategies for appealing to them and adding them to their coalition. And now you’re seeing, partly, I think the success of that in Florida, which experienced the red tsunami that landed nowhere else. But nationally, I think Republican leaders just don’t know where they are.

ezra klein

I want to talk about Florida, where you say the red tsunami showed up. Let’s start with this about Ron DeSantis, because I think my audience probably mostly gets Ron DeSantis filtered through more liberal media and then also filtered through stunts and messaging Ron DeSantis does to provoke them. So how would you describe who, or, politically, what Ron DeSantis is?

So Ron DeSantis was a conventional conservative in Congress before he ran for governor who was sort of where the trend lines were in his party. So before he ran for governor, he was a little bit more associated with the Club for Growth and the Tea Party causes. Then he runs for governor and tacks really hard for the Trump endorsement and the Trump vote, which solidified his image nationally in those famous and somewhat cringey commercials where he’s, like, reading “The Art of the Deal” to his infant child. [LAUGHS] And at that point, I think he became a punchline for liberals going forward. This is mini-Trump. This is what is going to happen to Republicans now in the Trump era is they’re going to become these doltish figures. But it turns out Ron DeSantis is a bit of a nerd and confident, and he took a calculated risk during the Covid era. And I think the Covid era transformed him politically into something entirely different. And he is not a conventional conservative still, but he made Florida into this alternative where he took, basically, almost the Great Barrington Declaration approach to Covid, which is we’re going to focus a lot of resources on nursing homes and elder care facilities, but otherwise we’re going to open up everything else as soon as possible and let people make their own decisions about their risk levels. I want to totally abstract whether he was right to do that or wrong to do that. There was a big demand for that among people, and it showed in Florida tourism, both nationally and from internationally, that a lot of people wanted this, at least temporarily. And hundreds of thousands of people moved into Florida in the last couple of years. I don’t think all of them would consider themselves conservatives, but many of them moved for that approach. And I think that calculated risk and the way he put himself out front, even more so than Brian Kemp in Georgia, made him a kind of conservative hero. He was also standing up to the media, standing up to Fauci, in a way that Donald Trump wasn’t standing up to Dr. Fauci. And I think the thing that really has driven DeSantis to the top of alternatives to Donald Trump in the Republican Party is that he is identifiably bringing people into the Republican Party. We have seen an exodus of people from the Republican Party under Trump. In Florida, when Ron DeSantis was elected, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 270,000 in registrations in Florida. In the summer of this year, Republicans outnumber Democrats by over 300,000 on the registries in Florida. That’s from in-migration. That’s from the Florida G.O.P. working hard to register new people. There’s a little bit of roll clearing, too, which I will acknowledge. Probably pushed some Democrats off the registered rolls. He’s brought in people that were skeptical of the Covid era guidelines. And many of them have made a political transformation. They no longer identify with their previous maybe center left politics or maybe far crunchy left politics, and they’ve come over to the Republicans as like an anti-establishment alternative. And I think that is what puts him so far ahead of a Brian Kemp or Greg Abbott in these past couple of years, and why he’s polling as high as he is.

ezra klein

Yeah, so there are a couple of things there I want to try to unpack. So one about Covid and how he remade himself around that. I am not a deep expert on specifically Florida’s policies compared to other states. But I covered Covid and had a general sense. And when I looked at it at that time, he didn’t look very different to me than Texas, didn’t look very different to me than Georgia, didn’t look very different to me, actually, than a lot of the Southwest, which took this approach. What did seem different about DeSantis was his level of identifying that the out-group to those policies, the antagonist to them, was somewhere in between the public health establishment, the C.D.C., Anthony Fauci and the media — the liberal media. And that in a way that was not true for some of the other governors who took very similar stances to him on Covid, he used Covid as a ground upon which to create a conflict that he’s then tried to extend in other areas like this immigration stunt, but where he wants himself to be in opposition to the media, to certain kinds of expert bureaucrats. And what makes him different, it often appears to me, is not dramatically different policies but a mastery of the antagonisms and resentments and a sense of who the fight is actually between that some of his gubernatorial colleagues who are just out there fighting with Democrats or Joe Biden or whatever, they don’t really get in the way he does.

I think that’s right. But I think you might be underestimating how Florida became a focus precisely because DeSantis was seen as this mini-Trump or more Trump than Trump. And he was also seen by Democrats as electorally vulnerable. He’d won a squeaker of an election against Andrew Gillum to become governor. So he seemed more vulnerable than maybe a Greg Abbott. And Florida became a kind of obsession in media about, oh, my gosh, look at them, they’re on the beaches. This is disgusting. Everyone’s going to die under DeathSantis. There’s no nickname for Brian Kemp or Greg Abbott like DeathSantis. And so he used that. He used the energy that was thrown at him and used it like a good martial artist. I’m going to take the punch you’re throwing at me and use that energy for my own purpose. So yeah, he wasn’t that different from others, but he benefited from this Eye of Sauron-like attention that was put on Florida in particular. And it was a mix of things. It was the idea that he was seen as more Trump than Trump. It was also a little bit the Florida man reputation. That Florida is this kind of strange swamp at the bottom of our country where all the weird stories come from. He has benefited from it, though, for sure.

ezra klein

It’s funny. I wonder now listening to that if some of this is geographic, because I just, in California, always heard much more about Texas.

Oh, interesting.

ezra klein

And you’re up in New York, and you clearly hear much more about Florida. And when Californians leave, they go to Texas, not to, as often, Florida.

That’s right. When New Yorkers leave, they go to Florida.

ezra klein

Exactly. So I wonder how much of this is actually a geographic thing. But let me ask you about his election night. Because I’ve been genuinely somewhat puzzled by how unique his victory has been treated as. Mike DeWine won Ohio by more than DeSantis won Florida. He won in Ohio by about 25 points. Chris Sununu won New Hampshire, which is a much more purple state — a closer state than Florida is — by 16 points. Phil Scott, the Republican in Vermont — I mean, he had a very weak opponent — but he’s a Republican in Vermont, and he wins by almost 50 points.

Yeah.

ezra klein

But all anybody will talk about out of this is Ron DeSantis. And I’m curious why the DeWines, the Sununus, why other big Republican wins are getting so little attention.

It’s a case by case basis. DeWine, because he didn’t face a very strong opponent and this is his 10th race, so it’s like this is a 10-time officeholder in Ohio, a very known quantity against a not very well-funded opponent. Now, the fact is Charlie Crist was a weak opponent for DeSantis. So DeSantis should have been expected to run up the score. I think one of the reasons he got a lot of attention is he ran up the score larger than the polls suggested. The polls looked like you were going to get a 12, maybe 15-point DeSantis victory, which would have been impressive. But it ended up coming out much larger than that. And him winning certain counties in Florida, like Miami-Dade or Osceola, that are typically out of reach for Republicans. He had deeper reach with Puerto Rican voters, with Cuban voters than anticipated as well. But yeah, in a way, Marco Rubio’s 17-point victory over Val Demings is almost more impressive because Val Demings was a really good candidate, a really serious figure in the Democratic Party, arguably should have been vice president, and Marco Rubio trounced her. But yeah, I think it was funding disparities. But again, Ron DeSantis, I think the reason he’s treated as the big winner that night is he gets a lot of support from Trumpy voters in the Republican Party. He’s not necessarily a turnoff to them. And so he’s seen as a potential viable successor or bridge from Trump to the future. And further — I mean, one of the reasons DeSantis did so well is his fund-raising in the party was beyond everyone else’s, even Donald Trump’s, in the last year. And like I said, I think that’s because he became this national anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine mandate figure in the party.

ezra klein

Let’s say I buy your take on DeSantis and Covid. That actually seems in a way to open up a pretty profound question about him because it seems unlikely to me that 2024 is going to be about Covid. I mean, I could prove wrong. There could be a more lethal variant. Terrible things can happen, right? I don’t want to predict the future. But extrapolating from where we are right now, that doesn’t strike me as likely to be the dominant issue. He’s obviously jumped on a bunch of culture worry issues with various bills about sexual identity and trying to send —

Education.

ezra klein

Education, immigrant — sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, which we can talk about. But what does he believe? I mean, what is his profile on the traditional bread and butter issues? I’m one of many liberals who keeps looking at him trying to understand what is his actual economic views — I know what they were when he was in the House — and finding him both hard and vague to place.

Yeah. And there’s another reason for that obscurity or that seeming obscurity in your part, which is that Florida’s Republican legislature and governors have actually removed, from the political discussion, lots of policy options on taxes and spending that would potentially give you clues. So DeSantis doesn’t even have room for maneuver in Florida to part from the low tax, low regulation environment that he’s in. And I’ve written the same column saying what is DeSantis going to say to voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio? Those four states that gave Donald Trump the victory in 2016 are not growing, experiencing the economic growth that Florida is seeing. And in fact, you could argue that Florida is, in a sense, creaming off the good stuff from other parts of the country that are in decline. And Ron DeSantis, if he’s going to make the big jump from a state to a national campaign, he has to speak to the whole country’s fate. And we just don’t know where he is on America’s economic model and whether it needs serious alteration. I actually think this is a huge problem for both parties going forward because the numbers are pretty forbidding on the federal budget as far as debt, interest payments, our previous commitments, our military budget. And I think both parties are going to face this problem of how can we solve issues for our voters and keep our coalitions together without a lot more economic growth than we’ve seen in the past two decades and that we expect to see. And I’m not sure anyone has the answer there.

ezra klein

Do Republicans care about economic issues at this point? I mean, something that really struck me about the election, one reason I thought Democrats were going to get creamed this year, was inflation that high is a disaster for the governing party, or at least I thought it would be a disaster for the governing party. And I watched month after month after month as Republicans did not really emphasize, did not develop a coherent, in my view, message on inflation, a sense of why we’re the party you should turn to to fix inflation. I understood why the other party you should turn to to make sure that various insurance policies weren’t going to include surgeries for children who want to switch gender identity. But I did not really ever know what it was Republicans are saying on inflation. Health care is a little bit of the same issue. Florida never expanded Medicaid. I guess Ron DeSantis doesn’t think you should, but I don’t know what Ron DeSantis thinks you should do about health care for the country. And I think it’s going to be a problem. But it may be just isn’t a problem in Republican primaries if that’s not where the energy is and he’s correct about that. Do Republicans actually have to have views on these issues anymore to be successful within their own party?

Probably not. I mean, listen, I’m a conservative writer at National Review. I’m not a Republican Party strategist or even an advocate. But yeah, Republicans have been almost policy-phobic for the last decade. They don’t know how to agree on — some of these have been perennial issues among Republicans. Like, do we care about deficits, or do we care about overall government commitments, or do we care about fiscal rectitude at all? And I know many Democratic commentators and voters are like, this is a party that runs against debts and deficits when Democrats are in charge and then spends like crazy when they’re in charge to please their voters. I mean, there was no party platform in 2020, and there was no even attempt at a coherent policy message on inflation other than the stickers on gas stations saying, Biden did this, which, in fact, wasn’t even entirely true itself, right? I mean, the whole issue of inflation was it’s a global issue that’s an after-effect of Covid. Maybe you can make a case that the last spending bill that Biden passed, that I think Donald Trump would have passed if he were president, too — something like it — contributed a little bit more. But overall, they didn’t have a theory for blaming Biden other than he’s in charge, and it’s happening. And they didn’t have a theory for how to overcome it either. I mean, I think they were hoping there would be a red tsunami and the Fed would have solved the problem by the time Republicans showed up in January.

ezra klein

You know I think that answer just made me pretty radically revise upwards my view of how strong a candidate Donald Trump is. I’m going to put a pin in why I think that is. But the other big thing that happens right after the midterm, of course, is that Trump announces, which is not a huge surprise but was interesting. What did you think of the announcement itself? What did you hear in what Trump said that was the same or different or telling? And what did you see in how it was covered that was the same or different or telling?

Oh, well, there was a lot, actually. And the fact that there was a lot surprised me. One, the drama of it was strange. Mar-a-Lago is like the closest thing America has ever had to a court of exile for a royal, right? I mean, it’s literally this gilded ballroom that he announces to his court, literally to the people who live in and around Donald Trump’s life since he became president. And what was so funny was on Fox News, they didn’t even show the whole speech live. They showed the meat of the speech where he kind of stuck to the teleprompter and then immediately cut to Mike Huckabee, who was saying, like, if he sticks with this message, he’s unstoppable. And it’s like, oh, my gosh, if there’s an unstoppable political message on my television, show it to me. Show me the whole thing. But it was almost like Sean Hannity and Mike Huckabee were in a sense, in this weird way that Fox News has done for years, trying to communicate back to Donald Trump, saying, good, just focus on the Biden economy and the economy under Trump until 2019, and don’t talk about the 2020 election. It was like that was the subliminal message back to Trump, which is, like, good job, stick to the teleprompter. And I actually think this is a mistake. And I’m going to say something that might sound upsetting. But part of the speech they cut away from, which was the part of the speech that I think had the most political dynamite in it — and it’s awful to say this — but it’s when he talked about, basically, executing drug dealers the way China does. That was not a policy I advocate at all, but it was the sort of thing that actually propelled Trump in 2015 and 2016, which was picking an issue that is under-discussed in American politics — the fentanyl epidemic — and proposing an absolutely radical solution that is far outside of the political imagination of our ruling class. The idea of instituting Chinese-style justice in the United States, of course, is hateful. But it’s the sort of thing that I think actually worked for him politically, is that I’m going to highlight to you how much I care about an issue that isn’t being talked about by saying the most outrageous thing imaginable about it. But Fox News had cut away. And so most people never saw that. And they only would have heard it if they had been on C-SPAN, or if they’re a political addict that listens to podcasts like this or to the editors on National Review. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

Something about Trump as a political orator is that he talks. He doesn’t orate. He doesn’t give speeches. He talks. And he says stuff that you may not think is wise but that accords with a lot of people’s intuitions. I mean, if you ever talk to normal people who don’t do politics professionally, a lot of ideas that make sense to people, political professionals find worrying, problematic, maybe won’t work all that well. But Trump just works with these passions. And I think you might have written about this, but I thought Chappelle in a S.N.L. monologue, that has become controversial for other reasons we don’t need to go into, had this good point when he said that the thing that is appealing about Trump is that he’s an honest liar. Can you talk a bit about that idea?

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s absolutely true, which is that Donald Trump’s appeal is — the way Chappelle said it is Donald Trump came out and said the system is rigged and I know because I used the system, which, again, is like this deep — hits a deep strain in American politics of the F.D.R. traitor to his class politics. And Trump also communicates in a way that feels — can often feel authentic and more connected emotionally to an audience than his Republican rivals who are used to speaking with nerds like us, journalists and people that write policy white papers. There are moments in the 2016 campaign where he described, with obvious physical and moral disgust, what a late-term abortion was. That had never been done before by a Republican and it made a huge connection with pro-lifers for whom that kind of description is part of their political cause and culture for decades. Or when he talked about, solemnly and with evident sadness in his voice, about the waste of the Iraq War. Or if you have a slightly different opinion on the war, which he’ll share with you as well later in the debate, when he speaks with evident anger that we didn’t take the oil. Got nothing out of it. And I do think Trump’s great strength as a candidate then and even now is that he understands politics is not just about policy. It is about these deep moral passions. And a ton of voters will connect with that if they’re expressed in that way. And I think that’s also why DeSantis sometimes is still learning that vocabulary. So for instance, when DeSantis defends some of his culture war-style bills about education in Florida, DeSantis will obscure his own role and agency in them. He’ll just say something like, I don’t think Florida parents will stand for that. That’s a C-plus line, right? But it’s much more effective if he says, like, Florida parents know it’s wrong, I know it’s wrong. It makes it personal and expresses some emotion. But Trump is the master of that.

ezra klein

It reminds me of something that journalist Molly Ball said about Trump in 2016, which I always thought was very smart, where she said, all the other candidates that get up on the stage — and I’m paraphrasing her here, of course — and they say voters are angry, and I understand that. And Trump gets up on the stage and says, I’m angry. [LAUGHS]

No, that’s exactly it.

ezra klein

Now, let me actually — I never liked the cut between policy and passion because I don’t think people think about policy and morality and politics and personality and experience. It’s all like a jumble. It’s all a stew of stuff. And I want to get to what you said that made me more optimistic about Trump’s shot than I probably was coming into this conversation, which is if you think the economy is actually going to be a major issue, if you think Republican Party and media strategists are a little wrong about the power of some of these cultural issues, if you look at 2022 and say maybe that’s evidence they were a bit wrong about this. The thing about Trump is that, whether you want to give him credit for it or not, as president, he has a very, very strong economic record. And that backs up the fact that he’s always had this appeal, which people like me will question and poke at and pull apart. But it doesn’t matter that we do that. That he’s a businessman who knows how to get things done. And if you’ve got a bunch of people running who have no real communication chops on the economy. And you have Trump, who has always knowing how to speak the language of at least the public’s idea of a businessman, of a builder, and now actually of an ex-president who drove unemployment very low and didn’t have, at that point, the inflationary boom period that we’re going through now. I mean, that gives him an actual lane of substance that I don’t think he’s going to communicate on through white papers and deep analyses of pricing decisions in the economy. But I don’t know, it actually strikes me as a genuine advantage to him because I’m somebody who thinks that the economy and how politicians are able to communicate about it actually still matters hugely.

Yeah, he’s going to have this. I mean, this is — Niall Ferguson made a version of this argument in The Daily Mail, that if, as Niall suspects, we’re headed for recession, where maybe inflation goes down but unemployment goes up, Donald Trump will have a nostalgia message of, like, do you remember what it was like in 2018 and 2019 where before Covid — because in a sense, there was an economic disaster late in Trump’s presidency, but no one blames him for it because it’s literally blamed on an act of God, blamed on a Chinese Communist Party, or a gourmand in the meat markets of China. So Covid isn’t his fault. So people will credit him with the hot economy. And remember, he believed the Fed to try to keep running things hot. He wanted to run the machine hot, which in a way aligns a little bit with where I think the center left has been drifting intellectually, too. So he was at the forefront of a couple of major trends in thinking about economics. And yeah, he has that fantasy power of, hey, a businessman was in charge. That’s been a Republican fantasy and a populist fantasy for decades, going back to Ross Perot and his candidacies for president. So yeah, I do think he has potentially that advantage. And again, we’ll see what the vibes are like. Maybe inflation doesn’t hurt Joe Biden or Democrats as much. Partly maybe it’s the Covid exceptional era extending longer. Partly it’s also — there is low unemployment, and there are jobs available, and people have been getting raises slowly. But in two years, if unemployment is up, if there’s going to be thousands of people who made financial decisions in their life — maybe they’re looking for a mortgage now and they’re looking at the interest rates — there may be a lot of reasons to dislike the economy in a year that will make Trump a more attractive figure.

ezra klein

Something I find genuinely weird about the Republican Party’s continuing interest in or affection for Trump is that, as you said, he’s just presided over loss after loss. I mean, they lose the House. They have a disastrous midterm in 2018. They lose the presidency in 2020. I know he says that he didn’t really lose. And I know some portion of Republicans believe him, although I’m always a little skeptical on how sincere I think that belief is. Among a lot of people, I think a lot of people are —

They just give an answer to identify themselves with one party or the other.

ezra klein

Yeah, it’s always hard for me to decompose what people are saying in that answer. But anyway, so obviously a lot of Republicans believe there was things wrong with the 2020 election. And Donald Trump has tried to shift blame onto that lie. But nevertheless, he lost. In 2022, his candidates don’t do well. I think people believe that he was part of why Republicans didn’t succeed more. And certainly you can’t make an argument that Trump had a magic touch and anybody he touched outperformed other kinds of candidates. You go back to 2016 and the Democrats, and they just become obsessed with winning. All they want to do is win. And that eventually leads them to Joe Biden, this candidate who most factions of the party feel is fine. But what they feel about him is that maybe the kind of voters who they need to win back also feel like Joe Biden is fine. You have this very strategic Democratic Party that emerges out of 2016. And I just don’t know. It’s a weird thing to me about Republicans, particularly given Donald Trump’s constant obsession with winning and turning that into the only thing you need to be in life, that it isn’t seen as more of an obvious vulnerability or even disqualifier for him that he’s such a modest electoral performer, whereas there are Republicans who, apparently in these terrible rigged elections, win by overwhelming margins even so.

Yeah, one, he’s always had a temptation to exaggerate the scale of his victories or even exaggerate the crowd size on inauguration day. So he makes — he tries to make his victories even bigger. I mean, I do think the 2016 victory was big. I mean, he was a popular vote loser. But it was big in that he really did outperform polls. He really did outperform expectations. And it was revealed that his campaign really did have some sense of who his potential voters were and targeted them with messaging that appealed to them and got them out to vote. People didn’t think he had that kind of skill as an operator or would have that skill as a machine in the Republican Party. But yeah, the thing is is that Trump’s success is not transferable to anyone else in the Republican Party. Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, is not a billionaire real estate developer who’s been on television for decades and Howard Stern’s show for a decade. And he doesn’t have buildings with his name on them all over the country and golf courses all over the world. I mean, it’s just — he’s not cited in rap songs the way Donald Trump is. Donald Trump is a huge figure, a Titanic figure in our culture. And so I think Donald Trump can argue, with some credibility, that, yeah, OK, my candidates — I can’t make Blake Masters into gold. I can’t make Don Bolduc into an electoral winner. But that’s because the magic is me. And you need me to turn out these rural voters. You need me to turn out the left behind. You need me to continue growing. And that might not be wrong. I mean, he really energized Democrats to vote against him in 2020. Will they again? I don’t know.

ezra klein

So we so far have been talking about the governor of Florida, the ex-president of the United States. Normally, after a midterm in which one party takes the House and takes the speakership back, the pretty much sure to be next speaker I think would be a more central topic of political conversation and fascination than Kevin McCarthy has, in fact, been. There’s a very real way in which McCarthy seemed very overshadowed to me by other players in the Republican Party. But he will, in a way, have the most institutional power of any Republican coming out of this election. And decisions he makes about, say, whether to actually have a big debt ceiling showdown or what to do with investigations and impeachments will create the context in which 2024 happens. How do you understand who Kevin McCarthy is and what kind of speaker he’s likely to be?

Kevin McCarthy is — if you could imagine [LAUGHS] a cat herder but all the cats are on fire. This is a thankless job. I think being majority leader in such a slim majority, he doesn’t have the institutional polar weight that Nancy Pelosi had in her party to keep things running smoothly. He’s not particularly liked. So we don’t know. I mean, he has shown a little bit of ability to let some Republican committees start experimenting with policy ideas. So he’s not showing the kind of iron grip that leadership has in both houses over legislation. So that I’m kind of hopeful for, that elected Republican legislators will have a little bit more to say about legislation, even if it’s not going to go anywhere in the next two years. But the big question is, like, what kind of investigations or oversight are Republicans going to launch, and whether they’re substantive or whether they are show trials, and what they produce? And you don’t know what they’re going to produce. I think a lot of people had a very low opinion of the Benghazi hearings. And yet, they ended up being very consequential for the 2016 election when Anthony Weiner’s laptop spills out in the end and forces Comey’s hand, late in the cycle. That’s not something that you can design to happen. That was a little bit of like the butterfly effect in action with Democrats watching in horror the whole way. But again, those hearings could matter. So far, of course, they’ve picked the Hunter Biden laptop as the juicy target to focus on. And that makes sense because Joe Biden is President. But it is questionable whether Republicans even understand the politics of this. Joe Biden has shown a remarkable ability to deflect anything scandalous about this story by pointing out to the fact that his son is a drug addict who is suffering, and that he himself, his father, loves his son and wants to support him. In fact, Joe Biden turns it into an asset because there are hundreds of thousands of families who have one troubled member in it who may cause trouble for the family but who is still beloved. And Republicans can misplay this to look like they’re persecuting a man who is not in control of himself.

ezra klein

So I want to note something in that answer, which is that, very quickly, Kevin McCarthy vanished into complete nothingness at the center of it. [LAUGHS]

Well, yeah —

ezra klein

Like he became —

That’s right.

ezra klein

There’s a sense of him as smoke. I mean, I’ve heard this before. People start talking about him and very quickly they’ll just be talking about something else.

Yeah, no, that’s a great observation.

ezra klein

Who is Kevin McCarthy? What does he believe? What kind of speaker does he want to be? I mean, he’s going to be a very powerful Republican. And speakers do have — I mean, as much as I like your metaphor there — the herding cats on fire — I mean, nobody envies him his job. But that job can be done in very different ways, and always is by different speakers. Who is he?

I literally just think he is an ambitious member of the House who wants to be where the center of gravity is in the party. And it’s been harder and harder to figure out where exactly that is. And it matters a huge amount how many seats they have in the majority, right? Because the Republican Party — the difference between their majority and minority could be like the seats in New York, or the seats in California, or it could be Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert on any particular issue. And in fact, I just would not be surprised if any of these factions, whether more moderate or more radical and populist, are willing to give him more trouble than the Squad or the Progressive House Caucus was ever willing to give Pelosi. And again, like you said, he disappeared from that answer, too. I said all the actors are going to be on the fringe. The theme of our conversation is that there is nothing in the center, that the Republican Party is kind of doughnut hole, where the outer edge determines everything and there’s literally a vacuum in the middle — a vacuum of authority. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So the more I think about what you’ve said, the more I think it is all kind of the same argument, which is there isn’t really a Republican Party right now. There are a lot of Republicans and a bunch of them hold power, but that’s kind of it. And that actually strikes me as a problem for a political system in which you’re supposed to have, on some level, parties organizing the preferences of voters and then in constant — not just competition with each other, but in a way that I think we’ve a little bit forgotten, in negotiation with each other. This is a thing that top Democrats complain to journalists about all the time, have been since Obama and Boehner. But this idea that there’s nobody to call on the Republican side. There’s nobody to negotiate with. Nobody who can make a deal happen even if they’ve agreed to that deal before. At some point even including Donald Trump, where Pelosi would think they made a deal on immigration and then Trump would get a bunch of criticism and flip on it the next morning.

Right.

ezra klein

This is actually a problem for our system of government. [LAUGHS]

Right. And the problem goes back to this problem of the Republican Party not knowing its own voter base very well. On a practical level, when you’re covering a Republican campaign event — it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been out on the hustings — but you’re often seeing a candidate who’s been brought in in a Black SUV from a gated community to somewhere else with people he never hangs out with, people he doesn’t intuitively understand, and he’s saying slogans that he sort of believes in and some of them he sort of doesn’t, and it’s plainly obvious which are which. And then he goes back to the gated community and maybe holds a fundraiser in the gated community and then tries to get to work. And there’s been an institutional failure on the Republican side to translate the instincts and aspirations of the Republican base into policy. Now, you might hate Republican base voter aspirations and say, well, that’s great, or that they can’t be translated into policy because it’s just some kind of cultural resentment or just the belch of the angry party. But that failure is how Donald Trump stepped in and smashed the party and affected his hostile takeover of it in 2016 is that this connection had been lost, the essential connection in a representative democracy between voters and representatives. And until Republicans restore that, I think you are going to see this kind of mix of populist versus establishment sniping with very little policy substance to the party at all. So you would need politicians who are intelligent enough and sensitive enough to speak passionately about things that their constituents actually care about and translate that into policy. That is what would restore trust in the Republican Party as an institution rather than as just a platform vehicle on which to run up on the stage and perform slam poetry on the culture war.

ezra klein

Let me offer a contrary thought to that that goes back to your very first answer to me, which is that the Republican Party is not the Democratic Party. Because, in a way, I have a little bit of trouble buying this. I don’t think Republicans, Republican voters are all that more diffuse or complex in terms of what they want in policy or what kind of country they want than Democrats are. I mean, I like the polling. I sit in on focus groups. Nothing is perfect. But Democrats are a complex coalition, too. They’re always disappointed in their politicians and so on and so on. I actually think the problem for Republicans for a long time, in terms of being a party, is that the level of, I think, at this point, actually apocalyptic sentiment towards the Democrats, more broadly towards a kind of sense of liberal woke establishment-ism that is out there, then through Donald Trump, in particular, towards elections and some of the more basic machinery of government. At some point, if you don’t have full power yourself — if Ron DeSantis is President and he’s got Kevin McCarthy as speaker and Mitch McConnell as majority leader in the Senate, he could just pass bills. And I think they’ll do that. But if you have to work with the rest of the system and the other party, but you and your media establishment made the other party too toxic to work with, it’s too easy to take you apart in a primary, as happened with the Tea Party and then happened around Donald Trump, if you’re seen as too much of a compromiser. Then you can’t translate what people want into policy because the act of the compromise is more loathed than the possible benefits it could bring. And I don’t want to say there’s none of this dynamic on the Democratic side. I think by the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, you did see some bipartisan work happen around Covid and some big bills happen in that emergency scenario. But I think Democratic views on Trump are quite apocalyptic, too. And so he’d be very hard for Democrats to compromise with. But I think there’s something about Republican hatred of the liberal elites that has made it very hard for them to then turn around and say, OK, but we’ve made a deal with the liberal elites, and it’s going to get you more of what you want and you should support it. And it’s like that particular bridge over the rushing waters that Republican leader after leader keeps falling into.

Yeah, and some of it is burned trust from before, which is it’s almost legendary in conservative circles that, oh, Ronald Reagan made a deal on immigration, which was amnesty now and we’re going to get enforcement at the border later. And then the enforcement never really came or kind of fell apart over time. And so Democrats got what they wanted out of the deal — or liberal-leaning voters on immigration got what they wanted out of the deal — amnesty — and Republicans were left holding the bag. And a lot of people felt, I think justifiably, that that was likely what was going to happen with immigration reform in 2006 or under Boehner in the 2010s. And so, yeah, there’s definitely a feeling that — and this is, I think, actually a broader problem of conservative parties in the West, is that as establishment liberals consolidate control over a lot of other institutions in national life, whether it’s universities, media — as they set the tone more and more in corporate life, there’s a sense in which all Republican political action or all actions by conservative governments are against the grain of society and are always felt as rough and almost feel violent, whereas Democratic actions are smoothed over because the institutions accept them and internalize and metabolize them much more easily. And I think that’s going to be a characteristic going forward. And it’s going to make in future Republican administrations, I think a lot of Democrats will feel like, oh, this is much more like Viktor Orban now because it’s like the executive is attacking the institutions of social life in the country in order to get what they want done.

ezra klein

One reality, I think, of a lot of the institutions, the civil servants we’re talking about, the media, to some degree, is that they would be so relieved by any Republican who seemed just modestly less conflict-oriented and antagonistic than the Trump/DeSantis axis now, that I think there would be a weird level of calm and openness to people who maybe a couple of years ago would have been understood, by these same organizations, as very, very, very conservative. And now a Mike DeWine or something just looks completely normal. And I have wondered whether or not Trump, DeSantis being at war in a primary doesn’t create room for a Nikki Haley, a Mike Pence, a Tim Scott — you can name your Republican. I don’t think it’s going to be a real moderate like a Larry Haugen. But there are plenty of fairly conservative Republicans who seem like a quite different kind of Republican right now than those two do. And you can imagine one of them winning New Hampshire when people are tired of the Trump/DeSantis battle and then getting a lot of momentum. When you look at the party, are there people you see as dark horses or other players who you think aren’t getting enough attention?

I don’t know if it’s Nikki Haley. I’ve seen her work relatively friendly crowds and not do all that well. I didn’t think she translated from South Carolina to the national stage perfectly well. Tim Scott sort of has this appeal. There is a Republican and I think global conservative appeal, of course, to say, hey, we’re going to show you our principles are not just white supremacy, because, look, we have a person of color as our candidate. I’ve seen that latent desire since the first CPAC I went to where I saw buttons for Condoleezza Rice for president. And we’ve seen that in the Tory Party in highlighting how many women or people of color they’re raising up into cabinet. That same impulse exists in the Republican Party and they’ll want to find diverse candidates in the future. However, I got to say I am on the team put all your eggs in the DeSantis basket. And I am that way for the reason that I think he has brought in voters into the Republican coalition in Florida and nationally. And he still appeals to a lot of Trump voters, even if in a selection straight up between the two of them, there’s a lot of voters who still prefer Trump now. And I just don’t see any other figure uniting the whole of the Republican Party and presenting opportunities for expansion the way I do in DeSantis. I think everyone else is a little bit too uncreative and probably keeps too much of the old council. And I am declaring very early that I think DeSantis is a special figure in the Republican Party right now.

ezra klein

I think that’s the place to end then. So always our final question. Michael, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

To the audience — and I can recommend them like with a full sentence? Can I explain why?

ezra klein

You can talk as much as you want about them.

All right, so for the first hour — so one history book I’ve loved reading in the last couple of years and returning to is “The German War” by Nicholas Stargardt. It is a history of World War II told from the perspective of German people, from common people all the way up to archbishops, and how they experienced World War II. It is a really haunting and frightening book in a lot of ways and more effective than I think a lot of Hannah Arendt essays, just in how people metabolized a dictatorship and genocide in their own borders and slightly beyond them. Another book, which I think captures a little bit of conservative fears about the direction of history, at the end of history, is this book, “The Demon in Democracy,” by Ryszard Legutko, who is a Polish philosopher and minister in the European Parliament. And it’s just a brilliant book about how a lot of partisans of liberal democracy in our era effectively have a communist worldview horizon, which is that the direction of history goes in one direction and that’s towards people who no longer have states, national loyalties, religious differences, that we kind of all meld into one global humanity. And then I want to recommend this book by probably my favorite conservative thinker, Roger Scruton. It’s called “The Face of God.” It’s a very interesting book in that I don’t think Roger Scruton believed in God, or I’m not sure. And yet, this series of essays takes the reader on a journey through thinking about the idea of God in a secular world. And I think it has a unique ability to show people who don’t believe in God what the rest of us see, this idea of a source and grounding for all of our gratitude and affection for the world and the way that God can rationalize the gift that we make to each other of self-sacrifice. It’s a very profound work, and it’s not like some treacly Christian apologetic like from Max Lucado. And I think it appeals to people who are immune to C.S. Lewis and other traditional apologists.

ezra klein

Michael Brendan Dougherty, thank you very much.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “For whom or what are you thankful this year?”One thing I’m thankful for this year are the emails that you send each week. As this newsletter began, I hoped that a community of this sort could have conversations on topics of controversy that avoided the worst aspects of what plagues public discourse on social media. Months into this experiment, I’m pleased to report that while I get far more emails each week than I can publish, almost none are abusive or even trolly. Collectively, you’ve managed to opine on some of the most controversial issues of the day from a wide variety of perspectives in a manner that’s hearteningly thoughtful and constructive. Thank you for helping to make the work of assembling this a privilege rather than a chore.Thank you as well to Jaleelah, the correspondent with the longest streak of consecutive replies to my questions. This week, she wrote to say that she is thankful for all four of her grandparents:
I’m grateful that they’re all alive and healthy.
My paternal grandfather taught me chess. He also insists on buying me candy from Dollarama every time he visits even though I’m now an adult. My paternal grandmother tells me stories about her childhood in Palestine and teaches me to cook her mother’s dishes. She also gave me the best piece of advice I’ve ever received (“If you’re feeling tired, sad, or stressed out, go wash your face with cold water”). My maternal grandfather comes up with new jokes to tell every time he speaks with me. My maternal grandmother sends me pictures of the flowers in her garden. The two of them send me thoughtful emails about their lives and frequently ask about mine. I know that many people aren’t as lucky as me. Still, I am sad that I haven’t seen my grandparents in a long time. They live far away in Ohio and Alberta. Nevertheless, I carry their support and wisdom in my heart everywhere I go.
At 42, I’m thankful enough to have three grandparents still living. I too carry all of them in my heart, along with my late grandmother and the three great-grandparents I got to meet.[Read: The case for building more housing]Mike, on the other hand, expressed gratitude for the support he’s received through a period of health problems:
This Thanksgiving is not going to be one spent with friends and family gathered around a table. My wife and I will spend the day at the hospital, working through my stem-cell transplant needed to treat multiple myeloma. This treatment results in a severely compromised immune system, so being around people is not something I can do for a couple of months.
That might sound a touch bleak for Thanksgiving, but this situation really brings into focus the many things I have to be thankful for: a great team of doctors and nurses to get me through this; an excellent caregiver in my wife; my family, which is scattered around the country but is constantly checking in. Their love and concern is evident in every conversation. My local support group, which consists of our older daughter and her husband (who are in the area) and a bunch of dear friends and neighbors who never stop offering to help.
Before we could do the transplant, we had to talk with a social worker. One of her concerns was what would happen if my wife got sick and couldn’t handle the caregiving chores––was there anyone else who could help? That’s when it really hit us. They ask those questions because there are people who don’t have the friends and family around them to back them up. That’s not something that we had thought about at all, and we left that interview a little stunned at how incredibly fortunate we are to have these people in our lives. As I was writing this, some friends offered to bring by a Thanksgiving supper for us. We may not be able to enjoy it with them, but we’ll be thinking of them and the rest of these wonderful people in our lives with every bite.
We’re pulling for you, Mike.[Read: 15 readers on how they’re cutting costs]Pat describes a return to loved ones:
After 13 years away, my husband and I moved back to our hometown, primarily to be with family. It was a super-good move, despite the not-as-good weather here! And we just had the most marvelous Thanksgiving with our adult grandchildren—so wonderful to see how they have developed as they’ve grown up. The return to “home” has let a lot of anxiety melt away and replaced it with joy.
Finally, I want to note the most unusual list of things to be thankful for that I encountered this year, published at the blog Dynomight and titled “Underrated reasons to be thankful.” An example:
That Brussels sprouts used to be terrible but in the 1990s we noticed that was because of glucosinolate and then seed companies found old low-glucosinolate varieties and cross-bred them with modern high-output varieties and now Brussels sprouts are great and also that this was all evidently seen as natural enough not to trigger team no-science-in-my-food.
There are 29 other items here. I’ll see you later this week.

From the outset of his political career, Donald Trump has compelled observers to continually revisit and thereby complicate their initial reactions to his seemingly straightforward and self-destructive displays. That was most apparent in the effort to reimagine the dubious company Trump kept as assets rather than anchors. Overnight (literally), the manifestation of a few thousand votes perfectly distributed across three must-win states in 2016 transformed a fraught campaign, to which so many pariahs gravitated, into a masterful reconceptualization of the American electorate.

Three consecutive losing election cycles later, the bloom is fading from that rose. But it’s not off it entirely. Except for those who are keeping their powder dry, little else but anxiety over once again missing the secret ingredient in Trump’s special sauce explains a general reluctance to call the former president’s dinner with an anti-Semite and a famous manic-depressive what it was. Not just reckless, irresponsible, and perhaps even dangerous, but also blisteringly stupid.

The meeting of the minds that occurred over the long Thanksgiving weekend at Mar-a-Lago between Trump, the white-supremacist agitator Nicholas Fuentes, and the artist formerly known as Kanye West seems torn from the transcript of HBO’s expose into Bellevue Hospital. Fuentes, an unapologetic bigot and Holocaust-denier, reportedly impressed Trump with nothing more than obsequious displays of affection. Sparks flew when “Ye” and Trump argued over which of them would win in a head-to-head election. It’s a wonder that any of them could hear each other over the voices in their heads.

The press has responded to this outrageous occurrence predictably: Probing anyone who has ever associated with the Republican Party for their reaction, tallying condemnations of the former president, and assessing whether those condemnations were vigorous enough for their tastes. I’m sympathetic to the notion that Donald Trump’s appeal to the Republican electorate, such as it is, won’t disappear on its own and will rebound absent a strong enough push. But there is something to be said for the degree to which the former president is marginalizing himself. Of course, Trump has done that from the beginning.

As early as 2015, Trump’s willingness to flout conventional notions of propriety ingratiated him with a constituency that regards propriety itself with contempt. Trump was willing to “go there.” He was the candidate who would “win” arguments with Jeb Bush by accusing his brother of being complicit in the September 11 attacks. He would exculpate his own conduct by accusing the Hispanic judge adjudicating his alleged fraud of being blinded by Mexican supremacy. His elaborate conspiracy theorizing appealed to conspiracy theorists, some of whom were explicitly racist, whose support the future president would not disavow. Trump’s 2016 campaign turned over a rock and emboldened the underside’s denizens.

All this looked quite foolish at the time. But Trump won by the skin of his teeth, and an intellectual enterprise soon sprouted up around the demand for theories that explained why behavior that seemed so self-evidently stupid was, in fact, a strange new species of brilliance. Trump had spent years cultivating the support of America’s cultural fringes. His populist flourishes enlivened unlikely voters whose ideological inconsistency wasn’t well served by either major political party. The haughty elites who turn their noses up at self-described racists are just as disdainful of you, the average American voter. And so on.

The illogical, cultish rationalizations that were erected around the notion that Trump’s voters backed him not despite but because of his disdain for respectable politics were encouraged by Republicans when they regarded illogic as politically useful. Suddenly, it wasn’t Trump who had erred by surrounding himself with elements of American society that had, voluntarily or otherwise, retreated into its shadows. The blunder was on the part of people like Hillary Clinton, who cast roughly half of the president’s supporters as “deplorables.”

Clinton did err, in the political sense, both by attacking voters and by getting the proportionality terribly wrong. She made no mistake, however, in observing that her opponent’s contempt for conventions, such as denying anti-Semites the attention they crave, was a deliberate exercise on his part. Trump’s flaws were not enough to overcome Americans’ distaste for Hillary Clinton, the most disliked politician in the country. But nor was any of that a savvy strategy on Trump’s part. It’s not clear that it was a strategy at all but a reflexive response to anyone who fluttered their eyelashes in Trump’s direction, no matter how loathsome they may be. That simplicity also suffices to explain what the former president was thinking when he sat down with “Ye” and Fuentes.

Now, confronted once again by Trump’s recklessness, some familiar rationalizations are making the rounds. West’s journey into anti-Semitism notwithstanding, he’s a celebrity and an iconoclastic one at that. Think of all the disaffected potential voters he might bring to Trump’s coalition! Fuentes may be a toxic personality, but he’s another figure who “drives all the right people nuts.” There are rewards available to right-wing politicians who buck political media’s exhortations about Donald Trump. The temptation to overthink the former president’s maniacal sudden movements is still with us.

In my first book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, I close with some observations about when and how America’s two competing political coalitions convince themselves to jettison their dead weight. The conservative movement’s expurgation of the “Birchers” and the labor movement’s dismissal of the Communists in its ranks serve as examples. It is never a moral conviction but a shrewd political calculation—the point at which the association reaches diminishing returns. Recent election results tell this same tale, but the signal Republicans are receiving is muddled by the apparent popularity and fundraising prowess of the party’s most disrespectable elements.

It’s unwise to underestimate Republicans’ willingness to rationalize themselves into a box canyon. But there are few indications that Americans are eager to reward genuine bigots and their abettors. And there’s plenty of evidence that the addition of these elements to the Republican coalition repels more voters than it attracts. There’s nothing hard to comprehend about Trump’s impulses and precious little worthy of analysis in the Algonquin roundtable over which he presided. Only through a collective, laborious commitment to being dense is it rendered anything other than what it was: a mistake.

For once, Donald Trump has a point.Shortly before Thanksgiving, Trump had dinner with the artist and aspiring presidential candidate Kanye West. Among West’s entourage was a 24-year-old livestreamer named Nick Fuentes. Fuentes, as all the world now knows, traffics in Holocaust denial, among other provocations. West is an outspoken anti-Semite in his own right.Some former Trump supporters have raised their voices against the meeting—This time, he’s gone too far! A few even criticized Trump by name.Now, here’s Trump’s point, implicitly at least: Have these critics been in a coma since 2015? He’s been keeping company with extremists, bigots, and charlatans for a long time—since before he entered politics, in fact.For that matter, keeping company with Fuentes isn’t normally a Republican deal-breaker. At least two members of the House Republican Conference, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have done so; the would-be Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has promised both of them important committee assignments in the next session.If Trump-endorsed candidates had done better in the November midterms, if Republicans had won the Senate and were not now poised to lose another race in Georgia, if the party’s prospective 2024 money was not uniting behind Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, then excuses would be made for Trump’s latest outrage, just as excuses were made for his previous outrages. What’s really going on here is something once explained to me (in a different context) by a China-watcher: “They say that an official who has done wrong will lose power. But what really happens is that an official who loses power will be accused of doing wrong.”[David Frum: Another flop from GOP productions]By way of illustration, compare two Wall Street Journal articles five years apart. Here is yesterday’s editorial about the Trump-Fuentes dinner, a clear and forceful demand for personal responsibility:
Mr. Trump hasn’t admitted his mistake in hosting the men or distanced himself from the odious views of Mr. Fuentes. Instead Mr. Trump portrays himself as an innocent who was taken advantage of by Mr. West. This is also all-too-typical of Mr. Trump’s behavior as President. He usually ducked responsibility and never did manage to denounce the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or others who have resorted to divisive racial politics, or even violence as on Jan. 6, 2021.
Stinging. Now here’s the Journal’s editorial after the racist and anti-Semitic demonstrations by “some very fine people,” as Trump called them, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017—when demanding personal responsibility of Trump was to be avoided at all costs:
The focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left … Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause.
In 2017, Trump was necessary, and so he had to be defended. In 2022, Trump is inconvenient, and so he can be condemned.But only Trump. There’s going to be no condemnation of Kevin McCarthy for basing his power in the House on the political circle associated with Trump’s dinner guests. McCarthy is necessary, and so he has to be defended.  Trump was once caught on audio expressing his core philosophy of scandal management: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He did not think through the corollary: When you cease to be a star, they stop letting you do it. For big-dollar Republicans, Trump has ceased to be a star.Thus the same Trump who launched his political career with birtherism, who hired Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka for his White House staff, who repeatedly attacked a U.S.-born judge of Mexican ancestry, can no longer “do anything.” Not if party donors can help it.A self-gratifying theory is swirling around Trump world that the Fuentes dinner resulted from a DeSantis-inspired dirty trick. The theory is too complicated and too implausible to render in full. The idea is that Milo Yiannopoulos, the notorious provocateur who has made his way into the Kanye West entourage, is acting, wittingly or otherwise, as a double agent for pro-DeSantis big donors—inviting Fuentes to the dinner to create a public-relations nightmare for Trump.[David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame]This all sounds more like an excuse than an explanation. But it reveals states of mind. Republicans who once submitted to Trump are now looking for exits. They have no principled objection to doing business with extremists, bigots, and charlatans. Trump used to get a pass; McCarthy now gets a pass. But if Republicans can weaponize an insincere objection for immediate political purposes, they will. As they have.The Fuentes dinner sets up a test of strength for Trump. Through two impeachments, in 2020 and 2021, and almost two years of election denial afterward, Trump benefited from the protection of a party that thought it needed him. Now some rich and connected Republicans are deciding that maybe they do not need him, after all.No one should assume, though, that those Republicans are right. Trump fought them before, in 2015 and 2016, and beat them. Can he beat them again? One thing is certain: If Trump does repeat that primary performance, if he can rally GOP voters in 2024 and oppose the big money, if all those Trump loyalists who took control of state party organizations in the 2010s stay loyal in the 2020s, then Trump can be sure that the condemnation by rich and connected Republicans of his dinner with Fuentes will vanish—poof! The condemnation is a ploy, not a principle.Hanging out with Holocaust deniers is bad. But so is trying to overthrow an election by fraud and violence—and that was not a deal-breaker for this GOP. Trump’s attempt to blackmail Ukraine into fabricating anti-Biden disinformation was bad—and that was not a deal-breaker. Trump’s invitation to Russia to help in the 2016 election, his real-estate business with Putin while running for president, his blurting valuable secrets to the Russian foreign minister—all were bad, but none broke the deal.If the deal is in danger now, it’s not because Trump got worse. He’s the same. His party is the same. Only the political calculations have possibly changed. If it turns out those calculations haven’t changed, have no doubt: The deal will be on again.

What will foreign policy look like under Rishi Sunak? From Boris Johnson onwards, the UK’s policy on Ukraine has been broadly consistent. Both rhetorical support and the supply of defence equipment have been maintained. On Europe, Sunak is pursuing a more conciliatory approach than his predecessors, particularly towards France’s Emmanuel Macron. The biggest uncertainty rests over his attitude towards China.
In his first major speech on foreign policy tonight (28 November) at the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London, Sunak will describe his approach to Britain’s adversaries as “robust pragmatism”. That suggests Sunak will be less combative on China than Liz Truss. As chancellor, Sunak championed economic ties with the rising superpower. But during the summer’s Conservative leadership contest, he sought to outflank Truss by declaring China the “biggest-long term threat” to the UK’s security. “For too long, politicians in Britain and across the West have rolled out the red carpet and turned a blind eye to China’s nefarious activity and ambitions,” he said. “I will change this on day one as PM.”
However, his tone has slackened. It’s unlikely that he will press ahead with Truss’s plans to officially designate China as a “threat” to national security in a review of the UK’s foreign, security and defence policy. A full-blown China strategy remains elusive. In the meantime, China-watchers around Westminster are scrutinising how this relatively new government acts in practice. 
The Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, for instance, raised eyebrows with his supposedly soft response when staff at the Chinese consulate in Manchester, including the consul-general, seemed to drag a protester into the compound and beat him. The police are investigating the matter, but some have suggested that Cleverly should have already expelled the consulate staff. Alicia Kearns, the new Conservative chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, has written to Cleverly asking why the government wasn’t more forceful in response to the Manchester incident. The government says it will decide how to respond once the police investigation is done. The question is whether the Foreign Secretary simply wanted to avoid a diplomatic row so soon after his reappointment by Sunak, or whether this is the first sign of what “robust pragmatism” looks like. 
As Sunak’s foreign policy emerges, keep in mind the government is vulnerable to the views of Conservative backbenchers in a growing number of policy areas. Despite his rhetoric over the summer, tonight’s speech suggests that Sunak wants to revert to the softer approach he advocated as chancellor. But there is still a large contingent of China-sceptics in the Tory party. Expect any backsliding to be swiftly challenged.
[See also: What we learned when Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met at the G20 Bali summit]

Among my various vices, one of the most prominent is my love of acquiring new equipment. The objects of this passion have shifted over the years, from hi-fi equipment (especially turntables) to hand tools (especially planes) to drones and all things Arduino. However, the most long-lasting category of acquisitions has centered around photography.I accumulate cameras and lenses the way some women collect shoes or handbags. My latest is a Sony FX30 video camera, which is the fourth Sony body I’ve bought (including an A7II, A7RIII, and A6400), along with a couple of APS-C zoom lenses to go along with it. This addiction has been with me since childhood. I remember seeing a glossy layout of cameras in Playboy back in the 1960s (don’t know why I was looking at this) that included shots of a Nikon, Leica, Hasselblad, Bronica, and others, and I was thereafter completely hooked. I inherited a Minolta Autocord twin-lens reflex (which I still have) and an old Canon 35mm rangefinder from my father. However, my real ambitions were centered around Nikons, and the moment I could afford one in graduate school (that was 1979), I bought a new Nikon F2A Photomic. This led to the acquisition of a series of historical Nikons over the next two decades, which you can see in this video.___STEADY_PAYWALL___This collection started with a Nikon S2 rangefinder that was the predecessor of the classic Nikon F. I also acquired a Leica M3 that my uncle Hiro had acquired in Germany back in the early 1950s. This camera is as old as I am, and (unlike me) still works perfectly.My collection stopped with the professional film Nikons (the last being the F6), where a new body would introduced roughly every six or seven years. When digital cameras appeared, they were updated so frequently that it seemed pointless to try to collect all the models. Nikon and Canon came to have a duopoly on the professional digital camera market. But then, in the mid-2010s, the mirrorless camera movement started with the introduction of the first Sony A-series cameras. Mirrorless cameras do away with the mirror and pentaprism which allowed photographers using single-lens reflex cameras to see the subject through the actual camera lens. Instead, they have an electronic viewfinder that takes the image directly from the digital sensor, and allows the lens to be placed much closer to the sensor plane (similar to a film rangefinder like a Leica). Among other things, this allowed virtually any legacy lens to be mounted on a mirrorless body. My first Sony mirrorless camera could accept any of the old Nikon or Leica lenses I owned, of which there were now about 20.Along the way, I took a detour through medium format by acquiring a Mamiya RZ67. These cameras were once favorites of fashion photographers and were used by people like Annie Liebovitz. The RZ67 is big and heavy and must be used on a tripod, but it took absolutely gorgeous photos on 120 or 220 film.  That was the pinnacle of film technology when you could shoot on Kodak Ektachrome E100 or Fuji Velvia and produce vivid and deeply saturated transparencies. I dragged this camera all the way to Australia and New Zealand on one trip, and remember the excitement I would feel when I got the roll back from the developer and looked at my pictures through a loupe on a light table.There was a moment when I was tempted to move from medium format into large format view cameras. This would have followed in the tradition of Ansel Adams and Jay Meyerowitz, the latter of whom used an ancient 8x10 wooden Deardorff for his photos of Cape Cod and St. Louis. However, I decided that this was a step too far.  The main advantage of a view camera was its ability to do tilt and shift movements to retain parallel verticals when shooting upwards at a building, or for an extended focus plane. But I bought a tilt-shift 75mm lens for my RZ67 on eBay, which allowed me to do a series of architectural photos of buildings in Washington without going the view camera route.The Willard Intercontinental Hotel, WashingtonThe mirrorless revolution undermined the old Nikon-Canon duopoly, and has put Nikon on the verge of bankruptcy ever since. I could watch this happening in real time since I get photographed very often and could see the way that professional photographers were switching to mirrorless cameras in recent years. Sony’s main advantage is in sensor technology; they are a dominant player in the pro video market and their video sensors have moved downstream from camcorders that costed tens of thousands of dollars at the time to ones costing less than two thousand. They also acquired Minolta’s lens business and seem to market a new pro-grade lens very month or so. Nikon and Canon have tried to compete by offering their own mirrorless versions, but Sony has stayed way ahead of them.Another area where I’ve accumulated a lot of equipment is woodworking tools. What’s remarkable about that hobby is how little woodworking has changed technologically over the decades. People are still building furniture with power tools that are little different than in their great-grandparents generation, and indeed I’ve jointed boards with a plane that is at least 150 years old.By contrast, digital photography has been evolving rapidly and relentlessly, in ways that are hard to keep up with. You can now shoot video in 5K, 6k, and 8K formats with enough headroom that you can compensate for six f-stops of underexposure without significant noise. In the days of film, you would have to choose your medium very carefully and could change color grades only by manipulating exposure times and bath temperatures. Today you can endlessly color grade a digital file simply by moving a slider in Photoshop or Premiere. I guess this is why I keep accumulating more photographic gear.

J. Edgar Hoover is notorious for his decades-long campaign to stamp out the Left by surveilling and even killing radicals like Fred Hampton. What is less well known is that liberals played an important role in enabling Hoover’s antidemocratic crusade.

J. Edgar Hoover (center) with President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, February 23, 1961. (US National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons)
 
Few figures deserve the animus of the Left more than J. Edgar Hoover, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). During his forty-eight years in power — stretching from 1924 to his death in 1972 — Hoover presided over a counterintelligence witch hunt that treated members of the American Communist Party as treasonous, and infiltrated and surveilled left-wing movements. The FBI’s record under its Hoover-era COINTELPRO program is particularly notorious — from the harassment and wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. (including sending a message that sought to goad him into suicide) to the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1969. Yet Hoover was celebrated by liberals and conservatives alike in his time, his power unchecked.
Historian Beverly Gage’s new book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, tries to understand how such an undemocratic figure like Hoover — at the helm of an undemocratic institution — was able to wield such influence within a formally democratic government. Drawing on unclassified FBI records and Hoover’s personal papers, Gage paints a nuanced, instructive portrait of Hoover that places him within the growth of the national security state, the rise of the United States as a global power, and the evolution of liberalism and conservatism after World War I.
Fellow historian Michael Brenes spoke to Gage about J. Edgar Hoover and his relationship with liberals, the far right, and emancipatory movements today.

Michael Brenes
Your book goes beyond Hoover the man, showing how his story is representative of the broader history of the United States. What made you come to this conclusion?

Beverly Gage
We tend to think of Hoover as a one-dimensional villain and a rogue actor — essentially, as someone who operated outside of normal checks and constraints. It’s true that Hoover often acted in secret, with little accountability. But he could not have remained FBI director for an astonishing forty-eight years without having some other skills as well.
He was a consummate bureaucrat who came of age with an expanding federal government. He made his name espousing many of the key values of the progressive state: efficiency, objectivity, professionalism, scientific methods. Though we rarely think of him this way, those ideas helped to make him enormously popular, both inside and outside of Washington. We can’t understand his career or his influence without taking that “administrative” story into account.

Hoover’s persecution of socialists, communists, and radicals was never sufficiently challenged by Congress or the White House. You argue that Hoover was an organizational mastermind, that he knew the inner workings and machinations of the FBI’s bureaucracy more than anyone else. Is this how Hoover was able to wield such outsized influence, to suppress the Left so thoroughly?

Anti-communism was the great cause of Hoover’s life. He viewed that cause expansively: as a national security matter, but also as an existential struggle for the country’s soul. In 1919, at the tender age of twenty-four, he became the first head of the Justice Department’s new Radical Division, which pioneered techniques of surveillance and deportation aimed at left-wing radicals. But his greatest influence came in the 1940s and 1950s, when he became the nation’s most famous and best-respected anti-communist.
We tend to think of Joe McCarthy as the figurehead of the Red Scare, but Hoover was far more influential.
We tend to think of Joe McCarthy as the figurehead of the Red Scare, but Hoover was far more influential. He was there before McCarthy, establishing new surveillance operations and working with congressional committees — even the White House — to manage the Red Scare’s political side. And he outlasted McCarthy, too. McCarthy died in 1957, but Hoover survived to carry many Red Scare techniques into the 1960s, when he targeted civil rights activists, the antiwar movement, and the New Left.

One of the more interesting aspects of your book is that you show how liberal Democrats aided Hoover’s rise and hold on power. Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Hoover to FBI director at the height of the New Deal; Bobby Kennedy disliked Hoover but still, in his own words, “deferred to him” many times; Lyndon Johnson and Hoover had a limited friendship that led to the “greatest political alliance of [Hoover’s] career,” as you write. Why did American liberals enable Hoover? What are the connections between American liberalism and the growth of the national security state?

Hoover’s close relationship with liberals — and with liberalism — fascinated me as I worked on the book. Though Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) in 1924, it was really Franklin Roosevelt who gave him much of his power.
Under Roosevelt, FBI agents expanded their role in federal law enforcement, becoming the great heroes of the New Deal’s War on Crime. During World War II, they expanded again, this time into a national domestic intelligence force. Roosevelt also taught Hoover how to sell the FBI’s work to the public. Both men believed that the work of government was not self-evident, that the American people had to be shown and taught to have faith in federal power.
J. Edgar Hoover, 1932. (Underwood & Underwood / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)
Lyndon Johnson embraced Hoover, too. In 1964, he exempted Hoover from mandatory federal retirement at the age of seventy, a key decision that allowed Hoover to stay in power throughout the critical years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Throughout his presidency, Johnson used Hoover in a variety of ways — often to contain the Civil Rights Movement, on occasion to empower it. The most outrageous FBI operation of the 1960s, its campaign of harassment and surveillance aimed at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took place with Johnson’s knowledge and support, even if Johnson did not necessarily know every detail of what the FBI was doing.
We might think of Hoover’s relationships with these liberal titans as strange or anomalous, because we know Hoover best for his conservative social views. But it makes sense that figures like Roosevelt and Johnson, famous for their ambitions and their willingness to use the power of the state, would admire a skilled state-builder like Hoover. Those relationships also highlight the ways that liberals in power have often been suspicious of the Left and have supported efforts to contain and discredit left-wing groups.

You argue that it was Hoover’s “racism that often made him see calls for justice as a threat to national security.” Can you talk a little bit more about this? How does Hoover’s racism work in tandem with “national security” as Hoover traveled from his obsession with Martin Luther King, Jr. to targeting Black Power activists like Stokely Carmichael?

Hoover’s racism is well-known. What I wanted to do in this book was tell a slightly more complicated story about how that racism worked in practice. One influential factor was his membership in Kappa Alpha, his college fraternity, which was explicitly devoted to advancing the “Lost Cause” of the white South.
Hoover chose many first-generation FBI officials from in and around Kappa Alpha, helping to create an institutional culture based on segregationist views and values. As director, he expended enormous time and effort targeting civil rights sympathizers, ranging from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. He often justified those efforts not in explicitly racial terms, but by pointing to the suspicion that civil rights groups might have been infiltrated by communists — or even just that communists sympathized with racial-justice movements, thus making all of them suspect.
There was also a lot of overlap in FBI techniques pioneered against the Communist Party and later applied to civil rights groups. The most famous is COINTELPRO (which stands for counterintelligence program). COINTELPRO started a campaign of harassment and disruption aimed at the Communist Party. As the 1960s went on, though, it expanded to include a vast array of civil rights and Black Power groups, as well as particular figures like King and Carmichael.

At one point, Hoover was dubbed the “patron saint” of American conservatives for his indefatigable dedication to stopping the Left and for embracing conservative ideas. G-Man shows, however, that Hoover had a more complicated relationship with the Right, never investigating them like the Left but never feeling comfortable with their “conspiracies and excess,” as you say. And it was Hoover’s death in 1972 that allowed Watergate to happen (if Hoover was still director, FBI agent Mark Felt would have never leaked secrets about the Watergate break-in), which undid Richard Nixon, now a favorite figure among conservatives. Where does Hoover stand in the pantheon of right-wing figures and the history of the American right?

The American far right loved Hoover, but he did not always love it back. Hoover was a hero to many far-right organizations, including the John Birch Society, for his outspoken conservative views on crime, race, religion, and communism. He welcomed some of their support, cultivating groups like the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution as part of the FBI’s grassroots constituency.
But he was also often suspicious of right-wing groups for their conspiratorial, far-fetched thinking and their vigilante impulses. Hoover always thought that the work of rooting out threats to the social order ought to be left to the professionals at the FBI, and he disliked groups that tried to take such matters into their own hands. He especially disliked violent right-wing and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who often thumbed their noses at federal authority.
J. Edgar Hoover and his assistant Clyde Tolson sitting in beach lounge chairs, circa 1939. (Los Angeles Times photographic archive, UCLA Library via Wikimedia Commons)
Those views sometimes led to surprising results. In the 1940s, the FBI launched a reasonably serious attempt to contain lynching in the South, in part because Hoover thought that lynching undermined federal authority and the politics of “law and order.” In the 1960s, he launched a set of COINTELPRO operations against the Klan and other white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups under a similar logic. He never conducted those operations with the same energy and enthusiasm he applied to campaigns against the Left, but they were still substantial operations. From a biographical perspective, they help to make Hoover a more complicated figure.
At the same time, the imbalance between the FBI’s campaigns against the Right and Left calls into question one of the more cherished myths of the mid-century conservative movement: that they were the consummate outsiders in an age of liberal consensus. It’s hard to say you’re really an outsider if the head of the nation’s political police agrees with many of your views.

During the presidency of Donald Trump, we saw a curious faith in the FBI’s ability to create democratic outcomes, to deliver us from Donald Trump. Robert Mueller was treated as a savior by mainstream liberals. How do you explain the recent embrace of the FBI as an institution that can serve American democracy? After all, faith in the FBI to stop Trumpism occurred while the organization was surveilling protestors during the 2020 George Floyd protests and pondering the use of spyware to hack mobile phones — tactics that echoed back to Hoover’s era. And what does this tell us about Hoover’s legacy for American politics?

Liberals now love the FBI! Some do, anyway. Polls show that Democrats on the whole are now far more supportive of the FBI than Republicans are. Most of that has to do with Trump, of course. But it’s also a reversion to an earlier period in FBI history, when liberals admired and empowered Hoover — and for some of the same reasons we see today. Though Trump is the key point of contention, defenders of the FBI now point to its designated role as an objective, nonpartisan, investigative force loyal to the facts and to the law — the most noble part of the FBI’s history and traditions.
Of course, today’s liberals may be making some of the same mistakes that mid-century liberals did: In supporting the FBI, they may be ignoring possible excesses and abuses. That’s one of many areas where Hoover’s example ought to be instructive.

The World Health Organization has recommended a new name for monkeypox, asking countries to forget the original term in favor of a new one, “mpox,” that scientists hope will help destigmatize the disease. But in the United States, the request seems to be arriving late. The outbreak here has been in slow retreat for months—and has already left many Americans’ minds.About 15 cases are now being recorded among Americans each day, less than 4 percent of the tally when the surge was at its worst. After a sluggish and bungled early rollout, tests and treatments for the virus are more available; more than a million doses of the two-shot Jynneos smallpox vaccine have found their way into arms. San Francisco and New York—two of the nation’s first cities to declare mpox a public-health emergency this past summer—have since allowed those orders to expire; so have the states of New York and Illinois. “I think this is the endgame,” says Caitlin Rivers, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.But “endgame” doesn’t mean “over”—and mpox will be with us for the foreseeable future. The U.S. outbreak is only now showing us its long and ugly tail: 15 daily cases is not zero daily cases; even as the number of new infections declines, inequities are growing. Black and Latino people make up a majority of new mpox cases and are contracting the disease at three to five times the rate of white Americans, but they have received proportionately fewer vaccines. “Now it’s truly the folks who are the most marginalized that we’re seeing,” says Ofole Mgbako, a physician and population-health researcher at New York University. “Which is also why, of course, it’s fallen out of the news.” If the virus sticks around (as it very likely could), and if the disparities persist (as they almost certainly will), then mpox could end up saddling thousands of vulnerable Americans each year with yet another debilitating, stigmatized, and neglected disease.[Read: America should have been able to handle monkeypox]At this point, there’s not even any guarantee that this case downturn will persist. “I’m not convinced that we’re out of the woods,” says Sara Bares, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha. Immunity, acquired through infection or vaccines, is now concentrated among those at highest risk, says Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine. But researchers still don’t know how well those defenses can stave off another infection, or how long they might last—gaps in knowledge that may be tough to fill, now that incidence is so low. And although months of advocacy and outreach from the LGBTQ community have cut down risky sexual activities, many cautionary trends will eventually reset to their pre-outbreak norm. “We know extensively from other sexually transmissible infections that behavior change is not usually the most sustained response,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University.At the same time, this year’s mpox outbreaks are stranger and more unwieldy than those that came before. A ballooning body of evidence suggests that people can become infectious before they develop symptoms, contrary to prior understanding; some physicians are concerned that patients, especially those who are immunocompromised, might remain infectious after the brunt of visible illness resolves, says Philip Ponce, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and the medical director of San Antonio’s Kind Clinic. (Some 40 percent of Americans who have been diagnosed with mpox are living with HIV.) Researchers still don’t have a good grip on which bodily fluids and types of contact may be riskiest over the trajectory of a sickness. Cases are still being missed by primary-care providers who remain unfamiliar with the ins and outs of diagnosis and testing, especially in people with darker skin. And although this epidemic has, for the most part, continued to affect men who have sex with men, women and nonbinary people are getting sick as well, to an underappreciated degree.[Read: What should worry most Americans about our monkeypox response]Intel on the only mpox-fighting antiviral on the shelf, a smallpox drug called tecovirimat, also remains concerningly scant, even as experts worry that the virus could develop resistance. The treatment has been given a conditional green light for use in people who are currently, or at risk of becoming, severely sick. Anecdotally, it seems to work wonders, shaving days or weeks off the painful, debilitating course of symptoms that can send infected people into long-term isolation. But experts still lack rigorous data in humans to confirm just how well it works, Bares, who’s among the scientists involved in a nationwide study of the antiviral, told me. And although clinical trials for tecovirimat are under way, she added, in the U.S., they’re “struggling to enroll patients” now that infections have plummeted to such a sustained low. It’s a numerical problem as well as a sociocultural one. “The urgency with which people answer questions declines as case counts go down,” Varma told me.Recent CDC reports show that a growing proportion of new infections aren’t being reported with a known sexual-contact history, stymieing efforts at contact tracing. That might in part be a product of the outbreak’s gradual migration from liberal, well-off urban centers, hit early on in the epidemic, to more communities in the South and Southwest. “In small towns, the risk of disclosure is high,” Bares told me. In seeking care or vaccination, “you’re outing yourself.” When mpox cases in Nebraska took an unexpected nosedive earlier this fall, “a colleague and I asked one another, ‘Do you think patients are afraid to come in?’” Those concerns can be especially high in certain communities of color, Ponce told me. San Antonio’s Latino population, for instance, “tends to be much more conservative; there’s much more stigma associated with one being LGBT at all, let alone being LGBT and trying to access biomedical interventions.”Hidden infections can become fast-spreading ones. Monitoring an infectious disease is far easier when the people most at risk have insurance coverage and access to savvy clinicians, and when they are inclined to trust public-health institutions. “That’s predominantly white people,” says Ace Robinson, the CEO of the Pierce County AIDS Foundation, in Washington. Now that the mpox outbreak is moving out of that population into less privileged ones, Robinson fears “a massive undercount” of cases.Americans who are catching the virus during the outbreak’s denouement are paying a price. The means to fight mpox are likely to dwindle, even as the virus entrenches itself in the population most in need of those tools. One concern remains the country’s vaccination strategy, which underwent a mid-outbreak shift: To address limited shot supply, the FDA authorized a new dosing method with limited evidence behind it—a decision that primarily affected people near the back of the inoculation line. The method is safe but tricky to administer, and it can have tough side effects: Some of Titanji’s patients have experienced swelling near their injection site that lasted for weeks after their first dose, and now “they just don’t want to get another shot.”The continued shift of mpox into minority populations, Robinson told me, is also further sapping public attention: “As long as this is centered in BIPOC communities, there’s going to be less of a push.” Public interest in this crisis was modest even at its highest point, says Steven Klemow, an infectious-disease physician at Methodist Dallas Medical Center and the medical director of Dallas’s Kind Clinic. Now experts are watching that cycle of neglect reinforce itself as the outbreak continues to affect and compress into marginalized communities, including those that have for decades borne a disproportionate share of the burden of sexually associated infections such as syphilis, gonorrhea, and HIV. “These are not the groups that necessarily get people jumping on their feet,” Titanji told me.Some of the people most at risk are moving on as well, Robinson told me. In his community in Washington, he was disappointed to see high rates of vaccine refusal at two recent outreach events serving the region’s Black and American Indian populations. “They had no knowledge of the virus,” he told me. Titanji has seen similar trends in her community in Georgia. “There’s some sense of complacency, like, ‘It’s no longer an issue, so why do I need to get vaccinated?’” she said.[Read: America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle]The tide seems unlikely to shift. Even tens of thousands of cases deep into the American outbreak, sexual-health clinics—which have been on the front lines of the mpox response—remain short on funds and staff. Although the influx of cases has slowed, Ponce and Klemow are still treating multiple mpox patients a week while trying to keep up the services they typically offer—at a time when STI rates are on a years-long rise. “We’re really assuming that this is going to become another sexually associated disease that is going to be a part of our wheelhouse that we’ll have to manage for the indefinite future,” Klemow told me. “We’ve had to pull resources away from our other services that we provide.” The problem could yet worsen if the national emergency declared in August is allowed to expire, which would likely curb the availability of antivirals and vaccines.Rivers still holds out hope for eliminating mpox in the U.S. But getting from low to zero isn’t as easy as it might seem. This current stretch of decline could unspool for years, even decades, especially if the virus finds a new animal host. “We’ve seen this story play out so many times before,” Varma told me. Efforts to eliminate syphilis from the U.S. in the late ’90s and early 2000s, for instance, gained traction for a while—then petered out during what could have been their final stretch. It’s the classic boom-bust cycle to which the country is so prone: As case rates fall, so does interest in pushing them further down.Our memories of public-health crises never seem to linger for long. At the start of this mpox outbreak, Titanji told me, there was an opportunity to shore up our systems and buffer ourselves against future epidemics, both imported and homegrown. The country squandered it and failed to send aid abroad. If another surge of mpox cases arrives, as it very likely could, she said, “we will again be going back to the drawing board.”

Rats should take notice, pigeons ponder their options: wild turkeys have returned to New England. They’re strutting on city sidewalks, nesting under park benches, roosting in back yards—whole flocks flapping, waggling their drooping, bubblegum-pink snoods at passing traffic, as if they owned the place. You meet them at cafés and bus stops alike, the brindled hens clucking and cackling, calling their hatchlings, their jakes and their jennies, the big, blue-headed toms gurgling and gobble-gobbling. They look like Pilgrims, grave and gray-black, drab-daubed, their tail feathers edged in white, Puritan divines in ruffled cuffs.

“There was a great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many,” the Mayflower arrival William Bradford wrote in his journal, during his first autumn in Plymouth, in 1621. Bradford didn’t eat turkey at that first Thanksgiving, because, really, there was no first Thanksgiving that fall. Also, much of the food that he and his band of settlers ate they had taken, like their land, from the Wampanoag, and at the harvest celebration in question he may have eaten goose. But turkeys abounded. And no reader of the annals of early New England has ever forgotten Bradford’s recounting of the public execution, in 1642, of a boy, aged sixteen or seventeen, hanged to death for having had sex with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey.” (A turkey?) Benjamin Franklin, writing in 1784, thought the turkey “a much more respectable Bird” than the bald eagle, which was “a Bird of bad moral Character,” while the turkey was, if “a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage.” Alas, by the end of the nineteenth century this particular fowl had nearly become extinct, hunted down, crowded out. The last known wild turkey in Massachusetts was killed in 1851, even as Americans killed passenger pigeons, by the hundreds of thousands, from flocks that numbered in the hundreds of millions. The last passenger pigeon, Martha, named for George Washington’s wife, died in a zoo in Cincinnati, in 1914, and, not long afterward, heartbroken ornithologists tried to reintroduce the wild turkey into New England, without much success. Then, in the early nineteen-seventies, thirty-seven birds captured in the Adirondacks were released in the Berkshires, and their descendants are now everywhere, hundreds of thousands strong, brunching at Boston’s Prudential Center, dining on Boston Common, and foraging alongside the Swan Boats that glide in the pond of Boston Public Garden. They most certainly do not make way for ducklings.

Birds, over all, are not faring well. Ornithologically, these are dystopian times, an avian apocalypse. One recent study estimates that the bird population of North America has fallen precipitously since 1970, down nearly three billion birds, one lost for every four. Not wild turkeys, whose numbers in New England are still rising. They eat everything: worms, hot dogs, sushi, your breakfast, grubs. They are fairly flightless and eerily fearless, three-foot-tall feathered dinosaurs.

If they look like Pilgrims, petty, pious, they also bear an uncanny resemblance to a mouthwatering main course, perambulating. Cows don’t walk down Commonwealth Avenue, but if they did would they give you a hankering for a hamburger? If lambs grazed on the outfield at Fenway Park, would the sight of them leave you licking your lips at the thought of lamb chops, roasted with rosemary and lemon? Or would making their closer acquaintance convert you to vegetarianism? People don’t meet their food anymore, even if they go to farmers’ markets and farm-to-table bistros. But a turkey sashays past your office window and a cartoon thought bubble pops up above your head, of that turkey on a platter, trussed, stuffed, roasted, and glistening, the bare bones of its severed legs capped in ruffled white paper booties. Do you forswear fowl? A fat tom walks by, proud as a groom. “If only I had a musket,” you hear someone say. “I mean, or I could just grab it.” Except, scofflaw, you can’t.

In Massachusetts, you can hunt wild turkeys (since 1991, the state’s official game bird), but only with a permit, only during turkey-hunting season, and only so long as you don’t use bait, dogs, or electronic turkey callers. You are, to be fair, permitted to whistle. “Sit and call the birds to you,” the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife advises. Yet beware: “Do not wear red, white, blue, or black,” or the gobblers, the full-grown males, might attack. Franklin offered the same caution: if a turkey ran into a British redcoat, woe to the soldier. This, my fellow-Americans, may be how we won the war.

“Don’t feed the turkeys,” one city office warns civilians, of the non-hunting sort. They may attack small children. (Small children’s approach, however, may prove difficult to deter.) “Don’t let turkeys intimidate you.” To daunt them, the henpecked advise, wield a broom or a garden hose, or get a dog. You sometimes see people standing their ground, a man chasing a squawking flock off his front porch, waving his arms. “Tired of the turkey shit on my steps,” he snaps. A bicycle cop veers into a hen, on purpose, a near-miss, urging her away from a playground: “Scram, bird, scram!” And still the turkeys gain ground: the people of New England appear indifferent to the advice of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, recalling childhood afternoons spent in schoolrooms, placing a hand on construction paper and tracing the outline of splayed and stubby fingers to draw a tom, its tail feathers spread wide. A turkey seemed, then, an imaginary, mythical animal—a dragon, a unicorn. And here it is! Roosting in the dogwood tree outside your window, pecking at the subway grate, twisting its ruddy red neck and looking straight at you, like a long-lost dodo. What more might return in full force? Will you ever see a moose in Massachusetts? A great egret in Connecticut?

Thanksgiving looms, a much trussed holiday. Meanwhile, night after night, sitting under heat lamps on the sidewalk in front of every neighborhood pizza place, diners toss oil-shimmered crusts to a rabble of turkeys, a muster of toms, a brood of hens, a mob of poults. “A Pilgrim passed I to and fro,” William Bradford once wrote. And there, a-gobbling, the new pilgrims go. ♦

Thomas Henry Huxley almost skipped the showdown of his life. It was the fourth day of the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was tired. He had spent the earlier part of the conference mingling, attending talks, and defending his friend Charles Darwin’s new book, “On the Origin of Species.” He was keen to escape the Oxford bustle and relax with his wife at her sister’s home, near Reading.

He knew that the fourth day would be charged. Everyone did. The Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, was scheduled to appear. The son of the abolitionist William Wilberforce, the Bishop was considered one of the greatest orators of his time—part viper, part soapbox parliamentarian. He had been armed with anti-evolution arguments by one of Darwin’s rivals, the anatomist Richard Owen, and arrived in Oxford ready to deploy.

“I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which, unless I am greatly mistaken, is in store for you,” Huxley had written Darwin just before the publication of “The Origin.” “I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.” And indeed, in the seven months since the book’s publication, Huxley had showed up slashing and pecking. He wrote reviews and rebuttals for the London Times, Macmillan’s Magazine, and The Westminster Review. In a public lecture for the Royal Institution, he not only defended “The Origin” but also explored its most sacrilegious implication: our kinship with apes.

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Still, he expected a confrontation with the Bishop to be trickier. Huxley later recalled that Wilberforce “had the reputation of being a first-class controversialist.” He could hardly “see the good of giving up some peace and quietness to be episcopally pounded.” But peer pressure got to him. He explained that a fellow-evolutionist had accused him of deserting the Darwinians: “So, I said, ‘Oh! if you are going to take it that way, I’ll come and have my share of what is going on.’ ”

The resulting face-off is now legendary. It was included in Hal Hellman’s book “Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever” (1998). It was reënacted in the PBS documentary series “Evolution” (2001) and the BBC television show “The Voyage of Charles Darwin” (1978). It inspired Crispin Whittell’s play “Darwin in Malibu” (2003), which imagined Darwin, Huxley, and Wilberforce meeting in a beach house in the afterlife more than a century after their deaths. And, like one of those enormous mama spiders carrying an ungodly number of spiderlings, it continues to spawn a relentless stream of scholarly papers, including an article published last year titled “Enough of Galileo and the Huxley-Wilberforce Debate.”

Today, the showdown is remembered less for its scholarly arguments and more for one of the zestier Victorian comebacks on record. After railing against “The Origin,” the Bishop addressed Huxley and, according to the London weekly The Press, “asked the Professor whether he would prefer a monkey for his grandfather or his grandmother.” There are different versions of Huxley’s response, although the one he reported a few months later is (no surprise) the most eloquent: “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

By this point, Huxley had eclipsed his upbringing. Born in 1825 and brought up in a lower-middle-class family, he received just two years of formal education before apprenticing to his rambunctious, opium-chewing brother-in-law, the doctor John Cooke. After pursuing more medical training, he was assigned to the Royal Navy’s H.M.S. Rattlesnake as an assistant surgeon. The ship’s voyage to Australia and New Guinea, which lasted four years, revealed Huxley’s talents in natural history. He spent his spare time dissecting marine invertebrates and mailing manuscripts to England. While he stewed in self-doubt in the South Seas, his scientific work was attracting attention at home, appearing in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and in Proceedings of the Zoological Society. When he arrived back in England, in 1850, Huxley learned that he had become a noted scientist. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1851, won its medal for physiology in 1852, and by 1854 had secured a lectureship in natural history at the Government School of Mines (now part of Imperial College London).

Even with his rising profile, the showdown with Wilberforce was a turning point for Huxley. He was, he later recalled, “the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours.” More important, he gained a new perspective on public speaking, becoming convinced that he “should carefully cultivate it, and try to leave off hating it.” While Darwin, forever sickly, stayed at home in the following years, Huxley fought as evolution’s champion. He used his growing influence to expand scientific education, and he grappled with ethics and religion. (He coined the term “agnostic” in 1869.) From relatively modest beginnings, Thomas Henry Huxley became one of the most prominent public intellectuals in the English-speaking world.

It was fitting for a man known as “Darwin’s bulldog” that his descendants inherited many of his traits—not just his talents but also his affinity for certain sweeping questions: Who are we? What is our place in nature? How can we design morality and religion in a world informed by science? In “The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution” (Chicago), the historian Alison Bashford moves across the Huxley generations, tracing how Thomas Henry and his gifted brood struggled to answer these questions, in the process shaping outlooks we hold today.

Bashford focusses her chronicle on the two most evolutionarily minded Huxleys: Thomas Henry and his grandson Julian. The eldest child of Huxley’s son Leonard—himself a notable writer and magazine editor—Julian enjoyed not one but two illustrious bloodlines. His mother, Julia, came from the Arnold family, a clan famed for its writers and scholars. (Matthew Arnold was her uncle.) After Julia’s untimely death, in 1908, her sister, the best-selling novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, both mentored Julian in his literary ventures and became a second mother to him and his siblings, Aldous, Trevenen, and Margaret.

Julian’s bond with his paternal grandfather was special. “I like that chap!” Huxley said when Julian was four. “I like the way he looks you straight in the face and disobeys you.”

Like his grandfather, Julian was a nerd for nature. As that four-year-old, he asked, “Why do all live things have natures?” Some three years later, when Huxley remarked that parental care was absent in fish, Julian interjected, “What about the stickleback, Grand-pater?” Their connection is apparent in a letter Huxley wrote Julian close to his fifth birthday: “There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things. When you grow up I dare say you will be one of the great-deal seers and see things more wonderful than water babies where other folks can see nothing.”

Thomas Henry died in 1895, days after Julian turned eight. But, as an adult, too, Julian took after his grandfather. Both men were moral, extroverted, sometimes tortured, and sometimes arrogant. They were also ambitious synthesizers, wildly successful storytellers, and agnostic materialists dazzled by the expansiveness of nature. They were so alike that Bashford says they can even be thought of as “one very long-lived man, 1825–1975.”

“The Huxleys” is an intimate history of evolution in several senses. First, it chronicles the understanding of evolution by two of the theory’s most zealous apostles. In the decades after “The Origin” was published, a Darwinian brand of evolutionary theory spread, fuelled in large part by Thomas Henry’s advocacy. By 1900, however, “the eclipse of Darwinism” (to use Julian’s phrase) was setting in. Evolution was widely accepted, yet natural selection seemed a tad too fantastical. Was the Earth truly old enough for a process as slow as selection to have fashioned the diversity of life? Could the eyes of mammals and squids—so complex, so similar—really have evolved through blind tinkering? Reinforcing such objections was the fact that Darwin got some important things wrong, most notably inheritance. He believed that the traits of progeny were blended averages of their parents’ traits, yet Gregor Mendel seemed to show that traits were passed down as discrete units. Biologists struggled to square new discoveries about inheritance with Darwin’s ideas. When Julian studied zoology at Oxford, from 1906 to 1909, the discipline was in the process of abandoning natural selection.

Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri, heads the closing session of the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Joseph Eid/AFPThe translated version of the original article in French has been updated to include the authors’ comments on COP27.

Since the Rio de Janeiro Declaration of 1992, government representatives have flocked to one Conferences of the Parties (COP) after the next in an attempt to halt global warming, in vain.
This year’s COP27 was no exception. Although delegates managed to strike a historic deal on a climate finance fund that would go some way in compensating developing countries for climate damage they are suffering, they were unable to produce measures to phase out fossil fuels, or protect biodiversity. This is despite the fact emission have now reached record levels.
A governance problem
In this regard, governments’ repeated failure in preventing and managing “global threats”, such as global warming, pollution, biodiversity loss and pandemics, appears to be the rule and not the exception and can hardly be attributed to ignorance. Years of reports on the causes and consequences of these threats have not sufficed to move politicians into action, with scientists increasingly having to take on the role of whistle-blowers to raise awareness over crises affecting their field of expertise.

Variation of annual observed global average temperature (1850–2019) relative to the 1850–1900 average (blue line), as reported in the Summary for Policymakers from The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, 2022) of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided objective and comprehensive scientific information on anthropogenic climate change. In 2022, the last part of its 6th report made clear that failure to take climate action threatens the survival of humanity. At the same time, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) published an alarming report on the risk of extinction of one million species and pointed the finger at intensive agriculture as the main culprit.
Western governments have been the main organisers of the international political response against these threats. Largely guided by the principle of liberal economics, they have favoured pro-market, and controversial tools such as carbon trading schemes. More than a much talked about leadership failure, could it be that liberal governance’s failure to prevent and manage global threats draws its roots from structural causes? Otherwise, how can we explain our inability, in spite of an overabundance of warnings and scientific evidence, to solve these issues?
In a recent study, we argue that certain structural features of liberal democratic governance are responsible for our recurring failures to manage global threats, and spell out proposals to overcome this urgent problem.
Controversial conceptions of the common good
Liberalism was established in the West in the 18th century, in a world torn by wars of religion. The pioneers of liberal thought tackled this issue by proposing to dissociate political and moral governance from any religious or philosophical normative system.
According to philosopher Charles Larmore, a liberal state has to be neutral, in the sense that public institutions and policies cannot be designed to support or favour one philosophical or religious conception of the common good over another.
Consequently, liberal society is characterised by “value pluralism” – values which can be incommensurable and mutually exclusive. And because there is no consensual way to prioritise values, “this pluralism of values frequently leads to a version of moral relativism”.
Now, if there are no norms defining the common good, how can one govern in the name of the general interest?
The legitimisation of “laissez-faire”
Answering this question requires us to go back in time to understand the nature of liberalism itself. Influenced by English empiricist philosopher John Locke, in the 18th century the French philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius attempted to replace divine laws by natural laws and to introduce a mechanistic vision of human nature in order to legitimise political decisions:

“If the physical universe is subject to the laws of motion, the moral universe is no less subject to those of interest.”

These ideas would greatly influence the pioneers of philosophical and economic liberalism such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith. The latter would go on to theorise that the free pursuit of private interest through trade is the natural driving force of the economy and must therefore constitute the self-organising principle of governance.
In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), the economist Joseph Schumpeter defined liberal democracy as follows:

“An institutional system leading to political decisions, in which individuals acquire the power to make those decisions through a competitive struggle for the votes of the people.”

Thus, although often considered as such, liberalism is not axiomatically neutral. One of its fundamental traits is the belief in the ability of competition to self-organise and optimise economic, social and decision-making processes. Such a faith legitimises a “laissez-faire” approach to markets, as well as the process of deliberative democracy which submits various social projects to the public or representative assemblies for scrutiny.
The ambiguous place of science
In a liberal approach, what is good for all and what should be taken as true tends to be determined by a democratic process. This leads to a “competition of opinions” in order to define what is desirable by the greatest number. Thus, scientific judgements frequently tend to be considered by policy makers as opinions among many others.
Moreover, as has been well documented in the fields of health and environmental policy, pressure groups can distort the deliberative process through misinformation from the public or policy makers. This is particularly common when science comes into conflict with private commercial interests.
Recently, during the Covid-19 crisis, many prominent liberal political leaders, such as presidents Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have publicly supported conspiracy theories and rejected the advice of official scientific agencies.
This denial of science has become too frequent an occurrence to be interpreted as accidental. Instead, it strikes us as symptomatic of a deep and very worrying structural problem linked to liberal governance.
Improving the decision-making process
Global threats are fundamentally different from traditional threats. First, given the seriousness and irreversibility of their consequences, it is necessary to prevent them, which requires being able to predict their effects. Second, these threats cannot be dealt with in the absence of a coordinated international response, which requires a broad consensus between States on their seriousness, their causes and on the priorities of the response.
Thus, the management of global threats depends on the value attributed to scientific knowledge and the meaning given to the common good. However, certain characteristics of liberalism, in particular the absence of norms defining the common good as well as the place of scientific arguments in the democratic process, make it ill suited to deal with global threats. We cannot therefore simply hope that a change in the composition of governments will solve the problem.
By referring to Hobbes’ modus vivendi, which aimed to ensure arrangements between members despite their differences in interests, beliefs and values, we propose to work on a minimum definition of what the common good is and how achieve it. This modus vivendi should be based on at least two arguments:
First, responding to global threats involves convincing as many people as possible, regardless of their differences. Thus, we postulate that the survival of the human species as well as the preservation of health be considered as consensual ethical priorities of governance and embody the common good.
Human survival and health are worthy and just goals, capable of convincing the greatest number since they are prerequisites for any other need or desire. In addition, the One Health, Planetary Health and EcoHealth concepts, which form the conceptual basis of international public health agencies, recognise that human health is closely dependent on animal and ecosystem health.
Second, scientific advice shouldn’t be considered as one opinion among others. Science is fallible and does not produce absolute truths, but it is our most reliable method for understanding natural phenomena and producing universal knowledge as the consensus basis for global decisions.
Eric Muraille received funding from Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS-FRS), BelgiumJulien Pillot and Philippe Naccache do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, told me that when she hit her mid-40s, she had an “aha moment.”“I was thinking, It’s so great having gotten to this stage of my career where I’m a little more established. It’s very freeing,” she told me. “And I realized: Oh, I think I just aged out of sexual harassment.” The leering, the inappropriate commentary, the talking over her—much of it had stopped, perhaps because she had become so accomplished, perhaps because she had reached an age where men in her profession did not automatically treat her as a sex object. “There was nothing like having babies to change the male gaze,” she added.Stevenson is one of many economists reflecting on the way they have been treated and the profession as a whole. Indeed, five years after econ’s first #MeToo moment, the field is in the midst of a new one. Once again, women are coming forward to out their colleagues, teachers, and co-authors as misogynists and abusers. Once again, women are noting how pervasive and persistent sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination are within the field. And once again, economists are asking how to make their subject area safer, more welcoming, and more diverse.[Read: The movement of #MeToo]This is not just an internecine battle for greater equality and opportunity within an elite profession. It is a battle to improve economics itself, and thus to improve our understanding of the economy, and thus to improve public policy, and thus to improve everyone’s lives. For such researchers to understand the world, they need to confront their own biases. And the testimonies of any number of women show how far the profession has to go in doing so.The most recent #MeToo furor began with serious accusations—of favoritism toward male students, of harassment, of groping—that spilled out from the profession’s whisper networks onto social media. Jennifer Doleac, an economics professor at Texas A&M University and an expert on criminal-justice policy, became a kind of clearing house for the controversy, receiving emails from people with stories to tell, directing them to journalists, connecting them with one another, and tweeting furiously through it all, as credible and corroborated accusations swirled about dozens of men.Two of those women spoke with me about their experiences. Both asked for anonymity, the first to avoid putting any of her male colleagues under unwarranted scrutiny and the second to avoid giving a serial harasser any reason to contact her.The first is an expert in global development working at a major Washington, D.C., think tank. In college two decades ago, she told me, she had aced a political-economy class taught by a public intellectual who is still prominent today. After the class ended, he emailed her to congratulate her on her final grade and offer to take her out to dinner. “I thought, I wonder if anyone else got this message,” she told me. “It seemed a little weird.” And it was. The professor made inappropriate comments throughout the meal. The next time they met, she arranged for it to be in a busy, public place. “He was disgusting. I literally cried the whole way home,” she told me. “He didn’t help me at all professionally. He very explicitly wanted me to sleep with him. And I just felt like such a fool.”The second woman graduated from one of the top 20 economics Ph.D. programs in the country a few years ago and is now an economist at a government agency in Washington. She told me her #MeToo moment occurred before even starting graduate school—at a campus event for admitted doctoral candidates, at which a fellow economics student groped her. (She enrolled, she recounted, because she believed the man planned to enroll in a different university, only to end up in the same program as him.) Both her male classmates and male professors regularly acted boorishly, she said. “All of the men around me felt that they were one woman away from having gotten into Harvard or MIT,” she told me. “As if a woman took their spot.”Five years ago, it became clear just how commonplace such stories are in economics. A series of investigations—some including major names in the profession—have been buttressed by a wave of new research analyzing discrimination within the profession and measuring the effect of such discrimination more broadly: In 2017, for instance, a paper by Alice Wu, then an undergraduate at the UC Berkeley, provided evidence that a popular academic economics web forum essentially had the gender politics of 4chan. Anonymous posters talked about male economists’ achievements and female economists’ bodies.As more and more stories, and more and more papers, began to pile up, leaders in the field decided to do something about it: In late 2018, the American Economic Association created a standing committee to assess diversity and equity in the profession. It surveyed tens of thousands of economists. The results of that survey were stark, if not shocking: Women were outnumbered 2 to 1, and just one in five women described themselves as “satisfied” with the climate in the profession. Harassment was pervasive. Discrimination was pervasive. “We treat women terribly. We treat minorities terribly. We’re really a discriminatory institution,” Stevenson told me, summing up the status quo in academic economics.[Read: Beyond sexual harassment]The AEA responded in force, or at least tried to. It adopted a code of professional conduct. It created web fora to compete with the one Wu had studied. It set up a raft of committees on diversity and equity. It created a process for removing harassers from the AEA. And it hired an ombudsperson, to “take and permanently record complaints concerning harassment or discrimination in any professional context” and to investigate them.“The problem is that the AEA cannot protect the confidentiality of any victims or witnesses to come forward,” Doleac said. “They don’t have any sort of real investigative or subpoena power either. These investigations are really not productive in any way.” She added that the process left her feeling it did “more harm than good.” (The AEA did not respond to my request for comment.)Although the culture of and standards within the profession might have changed for the better, nobody I interviewed thought they had changed enough. “Economists are naturally disinclined to think this is a big deal or that it is even happening,” Stevenson said. “The fear of people being falsely accused is so much bigger than the fear of not outing people.” And the culture was and remains particularly toxic at the intersection of race and gender. “The reality is that women of color—in particular, Black, Native, and Latinx women—are treated the worst,” Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, an activist who co-founded a nonprofit that promotes Black women in economics and related fields, told me. “It’s sexual harassment on top of racial harassment.”The broader issue is that sexism, misogyny, discrimination, marginalization, and sexual violence within the profession do not just affect the profession. “This is inside economics,” Stevenson said. “But this is also why economists are doing a shittier job with the economy than they should.”Relatively few women enter economics—and in particular very, very few Black women, according to the AEA. When female students do enter, they tend to not have their contributions acknowledged. They get talked over in the classroom. They get objectified in professional fora. They have to avoid professional events to avoid getting harassed. They are subject to high rates of abuse, in many cases from men who could make or break their careers by recommending them for jobs, refereeing their papers for journals, and helping them work on papers.[Read: The cost of balancing academia and racism]It grinds many of them down. “So many of the men in economics have a hard time seeing people as human,” Stevenson said. “They don’t really understand the cost of sexual harassment. They don’t understand the way it can sap your motivation. They don’t understand the way that can make you doubt your own abilities, question yourself. The derailment makes no sense to them. They think, Some guy put his hand up your skirt at a conference? Just get on with it. I think they really don’t understand the way that changes how women interact with lots of men in the profession after that.”As a broader point, women tend to silo themselves in certain parts of the field—labor economics rather than financial economics, family economics rather than public finance—in part because there is “safety in numbers,” as Stevenson put it. Those parts of the profession then get stereotyped as “soft” and less intellectually rigorous.Indeed, the two women who spoke anonymously told me that their experience of harassment had shaped their careers. “I gravitated to more nurturing environments, and thrived in them professionally,” the development expert told me. “Part of my anger is how close I came to not even being in public policy because of [my harasser]. I almost didn’t have this life I find so fulfilling. And my path could have been so much easier.” The new Ph.D. told me she had offers from both the government and academic institutions upon graduation. She took a government job. “I didn’t want to stay in academia. I think it’s a cesspool.”Ultimately the field is tilted to the worldview of the white men who dominate it. “What we study is very much tied to our identity, tied to what informs our worldview,” Opoku-Agyeman said. “If you are discounting my worldview, and using your worldview as a standard to determine whether or not I’m a productive researcher or someone who adds value to the field, that is fundamentally unfair.”That means our understanding of the world is warped too. Macroeconomics “absolutely would have made more progress if it had been more open to women over the last 25 years,” Stevenson said. “The profession values the study of investment in physical capital more than the investment in human capital, which seems like an awfully big blind spot.” And the policy consequences are profound. One obvious example: The United States’ labor force is hobbled by its lack of investment in child care and early-childhood education, a failure still somehow treated as a niche “women’s issue” instead of a calamitous, GDP-stifling flaw in America’s economic machinery. “If you called that an infrastructure issue, you’d get a lot of eye rolls today,” Stevenson told me. The oversights of American economic policy and the treatment of women in the economics profession are linked.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, where she also directs the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Her forthcoming book is Justice By Means of Democracy.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Danielle Allen discuss why the great American political texts of the 18th century can still inspire; how we can build a political system that invites more and more kinds of people to participate; and how such a form of "power-sharing liberalism" can reinvigorate our societies and promote human flourishing.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: The debate about liberalism, which used to be a kind of academic debate, has now become a much more urgent political debate. You have an interesting position in this debate as somebody who sees the flaws of liberalism and the need to reform it, but ultimately wants to defend it. What are some of the things that traditional liberals got right, and what are some of the things traditional liberals got wrong?Danielle Allen: It’s a really hard political moment, and sort of the opposite of the End of History that Francis Fukuyama predicted when the Cold War fell and it looked as if liberalism was all-ascendant. I think your question is important because it points to how there have always been varieties of liberalisms, and it's really important to pay attention to what those varietes have been. But you have to start, of course, from the core: the commitment to basic human rights. And then, for me, the question is which categories of rights are at the focus of any given liberalism. You have your liberalisms that really focus on things like freedom of expression, or freedom of contract and free market participation. Philosophers will call those the “negative freedoms”—freedom from interference. Then you have varieties of liberalism that focus on the right to participate, to vote, to run for office, to help shape your community. Philosophers call those the “positive liberties.”I think liberalism has gone wrong when it has focused exclusively on the negative liberties, the liberties about our own autonomous private sphere, separate from everybody else, where we control things, consume things and the like. And liberalism goes right, I believe, when we focus just as much on the positive liberties of participation, of playing a role as a coauthor of our collective lives and our political decisions.Mounk: What does it mean when you say that liberalism is focused too much (or perhaps in some contexts, exclusively) on those negative liberties? As you've outlined them, certainly in the self-understanding of the United States and of most liberal democracies today, we think of a need for both of those [positive and negative liberties], right? Clearly the freedoms of speech, of assembly, and some basic economic freedom are a core part of our political system and something that we're rightly proud of. But the ability to vote, the ability to run for office, the ability to have free and fair elections, are also thought of as being really at the core of our political system. That obviously doesn't mean that every country has been able to sustain that for all of its citizens, but it feels sort of comfortably within the mainstream of the tradition as an aspiration that we should have. What does it mean in practice to over-index on the negative liberties and to neglect the positive liberties?Allen: I think you honestly give us all too much credit in the picture that you just painted. I don't think we have been so good at holding on tight to the positive liberties of participation and the like. And I think one can see this in all kinds of ways. I said there are varieties of liberalism. Let me just name three that are conventionally recognized. There's the classical liberalism of the late 18th and 19th century, there's the Keynesian or Rooseveltian liberalism of the early 20th century, and then there's also neoliberalism. And I think if you go back to the sort of earliest variant, it's fair to say that across those kinds of liberalism, there was a recognition of both categories of rights. Famously, the French philosopher Benjamin Constant drew a distinction between those, calling negative liberties the liberties of the moderns, those that protected the commercial activity of the modern economy. The ancient liberties were those that protected rights of participation. And his view was that at the end of the day, we should prefer those negative liberties, the commercial liberties, where we are free from interference and can tend to our own gardens and build our own prosperity, because, of course, prosperity provides a certain kind of important degree of autonomy. I think we've neglected the fact that even when you come to the early 20th century, you look at Roosevelt, and there's four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear—none of those are actually positive liberties. They're all about how we live in terms of our own pursuit of the good, what we want to worship, what we want to talk about—and in freedom from want and freedom from fear, a certain kind of protection from the vicissitudes of life. But they're not about the freedom to participate, or the freedom to be a decision maker, for example. The ancient conception is that participation is actually a part of the human good. The actual experience of empowerment is a component of human flourishing. I am making the case that we need to recover that idea. Absent that idea, our politics is paternalistic and technocratic. That's the problem with our politics. I think precisely because it's paternalistic and technocratic, it works incredibly well for elites. But for those who have been subject to oppression and domination over time, the point to be made—and it doesn't matter if it's David Walker, Frederick Douglass or WEB Dubois—is that we will own and direct and steer our own lives. That requires empowerment at a collective level and it's not just instrumental. It's not just about self-protection. It's about full human dignity, the kind of human dignity that elites claim as technocrats, as steerers of policy, is a dignity that everybody deserves access to.Mounk: I think a lot of the time I completely agree with you that the policies we have, and a lot of decisions we have, are so influenced and controlled by an affluent, highly-educated elite that often has its own kind of social milieu and doesn't really track what people want. But I'm also aware of the fact that the two of us have chosen to build our lives around thinking about politics, and anybody who's listening to this podcast is choosing to spend their free time listening to two people argue about politics. So our preferences in the world and our idea of what we want to do with our lives are just very different from those people, some of whom have political interests, and some of whom hate politics. How do we balance a different set of preferences? How do we balance between real openness to participation, and the fact that some people will simply choose not to think that much about politics?Allen: Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, there was this very romanticized picture of what democracy ought to be that did involve the conception of everybody participating all the time, in big deliberative assemblies and things like that. That's not the case I'm making. I'm making a case for what I call “power-sharing liberalism,” a kind of reconstructed variant of liberalism that I would put on the table now, in the wake of neoliberalism. The point of power-sharing liberalism is that for any given decision that has to be made, you want to make sure that the decision-making structure is pooling all affected into the process. Sometimes representation is exactly enough to do that, if representation is working. If you take a look at Massachusetts, for example, we have a population that is dissatisfied with our situation on housing, on transportation, on the black-white wealth wealth gap, and with the response to the opioid epidemic in the state. We also have the lowest voting registration rate for African Americans in the country, at 42%. We have cities where the majority are people of color, but we don't have office holders of color. So in those instances, obviously, representation itself is failing to actually achieve the kind of participation that would channel into policy the frustration people have with basic building blocks of well-being. Representation might be enough, but we have to be really clear on the places where it's not even working to do what it's supposed to do. We need governance innovation to make sure that we have decision-making structures that are simultaneously effective and inclusive, but not in that sort of romanticized, sitting around talking all the time about everything kind of way.Mounk: What does that mean concretely, and how do we make sure we don't fall into a trap that I perceive quite a lot in American politics at the moment, where there are stakeholders in society, but the people who speak for them often don't have very organic links to those groups? The person who says that they are representing Latinos isn't necessarily in accordance with what most Latinos believe politically, for instance.Allen: This is exactly where our knowledge about how to operate constitutional democracy runs out. This has been an experiment for 250 years, and there's a need for new experimentation. I would point to another lesson from the COVID context. One of the things that was so striking in the case of schools operating during the pandemic was how hard it was for office holders (those with administrative or executive power) to ask people down at the far end of the policy chain what their perspective was. There were any number of concrete cases of teachers being told, “What you need to do is keep the windows open”—when their windows were nailed shut. The only person who could communicate that information back up the chain was the teacher, because they were the only ones who knew what the actual state of affairs was in the classroom. But nobody was asking the teacher. So in that regard, I think it's incumbent on any administrative person to be doing their due diligence, getting really clear on who all the stakeholders are, and then pulling that information in. And you're right—that doesn't mean just starting with self-appointed stakeholders. There has to be a kind of actual diagnosis of the shape of the issue being addressed, where the pain points are, and who's experiencing them.I'll just make one last point here. There is really good knowledge and understanding about this coming out of the travails of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. General Stanley McChrystal developed the concept of fusion cells, which pulled people together from across the array of points of contact for any given problem. He didn't worry that much about where they stood in the hierarchy or the chain of command, but just made sure that the people who had the best visibility into different pieces of the problem were brought together into a sort of shared deliberation space. You don't need to make those things permanent, because as the shape of the problem changes, you're going to need a different conversational shape. That's where I think elected officials and people with administrative power need to have that capacity to build and shape a conversation that actually tracks the shape of the problem. Mounk: To change the topic a little bit, you defend liberalism despite some of its historical flaws. In the same way, you defend the Declaration of Independence despite some of the obvious injustices about late 18th century America. You hear in the discourse today some people saying, “These ideas were formulated 250 years ago by people who are flawed in all kinds of ways. Why should we be bound by the dead letter of these documents?” I agree with parts of that; I think the United States Constitution is particularly hard to amend. But why, more broadly, should we continue to look back at these texts and be inspired by them? Allen: It's hard for me to answer that question without quoting the Declaration of Independence:“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”This was a revolutionary statement in two senses: because it anchored a revolution, and also because it was philosophically revolutionary. It established the people as the judge for how their lives were going and acknowledged the capacity of the people to name when things were not going well, and to self-consciously reorganize the powers of government in order to achieve their goals of safety and happiness. Nobody had ever put that much acknowledgement of the power and capacity of the people on paper before—not Locke, not Hobbes. They screwed up because they thought it was possible to organize the powers of government by putting power only in the hands of men of property, as if that then could still yield protection of rights for all. That is not possible. Absolute power over others leads to abuse of others, period. Powers have to be shared broadly. That's where power-sharing liberalism comes in, as reconstruction beyond that original moment. But the point is that the original incredibly pithy statement in the Declaration is very profound in its articulation of human agency, and what is possible when we acknowledge human agency. Mounk: Let's go from theory to more practical questions. One of those practical questions is how much our institutions will have to change to work in the 21st century and to help to overcome some of the divisions in our society today. You were the lead author of an influential report on that. What can we do to actually change the structure of our political system in a way that makes a difference for the health and stability of our democracy?Allen: You're referring to a report called “Our Common Purpose” that I had the pleasure of helping to draft, and this was a report issued by a commission sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The purpose of the commission was to think about the future of American democracy and try to propose a forward path.The American Academy has been around for a really long time. We predate the Revolution, actually. George Washington was an early member. The purpose of the Academy was that this new country, this weird experiment in self-government, would always need (the founders thought) knowledge resources to help it meet the challenges of the day. And so we took up that charge in beginning to think about the challenges with democracy. We did that, but we also held listening sessions all over the country, and with people from very different kinds of backgrounds—those deeply committed to service like naval cadets, and those who don't vote at all, people from both political parties, and the like. But there's one person, one gentleman in Maine at a listening session there, who said something that really gave us the kind of core concept of our set of proposals for securing a healthy democracy. And he said, basically, “Right now we're experiencing kind of a vicious circle. Our institutions don't really deliver for us, and then that makes it feel like, ‘Why should I engage when we don't actually engage and participate?’ Then our awareness of each other, and our commitment to each other, degrades. Isn't democracy supposed to be a virtuous circle?” We really latched on to that idea and recognized that it's not just about institutions. We do need institutional reform. But we need those reforms partly in order to re-inspire people to participate and bring them back into the civil society organizations that give them a chance of learning about each other and learning how to bridge differences. And, of course, we need a media ecosystem that pulls all that together.That's a very long-winded way of saying that there are things we can do to adjust our political institutions, and I don't see why we should anticipate less change in this century than either of our previous centuries have seen. If we stop and think about that, we've got a lot of change ahead of us, right? Think about how much institutional change there was in the 19th and 20th centuries. But at the same time that we have institutional change ahead of us, we need cultural change. We need those elites to abandon technocracy and paternalism. That doesn't mean abandoning expertise, but it means recognizing that their expertise needs to be complemented by the expertise of that teacher in the classroom who knew her windows were nailed shut.Mounk: Perhaps my favorite work by you is a very personal book about your cousin. Tell us about his story and about what we can learn from it.Allen: You're talking about my cousin Michael. We lost Michael in 2009, just before he was 30. And the thing about Michael's story is that he didn't start out with such different prospects from me. I wouldn't say they were identical, but they weren't worlds apart. We both grew up in Southern California; our parents had grown up in northern Florida and had fled the Jim Crow South looking for new opportunities. Michael's mother was my dad’s younger sister. My dad was making more progress professionally than his sister; he was a professor, his sister ultimately became a nurse, but it was definitely a much longer pathway there, for her.Just as this country over the 50 years of my lifetime has experienced this great coming-apart, a pulling-apart, so too did our family. My lifetime has been exactly parallel to this incredible increase in income inequality and wealth inequality, to the incredible increase in mass incarceration, and so forth. And that's what we experienced in my family. Some of us ended up having the most extraordinary opportunities. Here I sit as a tenured professor at Harvard, and I have too many dead or debilitated cousins. In Michael’s case, in particular, he was arrested at the age of 15, in 1995: a first arrest for attempted carjacking in Southern California. That's an obviously terrible thing to have done. It was also a time, though, when punishment in California was at its most intense. So on that first arrest, he got a sentence of 12 years and eight months and served almost all of that from the age of 15. And that was the decisive factor of his life. He'd had two years out at the point in 2009 when he was shot and killed by somebody he had met while he was in prison. That was a real life turning point for me, and really pulled my attention into the question of how it is that we've built traps that catch talented people. Michael was an exceptionally talented young man. He was bright, full of curiosity, and charismatic. He made mistakes. He made bad mistakes. He had no second chance. And that was that, in effect. For me, the question is how to undo the traps that we built for people that result in the fact that some folks have just had a much higher degree of difficulty in their life, and a single slip is catastrophic—whereas others, in other circumstances, make a similar single slip, and it's not catastrophic. Substance use disorder is a huge part of that. But also, you make one slip, and then you can't get housing. You can't get into school. You can't get a job again because you've got a felony on your record. That has produced an extraordinary degree of hopelessness, and then that hopelessness ricochets and produces other problematic phenomena. I've been an advocate to end the War on Drugs for quite some time at this point, going on 15 years, and I'm also an advocate for really focusing our political economy on basic building blocks: housing, transportation, schools, jobs—all of those things have to exist in proximity to each other for anybody to have a chance. In the 19th century, this country had a focus on the concept of internal improvements: how do you put the infrastructure in place that gives people the chance to stand up and build a life for themselves? I believe we should replace our “safety net” conception with that foundational flourishing conception; that we should be invested in internal improvements that yield an infrastructure pack that makes it possible for people to stand up and find a pathway to flourishing.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Friends,

Hate to drag you from leftover turkeys back into the world of politics (I'll refrain from the obvious bad joke here), but the question is growing louder about whether Joe Biden should run again for president.

Having turned 80 last Sunday, Biden is already the oldest president in American history. Concerns about his age top the list for why Democratic voters want the party to find an alternative for 2024.

But the question "should Joe Biden run again?" is really four different questions:

(1) Has he done a good job so far? (Answer: By-and-large, yes.)

(2) Should he run again if he wants to? (Almost certainly.)

(3) Will he be the best candidate to beat Trump or whomever else Republicans are likely to nominate? (Maybe, but let's discuss.)

(4) Would he be a capable leader of the United States when he's in his mid-80s? (Possible, but unlikely.)

As I've said before, I don't think concern about Biden's age reflects an "ageist" prejudice against those who have reached such withering heights so much as an understanding that people in their 80s do wither.

I speak with a certain authority. I'm 76. I feel fit, I swing dance and salsa, and can do 20 pushups in a row. Yet I confess to a certain loss of, shall we say, fizz.

Joe Biden could easily make it until 86, when he'd conclude his second term. After all, it's now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85. (My mother passed at 86, my father two weeks before his 102nd birthday, so I'm hoping for the best, genetically speaking.)

Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma should add at least a decade and a half. Beyond this is an extra helping. "After 80, it's gravy," my father used to say.

Joe will be on the cusp of the gravy train.

Where will this end? There's only one possibility. As the old saying goes, "we won't get out of this alive."

That reality occurs to me with increasing frequency. I find myself reading the obituary pages with ever greater curiosity about how long they lasted and what brought them down. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which an older reader of the obituaries sees headlines that read only "Older Than Me" or "Younger Than Me."

Yet most of the time I forget my age. The other day after lunch with some of my graduate students, I caught our reflection in a store window and for an instant wondered about the identity of that little old man in our midst.

It's not death that's the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It's the dwindling capacities that go with aging. "Bodily decrepitude," said Yeats, "is wisdom." I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but Biden seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add "for someone his age?").

I still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather whom I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I'm not tempting fate by my stating this fact). But I've lived through several kidney stones and a few unexplained fits of epilepsy in my late thirties. I've had both hips replaced. And my hearing is for shit. Even with hearing aids, I have a hard time understanding someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant.

You'd think that the sheer market power of 60 million boomers losing their hearing would be enough to generate at least one set of quiet restaurants. But no--restaurants seem to be loud as ever. Getting louder, in fact.

When I get together with old friends, our first ritual is an "organ recital"--how's your back? knee? heart? hip? shoulder? eyesight? hearing? prostate? hemorrhoids? digestion?

The recital can run (and ruin) an entire lunch.

The question my friends and I jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in college--"getting much?"--now refers not to sex but to sleep. I don't know anyone over 75 who sleeps through the night. When he was president, Bill Clinton prided himself on getting only about four hours. But he was in his forties then. (I also recall cabinet meetings where he dozed off.) How does Biden manage?

My memory for names is horrible. (I once asked Ted Kennedy how he recalled names and he advised that if a man is over 50, just ask "how's the back?" and he'll think you know him.)

I often can't remember where I put my wallet and keys or why I've entered a room. And certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again. Biden's secret service detail can worry about his wallet and he's got a teleprompter for wayward nouns, but I'm sure he's experiencing some diminution in the memory department.

I have lost much of my enthusiasm for travel and feel, as did Philip Larkin, that I would like to visit China, but only on the condition that I could return home that night. Air Force One makes this possible under most circumstances. If not, it has a first-class bedroom and personal bathroom, so I don't expect Biden's trips are overly taxing.

I'm told that after the age of 60, one loses half an inch of height every five years. This doesn't appear to be a problem for Biden but it presents a challenge for me, considering that at my zenith I didn't quite make it to five feet. If I live as long as my father did, I may vanish.

Another diminution I've noticed is tact. A few days ago, I gave the finger to a driver who passed me recklessly on the highway. These days, giving the finger to a stranger is itself a reckless act.

I'm also noticing I have less patience, perhaps because of an unconscious "use by" timer that's now clicking away. Increasingly I wonder why I'm wasting time with this or that buffoon. I'm less tolerant of long waiting lines, automated phone menus, and Republicans.

Cicero claimed "older people who are reasonable, good-tempered, and gracious bear aging well. Those who are mean-spirited and irritable will be unhappy at every stage of their lives." Easy for Cicero to say. He was forced into exile and murdered at the age of 63, his decapitated head and right hand hung up in the Forum by order of the notoriously mean-spirited and irritable Marcus Antonius.

How the hell does Biden maintain tact or patience when he has to deal with Mitch McConnell? Or Joe Manchin? And very soon with Kevin McCarthy, for crying out loud?

The style sections of the papers tell us that the 70s are the new 50s. Septuagenarians are supposed to be fit and alert, exercise like mad, have rip-roaring sex, and party until dawn.

Rubbish. Inevitably, things begin falling apart. My aunt, who lived far into her nineties, told me "getting old isn't for sissies." Toward the end she repeated that phrase every two to three minutes.

Am I repeating myself?

I'm doing videos on TikTok and Snapchat, but when my students talk about Ariana Grande or Selena Gomez or Jared Leto, I don't have clue who they're talking about (and frankly don't care). And I find myself using words--"hence," "utmost," "therefore," "tony," "brilliant"--that my younger colleagues find charmingly old-fashioned. If I refer to "Rose Marie Woods" or "Jackie Robinson" or "Ed Sullivan" or "Mary Jo Kopechne," they're bewildered. The culture has flipped in so many ways. When I was seventeen, I could go into a drugstore and confidently ask for a package of Luckies and nervously whisper a request for condoms. Now it's precisely the reverse. (I stopped smoking long ago.)

Santayana said the reason that old people have nothing but foreboding about the future is that they cannot imagine a world that's good without themselves in it. I don't share that view. To the contrary, I think my generation--including Bill and Hillary, George W., Trump, Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Chuck Schumer, and Biden - have fucked it up royally. The world will probably be better without us. (On the other hand, I think Nancy Pelosi has done a wonderful job.)

Joe, please don't run. (But if you do, I'll be 100 percent behind you.)

The list of investigative priorities for the House Judiciary Committee that the incoming chairperson, Jim Jordan, sent to the Justice Department earlier this month reads like an assignment sheet for Fox News.And that was before Jordan, with incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair James Comer, repeatedly insisted the FBI had colluded with “Big Tech” to undermine former president Donald Trump by “suppressing” information about Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election.It was also before reports surfaced that Kevin McCarthy, in his bid to secure the votes as speaker, promised far-right members of his caucus that he would authorize investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of the insurrectionists who rioted in support of Trump on January 6. This was also before McCarthy threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.Two months before taking power, the new House Republican majority has signaled that its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters. But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races. That contrast captures why the GOP’s plans for aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden may present as much political risk for the investigators as it does for the targets.[Read: The new majority]House Republicans and their allies are confident that the investigations will weaken Biden in advance of the 2024 presidential election. “This is not just superficial stuff—this is damaging stuff,” former Republican Representative Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me.But the new majority’s focus on airing echo-chamber conservative obsessions risks further stamping the GOP as the party of Trump precisely as more Republican leaders and donors insist the recent election results demonstrate the need to move beyond him.  “All these folks are coming out saying, ‘Turn the page; move forward’ … and I think this is really a problem if some of these [House] members are going to continue to look back and embrace Trump at a time when we saw the most Trumpian candidates get their heads handed to them,” former Republican Representative Charlie Dent told me.The choices confronting GOP leaders on what—and how—to investigate encapsulates the much larger challenge they will face in managing the House. This month’s midterm election left the GOP with a House majority much smaller than it expected. The results also created a kind of split-personality caucus operating with very different political incentives.Most incoming House Republicans represent districts in Trump country: 168 of them hold seats that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more in 2020. Another three dozen represent more marginal Republican-leaning seats that Trump carried by fewer than 10 points two years ago.But the GOP majority relies on what will likely be 18 members (when all the final votes are counted) who won districts that voted for Biden in 2020. Eleven of those 18 are in New York and California alone—two states that will likely become considerably more difficult for Republicans in a presidential-election year than during a midterm contest.For the Republicans from the hard-core Trump districts, demonstrating a commitment to confronting Biden at every turn is crucial for preempting any possible primary challenges from their right, says the Democratic consultant Meredith Kelly, a former communications director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But, as Dent told me, the Republicans precariously holding the Biden seats have the “polar opposite” incentive: “They need to have bipartisan victories and wins.”Amid that cross-pressure, many analysts second the prediction of outgoing Democratic Representative David Price of North Carolina, a political scientist who has written several books about Congress, that the new GOP House majority is not likely to pass much legislation. The problem, Price told me, is not only the partisan and ideological fracture in the GOP caucus, but that its members do not have “an agenda that they campaigned on or they are committed to.”All members of the GOP caucus might agree on legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts, to promote more domestic energy production, or to increase funding for border security. But resistance from the Republicans in blue and purple districts may frustrate many of the right’s most ambitious legislative goals, such as repealing elements of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passing a national ban on abortion, and forcing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.With their legislative opportunities limited, House Republicans may see relentless investigation of Biden and his administration as a path of least resistance that can unite their caucus. And, several observers in both parties told me, all sides in the GOP are likely to support efforts to probe the White House’s policy record. Such targets could include the administration’s handling of border security, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how it is allocating the clean-energy tax credits and loan guarantees that the Inflation Reduction Act established.But Republicans have already indicated they are unlikely to stop at such conventional targets.Jordan, in his letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month, warned of coming investigations into the Justice Department’s treatment of Project Veritas; allegations that the department has targeted conservative parents as “domestic terrorists” for their actions at school-board meetings; and the department’s decision making in the choice to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.At the press conference last week with Jordan, Comer declared that evidence from the GOP’s investigation of Hunter Biden’s business activities, including information obtained from his laptop, “raises troubling questions about whether President Biden is a national-security risk.”Jordan, asked at that press conference about the reports that McCarthy has committed to an investigation of the prosecution and treatment of the January 6 rioters, refused to deny it, instead repeating his determination to explore all examples of alleged politicization at the Justice Department. At one point, Jordan, an unwavering defender of Trump through his two impeachments, delivered an impassioned attack on federal law enforcement that reprised a long list of familiar Trump grievances. “When is the FBI going to quit interfering with elections?” Jordan excitedly declared.[David Frum: Another flop from GOP Productions]Jordan doesn’t even represent the outer edge of conservative ambition to use House investigations to settle scores for Trump. Earlier this week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida tweeted that when Republicans take the majority, they “should take over the @January6thCmte and release every second of footage that will exonerate our Patriots!”That might be a bridge too far even for McCarthy. But as he scrambles to overcome conservative resistance to his bid for speaker, he has already shown deference to demands from the Trump-country members who constitute the dominant block in his caucus. One example was the report that he promised Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that he would allow some investigation into treatment of the January 6 rioters. Another came in his appearance along the Texas border this week. McCarthy went beyond pledging oversight of the Biden administration’s border record to raise the much more incendiary (but also Fox-friendly) notion of impeaching Mayorkas.Dent, the former GOP representative, told me that on all these fronts, House Republicans risk pushing oversight to a confrontational peak that may damage its members from marginal seats at least as much as it hurts Biden—particularly if it involves what he described as airing Trump grievances. “These rabbit holes are just fraught with political peril in these more moderate districts,” Dent said.Democrats hope that the coming GOP investigations will alienate more voters than they alarm. Several Democratic strategists told me they believe that the focus on so many conservative causes will both spotlight the most extreme Trump-aligned voices in the Republican caucus, such as Jordan and Greene, and strike swing voters as a distraction from their kitchen-table concerns.Leslie Dach, a veteran Democratic communications strategist now serving as a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a group mobilizing to respond to the investigations, told me the GOP inquiries will inexorably identify the party with the same polarizing style of Trump-like politics that voters just repudiated in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. “We saw in this election that voters reject the Trump playbook and MAGA politics, but that is exactly what they will see in these hearings,” he said.Congressional investigations always carry the risk of disclosures that could hurt or embarrass Biden and other officials. And whatever they find, investigations also promise to divert significant amounts of the administration’s time and energy. The White House has already staffed up a unit in the counsel’s office dedicated to responding to the inquiries. Cabinet departments are scrambling to do the same.Recognizing the potential political risk, several Republican representatives newly elected in Biden districts have already urged their party to move slowly on the probes and instead to prioritize action on economic issues. Their problem is that McCarthy already has given every indication he’s likely to prioritize the demands for maximum confrontation from his caucus’s pro-Trump majority.“If past is prologue, Kevin McCarthy will fall much on the side of the ruby-red Republican base and the pro-investigation, pro-culture-war side,” Kelly says. “He’s never proven able to stand up to the fringe.” And that means the new members from Biden-leaning districts who have provided the GOP its narrow majority have reason to sweat almost as much as the Biden administration over the swarm of investigations that House Republicans are poised to unleash.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.La Grande Bouffe is a 1973 French Italian dark comedy about a group of four friends who shut themselves up in a villa and eat themselves to death. Although mostly unknown to American audiences, the film is a cult classic in Europe. I learned about it in November 1991 shortly after marrying my Spanish wife. Living in Barcelona at the time, I treated my new in-laws to a full Thanksgiving feast: multiple turkeys, stuffing, mashed potatoes—the works. I even somehow procured pumpkin pies.“This American holiday,” my wife whispered, as her amazed family surveyed the mountain of food in front of them. “It reminds me of a movie.”“It’s only once a year,” I responded after hearing the film’s plot. “And it makes us happy, not depressed, like from watching a European film.” She expressed skepticism that most Americans limit their blowout feasts to once a year—which I thought uncharitable, although perhaps fair play, given my remark about European cinema.Later, however, I began to wonder about the happiness part of the binge. People do love Thanksgiving—it is the average American’s favorite holiday. But does the bouffe really have to be so grande in order to give us a boost? Does overindulgence make us happier than regular indulgence? What if we ate a normal-size meal, instead of the 3,000 to 4,500 calories consumed by the average American during a Thanksgiving feast? For that matter, should we stop overconsuming food at every celebration?Like many traditional holidays, early Thanksgiving celebrations involved a food binge at a time when many people suffered a calorie deficit, so a large meal was a real treat. My father-in-law, who as a child suffered through the Spanish Civil War and the deprivation that followed, spoke with nostalgia about holiday meals when, one day in the year, he didn’t go to bed hungry.For most people, relief from hunger is no longer the source of Thanksgiving enjoyment. However, eating is still pleasurable, especially when it is social. Research shows that eating with another person can make food taste better, and eating with friends or family who eat a lot makes us overindulge. It might even be fun to binge together: There is research linking social drinking to the point of drunkenness (dubbed “calculated hedonism” by the investigators) to positive enjoyment, so it is easy to imagine the same kind of fun coming from other types of joint disinhibition—even a turkey bender. So in the short run, it seems that, yes, overindulgence can make you happy, especially if you do it with loved ones. (Although the stomachache that follows may dampen your spirits.)[Read: How therapy can cure overeating]But what about the long run? On the plus side are our memories, which elevate the evanescent pleasure of the meal to the longer-term reward of enjoyment. On the negative side, for many, is the weight gain from the Thanksgiving feast (as well as from the holiday meals that follow in the subsequent month). One study from 2000 found that, on average, Americans gain almost one pound between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. This gain, the researchers concluded, is generally not reversed during the spring and summer, meaning the annual calorie surplus could lead to weight increase over adulthood.This is not a health column, so I won’t adjudicate questions in that category. But what about the happiness effects from that weight gain? ​​If you listen to the dieting industry or pay attention to a lot of fitness influencers on social media, you have likely internalized the message that any weight gain is bad for your happiness, and that if you avoid putting on pounds (or work them off afterward), you’ll be a lot happier, presumably because you will be more attractive.But the data simply don’t support this idea. For example, a mid-2000s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development survey of 23,000 Dutch citizens concluded that although most happy people do not have obesity, “people who are moderately overweight are equally happy and satisfied with their life compared to people who are not overweight.” In other words, a few extra pounds probably won’t lower your well-being.But worrying a lot about those extra pounds might lower your happiness. There is evidence that excessive attention to weight can lead to increased stress, and that inordinate worry about a healthy diet can trend into a harmful nutrition obsession called orthorexia. Meanwhile, although moderate exercise is excellent for improving mental health, too much (which some researchers classify as more than five times a week) may be linked to increased stress, depression, and emotional problems. This is correlation, not causation, so I think there’s a good case to be made that it isn’t the week’s sixth or seventh workout that’s causing the problems, but the inability to take a day off.None of this is to say that weight gain above normal levels is always good or that weight loss through diet and exercise is always bad. There are times in life when we need to cut back and correct ourselves. My point is that people are happiest when they live with balance. Excess consumption can be a source of suffering. But intense abstemiousness—as in saying no to a Thanksgiving feast—can be a form of excess as well.Altogether, the evidence suggests that if eating gives you pleasure and you are with your loved ones, a Thanksgiving bouffe can indeed bring you joy and, if you keep it within proper boundaries, not bring suffering later on. Here are a few things to avoid.1. Don’t extend your feast past Thursday.The kind of weight gain that might lower your life quality would come from disinhibition all year round, not from one fun day. Go ahead and have seconds and thirds on Thursday, but don’t start Friday morning with waffles and ice cream. Go back to normal eating, and maybe add in a long walk for good measure.2. Don’t forget the Thanks part.Gratitude can have a lot of positive effects, including increasing life satisfaction and lowering depression and anxiety. It can also moderate overeating, according to a 2015 paper in the journal Integrative Medicine. The idea is to be mindful of each bite—even if you take 10,000 of them—and to enjoy it deliberately. And if you can really be mindful of not just the food, but also the atmosphere and the company, you will lay down the foundation for a rich memory—which can bring the lasting enjoyment that is a genuine source of happiness.[How to Build a Life: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful]3. Don’t beat yourself up.One last thing to keep in mind even if you do overeat on Thanksgiving: Feeling guilty won’t help you recover, and it will make your holiday a lot less enjoyable. Researchers writing in 2014 in the journal Appetite looked at people’s attitudes about delicious food (chocolate cake) and then followed their eating and weight patterns over an 18-month period. They found that guilt about eating the cake—versus associating it with celebration—was correlated not with more positive attitudes about healthy eating, but with lower levels of perceived control over eating and less success at maintaining weight. Guilt about eating will not make you better off, but it will make you appreciate Thanksgiving less. So whatever you do, be sure to celebrate and enjoy.

In the wake of the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and amid reports that FTX's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, diverted billions of dollars of clients' funds, some observers have linked the alleged financial malpractice to ideas widely held within the "effective altruism" movement, which Bankman-Fried says inspired him. More specifically, they point to the ethical view that the end justifies the means.

The deception in which Bankman-Fried is alleged to have engaged was unnecessary and unjustified. The many examples of successful financiers who have been ruined by unethical and illegal business practices should have been sufficient warning.

Effective altruism holds that one of our aims should be to do as much good as we can. In pursuing this goal, effective altruists believe, we should use reason and evidence to guide us. We should draw on research to find which charities do the most good, per dollar received.

In keeping with these ideas, I founded The Life You Can Save, a charity that encourages giving and curates a list of the most effective charities aiding people in extreme poverty. Another effective altruism website, 80,000 Hours, provides guidance on choosing a career that will enable one to do good. Included among a range of options is "earning to give" - seeking to earn well, not in order to live lavishly, but to be able to donate more to effective charities.

Many people seek to earn to give, but, until last month, Bankman-Fried seemed to be by far the most successful. In October 2021 a Forbes cover story reported that he had amassed $22.5 billion before turning 30, adding, "He just wants his wealth to survive long enough to give it all away." Tragically for FTX's clients, investors, employees, and those who would have benefited from the charities to which he might have donated, it didn't. The fund Bankman-Fried created to donate to effective altruist causes had, by June, distributed grants totaling $132 million, less than 1% of the wealth he was believed to have at the time. (The Life You Can Save has not received any money from Bankman-Fried.)

The Vox journalist Sigal Samuel has speculated about Bankman-Fried's thinking: "Did he reason that the ends justify the means - and that the ends of his plan to give away his fortune would be so benevolent that the risk of wiping out customers' savings was okay?" The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sets out (though without endorsing) a possible "purely negative reading" of these events. Effective altruism "is corrupted at root by its connection to a utilitarianism that, whatever protestations it may make, will always end up justifying wicked means for the sake of noble-seeming ends." Douthat connects this corrupting form of utilitarianism to my own work by linking to a hostile review, now more than 20 years old, of two of my books.

The problem with pointing to "the end justifies the means" as the flaw that brought down Bankman-Fried is that, even for non-utilitarians, it is implausible to deny that sometimes the end does justify the means. The non-utilitarian Immanuel Kant disagreed, writing that if a would-be murderer comes to your door pursuing someone who has taken refuge in your house, you must not lie to him. Today, we honor those who had the courage to hide Jews from the Nazis and lie when the Gestapo came to their door. If you must lie to save an innocent life, the end justifies the means.

Nor is it only when an innocent life is at stake that the end may justify the means. In a forthcoming study of the Southern Black leader and educator Booker T. Washington, Desmond Jagmohan of the University of California, Berkeley reveals that Washington, the founder and president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, misrepresented what the Institute taught in order to gain financial support from wealthy white donors. Because the donors did not believe that Blacks could benefit from the kind of education provided by colleges for white students, Washington led them to believe that the Tuskegee curriculum was limited to training its students for trades, farming, and domestic service.

Washington's secret was nearly blown when a grateful Black student wrote to thank one of the donors for the scholarship that enabled her to study philosophy, politics, and rhetoric. The letter's angry recipient rightly felt that he had been misled, but Washington pretended that the young woman had greatly exaggerated what she had been taught. In the difficult position in which he found himself, Washington's deception was justified by the goal of providing Southern Blacks with the education that would otherwise have been denied to them.

In contrast, the deception in which Bankman-Fried is alleged to have engaged was unnecessary and unjustified. The many examples of successful financiers who have been ruined by unethical and illegal business practices should have been sufficient warning. Kant was wrong to claim that telling the truth is an absolute requirement, but wise effective altruists and utilitarians know that honesty is the best policy, and dishonesty is inherently risky. In Bankman-Fried's case, the risk was not only to his wealth, his reputation, and possibly his freedom. It was also to the causes that would have benefited from his support, and to the effective altruism movement itself.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekFor whom or what are you thankful this year? Or, recount the best conversation you’ve ever had or the most interesting perspective you’ve ever learned about at a holiday dinner.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email. I read them all!Conversations of NoteGreetings, everyone––I’ve been focused this past week on a legal challenge to the so-called Stop Woke Act in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis is on what I regard as the wrong side of a free-speech fight. If that’s of interest, I hope you’ll give my article a read. As for the upcoming holiday, I’m thankful for a lot this year, but absent from my list is turkey. Perhaps it isn’t the tryptophan, but rather its boring flavor, that makes us fall asleep on the couch?Build More Housing, America!The Atlantic staff writer Annie Lowrey condemns the status quo in housing policy as a needlessly immiserating catastrophe:
High rents and sale prices in major cities are a policy choice, one that puts gates around many of our most wonderful places and taxes the folks lucky enough to live there. And it is unfair to all of us. A United States with more abundant housing in its big cities would have a more productive, vibrant, and dynamic economy too. The best evidence for how much housing we need to build lies in the prices that people pay today. Nationwide, the share of renters who are considered “burdened”—spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities—has climbed to 47 percent; one in four renters—about 11 million—spend more than half their income on shelter. Renters today spend about 10 more percentage points of their earnings more on housing than they did in the 1970s.
Meanwhile, rising prices have also forced millions of younger Americans to delay homeownership, making it impossible for many to buy their way onto the property ladder, particularly in California and New York. People make painful choices: To keep their housing costs in line with their income, millions of families do not live where they want to or in the kinds of homes they want to or with the people they want to. When the mortgage on a townhouse is too costly, families keep renting their run-down apartment. When a third bedroom costs too much, parents give up on having a third kid. This is a public-policy catastrophe too.
The problem is largely, if not exclusively, the result of the country not permitting enough homes where people want them. Although some communities in the interior of the country, especially in the South, have allowed housing construction to keep up with rapid population growth, the superstar metro areas of the Northeast and West Coast have not.
Pardoning Mary JaneGovernor Kate Brown of Oregon has pardoned an estimated 45,000 people who were convicted of possessing small amounts of marijuana in the state. Her argument on behalf of that action:
No one deserves to be forever saddled with the impacts of a conviction for simple possession of marijuana — a crime that is no longer on the books in Oregon. Oregonians should never face housing insecurity, employment barriers, and educational obstacles as a result of doing something that is now completely legal, and has been for years. My pardon will remove these hardships. And while Oregonians use marijuana at similar rates, Black and Latina/o/x people have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionate rates. We are a state, and a nation, of second chances. Today, I am taking steps to right the wrongs of a flawed, inequitable, and outdated criminal justice system in Oregon when it comes to personal marijuana possession. For the estimated 45,000 individuals who are receiving a pardon for prior state convictions of marijuana possession, this action will help relieve the collateral consequences.
[Read: 15 readers on how they’re cutting costs]The Mainstreaming of Muslim CandidatesKareem Abdul-Jabbar, still my pick for the greatest basketball player of all time, celebrates a little-noticed aspect of the 2022 midterms:
The mid-term elections resulted in 82 Muslim candidates [sweeping] up local, state, federal and judicial seats in 25 states. [As CBS News reports,] “Many of those wins were in red states, including Texas, Virginia and Georgia, and included 20 incumbents and 17 new candidates. Those seats range from local boards of education and city councils to the U.S. House of Representatives, where congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-MN, and Rashida Tlaib, D-MI, maintained their positions.”
My Take: Like most groups, Muslim-Americans are not a cultural or political monolith. They do not all agree with each other politically—they don’t even agree with each other religiously. So, the reason the election of more Muslim-Americans is good news is not because they will vote in lock-step, but because it is a hopeful symbol that more Americans are rejecting the harsh, widespread anti-Muslim rhetoric that the Trump cronies have been spreading for years. I would never support a candidate just because they are Muslim any more than I would support a candidate just because they are Black. In fact, a few of the Muslims who were elected do not align with my principles so I wouldn’t have voted for them. But what makes me excited for our future is that those who do align themselves with those Muslims I disagree with, did so without consideration of their religion, just the principles. I respect that. I encourage that. Because that’s the America I love.
Should Race Be Conserved or Abandoned?Last month, the Atlantic contributor Reihan Salam, who is well-known to many of you longtime readers, moderated a debate on “the ethics of Black identity.” Its central question: Is the persistence of a distinct Black identity necessary to solve the problems Black communities face today? The economist Glenn Loury and the civil-rights activist Bob Woodson think it is. The public intellectuals Shelby Steele and Kmele Foster are skeptical.Here is Professor Loury summing up their differences:
Collective action served Black Americans well in the past. Without racial solidarity founded in institutions like Black churches and Black community organizations, it’s doubtful that the civil-rights movement could have achieved all that it did. Black people, even those who were relatively well-off, were willing to sacrifice money, time, and their very bodies to secure basic rights not only for themselves but for their people.
But has racial solidarity served its purpose? I’ve often argued on behalf of “transracial humanism,” the setting aside of identity categories like race in favor of species-level identification. We’re all human beings, and we should all have the opportunity to lay claim to the fruits of human achievement, whatever their origin. Tolstoy is mine as much as Charles Mingus is mine. Yet I cannot simply define away my Blackness. It’s at the core of my self-understanding. To deny it would be to deny myself. And as Bob points out, there are strategic political advantages to calls for racial solidarity, especially when they’ve been nearly monopolized by the left. (Let me say once more with feeling: My Blackness is not in conflict with my conservatism.) Shelby and Kmele are much more skeptical of the uses of Black identity in the present. I believe, with them, that transracial humanism is the way of the future. The question is whether that future has yet arrived.
You can watch a 14-minute excerpt of their conversation here.[Read: The sad pragmatism of inflation-era cuisine]A Proliferation ProblemAt The Atlantic, Mark Bowden describes terrifying advances in drone warfare and the likely future in which the United States no longer enjoys the edge against hostile air forces that it has long counted on:
For years, military strategists have anticipated the arrival of the so-called drone swarm, a large cluster of small flying machines that will herald a new era of intelligent warfare. Thousands of robotic aircraft no bigger than a starling would be all but invisible when spread out, yet capable of instantly coalescing into a swirling dark cloud, like a murmuration. It would move the way such phenomena move in nature, guided by a kind of group intellect.
“A swarm is an intelligent organism and an intelligent mechanism,” Samuel Bendett, an expert in Russian weapons at the Center for Naval Analyses, told me. “In a swarm—just like in an insect swarm, in a bird swarm, in a school of fish—each drone thinks for itself, communicates with the others, and shares information about its position in a swarm, the environment that the swarm is in, potential threats coming at the swarm, and what to do about it, especially when it comes to changes in direction or changes in swarm composition.”
The weapons deployed in Ukraine by both sides are still far from the full nightmare potential. A swarm would use artificial intelligence to allow individual drones to behave autonomously while also harnessing the wisdom of the collective. David Hambling, in his 2015 book, Swarm Troopers, reported that software engineers had already been able to simulate those great swarms in nature by programming drones with three simple instructions: separate, or keep a certain minimum distance from others; align, or stay on the same course as your neighbors; and cohere, or attempt to move toward the average position of your neighbor. So instructed, drone swarms would move in clouds that function as a single entity, perhaps widely dispersed at first, hiding them from radar, only to converge on a target at the last minute. The swarm would be capable of reacting to threats without human intervention—changing course, speed, or altitude, maneuvering around heavily protected air spaces—and could absorb huge losses without stopping. Machines do not get discouraged and turn back.
“This is the holy grail,” Bendett said. “This is what everybody’s working towards. By everybody, I mean advanced countries and advanced militaries hoping to utilize swarm technologies. So the list is short, but it’s slowly growing. Of course, it’s the United States, it’s Israel, it’s China, it’s Russia, it’s Turkey, it’s Iran, and perhaps a handful of other states like India and South Korea.”
Such research programs are classified, but many military analysts see them arriving in the near future. A swarm of 103 micro-drones designed by MIT with a wingspan less than a foot long was successfully launched by the U.S. in 2016, a project sponsored by the Department of Defense. The individual drones were so small and flew so fast that a CBS camera crew trying to film the experiment had a hard time capturing an image of the swarm even with high-speed cameras.
When you consider that a drone swarm consisting of many thousands of off-the-shelf drones would cost less than, say, one F-35 fighter or a ballistic missile, you have a weapon that would give rogue states or terrorist groups the means to launch devastating attacks or assassinations anywhere in the world. Since the Korean War, American forces have controlled the skies wherever they have gone into battle. No other nation had the means to compete with it; the cost, the technology, the experience, and the level of training required are beyond the reach of even the most affluent nation-states. Drone swarms could end that domination. An aircraft carrier? A commercial airliner? The White House? The president? Sitting ducks.
Provocation of the WeekIf you want to bring a gift to the host of a holiday dinner party, what should you choose?In Wirecutter, Rose Maura Lorre argues that flowers and wine––which were her go-to gifts as a dinner-party guest––are actually flawed because they impose on the host the need to find a vase or wine bucket. Instead, she urges readers, bring three things: (1) your own apron; (2) your own take-home containers for leftovers; (3) a handy stain remover. (“Tide pens are frequently sold in packs of three, so you can offer them up en masse as a need-a-pen, take-a-pen present for all, or you can leave them behind at the end of the night.”)Why your own apron?
Upon arrival, hang up your coat, don an apron you brought from home—or better yet, wear the apron under your coat so you can reveal it Clark Kent–style—stride into the kitchen and declare, “I’m here to help.” You have just become a holiday hero. To a host who may be too frazzled to think about delegating, this is much better than the passive, “Let me know if I can help.” You are now the host’s go-to assistant, and they don’t even have to dig through an unkempt drawer of cast-off kitchen linens to find you an apron!
Josh Barro finds that advice preposterous. In a retort at Very Serious, he writes:
As a friend of mine put it, “If you try to upstage me with a secret apron reveal at my own party, it better be Kevlar.” … If you want to be a good guest, you should not enter a dinner party with the presumption that your host is a frazzled idiot who badly needs help but doesn’t know how to ask for it, didn’t realize there would be leftovers, and doesn’t have a plan for when the other, slovenly guests inevitably soak themselves in gravy.
Among his recommendations:
If you don’t want to give alcohol, give fancy non-perishable food. I’ve talked before about Fiore olive oils and vinegars — I’m partial to their Cobrancosa olive oil from Portugal and traditional-style balsamic vinegar — but there are lots of options here. Jams, nuts, dried or preserved fruit, olives, condiments — pick an assortment of foods you like and use around your house that your host probably doesn’t already buy, and you have a great and memorable gift that the host can use on his or her own schedule. If your gift budget is fairly large — perhaps you’re not just a dinner guest but are staying the weekend — you can even have Fortnum & Mason assemble a bunch of non-perishable products in a custom wicker hamper and ship it from London to you or your gift recipient.
In my estimation, a bottle of wine is a perfectly fine gift, and no gift at all is expected if you’re a dinner guest of mine, but if you want to be “a holiday hero” at my house, the only choice meriting that honorific is a leather wineskin of the sort Ernest Hemingway describes in The Sun Also Rises:
The Basque lying against my legs was tanned the color of saddle leather. He wore a black smock like all the rest. There were wrinkles in his tanned neck. He turned around and offered his wine-bag to Bill. Bill handed him one of our bottles. The Basque wagged a forefinger at him and handed the bottle back, slapping in the cork with the palm of his hand. He shoved the wine-bag up. “Arriba! Arriba!” he said. “Lift it up.” Bill raised the wine-skin and let the stream of wine spurt out and into his mouth, his head tipped back. When he stopped drinking and tipped the leather bottle down a few drops ran down his chin.”No! No!” several Basques said. “Not like that.” One snatched the bottle away from the owner, who was himself about to give a demonstration.He was a young fellow and he held the wine bottle at full arms’ length and raised it high up, squeezing the leather bag with his hand so the stream of wine hissed into his mouth. He held the bag out there, the wine making a flat, hard trajectory into his mouth, and he kept on swallowing smoothly and regularly.
The Spanish-goods store La Tienda sells a premium version but the $15 alternative works just as well. Be sure it is filled with a crowd-pleasing red and that you demonstrate how to use the wineskin before passing it around. If wine dribbles down anyone’s chin and onto their shirts, no big deal––I hear that some people are bringing three-packs of Tide pens to dinner parties these days.That’s all for this week––happy Thanksgiving!

Back in 2015, when I started covering climate change, climate war meant one thing. At the time, if someone said that climate change posed a threat to the world order, you would assume they were talking about the direct impacts of warming, or its second-order consequences. Analysts and scholars worried over scenarios in which unprecedented droughts or city-destroying floods would prompt mass migrations, destabilizing the rich world or giving rise to far-right nationalism. Or they worried that a global famine could send food prices surging, triggering old-fashioned resource wars. Or they fretted over social science showing that weather fluctuations could lead to revolutions and civil wars.The world of 2015 is not the world of 2022. Countries have made remarkable progress averting worst-case climate scenarios since then: Canada taxes carbon pollution, Europe has its Green Deal, and the United States somehow passed the Inflation Reduction Act. What’s more, elected leaders have run on these policies and won. Thanks to a global turn away from coal power, the world will likely not warm 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, as had once seemed possible.  The success of the past seven years was driven home for me when I saw a German public service announcement last month that added decarbonization to the old Enlightenment trinity: “Demokratie, Vielfalt & Klimaschutz. Du Bist Europa,” it read: “Democracy, diversity, and climate protection. You are Europe.” What a victory. And what a complicated one. Since 2015, the risks of climate war have not entirely decreased. Instead the risks have shifted. As more countries have integrated the energy transition into their economies, a chance now exists that efforts to address climate change could encourage conflict in their own right.This shift has not happened intentionally, to be clear. It’s the result of a process that climate advocates, to their credit, were among the first to note: that batteries, renewables, and zero-carbon energy are the next rung on the technological ladder. Climate hawks have rightly celebrated the news of Ukrainians using ebikes and electric drones for recon or to raid Russian tanks. But that only drives home that these innovations are “dual use”—they can be deployed in civilian and in military contexts, and thus are non-optional for countries pursuing their security.Conflict over dual-use technologies is already at the center of U.S.-Chinese trade spats. Last month, the Biden administration effectively banned the sale of any modern semiconductor-manufacturing equipment to China. It also forbade “U.S. persons”—a group that comprises American citizens and green-card holders—from working in the Chinese semiconductor industry. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the policy amounts to a type of economic war, because “it is now official U.S. policy to prevent China from achieving its development goals.”This is a dangerous logic when you consider that semiconductors are crucial for decarbonization: The shift to electricity all but necessitates greater use of semiconductors. Computer chips govern nearly every part of how electric cars, scooters, water heaters, induction stoves, and more use energy or preserve it. One of the major ways that electric-vehicle makers secure a competitive advantage is by eking out tiny improvements from the computer chips and software that govern a car’s battery pack. Now, the type of semiconductors affected by Biden’s policies is far more advanced than the cheaper kind needed for decarbonization. But you can see how trying to prevent the other country’s development can cascade from an economic disagreement into a military one.Part of what makes this dynamic tricky to manage is that the U.S. and China are productively using climate policy as a venue for their own diplomatic competition. Perhaps the most important international climate announcement of the past few years was President Xi Jinping’s pledge that China would aim to reach net zero by 2060. He announced the goal less than 2 months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and it was widely understood as a “pointed message” for—if not a rebuke of—the United States and the Trump administration. “It demonstrates Xi’s consistent interest in leveraging the climate agenda for geopolitical purposes,” Li Shuo, a Greenpeace analyst, told The New York Times then.Competition has improved American policy, too. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act—a law that passed in part because American legislators did not want to cede the clean-tech industry to China—the United States is about to subsidize domestic solar-panel manufacturing at a massive scale. It’s possible that a decade from now we will have more cheap solar panels than we know what to do with. And while that may cause substantial economic deadweight loss, it’s probably good, on net, for the climate. If geopolitical competition leads America to subsidize a solar industry, then competition is probably helping climate action, not hindering it. Flooding the world with cheap solar power will not only speed up decarbonization, but also push companies to find new and creative ways to use solar panels.The most likely trigger—possibly the only trigger—of a full-blown war between China and the United States remains Taiwan, but we should be attentive to how conflict over trade, even when it emerges from politicians’ virtuous desire to have a domestic clean-tech industry, can degrade relations between countries and push them toward zero-sum thinking. And the greatest risk from mitigation-fueled violence is not, we should be clear, to citizens of America or China or Europe. Over the past month, the Democratic Republic of Congo has seen its heaviest rebel fighting in a decade as groups allegedly backed by Rwanda try to lay claim to the country’s minerals, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Congo produces two-thirds of the world’s cobalt and has the largest reserves of tantalum, a metallic element used in capacitors.At the same time, the old idea of a climate war has not vanished either. The past year has shown how much climate impacts, such as drought, can drive up the price of key commodities, fueling inflation in the rich world and food shortages elsewhere. Conventional energy sources, such as fossil fuels, are far more likely than renewables or climate technology to trigger such a conflict, Dan Wang, a technology analyst at the China-based economic-research firm Gavekal Dragonomics, told me. China remains dependent on oil and natural gas from abroad; the U.S. has become a large and growing exporter of natural gas to the country. Were the U.S. to cut off those exports—as it did with oil to Japan in the run-up to World War II—then the risks of a bigger conflict could be far graver.For years, climate advocates argued that their issue deserved to be at the center of economic and social policy making. Climate is everything, they said. Well, to a degree, they won: Decarbonization is now at the center of how the U.S., China, and Europe conceive of the future of their economies. Climate advocates have won a seat at the table where the life-and-death matters of state and society are decided. What progress the world has made; what a long way we still have to go.

In the Northern Hemisphere, this year’s winter hasn’t yet begun. But Melissa J. Sacco, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at UVA Health, is already dreading the arrival of the one that could follow.For months, the ICU where Sacco works has been overflowing with children amid an early-arriving surge of respiratory infections. Across the country, viruses such as RSV and flu, once brought to near-record lows by pandemic mitigations, have now returned in force, all while COVID-19 continues to churn and the health-care workforce remains threadbare. Most nights since September, Sacco told me, her ICU has been so packed that she’s had to turn kids away “or come up with creative ways to manage patients in emergency rooms or emergency departments,” where her colleagues are already overwhelmed and children more easily slip through the cracks. The team has no choice: There’s nowhere else for critically ill kids to go.Similar stories have been pouring in from around the nation for weeks. I recently spoke with a physician in Connecticut who called this “by far the worst spike in illness I’ve seen in 20 years”; another in Maryland told me, “There have been days when there is not an ICU bed to be found anywhere in the mid-Atlantic.” About three-quarters of the country’s pediatric hospital beds are full; to accommodate overflow, some hospitals have set up tents outside their emergency department or contemplated calling in the National Guard. Last week, the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics asked the Biden administration to declare a national emergency. And experts say there’s no end to the crisis in sight. When Sacco imagines a similar wave slamming her team again next fall, “I get that burning tear feeling in the back of my eyes,” she told me. “This is not sustainable.”[Read: The worst pediatric-care crisis in decades]The experts I spoke with are mostly optimistic that these cataclysmic infection rates won’t become an autumn norm. But they also don’t yet fully understand the factors that have been driving this year’s surge, making it tough to know with certainty whether we’re due for an encore.One way or another, COVID has certainly thrown the typical end-of-year schedule out of whack. Respiratory viruses typically pick up speed in late fall, peak in mid-to-late winter, and then bow out by the spring; they often run in relay, with one microbe surging a bit before another. This year, though, nearly every pathogen arrived early, cresting in overlapping waves. “Everything is happening at once,” says Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician and vaccinologist at Vanderbilt University. November isn’t yet through, and RSV has already sent infant hospitalizations soaring past pre-pandemic norms. Flu-hospitalization rates are also at their worst in more than a decade; about 30 states, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico, are reporting high or very high levels of the virus weeks before it usually begins its countrywide climb. And the country’s late-summer surge in rhinovirus and enterovirus has yet to fully abate. “We just haven’t had a break,” says Asuncion Mejias, a pediatrician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital.Previous pandemics have had similar knock-on effects. The H1N1-flu pandemic of 2009, for example, seems to have pushed back the start of the two RSV seasons that followed; seasonal flu also took a couple of years to settle back into its usual rhythms, Mejias told me. But that wonky timetable wasn’t permanent. If the viral calendar is even a little more regular next year, Mejias said, “that will make our lives easier.”This year, flu and RSV have also exploited Americans’ higher-than-average vulnerability. Initial encounters with RSV in particular can be rough, especially in infants, whose airways are still tiny; the sickness tempers with age as the body develops and immunity builds, leaving most children well protected by toddlerhood. But this fall, the pool of undefended kids is larger than usual. Children born just before the pandemic, or during the phases of the crisis when mitigations aplenty were still in place, may be meeting influenza or RSV for the first time. And many of them were born to mothers who had themselves experienced fewer infections and thus passed fewer antibodies to their baby while pregnant or breastfeeding. Some of the consequences may already have unfurled elsewhere in the world: Australia’s most recent flu season hit kids hard and early, and Nicaragua’s wave at the start of 2022 infected children at rates “higher than what we saw during the 2009 pandemic,” says Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.[Read: What a ‘tripledemic’ means for your body]In the U.S., many hospitals are now admitting far more toddlers and older children for respiratory illnesses than they normally do, says Mari Nakamura, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. The problem is worsened by the fact that many adults and school-age kids avoided their usual brushes with flu and RSV while those viruses were in exile, making it easier for the pathogens to spread once crowds flocked back together. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Gordon told me, “if we see 50 to 60 percent of kids get infected with flu this year”—double the estimated typical rate of 20 to 30 percent. Caregivers too are falling sick; when I called Edwards, I could hear her husband and grandson coughing in the background.By next year, more people’s bodies should be clued back in to the season’s circulating strains, says Helen Chu, a physician and an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. Experts are also hopeful that the toolkit for fighting RSV will soon be much improved. Right now, there are no vaccines for the virus, and only one preventive drug is available in the U.S.: a tough-to-administer monoclonal antibody that’s available only to high-risk kids. But at least one RSV vaccine and another, less cumbersome antibody therapy (already being used in Europe) are expected to have the FDA’s green light by next fall.Even with the addition of better tech, though, falls and winters may be grueling for many years to come. SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay, and it will likely compound the respiratory burden by infecting people on its own or raising the risk of co-infections that can worsen and prolong disease. Even nonoverlapping illnesses might cause issues if they manifest in rapid sequence: Very serious bouts of COVID, for instance, can batter the respiratory tract, making it easier for other microbes to colonize.A few experts have begun to wonder if even milder tussles with SARS-CoV-2 might leave people more susceptible to other infections in the short or long term. Given the coronavirus’s widespread effects on the body, “we can’t be cavalier” about that possibility, says Flor Muñoz Rivas, a pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine. Mejias and Octavio Ramilo, also at Nationwide, recently found that among a small group of infants, those with recent SARS-CoV-2 infections seemed to have a rougher go with a subsequent bout of RSV. The trend needs more study, though; it’s not clear which kids might be at higher risk, and Mejias doubts that the effect would last more than a few months.Gordon points out that some people may actually benefit from the opposite scenario: A recent brush with SARS-CoV-2 could bolster the body’s immune defenses against a second respiratory invader for a few days or weeks. This phenomenon, called viral interference, wouldn’t halt an outbreak by itself, but it’s thought to be part of the reason waves of respiratory disease don’t usually spike simultaneously: The presence of one microbe can sometimes crowd others out. Some experts think last year’s record-breaking Omicron spike helped punt a would-be winter flu epidemic to the spring.Even if all of these variables were better understood, the vagaries of viral evolution could introduce a plot twist. A new variant of SARS-CoV-2 may yet emerge; a novel strain of flu could cause a pandemic of its own. RSV, for its part, is not thought to be as quick to shape-shift, but the virus’s genetics are not well studied. Mejias and Ramilo’s data suggest that the arrival of a gnarly RSV strain in 2019 may have pushed local hospitalizations past their usual highs.[Read: Will we get Omicron’d again?]Behavioral and infrastructural factors could cloud the forecast as well. Health-care workers vacated their posts in droves during the pandemic, and many hospitals’ pediatric-bed capacity has shrunk, leaving supply grossly inadequate to address current demand. COVID-vaccination rates in little kids also remain abysmal, and many pediatricians are worried that anti-vaccine sentiment could stymie the delivery of other routine immunizations, including those against flu. Even temporary delays in vaccination can have an effect: Muñoz Rivas points out that the flu’s early arrival this year, ahead of when many people signed up for their shot, may now be aiding the virus’s spread. The new treatments and vaccines for RSV “could really, really help,” Nakamura told me, but “only if we use them.”Next fall comes with few guarantees: The seasonal schedule may not rectify itself; viruses may not give us an evolutionary pass. Our immune system will likely be better-prepared to fend off flu, RSV, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and more—but that may not be enough on its own. What we can control, though, is how we choose to arm ourselves. The past few years proved that the world does know how to drive down rates of respiratory disease. “We had so little contagion during the time we were trying to keep COVID at bay,” Edwards told me. “Is there something to be learned?”

The press release declares: “Acupuncture can relieve lower back/pelvic pain often experienced during pregnancy.” This is based on a meta-analysis of 10 studies. However, taking even a slightly close look at the data reveals a very different picture. This may reflect the difference between EBM (evidence-based medicine) and SBM (science-based medicine), the latter of which takes a more complete picture of how to analyze the patterns of evidence in the literature. But honestly, any competent EBM analysis should come to the same conclusion.

The study itself is a great example of the dictum “garbage in, garbage out” that plagues meta-analysis. Taking a bunch of flawed studies and adding them together does not create good data. These studies also reflect how deeply flawed the acupuncture literature is, and the frustratingly persistent pattern of reporting essentially negative studies or worthless studies as if they are positive. This meta-analysis, in my opinion, is not only completely consistent with acupuncture being nothing but placebo, it strongly points toward that conclusion.

The ultimate author conclusion was:

Acupuncture significantly improved pain, functional status and quality of life in women with LBPP during the pregnancy. Additionally, acupuncture had no observable severe adverse influences on the newborns. More large-scale and well-designed RCTs are still needed to further confirm these results.

This type of conclusion is now a cliché here at SBM – “more study is needed” is a euphemism for “the data is negative, but we really want this to work”. The study reveals both generic problems with meta-analysis, and the persistent problems with acupuncture studies, in an overall pattern that screams “this is a placebo intervention”. Let’s dive into the details.

Here is a table of the 10 included studies, showing the main quality characteristic of each study. You will notice that no study is green across the board – which is not only a reasonable standard, it is absolutely necessary for an intervention with a subjective outcome. Specifically, eight of the ten studies did not have a blinded outcome assessment. That alone means that the pooled data is essentially worthless. An unblinded assessment of a subjective endpoint, like pain, is essentially measuring placebo effects, with no way of teasing out any non-placebo effects. The two studies that had blinded outcome measures did not have blinded participants. Therefore, no single study was adequately double blinded. Would anyone accept this kind of data for a non-“alternative” intervention?

But it gets worse. Only two of the studies compared acupuncture to placebo acupuncture. One study compared acupuncture at two different times. The other seven studies compared acupuncture to no intervention or standard of care. So of course people in the no-intervention group know they are in the placebo group. These types of comparisons are essentially worthless for pain studies.

Two of the studies had a >20% drop out rate in the non-intervention group. A large drop out rate is always problematic, because of the possibility that it is not random. But it’s worse when the drop out is high specifically in the non-intervention group. This also tends to happen when you don’t properly blind subjects – why stay in a study when you know you are in the placebo group?

One way to support a subjective outcome in a clinical trial is to combine it with secondary outcomes that are more objective and quantifiable, even if they are indirect. In pain studies it is common practice to assess use of rescue pain medications. Whether or not a subject takes pain medication may say much more about how much pain they are in than what they subjectively report. In this meta-analysis, there was no difference in the use of analgesic medication between treatment and non-treatment groups. That is a pretty fatal blow to the overall results.

Essentially unblinded subjects who knew they were in the intervention group being assessed by study participants that also knew they were in the study group subjectively said they felt better, while still taking as much pain medication. There is zero reason to conclude from this data that the intervention is anything but placebo.

The individual studies are all of dubious quality, but is there also any evidence of publication bias? Funnel plots are often used to evaluate publication bias, because they provide a rapid visual representation of the data. A funnel plot has study quality on the vertical axis and effect size on the horizontal axis. What we like to see is symmetry, which means there is a fair statistical spread of results around the true effect size, with higher quality studies being closer to the mean (hence the inverted funnel shape).

What we see here is decidedly asymmetrical. This is a classic outcome indicating publication bias, with more studies on the right side of the funnel. But there is something else here which is so classic it merits pointing out specifically. You will notice the two outlier studies in the upper left of the funnel. This shows that the two highest quality studies hover around zero effect. In fact there is a general trend that can easily be seen in this plot, with the higher quality studies having smaller effect sizes, and the best studies being negative. This pattern, arguably more than anything else in the data, strongly points toward the null hypothesis – acupuncture is just placebo. We consistently see this pattern in studies of dubious phenomena.

There is a final feature of this meta-analysis that is specific to acupuncture – heterogeneity in treatment methods. Heterogeneity itself (differences from study to study) are a generic problem of meta-analysis, but especially plague acupuncture research. To understand this problem we have to back up a bit and ask – what is acupuncture? Basically, it is sticking fine needles into acupuncture points to elicit a physiological response that is supposed to be specific to the points used (though there is also an incredible amount of diversity packed into this basic idea). If you can poke the skin randomly with toothpicks (without penetration and at random points) is that really acupuncture?

In fact, the totality of the acupuncture literature itself is consistent with the conclusion that acupuncture points do not exist. Further, in the last century no basic science has emerged to support or explain the existence of acupuncture points. If acupuncture points don’t exist, then acupuncture is not real. One important line of evidence for this conclusion is that acupuncturists can’t agree on where acupuncture points are precisely, and what they are used for. If acupuncture points were real, then the evidence should start to converge on reality. If acupuncture is astrology (which it is), then acupuncture points will remain in the realm of personal opinion.

In this meta-analysis, seven studies used body acupuncture while three used auricular acupuncture (on the ear). Are these even really studying the same intervention? As you can see in the comparison table, none of the ten studies used the same acupuncture points as any of the other studies. There are a few points of overlap, but the points chosen are far more different than they are similar. In most acupuncture studies the points are chosen by consensus of the study designers. There is no standardization – because acupuncture points are not real.

Conclusion: For acupuncture, GIGO rules

This meta-analysis should properly be interpreted as negative – as consistent with the null hypothesis that there is no specific effect of acupuncture in the studied intervention beyond placebo. I outlined above why this is overwhelmingly true. But again, the most damning evidence is the inverse relationship between study quality and effect size, with the best studies being negative.

This evidence certainly does not justify rejecting the null hypothesis, and that’s all that really matters. This is especially true of an intervention with an extremely low prior plausibility, and lack of a known or plausible mechanism. No matter how you look at acupuncture, from a historical, basic science, or clinical evidence perspective, it is nothing but an elaborate placebo. This meta-analysis is perfectly consistent with that conclusion. And yet, studies like this are consistently misrepresented to falsely support acupuncture.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the trading platform FTX, was a member of two cults. Or, more precisely, he was a figurehead of two movements that outsiders considered cultish. One of these movements I have criticized relentlessly. The other I belong to.The first is the cult of crypto. I’ve made little secret of the fact that, although I think crypto is anthropologically fascinating, its substance, so far, is almost completely lacking. The blockchain and its related innovations are sometimes described as extraordinary technology in search of an ordinary use case. They are also a glossary in search of a spine—pages worth of lingo (gm, ngmi, maxis, DeFi) that are, as of now, unglued from any stable vision of the future besides the bet that certain asset values will go up. To reinvent the casino and tell yourself that, next up, you’ll reinvent the world, requires either the mind of a time-traveling genius or the faith of a simple zealot.The second is the cult of effective altruism, a philosophy that seeks to do the most good for the most people, now and in the future. Despite its controversies, I find EA (as it’s often known) to be a compelling corrective for many modern activists and philanthropists. If you want to give away money, EA urges you to figure out how to make the most difference to the most lives. If you want to find a meaningful job, it offers clever (perhaps, sometimes, too clever) ideas for how to plow a career path that will create more value for the world than your likely replacement.Before the sky fell in on him, Bankman-Fried fluently spoke the language of both movements. He was one of the richest crypto founders in the world and the rare billionaire who publicly pledged to liquidate his personal wealth to benefit causes in line with effective altruism. This strange juxtaposition was too delicious for mainstream news organizations to resist. In retrospect, the whole thing looks like a nesting doll of fraud: a sketchy crypto product, built on a berserk approach to protecting customer assets, wrapped inside a fraudulent effort to “philanthropy wash” his ill-gotten wealth.One question circulating in the aftermath of FTX’s downfall is: To what extent should this scandal change our minds about crypto and EA? Predictably, critics of both movements say Bankman-Fried’s undoing should be the death knell for both causes.In the days after FTX’s bankruptcy, I was ready to believe that it was curtains for crypto. How many different ways had the rug been pulled out from under the promises of Web3 boosters?
Crypto advocates have hailed the decentralization of finance—that is, the idea that new financial institutions, built on the blockchain, might pull money away from the chokepoints of state treasuries and central banks. But this fraud was perpetrated on its own centralized exchange, which gave SBF unusual authority to move customer funds however he liked.
Another purported benefit of the blockchain was that it would make tracking money and tracing the provenance of assets easier; however, with FTX, authorities still don’t know where all the money went.
Crypto was supposed to give us trust in a trustless world. Instead, FTX created a shadow banking system outside of federal assurances for checking accounts; in other words, it injected an untrustworthy institution into an otherwise trusting relationship between customers and their brokerage accounts.
By contrast, I was defensive on the issue of effective altruism. As the criticisms of EA came pouring in, I was certain that the critics were being monstrously unfair. I thought: If every philosophy required the sinlessness of all participants, there would be no philosophies left. And: Blaming a philanthropic cause for the business ethics of its donors is simply nonsense; by definition, the money has already been earned by the time it is donated. And: Does anybody actually think that fraud in the Bahamas makes pandemic preparedness (a central cause of EA) less important for the world?But I was doing a lot of thinking with my heart, which is not necessarily the sort of thing effective altruists tend to promote. My mom died of pancreatic cancer in 2013, the same year that the EA philosopher Will MacAskill moved into my apartment in New York City, as a subletter. At the very moment that I felt emotionally eviscerated and existentially unmoored, I found his ethics to be an unexpected balm. I decided that I wanted to honor my mom’s death with a large donation to a charity that would save lives, so that, in some cosmic equation, I could feel as if I’d reclaimed a sense of purpose from a senseless tragedy. Effective altruism is often dismissed as an ersatz religion by its critics. But if religion is a tool for turning life’s chaos into stories of meaning, then EA was more than just a philosophical reorientation for me, or a mere coping mechanism. It filled a religion-size hole in my life.The reputational implosion of EA hit close to home in another way: I interviewed Bankman-Fried in October on his approach to donating money. He said nothing to me that was newsbreaking, but he demonstrated a fluency with the ideas of effective altruism that made him seem like a sincere believer. He was profoundly nerdy and seemed very kind.So consider all that a confession. My immediate response to Bankman-Fried’s downfall was that it had everything to do with the nonsense of crypto and nothing to do with the wisdom of EA. With time, I came to see how absurd that initial point of view actually was.The FTX detonation ought to leave a dent in both movements, crypto and EA. For crypto, the lesson is simple: This quasi-cult, which speaks of empowering the disadvantaged, has proved itself eerily adept at centralizing wealth and decentralizing losses in an era of whiplashing interest rates. History is long, and the range of outcomes is still wide. But for now, the ratio of “pension funds lost” to “nongambling use cases found” continues to grow.I also think the scandal ought to compel EA-aligned institutions to be much more critical of their financiers. This movement, which is so clear-eyed about outputs and outcomes, ought to be equally concerned about inputs and incomes. Where is this movement’s money coming from? Whom is it coming from? How might the reputations of EA funders shape the reputation of EA? These are questions that need answers.Many effective altruists are fixated on the threat of advanced artificial intelligence, including the so-called alignment problem: What if technologists build a big, powerful system that doesn’t do what we want, or doesn’t care what we want? A silly-yet-useful example is that we design an advanced AI to make paper clips, and the AI steals $1 trillion in bank assets to pay terrorists to acquire a fleet of weapons, with which they ransom the governments of every major steel-producing country to hand over the entire global supply of steel. All this, just to satisfy the initial parameters of the AI: make paper clips.Today, EA institutions have an alignment problem. Effective altruists helping to distribute SBF’s wealth built a big, powerful system whose central actor didn’t do what they wanted and didn’t seem to ultimately care what they wanted. Good intentions are worthless in the face of bad outcomes: That is the alignment problem, and utilitarianism, and effective altruism all wrapped up in a sentence. But the converse is also true: Being good is a part of doing good.
Want to discuss the future of business, technology, and the abundance agenda? Join Derek Thompson and other experts for The Atlantic’s first Progress Summit in Los Angeles on December 13. Free virtual and in-person passes available here.

Elizabeth Holmes dressed in the same style every day: black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and black low-slung shoes. This “uniform” underlined her deified status as a busy billionaire dedicated to changing the world, setting her apart from mere mortals with time to choose their clothes. “My mom had me in black turtlenecks when I was, like, eight,” she told one women’s magazine. “I probably have 150 of these. It makes it easy, because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it — one less thing in your life. All my focus is on the work. I take it so seriously; I’m sure that translates into how I dress.”
Yet this story of her image, like the blood-test technology that won her fame and fortune, was fake. One former colleague later revealed how a “frumpy” Holmes had adopted the look to mimic the signature style of Steve Jobs, even tracking down the exact Issey Miyake turtleneck favoured by the Apple founder. Her pose as a cool, black-clad genius worked for a while, fooling some of the best-known financiers and public figures in the United States. Then it had to be ditched in favour of dull suits to appear in court for fraud. And soon will switch to dowdy prison scrubs after her conviction and 11-year sentence.
Silicon Valley superstars love to embrace a simple style. Rich enough to buy anything in the world and puffed up with self-importance, they use clothing to send out the message that they are too important to waste their precious intellect and time on deciding what to wear every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when quizzed about his uniform of grey T-shirts and blue jeans. (This is, lest we forget, the man who set up a website to rank attractive women at university that exploded into one of the planet’s most pernicious companies.)

Sam Bankman-Fried also tapped into this approach: he presented himself as a financial prodigy who disdained societal mores while set on saving the world. He went for the scruffy skateboarder look, a man-child with an unkempt bubble of hair who even wore his T-shirt, shorts and sneakers when sitting on stage next to a former US president and a former British prime minister.
It is no surprise that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair fell for such a phoney. Yet they weren’t the only ones suckered by this high priest of cryptocurrency, who preached of earning billions through his unique financial acumen, promised to pour the money into philanthropy, and then crashed to earth with his fortune evaporating. “SBF” championed a modish millennial approach to philanthropy, that claims to harness data, in tandem with supreme brainpower, moral leadership and relentless logic to improve the cost-efficiency of charity and tackle state failures. But his downfall has exposed the hollowness at the heart of this cult that has become as much part of Silicon Valley’s uniformity as their T-shirts and turtlenecks.
The astonishing rise and fall of the disgraced crypto king began over a meal with William MacAskill, a prominent young Oxford University philosopher. This Scottish professor, guru of the effective altruism movement, persuaded the vegan SBF, then a student, to forget about devoting his life to animal welfare and instead focus on making as much money as possible for donation to good causes. So SBF duly set out to become mega-rich, ostensibly on the basis that this would let him do as much good as possible in the world, and he seduced admirers and investors alike with his sense of mission while pouring money into MacAskill’s own projects.
More from this authorInside Britain's psychiatric nightmareBy Ian Birrell
Effective altruism draws its inspiration from Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher. He contends that the moral obligation to save children from hunger in a famine is no different from that of saving a child you saw drowning before you. Unfortunately, so radical and inhumane is his stance that he ends up as an eugenicist: the lives of those with disabilities are of less value, he argues, and so killing babies born with disabilities is ethically permissible. Singer is relentlessly utilitarian.
Yet his arguments lie at the root of this movement so beloved by Silicon Valley billionaires since it justifies their accumulation of great wealth on grounds that it can end up doing great good. Now, though, leading devotee Dustin Moskovitz, another of the Facebook founders, has acknowledged that effective altruism either encouraged or excused SBF’s unethical — and almost certainly criminal — behaviour. Even MacAskill, whose organisations received big donations from his shamed protege’s operations, admits he was wrong to dismiss fears that his philosophy might be “misused” to cause harm. Their church of benevolence became cover for a giant crypto-scam.
This cult of ultra-rationalism implies that it is morally better to get rich than to slave away in a badly-paid job that might be socially useful. Essentially, it tells people to work in the City rather than a care home, demeaning those who believe in public service or actually helping other human beings rather than piling up mountains of cash in tax-efficient havens to give away to their pet causes. Critics such as Timothy Noah have noted how it ignores issues such as economic inequality since its “most distinctive characteristic” was the “deftness with which it tiptoes past targets likely to offend billionaires”.

Some key adherents — including MacAskill — have since moved on to “long-termism”, an ideology aiming to save us from future threats such as artificial intelligence, rather than more prosaic ideas such as funding mosquito nets to save lives of existing human beings from malaria. Their argument is that if all lives have equal value wherever they are, that should extend to whenever they are around. “The things that matter most are the things that have long-term impact on what the world will look like,” said Bankman-Fried last year. “There are trillions of people who have not yet been born.” 

It is, of course, impossible to apply data and accountability to the future. In reality, it seems that SBF used this pretence of doing good to provide cover for a giant pyramid scheme, pretending ends justified means while he hung out with his clique overseeing a crypto con at a $40m mansion in the tax haven of the Bahamas. “You were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers,” said a Vox reporter last week after his empire had fallen. “Ya, hehe… I feel bad for those who get fucked by it,” he responded, admitting “the ethics stuff” was mostly a front and talking of a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us”.
SBF was also the second-biggest donor to Joe Biden and the Democrats last year, handing over $37 million. Yet his veneer as a do-gooder slipped when the President’s party flirted with a wealth tax for the super-rich — who often end up paying proportionately far less to the state than fellow citizens due to armies of highly-paid accountants shifting their assets around the globe. He told the New York Times that “this could cause hugely negative collateral damage, significantly reducing the amount of innovation and taxable base in the first place”.  Elon Musk, who might have been hit for £50 billion, chimed in with a warning that this might hamper his long-termist plan “to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness”.
Suggested readingWilliam MacAskill's ineffective altruismBy Arif Ahmed
The downfall of SBF should send a stark warning to be wary of self-appointed prophets who think their wealth has given them special gifts to solve the problems of humanity. These tycoons are often little better than the robber-barons of old who used charity to atone for their rapaciousness in business — but only after becoming immensely wealthy. Note how Jeff Bezos has joined the ranks of those billionaires such as Zuckerberg and SBF pledging to give away much of their fortunes. It is a welcome trend but it reeks of hypocrisy, given that it would be so much better if the ultra-rich simply played by the same rules as the rest of us, ensuring at least that their firms pay a fair share of tax. Even that secular saint Bill Gates is not immune to such criticism when Microsoft became a case study in tax avoidance for the Senate during his reign.
Ultimately, these prophets of elitist altruism proclaim a specious and self-serving creed: they create giant fortunes by running firms exploiting their digital revolution to dodge tax and evade national borders, then bask in the glow of adulation for their philanthropy having subverted democracies, slashed government revenues and thus weakened state services. Finally, they claim to be the best people to solve some of the most pressing societal issues — although only the ones they decide to tackle on their own terms, rather than more unfashionable ones such as filling roads, funding soldiers or fashioning support for the vulnerable.
Canada’s finance minister Chrystia Freeland provided a glimpse into such attitudes a decade ago before she abandoned journalism for politics, writing a superb book called Plutocrats that exposed how a smug elite dictate public discourse and demand a system tilted even more in their favour. One billionaire Republican donor she interviewed even argued for the abolition of most taxes, praising how the super-rich “self-taxed” themselves by supporting charities of their choice rather than funding government. He demanded the state should pay tech tycoons for their contributions to society. “It’s that top 1% that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99%,” he concluded, outrageously.
Many people yearn for superheroes, visionaries and wunderkinds to offer hope of salvation on a complex, messy planet. But altruism built on avarice is simply a comfort blanket for billionaires. Behind the stylised images, the sci-fi sheen of technology, the bold claims to have remodelled philanthropy, the arrogant insistence some people are so important they should be spared taxes, lies the same hubristic mentality that tarnished the aid industry. It is based on the cynical idea that a small, superior and wealthy elite knows best — and that they should not be thwarted in their drive to earn billions since they are indisputably the good guys. As two new age messiahs stumble and fall, we ought to be more sceptical over billionaire geeks posing as god-like saviours and show a bit more faith in our communal ability to resolve serious problems.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.It’s time for us to look around and realize, with gratitude, not only what we have, but how many terrible outcomes we’ve escaped.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Inside the mind of an anti-Paxxer
Rebelling against Trump is not the same as rebelling against Trumpism.
The streaming death spiral must end.
What Could Have BeenOn Thanksgiving, we tend to express our gratitude for what we already have. We roll out of bed, glad (if we’re so blessed) that we are well and that our home is intact, and then head to the dinner table for a nice meal. Millions of us will do that on Thursday, and this is as it should be. But I want to challenge you to find gratitude for the disasters we’ve escaped over the past few years. This is the thankfulness not for the warm hearth or full belly, but the visceral sense of relief, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, that comes from being shot at and missed.The ancient Stoics were great practitioners of this form of gratitude, in which you supercharge your understanding of life by noting how much worse things could be—and how we are all eventually destined to die. As William B. Irvine noted in his wonderful book A Guide to the Good Life, the Stoics were “cheerful and optimistic about life (even though they made it a point to spend time thinking about all the bad things that could happen to them).”And so let’s hold our loved ones and be thankful for the moment but also take a quick tour of things that didn’t happen—and realize how fortunate we Americans are at this moment.
The economy has not collapsed. When the pandemic caught fire in early 2020, there were good reasons to think we would head for not only a downturn, but also a global event on the scale of the Great Depression. Globalization was over, we were warned, and soon we would (in some of the more far-fetched scenarios) be fighting in the streets for everything from food to microchips. Whether this nightmare was forestalled by good policy, a resilient planetary economy, or just dumb luck, it did not happen—and you should be grateful, at least today, that despite inflation and pricey gasoline, we are nowhere near the economic conditions of even the 1970s, much less the 1930s.
Speaking of the pandemic: Many of us have emerged from isolation with little fear of serious disease. We are living in a world of such immense scientific know-how that a terrifying new virus that kept us masked and locked away from our workplaces and schools—and families—was blunted by vaccines in a year. Yes, COVID is still with us. So are many other treatable diseases. But if you’re at a dinner table on Thursday with your toddler nephew and elderly grandmother, think for a moment about an alternate universe where you are still FaceTiming while freezer trucks fill with bodies that can’t be sent to overloaded morgues.
We are not living under an authoritarian government. Only two years ago, our president was an unhinged sociopath who had just lost an election. He was getting briefed by retired generals and a pillow magnate about crackpot schemes to declare martial law and seize voting machines. After his defeat, he would call on his followers to protest his loss—and the American nation, for the first time in its history, failed the test of the peaceful transfer of power. The madness did not end there; many of the would-be autocrat’s acolytes ran for office in 2022. Most were defeated. Our liberties—especially those of women and other vulnerable communities—remain in danger, but at least for now, our ability to vote, to criticize our government, and to change unjust laws remains intact.
Finally, we are not living through World War III. This might seem obvious, but that is because we have simply become accustomed to the shocking fact that a major war is raging in Europe. Think about that for a moment. A nuclear-armed dictatorship is trying to rewrite history and threatening the peace of the entire planet. And yet, steadfast Ukrainian courage on the ground, combined with wise policy in Washington and other NATO capitals, has put Russia on the defensive. Moscow’s army is in a humiliating retreat, and the conflict, for today, remains limited. The containment of the war is little consolation to the people of Ukraine, but as you serve dinner, look out your window at the world around you and note, if only for a moment, that you are not listening for sirens announcing the end of everything you ever knew.
Look, I don’t mean to be morbid (or, heaven forfend, overly dramatic). But this year, in addition to being thankful for what we have, let’s also think for a moment about the many ways that our nation—and world—could have been derailed by immense dangers that have so far been held at bay. This does not mean we live in the best of all worlds. We still must endure sadness and tragedies, both as individuals and as a society. Prominent Americans still attempt to stoke our nascent hatreds; mass shooters still kill our fellow citizens and obliterate our sense of safety. Ignorance and partisan tribalism continue to provide more victims for the pandemic.Yet America survives, and even thrives. We shouldn’t spend all of our days thinking about disaster, but it makes us better people (and better citizens) if we stop for a moment and realize that we should celebrate not only what we have gained, but also what we have—so far—been spared.Related:
Why dictators underestimate liberal democracies.
America’s strange sweetheart position in the world economy
Russia launched a string of attacks on the eastern front of the Donetsk region in Ukraine.
Argentina lost its World Cup match to Saudi Arabia, 2–1.
The Supreme Court denied Donald Trump’s request to block the release of his tax records to the House Ways and Means Committee.
The Great Game: Jacob Stern reflects on Lionel Messi’s “sumptuous minimalism” as an athlete; Clint Smith finds the unexpected upside of an off-schedule World Cup.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry, who was awarded the National Book Award last week, writes that “my teenage sons gave me my biggest win.”
Cole Wilson / The New York Times / Redux
Who’s Afraid of Masih Alinejad?By Graeme WoodWhen Masih Alinejad, Public Enemy No. 1 of the Islamic Republic of Iran, met me at a hotel in Lower Manhattan, she sat with her back to a ground-floor window. Her frizzy hair was framed in the glass and visible to tourists and office workers walking by—and, it occurred to me but seemingly not to her, to any assassin who might want to take her out. The threat is not theoretical. In July, police arrested Khalid Mehdiyev, of Yonkers, New York, after he was found prowling around Alinejad’s home in Brooklyn with an AK-47 and nearly 100 rounds of ammunition. One year before, the Department of Justice announced that it had thwarted a plot to kidnap Alinejad, take her by sea to Venezuela, and then spirit her to Iran for imprisonment and possible execution. She now lives in hiding, but she told me she doesn’t think about threats to her safety. “I don’t know why. I’m just missing this,” she said, pointing at her head, at the absent neuroanatomical structure that causes normal people to be afraid of being shot dead. “I don’t have this fear.”Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
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Photos: autumn colors and autumn chill
Ralph Fiennes in <i>The Menu</i>
Read. Art Spiegelman’s Maus. What makes the book controversial is exactly what makes it valuable.Watch. The Menu, in theaters, offers more food for thought than your average glossy fall thriller.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I realize my somewhat curmudgeonly take on happiness is not for everyone. This is what comes from reading Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius, in high school. I cannot pretend to be a good Stoic; I am far too emotional a person for that. But as a teen in the shallow, plastic 1970s, I found Stoic thinking appealing, and I still do. If you’d like a far warmer and more engaging view on finding greater satisfaction in your daily existence, however, read my colleague Arthur Brooks, who writes the Atlantic column “How to Build a Life.” I have never met Arthur, but I can tell he’s a nicer person than I am, and I read him attentively on everything from marriage to technology. You should too.The Daily will be back tomorrow with an interview with Bushra Seddique, a young Afghan journalist who fled the Taliban last year and is now an editorial fellow at The Atlantic. After that, we will take a break until Monday, when I will be back here with you. I wish you a lovely—and gratitude-filled—Thanksgiving.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

If free speech and fighting racism come into conflict, which is more important? If you think you know how American conservatives and progressives would answer that question, I’ve got a story to confound you.It starts with a win for the free-speech rights of professors at public universities. On Thursday, a federal district-court judge in Tallahassee temporarily halted enforcement of a Florida law––popularly known as the “Stop WOKE Act”––that prohibits certain viewpoints in classroom instruction. Signed into law earlier this year by Governor Ron DeSantis, the law (whose nickname is short for “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”) prohibits public schools and universities from promoting eight specific concepts. One of them is that “members of one race, color, sex, or national origin are morally superior to members of another race, color, sex, or national origin.” Another is that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion.”[Derek Thompson: This is how America’s culture war death spirals]In a press release announcing the legislation, DeSantis said he was taking “a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory”—a reference to instruction and course materials that, for instance, describe racial prejudice as a structural feature of American law and, in many cases, seek race-conscious remedies for it. “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other,” DeSantis continued. Supporters cast the law, introduced by conservative Florida legislators, as a civil-rights measure. In court papers, Florida’s lawyers argue that the state passed it to uphold the moral principle behind the Constitution’s equal-protection clause: that “discriminating against people solely because of their race, sex, or other immutable characteristics” is “odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.”This fall, the ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) all sought a preliminary injunction against enforcing the law. The groups argued (among other things) that it violates the First Amendment rights of college professors by imposing restrictions on disfavored viewpoints. As FIRE put it in a legal brief in support of a preliminary injunction, “Laws that suppress the expression of ideas violate the First Amendment, no matter how ‘controversial’ or ‘offensive’ lawmakers might find those ideas. Government officials ‘cannot make principled distinctions’ between what is or is not too ‘offensive’ to hear—especially when it comes to the ‘dissemination of ideas’ at state universities.”Florida insists that the First Amendment is beside the point. The state, its lawyers say, “has simply chosen to regulate its own speech—the curriculum used in state universities and the in-class instruction offered by state employees.” The law does not prevent professors from expressing their own views on their own time, the state argues, but the “First Amendment does not compel Florida to pay educators to advocate ideas, in its name, that it finds repugnant.”Two moments associated with the case clarify the stakes. In granting a preliminary injunction Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker noted that the law could be construed as forbidding one of the nation’s most powerful jurists to speak to law students in Florida. He noted that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor previously endorsed affirmative action when she wrote in her memoir that she “had been admitted to the Ivy League through a special door” and “had more ground than most to make up before I was competing with my classmates on an equal footing.” But she worked relentlessly. “Distinctions such as the Pyne Prize, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, and a spot on The Yale Law Journal were not given out like so many pats on the back to encourage mediocre students,” Sotomayor wrote. “These were achievements as real as those of anyone around me.”In blocking enforcement of the Florida law, Walker wrote:
Defendants assert the idea of affirmative action is so “repugnant” that instructors can no longer express approval of affirmative action as an idea worthy of merit during class instruction.
Defendants further assert that this prohibition extends to guest speakers if they are invited to participate within a course … Assuming the University of Florida Levin College of Law decided to invite Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to speak to a class of law students, she would be unable to offer this poignant reflection about her own lived experience.
I would hope that Florida law-school students would be exposed to prominent advocates of all positions in the affirmative-action debate, not shielded from any views—whether Sotomayor’s or those of affirmative-action opponents—that a majority in a given legislative session construed as racist.[Read: The GOP’s ‘critical race theory’ obsession]In October, an exchange between Walker and Charles J. Cooper, one of Florida’s lawyers, showed how severe and lasting a blow the law would strike against free speech if it were upheld. Walker asked whether the state wanted all professors at public institutions “to read from the same page of music.” Cooper maintained that it didn’t—with one “narrow, narrow exception”: Referring to the eight forbidden concepts listed in the law, he said, “These particular eight concepts, which we believe are racially discriminatory and repugnant, we are not going to permit professors speaking in our State-prescribed curriculum, in our classrooms, on our time, accepting our paychecks to express these particular viewpoints.”According to the transcript, the judge then asked Cooper whether, 15 years from now, after a change of government, “the State of Florida could prohibit the instruction on American exceptionalism because it alienates people of color … and other disadvantaged groups because it suggests that America doesn’t have a darker side that needs to be qualified.”“Yes,” Cooper said. He added that the state can dictate what will and won’t be taught in college classrooms 15 years from today as surely as today, even if its political profile changes completely. In the future, the Florida legislature could, by the logic of the state’s legal reasoning, prohibit professors from promoting color-blind admissions, meritocracy, individualism, and capitalism if a majority of legislators deemed them racially discriminatory and repugnant.In fact, a striking passage in Florida’s legal brief opposing the preliminary injunction states, “Even if the First Amendment did apply here, Florida’s compelling interest in stamping out discrimination based on race and other immutable characteristics amply justifies any burden on speech the Act may impose.” The explicit defense of the bill is that fighting whatever politicians dub racism on campus is more important than the First Amendment.If the DeSantis administration manages to set that precedent, we should rename the law the Enabling Wokeness Act. When David Bernstein lamented in his 2003 book, You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws, that some professors would use the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality under the law as a pretext to supersede the First Amendment, he was objecting to a prominent strand of critical race theory. How striking that people who claim to revile CRT are advancing the same logic. The precedent that Florida’s lawyers are pushing on their behalf could limit speech as radically as would any restriction proposed by a group of early critical race theorists in the seminal 1993 book, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Reviewing that book in The New Republic, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. issued an incisive warning to the critical race theorists:
The advocates of speech restrictions will grow disenchanted not with their failures, but with their victories, and the movement will come to seem yet another curious byway in the long history of our racial desperation.
And yet the movement will not have been without its political costs. I cannot put it better than [Words That Wound co-author] Charles Lawrence himself, who writes: “I fear that by framing the debate as we have—as one in which the liberty of free speech is in conflict with the elimination of racism—we have advanced the cause of racial oppression and placed the bigot on the moral high ground, fanning the rising flames of racism.” He does not intend it as such, but I read this passage as a harsh rebuke to the movement itself. As the critical race theory manifesto acknowledges, “This debate has deeply divided the liberal civil rights/civil liberties community.” And so it has. It has created hostility between old allies and fractured longtime coalitions. Was it worth it?
Proponents of the Stop WOKE Act should ask themselves the same question. Because the original critical race theorists failed to narrow the First Amendment in the name of anti-racism, their successors today––including some professors whom the ACLU is representing in the Florida proceedings––are able to invoke its protections. If the populist right succeeds in stripping faculty of most First Amendment protections in the classroom, where will it turn when progressive legislatures ban its ideas on campus? Meanwhile, DeSantis and his allies are now the ones who have ceded the moral high ground to their culture-war foes by framing a debate as if free speech were in conflict with the elimination of “woke” racism. Was it worth it? As a court dubs this law unconstitutional, I feel vindicated in saying that the answer is no.

One of the many factors contributing to increased polarization and the global weakening of democracies over the past decade is how effective populist demagogues are at using social media, according to a cognitive scientist who studies online misinformation.
“Both social media and demagogues are in conflict, or at least are exerting pressure on basic human cognition, while at the same time, there appears to be a symbiotic relationship between social media and demagogues,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, chair of the Department of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Bristol in England.
Lewandowsky discussed populist demagogues’ techniques as well as his latest research on the divergent ways U.S. congressional Democrats and Republicans used Twitter during the Trump administration at a Shorenstein Center talk Nov. 16 at Harvard Kennedy School.
The brouhaha over former President Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration crowd size is a good example of how demagoguery works on human cognition, he said.
Despite clear visual evidence to the contrary, the new president and his press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisted that the crowd had been larger than the one at President Obama’s inauguration in 2008. In a series of experiments done not long after, voters were shown photos side-by-side of the two inaugurations and asked to identify which crowd was larger. Hillary Clinton voters and non-voters overwhelmingly chose the Obama photo. Between 11 percent and 26 percent of Trump voters chose the Trump photo.
It’s not that these voters couldn’t discern the obvious crowd size difference. It’s that their choice was an act of “participatory propaganda,” Lewandowsky said, a way of expressing their support for their champion in the moment.
Often, skilled demagogues will lie and then increasingly demand loyalists embrace the assertion as a show of political support. Populist demagogues often reframe the world in binary terms, labeling lies and corruption traits of “The Elites,” and truth and fairness traits of “The People,” so “their lies become a signal of authenticity” to the public and accepting the lies becomes a “signifier of tribal identity,” he said.
Lewandowsky has studied how people’s brains “update” their memories to integrate new information about things they believe to be true but turn out to be false, as well as which variables determine whether people accept scientific evidence related to vaccinations or climate science. That work led to an interest in the persistence of misinformation in society and how it is spread.
He said the most effective demagogues successfully harness social media to not only communicate with their supporters, but to shape the coverage decisions of news media, highlighting and burying stories to their benefit.
The former president was especially skilled in this area, he said.
Trump critics accused the mainstream media of showering the former president with unwarranted coverage in the hope that whatever he did or said on Twitter and elsewhere would prove controversial and draw attention or out of fear of being left behind if they failed to cover him.
When negative news stories about him surfaced, like a $25 million fraud settlement with the state of New York over Trump University, Trump would typically tweet dozens of times in a single day to divert attention from unflattering coverage, a strategy Lewandowsky called “systematic shiny objects.”
Lewandowsky detailed how Democrats and Republicans in Congress communicate on Twitter, and the information they share differs significantly.
Lewandowsky and his team recently studied 1.6 million tweets (from more than 1,000 unique Twitter handles) sent by every member of Congress between 2016 and 2020. They analyzed the language choices used and the links shared to more than 160,000 articles. The sources for those articles were checked against a rating system by News Guard, which evaluates the journalistic credibility and trustworthiness of internet domains (not individual articles).
The researchers found that Republicans were much likelier to share untrustworthy information than Democrats, according to a new paper. While Democrats consistently shared information that scored 95 on a 100-point trustworthiness scale during the Trump presidency, Republicans shared information that scored just below 90 in 2016, and then slowly declined below 84 in 2020, when many in Congress repeated Trump’s denials that he had lost the election, Lewandowsky said.
When congressional Democrats and Republicans used words like “evidence” and “facts” in their tweets, a style Lewandowsky calls “truth-speaking,” they shared more accurate information. But when they used words like “common sense” or “opinion,” a style he refers to as “belief-speaking,” their paths diverged. When Democrats used these types of words, it was not accompanied by an increase in the sharing of false or misleading information on Twitter. But for Republicans, the more they engaged in belief-speaking, the less accurate the information they shared.
“For Republicans, the use of belief-speaking is a marker of whether or not they’re likely to share something that’s accurate,” he said.
Their research has found “fairly strong evidence” that regardless of party affiliation, the speaking style used in a tweet dictates the type of public reaction it will generate.
“So, leadership matters,” he said. “Leadership can determine the tone of the conversation and the public will follow suit.”

My first experience as an out queer person was dancing at a gay club in Boston in 1982, when I was fifteen. The club, like all other gay bars I’d seen, had windows painted black and only a tiny sign—you had to know the club was there, and you had to know what it was. Like most other gay clubs, it didn’t serve Coors beer. The Coors Brewing Company, of Golden, Colorado, was accused of using polygraph tests to weed out gay people from the pool of potential employees, which the beer maker denied. (This was only a small part of the company’s record of discrimination, and queer people were only one of the communities involved in the decades-long boycott.) A decade later, when Colorado residents, by a plurality, voted to amend the state constitution in a way that essentially inscribed anti-gay discrimination, the gay and lesbian community began boycotting the entire state of Colorado. (The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional.) Such was the imprinting on my teen-age brain that, when I heard about the shooting in Club Q, an L.G.B.T.Q. venue in Colorado Springs, which left five dead and eighteen injured, I thought, Of course, Colorado. I wasn’t the only journalist with a long memory: early coverage of the shooting noted the state’s, and the town’s, history of anti-gay organizing.

The accused shooter, though, is twenty-two, too young to remember Colorado’s antigay amendment. He was a young teen-ager when the state recognized same-sex marriage. He probably has no idea that gay bars used to be hidden from sight.

The idea that you can explain a mass shooting by where it happened is silly. The idea that politics, including the politics of hate, can explain a mass shooting, is only slightly less silly. People need little inspiration for finding someone to hate, to render less than human—if they are into that type of thing. Panicked, we rush to attach history and meaning to mass shootings, so that we can assimilate them into our minds. But the meaning of terror is senselessness.

The day of the Club Q shooting, I saw a movie that purports to explain what made the Russian war in Ukraine possible. Called “Manifesto” and released pseudonymously, because the director fears repercussions, it is a montage of cell-phone footage shot by Russian schoolchildren and posted on social media. It begins, charmingly and mundanely, with kids documenting their waking-and-walking-to-school routines, and segues into a series of ever more terrifying episodes. There are teachers yelling at kids, berating and humiliating them. There is a long sequence on sirens, including school fire drills, citywide bomb drills, active-shooter drills at schools, bomb threats at schools, actual fires at schools. Sometimes the kids in the footage look and sound indifferent; sometimes they are terrified, hiding under a desk or running down snow-covered streets in frantic search of a bomb shelter. Then there is footage of actual school shootings: again, kids hiding under desks, and also kids jumping out of school windows—some of them, probably, to their deaths.

Many Russian writers and filmmakers are attempting these sorts of projects now: reviewing—and re-viewing—experiences and assumptions that once appeared normal, and recasting them as a precursor to or even predictor of the war. Some of these artistic attempts are more successful than others. “Manifesto” struck me as unconvincing, at least in part because much of what it showed exists in the United States: the school shootings, the endless drills, the routinized expectation of terror.

I saw the movie at a festival in Amsterdam, with a local friend. On a ferry back from the screening, my friend, sheepishly at first, brought up the possibility that Russian and American cultures are similar in some important ways. She was shocked by the footage of school shootings, but also by the rote violence of so much of the film—the yelling by teachers, the herding and the raids. I told her that all of this was familiar to me from my Soviet childhood, but also from my American adolescence and the experience of my kids in American schools. I told her about the bizarre carceral disciplinary practices in U.S. schools, such as detention and taking away recess, and about the peculiar routine of drills, the training that kids receive to expect not only fire but also school shootings.

Maybe the movie explains more than I initially thought. It shows the face of terror—the faces of the people feeling terrorized and the faces of the people inflicting terror. It wastes no time on ideology, which is what we usually talk about when we talk about terror. But scholars of terrorism know that ideology is often a late addition to the script, sometimes almost an afterthought—as it seemed to be in the last mass shooting at a gay club in the U.S., the 2016 massacre at Pulse, in Orlando, where the gunman appeared to swear allegiance to the Islamic State after he’d entered the club. He killed forty-nine people and wounded dozens of others. It may be useful to think about terror—the desire to inflict it and the ability to do so—as the primary driver of this kind of violence.

In the United States, when we talk about mass violence and we are not talking about ideology, we usually talk about the easy availability of guns. Of course, access to guns matters. The easier it is, technically, to kill people, the more people will be killed. But terror can also be inflicted with a knife, an axe, and a homemade explosive. Of course, the politics of homophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism matter—among other things, they help the violence to spread, as it apparently did when a man threw a brick at a window of a gay bar in New York last week. In Russia, after the Kremlin unleashed an anti-gay campaign, reports of anti-gay violence, including rape and murder, skyrocketed. Yet, although no one pursues the politics of hating or othering children and arguing that they should be dead, school shootings proliferate, because one can imagine no terror greater than the terror inflicted on children and on their families. The essential precondition for mass violence, it seems, is not guns or hate but a culture of terror, a common imaginary that includes the possibility of a mass shooting. It may be most useful to think of a politics of terror. People—and states—carry out terror for the sake of terror. The senselessness is the point, even as our brains desperately seek to make logical connections and find explanations.

In 2013, the extraordinary American journalist Jeff Sharlet travelled to Russia to write about the rising anti-gay violence there. He opened his piece in GQ with an account of a shooting at an L.G.B.T.Q. space in St. Petersburg. It included the following passage:

Dmitry went down, and Rose ran, and Dmitry crawled. The men followed, kicking. One of them had a bat, “a baseball bat, yes,” says Dmitry. They were screaming. “Faggot, faggot, faggot.” The bat came down. And then the faggots in the other room charged the men with the gun and the bat and the masks, and the men ran away. Dmitry and Anna, who’d been shot in the back, inspected their wounds.

When I heard that the patrons at Club Q resisted and subdued the shooter, I flashed back to the passage in Sharlet’s story. Maybe, I thought, the experience of standing up to a society, or a family, that tells you not to be queer makes one less ready to be terrorized. Here I was, reflexively attaching a sense-making narrative to something that, by definition, makes no sense. Then I learned that Richard Fierro, the man who charged and disarmed the gunman at Club Q was apparently straight, visiting the club with his wife and daughter. Fierro and his wife, Jess, own a brewery whose company motto is “Diversity, it’s on tap!” ♦

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to speak to some Poles. I won’t pretend that they speak for the entire country, but my impression is that, broadly speaking, they believe a peace agreement with Russia would be a mistake. It is to be understood that many Polish people are both passionate about the subject of Russia and not directly militarily involved in the Ukraine war. Poland has provided some weapons and supplies, of course, and some Poles have chosen to enter the fight, but as a nation Poland is riveted by a war it is largely outside of.

Poland has two historic enemies: Germany and Russia. For more than a century, one (and sometimes both) threatened the country’s very existence. The German question was answered by World War II, but that conflict nonetheless resulted in Russian occupation, which lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union. Poland has thus been conditioned to distrust good fortune. The United States has guaranteed Poland’s security, placing increasing numbers of troops within its borders, yet the Poles are not at ease. Partly that’s because Washington has its own interests there, and history has taught Poland that those who do not attack you either betray you or let you down.

It’s unsurprising, then, that Poland was prepared to act in Ukraine at the outset of the conflict, and that it was disappointed when the Americans prevented them from doing so. (Washington didn’t want the war to spread anywhere else, and it didn’t want Moscow feeling more paranoid than it ordinarily does.) It’s also unsurprising that Poland doesn’t want a peace agreement. Warsaw sees this as a historic moment for Ukraine, and Kyiv’s supporters, including Poland, can use Russian weakness as an opportunity to break Russia militarily and secure Poland for generations to come. For them, the errant missile fire last week was a reminder of the threat Russia still poses.

In my opinion, this is neither militarily possible nor politically wise. The force committed to combat Russia is limited to Ukraine. The Ukrainian military has been fighting for its homeland – always a good motivator – and has been on the strategic defensive. The Russians have been on the offensive, which means their supply line is increasingly stretched and fragile as the army advances. More, extended offensive operations on multiple axes create command and control difficulties. Ukraine’s supply lines have been less stressed, and control of Ukrainian forces has thus been less strained but more effective. (This is to say nothing of the parallel U.S. supply lines.) As a result, the Ukrainians have paid a high price but have been rewarded. The Russians have paid a high price but with fewer rewards. Even then, the Russians have not been defeated. Moving into a strategic offensive posture will not yield the kinds of success Ukraine has had on the strategic defense. Attacking Russian forces in a defensive posture could readily lead to failure.

Poland may be willing to throw its military into the fray, but the Polish army is inexperienced and untested, and it depends on the United States for many critical supplies. Washington, for its part, is not interested in adopting an offensive posture. Its strategy is to keep Ukraine as a buffer zone between Russia and Europe – one designed to prevent a European war or even a new cold war. It therefore wants to avoid Russian occupation there without committing American forces to combat. If Ukrainian forces fail to hold their country, the U.S. has other military options, but Ukraine is absolutely its preferred first line of defense.

One option Washington does not have is to break the Russian army permanently. It simply lacks the resources and the will. The Russians have performed poorly in a foreign county, but it must be assumed they would fare better defending their home turf. Breaking Russia’s military demands deep penetration into Russia, and the U.S. is not going to use its military on an action that is likely to fail, let alone one that could trigger a nuclear scenario. (Not for nothing, an advance into Russia would be strategically faulty. If the attacking force were broken, a new westward thrust could work as it absorbs supplies and manpower.)

Politically, the invasion of Ukraine imposed costs on Russia, and though public opinion varies greatly, the people generally do not see the conflict as a necessary one. Attacking Russia would create political unity where there otherwise isn’t any, and the political goal should be to create dissonance. The current disagreement there has weakened Russia’s motivation to fight. Forcing Russians to fight outside the country will likely maintain that division, whereas taking the fight to Russia could have the opposite effect.

Forcing the Russians into an offensive posture has both military and political benefits. At a time when Russia appears internally fragmented and Ukraine is increasingly capable, the greatest danger is to assume that prior successes mean future success, a disease military success frequently causes.

If Moscow were forced into a peace treaty, the benefit to the West is political. A cease-fire raises questions about the prudence of the government and the competence of its military. Given that breaking the Russian army on the whole is a non-starter, a peace agreement creates a political force in Russia that must be allowed to mature. The risk of pursuing a broad victory is too high, much higher than the danger of peace. But President Vladimir Putin understands this equation too, so high-profile Russian losses inside Ukraine are key to his losing control.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Russia’s war on Ukraine is going badly: The Russian army is in retreat, and the Kremlin is looking for help from Iran and North Korea. But we must not forget that the Russian military is murdering Ukrainian civilians as the price of Moscow’s self-induced humiliation—and that Russia must pay a price for these atrocities.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Another flop from GOP Productions
Trump’s terrifically stupid return to Twitter
The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine.
Worse Than WarRussian television talk shows are a hallucinatory experience, a kind of febrile nightmare shot on sets that look like a dark mash-up of a manic game show, Fox News, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But the creepy star-chamber vibe and the vertigo-inducing camera work are perfectly suited to the deranged rantings of the hosts and guests. The Russian anchor Vladimir Solovyov is among the nastier pieces of work in this cadre: Nicknamed “Putin’s voice” in Russia, he has called for the destruction of Kyiv and said that nuclear war with the West is inevitable.And yet, even in the midst of this cuckoo’s nest, there are some small chirps of concern. On Sunday night, as Solovyov engaged in his usual smirking about Russia’s infliction of death and misery in Ukraine, one of his guests had enough. “It’s obscene; it’s not constructive; it’s criminal to bomb peaceful cities,” the former Israeli diplomat Yaakov Kedmi interjected. “These things shouldn’t even be uttered—to ‘wipe a city off the face of the Earth’ is obscene.” Solovyov tried to object, but Kedmi pressed on. “There are 1,001 ways to fight without touching civilians.”Kedmi is not some squishy peacenik who was pulled off Tverskaya Street to be a designated talk-show punching bag. He was born in Russia, emigrated to Israel, and returned several years ago as a supporter of the Putin regime on Russian television. He’s said some nice things about that great “statesman” Joseph Stalin, and he warned last spring that Russia could bomb the United Kingdom “back to the Stone Age” if the British didn’t mind their own business with regard to Ukraine.Why were Solovyov and Kedmi having this conversation at all? Because the Russian war in Ukraine is no longer a “war” in the sense that most people would conceive of a military contest between two states over some discrete or tangible issue. It is not, in any sense, the kind of conflict that academic “realists” would understand as some kind of Russian exercise in power balancing against an external threat. Instead, Russia’s invasion is now an ongoing operation of mass murder.I asked Julia Davis, a Daily Beast columnist who monitors the Russian media, why someone like Kedmi would have a change of heart. She thinks Kedmi, who lives in both Russia and Israel, feels that “the winds are changing,” that Putin is now seen by Russia’s elites as a loser, and that the Russian cheerleaders for the invasion face an increasing chance of “blowback in civilized countries” for their country’s conduct in the war. Davis takes it as a positive sign that Kedmi—and perhaps even Solovyov, who she believes is an opportunist acting the part of a cartoonish warmonger—might be worried enough about Russia losing to start moderating his position as a hedge against being too closely associated with Putin.Russia, as Kedmi and others now seem to realize, has gone far beyond any of the rationalizations Putin deployed last winter about saving the Ukrainians from “Nazis” or any other such nonsense. The Russians are killing innocent civilians as imperial retaliation for their defiance. Putative military objectives have vanished; Moscow’s goals have devolved into infuriated bloodletting. Each Russian retreat brings a rain of missiles against civilian targets, and the Kremlin isn’t even bothering to make military arguments for these strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and homes. Such bombings are civilian reprisals that are no different from the Nazi reprisals against the French and other occupied peoples for the resistance of partisans and militias. I taught for many years at a U.S. military college, and I believe these are obvious war crimes.Russian “strategists”—if any actually exist—might claim that the goal is to demoralize the Ukrainians into abandoning their loyalty to their government and surrendering. But the laws of war do not permit terrorizing civilians into submission, and, in any case, the Russians have almost no hope of occupying much more than the slivers of “annexed territories” they hold now. Moscow’s continued attacks, especially judging from the angry chest thumping from the Russian media, seem to have no other purpose but vengeance, and the intentional murder of civilians for the sake of salving the ego of the incompetent Russian military and placating their desperate commander in chief.This holiday season, many of us will seek peace and a reset heading into the new year by drawing closer to family, taking a break from work, and observing the rituals of our faith. We tend, during this time, to clear our mind of unpleasant things. But as Americans, citizens of the greatest democratic power on Earth, we must not forget that the largest European conflict since World War II is continuing to burn away in Ukraine. A democratic nation is refusing to be conquered by a vengeful imperial power, and it is paying for it with the lives of innocent men, women, and children. As we celebrate the season, let us remember that the Russians have shown no intention of taking a holiday from murder.Related:
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Russia’s war on Ukraine need not end in negotiation.
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The Great Game: Franklin Foer interviews Secretary of State (and longtime soccer fan) Antony Blinken; Adam Harris argues that American soccer is finally coming of age.
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Humans Being: The Great British Bake Off is for bros, Jordan Calhoun writes.
Two butterflies balance on a leaf. (Yuri Cortez / AFP / Getty)
An Evolutionary Magic Trick Is Popping Up EverywhereBy Carrie ArnoldThousands of miles from home in the steamy Amazon rainforest in the mid-1800s, the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates had a problem. More than one, really: There were thumb-size biting insects, the ever-present threat of malaria, venomous snakes, and mold and mildew that threatened to overtake his precious specimens before they could be shipped back to England. But the nagging scientific problem that bothered him involved butterflies.Bates had noticed that some of the brightly colored Heliconius butterflies in the forest didn’t flit about like the rest; they moved more slowly. When he captured them and examined them under his makeshift microscope, he discovered that they weren’t really Heliconius at all, but astonishing look-alikes.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
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A new theory of American power
Claire Danes and Jesse Eisenberg in the FX/Hulu show Fleishman Is in Trouble (Courtesy of FX)
Read. “I Was Wrong About So Much,” a poem by Eugenia Leigh.“About your eyes, not a savior’s eyes / but brown as blood. I was wrong / about the God I warped / into a weapon, a garrison. / Wrong about love, too.”Watch. Fleishman Is in Trouble, an FX/Hulu TV series based on Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel about a midlife crisis.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I’ve been one of the chroniclers of Donald Trump’s adventures on Twitter over what feels like the past several decades, and I know that I am supposed to be anguished about his return to the platform. I have been horrified by Trump’s presence in American public life since the 1980s, when I first became aware that I was sharing the solar system with him. But I am not particularly upset about the new Twitter owner Elon Musk lifting Trump’s ban from the social-media platform. And I have no intention of leaving Twitter; I am too old and cranky and stubborn, and I will not just pick up and run merely because the place is now owned by a grown man who has the puerile sensibility of a poorly behaved prepubescent boy.Instead, I agree with my colleague Quinta Jurecic, who wrote yesterday that this drama with Musk and Trump “is terrifically stupid,” a story that “revolves around the whims of two wealthy and self-involved men who enjoy nothing more than public attention.” The whole business “is an enormous waste of everyone’s time,” she adds, “and I resent having to think about it.” I agree. Trump, however, is the leader of the Republican Party. Whether he is on Twitter is irrelevant: He is a danger to this country no matter where he is.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Friends,

I'm not going to talk about Twitter today. I want to focus on two other outrages.

Over the past week, both Ticketmaster and FTX crashed.

This is what unregulated monopolies do, eventually - taking lots of angry consumers with them.

Which is why we need to either regulate or to bust up corporations that corner markets. But to do so, we need to stop big money.

Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in America; she hadn't done live shows for four years. Ticketmaster was her ticketing agent. But because Ticketmaster had under-invested in its platform, its site and app couldn't handle the demand (not before scalpers managed to get plenty of tickets and put them on sale for multiples of the original list price).

As Matt Stoller tells us, Ticketmaster's monopoly started in 1991 when it acquired its main rival in computerized ticketing, Ticketron - putting 90 percent of the ticketing business in the hands of one firm, and giving it the power to tack on an ever-rising assortment of fees (now as much a part of concert experience as sticky floors and shoving).

A few years later, Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation, the world's largest concert promotion company, so the combined entity could keep all the fees - and more - to itself. The combined firm was chaired by Irving Azoff (who in a New York Times profile - confessed himself a serial liar and talked about how he put pictures of himself giving the middle finger on his own stationary).

Monopolies exert power in several ways - and not just in high prices. They also exert power through failing to invest in their products and services. Either way, they make extra money by shafting consumers.

They also exert political power that shafts everyone. Why in hell did the Obama administration ultimately approve the Ticketmaster Live Nation merger? Perhaps because both firms were major political players?

Immediately after the Justice Department consented to the merger, the combo began violating the consent agreement--- charging outrageous fees, allowing the sale of tickets to bots, and suppressing competitors who had developed ways of blocking scalpers, like Songkick. It acted so badly even the Trump Administration had to rework the merger agreement. But not by much.

And since then, Swifties and other consumers of live entertainment have been paying through the nose.

Now, the Justice Department's antitrust division has launched an investigation. Talk about closing barn doors after the cattle have been rustled away.

Meanwhile, FTX and more than 100 affiliated crypto companies are filing for bankruptcy. Reportedly, a million or more creditors could line up. The situation is so dire that FTX has already said it doesn't know who its top creditors are or where many assets can be found.

Ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried turns out to be another Bernie Madoff -- a big-time Ponzi schemer. His FTX exchange also depended on monopoly power. Giant Ponzi schemes don't thrive in competitive markets; they need to be the only big game in town.

Here again, it's when monopoly power (which FTX exercised) is combined with political clout that the public gets taken for a ride.

Bankman-Fried contributed around $37 million to Democratic candidates in the last election cycle. His co-chief executive, Ryan Salame, gave more than $20 million to Republicans. In all, FTX executives contributed nearly $72 million to both parties, and the company was strategically bipartisan in its lobbying and government affairs hiring.

Where were the federal regulators? Nowhere to be seen.

It's the same vicious cycle: Corporations achieve monopolies that shaft consumers while pulling in big money, a portion of which is used to bribe politicians to look the other way.

This is not solely a Republican problem. The Ticketmaster Live Nation merger was approved by the Obama administration. FTX and Bankman-Fried were major contributors to Democrats. Republicans are more dependent than Democrats on big money, but far too often both parties are drinking from the same trough.

It has been hard to read the innumerable accounts of the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and the bankruptcy of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange this past week without a strong sense of Schadenfreude. SBF, as Bankman-Fried was known, was lauded as a different kind of crypto advocate, one who invited regulation, contributed to liberal causes, and claimed to be the voice of responsibility in a Wild West sector. It turns out that he may have been running one of the world’s largest ponzi schemes, in which investor money was used to shore up a related exchange, Alameda Research, which in turn invested in FTX’s own cryptocurrency FFT. As many as a million creditors may be out their money, leading to many further bankruptcies and collapses throughout the sector.  Cryptocurrencies were always a solution looking for a problem. Running on top of a blockchain, they were supposedly a currency that was not manipulable by governments and whose value was therefore more secure. As Nouriel Rubini and many others have explained, however, since the beginning of Bitcoin a decade ago they have never functioned as a meaningful form of money and have always had the character of a Ponzi scheme.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Currencies have three main functions: as a mechanism of exchange, a measure of value, and a store of wealth. Cryptocurrencies have fallen short in each category. Only a minuscule fraction of the world’s trillions of dollars of daily transactions are carried out in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin sharply limits the number of bitcoins in circulation, and uses an unconscionable amount of energy to verify each transaction. The usage of bitcoin has therefore hardly budged since its introduction; other crypto coins circulate more widely but are mostly used to buy other cryptocurrencies. Given the wildly fluctuating prices of cryptocurrencies, they hardly perform the second function as a reliable measure of value. (Bitcoins were worth $4,000 at the end of 2019 but soared to $69,000 in November 2021, and are currently at about $16,000 today.) How many times have you seen a house or car priced in Bitcoin or Ethereum? It is only as a store of wealth that crypto potentially has a use, since by design cryptocurrencies are limited in supply and cannot be readily counterfeited. But unlike gold—another store of wealth sometimes used as a currency—crypto tokens have no intrinsic value, and while any given cryptocurrency cannot be artificially replicated, anyone can create a new currency. Unlike gold, you can’t use tokens to make jewelry or fill teeth; they are valuable only as long as there is another sucker to come along and buy them.The only places where cryptocurrencies make sense are those like Argentina, which have a history of persistent inflation. And indeed, Argentines are per capita among the largest buyers of crypto. They would however have been better off buying U.S. dollars instead, were they allowed to. In the U.S., cryptocurrency prices have declined rather than increased as inflation has returned—the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do.

The rise of cryptocurrencies and related phenomena like NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and meme-stock trading (e.g., the pumping and dumping of GameStop and other penny stocks) in 2020-21 are related to the same underlying phenomenon, which was the monetary expansion that took place over the past two decades, and particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. The U.S. and other countries suffered numerous shocks in this period, from 9/11 to financial crises to the Covid pandemic, and monetary policy was used in each case to stabilize financial systems. Year after year, however, this pumping up of the money supply by central banks in developed countries through ultra-low (if not negative) interest rates and quantitative easing (purchases of financial assets by central banks) did not have the effect predicted by monetary purists of stoking inflation. Indeed, the failure of central banks to generate consumer price inflation despite the monetary expansion they produced led to things like Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) that argued that money could be endlessly printed with no adverse economic consequences.The fact was, however, that while consumer prices stayed largely flat throughout this period, money was flowing into other sectors and lifting the value of other assets from stocks and bonds to houses to paintings and antique cars. Monetary expansion encouraged the explosion of cryptocurrency prices, which after 2019 were also driven by the pandemic as Americans stayed away from stores and restaurants and cashed in their Covid support checks to trade in crypto assets. Ultra-low interest rates also encouraged the use of leverage to pump up capital gains.In the U.S., there was a generational component to the crypto movement. My first exposure to financial markets came when I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I was a member of Telluride Association, a student-run organization established by a robber baron named L. L. Nunn who founded Utah Power and Light. As students we managed everything about the organization, including the Association’s endowment. While a junior in college, I became chairman of the endowment’s investment board. Under my leadership, the value of the endowment went from $4 million to $3 million, having gotten caught up in the 1974 bear market. Hence my first experience with the stock market was that it usually went down.Subsequent generations, however, have experienced nothing but rising markets. Once US inflation was tamed in the early 1980s, the U.S. economy charged ahead over the next couple of decades. Technological developments kept driving down the cost of transportation and tied the world together in unprecedented ways. There were periodic setbacks like the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the dot-com bubble, or the 2008 financial crisis. But better monetary policy and underlying deflationary trends caused both by technology and globalization meant that those problems would only be temporary. Anyone with financial assets in this period could look like a genius. Gen-Z investors came regard crypto as a secret that their generation had uncovered, and they looked down upon anyone who tried to cast doubt on the fundamentals of the enterprise.In retrospect, it seems pretty clear that this unusual period of ultra-low inflation and interest rates was being driven by a one-off phenomenon, which was the entry of China and a handful of other developing countries into the global trading system. This was particularly the case after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. As hundreds of millions of new low-wage workers were added to the global labor supply, jobs and manufacturing along with their supply chains moved from the U.S. and Europe to East Asia, depressing rich country wages and keeping down the prices of goods and services.This period is now over. Wages in China have been rising steadily in recent years, and the flow of new entrants into the global labor market has slowed. Immigration became politically controversial in Europe and America, and barriers to the movement of people have gone up. The pandemic again exaggerated this slowdown in trade by disrupting supply chains and blocking cross-border movements of people. MMT now looks pretty silly in retrospect, as consumer price inflation has taken off in virtually every corner of the world. As interest rates rise, all the leveraged bets on asset prices have gone into a sickening reversal and financial failures have cascaded on one another. Younger investors probably need to dust off used copies of Graham and Dodd and relearn the fundamentals of market investing.The fall of SBF and FTX will probably increase calls to regulate the crypto world. A recent article in the Financial Times however suggested that this market be allowed to destroy itself through fraud and abuse, provided it was walled off from the rest of the economy by, for example, prohibiting fiduciaries to hold crypto assets. If libertarians want to live within their own government-free world, let them do so. It is hard to imagine that this would have a negative effect on the rest of us, since cryptocurrencies weren’t performing any useful social function in the first place. The safest financial asset remains, in the end, the U.S. dollar.

It’s my contention that 21st century capitalism is undergoing a triple crisis – one of inclusion, one of dynamism, and one of politics. As to the first of these, I’ve already written a couple of essays looking at the socioeconomic and political marginalization of ordinary people since the advent of mass affluence. Now I’ll turn to the crisis of dynamism. Piecing together what’s happened and why will occupy me for the next few essays.
We can conceive of this crisis in both narrower and more sweeping terms. As to the former, the concern is with declining rates of innovation and economic growth and growing barriers to scientific and technological progress. Zooming out and taking a larger view, there is the sense of a deeper, civilizational sclerosis. Ross Douthat calls it “decadence” – and I strongly recommend his insightful book on the subject. But I don’t think anybody can match the compactness and verve with which Ryan Avent of The Economist, in a Substack essay that deserves to be much more widely known and discussed, summed up the nature of what has happened in the rich democracies since the 1970s. He calls this past half-century “the conservative age,” and I’ll quote from him at length:

The notion that ours has been a period of intense, almost universally held conservatism may seem odd to some readers, particularly those of a nominally conservative bent. Hasn’t the state grown as a share of the economy, for decades? Hasn’t the observance of traditional religion declined? Haven’t sexual mores and gender norms been turned on their heads? And yet if the animating spirit of conservatism is the desire to command history to stop, and to preserve traditional practices across the breadth of society, the past half century can only be seen as the handiwork of a conservatism in near-total mastery of the flow of events.
From 1870 to 1970, the world was racked by violent change, across all spheres of human activity. National borders were drawn and redrawn. The residents of these shifting states experimented with the most radical forms of social organization ever attempted. Technologically, the world lurched from stagecoach journeys to landings on the Moon, from mechanical calculators to digital computers, from a near ignorance of “germs” to the study of our DNA. In the richest economies, incomes tripled, creating a large middle class and moving its members from a position uneasily close to subsistence to one of historically unprecedented wealth. Social relations — between sexes, races and classes — were upended. Culturally, the world experienced perhaps the greatest efflorescence of art ever: in literature, music, architecture, and just about wherever else one looked. It was an almost unbearably frenetic period of creative destruction, and destructive creation.
And then, around 1970, societies positioned at the frontier of human advance declared: enough. We went to the Moon; that was far enough. We grew tired of efforts to create utopia through our governments, and chose instead to enable the better heeled to consume the fruits of their labor by cutting their taxes. We began to freeze our cities in amber: by abandoning idealistic efforts to improve slums, prohibiting the replacement of the fine buildings of yesterday with the bold and the new, and shifting ever more of the population into the comfort and familiarity of suburbia. With rare exceptions, the energy and innovation bled out of our artistic endeavors. We lost interest in bold new political projects or grand reforming crusades; indeed we ultimately judged that we had found the best of all possible systems of social organization and declared that history had not only stopped but come to its very end. We made ourselves caretakers of a world built by our forebears — or less even than that: parasites upon it, draining what consumer comforts we can from it while they last.
The result has been a profound stasis, powered by a conservatism so deep and penetrating that we scarcely perceive it. To what do the ambitious among us aspire, today? To a structured life, repeating familiar steps: university, lucrative profession, comfortable retirement, modest thrills delivering anticipated rewards. We think our politics has become gridlocked because different factions have such different visions of the future, but that’s mistaken; our politics delivers very little, because even a little change is more than most of us are interested in. Seemingly radical shifts — in tolerance for same-sex relationships for instance — are achieved within an overarching social rigidity, in which power and class relations are preserved and the general order of daily life is undisturbed. Resistance to change has evolved into fear of the unknown; we have all been engaged in a paralyzing process of autoinfantilization, pursuing trivial comforts and eschewing risk.

I don’t necessarily endorse every element of this bill of indictment. In particular, I’m still not sure what to make of the claims of cultural stagnation – in certain popular art forms, sure, but overall is much less clear to me. And the turning away from utopian dreams was a sound move at the time, at least as long as the Cold War was still raging. But overall, I think Ryan does a fantastic job here capturing the essence of a profound civilizational shift – and identifying its character correctly as fundamentally conservative.
There are many different factors pushing this broad-based conservatism. But all share, in my view, common origins in capitalism’s transition to mass affluence and a postindustrial economy. In this essay, I’ll focus on the core concern over scientific, technological, and economic progress, and one very basic reason for the slowdowns we observe: Progress gets harder over time because of the exhaustion of the easiest opportunities for advance and generally declining returns to innovative activity.
It turns out that major components of economic growth during industrialization consisted of one-off changes that took decades to unfold but then were more or less completed. In the United States, growth during the 20th century was accelerated by two demographic trends: the increasing mobilization of women into the paid workforce due to the automation of housework and widening job opportunities not tied to physical strength; and the upskilling of the population through increased years in school. The simplest way to raise GDP per capita over time is to increase the percentage of the population making GDP for a living, which is precisely what the transition of women out of the unpaid household sector and into the labor force accomplished. Between 1900 and 2000, the female labor-force participation rate climbed from 19 percent to 60 percent, causing the total LFPR to rise from 50 percent to 67 percent.

Beyond increasing the sheer quantity of labor inputs, you can also boost economic growth by improving the quality of labor: with more highly developed skills, a given hour of work can produce substantially higher value. And over the course of the 20th century, the United States saw dramatic surges in secondary and then tertiary education. In 1900, only about 6 percent of young people graduated high school; by 1970, it was up to 76 percent. In 1940, only 6 percent of young adults had a college degree; by 1980, 24 percent did. All in all, the average years of schooling for Americans aged 25 and older rose from 8.0 years in 1900 to 12.5 years in 1980. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz estimate that some 15 percent of the total increase in GDP per capita from 1915-2005 can be attributed to the rise in educational attainment.
Mobilizing women and increasing years in school were processes that couldn’t go on forever, and so they didn’t. The female labor force participation rate stalled at the turn of the 21st century – still somewhat lower than that of men, but with only limited catch-up space left. And by 1980, the rapid run-up in educational attainment ended: From 1980 to 2005, the average years of schooling completed grew only 0.3 percent a year, compared to 0.8 percent a year between 1940 and 1980.

Once these changes were substantially complete, the tailwinds they provided to capitalist growth and dynamism subsided. Without a compensating speed-up in innovation and productivity growth, GDP growth would naturally subside as well. Since you could no longer rely on growth provided by increasing the relative quantity and quality of labor, you needed to substitute with growth from increasing the output per unit of labor.
Unfortunately, the same problems of exhausting the low-hanging fruit beset efforts to accelerate or even sustain productivity growth. In those sectors where productivity growth is easiest to achieve, that growth will eventually run ahead of demand for the products of those sectors. As a result, those sectors will shrink as a share of total economic output, and their contribution to overall output will be correspondingly diminished. Economic growth thus has this self-undermining dynamic: Over time employment and output will tend to concentrate in the least productive sectors. This isn’t a death sentence: If you can figure out how to rev up productivity in those reservoir sectors, you can keep overall growth from slipping. But without doubt, productivity growth gets harder over time.
We see this dynamic playing out over time in postindustrialization – that is, the shift from manufacturing to services. In general, productivity growth in manufacturing is higher than in services; labor-saving machinery can be added to the manufacturing process all the way to full automation, whereas human labor is often a vital component of service provision – it will always take four musicians to play a string quartet. But because of that fact, over time manufacturing has shrunk as a component of overall economic activity, and thus the economy has come to be dominated by services that are more resistant to automation and improved efficiency.
This is the phenomenon known as “Baumol’s cost disease,” named after the economist William Baumol who first identified it. Because of the productivity differential between manufacturing and services, the relative costs and prices of manufactured goods fall over time, and the relative costs and prices of services rise. Unless rising demand for manufactured goods can somehow keep ahead of this process, the result is that manufacturing as a share of total spending – and thus total output – will decline over time. And that’s precisely what has happened.
The cost disease phenomenon has an important implication – namely, that productivity growth can fall even if the pace of innovative activity in the economy stays constant, or even slightly accelerates. Let’s say innovation in both manufacturing and services stay constant, with the former at a higher rate than the latter. Over time, the shift from manufacturing to services will reduce overall productivity growth simply because the relative contribution from high-productivity manufacturing is now decreased.
The economist Dieter Vollrath contends that most of the decline in productivity growth in the 21st century is due to the shift from manufacturing to services – not, in other words, because of a slowdown in the pace of technological progress. In his book Fully Grown, he estimates that total factor productivity grew at an average annual rate of 1.51 percent between 1950 and 2000 – and that the average rate then fell to 1.26 percent during the 21st century (2000-2016). In other words, the productivity growth rate has fallen by 0.25 percentage points. Of that, he estimates that the shift from manufacturing to services during the 20th century reduced 21st century productivity growth by about 0.2 percentage points – or about 80 percent of the total decline in TFP.
Nevertheless, there is genuine cause for concern about the current vitality of technological and scientific progress. First, just looking at aggregate productivity figures gives an unduly rosy picture, as it hides the total collapse of productivity growth in the world of atoms. Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson’s research on industry-specific TFP divides industry groups into IT-producing (computers, semiconductors, software), IT-using (including, among others, finance and retail), and non-IT. As the figure below shows, during the postwar golden years productivity growth was robust in non-IT industries; afterwards, the contribution of non-IT sectors to overall productivity growth completely disappeared. Now I recognize that calculations of industry-specific TFP growth involve all kinds of methodological assumptions and ought to be taken with more than a few grains of salt. Still, these figures suggest an alarming imbalance in the current state of innovation.

And then there’s the eyeball test. The economist Robert Gordon, well known for his techno-pessimism, has proposed the following thought experiment: Would you rather live with only pre-21st century technology, or have access to everything new from this century but give up indoor plumbing in return? His point is that this single innovation from the late 1800s dwarfs the combined impact of all technological change in the current century.
There is also suggestive if not definitive evidence that the rate of scientific progress is declining. Admittedly, it’s very difficult to draw conclusions about the whole of science. Some fields are more mature and the biggest breakthroughs were long ago (particle physics), while other, newer fields are booming (genomics, planetary astronomy, artificial intelligence). How is it possible to generalize across such disparate fields, and what is the measure of impact? Granting these difficulties of measurement, there are still some troubling signs that scientific research is bogging down. The average ages at which scientists are first published in a major journal, receive their first grant as a principal investigator, and perform Nobel Prize-winning work have crept up steadily over time. In the early years of the Nobel Prize, scientists were around 37 years old at the time of their prize-winning work; today, the average age is around 47. Publications and prizes now tend to go to teams of researchers rather than individuals, and team sizes are increasing.
The number of working scientists today and the number of new scientific papers published every year are both at all-time highs – and, ironically, that may be part of the problem. Researchers James Evans and Johan Chu explain:

The deluge of new papers may deprive reviewers and readers [of] the cognitive slack required to fully recognize and understand novel ideas. Competition among many new ideas may prevent the gradual accumulation of focused attention on a promising new idea…. When the number of papers published per year in a scientific field grows large, citations flow disproportionately to already well-cited papers; the list of most-cited papers ossifies; new papers are unlikely to ever become highly cited, and when they do, it is not through a gradual, cumulative process of attention gathering; and newly published papers become unlikely to disrupt existing work. These findings suggest that the progress of large scientific fields may be slowed, trapped in existing canon. 

I’m not sure about a slowdown in the rate of overall scientific or technological progress. But what is indisputable is that progress per scientist or engineer is falling over time. In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, economists Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones, John van Reenen, and Michael Webb make the point that the number of researchers has skyrocketed over time – increasing over twentyfold since 1930 – while productivity growth has been flat or declining. Innovative activity has thus been experiencing sharply diminishing returns over time. To cite just one prominent example: The number of researchers required today to keep Moore’s Law going is over 18 times larger than back in the 1970s.
Their highly intuitive explanation is that these diminishing returns reflect the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Of course this isn’t the only possible explanation; it may be that our institutions for organizing and funding scientific research, and for translating that research into commercial products, are less efficient than in the past. But surely an important part of the story is that ideas are indeed getting harder to find.
A related idea is that progress gets harder over time because of the growing “burden of knowledge.” As the scientific and technological frontiers advance with every year, the years of study and training needed to reach the frontier – and thus be in a position to make a contribution of one’s own – necessarily increase over time. One reason ideas are getting harder to find, then, is that the preparation needed before the search commences is growing ever-more elaborate and taxing.
I don’t believe that the dynamics I’ve been describing here offer anything like a full explanation of the Age of Stasis. Other important factors are in play as well, and I’ll be exploring them in the essays to follow. But I wanted to start my investigation here because the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit and declining returns to innovative activity are inherent features of advanced capitalist development. We don’t need to identify bad guys, or find that a wrong turn was made years ago; rather, it is simply part of the nature of our social system that progress gets harder over time. That fact alone is sobering, as it means that the path of least resistance is toward torpor and stasis.
The post The Age of Stasis appeared first on Niskanen Center.

In recent weeks, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, created alarm among Ukraine’s friends by suggesting in several forums that Ukraine has fought Russian forces to a “standstill,” and that given the emerging stalemate on the ground and the onset of winter, the time may be ripe for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow.Other news reports indicated that the United States was denying Ukraine long-range Predator unmanned aerial vehicles, and the national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to at least signal openness to talks with Russia. As criticism of Milley’s remarks and the administration’s seemingly qualified embrace of talks erupted, backpedaling immediately ensued. Milley, anonymous officials told The New York Times, was ahead of the rest of the administration. In public, the Biden administration insisted that any decision to turn to diplomacy would be Ukraine’s, and no deals would be made behind its back.[Kori Schake: Ukrainian success will not be catastrophic]Milley is a man of strong views, candidly expressed in private and in public but not always carefully prepared in advance. It is a reasonable guess that he was not all that far out from where the administration is. But intentionally or not, he amplified a view that has risen from whisper to murmur: that it is time to think about how to bring the war in Ukraine to a close. On television and in foreign-policy journals, similar—indeed more pronounced—versions of these views may be heard.There is a large dose of what one might call “baloney realism” in the judicious declarations by those—most of them tepid at best in their support of Ukraine’s cause to begin with—who say that all wars must end in negotiations. No, they do not have to. These self-styled foreign-policy adults evidently failed to notice that America’s protracted negotiations with the Taliban had nothing to do with the Biden administration’s ending of that war with a skedaddle rather than a deal.Russia’s Afghan war ended the same way, although it executed its withdrawal more brutally and more skillfully than America’s. The 1991 Iraq War ended with a cease-fire negotiated (badly, on the American part) at gunpoint; the 2003 war in surrender. One need not reach for Winston Churchill’s refusal to negotiate with Adolf Hitler or Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to negotiate with Jefferson Davis to realize that not all wars end in a diplomatically arranged peace. Ukraine is fighting for its survival as a state and as a distinct people. In some sense, for that matter, this is a similarly existential conflict for the Putin regime, whose survival (though not Russia’s) requires victory.The argument for diplomacy now is wrongheaded. Those who have systematically underestimated the will of Ukrainians to fight to the death, their skill in making use of what they have, their ability to absorb a bewildering array of modern military technologies, and their operational and tactical cunning are likely making yet more tactical misjudgments. The long, increasingly dug-in Russian front line is not comparable to the Western Front in World War I. At a length of 1,000 kilometers, even after the dispersal of Russian forces west of the Dnipro River, it is far less densely held than the trench lines of France and Belgium in 1915.The assertion that winter makes operations difficult to the point of near impossibility is baseless. The United States has not fought a winter campaign since the Korean War 70 years ago. The Ukrainians have been fighting them every year since 2014, when Russia invaded the Donbas. In this, as in other respects, it would behoove Western experts to acknowledge that there is more that we can learn from the Ukrainians about crucial aspects of modern war than they can learn from us.The calls for negotiations, like the strategically inane revelations of our fears of escalation—inane because they practically invite the Russians to get inside our head and rattle us—are dangerous. It is the nature of a small, embattled ally to look over its shoulder at those who support it today but may lack the grit required to do so over a long period of time. These calls telegraph a lack of strategic patience and staying power that only encourages Russia. Moreover, an official, understated discussion of talks can take a particularly disingenuous form: The decision to negotiate is yours, but we won’t give you the weapons to get any further than you have gone.[Eliot A. Cohen: Putin is cornered]Such hypocrisy is the norm in international politics, but this is one of those moments where the stakes are too high for normal foreign policy. To his credit, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin gave a ringing depiction of the Western stake in the Ukraine war in his speech at the Halifax International Security Forum. He made it clear that Russia’s aggression is a threat to European security and to NATO, and that it is an assault on our fundamental values as well as the international order. The question is whether the Biden administration will have the nerve to follow through on the implications of those declarations.Still, one might say, we need to have some notion of how this war could end or will end. One possibility—unlikely but not completely out of the question—is that at some point Ukraine will sue for peace, accepting the loss of more territory than it already lost to Russia in 2014. Absent a battlefield collapse or a cruel limitation by the Western powers of the arms supply and economic aid on which Kyiv depends, this is conceivable, but highly unlikely.More important is our goal, and our theory of victory. The West cannot intend merely to “help Ukraine defend itself”—a mushy phrase for a mushy idea. We must help Ukraine defeat Russian aggression and expel Russian forces from within Ukraine’s recognized international borders. How does this lead to success? Ukrainian tank armies will not roll into Moscow to dictate peace, of course. But throughout Russian history, defeat on the periphery—Crimea in the 1850s, the Russo-Japanese War in the early 20th century, and Afghanistan in the 1980s—has led to political change domestically. It is perfectly reasonable to see that as our objective.The means to that end are clear: extensive and unstinting arming of Ukraine with all weaponry short of nuclear bombs, and a crushing and comprehensive system of economic sanctions on an isolated Russia.Although the Western states have begun to increase their arms production, they have yet to pursue the kind of bold industrial mobilization needed to arm Ukraine, rearm Western Europe, and build the arsenals that strengthen our posture in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. In the immediate term, the United States and its allies should provide Ukraine with long-range ATACMS missiles, which would allow Ukraine to hit with devastating effect all targets within its recognized territory, and finally sever the Kerch Strait Bridge, which is vital for Russian resupply. The West must push a lot harder to cut off Russia from the global economy, applying secondary sanctions as needed. And the United States needs to lean harder on allies and neutrals than it has so far.In particular, the time has come to begin the comprehensive reequipping of Ukraine with a tank fleet superior to that of Russia. The easiest measure would be to tap the large numbers of mothballed German-made Leopard tanks held not only in that country but in others that have indicated their willingness to supply them to Ukraine. The United States should help reequip the Ukrainian air force—remarkably, still flying and flying effectively in the teeth of Russian air defenses—with F-16s from our own and others’ large holdings of inactive planes. And the U.S. must pressure laggard allies and clients—Israel, most notably, which desires our help against Iran but has disgracefully refused to do enough to help Ukraine defend its civilian population from waves of Iranian drones—to provide effective assistance, particularly with air defense.There will be talks at some point. But they are less likely to resemble the Congress of Vienna than the palaver that American Marines had with Taliban forces surrounding the Kabul airport on their way out. In the meanwhile, time to pass the ammunition and to stop talking about talking.

If Democrats survived this week’s midterms because they increased their share of wealthier voters, it’s a bad omen for building a working-class coalition around left-wing politics. Something needs to change.

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro gives a victory speech to supporters at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center on November 8, 2022, in Oaks, Pennsylvania. Shapiro defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
 
With the votes from Tuesday’s elections still being counted — and with so many questions surrounding the Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing still lacking definitive answers — Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman decided to check in with Jacobin contributing editor Matt Karp to get his thoughts on what is shaping up to be a highly unusual midterm election. Over the years, Karp, associate professor of history at Princeton, has written extensively for Jacobin about the ongoing class dealignment in American politics and its baleful implications for the Left. While we don’t yet have the data to know for sure, Karp says, the signs so far don’t point to any significant change in that trend.

Seth Ackerman
On Twitter, someone relayed a pretty mind-blowing statistic highlighted by Matthew Dowd. Apparently, according to exit polls, those who “somewhat disapprove” of Joe Biden voted for Democrats by +4 percent this year, whereas in 2010, in the Obama midterm, among people who “somewhat disapproved” of Barack Obama, they voted Republican by +40 percent.

Matt Karp
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s obviously some kind of abstraction between Biden and the Democratic Party going on. Maybe there’s a sort of general agreement that Biden is a different kind of president somehow. I don’t know quite what to make of that. Whether that actually says something about what the quality of disapproval for Biden is in its intensity or whether it has to do with a consciousness that doesn’t identify Biden with the Democrats, I’m not sure.
I’ll just start by saying I was expecting it to be a lot bloodier, just based on what we know from history and what we know about midterm elections and about the current economic environment — that people don’t like it.
If you just look at first-term presidents and parties in power, without exception — or rather with one exception, the midterm that happened a year after 9/11 — those parties get hammered. That’s Donald Trump in 2018, that’s Obama in 2010, that’s Bill Clinton in 1994, that’s Ronald Reagan in 1982. I think 1990 was possibly another mild counterexample. So, every time you have a situation where you have a new president — a changing of the guard, a new power comes to the throne — then people respond in the midterms by saying, “No, I don’t like that either.” And that’s a really one of the most well-established patterns in American politics.
So, just on the surface of it, knowing that alone, you would expect the loss of twenty-some seats as a baseline in the House and a significant swing in the Senate and elsewhere. So, you have something like a historic underperformance by the GOP — at least that’s what it looks like now. How did the pundits get it wrong?
It looks like the conventional wisdom is settling around an explanation that focuses primarily on, one, the poor candidate quality and the number of extreme Trump-endorsed candidates symbolized by Herschel Walker in Georgia and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — these candidates are just too far out there.
The other explanation I’ve seen a lot of is abortion, basically. This summer we thought we saw that the Democrats were going to have an unusually good midterm after the Dobbs decision, and then it looked like that might not happen. Maybe it did actually happen.
I think you see some evidence for that in the exit polls — if you look at even Kentucky and Michigan, in different ways, they voted in favor of abortion rights. So that clearly had an effect too. I think both those things are right.
I think the third thing that I’d add, from a Jacobin magazine perspective  — and we’ll have to look a lot closer at the data, but there’s a general pattern — is the class dealignment that we’ve written a lot about over the years. That may favor the Democrats. Migrating to a more upscale electorate means that electorate is more likely to vote in off-year elections. You’re doing that Chuck Schumer trade, of exchanging one blue-collar voter in Western Pennsylvania for a moderate Republican in the suburbs. Well, that moderate Republican in the suburbs may be a more reliable midterm voter higher up the class pyramid.
I don’t know whether we can exactly nail it down yet, but class dealignment may have accelerated in this election. We’d have to look at the details in terms of the suburban precincts, but I suspect that it did. That doesn’t mean the Democrats didn’t win some working-class areas too, especially in Pennsylvania. Fetterman did really well, and we should talk about that.
But I think a dealigned electorate is one in which the Democrats’ traditional disadvantage in midterms — which was evident as recently as 2010 and 2014, where you had a younger, more minority-dominated electorate that was to some extent also more working class — is alleviated. You have a much larger college-educated base now, which is a factor on the margins too. That means that Republicans are going to have a smaller or maybe nonexistent midterm advantage.

What do you think about the ideological lessons? I don’t necessarily mean lessons that we should draw on the basis of objective fact, but rather: How will this affect conventional wisdom about who the Democrats are and where they’re going ideologically?
A year ago, the conventional wisdom was that it was a party that was racing to the left. But very recently, it seems as if the Democrats have ended up somehow being the party of moderation and reason.

Matt Karp
Yeah, I think in some ways the Supreme Court and the economic headwinds have combined to blunt the Joe Biden-as-FDR narrative and change the story to this new story of right-wing extremism, centered on both abortion and of course January-6-type stuff, which may have had some effects on the margins, especially in those suburban swing areas.
I saw Matt Christman saying in a tweet that the Democrats are now the “normie” party again. And that did seem to happen — that sort of thing certainly killed the Republican governor candidate in Pennsylvania, who just got annihilated in a state that Trump won. It was maybe, what, 40,000 votes in Pennsylvania? This guy lost in an open gubernatorial election, not even running against an incumbent, by over 10 percentage points. Almost as striking as the Florida blowouts in the other direction.
So, I think you had a Democratic Party that retreated from its economic agenda in the face of both this persistent inflation that hammered it in the polls and also centrists in the Senate who blocked most of the ambitious things that Biden wanted to do. So, that narrative has rightly disappeared on the ground, and I think voters probably did perceive it.
Then, the other meta story from this week that all the New York Times people were talking about is the calcification and entrenchment of these two power blocs that are roughly equal in size. You have polarization increasing with red places getting redder and blue places getting bluer. That was evident in the Georgia counties and precincts that I was looking at the other night. We don’t live in an era of conservative or liberal ascendancy. It’s really about parity and increasingly entrenched coalitions in which large majorities in either direction and ambitious programs are hard to imagine — certainly not legislative programs.
So, there is this sense that the Right can achieve some of its more ambitious agenda through the courts in a way that the Left can’t. That may help the Left in elections from time to time. It may have the silver lining of creating a sense of urgency about barring the way to right-wing extremism, which can work in a limited way and stave off a rout like it did this week.
But on the whole, that’s not really a good trade for us, in terms of actually changing the country and improving people’s lives.

Renée DiResta is a writer and the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Renée DiResta discuss how we can turn down the temperature on debates around social media and find real solutions; why terms like “censorship” and “misinformation” fail to capture the complex difficulties in reforming social media; and why, as a resident of San Francisco, she supported the school board and District Attorney recalls.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: As recently as six or seven years ago, I was teaching a class called Democracy in the Digital Age, and I felt that my role was to talk my students out of their unfounded optimism. They came in thinking that the internet would make everything better; the world would be richer and the Middle East more democratic. But now, all of the conversation about the internet is, “Here's why it's going to destroy democracy, help out autocrats all over the world, why we need to censor online, and why mis- and disinformation are dangerous.” What do you think the potential of the internet for politics is, and where do you think the real dangers lie?Renée DiResta: There was a lot of optimism pretty early on—the internet as the blogosphere, and the proliferation of voices that came about as a result of the elimination of gatekeepers and the ability to publish content. Then came the period where we moved into social networks. There was a dynamic of content being curated for you, with you being kind of pigeon-holed into being a particular type of person. We see these networks being assembled in the early 2010s, as platforms try to connect you to people who are just like you, independent of geography. And there's some really fantastic things that come about: people with rare diseases find each other. People who are in particular circumstances that they feel they can't discuss with people they know in real life find each other. But what you also start to see is recommendation engines connecting together all sorts of other communities as well, including those that we might consider a little bit more toxic, like the highly conspiratorial communities. People become really deeply engaged with a highly factional way of engaging on the internet. You start to see it in the 2015 presidential campaign in the US, with people putting certain emojis in their social media bio; you see the Pepe the Frog community come about as a very strong community in favor of then-candidate Trump. And over the next five or six years, you start to see all of these different types of people with a particular factional politics. The norm that gets established is the norm of, “We use this platform to fight. We use Facebook as a platform to argue, to insulate ourselves in particular communities, and then go and wage war against other communities.”Mounk: If what you're saying is that fundamentally, what's going on is that the structure of social media just makes people self-assemble in very small but very, very passionate groups, then it feels like we need a much, much more structural fix for our institutions to be able to cope. What is the implication of that?DiResta: First of all, I don't think that misinformation is a particularly useful framing of the dynamics of the problem today. Most of the things that really rile people up are not demonstrably falsifiable. You're not saying that a fact about the world is untrue, and you need to be corrected on that thing through a label or a fact check. And even in those neat cases, people might not believe it. There's this fundamental problem: if you're in Tribe A, you distrust the media of Tribe B and vice versa. And so even the attempt to correct the misinformation, when it is misinformation, is read with a particular kind of partisan valence. “Is this coming from somebody in my tribe, or is this more manipulation from the bad guys?”One of the more useful frameworks for what is happening today is rumors: people are spreading information that can maybe never be verified or falsified, within communities of people who really care about an issue. They spread it amongst themselves to inform their friends and neighbors. There is a kind of altruistic motivation. The platforms find their identity for them based on statistical similarity to other users. Once the network is assembled and people are put into these groups or these follower relationships, the way that information is curated is that when one person sees it, they hit that share button—it's a rumor, they're interested, and they want to spread it to the rest of their community. Facts are not really part of the process here. It's like identity engagement: “this is a thing that I care about, that you should care about, too.” This is rewarmed media theory from the 1960s: the structure of the system perpetuates how the information is going to spread. Social media is just a different type of trajectory, where the audience has real power as participants. That's something that is fundamentally different from all prior media environments. Not only can you share the rumor, but millions of people can see in aggregate the sharing of that rumor. Then the question is, what do you do about that? And that's where I think we can examine which rumor is resonating within which community at which time. This claim about COVID is really getting traction within the black community, and this other claim about COVID is really getting traction in the wellness community. But those claims are not the same claims. We don't see the wellness community sharing the claims that the black community finds impactful. And that means that the responses have to also be much more tailored, much more targeted.Mounk: If the structural architecture of Twitter and Facebook determines the way in which these rumors spread, don't we need a structural fix in order to contain the danger?DiResta: I think the answer is yes. I'll give a specific example here, to get out of the realm of theory. When you pull up your Twitter feed, there's “Trends” on the right hand side, and they're personalized for you. And sometimes there's a very, very small number of participants in the trend, maybe just a few hundred tweets. But it's a nudge, it says you are going to be interested in this topic. It's bait: go click this thing that you have engaged with before that you are probably going to be interested in, and then you will see all of the other people's tweets about it. Then you engage. And in the act of engagement, you are perpetuating that trend.Early on, I was paying attention to the anti-vaccine movement. I was a new mom, and I was really interested in what people were saying about this on Facebook. I was kind of horrified by it, to be totally candid. I started following some anti-vaccine groups, and then Facebook began to show me Pizzagate, and then QAnon. I had never typed in Pizzagate, and I had never typed in QAnon. But through the power of collaborative filtering, it understood that if you were an active participant in a conspiracy theory community that fundamentally distrusts the government, you are probably similar to these other people who maybe have a different flavor of the conspiracy. And the recommendation engine didn't understand what it was doing. It was not a conscious effort. It just said: here's an active community, you have some similarities, you should go join that active community. Let's give you this nudge. And that is how a lot of these networks were assembled in the early and mid-2010s. There are many people who feel that any change to the design or any change to the algorithm, how somebody is nudged or prompted, is censorship. And so what we're starting to see is these arguments around censorship, which historically have been tied to viewpoints, instead being applied to just the basic phenomenon of design—what is amplified and what is not? There is inherently a weighting and a value judgment there. I would argue that we could experiment with that far more than we have, and that is this question of how you use design. What does an optimal system design look like? I think that's really where the interesting research should be at this point.Mounk: Do you think that people are going to be as skeptical about structural changes as they are about continual attempts by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to “moderate” speech by making people delete tweets or suspending accounts, or even terminating them? And what are the kinds of structural reforms that social media platforms should be experimenting with to make healthier platforms?DiResta: I mean, there will always be complaints anytime a powerful platform does something that changes a particular individual or community's perception of their distribution. You may remember, some of the earliest allegations that the platforms were behaving unfairly came about when large numbers of automated accounts were taken down. We used to jokingly refer to these as “bot raptures.” So people wanted fewer bots, but when they saw their follower accounts decrease, there was a sense that something egregious had happened. But I think one way that platforms can address concerns about this is through a little bit more transparency around what came down and why, as opposed to you just waking up and you've lost, say, 20,000 followers. Because that moment creates an opportunity for powerful influencers to frame that reduction of automated or spam accounts as inherently anti-conservative, as opposed to a massive cull across the platform in which politicians in India lost many tens of thousands of followers as well. I think the legitimacy question is what you're really getting at here: who has the moral authority to decide how the system is run? That is a very complicated question, because of course, there's “ref working” by powerful people on all sides of the political spectrum, and not limited to the United States. We see ref working in many, many different countries, including authoritarians who rely on intimidation campaigns, propaganda bots, and trolls, to create particular perceptions of their popularity or the popularity of their policies. Although this is a very heated debate in the United States, these phenomena are happening globally. And that's one of the real challenges for the platforms. Mounk: I think there are at least three different questions. One is about who should be allowed to make the rules that govern big platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which are private companies, but also have systemic importance for being able to engage in political debate in this country and in other countries. Then the second kind of question is, once we figure out who should be able to make those decisions, what kinds of decisions should they be able to make, and what kind of decisions are the correct decisions? Is it just a question of making structural adjustments so that Twitter isn't built to be an adversity-and-hating-each-other platform?And then the third question is transparency. Even if we said that some committee in Silicon Valley should be able to rule on what happens in Facebook and Twitter, even on arbitrary grounds, should they have to inform users about what happens? I think it’s certainly become obvious how negative the consequences are when people are driven into this kind of paranoia. It becomes very tempting for people to think, if a few tweets in a row didn't perform that well, “Hang on a second, I somehow offended some engineer at Twitter headquarters, and they just shadow banned me.” DiResta: I completely agree. First, there's the question of transparency. As you noted, people are more attuned to takedowns on their own side. And yet one thing you notice when you look at the stats on how many millions of accounts come down, is that everybody feels this same sense of aggrievement that you're describing. So, to be able to assess that, we would want to have transparency in the takedown data so that researchers could look at these questions. There were a couple of audits within Facebook, a civil rights audit and an anti-conservative bias audit. And these things were happening kind of concurrently. I don't remember the final outputs, but I do recall that the anti-conservative bias  investigators really didn't find very much. There was no smoking gun there. Glenn Beck and a bunch of other people went to Facebook, had this meeting, decided that their hearts were in the right place, that there probably wasn't much of it there. But Facebook ends up eliminating human oversight. They take the human editors off the trending topics feature, and all of a sudden Trending Topics is promoting all kinds of—I remember getting, in the science section, a Wiccan blog about how Mercury was in retrograde. Facebook ultimately wound up killing that feature, because there was no way for them to curate it in a way that would surface reliable information. The kind of work that Facebook does internally is using data that only Facebook has. So when we make arguments for transparency, if you want to actually assess the extent to which a particular community may, in fact, be disproportionately silenced by a policy or by a design choice, then there has to be a way for someone outside of the platform to participate in that auditing process. You mentioned regulation. One of the bills that I was most excited about was the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, which argues that we can't answer these questions without access to data. And there is support for that idea, even from people on the right, like Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn, and also on the left, like Senator Blumenthal. You see this bipartisan recognition that in order to actually assess what is happening, we should create systems that enable the research to be done. The problem, though, is that regulation to simply punish the platforms is much more likely to get picked up in the media and become a topic of conversation. And that is much more likely to get passed at some state house level, as we've seen in Texas. I think people would like to neatly shoehorn this into a “censorship versus not censorship” choice, but it's not really that simple. I think we have to be advocating much more for transparency, if we want to actually assess the extent to which this is a problem. For any given user, though, there is one other thing I'll just flag: there is now the Facebook Oversight Board, which I think provides an interesting model by which you can appeal a decision that was made about your account. It’s a potential opportunity to plead your case, to have an outside body, not within the platform and operating under certain incentive structures take a look at it. That is, I think, a useful model. But as you noted earlier, the questions are, how do you scale that, who funds it, and who sits on the jury?Mounk: You mentioned education. Let me transition to a related yet very different topic. You lived in San Francisco for a long time, and you became quite active in challenging some of the political trends within the city. You refer to yourself as center-left, I assume you identify broadly with the Democratic Party, but you became worried about what progressives within the San Francisco city government were doing, particularly on education and crime. Tell us a little bit about why those headline stories about San Francisco really should be concerning to people, both in terms of what's happening to the city and in terms of the mistakes that other cities might make if they follow that model.DiResta: It was very interesting how we felt about it locally, versus how it was cast in the national media. This created some interesting tensions. I lived in San Francisco for a decade from 2011 to 2021, and it wasn't theoretical for me, right? My house and car were broken into. My children learned to recognize needles at the playground. And I felt like we could do better. When the schools closed during the pandemic, there was a lot of real goodwill. Early on in March we all said, “Great, close the schools.” We were all homeschooling, and everybody was very tolerant of the circumstances for a very long time—through the end of the summer, actually. But when it came to the end of the summer, and we began to realize that there was no plan to do anything differently, and that what had happened from March to May was going to be normal for the entire next school year, that was when people really started galvanizing and saying, “OK, things are really going off the rails here.”At the same time, the board was very focused on things like renaming the schools. We're renaming schools that we can't go into? That doesn't make any sense. And it wasn't right versus left, it was moderate versus progressive (which in San Francisco means something more like far left)—a blue versus bluer kind of community. And so parents did really galvanize, and it was very interesting because there was this galvanization that was happening nationwide, as people were calling for reopening and different communities had different kinds of things that they were very angry about. The San Francisco moderates were not anti-masks. They were very pro-vaccine. They were very much advocating for teachers to get vaccines first, to help them jump to the front of the line, to keep this moving—can we fundraise for PPE, or ventilation in the classrooms? All of these sorts of things. But it was very interesting, because within San Francisco, the far left, including the teachers’ union, tried to frame this as the right-wing manifestation of the reopener movement coming to San Francisco. And it doesn't help, of course, that right-wing media loves to talk about San Francisco, because there are real problems in that city and nobody has been held accountable for them, because our political machine just moves its friends into higher and higher offices. What you started to see was this pushback from parents who were saying enough is enough. But it was read as, “the right wing cabal comes to San Francisco politics.” And of course, that comes with a bunch of smears—“You are saying the same thing that Tucker Carlson is saying.” Then you find yourself in that awkward position of having to say, “Unfortunately, yes. We might find their politics unfavorable, but just because they said the same thing doesn't mean that we should be living in these circumstances.” It harkens back to the very start of our conversation. When you have these highly factional dynamics, everything is cast as, “Your political identity is opposed to my political identity, and therefore, what you're advocating for, I will demonize as an identity function, as opposed to engaging with the substance of the argument”—which was that we should reopen schools because kids are not doing well. Making that a partisan thing was extraordinary to watch. Mounk: This is what, drawing on an idea by Emily Yoffe, I've called “180ism”—the sense that politics has become so polarized that you often want to say the opposite of whatever your opponent is saying. And of course, the ironic thing about that is that as soon as Tucker Carlson jumps onto some bandwagon, you suddenly have to change positions and start saying the opposite of what he's saying, and you're actually outsourcing your own political positioning to the people you most abhor.What about the crime aspect of this? Give us a bit of a context for why it is that your children by the age of two needed to be able to recognize needles on the playground.DiResta: There is a lot of deep empathy for the plight of the unhoused and addicted people who are on the streets of San Francisco, and I think the entire blue spectrum in San Francisco feels that empathy. There are debates about what should be done about it, and there is actually a fair amount of support for safe injection centers and similar things, which the right would be horrified by, but which is perfectly within the realm of acceptable solutions. Many of us have argued for that at a state level as well. But there are extraordinary amounts of money that are thrown at the problem. Most of the vehicular break-ins in San Francisco are organized crime rings that operate outside of the city, come into the city because there are a lot of tourists, break in, and leave again. And this has been known for a very, very long time. But in the campaign for District Attorney when Chesa Boudin was running, there were arguments about creating a system by which people who had their windows smashed could apply for the city to cover the cost of the repair. So we're just going to keep paying to repair people's windows? And there's a lot of finger pointing from the DA to the police, and from the police back to the DA: Why aren’t police arresting more? Why isn't the DA charging anybody?This, again, fed into the larger national conversation about decarceral prosecutors, and how prominent people who were aligned with that movement nationwide saw Chesa as being under attack by this national machine. But what polling showed was just that the people of San Francisco—I think there was some crazy stat that came out a couple of weeks ago that said something like [half had been a victim of theft]. But the arguments were always that the crime stats don't support the sentiment, ergo it must be that a vast propaganda operation is brainwashing the good people of San Francisco, as if they're all reading right-wing media. There was a rather surreal conversation about it, where if somebody on the right is criticizing the crime wave in San Francisco, that means that we should just be happy with the status quo in the city, even though many of us had this very personal experience of being a victim of crime or knowing somebody who was a victim of crime. The idea that you've just been brainwashed by some right-wing pundit was actually really insulting, and so a lot of communities got very galvanized around this and felt that it was time to send a message back to the city leadership by saying that these policies are not working, and we cannot continue with them. I had left by the time of the Chesa recall, but that was where the momentum was.Mounk: How did this countermovement, first on the school closings, and then on the Chesa Boudin recall, happen? How did people manage to organize, even though the people in political power were arrayed in defense of these individuals and institutions? And how did you message those campaigns to make it harder for people to falsely claim that you were just foot soldiers in this vast right-wing conspiracy?DiResta: It was a huge effort by a number of different organizations in the moderate center of the city, so I don't get any real credit for this. But the focus had to be on competence: Is this policy working, what might a different policy look like, and who might better execute that policy? As much as the far left in the city tried to turn this into a referendum on the identity of the school board, as if this was just kind of punishing black and Latino school board members, what was really happening were arguments that would have led to the entire board being recalled if they could have been. But these three folks were eligible, and it was really just on competence—sun-shining for city records, for email records, to see if any work was being done to reopen, if there were emails between the school board members coming up with the plans. And they didn't exist. That was the thing that was so staggering, and that's when you start to see local media beginning to write the story of competence. Are these the best people to be running this school district at this time? And in the referendum, the voters overwhelmingly found that the answer was no. The focus was on how we might have a school board that is not just a stepping stone to higher political office, where the DCCC and the folks in San Francisco who do the endorsements are trying to position their people for a subsequent Board of Supervisors role or something. Is there a way to break that model and to argue for a parent-centered, student-centered school board, and I think that was, above all else, what really motivated the parents. The union advocated for the teachers, and the school board had been endorsed by the union, and there was nobody advocating for the kids. That was the gap that a lot of concerned parents decided to step in and fill.Mounk: What advice would you give to people who may be listening to this and saying, “Hey, my city has similar problems, or some institution I'm a part of has been taken over by deeply ideological and not very competent people—how can I argue against this without ruining my good name or being smeared as part of this right-wing conspiracy?”DiResta: When I talk about the kind of factional dynamics online today, it does make it very, very easy to smear people. That is almost the cost of participation in the public sphere today. I think it's really unfortunate that that's where the norms are, but that is where the norms are. What we tried to do was to create a positive message: these are ways that we want to help children—not counter-smear, not wading in to the greatest extent possible. But the recognition that you can impose significant costs on a person by smearing them and by making it impossible for them to speak up, because of a risk of firing—it’s my sincere hope that institutions and companies become more aware that this is a tactic that is widely used online by every facet of the factional spectrum at this point. And it is something that institutions should really take care not to fall prey to. There are occasionally times when something egregious has been uncovered or done, and an institution has a responsibility to investigate. But the idea that so-and-so is a fascist for advocating for a competent government is not that.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The authoritarians at home and abroad have faced some reversals, but Americans should consider the midterm elections as only a respite. Liberal democracy remains in danger in the United States and around the world.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Why Elon Musk is blowing up Twitter’s business
How close are we to nuclear war?
Tumblr gets the last laugh.
It’s Not OverNovember has been a good month for democracy. Brazil’s autocratic president, Jair Bolsonaro, authorized the transfer of power after losing in national elections to a left-wing challenger. Russia’s murderous army is literally on the run in Ukraine. And American voters went to the polls and defied both history and expectation: They left the Senate in the hands of Democrats, gave the House to the Republicans by only a tiny majority, and crushed the electoral aspirations of a ragtag coalition of election deniers, Christian nationalists, and general weirdos.That’s the good news. But as relieved as I am that some of my darkest worries did not come to pass last week, democracy is still in danger. What happened last week was an important electoral victory that allows all of us to fight another day—specifically, two years from now. Without the defeat of the deniers in 2022, the 2024 elections would likely have fallen into chaos and perhaps even violence. Both are still possibilities. But voters rallied and turned back the worst and most immediate threats to the American system of government.Think of last week as American democracy’s Dunkirk: an improvised but crucial escape from disaster. I generally dislike World War II metaphors; most things we do are nowhere near the scale of the fight to defeat the Axis. But I’m going to break my own rule here because I worry about too much complacency among the prodemocracy coalition.If you’re fuzzy on your 20th-century history, Dunkirk was the beach in France where the Nazis trapped retreating Allied forces, mostly hundreds of thousands of British troops, after the fall of France in 1940. Had these units been destroyed, the United Kingdom might well have faced the prospect of surrender to Nazi Germany. Instead, the Germans hesitated to close the noose, and nearly 350,000 men were evacuated to Britain by a flotilla composed mostly of civilian volunteers, a miraculous feat that protected Britain from invasion and bought time until the American entry into the war.Like Dunkirk, the midterms were a necessary, but not final, victory. The old saw about “the most important election in our lifetime” turned out to be true this time: Without multiple defeats of the worst state and federal candidates in recent history, the unraveling of American democracy would have accelerated and the security of future elections would be in doubt, at least in the states captured by the election deniers and their associated charlatans.If you want a vision of what such a nightmare might look like, imagine a close election in 2024. Battleground states are counting ballots with armed people swarming around election sites and state offices. Arizona Governor Kari Lake, Pennsylvania Governor Doug Mastriano, and Wisconsin Governor Tim Michels are all frantically calling and texting one another on Election Night, and ordering their state institutions to hold off on finalizing the results. Meanwhile, Arizona Secretary of State Mark Finchem (a former member of the Oath Keepers) reaches out to his like-minded counterparts—Jim Marchant in Nevada, Kristina Karamo in Michigan—to ensure that none of them will certify Democratic wins, perhaps in hopes of flipping the decision to their legislatures or sympathetic judges. If Karamo misses the call, it’s because she’s busy strategizing with Michigan’s new Republican governor, Tudor Dixon, a conspiracy-theory-spouting flake who thinks that COVID restrictions and the George Floyd protests were an attempt to topple the U.S. government.Fortunately, all of these people were soundly defeated—except for Lake, who lost in a squeaker and, true to form, still refuses to concede to Democrat Katie Hobbs. But among them, they garnered millions of votes. These 2022 losers and other, similar candidates are still out there, and they will all continue their best efforts (as Lake is demonstrating) to corrode the foundations of our constitutional order.Which brings us to Donald Trump.As I wrote a few days ago, Trump’s 2024 candidacy confronts us, once and for all, with a decision about what kind of country we are. I hope that the Republicans deny him their nomination: A spirited fight within the GOP that ends by flushing Trump out of the American political system would be good for the Republicans and for America. But I have no faith in the regenerative power of a party that has devolved into an anti-constitutional, violent movement led by cowards and opportunists. Especially because the current crop of possible GOP contenders is just another collection of poltroons and Trump imitators; the Republican primaries are likely only to replace one authoritarian cult leader with another.American democracy’s Dunkirk means that the danger to the 2024 election from chicanery and outright attack, both political and physical, is much lower now than even a month ago. Turnout in 2022 was high, as midterms go, but not high enough, particularly—and as usual—among young voters, whose turnout, at just over 27 percent, was actually lower than in 2018 (when it hit its highest level ever). And we’re stuck for years to come with some truly odious candidates who managed to get past the voters. (I am, of course, speaking of J. D. Vance here, among others.) The Kari Lakes and the Tudor Dixons will resurface in two years. If we are going to turn them back once and for all, we must not underestimate their resentment and will to power. We know who they are; we must decide who we are.Related:
What Bolsonaro’s loss reveals about the limits of populism
Benghazi times infinity
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, a former Justice Department official, as special counsel to oversee two major criminal investigations involving Donald Trump.
The Justice Department is reportedly conducting an antirust investigation into the owner of Ticketmaster. The investigation predates this week’s frenzy for Taylor Swift concert tickets, which caused the site’s systems to crash.
The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to allow its student-loan debt-relief program to go into effect. A federal judge froze the program on November 10.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg explains why fighting conspiracy theories is essential to fighting anti-Semitism.
The Third Rail: There is a legal basis for harmony between religious conservatism and LGBTQ rights, David French argues.
The Books Briefing: Katherine Hu asks: What do children owe their parents?
The Great Game: “When I watch the World Cup, I’m celebrating not what this country is, but what it can be,” Clint Smith writes.
(Tim Lahan)
An Ode to Pull-upsBy James Parker 
Who do I think I am, dangling off this bar?
I think I’m an ape. I think I’m an aerialist. I think I’m Jason Momoa. I think I’m a 54-year-old man with a dodgy shoulder, experiencing—to the pound, to the ounce—the precise terms of my contract with gravity. That’s one thing you can always say for the pull-up: You’re lifting your own weight.
Peter Wehner on his friend Mike Gerson, who died this week
What will writers do without Twitter?
Parents need their own AARP.
(Photo by Eric Zachanowich. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.)
Read. Curl up with one of these books that our writers read too late.Or spend a few minutes with a poem by Adrienne Rich, written before she became known as an advocate and feminist leader.Watch. Dead to Me is back for Season 3 on Netflix, and The Sex Lives of College Girls has returned for Season 2 on HBO Max. (Both were picks on our critic’s list of 20 perfect TV shows for a short attention span.)In theaters, see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever if you haven’t already. Plus: The Menu is a pitch-black comedy that skewers class politics.Listen. On the season-finale episode of our podcast How to Build a Happy Life, the hosts explore a new formula for happiness.And on a special episode of Radio Atlantic, Franklin Foer and Clint Smith talk about which teams they’re rooting for in the 2022 World Cup.Play our daily crossword.P.S.There was no way I was going to write about Dunkirk and not mention Darkest Hour, the remarkable film recounting the terrifying days after the fall of France. It is an inspiration, and a reminder of something we now often forget: World War II was, initially, a close-run thing—the Allies could easily have lost. Despite the beautiful sets, special effects, and top-notch battle scenes, what I found most moving were the depictions of political courage in London. This is where the war was won; the men on the battlefields would never have been able to engage in their heroic sacrifices without the determination of leaders back home and the solidarity of the societies that sent them into battle.For me, the most affecting scene—and one to watch when you feel your resolve fading and your patience with politics flagging—was the impromptu meeting between Churchill and King George VI (played elegantly by Gary Oldman and Ben Mendelsohn, respectively) late one night. Churchill, surprised and half-dressed, sits with his sovereign as they decide the future of their nation. The King has decided to support the prime minister’s determination to stand and fight, which was until that point in doubt—especially after George confessed earlier that Churchill sometimes scares him. Churchill, too, is nearly out of courage. “I have very few people with whom I can talk frankly,” Churchill says. “Perhaps now we have each other,” George answers. Churchill asks if he still scares his king. “A little,” His Majesty answers with a smile. “But I can cope.”— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The Crowd returns triumphantly this week, for a rollicking conversation with one of Twitter's brightest and most iconoclastic personalities, Phillippe Lemoine. Phillippe writes the War on Science newsletter for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, and is also working on a book on the recent history of Russo-American foreign policy.We begin the show talking about direct democracy, and whether "the people" are worth listening to. Should we actually want the vox populi to weigh in on, say, American policy towards China, or public health? Maybe not—but does the educated elite have a much better track record? Phillippe tells of his personal encounters with motivated reasoning, ideologically driven conclusions, and just plain stupidity among epidemiologists and statisticians during the pandemic. We also discuss how deeply felt "wokeism" is among younger generations. Are we doomed as generations turn over, or will the ideological fever eventually break?

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In Part 2 (available here for subscribers), we dig into that final question—the fate of the Great Awokening—even further. What is it about social media that makes us crazy? We ask Phillippe how he stays sane, and protects himself from the pressure to conform ideologically. His answer shows just how far gone Shadi and Damir really are.Required Reading:One of Philippe's many articles critiquing conventional modeling of the Covid pandemic (War on Science).The study Philippe criticized, “Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe,” by Waxman et. al (nature).Scott Alexander’s rundown of Covid models and their critiques, including Philippe’s (Slate Star Codex).

On a dusky evening in 2007, while completing her Ph.D., Laura Kelley was traipsing through the backwoods of Queensland, Australia, when she heard her landlady shouting for her cat. Bonnie! Bonnie! Bonnie! came the call, just as it did every mealtime. Kelley peered across the property, hoping to say hello—but the woman was nowhere to be found. Only when Kelley gazed upward did she discover the true source of the sound: a spotted bowerbird perched in a nearby tree.The bowerbird almost certainly wasn’t intentionally messing with Kelley, or what might have been a very confused cat. But it had the vocal chops to fool her several times during her stint in Queensland—a feat that’s both impressive and discomfiting. “It was so astonishingly accurate,” Kelley, who’s now studying animal behavior at the University of Exeter, in England, told me. “On more than one occasion, I got caught out.”Spotted bowerbirds are just one of hundreds of avian species that can mimic a whole menagerie of sounds—the laughter of children, the roar of a chainsaw, the wail of a police siren, the click of a camera shutter. There are birds that mimic other birds; there are birds that mimic more than one bird at once.[Read: The story of songbirds is a story of sugar]Mimicry, at its core, is the catalyst for farce: At its most powerful, it can make other animals (humans among them) question their own senses, or behave in ways they otherwise might not. Pulling it off requires awareness of one’s environment, and of the fragile social networks that single sounds can upend. Birds can manipulate their fellows into a false reality—and the way they manage it is something that the best polyglots among us can’t even dream to achieve.Scientists have long known that humans aren’t the only animals that eavesdrop, mimic, and deceive. Seals and whales have been documented impersonating human voices; certain bats can buzz like bees to scare the bejesus out of owls. But birds, as a group, are top among the world’s most accomplished auditory copycats. More than 300 songbirds are known to mimic at least one other creature; some, including mockingbirds, imitate so often that less than half of their “speaking” happens in their native tongue.TheAtlantic · Northern Pacific tree frog (Dave Gammon and Anna Corsiglia)TheAtlantic · Mockingbird mimicking a Northern Pacific tree frog (Dave Gammon and Anna Corsiglia)Not all impersonations are convincing to whoever’s listening; not all of them are even purposeful. But some birds do seem to deploy mimicry for personal gain. Brown thornbills—teeny specimens with all the heft of three pennies—can keep predators 40 times their size away from their nestlings by mimicking other birds’ alarm calls. Baby cuckoos, deposited by their parents as eggs in the nests of other birds, have evolved to copy the calls of their foster species to con their adoptive parents into feeding them. Some are such masterful mimics that they can imitate entire broods of chicks at once.[Read: Do you even lift, embryo?]Perhaps the most duplicitous con birds are the fork-tailed drongos of Australia. The little black birds spend their days listening in on the alarm calls of small birds and mammals—sociable weavers, pied babblers, meerkats, and the like—and will impersonate these manic chirps and squawks when they spy the animals rooting around for insects and lizards. Panicked, the listeners scatter; the drongos then swoop down to feast on the stolen snacks. To keep their victims gullible, or perhaps unsure, the drongos will mix some truth into the lies, sometimes accurately warning other creatures when actual danger is afoot. They establish reputations as stalwart sentinels then leverage that trust in their thieving hijinks. “They’re nasty little pieces of work,” says Tom Flower, a behavioral ecologist at Capilano University, in Canada, who has watched drongos yoink many a meal.The drongos’ antics introduce a strange paradox: For all their success, many birds’ impersonating powers are sometimes, well, “pretty crummy,” says Mairenn Attwood, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge. And yet, other animals fall for them consistently. There’s an explanation, at least, for how drongos pull it off: For meerkats and their ilk, the cost of assuming that alarm calls are fake is just too high. It’s still better to heed a dubious warning and lose a morsel of food than to ignore it and lose your life. But for researchers, poor impressions can make certain mimics tough to identify at all. “There could be birds that are mimicking things badly, and we might not know that they are actually mimicking anything because they’re bad at it,” says Chris Balakrishnan, an ornithologist at the National Science Foundation. Our biased human perspective can skew the way we assess mimicry, causing us to cast nets that are too narrow or too wide.TheAtlantic · Meerkat alarm calls (Tom Flower)TheAtlantic · Drongo mimicking meerkat alarm calls (Tom Flower)Mimicry can be just as befuddling when it’s done particularly well. In order to study mockery, researchers need to identify incongruity: a bird making a noise that we and the animal listener think it’s not supposed to make. “I suspect I’ve been duped numerous times without even knowing it,” says Jon Sakata, a vocal-learning expert at McGill University, in Canada. It can be a lot to track. Mockingbirds, for instance, are keen on all kinds of cross-species karaoke—which means scientists like Dave Gammon, at Elon University, have to “become experts on the acoustics of every sound made by any species in the local area” just to try and keep up. And although avian imitators have been subject to plenty of scrutiny, the victims of their shenanigans are generally, Attwood told me, an understudied bunch.Perhaps that’s in part because we, too, are often on the receiving end of feints. Plenty of bird researchers “have been thwarted by the study organisms themselves,” Balakrishnan told me. Sahas Barve, an evolutionary ecologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, has been taken in by a drongo mimicking an eagle; Sakata once mistook a mockingbird’s screech for a bona fide car alarm. Even Gammon, who enjoys stumping expert birders with recordings of mockingbirds, still gets played by his subjects on occasion. “Those mockingbirds keep me guessing all the time,” he told me, though he insists that he’s fooled far less often than he used to be.Just about anyone would likely be tricked by Australia’s superb lyrebirds—quite possibly the world’s most accomplished and convincing mimickers, operating at the intersection of seduction and deceit. During the breeding season, males will post up in trees or atop fallen logs, warbling out intricate arias composed of the calls of more than 20 other species to lure in females. Mimicry even plays a role during the act of sex itself: Males hop down to the forest floor to impersonate an entire mixed-species flock of birds attacking a predator, complete with the sound of frantic wingbeats, while copulating with their mates. “It’s like a one-bird radio play,” says Anastasia Dalziell, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Wollongong, in Australia, who’s spent years studying the birds. The raucous ruse seems to prolong intercourse—and can also stop a female from ghosting a male before they’ve had a chance to couple up.TheAtlantic · Shrike thrush (Anastasia Dalziell)TheAtlantic · Lyrebird mimicking a shrike thrush (Anastasia Dalziell)This might seem like a bizarre set of noises to set a romantic mood. But work from Dalziell and her colleagues suggests that males might be trying to dupe females into believing that peril is nigh so she won’t terminate their tryst and mate with someone else—a bonkers bird version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” The male will even cover the female’s head with his flapping wings, possibly raising a blindfold that prevents her from noticing that the coast is, indeed, clear.[Read: The birdsong that took over North America]I asked every expert I spoke with for this story whether birds that use vocal mimicry might be having fun with it—whether they are sometimes being, well, trolls. Most weren’t super keen on the idea without proof. “I don’t think I can go that far,” Flower told me. “My little anti-anthropomorphic bones in my body just can’t allow me as a scientist to go down that route.” Others, though, had been mollified by years of watching birds be straight-up jerks. If some have a mean mimicking streak, “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Balakrishnan told me. Plus, if birds did have a sense of humor, vocal copycatting might be how they put it on display, Attwood said.
A fork-tailed drongo (left) and a meerkat (Tom Flower)
Birds, after all, “have the free time and the cognitive capacity” for jokes, Barve told me. “It’s totally possible that parrots are playing pranks on each other out there and we just don’t know it.” If that’s the case, it’ll be yet another way we’re hoodwinked by birds. As much as we fancy ourselves good communicators, speakers, and listeners, they’re the ones that have been outdoing us for millennia, achieving what we humans so often struggle to do: cluing in to other creatures’ wants and needs and fears, transcending the barriers between species, and exploiting the fuzziness therein.People will inevitably struggle to understand animals that outdo us vocally—that can tap into and re-create soundscapes that we cannot. Still, Dalziell told me, that’s part of the appeal. Listening to a bird’s mimicry “makes you look at the world with a completely different point of view.” It’s a narration of the way an animal interprets its environment and attempts to mold it to its wants. In that context, an avian spoof—a lark, if you will—may not be so much of a stretch.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the suggestion that he might run the platform into the ground was, for many, including me, a shorthand. Many supposed that Musk would roll back key moderation policies or reinstate some banned accounts, or that his ownership would be some kind of anti-woke Bat-Signal, flooding the platform with people who are attracted to social media for its capacity to alienate people.Instead, less than a month into Musk’s tenure, he seems to be doing everything in his power to throw a wrench in the gears of Twitter’s infrastructure. As some Twitter insiders predicted, Musk has drastically and indiscriminately cut engineering staff with crucial institutional knowledge and gutted teams that deal with Twitter’s complex legal and privacy policies and their enforcement. He’s also frozen code deployment and has pledged to disconnect Twitter’s microservices, which are part of the website’s technical architecture, but which Musk sees as costly bloat. Anecdotally, users across the world—and specifically outside the United States—are reporting all kinds of abnormalities and glitches in the way tweets load. Since Musk’s layoffs started, current and former Twitter engineers have publicly and privately expressed concern that the world’s richest man is making decisions that could cause Twitter to structurally decay and go offline during peak moments.In recent days, I’ve had conversations with three former Twitter employees, all with varying knowledge of the platform’s infrastructure. They each argued that Musk appears to know very little about how the company he purchased actually works—that Twitter has its own, custom-built and self-hosted infrastructure, which runs out of multiple data centers, for example. And they were uncertain whether those crucial and complex parts of the company were still adequately staffed: Thousands of people have been laid off from Twitter in recent days, and remaining employees were offered buyouts yesterday. (“We will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk reportedly wrote to staffers. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.” If that promise somehow fails to entice, workers can opt for three months’ severance instead.)Musk seems to have picked the worst time possible for his ultimatum: On Sunday, the 2022 FIFA World Cup kicks off, an event that, according to the former Twitter employees, historically produces the site’s highest global traffic. All three individuals I spoke with said the World Cup is a major stress test for the platform in the best of circumstances, requiring careful coordination from the site-reliability-engineering team to ensure that crucial services stay up.I initially wanted to write about how Twitter might be quickly snuffed out. But most people with any understanding of how the platform works say Twitter is unlikely to just cough, sputter, and go dark forever. Those I spoke with all described a slow rot of systems that get more load than expected and “just fail silently,” as one recent employee put it. “And then other services are just waiting for those to respond [and] you start to see things just not work.” That former employee described what was happening to Twitter as similar to plaque building up inside a person’s arteries for years before a heart attack.This all squares with the nightmare scenarios for Twitter I wrote about as Musk was taking power. But just because Twitter might not permanently ascend to The Great 404 in the Sky doesn’t mean we won’t lose something in the process. One former senior employee suggested that Musk may simply prioritize the site so that it works great for celebrities and power users, noting that Twitter once ran a dedicated server just to handle Justin Bieber’s wildly popular account. But if the experience is significantly degraded for regular users or becomes unreliable during the kind of central news events that define Twitter, or if the platform’s most active users all migrate away, then, in a sense, the platform does die.What then? What do we lose if we lose Twitter?[Read: Elon Musk is bad at this]I’m sheepish to say that I find the question personally haunting. For a journalist who came up too late to latch on to the blogging era, Twitter acted as a career accelerator in a way that almost doesn’t feel real when I take stock of it. I know that I got at least one job because I was overzealous and presumptuous enough to start interjecting myself into conversations I probably had no business in. Follow somebody for long enough on Twitter and, rightly or wrongly, you begin to sense that you know them—or at least, have a rough idea of how they think and how they publicly perform their job. In the media, a whole microgeneration of younger journalists owe parts of their career to the way that Twitter collapses social networks and allows people to find new and interesting voices. This week, the writer Olivia Messer shared a poignant account of the way a series of Twitter DMs changed her life. Other accounts of this dynamic are more like time capsules, such as a 2013 story in this magazine in which Alexis Madrigal describes hiring a current Atlantic staffer largely because of a relationship built on Twitter. “One minute I’ve never heard of this kid, and the next minute, he’s engaged in interesting, respectful conversation with half of my Internet friends,” Madrigal wrote.If that sounds quaint, it’s because Twitter has changed quite a bit since those days. At its best, Twitter can still provide that magic of discovering a niche expert or elevating a necessary, insurgent voice, but there is far more noise than signal. Plenty of those overenthusiastic voices, brilliant thinkers, and influential accounts have burned out on culture-warring, or have been harassed off the site or into lurking. And many of the most hyperactive, influential twitterati (cringe) of the mid-2010s have built up large audiences and only broadcast now: They don’t read their mentions, and they rarely engage. In private conversations, some of those people have expressed a desire to see Musk torpedo the site and put a legion of posters out of their misery. I understand the impulse, and yet a part of me views this as a privileged cohort pulling the escape-hatch ladder up behind them.Perhaps the best example of what Twitter offers now—and what we stand to gain or lose from its demise—is illustrated by the path charted by public-health officials, epidemiologists, doctors, and nurses over the past three years. Many in this loosely defined group essentially speed-ran the 2009–15 Twitter lifecycle in a matter of months. In the earliest, most frightening days of the pandemic, before the lockdown protests and masking and vaccine arguments, medical professionals felt like a lifeline on Twitter. They provided harrowing accounts of packed ICUs or helped genomically track outbreak patterns. They offered guidance that a flailing government response was too slow to provide, and helped cobble together an epidemiological picture of infections and case counts. At a moment when people were terrified and looking for any information at all, Twitter seemed to offer a steady stream of knowledgeable, diligent experts. I remember it as an example of the platform doing what it does best.But Twitter does another thing quite well, and that’s crushing users with the pressures of algorithmic rewards and all of the risks, exposure, and toxicity that come with virality. For many medical professionals, the pandemic spotlight and the strange brew of attention, valorization, and demonization came as a complete shock to people who largely existed outside the realm of media. Some individuals managed to build large audiences overnight while staying true to their scientific bona fides, while others fell prey to audience capture and began to sensationalize or lean into polarization. As my former colleague Zeynep Tufekci told me back in 2021, “There are a lot of people who seem to be addicted to getting retweeted—scary warnings and sensationalism can be more engaging.” Plenty of other experts simply burned out or were threatened off the site by awful, enraged people. In the summer of 2021, Julia Marcus, a public-health professional whose tweets led to her appearing on television and writing for this magazine, told me that the experience was “rewarding and meaningful in many ways, but has also made me feel vulnerable and often quite anxious. The best way for me to cope with that, for better or worse, was to get really quiet.”Even if you don’t use the platform, Twitter has so fundamentally woven itself into our public life that imagining a world without it can feel impossible. What do our politics look like without the strange feedback loop of a Twitter-addled political press and a class of lawmakers that seems to govern more via shitposting than by legislation? What happens if the media lose what the writer Max Read recently described as a “way of representing reality, and locating yourself within it”? The answer is probably messy. As Read argues, there’s the worry that, absent a distributed central nervous system like Twitter, “the collective worldview of the ‘media’ would instead be over-shaped, from the top down, by the experiences and biases of wealthy publishers, careerist editors, self-loathing journalists, and canny operators operating in relatively closed social and professional circles.”If it’s not already clear, I am far too close to this discussion to view it with any great impartiality. And I realize that Twitter is, by some standards, a niche platform, far smaller than Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. The internet will evolve or mutate around a need for it. I am aware that all of us who can’t quit the site will simply move on when we have to.But moving on will be weird. Twitter is unique in the degree to which its users have shaped its evolution. Hashtags, the Retweet button—those were user hacks before they became in-house product features. And Twitter has certainly shaped us back. Many of the past decade’s most polarizing and influential figures—people such as Donald Trump and Musk himself, who captured attention, accumulated power, and fractured parts of our public consciousness—were also the ones who were thought to be “good” at using the website. And in a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, the author George Saunders mused about the effects of Twitter’s chief innovation—its character limit—on our understanding of language, nuance, and even truth.[Read: The age of social media is ending]“These days, it seems like we are having languages imposed on us,” he said. “The fact that you have a social media that tells you how many characters to use, this is language imposition. You have to wonder about the agenda there. Why does anyone want to restrict the full range of my language? What’s the game there?” Saunders, I should note, does not appear as aggrieved as the transcript might suggest. And his point is not just that the medium is different or faster, but that, in McLuhanian fashion, the constraints and the architecture change not only what messages we receive but how we choose to respond. Often that choice is to behave like the platform itself: We are quicker to respond and more aggressive than we might be elsewhere, with a mindset toward engagement and visibility. Near the end of the podcast, Saunders notes how he feels editing a short story—how the slow composition and chiseling away of language infuses more of himself into each draft until, ultimately, the draft is a version of his mind that is better than the one he can access in a given moment.Following this line of thinking, it’s easy to argue that we stand to gain something essential and human if we lose Twitter. But there is plenty about Twitter that is also essential and human. No other tool has connected me to the world—to random bits of news, knowledge, absurdist humor, activism, and expertise, and to scores of real personal interactions—like Twitter has. I’d be lying if I said I won’t feel some amorphous sense of loss if it fades away. And I’d be lying if I said I wouldn't feel an amorphous sense of outrage toward Musk if he takes all that away.What makes evaluating a life beyond Twitter so hard is that everything that makes the service truly special is also what makes it interminable and toxic. As hard-core users know, if Twitter is a game to attract engagement, then the worst experience you can have on the platform is to “win” and go viral. Generally, it seems that the more successful a person is at using Twitter, the more they refer to it as a hellsite. This is a weird dynamic that makes perfect sense if you use Twitter.Twitter has always been a strange platform, to the point that its leaders have long struggled to define it. Many years ago, a source told me that the co-founder Jack Dorsey couldn’t answer the question, What is Twitter? “He said, ‘Twitter brings you closer,’” they told me. “And I said, ‘To what?’ and he replied, ‘Our users always finish that sentence for us.’”Jason Goldman, a member of Twitter’s early team and the company’s former vice president of product, expressed a similar sentiment this week. “We had this joke about how no one really could describe what Twitter was, but that we knew it was the market leader in tweets. If you wanted tweets, you had to come to Twitter,” he told me. He then added, “Which is also why I think it’ll survive in some incredibly stupid way.”

No one should feel bad for Taylor Swift. Her walls are lined with platinum albums, she’s worth a small country’s GDP, she’s the biggest pop star on earth and it’s not even close. But when tickets to her Eras megatour went on presale this week, it went about as badly as it could. Some fans got kicked out of the virtual line to buy tickets after waiting for hours. Aftermarket prices soared into the thousands—even tens of thousands—per ticket. And the website of Swift’s ticketing partner, Ticketmaster, bowed and crashed under the weight of the demand.

Ticketmaster’s meltdown was more than just predictable. It was exactly how the country’s concert ticket monopoly has operated forever—simply because it can.

Throw Swift’s presale debacle on the pile of complaints about Ticketmaster and the way it operates. Because of Ticketmaster’s fluctuating (or “dynamic,” to use the industry’s preferred euphemism) prices, fans trying to buy concert tickets for artists like Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 have paid hundreds or thousands of dollars, far above what even loyal fans expected to pay. Earlier this year, a Harry Styles tour—another event Ticketmaster should have expected to be popular—crashed its ticket sale site.

If anyone should have the power to ensure their ticket sales go smoothly, it’s Swift. Her upcoming tour is on track to shatter records for a concert series. She’s doing five nights in Los Angeles’ enormous SoFi Stadium, breaking K-pop megastars BTS’ record of four sold-out shows at the 70,000-person venue. Last month, she became the first artist to claim every slot in the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. She’s a pop star of galactic proportions.

If Swift thought the company selling tickets for her tour might screw up the presale, or if it couldn’t keep bots and ticket hawkers out of the queue like it promised, she could threaten to leave. You’d think the threat of losing what could be the highest-grossing tour of all time would force the ticketing company to take any and every action necessary to make sure Swift’s fans got the best possible experience.

That’s not what happened, because Swift doesn’t have a real choice in ticketing partners. Ticketmaster controls more than 70 percent of ticketing at major concert venues. Big artists that need to play big venues while touring can’t avoid Ticketmaster, even if they want to. For stadium-level stars like Swift, Ticketmaster is the only choice; the NFL uses the company for its ticketing, which makes it the primary ticketing service of the league’s stadiums as well. Ticketmaster’s monopoly power means Swift and her fans are stuck with the company’s predatory fees and terrible service.

Furthermore, Swift hasn’t been a passive victim of Ticketmaster’s gatekeeping. The “verified fan” deal Swift struck with Ticketmaster in 2017 was ostensibly intended to ensure her concert tickets wound up in the hands of fans, rather than the aftermarket scalpers and bots that had come to plague Ticketmaster’s online purchasing system. But unlike other megastars like Bruce Springsteen, Swift’s deal came with a catch: The more Taylor Swift merchandise fans bought, the better chance they’d have at snagging her concert tickets. Rather than pushing back against Ticketmaster’s monopoly the same way she fought Spotify’s atrociously low royalty rates, she forced her fans to buy her merchandise on top of Ticketmaster’s pricey junk fees, all for a decent shot at seeing her live.

It’s a bad scene, and it’s everyone’s fault. It didn’t have to be this way. The world in which Ticketmaster could have had actual, legitimate competition in ticketing vanished the day the Justice Department approved its megamerger with live music titan Live Nation. The 2010 deal combined the world’s largest ticketing company with the country’s top concert promoter, top artist manager, and second-biggest venue owner and operator. It was a monopoly play from the beginning, creating a single company that could control every element of a major tour, from the talent to the tickets. The Justice Department knew it, finding at the time that the merger would result “in less aggressive competition, less pressure on the fees earned by Ticketmaster, and less innovation for venues and fans than would exist absent the merger.” But it let the merger happen anyway, promising that a few tweaks to the behemoth’s behavior would be enough to tame its newfound power.

It wasn’t. The merger cemented Ticketmaster’s dominance far better than the company ever could have on its own. Now, money spent on many big concerts lands in one central coffer, allowing the combined Live Nation/Ticketmaster to tighten its grip on the industry more and more. The company continues to charge concertgoers outrageous junk fees because fans have nowhere else to turn, especially for major tours. It has been credibly accused of threatening to withhold major tours from venues that refuse to use Ticketmaster—exactly the kind of bad behavior lawmakers and artists feared when the merger was announced, and something CEO Michael Rapino has admitted is in the company’s best economic interest to do. Live Nation’s power to impose its monopolized ecosystem on the live music industry has shut out smaller venues, rival ticketing companies, and everyone else.

The Justice Department’s decision to bless the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger has been, correctly, derided for years. Academics found that the company’s post-merger power gave it the ability to hurt small venues, artists, and fans. Competition and consumer advocates blasted the Justice Department’s failed attempt to fix the merger: “Ticketmaster remains dominant, and it is using control over its platform and its top-to-bottom control over concerts and other live events to increase its dominance,” the group Public Knowledge wrote. The government itself found the company had abused the monopoly it permitted (although it did little to actually stop it).

The botched rollout of Swift’s presale reignited calls for Live Nation’s concert monopoly to be broken up. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, and its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved.” David Cicilline, a Rhode Island congressman who has called on the Justice Department to reopen its investigation of the merger, said Ticketmaster’s monopoly status is “no secret.” Amy Klobuchar, the Senate’s antitrust hawk, sent a letter to Live Nation demanding answers. An already-running campaign to break up the company piled on. And now, the Tennessee attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, says his office is looking into the presale and that antitrust problems “could be an issue.”*

🚨 SWIFTIES 🚨

We're organizing to break up Ticketmaster. NOW is our best chance to make a difference through collective action! Sign up to stay informed and get involved here ↓ https://t.co/wAYqV1649M #TSxCapitalOne #TSTheErasTour #TSmidnighTS — Stephanie | theswiftiest.com/fight-back (@the_swiftiest) November 16, 2022

There’s one other agitated party. Ticketmaster might be used to criticism from advocates and Capitol Hill when it screws something up so publicly. But the company has never shaken a beehive quite like the Swifties. Swift’s fanbase is as rabid as they are loyal to the megastar, and the Eras presale nightmare focused the collective’s attention on a new enemy: Ticketmaster and its monopoly power. “We’re organizing to break up Ticketmaster. NOW is our best chance to make a difference through collective action!” tweeted Stephanie Aly, who runs the Swift fan site the Swiftiest. The Swiftiest has launched a campaign to take action against the company, including digital organizing and direct action to lawmakers. “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a monopoly,” the site tells fellow Swifties, riffing on the opening line from her song “Vigilante Shit.”

@mayte.lisbeth Organized Swifties?! 👀 is this what will radicalize people? ♬ original sound - Mayte Lisbeth This content requires consent that you have not granted on Slate. To view this content please visit www.tiktok.com or update your cookie preferences . Learn more about this at our privacy page.

Radicalizing Swifties to take down monopoly power likely wasn’t something Ticketmaster had on its bingo card, but it’s exactly what’s happening (with at least one fan wondering whether mobilizing an anti-monopoly movement was what Swift had planned all along). “I just feel like, in my heart of hearts, if anyone can stop Ticketmaster, it’s not the U.S. government. It’s Swifties,” one observer posted on TikTok. It’s a nice thought, and certainly collective action matters when fighting corporate power. But at the end of the day, this one is on the government. It approved the Live Nation merger that helped cement Ticketmaster’s power, and it’s the one that can unwind that deal if it finds, as it should, that the merger has been bad for artists, venues, and fans. Ticketmaster has no reason to change on its own—that’s what being a monopoly means. It’s time for the Justice Department to look in the mirror and admit: It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.

The emergency should justify the policy, not the other way around. That’s not how the Biden administration appears to see things.

On Monday, a federal appeals court blocked the implementation of Joe Biden’s scheme to transfer the debt burden held by student-loan borrowers onto the shoulders of taxpayers. The suit against the administration, which was brought by six Republican-led states, argued that the order threatens local tax revenues and exceeds the president’s constitutional authority, and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. This court’s decision against the Biden administration follows a similar ruling from a U.S. district court in Texas. That court also blocked Biden’s debt-transference plot on the grounds that the post-9/11 HEROES Act, which provided loan assistance to military personnel, doesn’t grant the White House statutory authority to erase the debt burdens held by civilians.

That, you might think, would be that. But the White House never gave the law its due when it crafted its patently lawless subversion of congressional authority in the first place, so why start now?

The administration is reportedly looking for ways to circumvent the courts’ rulings. The most attractive option, according to early reporting, is to further erode the public’s confidence in elected officials by abusing the emergency powers supposedly necessitated by the pandemic. White House officials are allegedly toying with the idea of extending a Covid-related moratorium on student-loan payments well past its scheduled sunset on January 1, 2023. The pandemic may be “over,” according to the president, who just recently extended the emergency around the pandemic into next year, but the social engineering it facilitated cannot be allowed to fade away along with the virus.

The abject contempt for the law displayed by the president is evident in on-the-record comments made by Michael Pierce, the deputy assistant director of another executive agency that spits in the face of congressional sovereignty, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He called on the administration to “make it clear that the student loan system will remain shut off as long as these partisan legal challenges persist.” Which is to say, if the courts keep siding with Republicans, Democrats should continue to mock their authority and abuse their power.

Regardless of the merits of the student-loan moratorium, the conditions that justified this extraordinary intervention are long gone now. America’s job market fully rebounded from the pandemic months ago, as the same administration that insists the pandemic justifies its emergency authority keeps reminding us. The labor market is presently defined by shortages and workers voluntarily leaving the workforce in pursuit of more fulfilling or higher-paying vocations. The Borrowers’ “fate,” as Pierce put it, is not “in Biden’s hands” but their own. The extension of the Covid emergency for this, little more than a handout to a favored Democratic constituency, subverts the democratic process in pursuit of the cheapest, most parochial of political goals.

A moratorium on loan repayments is not precisely akin to Biden’s effort to raid the U.S. Treasury absent congressional authority. It is not, however, without constitutional implications. The moratorium has cost the government tens of billions because the Treasury Department, of course, still has to pay the debt it incurs while issuing subsidized student loans. Taxpayers are still on the hook for that bill.

Democrats shouldn’t need to be reminded of all this. They know full well what a politicized emergency declaration looks like and the dangers it presents to the good working order of government. At least, they did when Donald Trump was doing the subverting.

Trump set the stage for what the New York Times claimed was nothing short of a “constitutional clash” when he declared a national emergency along the Southern border in 2019. The actual emergency existed in the eye of the beholder, not in the statistics, which indicated that illegal border crossings and apprehensions were down at the time of Trump’s actions. But the outcome Trump sought was clear: the leverage the emergency provided the White House to circumvent the congressional appropriations process and, at long last, build his wall.

Just as Biden has given away the game by extending an emergency around the pandemic that he insists is behind us, Trump exposed his own duplicity. “I didn’t need to do this,” he told reporters in a Rose Garden address, “but I’d rather do it much faster.” The former president’s action was, according to Nancy Pelosi, “a power grab” that “does violence to the Constitution and fundamentally alters the separation of powers.” Sen. Chuck Schumer wondered aloud whether the system of checks and balances could endure an affront on this “large and vital constitutional issue.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump’s “vanity project” would be halted by the courts, which tend to have “the last word.”

Less than a month after Trump’s maneuver, 12 Senate Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues in voting to cancel the emergency declaration. It seems fanciful to imagine Democrats may engineer a similar rebuke if Joe Biden abuses his power in a similar fashion. But the Biden administration is giving its allies no cover, no plausible rationalization to justify its assault on legislative prerogatives. They’ve noticed.

According to the American Prospect’s executive editor David Dayen, a constellation of “right-wing judges” across the country are applying tortured legal theories, which, along with novel interpretations of standing, have conspired to illegitimately block Joe Biden’s fiat. But the worst part about it? The Biden administration isn’t fighting back.

“[T]he Biden administration will need to rebut charges that they conned young voters by offering debt relief before the election, only to have it taken away by the courts, as they knew it would be,” he wrote. But that’s not happening. Therefore, a necessary corollary to this indictment of the administration’s inaction is that the president’s debt scheme was, in the Prospect’s formulation, “a political stunt to attract young voters.” And in trying to keep that stunt going, Biden is abusing his authority and betraying the public trust.

Climate scientists have a surprising habit: They often underplay the climate threat. In 2007 a team led by Stefan Rahmstorf compared actual observations with projections made by theoretical models for three key climate variables: atmospheric carbon dioxide, global average temperature and sea-level rise. While the projections got CO 2 levels right, they were low for real temperature and sea-level rise. In 2008 Roger Pielke, Jr., found that sea-level rise was greater than forecast in two of three prior Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. In 2009 a review of hundreds of papers on climate change identified several areas where scientists had lowballed event predictions but none in which they had overestimated them.

In 2013 researcher Keynyn Brysse, then at the University of California, San Diego, along with other colleagues and me, pointed out that these underestimates represent a kind of bias. Scientists tended toward lower projections because they did not want to be accused of making dramatic and exaggerated claims. The articles reporting the underestimates have been widely cited, so one might think that by now scientists would have taken corrective steps.

But recent studies of Arctic warming suggest that the problem may not have gone away. For instance, scientists have long known about how Arctic ice reflects sunlight, redirecting heat away from the planet. But as polar ice melts because of global warming, the Arctic Ocean absorbs more heat, which causes the Arctic to warm even more, which melts more ice, and so on. It should surprise no one, then, that the area is warming fast. Yet scientists have been caught off-guard by just how fast the region is heating up.

A recent study led by Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute found that, since 1979, the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than Earth as a whole. Few climate models have predicted an effect this large.

Model results are typically reported as the averages of many runs of a set of similar models, referred to as ensembles. These new Arctic temperature observations are not only warmer than all the major ensemble averages but, in some cases, outside the whole ensemble envelope. In one very large and highly respected one—the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble—the observed warming for 1979–2021 is entirely beyond the results. Some real-world observations are hotter than even the hottest projections.

This has several implications. First, it reminds us that averages can be misleading. Extreme outcomes may be unlikely but do occur and are crucial in assessing risk. Second, it suggests that climate models may be continuing to underestimate key climate effects.

Admittedly, the observations might be wrong; measuring the temperature of the region is notoriously difficult, in part because of sparse sensor coverage over the Arctic Ocean. In addition, scientists may have analyzed different time periods or used conflicting definitions of “Arctic” boundaries. But it may also be that their subconscious bias toward playing things down was playing itself up.

We’ve heard a lot in recent years about subconscious bias in relation to race and gender discrimination. But subconscious bias can be caused by many things, including defensiveness. Even now scientists continue to be accused of exaggerating climate risks by prominent figures who get outsized media attention. Scientists who have internalized this concern may be subconsciously biasing their models to be unrealistically conservative.

If scientists have underestimated Arctic warming, they have likely minimized amounts of permafrost melting and methane release as well. And that could be truly dire because the permafrost holds about 1.5 billion metric tons of organic carbon, twice as much as now in the atmosphere. Were that carbon to be rapidly released, it could cause a worst-case scenario: a runaway greenhouse effect. Whatever the cause, it’s time that scientists looked seriously at whether their models continue to underplay critical aspects of the climate problem. Low estimates can create the false impression that we have more time to fix the problem than we actually do.

The spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency trading firm FTX has raised a number of urgent questions. Why did the founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, get such fawning media coverage? Will his customers get their crypto back? Oh, and should wealthy philanthropists in the United States spend their money on buildings at their alma mater, mosquito nets halfway around the world, or the prevention of global catastrophes in the distant future?[Annie Lowrey: The crypto meltdown could have been so much worse]That last question is relevant because Bankman-Fried was one of the biggest financial supporters and media promoters of effective altruism, in its own words, “a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” EA involves studying various charitable endeavors, figuring out which ones do the most good, and directing money to them. It has also become an influential subculture in the Bay Area, where devotees commonly refer to themselves as effective altruists in the same way they might describe themselves as leftists or psychonauts.The fact that the public face of EA was the leader of a clique of Millennial super-nerds seemingly running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme from a penthouse in the Bahamas has, understandably, tainted the movement. Any number of charities are out hundreds of millions of dollars of expected donations. Some donors are questioning whether to be involved with EA at all. “Effective altruism posits that making money by (almost) any means necessary is OK because you … are so brilliant that you absolutely should have all the power implied by billions of dollars in the bank,” the CoinDesk columnist David Z. Morris argues, a sentiment echoed over and over online.Yet this crisis also creates an opportunity. Effective altruism, the movement, is not the same thing as effective altruism, the practice of financially maximalist and rigorously data-driven philanthropy. Divorcing the latter from the former would benefit everyone on the planet.EA began coalescing in the aughts, when the Oxford philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill, along with Bernadette Young, founded Giving What We Can, a group whose members agree to “donate a significant proportion of their incomes to cost-effective charities.” A number of other think tanks and research centers followed, as well as an active online community. The main intellectual headwater for the movement was the work of utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer. We can help one another. We should help one another. We must help one another, his philosophy urged. How should we do it? As much as we can, as effectively as possible. “It combines both the heart and the head,” Singer said of EA in a widely watched 2013 TED Talk.EA encourages everyone who can to give away as much of their wealth as possible, whether that is 10 percent of their income or everything above a certain amount. More controversially, it suggests that people earn for the sake of giving—by working on, say, Wall Street and giving the cash away, rather than toiling in a socially responsible but unremunerative job. MacAskill himself encouraged Bankman-Fried to make millions, leading him to go into high-frequency trading and then crypto. (The irony is rich: A movement devoted to addressing poverty encouraged its adherents to become as wealthy as possible.)  EA holds that all people are equal; thus, donors should not prioritize giving to folks who share their interests, background, or nationality. In practical terms, it tries to figure out how to do the most good for the largest number of people, then advises donors on where to send their cash.This emphasis on results is a very good thing, and nonprofits such as GiveWell and Open Philanthropy have helped make big-ticket philanthropy more accountable, transparent, and effective. Many charities spend huge sums on overhead and do little measurable good. In some cases, nonprofits damage the communities they want to help; research shows that donated American clothing, for instance, hurts the textile trade in sub-Saharan African countries and overstuffs their landfills.And a lot of charitable giving is about the hubris of the donor, rather than the needs of the recipient—about getting a name on a gym at an Ivy League university rather than aiding children suffering from diarrheal illness on another continent. Giving a million dollars to, say, a youth sports league in the country your grandparents grew up in might feel like a great thing to do. It would surely be better than buying a yacht for yourself. But those dollars would do more good if distributed as cash grants to refugees or spent on antimalarial bednets. The EA movement got a lot of people to see that logic, and thus to commit an estimated $46 billion to unsexy but important initiatives.Yet the movement is insular. Its demographics skew very young, very male, very white, very educated, and very socioeconomically privileged. Many EA folks come from tech; many also consider themselves “rationalists,” interested in applying Bayesian reasoning to every possible situation. EA has a culture, and that culture is nerdy, earnest, and moral. It is also, at least in my many dealings with EA folks, overly intellectual, performative, even onanistic.[Read: Effective altruism’s philosopher king just wants to be practical]Perhaps not surprisingly, EA’s focus has shifted away from poverty and toward more esoteric concerns in recent years. The movement has become enthralled with something called “longtermism,” which boils down to prioritizing the far, far future. Letting thousands of children die from preventable, poverty-linked causes today is terrible, of course, but wouldn’t it be worse if billions of people never got to live because of the ravages of some as-yet-uninvented weapon? Yes, according to a certain kind of utilitarian logic. And money has followed that logic: Bankman-Fried himself put $160 million in a fund to address, among other issues, the dangers of synthetic biology, the promise of space governance, and the harm that artificial intelligence could inflict on humanity many years from now.Longtermism is right about one thing: We do underrate the future. The world would be a better place today if philanthropists had invested heavily in pandemic preparedness or the prevention of global warming 30 years ago. But a lot of EA thinking about the distant future is fantastical. Some longtermists, for instance, argue that we need to balance the need to address climate change now with the need to invest in colonizing space; they encourage us to think on a billion-year timescale.The FTX debacle neatly demonstrates the problem with this sort of mindset, as the economist Tyler Cowen has noted. Nobody at Bankman-Fried’s multimillion-dollar philanthropic fund seemed to realize that the risk emanating from the Bahamas today was more pressing than whatever space lasers might do tomorrow. “I am thus skeptical about their ability to predict existential risk more generally, and for systems that are far more complex and also far more distant,” Cowen writes. “It turns out, many of the real sources of existential risk boil down to hubris and human frailty and imperfections.” Indeed, EA seems to have ended up committing the sin that it was meant to correct in traditional philanthropy: It got lost in the vainglory of its unaccountable donors and neglected real problems in the real world.The task of making altruism effective is too important to be left to the effective altruists, nor do they have any particular claim to it. EAs did not come up with the idea of figuring out the biggest bang for your buck when donating money to the world’s poor, after all. Indeed, the EA revolution borrows its techniques from the “randomista” movement in development economics—which subjects policy interventions to randomized controlled trials—and from advocates of simple cash transfers as a solution to poverty in the global South. The whole thing is, in part, an exercise in rebranding.Bankman-Fried’s downfall should trigger another rebranding, and a sorting out of the EA good from the EA bad. Encouraging people to give their money away? Great. Becoming a billionaire to give your money away? A terrible idea. Getting some of the world’s richest white guys to care about the global poor? Fantastic. Convincing those same guys that they know best how to care for all of humanity? Lord help us. A cultish crew of tech-world self-promoters should not be the public face of making charities accountable and effective. Let’s not let them.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.The tech industry seems to be in a recession. Although overall unemployment is still very low, just about every major tech company—including Amazon, Meta, Snap, Stripe, Coinbase, Twitter, Robinhood, and Intel—has announced double-digit percentage-point layoffs in the past few months. The stock valuations for many of these companies have fallen more than 50 percent in the past year.Watching this surge of mass layoffs in big tech companies, plus the lurid chaos unfolding at Twitter over the past few weeks and the spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto, the big question on my mind is: Why is it all happening at once?The simple, and possibly simplified, answer to this question is: It’s the interest rates, stupid.The period after the Great Recession was defined by a weak economy with low aggregate demand and low interest rates. This created the perfect conditions for an era of endless cash that venture capitalists, seeking high rates of return, poured into low-marginal-cost software companies. As smartphone penetration rose in the U.S. and around the world, the app revolution took off. Social-media and consumer-tech companies became some of the richest and fastest-growing in the world. Hollywood went streaming, content went digital, and the services economy became intermediated by smartphones.Then came the surge of post-pandemic inflation. Rising interest rates have meant the end of easy money. The Millennial Consumer Subsidy—my term for VCs splitting the bill with consumers to grow their companies—has come to a close. As the cost of risk has gone up, venture funding has gone down, and companies have had to cut costs, raise prices, or both. Meanwhile the narrative in markets has flipped from growth to profits, and valuations for tech companies have crashed.The inflation explanation is fairly technical. I’ve got another story that’s a little bit harder to prove. It goes something like this: The tech industry is experiencing a midlife crisis.After using its metaphorical youth to experiment with social media and consumer tech through boundless investment and endless optimizations and A/B tests, many tech executives and investors today feel like they’ve essentially solved the most interesting and important problems of basic digitization. This is not just my opinion: Four years ago, the tech analyst Ben Evans observed that software had scaled the mountain of advertising and media and connected the world, and tech was looking to climb new mountains and find new challenges. One chapter was closing, and the most prominent tech executives and investors were looking for the next story.Executives of the largest tech firms have for years been shifting resources toward new ventures with uncertain returns. Amazon recently employed more than 10,000 people to work on its AI product, Alexa. (Jeff Bezos stepped away from the company he founded to work on rocket ships.) At Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—Reality Labs, the division working to build a metaverse, has about 15,000 employees. Apple reportedly has 3,000 people working on an augmented-reality headset, and thousands more are working on Google’s voice assistant. At the same time, the venture-capital community has been looking for its own moonshot, and many investors have found one (or, at least, have wanted people to believe that they have) in crypto. VCs have reportedly bet dozens of billions of dollars in the space, even though, for all the bluster and investment, it mostly remains a technology in search of a use case beyond betting money on tokens that cash out in dollars. Meanwhile, in what may be a literal midlife crisis, Elon Musk, a car and rocket executive, has installed himself at the helm of a digital delivery mechanism for news outrage with, at best, a chaotic plan for resurrecting its business.It would be unfair to suggest that all of these moves are the emotional equivalent of a 52-year-old man dyeing his hair and trading the minivan for a Corvette. Companies going big and spending lots of money on important and difficult problems with uncertain solutions is cool, in a way. But at the moment, a lot of these bets look half-baked, catastrophically expensive, or outright fraudulent.  These explanations—the macroeconomic one and the psychodynamic one—intersect. The tech industry, which had perfected the art of optimizing digital spaces for engagement and ad placement, was prepared to invest deeply in the next adventure. But it’s gotten smacked by post-pandemic inflation and rising interest rates, which has made this pivot harder to execute. The result is the current news: mass layoffs across companies that just a few years ago seemed utterly unstoppable.One mistake that a journalist can make in observing these trends is to assume that, because the software-based tech industry seems to be struggling now, things will stay like this forever. More likely, we are in an intermission between technological epochs. We’ve mostly passed through the browser era, the social-media era, and the smartphone-app-economy era. But in the past few months, the explosion of artificial-intelligence programs suggests that something quite spectacular and possibly a little terrifying is on the horizon. Ten years from now, looking back on the 2022 tech recession, we may say that this moment was a paroxysm of scandals and layoffs between two discrete movements.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.The Washington Post columnist George Will was once asked to explain his long-standing distaste for American football. The sport is, he responded, “violence punctuated by committee meetings.” To my mind, this is a savage condemnation not so much because of the violence, but because of the meetings.If you, like many people, think work meetings are a huge waste of time, that might be because most meetings keep employees from, well, working: One survey of 76 companies found that productivity was 71 percent higher when meetings were reduced by 40 percent. Unnecessary meetings waste $37 billion in salary hours a year in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the software company Atlassian. And in case you’re wondering, COVID made things worse: The number of meetings required of employees has risen by 12.9 percent on average since the coronavirus pandemic began.But the real problem with meetings is not lack of productivity—it’s unhappiness. When meetings are a waste of time, job satisfaction declines. And when job satisfaction declines, happiness in general falls. Thus, for a huge portion of the population, eliminating meetings—or at least minimizing them—is one of the most straightforward ways to increase well-being.According to user data from Reclaim.ai, a calendar-app company, the average full-time white-collar professional in the United States spends 21.5 hours a week in meetings. According to scholars who specialize in the topic (who no doubt have research meetings about their research on meetings), work meetings generally center on one or more of four purposes: to “share information,” “solve problems and make decisions,” “develop and implement organizational strategy,” or “debrief a team after a performance episode.”[Read: This is what happens when there are too many meetings]I should clarify that these are all potentially good reasons to have meetings. You have probably attended many that didn’t fit into any of these categories. For example, many meetings occur during a regular time slot as a matter of routine, without a specific reason. Another motive for meetings is what some scholars call the Mere Urgency effect, in which we engage in tasks—such as a meeting where each person recites what they’re working on, whether others need that information or not—to help us feel like we are accomplishing something tangible. If your spouse asks you, “What did you do at work today?” and you answer, “I had six meetings,” this might be why.Excessive and unproductive meetings can lower job satisfaction for several reasons. First, they generally increase fatigue as well as our subjective sense of our workload. You have probably experienced a day of meetings after which you are exhausted and haven’t accomplished much—but where you have gotten a bunch of new assignments. Second, people tend to engage in “surface acting” (faking emotions that are deemed appropriate) during work meetings, which is emotionally draining and correlated with the intention to quit. Finally, researchers have found that the strongest predictor of meeting effectiveness is active involvement by the participants. If you are asking yourself, “Why am I here?” you are not likely to think that the meeting is a good use of your time—which is obviously bad for your work satisfaction.Taken together, the research on meetings shows that if you want to be happier at work (or want your employees to be happier), you should fight against the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings at every opportunity. And when they actually are necessary and unavoidable, there are a few steps you can take to make them less draining and more useful.1. Ruthlessly avoid and cancel meetings.If you are plagued by unnecessary meetings where little is accomplished, find ways to avoid them if you can. Schedule work trips or important client calls to coincide with them, for example. In many cases, you can skip very large gatherings without anyone noticing. If you are the convener, cancel all meetings that don’t have a clear agenda or purpose.Take this advice with caution if you are an employee, of course. It is not likely to be helpful, if your boss asks you why you are skipping all the staff meetings, to say, “Because I read an article in The Atlantic.” If it’s too risky for you to skip meetings, maybe your boss will schedule fewer to begin with if you slip a copy of this essay under their office door.2. Create meeting-free days.If possible, bosses should create a policy of guaranteeing whole days without meetings. According to scholars writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, productivity and workforce engagement are maximized at four meeting-free days; stress is minimized at five meeting-free days. (In other words, stress is minimized when there are no meetings at all.) In an era when many are working in a hybrid format, if people come to the office three days a week, a good policy might be to hold all meetings on just one of those days.3. Keep meetings to half an hour or less.In 1955, the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson coined what he called—and which has since been known as—Parkinson’s law: We expand a task in order to fill the time available to complete it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in staff meetings. How many times has a meeting started with the words “This shouldn’t take the full hour” only to take the full hour?[Read: ‘Ugh, I’m so busy’: A status symbol for our time]So, what is the right meeting length? Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, famously held micro-meetings that lasted 10 minutes. One productivity expert says that 25 minutes is ideal, based on what research says is the optimal amount of time for people to focus. But the point is clear: Make meetings more efficient by having a tight focus and getting right to the point, and make a commitment to finishing within a short window.4. Don’t invite everybody.According to what is called the Ringelmann effect (named after the French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann), as the size of a group increases, the average individual effort falls. Scholars differ on the ideal number of people in a meeting, which no doubt depends on the meeting’s goals. If the boss has a huge announcement such as “We’re bankrupt,” perhaps all staff is appropriate. (Then again, an email might suffice for that.) For making decisions and discussing strategy, many management scholars recommend seven or fewer people in a meeting. People are less likely to fully participate beyond this number, and accountability can become confusing. Try to invite to your meetings the minimum number of people necessary to accomplish the task at hand.If there is one rule to remember about work meetings, it might be that they are a necessary evil. They are necessary insofar as organizations need them for proper communication, but they are evil in that they are almost never inherently desirable, and should thus be used as sparingly as possible for the sake of productivity and happiness.Under ideal circumstances, meetings would be unnecessary. But circumstances are never ideal, at least on this mortal coil—which, come to think of it, might give us something to look forward to in the afterlife. As the poet Edgar Albert Guest wrote in 1920,
When over me the night shall fall,
And my poor soul goes upwards winging
Unto that heavenly realm, where all
Is bright with joy and gay with singing,
I hope to hear St. Peter say,
And I shall thank him for the greeting:
“Come in and rest from day to day;
Here there is no committee meeting!”

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as the protagonists sail through a dark and eerie Thames Estuary towards the Congolese rainforest, the sailor Marlow remarks knowingly that “this also has been one of the dark places of the earth… when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago… They were men enough to face the darkness.”
Conrad’s analogy was more apt than he perhaps realised: in that distant past, a considerable portion of Britain’s surface was itself rainforest, a dark and forbidding place for Rome’s colonial adventurers to venture into and civilise. After all, when Boudicca launched her revolt against Roman rule in AD60, burning down the thriving colonial outpost of Londinium, she had chosen her moment well. The Roman governor Gaius Seutonius Paulinus was busy campaigning in his own heart of darkness, the mystical island of Mona or Ynys Mon — today’s Anglesey — where the Druids fomented rebellion from within their sacred oak groves, dripping with rain and, according to the Romans, human guts. Their first task upon victory, as Tacitus observed, was “to demolish the groves consecrated to their savage cults: for they considered it a pious duty to slake the altars with captive blood and to consult their deities by means of human entrails”.
Even without the human sacrifices, Britain’s last patches of temperate rainforest still possess a markedly eerie quality, as the writer and land campaigner Guy Shrubsole observes in his excellent new book, Lost Rainforests of Britain. In Dartmoor’s tiny surviving fragment of rainforest, Wistman’s Wood, “grimacing faces appear in the gnarled and knotted trunks, bringing to mind the Ents of Tolkien’s Fangorn Forest. Wreathed in autumnal mists, the wood feels Otherworldly, and with good reason. It is as soaked in legend as it is in rain.”

It is this eternal, cool ambient moisture that makes a woodland, wrapped in sea fog and drenched in rain, a rainforest, in the technical sense of being a place “wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants”, their gnarled and wizened trunks eerily shrouded in green mosses, lichens, fungi and other epiphytes listed by the author in loving botanical detail. Even the wood’s very name derives, Shrubsole notes, “from the Devonshire dialect word wisht, meaning ‘eerie, uncanny’ or, in some readings, ‘pixie-haunted’” — a place for centuries “seen as a domain of pixies and fairy folk, a ‘thin place’ where the gap between our world and a spectral Otherworld is narrow and passable”.
And yet, as with so much of the deep magic of our realm, Wistman’s Wood has been almost extinguished by modernity. Only eight acres of the wood survive, surrounded by a bleak and inhospitable moorland haunted only by ravenous sheep. The sad story of Wistman’s Wood is thus the story of Britain’s lost rainforests in miniature. Once covering up to a fifth of Britain’s landmass, concentrated on the western seaboard where Atlantic rains still shroud the steep hills in mist and gloom, Britain’s temperate rainforests have been felled, grazed and overplanted so ruthlessly that they now cover less than 0.5% of the country. The loss of much of this ancient, mythic landscape is more recent than we may realise: the post-war planting of conifer plantations alone, Shrubsole notes, means that “we may well have felled some 66,000 acres of Britain’s rainforests in the twentieth century alone – an area the size of Birmingham – and all in the name of planting trees for timber”.
Suggested readingWhy are women becoming witches?By Suzannah Lipscomb
This loss through sheer neglect is not just a tragedy for Britain: it is the destruction of a habitat of global significance. As Shrubsole notes, “temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1% of the world’s surface”. Yet remarkably, this precious habitat is not protected by law — indeed, no government bodies have ever bothered to even map its remaining fragments, meaning the precise extent of Britain’s surviving rainforests are a matter of supposition, recorded by a small band of obsessive enthusiasts. A celebrated campaigner for land rights, Shrubsole takes aim at Britain’s fragmented and unequal system of land ownership as the root cause of the decline. In Scotland, as he observes, fewer than 500 people, often mysterious offshore investors, own half of the land, leaving sterile deer-wrecked moorland where rain-drenched, life-filled hazelwoods would naturally thrive.
In England, where archaic quasi-feudal patterns of land ownership have rarely been matched by dutifully benevolent stewardship, the situation is not much better. Indeed, those who profess to care for the environment have often been the nemeses of England’s last patches of rainforest. The Dartington Hall estate in Devon, a pioneer of organic farming methods, was directly responsible for grubbing up precious stands of ancient rainforest to plant lucrative conifer plantations. Even the survival of Wistman’s Wood itself, part of the Duchy of Cornwall estate, is threatened by the neglect of its former steward and our present King to install proper fencing to prevent nearby sheep from nibbling away at its edges: a disappointing lapse from such a passionate advocate of the natural environment, and one we should hope his successor, the new Prince of Wales, will take care to rectify.
For the campaign to save Britain’s dying rainforests is not, in itself, a difficult task. All that is really necessary, at least at first, is to fence off the surviving remnants to prevent the destructive grazing of sheep and deer, and the grubbing up of invasive rhododendrenons, allowing the surviving patches to regenerate. Left to their own devices, much of Britain’s western uplands would become rainforest once more, a wild and evocative landscape rich in historic associations. As Shrubsole observes, “the fragments that remain are reminders of our lost heritage: an ecosystem that inspired some of our greatest myths and legends”. This vivid sense of myth and magic, the yearning for deep history that these landscapes evoke is powerful, and deftly evoked by Shrubsole, perhaps rarely for a current-day Left-wing activist. For as he notes, “the Atlantic rainforests are woven into Celtic mythology, the weird tales of The Mabinogion, the Arthurian romances, the body of literature that folklorists call ‘the Matter of Britain’”, and even today “they can inspire and rejuvenate us, just as they did our predecessors.”
More from this authorElon Musk must destroy TwitterBy Aris Roussinos
The restorative properties of this mission, blending myth and land stewardship, are inspiringly real: one former soldier, the evocatively named Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, is healing the psychic wounds of combat in Afghanistan by returning his family’s Cornish farm to rainforest. In Ireland, a landscape even more denuded of its native woodland and blanketed in sterile forestry plantations than Britain, the writer and farmer Eoghan Daltun is pursuing a parallel project, restoring and expanding his own small patch of West Cork rainforest. To restore such habitats does not mean to close them off to human activity, as many critics of rewilding fear: Shrubsole’s book gives inspiring examples of small landowners returning to premodern methods of farming, allowing native cattle and pigs to rootle through the forests in place of the destructive desert interloper, the sheep. Across these isles, passionate individuals are doing their best, on a small scale, to restore habitats of global importance without support or subsidy.
Yet much more can, and surely should be done. As Shrubsole observes, “when it comes to temperate rainforest, Britain truly is world-beating”, yet “we call on Brazil and Indonesia to save their rainforests, yet don’t own up to the fact that Britain is a rainforest nation, too — just one that’s already cut most of ours down”. At minimal cost, and little effort, the government could record what patches of Britain’s rainforests still survive then pursue a course of action to regrow them, linking the sterile subsidy-sinks of our western uplands into a dense and nature-rich landscape of Atlantic oak and hazelwoods. By doing so, not only could we reverse the catastrophic decline of birds and insects driving many of Britain’s native species to extinction, but we can achieve something of less tangible, mythic importance: restoring our national connection to the land, and rewilding ourselves.
A committed campaign to save Britain’s rainforests would surely strike the imagination of many people who may not even know that they still — just — exist. It is a more concrete and achievable good than that achieved by throwing soup at paintings, say, and one more likely to win public support. As Shrubsole calculates, simply by installing a 150-metre fenced buffer zone around the surviving patches of rainforest, we could double their extent in a generation. The Duke of Cornwall could easily pledge to protect and expand the two threatened patches of rainforest, Wistman’s Wood and Black Tor Beare, he owns in Dartmoor, and in doing so provide an example for other landowners to follow. From Scotland to the Lake District, Wales to Devon and Cornwall, and (though Shrubsole ignores the province) Northern Ireland, much of the country was until very recent times rainforest, and could easily be rainforest once again. In saving these ancient habitats, as rich in myth and legend as in wildlife, we can restore the sacred groves of our ancestors, and make Britain once more one of the wild places of the Earth.
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For years, investigations such as the Panama Papers have revealed how dictators, criminal organizations and corrupt foreign officials use the U.S. financial system to launder their dirty money with impunity. Yet watchdog groups say the United States is still the No. 1 money-laundering country in the world. How is that possible?

The answer is that our leaders are failing to stop our enemies from abusing our democratic institutions — and failing to stop Americans from helping them. Right now, a perfect example of this dysfunction is quietly unfolding in Congress, where an important effort to close a huge international money-laundering loophole is being thwarted.

The war in Ukraine has forced Western societies to acknowledge that when kleptocratic leaders and their cronies use democracies to wash their illicit proceeds, it’s not just a moral failing but a national security threat as well. One reason Russian President Vladimir Putin has enough cash to wage unending war while resisting international sanctions is that the U.S. and other international financial systems have long been helping his officials and oligarch friends store their ill-gotten gains as offshore wealth. That Putin and others then use that cash, in part, to undermine Western democracies merely underlines our stupidity for participating in this scheme.

In 2020, Congress passed a law mandating more transparency for corporate shell companies, which are one part of the problem. This year, the Justice Department launched a “KleptoCapture” task force, devoting more resources to the issue. But one glaring loophole remains — and a bipartisan drive to close it is being blocked in the Senate.

Republicans and Democrats have joined together to pass a bill called the Establishing New Authorities for Businesses Laundering and Enabling Risks to Security (Enablers) Act. It would require lawyers, financial consultants, art dealers and any other businesspeople who deal with large amounts of foreign cash to perform basic due diligence on their clients before helping them access the U.S. financial system.

The bill passed the House as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which is currently the subject of House-Senate negotiations. But inside those negotiations, the GOP staff of the Senate Banking Committee, who work for outgoing Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), are blocking the legislation’s inclusion in the final package, several lawmakers and staffers told me.

“The Enablers Act should not be jammed into the NDAA without first being thoroughly vetted by lawmakers,” a GOP Senate Banking Committee staffer told me, defending Toomey’s stance. Congress should wait and hold hearings on the bill before giving more authority to the Treasury Department, the staffer said.

The ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, Patrick T. McHenry (N.C.), also opposes the bill, but Toomey’s staff is the main obstacle, sources said. The American Bar Association and some trade groups have also expressed opposition to the bill, arguing it could impose onerous reporting requirements and infringe upon their confidentiality with their clients.

“There are people out there who like their suitcases full of cash with no questions asked,” said Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who co-sponsored the House bill with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.). “But given those suitcases of cash often come from Russia, China and other adversaries trying to influence our politics, the national security imperative here vastly outweighs any slight inconvenience these minimal reporting requirements would create.”

In the Senate, the push to pass the legislation is led by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and supported by several national-security-minded Republicans, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who last month publicly called on Congress to include the Enablers Act in the defense legislation this year.

On Wednesday, a group of conservative national security experts and former officials sent a letter to the leaders of both parties in Congress arguing that the United States cannot press other countries to clean up their financial systems while leaving large loopholes in the U.S. system unaddressed.

“Fentanyl traffickers, [Chinese Communist Party] agents, and Chinese kleptocrats operating within the United States cannot navigate the U.S. financial and legal systems by themselves. Neither can Russian oligarchs or Iranian sanctions evaders,” the letter stated. “Instead, they have often taken advantage of unwitting or unscrupulous Americans to facilitate harmful activities.”

Even though there is ample evidence of the threat, widespread awareness about how to address it and bipartisan agreement on the proposed solution, the expectation right now on Capitol Hill is that Toomey’s staff will prevail in blocking the legislation, leaving the next Congress to start the process over again. Killing an idea in Washington is much easier than solving a problem.

But the good news is that it’s not too late. Negotiations are still possible. There’s still time to do something real to drain the money-laundering swamp here at home. If our democracy can’t function well enough to stop our adversaries from using our financial system against us, we will have nobody to blame but ourselves.

It is heartening to see some important Republican figures come out against Donald Trump. But it’s worth noting that many embraced him when he proposed a Muslim ban, tried to extort Ukraine’s president, was impeached and tried to overturn an election. His real sin, in their eyes, is that he is losing popularity.

However, Trump’s slump among Republicans could change. Imagine that during the 2024 campaign, the Republican Party runs a large and varied field: Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Larry Hogan and Liz Cheney (among other possible candidates). Trump starts with a shrunken base but generates enormous publicity and wins the single-largest vote share in the early primaries. He doesn’t get past 50 percent of the vote in any state — but most Republican state primary systems favor the front-runner, and, in state after state, he just does better than anyone else. As Ronald Brownstein reminds us, that’s how Trump became the presumptive nominee in 2016 while garnering only about 40 percent of total votes.

Voters did deliver a powerful rebuke to the Republicans in the midterm elections, and clearly it was centered around two issues, election denial and abortion. But those who shifted appear to have been independents and a sliver of moderate Republicans. These are not the voters who will determine the results of Republican primaries.

The results also don’t tell us enough about a possible matchup between Trump and DeSantis. DeSantis’s victory in the Florida gubernatorial race was impressive. But in the early stages of a presidential campaign, DeSantis would not be facing Trump mano a mano but rather as one choice among many. A New York Times-Siena poll from October found that almost half of likely primary voters still preferred Trump, with about one-quarter favoring DeSantis and only 6 percent favoring Pence. DeSantis’s popularity will probably have increased in recent weeks, but in a possible 2024 presidential campaign he will be fighting for “Not Trump” voters, and the Not Trump Lane of the Republican Party is going to get very crowded.

Were Trump to have a revival of his fortunes, many would jump back on his bandwagon. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has already reserved a spot there, promising that if Trump were to get the nomination he would “enthusiastically support him.” Republican officials seem to be hoping that their voters will do their dirty work for them and deliver them from Trump — reversing the usual roles of leaders and followers. But it won’t work. The party must put an end to its moral cowardice and finally and frontally confront the cancer within. Republican leaders need to explain to their voters that Trump is a demagogue who tried to undermine American democracy, which should make him an unacceptable nominee for Republicans.

In a fascinating essay in Foreign Affairs, Barnard College scholar Sheri Berman points out that America is something of an outlier among well-established democracies. She notes that in many Western European countries, right-wing populist parties have been forced to retreat from their most extreme positions and accept mainstream stances on issues such as the European Union, the euro and the war in Ukraine. But in the United States, the Republican Party, having opted for extremism in the wake of the Trump revolution, has been far more willing to go along with his dictates, with a slate of almost 300 election deniers as candidates in the midterms.

The reason, Berman points out (both in the essay and in a conversation with me), is that the institutions and norms of liberal democracy are strong in Western Europe. The political parties act responsibly, European and national institutions maintain their independence, and leaders call out bad behavior. So, from Sweden to Italy, when radical right-wing parties come to power, they are rarely able to change policy along the dramatic lines that they had once called for. She notes that in Sweden and Italy, the far-right parties have had to moderate their rhetoric and policies significantly to attract support and be seen as serious enough to govern.

The United States, unfortunately, has a weaker, more open political system to begin with, defined nowadays by primaries, money, social media and celebrity, all of which enable an entrepreneurial politician such as Trump to take over a major political party and turn it into something resembling a personality cult. (At the last Republican National Convention, not one of the former presidents or presidential nominees spoke, but six members of Trump’s family were given prominent slots, something unthinkable in a European country.) Berman writes that “Freedom House and other groups that track democratic development, such as V-Dem, have noted a marked decline in the strength of American democracy but have found no similar decline in Western Europe.”

In countries where democratic institutions are weaker — such as Hungary, Turkey and (alas) the United States — demagogues change parties rather than the other way around. To fend off the threat, Republican leaders must act to purge their party (and country) of extremism. Even after the midterms, Trump and Trumpism will not magically vanish.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump wants to return to the White House. His candidacy should be the final test of whether the United States has truly overcome the lure of authoritarianism.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Is Trump still a viable candidate? Yes and no. 
“Stop the Steal” isn’t conceding.
What really caused the missile explosion in Poland
Lance the BoilTrump is back. Twice impeached, facing a slew of legal and financial issues, the disgraced former president made good on his threat to run in 2024 in a weird and draggy hour-long mess of a speech to the faithful last night at Mar-a-Lago. The announcement was everything you’d expect from a Trump performance: the accordion hands, the singsong voice, the tussle with the teleprompter as if the machine were a hostile headmaster testing him on Latin declensions.Whoever wrote the speech loaded up the usual gobbledygook about “globalist sellouts” and China and rebuilding the military, but to no avail. Trump, as usual, seemed uninterested in the prepared text, and he shifted to all the greatest hits, including his many grievances, the meandering stories, and the bragging that defies fact-checking. Among the many weird gems of improvisation, Trump said that, during the four years of his presidency, there were “decades without a war.” (Pretty sure that one’s inaccurate, but forget it, he was rolling.)As a former speechwriter, I can’t really blame Trump for being bored by the text. Whatever Trump’s idiosyncrasies and failings as a public speaker, his speechwriters—I assume Stephen Miller, in most cases—are terrible, writing for themselves with attempts at high drama and Gothic menace, rather than for the simpler cadences of a Queens casino boss with a limited vocabulary.I’m sure that many Americans, if they bothered to watch the speech, rolled their eyes. Even the loyalists at Fox kept cutting away, while reassuring the viewers that it was a great speech. (Among the network’s many over-the-top moments: Joe Concha said it sounded like a State of the Union address, which I suppose made sense if you couldn’t hear the actual words.) As I used to do during the Trump years, I live-tweeted my commentary on the speech, and many Twitter users angrily told me to ignore Trump—to stop amplifying him and stop giving him attention, as if he would just disappear if we looked away.But I have to admit that I welcome Trump’s candidacy.I know that Trump reentering the political fray is a threat to our political system and a pollution of our civic hygiene. I know that if he wins again, he will bring with him people who might be far less stupid, and therefore much more dangerous, than the gang of goons and opportunists who infested our institutions the last time around. And yet I think he should run.It’s time for us to once and for all declare who we are as a people. There is still an illness lurking in our political immune system. We discovered (or rediscovered) in our elections last week that American democracy has great regenerative power. But the elections of 2022 only suppressed a fever. The people of the United States, until now, have been reluctant to lance the boil, cleanse the wound, and just get it over with.  America needs a reckoning. If Trump were to slink off into the night—that is, if he had even a microgram of decency—his supporters would never have to come to grips with what they, and he, have done to this country. Even worse, if Trump stayed in exile in Florida, Trumpists and their cowardly Republican enablers could quietly nurture a 21st-century version of a GOP Dolchstoßlegende, a modern stab-in-the-back theory in which Republicans and the conservative media could continue muttering darkly about how Trump was unfairly defeated in 2020 by The Swamp, or The Lamestream Media, or the “China Virus.” Some of them could even pretend they never liked him. All of them could bloviate at will while safe in the knowledge that they would never have to defend voting for Trump again.To pretend, however, that Trump is irrelevant is not only a mistake; it provides no resolution to our democratic crisis. It is denial, the equivalent of a drunk driver telling us to ignore the whiskey bottles on the lawn and the damage to the family car, whining that dents can be fixed and that no one got killed—not this time, anyway.Trump’s candidacy, by contrast, is an opportunity for a moment of clarity. We now know about Trump’s many offenses against the American nation. We now know, according to the January 6 committee, that Trump instigated an attack on the government of the United States; that he endangered the lives of elected leaders, including his own vice president; that he put national security at risk, repeatedly, for his own ego.We now know, without doubt, that Donald Trump is every bit as unhinged and reckless and dangerous as his critics warned back in 2015, and that there can be no more excuses, from neither voters nor elected Republicans. Trump’s supporters should now say that they are with him, and admit that they care not a damn for democracy; Republican officials should now declare that they will support him—or oppose him—without burrowing into weaselly excuses about “the past” and “moving on.”Trump’s candidacy is what millions of voters and many Republican officials claim to want. Let them have it, and let the contest begin to decide who we are and what we value.Related:
Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame.
What Joe Biden knows about America
Senate Republicans reelected Senator Mitch McConnell as minority leader.
Elon Musk gave Twitter employees a deadline of 5 p.m. eastern time tomorrow to decide whether they want to stay at the company.
The NATO secretary general and Poland’s president said that an explosion that killed two people in the country yesterday was likely caused by a Ukrainian air-defense missile, though Ukraine’s president said he had “no doubt it was not our rocket.”
The Great Game: Soccer is one of the few team sports where short kings reign supreme, Adam Serwer argues.
The Weekly Planet: Robinson Meyer offers three theories for why Democrats avoided a climate backlash.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the sadness of inflation-era cuisine.
(Gregg Newton / AFP / Getty)
NASA’s Overshadowed Moon LaunchBy Marina Koren
In the middle of the night, while many Americans were sleeping, NASA launched the country into the next era of space exploration.
A giant new rocket, the most powerful that the agency has ever built, soared into space just before 2 a.m. today, carrying a gumdrop-shaped capsule on a journey to the moon and back. It’s the first mission in the Artemis program, NASA’s ambitious effort to land American astronauts on the moon for the first time in 50 years.
“What is Jesse Eisenberg doing here, saying these things I wrote?”
Doctors are failing patients with disabilities. 
Hip-hop needs an intervention.
Kelly Reilly in Yellowstone. (Courtesy of Paramount)
Read. “The Squirrel,” a poem by Ellen Bass.“It’s the squirrel I keep seeing behind my closed lids as we begin to kiss, begin to go under into that realm of I don’t care, not now … The squirrel. And the squirrel’s eyes, black, glossy, rimmed in white.”Watch. Season 5 of Yellowstone, on Paramount. One of the worst people on the show is also one of the best characters on TV, our critic writes.Play our daily crossword.P.S.It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up all night to finish a book. But then I picked up Leah Carroll’s Down City, her account of growing up in Rhode Island, where I have now lived for many years. From the first pages, I realized that this was no ordinary memoir. The book opens with Carroll’s mother being strangled to death by a brutal Mafia drug dealer who is convinced that she is a “rat” cooperating with the police. A few paragraphs later, her father, a Vietnam veteran, dies at 48 from alcoholism (and maybe from despair). And that’s just the prologue.All of this happens around young Leah as she grows from a child of the 1980s who loved Inspector Gadget into a purple-haired, aimless 1990s teen who can’t finish high school, and then into a young woman who decides to find out the truth about her mother—and finally, as much as possible, to understand her father. I discovered the book because Leah’s husband, Nick, is an editor at The Atlantic, and he suggested it to me one day as we were driving around the Ocean State, talking about how it was the epicenter of Mafia activity in late-20th-century New England. It’s one thing to know that Providence was once a mob city, but it’s another to see the damage wrought by the mob ripple through a family for years. It’s a harrowing story, but told in a clear voice and, perhaps most important, without self-pity.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The critical consensus on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign launch is that it was boring in both delivery—uninspired and listless—and content, mostly rehashing themes he’s played since he started running for president in 2015.But underneath the weird ad libs and overwritten Stephen Miller rhetoric, the speech revealed a new and important challenge for his comeback attempt. In 2016, Trump’s appeal to many was that he was perceived as a bold truth-teller: Unlike both Democrats and his fellow Republicans (he and his backers contended), he was willing to say what everyone could see. But in 2024, Trump finds himself in the opposite position: trying to convince voters that reality is different (and worse) than what they see and feel.The early part of the speech was dedicated to the kind of doomsaying familiar from Trump’s 2016 nomination-acceptance speech or from his “American carnage” inaugural address in 2017.“We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. For millions of Americans, the past two years under Joe Biden have been a time of pain, hardship, anxiety, and despair,” Trump said. “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crimes which are being watched all over the world as leadership of other countries explain that this is what America and democracy is really all about.”[David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame]This account may appeal to hardcore MAGA fans (though not apparently to some speech attendees who sought in vain to step away), but as Trump himself acknowledged a few moments later, it doesn’t resonate with other voters. In launching his campaign, Trump had to reckon with the Republicans’ huge disappointment in the midterm elections, which most observers see as the result of voters rejecting the candidates and causes (especially election denial and ending the right to abortion) that he backed. He did so by deflecting blame—some to the GOP, and some to the voters, who he argued simply didn’t see what was happening around them. In short: The people have spoken—the bastards.“Much criticism is being placed on the fact that the Republican Party should have done better, and frankly, much of this blame is correct, but the citizens of our country have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through, and the total effect of the suffering is just starting to take hold,” he said. “They don’t quite feel it yet, but they will very soon. I have no doubt that by 2024, it will sadly be much worse and they will see much more clearly what happened and what is happening to our country, and the voting will be much different.”[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]Arguing that voters would agree if only they weren’t too dumb and blind to see is an uncomfortable position for any politician, but it’s especially challenging for Trump because his original appeal was built on his willingness to speak the supposedly obvious facts that other politicians would not. He would tell voters that the political system was rigged toward donors. He would say that free-trade policies had harmed many Americans. If they were racist or xenophobic, he’d speak their truths, too. The central appeal was common sense, even when it was neither common nor sensical.Trump’s critics howled that this was absurd and that he was a serial liar. They were right, but they didn’t grasp that he was able to convey something that felt right to many Americans, an impression captured by a famous New Yorker cartoon by Paul Noth.Why did that not work in the midterm elections, nor in 2020? What’s changed is not Trump’s rhetoric but the context in which he delivers it.[David A. Graham: Trump’s future isn’t up to Fox News]One problem is exaggeration. Crime is rising and this clearly does trouble voters as a group, as I wrote just before the election, and that is especially dangerous for Democrats. Americans want safe neighborhoods and are troubled by violence. But c’mon: “The blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities are cesspools of violent crimes”? Does anyone, even Miller, believe this?Second, voters see the problems he’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter enough. A raft of data shows that voters this year were deeply concerned about the economy and crime, but they gave Democrats an unprecedentedly good showing anyway. One reason for this is backlash against the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade (a decision issued by justices who comprise one of Trump’s signature accomplishments), but another, I’ve argued, is that voters are repulsed by Trump’s attacks on normalcy, rule of law, and the institutions of democracy—including the literal attack he incited on January 6, 2021.Third, independent and centrist voters may have experienced Trump as a breath of fresh air and been willing to give him a chance to run the country in 2016, but now they’ve seen what happens when he tries. “I never respected critics,” Trump said last night. “They tell people what’s wrong, but they can’t do it themselves.” Yet that is exactly his M.O. Trump didn’t build his border wall, he didn’t repeal Obamacare, he didn’t cut the federal debt, he didn’t disarm North Korea—though he talked a good game about all of these things.[Read: Why Trump invokes ‘common sense’]Trump’s dishonesty has started to catch up to him. Consider this account of his presidency from the announcement speech: “Two years ago when I left office, the United States stood ready for its golden age. Our nation was at the pinnacle of power, prosperity, and prestige, towering above all rivals, vanquishing all enemies, and striding into the future confident and so strong … There was never a time like this … When the virus hit our shores, I took decisive action and saved lives and the U.S. economy.”Is this how you remember 2020? If not, you’ve seen a key weakness of the 2024 Trump campaign. Once, he was the guy telling people what other people were unwilling to say. Now he’s stuck begging them to believe something other than what they’ve seen.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat are your best tips––at this time of rapidly rising prices––for cutting costs in ways that meet your needs while depriving you of as little pleasure or convenience or comfort as possible? OR, looking back on your life, what do you consider to be your most wasteful spending?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteSummertime editions of this newsletter fretted repeatedly about the coming winter as ongoing effects of the pandemic and geopolitical turmoil (especially the war in Ukraine) triggered global inflation. Now Thanksgiving is almost here––Americans should expect a 28 percent increase in turkey prices––and around the world, all those early predictions of a tough winter are becoming reality.In Britain, where there is still a cultural memory of World War II rationing and postwar stretches of economic hardship, food and cooking “have long been associated with upward mobility and aspiration,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert observes. That may explain the apparent sadness of the chef Jamie Oliver as he makes a new television show, Jamie’s £1 Wonders, about how to cook on a budget as energy and food costs soar across Europe and beyond.In her estimation, the show succeeds by eschewing the expectation that celebrity chefs will indulge our culinary lifestyle fantasies and instead attempting to give the audience something more practical, like a recipe for a sweet-potato curry with chickpeas and frozen spinach that can be cooked entirely in the microwave, “which he says costs just six pence to run for 20 minutes.”She writes:
If you consider food to be a bellwether for the state of the nation, Jamie’s £1 Wonders has an awful openness to it. This is where we are now: too poor to run our electric ovens, swapping pricey Parmesan for cheaper cheddar, reduced to trying to find joy in a three-pack of peppers and a microwaved tablespoon of jam. “This isn’t cooking as usual for me,” Oliver says at one point, brow furrowed. “But I do like the challenge.” The overarching message is that we can too, if we try—that this period of food-bank exhaustion and spiraling grocery prices can be but a temporary puzzle on the road to future plenitude. More than his relentless optimism, I appreciated his honesty and his effort. We expect celebrity chefs to be aspirational, to constantly prod us to try newer, shinier, more elaborate, more enticing things. It’s much less common for them to acknowledge the kind of ongoing, acute hardship Oliver is addressing—and to still insist that people can find some comfort in cooking through it.
[Read: What the midterm results really mean to voters]Drought Exacerbates the Food CrisisThe burden of rising prices is, of course, higher in poorer countries. In Somalia, for example, millions of people lack sufficient food. Rania Dagash-Kamara, a UNICEF staffer, argued in a harrowing segment with NPR’s Ari Shapiro that climate change is a factor in the East African nation’s current food crisis.
SHAPIRO: When you visit Somalia, what does this crisis look like?
DAGASH-KAMARA: It looks different to most crises that I’ve seen in the last 22 years in the region. It is the frontlines of climate change. It is five failed rain seasons, which we’ve never seen in this part of the world - and a potential sixth one, actually, likely to fail. So people have lost millions of livestock. They’ve lost all their crop. They have lost all their assets, basically. And they’re on the move looking for assistance to survive.
And if I could zoom out a little bit, Ari, in the Horn of Africa, in total, the numbers have been escalating. We’re at close to 15 million children affected at this point, and that’s over 30 million people.
SHAPIRO: Are there people you’ve met in your visits to Somalia who you can tell us about, people you remember who put some individuality on this massive tragedy?
DAGASH-KAMARA: There is a mother that I met who was pregnant, and she also had 1-year-old twin boys, one sitting on her lap, one trying to breastfeed. They had walked 120 kilometers to get to our assistance. And they did. They were lucky. The child on her breast was crying because there was nothing coming out of her breast. And he was trying so desperately. The other one was totally lethargic and unable to move. His stare was blank. And that was one of the saddest things. She herself was malnourished, and her children were malnourished. And she was pregnant.
And many mothers we spoke to had the same story.
Problems Beget ProblemsElsewhere at NPR, Seyma Bayram reports on a study which found that food insecurity across Africa may lead to higher rates of AIDS on the continent:
Women and girls experiencing food insecurity were 28% more likely to engage in transactional sex, defined as sex in exchange for material goods, including food. They are also more likely to engage in high-risk or unprotected sex, sex before the age of 15, forced sex, or sex with a man who is 10 or more years older, the study found. This increases their risk of contracting HIV … The researchers found that providing direct food support to women significantly lowered the risk of contracting HIV.
The Twisted Logic of Trenches in ChernobylIn Aeon, Michael Marder argues that an early chapter in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is striking in its absurdity and illustrative of the modes of thinking that continue to shape that conflict.He writes:
The date was 24 February 2022. Under leaden-grey wintery sky, a column of tanks and armoured vehicles carrying 1,000 Russian servicemen crossed the Belorussian-Ukrainian border and rapidly moved further south, toward the town of Prip’yat and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Kicking up radioactive dust, heavy military equipment and its crew rolled along the most contaminated area, that of the Red Forest. No precautions were taken to keep the soldiers safe: they wore no protective gear, which would have prevented them from being exposed to radioactive particles, the timeless remainder of the 1986 nuclear accident that destroyed the plant’s reactor Number 4 and released tons of contaminated debris into the atmosphere.
On day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chernobyl was among the very first territories ‘taken’ in the still-ongoing war. As if a nuclear disaster site can be seized – as if it does not seize whomever and whatever is in its vicinity in advance, dictating its own rules of a deadly game. The occupying powers will discover the limits of mastery and of habitability the hard way, once they start experiencing the unmistakable symptoms of radiation sickness. But, for now, they are exhilarated with an easy victory, having negotiated the surrender of dozens of Ukrainian national guards and of the workers who maintain the nuclear power plant. And, just as they are settling into the place, or non-place, that will be unfit for human habitation for at least another 20,000 years, Russian soldiers are busy with an absurd task: digging trenches in Chernobyl.
Why trenches in Chernobyl?
Within the twisted logic of Vladimir Putin’s war, the strategic rationale was evident. The exclusion zone, in particular the territories adjacent to the exploded reactor, were to become the staging grounds for attacks that would be invulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks: who, after all, would return artillery or any other sorts of fire emanating from there?
Crypto’s Trust ProblemReflecting on the collapse of FTX, a major cryptocurrency exchange, Megan McArdle argues in The Washington Post that bitcoin, ethereum, and their lesser-known cousins need to be better trusted in order to succeed. But their fans are averse to much of what built confidence in traditional financial systems.She writes:   
It’s not crazy to believe that crypto can change the world. I myself can’t exactly see what it’s good for, but the same question could have been asked about the joint stock company in the 1720s, when England was trying to recollect itself after the South Sea Bubble. It seems at least plausible that crypto, as with the corporation, will eventually evolve into a key part of the financial system. But as with public companies, a crucial part of that evolution will be making the product trustworthy. It took a lot of work to make the stock market boring enough to attract the wealth of more than half of all American households, a lot of institution-building to control fraud and limit the fallout from speculation. If crypto wants to become a world-changing financial technology, it will need to take the same journey.
The problem is, crypto tends to attract people who don’t want to trust the system — any system. That is the core idea behind bitcoin, the ur-cryptocurrency: no intermediaries who might be crooked, no government regulators, just a decentralized database and the remorseless, incorruptible logic of an algorithm.
This all sounds very exciting when crypto nerds talk about it. Decentralized finance! Permissionless innovation! But at present, too much of this freedom is being used to reinvent financial architectures that were de-permissioned for good reason — including the self-dealing clearinghouse, the undercapitalized market-maker and the Ponzi scheme.
The NBA’s New PR ProblemAt the consistently interesting House of Strauss, the sports journalist Ethan Strauss opines on Kyrie Irving, the Brooklyn Nets player who was suspended after posting a link to a film that promotes anti-Semitic disinformation, arguing that the NBA erred in encouraging its players to air their political views:
He’s the end product of another failed corporate project: The NBA’s effort to promote the socially conscious sportsman, to fill the vacuum left by accelerated player movement.
It’s fine to be a socially conscious sportsman, within reason. The league just ran into some trouble when it became part of the #brand. Once the NBA was encouraging its protagonists to “speak out” and sell morality, it established an impossible standard that it would subsequently be judged against. The check was written, it couldn’t be cashed, and now the debts are accumulating.
If you buy into the idea that what athletes say is very important, as the NBA has, you can find yourself obsessively managing what they have to say, or, in this instance, what they happen to believe.
And what do NBA players happen to believe on the Jewish topic? How many players share Irving’s general outlook? … I couldn’t tell you, but it’s a nontrivial amount, even if LeBron James is trying to create some distance between Irving and the others. Hell, LeBron himself was rapping about “getting that Jewish money” on IG back in 2018. The day after, guys in the Warriors’ locker room were mostly aghast that anyone would take issue with LeBron doing this. I’ve been in locker rooms when The Jews were brought up. I’ve heard wacked-out conspiracies, admiration, scorn, oddly earnest questions about how “you people” are so good at making money. Was I offended? Not really. I think I preferred it to the standard White/Black humor that comes with a lot of awkward player-to-reporter jabs. Any banter that disrupted the routine was welcome in a world I was only visiting. But I mention it to point out the following: Kyrie Irving’s views on The Jews would not qualify him as some outlandish NBA outlier. He’s nuts, but his brand of nuts is fairly normal fare, even from a variety of athletes you probably like and root for.
The Jews are just one no-go zone for an NBA that actively encouraged its players to express themselves on social issues. Does the NBA want the unfiltered takes on women out there? What about gays? The NBA made a big show of moving its All-Star Game from North Carolina over the “trans bathroom bill.” Anyone in the league office want the uncensored modal NBA take on trans out there? This all prompts a question of the NBA: If these guys have takes that terrify you, then why did you encourage them to shout their opinions from rooftops? Yes, we can all understand abiding the opinions expressed by players. Again, I favor expansive free speech and dislike when corporations aggressively punish it. But why did you merge your organization with their messaging in an attempt to morally instruct the country?
… Kyrie is his own special case, but he’s also what happens in a league that refuses to establish boundaries. If expressing yourself is part of the product, then the product is under threat when self-expression goes bad.
[Read: Is Florida still a swing state?]Provocation of the WeekIn Brink Lindsey’s incisive newsletter, The Permanent Problem, he argues that, due to a global revolution 50 years ago, “the world today may very well be much poorer than it otherwise could have been—and the existence and extent of that massive loss are all but invisible.”He explains:
The revolution I’m talking about is most closely associated with environmentalism, but I think it’s critically important not to conflate the two. I regard good stewardship of the natural world to be a bedrock component of “living wisely and agreeably and well,” and humanity’s record on that score during industrialization was abysmal. Accordingly, the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s—the growing recognition of the grievous harms inflicted by industry on both the natural world and human health, and the firming resolve to do something about it—must be judged as a large and necessary step forward in human progress.
No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash—the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and ’70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.
It was primarily through environmentalism that the anti-Promethean backlash manifested itself and exerted influence over events, yet there is no fundamental, necessary connection between concern for the health and beauty of the natural world and antipathy toward—in Francis Bacon’s formulation, the use of science and technology “for the relief of man’s estate.” Indeed, as is now becoming clear in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused.
Yet if the connection between environmentalism and the anti-Promethean backlash was theoretically contingent, in historical context it was eminently understandable that these two separate streams of thought met and merged. To see why, we need to understand why it was that the environmental movement emerged when it did. Industry had been loud and dirty from the beginning, and thus from early days had inspired romantic revulsion at its “dark satanic mills.” Why did it take until the 1960s for a mass environmental movement to emerge?
I believe that we can attribute the timing to the maturation of two deep social trends triggered by the spread of material plenty, and to the specific historical context in which those trends were building momentum. The first trend was the “postmaterialist, postmodern” cultural shift documented by Ronald Inglehart: as economic security spread throughout the populace, priorities shifted from physical security and material accumulation to self-expression and quality of life. With the confidence that hearth and home were safe and sound, people naturally turned their gaze to their broader surroundings and began to care more about the beauty and healthiness of those surroundings … The second trend, described in my last essay, was the growing power of loss aversion in step with the widening and deepening of affluence. As people acquired more, they had more to lose, and accordingly began worrying more about holding on to what they had. Greater attention to preserving our natural patrimony was one result; so was greater concern with environmental contaminants and their threats to human health …
The rapid growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s can thus be understood as a consequence of the ripening of these two trends, a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance of cultural attitudes: on the one hand, the high-minded broadening of moral horizons and greater empathy for the non-human “other”; on the other, the self-regarding “I’ve got mine, Jack” stance that regards change as not worth the bother if it carries any possibility of loss.
There is much more to his argument––and supporting charts––at the link.That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Vladimir Putin has eschewed liberal democracy and remains vulnerable because of this, according to Fukuyama. Sergei Bobylev/APIn 1989, a policy wonk in the US State Department wrote a paper for the right-leaning international relations magazine The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”. His name was Francis Fukuyama, and the paper stirred such interest – and caused such controversy – that he was soon contracted to expand his 18-page article into a book. He did so in 1992: The End of History and the Last Man. The rest, they say, is (the end of) history.
Fukuyama became one of those academics whose work was cribbed to a shorthand: The End of History. It is, no doubt, a memorable and dramatic phrase – but it is as unclear as it is striking.

Put very simply, by “the end of history,” Fukuyama did not mean that we had reached a stage where nothing else would occur of historical significance – that all problems had been solved and politics would now be smooth-sailing. 
His argument was that the unfolding of history had revealed – albeit in fits and starts – the ideal form of political organisation: liberal democratic states tied to market economies. (Or to put it in Churchillian language, the least-worst form.) 
Fukuyama’s use of the word “history” here is best approximated by synonyms in sociology such as “modernisation” or “development”. 
He wasn’t saying those states that claimed to be liberal democracies lived up to this ideal, nor that such a political organisation resolved all possible problems – merely that liberal democracy, with all its flaws, was the unsurpassable ideal.
For him, a liberal democratic state requires three things. First, it is democratic, not only in the sense of allowing elections, but in the outcomes of these elections resulting in the implementation of the will of the citizenry. Secondly, the state possesses sufficient strength and authority to enforce its laws and administer services. Thirdly, the state – and its highest representatives – is itself constrained by law. Its leaders are not above the law. 
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Fukuyama, now a senior fellow and professor at Stanford University, appeared to stand firm on his central idea. He argued that those states which have eschewed liberal democracy and proclaimed it dead or dying – particularly Russia and China – remain vulnerable in two specific ways. 
Firstly, he argues, their reliance on a single leader or small leadership group at the top virtually guarantees bad decision-making over the long-term. Secondly, the absence of public participation in any political processes means the support for such leaders is inherently volatile, liable to evaporate at any moment. 

Read more:
Why Putin’s retreat from Kherson could be his most humiliating defeat yet

A debt to Hegel and others
The phrase “the end of history” was not, in fact, coined by Fukuyama. It bears a history, and philosophical currency tracing back to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (who coined the term) and his modern interpreters Karl Marx (1818-1883) and the Russian-born French philosopher and statesman Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968). Understanding it requires an understanding of these thinkers. 
Hegel had argued, most clearly in Ideas for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent (1784), that history has a telos or goal – an end point – equivalent to the emergence of a perfectly rational and just state. That state would guarantee the liberty necessary for the full development of all human capacities. At the same time, it would exist in a state of perpetual peace with other – similarly configured – states. 

Jakob Schlesinger: The Philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, 1831.
Wikimedia Commons

Hegel – according to Kojève – had witnessed this end of history (or at least the beginning of such an end) with the French Revolution and its universalisation of the ideas of equality and liberty.
Fukuyama judged Kojève correct: the French republic had not been bettered, despite many fascistic and communist attempts to make it so. It is not necessarily that the ideals of the revolution were all realised perfectly (as if the Reign of Terror served as vindication of liberalism) but that – as ideals – they had manifested themselves decisively, shown their force, and since proved unsurpassable.
For Fukuyama, Hegel’s misfortune was to be thought of by many 20th-century intellectuals as a mere precursor to Marx, for whom the fate of a society – and an “end of history” – was not determined by its ideas, but by its material organisation. 
For Marx, the resolution of historical development would take the form of global communism. This would mean the end of the exploitation of man by man, the dissolution of private property, the resolution of all antitheses between mental and physical labour, the emergence of a system in which each individual would contribute “according to his ability,” and consume “according to his needs”.

Read more:
Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

But by the end of the 1980s, Fukuyama – along with a host of others – began to suspect we weren’t going to see a Marxist “end of history” after all. The Russian Communist Party, under Mikhail Gorbachev, was moving towards a series of reforms: a “reconstruction” (Perestroika) pushing for greater openness and transparency (Glasnost) and even the expansion of profit-seeking and commercialisation within the confines of a planned economy.
These democratising and liberalising reforms – a response to the totalitarian impulses and long-term economic stagnation of the Eastern Bloc – both delayed and precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. 
Limitations
Many have accused Fukuyama of a Whiggish tendency towards reifying and valorising a particular model of government – the United States specifically – as somehow embodying the perfect form of the modern state.
But this critique, commonly held, is largely misplaced. Fukuyama has pointed out repeatedly the failures of the US, the misguided collapsing of liberalism with neoliberalism, and – more recently – the populist nationalism of the Republican Party, which he sees as catastrophic and of a piece with parallel developments in, for instance, Tayyip Erdōgan’s Turkey and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. 

Viktor Orban pictured last month.
Hungarian Prime Minister's Press Office/EPA

His thesis, therefore, concerning “the end of history” is not so much that this form of political organisation has been realised, but that, as an idea, it is one upon which we cannot improve. And maybe he is right about this. But the devil, as always, is in the details – and Fukuyama seems to sometimes pass over those in silence.
He acknowledges, for instance, but has provided scant recommendation on how to resolve, the inherent tension between the strength of liberal democratic states and the freedoms of their citizens.
A strong state will be one which is able to enforce its mandate – but how is this enforcement to be squared with the liberties of the individuals that comprise its citizenry?
Here Fukuyama counsels “balance”. We may be given to wonder not only what to weigh, but what metric might be used. Furthermore, issues about “details” may run deeper than merely the question of policy resolutions to address such fundamental tensions; much of Fukuyama’s best-known work work favours the general over specifics.

Francis Fukuyama speaking at a world leaders forum in Seoul in 2008.
Yonhap/AAP

This may be no coincidence, given the German idealist framework out of which his thesis was originally couched. Both Hegel and Marx have been accused of a “totalising” vision in which the dirty historical details – of stateless people, show trials and pogroms, the human casualties of both liberal and illiberal “state building” – are swept to the side in the name of universal tales of progress.
It is important to point out that the liberal democratic state Fukuyama praises is one which is very rarely established liberally or democratically. Recent attempts at forcefully “exporting” liberal democracy into countries have very often resulted in destabilisations and tyrannies far worse than those they hoped to replace. 
And what of the recent phenomenon concerning the global resurgence of a number of authoritarian regimes, from Nicaragua and Sudan to Burma and Iran, whose successes (if not stability) don’t immediately give rise to the kind of optimism about democratisation that was at large in the 1980s? 
A more sober stance
Even if his commitment to his position hasn’t wavered, Fukuyama has sobered somewhat in the years following his original article. Although as convinced as ever in liberal democratic states as the ultimate form of political organisation, he is certainly more sanguine about their imminent victory in the world we actually live in. 
In an interview in 2021, the Norwegian political historian Mathilde C. Fasting pressed Fukuyama on the global rise rise and damaging impact of populism, and on what Stanford University’s Larry Diamond calls “democratic recession” – a decline in the number of democracies around the world, as well as the degradation of democratic structures within established democracies, including the US and Britain:

Fasting: Is what we are witnessing “temporary counterwaves,” to quote Samuel Huntington, or are they fundamental reversals that belie the optimism before the millennium?
Fukuyama: I don’t think you can answer that at this point.

Nobody can, of course. As a science, political futurology has proved itself even more dismal than economics.
Chris Fleming does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Even before Donald Trump announced that he was seeking the presidency again, last week’s election results showed Republicans how difficult it will be to escape the former president’s gravitational pull.Widespread voter resistance to a Republican Party refashioned in Trump’s image offset disenchantment with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance and allowed Democrats to post one of the best first-midterm showings for the sitting president’s party in more than a century. In almost all the key battleground states, the same powerful coalition of voters who opposed Trump in the 2018 and 2020 elections delivered stunning rebukes to GOP candidates running with the former president’s endorsement or in his polarizing style, or both.[David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame]The results were much better for Republicans running in red states and districts. But for party strategists operating anywhere outside the most reliably conservative terrain, the election’s message was unequivocal. In those contested areas, “there is no road back to relevance if Donald Trump continues to be the dominant figure in the Republican Party and especially if he is our nominee in 2024,” Dick Wadhams, the former GOP chair in Colorado, told me.Trump’s unusually early presidential announcement, though, made clear that he will not surrender his grip on the GOP without a fight. Last night’s announcement speech itself was instantly forgettable, a rambling greatest-hits collection of familiar priorities (building a border wall), bombastic descriptions of American carnage (“the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities”), and well-worn grievances (“I’m a victim”) delivered with surprisingly little emotion or energy. He pointedly denied responsibility for the GOP’s disappointing showing last week, instead blaming “the citizens of our country [who] have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through.”Yet Trump’s greatest obstacle to a comeback may be the widespread belief among party leaders, donors, and key figures within conservative media that continued hostility toward him is the principal reason Democrats last week succeeded at holding the Senate and gaining control of more governorships and state legislatures—and minimized their losses in the House of Representatives, even though Republicans are poised to capture a slim majority in the chamber.Such a strong performance is exceedingly rare for the party in the White House during the president’s first midterm. Over at least the past century, it is unprecedented for that party to do so well when the president faces as much discontent as Biden does now. Since 1900, the only other examples of the incumbent party running at least as well as Democrats did this year came for presidents who were soaring in popularity, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 (during the early New Deal), John F. Kennedy in 1962 (after he defused the Cuban missile crisis), Bill Clinton in 1998 (amid the backlash to the Republican Congress’s moves to impeach him), and George W. Bush in 2002 (after 9/11).This year, though, just 44 percent of voters nationwide said they approved of Biden’s job performance, while a 55 percent majority disapproved, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. Biden, the exit polls found, did not receive majority support in any of the states with the most closely watched gubernatorial and Senate races, and in some of those states (including Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona), his approval rating peaked barely above 40 percent.In the 21st century, as I’ve written, there are very few examples of Senate (and even gubernatorial) candidates from the president’s party winning elections in states where his approval rating had fallen that low. Yet Democrats rolled to unexpected victories in many of the key swing-state races, including Senate contests in Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and governor’s races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (The Democratic incumbent also led in the Georgia Senate race, now heading for a December runoff, between Senator Raphael Warnock and the Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.) In more reliably blue states, such as Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York, Republicans were uniformly frustrated in their hopes for breakthroughs in Senate and governor’s races (though the GOP did flip several New York House districts).[Read: Trumpism is toxic]GOP governors did score decisive reelection victories in Republican-leaning states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas. GOP Senate candidates also won in states with large populations of non-college-educated white voters (particularly Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina). Exit polls showed GOP candidates continuing to benefit from the electoral advantages Trump has bequeathed them: dominant majorities among white voters without a college education, nonurban, and white evangelical voters, as well as a higher floor of support among Latino voters, particularly men.But the overall ledger showed more bright spots for Democrats. And given Americans’ broadly negative views on Biden and the economy, the only plausible explanation for that success is many voters’ unwavering resistance to the Trump-era GOP. Democrats successfully painted many Republican nominees (including most of the high-profile contenders Trump endorsed) as extremists, citing their opposition to legal abortion and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory. Outside the conservative heartland, Democrats in most key statewide races maintained a winning edge among the groups that most resisted Trump: younger voters, college-educated white voters, people of color, and secular adults; the tilt was more pronounced among women than among men in each group.Most striking, the exit polls found that Democrats carried a plurality of independent voters nationally and won them by bigger margins in most of the marquee contests. “I think, at the end of the day, our crazy was more repelling than their crazy,” Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based GOP consultant, told me.Nationally, nearly six in 10 voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, and they voted almost four to one for Democrats. Among independent voters, Trump’s national unfavorable ratings rose to two-thirds overall, reaching nearly three-fourths among women. Among women especially, that was a far more negative rating than independents gave to Biden.Election results showed that the white-collar suburban areas across blue and swing states that rejected Trump remained locked down against GOP candidates this year, even amid the pervasive discontent over the economy.  In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman, matched Biden’s elevated advantage over Trump in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia; Warnock did the same in the populous Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, outside Atlanta. In 2020, Biden became the first Democratic candidate since Harry Truman in 1948 to carry Maricopa County (centered on Phoenix and its suburbs) when he won it by about 45,000 votes; as of this morning, Senator Mark Kelly led there by nearly 100,000 votes. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet almost exactly matched Biden’s massive 2020 margins in Denver and its big surrounding suburban counties.Especially striking was that these suburban areas broke as badly against GOP candidates who tried to define themselves as centrists, including the Senate nominees in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.In Colorado, the GOP nominated Joe O’Dea, a moderate, energetic candidate who explicitly distanced himself from Trump. Yet he too was swamped. To Wadhams, that pattern is a clear signal that in Democratic-leaning and swing states, virtually no individual Republican can wash off Trump’s stain on the GOP image.Heading into the election, Wadhams told me, the key uncertainty in Colorado was whether “those vast numbers of unaffiliated voters who had voted so strongly Democratic and anti-Trump in 2018 and 2020 would … give strong Republican candidates a serious look in 2022,” now that Trump is no longer in the White House. On Election Day, he added, “I got my answer, and the answer was no.” The lesson, he said, “is that even among the unaffiliated voters who I thought we had a shot at, they ultimately said, ‘Those Republicans are still crazy; they are still in the hip pocket of Donald Trump.’”House elections produced the same pattern. Republican House gains were concentrated in the least urban districts, where Trump has always been strongest, including sparsely settled distant suburbs and pure rural areas, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. But the GOP’s overall House success was constrained because the party still faced a virtual brick wall of resistance in the central cities and inner suburbs of the large metro areas that repeatedly rejected Trump: With about 10 races still to be called, Democrats have won 129 of the 140 seats in the three most urban districts, according to figures Bump provided to me.Such disappointing results have led more GOP leaders than at any point in Trump’s political career to publicly declare that the party must now move beyond him. Trump will likely also face much more serious resistance from party elites and leading conservative media outlets. His announcement speech had a musty feel, which may preview the difficulty he could face convincing GOP voters that his day has not passed. And in Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump could face a challenger more formidable than any he swept aside in 2016.But, still, displacing Trump may not be so easy. Compared with the Democrats, the GOP favors winner-take-all systems in its presidential primaries that benefit the candidate with the largest block of support, even if that’s less than a majority, Benjamin Ginsberg, the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, told me. That could benefit Trump because even if the disappointment over last week’s results shrinks his potential ceiling of support, he retains a dedicated floor among non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical white Republicans. In 2016, as I wrote at the time, Trump pulled away from the field to become the presumptive nominee at a point when he had not won 50 percent of the vote in any state and had captured only about 40 percent of all ballots cast.A second challenge is whether anyone, including DeSantis, can consolidate the college-educated Republican voters most resistant to the former president. Some early 2024 polls already show Trump attracting only about one-third of Republicans holding at least a four-year degree. But that’s about as much support from them as he captured during the competitive stage of the GOP race in 2016; he won because he amassed a dominant advantage among non-college-educated Republicans (many of whom are also evangelical Christians), while those with degrees splintered among many alternatives, such as John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.That could easily happen again, particularly if candidates who position themselves as more centrist on social issues, such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, run. Both men are probably too moderate (or at least perceived that way) to win a GOP presidential nomination, but they could siphon away too many of the voters that a more viable alternative like DeSantis would need to overtake Trump.Then there is the grueling practical reality of running against Trump, who has shown himself willing to say and do almost anything. In 2016, he bludgeoned Cruz and Rubio so relentlessly that they still seem broken—a turn of events reminiscent of Game of Thrones. DeSantis might fare better, but until someone actually runs against Trump, it’s impossible to guarantee that they can handle the jackhammer pressure. Nor is it clear that the donors and strategists who now insist that the party must move on from Trump will remain steadfast if he threatens to trash the nominee or run as an independent should he lose.Another wild card is a possible indictment of the former president, from investigations by either the Justice Department or the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. An indictment could cause more Republican voters to reflexively rally around him. But it could also make some back away, either because his behavior offends them or, more likely, because they conclude that his legal troubles would further degrade his capacity to win a general election.Last week’s results signaled plenty of vulnerabilities also for Biden, including the national-exit-poll finding that two-thirds of voters do not want him to run again. But if the 2022 election demonstrated anything, it is that many Americans who are disappointed in Biden will stand with him and his party nonetheless if the alternative is to entrust power to a Trump-era GOP that they view as a threat to their rights, their values, and democracy itself. That’s the ominous prospect for GOP officials in swing states nervously watching Trump storm into the party’s next presidential nominating contest.

The precise chain of events doesn’t matter. Whether the missile that landed in the Polish border village of Przewodów yesterday was, as President Joe Biden, Polish President Andrzej Duda, and other NATO officials have suggested, the result of a Ukrainian antimissile defense barrage, or whether it was, as some initially suspected, a Russian targeting mistake makes no difference. The real cause of this explosion and the deaths of two people is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an invasion that has already devolved into an advanced form of state terrorism.Usually, terrorist tactics are pursued by small bands of extremists or revolutionaries, not by established states that aspire to world influence. Russia is using them now because the Russian president knows he is losing this war, and in many different ways. Russia’s army is losing on the battlefield; Russia’s government is losing diplomatically. Russia’s leader is losing politically too. Vladimir Putin chose not to attend the G20 meeting in Bali this week, perhaps because he knew he would be shunned by many leaders there, and perhaps because he was afraid of what events might unfold in Moscow in his absence. The 19 other members who did attend issued the clearest possible condemnation of Russia’s war, declaring that the group “deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands its complete and unconditional withdrawal from the territory of Ukraine.”[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]To compensate for these clear losses, the Russian state, like ISIS or the IRA, seeks to inflict suffering on Ukrainian civilians. On Tuesday alone, the Russian military sent more than 90 missiles into Ukrainian territory in an attempt to destroy the country’s electrical grid and other infrastructure. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians are already victims of this air campaign, unprecedented in postwar European history. Now two Polish civilians are victims as well.The missile that fell on Poland could have had more serious consequences, but not for moral reasons: The incident in Przewodów was no more cruel, no more pointless, no more unjustified than the attacks on Dnipro, Lviv, Chernihiv, and Poltava that occurred on the same day. The two Polish farmers who died pose no threat to Moscow or its leadership. The Ukrainian victim who died in an apartment block in Kyiv posed no threat to Moscow or its leadership either.   The only difference between this explosion and others is that Poland is a NATO member, and the other members of NATO are bound by treaty to defend Polish territory if it is attacked. As a result, the Polish government called a meeting of the country’s national security council. Several NATO leaders held an impromptu meeting in Bali, and NATO representatives met in Brussels on Wednesday. No rash statements were issued and no threats were made. Contrary to the accusations of some Russian and pro-Russian propagandists, there is no rush to start World War III. The democratic world is not interested in escalation. The only country that continually escalates is Russia. This morning, air-raid sirens rang again all over Ukraine.[Eliot A. Cohen: Why can’t the West admit Ukraine is winning?]The Przewodów incident might not be the one that brings NATO more directly into this conflict. But it should serve as a reminder: We in the West have now grown accustomed to the war in Ukraine, but familiarity should not blind us to reality. The Russian regime remains extremely dangerous, not just to Ukrainians but to Poles, Balts, and indeed Germans and other Europeans, whose cities are also well within the range of the cruise missiles being fired across Ukraine. Russian attacks are growing in number and severity; they force the Ukrainians to respond with air defense that is also dangerous and potentially lethal too. The longer the missile barrage continues, the more likely we are to face a more consequential accident, or even a deliberate, carefully planned attack on a NATO state.We need more deterrence, now. We could increase assistance to the Ukrainian army fighting in the east and south of the country, including modern tanks and ammunition, in order to speed up the recovery of territory and the end of the war. We could expand sanctions to the thousands of Russian officials responsible for this war, and make it clear that those sanctions will be lifted when Russia withdraws its troops. The Biden administration’s strong support for Ukraine is, so far, a huge success: It has already changed Putin’s calculus and has shifted politics inside Moscow. Backing the Ukrainians to reconquer the remaining Russian-occupied territory and persuading the rest of the world to isolate Russia further is the right response to this accident, and to the continuing daily parade of atrocities.  

So far, 2022 election postmortems have focused on the degree to which Donald Trump’s mimics—with their prickly demeanors, conspiratorial paranoia, and adherence to stolen election narratives—cost the GOP winnable races. That’s justifiable, given the underperformance of those candidates compared with more conventional Republicans up and down the ballot. But the GOP’s Trumpy candidates were not evaluated on personality alone. They took with them into their races both the baggage Donald Trump brings to the table and his populist platform.

In 2022, the rise of populist Republicanism muted the distinctions between the two parties and foreclosed any prospect of voting for a party that will preserve as much or more than it will transform. Indeed, the bipartisan consensus around the notion that America could use a radical overhaul has led the country’s two major political parties to mirror each other in ways that are utterly redundant.

For example, America doesn’t need two parties dedicated to fiscal profligacy. In October, by dint of the fact that his party didn’t introduce another multi-trillion-dollar Covid relief bill in 2022 and instead passed something it decided to call the “Inflation Reduction Act,” Joe Biden insisted that Democrats were now the “fiscally responsible” party. It’s a laughable claim, but it’s understandable why he’d stake it out. With the GOP having sacrificed its reputation for frugality, the mantle of fiscal prudence is up for grabs. Democrats cannot simultaneously attack the few honest brokers willing to acknowledge the imminent insolvency of America’s entitlement programs or its unserviceably large interest burdens and still claim to be the party of green eyeshades. But nor can the post-Trump GOP.

Critics of pre-Trump Republicanism long observed that the GOP was only ever the party of fiscal prudence when it was out of power. In power, Republicans spent as big as their liberal counterparts. But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, the virtue here being prudence. In abandoning the hypocrisy with which it was duly charged, the Republican Party has given up a contrast with the Democrats that served it well in times of uncertainty and hardship. If both parties are profligate and don’t care who knows it, why would voters endorse pale pastels over bold colors? In Republican-led states, conventionally conservative prescriptions for growth–low taxes, a navigable regulatory environment, and the freedom to fail–are proven concepts. Moreover, given the GOP’s intention to present itself as the anti-inflation party merely because its augmented presence in Congress represents an obstacle before big-spending Democrats, the reversion to a conservative mean will require fewer rhetorical contortions along the way.

Likewise, America doesn’t need two parties committed to the country’s withdrawal from the world stage. Again, Republicans thought they might benefit by default, having failed to preside over the humiliating, bloody debacle Joe Biden engineered in Afghanistan. In retrospect, it’s unclear why. Donald Trump retailed his intention to do the same thing, and (we subsequently learned) he tried to execute a withdrawal similar to Biden’s but with even less preparation.

In the interim, the Republican Party has made itself into a tribune for the unpopular view that the U.S. should abandon Ukraine to the depredations of its would-be Russian conquerors. Republican infotainment addicts are bombarded almost nightly with a McGovernite view of America’s malign role in geopolitical affairs—a view shared primarily by the last few genuine McGovernites who still call the Democratic Party home. Trump-trained Republicans have increasingly come around to the notion that the American-led world order isn’t worth preserving. So, the banal and thankless task of maintaining the advantageous status quo falls to their counterparts.

Speaking of the unfashionable, counterrevolutionary act of preserving the status quo against the forces of radical change, the United States needs a party responsive to its pro-life constituents that also reckons with the political realities of the post-Dobbs environment. Anti-abortion activists who might once have thought they could impose their vision of society on their neighbors by fiat have endured enough rude awakenings by now that only the comatose could miss them. A healthy political party would internalize those unmistakable signals and respond accordingly.

A conservative party is not without moral convictions, but nor is it allergic to the persuasion and incrementalism that effects durable changes to the social contract over generations, not election cycles. The verdict in Dobbs overturned a half-century of predictability. Progressive partisans and their emissaries are just as out of step with the American mainstream when it comes to abortion, but they maximized the advantage of being the party that promised to restore the status quo. Republicans believe Dobbs restored a more durable, republican social covenant. But without an emphasis on liberty and the sovereignty of the individual, it looks to the uncommitted observer–with no living memory of pre-Roe conventions–like radicalism.

Of course, America does not need two parties animated by paranoia. Among Democrats, the story of the United States is a Balkan tale of inter-tribal warfare. Rich vs. poor, corporate America vs. the little guy, the white majority vs. everyone else, and so on. It is an account of historical grievances and the long march toward justice, with the promise of victory culminating in the comeuppance to the vanquished. This outlook provides fertile soil in which conspiracy theories could flourish, which is why the Democratic Party has until recently been the traditional home of election-denial and constitutionally dubious power grabs designed to punish the ill-defined plotters.

The long, bitterly aggrieved memory this outlook requires was imported into his adopted party by Donald Trump, and it flourished like an invasive species. But this is not an outlook that can long survive in a political coalition that prizes individual agency above all else. An outlook that views government as a tool to even the historical scales rather than what it more often is, an obstacle to human flourishing and a means of preserving more conflicts than it resolves, will embrace paranoia.

When America had a conservative party, it also had a boring party. Contrary to conservatism’s critics, the boring party was not without ethical convictions, strong policy preferences, or the will to shape the nation in its own image. Nor was it bereft of success stories, however reluctant its critics are to admit. Today, the country has two very lively parties, and lively parties are unpredictable parties. Both seek fundamental transformations to the American compact. Both take a dim view of the choices you’ve made for yourself and their aggregate effects. Neither can muster much enthusiasm for America’s institutions of self-governance or the mechanisms of entropic social organization that constitute themselves in the absence of a guiding hand.

To some extent, that is the natural disposition we would expect from the technocratic party—the party of reform, revitalization, and renewal. It’s alien to a conservative party, which is perhaps why conservatism can seem passé. To hear the most passionate Republican office seekers tell it, the nation is in a state of existential peril that only revolutionary action can reverse. There is no American political party dedicated to taming the reactionary impulses that fall in and out of fashion among the gentry classes. Our political culture is defined now by two factions in a constant state of reinvention, and they’ve come to look a lot like each other in that regard.

As liberals become progressives and conservatives become populists, Americans look upon this perpetual identity crisis and see a nation without grownups secure enough in their convictions that they might maintain them for more than a few months. America needs a grown-up party. America needs a conservative party.

There should have been a climate backlash.A week out, that’s what’s most astonishing about the midterm elections. During previous administrations, voters penalized congressional Democrats for even trying to pass a climate bill. That’s what happened in 1993 and 2009. This time, Democrats actually did it with the Inflation Reduction Act, and then it turned into the best midterm performance for a party in power in a generation.As I wrote last week, that Democrats stopped a red wave is excellent news for climate policy itself. With control of the Senate, President Joe Biden will be able to appoint and confirm nominees and judges, allowing him to implement the IRA as planned. He will also have a stronger hand in budget negotiations. But I’m still wondering: Why was there no backlash?Let’s set aside what might be the most likely explanation—that voters were focused on other issues this year, or that Republicans nominated such extreme candidates for the Senate that voters overlooked the IRA and voted for Democrats anyway. The GOP barely made an issue of the IRA, almost never mentioning it in attack ads, preferring instead to focus on inflation and crime. Still, that suggests something worked about the IRA that didn’t work about earlier climate proposals. What was it? I’ve come to think that three aspects of the law—and the campaign to pass it—helped differentiate it.First, Democrats need to thank Joe Manchin. For most of Biden’s presidency, Manchin was the archvillain of the climate process: He killed the Build Back Better Act, which fused the president’s original climate goals to a messy set of new domestic programs, not once, but twice. In July, I wrote that Manchin’s fickleness at the negotiating table was setting America up for catastrophe. Yet when he finally settled on a deal, he defended it, and his long opposition to climate policy bestowed an aura of moderation on the IRA. The public never thought the IRA was radical in part because it was Manchin’s bill.But second, Manchin should thank Democrats, too. If Manchin provided political cover for the party, then the party returned the favor and gave policy cover for Manchin. The idea underpinning the IRA—that climate policy should aim to lower the cost of clean energy and create new, pro-decarbonization coalitions within the United States—proved politically far less harmful than the older idea that climate policy should aim to make fossil fuels more expensive.The third and perhaps most important reason the IRA did not face a backlash is that the other half of Biden’s energy policy has given the law cover. Biden has made enterprising use of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, the U.S. government’s strategic stockpile of oil that it can distribute in an emergency or if supplies are interrupted. Starting in April, after gas prices surged during the Ukraine war, the government released an average of about 1 million barrels a day from the reserve, the largest and fastest sale of supplies from the stockpile ever.In June, gas prices hit an all-time high, and then they steadily declined throughout the summer. Although these releases are not solely responsible for the decline, they have helped accelerate the downward slide. Last month, the White House announced the second and more important aspect of this policy, which is that the government will refill the reserve at a price guaranteed to generate a small profit for U.S. oil companies. Until the government runs out of space in the SPR, this will help place a floor under global oil prices, giving drillers the confidence to expand production.Although Republicans have tried to attack Biden over these releases, they haven’t hit the mark. That’s in part because … what would they criticize? If Americans are upset about gas prices being so high, shouldn’t Biden go out of his way to bring them down? Some moderate Republicans even called for Biden to adopt a similar strategy in March.In the simplest sense, Biden’s use of the SPR allowed moderate Democrats to say that they support expanding oil and gas drilling or lowering costs while still backing Biden’s far more important climate policy. Using the SPR as an insurance policy is one of the policies that Representative Jared Golden of Maine, for instance, called for after Russia invaded Ukraine. Golden later voted for the IRA, but framed it as one more policy among many to lower energy costs—all kinds of energy costs. He was just reelected in a district that leans 10 points toward Republicans.It turned out that addressing energy costs now allowed Democrats to take the most ambitious steps ever proposed to cut long-term fossil-fuel demand. It’s notable what an act of defiance Biden’s energy policy is. That the president could even try managing gas prices reflects a shift away from political wisdom. In 2012, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business surveyed 41 economists about whether federal policy affected gasoline prices more than market forces did. (This was seen as a proxy for: Can the president do anything about gas prices?) Not one said yes.Yet here is Biden, doing it, and it may have helped save him. What’s more, voters vindicated those efforts at the polls. To the degree that politics is what you can get away with, Biden has managed to successfully nudge down gas prices while preserving power to pass more aggressive climate policy.This is perhaps the most reassuring lesson of the midterms. Managing the energy transition is going to be really hard. Here’s one example: Global oil demand is set to plateau in the 2030s, according to the International Energy Agency. During that time, the world’s transportation sector will still depend on oil, but for the first time in the roughly 160-year-old history of the oil industry, nobody will want to risk producing too much of it. Oil companies have no experience running a business when global liquid-fuel demand is plateauing, much less falling—but they will have to learn.And that is only one challenge. New factories will have to open; demand for certain minerals will explode. These are going to be unprecedented changes, and they will likely cause some volatility and backlash, both in politics and the economy. What Biden’s energy balancing act suggests is that these bumps in the road can be managed as long as politicians understand what the economy needs—to fight climate change in the long term and to manage costs in the near term—and deliver.The country isn’t doomed to endless thermostatic backlashes: When policy is designed cannily and attentively, it can avoid political blowback. That’s maybe the most hopeful takeaway of them all.

The COVID pandemic appears to be causing a flu-season double-whammy – increased risk and decreased attention. It starts with the fact that during the last two years the severity of flu seasons have been dramatically diminished:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that it had logged 1,316 positive flu cases in its surveillance network between September 2020 and the end of January 2021. During that same period last year, the CDC had recorded nearly 130,000 cases.

Flu cases partially rebounded last year, but were still historically low. Almost certainly the reason for this decrease in flu cases is because of the implementation of masking and social distancing – because these methods work to prevent the spread of respiratory infections. And now the flu, and other respiratory infections, are rebounding with a vengeance.

The reason for this is what experts call immunity debt. Our immune systems respond to challenge with a virus or other infectious agent by not only responding with an immediate immune response, but with long-term immunity. Among other mechanisms, for example, memory B-cells that produce antibodies with fine-tuned affinity for the infecting agent can have a robust immediate response on later exposure.

But immunity generally wanes over time (at varying rates depending on the type of organism and degree of initial immune reaction). Some vaccines, such as those for measles, rubella, and diphtheria, provide good life-long immunity. But the flu has particularly short-lived immunity from infection or vaccine, waning after only a few months. This is because some of the immune cells involved in that immunity are short-lived. Immunity is complex, however, and other aspects of immunity may last for years. In addition, there is evidence that repeated annual flu vaccines provide some cumulative benefit, reducing mortality from the flu especially in older adults. The flu strains also drift every season, evading prior immunity to some extent.

It is likely that exposure to the flu every year, even if one doesn’t develop a clinical infection, may provide a little boost to immunity. If, however, the general population has essentially gone two years with little or no exposure to flu viruses, we are missing this boost – and that’s the immunity debt. Plus, we also now have a crop of young children who have never been exposed to the flu.

For these reasons experts are expecting a worse than normal flu season. In fact, early cases are already worse than average. In fact, some are warning of a “tripledemic” with a spike in COVID cases, a bad flu season, and a bad season for RSV and other respiratory viruses.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself and others is to get vaccinated. If you have not yet had your annual flu vaccine, get it as soon as possible. The flu season is already underway – but it’s not too late, as the season is likely to last for months. Get fully boosted against COVID, and get your flu vaccine. You can get them at the same time, but spreading them out over a few days to limit side effects is reasonable.

This brings us to the second part of the double whammy – despite the fact that we are facing a worse than average flu season, vaccine uptake is down. According to the CDC we are at about 5 million fewer doses given than at the same time last year. It’s always hard to know exactly why aggregate behavior shifts. There are lots of factors to consider, so we don’t really know why fewer flu vaccines are being given this year.

It is possible, however, that we are partly seeing the effect of pandemic fatigue. People are simultaneously tired of having their life disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and yet COVID still is occupying their attention when it comes to public health concerns. The regular-old flu seems to be forgotten. Perhaps this effect is exacerbated by two recent flu seasons that were minimal.

Basically the message is – don’t forget about the flu. This is still a serious illness. The flu causes between 12,000-52,000 deaths each year in the US alone, and between 294,000 and 518,000 deaths each year globally. It causes more than 10 times that many hospitalizations. This is another very real concern – the total hospital burden of a tripledemic.

Get your flu vaccine. This is part of basic preventive care and health maintenance. COVID is also likely slipping into an endemic illness, and so we will likely need to get at least an annual COVID booster as well. This is now just part of routine care.

Editor’s Note: This piece was adapted from Arthur Brooks’s remarks at the Irving Kristol Award & Annual Dinner, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, on November 15, 2022. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      Three and a half years ago, I made a hard career pivot. After more than 10 years as president of the American Enterprise Institute—a Washington, D.C.–based public-policy think tank dedicated to expanding free enterprise and American global leadership—I left to teach classes on happiness at Harvard and write about happiness for The Atlantic. When I tell this to my old friends in Washington, they sometimes react as if I’ve said I ran off and joined the circus. It all seems completely disconnected from my old career.It isn’t disconnected, however. Happiness is a core part of the American dream. As the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence reminds us, the pursuit of happiness is one of our unalienable rights, alongside life and liberty. Asked later why he included it, Thomas Jefferson said it was simply “an expression of the American mind.”How radical—and how peculiarly American. At the time, happiness would have been considered presumptuous for anyone to pursue, let alone the nobodies populating this start-up nation. But that is who our ancestors were—ambitious riffraff living start-up lives, pursuing their happiness as they saw fit.And still today, the pursuit of happiness is what leaders must promote and protect. Their job is not to make us happy—no government can or should try to do that—but to protect our ability to pursue our happiness freely.[Read: A happiness columnist’s three biggest happiness rules]Unfortunately, that pursuit is getting harder. According to the General Social Survey, since the year 2000, the percentage of Americans saying they are “not too happy” has risen from 10 percent to 24 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage saying they are “very happy” has fallen from 34 percent to 19 percent. This is reflected in Americans’ pessimism about our country. A record number says the country is headed in the wrong direction. Since 2000, national confidence in our institutions—whether business or government—has fallen by 34 percent.You don’t need these data, though, to know there is a problem. It’s in the air. Practically everyone I meet will say they have a feeling that we are losing something as a country—something beautiful, unique, and valuable. No matter how one feels about politics or the election last week, very few can shake this feeling.On the first day of class, I ask my students at Harvard Business School a simple question: What is happiness? The students’ answers always have the word feeling in them. “It’s the feeling of being with people I love,” for example. “Wrong,” I answer. “That’s like saying your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey.” Happiness is not a feeling; rather, feelings are evidence of happiness.As a social scientist, I believe that happiness should be understood as a combination of three phenomena: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Enjoyment is pleasure consciously and purposefully experienced, so it can create a positive memory. Satisfaction is the joy of an achievement, the reward for a job well done.And then, there’s meaning. You can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even without a lot of satisfaction. But without meaning, you will be utterly lost. That is the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s argument in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. Without a sense of meaning—a sense of the why of our existence–our lives cannot be endured.Here is a quick diagnostic tool I sometimes use to find out if someone has a good sense of their life’s meaning. I ask them two questions:
Why do you exist?
For what would you be willing to die?
There is no greater joy than seeing someone you love find their answers. I remember this in the case of my son Carlos. He struggled in high school, like so many adolescents, to find a sense of his life’s meaning. After high school, he joined the military. Today, at 22, he is Corporal Carlos Brooks, Scout Sniper, Third Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, Weapons Company.Ask him the two questions today, and he now has answers:Why do you exist? God created me.For what would you be willing to die? For my faith, for my family and friends, and for America.But I have to ask him: What is America? The American people, and people with the spirit of American freedom in their heart.My research over many years has led me to identify four “institutions of meaning”: faith, family, friendship, and work. Social-psychology research shows that these institutions are indeed central to understanding who we are as people and, thus, how to answer the questions above. That is certainly true for me. My sense of meaning comes from my Catholic faith, my family, my beloved friends, and my work to lift people up and bring them together.I believe the happiness crisis in America is at its core a crisis of our personal and shared sense of meaning. The institutions of meaning have all weakened dramatically in the past two decades:
Religious affiliation and practice have been steadily falling. About 30 percent of U.S. adults now say they are unaffiliated.
Marriage rates have fallen by 38 percent since 2000. Childbearing has fallen by 18 percent since 1990.
The percentage of people with fewer than three close friends has nearly doubled since 1990.
The workforce-participation rate has steadily declined. According to the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, for example, the percentage of men ages 25 to 54 not in the workforce more than tripled from 1965 to 2015. COVID-19 accelerated this trend.
Faith, family, friendship, and work—the institutions of meaning—all have one thing in common. They are all outward-facing expressions of love and solidarity with others. Of course, love can be an awkward topic—for some, practically painful. But we have to talk about love today, because when we lose the institutions that reinforce our love for one another, a vacuum of meaning opens in our lives.Happiness abhors a vacuum, so we seek alternative sources of meaning, and that leaves us vulnerable to moral predators—people who offer us fear and hatred instead of love. They exploit our lack of love to divide us for political, financial, and personal gain. Some politicians, pundits, academics, or simple internet trolls would set us against one another, telling us that we are victims of our fellow Americans—even our friends and family–who don’t share our demographics or political beliefs.[How to Build a Life: Trolls aren’t like the rest of us]These predators have invaded the space people once reserved for faith, family, and friendship, and given us instead the zombie religion of grievance and the counterfeit family of shared victimhood. They urge us to think in terms of us versus them—and to see us as victims of them, be they immigrants, wealthy people, Democrats, Republicans, or people of another race.This is ripping our country apart: 63 percent of Democrats today say Republicans—that means Republican citizens, not politicians—are more immoral than other Americans; 72 percent of Republicans say this about Democrats. According to one survey, 61 percent of Americans are concerned that we could face another civil war.Leaders who promote grievance do not have our interests at heart. On the contrary, researchers have found that people who display “dark triad” personality characteristics—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—tend to engage in so-called virtuous victimhood. These are people we should pity—or perhaps fear—but certainly not follow. These are not the people we want setting policy or educating our kids.How long can this go on? The words of the historian Will Durant on why Rome fell ring in my ears these days: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”It’s easy to be discouraged when you look around at the terrible polarization and the suffering it is bringing, and the resulting degradation of our sense of national purpose. I don’t blame anyone who concludes that we might never bring America back together again as a people.[Read: The doom spiral of pernicious polarization]But my goal is not just to tell you our troubles. It is to suggest solutions. Let me propose three that we all can undertake.First, share your secrets of meaning. When I explained the importance of faith, family, friendship, and work, perhaps you said to yourself, I practice those things! That’s great. But it’s not enough to practice these things in our own lives—we need to celebrate them openly and recommend them to others. We all need to preach what we practice. To keep quiet about your sources of meaning because you are worried about looking judgmental is an act of selfishness.Second, go out of your way to reject identity politics, and tell our shared story as Americans instead. If we want to find our way back as a nation, we must repudiate the poison of grievance and victimization and work instead to reestablish a healthy sense of meaning by constructing a narrative for our country that includes all of us.Please don’t dismiss this as impossibly idealistic. On the contrary, some of our most successful presidents, from Washington to Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt, did exactly this in times of crisis and trouble—they told a shared story to unite Americans against a common threat rather than balkanizing our people against one another.For an example from within my lifetime, take Ronald Reagan. Here are his words upon acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination in 1980: “I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the Earth who came here in search of freedom.” (And he added, by the way, “Make America great again!”)In 2022, Reagan’s elegy to immigrants sounds strange coming from a conservative, doesn’t it? As Reagan knew, the best way to maintain a shared story is to welcome people who want (and work) to be part of it. As an American conservative myself, I strongly support that old-fashioned view, and am deeply grateful to immigrants to this country for believing in the American dream for themselves and their children, thus reminding us that America is still great.[How to Build a Life: What immigrants know about happiness]The third solution is the most urgent of all: It is to love your country, no matter who you are, no matter how you got here.In 1796, in his farewell address, George Washington said, "Citizens by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.”But let me ask: What is my country? Is it the soil, the ethnic ancestry, or the money? No. It’s our people. You and I are America. And so are the people who don’t agree with me, look like me, think like me, or vote like me. To love our country means we must be good to one another, even when we disagree. No, especially when we disagree. Anything less is un-American.Let me emphasize a little more the importance of not agreeing with one another. This is a country based on competition: democracy, capitalism, and the competition of ideas. We must disagree. But I will not treat those with whom I disagree with contempt, because that is to say I have contempt for my country.That would also mean having contempt for some of the people I love best. How many of you love someone with whom you strongly disagree on politics? Me too. When my fellow conservatives trash people on the left, they are trashing my family and many of my friends. People I love. My parents were liberal Democrats. I was the only bona fide conservative in the family. (My mother once confronted me when it was becoming apparent that I, as a young man, was developing an interest in free markets. “Be honest with me,” she said. “Have you been voting for Republicans?”)We all love people who disagree with us but who share our American story. It’s time to start acting that way.Easier said than done. We are in something of a stalemate, ideologically. How can I be nice when they are being so awful?Let me suggest that the ones to make the first move should be the party trying to retake the White House in a couple of years—the Republican Party that I, for many years, have voted for.The way to win the heart of Americans is not to double down on contempt and pugilism but rather to become the party of ordinary people, with ordinary people as leaders who promote greater unity and happiness. Not only is that the right thing to do, it’s a practical way to get votes: 93 percent of Americans say they hate how divided we have become. But without leaders who do as well … they can only sigh and pull the lever for the lesser of two evils.If politicians on either side were to reject divisiveness, they could seize on a real opportunity to go from a 51–49 political ping-pong match to governing with a big majority. Why shouldn’t that be the Republicans?Leaders can start by offering all Americans these two answers to the meaning questions I outlined above, but for our nation and shared story.Why does America exist? To lift up the world. Both indirectly through the example of its unapologetic enjoyment of freedom and prosperity, and directly through its generosity to others and courage in times of trouble.For what are we willing to risk our prosperity and security? For our way of life. For our democracy, for our system of free enterprise that has pulled so many of our brothers and sisters around the world out of poverty, for our commitment to religious freedom. Our willingness to fight for these things benefits us but also benefits the world by providing a model that others can and have followed.Then, all of us, voters and politicians alike, should make these four joyful commitments:
Renounce all rhetoric of contempt and hate for fellow Americans.
Leave behind leaders who keep us mired in this swamp of grievance and victimization.
Make a commitment to reject all political violence, without fear or favor.
Search for stable, mainstream policy solutions that a majority can live with, while disregarding the approval of radicals and activists.
The hardest part of what I’m suggesting is that it requires standing up to one’s own side—and calling very powerful people to account. Nobody wants to do this, because it’s scary. We evolved to avoid offending our friends. Half a million years ago, offending a friend would have meant getting kicked out of your tribe, wandering the frozen tundra, and dying alone.But look around: There’s no tundra—just Twitter.Standing up to the powerful isn’t physical courage; it’s moral courage. We often hear from the leaders of the grievance coalition that it is morally courageous to stand up to your enemies. What nonsense. As my father taught me, true moral courage is standing up to your friends, on behalf of the people with whom you disagree. Are we strong enough to do that?Goodness isn’t for weak people. It’s not easy or soft. It is difficult, and as hard as granite. It requires leaders who are as strong as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan.Here’s my last word on the matter.As a kid, I was crazy about fishing. No one in my family fished—I just took it up on my own, fishing in lakes around Seattle, where I grew up, or in Puget Sound. At about age 11, I tried fishing in the ocean for the first time, on the Oregon Coast in a place called Lincoln City. I remember the day perfectly. I was standing on the rocks, casting into the wild surf—but catching nothing. I was there for hours.Finally, a wizened old fisherman came up to me holding his own pole, and asked, “Hey kid, I’ve been watching you. Are you catching anything?”“Nothing,” I replied, “not even any bites.”“That’s because you’re doing it wrong,” he said. “You have to wait for the falling tide.”The falling tide is when the tide is going out fastest—really rushing out between the rocks. It didn’t make sense to me that I would catch fish then. Wouldn’t they all be going out to sea? He explained that this was when the plankton and bait fish were all stirred up, so the game fish would bite everything.He said it was going to happen in about a half hour. So we waited together. Finally, he looked at his watch and said, “Let’s fish!” We cast out and within seconds started pulling in fish, one after another. We did that for about a half hour.Afterward, sitting on the rocks, the old man started waxing philosophical. He lit up a cigarette and said, “You know, kid, there’s only one mistake you can make during a falling tide.”“What’s that?” I asked.“Not having your line in the water.”America is experiencing a falling tide. It can look and feel like we are losing our happiness and purpose. But that just means there is an opportunity to build something new and great. We can do that. But we have to get our lines in the water now.I love this country. I know you do too. So: Let’s fish.

Daphne Koller has a knack for using technology to improve the human condition. She’s won some of computing’s highest awards and been at the center of a few of Silicon Valley’s efforts to improve lives—one example being Coursera, the global online learning platform she cofounded. A recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant” and one of Time magazine’s Most Influential People, Koller is a leading authority on machine learning. Her current mission, as the founder and CEO of drug discovery and development company insitro, is to harness the power of machine learning to create better medicines for patients in need.

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Email Daphne Koller biography Education Hebrew University of Jerusalem, BSc and MSc Stanford University, PhD in computer science University of California, Berkeley, Postdoctoral researcher, Computer Science Division

Career highlights insitro Founder and CEO (2018–present) Coursera Co-chair (2016–19)

Founder and president (2014–16)

Founder and co-CEO (2012–14) Calico Labs Chief computing officer (2016–18) Stanford University Professor (1995–2014)

Fast facts Cofounded Engageli, an online learning platform, in 2020 Was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business (2014), Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People (2013), and Newsweek’s 10 Most Influential People (2010) Is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the International Society for Computational Biology Received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 Has won many awards, including the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1999 Authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications in journals and venues, such as Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, NeurIPS, and the International Conference on Machine Learning, with an h-index of over 145

Koller recently spoke with McKinsey’s Lydia The at insitro’s headquarters in South San Francisco. Excerpts of their conversation follow.

Lydia The: Let’s start with a big-picture question: How do you think AI and ML [machine learning] can change drug discovery? How would you describe the opportunity?

Daphne Koller: Drug discovery in the past 50 years is a tale of glass half full and glass half empty. On the half-full side, we have transformative medicines that have made a very big difference to patients. On the half-empty side is the so-called Eroom’s Law, the reverse of Moore’s Law, where the cost of drug discovery has grown exponentially year on year without an increase in new drug output.

Why is that? It’s because there are multiple places in the drug discovery process where we need to make significant decisions. If we’re lucky, one decision will get us to a good outcome, but the rest will get us to a dead end. Every successful drug has to bear on its back the cost of all the failures. That means for many diseases there’s just no drug—because either it’s never been a priority and no one’s working on it, or people are working on it but haven’t figured out a path to create an effective medicine. Disease-modifying medicines are few and far between, and cures are almost nonexistent.

With AI, we’re able to use large amounts of data to build “compasses” that allow us to know, when we get to these forks in the road, which path will most likely lead to success. We aspire to create a much more engineered process, with a higher success rate. The aim is to go faster from identifying the genetics of a disease, or of a group of patients, to developing a disease-modifying intervention—so that maybe, when we get to 2035, there will be a lot more treatments to help patients live a long and healthy life.

Lydia The: How exactly is insitro tackling that? What’s the first angle you’re taking?

Daphne Koller: Our focus is “de-convoluting” the biology of human disease. Often, clinicians tackle disease without really understanding what the disease even is. Disease is often defined by coarse-grained symptomatic manifestations, some of which use classifications that date back 50 years or more. These are typically filtered through a subjective lens of both the patient and the clinician, so we end up with a mishmash that really doesn’t speak to the underlying biological causes of the disease.

Video Collecting and creating valuable data

At insitro, we collect high-content data to help us understand underlying biological processes that correspond to disease. Some of those data sets come from patients. For example, we collect imaging data, such as MRI and histopathology; various molecular measurements; and other data that allow us to identify, via machine learning, subtle patterns to disentangle distinct patient subsets.

At the same time, we generate in our lab large amounts of human-derived cells, called induced pluripotent stem cells. These are human cells that were reverted to stem cell status, from which we then create neurons or hepatocytes that carry our genetics. We can further introduce into those cells genetic variations that we know are likely to cause disease. Then we can measure those cells and interrogate—with microscopy or RNA sequencing—what disease looks like at the cellular level. This system gives us a rapid approach for testing therapeutic interventions that could potentially work in humans.

‘Let machines loose’

Lydia The: What role do AI and ML play in this process? In other words, what is AI doing that a scientist or researcher can’t do?

Daphne Koller: I’ll give you a couple of examples. In our recent work studying a fatty liver disease, we were able to identify—using ML—patterns within the liver tissue that correspond with known genetic drivers of disease. Human pathologists couldn’t see those patterns because they don’t even know what to look for. We found that if we let ML loose on the samples—if we let machines have an unfettered, unanchored look at the data—they’re able to identify disease-causing and disease-modifying associations that a human just can’t see.

Video Machine learning in the lab

Another example is our work on tuberous sclerosis complex, which is a rare but not ultra-rare disease: there are 50,000 patients diagnosed with it in the United States, a million worldwide, and we believe it’s underdiagnosed. We created an in vitro cellular disease model by introducing the genetic variant that causes the disease into our cellular systems via CRISPR, and then we were able to phenotype those cells using different methods—including some live cell imaging via our proprietary ML-enabled microscope. We were able to demonstrate reversions that had never been identified before. We’re now assessing those as potential novel drug targets.

Ensuring data integrity

Lydia The: Good data is critical to AI and ML. A question in my mind about AI and ML in drug discovery is, “Why now?” What makes you believe that we can now get enough data that’s fit for purpose for AI applications? And how do you ensure you have good data coming out of your models?

Daphne Koller: One of the things that led me to come back to this field after a bit of a digression into online education at Coursera is that I felt like now is a time when we can really make a difference in applying machine learning to biomedical data. When I was at Stanford, a large data set was 200 samples. You felt lucky if you had 500. Now we’re in a world where there’s an unbelievable ability to both access and generate data that is fit for purpose for machine learning.

Video A new era of science

On human data, one of the earliest efforts is the UK Biobank, which has been able to create deep phenotypic data from 500,000 individuals—measuring everything from whole body imaging, brain imaging, blood biomarkers, urine biomarkers, predisposing factors, and so on, as well as longitudinal outcomes. It has limitations, of course, not least of which is that its composition is very Eurocentric, but—both in the UK and elsewhere—others are building on this effort and creating additional cohorts, making it more diverse. These data sets are only going to get bigger and more useful due to the growing availability of electronic health records.

Separately, in the last decade or so, there have been major advancements in life science tools like CRISPR—which is a therapeutic intervention but is at least as powerful as a research tool—and in measurement technology, with things like super-resolution microscopy, single-cell RNA sequencing, and single-cell proteomics. All of these enable the creation of incredibly large data sets that allow us to interrogate, in very fine detail, the underlying biology of disease.

Lydia The: How do you think about the balance between using publicly available data—which exists but isn’t always clean or easy to use and doesn’t necessarily confer competitive advantage—and generating your own data?

Daphne Koller: Many people believe that by simply collecting a bunch of data haphazardly from different places and creating a sufficiently big pile, you’ll have something that is fit for purpose for machine learning. That’s very rarely the case, especially because some of that data comes from small experiments that were all done in a different way, in a different assay, under different conditions, with different definitions of what success looks like. That strategy is very dangerous, especially when mistakes are made at the early stage and you discover the mistake five years later in a very expensive clinical trial.

The future of biotech: AI-driven drug discovery

There are high-quality data sets available to everyone—not many, but they do exist. As I mentioned, the UK Biobank is an example. So we’ve onboarded data sets that we think add value to machine learning. There are novel methods that we can apply to these data sets that give us unique differentiated insights.

Now, is that a permanent competitive advantage? Probably not, because there are a lot of smart people out there. But it certainly gives us a head start.

Our bigger advantage is that we generate, in-house, complementary forms of data that align with what’s available publicly but allow us to do experiments. Our data set allows us to intervene and assess causality of a disease variant or of an intervention, so it’s a huge amplifier to what is available in public data sets. Using both, the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the parts.

A spirit of collaboration

Lydia The: Something I think about a lot is talent and culture. At insitro, you’re mainly looking for two different types of talent: people with a biology background and people with a computer science background. Everyone talks about how hard it is to avoid silos and how challenging it can be to get everyone working together and understanding one another. How do you make sure that you don’t create second-class citizens and that your employees truly see one another as equals?

Daphne Koller: That’s one of my favorite topics. One of the things I’m most proud of is the way in which insitro has brought together people with diverse backgrounds: machine learning scientists, software engineers, automation engineers, stem cell scientists, discovery biologists, drug hunters, and more.

We’ve laid out behavioral norms from the very beginning to make sure that there’s collaboration and team spirit within our company. We expect employees to engage with one another openly, which means you are willing to ask “naive” questions and accept “naive” ideas from people outside your discipline; constructively, which means you seek to make the outcome better rather than trying to be the smartest person in the room; and with respect for what everyone brings to the table.

This spirit of collaboration permeates insitro and is something that every new “insitrocyte” comments on when I have my 60-day meeting with them. And we’ve consistently found that it gives rise to not only better solutions but also better problems. Questions that we would never have thought to tackle just emerge when people with different backgrounds come together and say, “What is it that we’re really trying to do here?”

Lydia The: On that point and looking forward, what can we reasonably hope for in this space? There’s a wide range of opinions about the potential of AI and ML in drug discovery. What’s your take?

Daphne Koller: I find that there’s an interesting bimodal distribution of opinions regarding the role that machine learning could play in drug discovery. Just four to five years ago, skeptics thought AI was going to be completely useless. More recently, there’s been a greater recognition of the value, but there are still people who think it will be a point solution, like combinatorial chemistry—something that will help in a narrow niche but won’t have broader impact.

Video Neither skeptical nor starry-eyed

On the other side, there are people who are starry-eyed true believers who say, “This is going to be artificial general intelligence!” and who believe they’re going to “get every drug approved within six months!” Biology is really hard, and we need to be very careful when intervening in something as precious as human life. If people tell you that they’re going to have “100 drugs in the clinic in three years” and have predictions along those lines, that too is wrong, in a different way.

Where I think we’ll be in 15 years is that machine learning will be an absolutely critical, pivotal shift—a paradigm shift in how we discover and develop medicines. It’s going to be more akin to computers as a tool than it is to combinatorial chemistry as a tool, in the sense that it will touch every single facet of how we discover and develop medicines, and accelerate and improve every single one of them.

U.S.-China relations are so bad these days that any communication between Washington and Beijing is inevitably hailed as a potential turning point in the ever-worsening relationship. But Monday’s meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping actually serves as a sober reminder of the unfortunate reality that the two superpowers are headed for more confrontation, not less, in the months and years ahead.

Despite Biden’s oft-repeated belief that “all foreign policy is personal,” there was no substantive progress made in the 3½-hour confab. That’s because the problems in the U.S.-China relationship are structural, not personal. And although Xi says he wants to improve the atmosphere, his actions tell a different story.

The White House set expectations low before the first in-person meeting between the two men since Biden assumed office. The event was pitched as an effort to “build a floor” under the relationship by bolstering high-level communication. And it’s certainly true that Xi’s isolation from the world for the past three years has raised the risk of misunderstandings. The fact that he’s inhabiting an ever-shrinking bubble — having purged all his critics — means that any opportunity to speak directly to Xi is worth taking.

“I’m convinced that he understood exactly what I was saying. I understood what he was saying,” Biden said afterward, rolling out the meager results. Biden said he was convinced that there was no need for the United States and China to enter into a cold war and he was confident a Chinese invasion of Taiwan was not “imminent.”

The two sides agreed to restart some of the stalled dialogues cut off by Beijing after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan in August. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China at some point. Both sides agreed that a nuclear war would be bad, a warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his comments before the meeting, Xi played into the idea he wanted a detente in the U.S.-China relationship. He and Biden should “bring China-U.S. relations back to the track of healthy and stable growth,” Xi said. Predictably, much of Washington praised this supposed thaw, and markets jumped at the prospect of an economic thaw to go with it.

The problem with this thinking is that it ignores Beijing’s worsening behavior and the fact that Xi wasn’t willing to negotiate on any of the contentious issues. After his appointment as dictator for life and his consolidation of power, Xi has little incentive to do anything substantial to address U.S. concerns about China’s military aggression toward Taiwan, its mass atrocities against the Uyghurs, its unfair trade practices or any other issue.

“When Xi Jinping says he wants a better U.S.-China relationship, what he really means is that he wants U.S. capitulation on China’s ‘core interests,’ ” said Joshua Eisenman, associate professor of politics at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. “So it’s not that Xi wouldn’t be happy with a better U.S. relationship; it’s just that the terms he is offering are more a list of demands than areas of actual bilateral cooperation.”

Even on issues of mutual interest, there was zero give on Beijing’s side. China has resumed talking about climate change but has not agreed to drop its demand for sanctions to be lifted upfront on its silicon companies for their use of forced labor. On Iran, North Korea and Russia, Beijing is still intent on undermining U.S. policy.

And because the United States has no intention of capitulating to Beijing’s demands that it abandon Taiwan and shut up about its human rights violations, U.S. policy will continue to bump up against Xi’s “red lines.” In fact, both parties in Washington are set to ramp up their efforts to confront China’s actions next year. A GOP-led House of Representatives is going to intensify its focus on the Chinese Communist Party. More lawmakers, including perhaps prospective House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), will visit Taiwan. The Biden administration will only be expanding its export restrictions on high-technology items to China.

Xi’s professed desire for a reset in U.S.-China relations rings hollow because of his long record of deception on this issue. This is the same Xi who promised President Barack Obama in 2015 that he would not militarize the South China Sea — and then did just that. This is the same Xi who signed an agreement promising that China would not use cyberespionage for economic aggression. Fool me once …

Rather than listen to Xi’s dubious claims, Washington should listen more to U.S. allies and partners in Asia, who want more U.S. economic engagement in the region, and to U.S. military commanders, who are warning that U.S. military deterrence in the Pacific is eroding as China’s military footprint quickly expands.

As for handling Xi, it makes complete sense to keep the lines of communication open, in the hope that Beijing will someday be ready to really negotiate in a way that responds to the international community’s concerns about its actions. Talking is great, but only if we are clear-eyed about the character and intentions of the dictator across the table.

Even the biggest loser (at least to some) of last week’s midterm election was a surprise.
“The 2022 midterm election was expected to be a referendum on Joe Biden. It’s closer to say it was a referendum on the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court lost,” said William Galston, a liberal political theorist, Brookings Institution senior fellow, and Wall Street Journal columnist, during the Program on Constitutional Government’s biennial post-election breakdown, co-sponsored by the Center for American Political Studies.
Galston was joined in the Thursday discussion by conservative journalists Ramesh Ponnuru and Bill Kristol ’73, M.A. ’76, Ph.D. ’79, in trying to make sense of what all agreed was a “crazy” and “remarkable” midterm election.
Pre-election polls had many expecting a nationwide “red wave” of Republican victories, with voters blaming President Biden and the Democrats for the economic pain brought by surging inflation. Instead, Democrats held on to the U.S. Senate, and control of the House of Representatives, while still not fully settled a week later, is likely to yield only a narrow majority  for one side or the other.
One key reason is reflected by exit polls nationwide, which showed that the percentage of people who said inflation and abortion were key was nearly equal. In swing states like Michigan, voters cited abortion (45 percent) over inflation (29 percent) as a top concern in exit polling. The “near parity” in these numbers is a “substantial” part of why everyone has been so surprised by the fizzled Republican showing, said Galston.
Democrats also fared much better with voters who were “lukewarm” on Biden’s performance or the direction of the country, but not “angry” enough to vote for the Republican candidate, said Galston.
Kristol was an early “red wave” skeptic. He attributed the incorrect predictions by the media and others to the relative youth of so many influential political analysts and opinion-makers who have only ever experienced “wave” midterm elections.

Panelist William Kristol (at podium) attributed the incorrect predictions to the relative youth of the influential political analysts and opinion-makers. Kristol was joined by Harvey Mansfield (from left), William Galston, and Ramesh Ponnuru.

“They took what is a real historical trend, no question about it, as if it were somehow inescapable and forward aimed,” said Kristol, editor at large at The Bulwark and founder and longtime editor of The Weekly Standard, a now-defunct, neoconservative magazine.
Kristol co-founded the Program on Constitutional Government in 1985 with panel moderator Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard and the program’s current director, as a venue for political theory and debate.
With two elections in a row with very similar results, 2020 and 2022, this midterm was neither a repudiation of Biden nor of the Republican Party. And while many of former President Donald Trump’s preferred candidates lost, even he suffered more of a “setback” than a “massive repudiation,” Kristol added.
Election deniers “had a bad night,” but Republican incumbents did well for the most part, which also bolsters the case that this was not a change election, said Ponnuru, editor of the National Review and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Republican governors who pushed through anti-abortion legislation didn’t seem to pay a price, and demographic groups who were expected to rally in opposition to such legislation, like unmarried women, turned out in similar numbers as in 2018, leading some to argue the abortion effect may be somewhat overstated, said Ponnuru, a CNN contributor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
Candidate quality coupled with concerns about democracy had an impact in many races, even those that Republicans won easily. “It does seem to me that the deeper a candidate in a competitive race was into Trump’s nonsense about the 2020 election, the worse they did,” he said. Even Republican J.D. Vance, the Trump-endorsed candidate who beat Democrat Tim Ryan for Ohio’s open Senate seat, did significantly worse than other major Republican candidates on the ticket who won their races, including the state auditor, Ponnuru noted.
These voters very easily might have chosen Republicans given the set of issues they cared about, had the party fielded different candidates.
“This is a group of voters that is cross-pressured. It doesn’t want to vote for Democrats necessarily, but the Republicans have to pass this minimum threshold of acceptability, and too many of them decided to light themselves on fire instead,” Ponnuru said.
The Democrats’ showing instantly relieves potential pressure on Biden to step aside and let other more promising candidates run in 2024, and likely squashes the possibility that anyone will try to challenge him in a primary. Many in the party were “locked and loaded” to attack an abortion-focused strategy if things had gone badly, said Galston. That won’t happen now. Democrats may even gain some strength as a result, but need to avoid going too far.
“The fact that the Democrats were on the winning side of what turned out to be the core cultural issue in this election does not mean that they will be on the winning side of all the other cultural issues that many Democrats like to push, but overreach is us,” said Galston, a veteran of six Democratic presidential campaigns who served as President Bill Clinton’s deputy assistant for domestic policy from 1993 to 1995.
Galston said with gubernatorial victories in key swing states including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania (and Arizona on Monday night), the Democrats will not have to face the kinds of concerns that could arise from having election fraud conspiracists in those top jobs in 2024. Even the win by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, who rejected Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, will help Democrats fend off a repeat of 2020 election conspiracy unrest.
Heavy losses for Democrats in Florida, Texas, and Ohio offer “substantial clarification” of the Electoral College map heading into 2024, said Galston, with both parties likely to focus their energies primarily on the upper Midwest states, along with Arizona and Georgia.
Looking ahead, Kristol said whether the GOP abandons Trump in favor of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another candidate in the wake of last week’s poor showing is still unclear and will depend largely on whether a critical mass of Republicans speak out against Trump and urge voters to move on in the coming months, a prospect that’s not at all certain.
Despite the boost Biden will get from the Democrats’ strong showing, and Trump’s expected Tuesday night announcement that he’s going to run, Kristol said he still believes the nomination of both parties is “very much up in the air.”
He said that of the four possible 2024 matchups — Trump vs. Biden, Trump vs. some other Democrat, Biden vs. some other Republican, a race with neither Biden nor Trump — the “best thing for the country, in my view, would be Non Biden-Non Trump. That’s the least likely of the four.”
“The worst thing for the country in my view would be Biden vs. Trump, and that’s the most likely outcome.”

As I watched Dave Chappelle’s much-discussed Saturday Night Live monologue poking fun at recent anti-Semitic incidents involving Black celebrities, I finally figured out why I no longer felt comfortable cracking jokes about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.In his 15-minute appearance, Chappelle, a habitual line-stepper, deliberately mocked the presumptions of both anti-Semites and their critics, with little concern for where the chips fell. He closed his potent performance with a pronouncement: “It shouldn’t be this scary to talk about anything. It’s making my job incredibly difficult, and to be honest with you, I’m getting sick of talking to a crowd like this. I love you to death, and I thank you for your support, and I hope they don’t take anything away from me—whoever they are.” In context, this felt like a cheap but clever attempt to immunize himself against criticism—say nothing, and his comedic choices go unchallenged; say something, and you’ve proved him right.That said, Chappelle is correct that it’s become more difficult to poke fun at anti-Semitism in front of an audience, but not because some censorious Jewish cabal is looking over the shoulder of Netflix’s multimillion-dollar man. The problem, I realized, is that as anti-Semitism and related conspiracy theories become more normalized in our discourse, laughing about them becomes harder, because you never know who might not get the joke.[Read: Does Dave Chappelle find anything funnier than being canceled?]From sources as varied as Tucker Carlson, Kyrie Irving, Elon Musk, and Kanye West, our culture faces a flood of conspiracism. And inevitably, with the rise of conspiratorial thinking comes a surge in anti-Semitism. As another comedian famously said, “That train is never late.”The progression is as dependable as it is depressing. Conspiracy theorists begin by rejecting mainstream explanations for social and political events in favor of supposedly suppressed knowledge and hidden hands. These individuals may not start out as anti-Semites. But anti-Semitism has a multi-thousand-year head start on their crooked conception of the world, and has produced centuries of material casting the Jews as its chief culprit. Once a person has convinced themselves that an invisible hand is manipulating the masses, they are just a couple of Google searches away from discovering that it belongs to an invisible Jew.Take Irving, the Brooklyn Nets basketball star who shared a cartoonishly anti-Jewish film with his social-media following. As the Yahoo Sports columnist Ben Rohrbach noted at the time, this was far from the first conspiracy theory that Irving had promoted. In the past, the point guard had suggested that the Earth was flat, that the CIA killed the musician Bob Marley, that the Federal Reserve helped assassinate President John F. Kennedy, and that 9/11 might have been an inside job. “People will be like, Who’s ‘they’?” Irving said in a 2018 podcast, before answering his own question: “Everyone who has basically controlled us.” Seen in this perspective, it’s less surprising that Irving landed on anti-Semitic ideas, and more surprising that it took him this long.Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, the host of the most popular political show on television, has produced an entire propaganda series pushing the fevered fantasy that the U.S. government manufactured the January 6 insurrection in order to ensnare and persecute innocent patriots. Carlson has also celebrated Alex Jones, the far-right radio host recently hit with a $965 million libel judgment for repeatedly claiming that no children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and that their grieving parents were in fact paid actors.It is no surprise, then, that Carlson has also taken to promoting a lightly sanitized version of the “Great Replacement” theory, which posits that shadowy elites are plotting to replace the country’s white majority with brown minorities—a claim that has motivated multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. Carlson is careful never to explicitly implicate Jews in this supposed scheme, as white nationalists do, but the far-right members of his audience can fill in the blanks after he hits all their preferred beats.The conveyor belt from all-purpose conspiracy to anti-Jewish specificity doesn’t stop there. It’s how Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene went from claiming that Democratic leaders were running a pedophile ring out of a pizza store and that no plane hit the Pentagon on 9/11 to fulminating about Jewish-run space lasers and seconding accusations that Israel’s Mossad killed JFK. This is how QAnon became JewAnon. And it’s why the rise of conspiracism should concern us all.Earlier this month, the entrepreneur Elon Musk posted and then deleted a conspiracy theory on Twitter about the recent attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The site he linked to had previously claimed that Hillary Clinton had died during the 2016 presidential campaign and been replaced with a body double. This foray of the world’s richest man into casual conspiracism is frightening not because he is unique, but because he is entirely representative of our moment, a reflection of just how much erratic thinking has seeped into the mainstream. Indeed, Twitter, the platform Musk recently acquired, is filled with hoaxes and conspiracy theories, an accelerant of the breakdown of our society’s shared frame of reference.[Adrienne LaFrance: Elon Musk accidentally bought a casino]And this is what I realized as I watched Chappelle’s monologue: When so many people have proved so susceptible to the conspiracism that animates anti-Semitism, it becomes harder and harder to laugh about it. Comedy cannot be divorced from its context. Jokes assume a shared set of presuppositions between the comedian and the audience, which are subverted for ironic effect. But when that collective context is called into question, and one no longer knows whether everyone in the room is operating from the same premises, what was once satire becomes suspect. After all, the best parody is often indistinguishable from the thing itself—the perfect impressionist is the one who sounds exactly like Donald Trump. But when the performance is anti-Semitism, and so much of society seems in thrall to its essential elements, it’s not clear whether the bit is setting up a punch line—or just a punch.

On the morning of January 1, 2021, Mike Pence awoke after a terrible night’s sleep, poured a cup of coffee, and started his new year with a tongue-lashing from the president of the United States.Donald Trump’s angry phone call didn’t come as a surprise. The vice president had gone to bed the night before “with a growing foreboding about the days ahead,” he writes in his new book, So Help Me God, which is part memoir, part soft launch of a 2024 campaign, and part eyewitness account of the lies, betrayals, and abuses of power that roiled the nation during Trump’s final days in office. For weeks, the president had been subtly suggesting to Pence that, as vice president, he could act unilaterally on January 6 and prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Pence had continually resisted, explaining that his only authority under the Constitution was to tally the electoral votes after Congress certified them. Now the proceeding was just days away, and Trump was done being subtle.Tearing into Pence over the phone—“hundreds of thousands are gonna hate your guts,” the president told him—Trump was vexed about one thing in particular. A few days earlier, Louie Gohmert, the far-right representative from Texas, had joined other Republican officials in filing a federal lawsuit that would have given Pence “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electoral votes would be counted on January 6. Pence, in turn, had enlisted lawyers from the Department of Justice to defeat the “frivolous” lawsuit, which he considered an affront to the Constitution. The president could not comprehend his reasoning. “If it gives you power,” Trump asked Pence, “why would you oppose it?”The anecdote speaks to what makes Pence’s book utterly captivating—and equally unsatisfying.In the growing library of Trump White House tell-alls published by staffers, family members, and grifters of a general sort, Pence’s could have been the most intimate. It does offer a truly distinctive window into the Trump phenomenon, from unlikely election winner to unwilling election loser, recounting conversations and deliberations to which he alone was privy. And yet, the book is also singularly frustrating, tortured in its appraisal of so many history-making moments and reluctant to reflect meaningfully on the author’s view of them.The New Year’s Day phone spat is illuminating, because it’s the moment Pence finally sees the light. Once nonchalant about Trump’s refusal to concede defeat—Pence makes no mention of ever encouraging him to do so—he came to realize just how determined the president was to remain in office. Trump didn’t just want to subvert our system of self-government; he wanted Pence to make it happen. Here, the vice president hopes the reader will be as shocked and horrified as he was. The problem is, Trump’s egomaniacal fixation on thwarting a peaceful transition of power is not some anomaly to be understood in a vacuum; rather, it is the continuation of a long pattern of selfishness, deception, and even treachery that long foretold such a crisis. That it took Pence four years—or, in this case, 446 pages—to reach the startling conclusion that the president cares more about himself than about the country robs the book of the visceral authenticity that flashes throughout the opening and closing passages.[Read: Mike Pence owes the country an explanation]The author’s caginess is hardly surprising. Pence, a onetime talk-radio host who communicates as deliberately as any politician I’ve ever met, had no choice but to acknowledge his bad blood with Trump as it relates to January 6. There was no brushing it aside or wishing it away, not after the public had seen the gallows and the noose and heard the mob’s chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” Whatever suspense accompanied the news, then, that Trump’s once-loyal sidekick was writing a memoir pertained to the rest of their relationship. It was widely understood that Pence, a scripture-annotating family man from southern Indiana, has little in common with the Manhattan playboy turned president. Because of the literally violent nature of their falling out, it was fair to wonder whether Pence, who had been insistent on keeping their disagreements private, might finally provide an open, honest assessment of the totality of Trump’s presidency.Anyone who hoped so—anyone who figured that having a seditious mob sicced on you and your family by the president of the United States might be cause for public introspection—is going to be disappointed. It’s not clear whether Pence’s stubbornness on this front is to protect his own presidential ambitions, which remain very much alive, or to safeguard his vice-presidential legacy, which is already under assault. Either way, it makes for a maddening read: Pence surely has thoughts on Trump beyond the book’s carefully crafted, made-for-promotional-material talking points, but he won’t give them to us.Here, for transparency’s sake, I should pause to clarify two things. First, I have some history with Pence; he once lost his (typically well-concealed) Irish temper in response to a story I wrote detailing his turbulent partnership with Trump and his own designs on the presidency. Pence believes I’ve unfairly picked on him, holding him to a higher standard than I have other people in Trump’s orbit. The second thing is: I have. Why? Because I believe that unlike so many other Trump associates—Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn—Pence is a decent human being. (Any number of high-profile Democrats, including Joe Biden and the late Representative John Lewis, have said the same.) The former vice president isn’t another craven, self-indulgent schemer bent on domination; he’s a humble, civil person who takes his faith seriously and knows the difference between right and wrong.For decades, Pence has introduced himself to audiences in the same way: “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican. In that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Pence and his team of longtime loyalists would often bristle at that scrutiny, especially when it stemmed from his silence in the face of some blatant offense committed by Trump. They would remind people that he was the vice president, that his job was to support the boss, not undermine him by opining publicly on the president’s honesty or integrity or judgment.That defense was plausible, if not always convincing, while Pence was helping Trump lead the free world. But given that he no longer is—and given the rupture in their relationship, which Pence suggests in the book’s closing pages is now permanent—a reader might hope to ascertain how the former vice president truly felt about the controversies that will be debated for decades to come. This is not a journalist’s lazy game of gotcha, hoping to pin down Pence on every policy judgment or political statement the president ever made (although it would be nice to know the author’s innermost thoughts about, say, Trump siding with Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community in Helsinki; Pence shares only that he encouraged Trump a day later to “clarify his remarks”). At the very least, because Pence orients much of the book around his Christian faith—assigning scriptural subtitles to each of the 52 chapters, plus the epilogue—it is fair to expect that he would at least acknowledge the moral dilemma that gripped many Christians who observed Trump only from afar. What to think of the administration separating children from their parents at the southern border? Whom to believe when convincing evidence surfaces to show that Trump paid hush money to a porn star during his presidential campaign? How to reconcile the example of Christ with Trump’s swaggering insults and unrepentant falsehoods and constant, merciless marginalization of those who are the least among us?Pence makes a conscious decision not to engage with these questions. There is an argument, certainly, that politics requires even the most pious of public servants to make compromises that are justified by some greater good. But Pence does not make this argument. In fact, he flatly refuses to recognize the existence of any such compromises. He wants to impress upon the reader that no soul searching is required. He cannot even bring himself to deal with the perceptions of Trump that span ideological divides. When navigating the sea of buzzwords that substitute for any description of Trump’s manifest vulgarity—the former president is repeatedly described as “brash” and “blunt”; his “freewheeling manner” and “hardball approach” are not for “the faint of heart”—the reader can almost see Pence’s face contorting into that quizzical, far-off look he gives when confronted with questions about Trump’s decorum.Making this even more conspicuous—at times, almost comical—is Pence’s earnest attempt to communicate his own moral code. The only non-insurrection-related private tiff with Trump that he describes is when, after the then–Republican presidential nominee ridiculed the Gold Star parents who spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, he registered his “disagreement” with Trump’s “tactics.” He concludes, “I think he got the message.” Trump did not get the message, but you wouldn’t know it from Pence’s recollection of the following four years, which speeds past so much of Trump’s hateful, deceptive, dehumanizing commentary but stops often to dwell on Pence’s own persecution at the hands of the Democratic Party.[Read: Mike Pence is an American hero]Some of Pence’s grievances are legitimate. The mocking of his personal relationship with God, by Joy Behar of The View, among others, was repulsive. And the snickering coverage of “the Pence Rule” (borrowed from the evangelist Billy Graham), which prohibits him from being alone with any woman who is not his wife, was embarrassing.Still, the extent to which Pence portrays Trump as a martyr, a good and virtuous man who suffered gallantly for the sake of his supporters, makes his lecturing of the left ring hollow. There is harsh judgment of many Democrats—Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Adam Schiff, and, of course, Joe Biden—and their scheming, but abundant grace and bottomless benefit of the doubt for Trump himself.In fact, Pence goes out of his way to depict all critiques of Trump as partisan and therefore politically motivated, ignoring the fact that plenty of his fellow Republicans, including close, longtime friends such as Jeff Flake, were among the most outspoken critics of the administration. Naturally, Pence does not mention Trump’s cruel ad hominem attacks on Flake—a man who was once like a brother to Pence when they served together in Congress—or on the other former senator from Arizona, John McCain, whom Pence considered a friend and mentor. That the sitting president of the United States was not invited to McCain’s funeral, while former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush delivered eulogies, is the subject of zero analysis.It’s true that the political warfare had become more conventionally partisan by the end of Trump’s term, because he purged so many of his critics from the party (a fact that Pence does not mention). But it’s also true that 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump after the attack on the Capitol, and that another seven Senate Republicans voted to convict and bar him from running for president again (another fact Pence does not mention).This is the fundamental failing of the book. Pence has been known to lament to friends the myopic examination of Trump and his presidency, complaining that journalists like me and disaffected Republicans like Flake focus only on the negatives and ignore anything constructive that was accomplished. But in writing such a selectively edited history of the Trump era, Pence has done exactly the opposite: He focuses almost exclusively on the positives of those four years and declines to validate any of the trepidation Americans felt long before the Capitol was overrun on January 6.Pence wants readers to believe that the carnage of that day came out of the blue, that we could not possibly have foreseen any of it. It’s an insult to the reader’s intelligence. So many dots along the way—the defense of “very fine people” in Charlottesville; the demeaning of anyone who dared, as Defense Secretary James Mattis did, to question his judgment; the quid pro quo with Ukraine and the obstruction of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2020 election—collectively pointed to how Trump’s approach to governance was shaped by vanity and self-interest. But Pence refuses to connect those dots. Even now, with the full benefit of hindsight, nearly two years after fleeing for his very life, Pence refuses to consider the connection between the manipulative propaganda of Trump’s administration and the people wearing Make America Great Again hats who wanted to murder him for doing his constitutional duty.It’s a shame for many reasons, chief among them the fact that Pence acted so admirably on January 6. Not only did he stand up to the mafioso tactics of Trump and his henchmen—more than could have been expected of, say, a Vice President Newt Gingrich—but Pence also refused to leave the Capitol that day, defying his own Secret Service detail and insisting that the work of Congress to certify the election results be completed in the face of bloodshed and death.Pence deserves the gratitude of every American for his courage and conviction in that moment. Unfortunately, with the moment now passed, he has chosen to revert to vice-presidential form, excusing and ignoring the authoritarian impulses that incited a mob long before the election of 2020 was lost.

This work was produced in collaboration with the Partnership for Innovation, Cross-Sector Collaboration, Leadership, and Organization (PICCLO), School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.
When COVID-19 first struck, many observers looked with dread toward its likely impact on poor countries. With fragile and often corrupt governments, weak public health systems, and inadequate medical resources, these nations seemed defenseless against the novel coronavirus. “The pandemic will have dramatic consequences, eroding many of the gains recorded over the last decade in terms of poverty reduction,” predicted a working paper from the World Institute for Development Economics Research. 
As the months passed, however, a more ambiguous picture began to emerge. Writing in the New Yorker in early 2021, Siddhartha Mukherjee described what he called an “epidemiological mystery.” Going by reported death rates, many poor countries like India and Nigeria seemed to be coping with the pandemic not less but more successfully than rich countries like Italy, Belgium, or the United States. Why could that be?
Mukherjee concluded that underreporting of infections and deaths in countries with weak statistical systems was only part of the explanation. Other factors seemed to be at work, too, including differences in the age structure of populations, prior exposure to infectious diseases, and differences in living arrangements. Finally, some of the experts that Mukherjee consulted emphasized that pandemic outcomes also depended on differences in the effectiveness with which governments responded to the crisis.
The following discussion will focus on this last aspect of the epidemiological mystery: the effectiveness of the government response as measured by an index of state capacity. Here, as in previous work, the index of state capacity is based on data provided by the Legatum Institute as part of its annual Legatum Prosperity Index. Specifically, state capacity is construed as the ability of a government to formulate and carry out policy goals (administrative capacity); to provide security against crime and external enemies (security capacity); and to manage government finances (fiscal capacity).[1]
Measures of pandemic outcomes are based on research reported in two articles published in the British journal The Lancet, which provide country data on pandemic outcomes in the form of infection rates and mortality rates.[2] The studies provide infection rates in both an unadjusted version, as publicly reported, and a version that is adjusted for a variety of demographic, economic, and epidemiological factors. In addition to unadjusted mortality rates, the second Lancet study provides an estimate of excess mortality, that is, an estimate of the amount by which a country’s overall mortality rate, adjusted for underreporting, exceeds what would have been expected if there had been no pandemic. 
A two-factor model of state capacity and pandemic performance
Simple correlations of state capacity with infection and mortality rates do not yield much of interest. There are small tendencies for reported infection rates to fall and for reported mortality rates to rise with increasing state capacity. However, the correlations of state capacity scores with all four outcome variables lie below the threshold of statistical significance. But simple correlations can hide more than they reveal. Closer examination of the data shows that there are significant nonlinear relationships between state capacity and pandemic outcomes. 
Figure 1 illustrates the nonlinear relationship in the case of unadjusted infection rates. Data on both axes are standardized to show the number of standard deviations by which each observation falls above or below a mean value of zero for that variable. The arched trendline shows a tendency for reported infection rates to be highest in countries with state capacity scores near the mean, while these infection rates tend to be lowest for countries with very high or very low state capacity scores.

The fit of the curve with the data is not exact, but it meets a test of statistical significance with room to spare.[3] Similar significant nonlinear correlations are found for adjusted infection rates and for both reported mortality and excess mortality rates. But these patterns are little more than curiosities unless they can be explained in terms of some credible causal model.
One credible model is based on the interactions between two types of causal factors that jointly determine pandemic outcomes. Those that are associated with lower infection or mortality rates as state capacity increases will be called facilitating factors, since they facilitate an effective response to the pandemic. Others that are associated with higher infection or mortality rates as state capacity rises will be called contravening factors since they are contrary to the expectation that countries with greater state capacity should be better able to deal with pandemics. In this two-factor model, the overall success of a country’s response to the pandemic would potentially depend both on the individual facilitating and contravening factors and on the way they interact.[4]
The facilitating factor that is most widely discussed in the literature is the quality of a country’s health care and public health systems. Here, those are measured by the average of the Legatum Institute’s compound variables “Care Systems” and “Preventive Interventions.” Each of the Legatum elements correlates strongly with state capacity (R = 0.86 and R = 0.65, respectively.) We should expect the quality of health care and public health systems to increase with increases in overall state capacity, and thus for higher state capacity to be associated with better pandemic outcomes.
Contravening factors, meanwhile, push in a counterintuitive direction: When these factors are in play, we should expect increases in state capacity to be associated with worse outcomes. Two of the most widely discussed contravening variables are the accuracy with which infection and mortality rates are reported in a given country and the country’s population age structure. Countries with very low state capacity will be unable to track cases and deaths accurately. Accordingly, as state capacity rises from low levels, we should expect to see reported cases and deaths rise because of better tracking and reporting, and that is just what happens. Also, countries with low state capacity tend to be poor, with relatively young populations. Since cases and deaths are generally much lower among young people, we should expect the countries at the bottom of the state capacity rankings to have better outcomes as a result of their population structure. As we move to countries with higher state capacity, we are looking at countries with older populations and should expect worse outcomes. 
The data support all of these expectations regarding the relationship of state capacity to the facilitating and contravening factors. The ratio of reported mortality to excess mortality reported in the March 2022 Lancet study cited above was used as an estimate of reporting accuracy for both mortality and infection rates. The accuracy ratio is positively and significantly correlated with state capacity (R = 0.69). Population age structure was represented by old-age dependency ratio (ratio of population aged 65 and older to the working-age population) provided by the World Bank. The old-age dependency ratio, too, is strongly correlated with state capacity (R = 0.75). Old-age dependency is a contravening factor since, other things being equal, an older population is more vulnerable to COVID-19. For this study, the contravening factor in the two-factor model was represented by the average of the standardized values of reporting accuracy and old-age dependency.
The two-factor model produces statistically significant results for all four measures of pandemic outcomes. The results are strongest when the model is applied using reported death rates as the response variable (R = 0.74), but the multiple correlations are also significant for excess mortality and for both reported and adjusted infection rates. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that state capacity has multiple effects on pandemic outcomes, including both facilitating effects resulting from better health systems and contravening effects resulting from reporting accuracy and population age structure.
Is state capacity just a proxy for high income?
One more issue needs to be raised to round out the analysis. Countries with high state capacity, for the most part, tend also to have high per capita incomes. To the extent that those countries have better pandemic outcomes, how do we know that is specifically because they are well governed, and not just because they are rich?
Statistically, the correlation coefficient between state capacity and gross national income (GNI) per capita is a strikingly high 0.87 for the 152 countries covered by this study. That is not really surprising, considering that there are strong causal connections between good government and high incomes. What is more, the causal connections operate in both directions. Higher national income provides the resources needed to run an effective government – to educate civil servants, pay them enough to resist the temptations of petty corruption, build infrastructure and so on. At the same time, better government facilitates economic growth by maintaining law and order, supporting orderly markets, and providing good public services. 
However, the fact that state capacity and national income are highly correlated does not mean they are interchangeable. Two variables are statistically interchangeable only if neither of them contains substantively important information that the other does not. For example, suppose we have two measurements of the temperature in a certain city based on two thermometers. Neither of the instruments is perfectly accurate. Each gives the same average temperature over time, but the reading from each instrument on any given day is equal to the true temperature plus a small random error. The temperature readings from these two thermometers would not only be highly correlated, but would be fully interchangeable in that neither would give a different answer to a question such as whether it is more likely to rain on warm days or cool days.
One way to explore the interchangeability of two variables is to look not just at their correlation, but at their outliers. The outliers are cases where the two variables do not line up – for example, days or weeks in which the readings of Thermometer A are higher than those from Thermometer B. If the outliers are random, we would not expect the average rainfall in those weeks to be significantly different from the rainfall in weeks where Thermometer B gave higher readings than Thermometer A.
Returning to the subject of this study, the outliers are countries for which state capacity is higher or lower than expected predicted by per capita income. If state capacity and income were interchangeable, we would find no discernable pattern in the outliers. For example, we could ask whether mortality rates are significantly different from those predicted by the two-factor model in countries in which state capacity is different from what is predicted by income.[5] If patterns were found, we could begin to look for explanations. Does state capacity influence pandemic performance more strongly than does per capita income? Are there other variables that explain the reasons for the nonrandom factors that are observed? 
As it turns out, for the full sample of 152 countries, there is no significant tendency for countries with higher-than-expected state capacity to have higher- or lower-than-expected mortality rates. However, if we look at the results for regional groupings of countries, some interesting patterns emerge.
For example, in the East Asia and Pacific region, state capacity averages 25 points higher than would be expected based on the region’s average income.[6] At the same time, reported mortality rates in that region are 78 points lower and excess mortality rates are 91 points lower than predicted by the two-factor model. A similar pattern, although not as strong, is found in Central and South Asia, and again, although weaker, in Western Europe and North America. These findings suggest that when these regions are compared with global averages, higher state capacity has a favorable impact on pandemic outcomes above and beyond any effect produced by differences in income alone.
Meanwhile, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the average score for state capacity is 10 points below the level that is expected based on income, while reported and excess mortality are higher than predicted by the two-factor model. Here, low state capacity appears to have the effect of raising mortality rates above what would be expected from income alone.
Eastern Europe, however, provides a contrasting example. Eastern European countries have lower average per capita GNI than those in Western Europe, but their state capacity is nevertheless somewhat higher than expected based on income alone. Surprisingly, though, in that region reported and excess mortality rates are higher, not lower, than is predicted by the two-factor model. It is interesting to speculate as to why.
One possible explanation is suggested by previous studies that have shown that high levels of social and political trust have favorable effects on pandemic outcomes above and beyond the effects that are accounted for by the two-factor model.[7] Both social and political trust are substantially higher than the world average in East Asia. In that region, high trust appears to reinforce the favorable effect of state capacity on pandemic mortality rates. On the other hand, both social and political trust are much lower in Eastern than Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, it may be that the large deficit of trust more than offsets the favorable effect of state capacity that is somewhat higher than expected based on income. 
The so-called petrostates are another group of countries for which state capacity scores depart widely from those predicted on the basis of income. Consider Iraq, whose oil exports contribute 32 percent of GDP, which, according to World Bank data, is the highest oil export share of any country. Iraq’s state capacity score is 57 points below what would be predicted based on income. At the same time, the country suffered terribly from the COVID-19 pandemic, experiencing an excess death rate 99 points higher than predicted by the two-factor model. However, that pattern of low state capacity linked to high mortality rates is not found consistently across oil-rich countries. For example, Saudi Arabia, like Iraq, has a state capacity score well below the predicted level, but its excess death rate from COVID was below, rather than above, the level predicted by the two-factor model. Across 18 countries that have oil exports in excess of 5 percent of GDP, state capacity averages 38 percent of what would be predicted on the basis of income, yet average excess death rates for these petrostates are not significantly different from the world average.
Taken together, these examples show that income and state capacity, although highly correlated, are not interchangeable. And for many countries and groups of countries, the pandemic outcomes implied by income alone differ greatly from those implied by state capacity scores. The reason, presumably, is that many other factors are at work in determining pandemic outcomes, including aspects of social capital, such as trust; economic factors, such as dependency on resource exports; cultural factors, such as kinship structures; and epidemiological factors, such as prior exposure to infectious diseases. All of these deserve further investigation. 
Overall, the evidence examined here remains consistent with the hypothesis that countries that are well-governed have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic better than those that are not. But many puzzles remain regarding other factors beyond state capacity that have determined pandemic outcomes around the world.

1 Administrative capacity is measured by the Legatum element for government effectiveness; security capacity by the Legatum elements for war, terrorism, and crime; and fiscal capacity by the Legatum indicator for country credit rating. The administrative, security, and fiscal components are equally weighted to get the overall state capacity index.
2 The Lancet, “Pandemic preparedness and COVID-19: an exploratory analysis of infection and fatality rates, and contextual factors associated with preparedness in 177 countries, from Jan 1, 2020, to Sept 30, 2021,” February 01, 2022 (doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00172-6) and The Lancet, “Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020–21,” March 10, 2022 (doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02796-3).
3  When the reported infection rate is used as the response variable and state capacity and the square of state capacity are used as the response variable, the coefficient of multiple correlation is 0.52. The multiple correlation and the coefficients on each of the control variables are significant at the 0.01 level. 
4 Mathematically, the two-factor model can be represented as R = FF + CF + FF*CF, where R is the outcome being measured (case rate or mortality rate), FF represents one or more facilitating factors, CF represents one or more contravening factors, and FF*CF, the product of FF and CF, represents the interactive effect. For a more detailed discussion of the two-factor model, see “Trust, State Capacity, and the Epidemiological Mystery of Covid,” Niskanen Center, April 28, 2022. That paper includes a link to the underlying data used in this study and details of key statistical results.

5 In the language of statistics, the question can be posed in terms of residuals. Define a country’s state capacity residual as the number of standard deviations that its observed state capacity exceeds or falls short of the value that would be predicted by its GNI per capita. Similarly, define its excess or reported mortality residual as the number of standard deviations by which its observed excess or reported mortality rate exceeds or falls short of the value predicted by the two-factor model. If income and state capacity are interchangeable, we would expect to find no statistically significant patterns in the mortality residuals and state capacity residuals.
6 “Points” is used here as shorthand for hundredths of a standard deviation on the standardized scale used in Figure 1. See Appendix Table 1 for the full data. 
 7 See, for example, the February 2022 Lancet study cited in note 2 and the Niskanen Center commentary cited in note 4.
The post The puzzle of COVID and state capacity appeared first on Niskanen Center.

In December, 1954, the United States Senate gathered for the purpose of censuring the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. During the preceding months, McCarthy, whose anti-Communist bromides had made him among the most feared and powerful figures in Congress, had suffered a calamitous decline in fortunes. He had been thoroughly humiliated in the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings and endured lacerating criticism from the journalist Edward R. Murrow. The once potent brand of innuendo, fearmongering, and outright lying that brought the senator to prominence was now the central reason for his rebuke. The traditional narrative of McCarthy’s demise centers on the most visible and operatic moments, but there was also an underlying political logic that facilitated them. In 1950, when it was reported that McCarthy, a Republican, falsely claimed to have the names of two hundred and five Communists employed by the State Department, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House. In 1954, when the Army-McCarthy hearings took place, Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate (narrowly) and the White House, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was one thing to cast toxic conspiracies that made Democrats look bad, but quite another to spread falsehoods that made his own party look inept. In the end, twenty-two Republican senators voted in favor of censure.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a Presidential candidate, observers have compared him to McCarthy, not simply because of their demagogic commonalities and mutual ties to the attorney Roy Cohn but also for the hostile symbiosis they forged with the media outlets of their respective eras. The aftermath of last week’s midterm elections suggests an additional area of comparison: the narratives attached to their political declines. The G.O.P. has abided all manner of corrupt, dishonest, anti-democratic, and potentially illegal behavior from Trump, including his incitement of an armed insurrection against the United States Congress, but the lacklustre midterm performance of Republicans seems to suggest that, like McCarthy sixty-eight years ago, the former President has reached a point where his demagogy has become a liability for his own party.

Few are the demagogues noted for their superior emotional-regulation abilities, but even by that standard the reports that the former President Trump is alternately enraged and defensive over the results of the midterm elections are noteworthy. Not since his grudging exit from the White House in January, 2021, has he inspired such levels of Schadenfreude among his critics. This election—in which the Republicans picked up far fewer congressional seats than expected, the Senate remains in the hands of Democrats, and even those Trump-affiliated candidates who prevailed seemed to have done so against real political headwinds—is being read as a referendum on the dwindling viability of MAGA-style Republicanism, as well as on the former President’s prospects in 2024. Republicans are, tentatively, distancing themselves from the Trump brand, and media observers have noted the stream of criticism emanating from Rupert Murdoch-owned news properties. The cumulative effect of these developments is a barely concealed hope that the G.O.P. will jettison Trump like loose cargo on a storm-battered freighter, and that the most volatile and dangerous elements of American politics will sink along with him. But, for reasons that should be more than familiar to us by now, the path the MAGA movement takes toward irrelevance is likely not so simple—if, in fact, it is headed in that direction.

In the seven years since Trump took his ride down the gold-colored escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for President of the United States, the movement that coalesced around him has died a thousand deaths, only to climb out of its shallow grave before the first trowel of dirt hit the casket. The political landscape in front of Trump is different and far more formidable than it was even in 2016, when he was a political novice. Notable Presidents—Ulysses S. Grant and Eisenhower among them—had been elected without much political experience. But, in 2024, a prospective Trump would be attempting reëlection after having lost a Presidential election, a feat that only the Democrat Grover Cleveland achieved, in 1892, by defeating Benjamin Harrison, who was himself hobbled by divisions among Republicans. Moreover, in 2016, Trump sliced through a fairly unimpressive field of G.O.P. competitors in the primaries. This time, though, he could face a significant primary challenger, in the form of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. All this seemingly points to the diminished viability of one of the most disruptive political movements we’ve seen in modern American history. Yet it’s worth thinking about what exactly Trumpism is and how it came to be before penning another potentially premature eulogy on its behalf.

It would be easy at this point to saddle Trump with all the ills and the disastrous implications of what we’ve come to refer to as “Trumpism.” But the most significant parallel between Trump’s careers in business and in politics is his lack of standing as a creator. His talent lies not in organizational leadership or in shepherding a novel concept from its inception to a place of prominence but, rather, in marketing. Trump emerged as a political force in the middle of the first Black Presidency and adroitly played to racist and xenophobic fears that attended Barack Obama’s election. He lied prolifically about Obama’s birth certificate. In early 2011, Trump claimed to have people looking into the matter, “and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” As with Trump’s other canards, he never actually said what these people—if they existed at all—were finding.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump did not invent birtherism; he simply recognized the broader political potential of a ridiculous lie and ran with it. Similarly, the phenomenon known as “McCarthyism” had roots that preceded the 1946 election that sent McCarthy to the Senate. Notably, the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Representative Martin Dies, Jr., the Democrat of Texas, was formed a full decade earlier, and its combative use of Red-baiting innuendo against the subjects of its inquiries provided a template for McCarthy’s approach. Yet the disparate elements of intolerance for dissent, including the suppression of First Amendment rights, and the broader currents of social paranoia might have remained just that but for McCarthy’s ability to synthesize them into a cohesive whole.

The persecution associated with anti-Communism survived McCarthy. It took a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1957 and 1958—most notably the Yates v. United States ruling, which overturned the convictions of several Communists prosecuted under the Smith Act—to curtail the most egregious excesses committed in the name of patriotism. Trump did not single-handedly inject the strains of intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence, and a durable sympathy for anti-democratic behavior into the Republican Party, and there is no reason to believe that his absence would cause them to evaporate. Immigrants make up just under fourteen per cent of the population of the United States—almost triple their proportion in 1970. The age-old fears about racial and ethnic replacement that Trump so deftly manipulated in 2016 remain ambient. Moreover, the drive to curate the electorate via voter suppression has lost none of its resonance on the right. In fact, the razor-thin margins in last week’s elections point to the outsized effect that suppressing even a sliver of specific electorates can yield. And, paradoxically, the emerging audacity among right-wing media to criticize Trump points to how little has changed. Part of what has driven the Republican Party so far to the right has been the influence of these same conservative outlets, whose criticism can spark a primary challenge for Republicans deemed too moderate. They helped foster the environment in which Trumpism could not only emerge but thrive. If they play a role in undermining Trump, this serves to reinforce their role as the rudders of the G.O.P.

For critical observers, it has always been apparent that everything Trump offered the public came slathered in snake oil. That is either a statement about the willful blindness of the American public or a barometer of how many Americans view those dangerous liabilities as assets. In either case, the McCarthy example provides at least one other insight: fixating on the salesman misses the point. The problem is, and always has been, the size of the audience rushing to buy what he’s been selling. ♦

Earlier this week, the G-20 summit opened in Indonesia, during which the long-awaited meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took place. That they met at all means the meeting was a success. That it was three hours long is encouraging too, since unsuccessful meetings tend to end quickly and are followed by inconsequential joint statements, which so far has yet to be issued. This suggests honesty, substance and the promise of future substantive talks.

Indeed, early reports from the meeting corroborate as much. The two were apparently agreeable on topics such as the dangers of nuclear weapons and the prospect of Secretary of State Antony Blinken visiting China in the future, even as they reiterated the fact that they are competitors with different views on issues such as Taiwan. Xi allegedly even said the American model of democracy is obsolete.

As I have argued for a year, progress on this front owes not to the virtue of either side but to the geopolitical realities in which they operate. For the United States, the confrontation was anchored in economics. From the U.S. perspective, China has yet to provide ready access to its market for American goods and has been manipulating the value of the yuan to maximize trade and investment – a charge levied years ago by the Obama administration. Washington argued that given the amount of investment and technology provided by American firms, China needed to be forthcoming, especially since public sentiment suggested the U.S. had been exploited by China. China was in no position to comply with American demands without undermining its own economy. Thus was the American foundation laid.

For China, American economic demands signified a military threat. Beijing could not accommodate the United States and feared an American military response. China is an exporting power, and its well-being depends on the ability of its goods to pass from its east coast ports to the South China Sea into the Pacific and then into the world. The United States could, in theory, mine or close those ports by other means. China’s response to this possibility was to appear as aggressive as possible to convince the U.S. that its economic demands could mean war and that China could defeat the U.S. Navy.

It never meant to break China’s economy; it meant to use the threat of breaking it to influence Beijing’s response. Likewise, China never intended to go to war with the United States; it wanted to convince the U.S. it was a real enough possibility to induce a policy change. Each appeared ferocious, but each was careful not to push the other too hard.

Two things brought this to a head. The first was Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The willingness of Washington to wage a clever war, marrying U.S. weapons to Ukrainian forces, demonstrated a capability China did not believe the United States had in its repertoire. China’s alliance with Russia, which was designed to confront the United States in two theaters, collapsed before it was put in place. China reevaluated America’s military power, will and alliance structure and saw a military conflict as more dangerous to China than to the U.S.

The second was the continued deterioration of the Chinese economy. A long-term cyclical force created a massive downturn that has threatened social stability. Regulations on imports from and investment in China could make a bad situation worse. Put differently, China has a lot at stake in their relationship. The United States doesn’t. Absent a military threat, the U.S. benefitted from low-cost Chinese products. The U.S. has little to gain from a military confrontation and plenty to gain from economic cooperation. China had no desire for a war it might lose, and the U.S. had no interest in an economic crisis in China. Economic amelioration is very tempting, so long as it’s possible. The meeting this week shows it may well be possible.

This week, PS talks with Nouriel Roubini , Professor Emeritus of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Chief Economist at Atlas Capital Team, CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, Co-Founder of TheBoomBust.com, and the author of MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them .

Project Syndicate: In your latest PS commentary, you reaffirmed your expectation that monetary authorities’ efforts to rein in inflation will “cause both an economic and a financial crash,” and that “regardless of their tough talk,” central banks “will feel immense pressure to reverse their tightening” once that crash materializes. What would the impact of such a reversal be? Do monetary policymakers in the United States and Europe have any good – or less bad – options?

Nouriel Roubini: Central banks are in both a stagflation trap and a debt trap. Amid negative aggregate supply shocks that reduce growth and increase inflation, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they increase interest rates enough to bring inflation down to 2%, they will cause a severe economic hard landing. And if they don’t – attempting instead to protect growth and jobs – they will be left increasingly far behind the curve, leading to a de-anchoring of inflation expectations and a wage-price spiral.

Very high debt ratios (both private and public) complicate the dilemma further. Raising interest rates enough to crush inflation causes not only an economic crash, but also a financial crash, with highly leveraged private and public debtors facing severe distress. The resulting financial turmoil that intensifies the recession, creating a vicious cycle of deepening recession and escalating financial pain and debt distress.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Joe Biden took a risk in making the midterms about democracy. I cheered that decision, because I thought it was the right issue—in fact, the only issue. But even I started to lose confidence as the election approached. America’s voters, however, affirmed Biden’s gamble, and our democracy is better for it.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Anne Applebaum: The Russian empire must die.
December cover story: Clint Smith on monuments to the unthinkable
What in the world happened to the Supreme Court?
A Break in the GloomIt’s been a rough ride for democracy in the United States and around the world. We’ll talk later in the week about the setbacks for authoritarians overseas in Brazil and Russia, but for now the results of the 2022 elections are good news for American democracy. Biden took heat from friends and foes alike for making closing arguments in favor of democracy instead of prosaic “kitchen-table” issues, but the president—a man with half a century of experience in elected politics—knew the voters better than his critics did.Consider the magnitude of what happened last week. The Republicans went into the midterms as heavy favorites, with advantages that included the patterns of political history, some star power, money from churlish billionaires, and—in theory—Donald Trump. The Democrats had every headwind imaginable, including an unpopular president, a fractious coalition, and an economy beset with high inflation.The misfit flotilla of Republican election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and other assorted flakes and phonies was poised, it seemed, to board the American ship of state without much resistance. Instead, much of the Republican fleet sank within sight of the shore. A few survivors (such as the reprehensible J. D. Vance) made it to the beach, and the GOP seems likely to control the House by the thinnest of margins. But the Republicans fell short when the voters noticed their extreme positions on almost everything, including January 6, elections, and abortion.Jim Marchant of Nevada, for example, put together a slate of fellow election-denying secretary-of-state hopefuls under the banner of “America First.” This congerie of conspiracy theorists ran as a bloc that promised to make voting more difficult and hold up election results they didn’t like. The gang included Arizona’s Mark Finchem, an extremist whose bio notes that he is a “Six Sigma practitioner” but leaves aside that he was also a member of the Oath Keepers. Arizonans, who kept some of their other races close, had no trouble rejecting Finchem by more than five points. Marchant and the rest of the deniers lost, except for one candidate in Indiana (not exactly a battleground state).Pennsylvanians elected Josh Shapiro their governor in a double-digit drubbing of the Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano, and they seem close to flipping the state’s House to the Democrats. In Michigan, Tudor Dixon—another out-of-nowhere candidate endorsed by Trump—lost and took the weird secretary-of-state candidate Kristina Karamo down with her, while Michigan voters placed their state under unified Democratic rule. And in Wisconsin, the Democrat Tony Evers beat Tim Michels—a man who said that if he won, the GOP would never lose another election in Wisconsin—by three points.The challenge to American democracy is not over, but the 2022 results should give the prodemocracy coalition hope, for many reasons.
American voters stepped back from the abyss. (Even if they cut it a little close for my comfort.) As my colleague Anne Applebaum tweeted, “the biggest story” of the midterms is that “the 2024 election is safe, or safer, from another, better organized, MAGA attempt to steal it.” This is not an exaggeration. Imagine if, in 2024, there is a close presidential election, and the governors of Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin, buttressed by election-denying secretaries of state, simply decided not to certify any Republican electors. Chaos and even violence would almost certainly have ensued. All of that is unlikely now; whoever wins in 2024 will have to win the old-fashioned way, by getting enough votes in enough states to win the Electoral College.
The midterm results suggest that Americans (and American women, especially) made a decision not to separate abortion rights from democracy; I suspect that they viewed the overturning of Roe v. Wade as part of the overall right-wing assault on their liberties. Plenty of voters are in favor of placing limits on abortion—but they do not want the issue decided by theocratic judges. Even more galling, the GOP decided that Herschel Walker’s personal involvement in at least one abortion (and perhaps more) was not disqualifying even as Walker and other Republicans insisted that no one else should have access to abortion ever, under any circumstances. The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe.
Three cheers for the American system of government. Frustrated liberals have sometimes wished for a parliamentary system, in which a single election can flush out the ruling party overnight. But under a parliament, we might never have been rid of Trump after 2016: Republicans could have used parliamentary supremacy to ram through changes in important laws and kept power for a long time. Instead, American federalism and the distinct mandates required for both the executive and legislative branch functioned as the Founders intended, ensuring that the GOP majority of 2016 could be broken in 2018 independent of the presidency, and that Democratic gains would have to be revalidated at the ballot box in 2020 and 2022.
Perhaps most heartening, the midterms showed that money and gerrymandering and voter suppression can be overcome when people actually show up and vote. Ballots are more powerful than Peter Thiel’s checkbook.
We should not lull ourselves into believing that the fight for democracy is over. The local governments, state houses, and the new Congress will still have plenty of odious characters in them. There’s still a lot of work to be done.Nonetheless, the gloom and gathering darkness I felt last week has dissipated to a considerable degree. The president and the prodemocracy forces issued a call to the public to defend the American system, and the public responded in force. I regularly criticize the public for a lack of civic virtue; I even wrote a book about it. But I must give credit where it is due: The voters, this time, proved me wrong—and showed that Joe Biden was right.Related:

The hidden way that election denial hurt Republicans

The House race that shows why Republicans collapsed in the midterms

President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to restart climate talks at their first face-to-face meeting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the city of Kherson after Russia’s withdrawal and declared that Ukraine retaking the city was “the beginning of the end of the war.”
Three students were killed and two wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia last night. A suspect is in custody.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung gives advice on building a writing practice from scratch.
Up for Debate: Voters from across the political spectrum weigh in on what the midterm results meant to them.
Famous People: Kaitlyn and Lizzie host a party for the 100th edition of their newsletter.
Bianca Bagnarelli
Dear Therapist: My Brother-in-Law Is a Thanksgiving FreeloaderBy Lori Gottlieb
Dear Therapist,
I have a situation with my brother-in-law. My husband and I have been married for 25 years, and his brother has been mostly single until recently. Because their parents are no longer alive, I have always made a point to include my brother-in-law for every holiday and have also included any girlfriend he has had at the time. He has come to my parents’ house out West, our vacation home down South, and our home here in the East. All he has been required to do is show up and take part. He has never had to cook, plan, or prepare anything.
Right before the pandemic, he met a very nice woman who has a son the same age as mine. But he has made no effort to invite us to spend time with them. I just assumed that he was busy with his new family and gave him space. But now I think that we were just a placeholder until he had what he considered a family of his own. I feel very used.
Thanksgiving is coming up, and I am honestly tired of creating great holidays only for him to show up, then leave—and not even consider inviting us or my kids to anything in return.
How to fight fascism before it’s too late
The lesson Republicans refuse to learn
Does Dave Chappelle find anything funnier than being canceled?
Dignity Productions / Amazon Studio
Read. “Stagger,” an inventively formatted poem by Linda Gregerson.Watch. Mammals, a new Prime series with James Corden that explores the exquisite pain of monogamous life.Listen. The season finale of our podcast How to Build a Happy Life, about one of the longest studies of human happiness on record.Play our daily crossword.P.S.The character of Warden Norton has been on my mind for the reason I mention above, but also because I recently rewatched The Shawshank Redemption. It’s one of the great “guy-cry,” male-friendship movies of all time, and I think I’ve now seen it 4,372 times, give or take. But as majestic a movie as it is, I want to note the portrayal of Norton by the terrific character actor Bob Gunton.You’ve seen Gunton many times: as the hapless future police chief in Demolition Man (a personal favorite), Cyrus Vance in Argo, and in dozens of other TV and movie roles. But Shawshank was his triumph; he stole every scene he was in. His depiction of Norton is at different times fatherly, stoic, cold, brutal, and, ultimately, terrifying. When Tim Robbins’s innocent Andy Dufresne refuses to cooperate with Norton’s schemes, Gunton threatens to throw Andy back into the general population, where a gang of rapists awaits him. “I will cast you down with the sodomites,” he whispers, in one of the scariest scenes in the movie. Robbins and Morgan Freeman were terrific, but I’ll rewatch that movie, and many others, just to witness Bob Gunton work.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked readers for their best tips on cutting costs in times of economic strain—and, looking back on their lives, what they might consider to have been their most wasteful spending.Denise leads us off this week as an exemplar of having one’s priorities in order:
I don’t have a ton of suggestions, but I did four things this fall to combat rising prices and my overall expenses:

I bought a heated throw hoping that it will help me keep the thermostat lower in my house; I’m frequently cold and used to not worry about the cost of heat, and I was determined to stay comfortable.
I called DirectTV and reduced my plan. I lost about 30 channels and haven’t missed any of them. I am saving $95 per month.  
I removed the warranty plan on my cellphone. That was $30 per month for two phones that are over a year old.
And the last item was a group decision: I meet regularly with a lovely group of retired friends. We switched to morning coffee instead of dinner. We just buy coffee, no big restaurant meal and drinks, but maybe we occasionally splurge on a muffin. :)

I did not even consider eliminating my subscription to The Atlantic.
Thrifty and discerning!Timothy doesn’t see what more he could do to save:
I have always pursued a frugal lifestyle. I’ve eschewed brand names for decades. I’ve invested in freezers to be able to buy larger quantities of perishable food items and store them for longer than shelf-life allows.  
The current cycle of inflation is hitting particularly hard because there is nowhere left to economize. All my windows have plastic sheeting sealing them to avoid drafts. Blankets and space heaters are used to avoid heating the entire house. I get in lots of walking just to keep from driving the car; a single tank of gas lasts well over a month. All electric lights have been replaced with CFLs or LEDs. Water use is routinely checked and the toilet tanks dyed every few months to ensure there are no leaks. I’ve shopped at Aldi for a decade, eschewing choices and brand names for the cheapest prices of any grocery; I plan meals and attempt to ensure zero food waste.
Marilyn retired early on a relatively modest salary:
I come from Depression-era parents, so penny-pinching comes naturally to me. And I’m a great cook, so we don’t have restaurant food that often. I buy reduced-price produce that I turn into vegetarian main dishes like eggplant parmesan and such necessities as tomato sauce to avoid paying the canned prices. I don’t eat much meat and buy whatever fish is on sale. On Monday, my grocery store sells a prepared, eight-piece, cut-up chicken for $5.99, so I get that fairly often.
I shop at Aldi most of the time because they have great prices and great selections. And the delicious pizza I can get in Chicago is pretty cheap, either from the restaurant or in the freezer section. I’ve cut down drinking wine and alcohol so that it becomes a treat when I have it.
I see cheaper theater previews and use half-price websites for theater and concert whenever I can. Youth concerts are often free and very good. I’m a film critic, so I almost never pay to see movies. And I love nature, so going out in the woods or by the beach of Lake Michigan, often looking for birds, is the best entertainment I can have.
With my frugal ways, I was able to retire at 66 with a paid-off condo having never earned more than five figures my entire life. Retiring also means I don’t have to invest in office attire, makeup, or commuting. I’m not missing a thing.
Jaleelah saves on fashion:
If you need or want new clothes, get them secondhand. Swapping clothes with friends is arguably more enjoyable than walking around an offensively bright mall. The practice is affordable, sustainable, and conducive to style development. I never wore giant Hawaiian shirts or lace tank tops before my friends put theirs up for grabs.
Fast fashion is bound to drain the money and life out of you. It will cost lots of money to replace your wardrobe every two months when your slave-made dress shirts inevitably fall apart. If you have no friends, or your friends are all very different sizes than you, go to a brick-and-mortar secondhand store instead. If you live in a city, you can almost certainly find secondhand stores that fit your price range.
I’ve heard people argue that no one above the poverty line should purchase from thrift stores because it steals options from the poorest. I don’t find the argument convincing. Try not to buy scarce and important items like winter jackets or plus-size clothing from Value Village if you can afford it—poorer people do indeed need those options. But thrift stores only sell about 25 percent of their inventory—there are more than enough blazers and funky ties to go around.
If you have a wedding coming up in a recession, look for formal wear in vintage stores. Vintage stores are common in most major cities, and while they’re more expensive than thrift stores, they’re still far cheaper than normal retailers. I bought an amazing, unique formal dress for $60 at a vintage store in Toronto last summer. There’s no reason to blow hundreds of dollars on a cookie-cutter gown from Nordstrom.
[Read: The sad pragmatism of inflation-era cuisine]Kimberly is a proponent of more and better physical intimacy in romantic partnerships:
I have meandered in and out of thrifty stages in my 62 years. After a big financial splurge on grad school in my 50s, a very late-in-life investment, I am now a couples counselor, specializing in sexual issues.
My suggestion is very thrifty, healthy for the heart and mind, and mutually beneficial in couples: Improve your sex life. If you’re not sure how, Google some podcasts, read blogs and articles from reputable sources, or explore alternative sex communities online. Consider non-orgasmic sex, non-penetrative sex, or meditative models like Tantric yoga.
If you’re inhibited by children or other care duties, swap caretaking hours with another couple. If you’re inhibited by beliefs and opinions, consider taking it slow by simply spending more time skin-to-skin with your partner. In the dark with your eyes closed, if necessary.
Most important, as my sexuality professor used to affirm, “More sex equals more sex.” In other words, the more often you engage, the more often you’ll want to engage. And it’s free.
Ed offers a range of tips with a caveat that not everyone can follow all of them:
When you can, do things yourself rather than pay others. The added advantage is that you might learn something new. An easy one: Don’t eat out so often, and fix your own meals instead. Learn how to do home repairs, like fixing a leaking faucet. Car maintenance and simple repairs are learnable; just check out the web for how to do many things.
A biggie: Learn how to pay off your credit-card debt every month, and never, ever pay credit-card interest! If you are paying credit-card interest, you are living beyond your means. This was the hardest rule to teach our kids.
I was fortunate growing up because my mom was a bookkeeper and always accounted for every expenditure to the penny, and taught me to do the same. Early habits of budgeting, saving, and learning how to do things myself when I could has paid many dividends for me over my lifetime.
I would, however, like to emphasize my first three words, “when you can.” Many people can’t follow this advice because of various circumstances, such as low wages, illnesses, family commitments, and other factors that make inflationary times exceedingly difficult for a sizable portion of our citizens. Those citizens deserve our help rather than glib pointers. They are entitled to, and should seek help from, all sources without embarrassment, and our government should do all it can to make sure that the basic needs of everyone are met. To start, the obscene tax cuts for the wealthy should be repealed, excessive corporate profits taxed, and monopolistic corporate mergers curtailed.
Dennis is a snowbird who saves in all sorts of ways:
I’m a 65-year-old frugal, happy person living in a Mexico beach town in the winters and a Canadian small town in the summers. I call it living well, within my means.
Make your own bread. Get a breadmaker at a thrift store for $20. Get flour for 50 cents a pound. Google some recipes, get yeast in bulk, and a few additives at a bulk-foods store. Use the dough cycle, and form and bake your own loaves. Eat better bread for 75 cents a loaf instead of $4. Enjoy the aroma of bread baking for lunch.
Make your own yogurt. Milk, a microwave, a bit of yogurt for starter, a warm place or a good large thermos in the sun, six hours.
Make your own beer. Buy Grolsch beer in flip-top bottles until you have 60 or so. Get beer mix kits for $25 and a 5-gallon fermenter or water bottle and air-lock cap. Boil some water; add the mix and sugar, more cold water and maybe ice to bring it down to 75 degrees; add the yeast; let it sit for a week; put it in the Grolsch bottles—sterilized with a bit of bleach—and a cup more sugar. Let them sit another week. Drink beer for 50 cents a bottle. Make wine from kits, if that’s your thing.
Buy cheap large cuts of pork. Put it in a Crock-Pot for 12 hours with some additions. Eat pulled-pork sandwiches for weeks on $20. Ditto chicken. Do I even need to say “Make your own coffee?” Buy big bags of rice and beans.
Google recipes. Eat well, cheaply.  
Get the best used Prius you can afford, if you need a car. Consider an electric bicycle instead. Look at Rad Power Bikes or Lectric eBikes to get set up for under $1,000.
Learn to sew, if only to fix stuff. Shop at thrift stores and church shops. When facing a choice of whether to spend money or not, think hard.
Understand the time value of money and compound interest. Use a credit card only as a way to pay, not a way to borrow. Avoid all debt except a mortgage. Don’t spend money you don’t yet have. Have a contingency fund.
Learn to enjoy things that are lasting, free, or cheap. Family. Nature. Games. Understand advertising isn’t there to serve you; they want your money.
Susan feels guilty about bygone clothing purchases:
My husband and I have a decent income and live comfortably, even with the current inflation. Yes, we have worked hard, but we have also been lucky (and we didn’t have children).  
I became aware a couple years ago that my clothing habit was filling landfills. I love clothes and started buying way more than I ever needed in my late 30s. Bad choices or things that no longer fit that were in good condition probably went to someone in need after donating. But I didn’t realize that shabbier donations ended up in landfills. I am rather ashamed of this.
Not only was it arrogant on my part to think that low-income people would be okay with my more visibly worn items; it never occurred to me that items too worn to give away or sell went to landfills. I’m not sure what I thought; maybe that they went to developing countries? A friend told me they were made into rags, which is doubtful.  
I have now retired and have quit buying very much at all. I have given good clothes to friends and family. We use sheets and towels until in threads.  
I am slowly emptying my closet of items worthy of donating. I won’t say I’ll never buy again but will definitely be more thoughtful in the future. I am appalled to read online that younger girls are buying “disposable” inexpensive clothes that meet current fashion trends but are made very cheaply, not meant to last, and are to be thrown away when they are no longer in fashion. That speaks to terrible waste and very poor spending practices.
[Read: What the midterm results really mean to voters]Nicholas evangelizes for a particular item from the frozen-foods section:
I’ve been buying frozen mixed berries since I graduated from college in 2018. The sticker cost is higher than a single carton of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries, but in the long term, I think you get more fruit for less money. It is also incredibly versatile. Want a smoothie? It’s already frozen. Are chilled berries the day’s craving? Set a bowl on the counter for 20 minutes and they’re almost identical to a fresh batch out of the produce aisle. They’re almost perfectly ripe every time, so each bite is bursting with flavor. They’re healthy for you, providing essential nutrients and antioxidants. And because the bag has more volume than just buying a carton of each fruit and mixing them together, you do not have to go back to the store as frequently to refill. Frozen mixed berries are the perfect steal for wanting to eat healthy for a long-term reduced cost.
Gary gets political:
For me, the answer is easy: VOTE. For all the excuses that politicians make, inflation is simple to understand—too much money in the system chasing too few goods and services. Government policy is instrumental to inflation. If it was not, why would we ever believe the Fed could fight inflation with its policy on interest rates?
The question becomes, what policies have the current crop of politicians put in play that contribute to inflation? Of course, one must consider other factors, like manufacturing and supply chain disruptions. However, the continuing largesse of this administration and a very generous Congress have been instrumental to the rising inflation. There are no bad people in this equation; the government giveaways all have good intent behind them, but like so many things done with good intent, the second-order effects are never considered.  
To paraphrase, the road to inflation is paved with good intentions. Look hard at those who want to continue to print money and dump it on an overloaded economic system to buy votes and VOTE them out.
James reminds us that a bargain depends in part on how much one enjoys something. Upon reflecting on which possession gave him the most value, the answer was blowing in the wind:
I purchased and hung a $300 hand-tuned wind chime outside of my front door. A ridiculous purchase. And yet, it has brought me exponentially more peace than all of my other material possessions and worldly spending combined. That has been extraordinarily eye-opening to realize. (If you’re curious about this wonder item, here’s the exact one).
Jim’s most wasteful spending was in failing to retire sooner:
My top tip: Remember that the less you desire, the more fulfilled you’ll be. The more you have, the more you’ll be distracted. Simple, not easy.
My most wasteful spending: My personal energy, particularly that spent in the workforce and commuting. If only I’d come to my senses decades earlier and retired to my home to turn my time and effort into food and useful domestic goods instead of cash. Even though my daily life today is a source of great contentment, I can’t help but think of the great opportunity cost of having to postpone this life by 45 years, dabbling when I could. Nevertheless, my personal contentment today isn’t diminished by that. What was lost, however, was the opportunity to spread the fruits of my good work that never took place. That was most wasteful.
Christine regrets searching without rather than within:
My most wasteful spending was when I was in my mid-20s, with a very large (for me, at the time) salary of $40,000/year, working at a spin-off of Bell Labs in NJ. I considered mid-NJ a cultural wasteland compared to the college towns I had lived in the seven years prior. I drove endless miles on the Garden State Parkway and the NJ Turnpike, with my new Toyota Corolla hatchback that got 40 miles per gallon of gas, and gas was only 69 cents/gallon. I was looking for culture, for something unique within all of the malls. If only I had not driven so much and spent more time looking inside of myself, I would have been much happier, and the world would have been a little better off.
JD summons his inner do-it-yourselfer:
My answer is simple. Stop paying for services you can do yourself. I’m that guy. You know, the guy in the Miller Genuine Draft commercial (they are all retrograde—and awesome) judging you for paying others to do what you should be doing yourself: lawn mowing, dog-waste disposal, house cleaning, food delivery. Those are low hanging fruit. Recently, I fixed the brakes on both of my vehicles and did some minor plumbing work. It was harder than expected, as these things usually are. But, conservatively, I’d say I saved my family $1,000, just in the last couple of months.
And Paula closes us out with a savings method:
My tip? For a week, keep track of the things that little voice inside you thinks you need: a gallon of milk, a manicure, new Thanksgiving table decorations. Extra credit if you write them down and look at the list at the end of the week. Then go get the things you do need. And be grateful for what you already have.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked readers to share their election thoughts.Anna weighed in on her state’s governor:
Okay, true-confessions time from Florida: I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and I voted straight Democrat this election and always have. But I don’t hate Ron DeSantis. I dislike his culture-warrior crap, but otherwise he’s been a really effective governor. He was right about COVID; his policies at the time worked out well. “His” legislature came through with raises for teachers, first responders, and state workers. He threw a lot of money and resources at environmental concerns and storm relief. The state economy is cranking; the budget is balanced. Medical marijuana is booming. The state-university system is flourishing. He’s always on the move, extremely visible and interactive. Notwithstanding some of the red meat he throws to the base, his actual policy moves work out pretty well for the general public. It’s really made me rethink my priorities about adherence to political platforms that check all my personal preferences versus looking at what and how much actually gets done. Effectiveness is becoming more compelling, purity less so.
Jon praised the Sunshine State’s election infrastructure:
Florida should be required to go around the country and teach everyone how to run an election. Florida is a massive state of nearly 22 million people, composed of multiple large cities as well as rural hinterlands. It is socioeconomically and racially diverse, and it is thoroughly bilingual with large Spanish-speaking populations. And yet, Florida manages to tally almost all of its votes within a few hours of polls closing. We are never left wondering what is going on or speculating on how many ballots are left and where they are coming from or anything. The whole shebang is done and dusted in one evening. Whatever it is that Florida is doing, the rest of the country should emulate it.
Harold, who dislikes Ron DeSantis, is tired of the culture wars:
The 2022 midterm election, for me, was about decency, and regardless of how the uncalled races shake out, decency won. It is my hope moving forward that both parties will move on from the culture wars and focus on delivering stability, peace, and prosperity. In reality, the Democratic Party can more readily do so.
John Fetterman in Pennsylvania showed how progressive candidates can win if they focus on how their policies can improve everyone’s lot in life while not overreaching and alienating voters with extreme and unpopular positions. Paired with moderates, these candidates can form a durable coalition that delivers for the American people, while emphasizing respect and human dignity.
Unfortunately I do not see a clear path forward for Republicans. As much as the right wishes DeSantis will be their standard bearer, I just cannot see the divorce from Donald Trump going well for the party.
Moreover, in his own way, DeSantis represents the same rot. I am not sure voters would accept the Florida model nationally, especially with its focus on picking cultural winners using state power, forcing companies into submission, and threatening freedom by banning books and attacking free speech. Although popular among a third of the party’s base, such pugilism is a turnoff for moderate voters who want to see a return to decency in America.
Jaleelah fretted about all the people who stayed home on election day:
Why has no one been talking about voter turnout?
In most states, voter turnout was down from 2018 and 2020. Why should Democrats be proud of winning the Kansas governorship by 15,000 votes when less than half of the state showed up? Why is Ron Johnson’s Senate victory in Wisconsin only a footnote when Democrats could’ve flipped the seat by motivating a couple thousand more voters to turn up to the polls?
The media is rejoicing at the Democrats’ victories. I understand that everyone’s breathing a sigh of relief, but I worry that people are attributing the results of the midterms to the wrong causes. I believe that the Democrats only won because the working-class Americans who voted for [Barack] Obama and Trump were too tired to show up.
It is a good thing that working-class voters are realizing that Trump will not save them. It is a bad thing that Democrats are assuming they’re in the clear. When another motivating figure like Ron DeSantis comes along in 2024, those voters will come back to the polls. Analysts have known for years that the group of people who swing from voting to not voting is far more crucial than the group that swings from Democrat to Republican, but politicians can’t seem to get that through their head.
Democrats should heed the midterms as a warning. They should start preparing now to motivate the real swing voters to support them in 2024.
August opined on efforts to protect legal abortion: “Changing our representative democracy through elections is like trying to steer the Titanic away from that newly discovered iceberg,” he argued, “but messy direct democracy through ballot initiatives in five states protected women’s rights in their constitutions.”[Read: Is Florida still a swing state?]Meredith reacted to a season of campaign ads by fantasizing about turning the tables:
For weeks, on social media, in my emails, and on the TV, I had to pause my intended activity to scroll past or sit through a campaign ad. “Can I get your support?” they constantly asked us.
But what I want to ask is: Can we get theirs?
Half jokingly, I suggested to a friend that before any gathering of our elected officials, they should be forced to sit through taped messages of voters asking them for their “support.” I mean real productions: video messages with expert lighting and heartwarming soundtracks from Us, the Real People, who can speak to the impact on our lives. And they should be forced to sit through it, just as we have been.  Ben is heartened by ticket splitting:
I think the crossover votes are very interesting. I live in Georgia and there were many people who voted for the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who didn’t vote for the Republican Senate candidate, Hershel Walker. I think it shows the decline of Donald Trump’s influence on the party.
Kemp and Brad Raffensberger (Georgia’s secretary of state) notoriously stood up to the former president’s request that Raffensberger “find” the necessary votes to change the 2020 election outcome in Georgia. Walker, on the other hand, is Trump’s handpicked Senate candidate, and many Georgia voters refused to fall in line, even with the balance of power in the Senate potentially at stake. I am hopeful that this means there are still voters who believe that character and principals matter. And for that, I am proud to be a Georgian!
MC believes that Trump hurt the Republican Party in this election:
The GOP was set to have a Red wave, but Donald Trump got in the way. Trump had been pretty quiet until about six months ago. Then he started being seen and heard in the news. He and his minions don’t understand that a majority of Americans, including many in the GOP, do NOT want Trump in any way shape or form to be running our nation. Had Trump not endorsed candidates or gotten involved with primarying members of Congress that he didn’t like, I believe the GOP would have been far more successful.  
Generally, midterms are a referendum on the party in charge, which at present is the Democrats. By sticking his nose into the election, Trump managed to make the midterm about himself and the MAGA version of the GOP. Just as in 2020, the nation said NO.   
CG believes COVID played a significant role in the midterms:
COVID didn’t affect people equally. If you didn’t have a close family member who died or was hospitalized, and you don’t work in health care, then you likely felt the biggest impact of COVID in business or, particularly, school closures. (I live in a deep-blue area; my kids are 10 and 14, and they did remote or hybrid learning for almost the entire ’20–’21 school year.) The evidence seems to suggest that Kemp, DeSantis, [Kim] Reynolds, and [Greg] Abbott were correct to aggressively reopen schools and Democrats and teachers unions were wrong. In contrast, on vaccines, Republicans mostly modulated between hesitancy and fear mongering. That lack of leadership led to many excess deaths and illness.
I would guess that for the less-partisan voter, getting schools and businesses open was more important than a successful vaccination campaign. They themselves were often vaccinated. If someone else didn’t vaccinate, that was the unvaccinated person’s problem and responsibility, whereas having kids virtually learning at home was their own problem.
I see the culture-war stuff on race and gender in schools as effective only because nonpartisan parents are already frustrated by distance learning, hybrid learning, and COVID protocols. They know that schooling hasn’t been satisfactory, that their children are suffering. I don’t know if they would be opposed to discussions of race or gender in school in normal times. But during the pandemic, it seemed like schools were losing their focus on the essentials. And so schools became an issue for more than the most partisan voters.
Josh remarked on the results in his home state:
In Michigan, the state legislature (House and Senate) flipped to Democratic control for the first time in 40 years. The margin is razor thin in both bodies. This was the first election that our Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission drew the lines, making races actually competitive. The GOP had aggressively gerrymandered the state in the past. The Trump-endorsed gubernatorial, attorney general, and secretary of state candidates all lost by 10-plus points. These candidates absolutely hurt the downballot races.
A Dem trifecta in Michigan could have a big impact—repealing Right to Work legislation from the Rick Snyder era, meaningful action on guns (the GOP legislature debated and voted on zero bills after the 2021 Oxford High School shooting). There is a very real chance Dems lose the state House in 2024. A 56–54 split is tight. But competitive districts are good for democracy.
Legislators will have to get things done; their seats are not safe. They have to be responsive to their constituencies.Jonathan perceives a national fever breaking:
Something snapped. I think a lot of people feel it. America returned to the realm of the reasonable. MAGA will rage.
It did not take three days for the former president to attack the single Republican who was most successful Tuesday. Donald Trump has the power to destroy the Republican Party, but not the American system and way of life. A great middle won this week and is still winning. It’ll take their party to achieve it, but by God, they have it.
The next several months will be among the most interesting in American history. There is a true chance to extricate this great American cancer.
In contrast, DE believes that Trump’s national influence looms larger than ever:
I’m not sharing in the sense of jubilation over the unexpectedly modest gains made by the Trumpian right. What do I mean? I rather suspect that Trumpism has captured the American political imagination, such that even dyed-in-the-wool liberals, who fancy themselves opposed to everything Trump stands for and represents, unthinkingly genuflect to Trumpism and even work to enshrine it in policy.
As an Ohio voter, two contests spring immediately to mind that speak to the dominance of Trumpism in American politics. The first is the contest for U.S. Senator between Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance, which I think shows Trumpism on the ascent despite the race being closer than expected. A lot of left/liberal analyses of Ryan got a great deal wrong by deemphasizing or explaining away the very essence of his campaign: his rabidly anti-China posturing, by which Ryan sought to out-Trump Vance by going all-in on Trump’s vision of decoupling from China in everything but in name. I would argue that, while Trump definitely lost the 2020 election, he nonetheless won the policy debate on China even in the eyes of his nominal opponents, who have now indeed taken it upon themselves to implement Trump’s vision of decoupling in his stead. Little wonder, then, that the contest between Ryan and Vance was as close as it was: The U.S. Senate contest was merely one between different styles of Trumpian politics.
The second contest that comes to mind is a ballot initiative amending the Ohio Constitution to make citizenship a requirement for voter eligibility (noncitizens were granted the right to vote in local elections in 1917). That it passed by over 77 percent of the vote speaks to the willingness across the political spectrum to alienate and ostracize noncitizens in the public sphere, which reflects a broad and bipartisan (yet distinctively Trumpian) consensus about the place, or lack thereof, for the noncitizen in the body politic. The measure appears to be a reaction to a 2019 referendum that passed in the village of Yellow Springs allowing noncitizens to participate in local elections. The referendum notwithstanding, Secretary of State Frank LaRose objected that allowing noncitizens to vote went against both the U.S. Constitution and the Ohio Constitution, and he forbade the local board of elections from accepting voter registrations from noncitizens.
Now one might have imagined that, if the Ohio Constitution already barred noncitizens from voting, an amendment to that effect would be totally unnecessary. Alas, LaRose (making an official statement in favor of the initiative) maintained that cities allowing noncitizens the right to vote in local elections “are undermining the value of what it means to be an American.” It’s a rather remarkable assertion of principle (or prejudice), acknowledging as it does that the ideals of citizenship and Americanism are defined by the act of excluding noncitizens like immigrants from our society and institutions for being insufficiently like “us” (however “we” construe ourselves). These ideals of citizenship and Americanism function not only to exclude noncitizens from the public sphere but also to underwrite the justifications for that very exclusion.
There’s more to be said about the ballot initiative and the motivations behind it, but from how much support it garnered in the election, one simply cannot deny that the demonization of noncitizens extends far beyond the fringes of the Trumpian right; it has captured even the political imagination of those right-thinking liberals who would prominently advertise in their front lawns, in 15 different languages no less, that “Hate has no home here.”
[Read: What should colleges care about?]Chadd describes his frustrations as a dissenter in South Florida:
I’ve lived in South Florida all my life, and despite pundits and folks who don’t live here calling it a swing state, I’ve never felt like it was one. Maybe it’s because I’m 34 and I’ve only ever really seen mostly Republican control down here. It’s unfortunate. Solidly red. I can’t even begin to express my disappointment with the Democratic Party and its operations (or lack thereof) in Florida. My inbox was blown up daily with emails for candidates from all over the country, but I bet I got at most maybe one or two for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist (the worst candidate of the entire lineup; I can’t believe THAT is who the left decided to prop up against DeSantis). It honestly feels like the Dems have completely abandoned us.
At my work, folks are generally nonpolitical. Lots of libertarian-esque ideologies, lots of folks who just aren’t really paying attention to what’s going on in Tallahassee, and an outright LOVE of DeSantis. These are folks who, from my observations, are very socially liberal, kind of passively conservative, and mostly not politically affiliated. And the Dems straight up gave them away.
I had to sit and watch as my close friend’s husband quit his teaching job out of fear of being sued by rabid parents because of his sexual orientation. I heard the quiet, whispering conversations with clients about the misinformation flourishing about “grooming” and litter boxes in classrooms. All the while, I personally self-censor for fear of what the repercussions to my job could be. That said, I love my co-workers and my bosses and I honestly don’t blame them for their leanings because in my eyes, the Dems gave up even trying to convince them otherwise.
The national Democratic establishment and the absolutely inept Florida Democratic Party gave the state away. I have tons of friends in the Hispanic community and absolutely all of them swing to DeSantis and Trump. Do I blame them? The Dems offered nothing in terms of substance to counter any of the nonsense DeSantis has been doing, nothing to actually show the damage some of these policies are having on our neighbors.
The appalling arrest of 20 citizens who were tricked into voting was turned into an election-integrity crusade that the left did nothing to counter. As a returned-citizen felon, I find what he did to these poor human beings to be about as grotesque, nihilistic, and cynical as it gets.
Again, I self-censor. I can’t come right out and say, “Hey guys, I’m a felon you know; that very well could’ve been me considering there is no actual process for restoring the ability to vote after finishing a sentence.” If my rambling means anything, it’s that the Dems are wholly responsible for this. They’ve truly given up on Florida and now we get to reap the benefits of an entrenched mildly autocratic party with no intention of staying true to democratic principles. It makes me wanna switch my affiliation to independent, which I’m only holding out on to vote in primaries for my preferred Dem candidate. Otherwise, my observation for the most part is that there is no Florida Democratic Party.
We are a solidly red state and will be for the foreseeable future.
Pam remains worried about the future of the GOP:
I’d like to thank Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger of the January 6 committee. Liz showed courage by bucking the sycophants in her party, knowing that it would cost her the election in Wyoming. She is a profile in courage. Together, she and Adam exposed the duplicitous Trump, the evil PR genius. He manipulated the press and they gave him too much coverage. The former president of CBS, Leslie Moonves, said, when he was asked about whether CBS would cover Trump, “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. He was correct.
The remaining question: What will the Republican Party do now? They had two opportunities to help the country rid us of the evil genius, but they chose to sit on their thumbs. If we fail to prosecute these evildoers, we encourage more white supremacy and vigilantism. We need to right these wrongs. Our failure to act will only cause further damage.
And Jerome critiques coverage of his local municipal election:
This morning, the day after the midterms, I noticed something interesting on local TV news in my city of about 1 million souls. Much is being made on the local news of the potential that the majority of the members of our new city council will belong to one racial or ethnic-minority group or another, thus creating a so-called majority-minority city council.
Except, based on the last census, that can’t by definition really be the case. Demographically, the city is currently 48.2 percent non-Hispanic white (Anglo in local parlance). All others are lumped together by the news media as minorities. So, in fact, the new city council will not be the advertised majority-minority council. Rather, we will find that the democratic process reflects the racial and ethnic makeup of people in a diverse city—a city in which the current majority is composed of individuals who were formerly identified collectively as minorities.
When racial and ethnic minorities become the majority, will they continue to define themselves collectively as minorities? Conversely, when the white (Anglo) majority becomes the minority, will it claim the minority label and the burden of grievance that goes with minority status? Six-and-a-half percent of individuals in our city report belonging to two or more races. In the past, because of our country’s history of racism, mixed-race children of Black and white parents claimed Black as their race by default. In recent years, many mixed-race young people have rejected classification and opted out of the racial-sorting game. As that cohort of the population grows, will racial political discourse become a relic?
Perhaps we need to reframe how we talk about race in politics. The way that people hear, interpret, and act on matters of race is based on the language we use and the framing of our argument. I believe that people of good will can find common ground once we acknowledge our shared humanity. We need to imagine the best we can do and keep it as simple as possible, with kindness, respect, and compassion as the hallmarks of our dialogue.
Thanks for all your emails, and see you later this week.

       With few exceptions, liberal pressure groups have lost lawsuits in state after state, with courts tossing out their faux claims that ID laws are discriminatory, unconstitutional or suppress minority voting. (iStock)   It was a boring Election Day, and that’s good   Walter Olson  November 14, 02:29 PM November 14, 02:29 PM  How much went right with last Tuesday's midterm election? A lot.  Violence at the polls, much feared, didn’t happen. Nor did widespread intimidation. For all the talk of voter suppression, poll access was healthy and uneventful in the state of Georgia and pretty much everywhere else. Nearly all candidates who’d expressed distrust in the electoral process did in fact concede in a timely way on losing their races. (On this last, Benjy Sarlin offers one plausible explanation, which is that former President Donald Trump simply is unlike most persons in his willingness to commit with total intensity to a storm of lies: it all helps underscore “just how much Stop The Steal was a one‐man, top‐down phenomenon in 2020.”)  Each Election Day also features news stories that get some play, but in fact fall within the normal range for things that happen this time of year. Here are four stories for which we did not need to set our hair on fire.  1. Humans screwed up. Example: owing to human error a Georgia county failed to send out 1,000 or so absentee ballots. The error was discovered, the county moved to fix things, and the voters involved were given several options to adapt. It wasn’t a plot, and things are going to be okay.  2. Machines screwed up. During every big election, equipment breaks down somewhere. This time there were ballot tabulation failures that caused delays, some serious, for voters at 70 of 223 voting centers in Maricopa County, Ariz. Happily, as in the Georgia case, modern voting methods build in backup options that included use of temporary dropboxes for ballots not being accepted by tabulators, as well as the availability of other voting centers with no wait. (Under the Arizona system, you needn’t vote at a neighborhood precinct but can go to whichever voting center you please.) Again: it wasn’t a plot, despite some efforts to portray it as such.  3. Someone sued someone. Every big election includes litigation. When it’s groundless litigation, as with an attempt to shut down Detroit mail votes, the courts’ job is to shut it down, and we (and the voters) may draw negative inferences about those who filed it. Other times the issue is closer, as with a battle in Pennsylvania in which the state’s high court split 3–3 over whether or not to count mail ballots that arrive in undated or misdated envelopes.  Most of the legally close claims tend to involve relatively few actual votes. Some coverage has portrayed the recent Pennsylvania dispute on envelope dating as resulting in the rejection of more than 2,000 ballots in Philadelphia, but according to a Washington Post account, that’s the number rejected total, and ballots get rejected for plenty of reasons other than envelope misdating. Moreover, mail ballots once rejected can often still be rescued (“cured”) rather than resulting in the annihilation of a vote.  4. The feds sent monitors. The U.S. Department of Justice said Monday it was sending election monitors to 24 states, and Florida Gov. DeSantis said those monitors wouldn’t be allowed inside polling places in his state. Here the hair‐on‐fire reactions divided into opposing scorch salons, the “OMG things have gotten so bad the feds have to step in” versus “OMG Merrick Garland commits new outrage against the Constitution.”  The actual story is less exciting. Federal use of monitors regarding Voting Rights Act compliance has been going on for 50 years, and the practice has tended to decay, rather than accelerate, in the past decade. The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County case much curtailed the feds’ discretion to place observers inside polling places in what were deemed suspect jurisdictions. The DOJ remains free to send monitors for tasks that do not require polling place access, such as fielding complaints or interviewing locals, but that’s relatively ho‐hum stuff. All sides seem to agree that aside from exceptional situations as when there is a court order, the feds have no right to hang out inside polling places unless state law allows them to. So the Florida showdown wasn’t much of a showdown.  I’ve written before about how the contending “voter suppression” and “voter integrity” schools on Left and Right encourage an alarmist picture of an electoral system in crisis, even though by and large the system we have tends to work pretty well. Things on Tuesday were mostly normal and boring, and in the world of election administration, normal and boring are good.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA  This article originally appeared in the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the Cato Institute.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

The Republican Party is struggling to reconcile a contest between the compelling power of an idea against the irresistible force of a personality. The idea is that the 2022 elections communicated as clearly as possible the degree to which Trump-aligned candidates are utterly unpalatable to voters. If you lent credence to the notion that Trump was denied the presidency in 2020 due to fraud or if, God help you, you promised to do something about it, you probably lost. Republican candidates with a credible claim to conventionality fared far better. That conflicts with the transformation of the party under Trump. Painful memories persist—memories of the punishment meted out against the former president’s foes—2022’s elections notwithstanding. This is a contest for power, and power is won by those who seize it.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the man understands how to secure power. He has a kind of horse sense about his relative standing. As the scale of the debacle over which Republicans presided comes into sharper focus, it has thrown into sharp relief the looming shadow he casts over the GOP. Trump and the forces loyal to him know their primacy within the Republican coalition is as vulnerable now as it has ever been, and they’re acting fast to secure their flanks before an alternative to Trump’s dominance emerges.

The conflict over the coming shape of the party has emerged in a fight over the GOP’s congressional leadership heading into the next Congress. In the House, the GOP’s narrow majority—if a majority materializes at all—limits the options available to Republicans who want to move on from the Trump era. And the party’s pro-Trump forces know it.

Trump ally Jason Miller expressly warned aspiring Speaker Kevin McCarthy that “he must be much more declarative that he supports President Trump” if he wants the gavel. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the lower chamber, has already endorsed “the most popular Republican in America” ahead of 2024, and McCarthy (who has already won Trump’s conditional backing for the post he seeks) has been compelled to turn to his conference’s most reliably mutinous elements to secure his post. The bona fides of those potential new leaders within the House GOP are still determined by the degree to which they make plain their absolute fealty to Trump.

If there is a less Trumpy alternative to the populist affectation within the Republican conference in the House that so repulsed the 2022 electorate, it has yet to emerge. If it does, it may be too late to prevent the flight of Republicans back into the former president’s fold.

A similar but less menacing dynamic has emerged inside the GOP’s Senate minority. What was clearly a long-planned palace coup against Mitch McConnell’s leadership by insurgent pro-Trump forces commenced even despite the loss of those forces (as evinced by losing Arizona candidate Blake Masters’ bluster, from a position of abject weakness, about the rise of Republican nationalism). Humiliation at the ballot box hasn’t imposed humility on those nationalist Republicans who possess a Marxian view of their historic inevitability.

“One lesson from this week is that the establishment has failed the conservative movement — yet again,” wrote Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts. His organization is set to publish an open letter this week signed by the chiefs of organizations such as Freedom Works and CPAC and by odious figures like the disgraced Rep. Steve King calling on Senate Republicans to delay leadership elections. GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, and Marco Rubio, agree. Against this backdrop, a fratricidal conflict between McConnell and one of his rivals, Florida Sen. Rick Scott, has spilled out into the streets.

There appears to be little appetite within Senate GOP leadership to delay a leadership vote ahead of December’s runoff election in Georgia, the outcome of which will have no effect on the control of that chamber. The elected officials and Republican powerbrokers who are sticking their necks out in defiance of McConnell don’t seem likely to succeed. But neither do they appear to expect any adverse consequences for challenging a figure who suffices as an all-purpose scapegoat for MAGA’s failures.

The big idea—the absolute existential imperative of shifting the Republican Party back in the direction of rationality—is self-evident. But the GOP hasn’t been a party of ideas for some time. The Republicans who are convinced by this idea are disoriented and disorganized. Their counterparts, by contrast, recognize their peril, and they are busily securing the commanding heights of authority within the party ahead of the insurrection they anticipate.

For politicians, elections are the primary feedback mechanism. Every faction of the Republican Party got the message that voters were sending this cycle, and they’re acting in ways that maximize their advantages. Pro-Trump forces inside the Republican firmament have opted to aggressively arrest the party’s entropic drift away from the millstone to which it attached itself in 2016. By contrast, those who envision a different future for the party haven’t even strapped on their shoes. By the time they do, it may already be too late.

There have been a couple of amazing weeks so far in a year that has been overall a shocking and gloomy one. The first occurred beginning on September 6, when the Ukrainians started their Kharkiv offensive and drove the Russians out of most of the oblast in a matter of days. And the second was this past week, which was memorable in many respects. Americans went to the polls on Tuesday, with many of us dreading what was almost universally predicted to be a crushing Republican repudiation of Joe Biden and the Democrats. As Wednesday turned into Thursday, it became clear that the "red wave" had not materialized. The news kept getting better: by the weekend it was clear that the Democrats would not just keep the Senate (and were on track to increase their majority), but that the Republicans would claim the House by at most a seat or two. All of the Trump-endorsed election deniers in critical swing states that would have authority over the 2024 election were defeated, as were many of Trump's acolytes in important state races like those in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. The Democrats, contrary to expectations, held on to key governorships, and in Michigan also flipped both houses of the state legislature. Moreover, there was no election day violence, or charges by defeated Republicans of election rigging. Americans overall voted peacefully and normally.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Then, on Nov. 10, the Ukrainian army entered the city of Kherson, following a bizarre Russian announcement that they were withdrawing from the city. The Ukrainians did this without the kinds of artillery bombardments that are a Russian trademark, and were greeted with amazing scenes of joy as the citizens of that city came out of their basements to welcome their liberators.The longer term implications of these two events will be momentous. I think Tuesday’s election marks the high water mark of Donald Trump’s threat to American democracy. As I noted in an earlier post, the way out of our current polarization is via the Democrats winning a series of elections. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has been so thorough that some kind of spontaneous uprising against him from within the party is about as likely as Putin being swept away in a color revolution. Only by suffering a series of electoral defeats will Republicans realize that Trump is a huge liability to their brand and future success, something that publications in the Murdoch empire finally began to admit.The white smoke seen floating above Fox News now merging with the white smoke billowing above News Corp pic.twitter.com/LsZqPaFNbl— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) November 10, 2022
Similarly, the Wall Street Journal denounced Trump on Wednesday as the “Republican Party’s Biggest Loser,” pointing out that he has now led the party to defeat in four consecutive elections.Many observers have become cynical over time and have reminded us that there were many moments in recent years—Access Hollywood, drinking bleach to cure Covid, January 6—that were touted as turning points where Trump’s influence would begin to wane. But while many in the party will again line up with him in the near future, the likelihood that he could actually be re-elected in 2024 has become much smaller. If he does re-establish himself as the unopposed leader of the party—something quite likely at this point—they will have selected their weakest possible candidate. Tuesday’s vote demonstrates that Americans fervently dislike Trump’s brand of divisive politics despite high inflation and crime. Trump-endorsed candidates ran behind their normal Republican peers all over the country. Republicans turning away from him now will not be doing so because they’ve seen the light regarding the importance of character or the dangers of populism, of course; they’ll do so because they want to win. But while populism will survive, the extreme danger to American democracy posed by Trump’s concerted effort to undermine the electoral process has receded.The Ukrainian liberation of Kherson also has important long-term implications.  They have inflicted huge losses on the Russians in recent days, including thousands of likely casualties among the mobiks mobilized after Sept. 21 in a chaotic and incompetent process. The Ukrainian takeover of the right bank of the Dnipro River gives them a clear defensive line against a future Russian attack, and puts a good part of the Crimean Peninsula within HIMARS range. There is a real possibility that they could retake Crimea itself. While a Ukrainian crossing of the Dnipro and a move into the peninsula through the narrow isthmus will be militarily difficult, the Russians will themselves face huge logistical difficulties supplying their forces. The Ukrainians will likely liberate Nova Kakhovka on the left bank soon, and then be able to once again cut the canal supplying fresh water to Crimea. And they can re-attack the Kerch Strait bridge.There are at this point several longer-term possible outcomes. The only one pointing to a sustainable solution to the problem (which, to remind, is Russia’s determination to annex Ukraine) is regime change in Moscow. No one can predict if and how this will happen, but Putin’s humiliation at this point will be pretty thoroughgoing and Russian history suggests failed leaders don’t last long.If Putin stays, he could escalate his long-range strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure using Iranian ballistic missiles, and there is always the possibility of his using nuclear weapons. The former is far more likely than the latter, but even that may not materialize as Ukrainian air defenses improve with Western help and the Iranians themselves come under pressure to desist from lashing themselves to a corpse. Neither type of escalation is likely, however, to drive the Ukrainians to surrender; this is what the history of strategic bombing tells us.The final scenarios then revolve around the extent of future Ukrainian military victories. It is within the realm of possibility that Kyiv could drive the Russians all the way back to where they were before 2014, including as noted above liberating the Crimean Peninsula. This will inevitably be a very hard slog. If they succeed in getting back to at least the Feb. 23 lines, it is conceivable that Kyiv might consider a ceasefire, though with many conditions. Russia’s blockade of southern Ukrainian ports would have to be neutralized either militarily or through some form of diplomacy. I assume that any deal negotiated with Putin at such a hypothetical point will last only as long as it takes for him to rebuild his forces and have another go at Ukraine. So it is important that Ukraine recover territory that is strategically and economically vital for its long-term survival. In this respect, liberating the whole of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts is more important that recovering the whole of the Donbas. The south of Ukraine is the sine qua non of defense against a future Russian invasion, and economically vital to Ukraine’s ability to export.The two happy events of the past week occurred on opposite ends of the world, and yet are closely linked to one another. The number of House Republicans voting against aid to Ukraine has steadily increased with every successive vote; both Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Marjorie Taylor Greene have suggested that such support may stop or be curtailed in the future. A red wave would have accelerated this shift, but is now much less likely as the Republicans cling to the narrowest of majorities in the House. Hostility to Ukraine and sympathy for Russia run deep in MAGA-land, but that movement is for now on its back foot. So the enormously productive partnership of the U.S. and NATO with Kyiv is safe for the time being.All around, it has been a good week.Image: Ukrainian forces in a joint operation along the Azov coast. (Flickr: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense)

To understand why Republicans are on course to barely capture control of the House of Representatives in precedent-defying midterm elections, a district all the way on the other side of the country from Washington, D.C., might be the best place to look.In Washington State’s Third District, the Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez was projected over the weekend to defeat Joe Kent, capturing a district that Republicans have held since 2010. Democrats have sought for years to flip the Third, repeatedly spending piles of money to defeat Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler. But what they were unable to achieve, the GOP achieved for them this year: A Trump-backed primary challenge unseated Herrera Beutler and paved the way for a Democratic takeover.The self-inflicted wound in Washington is emblematic of how poor Republican choices and MAGA purity tests hurt the party in races up and down the ticket, and cost them their chance at control of the Senate. Senate candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, and Adam Laxalt in Nevada couldn’t beat vulnerable Democrats; in Georgia, Republican Herschel Walker trailed Senator Raphael Warnock, though that race is now headed to a runoff. Extreme candidates for secretary of state flopped, too. The Republican losses show the influence of the anti-MAGA majority.[David A. Graham: America has an anti-MAGA majority]The Third District sits in southwestern Washington, just north of Portland, Oregon. It’s a historically working-class district, once dominated by timber and fishing, and sits apart from the Democratic strongholds around Seattle and Tacoma. Living there is attractive for tax reasons: You can reside in Washington, with no income tax, and shop over the border in Oregon, with no sales tax. The Cook Political Report rates it as four points more Republican than the U.S. overall. Barack Obama carried the district in the 2008 presidential election, but no Democratic presidential candidate has won it since.In districts like this one, outside the Seattle sphere, “there’s kind of a built-in, inherent Republicanism, a low-key Republicanism built on a perception that Democrats don’t care and they don’t need to care,” Kevin Pirch, a political-science professor at Eastern Washington University, told me this summer.But as the Portland area expands, Democrats have eyed the district jealously, seeing in it the sort of suburbanizing tracts that have become more favorable to the party. The party has put its money where its mouth is and ended up with little more than a depleted wallet. Herrera Beutler won the seat by six percentage points in 2010, and no Democrat came close to that for years.[David A. Graham: Lessons from a lonely, Trump-defiant Republican]Herrera Beutler is a moderate Republican but not aggressively centrist, and a protégé of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. In 2018, with expectations of a backlash against then-President Donald Trump in the midterms, Democrats made the district a top target and put muscle behind Carolyn Long, a young political scientist, to win the race. She far outraised Herrera Beutler but ended up a little more than five points back in November—the best Democratic showing in years. Two years later, Long ran again and once again raised money prolifically, but then ended up 13 points back.Two months after the polls closed, Trump incited a riot that sacked the U.S. Capitol as Congress was supposed to be certifying Joe Biden’s victory over him. Herrera Beutler was appalled. She revealed that McCarthy had begged Trump in vain to intervene as the mob stormed the Capitol, and was one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump. That turned her into a target for the former president’s vengeance. In her reelection campaign, Herrera Beutler tried to steer a narrow path, never apologizing for her vote but focusing on local issues rather than making it a central part of her identity, in the manner of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.She ended up just as toast as Cheney and Kinzinger. Trump backed a primary challenge by Joe Kent, a lantern-jawed former Green Beret. Washington holds nonpartisan primaries—the top two candidates advance—and in August, Herrera Beutler came in third, just half a percentage point or about 1,000 votes behind Kent. Gluesenkamp Perez, a little-known Democrat, took 31 percent of the vote, but she was still a heavy underdog: The assumption was that Republicans would coalesce around Kent.But Kent, despite his sparkling résumé, was vulnerable because of the company he keeps and the positions he holds. He gave an interview to a Nazi sympathizer and was friendly with Nick Fuentes, an infamous white-supremacist leader who participated in the racist 2017 melee in Charlottesville, Virginia; his campaign paid thousands of dollars to a Proud Boy.David Frum: The lesson Republicans refuse to learnBefore the election, conventional wisdom held that candidates like Kent would probably be able to win despite these liabilities, especially in a solidly Republican district like the Third. FiveThirtyEight’s model gave Kent a 98-in-100 chance at victory on the eve of the election. But with most of the vote in, Gluesenkamp Perez leads by roughly 1.5 points. (Like clockwork, Kent is crying fraud, without any evidence.)Kent’s weaknesses don’t take away from Gluesenkamp Perez’s accomplishment. She seems to have been the perfect Democrat to win the district. She has a bit of the magic John Fetterman dust many in her party will soon be seeking: She’s young (in her mid-30s) and owns an auto-body shop with her husband. She ran in large part on abortion rights, but is also a gun owner who opposes an assault-weapons ban.Soon she’ll be a U.S. representative too. Voters turned out to be repulsed enough by MAGA candidates who question elections and pal around with racists that they were willing to give a chance to the right alternative. Democrats alone couldn’t flip seats like Washington’s Third, but with the help of Trump and the most extreme primary voters in the area, they were finally able to make it happen.

Another week, another bullying allegation against a senior minister. Pressure is building on Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, over allegations that he was aggressive towards staff during his time at the Foreign Office and Ministry of Justice.
Rishi Sunak has so far stood by Raab but the story won’t go away. Today Simon McDonald, a former top civil servant who worked with Raab at the Foreign Office, told Andrew Marr on LBC that it would be “plausible” to characterise Raab as a bully. That will keep the story alive for at least another day.
The parallels with the saga of Gavin Williamson are inescapable. As it was then, the broader problem for the Prime Minister here is that the steady stream of allegations suggests there’s a strong contingent in the Conservative Party that wants to damage Raab and by extension Sunak. That’s further proof (if you needed any) that the divisions in the party are irreparable. Sunak cannot escape scandal and disunity.
However, that does not mean Raab will have to resign. Williamson’s resignation has already made Sunak look weak. Losing two allies in as many weeks may be too politically damaging for Sunak to stomach. Much depends on whether more allegations emerge.
Away from Westminster, there’s the perennial question over whether these scandals reach the public consciousness. The police investigation into Boris Johnson breaking Covid rules may have dominated the agenda for months, but that does not mean Williamson’s aggressive texts or the claims against Raab will make such an impact. A poll from Redfield and Wilton carried out on 9-10 November found that 61 per cent of people had heard about the bullying allegations against Williamson. It is not yet clear whether the claims against Raab will reach as many people. At the very least, these recurrent scandals won’t do anything alter the perception that the Conservative Party has a troubled relationship with integrity.
[See also: Rishi Sunak has been an improvement – but we shouldn’t forgive his past]

During the quarter century of its formal existence, the Moscow School of Civic Education did not have a campus, a syllabus, or professors. The school instead ran seminars for politicians and journalists, led by other politicians and journalists, from Russia and around the world. It operated out of the Moscow apartment of its founders, Lena Nemirovskaya and Yuri Senokosov. They had met in the 1970s while working on a Soviet philosophy journal, and shared a hatred of the violent, arbitrary politics that had shaped most of their lives. Nemirovskaya’s father was a Gulag prisoner. Senokosov once told me he could not eat Russian black bread, because the taste reminded him of the poverty and tragedy of his Soviet childhood.Both also believed that Russia could change. Maybe not change very much, maybe not very dramatically, but change nevertheless. Nemirovskaya once told me that her great ambition was just to make Russia “a little bit more civilized” through the exposure of people to new ideas. Their school, an extension of conversations held in their kitchen, was designed to achieve that single, nonrevolutionary goal.For a long time it flourished. From 1992 to 2021, Nemirovskaya reckons, more than 30,000 people—parliamentarians, city-council members, businesspeople, journalists—attended their seminars around the country on law, elections, and media. British editors, Polish ministers, and American governors came to speak; they got financial support from an equally wide range of European, American, and Russian foundations and philanthropists. I attended perhaps a dozen seminars, mostly to speak about journalism.But the school remained a Russian organization, built by Russians, for Russians. The topics were chosen because they interested Russians and later because they interested the Georgians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians who attended some seminars too. I remember a particularly boring (to me) seminar on federalism in Scandinavia that the participants found fascinating because they hadn’t ever pondered, in their highly centralized societies, the various relationships between regional and national governments that could theoretically exist.At the time, this project did not feel naive, idealistic, or radical, let alone seditious. Even during the first decade of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, democratic politics were restricted but legal in Russia; opposition views were tolerated, as long as they didn’t attract too much popular support; and there were many endeavors to organize discussions, training sessions, and lectures on democracy and the rule of law. Nemirovskaya told me that it never occurred to her that she was creating a “dissident” organization. On the contrary, her efforts were meant to support exactly the kind of transformation that people in power in Russia in the ’90s said they wanted. But slowly, those people were pushed out, or changed their mind. Officers of the FSB, the Russian secret police, began showing up at the seminars and asking questions. Negative articles about the school appeared in the Russian press. Finally, the state designated the school as a “foreign agent” and decreed that it had to advertise itself as such.[Anne Applebaum: Fear of nuclear war has warped the West’s Ukraine strategy]In 2021, the school was closed. Nemirovskaya and Senokosov sold their apartment and moved to Riga, Latvia, where they still run seminars, only now for exiles. Many of their friends, colleagues, and former students trickled out of the country too. In the spring of 2022, following the invasion of Ukraine, that trickle became a wave. Tens of thousands of Russian journalists, activists, lawyers, and artists left the country, bringing with them whatever remained of independent media, publishing, culture, and the arts. Among them were many people who might have once attended a seminar on local government at the Moscow School of Civic Education.That moment felt, to many inside and outside Russia, like the end of the story. But it wasn’t—because stories like this one never end.Ideas move across time and space, sometimes in unexpected ways. The notion that a country should be different—differently ruled, differently organized—can come from old books, from foreign travel, or just from its citizens’ imaginations. At the height of the Russian empire, in the 19th century, under the rule of some of the most ponderous autocrats of their time, a plethora of reform movements flowered: social democrats, peasant reformers, advocates of constitutions and parliaments. Even some of the people born into the Russian imperial elite came to think differently from others in their social class. Leo Tolstoy evolved into a world-famous advocate of pacifism. The father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov made fiery public speeches in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, edited a liberal newspaper, and spent time in prison. His son later remembered how, on the evenings when his father was holding his political meetings, “the hall would house an accumulation of greatcoats and overshoes,” and guests would talk well into the night.The state pushed back against people who thought differently, even then. Mikhail Zygar, a Russian author and the founding editor of an independent television station called TV Rain, has written a book, The Empire Must Die, that, among other things, tells the story of the independent thinkers forced out of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, some of whom came back to reshape it during the revolution. This was a moment when “the number of Russian political émigrés becomes so great that there is talk of the emergence of an alternative Russian civil society,” he writes. “The Russian diaspora is no longer a branch of Russia; it is no longer clear which is the branch and which the trunk.”Most suffered from one major blind spot: Neither then nor later did most Russian liberals understand that the imperial project itself was the source of Russian autocracy. The White Russian armies lost to the Bolsheviks in part because they would not join forces in 1918–20 with newly independent Poland or would-be independent Ukraine. Democratic ideas did not triumph in either the branch or the trunk in the years that followed the Russian Revolution, partly because the state needed to use so much violence to keep Ukraine, Georgia, and the other republics inside the Soviet Union.Still, even the decades of fear and poverty that followed the Russian Revolution did not eliminate the belief that another kind of state was possible. New generations of thinkers kept emerging out of the Soviet gloom. Some of them would help start the modern human-rights movement. Others, like the founders and students of the Moscow School of Civic Education, would try to create an alternative Russia in the years following the Soviet Union’s collapse.They lost, of course, to yet another dictator who is using an imperial war to eliminate his enemies and spread fear across Russia. Yet even now, even as the majority of Russians remain silent, even as they are cowed by propaganda or swayed by nationalist slogans, more than 17,000 Russians inside the country have protested against both the regime and their apathetic countrymen, have opposed Russian imperialism, and have been detained or imprisoned as a result. A few are well-known politicians who could have left long ago, among them Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin. The opposition politician Alexei Navalny was imprisoned in January 2021; he has been kept in isolation, but at a court hearing on September 21 nevertheless denounced the “criminal” war and accused Putin of wanting to “smear hundreds of thousands of people in this blood.” On September 30 he published an essay, smuggled out of his cell, that imagined a post-Putin Russia and called for the replacement of Russia’s current presidential system, which has now collapsed into full autocracy, with a parliamentary republic. Instead of posing as a new savior for the empire, he is calling for a different kind of Russia altogether.Outside the country, hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians are beginning to understand how closely the empire and the autocracy are linked. Some of the new exiles have given up on politics altogether, and many are just dodging the draft. But a large cohort oppose the war from abroad, through Russian-language websites that report on the war and try to get information to Russians in Russia. TV Rain, shut down by the government in March, is up and running again, online, based in Riga. Navalny’s team, the remnants of his large national organization, is making videos that have millions of viewers on YouTube, which can still be accessed in Russia.[From the June 2022 issue: Ukraine and the words that lead to mass murder]A panoply of groups and people wants to keep a different idea of Russia alive, to create an “alternative civil society” outside Russia, not unlike the early-20th-century version described by Zygar, who is now in exile himself. Garry Kasparov—the former world chess champion who turned to democratic politics, helped organize street demonstrations in Moscow in the 2000s, and is now persona non grata in the country where he was once a hero—recently told me that he hopes to build a kind of “virtual South Korea,” an opposition-in-exile that stands in contrast to a Russia that more and more resembles North Korea. One of Kasparov’s projects, the Free Russia Forum, regularly brings together the various, sometimes squabbling branches of the Russian community outside Russia.In at least one respect, all of these 21st-century exiles are unlike their 20th-century predecessors: They remain abroad, or in jail, because of a terrible war of imperial conquest. Many therefore oppose not just the regime, but the empire; for the first time, some argue that it is not just the regime that should change, but the definition of the nation. Kasparov is one of many who argue that only military defeat can bring political change. He now believes that democracy will be possible only “when Crimea is liberated and the Ukrainian flag is flying over Sevastopol.”That idea—that there could be a different Russia, a Russia that is a nation-state and not an empire—does not carry much weight in Ukraine right now. On the contrary, many Ukrainians consider the Russian democratic opposition just as culpable, just as imperialist, and just as responsible for the war as non-dissidents. Certainly it is true that not all of the people who have been called “Russian liberals” in the past were against the empire or opposed to Putin. Some are technocrats who argued for a Pinochet-style dictatorship, or socialites whose “liberalism” was conveyed through photographs of European vacation spots posted on Instagram. The Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk recently argued on Twitter that “even Russian ‘liberals’ repeatedly expressed imperialistic ideas re foreign policy and Ukraine. There is tolerance to war and aversion to democracy.” Many ask, Where are the mass protests of Russians in London or Tbilisi? Why aren’t the thousands of exiles, not just the few who write for websites, making their voices heard?[From the October 2022 issue: Anne Applebaum on a Belarusian volunteer regiment fighting for Ukraine]The argument that there are no “good Russians” does have a deep emotional logic, and a political logic too, and not only for Ukrainians. After all, Russian liberals have failed before. They failed in the 1900s, they failed in the 2000s, and they are failing now. They failed to stop Putin, failed to prevent this catastrophe from unfolding. Some of them failed, at least until recently, to understand how Russian imperialism has fed and nurtured Russian autocracy—to understand why, as the title of Zygar’s book proclaimed, the empire must die. You can hear the anger at this failure in the changed tone of the speeches of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. On the eve of the war, Zelensky addressed Russians, in Russian, calling on them to prevent what was about to happen: “Do Russians want the war?” he asked rhetorically. “The answer depends only on you, citizens of the Russian Federation.” But because they did not stop anything, Zelensky more recently joined others to advocate a ban on visas for Russians to Europe, on the grounds that Russians should “live in their own world until they change their philosophy.” After Putin announced his mobilization drive in September, Zelensky was even more explicit. Russians should not leave their country to escape the draft, but should “fight on your streets for your freedom,” he told them. The Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has also argued that the Russians who left Russia most recently are not fleeing war, just the draft: “If only these hundreds of thousands [of ] people who flee mobilization stood up against the war inside Russia, the war would be over. Cowards.”There isn’t really any way to oppose this logic. Of course Russians should have fought, and should fight. But it’s important to remember, again, that a few of them have, and a few of them always will. Maybe this group needs a new name—they are not “Russian liberals,” but “anti-empire Russians” or “pro-democracy Russians” or “pro-freedom Russians.” Some have come to this conclusion through careful analysis, some instinctively. In recent conversations, Russians have mentioned to me an aunt who was a Soviet dissident, or a close friend in Ukraine, to explain why they hope that their country experiences a decisive military defeat.These connections are the product of chance and accident. But chance and accident explain why Lena Nemirovskaya’s modest goal—to make Russia a little bit more civilized—was not entirely naive. Because there is nothing inevitable, nothing genetic, nothing predetermined about any nation or its government. Only dictators believe that there are laws of history that have to be obeyed. Democrats, by contrast, know that the state will eventually adjust to society, not vice versa—and society, by definition, is always changing.The cultural weight of the past is heavy, and the habits of autocracy—especially the habit of living in fear—persist. The attraction of power is also strong. The people who have it will not want to lose it, and the next government of Russia might well be even more repressive than the one that runs Russia now. But accidents happen; unexpected events occur. Countries evolve, sometimes creating better governments and sometimes worse ones. Empires fall: The Russian empire fell, the Soviet empire fell, and sooner or later Putin’s new Russian empire will fall, too. From his prison cell, Kara-Murza has pointed out that the more than 17,000 detained anti-war protesters far outnumber the seven people who were arrested in Moscow’s Red Square when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to stop that country from changing. Nemirovskaya, from her exile in Riga, recently told me that her efforts were not in vain. She still believes that the three post-Soviet decades left their mark: Whatever happens next, “we will never again live the way we did then.” Leonid Volkov, the leader of Navalny’s organization in exile, told me last year that he believes the most important thing he and his colleagues can do is simply be prepared for change, whenever it comes.I have argued before that there is no guarantee that American democracy can survive, that what happens to America tomorrow depends on the actions of Americans today. But the same is true of Russia. The country’s future will be shaped not by mystical laws of history but by how its leaders and citizens absorb and interpret the tragedy of this shocking, brutal, unnecessary war. The best way that outsiders can help Russia change is to ensure that Ukraine takes back Ukrainian territory and defeats the empire. We can also keep supporting those Russians, however small their number, who understand why defeat is the only path to modernity; why military failure is necessary for the creation of a more prosperous, open society; and why, once again, the empire must die. We don’t need to search for idealized “good Russians”—no savior will emerge to fix the country, not now and not ever. But Russians who believe the future can be different will keep trying to change their country, and someday they will succeed. In the meantime, no one should ever concede to Putin the right to define what it means to be Russian. He doesn’t have that power.This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “Putin Must Lose.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Decades of international collaborative research, much of it funded or conducted by governments including that of the United States, enabled the rapid development of highly effective COVID mRNA vaccines. The substantial public contribution to this scientific triumph has, however, not persuaded governments to treat the vaccines as global public goods—resulting in starkly inequitable distribution that should be remembered as an epic failure for humanity.

Vaccines have been available for almost two years, yet only 20 percent of people in low-income countries have had a first shot. And almost no people in low- and middle-income countries have access to the most effective mRNA vaccines, because their production and distribution are under the monopoly control of BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, companies to which governments have granted numerous patents and other intellectual property protections. The result has been a stark vaccine apartheid: shots and boosters of mRNA vaccines are easily available to people in wealthy nations while many people in the Global South continue to suffer the pandemic with no vaccines at all.

Governments are eager to be done with COVID, but continued outbreaks around the world—including in regions where populations of immune-suppressed people with HIV can harbor extended infections—mean a more deadly global variant could be just a few mutations away.

Access to vaccines remains crucial, but for a variety of reasons such as recent SARS-CoV2 variants’ ability to evade vaccines, attention has shifted to testing and treatment. Global policy makers need to radically change their approach to how they control the intellectual property regime not only for vaccines but also for COVID treatments and diagnostic tests. Otherwise, the moral and epidemiological failures that led to vaccine apartheid will occur again in treating and diagnosing COVID.

Consider that in clinical trials, Paxlovid reduced COVID mortality by 89 percent, and that the treatment is effective among high-risk groups, including people who are unvaccinated. A new report from the Veterans Administration health system found that treatment with Paxlovid was associated with reduced risk of long COVID regardless of vaccination status. In the United States, anyone who needs it can quickly get Paxlovid. President Biden, Anthony Fauci and many others have benefited from the drug. But if governments uphold intellectual property rules surrounding this and other antiviral treatments, hundreds of thousands of people will die unnecessarily, and multiples of that number will be severely affected by lengthy and damaging infections, hospitalization and lasting side effects. With Omicron variants that evade vaccine-induced immunity, even vaccinated people face repeated breakthrough infections.

Keeping infected people alive and out of hospitals is not only a moral imperative—it’s an economic one. Treatments and vaccines are critical for the livelihoods of billions of people in the developing world, where COVID has created increased income inequality. In these countries, people (and their families) who do not work, do not eat. It’s that simple. And there are global economic implications, of course. The spread of the new variants to China has worsened supply chain problems, exacerbating inflation around the world.

So what can be done to ensure global access to COVID treatments and tests? To start with, we cannot repeat the mistakes that fostered vaccine apartheid. To recap, a temporary waiver of the WTO’s Agreement on TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, a pact that requires governments to ensure holders of patents and other intellectual property grants have monopoly control over production of protected products) was vital for saving lives. Despite this request at the beginning of the pandemic by South Africa, India and 100 other WTO member nations, as well as support from a global coalition of religious leaders, nonprofits and public intellectuals, the European Union, U.K. and Switzerland blocked it.

And in the case of vaccines, compulsory licenses—a critical tool permitted by the WTO and intended to make sure that critical medicines are available in the midst of an epidemic—proved ineffective. (In contrast to a “voluntary license,” which is issued by a company, a compulsory license comes from a government. It means that a patent holder will be compensated by other firms that produce its patented medicine, but it cannot block more production by denying licensing in order to limit supply and keep prices high.) COVID vaccines, especially the cutting-edge mRNA vaccines, have too many intellectual-property barriers—dozens of patents, copyrights, industrial-design and trade-secret monopolies and too-complex international supply chains—to be made in a timely fashion using compulsory licenses. For instance, the lipids that are a key component are made in just a few locations and are locked behind a web of IP protections, as are other elements of these complex biologic drugs.

Had there been an IP waiver for vaccine production, there is considerable evidence that, in spite of these complexities, some producers around the world would have entered. (The opposition to the waiver, that it would be ineffective because no one could produce the drugs, is ironic: If that were the case, there would be no downside for the drug companies. Moreover, governments that provided so much money for the development of the vaccine, and holding key patents, could have pressured the companies to transfer critical technology.) Remarkably, in spite of the evidence of supply shortages and vaccine apartheid, a WTO ministerial declaration issued in June failed to waive any IP barriers.

Avoiding Treatment Apartheid

There is however the possibility that even without a full waiver, using compulsory licenses for effective treatments like Paxlovid and the many other antivirals now in the pipeline can avoid the kind of discrimination that marked vaccine availability. Paxlovid has many fewer IP barriers than vaccines do. It is also simpler to make, so technology transfer from Pfizer is not necessary. Hundreds of generic manufacturers worldwide could make it.

Since the TRIPS agreement already has a provision allowing compulsory licenses, what’s the problem? Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical companies never liked the idea of compulsory licenses, and so are doing everything they can to make them ineffective.

There are two problems. First, TRIPS did not adequately provide for compulsory licenses to be used to produce generic medicines that can be exported for use in other countries. So South Africa, Argentina, Chile and other countries that can produce do not have sufficient demand at home to gear up production just for domestic use while small countries like Botswana, Costa Rica or Jamaica are denied generic imports. And secondly, developing-country governments and drug companies have a long history of threatening governments that issue compulsory licenses.

The June WTO ministerial decision had one meaningful provision. Article 8 of the text makes it easier to export generic vaccines—but just vaccines—if only they could be produced using compulsory licenses. Extending that permission to export to treatments and tests could make a real difference in increasing access worldwide .

Just as happened when COVID vaccines emerged, wealthy countries pre-purchased the entire supply of Paxlovid. Under the current pharmaceutical IP regime, the same will likely occur with whatever effective COVID treatment surfaces next. Limited supplies and high costs restrict the flow of COVID-19 antivirals to low- and middle-income regions. In other words, there is great need for treatments in poor countries, but “demand” in the form of orders for Paxlovid has been crushed by a lack of supply and unaffordable pricing.

Consider the effect of Pfizer’s monopoly control over production of Paxlovid: Pfizer made a deal with the UN Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) to voluntarily license 35 firms in 12 countries to make generic Paxlovid that can be sold in 96 nations. But the company has barred sales of those generics in the other 100 countries of the world with 47 percent of the world’s population and the highest COVID infection rates where the firm may think profitable sales are possible.

In some instances, Pfizer has even barred sales in a country where it has issued a license. A Dominican Republic generics firm has a license, but cannot sell doses at home. Pfizer’s deal with all 35 licensees only allows sales in the poorest countries. In the Americas, that means only Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Most African, Middle Eastern and Asian nations that are not Least Developing Countries are likewise excluded. That’s why it’s critical for companies all over the world to be able to make the treatment using a compulsory license and then export it easily.

Disappointingly, the U.S. played a negative role in the June WTO meeting: Over the opposition of most other WTO nations, the U.S. insisted the June WTO COVID deal only cover vaccines. Countries seeking a full waiver successfully pushed for the June Declaration to include a six-month timeline to decide whether to extend the export permission to treatments and disagnostic tests. Today South Africa, Indonesia, Egypt and other countries are pushing for the extension. Only a few countries flacking for Big Pharma, like Switzerland, specifically oppose it.

Immediate U.S. support will be the deciding factor. Recently, a large coalition of U.S. health, faith, consumer, human rights and labor organizations called on President Biden to support broadening the WTO deal to treatments and tests and to publicly declare that no country using compulsory licenses to produce COVID medical supplies will face U.S. threats, political attacks, or trade sanctions. Ironically, the U.S. government issued the most COVID-related compulsory licenses. Yet historically, the U.S. government has systematically attacked countries around the world that employ this WTO-authorized mechanism to improve access to affordable medicine.

The Biden administration should also work with the partners of the dozens of U.S. free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties to suspend the terms of these pacts that empower corporations to skirt domestic courts and sue governments before a panel of three corporate lawyers—often rife with conflicts of interests and serving on an ad hoc tribunal—if they believe their property rights have been violated. Through this investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, the lawyers can award the corporations unlimited sums to be paid by the country’s taxpayers, including for the loss of expected future profits. A pharmaceutical corporation need only convince the lawyers that a compulsory license or related policy violates some purported investor right granted in one of these pacts. The lawyers’ decisions are not subject to appeal and the amount awarded has no limit. ISDS tribunals have ordered governments to pay corporations more than a billion dollars in compensation.

This is not a hypothetical threat. Today in the Americas, applications for Paxlovid compulsory licenses have been filed in the Dominican Republic, Chile, Colombia and Peru, which each have free trade agreements with the U.S. that have ISDS enforcement. Pfizer, which holds the monopoly patents on the treatment, is fighting to preserve its monopoly and pricing, including by saying compulsory licenses would violate these trade agreements.

As the world pivots from vaccines to testing and treatment, there is a moment of hope and of frustration. But the “apartheid” that marked the era of vaccines will be avoided if and only if the international community insists on a WTO deal to ease exports of compulsorily licensed medicines that goes beyond vaccines and if the U.S. and other countries suspend the ability of the drug companies to sue under these noxious ISDS provisions. Without U.S. support, it won’t happen. And the U.S. can lead the way in agreeing to a trade “ceasefire” of not threatening countries that issue compulsory licenses. The many countries and companies that will be able to produce treatments and tests must be able to sell them to the myriad of countries that can’t get adequate supplies or can’t afford Pfizer’s monopoly prices.

The lives and livelihood of millions depend on it. And so does the moral authority of the West. During the pandemic, global democracies put profits over lives, in contrast to authoritarian regimes, which showed greater solidarity to people in the Third World. We now have a chance to redeem ourselves.

“This book started on Twitter,” Ruttenberg writes, which is something of a tip-off. “Twitter gamifies communication,” the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has argued; it’s custom-built to do things like score apologies, to drag users into a rating system that has nothing to do with morality. An unforgiving god rules Twitter, where the modern economy of apology runs something like this: If you express what I believe to be a toxic or ignorant opinion, you must apologize according to my rules for apology. If you do, I may forgive you. If you don’t, I will punish you, and damn you unto eternity.

The practice of establishing and enforcing strict requirements for public apology is not a human universal. It happens only here and there, and now and again. You see it in fiercely sectarian times and places—like twenty-first-century social media, or seventeenth-century New England.

Consider a case from October, 1665, when the Massachusetts legislature assembled in Boston to attend to a docket of ordinary affairs, a day in the life of a puritanical theocracy. It set the price of grain: wheat, five shillings a bushel; barley, four shillings sixpence; corn, three shillings. It addressed a petition filed by three Native men, including the Pennacook sachem Wanalancet, regarding an Englishman’s claim to an island on the Merrimack River. It warned one unhappy, estranged couple, Mr. and Mrs. William Tilley, that he must “provide for hir as his wife, & that shee submit hirselfe to him as she ought,” or else he would be fined and she would be imprisoned. In honor of God’s having graced the colony with abundant rain during the summer and mercifully diverted a fleet of Dutch ships from an invasion, the legislature appointed November 8th “to be kept in solemn thanksgiving,” but, because a plague was still raging in London, a sign of God’s wrath, it declared November 22nd “a solem day of humilliation.” And it condemned five men who had dared to practice a heretical religion, Baptism, at which announcement one colonist, Zeckaryah Roads, blurted out “that the Court had not to doe wth matters of religion.” He was detained as a result.

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For the things they said—words whispered, grumbles muttered, prayers offered, curses shouted—dissenters, blasphemers, and nonconformists in seventeenth-century New England faced censure, arrest, flogging, the pillory, disenfranchisement, exile, and even execution. Quakers might have their ears cut off. For holding toxic opinions, one blasphemer was sentenced to have the letter B “cutt out of ridd cloth & sowed to her vper garment on her right arme.” Those who wished to avoid or mitigate these consequences might apologize in public. Mostly, apologies followed a script. The Six Steps to a Good Apology! Disappointing People Is My Central Trauma: How to Avoid the Eight Worst Apologies of 1665! Earlier that year, just months before Zeckaryah Roads dared to voice dissent, Major William Hathorne, of Salem—an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s—issued a public apology for his own (now lost to history) error: “I freely confesse, that I spake many words rashly, foolishly, & unadvisedly, of wch I am ashamed, & repent me of them, & desire all that tooke offence to forgive me.” That did the trick. You went off script at your peril, as the historian Jane Kamensky demonstrated in her masterly book “Governing the Tongue” (1997). In the sixteen-forties, observers deemed Ann Hibbins’s apology—essentially, for being abrasive, and a woman—“very Leane, & thin, & poore, & sparinge.” It saved her neck, but not for long: in 1656, Hibbins was hanged to death as a witch. Still, there was one other option: after John Farnham refused to apologize for countenancing heresy, and was therefore banished, he said the day he was kicked out of the church “was the best day that ever dawned upon him.” I mean, fuck it, there was always Rhode Island.

Lately, online, you can find modern apologies ranked by the same standards once so punctiliously applied by Puritan divines. “I doe now in the presence of god & this reverand assemblage freely acknowledg my evell,” Henry Sewall confessed in a church near Ipswich in 1651, although, as he pointed out, he’d been forced to make that apology “as part of ye sentence” he’d been given by the Ipswich court. He squeaked by with that one, but just barely. Modern SorryWatchers might rate it Garrison Keillorian.

In 1665, for intimating that the government ought not to banish people for being Baptists, or kill them for being Quakers, Zeckaryah Roads did what he had to do, as chronicled in the meeting records, “acknowledging his fault, & declaring he was sorry he had given them any offence, &c.” Easy to say from here, of course, but I wish to hell he hadn’t.

The twenty-first-century culture of public apology has its origins in the best of intentions and the noblest of actions: people seeking collective justice without violence for terrible, unimaginable acts of brutality, monstrous wickedness, crimes against humanity itself. In the aftermath of the Second World War, churches and nation-states began issuing apologies for wartime atrocities and historical injustices. Some of the abiding principles that lie behind this postwar wave of collective apologies also found expression in “restorative justice”—individuals making amends to their victims, sometimes as an alternative to incarceration or other kinds of force and violence. The idea gained influence in the nineteen-seventies, when it intersected with the victims-rights movement, and its particular demands for apology as remedy. And you can easily see why. Prosecutors—for years, decades, centuries—had failed to act on allegations of sexual misconduct, had ignored or suppressed evidence of police brutality and predatory policing; in a thousand ways, the criminal-justice system had failed women and children, had failed the poor and people of color. For some, “restorative justice” held out the prospect of a better path. By the nineteen-nineties, schools and juvenile-justice systems had begun using restorative-justice methods, often requiring, of public-school students, public apologies. Meanwhile, in the United States, church membership was falling from around seventy-five per cent in 1945 to less than fifty per cent by 2020. In many quarters, public acts began taking the place of religious ritual, political ideologies replacing religious faith. The national public apology took on the gravity and solemnity of a secular sacrament: Ronald Reagan apologizing, in 1988, for the imprisonment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans during the Second World War (and providing limited reparations); David Cameron apologizing, in 2010, for Bloody Sunday; or the Prime Ministers of Canada apologizing, in 2008 and 2017, for the practice of taking Indigenous children from their homes and confining them to schools where, maltreated, neglected, and abused, they suffered and died.

Apology came to play a role, too, in therapy, including family therapy, in twelve-step recovery programs, and in H.R. dispute-resolution procedures. Conventions that were established for heads of states and churches making public apologies to entire peoples against whom they had committed atrocities came to be applied to apologies from one individual to another, for everything from violent crime to petty insult. The person became the collective. Eve Ensler’s 2019 book, “The Apology,” in which she imagines the apology her father never offered for sexually abusing her, is dedicated to “every woman still waiting for an apology.” The particular injury became the universal harm. “We all cause harm,” Danya Ruttenberg writes in her book on repentance. “We have all been harmed.”

But the origins of the Twitter apology orgy lie elsewhere, too, and especially in the idea that many kinds of speech can be harm, a conviction central to the brand of feminism founded in the nineteen-nineties by the legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon. (Her book “Only Words” was published in 1993.) In 2004, in “On Apology,” Aaron Lazare tried to figure out when the number of public apologies began to explode. He counted and identified a rise in the number of newspaper articles about apologizing, beginning his analysis in the early nineteen-nineties and identifying a peak in 1997-98. He found this puzzling. But, historically, it makes sense: his chronology nicely lines up with Anita Hill’s testimony at the Clarence Thomas hearings, in 1991, and with the breaking of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in 1998. Thomas maintained his innocence, and although Clinton went on television later that year and admitted to the relationship, many viewers found his apology inadequate. And neither man seemed sorry, either, except insofar as they both quite plainly felt very, very sorry for themselves.

The refusal of Thomas and Clinton to apologize for the ways in which they had harmed women took place on television. And the whole spectacle, with its scripted expectation of apology and contrition, drew its sensibility from television. In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the stock soap-opera plotline—betrayal, hurt feelings, and misunderstanding followed by tearful apology, reconciliation, and reunion—became a hallmark of the daytime talk-show circuit. Oprah and Phil Donahue staged churchy apologies in front of studio audiences, choreographed for maximum emotional intensity, and advancing the idea that every possible political, economic, or social injustice, from child abuse to police brutality and employment discrimination, could be addressed by a two-shot, a few closeups, and Kleenex. Donahue mounted an especially perverse sorrywatching spectacle in 1993. The year before, after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles policemen who beat Rodney King and riots broke out in angry, anguished protest, a group of Black men pulled Reginald O. Denny, a white man, out of his truck and beat him nearly to death. Henry Keith Watson, charged with attempted murder, was found not guilty, and was convicted only of misdemeanor assault. After Watson got out of jail, Donahue brought Denny and Watson together in front of an almost entirely white audience for a two-part apology special. “Are you sorry?” Donahue asked Watson, again and again, as the audience grew tense and even tenser. “I apologize for my participation in the injuries you suffered,” Watson said to Denny. Then Watson eyed the audience: “Is everybody happy now?” Everybody was not.

Demanding public apologies on daytime television and deeming those apologies insufficient was an occasional thumb-wrestling match between two seven-year-olds sitting on a green vinyl school-bus seat on the ride to second grade compared with the daily, Roman Colosseum-style slaughtering that takes place online. It’s not that people don’t do and say terrible things for which they ought to atone. They do. Some of those things are crimes. Many are slights. Very many are utterly trivial. A few are almost unspeakably evil. But, on Twitter at its worst, all harm is equal, all apologies are spectacles, and hardly anyone is ever forgiven.

In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Matt Damon tried to rate harm. “You know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” he said in an interview on ABC News. “They shouldn’t be conflated, right?” At that, Minnie Driver tweeted her ire, and later told the Guardian, “How about: it’s all fucking wrong and it’s all bad, and until you start seeing it under one umbrella it’s not your job to compartmentalise or judge what is worse and what is not.” Damon apologized, and said that he’d learned to “close my mouth.”

In 1993, Phil Donahue seemed to think that, by asking Henry Keith Watson to apologize to Reginald Denny in that studio, he was bravely addressing the problem of racism in America. Twenty years from now, what’s been happening on Twitter will likely look exactly as grotesque and cruel and ineffective as that two-part, syndicated apology special. Will Donald Trump or anyone in his inner circle ever apologize for anything—for tearing toddlers from their parents’ arms, for inciting neo-Nazis, for grift, fraud, sedition? Never. Will responding to the gaffe of the day by demanding a six-step apology usher in an age of justice for all, or an end to iniquity? No. There’s a reason Puritanism did not prevail in America; it tends to backfire. In 2018, during an exchange on Twitter, the television writer Dan Harmon apologized for sexually harassing the writer Megan Ganz, and then made a heartfelt video, elaborating. “We’re living in a good time right now, because we’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he said, referring to sexual misconduct. And I hope that’s true. But very little evidence suggests that calling people out on Twitter, self-righteous indignation followed by cynical apology, is making the world a better place, and much suggests that the opposite is true, that Twitter’s pious mercilessness is generating nothing so much as a new and bitter remorselessness.

“I don’t give a fuck, ’cause Twitter’s not a real place,” Dave Chappelle said last fall, in his Netflix special “The Closer.” In June, on the Amazon Prime series “The Boys,” a made-for-television Captain America-style superhero named Homelander, who is secretly a villain, recited a rehearsed apology on television, only to unsay it later, in an unscripted outburst. “I’m not some weak-kneed fucking crybaby that goes around fucking apologizing all the time,” he said, seething. “I’m done. I am done apologizing.” Around the time the episode appeared, the actor who plays Homelander, Antony Starr, who was found guilty of assault and released on probation, told the Times, unabjectly, “You mess up. You own it. You learn from it.” No “I am listening,” no “I am going to rehab.” None of it. It was as if he got away with going off-script because his character already had. And Homelander won’t be the last to make that “I’m done” speech. “I’m done saying I’m sorry,” Alex Jones yelled in a courtroom in September during a trial to assess the money he’ll be required to pay the parents of very young children who were killed in a mass shooting, a shooting that Jones has for years insisted never happened, because those children, he told his audience, never existed. Jones has been found liable for defamation. Even the hundreds of millions of dollars in damages he was ordered to pay to the families whose despair he worsened, and on whose affliction he feasted, goes nowhere near far enough. And neither does any apology.

Twitter is blowing its top, some very angry people very loudly demanding apologies while other very angry people demand the denunciation of the people who are demanding apologies. Dangerously, but predictably, the split seems to have become partisan, as if to apologize were progressive, to forget conservative. The fracture widens and hardens—fanatic, schismatic, idiotic. But another way of thinking about what a culture of forced, performed remorse has wrought is not, or not only, that it has elevated wrath and loathing but that it has demeaned sorrow, grief, and consolation. No apology can cover that crime, nor mend that loss. ♦

Friends,

Democrats will retain control of the Senate, and maybe even the House.

There was no red wave. But there was no blue wave, either.

Americans chose not to make any more waves.

This was not a change election. It was a stability election.

As the dust now settles, it appears there was only one clear loser last week: Trumpism.

Even though President Joe Biden's approval rating on Tuesday averaged 41 percent, and72 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction, at least for now Americans have chosen steadiness over tumult.

The past few years have been too hair-raising: Four wild years of Trump, two horrible years of pandemic, a deep recession followed by steep inflation, climate catastrophes, a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, a rogue Supreme Court untethered from precedent and eager to take away reproductive rights assumed sacrosanct for almost fifty years, a war in Ukraine where the Russian president speaks of using nuclear weapons.

Americans want to keep politics pretty much as is because everything else is so unpredictable.

This is bad news for Trump and Trumpism--the quasi-religious personal cult of authoritarianism, political violence, and QAnon conspiracy theories that Trump has fostered, whose fundamental goal is to upend American politics with Trump at its head.

There will be no upending.

In fact, as the dust now settles, it appears there was only one clear loser last week: Trumpism.

As a result, the next two years leading up to the 2024 election are less likely to pose a terrifying threat to American democracy. (They may still be terrifying, though.)

Notably, not a single election-denying candidate at the state level for secretary of state--the people who would have overseen the 2024 elections--was elected.

In Pennsylvania, an election denier who would have had the power to appoint the secretary of state lost his bid for governor. In Wisconsin, an election denier's loss in the governor's race blocked a move to put election administration under partisan control.

Nor were two of the most notable Trump-endorsed election-denying senate candidates elected, Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Blake Masters in Arizona.

Trump himself did not help the Republican cause. His conspicuous stream of invective, bigotry, and election denialism reminded many voters of what the Republican Party threatened if it regained power.

Given all this, Trump's expected announcement on Tuesday that he's once again running for the presidency is hardly good news for the Republican Party--although, presumably, Trump couldn't care less.

The next two years won't be as dangerous as they might have been had Trump's picks been elected, but they will still be filled with his divisive belligerence.

At least some political stability will prevail.

Biden will continue to fill the federal courts with judges likely to protect the Democrats' major legislative accomplishments (including previous achievements such as the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Social Security), as well as voting rights and reproductive rights (as far as the Supreme Court leaves them room).

If any of the current Supreme Court justices dies, Biden will have a clear shot at filling the vacancy with someone more amenable to Democratic (and democratic) values.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans won't be able to do what House Republicans are almost certain to do if they gain a majority--launch a series of hearings and investigations to embarrass Biden and his administration over everything from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to Hunter Biden's laptop.

Thanks to Americans' preference for stability over tumult, Georgia's December 6 runoff between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will no longer determine control of the Senate--and therefore no longer invite a media circus and cesspool of campaign money.

If Warnock prevails, the real loser will be West Virginia'sJoe Manchin--who will lose effective control over the Democrats' senate agenda because Democrats will gain a 51-49 majority that shifts the balance of power to Manchin's left.

The other change if Warnock wins is that Senate committees will no longer be evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats will gain majorities on them, with the result that Biden's nominees and Democrats' bills won't be deadlocked in committee, requiring time-consuming floor votes to resolve.

But if Republicans prevail in the House, even by one or two votes, Democrats' senate bills won't go anywhere, anyway.

Perhaps that's what Americans have opted for. After years of tempest and tumult, it may be that most of us want nothing more dramatic than a competent government that acts reasonably and carefully--and doesn't make any waves.

Liberals reacted to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 with dismay, horror—and curiosity. Reporters ventured to Trump counties to ask questions. Political scientists studied the voting effect of international trade. Hollywood made a movie out of J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.Liberals didn’t like what had happened—but for exactly that reason, they wanted to understand it. They strove for understanding until it became a kind of inside joke: the journalist on Trump safari in Pennsylvania diners. But the joke made its own kind of sense. Survival depends upon adaptation. Adaptation depends upon learning.The question after the 2022 midterms is: Can conservatives learn?Through the Trump years, the Republican Party has organized itself as an anti-learning entity. Unwelcome information has been ignored or denied.Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and by a worse margin than Mitt Romney had in 2012? Not interested: It was a historic landslide victory.[David Frum: Biden laid the trap. Trump walked into it.]Trump never rose above 50 percent approval (in any credible poll) on any single day of his presidency? Not interested: All that matters is what his base thinks.Republicans were crushed in 2018 in the highest midterm turnout of eligible voters since before the First World War? Not interested: The result showed only that voters wanted more Trump and more Trumpiness.Trump got swamped by a margin of 8 million votes in 2020? Joe Biden won the second-highest share of the popular vote than any presidential candidate since 1988, next only to Barack Obama’s blowout win in 2008? No need to pay attention: After all, Rudy Giuliani and Dinesh D’Souza said the election was stolen! Besides, check out those Latino votes for Trump. Democrats won two Senate seats in formerly bright-red Georgia after winning the state’s electoral votes in the presidential contest? Only a temporary setback; wait ’til next time. By then, Trump will have helped get elected a bunch of “America First” secretaries of state who will rewrite the rules so that a Democrat can never win again.“Next time” is now. In every way you can measure, 2022 was a crushing repudiation—not only of Trump personally or of Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was corrupted, but of the larger Republican Party. For the first time since 1934, the party of the president lost not a single state legislature in a midterm year—and actually made gains in the Midwest: Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Every last one of the candidates running for offices to control elections who endorsed Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election went down in defeat, as did up-ballot election deniers such as Blake Masters in the Arizona Senate contest and Lee Zeldin, who ran for governor in an otherwise good Republican year in New York.[Read: Trumpism is toxic]A Democrat won a Trump district in Washington State from a MAGA Republican who, having primaried the moderate Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler out of the seat she won in 2020 by 13 points, drove away GOP voters by blaming the January 6 attack on the FBI and defending the attackers as “political prisoners.” Supporters of abortion rights won all six contests where the issue was on the ballot: Kansas in August, then California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Vermont in November.So you’d think the time would be right for Fox News to organize some safaris of its own. Maybe the podcast hosts and newsletter writers who argued that “woke” politics was alienating former Democrats will ask why Republican authoritarianism and reactionary culture warring has even more offensively alienated their former voters.Perhaps that soul-searching will happen—it’s early days. But if it does, it will be a break from past practice.In their anti-learning culture, conservatives have come to view everything that happens, however unwelcome, as proof simply that the most extreme people were the most correct. In the state of Florida, Republicans are proceeding postelection with more of the draconian anti-abortion laws that cost their colleagues so dearly across the country. Conservative pundits are gamely insisting that they did not really lose the 2022 elections but were once again cheated by a rigged system.Should conservatives start noticing that they lag among unmarried women and the young? No, instead: Ridicule and insult unmarried women, especially the young. Having hooted and jeered Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush, and pushed Liz Cheney and other principled Republicans out of Congress, the right now expresses bafflement and outrage that those rejected leaders did not rally to help candidates who condoned the January 6 insurrection and opposed aid to Ukraine.[Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave]The historian Bernard Lewis once offered sage advice to any group that faces adverse circumstances: “The question, ‘Who did this to us?’ has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question—‘What did we do wrong?’—has led naturally to a second question, ‘How do we put it right?’ In that question … lie[s] the best hope for the future.”For the party of the president to do well in a midterm election is very rare: 2002, 1998, 1962, and 1934 are the exceptions over the past century or so. In all four of those exceptional years, the president’s party was buoyed by some affirmative factor: a rally around the flag after 9/11, the economic boom of the late 1990s, relief after the Cuban missile crisis, the beginnings of recovery from the Great Depression.This year was one in which all the indicators seemed negative for the party of the president: right-track/wrong-track numbers, presidential approval ratings, and optimism about the future. Yet Biden’s party won and won and won again despite the negative indicators. Yes, for sure there were affirmative reasons to vote Democratic in 2022, but it’s hard to miss the strong smell here of a thorough repudiation, up and down the ballot, of the post-Trump Republican Party, of the January 6 insurrectionists, and of a cultural agenda that seems to many Americans regressive and repressive.Amid the initial shock of these 2022 defeats, Senator Josh Hawley tweeted, “The old party is dead. Time to bury it. Build something new.” He was right—but in exactly the opposite sense he intended. The Republican Party needs less of everything that authoritarian and reactionary Republicans such as Hawley champion, and more of the democracy and modernity that those Republicans have resisted.The American electorate has been administering that lesson over and over. Republicans need at long last to open their ears to hear it, their mind to absorb it, and their heart to accept it.

The Hardangerfjord, the second-largest fjord in Norway, carves its way from the North Sea into the distant mountains of Vestland. About halfway up the fjord, where the light on the shore is dark, and the dark of the water is silvered by light, lies the village of Strandebarm. It is home to the Fosse Foundation, an organization dedicated to Jon Fosse—novelist, essayist, and one of the most produced contemporary playwrights in Europe—who was born there, in 1959. The members of the foundation meet in a small gray prayerhouse overlooking the curve of the harbor; a waterfall runs down the black rock face behind it. Down the road from the foundation are two white houses: the house that Fosse grew up in, where his mother still lives, and the house that belonged to his grandparents.

This August, the Fosse Foundation hosted a lunch for the translators, publishers, and journalists who had gathered to attend the Jon Fosse International Symposium. On the top floor, a fiddler played a waltz on the Hardanger fiddle, which is strung with four top strings and, underneath them, four sympathetic strings, which vibrate according to the notes played on top. On the bottom floor, visitors could walk through an exhibit by the textile artist Åse Ljones, who had stitched sentences from Fosse’s writings into sheets, handkerchiefs, and nightgowns. A member of the Fosse Foundation held up one of Ljones’s sheets and asked any one of Fosse’s six translators to translate it. Words were hazarded, corrections grumbled under the breath. There was a sense of competition, of covetousness in the air.

The word that comes to mind to describe all this—the light, the music, the sacred waters, the sacred garments—is “pilgrimage.” One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence. “I am just a strange guy from the western part of Norway, from the rural part of Norway,” Fosse told me. He grew up a mixture of a communist and an anarchist, a “hippie” who loved playing the fiddle and reading in the countryside. He enrolled at the University of Bergen, where he studied comparative literature and started writing in Nynorsk, the written standard specific to the rural regions of the west. His first novel, “Red, Black,” was published in 1983, followed throughout the next three decades by “Melancholy I” and “Melancholy II,” “Morning and Evening,” “Aliss at the Fire,” and “Trilogy.” After a wildly successful and hectic period during which he worked almost exclusively as a playwright, Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2012, quit drinking, and remarried. He then started writing “Septology,” a seven-volume novel written in a single sentence and exemplifying what he has described as his turn to “slow prose.” (The book was translated, by Damion Searls, for Fitzcarraldo Editions, in the U.K.; a U.S. edition is out this month, from Transit Books.) The narrator of “Septology” is a painter named Asle, a convert to Catholicism, grieving the death of his wife, Ales. The night before Christmas Eve, Asle finds his friend, also a painter named Asle, unconscious in an alley in Bergen, dying of alcohol poisoning. Their memories double, repeat, and gradually blur into a single voice, a diffuse consciousness capable of existing in many times and places at once.

To read Fosse’s plays and novels is to enter into communion with a writer whose presence one feels all the more intensely owing to his air of reserve, his withdrawal. His plays, whose characters usually have generic names—the Man, the Woman, Mother, Child—seize upon the intensity of our primordial relations and are by turns bleak and comic. “Septology” is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: “It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.” None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? “He is the most destructive writer I know,” Fosse claims. “I feel that there’s a kind of—I don’t know if it’s a good English word—but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.”

Fosse had not come on the outing to the Hardangerfjord, but he had attended the dinner hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture the night before, in Bergen, where the Norwegian Foreign Minister had quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” We chatted over dinner, then met again at the House of Literature, in the Fosse Room, where a black-and-white mural of Fosse’s face benevolently looked down at us. More than the mural, Fosse resembled his description of Asle: long gray ponytail, black overcoat, black shoes, snuffbox in his pocket. He seemed at times pained by the need to speak, yet entirely self-assured in what he said. Often, during our conversation, I felt the same competing impulses to which his writing gives rise: both curiosity and protectiveness toward the man behind the words; both skepticism and faith in his mystical descriptions of how he writes fiction. He struck me, above all, as a profoundly kind person, as expressed by his willingness to speak about everything: grace, love, jealousy, and peace, his near-death experiences, and his love of translating. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

You do not grant many face-to-face interviews.

I prefer to do interviews by e-mail. I feel that it’s often easier to write, even in English, than to speak.

I have interviewed several writers who claim that the reason they write is because they cannot speak.

Yes, it’s a bit like that for me. The man from the foreign department quoted Wittgenstein: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. You know this famous twist by Jacques Derrida: “What you cannot say, you have to write.” That’s closer to the way I think about it.

Derrida is extremely present in your early essays in “An Angel Walks Through the Stage.” One can sense his patterns of thought in many of your plays and novels, particularly around the play of speech and silence.

I started studying Derrida back in 1979. At least here in Norway, the university, or the spirit of the university, was very influenced by Marxism. We had an extreme Maoist party that was very strong among academics and writers and folks like that. It was the spirit of the time, even for me. I started studying sociology. And I felt like it was completely stupid. This way of thinking, this positivistic way of calculating things—it was nothing at all. So I jumped over to philosophy. And there was a big change in those years from Marx to the French post-structuralists. I remember reading Derrida for the first time, in the Norwegian countryside somewhere. It was a Danish translation of “Of Grammatology.”

“Of Grammatology” somehow had an influence on me. You have read Martin Heidegger’s “Sein und Zeit.” I studied and read Heidegger very much. It was difficult, but also very inspiring. I felt that what Derrida was doing was turning Heidegger on his head. The main question for Heidegger was: what is common to everything that exists? The main question for Derrida was the opposite: what makes all that exists different? And I thought that the act of writing is something very peculiar. It’s not like talking. It’s something different, very different. And that also gave me a kind of connection, of course, to Derrida and his concept of writing.

And then I started studying comparative literature. By then, I had already written my first novel and various literary things. The theory of the novel was my main subject. These theories always had the narrator as the basic concept: narrator, person, character, the relation between their points of view. And they are important enough, but still I felt that the basic concept for a theory of fiction ought not to be the narrator, which derives from the oral tradition. It ought to be the writer. The way I thought of the writer was as the bodily part of what was written, the materiality that went into your writing. And I wanted to write my own small theory of narration or of written fiction with the writer as the main concept.

WASHINGTON — A day after clinching a narrow hold on the Senate, Democrats began laying plans on Sunday to use their majority as a bulwark for President Biden in Congress should Republicans wrest control of the House, including by confirming his nominees, killing G.O.P. legislation on arrival and promoting their own policies to voters.

Defying political gravity and historical midterm trends that have heavily favored the party not in power, Democrats secured a bare-minimum majority in the Senate on Saturday night with the re-election of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. While their margin of control in the chamber will remain razor thin — and far short of the supermajority needed to pass major legislation — it constitutes a lifeline for Mr. Biden, limiting Republicans’ opportunity to wreak havoc on his agenda or to impeach and remove him or other members of his administration.

If Democrats manage to retain the House — a possibility, albeit a remote one given where uncalled races are currently leaning — it would be a true game changer for Mr. Biden, potentially allowing him to push through even more of his agenda in the second half of his term. But even without that, the Senate gives him a critical foothold.

Democrats will retain the power to unilaterally confirm scores of additional Biden-appointed judges. They will also keep control of the Senate floor, allowing them to ensure that, should Republicans win the House majority, any legislation that could frustrate Mr. Biden’s agenda or make life politically difficult for him and other Democrats never sees the light of day in the other chamber.

Clearly a cash-free economy has its beneficiaries, foremost banks and credit card companies: Visa and Mastercard reap $138 billion from participating merchants in service fees a year. According to a recent report in The Economist, Visa and Mastercard are two of the most profitable companies in the world, with net margins of 51 percent and 46 percent last year.

It’s also easy to pick up the rich scent of Silicon Valley. In the rose-metallic vision of libertarians like Peter Thiel — who of course, co-founded PayPal — operating in a cash-free world is easier and more convenient than handling grubby lucre. Amazon has also been a notable opponent to cashless bans in states like New Jersey; in the company’s original vision for its Go stores, paper money was not an option.

Many people believe cashless is the wave of the future, citing Sweden as an example. Countries such as India and South Korea have also made a strong push toward a cash-free future. According to an analysis of sales data by the payment platform Square, the share of cashless businesses nearly doubled in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada between February 2020 and February 2021; in the United States, cash payments dropped more than 8 percentage points in that period. And while the United States is far from the vanguard on going cash-free, here consumers use either credit or debit cards for 57 percent of transactions. As of 2022, 41 percent of Americans say they go cashless in a typical week, up from 24 percent in 2015.

So who’s paying for all this? While cash-free means profits for credit card industries and efficiencies for merchants in terms of training workers and managing their time, it isn’t cost-free for everyone. One recent study found that merchants increase their prices by approximately 1.4 percent to offset the interchange fees they pay to credit card companies; for those earning miles, that may not matter — but those who pay cash pay the price. Moreover, many cashless venues use tablet payment systems that automatically ask consumers to tip for a retail service that was long standard. If you’re like me, that screen may leave you flummoxed: Are the workers being paid less than minimum wage because these are now tipped jobs? Will this barista think I’m a jerk for not tacking on 20 percent or 30 percent for a muffin?

Consumers also pay in terms of privacy. Do you want your payment app or credit card company to share exactly how many beers or Big Macs you’ve bought in the past week with its data partners, or to know every item you picked up at the pharmacy? And while a cash system is subject to crime, like employee theft and robbery, digital payments aren’t without their own risks, including double charges and identity theft.

A difficult labor—30 hours!—and someone has to make the terrible decision. Right there in a Buckingham Palace bedroom, with mother and child etherized upon the table, deft hands make the cut, the unwilling baby is tugged out—and it’s done.A boy! Clever girl.To sleep, to sleep, to sleep.Posted on the gates of the palace, a handwritten announcement:Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth Duchess of Edinburgh was safely delivered of a Prince at 9.14 o’clock this evening. Her Royal Highness and the infant Prince are both well.They are both children of empire, princess and prince, though as they lie there recovering, that empire is receding, the long, melancholy withdrawing roar audible even above the cheers of the crowds outside the palace.They have been chosen for the same fate, but only one at a time can live it out. This will at once draw them together and complicate what will be a strange and mutually disappointing relationship. In just three years, Elizabeth will become the 25-year-old Queen of the United Kingdom, but Charles won’t be King until he’s 73. What must it be like to watch yourself fade into a middle-aged man and then an old one, but still your life’s work has not begun? He is only hours old, and at the very start of the world’s longest apprenticeship.When he finally became King in September, not even a week passed before the tabloids were talking about his poor hands looking as red as lobster claws, perhaps because never before had so many people wanted to shake them. Things were not going perfectly! But they were going well. There was the hand-shaking—undertaken, however painfully, with his mother’s famous commitment to duty—and there was the first speech to his people, with him sitting in Buckingham Palace doling out sinecures to all the good little kittens (Queen Consort for Camilla; Princess of Wales for well-behaved Kate; sweet fuck all for Meghan, who had dragged Harry off to the non-realm of California). Had he struck the right note when he referred to the late Queen as “my darling mama” rather than “my mother”? Everything he’d waited so long to do was happening so quickly.But it was during a hop to Northern Ireland that the wheels came off the carriage, and Charles lost his cool. While signing the visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle, he wrote down the wrong date, was quietly informed by Camilla that the pen was leaking, and seethed: “I can’t bear this bloody thing! … Every stinking time!”There was something a little Fawlty Towers about the scene, and it gestured toward the fact that the English monarchy seemed to be downsizing. Charles’s mother had survived the Battle of Britain; he couldn’t survive a guest book.But we’re ahead of ourselves! It’s Elizabeth who’s got to get out of that birthing bed and take the first shaky steps down the long corridors. The health of her father, George VI, is failing. Already, she has been performing some of his duties. Once she takes the throne, she’ll head off on many, many royal tours—some months long—leaving Charles, who will spend his childhood pining for her, behind.During the first half of her reign, Elizabeth will preside—in her wholly symbolic, yet powerful way—over the final dismantling of the empire. She will be the last face of a centuries-long fiction of ownership, in which human beings, gold, precious gems, rubber—anything that could be chained up, prized from the Earth, grabbed from villages and palaces, or literally cut out of rock—was transformed into property of the British empire or its NGO, the unfathomably brutal East India Company.Everything you saw at the Queen’s funeral—the sheer size of the regiments, their ornamental uniforms, the perfection of their marching, all of it so unbelievably out of step with modern, cash-strapped Britain—was a proud reminder of the days when Britain was the most powerful nation in the world, a place that could be hyped up in pubs and snooker halls the way football teams are now:Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! Britons never, never, never will be slaves.Consider the Queen’s—now the King’s—scepter, which figured so prominently in the service. What is that massive, glittering, unreal-seeming jewel at the top? The Great Star of Africa, one of many diamonds relocated from South Africa to the Crown’s vast holdings.You would assume that Elizabeth would be despised in Britain’s former colonies—she was, after all, the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the first empress of India. But Elizabeth was admired by millions of people in many of those former colonies, from the earliest years of her reign to the hour of her death. Even now, when we view so much of world history through the lens of colonization and its devastations, the Queen is mourned.[Read: What the Queen’s funeral taught me about Britain]Queen Elizabeth II was formal, interested, uncomplaining, and always respectful. Her warehouse’s worth of matching coats and whimsical hats were an aspect of that respect. It didn’t matter if she had arrived for a tour of your rat-extermination business in Manchester; she was dressed as if attending a new exhibit at the National Gallery. She seemed to understand that her fate and that of the rat exterminators were deeply bound together—which they were. She didn’t really serve at the pleasure of God and the House of Windsor; she served at the pleasure of the exterminators and the takeaway-shop owners and the Daily Mail.Once the sun had set on the British empire, the Queen began her more complicated mission, which was forming a coherent narrative of “England” and “Englishness” in the face of the great disrupter: 25 years of massive immigration. In 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair began relaxing immigration laws in hopes of creating an England imbued with the best traditions of a range of cultures, an England that was no longer fortified against the world but wide open to it, an oasis of people eating fusion cuisine and voting Labour.In a way it’s sort of worked, as any episode of The Great British Bake Off attests. To watch contestants from every racial, ethnic, and religious background tell the hosts the secret ingredient in “me gran’s sponge” from inside a giant white tent pitched on the green lawns of a country house in Berkshire is to see “England” smacked down to a set of consumer preferences: Emma Bridgewater, strings of fluttering Union Jacks, cake.But the old lessons of empire were not lost on the newcomers, a few of whom brought to England the same thing that England had once brought them: contemptuous disregard of the religion, customs, habits, traditions, and shared beliefs of the native population. And that’s how you get Sharia councils in modern England.It fell to Elizabeth—older daughter of a man who never wanted or expected to be King, a woman with many interests of her own that she would much rather have pursued—to try to maintain the fantasy of a continuous England that could absorb within it wildly different cultures. What she relied upon was the West. The Englishmen who caused so much devastation around the world did not bring any miracles with them; they brought only bloodshed and cruelty and plunder, the same forces that had ruled the world since the beginning. But by the time of Elizabeth’s reign, England understood itself as a Western nation, identifiable by its commitment to individual rights, equality, and self-determination. These values created the free world, and to the very limited extent that a Queen can stand for them—the Queen of a country with such a terrible imperial history—she was determined to do so.Elizabeth never “celebrated” multiculturalism in the smarmy, meaningless way of college presidents or HR functionaries. But she often acknowledged how Britain was changing, never once disparaged it, and found within it a plausible case for continuity. What she did was locate—or possibly create—a unifying culture of Englishness as defined by the values of the Blitz: courage, calm, resolve.[Read: No one performed Britishness better than Her Majesty]Here she is just a couple of years ago (at 93!) giving a televised address about COVID‑19: “I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it. I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge. And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any. That the attributes of self-discipline; of quiet, good-humored resolve; and of fellow feeling still characterize this country. The pride in who we are is not a part of our past; it defines our present and our future.”Well. Goddamn.It was COVID, not war. She was just asking her subjects to wear a mask and watch the telly. But it sounded like a call to greatness.
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
It was COVID, but it was also the Battle of Britain and Agincourt and all of it. Elizabeth spoke of Englishness and its enduring character, not of racial composition or traditional custom. She—of all people—said England’s greatness wasn’t in its past. It lies in its present and its future.And now this whole delicate operation of creating a Britain in which the old and the new don’t merely coexist, or inform each other, but are together part of a cohesive narrative of greatness, in which the monarch is both the defender of the Church of England and the symbolic leader of a country with 3 million Muslims—all of this has fallen to … Charles?Weak, selfish, petulant Charles?Only in fairy tales does it make sense to weep for a prince. That said, Charles’s early years were sorrowful. He longed to be with his mother, but she was often away. One newsreel of the little boy captured him immaculately dressed, standing trustingly at his grandmother’s side, looking anxiously down a train platform for any sign of his approaching mother. Once there, Elizabeth greeted her mother, and then—as an afterthought, almost—bent down neatly, pressed a light kiss on her child’s head, and went about her ceremonial duties. Charles stared up at her in a bemused way, as though the months-long dream of “mother” had not really suggested this slender, preoccupied adult.A word so often applied to Charles in his early years that you might have assumed it was a code word for gay—which he is not—was sensitive. There is nothing his ghastly father wanted less than a sensitive son, which only redoubled his certainty that Charles had to attend Prince Philip’s own brutal, “make a man of you” Scottish boarding school, Gordonstoun, from which Charles begged to be rescued and where he complained of serious bullying. What does bullying mean in the context of a mid-century, Scottish, all-male boarding school? It means, I would imagine, that it was a traumatic experience in a variety of ways. (Gordonstoun is under investigation by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry for accusations of physical and sexual abuse of students from the 1960s to the 2010s.)He did the required military duty (tangling his legs in the rigging on his first parachuting exercise, getting seasick on naval ships, and banging his head on low doorways belowdecks), and after that … the long, long wait, filled with the eccentric preoccupations of a country gentleman.The aspect of Charles’s character that makes him particularly unsuited to being King is that he’s weak. How many men in the history of the world have managed to have a wife and a mistress without damn near burning down civilization? In his first address to the nation, he sounded less like he was assuming the throne of England than throwing his hat into the Pennsylvania Senate race. He promised to respect people no matter their heritage and beliefs and to uphold “constitutional principles” (well, that’s a relief).More than anything, what Elizabeth was able to do, for an astonishing 70 years, that her feckless son will not be able to do was prevent a very large bill from coming due. She was allowed to keep the Great Star of Africa and the palaces and the untold billions of pounds because she was Elizabeth.But make no mistake, Charles has been handed an England in which a growing percentage of the population has no inclination to continue making nice with the Crown. After the racial-justice protests of 2020, statues of English slavers were taken down, one famously stomped by a mob. This is not an era of reconciliation and bygones being bygones. This is an era of reparations. A lot of people around the world don’t want to “celebrate diversity,” a concept wholly born of the dying West. They want their treasures back, and they know where to find them.Most of them were stolen, and in the most sadistic way possible. Will Charles—Boomer Zero—be able to keep hold not merely of the things but of the idea of England that his mother helped create?Doubtful.This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “The Petulant King.”

Ed Luce is the US national editor and columnist at the Financial Times. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ed Luce discuss the electoral toll of Trumpism; why Democrats who focus on identity politics fare poorly at the polls; and whether Ron DeSantis poses as great a threat to democratic norms and institutions as Donald Trump.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Forgetting questions about who’s going to win this or that outstanding race, what do you think are the big takeaways from the midterm elections for the state of America?Ed Luce: The state of America—it's actually been a pretty good week. I think the angst about democracy receded a little bit, and to that degree, the angst of America's partners and allies is probably under better control after Tuesday than before. Because as you remember, this talk of a red wave that had been building up—which fed on itself and crystallized as an immediate consensus, but which wasn't really backed up by all the numbers—had spilled over into genuine worries among America’s partners, almost a sort of borderline hysteria, that “Oh, Trump is going to be reelected in 2024.” The media only had the second worst night on Tuesday. The first worst was Donald Trump, and I think it’s going to renew some degree of hope that there might be continuity—and not just for the next two years in terms of Biden's foreign policy on Ukraine, but in terms of the American democratic model not being in as deep a state of dysfunction.Mounk: When you look at election deniers running in the midterms, a lot of them got elected, right? When they ran in safe districts in deep red states, many of them did win elections. But when they were in purple states, they often lost. It feels like one of the lessons of this election is that Trump has superfans—he always had, and he will for a long time—but that even among traditional Republican voters, there are a lot of people who feel, “This is enough.”Luce: Independents swung very much in that direction. They were very discriminating between the types of Republican candidates. Tim Michels, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Wisconsin, notoriously said two weeks ago that if he won the governorship of Wisconsin, Republicans would never lose an election there again. And it was very clear what he meant by that: there will be a supermajority in the Wisconsin legislature, and he would change the election rules to such a degree that Democrats would be made into a minority party. But he lost very comprehensively. Meanwhile, Don Bolduc, a former army guy in the mold of Mike Flynn, and very Trumpian—he lost very, very convincingly to Senator Hassan in New Hampshire. Pennsylvania, where Trump invested most of his time in terms of the rallies that he attended, was a wipeout for Trumpian candidates: Dr. Oz for the Senate, Doug Mastriano for the governorship. And it's looking more likely than not that Kari Lake, the Arizona gubernatorial candidate, will probably lose for similar reasons. Paul Pelosi, the speaker's husband, was assaulted in his own home at 2am by a deranged MAGA guy with a hammer, and ended up in the ICU with a fractured skull. And the leading Republicans like Trump not only didn't condemn the attack—they actually used the attack to mock Nancy Pelosi. Kari Lake was another example of that. She made a joke about the fact that the attack happened in the last few days before the midterms. But something we in the full-time political watching classes probably don't fully appreciate is that most voters only really pay attention in the last few days. And this was an extremely disruptive, dissonant event, that I think, regardless of your ideology, unless you are really hardcore, would create feelings of sympathy, rather than mockery. And I don't think we should underestimate the role of events like that in what happened on Tuesday night. There was a sort of decency theme to it.Mounk: I suppose I'm trying to think of how this might be good news for democracy. One way is simply that—with these instances of split-ticket voting, and the failure of some of the most Trump-aligned candidates—the appetite simply isn't there for Trump-like candidates. Moderate, traditional, sometimes very conservative Republicans are just much stronger candidates, and that's a good sign for the future.To me, the nightmare scenario was what happens if, during the next presidential election, Democrats win in a majority of the vote in Pennsylvania, but there’s a Republican governor who says that there was fraud, and who discounts a bunch of the Democratic votes and sends a Republican slate of electors to the electoral college. That was the only circumstance in which I could imagine actual civil war. Because under those circumstances, you could imagine different branches of the armed forces coming to different conclusions as to who is the legitimately elected commander-in-chief. I always thought there was a very small likelihood of that happening, but it was something that kept me up at night. With the victory of moderate candidates in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, and so on, in the gubernatorial and secretary of state elections, that danger seems to have subsided very significantly. Do you share that sense of relief?Luce: I do. The one state that very clearly has returned a Republican governor is Georgia, with Governor Brian Kemp. Governor Kemp did the right thing last time, and didn't bend to Trump's will. He backed up his secretary of state, who also just reelected, Brad Raffensperger. The other four states, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—three of them have Democratic governors. Tony Evers was reelected in Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer reelected in Michigan, and in Pennsylvania, Shapiro beating Mastriano. Arizona too, I think, is tilting towards the Democratic candidate. So that removes at least four out of five of the states, in terms of conceivable independent state legislature theory. You highlighted Pennsylvania. It's not just that Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano lost. It's that John Fetterman won. John Fetterman had a stroke. He was mocked for his linguistic defects following the stroke, his problems with communicating. But from what I understand from people who live in Pennsylvania, there was a great deal of admiration for his tenacity. It's very difficult to fear or hate somebody like that, who’s clearly a decent person struggling with their own issues. Biden has very low approval ratings, but by any measure, it’s extremely hard to hate Biden, even if you have deep disapproval of him, even if you think he's got dementia, even if you think he's incompetent and completely inarticulate. You can't really hate him or fear him. Whereas, the near 60% of American who dislike Trump really dislike Trump, and they really fear him.Mounk: It's something that polls always have trouble getting at: intensity. I've seen in some polls, which seems interesting to me, that when you ask people about the ideology of the Republican Party and the ideology of a Democratic Party, they think that each of those is very extreme and very far away from where they are. But when you ask them about particular candidates in this election, they could perceive the Democrats as much more moderate than the Republicans. Is this a little bit about candidate selection as well? Each party actually has a very, very toxic brand—people perceive the party in general as being very extreme—but particular candidates in this election made very different choices on the Democratic than the Republican end?Luce: I think candidate quality played a very, very big role in this election. It's always a factor, of course, particularly in senatorial and gubernatorial elections. But Trump made it a much, much bigger factor because he really made it his mission to judge people based on loyalty and nothing else, which began an ever-escalating bidding war to see who could be the most cartoonishly loyal. This has been getting worse, and therefore the candidate quality has been getting worse. It's caused immense frustration amongst the Mitch McConnells of this world and other senior Republican leaders. Trump's interests are not the same as the more conventional Republicans. It wasn't a triumph by any objective measure for Biden, although it was really a relief of a gargantuan scale for his administration and for him personally. But the most important thing here is the damage it's done to Trump, which was not enough damage to stop him from quite possibly being the Republican nominee again. The polls show that he's still by far the favorite. He's polling about 50% amongst Republican primary voters, registered Republicans. And DeSantis is about half that—though that might change. And if you were going to be Machiavellian about this—and the Democrats are no strangers to being Machiavellian: they funded a number of very prominent Trumpian candidates in the primaries to help them get the nomination—you would want Trump to be the nominee in 2024. It's extremely high risk Machiavellianism. But I'd say, optimally, from a very cold logical point of view, Trump being damaged, but not out, is pretty much where you would want the situation to be right now, if you were a Democrat.Mounk: If you're talking purely in terms of the Democratic Party trying to retain the White House at whatever cost, they would be well-advised to boost Trump in any way it can. But if you're talking about the values which I think should animate people to be members of the Democratic Party, the broader public good and interests of the country, it would be a shameful mistake to help Trump win the primaries in 2024, as it was a shameful mistake to help Doug Mastriano secure the nomination of the Republican Party for governor in Pennsylvania, even though, as was perhaps likely, the gamble paid off this time. The problem is that one day the gamble is not going to pay off. And that is why I find it immoral to take that risk.Luce: I suppose if you were going to defend the Machiavellianism—and by the way, I share your principal response to this as well as your pragmatic warnings—you would say: well, DeSantis is actually the bigger danger, not just to Biden, but to any Democratic nominee in 2024. Because he's young. He's not sort of capriciously offensive. He's not personally mean, in the way Trump is. He appears to be competent, to have plans that he then executes. He's not the kind of person who will suddenly think, “Oh, I'm gonna call Kim Jong-un. He loves me.” And he's just slightly more predictable than Trump. But he's ideologically just the same. His ambition is not to go back to the Republican party before Trump, or before Newt Gingrich (date when you will the current pathology on the right). He is auditioning to be the leader of the MAGA movement—and I don’t believe the MAGA movement is going anywhere. So you could argue that if DeSantis is the nominee—the MAGA nominee, the Viktor Orbán-admiring nominee—the man is prepared to use the state, the offices, the tools, the arms of the state in Florida, to punish businesses that disagree with his cultural agenda and reward those that agree with it; to really mess with election rights by setting up a roving police unit that turned up here and there at different polling stations looking for fake voters, and intimidating actual ones. You could make the case that DeSantis is actually a more dreadful prospect than Trump. But I entirely agree with the premise of your question and the principal point that you just made. I think it's right on principle, and on pragmatic grounds.Mounk: A number of people have observed quite rightly that DeSantis was the biggest winner of this election. And I have to say that I'm a little bit torn on this question of who is worse. There are certainly many things about Ron DeSantis I dislike, certainly many policies he has taken that break the kind of norms that I think governors of large states should observe. But I'm also a little bit concerned about the inevitable rush to say, “Not only is Trump absolutely terrible, but any successor to him is going to be terrible too, and in the end, DeSantis is an even bigger threat than Trump”—I have to say that I've read a number of articles making this case which I found to be sloppy, unconvincing, and quite dangerous, because the argument about the stability of democracy needs to be deployed genuinely and with care. If you start to say that anybody whose policies you deeply dislike is an enemy of democracy, people will rightly start to tune out the rhetoric of people like me who really are concerned about the stability of democracy. With a level head, talk me through why we should be scared about Ron DeSantis, not in terms of the policies we dislike or the unpleasant things he’ll do, but as a potential threat to the American Republic in the kind of way that I know you and I agree Donald Trump was and remains (if he gets reelected).Luce: I would start with the fact that any ambitious Republican has got to say, “Look, Trump's ideas are right, the movement is right. But he himself is now too imperfect and divisive to be the standard bearer of the movement.” There's nobody more ambitious than Ron DeSantis, and there's nobody more effective at executing their ambition than him. I can think of others like Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, who are way, way cruder and openly flirted with white nationalism. Ron DeSantis hasn't done that. And it might be because he, on principle, thinks that's wrong. I don't think that's the reason. I think the reason is that he's more sophisticated as a tactician, which is something to admire, in a democracy, in your opponents.What concerns me, I suppose, is the degree to which he has become popular because of his cultural conservatism and his use of God. I don't know whether you saw the advertisement he put out a couple of days before the election. It was unironically presenting himself as an instrument of divine will. And it's quite clear that to the Evangelical Church—and the legal and judicial sort of conservative circles, the Federalist Society types—that this is mana from heaven to them, to have a young candidate with kids (and he's always pictured with his kids) talking God in the way he talks God with a really quite terrifying sincerity, to judge by that ad. That concerns me. I am less concerned about the weird foreign policy implications of a DeSantis presidency. DeSantis seems to be a more even-keeled, strategic-minded person than Trump. But he also doesn't seem to have much charisma. He seems to be a very effective governor, but he doesn't have the retail skills. And so three or four years from now, we might be talking about him in the same way that we talked about Rubio after he flunked out. I cannot agree with you more that this sort of Pavlovian tendency to say that any Republican is just as bad as Trump is a horribly polarizing instinct amongst Democrats. It's also to some degree self-fulfilling, because it pushes the Republican Party further into the cynical mindset of, “Well, if they think that about us, we're gonna give you that.” In general, I agree with the point you're making. We don't know enough about DeSantis to stand up the argument that he's as bad as Trump. I'm just pointing out various worrying indicators.Mounk: Let’s focus a little bit on the Democrats. I have a theory about the election in Georgia, and I'd love to hear your response to it. Georgia was one of the states in which we saw this very big divergence in the performance of Republican candidates. Brian Kemp—who had stood up for the integrity of elections in 2020 against Trump's pressure—survived a very nasty primary challenge and won reelection against Stacey Abrams quite convincingly. Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, did much less well, and is going to a runoff. Of course, Walker was an election denier with very deep personal scandals. But I wonder whether there's also a contrast to be drawn between the two Democratic candidates in that race. Now, to be clear, neither of those candidates is in any way comparable to Herschel Walker. But Stacey Abrams has argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs that the Democratic Party should be in the business of identity politics, and in particular, mobilizing its traditional electorate of nonwhite voters, Latinos, and African Americans, and so on. And indeed, that's what she focused on in this election, going so far as to basically dismiss, perhaps, the distance between her progressive social policies and the views of many black men in Georgia. Raphael Warnock, another African American candidate (for Senate) took a very different stance, emphasizing his past profession as a pastor, going all around the state and speaking even in very white counties of Georgia that aren't very hospitable to Democrats traditionally, and trying to appeal to people there; recording a very funny ad in which he's on a Peanut Farm, talking about how he fought for Georgian peanut farmers by teaming up with a deeply conservative Republican senator. So, one way to look at Georgia is that Kemp is a much better candidate than Walker; but what role do you think it played that Warnock arguably had the better strategy and was a better candidate than Abrams?Luce: It's a very good question, because it has broader implications beyond Georgia. I think the registration drives that Stacey Abrams did in Georgia over a period of many years is, of course, a very, very good thing. You need to win over people who don't vote, to enthuse them about politics. And she's, for obvious reasons, particularly good at doing that in African American communities. I think there were two big reasons why in January 2021, the two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Warnock, won those run offs. One was Abrams’ turnout model. The registration had gone way up, and that's because of Stacey Abrams. It was incredibly effective. The other reason was that Trump just kept casting doubt on whether anything would change regardless of whether you voted. Trump was detonating Republican prospects. But there are limits to this. The notion that all these very real attempts to suppress the vote, or to make it harder to register to vote, actually changes elections is not that strongly supported by data. Other than perhaps Stacey Abrams’s own previous failed electoral bid in Georgia, it's hard to find elections that have actually been changed by voter suppression.Mounk: Is there very clear evidence of that happening four years ago? My understanding is that a lot of the cases that brought Stacey Abrams to repeatedly deny having lost that election (in a way that I think is deeply problematic intrinsically, and also deeply problematic because she was the face of democracy efforts for a party that is rightly slamming Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge the outcome of elections)—I think that so far as that case existed, it was a sort of “vibes” case; that it was really unfortunate that in Georgia in 2018, Brian Kemp was the Secretary of State responsible for administering the election, as well as a candidate for governor at the same time. Now, of course, that is the exact argument that Kari Lake is starting to run in Arizona. She’s asking how it can be that Katie Hobbs is the Secretary of State responsible for administering these elections while at the same time being a candidate for governor. I think it is shameful when Kari Lake is using that to justify not conceding the election. And despite some voter suppression efforts that did exist in Georgia in 2018, and that habitually exist in American politics and are a deep problem, I think it's shameful that Stacey Abrams refused to acknowledge the outcome of an election for many years.Luce: I think I agree with you. The only thing that gives me pause is that I didn't go into the same kind of detail about the 2018 election and Abrams’s allegations, compared with the detail I've gone into about the self-evidently fraudulent allegations around 2020. And that's my failing. I just didn't invest the time. But from what I understand from people who did invest the time, this was way overblown, and her saying it was a stolen election—and essentially that therefore, Brian Kemp was an invalid and illegitimate governor—set a very, very bad precedent. It provides an instant whatabout-ist argument for the Kari Lakes and the Trumps of this world when they try to do something similar. But again, I don't want to set off any tripwires here, because I'm not as steeped in the 2018 Georgia election. Mounk: Looking ahead to 2024, what lessons do you think Democrats should take from this election?Luce: If you're going to find a positive sociological trend from Trumpism, the fact that non-whites are moving to the Republican Party is a good thing. It deracializes the divisions between the parties. The fact that Hispanics across the country are moving to the Republican Party, even one led by Trump; and that even African Americans, to some degree, have been moving more to the Republican party—I think it’s a good thing. Now, 99 out of 100 of my liberal friends would be horrified having heard that. But to the degree that there's an overlap between polarization and racialization, there is a greater risk to the stability of America. So this, to me, reduces some of the temperature. Democrats have to understand that there's no such thing as a “Hispanic.” Hispanics are a figment of their imagination. There are lots of different groups that we, outside of that world, classify as Hispanics, but legal immigrants from the Dominican Republic, refugees from Venezuela, documented and undocumented immigrants from Mexico living on the border or living in Minnesota at the Canadian border—these people all have incredibly different backgrounds (in terms of being Spanish speakers, or not, as the case may be) but also very similar interests to most Americans, who find that a lot of them are quite naturally patriotic types. They might be feeling precarious economically, and therefore inflation might matter a lot to them. But they're quite comfortable with the flag and quite uncomfortable, I think, with a number of signals they’re getting from the more left elements of the Democratic Party. Signals such as: A) they are some special group that needs to be catered to, and that we're obsessed with the border; B) that they’re Latinx, and that C), somehow that means that all the other stuff doesn't matter that much, but also that American patriotism isn't a good thing, and we should sign up to the worldview that this is a structurally irredeemable nation. That doesn't really appeal to most—Mounk: —it’s not a very appealing thing to say to people who have chosen to immigrate to a country. Now, obviously, many Latinos have been in the country for a very long time. Many Latinos literally stayed on the same land while the nationality of that land changed. But for many of them, they have immigrated, or they have parents who have immigrated, and to tell them, “Why on earth have you chosen to immigrate to the worst country on Earth?” is actually quite tone deaf.The other point that I want to add is that Latin American societies have very complicated and often quite nasty racial politics, depending on whether people are predominantly descended from European immigrants or whether they are predominantly indigenous. The taped conversation of the president of the Los Angeles City Council was an indication of that. One of the most offensive things she said was a very traditional expression of racial prejudice from more white Latinos towards less white Latinos. And here's another area where this attempt to pretend that they’re all the same, and therefore will naturally become a version of the “people of color,” is simply naive about what those political cleavages look like.Luce: Yes, it is. And I very much hope that lesson gets taken on board. I suspect it won't be, because Tuesday night wasn't a disaster for the Democrats—although it was in Florida, for sure. But there were huge mistakes there on the Republican side, too. DeSantis luring a bunch of refugees from Texas to Florida in order to pull off this stunt of sending them to Martha's Vineyard—the obvious thing Democrats should have said is, “These are refugees from socialism. These are refugees from Venezuela. And you call yourself an anti-socialist? You're making them victims, double victims!” But I don't think there is the mindset in the Democratic Party to make that kind of differentiation. They are just refugees and Hispanics.But because the Democrats did pretty well this week, I suspect that they're not going to revisit first principles on that. I would say, though, that even though he lost, Tim Ryan's campaign in Ohio was a model campaign in a state that, like Florida, is now written off as a red state. He came within seven points of JD Vance in a state where, in the gubernatorial race, the Republican Mike DeWine won by 26 percentage points. That was a close race, because Ryan very, very clearly eschewed identity politics and spoke to what blue collar people and ordinary, hard working Americans have in common. And that resonated. The fact that he lost should not, I think, lessen the force of that campaign as an example that would work in many parts of the country.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

In 2001 Margaret Atwood began writing the novel Oryx and Crake. She started from the idea of species extinction, including human extinction. How long have we got? And would we bring about our own demise?
The premise of Oryx and Crake was that, since we have the capability to bioengineer a virus capable of wiping out humanity, someone might be tempted to do just that – in order to save everything else. In this imagined future, humans have been replaced with a vegan, peace-loving, self-healing upgrade. Twenty years after the novel was published, Atwood writes, as the climate crisis accelerates, there is a high probability a Crake might appear among us to put us out of our misery. And in the real world, there would be no new replacement.
Atwood’s novel continues to have relevance, as does a question she is frequently asked: why write dystopias? Why not imagine worlds where there is greater equality, not less? In this essay, she explores the 19th-century boom in literary utopias, from William Morris to Edward Bellamy, and then their 20th-century demise, as “several nightmares that began as utopian social visions” unfolded. As a thought experiment, Atwood imagines what a 21st-century utopia might look like and how it might address the many contradictions of civilisation. Could she write a practical utopia? And would anyone want to read it?
Written by Margaret Atwood and read by Amelia Stubberfield.
You might also enjoy listening to Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel
This article appeared in a special issue of the New Statesman on 21 October 2022 guest edited by Greta Thunberg. You can read the text version here, and more from the issue here. 
The essay is also included in “The Climate Book”, curated by Greta Thunberg and published by Allen Lane. It is available with a 15 per cent discount here, using the promo code ClimateNS (purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops).
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You could see it in this election. Herschel Walker is a terrible candidate. He’s dogged by a history of infidelity, abuse and abortion — a problem, you would think, for a candidate running as a social conservative. One of his own advisers said he lies “like he’s breathing.” Voters aren’t stupid: They know Walker is a flawed man. But there’s a reason he netted enough support to force a runoff with Raphael Warnock.

The most consequential vote Walker would make, if elected, is for Mitch McConnell to be Senate majority leader. The same is true for Warnock, in reverse: For all his theological depth and moral authority, the most consequential vote he cast in the U.S. Senate was the one that made Chuck Schumer majority leader. On the vote that matters most, Walker is not Walker; he’s a Republican. Warnock is not Warnock; he’s a Democrat.

Or take it the other way: I am not John Fetterman’s doctor and I don’t know the extent of the damage his stroke inflicted. Still, the impairments it left are visible, and in another era, might have stalled his political career. But if you were supporting Fetterman before, switching your vote to Dr. Mehmet Oz because Fetterman had a stroke is a kind of lunacy. Fetterman, at any level of impairment, will be part of a coalition that protects women’s reproductive autonomy and tries to decarbonize the economy and fights to expand health care. Oz would have been part of a coalition that seeks to do the opposite on every count.

Calcification, on its own, would produce a truly frozen politics. In some states, it does, with effective one-party rule leading to a politics devoid of true accountability or competition. But nationally, political control teeters, election after election, on a knife’s edge. That’s another strange dynamic of our era: Persistent parity between the parties.

American politics has typically had “sun” and “moon” parties. After the Civil War, Republicans controlled American politics for decades. After the New Deal, Democrats dominated. Between 1931 and 1995, Democrats held the House for all but four years. Since 1995, control of the House has flipped four times, and if Republicans win the gavel in 2023, that’ll be five.

We live in an era of unusual political competitiveness. Presidential elections are decided by a few points, in a few states. The House and Senate are up for grabs in nearly every contest. In both 2016 and 2020, fewer than 100,000 votes could’ve flipped the presidential election. So even as calcification means fewer minds change in any given election, parity means those small, marginal changes can completely alter American politics.

Take 2016. If 40,000 people in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Trump, American politics travels a radically different path. Democrats probably replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. The Republican Party probably blames Trump and his acolytes for blowing a winnable election and turns sharply against them and everything they represent. So much in 2016 turned on so little.

Early on Wednesday morning, while I was scrolling through Twitter in order to learn the midterm-election results in the most piecemeal and confusing fashion possible, I noticed something a little off.On the lists of “historic firsts” and “barriers broken,” which logically included such victories as those of Massachusetts’s Maura Healey and Oregon’s Tina Kotek, the first openly lesbian governors to be elected, and that of Wes Moore, Maryland’s first Black governor, journalists were also citing the win by Florida’s 25-year-old Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. These firsts are inarguably all firsts, but they’re “historic” in different ways. In the former cases, historic refers to the historical context that makes the win notable—a context of longtime oppression or marginalization or underrepresentation. In Frost’s case, although he will also be the first Afro Cuban member of Congress, the word historic is being used more literally, to refer to the passage of time. A few years ago, members of Gen Z—people who now range in age from roughly 10 to 25—were too young to be elected to office. Now some of them are old enough. So the barrier being broken is, in fact, not being broken, because it is impossible to break; time marches on, always, no matter what. People get older.“I decided to run to represent my district, my home. I didn’t run to be the first Gen Z member of Congress,” Frost told me in a call. But he guessed that people were excited about it because he is so young. “It’s surprising that there was a first Gen Z member of Congress this early. It might not have been such a big thing if my generation wasn’t represented until we were 40 or 50 or 60.”
WE WON!!!! History was made tonight. We made history for Floridians, for Gen Z, and for everyone who believes we deserve a better future. I am beyond thankful for the opportunity to represent my home in the United States Congress. #FL10
— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) November 9, 2022This is not to pick on Frost or on Frost-headline writers. Wednesday morning also brought an outpouring of gratitude toward Gen Zers in general, and an exultation of their presumed role in preventing a Republican sweep. THANK YOU GEN Z was trending on Twitter in the afternoon, and my own timeline was scattered with progressives celebrating everyone in the United States who is between the ages of 18 and 25. Though exit polls showed young voters coming out in large numbers to support Democratic candidates—and there is other evidence of higher-than-average participation from 18-to-29-year-olds—data from the Associated Press suggest that Election Day turnout was higher in older counties, and an analysis of early voting by the University of Florida professor Michael McDonald shows that just 5.2 percent of registered voters under the age of 26 cast a ballot before Election Day (compared with 11.1 percent of voters from 26 to 40, and 41.7 percent of voters from 41 to 65).[Read: Generation Z doesn’t remember when American politics worked]Even so: “Gen Z saving us from the world we’ve given them,” the Game of Thrones actor Pedro Pascal wrote on Twitter, with one broken-heart emoji and two regular-heart emoji. “Gen Z voted like a generation that has done active shooter drills since elementary school told that they aren’t allowed to read books by anyone who isn’t straight and white,” the author Frederick Joseph tweeted. “In doing so, they saved the election.” The latter tweet suggests that members of Gen Z were somehow able to vote with more drama and force than other people who voted—their voting acts were not just quick chores run before work, but somehow cinematic. (It also suggests that they all voted the same way.)This is kind of weird, no?
Gen Z is about to end the careers of several Republican politicians.

They pissed off the wrong generation.
— Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) November 8, 2022It has always been desirable to be young, and youth has often been interpreted as an identity. Today, though, youth is saddled with the expectation of moral authority and benevolence. Gen Zers are cheered by some progressives as righteously angry and so good-hearted that America doesn’t deserve them. But it would be surprising if an entire cohort was “just kinder” than all others that came before. (Scientifically surprising, even!) And though younger people are generally more progressive, they are not a monolith.[Read: ‘Gen Z’ only exists in your head]All of this weirdness isn’t the fault of young people. It is the fault of older people who talk about them, and who ask the question—in The New York Times and on Quora and everywhere in between—“Will Gen-Z save the world?” This is a question bolstered by internet-y tropes: In the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, the entire generation was conflated with activist K-pop fans and with TikTok users. In the past few years, some advocates of a blockchain-based Web3 have evoked the halo around Gen Z to market their vision for the future of the internet, tapping into the supposed Gen Z desire to “make the world a better place.”On Wednesday morning, Dirt’s Terry Nguyen published a report on the world of self-described Gen Z venture capitalists. Nguyen detailed a recent Gen Z–VC summit in Chicago that led Mayor Lori Lightfoot to declare October 7 “Gen Z VCs Day” and to “salute the Gen Z VC community.” The perspective that these Gen Z financiers have to offer is youth, which they position as synonymous with culture. “There’s a need for different kinds of culture to be funded,” Emily Herrera, a 23-year-old investor with the fund Night Ventures, told Nguyen. “It’s such an exciting thing to think about. The technology we’re investing in has the potential to meaningfully affect society.” Right, sure. But is this statement, in some notable way, different from the Silicon Valley–speak of generations prior? When I called Herrera to ask this question, she said that, unlike big tech companies, her fund is interested in “underserved consumers” and tries to work with “creators in very niche communities.”Gen Z branding appeals in business and in politics. On Tuesday night, the 25-year-old Joe Vogel tweeted that he had won his state-legislature race and was set to become “the first GenZ legislator” in Maryland. About an hour later, the 25-year-old Jeff Long—who had won in a nearby district—tweeted the same claim, with almost the exact same wording. (When I called them both to settle the matter, Vogel said that Long was “a few months” older than him. “I actually didn’t know he’s a Gen Zer,” Vogel said. He also sounded sort of annoyed. “Is this what your story is about?” Long, for his part, noted that both he and Vogel will turn 26 before the start of the legislative session.) I don’t know much about these men beyond what’s on their campaign sites. But that’s the point—knowing that they are both Gen Z doesn’t actually tell you anything, so why does it seem to? Millennials (hi, and sorry) were the subject of mass disdain because of their perceived petulance and excess of emotion. Gen Z, written about by media that are now made up in no small share by Millennials, has been awarded a totally different story.Generalization, whether positive or negative, is condescension. The youth of a cohort is not a barrier, nor does it guarantee the whole group a special perspective or capacity for insight. You don’t do the 20-year-old in your life any favors by treating her like the Second Coming. She might not even be voting as hard as you assume she is.Gen Z is just fine. Gen Zers are the millions of people born in 1997 or later. They are my fellow citizens and that’s all I know about them. I agree it’s good that they vote, if they do.

Probably the best day for climate action in American political history was August 7, 2022, when the Senate overcame 30 years of sclerosis and passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the country’s first comprehensive climate bill. After that day, the bill’s adoption into law was all but assured, and it sailed through the House and reached the president’s desk.But perhaps the second most important day for American climate policy was this past Tuesday. Democrats’ surprisingly strong showing in the midterm elections will prove to be a landmark in the history of how the country has handled global warming. It will help ensure that the IRA can transform American industry and boost renewables, electric vehicles, and other sources of zero-carbon energy. There will still be bumps on the road to implementing the law, of course. And Biden’s policy may yet prove insufficient to the task of reducing carbon pollution. But the game has changed nonetheless. American  climate policy will never be the same.Why is that? Well, first, because Democrats bucked the cardinal rule of American politics—that the president’s party almost always hemorrhages seats in the House in its first midterm election: Republicans lost 41 seats in the 2018 midterms, for instance, and Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010. Although control of the House is still being decided, the most likely outcome as of this writing is that Republicans will win a tiny majority, perhaps as small as one seat. That majority will be wobbly, and the new speaker of the House will have very little margin for error.Democrats, meanwhile, seem likely to retain control of the Senate, perhaps even growing their majority by a seat. There’s more precedent for that in the midterms: The GOP successfully defended its Senate majority in 2018 as well.The significance of these two results—the first a spiritual victory for Democrats, the second a literal one—becomes clear once you fit it into the broader sweep of American environmental history. Since global warming became a national issue in the late 1980s, Democrats have struggled to fight it without facing electoral blowback. In 1993, President Bill Clinton tried and failed to pass a “BTU tax,” a surcharge on energy production that would have boosted renewables and resembled a carbon tax in some ways. That proposal never became law—it passed the House and died in the Senate—but many lawmakers who voted for it got tossed in the 1994 midterms anyway. In 2009, a Democratic House majority again considered the pro-climate cap-and-trade bill. That proposal, too, passed the House, died in the Senate, and then cost some House members their seats anyway.The IRA had already defied the examples here, of course, because it passed into law. But its passage also appears to have not cost Democrats in the midterms. That sets the IRA apart not only from previous climate proposals but from previous laws of all sorts. The 2010 and 2018 midterms were powered in part by public revolt at the incumbent president’s major piece of legislation: the Affordable Care Act in the first case and President Donald Trump’s tax-reform bill in the second. Yet voters did not rise up in the same way against the IRA, even though it is at least as central to Biden’s legacy as tax reform is to Trump’s. As E&E News noted last week, relatively few GOP ads even mentioned the IRA in the run-up to the election.The climate law did not appear to hurt Democrats even in particularly rural or fossil-fuel-dependent areas. Look at New Mexico, for instance, which recently supplanted North Dakota as the country’s No. 2 oil-producing state. Going into the election, the state was represented in the House by two Democrats and one Republican, Representative Yvette Herrell, who came from the state’s oil-rich southeast. Voters not only reelected the two Democrats (both of whom had backed the IRA) but replaced Herrell with a Democrat (who got some help from a friendly gerrymander). Or look at Colorado’s Eighth District, comprising Denver’s north suburbs and much of the state’s oil country, where the Democrat Yadira Caraveo eked out a win against the Republican Barbara Kirkmeyer.The party also likely held on in Maine’s rural Second District, one of only eight Democratic-held districts nationwide that backed Trump in 2020. The incumbent Democrat there, Representative Jared Golden—who rejected earlier climate proposals but voted for the IRA—seems to have won reelection.The IRA’s lack of electoral penalty is only part of the good news for Biden. The fruits of the election—likely a fractious Republican House and a narrowly Democratic Senate—will significantly boost the president’s ability to implement climate and energy policy in his second term.Over the next two years, the Biden administration will implement the IRA, translating its tax credits into policy and instituting new programs in the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. His party retaining control of the Senate means that Biden will be able to staff and run the government as normal, submitting judges and executive-branch nominees for confirmation for the duration of his term. And if the slim Republican majority in the House is especially ungovernable, that will give Biden even more clout in budget negotiations to push for more climate funding.He will also be better able to defend the IRA itself. By 2024, the IRA will be harder to undo—it will already have led to the construction of more hard infrastructure and even subsidized new factories across red states, getting “steel in the ground,” as Ali Zaidi, Biden’s domestic climate czar, says.A few weeks ago, the investment bank Credit Suisse published a report saying that if the IRA was implemented successfully, it could unleash more than $800 billion in spending and turn the U.S. into the world’s “leading energy provider.” The midterm election was the great threat to that outcome. Now the threat has passed.

In March 2008, I experienced the worst night of my life. I was downrange in Iraq, serving as the squadron judge advocate—the lawyer—for the Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. It was the height of the surge, and my unit had been deployed to one of the most violent regions of the country.Nights were always tense. Because most of our combat operations were at night, that’s when we engaged the enemy. That’s when we took casualties. And that evening, a young soldier burst into my tiny office in Forward Operating Base Caldwell, a small base in eastern Diyala Province. “Captain French,” he said, “you’re needed in the TOC. Now.”In Army language, the TOC is the tactical operations center, the “brain” of an Army unit at war. That’s where an officer called a battle captain helps manage and direct the fight, like a conductor leading a deadly symphony.[Read: Is there a better way to observe Veterans Day?]A torrent of information flows into a TOC, especially in a time of crisis. Radio reports, text messages from the Army’s Blue Force Tracker system, and drone feeds can overwhelm the senses.When I arrived, I saw grim faces and eyes shining with tears. The news was very bad. A Humvee had been hit by a command-detonated improvised explosive device. Multiple troopers were dead. At least one had grave injuries. In moments like this, your mind splits in two. One part is awash in uncertainty and grief—we had fewer than 1,000 soldiers on our small base, and by this point in our deployment, we all knew one another. We knew that friends were likely in that burning Humvee.The other part of your mind knows there’s a job to do. So you push the grief away and focus. Was this a single strike, or was it the start of an ambush? Are medevac helicopters on the way? Do we need to deploy the quick-reaction force? Life-and-death decisions flow one after another until the crisis passes.Why was I there? The short answer is that Army lawyers were constantly present during the Iraq War. We were fighting a complicated counterinsurgency, and complex rules of engagement governed our uses of force. For better and for worse, commanders often consulted their JAG officers—the military’s lawyers—before ordering responsive fires.On other occasions, I’d helped make tough, terrifying decisions, but this time there was nothing for me to do. We never saw the enemy. We never even had the chance to make a choice about whether to respond. Instead, I watched and waited until more terrible news arrived.We lost four men: a civilian interpreter named Albert Haroutounian and three soldiers—Specialist Donald Burkett, Sergeant Phillip Anderson, and my friend Captain Torre Mallard. The news hit us all like a punch in the face. Every person in the TOC was close to one or more of those guys, as close to them as a brother.The shock of the moment caused me to reflect once again on the longer answer to the question why. Why was I there, really?In October 2005, I was living the good life. I was president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a small civil-liberties nonprofit located in Philadelphia. It was a dream job. I led a bipartisan team of idealistic young civil libertarians, and I lived in a penthouse apartment in the city’s center with my wife and two kids. I was 36 years old.I’d supported the war in Iraq. I didn’t really have any kind of national voice, but to the extent that my opinion mattered, I’d voiced it loudly and vociferously. Saddam Hussein had to go. We now know the rest of the story. We toppled his regime in a lightning war but then faced a grinding insurgency. By late 2005, the Sunni-Shia civil war raged, American casualties mounted, and the Army struggled to meet its recruiting targets. Who wanted to fight and die in what seemed like a losing war?One evening, at home in Philadelphia, I read the story of a Marine officer who had been wounded in Anbar province. He’d used the reporter’s satellite phone to call his wife and two kids and tell them that he was hurt but he’d be okay. At that instant I was hit with a burning sense of conviction. How could I support a war I wasn’t willing to fight?With my wife’s blessing, I enlisted. I walked to the recruiting office in downtown Philly and asked about getting an age waiver and joining the JAG Corps. I didn’t have an infantry body, but I did have a legal mind.What followed would have been pure comedy if it hadn’t had serious consequences. I almost flunked my initial physical. I was so nervous, my blood pressure spiked. The very first time I tried to run myself back into shape, I pulled a hamstring. Let’s just say I wasn’t the most impressive person in officer basic training at Fort Lee, Virginia, in the hot summer of 2006.Everyone called me “Professor” (I’m a former Cornell Law School lecturer), and the drill instructors seemed to delight in saying things like, “Professor, get in the plank position,” or, “Professor, drop and give me 20.”But I made it through, and in June 2006, I graduated from officer basic training humbled, sore, and covered in hives. (Two days before graduation, I had dived into a patch of poison ivy in the middle of a simulated ambush—another great moment of high comedy.)[From the January/February 2015 issue: The tragedy of the American military]By April 2007, I’d finished my Army legal training. In June I volunteered to go to Iraq. In September I got orders to join the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, and by November I was in the country. The next 11 months would be the hardest of my life.I’ll never forget landing at Forward Operating Base Caldwell in the very early-morning hours of Thanksgiving Day, 2007. After a low and fast nighttime helicopter flight across the Iraqi countryside (the first helicopter flight of my life), I was exhausted and intimidated. When I landed, one of the troop commanders saw my wide eyes, put his arm around me, and said, “Lawyer, if you live through this, this is your most important year.” He was right.Serving as a JAG officer in a combat-arms unit isn’t exactly the stuff from which movies are made. You’re definitely not the hero. You serve the heroes. And there were heroes in our midst. One sergeant was shot in the neck yet stayed in his gun turret, returning fire until he defeated an ambush, and then refused to board a medevac helicopter until every other wounded trooper was accounted for. Another specialist tried to remain in the fight even though an AK-47 round had taken off most of his arm. An officer dived into a burning Humvee in a vain effort to rescue a dying friend. Those were the stories of our deployment. Those were the men I knew.When I came home, I was racked with grief. All the emotions that I’d put aside because of the life-and-death necessities of the job came flooding back. But that wasn’t the end of my Army journey. It was the beginning. I spent six more years in the reserves, a span of time that took me from Iraq to weeks in a bunker in South Korea and to a short assignment on the best Army base in the world, Caserma Ederle in Vincenza, Italy.Throughout my service, I experienced a paradox: I felt both unimportant and alive with purpose. From the first minute on the helicopter flying into my base, I realized that I was a very small cog in a very big machine. I was expendable. But I also felt an overpowering sense of duty. I prayed a simple prayer, asking God to give me the wisdom and courage to do my job well, whatever my job might entail.There are powerful reasons that the overwhelming majority of veterans feel proud of their service. Even the post-9/11 generation—the men and women who fought the frustrating “forever wars”—not only feel proud of their service; they endorse joining the military. This is true even when they suffered emotionally traumatic experiences during their own deployments.And that takes me back to March 2008, when our fallen brothers were airlifted home. Two helicopters landed at our base. They turned off their engines. In complete silence we stood as Torre, Albert, Donald, and Phillip were loaded on board to begin their long journey home.In that instant, holding my salute, I had a distinct feeling—one shared by veterans from across the span of our nation’s history: This is where I’m supposed to be. Most people don’t serve, and that’s fine. It’s good, even. We don’t want a thoroughly militarized country. But some people must, and when they choose to serve, they’re not investing in a president or a policy but in the nation itself.The decision to serve is a tangible declaration that you love your home—the place and its people—enough to bear profound burdens to sustain its existence and its way of life.Memorial Day is the day set aside to remember our fallen brothers. Veterans Day is a day dedicated to the living, the people who stood at attention, honored the lost, absorbed their grief, and then did their job, day after day, month after month, year after year.When I was a younger man, I’d see the older vets wearing hats with their unit insignia, and I’d thank them for their service. But I’d also wonder, Was military service that profound? Was it something that would shape you so much that—decades after it was over—you wanted people to know that it was still part of your identity, still part of who you are?Now I know. It is that profound. It was the honor of my life.

I.In October, a study published in PLOS One provided some fresh insight into how and why American media has become so dysfunctional. Over the past 20 years, the study reported, headlines that convey anger, fear, sadness, and disgust have been increasing, while headlines conveying neutrality or joy have been in decline. These trends have coincided with a massive drop in trust in news journalism, particularly in the US.According to a new study by David Rozado, there has been a big increase in news headlines suggesting fear, anger, disgust, and sadness since 2000, and especially since about 2010. Journalists are pushing your buttons. pic.twitter.com/Sg3QTNbdSz— Paul Graham (@paulg) October 20, 2022
 According to Gallop polling, seven percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” of trust in the media, while 38 percent say they have none at all. As angertainment has increased, trust has decreased. As one political tribe provides angertainment for its loyal readers and viewers, the other becomes increasingly alarmed and disgusted. Angertainment may be profitable for journalism in the short-term but over the long-term it trashes the integrity of the profession.Source: Gallup.comAngertainment is unlikely the sole cause of US political polarisation, but it certainly hasn’t helped. Just as mad cow disease was caused by feeding bovine-meal to cows, angertainment feeds on polarisation which in turn feeds on angertainment. It’s a cannibalistic cycle.II.None of this is abstract to those of us who run publications. In 2015, I founded Quillette on my couch. My first child was an infant and I had just dropped out of a master’s program in forensic psychology. Unable to juggle motherhood and the demands of clinical placements, I naturally decided it would be a good idea to start a business.I created Quillette to provide a platform to many of the interesting bloggers and academics I had met in person and online during my student years—gifted writers who were underused or ignored by existing publications, and original thinkers whose heterodox ideas and research were being frozen out of mainstream discourse. It seemed to me that valid and potentially important findings gathered from psychology and behavioural genetics, in particular—and from biology more broadly—were either being avoided or suppressed because they violated progressive taboos. It was becoming increasingly difficult to talk about sex differences, human variation, and the influence of genes on human traits and behaviour. As the histrionic and censorious response to the Damore memo demonstrated, blank slatism has experienced a resurgence in the academy and the broader culture, and I wanted Quillette to be a forum in which these ideas could be challenged, debated, and rationally discussed.During the early years, my co-editors and I ran a series of articles critical of “wokeness” before it had a name and about “cancel culture” before it was fashionable. If the articles we published were overwhelmingly critical of the Left, it was because that was where the ideological hostility to biology seemed to be flourishing. This naturally attracted a great deal of interest and support from the political Right. But those on the Left and Right who expected us to serve as a propaganda outlet for one side in their culture war had not understood what the publication was for. Quillette was not established to defend right-wing dogmas or denigrate any perceived out-group for reasons of tribal solidarity. It emerged out of a wellspring of curiosity and a conviction that neither side of the political divide held a monopoly on truth and wisdom. In unpicking the knots of progressive dogmatism we did not wish to tighten ligatures for the other side.I was prepared for the articles we ran to meet with resistance, but I was taken aback by just how abusive and personal some of the early pushback was. A high-profile US civil rights lawyer and occasional Atlantic contributor named Ken White (who goes by the name of @PopeHat on Twitter) popularised the slur “Caliper Claire” in an attempt to associate me with phrenology. This accusation rested on a misunderstanding of a single line in a scholarly review we published of Angela Saini’s 2019 polemic, Superior. Anyone capable of appreciating the difference between astrology and astronomy ought to have been able to grasp the distinction between phrenology (a discredited pseudoscience) and craniometry (a subset of anthropometry routinely employed by forensic anthropologists). At Mother Jones, writer Kevin Drum called the attacks on Quillette “wildly unfair” and added that “the authors [of the Superior review] don’t defend or apologize for phrenology or anything like it in any way whatsoever.” An appreciation of this fact (not to mention a commitment to basic standards of fair-mindedness) ought to have been well within the capabilities of a professional writer and lawyer such as Ken White. Instead, he and others preferred to circulate falsehoods and smears in an attempt to discredit me and my publication.This episode, and others like it, confronted me with the lamentable reality that merely defending psychometrics—the subfield of psychology concerned with measurement—or any other investigation of human differences would result in unavoidable vilification. In 2019, the Columbia Journalism Review included me on their shortlist of the world’s greatest disinformation “villains,” alongside Yevgeniy Prigozhin (“Putin’s chef”), Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (who approved the murder of Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi), and “Q” of QAnon. The reason? Because I publish “academics, journalists, and tech entrepreneurs who defend debunked race, gender, and climate science.”Source: Columbia Journalism ReviewAround this time, a friend asked me if I was overreacting to the illiberalism of the Left by publishing so many articles about progressive mobbings, pile-ons, defenestrations, and persecutions (many of which we compiled into a marvellous anthology in 2020, still available from all good online retailers). I replied that I didn’t think I was, and I maintain that we gave a serious problem the attention it deserved, long before the excesses of #MeToo and the summer of riots that followed the murder of George Floyd. Nevertheless, the intervening years have taught me to be less complacent about a corresponding conformity on the Right.In early 2020, COVID-19 arrived in Europe amid an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty. As the pages of Lombardy’s newspapers began to fill with obituaries, Quillette adopted a hawkish editorial position on containment of the virus, more or less in line with that of the public health establishment. This would not have been surprising to anyone who knew me. Before founding Quillette, I had worked in Canberra for Australia’s Federal Department of Health, and then later in Sydney for the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance. While these institutions were by no means perfect, I had no reason to distrust their policies or the professional integrity of the scientists working within them. On the contrary, I developed a profound admiration for the work the scientists in these institutions performed.The arrival of a highly transmissible novel virus among native populations necessarily forced societies to grapple with trade-offs between public health and individual freedom, and produced a tragedy of the commons. Charting an editorial course under such circumstances was difficult, especially when measures became hostage to the culture wars. We published some articles critical of lockdowns—specifically in Victoria, Australia—and of their effectiveness. We also ran a qualified defence of the trucker convoy in Ontario, Canada. Nevertheless, our editorial position was undeniably hawkish, and there will be those who maintain that the balance of our coverage underweighted the harm produced by non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) intended to control the virus while overstating the dangers posed by infection. The Economist estimates that COVID-19 has killed over 19.8 million people globally, but now that the lethality of the virus has been neutralised by mass vaccination, it is much easier to focus on the costs borne by survivors.Should Quillette have published more thorough investigations into the impact of lockdowns and school closures on the development and mental health of young people? Almost certainly. But these were judgement calls made in a fluid situation with incomplete information. However, if we were guilty of error, it was an error of omission rather than commission. We avoided the traps that almost every other right-of-center publication threw itself into at some point during the pandemic. We never tried to minimise the virus’s infection fatality rate for ideological reasons, or dismiss the likelihood of a second (or third) wave, and we never sought to discredit the results of COVID tests as “false positives.” Nor did we allow ourselves to get swept up in the pseudoscientific crazes that developed around ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.This last topic became a particularly bitter point of contention, not least because wishful thinking about off-label miracle cures correlated with vaccine skepticism. For the editorial position my editors and I adopted on vaccines—we made—and continue to make no apology. It was clear to me that the mRNA vaccines were safe once I had looked at the results of a 2020 randomised controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That trial used a sample size of 43,548 participants, randomly allocated to two groups (treatment and placebo), and found that adverse reactions in the treatment group were not significantly higher than those found in the placebo. I didn’t need to listen to public health authorities to arrive at this conclusion, I simply read the study.Although we are a publication that encourages dissent and disagreement (we publish regular roundtable symposia so that scholars can disagree with one another on contentious issues), that does not require us to relativise truth on matters that have been established to a high degree of scientific certainty. It is one thing to counter one idea with another. It is quite another to respond to troves of data with anecdotes and hand-waving. To have done so on such an important matter of public health—not to mention the best hope of ending the hardship of lockdowns—would have been reckless.But this view was not especially popular among the loose-knit collection of heterodox writers, thinkers, and scholars that had gathered beneath the informal banner of the “Intellectual Dark Web.” That term was originally coined by mathematician Eric Weinstein and then popularised in a 2018 magazine profile by former New York Times editor Bari Weiss. Quillette’s association with this group was not an accident. We ran sympathetic articles by and about some of its central personalities, and shared many of their concerns about the censorious turn of liberal institutions. I was featured in Weiss’s NY Times essay along with public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Bret Weinstein, and a story about Quillette published in Politico at the end of the year described us as “the voice of the Intellectual Dark Web.”For a short period, it was exciting to find my fledgling business associated with what looked like an intellectual realignment. I admired many of the movement’s figures and was sympathetic to its rejection of traditional notions of Left and Right politics. The “IDW” term seemed to represent iconoclasm and free thought, and it offered comfort and a sense of belonging to the politically adrift. If this or that IDW intellectual occasionally raised eyebrows with an eccentric statement or poorly considered view, perhaps that was part and parcel of a general commitment to heterodox thought.But as the societal crises precipitated by the pandemic deepened, the heterodoxy of several IDW figures calcified into perverse and childish contrarianism. At their Dark Horse podcast, former academics Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both of whom were name-checked in Weiss’s article) marshaled findings from a series of poorly designed studies to argue that ivermectin was preferable to vaccination as an intervention for COVID-19. Ivermectin, they declared, could “save the world” if only the greedy elites at Big Pharma would place the value of human life above the pursuit of profit. The unfounded claims made on the Dark Horse podcast are too numerous to itemise here, and they have been painstakingly documented and refuted elsewhere. Among the more egregious was the notion that mRNA vaccines were “unsafe for women,” while others featured lurid stories of miscarriages and babies born with split brains. In recent months, randomised controlled trials that have tested the efficacy of ivermectin have found that it does no better than placebo. Other research has found that US fatality rates became higher among Republicans after vaccines were made available—tragic evidence of lives needlessly wasted. After spending the pandemic cultivating vaccine hesitancy in his audience, Weinstein has since moved on to “worry” about flu vaccines, alarm clocks, air conditioners, sunblock, orthodontia, synthetic carpet, correcting child vision, and other assorted features of modernity:I worry about:Alarm clocks Daylight-spec bulbs (after dark)Flu shotsEmulsifiers Air-conditionersCasual sexAdjuvantsSunblock PornGlyphosateKids using virtual environments Orthodontia TeflonSynthetic carpet FluoridationCorrecting child vision to 20/20Modern THC…— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) October 13, 2022
Since many of my readers and followers associated me with the “IDW,” and since I had published articles in defence of Heying and Weinstein after they were hounded out of Evergreen State College, I felt duty-bound to publicly challenge their claims about the alleged dangers of vaccination. I did so, both on Twitter and by commissioning articles critical of their position. This was greeted with howls of betrayal and accusations that Quillette was now in the pocket of “Big Pharma.” If membership of the IDW had ever been predicated upon a commitment to heterodox thought and reasoned argument, now it was just another marker of tribal identity. Either you were with the establishment, or against it—and woe betide any “free thinkers” who thought otherwise.But being reflexively anti-establishment is a sloppy heuristic that inevitably devolves into conspiracism and paranoia. Not content to oppose lockdowns and other NPIs because the trade-offs were not worth it, a number of lockdown skeptics began to insist that the pandemic was merely a pretext for some kind of global totalitarian power grab. This fever dream reached its peak when former counter-extremism activist Maajid Nawaz and YouTuber Tim Pool informed their followers that Indigenous Australians were being “rounded up” and forced into “concentration camps” in the north of Australia. Refuting this absurdity ought to have involved nothing more than an appeal to common sense, but it resulted in another wave of abuse and the accusation that I was now using Quillette to defend actual Naziism and genocide.It is amazing to reflect that my publication suffered financially for defending the efficacy of life-saving vaccines and the efforts of the Australian government to protect its own citizens. Subscribers fled and made public appeals that others do the same. Former Quillette writers joined the mob, sometimes assailing an organisation that had offered them support when no one else would. Friends and supporters on the Right fell silent as controversy engulfed my magazine and hundreds of thousands of dollars in earmarked investment went up in smoke.And for what? For trying to express some fairly banal and self-evident truths about the world—that no, the Australian government was not using the cover of the pandemic to perpetrate a genocide against its Indigenous citizens; that yes, biology is real, and that men and women are different, despite what activists armed with volumes of gender theory might insist; that yes, genes do influence who we are and not every outcome can be socially engineered; that yes, vaccines were a miracle of scientific knowledge that have saved millions of lives. Stating facts like these should not require courage. And yet far too many people are afraid to affirm these self-evident truths among their peers.The sensible business decision would have been to keep quiet as falsehoods were being promoted about vaccines and Australia, and to pander to the most irrational biases of our angriest and most hateful readers and enemies. Partisan media organisations can soak up the hatred of their enemies in large part because they can rely on the loyalty of their own foot-soldiers to defend them. But Quillette wasn’t established to be a propaganda outfit in a tribal war. Both conservatives and progressives are fond of claiming oppression by “elites” and structural forces when it suits them. But in a world where what is true is far less popular than what is useful in the unending campaign to humiliate one’s political enemies, the most unpopular position a publication can adopt is that of moderation.III.The incentives for journalism are broken. This is not always the fault of individual journalists, although some strive for truth and accuracy with more sincerity than others. Nor is it solely the fault of media companies, although many of them prioritise profit and engagement over rigour and fairness. It is not even the fault of “Big Tech,” even though social media companies have built the machine on which these broken incentives run.It’s the fault of all of us. We are the ones who devour angertainment and get high on watching our enemies suffer. We are the ones who want to see various idiots eviscerated and dismembered by the bayonets of Twitter. We are the ones who clamour after content which makes us feel virtuous, complacent, and like we belong. The 20-year incline in headlines denoting fear, anger, disgust, and sadness in American media would not have occurred if audiences had not been rewarding it. In a competitive eco-system, media organisations must adapt to their audiences, feed them what they want, or die. But like the cows feeding on the meat-and-bone meal of other cows, this feedback loop creates the cultural equivalent of a neurodegenerative disease. I have been just as guilty of this as any other publisher, consumer, or creator of media. But in recent months I’ve largely stepped back from social media, stood outside this machine, and have watched it whir and whizz from the sidelines. It is possible to disengage and reconsider the machine from a safe distance, starving it of fuel. And every day at Quillette I am reminded by my writers and readers and subscribers that it is possible to publish and create journalism that is appreciated for its analytical and aesthetic value, rather than for the artillery it provides in a never-ending culture war. It's a war in which facts and reputations exist merely as cannon fodder, and where truth is less important than tribe. The media’s incentives may be broken, but we as individuals do not have to be.

In COVID terms, the middle of last autumn looked a lot like this one. After a rough summer, SARS-CoV-2 infections were down; hospitalizations and deaths were in a relative trough. Kids and workers were back in schools and offices, and another round of COVID shots was rolling out. Things weren’t great … but they weren’t the most terrible they’d ever been. There were vaccines; there were tests; there were drugs. The worst winter development the virus might produce, some experts thought, might involve the spawning of some nasty Delta offshoot.Then, one year ago this week, Omicron appeared. The first documented infection with the variant was identified from a specimen collected in South Africa on November 9, 2021; by December 1, public-health officials had detected cases in countries all around the globe, including the United States. Twenty days later, Omicron had unseated Delta as America’s dominant SARS-CoV-2 morph. The new, highly mutated variant could infect just about anyone it encountered—even if they’d already caught a previous version of the virus or gotten several shots of a vaccine. At the beginning of December, and nearly two years into the pandemic, researchers estimated that roughly one-third of Americans had contracted SARS-CoV-2. By the middle of February this year, that proportion had nearly doubled.Omicron’s arrival and rapid spread around the world was, and remains, this crisis’s largest inflection point to date. The variant upended scientists’ expectations about SARS-CoV-2’s evolution; it turned having COVID into a horrific norm. Now, as the U.S. approaches its Omicronniversary, conditions may seem ripe for an encore. Some experts worry that the emergence of another Greek-letter variant is overdue. “I’m at a loss as to why we haven’t seen Pi yet,” says Salim Abdool Karim, an epidemiologist at the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa. “I think there’s a chance we still will.”A repeat of last winter seems pretty unlikely, experts told me. But with a virus this unpredictable, there’s no guarantee that we won’t see disaster unspool again.[Read: The worst pediatric care crisis in decades]A lot has changed since last year. For one thing, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is higher. Far more people have received additional doses of vaccine, many of them quite recently, with an updated formula that’s better tailored to the variants du jour. Plus, at this point, nearly every American has been infected at least once—and most of them with at least some subvariant of Omicron, says Shaun Truelove, an epidemiologist and a modeler at Johns Hopkins University. These multiple layers of protection make it more challenging for the average SARS-CoV-2 spin-off to severely sicken people. They also raise transmission obstacles for the coronavirus in whatever form it takes.Omicron does seem to have ushered in “a different phase of the pandemic,” says Verity Hill, an evolutionary virologist at Yale. The variants that took over different parts of the world in 2021 rose in a rapid succession of monarchies: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. But in the U.S. and elsewhere, 2022 has so far been an oligarchy of Omicron offshoots. Perhaps the members of the Omicron lineage are already so good at moving among hosts that the virus hasn’t needed a major upgrade since.If that’s the case, SARS-CoV-2 may end up a victim of its own success. The Omicron subvariants BQ.1 and BQ1.1 appear capable of spreading up to twice as fast as BA.5, according to laboratory data. But their takeover in the U.S. has been slow and halting, perhaps because they’re slogging through a morass of immunity to the Omicron family. That alone makes it less likely that any single Omicron subvariant will re-create the sudden surge of late 2021 anytime soon. In South Africa and the United Kingdom, for instance, different iterations of Omicron seem to have triggered just modest bumps in sickness in recent months. (That said, those countries—with their distinct demographics and vaccination and infection histories—aren’t a perfect bellwether for the U.S.)For an Omicron 2021 redux to happen, SARS-CoV-2 might need to undergo a substantial genetic makeover—which Abdool Karim thinks would be very difficult for the virus to manage. In theory, there are only so many ways that SARS-CoV-2 can scramble its appearance while retaining its ability to latch onto our cells; by now, its options should be somewhat slimmed. And the longer the Omicron line of succession persists, the tougher it may be to upend. “It’s just getting harder to compete,” Hill told me.But the world has gotten overconfident before. Even if SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t produce a brand-new version of itself, low uptake of the bivalent vaccine could allow our defenses to wither, driving a surge all the same, Truelove told me. Our transmission-dampening behaviors too are slacker than they’ve been since the pandemic’s start. This time last year, 50 to 60 percent of Americans were regularly wearing masks. The latest figures, many of them several months old, are closer to 30 percent. “The more opportunities you give the virus to get into somebody,” Hill said, “the more chances you give it to get the group of mutations that could help it take off.” Immunocompromised people who remain chronically infected with older variants, such as Alpha or Delta, could also become the sites of new viral offshoots. (That may be how the world got Omicron to begin with.)Going on probability alone, “it seems more likely that we’ll keep going with these subvariants of Omicron rather than dealing with something wholly brand-new,” says Maia Majumder, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. But Lauren Ancel Meyers, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Texas at Austin, warns that plenty of uncertainty remains. “What we don’t have is a really data-driven model right now that tells us if, when, where, and what kind of variants will be emerging in the coming months and years,” she told me. Our window into the future is only getting foggier too as fewer people submit their test results—or take any test at all—and surveillance systems continue to go offline.It wouldn’t take another Omicron-type event to hurl us into disarray. Maybe none of the Omicron subvariants currently jockeying for control will surge ahead of the pack. But several of them might yet drive regional epidemics, Majumder told me, depending on the local nitty-gritty of who’s susceptible to what. And as winter looms, some of the biggest holes in our COVID shield remain unpatched. People who are immunocompromised are losing their last monoclonal-antibody treatments, and although powerful drugs exist to slash the risk of severe disease and death, useful preventives and treatments for long COVID remain sparse.[Read: The end of Evusheld]Our nation’s capacity to handle new COVID cases is also low, Majumder said. Already, hospitals around the country are being inundated with other respiratory viruses—RSV, flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus—all while COVID is still kicking in the background. “If flu has taken over hospital beds,” says Srini Venkatramanan, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Virginia, even a low-key wave will “feel like it’s having a much bigger impact.”As the country approaches its second holiday season with Omicron on deck, this version of the virus may “feel familiar,” Majumder pointed out. “I think people perceive the current circumstances to be safer than they were last year,” she said—and certainly, some of them are. But the fact that Omicron has lingered is not entirely a comfort. It is also, in its way, a reminder of how bad things once were, and how bad they could still get.

It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.Now that we’ve washed up on this unexpected shore, we can look back at the shipwreck that left us here with fresh eyes. Perhaps we can find some relief: Social media was never a natural way to work, play, and socialize, though it did become second nature. The practice evolved via a weird mutation, one so subtle that it was difficult to spot happening in the moment.The shift began 20 years ago or so, when networked computers became sufficiently ubiquitous that people began using them to build and manage relationships. Social networking had its problems—collecting friends instead of, well, being friendly with them, for example—but they were modest compared with what followed. Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.But now, perhaps, it can also end. The possible downfall of Facebook and Twitter (and others) is an opportunity—not to shift to some equivalent platform, but to embrace their ruination, something previously unthinkable.A long time ago, many social networks walked the Earth. Six Degrees launched in 1997, named after a Pulitzer-nominated play based on a psychological experiment. It shut down soon after the dot-com crash of 2000—the world wasn’t ready yet. Friendster arose from its ashes in 2002, followed by MySpace and LinkedIn the next year, then Hi5 and Facebook in 2004, the latter for students at select colleges and universities. That year also saw the arrival of Orkut, made and operated by Google. Bebo launched in 2005; eventually both AOL and Amazon would own it. Google Buzz and Google+ were born and then killed. You’ve probably never heard of some of these, but before Facebook was everywhere, many of these services were immensely popular.Content-sharing sites also acted as de facto social networks, allowing people to see material posted mostly by people they knew or knew of, rather than from across the entire world. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, was one; YouTube—once seen as Flickr for video—was another. Blogs (and bloglike services, such as Tumblr) raced alongside them, hosting “musings” seen by few and engaged by fewer. In 2008, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink published a book about blogs and social networks whose title summarized their average reach: Zero Comments.[Read: A day without Facebook]Today, people refer to all of these services and more as “social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist. Many of these sites framed themselves as a part of a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,” a term that had previously meant “satisfied” when pronounced differently. But at the time, and for years, these offerings were framed as social networks or, more often, social-network services. So many SNSes proliferated, a joke acronym arose: YASN, or “yet another social network.” These things were everywhere, like dandelions in springtime.As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of the trusted contacts of trusted contacts. LinkedIn promised to make job searching and business networking possible by traversing the connections of your connections. Friendster did so for personal relationships, Facebook for college mates, and so on. The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.The terms social network and social media are used interchangeably now, but they shouldn’t be. A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.A 2003 paper published in Enterprise Information Systems made an early case that drives the point home. The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.This was a novel concept. When News Corp, a media company, bought MySpace in 2005, The New York Times called the website a “a youth-oriented music and ‘social networking’ site”—complete with scare quotes. The site’s primary content, music, was seen as separate from its social-networking functions. Even Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook, to “connect every person in the world,” implied a networking function, not media distribution.The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them. LinkedIn did the same thing with business contacts, making referrals, dealmaking, and job hunting much easier than they had been previously. I started a game studio in 2003, when LinkedIn was brand new, and I inked our first deal by working connections there.[Read: What if Rumble is the future of the social web?]Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it. Sure, a blog could technically be read by anybody with a web browser, but in practice finding that readership was hard. That’s why blogs operated first as social networks, through mechanisms such as blogrolls and linkbacks. But on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.The notion of a global “town square,” as Elon Musk has put it, emerges from all of these factors. On Twitter, you can instantly learn about a tsunami in Tōhoku or an omakase in Topeka. This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”). In 2005, at an industry conference, I remember overhearing an attendee say, “I’m so behind on my Flickr!” What does that even mean? I recall wondering. But now the answer is obvious: creating and consuming content for any reason, or no reason. Social media was overtaking social networking.Instagram, launched in 2010, might have built the bridge between the social-network era and the age of social media. It relied on the connections among users as a mechanism to distribute content as a primary activity. But soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content. In their latest phase, their social-networking aspects have been pushed deep into the background. Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm. You still have to connect with other users to use some of these services’ features. But connection as a primary purpose has declined. Think of the change like this: In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.Social networks’ evolution into social media brought both opportunity and calamity. Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach. Ordinary folk could now make some money or even a lucrative living “creating content” online. The platforms sold them on that promise, creating official programs and mechanisms to facilitate it. In turn, “influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.The ensuing disaster was multipart. For one, social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.Obsession fueled the flames. Compulsion had always plagued computer-facilitated social networking—it was the original sin. Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships. It was just as common to obsess over having 500-plus connections on LinkedIn in 2003 as it is to covet Instagram followers today. But when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale. And the values associated with scale—reaching a lot of people easily and cheaply, and reaping the benefits—became appealing to everyone: a journalist earning reputational capital on Twitter; a 20-something seeking sponsorship on Instagram; a dissident spreading word of their cause on YouTube; an insurrectionist sowing rebellion on Facebook; an autopornographer selling sex, or its image, on OnlyFans; a self-styled guru hawking advice on LinkedIn. Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.The flip side of that coin also shines. On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive. When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality. That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result could help accelerate social media’s decline more generally. It would also be tragic for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely—and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation (although the risk of instrumentalizing one another was present from the outset). The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain. Someday, eventually, perhaps its web will unwind. But not soon, and not easily.A year ago, when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible. That’s a victory, if a small one, so long as the withdrawal doesn’t drive us back to the addiction. To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well. We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

We’ve seen it before. Far too often, in fact. And so far, the cycle is playing out in predictable stages.

First, Donald Trump or his disciples turn in a poor performance at the polls, leaving the GOP to mourn the loss of what were winnable races. Next, the pundits, politicians, and institutions on the right that haven’t had much use for Trump in the recent past bury the president and his movement in condemnations. Even some sources ensconced in Trump’s orbit appear to share the establishmentarians’ concerns, but not so much that they want to incur consequences for echoing them on the record. So, they share them with reporters on the condition of anonymity.

That’s where we are today in the immediate aftermath of a depressing midterm cycle for Republicans in which voters sought to cleanse the landscape of Trump’s hand-picked cronies and neophytes. If the cycle continues as it has in the past, this outburst of recriminations will soon face a retrograde counterattack from the forces that owe their political relevance to Trump. In the end, the fear of alienating the Republican voters who make up the base of the party’s primary electorate usually wins out over the instinct to appeal to a broader universe of voters. Trump’s critics stifle. His fans posture as though they’ve won something. Everyone retreats to their respective corners, and the GOP goes on losing.

That’s what we might expect to see soon enough, though we haven’t seen it just yet. The backlash against Trumpism—focusing less on MAGA-flavored policy preferences and more on the surly affectation the former president cultivates in his mimics—is coming from some auspicious quarters.

Former Trump adviser Jason Miller, who joined a select few who spent election night in Trump’s company, doesn’t evince any compunction about telling reporters that he’s advising Trump to keep his head down for a while. “Georgia needs to be the focus of every Republican in the country right now,” Miller said of the forthcoming runoff election between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Hershel Walker. For Miller, this means that Trump must, at the very least, put off his intention to announce another presidential bid next week. “I’m not alone when I say President Trump’s best moves are to put all his efforts to get Herschel Walker elected,” he added.

Is Trump even capable of making a positive contribution to that cause? Former Trump-era Press Sec. Kayleigh McEnany doesn’t think so. “I think he needs to put it on pause,” she told reporters. “I think we’ve got to make strategic calculations.” By contrast, she added, “Gov. DeSantis, I think he should be welcomed to the state, given what happened last night. You’ve got to look at the realities on the ground.” This concession to reality was echoed by Trump adviser David Urban. “It is clear the center of gravity of the Republican Party is in the state of Florida, and I don’t mean Mar-a-Lago,” he confessed.

The acute threat these admonitions present to Trump’s ego are unlikely to go unanswered. And, according to Jonathan Swan’s reporting in Axios, they won’t. While many of the courtiers caught in the former president’s realm are reportedly begging Trump to postpone a presidential announcement until the heat dies down, “he has no intention of listening to that advice.” And why should he? If Trump is looking for evidence that this burst of enthusiasm will fade like all the rest, he is getting the familiar feedback he needs.

“Several well-known Republicans declined an opportunity to tell Swan on the record that they feel it’s time to move on from Trump,” Axios reported. Indeed, the dispatches that reporters are filing from Mar-a-Lago are replete with unsourced quotes from people close to Trump who would not otherwise speak candidly about their boss’s predicament. And aspiring Republican ladder-climbers seem unwilling to give up.

In statements provided to the New York Times upon the paper’s solicitation, some MAGA-friendly current and future lawmakers turned in lifeless and perfunctory but nevertheless illustrative endorsements of their embattled leader.

“It is time for Republicans to unite around the most popular Republican in America who has a proven track record of conservative governance,” read Rep. Elise Stefanik’s endorsement of Trump’s presumed 2024 campaign. Senator-elect J.D. Vance staked out a less unctuous position, merely deeming Trump “the most popular figure in the Republican Party,” now and forever. Indiana Rep. Jim Banks offered the unassailable observation that Trump “transformed our party,” leaving it to his readers’ imaginations whether this metamorphosis has been a desirable one.

The nature of this particular backlash against Trump feels different only because it is occurring alongside the emergence of a real competing power center inside the GOP. Within the ocean of disappointments for the GOP, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis presides over an island of hope. Previously, when the power dynamic inside the GOP was unipolar, Trump could weather intra-party criticisms. The rise of a rival pole within the Republican infrastructure complicates things for Trump.

But that may not continue. And even if the draft DeSantis movement proves irresistible, it will not manifest in a declared DeSantis presidential bid until after the first legislative session of the governor’s second term is over in May. Plenty of time for present passions to cool. Nor is DeSantis likely to be the only figure who challenges Trump. And some potential rivals are far less popular among Republican voters. Their presence in the national debate may hasten the flight of anxious Republicans back into the Trump fold. The abject cowardice of Trump’s unnamed critics and his rote endorsers is frustratingly familiar to those who have seen similar anti-Trump insurrections put down.

Maybe this time is different. Who knows? But it doesn’t look different yet.

The headline yesterday in the German newspaper Der Spiegel summarized the mood among America’s allies: “The Trump Apocalypse Has Been Canceled.” Clearly the midterm results were excellent news for European leaders who continue to need support from Washington. But they shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that America has fully cast off Trumpism.Heading into Tuesday’s midterm elections, senior officials in Europe worried privately that voters would breathe fresh life into Trumpian isolationism. If a “red wave” had indeed materialized as expected, that would have empowered figures within the Republican Party who were growing more vocal about distancing Washington from the war in Ukraine.[Dominic Tierney: The rise of the liberal hawks]That stance was most loudly advocated by figures such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a staunch isolationist and Putin apologist and Washington’s most conspiratorial crackpot. She recently pledged that “under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine.” Kevin McCarthy, the aspiring speaker of the House should Republicans take that chamber, said he would stop writing a “blank check” for Ukraine. Former President Donald Trump has also directly criticized American support for Ukraine as excessive.But the bigger threat was a longer-term one: the return of Trump himself in 2024, a specter that continues to haunt allied politicians who try to convince their constituents of the value of being strategic friends with the United States. If more candidates endorsed by Trump had surged to victory, that would have strengthened his prospects. The reverse happened.  Why worry so much about Trump? Because he’s a strongman ideologue who appears to take pleasure in denigrating America’s alliances and insulting historical partners, but also in finding countless ways to praise one of America’s most dangerous adversaries, Vladimir Putin.“The overriding fear in Europe is a return of Trump,” Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a former president of Estonia, told me. “A landslide would have strengthened the hand of the isolationists. It seems the ‘old GOP’ of the McCain mold did not do badly.” Of course, that old guard has mostly been purged from the Republican Party or been transformed into something unrecognizable by Trump’s populism. But Ilves is right that a reasonably large number of senior Republicans still believe that America’s long-standing commitment to NATO and other allies is a valuable pillar of Washington’s foreign policy. They continue to accept, albeit sometimes grudgingly, that helping Ukraine and defending Europe against Russian aggression is in America’s interest.In 2016, countries that had based their foreign policy on a security umbrella and a trading relationship with the United States learned that, with just one isolationist election cycle, the umbrella could be snapped shut, the tight-knit trade unraveled by tariffs and insults. As a result, some in the policy world assumed that European countries would start to hedge their geopolitical bets, moving away from Washington and seeking more reliable partners, while beginning to take responsibility for their own security.[Read: Joe Biden has a Europe problem]But that hedge never really happened, because the transatlantic alliance is the only realistic option. Some European politicians have flirted with getting deeper into bed with Putin for Russian oil and natural gas, or staking their long-term strategy on being more closely tied to Beijing. But in 2022, neither path appears appealing, sensible, or politically feasible. The war in Ukraine has made Russia an international pariah. President Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism and human-rights abuses have increased domestic pressure on American allies to turn away from China. And India, Japan, or Brazil isn’t exactly a viable replacement for an alliance with the United States.And Europe simply isn’t in a position to go it alone on security. After all, the European Union has provided just 2.5 billion euros in military aid to Ukraine, with Germany adding just over a billion more and France a measly 220 million. The U.S. government, by contrast, had pledged or provided nearly 30 billion euros of military assistance as of early October. For the foreseeable future, Europe and Britain still desperately need the United States.The midterm results were therefore clearly better for the Western security alliance than an alternative scenario, in which Republicans swept Congress and Trump emerged as an invincible political kingmaker. But the rebuke to Trump embedded in the election outcomes should not make Europe complacent. Too many in London and Brussels are underreacting to the risks of a semi-authoritarian, isolationist United States, a realistic possibility in the not-so-distant future, with or without Trump.Granted, some aspects of European security have already been bolstered by the war in Ukraine. The biggest change, according to Ilves, is the application of Sweden and Finland to join NATO, which, in his view, “completely changes the security of Northern Europe, with the Baltic Sea turning into a NATO lake.”Nonetheless, European leaders are not moving far or fast enough, perhaps because they don’t fully realize how crazy and conspiratorial the Trumpian base has become: The most extreme have gone all in on rejecting the results of the 2020 election, and one in four party members believes in the core tenets of the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory. The loonier and more dangerous features of Trumpworld, which dominated headlines across Europe during the early days of the Trump administration, have mostly faded from the foreign press. If you pay attention only to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the ratcheting extremism and unapologetic authoritarianism within the Trumpian base may be obscured.European leaders are, for now, relieved. Aid to Ukraine will continue to flow. America will remain committed to tackling climate change, rather than be led by a man who denies its existence. A powerful ally will still have their back, for now. But the surprising results of the midterms should not fool anyone. The foreign-policy consensus is splintering in Washington, and it can no longer be taken for granted that America will remain a democratic stalwart. Its democracy, and its support for historical alliances, remain under threat from within.

The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?The answer, it turns out, is neither.As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024.1. Democratic turnout is going to boom in the post-Dobbs era.For 50 years, Republicans raged against the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to an abortion, arguing that the ruling should be struck down and abortion policies should be determined by individual states. When it finally happened—when Politico in early May published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade—I warned the evangelical leader Russell Moore on his podcast that Republicans, and especially conservative Christians, were about to deal with some devastating unintended consequences.Up until the 2022 election, most voters had engaged with the abortion issue as an every-four-years, very-top-of-the-ticket decision. Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, after all, and only a Supreme Court ruling could fundamentally change abortion policies in the country. (This was essential to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016: Nearly a quarter of his voters said the Supreme Court was their top issue in the election, after he’d promised to appoint “pro-life judges.”) Given that abortion rights were protected by Roe, the voters who identified abortion as their top priority always skewed Republican, and they were primarily mobilized by presidential campaigns and the prospect of Supreme Court vacancies.We have now entered a different political universe.More than a quarter of all voters named abortion as their top priority in this election. That number would be astonishing in any cycle, much less in a midterm campaign being waged against a backdrop of historic inflation and a looming recession. (The only issue of greater salience to voters overall—and not by much—was the economy, which 31 percent named as their top priority.) Even more surprising was the gap in partisan enthusiasm: Among the 27 percent of voters who prioritized abortion in this election, 76 percent supported Democratic candidates, according to exit polling, while just 23 percent backed Republicans.This is a direct result of the Dobbs ruling, which left individual states scrambling to figure out their own abortion regulations. With Republicans pushing a menu of restrictive measures across the nation, Democrats running for office at every level—Congress, state legislature, governor, attorney general—suddenly had ammunition to mobilize a party base that was, until that time, looking complacent. (When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in deep-blue Virginia last year, only 8 percent of voters named abortion as their top priority.) At the same time, Dobbs gave Democrats a tool to reach moderates and independents, particularly suburban women, who’d rejected the Republican Party in 2020 but were beginning to drift back toward the GOP because of concerns about inflation and crime.Democrats I spoke with throughout the summer and fall were hopeful that the abortion issue would be sufficient to prevent a Republican rout. It did that and much, much more. The Dobbs effect on this election is almost impossible to exaggerate. All five states that featured a ballot referendum on questions of abortion saw the pro-choice side win. (This includes Kentucky and Montana, states that President Joe Biden lost by 26 points and 16 points, respectively.) In those states alone, dozens of Democrats, from the top of the ballot to the bottom, received a potentially race-deciding boost from the abortion referendum. Even in the 45 states where abortion wasn’t literally on the ballot, it was clearly the issue that carried the day for a host of vulnerable Democrats.By every metric available—turnout, exit polling, individual races, and referendum results—abortion was the dominant motivator for Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, who have historically skipped midterm elections. It was also the dominant motivator for moderates and independents to stick with an unpopular president. The story of this election was that millions of voters who registered dissatisfaction with Biden and his economic policies voted for his party anyway. Why? Because they were more concerned about Republicans’ approach to abortion than Democrats’ approach to inflation.This is very bad news for the GOP. Democrats now have a blueprint for turning out the vote in a punishing political environment. In each of the two midterm elections under President Barack Obama, Democrats hemorrhaged congressional and state legislative seats because the party lacked a base-turnout mechanism—not to mention a persuasion tactic—to compensate for voters’ concerns over a sluggish economy. Politics is a copycat business. Now that Democrats have found a winning formula, you can expect to see entire field programs, messaging campaigns, microtargeting exercises, and ballot-initiative drives built around abortion access.A winning issue today is not necessarily a winning issue tomorrow. Abortion rights will rise and fall in terms of resonance, depending on the place, the party in control, and the policies that govern the issue locally. We’ve seen Democrats overplay their hand on abortion in the past, as in 2014, when Republicans flipped a U.S. Senate seat because the Democratic incumbent, Mark Udall, campaigned so myopically on abortion rights that even the liberal Denver Post editorial board ridiculed him as “Senator Uterus.” If Democrats rely too much on the issue—or, maybe the greater temptation, if they use their legislative power to advance abortion policies that are just as unpopular with moderates and independents as some of what Republicans campaigned on this cycle—their advantage could evaporate quickly.Still, the “Senator Uterus” episode came in the pre-Dobbs era, back when Americans still viewed the Supreme Court as the most immediate arbiter of abortion rights, and local candidates didn’t have nearly the reason (or incentive) to engage with the issue. This is now the post-Dobbs era. Voters who care about abortion are thinking less about Supreme Court justices and more about state legislators. The political advantage, at least for now, belongs to a Democratic Party that just weaponized the issue to turn out its base in a major and unexpected way.2. Bad candidates are an incurable (and fast-spreading) cancer.In Michigan, “Prop 3,” the ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution, drove enormous voter participation. Democrats were the clear beneficiary: They won all three statewide campaigns as well as the state’s most competitive congressional races. But Democrats did even more damage at the local level, ambushing Republicans in a number of off-the-radar local contests and winning back control of both state legislative chambers for the first time since 1983.But if you ask Republicans in the state, Prop 3 wasn’t the biggest contributor to the down-ballot massacre. Instead, they blame the terrible GOP candidates at the top of the ticket.Whereas Republicans in other states nominated one or perhaps even two far-right candidates to run in marquee statewide races, Michigan Republicans went for the trifecta. Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial nominee, was a political novice who had made extreme statements about abortion and gun control in addition to casting doubts on Trump’s 2020 defeat. Matt DePerno, the nominee for attorney general, was best known for leading a crusade to investigate and overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Kristen Karamo, the nominee for secretary of state, was a like-minded conspiracy theorist who manifestly knew nothing about the way Michigan’s elections are administered, and even less about the other duties of the job she was seeking.“You just can’t ignore the question of candidate quality,” Jason Roe, who ran Republican Tom Barrett’s campaign against Elissa Slotkin, one of the nation’s premier congressional contests, in Michigan’s Seventh District, told me. “We had a fundraising disadvantage, we had Prop 3 to overcome, but candidate quality—that was our biggest headwind. Tom ran about seven points ahead of the statewide ticket. I’m not sure what else he’s supposed to do.”The same pattern was visible in different parts of the country. In Pennsylvania, Democrats seized back control of the state House chamber for the first time in more than a decade. How? Two words: Doug Mastriano.In the campaign to become Pennsylvania’s next governor—what was once expected to be one of the nation’s tightest races—Mastriano, the GOP nominee, proved particularly unpalatable. It wasn’t just Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in that state, who stayed away; most GOP state lawmakers, even those who shared some of Mastriano’s fringe worldview as it pertains to election legitimacy or Christian nationalism, kept their distance.But it hardly mattered. The smoldering crater left by Mastriano’s implosion (he trailed by nearly 14 points as of yesterday evening) swallowed up Republicans all around him. Not only did Democrats improbably win back control of the state House; they also won all three of the state’s contested congressional races.Time and again on Tuesday, bad candidates sabotaged both their own chances of victory and also the electoral prospects of their fellow partisans on the ticket. And for most of these bad candidates, a common quality stood out: their views on the legitimacy of our elections.3. Voters prefer “out of touch”  to “out of their mind.”For Republicans, a central charge against Democrats throughout 2022 has been that Biden and his party are out of touch with ordinary Americans. A distilled version of the argument went like this: Democrats, the party of social and cultural elites, can’t relate to the economic pain being felt by millions of working people.That message penetrated—to a point.According to exit polls, 20 percent of voters said inflation has caused their families “severe hardship” over the past year. Among those respondents, 71 percent supported Republicans, and 28 percent supported Democrats. This is broadly consistent with other findings in the exit polling, as well as public-opinion research we saw throughout the summer and fall, showing disapproval of Biden and his stewardship of the economy. This would seem damning for Democrats—that is, until you consider the numbers in reverse and ask the obvious question: Why did three in 10 people who said they’ve experienced “severe hardship” decide to vote for the party that controls Congress and the White House?The simplest explanation is that although many of these voters think Democrats are out of touch, they also think Republicans are out of their minds. And it seems they prefer the former to the latter.“This is what I would see in our focus groups all summer, and it makes more sense now in retrospect,” says Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who produced a podcast series this year narrating her sessions with undecided voters. “We would have these swing voters who would say things are going bad: inflation, crime, Biden’s doing a bad job, all of it. And then you say, ‘Okay, Gretchen Whitmer versus Tudor Dixon. Who are you voting for?’ And even though they’re pissed at Whitmer—she hasn’t fixed the roads, she did a bad job with COVID—they were voting for her. Because they all thought Dixon was crazy.”It was the same thing, Longwell told me, in her focus groups all over the country—but particularly in the Midwest. She said that Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, kept getting the same benefit of the doubt as Whitmer: “They didn’t like a lot of his policies, but they thought Tim Michels”—his Republican challenger—“was an extremist, a Trumplike extremist.” Her conclusion: “A lot of these people wanted to vote for a Republican; they just didn’t want to vote for the individual Republican who was running.”For many voters, the one position that rendered a candidate unacceptable was the continued crusade against our elections system. In Pennsylvania, for instance, 34 percent of voters supported Democrats despite experiencing “severe hardship,” significantly higher than the national average. The reason: 57 percent of Pennsylvanians said they did not “trust” Mastriano to oversee the state’s elections.Another strategy Republicans used to portray Democrats as “out of touch” was to focus on rising crime rates in Democratic-governed cities and states. This was an unqualified success: Exit polling, both nationally and in key states, showed that clear majorities of voters believe Republicans are better suited to handle crime. In Michigan, 53 percent of voters said they trusted Dixon to deal with crime, as opposed to just 42 percent for Whitmer. But it barely made a difference in the outcome: Despite trailing by 11 points on that question, Whitmer actually won the race by 11 points. To understand why, consider that 56 percent of Michigan voters characterized Dixon as “too extreme.” Only 38 percent said the same about Whitmer.In the exit polls, perhaps the most provocative question was about society’s changing values relative to gender identity and sexual orientation. Half of all voters—exactly 50 percent—said those values are changing for the worse. Only 26 percent, meanwhile, said those values are changing for the better. (The remaining 24 percent did not have a strong opinion either way.) This is another data point to suggest that Democrats, by championing an ultraprogressive approach to LGBTQ issues, come across as out of touch to many Americans. And yet, even among the voters who expressed alarm over America’s values in this context, 20 percent voted for Democrats. This is a revelation: Given the ferocity of rhetoric in this campaign about drag shows, transgender athletes, and sexualized public-school curricula, one might have predicted virtually zero people would both decry the LGBTQ agenda and vote Democratic. But two in 10 voters—more than enough to tip any close election—did exactly that. Why?Again, the simplest explanation is probably best: Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right.That extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our elections system, endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol, cracking jokes and spreading lies about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And all of this extremism, which so many swing voters spurned on Tuesday, is embodied by one person: Donald Trump.4. Trumpism is toxic to the middle of the electorate.Here’s the scenario many of us were expecting on Election Day: The president, still the titular head of his party despite a growing chorus of questions about his age and competence, suffers a series of humiliating defeats that reflect the weakness of his personal brand and cast doubt on his ability to lead the party moving forward.And that’s precisely what happened—to the former president.If Tuesday felt strange—“the craziest Election Night I’ve ever seen,” as the elections-analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted—it’s because so many races revolved around someone who wasn’t running for anything. The reason that practically every first-term president in modern history has gotten pummeled in the midterms is that the opposition party typically cedes the stage and makes it all about him. The idea is to force the party in power to own everything that’s unsatisfactory about the country—its economic performance, military failures, policy misfires. It’s a time-honored tradition: Make the election a referendum on the new guy in charge.Until now.In each of the three states that saw major Democratic victories—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—25 to 30 percent of voters said they had cast their vote in opposition to Trump. To reiterate: This is a quarter of the total electorate, consistently across three of the nation’s most polarized battleground states, acknowledging that they were motivated by the idea of defeating someone who wasn’t on the ballot, and who currently holds no office. It’s easy to see why they succeeded: In these states, as well as nationally, the only thing worse than Biden’s approval rating was Trump’s. In state after state, congressional district after congressional district, voters rejected the Trump-approved candidate, for many of the same reasons they rejected Trump himself two years ago.Looking to 2024, GOP leaders will attempt to address the missed opportunities of this election. They will, no doubt, redouble their efforts to recruit strong candidates for statewide races; they will prioritize proven winners with mainstream views on abortion and democratic norms and the other issues by which moderates and independents will assess them. Whatever success party officials might find on a case-by-case basis, they will be treating the symptoms and ignoring the sickness. The manifest reality is that Trumpism has become toxic—not just to the Never Trumpers or the RINOs or the members of the Resistance, but to the immense, restless middle of the American electorate.We’ve long known that Trumpism without Trump doesn’t really sell; the man himself has proved far more compelling, and far more competitive, than any of his MAGA imitators. But what we saw Tuesday wasn’t voters selectively declining certain decaffeinated versions of Trump; it was voters actively (and perhaps universally, pending the result in Arizona’s gubernatorial race) repudiating the core elements of Trump’s political being.This trouncing, on its own, might have done little to loosen Trump’s chokehold on American conservatism. But because it coincided with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s virtuoso performance—winning reelection by an astonishing 1.5 million votes; carrying by double digits Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points; defeating his Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points statewide—there is reason to believe, for the first time in six and a half years, that the Republican Party does not belong to Donald Trump.“I’ll tell you why Tuesday was a bad night for Trump: Ron DeSantis now has 100 percent name ID with the Republican base. Every single Republican voter in the country knows who he is now,” says Jeff Roe, who managed Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign and runs the nation’s largest political-consulting firm. “A lot of these people are gonna say, ‘All these other Republicans lost. This is the only guy that can win.’ That’s really bad for Trump. Republicans haven’t had a choice in a long time. Now they have a choice.”Trump’s intraparty critics have long complained that his brutally effective takeover of the GOP obscures his win-loss record. This is someone, after all, who earned the 2016 nomination by securing a string of plurality victories against a huge and fragmented field; who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million; who gave away the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020; who lost the popular vote to Biden by 7 million and handed over the White House; and who just sabotaged the party’s chances of winning key contests in a number of battleground states.Earlier this week, Trump pushed back the expected launch of his 2024 presidential campaign. This was done, in part, so that he could appropriate the narrative of a grand Republican victory against Biden and the Democrats. Given his humiliating defeats, and how they’re being juxtaposed against the victories of his emerging young rival from Florida, Trump might want to move the announcement back up before a very different narrative begins to take hold.

I spend a lot of time and effort at my law school promoting the free exchange of ideas and ensuring that unpopular speakers have a platform. I do not believe I have ever advocated censorship of anything or anyone.

I was thus surprised (and, at first, amused) to read Jonathan Turley charging me with “call[ing] for Chinese-style censorship of the internet,” and claiming I was part of a group of “professors, writers, and editors” that was “against free speech” and “doing lasting damage not only to free speech but [to our] professions.” In support of this claim, Turley cited this sentence from a piece with Andrew Woods in the Atlantic in 2020: “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.” I normally would not respond to a misconstrual or misrepresentation of my work—it happens. But then I discovered that Turley had at least 20 times—in posts, op-eds, and an article—asserted that I “call[] for Chinese-style censorship.”

If you read the Atlantic piece, which Turley does not link to, you will see that neither the sentence nor the article calls for Chinese-style censorship of the internet. But when some conservatives commentators nonetheless construed the article along the lines of Turley back in 2020, Woods and I quickly wrote a follow-up piece on Lawfare to underscore that we “do not remotely endorse China-style surveillance and censorship, or claim that the United States should adopt China’s practices.” (It seems absurd to have to repeat those words.)

The Atlantic article was about the rise and rise of digital harms, and of private and public regulation of those harms, and it predicted that the general trend of increased regulation of those harms, especially by the government, would not soon abate. From the perspective of the 1990s, it argued, China was largely right, and the United States largely wrong, about the existence of such harms and the need to address them, either by public or private means, albeit in pursuit of very different values and ends in the two systems. (One window on the likelihood of more government involvement in the problem can be seen in the broad efforts by conservative justices, judges, commentators, and legislators—many of them libertarians—to regulate, or approve regulation of, social media platforms via antitrust, Section 230, common carrier theories, and the like, to ensure that they monitor speech in the “right” way.)

I am not going to relitigate what I said in the Atlantic or on Lawfare—anyone interested can read those pieces to see if Turley has accurately represented my views. But I do want to correct the record concerning some of Turley’s campier claims—somehow connected to the Atlantic article—about my actions and beliefs. In addition to not “call[ing] for Chinese-style censorship of the internet,” I am not “against free speech”; I am not “panic[ked] over free speech breaking out” on Elon Musk’s Twitter; I have not “echoed the call” for European Digital Service Act censorship; I am not part of an “alliance of academics, writers and activists calling for everything from censorship to incarceration to blacklists”; I have not “cross[ed] the Rubicon from free speech to censorship models”; I am not “pushing for greater censorship and speech controls”; I am confident that the Biden administration was not “drawing upon” my work in its jawboning efforts, which I oppose; and I am not part of “a strong movement on the left to regulate and censor the Internet.”

With that out of the way, let me state the obvious: Platform speech, as Elon Musk is learning, is a super-hard problem. The platforms have not done a great job of figuring out the right speech rules—assuming there is such a thing. And the federal government is very unlikely to do better, even assuming that it acts consistent with the First Amendment. Yet the current arrangement has produced an enormous variety of serious social harms, including harms to America’s free speech culture. I haven’t seen a workable solution to this foundational conundrum, and I do not have one. Woods and I will have much more to say on these hard topics in a book we are writing about the naivete and failure of the 1990s American internet project, and the tragic trade-offs that digital networks pose to foundational American values. More to come.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Celebrity news doesn’t typically interest me, but a quote from the actor Scarlett Johansson recently caught my eye. The 37-year-old has been married three times, and in an interview, she gave her assessment of why so many celebrity marriages seem to fail. The reason she cited from firsthand experience wasn’t being too busy, or apart too much, or filming sex scenes with someone who isn’t your spouse. “If one person is more successful than the other,” she noted, “there may be a competitive thing.”It’s easy to see how competition could wreck a marriage when millions of dollars and adoring fans are at stake. But the rest of us really aren’t so different. We all have individual interests that are important to us, and they can readily fester into competition in a relationship. Small things such as who unloads the dishwasher can become a contentious issue of fairness; when one partner earns more money than the other, it can stimulate rivalry even between people in love.As a man who has been married for the past 31 years, I know this is natural. But competition doesn’t have to be the predominant language of a relationship, nor should it be. The most harmonious couples are the ones who learn to play on the same team. Their predominant mode of interaction is collaborative, not competitive.Few people, I imagine, enter into a romantic union seeing it explicitly as a competition. “I’m going to kick his butt” doesn’t make for a great wedding vow. However, this is effectively what happens when each partner prioritizes “I” over “we,” creating a clash between two identities, according to scholars writing in the journal Self and Identity. In contrast, couples who see themselves as part of a unique couple identity—where neither partner’s individual identity is dominant—tend to be better at coping with conflict. This makes sense: Good teams see internal strife as a problem to solve together, because if unresolved, it lowers the whole team’s morale and performance.[Read: The secret to love is just kindness]The key is not to eradicate all competition, but to change what kind of competition we’re engaging in. A study of young basketball players published in 2004 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology makes this clear. Researchers asked a group of boys to shoot free throws. They found that when boys cooperated to get the most free throws as a team and competed against other teams, both their performance and enjoyment were higher than when they competed individually without the support of a cooperative relationship. The implication for love is clear: The world can be harsh and competitive, so face it together—arm in arm. Your partner’s struggles are your struggles, and their victories are your victories. Your adversaries are the problems you both face.Competitive personal relationships are like a prisoner’s dilemma, a famous model in which two partners in crime are motivated only by self-interest. Call them Bonnie and Clyde. If, when captured and interrogated separately by the police on suspicion of bank robbery, Bonnie and Clyde look out only for themselves, they have an incentive to rat out the other to get off easier—but both will lose and go to jail. As researchers have shown, however, if Bonnie and Clyde both independently seek the best outcome for the team (staying silent) rather than what’s good for themselves (squealing), they receive the smallest punishment collectively and the greatest number of years free to be together. I certainly hope your romance does not involve bank robbery, but the lesson is the same: In a competitive relationship, each partner looks out for her or his own interest, and both sides end up getting less than they want and feeling aggrieved. When both sacrifice individually for the joint good of the couple, both are better off.“Sacrifice” implies loss, but a collaboration can feel like a win to both people. For instance, when it comes to purchasing decisions, such as buying a car, psychologists have found that if both partners cede some control in service of a mutual decision, it doesn’t feel like anyone loses. On the contrary, both partners tend to come away from those decisions feeling a greater sense of power in and satisfaction with the relationship. In my experience, this approach works for all kinds of decisions. For example, I know partners who come out of graduate school together who—instead of moving where one person will have the higher-paying and more prestigious job—resolve to go where their combined income and job satisfaction is highest.[Read: The secret to a fight-free relationship]This approach also makes inevitable conflict less harmful to a relationship. All couples have disagreements, but the happier ones frame them as shared problems to manage jointly. Those that have a competitive conflict style (associated with win-lose arguing) tend to be unhappier in their marriage than those with a collaborative conflict style (where the couple works together to find solutions). This pattern is clear even in the way they speak. Researchers studying couples’ arguments have found that those that use “we-words” when they fight are apt to have less cardiovascular arousal, fewer negative emotions, and higher marital satisfaction than those that use “me/you words.”If your relationship is a little too competitive and not collaborative enough, there are a few effective steps to consider.1. More we, less me.We often assume that our thoughts and emotions control what we say, but a lot of research shows the opposite as well: What you choose to say can affect your attitude through the “As-If Principle,” in which acting as if you feel something can induce the brain to make it so. If you want your partnership to be more about “we” than “you versus me,” start making a joint effort to talk that way. Instead of saying, “You don’t try to understand my feelings,” try, “I think we should try to understand each other’s feelings.” Make we your default pronoun when talking with others. If you like staying out late, but your partner hates it, say, “We prefer not to stay out so late” when you turn down a 10 p.m. dinner for your partner’s sake.2. Put your money on your team.Many couples act individualistically when it comes to their money—keeping separate bank accounts, for example. This is generally a missed opportunity to think and act as a team. Indeed, scholars have demonstrated that couples that pool all their money tend to be happier and more likely to stay together. This might be harder for partners with very different spending habits. But research has shown that people tend to spend more practically when they pool their resources.3. Treat your fights like exercise.Something every inveterate gym-goer will tell you is that if you want to make fitness a long-term habit, you can’t view working out as punishment. It will be painful, sure, but you shouldn’t be unhappy about doing it regularly, because it makes you stronger. For collaborative couples, conflict can be seen in the same way: It’s not fun in the moment, but it is an opportunity to solve a problem collaboratively, which strengthens the relationship. One way to do this is to schedule time to work through an issue, rather than treating it like an emotional emergency. Look at a disagreement as something we need to find time to fix, instead of me being attacked by you, which is a disturbing emergency.One final note to consider as you work toward greater collaboration in your relationship: This does not mean losing your identity. Collaboration requires people to choose to work together, not to cease being individuals. There is no “us” when one or both lose the self. “The biggest danger, that of losing one’s own self,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife … is sure to be noticed.” It is, he believed, the basis of despair—certainly not of conjugal bliss.In love, collaboration brings happiness when it is the ultimate expression of mutual freedom—the decision of each partner to blend the “I” into the cosmic “we” that, almost like magic, expands our happiness beyond what either of us could imagine alone.

President Biden expressed confidence Wednesday that next year’s Congress — likely with at least one chamber under Republican control – will maintain robust U.S. support for Ukraine. But his certainty is not shared by many on Capitol Hill and in Kyiv. The struggle inside the GOP could have a massive impact on Ukraine’s fight for survival against Russia.

At his post-election news conference, Biden defended his administration’s support for Kyiv, maintaining that he had not given Ukraine a “blank check” and bragging that “there’s a lot of things that Ukraine wants we didn’t do.” He also said that he expects Republicans in the House, likely to be led next year by Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), to come out in favor of continued aid to Ukraine.

“I would be surprised if Leader McCarthy even has a majority of his Republican colleagues who say they’re not going to fund the legitimate defensive needs of Ukraine,” he said.

Biden either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to acknowledge that there’s no agreement in Congress on what the words “legitimate” or “defensive” mean in this context. What’s clear is that the congressional path to approving new Ukraine aid next year will be rocky.

According to several lawmakers and senior congressional staffers, McCarthy and other GOP House leaders are already discussing how to alter the Ukraine aid package in the next Congress to respond to a wide array of concerns within their caucus. Some far-right lawmakers are calling for a complete cutoff of aid to Ukraine. But many Republicans are looking to cut much of the economic assistance while keeping or even increasing the military component — something of a compromise.

But cutting the economic aid now, most of which is direct support to the Ukrainian government, would be ill-timed and dangerous, Ukrainian officials told me. The Ukrainian economy could break down without continued support from the United States, Europe and the International Monetary Fund. If that happens, their military can’t fight, they said.

“The financial support for our public finances in our eyes … is a part of security and military support,” Taras Kachka, Ukraine’s deputy minister of economy, told me. “Without this financial support, our public finances would collapse. And it means that this is immediate victory for Russia.”

Ukraine needs $38 billion in direct economic support next year, Yulia Svyrydenko, Ukraine’s minister of economy and first vice prime minister, told me. Ukraine’s economy shrank by 35 percent this year and taxes cover only about half of the government’s budget, she said. Ukraine is also facing attacks on its energy grid and infrastructure even as it tries to launch “early recovery” efforts such as building houses for returning refugees and financing new businesses.

“We really appreciate the help you provided, but for us it’s very important to keep our economic system running, and that is the most essential thing for us right now,” she said.

The United States has pledged about $12 billion in direct economic aid to Ukraine for 2022, out of $54 billion in total aid so far. Congressional sources said that a temporary spending bill in December will likely keep the economic aid going at the rate of $1.5 billion per month until the spring. That’s when the congressional showdown over the money will come to a head.

Republicans have legitimate concerns about how this aid has been handled. Conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation argue, with some merit, that U.S. aid to Ukraine has lacked sufficient debate, oversight and accountability. Many point out (rightly) that the European Union has failed to pull its weight. The E.U. has promised robust financial support for Ukraine in 2023, but its past pledges have gone largely unfulfilled.

While there are many GOP leaders who internally defend economic assistance, there’s much less support for a separate bucket of humanitarian aid, which is largely administered by the State Department and USAID, aides said.

Several GOP officials told me that they were confident, like Biden, that in the end both military and economic aid will continue. Others aren’t so sure. Attacks on the assistance program by allies of former president Donald Trump are continuing to erode GOP support, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told me. And with a slim majority, whoever becomes House speaker will face an internal GOP revolt if they don’t cut Ukraine aid, he said.

“Putin has a backup plan if he can’t defeat Ukraine militarily,” Murphy said. “He is going to keep the war going long enough to bankrupt Ukraine and force them to sue for a humiliating peace. That means U.S. support for Ukraine is half-baked if it doesn’t address both the military and economic threats Russia presents.”

The costs of supporting Kyiv financially are small compared to the costs for the United States and the world if Ukraine falls. If Ukraine collapses economically, that would exacerbate the energy crisis, the food crisis, the refugee crisis and the global economic slowdown. Let’s hope that the new Congress doesn’t succumb to this penny-wise, pound-foolish approach.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to the show. So we are recording here on Wednesday, and we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’ve asked my revered, honored editor Aaron Retica, the man who makes all of my thoughts somewhat worth thinking, and certainly somewhat worth reading, to come on and to have the conversation with me that we often have sort of every week in politics, but certainly around elections, to try to talk about what mattered, what we think is important, where we think our coverage should go. But rather than having all that happen in private, we thought that we would do it in public. And it’d be a way to work through an election that we do not yet have all the information on, we should not yet have too much confidence about, but that we at least want to process a little bit in real time. And so I should say as we’re recording, here’s where things stand. The Senate looks like a pretty good shot for Democrats to keep it, if you look at “The New York Times” needle, which has now stop moving. It’s at lean Democratic. It’s totally possible that what we’re going to see is the Senate control going to a runoff in Georgia, depending on how things like Nevada turn out. We don’t know yet. The House probably looks like Republicans are going to take control, but it is not nearly as sure a thing as one would have thought. And so overall, you have a lot more stability in this election than many expected. This election looks like the election the polls promised us, an election where Democrats did a lot better than you would think they would do for a midterm with inflation high and Joe Biden’s approval ratings low. Republicans did a lot worse than you might have thought they would perform. And so the strange thing that has to be explained is not a wild swing in one direction or another, but the absence of a wild swing in one direction or another. But with that, I’m going to turn this over to Aaron, who will pepper me and interrogate me with all the questions he has brought to bear.

So let’s start with a happy Republican, Ron DeSantis. He crushed his opponent. People got very excited about this. During the election itself, on Election Day, the chattering classes, the political chattering classes were freaking out, because Miami-Dade was looking like DeSantis would win, and he did. He rolled out an enormous juggernaut and did incredibly well. So immediately, the narrative, as people like to say — becomes OK, DeSantis is the winner. You have some heterodox thoughts on that. Let’s start there. How great a night was it for DeSantis?

ezra klein

Oh, DeSantis. So I don’t want to say I have overly heterodox views on Ron DeSantis. What I have heterodox views on is the narrative. The big narrative of the night is Republicans did poorly everywhere, basically, except for Ron DeSantis, who wrecked Charlie Crist in Florida — won by, I think, around or a bit less than 20 points. And doesn’t this just show that DeSantis is the future of the party? The Trump acolytes didn’t do as well as, certainly, Donald Trump had hoped, certainly as well as they had hoped. And maybe — maybe, maybe. I guess my question is if there is anything so profound that actually needs to be explained in DeSantis’s victory margin? So just a couple points for comparison here. Marco Rubio, running for Senate in Florida, he beat Val Demings by a pretty close margin to how DeSantis beat Crist. And I think everybody agrees that Val Demings is a fresher and more capable candidate at this point than Charlie Crist. Go over to Ohio. Mike DeWine won his gubernatorial election by much more than DeSantis won. I mean, last I looked, it was about 25 points. Nobody’s talking about Republican Mike DeWine, who just stomped to victory in Ohio, as the future of all American politics, or some political model that we all need to reckon with at a deep level. Go over to Colorado, on the other side, Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado — Colorado’s about 80 percent reported as I’m speaking. It’s been pretty stable in the margin. It could change, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt, but he’s up by 15, 17 points. That’s a pretty big win for a Democratic governor in a state that is no bluer than Florida is red, and I think at this point arguably less blue than Florida is red. And he ran ahead of Michael Bennet, who also did quite well and won the Senate election in Colorado. If you go back to 2018, you can see Tom Wolf, the incumbent Governor of Pennsylvania, the Democrat back then — that’s a big Democratic year. And Pennsylvania is a closer state than Florida. He wins by almost 20 points. I say all this only to say that — look, if I were DeSantis, I’d be thrilled. If I were DeSantis, I would be plotting my 2024 run. But I think the narrative is so interested and attuned to Ron DeSantis that we are taking a victory that is quite well within the established boundaries of how incumbent governors run in a state that leans in their direction, in a year that leans in their direction, as some kind of cataclysmic political performance when it just looks like a strong win. And it looks like strong wins that other governors are putting up around the country, and have put up in the past. So I don’t know. I think that the press is very interested in DeSantis and is making not more out of his win maybe than he deserves, but less out of other people’s wins than they deserve, in a way that is making him look more unique than he is.

Let me push back against that a little bit, Ezra. So if he’s winning Miami-Dade, that’s a huge thing, right? If the future of elections in America is in part about who’s going to win the Latino vote in various different places — and obviously, that’s a complicated question. Florida is a very specific Latino vote. It’s always specific. We talk about the Latino vote as if it’s a thing, but it’s a million different things. But DeSantis runs his culture war playbook. DeSantis keeps his state more or less open, and then is rewarded for it with a gigantic victory. So that’s not nothing, right? It’s something he can work with. My question about this, though, is — like, here’s the part about Trump and DeSantis I don’t understand. Republicans actually have a very narrow margin — way of winning national elections, presidential elections, right? How does DeSantis, if he somehow manages to defeat Trump — how does he win if Trump says, don’t vote for this guy? Like, even, if 5 percent Trump voters won’t vote for DeSantis nationally, that’s it. So I don’t — I actually find the DeSantis speculation a little weird.

ezra klein

So on the Miami-Dade question — and so the backdrop to that is that Miami-Dade is a big county in Florida, heavy Hispanic population. Democrats have typically done very well there, and DeSantis won it. And I just don’t exactly know what to make of what we’ve seen in Florida over the past couple of elections. There’s clearly compositional changes in the Florida electorate, even more so after the pandemic. A lot of people went there. People retired there. Then, a bunch of people left there during the hurricane, particularly if they could leave there. I know people who were living in Florida six months ago who are not living there now. They were Democratic voters. We know Florida’s been trending more and more Republican. If I’m not wrong, Trump’s most significant improvement — certainly, in a swing state from 2016 — was in Florida in 2020. And so I wonder if we have gotten into a position where we should understand Florida as a much redder state than we do, so we are more surprised by close elections there than we should be. There are clearly dynamics among the Florida Hispanic population that are not the same dynamic you see in every other state. I mentioned Colorado, that’s also got a high proportion of Hispanic voters, and Democrats did very well in Colorado. We don’t really know what has happened in Arizona yet, but it’ll be interesting, and it looks to me like Mark Kelly is at least going to pull it out in the Senate. So I just don’t know how to read Florida. And how you read Florida has a lot to do with how you read DeSantis, because if you understand Florida as a real swing, and what DeSantis did is turn it red, I mean, that’s a remarkable political achievement. And if you understand Florida as more like Ohio, then it looks more like what Mike DeWine did in Ohio, which isn’t to say it’s not a strong performance. It’s just to say it’s not as unique a performance as people think. So then you bring up the question of Donald Trump. And yeah, I mean, I think in a lot of ways things play out in the moment are not the way they play out over time. And I’ll give two examples — one sort of the DeSantis example, and one the Joe Biden example, of the way a narrative can in the moment mislead you. This looks great for DeSantis, right? He’s getting all this coverage. He did great when a lot of Donald Trump’s people did poorly. What this is actually going to do for Donald Trump is make clear that his main competition in the world, the person who could turn him from — in his own mind — winner to loser is DeSantis. And he is going to put everything he has into destroying this person. So maybe a more normal performance, right — a 10 point win or an 8 point win or something for DeSantis — would have kept him a little bit more out of Trump’s sights for longer, and would have been better for him. Or who knows? Maybe DeSantis crushes Trump and that’s the end of that. But I do think it’s a mistake right now that the narrative in the press is thinking about 2024 as this two man race, because the nature of Trump and DeSantis both being in the game, and possibly destroying each other like Godzilla and Mothra, is that it creates space for other candidates to emerge. It makes for a more multi-candidate race than it otherwise would be. If it was just Donald Trump or it was just Ron DeSantis, they would have that lane, like, that main lane of the Republican Party right now, that post-Trump lane to themselves. But it won’t be. And they may well split that lane. And that might create space for a Nikki Haley, a Glenn Youngkin, a Tim Scott, somebody we’re not thinking of right now, to win in New Hampshire. And all of a sudden, a snowball effect happens. And Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are doing to each other what Chris Christie and Marco Rubio did to each other — what Chris Christie did to Marco Rubio. And so things could just go in very weird ways. And I just — I would really urge people to not get too caught up in just, like, the idea that only DeSantis and Trump — Mike Pence might run. It’s going to be very weird in 2024. I’ll note there’s a similar thing, I think, with Joe Biden. Biden and the Democrats clearly overperformed compared to what people were expecting in the midterm. And on the one hand, that puts Biden in a stronger position, if Kevin McCarthy, as Speaker, is going to have a very narrow majority. There’s a good chance Chuck Schumer will remain Majority Leader. That puts Biden in a much better governing position. It puts Republicans in a worse position. But it makes it harder for Biden to do what Bill Clinton was able to do after 1994, what Barack Obama was able to do after 2010, and let Republicans create so much chaos and become so unpopular, become this whole pole of American governance that he can stand presidentially against, sort of be the bulwark between the country and Republican cataclysm. And so in a way, I’m not sure this outcome is as strengthening for Biden 2024 as really a worse one would be. Now, I’m not saying that should make you want a worse outcome, right? I don’t think you should want worse things based on these speculative reads of the future. But I am saying it’s one reason I’m very mistrustful of the political narratives that take hold immediately after an election because everything that happens creates a counter-reaction. And we’re often looking at the thing that happened without assessing or even knowing what kind of backlash or response it’s going to create in a very, very dynamic system. And oftentimes, that response ends up mattering as much or more as the original event. So this is where we are today. Where we’re going to be in a year, who knows?

Let’s just stay with Trump for a second. What does he do now? How does he read this election? What do you think he sees? I mean, obviously he sees some victories that he’s taking responsibility for. That’s always how he behaves. But in his colder calculus, what does he see?

ezra klein

The way you phrased that is, I think, impossible. I mean, I think Donald Trump walks around the world, and he looks at the world, and he thinks — that’s me, and that’s also me. And that’s also related to me. And that’s me too. And what level of rationality, what level of cold analysis he has I’ve never known. And I don’t know that anybody does. I think that the coverage of Ron DeSantis today is going to drive him insane. I mean, he was already starting to say some very weird things about DeSantis, saying I know more about him than anybody but his wife, and the things I could tell you — like, the sort of threat that he has secret negative information about Ron DeSantis that he will reveal to the public.

Plus the nickname.

ezra klein

Ron DeSanctimonious.

ezra klein

Ron DeSanctimonious, which — also, in the way that Trump is sometimes a little bit of a genius, like a bullying genius at pinpointing somebody’s actual weak spot, it’s not an amazing nickname. It’s not quite as good as like Low Energy Jeb. But Trump has this kind of manic circus charisma where he doesn’t seem to take it all so seriously. He seems a little bit, like, always winking at you. And DeSantis has none of that. It’s like a complete literalization of Trumpism. Trump is seeing something clearly there that’s I think actually quite interesting. So yeah, I mean, I think the thing Donald Trump wakes up and sees — I don’t think Donald Trump cares about the actual results of things. When not enough people attended his inauguration, he told his press secretary to go out and lie about it. And he might really have believed his own lies. You know, he’s endlessly talked himself into ideas about his Electoral College victory that clearly weren’t true. Or he would believe a poll result that was actually a subgroup of a random poll in the state. I mean, like everything you ever hear about talking to Donald Trump about the outcome of anything is that you’re talking to somebody living in a world of their own fantasies, spun around tiny grains of sand of truth, right? And after 2020, I don’t know what Donald Trump truly believes about whether or not he won or he lost. But it doesn’t matter. Like, I think he believes what he needs to believe. And so he has moved forward on the view that he won, and has made everybody else move forward in either agreement or opposition to that view, too. So I don’t think Donald Trump wakes up today, and — whatever he says in public — starts going through the exit polls in private. I think he watches “Fox and Friends” and I think he flicks through the other cable news channels. And he sees everybody talking about how Ron DeSantis is so great, and Donald Trump’s candidates didn’t do that well. And it’s Ron DeSantis’s party — and oh, did you notice in the betting markets, all of a sudden, Ron DeSantis is ahead of Donald Trump in the 2024 betting. And I think the guy’s going to have a conniption. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Let’s talk about how we got to where we are today, because it really is mystifying, right? You have a very high inflation rate, which just on its own should have meant that there was much more punishment for Democratic candidates all over the United States. You have gas prices that were very high — fluctuating a little bit, but super high. One thing that people are citing as — an example of that you talked about at the beginning is the idea of calcification. You just had Lynn Vavreck and John Sides on your show. And Lynn just did a great piece for us on this subject. And the basic idea is that everything is at such parity, everything is so connected, half and half, and the parties have separated ideologically so that there are very few heterodox people within those parties — is that the reason that inflation did not matter as much as it did? Do you think that the calcification controlled voting, polarization prevented a big swing? What happened here?

ezra klein

So first, I cannot recommend enough that people go listen to that show with Lynn Vavreck and John Sides. So they are political scientists who just wrote this big book, along with another co-author, on 2020. And what they show is that 2020 looks just eerily like 2016. For all that happens, like Donald Trump’s whole first term, impeachments, pandemic, Russia, everything — right, all that craziness we lived through, basically nobody changes their mind about anything. You could have predicted 2020 very, very, very closely just by knowing 2016. So that is calcification. People are not changing their minds. But the other opposing force is parity. For whatever reason, and this is much more of a mystery than people would think it is — I mean, I actually talked at some length with John and Lynn about it. And we ended up cutting that section of the conversation because the answers are just so unclear — the parties are very closely divided in power. And so on the one hand, huge events in American politics, huge changes, are not shifting large numbers of the vote. And on the other, you shift one or two or three percentage points of the vote, and control of everything goes the other way, right? I mean, both the 2016 and the 2020 elections could have been flipped, presidentially, by the movement of well fewer than 100,000 voters. And here, too, this stayed very, very closely divided. You’re going to have a 50/50 or 51/49 Senate. You’re going to have a very closely divided House. And so not many people moved because the parties are very different. But on the other hand, because they are so narrowly matched, those movements could change everything. So then you get into inflation. And inflation was the force that could have made this — or in many of our expectations — would have made this something like 2010, where a bad economy is understood to have created a huge midterm wave for Republicans. And it didn’t. Now maybe that expectation was wrong. Matt Grossman, who’s a political scientist, tweeted out this chart that was really surprising to me showing that there’s a very weak relationship between the rate of inflation and midterm election results. And he actually also showed there’s a pretty weak relationship between employment and midterm election results. But now, you might say that’s mediated by something else, so something that Sides and Vavreck show in their book is that the really strong predictor of what happened in the 2020 election was Trump’s approval rating. His approval rating was bad. He did about as badly as that would anticipate. And so yeah, there’s all kinds of weird stuff happening in the economy in 2020, but basically, what ended up mattering is how people absorbed that into their view of the president. And so at the end of that conversation, I asked them what the fundamentals — sort of presidential approval and the economy — would say about Democrats in 2022. And John says, basically, if I were a Democrat, I’d be terrified. This looks bad. Joe Biden’s approval rating is bad and inflation is high. And so the interesting thing to me is that Democrats did not perform as badly, not just as inflation might have made you think — but yeah, maybe inflation doesn’t work like that in midterms. Maybe I need to take the Grossman chart more seriously. But they didn’t perform as badly as Joe Biden’s approval rating would have predicted. And that’s the real surprise. There was a decoupling of how people felt about Joe Biden from what they did in the election. And I think that reflects that the driver for Democrats is fear of Republicans. You don’t have to like Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi to fear Republicans coming back in power, to fear what they would do to, say, a woman’s right to choose in a post Roe landscape, to fear what would happen if they breached the debt ceiling or have a lot of power over election administration. So negative polarization can be a profound driver of votes. You’ll sometimes hear politicians say things like voting is an act of hope. Yes, sometimes, but voting is also very much an act of fear. And as the parties become more different, as the Republican Party in my view becomes more deranged and more frightening in terms of how it sees the system, and what it will permit and what it will accept within its own ranks, that fear based voting becomes more prevalent on the Democratic side. And so you don’t have the collapse in turnout among Democrats in 2022 that you might have expected. I mean, that’s why midterms swing so much. The governing party becomes dispirited and they don’t turn out. Republicans might have had a little bit of a turnout edge this year. I’ve seen some varying analyzes of that. I don’t think we’re really going to the numbers on that for some time. But what’s clear is Democratic turnout did not collapse. And as such, Democrats were able to hold on.

I’m going to say that the debt ceiling was not a big factor in how people voted out of fear.

ezra klein

You don’t think they read my piece on that?

I don’t know, just a thought. But obviously, fear is critical, right? It’s —

ezra klein

But wait? What do you think about this, Aaron. What do you think is the driver?

It’s really hard to know. I mean, the calcification thing is really weird, right, because it’s not that the parties are static. There’s been tremendous movement from side to side. College educated people have moved out of the Republican Party into the Democratic Party in huge numbers. In smaller numbers, but still significant numbers, Black and Hispanic men in particular have moved, as far as voting goes, from the Democratic column to the Republican column. So the coalitions have actually changed even though there’s parity, right, which is very strange. So I’m not sure what happened. I do think fear of Republican majorities is there. There’s no question about that. I was joking about the debt ceiling. I don’t think people are too worried about the debt ceiling. I do think it was interesting. The Times/Siena poll said that a lot of people were worried about what Republicans were going to do if they were in control of more of the levers of democracy, but they didn’t actually care that much about it. But maybe they did. Maybe it had some influence on how people voted. And maybe people understand more than a lot of media chatters think about what the president can and cannot do about inflation, about gas prices — right, because inflation is a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, Western European countries are doing worse in most of the cases than the United States is. So maybe people are more resigned in a way, and so they weren’t voting on that because they didn’t think the president could do anything about it. I don’t know.

ezra klein

Well, let me add two ideas to that. So one is that I don’t think Republicans ever convinced anybody they had a plan on inflation. And they didn’t pretend to have a theory that they messaged repeatedly and consistently in a clear way, that if you elect us, this is why inflation is going to come down. I mean, in 2010, Republicans really put a lot on the budget deficit. They really put a lot on that what was happening in the economy was Democrats are running up all this debt, and it was making businesses uncertain. And people — wrongly, often, in my view — but nevertheless intuitively feel like it’s a bad thing when government runs up all this debt. And so they really pushed this sort of view of Republicans as the responsible belt tighteners. And that was going to — something, something, something, and make a better economy. And I disagreed with that view, but it was a message. And the view was that it resonated. I mean the view is that it resonates so much that Barack Obama, then — and his administration — make this, I think, quite ill chosen turn to austerity in the aftermath. But Republicans didn’t try anything like that this year. So that’s one thing. And the other is that to pull back the curtain on our process a bit, you and I were working — and I was working on this piece for a bit — that was about on the off chance, and it turned out there was an off chance — maybe even still is an off chance — the Democrats end this with control of the House and Senate maintained, what are they going to do? What’s their agenda? What is the positive Democratic agenda going forward? And I scrapped that column, and I scrapped it in part because I don’t think Democrats actually have any agreed upon positive agenda going forward. I don’t think they were expecting to hold it. I don’t think they will hold the House, for that matter. So that’ll probably prove to be right. But one, there wasn’t an answer there, because they weren’t trying to come up with an answer there. I mean, people talk about child care, this or that. But they didn’t really have anything. And the second thing is they didn’t have anything in part because they didn’t think that was how they were going to get people to vote for them. They wanted Republicans scariness to be the center of the agenda. And within Republican scariness, I think there’s a miasma of different things, right? I mean, I take your point that they’re not — most people aren’t sitting around being, like, well, we’ve got a debt ceiling coming up, and Congress is going to need to raise that, or the full faith and credit of the blah, blah, blah is going to go down. What I do think happened, though, was a sense that there’s just a lot of chaos on the Republican side. They are willing to do a bunch of things that are kind of frightening, from elections to abortion to the economy, to just like what the Republican Party is and represents. You can’t cut out from all this the kinds of people they nominated in a bunch of key races, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia. So part of it was a candidate quality issue. Like, people looked at the actual person who might represent them and said, I don’t want this person. But Democrats really chose not to run on a positive agenda. They chose to run functionally on — I mean, you don’t want these maniacs in charge, do you? And that worked.

So if the Democrats had been wrecked on Election Day, there would be bitter recriminations going on between the more progressive side and the more centrist side. There would be more inside baseball. There would be the argument between David Shor and Sean McElwee, who are arguing for doing popular things, and other people who think that the party has to orient more around a — whatever race, class narrative, or any of these other things. But do those conversations get obliterated by what happened here? Are the Democrats going to be missing out on recriminations that would actually benefit them — is really the question I have.

ezra klein

I think the Democrats did plenty of recriminations about the 2022 election in the weeks leading up to the 2022 election, so they might have actually gotten most of the benefit of it. I mean, they had really turned, I think because they didn’t believe the polls, and the polls were tightening against them, to the view that this is going to be a bloodbath. Emotionally, that’s where they had gone. The thing is that there actually isn’t a ton of strategic questions that are open to the Democrats right now. If Democrats had gotten wiped out, if they had lost 30 seats in the House and actually five seats in the Senate unexpectedly, losing all of the marginal seats — they lose in Pennsylvania and they lose in Nevada and they lose in New Hampshire, I think the question of whether or not Joe Biden runs in 2024 would — whatever Joe Biden decides — have been opened. And putting aside whether he runs, whether or not there would be a primary in 2024. But with Biden and the Democrats doing unexpectedly well, so long as Biden wants to run, he’s probably going to have the field to himself. And that means he’s going to run on whatever Joe Biden is, right — Joe Bidenism. He’s got his record. He’s got his political style. It’s the same one it was in — not the same record as in 2020, but the same political style as in 2020. He has mostly done popular things. I mean, the individual component parts of his agenda have been pretty popular. He’s got weaknesses as a communicator. I mean, we know what Joe Biden is. I think there would be a real question otherwise — right, again, if there had been a bloodbath. I don’t think it would have really been a debate between the so-called populists and the virallists and the progressives and everybody else. I think it would have been a debate about standard bearers. And with the possibility that Biden wouldn’t run, or wouldn’t win if he did run in the primary, you would have had people who were out there saying that AOC should run, or saying Jared Polis, the Colorado governor should run — Gavin Newsom and Pritzker clearly seem to be playing around with the possibility of runs, the governors of California and Illinois. There are many, many more people out there like that — Chris Murphy out of Connecticut. I mean, you can name a bunch of people who look like they would be in a scrum to be the future standard bearer of the party. And those people would be the vehicles, containers, through which that debate would happen. But I think assuming nothing really surprising happens as the results come in from the West, I think that Biden’s position, rightly or wrongly, is quite strengthened. And as such, I don’t think there’s much of a debate to have, because what’s going to happen over the next two years, particularly if Kevin McCarthy is the House Speaker, which again, I think is the right bet to make right now, Biden will be acting in opposition to House Republicans who are going to be doing a lot of nutty things — and oh my God, Kevin McCarthy’s life is going to be miserable with a tiny House Majority, just miserable. He will be led around by Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Freedom Caucus. I mean, he’s going to be able to say no to nothing. He’s a weak leader already. He’s going to have no margin in the majority if he gets a majority. It’s going to be a disaster, which means he’ll probably end up having to do crazier things like debt ceiling showdowns — which, by the way, Donald Trump is already saying they should do a debt ceiling showdown. And then there’ll be Donald Trump out there. There will be Ron DeSantis out there. And so you’re going to have all these other poles of politics who Joe Biden is going to be acting as the Democratic safe harbor from. And it could really rebuild his strategy from 2020 of, like, Joe Biden may not be any Democrats’ favorite Democrat, but there’s a sense that he’s acceptable enough to sort of everybody, and so he himself forestalls this debate that might otherwise happen. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Let’s look at two states that are right next to each other, right, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Tim Ryan, people had a brief moment of thinking he was going to do well, but he did not come close to beating Vance. He had one model of how you’re going to have a kind of inclusive, pro-labor, liberal left idea, where you’re kind of knocking the national Democratic Party and you’re going to run next to him. In Pennsylvania, there’s Fetterman, who had a different approach to it, right? It’s more like, I’m like you. I’m a regular person. And he won. Can we draw any lessons from that, or is this the same situation as Florida, where Ohio is just getting more and more red? And so we can’t actually say anything, because Tim Ryan had no chance.

ezra klein

I have two thoughts on this. So one, I think Ohio is just way redder than Pennsylvania now. I mean, you can look at that in the 2020 results. Joe Biden wins Pennsylvania and he loses Ohio handily. So Fetterman running in Ohio loses, probably. Now, it’s interesting, right? What is Fetterman’s outcome here if not for the stroke? So Fetterman runs way behind Shapiro, the Democrat for governor in Pennsylvania. Now, Shapiro is running against a truly crazy candidate, but Dr. Oz was also a pretty weird candidate. So if he had Shapiro’s margin, if he’d run closer to Shapiro, maybe that can make up some of the gaps in a place like Ohio, if you believe it would have held there. So I don’t know. I think there’s too much difference between the states. But I will say in terms of the difference between Ryan and Fetterman — particularly, again, Fetterman pre-stroke, because — look, the stroke really did impair Fetterman. I mean, there’s been all kinds of commentary about this, and it’s just an auditory processing issue. I’m not his doctor. I’m not inside his brain. But the man suffered a traumatic brain injury, and he is visibly, obviously altered in its aftermath in a way that would reasonably give voters pause about his capacity as somebody to represent them. Now, they still would prefer him to Dr. Oz, which I think says a lot about Dr. Oz. All that said, and I’m very happy to see Fetterman win, what Fetterman had and has as a candidate, which is different than Ryan — Ryan is a capable politician whose policies and beliefs position him in this older, labor oriented tradition. He’s always been very skeptical and hawkish on China. He’s very pro organized labor. But he’s not somebody who if you meet him, or you look at him, or you listen to him talk, he bleeds a working class aesthetic. He’s a big meditator, right? I mean —

You don’t imagine John Fetterman doing a lot of yoga.

ezra klein

Yeah. And he probably does, weirdly enough, knowing a little bit about him. But Fetterman has the aesthetic, right? And this is a place where I think I end up having a real disagreement with the David Shors, and my friend Matthew Yglesias and others, who — I’m a policy guy. I’ve been covering policy my whole career. I think they’ve become too literal about policy, and too literal about how much voters know about policy, and how much policy positioning matters. I think a lot of things are tributaries into this overall gut sense of whether or not this politician is like you, and they like you, which are different ideas. You know, are they like you? Do they come from the world you come from? Do they understand you? And also, how do they feel about you? And Fetterman, who I think in a lot of ways is more liberal than Ryan, Fetterman visually and communicatively signals like he’s a guy who not only would be at the bar, but would be in the bar fight. And that’s not Tim Ryan. And so Fetterman is a kind of visual of this — rightly or wrongly, whether or not you believe this to be true about him — this sort of working class aesthetic. And so will that work in Ohio? It’s interesting. It’s an interesting question. But if you’re comparing the two of them, I think you’re comparing trying to signal whose side you’re on through the positions you take and the things you say versus who you are, how you move through the world, how you dress, what your temperament and comportment as a person are. And I think at a candidate level, the latter set of qualities tend to trump it.

What interests me about that is that most people live — right, you might live in a media bubble, but you live in this world where some people you know support Trump. Maybe they’re at work, maybe they’re your family. Some people you know support Biden. Again, maybe they’re at work, maybe they’re in your family. And the world that you live in is much more like the world as a whole than your political world is, or your media consumption is. And I think Fetterman was able to work with that in a way. Lots of people who certainly do not have the left wing populist ideas that he had have to have voted for him, because otherwise there’s no way in hell he would have won, right? And so how does he do that? He does it by being who he is. And therefore, even the stroke in a weird way does not hurt him, because as Dr. Oz his campaign is lecturing him about eating vegetables, lots of people are thinking, like, well, that could be me, which I think is an interesting part of it. This actually brings us to another interesting question. So Democrats made a big deal about democracy. People were perplexed, or at least worried, that the Democrats who helped radical Republican deniers like Bolduc in New Hampshire — he’s probably the best example where the Democratic Party spent really quite a fair amount of money to make sure that he won the primary. So that strategy has moral questions in it, right? If you’re really that worried about democracy, why are you promoting these people. What if they win? But on the other hand, it does seem as a tactical matter to have worked fairly well on Election Day itself. What do you think about that? Does that mean that Chuck Schumer doesn’t really fear for our democracy if he’s willing to let some of these people run? Or is it just — this is political hardball and that’s what they should be doing?

ezra klein

I always thought the discourse around this was weird, this idea that because Democrats were trying to push for these weaker but more extreme candidates, it meant they didn’t care about the thing they said they cared about. To your point about there being moral questions, and I know what I’m about to say is very on brand, the moral question is what moral philosophy you follow? Are you a consequentialist, are you into Aristotelian virtue ethics? Like, what are you — what kind of moralist are you — because if you’re a consequentialist who cares very deeply about democracy, and you believe that the somewhat less crazy Republicans are not actually that non-crazy, and they will go along with what the broader Republican Party wants them to do, which is very often the case and has become more so — I mean, most House Republicans voted against certifying the election.

Even after, right — it’s not like they did that in a blue sky, right? They did it after January 6, in the middle of the night, on January 7.

ezra klein

Yes. So I think the view that there’s a sharp cut between the election denying Republicans, your Kari Lake’s — the good, normal Republicans. I mean, there are some of them, right? Mitt Romney — I don’t think Mike DeWine, who’s been around for a long time, and has a sense of himself, is going to go in for a steal. But for a lot of them, a lot of the ones who are coming up in this era, through this party, they have shown a tendency to be very submissive to what Trump and his base want them to do. And so if you believe that you have a — let’s put it this way. The difference between a Democrat in these positions and any Republican is so much larger than the difference between a sort of cowardly Republican who has never spoken out against this dimension of the party, and a fully bought in, stop the steal Republican, that it becomes a kind of math problem. Like, OK, well, how much likelier is a Democrat to win the seat if you get the more extreme person in? If you think the more extreme person has x chance of winning the election and you multiply that by — you get into all these very weird consequentialist math problems. But I don’t know what I would have done if I were in strategic charge of this, but I think the people who made it seem like a completely easy question were not actually taking it seriously. And beyond that, I think we’re not taking seriously how complicit the Republican Party has been particularly, post-2020, in Trumpian nonsense. Look at how Kevin McCarthy interacted with the January 6 commission. Look at what happened to Liz Cheney. The idea that there is this normal Republican Party is just not true anymore. I think I said this in a recent column. I wrote about Democrats being the party of normalcy and Republicans being the party of crisis. But in many ways, the bigger threat to democracy is the Republicans who will go along with the election deniers, rather than the election deniers themselves. It is that larger mass of cowardly Republicans who create the numbers for really terrible things to happen. So I don’t know. I have much more complicated feelings about this. I understand the position that just, morally, you don’t try to put these people closer to power. But it’s not a choice between two Republicans. It’s a choice of, how do you try to not have either of them in power? And I understand why people who are actually in charge of making that decision don’t find it easy to say, well, we’re going to give up our chance to win this seat because this particular Republican, despite clearly backing Trump and everything he does, has not literally said the 2020 election was stolen. Yeah, it’s not easy.

I want to stay with the democracy thing for a minute, though. A lot of people voted on Election Day. Millions and millions of people voted early, mail in votes. I wonder a little bit if both sides here don’t believe the rhetoric that they spew fully at all, right? Maybe — I mean, I don’t know whether turnout — what to say about that. Does that really mean that people actually believe in democracy, and they’re not that worried about it? I mean, somebody I work with here I was chatting about retirement. And I was saying like, OK, when I’m 70, I’ll leave right after the 2036 election. And she looked at me, and was like, what makes you so sure there are going to be elections in 2036? And I laughed, but also like, I absolutely think there will be elections in 2036. You know, I’m very concerned about Republican election denialism, and deeply worried about it. And at the same time, I’m not thinking that 2036 isn’t going to be happening. Another way of thinking about that is that if you are in the ruling party in many other countries — bear with me for a second, I mean, over time, right — Brazil, Turkey, Argentina in different decades and different times. Like, if you’re a politician, you’re having to think like, well, what does the Army think about this? And here, no one’s thinking that way, or very, very few people are thinking that way. So we’re still in a very larval state in terms of going really down the path of being anti-democratic. And yet, you have hundreds and hundreds of people running who claim that the 2020 election was won by someone who didn’t win it. So I’m not sure what to make of all that. It’s very hard to think through. Do you have any thoughts about whether we’re actually living in Rome, 250 AD, or Rome 350 AD, and just not realizing what’s around the bend? Or do you think that this is all going to calm down at some point?

ezra klein

Well, of the two of us, you’re the one who knows the difference between Rome in different periods. So I’ll let you do the historical analogy —

What I meant by that was just — I just meant, like, you’re living in a city, and you’re —

ezra klein

I know, I know. I’m just playing with you.

You’re in this empire. And you’re living in this city. And you think, oh, this is going to go on forever, when meanwhile, a mere 200 years from then, your city is going to have half the people in it, and there’s no more empire.

ezra klein

Human beings, I think, have a lot of trouble living and thinking in probabilities, which is normal. I mean, I do too.

Yeah.

ezra klein

We’re really playing to type here. You’re, like, Rome in 20 — I’m like, well, it’s hard to live in probabilities. This is what all of our conversations are like, people. Look, I think the way to think about the election and sort of democracy crisis is that the near term possibility for the kind of crisis that can dissolve a system, collapse the system, create violence in the streets, has gone from — I would have said in the ‘90s, very, very low, right? Like, obviously, always something could happen, but a point, two points — to if I said on the 15-year time frame, if you told me 15 percent, I wouldn’t think that was crazy at all, right? A election as unclear as 2000, with the polarization, media institutions, and figures that are dominating the situation of 2022 — I think you rerun 2000 now and there’s blood in the streets. I have no doubt about that, actually.

Florida again, by the way, right?

ezra klein

Florida again. So I think that people thinking about this, what they are saying is not that we have lost our democracy, or we no longer have elections, but that we stand very close. I mean, it is — we stand at a reasonably high probability of a crisis. We do not know how to resolve or whether it would be safely resolved. And yet I don’t think that’s a majority probability. I don’t think the probability of that is 75 percent or 85 percent. And this is true in all kinds of things. I mean, we always knew a pandemic respiratory virus was a high probability. I mean, we knew it would happen some time. I mean, back at Vox, we ran a piece from Ron Klain, who at that point was out of office. But he had been the Ebola czar, talking about how we were unprepared for this. I did a video and an interview with Bill Gates about all the damage that a pandemic respiratory flu would do. This is well before the coronavirus. And even in the early months of the coronavirus, a lot of the people who worry about this most, they still felt — even knowing that this was going to happen eventually, they couldn’t see, because they didn’t have the information or they didn’t want to believe the information yet that it was happening now. And so when it did happen, in many, many ways, we were very unprepared. And so I just think that’s the answer to that. I don’t think these things are — I don’t think it’s revealing that people don’t believe what they say they believe. I think what people believe is that there is a non-negligible and in fact significant chance of a constitutional or electoral crisis of the kind that can break a system. And yet day to day how you live in that when it’s not happening today is very unclear. I don’t know, like, I’ve got to go to work. I just had — I’ve been thinking a lot — I had somebody I love die recently. And I’ve been thinking a lot about something George Saunders once said to me in an earlier podcast, where he said — and I’m paraphrasing, but he said, it’s a very strange world. The people you love, the people we love die, and we are supposed to just go back to normal within a couple of months. And that’s both horrifying and necessary. I mean, that’s kind of how I feel about almost everything. We live in a moment in which there are a hundreds possible cataclysms. What’s the chance of a nuclear escalation between Russia and Ukraine — not nothing. We could enter into a world of antibiotic resistance. The possibilities of climate change setting off runaway feedback loops are lower than we used to think, but not completely negligible. But also, like, I got to get my kids to school. And I got to record this podcast with you. And I hurt my neck the other day, and I needed to do my stretching. And so it’s just kind of constant tension between you live the banal, even as you exist amidst the very sacred and the very profane. But to be really open to how wild the world can get is a sort of paralyzing way to exist, and so most people cannot day to day in truth maintain it.

We’re kind of a long way from the midterms. But I want to stay with your point for a second because it actually is connected to this whole calcification idea. I mentioned this earlier, but it is truly astounding, right, that more than a million people died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic just in the United States alone. And it had almost incalculable effect on the families, on the health care system, on all of this. But compared to plagues in the past, it had not that much effect on anything political or historical, at least in the short term. Everything is pretty much as it was, which is really very, very strange. So I want to ask you how we’re going to get beyond calcification for a little bit, because what’s truly remarkable — I referred to this earlier, but the coalitions have actually changed somewhat, but the calcification has remained. The parity has remained. What do you think could possibly happen that would create a shift here, where one coalition could actually dominate — which outside of the late 19th century has actually been the norm in American politics, where one side was up and the other side was more clearly in opposition? Like, what do you think could happen that would either shift things — and not even necessarily which side would be ahead, although obviously that’s part of it. But what do you think could come soon that would alter these coalitions in a way that would alter the politics, and make it no longer so calcified?

ezra klein

I don’t know that I think the calcification can be broken. And the reason I say that is that we have maintained pretty close parity despite the fact that the parties have changed very dramatically over the past two decades. So you think of how close the Bush-Gore election was. But the Bush-Gore political parties, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum, as Ralph Nader said at the time, were very, very, very, very, very different than the Obama, George W. Bush parties that went into contest in 2008. Those were very, very, very different than the Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump parties, which were in turn somewhat different than the Trump-Biden parties. And I bring that up because the two major variables you might imagine as being what you could manipulate here both changed. What the parties believed changed dramatically. I mean, you’ve seen the Republican Party go from, say, humble foreign policy to democracy-promoting neoconservatism, to Trumpian, resentful — not quite isolationism, but a strange, sort of resentful retreat.

Isolationism with drone strikes.

ezra klein

Right, sure. You’ve seen the Democratic Party become much more diverse, much more self-consciously multi-ethnic, move quite far to the left. You’ve seen the Republican Party go from moving quite far to the right economically to becoming less certain about what it stands for economically, but more a party of cultural backlash. And yet through all this, we’ve maintained this incredible razor’s edge of power. The balance of power in the country is often closer than the votes are, but political parties orient around the system we have, not around a popular vote that often doesn’t matter. And so whatever the force that is keeping the parties near parity is really profound. And then whatever is keeping calcification — right, the fact that the parties are very different. One thing that has maintained through this whole period is the parties are just getting more and more and more different. The Obama-Bush parties are more different than the Bush-Gore parties were. The Clinton-Trump parties were more different than the Obama-Bush parties were. And now, the Republican Party is becoming in my view deranged in its orientation towards the political system itself — right, its orientation towards elections and so on, the kind of temperament it rewards in its people. The Democratic Party has moved quite far left. And post Joe Biden, I expect that to continue. And so calcification is a byproduct of the parties becoming very different. The choice is so clear that even when you don’t love the party you support, the idea of going to the other party becomes unthinkable in a way that it wasn’t when only half of Americans thought there was a major difference between the two parties at all. And so I don’t really see that changing. Now, things could happen that are so profound — we could go to war with China, or a Russian nuclear attack or something. I mean, you can imagine things that are so unignorable that they reorient American politics. And then I’d also just note that the rise of these populist right parties is happening in a lot of different countries, as my episode with Pippa Norris talked about. And so the sort of appeal of this kind of politics is not some weird quirk of the American system, but something you’re seeing in Italy, something you’re seeing in Germany, something you’re seeing in Switzerland. Something you’re seeing — and you can go down this list. I mean, the closeness of the Lula-Bolsonaro match up in Brazil — just achingly sad to me. I mean, I’m glad Lula won, but Bolsonaro getting in the very high 40s — like, he’s a terrible leader, did terrible things. A lot of people suffered and even died. What he’s done to the rainforest is appalling, but also just how he treats other human beings, and how he treats the truth, and how he treats his own base is quite appalling. So taking the more global perspective, there is clearly a lot of space for parties to move into what seem to be extreme directions and maintain a very high level of competitiveness. And so I think it would be foolish for me to suggest that there is some tactic or event that could change it. Maybe if technology changes, communication technology changes dramatically in some way I can’t foresee, maybe that would do it. But I think we’re kind of stuck in this period of high calcification, high parity, and the central dynamic of politics being the sort of — do you like this diversifying, more individualistic, more freedom oriented future, or do you feel disoriented by it, and you want people who at some level aesthetically and substantively are promising to go back to a world that you understood better and you felt more comfortable in?

All right, so I want you for a second to put away the metaphysics and the ethics and imagine that you’re a Democratic strategist, and this election, just happened, and you have to deal with it. What do you take out of this? What lessons do you draw for not just 2024, but for trying to create a coalition that is bigger than the parity that we’ve been talking about? What do you do?

ezra klein

I think the lesson of the election for Democrats is that the motivating force for Democrats is Republicans. And Republicans are likely to have a very, very ugly bruising primary. They’re likely to have a lot of really wacky candidates, both who are trying to win power in 2024, but also have power from 2022 or before. And you are thinking about how to make them the issue and not get in their way. That’s the key lesson here. If Donald Trump and the bruising Trump-DeSantis war can be the central topic, I think that’s the question. Then, there’s this issue of what the match-ups end up being, because the issue with Joe Biden, I think, is that he’s a very good match for Donald Trump for a bunch of different reasons, and not as good a match — plausibly, we’ll see about DeSantis — but particularly if the Republican Party goes in a different direction. And look, I think Democrats need to think seriously about the fact that Joe Biden is in his 80s. And it is taking nothing away from his mental acuity or his governance strategies to say that voters might reasonably have concerns about this job for a guy in his 80s, who shows his age, and not in any abnormal way, but just because he’s a very old man. So I do think that’s the open strategic question for Democrats, and honestly for the Biden administration. If it’s Trump, then we’re just kind of in this weird rerun with these two old guys who are now, like, known antagonists of each other. But if the Republican Party turns a page on Donald Trump, or looks to be turning the page on Donald Trump, that’s going to be a hard internal question for the Biden administration and the Democratic Party to face up to, that they obviously didn’t have to face up to in 2022.

So you’re saying if it’s a generational battle as well, right, if it’s somebody in his 50s or her 50s running against someone who will be over 80.

ezra klein

Yes. People don’t really like talking about this, but I think it is like burying your head in the sand to not think about this seriously. Also, just for the job itself — like, I don’t know how Joe Biden feels about the question, but the presidency is a very demanding job. Should he be doing it from age 82 to 86? I just think there are very hard questions here that don’t have an obvious way to resolve them. And because there’s a very strong norm within parties that you don’t challenge an incumbent president in the primaries, there is not, I think, an intention or an expectation that the Democrats are going to test out the Joe Biden question within a Democratic primary where information on it can be gathered and a decision on it can ultimately be made. So this decision is going to be made quietly, and possibly just by Joe Biden and his direct team, but also by the question of whether or not some of the other candidates in the party decide to run when that would be a very dangerous thing for them to do against an incumbent president. It’s a hard question but 2024, will not just be 2022 in part because Joe Biden will be on the ballot, or some Democrat will be on the ballot as the presidential nominee. And how they think about that — in many ways, I think there’s a conversation that would have opened here if Democrats did a bunch worse than they did, that may not open. But it doesn’t mean that conversation is irrelevant. But I don’t think anybody in the party quite knows how to have it. And I’m not saying I even know what the answer to it should be. I just think it has to be had.

What’s interesting about that also, though, is that you say that people shy away from talking about. That may be true for professional politicians. But in regular life, people talk about it constantly.

ezra klein

Yes.

Right. Biden’s too old.

ezra klein

Right. This is, like, a point of elite sensitivity. And that’s exactly what I’m saying — that Democrats can’t pretend that because they don’t like to talk about this — right, elite Democrats can pretend that because they don’t like to talk about this, that the country will not talk about it, or that a capable, younger candidate will not find ways to weaponize it or whatever. And maybe it’s fine, right? I mean, we’ve had a real gerontocracy in this country. It’s not like McConnell or Pelosi or Trump himself are young. And so maybe the views I have as a 38-year-old, or the worries I have as a 38-year-old are not shared. And in fact, maybe it helps Joe Biden win over older voters, who are very powerful. You can make different arguments about this but. But you have to think about it, both as a political question and then again also as a substantive question. I don’t know how the job feels for Joe Biden. But he’s not out there, like, running around the country in the way he would have as a younger man. And this is tough. And we’re two years from the election, and then six years from the end of the second term. So that’s a long time in your mid 80s. And so I don’t know. I just think it has to be taken seriously. And the normal way you might imagine this getting worked out, which is a primary, I think has become less likely given the election results. And so — but it will have to be worked out and thought through somehow.

Yeah, there’s a — I mean, not that I’m going to be laying down political rules, but there’s an interesting rule here, right? If your public conversations are too out of line with the private conversations, you have a political problem, right, because if people are in the proverbial kitchen tables discussing things that are not being talked about by the politicians themselves, that divergence probably means that you’re not doing things quite the way you should be. So let me ask you to go into a headspace that’s a little further from where you actually live, which is the Republican strategist just waking up to these results. So they ran on fear, disorder, chaos, senility. They tried to run a very negative campaign. It didn’t work as well as they thought it would. And by the way, getting back to our DeSantis discussion, he didn’t totally do that, right? He had the negative thing, but he also had the sunny side. So if you’re a Republican strategist, what do you take out of this?

ezra klein

I don’t know that I think Republican strategists have much control over their own party. So I’m not sure what — I mean, you feel depressed, maybe? They can’t control Donald Trump. They can’t get Republican primary voters to vote for the most capable candidates. Once you’ve got Dr. Oz, once you’ve got Herschel Walker, once you’ve got Donald Trump, you’re in trouble. So I mean, I think what’s going to happen is the party machinery is going to try to organize itself around DeSantis because he’s the best weapon they have against Trump being the standard bearer again. But what is his relationship to that strategic class? What would it mean for him to listen to them more or less? I really don’t know. I mean, what the Republican Party wishes it had was more of the actual structure of a party, where the people who make strategic decisions and run polls and so on had had a little bit more influence over the base. But they don’t. And so I think what you’re going to have is not so much a bunch of lessons learned here. I think the lesson they have learned is that Ron DeSantis is the one figure in the Republican Party, notwithstanding things I said about other governors who also did quite well — people like Mike DeWine. But Ron DeSantis is in the Venn diagram of a Republican who won very big in 2022 and a Republican who the Republican primary base might support for president. Now, other weird things could happen in a DeSantis-Trump race, as we talked about. But in terms of who the strategists, I think, are going to try to make a gold rush around, it’s going to be DeSantis. So ultimately, I think a lot now depends on the strategic decisions that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis make about how to position themselves in the Republican Party. I don’t think the strategists have a big say in this one.

I wanted to ask you something. You always ask your guests for three books they would recommend. But I want to try something a little different here, for my little cameo on your show. Could you recommend to your listeners three podcasts that you like to listen to, always listen to, think are important?

ezra klein

I’m going to do two versions of this. One is what you actually asked. I don’t get to listen to that much. Most of what I listen to is this podcast, or evaluating guests for this podcast. So I listen to random things that people we might want to have on have been part of. But I have been listening to “The Prince” which is an Economist podcast — by the magazine, “The Economist,” about Xi Jinping, the leader of China, who — I think it’s probably fair to say, is the single most powerful person in the world. And where China goes and what our relationship is with China is probably — I mean, certainly in the top three fundamental questions of this era. And I’m not through the whole show, but I’ve loved it and I really recommend it. Another show that I just love is Odd Lots, which is a Bloomberg podcast by Joe Wiesenthal and Tracy Alloway. And it’s an economics show, but the thing I love about the way they do Odd Lots is it is specific. You will have full shows on, what’s going on in the lumber category right now — and super smart, great vibe with the hosts and the guests. I’ve been on it once. But I just think it’s a really good show for actually learning about what’s going on in the economy all the way from the real tangible economy of moving materials around, and supply chains, all the way up to the crypto economy. And so I get a lot out of Odd Lots, and I think other people will too. And then we’ve been doing a lot more climate on the show, but, Volts, the Dave Roberts climate podcast, is a great show. And I’ve gotten a ton on climate and energy and the energy transition out of Volts. And then I want to recommend a couple — just quickly episodes from my show, because we really — like, they ended up shaping both this conversation and a lot of how I understood the election. So my podcast with John Sides and Lynn Vavreck about what happened in 2020 and calcification and parity — I mean, we’ve done a kind of a thin job on these ideas in the show, but that’s the place to go to really hear that explained. And I think it is a model of elections that is really helpful right now. Pippa Norris, also right around just a couple of weeks ago, about cultural backlash and the rise of the populist right. And then going back a couple of months, we did a series on the right, which we call the rising right. But the first one was with Matt Continetti all about a sort of alternative history of conservatism, understanding the more conspiratorial, anti-elite, more resentful side of conservatism, not as something that had ever been purged from the right, but was always a life force, and now has become a dominant one. And I think in thinking about who the Republican Party ran, and what kind of Republican Party we now have, you’re seeing a thread that has always been there flower into — I guess threads don’t flower, you would tell me. You’re seeing a seed that has always been there flower into the dominant plant of the party. And I think that show holds up pretty well and is worth going back to. So we’ll put all of those in show notes.

All right, so I’ll mention since you mentioned that — obviously, anyone who wants to understand that should read the “Paranoid Style of American Politics,” famous Richard Hofstadter essay which takes up that question, and is amazingly relevant even though it was written decades ago. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

The midterm election turned out to be a referendum — just not on President Biden and the Democrats. How else to explain the mismatch between two crucial numbers: Biden’s approval rating is the lowest for any president at this point in a term, and the public’s view of the economy is in the dumps. When times seem bad — Bill Clinton in 1994, Barack Obama in 2010, Donald Trump in 2018 — the party in the White House usually gets a shellacking. But this time, the Democrats seem to have had the best showing of any party in that position since 9/11 shored up the Republicans in 2002.

So, what was the vote about (or, rather, against)? It’s difficult to be sure, because exit polls are hopelessly skewed and unreliable. But it does seem likely to have been about two things: abortion and, more broadly, Trump. Voters did turn out in large numbers to vote on five state initiatives, in all favored liberal attitudes on abortion, even in dark-red Montana. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s effort to find a compromise by allowing abortions in Florida for the first 15 weeks appears to have allowed him to escape any punishment on the issue. And only in places where abortion rights were totally secure, such as New York state, did the election seem to turn to factors such as the economy and crime. And as Nate Cohn explained on the New York Times’s Daily podcast, wherever threats to democracy (in the form of Trumpist “Stop the Steal” candidates) or abortion were up for vote, Democrats excelled.

That brings us to Trump. Though some of his favored candidates won, most lost. The most egregious MAGA zealots seem to have turned voters off. In fact, it’s hard not to see the midterm elections as one more verdict by the public against Donald Trump. They turned out in higher than usual numbers in 2018, 2020 and 2022. As David Frum writes in the Atlantic, “Trump led his party from loss to loss. He lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost the House in 2018. He lost the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2020. He lost the Senate in 2021.” And yet, the Republican Party has so far remained in thrall to him.

Many of the critiques of the GOP and its leaders get it somewhat wrong. The party is not filled with authoritarians (though many do exist). It’s filled with cowards. Despite the pose of machismo, the swaggering strut and the tough talk, in fact the party is pervaded by fear and weakness, a terror of confronting the big bully in the room. Consider what happened with Jan. 6. Most Republican leaders, including the two senior-most congressional leaders, saw it for what it was, an unprecedented assault on democracy. They privately and even sometimes publicly spoke out against it. And then they worried that Trump still had the base with him, tucked in their tails and either quickly reversed course and became lapdogs (Kevin McCarthy) or quietly dropped the subject altogether (Mitch McConnell).

It’s always hard for politicians to break with an activist and energetic base. It took the Republican Party years to speak out against Joseph McCarthy. It took a while before Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were willing to distance themselves from the John Birch Society. In both cases it did happen in the end. It was easier in those days when the party was more hierarchical.

But it took the voice of the most influential conservative intellectual, William F. Buckley Jr., with his persistent attacks on the Birchers, to provide cover for a politician like Reagan. Today, Fox News does the opposite, persistently trying to stir up the anger, the hate and the conspiracy theories. Unlike Buckley, Fox News is not motivated by the national interest but by profit.

Will the fever break this time? Obama predicted that after his 2012 election, the GOP would free itself of its increasingly extreme elements (such as the tea party). But it never happened. While there have been opportunities to course correct, the party remains utterly enamored of and captive to its most extreme members and the media outlets that sing their praises. Remember that even as Fox News dominates cable news, its biggest show has 3.4 million viewers out of about 170 million registered voters, just under half of whom are or lean Republican. It is an extreme minority that has cowed the majority into silence.

There have been important Republican leaders who have spoken out against Donald Trump, most prominently Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney. Now is the time for them and others who want to save the party to come out and purge it of its extremism. The fever has broken, but if the Republican Party’s doctors willingly continue to behave like cowardly quacks, the patient could easily relapse once again.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Some observers ridiculed Joe Biden for making a closing pitch for democracy, but as it turns out, Americans do care about more than the price of gas. Voters concerned about democracy and their rights defied predictions of a red wave and sharply limited Republican gains.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
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Annual COVID shots mean we can stop counting.
America has an anti-MAGA majority. Read all of our election coverage here.
Deniers DeniedLet’s get the bad news out of the way: In yesterday’s midterm elections, a fair number of odious candidates managed to buy tickets to Washington. Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson is going back to the Senate, where he will be joined by Ohio’s would-be hillbilly whisperer J. D. Vance, whose campaign will stand for years to come as a monument to cynicism and hypocrisy. We don’t know yet if Kari Lake—or as my friend Tim Miller calls her, the “Empress of Trollistan”—will become governor of Arizona. And we still don’t know who will control Congress.Nonetheless, yesterday was a good day for democracy. Some of the worst election deniers and kookiest candidates were sent packing, in many cases by larger margins than anyone—including me—expected. Among those who must now go back to writing angry Facebook posts and griping on conservative podcasts were such notables as Don Bolduc, the retired general who promised to get to the bottom of the Great Kitty Litter Mystery, and Mehmet Oz, the carpetbagging celebrity doctor.At the state level, things look even brighter for the protection of democracy, as voters turned back a fleet of extremists and outright weirdos. Michigan, whose Democratic governor was the target of a bizarre kidnap plot two years ago, is now under a unified Democratic government for the first time in nearly 40 years. A crackpot running as the GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania was drubbed in a double-digit loss to an utterly conventional Democrat. And let’s even give a cheer as well for one Republican: Brad Raffensperger, who had to endure death threats for defying Donald Trump’s demands to upend the 2020 vote in Georgia, was reelected as secretary of state.As the elections analyst Sean Trende said today on Twitter: “It turns out that selecting your candidates from the Star Wars cantina might not be a recipe for electoral success.”If you want to know how bad a night it was for Republicans, check Trump’s temperature, which apparently zoomed last night past “boiling,” through “molten lead,” and is now somewhere near “the surface of the sun.” And rightly so: Some in the GOP are holding Trump responsible for their party’s losses and are now trying to push him out of the way. Even Trump’s conservative hometown paper, the New York Post, twisted the knife this morning with a cover photo of Governor Ron DeSantis and a one word caption: “DeFuture.”The best news in all of this is that the pundits and advisers who told Democrats to talk only about the economy and inflation and avoid any boring yakety-yak about democracy were wrong. As my colleague McKay Coppins tweeted after looking at an AP VoteCast poll, “it’s striking how many voters were motivated by concern for American democracy.” I have been arguing for months that voters are in fact capable of thinking about more than one thing at a time, but I admit that I also was starting to wonder whether fears about GOP authoritarianism could break through the noise.And so I was especially glad that Biden made the case for democracy in his closing argument at Union Station, because I thought it was his duty as president to speak on the threats to our system and warn the voters of what was at stake. In any case, to argue over grocery prices while ignoring Republican threats to stomp on our rights and nullify elections would have been malpractice, with Democrats taking the bait to apologize for the economy (much of which no one can fix right now) while giving a pass to unhinged candidates who couldn’t care less how much a gallon of milk costs.Looking ahead, American democracy now has some breathing room. What I and others were most worried about was not some overnight establishment of a dictatorship—our country is too big and diverse for that—but rather the ripple effect of having multiple state offices and governorships in the hands of fanatics and election deniers while Congress was firmly in the grip of a Republican majority. That’s not going to happen now. Important battleground states, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, will continue to be led by normal politicians of both parties (and yes, that includes Brian Kemp in Georgia, who also defied Trump).This means, in turn, that the nightmare scenario of ultra-extreme governors and secretaries of state refusing to certify their own elections is now a lot less likely. Of course, the Supreme Court could still decide in the upcoming Moore v. Harper case that state legislatures, not actual voters, control the outcome of elections, and then we’re back in the trenches once again to protect our rights and liberties—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.Besides, we’re not out of the woods yet. Trump is almost certainly going to run for president again, and then we’ll see just how many Republicans are willing to join the former president on his own personal Titanic and go chasing more icebergs. We’re not done with Trump’s cult of personality by a long shot. But Americans have held off the vandals who sought to win offices specifically, it seems, in order to subvert future elections. That’s good for the United States, and it’s good for democracy.Related:
How Democrats avoided a red wave
Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.
Russia’s defense minister announced that he has ordered the retreat of Russian forces from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, signaling a possibly serious setback for Vladimir Putin.
Voters in Michigan, California, and Vermont pushed through amendments to their state constitutions to include abortion protections, and Kentucky voters rejected an amendment that would have denied the right to an abortion.
Elon Musk held a public meeting to address concerns from Twitter’s advertisers and marketing partners.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks: Is Florida still a swing state?
The Weekly Planet: The Paris agreement is working … for now, Robinson Meyer writes.
Work in Progress: Democrats might’ve pulled off the biggest midterm shock in decades, notes Derek Thompson.
(Erik Carter / The Atlantic)
America Has Ruined College Football. Now College Football Is Ruining America.By Devin Gordon
Every sports fan, whether they acknowledge it or not, has a line they won’t cross—where the intrusion of the ugly real world onto the playing field becomes too much to ignore and they have to look away. Maybe you’re a Miami Dolphins fan, so you’ll root for Tyreek Hill, the Dolphins’ $120 million wide receiver whose girlfriend accused him of threatening her life and breaking their 3-year-old son’s arm, but you refuse to draft him in your fantasy league. Maybe you stuck with the Brooklyn Nets’ Kyrie Irving when he wouldn’t get vaccinated, but dropped him when he finally got suspended this week for refusing to apologize for tweeting out the link to an anti-Semitic, Islamophobic documentary.
… I was so obsessed with college football growing up that I would spend all of December watching every single televised bowl game, until it got preposterous, until I was wasting a Saturday afternoon watching the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl. I still love so much about the game—the unhinged unpredictability, the ludicrous offensive schemes, the mad carnival that is ESPN’s College GameDay, Lee Corso going to his grave in a Wisconsin Badgers mascot head. I wasn’t looking for reasons to break up with college football. The reasons came and found me.
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, explained in 19 Elon Musk tweets
Book-industry activists should be careful what they wish for.
What a “tripledemic” means for your body
Left: Chicago, 1920s. Right: A drag ball in Harlem, 1920s. (Chicago Daily News / Getty; Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University)
Read. An Angel in Sodom, by Jim Elledge, offers a rare glimpse into a 1920s and ’30s queer movement about which the general public still knows remarkably little.Watch. Try something new from our list of 20 perfect TV shows for short attention spans—including shows that will remind you of the joy of community, shows that offer bite-size scares, and more.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Nostalgia is a complex emotion, and in politics, as I wrote in one of my books, it can be absolutely toxic. But I was reminded of how easily we can fall into missing things we rationally know are terrible when I was in New York City’s Penn Station today. As I walked through the beautiful new Amtrak entrance in the Moynihan Train Hall, I had the strangest thought: I sort of missed the entrance to the old Penn Station. (Not the old old Penn Station, which was gorgeous, but the awkward mess that replaced it when the original was torn down, starting in 1963.)This is, of course, ridiculous. For years, the central hall of Penn Station was a blight. You stepped off the train and into a hot wind tunnel that smelled like a combination of stale popcorn and questionable hot dogs and … maybe some other things you’d rather not think about. But many happy memories are bound up in that hellhole, like taking the train from Massachusetts at 17 to meet a girl and go see Beatlemania at the Winter Garden Theatre. It was my portal for rides back home while I was in graduate school at Columbia, and later, for business trips and short vacations.The old Penn Station is still there, but many of us now arrive over in the new hall, and it feels different. I suppose it’s like missing the old Times Square: You know it was a nightmare, but you’d like to peek at it one more time. (Admit it: You just clicked on that link.) My reverie reminded me of how the barflies in The Simpsons reacted when Moe thought of upgrading his tavern to a family restaurant. Carl asks: “You ain’t thinking of getting rid of the dank, are you, Moe?” “Ah, maybe I am,” Moe answers. “But, Moe, the dank! The dank!” This is what nostalgia, in life as in politics, can do: We think we miss the dank, even if we should know better.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

2022 Election
Candidate Quality Mattered
As it often does.

Nov. 9, 2022, at 4:48 PM	

ILLUSTRATION BY EMILY SCHERER

On Monday, I wrote about my three key questions heading into Election Day. I’ll address the first two – about polling error and turnout – at length once results are a bit more final. But the third question, about whether candidate quality would matter, is the easiest to answer: It’s a resounding yes.
For one thing, just look at the large difference between Senate and gubernatorial results in states with both types of races on the ballot. In the nine states with battleground1 Senate races in states that also had a gubernatorial race on the ballot, there were significant discrepancies between the performance of the candidates:

Ticket-splitting abounded in key Senate and gubernatorial races
Margin between Democratic and Republican candidates as of 3 p.m. on Nov. 9 in battleground Senate races that also had a gubernatorial race on the ballot

Margin
State
Senate
Governor
Difference
New Hampshire
D+9.6
R+15.7
25.3
Ohio
R+6.6
R+25.6
19.0
Pennsylvania
D+3.4
D+13.4
10.0
Georgia
D+0.9
R+7.6
8.5
Colorado
D+12.2
D+17.1
4.9
Wisconsin
R+1.0
D+3.4
4.4
Arizona
D+5.0
D+0.7
4.3
Florida
R+16.4
R+19.4
3.0
Nevada
R+2.7
R+4.8
2.1
Source: ABC News

We could wind up with as many as five of the nine states where one party wins the governorship and the other wins the Senate race. It’s already happened in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. It could happen in Nevada and Arizona depending how the remaining vote comes in. And it will also happen in Georgia if Democrat Raphael Warnock wins the runoff next month after Republican Brian Kemp comfortably won the gubernatorial race.
Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/expect-georgias-senate-runoff-fivethirtyeight-93006554
And even in states where there weren’t split-ticket winners, there were still big gaps in candidate performance. Ohio governor Mike DeWine, the Republican, was re-elected by nearly 26 percentage points at the same time the GOP Senate candidate, J.D. Vance, won by just 6.2 In Pennsylvania, Democrat John Fetterman did well enough in the U.S. Senate race against Mehmet Oz, but Josh Shapiro nonetheless won by a much larger margin against Doug Mastriano in the gubernatorial contest.
Alternatively, we can benchmark candidates against the partisan lean index in each state, which measures a state’s partisan baseline and is mostly based on recent performance in presidential races. For this comparison, we’ll use the projected final Senate results as estimated by the New York Times Upshot “Needle”3:

Democratic Senate candidates outperformed state partisan lean
Difference between FiveThirtyEight partisan lean index and projected final margin for Democratic candidates in battleground Senate races
State
Democratic candidate
Republican candidate
538 PLI
Projected Margin, UPSHOT NEEDLE
Diff.
AZ
Mark Kelly*
Blake Masters
R+7.1
D+2.8
+9.9
NH
Maggie Hassan*
Donald C. Bolduc
D+0.6
D+9.0
+8.4
GA
Raphael Warnock*
Herschel Junior Walker
R+7.4
D+0.5
+7.9
CO
Michael Bennet*
Joe O’Dea
D+6.7
D+14.0
+7.3
PA
John Fetterman
Mehmet Oz
R+3.0
D+4.0
+7.0
OH
Tim Ryan
J.D. Vance
R+12.1
R+6.6
+5.5
NV
Catherine Cortez Masto*
Adam Paul Laxalt
R+2.5
D+0.4
+2.9
WI
Mandela Barnes
Ron Johnson*
R+3.8
R+1.3
+2.5
NC
Cheri Beasley
Ted Budd
R+4.8
R+3.7
+1.1
WA
Patty Murray*
Tiffany Smiley
D+14.2
D+11.0
-3.2
FL
Val Demings
Marco Rubio*
R+7.4
R+16.0
-8.6
*Incumbent
Source: New york times

If the Upshot estimates are right, then Democrats will outperform the state’s partisan lean of the state in all but two battleground Senate races: Washington, where Republican Tiffany Smiley held her own against incumbent Democrat Patty Murray, and Florida, where Marco Rubio cruised to re-election by double digits.
This measure isn’t perfect. States like Colorado and Florida may be trending in different directions relative to their historic norms, so results like these may say as much about the electorate as the candidates. We also don’t know what the overall national environment was on Tuesday. Maybe Democrats beat their partisan lean everywhere on Tuesday and not just in these battleground Senate races, although an initial estimate from Pattrick Ruffini of Echelon Insights suggests that Republicans will win the popular vote for the U.S. House, which would make the strong performance of the Democrats in Senate battlegrounds more impressive by comparison.
None of this is surprising — in fact, it’s common: In the 2018 midterms, the results in a number of major Senate races also significantly diverged from the partisan lean of the state. Republicans nominated a series of inexperienced Senate candidates, and such candidates tend to underperform statewide benchmarks. And although the incumbency advantage is smaller than it once was, some of the strongest-performing candidates, such as Rubio and New Hampshire Democrat Maggie Hassan, were incumbents.
Also, candidate quality almost certainly matters less than it once did given the high partisanship of the modern political era. We’ve even made some changes to our forecast model to reflect this. 
Still, another feature of modern American politics is that it tends to feature exceptionally close races. So a candidate who underperforms by even 2 or 3 percentage points – let alone 5, 10 or more points – will often cost their party the election. Sometimes, quality has a big effect on quantity.
Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/red-wave-happen-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-92956144

Who will control Congress after yesterday’s midterm elections remains unclear, but two things are certain: Moderation can pay big electoral dividends, and Donald Trump has become a liability for the Republican Party.Yes, plenty of extremist candidates just won office. According to The New York Times, more than 200 Republican candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election or flirted with doing so secured victories on Tuesday. In many states, too few voters are queasy enough about the MAGA movement’s attacks on election integrity to keep the deniers out of office. Clearly, extremist candidates who question our democratic institutions retain some electoral viability.[David A. Graham: The divided states of America]But in practically every state where a more extreme Republican candidate ran alongside a more moderate one for different statewide offices, the more moderate candidate drew a higher share of the vote. For decades, “split-ticket voting” has been on the decline. As American politics became more polarized, fewer voters supported a Republican for one office and a Democrat for another office. But this trend now seems to be reversing. A significant bloc of voters split their ballots on Tuesday, choosing to support Republicans who kept some distance from Trump and punish those who courted the MAGA movement.The Trump base still has a strong hold over parts of the GOP. But the extremism of many Republican candidates—along with the moderate character of some Democrats in key races—was a principal reason the anticipated “red wave” failed to arrive.Take Georgia.Brian Kemp, the incumbent Republican candidate for governor, courageously resisted pressure to reject the state’s election results in 2020. He survived furious attacks from Trump and a serious primary challenge, which at times looked likely to succeed. Kemp was rewarded with a clear victory over his Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams.By contrast, Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for Senate, won his primary with strong support from Trump. And when he had a chance to talk about anything other than his personal scandals, he repeated the MAGA movement’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Walker will likely have a shot at securing the Senate seat in a runoff election. But he performed markedly worse than Kemp, winning some 200,000 fewer votes, and trailing his Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, by a slim margin.[Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave]A similar contrast was even more striking in Pennsylvania. Mehmet Oz, the Republican candidate for Senate, and Doug Mastriano, the Republican candidate for governor, both had backing from Trump and lost. But Oz, who presented himself as a more conventional conservative and focused on economic issues, lost to the progressive Democrat John Fetterman by only three points or so. Mastriano, a die-hard member of the MAGA movement who participated in the January 6 pro-Trump rally, lost by 13 points to the moderate Democrat Josh Shapiro.Split-ticket voting was mostly driven by the stark contrast in the profile of Republican candidates like Brian Kemp and Herschel Walker. But the more subtle differences in the profile of Democratic candidates such as Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams may also have played a role.Warnock has consistently supported the Biden administration’s policies and stood up for the rights of minority groups. But he has shrewdly combined these commitments with an emphasis on moderation and outreach to traditional Republicans. A former pastor, he likes to talk about his religious faith, and he worked hard at winning over white and centrist voters in the Atlanta suburbs. He even recorded folksy ads, such as one showing him at a peanut farm touting his bipartisan legislative accomplishments.[David Frum: Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.]Abrams pursued a markedly different strategy. A firm believer in identity politics as the way for the Democratic Party to win elections based on the rising share of the electorate that is nonwhite, she ran well to the left of Warnock. When polls suggested that her support among Black men in Georgia was weakening, she dismissed the idea that her campaign approach may have alienated a demographic that is traditionally Democratic but socially moderate. Instead, she blamed her troubles on their supposed vulnerability to propaganda: “Unfortunately this year Black men have been a very targeted population for misinformation.”Democrats who focused on the economy, eschewed the party’s progressive wing, and reached out to traditional Republican voters also performed well in other states. In Ohio, the Democratic Senate candidate, Tim Ryan, fell well short of beating J. D. Vance, but he far outperformed other Democratic candidates on the ballot in that state. Similarly, in Wisconsin, Tony Evers, the incumbent Democratic governor, outran more progressive statewide candidates such as the Senate nominee Mandela Barnes to narrowly win reelection. “Over the past four years, I’ve worked hard to keep [my] promises,” he said, emphasizing his moderate credentials. “Some people call [me] boring, but you know what, Wisconsin? As it turns out, boring wins.”[Yascha Mounk: Democrats need a real primary contest]David French, a leading anti-Trump conservative (and contributing writer at The Atlantic), summarized a crucial lesson of Tuesday’s election. “The GOP base,” he tweeted, “actually needed some of the folks that it mocked, scorned, and bullied right out the party.”As a result, the more closely Republican candidates aligned themselves with the MAGA movement, the worse they generally fared. The problem, of course, is that the activist wing of the Republican Party may be too enamored of Trump to learn its lesson. As unpopular as they are with the country at large, the extremist candidates who underperformed in this election can still count on fanatical support among a big bloc of Republican primary voters.The rise in split-ticket voting shows that Americans have a real preference for moderates when they are on the ballot. Yet the system that both major parties use to pick their candidates may ensure that this choice won’t be on offer when it counts most, in November 2024.The midterms have sent a clear lesson to both Democrats and Republicans. To maximize the chances of winning the White House in 2024, pick a moderate candidate who can reach beyond the party’s base. If both parties heed the lesson, that could usher in a less polarized and perilous era in American politics. If only one party heeds the lesson, it will likely enjoy a big advantage. If neither party heeds it, anything is possible—including a second term for Donald Trump.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekElections alter the balance of power in a democracy while affording us new information about what voters want. What do you think about yesterday’s results and those still outstanding? Feel free to comment on federal, state, or local races, or any ballot initiatives, especially if what you’re seeing or thinking isn’t reflected by what you see in the media.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteIt’s too early for conclusive analysis of the midterms, with ballots still being counted in some races and observers just beginning to refine their analysis. But as ever, the Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham offers a compelling first draft of postelection history. His summary of where U.S. politics seems to be right now:
The final balance of power in the U.S. Congress and state houses won’t be clear for days or in some cases possibly weeks, but early results suggest that Republicans will likely retake control of the House, while the balance in the Senate remains too early to predict. GOP gains on Capitol Hill are the most important headline in immediate policy terms, since they mean President Joe Biden will be unable to move his priorities through Congress and will face new investigations … But the first round of results also suggests a smaller Republican victory than expected, and certainly smaller than some of the party’s leaders had at times predicted. This may prove the best midterm performance by the sitting president’s party since 2002. Several factors might explain that underperformance, including weak candidates, backlash to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs overturning abortion rights, and continued anger at former President Donald Trump.
At Politico, David Siders explained the conventional wisdom that Tuesday was a bad day for Trump:
If not for the former president’s interventions, the night could have been a lot better for the GOP. Just look at how the most Trump-y candidates fared in states where more traditionalist Republicans were on the same ballot. In Georgia, Herschel Walker was locked in a neck-and-neck contest with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. Gov. Brian Kemp, whose resistance to overturning the 2020 results infuriated Trump, easily defeated his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. In New Hampshire, Republican Don Bolduc lost to Sen. Maggie Hassan in a race that didn’t even look close, while Gov. Chris Sununu, who once referred to Trump as “fucking crazy,” cruised to reelection.
Trump’s preferred candidate in Ohio, J.D. Vance, did better, beating Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan by a comfortable margin in that state’s U.S. Senate race. But he came nowhere close to the margin that incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine, a more traditionalist Republican, put up. In Arizona, it was still early, with only about half of the expected vote in. But Kari Lake was running behind Katie Hobbs. Even if she comes back to win, it will be a closer race than political professionals of both parties had predicted had a more traditionalist Republican, Karrin Taylor Robson, made it through.
And in Florida, Trump’s home state?
Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida — and a potential rival to Trump — won reelection in a 20-point landslide. In 2020, Trump carried the state by just more than 3 percentage points.
The results are good news for Republicans who want DeSantis to be their standard-bearer in 2024, Ross Douthat argues, because it vindicates their theory of what he could do for GOP prospects:
That theory, basically, is that there’s a decisive right-of-center majority there for the taking in American politics, an opportunity magnified by the Biden administration’s unpopularity. It’s a majority that Donald Trump pushed the party toward, by picking up working-class white voters in 2016 and then Hispanic voters in 2020 — proving that the G.O.P. coalition could be more blue collar and multiracial than its Romney-Ryan iteration …
But Trump himself is just too much, too erratic and polarizing and plainly dangerous, to complete the realignment on his own. And his influence on the party as a whole, manifest in the underperforming candidates he elevated in this cycle, is preventing the new G.O.P. majority from taking its natural shape. States like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and maybe even New Hampshire should have been easy Republican pickups; all they needed was a normal set of Senate nominees. Instead they got the kind of nominees Trump wanted, and the result is difficulty, defeat, disappointment and votes being counted late into the night.
Crucially, the DeSantis theory emphasizes, “normal” doesn’t have to mean “squishy.” Instead, his sweeping success in Florida proves that you can be an avatar of cultural conservatism, a warrior against the liberal media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a politician ready to pick a fight with Disney if that’s what the circumstances require. You just also have to be competent, calculating, aware of public opinion as you pick your fights and capable of bipartisanship and steady leadership in a crisis. The basic Trump combination, cultural pugilism and relative economic moderation, can work wonders politically; it just has to be reproduced in a politician who conspicuously knows what he’s doing‌, ‌and who conspicuously isn’t Donald Trump.
[Read: What should colleges care about?]Speaking of Florida, is it still a swing state?In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that, gradually and then suddenly, it became a red state:
For 30 years, Florida has been tough for the Democrats: The Sunshine State has not elected a Democratic governor since 1998; it has not elected a Democratic legislature since 1994; the last year in which a Senate or presidential candidate won here was 2012; and, in 2018, the only Democrat elected statewide was that lunatic, Nikki Fried. But, while Republicans have tended to win here, they’ve tended to win in nail-biters. Despite Republican waves in the rest of the country, the GOP prevailed in the Florida governor’s races by just 1 percent in 2014 and 1.2 percent in 2010. In 2016, Trump eked out a win by 1.2 percent. In 2020, that number was 3.4 percent. Four years ago, in races that both went to mandatory recounts, Ron DeSantis won the gubernatorial contest by 30,000 votes and Rick Scott won the Senate race by just 10,000. Between 1992 and 2016, voters in Florida filled in 48,263,173 presidential-election ballots. In that time, the difference between the Republican votes and the Democratic votes was just 17,753 — or 0.0004 percentage points of the total. Those 17,753 went to the Democrats.
Now? Something has changed. No longer can Florida be seen as a swing state. This is Republican ground. Tuesday night, Ron DeSantis blew out Charlie Crist by 19 points … and counting. This feat was echoed by Marco Rubio, who won by 16; by the Republican candidates for attorney general, chief financial officer, and agriculture commissioner, who all won by ten points or more; in the state legislature, which seems likely to feature Republican supermajorities in both chambers; and by the Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, who won 20 of their 27 races. For the first time in a long time, Republicans didn’t just win in Florida; they won big in Florida.
Failing UpwardThe Atlantic’s Jacob Stern argues that Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams have something in common:
The two Democrats are among the country’s best-known political figures, better known than almost any sitting governor or U.S. senator. And they have become so well known not by winning big elections but by losing them. Both Abrams and O’Rourke have won some elections, but their name recognition far surpasses their electoral accomplishments. After serving 10 years in the Georgia House of Representatives, Abrams rose to prominence in 2018, when she ran unsuccessfully for the governorship. O’Rourke served three terms as a Texas congressman before running unsuccessfully for the Senate, then the presidency. And they are both running again this year, Abrams for governor of Georgia, O’Rourke for governor of Texas. They are perhaps the two greatest exponents of a peculiar phenomenon in American politics: that of the superstar loser.
Who Is to Blame for the State of the GOP?Jamelle Bouie indicts Republicans for their choices:
We are moral agents, responsible for our decisions, even if we can’t fully escape the matrix in which we make them. And yet so much of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes the opposite: that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold, no choice but to apologize for his every transgression, no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and now no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country. But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn, Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work — for the sake of their narrow political and ideological objectives.
How Democrats Lost the Working ClassIn The American Prospect, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg explains at length where the party went wrong. Ruy Teixeira has more at The Atlantic:
This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy—issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters. They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms. This inattentiveness to working-class concerns is not peculiar to the present election. The roots of the Democrats’ struggles go back at least as far as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, and, as important, to the way in which many Democrats chose to interpret her defeat. Those mistakes, compounded over subsequent election cycles and amplified by vocal activists, now threaten to deliver another stinging disappointment for the Democratic Party. But until Democrats are prepared to grapple honestly with the sources of their electoral struggles, that streak is unlikely to end.
Why a Perennial Swing Voter Went Republican in 2022Andrew Sullivan explains at UnHerd:
There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.
By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-Left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far Right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far Right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.
And yet … in return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-Left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the centre — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the centre?
Whither California?Apropos news that at least 352 companies have moved their headquarters out of the Golden State in the past few years, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an editorial addressed to Nevada Democrats:
California is the most populous state and has the third-biggest land area in the union. It has a strong system of higher education and ample access to ports for international shipping. Plus, the weather, diverse terrain and beaches are superb. But California ranks just 16th in new capital projects. Per-capita, it ranks 46th, which is tied with North Dakota. On the per-capita list, Nevada ranks 35th. This didn’t happen by accident. California progressives have enacted policy after policy that make it hard to do business there. The taxes are high. The regulations are oppressive. The permitting is costly. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council ranks California as the 49th-most “entrepreneur-friendly” state. Laws stack the deck against employers targeted by trial lawyers. Energy is expensive. The possibility of blackouts is a regular occurrence.
… Unsurprisingly, companies have generally moved to states that are much more business-friendly. Workers are better able to afford houses and fill their gas tanks, even if the weather isn’t as pleasant. There’s an important lesson here for Nevada Democrats — and voters. California isn’t a model to imitate, but a slow-motion disaster to avoid.
My feature-length thoughts on the California dream are here.[Read: How America has changed since the first affirmative-action case]Provocation of the WeekAt UnHerd, Elbridge Colby argues that a change in America’s foreign-policy posture is urgently needed:
The United States is struggling to keep up with the military advances China is making to prepare for a conflict in the Western Pacific — the most plausible locus of such a war. Indeed, many of the most respected voices on US defence matters openly question whether the United States would prevail in a conflict with China centered on Taiwan. And … Washington does not appear to be taking the kind of dramatic steps needed to match China’s ongoing military buildup … As the Biden Administration made clear in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, the United States does not have the capacity to fight both such an exceptionally stressing war with China and another significant conflict, such as in Europe against Russia or the Middle East against Iran, on even roughly concurrent timelines. This military scarcity confronting the United States is felt not so much in overall number of soldiers or total expenditures, but rather in the critical platforms, weapons, and enablers that are the key sources of advantage in modern warfare — heavy bombers, attack submarines, sea and airlift, logistics, and precision munitions. It is not clear America has enough systems just to win a war against China alone.
His advice:
America should laser-focus its military on Asia, reducing its level of forces and expenditures in Europe. This will allow America to hopefully deter and, if necessary, defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan and other US allies in the region, using military force to defeat Chinese aggression rather than substantially relying on economic warfare.
… Europe should focus on taking the lead on Ukraine and, more broadly, assuming the primary role in its own conventional defence. In this model, the United States can continue to provide more focused military contributions and support to Nato, but only consistent with a genuine prioritisation of the first island chain necessary to ensure prevailing there against Chinese attack.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.In 1962, President John F. Kennedy and the Democratic Party took advantage of low inflation and exceptional real-income growth to add three seats to their Senate majority. Sixty years later, no Democratic president with control of the Senate has ever duplicated the achievement by picking up Senate seats, or even holding steady, in a midterm election.Until … now?In this economy?!President Joe Biden and the Democrats have defied a gloomy narrative to give themselves a real shot at retaining control of the Senate. (We still don’t know the full results from Arizona, which is leaning Democratic, or Nevada and Georgia, which appear to be toss-ups.) They also seem poised to lose a relatively small number of seats in the House. Yet Biden’s record looks almost nothing like JFK’s in ’62. He has one of the lowest approval ratings of any postwar president after 22 months. Inflation is more than 8 percent. Real-income growth, which has a surprisingly good record of predicting the incumbent party’s vote share in each election, has turned sharply negative.Perhaps that’s why pundits and commentators seemed certain over the past few weeks that Democrats faced electoral calamity on Election Day. Politico and The New York Times anticipated “disaster” for Democrats. Joe Rogan predicted a red wave resembling “the elevator scene from The Shining.” Conservative pundits such as Ari Fleischer predicted a similar bloodbath. “Part of my overall prediction [is] that Democrats will wake up on Wednesday morning with a powerful impulse to move to Canada or Belgium to take advantage of their permissive assisted-suicide programs,” the New York Times commentator Bret Stephens wrote. Betting markets agreed with this overall assessment, predicting that Republicans would finish the night with 51 to 53 Senate seats.The vibes were wrong. The Democratic horror movie never rolled, the disaster hasn’t materialized, and many Democrats woke up this morning with a powerful impulse to retain their citizenship, at least for one more election cycle. Americans are experiencing an unfamiliar sensation: the feeling that the polls were right. Or, at least, right enough, in aggregate.In particular, reputable institutional pollsters, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, provided high-quality indicators of the final outcome. The website FiveThirtyEight’s final polling average, which gives more weight to blue-chip pollsters, predicted a 50–50 toss-up for the Senate. “In the end, the FiveThirtyEight averages in most key races are looking pretty solid,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, wrote to me. “I think a lot of people who watch politics closely were mentally giving Republicans a few bonus ‘Shy Trump Voter’ bonus points. That’s why they’re surprised today.”The polls seem especially good relative to more subjective forecasts. On the betting market PredictIt, which offers a nice quantitative measure of preelection vibes, Mehmet Oz was favored to defeat John Fetterman in the Pennsylvania Senate race all week. But polls receiving an A rating from FiveThirtyEight, including one from Siena College/The New York Times and a Fox News–sponsored one from Beacon Research, consistently predicted a narrow Fetterman win. Indeed, Fetterman won narrowly. In New Hampshire, PredicIt gave the Republican Senate challenger a 45 percent chance to win earlier this week. Instead, the Democrat Maggie Hassan won comfortably, as traditional polls had predicted.Every election has polling errors. When the final vote is counted, we will likely see some state contests where the polls were off by double digits. But those errors don’t appear to show a systemic bias against one party, the same way that the 2016 and 2020 elections undercounted the Trump vote. Instead, the polls, properly weighted, seem to have offered a pretty good indicator of the final result.One lesson of the 2022 midterms is that the polling industry is not existentially screwed. High-quality polling still exists, even though it is hard to do in an age of cellphones, caller ID, and low response rates. It means that the direction of polling errors is still random enough that people shouldn’t automatically subtract several points from every Democratic vote-share figure they read.Another lesson is that Republicans seem to have given more weight to vibes than polls throughout the past year. Here are several things that poll terribly: Donald Trump, the foiled insurrection on January 6, explicit plans to reject democratic elections, overturning Roe, and installing abortion bans. To believe that one’s party can win a landslide election while embracing all five, one must, at some level, believe that unquantified bad vibes are worth more than quantifiable polling.The fact that Biden seems so close to holding the Senate ought to shock us. But when Republicans embrace unpopularity and come up short in a popularity contest, one cannot call it surprising.

This week, tens of thousands of diplomats, activists, and world leaders are gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP27. They’re meeting to discuss the ongoing implementation of the Paris Agreement, the global climate treaty that was finalized in 2015. The key issue is likely to be the pact’s “loss and damage” provisions—diplomatic shorthand for whether rich countries, which have emitted the bulk of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, should reimburse poor countries facing climate-change-intensified disasters. It’s one of the most controversial issues at the climate talks, and negotiators have kicked it down the road at each of the past handful of UN negotiations.But the talks will also refocus attention on the Paris Agreement more broadly, and the international process that it jump-started seven years ago. The treaty, which is voluntary and nonbinding, has never been particularly revered: Many climate activists believe it doesn’t go far enough—its text doesn’t even mention fossil fuels, which cause climate change, by name—while climate-change-doubting politicians have demonized it. Yet its apparent mediocrity has hidden an important story that has played out slowly over the past few years. The Paris Agreement process seems to be working … at least for now.Let’s refresh how the main process of the Paris Agreement is supposed to work. Every few years, each country makes a new pledge about how much it will cut emissions. A few years after making their pledges, negotiators gather at COP for a “global stocktaking” of how they did. There’s no penalty for not hitting your target; the only punishment is getting “named and shamed” by other attendees, nonprofits, and the press. Then the cycle restarts, and countries make new, more ambitious pledges. This current conference is taking place in an “off” year for this cycle, when negotiators hash out other parts of the Paris Agreement or revisit other climate commitments.There’s no particular reason to think that the process should work. The Paris Agreement is little more than a global procedural requirement—a voluntary commitment by every country in the world to do the same homework assignment. And it is not how earlier international environmental treaties worked. The Montreal Protocol, for instance, which successfully phased out the use of ozone-depleting pollutants, worked by imposing a de facto command-and-control scheme across the global economy, limiting how much of certain chemicals could be made and how they could be traded.But the world has made more progress on climate change over the past few years than it did in the 25 years prior. As David Wallace-Wells recently noted in The New York Times, the world has significantly reduced the possibility of some of the most catastrophic climate outcomes. That’s partially because of technological improvements in wind, solar, and batteries. But it’s also because of a new urgency in how climate change has been discussed since 2015, and since 2018 in particular. You can see the urgency nearly everywhere you look: Since 2020, China has committed to its first net-zero target, the United States has passed the first substantive climate legislation in its history, and the European Union has committed at least 1 trillion euros to a new vision of its economy that it calls the “European Green Deal.”Why is that? This is going to sound weird, but so far the Paris process is managing climate change because it has created a space to manage climate change. It has made a zone of peaceful competition, collaboration, and one-upmanship that stands apart from the rest of international politics. Consider that when the U.S. announced it would withdraw from the Paris Agreement at the beginning of the Trump administration, climate advocates worried that the treaty process would fall apart and other countries would pull out. Yet it did not, and they did not.If anything, the process was stronger when the U.S. rejoined last year. That’s partially because mayors, blue-state governors, and some of the country’s largest companies went into overdrive to hold up the spirit of the pact, but it’s also because the rest of the world used Trump’s departure as an opportunity to show up Trump. And as the political scientists Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger have observed, it’s also because the Paris process—and the COPs themselves—allow pro-climate-action groups in each country to coordinate with pro-climate-action groups in other countries. (This often happens through the trade or finance-related talks that happen off to the side of the conference.)Watching the Paris talks play out, I’ve started to wonder if they meet the philosopher and polymath Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s definition of antifragility—systems that get stronger as they are subjected to shocks and volatility. And yet, it’s possible that for all that the Paris Agreement has done, we’ve now reached the high point for the treaty. Countries, after all, are starting to tackle the trickiest issue at COP—the issue of loss and damage, or as former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson derisively called it on Monday, climate “reparations.” The treaty process is only antifragile as long as countries have something to collaborate on; if parties or movements in several large countries decide they want nothing to do with climate action, then it could wither.That possibility got likelier after last night’s midterm elections in the U.S. The red wave did not materialize, but the GOP could still win a robust trifecta, giving it control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, as soon as 2024. Even another American withdrawal—or a U.S. attempt to defund certain UN agencies—might not be enough to disturb the Paris process. But combined with an anti-climate or far-right turn elsewhere in the world—in China, perhaps, or Europe—then it might be enough.Climate-related pledges work only when some plurality of the world’s largest polluters get together to make them. The U.S., as Republican politicians continually remind us, emits only a fraction of the world’s annual carbon pollution. But were it to depart Paris along with China and several European countries, then it could do real damage. Earlier this year, I said we might be in a golden age of climate action. But Eden only seemed like Eden after the Fall.

In an open letter that began circulating last week, more than 700 “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community” are urging Penguin Random House to cancel the publication of a forthcoming title by Amy Coney Barrett. Citing the conservative Supreme Court justice’s vote with the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and declared that the Constitution affords no right to an abortion, the signatories argue that publishing Barrett’s book would put the publisher at odds with globally recognized human rights.According to the letter, “harm is done to a democracy not only in the form of censorship, but also in the form of assault on inalienable human rights.” The signatories consider abortion to be such a right; harm is done to a democracy, in their telling, by publishing the arguments of an anti-abortion judge.How striking a claim! In the nearly 50 years since Roe, the publishing industry has released books on both sides of the abortion debate. I’ve never seen anyone suggest that doing so violated international human rights––until now, when hundreds are signing on to that proposition (with regard to a book they cannot have read, the manuscript being incomplete).[Read: What comes after Roe?]This claim exemplifies a disturbing trend in American public discourse. Instead of having a straightforward argument about a proposition—such as whether abortion is moral or immoral, or whether it should be legal or illegal, or what compromises society should make about it—we keep getting bogged down in meta-arguments about whether even airing certain viewpoints is okay. Some participants in these debates concede that everyone has the right to speak, but they also urge private actors, such as publishers or universities, to refrain from spreading widely held yet supposedly discredited ideas. The open letter’s signatories seem to presume that abortion rights will be safe if cultural elites simply declare dissent illegitimate.Although the letter explicitly targets only Barrett’s current publisher, the signatories include people from across the industry, and their argument implies that no one who cares about human rights should publish the book, regardless of their legal right to do so. “We care deeply about freedom of speech,” the letter declares. “We also believe it is imperative that publishers uphold their dedication to freedom of speech with a duty of care.”What does that even mean?Penguin Random House has held firm so far, consistent with the long-standing view that publishing material on all sides of a hotly contested political question is an exercise of human rights, not a violation of them. The company—which is reportedly paying Barrett $2 million for her book—clearly believes that the reading public will be interested in the justice’s work. And although a letter with 700-plus signatures is no lark, it represents a tiny fraction of publishing-industry professionals. Still, any effort to prevent a book from reaching a mass readership warrants scrutiny, whether the activists involved are trying to get a particular title banished from public schools and libraries or––more onerous for would-be readers––pulled from publication in the first place.There have always been people who want to restrict the range of permissible debate, even when it means that the views of tens of millions of their fellow citizens would be deemed beyond the pale. This approach is incompatible with democracy. But how did so many in a traditionally liberal ideas industry come to regard a timely book on a perennially contested question as being immoral to publish? A close read of the open letter reveals both the radicalism of the standard put forth by the signatories and their apparent obliviousness to its implications.Let’s consider the signatories’ argument in its strongest possible form. Bertelsmann, the conglomerate that owns Penguin Random House, declares in its code of conduct, “We are committed to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations’ Global Compact.” International human-rights organizations “widely recognize abortion access as a fundamental human right and have condemned the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision,” the letter asserts. It cites the organization Human Rights Watch, which has argued that “the human rights on which a right to abortion access is predicated are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Barrett voted to overturn Roe and will presumably defend that decision in her book. Therefore, the letter’s authors reason, moving forward with the book’s publication “places Bertelsmann and Penguin Random House both in direct conflict with their own Code of Conduct and in violation of international human rights.”This is a question-begging mess. In Dobbs, the Supreme Court wasn’t deciding on the legality of abortion but whether the Constitution protects a right to it: The majority opinion doesn’t outlaw abortion; it returns abortion policy making to the states. And whether the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects a right to abortion is as hotly contested as whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects a right to abortion––in fact, some abortion opponents argue that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the right to life of fetuses, citing passages such as “everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” What’s more, a publishing house can be committed to a principle and nevertheless print arguments that are in tension with that principle.[Tom Nichols: Roe was flawed. Dobbs is worse.]Despite all of this, some people in an industry of left-leaning creatives are trying to reverse the judgment of editors and stop a book’s publication via a lawyerly appeal to a conglomerate’s corporate rules.But set all of that aside for the sake of argument. The most significant idea here, in my estimation, is proposing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a baseline standard for publishers, as if to say, Of course publishers should air diverse opinions—just none that would challenge human rights.That notion is superficially seductive. After all, major publishers turn away most manuscripts by necessity, and almost no one would rule out rejecting a book on moral grounds. Even if a book arguing for the genocide of an ethnic minority could make back its advance, most people would object strenuously if Penguin Random House published it. So why isn’t the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a reasonable moral floor, especially for a publisher whose owners have long cited adherence to its values?But imagine actually applying that standard. The declaration states that “everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others”––a proposition starkly at odds with The Communist Manifesto, a book included in the Penguin Great Ideas series. Would the open letter’s authors sign on to canceling all books at odds with private-property rights?The declaration also states that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation.” Ken Auletta’s Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence (Penguin Random House 2022) attacks the honor and reputation of its subject. Readers, do any of you object?Penguin Random House did not happen to publish Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family or Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation by the academic Sophie Lewis. How many signatories would object if it had, given the declaration’s insistence that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”?Countless other works released by major publishers promulgate arguments that are starkly at odds with various parts of the declaration. If the open letter’s signatories start objecting to all such books, I will grant them points for consistency, but I will still believe that they have adopted a silly, unworkable, illiberal standard for deciding what can be ethically published. But if abortion opponents are the only people whose arguments are targeted in this way, I’ll regard the letter’s argument as tendentious, motivated reasoning, however earnest.“The decision to publish a book should not be construed as an endorsement of the views of the author or subject,” the literary organization PEN America declared in its statement on the Barrett controversy. “Editors should play a role in raising tough questions in preparing a book for publication to ensure that work serves the public interest in terms of thoroughness and veracity.”PEN America has it right, and fortunately, the authors of the open letter likely won’t get their way. But the document remains a cautionary example of an argumentation style that has become all too common: the hijacking of liberalism’s language toward an end that is fundamentally authoritarian.

Over seven decades, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has advanced one of the most radical critiques of capitalist modernity. But in opposing modernity, he has denied a key insight of Marxism: socialism must develop, not reject, capitalism’s dynamism.

The WPA mural New Deal by Charles Wells, from the Clarkson S. Fisher Federal Building and US Courthouse, Trenton, New Jersey, circa 1935. (VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)
 
Review of Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022)
For the average European, America is both horrifying and alluring in the same way that for the average socialist, modernity is both horrifying and alluring. The United States is, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard remarked during a tour of the country at the height of the Reagan era, “a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence.” But, sitting in a Manhattan bar or racing toward a vanishing point on an endless empty freeway, it is hard to shake the feeling that among this mess there is “something of the dawning of the universe.”
Steeped in the writings of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx, the philosopher and member of the New Left Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking has been torn between two impulses. These are an old-world concern with community and belonging, threatened by industrial modernity, and a Marxist commitment to progress. Born in Glasgow in 1929, MacIntyre’s most significant writings were published well after any serious thinker could uncritically hold onto the idea of progress.
The Britain of his formative years was a nation in terminal decline; the Soviet Union was, for the Trotskyist MacIntyre, not a socialist country; and the United States’ use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had guaranteed that future wars would be existential threats not just for the belligerents but humanity as a whole.
What are the political options available to someone who both recognizes the scale of the defeat of the Left and holds on to the Marxist view that the strange world being fashioned by capitalism provides tools for human emancipation? MacIntyre’s writing has largely been concerned with fleshing out an answer to this question.
Despite living the majority of his life in the United States, MacIntyre is perhaps better known in the UK. There he spent the first part of his life enmeshed in the circles of the early British New Left alongside Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Walzer of Dissent magazine, Charles Taylor, and Tony Cliff, the founder of the International Socialists, a movement that counted among its members the journalist Christopher Hitchens and his brother Peter.
A newly translated, posthumously published book — its author was a French fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before he passed away at thirty-seven in 2010 — Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine seeks to defend the Scottish philosopher’s standing as one of the most profound theorists of capitalist modernity on either side of the Atlantic.

Caught Between Worlds?
Perreau-Saussine’s Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography is more “intellectual” than “biography.” In this respect, it is in line with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s adage that all students of Aristotle needed to know about the Greek thinker was that “he was born, he thought, he died.” This is of course partly because MacIntyre has often kept his cards close to his chest and shied away from writing about his own life. “To write a worthwhile autobiography,” he once remarked, “you need either the wisdom of an Augustine or the shamelessness of a [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau,” a thinker who wrote about exposing his naked body to onlookers in his Confessions.
For Perreau-Saussine, the central intellectual problems with which MacIntyre was concerned were the moral vacuity of liberalism and Stalinism, the possibility of the common good and collective reasonings in an individualistic age, and the secularization of politics. Despite his explicit commitment to not sullying himself with trivial matters, along the way we do learn a great deal about MacIntyre’s life and how it informed his unique blend of Marxist-Catholic Scholasticism.
MacIntyre was born into a middle-class, Presbyterian, Gaelic-speaking family of doctors from the west coast of Scotland. He soon moved down to London’s working-class East End in the 1930s, where his parents treated a population of industrial workers during the Great Depression. MacIntyre was sent to a private boarding school, Epsom College, in the home counties, the Tory heartlands surrounding London, and spent his teenage years among what the English might refer to as the upper-middle class.
Consequently, he came to understand himself as a figure living between two worlds: “a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers” and “[a] modern world . . . a culture of theories rather than stories.” Given that his parents were educated members of the professional class, this characterization perhaps relied on some idealization. Nevertheless, this tension — real or perceived — would stay with MacIntyre for the rest of his life as he navigated, first, an epoch of competing Cold War universalisms and then the age of fragmented relativism that characterized his adopted home of the United States in the 1990s and 2000s. He would find all these twentieth-century totalities, Stalinist communism, liberal capitalism, and fascism, to be morally flawed while also rejecting a postmodern abandonment of grand historical narratives.
Returning to the East End, MacIntyre would go on to study classics at Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1945. In the bombed-out shell of postwar London, he would read Aristotle  and join the Communist Party of Great Britain, which elected its first MP in the nearby Mile End.
Amid the ruins of the largest, at that time, city on earth, the center of what had been considered by liberal capitalists to be the most advanced modern nation, MacIntrye must have contemplated Aristotle’s argument in the Politics that “every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good. . . . The state . . . which is the highest of all . . . aims at good in a greater degree.”
As MacIntyre reflected on the notion that the state should magnify the community’s search for the good, he sat in the rubble of a war lost by a genocidal regime and won by states that had maintained empires, racial segregation, and extrajudicial purges. Was this evidence that the causal link between the morality of the community and the polis, central to Aristotle’s thinking, was broken?
The failing of capitalism was not that it produced too much abundance, but that it produced too little.
At the same time, MacIntrye encountered the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a thinker who argued that the deep metaphysical problems with which traditional philosophy had typically been concerned were the result of linguistic confusion. Marx would join Aristotle and Wittgenstein as one of MacIntrye’s greatest influences. Alloying these three thinkers, he would advance a moral critique of Stalinism. Socialist politics for MacIntrye must respect diverse “forms of life” contained within what Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) had called “language games.”
Inspired by Aristotle, he argued that the lives of individuals in communities could not, as Stalinism imagined, be seen as means for the realization of some greater plan; they were, instead, meaningful ends themselves. MacIntyre understood this as an invalidation of both the late Marx’s historical materialism and the Enlightenment liberalism of Cold War America. His move to a pluralistic vision of socialism coincided with the rise of multiple left-wing nationalist, anti-imperialist, and local socialisms, independent of the Soviet Union and emerging from the process of decolonization.
MacIntyre’s vision of socialism hit at the heart of Marxism’s claim to universalism. It posed the question, could effective socialist movements be generated better at the local and micro levels where particularities abound? According to Perreau-Saussine, in response to a chaotic veering away from linear historical progress, MacIntyre asked: “Following Trotsky, how can one still be a Marxist after the failure of most of the predictions made by the ultra-determinist Marx?”

A New Left
These disagreements would eventually push MacIntyre away from old left-wing paradigms. He rejected, in turn, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Western social democracy, and the British tradition of pragmatic trade unionism conceptualized by Tom Nairn as “labourism” in the New Left Review in 1964. Instead, MacIntyre, along with many thinkers of his generation, would find themselves caught between front lines, outraged by both the Soviet Union’s interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the capitalist camp’s imperialism, consumerism, and hostility toward socialism. This generation would formulate a New Left tradition based on social and cultural theory. This would not be enough for MacIntyre, who would eventually feel alienated as much of the New Left swung toward relativist postmodernism in the 1970s.
During the postwar boom in which both Moscow and the social democratic states of the West benefited from rapid economic growth, young left-wingers started to question the fundamentals of these two models. Both, critics argued, failed to move beyond a passive conception of citizenship. Rising living standards could not, on their own, legitimate the political systems of the communist and capitalist blocs. This pessimism about the successes of the postwar era was in stark contrast to the often rosy-eyed picture of the period put forward by the social democratic left. During the welfarist administration of British prime minister Clement Attlee, Perreau-Saussine points out that MacIntyre considered: “growing abundance . . . [as] not enough to promote democratic community.”
Of course, the restriction of socialism to purely developmental aims had its origin in the economic and political context in which both social democratic and communist governments were forced to govern. Both confronted polities ravaged by war and poverty. Throughout much of what we now call the developing world, socialism was seen as a gateway to industrial modernity.
The first generation of the British New Left, including MacIntyre, would seek to renew a socialism that had, according to Perreau-Saussine, “slid from a neo-Hegelian humanism to a markedly more materialist and economist position . . . [because] the struggle against the impoverishment of the proletariat had to take precedence over the safeguarding or renewal of human solidarity.” This program would be outlined in his Marxism: An Interpretation (1953) — published when MacIntyre was twenty-four years old — and Marxism and Christianity (1968).
Ironically, MacIntyre’s focus on regional differences between different forms of socialism and the noneconomic aspects of Marxism overstated the extent to which abundance and consumerism were prevalent across the globe. The failing of capitalism was not that it produced too much abundance, but that it produced too little.
In 2022, a generation of people across the developed and the developing world are reckoning with decades of lost productivity, underinvestment, sky-high income inequality, poor public services, unreachably expensive basic commodities, and an environment that is placing hard limits on humanity’s industrial growth through fossil fuels. Faced with these crises, what seems clear is that the economic analysis of the Old Left — which focused on questions of production and distribution of wealth — is more relevant than ever.

Universal and Particular
Nevertheless, MacIntyre’s interest in noneconomically determined relations and community still has value. However, the suggestion that it might offer an alternative to labor organizing and political-economic thinking is misguided. Instead, MacIntyre’s work serves to remind us of the higher goals of socialism.
Despite his retreat from the clash between universalism and relativism, MacIntyre does offer a useful critique of liberal democracy. Unlike other New Leftists committed to “neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism,” MacIntyre did not weaken his criticism or default to a defense of liberalism and capitalism once the Cold War wound down and the United States stood as the victor in a unipolar world.
For MacIntyre, contemporary liberalism, heavily influenced by the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, is far too concerned with managing threats, internal and external, from its perceived enemies rather than advancing a positive vision of the common good. The limitation of this perspective is that, as Perreau-Saussine neatly puts it, “by keeping only to the perspective of what is evil, we run the risk of dangerously narrowing our range of vision.”
Instead, MacIntyre holds onto the possibility of communities that are not incommensurate with liberalism but certainly separate, democratic, and guided by a pursuit of their own ideas of the common good gained through a shared sense of rationality rooted in cultural traditions. These spaces, rather than the liberal state or civil society, are the building blocks of moral, and therefore political, life. MacIntyre’s investment in these ideal communities goes someway to explaining his strange decision, in 1969, to move to the United States.
There, at the center of global capitalism, MacIntyre was best able to cultivate his own persona as both embedded in and opposed to the dominant traditions of the West. This move is explained brilliantly by Perreau-Saussine:
Why did MacIntyre leave Europe in 1969? Why did he need to immigrate into the United States . . . the most liberal of the commercial republics? Beyond the Atlantic, MacIntyre discovered the possibility of not being of his time. . . . For there, one can profit from the liberal separation of the state and civil society to critique liberalism. . . . His theory of the primacy of traditions presupposes liberalism’s success: it comes after liberalism.
It would be in America, among the diversity of traditions that liberalism tolerates, that MacIntyre would convert to Catholicism and write his major works of ethical philosophy attacking the moral vacuity at the heart of what he saw as a mechanistic, artificial system stripped of meaning. These works are Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999).
In these books, MacIntyre moves toward an atypical conservative traditionalism while retaining much of his earlier Marxist critique of capitalism and liberalism. His focus would shift to proposing an ethical life lived in a localized community, withdrawing from the thorny issues of theorizing mass politics within industrial modernity. Instead, a fulfilling life could be found in the cracks ignored by the liberal and capitalist system — in the traditions that resist, survive, and, perhaps, undermine it. If the narrowness of liberalism would not allow for the realization of the common good on the level of the state, it might tolerate it at the local level.
Can anyone seriously wish to become a modern equivalent to the monks of Iona, sheltering at the edge of the world and hiding relics in the basement while capitalist Vikings bash down the door?
Indeed, MacIntyre, currently resident at Notre Dame University as an emeritus professor, has identified scholarship, alongside chess, medicine, science, painting and football, as potential, although fragile, respites from consumerism, managerialism, and the aimlessness of the liberal world. According to MacIntyre’s After Virtue, these activities all contain their own “internal goods” accessed through self-sustaining rules or “practical reason.” This desire for internal meaning is supposed to be an antidote to the growing sense of agoraphobic angst in the vast fields, shopping malls, and suburban spread of modern America.

No Alternative?
Importantly, as MacIntyre settled into life in the United States, society had become fast moving and exciting. It had also become a cruel, atomized, and meaningless place under the neoliberal regime of Ronald Reagan. That the most advanced form of society coincided with the most brutalizing and violent social relations was a problem that deeply troubled MacIntyre.
Despite the clear limits of a postwar capitalism that had reached a phase of decadence under the leadership of a minor film star, MacIntyre did not seek to renew the old Marxist project. Writing in After Virtue, he argued:
A Marxist who took Trotsky’s last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could . . . replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own. . . . This exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.
Instead, for MacIntyre, what matters at this stage “is the construction of local forms of community within which . . . the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages.” That is a monastic withdrawal in anticipation of better times.
But can anyone, faced with the horrors of global poverty, which even in the so-called rich world leaves children without food, seriously wish to become a modern equivalent to the monks of Iona, sheltering at the edge of the world and hiding relics in the basement while capitalist Vikings bash down the door?
Here, the old socialist bromides are truer than profound attempts to reinvent the wheel. Philosophers really only interpret the world; the point should be to change it — or at least try to.

The coalition of voters who turned out to oppose Donald Trump in 2018 and 2020 largely reassembled yesterday, frustrating Republican expectations of a sweeping red wave.Under the pressure of high inflation and widespread disenchantment with President Joe Biden’s job performance, that coalition of young voters, people of color, college-educated white voters, and women eroded at its edges. And because Democrats began the night with so little margin for error in Congress, that erosion—combined with high Republican turnout—seemed likely to allow the GOP to seize control of the House, and possibly the Senate as well.But even if the GOP does squeeze out majorities in one or both chambers when the final votes are counted, its margins will be exceedingly narrow, with control of the Senate, once again, possibly turning on another Georgia runoff. Up and down the ballot, Democrats dominated among voters who believe that abortion should remain legal—despite predictions from Republicans and many media analysts that the issue had faded in importance. Democrats held House seats in states including Rhode Island, Virginia, Michigan, and Ohio that Republicans had confidently expected to capture. And with the exception of Georgia, which reelected Governor Brian Kemp, Democrats could win gubernatorial races in each of the five swing states that flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020—a development that would greatly ease Democratic fears of Trump allies trying to rig the vote (and potentially the presidency) in 2024.[David Frum: Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.]The results largely followed the outline of what I’ve called a “double negative” election. On balance, voter dissatisfaction with Biden’s performance meant that Democrats faced more losses, but the continuing unease about the Republican Party lowered the ceiling on GOP gains well below what the party might have expected.These relatively positive results for Democrats were so striking because the findings of the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations, like virtually all preelection polling, showed deeply pessimistic attitudes that typically spell doom for the sitting president’s party. More than three-fourths of voters, Edison found, described the economy as only “fair” or “poor.” Four-fifths of voters said inflation had caused them either severe or moderate hardship. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they disapproved of Biden’s job performance as president. His approval stood even lower in many of the key Senate battleground states: 43 percent in Nevada and Arizona, 42 percent in New Hampshire, just 41 percent in Georgia.Exit polls suggested that unhappiness over the economy could doom the most embattled Democratic Senate incumbent, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, though that race remains on a knife’s edge awaiting the counting of the last mail ballots. Across a wide array of other battleground states, Republicans carried significant majorities of voters who expressed negative views on the economy.But Republicans did not win those economically pessimistic voters by quite as big a margin as midterm precedents had suggested. Usually, the party out of power has dominated voters with those views: Democrats, for instance, in 2018 won about 85 percent of those who described the economy as either not so good or poor. This year, Republicans slightly exceeded that result among those who called the economy “poor,” the most negative designation. But among those who gave the equivocal verdict of “not so good,” Republicans won only 62 percent, way down from the Democrats’ total four years ago.The relationship between presidential-approval ratings and the midterm vote was similar. Biden’s national job-approval rating in the exit poll (44 percent positive, 55 percent negative) resembled Trump’s in 2018 (45–54). But, compared with Republicans in 2018, Democrats this year carried slightly more of the voters who disapproved of Biden, as well as slightly more of those who approved of him. Particularly noteworthy: Democrats won almost exactly half of voters who said they “somewhat disapproved” of Biden, whereas about two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of both Trump in 2018 and Barack Obama in 2010 voted against their party in House races.These effects were even more pronounced in several of the battleground states. In 2018, no Republican Senate candidate in a competitive race carried more than 8 percent of the voters who disapproved of Trump, the exit polls found. But Cortez Masto and Raphael Warnock in Georgia carried about 10 percent of them, while Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona and Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman in Pennsylvania reached about 15 percent of support with Biden disapprovers, the exit polls found. In New Hampshire, the exit poll found Senator Maggie Hassan winning a striking one-fifth of voters who disapproved of Biden. Similarly, Warnock won about one-third of voters who described the economy as only fair or poor, while Kelly and Fetterman approached 40 percent with them in the exit polls. All of this may sound like a small difference—but it proved to be the margin between defeat and victory for Democrats in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, and potentially in Arizona and Georgia.[David A. Graham: The divided states of America]How did Democrats overperform recent historical trends with voters dissatisfied with the economy or the president? Attitudes about the former president, and the party he has reshaped in his image, may largely explain the difference. In the exit poll, nearly three-fifths of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, and more than three-fourths of them voted Democratic this year. Many of the Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates he helped propel to their nominations also faced negative assessments from voters. And despite predictions from both Republicans and media analysts that abortion had faded as a galvanizing issue, a clear three-fifths majority of all voters in the national exit poll said they believed that the procedure should remain legal in all or most circumstances—and about three-fourths of them voted Democratic. Democrats also won about three-fourths of the voters who said abortion should remain mostly legal in the key Senate states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and two-thirds of them in New Hampshire. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer won a stunning four-fifths of the voters who said abortion should remain legal.These concerns about Trump and abortion rights didn’t completely erase voter discontent over the economy and inflation. Inflation still ranked highest when the exit polls asked voters what issues most concerned them (with abortion a very close second). And Republicans still won most of the voters who expressed the purest “double negative” views—those with unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump. But it’s hardly a surprise that the party out of the White House might win most voters who express an unfavorable view of the sitting president, no matter what other attitudes they hold. The notable part was that the exit poll found Democrats holding 40 percent of those double-negative voters—a number that helped them apparently avoid a titanic red wave.In the past, when midterms have turned decisively against the sitting president’s party, one reason is a backlash among independent voters, who are the most likely to shift allegiance based on current conditions in the country. Each time the president’s party suffered especially large losses in a midterm since the mid-1980s (a list of electoral calamities that includes 1986, 2006, and 2018 for Republicans and 1994, 2010, and 2014 for Democrats), independents have voted by a double-digit margin for House candidates from the other party, according to exit polls. But yesterday’s exit polls showed the two parties splitting independent voters about evenly on a national basis and Democrats winning among them in the Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania Senate races.The other ingredient in decisive midterm losses has been what political strategists call “differential turnout.” Almost always in American history, the party out of the White House has shown more urgency about voting in midterms than the side in power, but when midterms get really bad, that disparity becomes especially pronounced.A complete picture of this midterm won’t be available for months. But the early indications are that this year’s electorate leaned more toward the GOP than the past few campaigns. In 2020 and 2018, the exit polls found that self-identified Democrats made up slightly more of the voters than Republicans. But the exit polls yesterday showed Republicans with a slight edge.Young people gave Democrats preponderant margins in most races, but likely made up slightly less of the electorate than they did in 2018. Among voters of color, the story was similar—some erosion in support for Democrats, but not a catastrophic decline. The exit polls showed Democrats winning about 60 percent of Latino voters and 85 percent of Black voters. That was down just slightly from their level in 2020, though it represented a bigger fall from the party’s support with those voters in 2018. Republicans in the coming days will likely trumpet the continuing gains—though Democrats can fairly rebut that they have a clear opportunity to rebound if and when the economy recovers.[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Five things to know about midterm election results]Before Election Day, conservative pundits speculated rampantly about a sweeping shift toward the GOP among nonwhite voters without a college degree—what Axios breathlessly declared “a political realignment in real time.” But Democrats nationally carried about two-thirds of those non-college-educated voters of color, almost exactly their share among minorities with degrees; the picture was similar in the heavily diverse states across the Sun Belt, the exit polls found. Among white voters, the familiar educational divides held: The national exit poll showed Democrats slightly underperforming expectations among college-educated whites (winning only about half of them) but still showing much better with them than among non-college-educated whites, who once again broke about two-to-one for the GOP. (College-educated white voters did provide more resounding margins for Kelly, Hassan, and Fetterman, the polls found.)The full results won’t be known for days, and control of the Senate may not be settled until another runoff election in Georgia. But the 2024 presidential contest will likely kick into motion almost immediately. Trump has repeatedly hinted that he may announce a 2024 candidacy as soon as next week—and the GOP’s gains, even if less than the party anticipated, will only encourage him.Throughout American history, midterm results have had little relationship to the results in the next presidential contest. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush had relatively good first-term midterm results in 1978 and 1990, and then lost for reelection two years later. Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were all shellacked in their first midterm and then won reelection.Could Biden follow those precedents and recover in time for 2024? Much will depend on the economy. Doug Sosnik, a senior White House adviser to President Clinton during his recovery after the 1994 midterm, pointed out that the period from fall of the third year to spring of the fourth year is when voters really lock in their judgment about a first-term president. That doesn’t leave Biden much runway to dispel the economic pessimism that weighed so heavily on Democrats yesterday. Many economists believe that the Federal Reserve Board’s actions will trigger at least a mild recession before squeezing out inflation, potentially by late next year.Given the doubts many voters have expressed about Biden’s age, it’s not clear that a rising economic tide would lift his prospects as much as it did for Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. Many Republicans (and even some Democrats) believe that the loss of the House, and possibly still the Senate, when all of this year’s votes are counted will increase pressure on Biden to step aside in 2024. In the exit polls, two-thirds of voters said they did not want to see Biden run again.Yet the GOP may be saddled with a 2024 nominee carrying even more baggage. Trump will inevitably interpret any GOP gains as a demand for his return. But even in a Republican-leaning electorate, the exit polls still registered enormous resistance to him.One of the night’s clearest winners was Trump’s most serious competitor for the next GOP nomination, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who won a convincing victory that included breakthrough results in heavily Latino Miami-Dade County. His success will likely embolden the Republicans urging the party to turn the page from Trump—though Trump has already signaled his willingness to bludgeon DeSantis to secure the nomination, the way he did Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in 2016.For Biden, the situation will likely be more equivocal: The results for Democrats probably won’t prove good enough to completely quiet the chatter about replacing him, but nor will they likely prove so bad as to significantly amplify it. After this double-negative election produced something of a standoff between the parties in 2022, it remains entirely possible that the nation may find itself plunged into the same grueling trench warfare between Trump and Biden again two years from now.

It is now well-established that having high levels of “bad” cholesterol (low density lipoprotein, or LDL) increases the risk of heart disease. Further, lowering LDL is protective, reducing the risk of atherosclerotic vascular disease, with higher risk patients having more of a benefit. This is extremely convenient in terms of cardiac and vascular research because now we can study simply if a treatment effectively lowers LDL. Following a marker in the blood is a lot easier than tracking health outcomes, which have a lot of confounding factors and takes a much longer time.

People looking to improve their cardiac and vascular health by improving their cholesterol numbers (lowering LDL and increasing good cholesterol – HDL) have lots of options. Regular exercise has been shown to improve peoples’ cholesterol profile, and has lots of other health benefits, and so it is a clear recommendation. The relationship between diet and cholesterol is more complex. Dietary cholesterol does not seem to have a significant effect on blood cholesterol for most people (some individuals, however, are genetically predisposed to respond to cholesterol in their diet). Otherwise the basic advice is to have an overall healthy diet, limiting saturated fats and having plenty of fruits and vegetables. Having a lean body mass is also helpful.

Diet, exercise, and maintaining a healthy weight is enough for most people to maintain a healthy cholesterol profile, and should always be part of any strategy to do so. However, not everyone can or does maintain a healthy lifestyle. Also, many people are genetically predisposed to high cholesterol, and no amount of healthy lifestyle will counteract their genetics. For many people, therefore, adding either a drug or a supplement to help improve cholesterol profile is a helpful or even necessary strategy. That is the focus of a recent study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology .

The study includes 190 participants, which is modest in size.

It was a single-center, prospective, randomized, single-blind clinical trial among adults with no history of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), an LDL-C of 70-189 mg/dL and an increased 10-year risk of ASCVD. Participants were randomized to 5 mg daily of rosuvastatin, placebo, fish oil, cinnamon, garlic, turmeric, plant sterols or red yeast rice.

The primary endpoint was change in LDL-C from baseline at 28 days. The rosuvastatin group confirmed that this medication is effective, with a 35.2% decrease in LDL-C from baseline. That is both clinically significant and statistically significant (<0.001). None of the six supplements showed any significant reduction in LDL-C.

The primary weakness of the study was its modest size. But this is not really a significant issue, in my opinion, because the study was clearly large enough to detect a clinically significant effect. One might argue that the trial was too small to rule out a small beneficial effect from any of the supplements, which is true, but such a small effect is likely not worthwhile in any case. The study was single-blinded, but because the only outcome measure was completely objective, a blood test result, this should not matter. Still, a larger, double-blinded, and multi-center trial would be welcome. I just doubt it would show anything different.

The negative results for all the supplements save fish oil is to be expected. The previous evidence for these supplements was never good. Turmeric, for example, suffers from insignificant bioavailability. Some versions of red yeast rice actually contain a small amount of lovastatin (a proven cholesterol-lowering drug) but not the brands available in the US. Red yeast rice without lovastatin has no effect on cholesterol. Garlic has also been studied, and shown to be ineffective as a cholesterol-lowering agent. The evidence for cinnamon is also negative.

The story of plant sterols is a bit more complicated. The evidence does show a possible modest effect, about a 9% lowering of LDL. This effect may have been missed in the current study. But also, this requires having 2 grams of plant sterols twice a day, which many may find difficult. Further, there are lingering issues of the net clinical effects of these doses, so relying entirely on a marker such as blood LDL may not be the whole story. Margarines with plant sterols may also contain trans fats, which can wipe out the benefits. So this is a tricky option, but may not be entirely useless. Clearly, however, it is no substitute for a statin drug.

Fish oil is also a bit complicated. While the evidence shows it does not lower total cholesterol, and may even increase LDL a bit, its primary benefit may come from increased good HDL cholesterol. This is a situation where we need evidence from net clinical outcomes, but they are very difficult to document with modest interventions because they would requires thousands of subjects, or tens of thousands, over years to get to statistical significance. The bottom line with fish oil is – you can’t just sprinkle it on your steak. It is no substitute for a good diet, or a statin drug. But there may be some benefit in helping to increase HDL.

This one study, because it is modest, is not definitive unto itself, but it does add to a growing body of evidence that is fairly consistently showing the same thing. There are two strategies proven to significantly improve cholesterol profile and cardiovascular health – lifestyle factors, and statin drugs. Supplements are basically drown in the noise of the evidence, and have either been shown to be useless or at best have a modest effect that is difficult to pin down. Supplements are not a substitute for the first two strategies.

This also makes sense because supplements are drugs, they are just drugs that have been poorly purified and generally have poor pharmaceutical attributes (otherwise they would be marketed as drugs). What they have is effective (and misleading) marketing.

Tuesday was a great night for prison reform advocates, as four states approved ballot measures banning slavery or indentured servitude as punishment for a crime.
Voters in Alabama, Tennessee, Vermont, and Oregon approved measures prohibiting the practice. A similar measure in Louisiana—which some prison-labor advocates argued was poorly worded and likely to create further issues—failed. Such solid victories, even in red states, show that a narrow criminal justice issue can be broadly popular with voters.
In Alabama, 76 percent voters, as of Wednesday morning, supported a measure to remove language in the state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. This question was part of a broad ballot measure, the Alabama Recompiled Constitution Ratification Question, which sought to reorganize the state's notoriously messy constitution, as well as "[remove] racist language," including the state's slavery exception.
In Tennessee and Vermont, ballot measures deleting those states' slavery exceptions also passed handily—with the vote count on Wednesday morning showing nearly 80 and 90 percent support, respectively. A measure in Oregon, also removing an exception to the state's anti-slavery constitutional provision, passed with a much slimmer majority, despite no formal "vote no" campaign.
While Louisiana's anti-slavery measure failed, prison reformers didn't want it to pass. The ballot measure would've removed language from the state's construction permitting "involuntary servitude" as punishment for a crime and replaced it with language saying that the state constitution's ban on slavery and involuntary servitude "does not apply to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice." The measure thus appeared to supplant one slavery exception for another.
"The way that the ballot language is stated is confusing," Louisiana State Rep. Edmond Jordan (D–29), who introduced the proposed amendment, said in a statement to KSLA News 12. "Because of the ambiguity of how it was drafted, I'm asking that people vote against it so that we can go and clean it up with the intent of bringing it back next year and making sure that the language is clear and unambiguous." The no votes were leading with 60 percent as of Wednesday morning.
While involuntary servitude for the incarcerated is federally legal under the 13th Amendment, several states have banned the practice since 2018. While prison labor is an $11 billion industry, the success of anti-slavery ballot measures shows that voters do not see forced labor as just. 
The post Voters Approve Anti-Slavery Ballot Measures in 4 States appeared first on Reason.com.

Despite telling pollsters that rising prices are a top concern, voters in Tuesday's midterm election seem to have approved all three proposed minimum wage increases—policies that will likely force businesses in some places to raise prices.
The broadest minimum wage increase on the ballot was in Nebraska, where voters approved a hike from $9 per hour to $15 per hour. With all precincts reporting on Wednesday, the measure passed with more than 58 percent of the vote.
As a result, the minimum wage in the Cornhusker State will increase by $1.50 annually until it reaches $15 per hour in 2026. After that, the state's minimum wage will be tied to inflation and will continue to rise with the consumer price index.
Business groups like the Nebraska Grocery Industry Association have warned that the planned increase in minimum wages will require further price increases for goods and services. That's coming on the heels of decades-high inflation rates that have caused food prices to rise by more than 11 percent in the past year—something voters told exit pollsters on Tuesday was a top concern.
In Washington, D.C., an even more aggressive minimum wage increase was approved by more than 74 percent of voters—four years after D.C. City Council blocked a similar plan.
The so-called "tipped minimum wage" ballot question will increase hourly pay for waiters, bartenders, and other tipped workers from $5.35 per hour to $16.10 per hour by 2027. That means workers who earn tips will have to be paid the same amount as other employees who do not earn tips.
As Reason has previously reported, that's not as good of a deal for workers as it might sound. Tipped workers can earn far more than $16 per hour and D.C. law requires that employers make up the difference if workers fall short of the hourly minimum wage during their shifts. Eliminating the tipped minimum wage means customers will likely tip less, which means tipped workers might end up actually earning less despite the minimum wage increase.
In New York, a recent tipped minimum wage hike caused many bars and restaurants to cut hours and reduce staff, according to a survey from the New York City Hospitality Alliance. Workers who merely saw their hours cut might have been lucky. As Reason's Billy Binion reported in 2019, two researchers at Harvard Business School found that the average restaurant has an additional 14 percent chance of closing for every dollar added to the tipped minimum wage.
Unions and other left-leaning political groups have successfully pushed minimum wage hikes in states and localities in recent years, usually by ignoring the obvious trade-offs of these policies. In 2021, the Congressional Budget Office calculated that a national minimum wage of $15 per hour would cost 1.4 million jobs, even as the higher pay for those who remained employed would lift 0.9 million people out of poverty.
The final minimum wage question to appear on midterm election ballots was in Nevada, where voters were asked if they wanted to amend the state constitution to hike the minimum wage to $12 per hour but also remove a previously approved measure tying future minimum wage hikes to inflation. It would also eliminate a provision of the state's minimum wage law allowing employers to pay $1 less per hour if they offer health insurance to their employees.
That's a complicated question—probably not well suited to a ballot initiative—but it appears to be headed for approval. With some precincts still unreported on Wednesday afternoon, 54 percent of voters have signaled their support.
As in D.C., where voters and the city council have been going back and forth over the tipped minimum wage increase for several years, Nevada's vote on Tuesday represents a quick reversal of a recent decision. In 2019, state lawmakers voted to tie the minimum wage to inflation. Now, that could be undone.
And with prices still rising at unacceptably high rates and driving wages higher everywhere, Tuesday's election is surely not the final word in the debate over how much workers should be paid per hour.
Maybe we should try letting employees and employers figure out the answer without getting state lawmakers and voters involved.
The post Worries About Inflation Didn't Stop Voters From Approving Minimum Wage Increases appeared first on Reason.com.

I’ll admit it: I let the right, and political analysts who were listening to the right, psych me out.

There was never much hard evidence that a red wave was coming. Since the imperious Supreme Court scrapped Roe v. Wade, Democrats have overperformed in special elections, and the pro-choice side won an overwhelming victory in a Kansas referendum on abortion. Polls showed an extremely close race in several competitive states and districts, and some of them had Democrats ahead, but ostensibly savvy observers put the narrative before the numbers. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that 48 percent of respondents intended to vote for Democrats for Congress and only 43 percent for Republicans. Politico dismissed its own survey as an outlier and headlined the story about it, “Voters Appear Ready to Blame Democrats for Economy, Inflation.”

Because I’m an anxious person traumatized by 2016, I mistook my own sense of dread for insight and assumed the people predicting a Democratic wipeout must know something. What I should have done was listen to those monitoring the furious political energy unleashed by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision stripping women of their right to bodily autonomy. “As it turns out, there was a lot of data, and almost all of it was pointing towards this notion that Dobbs changed everything,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic analyst who’d tracked a surge of new voter registrations and early voting by women.

As I write this, control of Congress is still up in the air. The fight for the Senate could, once again, come down to a Georgia runoff. The House seems likely to fall into Republican hands, but only by a handful of seats. Democrats won governorships in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and are ahead in Arizona, Oregon and Kansas. They’re poised to take control of the Michigan Legislature for the first time in almost 40 years. And they staved off a Republican supermajority in North Carolina that would have allowed Republicans to pass an abortion ban by overriding the Democratic governor’s veto.

Though it feels reductionist to compare Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the Musk era at Twitter has some eerie parallels to the Trump White House. There’s a ton of confusion; lots of firings; people shredding documents; outlandish, impossible-to-execute ideas being floated; sycophantic advisers; nervous employees trying to appease a mercurial man; and tweets—so many tweets. It is an exhausting, enraging, and sometimes grimly hilarious spectacle that changes by the hour. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the extended universe, tearing your attention away can be hard.Over the past few weeks, tech observers and Twitter obsessives like myself have been following every twist and turn that will ultimately decide the fate of the platform. Musk’s Twitter takeover is like so many things in American life in 2022: It is both dumb and consequential. Twitter, despite its relatively small size, has disproportionate importance in our politics and culture. It’s used by activists and dissidents, and what happens on Twitter does not stay contained to the internet. Moreover, Twitter’s fate is wrapped up in the identity of the world’s richest man, whose lack of expertise on how social platforms work could collapse the whole enterprise.I hope, for your sake, that you lead a richer, more spiritually fulfilling life than I do and that the hour-by-hour machinations of Elon Musk’s Twitter account are merely a vague curiosity. But for those who want to catch up on this strange internet drama, here’s a tweet sheet to get up to speed.October 27: The Bird Is Freed
the bird is freed
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022On October 27, Musk finalized his Twitter purchase. Though that wasn’t even two weeks ago, we were all spiritually 47 years younger when the billionaire implied that he was going to liberate the service from censorship and let free speech reign.October 28: Time to Form an Independent Committee
Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.

No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022Every opinion writer knows that when you don’t have a good answer, but you need to make content, you form a committee. Musk did just that in his first few hours as Twitter’s owner, announcing that, on moderation decisions, he would not call the shots.Except for three hours later, when Musk would make this moderation decision himself. Consistency is hard!
Anyone suspended for minor & dubious reasons will be freed from Twitter jail
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022October 28 and 29: Rejoice! Comedy Is Now Legal!
Comedy is now legal on Twitter
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2022Musk loves a good laugh. He hosted Saturday Night Live, you know! Comedy is why he brought a sink into Twitter headquarters the day before he completed the deal. Anyhow, part of Musk’s goal at Twitter is to protect free expression, even when it’s subversive and offensive, as some Truly Important comedy can be. You might not like it, but damn it, you’ve got to respect it.This, in case you were wondering, is Musk’s concept of comedy:
Finally, the truth that carbs are amazing can be said on this platform! #FreeSpeech
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2022I said you might not like it. This edgy stuff is not for everyone.October 30: Conspiracy Theory SundayYou’ve probably heard about this one. Man offers to buy website, man tells advertisers he wants to keep it from devolving into a “hellscape,” man buys website, man tweets a link to a homophobic conspiracy theory at former first lady from a website that famously claimed she died on the campaign trail in 2016. An advertising veteran suggested to me that Musk’s now-deleted Paul Pelosi tweet was perhaps the most expensive tweet ever and may have cost Twitter billions in advertising revenue. And still we tweet on!October 30 (continued): Never Apologize
This is fake – I did *not* tweet out a link to The New York Times! pic.twitter.com/d6V6m5ATW2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022This is probably as good a view into the way Musk deals with being wrong as we are going to get on Twitter. When you screw up, don’t say so. Just make a joke that, if you’re lucky, will only make your haters angrier. In this case, the butt of the joke is The New York Times.  It’s Trolling 101, really. Remember, comedy is legal again.Wow, Still October 30: Brainstorming
Interesting
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022This is just a short reply, but it’s a good example of Elon Musk and his Twitter advisers (like the investor Jason Calacanis) conducting market research via the internet’s least scientific tool: Twitter polls. In this case, 81.5 percent of the more than 2 million respondents said they would not pay for Twitter verification. Musk saw this information and two days later announced that Twitter would charge people $8 a month to be verified.Brief Interlude: “Halloween with my Mom”
Halloween with my Mom pic.twitter.com/xOAgNeeiNN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022Work-life balance is healthy.November 1: Power to the Peasants
Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit.

Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2022Nothing moves product like a little class warfare. Musk framing his decision to charge for Twitter verification as a populist effort is a savvy business step.Unfortunately, Musk is conflating the status elements of Twitter verification (blue-check elites) with the logistical elements of Twitter verification (curbing scammers and imposters). Reports suggested that Twitter will take away verification from users who don’t shell out $8 a month for it. It only really makes sense when you realize that Musk just paid $44 billion for the social network and needs revenue ASAP.A lot of people (myself included) thought this was a bad idea. Others just got mad. Musk responded as all good businessmen do, bringing to mind the age-old phrase: The customer is always … complaining; charge them anyhow.
To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022November 2: More Twitter-Poll Market Research
Advertisers should support:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022You are the world’s richest man and a titan of industry with tens of thousands of employees. You need money for the company you just purchased. That company is a social network that runs off brand advertising. Your tweet with a homophobic fake news story has led some people on the internet to suggest to advertisers that they should pull their business. What do you do? If you guessed passive-aggressive Twitter poll, you are correct.Around this period, Musk is mulling the decision to lay off half of Twitter’s staff. He is under a great deal of financial stress and seems to be struggling with the basics of his new job.November 3: The Very Big Idea
Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic super-intelligence
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2022This is very classic Idea Guy behavior. Twitter as a pulsing digital brain of the commons is a nice idea and well in line with Musk’s dabbling in neuroscience. He is, as experts on Twitter pointed out, very incorrect. Twitter is not, at least not in any current form, a collective brain.Things start to pick up here.November 6: Beyond Parody
Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022Kathy Griffin, a known media personality and comedian, changed her Twitter display name and profile picture to look like Elon Musk in what turned out to be a last act of Twitter satire. Musk and Twitter suspended her account. Musk, a noted lover of comedy, instituted a new rule banning unlabeled parody accounts. Speech and comedy—both tricky things!Surround Yourself With Yes-Men
Absolutely
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022To understand Musk’s Twitter experience, you need to remember that—with roughly 115 million followers—Musk is constantly being simultaneously yelled at and complimented. Many celebrities with huge followings deal with this. But few seem to read their mentions like Musk. Anyhow, here is the world’s richest man, owner and operator of three large companies, replying on a Sunday evening to a Musk fan account calling itself “Pope of Muskanity” and arguing that journalists are bad at their job.Yesterday began the second workweek of Musk’s tenure. He celebrated it in the traditional way, by tweeting an image of a Nazi soldier in a meme about birds.
How times have changed pic.twitter.com/gCxUkZ4kZC
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022Followed by two separate masturbation jokes.Remember, this website is (still, for now, at least) free!Those were followed by an endorsement of the Republican Party on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections.
To independent-minded voters:

Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022What fresh hell will tomorrow bring? Beyond more chaos, who can say?

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Americans sometimes forget how blessed they are. I hope they remember today, regardless of their vote, that their Constitution is a miracle. I learned a lesson about this in, of all places, the former Soviet Union.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Democrats’ pitch to voters is what decadence looks like.
Charlie Warzel: Elon Musk is bad at this.
Mandela Barnes’s last punch
Sacred BallotsToday we’re supposed to exhort our fellow citizens to vote, invoking the traditional words of the Founders and all the usual clichés (some of which have more truth in them today than in the past): “Vote as if your life depends on it,” “This is the most important election of our time,” and so on.I’m not going to do any of that. Instead, I’m going to tell you a story and then offer you one simple guide for voting.The story begins in 1989, when I was a young scholar who joined a small American delegation to the Soviet Union to carry out informal discussions on arms control with our Soviet counterparts. This was my third trip to the U.S.S.R. My first, just six years earlier in 1983, was during one of the coldest periods of the Cold War. A lot had changed by 1989, and the once-mighty Soviet Union was edging toward oblivion.As part of his attempt to keep the country together, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev created a new legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies. For the first time, Soviet citizens would have something like a real election; although the Communist Party insisted on its usual cut of the seats, Soviets in many places now had the chance to be actual “voters” instead of participants in a meaningless ritual. This election, for example, brought Boris Yeltsin back to Moscow after he was removed from the Kremlin and sent into the political wilderness two years earlier. Without it, Yeltsin might not have been in a position to help face down the Soviet coup of 1991.Our delegation was housed on a boat that was taking us from place to place along a river, and at night, after our meetings were over, we would leave the boat and explore. Most things in the old Soviet Union were closed after 8 p.m., but we would walk and take pictures and chat with whomever would talk with us.One night, very late, I was with some American friends on the outskirts of a major city. I saw a light on in what looked to be a school of some sort. On closer inspection, I realized that it was a makeshift polling station for the new elections. Voting was over, and the workers were counting ballots. I was young and brash, and my Russian was a lot better than it is today, and so I walked in as if I knew what I was doing. (I also had not yet developed a healthy fear of being arrested.) When I was stopped by one of the workers, I explained that we were Americans, that we were fascinated by the first real Soviet elections, and that we’d appreciate anything the local authorities could tell us.It worked.We were allowed to observe at a distance from the vote counters. What struck me was the reverence, the quiet seriousness, the sense of care in the room. The workers—mostly women, who did most of the many day-to-day things that made the Soviet Union function—were treating the ballots as if they were a sacrament. They handled them gently, counted them, marked sheets in their careful penmanship, wrapped the ballots with string, and gingerly placed them in boxes and sacks. No one spoke above a murmur. A few people looked up and smiled, and then it was back to business.I felt a swell of hope watching all this. The city was a grimy, industrial place even by Soviet standards, but these people, who had never known anything like a real election, were engaged with the same calm seriousness that I have seen in every American polling place. I started to think that democracy really is universal, a gift there for the asking.I wish I had a fairy-tale ending to this story. I do not. We were in Soviet Ukraine. The river we were on is now called the Dnipro. The city was Zaporizhzhia, which is now just miles from Russian-occupied territory. Democracy in the Soviet Union failed, and then it failed again in Russia. It is alive in Ukraine, despite Moscow’s attempt to exterminate it.These Soviets, however, were acting with the utmost seriousness because they’d never before had the chance to vote. They had no idea if they’d ever be allowed to vote again. This is how you too should vote: as if you’ve never had the chance to do it, and with at least the thought that you might never be able to do it again. Try to imagine, when that poll worker hands you a ballot, that it’s the last one you’ll ever see. It’s a thought that focuses the mind.I did promise a guide to voting, so here it is: Read the federal oath of office.
I swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion … so help me God.
Those about to take a job promise to “well and faithfully discharge” their duties—which should also apply to voting.I realize that for many people, this oath means that they are obligated to vote for election deniers and other extremists. The so-called Oath Keepers now on trial for sedition selfishly interpreted the oath as a call to arms against enemies of their own choosing, especially other Americans who disagreed with them. But I doubt whether many people who have ever read the Constitution can read this oath and come away thinking that their duty is to smear our elections and threaten our fellow citizens.America is now beset by shameful charlatans who have dishonored this oath, including almost everyone who worked in the White House for Donald Trump. That’s their burden to carry. But today, you can renew your oath to the Constitution. We are required to offer our “true faith and allegiance,” which means our trust and patience, our honesty, our willingness to put the common good above our own gripes and worries, and our commitment to the ideal that every voter is a fellow citizen who is no less and no more important than ourselves. That’s not a lot to ask, and the requirements of the oath are within the power of every American citizen—if they choose to honor them.Related:
Why is America always divided 50–50?
How a GOP Congress could roll back freedoms nationwide
Ukraine announced that Russia is seeking ballistic missiles from Iran to use in the ongoing war. (Iran has denied plans to sell such missiles to Russia.)
The DeSantis administration said that Department of Justice election monitors cannot have access to polling places in three South Florida counties, according to The Washington Post.
Tropical Storm Nicole is expected to strengthen into a hurricane before hitting Florida’s east coast on Thursday. It would be the first hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. in November in almost 40 years.

Brooklyn, Everywhere: American voters want to feel saved, argues Xochitl Gonzalez; they don’t want to be the ones called upon to do the saving.

(The Atlantic)
What I’ve Learned From Four Years of Open DMsBy Ginny Hogan
My Twitter DMs are open, and I will respond. I’m a comedian, and I use direct messages to find freelance writing opportunities, contact sources for articles, and—as most people who have messaged me in the past year can tell you—send links to my new book. But at my core, I’m just a woman with 170,782 Twitter followers and poor time-management skills. A reasonable person would have blocked DMs from strangers once they started streaming in daily—for me, around 2019. I did not.
I haven’t kept my DMs open just for professional benefits. The real reason is that they expose me to people I wouldn’t otherwise meet—people who tend to teach me something about themselves (and who might buy my book). The unsolicited messages I receive are sometimes sweet, sometimes sexual, and sometimes truly cruel: Senders tell me they like my tweets or they hate my tweets; they want to work with me, they want to motorboat me, or they want me to know I’m worthless. But things really get interesting when I write back. Perhaps out of depraved curiosity, probably against my better judgment, I almost always do.
Five things to know about midterm election results
Why did we all have the same childhood?
Why Democrats keep struggling on crime
Illustration of the Grimke family. (Tejumola Butler Adenuga)
Read. The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family views the abolitionist sisters, long been portrayed as heroes, in a new light.Watch. The Good Nurse, on Netflix, is a chilling—and completely bloodless—murder mystery.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I know many of you will be waiting up late into the night for election results, but some key results we may not see for days or even weeks. So when you need a breather, how about indulging in this thing we used to call “reading”?We’re so easily distracted that taking up a new book can be hard to do. This is why I love short stories, especially classic science fiction. My favorite collection is Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Treasury, which uses the clever principle of grouping stories by their literary form. “The Future in Question” is a compendium of stories posing as questions, including classics such as “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell Jr. (the basis for the movie The Thing) and “Who Can Replace a Man?” by Brian Aldiss. “Space Mail” is even better—a group of epistolary stories told as letters or telegrams (or, in the case of “Flowers for Algernon,” a heartbreaking diary). If you’ve never read “The Prisoner” by Christopher Anvil—a story told through email long before there was email—start with that, and I guarantee you’ll ignore the election for an hour or so. Stay informed, but take a break and step into another world for 20 pages. It’ll do you good.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In my last essay, I argued that the progress of capitalist development from industrial to postindustrial has worked to marginalize the socioeconomic position of ordinary people. Steadily declining dependence on their contributions in the most progressive sectors of the economy means that what they have to offer is less important than in the past; the result has been a drop in status and a loss of collective social power. This development, I believe, is the fundamental driver of our new class divide.
Here I want to describe a similar dynamic concerning the political marginalization of ordinary people. (By the way, I’m using “ordinary workers” and “ordinary people” in lieu of the off-putting “less-skilled workers” and “less-educated voters.”) In the new politics created by the conditions of mass affluence – namely, a postindustrial economy, mass higher education, an enormous increase in the scope and complexity of governance, and the ongoing revolution in communications and mass media – the participation and representation of ordinary people in the political process has declined, as has attention to their economic interests. Consequently, politics now exacerbates more than mitigates the crisis of inclusion, as the rules of the game for many important sectors of the economy have been rewritten to favor the elite at the expense of everybody else.
It’s weird in retrospect, but when Steve Teles and I were writing The Captured Economy we gave almost no thought to the historical process that had created the situation we were describing. We noted that in the past the redistributive effects of regulatory policies went in all different directions, whereas the regulatory interventions of recent decades virtually all redistributed up the socioeconomic scale. And we gave political-science-y reasons for how regulatory capture can happen and how elite insiders have special advantages. But we didn’t even try to explain why the pattern of redistributive effects had shifted. When the book came out and we started giving talks, though, that question came up pretty much every time. We fumbled around, mentioned the decline of unions, but didn’t have much to say. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then.
And it turns out that something I had written years earlier pointed me in the right direction, even though back then I didn’t connect all the dots. In The Age of Abundance, I told the story of how the advent of mass affluence after World War II triggered convulsive change in culture and values – a “postmaterialist” and “postmodern” shift, employing the terminology used by political scientist Ronald Inglehart, from “survival” values centered on acquisition and material security to “self-expression” values centered on quality of life and self-realization. This cultural sea change naturally carried over into politics as well, with the conflict between old values and new emerging as a major axis of political contestation during the tumultuous 1960s.
I’ll quote a bit from the book:

In the new era, the interests of the white working classes no longer seemed a pressing concern. Factory workers, far from oppressed, were now enjoying middle-class incomes and moving to the suburbs…. And so, as the sixties dawned, twentieth-century liberalism’s fundamental passion – to use the agencies of the state in support of social equality – redirected its ardor to needier and more appealing objects….
[T]he triumph over scarcity shifted the primary focus of liberal egalitarianism from lack of material resources to lack of cultural acceptance. When most people were poor, and many desperately so, the great invidious distinction was between the haves and the have-nots, and liberals cast their lot with the latter. But with the arrival of widespread prosperity, liberal sympathies were redirected to the grievances of “belong-nots” – various groups of dissidents and outsiders that challenged or were excluded from America’s cultural mainstream. Thus the increased attention to discrimination against blacks and women, harsh treatment of suspects and criminals, the problems of American Indians and migrant workers, and restraints on free speech and cultural expression…. 
Fear that domestic inequalities were being replicated on the world stage fed the growing discomfort with American “imperialism” and its real and imagined depredations against the yellow, brown, and black peoples of the Third World. And, without stretching overly much, the embrace of environmentalism could be seen as a call for better treatment of an excluded “other” – in this case, the natural world.
The upshot of all this was that liberal policies and priorities lost touch with, and indeed grew increasingly antagonistic toward, the culture and values of the vast bulk of the American population – the constituency that as a result of this conflict came to be known as the Silent Majority or Middle America.

This political transformation may have started in the United States, but it soon spread to other rich democracies. And the new values that were upending culture and politics may have made their dramatic debut on college campuses, but they soon became the norm throughout the more highly educated strata of society – a group that was rapidly expanding as the new information economy was in the process of creating a mass elite of managers and professionals. 
As described by the French economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues, the rich democracies transitioned from class-based politics, where the primary conflict was between the wealthy elite and everybody else, to a “multi-elite” politics. In the new politics, a “merchant right” that was affluent and more culturally conservative squared off against a “Brahmin left” that was highly educated and more culturally progressive. Now there were two main fault lines in politics: one based on income, the other based on education. As you can see in this chart based on the experience of 12 rich democracies, polarization between left and right based on income has generally held firm (although in the U.S. it has weakened considerably in recent election cycles), while divergence along educational lines – a proxy for differences in cultural values – has widened steadily over time. 

The shift from class-war to culture-war politics resulted in a significant downgrading of the priority accorded to the economic interests of ordinary people. There was now a major cross-cutting source of political conflict to sow division among different working-class constituencies and prevent their uniting in a common front on behalf of their shared pocketbook concerns. And liberal elites, who once sympathized wholeheartedly with the working class, now increasingly saw the white working class as the enemy of social progress; growing liberal contempt for blue-collar backwardness was matched by growing blue-collar contempt for liberal permissiveness and self-righteousness. 
If the crackup of class-based politics could be captured in a single moment, one candidate would be the New York City “Hard Hat Riot” of 1970. On May 8, just a few days after the Kent State shootings, hundreds of construction workers and office workers attacked a large group of student protesters, leading to hours of mayhem and around a hundred people injured. Just weeks later, Richard Nixon invited the construction worker leaders to the White House and received a hard hat as a souvenir.
And so the postwar social-democratic coalition to uplift the material conditions of ordinary people ruptured on the jagged edges of rapid cultural change. By the 1980s, when it became clear that inequality was once again on the rise and the salience of class conflict reasserted itself, the political realignment into a New Left and New Right was too well established to be reversed. Humpty Dumpty remains a shattered wreck to this day.
The marginalization of ordinary workers’ interests in the wake of ideological realignment was exacerbated by the professionalization of political life that was occurring simultaneously. Here again, we are looking at the consequences of mass affluence. As capitalism developed, its operations grew ever more complex – and thus required an ever larger elite of managers and professionals to direct and coordinate that complexity. It’s a development that the economist Frank Knight referred to as the “cephalization” of economic life. Just as animals capable of more complex behaviors have relatively larger brains, so economies with increasingly extensive and intricate divisions of labor have relatively larger elites of “knowledge workers.”
The process of cephalization necessarily spilled over into government: As the economy grew more complex, the task of governance became more complex as well. With the dramatic growth in the size and scale of government came a corresponding growth in bureaucracy – not just large numbers of clerks whose simple information-processing jobs would eventually be automated, but also mid- and upper-level civil servants with highly specialized and technical expertise. Politics professionalized as well, as seeking and holding elective office – traditionally a part-time job except at the very highest levels – became a full-time career. Congress didn’t stay in session over much of the year until the 1960s; election campaigns in the past were mercifully brief and correspondingly cheap. Year-round government and the rise of never-ending campaigning created a whole new industry of office seekers, pollsters, and consultants. As politics became more professionalized, it naturally grew more individualized as well – and the role of political parties as the directors of political life went into long-term decline.
More broadly, civic and associational life generally became more professionalized. As observed by, among others, Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, the whole structure of American civic engagement was transformed: from large, democratically organized mass membership organizations with active local chapters to a profusion of new business associations, nonprofits supported by charitable foundations, and national advocacy groups with large professional staffs whose “members” exhausted their responsibilities by writing checks. This change in civic life was a response, not only to the growing complexity of government and the need for deep professional expertise to be in a position to influence it, but also to plummeting communications costs that made it possible to form and maintain organizations without the need to root them in local meetings of the rank and file. In the altered ecosystem of postindustrial civic and political life, the numerous and nimble new professionalized groups simply outcompeted the old mass-membership organizations and drove them from their former prominence.
The end result of all this change is that politics is now largely a game for well-educated elites: there are few paths to power and influence that don’t start with at least a four-year university degree. The change in the demographics of political actors can be seen across the rich democracies, but the example of the United Kingdom is especially vivid. Back in 1964, roughly 35 percent of Labour Party members of Parliament came from working class occupational backgrounds; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 10 percent.
Something I learned from co-writing The Captured Economy is that when a political process is dominated by actors from a certain narrow group, the results of the process tend to get skewed to conform to that group’s outlook and interests. And that’s what has happened to politics in the rich democracies. It’s not just a matter of this or that industry being captured by narrow group interests, although that’s certainly going on as well. Rather, the entire political system has been captured by highly educated managerial and professional elites and is now run according to their narrow and well-insulated points of view. 
This capture has been especially fateful because it occurred at the same time that elites were diverging culturally from the rest of the country. The cultural shift from materialist “survival” values to postmaterialist “self-expression” values has been most widespread and far-reaching among the highly educated. Accordingly, the gap between the political class and the citizenry is not just financial and educational; there is also a yawning gap in deeply and passionately held beliefs about good and bad, right and wrong. Although elites on the political right tend to be more culturally conservative, and certainly act that way in public, nevertheless they are generally much more socially liberal than the people they represent. And elites on the left regularly find themselves drawn to positions – just recently, “defund the police,” “abolish ICE,” and uncritical support for gender affirming surgery for minors – that are vehemently rejected by overwhelming majorities. 
The cultural distance between elites and ordinary voters has often worked to narrow the apparent range of political debate, as elites on both sides collaborate to keep some issues off the table. But this suppression of non-elite views builds up pressure and seething resentment over time – and if that built-up pressure can find an outlet, the results can be ugly. Consider this much-discussed map of the 2016 American electorate prepared by Lee Drutman and the Voter Study Group:

The traditional bases of the two parties lie in the lower-left and upper-right quadrants: solidly liberal and conservative, respectfully, on both economic and cultural issues. Many elites of both left and right, meanwhile, describe themselves – at least among themselves – as socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and thus find themselves in the comparatively empty lower-right quadrant. And diametrically opposed to them are large numbers of people in the suppressed quadrant of the economically liberal and socially conservative – a sizeable group of people with views that long went without any representation in national debate. This is the vacuum that authoritarian populism has rushed to fill. Donald Trump was the first U.S. presidential candidate to claim these voters as his own. Of course he offered them poisonous demagoguery, not actual concern for their outlook and interests, but he made them feel seen, and that was enough to enable him to nearly wreck American democracy. Whether he will ultimately succeed remains an open question.
Similar dynamics are playing out in Europe. The emergence of more culturally oriented politics could be seen in the rising prominence of far-right parties in the 1970s and the birth and rapid growth of Green parties around the same time. As mass immigration, and especially Muslim immigration, became a cultural flash point, and as the social-democratic parties made their neoliberal turn in the 80s and 90s, a large bloc of economically progressive, culturally conservative voters came to feel unrepresented by the established parties of center-right and center-left. Hence two signal developments in 21st century European politics: the growing electoral clout of the authoritarian populist far right, and the collapse of the social-democratic parties that once were the voice of a unified working class. 
The elite capture of politics has done more than roil cultural conflict to the point of imperiling democratic stability. It has also worked to seriously aggravate the socioeconomic marginalization of ordinary people I described in my previous essay. First of all, elites’ elevation of culture-war politics has split working-class constituencies that might otherwise have united on behalf of their bread-and-butter interests. Although most people’s absorption in cultural conflict is completely sincere, the fact remains that this absorption gives the rich and powerful a crucial political advantage: it allows them to divide and conquer.
And it’s not just that democratic politics has become a less effective brake on economic elites’ pursuit of self-interest. It’s that politics now frequently turbocharges their self-dealing. The result is the “captured economy” that Steve Teles and I wrote about – key sectors of economic life where public policy has been systematically skewed to funnel income and wealth up the socioeconomic scale while undermining the dynamism upon which our common prosperity depends. In finance, intellectual property, the regulation of the legal and medical professions, and legal restrictions on land use, upward redistribution is occurring on a massive scale, while the competition necessary for well-functioning markets is either badly distorted or actively throttled.
Even when elites aren’t purposefully twisting the rules in their favor, the whole professionalized style of governance tends to produce policymaking environments that are hostile to non-elite interests and participation. Professionalization is a product of complexity; it is the job of professionals to master and navigate the complexities of contemporary social life. This characteristic virtue of the professional, the ability to handle complexity, leads to the professional’s characteristic vice: a strong inclination to make things more complicated than they need to be. Using impenetrable jargon whose decoding requires professional assistance, designing procedures so baroque that professional guidance is needed at every step – this kind of thing is virtually second nature among any group of people whose economic value consists of knowing things that most people don’t.
Needless complexity is ubiquitous in contemporary government – from tortuous applications for government benefits, to the use of multifactor balancing tests in lieu of simple rules, to all the interagency working groups needed to make government run because authority over a particular subject is routinely shared among many different agencies. In the United States, the professionalization of government has been dominated by lawyers, so Rube-Goldbergism is especially rampant. Compare the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 to the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010: the former totally remade the U.S. financial industry in 37 pages, while the latter pursued its more modest goals through 848 pages of statute and thousands of pages of implementing regulations. We can take this as a representative indicator of the general trend – a trend that makes participation in the business of government intimidating and off-putting to all those uninitiated in its secret codes and handshakes. 
When the inherent complexity of modern governance is magnified many times by gratuitous embellishments, the result is a policy environment with nearly ideal conditions for capture by elite insiders. It is no accident that the regulation of finance and intellectual property, two policy areas notorious for their byzantine complexity, is so rife with rent-seeking and regressive redistribution. The spectacular misallocations of people and money accomplished by zoning and other land-use restrictions would not have been possible without the hyperlocal system of decision-making that ensures virtually all affected interests are never in the room where it happens. And as law professor Nicholas Bagley has argued here (and at greater length here), the “procedure fetish” that is endemic in American administrative law, although motivated by a desire to make government more responsive to broad public input, actually greatly empowers the rich and powerful to protect their interests at the expense of effective government. We have inadvertently created an unaccountable and imperious “vetocracy” that hamstrings the operations of government at every turn – with the frequent result of shielding vested interests from disruption or even inconvenience.
There’s a great deal of Green Lantern theorizing when it comes to prospects for reversing the yawning class divide. If the trend toward the marginalization of ordinary people seems so resistant to redirection, it must be because bad people are being bad too hard and good people aren’t being good hard enough. There’s comfort in believing that passion and willpower are all that’s needed to change the world, but it’s false comfort. The disconcerting fact is that the arrival of mass affluence – the greatest humanitarian blessing of all time – has caused both the economic system and the political system to downgrade the importance of ordinary people’s contributions and interests. Archimedes taught us that with the right lever you can move the world. But where now can ordinary people find the leverage they need?
The post The political marginalization of ordinary people appeared first on Niskanen Center.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me how many COVID shots I’d gotten so far. And for a brief, wonderful moment, I forgot.“Three,” I told them, before shaking my head. “No, actually, four.” I had no trouble recalling when I’d received my most recent shot (September). But it took me a moment to tabulate all the doses that had preceded it.By this point in the pandemic, a lot of people must be losing track. “I actually think this is a good thing,” says Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford, and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Now that so many Americans have racked up several shots or infections, she told me, the question is no longer “‘How many doses have you gotten cumulatively?’ It’s ‘Are you up to date for the season?’”The flip is subtle, but it marks a rethink of the COVID-vaccination paradigm. We’re at a define-the-relationship moment with these shots, when people are trying to commit—to normalize them as a routine part of our lives. At a September ACIP meeting, CDC officials noted that “we are changing the way we are thinking about these vaccines,” and trying to “get on a more regular schedule.” If COVID shots are here for good, then at least we can be rid of the bother of counting them.[Read: It’s a bad time to be a booster slacker]Counting doses was more apt early in the vaccine rollout, when it seemed that two jabs (or even one) would be enough to get Americans “fully vaccinated” and out of the danger zone. When more shots followed, they were often advertised with confusing finality: What some initially described as the booster was later retconned as the first booster after a second one was recommended for certain groups. But with immunity against infection more fragile than some hoped, and a virus that quickly shapeshifts out of antibodies’ grasp, those ordinal adjectives have stopped making sense. Until our vaccine tech becomes much more durable or variant-proof, repeat doses will be, for most of us, a fixture of the future—and it won’t do anyone much good to say, “‘I’m on shot 15’ or ‘I’m on shot 16,’” Angela Shen, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.The numbers certainly matter when they’re small: It will continue to be important for people to count off their first few shots, for instance, especially those without a history of infections. But after that initial set of viral-spike-protein exposures, the total count is moot. In most cases, about three vaccinations or infections—preferably vaccinations, which are both safer and easier to accurately track—should be “enough to fully charge up the immune system’s battery” for the first time, says Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Further COVID shots will help only insofar as they can recharge the battery toward max capacity when it starts to lose its juice. Scheduling a vaccine, then, becomes a matter of “how long it’s been since your last immunity-conferring event,” regardless of how many exposures a body has racked up, says Avnika Amin, a vaccine epidemiologist at Emory University.People who are immunocompromised may need four or more shots to establish that initial immunity charge, and their own (maybe smaller) peak capacity. But ultimately, the threshold effect they experience—a point of “diminishing returns”—is similar, says Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington. Given how many vaccinations and infections the U.S. has now logged, the majority of Americans “can be done with counting,” she told me.If we’re going to shift our focus to timing shots, instead of counting them, we’ll have to schedule our shots smartly. Several prominent figures have already come out and said that yearly doses are a top choice. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s CEO, has been pushing that idea since early 2021; Peter Marks, who heads the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, has been delivering a similar line for several months. Even President Joe Biden has endorsed the annual approach, noting in a September statement that the debut of the bivalent shot heralded a new phase in COVID vaccination, in which Americans would receive a dose “once a year, each fall.”That plan is not unreasonable. Shots will have to come with at least some regularity, as variants keep rolling in and immunity against infection ebbs. But re-dose prematurely with a shot with similar ingredients, and the body—still hopped up from the previous dose—may destroy the vaccine before it has much effect, making it about as useful as charging a battery that’s already at 95 percent. SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels drop off steeply in the first six months following a vaccine dose, and then, the rate of drain slows down. It’s as if the immune system goes into “power-saver mode,” Goel told me, which means there might not be a huge difference between revaccinating twice a year or only once. Plus, living out much of the year with lower antibody levels is not as worrisome as it might sound. Although antibodies can be a rather useful proxy for our level of protection, especially against infection, they don’t paint the whole defensive picture: T cells and other fighters tend to stick around for far longer, maintaining safeguards against severe disease. (The immunocompromised and older people may still need more frequent COVID-immunity top-offs.)[Read: Are we really getting COVID boosters every year forever?]The optimal pace for COVID vaccination will also depend on the speed at which the virus spews out variants. A yearly schedule works for influenza, Shen told me, but “we know flu’s cadence.” SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t yet settled down into a predictable, seasonal pattern; its waves aren’t relegated to the chilliest months. The degree to which we, as the coronavirus’s hosts, tamp down transmission also matters quite a bit. Having more virus around puts more pressure on vaccines to perform, especially when there aren’t many other mitigation measures in place. If all this talk of “once a year, each fall” turns out to be another red-herring recommendation, Amin told me, it could undermine any messaging that follows.All of that said, the autumn regimen may yet stick around because it’s the easiest approach. Flu-shot uptake is far from perfect, but the messaging around it is “simple and clean,” says Rupali Limaye, a behavioral scientist and vaccine-attitudes researcher at Johns Hopkins. After dosing up twice in four weeks as infants, people are asked to get a yearly shot, and that’s it. Compare that with the most convoluted days of COVID vaccination, when people couldn’t dose up without accounting for their age, health status, number of previous doses, vaccine brand, time since last dose, and more. “That’s absolute overload,” Limaye told me. Complicated schedules burn people out—or dissuade them from showing up at all. This fall, when the bivalent shot debuted, a troubling proportion of Americans didn’t even know they were eligible.Encouraging COVID vaccines at the same, straightforward pace as flu shots would make it easy for people to sign up for both at once, and maybe, eventually, to get them in the same syringe. Vaccines tend to ride one another’s coattails, Shen told me. “In the fall, there’s a bump in other routine vaccines,” she said, because people “are already there for their flu shot.” It would also make a big difference if the COVID-vaccine recipes changed for everyone at the same time, as they do for flu.[Read: When’s the perfect time to get a flu shot?]If we’re going to pivot from numbering doses to timing them, we might as well take the opportunity to discard the term booster as well. Some people don’t understand what it means, Limaye told me, or they default to a logical question—How many more boosters will I need? Plus, booster may no longer fit the science. “When we start updating formulas, it’s not really a booster anymore,” Amin told me. That’s not how we generally talk about flu shots: I certainly couldn’t tell you how many “boosters” of that vaccine I’ve had. (I don’t know, maybe 14? 15?) Pivoting to a terminology of “seasonal shots” could make COVID vaccination that much more routine.So, fine, if anyone should ask: I’ve had (count ’em: one, two, three) four doses of the vaccine so far. But more important, I’ve gotten the shot most recently available to me.

Leveling complaints about the party’s overripe leadership to its prohibitive focus on abortion and the health of America’s democratic institutions, those Democrats who haven’t spent the last several weeks whistling past their own graveyard have trained their fire on the White House. True to form, the Biden administration is only just beginning to belatedly counter the ongoing effort to blame the party’s misfortunes on the hapless president. Just as characteristically, the narratives the administration is crafting for itself are muddled and conflicting to the point of incoherence.

The White House seems to have selected Politico Playbook as the venue where its preferred fables will generate the most traction. The first attempt, published on Monday, posits that Joe Biden will have a legitimate claim to the argument that he weathered the storm of 2022 if his party fares better than Bill Clinton’s, Barack Obama’s, or Donald Trump’s did in their first midterm elections. Politico itself seems interested in helping out, by declaring that it will not use the “W-word” [wave] unless the GOP takes 40 or more seats away from Democrats.

Nonsense. Politico, along with every other political political-media outfit, will almost certainly call it a “wave” if Republicans win as few as 23 seats, which would give the party the precise House majority Democrats won in the wave election year 2018. In 2018, like 2010 and 1994, the party out of power entered the year with fewer than 200 seats in the lower chamber. Today’s GOP, by contrast, walks into Election Day with 212 seats already in its control. A wave strong enough to secure what playbook insists would just be a “normal midterm,” “below what would be expected given Biden’s unpopularity,” would, therefore, be strong enough to register in statewide contests for governor and Senate, too. The voters’ verdict in the event of such a “normal midterm” would be hard to miss unless you’re committed to missing it.

So, that one didn’t stick. What’s next? Well, in today’s Playbook, the White House is road-testing the idea that the Democratic Party is united behind Biden to a remarkable degree, given the pressure on the party’s members to distance themselves from their unpopular president. “If you look at what Dems are running on—it’s the president’s agenda,” one Biden campaign operative told Politico reporters. “They’re all embracing it.” Here, too, the outlet lends credibility to the claim. It contends, for example, that Democrats aren’t being dragged down by anything so unpopular as the Affordable Care Act.

Indeed, Democrats aren’t facing a backlash against one particular piece of legislation but the cumulative effect of the wild spending spree they’ve been on for nearly two years. Democratic lawmakers understand the mess they’ve made for themselves. “Democrats Spent $2 Trillion to Save the Economy,” the New York Times headline read. “They Don’t Want to Talk About It.” Independent voters long ago made the connection between rising consumer costs and government’s refusal to become “more fiscally responsible.” When Democrats passed the “Inflation Reduction Act”—itself a Trojan Horse of a bill that consisted primarily of spending on climate-change initiatives while nonetheless acknowledging the primacy of inflation as an electoral issue—only 24 percent of voters said it would do anything to “make inflation better.”

When the White House isn’t insisting that congressional Democrats are united behind their president, it’s castigating congressional Democrats for failing to get behind the president. In her newsletter for Puck, reporter Tara Palmeri found that the White House is “leaning toward delicately arguing” that Democrats would have fared better at the polls “if Congress had been able to pass his very popular legislation earlier into his term.” This self-congratulatory yarn doubles as an indictment of his party’s “camera-mugging, foot-dragging moderates, like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, who just wouldn’t support his F.D.R.-ish $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill.”

That’s the kind of thanks Joe Manchin deserves for saving his party from passing another inflation-driving spending bill only to cave at the last minute. These attacks on the party’s most moderate senators in purple and red states, respectively, may help burnish their tarnished images back home. It does not, however, advance the notion that Biden is in total command of his party.

Finally, there’s the perennial punching bag of last resort: “the media.”

“The media holds Democrats to a different, often higher, standard than Republicans, they say,” Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday. “The media is too focused on intra-party Democratic fights and not a potentially crumbling U.S. democracy, they add.” Let’s put aside the fact that the White House itself is just as focused on those “intra-party” feuds and has been for months. Let’s also ignore the self-flattery embedded in the notion that Democrats operate on a higher plain of moral probity and governmental competency. The White House isn’t entirely wrong that the press owns its share of the blame for this debacle, but not because they were too hard on Biden. Just the opposite.

The political press contributed mightily to a party-wide delusion that voters would subordinate their sense of acute economic precarity to matters such as access to abortion services and the threat Republicans pose to the electoral certification process, which isn’t even a midterm issue. But the press didn’t force Democrats to highlight those issues at the expense of more salient features of the political landscape. The party did that all on its own.

The wave isn’t even ashore yet, and already the president is clinging to whatever might float. If these unconvincing attempts by the Biden White House to absolve themselves of blame for what’s coming tell us anything, it is that the president and the administration beholden to him aren’t going to go down without a fight. Already, the president is the subject of graceful efforts to shepherd’s crook him off the political stage, but Joe Biden isn’t taking the hint. The gentle nudging is sure to get more forceful, and the White House sees it coming. But first, it seems we all must endure an exhausting game of “would you believe” before reality sinks in.

The United States has asked Ukraine to be open to negotiations with Russia, according to a report that was likely carefully leaked by U.S. officials. Since no one in the U.S. administration is denying the report, it’s meant to be taken seriously by the Ukrainians. (Considering that the U.S. is not asking them to negotiate but only to be open to negotiating, it is nicely deniable.) Meanwhile, on Nov. 15, Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden will both attend the G-20 summit in Indonesia. They will likely hold a meeting there, but if they don’t, it would send a message about as clear as a post-meeting press release. Russian President Vladimir Putin has also been invited to the summit. He hasn’t confirmed if he will attend but initially indicated he would not. His presence would open him to face-to-face hostility, or at least frigidity, from many attendees. Therefore, if Putin decides to come, and for more than the canapes, he would be attending in the expectation of some benefit.

A refusal to meet paints a leader as inflexible and responsible for the tension. A willingness to meet creates an expectation of some progress. If there is none but neither side wants to burn bridges, a cheerily incoherent announcement will be made. If a major breakthrough is announced, everyone will be shocked. The details of any meeting will be worked out to the letter before Biden and Xi meet, and will be carefully leaked to test responses at home.

There are three major and generally hostile powers that may be at the meeting. The U.S. will be there wanting a low-cost breakthrough with Russia and China. The leak about Ukraine would seem to be an attempt to get Putin to the meeting. He hadn’t expected the leak so he didn’t plan on coming. One question will be whether he changes his mind and tries to end the war over Ukraine’s head. As for Xi and Biden, if they can’t even sit down and have a drink, it would indicate that at least one side can’t even set an agenda for the sake of appearances. And if Putin does come and ignores Xi, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

Let’s consider Biden’s message. The Ukrainians would willingly accept an agreement only if Russia withdraws from all of Ukraine and pays reparations. On the surface, this isn’t going to happen. But without the United States, it would be very hard for them to wage war. And the problem with this war is that it is neither going anywhere nor ending. Russia seems to be weakening, but that’s a long way from capitulating. Also the Ukrainian public has a breaking point somewhere, and the war has to end before then. The message to Ukraine was: You may score more victories or you may not, but your chances of defeating the Russians outright are too low to bet on. At the same time, this war has turned out to be a Russian nightmare, not going at all as Moscow hoped – kind of like most wars. Russia has to want an out that doesn’t look like a defeat.

Ukraine, and the United States, can’t give on territorial integrity – Ukraine because it’s an issue of its very sovereignty, and the U.S. because it has gone too far to allow a hint of weakness. This seems to make an agreement impossible. But there is a deal that might work, and it includes the following:

1. Russia withdraws all forces.

2. The United States withdraws all military support for Ukraine.

3. NATO guarantees not to accept Ukraine as a member.

4. A fund for rebuilding Ukraine is created under the U.N. using donations from NATO members, and would include Russia.

This would not prevent Russia from invading Ukraine again later, but it will be a while before it has the appetite for doing so. I don’t know what deals Washington wants Kyiv to consider, but this is a possibility. And if Putin were to come to the meeting, it would, I think, signal something like this.

As I said, if Xi and Biden are in the same building and don’t meet, it would indicate serious trouble. But I think both want to be there – Biden to get Putin nervous, Xi to try to shift relations.

Xi has just seen the U.S. performance in Ukraine, and it made him thoughtful. China has massive economic problems, many of which are linked to the United States. He needs more imports and investment from the U.S. As the recent embargo on advanced microchips indicated, the U.S. government has a lot of influence over trade, and its decisions can seriously hit China.

What the U.S. wants from China is a halt to hostile statements on Taiwan and the U.S. Navy’s presence, as well as concessions in China’s limits on U.S. exports. Beyond gestures, China has little interest in Taiwan. If Beijing was serious about invading, it would have attacked long ago. It didn’t because failure was very possible. The U.S. will not end its presence but has no appetite for a war with China.

I think a meeting between Biden and Xi is likely, unless either side wants to look tough for negotiation’s sake. But as I have said, a war between the two countries is not likely, and their economic ties are needed by both sides.

As for Putin, I doubt he will attend the summit, as it is not the venue in which he will want to make concessions. But if he does attend, he will be taking the Ukraine report seriously and asking about the terms of a possible deal. I think he will be allowed to claim he won something – even though he didn’t. Ukraine will have its country but will fear Russia will strike again. And the Americans will do the usual: make charges against each other.

Republicans and Democrats once again find themselves in a dead heat as they fight for control of the American government. The Senate majority hinges on a handful of seats. Republicans are likely to retake the House, but unlikely to eke out a strong majority. The generic ballot shows that 46 percent of Americans prefer the GOP and 45 percent the Democrats.The two parties have been neck and neck since long before this midterm. Despite wild gyrations in the economy, the terrifying rise of antidemocratic politics on the right, and yawning policy differences between Democrats and Republicans, recent national electoral results keep coming in remarkably close, as if decided by a coin toss. A few decades ago, a Democratic president being 15 points underwater on his approval rating likely would have led to a Republican wave in the midterms. This year, political analysts expect more of a ripple.Many statistics point to the same trend. The frequency with which the House and Senate flip between parties has increased; neither party builds much momentum for long. Democrats controlled the House from 1955 to 1995, for instance. Now the chamber is about to change hands for the fourth time in 15 years. The difference in the number of congressional seats held by the majority and minority parties has collapsed too. Between 1959 and 1995, the House majority was never less than 50 seats and repeatedly hit the triple digits. Today, the Democrats have only eight more seats than the Republicans. The popular-vote margin in American presidential elections has diminished too. In five of the past six contests, fewer than five percentage points separated the winner from the loser.Every election is close. Every election feels consequential, because it is. And far-reaching policy outcomes are over and over again determined by just a few thousand votes in a handful of states.[Read: Why politics has become so stressful]In many ways, this is a baleful trend. Our coin-toss elections are not the result of having two parties competing for an engaged and persuadable electorate. They are at least in part a product of our political stasis and extreme polarization. They mean that when either party wins, it does so without much of a mandate. They also mean that neither party is ever forced to regroup and reform after a humiliating defeat. In the words of the Princeton political scientist Frances Lee, both parties are “insecure” in victory and hyper-engaged in a “perpetual campaign” against the other side.  There is no simple explanation for why this is happening. I had at first figured it had something to do with game theory. You have two parties. Each has deep resources and strong incentives to win over and thus reduce the number of middle-of-the road voters. The parties zig, they zag, they revise their arguments. They both get better at winning elections, beefing up their use of voter data, opposition research, on-the-ground organizing, and gerrymandering. In time, each gets good enough that the contests start to come out 50–50.That hypothesis might be partly true, John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me. But he pointed to historical factors that, in his view, offer the strongest explanation for today’s political environment. During the Great Depression, the Democrats became a nearly unshakable majority party in Congress, buttressed by the votes of white southerners and New Deal supporters across the country. But in the 1960s, white southerners began migrating to the Republican side in a revolt against national Democrats, who backed civil-rights legislation and redistributive policies that aided Black Americans. As the political saliency of the New Deal faded, the parties became more competitive and their voter bases more equal. “The thing that made us so unusual for so long was the South,” Sides said. “We had a one-party state within the country.” Its disappearance paved the way for our 50–50 electorate and pendulum-swinging government.  Indeed, as Lee describes in her excellent book Insecure Majorities, the Republicans became a “full-fledged, politically viable national alternative to the Democrats” only in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency on a low-tax, small-government platform. The same year, Republicans took the Senate for the first time in a quarter century. And in 1994, they broke the Democratic grip on the House.   A related explanation for today’s instability has to do with the growing polarization of the two parties. In the early half of the 20th century, Democrats and Republicans had considerable policy overlap, and legislators worked across the aisle frequently. Since then, their policy differences have become sharply pronounced. Voters changed too: They quit splitting their tickets and became more reliable supporters of one side or the other. They “sorted” along political lines, becoming more likely to live around people who vote like them, as well as becoming more ardent ideologically, with fewer cross-cutting social ties, a phenomenon described by the political scientist Lilliana Mason. They also became more averse to partisans of the other side. That polarization has contributed to our close elections: When almost all voters have already made up their mind, there just aren’t that many people for politicians to persuade.[David A. Graham: How to save democracy]As Lee shows in Insecure Majorities, such close contests and frequent changeovers in power are a cause of partisan strife. In recent decades, “neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or permanent minority,” she writes. “This shift altered members’ partisan incentives and strategic choices in ways that help drive the sharp and contentious partisanship that is characteristic of contemporary American politics.” These days, both Republican and Democratic leaders have less incentive to cooperate across the aisle. Why give the other side a legislative victory if you are so close to taking back the House or winning the Senate?The competitiveness of American elections also seems to have made the government less responsive to the wants and needs of voters—not more so, as you might normally expect. “In the current context, you have party control that hinges on small margins of the vote share in a small number of races,” Sides said. “A narrow shift creates a vast difference in terms of how the country is governed. Is that really what the election mandate was? Is that what voters want? I’m not so sure.”Never losing by a significant margin or for a long period of time seems to have been bad for the parties themselves as well. Being banished to electoral purgatory every now and then encourages political groups to reform and change. It encourages them to think about their long-term value proposition, not just how to gain a few thousand more votes in Wisconsin. It forces them to adapt to the needs of average voters. Our political climate has diminished that constructive pressure for both sides. (Consider how many times Republicans have ignored their own advice about moderating and being friendlier to voters of color, opting instead to run some version of the “southern strategy” over and over.)  Yet for both sides, being out of power for any considerable amount of time feels like an existential threat. And for both sides, holding power for any considerable amount of time feels like an impossibility. Whatever happens this election, the next is likely to undo some of it—giving voters a greater sense of insecurity and urgency, with so much on the line each and every time.

Opinion (Washington Post Staff illustration; iStock images)

As China ramps up its cyberattacks on Taiwan’s democracy, the island’s leaders are building both the infrastructure for defense and the capabilities to fight back. One of the Taiwanese government’s major projects is preparing a backup system to keep the country online if China tries to cut it off from the internet altogether.

Beijing is deploying cyber campaigns in many countries but nowhere as intensively as in Taiwan. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan in August, the Chinese government took its tactics to a new level. Beijing coordinated conventional retaliatory measures, such as missile tests, mock bombing runs and military exercises that mimicked a blockade, with a cyberwarfare and disinformation campaign meant to disrupt Taiwan’s democracy and undermine its people’s grasp on reality.

Taiwan is responding by bolstering its cyber resilience. The Ukraine war has heightened Taipei’s sense of urgency by demonstrating that a country under attack can’t necessarily rely on foreign governments or foreign billionaires — such as Elon Musk — when the crisis hits. And the reality is that China and Taiwan are already locked in online conflict on many fronts.

“It’s not like we’re preparing ourselves for something in the future,” Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first “digital minister,” told me in an interview in Taipei. “What we’re facing now will probably continue for a while, and we need to prepare ourselves for it, much like we prepare our infrastructure for earthquakes.”

Tang’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, which opened just this August, is central to Taiwan’s effort to build cyber resilience among the population and update government institutions.

Taiwan’s most ambitious project is building a network of non-geostationary satellites to keep the internet going if Beijing cuts the undersea internet cables. The project is still in its early stages. The goal is to have 700 satellite receivers deployed in low- or mid-earth orbit, connected to mobile 5G towers on the ground. Applications for vendors are set to open this month.

One possible applicant could be Musk’s company SpaceX, which operates the satellite communications network Starlink, with more than 3,000 small satellites in low-earth orbit. Starlink has been crucial to Ukraine’s ability to keep its broadband capabilities intact so both the government and journalists can do their jobs and fight Moscow’s disinformation.

But Musk threatened to stop providing Starlink for Ukraine after Ukrainian officials criticized his public proposals for a Moscow-friendly negotiating platform. Taiwan’s government wants a system that can’t be cut off by any foreign firm or business executive. Taiwan’s leaders know that in the first days of a Chinese attack, Taiwan’s ability to communicate directly with the world will be crucial to its survival.

“A lot of international correspondents are in Taiwan now,” said Tang. “If we don’t provide them with a broadband link in the event of a disaster, natural or unnatural, then of course, the disinformation will win the war.”

Musk has also proposed that Taiwan rejoin China under the one-country, two-systems model, an idea that Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me was exactly the same as Beijing’s line.

“It’s a Chinese proposal,” Wu said. “The people of Taiwan … they are not interested in this.”

In the meantime, Taipei is already fighting a daily battle against Chinese hybrid cyberwarfare and disinformation campaigns. Beijing has used its information warfare machine to undermine Taiwanese people’s confidence in their government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Chinese influence campaigns promote pro-Beijing candidates in Taiwanese elections. Most recently, China is focused on convincing Taiwanese people that their democracy is a facade and that their leaders are controlled by the CIA.

Increasingly, Tang said, Beijing is integrating disinformation and cyberattacks to powerful effect. After the Pelosi visit in August, cyber attackers disabled the website of the Taiwanese president’s office and its Ministry of National Defense. While the websites were offline, propagandists spread disinformation about the Taiwanese government’s actions, knowing people could not refer to the official sources. Hackers took over an electronic billboard at a rail station and broadcast an anti-Pelosi, pro-Chinese Communist Party message.

“Pelosi’s visit, that’s like a drill, that’s like a taste of what’s to come,” Tang said.

Tang, 41, represents a generation of Taiwanese people who have never experienced being ruled by China and don’t want to be. Both of her grandfathers fought against the Chinese Communist Party for the Republic of China Armed Forces, also known at the time as the Nationalist army. Her father was a journalist in Tiananmen Square in the runup to the June 1989 massacre of students.

She rose to prominence during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, in which she used her hacker skills to help student protesters occupying the Legislative Yuan broadcast their message. That led to her helping the government implement media literacy programs in Taiwan’s schools. The island’s first transgender cabinet minister, she often wears a shirt with Ukraine’s coat of arms on it.

Tang’s personal mission is to use technology to decentralize government and increase civic engagement. For example, Taiwan created an online contest to allow people to vote for their favorite vaccine, as an attempt to turn vaccine skepticism into vaccine adoption. A “humor over rumor” campaign helped fight covid disinformation in an engaging way.

Not all of Taiwan’s solutions will apply to the United States, where disinformation often comes from within our political system. But China’s tactics are increasingly being used inside America. Chinese hackers are attacking U.S. government websites. Beijing’s influence operations are widespread on American social media platforms and in the American media.

The good news is that China’s favored narrative about the superiority of autocracies is being undermined by Xi Jinping’s faltering economy, “wolf warrior” diplomacy and unpopular domestic crackdowns. Democracies such as Taiwan, Ukraine and the United States are “natural allies” in fighting China’s cyberwarfare strategy, Tang said, but they must do more to prove that their model can work better in a digital world.

Obviously, I can't tell you how today's elections will turn out. But I do want to reassure you about one thing: Over the long term, we are winning.

Ask yourself: Why are the election deniers, the monied interests, and the bigots and the haters fighting so hard to defeat us? Why are they telling such blatant lies? Why are they so desperate to suppress our votes? Why are they so willing to violate the Constitution, the rule of law, and common decency in order to claw their way to victory?

For one simple reason: They are afraid of us.

They know deep in their hearts that we are the future of America.

We who call ourselves progressives. We who are people of color. We who are young. We who are women. We who are new immigrants to these shores. We who are LGBTQ people. We who are Muslim and Jewish and people of every faith, or no faith. We who are poor. We who are average working people who need and deserve better jobs and higher wages. We who believe in democracy and cherish the Constitution and the rule of law.

They are afraid of us because we are gaining in numbers, gaining in strength. Our voices are growing louder.

Regardless of what happens today -- even if they regain control of the House or the Senate or both, even if they take over some governorships, even if they create veto-proof majorities in one state or another -- they know that over the long term we are winning.

It is inevitable.

Not their filibusters, nor their gerrymanders, nor their suppression of votes, nor their attempts to rig electoral votes, nor their Trumpian Supreme Court majorities, nor their attempts to intimidate us -- none of the obstacles and barriers they're putting in our path will stop our inevitable rise.

Which is why they are so desperate.

I've been at this game for almost three-quarters of a century. America still has a long way to go. But it is far better and stronger now -- more inclusive, more tolerant, more diverse, more accepting, more dynamic -- than it has ever been. And it will be ever better and stronger years from now. Because we are rising.

Which scares the hell out of them.

Sure, we can and must do better organizing, mobilizing, and energizing. Yes, the Democratic Party must be bolder at countering the power of big corporations and big money. Of course we must do far more to get a Supreme Court that reflects our beliefs and values. And at recruiting a new generation of leaders into electoral politics.

We can and must do all of this. And we will. It is part of the long game.

I hope we win every contest today. But regardless of the outcomes of today's elections, have no doubt: we are the future.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The former president and the new Twitter boss are role models for voters whose concerns are not about democracy, justice, or the cost of milk, but their own bitterness.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Taiwan prepares to be invaded.
The loudest political voice on SNL
Petty GrievancesOn October 7, the Republican House Judiciary Committee cryptically tweeted, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” The tweet was, predictably, ridiculed—especially after Ye (as Kanye West is now known), just days later, threatened “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” on Twitter. But, intentionally or not, the committee had hit upon a basic truth: The three are alike.What unites these successful men—and, yes, Trump is successful—is their seething resentment toward a world that has rewarded them money and influence, but that still refuses to grant them the respect they think is their due. And if we should have learned anything since 2016, it is that resentment is perhaps the most powerful political force in the modern world.In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, nationalism had its turn at spurring us to destroy ourselves; in later years, the struggle with monstrous ideologies killed tens of millions and brought us repeatedly to the brink of nuclear war. Today, however, social and cultural resentment is driving millions of people into a kind of mass psychosis.I will leave aside Ye, who has his own unique problems (although I will note that his early career was marked by his anger at being shut out, as he saw it, from hip-hop and then the fashion world). Prominent and wealthy Americans such as Trump and Musk, along with the former White House guru Steve Bannon and the investor Peter Thiel, are at war not so much with the American political system, whose institutions they are trying to capture, but with a dominant culture that they seem to believe is withholding its respect from them. Politics is merely the instrument of revenge.Don’t be fooled when such people protest that they hate the dominant culture and want no part in it. Trump has spent his life as the outer-borough mook with his nose pressed to the windows of midtown Manhattan, wondering why no one wants him there. He claims to hate The New York Times but follows it obsessively and courts its approval. Musk, for his part, has put people in space, but when Twitter users started impersonating him, mostly to show him how idiotic his new “verify everyone for $7.99” plan is, he blocked and suspended them. (As one Twitter wag noted, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is like Elmer Fudd buying a platform full of Bugs Bunnies.) The great irony is that Musk’s other achievements might have vaulted him past perceptions that he’s a spoiled, rich doofus, but buying Twitter and making (and then deleting) jokes about self-gratification while telling people to vote Republican has pretty much obliterated that possibility.Trump (and Bannon, Thiel, and others) is enraged, apparently, that his transition to elite-class status did not produce respect—or, at least, not the kind of respect he wants from the quarters of society from which he seems to crave it. Never underestimate the kind of anger that such insecurity can produce: Trump and those like him managed to get a ticket in the swankiest carriage on the train, only to find themselves sitting alone. And if that’s how it’s going to be … well, the only answer is to derail the entire thing, from locomotive to caboose, and make everyone suffer.Even worse, the voters who do accept someone like Trump are people with whom Trump would never associate. Howard Stern, once a close friend of Trump’s, has said bluntly that the former president actually hates his own voters. Trump, Thiel, and many others have no interest in “the people” other than to use their votes as raw fuel for settling scores with other elites.And in many cases, plenty of “the people” are just fine with that. As the British journalist Simon Kuper noted a few years ago, anti-system parties in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States are powered not by struggling workers, but by the “comfortably off populist voter” who has “never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations.” The January 6 rioters were, by and large, not the dispossessed; they were real-estate agents and chiropractors. These citizens think that the disconnect between material success and their perceived lack of status must be punished, and if that means voting for election deniers and conspiracy theorists, so be it.If you still doubt the power of resentment, remember this: Trump wasted his years as the most powerful man in the world whining about how no one respects him. Thiel has spent many millions propping up two candidates who are shameful buffoons. And Musk just lit $44 billion, with a B, on fire so that he could be a hero to an army of trolls that continues to goad him into doing even dumber things, as the Bonfire of the Dead Presidents roars away.There is one more example of such resentment, and it’s a lot less funny. Russia is an entire nation seized with a massive inferiority complex, and the Russian regime is giving vent to that resentment in the continual murder of Ukrainians. Putin, an insecure thug, has his own bizarre reasons for the war, but the brutality of the Russians on the battlefield against their Slavic kin is very much rooted in resentment: Why do you live in freedom? Why are you living better than us?And finally, look at the Republican campaigns across the nation. Few are about kitchen-table issues; many are seizing on resentment. Resentment sells. The GOP is running a slew of candidates who are promising that “we” will make sure “they” never steal an election again, that “we” will stop “them” from making your kids pee in litter boxes, that “we” will finally get even with “them.”Voters in the United States and many other developed countries can lie to themselves and pretend that a one-year hike in the price of eggs is worth handing power to such a movement. Human beings need rationalizations, and we all make them. But voting as responsible citizens requires being honest with ourselves, and I suspect that we will soon learn that more of us are gripped by this kind of sour social irritation than we are by the price of gas.Related:
Elon Musk isn’t buying Twitter to defend free speech.
The Capitol rioters aren’t like other extremists.
In several battleground states, Republican officials and candidates have filed lawsuits to disqualify thousands of mail-in ballots.
World leaders gathered in Egypt yesterday for the COP27 global climate summit.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is reportedly planning layoffs that could affect thousands of workers.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung talks with a fellow adoptee about what adoption “salvation” narratives get wrong.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader responses on what colleges should care about when accepting students.
(The Atlantic; Getty)
Jamie Oliver vs. InflationBy Sophie Gilbert 
It was about 20 minutes into Jamie Oliver’s new British cooking show, while Oliver was grating a big hunk of cheddar over a dish he called “mega meatloaf,” that I realized I was going to cry. It wasn’t his fault; the recipe looked lovely. What tore at my heart was Oliver’s commitment to energetic cheerfulness in the face of ongoing hardship, as though he were a newly divorced dad totally intent on proving to his kids that he was fine, terrific actually, he had a can opener somewhere, dinner would be ready in a jiffy. “This is full of flavor,” Oliver exclaimed, the most enthusiastic man to ever encounter a meatloaf. “There’s no shortage of flavor right here. The fun hasn’t stopped!” He brandishes the cheese; the cheese is “the fun,” apparently: “That’s joyful. That’s family food. And for under £1 a portion.”
What happens when everything becomes TikTok
What Joe Biden has (and hasn’t) accomplished
Bill Skarsgård in Barbarian (20th Century Studios)
Read. Percival Everett’s new novel, Dr. No, is a satirical spy thriller—and a zany masterpiece.Watch. The Barbarian, an indie horror film streaming on HBO Max, capitalizes on the thing viewers love and hate most: the unknown.Listen. The latest episode of our podcast How to Build a Happy Life explores parenting choices.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Elon Musk using Twitter as his personal clubhouse is a bad development, but now and then, it’s also hilarious—especially because Musk’s skin is thinner than phyllo dough. There are some very funny memes circulating, but I am surprised no one has drawn the most obvious parallel here: Elon Musk is Homer Simpson in “Homer the Great,” a Season 6 episode of The Simpsons in which Homer tries to join the cool secret fraternity in Springfield known as the Stonecutters. It turns out that Homer has a birthmark denoting him as their Chosen One, and he’s given absolute power over the club. Homer, as he often does, screws everything up, and the Stonecutters, fed up, disband and form a new society: the Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers. The episode is worth it just for the greatest song ever done on The Simpsons: “We Do (The Stonecutters’ Song).” I dare you to watch it without thinking of Musk.One other parallel, far less humorous, that comes to mind is with the millionaire Paul Radin in the Twilight Zone episode “One More Pallbearer.” I can’t explain why without spoiling the surprise for you, but the comparison is obvious—and sad. It’s a classic episode, and again, I challenge you to watch it without thinking of Musk (or Donald Trump).—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Updated at 6:55 p.m. ET on November 7, 2022Elon Musk has spent the past 12 years tweeting whatever comes into his mind, often without major negative consequences. That was before he owned the place. Now, less than two weeks after his $44 billion purchase, the world’s richest man is finding that his actions—which recently included tweeting a baseless conspiracy theory to Hillary Clinton about the assault on Paul Pelosi—may actually have consequences. Advertisers are fleeing, the employees remaining after a round of mass layoffs are alienated, and onlookers are completely vexed by a freewheeling approach that has coincided with a rise in hate speech on the platform, among other problems.Musk’s fans see the billionaire as a visionary, but it’s worth noting that many casual observers—people whose only real understanding of Musk is as the guy who put the fancy electric cars on their streets—have also internalized the heuristic that he is Good at Business and the type of man who spends his waking moments dreaming of how to save humanity from its existential problems. But what the past two weeks demonstrate is that Musk is, at best, a mediocre executive—and undoubtedly a terrible, distracted manager.Musk is obviously wildly financially successful, and the companies he owns have a reputation for taking futuristic-sounding ideas and dragging them into the present. But what Musk is showing us in real time is the folly of equating financial success with intellect, managerial savvy, and good judgment. I reached out to some experts to see if I was possibly missing something about Musk’s performance so far. Given Musk’s current focus on advertisers leaving the platform, I called up Rick Webb, the COO of Timehop and a co-founder of the Barbarian Group, a major digital-ad agency. Webb also served as a marketing and sales consultant for Tumblr during its heyday. I asked him to assess Musk’s first few days on the job, and he did not mince words.“The advertisers are gone because of his awful tweets,” Webb told me. “There’s no room for debate. He stated his intentions up front. He cared about advertisers and didn’t want them to leave and then he told us they’ve left.” Webb suggested to me that Musk’s now-deleted Paul Pelosi tweet was perhaps the most expensive tweet ever: It may have cost Twitter billions in advertising revenue. Companies including General Mills, Audi, and Pfizer are pulling their marketing from Twitter because they likely don’t want their brands to be associated with anything remotely scandalous. High-level executives—CMO types—are the ones ultimately deciding what these brands spend on Twitter, and “those people are, to a T, conflict-avoidant,” Webb said.Musk seems to understand this—according to reporting from Kara Swisher, he realized that ad execs were freaking out and tried to quell concerns on a conference call last week. It did not go well. “There were CMOs who literally paused/shifted budgets DURING the call because of the uncertainty,” Swisher tweeted. Worse yet, Musk has either alienated or fired some of the employees—such as Twitter’s chief customer officer—who maintain crucial brand and agency relationships.As bad as that sounds, Webb argues that the reality is worse: “What people might not understand is that the advertisers don’t need Twitter. They barely cared about it at all before Musk. The only reason those people cared about Twitter ads is because they had personal relationships with members of Twitter’s marketing team or because there are hundreds of Twitter account reps making them pay. And Elon may have fired those people.” Twitter is much smaller than rivals like TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, after all.[Read: How Elon Musk could actually kill Twitter]With each passing day, Musk seems to be digging a deeper hole. This morning, to the dismay of many brand advertisers who strive to be apolitical, Musk used his 114-million-follower platform to endorse the Republican slate of candidates for tomorrow’s midterm elections. “The dude could’ve napped and saved billions of dollars,” Webb said. “Every decision he’s made has lost him money. It’s astonishing.”Musk’s marketing debacles are not the stuff of visionaries, but they pale in comparison to his management skills. Here’s a brief summary of how he has steered the company so far.Before assuming control of Twitter, the billionaire reportedly floated the idea that he could gut the company’s workforce by nearly 75 percent, which created a sense of low-grade panic inside the company. Despite the specter of mass layoffs, Musk walked into Twitter headquarters like a court jester, filming content for his own Twitter feed. In his first hours, Musk fired some well-liked executives and, on his first full day, pompously asked engineers to print out their code so Tesla staffers could review it. (Later, he reversed course and asked staffers to shred their printed code.) When it came time for layoffs, he cut nearly half of the company via email (though word leaked beforehand and left many employees wondering about their fate) and, in an act of extreme cowardice, didn’t even sign his name. Many staffers found out about their termination ahead of time, when their work accounts stopped functioning. The cuts—which hit or completely destroyed big chunks of the trust-and-safety, policy, machine-learning, social-good, accessibility, communications, ethical-AI, data-science, and research teams—caused real concern that the company may now be especially vulnerable to outages and attacks, which could be particularly dangerous during the midterms. Inside the company, managers scrambled. They told employees to work 80-hour weeks to build products for Musk (lest they be terminated too) and instructed employees to come up with ideas to tantalize their mercurial new owner. The vibe was like “hack week, but with a gun to your head,” a Twitter employee told the New York Times podcast Hard Fork.This is awful, chaotic management. Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale, who run the Raw Signal Group, a consultancy that focuses on coaching managers in the technology industry, told me that Musk is putting on a master class in what not to do to run an effective organization. “Absolutely nothing he’s doing is cultivating an environment that helps people be creative, consistent, and innovative,” Melissa Nightingale said. For the employees who remain, Musk has created an atmosphere of panic and uncertainty, which destroys trust and leads to employee resentment. Musk has created a vast network of ex-employees who will go on to talk trash and share nightmare stories about Twitter. This is already backfiring spectacularly: Some of the employees had skills necessary to build products Musk actually wants to launch and were terminated by mistake, Bloomberg reported, and the company is trying to lure them back.Had Musk listened to people with experience running social networks (like those I cited in this magazine two weeks ago), he might have understood that they are complex, fragile systems and that staff reductions must be managed carefully. But instead, Musk surrounded himself with a group of yes-men advisers, many of whom also lack specific expertise. These men and Musk all operate under a hyper-rationalist managerial framework: They appear to have reasoned that Twitter was bloated and losing money on payroll, that change needed to come quickly, and that layoffs are naturally messy, so there’s no need to handle them with care. That lack of care in particular is a hallmark of bad, shortsighted management, the Nightingales told me.“When we say ‘care,’ we mean it ​​both in an empathetic sense, but also in a professional, attention-to-detail sense,” Melissa Nightingale said. The pair argued that Musk’s haphazard cuts and alienation of his employees may work in the short term by balancing the company’s budget, but disaster might soon follow. “If you start looking long term and evaluating his decisions by metrics like How many labor-discrimination suits will he face? or How many people will work for him again?, it looks different.”The Nightingales argued that Musk’s managerial decisions show a lack of human understanding that is key to running any business—and especially a business like Twitter. “He may really understand things from an engineering perspective,” Johnathan Nightingale said. “But humans are different. And care is a major input in creating a human system.”[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]Unfortunately for Musk, Twitter is less of an engineered machine and more of a chaotic collection of humans. “He loves to talk about Twitter as a great public square,” Johnathan Nightingale told me.* “But public squares are built with care. They are not machines … Public squares are for humans and designed by humans. And Musk has just fired half of them.”There is always a chance that this somehow all works out for Musk (The Verge reported Monday afternoon that user growth is currently at an all time high) and an even greater chance that his confident, unapologetic, and wrongheaded style will only endear him to his fans. But even if he does manage to salvage part of his $44 billion investment, what we are seeing is the opposite of a business mastermind at work. Musk is not leading Twitter with careful vision, and he is certainly not dragging us all into the future with him. He’s bumbling his way through a job he’s unqualified for. He’s treating a human problem like an engineering problem, torching bridges and embarrassing himself in the process. As Melissa Nightingale put it, “The entire history of capitalism is a lesson that you can be very successful and also very terrible.” In this sense, Musk is an excellent teacher.This article previously misattributed a quote from Johnathan Nightingale to Melissa, and vice versa.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “If you were in charge of the admissions office at a top-50 college or university, how would you decide which applicants got accepted as undergraduates and which got rejected?”Jonathan deems character traits to be the most important qualification for college––and argues (contrary to how many conceive of virtue) that the status quo is selecting for bad character. He writes:
In admitting students, these two points are absolutely crucial: First, prospective students should demonstrate their commitment to pursuing truth, goodness, and/or beauty through their university education. Those who would instead exploit the university to pursue wealth, power, or prestige should suffer serious demerits. Second, prospective students should demonstrate their desire to be formed, or to become a better person, through their education. Those who are primarily interested in becoming a leader or in changing the world should suffer serious demerits.
Today, universities are obsessed with fostering careers (wealth), training activists (power), and producing high-profile figures (prestige). They select students who desire to dominate others (leaders) and impose their ideas on others (changing the world). This is the exact inversion of the idea of a university and of liberal education. Instead of promoting virtue, universities prioritize vice. Instead of education freeing us from ourselves, we use education to impose ourselves upon others.
Until we correct course on these points, all else is in vain.
Cindy would admit exceptional communicators:
The most valuable skill I think any learner can have is the ability to express themselves with clarity and poise. In formal high-school speech and debate, the students who work with extemporaneous speaking do just that: They learn about all aspects of current events and then, during competitions, are called up one by one to choose three questions randomly from a bowl. They must choose one of these three questions and then have 30 minutes to prepare a seven-minute extemporaneous speech complete with evidence. It’s an internet-free zone—no notes allowed. I wish that college applicants all had to log into a school website to provide a short video response to a provocative, extemporaneous question. How do they handle the question? How creative are their responses? How confident are they in their ability to communicate?
To me, this is a better measure of who a person is than being prepped for standardized testing or hiring people to guide students through the rigors of the college essay. Who are you, what do you think, and how do you think? That’s what admissions people truly need to know.
Jen would admit helpers:
I would have an exclusively merit-based system. Standardized test scores would not count; I would focus on the extent to which the person helped their community as the deciding factor.
I wonder how one would best measure or assess that.[Read: How old is too old in politics?]Olive argues for ending legacy admissions:
I am a college student who recently dealt with college admissions and was accepted into some, but rejected from most, of the top 50 universities I applied to (I wouldn’t have been able to afford any of them anyway, but that’s beside the point). I am white. However, I personally hold no grudge against affirmative action, as I believe that the diversity it brings and its attempt at equity is admirable. Instead, I blame the practice of legacy admissions for the unfairness in the application system, and the clear way it impacts who gets in. I understand the merit in test scores, extracurriculars, etc., as long as these are taken in context of the opportunities a student was offered.
I don’t understand how the wealth and opportunities of one’s parents are a valuable metric of one’s merit. It’s a concept that brings nothing to the table except bald-faced inequity, and the thing that I would get rid of if I were in charge of the system. I don’t believe that the rest of it is flawed in such a way that it can’t be remedied, but legacy admissions are the one thing I find inexcusable.
Sarenna would hold an admissions lottery:
In the interest of fairness, a lottery system is truly the only way to eliminate discrimination from the university-admissions process. Why is this? Let's walk through the various alternative means of doing admissions.
Legacy and athletic considerations are obviously unfair, and privilege students for factors that are often beyond their control (you cannot chose to have parents who went to a prestigious school, nor can you choose to have a family that is wealthy enough to sacrifice both the time and money it typically takes to afford the cost of playing sports at a high level). Test scores and grades are also often reflective of privilege. Private schools tend to give out higher grades than public schools for a variety of reasons.
Finally, extracurriculars are not cheap. I was a competitive debater in high school, and tournaments often cost up to $1,500 between flights, hotels, and supervisors. Even activities like volunteering require time, and free time is a luxury; often students from low-income backgrounds have to work or do child care for siblings.
So what about affirmative action? It is not fair to reject students of one race to prioritize admission of another. Artificially capping the number of Asian students to allow more students of other races, for example, is not fair to the Asian students who would have been admitted if not for their race.
I have often been exposed to arguments about the importance of creating diverse classrooms to improve the learning experience and broaden the perspective of students. Lottery systems allow for diverse classrooms while also ensuring that students do not gain arbitrary privileges in the admissions process for immutable parts of their identity. Set a basic standard that students must meet to demonstrate that they are academically prepared for college. From there, allow students to express their preferences, both for schools (i.e., have them rank their choices) and for environmental factors (i.e., what state would they like to live in? Would they like to be in a big city or a college town? Would they like to attend a school that is stronger in STEM or humanities?).
Then, let the matching begin.
Steven concurs in principle, but suggests different details:
The root of the problem is that highly selective universities have more qualified applicants than they have slots. I would create a large pool of qualified students who meet a threshold, and then run a lottery for offers. This would change the job of admissions officers from crafting the perfect class to determining which students are good enough. For general admissions, a combination of standardized test scores, GPA, and some sort of distinguishing service/character trait would be sufficient. Admissions officers can add the accomplished political activist with a low SAT score, the perfect SAT with no extracurriculars, AND the first-chair violinist with a 3.0 GPA. There is no need to make the impossible/arbitrary judgment of which is most deserving. They can also make the pool as big as needed.  
Calls for a lottery system dovetail with M.’s instincts as an interviewer at an Ivy League institution:
I was fortunate enough to have been accepted by and graduated from Princeton (class of 1964). I have for more than a decade participated as a member of the Alumni Schools Committee by interviewing three or four high-school applicants, almost entirely from public schools, every spring. I have spoken with numerous applicants who easily would have been successful Princeton undergraduates but were not admitted. In the end, the present system forces admissions to choose from among fully qualified applicants. The final choices, therefore, tend to be influenced by unconscious biases and other superficial factors. Among highly qualified applicants, a lottery becomes the most impartial means of selection.
Thomas sets forth the relatively conventional standards he would use for admissions then adds: “In addition, each year I would select a sample of applicants to admit at random to see over time what traits seemed to lead to good outcomes in order to refine admissions criteria for the future.”I like the instinct to experiment!Jackie sets forth a range of qualities she would select for:
I’ve always viewed education as preparing youth to be engaged citizens of their countries and the world. I do believe a strong academic record is the best place to start, but there are other character attributes that I think are good predictors of academic and career success. I think students should be curious, hungry for knowledge and understanding. If the student is passionate about a cause, even better, but it’s okay if they’re still figuring that out for themselves. Grit is also necessary to persevere through challenges. I would credit applicants coming from disadvantaged backgrounds with an extra measure of grit, simply because they had more obstacles in their road to achievement.
Big problems only get solved through collaboration, so I do think there needs to be a dose of humility as well. Nobody enjoys working with someone who can’t see beyond their own ego.
The only way to figure this out is through letters of recommendation and admissions interviews, which I know top-tier colleges and universities use in order to narrow down their incoming class. I do think there should be some consideration given to how the group is composed, with an eye toward religious, socioeconomic, ideological, and racial diversity. There are many students coming to college who grew up in places where perspectives went unchallenged, and higher education is supposed to be the safe space to test them in the free marketplace of ideas, as long as it is done respectfully.
Ed begins by disputing one premise of the question:
The assumption that one can identify the top 50 colleges or universities is inherently prejudicial. Biased ranking systems have contributed to the creation of an American aristocratic system that promotes and protects the privileged, otherwise we would see statistical diversity as to who sits on the Supreme Court or in Congress or on corporate boards. Entry to higher education should be open to everyone at the start of core first-year courses. If desired, design those courses to weed out those who are not ready or capable of continuing. For the determined student, a certain amount of repeat attempts should be allowed.
But what if egalitarianism isn’t the point? Mike has a distinct theory about the purpose of higher education:
Priority one has to be bringing in enough tuition revenue to sustain annual expenses. Then, using SAT scores combined with grades, attract the students most likely to succeed in challenging college courses. I do not think it’s best for anyone to “dumb down” courses to accommodate less-than-capable students. The purpose of higher education is to push our society to better outcomes in all fields and enhance our understanding of the world. Not everyone is college material. There should be no shame in that.
[Read: The importance of dissent in wartime]Claire proposes a novel admissions scheme:
Applicants are divided into four pools, the first three reflecting economic strata (lower, middle, upper) and the fourth favoring the artistically or athletically gifted. Each quadrant prioritizes academic performance and also je ne sais quoi (creativity and ingenuity); any lack thereof adversely affects the applicant. Racial quotas are regarded as arbitrary and counterproductive and removed from the rubric. Legacy applicants include a persuasive essay describing the value that a generational through line creates (including information about any buildings they wish to, or have already, refurbished), but this may harm their scores if it's handled perfunctorily. The goal is to scoop the crème de la crème off each stratum of society and avoid a disproportionate quantity of (uninspired) rule followers.
Many of you used this question to share your thoughts on affirmative action in college admissions. Howard wrote:
The only way to truly eradicate racism is to outgrow race.
Kristina disagrees:
Because I support reparations, and these can take many forms, I would prioritize Black and Indegenous applicants ahead of others as a form of reparations for centuries of brutal oppression and structural racism. However, I'm not sure that saddling any applicant with the massive debt that college entails today does anyone a big favor. To remedy this entire problem of “affirmative action” or not, we should make all education free, including higher education. This would eliminate all these problematic questions and ridiculous competitions.
I find it tragic that the U.S. is willing to spend billions on its failed wars and chooses to escalate violence abroad. War funding should be diverted into public education (not to mention health care, affordable housing, etc.). But with respect to the original question, in today’s context, prioritizing those who have faced insurmountable institutional barriers over those who have been privileged to not have barriers is the correct path.
Sidney opined on the trade-offs he believes affirmative action presents us with:
Should those whose ancestors were discriminated against due to race be entitled to preference in admissions? The decision is a zero-sum game. Affirmative action in undergraduate admissions requires discrimination according to race, the very problem it is intended to remedy. Those who did not participate in discriminatory behavior must suffer in turn. Diversity may be a worthy goal, but it has costs. Perhaps this is one of them. The question for each admissions officer is how much shall be paid and for how long?
Rob urged an alternative to it:
An underarticulated problem with affirmative action is that it abandons the ethical argument against anti-Black discrimination. If it’s ethically permissible to prefer one race over another, then you’re reduced to simply arguing for your choice, rather than making a moral argument that racial discrimination is fundamentally unjust. I think that once you’ve identified (to the best of your imperfect ability) the subset of candidates who are likely to do well enough to graduate, colleges should simply select from that pool by a random lottery. This will prevent the ethical violation of bias while keeping a competent admissions class. This will not result in the most academically outstanding class.
Jim expressed opposition to race-based considerations:
My biggest concern is: How do we find a way in college admissions and the rest of life to not factor in race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other bias when deciding what a human being can or can’t do or where they can or can’t go? We need to start seeing humans.  
Percival knows that top-50 colleges tout diversity as something they value, but he doesn’t believe their rhetoric:
Different skin colors of cookie-cutter students all with high academic test scores, multiple respected extracurricular activities, and do-gooder volunteer work are not diverse in any real-world sense, although they come out of university with a shared, smug sense of superiority for their tribe, and maybe a sense of noblesse oblige. There are brilliant or creative people who wouldn’t play the game to get the grades, or won’t perform on cue, who are too introverted or socially anxious to tick the “social work” or “team athletics” boxes, or who lacked the home life, family traditions, assumption that academic performance is the highest priority, or finances to prove their potential use to the university in bolstering publicity or generating bragging rights. There are average students who wonder about the world and want to learn more or better themselves. There are siloed students who need to step outside the echo chamber and learn to persuade people who are different instead of tribalize and bully. There are students who have never met a cow or couldn’t recognize grocery-store food in its native form and students who lack street smarts and have never taken public transit. A population of students unlike one another can, by exposure to one another, create an educational experience in addition to “mastering” course material that can range from scientific methodology to an instructor’s bid for peer attention as cutting edge or pure indoctrination.
A student population of different skin colors that’s otherwise identically Type A, identically capable of identifying and performing to please an instructor, identically assured that their opinions are better formed and preferable to others, and who identically assume they [are entitled to have the world conform] to their expectations cannot, by exposure or interaction, foster an educational experience.
Luciano began by noting, “My story with affirmative action is, to put it mildly, complicated,” then explained how it shapes his views:
To begin with, I graduated from one of these top-50 universities. I came from a working-class family that was comfortable but by no means able to pay for a top-50 university. I’m also one of those people with a muddy background that doesn’t fit with the older affirmative-action narrative: My dad is Italian, and immigrated first to Venezuela and then the U.S.; my mom emigrated from Ecuador to the U.S. I’m pretty white, but I’m also Hispanic. Did I game the system to get into my college of choice? Absolutely. Being Hispanic was for both me and my sister the “golden ticket” to get into our schools of choice, as well as get the scholarships and grants to make them affordable (back in the ’90s when undergrad schools routinely doled out bags of cash on a regular basis).  
Here’s the thing: I have no clue whether or not my ethnicity was a factor in my college admission. I was a top-10 student, high SAT scores, involved with numerous clubs, traveled internationally, etc. I could have gotten in, supposedly, on any one of those factors. Does it gnaw at me that my ethnicity could’ve been the deciding factor, even though I’m white? Perhaps.
As an adult, I got involved with conducting interviews for my alma mater to evaluate applicants. I thought that in this capacity, as an alumni interviewer, I could get a further “peek behind the curtain” on the admissions process. In my interviews, I asked the typical questions about grades, favorite subjects, clubs, etc., but I also got them to tell me about their backgrounds, their desires, the things they like to do or enjoy, etc. It helped me get a better picture of each applicant to build a holistic portrait of them to the board of admissions.  
Did it help? I really don’t know. I may have performed some sort of pseudo–affirmative action in my own way by building these portraits, inadvertently pushing for applicants with bottom-up stories like my own (sort of). I may have wanted to know more about minority applicants to give them an advantage in the process. But ultimately, we would get a report of who was accepted and who wasn’t, and it often didn’t make sense to me.
The bottom line is that building a college class can be a lot more complicated than most seem to think. This is probably why the college-admissions process is still cloaked in secrecy. The more selective the school, the more bewildering the algorithm becomes, if there’s even an algorithm to begin with. When you have a lot of students that on paper look exactly the same, the deciding factors that determine who’s in or who’s out often defy logic. In short, with affirmative action gone, there’s no guarantee that the admissions process will get any more open, logical, or efficient. In fact, it may get even more illogical. But that’s not necessarily the fault of the policy. Rather, it’s due to our system, where the top is determined through secretive formulas unbeknownst to anyone, and the removal of a deciding factor won’t make it any more straightforward.
Thanks for all your emails––see you later this week.

Astro Teller is the CEO of X, though his actual job title is “Captain of Moonshots.” His only requirement for accepting the position, granted by Google’s founders, was that he had complete autonomy over the company. Even though X is a subsidiary of Alphabet, he has always insisted on cultural separation.
X has become a famous incubator and developer of ideas in the nontraditional tradition of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Thomas Edison’s laboratories. X’s mission is to build and launch technologies to “improve the lives of millions, even billions of people.”
They’re specifically in the business of identifying and accelerating world-changing ideas. That means they reject plenty of good ideas because the change those ideas create would be too incremental for their mission. One of X’s slogans is “10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement.”

X is an innovation hub but it’s not about any innovation at any cost or on any time horizon. X has a very specific charter: to take their best ideas from concept to commercial viability in a five-to-ten-year time horizon. It’s not enough that the idea is a world-changing solution, or even that the proposed solution is possible. They also have to know that the economics will work, so that it will become self-supporting and profitable.
The reasoning behind the five-to-ten year time horizon is that if the solution could be developed in fewer years, somebody else is probably already working on it. If it is going to take longer than a decade, the technology might be outdated by the time it gets to market.
X takes a lot of big swings, knowing that most will be whiffs. Teller looks at each project as buying an option on the future. Like most options, you have to keep paying to hold it, in increasing amounts.
To pursue radical ideas, he has to be a radical loss-cutter. Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.
As he told me, “We’re going to buy a thousand options over the next couple of years. We need only four a decade to get to Sundar [Pichai, CEO of Alphabet].” Teller sees his job as being smart about building a portfolio of value as cheaply as possible.
Even when your owner is Alphabet, you have limited resources of time, money, and attention. What that means is Teller has to identify the projects that aren’t going to pan out as quickly as possible. To pursue radical ideas, he has to be a radical loss-cutter. Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.
Monkeys and pedestals
To help X-ers become better quitters, Teller has come up with a unique mental model that has been woven into the fabric of X: monkeys and pedestals.
Imagine that you’re trying to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in a public park. If you can achieve such an impressive spectacle, you’ve got a moneymaking act on your hands.
Teller recognizes that there are two pieces to becoming successful at this endeavor: training the monkey and building the pedestal. One piece of the puzzle presents a possibly intractable obstacle in the way of success. And the other is building the pedestal. People have been building pedestals since ancient Greece and probably before. Over two-plus millennia, pedestals have been thoroughly figured out. You can buy one at a furniture store or a hardware store, or turn a milk crate upside down.
The bottleneck, the hard thing, is training a monkey to juggle flaming torches.
The point of this mental model is to remind you that there is no point building the pedestal if you can’t train the monkey. In other words, you ought to tackle the hardest part of the problem first.
There is no point building the pedestal if you can’t train the monkey. In other words, you ought to tackle the hardest part of the problem first.
Years ago, X looked into developing what’s now known as a hyperloop, an experimental high-speed rail system. The concept was fine. Building the physical infrastructure wouldn’t be very hard from an engineering standpoint.
The monkeys for the hyperloop to be viable were things like whether you could safely load and unload passengers or cargo, and whether you could get the system up to speed and get it to brake without incident. A couple hundred yards of track wouldn’t tell you anything about whether you could conquer those challenges. In fact, Teller and the team at X figured out that you would have to build practically the whole thing before you knew whether it worked. You would have to build a bunch of pedestals before you could find out if the monkeys were intractable.
They quickly decided not to pursue it.
One of Teller’s valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself. Teller also realizes that when you’re building pedestals, you are accumulating sunk costs that make it hard to quit even as you find out that you may not be able to train the monkey to juggle those torches.
Butting up against a monkey that you can’t solve and turning to pedestal-building is a disaster on two fronts. Not only are you continuing to pour resources into something after the world is giving you signals that you won’t succeed, but those are resources you could be devoting to something better.
But there is something that can help.
Kill criteria
If we can identify in advance what the signals are that we should pay attention to and make a plan for how we will react to them, we can increase the chances that we’ll cut our losses when we ought to.
Essentially, when you enter into an endeavor, you want to imagine what you could find out that would tell you it’s no longer worth pursuing. Ask yourself, “What are the signs that, if I see them in the future, will cause me to exit the road I’m on? What could I learn about the state of the world or the state of myself that would change my commitment to this decision?”
That list offers you a set of kill criteria, literally criteria for killing a project or changing your mind or cutting your losses. It’s one of the best tools for helping you figure out when to quit closer to on time.
Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn’t trainable or that you’re not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.
The best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date. A state is just what it sounds like, an objective, measurable condition you or your project is in, a benchmark that you have hit or missed. A date is the when.
Kill criteria, generally, include both states and dates, in the form of “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.” Or “If I haven’t done X by Y (time), I’ll quit.” Or “If I haven’t achieved X by the time I’ve spent Y (amount in money, effort, time, or other resources), I should quit.”
For mParticle, a SaaS (software as a service) company I’ve worked with, one of the kill criteria was a lack of a decision-maker in the room, triggering an offer of executive alignment for the next meeting. If there was no executive in the room during the first few meetings (a less certain kill criterion), the seller was instructed to offer up executive alignment at the next meeting. The seller would explain to the potential customer that, in their experience, deals go more smoothly when there are executives from both sides in the room, and offer to make sure to have an executive from their side at the next meeting if the potential customer would do the same. If the lead refused the offer, the seller would kill the deal. Translated into states and dates, “If I can’t get an executive in the room (the state) by the next meeting (the date), then I’ll kill the deal.”
And you don’t have to look any further than X’s charter for an example of the interaction of states and dates. X’s projects must have the potential to be 10x world-changing (a state), capable of becoming commercially viable (a state), within five to ten years (a date).
Better, not perfect
When I was playing poker, I applied a bunch of kill criteria that helped me be a better quitter (of hands and of games). One example was a stop-loss. If I lost a certain amount, I would quit.
This was especially important at the start of my career, because novice players are particularly poor at judging whether they’re losing due to their poor play or because of bad luck. After turning pro, I still maintained a stop-loss. Elite poker players are still going to be worse at making quitting decisions when they’re in it, especially if they’re in it and losing. So, even after I gained experience and got a better understanding of the quality of my play and the short-term swings of luck, I still set loss limits.
I also realized that I played better in sessions of six to eight hours or less, so I committed to quitting after I played that long. Because I was more aware of the importance of game conditions, I also committed to quit if the quality of the players in the game drastically changed in an unfavorable way as some players cashed out and new ones took their seats.
Those kill criteria helped me to become better at quitting games. But was I perfect? Not even close.
I was far from flawless, but I did better than I would have without kill criteria. In the one long game of my poker career, I’m confident my bottom line benefited because I was able—some of the time—to reduce the mental and financial resources I spent in negative expected-value situations.
The important thing is to be better, not perfect. After all, we’re only human and we’re operating under conditions of uncertainty. It’s hard to time quitting decisions perfectly.
The monkeys-and-pedestals mental model and kill criteria help us overcome our aversion to closing accounts in the losses.
Astro Teller knows that they don’t always quit at the exact right moment at X. He’s fine with that because they do better overall since they are always trying. “This is exactly why X produces such outsized returns. Not because we’re perfect at what we aspire to, but because we’re so relentlessly aspiring to it that we’re modestly successful and that turns out to be enormous.”
Taken together, the monkeys-and-pedestals mental model and kill criteria help us overcome our aversion to closing accounts in the losses. First, they both get you to no faster, which naturally limits the losses that you have to absorb when you quit. And the less you are down, the easier it is to walk away.
Second, when you set clear kill criteria in advance and make a precommitment to walk away when you see those signals, you are just more likely to follow through, even when you are losing. Anytime you can make a decision about cutting your losses in advance, you’ll do better at closing those mental accounts.

Adapted from Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke, Copyright © 2022 by Annie Duke. Used by permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The post Mental Models to Help You Cut Your Losses appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Here are two common ways of thinking about democracy in the online era. First, the internet is a liberation technology and will usher in an era of global democracy. Second, you can have social media or democracy, but not both.
Which is more correct? There is no doubt democracy is in retreat around the globe. Even supposedly stable democracies have recently seen events incompatible with democracy and the rule of law, such as the violent assault on the US Capitol in 2021.
To understand the role of social media in this process, we carried out a systematic review of the evidence linking social media to ten indicators of democratic wellbeing: political participation, knowledge, trust, news exposure, political expression, hate, polarisation, populism, network structure, and misinformation.
We reviewed almost 500 studies across different platforms in countries around the globe, and saw some broad patterns emerge. Social media use is linked to an increase in political engagement, but also increases in polarisation, populism, and distrust in institutions.
Different kinds of evidence
In our review, we put greater weight on research establishing causal links between social media and indicators of democratic wellbeing, rather than just correlations.
Correlations can be interesting, but they cannot prove any outcome is caused by social media use. For example, suppose we find a link between social media use and hate speech. It might arise because people who produce hate speech use social media more, rather than because using social media triggers hate speech.
Causal links can be established in a number of ways, for example through large-scale field experiments. Participants may be asked to reduce Facebook usage to 20 minutes per day or turn off Facebook altogether for a month. (Both interventions led to an increase in wellbeing, and abstaining from Facebook altogether also significantly reduced political polarisation.)
More engagement, more polarisation
Across the 496 articles we considered, most correlational rather than causal, we found a mix of positive and negative effects. As often happens in science, the pattern is complicated but can still be interpreted.
On the positive side, we found digital media use relates to higher political engagement and greater diversity of news exposure. For example, a study in Taiwan found information-oriented social media use increased political participation. However, this was only true if the user believed an individual can influence politics through online actions.

Read more:
Clickbait extremism, mass shootings, and the assault on democracy – time for a rethink of social media?

On the negative side, we found considerable evidence for effects such as fostering polarisation and populism, and reducing trust in institutions. The effects on trust in institutions and media were particularly pronounced. During the pandemic, digital media use has been shown to be associated with COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.
Another negative outcome of social media use, in a range of political contexts and on various platforms, appears to be increased political polarisation. 
We found increased polarisation was also linked to exposure to opposing viewpoints in one’s social media feeds. In other words, being exposed to the words of political opponents did not bridge the political divide. Rather it seemed to amplify it.
Links to violence
We also found a strong and pervasive association between social media use and populism. More social media use translates into a greater vote share for populist parties. 
Studies in Austria, Sweden and Australia have found evidence for an association between increased social media use and online right-wing radicalisation. Studies in Germany and Russia have provided causal evidence that digital media can increase the incidence of ethnic hate crimes. 

Read more:
Meet BreadTube, the YouTube activists trying to beat the far-right at their own game

For example, the German study found local outages of Facebook (due to technical faults or internet interruptions, for example) decreased violence in those locations. The authors of the study estimated that 50% less anti-refugee sentiment on social media would reduce violent incidents by 12.6%.
The distribution of effects around the world was also striking. Positive effects on political participation and information consumption were most pronounced in emerging democracies in South America, Africa and Asia. Negative effects were more evident in established democracies in Europe and the United States.
No simple answers
So, to return to where we began: is the internet a liberation technology? Or are social media incompatible with democracy?
There are no simple yes or no answers. There is, however, evidence that digital media impact political behaviour globally. This evidence warrants concern about the adverse impacts of social media on democracy. 

Read more:
The 'digital town square'? What does it mean when billionaires own the online spaces where we gather?

Facebook, Twitter and other social media are not per se incompatible with democracy. Democratic welfare, however, requires that scientists carefully study the social effects of social media. Those effects must be evaluated and regulated by voters and elected policymakers, not a small clique of super-rich individuals. 
We have seen small but important steps in this direction. The Digital Services Act of the European Union is one. Another is the proposed Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA) in the US, though its fate is uncertain. 

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from financial support from the European Research Council
(ERC Advanced Grant 101020961 PRODEMINFO), the Humboldt Foundation through a research award, the Volkswagen Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation (through the Honesty program awarded to Wake Forest University), and the European Commission (Horizon 2020 grant 964728 JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google) and from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN). He frequently collaborates with researchers in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.Lisa Oswald receives funding from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Philipp Lorenz-Spreen receives funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. He is a member of the board of the non-profit Prosocial Design Network. He has collaborated with researchers in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.Ralph Hertwig receives funding from the Volkswagen Foundation and the European Commission (HORIZON 2022 grant GA 101094752). He has collaborated with researchers in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. 

Joe Biden did the nation a service when he declared the pandemic “over” in a mid-September interview with “60 Minutes.” He didn’t really mean it, and his administration had no intention of pursuing the kind of course correction that his observation would have necessitated. Only a seismic shock will rattle the remaining foundations of the Covid regime. That may be precisely what’s coming.

For millions of Americans, the once ubiquitous daily reminders of the condensed and unsatisfying life we were all forced to lead at the height of the outbreak are harder and harder to come by. Where restrictions persist—and will continue to persist, as they are now untethered to any objective observations about the virus—are in settings dominated by those who were most beholden to mitigation protocols. Vaccination cards are still currency in parts of blue America. Masking in almost every medical setting, up to and including veterinary offices, is standard. Performative displays of hygiene theater contribute to a rise in “behavioral” maladies such as hypochondria, even if they have few other measurable effects on our environment. Colleges and universities maintain Covid-testing regimens that conflict with their education.

No single election cycle will wash all that away. But where Republicans in Congress can help the nation move on from the pandemic is in their capacity as the majority party in the House. They can force the federal government to relinquish its vice-like grip on Covid protocols that have long outlived their usefulness.

According to Axios, Republicans will attempt to strip the Biden administration of the authority Congress vested in the executive branch at the onset of this emergency in 2020. They will overturn the Covid vaccine mandate affecting the U.S. military, which has contributed, at least in part, to the failure of some of the services to meet recruiting goals and maintain readiness. They are likely to eliminate the pandemic-era privilege of “proxy voting” for lawmakers, a constitutionally dubious provision contributing to Congress’s transformation from a deliberative body into a stage upon which elected officials preen for partisans. They will almost certainly attempt to terminate the national-emergency declaration around Covid that the Biden administration extended into next year (the first attempt, which passed a Democrat-controlled Senate in March, was never taken up by the House).

But that’s not all. While it may unsettle members of the public health establishment, the vanguard of the ascendant GOP doesn’t seem inclined to move on with reconciliation in the absence of truth. Republicans are reportedly set to launch investigations into the virus and how we responded to it. What were Covid-19’s true origins? Why did American schools stay shuttered longer than other industrialized nations? What happened to the trillions of dollars (which Democrats gallingly insist was insufficient) appropriated to combat this crisis? And what about the tens of billions of dollars pocketed by fraudsters.

Some of the GOP’s efforts to restore what one Republican aide called “normal” may not be wildly popular. A Republican majority in the House will reportedly “claw back leftover Covid aid” in state and federal coffers. If, however, Covid aid remains unspent, it is no longer Covid aid; it is a fungible dispensation that states have applied to priorities favored by pressure groups that would otherwise have to put their preferences to a more democratic test.

Republicans are keen on ensuring that programs such as expanded unemployment insurance and the 2021 Child Tax Credit do not become permanent. This will surely frustrate reformers on both ends of the political spectrum who want to see the federal government subsidize social contributions that do not generate an income. But if “normal” is the goal, “normal” also involves the restoration of price stability. But to the degree that spending in the pursuit of social engineering has contributed to voters’ apprehension, the political rewards on the other side of austerity will outweigh the aggravation of the natalist right and those progressives who have come to regard work as an assault on personal dignity.

Some of the GOP’s crusades against the permanence of the pandemic’s mitigation protocols will succeed. Others might not. But even the effort will be an unusually healthy exercise for the country. Congress granted the executive branch and its agencies extraordinary power during the pandemic, and that power will not accrete back to the legislative branch through entropy alone. Even if it would, we should expect the most powerful branch of government to jealously guard its authority.

Through lethargy or incompetence or a bit of both, Joe Biden has gifted Congress an opportunity to reassert itself. If that enterprise concludes, even in some small way, in the trimming of the imperial trappings with which the modern presidency is festooned, it will be a good thing. Indeed, it will be an expression of constitutional propriety that befits a representative republic, which is what Democrats insist the GOP is set on destroying. That will be a win for democracy, even if it has to be clawed from the hands of democracy’s self-styled defenders.

Apart from a speech in America to insurance brokers and three days of a failed Conservative leadership bid, Boris Johnson has been relatively quiet since he was ousted from No 10. But at the Cop27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt today, the former prime minister tried to spruce up his image by calling for countries to fulfil the promises made a year ago at Cop26 in Glasgow.
Johnson, at a New York Times fringe event, said his ambition was to “incarnate the spirit of Glasgow”. More accurately, it was an attempt to burnish his tainted legacy. He condemned those who want to “frack the hell out of the British countryside” and called for greater government cooperation with the private sector.
Johnson chastising his party on energy policy underlined his successor Rishi Sunak’s recent poor decisions. Even though Sunak has reinstated the fracking ban that Liz Truss tried to repeal during her brief time in office, his reputation on climate matters is decidedly mixed – especially given that he initially said he would not attend Cop27. That was not a wise move and the U-turn was inevitable. The UK was central to events this year because it was handing over the Cop presidency to Egypt, and it would not have been good for Sunak to miss a key international event so soon after taking up office (today, for example, he met Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, for the first time as Prime Minister).
Johnson’s speech also gave him the opportunity to frame his time in office as a high point for climate action by the UK – in contrast with his successors. Ultimately, Johnson’s intervention highlighted how badly the supposedly PR-savvy Sunak had mismanaged the conference.
[See also: Cop27: What is on the agenda in Egypt?] 

Most grownups don’t believe in magic anymore. Sometimes, though, it can be helpful to imagine it. A powerful ring turns the wearer invisible in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. That power means the wearer can act with relative impunity. (For that device, Tolkien had Plato to thank.) We can also imagine characters with superhuman abilities. These thought experiments sometimes help us put ourselves and our societies into perspective. In Tolkien’s world, we wrestle with questions on the nature of power. In our world, we can explore the nature of peace. Let’s imagine that wizards exist in our world, and one supremely powerful wizard has cast a spell over the realm.

The Spell of Nonviolence The wizard’s spell is of nonviolence. Call it “The Spell of Ahimsa.” Under this spell, no one can threaten or commit any act that injures another person or their property. When a brigand tries to attack a caravan on the road, his fingers weaken, and his dagger simply falls from his grasp. When a tax collector tries to arrest a merchant in the town, the handcuffs slip from his fingers. When a bully tries to push another girl, she discovers an invisible wall of protection. It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrator thinks he is using violence to serve good or evil. The fact is, the spell ensures a condition of complete nonviolence in society. What should we make of this? Would the realm be better off under the wizard’s spell? Answers will vary. Nearly every society has laws against theft, fraud, and physical injury, which means something is justifiable about the spell. So at least a fair number of people might agree intuitively that the world would be better without violence. As soon as we get into questions about the justification for authority’s threats of violence, though, answers start to diverge. Differences are starkest when we think of the spell affecting government officials. Consider “The Spell of Nonviolence” as it relates to issues of government-issued welfare. In other words, if the wizard used magic such that officials had to abstain from violence, how would authorities implement redistribution schemes? Specifically, how would authorities tax the rich to give to the poor?

Redistribution as Rooted in Violence The modern redistributive state is relatively recent in history. In fact, what made the welfare state affordable was the rapid advances of industry and enterprise. After about 1800, this advance—known as the “hockey stick” of prosperity—helped generate opportunities for people to create more value for each other. For maybe the first time in history, there were more people trading than raiding. People living in this Great Enrichment rocketed out of poverty. According to economic historian Dierdre McCloskey:, Earlier prosperities had intermittently increased real income per head by double or even triple, 100 or 200 percent or so, only for it to fall back to the miserable $3 a day typical of humans since the caves. But the Great Enrichment increased real income per head, in the face of a rise in the number of heads, by a factor of seven—by anything from 2,500 to 5,000 percent. A few entrepreneurs got amazingly wealthy in the Great Enrichment, but a massive middle class emerged, too, as people figured out how to organize themselves into productive firms. These firms weren’t perfect, but they were responsible for unprecedented improvements in living standards. With such gains, even the poorest improved their lot. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, governments began instituting welfare programs and other centralized forms of social welfare. The idea was to see that the least fortunate in society could meet their basic needs. But these systems brought along a set of perverse consequences. And as these systems began to predominate, existing voluntary systems of civil society disappeared. Essential features of voluntary systems, such as the practice of compassion and community, not to mention the development of personal responsibility, slowly disappeared along with them. The Spell of Ahimsa helps us see a feature of the redistributive welfare state that is frequently overlooked: its very existence depends on state-sanctioned violence. In other words, how would the system operate if authorities couldn’t threaten to imprison those who refused to pay for it? Most people don’t think about matters this way, accustomed to the idea of the welfare state as a permanent fixture of life. But as we will see, it hasn’t always been this way. Human beings naturally organize themselves.

Savings Clubs Around the World Tanomoshi is a locally organized system of mutual aid. These community resource pools have existed in Japan at least since the middle Kamakura period of 1185 to 1333 BCE. Under this system, each member would contribute a small sum at regular intervals and would receive a single, lump payment whenever the member experienced a significant life event. In medieval Japan, per capita GDP is estimated to have been between 500 and 800 dollars in 2011 dollars. (Compare this with today’s United States poverty level of $12,880 for a single person.) Every month, people would travel to the tanomoshiko to leave a little bit of money. A trusted party there would accept their contribution with a bow. Tanomoshiko is translated as “reliable group,” so the community selected a steward of integrity. Though most medieval Japanese earned very little, they were committed. One family might have arranged for a daughter to be married. Another might have found a parent has become gravely ill. Each would be able to go directly to the tanomoshiko for support. In some of the poorest parts of the world, there is little capacity for government welfare, much less modern banking. So in places like sub-Saharan Africa, people contribute a modest monthly allotment to a su su (or sou-sou). Those who aren’t very good at saving money by themselves are encouraged to use a su su because club members hold one another accountable. Here’s how it works, according to South African writer Lihle Z. Mtshali, describing the Afro-Caribbean variant in America: The group elects a treasurer who will collect the members’ contributions. She will also create a payout roster, or members can request to receive their hand at any given date during the cycle. Everyone agrees on how much and how often they want to contribute. If ten members are contributing $100 a week, each week a member will receive a $1,000 hand or cash lump sum. The cycle begins again after ten weeks. Any member who can afford it, can also double their contribution and get paid two hands in one cycle. Because there is no interest to be collected, members always get out the exact amount they put in. The recipient changes each period in a rotating fashion such that every member of the group is eventually a recipient. Curiously, this arrangement has sprung up in various forms worldwide throughout history. A similar system called kye in Korea is still around today, even among Korean immigrants to the United States. Similar rotational systems include tandas (Latin America), cundinas (Mexico), partnerhand (Caribbean/United Kingdom), hui (Asia), Game’ya (Middle East), pandeiros (Brazil), and arisan (Indonesia). These systems facilitate personal savings, investment in property and enterprise, insurance, personal loans, and assistance to poorer people. In developed countries, people can use these systems to build credit.

Mutual Aid in America Seal of the Souvereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Today, if you were to ask the average man or woman on the street to name a mutual aid society, you would be lucky if he or she could name a single one. But at one time in America these organizations were everywhere. They had funny names like the Oddfellows, the Free African Society, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. At one time, they included health insurance and unemployment support. Because they were a mix of the communitarian and the charitable, surplus dues could go to growth and giving. As most organized into local chapters and lodges, they featured the undocumented acts of kindness and tough love we would scarcely recognize if we saw them today. They are the forgotten social safety net. This vast empire of human good was built not by federal largesse but on the moral conviction of free people weaving their lives together as a community to guard against hardship. Once held together by tight neighborhoods, mutual support, and barn raisings, a communitarian society has been torn apart by redistribution. Beholden to banks or bureaucracies, most Americans are dependent on authorities’ plans thousands of miles away. The rest are compelled to foot the bill—or else. At one stage, this system was affordable. But in time, the system became corrosive and dependent on public and private debt. “As we have fallen deeper into debt, we have forgotten how to take care of one another.” As we have fallen deeper into debt, we have forgotten how to take care of one another. The rise of the administrative welfare state corresponds to civil society’s decline. Whether it’s correlation or causation, I cannot say. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty damning.

The Decline of Community When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he saw something profound. Maybe you’ve read the following passage before. But as you read it again, ask yourself whether or to what degree this is an America you recognize: The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. I suspect that if you see today’s America in the above, it’s been weakened and politicized. Reading Tocqueville, one can imagine a time when the organs of civil association extended to spheres of life such as childhood and old age. But these are institutionalized and segregated today. Children are warehoused by the state so that parents can work to pay bills and taxes. The elderly are similarly warehoused and told more or less that their participation in productive society is optional after age 65. Beyond that point, many become liabilities to be managed by the Congressional Budget Office. Consider then the lost array of mutual aid societies, lodges, and fraternal orders of which a third of Americans were once members. Historian David Beito painstakingly investigates a handful of these to offer a clearer picture: century illustrates the many variants of this system. Each had a distinct membership base. Two of the societies, the Independent Order of Saint Luke and the United Order of True Reformers, were all-black. Both had been founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War and specialized initially in sickness and burial insurance. The other societies had entirely white memberships. The Loyal Order of Moose was an exclusively male society that emphasized sickness and burial benefits. It became best known during the 20th century for its orphanage, Mooseheart, near Aurora, Illinois. The Security Benefit Association (originally the Knights and Ladies of Security) followed in a similar tradition but broke from the mainstream by allowing men and women to join on equal terms. Even as we shake our modern heads at segregation along racial lines, we can still appreciate the power of civil association that has all-but-disappeared in the twenty-first century. There is no doubt that most human beings care for others. This care can extend to strangers. At some level, we all want to be assured that poor people can get help when they need it. Most of us want to know that those who seek our help really need it and that assistance doesn’t create dependency. Mutual aid societies served this function because members kept an eye on other members. Government welfare views successful people as human ATMs and the poor as statistical plot points. There is no discernment. A mutual aid renaissance would discourage people from simply outsourcing their compassion. Instead, we would all have to learn to be compassionate again.

The Fundamental Questions In an age of rapid technological advances and material abundance, we must ask penetrating questions about whether the current socio-political order is morally justifiable. First, if you could choose non-violent means of achieving social goals such as poverty relief, wouldn’t you? After all, violence causes suffering. Causing unnecessary suffering against innocent people is wrong. One might respond by arguing that non-violent forms of poverty relief are impossible, so the extent to which the relatively well-off suffer from taxation is a necessary evil. But isn’t this line of argument just a failure of imagination? Remember that mutual aid was robust in the past without the benefits of modern technology. It’s easier to dispel skepticism about voluntary arrangements when we reflect on mutual aid in the era of digital ledgers. (Remember, we haven’t yet discussed improvements to the charity sector that the Internet has enabled.) Now, if we can demonstrate that mutual aid and charity could be robust enough to help the least advantaged, wouldn’t that mean the violent redistributive state causes unnecessary suffering? Advocates for the welfare state argue that wealthier members of society don’t suffer all that much when authorities compel them through redistributive taxation. But if we agree that the goal is to help the poor rather than punish the rich, then all such suffering is unnecessary. Moreover, the vast majority of the rich’s assets don’t go to consumption but rather to capital that fuels other poverty-fighting endeavors such as investments in companies and a thousand experiments in effective altruism. Capital is rarely idle–passing over, for now, the perverse distortions created by central banks. Finally, if it’s possible to help the poor (or the poor to help each other) without resorting to violence, isn’t this something we ought to do? If the answer is yes, we have a moral obligation to transition away from the violent welfare state to a nonviolent condition of community support, charity, and mutual aid. Sadly, moral suasion isn’t likely to work. But if governments around the world find they can no longer afford the bloat and unprecedented debt, it could be that mutual aid is the last remaining option.

Becoming the Social Safety Net We have demonstrated that mutual aid is possible and probably more effective even among the poorest people. Even if a subset cannot afford to participate in mutual aid, the least advantaged would be able to rely more on families, churches, charities, and communities, all of which would likely receive greater comparative support. Again, the poor are more likely to find these options without a vast government welfare empire. In 1900, when U.S. per capita GDP was only $4,000, one-third of American men belonged to a mutual-aid society. Just think what this sector could look like with an average per capita GDP of $65,000—with only about 11 percent living below the federal poverty limit. Mutual aid arrangements are not just superior because they are voluntary. These systems build in mechanisms of accountability and integrity for members—the practice of compassion. By contrast, government welfare is impersonal and treats everyone the same, reducing incentives to work and engendering an unhealthy sense of entitlement. Again, the debt spending that is needed continuously to prop up the welfare system has created risks of a global contagion. For more on these topics, see Welfare, by Jeffrey M. Jones and Thomas MaCurdy. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Charity, by Russell Roberts. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Christy Ford Chapin on the Evolution of the American Health Care System. EconTalk.

Christy Ford Chapin on the Evolution of the American Health Care System. EconTalk. Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. English Edition. 2 vols. Online Library of Liberty. The mutual aid sector is thus due for a renaissance. It might seem radical, but charity and mutual aid systems create more trust, engender more integrity, and offer greater responsibility. Suppose, though, that the compulsory redistribution system continues to grow. There will be fewer opportunities for experimentation in mutual aid, that is, until the economy drowns in a sea of red ink.

Casting the Spell Of course, there is no Spell of Nonviolence. It is impossible to cast such a spell on everyone. But one thing is possible: You and I can cast this spell on ourselves. We can form a moral community of people who refuse to support institutions that threaten violence to operate. I’d be willing to bet that where there is more peace, there is also more compassion. As more people cast this spell upon themselves, we will find we live in a world of increased dignity, flourishing, and love.

Most of the time, when heads of state talk about nuclear war, they speak in careful, measured tones, acknowledging the gravity of the nuclear taboo and the consequences of breaking it. The Russian president takes a different approach. Speaking at his annual foreign-policy conference a few years ago, Vladimir Putin reflected, without smiling, on the consequences of a nuclear war. “We will go to heaven as martyrs,” he said, “and they will just drop dead.”At the same conference last month, a regime insider, Fyodor Lukyanov, asked him about this remark: “You said that we would all go to heaven, but we’re in no hurry to get there, right?” Putin did not answer. The seconds ticked by. Lukyanov said, “You’ve stopped to think. That’s disconcerting.” Putin responded, “I did it on purpose to make you worry a little.”I did it on purpose to make you worry a little? Why does he want anyone to worry? Because fear is not just a feeling or an ephemeral emotion; it is a physical sensation. It can grip your stomach, freeze your limbs, make your heart beat faster. Fear can distort the way you think and act. Because it can be so paralyzing, human beings have always tried to make other human beings feel fear. If you can make your enemies afraid, they will not oppose you, because they cannot oppose you. You can then win the argument, the battle, or the war without ever having to fight.[Uri Friedman: Will Putin use nuclear weapons? Watch these indicators]Putin is a KGB officer who knows about the manipulation of emotions, fear most of all. For two decades, he has sought to evoke fear inside Russia. Unlike his Soviet predecessors, he doesn’t shoot or arrest millions of people. Instead, he uses targeted violence, specially designed to create fear. When the investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her Moscow stairwell, and when the businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky was sent to prison for a decade, other journalists and other businessmen got the message. When the opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny were murdered and poisoned, respectively, those incidents sent a message too. This isn’t mass terror, but it is just as effective. Fear keeps Putin in power by rendering people too frightened to report news, protest government actions, or conduct independent business or even independent activity of any kind.Putin also seeks to create fear in the outside world, especially the democratic world. He does this, above all, by bantering about nuclear weapons, at conferences and everywhere else. Indeed, this has been a central subject of his public commentary, and of Russian propaganda more broadly, for many years. Pictures of mushroom clouds appear regularly on the evening news. Threats of nuclear strikes against Ukraine have been made repeatedly, as far back as 2014. Russia’s armed forces practice nuclear strikes as a routine part of military exercises. Back in 2009, they played out a war game that included dropping a nuclear bomb on Poland. This constant, repetitive nuclear signaling, which long predates the current war, has a purpose: to make NATO countries afraid to defend Poland, afraid to defend Ukraine, and afraid to provoke or anger Russia in any way at all.In the past few weeks, Putin and those who echo Putin have been seeking to pump up fear once again. Russian television journalists now regularly allude to nuclear war in the same half-serious, half-sinister tone, coolly referring to World War III as “realistic” and saying “It is what it is,” because “we’re all going to die someday.” The Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, has called his American, British, and French counterparts to accuse the Ukrainians of preparing a nuclear attack despite the fact that they don’t have nuclear weapons—immediately triggering the suspicion that he is planning one himself. Russian nuclear threats are now habitually echoed and amplified by proxies as disparate as the British politician Jeremy Corbyn and the tech billionaire Elon Musk, growing louder with each Ukrainian military victory. Unsurprisingly, the anxiety created by these repeated threats has already shaped American and European policy toward Ukraine, exactly as it was supposed to do.Fear certainly explains why we in the West have given Ukraine some weapons but not others. Why no airplanes?  Why no advanced tanks? Because the White House, the German government, and other governments are afraid that one of these weapons would cross an invisible red line and inspire a nuclear retaliation by Russia. Fear also shapes tactics. Why don’t the Ukrainians more often target the military bases or infrastructure on Russian territory that are being used to attack them? Because Ukraine’s Western partners have asked its leaders not to do so, for fear, again, of escalation.Fear also causes us to treat nonnuclear acts of mass violence and terror as if they are less important, less frightening, less deserving of a response. Right now, Russia is targeting Ukrainian utilities, openly seeking to deprive millions of Ukrainians of electricity and water. This policy could lead to mass evacuations, even mass death, maybe even on the same scale as a tactical nuclear weapon. The Ukrainians have accused the Russians of preparing to dynamite a dam that, if burst, would flood Kherson and other settlements. If a small terrorist or extremist group were even hinting at a similarly devastating blow, people in the West would already be arguing about how to force them to stop. But because this is Russia, and because these are just conventional weapons, we don’t think in terms of retaliation or response. We feel relieved, somehow, that people will die because they have frozen in unheated apartments or drowned in an artificial flood, and not from nuclear fallout.  Yet even as we feel this fear, even as we act on this fear, even as we let this fear shape our perceptions of the war, we still have no idea whether our anxious responses are effective. We don’t know whether our refusal to transfer sophisticated tanks to Ukraine is preventing nuclear war. We don’t know whether loaning an F-16 would lead to Armageddon. We don’t know whether holding back the longest-range ammunition is stopping Putin from dropping a tactical nuclear weapon or any other kind of weapon.[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]On the contrary, some of these decisions may have had precisely the opposite impact. Our self-imposed limitations may well have encouraged Putin to believe that American support for Ukraine is limited and will soon end. Our insistence that Ukraine not harm Russia or Russians in its own defense might explain why he keeps fighting. Perhaps our nuclear anxiety actually encourages him to carry out nonnuclear mass atrocities; he does so because he believes he will not face any consequences, because we will not escalate.Given the growing popularity of the word restraint, we must consider how that concept might not only prolong the war but lead to a nuclear catastrophe. What if calls for peace actually reinforce Putin’s deep belief, one he has expressed many times, that the West is weak and degenerate? Before the war, Western shipments of weapons to Ukraine were limited because of similar fears. No one wanted to provoke Russia by offering the Ukrainians anything too sophisticated. In retrospect, this caution was disastrous. It meant that Putin thought the West would not come to Ukraine’s aid; it left Ukraine less prepared than it could have been. Had we armed Ukraine, we might have prevented the many tragedies that have unfolded on occupied territory. Had we helped make Ukraine into a difficult target, the invasion might never have taken place at all.I can’t prove this to be true, of course, because no one can. We can’t consult a rule book, published military doctrine, or any other document to explain these issues, because Russia has no institutions governing the use of nuclear weapons, indeed no institutions that can check or balance the president. In a one-man dictatorship, the decision whether to use nuclear weapons lies in that one man’s head. Because no one else lives inside that head, no one else knows what would really provoke him or where his red lines really are.The only guide we have is the past, and given Putin’s behavior in the past, we should at least consider the possibility that by arming Ukraine, by supporting Ukraine, we will also prevent the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Notwithstanding his bravado about martyrdom, if Putin genuinely believes that a Russian nuclear attack will carry “catastrophic consequences,” to use National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s language, then he is much less likely to carry one out. The less fear we show, the more Putin himself will be afraid.The Ukrainians are already ahead of us. One Ukrainian friend recently told me that she is having the windows on her house changed to make them more airtight—just in case. But she isn’t moving. She has learned not to let fear deform her decisions, and we should learn the same. Here is the only thing we know: As long as Putin believes that the use of nuclear weapons won’t win the war—as long as he believes that to do so would call down an unprecedented international and Western response, perhaps including the destruction of his navy, of his communications system, of his economic model—then he won’t use them.He has to believe that a nuclear strike would be the beginning of the end of his regime. And we have to believe it too.

One of my earliest blog posts in Frankly Fukuyama was on Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization, in which I suggested that Berlusconi had invented a form of politics that has been corrupting countries around the world ever since he entered politics in the 1990s. Berlusconi used his media ownership and surrounding celebrity to promote his political career, and used his political post as prime minister of Italy to protect his business interests.  The political value of media ownership was recognized by any number of oligarchs in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, who began purchasing these properties from foreign owners like Axel Springer. In the early 2000s the latter were trying to exit from the sector as legacy media began its long-term decline due to the rise of the internet. It didn’t matter to these oligarchs that newspapers and TV stations weren’t making money; they had a non-monetary value in helping their friends get elected and keeping politicians in their orbit. One of Ukraine’s chief problems before the Russian invasion was the fact that each of its main TV channels was owned by a different oligarch, who could protect their enterprises in that manner.We now have our own oligarch, Elon Musk, who is moving into a similar role. His takeover of Twitter will (in theory, at least) allow him to use the platform to protect his business interests at Tesla and SpaceX, and also to promote whatever constitutes his political preferences. Recent months have revealed that he leans Republican and conservative, and has said he would allow Donald Trump back on Twitter in the interests of free speech. Recently, he has very unhelpfully waded into geopolitical issues like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s relationship with Taiwan.___STEADY_PAYWALL___The kind of political influence that a large social media platform offers is different and more subtle than legacy media. Content moderation is largely invisible; Twitter would likely be used not to post glowing editorials praising Musk’s businesses, so much as steering conversations towards desired outcomes or suppressing negative views. Social media takedowns are very difficult to track. As many people have noted, Musk has huge economic interests in China and in other authoritarian countries, and could be subject to considerable pressure from them to go lightly on critical posts and comments.Back in 2020 I led a Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale. In the white paper we produced, we argued that the real problem with the large social media platforms was not that they carried fake news or conspiracy theories per se: our First Amendment protects the right to free speech, even if that speech is false or toxic. The problem is their scale: the ability of Twitter, Facebook, Google, and now TikTok to vastly amplify certain voices and to silence others. In our report, we likened the large platforms to a loaded gun left on the table in front of us. We hoped that the person sitting opposite us would not pick up the gun and use it to shoot us, and up to now the people running the big platforms were at least trying to be responsible. But any rich individual could come along and pick up the gun.That rich individual has now appeared, and is cradling the gun in his hands.The existence of the loaded gun—that is, a large-scale social media platform—is why Twitter users moving to an alternative site like Mastodon in response to Musk’s takeover won’t work. No competitor reaches audiences remotely as large as Twitter’s, and none is likely to get to that scale anytime in the future. Back in October, the New York Times published a piece decrying “How Disinformation Splintered and Became More Intractable.” Apart from the fact that there was little empirical evidence adduced about how disinformation was actually more intractable, the article missed the point that Gab, Parler, Truth Social, and Telegram collectively don’t reach anywhere near the audiences that Twitter does.  Donald Trump had 85 million followers on Twitter; today he has less than 5 million on Truth Social. What we should want is for the online information space to become more fragmented and competitive, in ways that accord with the fragmentation of views in the population as a whole. This takes power away from the large platforms and distributes it more democratically.All of our current worry about the political impact of Musk’s takeover of Twitter may be completely academic, however. The challenges he faces in making his over-valued acquisition work are formidable, and even a great business genius may not be able to make the numbers add up. Advertisers and users have been fleeing the platform since Musk became CEO because of worries about the impact of his preferences on content moderation. My colleague at Stanford’s Internet Observatory, Alex Stamos, published a long Twitter thread on the challenges that Musk faces in trying to revise any of Twitter's content moderation rules.I think @elonmusk has made a huge mistake, making himself the global face of content moderation at a critical moment of struggle with governments, while maintaining massive personal exposure to challenging countries.— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) October 28, 2022
Musk seems completely out of his depth in his understanding of the difficulties of what he claims he wants to do. He claims that he wants to promote free speech on the platform. But what happens when Egypt or India demands the takedown of certain content critical of their government? Will he defend free speech if it means getting kicked out of these countries? Any choices that he makes will potentially affect not just the profitability of Twitter but his other myriad business interests. Twitter has lost money each year for most of the past decade, and now is saddled with a billion dollars in annual debt payments as a result of the change in ownership. Will Musk be willing to subsidize Twitter from his other businesses, as the Eastern European oligarchs do? Or will he use it to support a more overtly political role for himself? That will end up being a pretty expensive hobby.Ukraine is in the process of fixing its oligarch problem, by creating a legal category of oligarchs who receive special scrutiny of their business affairs. This has caused a number of them to seek to divest their media holdings. It would seem to me a reasonable rule for a democracy to use anti-trust laws to prohibit industrial corporations from owning large media properties and cross-subsidizing them, or to force large internet platforms to stay in their lane and not branch out into other sectors. Oligarchs have shown themselves toxic to democratic politics since the earliest days of Silvio Berlusconi.So welcome to the global oligarch club, Elon!

If Republicans win control of one or both congressional chambers this week, they will likely begin a project that could reshape the nation’s political and legal landscape: imposing on blue states the rollback of civil rights and liberties that has rapidly advanced through red states since 2021.Over the past two years, the 23 states where Republicans hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature have approved the most aggressive wave of socially conservative legislation in modern times. In highly polarizing battles across the country, GOP-controlled states have passed laws imposing new restrictions on voting, banning or limiting access to abortion, retrenching LGBTQ rights, removing licensing and training requirements for concealed carry of firearms, and censoring how public-school teachers (and in some cases university professors and even private employers) can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation.With much less attention, Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate have introduced legislation to write each of these red-state initiatives into federal law. The practical effect of these proposals would be to require blue states to live under the restrictive social policies that have burned through red states since President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. “I think the days of fealty [to states’ rights] are nearing an end, and we are going to see the national Republicans in Congress adopting maximalist policy approaches,” Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group that advocates for stricter gun control, told me.[Read: The double-negative election]None of the proposals to nationalize the red-state social agenda could become law any time soon. Even if Republicans were to win both congressional chambers, they would not have the votes to overcome the inevitable Biden vetoes. Nor would Republicans, even if they controlled both chambers, have any incentive to consider repealing the Senate filibuster to pass this agenda until they know they have a president who would sign the resulting bills into law—something they can’t achieve before the 2024 election.But if Republicans triumph this week, the next two years could nonetheless become a crucial period in formulating a strategy to nationalize the red-state social-policy revolution. Particularly if Republicans win the House, they seem certain to explore which of these ideas can attract enough support in their caucus to clear the chamber. And the 2024 Republican presidential candidates are also likely to test GOP primary voters’ appetite for writing conservative social priorities into national law. Embracing such initiatives “may prove irresistible for a lot of folks trying to capture” the party’s socially conservative wing, Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me.It starts with abortion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in September introduced a bill that would ban the procedure nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy. In the House, 167 Republicans have co-sponsored the “Life Begins at Conception Act,” which many legal analysts say would effectively ban all abortions nationwide.In elections, Senator Rick Scott of Florida has proposed legislation that would impose for federal elections nationwide many of the voting restrictions that have rapidly diffused across red states, including tougher voter-identification requirements, a ban on both unmonitored drop boxes and the counting of any mail ballots received after Election Day, and a prohibition on same-day and automatic voter registration.In education, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed to federalize restrictions on how teachers can talk about race by barring any K–12 school that receives federal money from using “critical race theory” in instruction. Several Republicans (including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri) have introduced a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which would mandate parental access to school curriculum and library materials nationwide—a step toward building pressure for the kind of book bans spreading through conservative states and school districts. Nadine Farid Johnson, the Washington director for PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group, predicts that these GOP proposals “chipping away” at free speech are likely to expand beyond school settings into other areas affecting the general population, such as public libraries or private companies’ training policies. “This is not something that is likely to stop at the current arena, but to go much more broadly,” she told me.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, along with several dozen co-sponsors, recently introduced a federal version of the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation that Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida pushed into law. Johnson’s bill is especially sweeping in its scope. It bars discussion of “sexually-oriented material,” including sexual orientation, with children 10 and younger, not only in educational settings, but in any program funded by the federal government, including through public libraries, hospitals, and national parks. The language is so comprehensive that it might even prevent “any federal law enforcement talking to a kid about a sexual assault or sexual abuse,” David Stacy, the government-affairs director at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, told me.[Read: Want to understand the red-state onslaught? Look at Florida.]Johnson’s bill is only one of several Republican proposals to nationalize red-state actions on LGBTQ issues. During budget debates in both 2021 and 2022, Republican senators offered  amendments to establish a nationwide ban on transgender girls participating in school sports. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has introduced a bill (the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act”) that would set felony penalties for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors. Cotton, in a variation on the theme, has proposed to allow any minor who receives gender-affirming surgery to sue the doctor for physical or emotional damages for the next 30 years.Meanwhile, Senator Steve Daines and Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina have introduced legislation requiring every state to accept a concealed-carry gun permit issued in any state—a mechanism for overriding blue-state limits on these permits. When Republicans controlled the House, they passed such a bill in 2017, but the implications of this idea have grown even more stark since then because so many red states have passed laws allowing residents to obtain concealed-carry permits without any background checks or training requirements.Ambler told me he expects that the NRA and congressional Republicans will eventually seek not only to preempt blue states and city limits on who can carry guns, but also to invalidate their restrictions on where they can do so, such as the New York State law, now facing legal challenge, barring guns from the subway.Brown, of the conservative EPPC, said it’s difficult to predict which of these proposals will gather the most momentum if Republicans win back one or both chambers. Some congressional Republicans, he said, may still be constrained by traditional GOP arguments favoring federalism. The strongest case for contravening that principle, he said, is in those instances that involve protecting what he calls “fundamental rights.” Graham’s national 15-week abortion ban can be justified on those grounds because “we are talking about, from my perspective, the life of an unborn baby, so having a federal ceiling on when states can’t encroach on protecting that fetus in the womb in the later stage of pregnancy makes a lot of sense to me.”In practice, though, Brown thinks that congressional Republicans may hesitate about passing a nationwide abortion ban, particularly with no hope of Biden signing it into law. He believes they are more likely to coalesce first around proposals to bar transgender girls from participating in sports and to prohibit gender-affirming surgery for minors, in part because those issues have proved “so galvanizing” for cultural conservatives in red states.[Conor Friedersdorf: The constitutional case against a federal abortion ban]Stacy, from the Human Rights Campaign, said that although Senate Republicans may be less enthusiastic about pursuing legislation restricting transgender rights, he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of a GOP-controlled Congress advancing those ideas. “It’s hard to know how far a Republican majority in either chamber would go on these issues,” he told me. “But what we’ve seen again and again in the states is that when they can, they have moved in these directions. Even when you take a look at more moderate states, when they have the power to do these things, they move these things forward.” That precedent eventually may apply not just to LGBTQ issues, but to all the red-state initiatives some Republicans want to inscribe into national law.These approaching federal debates reframe the battle raging across the red states during the past few years as just the first act of what’s likely to become an extended struggle.This first act has played out largely within the framework of restoring states’ rights and local prerogatives. As I’ve written, the red-state moves on social issues amount to a systematic effort to reverse the “rights revolution” of the past six decades. Over that long period, the Supreme Court, Congress, and a succession of presidents nationalized more rights and reduced states’ leeway to abridge those rights, on issues including civil rights, contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.Now the red states have moved to reverse that long trajectory toward a stronger national floor of rights by setting their own rules on abortion, voting, LGBTQ issues, classroom censorship, and book bans, among other issues. In that cause, they have been crucially abetted by the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, which has struck down or weakened previously nationally guaranteed rights (including abortion and voting access).But the proliferation of these congressional-Republican proposals to write the red-state rules into federal law suggests that this reassertion of states’ rights was just a way station toward restoring common national standards of civil rights and liberties—only in a much more restrictive and conservative direction. “All of these things have been building for years,” Alvin Tillery, the director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, told me. “It’s just that Mr. Trump gave them the idea they can succeed being more [aggressive] in the advocacy of these policies.”Like many students of the red-state social-policy eruption, Tillery believes that Republicans and social conservatives feel enormous urgency to write their cultural priorities into law before liberal-leaning Millennials and Generation Z become the electorate’s dominant force later this decade. “The future ain’t bright for them looking at young people, so they are acting in a much more muscular and authoritarian way now,” he said. With Republicans likely to win control of the House, and possibly the Senate, the next two years may become the off-Broadway stage of testing different strategies for imposing the red-state social regime on blue America. The curtain on the main event will rise the next time Republicans hold unified control of the White House and Congress—a day that may seem less a distant possibility if the GOP makes gains as big as those that now seem possible this week.

When Supreme Court Justices want to justify overruling long-standing precedent, the paradigm often cited is Brown v. Board of Education, from 1954, which, in declaring segregation unconstitutional, overruled Plessy v. Ferguson and its “separate but equal” doctrine, from a half century earlier. During the last term, Justice Samuel Alito offended many people when he compared the Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade to Brown’s overruling of Plessy. (He continued to offend people last week, when a new book by John A. Farrell revealed that, during Alito’s confirmation hearings, he had privately told Senator Ted Kennedy, in reference to Roe, “I am a believer in precedents.”)

This term, the Court will lean more pointedly into Brown’s legacy in a pair of cases about the use of race in college admissions. Eight years ago, Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by the conservative activist Edward Blum, filed lawsuits claiming that the policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina are racially discriminatory. The universities successfully defended themselves in the lower courts, but the Supreme Court, which hears oral arguments in both cases on October 31st, will likely overrule more than four decades of precedents, and declare that it is unlawful to use race as a factor in admissions.

S.F.F.A. alleged in the 2014 suits that race-conscious affirmative action violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and also Title VI, the statute prohibiting any “program or activity” that receives federal funds (this category includes virtually all colleges and universities) from discriminating “on the ground of race, color, or national origin.” At the time, this claim was a clear loser under Supreme Court precedents that interpreted both the Constitution and the statute to mean that schools can consider race as one factor in a holistic review of an applicant. Indeed, it was dismissed before trial. But S.F.F.A. also claimed that Harvard and U.N.C. had deviated from those precedents to achieve “racial balancing,” which the Court prohibited, and that Harvard had discriminated against Asian Americans in particular. That set of claims against Harvard made it to trial in federal district court in Boston, in 2018, and some of the evidence was troubling, suggesting at least implicit bias against Asian applicants relative to white ones. (The school denied that it discriminated; the percentage of Asians in the entering class has now risen to 27.9 per cent.) But S.F.F.A.’s purported effort to protect Asians is widely seen as a vehicle for Blum’s broader agenda, which is to rid society of all so-called racial preferences; he has already shepherded six cases to the Court, including Shelby County v. Holder, which sharply curtailed the Voting Rights Act.

Each university prevailed at trial by proving that it had complied with the Court’s precedents. But the Court is hearing the cases to consider whether those precedents—including Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. Bollinger—should themselves be overruled. If it finds that they should, the ruling will also raise doubts about the permissibility of affirmative-action practices in employment, and cast a further shadow on race-conscious efforts to protect voting rights.

For decades, conservative Justices have read Brown as standing not for an anti-subordination idea but, rather, for a color-blindness principle that disapproves of determinations that consider race. That reading claims to find support in Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy, in which he stated, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly made clear his distaste for actions that take race into account. In a 2006 case about creating majority-minority voting districts in Texas, he wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” A year later, in explaining why the Court disallowed Seattle from undertaking a race-conscious measure to ameliorate de-facto segregation in public schools, he wrote the highly quotable line “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” It was a polar rejoinder to Justice Harry Blackmun in his concurrence in Bakke: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way.”

What has been contested since Brown is what, exactly, “discrimination on the basis of race” means. For conservative Justices, it appears to mean taking account of race in any way, even to remedy the effects of prior discrimination. When Harvard went to trial, in 2018, it said that the consequences of not considering applicants’ race would be dire: fewer than half the Black students and fewer than two-thirds of the Hispanic students admitted to the class of 2019 would be accepted. But, if affirmative action is ruled unlawful, Harvard and other schools will surely not abandon their commitment to diversity, which they understand as indispensable to the educational mission—in part because the Court itself has said so for decades, holding, in Bakke and in Grutter, that promoting diversity is a “compelling interest.” Those schools will then need to turn to a variety of methods that are race-neutral but may still help to achieve racially diverse results.

One of the most widely discussed of those methods involves standardized tests. The pandemic gave Harvard and other top universities an urgent reason to make the submission of SAT and ACT scores optional, but more could follow the University of California system, which last year ended the consideration of all standardized-test scores in a settlement with students who alleged that the tests disadvantaged, among other groups, racial minorities (excepting Asians). Another possibility is to promote students from low-income families or neighborhoods, or from poorly funded schools, which have a high concentration of underrepresented minorities. But the coming years will undoubtedly bring an onslaught of litigation about whether strategies designed to produce a diverse class without using applicants’ race are themselves unlawful.

The Court’s view, in its affirmative-action precedents, has been that educational diversity is a foundation for a multiracial democracy. Rejecting those precedents would be a key piece of a “color-blind” vision, in which race-conscious efforts to insure citizens’ equal rights are seen as discriminatory. At the heart of the issue is which definitions of discrimination and equality best fit our democracy. The character of that democracy hangs in the balance. ♦

Reginald Jones, one imagines, never backed anyone up against a wall. And he would never have been caught dead in North Palm Beach.

Did he see something in Welch that he could not find in himself? Was he so critical of his own tenure at America’s flagship corporation that he felt a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn was in order? The most charitable explanation is that the transition from Jones to Welch came at the end of one of the more unsettling decades in the history of American capitalism, and Jones may have felt that the sun had set on his brand of corporate paternalism.

After Welch, at age forty-five, was named the new C.E.O. of General Electric, Jones called him into his office to bestow some final words of wisdom. Another recent book about Welch, David Gelles’s “The Man Who Broke Capitalism” (Simon & Schuster), recounts the exchange:

“Jack, I give you the Queen Mary,” Jones said. “This is designed not to sink.” Jack didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t want the Queen Mary,” he snapped back. “I plan to blow up the Queen Mary. I want speedboats.”

Then Jones threw his successor a party at the Helmsley Palace Hotel, in midtown Manhattan, where Welch had a few too many cocktails and slurred his way through his remarks to the group. The next morning, Jones stormed into Welch’s office. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life,” he told Welch. “You embarrassed me and the company.” Welch worried that he would be fired, losing his chance at glory before it had even begun. Cohan writes, “He was despondent for the next four hours.” By lunch, apparently, he had put his existential crisis behind him. That’s our Jack.

Welch believed that the responsibility of a corporation was to deliver predictable and generous returns to its shareholders. In pursuit of this goal, he exploited a loophole in the regulatory architecture of corporate finance. Companies that made things—companies such as G.E.—had long been permitted to lend money to their customers. They could behave like banks, in other words, but they weren’t really banks. Banks were encumbered by all kinds of regulations that had the effect of limiting their profit margins. The markets considered them risky, so they paid dearly to raise capital. But blue-chip G.E. had none of those burdens, which meant that, when it came to making money, Welch’s non-bank bank could put real banks to shame. He then used the proceeds from G.E. Capital to acquire hundreds of companies. In the warm glow of G.E.’s riches, Welch articulated a series of principles that captivated his peers. Fire nonperformers without regret. Shed any business that isn’t first or second in its market category. Your duty is always to enrich your shareholders.

In his interview with Varney, Welch took a question from the audience about how, in enacting these principles, a C.E.O. could tell the difference between leaders who create an “edge” and those who simply create “fear.” Welch explained that there were four types of manager:

One who has the values and makes the numbers: love them, hug them, take them onward and upward. Second one doesn’t have the values, doesn’t make the numbers, get them out of there. That’s easy, too. The third one has the values, doesn’t make the numbers, give them a second and third chance. The fourth one’s the one you’re talking about. The tough one. The horse’s neck that makes the numbers on the backs of people. The go-to person in an organization. And an organization that doesn’t root them out, can’t talk about values, can’t talk about the human equation.

In a perfect world, the interviewer would have asked a follow-up question: What are these “values” that you’re talking about? Surely the desire to meet Wall Street’s quarterly estimates—as much as it felt like a value in Welch’s universe—does not amount to an actual moral belief system. And then perhaps a second follow-up: Doesn’t the fourth category—the “tough” manager who makes the numbers but does not have the values—sound a lot like you, Mr. Welch?

But few ever asked questions like that of Welch. So the man himself remains opaque, and the best we can do is try to piece together the clues scattered throughout “Power Failure.”

One time in Welch’s senior year of high school, his hockey team lost to a crosstown rival, and Jack, who had scored his team’s only two goals, threw his stick in anger. Cohan writes:

Next thing he knew, his mother was in the locker room. She bounded right up to him, oblivious to the fact that the guys around her were in various states of undress. She grabbed him by the jersey in front of everyone. “You punk,” she yelled at him. “If you don’t know how to lose, you’ll never know how to win. If you don’t know this, you don’t belong anywhere.” He paused for a moment, recalling the memory. “She was a powerhouse,” he said. “I loved her beyond comprehension.”

After college, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois. His thesis was on condensation in nuclear power plants. “I thought it was the most important thing in my life,” he tells Cohan. For many people, years of immersion in a complex intellectual endeavor would leave an imprint. Not for Welch. Condensation in nuclear power plants does not come up again.

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Golf, by contrast, was “one of the few constants in Jack’s life,” Cohan writes. “One way or another, there was always golf.” But did he like the game for its own sake? Or was it simply, to adapt Clausewitz’s dictum, the continuation of business by other means? After Welch left G.E., the details of his retirement package were made public. It included a pension of $7.4 million a year and a mountain of perks. He got the use of a company Boeing 737, at an estimated cost of $3.5 million a year. He got an apartment in Donald Trump’s 1 Central Park West, plus deals at the restaurant Jean-Georges downstairs, courtside seats at Knicks games, a subsidy for a car and driver, box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, discounts on diamond and jewelry settings, and on and on—all this for someone worth an estimated nine hundred million dollars. And then, finally, G.E. agreed to pay the monthly dues at the four golf clubs where he played. It would be nice to hear from the high-priced attorney who negotiated that last line item. Would it have been a deal breaker? Did Welch believe golf had been so central to his performance as C.E.O. that it made sense for the company’s shareholders to pay those monthly dues?

A few months after he recovered from his bypass surgery, Welch went to see his heart surgeon, Cary Akins. They had become friends. “He was incredibly cordial for somebody who was that powerful,” Akins tells Cohan. Welch had wanted the operation to be done on a Friday, so that he would have three days of recovery under his belt before the news hit the stock market—and Akins obliged. Now Welch wanted to talk.

On Monday, I was at the Supreme Court for five hours of oral arguments on affirmative action. In constitutional debates about the issue, both sides like to lay claim to Justice John Marshall Harlan’s celebrated dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson—the 1896 case that notoriously held that requiring separate train cars for Black and white passengers did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, and that was eventually overruled in Brown v. Board of Education. Harlan wrote, “In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Predictably, the plaintiff in the two current affirmative-action cases, Students for Fair Admissions, takes the “color-blind” language to mean that the equal-protection clause forbids all racial classifications for any purpose, including race-based affirmative action. The defendants, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, along with the U.S. government as amicus, instead take the anti-caste idea to prohibit subjugation based on notions of racial inferiority—which surely allows race-conscious measures to insure diversity.

But read just a bit further in Harlan’s famous dissent, and you’re hit with a meaning that’s not so debatable, in lines that are not so frequently quoted: “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.” Harlan’s aim was clearly to recognize Black citizens’ equal membership in the polity. Along the way, he also treated as a given that, because of racial difference, Chinese people were prevented from entering the country, and excluded from participation in its political life and from the civil rights of white and Black citizens. Harlan’s assumption was consistent with decades of American governance. In the years after the Civil War, both Republicans and Democrats portrayed the Chinese arriving on the Pacific Coast as an invading horde, a heathen, unassimilable people. Congress barred Asian women suspected of prostitution in 1875 and passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. In the Senate, lawmakers supporting the exclusion of Chinese called them a “degraded and inferior race,” and said that their “machine-like” ways made it difficult for U.S. laborers to compete. (The law was repealed in 1943, just in time for the Court to hold that the internment of Japanese Americans did not violate the Constitution.)

The Harvard and U.N.C. cases, in which the Court is expected to undermine or eliminate race-based affirmative action, are among the few Supreme Court cases in history that explicitly involve Asian Americans. The cases address Asian Americans’ uncertain place in American society, and the Court is considering them in a period of increased anti-Asian violence. I am an Asian American supporter of affirmative action who attended élite universities, and the first Asian American woman to be tenured at Harvard Law School. For all these reasons, I wanted to be in the courtroom for the oral arguments. What I observed by being there in person was a striking contrast between the overrepresentation of Asians at selective universities and the paucity of Asians present at such an important moment in the highest court in the land. Apart from Ryan Park, arguing as North Carolina’s solicitor general, and William Lee, who had been the trial lawyer in the Harvard case, there were almost no Asians in attendance among the scores of members of the Supreme Court bar and the public. I was also one of a tiny number of Asians, and perhaps the only East Asian person, among the many dozens of reporters in the press seats.

Several Justices on the Court, which also obviously lacks Asians, emphasized that universities are the “pipeline” to diverse leadership, and that the representation of minorities in leadership positions cannot improve if they are not admitted in sufficient numbers to selective universities. To support the point, Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. Solicitor General, pointed out that only two out of the twenty-seven lawyers arguing in the Court in late October to early November are women. “I think it would be reasonable for a woman to look at that and wonder, Is that a path that’s open to me, to be a Supreme Court advocate?” This “common-sense example,” which she hoped “would resonate with this Court,” though important, was somewhat inapt, because women today account for, as she said, “fifty per cent or more of law-school graduates”—including of the most élite schools. The problem in the case of women is real, but it is plainly not a university-pipeline issue. (Justice Elena Kagan had, minutes earlier, mentioned “statistical evidence that suggests that colleges now, when they apply gender-neutral criteria, get many more women than men.”) Prelogar’s point did, however, inadvertently underline the fact that, for Asians, as for women, robust representation among university students has been slow to translate to leadership positions in our country, particularly in the worlds of government, rarified legal advocacy, the media, the judiciary, and the Court itself.

This exchange did seem to reflect the awkward mismatch contained in these cases. S.F.F.A. is asking the Court to declare race-conscious affirmative action unlawful—and that Harvard and U.N.C. in fact discriminated against Asian Americans. But, as evidence in the Harvard case in particular suggested, the practice of race-conscious admissions is not what has limited the number of Asian American students; it is instead the parts of the process in which Harvard claims not to think about race at all.

The strongest aspect of the discrimination claim against Harvard involves something called the personal rating. As early as 1969, the Crimson reported that the personal rating, assigned by admissions officers based on interviews, high-school officials’ reports, and essays, “has become by far the most important factor in Harvard’s admissions process,” because the increased academic strength of the applicant pool was making it harder to select students based on grades and test scores. It reported that, for the class of 1968, “there is just about no correlation between admission to Harvard and such factors as SAT scores, rank-in-class, and predicted rank list,” but “the correlation between admissions and the personal factor is better than 90 per cent.” The article quoted the dean of admissions saying, “We are justified and obligated to trust a hunch.”

When the Harvard case first went to trial, in 2018, S.F.F.A. alleged that Harvard uses the personal rating, in which admissions officers score applicants on qualities such as “integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness,” even “effervescence,” to discriminate against Asian American applicants. Admissions records showed that, despite alumni interviewers, who met with applicants, having given Asian students scores that were as high or higher than those of white students, admissions officers, who normally did not meet with applicants, gave Asians the lowest personal ratings of any racial group. The trial, which I attended, focussed on these disconcerting questions: Did Asian students, who had higher academic and extracurricular ratings than white applicants, actually have worse personalities than all others? Or was the personal rating concealing an impermissible racial quota?

The discussion was obviously charged, evoking the old idea of Asians as “a race so different from our own,” as Harlan put it, whose “machine-like” qualities make it hard to compete, as senators feared. It also excavated Harvard’s use of “diversity,” including geographical diversity, a century ago, as a mechanism to limit the admissions of Jews, who were also perceived as lacking character. But, in the end, the district court rejected the most sinister readings of the personal rating. It found that Harvard’s admissions process “may reflect some implicit biases” that, “while regrettable, cannot be eliminated in a process that must rely on judgments about individuals,” and that “a few identified imperfections” in the system did not amount to intentional discrimination against Asians.

At Monday’s arguments, Justice Samuel Alito grilled Harvard about Asians’ low personal ratings. “It has to be one of two things. It has to be that they really do lack integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy to the same degree as students of other races, or there has to be something wrong with this personal score,” he said. “Why are they given a lower score than any other group?” The question was one that Harvard’s lawyer must have been preparing to answer for at least four years. And yet the seasoned Supreme Court advocate Seth Waxman, a former U.S. Solicitor General, seemed cornered and stuck. During several uncomfortable minutes, he at first tried to deflect the question; then, somewhere in the midst of multiple attempts by Alito to get him to answer, an assist from the Chief Justice, and Waxman’s telling assurance, “I’m not trying to filibuster you,” he managed to say that the personal ratings reflect “what teachers said, what guidance counselors said, what these students wrote” in essays. (Those inputs would have to be quite poor to offset the alumni interviewers’ high scores.) In other words, Asian applicants deserved the low personal ratings—or, perhaps, if there was any discrimination, it was by high-school officials, not Harvard.

Voter grumbling, rage and cynicism is rampant heading into the mid-term elections on November 8th. Add the flattering, flummoxing and fooling of voters by many corporatist politicians to the mix and we have the makings of an election-day disaster.

Set the above aside and reflect on the unused citizen power, given wholesale, to 535 members of Congress. Our sovereign power starts with the preamble to our U.S. Constitution - that is "We the People." Not "We the Congress." Not "We the Corporations." As a Republic, we then delegate power to Congress to define, enable and fund the activities of the Executive and Judicial branches.

If you don't like what your Senators and Representatives are doing, elections are supposed to give you a chance to say "Stop, Go, Listen or Leave." The problem is that the monied interests corrupt our elections, from pressing their own choice of candidates, financing them, directing them and backing them with nonstop television/radio/social media propaganda, and using front groups to promote lies and coverups.

Year after year, this assault has ground most voters into - Republicans and Democrats under varying degrees of corporate encampments. Too many voters put these labels on themselves and never look back.

Here's the nub. Most voters who do not do their homework about "politics" "elections" and their "voting strategies" end up either passively voting for their family's long-held party choice or staying home. Not voting helps powerful interests have a field day because voters are not even on the playing field. There are an estimated 120 million eligible voters who will not vote in this election.

Voters who don't spend the time don't realize that candidates go back to Washington and work actively and often furtively against people's most immediate livelihood interests, as does Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Such lawmakers aid and abet your worst fears about "politics" unless you're quite rich.

For example, when you delegate (with no accountability attached) your voting power to Congress, you are entrenching corporate power to keep your wages down, allow price gouging and crumble your public services in favor of more destructive weapons for an Empire and needless wars we don't want. The corporate Congress renders our country unprepared for pandemics, climate violence and the corporate crime wave running amuck. Moreover, Congress sends your tax revenues as subsidies and bailouts to the grossly under-taxed super-rich and big businesses.

Whenever you hear your friends say "I'm not into politics - they're all crooks" signifying dropping out of voting and civic engagement, you can tell them, "But politics is into you in all kinds of impactful ways. Since you can't escape, quitting is only hurting you."

To be sure, our two-party duopoly restricts choices and opens the door wide to con artists - candidates with bulging campaign treasures. They specialize in grand lies, fake versions of what they call reality (as with "Covid-19 is fake" and "global warming is a hoax"). They make grandiose promises, then betray you and always blame someone else. Voters who don't do their homework become rigid believers and do not reconsider what political tricksters have done to them.

For example, did you know that the greatest wealth in our country is owned by the people, but controlled by corporate power? These powerful assets of the people include our vast public lands, public airwaves and government R & D that founded most of the modern industry (e.g., the internet, computers, aerospace, drug, biotech and nanotech industries) and trillions of dollars in money market savings and pensions. Who allowed corporations to control what you own and turn these assets against your legitimate interests? The politicians. Do you still want to drop out of politics?

In your own private moments, ask yourself whether you are spending as much time studying the candidates vying for your vote as you do when choosing to buy a car or a house, or playing a month's worth of bridge or video games.

Voter withdrawal is allowing the dangerous extremists in the GOP to think the unthinkable - taking away what you already have by corporatizing Medicare, cutting Social Security and repealing consumer, labor and environmental protections. They're saying things that fifty years ago would have been political suicide for their notorious careers. Such cruel assaults on the people's well-being reflect their sense of what the passive voters will let unscrupulous candidates get away with.

If you want recent evidence, read the report by GOP Senate Re-election Chairman, Rick Scott (R-FL) - who once presided over a large hospital corporation fined $1.7 billion for defrauding Medicare. The report's misleading title "An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America" demands that your existing protections and economic security be terminated and up for Congressional grabs every few years.

Other GOPers want to eliminate the minimum wage altogether - never mind just holding it at its present frozen federal level of $7.25 an hour.

With voters reading, thinking and acting, our country can turn around and benefit all the people, their children and grandchildren. It's in your hands, people. Pursue your legitimate interests and you will find Thomas Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" goal on its way as never before.

If you're waiting until election day to vote, take a look at the website winningamerica.net and my little paperback Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think.

Then do your duty and cast an informed vote!

Russ Muirhead is the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College and a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. His latest book, co-authored with Nancy Rosenblum, is A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Russ Muirhead discuss how legislators can find sensible compromise even amidst vehement disagreement, why we misunderstand the popularity of conspiracy theories, and what Democrats can do to broaden their coalition and defeat right-wing populists.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I've known you for many years, but you only recently became an elected official. What's it been like going from studying and teaching politics to being a state legislator in New Hampshire?Russ Muirhead: It's a lot of fun. Sitting in a legislature is like being back in school. I learn so much every day. Any political scientist would probably love serving in the legislature for a couple of years, if they could possibly manage it. There's a difference between activism politics, movement politics and legislative politics. In movement politics, it's often about activating like-minded people, coming together, forming a movement. That has an essential place in democratic reform. But legislative politics is about brokering disagreement from the beginning. There's no legislature that's defined just by a movement. There's always more than one party or more than one faction in the legislature. So, legislative politics are about doing politics under conditions of disagreement. There's a kind of “right answer” mentality in politics—that the right answers are there, and it's just about authorizing and empowering them. A lot of people in the legislature have that mentality. They kind of think, “if our side just didn't encounter any obstacles, we would be able to legislate the right answers, and the world would be permanently improved as a result of that.” And, you know, the phrase that my co author, Nancy Rosenblum, used in the title of one of her books is On the Side of the Angels. It's incredibly tempting to think that about your side. But there's a kind of wisdom that comes from political activity. It might come just from looking at the details of policy. This is the realization that there are no right answers. Very rarely do we face a question to which there exists just a right answer, a great answer. We're always, in politics, in a world of “second best”, at best.Mounk: You just made me realize something that I hadn't thought about before: a parallel between two different institutions in our democracies. One quintessentially democratic institution is an adversarial legal system, in which somebody makes the case for prosecution and somebody makes the case for defense. Now, by and large, people who are part of that system understand that they're gonna really strongly play one of these roles. But you need both roles for the system to come to the right results. Now, in a way, parliaments were conceived of as a similar thing. You don't try to suppress factions: you try to organize and verbalize them in the hope that the debates between them and the clashes between them lead to policy that's closer to the public good. But that doesn't really seem to be people’s self-understanding, most of the time.Muirhead: You're putting your finger on something really important about making politics work in the United States. The very best lawyers always understand the other side: they understand the other’s case. They can try the case on the other side and do a great job because they know the weaknesses of their own side. It's a very bad lawyer who doesn't know how to make the case on the other side. Well, in politics, we have a lot of people—a lot of Democrats—who look across and think, “why are there Republicans? Because people are evil, because people are frail and self interested—a bunch of privileged people who are trying to defend their privilege.” And the Republicans look at the Democrats and see a bunch of self-serving cultural elites, professors like me, and people who don't want to work; people who are “takers, not makers.” And they think, “Well, the world would just be much better off if we didn't have that side.” We've taken a very, very giant step toward delegitimizing the other side. But also, we've made it more difficult for us to understand our own weaknesses, to answer for them, to guard against them, and to build a real coalition.And I don't mean to compress politics to just two sides. But let's just work with that. If you're a progressive, and you can't give an account of what conservatism really looks like, and what a conservative party ought to be, then you're driving with your eyes closed, and you're gonna make it harder, paradoxically, to build your party, because you can't take those little bits of wisdom from the conservative side and try to acquire them. Mounk: The second point that you're insinuating is that being able to give a fair account of what the other side believes actually helps win elections. Why is that? Muirhead: It would help Democrats win elections if they could understand and give a better account of conservatism than most conservatives could offer. We operate under a framework of constitutional rules. Now, you and I, as political-legal thinkers, might have a better constitution in mind for a country like the United States than the one that the United States actually possesses. So, let's just put aside our ideals for a moment. We've got the Constitution: it has the Senate, in which the states are represented. Meanwhile, progressives are geographically very clustered. And so for the progressive party to build a majority, they need to create a geographically dispersed majority, they need to appeal to people outside of Boston and San Francisco. You need a durable, extensive and diverse majority to rule under our  constitution, and there's no way to do that without creating a really cacophonous, heterogeneously diverse—or, as we like to say, “inclusive”—majority. Purity rituals are not going to get us there. The deepening conviction that the way you think is the perfect way to think, and that your party isn't actually a party, it's really the side of the angels, doesn't get you there either. What does get you there is a really capacious political imagination, where you can close your eyes and imagine how the world looks to somebody who sees it from the other side of the political fray. Only then can you start to, like I said, not just manipulate people who disagree with you, but actually capture some of the pieces of wisdom and insight that the other side has and bring them over to your side, mix them in with your philosophy to get something that can elect 54 senators. Mounk: What does it take for Democrats to be able to win in Indiana or Missouri, or perhaps in one of the Dakotas? And to anticipate one of the frequent objections to this: Am I just saying that we should throw in our cards and give up on anything that's important to progressives? Muirhead: I think that the real defect in American politics right now is a lack of ambition. Both sides want to win the next election, and only the next election, and they’re content to win it just barely. I see this absence of ambition as even more definitive on the Republican side than the Democratic. It's always easier to see the flaws in your opponents; but trying to disenfranchise people on the margin, so that you can get that 0.4% advantage and barely win the congressional seat in a swing district—I mean, that wasn't the way Ronald Reagan thought about American politics. He took his conservatism to the country, he argued for it. I found it unconvincing and, in many ways, repellent—but he won 49 states after serving for one term. And that was a reflection of not just his capacity as a speaker, but of his ambition. The last Republican I saw who had that ambition was Karl Rove, when he helped get George W. Bush elected in 2000. We're going to try to build a “durable governing majority”—that's a quote that sent chills up the spines of liberals all over the country when they read it. And he wanted to make conservatism compassionate: he took this thing from the progressive side, compassion, and tried to acquire it for conservatism. What liberals need to do is exactly that. Democrats tend to speak the language of equality, and less the language of virtue or distinctiveness or deservingness. But there's no reason why we should have a one-sided egalitarian language that gives up on virtue completely. We appreciate distinction, we appreciate effort. We also understand that everybody can make a certain kind of claim for themselves by revealing their virtue to the world, and that one of the ways to do that is through work. I think that Democrats have to speak the language of the dignity of work: it's consistent with their beliefs, it's consistent with their commitment to protecting the rights of workers. But they also have to believe in hard work. Another thing is love of country. It's obvious to me as a Democrat, as somebody in electoral politics, just how profoundly patriotic my friends in the Democratic Party are. But we're also really good at criticizing our country. To be progressive is to say, “Here are the things we're inheriting in our political community that are unjust, that are unwise. We want to change them.” But that doesn't mean that we're not awed by what we've inherited, and that we don't love what we have, and want to preserve a lot of it. I think we need to learn how to speak that language, without giving up one speck of our conviction about individual rights for even the smallest minority and the most overlooked individuals. So, no: we don't change that. But we do look to what we can acquire to complement our public philosophy.Mounk: When you enter into that adversarial environment, does everybody revert to being “on the side of the angels” and shouting at each other across the aisle? Or have you had opportunities to put some of these aspirations into practice?Muirhead: It's hard to overstate how adversarial my experience in the New Hampshire legislature was in the last two years. I was in the minority, and when you're in the minority, you lose almost everything. And the stuff that we lost was stuff that I care about—reproductive rights, voting rights, public education. When a bill that I really care about goes down, and I see the other side celebrating its defeat, or something I really oppose passes, it's hard to describe the feeling one has of revulsion, of hatred, of despondency. It's really easy to hate the other side. It's really easy to come to think of them as constituted by people who are just fundamentally not nice. And I actually think that the most important thing in day-to-day politics where you're in the fray, is to be able to participate in common life. I think a little bit about David Hume. He’s talking about philosophical theories that actually fill him with doubt and despair, theories of skepticism. And he says what cures it for him is going out to the pub and having a drink with friends and playing backgammon. We don't have to read David Hume to know this. One time I was in a committee meeting in an academic context. And we fought for three days. I thought I never want to see these people I'd been disagreeing with again. “I'm not coming to campus again for months,” I thought. And the guy I disagreed with the most put his hand on my shoulder and said, “We're going out to lunch.” I almost wanted to puke. But two beers into that lunch, we were singing songs. We were having a good time. And we didn't stop disagreeing—but we remembered what it was like to just interact as two human beings. It's incredibly healthy to let people make fun of you or tell jokes at your expense. And when the vote comes, you're still going to really hate the other side. When the campaign comes, you're gonna campaign against the other side with everything you have. But in between, remember how to be human with each other. This past summer I got an email for a legislative softball game. I thought, “that's the last thing I want to do with these people who have been sticking it to me over and over again for the last two years.” But my wife said, “Come on, you gotta go. You gotta go be human.” And sure enough, there's a cooler full of beer and we're hanging out. And we didn't play Republican against Democrat. We just had such a nice time. An hour and a half into it, I was like, “Why are these people here? It's because they want to make this institution work. They're breathing life in the institution itself. They're trying to maintain some ties of likability, some capacity to enjoy each other as human beings, so that when we go back in there and fight like mad, we don't destroy the place.”Mounk: What does that look like in your day-to-day work in the legislature? Muirhead: I serve on the electoral law committee. That's actually why I ran two years ago. Nancy Rosenblum and I had just finished our book, called A Lot of People are Saying. It’s about what we call the new conspiracism in American politics. We wrote about the rigged election conspiracy. We followed the logic of that conspiracy to the possibility that a president might lose an election and fail to vacate the office. And, by the way, we pulled it from the text at one point. We said, “This is just too outlandish. People are going to think we've lost our bearings, if we have this in the book.” And then, of course, January 6 happened. I thought there might be an attack on election administration. It seemed preposterous in 2016 for the person who won the election to claim that the election was rigged. He actually claimed that the elections in New Hampshire were rigged; that busloads of people were sent up from Massachusetts to fraudulently vote in the little towns in New Hampshire and in the wards of our cities. The allegation was actually investigated by the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, which found that there was no fraud whatsoever. It was so weird for the winner of the election to say this. He was upset. He lost the popular vote, I guess. But that's why I wanted to get onto the election law committee. Luckily, the leadership put me on that committee. And yes, that is ground zero for the attack on election administration that is happening in the states—not at the national level. It's happening in states all over the country. And there are just millions of people, possibly tens of millions of people, who think that American elections are marred by widespread fraud, and that recent elections were rigged. They're getting people in the Republican Party to introduce bills that will actually, paradoxically, create opportunities for fraud.Against the background of this fight, you’ve got to make some common cause. And one way to do that is by looking for those bills that just aren't fundamentally ideological or partisan. In any legislature—sort of like in the Supreme Court—there are a whole bunch of cases that are going to be essentially partisan ideological cases. But a whole bunch are not.There was a bill that came up: it was essentially an in-the-weeds bill on election administration, there was nothing ideological or partisan about it. But I could see the way it was shaping up: it was going to be a party vote. This can happen on anything, once you start to really dislike each other, once you start to not trust each other, once you're just used to fighting with each other. “If they go this way, we go that way.” But there's no reason for this to happen. So, I said to the chair, “I think if we work on this a little bit more, we can probably get a unanimous vote out of it.” And the chair, who's a Republican, saw the utility of that: “If you're so smart, professor, let's see what you can do.” We created a little working group, and the people who really cared about the bill joined with the most moving spirit of compromise. They really wanted to solve the in-the-weeds problems that the election moderators experience. They said things like, “Okay, I can give up on this one; but this thing, I think, is really important.” And the other ones were like, “Okay, if you think that's really important, I think I can go along with you on that. But such and such is where I draw the line.” They revised this bill so the leaders of the two factions could sign onto it, and it passed unanimously. I saw that possibility, and I'm glad I spoke up. But I'm even more glad that the committee chair from the other party saw that this would be worth trying. We need to do as much of that as we possibly can, so that we have the social capital that will allow us to maintain a democracy through these fights.Read: Julian Baggini on David Hume.Mounk: Why are conspiracy theories so central to American politics, but also the politics of other democracies? What do people normally get wrong about conspiracies, and how is it that our usual way of conceptualizing the nature of a conspiracy theory actually misunderstands them?Muirhead: The classic account of conspiracy theories is that they are a tool that losing social classes and social groups use to make sense of their declining position. There's a chapter of a recent book on American conspiracy theories that basically says “Conspiracy theories are for losers.” It's a very familiar idea that goes back to Hofstadter. But that's not what we're seeing right now. When Putin engages in the “Golden Billion” conspiracy theory, or when the president of the United States trucks in one conspiracy after another—these are some of the most powerful people in the world. It's no longer just social groups explaining to themselves a hostile world by scapegoating some minority. It's more political. It's about power. Think of the baffling and wacky conspiracies like, say, Pizzagate: Hillary Clinton sex trafficking children from the basement of a pizzeria. It's just preposterous. It's ludicrous. Who could believe this? Do the people who repeat it, actually believe it? Those are psychological questions, and we ask them because we just can't imagine that people could bring themselves to believe something so wacky. But the psychological questions, as interesting as they are, are distracting us from the politics involved. What these theories do in practice is delegitimate the other side. They eliminate all doubt. Conspiracy theories say: “don't worry about the other side. They're not just erroneous, they're not just mistaken. They are evil. They are as evil as the Nazis. They literally are abusing children. And if you were in an election against a Nazi, and you lost, would you concede peacefully? The other side isn't just different or mistaken: it's evil, and therefore, it shouldn't be tolerated.” That's what's motivating conspiracism today in American politics. It's about delegitimizing the political opposition. Let's not ask why people will believe it. It’s an interesting psychological question, but we get stuck there. We'll never get to the politics of it, which is that power-seekers find it very, very useful to delegitimize the opposition. And who knows whether Donald Trump believes that the election was rigged? I don't care. I don't know if it's an answerable question as a matter of his psyche. But I still know why he's doing it. Because everyone who loses an election has a strong incentive to say the election was rigged. And when we get to a political life where everyone who does lose an election says that and convinces their followers to believe it, we won't have a functioning democracy.Mounk: This helps me formulate why one usual way of talking about conspiracy theories is sort of wrongheaded. But what does that tell us about how to deal with conspiracy theories? If the thing that drives these conspiracy theories is pre-existing polarization and a pre-existing commitment to hating the other side, what can we do to control the corrosive and dangerous facts that conspiracy theories have on society, as is the case with the one guy who clearly did truly believe in Pizzagate and set out to the pizza parlor to “liberate” children that didn't exist? And how do we control the effect on our political system of people like Donald Trump who ignore the outcome of an election?Muirhead: That’s the right question, and it's the hardest question to answer. What can we do about it? Truth and shame—I think those are the two forces we have to marshal. The power of truth still matters. It matters enormously to simply publicize the fact that Barack Obama was born in the United States and was constitutionally eligible to serve in the office of the presidency. It's absolutely essential to get those facts out there in every way you possibly can. This is not because true believers will change their minds when they see the long-form birth certificate: The true believer will never change her mind or his mind. But there are a lot of people out there who don't know what to think, and conspiracism disorients them, has them wondering about where Obama’s from and what he's about. The group we're fighting for is a group that is disoriented. And who isn't disoriented in today's information ecosystem from time to time? So, it can be extremely stabilizing to hear someone cite real, publicly-available evidence. Fact-checking is absolutely essential. The second thing that I think we have to make more use of is shame. We have to create ways of shaming those who truck in conspiracism. There's a Republican candidate here in New Hampshire who's running for Senate, Don Bolduc, who's running against the incumbent Democratic senator, Maggie Hassan. Throughout the Republican primary campaign, this candidate insisted that the 2020 election was stolen and said things like, “I'm never gonna stop believing that. I'm never gonna get off this horse.” Within five days of winning the primary, this person said, “Joe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States.” This person should just be shamed nonstop for having been willing so cynically to truck in that conspiracy theory all summer, while trying to recruit votes at the extreme wing of the Republican Party. And this gets back to the question. It’s not, Do people believe it? It’s, Do they repeat it, and are there incentives for repeating conspiracy theories even when you don't totally believe them? We have a media ecosystem now where stuff gets spread, and it can get repeated by people who don't, or won't, stand up and say, “I believe it.” And this kind of validation through repetition is what's empowering conspiracism in our public life. There's something a little bit kind of goody-goody about the fact checker. I think they’re important; but I also think we're not using mockery nearly as much as we should. Mockery is an extraordinarily effective tool in politics.Mounk: I think the important thing is to deploy mockery when somebody is doing something that really is morally unacceptable and widely unpopular. We have a lot of mockery that is smug and self-serving, directed at somebody who dares to run astray of a relatively narrow consensus. That, I think, is the sort of mockery that can often get politicians—and Democrats in particular—into trouble.Muirhead: Shame and mockery are potent tools. You can misuse them, and we probably do, more than we use them right. Here's another tool, which represents the other side of the human spectrum—nobility. There's that great moment when John McCain in a town hall encountered a voter who referred to Barack Obama as someone who wasn't an American. McCain interrupted the person: “No. He is a citizen. He's a good person. He's a family man,” he said. “He and I just disagree about policies and principles, and that's what this campaign is about.” That was John McCain, and he was willing to do things like naming Sarah Palin to be on the ticket to try to win the campaign. But he just wasn't going to truck in conspiracism. He was just too noble a human being to make an alliance with that. It sounds high-minded and impossible. But that wasn't all that long ago. And without that, I don't know? Maybe conspiracism wins.Mounk: 2024 is no longer that far away, and so the question of whether or not Donald Trump will run—and whether he might win—is on the minds of many. I'm struck by the fact that Trump is not popular, that all of the polls suggest that most Americans dislike him, and that most Americans are pretty skeptical of large parts of the Republican Party. And yet, it seems hard for Democrats to build the kind of lasting governing majority that you talked about at the beginning of our conversation. Why is that? What are Democrats doing wrong, and what can some of your peers in Democratic politics do to increase the chances of beating populists like Trump in the years to come?Muirhead: We're so indignant at the way the other side assaults and attacks the values that we care about most, that we don't really think we need to make the case for our own principles or policies. We don't think we need to make the case to people who don't already agree with us. Those of us who work in campaigns, who vote in primaries, who write checks, who are really attuned to politics all throughout the year—the conversations we're in all the time are with people who agree with us. And that can just make us really bad at remembering how to make the case for our own program to people who aren't already with us. Just yesterday, I was talking to somebody who was working in my house, a blue collar worker who was sanding my floor. We're having a very fun chat, and he mentioned to me that he supports Trump. That's the moment for me to discover something about what makes this person—who works super, super hard at a job that certainly doesn't carry health insurance—want to support Donald Trump. Learning what that person (who, in many ways, has none of the qualities that Donald Trump himself has) finds attractive is the secret to winning in 2024. I would just beg my friends who happen to be in my party to look for moments like that one, and learn what's going on, through conversation. And I would just go back to the importance of the dignity of work. There are a lot of people who really work hard, they live by their wits, and they've come to identify the Democratic Party as the party of people who don't want to work. And that's so false. It's just a slander on the Democratic Party. But I also think we need to speak the language of the dignity of work. We don't want to offend those who do work.We have to not just ask “which candidate agrees with me most perfectly?” or “which candidate mirrors my own convictions and feelings and passions?” We have to ask: “which candidate is best going to translate the things that I believe in for people who don't agree?” And that's just a different kind of question from the one we normally ask. We need to figure out how to have coffee with each other when we don't agree. I don't think this is going to change the election in 2024. But I do think we need to build a culture that grows out of daily life, where we remember how to enjoy each other, even though we disagree ferociously with each other. I think we need to cultivate those occasions where we hang out and enjoy each other's company, even though we don't agree. And this goes back to Bob Putnam’s work on social capital. We're not bowling together. We need to recreate these occasions where—not for very long, but just a half hour or so—we enjoy each other. And I don't know quite how that's going to work. But I do think that it would do enormous things, not just for our ability to knit ourselves together as one complicated community, but more importantly, I think, for our ability to create winning coalitions.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

“Reality,” Stephen Colbert remarked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006, “has a well-known liberal bias.” That was back when he played a caricature of a conservative instead of a caricature of a liberal (I assume that’s the point of his current late-night role, at least), and the line rolled out brilliantly into the midst of a decade where reality was delivering some punishing blows to the Republican Party’s theories of the world.

In that period, the years from the invasion of Iraq through the re-election of Barack Obama, the G.O.P. staked itself to the conceit that the Iraq war would disarm a dictator (the armaments in question mostly did not exist) and revolutionize the Middle East (it did, but not for the better). It staked its domestic policy on tax cuts and a housing bubble, touting the strength of the George W. Bush-era economy right up to the point when the worst financial crisis since the 1920s hit.

Then in Obama’s first term, the G.O.P. staked itself to the claims that deficit spending and easy money would lead to runaway inflation or debt crisis (they did not), that Obamacare would wreck the health care market (flaws and all, it didn’t), that entitlement reform was an appropriate prescription in a slowly recovering economy (it was a good long-term goal but not an ideal 2010 priority). And as a small capstone, the G.O.P. assumed that the polls were skewed against Mitt Romney in 2012, which they emphatically were not.

I was a participant in some of this, overestimating the urgency of the deficit problem and the risks of Obamacare. So I have experience from which to observe that the Democrats in 2022 find themselves struggling because reality has finally changed sides, and now has a conservative bias.

Employers added 261,000 jobs in October on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said Friday. That was down from 315,000 in September. The unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent.

As American corporations report their highest profit margins the United States has seen in over seventy years, executives of leading companies are admitting on earnings calls that they're taking advantage of inflation.

Average hourly earnings climbed by 4.7 percent in the year through October. Consumer prices grew 8.2 percent through September.

Bottom line: Workers are losing purchasing power more rapidly now than they have at any point over the last year.

This may explain why the share of Americans between the prime working ages of 25 and 54 who are working or looking for work fell to 82.5 percent in October--down from 82.7 percent in the previous month. At the beginning of 2020, the number stood at 83.1 percent.

Why aren't more people working? Because pay is lousy.

So why does Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, insist, as he did at a news conference this week, that "the broader picture is of an overheated labor market where demand substantially exceeds supply"?

Overheated?

No, Mr. Chairman. The broader picture is of slowing job and wage growth--even though prices continue to rise and the Fed continues to raise interest rates.

Powell and the Fed lifted interest rates by three-quarters of a point this week, and signaled more increases to come. Presumably, they'll continue to raise rates until they push the economy into recession, thereby pushing most working people into ever-greater peril.

This borders on insanity.

The broader picture is of big corporations continuing to raise their prices above their rising costs (including their labor costs). Why? Because they can. They have enough market power to get away with this--using inflation as a cover.

One executive argued that "a little bit of inflation is always good in our business" while another admitted that his company's prices wouldn't fall with decreasing costs, stating "we don't reduce prices on the back end of these increases."

Last weekend, ExxonMobil posted the highest quarterly profit in its 152-year history, and Chevron the second-highest quarterly profit since its own founding. Oil company profits have been soaring for the past year, prompting many other nations (including the U.K., governed by those crazy left-wing Tories) to adopt windfall profits taxes of their own.

Finally, last Monday, President Biden called for a windfall profits tax on oil companies if their prices didn't drop or didn't offer rebates to consumers.

A bit late, perhaps?

We're just three days before one of the most consequential elections in history. Democrats should be--and should have been--raising the alarm about corporate power.

“Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.”Winston Churchill, 1954
As is often the case with familiar quotations, this is not quite what Churchill actually said. His official biographer Martin Gilbert reports that the original was “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war”, which is not quite as punchy. The sentiment remains the same, however – talking is to be preferred to fighting. But the context is also important because Churchill was explaining why summit diplomacy was vital to prevent another great power war. He was not arguing that diplomacy was always preferable to continuing with the fight once a war had begun. After all, one of his first acts as prime minister in 1940 was to reject suggestions that it was time to explore a negotiated peace just because, at that time, Nazi Germany appeared to have the upper hand in the war.
Another biographer of Churchill, Boris Johnson, used the phrase last December in conversation with Vladimir Putin about the need for talks as an alternative to fighting. But while jawing might be preferable to warring, jawing and warring at the same time is much more problematic. A deal to stop a war will define who has won and lost. Neither side will want to agree so long as there is a possibility that its position may be improved through further fighting. When it comes to the current war in Ukraine there is a further problem. Since the spring, observers have thought it would make sense for Putin to offer a ceasefire that would leave him with something to show for invading Ukraine, even though for the same reason Volodymyr Zelensky would be bound to reject such proposals. Yet without there being any proposals on the table from Putin, Zelensky is still regularly urged to take the prospect of negotiations seriously in order to gain relief from this bloody war, and to remove the risk of escalation. Far less attention is paid to the Russian side of this equation. Why is Putin not demanding talks? Is it because he still dreams of victory? Perhaps, but a more disturbing reason is that he dare not conclude the war in a way that requires him to acknowledge failure.
In one fundamental sense little has changed in this war since the end of February. Ukraine is determined to resist the Russian invasion and is both confident in its ability to do so and fearful of the dire consequences should it fail. For the war to end Russia must accept that it cannot subjugate Ukraine and give up on its attempt to do so. Once it became clear after the first couple of weeks that Russia’s initial strategy was failing there was much discussions in the West about the need to find Putin an “off-ramp” or some “face-saving” device to make it easier for him to accept this failure. Some areas where Ukrainian concessions might be possible were identified, often around whether some formula should be found that kept it out of Nato while remaining secure. There were even some negotiations, including at foreign minister level, but no compromise was found. By April, Kyiv was less interested in helping Russia find a way out. Its behaviour in the occupied territories and persistent efforts to make life as miserable as possible for ordinary Ukrainians by attacking their homes and energy supplies made it impossible to contemplate rewarding Russia by conceding any conquered territory.
Zelensky’s attitude is best summed up in a recent interview: “You don’t have time for this diplomacy because they lie. It’s not diplomacy. They lie, you know, they want to find ‘diplomatic directions’ to stop the war. It’s lying. Yesterday they said, ‘we are ready, Ukraine is not ready.’ And today they attacked us by 54 rockets. What? They are crazy.
“So they are ill – I can’t understand – on their head. So what are they speaking about? How can we speak if they attacked us with 54 rockets? This day – half of the day. What about are they speaking now? I think they live on another planet. It’s not about compromise or no compromise, of course, only victory.”
Few dispute Ukraine’s right to take this position but there have been regular questions about its wisdom. For some the problem is that its war aims are unrealistic. Ukraine lacks the strength to take back all its territory and so it should cut a deal to avoid yet more death and destruction. For others the problem is that it is too realistic. Suppose Ukraine continues to liberate territory and even begins to move to free Crimea from Russian rule. Might that lead Putin to use nuclear weapons to prevent total humiliation? Better to negotiate now so that Putin has no need to resort to such a terrible threat. For those who take this view, Ukrainian objections are not overriding. If Zelensky’s government persists in trying to push Russian forces out of all of its territory, despite the difficulties and risks, then they should be invited to a “conversation” with Washington to discuss how they must take account of the wider international interest in preventing escalation and be reminded how much they depend on Western support to keep their forces supplied and their economy afloat.
In an earlier piece I explored the difficulties associated with trying to bring peace through negotiations. The only deal that would meet the standards of international law, is routinely rejected by Moscow because it does not accept that it is the aggressor and is obliged to withdraw from occupied territory. A more cynical “grand bargain”, reflecting the existing balance of power and giving something to both parties even if neither are left totally satisfied, is unlikely to be found while both have reason to hope that they can improve their positions. Even if the outlines of a deal could be designed and there was sufficient goodwill, currently in extremely short supply, to pursue it, turning it into treaty language would be a tortuous process. The issues to be decided are complex and could not be sorted in a hurry. Zelensky has promised to take any agreement to a referendum. Moscow will want sanctions eased but this will be conditional on Russia honouring its part of any bargain that has been struck. That is why I argued that a more promising approach would be to go for a ceasefire/disengagement agreement, negotiated on a military-to-military basis, which would require Russia to withdraw to internationally recognised borders. But this is only promising compared with other even less credible options and would still depend on Ukraine making more military progress.
What is striking in all these debates about how to get to a deal is how little Russia contributes. Moscow never says it has no interest in negotiations, but then patiently explains why the problem holding them back is Kyiv’s refusal to accede to its demands. Putin has shown no urgency when it comes to bringing the war to a quick conclusion. Even if a serious offer was put on the table we cannot assume that he would give it careful consideration. We need to consider another possibility: that Putin has no interest in ending the war soon if this would require him acknowledging that he has failed to achieve his key objectives.
An article by Emma Ashford for Foreign Affairs illustrates the problem. She explains why there is a case for negotiations whether Ukraine is doing too well or not well enough, and explores the issues that would need to be addressed. She assumes, probably correctly, that the United States would need to play a leading role in any talks, not least because of the sanctions issue. She is emphatic that the West should not “push Ukraine to concede” and acknowledges that little is likely to happen in the diplomatic sphere until the situation in the military sphere becomes clearer.
Her argument is more that at some point a negotiation will occur and the Joe Biden administration needs to prepare for that eventuality. Nonetheless that clearly involves some strong guidance: “Washington should encourage Kyiv to take a more moderate stance on issues, such as Crimea, that are likely to figure in a future settlement; to tone down triumphalist talk; and to emphasize the economic rewards that Ukraine stands to receive through international reconstruction aid and European economic integration under a settlement.”
Out of this emerges Ashford’s preferred solution, which is one that was widely canvassed early in the war when it might have had some traction, involving Ukraine agreeing that it will not take back Crimea and perhaps leave alone the annexed territories in the Donbas region.
The real difficulty with her analysis comes when she gets to Russia. We learn a lot about the arguments that Washington might put to Kyiv about the need for compromise but not much about how the case might be made to Moscow.
“[P]olicymakers need to focus on Putin and the small group of elites around him and consider what settlement they might be willing to accept,” she writes. “Given Putin’s mobilization of several hundred thousand additional front-line troops, it seems increasingly clear that he will seek to avoid a complete, devastating loss at any cost. But like many other authoritarians before him, he can sell a poor result as a win. This means that it may be possible to find some face-saving deal in which de facto realities, such as Russian legal control of Crimea, could be recognized, and which the Kremlin could portray to the Russian public as genuine concessions by the West.”
Yet Putin has described the sort of settlement he would be willing to accept and it is not one that Kyiv, or its Western backers, could agree to. The issue of Crimea is, as far as the Russian president is concerned, not even part of the discussion. Putin has had no doubt about the “legal control” of Crimea since 2014. But now he is also refusing to accept there can be any doubt about the legal status of the four provinces he has annexed – Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk – even though none are completely under Russia’s control. His condition for talks is that Zelensky accepts that these are forever part of Russia. If he had been trying to manage expectations to prepare the Russian people for an eventual compromise, announcing the annexations was the worst possible move.
[See also: Russia is trying to engineer a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine]
For this reason he will not be able to claim anything that falls short of that recognition as a “win”. Putin may be a master of manipulating Russian public opinion, but even for him there are limits. As the bad news began to come in during September, with the successful Ukrainian offensives and then the botched mobilisation, there was no attempt even among Putin’s cheerleaders on Russian state media to pretend that all was well. Giving up what has been proclaimed to be a chunk of Russia could not be finessed.
Even assuming that Zelensky would be prepared to concede Crimea and bits of Donbas, Putin can no longer present this as a “win”. And if that is the case then it will look like a loss, which contains many dangers for Putin.
There is an important distinction between not winning and clearly losing. Given the current state of the war, his main priority is not so much to win – although that aspiration has not disappeared – but to avoid a complete loss. For Putin the stakes are personal. This is his war and he has not hidden what he sought to achieve. Once it is impossible to deny failure then his judgement will be shown to be flawed and his position will become vulnerable. Put simply: for Putin to stay in power Russia needs to stay in the war.
His concern is not only that any conceivable deal will appear as a loss, but a deal that truly ends the fighting will be followed by a reckoning. So long as the war continues, Putin is protected to a degree by patriotic urges to support the motherland when it is in peril, and also the opportunities war provides for censorship and tight control of dissent. Without the war the consequences of his folly will be exposed. His legacy would not be expanded territory but a contracted economy, continued international isolation, a diminished reputation, and a multitude of disillusioned followers, bereaved families and traumatised veterans with nothing to remember with pride.
Staying in the war was the point of mobilisation. Without it, shortages of manpower meant that Russian forces would struggle to keep it going. The first tranches of mobilised troops were dumped in the front line to hold positions under threat from Ukrainian advances. Putin’s aim remains to hold these lines for the next few months so that when winter ends, the rest of those troops can be turned into a moderately professional force capable at least of allowing the battles to grind on – just so long as more military humiliations can be averted. 
If Ukraine can be denied victory the Russian president can hope, as he has hoped from the start, that the country will start to buckle under the weight of the social and economic pressures caused by his strikes against critical infrastructure. Yet even if this leads Kyiv, along with its weary international backers, to go grovelling to Moscow to explore a negotiated peace, he will still only want peace on his terms. Otherwise it is not worth having. For if it is in any respect a “just and lasting peace”, that acknowledges Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, then the question of “what was all that for” will be impossible to ignore in Russia. Thus, any suggestions for a compromise peace will not be assessed on their merits but for signs of Kyiv’s desperation. If Zelensky appears desperate enough then talks might be worthwhile, but only to see if more concessions can be extracted. As the Ukrainian president’s quotations above illustrate, Zelensky is certainly exasperated but he is not desperate.
There is an important difference between the Ukrainian and Russian situations. The war and the September mobilisation have disrupted Russian society but life can go on. There are no disruptions to energy and food supplies. Homes have not been blown apart. There is no need to rush regularly into air raid shelters. Sanctions have hurt the economy and its degradation will continue steadily, especially as energy prices fall and Russia can no longer participate in what were once key markets. All forms of manufacturing, including defence, have been badly hit and few international companies are looking to invest in Russia over the long term. The costs of this war are huge and will relegate Russia to an even lowlier position in the international economic system. Nonetheless, the economy is not approaching a cliff edge.
There is no offer that might be tabled by Ukraine that would tempt Moscow because withdrawal from occupied territory would be a core condition for it. Any deal would require Moscow to move explicitly from its current maximalist position and signal some readiness to compromise on the territorial issues. How might this happen? One obvious route would be a change at the top in Moscow. This might happen but few Kremlin watchers expect it or can explain how it would come about, or even offer confidence that any replacement would be easier to deal with. The major opposition to Putin’s conduct of the war has come from disgruntled hardliners. My own view for some time has been that one possible route, which is not to say probable, would be if Russia’s military concluded that its position is untenable, which is also why I suspect a military-to-military deal on disengagement is one of the better options. 
For there to be any rethink in the Kremlin, more needs to happen on the ground. After the impressive Ukrainian offensives of September, October was a much slower month. There were a number of reasons for this: keeping up supplies of ammunition; wet weather making for boggy conditions and slow movement of vehicles; Russian defensive lines being filled up with the new draftees. Ukraine knows the costs of rushing into assaults across open ground and so, to use an American phrase, prefers to prepare the battlefield by using its advantages in accurate artillery to work on Russian supply routes, ammunition dumps, command posts and troops concentrations, where they can be found. There have been some significant advances into Luhansk. There has been talk of Russian forces preparing for a vigorous defence of Kherson city but enthusiasm for this option may be waning. There is evidence of Russians evacuating the city with as much loot as they can carry. The sole Russian offensive against Bakhmut in Donetsk has reportedly led to utter carnage (including many of the former prisoners recruited by the Wagner group along with other “single-use soldiers”). So the military initiative is still with Ukraine.
It might have been hoped that the accumulation of bad news from the front would weaken Putin’s resolve and lead him to discuss peace deals in more realistic terms. An additional basis for hope might be found in the saga of the on-off grain deal. After an audacious Ukrainian attack on the Russian navy near its Crimean port of Sevastopol a furious Putin announced that he was suspending Russia’s participation in the export of Ukrainian grain by sea to countries that could experience food shortages without it. Turkey, which had brokered the deal in the first place, insisted that the shipments would continue, at which point Putin relented. The suspension was over. There are obvious positives from this episode: the trade continues; Putin has shown that he knows how to back down, especially when the alternative is to start sinking food ships; Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has demonstrated that he is always available as a mediator (he has also been active in prisoner exchanges). But there was also a severe backlash in Russia (as there had been with past prisoner exchanges) over the appearance of weakness and concessions.
This illustrates Putin’s problem. If, as I suspect, he fears having to order his troops to withdraw from all of Ukraine because of the anger and recriminations that would follow, then he will struggle to take the initiative even if his forces continue to be pushed back towards Russia’s true borders. He can still blame the military retreat on the generals, at least, and he has a ready-made excuse for Ukraine’s current strength – the range of support given by the US and its allies. The Russian people can appreciate that if they are really fighting all of Nato it might be tricky to prevail.
Letting events on the battlefield take their course carries its own dangers for Putin. The spectre of defeat will hang over the Kremlin. The decision-making process will malfunction and frustrations will grow among the elite. Potential successors will start jockeying for position. The military will get caught between their need to conserve forces while not abandoning strategic positions, between a system demanding success yet incapable of providing the necessary resources.
Faced with stark choices Moscow might suddenly discover a serious interest in negotiations. Until then, however, there is little choice but for Kyiv, with Western support, to persevere with its efforts to liberate territory until a point is reached in which a Russian defeat can no longer be denied – or, to use another Churchillian phrase, to “keep buggering on”.
Lawrence Freedman is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. A version of this piece originally appeared on his Substack “Comment is Freed”.
[See also: Vladimir Putin counts on “dirty bombs” and dipping temperatures in Ukraine]

This week, Joe Biden sat down with radio host Rickey Smiley, who asked the president point-blank what he had “done to improve the lives of African Americans.” The first thing the president thought of was his efforts to scrub their criminal convictions from the public record.

“For example,” Biden said, “too many African Americans were denied everything from Pell Grants, student loans, housing, etc. because they were arrested for possession of marijuana, many too many.” To be sure, Biden added, his pardoning of Americans convicted of federal marijuana possession charges affects “whites as well.” But the fact that criminality was, as Karine Jean-Pierre would say, “top of mind” when the president was asked about the black experience wouldn’t have escaped the notice of those who police covert racism if a similar statement had been uttered by a Republican. Indeed, if it had been said by Joe Biden circa 2019, it would have fueled a national news cycle akin to those that erupted around the efficacy of forced busing and Biden’s relationship with the segregationists in his caucus.

At the very least, Biden believed there would be some residual political benefits that the black community would bestow on him for pursuing decarceral policies. The administration has acted as though that were the case since Biden was elected.

Upon Biden’s assuming office, “equity” fast became an administration euphemism for a variety of policy reforms aimed at promoting equal rights and just outcomes for all Americans. The Biden White House was quick to promise that it would integrate “issues of racial equity into everything it does.” The merits of the various legislative reforms and executive actions this philosophical outlook produced aside, its political benefits have yet to materialize. In fact, in these midterms, “equity” seems more like a drag on Democratic electoral prospects than a boon to them.

In a merciless filleting of his fellow liberals, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg recently analyzed how his party has mishandled the issue of crime to such a degree that the damage is irreparable in this election cycle. His polling suggests Republicans have effectively tarred the Democratic Party as “pro-crime,” and that this is not a byproduct of the GOP’s savvy. It was an outgrowth of “the choices they made” in 2020, and Democrats’ being captured by political interest groups wedded to “equity” initiatives.

“The Democrats had so little credibility on crime that any message I tested this year against the Republicans ended up losing us votes, even messages that voters previously liked,” Greenberg wrote. “With Democrats so out of touch on crime and the police, just discussing crime cost Democrats.” He added that his research since 2016 had found that the base of the Democratic Party always responded more favorably to “attacks on the rigged political economy,” but Democratic lawmakers focused not on those inequalities but on the “systemic racism that produces police abuse and threaten their right to vote.”

This year, Greenberg’s firm tested the Democratic response to Biden administration initiatives such as those that provide black farmers with “grants,” “housing vouchers targeted to minority communities,” increased funding for predominantly minority institutions of higher learning, and infrastructure initiatives aimed at removing lead from pipes. Biden himself highlighted a handful of these efforts when pressed on the matter by Smiley. “But that scored at the bottom of the list of ten actions of the administration,” Greenberg confessed. “Blacks ranked it third, but well below empowering workers and Medicare. It was the lowest-ranking accomplishment for Hispanics and Asian Americans.”

Black voters prioritize worker protections and Medicare expansion over anti-discrimination initiatives. Asian Americans are more focused on infrastructure and the corporate tax structure than “hate crimes.” Hispanics rank immigration reform dead last on their list of priorities. In other words, minority voters, like all voters, tend to prioritize governmental initiatives that are traditionally the province of government. The specter of “systemic racism” manages to be both omnipresent in American institutions but so vague that it’s hard to identify, much less extirpate. By contrast, the downstream consequences of this outlook are clear as crystal and just as tangible.

Equity compelled the state of California to try (and blessedly fail) to codify language authorizing racial discrimination in the state constitution. The same could be said of New York City’s attempt to eighty-six high-achieving high schools and standardized tests. Opponents of these measures were predictably demonized as bigots, though a significant number of them were the Asian Americans these initiatives were designed to disempower.

The depopulation of America’s prisons and the popularization of cashless bail, too, were equity-related enterprises. Though ostensibly justified by the strain Covid placed on the public-sector workforce, the reduction in prosecutions, early prisoner releases, and the “de-policing” of dangerous neighborhoods were ideas hatched long before the onset of the pandemic. Long after “Defund the Police” was universally recognized as a toxic slogan, the effects of our national experiment in curtailing police powers were acutely felt.

Even when the Justice System worked, as it did in the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, it remained evidence of America’s “long history of systemic racism,” according to Vice President Kamala Harris. Violent crime is up, in part, because of these misguided gestures in the direction of racial rapprochement. Far from being grateful for the effort, black voters are more likely than any other demographic outside conventionally conservative redoubts to say crime is “very important” to their midterm vote.

When it comes to America’s Hispanic population, “equity” drove a variety of educational reforms. The academic framework that became “critical race theory” is often attributed, in part, to Hispanic scholars. “LatCrits, as they would be later called,” Axios reported in 2021, would give way to “Latinx,” and the imposition of CRT-related themes in schools would light a fire under formerly complacent parents. Pedagogical fads that deemed universal arithmetic and English grammar racist are viewed with understandable suspicion by groups that regard education as the vehicle to achieve upward social mobility. And access to an unadulterated education is fueling concerns that Republicans will continue to make inroads this year in Hispanic-heavy districts along the border and even in dark-blue areas of the country like Miami-Dade, Florida.

What Greenberg astutely indicts as the “choices” Democrats made in 2020 weren’t made on a lark. They were informed by a philosophy of dubious provenance, a theory of everything that set its sights on everything. In the pursuit of equitable outcomes (often in direct opposition to equal access to opportunity), Democrats went to work attacking the conventions and institutions that create the stable and predictable environment upon which generational advancement has always been predicated. It was a good-hearted mistake, but a mistake, nonetheless. Next Tuesday will give us some understanding of just how big a mistake it was.

The economy added 261,000 jobs in October, somewhat faster than most analysts had expected. Despite the rapid job growth, unemployment edged up slightly to 3.7 percent. Perhaps most importantly, it seems wage growth is settling down to a level consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 percent inflation target. Over the last three months, it has increased at a 3.9 percent annual rate. That compares to a 3.4 percent rate in 2019, when inflation was comfortably below the Fed’s target.

Job Growth Led by Health Care and Manufacturing
Job growth was strong across sectors, but it was especially strong in health care and manufacturing. Health care added 52,600 workers in October, and it has added 298,800 workers since May. This is largely catch-up since the sector’s employment had lagged earlier in the recovery. It is now 0.5 percent above the pre-pandemic level.
Manufacturing added 32,000 jobs in October, and employment in the sector is now 1.1 percent above the pre-pandemic level. Manufacturing is usually hit hard in a recession, but to date does not seem to have been much affected by the Fed’s rate hikes.
Construction Employment Edges Up, Jobs Related to Mortgage Financing Fall
Higher interest rates have certainly taken a toll on construction, as is most evident in the plunge in housing starts. Nonetheless, employment in the sector increased by 1,000 in October, with residential construction showing a small gain. Employment is now 1.3 percent above pre-pandemic levels. Workers are still needed to finish the many homes that are still under construction.
The impact on the credit intermediation sectors that are involved in mortgage issuance is easier to see. The number of people working in these sectors fell by 4,400 in October and is now down 36,600 from its April peak.
Airlines Add Jobs, Internet Retailers Lose Jobs
The airline industry added 4,200 jobs in October. Employment is now 10.6 percent above its pre-pandemic level, even though air travel is still below pre-pandemic levels. Employment at Internet retailers fell by 300 in October, as people are switching back to in-store shopping and also buying fewer goods. It is now down 0.6 percent from its peak last November, but still 10.6 percent above the pre-pandemic level.
Sectors Having Trouble Hiring Are Now Adding Jobs
Nursing homes added 4,100 jobs in October, while childcare centers added 4,900. Employment in the sectors is still down by 13.7 percent and 8.4 percent, respectively. The low pay in these sectors have made it difficult to get workers.
Local governments added 29,000 jobs in October, while state governments lost 7,000. They are now 3.3 percent and 1.1 percent below pre-pandemic employment levels, respectively.
Restaurants added just 6,000 jobs in October, but this followed an increase of 69,000 in September. This is likely just an error in the data rather than a sharp plunge in job growth. Employment is still 4.6 percent below the pre-pandemic level. Hotels added 19,900 jobs in October, but employment is still 17.1 percent below its pre-pandemic level.
Women Accounted for 66.1 Percent of Payroll Employment Growth in October
Women again accounted for the bulk of payroll job growth in October. They have accounted for 59.3 percent of job growth since May. They now are 49.91 percent of payroll employment. There were some months before the pandemic when women held more than 50.0 percent of payroll jobs.
Weekly Hours Stable in October
Average weekly hours were stable at 34.5 in October. This is down from a peak of 35.0 earlier in the recovery. This is another sign of the labor market normalizing. It suggests employers are not making workers put in more hours due to an inability to hire new workers.
Wage Growth Nears Noninflationary Pace
The annual rate of wage growth over the last three months is just 3.9 percent. This rate is very close to being consistent with the Fed’s 2.0 inflation target. (It is somewhat higher at 4.4 percent, using my preferred measure of taking the average wage for the last three months, compared to the average of the prior three months.)
Hourly wage growth was 3.4 percent in 2019, when inflation was comfortably below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. By this measure, the Fed’s work is largely done.
Labor Force Participation Edges Down, Prime Age Participation Drops 0.2 Percentage Points
The overall labor force participation rate edged down 0.1 percent to 62.2. The participation rate for prime age workers fell 0.2 percentage points to 82.5 percent. This is 0.6 percentage points below the pre-pandemic peak, but equal to the average for 2019.
Share of Unemployment Due to Voluntary Quits Falls
The percentage of unemployment due to voluntary quits fell sharply in October to 14.6 percent. This number is erratic, but the October figure is consistent with a strong, but normal labor market.
Employment Rate for Workers with Disabilities Hits a New Record High
The employment rate for people with disabilities rose to 22.0 percent in October. This is a new record high. This is likely due to a combination of a strong labor market and a huge expansion in opportunities for work from home.
Average Duration of Unemployment Spells Rises
For the first time since April, both the average duration of unemployment spells and the share of long-term unemployed (more than 26 weeks) rose. The average duration rose from 20.2 weeks to 20.8 weeks, while the share of long-term unemployed rose from 18.5 percent to 19.5 percent. This is consistent with the modest rise in recent weeks in the number of people receiving unemployment benefits.
Strong Jobs Report With Inflationary Pressures Waning
On the whole, this is a very positive report. The job growth is somewhat higher than can be sustained over the long term, but not hugely so. Most importantly from an inflation perspective, wage growth is now very close to being at a noninflationary pace. Other items in this report, such as the drop in the share of unemployment due to voluntary quits and the stabilization of average weekly hours at pre-pandemic levels, are also consistent with a strong, but normal labor market.
We should never make too much of a single month’s data, but as the rate of wage growth falls back near a noninflationary pace, there is a reasonable case for the Fed pausing rate hikes to get a better picture of their impact to date.

As Sunday’s high-stakes runoff election for the presidency between Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his left-wing challenger, approached, Brazilian political analysts kept returning to two big questions. The first was simply, “Who will win?” The second was more ominous: “Will the incumbent leave office if he loses?”The answer to the first question came late on Sunday night. Lula clearly, if narrowly, defeated Bolsonaro, with 51 to 49 percent of the vote.All of the attention then shifted to the second question. Throughout his time in office, Bolsonaro had given the army a more political role, praising the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 and appointing generals to senior positions in his administration. In the past months, he’d lambasted the country’s voting system, claiming that it was rigged. Much seemed to indicate that he might follow the lead of Donald Trump and try to stay in power despite losing the election.Lula gave a victory speech. Bolsonaro kept his silence. The Supreme Court called on him to acknowledge the outcome of the election. Bolsonaro kept his silence. Some of his own allies admitted defeat. Bolsonaro kept his silence. The suspense finally came to an end on Tuesday afternoon. Looking deflated, Bolsonaro appeared before the press at his official residence in Brasília, the country’s capital. Flanked by aides, he read a terse statement. “I’ve always been labeled antidemocratic, but unlike my accusers, I’ve always played by the rules,” he said. “As president and as a citizen, I’ll continue to follow our constitution.” Within two minutes, the usually attention-hungry president was out of sight.Although Bolsonaro stopped short of conceding defeat or congratulating Lula, the implication was clear. Unlike Trump, he would not attempt to stay in power. His chief of staff soon confirmed that “President Bolsonaro has authorized me … to start the transition process.”The handover period will still be fraught. Bolsonaro’s most hard-core supporters continue to protest against the election result. Some are even calling on the military to intervene. As Filipe Campante, a professor (and a colleague of mine) at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told me, the country is going through a “low-key, slow-motion January 6.” But as Campante also emphasized, the much-invoked prospect of a coup has significantly dwindled.[Read: Can Brazil’s democracy withstand Jair Bolsonaro?]Bolsonaro’s probable failure to hold on to office is an important moment in the protracted struggle between democrats and demagogues. As Brazil shows, even democracies that elect deeply antidemocratic leaders can prove resilient enough to stop them from seizing power. That should give hope to people struggling to preserve their democratic institutions against would-be strongmen all over the world. At the same time, Brazil is yet another indication that the threat from authoritarian populists is here to stay. Bolsonaro still won the support of nearly half the country—and may, like the man who now replaces him, one day mount a comeback.As populist leaders rose to prominence over the past decade, it was unclear how long the trend would last. Some commentators assumed that their governments would soon collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. Others argued that populist governments had proved very durable previously, in part because many of them had succeeded in concentrating power in their own hands. But as these populists come up for reelection, the outcomes of these contests provide evidence that may resolve this dispute.The first big reason for optimism came when Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 demonstrated that removing an authoritarian populist from office was possible through the ballot box—even when he did everything in his power to stay put. That Lula has now repeated Biden’s feat in the world’s fourth-largest democracy bolsters the case.Taken together, the defeats of Trump and Bolsonaro reveal why many populists find it hard to sustain their popularity and win reelection. When they first gain influence, in opposition, populists usually combine the absence of any substantial record in government with the promise of a radical break from the status quo. This allows them to attack the flaws and hypocrisies of the political system, both real and perceived. And so they can position themselves as truth-tellers who will “throw the bums out” and actually deliver for ordinary citizens—for example, by raising living standards.Even their lack of support within mainstream institutions and political movements can be to populists’ benefit, because it seemingly testifies to their authenticity. Trump’s ascent is a good example. Polls consistently showed that most Americans objected to the outrageous comments he made about women and immigrants in 2015 and 2016. But because these slights were denounced by politicians who were themselves deeply unpopular, they demonstrated Trump’s willingness to break with the political establishment.[Yascha Mounk: Attack of the zombie populists]When populists win office, they begin to lose this outsider status, and their advantage fades. Before they come to power, populists have an incentive to overpromise. Once in government, they find it impossible to keep their word. Because they are inexperienced, many populists also weaken their position by making avoidable mistakes. They may struggle with basic competence, mismanaging the economy or failing to deal with such unexpected emergencies as a pandemic.Populists claim to represent the true voice of the people, and usually move to short-circuit democratic controls once they are in office. But their campaigns are so polarizing that they cleave the country in two and mobilize their opponents. Especially in large countries whose power is geographically dispersed, like Brazil and the United States, the opposition usually retains key tools—such as strong representation in parliament or control over some cities and states—to slow the concentration of power.All of these factors help explain Bolsonaro’s defeat. The rapid economic growth he promised never materialized. His handling of the pandemic was a deadly disaster. He never managed to win consistent control over Brazil’s Congress. By the end of his term, he was, in the eyes of many voters, defined by his failures—and had not yet amassed the power to defy their will.Despite the electoral defeats of Trump and Bolsonaro, their opponents would be unwise to prematurely declare victory.At the time of Biden’s inauguration, in January 2021, many observers judged that Trump had finally lost his hold over the country, and perhaps his party. Less than two years on, those predictions look naive. Biden’s victory was clear but hardly commanding. His approval ratings remain near record lows for a first-term president at this stage of his term. Meanwhile, Trump retains a passionate fan base, and has succeeded in purging most of his critics from the Republican Party. Although he has not yet declared his candidacy for 2024, a return to the White House is far from unimaginable.Bolsonaro may prove similarly resilient. Little more than 2 million votes separated him and Lula. Brazil is more unequal and arguably even more polarized than the United States; these divisions make it easy for Bolsonaro to continue stoking discontent among his base. And although Lula’s comeback relied on a broad coalition, he rose to power as a proud leftist, earning the fierce and probably enduring enmity of nearly half the country.[Read: Brazil’s corruption scandal has it all]Like Trump, Bolsonaro will probably retain the fervent support of a substantial portion of the electorate, putting him in a good position to exploit the next political opportunity. If Lula makes significant missteps, or even if Brazil suffers some misfortune that isn’t under the control of the new president, Bolsonaro may regain momentum by blaming the government for people’s frustrations. And the opportunities for Lula to slip up are many: A global recession is on the horizon, corruption runs deep in Brazil, and some of his more extreme allies will try to push him toward unpopular policies.There are two competing narratives about what the outcome of the Brazilian election means. Some see Bolsonaro’s defeat as a sign that the populist wave is finally cresting. Others see his support among the 58 million Brazilians who voted for him as a sign that democracy remains as embattled as it has ever been. But the two interpretations are not as far apart as they might seem.When authoritarian populists win power, they usually do a lot of damage to democratic institutions. But this doesn’t mean that they are guaranteed to prevail. As often as not, they ultimately lose their hold on power.Conversely, when authoritarian populists lose power, the most acute threat to democracy usually subsides for a few years. But that doesn’t mean it has ended. Authoritarian populists can retain an ability to shape the political system from opposition—even staging seemingly improbable comebacks, as Benjamin Netanyahu just did in Israel.All of this suggests that neither a triumphant resurgence of democracy nor a definitive defeat of populism is likely to occur in the next few decades. Rather, authoritarian populists such as Trump and Bolsonaro will remain a major part of the political landscape. The battle with populism is not a transitory phenomenon, soon to be resolved in favor of either democracy or fascism. It is the new normal for the troubled yet resilient democracies of the world.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.If you want to buy or sell a house in 2022, I wish you good luck. Mortgage rates have increased faster than in almost any period on record, adding tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the typical cost of owning a home. For many people, that point is immaterial, because they can’t even find a place to buy: The number of available homes is still about 40 percent lower than it was before the pandemic. If you want to find a new place to rent, good luck twice over. The average rent has soared to an all-time high, as demand surges in the absence of available units.One could tell a simple story about the housing market to explain all of this madness. There was a pandemic, followed by inflation, followed by rising interest rates: That’s it; the end. But zoom out and a more accurate picture comes into focus. The 21st century has been a tango between vertiginous swings in demand and corresponding swoons in construction, which has left us with a historically unusual shortage of available housing.The full story of the 2022 housing market begins at least 15 years ago, in the flaming dumpster fire of the global financial crisis. After years of undisciplined lending, the U.S. real-estate market collapsed and dragged down financial markets. Home prices fell for six straight years from 2006 to 2012. The number of new homes under construction plummeted to a disturbing low as the 2010s became the worst decade on record for home building per capita.Ten years ago, the U.S. housing market might have seemed dead. But several factors conspired to bring it back to life. The supply of homes all but stagnated just as the Millennial generation—the largest in American history—aged into its prime home-buying years. College graduates plowed into downtown neighborhoods, leading to a sharp rise in living costs in America’s largest cities, and then pushed into the suburbs. Meanwhile, mortgage rates fell below their 50-year low. The combination of constricted supply, skyrocketing demand, and bargain-basement rates set the stage for a surge in home prices. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, the Case-Shiller national home-price index set new all-time highs each year.Then the pandemic hit. In March 2020, the economy experienced a flash-freeze depression in the face of a normalcy-destroying virus. The economy ground to a halt and homebuilders, scarred by the housing crash of 2007, pulled back. “Builders remembered what happened in 2007 and 2008 as a near-death experience,” Tracy Alloway, a financial commentator, told me on my podcast, Plain English. Nobody wanted to overbuild for the second time in 15 years.But their expectations were wrong, and not just a little wrong. Catastrophically wrong. The year 2020 wasn’t anything like 2008 in the real-estate industry. Rather than implode, the housing market went berserk in the opposite direction. The federal government sent checks to more than 100 million households even as typical families couldn’t or wouldn’t spend their money on leisure experiences—movies, vacations, amusement parks—which left many households richer than they were before COVID. Families with means, tired of being locked in their home, made Zillow the new Netflix. Thrust into a work-from-home experiment, the white-collar labor force drove demand for larger houses with more space for at-home offices. One study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that remote work was a key driver of the rise in housing prices.After 2007, supply outstripped demand, and housing prices fell for years. But after 2020, demand outstripped supply.“Whether it was windows, lumber, garage doors, roof tiles, or washing machines, [suppliers were] never able to catch up from that standing start in spring of 2020,” the financial commentator Joe Weisenthal told me. In April of 2021, half of the houses listed nationwide had pending contracts in less than a week. One Maryland resident infamously included in her offer “a pledge to name her first-born child after the seller.” She didn’t even get the house.This madness set the stage for an utterly bizarre 2022. As the rising cost of shelter helped push up core inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates—again, and again, and again. It’s hard to appreciate just how dramatically mortgage rates have trampolined, but maybe this sentence does the trick: Just 20 months ago, the average fixed rate for a 30-year mortgage was lower than at any time on record; today, it’s higher than in any other month this century. “You’d be kind of crazy to sell your house right now unless you have to,” Weisenthal said. It’s not a great buyer’s market, because rates are spiking. And it’s not a great seller’s market, because owners don’t want to double their monthly payments by taking on a new mortgage at a higher rate. While the flash-freeze recession of 2020 brought the housing market to a boil, the simmering inflation of 2022 has somewhat frozen it.So far this century, first-time home buyers have every right to feel like they are victims of a horrible cosmic prank. In the late 2000s, the housing crisis raised unemployment and dampened aggregate demand, which made Millennials poorer. In the 2010s, the evisceration of the construction industry led to a shortage of new homes, which contributed to higher prices. In 2020 and 2021, a pandemic visited several horrors on the country and unpredictably spurred a run on housing that drove prices into the stratosphere. And in 2022, mortgage rates spiked from all-time lows to all-century highs in a matter of months. I’m not a believer in curses. But if anything is cursed in this world, it’s the 21st-century American housing market.

If there is anything more dull than listening to acquaintances relating their dreams, it can only be reading journalists complaining about Twitter. Yet since Elon Musk spent $44 billion on becoming its main character, the topic has become inescapable. As Ernst Jünger remarked in The Glass Bees, his prophetic 1957 novella about a tech billionaire, “economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake”. The furore — online of course — about Twitter’s future direction is entirely downstream of the perception that its ownership is a valuable prize to be wrestled over, the world-island of political discourse whose mastery brings with it absolute power.
Such a widely-held belief, put forward by Musk’s opponents and fans alike, illuminates the nature of the platform. It has become the precise opposite of its original stated intention, as a decentralised platform for the instantaneous dissemination of information. Instead, Twitter is a centralised platform for the creation and enforcement of ideological narratives. The fear of liberals, and the hope of some conservatives, is that under Musk’s ownership Twitter will cease to be a central pillar of “the Cathedral”, the ideological apparatus by which the liberal order maintains its hold on effective power despite the growing opposition of voting publics.
For Right-wingers, who see Twitter functioning as a mechanism to enforce the dogmas of liberal ideology, the hope is to seize the Cathedral; Conservatives, by contrast, hope to open it up to debate, using Twitter as a pulpit through which the congregation will select the best ideology on rational grounds. Both beliefs are based on a fundamental misapprehension of what Twitter is, and how it has achieved the cultural prominence it has. And both groups, as well as society as a whole, would be better served if the entire edifice was levelled to the ground.

Twitter’s rise to prominence was a product of a specific set of material circumstances, the unintended effect of the demolition of legacy media platforms by Facebook, which destroyed the advertising revenue on which their journalism depended. During the 2010s, media companies reoriented themselves towards “the pivot to video”, producing short-form audiovisual content designed to be shared on Facebook. When Facebook suddenly changed its algorithms to deboost such content, fortunes were lost and the rising stars of the new media landscape, like VICE and Buzzfeed, came close to collapse. The resulting jobless diaspora of online journalists swiftly congregated on one platform: Twitter.
Twitter is at heart nothing more or less than a tool by which commentators measure their social capital, a social credit system for insecure writers. The most dangerous creature on Twitter is, after all, the aspirant blue check, whose desperate clamour for attention drives so much of the platform’s pathologies. From the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep, the journalist’s day is bookended, and punctuated by the platform: he scrolls through Twitter on his journey into the office; then, sitting at his desk, the first thing he does is open his laptop to scan Twitter. Stories, interviewees, heroes and villains are all identified on Twitter. Often contractually obliged to promote their work on Twitter, it becomes reality to the journalist, especially the opinion columnist, whose requirement to produce copy frequently outruns their capacity to formulate considered opinions.
Likewise, the value of a news story is almost entirely based on whether or not people are discussing it on Twitter. Its baneful effects are visible everywhere: the precipitous decline of Channel 4 News as a platform for serious journalism began, in the mid-2010s, as it reoriented its focus towards producing shareable video content for Twitter, aiming particularly at middle-aged liberals outraged by Trump and Brexit, the demographic to which its editors belong. For the online BBC journalist, Twitter is used as a means to circumvent impartiality rules, using often the obscurest of Twitter accounts to voice sentiments they are banned from expressing themselves: when a BBC article tells you that something has “sparked online debate”, prepare for a lecture on the Twitter fixation of the day, in which the quoted account merely ventriloquises the barely-hidden political believes of the journalist sharing it.
Suggested readingDo we need Caesar Elon Musk?By Mary Harrington
All journalism is now a Twitter performance: the journalist writes primarily for Twitter, and not his readership, their published work functioning as an esoteric text demonstrating allegiance to an in-group and hostility to an out-group: the readership, and the company paying for it are mere spectators to the essential work of Twitter performance. It is for this reason that journalists have become so reviled: their role has become so oriented to the production of discourse rather than the description of reality that the gulf between them and their readers widens ever more: Twitter and journalism are both locked in a fatal embrace.
Because of its outsized role in the journalistic imagination, Twitter has come to consume politics, just as it has journalism. When the MP David Amess was murdered by a jihadist, the government turned it into a narrative about Twitter trolls: not only because it was easier for them to talk about — they would, horror of horrors, have been criticised on Twitter for talking about the actual problem — but because it is the only thing they care about. If they have tweeted their disapproval of something it is within their power to fix, like Conservative MPs moaning about the migrant crisis, politicians feel satisfied their work has been done: the point is no longer to change the world, only to create discourse about it. 
Conservatives, who feel shut out of Twitter’s system of reward and approbation, have found themselves particularly entranced by the platform’s spell. They frequently declare that Twitter is not the real world, but the truth is worse, that the real world has become entirely suborned to Twitter. Similarly, it is easier for the police to demonstrate their political allegiances on Twitter than to prevent crimes; if every British Police force deleted its Twitter account, it would instantly be held in much higher regard by the public. But then no-one’s reputation is enhanced by Twitter: reading the thoughts of historians, barristers or public health professionals on the platform is a genuinely nihilistic experience. All have had their repute levelled by the platform which erodes every institution it touches.
Suggested readingDon't punish Kanye WestBy Hadley Freeman
As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned back in the Sixties, “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village”. Anyone who has actually lived in a small, traditionally-structured village, and not merely fantasised about the premodern world on Twitter, will be aware of the claustrophobic intensity of such a state of being, the life monitored and circumscribed by village gossip and obscure feuds. As McLuhan remarked, “unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”, forced on us by “the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives”. The spasms of moral panic that pulse around the world from their origin in America’s neurotic taste-making class are a result of the world’s opinion-makers being locked together in the Twitter panopticon. 
In viewing the Twitter blue check as a coveted badge of status, both Musk and his anxious critics are entirely mistaken. The best analysis tends to come from anonymous accounts, freed from the combination of fear and need for approbation which consumes the blue check: if Twitter were an entirely anonymous platform, it might be a better functioning clearing-house for information and informed commentary. Rather than the presence of bots being Twitter’s original sin, as Musk has claimed, its greatest flaw is that it has turned Twitter’s “power users” into effective bots themselves, their every utterance shaped by the need to navigate Twitter’s treacherous rocks and shallows. 
Suggested readingYou are already in the metaverseBy Jon Askonas
Instead, the true mark of success as a commentator is freedom from needing to be on Twitter at all: who knows what Cormac McCarthy, say, thinks about Trump, or Black Lives Matter, or trans toilets? Whatever his opinion, he would sink in our estimation even if we agreed with him. This is why the Twitter presence, let alone addiction, of the super-rich is viewed with simultaneous bewilderment and disgust by the platform’s most committed users, toiling away in the take fields.. Why would anyone be here if they didn’t need to? How much weaker and more pathetic does Putin seem for the growing fixation on American culture war issues that manifests in his speeches? Rather than being outside the system of America’s cultural power, he has revealed himself as trapped here with the rest of us. Who can doubt that if a nuclear exchange began, we would find out on Twitter — the shared countdown, the snarky memes — or that many would spend their final minutes composing the perfect final tweet, the one last dunk on their enemies or expression of tribal allegiance?
If Musk, as is likely, destroys Twitter as it currently exists he will be doing the world a great service. By wrecking the current function it performs for commentators, he will free journalism and politics from its concentration in a single online madhouse, and in doing so, no doubt entirely unwittingly, help decentralise the spread of information. Like Legion in the New Testament, Twitter’s constellation of unhappy, clamouring souls must be driven off a cliff. When he learns, as he perhaps already has, that the platform will never be profitable, he should smash his new train set. The greatest power that will accrue to him, and the greatest gift he can offer civilisation, is not reforming Twitter through tweaks here and there but by loading its servers into a Space X rocket and firing them into the heart of the sun, forcing us all, finally, to log off.

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Molly Liebergall chats with former professional poker player Annie Duke about her new book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (Penguin Random House, September 2022). Annie Duke retired from professional poker with more than $4 million in winnings by knowing when to stick out a hand and when to cash in her chips. Much like a poker career, life, she says, is “one long game,” and the biggest winners are also the most strategic quitters. An edited version of the conversation follows.

How can quitting be valuable?

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People have the idea that quitting slows you down, that it stops your progress, but in reality, quitting really speeds you up. If you’re engaged in something that isn’t the best path for you to achieve the things that you want to achieve, then staying on that path—not quitting—is going to slow you down, whereas if you quit and switch to another path that is more likely to cause you to gain more ground, that will speed you up.

That’s the number-one reason why quitting can be so valuable. The second reason has to do with the fact that pretty much every decision we make is under the influence of two sources of uncertainty: the first is pure luck. If I’m playing poker, I don’t control the cards that are coming. When you’re driving on the road, you don’t control the other cars that are driving around you. When you go into a new job, you don’t control who might quit after you go there, what new leadership might come in, or how they might behave.

The other influence is hidden information. For most decisions we make, we know very little in comparison to all there is to be known. Inevitably, after we make a decision, we learn new information. I think that we’ve all had that feeling of, if I had known then what I know now, I would’ve made a different decision. That’s that feeling of new, hidden information revealing itself to you that would’ve changed your choice.

The option to quit is what makes it so that we can react to new information. Even further, it also is what allows us to make decisions under uncertainty in the first place. . . . This lets us do things like go on a date—imagine the first date you ever went on, and if you had to marry that person.

This is where quitting becomes so incredibly valuable: the option to quit is what makes it so that we can react to new information. Even further, it also is what allows us to make decisions under uncertainty in the first place, because when we learn that new information, we have the option to quit. This lets us do things like go on a date—imagine the first date you ever went on, and if you had to marry that person.

This is what allows us to do things like agile software development, for example, or A/B testing, or anything that relies on the option to quit the stuff that isn’t working. I think that is what’s so important about understanding the value of quitting as a decision skill: it lets you deal with uncertainty, and it will get you to where you want to go, faster.

How do you know when it’s the right time to quit?

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We can’t perfectly see the future. We’re not omniscient. We don’t have a crystal ball. It’s hard for us to know exactly how other paths that we might be thinking about taking might turn out. This makes this decision to quit really hard, due to not knowing exactly when the right time is.

If we were perfectly rational and omniscient, the exact time to quit would be when the expected value—what you’re getting out of the path you’re on—is no longer worthwhile, either on its own or in comparison to other paths that you might want to take. The problem for us is that it’s very hard to see that, because it’s a forecast, and we know that forecasts are uncertain. The thing I try to tell people is that you should assume that if you’re thinking about quitting, it’s already probably past the time that you should have quit.

There’s wonderful research from Steven Levitt, the economist who wrote Freakonomics. He built a website for people who were struggling with big life decisions like: Should I quit my job? Should I leave my relationship? Should I move to a new town? Should I stay or should I go? Should I quit or should I grit? When they were in that moment of, “I don’t know, because it’s 50-50 and I’m having trouble deciding,” people could go to this website, and the website would flip a virtual coin for them.

You should assume that if you’re thinking about quitting, it’s already probably past the time that you should have quit.

People who are willing to go flip a coin for a big life decision like this must really feel like it’s a 50-50 choice, right? Otherwise, the choice would be clear one way or the other. Given that, you would assume that the quitters here—the ones who are told to quit by the coin or who quit on their own—would be equally happy as the ones who were told to stay.

What he actually found when he measured the happiness of the coin flippers two months and six months later was that the quitters were happier. That shows that the moment when people felt it was 50-50, it was actually well past 50-50. This is the problem that we have: we need much more signal than is actually necessary in terms of the right time to quit.

Why can grit sometimes be a bad thing?

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If we think about grit and quit, I think people view those as opposing forces. In the battle of the popular mind, grit is the clear winner. Grit is a virtue. It’s a sign of character, as a matter of fact. We admire those who persevere, whereas quitting is clearly a vice—at least as people view it—quitting shows that you’re weak willed.

We can see this reflected in aphorisms like, “Winners never quit and quitters never win.” That’s how we think about the battle between the two. In reality, grit and quit are the exact same decision if you think about it, because if I choose to stick to something, that means I’m choosing not to abandon course, and if I choose to walk away from something, it means I’m choosing not to stick to it. They’re literally the exact same decision.

There are certainly circumstances under which quitting would be correct. As an example, if I’m at the top of Mount Everest and there’s a snowstorm, I should probably quit my summit attempt. That would be a wise thing to do. This means that the flip side must be true, and that sometimes sticking it out—or gritting it out—can’t possibly be correct. Those circumstances happen in particular when the path you’re on is no longer worthwhile.

There are certainly circumstances under which quitting would be correct. As an example, if I’m at the top of Mount Everest and there’s a snowstorm, I should probably quit my summit attempt. That would be a wise thing to do. This means that the flip side must be true, and that sometimes sticking it out—or gritting it out—can’t possibly be correct.

The value of grit is that it gets you to stick to worthwhile things that are also hard. Most things that are really worth doing are going to be hard also. We want to stick to those worthwhile things even when we’re in down periods.

When grit is really great is when it’s getting to you to stick to something that is going to get you to your goal. The issue is that it also gets you to do that when the end goal is no longer worth pursuing, and when there are other paths you could take that would get you to where you want to go faster.

Why is ‘quit while you’re ahead’ actually bad advice?

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There are a few problems with “quit while you’re ahead.” The first is, what makes a path worth sticking to is not whether you’re ahead right at this moment.

Let’s stay that I bought a stock at $50 and it’s now at $60. I’m ahead, but that’s not what actually tells me whether I should stick to it. What tells me whether I should stick to it is whether, going forward, I feel that this is a stock that’s in a good position or not. Is this a good place for me to have my money versus other places that I could invest my money?

“Quit while you’re ahead,” is getting you to focus on the wrong thing because it’s not telling you what “ahead” means. But the bigger problem with that aphorism is that it’s amplifying a cognitive bias we have that’s quite bad. For most things, particularly when we get bad news, we have a tendency to quit too late, but there is one place where we tend to quit too early, and that is exactly when we’re ahead.

To get this idea across, I’d love to talk about a study that was done by Colin Camerer and many colleagues, including Richard Thaler, who’s a Nobel laureate. They looked at a plethora of trip sheets of New York City cab drivers, and what they found was a very interesting pattern: when the driving conditions were really good, the cab drivers were quitting early in their shift, and when there weren’t a lot of fares to pick up, they were staying in the cab and sticking it out.

For most things, particularly when we get bad news, we have a tendency to quit too late, but there is one place where we tend to quit too early, and that is exactly when we’re ahead.

This is the opposite of what you would do in an ideal world. When the driving is really good, meaning there are lots of fares around, in terms of maximizing your income, one would think that you would stay in the cab and keep driving because there are so many fares to be picked up. Then, when there aren’t a lot of fares around, you would say, “I’m not going to take my time doing this. I’m going to quit, and I’ll come back another day when the fare conditions are better.”

The cab drivers flipped their behavior. It turned out that most of the drivers had set an earnings goal for the day. If you hit your earnings goal really fast, that means that there are lots of fares around. They hit their earnings goal, so they were ahead, and they quit. When the driving was bad, they didn’t hit that earnings goal, and they kept driving around in their cab trying to get to their daily earnings goal.

They stuck while they were behind, and they quit while they were ahead, costing them a lot of money. It turns out that this is a very strong human tendency: when things aren’t going well for us, we tend to escalate our commitment to the cause, but when things are going really well—you have a stock at $60 that you bought at $50—then we want to get out of it right away.

What can poker teach leaders in any sector about sunk cost?

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When we’re thinking about businesses and leadership and how leadership should be thinking about quitting problems, what we need to realize is that, when it comes to the stories about people quitting too late—cab drivers, people in the stock market, people climbing Mount Everest and continuing to the summit after conditions have turned bad on them—this is repeating across your organization.

Every employee has these tendencies because these tendencies are embedded cognitive biases. In particular, one thing to think about is the sunk-cost effect. We tend to take into account resources that we’ve already spent when we’re thinking about whether to spend more on a project. You’ll hear people say, “If I quit now, I’ll have wasted my time.” That’s a sunk-cost fallacy problem. The time that you’ve already spent is gone—what matters is if you’re wasting more time by continuing with the project.

The other thing to understand, and this is particularly important for leadership, is that when people are considering quitting, there are issues with what we call “internal validity” and “external validity.” Internal validity is basically: How am I going to view myself? Am I going to view myself as having wasted my own time? Or am I going to view myself as having been inconsistent? Issues of external validity are about: How are other people going to judge us?

You’ll hear people say, ‘If I quit now, I’ll have wasted my time.’ That’s a sunk-cost fallacy problem. The time that you’ve already spent is gone—what matters is if you’re wasting more time by continuing with the project.

When we’re thinking as leaders about this, what we need to understand is that people have these biases, which means that they’re going to be quitting too late in general. They’re going to be recommending that projects get shut down too late. Why? Because of this fear of waste and the fear of the career risk that’s associated with quitting something. If people are afraid of quitting until it’s so certain that that’s the only choice—which is well beyond the point at which they should have walked away—that’s a problem for you as an organization.

One of the things that I try to get people to think about is something that comes from poker. In poker we used to remind ourselves, as professionals, that poker is one long game. It was advice that I was given when I was a new player. What it meant was that over the course of all the hands that I might play over my whole lifetime, I wanted to make sure that I was investing my resources, my money, my time, and my attention into the hands that were going to, in the long run, make me the most money.

How I might feel on a particular hand, at the moment that I might have to fold it, should matter very little. I shouldn’t be thinking about, “but I already have money in the pot,” because that doesn’t really matter. What matters is, “Is the next chip that I’m going to put in the pot going to make money?” It shouldn’t matter that I’m worried how people are going to perceive me for folding, for example—people do sometimes make fun of you for folding at a poker table, believe it or not.

When I’m in a poker game, I shouldn’t be like the cab drivers. I shouldn’t say, “If I make this amount of money in the game, I’m going to quit.” What I should say is, “I’m going to play as long as I feel like I’m playing really well.” What matters is how I do in the long run, because poker is one long game, and life is one long game.

In order to play the game of poker or play the game of life well, you have to quit in some situations, particularly those situations where other people might not. Poker players find it very hard to quit games when they’re losing. You have to be willing to do that so you can get yourself in a better position later. People don’t want to quit projects for the same reason. You, as leadership, have to remind them that it’s one long game.

I shouldn’t be thinking about, ‘but I already have money in the pot,’ because that doesn’t really matter. What matters is, ‘Is the next chip that I’m going to put in the pot going to make money?’

It’s also really important for you to realize how you might be exacerbating that particular bias: the unwillingness of people to walk away from things. How might you be doing that? Well, if you judge people solely by their outcome—for example, only asking, “Did you finish the project? Did you complete it?”—well, maybe it wasn’t a project that was worth completing.

If you have a bad outcome, which is generally something like missing a sales target or not completing a project on time, you end up in a postmortem where people might say they’re concerned about the process that led there—but you’re only there because you had a bad outcome. You’re only there because you missed a target, or a date, or a sales number at the end of Q3.

Your employees hear that. What they hear is, “I am being judged for whether I finish things. I am being judged for whether I hit the target. As much as they’re telling me that they care about the process, when I’m in a room defending myself, it’s when I’ve missed.” That’s going to create behavior from the people who work for you, where they don’t want to quit things.

What surprised you most in your research and writing?

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The thing that surprised me the most in the writing of this book was the discovery through the work of Maurice Schweitzer and his colleagues that goals have a downside. I, like most people, thought about goals as just a positive. You set a clear target, you head toward that target, and that’s very motivating. I think that’s the way that most people feel about goals.

However, goals get you to head toward a finish line, come what may. There’s a very well-known case from the 2019 London Marathon of Siobhan O’Keefe. She starts to experience pretty bad pain somewhere around mile three. On mile eight, her fibula snaps. She literally breaks her leg. She kept running all the way to the finish line in excruciating pain, obviously putting at risk the chances that she runs another marathon in her life.

This is the thing that we need to realize about goals: they can get us to behave in ways that make us keep going toward the summit in a snowstorm or well past the turnaround time. It causes people to drive businesses into the ground.

The thing about Siobhan O’Keefe is that she’s not even that unusual. In the same marathon, someone broke their ankle right around the same point and also finished that marathon. The reason why they don’t stop is because there’s a finish line.

If you run 13.1 miles, in the context of a marathon, you have failed because you didn’t reach the 26.2 mile marker. But if you run 13.1 miles in the context of a half marathon, you have succeeded. Once we’ve set that finish line, anything short of that goal is failure because we grade the achievement of goals as pass/fail in nature, so we just keep going. It causes us to ignore very clear signals from the world, like a broken bone, that we should be quitting. It just makes us ignore it.

Whenever you set a goal, have a set of ‘unlesses’ that go along with that: ‘I’m going to go toward this finish line, unless . . .’ What is the ‘unless I break a bone’ for any goal that you set?

This is the thing that we need to realize about goals: they can get us to behave in ways that make us keep going toward the summit in a snowstorm or well past the turnaround time. It causes people to drive businesses into the ground. It causes people to stay in really bad relationships. It causes people to stay in jobs that aren’t going well and to stick to projects that they shouldn’t be sticking to because there are goals associated with all of those, and we can’t quit them once we set them.

Whenever you set a goal, have a set of “unlesses” that go along with that: “I’m going to go toward this finish line, unless . . .” What is the “unless I break a bone” for any goal that you set?

Video Annie Duke on the right time to quit

As an immigrant to the United States who has traveled a great deal around the world, I have always been certain that America was the best place for people like me — people who looked different, with brown skin and a strange name. I remember coming to America as a college student and feeling the openness and generosity of a country born of and made by immigrants. When visiting Britain around the same time, I could sense that I was treated politely but as an outsider.

But in 2019, a tweet from Britain’s then chancellor of the exchequer, Sajid Javid, caught my eye: “Britain is the most successful multiracial democracy in the world.” He tweeted something similar last week after the appointment of Rishi Sunak as prime minister of Britain. So I spent some time looking at the data.

The Migrant Integration Policy Index measures policies to integrate migrants in dozens of countries around the world. As of 2019, the United States is in the top 10, but in the bottom half. In general between 2014 and 2019, the average country studied improved its score by two points. The United States on the other hand retreated by two points.

The story is largely one of the rise of the rest. Countries such as Canada have long been welcoming to immigrants but have gotten even better. Any would-be immigrant with technical skills and strong academic standing knows that it is easier to get a green card equivalent in Canada or Britain (or Ireland or Sweden) than in the United States these days. And since the Trump crackdown in every area of immigration — from business visas to work permits — the experience has become even more hellish and demeaning for people trying to move to the United States.

Others have also become far more tolerant. If you look at a recent Pew Research Center survey on attitudes toward national identity, you see that major European countries are becoming more tolerant and inclusive. The percentage who say that to truly belong you need to be born in that country is about the same in Britain, France and the United States. (Germany is even lower.) And those who say you have to be Christian to belong make up 14 percent in France, 20 percent in Britain, 23 percent in Germany and a high of 35 percent in the United States.

Britain did not score as high on the Migrant Integration Policy Index in 2019 as the United States, but the more you observe the day-to-day reality, Javid’s comments do not look like an empty boast. (Though Canada likely does better than Britain or the United States on any objective set of measures.) When Boris Johnson resigned, of the eight candidates who came forward to replace him, four were members of ethnic minorities (Sunak, Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch and Nadhim Zahawi). And not one — unlike, say, Bobby Jindal or Nikki Haley — has converted to Christianity. Sunak took his oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita and lit Diwali lamps at his 10 Downing Street residence.

The Tory Party, the party of the old English aristocracy, has had an explosion of diversity. In contrast, about 90 percent of Republicans in Congress are White and virtually all the Republicans are Christian. Much of the credit in Britain should go to David Cameron, the former Conservative prime minister who took it upon himself to make his party more open to minorities of all kinds, including gender minorities. Once the party put out the welcome mat, it should not have come as a surprise that so many migrants proved to be natural Tories. After all, the Indian community in Britain is socially conservative, often with an entrepreneurial streak (including an aversion to high taxes). The same is true of Indian Americans, but because the Republican Party so powerfully signals its embrace of White racialist politics, it turns off many minorities who would agree with them on most issues. It is also worth noting that Britain does not have affirmative action policies, which might explain why there is less resentment toward minorities who have succeeded there.

America has had distinct advantages compared with other countries that have allowed it to thrive — an open market, business-friendly policies — but many of these have been copied by other countries. I always believed that being truly welcoming to immigrants was America’s last and greatest competitive advantage. It does appear that now others are catching up or even beating the United States at a game that it invented.

Friends,

Coming into the home stretch before the 2022 midterm elections, I feel different than I've felt in the days before every election I've witnessed or participated in over the last three-quarters of a century.

Before, I've worried about Republicans taking over and implementing their policy preferences--against political rights in the dark days of Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt in the early 1950s, against civil rights in the late 1950s and early 1960s, against Medicare in the mid-1960s, for smaller government in the 1970s, for tax cuts for the rich in the 1980s, for a balanced budget in the early 1990s, against universal health care in the late 1990s and early 2000s, against LGBTQ rights in the 2010s.

My friends, we owe it to generations before us who fought and died for democracy and the rule of law, and to generations after us who will live with the legacy we leave them.

Today I'm not worried about Republicans' policy preferences. Today I'm worried about the survival of our democracy.

I'm worried that a majority of Republican candidates are telling voters, without any basis in fact, that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

I'm worried that if elected, many of these Republicans will make it harder to conduct elections, allow or encourage endless audits of election results, and even refuse to sign off on them.

I'm worried that Republicans have been spending millions to recruit partisan poll workers and watchers who could disrupt the counting process or raise false claims about it. (Michigan Republican secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo rose to prominence as a Detroit poll watcher who made false claims about election fraud.)

I'm worried that thousands of Trump supporters have been calling their local election offices requesting all kinds of public records, often using suspiciously similar wording, leading election officials to believe this is a coordinated effort to prevent them from holding an election.

I'm worried that violent thugs are on the prowl, and that Republican leaders--starting with Trump--have been quietly encouraging them. (Speaking on a conservative radio talk show on Tuesday, Trump amplified a conspiracy theory about the grisly attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, saying "Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks." Other Republican candidates are joining in this cruel, baseless, disgusting taunt.

Most of all, I'm worried that Americans are losing the trust that a democracy needs in order to function--trust that even though we may not like the outcomes of particular elections, we feel bound by them because we trust the democratic process.

The biggest question hanging over the 2022 midterm election is not a policy. It's not even an issue.

It is analogous to the question we as a nation faced in 1860, as we slid into a tragic Civil War.

It is whether our democracy can endure.

The extraordinary, abominable challenge we now face--one that I frankly never imagined we would face--is that the Republican Party and its enablers in the media and among the monied interests appear not to want American democracy to endure.

As Joe Biden said last night, "Democracy itself" is at stake in the upcoming election, and he appealed "to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance."

Indeed.

My friends, we owe it to generations before us who fought and died for democracy and the rule of law, and to generations after us who will live with the legacy we leave them--to get out the vote next Tuesday, to vote out the traitors and liars, to renounce the party that has forsaken the precious ideal of self-government, and to vote in people who are dedicated to making our democracy stronger and better.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Joe Biden asked Americans to remember that democracy is on the ballot next week. He seemed dispirited. I understand why.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Tim Alberta: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters
What does Kyrie Irving see in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?
David Frum: Why I logged off Twitter
Democracy on the BallotNear the end of the 1972 movie version of the Broadway musical 1776, John Adams is by himself in the congressional chamber after all of the delegates, friend and foe, have walked out on him. He has refused to budge on abolishing slavery in the new Constitution, and now all is lost, or so it seems. Alone in the dark, Adams asks, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care?”I thought of this scene while watching Joe Biden at Union Station last night pleading with his fellow citizens to not abandon our democratic institutions and norms. Biden seemed disheartened, and understandably so. He was making a closing argument for American democracy, and he seemed to be wondering if anybody is out there to hear the message—and whether anybody cares.I wonder too.Biden’s aides claim that he had been thinking for some time after his “Soul of the Nation” speech last summer in Philadelphia about making another statement on threats to democracy, but the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband seems to have persuaded the president to speak out now. I suspect that Biden feels, as I and others do, that what happened to Paul Pelosi—and, more important, the callous and disgusting reaction to it among some Republicans—marked a watershed moment.The brief speech in Union Station was a landmark address, but by that I do not mean that it was a great speech. There was no soaring rhetoric; there were no quotable phrases. Instead, the president of the United States talked about how his friend had been put in the hospital by a man with a hammer, and then asked the rest of us to think about whether we can stop our system of government from descending into authoritarianism and violence. No matter who wins or loses next week, that is an astounding question, and it is the right one to ask.The usual suspects in conservative media are, of course, dismissing Biden’s speech as just another partisan exercise. Their criticisms are partly a reflection of how denatured and corroded the American right has become now that it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump’s cult of personality. Few of them can imagine anyone doing anything as a matter of principle: Once you’ve sold your own soul, you are loath to believe that anyone else has kept theirs.Biden’s speech, however, sounded more like despair than partisanship. It’s not exactly shocking that a Democratic president would like to keep his congressional majority, but if that’s all Biden wanted, he could have made a better pitch for it. Instead, he ignored the economy, despite the polls showing that economic issues are at the top of voter concerns, and he took a direct swing at Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans,” which could alienate the last remaining moderate GOP voters.More important, he nationalized the issue of democracy by warning about the election deniers in state and local contests using their victories to unravel our electoral processes, and he anticipated the trouble that is likely to come if those same extremists lose and refuse to accept the outcome:
As I stand here today, there are candidates running for every level of office in America—for governor, Congress, attorney general, secretary of state—who won’t commit, that will not commit to accepting the results of the election that they’re running in. This is a path to chaos in America. It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful, and it’s un-American.
Biden called on Americans to summon two of our most endangered virtues—patience and faith—on election night. He knows that there is likely to be dangerous mischief on November 8, not least because so many Republicans have essentially promised it and, in some cases, done their best to ensure it.The president’s appeal to defend our democratic values will exasperate supposed pragmatists who believe that all people want to hear about is the price of cereal and bananas. Maybe the pragmatists are right, and voters don’t care about anything else. But a president betrays his oath to defend the Constitution if he allows his concerns about our democracy to be held hostage to the price of a gallon of gasoline. Presidents, unlike the occupants of lesser offices, must speak to the American people like they are adults capable of thinking about many things at one time, including foreign policy, crime, inflation—and the state of our democracy.And maybe the pragmatists are also correct that reminding Americans of their responsibilities as the stewards of their own freedoms will backfire. Democrats might well lose control of both houses this fall, and there’s little evidence that Biden’s speech will do much to prevent that. (As  the New Yorker writer Susan Glasser asked on Twitter during the speech, “Biden sounds like he's trying to persuade Americans about the threat to democracy. But who is there left to persuade?”)At the moment, however, a slew of candidates across the nation are promising to ditch the Constitution and the rule of law; armed goons are positioning themselves near ballot boxes in Arizona; Republicans and their supporters are making sick jokes about an alleged attempt to kidnap and torture the speaker of the House. Only the most self-absorbed and selfish leader would refuse to speak out. We had enough of that with the last president.This speech will soon be buried and forgotten in a blizzard of media cynicism and the buzz of impending election news. But the president of the United States told us something important last night. The only question is whether anyone cares.Related:
The courts are the only thing holding back total election subversion.
A Republican Congress is coming for Biden’s climate wins.
Imran Khan, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was wounded at a rally after a man shot at his convoy.
Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel conceded the election to Benjamin Netanyahu, setting the stage for Netanyahu to return to his former role as prime minister at the head of a far-right coalition.
The White House announced that U.S. embassy officials in Russia have met with the imprisoned WNBA player Brittney Griner.
(Jan Buchczik)
How to Love People Who Love ConspiraciesBy Arthur Brooks
In these polarized times, one of the laments I hear a lot from readers and friends is that people they are close to have fallen prey to conspiracy theories. This is strikingly common; after all, some scholars estimate that, in recent years, half of Americans endorsed at least one such belief.
Perhaps you are cringing as you look toward Thanksgiving, when someone you love will explain the truth about the midterm elections, or the real origins of the coronavirus. It can be very upsetting to hear a friend or family member say things that seem to you like obvious, falsifiable nonsense—it can feel almost as if they had joined a cult.
Taylor Swift’s best new songs aren’t technically on Midnights.
Star Wars gets political.
Photos: Celebrating the Day of the Dead, 2022
A still from the Netflix show Blockbuster. (Netflix)
Read. “Disaster Means ‘Without a Star,’” a poem by Franny Choi.“Human History, a front parlor / infinitely painted over with massacre, and into the fray came I, highly allergic, / quick to cry, and armed with fat fists of need.”Watch. Blockbuster, on Netflix, is a new sitcom about an obsolete business—and a meditation on our age of precarity.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Speaking of the movie 1776, this would be a good time to see it if you’ve never had the pleasure (or to rewatch it for a bit of preelection inspiration). Adapted from the Broadway show that won the 1969 Tony Award for Best Musical—you can see shots from the original production here—the movie is a delightful if mildly ahistorical retelling of the summer when America chose independence. The songs will stay with you, along with some witty dialogue and fine dramatic moments, including the showstopping “Molasses to Rum,” in which South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge slices Adams’s New England sanctimony about slavery to pieces. (Also, make sure to pull up the original Broadway soundtrack so you can hear “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” a slam on conservatives that the producer Jack Warner took out of the film at the request of none other than President Richard Nixon.)There is a new production of the play currently on Broadway, but I am too much of a curmudgeon to see it; I tend to like the original version of almost everything by nature, and the actor William Daniels will always be the voice of John Adams to me (although Paul Giamatti’s stunning performance as our second president in a 2008 HBO miniseries was a triumph). Yes, it’s Broadway and Hollywood, and it’s all very chipper and singable, but maybe a few hours of idealistic patriotism is just what we need right now.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Disagreements don’t have to end discussions. In fact, as researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School discussed on Wednesday, engaging with those who hold opposing views can be constructive and lead to new discoveries and new allies.
“Many of us look at conflict as something we’d rather avoid than engage in with confidence,” explained Francesca Gino, Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School during the Harvard Alumni streaming event. “But conflict and disagreement can be quite beneficial.”
Gino was joined by Julia Minson ’99, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School who researches the psychology of disagreement at the Minson Conflict and Collaboration Lab, for “How to Engage in Productive Disagreement.”
The business professor opened the evening with an example of such constructive sparring. Sharing video of the Pixar creative team discussing their heated arguments over the creation of the film “Toy Story,” she broke down the elements of what this team had been able to do.
“What stood out to Julia and myself is you hear about these intense disagreements and people coming out and saying, ‘That was an amazing discussion,’” said Gino, who is also affiliated with Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. “What was it that they figured out that allowed for disagreement to be productive? What can we all do so that disagreement turns out to be productive rather than damaging?”

“Many of us look at conflict as something we’d rather avoid than engage in with confidence. But conflict and disagreement can be quite beneficial.”
— Francesca Gino, Harvard Business School

Key, the researchers found, was honest and opening listening that incorporated “receptiveness to opposing views,” Minson said. She defined this characteristic as “the willingness to access, consider, and evaluate supporting and opposing views in a relatively impartial manner.”
That means, she said, listening as intently to ideas from the opposing side as you would your own. “You can’t just say, ‘I listened to it and it’s stupid,’” she cautioned. Nor can you listen only “to find the flaws in the argument.”
This requires some discipline, both researchers acknowledged. “It’s hard, and it’s uncomfortable to recognize that there is a different viewpoint,” said Gino. The challenges have only grown in recent years, Minson added. “Arguments have become more accusatory and more emotional,” she said. She blames social media. “It’s become so much easier to surround yourself with people who agree with you. Now you can go online and create your own little universe of people who think just like you. It makes it that much harder to exercise that muscle of engagement.” (To find how receptive you are, take their quiz at receptiveness.net.)
This elusive quality is worth pursuing, Minson said. She described a study at the Kennedy School executive education program that paired attendees to discuss controversial topics and then asked them to rate their partners’ receptiveness. “What we saw was interesting and hopeful,” said Minson. “The more receptive people saw their partner as being, the more they wanted to work with them.”
Key to these perceptions, the researchers found, was language. Using a language-processing algorithm designed by Imperial College Business School Assistant Professor Michael Yeomans (then a HBS postgrad), the executive group’s discussions were analyzed and certain types of words and phrases stood out. In particular, people responded to negation (“no”) and reasoning language ( “the reason is …” or “because”) negatively, while viewing acknowledgment (which Minson described as “using some of your airtime to restate the other person’s opinion”), hedges (“it could be …”), second-person pronouns, and agreement positively. That last, the researchers stressed, did not have to mean capitulation to an opposing view.
Discussing whether schools should close or remain open during a COVID outbreak, for example, a receptive person could say, “We both agree we want our children to be safe and get an excellent education,” said Minson. Finally, expressing a positive emotion also played a role in how the speaker is perceived.
Focusing on the elements that contributed to being viewed as receptive, Minson offered the acronym HEAR (hedging, emphasizing agreement, acknowledging, and reframing the positive). “Using this language has positive outcomes,” she said. Not only does it make other people want to work with you, she said, “it also makes the other side more receptive.”
In other words, “even when the other side seems to be combative and not receptive,” Gino said, “this approach can be contagious.
“If your intent is to persuade the other side, this is a more productive and effective approach,” she said.
That does not mean being receptive to opposing viewpoints is easy. “I’m always surprised by how much patience this takes and how hard it is to execute when you’re angry or tired,” Minson said. However, for these researchers, the conclusion is clear: People have more positive interactions if they believe the other person is receptive and truly wants to learn.

This weekend, I’ll be waking up to one of my favorite days of the year: a government-sanctioned 25-hour Sunday. Forget birthdays, forget my anniversary; heck, forget the magic of Christmas. On Sunday, I’ll get to do a bit of time traveling as most of the United States transitions out of daylight saving time back into glorious, glorious standard time.I may be a standard-time stan, but I’m no monster. I feel for the die-hard fans of DST. With the push of a button, or the turn of a dial, most Americans will be cleaving an hour of brightness out of their afternoons, at a time of year when days are already fast-dimming. Leaving work to a dusky sky is a bummer; a pre-dinner stroll cut short by darkness can really be the pits.But if we all put aside our differences for just a moment, we can celebrate the fact that this weekend, nearly all Americans—regardless of where they sit on the DST love-hate spectrum—will be blessed with a 25-hour day, and that freaking rocks. If we must live in a dumb world where the dumb clocks shift twice a dumb year, let’s at least come together on the objective greatness of falling back.[Read: The family that always lives on daylight saving time]I don’t want to minimize the nuisance of the time shift. Toggling back and forth twice a year is an absolute pain, and many Americans cheered when the Senate unanimously passed a proposal earlier this year to move the entire U.S. to permanent daylight saving time. But Katy Milkman, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the host of the podcast Choiceology—who, by the way, loathes the end of DST—told me we can all reframe the autumn clock change “as a windfall.” Sunday will contain a freebie hour to do whatever we like. Rafael Pelayo, a sleep specialist at Stanford, will be spending his at the farmers’ market; Ken Carter, a psychologist and self-described morning person at Emory University, told me he might chill with an extra cup of coffee and his cats. I’m planning to split my minutes between a nap and Paper Girls (the graphic novel, not the show).An hour isn’t enough time to learn a new language or cure cancer, or even to watch the entire season finale of The Rings of Power. But a little wiggle room could help kick-start a new habit, such as a gym routine, Milkman said, especially if you make a plan, tell a friend, and stick to it. Above all, she said, “do something to bring you joy.”Falling back, to me, is its own joy: It recoups a springtime loss, and resets the clocks to the time that’s always suited me best. It’s wicked hard to fall asleep when the light lingers past 8 or 9 p.m. I also struggle to get out of bed without a hefty dose of morning light, which has been scarce in the past few weeks. Going out for my prework run has meant a lot of stumbling around and using my phone as a crummy flashlight. If and, God willing, when we ditch the status quo, I maintain that permanent standard time >>>> permanent daylight saving time. (So maybe it’s not terrible that the DST-forever bill is now stalled in the House.)And I gotta say, the science (pushes glasses up nose) largely backs me and my fellow standardians up. Several organizations, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, have for years wanted to do away with DST for good. “Standard time is a more natural cycle,” Pelayo told me. “In nature we fall asleep to darkness and we wake up to light.” When people spend most of their year out of sync with these rhythms, “it reduces sleep duration and quality,” says Carleara Weiss, a behavioral-sleep-medicine expert at the University at Buffalo. The onset of DST has been linked to a bump in heart attacks and strokes, and Denise Rodriguez Esquivel, a psychologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, told me that our bodies may never fully adjust to DST. We’re just off-kilter for eight months.[Read: Daylight saving is a trap]For years, some researchers have argued that perma-DST would cut down on other societal woes: crime, traffic accidents, energy costs, even deer collisions. But research on the matter has produced mixed or contested results, showing that several of those benefits are modest or perhaps even nonexistent. And although sticking with DST might boost late-afternoon commerce, people might hate the shift more than they think. In the 1970s, the U.S. did a trial run of year-round DST … and it flopped. (Most of Arizona, where Rodriguez Esquivel lives, exists in permanent standard time; she told me it’s “really nice.”)Returning to the proper state of things won’t be without its troubles. Next week will have its missed meetings, fumbled phone calls, and general grumpiness. Although springing forward is usually tougher, “fallback blues,” Weiss told me, are absolutely a thing. The change-up may be extra hard on parents of very young kids, overnight workers, and people who don’t have a safe place to sleep. “It’s a very confusing time for our brain,” Rodriguez Esquivel told me. “Just be kind to yourself.” That’s why I’ll be having two breakfasts on Sunday: one when my body says it’s time, and one when the clock does. Carter told me it doesn’t hurt to be extra accommodating of others, too. “I try to keep quiet this time of year,” he said. “It doesn’t annoy me very much. But I’m secretly amused by people like you.”Realistically, many of us will just end up snoozing right through the bonus hour. Which is totally fine. I’m considering that plan, too. The only losers in that scenario will, alas, be my cats. They do not follow the clock changes, legislation be damned; a 25-hour day is to them a scourge if it means that I sleep in, and breakfast arrives a full hour late. In that event, they, unlike me, will eat when the clock decrees, and not a minute sooner.

A grim retrenchment is under way in America. A government report recently showed that life expectancy in the US took a steep drop in 2021, after another dip in 2020. On average, Americans can expect to live 76 years, the fewest since 25 years ago – and on a level with the latest recorded level in much less wealthy countries, such as Brazil or Vietnam.
Why are Americans dying so young? The major immediate cause of the drop in the last two years – the pandemic – is clear enough, but discrepancies date back to before the pandemic. By 2019, Chileans and Slovenians were already living longer than Americans.
Life expectancy in the US was flat for almost a decade before the recent drop, as citizens of other rich countries continued to live longer and longer each year. This fact represents a stunning – if largely unacknowledged – rebuke of the dominant view in some circles, especially in the tech and business sectors, that indicators like GDP and life expectancy show constant historical improvement in America thanks to technological progress, and will continue to do so (that is, if only regulators will cut taxes on capital gains).
Even reliably boosterish US pundits such as Matthew Yglesias – known for extolling America’s civilising improvements, such as tumble dryers – have had to admit the situation is bleak. “We are earning like Norwegians but dying like Latvians,” Yglesias writes in a recent post on his Substack.
The US may have a higher GDP per capita than even wealthy countries in western Europe. But what good is that money – or a tumble dryer, for that matter – if the lifestyle it supports, far from keeping death at bay, seems only to hasten its coming?
Possible explanations for the retrogression in American lifespans are not scarce. At the top of the list is a healthcare system that spends freely and yet achieves disappointing results. In Texas, the second-most populous state in the nation, nearly 20 per cent of the population lacks health insurance. Even those who do have insurance can be prevented from receiving the necessary care by a byzantine system of fees that often extract a steep toll from those who fail to navigate it adeptly enough – in the form of “out of network” costs and a panoply of other nasty surprises. This is despite the fact that the highest echelon of medical care in the US is the best in the world and that – due in part to a certain national hypochondria? – it screens more aggressively and more effectively for some cancers than Europe.
The US healthcare system has played a role, too, in another factor pushing American life expectancy downward: opioid and other drug overdoses, from which more than 100,000 died in 2021 alone.
[See also: American sociologist Dylan Riley: “Justice cannot be the lodestar of a new society”]
Lifestyle is also often cited as a killer – specifically, the national penchant for driving to places instead of walking, and for consuming too much sugary food and drink. Cars reduce the amount of exercise that people get and, especially when combined with alcohol, are deadly to pedestrians and drivers, too. While sugary foods contribute to obesity and a range of health problems. Could this be solved with a government campaign to tax sugary goods and get people out of cars?
This may depend on whether Americans want to consume less and drive less. Imploring the nation to restrain its love for material things like these is best done advisedly. As president during the energy crises of the 1970s, Jimmy Carter tried to do so in his famous “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979 – telling Americans that “piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose”. Days later, he reshuffled his cabinet; in little over a year, he lost re-election to Ronald Reagan who promised a return to supercharged consumption.
Joe Biden noticeably opted not to take a similar line this year when petrol prices spiked – and despite his own well-known history of commuting by train (the national train service has received lavish funding under his watch), the president seems more supportive of electric cars than expanding public transit as a next-generation transportation solution for the nation. Despite the slowly increasing influence of civil-society advocates for walkable cities, Americans’ love affair with the automobile seems just as passionate as ever. The rise of the electric car has made clear that even in the case where the US transitions to a low-carbon economy, it seems wholly possible for the car to maintain its dominance.
It is little wonder why Americans love cars with a special intensity. The automobile is a piece of private property that is movable. Unlike a train or bus, it operates on no fixed schedule or route set by an outside authority. It is a bubble that separates and protects the individual (or the nuclear family) from a potentially hostile outside world. In a word, it promises atomised freedom, safety and spontaneous mobility.
[See also: Is this America’s last real election?]
Even placing to one side the inexhaustible American mythos of the car, from the road trip to the high-speed chase to the fast food drive-through, the automobile captures so much of what so many Americans long for, and fear, that it is difficult to see how it could ever be abandoned – even if it exacts a mortal toll on the country.
On the topic of encouraging Americans to drive less or eat better, it is possible to debate the merits of public policy interventions that target individual behaviour – for example, the sneaky “nudges” that the Harvard scholar Cass Sunstein advocates, things like putting unhealthy food in harder-to-reach spots in stores. But it is also worth interrogating the assumptions of such policies. The idea is that enlightened officials can and should change the way people live to achieve for them outcomes the public desires but is incapable of realising, either because of personal weakness or structural forces arrayed against them.
But the best way to tackle structural forces that present Americans with a set of bad choices – and there are many – is head-on rather than indirectly. Instead of devising financial instruments that help Americans save money to defray unexpected health expenses, for example, it would be more effective, and simpler, to create a healthcare system that does not generate such expenses.
And in the case where individuals seem unable to choose what is better for them, we must ask, better according to whom? After all, people are owed the chance for a long and full life, but they are also owed the chance to live pleasantly. One does not have to hew to the “live fast, die young” school of thought to admit that what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” – mere existence, bereft of considerations about how life is lived – is not worth fighting for alone.
When life is good, prolonging the human lifespan becomes a much more worthy goal. And who can judge the good life except those seeking to live it? There are undoubtedly people who would accept endless controls on their behaviour (or “nudges”) in exchange for a life longer in years if not fuller of joy. But there are also many, in the US and elsewhere, who would refuse such a trade.
No discussion of the material reality of dying in America would be complete without considering the complex and contradictory valence of mortality in American culture. Mortal violence is a conspicuous presence in its society, from dramatised gun battles in action movies to the real violence on city streets and, most horribly, in the nation’s schools.
Homicide – having dropped significantly since the 1990s but having risen in 2020 and 2021, and still far above European levels – is another drag on the American life expectancy, its relative rarity set against the reality that its victims are often young. And unlike most of Europe, where capital punishment has been abolished, death can still come in the US from the state.
These dynamics have drawn extreme claims from commentators – that American society worships the gun as the Canaanites worshipped Moloch, the biblical god of child sacrifice; or that American society is motivated by Freud’s notion of the “death drive”, described as a deeply buried psychological urge to seek death as a return to the remote era before the dawn of multicellular life itself.
But such claims would seem to make the country out to be in some sense primitive, pre-modern – when it is anything but. In fact, the reality of death in America co-exists with a deep-seated, and distinctly modern, cultural refusal to reckon with its very imminence. In the Mexican Nobel Prize-winning poet Octavio Paz’s controversial Labyrinth of Solitude – a 1950 essay in the Mexican national character – Paz juxtaposes Mexican culture, which he says embraces death, with American culture, which “not only does not want to familiarise itself with death but actively avoids the idea”.
Why is this? Hollywood certainly incubates a sinister cult of youth, while a celebrity class terrified of death would rather make themselves carnivalesque with copious plastic surgery than accept the outward signs of ageing.
But a deeper cause might be found in the long-term cultural effects of a Protestantism that connects purity with health and godliness. In this model, illness becomes the mark of those not favoured by God: witness the unhinged response of Donald Trump to contracting Covid-19 in 2020, broadcasting a freakish positivity, downplaying the extent of his illness, and then insisting on being discharged prematurely from hospital to publicly pump his fist. Such behaviour, besides being odd, is probably unhealthy.
Culture is, of course, hard to quantify – and, luckily, not all Americans have the attitude of Trump or other celebrities to ageing and illness. But, counterintuitive as this might sound, it may still be the case that a greater societal sense of comfort with the prospect that all life comes to an end would represent an important step towards reversing the shrinking of American lives.
For the time being, however, the loudest voices seem to be pushing in the opposite direction. Americans have long been tempted by the misbegotten idea that, instead of dying, humans might simply be able to live forever. And as real-world life expectancy erodes, in tech circles the dream of eternal life has gained momentum in recent years. Tech billionaires from across the political spectrum, from the Democratic-aligned Bill Gates to the conservative PayPal founder Peter Thiel, have become taken with the idea of extending the human lifespan. “There are all these people who say that death is natural, it’s just part of life, and I think that nothing can be further from the truth,” Thiel said a decade ago. The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has reportedly funded a Silicon Valley lab investigating “longevity” technology.
The effort to cheat death by tech and venture-capital circles has been punctuated by the occasional bump in the road: a start-up offering rejuvenating infusions of young people’s blood shut down in 2019 after the government issued a warning against the procedure.
Technology does have an important role to play in producing improvements both to the quality and length of human life. But there is obvious hubris in the way Silicon Valley’s captains of industry are pursuing their goal – any reasonable person knows that denying death is no way to live well. And even putting that aside, a lack of attention to social considerations threatens to hamstring the positive effects of whatever technology might emerge from their investments.
Americans shouldn’t be fooled by Silicon Valley’s enticements of eternal life. Not only are humans inevitably mortal, the retrenchment of recent years proves beyond a doubt that further progress to living standards is by no means assured. Instead of falling victim to the dreams of cheating death that are emanating from villas in the Palo Alto hills of California – even as the country around them decays – what is needed is attention to the real economic and social structures that cheat Americans of life.
[See also: Bruno Latour and the philosophy of life]

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.In these polarized times, one of the laments I hear a lot from readers and friends is that people they are close to have fallen prey to conspiracy theories. This is strikingly common; after all, some scholars estimate that, in recent years, half of Americans endorsed at least one such belief.Perhaps you are cringing as you look toward Thanksgiving, when someone you love will explain the truth about the midterm elections, or the real origins of the coronavirus. It can be very upsetting to hear a friend or family member say things that seem to you like obvious, falsifiable nonsense—it can feel almost as if they had joined a cult.[Read: The prophecies of Q]Perhaps in the past you have tried to meet these beliefs with evidence and reason. Maybe you lost your patience and resorted to derision and mockery. Most likely, you made no progress and only strained your relationship. Fighting over the facts is very unlikely to convince anyone. The truth is that, often, the substance of conspiracy theories—the actual claims they make—isn’t why people cling to them so tightly. In some ways, these beliefs can make people happier. To those who hold them, they may bring a sense of belonging, control, and even entertainment. Understanding this can help you meet their views in a more compassionate and persuasive way.A conspiracy theory is the belief that powerful people have conspired to achieve a particular circumstance or event, and have done so in a covert way. Those who believe these theories often have what psychologists call a “conspiracy mentality,” or a general tendency to suspect that powerful people are acting in hidden ways.A big mistake we make in confronting conspiracy theories is assuming they provide nothing but harm to those who hold them. In fact, a tendency toward these beliefs may be wired into us, because they could have been helpful to our survival at times. For example, some scholars have theorized that true conspiracies by hostile forces in past times—before modern institutions such as civil rights and police protections—could be so deadly that it was better to be safe than sorry by embracing a paranoid idea that might well be false.Conspiracy beliefs can also bring tangible benefits for well-being. For example, they can provide a sense of control in a chaotic world. Research has shown that people who feel they have little control over their lives are more likely to hold superstitions (for example, that the number 13 is unlucky), see spurious correlations (in, say, the stock market), and believe in conspiracies. Similarly, people with a need to feel unique and special may gravitate toward unusual beliefs, such as conspiracies, held by a minority of people.These beliefs can also provide a sense of community, as Kelly Weill wrote earlier this year in The Atlantic in an article about people who believe in a flat Earth. Even though conspiracy theories can drive a wedge between those who believe them and their friends and family who don’t, at the same time, these unpopular views can create a sense of kinship among people who hold them—sort of like unpopular tastes or esoteric knowledge. For more than a century among some social scientists, this has been called the “sociology of secret societies.” (Come to think of it, with our specialized language and technical toolkit, we social scientists might be considered an example of just such a society, although hopefully not a conspiratorial one.)[Read: When your friends fall off the edge of the Earth]Plus, conspiracy theories can be, well, fun. Think of all the movies you’ve enjoyed where the hero has to get to the bottom of something that powerful, bad people are secretly doing. People find conspiracies entertaining in real life too. In a paper published this year in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers described experiments in which people were offered both conspiratorial and non-conspiratorial explanations for big events, such as the Notre Dame fire. The former explanations were rated as more entertaining and elicited stronger emotions than the latter. Conspiracy theories are where current events meet entertainment; it’s easy to see why they are such good business on cable television and social media.Understanding the benefits that conspiracy beliefs give to their adherents doesn’t mean ignoring or minimizing the danger they can sometimes bring in terms of radicalization, prejudice, or even violence. If someone you know and love entertains conspiracy theories, it’s reasonable to be concerned about these threats. Or maybe it just feels undignified to see someone you love falling prey to ideas that seem to you not just incorrect but preposterous. But to comprehend why they hold these beliefs can make you more empathetic and thus more effective in dealing with them.Keeping in mind the benefits that conspiracy theories bring, here is a two-step plan—starting with the behavior to resist, and then what to do instead—to help someone change course (or at least to help change the subject and protect your relationship).1. Resist the urge to debunk.I remember arguing with a colleague years ago about what I considered a patently absurd conspiracy in our workplace. It felt like every way I showed that his theory was ridiculous simply hardened his resolve. In the end, he said, “The more you say I’m wrong, the more I believe I’m right.” I figured he was just closed-minded, but then I encountered the work of the psychologist Rob Brotherton, the author of Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. Brotherton writes about the so-called backfire effect, where a person who believes conspiratorial views holds them more strongly in the face of alternate explanations or refuting evidence. Debunking is often a doomed venture.2. Focus instead on what you have in common.Maybe you can remember the experience of leaving home for the first time, feeling alone and insecure. Imagine that in this vulnerable state you fell in with a group of people who made you feel better—less alone. They had views very different from those of your family and old friends, a difference you saw starkly when you went back home. If your family attacked your new way of thinking, they would in effect be attacking the one thing that had made life tolerable for you during a lonely time. Homecoming would have been much sweeter if they’d simply welcomed you back and focused on the things you still had in common, right?[Read: I was a teenage conspiracy theorist]Do the same with your loved ones who hold odd or incorrect beliefs. Talk about your shared loves and cherished memories, not the things you disagree on. Do things together that you used to enjoy, and go back to your old corny inside jokes. At the very least, this will make the time at hand easier, and it might just create a line back to reality for your loved one, if and when they’re ready for it.One last point worth considering is the costs and benefits to you of focusing on a loved one’s conspiracy beliefs. Something that astonishes me about humans is our capacity to ruin things we love by focusing exclusively on what we hate. I understand this from an evolutionary perspective, of course: Survival often requires attention to the speck of threat in a vast space of comfort. I also understand it from a practical perspective: It is terrible to see someone you love in the grip of something you consider insane or even dangerous.But that tendency is woefully maladapted at Thanksgiving dinner when we insist on drilling into Aunt Marge’s weird views on fluoride instead of focusing on the warmth and goodness of being together as a family. Sometimes, the problem with conspiracy theories isn’t that others hold them, but that we focus on them alone, making things unnecessarily unpleasant. When you think about it carefully, you might just conclude that being right is less valuable than enjoying some love in your life.

Photographs by Philip MontgomeryHave you ever met someone who’s watching their life’s work—their very legacy—fall apart in front of their eyes? I’m talking to two of them right now.Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox spent the morning juggling plates of chorizo and shouting orders in Spanish toward the kitchen behind them. Now they’re catching their breath in a corner booth at El Portal, the South Phoenix restaurant they’ve run for two decades. They point out the members of their family depicted in a mural on the nearby wall, retracing the mission that brought them to this place and wondering aloud how it all went wrong.I came to Arizona looking to answer the question of why, over the past few years, so many Hispanics have fled the Democratic Party. This exodus is evident across numerous counties, congressional districts, and battleground states, but the stakes seem highest in Arizona, where Republicans are promoting a slate of extremist candidates and counting on Hispanic voters to help put them in office.What I found is Earl and Mary Rose, a couple in their mid-70s and the twin bosses of a Phoenix political machine, reckoning with the same awful conclusion I have heard from so many Hispanics, both here and around the country. “The party doesn’t care about us,” Mary Rose tells me. “They pretend to care every two years.”When Earl and Mary Rose bought El Portal in 1999, in the working-class barrio of Grant Park, they didn’t know much about running a kitchen. Earl had been one of few Hispanic lawmakers in the state legislature; Mary Rose broke barriers twice, as the first Hispanic woman ever elected to the city council and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. But the Wilcoxes envisioned the cramped, dusky dining room of El Portal as more than a place for cheap tacos and tequila; it would be a de facto headquarters for the city’s Hispanic Democrats. There weren’t many of them. But Earl and Mary Rose knew that was about to change.The Hispanic population was just beginning to boom, and the potential of these voters to tip elections toward Democrats—nationally, but particularly in states like Arizona—was becoming more apparent with every campaign. Hispanics are not a monolith, even if the political class treated them as such. The Wilcoxes wanted to harness the political promise of their community. What they didn’t want was to be taken advantage of. They felt that Democrats were prone to patronizing Hispanics, offering noble rhetoric but never a seat at the table. Earl and Mary Rose decided that the only way to advance their interests was to start organizing, creating a base of power separate from the party’s, making the Hispanic vote so essential that no Democrat could win without it.The Wilcoxes staged protests, hosted candidate events, ran voter-registration drives, transported voters to the polls. Yet the next two decades brought little but defeat: Two losing battles over comprehensive immigration reform. The signing of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s law codifying racial profiling. Perpetual conflict with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who terrorized Hispanic neighborhoods with “round-ups” and targeted his political opponents. (He once indicted Mary Rose; she and Earl sued him and the county for violating their civil rights, resulting in a $975,000 settlement.) And then there was Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
Mary Rose and Earl Wilcox, (top) co-owners of El Portal (bottom), a restaurant in South Phoenix (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Finally, in 2020, a breakthrough: Joe Biden didn’t just win the election, he won Arizona, only the second time since Harry Truman’s administration that a Democrat had carried the state. Given Biden’s winning margin—three-tenths of a percentage point—and the unprecedented turnout of Hispanic voters, there could be no disputing who had delivered Arizona to the president-elect.The state’s Hispanic population had tripled since 1990, but Republicans had spent those years doubling down on the harsh policing and immigration policies that appealed to their white conservative base. Earl and Mary Rose had spent decades waiting for the GOP’s bill to come due. On Election Night 2020, they toasted to a new era.And then the strangest thing happened. People started coming into El Portal to vent their frustrations and unload their grievances—against the Democratic Party.​​“Our community, we may not be educated at the highest levels, but we have a lot of street smarts. We know when people are bullshitting us,” Earl tells me, motioning to the people sitting around us. “You know what they say to Democrats now? ‘Es pura cábula.’ Bunch of bullshit.”Over the past few years, Hispanics have begun abandoning the Democratic Party, defying generations of political patterns and causing varying degrees of panic on the left. In the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, they won the Hispanic vote by 40 points nationally. In 2020, Democrats still carried the vote by an estimated 33 points against Trump himself, though the party’s margin against GOP candidates nationwide shrank to 27 points. This summer, numerous polls showed Hispanics splitting in a statistical tie between the two parties. Even if such findings are exaggerated—several recent surveys have shown Democrats reestablishing an advantage among these voters—it’s evident that Republicans are poised next week to win their biggest share of Hispanics in the modern era.Whether this translates into outright GOP victories is harder to predict, given the party’s continued hemorrhaging of white suburban voters. Indeed, this is what makes the implications of a Hispanic partisan realignment so profound: At a moment when Democrats have begun to dominate the affluent, college-educated vote that for decades formed the cornerstone of the Republican coalition, perhaps the only thing that can keep the GOP competitive is an infusion of support from the very middle- and working-class Hispanics who were, at this moment in history, supposed to deliver the Democrats a foolproof majority.Given the ferocity of the criticisms Earl relays to me from his patrons—Democrats are insufficiently patriotic; they are elitist in their cultural sensibilities; and they are oblivious to the struggles and priorities of working people—I ask the obvious question: How durable is his party’s hold on the Hispanic vote?
Guests gather for an anniversary party at the American Legion post next door to El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
He thinks for a moment. There’s a professor from Arizona State, he tells me, who comes by often. One recent morning, after overhearing some of Earl’s regulars sounding off on the Democratic Party over breakfast, the professor pulled him aside. He could sense that Earl was anxious, and told him not to worry. Whatever gains the GOP was making were bound to be temporary. Hispanics, the professor told him, would never abandon the Democratic Party.Earl shakes his head. “I’m not so sure anymore,” he says.The Democrats’ predicament today is 20 years in the making.It’s almost hard to remember now, but in 2002, Democrats were deep in the minority. The president, George W. Bush, was immensely popular, and the GOP was about to win strong congressional majorities in the midterms. There was no easy path back to power for Democrats. Salvation arrived in the form of a book, written by the political scientist Ruy Teixeira and the journalist John B. Judis, called The Emerging Democratic Majority. The book, which analyzed evolving social structures relative to voting behaviors, argued that because America was becoming more educated, more urban, more secular, and more diverse, Democrats were “on the verge of establishing the same kind of ‘lock’ on the electoral college that the Republicans enjoyed in the 1980s.”On the left, the book was treated as something akin to divine prophecy. Though Teixeira and Judis took pains to avoid having their work reduced to an end-of-white-America analysis, it was inevitable: The book documented how, every election cycle, minorities were increasing as a share of the overall electorate while non-college-educated white voters were decreasing at an even faster clip. A phrase that appeared nowhere in the book—“Demographics are destiny”—became a kind of support-group mantra for progressives whose consolation after Bush’s reelection in 2004 was the assurance of a long game that was already being won.“It took hold because, let’s face it, this was something Democrats really wanted to hear,” Teixeira, a Democrat himself, told me this summer. “And so, of course, when Obama got elected in 2008, it was viewed as a validation of that analysis—even though Obama’s election was more complicated than that.”Democrats had won big among nonwhite voters since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. What set apart Barack Obama’s victory wasn’t necessarily his margins—he carried two-thirds of Hispanics, per exit polls, and 95 percent of Blacks—but the mass mobilization of these and other groups that had historically gone underrepresented. Obama assembled “a coalition of the ascendant,” as my colleague Ron Brownstein put it, cornering the demographics—young people, women with college degrees, and minorities, particularly Hispanics—that were emerging as the future of the electorate. By emphasizing these groups, by elevating them and celebrating their inclusion in the party’s coalition, Democrats were portraying themselves as the party of a new America.When Obama put that same winning coalition back together in 2012, running up the same crushing margins among nonwhite voters, “Demography is destiny” became conventional wisdom, and not just on the left. Two days after Mitt Romney’s defeat, Fox’s Sean Hannity called for comprehensive immigration reform, complete with a path to citizenship, lest Hispanic voters usher Republicans into permanent minority status. The national GOP commissioned an autopsy report focused on repairing the relationship with Hispanics. Senator Lindsey Graham, who led a team of Republicans on a doomed mission to fix the nation’s immigration laws, warned that his party was entering “a demographic death spiral.”But neither the left nor the right really understood Hispanics, who were motivated by different issues than were Blacks—to the extent that they could be accurately categorized at all. In Florida alone, Cubans are generally more conservative than Colombians, who are generally more conservative than Puerto Ricans; the Mexicans who live across the Southwest have distinct ideological profiles that depend on how long they’ve been in the United States. All the emphasis on nonwhites, and the GOP’s inability to win them, made it hard to see the very different reasons that different blocs had for supporting Democrats—or their different degrees of partisan loyalty.
Josue Gomez, Alejandro Villa, and Brandon Gomez canvass a neighborhood in South Phoenix, encouraging residents to register to vote. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“In my opinion, the Latino vote has always had a swing dimension to it,” says Carlos Odio, a former Obama aide who specialized in Hispanic outreach and in 2019 co-founded the Miami-based firm Equis Labs. “Now, it just so happened to swing the same way over a series of elections. It’s like a coin flip landed on heads, over and over again, for a variety of reasons. But we keep thinking the coin will always land on heads. I think it’s a mistake.”There are two ironies at work. The first is that it required the presidency of Donald Trump—he of the “I love Hispanics!” caption on a Cinco de Mayo tweet, fork digging into a Trump Tower taco bowl—for some Democrats to question their own dogma. Trump was supposed to be uniquely unacceptable to minorities, and to Hispanics in particular, given his assessment of Mexicans as, among other things, “rapists.” Yet Democrats didn’t see major gains with Hispanics during his four years in office. Instead, their margins shrank.“In the end, the 2020 election wasn’t won by the ‘ascendant’ nonwhite voters at all,” Teixeira told me. “It was the college-educated white voters who won the election for Biden.”Hence the second irony: The very thing that breathed life into the Democratic Party 20 years ago—the focus on identity and inclusion—is making it more popular with white voters, and less popular with Hispanic voters. (This is what far-right fear merchants like Tucker Carlson fail to grasp: The immigrants demonized by his “Great Replacement” rhetoric are now, in some respects, likelier to vote Republican than the people they are supposedly replacing.)Democrats like Teixeira believe that the party has become culturally detached from Hispanic voters, moving too far left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. Democrats like Odio say the real problem is a “class disconnect” in which Democrats are catering to the cultural concerns of economically secure whites at the expense of the pocketbook priorities of working-class Hispanics.Neither man is wrong. Hispanics are leaving the Democratic Party for many different reasons. This represents “a sea change” in our politics, Teixeira said, whether his fellow Democrats want to accept it or not. “The idea that what we’re seeing from the Hispanic vote recently is a deviation, and that they will snap back to their historic preference for the Democrats two to one, I think it’s a total illusion,” he said. “The real question is how far this trend goes.”The timing couldn’t be worse for Democrats. According to Pew Research, the U.S. Hispanic population has grown to 62 million from fewer than 10 million in 1970. (Hispanics accounted for more than half of America’s population growth from 2010 to 2020.) In the last election, Hispanics eclipsed African Americans in terms of raw eligible voters. Hispanics are not yet a national force—their numbers are still diluted in the upper Midwest, for instance—but in several key battleground states, such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, they have become the most essential, and most coveted, demographic.“We’re in a game of tug-of-war. There are two sides,” Odio told me. “Democrats are going to lose where they let go of the rope.”I asked him where Democrats are in the most trouble with Hispanic voters, and Odio didn’t hesitate. It’s the place where he lives: Miami, Florida.Juan Cuba can still remember the moment he began to worry.It was 2013, and Democrats were euphoric after Obama’s back-to-back victories. Not only had the president carried Florida in both elections, but he had made a statement in Miami-Dade County, a place crowded with Cuban Americans, who, due to historic distrust of the Democratic Party dating back to John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs, have aligned more with the GOP than have other Hispanics. Obama won the state’s most populous county by 16 points in 2008 and 24 points in 2012. In a place where Republicans had spent a generation building relationships with Hispanic voters—much of it thanks to Jeb Bush, the popular bilingual governor, whose brother ran two ultracompetitive presidential campaigns in Miami-Dade—Obama’s triumphs felt like a watershed.
Campaign volunteers rally primary voters in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
And yet Cuba, who assumed the role of executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party after Obama’s reelection, started seeing red flags. As the 2014 midterm campaign got under way, Democrats spoke with a certainty—bordering on arrogance—about the Hispanic vote being locked up. Those who had turned out for Obama, Cuba told me, were now considered part of the party base. Charlie Crist, the Democratic nominee for governor, campaigned as if Hispanics were a sure thing. They would vote, and they would vote for Democrats.Crist lost the governor’s race by about 64,000 votes. And although he won Miami-Dade by a sizable margin, turnout lagged relative to both parties’ expectations. “Had we engaged more voters, especially Hispanic voters, we would have won that race,” Cuba said.When Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination in 2016, Democrats in South Florida stressed to her team the importance of not repeating that mistake. Clinton poured resources into Miami-Dade, running a ground game that located existing voters, registered new ones, and tracked both to make sure they were casting ballots. Cuba’s concerns about the party’s complacency were assuaged. He had a new worry, however. The messages used by Clinton and her Democratic allies to mobilize Hispanic voters were nothing like what they’d used in the Obama campaigns. There was little about hope and change. It was mostly about fear and victimhood.“I’m an immigrant myself, and when I think back to what worked on those Obama campaigns, it was really that he spoke to the aspirations of Hispanics. He talked about the American dream. He gave people a sense of how the Democratic Party was about social mobility through hard work,” Cuba said. “But by 2016, we’d become less the party of the American dream, and more the party of anti-Trump.”It worked, at least initially: Clinton carried Miami-Dade by nearly 30 points against Trump—an unprecedented margin in Florida’s biggest county. But Cuba, who rose to the position of county party chair in 2017, recalls how quickly the anti-Trump message began losing potency. The economy was roaring to life after eight sluggish years of post-recession recovery at the same time that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, emboldened by Bernie Sanders’s insurgency in 2016, was espousing an open distrust of capitalism and questioning the existence of opportunity and upward mobility in America.“I’ll never forget, we did a focus group with Hispanic voters in 2019,” Cuba said. “It was clear that a lot of these Hispanics voted against Trump in 2016 because they were scared of him. And by 2019, they weren’t scared anymore.”
María-Elena López has held a variety of positions within the Miami-Dade Democratic Party. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
María-Elena López, who held a variety of positions under Cuba in the county party, saw this shift taking place in real time. She believes that there is no real mystery to it: While Trump successfully portrayed himself as a populist achieving hard-won economic growth—signing tax cuts into law, touting a record-shattering stock market, boasting the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate in history—Democrats came across as a bunch of out-of-touch idealogues. Promises of shared social progress, she told me, offend the sensibilities of many first- and second-generation immigrants who hate the idea of government handouts.“We’re not a political party; we’re a charity. And you know what? These people don’t want charity,” López said. “These immigrants come here to make money and keep their families safe. They are not here because the sea levels are rising, or because of social justice, or anything else. We’re out there talking about racism and the Green New Deal and defunding the police, and we’re freaking them out.”López is a former Republican who, in the mid-1990s, became estranged from the GOP of her youth. She became an avid Democrat during Obama’s first run, got deeply involved with local party politics, and today serves as first vice chair of the county party. She counts herself as a progressive on nearly every issue. But, López said, many of her fellow progressives don’t appreciate how fundamentally conservative the Hispanic community is—more religious, more entrepreneurial, more working class—relative to the other cogs in the Democratic coalition.At one point in our conversation, I mentioned to López how the overturning of Roe v. Wade seemed to be muddying forecasts of a Republican romp at the polls in November; how some Democrats, particularly those running in wealthy white suburbs, were gaining momentum in their campaigns by hammering the GOP’s anti-abortion platform. López, who had been quite animated, suddenly lowered her voice.“You see, that’s a perfect example. I’m telling every single one of my candidates here, do not talk about abortion in this campaign,” López said. “You have a lot of Latinos who are fine with abortion being the law of the land—but they are against it morally. They may not be, quote-unquote, pro-life, but don’t shove the issue in their face. Don’t force them to choose sides. They might not choose the side you would think.”To some extent, López said, the same principle applies to other issues she feels Democrats are enamored of—green energy and racial justice, individual pronouns and group identities. “What the hell is a ‘Latinx’?” she said, throwing up her arms. “Now we’re inventing language?” (This was but one of the many unsolicited rants I heard against the term Latinx.)
Campaign volunteers surround Maria Dominguez and her children as she goes to vote in the Florida primary. Originally from Nicaragua, Dominguez recently obtained U.S. citizenship; this was her first time voting in the country. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
López said it’s all about opportunity cost: Every minute Democrats spend on topics that appeal to small portions of their existing base is time that could have been spent speaking to a single theme that preoccupies voters across the ideological spectrum: jobs, opportunity, upward mobility. “You can still be the party of all those other things,” she said. “Just don’t talk about them so much.”Of course, the challenge for Democrats isn’t just modulating the message; it’s also combatting the right-wing misinformation machine.When I sat down with Joe Garcia on the narrow, concrete-slabbed patio of a Miami Beach café, the former congressman spoke in fatalistic tones. A political party is only as good as its rhetoric, Garcia told me, and in South Florida, “Democrats are losing the rhetoric war to Republicans—badly.”  Garcia, who was elected alongside Obama in 2012 and represented his native Cuban neighborhoods in western Miami-Dade, said Republicans have always been craftier in delivering their messages on Spanish-language TV and radio. What’s new, he said, is the way conservatives have swarmed the most popular social-media pages and WhatsApp chat groups in his community, relentlessly circulating half-sourced posts that portray the Democratic Party as weak on crime and soft on socialism.
Former Representative Joe Garcia smokes a cigar outside Pinecrest Bakery in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“Look at Biden’s new Cuba policies, for instance,” Garcia said. What the administration announced in the spring—the relaunching of a family-reunification program, increased flights to the island, an easing of restrictions on the money Americans can send and invest there—“should actually be more popular with Cubans than Trump’s hard-line policies,” Garcia said.But the White House—according to numerous Democrats on the ground—did nothing to coordinate a messaging strategy around these policy changes. Nobody here could get booked on a local news program, or write a social-media post defending the new policies, because they found out about them at the same time everyone in the general public did. As a result, Garcia told me, puffing a massive Cuban cigar, “Democrats are getting killed, every single day, on Spanish-language media here, even though it’s an argument we should be winning.”This episode reflects a broader intellectual arrogance, Garcia said. The conviction that history and demography are on the Democrats’ side dulls the political instinct of persuasion. “Look, I’m a big fan of Barack Obama. But he turned our party into a religious order,” he said. “When you think you’re right—no, when you know you’re right—everybody should just get it. You stop making the argument.”Garcia pointed to 2018, when Democrats nominated Andrew Gillum for governor—a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Garcia and his fellow Democrats in Miami could already recite the attacks on Gillum as a sleeper socialist. When those attacks came, Gillum didn’t do much to dispel them. (When NBC’s Chuck Todd asked if he was a socialist, Gillum replied simply, “No, I’m a Democrat.”) He wound up winning Miami-Dade by 21 points—down from Clinton’s 30-point margin two years before—and lost the election by 32,463 votes statewide. “Let’s face it,” Garcia said. “We lost the governorship to Ron DeSantis because our nominee wouldn’t come out and say, ‘I’m not a goddamn socialist.’”Democrats here say the national party should have learned a hard lesson from that campaign. Instead, after 2018, the party’s ranks began to swell with influential young progressives, such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who championed far-left policies while openly embracing the socialist label. Moderate Democrats were reluctant to push back. It was a Republican dream come true. By the time Trump ran for reelection in 2020, the GOP had scaled up the socialism attacks nationwide. The reward was clearest in South Florida: Republicans knocked off two Democratic congressional incumbents, and Trump closed the gap in Miami-Dade to seven points, a 23-point swing from the 2016 election.The name “AOC” came up in dozens of my conversations with Hispanic Democrats around the country, many of whom are struggling to neutralize the socialism charge in their own communities. By turning the young representative into a boogeyman, Garcia told me, Republicans forced Democrats to play defense over labels and abstractions while rendering the left’s version of 21st-century populism unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate that might otherwise be receptive to it.
Campaign volunteers shout their support for candidates outside the Westchester Regional Library in Miami, Florida. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“She is not Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Mao, or anything like that. She’s a classic northeastern liberal who’s pushing a social agenda that, in many respects, has real viability at a time like this,” Garcia said of Ocasio-Cortez. “So, how do you shut down the debate? You engage in name-calling. You use propaganda to scare us from acting on the issues most important to our base.”He also acknowledges, however, that the Democratic base is changing. Progressive policies—around climate, or guns, or even immigration—might poll well with the liberal, college-educated wing of the party. But they might also continue to alienate the working class, including the Hispanic working class, from the Democratic brand. Days before I sat down with Garcia in Miami Beach, a poll from The New York Times and Siena College showed, for the first time in the survey’s history, that “Democrats had a larger share of support among white college graduates than among nonwhite voters.”This is what Carlos Odio meant when he told me national Democrats have “let go of the rope” in Miami-Dade County. It wasn’t that his party would no longer compete for votes down there; rather, it was that his party was acknowledging a new reality, in which affluent white voters are a higher political priority than are working-class Hispanics. This would have been unthinkable just five years ago. I asked Garcia if he was comfortable with such a trade-off.He shrugged. “That’s how we won last time.”In Bruno Lozano’s blue pickup truck, the air-conditioning whistling through every vent, we stopped and gazed at the Del Rio International Bridge. It was here, Lozano told me, that in September 2021 tens of thousands of Haitian migrants gathered underneath the bridge and set up camp for several days in extreme heat. Del Rio had dealt with migrant waves before, but nothing like this. The city could not handle the influx; its border-processing facilities were at capacity, its humanitarian workers past their breaking point. The community was panicked. Lozano, then the mayor, was desperate. Some of these migrants, he thought, were going to die.“I’m right here, at the bridge, watching this thing spiral out of control. And Democrats in Washington are like, ‘Nothing to see here,’” Lozano said.
Bruno Lozano (left), a former mayor of Del Rio, Texas, says his warnings to Democratic leadership about a deteriorating situation at the southwest border went largely unheeded. An abandoned bus in Del Rio (right), where migrants discarded clothing after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Lozano told me he reached out to every Democratic official he could think of, in Texas and beyond, pleading for any help or resources they could offer. When that failed, he asked them to come visit Del Rio, to at least shine a light on what was happening at the border. “They looked the other way,” Lozano said. “They just pretend it’s not happening.”[Caitlin Dickerson: Democrats’ free pass on immigration is over]When he was elected mayor of Del Rio in 2018, Lozano, just 35 years old at the time, fit the profile of a rising star in the Democratic Party. An openly gay Hispanic military veteran, Lozano “checked every box” for the party. Since he had defeated a Republican incumbent just as his county was beginning to turn red, Lozano said, “you would figure Democrats might listen when I’m telling them something is wrong.”Lozano said he began sounding the alarm almost as soon as Biden took office. He told his fellow Democrats that, for all the damage done by Trump’s cruel border-security policies, a relaxed approach to border enforcement could prove even more disastrous. He warned them of a potential humanitarian or national-security crisis. He told high-ranking party officials in Austin and in Washington—including during a visit to the White House for an LGBTQ pride event—that Hispanics in his community were turning on the Democratic Party, in part because of its indifference to the chaos at the southern border.He told me they refused to listen. And today, Lozano said, pulling into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn a few miles from the border, the problem is worse than ever.The Ramada is where locals host wedding receptions, where businesspeople and politicians meet for breakfast, and where, on a blazing July afternoon, the Del Rio Chamber of Commerce was holding its monthly luncheon. There was no vacancy at the hotel; rooms were booked for Border Patrol agents who had flooded into the area to reinforce a sector that was being overrun.“This is the biggest wave of illegal immigration in American history, and we’re at the epicenter of it here in Del Rio,” Jason Owens, the Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, announced at the luncheon. “In the last 24 hours, we’ve apprehended 2,240 people in this sector alone.”The room buzzed. Forty or so people, local entrepreneurs, most of them Hispanic and many of them lifelong Democrats, exchanged looks of dismay. A few expletives could be heard. Owens wasn’t done.“In fiscal year 2021, we apprehended nearly 260,000 people in the Del Rio sector. That was more than the previous nine fiscal years combined,” Owens said. “This fiscal year … we are already in excess of 330,000 people apprehended in this sector. Last year was record-breaking; this year, we’ve already shattered it.”
Deputy Jaime Guzman searches for migrants just off the shore of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Part of this can be attributed to the continued enforcement of Title 42, a COVID-era policy that suspended asylum requests and authorized the automatic expulsion of single adult migrants who hailed from certain countries; many of those migrants have been apprehended and expelled more than once, driving the number of crossings higher. Because of the known gaps in America’s immigration policy, Owens said, many migrants in this area follow a trail to where they know Border Patrol will be waiting. Those who are allowed to stay in the U.S.—because they are not subject to expulsion, or because they have no criminal record—are typically processed, then detained or released, with orders to appear at a future court date.Owens said it’s the migrants who go out of their way not to get caught—he cited data from video monitoring suggesting that roughly 140,000 people have crossed unmolested in this sector in fiscal year 2022—who worry him the most. Those 140,000 who got away combined with the 330,000 apprehensions makes for 470,000 illegal crossings from October through July—in the Del Rio sector alone. “And there are nine sectors along the southwest border,” Owens said.When he opened the meeting to questions, person after person demanded to know how this could be happening, who was to blame, and what they could do to punish the political actors responsible.“How do you feel,” Sarita Perales, an administrator from the local hospital, asked, “about the Biden open-border policy?”Owens fought a smirk. “The administration will tell you that the border’s not open,” he replied, eliciting groans from the audience.Technically, the border is not open. But you wouldn’t know it from spending a few days in Del Rio. People I spoke with down there said they’d never seen anything like the mass of humanity moving across the border since Biden became president. In fairness, apprehensions at the southern border began to rise in the spring of 2020 and continued to climb throughout Trump’s final year as president. But the numbers spiked much higher after Biden took office. It’s difficult to examine the policies of his administration—which, according to the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute, “narrowed the scope of immigration enforcement in the U.S. interior” and “adopted something of a new approach to border enforcement”—and dispute the conclusion that Democrats have made it easier for migrants to attempt and complete an unlawful crossing into the U.S., making a historically bad problem much worse.This is exactly what Perales, a mother of four, feared would happen. Born in Mexico, Perales came to the U.S. legally when she was 7 years old and became a naturalized citizen in 2017. Her first opportunity to vote in a presidential election was in 2020, and she felt “so disappointed with my choices.” Perales grew up in Del Rio, a place with deep Democratic roots. She has progressive sensibilities on many social issues. She hated some of the hard-line policies of the Trump administration, including the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. But the more she listened to activists and elected officials on the left, the more worried she became that Democrats would embrace the other extreme—refusing to secure the border at all.
Left: The fence that separates the United States and Mexico in Val Verde County. Right: Abandoned backpacks inside a residential home used by migrants while the owner was away. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Perales ended up voting for Trump. Despite disagreeing with him and the Republican Party on a host of issues, she told me, she plans to vote a straight-GOP ticket in 2022, because of the chaos Democrats have brought to her community.“Where is our respect for laws? Where is our respect for the people already here?” Perales said. “I’m an immigrant; I’m also an American. We are allowing our country to be overrun.”Studies and polling suggest that Hispanics who entered the U.S. legally tend to be more conservative on questions of immigration. Some progressive Hispanics have bemoaned this, likening it to selfishly slamming shut a door behind you. Perales insisted that she doesn’t feel threatened, economically or otherwise, by new immigrants. She understands the hopeless circumstances that drive so many people from impoverished and conflict-ridden countries to make the journey north. What worries her is the perception of “crossing without consequences.” She wants the U.S. to broadcast a stricter approach to immigration, not just for the sake of the rule of law and for the stability of her community, but also for the well-being of those thinking of coming here.“They’re being treated so inhumanely,” Perales said of the migrants traveling to America. “But it’s the open-borders policy that is leading to that inhumane treatment.”
Joe Frank Martinez, the sheriff of Val Verde County, photographed along the U.S.-Mexico border wall (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Joe Frank Martinez, the sheriff of Val Verde County, told me the same thing when I visited his office in Del Rio. A strong show of deterrence at the border, he said, is the decent thing to do. Not a week went by this summer, Martinez said, that he and his deputies didn’t discover a body of someone who had either drowned in the river or perished in the heat. Shortly before my visit, he told me, they recovered four corpses in the span of three days. (I checked the weather app on my phone. It was 106 degrees outside.)Like most of the sheriffs in South Texas, Martinez is a Democrat. But definitions are a funny thing down there. Many of the residents have ancestral roots in both old Mexico and present-day Texas; they identify as “Tejanos.” In the same way Tejanos here don’t identify with, say, Mexican Americans in Arizona, Democrats here don’t identify with Democrats just about anywhere else. Martinez is pro-life, pro-gun, and generally conservative in ways that don’t mesh with the modern Democratic Party.He believes that both parties deserve blame for failing to fix a broken immigration system and “put something in place that can reasonably allow people to make a legal entry.” But, Martinez insisted, this present crisis is one of his own party’s making. “Right now, these migrants feel like they’ve got a standing invitation from this administration to cross the border,” he said.It wasn’t long ago that Democrats ruled South Texas. Today, Martinez told me, “the Democratic strongholds in Del Rio aren’t real Democratic anymore.” Val Verde County, which Democrats carried by an average of eight points in the previous three presidential elections, went for Trump by 10 points in 2020. The Twenty-third Congressional District, which covers Val Verde, is held by a Republican. Just weeks before I arrived in Del Rio, Mayra Flores, a Mexican-born Republican, flipped the Thirty-fourth District—farther to the east, in the Rio Grande Valley—in a special election. (A Democrat had carried the district by double digits in every election since it was redrawn after the 2010 census.) The GOP is favored to flip the neighboring Fifteenth District next week and represent a majority of Texas’s border districts; less than a decade ago, Democrats controlled every single one.Martinez said most of the Democrats he’s known over the years have become skeptical of the party. For longer than he can remember, he’s had a weekly breakfast with the same group of seven or eight guys at the Ramada. They were always Democrats—all of them. Now, he said, there’s only one holdout. The rest have switched sides.In the sheriff’s view—and he said it’s part perception, part reality—his party has become too progressive for Hispanics in a community like his. “This talk of defunding the police, it’s had a real impact,” Martinez said, describing the local Hispanic community as ardently pro–law enforcement. Meanwhile, he added, the moderates in his party at the state and national levels aren’t doing enough to push back on the left. Over the past three years, Martinez estimated, he’s given tours of the border to more than 100 members of Congress. “I haven’t had a single Democrat here. Not one,” he said. “And trust me—I’ve invited them.” (Not long after we spoke, Martinez finally welcomed his first congressional Democrat, Darren Soto of Florida, to the border.)
Left: The Rio Grande. Right: Wet clothing discarded by a migrant on the river’s Del Rio–side bank. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
In Lozano’s truck, as we drove on a narrow road that runs parallel to a stretch of border fence—started by the George W. Bush administration, continued under Obama—he was still seething. Progressives exploit the suffering at the southern border to raise money or get booked on television shows, he said, but they won’t actually come see it for themselves. I asked him why.“Because it’s a romanticized ideology,” Lozano said. “It’s easy for them to romanticize this whole situation. ‘They’re struggling! They need help! They’re coming here for a better life!’ It’s harder for them to come look at bodies of people who died in 107-degree heat. Kids who drowned. Border Patrol agents—who they’re so opposed to—trying to help pregnant mothers. None of this fits their narrative.”I asked Lozano what he wants Democrats to do about the border crisis. He laughed.“Democrats refuse to even call it a crisis. They’re gaslighting me,” Lozano said. He ran through a list of requests: more funding for Border Patrol; better technology to monitor movement; more support for humanitarian groups on the ground; stricter processing policies to deter would-be migrants; and, yes, in certain places, reinforced physical barriers. Above all, he wants Democrats to stop signaling that America has an open border. Throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, he noted, the party’s aspiring leaders took a host of positions—on decriminalizing border crossings, or providing health insurance to undocumented immigrants—that broke with decades of orthodoxy, to appease the progressive base.“I’m all about the American dream. But this is unsustainable, just totally unsustainable,” Lozano said. “Government is supposed to be about stability. But this party, my party, is inviting all this instability. I’ve had enough.”Lozano is no longer the mayor of Del Rio. This summer, just a few weeks before I came to town, he served his last day in office. Once a promising young prospect in the Democratic ranks, he quit electoral politics, walking away from a job he loved. Now, he’s thinking about quitting the Democratic Party, too.Danny Ortega is a legend in local progressive circles and a member of Arizona’s Democratic Party Hall of Fame. As an activist and civil-rights attorney, he has spent decades working in households and neighborhoods where voting is a foreign behavior, and where fear of filling out government forms runs deep, pleading with first- and second-generation Hispanics to get involved with politics. Around the time Obama was first elected, Ortega told me, he sensed a turning point. The GOP’s overt targeting of the Hispanic community—via legislation and law enforcement, rhetoric and rumormongering—helped embolden citizens to finally turn out to vote, and to vote for Democrats. The floodgates had opened. Demography, at last, was going to be destiny.Until it wasn’t.“The past few years, our young people have been registering as independents. More than 50 percent of them. We have the data,” Ortega said. “These voters, the future of our community, they are abandoning us. And honestly,” he paused, with a grimace, “I don’t blame them.”
The activist and civil-rights attorney Danny Ortega (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
We sat in Ortega’s first-floor law office in Phoenix, now the nation’s fifth-largest city thanks to a mass influx of immigrants, most of whom are Mexican. Surrounded by framed awards and photos with politicians, Ortega was leaning across his desk, sweating through his Hawaiian shirt, shouting mostly at himself. For too long, Ortega said, Democrats have refused to spend real time and resources in the Hispanic community, checking a box during campaign season but rarely engaging between elections. When Democrats do come calling, he said, they treat Hispanics like children: speaking in paternalistic tones about what’s good and bad for them economically; assuming simple and monolithic views on social issues; pandering shamelessly on immigration and promising sweeping reforms that never materialize.More and more, Ortega told me, Hispanics are suspicious of his party. They question whether Democrats want to solve a problem like immigration; whether they would rather continue to wield themes of racism and xenophobia to mobilize voters against the GOP; whether moral outrage is simply the means to a political end. In his view, the Democratic Party has a credibility crisis, and it’s not specific to immigration. Ortega said that so many adjacent Democratic causes—voting rights, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights—are viewed skeptically, particularly by younger Hispanics, who perceive Democrats as manipulative at worst and tone-deaf at best. Even if their social-justice efforts are regarded as genuine, Democrats are pushing an agenda that doesn’t resonate with a wide array of voters during this time of economic uncertainty.“A lot of Latinos, they’re just not moved by these issues,” he said. “They may think Republicans are racist, but some of them are going to vote for the Republicans anyway, because they’re better on the economy, better on small business, better on regulation.”César Chávez hears it all the time. A member of the Arizona House who represents the most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state, Chávez finds himself engaged in a daily struggle to hold the line for the Democratic Party.“It’s very hard for an individual to vote for somebody who leans more on social justice than on the economy,” Chávez told me in a coffee shop not far from the state capitol. “When a person has to choose between paying for a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas, every other issue goes out the window.”Chávez was born in Mexico. When he was 3 years old, he and his pregnant mother crossed the desert and found their way to Pennsylvania, where his father, who had also immigrated illegally, was working on a mushroom farm. Chávez was raised alongside Amish children and “fell in love with America,” cherishing the traditional values of his community. Because it was Ronald Reagan’s amnesty program that eventually granted his father citizenship—allowing the rest of the family to eventually follow suit—Chávez felt a kinship with the GOP. It wasn’t until his family moved to Phoenix that Chávez experienced real discrimination. He came to feel that the Democratic Party, with its emphasis on inclusion, was the natural home for people like him.
César Chávez represents Arizona’s most concentrated community of Hispanics in the state legislature. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
Chávez told me this experience speaks for many of his constituents. The Democratic Party “has always been their safe haven,” he said. But today, he continued, progressives have adopted a “no-holds-barred mentality” on social issues that leaves many Hispanic voters—religious, patriotic, culturally conservative voters—questioning whether they still belong.“There are individuals in my party who believe these voters are always going to be there for us. They take them for granted,” Chávez said. “That’s why I think this could get a lot worse.”For all the baggage saddling the state GOP—a proud conspiracy theorist as chair; a trio of prominent election deniers running for statewide office—the party’s consultants and strategists are making real inroads in the Hispanic community. They are hiring Hispanic staffers, spending money on Spanish-language media, investing heavily in grassroots infrastructure. This matches descriptions I heard everywhere else: Republicans can sense that the door is opening, and they are preparing to barrel through it.“I’m telling you,” Chávez said, “if we don’t do something about it, we’re going to lose a big part of this vote.”Back at El Portal, Earl and Mary Rose Wilcox’s restaurant in South Phoenix, the warnings are the same. One woman, a longtime progressive activist named Petra Falcon, tells me that Hispanics “have no idea what Democrats really stand for anymore.” Anita Ritter, who serves as the secretary of the American Legion post next door, says she doesn’t know of many of her members who still vote for Democrats.And then there is Luis Acosta. A respected Democratic campaign consultant, Acosta is also a so-called Dreamer. His mother brought him to the U.S. when he was 2; his earliest memory is crawling under the chain-link border fence. Inspired by Obama’s candidacy, Acosta threw himself into Democratic politics. He helped elect numerous candidates to office. But now, he tells me, he’s “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections.
Luis Acosta, a Democratic campaign consultant, says he is “absolutely done” helping the Democratic Party win elections. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
“People are tired of being taken for granted. Tired of being ignored for two years and then pandered to when it’s election time. Tired of being in the shadows. Just tired,” Acosta says. “There’s no other way to put it. We’ve supported the Democrats my whole life. Now, we want to know: Are we more than a talking point to you?”In the corner booth, Earl and Mary Rose look distressed. Earl tells me this kind of talk has been pervasive in his restaurant and his neighborhood since Biden took office. And now they’re even hearing it at home: Two of Earl’s grandsons voted for Trump in 2020. One of them, Earl says, got hooked by the pandemic-era fights over public-education policy and is now a Tucker Carlson devotee; the other grandson, he says, is “less dogmatic” but exasperated by the left’s fixation on social justice.Mary Rose confesses to feeling a certain pessimism. She and Earl spent a generation building a community, organizing a vote, working to translate raw Hispanic numbers into real political influence. Yet they are confronting the same harsh realities today, about power and patronage, that they fretted over 23 years ago. Wins and losses are not the measure; Democrats could sweep Arizona’s statewide races against an unpalatable bunch of Republicans this fall, but it won’t quiet the feeling that the Wilcoxes’ dream is slipping away. They have so much of what they wanted—an engaged base, a hard-won 11 electoral votes, a Democrat in the White House—and so little to show for it.“Maybe the best we can hope for is that these voters”—Mary Rose nods toward one of her adult grandsons nearby—“become independents, and we fight for them on a race-by-race basis,” she says. “And honestly, that’s a win for Republicans.”
Ruby Bernal discusses politics over breakfast at El Portal. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)

I almost feel sorry for Suella Braverman. One minute, the Home Secretary was living her best life, happily raging against “the tofu-eating wokerati”; the next, she was being blamed for a firebomb attack on a migrant centre in Dover, the latest chapter in Britain’s sorry immigration story. But amid the chaos, the combination of these flashpoints perfectly encapsulated everything wrong with the current immigration system: here we had yet another politician trying to appear tough on immigration while flailing incompetently, only to be followed by an outburst of hateful violence in response to their incompetence. And so the cycle continues.
Ever since Britain voted to leave the EU, countless politicians have tried to place immigration at the heart of public debate. Perhaps they think that tackling the issue is a guaranteed way to make their name and advance their career. What few realise, however, is that it is a career-killer.

What are we to make of this? Are we simply to conclude that immigration is an unsolvable problem, fated to forever curse Britain’s unfortunate Home Secretaries, from Jack Straw through to Braverman? It often seems that way. But such fatalism is not helpful. Immigration is a political problem like any other, and can be solved like any other, even if it happens to be a particularly tough one.
Perhaps the real challenge isn’t actually immigration itself, but a lack of political willpower. After all, the immigration issue is not going away any time soon. If anything, it is likely to get worse. Africa and the Middle East contain more than 1.5 billion people, many of whom live in areas rife with political instability and will be the hardest hit by the looming global economic recession related to the war in Ukraine. Nearly all these regions are on Europe’s periphery.
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To put it simply, many, many more will likely make their way to Europe in the very near future. This will mean more political polarisation and extremism in Europe, as those frustrated by politicians’ failure to control their nation’s borders seek radical, even violent, solutions. If there has ever been a time to reverse decades of incompetence on immigration, it is surely now.
What, then, can be done? For a start, instead of hollow tough-talking and tinkering around the edges with frivolous, impractical plans like the Rwanda scheme, politicians need to address the underlying issues that have allowed this crisis to flourish. And the most obvious place to start would be completely replacing the underlying, outdated legislation that is at the root of so many of the UK and Europe’s immigration woes.
The UK, for instance, remains a signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which, along with its 1967 Protocol, the UN’s refugee agency calls “the key legal documents that form the basis of our work”. What the UN fails to mention, however, is that its legislation dates from the Cold War, and was originally devised as a short-term Eurocentric solution to a post-war problem: to help those fleeing from the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Its architects never envisioned a world of mass, global migration from poorer, less stable countries whose people follow very different cultural norms, many of which clash with modern Western values (women’s rights, for one). The 1951 Convention is, in other words, decades out-of-date. Its authors could never have conceived the scale of today’s migrant crisis.
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Yet the 1951 Convention is just one example of international legislation hampering British attempts to control its borders. There are many others. As the Joint Committee on Human Rights found last year when examining a proposed bill to give the UK government more power to criminalise and turn back migrants crossing the Channel:
“As a signatory to international treaties governing maritime law, including the SOLAS and SAR conventions and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea… the Joint Committee finds that Government proposals to ‘pushback’ migrants attempting to cross the Channel in small boats is likely to see the UK act in contravention of its international obligations.”
The bill passed, but as the above shows, it is unlikely to be effectively implemented. At present, then, it is impossible for the immigration crisis to be solved, for the simple reason that any effective new laws will clash with other legal obligations. Indeed, it is because of the UK’s membership in the European Convention on Human Rights that the Rwanda scheme failed: at the last minute, the ECHR ruled that the UK could not deport migrants to Rwanda. This is not to say that the Rwanda plan was a suitable solution, but rather that if progress is to be made, a fundamental conflict has to be resolved — and the only way to achieve this is for the UK to revisit its legal obligations and amend or even abandon them completely.
In today’s climate, of course, this will prove tricky, if not impossible. Braverman’s position is increasingly unstable: as last week’s attack in Dover demonstrated, she has lost control of her brief and shows little sign of regaining it. In the short term, at least, it is unlikely that she will have the parliamentary support to push through a complete overhaul of the UK’s legislative commitments. All of which means that Rishi Sunak has little choice but to step in. This is no longer a battle he can afford to delegate. For immigration is a career-killer — and if it’s not warded off soon, Braverman is unlikely to be its only victim.

Hauser & Wirth Mark Wallinger: Self-Portrait (Freehand 41), 2013

The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand.

—Theodor Adorno

The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a permanent temptation for a form whose suspiciousness of false profundity does not protect it from turning into slick superficiality,” writes Adorno. A list of counterparts to the personal essay might include more admirable imaginary genres such as the structural essay, the communal essay, the public essay, the critical essay, and the impersonal essay. Or, as Adorno insinuates, the good essay, which prioritizes “elucidating the matter at hand” instead of telling “stories about people,” as “bad essays” do.

What makes essays that tell stories about people bad? For Adorno, as for Walter Benjamin, one of the essayists Adorno most admired, essays about people betray the true object of essayistic criticism: the private individual. The private individual is not a particular person with a particular story to tell, no matter how distinctive, original, or purely bizarre that story may be. The private individual is not a proper name—not “Virginia Woolf” or “Elizabeth Hardwick,” not “Joan Didion” or “Zadie Smith” or whoever it is you consider your favorite personal essayist to be. Rather, it is the idea that animates all these figures, the powerful, unobtrusive concept that gives the personal essay the appearance of ventriloquizing a singular and spontaneous subjectivity.

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. Yet having marveled at its aesthetic flexibility and freedom, few critics put this claim through its paces. What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

To answer these questions about the personal essay, its mode of address, and the private individual that enlivens them requires a biography of sorts, though not a personal one. The biographer could be any of the twentieth-century theorists who have heralded the entrance of individual subjectivity into history, but it is Benjamin who emerges as the thinker most interested in its literary aesthetics. According to Benjamin, the private individual was conceived sometime between 1830 and 1848, during the reign of Louis Philippe, often known as the first “bourgeois monarch.” Under his rule, the European ruling class and the middle class came together to realize their defining goal: the separation of the public domain from the private, where, as Karl Marx observes, the bourgeoisie could rejoice in “Property, the Family, Religion, and Order.”

Once labor had been cordoned off from life, once the productive activity of work had been extricated from the supposedly unproductive experience of dwelling, the private individual was born. He was, quite naturally, blind to his own history as a derivative creature, an artifact of political and economic processes that he had little incentive to question. The domestic sphere was his incubator, his sanctuary from commercial and social considerations. There he could retreat, wide-eyed and mewling, to probe what he believed to be his thoughts, lodged in his self, his mind, his body, and his home. “The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions,” Benjamin wrote, explaining how the ownership of property mirrored the ownership of subjectivity. He continued, “From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior—which, for the private man, represents the universe.”

For Benjamin, the best representative of the private individual was the collector of decorative objects, “the true resident of the interior” as an architectural and an existential space. For us, it might be the personal essay collection, which props up the same ideology. The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial—that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. This is a lie, the lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language, art, and education, as Adorno explains. The personal essay appears as the purest, most unflinching aesthetic expression of the lie, for the simple reason that, for an essay to qualify as personal in the first place, the primacy of the private individual must be presupposed, “implicitly but by the same token with all the more complicity,” Adorno wrote.

By my account, the personal essay is a modern formation. It is a wholly different creature from the essay birthed by Montaigne in 1570 and nurtured through the seventeenth century by Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller, and Abraham Cowley. Each of these essayists is unwilling to disentangle the individual from the condition of man or nature, a commitment reflected by how their prose slides with graceful abandon through the various third-person singulars. The “I” with and of which the modern personal essay speaks proclaims its distinctiveness from the “we” that crowds the eighteenth-century periodical essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, as well as the “they” that throngs the nineteenth-century metaphysical disquisitions of Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt. It bears a distant family resemblance to Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia, the “quintessence of the spirit of bourgeois intimacy,” according to Mario Praz. Though Lamb begets the lineage in the early nineteenth century, he takes care to thwart its autobiographical referentiality. Writing under the pseudonym Elia lets him throw a small but devastating wrench into the personal essay’s production of individual personhood—its demand for “a single subject whose identity is defined by the uncontested readability of his proper name,” as Paul de Man writes in his essay “Autobiography as De-facement.”

“No one has approached the essays of Elia,” writes Virginia Woolf in “The Decay of Essay-Writing.” Published nearly a quarter-century before Benjamin began his Arcades Project and a half-century before Adorno’s “The Essay as Form,” Woolf’s lament about the aesthetic decline of the personal essay grasps the problem of telling stories about people not head-on but obliquely. She opens not by offering a history of bourgeois individualism but by decrying its most obvious institutional manifestations: first, “the spread of education,” and second, the proliferation of print culture. The churn of both schools and presses results, ultimately, in the flattening of much written matter, Woolf complains, and in a feeling of oversaturation, of boredom on the part of the reader who bears the onslaught. But the reader’s boredom is not the boredom one feels when confronted with an apparently infinite, depersonalized expanse of writing—the boredom of slogging through tightly packed columns in a nineteenth-century periodical, for instance. Rather, it is the boredom of having to attend to “a very large number” of people, all of whom demand public recognition through the projection of a private interiority.

The intimate connection between education, the bourgeois public sphere, and the specter of private individuality compels Woolf to judge the personal essay “a sign of the times.” It is the genre whose formal conventions—the “capital I” of “I think” or “I feel”—not only draw the individual into public view, but also insist upon the primacy of the individual. This insistence occurs regardless of the quality of the essayist’s prose. The personal essay’s significance “lies not so much in the fact that we have attained any brilliant success in essay-writing…but in the undoubted facility with which we write essays as though this were beyond all others our natural way of speaking,” with the “amiable garrulity of the tea-table,” Woolf writes. It is “primarily an expression of personal opinion,” with the stress falling on the “personal,” one’s “individual likes and dislikes,” rather than the strength or the stylishness of the opinion expressed. While these individual likes and dislikes certainly add up to a large “number,” a word that Woolf repeats with scornful amazement, they do not combine in any sensible way. They cannot be imagined as a mass, a totality, cannot be integrated and set to any collective social or political purpose.

Woolf did not hold the desire for recognition to be unethical or untoward, nor did she believe that collective representation is the only purpose to which the essay ought to be directed. Rather, the essay had to maintain the contradictions between individual desires and social demands, between personal being and impersonal experience, to grant the form its unique ability to capture the texture of life—not a particular life, but the impersonal activity of living. “The Decay of Essay-Writing” thus concludes with two visions of potential essays, the first permissible, according to Woolf, the second unacceptable. “To say simply ‘I have a garden, and I will tell you what plants do best in my garden’ possibly justified its egoism,” Woolf writes;

but to say “I have no sons, though I have six daughters, all unmarried, but I will tell you how I should have brought up my sons had I had any” is not interesting, cannot be useful, and is a specimen of the amazing and unclothed egoism for which first the art of penmanship and then the invention of essay-writing are responsible.

The tacit hope is that one day, the essay may be blocked from circulating stories about private, homebound people into the wider world.

“The Decay of Essay Writing” appeared in 1905, roughly when the descriptor “the personal essay” began to spread through the English lexicon. Before the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but, as the writing of Montaigne and his contemporaries reveals, only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. Reading across composition textbooks from 1900 to 1940 reveals that the personal was not conveyed through action; not “the simple words ‘I was born’” and a description of the events that followed. Rather, it was through style, a different form of excess from the excesses Woolf decried.

Style was marked by the excesses of language, by an author’s pace, punctuation, diction, and grammar; her distinctive deployment of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions, which, as Jeff Dolven observes in Senses of Style (2017), “cannot be counted upon to shore up the first person as a verb does.” Consider, for instance, Woolf’s ecstatic tendency to set off adverbs in pairs (“simply and solemnly,” “finely and gaily”). Consider Hardwick’s love of trebling adjectives and sometimes hitching an adverb to the last one, so that her prose appears to increase in precision exponentially in the short span of a sentence. (“She is self-absorbed, haughty, destructive.” “They are defenseless, cast adrift, and yet of an obviously fine quality.”) Consider Didion’s habit of beginning with a missing antecedent to create the impression that writer and reader have arrived at a scene in medias res. (“It is an altogether curious structure…”) Framed by teachers of writing as “conversational” and “chatty,” characterized by its air of “spontaneity,” the essay suggested the author’s “personality” as a specular structure. Its refusal to subject the writer to direct observation was an integral part of its signature.

The essays from earlier centuries that are retroactively designated as “personal” today were commonly referred to as “familiar” essays in the early twentieth century. Their counterparts were “didactic,” “factual,” “informative,” or “instructive” essays. The familiar essay seldom treated the author as its object of interest. Rather, familiarity concerned the relationship triangulated between the essay’s writer and its reader—a relationship between friends. Always, this friendship was mediated by the presence of an object to which the writer had committed her powers of perception and analysis, and, through it, secured her reader’s interest: a novel or a painting, a historic figure such as Cato, a creature such as a moth. “One might put it thus,” writes Christopher Morley in the 1921 anthology Modern Essays: “that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious revelation of self done inadvertently.”

By contrast, the personal essay distinguished itself from the beginning by its failure to maintain the practice of triangulation between the essayist, her reader, and the object that shared their attention—its unwillingness to commit to inadvertency. It indulged the temptation to “fall into monologue,” Morley complained, allowing its language to curdle into disclosures that were “too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately ‘whimsical’ (the word which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic).”

As many of the composition textbooks from the early twentieth century recognized, direct address could not be avoided entirely: it was inherent in the use of the first person. Yet its influence on essay writing and reading could be minimized, made to harmonize with competing forms of address that were more depersonalized in the kind of friendship they imagined—indeed, that held impersonality to be a sign of the essay’s aesthetic and ethical success.

Any avowal of “impartial publicness” is, of course, never as impartial as it insists. Public styles are always marked by nationality, literacy, class, and race; there exists no such thing as a perfectly inclusive or universal language. Yet the claim to mediating friendship through style nevertheless reveals how, against the rising tide of individualism, the familiar essay demanded that its readers place the highest premium on the imaginative interactions of nonintimate selves. It is the friction between social and private modes of representation that the contemporary personal essay smooths away with increasing vigor in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Why are people attracted to stories about individuals? The answer is as obvious as it is petty and perhaps cynical. The fiction of private individuality projected by the personal essay allows bourgeois subjects to accrue various economic, cultural, and social rewards. These rewards are dispersed by institutions that are both constituted by the fiction of the private individual and responsible for reproducing it. The most obvious institution of this kind is the school and, as Adorno observes, its elevation of “pedagogical necessity” into “a metaphysical virtue.” Once the production of personhood becomes bound to and administered by pedagogy, its illusions gain in intensity and reach, as does the personal essay.

A more specific genealogy for the genre—and an explanation of its distinctively American quality today—is the “personal statement” that high school students applying to US colleges and universities were asked to produce starting around 1920, and which has evolved into a cornerstone of the admissions process. Although it is difficult to pinpoint how many students per year write personal statements, more than 5.6 million applications were submitted in 2019–2020 through the Common App, a generic college admission application that requires the applicant to write at least one personal essay. Orbiting these millions of essays is a burgeoning industry of tutoring, prepping, and editing services, evinced by the popularity of books such as How to Write the Perfect Personal Statement, The Berkeley Book of College Essays, College Essays That Made a Difference, and How to Write a Winning Personal Statement. The personal narrative is the designated genre to reveal the writer’s “inner self,” an “opportunity to differentiate yourself from everyone else,” writes Alan Gelb in Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps.

The first mention of the personal essay as an admissions requirement, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), came during Harvard’s drastic changes to its admissions practices in the 1920s. Since the turn of the century, selection based on exam scores had created what administrators called a “Jewish problem”: the admission of more Jewish applicants than the university deemed acceptable. “We can reduce the number of Jews by talking about other qualifications than those of admission examination,” wrote Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1922, advocating for a subjective set of criteria. The other qualifications he listed, “character” and “leadership,” were to be assessed through three new genres, as Karabel writes: “Demographic information, a personal essay, and a detailed description of extracurricular activities.” The assumption was that Jewish applicants would fall short of the school’s desired “character standard”—that their “centuries of oppression and degradation” meant that they were characterized not by a commitment to individual and personal self-assertion but by a “martyr air.”

To weed out Jewish applicants, universities mobilized the essay as an heir to the Catholic tradition of confession and the later Protestant tradition of narratives of “saving faith,” notes the historian Charles Petersen in his dissertation on meritocracy. No doubt the version of individualism championed by administrators drew on the moral culture of the Protestant bourgeoisie, what Max Weber described as its use of education to cultivate a rational, self-assertive personality. This type was marked by its ability to adhere to a consistent and subjective set of values in a disenchanted world. Forced to conceive the meaning of things, and even man’s relationship to reality, as an individual matter, Weber’s rational personality type formed intellectual arrangements to anoint himself the master and the arbiter of his own destiny, and eventually the destinies of those around him.

The premise of elite college admissions was that this relation could be cinched, and indeed enhanced, by reversing its terms: that the ability to demonstrate, through the genre of the essay, one’s commitment to an idealized model of private and rational individualism marked the applicant as someone well-suited to higher education. Whereas in previous centuries, higher education would have secured a career in the ministry, now it led to executive roles in industry and government. Beyond its discriminatory function, the personal essay sought to identify the students whom the university could transform into the political and economic leaders of the future. Learning how to “game the system” was only a sign of the system’s success at shaping applicants’ behavior.

The overtly discriminatory origins of the admissions essay have been superseded by more covert models of calibrating personhood by ethnicity, as in the recent case of Harvard University admissions officers accused of assigning Asian American applicants lower scores in subjective categories such as “positive personality.” Yet the value the admissions essay—and the college application process in general—places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever. Kathryn Murphy and Thomas Karshan, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020), write:

Applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by some element of their reading or studies: “failure,” an expert on the admissions essay tells us, “is essayistic gold.”

Far from signaling weakness, the proud narration of failure speaks of character in precisely the terms set by the educated bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century: character as the capacity to maintain one’s self-comportment in a moment of distress, to tell a tale of hardship lit by the glow of self-knowledge.

At the start of the last century what Petersen has described as the “Catholic tradition of confession,” with its ponderous moral and spiritual accent, its desire for masochistic public exposure and redemption, had yet to enter the scene of personal essay writing and did not do so until the mid-1960s. Almost all the guides mentioned earlier warn applicants away from striking a tone that is too testimonial or therapeutic, working hard to buffer the admissions essay from the sins and perils of what is commonly called confessional writing. Unlike the admissions essay, whose rules and stakes are firmly pegged to educational institutions, confessional writing speaks to a shift in the importance of the individual and the technologies used to conceptualize new notions of personhood. “Its development coincides with new cold war cultures of privacy and surveillance, with therapy/pop psychology culture, with the falling away of modernist and ‘New Critical’ approaches to art and literature, with the rise of the television talk show and the cult of the celebrity,” writes Jo Gill in Modern Confessional Writing (2006).

While one could trace the history of confessional writing back to Augustine, Rousseau, or Freud, as the scholar Christopher Grobe does in The Art of Confession, it was only during the mid-twentieth century that “the confessional” coalesced as a “reinstatement of two closely related literary conventions,” writes the critic Robert von Hallberg: that literature originates “in [their] subject matter” and that writers “mean, at least literally, what they say.” Hallberg was writing about confessional poetry, but one could apply the claim to literature more generally. Perceived by many critics as a rejoinder to New Critical ideologies of reading, the confessional generation appeared to turn away from the university, where the modernist idea that a work exists independently of its creator had been institutionalized. The confessional school, by contrast, squatted at the nexus of therapeutic culture, with its air of psychological self-seriousness; second-wave feminism, from which it drew its reputation as a genre of female complaint; and 1960s counterculture, which imagined literary production as a loose and spontaneous activity.

The rise of confessional writing authorized new groups to speak as individuals, amplifying the voice of the “voiceless” in testimonies to dispossession. Yet as Cheryl Butler argues in The Art of the Black Essay (2003), the essays of James Baldwin, Rebecca Walker, and, more recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates are only awkwardly aligned with the tradition of the personal essay. Even if personal experience is what authorizes the essay form, its function as “a weapon for the downtrodden and the desperate-to-be-heard” presumes that personhood was, from the outset, an unequally distributed resource. Nowhere is this more evident than in Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village,” in which he examines himself from the self-estranged perspective of the white Swiss villagers who rub his skin and touch his hair, astounded by his blackness: “There was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.”

The uncanniness that Butler identifies in Baldwin’s moment of double-consciousness—the same uncanniness that marks “the Latino essay” and “the woman’s essay,” she claims—resides in the moment when the essayist recognizes “who I am.” Yet this recognition is also the moment when the question of the private individual is dissolved by the knowledge that the ability to write and to speak as an “I” is a restricted social and political phenomenon. “Haunted by sociopolitical dramas around issues of race, sex, and class, for example, the essay itself might arrive as a racy document with a radical politics left unveiled,” Butler writes. Had the personal essay followed in the footsteps of the racy documents of the 1960s, it might not exist anymore, having yielded entirely to the countercultural currents of the political essay.

A genuinely countercultural practice can only flourish for so long before being co-opted by the dominant culture. In this case, co-optation proceeded not through the university, but through the publishing industry, which, as one publisher’s report concluded in 1982, had realized that “giving the actual names of girl-friends involved with [one’s] sex ventures…further increased the curiosity of the general reader, and also promoted sales.” Running under this gleeful voyeurism were more depressing and commonplace changes in the conditions of publishing after the recession of the 1980s forced the industry to grow “leaner and meaner.” “Confession is a growth industry,” announced The Sydney Morning Herald, a claim that was echoed in Irina Dunn’s textbook The Writer’s Guide (1999).

On the production side, confession’s growth had been spurred by a proliferation in new media forms attractive to nonprofessional writers, particularly the rise of blogs and self-publishing, at the same time that professional editorial jobs were being made redundant and advances for nonfiction books were beginning to decrease. On the consumption side, it was marked by the erasure of meaningful aesthetic differences between “quality media and the tabloids.” These economic factors made individual experience more salable than ever, simply because it could be bought on the cheap and sold on the regular, especially when tethered to intimate, therapeutic disclosures about transgressive sexual activity, trauma, and family members in crisis.

While one could read individual essay collections to trace how the market emboldened the aesthetics of confession, parody presents a more fruitful opportunity for understanding the personal essay’s evolving commercial function through the 1990s and 2000s. “I am a Personal Essay and I was born with a port wine stain and beaten by my mother,” declares the Personal Essay who narrates Christy Vannoy’s “A Personal Essay by a Personal Essay,” published in McSweeney’s in 2010. “A brief affair with a second cousin produced my first and only developmentally disabled child.” Here, in close and crowded quarters, appear the most notable features of confessional writing, beginning with its audacious use of the first-person pronoun at birth—a wink at Woolf’s line in “The Decay of Essay-Writing”: “The simple words ‘I was born’ have somehow a charm beside which all the splendours of romance and fairy-tale turn to moonshine and tinsel.” Yet the charm of the Personal Essay wears off immediately in Vannoy’s delightful piece. It is sullied not by the port wine stain—there is magic to that punning detail—but by the rapid accretion of traumatic disclosures: the observation of physical deformity, the admission of family violence, the recollection of sexual transgression. In aggregate, they add up not to a story, but a sales pitch.

The Personal Essay speaks to us from “a clinic led by the Article’s Director and Editor for a national women’s magazine,” which will publish the most promising personal essay out of a crowded field of candidates. In attendance are “the Essay Without Arms,” the “Exercise Bulimia” essay, “Divorce Essays,” the “Alopecia” essay, and a pitiful, misfit essay who refuses to speak in the first person and talks only about “Tuesday.” “Not the Tuesday of an amputation, just a regular any old Tuesday,” the Personal Essay tells us, bewitched by this essay’s descriptive prowess and scandalized by its refusal to play by the rules. Doesn’t the Tuesday essay know what it takes to secure a social position in the contemporary literary field? she wonders. Our narrator prevails as the winner of this competition, as we know she will from her triumphantly abject beginning. “Anyway, come November I will be buying every copy of Marie Claire I can get my one good hand on!” she crows. “If you haven’t looked death straight in the eye or been sued by a sister wife, you won’t see yourself in my story.”

Whereas the narrator of a personal essay draws our attention to the experience of a single individual, the Personal Essay Vannoy ventriloquizes channels the genre’s conceptual production of personhood as a salable commodity. This production takes place through a competitive practice of disclosure, a game of one-upmanship that promises access to publishing’s networks of mentorship, distribution, and circulation. And the conventions of confession, the shocking clichés that the personal essays in the clinic must mobilize to perform their singular and embodied personhood, depend so much on their content that they short-circuit any consideration of individual style on the part of either reader or writer. We have no idea how these essays are written; we only know what they are about. We see this in the naming of the personal essays at the clinic—not by the readability of the proper name, but by subgenre, a categorical descriptor that could belong to any number of individuals. (Certainly, more than one essayist has written on divorce.) One could imagine the clinic filling up with an infinitely receding horizon of subgenres that, for all their startling combinations, never get any closer to grounding the essay in the peculiarities of prose. The tension between personality and impersonality, essential to early understanding of the familiar essay, has gone slack, bloated by traumatic content.

Under what conditions is content king? When the personal essay makes the production of personhood not only publicly legible but also monetizable. “Secretly…we each hoped to out-devastate the other and nail ourselves a freelance contract,” confesses Vannoy’s Personal Essay. Her confession is comic, cruel, and pathetic, revealing the mismatch between out-devastating another person through self-exposure and the rewards it yields. In a publishing industry that has largely done away with staff writers, an industry in which art and literature have dwindled into minor cultural forms and creative laborers must maintain appealing online personae to crowdfund their livelihoods, few things could be more coveted than a “freelance contract.” If there is something painfully anachronistic about buying every copy of Marie Claire, then there is something equally painful in the recognition that the Personal Essay’s performance of personhood only gives her access to exploitative labor conditions. But this is as good as it gets.

The Personal Essay’s appraisal of the economic situation reveals why the triangulation of reader, writer, and object secured by the familiar essay is no longer possible. Fewer places will pay for it; fewer people are trained to produce it. The confessional has proved a highly successful strategy for extracting literary production from an increasingly deskilled workforce that needs to do little more than share experiences. As Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker writer, has pointed out in “The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over,” low-budget websites pay young women a pittance for “ultra-confessional” essays that allow for the “negotiation of [their] vulnerability,” knowing that these essays will encourage voyeuristic traffic and, by extension, increase the advertising revenue on which these sites depend. The Personal Essay who narrates the conditions of her own existence is more matter-of-fact about what other essayists have failed to recognize, or, in Tolentino’s case, have helped to perpetuate: the precarious conditions under which creative labor is performed.

For Tolentino, the end of the personal essay boom is explained by the election of Donald Trump and the suspicion that, since his reign, the personal is no longer political. Yet its decline is explained more by the structural shift on the Internet toward a “self-branding social media influence economy,” as Sarah Brouillette has argued. In the last analysis, it is not a decline so much as the convergence of the genre with social media platforms that has rendered online venues devoted to personal essays redundant. Whereas personhood, as a collection of tastes, preferences, and experiences, was once bought and sold through long-form narrative, now it can be sold and bought in the form of views, shares, and followers—personal data managed not by editors and the publications they run but by corporations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. What we ought to mourn, then, is not the decline of the personal essay; its ethos and its aesthetics persist. Rather, it is the much longer, slower death of the conditions that gave rise to the essay’s unintimate friendship, a familiarity mediated not by a spectacular personhood but by the skillful cultivation of style.

Taiwan now faces a more powerful foe in Chinese President Xi Jinping. Last month’s Chinese Communist Party congress freed Xi of the last internal checks on his power, bestowing upon him a status akin to that of an emperor. For Taiwan’s leaders, that increases the already high risk of conflict. They are warning that time is running out to do what’s needed to avoid war and save their democracy.

In my meetings with senior Taiwanese government leaders last week in Taipei, several officials shared their concerns about the outcome of the congress. Xi’s bellicose statements on Taiwan at the congress, and the fact he amended the party constitution to say that China will “resolutely oppose and contain Taiwan independence,” continue a trend of rising threats and aggression.

Even more worrying were Xi’s purging and demotion of officials who might not support his hard-line policies and his promotion of loyalists and “wolf warrior” diplomats. Xi, like other totalitarian leaders, is becoming more isolated from contrary views. This could make him more detached from reality and therefore more likely to do something risky or dangerous, Taiwan’s analysis goes.

Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told me that Xi demoted several Chinese officials with long experience on the Taiwan issue, further complicating the already tense relationship between Taipei and Beijing.

“It might show that Xi Jinping does not trust the bureaucracy in making Taiwan policy, and he seems to have his own small circle in thinking about Taiwan,” Wu said. “And if Xi Jinping is so detached from the reality of the situation in Taiwan … you can expect his policy toward Taiwan might not be as realistic as we hope.”

Alex Huang, deputy secretary general to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, told me Xi is now surrounded by yes men whose sole purpose is to help Xi consolidate domestic control and protect his power.

“They are not experts in improving China’s economy or improving its status in the international landscape,” he said. “So that creates a lot of risks, not only to Taiwan, but to the entire Indo-Pacific and the entire world.”

In Washington, the Taiwan debate centers on whether (and when) China might attack — and whether the United States would intervene on Taiwan’s behalf. Four times, President Biden has promised to do just that. Yet four times, the White House has also said that America’s policy of not revealing its intentions, known as strategic ambiguity, had not changed.

That confusion can’t be reassuring to Taiwan’s leaders. They know that a Chinese invasion can’t be held off for very long without sustained U.S. help. Whether that help comes in the form of weapons only (see Ukraine) or actual U.S. troops is also out of their control.

Taiwan’s leaders also know there’s no way to predict what a newly all-powerful Xi will do. But they calculate the risk of attack will be most acute as soon as he believes he has the military capability to succeed in taking back the island.

In the meantime, Xi will look for opportunities to escalate the situation, Wu said. For example, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) visited Taiwan in August, Beijing intentionally overreacted, seizing the chance to unveil new aggressive tactics, including missile launches, blockade-like military exercises, economic coercion, cyberattacks and a massive disinformation campaign.

The most sensitive moments ahead will come, Wu said, when Taiwan holds its presidential election in early 2024, when the United States holds its presidential election in late 2024, and when Xi is nearing the end of his third term and looking to his cement his legacy in 2027.

What seems clear is that, right now, preparations are not going fast enough. Taiwan is trying to revamp its defensive strategy to take into account the lessons of the Ukraine war. But some items it needs, such as antiaircraft and antimissile defenses, are scarce because most spare supplies are being sent to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Taiwan is building backup communications systems, stockpiling supplies, sharpening its hybrid warfare skills, reforming its system of military reserves and trying to prepare a frightened population for what might come.

Taiwan’s leaders acknowledge that the free world suffers from fatigue in fighting for democracy. But if Taiwan falls, they say, Xi will feel empowered to go further — and at that point, stopping China’s advance will only be more costly. Already, China is trying to lay claim to much of the South China Sea and East China Sea, while expanding China’s military footprint in both the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Taiwanese leaders insist that defending Taiwan is Taiwan’s own responsibility. They understand that Americans’ willingness to help Taiwan depends heavily on whether the Taiwanese are absolutely determined to fight for their own freedom.

“We only have one plan — that is, to defend ourselves,” Wu said. “Whether the United States is going to come or not, Taiwan has to be prepared.”

That’s the right message. But unless leaders in both Taipei and Washington speed up those preparations, Xi could become convinced that his opinion on Taiwan’s future is the only one that matters.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekIf you were in charge of the admissions office at a top-50 college or university, how would you decide which applicants got accepted as undergraduates and which got rejected? (How would you weight grades? Test scores? Athletic ability? Musical prowess? Volunteer work? Parents willing to write a big check to the building-renovation fund? Other factors? Would you think merely of ranking individuals, or also of composing a whole class?)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteWhile I encourage wide-ranging responses to that Question of the Week, it is inspired by the Supreme Court’s consideration of cases challenging affirmative action in college admissions––and if you want fodder as you ponder the subject, a lot has been produced of late.At The Washington Post, Megan McArdle provides a bit of historical context that suggests affirmative-action policies are a more awkward fit for America than they used to be:
One of my favorite statistics for shocking Washingtonians is to reveal that in 1960, more than five out of every six accounted for in the census were White — and of the remainder, the overwhelming majority were Black, with the rest of the “non-White” population totaling less than 2 million … Unsurprisingly, our civil rights architecture was primarily structured to equalize the relations between a Black minority that had suffered centuries of state-sponsored racial oppression and a majority group that had perpetuated that manifestly unjust system.
But the country changed: 1965 heralded an era of mass immigration that would complicate racial preferences. Says McArdle:
A system that drew its political support from our desire to eradicate Jim Crow ended up covering a number of protected classes, though along somewhat arbitrary lines that were driven as much by political maneuvering as by any rational criteria.
This created various ad hoc absurdities — a Pakistani is “Asian,” but an Afghan born a few miles across the border might be coded “White”; the daughter of a Spanish doctor is Hispanic, eligible for various private and government-sponsored affirmative action programs, while the child of an Italian janitor, who might be visually indistinguishable from the doctor’s child, is presumably in no need of help. The more immigrants who arrived, the more these complications multiplied, even among Black Americans. American descendants of enslaved people are our most disadvantaged citizens, with enduring gaps in education, income and wealth, but African immigrants are much better educated than average.
The old system assumed a large White majority that was self-contained and thoroughly dominant; it was simply not built for a world where “biracial” was a meaningful category, or where some minority groups were more successful than the (rapidly shrinking) White majority.
Meanwhile, my colleague Adam Harris, author of The State Must Provide: Why America’s Colleges Have Always Been Unequal―And How to Set Them Right, complicates arguments for ending affirmative action by describing and commenting on an exchange that occurred during Monday’s Supreme Court oral arguments, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned the lawyer Patrick Strawbridge.Here’s Harris:
She offered a hypothetical to emphasize her point. There are two applicants who would like their family backgrounds recognized. One writes that their family has been in North Carolina since before the Civil War, and that if they were admitted to the university, they would be a fifth-generation student there. The other student is also a North Carolinian whose family has been in the state since before the Civil War—but their ancestors were enslaved and, because of years of systemic discrimination, were not allowed to attend the university. But now that they have the opportunity, they would like to attend. “As I understand your no-race-conscious-admissions rule, these two applicants would have a dramatically different opportunity to tell their family stories and to have them count.” Both applicants were qualified, Jackson offered, but the first applicant’s qualifications could be recognized in the process, whereas “the second one wouldn’t be able to [get credit for those qualifications] because his story is in many ways bound up with his race and the race of his ancestors.”
Strawbridge thought for a moment, then offered that UNC does not have to give a legacy benefit to the first applicant if it doesn’t want to. This is true, but it was not Jackson’s point: “No, but you said it was okay if they gave a legacy benefit.” Race, she said, would be the only thing that couldn’t be considered under that program. And that would disadvantage the Black student who, in a similar set of circumstances, wants “the fact that he has been in North Carolina for generations through his family” considered.
In a day filled with questions about the meaning of “true diversity” or the educational benefits of diversity, Jackson’s questions cut through the muck. Some students had historically been denied access to some of the nation’s most well-resourced institutions of higher education—feeder campuses for prominent roles throughout society—because of their race.
If the court rules against affirmative action, “that fact will be one of the only things a university cannot consider in its admissions process,” Harris concluded, “as though that history never happened—as though the system is fair enough already.”[Read: How old is too old in politics?]The Future of the Music BusinessTed Gioia argues that mere individuals will begin to surpass even the biggest record labels in launching new artists to stardom. His explanation begins five decades in the past:
Over a fifty-year period, record labels relentlessly dumbed-down their A&R departments. They shut down their recording studios, and let musicians handle that themselves—often even encouraging artists to record entire albums at home. Then they let huge streaming platforms control the relationship with consumers. At every juncture, they opted to do less and less, until they were left doing almost nothing at all.
The music industry’s unstated dream was to exit every part of the business, except cashing the checks. But … if you don’t add value, those checks eventually start shrinking …
The major labels would like to own the music stars of the future, but they won’t … And who will win if record labels lose? You think it might be the streaming platforms? Think again—because that’s not going to happen. Spotify and Apple Music are even less interested than the major labels in nurturing talent and building the careers of young artists.
Here’s my craziest prediction. In the future, single individuals will have more impact in launching new artists than major record labels or streaming platforms. Just consider this: There are now 36 different YouTube channels with 50 million or more subscribers—and they’re often run by a single ambitious person, maybe with a little bit of support help. In fact, there are now seven YouTube channels with more than 100 million subscribers. By comparison, the New York Times only has nine million subscribers … Just ponder what it means when some dude sitting in a basement has ten times as much reach and influence as the New York Times. If you run one of these channels and have any skill in identifying talent, you can launch the next generation of stars.
Gioia goes on to argue that similar dynamics will apply to other creative industries. While pondering his thesis, I began to wonder if it might be a solution to the problem that Derek Thompson identifies in his insightful “What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture.”Noticing Negative PolarizationKat Rosenfield has a theory:
Politics no longer have anything to do with policy. Nor are they about principles, or values, or a vision for the future of the country. They’re about tribalism, and aesthetics, and vibes. They’re about lockstep solidarity with your chosen team, to which you must demonstrate your loyalty through fierce and unwavering conformity. And most of all, they’re about hating the right people. Politics in 2022 are defined not by whom you vote for, but by whom you wish to harm.
In her telling, that explains why conservatives keep mistaking her for one of their own rather than the liberal that she is:
Not because I argue for right-wing policies or from a right-wing perspective, but because progressives are often extremely, publicly mad at me for refusing to parrot the latest catechism and for criticizing the progressive dogmas that either violate my principles or make no sense. I look like a friend of the Right only because the Left wants to make me their enemy — and because I can’t bring myself to do the requisite dance, or make the requisite apologies, that might get me back in the Left’s good graces.
… It’s remarkably easy these days to be named an apostate on the left. Maybe you were critical of the looting and rioting that devastated cities in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020. Maybe you were skeptical of this or that viral outrage: Covington Catholic, or Jussie Smollett, or the alleged racial abuse at a BYU volleyball game that neither eyewitness testimony nor video evidence could corroborate. Maybe you were too loud about the continued need for due process in the middle of #MeToo. Maybe you wouldn’t stop asking uncomfortable questions about the proven value of certain divisive brands of diversity training, or transgender surgeries for kids, or — come the pandemic — masking. Maybe you kept defending the right to free speech and creative expression after these things had been deemed “right-wing values” by your fellow liberals. This is a fraught moment for those of us who aren’t reflexive team players, who struggle with reading the room, who remain committed to certain values on principle even when they’ve become politically inexpedient. The present climate leaves virtually no room for a person to dissent and yet remain in good standing.
A similar phenomenon causes conservatives such as David French and Jonah Goldberg to be treated as apostates for sticking to their principles, even when that means criticizing Donald Trump.Forgive Them, for They Knew Not What They DidHere at The Atlantic, Emily Oster harkens back to the earliest months of the pandemic, when everyone was making decisions under conditions of significant uncertainty, and argues that our treatment of one another going forward ought to be informed by that context:
Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong …  
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts … These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward … We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.
The Restaurant Industry’s Worst IdeaIn my estimation, it is the QR-code menu:
Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen.
QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right––when everyone’s phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works––they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. “You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be,” Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, “but from there it’s easy to start checking texts and emails.”
And wasn’t it already too easy?
The article goes on to express this hope for the future: Rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, I hope we look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society understood the high costs of social isolation––and settled on mealtime norms as an especially vital way of mitigating them.What if, three times a day, society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?[Read: The importance of dissent in wartime]Provocation of the WeekJohn Tierney has been a skeptic of recycling plastic since at least 1996, when he wrote in The New York Times Magazine:
Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense—for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups—politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations—while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.
Last week, Greenpeace published a new report on recycling, announcing it in a press release that began:
Most plastic simply cannot be recycled, a new Greenpeace USA report concludes. Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, released today, finds that U.S. households generated an estimated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, only 2.4 million tons of which was recycled.
In City Journal, Tierney claims vindication:
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
How we ought to think about and regulate plastic going forward is a complex issue that Tierney and Greenpeace disagree about, and that Up for Debate will return to. But I am convinced by both of their bodies of work that plastic recycling is not an effective “green” policy—which is depressing, given how much time well-intentioned people have spent on it all these years.That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

If you were still hanging onto some strained fiber of hope that the Biden White House would cobble together a coherent economic message ahead of next Tuesday’s elections, the president’s handlers cut you loose last night.

“Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership,” the White House crowed. Indeed, Social Security recipients will see a staggering 8.7 percent increase in their cost-of-living adjustment next year, but that is nothing to celebrate. That gigantic cost-of-living boost, which follows 2022’s similarly large 5.9 percent hike, is a function of inflation. Social Security’s general benefit increases have been legally tethered to the Consumer Price Index for nearly a half-century. What’s more, the increase in disbursements will be paired with a middle-class tax hike. Wages subject to Social Security payroll taxes will grow by nearly 9 percent next year, with the maximum income subject to withholding growing from $147,000 to $160,200.

Only the presumption of profound ignorance on the part of Social Security recipients, to say nothing of everyone else, could explain why the White House thought this was a winning message. It was so deliberately misleading that even Twitter’s misinformation sleuths felt compelled to contextualize the tweet by reminding oldsters their good fortune is a byproduct of widespread hardship. Within hours, the White House quietly deleted the tweet.

Much like the off-key party the White House threw for itself to celebrate what a great job it had done taming inflation, the administration likely hopes this fiasco will recede into memory. And it might, if only because the administration is pivoting back to its comfort zone. With just six days to go before the midterm vote, Joe Biden will deliver yet another address to the nation about the menace Republicans represent to the health of American democracy.

The president’s staff have chosen Union Station in Washington D.C. for the backdrop against which Biden will warn the nation about what White House adviser Anita Dunn called the “threat of political violence.” The idea being that this threat is “geared towards subverting democratic processes” and is akin to what the nation witnessed on January 6, 2021. That threat has only grown more acute, Politico reported, as fears of Republican-inspired political violence were “borne out by Friday’s brutal assault” on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

It’s Biden’s second bite at this apple and a curious one at that. His first attempt to mobilize voters in the defense of democracy was a political disaster, in part because it was so nakedly political.

Biden’s September 1 speech was billed as an effort to cool down national tensions, but the text of the speech only aggravated them. It was allegedly a non-partisan speech, dressed in all the trappings of the office of the presidency. But what Biden turned in was a modified stump speech. It was supposed to be a clarion call to Americans to move on from Donald Trump and his misguided grievances against the 2020 election, but the president’s clear intention was to summon the specter of Trump back into the national consciousness. It was an atonal visual disaster and a naked attempt to capitalize on voters’ fear that America’s democratic institutions are in jeopardy.

Those fears are real. Poll after poll has found that, behind economic issues, voters of all political stripes expressed more anxiety about the “state of democracy” than almost any other issue. But those same polls show that Democrats only enjoy a modest advantage on the issue compared with the GOP. That isn’t explained entirely by partisanship, with Democrats using “democracy” as a proxy for the Capitol riot and Trump voters conjuring up images of “mules” bearing boxes of fraudulent ballots. Independents, too, are roughly split down the middle on the issue of which party is best suited to preserve America’s democratic institutions. That’s a discerning perspective because neither party seems inclined to defer to those institutions when they produce political or electoral outcomes they dislike.

Given all this ambiguity, it’s a wonder that Biden has decided to go back to the same well. Indeed, White House advisers are telegraphing that this speech seeks to make political hay out of the assault on Paul Pelosi by a drug-addled paranoiac who apparently believed himself to be Jesus, which risks further cheapening the threat to democracy. But the White House is in a state of panic and is throwing whatever it can against the wall.

Excerpted from “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human” by Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D. ’00.
In November 2017, I watched my friend Sam P. die because his cells had rebelled against his body.
Sam had been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma in the spring of 2016. The cancer had first appeared as a coin-shaped mole, purple-black with a halolike aureole, near his cheek. His mother, Clara, a painter, had first noticed it during a late-summer vacation on Block Island. She had cajoled — and then begged and threatened — him to have it examined by a dermatologist, but Sam was a busy, active sportswriter for a big newspaper, with little time to worry about a pesky spot on his cheek. By the time I saw and examined him in March 2017 — I was not his oncologist, but a friend had asked me to look at his case — the tumor had grown into a thumb-sized, oblong mass, and there was evidence of a metastasis in his skin. When I touched the growth, he winced in pain.
It is one thing to encounter a cancer, it is quite another to bear witness to its mobility. The melanoma had begun to travel across Sam’s face toward his ear. If you looked closely, it had marked its progression like a ferry moving across the water, leaving a wake of stippled, purple dots behind it.
Even Sam, the sportswriter who had spent his life learning about speed, motility, and agility, was astonished by the pace of the melanoma’s progression. How, he asked me insistently — how, how, how — had a cell that had sat perfectly still in his skin for decades suddenly acquired the properties of a cell capable of careening along his face while also dividing furiously?
But cancer cells don’t “invent” any of these properties. They don’t build anew, they hijack — or, more accurately, the cells that are fittest for survival, growth, and metastasis are naturally selected. The genes and proteins that cells use to generate the building blocks required for growth are appropriated from the genes and cells that a developing embryo uses to fuel its fierce burst of expansion during the first days of life. The pathways used by the cancer cell to move across vast bodily spaces are commandeered from those that allow inherently mobile cells in the body to move. The genes that enable unfettered cell division are distorted, mutated versions of genes that allow cell division in normal cells. Cancer, in short, is cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror. And as an oncologist, I am, first, a cell biologist — except one who perceives the normal world of cells reflected and inverted in a looking glass.
Siddhartha MukherjeeScribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
In late spring 2016, Sam was prescribed a medicine to turn his own T cells into an army to fight the rebel army that was growing in his body. Consider this thought: for years, perhaps decades, Sam’s melanoma and his T cells had coexisted, essentially ignoring each other. His malignancy was invisible to his immune system. Millions of his T cells had brushed past his melanoma every day and just moved on, bystanders that had turned their faces away from a cellular catastrophe.
The drug that Sam had been prescribed would hopefully uncloak the tumor’s invisibility and make his T cells recognize the melanoma as a “foreign” invader and reject it, much as T cells reject microbe-infected cells. The passive bystanders would become active effectors. We were engineering the cells in his body to make visible what had previously been invisible.
The discovery of this “uncloaking” medicine was the culmination of radical advances in cellular biology that date back to the 1950s: an understanding of the mechanisms used by T cells to discriminate the self from the nonself, the identification of the proteins that these immune cells use to detect foreign invaders, the uncovering of pathways by which our normal cells resist being attacked by this detection system, the way cancer cells co-opt it to make themselves invisible, and the invention of a molecule that would strip the malignant cells of their cloak of invisibility — each insight, built atop an earlier insight and each dug by cell biologists out of hard, cold earth.
Almost immediately after Sam began his treatment, a civil war unfolded in his body. His T cells, shaken awake to the presence of the cancer, were pitched against his malignant cells, their vengeance provoking further cycles of vengeance. The crimson boil on his cheek turned hot one morning because the immune cells had infiltrated the tumor and unleashed a cycle of inflammation; then the malignant cells folded camp and left, leaving smoldering, dying campfires. When I saw him again a few weeks later, the oblong mass and the stipples behind it had vanished. Instead, there was just the dying remnant of a tumor, shriveled like a large raisin. He was in a remission.
We shared a coffee to celebrate. The remission had not just changed Sam physically; it had charged him psychologically. For the first time in weeks, I saw the creases of worry in his face relax. He laughed.
But then things turned: April 2016 was a cruel month. The T cells that attacked his tumor turned on his own liver, provoking an autoimmune hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver that could barely be controlled with immune-suppressive drugs. In November, we discovered that the cancer — in remission just weeks prior — had battened to his skin, muscles, and lungs, hidey-holing in new organs and finding new niches to survive the attack of his immune cells.
When she was around six, Emily Whitehead was Patient No. 7, treated at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).  In May 2010, Emily had been diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Among the most rapidly progressive forms of cancer, this leukemia tends to afflict young children.
The treatment for ALL ranks among the most intensive chemo regimens ever devised: seven or eight drugs given in combination, some injected directly into the spinal fluid to kill any cancer cells hiding in the brain and spine. Although the collateral damage of the treatment — permanent numbness in the fingers and toes, brain damage, stunted growth and life-threatening infections, to name just a few — can be daunting, the treatment cures about 90 percent of pediatric patients. Unfortunately, Emily’s cancer fell in the remnant 10 percent, proving unresponsive to standard therapy. She relapsed 16 months into treatment. She was listed for a bone marrow transplant — the only option for a cure — but her condition worsened while she awaited a suitable donor.
“The doctors told me not to Google” her chances of survival, Emily’s mother, Kari, told me. “So, of course, I did that right away.”
What Kari found on the web was chilling: of the children who relapse early, or relapse twice, almost none survive. When Emily arrived at Children’s Hospital in early March 2012, nearly every one of her organs was packed with malignant cells. She was seen by a pediatric oncologist, Stephan Grupp, a gentle, burly man with an expressive, ever-moving mustache, and then enrolled in a clinical trial.
Emily’s trial involved infusing her body with her own T cells. But these T cells had to be weaponized, via gene therapy, to recognize and kill her cancer. Unlike Sam, who had received drugs to activate immunity inside his body, Emily’s T cells had been extracted and grown outside her body. This form of treatment had been pioneered by the immunologist Michel Sadelain at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and by Carl June at the University of Pennsylvania, building on earlier work by the Israeli researcher Zelig Eshhar.
The infusions, which took place over three days, were largely uneventful. Emily sucked on an ice pop while Dr. Grupp dripped the cells into her veins. In the evenings, she and her parents went to stay with an aunt who lived nearby. The first two nights, she played games and got piggyback rides from her father. On the third day, though, she crashed: throwing up, and spiking an alarming fever. The Whiteheads rushed her back to the hospital. Things rapidly spiraled downward. Her kidneys failed. Emily drifted in and out of consciousness, verging on multi-organ system failure.
“Nothing made sense,” her father, Tom, told me. His daughter was moved to the intensive care unit, where her parents and Grupp kept an all-night vigil.
Carl June, the physician-scientist who was also treating Emily, told me candidly, “We thought she was going to die. I wrote an e-mail to the provost at the university, telling him that one of the first children with the treatment was about to die. The trial was finished. I stored the e-mail in my out-box but never pressed Send.”
The lab technicians at Penn worked overnight to determine the cause of the fever. They found no evidence of infection; instead, they found elevated blood levels of molecules called cytokines — signals secreted during active inflammation. In particular, levels of a cytokine known as interleukin 6 (IL-6) were nearly a thousand times normal. As the T cells killed the cancer cells, they were releasing a storm of these chemical messengers, like a rioting crowd disgorging inflammatory pamphlets on a rampage.
By a strange twist of fate, however, June’s own daughter had a form of juvenile arthritis, an inflammatory condition. He knew about a new drug, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just four months earlier, that blocks IL-6. As a last-ditch effort, Grupp rushed an application to the hospital pharmacy requesting permission to use the new therapy off-label. The board granted its approval for the IL-6–blocking drug that evening, and Grupp injected Emily with a dose in the ICU.
Two days afterward, on her seventh birthday, Emily woke up. “Boom,” Dr. June said, waving his hands in the air. “Boom,” he repeated. “It just melted away. We did a bone marrow biopsy 23 days later, and she was in a complete remission.”
“I have never seen a patient that sick get better so quickly,” Grupp told me.
The deft management of Emily’s condition — and her startling recovery — saved the field of cell therapy. Emily Whitehead remains in that deep remission to this day. No cancer is detectable in her marrow or her blood. She is considered cured.
“If Emily had died,” June told me, “it’s likely that the whole trial would have been shut down. It would have set back cellular therapy perhaps a decade or even longer.”
As I watched the advance and retreat of Sam’s illness, and the remarkable recovery of Emily Whitehead, I knew that I was also observing the birth of a kind of medicine in which cells were being repurposed as tools to fight illness — cellular engineering. But it was also the replay of a centuries-old story. We are built out of cellular units. Our vulnerabilities are built out of the vulnerabilities of cells. Our capacity to engineer or manipulate cells (immune cells, in both Sam’s and Emily’s cases) has become the basis of a new kind of medicine — albeit a kind of medicine that is still in midbirth. If we knew how to arm Sam’s immune cells more effectively against his melanoma without unleashing the autoimmune attack, would he be alive today, spiral notebook in hand, writing sports pieces for a magazine?
Copyright 2022 by Siddhartha Mukherjee, M.D. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Let’s get right to it: Come January, Republicans are likely to control both houses of Congress. The signs are lining up. After a summer when Democrats saw glimmers of hope—and when they seemed likely to retain the Senate—the light has faded. GOP control of the House of Representatives seems all but assured, and as of yesterday, prediction models suggest that the Senate will tip as well.If history is any indication, a Republican Congress could spell doom for climate policy. Since the early 1990s, when the GOP took a turn toward climate-change denialism, the party has been one of the world’s top enemies of climate policy. For years, it was one of the few major political parties in a developed country that rejected the reality of human-caused climate change. When Republicans won the House in 2010, two years into Barack Obama’s presidency, it set back American climate politics for years, putting a generation of open climate-science doubters in Congress. They tried to fire White House climate advisers, hectored environmental officials, shut down the House’s global-warming committee, and doomed what had been a bipartisan effort to tax carbon pollution.Of course, plenty of congressional Republicans—more than 130, by one count—still deny the reality of human-caused climate change. But some members of the party claim that they’ve evolved since then. This year, House Republicans unveiled a new Conservative Climate Caucus that, in a fascinating circumlocution, sort of recognizes that fossil fuels are causing the planet to warm. (“The climate is changing, and decades of a global industrial era that has brought prosperity to the world has also contributed to that change,” the group has said.) The caucus now has 74 members, including Representative Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, who is likely to lead the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee next year. Lucas has called “the need to address global climate change” one of that committee’s “two most immediate challenges.” (Not that he’s a dyed-in-the-fleece environmentalist: He also has a 5 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters.)So what will this new Republican Congress actually mean for climate policy? Three factors will help determine what could happen next.First, and most crucial, the party will want to own Joe Biden—to defeat him, humiliate him, smash his presidency into bits. As my colleague Barton Gellman has reported, the House might impeach Biden at some point in the next year, simply because its rhetorical groundwork will leave it no other choice.  These same dynamics seem likely to all but force the party to target the president’s climate policy as well, because climate policy has been so central to Biden’s presidency. The president’s three big bills—the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and especially the Inflation Reduction Act—cement emissions reduction as a core goal of American economic policy. On the face of it, you would expect Republicans to attack these policies and the officials implementing them. Many Republicans will want to turn the IRA, which got zero Republican votes, into Biden’s Obamacare: a legislative boondoggle that stands for the broader problems of his presidency. The IRA funds two public-financing agencies to help create more green industry in the U.S. Both will be natural targets of aggressive, and even destructive, Republican oversight in the coming Congress.[Read: It wasn’t just oil companies spreading climate denial]But that will be tricky because the public doesn’t seem to hate the IRA like it disliked the Affordable Care Act. Republicans will also have to navigate that the IRA isn’t so far from the climate policies that they have recently mooted; certainly, it’s much closer to their views than Obama’s 2009-era climate policies were. In 2011 and 2012, for instance, conservatives hammered the Obama administration for making a high-profile $535 million loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra, which later went bankrupt. The episode represented all the failures of liberal economic planning, Mitt Romney said on the presidential-campaign trail: Democrats used taxpayer money to pick winners and losers in the economy, and those winners didn’t even succeed.But since then, Republicans have warmed to similar industrial policies because they will, at least in theory, help the American economy better compete with China’s. “We need capitalism,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said last year. But “in those instances in which the market’s most efficient outcome is one that’s bad for our people, for our national security, for our national interest, bad for America—in those instances, what we need is targeted industrial policy to further the common good and to protect our people, our country, and our future.” It’s also clear now that Solyndra failed in part because China’s policies enabled its own factories to spit out solar panels far more cheaply than U.S. factories could.The second factor is that economic incentives will pull the party in two directions. The GOP has historically been close to the fossil-fuel industry: Since 1990, more than two-thirds of the oil-and-gas industry’s donations to candidates and party committees have flowed to Republicans, according to the watchdog group OpenSecrets. There’s no reason to expect that trend to slow.But the green transition is also a windfall for rural areas, and that means—given the country’s increasing urban-rural polarization—it’s a windfall for Republican districts. As the analysts Liam Denning and Jeff Davies have shown, most of the country’s new zero-carbon energy infrastructure is getting built in securely GOP districts. For instance, Kevin McCarthy, who in all likelihood will be the next speaker of the House, actually lives in the country’s No. 1 district for planned and operating grid-scale battery projects. Nine of the 10 congressional districts with the most planned or operating renewable capacity, in fact, are held by Republicans. This concentration will only intensify as the IRA pumps more money into zero-carbon infrastructure. Ford’s four new electric-vehicle and battery factories, for instance, are being built in deep-red Kentucky and Tennessee.For this reason, Credit Suisse analysts concluded in a recent report that the GOP is unlikely to repeal the IRA even if it clinches a trifecta in 2024. The question in the short term is whether that political concern changes the party’s oversight agenda.[Read: The climate economy is about to explode]Finally, the party has long-term electoral concerns to consider. Combatting climate change is far more popular than it was in 2010. “Obviously McCarthy wants to win the midterms and become the speaker of the House, but he also understands that if he wants a longer-term majority for Republicans, then climate change and environmental issues broadly have to feature as a part of the party platform,” Christopher Barnard, the policy director of the American Conservation Coalition, told me. That group has helped establish new pro-climate GOP efforts, framing its work as crucial to reaching the voters of the future, including women, independents, and younger voters.Perhaps the most catastrophic outcome for the climate is not that the GOP targets Biden’s climate policy, specifically, but that it takes aim at his whole administration through budgetary showdowns or by letting the government lapse into endless shutdowns. That would sap some of Biden’s power, and some of his precious days in office, to implement the IRA’s important tax provisions.There are lots of good reasons—economic, political, and electoral—that it might be unwise for Republicans to try to smash Biden’s climate policy. But they may pale in comparison with what’s virtually certain to be the supreme goal of any Republican majority: opposing Biden by any means possible.

The Case For A Republican Sweep On Election Night

Nov. 2, 2022, at 9:55 AM	

ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT

Republicans reached a milestone on Tuesday, surpassing a 50 percent chance of a Senate takeover in our Deluxe forecast for the first time since July 25. Still, the race for the Senate is about as close as it gets. So I thought it might be worth engaging in a dialog with my alter egos.
Today, you’ll meet Nathan Redd. He’ll try to convince me that the Republican outlook is even better than our model shows. Then later this week, we’ll introduce you to Nathaniel Bleu.3 While fairly partisan, Redd and Bleu are canny observers of politics who are reasonably numerate. Last night, I met with Redd at a bar near Grand Central Station before his commute back to Connecticut. An abridged transcript follows:

Redd: You’ve gotta be the luckiest guy I know, Silver.
Silver: Wait, what? What are you talking about? How are the kids, by the way? It’s been a while.
Redd: Luckiest guy I know. This is the easiest election call I’ve ever seen.
Silver: Well, we’re not really making “calls” at FiveThirtyEight, exactly. You know how the model works. It’s probabilistic. And the model says the Senate is about as close to 50-50 as it gets.
Redd: You think it’s 50-50? OK, let’s bet then. Steak. Sushi. Rangers tickets. You name it.
Silver: You haven’t even told me which side you want to bet on! Though I think I can guess.
Redd: To me there are two scenarios: Republicans win big or Republicans win small.
Silver: Shocker.
Redd: I’m telling you, this one is easy. Just look around you. 
Silver: It looks like … an Irish bar in Midtown.
Redd: It’s half-empty. And yet, the waitress hasn’t been to our table in 15 minutes. Welcome to Joe Biden’s America!
Silver: So, you’re voting Republican because you can’t get your drink refilled?
Redd: I mean, just look. It’s not back to normal. This place used to be packed from 5 p.m. ’til close. Now, they don’t even stay open past 10. Then there’s all the crime, the homelessness. There’s the inflation and the supply chain.
Silver: I’ll take you out to Brooklyn next time. It might as well be 2019 there. And when was the last time you closed out a bar? You moved to Connecticut when you were 23 and single.
Redd: You’re getting off-track. The equation is pretty simple. The Democrat Party promised normal. They’re in charge of everything. We haven’t even gotten close to normal. 
Silver: Are we really saying “Democrat Party” now?
Redd: You’re dodging, Silver. I know the numbers. People are unhappy with how things are going. They’re unhappy with Biden. Democrats barely even have a majority to begin with and there’s a backlash every midterm election.
Silver: I get that, but it’s not so straightforward. Voters may be unhappy, but they’re agnostic about which party they prefer. They remember former President Donald Trump, who didn’t leave office as a popular guy. They care about the Supreme Court, which exercises a lot of power even when Republicans are out of office. Have you talked to any of your female friends about abortion?
Redd: I don’t trust the polls anyway. C’mon. I read your stuff, believe it or not. I know your argument about how it’s hard to predict polling bias. I sort of get it. But let’s do a little thought experiment. Let’s say it’s France, where they ban you from doing polling —
Silver: You can do polls in France! Except for the weekend before the election.
Redd: Silver, this is a thought experiment! Let’s say you’ve got no polls. What does your model say?
Silver: Well, it’s not exactly set up to run like that. But if what you’re getting at is Republicans are pretty heavily favored on the basis of the fundamentals, then I agree. At the start of the year, I was expecting this to be an anticlimax — Republicans would win both chambers of Congress.
Redd: That’s exactly what I’m getting at. I’m not even saying polls will always have a Democratic bias. I’m just saying in this election they will, because if you look at everything apart from the polls, it points toward a big Republican year. And the less you trust the polls, the more you need to look at everything else.
Silver: I’m not even sure that’s true. Democrats are raising as much or more money than Republicans. They did awfully well in those special elections this summer.
Redd: Summer? Who cares about summer? The Trump guys I know, they don’t vote in the summer.
Silver: So now you’re back to making assertions based on imaginary friends of yours?
Redd: And by the way, I do talk to my female friends about abortion. Abortion is a problem for Republicans. That’s why I’m not sure if we’re going to win small or win big. But pretty much everything else lines up on our side.
Silver: I don’t see how you can be so confident about all of this.
Redd: I’m not confident! I just told you, I don’t know if we’re going to win small or big. But lately I’ve been thinking big. You want to know why?
Silver: I’m sure you’re going to tell me.
Redd: You know my favorite saying? Follow the outfielders, not the ball. When Aaron Judge hits a fly ball, look at what the left fielder is doing. Don’t listen to the crowd, they’re a bunch of idiots. Look at the professionals. The professionals are backing way up, like it’s going to be a big year for Republicans. Look where the campaigns are spending. For Democrats, it’s in blue districts. They have problems in New York. I’m going to ask you about my boy and future New York governor Lee Zeldin in a minute, by the way. They have trouble in California. They’re even sending Biden to Miami-Dade County!
Silver: For a guy who’s as cynical about the media as you are, you’re awfully willing to buy into cherry-picked narratives. I don’t see how there’s any information given away by Biden visiting South Florida, for instance — it’s a swingy part of the country! And midterm elections can be regional. For every Lee Zeldin, you’ve got an Oklahoma, where the race is surprisingly tight in the other direction. And by the way, the professionals aren’t always so smart. They’re just as much in the fog of war as anyone else.
Redd: I’m just saying, Occam’s razor, Republicans win this thing. Keep it simple.
Silver: Occam’s razor? Where have I heard that before? But here’s the thing: I’m not actually sure that keeping it simple is better. There’s a reason we go through the trouble of building a model and all the extra work that entails. I’m not sure that people’s intuitions are very good when it comes to election forecasting. In 2012, the media insisted that the race was a toss-up because they were looking at national polls, not realizing that former President Barack Obama had a pretty big edge in the Electoral College. In 2016, they didn’t realize how fragile Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead was because of correlated errors between the states. They kept it simple and they were wrong! Sometimes the devil is in the details!
Redd: I’ll tell you a detail. Your polling average still has Democratic John Fetterman up in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. He’s not going to win after that debate.
Silver: Ahead? I mean, just barely. And it’s still not entirely clear how much the debate changed things. But I agree with you in principle: if there’s news that hasn’t yet been fully reflected in the polls, that’s going to make our model a lagging indicator.
Redd: And I tell you who else is going to win: my boy Lee Zeldin. People are sick of Kathy Hochul. Maybe you need to step out of your media bubble.
Silver: Your boy? Do you actually know him? You live in Greenwich, Connecticut, not New York. Who’s living in the bubble? And he’s probably not going to win. Hochul’s still ahead in the polls. And by the way, this cuts against everything you were saying earlier about the fundamentals. Even if Republicans are having a pretty good night, we’re living in very partisan times — it’s hard to win as a Republican in New York these days.
Redd: So, we got a bet?
Silver: You on Zeldin, me on Hochul? Sure. Winner picks the restaurant and the wine, too. 
Redd: No, on the Senate.
Silver: I’m going to pass. Our model has it at 50-50, it’s been trending Republican, and you make a couple of semi-persuasive points, like about Pennsylvania. 
Redd: Semi-persuasive! That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Silver! And good luck on Tuesday, but you won’t need it. It’s going to be an early night.

A recent meta-analysis looks at all studies calculating the risk of developing either myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) or pericarditis (inflammation of the lining around the heart) following each of the various COVID-19 vaccines. We already knew that there was an association, but the authors wanted to look at all the data currently available to nail down the statistics of the risk as much as possible.

The meta-analysis included 11 studies and a total of 58,620,611 subjects. Here are the main findings:

The risk of developing either myocarditis or pericarditis was increased following COVID-19 vaccination, with a relative risk of 2.04.

Risk was statistically significant for myocarditis alone, but not pericarditis, which may be because there is no increased risk for pericarditis, or because fewer studies looked at this outcome and therefore there was less statistical power.

Risk was increased in men more than women, and in people <40 years old vs > 40.

Risk was increased more following the second dose than the first.

Risk was significant only in the mRNA vaccines, not the viral vector vaccines.

Most cases of myocarditis were mild and self-limiting.

The authors did a good job of fleshing out the statistics, showing good homogeneity of results (the studies generally agreed with each other) and minimal publication bias (a symmetrical funnel plot). However, I was disappointed that they did not calculate the absolute risk or the number needed to harm. Only presenting the relative risk can often be misleading.

This comes up frequently on SBM – it is critical for consumers of health information to understand the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. If, for example, exposure to a drug cause the risk of side effect X to increase from 1% to 2%, that is a relative risk of 2, or a 100% increase, or twice the risk. That sounds significant. But the absolute risk increase is only 1%, which doesn’t sound as significant.

In this case I searched for some mention of absolute risk, but could not find it. That information may be buried in a table somewhere, but was nowhere in the write up itself. I would have preferred that it was right there in the abstract, or at least the discussion. It wasn’t even in the text of the results section. The authors might argue that this was not the purpose of the meta-analysis, but I would reject that explanation. Scientists must realize (and this is fairly explicit with academia now) that they are essentially communicating with the public when they publish studies, not just their colleagues. What they write influences the press release, and influences reporting on their findings.

This is exactly why “number needed to treat” or “number needed to harm” statistics are encouraged and becoming more common in medical reporting. They are more intuitive for the public, and even scientists and practitioners (i.e., humans), to understand.

Further, the authors have to know that the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations is a hot political topic. This makes it necessary, in my opinion, for them to make their write-up as bullet-proof as possible, to anticipate and cut-off motivated misinterpretation, and to put their data in as much context as possible.

Looking at discussions of the individual studies elsewhere, I was able to find that the risk of myocarditis following one of the mRNA vaccines is about 40 cases per million doses among the highest risk group – young males, or an absolute risk of 0.004%. The rate was 2.4 per million doses in older males and 1 per million in women. Even in the high-risk group:

Per million second doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine administered to males aged 12–29 years, 11,000 COVID-19 cases, 560 hospitalizations, 138 ICU admissions, and six deaths due to COVID-19 could be prevented, compared with 39–47 expected myocarditis cases after COVID-19 vaccination.

Given that >90% of cases of myocarditis will completely recover, that means in young men the vaccines prevent six deaths per million doses while causing <4 cases of myocarditis that have less than complete recovery. In all other groups the results are much more dramatic, saving hundreds of lives for every case of myocarditis (including the mild cases). Also, the data generally looks only at hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths from COVID. They don’t look at long-COVID morbidity. These statistics are becoming alarming, with the CDC estimating that 7.5% of American adults having long COVID symptoms following infection.

To their credit the authors of the current meta-analysis point out that the risk vs. benefit of the vaccine is still favorable, and people should get their recommended vaccines. But they did not present the data to make this explicit.

We also have to keep in mind that COVID-19 infection itself causes myocarditis. The relative risk here is 16 times – with the absolute risk increasing from 9/100,000 to 150/100,000. That’s 1,500 cases of myocarditis per million COVID-19 infections, vs 40 per million in the high-risk group of young men from mRNA vaccines, and 1-2 per million doses in lower risk groups. The risk is literally 1-2 orders of magnitude (10-100x) greater from getting infected than from the vaccine.

These are the kinds of statistics that the public needs to here, and they should be prominent in any study of a public health intervention, such as vaccines.

The bottom line from this data is that the small increased risk of myocarditis, especially in young males, following 1-2 doses of an mRNA vaccine for COVID appears to be real. However, the risk is small in absolute terms, most cases are self-limiting, and the benefit of the vaccines vastly outweigh this small risk (even just for myocarditis itself).

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.January 6 was not an outlier. Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The cold dose of reality awaiting Elon Musk
The nuclear question America never answers 
Democrats keep falling for “superstar losers.”
A Spreading CancerIt might seem late in the game to point to any one event as a final or conclusive moment in the decline of the Republican Party. And I have no doubt that if the GOP returns to power this winter, its worst members will find new ways to appall decent people while gamboling about in jester’s bells for its base. (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has put it so well, “The cruelty is the point.”) But the reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating of Paul Pelosi—by a man named David DePape, who was charged with attempting to kidnap Speaker Nancy Pelosi and admitted to planning to torture her—feels different.I am not alone; my friend Mona Charen, among others, also senses that this event marks a new level of depravity in the GOP. I have struggled for a few days to decide why, exactly, this moment seems like an inflection point. In terms of actual damage, January 6 was far worse than one violent crime in San Francisco. Republican leaders—and here I will leave aside Donald Trump, who is in a class of hideousness all by himself—have said far worse things over the past five years. But a parade of Republicans somehow think that an unhinged, hammer-wielding intruder putting an old man in the ICU is funny.We might expect such inanity from pathetic attention hounds such as Donald Trump Jr. and the usual conservative troll-pundits. Some of them tried to get a rumor about Paul Pelosi trending and briefly succeeded, especially when Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, characteristically decided that he just had to get involved in something he knows nothing about and amplified a dodgy story about it on Twitter. (He later deleted the tweet.) GOP leaders, however, stayed silent.But that didn’t stop people in both right-wing politics and media from laughing it up over the Pelosi attack, including the Arizona gubernatorial contender Kari Lake, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, and sitting Representative Clay Higgins. Others have joined in trying to obfuscate or deflect attention from the intent of the attack; Senator John Cornyn of Texas even lamely tried to raise immigration as an issue. (DePape is here on a long-expired visa from Canada.)One might think that it would be easy for America, as one nation, to condemn an attempt to kidnap the woman second in line to the presidency that resulted in the beating of her husband with a hammer. As Ernest Hemingway would say: Pretty to think so. Instead, we have seen the dark heart of the Republican Party, with a reaction so callous, so flippantly sadistic, so hateful, that it all feels irredeemable.Of course, Republicans have put on a master class in whataboutism over the past few days. What about the people who laughed at Rand Paul’s neighbor giving the Kentucky senator a beatdown? What about Kathy Griffin’s ugly photograph of her holding up a mask representing Trump’s severed head? And, most of all, what about James Hodgkinson, who shot at a group of GOP political officials and nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise? These are all said with triumph, as if the transformation of the GOP into a violent mob is rendered moot by these examples.I disapproved of laughing off the attack on Rand Paul and the Griffin photo shoot. (I am allergic to even the implication of violence against any president.) But I also don’t think these are neatly comparable cases; Paul, a middle-aged man, was attacked by a neighbor angry over a pile of brush in Paul’s yard, and Griffin paid a significant career price for her tasteless stunt.Hodgkinson and DePape, by contrast, do seem alike, a similarity exploited by Republicans. Both were troubled and unstable men who spent a lot of time on the internet and settled on political figures as their intended target. That’s fair as far as it goes.The problem is that the GOP and their media footmen are flooding the zone with hate, and creating more potential DePapes every day. There is no equivalence here; it’s not liberals who are threatening election officials, stalking ballot boxes with guns, or barraging Congress’s phones and inboxes daily with threats. January 6 should have been our warning that these messages have real power, and yet that terrible day has already receded from our collective memory.To see how the right wing is deranging more people every day, consider the case of Scott Haven, a Utah insurance salesman. In a new book, the journalist Robert Draper notes that Haven was convicted in 2019 of making threats in many of the almost 4,000 calls he made over two years to Democrats in Congress, singling out Maxine Waters, Dick Durbin, and Jerry Nadler:
He focused his attention on them because Limbaugh and Hannity had themselves done so—even going so far as to supply their Washington office numbers while on the air. Haven dutifully jotted them down. Then he began calling, sharing sentiments like the following:
“Tell the son of a bitch we are coming to hang the fucker!”
Later, as he pleaded guilty in court, Haven trembled with regret. So did many of the insurrectionists of January 6. Perhaps David DePape will do so as well one day. But the members and staff on the Hill who lived in fear of Haven’s threats will not get those years back; the people killed and injured in the Capitol breach cannot be made whole; Paul Pelosi’s body is no less shattered.Sadistic glee in harming others is a sin (at least in my faith). But it is also a social cancer, a rot that can spread quickly and kill the spirit of democracy. If all attempts at reason and all offers of friendship fail, the rest of us should shun those whose dark hearts encourage them to revel in such poison. Unfortunately, millions of our fellow citizens seem poised to vote many such people into power. The darkness is spreading.Related:
Only the GOP celebrates political violence.
January 6 never ended.
Israel is holding its fifth national election in four years, which will determine whether former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returns to power. Early exit polls suggest that Netanyahu will succeed in winning a narrow majority.
Chief Justice John Roberts extended a freeze barring the Treasury Department from giving Donald Trump’s tax returns to House investigators.
The rapper Takeoff, of the trio Migos, died at age 28 in a shooting in Houston.
Galaxy Brain: Welcome to geriatric social media, Charlie Warzel writes.
Brooklyn, Everywhere: Elon Musk’s “personal brand is Frat Guy Planning Pledge Week,” Xochitl Gonzalez argues. Do Twitter users want to go along for the ride?
(Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty)
Why Does Chronic Pain Hurt So Much?By Kieran Setiya
You never forget the first time a doctor gives up: when they tell you that they don’t know what to do—they have no further tests to run, no treatments to offer—and that you’re on your own. It happened to me at the age of 27, and it happens to many others with chronic pain.
I don’t remember what film I’d gone to see, but I know I was at The Oaks Theater, an old arts cinema on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, when pain stabbed me in the side.
Iran has become a prison.
Elon Musk is no aberration. 
Why are people weird about only children?
Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal sitting on a boat in Aftersun. (Zoey Kang / A24)
Read. The Carrying, a collection of poems by Ada Limón about the ubiquity of grief—and the possibilities of joy.Or try something else from this list of seven books that understand grief.Watch. Aftersun (in select theaters), an exquisite debut film about the journey to seeing a parent as their own person.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I’m sorry today’s Daily was so dark. So let me suggest a happy diversion now that we’re heading into the Thanksgiving season. There aren’t a lot of great Thanksgiving movies; Americans tend to revel in the gory fun of Halloween and then dive straight into Christmas movies and specials. (More about those next month.) But in my house, there is one movie that returns every November: Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the buddy-road-trip masterpiece starring John Candy and Steve Martin.I first saw PTA, as we aficionados call it, when it came out in 1987. It has since provided me with 35 years of laughter and family catchphrases that have survived across three generations. When my father, who had a notorious temper, backed into my girlfriend’s car many years ago, he surprised me by pausing and then drawing on a line from one of the great scenes in the movie: “Oh, they’ll be able to buff this out, no problem.” We dissolved into laughter. Years later, my daughter came home, contrite that she had dinged up the bumper of my car. I said the same thing, and the same laughter saved the day. Make a viewing part of your Thanksgiving tradition.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

It was December of 1996 when Karen Lips turned up the first bodies—and finally felt an ember of hope. As a graduate student working in the muggy forests of Central America, she’d noticed that an as-yet-unnamed culprit had been stripping the area of its frogs. Regions that had once rung with a chorus of croaks were silent and still, but no one had found the carcasses that could speak to a cause. With those finally in hand, “I remember thinking, Wow, this might actually be helpful,” Lips told me. Surely, data would beget a solution; surely, the frogs’ declines would now be reversed.More than 25 years later, Lips has felt much of that early spark of hope fizzle and flame out. Scientists did indeed go on to identify the amphibian-killing pathogen: the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short. But Bd has not been stopped. Instead, it has spread to every continent where frogs and their close cousins are found. “If you pick up an amphibian here in the U.S., on average you have a 50 percent chance of picking up one that’s infected with Bd,” said Lips, who now runs her own lab at the University of Maryland. Eradication is no longer possible; the fungus has established itself in too many animals, in too many places. Lips sometimes imagines the planet coated in a layer of fungus that grows back when poked, prodded, or torn. “I’m not sure I have optimism,” she told me, not anymore.Bd is the paragon of a pandemic. It has been described as perhaps the most devastating disease the world has ever recorded, in terms of its species scope and death toll. A pathogen that wriggles inside amphibian skin cells and causes fatal heart attacks, the fungus is estimated to have contributed to the decline of about 500 amphibian species, about 90 of which have been driven to extinction; more are expected to follow, sending ripples through countless food webs. Bd is also, outside of tight circles of amphibian enthusiasts, little known, and barely addressed. For the network of researchers who have devoted decades of their lives to combatting it, hope has long been hard to keep alive. And in the past three years, as another outbreak—this one, a plague of humans—erupted into public consciousness, their prospects for success have felt even dimmer.[Read: The worst disease ever recorded]Bd wasn’t always thought of as a permanent planetary scourge. When scientists first began to study the pathogen, “it was not looked at as a hardy organism,” Lips told me. Several antifungals, including a drug called itraconazole, can easily wipe it out in test tubes; so can potent chemicals released by multiple species of bacteria, including some that naturally reside on certain amphibians’ skin. Researchers actually have to fight to keep the finicky fungus growing in the lab: Even small perturbations in temperature or salt content are enough to nuke it, forcing scientists to start their cultures over from scratch. “We used to joke about how easy it was to kill,” Lips said.Out in the wild, though, Bd rapidly proved itself to be far more formidable. Some research suggests that the fungus can linger in the environment for days or weeks, awaiting its next host; it is a fast evolver, too, with the ability to essentially “add or kick out chromosomes at will,” says Trent Garner, a biologist at the Zoological Society of London and University College London. The range of animals it can trouble is also staggeringly large: The fungus seems to be able to infect just about any of the 8,000-plus species of amphibians it encounters, transmitting directly through skin-to-skin contact, or by releasing sperm-shaped spores into water. It’s hardy; it’s ubiquitous; it’s impossible to permanently purge. Boot it out of one population, and it just moves into the next.Researchers, having acknowledged that Bd’s threat will never completely dissipate, still try their best to mitigate its harms. Antifungals work, at least in limited contexts: About a decade ago, a team of scientists led by Garner used them (along with disinfectants) to eliminate Bd from several ponds in Majorca, Spain. Some researchers are also experimenting with probiotics that can be slathered onto amphibians like “a topical yogurt” to imbue their skin with fungus-fighting bugs, says Molly Bletz, a disease ecologist and conservation biologist at UMass Boston who’s working on one such intervention. Other scientists are looking into Bd-focused vaccines, or selective breeding in captivity—even engineered genetic tweaks—that could make certain species less vulnerable to disease. Some researchers are trying to mobilize amphibians out of Bd-infested areas; chauffeur them into fungus-free havens; or seed their habitats with crustacean micropredators, such as water fleas, that might snarf Bd down.[Read: Why are some frogs surviving a global epidemic?]The tricky thing with all of these tempering tactics, though, is that they’re ultra-laborious—with little guarantee that the effects will last. In zoos, frogs that are cleared of Bd with drugs get “reinfected all the time,” Lips told me. And that’s after researchers “treat them all,” a proportion that would be infeasible in the wild. The looming specter of fungal evolution also keeps herpetologists up at night. Obed Hernández-Gómez, an evolutionary ecologist at Dominican University, in California, has found that it can take as few as 15 generations for Bd to evolve resistance to the molecules made by certain probiotic bacteria; the case is probably comparable with antifungals, though the phenomenon hasn’t been well studied. Some also worry that any chemical, bacterial, or environmental intervention could come with serious consequences for creatures that coexist with frogs, or for the frogs themselves.Vaccines could be a more lasting intervention, with fewer environmental ripple effects. But effective immunizations don’t yet exist. Cold-blooded amphibians are also a challenging group to vaccinate. “Their immune systems are really slow,” Bletz told me, especially when temperatures dip. Even vetted vaccines wouldn’t pass protection down through the generations, requiring scientists to make regular trips into the field. Interventions in captive contexts, too, may serve only as a stopgap. The idea is to “breed them, then return them to their habitats,” says Ana Longo, a herpetologist at the University of Florida. “But if the pathogen is still there, is it worth it to spend all this effort?”People, too, could get their act together. Humans seem to have ferried the fungus, once restricted to parts of Asia, around the globe, via imported or stowaway amphibians. Better regulation of the international trade in these animals could reduce the global burden, but Bd has already spread to nearly all frog-inhabited corners of the world, save for maybe Papua New Guinea and a few nearby island outposts, and its ubiquity is seen by many as a foregone conclusion. Researchers have also been distracted, for the past 10 years or so, by another fungal outbreak caused by a sister species called Bsal that mainly targets salamanders. Bsal hasn’t yet been detected in North America, the “hot spot” of salamander diversity, Hernández-Gómez said, and the effort to keep it out has gobbled up herpetologists’ attention, pushing Bd to the sidelines. And among some policy makers, there’s been a pervasive attitude of “what exactly do you want us to do?” Lips told me. “It’s already here.”[Read: The origins of the killer fungus driving frogs to extinction]That sentiment has seemed particularly familiar of late, Bd experts told me, now that the world is grappling with another pandemic-caliber disease, this one trained on humans. COVID has forced a reckoning with the same sorts of questions as the frog fungus, and produced similar stalemates: What level of suffering is sustainable, or tolerable? What do you do when a disease is still raging but many people seem to have tired of fighting it? As with Bd, the coronavirus has no silver-bullet solution. Both are here to stay.Lips has been gathering data that could draw more direct connections between amphibians’ well-being and our own. She and her colleagues recently published a paper proposing that the decline of amphibians in Central America may have led to a boom in populations of mosquitoes—typical frog fare—and raised the risk of malaria among people. Though even infectious threats to Homo sapiens can be easy to ignore. Our response to the coronavirus pandemic, in particular, felt like “a slap in the face,” Hernández-Gómez said. “If humans don’t even care about a disease that’s killing off their own,” Bletz told me, “how are they going to care about something that affects amphibians?”In broad strokes, much of the rest of the Bd and Bsal story may feel written: More populations will dwindle; more species will disappear, many of them far from human habitations, where they may, once again, escape the notice of most. Perhaps more species will ultimately adapt to resist or tolerate Bd, and so the struggle continues to “keep populations in the wild for as long a time as possible, to give more time for natural selection to act,” says Ben Scheele, a disease ecologist at Australian National University who’s working to save his nation’s corroboree frogs. But even on an evolutionary timescale, there are no guarantees: Where frogs go, the fungus seems to follow.[Read: The cascading consequences of the worst disease ever]“There’s almost nothing we can do, in a way, and that’s the sad part,” says Timothy James, a chytrid-fungus expert at the University of Michigan. Lips has held dying frogs in her hand, each of them sluggish, discombobulated, and weak, sometimes to the point where they can no longer muster the energy to try to wrest themselves free. “They just sort of sit there, even if you bend to pick them up,” she told me. Their deaths are slow, subtle affairs—agonizing fades that have become, like so many other infectious endings, a kind of background noise.Some of the experts I spoke with told me there is still plenty of room for optimism—that the efforts of the few could still turn the tide, especially against the less pervasive Bsal. Others, although far from giving up on the Bd battle, feel more conflicted. At the start of the COVID outbreak, Lips felt another wellspring of hope burble up in her chest. She gave talks. She told people, “This is not my first pandemic.” Maybe, she thought, there would be a surge in interest in infectious disease; maybe, she thought, people would understand the importance of conservation, and keeping ecosystems intact. That’s not what happened. “I had hoped COVID would be our success story,” she said. “But I went from ‘This will be a motivating factor to do better!’ to ‘Wow, we’re kind of losing momentum again.’”Lips still remembers what Costa Rica’s tropics looked like in the 1990s, before Bd was truly known. She recalls the feeling of becoming enamored of the spectacular green coloring and the nubby spiked skin of the region’s Isthmohyla calypsa tree frogs. Isthmohyla calypsa is now no longer in Costa Rica: Bd has driven it out. And Lips no longer does much fieldwork. A lot of pain comes with confronting the froglessness—trying to count creatures that she and others worry will no longer be countable in a few years’ time. Lips’ current research—some of it geared toward influencing policy, and buoying biodiversity as a whole—does keep her going. But as the frogs continue to vanish, so too does the work of the scientists who study them. “Where do I go?” she said. “Where are the frogs?”

There’s an op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday on the rise of right-wing comedy, and you won’t be surprised to learn that this is no laughing matter.

Left-of-center satire is becoming an endangered species, Times opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom begins. Trevor Noah is retiring from “The Daily Show,” and James Corden is following his lead. Samantha Bee’s TBS program was canceled. Desus and Mero broke up. The late night shows, most of which have transformed into flaccid group-therapy sessions for anxious progressives, are struggling to retain viewers. And in their place, comedy with a distinctly right-wing flavor has become an emerging cultural and financial powerhouse. Humor that is utterly devoid of any social mission beyond its entertainment value is back in vogue.

The retreat of the left-wing comedy scene is a cultural phenomenon, McMillan Cottom observes. “Audiences have different orientations toward humor and political talk,” she writes. “Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs.” Indeed, much of mainstream center-left comedy predictably caters to those “psychological needs,” and predictability is the enemy of the joke.

As the late satirist P.J. O’Rourke told me in an interview for my book The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, the laugh is a product of “two planes of meaning at an unexpected angle”—emphasis on “unexpected.” But the extirpation of frisson from the equation is only part of the problem.

“Bluntly, scholars who study political communication and humor often find that liberals are ironic smart alecks and conservatives are outraged moralists,” McMillan Cottom contends. Maybe once upon a time. Today, however, the left is increasingly inclined toward detached irony and preening moralism. Take the example McMillan Cottom uses to illustrate the “spectrum” of political humor, with Jeff Foxworthy on one side and George Carlin on the other. Foxworthy is presently teaming up with former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno, both of whom are less overtly conservative than they are simply not liberal (a distinction with a difference that too few progressive comedy critics recognize). Carlin, by contrast, has been deemed posthumously problematic in the pages of the New York Times.

As Times writer David Itzkoff wrote, “the durability of Carlin’s material can be dangerous, too.” Though the injustices against which Carlin railed “persist to this day,” the American right finds itself increasingly attracted to his flippancy, iconoclasm, and almost libertarian desire to be unmolested by moral scolds. “Dislocated from the time and circumstances that inspired his work, the arguments he delivered can be made to serve purposes he didn’t intend,” Itzkoff continued. Nobody familiar with Carlin’s work doubts how the man would be voting if he were alive today, but that’s beside the point. In an age in which everything is political, everything becomes an instrument of political utility. And those instruments must be kept out of the wrong hands.

Carlin’s insistence that standups should avoid “punching down” has been praised by the progressive left. A strong satirist, the comic once said, challenges convention and speaks truth to power. But when Carlin offered that observation, it was a time in which the American left thought of themselves as an insurgency. They were the plucky radicals mounting an assault on the commanding heights of corporate and political power.

Today’s progressives are not orchestrating a rebellion but trying to put one down. Corporations kowtow to their concerns. Politicians flatter their pretensions. Universities cater to their preferences. Entertainment follows the flow chart they wrote. There is a pervasive sense on the politically active left that this is a fragile covenant, and anything that threatens it must be policed. Even humor. But that is a rearguard action, not a bold assault on the citadels of conformity.

Back to McMillan Cottom: “If you have a high need for clear-cut moral rules, then satire, which asks us to skewer our own beliefs, is going to make you pretty anxious.” She has that right, but she has applied this observation to the wrong targets. The rise of right-wing humorists like Greg Gutfeld and irreverent alternative media figures like Ben Shapiro (who is a conservative) and Joe Rogan (who is not) is not explained by a dispositional attraction to “outrage” among those who identify as conservative. Outrage isn’t funny. It is explained by the self-seriousness of the audiences to whom left-leaning comics are trying to appeal, which McMillan Cottom evinces in abundance:

The Dobbs decision has radicalized and terrified millions of voters. Many Americans think the Supreme Court is partisan, if not outright corrupt. President Biden’s policy achievements do not seem to be capturing voters’ imagination. And he has several significant policy wins. Large swaths of the Republican Party have embraced white identitarian violence. We are too scared to laugh.

Progressives have ceded the genre to their political opponents in the misguided belief that the laugh is subversive. And what is being subverted is their own political and cultural preeminence. “If satirical political content is the liberal audience’s way to stick it to the man,” McMillan Cottom asks, “why isn’t the genre exploding right now?” It’s because you are “the man.”

As a theory of “political economy,” Marxism isn’t at all complicated. At the very bottom, it is the belief that human beings are fundamentally social beings whose true nature shapes and is shaped by their societies. Off this, Marxism boils down to two essential beliefs about people and society. Those are

The Division of Society Through Private Property: Some people illegitimately declared themselves the exclusive possessors of some special kind of private property and order society and its supporting ideological narratives to justify their claim on this property now and into the future; and
A Dynamic Relationship Between “Praxis” and Its “Inversion”: People—especially those with access to structural power—can shape society as a matter of continually becoming what it is and will be (called “praxis”), and in turn structural power in society shapes the people who live within it (called “the inversion of praxis”). Phrased otherwise: Man makes Society makes Man makes Society… in an endless loop of praxis and inversion of praxis.

That’s how Marxism understands society. Basically, certain people create systemic (or structural) injustice by granting themselves exclusive access to a special form of private property and using it to shape society to their own persistent benefit, including by arranging systems and the narratives surrounding them to brainwash people into accepting this unjust state of affairs. This arrangement becomes the fundamental organizing principle of society until such time as it is overthrown from its conscious margins in societal revolution, according to Marxist thought.
That word “conscious” is the key term because Marxists believe that humans are making society and thus themselves no matter what. They’re always doing praxis, and the inversion of praxis is always occurring. Society and mankind are always becoming what they have been, are, and will be, whether we’re conscious of the trajectory of it or not. Marxism bills itself as the first true scientific study of History, which claims to reveal the true causes of the unfolding of society and thus man historically, by which is meant through his entire past, present, and future. Hitherto, one might say, this process has largely happened blindly, by people unconscious of the Scientific Socialism, as Marx called it, but that doesn’t need to stay the case. We can consciously seize the means of production of society and consciously direct it where it’s meant to go.
For Marxists, whoever has control over the capacity to do meaningful praxis in the world can shape society, which in turn shapes mankind. That’s, in fact, what makes us human, except that oppression is inherently dehumanizing, so we’re all estranged from our true nature until all structural dehumanization is brought to an end. Communism, writes Karl Marx, as the “positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement” and as “the abolition of private property” is the only possible answer to the end of all dehumanizing structures, by which we remember who we really are as human beings—Communists. The people who would benefit least from this transformation of society have arranged things so that they can’t possibly see it, and the people who would benefit most from it have been conditioned (through narrative, ideology, and the inversion of praxis) to accept those terms as “just how it is” or to be too marginalized, divided, and disenfranchised to do meaningful praxis.
Marxism isn’t just a descriptive theory of political economy, then. The point isn’t merely to understand society, explained Karl Marx, but to change it. As a theory of consciousness—which in this case means gnosis—Marxism is a program with two other essential beliefs about what to do with their beliefs about the organization of society at the level of its fundamental organization. Those are

Historical Purpose (Telos): History has a purpose and a trajectory, and it is people’s role in life to realize this purpose and direct it to its (teleologically) intended endpoint; and
Class Conscientization: People, especially those who directly experience the oppression, estrangement, and alienation of this unjust arrangement in society, can be awakened to it being the fundamental organization of society, which was historically derived and is malleable by understanding and seizing the means of the production of society, i.e., of the inversion of praxis, which is effected not so much by individuals but by the class in which they are situated.

In short, Marxism posits that those excluded from the special form of property are disenfranchised from the capacity to do praxis to shape society to their betterment (and, in fact, emancipation from the structural injustice imposed upon them). The privileged have structured society to reinforce their own worldview and principles from every dimension, so they naturally operate as though they are a conscious class even though they are not. Their imposition of “structural reality” and the ideology that seeks to justify it prevents the oppressed underclass from being able to realize that they could band together as a class to do meaningful praxis and transform the system to one that is more just and equitable.
Speaking religiously, as an aside, what Marx proposed is that the real Fall of Man and ejection from the Garden of Eden was self-imposed by taking up “knowledge” of the ownership of private property. This, in turn, created the division of labor and thus, through the inversion of praxis, the division of Man. Man sundered himself from himself, each other, nature, his true nature in this Fall. Marxism is therefore a “theory” (technically, it’s an anthroposophy or, depending on one’s perspective, a theosophy) for how Man can remember who he really is (a socialist), undo the Fall (the division of labor created by the belief in private property), and return to the Garden on his own terms.
There’s nothing particular about economic material production that defines the essence of Marxism, then. Karl Marx, for reasons we might speculate about, believed that one’s material economic conditions are the overwhelming primary determiner of one’s person and character through the inversion of praxis. In other words, it is one’s material and economic conditions that “make Man” and estrange him from his true social nature, which is Communist. Classical Marxism therefore becomes a matter of teaching the disenfranchised workers, who are marginalized and exploited in the unjust system of capitalism, to realize how things really work, seize the means of economic and material production (like factories and farms), and then use that to control the means of societal and human production, consciously and in line with Marxist anthroposophy about the purposed endpoint of society, which is Global Communism. In other words, there’s no reason that other types of exclusive or private property than capital might not be plugged into this political economy machine and spit out another fully formed Communist theory. This allows Marxist Theory to mutate according to need in whatever society it finds itself in, depending on where the biggest levers of power against that society might reside.
Take race, for example. If one assumes, as did Cheryl I. Harris in 1993, that “whiteness” defines a special form of property that certain people (“whites”) can treat as exclusive, a complete Marxist theory of race can drop out of the political economy machine. They call it “Critical Race Theory,” and, for reasons that are about to be perfectly clear, I call it “Race Marxism.” Here’s how it works, comparing against classical Marxism with a forward slash between the concepts.
Some people (whites/capitalists) unjustly declare themselves the exclusive possessors of a special form of private property (whiteness/capital), thereby divide society into those who have it and those who don’t, and begin to arrange society such that the power granted through that access increases for those people over time. Those excluded from the resource and thus power by this declaration (people of color/workers) are thereby exploited for their productive capacity that is then turned into surplus value (cultural property/profit) for the advantaged class. Not only are the exploited thereby robbed of what they produce (cultural property/labor value), but they are estranged from who they really are (valid representatives of a culture/producers). More specifically, the product of their work (cultural production/labor) is subsumed into the privileged class (becomes part of white culture/is turned into profit), leaving the exploited (people of color/worker) impoverished (culturally/materially) and unable to recognize himself for who he really is (say, authentically Black/a producer). All this is enabled by the privileged class structuring society at its most fundamental levels for their own benefit (structural or systemic racism/structural classism), justified by the privileged class promulgating an ideology that it’s how things are supposed to be (white supremacy/capitalism and meritocracy). People in this dynamic system can be awakened to the structural “realities” of their lives and become (race/class) conscious activists (antiracists/proletarians) who work to seize the means of production (cultural/material) of their society to make it more fair (equitable/socialist). Eventually, this will be generally understood as the right way to order a society and will, through their praxis inverting into the inversion of praxis and thus socially conditioning people to accept it, become spontaneously fair (socially just/communist).
This extends to other forms of property, construed more abstractly as not just material as in capital and land, but also as social, cultural, and even human capital. This allows for the instantaneous creation of the entire constellation of “Identity Marxist” theories of identity politics with virtually no work (which makes it funny how much work it has taken these people to devise this stuff). Again, technically none of these is a theory (they’re all anthroposophies and/or theosophies). Here’s a quick summary:
Marxism: The bourgeoisie claims access to a special form of property called capital. They create an ideology called capitalism (based on things like meritocracy) to justify this. This allows them to structure society with structural classism that advantages the bourgoisie and exploits, estranges, and disenfranchises the working class. People can be made aware of the Marxist theory of societal production and become class-conscious proletarians or a bourgeois vanguard operating in solidarity on their behalf. If they seize the means of production of society and Man, they will usher in socialism that will eventually ripen into Communism through the inversion of praxis.
Critical Race Theory: The whites (and their adjacents) claims access to a special form of property called whiteness. They create an ideology called white supremacy (based on things like meritocracy and racism) to justify this. This allows them to structure society with structural or systemic racism that advantages whites and exploits, estranges, and disenfranchises people of color. People can be made aware of the Critical Race theory of societal production and become race-conscious antiracists and/or “white allies” operating in solidarity on their behalf. If they seize the means of race-cultural production of society and Man, they will usher in racial equity that will eventually ripen into racial justice (a kind of social justice) through the inversion of praxis.
(Marxian) Feminism: Men claim access to a special form of property called maleness or masculinity. They create an ideology called male supremacy or hegemonic masculinity (based on things like meritocracy and sexism) to justify this. This allows them to structure society with patriarchy and structural or systemic sexism, enforced by misogyny, that advantages men and exploits, estranges, and disenfranchises women, as a class. People can be made aware of the (Marxian) feminist theory of societal production and become feminist-conscious feminists and/or “male allies” operating in solidarity on their behalf. If they seize the means of sex-cultural and material production of society and Man, they will usher in gender equity that will eventually ripen into feminist justice (a kind of social justice) through the inversion of praxis.
Queer Theory: Straight people whose “gender identity” and sex match (and those who pass as such) claim access to a special form of property called normalcy (by declaring themselves the normal ones and defining normalcy to mean like themselves). They create an ideology called normativity (e.g., heteronormativity and cisnormativity) to justify this. This allows them to structure society with structural or systemic homophobia and/or transphobia (or, generally, queer-phobia) that advantages the “normal” and exploits, estranges, and disenfranchises “queers” (anyone different, especially gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the gender non-conforming, transgenders, and the mentally ill). People can be made aware of the Queer Theory theory of societal production and become queer-conscious (“proud”) allies operating in solidarity on their behalf. If they seize the means of normative cultural production of society and Man, they will usher in gender, sexual, and sex equity that will eventually ripen into gender, sexual, and sex justice (a kind of social justice) through the inversion of praxis.
Disability Studies: The able-bodied claim access to a special form of property called “ability.” They create an ideology described from the outside as dis/ableism (based on a belief that it is generally better to be fully able-bodied than not, and further based in ideas like “medicalism”) to justify this. This allows them to structure society with structural or systemic dis/ableism that advantages able-bodied and exploits, estranges, disenfranchises, and disables the disabled or “differently abled.” People can be made aware of the Disability Studies theory of societal production and become disability activists conscious allies operating in solidarity on their behalf. If they seize the means of ability-relevant cultural and material production of society and Man, they will usher in ability-based equity that will eventually ripen into ability-based justice (a kind of social justice) through the inversion of praxis.
Fat Studies: The “thin” (those who are not “fat”) claim access to a special form of property called “normal weight” or even “health.” They create an ideology described from the outside as thinnormativity (based on a belief that it is generally better to be at a healthy weight than not, and further based in ideas like “healthism” and “medicalism”) to justify this. This allows them to structure society with structural or systemic fatphobia that advantages “thin” people and exploits, estranges, and disenfranchises the “fat” (they cannot be called “obese” because that “medicalizes” them or “overweight” because that “unjustly” implies a normal or acceptable weight). People can be made aware of the Fat Studies theory of societal production and become fat activists fat-conscious allies (or fat) operating in solidarity on their behalf. If they seize the means of weight/health-relevant cultural and material production of society and Man, they will usher in fat-based equity that will eventually ripen into fat-based justice (a kind of social justice) through the inversion of praxis.
It’s extremely important to understand Marxism on this general level so that what we’re dealing with around us in the world can be properly understood, called out for what it is, and prevented from achieving its ultimately destructive goal of seizing the means of production of anything, especially Man and History. Understanding these “theories” for what they really are not only allows us to call them out accurately and understand why they must be stopped, but it also allows us to be strategic in our fight against them because it enables us to easily predict their next moves and to delegitimize their manipulations as quickly as they arise. Failure to understand them this way means continually being taken off-guard, losing, and being manipulated, or—more accurately and through the inversion of their praxis—being exploited, estranged, and disenfranchised from our own societies.
The post CRT, Queer Theory, and Marxism by Any Other Name appeared first on New Discourses.

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the Valdai Club, a Moscow-based think tank where serious matters are discussed, and where Russian policy is frequently shaped. I was invited to speak there in December 2014, after the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The Russians believed it was engineered by American intelligence. I argued that that’s a hard thing to pull off without widespread dissatisfaction, and that while the CIA can do many things, fueling a revolution, including feeding, watering and supplying tens of thousands of people in a small space without end, isn’t one of them. The U.S. could hand out cookies, as the assistant secretary of state for European affairs did for her own strange reason, but the Maidan uprising was mostly an organically grown rebuke of a staunchly pro-Russia president and the massive corruption that surrounded him. I said that if the uprising was the result of a coup, then it had to be the most blatant coup in history. What I meant, in a wryly sarcastic way, was that the United States did absolutely nothing to hide its enthusiastic support. Russian media took it to mean that it was, in fact, the most blatant coup in history. There’s a reason I’m not a diplomat.

The Russians believed it was a Western coup, while the Americans saw it as an expression of political independence. I think both sides were sincere. From the U.S. point of view, a democratic uprising was an appropriate outcome. From the Russian point of view, it was a first step toward destabilizing Russia. The Americans dismissed Russian concerns, of course, but the Russians could not dismiss the idea that this was all but an act of aggression. It was at this point in 2014 that the current war was set in motion.

Moscow concluded that Ukraine, under American “control,” was a threat. Eight years later, Russia launched a war intended to impose its will on Ukraine, to make clear to the region that Russia was again a great power and to demonstrate American weakness. It is increasingly unlikely that any of this will be achieved.

Nothing is impossible, but it’s far-fetched enough for Putin to redefine the terms of war, which is precisely what he tried to do during his speech at the Valdai Club. Importantly, he did not identify the United States as the key enemy; the enemy, to him, is the West writ large, which had succumbed to a corruption – new secular mores, gender fluidity and other cultural bugaboos – that it is now trying to impose on Russia. That corruption is undermining the West, and Russia is merely standing up to it, according to Putin. (There was also an explicitly religious angle to the speech.) The Russian efforts in Ukraine are therefore not the whole of the war but merely one dimension of a much broader geopolitical and cultural conflict. Being defeated in Ukraine, then, is not the same as being defeated in this larger struggle. Which makes sense if you define the war in Ukraine as a crusade against the arrogance of the West rather than a place you mean to control.

Putin has since released a statement through his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, offering to negotiate. This follows the logic of his Valdai speech.

Peskov is Putin’s spokesman, and he holds that position because he is careful about what he says. The offer is real, but it still seems as though Putin is setting up a tough negotiation, as evidenced by efforts to block shipments of Ukrainian grain. Having completely reframed the war in Ukraine as a campaign against Western imperialism, he isn’t going to be easy to negotiate with, but that doesn’t mean he won’t negotiate at all.

On October 23rd, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, made phone calls to the defense ministers of four NATO member countries to tell each of them that Ukraine was planning to detonate a “dirty bomb”—that is, a conventional weapon spiked with radioactive material—on its own territory. Three of the four recipients of this information—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—responded that day with an unusual joint statement denouncing the claim. (Shoigu’s fourth interlocutor was Turkey.) Russian leaders and propagandists, who covered the phone calls in some detail, don’t necessarily think that anyone, anywhere, will believe that Ukraine would use a radioactive weapon against its own people just so it can blame Russia for the attack. Shoigu’s phone calls were preëmptive, another example of Russia creating information noise, sowing doubt, asserting the fundamental unknowability of the facts of war. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that he had personally directed Shoigu to make the calls, and this claim underscored their true meaning: Russia is preparing for a nuclear, or nuclearish, strike in Ukraine.

This was not the first, second, or third time that Moscow had sent this message. Putin has been rattling the nuclear sabre since the start of the full-scale invasion in February, and, indeed, for many years before. In 2014, months after annexing Crimea and at the height of engineering a pro-Russian insurgency war in eastern Ukraine, Russia changed its military doctrine to open up the possibility of a nuclear first strike in response to a threat from NATO. In 2018, Putin first proffered his promise—since reprised, and replayed many times by Russian television—that, in a world-scale nuclear event, Russians will go to heaven while Americans “just croak.” The threat of a nuclear strike has become more apparent—more frequently repeated on Russian propaganda channels—since the Ukrainian counter-offensive began, at the end of the summer.

The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not. Earlier this month, the U.K.’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, reassured the audience at a Conservative Party conference that, although Putin’s actions could be “totally irrational,” he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons because he couldn’t risk losing the support of China and India—both of which, Wallace asserted, had put Putin on notice. President Biden has offered a different perspective: Putin, he said, is a “rational actor who has miscalculated significantly” in launching his offensive in Ukraine, and this was the reason he wouldn’t use nuclear arms. (On another occasion, Biden said that a Russian nuclear strike would unleash Armageddon.) Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national-security adviser, has consistently said that the White House takes Putin’s threats seriously and would respond decisively in the case of a nuclear attack. Still, in recent weeks, as Moscow has ramped up its warnings, it has become conventional wisdom, or perhaps just good form, to say that Putin isn’t really going to use nukes. “Russian President Vladimir Putin will probably not drop an atomic bomb on Ukraine,” a September Washington Post editorial began, axiomatically. Bloomberg’s European affairs columnist Andreas Kluth started a recent column by instructing the reader to “put aside, if you can, the growing anxiety about Russian President Vladimir Putin going nuclear in his barbaric war in Ukraine” because, Kluth asserted, the risk “remains small.”

These reassurances tend to rely on arguments that fall into three categories: Putin fears the consequences of a nuclear strike, Putin is unwilling to put Russian citizens at risk, and a nuclear strike will not help accomplish Putin’s strategic goals. Back in July, James Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, laid out most of these arguments in a Bloomberg column. He wrote that Putin understands he needs to work to maintain the political support China has reluctantly given him, and the economic coöperation of Latin American, African, and South Asian countries—especially India—that continue to buy Russian oil and gas. Putin also, according to Stavridis, “likes his life and loves his country”—and the use of a nuclear weapon would jeopardize both. Stavridis argued that the conceivable strategic objectives of using a nuclear weapon—to cut off military supply lines by destroying the western Ukrainian city of Lviv; to decapitate the state by annihilating the capital, Kyiv; to devastate Ukraine’s economy by pulverizing the Black Sea trade-port city of Odesa—could be achieved with less risk by using conventional weapons. Finally, Stavridis noted, if Russia used a nuclear weapon, it could not deny that it had, the way it was able to at least attempt to deny that it had used chemical weapons in Syria.

In an October 5th Substack newsletter, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, one of the most knowledgeable observers of the war in Ukraine, cautioned his audience against caving to Putin’s “nuclear blackmail” and advanced several new arguments for why Putin is not about to use nuclear weapons. With a military draft in effect since late September, Russia is putting hundreds of thousands of men on the ground in Ukraine, and Putin wouldn’t want to risk killing them by detonating a nuclear bomb, Snyder argued. Russia has unilaterally (and illegally) declared a chunk of Ukraine to be part of Russia—which makes it impossible for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb in eastern Ukraine, where it would presumably devastate lands and people Russia claims as its own. The country has had so much trouble holding on to its military equipment, and, conversely, Ukraine has proven so adept at shooting down and capturing Russian weapons, that Moscow would not risk bringing a nuclear weapon even close to Ukraine. Finally, Snyder argued, given that Russia has been losing to Ukraine for months, if Putin were going to detonate a nuclear bomb as a desperate response to military defeat, he would have done so already. What Putin really needs, Snyder argued, is to shore up his power at home, something he is more likely to accomplish by finding a way to end the war—a nuclear bomb, Snyder suggested, would almost certainly prolong it.

Snyder is making the case that a nuclear attack against Ukraine would risk too much collateral damage to Putin, his people, and his troops—and that Putin’s awareness of these risks has so far held him back. And, like Stavridis, he suggests that Putin doesn’t need to use nuclear weapons to end the war. But, as the nuclear-arms expert Ankit Panda told my colleague Isaac Chotiner, Putin has been consistently—and unproductively, from the point of view of Western war science—running down his conventional arsenal; soon, cannon fodder, Iranian drones, and nuclear arms may be all he has left. “He’s making tactical military decisions that really don’t make sense from the perspective of rational military planning,” Panda said.

When we say that someone isn’t acting rationally, what we mean is that we do not understand the world in which the person’s actions are rational. The problem is not so much that Putin is irrational; the problem is that there is a world in which it is rational for him to move ever closer to a nuclear strike, and most Western analysts cannot comprehend the logic of that world. Robert Jay Lifton, the pioneering psychiatrist and historian who has written about nuclear arms for half a century, is fond of quoting the philosopher Martin Buber’s phrase “imagine the real.” That is what we fail to do when we talk about Putin and his nuclear threat: we can’t imagine the very real possibility that he will follow through.

We have three sources for understanding what the world looks like to Putin: Putin’s own statements, Russian propaganda, and the voices of Russian defectors. During the Soviet period, memoirs by men who fled to the West—such as the former Party functionary Abdurahman Avturkhanov and the former spy Anatoli Granovsky—served as manuals to the thinking of the Soviet leadership for generations of researchers. These days, it’s much easier to leave Russia than during the Soviet Union, when citizens were rarely allowed to travel abroad and, if they were, had to endure constant surveillance. And yet few highly placed Russians have left recently, and so far only Boris Bondarev, a diplomat who defected following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has written in detail about his experience. Bondarev’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is a fascinating account of a conspiracy of distortion. “Even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day,” Bondarev, who had been stationed in Geneva, wrote. “It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves.”

After Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, the U.S., members of the European Union, and some other Western nations imposed economic sanctions on the country. Putin responded with counter-sanctions, effectively isolating the Russian economy even further. The Kremlin spun the entire affair as a victory, a boon for domestic manufacturing—and in some sectors this was true. But, Bondarev writes, some essential components used in defense production—sensors for aircraft, for example—came from Western manufacturers, and sanctions cut off the supply. “Although it was clear to my team how these losses undermined Russia’s strength, the foreign ministry’s propaganda helped keep the Kremlin from finding out,” Bondarev writes. “The consequences of this ignorance are now on full display in Ukraine: the sanctions are one reason Russia has had so much trouble with its invasion.”

Similarly, diplomats covered up losses on the international-relations front. In 2018, when Russia stood accused of poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, the Kremlin attempted to derail the investigation by introducing a resolution before the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It was easily defeated, but Bondarev writes that cables to Moscow reduced the loss to a single sentence, surrounded by paragraphs “about how they had defeated the numerous ‘anti-Russian,’ ‘nonsensical,’ and ‘groundless’ moves made by Western states.”

Such is the feedback loop of propaganda, ambition, and fear that shapes Putin’s perceptions of the world. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Bondarev writes, many of his colleagues “took pride in our increasingly bellicose behavior.” When questioned, “they gestured at our nuclear force.” This was during the very early days of the full-scale war, when Russians and much of the world believed that Ukraine would quickly lose. As the Russian offensive faltered, the deployment of the nuclear threat went from triumphant to menacing. “One official, a respected expert on ballistic missiles, told me that Russia needed to ‘send a nuclear warhead to a suburb of Washington,’ ” Bondarev writes. “He added, ‘Americans will shit their pants and rush to beg us for peace.’ He appeared to be partially joking. But Russians tend to think that Americans are too pampered to risk their lives for anything, so when I pointed out that a nuclear attack would invite catastrophic retaliation, he scoffed: ‘No, it wouldn’t.’ ”

Although it may be evident to a non-Russian military strategist that the use of a nuclear weapon would be strategically disastrous for Russia, Putin sees his mission in grander and less pragmatic terms. He believes that, on the one hand, he is facing down an existential threat to Russia and, on the other, that Western nations don’t have the strength of their convictions to retaliate if it comes to nukes. Any small sign of a crack in the Western consensus—be it French President Emmanuel Macron pressuring Ukraine to enter peace negotiations, or the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy criticizing what he sees as unconditional aid to Ukraine—bolsters Putin’s certainty. An army of yes-men and the propaganda machine amplify both the threat Russia ostensibly faces and the support it supposedly enjoys.

Last week, Putin hosted his annual Valdai policy conference, an invitation-only junket that has traditionally served as a way for him to broadcast his message to the world. In the past, the audience has consisted largely of Western journalists and Russia scholars. But the crowd at this year’s event was different. The topic was “A Post-Hegemonic World: Justice and Security for All.” Putin delivered a nearly hour-long talk on the need to liberate the non-Western world from the choke hold of “cancel culture” and “the ten different genders” that the West inflicts on countries in place of “traditional values.” For a couple of hours afterward, he fielded questions from representatives of Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Brazil, former Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus, and others; most speakers began by expressing respect bordering on adulation. “Many countries are tired of living under the rule of external powers,” Putin remarked at one point. “The more they see us pushing back against that pressure, the more they support us. That support will only grow.”

What is the purpose of the American nuclear arsenal? Every American president since the end of the Cold War has tried to answer this question in a formal report called the Nuclear Posture Review. And every American president has fudged their answer—now including President Joe Biden, who released his NPR last week even as Russia wages war in Europe and the Russian president makes barely veiled nuclear threats against Ukraine, NATO, and the United States itself.The first NPR, in 1994, was the result of an initiative by President Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense Les Aspin to ask what we should do after the Cold War with a nuclear arsenal that was designed to defeat a Soviet adversary that no longer existed. The process, unfortunately, turned into a kind of bureaucratic free-for-all, in which the Pentagon—better organized, more powerful, and more committed to the status quo than other agencies—outflanked Aspin and his staff (including a talented young assistant secretary of defense named Ashton Carter, later to become secretary himself). Unsurprisingly, the document effectively said that our nuclear establishment, including the triad of bombers, land-based missiles, and submarines, was just fine. Its authors conceded that a new force could be smaller and cheaper, a kind of Mini-Me of the old one.And that’s pretty much what subsequent NPRs have said ever since. Over the years, other administrations have differed in their emphasis but not their conclusions. The 2002 NPR, for example, reflected both the priorities of the George W. Bush administration and the trauma of 9/11. It was, apparently, a mess of a document. I say “apparently” because most of it was classified; the parts that were released—or leaked—to the public looked very much like the result of lazy outsourcing to defense contractors once everyone in the national-security establishment had stampeded over to counterterrorism and insurgency issues. It was soon buried and forgotten.[Tom Nichols: The president and the bomb]When Barack Obama released an NPR, his administration hired communications consultants to try to avoid his predecessor’s stumble, but this precaution didn’t matter. I was among many who hoped that the 2010 release would contain serious changes to U.S. nuclear doctrine, especially because a year earlier, Obama had committed the United States to a nuclear-free world. But again, interagency struggles produced a compromise document that kept previous policies and structures intact.When Donald Trump became president, many in the national-security community held their breath to see what would come from a man so staggeringly ignorant about nuclear issues. But in the end, the 2018 review, while somewhat harder-edged in its rhetoric, didn’t make major changes to U.S. policy. One significant addition was the idea that the United States could respond to “non-nuclear strategic attacks” with nuclear weapons, but Washington has always implicitly reserved the right to such a response; the Trump administration just decided to say it a little louder.And now here we are with the fifth NPR. Biden’s report does make some changes. Trump, for example, proposed a new sea-launched nuclear cruise missile. This was a bad idea, and as a result of deliberations over the NPR, Biden zeroed out the budget for it. Biden’s NPR also jettisons much of Trump’s language about responding to nonnuclear attacks.[Read: Letting it be an arms race]But we’re keeping the same kinds of forces and the same strategies we used during our long struggle with the Soviet Union. The NPR says, yet again, that the triad is a good idea, that it should be modernized at great expense, and that nuclear deterrence is the ultimate guarantee of American national security.  And yet the big questions remain unanswered. Does the strategic arsenal exist only to deter the use of similar weapons against us? Or does it exist to fight and prevail in a nuclear war? Biden’s solution is the same compromise found in the four other posture reviews: America hopes for a world in which nuclear arms only deter nuclear arms, but that world isn’t here yet.The Biden NPR is woven into something the administration calls “integrated deterrence,” and as a symbolic point, it was released not as a stand-alone report, but along with both the National Defense Strategy and the Missile Defense Review. “Integrated deterrence” sounds very sensible, but what is it, and what role do nuclear weapons play in it? Here’s the 2022 National Defense Strategy:
Integrated deterrence entails working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power, and our network of Alliances and partnerships. Tailored to specific circumstances, it applies a coordinated, multifaceted approach to reducing competitors’ perceptions of the net benefits of aggression relative to restraint. Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces prepared to fight and win, as needed, and backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.
If you found all that verbiage hard to parse, so did I. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Posture Review adds this refinement—such that it is:
A key goal of integrated deterrence is to develop tailored options that shape adversary perceptions of benefits and costs. The role of nuclear weapons is well established and embedded in strategic deterrence policy and plans. Non-nuclear capabilities may be able to complement nuclear forces in strategic deterrence plans and operations in ways that are suited to their attributes and consistent with policy on how they are to be employed.
As the writer Fred Kaplan noted, this is just “a slog of cliches.” But what it all boils down to is that we’re going to keep doing what we’ve done for some 60 years or so: The United States will deter its enemies by having very good military forces capable of fighting in various environments, with the ultimate security of America and its allies guaranteed by many hundreds of strategic nuclear warheads deliverable in hours by manned bombers—or in a matter of minutes by sea- and land-based missiles.There is one part of the NPR that minces no words. It says:
Any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime. There is no scenario in which the Kim regime could employ nuclear weapons and survive.
This is a remarkably stark warning to North Korea. Notice, however, that this passage does not guarantee nuclear retaliation, which is wise. Presidents as far back as Richard Nixon have sought nuclear options against North Korea, a difficult business that carries great risk of escalation as well as damage to other nations. Still, the clarity of this one line raises the question of what might be happening behind the scenes that Biden felt the need to say it.The report, however, is overall a disappointment for arms-control advocates, especially because Biden, like Obama and Trump before him, remains committed to spending a huge amount of money—more than $600 billion over the next decade—on nuclear weapons. Kaplan, rightly, argued that the 2022 NPR is “a sign that another casualty of the war in Ukraine and various other messes in the world is the suspension of creative thinking about nuclear strategy.” Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda at the Federation of American Scientists said that “efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.” And the arms-control expert Joe Cirincione believes that the whole review process itself is so flawed that Biden’s NPR should be the last ever issued, because it removes too much power from the White House and gives the nuclear establishment too much control over its own interests.[From the September 2010 issue: Living with a nuclear Iran]How could this NPR have been different? I am a reformed nuclear hawk—early in my career, I worked in a defense firm that assisted the Strategic Defense Initiative—but since the early 1990s, I have been advocating for reducing our nuclear inventory and decreasing our reliance on nuclear threats. And so I would have liked to have seen a declaration that the sole purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter the use of similar nuclear weapons, along with a “no first use” pledge, in which the United States vowed never to be the first to employ nuclear arms. Sole-purpose and no-first-use declarations cause anxiety among our allies, and understandably so, but it is not 1968 and we are not facing two dozen Soviet divisions along the NATO border.The huge cost of nuclear modernization also shifts resources away from necessary conventional-force improvements, which are important to countering potential Chinese aggression at sea. Nuclear weapons are not a replacement for naval, air, and ground forces that can deter—and if need be, fight and win—a war in the first place. Look no farther than Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin is learning that painful lesson right now: The Kremlin’s mighty nuclear arsenal has not saved tens of thousands of Russian men from being killed or wounded in a losing battle against a nation one-third the size of Russia.Realistically, the Biden NPR probably said all that could be said in the current circumstances. A drawn-out crisis with Russia is not the time to invite a debate over the role of the American nuclear deterrent; as former U.S. Ambassador Steven Pifer told me earlier this week: “I had hoped for more ambition in the NPR, but given Russia’s actions and nuclear threats, the final product is no surprise.” The military and the nuclear establishment are resistant to change, but if the current NPR looks a lot like a status quo Cold War document rather than a blueprint for reform, we largely have Putin—and the Chinese, who may be ramping up their threats against Taiwan—to thank for it.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] It’s easy to look at American politics as aberrational right now. It’s comforting, in a way. Maybe the whole problem, the whole question, is Donald Trump and the unique magnetism and attributes he brings to modern politics. I mean, Trump is many things, but one thing he is, is distinctive. Once a billionaire — or maybe billionaire — developer, known for being a businessman, a celebrity, reality TV star, forever in the tabloids with an unerring sense of what will get people’s attention, who is somehow immune to the disciplining force of shame. Maybe that’s a story right there, the particular package of attributes Donald Trump brings to all this. And then you have the weird dimension of American institutions, our Republican Party that he was able to take over, in part due to our weird way of doing primaries, and the electoral college, and the way we distribute power. So it’s easy to step back from that and think, something’s just wrong with America. Why are we taken in by this guy? But maybe nothing’s wrong with America, or at least nothing specific. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden may be polling in the low 40s, and people can come up with all kinds of explanations for that. But that’s better than other G7 leaders right now. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, also in the low 40s. In France, Emmanuel Macron, upper 20s. In Germany, Olaf Scholz, also in the 20s. In the U.K., Liz Truss was at 9 percent — 9 percent — when she resigned as prime minister. And she resigned mere months after Boris Johnson had also resigned as prime minister. Nor is the Republican Party’s ongoing competitiveness or turn towards a more reactionary subversive message all that unusual. Italy just elected a far right prime minister from a party with fascist roots. In France, Marine Le Pen, the far right leader, she won around 40 percent of the vote in the final round of their presidential elections, doing better than she did in 2017. In Sweden — I mean, Sweden — a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads won the second highest number of seats in Parliament in elections earlier this year. In Brazil, Bolsonaro lost on Sunday. I mean Bolsonaro is about as Trumpy a figure you will find outside of the Trump family. So that’s a big deal. But he won 49 percent of the vote — 49 percent. It’s hardly a resounding rejection of what he stood for or how he governed the country. And that’s just a partial list. The rise of these right-wing populist parties and politicians is happening in many countries, in many contexts. It’s coming in wealthy countries and poor ones, in places with high levels of immigration and low levels, in countries with a lot of economic inequality and much lower inequality. This is not just an American dilemma, not just a French one, not just a Swedish one or Brazilian one. And so we need theories that explain more than one country, or more than one situation, which brings me to Pippa Norris. She’s a comparative political scientist at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And in 2019, she and her co-author, the late Ron Inglehart, published what I’ve come to see as a really crucial text for thinking about the rise of global populist authoritarians. It’s called “Cultural Backlash,” and I asked her on the show this week to explain it. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Pippa Norris, welcome to the show.

pippa norris

Thank you so much, Ezra. Pleasure to be here.

ezra klein

Tell me about the silent revolution in cultural values.

So this is very much a part of the legacy of Ron Inglehart, who we sadly lost from the University of Michigan. He was observing what was happening in the 1970s. That’s how he started his work. And he went to Paris and saw people on the streets — young people, workers — everybody out demonstrating and protesting. And then he looked around, in particular, at Washington, where, again, the anti-Vietnam movement was going, and also in Tokyo, where there were also protests in London. And he said, something is going on, and it’s a younger generation, in particular, and the college educated who are leading the charge, along with an alliance of workers and other groups. And his prediction was that in the 1940s and ‘50s, as countries emerged from the Second World War, and particularly in Western Europe and in postindustrial societies, there was a basic sense that what was important there was materialism. In other words, growth — economic goods, better housing, better welfare states, making sure there were pensions and national health services and those sorts of things. And particularly amongst the generation that went through the war, our parents and our grandparents, those who suffered from the Great Recession and Depression, the instability of Hitler, Mussolini and all the changes involved with the rise of fascism, the Second World War, which disrupted lives, in that context, people wanted security. That was their priority. And they would join, for example, trade unions in order to negotiate better wages, if they were in blue-collar work. And they would increasingly buy their houses and try and get economic prosperity if they were middle-class professionals, teachers, people like that. The younger generation, however, that subsequently grew up, in particular, those who lived in their early years in the ‘60s and ‘70s, had a very different set of experiences. They could take for granted that there was a certain level of economic prosperity. Remember, there was technology that was taking off in that era. There were blue-collar workers who were increasing their wage packets. People could afford the nice things in life and they could go to college, which was a major revolution throughout Europe. As a result, they started to prioritize other things. And this is exemplified by the new social movements. Think in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And so, it wasn’t just sex that was being invented, according to many observers, but many other things, the environmental movement, for example, and protests about climate change. There were changes in terms of protest about nuclear weapons and the old idea of military strength and defense. And there was movements, in particular, for women, in order to get women’s equality — the second wave women’s movement. And of course, the rise of the L.G.B.T.Q. movement as well. And all of these, Ron basically said, were part of a single pattern. And they led to new parties. And in particular what he predicted in that period was that this generation that was concerned with, what he termed, post-material issues, the quality of life, the ways in which we can improve our living standards, took for granted material affluence and so they moved on to other issues and other values, which they regarded as much more important, in particular, freedom and autonomy, the ability to live your own life and to enjoy diverse lifestyles, to enjoy gender fluidity, for example, not simply fixed gender roles or fixed sex roles in the family. It became much more of a secular focus rather than religion, much more of a cosmopolitan focus rather than one that was based on nationalism or nativism. And so a generation grew up. And you can think about the hippies and a wide range of other movements around that period that challenge traditional values. Now, the silent revolution was such because it was a gradual process. It wasn’t one which produced that many changes that were that visible. But it was one that gradually, rather like a rat in a python, went through the population. As the older generations died out, gradually, just through natural causes, as they were replaced by their children and their younger generations, so values in society as a whole started to change. And that cultural cleavage, that basic division, started to be apparent in parties and in the issues that were being debated in politics as well. And so, the old left-right cleavage between socialist parties, social Democrats, labor parties on the left, in favor of high levels of public spending, generous welfare states, and probably moderate to high taxation to an egalitarian system on the one side, and on the other side the conservatives, the Christian Democrats, and other parties who are European liberals who favored fiscal prudence, low taxation and low public spending. That basic economic cleavage was no longer as important as the emerging cultural cleavage over a wider range of new issues. And again, we can think about America as an example of this. And so think back to the 1960s and ‘70s, and you have those like, for example, Nixon, who were actually fairly liberal on many issues towards women and child care and welfare policies. And indeed, the Republican Party, at that time, many were in favor of reproductive rights and abortion. And on the left, you had Democrats, particularly those who were socially liberal in progressive areas, as well as Democrats who were more conservative from the solid south. And so the new cleavage started to remake political parties, party competition, and the issues which were critical in elections and campaigning and so on. So the silent revolution was a fundamental change in the basic level of society, which percolated up and gradually produced new issues, new parties, and new party leaders as well.

ezra klein

Walk me through a couple of the pieces of evidence you find strongest here. If you were looking for, let’s call it, three data points that in the way they shifted from 1950 to 2020, or 1970 to 2020, that show the way politics has changed, what would they be?

So we can think of the key issues. One would be something like women’s equality and the idea that — you remember after the Second World War, people went back to their traditional lifestyles. In the middle of the war, they were Rosie the Riveter, and women were engaged in heavy industry, producing the bombs. And then shortly afterwards, in the 1950s, we had real constraints. And think about Betty Friedan, for example, and the way that she described the role of housewives at that time. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when civil rights in America was taking off, and when feminism was taking off, basically the women were saying, look, we’re actually being excluded from some of these new social movements. We need to demand equal pay. And, of course, at that time, there were major developments in things like equal pay acts and sex discrimination acts in many liberal democracies, as well as in the United States. And gradually, the idea that women should have an equal role in management, in the professions, and that there should be much more flexible sex roles in the home, that came to be accepted. That’s normal. That’s pretty much widely accepted in most of the established liberal democracies. Second trend — in similar ways, much more secular, but secularization, the decline of religion. And again, with Ron Inglehart, I wrote a book on that, “Sacred and Secular.” And as increasing security came about, so religion no longer seemed to be as important in people’s lives. And you can see that through churchgoing. But you can also see that in terms of religious identifications. And it particularly started in the earlier decades amongst the Protestants in Europe, which had been the established church, of course, in many places, and where the church pews gradually emptied out. But it gradually also then affected the Catholic Church. And that was accelerated by changes and scandals within the Catholic hierarchy. So secularization is a dramatic change. It starts at different levels in different countries. In fact, the United States was rather late to come to this trend, but it’s clearly going on, if you look, for example, at Gallup or Pew. But in most West European countries, you can look at the Eurobarometer, you can look at Pew surveys, you can look at the World Values Survey, and the proportion who see themselves as religious, shrinks and shrinks over successive decades. And in particular, what’s left is the older populations who still, to some extent, attend church in Europe, but it’s a very small minority now on a regular basis. By the way, people still often have a religious identity, if you ask them. They will say, for example, I’m Methodist, or I’m Catholic, or whatever their religious faith is. But it’s no longer vital to their lives in the way it might have been in earlier decades. And then as well as that, we can think of other issues, like climate change and the environment. And again, it was a small group with the “Silent Spring.” It was a small group who was concerned about recycling — and very, very minor support for Green parties who were often not able to break into parliament in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But it gradually took off, until nowadays, of course, it’s one of the key issues of our time. If you look at the most important problem in most countries, as we’ve seen from the headlines in today’s papers from the U.N. Report, everybody is aware of the consequences. Everybody is living through the consequences of climate change. And so again, that is a major development which has altered our politics and also society as a whole and our basic attitudes towards social values, what we think is important for us, our families, our governments and our country.

ezra klein

There’s something that you touched on briefly that I’ve come to think of as much more important here than people recognize, which is that this is generational, that this change in values was not a process of persuasion equally distributed across society where you convinced 40 percent of the baby boomers and 40 percent of Gen Xers and 40 percent of millennials, but that it is successive generations showing sharply different views about politics and cultural questions and what is important in life than each other. Talk to me a bit about that process and distinction.

So generational change is a really powerful force. It’s like a tide which is moving in a single direction. And where a generation changes, we’re saying it’s not a life cycle effect. A life cycle is, for example, an attitude that you might be, say, more liberal when you’re younger, and then as you settle down, and get married, have kids, have a house, you might get more conservative, and then, maybe more conservative in later years as well as you retire. But this is a different idea. This is that you get your formative values and attitudes and norms, the basic things that you think are important in life, when you’re in your socialization process, and that’s during your formative years, so in childhood, and in your adolescence, and as you start to enter the work force. Often, for example, the first party that you vote for in the past used to be the party that you would continue with. And these values are things which you learn from different role models. And so, it could be teachers and schools and classmates. It could be your family and your neighbors and your community. And it could be values at the level of your society. And those values then stick with you in later life. You become much less fluid. You don’t really adapt nearly so much once you’re in your 30s, your 40s, and so on. So young people growing up in the interwar years, at a time of austerity, at a time of incredible economic uncertainty, poverty — think about the Dust Bowl region in the United States. Think about the lines for unemployment in Western Europe. Think about the disruption of Germany after the war. In all of those cases, when you grow up in those circumstances, you prioritize security. You prioritize stability. You wanted, often, a strong leader who can provide you with order and economic growth — that basic idea. But for the younger generation, they could take those things for granted. And often, by the way, Ron Inglehart took on the idea from Maslow of a hierarchy of values. And Maslow thought of this as an individual where you had various basic physical needs — water, food, security, et cetera — once you fulfilled those, you can go onto other needs such as those for aesthetic life, or other types of recognition, or status. And what Ron did, and what was so brilliant in his early work, which he published in 1977, on the silent revolution, was to apply that not to individuals, but to societies. So if somebody grew up, for example, in Sweden in those era of the 1960s and ‘70s, their lifestyle, the things they took for granted, the values that were imbued from that, were very liberal, very much ones of social tolerance, social trust. A belief in the state, and the state should run things, in terms of public services, that was taken for granted. But the idea also of a confidence that their lives weren’t just within a country but were cosmopolitan, that they can be part of Europe and have a European identity, they could work and live and travel in many places. And their lifestyles were just very, very different to their parents, who in turn were very different to their grandparents. And as the older generation, as I said, gradually declined, in terms of the population, still very important as a group, still, by the way, voting very highly, but as they were gradually replaced in the population by the younger generation, so values in society changed overall. Think about things like attitudes towards gay marriage again, even as recently as Obama. People didn’t really talk seriously about the idea of legalizing marriage equality. And now in many, many countries, it’s taken for granted. Think about issues of, say marijuana and that use, which was liberalized first in many European countries, like the Netherlands and is now, of course, increasingly available throughout the U.S. states and is taxed like alcohol and so on. So values and attitudes and lifestyles changed on a generational basis as younger people became gradually more secure in their formative years and as older people gradually died out as a proportion of the population.

ezra klein

This can feel, upon hearing it, almost like a tidal pattern. Of course every generation is more liberal, more tolerant, more open than the one that came before it. But a point you and the late Ron Englehart make in your work is that this isn’t true, certainly not at this speed. Can you talk a bit about the way this generational change we’ve seen has been different than what has been the norm throughout history?

Yes. In particular, it can, as you say, seem like a deterministic theory of modernization, which is rather outdated. If you look around the world, you see different paces of change. But nevertheless, it is a broad, as it were, a Gulf Stream moving in one direction. But it can move back and forward. And clearly, those who are carried in these powerful forces, can also move back and forward, depending on circumstances. So for example, think about the economic crisis of 2008. Suddenly, people who had bought their own homes found themselves not able to afford the mortgages. Young people who might have assumed that they could easily get a job once they finished college, or if they just left school, found immediately there was high levels of unemployment. And a lot of people who thought that they were safely middle class, suddenly found themselves moving backwards, that their pensions or their savings no longer really meant what they thought they had. And so, you can for that time have a period effect in which the whole of society is suddenly pushed backwards, either economically, or think again about 9/11 and the way in which that made Americans suddenly feel a genuine sense of insecurity from terrorism. So events matter. Generational changes are long-term. Events are short-term period effects. But again, we would expect a period effect to have a short-term, as it were, a blip, so everybody in that society might move back towards demanding economic growth, if there’s a recession, or cutbacks in inflation, as we now see when prices are rising so much for groceries, or changes in security or changes in their attitudes towards immigrants when new events come onto the stage. But it doesn’t still change the differences between the older generations and the younger generations. You can think of it almost like a layer cake. Everybody might move back towards demanding a different role for government and greater security at that time, depending on the nature of the threat as perceived, but still the older generation tends to be the ones that is the most socially conservative and the younger generation is are the ones which tend to be the most liberal.

ezra klein

We’ve been talking a lot about the younger generations and how they’re changing, how they’re becoming more post materialist, more culturally liberal. But I also want to talk about that other group, the older generation, because these shifts are happening generationally, and that leaves a whole segment of the population who are, or at least feel themselves, to be left behind by these trends. So tell me about that group and how they’ve been reacting.

So again in the 1950s, things which were central to people’s identity, like patriotism and nationalism towards one’s country, issues of religion and belief in God, and that the church played a central role in people’s lives, attitudes towards marriage in the family and children within that traditional unit, attitudes towards what it meant to be an American or what it meant to be Swedish or what it meant to be British, all of those things were seen by many of the older generations and the socially conservatives to be under threat. They were no longer the 60 percent of the population adhering to those values. They were no longer the 50 percent. Instead, in society as a whole, as liberalism gradually expanded, they found themselves to be increasingly in minority. And so those views, which were very much led by younger college educated, and other social progressive groups in society, were really fundamental social shifts. But what Ron Inglehart’s silent revolution theory had neglected to really emphasize at the time was that many people lost out from these developments. Many people felt that the things which they took for granted, the things which they regarded as important for themselves and their community and their country, those things were being lost. And as a result, you saw increasing support for what we term in our book, authoritarian populist parties. And this is a group, which you can call them radical right, that’s a very common way of labeling them, but they’re not always right-wing in economics. Sometimes they’re fairly positive towards public spending, for example, in Scandinavian countries. What distinguishes them is that they really want to restore and push back against social liberalism, or as we call it in the contemporary parlance in the media, the woke agenda. And so you can see many countries, which have got the parties who’ve been standing up for many traditional values, for example, on welfare, if you look in France, in Italy, in Sweden, many authoritarian populist parties, the Sweden Democrats, the brothers of Italy, or the National Front or National Rally as they’re now known in France, all of these parties, in particular, push back on the diversity which comes from immigration, but they also have a larger agenda. They also push back sometimes on issues which concern reproductive rights. And so anti-abortion laws, for example, which were passed say in Poland. They also push back on L.G.B.T.Q. and the rights of those groups and particularly transsexual rights is something which has been a bête noire for many of these parties. And they also push back on globalization, and thus, the European Union. And so they really want to restore national borders and nativism benefits for those who are born in the country rather than having the diversity, which has come about through increasing waves of immigration and the liberal values, which have been the result of generational changes. So these parties are the parties which have been growing in votes, growing in seats, sometimes entering government in European countries, and really changing the nature of European politics in remarkable ways.

ezra klein

I want to sit in this for a minute, because I want to try to spend some time on the psychology of this political tendency, which I don’t think we describe well. And let me try something on you. I think there’s one level of it that is very easy to see in polling. And so those of us who look at a lot of polling, tend to fixate there. So you’ll see that attitudes on immigration are very related to, say, support for Donald Trump or some of these other parties in Europe. And we’ll say, OK, it’s an anti-immigrant right. Or there’s just a set of polls that came out today that I saw from the pollster PerryUndem, showing that opinions on Black Lives Matter are extraordinarily predictive in America of which party you’re going to vote for. And so you can begin to assemble a set of policy ideas. So maybe that’s — we’ll call that level one. And then there is this sort of backlash level that you’re talking about, which is this sense that you are losing power, that the world is being changed against you, that you don’t have the capacity to speak, that you have to be silent. I think this is why there’s so much power in free speech arguments because people do have a sense — I know people in my own life who have a sense in their own day-to-day existence, despite the fact that they are not in politics in any professional capacity — that the things they have always believed have become verboten to say. They are sort of culturally dismissed. And so there can be a backlash effect in that, a feeling — it often gets described as a feeling of losing power or losing hegemony. When I was reading your book though, another word was used in passing, disorientation. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that word, because the people I know who are of this political tendency, what I hear most often from them is a kind of disorientation. That the way all this change is experienced, across a variety of domains, from how many immigrants there are, to what you can say about race, to gender fluidity, all the way up to things like inflation and the Fed and quantitative easing, there’s just this constant sense of disorientation, which is also why I think the generation gap dimension is very important. Because as you get older, and particularly older without a lot of tethers into society, right, maybe you don’t work anymore. You don’t see the people you used to see. It just feels like things are changing very rapidly. And what often seems to me to unite the parties that respond to this tendency is a kind of promise that they will solve disorientation by making things a way they were. America — we’re going to make America Great Again. We’re going to have an economy built on manufacturing and coal. It has materialistic appeals at times, but also appeals around gender and gender identity and race. But at its core is a kind of nostalgic promise that you won’t have to feel like your own country has changed in a way that you don’t recognize it, and it doesn’t recognize you.

No, that’s absolutely right. That’s exactly what’s going on. And in particular, a nostalgia for the past, because after all, we’re talking about people’s social identities. You can disagree about things like taxing and spending, but you can cut the pie in lots of different ways. And we can kind of agree to disagree. But when it comes to issues of what you can say, for example, what is socially acceptable in terms of race and ethnicity or what socially appropriate in terms of issues of gender or sexuality, then a sense — it is really getting at the heart of who you are, who you feel that your identity is, what you can be proud of, what your status is in that society, and what your moral values are. So a lot of these debates are bitter, because it’s really us-them. Instead of being able to find a common ground for compromise, as you can on economic issues, cultural issues are the ones which really get to the heart of who people see themselves as — and how they see their community and how they see their country. And I think what’s worth emphasizing here is there is, it’s not simply a psychological change, nor is it simply something which is changing in elites, like in Hollywood media or in journalism or in representation, but it’s a real change in people’s lives. It’s a change that they realize is happening around them. They know that. They know that the clock really can’t be turned back. And yet, they hanker to at least respect that old forms of social status which they had when they grew up and which is really part of their own lives. Give the example of Brexit. Brexit is a fascinating development. After all, Britain had been a member of the European Union for 40 years. It had been part and parcel. They were our closest trading partners in Britain. And yet, the way that it was sold, in many ways, during the referendum, by those who were in favor, including Boris Johnson, was very much a return to Britain’s greatness on the world stage. Boris Johnson didn’t see Brexit as making Britain cut off. He saw it, instead, as a new way of reasserting, almost back to the days of the Second World War, an empire where Britain was one of the major world players. One of the repeated statements was the British economy is the fifth largest in the world. And much of the framing was about making Britain great again, just like the phrase is there in American language for the Trump rhetoric, as well. So people wanted to respect the old ways of doing things and to hanker after the things that they realized they actually were losing. It isn’t just culture wars. It isn’t just a cancel culture. It’s a fundamental change in the nature of how society works and what the attitudes and what the values are. And these parties have come in and said, look, you need a voice, and we’re going to speak for you. The establishment, the old parties, the mainstream, the Christian Democrats, the social Democrats, they don’t care about you, but we do. And always, again, when Trump had his inaugural, you so remember that he depicted a place where the establishment was corrupt, the establishment was working for its own interests to get back into power and to pass things which they felt was appropriate, but at the same time, America was in crisis and the culture was in crisis, and he would defend the silent majority. He would defend the average American. He would stand there and be a strong leader, pushing back against all of these other forces, and thereby, restoring respect, if you like, for many of those who felt that they were no longer respected in American society, and their views were no longer respected. They were just beyond the pale.

ezra klein

I want to try to untangle what you might think of as the materialist and the post materialist appeal of some of these politicians and parties. And this is a very live debate here. Now you have a much broader set of global examples and knowledge, so you can tell me how well it tracks elsewhere. But there is, on the one hand, an argument — you’ll hear this quite a bit — that what’s really underestimated about the appeal of a Donald Trump, maybe even a Ron DeSantis, or others like him, the Brexiteers, Boris Johnson, is that they are jettisoning some of the really unpopular or materialistic views of the conservative parties that they come to represent. In Donald Trump’s case, promising not to cut Medicare and social security, saying — it was a lie — but saying that he would raise taxes on people like himself. You’ll hear an argument that all those things that people experience as Trumpism are actually negatives, and why he is an effective politician is that he actually takes on more popular policy views, whether or not he follows through on them than people realize. But at the same time, there is a transgressive aesthetic that seems to reoccur among many of these politicians. You can see Ron DeSantis trying to ape it and learn it from Donald Trump, as many other Republicans are. You can see it in Bolsonaro. You can see it in a different way in Boris Johnson and a lot of the people who are involved in Brexit. You can see it in a lot of media figures in these countries. Can you talk a bit about the role of the transgressive aesthetic and what role that plays in responding to this politics of cultural backlash?

So the transgressive ways of working is reflected in all sorts of aspects of populism. It’s kind of part of its rhetoric and its appeal. People who can — leaders who can put their feet on the desk, who can swear in public, as we think about, for example, Duterte and the language which he would use in the Philippines, or who wish to challenge the power of the state and the establishment, those who have tried to really criticize, in particular, many public servants and civil servants, in many cases, or who push back on experts. There was a famous phrase in Britain by Michael Gove once who said, experts who need experts, and the idea that we don’t need these authorities, that these so-called authorities, whether they’re in Covid, or whether they’re in other aspects of trying to run economic policy, don’t really speak for the people. And if we can somehow tap into something which is just the ordinary people, and by the way, this is all quite coded. Who is meant as the ordinary people is often meant as the groups who are white and who are born in that country, and of course, the diversity is kind of overlooked. So some people are seen as effectively Swedish or Italian or British but not others. But all of those groups, these leaders appeal to in fundamental ways. And as you say, what’s happening in the competition is that you can think of this as left-right on the economy. And you can think of this as socially conservative and liberal on cultural issues. And what many populist leaders have done is they’ve gone towards the kind of left-center on the economy. And so, they may be in favor, for example, as Boris Johnson was of leveling up for the northern areas. Leveling up was the idea that we put more money into, say, Newcastle and Liverpool to try to make sure that the benefits of London were actually there in the North of England, as well, where, of course, the red wall was where the conservatives made gains. And you can see similar processes where other parties, again, are in favor of welfare and in favor of strong education and strong health care. And that’s particularly common, for example, the Sweden Democrats are along those lines. And the Norway progress party always favor a strong welfare state. But they also want really to, again, go back in terms of socially conservative views on many of the other cultural issues which they feel they’ve been excluded from.

ezra klein

I want to draw out the rationality of that view a little bit, because I think that there’s a direct logic to it that is often missed. If you feel the culture has turned on you, if you feel that what is sayable, and what is respectable is being enforced by institutions and experts who no longer care for you and what you think, then the need for politicians, for leaders, who gleefully reject the gatekeeping capacity of those institutions and experts becomes very intense. I think this is something that is sometimes missed about some of these politicians — that people don’t like, in my view, generally, some of Trump’s excesses, his cruelties, the way he acts. Some do, obviously. Some find it very thrilling. But many don’t. But even many who aren’t comfortable with it, appreciate that him and others like him don’t seem cowed, because they’re cowed. They feel cowed.

Yes.

ezra klein

And they feel some of their leaders have been cowed. People maybe agree with them, but won’t really say it aloud. And then somebody comes out and says, Mexico isn’t sending good people here and we shouldn’t let them send people here anymore and just build a wall and be done with it. It’s like yeah, that guy. And that there’s something about, in a lot of these different places, the aesthetic of transgressiveness being a kind of a reflection of a commitment, or a reflection of an unwillingness to not be cowed when the main problem some of these people are voting or feeling is a feeling of being cowed. There’s a more direct relationship there that makes transgressiveness a more essential part of the cocktail than I think people who believe maybe these parties could re-emerge as economically liberal and socially conservative, but nevertheless, genteel, are missing.

Yes, that’s absolutely right. And it’s essentially being part of the “out” group, the group of kids at school who are always excluded and picked upon and bullied and all that sort of thing. And if you have a strong leader who says, I’m for you, I’m defending this tribal identity, I’m defending the traditional values that you believe, I respect your values, I stand for you and I speak for you, then, of course, that leaves a direct appeal. And think about some of the symbolism. For example, Viktor Orbán, when he speaks, he’s used language which is really frowned upon in the European Union. He says, for example, that Hungary does not want to be a mixed-race country, which is really controversial in Europe. He’s demonized immigrants. He’s used anti-Semitic language and restricted the rights of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He criticizes the E.U., very openly, as well. And so, in all of those ways, he’s transgressive. And people who are outgroups, the groups of kids at school who were never part of the fashionable clique, they feel, OK, maybe the traditional establishment don’t like me, maybe traditional parties don’t speak to me, maybe the middle classes who have taken over politics and the media and college education, in particular, and the changes which that’s produced, maybe other people can speak for me instead. And that’s very much part of their appeal, I think. Now, transgressive leaders often tend not simply to transgress in terms of their personal style or their language, but then to start to also, once they get it elected and into office, they start to transgress in terms of democratic norms. So they’ll push back on some of the niceties, and they would rather overlook them, for example, making patronage appointments to the courts of friends or partisans who they support, or basically breaking the law. There have so many corruption scandals amongst some of these parties, some of which have brought down the leader, and some of which we’ve seen a revival after that. If we think about some of the cases, there are many court cases for some of the leaders, which have been a fundamental problem. Or we can think of other ways in which these parties have pushed back on freedom of the press and also, increasingly, tolerance of violence. Now, are all the parties accepting these pushing backs on democratic liberal values? No, they’re not. Some of them have actually moderated their views, partly to get into coalition. And that’s an important difference, I think, between majoritarian systems, like the United States and the United Kingdom and coalition governments, which are much more common in Europe with proportional representation. So in a winner take all, if you’re going to be transgressive in your leadership style, then it’s often the case that presidents will try to also go for executive aggrandizement, pushing back on liberal democracies and liberal norms, basically. In coalition governments, what we often find is that where populist parties get into power, they often tend to moderate their language and they moderate their policies, and they also don’t push back so much on liberal democracy because that’s how they can actually get a coalition together with some of their center-right parties. And then they make some gains on certain issues, like immigration issues and immigration policies and restrictions. So there are differences there. But transgression is a common aspect of populism, a very common aspect indeed, even on things like accents and language. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

These values changes, as you describe, have been happening for many decades. And you can see the kinds of politicians you describe also arising over these decades. In America, I think, the classic forerunner to Donald Trump, as an example, is Pat Buchanan. But in your data and telling, something happens around 2010 that is like a step change in the success of this populist authoritarian tendency. Tell me why you locate that in 2010, and then, what you think the cause of it is.

So, as you say, these are longstanding parties. They were parties in the 1950s, left over from the Second World War, which were neo-Nazis, often banned as hate groups or made illegal, for example, in Germany. They were parties in the 1970s. The Front National or the National Rallies, it’s now called with Marine Le Pen is actually celebrating its 50th anniversary. And you can see similar patterns like the British National Party in the 1970s. But they were always marginalized. They were always below thresholds to actually achieve seats. They may gain 4 percent of the vote, 5 percent, but it wasn’t sufficient in order to have any sort of numbers, still less to have any sort of power in a coalition, still less to be the largest party in government. So what changed, I think, was a number of precipitating developments and also some of the dissatisfaction which is a long-term trend. So there’s been a period of dealignment in party politics in many postindustrial societies. And that can be dated, again, from the ‘60s and ‘70s, when what happened was that the mainstream parties in the center-right and the center-left, so the Christian democrats, the conservatives, the liberals, social democrats, socialists, and so on, they gradually lost support. They were at the height in the 1950s. They went down from the 1960s, progressively in the ‘70s, progressively in the ‘80s, and party systems fragmented. The old loyalties were lost. For example, union vote workers would normally always support socialist parties and communist parties in Europe. Whereas the party bourgeoisie and the middle classes were, by and large, particularly in the private sector, support the conservative parties. But those class identities weakened in Europe. And the basis, the kind of foundations of party politics, became much looser. People were more willing to move around in different elections, or to vote for one thing for a local election, something else for a national election and so on. So this provided opportunities for smaller parties, and it provided it both on the progressive side, like the greens, who suddenly started to move up, as well as the support for the radical right or populist parties. And it takes time. All of these are processes where once you get a few members of parliament, you get a bit more of a platform, you get more credibility. People don’t want to waste their vote. They need to have some sense of what the party stands for. And if it’s always just the major parties standing for campaigning, they have very little idea, and particularly, if they’re demonized as being very extreme and outside the pale, people are not going to vote for populists. But gradually what’s happened is that the populists themselves have become much more savvy at presenting a more moderate image on many issues. For example, many of the European Populist Party, most recently, after Brexit, have stopped saying and stop being explicitly anti-European Union. They said that policy really wasn’t the one that was giving them support. And it was simply alienating them from the other mainstream parties as well, and from many voters. So by making their more extreme elements the real hate groups and the groups who are really using extremism in politics, by excluding those, and by appealing primarily on immigration that was a rising issue in Europe, particularly — remember the European immigration crisis when Angela Merkel opened the door in about 2015. That led to a surge of migrants, along with the war in Syria, and the war in Afghanistan, and economic deprivation and economic migrants from Africa. So the economic recession of 2008, the eurozone crisis, which followed with very deep consequences for Mediterranean Europe, and then the rise of migrants, which is continuing, although that has gone down as an issue in Europe, all of those created very favorable circumstances. And again, all of these changes are gradual processes. You get, for example, 10 percent of members of parliament, suddenly you might have a coalition partner. Suddenly, you’re much more visible. You also get access to public funds. And so for the next election, you’re likely to be in a much larger position, much more effective position in order to get elected in that. And so, we can see those developments. For example, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first female prime minister, leader of the brothers of Italy, she just got 26 percent of the vote, a quarter. Her party had roots in fascism, but she abandoned that and she sought to tone down the extremism and really be pro-European Union, even pro-NATO for Ukraine, but still anti-migrant and anti-immigrant. And she’s basically now leading the coalition with Berlusconi and with Matteo Salvini for the Labor Party. So the party became more respectable. The extremist image was less evident. And over a series of elections, basically, populist parties have gained in Italy. You can see the same in France, if you look at Marine Le Pen. And in the last presidential election, of course, Emmanuel Macron won, but Marine Le Pen came second with 41 percent of the vote in the second round presidential election, up from 34 percent in 2017. And you can see a steady rise in a series of presidential elections, as well as elections to the European Parliament. So gradually, the party itself became more moderate. Marine Le Pen became more effective as a campaigner. She abandoned her father’s extremism. And with rising dealignment for the major parties, and with rising disaffection with the major institutions, she has a basis of support. And you can see similar patterns in Belgium, as well as in many parts of central and Eastern Europe. Law and justice, for example, in Poland. In Turkey, with Erdogan. In Hungary, of course, with Fidesz achieving a substantial vote, majority of the votes, and two-thirds majority in Parliament. In all these cases, it’s a gradual rise of minor parties. And they become part of the government. And then, of course, the other parties also are in decline. The center has been losing ground and it will not hold.

ezra klein

One thing that you distinguish in the book is between supply-side explanations, in politics, and demand-side. And so there’s the supply-side, which you’ve been explaining here. The parties somewhat changed. They trimmed their sales. They entered into new coalitions. But there’s also the demand-side, which you emphasize, which is I think often overlooked in politics. What do people actually want and why do they want it? What kind of politician will they respond to, if that politician or party arises? And you argue that in this period, we’ve been seeing profound demographic and cultural tipping points that are changing the appeal of these politicians precisely because they are changing the desperation of voters for politicians like these. So these politicians, in a way, are the response to a market or even small-D democratic demand. Tell me a bit about your thinking on tipping points.

So, as you say, you have, just like in the economic market, the demand side of the public and the electorate, the supply side, which is how the parties respond, including the major parties, in terms of issues. Do they take them on board or do they exclude them? And then you also have the regulations. You have the rules of the game. And that really is important for how successful some parties are versus others. So the idea of a tipping point is that if you’re got a group, and again, it can be on the environmental group as much as the radical right group, and there are only a small proportion of the electorate, then in any majoritarian system, there’s very little reason to necessarily cater to those because you already have loyalists as your base and you have an established coalition amongst the groups who are going to support you, and therefore, you can appeal to those. But if there’s a tipping point, and that particular tipping point angers and alienates the group that was the former majority so that they become much more aware that the values and attitudes and identities they hold are no longer necessarily in alignment with how the culture is moving, then the politics of resentment comes forward. And that’s exactly where the populists can tap into this. So obviously, much of the MAGA movement in America is premised on the idea of the demographic replacement. And this is that the urban areas are expanding, rural areas are contracting. The white population is dramatically declining, particularly in places like California, as we see the rise in the number of Hispanics and also African Americans and Black voters. And so we can see substantial social changes in class, in rural urban, in race and ethnicity, in religion, and all of these are real changes in society. They are nothing that’s being made up. And as a result, those groups who feel that their identity is based on those assumptions, feel that they’re losing out.

ezra klein

Let me pick up on something you mentioned there, because when I look at the time frame we’re talking about, this post 2010 period, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is the iPhone, the rise of social media, increased competitiveness in the broader media. And I think this is important because there is the question of the ways the culture and society are changing, but none of us have access to the entire society or culture, and most people aren’t sitting around reading polls about other people’s opinions about cultural issues. So there’s this question of how do you end up feeling, like what leads somebody in a rural area of Wisconsin to feel like everything is different now. And it seems to me, in a lot of places, all around the world, at the same time, you have this rise in algorithmic media in highly engagement oriented media that is constantly confronting people with, usually, stories charged around identity, in many cases, at least, that really give, I think, often an outsized view of how quickly society is changing, but nevertheless are a very, very big part of a very rapid set of changing views, a sense of what you can and can’t say, because people are now yelling at you in the comments section of your own Facebook posts. Something I felt was a little bit under theorized in the book is this dimension of the changes in media. 2010 is right around then with the rise of smartphones, is a signal event. And in my experience of it, it’s a signal event that tends to lead to people being confronted a lot more with whatever they fear most about the country they live in. And so the fact that would lead to a rise in these populist authoritarian figures seems pretty logical to me.

Yes, the book does not focus that much on political communication. But part of that is because I wrote an earlier book called “Digital Divide,” which really said that the internet, which was taking off at the time, started, of course, in around 1995, in terms of the visual browser, the internet is a tool, and it can be used both positively and negatively for democratic engagement, for political communications, and a variety of other things. So on the one hand, clearly, it allows anybody to break outside of their bubble. If they are more focused in the past on their local newspaper or local television, they can now see the events going on. For example, they can watch live the Brazilian election on Sunday. Or they could have watched, for example, Rishi Sunak when he was in parliament the other day as the first prime minister in his first outing. So it gives us a broader sense of information, if you want that information, and if you have the skills and the cognitive ability and the education and the information to make sense of it. On the other hand, if you simply want to listen to your own tribe and you want to simply be in a media bubble and just have repetition of exactly the same messages and the rise of misinformation and disinformation, then, of course, you can do that as well. So it’s a double-edged sword, the role of social media in all of these processes. Does it reinforce conspiratorial theories in the United States, but also in Europe as well — absolutely. Does it reinforce misinformation, and the pace and spread of misinformation both across borders and within countries — absolutely. But is it primarily a driver of the support for authoritarian populists? And there I am somewhat more skeptical. In some ways, it seems like it’s too obvious a Breitbart, too obvious candidate to be blamed. And it’s so many other more socially profound shifts in society which, I think, have caused these developments where the media, including legacy media as well as social media, are more of a reflection of what’s going on than a primary driver of what’s going on.

ezra klein

Well, let me try to take the other side of this argument for a minute, because I think I’m more convinced in the other direction. So part of it is the way that these changes in media also change the reality of political systems. I am skeptical Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and thus the President of the United States in 2008 and 2009 without social media. His campaign is the first to really use social media very, very well. And of course, the amount of money they’re able to raise online is tremendous, right? He has to do something very hard in beating Hillary Clinton that year. Take out social media — I’m not sure he does it. And if he doesn’t do it, that also changes the way people sense society changing, right? Barack Obama is, as you put it in the book, a shock to the American political system. And so, for a lot of people, the first Black president is a really transformational event that arouses a lot of, let’s call it, cultural anxiety. But Donald Trump, similarly, I don’t think Donald Trump becomes a Republican nominee without Twitter, and Twitter’s sort of tremendous capacity to influence traditional media coverage. So that’s one level of it, that what is happening as candidates who are intensely supported by portions of the population can get around some of the traditional ways you needed to go through gatekeepers to get coverage that changes who can win and what kinds of things can be won. Then, another level, you mentioned here about your book “The Digital Divide,” and I think you put that a little bit on education. If you’re thoughtful and out there looking to use the internet to your own benefit and become a more informed person and get more perspectives, or you can use it a little bit thoughtlessly and get surrounded in an echo chamber. I think that’s true, obviously. But I think we have a lot of evidence, at this point, that education and intention may not be as relevant here as we wish they were. That, particularly because of algorithmic media, where it’s not really just what you are choosing, but what the computer, or the algorithm, I should say, is deciding you like, you start getting served up certain kinds of stories, certain kinds of voices. So I do think there’s something, too, about the ways in which people who are very into politics now have this way of getting served up things that they’re more and more into, which in turn, creates all these dynamics that I think push people towards the edges and create a counter-reaction among their opposition on the other side. So I guess I’d put that as a provocation here. Isn’t it at least plausible that one of the shocks to the system is that all of a sudden these kinds of figures and ideas and news stories and local news stories that once might have been somewhat marginalized now have this capacity to go viral and to create the political context we’re all living in? I always think of Bolsonaro supporters chanting Facebook at his victory speech. I mean, I think they were right about that.

So clearly social media has changed the nature of campaigning, in many ways, returning back to its roots of one-to-one communication and one-to-a-few in group contexts, et cetera. And it’s changed the nature of politics. And it’s changed the speed and the distance. Those two things have both shrunk on any particular political event. So immediately you can know if something has happened and you can follow it along if you’re interested in that. Has it, however, changed attitudes, values, norms, and political orientations? And it’s there which I’m — I just push back. Because, on the one hand, it seems too easy to blame social media and the rise of the internet on some of these phenomena, which are in my view, based on deep roots in society, rather than in just our processes of communication. And, of course, journalists love to point to Twitter as the way that we all find out about information. But, of course, if you actually look, we’ve included a whole bunch of new questions about social media use in the World Values Survey in the last wave. And when you ask people in most countries, including in Russia, but also in India, and also in many Western European countries, where do you get your most common source of information, they all say television. That’s still the source. Now, are they watching television through their iPhones? Perhaps. But they’re still watching the BBC or ITV or CNN or NBC, et cetera, et cetera. Are they reading newspapers? Probably not. But are they watching — or reading an article from The New York Times or The Washington Post or any of our legacy media? Absolutely. Are they also going towards the fringe of politics and reading other things from QAnon, which might not have been available in the past? Yes. But of course, again, we’ve always had for a long, long period the rise of the far right through radio. So again, it’s an amplification and it’s an expansion. But talk radio, which was there for a decade at least before the internet also carried much the same messages, also reached a large audience, and also created those sorts of senses of tribal communities, as you can tune into one or tune into another, depending on your political priors. So the internet reinforces, accelerates — doesn’t necessarily, I think, change the bones of politics, doesn’t change the ways in which we engage, or how we get involved. And speed in itself, which is vital to journalism, is not necessarily how most people are simply responding to politics. As you know, most people aren’t watching the politics on Twitter. They’re watching Adele and things like that, which are also on Twitter. So sometimes we exaggerate how much attention — because we’re paying attention to these things, we exaggerate how much everybody else is as well.

ezra klein

Oh, I never think — I should say this very, very openly, I never think the power of Twitter or even a lot of other social media is its direct role as a venue of political information.

Right.

ezra klein

It’s that the people who are providing political information and making political decisions in all the other venues — the elites of the media, of politics, of technology — they’re all jacked into Twitter all the time. The influence of Twitter is that all the editors and producers on the cable news networks and staffers for all the politicians and Donald Trump himself and Elon Musk and — that they are disproportionately getting it, and then using their sort of other influence channels to increase the salience of the debates that are dominant there. But I think something you brought up brings another very interesting counterargument to the fore, which is who’s to say we’re in any kind of unusual period of cultural backlash at all. I mean, you go back into the 20th century, you have Mussolini, you have Hitler, you have Father Coughlin, you have all kinds of populist authoritarian figures who wielded much more influence than these figures wield today. Maybe what happened here is simply that it has been far enough since fascism and other kinds of populist authoritarian movements were discredited such that some movements that have more of this aesthetic can begin to reemerge. And in much the same way, although obviously, I have a slightly different view on it, that the fading of the Soviet Union has reinvigorated socialist politics in America, both as a substantive direction and as a label, because socialism isn’t quite the slur it once was. Maybe the only thing aberrational here is this couple decade period when these other tendencies were sufficiently discredited that politicians couldn’t rise through them, and we’re just in a reversion to the historical mean.

Yes. I mean, the starting point for any trend is absolutely critical for its interpretation, depending on whether you think inflation or unemployment has got better or worse, depends on what date you’re picking, and so on. So we certainly can look at the classic era of fascism and what we used to term totalitarian governments of that particular era. And the postwar era was certainly one which looked at that extensively. But also I think there is something new. If we look around the world, which we haven’t really mentioned, is all the number of leaders in executive office who really have this broad orientation. We focused a lot on Europe, to some extent on the United States. But let’s think, for example, India, the most populous democracy, which is backsliding, and Narendra Modi emphasizing, in that case, Hindu nationalism against Muslims. The Philippines, until recently, Rodrigo Duterte. Turkey — Recep Erdogan, who started off fairly democratic, but who’s moved his country increasingly, after an attempted coup, in an authoritarian direction, and against the European Union. Venezuela — Nicolás Maduro taking over from Hugo Chávez with a left-wing form of populism. Argentina — Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Peronists, and a long tradition, of course, in Latin America. AMLO in Mexico is another example there, as is Daniel Ortega, in terms of Nicaragua, who again, was seen as fairly democratic when he first came in, increasingly authoritarian over successive elections. Evo Morales can be seen as a populist. In Slovakia and in Belarus, as well, as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic — and there’s even arguments which is expanding the notion, but maybe even Vladimir Putin is populist in certain ways. He wants to — he’s clearly authoritarian. He has tremendous coercive powers and financial powers. But he also wants to remain popular amongst the Russian public. So this idea of populism, depending on whether you have a narrow or a broad notion, if you look around the world, it’s much, much broader than it was simply in the era of Mussolini, and the era of Franco and the era of Hitler. It really has gone viral in many places, in many developing societies. Sometimes it’s stable. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes we see presidents moving up and down in popularity or in and out of office. But it certainly seems to be a development which is increasing in power and rising as a threat to liberal democracy. And of course, it goes hand in hand with democratic backsliding, the other major phenomena, also of the period from 2010 to 2022. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

One other explanation you’ll hear, particularly in this period, which 2010 is following the financial crisis, which was a global crisis, is that this isn’t about race, it isn’t about cultural anxiety, it’s about economics. The left of center, or even traditional right-of-center parties, stopped delivering economically. They had stopped for some time. You had stagnating wages, say, in America. And then you had a big economic shock, which fundamentally discredited them. And what is being drafted on here is frustration. And that would also, then, imply a straightforward answer, if other parties can deliver economically, that will drain the potency of these populist parties. How do you think about that both as a causal explanation for the post-2010 rise of the populist authoritarian right, and how do you think about it as a solution?

In 2015, when Trump first started to descend the golden staircase, this was a popular explanation. And political economists certainly looked at areas of the country in Europe and in the United States where manufacturing industry had declined, primarily as a result of Chinese imports. And certain areas, such as textiles, such as computers, and so on, footwear, and there was a correlation between the areas which Trump did well at and those areas of loss of manufacturing. And similarly, in Europe, it was the areas which had lost the mining industries and extractive industries and so on. The problem is that this economic explanation which appeared fairly plausible, and is still advocated by some, doesn’t appear so plausible when we look at it across countries. Some of the most affluent countries in the world with very solid welfare states, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, one of the most affluent countries again in Europe, the Netherlands, these have all got very strong authoritarian populist parties — the Swiss People’s Party, Progress Parties, Freedom Party of Austria, et cetera. So it’s not simply the poorer areas of Europe or the poorer countries of Europe, like Bulgaria and Romania, which have seen the rise of populism. And also, as soon as you go to the survey data and you look at the individual level data, we can ask people about their economic circumstances. We can monitor their class. We can look at their income and their savings and how secure they feel. And when you do that, what you find, whether you’re looking at support for Trump in 2016 and 2020 or support for many of these parties in Europe through the European Social Survey, is that the individual level economic indicators, by and large, don’t predict whether somebody voted for these parties. Basically, class is being kind of flat. Other factors — age and other factors, like ethnicity, really trumped this strength and significance of class. Similarly, in terms of whether you have personal savings, and also relative deprivation, whether you feel you’re better off than your parents. So economics, the jury is still a bit out, I think. But most of the evidence seems to say, it’s cultural issues, not economic issues which really are the cutting edge for why voters swung towards these parties.

ezra klein

So then, if simply delivering economically it doesn’t work, what does? What does a post-post-material left do?

This is the challenge. On economics, clearly, the natural solution, whether it was for Biden or whether it’s for Keir Starmer in the Labor Party in Britain, or for many other leaders of social democratic parties, is to say, well, we’ll just go back and we’ll improve the areas where we lost some votes, and that means things like jobs programs. It means training. It means expanding college access. It means improving work opportunities, housing, roads — all of those things which are very familiar. The assumption is that we can follow social democratic policies, expand all of these services, improve rail transport, for example, have leveling up, improve educational opportunities, particularly apprenticeship programs, for example, for the less skilled so they don’t necessarily need to go to university, but they can get practical skills as plumbers, electricians, and so on, and in the new green industries — all of that is a set of assumptions that social democratic parties on the left are very comfortable with. The problem is that it’s not clear that this is the driver of the support, if it’s the cultural issues. And the problem about the cultural issues is that the parties on the left are totally divided internally on issues like reproductive rights, on issues like diversity and immigration, on issues like changing immigration policies, or backtracking, for example, on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. It’s impossible for many of these parties to consider diluting or reversing some of those liberal gains. And they can’t also, thereby, appeal to the classic working class base, which is very much more traditional and more conservative on those sorts of issues. So they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. And I think this is their fundamental dilemma. It’s far easier for the parties on the center-right to adapt. They can basically go into bed with the populist parties. And they can change the immigration policies, which they have. That’s the big area where populist parties have made a big success in Western Europe. And they can also continue with their economic policies, which are fairly libertarian — tax cuts and things like that. And you can have a coalition which is kind of accommodated. But left parties have to go into bed with Greens. They can’t basically have any sort of compromise with the authoritarian populist parties. It’s just impossible in their make-up.

ezra klein

But particularly if you understand a lot of what’s happening here as a set of anxieties, not just a set of policies, that would at least seem to me to open up strategies that are a little bit different. So I always think of Obama as having been fairly masterful as a politician at this. I think now there is a tendency to look back at him and read him a little bit overly literally — that he didn’t support gay marriage or had this or that position on immigration. But he really always paired, in a very, very explicit way, this excitement about change, right, hope and change, change we can believe in, with a constant effort to answer and reassure cultural anxiety. And it often seems to me that one or the other gets chosen. You either see politicians who are good at emphasizing how much change they are going to bring, or even if they’re not good at it, that’s what they are doing. So you might think of an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I think is very good at representing change, or a Hillary Clinton, who is very — who talked very intensely about how much change she would bring and what it would mean for her to be elected, but don’t do very much to try to reassure people who are nervous about the way the world is changing. Or you can look at somebody, I think, like a Joe Biden — and there are other figures like him — who are oriented at trying not to arouse too much anxiety around change. They want to try to keep their coalition together, but they are there to be acceptable, in a way, to voters who are outside the coalition. It’s very well established, I think, at this point, that the Joe Biden in 2020 primary campaign wins on this theory of electability, wins on a theory that he’ll be acceptable to other people. And that theory actually turns out to be true. But that there is some kind of synthesis, here, for talented politicians, where they are simultaneously either themselves representing or able to tell a story of change while quite explicitly trying to tell a story of why that does not have to leave people out. But I do think there — look, I don’t win elections. I’ve not done it. But I observe and report on politicians. And I have just noticed a kind of literalism creeping into it, as if the only variables on the board are what literal positions you take on policies. And I’m a policy guy. And I track policy positions. And I track policies. But Joe Biden has a lot of very popular policies. They’re much more popular than the policies Donald Trump pushed. And they have functionally the same approval rating right now, as the other one did, at a similar point. And there’s other confounding factors here. I don’t think it is so as impossible as people have begun to make it sound to be optimistic about the future and conscious of the fact that many people are fearful about the future. Now you have to be a very talented politician to do that, but you kind of always have to be a talented politician to change politics.

But it does depend on the issue dimension. So if we’re talking about economics, of course, they’re promising a better life and prosperity and affluence and minimal pain that will go along with that. Although, of course, under periods of inflation, people do realize that there has to be pain as well. On foreign policy, dramatic changes, which they can implement, in terms of internationalism versus nationalism, in terms of engagement in Ukraine versus isolationism, and so on. So those are things which you can see how politicians can promise certain deliverables and try to achieve those and people can be confirmed. But when it comes to culture, I just think it’s far more difficult. When it comes to immigration, it’s far more difficult to promise that, on the one hand, you’re going to make America great again — you’re going to make Sweden Swedish, as people said in the democratic party there — or that you’re going to reverse some of the things which allowed these populist parties to come to office. I’ve been obsessed in the last couple of weeks, of course, with the leadership contest in the conservative party as you might be able to tell.

ezra klein

In the U.K.

Yes. And I think about how the leadership has changed. So on the one hand, Corbyn suggested radical economic change, so radical that nobody would vote for him, because he really was pretty far left. And he was kind of insular in how he saw that. And Boris Johnson said, get Brexit done. So he promised to follow through on the referendum, which was popular at the time, or at least enough popularity. After Johnson, of course, we had the six-week experience of Liz Truss, who promised radical change and everybody — everything went nuts. And it was basically a government of chaos. And inflation soared and the pound dropped and bond markets went mad and so on. And now, of course, what we have, essentially if you saw this last prime minister’s question time, was two politicians both of whom are very kind of sensible, middle-of-the-road, somewhat boring. They do not want to promise much change. They want to promised continuity, restoration. But Rishi Sunak wants to say things are going to be stable, and we’re not going to have the chaos of either Truss or the drama and scandals of the Johnson administration. At the same time, whilst he’s putting forward a number of different financial options to try and increase economic stability and reduce economic instability, he’s not changing on immigration policy. That’s a legacy of the previous administration with some fairly extreme measures. And the simple reason why he can’t change on that, is he feels if he does, that the populist party will rush in and Nigel Farage will come back to life and the conservatives will really be going into an election facing a moderately sensible and solid labor party on the one side, very popular 30 points ahead in the polls, in the recent period, and then also being eaten on the far right by the anti-immigrant policies of Nigel Farage, or any sort of far right party at that side as well. So some change is reassuring. But where populists say let’s go backwards, let’s reassure by not having too much change, then it’s very difficult to face both forwards and backwards on some of these classic issues.

ezra klein

Let me ask you about another cut there, this cut between the cultural issues and the economic issues. This is something that has been on my mind a lot, reading your work and just thinking about the conversations I have with people about inflation. I was talking earlier about disorientation as an emotion here, as a politically salient emotion, a sense that things are changing. They’re not right. This isn’t the country you knew. And a lot of what I hear in inflation discourse sounds much more like what I hear in what gets called cultural discourse, than what I would understand as normal kind of economic discussion. Something’s going wrong. We’re losing the country and the economy we once had. And it’s made me think a bit about the ways you can have materialistic and post-materialistic responses to economic issues. So you might think of this as like the Paul Ryan, Ron Paul, or Mitt Romney, Ron Paul divide. The economy wasn’t great around 2012. It was coming back, but it wasn’t great. And some people responded to that in the Republican Party by saying, we need Mitt Romney, a sober private equity guy, who knows how to lead things, knows how to run a corporate office, knows how to manage. And others said, we need Ron Paul. We need to go back to gold. And, I think, both of these tendencies live in the appeals of Donald Trump. But it makes me wonder a bit whether or not we overly code economics as materialistic. Because oftentimes, a lot of the debates about economics end up having this implicit question about whether or not what you’re looking for here is like what you might call technocratic management of the economy or what you’re looking for is a sense, what you’re feeling, experiencing is a sense that too much here has changed. We used to know what we’re doing and now we’ve gotten away from the wisdom of our forefathers. And we need gold. We need to bind the Federal Reserve. We need not so much debt. Whatever it might be, that there’s a tendency to experience those through the same lens of disorientation, the same lens of too much has changed and it has robbed us of what makes us great. And that sometimes, the effort politically to try to answer economic fears as simply economic as opposed to as part of this larger miasma of anxiety, particularly of generational anxiety, is actually quite misguided.

No, I think that is right. And that when we see prices rising so sharply and groceries and people’s lifestyles — when we see the mortgage rate rising so that people are no longer able to renew their mortgages and may have to lose their homes, and we see other sorts of economic crisis, then that is going to create tremendous anxiety, which is both cultural, as well as purely materialistic. And if you go back to Ron’s early work, he would say that when you get an economic crisis, of course, there’s rise in importance. And if you perceive it as an economic crisis, whether it is or is not, for example, in your family or in your community, then it’s genuine. And then those material concerns come back. And you want, basically, competence in your government. You want a government of technocrats, or at least a government that can deliver basic economic security. Once that’s secured and you’re into a period of growth and prosperity, or at least steady growth, then that’s the time in which these other concerns rise to the surface and you can start to be concerned about the quality of life and personal relationships and a wide variety of other aspects which are affecting society, like social cohesion or social order. So the two things aren’t isolated by any means. They interact.

ezra klein

One implication of framing much of this or understanding much of this as generational conflict is that generations age out of the electorate.

Yes.

ezra klein

And that’s something you say in the book that we might be in this lag. On the one hand, there’s more cultural backlash because the younger generations have gotten older, they’ve gotten bigger, and as such, what used to be the counterculture has become the culture. And that’s made what used to be the culture feel resentful, feel silenced, and created a yearning for these transgressive strongman politicians who can put things back the way they were, reempower you, make you feel safe in your own country again. But year by year, the size of the millennials and then the Gen Zers is getting bigger. And it sort of seems to me that you see what we’re in as a kind of lag period between when the younger generations are big enough for their politics to really dominate and the older generations are small enough for their politics to be a more obviously minoritarian tendency. On the other hand, ideas of demographic determinism have become quite unsafe in politics recently, particularly given how wrong Democrats were about what the Browning of America would look like for them. So how do you see this? Are we in a lag? Should we expect this to just be a kind of period of turbulence, and then, in 15 years, we’ll have resettled into a new normal? What’s your projection in the slightly longer frame?

So secular changes, long-term changes by generation are pretty evident. You can see these patterns across many different societies, across many different surveys and across many different time periods, where we have panel surveys and so on. And they are things like greater secularization and the decline of religiosity, which has been evident. The problem is that generational changes take a long time to have any sort of effect. And so, when you are changing, as we say, with this tipping point, where the majority population that once took for granted certain values sees that they’ve become a large but still minority within their own societies, when you’ve become from 60 percent down to 50 percent down to 40 percent — and coincidentally, by the way, almost most of the indicators throughout Trump’s period in office, showed that about 40 percent of the population, consistently, in America, supported him, approved of him, voted for him and so on. When you become 40 percent, but you still outvote and you’re still energized, then you’re both angry and energized to be active, and you’re still having some clout, largely because the younger generation are not so active in conventional politics. As you become the 30 percents and the 20 percents, you’re much more likely to get a process in which you feel you can no longer speak up because of social pressures. Here, you come across what Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann used to talk about — self-censorship. And so, for example, racist attitudes that could be expressed, say, decades ago in the ‘50s are no longer acceptable in society, and then, you, yourself no longer feel that you can say things once you become a small minority. But, of course, again, that takes a long time. And the real question for me is this: Can we actually get to that demographic change, or by the time, in particular the United States gets to that, is the political system and democracy as we know it going to be so changed by those who have politicized the refusal to accept the decline that we can no longer have effective political representation? And there are so many indicators of that, which everybody is aware of, where candidates increasingly no longer say that they will accept the results if they lose, where we see changes to laws, which are going to minimize some of the demographic changes or attempt to minimize them, for example, for minority communities, or when we see many other changes to the electoral system or to the political system. It’s not clear to me that the long-term generational rise of liberal values, which I do think is happening, and which there’s solid evidence in the polls, is necessarily going to trump all these other aspects which are changing the political institutions in America and really are weakening democracy and the public’s faith in the norms of democracy in America. And I think we can see these changes, also, in, again, some other countries, Hungary being a case, which clearly comes to mind, but many other, also, countries where increasing social intolerance, as these changes occur, lack of social trust, lack of trust in institutions, lack of the glue that holds communities together and holds countries together is increasingly becoming evident as these minority parties and candidates and presidents come to power. So it’s really a question of long-term change, yes, but politics gets in the way, and other things may not hold in order to allow that representational change to actually occur. That, again, the jury is still out.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good place to end it. So always our final question — what are three books that you’d recommend to the audience?

So where does all of this leave us? I think one of the big questions, which I’m really fascinated about and which I’ve been working on in recent months, is to think about the basis of popular support for authoritarian leaders, the basis of support for attitudes towards democracy and democratic norms. And I think we’re getting some new literature which really starts to look at that, and I’d like to recommend three. Firstly, when we think about dictatorships, like, for example, Putin in Russia, or many other cases — Lukashenko in Belarus, President Xi in China — we assume that they’re in power because they exert coercive power. They have control of the military, the police, the security forces. They can throw their opponents into jail. Or they have power which arises from patronage — state ownership, licenses, oligarchs. They can distribute largesse and corruption. But the new literature really says maybe there’s genuine support for authoritarian strongman leaders who promise security and order. And that many people may feel that that’s a priority — not freedom and not the chaos that can be attributed to democracy. So the first book, Aleksandar Matovski, “Popular Dictatorships.” He has used some really interesting new data, particularly from Russia and from central and Eastern Europe to say that maybe leaders have actually really risen partly because of deep political and economic and security crisis by promising efficient strong-armed rule, tempered by some form of elections, some form of popular debate. Maybe leaders like Putin have actually got public support behind them. Now, we don’t know for sure. It may be that the opinion polls aren’t reliable. That’s entirely possible. But I think that’s a really interesting new take on how we explain the rise of authoritarianism and the backsliding of democracy in many countries around the world. Second book, which builds on that, is another good book by Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, and the book is called “Spin Dictators.” And it’s about the changing face of tyranny in the 21st century. And again, is going back to many of the dictators and authoritarian regimes and saying what’s the basis of their support. Well, again, in the past, it would be that there’d be a military coup d’état, as in Myanmar, and the generals would basically come into power. The same is true in Egypt. But increasingly, what you find today, is the use of propaganda in a way that hasn’t been used in the past. Propaganda has always been there. It was there, for example, with Goebbels in Germany. It’s been there with Mussolini and the use of radio and so on. But nowadays, what we have is electoral authoritarian regimes. And they’ve learnt that if they manipulate and fake democracy, and they manipulate the information which is available through censorship, a traditional technique, but also through very effective control, again, this can be how they can maintain popular support. And the last book is a classic. It’s not a modern study, but I think we now need to go back to read Hannah Arendt. And we need to read “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” and reflect on the developments of the ‘20s and the ‘30s, and reflect on the nature of, again, how these regimes came to power. A classic book written in the aftermath of the Second World War. But so many of the things which she was writing about — the birth of anti-Semitism, for example, the Dreyfus affair, the role of race, of how we can think about the petty bourgeoisie who was supporting strongmen rulers, and how we can think about class and totalitarian movements — al of those, I think, are really giving us important insights into our contemporary regime. And we’re very familiar with democratic backsliding. Everybody is talking about that. We have a lot of description about how it occurs, and studies about, for example, how democracies die, or how democracies are backsliding. But our theorists, I think, have to think anew and have to think that new authoritarian regimes are different to old authoritarian regimes. And we need to get to grips and discard some of our liberal assumptions and get some new evidence and new data to basically say, is there genuine popular appeals of authoritarianism. We’ve measured support for democracy around the world in many, many surveys throughout the third wave era. That’s to say, from the early mid -‘70s onwards. But what’s the popular support, not for democracy with a big-D, but for an erosion of democratic norms and practices, and then real support for the values which authoritarian strongman leaders promise? Do Americans want stability? Do they want security? Do they want a restoration of the America of the past and a sense of order versus crime, and a sense that America can be, quote, “great again?” If they do, is that also the secret to the support of many other strongmen leaders around the world? And maybe we can look comparatively and we can really try to get to grips with why backsliding is occurring and whether this is the heart of the challenges facing liberal democracy.

ezra klein

Pippa Norris, thank you very much.

Thank you, Ezra. A pleasure to be with you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

The fascism debate is not a semantic debate. It’s not (just) about words. As a debate, it manages to touch on a series of fundamental questions about what  drives political behavior. Why do we believe what we believe? Why do we insist on focusing on the things that we focus on? There are two primary reasons to care about something politically. The first is that it’s practical: it serves a purpose relating to power or electoral gain. The second is that it’s true. One might concern oneself with an obscure 17th century text about, say, pottery not because it particularly matters but because it adds to our repository of knowledge about the way things were. Ideally, something would be both true and have practical import. The problem is when facts and one’s political desires diverge, thereby putting the well-meaning individual who wants to do good in a bit of a quandary. If there is a gap between truth (did Trump collude with the Russians in a manner that meets evidentiary standards of criminal activity) and goals (if only there was a way to get rid of Trump through legal means?), then what is one to do about that gap?The odd thing about the use of the word “fascist” to describe, say, the Brothers of Italy, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), or the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party is that it somehow manages to fail on both counts: it’s not historically accurate or verifiably true in any meaningful sense. And it serves no obvious electoral or political purpose that couldn’t be served through less inflammatory means. That said, in some ways, it’s an instructive encapsulation of a particular way of doing and thinking about politics. It treats words as a substitute for action, and language as a substitute for politics. Fighting over words is a way of policing the boundaries of belonging and identity. The purpose is to maintain cohesion within one’s own tribe. To believe that Trump, Trumpism, and Trumpists are fascist is to confirm that you are on the right side of history. For there to be a right side of history, there must also be a wrong side. And so it becomes important to know who qualifies and who doesn’t, particularly when there is so much at stake. To maintain internal cohesion, clarity and conviction are essential. The introduction of nuance, on the other hand, doesn’t exactly do wonders for cohesion, because nuance introduces alternative conceptions of threat. Every American knows about Hitler and Mussolini and their association with not just badness but evil. These references to World War II-era fascism are evocative for precisely this reason: they are meant to end conversations before they start. There was a time when it was seen as a weakness of argumentation to fall back on historical cliché. There used to be something called Godwin’s Law. To quote Godwin himself: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one hundred percent.” Godwin’s Law, like most things on the internet, is eternal, but it’s been rendered passé, because people at least used to wait a bit before bringing up the specter of Hitler. Where Hitler used to end the conversation, now he might as well be right there at the beginning.Fascism’s association with Hitler is powerful enough in the popular imagination that Hitler doesn’t even need to be explicitly evoked, which is a nifty trick. With or without him, the end result is similar. It functions as a conversational suppressant—the political equivalent of telling someone to “read the room.” It just so happens that, this time, the room is wrong.                 ***The economist Adam Tooze and the political theorist (and Wisdom of Crowds contributor) David Polansky both have new pieces that dismantle the center-left’s obsession with “fascist” analogues to such a degree that I began to feel pity towards the targets. For Tooze, fascism, to be fascist, must meet three basic conditions, none of which obtain in the case of Trumpism. They are: (opposition to) Anglo-American hegemony; total war; and class war. The latter, to take one of the three conditions, seems particularly easy to observe: The ascendant populist right is  marked by a relative disinterest in the question of class. If anything, the populist right is a victim (or beneficiary) of history’s end. There is nothing new under the sun. The right and far-right have moderated considerably on economic and class-related questions. It is this economic convergence that has paradoxically made the Biden era a relative high point for bipartisan cooperation and legislative productivity in the U.S. Congress, as James Sutton recently argued. American gridlock, at least for the moment, is a myth. One reason we’ve failed to realize this is, well, that we simply don’t care. We’re not paying attention to bipartisan cooperation, in part because it’s boring. And it’s boring because it concerns things that most voters and politicians agree on. Agreement is quaint. Instead, the wars that matter today to the politically minded are culture wars. Our cultural divides feel so stark precisely because the other big questions have been largely resolved. Culture, identity, and religion are all we have left to draw sharp lines between “us” and “them,” between friends and enemies. And so we return to “fascism”—and how it serves a very particular purpose. It transforms adversaries into enemies, and once an adversary becomes an enemy, he must be defeated. In other words, once a mere word is introduced into the political lexicon, it primes us for a fight-or-flight response. We have decided on a political frame, and we must now twist reality to fit the frame, regardless of the truth of the matter. Language structures behavior. Words are reflections of beliefs, and once words are uttered with enough frequency, they strengthen and deepen what might have otherwise, at least initially, been mere flights of rhetorical fancy. The use of the word “fascism” to describe one’s political opponents—one’s fellow American citizens—is, in my view, contrary to the democratic spirit. At an even more basic level, though, it is also an anti-pluralist move, even if we don’t intend it as such. As the political theorist William Connolly writes in the appropriately titled Pluralism: When your faith is disturbed your being is rattled. You react bodily through the roiling of your gut, the hunching of your shoulders, the pursing of your lips, and the tightening of your skin. The visceral dimension of faith, moreover, bubbles into explicit belief, affecting the intensity with which you respond to debates about elemental questions.This is the kind of intensity—bursting with feeling, fear, and resentment—that we must pay attention to and, when necessary, protect against. We must not hunch our shoulders or purse our lips. It is difficult to converse, after all, when one’s lips are pursed. In our existential setting, the immoral can easily become moral. This is the story of political battle, after all. We are led into overreach, because we come to believe that exceptional measures are necessary to put down what we perceive to be an existential threat. So, let’s stop perceiving it as an existential threat. Unless, of course, it’s actually existential. Do we really think that about this political moment? If your answer to that question is “yes,” then it is not enough to merely say yes. You must also explain what saying yes actually entails. Either a word has practical import or it doesn’t.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.There’s been some—mostly silly—hysteria over Elon Musk finally taking ownership of Twitter. But there are reasons to be concerned, even if you’re not on the platform.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Emily Oster: Let’s declare a pandemic amnesty.
The worst pediatric-care crisis in decades
Dear Therapist: I don’t think I can accept my boyfriend’s past.
Tweet the TruthElon Musk finally bought Twitter—or, as it turned out, was essentially forced to buy Twitter after shooting his mouth off about how keen he was to own it. He is now learning that contracts matter, and that this whole fandango was probably a stupid idea; his first three days at the helm have not, shall we say, inspired a lot of confidence in his managerial acumen. I suspect that Musk, as Spock said in a classic Star Trek episode, is about to find out that “having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”Many liberals on Twitter have unfortunately decided that if Musk owns the platform, they must leave. This is a kind of self-deportation that—like the threats to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the 2016 election—in my view makes no sense. Many of us with larger presences on the platform have seen a significant drop in our follower counts as people make good on their threat to exit.This is, of course, as much their right as it is Musk’s to buy the platform and run it as he pleases. But I think leaving is a mistake. Twitter, so far, is still Twitter: infuriating and fascinating, disgusting and enlightening, full of very nice people and intelligent interlocutors, along with the usual cohort of angry losers, bored juveniles, and wannabe keyboard heroes. Musk’s ownership isn’t going to change that. So I will put in a word here for a calm and measured response to his arrival.If we were to avoid every forum or product owned by a reprehensible narcissist, we’d live a pretty simple life. Staying on Twitter does not mean you approve of Musk any more than reading The Washington Post means you’re a fan of Jeff Bezos. As my Atlantic colleague Norm Ornstein puts it, he can stipulate that Elon Musk is “a disgrace and a partner with the murderous Saudi regime”—the Saudis are now the second-largest shareholder in Twitter after Musk, and they are crowing about it—but still realize that many of us have “built a community of friendships that [we] would never have found otherwise,” including people who are “interesting, morally strong and admirable.” Norm does not want to lose that, and neither do I.More to the point, if you believe that it is important to combat disinformation, spread reliable information, and in general try to defend some basic notions of civility, social media is an important arena for doing all of those things. Abandoning this part of the public square to vandals and extremists—who became more vocal on the platform practically from the moment Musk took over—accomplishes nothing.Twitter can be a great place to practice some skills that also serve us well in real life. As I have suggested many times, we should sidestep those who want to bait us into endless arguments that are detached from reality. We should state what’s true and the values we support. We should engage those who ask for discussion in good faith. Ignore those who merely want to drain you of patience. That’s a sensible approach, whether it’s Twitter or Thanksgiving with your Fox-obsessed uncle.We’re all human, and we’ll all fail at this at some point. I have been baited online into plenty of idiotic arguments that I now regret (just as I have been in real life). One way to improve your experience on Twitter, however, is to be less personally invested in it. This may sound odd coming from a man with more than 600,000 followers who has tweeted, by my count, at least eleventy-gajillion times and is known for being willing to pursue a Twitter argument to the gates of hell. But the key is to remember that Twitter is a forum, not a lifestyle. It’s not therapy. It’s not where you’ll save the world or crush your enemies. It’s just people, some of whom are good and some of whom are horrendous jerks, talking to one another.Still: When the world’s richest man (and the Saudis, among others), own a huge slice of the public space, it matters. It would matter even if Musk did not have the Twitter persona, as he unfortunately does, of a shitposting teenager. Musk, if he is to be believed, plans to loosen the restrictions on Twitter—again, as is his right—to allow more disinformation. Yesterday, he even tweeted (then deleted) links to a discredited conspiracy theory about the Paul Pelosi assault. He may allow Trump back on the platform.But all of that makes it imperative to stay, not go. Disinformation and trolling works best when the malefactors who engage in it create an impression of being a reliable and trustworthy majority, when they can say that “everybody knows this.” Abandoning such places out of some misplaced sense of moral rectitude simply clears the field for more lies and mischief. The trolls delighting in Musk’s purchase are a very small fraction of the world—and we should not encourage the delusion that there are more of them than there are normal and decent human beings.Related:
Elon Musk’s disastrous weekend on Twitter
There may be no Twitter comeback for Trump.
The Trump-organization trial began today. Prosecutors have accused the company of taking part in a 15-year tax-evasion scheme.
Federal authorities filed charges of assault and attempted kidnapping against the man accused of attacking Paul Pelosi in the Pelosis’ home last week.
Jair Bolsonaro has not yet conceded defeat after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was declared the winner of Brazil’s presidential election last night.
Humans Being: It’s a bad time to be a new Marvel fan, Jordan Calhoun argues.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung talked with the poet Christopher Soto about breaking rules in writing and how literature can spur change.
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explores what the Moneyball-for-everything mentality has done to American culture.
Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn recount an album-cover-themed costume party held in Kaitlyn’s backyard.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers: How old is too old in politics?
(David Corio)
The Too-Muchness of BonoBy David Brooks
Bono was 14 when his grandfather died. His family was at the cemetery burying him when his mother, Iris, fainted. His father, Bob, and older brother, Norman, took her to the hospital to have her checked out, and Bono went over to his grandmother’s house, where the family was gathering.
A little while later, one of his uncles burst in, wailing: “Iris is dying. Iris is dying. She’s had a stroke.”
It was at that instant, Bono says, that his home disappeared. A hole opened up within him. Bono is now 62 and reflecting on how many rock stars lost their mother at a crucial age: John Lennon, Johnny Rotten, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney—the list of the abandoned goes on and on. Their mothers’ deaths left them with this bottomless craving. “People who need to be loved at scale, with 20,000 people screaming your name every night, are generally to be avoided,” Bono says with a laugh. “My kind of people.”
A world without Chuck Grassley in the Senate?
SNL’s David S. Pumpkins effect
Photos: The spirit of Halloween 
Simona Tabasco as Lucia in season 2 of The White Lotus. (Fabio Lovino / HBO)
Read. The original Dracula novel by Bram Stoker is 125 years old—and still biting. Watch. The Season 2 premiere of The White Lotus, on HBO, examines the sex lives of the one percent.Listen. The latest episode of our podcast How to Build a Happy Life explores the happiness we can get from subtraction.Play our daily crossword.P.S.It’s Halloween, and if you think you’re going to get some high-toned classic-horror-movie recommendation from me, you’re mistaken. That would be like handing out organic dried fruit and healthy sawdust treats to kids on the front step. Instead, I’m going to direct you to a bowl of candy corn, a 1985 cult classic directed by Dan O’Bannon (who, a few years earlier, wrote Alien) that still holds a 91 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes: The Return of the Living Dead.The plot: Military goo turns hard-partying young people into brain-eating zombies. Were you about to ask me about motivation and layers of meaning? Let that go. This is a movie that’s just plain fun, a 1980s time capsule—the wardrobe is as scary as the zombies—with a dumb plot, lots of screaming, and some veteran character actors, including the ever-reliable Clu Gulager. There’s plenty of cartoonish gore, a few risqué scenes, and an ending that I won’t spoil but that I will say includes the use of a, uh, military device that is within my area of expertise.The world is scary enough these days, and we might as well have a good laugh along the way. Happy Halloween.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked: “How should voters assess the physical and mental fitness of politicians, and how should the press cover such matters?”Bekke points out that voters have a tough job:
How to decide who is mentally fit to serve is a true conundrum. Like beauty, it is mostly in the eye of the beholder. Media can be a big influence and paid ads can sway voters. Given the First Amendment, it’s difficult to throttle “free speech” regardless of its veracity. In the end, it comes down to the voters doing their due diligence and really paying attention to the candidate’s policies, rather than listening to media hype and attack ads.  
Glenn believes that the matter calls for impolite journalism, a necessity that is heightened by a generational characteristic of Baby Boomers:
If the World War II generation was the “Greatest Generation,” then the Baby Boomer generation is the “longest generation.” They refuse to retire; can’t imagine retiring; won’t retire!
The Greatest Generation made its name and reputation on the battlefields of Europe, all the time looking to return home to a normal life with their family, whether it existed yet or not. Once home in the postwar era, they set about building a career, a life, a family, and a nation, but always looked to retirement when they could enjoy the fruits of their labor in a much more private manner. The Baby Boomers are nothing like that. They have never contemplated any life beyond a professional one. And so their plan seems to be to hang on to whatever power, prestige, or routine their work affords them for as long as possible.
We all value this stubborn “not gonna quit” mentality, and of course many of us can be highly functional assets to our chosen profession very late in life. But it is equally apparent that many of us can and do lose some of our acuity and utility as we grow older. This physical reality, coupled with the psychological makeup of our current eldest generation, has forced the burden of determining “when it's time to go,” from the individual to the rest of society. None of us are comfortable making these decisions within our own families, much less for someone else’s family. These decisions are being made privately in company boardrooms and family living rooms all over America today. But in the political arena, such decisions are necessarily made in a very public setting.
Voting is a big responsibility. Every citizen is asked to make very difficult and messy boardroom and living-room decisions for our nation in a very public way. If we are to make the best decisions possible, we need accuracy and fairness more than politeness from our media. One’s physical and mental acuity is a valid voting factor. Is that ageism? Maybe. Is it appropriate for the people that have to choose the leaders of the free world?  
Absolutely.
If the days of the party nominations coming out of a smoke-filled back room are over—and they are—then we will have to make some very public, very uncomfortable decisions, and we will need some very public, very uncomfortable reporting to fulfill our civic duty.
Rachel feels herself to be at the mercy of media that are failing to perform their duties:
Can the population assess a candidate’s fitness to serve without honest reporting? We, the plebeian class, find ourselves caught between two forces of chaos while our journalistic class finds ever more justifications to align with one of them. Honest assessments are met with cries of some evil “-ism”, as if basic journalistic integrity is fodder for oppressors.
Our journalistic class has spent a year telling me Democracy is in peril—that if I do not come to the same conclusion as them, I am killing our republic. But I believe that the failure of our journalists to report honestly, to strive to separate their personal perspectives from their public service, is killing our democracy. A polity unable to honestly assess a candidate’s fitness because journalists fear having a scarlet A for ableism sewn to their profiles is a population incapable of carrying the weight of our democracy.
Whereas Harold would prefer a less individualistic approach to evaluating candidates:
There is a myth in America: Change, innovation, and genius flow from a single person, preferably a model of perfection. Those around them who made all of it possible share little in the success. It is a story that shapes who we perceive as being worthy to represent us. Should anyone exhibit any characteristic that is viewed as a deviation from perfection, then they are no longer qualified for the position. I find it all very disheartening.
And Timothy believes the press should avoid even raising the question of age in order to avoid ageism:
There are 90-year-olds getting college degrees and opening businesses and there are 60-year-olds rotting away in a recliner watching I Love Lucy reruns for the 96th time. Young politicians should not have their age used as a weapon to create doubt about their competency any more than an old politician should have their age used as a weapon to create doubt about their competency. Even mere mentions of a candidate’s age, presented as nothing more than fact, can impose bias in the public and should be avoided.
Other than the candidate meeting the legal minimum required age to serve in the office, there should be no mention of a candidate’s age by the press nor the opponent unless the candidate themselves makes it an issue. Just as a criminal defendant’s medical conditions can’t be pursued in court unless the defendant brings it up, age needs to be protected to start removing ageism from our conversations.
[Read: The importance of dissent in wartime]Meredith attempts to draw distinctions:
As a mother of a neurodivergent son and a volunteer who helps adults with disabilities, ableism is not a subject I take lightly. We live in a country that continues to overlook the dignity, rights, and needs of citizens with disabilities and that undervalues the lives of our seniors. To assess a particular politician, ask one simple question: Can the impairments in question be mitigated with reasonable accommodations? If so, withholding those accommodations would be wrong. However, if there is no form of support that could assist a person in performing the duties to which they were elected, questioning their suitability is appropriate. A free and fair society must have a media where their fitness to serve can be challenged, but there is a way to do so that targets the issue and not the person.
If we keep throwing ableism and ageism around to shut down criticism, we become complicit in covering up the systemic ableism that permeates our world and presents the REAL problem for those living with disabilities or returning to the workforce at an advanced age. I DO see the impact of ableism in our society, in our cities, in how we educate, work, and recreate … I don’t see it in asking our elected officials to put the needs of their constituents above their own need to be the person holding the office when age or illness impairs their ability to serve. I share the desire that our politicians be cognitively capable.
Theodore wants voters to get help from experts so that they can make more objective decisions:
Where issues of mental competence or mental health arise, I would suggest a politically neutral panel of eminent doctors specializing in neurological and psychiatric disorders, perhaps convened by the National Academy of Sciences or some similarly distinguished, apolitical, medical or scientific body, either at the initiative of the convening body or upon the request of the candidate whose fitness has been challenged. The candidate or candidates would be asked to submit to examination by the panel. The panel would be tasked with examining the candidate and issuing a public report on the candidate’s fitness for the public office he or she seeks and, if appropriate, the candidate’s prognosis over his or her prospective term. The report should be couched in nontechnical, easily understandable language capable of being understood by the general public.
Bruce agrees:
I don’t believe voters can or should have to decide on the physical and mental health of candidates for public office when plenty of experienced experts are available. As a starter, I suggest a board of five nonpartisan physicians, including a neurologist and a psychiatrist, who are permitted to fully examine candidates for the presidency and vice presidency and report their findings publicly and transparently in a manner to be determined.
But Robert warns against misleading ourselves into overestimating the objectivity of our impressions and judgments:
This obsession with the mental and physical health of politicians is part of a larger problem: misuse of medical terminology to give a patina of scientific objectivity to subjective judgments. We label someone a “narcissist” when we mean to say he’s a bit full of himself. We call someone a “sociopath” when we mean to say she’s insensitive to our feelings. We rarely, if ever, diagnose people on our side. It is always a way of saying someone on the other side is unfit. But a mental or physical illness does not define a person. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all suffered from serious illness while in office. All three are considered among the top presidents.
I think we should mostly leave mental- and physical-health concerns out of our political judgments. We’d be more honest if we called our politicians too old, cold, or stupid instead of making armchair diagnoses of dementia, psychopathy, or intellectual disability.
Gary stopped working to spare his patients the possibility of age-diminished performance, and criticizes politicians who stick around too long, arguing that in doing so they risk great harm to millions of people.He writes:
I am a retired surgeon.
My mother is alive at 101; my father lived to be 97. Both appear (past tense for father) alert and cogent to a casual observer. That is far, far from true. I am well: no medications, quite active, etc. My experience with peers and patients (my practice was joint replacement; Medicare age heavily represented) and general observations prompted me to retire from surgery at age 70 and completely at 71.
I greatly enjoyed my medical/surgical practice and was in no way “burned out.” With a largely Medicare population, I am far from wealthy. In order to cheer myself—or, at least, to reassure myself of this decision—I did a little research. You can see how my voting will go from what I wrote:
Old age brings physical infirmity and illness. Mental decline—especially in tasks requiring rapid analysis and fluidity of thought—is also inevitable. Although length of life has increased, there has not been an accompanying improvement in physical and mental well-being. Between 5 and 14 percent of people aged over 70 suffer some form of dementia, and this incidence nearly doubles every five years. Roughly 20 percent of those aged over 80 are mentally impaired, and by 90 years, up to 40 percent have dementia.
Loss of insight and judgment are nearly universal with dementia. These changes may be subtle; worse, a person with diminished mental acuity will never recognize their dementia. For the elderly, rapid yet complete and accurate decision making as is required in some occupations may be difficult, even impossible. Conflict then occurs between personal interests versus public safety; these are ideally resolved in favor of public safety.
Certain positions come with a mandatory retirement age: air-traffic controller, 56 years; federal law-enforcement officer, 57 years; airline pilot, 65 years; diplomat (but not ambassador!), 65 years. At least eight states require mandatory retirement for certain types of judges. Several health systems have introduced mandatory retirement or competence testing by age 75. Doctors can injure people, of course, but only one at a time, and an airline pilot might be responsible for several hundred deaths. In either event, the effect of an error is immediate and obvious. With consequences delayed and unclear, a president, legislator, or judge might repeatedly ruin the lives of tens of millions with misguided decisions and undo a lifetime of their own accumulated esteem.
Woodrow Wilson represented the U.S. at the Paris Peace Talks following World War I. During these talks, Wilson became ill. One school of thought on how harshly the Treaty of Versailles treated Germany is that Wilson failed to counter the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, who prevailed: Germany was destroyed, disorganized, and demoralized. The result in Germany included paranoia, rabidly defensive nationalism, intense racism, and division. The consequence was Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust.
FDR was impaired when elected to his fourth term in 1944. The Yalta Conference in early 1945 determined the fate of Germany after World War II. According to some, its terms inadvertently set the way for Stalin and the Soviets to dominate Eastern Europe and precipitated the Cold War. It is believed that Roosevelt’s weakened state was partly responsible. FDR died two months later.
Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will be 93 when his term is completed. Chuck Grassley is running for another Senate term; Senator Dianne Feinstein is leaning toward another term in 2024. If reelected, both will be 94 at the end of their term. In Congress, there are currently more than 10 members over the age of 80. The current Supreme Court’s conservative composition is in part attributable to the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. RBG is respected as a Supreme Court justice and brilliant legal strategist. Yet, in her 80s and having survived several episodes of cancer, she lacked the insight to retire.
Just as the requisite hyperconfidence of a successful person might become dangerous hubris with years of power and influence, a decline from highly functional, wise, and insightful to mildly eccentric to overtly demented can subtly occur. Those in positions of power carry a burden to provide for clients, patients, constituents, customers. As they age, they deserve respect and, if desired and appropriate, a position where they will contribute. They also carry an obligation to potential successors, and their best action might be stepping aside, deferring to a younger, more astute and mentally agile individual who would benefit from mentorship or guidance. Consider Sir Isaac Newton’s observation: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Read: 10 reader views on the varieties of anti-racismStephan offers a similar conclusion from the perspective of a different profession:
I’m [Federal Aviation Administration–licensed] as a commercial pilot, and I’m now 86. I no longer fly, either recreationally (which is my choice) or for work (which is the government’s choice). The FAA mandates a fixed retirement age for working pilots, which is basically age 65, though there are minor exceptions. I have also stopped driving unless it’s absolutely necessary. My 16-years-younger wife takes the wheel of our Porsche. That is my choice as well, even though I am still quite capable of driving, after a career as an automotive journalist, including the editorship of Car and Driver, that put me behind the wheel of plenty of high-performance cars, including my own modified Porsche track car.
If we don’t want 86-year-old pilots flying our airliners, why should we accept 86-year-old politicians flying our country? There should be a government-mandated retirement age, and I’d be happy with it at age 75. How many of these people whining about ableism/ageism are also complaining that they should be allowed to fly in airplanes piloted by people Dianne Feinstein’s age?  
I’m guessing none.
Margie and Don object to ageism:
As two retired business consultants who are now 83 and still going strong, we object to Americans’ reacting to anyone over 70 as somehow less able. We are very active in our retirement home, and volunteer for many other charitable endeavors here in Boulder. I do four exercise classes each week, have written letters to the local newspapers and hundreds of postcards to get out the vote, monitor the book club, attend painting sessions weekly, and host a potluck monthly for 30 to 35 residents. We also volunteer at our local library for various ESL programs. In addition, we stay in touch with our five children and 11 grandchildren, including sending boxes of homemade cookies to encourage our college students at midterms and to celebrate their birthdays. We stay informed by watching morning and nightly news, as well as the Sunday political programs and Fareed Zakaria’s take.  We are not just “napping our lives away,” that’s for sure.
My husband, a former college professor with a Ph.D., has climbed all the 14ers in the lower 48, still plays senior softball, manages the 70s team, and runs the Boulder Blues Softball Club. He works out in a gym, hikes or rides his bike at least three to four days per week. His interest in and concern for climate change has prompted him to take the lead in our efforts to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and we now compost and recycle more than 70 percent of our refuse in our building. Fortunately for us, he also volunteers to help with everything else in our senior community, including running the Great Decisions discussion group sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association each winter. Our management here has benefited from his advice and counsel on everything from staffing to the installation of electric chargers in our communal garage, used for charging our EV and two others.  
We take umbrage at the idea that anyone beyond a certain age can no longer contribute to the greater good. If the American public chooses to lump all of us in one category just because of our ages, they’re sadly mistaken. We think Joe Biden is doing an excellent job and, if allowed to continue, will do so in another term beginning in 2024.  
Dennis reflects that age giveth and taketh qualities of a good leader:
I have a saying: “I know that tomorrow I will be wiser than I am today, because I know that today, I am wiser than I was yesterday.” At age 77, I feel very wise and able to act on that wisdom.  
Nevertheless I must admit that my strength and stamina have declined. My ability to physically act is somewhat limited compared to decades ago. Wisdom and experience are excellent traits for leaders; however, each individual is different, and voters need to be able to fully evaluate all circumstances of a candidate’s fitness. Also, do circumstances require a leader who can carry the sword in a charge in battle or have the diplomatic skills to negotiate and maintain prosperity and peace?
Hopefully, I will be able to continue being wiser tomorrow than I am today. However, I realize that at some point I may not remember what wisdom I have gained today for tomorrow––and how, when, or if this decline should occur is unpredictable. Unfortunately, age does increase the probabilities of some decline, but not when and in whom.
I fully enjoy my retirement, although I know others my age and in my profession who continue to work. I believe that most people (who are free to choose) know when it is time to retire, and we should give a candidate some credit for knowing if they are fit for the job. Still, it is the voter’s right to have as much information as possible to evaluate a candidate, and the candidate’s obligation to provide that information, and the journalist’s obligation to report on it as well.
And Errol opines:
There is something to be said for your leader having poise and exuding strength. People can call that “ableism,” and maybe it is, but we live in the real world where superficialities have value. People are going to have to learn to live with that as long as humans exist.

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as lines of ambulances roared down the streets and freezer vans packed into parking lots, the pediatric emergency department at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was quiet.It was an eerie juxtaposition, says Chris Woodward, a pediatric-emergency-medicine specialist at the hospital, given what was happening just a few doors down. While adult emergency departments were being inundated, his team was so low on work that he worried positions might be cut. A small proportion of kids were getting very sick with COVID-19—some still are—but most weren’t. And due to school closures and scrupulous hygiene, they weren’t really catching other infections—flu, RSV, and the like—that might have sent them to the hospital in pre-pandemic years. Woodward and his colleagues couldn’t help but wonder if the brunt of the crisis had skipped them by. “It was, like, the least patients I saw in my career,” he told me.That is no longer the case.Across the country, children have for weeks been slammed with a massive, early wave of viral infections—driven largely by RSV, but also flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2. Many emergency departments and intensive-care units are now at or past capacity, and resorting to extreme measures. At Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, in Maryland, staff has pitched a tent outside the emergency department to accommodate overflow; Connecticut Children’s Hospital mulled calling in the National Guard. It’s already the largest surge of infectious illnesses that some pediatricians have seen in their decades-long careers, and many worry that the worst is yet to come. “It is a crisis,” Sapna Kudchadkar, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist and anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. “It’s bananas; it’s been full to the gills since September,” says Melissa J. Sacco, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at UVA Health. “Every night I turn away a patient, or tell the emergency department they have to have a PICU-level kid there for the foreseeable future.”I asked Chris Carroll, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at Connecticut Children’s, how bad things were on a scale of 1 to 10. “Can I use a Spinal Tap reference?” he asked me back. “This is our 2020. This is as bad as it gets.”[Read: The strongest signal that Americans should worry about flu this winter]The autumn crush, experts told me, is fueled by dual factors: the disappearance of COVID mitigations and low population immunity. For much of the pandemic, some combination of masking, distancing, remote learning, and other tactics tamped down on the transmission of nearly all the respiratory viruses that normally come knocking during the colder months. This fall, though, as kids have flocked back into day cares and classrooms with almost no precautions in place, those microbes have made a catastrophic comeback. Rhinovirus and enterovirus were two of the first to overrun hospitals late this summer; now they’re being joined by RSV, all while SARS-CoV-2 remains in play. Also on the horizon is flu, which has begun to pick up in the South and the mid-Atlantic, triggering school closures or switches to remote learning. During the summer of 2021, when Delta swept across the nation, “we thought that was busy,” Woodward said. “We were wrong.”Children, on the whole, are more susceptible to these microbes than they have been in years. Infants already have a rough time with viruses like RSV: The virus infiltrates the airways, causing them to swell and flood with mucus that their tiny lungs may struggle to expel. “It’s almost like breathing through a straw,” says Marietta Vazquez, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Yale. The more narrow and clogged the tubes get, “the less room you have to move air in and out.” Immunity accumulated from prior exposures can blunt that severity. But with the pandemic’s great viral vanishing, kids missed out on early encounters that would have trained up their bodies’ defensive cavalry. Hospitals are now caring for their usual RSV cohort—infants—as well as toddlers, many of whom are sicker than expected. Infections that might, in other years, have produced a trifling cold are progressing to pneumonia severe enough to require respiratory support. “The kids are just not handling it well,” says Stacy Williams, a PICU nurse at UVA Health.Coinfections, too, have always posed a threat—but they’ve grown more common with SARS-CoV-2 in the mix. “There’s just one more virus they’re susceptible to,” Vazquez told me. Each additional bug can burden a child “with a bigger hill to climb, in terms of recovery,” says Shelby Lighton, a nurse at UVA Health. Some patients are leaving the hospital healthy, only to come right back. There are kids who “have had four respiratory viral illnesses since the start of September,” Woodward told me.Pediatric care capacity in many parts of the country actually shrank after COVID hit, Sallie Permar, a pediatrician at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, whose hospital was among those that cut beds from its PICU, told me. A mass exodus of health-care workers—nurses in particular—has also left the system ill-equipped to meet the fresh wave of demand. At UVA Health, the pediatric ICU is operating with maybe two-thirds of the core staff it needs, Williams said. Many hospitals have been trying to call in reinforcements from inside and outside their institutions. But “you can’t just train a bunch of people quickly to take care of a two-month-old,” Kudchadkar said. To make do, some hospitals are doubling up patients in rooms; others have diverted parts of other care units to pediatrics, or are sending specialists across buildings to stabilize children who can’t get a bed in the ICU. In Baton Rouge, Woodward is regularly visiting the patients who have just been admitted to the hospital and are still being held in the emergency department, trying to figure out who’s healthy enough to go home so more space can be cleared. His emergency department used to take in, on average, about 130 patients a day; lately, that number has been closer to 250. “They can’t stay,” he told me. “We need this room for somebody else.”Experts are also grappling with how to strike the right balance between raising awareness among caregivers and managing fears that may morph into overconcern. On the one hand, with all the talk of SARS-CoV-2 being “mild” in kids, some parents might ignore the signs of RSV, which can initially resemble those of COVID, then get much more serious, says Ashley Joffrion, a respiratory therapist at Baton Rouge General Medical Center. On the other hand, if families swamp already overstretched hospitals with illnesses that are truly mild enough to resolve at home, the system could fracture even further. “We definitely don’t want parents bringing kids in for every cold,” Williams told me. The key signs of severe respiratory sickness in children include wheezing, grunting, rapid or labored breaths, trouble drinking or swallowing, and bluing of the lips or fingernails. When in doubt, experts told me, parents should call their pediatrician for an assist.[Read: The great pandemic hand-washing blooper]With winter still ahead, the situation could take an even darker turn, especially as flu rates climb, and new SARS-CoV-2 subvariants loom. In most years, the chilly viral churn doesn’t abate until late winter, which means hospitals may be only at the start of a grueling few months. And still-spotty uptake of COVID vaccines among little kids, coupled with a recent dip in flu-shot uptake and the widespread abandonment of infection-prevention measures, could make things even worse, says Abdallah Dalabih, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at Arkansas Children’s.The spike in respiratory illness marks a jarring departure from a comforting narrative that’s dominated the intersection of infectious disease and little children’s health for nearly three years. When it comes to respiratory viruses, little children have always been a vulnerable group. This fall may force Americans to reset their expectations around young people’s resilience and recall, Lighton told me, “just how bad a ‘common cold’ can get.”

The libertarian solution By: Scott Sumner

Richard Hanania recently suggested to Tyler Cowen that we might have been better off with a libertarian response to Covid. Tyler responded:

Tyler: I have more sympathies for the libertarian solution than most people would. But I think in this case, it’s not time consistent. So one issue is simply how do you deal with legal liability? Now the FDA process, for all of its flaws, does give manufacturers the ability to bring the thing to market in a way consistent with corporate law and their other fiduciary responsibilities. So no FDA means everything is fair game in the court system. That is much worse even than the FDA. It’s a bigger constraint. But also, government won’t let them keep the prices high.

Governments confiscate resources ex post. We know that, so you need to reward them upfront, even if in principle you think the higher price would be a better incentive. I would also point out that when there’s an externality through contagion, you don’t want the price of a vaccine to be very high.

I have two thoughts on this response:

1. From one perspective, Tyler is actually showing the advantage of the libertarian approach to Covid. It would be better if governments were not able to put price controls on vaccines. It would be better if vaccine sellers could insist that customers sign contracts promising not to sue if there were bad side effects, and if those waivers were legally enforceable.

2. Given that we do not live under that sort of libertarian regime, there may be a case for subsidizing vaccine development, or providing an FDA stamp of approval to reduce the risk of lawsuits.

Similar examples occur in many contexts. In an unregulated free market banking system with NGDP targeting, it probably makes no sense to have minimum capital requirements for banks. But in a regime where FDIC creates moral hazard and Fed policy creates cycles in NGDP growth, there may be an argument for regulations that make the banking system a bit safer. (Whether those regulations work in practice is another question, but it’s at least possible that some regulations are beneficial in terms of offsetting the negative effects of other regulations.)

PS. The interview also includes an interesting discussion of why Tyler believes that (at the margin) the developing world needs to become more woke.

There’s a terrible rhythm to how we react to episodes of violence with a political dimension. Paul Pelosi’s brutal assault is no different.

Targeted, premeditated attacks like this one, we soon learn, are cooked up in an addled mind, but something as unsatisfying as madness fails to suffice for a motive. So, we go about the flawed human practice of seeking patterns and applying rationality to the irrational. In this ritual, we exercise the agency chaos has otherwise stolen, even if it usually manifests in the unconstructive practice of assigning blame for violence to the non-violent.

From what we know of Paul Pelosi’s alleged attacker, the preponderance of evidence indicates that he was a sick man. The paranoia to which he was attracted of late has an unmistakably rightwing flavor. He seems enticed by the collection of lunatic conspiracy theories espoused by disciples of “QAnon,” which the Associated Press summarizes as “the belief that the country is run by a deep state cabal of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles, and baby-eating cannibals.” This was, however, a recent conversion. His neighbors describe the alleged assailant as a transient drug addict, well-known around infamously left-wing Berkeley, California as a pro-nudity activist and a “hemp jewelry maker.” His online activities include a variety of anti-Semitic themes, which is a common feature of the psychologically deranged, whatever their politics.

This presents a maddening conundrum. When America’s mental-health crisis is discussed at all, it is either an intractable Gordian Knot or another example of how America just won’t throw enough money at its problems. Irresponsible conspiracy peddlers in media and politics display no sense of accountability. They’re not listening to these admonitions, nor are their audiences. The only people listening to reason, in fact, are the reasonable. So, that’s who you must train your fire on.

In Politico, reporters Sarah Ferris and Jeremy White point an accusatory finger at Republican ad makers, who may have contributed to the violent mania exhibited by Pelosi’s alleged assailant by crafting messages critical of the Democratic Speaker of the House in an election year. The article notes that Republican committees and candidates have used Pelosi as a foil for well over a decade—a fact the reporters believe supports rather than disputes the notion that this year’s fare crossed a line.

“The attack on Paul Pelosi is becoming the latest inflection point in an American political discourse that’s grown exponentially coarser since Republicans first embraced Nancy Pelosi as an attack-ad bogeywoman,” Politico asserted. The Democratic lawmakers the outlet quotes place the blame at the feet of Donald Trump and the Republican political “machine,” which “led directly to this attack.” The president himself echoed these sentiments within hours of the attack on Pelosi.

This attempt at advantage-seeking in the wake of this episode of violence is as familiar as it is sordid. It’s precisely what the New York Times editorial board engaged in when it alleged that a paranoid schizophrenic with a deluded grudge against English grammar shot Rep. Gabby Giffords because Sarah Palin’s PAC placed “Democrats under stylized cross hairs.” It’s of a piece with the efforts to establish a causal relationship between “martial metaphors” and attempted murder. That is a source of psychological comfort, insofar as those are things that are at least theoretically within our control. As a bonus, it is also a tool of political utility.

It would be nice if we had a more responsible political class (though the dominant figures in 2010 were more responsible by any definition, and that didn’t stop the commentariat from blaming everyone but the violent for their violence). There was no time in American history when our politics were unsullied by notions that a secret cabal is plotting against the public interest, but it would be great if American political life weren’t as conspiratorial as it is today. We know that radical notions can radicalize the disturbed, and we’ve seen a lot of radicalizations recently; only some of them right-wing.

The would-be gunman who was charged with the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh was moved to violence by apocalyptic rhetoric around the Court’s rulings on abortion and gun rights. But that episode was “not especially hair-raising,” and it inspired no soul-searching.

When one of Marco Rubio’s campaign canvassers was beaten to the point of hospitalization, reportedly, “because he was a Republican,” Florida Democrats said the staffer’s history was perhaps behind the attack. He was “a misogynist and a racist,” a “white supremacist,” someone with a “history of being tied to hatred and bigotry,” and who should be “condemned” by the campaign that hired him.

The man who almost killed a number of Republican members of Congress in 2017 populated his social-media accounts with eschatology that Donald Trump’s presidency would supposedly fulfill. In 2020, American cities burned over the conspiratorial notion that the United States is founded in evil and remains wholly dedicated to the subjugation of its minority population. This year, dozens of pro-life pregnancy centers have been targeted with violence over the notion that their “campaign of oppression” is an existential threat.

Some of these conspiracy theories are more fashionable than others, but they are all poison. We should demand more seriousness and sobriety from our representatives. But even if a better politics were bestowed upon us tomorrow, it wouldn’t rid us of the violently mentally disturbed. It would, however, prevent our political actors from leveraging acts of violence to squeeze out whatever political rewards bloodshed provides the unscrupulous. As the attack on Paul Pelosi suggests, we’re a long way off from that.

As America’s partisan divide becomes ever wider, deeper, and angrier, many Americans from both red and blue tribes are increasingly worried about the possibility of a new civil war. Jeremi Suri, a professor of Public Affairs and History at the University of Texas at Austin, says that these worries are in a sense misplaced “because the Civil War never fully ended. Its lingering embers have burst into flames at various times, including our own.”
Suri gained his scholarly reputation writing books contemporary politics and foreign policy, but the events of recent years, starting with Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, led him to cast his frame of historical reference back to the Civil War of 1861-65 and its aftermath. The roots of the rage behind the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in his view, go back to the cataclysmic conflict of the nineteenth century and resistance to the postwar Reconstruction of the defeated South. Through a deep analysis of key individuals during that period, as well as events including President Andrew Johnson’s 1868 declaration of amnesty for Confederates and the disputed presidential election of 1876, he finds parallels and precedents for the rhetoric and actions that run through much of today’s politics.  
Reconstruction’s end brought a halt to efforts by Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant to create a more racially inclusive democracy. The unfinished work of that second Founding continues to this day, and continues to meet with similar resistance to what was seen in the nineteenth century, including widespread claims of election fraud and a growing willingness to use violence to attain political ends. This podcast discussion also touches on present-day battles over how to teach American history as well as what Suri’s study of the nineteenth century suggests about possible twenty-first-century reforms to remedy flaws in the design of our constitutional structure.  

Jeremi Suri: We need institutions that can, with legitimacy, make claims as to what is a fair election and what isn’t. With the collapse of any kind of mainstream news, we don’t have an authoritative way of affirming that, and I’d like to see us develop more of that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to welcome Jeremi Suri to the podcast.
Jeremi is an old comrade from struggling graduate student days, so I can say that I knew him when. But he is now Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs and Professor of Public Affairs and History at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s been at Texas, I think, since 2011, and prior to that he spent a decade on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. So welcome, Jeremi!Jeremi Suri: Thank you, Geoff, for having me on your wonderful podcast.Geoff Kabaservice: I appreciate you being here. You are the author of eleven books on foreign policy and public affairs, and your most recent appears this month, which is to say October 2022. And it is titled Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. Congratulations on this great new book.Jeremi Suri: Well, thank you so much, Geoff.Geoff Kabaservice: I should also add that you are a prolific contributor to the public discourse, including not only your books but your writings for virtually all of the media outlets that most people have ever heard of and quite a few they haven’t; multiple radio and TV appearances; and your weekly podcast, This is Democracy, which I myself have had the privilege of joining.Jeremi Suri: And we hope to have you on again soon, Geoff.Geoff Kabaservice: Well, thank you. One of the more endearing features of that podcast is the weekly poem written and recited by your son, Zachary. How is he doing?Jeremi Suri: He is doing very well. He’s applying to colleges right now. He’s a senior in high school and he’s struggling with trying to figure out what the future of our country’s going to be and how he can find a place for himself in it.Geoff Kabaservice: That is a struggle that confronts a lot of young people nowadays, I think.Jeremi Suri: Yes.Geoff Kabaservice: Jeremi, you actually had a quote on your website which I found quite interesting and appealing. You said: “I am a child of the global transformations that remade societies in the last century — war, migration, nation-building, and mobility through higher education. All of my research, writing and teaching seeks to explain these transformations.” And you go on to say that “My scholarship is therefore an extended inquiry into the workings of power at local and international levels, and the interactions across these levels.” Can you tell me something about your background and why this is the way that you have sort of framed your own writing and scholarship?Jeremi Suri: It’s a great question. So my father is an immigrant from India. He came in 1965 with the Immigration Reform Act of that time. He came from an India that was going through some really, really difficult economic conditions that we could hardly imagine in the United States. And my mother is the child of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States who fled pogroms in Russia.And that history’s always been with me, Geoff. From the earliest memories that I have, I’ve been interested in trying to figure out what happened in those societies, why my parents came and met at the Roseland dance hall in New York City. And I think it’s not only shaped who I am, it’s shaped the ways I view the world, the ways I think about our country. The United States made my family possible. It made the survival of my family possible. It made the wonderful life I live as a scholar wonderful and possible. And trying to explain how we’ve come to where we are, flaws and benefits, and how we go forward has always been central to my identity.Geoff Kabaservice: I believe the Roseland Ballroom has closed down now, to many people’s lamentations.Jeremi Suri: It has indeed. And so now when I mention that story to students, they have no idea what I’m referring to.Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, alas. So where did you grow up?Jeremi Suri: I grew up in New York City. I went to public schools in New York City. I was fortunate enough to get admitted to one of the magnet public schools, Stuyvesant High School. And my parents were working-class people — they didn’t have any money — but I was able to get a good education in New York. And I had some wonderful teachers. I had some horrible teachers, but I also had some wonderful teachers. And then I was fortunate to get a fellowship to go to Stanford University as an undergraduate. I could not have gone if I didn’t have financial aid.Geoff Kabaservice: I happen to remember that you went to Stanford because you were kind enough to provide me with an introduction a long time ago to David Kennedy, who I think was one of your professors there.Jeremi Suri: He was my advisor. I just had dinner with him recently. He’s going strong in his early eighties. And he taught me early on, Geoff, that serious history based on deep research can also be well-written for a broad public. I never considered being a historian who only writes for historians, because my models, the figures that I’ve revered, have always been those who did the most serious research but always wrote for a broader audience.Geoff Kabaservice: He is a great person and a great historian, and he definitely has taken that approach himself. And you went to Ohio… Did you go there to study with John Gaddis?Jeremi Suri: I did. So when I was finishing my undergraduate work at Stanford, I happened to get connected with John Gaddis, who at that point was a professor at Ohio University and also a visiting professor at Oxford. And I had a visiting period at Oxford as well, and that’s how we overlapped. And he invited me to Ohio University to see if this graduate school thing was something I wanted to do. And so I went and did my master’s there.Geoff Kabaservice: Okay, and then on to Yale?Jeremi Suri: Then I was following you, Geoff, that I had to connect. And like you, I had the great fortune of getting to know Gaddis Smith and to work with Paul Kennedy and so many other luminary figures. But it wasn’t that they were luminaries that made a difference for me. It was that they were people who believed history could change the world and, again, could be written for a larger audience. And so I was drawn to that and so shaped by some of the same people who shaped you and your fantastic writings.Geoff Kabaservice: Oh, thank you. And yeah, I remember those teachings with John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy very fondly. We had a great seminar with Paul Kennedy and Bruce Russett where we were comparing the historians’ and the political scientists’ approaches to the world, which I still draw upon for a lot of my own work.Jeremi Suri: And I think you and I, as much as we respect political scientists, I think it was obvious we knew which side of that we were on.Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, this is true. Something about our own graduate work as well is that although we worked in very different fields, we were both studying the 1960s. And the work you did on your dissertation, I believe, led to your first book, which is Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente.We were going to grad school at the time of the ’90s culture wars. And to me, it was only natural to study the 1960s because that was where the seeds of those culture wars were planted. And although I’m not much of a believer in cycles of history, one can’t help but notice that there are 30-year cycles that sometimes recur in American history. Because the 1930s was a very politically active decade, as was the 1960s. The 1990s picked up where the 1960s left off. And here we are in yet another culture war in 2022.Jeremi Suri: I agree. And I think your podcast’s namesake, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., of course came up with this enduring concept of “The Vital Center,” and it was his father who spoke of cycles of American history. And I agree with you. That’s maybe a too rigid way to think about things, but we do have these patterns. And to me, what you and I experienced in the 1990s in that culture war was a way in which the prior culture war of the ’60s was being refought.And I feel like we’re refighting it. You’ve written about this, of course, so well. We are refighting those wars today. And that definitely inspired my first book/dissertation, Power and Protest, and much of my other work — and to some extent even this current book that goes back to the years after the Civil War. I think the point is that prior battles, they don’t go away. They remain part of our scar tissue as we go forward.Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, and very rarely are there complete victories. And some of these battles get refought and the understanding of the past gets relitigated.Jeremi Suri: Exactly. That’s why the stakes are so large. I mean, it seems like we’re debating curriculum in high school. That’s usually not something that’s exciting for people. But the stakes are pretty large because it defines how we think about ourselves in the current moment.Geoff Kabaservice: I’m sure these are subjects we’ll come back to. But given that you’ve studied a lot of foreign affairs — that Henry Kissinger, for example, has been one of the central figures in a lot of your scholarship — but that in any case a lot of your work has focused on the twentieth century, why did you decide that you wanted to write about the Civil War and its aftermath?Jeremi Suri: Because of the last six years. So just as I was drawn to the ’60s, just as you were in the 1990s, I was drawn to this period because of what at first seemed to me to be a smattering of resonances. And the more I looked into it… As any research project develops, it starts as an article and a thought piece and an idea. And the more I looked into it the more parallels, the more resonances, the more connections I saw.One of the things that became so clear to me was that some of the rhetoric we see today is the rhetoric of the 1860s and ’70s and ’80s — it’s from the opposite party. It’s the Republican Party using the Democratic Party rhetoric of the 1870s, the arguments about fraud in elections, how fraud is deployed as a weapon in denying certain groups the right to vote, questioning results. This is vintage 1874, 1876, 1878.Geoff Kabaservice: I agree, and I highly recommend your book. Like I said, not only is it beautifully written, but it’s really thought-provoking. I never was a student of the nineteenth century in America, but I feel like I absorbed a lot of information about the Civil War just in the course of growing up and being an American. It’s something that we all seem to know something about. And of course, I had family trips to Civil War battlefields, and I in fact think that one of the great American novels is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, which focuses on the Battle of Gettysburg.The Civil War in some sense is always with us. But it was still a little bit startling to read one of the first sentences in your book, which is that “Worries about a new civil war in America are misplaced because the Civil War” — that is with capital letters — “never fully ended. Its lingering embers have burst into flames at various times, including our own.” When did you come to feel that?Jeremi Suri: About halfway through the research. I went in thinking that there were, as I said, some references, some connections. The original book proposal was going to cover a number of other periods. And the more deeply I went into the research — I mean, this is what we do as historians; we immerse ourselves in the sources — the more it felt like we were refighting those issues. And in a way that isn’t new; it’s recontextualized. But I think fundamentally the question at the end of the Civil War, with the end of slavery, is: How are 4 million former non-citizens now going to be integrated into our society in areas where their integration will give them enormous power by virtue of their presence?And I think at the center of our politics today is the same question: How are groups that have traditionally not been in power — that are grabbing, claiming, making a case for power — how are they going to be integrated in our society? And the battle lines look very similar. One side wants a more narrow definition of democracy, one side wants a wider definition of democracy. And that’s where we are today.Geoff Kabaservice: I should say for podcast listeners what this book is not. It is not a political science approach to the question of civil war and whether America is on the verge of civil war. That’s something you leave to them.Jeremi Suri: Right. And I think, honestly, it’s a little silly to think that there’s going to be another Antietam or Gettysburg. It’s not that we’re going to start another war. It’s, again, that the elements, the conflicts from the past, are becoming sharper. But they haven’t gone away.Geoff Kabaservice: And one of the figures with whom you lead off the book is this guy, I think his name is Kevin Seefried…Jeremi Suri: Yes.Geoff Kabaservice: …who was one of the January 6th rioters in the Capitol, who was very prominently photographed carrying a big Confederate flag. And it turned out that Kevin Seefried was there, with his son, from Sussex County, Delaware, which is a pretty rural agricultural area. He definitely was a sort of representative figure of a lot of the left-behind parts of the country that voted for Trump. And him carrying that flag is, on the one hand, kind of a strange image because he’s from Delaware, which was not a Confederate state; it was a slave state but it did not fight on the side of the Confederacy, although individual Delawareans did. You do mention that there’s a chapter of the Sons of the Confederacy in that county called the Delaware Grays who’ve made a lot of news by putting up Confederate memorials and the like.But nonetheless, the Confederate flag is kind of an image that people who have no connection whatsoever to the Confederacy have seized on as way of giving the middle finger to what they see as the elite in America. And that was certainly present at January 6th. But it cannot help but connect to the darker history of the United States and the Confederacy.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. And that’s coupled, as you know so well Geoff, with other iconography and artifacts from the Civil War era, most horrifyingly the construction of a gallows on the lawn in front of the Capitol. And we have an image of that in the book. I’m sure many of your listeners have seen that image.When I talked to my friends from Germany — I was just at a meeting with a delegation of German leaders in the United States — they don’t understand this. They’ve dealt with their own even greater ghosts and horrors from their past. But the fact that people would build a model concentration camp somewhere as a political statement — even their farthest of right parties don’t consider doing this. They might deny that ever happened.But to valorize the idea of lynching, and then to advocate the lynching of the Republican vice president, as they did on that day — you can’t help but think there is a direct and intentional connection to this earlier era.Geoff Kabaservice: I was struck by another sentence early on in which you wrote: “As I looked back at the history I had studied, I realized that I had underappreciated the longstanding domestic forces of destruction and exclusion. Alongside the growth and development of American democracy, the country had remained mired in unresolved debates about who should have power and who should not.”Jeremi Suri: And I think this connects to your work on the Republican Party, right? I mean, there was a time when the Republican Party, the party of [John] Lindsay in New York and others, was a party that actually embraced perhaps the most inclusive vision. And I think, as you show, it’s the desire for power — not some major utopian or dystopian vision — the desire for power that moves people in a very different direction. And I think that’s what we’ve seen now in these old experiences, these old tropes, these old paradigms — they become deployable weapons for those who are seeking, like a Newt Gingrich, to narrow the range of democracy and seize power, quite literally, for themselves.Geoff Kabaservice: What I like so much about your book is that although you do set up kind of a polemical framework in the first chapter, you do conclude with some actual policy prescriptions (which is unusual and interesting for work of history), what comes in between is a very detailed and pretty nuanced history of the two decades after Appomattox, where you don’t hit the reader over the head with parallels to the present age. But these parallels cannot help but jump out because anyone who’s paid attention to what’s going on in the last six years, as well as the Republican Party’s transformation over the past several decades, will see these parallels very clearly. And although you also don’t say this, it really seems that what you are doing is retelling an American tragedy…Jeremi Suri: Yes. I feel that way, yes.Geoff Kabaservice: …which is the failure of America to build upon the foundations that it laid down after the Civil War, in some ways, that would’ve created a multiracial, much more equal American democracy.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. And I think, by the way, that’s a Burkean argument, if I might say so. It’s not a radical argument at all. It’s actually that there was new bedrock being laid, as you put it, at the end of the Civil War. And we didn’t finish the job.And I think this now connects to the work I’ve done in the foreign policy space. It’s a classic case of winning the war and losing the peace, which happens all the time. It’s particularly the most American way of fighting wars, because by nature we see conflict as the irregular, the exceptional. And so when we reach some point where we feel we have accomplished whatever it is we think we’re accomplishing, we want to move on.And this is the story of Northern Republicans after the Civil War. It’s not that they didn’t care about enforcing the law. It’s that they didn’t feel they had to fight to do that anymore. And that gives an advantage to the losers on the battlefield if they continue to resist away from the battlefield.Geoff Kabaservice: I had a guest on my podcast a few months ago, John Avlon, who’s probably best known as a CNN commentator. But he wrote what I thought was a really interesting historical exploration called Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, where he tries to envision what Lincoln might have done, if he had lived, in terms of bringing equality to the South as well as trying to reintegrate it back into the United States. But of course, Lincoln lived merely a matter of days after Appomattox and Lee’s surrender there, and so therefore we can’t really know what would’ve happened under Lincoln. But as it was, the first part of the tragedy was that Lincoln’s vice president, who succeeded him in office, was Andrew Johnson, who was almost wholly against the Lincoln vision of how to bring about peace in the Civil War.Jeremi Suri: Precisely, and he also had inordinate power. I didn’t realize this, Geoff, until I did the research… I should have known this. At that time, Congress did not sit in session between April and December. And so Lincoln is of course assassinated in April of 1865, Johnson takes over and is virtual dictator with full war powers until December. And he does not share Lincoln’s vision of a reformed South in any way. He accepts the end of slavery but thinks nothing more needs to be done. He wants to protect the power of not just white elites but small-scale shop owners and others — he was a tailor himself — those who were what the Germans would call Middelstadt, the white Middelstadt in the South…And perhaps most significant of all for where this goes, his vision is of locking out any of the changes that even the most moderate Republicans are seeking. And it’s ironic, because he is elected on what is ostensibly the Republican Party ticket. It’s a real problem of succession that our system has. And we then get three years of conflict between him and Congress and an effort to impeach him, which succeeds, but then the conviction fails and he remains in office.Geoff Kabaservice: You know, my sister actually lives relatively close to where Johnson came from in Tennessee. He was, I think, a tailor in Greenville, which is one of the older towns in the state. And that part of Tennessee historically was not pro-Confederacy. It’s a hilly part of the state. And although there were slaves — I think Johnson owned a few — there was none of the plantation economy that existed into the Civil War period in the west and central parts of Tennessee. So Johnson was against slavery, but in other respects he was kind of a Copperhead Democrat, really.Jeremi Suri: That’s exactly right. And in fact, the last thing he wanted — and I don’t think he’s unique in thinking this way — the last thing he wanted was for those who were not as wealthy as the plantation elite that he hated, in places like Virginia… But those who were, again, struggling white families, the last thing he wanted was for them to be challenged by newly free black families that could operate in the same economic and social space.Geoff Kabaservice: It’s something that’s very easy for historians looking back to say, “This is what the people in power should have done.” And I always have been resistant to that because I think we here should not extend the condescension of the immediate era to posterity. In terms, though, of missed opportunities, do you think that Grant in hindsight was too lenient to Lee and his surrendering Confederate forces at Appomattox?Jeremi Suri: Well, I think at Appomattox, Grant did not have much of a choice. He wanted to end the war and he was hoping that Lee would help him. And if you read Grant’s memoir — which is still one of the great memoirs, one of the great works of literature in American history actually…Geoff Kabaservice: Agreed.Jeremi Suri: …you can sense his frustration with Lee. He was expecting that Lee would help more. Lee, of course, lays down his arms, goes back to his farm, but Lee doesn’t actually sell the peace in the South. He tells Grant famously, “Your army will have to run over the South three times.” And of course, the Union’s not prepared to do that. Soldiers want to go home, they want to go back to their families. I think the missed opportunity is less at Appomattox, it’s in what happens in the months and years after that.The biggest missed opportunity is the prosecution of those who committed treason. I don’t think ordinary soldiers should have been prosecuted, but the Confederate leaders, especially some of those I profile who tried to go to Mexico and joined a foreign army and then come back — and in the case of Alexander Watkins Terrell, one of the figures I discussed, he comes back and actually writes the voting laws in Texas after joining a foreign army and seceding — I think the non-prosecution of those who broke the law in positions of high authority, that creates a space for them to continue to pursue their illegal aims.Geoff Kabaservice: Did there used to be, or is there still, a building at the University of Texas named after Terrell, who was one of the regents?Jeremi Suri: I believe it’s still named after him, yes.Geoff Kabaservice: How about that. You wrote that the Terrell’s election laws, which essentially restricted the primaries to only white voters, have continued to have an impact and a legacy in Texas in the twenty-first century.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. Texas is a rapidly growing state — Austin is just one example of this — but yet it’s a state with very, very low turnout. And there’s very low turnout because there’s a long tradition of making it hard for people to vote. I’ll just give you one obvious example. You must register to vote in Texas one month before the election: October 11th this year. Geoff, this won’t surprise you… On October 20th, every fall semester if there’s an election, I have 20 to 25 undergraduates who come to me and say they want to register to vote, and I have to tell them they can’t. Now, some people will say, “Well, they should plan farther ahead.” Do you know an 18-year-old who plans a month in advance for anything? And this is not a mistake. Many other states run perfectly safe elections with same-day registration, day-before registration. Now you don’t even have to register, but when you had to register to buy a gun in Texas you could register and get it within 24 hours. But yet somehow we need a month for people to be prepared to vote.Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, it’s interesting… In your book, you mentioned that 50,000 white Southerners, maybe more, went into exile after the conclusion of the Civil War. And there are some, in hindsight, somewhat farcical episodes like Confederate officers offering their services to the Emperor Maximilian, who ruled over Mexico after his installation by France’s Emperor Napoleon III. It’s all rather strange. But what this leads up to is your really being very critical of an episode most Americans know nothing about, which was Andrew Johnson’s Christmas Day 1868 presidential proclamation — a forerunner to an executive order — in which he offered full pardon and amnesty for all who participated directly or indirectly in the Confederacy.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely.Geoff Kabaservice: Tell me why this is so important.Jeremi Suri: Well, it’s crucial because it allows them to come back and go into elected office. It violates the very intention of the Constitution, which is that if you proved yourself unwilling and unable to defend the Constitution, you should never be near public office. This is the oath that every military officer takes. These are the only words written into the Constitution that you must say if you are elected president: that you will defend the Constitution of the United States. And, in a sense, our highest crime in our democracy is showing you can’t, won’t, and will not do that.And these men had done that. They had, in some cases, twice — three times if they went to serve for Maximilian. And then they get a clean slate. They get to come back. But of course, the former slaves don’t get a clean slate. You can see their slavery in their skin. And so that allows space for the bad guys to do all the things that they do. The equivalent is giving a blanket amnesty to all murderers and saying, “Okay, go back out on the street.” I mean, who would support something like that?Geoff Kabaservice: There’s a term that isn’t very often used called “lustration.” And I’m probably going to mess this up, but I do believe it was actually used in Eastern Europe, for example, after World War II, where people who had been high Nazi officials were simply not allowed back into public life. And it seems that would’ve been the appropriate course in the United States as well.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. You do not, in a democracy, have a right to elected office. There are conditions. And I think that would’ve been sufficient and it would’ve made a strong moral statement. To use the example of Germany, the Germans to this day have a law against Nazis in government. And I think that’s appropriate, right? There are certain lines you cross — and they’re not always on the right, they might be on the left sometimes too — but there are certain lines you don’t cross for the basic rules of democracy.Geoff Kabaservice: Your portrait of the early Republican Party is not wholly flattering; it’s a mixed bag. You write that the GOP, essentially, when it started was a regional organization appealing to white men in Northern states who feared they were losing control of their lives to growing immigrant communities, on the one hand, and the slave owners on the other. I was fascinated by that quote you found from the November 1856 Springfield Republican newspaper, where it said that the party appealed to “the great middling-interest class… They form the very heart of the nation, as opposed to the two extremes of aristocracy and ignorance.”Of course I’m always looking for anything that has to do with moderation and the middling sorts. But the point is that these were people who were up-and-comers, often part of the professional classes; not very open, I suppose, to what we would now think of as diversity, in the sense that they were very suspicious of non-Protestants. And in some sense, you write, they were the mirror image of the Confederates because in both cases these were people who were motivated by fears of declining status. And this was the motivation for the Republican Party when it started.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. And again, your podcast is so appropriately named after Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., but I think one of the other figures who exerts such a positive influence on our scholarship, yours and mine, is Richard Hofstadter, of course. And Hofstadter’s point about status anxiety, I think… You know, it was rejected by historians for a long time. I think our generation, Geoff, yours and mine, has actually brought it back to the center. I hope so, because I think it’s so powerful, for good and for bad.Abraham Lincoln is exactly this. I mean, what really bothers him about the movement toward the expansion of slavery is that it jeopardizes exactly what he sees as the source of economic opportunity for men like him: white men who are poor, who have no land and have no slaves. They need an opportunity, they need a space, they need a party. And he sees that voice being crowded out. The Whigs don’t defend that. And of course, the Democrats are moving to the expansion of slavery, which he feels will erode the middle. And that’s why he joins and helps create the Republican Party.Geoff Kabaservice: Very much so. When was it… It might have been eight years ago that I wrote a review in The New Republic of Heather Cox Richardson’s book To Make Men Free. And I was kind of critical about it, probably more so than I would be now. Sorry, Heather, apologies if you’re listening. I’m in a much better head space now than I was then. But I did think it was kind of unfair that she was saying that today’s Republican Party is essentially like the antebellum Democratic Party, and specific figures who were representing the top 1% and believe that the rest of the population needed to be kept in subjection. I think that was going a little bit too far. But nonetheless, she’s kind of true that there’s been this oscillation in American history — again, the kind of cyclical process — where the Republican Party starts being kind of on the side of progress and equality, and counter-reactions happen and it moves back toward defense of the wealthy and the establishment. And that’s kind of the cycle that you’re depicting in your book as well.Jeremi Suri: I agree, and I think it’s a tension within the party that’s there from the start. But I think it’s clear that at its best moments, the Republican Party is the party that is not of the super-wealthy, even though sometimes they will support the Republican Party. But it’s exactly of what Lincoln called “the penniless beginners.” I love that phrase. He uses it time and again. The penniless beginners who want to work hard — they don’t want anything for free — but they want a chance. They want a chance. And the Republican vision, Lincoln’s vision, includes public universities for that reason, where any hardworking young lad can go and learn the agricultural sciences and read Shakespeare and maybe read law and move his or her way forward. That’s the Republican Party at its best. And boy oh boy — I know you share this — I wish the Republican Party of today would come back to that. It’s such a powerful image and it needs a voice in our society.Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, I agree. The Republican-dominated Congress in a sense went to war with President Andrew Johnson and passed or created the Reconstruction of the American South against his wishes and also against his presidential actions. Can you talk about how that happened and what the elements of Reconstruction were, and the ways in which the Congress actually in a sense took power to impose the Reconstruction on the South?Jeremi Suri: Well, the first thing that the Republican Congress… And it’s important to remind everyone, the Republican Congress was totally dominated by Republicans after the war; Democrats were not brought back into Congress initially, so they had two-thirds in the Senate, which is unthinkable in a modern context. The first thing they did was limit the power of the Supreme Court. It’s actually very interesting… They wanted to take this away from the Court. The Court had been very conservative and dominated by Southerners until Lincoln’s presidency. The Court is changed by Republicans to allow Lincoln to make more appointments. The jurisdiction is changed. At times, there are actually ten justices under Lincoln’s presidency.But then when new slots open up, Congress does not allow Johnson to appoint, so they keep the Court out of his grasp. And then they pass legislation that he vetoes: legislation for civil rights, legislation for enforcement. They override his vetoes. And then when he refuses to enforce through the executive branch, Congress actually stipulates that Ulysses Grant as the commander-in-chief of American forces, as the supreme command of American armed forces, that he will implement. They create, under the Reconstruction Acts, different military districts in the South, and Grant is in charge of all the districts. And then different generals like Sheridan and Sherman are placed in charge. And quite literally, the U.S. Army, the Union Army, will go in and create its own military courts to supersede the local courts that refuse to enforce the law.So the early enforcement of civil rights laws, the early enforcement of even the 13th and 14th Amendments, comes through the arm of military courts overseen by General Grant, not by President Johnson. General Grant is reporting to Congress. This is in part why Andrew Johnson wants to remove the Secretary of War. Stanton, who is Secretary of War, is the one who Grant reports to. Johnson wants to remove the Secretary of War so he has his own Secretary of War in there who will not enforce these laws. It resonates with some recent events we’ve struggled with.Geoff Kabaservice: I’m guessing, though, that when you started this research you didn’t think that you would end up writing a paean to the United States Army taking power away from the United States president to impose order and law on part of the country.Jeremi Suri: No. Actually, first of all, I have to confess that I didn’t understand the details of this. It gets very complicated. It’s not the way we think about separation of powers, certainly. But secondly, as I say in the book, it’s dangerous. In many ways, Congress is empowering the military to disobey the president, and that is a dangerous precedent. I don’t think we want to fall into that. And again, I worry today that on January 6th and other days, we also relied on perhaps a similar process.Geoff Kabaservice: You’re right that Johnson was the first commander-in-chief to work against the government that he led — which is kind of fascinating, really.Jeremi Suri: And I think he was explicit about that. He believed that he didn’t have to do what Congress said he needed to do, and he actively sought to undermine Congress. I can’t find a case of a prior president who did that. Andrew Jackson, of course, had his issues with Congress, but he believed, even in his worst days with Henry Clay and others, that he was leading the government, not that he was undermining the government. Johnson was, in a sense, trying to eliminate the “Deep State,” even though there wasn’t much of a deep state.Geoff Kabaservice: It’s also interesting in your book that you use terms that today don’t quite mean the same thing, which is “radical Republicans” and “moderate Republicans.”Jeremi Suri: Yes.Geoff Kabaservice: The radical Republicans, in this case, were the ones who wanted a thorough-going Reconstruction of the South, and who also generally had been on the side of abolition before the Civil War. And the moderates are moderates, they’re more cautious. They want equality for African-Americans if possible, but they also don’t really want another Civil War. But more than that, they seem to not want to rock the boat too much. Moderates don’t come off all that well here.Jeremi Suri: No, it’s true. One figure, for example, is Lyman Trumbull, who is a towering figure from Illinois — in many ways a highly respectable figure. He’s a man of unimpeachable integrity. He is someone who is a strong and consistent supporter of the Union cause in the war. But he does not want a great deal of federal enforcement in the South because he wants to move on from the war. And he knows his constituents, especially in Illinois, have suffered greatly, and the opportunity for their growth and improvement in their lives is Westward activity, not Southern activity. So the moderates are not apologizing for the bad behavior of former Confederates, but they don’t want to devote the resources and energies of the federal government to that issue when there are other issues they care more about.Geoff Kabaservice: You wrote that “To Republicans intent on expanding democracy and removing a president who defied their authority, the moderates had become apologists for the worst of white supremacy.” And what the moderates really don’t want to do, in this situation, is impeach Johnson if this means replacing him with Senator Benjamin Wade, who would’ve been the next in line.Jeremi Suri: Correct. Benjamin Wade was from Ohio. He had been governor and now he was senator and Senate pro-tem, which at that time meant he would take over as president under the succession procedures of the time. And he was a true radical in the sense that he wanted African-Americans to be voting in the North as well as the South. It’s important that the moderate Republican position was that African-Americans should vote in the South, because they’d vote Republican there, but they shouldn’t necessarily vote in the North — because, again, these were senators elected under a system in which African-Americans couldn’t vote in most Northern states. They didn’t want to actually bring all those voters in.Geoff Kabaservice: And to make things more complicated, there also were liberal Republicans there — Carl Schurz being a representative example — who during the Grant presidency opposed continued federal intervention in the South.Jeremi Suri: Right. The liberal Republicans… I think a better way to think of them is they’re really Democrats who want to renounce the negative baggage of the Democratic Party. They don’t just want to end Reconstruction, they want to empower former Confederates in the South, because that’s the constituency they’re appealing to. So you might think of them even as Dixiecrats. As Dixiecrats move from the Democratic Party, these are Democrats who move left in a certain way. Carl Schurz is an exception, though, because he was a Republican. He was actually a supporter of Lincoln’s, very prominent among German immigrant groups in the United States. But he was not a fan of civil rights.Geoff Kabaservice: No, that’s true. And again, this is a very suggestive parallel with more modern times. These Democrats who you’re describing — as well as the liberal Republicans, but particularly the Southern Democrats — “criticized U.S. government intervention in their region,” you write. “But they still wanted resources from the U.S. Treasury. They demanded extensive federal subsidies to help white communities improve their conditions. Claims about ‘states’ rights’ were really calls for more public resources, not less, but without federal conditions attached. Then as now, the loudest critics of ‘big government’ were often the recipients of the most benefits.”Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. I think in the period that I cover in the book, in the 1870s in particular, there really aren’t small-government people. They’re all for big government. They want government to do more. They want the federal government to make investments. And that makes sense to me, Geoff, because they’re dealing with the aftermath of war, all of the destruction. And the biggest single possible investor is the federal government. In many of these states, the federal government owns more land than anyone else. And so it’s really not small government versus big government, it’s government for whom. And that’s how I think of our politics today, too.Geoff Kabaservice: The 1876 presidential election was one of the most consequential in United States history —although, again, most people would be hard-pressed to tell who was running on which side and what was at stake. But can you explain about why this election mattered so much?Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. This is really the first election when you don’t have a Lincoln or a Grant running for the Republicans, so it’s sort of like when there are no more Roosevelts left for the Democratic Party later on. And so it’s a real transition. Rutherford B. Hayes, the really well-regarded former governor and Union veteran from Ohio, is the Republican candidate. And Samuel Tilden, who’s very highly regarded as governor of New York, is the Democratic candidate. Many of your listeners will probably know Tilden as the person who actually broke the back of Tammany in New York. He was the figure who really… Actually, not Tammany, but Boss Tweed. Excuse me, Boss Tweed. Tammany’s later. He broke the back of Boss Tweed’s group in New York. And he was a real reformer of politics in New York City. But he was also very close to Democrats who were very strong in New York who believed that they made money and that their future was hinged to the continuation of King Cotton in the South.I remind people that most of the wealth you see in New York, with these beautiful late nineteenth-century buildings — the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library — the names on those are often names of people who made money working with cotton and other Southern plantation money. They were the financiers for that in New York City. So there’s a strong connection to the South here.Tilden runs on basically no more Union intervention in the South, let the Southern states just go their way. He doesn’t want to reverse things, but he doesn’t want to do anything new. And Hayes wants to gently continue the process of pursuing reform and Reconstruction in the South. In this election, Tilden wins the popular vote. He wins by about 300,000 to 400,000 more votes — which is a lot, actually, in an electorate where I think it’s four million who vote for Hayes, four and a half or 4.4 million who vote for Tilden.But the problem is the Electoral College. It’s not clear who’s won a key number of states — that were what we today call battleground states — that determine who has the requisite number of votes the majority needed. Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina each report two different sets of electors, and different countings produce different results in those states. It depends if you throw out some ballots that you think are not appropriate, you include some. And then of course there’s the vote denial in all of those states. Many of those states have, like Florida, they have a Republican governor who’s lost this election but is still governor after the November election. And so you have this question as to who really won the election. Tilden needs only one of those electoral votes, but all three states are certified by their Republican governors as Republican states with Republican votes for Hayes.And so Hayes wins in the Electoral College — or so it seems — by one. Now, it’s important to say that there were legitimate claims in each of these three states either way. I repeat in the book what C. Vann Woodward, the great historian of the South and the person who first really investigated this, what he concluded now 50 years ago, which I think is still right: there’s no way of knowing. There’s just no way of knowing. But this is not one side making it up. It’s very important to say that. They’re not pretending that there were votes that weren’t there. There’s a dispute over which votes counted, which votes were legitimate, which ones were double-votes and which ones were not, who didn’t vote… It’s really hard to know who won in these states.
So there’s a serious dispute, and we go until early March of 1877 without a president of the United States. Inauguration Day is going to be in March. And it requires a compromise, a compromise that involves a commission, that involves Supreme Court justices. In the end, it’s a compromise made by Southern Democrats who had some Whig connections — so we might call them moderate Southern Democrats — and some moderate Northern Republicans — especially those around Hayes, John Sherman, William Thorns, Sherman’s brother and others — that the Southerners, the Democrats will recognize that Hayes has won. But in return, Hayes will provide them the support they want and will withdraw Union forces, U.S. Army forces, from the South. And that’s often treated as the end of Reconstruction.Geoff Kabaservice: Interestingly enough — I had forgotten this — but the House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, passed a resolution after the election denying that Hayes was elected to the office that he held. They aren’t denying that he holds the office, but they are denying that he was elected to that office.Jeremi Suri: And they called him repeatedly “His Fraudulency.”Geoff Kabaservice: Good term. And they were extremely recalcitrant in their dealings with him. And you ask, on their behalf, “How could Democrats reconcile with someone they believed stole power from them?”Jeremi Suri: Yeah, yeah. That’s the problem. And Hayes never really gets through that. He tries to reach out and do what we would want him to do, to build bridges, but there’s no way really to do that. And repeatedly there are efforts to what we would today call “shut down the government,” to not pass basic appropriations bills, to try to harm his agenda, to prevent him from moving forward. That is eventually how we get the Posse Comitatus Act, which is actually forced upon him as part of a military appropriations bill. The Posse Comitatus Act is a pledge not to use the U.S. Army to enforce the law in the United States, just as they wanted. So Hayes has a terrible time. And the thing Hayes doesn’t do, because it’s not his skill set, is try to find some way to appeal over their heads. He’s not very good at that. And so he becomes a prisoner of congressional opposition.Geoff Kabaservice: And the fate of his successor, James Garfield, is in some ways worse. Garfield is the last Republican to really try to bring equality to the races in the South. And he’s shot by a disgruntled office-seeker on a totally different issue, which eventually in the next administration leads to civil service reform. But you’re right that his death really marked the end of Republican efforts to build an inclusive, multiracial democracy in America.Jeremi Suri: That’s right. Because after Garfield — who by the way was really trying, and we have no idea what he would’ve done, because he never really got beyond the problems of trying to appoint people to office. And he was killed, was shot and then had this long, terrible ordeal where he finally dies after being, quite frankly, mistreated by his doctors…Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, there’s actually a little note there on the side of meritocracy, because Garfield was treated by the best-connected doctors, not necessarily the most skilled or knowledgeable.Jeremi Suri: That’s my argument, yes. If you look at it, he’s treated by the most respected doctors coming out of the Civil War. But there were many young doctors in the United States who understood germ theory. The problem for Garfield is when he’s shot in Washington, D.C. before he boards a train, multiple doctors stick their hands into the wound to try to pull the bullet out. And he actually dies of the infections from these dirty hands in a train station going into his body. It’s a long infection and death, and he’s mistreated repeatedly and misdiagnosed. But younger doctors, who had less status but had been educated in germ theory which was pioneered in Europe, knew exactly what was going on and tried to tell his doctor, who refused to listen. So it’s a terrible tragedy. But he was the last president to really try to deal with these issues.He’s replaced by Chester Arthur, who had no business… Chester Arthur was a former collector of the New York Custom House. He was only put on the ballot as a gift to, an attempt to appease the New York faction of the Republican Party that didn’t like Garfield, another Ohio Republican. And Chester Arthur is sick himself, unable to do much. And then we get Grover Cleveland, the first Democratic president elected since the Civil War, thereafter. And the country, the executive, turns away from these issues. In essence, the Democratic local governments in the South that are pursuing what will soon become called Jim Crow, they’re just not paid attention to by the federal government anymore.Geoff Kabaservice: A lot of things come through in this account, one of which is that there are always going to be forces in this country that will try to seek to suppress their opponents’ voters — and they will do this in the name of democracy. Humans are capable of almost any rationalization. And the claims of electoral fraud will be raised whenever it is felt that too many of the wrong kind of people are voting.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. I think that’s, unfortunately, as American as apple pie, and we need to be attentive to that. And that is why we need institutions that can, with legitimacy, make claims as to what is a fair election and what isn’t. We all know our elections are actually quite fair now. But with the collapse of any kind of mainstream news, we don’t have an authoritative way of affirming that. And I’d like to see us develop more of that work toward that, perhaps what many other countries have: a federal election agency that really does this work.Geoff Kabaservice: I have to admit, I did not think that in my lifetime I would see a return of an endemic problem in this period, which is violence used to intimidate at the ballot box and in the process of politics more generally, as well as an attempt to manipulate the outcomes of elections by determining what votes got counted rather than what votes were cast.Jeremi Suri: Yes, and I agree with you. I did not predict that even five years ago. And it’s stunning, but I think one of the values of this project, one of the values of this book, is showing us the roots of this. Because I think many of these techniques were developed after the Civil War. Again, the point that needs to be made is that when the people you wanted to exclude were already excluded — because they were slaves — you didn’t have to do this. Once they had claims on power, then you had to find new ways to keep them out of power. And bullying was certainly one of them, paramilitary violence. And I think what the book shows is that paramilitary violence is often highly organized. It looks unorganized, but it’s often highly organized. We’re learning about that in our own time now.Geoff Kabaservice: And actually it succeeds on a surprising number of occasions as well.Jeremi Suri: It does. Bullying works. That’s why probably the oldest form of political coercion is to bully people. The leader of Russia is trying to do that with the rest of the world right now. It works. It shapes how people think. It frightens people. And those who are newly part of a democracy — either immigrants, minorities, others — they are most susceptible to that, of course.Geoff Kabaservice: And of course what we saw in 2020, and its aftermath especially, was that the American democratic and constitutional structure is actually quite rickety. It’s built on all kinds of unworkable arrangements. It really lacks clarity. There is no uniformity in many of its processes. And the fact that we are now trying to bring clarity to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 suggests something about the work that needs to be done to actually reform our constitutional system.Jeremi Suri: Absolutely. And again, I’m a Burkean, as I think you are too. And my view is that what Burke taught us is that rapid breakneck change is dangerous, but also status quo commitments are dangerous as well. You need slow-evolving institutions. That’s the Burkean wisdom, which I think is what our founders had as well, even though some of them had preceded Burke. Nonetheless, this notion that you would have a slowly evolving set of institutions. And we have not participated in that process. We have not encouraged that process in at least a generation or two. Well, some of this happens after World War II — you’ve written about this — and then a lot of it gets stymied. And we need that now. Again, I’m not arguing for overturning, rewriting… I’m not for a new constitutional convention. I’m not for any of that. But I am for looking long and hard at some of the key pillars — these rickety pillars, as you put it — and finding ways to reinforce them. And reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is a good place to start.Geoff Kabaservice: So you, late in the book, write a sentence that I think I would’ve objected to if it had come at the beginning of the book. But by the end of the book, I felt like it was earned. And you write: “Black Lives Matter is the 21st-century echo of the Union Leagues, the Freedman’s Bureau, and African-American Republican organizations across the old Confederacy. Donald Trump and QAnon are 21st-century replays of Andrew Johnson and the Ku Klux Klan — red hats this time, born of older white hoods.” Now, I’m sure a lot of people are going to object to that. But I think what you’re saying is not literally that Donald Trump and QAnon are Andrew Johnson and the Ku Klux Klan, but that, again, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.Jeremi Suri: Precisely, that we’re seeing a similar divide. And this is not to say that everything Black Lives Matter does or advocates for is correct in my view. But it is to say that it’s an effort to organize those who feel themselves more and more being excluded from participation in our democracy, in the ways in which the Union Leagues and others did that. And it is to say that on the other side, there is a deployment, a weaponization, of these anti-democratic racist elements of our democracy — which are not the whole democracy at all. But they’re being weaponized and deployed to exclude certain people — even to exclude people who were formerly Republicans (in the case of Trump and QAnon) themselves, people like you, Geoff. That’s part of what’s being done. And so it is a weaponization of our history. And I think that’s why we study history, most of all. It’s not that in studying history, you and I are wiser and can make better policy. I wish that were true. I don’t think it’s true. But I think it’s that we can see the flaws, and as patriots we can try to work to change those flaws in the design structure of our constitutional house.Geoff Kabaservice: So you conclude your book with five major proposals, so to speak, to try to redress some of these flaws. And the first of them is that we need a very ambitious change to voting.Jeremi Suri: Yes. I think we need a constitutional amendment that every citizen above the age of 18, if we wanted to start there — my son would say it should be above the age of 16, that’s another story — has a right to vote. And it should be like free speech. I’m a near-absolutist on free speech. And my view is it’s appropriate, it’s one of the best things in our democracy, that there’s a presumption against any censorship. If you want to censor someone’s speech in this country, you’ve got to work really hard to prove you have legal reason to do that. It should be the same thing for voting.And most democracies have that. We have the opposite now. Voting is in the hands of states, and states can create all kinds of reasons. By the way, not only Republicans do that. Now Democrats do too. New York City, New York State — I know this from having grown up there — does all kinds of things to make it hard for certain people to vote, just as Texas makes it hard. We need a constitutional right to vote, just like our right to free speech.Geoff Kabaservice: Your second proposal is for major changes in elections and our election system.Jeremi Suri: Right. I mean, the Electoral College is just part of this right now. And of course all your listeners are familiar with the problems with Electoral College that obviously go back to 1876. They go back to 1800, of course, with Jefferson and Aaron Burr. But they’re particularly bad now because of the disparity between a Wyoming and a California or Texas. And what it means is that we get someone selected as president who doesn’t really represent the country as a whole. This has happened four of the last six times in our presidential elections. This is a real problem. And that person then gets to choose Supreme Court justices and all these other things.And our elections are hard to follow. Our elections are messy. We have questions as to who is certifying. We have volunteers doing a lot of the work who are now being intimidated. I think we need to invest in running professional elections, with a professional group of people, with professional regulations from the federal government. Many other societies do this. India, for example, has a very highly regarded… As politicized as India is — it’s at least as politicized as the U.S. — they have a very highly regarded central election agency. I think we should have that.Geoff Kabaservice: You believe that there need to be changes in representation as well.Jeremi Suri: Right. This is the point about gerrymandering. This is the point about having citizens choose their leaders rather than leaders choose their citizens. And a lot has been written on this; I recapitulate a little bit of it in the book. Gerrymandering is as old as our republic, but it’s gotten so much worse — on both sides —because of technology, and because of the inspiration that comes from after the Civil War when this becomes a normal way of thinking about politics. We need to reverse that. I think we should have nonpartisan (as some states do) panels created to try to create the most fair districts with the most diversity. We should have as many 51-49 districts as possible.Geoff Kabaservice: You write that there needs to be a change to the process of presidential succession.Jeremi Suri: Right. Well, this is something I came to entirely from the research, Geoff, and I don’t know anyone else who’s argued this way; I might be completely off-base. But it strikes me, when we get to Lincoln’s presidency, that he United States had not had a presidential assassination. It’s one of the reasons it’s so easy for Booth to do this. Lincoln, as violent as the Civil War was, he didn’t think anyone would try to kill the president. And then from Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 to 1901 — 35, 36 years — we have three presidential assassinations. And the first two are terrible successions: two people completely unprepared, unsuited for the office. Congress is not available to help. I mean, it’s a real problem. And they both succeed early in the term, so they get three-plus years.I believe we should have a system where the vice president takes over, but then in the next election year — so if it’s the first year of the presidency, the end of the second year — there’s an early election. Because the problem really is that Johnson and Arthur are in office far too long, no one’s ever elected them, and there’s really no way to remove them.The impeachment process is broken. I can’t imagine a time anytime soon when we will remove a president through impeachment and conviction. So if someone is there illegitimately — either because of a resignation or a death or, God forbid, a mental issue, which could happen — then there should be a way to have an election sooner rather than later.Geoff Kabaservice: And finally, you feel that there needs to be some kind of new appeal to hearts and minds.Jeremi Suri: Yes. And this is making a case for historians — making a case for you and me, Geoff. Every one of our books ends that way, right? I mean, look, this is true for most historians, but at least for you and me, we’re patriots who love our country. We love our country, and we love our country so much that we want our country to see how it could be better. And you only get better by, of course, teaching the great things you’ve done, but also studying the limitations, the places you’ve been off-base. And we have to use that to persuade people, in an idealistic way, that we can be better — not to try to cover up these issues. And I think that can be appealing. I think that’s actually what students want. They don’t want people who hate their country, but they want people who love their country and want to make it better. And we can all be part of that.Now I’m going to get a little hokey, but I think that’s actually what motivates immigrants who come to a country and are mistreated yet go and fight for that country — because they believe in its possibility of being better for them after the war. And it certainly was for my Jewish relatives, who were in a very anti-Semitic America before World War II. It’s not that anti-Semitism went away, but their work in World War II helped to expose and improve not just countries abroad but at home when they came back. And we had some long, hard thinking as Americans about our own anti-Semitic history, and we’re a different country. Our universities are different, as a concept. Yale would not have had more than a handful of Jews right before World War II, and it becomes an institution that in many ways is open to some of the greatest Jewish talent thereafter.Geoff Kabaservice: It is. I listen to a lot of podcasts, including many that I don’t agree with at all. And occasionally I listen to a podcast by your University of Texas colleague, Peniel Joseph, who’s also written a book recently called The Third Reconstruction.Jeremi Suri: Yes.Geoff Kabaservice: I don’t believe that Black Lives Matter amounted to a Third Reconstruction, and I don’t believe that the Republican legislative attempt to dictate what goes on in terms of discussion over Critical Racial Theory and other racial concepts amounts to a ban on teaching about black history. But I do agree that there are real debates that are going on over the teaching of history that often fail to find a middle ground.Another podcast that I want to recommend to one and all is your podcast with Jill Lepore. And she made what I thought was such an interesting comment, which is that America’s history contains atrocities and yet also contains moments of real inspiration and glory. And yet to actually say that as a historian is to say, “On the one hand, on the other hand.” And that’s a kind of despised moderation which is being squeezed out of our politics and also, she thinks — and I agree — out of our teaching and out of the academy.So here’s the question: How do you actually teach in a way that allows Americans to come to terms with their past as an “aspiring but imperfect” democracy?Jeremi Suri: I was just going to say, Geoff, I think you’re spot on. And I think Jill did say this very well on our podcast. I was kind of surprised, actually. Here’s what I think… I think we need those who are fortunate enough to be in positions of respectability, those who get to write — as you do, right — those who get to be scribblers, as you and I do, to be advocating for this and to be modeling this.I think one of the reasons our history teaching has become so narrow is not just because of the political pressure, but people don’t know better. They don’t have other models. And I’ve always tried to teach in the way we’ve described. I don’t know if I’ve always done it well, but I rarely have students who don’t want that. There are always some students complaining about something, but as a whole, this is why I think it’s hearts and minds. That’s a compelling story, because most people can see the beauty and possibility of our country, and also its severe limitations. And so I want to model that. I think we need more people modeling that, is I guess what I’m saying.Geoff Kabaservice: You and I talked more than a year ago as you were writing a long piece that was published as “How Elite Universities Have Promoted Destructive Republican Leaders.”Jeremi Suri: Yes.Geoff Kabaservice: And I’ve thought about that piece a lot, because recently I’ve actually tried writing about Ron DeSantis. And I think that I actually had Ron DeSantis in some sections that I taught. He wasn’t enrolled in my actual sections, but I would take over for some graduate students who didn’t want to teach the evening sections, and those are the ones that were full of athletes, because of course they were practicing during the daytime. And there were some real tensions even then between the grad students, who leaned pretty far left, and the athletes, who didn’t. But I think it was actually more than just political disagreements. It was also that a lot of the athletes were, like DeSantis, from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, and kind of traditional public education or Catholic parochial education. And they felt looked down on by their wealthier classmates, as well as by the grad students and the faculty to some extent. They were really kind of alienated yet privileged young men, by virtue of the education and the credentialing that they were getting.And you wrote about people who were like that, who are now sort of populist leaders in the Republican Party. And you specifically had in mind people like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and of course one could add to that list Elise Stefanik or Tom Cotton. These are all up-and-comers in the Republican Party, and yet they have these sort of elite educational backgrounds. And you kind of write that essentially they were just using these universities as networking opportunities and sort of credentialing factories. And I think that’s true, but I also think there are some resentments that they still carry against the elite class. And I think this is part of what makes them populist warriors, and maybe a little dangerous.And this is a perspective that they bring to the teaching of race and our racial history in the classroom. So Ron DeSantis has passed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which hasn’t yet found its test in reality in terms of what teachers can and can’t teach. But this theoretically, at least, will also extend to the teaching of American history as well as race at the university level in the public university system.Jeremi Suri: Sure, sure.Geoff Kabaservice: And what happens in Florida tends to happen in Texas, so this is going to come to visit your doorstep. And I just wonder what your perspective is on all of this.Jeremi Suri: It’s a great question. Back to your really thoughtful reflections on the university element of this… I’m sure they pick up some resentments for being different. I’m sure DeSantis felt that way at Yale. I can see that. At times, I felt a little bit that way at Stanford also, as the child of immigrants from a working-class background, and everyone in my dorm was driving a BMW; I couldn’t afford even to get a driver’s license in New York. So I certainly felt some of that. But what’s striking to me is — in the case of a Josh Hawley, a Ted Cruz — how they use their elite education to boost themselves.Geoff Kabaservice: Let me parenthetically add here that one of Josh Hawley’s mentors and great assists, particularly in getting his Theodore Roosevelt biography published, was David Kennedy.Jeremi Suri: Correct. And I feel like Josh and I have been in many of the same places. He’s just a few years younger than I am. He had the same advisor at Stanford, and then he was at Yale when we were at Yale also. And so they used these institutions — and these institutions used them, I think, actually — to succeed, to boost, to get ahead. And really what I’m concerned with is not just the resentment they have. Why haven’t these institutions been better at teaching ethics and a sense of true public service? That’s what they’re about. That’s what they should be about. I think we value, and we should take ownership of this, as universities are being too much about success and not about bettering society.And that’s kind of my answer to the other part of your question. I do see wokeness, of course, at universities and things like that, but I actually think the problem is we’re too preprofessional. I think if we want to really go after higher ed, I’m going to go the Allan Bloom route and say the problem is “the closing of the American mind” from the closing of actual deep inquiry, and the emphasis upon professionalization. The most popular majors across private and public universities now are majors like business and economics, and that’s fine if that’s really what people are interested in. But I’m not sure that’s why. At Yale, history had been the queen discipline for so long. And it’s not because you don’t have great teaching of history there; it’s because of the preprofessional interests that many, many students have.I think that the “Stop WOKE” teaching act and things like that, I think they’re actually terribly counterproductive. They will be difficult for myself and other teachers to deal with. But what they actually do is they make those subjects more interesting for students, right?Geoff Kabaservice: The lure of the forbidden…Jeremi Suri: Yeah. I mean, the truth is, right, it would be a boon for you or for me if Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis condemned one of our books. Please do! So I think what we have to worry about more than anything else is not the efforts to politicize these issues by politicians, it’s actually getting the best teachers in the classroom prepared with the best modeling. I do a lot of work with high school teachers, and I try to model for them and help them think about: What is the way to do just what you and I are talking about? How can we teach the glorious cause of the Union Army in the Civil War and the horrors of what also occurred at the same time?Geoff Kabaservice: I would give the next-to-last word to Carl Schurz, since we mentioned him not-so-positively earlier. He’s well known, of course, for that saying: “My country, right or wrong: if right to be kept right, and if wrong to be set right.”Jeremi Suri: Correct.Geoff Kabaservice: And at the end of your book, you say that the reckoning that we need requires a willingness to learn more openly about our history, identify our inherited flaws, and work to repair them.Jeremi Suri: Yes. I believe that. And that comes out of the Jewish tradition, if I might say: l’dor v’dor, which is that from generation to generation we want to leave things a little bit better. And how do we leave things a little bit better? We try to figure out where there are places — this is what every Jewish family talks about just this time of year, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — what are the things we can do just a little bit better so that the next generation can live just a little bit better?Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Jeremi Suri, g’mar chatima tova. Thank you so much for joining me and congratulations to you on Civil War by Other Means.Jeremi Suri: Geoff, thank you. This was a wonderful conversation and I love your podcast. Thank you for having me on.Geoff Kabaservice: Thanks, Jeremi. And thank you all for listening to The Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
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Liberals who minimize the importance of free speech on Twitter are dead wrong. But we shouldn’t have to hope that a billionaire with a track record of suppressing his critics will live up to his free speech rhetoric.

Twitter logo and Elon Musk's Twitter account displayed on a screen on October 30, 2022, following Musk's purchase of the platform. (Jakub Porzycki / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
 
Now that Elon Musk’s long-anticipated takeover of Twitter has finally gone through, many liberals are angry for all the wrong reasons. They seem to be worried that Musk will allow too much free speech on the platform and that this will enable bigotry and “misinformation.”
As a democratic socialist, I reject that view root and branch. Empowering ordinary people to run society in their own interests is the whole point of the socialist project — and that’s flatly incompatible with the technocratic liberal view that ordinary people can’t be trusted to decide for themselves what to believe.
And socialists obviously reject the view that free speech only applies to governments and that private companies should be able to do whatever they want. If I didn’t think private regimes of power could be dangerous, I wouldn’t be a socialist in the first place.
A better concern about Twitter becoming the personal property of Musk is that he can’t be trusted to practice what he preaches. Musk has a sketchy history of trying to shut down his own critics. He’s also deeply connected to the national security state, giving him a vested interest in enabling the United States’s giant surveillance regime — historically one of the biggest threats to free expression here and abroad.
Letting billionaires buy and sell vitally important sources of information is bad for democracy. It’s also a risky bet for the free speech norms that Musk claims to venerate. The most effective way to safeguard those norms at the big social media companies would be to remove them from control by rich people whose “content moderation” policies aren’t restricted by the First Amendment. We need to take our digital public square into public ownership.

Has Free Speech Caused “Untold Death and Suffering”?
Writer and “defense analyst” Brynn Tannehill spends a lot of her time sounding the alarm about conservative authoritarianism. That’s a reasonable thing to worry about. The American right is disturbingly authoritarian.
When it comes to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, though, Tannehill’s critique is that he won’t be authoritarian enough. In an article a few days ago in the New Republic, Tannehill claimed that “Musk’s idea of free speech” will “help ruin America.” That “idea of free speech” seems to simply be that free speech norms are important on social media, and people should be free to make controversial claims — including ones that may be offensive or inaccurate.
Letting billionaires buy and sell vitally important sources of information is bad for democracy. It’s also a risky bet for the free speech norms that Musk claims to venerate.
She claims that “free speech has caused untold death and suffering when used to disseminate hate or spread disinformation” and cites the popularity of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Weimar Germany. According to Tannehill, these books were “key contributors to the fall of German democracy, the rise of the Third Reich, and the Holocaust itself.”
Tannehill’s grasp of some of the historical facts is shaky at best. For example, Mein Kampf wasn’t even close to having been popular enough in Weimar Germany to be a “key” contributor to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. As William Shirer notes in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Mein Kampf was so poorly written that even many dedicated Nazis would privately admit that however many times they tried to read it they were unable “to get through to the end of its 782 turgid pages.” The sales figures were tiny in the first several years after it was published, and it only became a bestseller after Hitler rose to power and owning a copy — though not necessarily reading it — was a way of signaling enthusiasm for the new regime.

Should We Trust Benevolent Censors to Stamp Out “Misinformation”?
Apparently unaware of the long history of left-wing free speech advocacy, from Karl Marx’s days as a crusading newspaper editor fighting censors in Germany to the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley that helped give birth to the New Left, Tannehill associates this “idea of free speech” with libertarianism. She calls the view that “truth will inevitably conquer demonstrably false narratives” a “libertarian fantasy.”
It’s true enough that such claims of inevitability are silly. But as left-wing free speech advocates have always recognized, that’s a very different question from whether the consequences of trusting benevolent censors to determine which narratives are false will be better or worse than the consequences of letting the rest of us decide for ourselves.
It’s easy to say, in the words of Tip O’Neill, that everyone is entitled to their “own opinion” but not “their own facts,” but in practice every political debate is at least partially a debate about facts. Think about the disagreements between supporters and opponents of a higher minimum wage about whether minimum-wage hikes lead to increased unemployment, or the disagreements between supporters and opponents of the invasion of Iraq about weapons of mass destruction.
Very little about Elon Musk’s record should give us any reason to be confident that he’ll be true to his word.
If Twitter had existed in 2002 and 2003 — and it had the kind of aggressive “content moderation” policies advocated by Tannehill — who do you suppose would have been more likely to be censored for “spreading misinformation”? Users who agreed with the US government (and the New York Times) that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or users who accused Bush administration officials of conspiring to mislead the public?
Or imagine that in a few years some equivalent of Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls succeeds in organizing one of Musk’s Tesla factories. This person accuses Tesla of some particularly horrifying and dangerous labor practice. Tesla accuses the union leader of spreading misinformation.
Would you hope, in that situation, that Twitter’s “content moderation” policies gave either Tesla or the unionists the power to crack down hard on “misinformation” — or that Twitter had gotten out of the business of trying to adjudicate which narratives were true and which were false?

Can Musk Be Trusted To Protect Free Speech?
A depressing amount of Musk-buying-Twitter Discourse consists of Musk fans celebrating the return of free speech to the platform on the one hand, and, on the other, Musk detractors comparing the prospect of Musk instituting looser speech norms to the scene in Ghostbusters where all the ghosts are set free to wreak havoc. What’s left out of all of this is that very little about Musk’s record should give us any reason to be confident that he’ll be true to his word.
For one thing, as Yasha Levine has pointed out, Musk’s reputation as a free speech “outsider” doesn’t survive a glance at his business activities as a military contractor. This is a guy who’s been “raking in hundreds of millions of dollars fitting out tech for the most secretive and ‘strategically important’ intelligence agencies in America.” He’s being paid by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to equip Ukraine with Starlink terminals during the war with Russia. (He tried to pass it off as charity but USAID seems to have paid $900 a piece over market value for the terminals.) He has a “nearly $300 million military contract to launch a classified American spy satellite.” He “signed a $149 million deal to track missiles — aka to spy on the sky.” And of course his company SpaceX is doing billions in business with NASA.
Elon Musk’s reputation as a free speech ‘outsider’ doesn’t survive a glance at his business activities as a military contractor.
If you trust someone in Musk’s position to say “no” when the national security state encourages him to censor whistleblowers and investigative journalists who are embarrassing them in the future, all I can say is that you have a heartwarming level of trust in the moral character of an oligarch.

Elon Musk is again claiming that he’s all about free speech. So let’s look at the record. Here’s thread with just a few of the countless examples showing he couldn't care about it less (🧵)
— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) October 27, 2022

Then there’s Musk’s personal history of — to put it gently — not handling criticism well. He’s paid a private investigator $50,000 to dig up dirt on someone who committed the grave crime of saying that Musk had been involved in a dumb “PR stunt.” He’s illegally fired union organizers — and fired, hacked, and spied on corporate whistleblowers who have embarrassed him. He’s tried to dox critics. He’s even asked the Chinese government to censor social media posts critical of Tesla.
Beyond all the reasons to distrust this particular oligarch, there’s a much larger issue here about letting a single wealthy individual have this much control over the flow of information. When Twitter first accepted Musk’s offer back in April, I said: “It’s absurd that we live in the kind of capitalist hellscape where the only hope for reasonable norms protecting free speech online is that we get lucky and the right kind of billionaire purchases our digital public square.”
The real solution is to take our digital public square into public ownership. That wouldn’t mean Twitter would be a free-for-all where you could post literally anything at any time — any more than you can approach the microphone at your local city council meeting and start screaming obscenities at the top of your lungs. But it would mean that Twitter administrators would have a legal obligation to prove that they weren’t cracking down on the political content of speech in ways that — in the context of a publicly owned Twitter — would violate the First Amendment.
As Edward Snowden has pointed out, many content moderation problems could be handled by users themselves if companies like Twitter gave them better tools for filtering the content they see. But even critics of the companies as passionate about the value of free speech as I am can concede that crafting reasonable rules to prevent harassment, doxing, the abuse of children, and so on can pose real and complicated challenges.
In a future where the big social media companies were brought under public ownership, I would expect messy battles would be fought over these issues in both courts of law and the “court” of public opinion. But however messy that would be, I would infinitely prefer that to leaving these questions up to the whims of an individual billionaire. Free speech matters far too much to be entrusted to Elon Musk.

You Deserve an Education Today. By Amy Willis

Economist Roland Fryer worried about the fate of students in America’s inner-city schools, and he had a crazy idea- could monetary incentives affect student, teacher, and parent behavior? A natural enough question to be posed by an economist, but Fryer was shocked at how many people found financial incentives in education repulsive. What gives, he asked? Don’t middle class parents do this all the time???

Fryer and a dedicated team set out to see how they might improve outcomes for some of the nation’s most vulnerable students, and in this episode, he discusses what they did and what they found with EconTalk host Russ Roberts.

Over the course of his research, Fryer has identified the five characteristics of successful schools- what he calls “the basic physics of education. These include 1) more time in school, 2) changed human capital strategy, 3) using data to inform instruction, 4) high dosage tutoring in small groups, and 5) a culture of high expectations. On of the most charming parts of the conversation is when Fryer describes his grandmother’s reaction to his findings. As she exclaimed, “Why aren’t they [all] doing it? Why is this revolutionary?” Do you think this is revolutionary? Can it be replicated? Why isn’t every school doing it? Let’s hear your thoughts. Use the prompts below to reply in the comments, or start your own conversation offline.

1- Fryer and his colleagues found that generally, paying students for output didn’t work, but paying for inputs did. What does this mean in practice? How were Fryer and his colleagues able to measure the price elasticity of the incentives they offered students? Again, what does this mean in practice? And perhaps most importantly, why did these results make Fryer less concerned about fostering “a love of learning” among these students? How do you feel about this claim?

2- Though Roberts reminds us all that implementing findings such as Fryer’s is never simple, why can’t we create a McDonalds-like template (or a “popcorn” button) for education reform? Or in other words, how would you answer Fryer’s Grandma?

3- Roberts asks Fryer what is the ONE thing he would suggest to the principal of a failing school? What is the “one-two punch” Fryer suggests, and to what extent do you find this a reasonable suggestion?

4- Fryer notes the tremendous variance in charter school success, which makes them interesting research subjects. That is, while on average charter schools perform only marginally better than traditional public schools, some fare much better, and others much worse. Roberts askes Fryer, should charter schools be expanded? How would you evaluate Fryer’s answer? How would you answer?

5- Both Roberts and Fryer admit to frustration in the way we typically talk about parents and schooling in poorer neighborhoods. What sort of inherent prejudices do such conversations reveal? What does Fryer mean when he says what we observe about the way poorer parents make choices about schools is more an information problem than a preference problem? How might changing the way we vies such decisions change the way we approach education reform?

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it every week.The return of the World Series this weekend offers an opportunity to engage in America’s real national pastime: wondering loudly why people don’t like baseball as much as they used to.Speaking personally, my relationship to the game these days is one of nostalgic befuddlement. The nostalgia part comes from spotless memories of watching Sunday Night Baseball on my parents’ couch, nestled between my dad and my dog: the chintzy ESPN graphics, the theme song that sounded straight out of a video game, the dulcet baritones of the announcers Jon Miller and Joe Morgan. The befuddlement part comes from the fact that, like a lot of people of my generation, I spend a weird amount of time wondering why I don’t spend any amount of time watching baseball anymore.Possible reasons abound. After the steroid scandals of the 2000s, the stars of my childhood got dragged onto C-SPAN, ceremonially berated for cheating by grumpy old dudes, and blacklisted from the Hall of Fame. Kind of a bummer, to be honest. But on a deeper level, I think what happened is that baseball was colonized by math and got solved like an equation.The analytics revolution, which began with the movement known as Moneyball, led to a series of offensive and defensive adjustments that were, let’s say, catastrophically successful. Seeking strikeouts, managers increased the number of pitchers per game and pushed up the average velocity and spin rate per pitcher. Hitters responded by increasing the launch angles of their swings, raising the odds of a home run, but making strikeouts more likely as well. These decisions were all legal, and more important, they were all correct from an analytical and strategic standpoint.Smarties approached baseball like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one. The sport that I fell in love with doesn’t really exist anymore. In the 1990s, there were typically 50 percent more hits than strikeouts in each game. Today, there are consistently more strikeouts than hits. Singles have swooned to record lows, and hits per game have plunged to 1910s levels. In the century and a half of MLB history covered by the database Baseball Reference, the 10 years with the most strikeouts per game are the past 10.The religion scholar James P. Carse wrote that there are two kinds of games in life: finite and infinite. A finite game is played to win; there are clear victors and losers. An infinite game is played to keep playing; the goal is to maximize winning across all participants. Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game. The midterm elections are finite games. American democracy is an infinite game. A great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world comes from not knowing the difference. A bad fight can destroy a marriage. A challenged election can destabilize a democracy. In baseball, winning the World Series is a finite game, while growing the popularity of Major League Baseball is an infinite game. What happened, I think, is that baseball’s finite game was solved so completely in such a way that the infinite game was lost.When universal smarts lead to universal strategies, it can lead to a more homogenous product. Take the NBA. When every basketball team wakes up to the calculation that three points is 50 percent more than two points, you get a league-wide blitz of three-point shooting to take advantage of the discrepancy. Before the 2011–12 season, the league as a whole had never averaged more than 20 three-point-shot attempts per game. This year, no team is attempting fewer than 25 threes per game; four teams are attempting more than 40.As I’ve written before, the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity. Take the music industry. Before the ’90s, music labels routinely lied to Billboard about their sales figures to boost their preferred artists. In 1991, Billboard switched methodologies to use more objective data, including point-of-sale information and radio surveys that didn’t rely on input from the labels. The charts changed overnight. Rock-and-roll bands were toppled, and hip-hop and country surged. When the charts became more honest, they also became more static. Popular songs stick around longer than they used to. One analysis of the history of pop-music styles found that rap and hip-hop have dominated American pop music longer than any other musical genre. As the analytics revolution in music grew, radio playlists became more repetitive, and by some measures, the most popular songs became more similar to one another.Or take film. As with music, you could certainly make the case that the communications revolution has created an abundance of video content that, in the aggregate, is fantastically diverse. But although the rules for making a viral video, or a critically acclaimed film, are deeply complex, blockbuster movies look a lot like a solved equation. In 2019, the 10 biggest films by domestic box office included two Marvel sequels, two animated-film sequels, a reboot of a ’90s blockbuster, and a Batman spin-off. In 2022, the 10 biggest films by domestic box office included two Marvel sequels, one animated-film sequel, a reboot of a ’90s blockbuster, and a Batman spin-off. Correctly observing that audiences responded predictably to familiar intellectual property, studios invested in a strategy that has squeezed original IP from the top-10 charts. Blockbusters are kinda boring now, not because Hollywood is stupid, but because it got so smart.Is what I’m complaining about really a problem? Does it actually matter that people watch a lot of Marvel sequels, or that baseball no longer bestrides the national discourse? These issues don’t belong alongside wealth inequality, democratic continuity, or malaria on the spectrum of material problems. But I don’t want to hold cultural analysis ransom to the malaria test. The fact that movies and music aren’t as weighty as mortality is a part of why they are so important. As Larry Kramer wrote of sugar, culture might be the most important thing in life precisely because it’s about living, not just staying alive.So yes, I care about the dark side of Moneyball. The Nobel laureate particle physicist Frank Wilczek once said that beauty exists as a dance between opposite forces. First, he said, beauty benefits from symmetry, which he defined as “change without change.” If you rotate a circle, it remains a circle, just as reversing the sides of an equation still reveals a truth (2+2=4, and 4=2+2). But beauty also draws from what Wilczek calls “exuberance,” or emergent complexity. Looking up at the interior of a mosque or a cathedral, or gazing at a classic Picasso or Pollock painting, you are seeing neither utter chaos nor a simple symmetry, but rather a kind of synthesis; an artistic dizziness bounded within a sense of order, which gives the whole work an appealing comprehensibility.Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world that will only become more influenced by mathematical intelligence, can we ruin culture through our attempts to perfect it?

With less than two weeks to go before the November 8th congressional elections, the candidates in close races are frantically racing around their districts, dialing for campaign dollars and doing more of the same speechifying and repetitive political ads. "More of the same," however, may not be enough.

I say, go directly on the offensive against the most lawless, corrupt, repressive GOP in history.

Candidates whose campaigns are stalled and a little stale need to resist late-campaign ditto-heading and freshly propose a compelling future for voters.

In a recent compilation of ideas from twenty-five leading progressive civic leaders and advocates titled "Crushing the GOP, 2022" (https://winningamerica.net/), Democratic campaigners can pick and choose motivating messages and ideas to use in the remaining days before November 8th and in forthcoming elections of 2024.

It is time to present all the families in America with a fulsome commitment to elevate our health, safety, and economic well-being. Elections should be about the future, as well as the near-term. Our children, who can be practical idealists, are our future, and the hope for a just democracy and safe planet.

Astonishingly, the Republicans have been getting away with an astounding variety of cruelties to children. It is almost as if their inbred corporatism keeps them from seeing the children for the big bucks. Republicans are pro-life until children are born. At that point, you're on your own baby!

The particulars are overt and shameless. Republicans have opposed adequate neonatal care, paid family leave, maternity leave and child care. They have blocked a long-overdue national elevation of the $7.25 frozen minimum wage to $15 an hour. All these issues register large polling majorities. They are the routine social safety nets common in other western countries.

The clenched-jaw opposition by congressional Republicans to programs confronting the violence of fossil-fuel-driven climate disruption gives grim meaning to bought-and-paid-for politicians. They are eagerly refusing to protect our descendants from the oncoming fury of mega-storms, floods, droughts, uncontrollable wildfires and sea level rises. Even the Pentagon thinks the climate crisis is a serious national security threat.

To make matters worse, the Republicans, since 2011, have starved the IRS budget to the point that the present Trump-appointed head of the IRS Charles Rettig estimates about one trillion dollars in taxes a year go uncollected. If Democrats had the FDR, Harry Truman fighting spirit, today they could very accurately accuse the GOP of actively aiding and abetting massive tax evasion.

The GOP pushed for tax giveaways to the super-rich and large corporations in 2017 and huge tax escapes. But they blocked a portion of the tax dollars being invested in pro-children programs.

There's more. In January, Republicans callously and disgracefully blocked the extension of the $300 a month child tax credit for fifty-eight million children. Until its suspension, this tax credit cut the child poverty level by one-third.

At the same time, Republican-dominated, gerrymandered states have governors and legislatures that refuse to apply for available federal Medicaid funds to provide broader health insurance for the children in their states.

With Trump in the White House, the GOP Congress pushed for more junk food (salt, sugar and fat) in school lunch programs. They also repealed a ban on a pesticide that scientists found to be especially dangerous for very young children.

Democrats have supported pro-children legislation and regulations, and have a reputation going back decades fighting against Republican neglect of safeguarding children. Democrats can connect with parents of fearful tweens and teenagers calling out adults with their plea: "We are children and 'you' are not protecting us." Pin that "you" directly onto the GOP.

It is also not too late for get-out-the-vote campaigning for the tens of millions of midnight shift workers who keep the country running while we are asleep. Workers in hospitals, nursing homes, factories, all-night stores, police stations, firehouses, and emergency repair shops have been overlooked in campaigns. Respecting by name these third-shift occupations and visiting their places of work can give these voters an exhilarating lift in the closing days of campaigns.

There is also still time to go on the offensive against the Republicans who specialize in placing the Democrats on the defensive by invoking cultural and family values. Ridiculous. In 2014 and 2020, I put together 12 Kentucky Values the Republicans regularly reject. The Kentucky Democratic Senatorial candidates refused to embrace this message, even though the state's leading paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal published my article titled "Ky. values vs. McConnell." Most of these "values" resonate with people everywhere in America. (See: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2014/10/24/ralph-nader-ky-values-vs-mcconnell/17846981/).

To the Democratic candidates - Tim Ryan, John Fetterman, Mandela Barnes, Beto O'Rourke, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Raphael Warnock, Patty Murray, Mike Franken and others in House and Senate races that should not be close - I say, go directly on the offensive against the most lawless, corrupt, repressive GOP in history that creates Anxiety, Dread, and Fear for families desperately trying every day to make ends meet.

Make the final stretch drive a luminous comparison of how the lives and livelihoods of most people, of most workers and children, would be better under the Democratic Party than under the chronically lying Republican Party of Big Business Greed over People.

Trump was much mocked for infrastructure weeks that almost never resulted in new infrastructure. Biden and the Democrats have set the conditions for an infrastructure decade that could transform what America makes and how it’s made. And to my surprise, Biden has put invention at the center of his policymaking, and while we cannot yet know what fruits that will bear, it may prove his most lasting legacy.

But the care side of Biden’s agenda — universal pre-K, the expanded child tax credit, subsidies for child and elder care, paid leave — collapsed almost entirely (the sole exception being an increase to the subsidies under Obamacare). Was that inevitable?

This is murky territory, given the contradictory accounts that Biden and Senator Joe Manchin have given of their negotiations. Was there truly a $1.8 trillion Build Back Better package that Manchin would have voted for? The Biden team thought they had a deal. Manchin says they never did. And at the end of the day, no one forced Manchin to decide child care wasn’t worth doing and child poverty wasn’t worth reducing. That so many in the Senate care so much for bridges and so little for bodies is a scandal.

Still, if you’d told me in 2020 that the next Democratic president would have a 50-50 Senate, with Manchin as the hinge vote, and a House margin of just a handful of members, I would not have predicted that the Democrats could pass more than $400 billion in climate investments or significant corporate tax increases or the most important infusion of cash and capital into scientific research in a generation.

Three criticisms are worth airing. One is that Democrats could have gotten more of the care agenda passed by refusing to allow a separate vote on the infrastructure bill. The Biden administration believes now, and believed then, that it didn’t have the votes to tie the two together. That strategy ran an unacceptable risk of nothing passing. Given that Manchin proved perfectly willing to kill huge swaths of Biden’s agenda and let the administration twist in the wind for month after month, I suspect they’re right. But there’s no way to truly know.

Another is that the American Rescue Plan was too large, and however well meaning the intentions behind it were, it was a handmaiden to inflation. I think the Biden administration erred on the right side of the ledger here. Unemployment is 3.5 percent. Workers got raises and stimulus checks. Poverty fell — sharply. The unemployed weren’t forced into indigency. All of this is easy to dismiss now, but none of it was guaranteed. And with inflation running at 10 percent in Germany and Britain and 7 percent in Canada, I’m skeptical of explanations that make one piece of legislation passed in one country too central to the story.

I think the case is stronger that the Fed should’ve raised interest rates earlier and that Biden and the Democrats should’ve undershot economic support in the teeth of a pandemic that had frozen the global economy. Perhaps the rescue plan should’ve been built with more automatic stabilizers so aid rose as unemployment rose and vanished more quickly if it fell. But that’s true in every economic downturn, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, Congress refuses to learn that lesson.

In 1970, humans numbered 3.7 billion. Today, we're more than double that--eight billion! During that short time, the number of animals that also share this planet dropped by 69 per cent!

As the WWF report states, "The evidence is unequivocal--we are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet's resources."

This catastrophic decline is outlined in the World Wildlife Fund's "2022 Living Planet Report," which examines the state of Earth' biological diversity based on mammal, bird, fish, reptile and amphibian population trends.

As environmentalist and author Bill McKibben writes on his site, "Over those five decades most of the decline can be traced to habitat destruction: the human desire for ever more stuff playing out daily, acre by acre, across the globe." Human-caused climate disruption will soon become the main driver, the WWF report notes.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the WWF's Living Planet Index as "an indicator of progress towards its 2011-2020 targets" and for its "important role in monitoring progress towards the post-2020 goals and targets negotiated at COP15 this December." That's critical, because we still have time--although increasingly less--to turn things around.

The December UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal offers an opportunity to improve and approve a new Global Biodiversity Framework, a plan to protect and restore nature in the coming decade. But, in light of COP15 and the UN climate summit (COP27) in Egypt in November, we must recognize that climate and biodiversity are connected.

As the WWF report states, "The evidence is unequivocal--we are living through the dual crises of biodiversity loss and climate change driven by the unsustainable use of our planet's resources. Scientists are clear, unless we stop treating these emergencies as two separate issues neither problem will be addressed effectively."

Stabilizing and reversing the alarming trend will require "more conservation efforts, more sustainable production and more sustainable consumption," the report says, adding, "None of these actions alone are enough. Only when all three actions are taken together will we see the reversal of nature loss at the speed we need."

WWF shows how laws can be effective in reversing damage. It notes the UN recognized in 2021 that "everyone, everywhere has the right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment," and countries that were ahead of the curve are already reaping benefits: "Costa Rica added the right to a healthy environment to its constitution in 1994. Renewables now deliver 99% of its electricity; laws ban open pit mining and oil and gas development; and carbon taxes pay Indigenous Peoples and farmers to restore forests, which have since doubled in size." (Canada still doesn't recognize the right to a healthy environment in law.)

The December UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal offers an opportunity to improve and approve a new Global Biodiversity Framework.

The report outlines many solutions and successful examples of reversing nature loss, from removing dams to employing nature-based infrastructure. (In his article, McKibben points to a study that found "when a couple of small and no-longer-useful dams were torn down on some New England streams, herring populations quickly rebounded from a few thousand to a few million, which doubtless did wonders for whoever eats herring too.")

Not everyone is affected equally by the twin crises. "Climate change and biodiversity loss are not only environmental issues, but economic, development, security, social, moral and ethical issues too," the WWF study says, noting that although industrialized countries are most responsible for environmental damage worldwide, developing nations are disproportionately affected by biodiversity loss. Compare the 20 per cent biodiversity decline in North America to the 94 per cent decline in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Many people have become so disconnected from nature that they find it difficult to see how losing some animals will affect them. But everything is interconnected. When ecosystems lose components, they can change drastically, even collapse. As we destroy more and more habitat, we come into closer, more frequent contact with microorganisms that can lead to pandemics. When other life starts to disappear--whether it's plants, fungi, invertebrates or vertebrates--everything we need to survive is affected, from the food web to natural systems.

Environmental organizations worldwide, including WWF, are calling on COP15 negotiators to make halting and reversing nature loss by 2030 and achieving full recovery by 2050 to be the 10-year Global Biodiversity Framework's overarching mission, and to "embrace clear, science-based targets and hold governments accountable to their commitments."

Let's all do our part.

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is an economics professor at Harvard University, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures. I benefited greatly from affirmative action. I very much hope my children will not — because the current system contains significant weaknesses. The fate of the American Dream depends on reforming it to make it work.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an affirmative action case involving Harvard, where I am a professor. Many people who are concerned about racial representation at elite institutions fear that the justices will end the practice as we know it. But if they do, they could provide an opportunity to create a new, data-based system that would truly help level the playing field for disadvantaged kids.

I was raised, in part, by my father, who was sentenced to eight years in prison when I was in my teens. He never emphasized education — he beat me up more times than he read to me. I didn’t meet my mother until I was in my 20s. While my test scores were stellar in the early grades, I became indifferent to school and angry at the world by the time I took the SAT in high school. My score was well below the national average, partly because my only goal was to score the 700 minimum for college athletic participation, and partly because I took the test while still drunk from a party the night before.

I needed help. I needed someone to see flickers of promise in me — even though I couldn’t recognize them myself. I needed an opportunity to show that were it not for the drama at home, my full-time job, biased teachers and the anger boiling inside me, I could compete with anyone.

But for my college professors’ willingness to look beyond my past performance — but for affirmative action — I would not have benefited from twice-weekly 7 a.m. meetings with the economics professor who showed me how science could be used to help people. Or the statistics professor who marveled at my stories of my favorite uncle — a wino with sophisticated strategies of betting on Greyhound races — and helped me use formal models to explain his behavior. Or a spot at the American Economic Association’s summer school for minority students.

But affirmative action is very often not targeted at individuals who, because of disadvantage, are achieving below their potential. Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.

How can affirmative action be made consistent with true meritocracy? How can the minority applicants who have lower scores but high potential be distinguished from those who just have low scores?

The answer is simple: Use data more rigorously. The problem is not affirmative action per se. The problem is lazy implementation of it as a set of blunt racial preferences.

If racial diversity is the only goal, then explicit racial preferences — which are already illegal — are the most efficient way to achieve it. Mathematically, the optimal policy amounts to treating each race as a distinct applicant pool, and then admitting the top students from each one.

Under this approach, students of all races will disproportionately come from wealthier backgrounds, because grades, test scores and other factors used in admissions are positively correlated with parental income.

What if, instead, admissions involved the use of sophisticated analytics to predict which applicants stand to become the future top performers?

Evidence is accumulating that machine-learning algorithms can make better decisions than humans, especially when bias is present. A Cornell study of data on judges’ bail decisions found that computer predictions could reduce crime as much as 25 percent with no change in jailing rates. A Stanford University study found that a machine-learning algorithm performed as well or better than trained radiologists on screening X-rays. Why not use this approach in college admissions?

A machine-learning model would be fed historical admissions data, including candidates’ family background and academic achievement, and noncognitive skills such as grit and resilience, along with outcomes of past admission decisions. It would use these data to predict new applicants’ performance — as defined by each institution, such as college grade-point average or income 10 years after graduation. The model could figure out which characteristics best predict performance for various subgroups — for example, how salient SAT scores are for public-school Black students raised in the South by single mothers vs. private-school White kids from the Northeast. If we use only unadjusted test scores, all that context is lost.

This approach would sidestep other thorny issues in college admissions as well. If, as some have argued, the SAT test is racially biased, the algorithm could place less weight on scores for Black students. If students who demonstrate resilience as children are more likely to be hidden gems, the data will show that, too.

The Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the explicit use of race in university admissions. My hope is that it will still leave room for data-driven approaches to affirmative action that ensure real meritocracy.

For the first couple of years of the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis was marked by a succession of variants that pummeled us one at a time. The original virus rapidly gave way to D614G, before ceding the stage to Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and then Omicron’s many offshoots. But as our next COVID winter looms, it seems that SARS-CoV-2 may be swapping its lead-antagonist approach for an ensemble cast: Several subvariants are now vying for top billing.In the United States, BA.5—dominant since the end of spring—is slowly yielding to a slew of its siblings, among them BA.4.6, BF.7, BQ.1, and BQ.1.1; another subvariant, XBB, threatens to steal the spotlight from overseas. Whether all of these will divvy up infections in the next few months, or whether they’ll be pushed aside by something new, is still anyone’s guess. Either way, the forecast looks a little grim. None of the new variants will completely circumvent the full set of immune defenses that human bodies, schooled by vaccines or past infections, can launch. Yet all of them seem pretty good at dodging a hefty subset of our existing antibodies.For anyone who gets infected, such evasions could make the difference between asymptomatic and feeling pretty terrible. And for the subset of people who become sick enough to need clinical care, the consequences could get even worse. Some of our best COVID treatments are made from single antibodies tailored to the virus, which may simply cease to work as SARS-CoV-2 switches up its form. Past variants have already knocked out several such concoctions—among them, REGEN-COV, sotrovimab, and bamlanivimab/etesevimab—from the U.S. arsenal. The only two left are bebtelovimab, a treatment for people who have already been infected, and Evusheld, a crucial supplement to vaccination for those who are moderately or severely immunocompromised; both are still deployed in hospitals countrywide. But should another swarm of variants take over, these two lone antibody therapies could also be obsolete within months, if not weeks. “It seems like the writing is on the wall,” says Erin McCreary, an infectious-disease pharmacist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “I live constantly low-key worried that I’m not going to have an active therapy for my patients, and I won’t be able to help them.”All of this bodes poorly for this winter and beyond. In the near term, millions of immunocompromised people could be left without viable options either to keep SARS-CoV-2 at bay or to temper its blaze once an infection begins to burn. And that loss would set a troubling precedent for seasons to come. The business end of the virus “is now adapting so rapidly that I don’t know how it’s going to be possible for monoclonals to keep up,” says Jeanne Marrazzo, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Experts may need to revamp the strategies they use to bring new therapies to market—or find themselves, once again, in a serious bind. “I worry,” Marrazzo told me, “that we’re on a razor’s edge.”Whatever happens this winter, doctors will still have some options to treat COVID patients. Experts don’t think the virus will develop widespread resistance to our antiviral drugs—molnupiravir, remdesivir, and Paxlovid—“anytime soon,” Marrazzo said. But the vanishing of effective antibody therapies would still leave a massive hole that other treatments can’t fill. The benefits of molnupiravir seem lackluster at best; remdesivir offers a few more perks but is a hassle to administer, requiring several days of infusions. And although Paxlovid has worked wonders for people in high-risk groups, one of its ingredients can screw with a long list of other drugs. McCreary has seen many patients hospitalized, she told me, because their physicians prescribed Paxlovid without properly adjusting their regular meds. “Plus,” she added, “Paxlovid tastes awful.”[Read: Paxlovid mouth is real—and gross]Monoclonal antibodies aren’t perfect. But at their best, they’re astoundingly effective and safe, and often the first thing McCreary reaches for when caring for newly infected people. Some patients are also “just more comfortable with monoclonal antibodies than they are with antivirals,” says Mari Nakamura, an infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. And Evusheld remains the only COVID treatment that is authorized to guard people before they encounter the virus at all. People who don’t mount much of a response to vaccines can sign up for a pair of injections—one into each gluteal muscle—and expect to have their defenses buoyed for a good six months. “I see it as an extension of vaccines for those who are vulnerable,” says Jonathan Abraham, an immunologist and physician at Harvard Medical School.The greatest strength of these treatments, however, also happens to be their most glaring weakness. Monoclonal antibodies work their magic by glomming so tightly onto SARS-CoV-2’s surface that the virus can’t dock onto our cells. Their grip is ultra precise—enough so that it can be nullified by just one viral mutation in exactly the right spot. Those genetic changes have already booted antibody treatments from our lineup. Now the data hint that bebtelovimab might not work against BQ.1 or BQ1.1. The list of subvariants that might be able to resist Evusheld is even longer: BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BA.4.6, BA.2.75.2, BF.7, and XBB.Soon health-care providers will have to start making tough calls about when to retire these two antibody treatments—and with few hard rules to guide them. Resistance can be a pretty murky concept: Viral mutations sometimes soften an antibody’s grasp without totally obliterating it. With antibiotics, for example, doctors can respond to some forms of low-level drug resistance just by increasing the dose, McCreary told me. But COVID monoclonal antibodies are still new to the scene. Even when an antibody cocktail has clearly become functionally useless against a given set of variants, there’s no universal standard for deciding when those variants have become so common that the cocktail should be shelved. (When I asked the FDA about this, it declined to comment on specifics.) So the choice is often left up to individual hospitals, Nakamura told me, which can create a bit of a patchwork in how experts are approaching COVID treatment—and put a burden on surveillance efforts to deliver hyperlocal data in real time.In Pittsburgh, McCreary’s team has, in prior seasons, pulled monoclonals when they stop working against just 20 to 30 percent of the reported variant milieu. Alpana Waghmare, a physician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Seattle Children’s Hospital, told me her threshold may be closer to about 50 percent, though she pointed out that the more the options dwindle, the more willing health-care workers may be to keep using a variant-mismatched antibody. Alfred Kim, a rheumatologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me he’d need to see resistant variants make up “the majority in a region” before he’d even consider putting an antibody out to pasture. There’s little downside to administering the treatments, he said, and for his patients, the potential cost of withholding them is just too immense.Should bebtelovimab and Evusheld be forced from the stage in the coming months, they might, at least, have a few understudies waiting in the wings. Regeneron, the maker of the late REGEN-COV, has two antibody treatments in Phase 1 trials, according to a spokesperson; AstraZeneca, Evusheld’s parent, also has replacements in development, though a spokesperson declined to provide more details on where in the pipeline they sat. Eli Lilly, which manufactures bebtelovimab and the now-gone bamlanivimab/etesevimab, didn’t respond to my questions about whether they were cooking up new recipes for future use. Vir, which makes sotrovimab—still available overseas—is working on “several highly potent” new antibodies “that have shown activity against all COVID-19 variants tested to date including BQ1.1,” according to a spokesperson.Clearing drugs for human use remains a plodding process; all of those options could be months away from regular use. “The virus may have moved on” by then, Abraham told me. Already, experts are grappling with whether once-a-year shots will be enough to keep pace with coronavirus evolution; updates on the treatment side may have to come much faster. The problem could get worse as SARS-CoV-2 lineages continue to jockey for control. For the moment, at least, the leading variants are invalidating antibody treatments in relatively similar ways. But if variants diverge further, pharmaceutical companies could have an even tougher time devising broadly effective antibody therapies.Some experts are also concerned that the market for monoclonals may be going dry. Antibodies are expensive to produce, and with a turnover rate this high, the industry may not have much incentive to stay involved, McCreary told me. Marrazzo, too, thinks the urgency may have lessened with the advent of oral antivirals, and the rush to return to “normal.” If anything, though, the need for good monoclonal options may be growing in urgency. Treatments such as REGEN-COV and bamlanivimab/etesevimab once had clearance to be used in people right after they were exposed to SARS-CoV-2—a sort of emergency antiviral contraceptive. Now no monoclonals are available for so-called postexposure prophylactic use. Kids, too, could use more treatment options. Children under 12 are eligible for three-day courses of remdesivir, given by IV infusion—but those are a tough ask for many families who don’t have the time or means to make such frequent trips to the hospital, Nakamura told me. “And that’s pretty much it.”Yet no one would feel the loss of antibody-based COVID treatments more than the immunocompromised, Waghmare told me. “It’s this horrible nexus,” Marrazzo said: The most vulnerable people will lose their best options first. Many of those who received Evusheld in the spring will soon be due for their second set of injections, scheduled six months after the first. As of right now, “we’re still telling patients to come in,” McCreary told me. But that may not be the advice she gives next month, or the next. Robyn Ruth, of Augusta County, Virginia, is at that decision point now. Her first experience with the treatment, in April, was momentous: “I had my first hug since the beginning of the pandemic,” Ruth told me. “I just remember my knees buckled, because I hadn’t touched another human being in so long.” In the weeks after, Ruth felt safe enough to go to a couple of doctor appointments and visit a few friends, even garden in their company—activities she hadn’t engaged in since the start of 2020. But as variants continue to chip away at Evusheld’s efficacy, Ruth is steeling herself for the possibility that another dose won’t bring the same relief.Caregivers and patients alike must now strategize for what could be a very difficult winter stretch. Many immunocompromised people can still benefit from vaccines, even if not as much as others. Marrazzo also cautiously pointed out that if things get bad enough, some providers might go back to convalescent plasma—a treatment with just so-so effectiveness that’s hard to roll out in large quantities, and that doesn’t deliver consistent results—as a desperate stopgap. Other than that, though, it’ll come down to the behavioral measures that many Americans have long since abandoned: isolation, quarantine, masking, distancing.[Read: It’s gotten awkward to wear a mask]Nakamura told me she’s been struggling to deliver optimistic advice. “All they can do is try not to get the virus,” she said. She also worries about what might happen should her young patients actually fall ill. “Our hospitals are already overflowing,” she said, amid an early seasonal surge of respiratory viruses, including RSV, and a massive mental-health crisis. McCreary, too, knows many tough conversations are ahead. “There’s nothing worse than one day having something safe and highly effective,” she told me, “and the next day, it’s, ‘Sorry, we don’t have that anymore.’”For some, the simultaneous disappearance of bebtelovimab and Evusheld could almost rewind the clock to the pandemic’s start. Sara Anne Willette, a data analyst in Ames, Iowa, has a condition called common variable immunodeficiency that keeps her from making certain types of protective antibodies. She also has a history of anaphylaxis to antivirals, potentially making bebtelovimab her only postinfection treatment option should she fall ill. Willette’s second dose of Evusheld is scheduled for December, but she’s not sure whether, by that point, risking the trip will even be practical. “It feels like we’re back at square one,” she told me. “I get COVID, and it’s ‘go it alone.’”

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, philosopher, author, and the host of the Making Sense podcast. He rose to prominence as a member of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism, which also included Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Harris discuss the intellectual case for atheism; why both left and right have become more extreme in recent years; and the prospects of a more rational politics in the near future.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I want to start by revisiting one of the topics that really made you prominent. You were one of the Four Horsemen of atheism. Just what is the intellectual case for atheism, and why should we care about it?Sam Harris: The epistemological case for it is pretty simple; it's the same as the case for not believing in Zeus or Poseidon or Isis or any of the other of the thousands of dead gods that are interred in the graveyard we call “mythology.” The atheist just goes one god further, and consigns the God of Abraham to the same. I mean, these are clearly inventions of people, and they don't purport to be. The God of Abraham is explicit in the Bible and in the Quran that the document you're reading is the Word of God, and that it is not of human manufacture. And it's just obvious that that can't be. You look at the books, and there's just no way they're the product of omniscience. They betray their merely human origins on every page and what they don't show (which would have been trivially easy for a god to put in there) is a single sentence that announces its supernatural provenance. Just think of how easy it would be for an omniscient being to write a book, or even a single page of text, that proved that it could not be of human origin. But rather than give us insights into mathematics and science, computation, medicine, or anything else that we care about at the moment, it tells us how to sacrifice goats and how to keep slaves. I'm not saying there's no wisdom in those books. But there was wisdom in many other books in that period. We're living in a world that is shattered over competing claims about literature. It’s every bit as absurd as a world in which people sought to pass laws infringing on the rights of their neighbors, or to start wars or to commit terrorist atrocities based on rival interpretations of the plays of Shakespeare: there’s the Hamlet cult that's going against the Lear cult, and they're literally willing to die and let their children die over differences of opinion about those various texts. It would be insane. The world we live in is every bit as insane as all that—and yet, we've acclimated to it. We cease to notice it. I'm not denying that there are extraordinary experiences that are testified to in some of these books, or that the transformation of the human mind is possible. Unconditional love and self-transcendence is possible, and we should be interested in it. But we should be investigating it and experiencing it and talking about it in 21st century terms.If there were some kind of divine mind that could intervene in our affairs whenever it likes—well, one thing you can know about this mind is that it's not moral, in any sense that we would want it to be. It's certainly not compassionate. It wasn't of much help when 500 million people were killed by smallpox in the 20th century. It wasn't much help during the Holocaust. You have all these religious people thanking God for various invisible interventions: you get a diagnosis of cancer, but you get this miraculous remission, etc. But think of all the people who didn't get better, and think of all the good work this god of yours has not done in the lives of others who are just as deserving, or even more deserving, of compassion than you were. Just think of all the children who cannot be accused of having done anything wrong, who were annihilated casually moments after birth, or in the first years of their lives. You need only one horror story like that—and of course, there are millions—to disprove this notion that an all-seeing, omnibenevolent God is watching over us.Mounk: Let me move to what I'm in some ways more interested in, which is the political implications of religion. I have become quite convinced that there are certain basic aspects of human psychology which drive our behavior; that we are, as Jonathan Haidt would say, “groupish”: we tend to form groups very easily, often treat members of those groups with great compassion and great altruism. But we are also capable of treating anybody who's not a member of our group with incredible cruelty and nastiness. It's not that clear to me that an absence of religion would lessen human conflict or suffering, because with our infinite ability to invent lines—to distinguish “my” group from “your” group—we would simply be driven to give more importance to ethnic differences, more importance to ideological and political differences, and so on. Do you think that if people for the last two thousand years hadn't believed in these different religions, would we have had fewer conflicts? Or perhaps just different conflicts?Harris: Well, a simple way to answer that question is to just imagine what it would take to improve our religions. Just imagine modifying the Ten Commandments so as to produce a wiser, less divisive ideology. Just swap out the graven image clause for something truly useful, like ‘Don't keep slaves.” That would have closed the door theologically to slavery, whereas the door is wide open. Even Jesus doesn't condemn it. The Quran could have been a document that assiduously spelled out the political equality of men and women. But it doesn't do that, and women the world over are paying the price for that: women in Iran are protesting, fighting, in many cases dying, to carve out some space of equality for themselves. We have, over the course of many centuries of smashing religion against secular ethics and scientific rationality, taught generations of people that being a true fundamentalist just isn't worth it. Fundamentalists in the West have relaxed their hold on religious literalism. And whenever people don't do that, you have something like the Taliban or the Islamic State. I don't think we're condemned not to make progress in overcoming our native tribalism and xenophobia—because we have already made immense progress, even under the shadow of these divisive and tribal identities. Scientists were literally dying trying to interrogate the nature of the world. The house arrest of Galileo was one of the final moments where you had a bunch of glassy-eyed religious maniacs who won't look through his telescope. We've made progress since then. And so, the beliefs could have been much better. We could have had something like enlightenment-based, secular rationality, centuries before we did.I take your point that religion is a very powerful piece of software for us to enshrine our groupishness. There's certainly an argument that religion allows strangers in groups larger than Dunbar's number to cohere readily in large social organizations. So, it's easy to see how there could have been a cultural evolution within which religion proved a very durable feature, where you prove your in-group status by making costly sacrifices in the same direction. But that’s not the only conceivable version of that kind of trust. I think what you want are people whose convictions scale with good reasons and good evidence and good arguments, and intuitions that are tutored by intellectual honesty and honest collisions with the opinions, so that there's a certain kind of humility and circumspection and discomfort with illogic, and a desire for consistency. This whole toolkit that we’ve developed is eroding in various places, and not just religious places. We've got this postmodern effort that's happening over in “Wokistan” that is making everything seem upside down, to a degree that's insane, divisive and intolerable. And it really resembles a new religion. That's what's so awful about wokeness. It's essentially intellectual dishonesty, plus a willingness to sacrifice obviously innocent people as scapegoats.Mounk: There are many scholars who claim that the foundations of liberalism and democracy are ultimately religious, and that a lot of the beliefs that ground the American Republic—a lot of the beliefs which ground human rights—actually are religious, or a kind of secular version of Christianity which is always trying to hide its true origins. What do you make of that line of argument? Can we ground a deep belief in these important political values without recourse, explicit or implicit, to religion?Harris: I think we obviously can. I think people draw the wrong lesson from the observation that the roots of much of what we value are religious. If you go back far enough, virtually all of those good things, most of the time, were accomplished by people who believed in God. And so what lessons should you draw from that? I say there's no lesson to draw from that, because there was simply no-one else to do the job. You could say that every bridge that was ever built was, for the most part, built by people of faith. For the longest time, every scientific experiment was done by somebody who professed some belief in God. But the question is, are those beliefs intrinsic to the enterprise and essential to it? Or are they just adding friction to all the good things, too? We got the idea of democracy out of Athens, and there was a lot of Zeus-talk there, right? Let's bring back Zeus? No. It’s just a waste of time. Mounk: I want to move on to a more contemporary version of the political concerns I have. A lot of the pushback against atheism had a political context where—with a very strong evangelical movement, and George W. Bush in the White House—Christianity felt very politically powerful in the United States, and there was good reason to be concerned. But we're now almost two decades on from those debates. And the political moment feels very different. I've seen people make the argument (though I don't think there's any really conclusive work on whether this is true) that actually, the relatively rapid secularization of American society over the last 15 or 20 years has a lot to do with some of our problems today. That the people who suffer deaths of despair, or who are addicted to painkillers, are less likely to be religious. That people who continue to have some real religious links actually have some kind of community, which acts as a force for social stabilization. That actually, a lot of the raw energy behind Donald Trump and the MAGA movement often doesn’t come from the people who are embedded in a real church community (even if they claim to have some kind of Christian evangelical belief), but, by and large, comes from people who are more isolated and therefore more angry. And of course, as you alluded to, John McWhorter and others argue that wokeness is a kind of quasi-religion. Are you still sanguine that a further retreat of religion would help to make our politics more harmonious and sane? Or has it turned out that religious beliefs, irrational as they might be, have provided an important social kit, and that its absence is precisely what's driven the deep cultural division of our country today?Harris: Well, we clearly have a lot of problems. I would not deny that. And some of those problems could be compounded certainly in specific people, or in any given generation. People are attached to a belief in Santa Claus, and when you tell them there is no Santa Claus, they suffer. But then the question is: Is there really a Santa Claus-shaped hole in someone's life that's indelible, that needs to be filled with a Santa Claus-shaped object at some point in the future? Or can we grow up? Can we make progress that gives us greater capacities and greater understanding and a greater basis for love and compassion and self-transcendence and solidarity and community and everything else? Community is a very good thing, and people who don't have it, or who have lost it, are suffering. That is a problem that requires a remedy. It could be that we're in this kind of valley between two high spots, where we descended a relatively mediocre peak on this landscape in search of a higher one. But we've had to—we've had to go downhill a bit in order to then climb higher to some other part of the landscape. So, it's not that progress is just monotonically pleasant, where things just get better and better and better and better with every increment of change. I don't imagine that. We could be paying some kind of price for secularizing rapidly. That's true. And certainly any individual, again, could feel like he or she has paid a price for losing their faith. God really does do a lot of work for people who have faith, especially surrounding the phenomenon of death and bereavement—when you're contemplating your own death, or the death of someone you love, and you sincerely believe that death is an illusion and that not only do you not lose anything of importance when you die, but that person gets everything they want, and they get it for eternity. You will be reunited with your child or your mother, whoever it is, in a few short years, and you'll be on the right hand of Jesus and there's just no problem; and this universe is set up to reward and console you in the end (that is, if you espouse the right opinions while alive). We can talk about how perverse that moral worldview is in the end. But I would add here that my big-picture concern—and really the proper lens through which to view all of this—is that all we have, at any moment in time, is human conversation with which to orient ourselves collectively. We're faced with the truly open-ended challenge of cooperating in the face of uncertainty with eight billion strangers. And the question is: What are the tools by which we can navigate that situation, given that all we have is persuasion or force? It's patently obvious to me that you can't appeal to non-negotiable, ancient dogmas for which there is no evidence and which are not universally subscribed to. At bottom, there are things that a Christian and Muslim can’t agree about—the question of the divinity of Jesus, say, which the Christians really do care about, and the Muslims really do repudiate. That's a problem, right? Those are not the best parameters for a conversation that is going to engineer real open-ended solutions to our problems. Nature is going to be throwing up pandemics, and we may throw up some ourselves through malfeasance in various labs, or deliberately through terrorism. And we're going to have a host of other problems. Mounk: But how much should we blame religion for bad things in the past, and how much hope or fear should we have for its decline? That's an important question whether or not you think that there's some meaningful way to affect it. Should we be hopeful for more secularization in the United States, if it might have these really bad political consequences?Harris: I think we should all be increasingly allergic to dogmatism. Especially when the dogmas are leading to needless human suffering and division. Again, it's useful to look at specific religious or political ideas and ask the question,”Do we keep this? If we had a choice, would we want to reinvent this crazy idea?” Take your pick: “homosexuality is immoral.” That comes to us courtesy of religion. Maybe it has older roots, still, but it's certainly been enshrined in various religions. How useful is it? How good is our world, how improved is it socially and ethically, that millions and millions of people insist that this dogma is true? They think, “God has insisted it’s true.” And if God had insisted otherwise, presumably they would believe that. You could imagine, had the ancient Greeks gotten their hands on the Bible at the crucial moment, they might have relaxed some of that homophobia, and gay people through the generations would have lived in a different world. Had that been the case, you wouldn't have had Oscar Wilde thrown in prison for being gay. That would be a net good. If we could do this piecemeal and just strip out specific dogmas, I think we could do it wisely. And we're right to want to do that. In fact, we've been doing that, politically, over time. The problem is, we're doing it with one hand tied behind our back, because the people—even the people who are doing it, quite heroically, for the most part—are still attached to these religious myths and these religious books and these religious identities. Our mutual friend Andrew Sullivan has done as much as anyone (and perhaps more than anyone) in American society to get us into the endzone where we now have gay marriage as the law of the land. But he's a believing Catholic. He and I have debated these issues, and he's brilliant. But to me, anyone who is forced to be on the other side of this debate based on their religious attachment loses 30 IQ points. The ballast they're carrying—they just can't get it up the hill. It would be better had God not said that homosexuality was a sin, in the various ways he said it in both the Old and New Testament. And there are a hundred very important examples like that, where we could make our world a better place and edit these books, if we could edit them—which most modern cosmopolitan, well-educated religious people do simply through their disregard of those passages, right? People effectively edit the books by just deciding not to pay attention to the parts they don't like. But I'm just saying we can be more intellectually honest than that, and recognize that all we've got is human conversation. The question is: Do we want a 21st century conversation where we avail ourselves of all the useful concepts and ideas? And we can take what we like from Shakespeare, and what we like from Pericles, and what we like from St. Paul, and what we like from Jesus, and what we like from the Quran, and consider it a bequest from prior generations of merely human, but still fairly incandescent wisdom, which we can improve upon, hopefully, as we push into the unknown future.See also: John McWhorter on Why Woke Ideas Harm Minority Communities.Mounk: I'm going to move on from religion, and try to understand how you think about this cultural moment. I'm struck, thinking about the 15 years that I have now spent in the United States, how much the basic intellectual lay of the land has been transformed. And it seems to me that the two fundamental changes have been: on the one hand, the transformation of the American right. The Republican Party of George W. Bush was not to be celebrated in every respect, and had many flaws. But the Republican Party of somebody like Donald Trump is just a fundamentally bigger threat to American democracy and to decency. And then, on the other hand, there’s been the sort of strange transformation of the left, in which this sort of single-minded focus on identity and the marginalization of ethnic, religious, racial, and sexual gender groups, has taken center place in a way that wasn't the case 15 years ago. It has sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gone hand in hand with a real embrace and tolerance for pretty illiberal ideas. So, how worried are you about each of these forces? And is this an intellectual moment that's going to pass, or is it setting up the battle lines for the politics of the next 25 or 50 years?Harris: Well, I'm not really in the game of making predictions across any time horizon. But the one prediction I feel like I can make is that if Trump, or anyone sufficiently Trumpist, runs in 2024 for the presidency, the woke problem doesn't go away anytime soon. If we had a normal Republican candidate for 2024, I feel that wokeness—the moral derangement of the left—has reached some kind of tipping point, and the vapors would dissipate on their own. But the craziness of Trumpistan is so provocative, and so seemingly justifying of the craziness of the woke. They mutually create one another at this point. Mounk: I agree that one of the reasons why woke ideas became so hegemonic—not just on the American left but in some mainstream institutions—was that when Trump was in office, it both seemed to justify the most extreme claims, and it made it very toxic to argue against any left position, because you would be seen as running interference for Trump. And conversely, I think one of the reasons why it's so hard to beat Donald Trump is that so many Americans look at what's happened on the left and the kinds of abuses that happened in some mainstream institutions and say, “Well, I don't trust these guys. I may as well hold my nose and vote for Trump.”When you take some of the rhetoric of the far left on the topic of race seriously, they talk about the historical effects of racism, and structural racism. This should actually allow them to see that the biggest problem is not ongoing forms of active discrimination; rather, one way of explaining the distinction is precisely to say, “Look, ongoing discrimination exists, but it's relatively minor compared to the problem of the long-term effects of people, for centuries, being enslaved and excluded from society.” I'm always struck by the fact that this is an argument that actually should be a left-wing argument; it's an argument about the enduring impact of the worst chapters of American history and the way it’s continuing to shape the present. That's actually very convincing. But instead, we get a much less intellectually rigorous account of the nature of the problem, which then easily results in people thinking that if only we let Robin DiAngelo loose on every boardroom in America, that would solve the problem.But a little while ago, it sounded as though you were saying: if only Trump or one of his followers doesn't win in 2024—if only the threat from the anti-democratic right would subside a little bit—then it feels like we could be at a turning point where people are willing to reject some of the more irrational ideas that have somehow been able to capture mainstream institutions in the last five or seven years. So, how optimistic or pessimistic should we be?Harris: Well, I don't know how hopeful that prediction is. It does feel somehow contaminated by hope. And I don't know how influenced it is by my just having paid so much attention to this issue, and gotten so tired of it, that I just feel like there's no way this mania is going to continue for that much longer. I do feel like more and more people behind closed doors have broken the spell. Meanwhile, what's wrong with the far right is so obvious that it almost requires no discussion: what's wrong with being a neo-Nazi, or a true xenophobe? It's not ethically or intellectually interesting to try to parse. And that's why I spend very little time thinking about it. But I am worried about the far right, and I'm worried about the possibility of far-right violence, and I'm worried about the weird variants in Trumpistan that are not quite necessarily far right in all the usual ways, but are profoundly undemocratic and profoundly distorted by bad ideas. But the far left, and its influence on the rest of culture and its influence on our core institutions is far harder to understand, and it's far more confusing to well-educated and well-intentioned people. It requires a conversation to get to many ordinary liberals, who have day jobs and don't spend all their time in the weeds of Twitter. It's harder to talk about, and yet it is no less dishonest; Ibram X. Kendi is no less dishonest than some analogous lunatic on the right, and he won't debate anyone who could mop the floor with him and reveal his dishonesty. He won't talk to Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams, or any of these guys who have his number. He has built a temple of white guilt for himself and other priests in this temple. It's a good gig, and it works at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Our core institutions from The New York Times to Harvard, to our scientific journals to Hollywood to the media that's not right wing—all of it is being vitiated by public displays of dishonesty and masochism and frank stupidity that should be intolerable to all of us. And I think it is growing intolerable. And if we could just get Trump out of the picture, I think people on the left could begin to be publicly honest about it. Because privately, they're being honest about it. In private, they see the world as I do. Just to take one claim that cuts through the morass here: You can go further, and not only say that there's not a lot of active racism keeping qualified black people out of good jobs and educational opportunities and all the rest of it; you can also say that, at the same level of qualification, it is a positive advantage to be black at this point, in almost any part of society that would be truly desirable to a qualified candidate, whether you're looking for an educational opportunity, or you want to work in media, tech or in a Fortune 500 company. Being a black applicant, or being a person of color more generally, at the same level of qualification—America is your oyster at this moment. This is just a fact. You talk to anyone at any of these companies; you talk to anyone in Ivy League admissions, in medical schools, any nonprofit; they are desperate to hire qualified people of color. And if you're white or Asian, you're at a positive disadvantage, generally speaking. It is a fact, and basically everyone knows it. And so, what's happening on the left is that you have a generation of activists determined to lie about all of that, determined to say that not only is that not true, but the opposite is true, and racism is the cause: for example, that the reason why there are not more black cardiologists in your local hospital is because of racism. They claim that the reason why black people don’t make up 13% of everyone in good places in our society, is racism today. And it's just not true. The opposite is true. It is just a fact that Harvard has to have a racist policy against Asians now in order to meet its affirmative action goals. It's the lying that is so divisive, and the gaslighting. And again, I don't want to be read as somebody who's not concerned about and sympathetic to the very real disparities in our society. I want these disparities to be remedied. And the question is how to do that. But finding racists where no racists exist, rolling into the board of a company that is desperate to hire qualified people of color (and feels exactly as you and I do about the divisions in our society) and calling everyone racist and taking them to task for their white privilege—that is just a symptom of a moral panic, and it is leading to cultic behavior that is mirroring the cultic behavior of the right, and the personality cult of Trump. And it's driving everyone crazy.Mounk: I want to end on a topic that I’m less comfortable with, and that's meditation. You are a great evangelist of meditation. You talk powerfully about its effects. I've never properly tried to meditate. Why am I wrong about this? Why should I go and download your app or download some other kind of app or go to some kind of meeting or retreat and actually try to engage in this practice?Harris: Meditation is the method by which you pay more attention to your experience. In the morning, you wake up from a dream which you dimly remember, and then you're chased out of bed by your thoughts, and you think, think, think throughout the day. And the structure of this thinking is somewhat paradoxical. In many cases, you're literally talking to someone who isn't there. You're telling yourself things you already know, you're replaying conversations that happened, or almost happened, or may yet happen. You're only dimly aware of your present experience through this cacophony of discursive thought. And all of that feels like me, as the subject and center of my experience. Once you discover how to do it, meditation is actually not a tool, or a practice, or anything you're adding to your life. Meditation is nothing more than ceasing to do something you're doing helplessly now. It's ceasing to be distracted by thought, and it's ceasing to be identified with each passing thought; to notice thought itself as an appearance in consciousness. When you can step back and just notice thoughts as thoughts and notice what the mind is like prior to their arising, and in the very midst of their arising, then the mind becomes a very different place; it becomes much more expansive. You begin to notice that there's a freedom, even in the midst of struggle or stress. You can solve your basic problem of, “How can I be in the world in a way that is truly fulfilling without actually changing the world?” I'm not saying that there aren't projects worth pursuing. We spent this whole conversation talking about immense social projects that we both desperately want to pursue, and there's no question that life can get better in all kinds of material and social ways. But there's a psychological layer to this which produces so much that ails us, and which is solved by recognizing that virtually all of your hours of suffering are the product of thought and identification with thought. It's a suffering born out of the past and your fears about the future; and the mechanism by which that is doled out to you in the present is thinking without knowing that you're thinking. Meditation is nothing other than being able to wake up from that dream.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of four science books, including The Emperor of All Maladies, which won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction and the Guardian first book award. Born in Delhi in 1970 and educated at Stanford, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and Harvard, Mukherjee is now assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, as well as a cancer physician and researcher. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and their two daughters. His latest book, The Song of the Cell, will be published on 3 November.

Why a book about cells?

Cell biology had always been at the centre of my thinking – as an oncologist, I look at cells through cancer, which is their ultimate distortion. So much of our attention has been occupied by genetics over the past century, but a gene is lifeless without cells. There’s nothing you can read from a DNA molecule that tells you that your eyes are shaped like eyes or that your kidney is kidney-shaped. Only your cells in the right context and the right time can interpret that code. So it felt as if we were missing part of the equation.

What is a cell? Do you have a handy definition?

A cell is the least autonomous living unit of life, and it is the unit that makes up all of life on this planet. So we need to know more about how it functions and how it acts.

It’s such a vast topic. How did you pull the book together?

Finding a structure was the biggest challenge. You can’t write about the history of cell biology in the same way you could with genes, because the chronology becomes very muddled. In the case of DNA, or cancer, there’s a whole army of scientists trying to solve a riddle. In the case of cell biology, there isn’t an army trying to solve a riddle, there are a thousand riddles. How does each cell acquire its unique form and function? Why is the brain different from the heart, even though they’re both composed of cells? So the challenge was: how does one put a form on this information without falling down a rabbit hole?

Bizarrely, I love editing, and I love being edited

Some of the stories in the book are very personal – you open with one about a friend dying from cancer. What made you decide to include these stories, and were they difficult to write?

Not difficult to write, but I think essential. I don’t like writing as if I don’t exist. The tone that comes most naturally to me floats somewhere between memoir and history and science. Occasionally a poem will creep in, or a fragment of an essay. It all goes into the mix. If you can convince a reader to come on the journey with you, then you can combine memoir with science writing.

A piece you published in the New Yorker in 2016 about epigenetics – excerpted from your last book, The Gene – came under fire from some geneticists who accused you of oversimplifying. How did you react and did it affect your writing of this book?

Extracts are very hard to do. I’m a little careful with them now. Taking a 500-page book and picking 10 pages out of it, particularly if it’s a chronology, is very tough. Editors make that decision. So I just remind people that it’s an excerpt and you need to read the whole thing in context.

You’re an assistant professor, an oncologist, a researcher. How do you find time to write?

My time is pretty regimented: I have time to do one thing, then another, and then I take a break. It’s not like I’m running around the hospital one minute and then dashing off to write a sentence. It’s funny, because I don’t really pace myself, which is to say that it’s not always 10 pages a day. Some days I can write 50 pages, sometimes I’ll be stuck for days not being able to write at all. So I follow the thread of a thought, and let it rest. What helps is realising that this [thought] is not the comprehensive end of everything.

Where do you write?

Famously, I write in bed. I only say “famously” because people make fun of it all the time. But I love writing in a small place. I don’t have a writing studio or anything like that. I like to snuggle up with my computer.

What part of the writing process do you most enjoy?

Bizarrely, I love editing, and I love being edited.

That’s unusual.

Well, no, I think it gives you a sense of perspective on the whole situation.

Do you have a most trusted reader?

Obviously, my publisher, but also my wife is a great reader. (I also see everything that Sarah is making and try to give her feedback on it.) I have two kinds of readers and I use them very differently. One kind I call a champion, and I give them the book first because they are likely to say: “It’s all good, keep going.” A second kind of reader is a critic who says: “Wait a second, we need to think about this book differently, here are the problems.” I think it’s really important to sequence them correctly, because in the early stages a book is very fragile and you don’t want it to be beaten down. Later on, it’s a tougher object and has the capacity to withstand challenges and critiques.

You daughters get a mention in the acknowledgments. Did they read the book?

They did. They are very good readers and give very thoughtful critiques. Leela, my older child, is a writer herself and she’s very interested in structure, so she will give me very feedback on that. Aria, who’s younger, might tell me what parts of the book are too dense. But their feedback is pretty global. They’ll tell me about the cover and what they like or dislike about it. All sorts of stuff.

What have you been reading lately?

I just read Jennifer Egan’s novel The Candy House. Every time she comes out with a new book, it’s a new narrative trend or trail, and I love that about her writing. I finished, after a long delay, Katherine Boo’s book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, about life in a Mumbai slum. I loved it. The Lives of Artists by Calvin Tomkins is a nice series of essays. Zadie Smith has a very slim essay collection that’s great, called Intimations.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

In India it was generally hard to buy books. My father made a deal with me that every birthday, I would get the number of books to match my age. So at 14, I got 14 books, and so forth. I read pretty widely. I read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984. Midnight’s Children was an immense book for me, as it was for tens of thousands of readers in India, and as I grew up, I read more of Rushdie’s work. Suketu Mehta’s book Maximum City, which I read as a young adult, was very influential, both in terms of style and the way he puts together memoir and history. I loved reading poetry too, and still do – and that’s how poems find their way into my books.

American voters seem poised to hand the Republican Party control of the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate as well, in November's midterm elections. The same goes for many state races, where polls show Republicans gaining ground.

Rising inequality is not a new phenomenon, and economic disparities have worsened dramatically under Republican presidents, owing in part to tax cuts for the wealthy under Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump.

Such an outcome could have profound consequences for American democracy, especially if it results in even greater degradation of the U.S. electoral system. Given the large number of 2020 election deniers running for offices in 2022 and the enormous power over how votes are cast and counted that victory would give them, this prospect is increasingly worrisome.

The Republicans' likely midterm victory is baffling. The GOP is now dominated by an extremist faction whose prominent members claim (or have claimed) not only that former President Trump won the 2020 presidential election, but also that climate change is a hoax, COVID-19 is a conspiracy and former President Obama was not born in the United States. While many Republicans do not say such things (and many who do probably do not believe what they are saying), the Trumpian extremists are in charge.

To be sure, many elected Democrats, including some on the party's far left, also make contentious statements. But they are far fewer and less prone to factual falsehoods. In any case, this election's outcome--like most--will probably be determined by those who are neither die-hard Trump loyalists nor left-wing progressives. So, the question becomes, why would swing voters consider casting their ballots for the current version of the GOP?

The answer, of course, is that voters consider economic issues their top priority. They are far more concerned about surging prices than they are interested in conspiracy theories about past or future elections. Some voters seem to believe that Republican presidents have a better economic track record, and cite current high inflation and fears of recession as evidence that Democrats are mishandling the economy.

The actual historic economic record, however, is strikingly different from what people think. And, while the Biden administration has made some policy mistakes, the U.S. economy is currently strong. It is remarkable that so many Americans believe that the economy is in awful shape when the unemployment rate is at 3.5%. The last time unemployment was lower than that, in May 1969, the Beatles were still together. Similarly, there have been almost two job vacancies per unemployed worker over the past year, signaling the tightest labor market since records began in August 2007. Typically, this ratio would be lower than 1 to 1.

Even though the probability of a recession in 2023 or 2024 is higher than usual because of the Federal Reserve's rapid interest-rate hikes, it is unlikely that the U.S. is already in one. Nor is it certain that a recession is imminent. Europe, on the other hand, is more likely to experience a severe slump, given that European economies are more vulnerable to energy prices than the U.S.

Nonetheless, voters are understandably angry about inflation. In September, the Consumer Price Index increased by 8.2% year on year. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was lower, at 6.6%. But this is of little comfort to Americans suffering sticker shock every time they go to the supermarket. The price of milk, for example, has increased by 30% since February 2020, to an average of $4.41 per gallon. It is no wonder that many voters fear a rerun of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and '80s.

As prices rise, so should incomes. It may be surprising to learn that, in the aggregate, U.S. nominal income has kept up with prices. But wages are not rising as fast, and the share of U.S. income going to the top earners has been growing, as it has for more than 40 years. Rising inequality is not a new phenomenon, and economic disparities have worsened dramatically under Republican presidents, owing in part to tax cuts for the wealthy under Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump.

If voters were concerned about growing inequality, it would make more sense for them to support Democratic policies. Over the past few years, Democrats have extended Obamacare, thus increasing the number of Americans who have health insurance, and reduced drug prices through the Inflation Reduction Act. They have also tried (and so far failed) to close the carried-interest loophole, raise taxes on the rich and establish high-quality universal preschool.

Such policies will run into a brick wall if the party of Trump prevails in November. And yet, despite their hostility to most voters' economic interests--and to democracy itself--the Republicans are still favored to win. That is inexplicable, and alarming.

While threats have proliferated from every corner of the political spectrum, the Department of Homeland Security has warned that the United States faces growing danger from “violent domestic extremists” emboldened by the Jan. 6 attack, and motivated by anger over “the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives” — a reference to Mr. Trump’s claims that have been echoed by Republicans and right-wing activists.

The impact of conspiracy-laden forums that helped fuel the Jan. 6 riot can be seen at congressional town halls across the country, where Republican lawmakers often field questions based on disinformation from angry constituents convinced that they are facing not just political opponents with whom they disagree, but evil actors who must be destroyed.

“As we wait to hear more, every single American needs to be lowering the temperature,” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said in a statement on Friday. “This is increasingly obvious: Disturbed individuals easily succumb to conspiracy theories and rage — the consequences are bloody and un-American.”

Political violence is hardly a new phenomenon. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, then the third-ranking Republican, was shot and gravely wounded in 2017 at a congressional baseball practice in a suburb of Washington, D.C., by a man with a grudge against Republicans; Mr. Scalise has said the presence of his security detail saved his life.

But since the attack on the Capitol, members of Congress have reported feeling increasingly vulnerable both in Washington and at home in their districts. The number of recorded threats against members of Congress increased more than tenfold in the five years after Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, according to figures from the Capitol Police, the federal law enforcement department that protects Congress, with more than 9,625 threats reported in 2021.

How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause. Learn more about our process.

Many of those threats have come from people with mental illness who are not believed to pose an immediate danger, a spokesman from the Capitol Police said, and even fewer of those threats result in an arrest or indictment.

But lawmakers have reported an increase in jarring confrontations that have sent them dipping into their campaign accounts to bulk up their security and minimizing their public footprint.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.At his annual conference with foreign international-affairs experts, Vladimir Putin ranted about cancel culture and gay-pride parades. He’s trying to unite the global right.Also: We’re keeping an eye on the story from San Francisco about a brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. The suspect, now in custody, was apparently looking for the speaker, who was not at home. Paul Pelosi was seriously injured. For more, read my colleague David Graham’s story on the assault, ”January 6 Never Ended.”And here are three more new stories from The Atlantic.
A political party unhinged from truth
The first minute of every phone call is torture now.
Culture WarriorFor nearly two decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin has held an annual event called the Valdai Discussion Club, named for the picturesque lake in Russia near where the first meeting took place in 2004. It’s a kind of Eastern Davos for influential foreigners—the Valdai website notes that this year, it included “111 experts, politicians, diplomats and economists from 41 countries”—who come for a few days of high-level discussions with the Russian political elite.The star of the show, however, is always Putin, who gives a speech and then sits for questions. You go to such an event knowing that the regime is going to have its say—but even under a repressive government, there is value in such things, as my friend Dan Drezner wrote when he attended in 2016. (I went to conferences with Soviet colleagues in the old U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, and yes, they were worthwhile; I managed to learn things and exchange a few ideas.)This year, Putin tailored his message to appeal to right-wing forces in the United States and Europe. The Russian president has been pursuing his own version of “Unite the Right” for some time now, but at Valdai, he didn’t even bother with the pretense of speaking to diplomats and public intellectuals. Instead, he baited Westerners into arguing with one another about the culture wars instead of opposing his criminal war in Ukraine.It’s not hard to spot the raw meat in his speech. “If the Western elites believe they can have their people and their societies embrace what I believe are strange and trendy ideas, like dozens of genders or gay-pride parades, so be it. Let them do as they please,” he fumed. “But they certainly have no right to tell others to follow in their steps.” Putin has been attacking gay and trans people in speeches for a while, but reprising his homophobic complaints at a place like Valdai is an indication that Putin is aiming for Western televisions, not an audience of international-affairs experts.There was, of course, the usual Soviet-era hangover in Putin’s discussions with the audience, including how the “so-called West” is seeking global superiority over the rest of the world. (To add “so-called” is a way of indicating that he is really speaking mostly of the decadent United States and its friends.) But Putin returned to the themes he no doubt hopes will show up in the Western media, including “cancel culture”—which is not exactly a source of anxiety in wartime Russia these days, but is of great interest to Western rightists:
And what is happening now? At one time, the Nazis reached the point of burning books, and now the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” have reached the point of banning Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “cancel culture” and in reality—as we said many times—the real cancellation of culture is eradicating everything that is alive and creative and stifles free thought in all areas, be it economics, politics, or culture.
The mention of Dostoyevsky might be a reference to one Italian university that canceled and reinstated a course on the Russian author. And it’s true that while Putin’s forces are engaged in mass murder in Ukraine, some American orchestras have become skittish about playing the “1812 Overture,” which is a celebration of a Russian military victory. (The Boston Pops play it every summer at Tanglewood and on the Esplanade; this year, they decided to add the Ukrainian national anthem just before it.) This is not “canceling” Russian culture, and Putin knows it—but the accusation makes great material for Putin’s useful idiots outside of Russia.(As an aside, Putin quoted from Dostoyevsky’s Demons to make his point, but in a wonderfully revealing moment, he added, “These were great thinkers and, frankly, I am grateful to my aides for finding these quotes.” Culture is important, but who has time to read those books?)And, of course, Putin exhibited his classic chutzpah, the insulting audacity the Russians would call naglost. “I am convinced that real democracy in a multipolar world,” Putin said, “is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or any civilization to follow its own path and organize its own sociopolitical system.” The Soviets used to say this too, but it’s especially galling to hear it as Russian forces continue their quest to erase an entire nation.There was much more, but for Americans, the most important point is that among the many ways Putin intends to pursue this disastrous war in Ukraine, he is staking at least some of his hopes on undermining unity in the United States and Europe. It’s not a bad bet; the Republicans appear poised to retake the House in November, and the putative speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has already had to walk back a gaffe in which he admitted that support for Ukraine might weaken (which I think is likely) once the GOP gets control.Putin would much rather have us arguing over gay rights than over how many more artillery systems to send to Ukraine. His comments at Valdai might seem like hyperventilation, Soviet-era blather, or even just plain silliness, but he knows what he’s doing. It’s up to us to make sure his culture-war-propaganda gambit doesn’t work.Related:
Germany is arguing with itself over Ukraine.
The war that Russia already lost
Police announced that they intend to charge the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi's husband this morning with attempted homicide and other felonies.
This year’s flu season in the U.S. is earlier and more severe than it has been in 13 years.
Several of Twitter’s top executives and board members—including the chief executive, the chief financial officer, and the general counsel—were fired shortly after Elon Musk closed his deal to purchase the company.
Deep Shtetl: Next week’s Israeli election could change the face of the country. Yair Rosenberg explains why.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry, who has written a biography of Lorraine Hansberry, reflects on a new production of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
The Third Rail: David French weighs in on the debate about intensive parenting.
The Books Briefing: Mary Stachyra Lopez asks why we keep writing about life after death.
(Alex Webb / Magnum)
Adult Halloween Is Stupid, Embarrassing, and Very ImportantBy Faith Hill
When I was a kid, fun felt really fun. Reading a book was completely immersive; chasing the dog around the yard was transcendent; running a fake restaurant with rocks as potatoes was the honor of a lifetime. The absolute peak, though, was Halloween. I can still recall bounding down the sidewalk in the cool October air, chuffed to be up late, drunk on the maniacal power that comes from knocking on strangers’ doors and demanding candy.
It’s not that, as an adult, I don’t do anything that could be called fun; it’s just that fun doesn’t feel quite the same as it used to. Getting dinner with friends is lovely. My little neighborhood stroll is nice. Standing around at a party and shouting over music to catch up with acquaintances is … fine. I just no longer experience the deep, whimsical joy that a rock potato could once bring.
Photos: Drought conditions drop the Mississippi River to historic lows
The restaurant industry’s worst idea
The climate art vandals are embarrassing.
Kathy Najimy, Bette Midler, and Sarah Jessica Parker as the three witch sisters of Hocus Pocus 2. (Disney+)
Read. Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, uses a fixture of Japanese life to demonstrate the difficulty of fitting into society’s tidy categories.Or try another pick from our list of short novels you can tear through in one weekend.Watch. Need to spice up your Halloween watch list? Try one of these 25 horror movies, ranked by scariness.If you consider yourself proudly anti-horror, turn to one of these 10 “scary” movies—we promise you can handle them.And there’s always Hocus Pocus, the magic of which you should never question.Listen. Two things are exciting about Rihanna’s new ballad from the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack: the sound of her voice, and the track’s ambition.Play our daily crossword.P.S.October is almost over, but before it’s done, let me suggest that it’s the perfect month to revisit (or discover) an album from 1994: the self-titled debut from a group that called itself October Project. The group split up soon after their follow-up album and tour, but October Project was a masterpiece. Beautifully structured songs, heartbreaking lyrics, and lead singer Mary Fahl’s vocals combined to make the kind of album you had not heard before and would never hear again. (The Boston Globe once said that Fahl has “a voice for the gods” that “can transport listeners to other realms,” and the Christian Science Monitor referred to her singing as “ethereal.”)But Fahl’s voice was only part of the magic that included vocals from Marina Belica, compositions by Emil Adler, and the poetry of the lyricist Julie Flanders. It’s not enough to say that the songs are about love; they are, but there is also bravery, yearning, sadness, desire, and anger in them. (The song “Eyes of Mercy” was written for the children of Bosnia, which was in the midst of war at the time: “Hush, close your eyes … The noise in the street will soon disappear,” Fahl and Belica sing, promising to “stay here with eyes open to watch over you.”) The album is hard to explain, so instead, just give it a listen while it’s still October.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The US's coming possible "Treasury QE," perhaps enacted sometime in early next year, may be more suitable for today's China than today's US, since China's central government has been much less indebted and much less deficit-spending than her US counterpart.

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The Bank of Japan's (BOJ's) good old and proud yield-curve-control (YCC) policy, which has pressed down the country's interest rates to help stabilize the domestic economy, has recently run into trouble.

Given the contractionary monetary policies now being practised by many other major central banks, coupled with the fact that Japan has just experienced the country's first inflation since 1991, the market widely expects that the BOJ will have to raise the interest rate anytime soon, resulting in the massive dumping of Japan's government treasuries in the market recently.

The resulting rise in interest rate in turn forces the BOJ to rely on YCC once again to press down the interest rate, using her tool of unlimited QE.

But as other major central banks keep raising their interest rates, Japan's YCC is becoming less and less effective.

Since the BOJ has announced her intention to keep buying irregularly Japan's government treasuries to prevent the domestic interest rate from rising, the Japanese Yen has kept depreciating quite massively in the global FX market in the past months, reaching a 32-year lowest level.

To prevent the Yen from further depreciating, Japan in last September alone had already spent US$ 19.7 billon to support her own currency, through the selling of US dollar to buy yen in the market.

But Japan doesn't have an unlimited amount of US dollar cash on hand.

It's estimated that the BOJ has more than US$110 billion in the US Fed's FIMA repo pool.

Before finishing spending this amount of cash, the BOJ will have to start selling her US treasuries to raise the necessary fund to support her currency's exchange rate.

Such non-trivial and persistent net-selling of US government treasuries by the foreign central banks has led Janet Yellen to worry recently about the quick loss of treasury liqudity in the market, leading to a potential free-fall-like crash of the US treasury market resembling that in Britain's gilt market recently.

Hence Yellen's suggested Treasury Buyback starting perhaps early next year.

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This Treasury Buyback resembles the Stock Buyback of a listed private corporation, which has positive profits and hence free cash flows to support the share prices of the corporation.

But today's highly-indebted and deficit-spending US Treasury may have to raise new funds, say through the issuance of short-term treasuries to lure funds currently stored in the Fed's RRP account to leave the Fed's balance sheet, both

(i) to support the US treasury market, and

(ii) to prevent the US commercial banks' reserves in the Fed from falling too quickly in the future.

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If QE isn't China's cup of tea, she may also consider Treasury Buyback.

Xi's new ruling government can also consider using QE and/or Treasury Buyback to support the IPOs in the country's stock markets in the coming years.

Doing so can help nurture much more new innovative domestic SMEs in China, in order to more successfully compete with the US in the coming decades.

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Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather’s credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, “Why did they stop using those?”If that happens, I’ll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. “Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus,” the federal agency advised. “Use disposable or digital menus.”[Read: Restaurants learned the wrong pandemic lessons]The QR-code menu—which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone—has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen.QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right––when everyone’s phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works––they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. “You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be,” Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, “but from there it’s easy to start checking texts and emails.” And wasn’t it already too easy?Research conducted before the pandemic suggests that, even if everyone resists the temptation to check an incoming text message, merely having a phone out on the table makes a meal less fun for all involved. In the 2018 study “Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions,” the social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. “We found that groups assigned to use their phones enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones,” Dwyer told me by email, “primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted.” The research team directed members of the phone group to use their device just once at the beginning of the meal—a setup “very similar to the nudge provided by QR codes,” Dwyer notes—and these subjects were free to use their phone as much or as little as they wanted thereafter. The control group kept their phone in a box.  QR-code menus reduce privacy, too, because diners who use them aren’t just communicating with the restaurant in question. Many of the codes “are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, ” the ACLU has warned. “In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior.”For restaurants, QR-code menus offer potential benefits beyond putting germ-averse patrons at greater ease. In the near future, rather than offer the same static selections to every customer, restaurants might deploy dynamic menus from which dishes disappear as the kitchen runs out. The prices of appetizers and entrees could also rise or fall to better match supply with demand. One day, I may have to explain to my nephew that before, say, 2030, people with peanut allergies would nevertheless see pad thai on their menu at the Cheesecake Factory; that Manhattan restaurants didn’t always use surge pricing to manage their weekday lunch rush; that certain chains didn’t previously charge iPhone and Android owners different prices.But I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus.[Read: Nothing is cooler than going out to dinner]What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?I say all this as something of a convert myself.As an introvert and a frequent solo traveler, I have eaten many happy meals alone with a smartphone in hand. Still, when pandemic restrictions deprived almost everyone of the ability to dine in public with one another, the loss helped me see the unique value of mealtime togetherness.During my domestic and overseas travels in the past couple of years, my heart has swelled with joy just watching patrons of far-flung establishments gather as in pre-pandemic times. Actually interacting with strangers has seemed more appealing than ever before. And more often than not, technology has played a part in my worst experiences—whether because making it a bigger part of hospitality so frequently comes at the expense of connections among people or because it malfunctions so much more often than ink on paper, annoying customers and staff alike. At one small-town bistro in Provence, I had no phone service and couldn’t access a digital menu even after pacing around a square in search of a signal. Eventually a waiter took pity on me and gave me his phone––so much for a touchless solution––but as I was figuring out what to get, text messages kept popping up on his screen, flustering both of us enough that eventually I just told him to bring me whatever he recommended.  I am not a Luddite. I know restaurants and bars change. And although the transition from smoke-filled to smoke-free was years shorter than I would have anticipated, I do not expect phones to go the way of the cigarette or for humans to socialize at every meal. But I cheer the fact that more bars, many of them speakeasy-style, are compelling patrons to check the phone at the door, and I hope different sorts of establishments attempt their own experiments.The next few years may determine to what degree the restaurant of the future embraces the digital era or deliberately operates as a respite from it, conserving the traditional focus on sociability, connection, and camaraderie. And despite QR codes’ growing ubiquity, their triumph is not foreordained. When you’re deciding where to spend your dining budget, consider rewarding restaurants that conserve the benefits of the analog world and punishing those that introduce technology in ways that detract from communal experience.

This has become the double-negative election.Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.[Read: Why this election is so weird]It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.[Read: What to expect when you’re expecting a Republican house]For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.

The stakes in the midterm election, now just 12 days away, could not be higher. In many ways, these midterms will determine the future of American democracy.

Trumpism is a clear and present danger to American democracy--but so is the corruption of our system by big money.

But let's be clear. There are two enemies of democracy in the upcoming midterms:

Election deniers, undermining Americans' faith that our system is unbiased.

And big money from corporations and the ultra-wealthy, undermining Americans' faith that our system is fair.

We must fight both.

Election deniers are dangerous enough, but big money is also poisoning our politics.

So far, the 50 biggest donors in the midterms have collectively pumped a record $1.1 billion into political committees and other groups supporting candidates. Most of this is going to Republican candidates.

Corporations are also setting contribution records. The total cost of the 2022 midterm elections is projected to exceed $9.3 billion, on track to surpass the inflation-adjusted 2018 midterm record of $7.1 billion.

As political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded years ago after examining in detail 1,799 policy issues before Congress, "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically nonsignificant impact upon public policy."

Why? Because moneyed interests have bribed lawmakers to do their bidding.

And the two are related.

If you're one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do?

Hopefully, you'll reject Trumpism. You'll see it for the snake oil it is.

But there's a chance you might just believe Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the system is rigged. And you might just be willing to throw out our current democracy in favor of dictator and his enablers who promise to bring power back to the people.

In other words, the overwhelming dominance of big money has created a deep cynicism about our democracy, which Trump and election-denying Republican candidates are exploiting to the hilt.

Those of us who love democracy must do more than vanquish Trumpism. We must also vanquish the corrupting influence of big money on our system.

Jean Salata is a climate optimist, enough to often elicit a gentle eyeroll from his wife, Melanie.
“I am very optimistic — and as I was joking last night — my wife would say that I’m delusional,” Salata said Wednesday.
Despite that optimism, Salata, CEO of one of Asia’s largest private equity firms, Baring Private Equity Asia, isn’t kidding himself about the complexities of the climate crisis. He knows it is a multifaceted, global issue that will affect the world his children and grandchildren inherit. But he decided that his best shot for making a real difference was to find a place with robust resources, deep talent, and the right leaders, and then just step back. And, he said, that is what he did.
“I’m optimistic that we can make a difference,” Salata said at the kickoff event of the new institute that bears his and Melanie’s name. “It’s not going to be easy. We’re not going to do it alone. We can galvanize all the resources that the University has to be a beacon to the rest of the world, almost like a call to action of why this is important and how we together are going to solve this problem.
Several speakers at Wednesday’s event, “The Future is Now: Harvard Takes on the Climate Challenge,” cited Harvard’s broad interdisciplinary breadth and leadership in higher education as reasons why it is imperative the University engage fully on the problem. They said the new Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability will fill an important role in the array of research, teaching, and other activities related to climate change taking place on Harvard’s campuses. Indeed, a recent report commissioned by James Stock, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability, concluded that despite the abundance of climate change-related courses, events, research opportunities, internships, and other types of engagement already offered at the University there remains a huge desire for more.
The Salata Institute, which Stock will head, seeks to play a unifying, catalyzing role that ultimately brings a University-wide focus to a massive, complex, and existential dilemma that has at times driven researchers, scholars, and students nearly to the point of throwing up their hands in resignation.

“I’m optimistic that we can make a difference. It’s not going to be easy. We’re not going to do it alone,” said Jean Salata at the kickoff event of the new Salata Institute.

Even that distress, however, points to the importance of an all-encompassing approach, according to Daniel Schrag, the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. During a panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon at Radcliffe’s Knafel Center, Schrag recounted a discussion with Matthew Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, about his freshman seminar, “Apocalyptic Grief: Love, Loss, and the End of the World,” and the importance of dealing not just with facts and policy but also with hope, despair, and other emotions in the face of war, pandemic, the climate crisis, and problems that at times seem ready to overwhelm us.
Schrag said that often during discussions of the geologic timescale of the changes we are making — it can take 100,000 years for carbon we’re putting in the atmosphere to be removed by natural processes — students nearly despair over the possibility of finding a solution. And, though every day we delay makes the problem worse, it is also true, he said, that it’s never going to be too late.
“It’s never too late for us to act on climate system. There’s no threshold beyond which we shouldn’t act. We have an obligation to keep working to solve this problem, whatever the impacts are,” Schrag said. “We have an obligation to continue to work on the social justice issues associated with this problem, whatever impacts happen.”
The panel, moderated by Jody Freeman, Archibald Cox Professor of Law and director of the Energy and Environmental Law Program, also included Caroline Buckee, professor of epidemiology; Bridget Long, dean of the Graduate School of Education; Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science; Robert Stavins, A.J. Meyer Professor of Energy & Economic Development and director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements; and Michael Toffel, the Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School.
Panelists described a range of different impacts in their disciplines, as well as activity going on at Harvard in those areas. Long said climate change is an important issue in America’s schools, both as a subject for instruction and a factor affecting learning: A 100-degree heat wave last spring struck while schools — including many without air conditioning — were in session. In addition, she said, schools are an important institution because, while decentralized, they stretch across America, penetrating every community. They are enormous consumers of electricity, cover some 2 million acres of land, and operate approximately 7 million buses, making the choices of education leaders important in enacting solutions.
While interdisciplinarity is important, the event also offered a snapshot of climate science and policy. The good news, Stavins said, is that governments around the world have committed to address the problem, with those representing 97 percent of global admissions signed onto the Paris Accord. The bad news is that their commitments to reduce emissions are nowhere close to what will be needed to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels, a threshold below which experts believe the worst effects of climate change can be averted. Efforts, he said, are turning to how to raise those levels of commitment.
Schrag and Oreskes said that the science has moved past the now-settled debate over the problem’s roots in fossil-fuel burning to advances in “attribution science,” which determine how much climate change influences weather events, and in forecasting what shifts to expect.
Though the scientific debate over climate change has been settled for some time, Oreskes said it isn’t over in many parts of the country. Misinformation and disinformation are still a problem, and another significant hurdle is the fact that fossil fuel extraction provides lots of jobs, and, though there are promises of retraining, people holding those jobs only have to look to America’s Rust Belt to see how well they were kept in the past.
“We can have the best science in the world, but if people don’t accept it and act on it, it doesn’t matter,” Oreskes said.
Stock, who offered closing remarks, said the new institute will be operating at a time of transformational change, both in the climate and in society, as energy-source transitions and other climate-related changes accelerate. The transition should be approached, he said, with an eye not just to problems, but also to the opportunities to address inequities in society.
“It’s hard to imagine how vast and consequential the next 30 years will be,” Stock said.

Updated at 9:35 p.m. ET on October 27, 2022Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Journalists have been declaring Twitter dead for nearly a decade. Observers see flagging user numbers or feel an amorphous, grim vibe shift and pounce, often prematurely. But this week, everyone is fretting and monitoring. Tonight, Elon Musk reportedly took control of Twitter, firing CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives, including Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust. There is, both inside and outside the company, an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal.Earlier, Musk wandered around Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, carrying a porcelain sink (for content purposes) while simultaneously trying to convince employees that he will not, as previously reported, cut 75 percent of staff. One current Twitter staffer told me that “the bootlicking [was] next level” as anxious employees greeted Musk in the hallway, unsure of his plans for his new company and their place in it.Outside the company, power users are mulling plans to bail, and sharing a report that Twitter is already on life support. My timelines are full of earnest eulogies for the platform or fears that it will turn into a 4chan clone now that Musk is taking the reins. People are waxing nostalgic, sharing greatest-hits threads of good tweets. Dara Lind, a reporter, summed it up succinctly, noting that the whole thing has “big, big last-night-of-camp energy.”It seems foolish to try to predict what a mercurial person like Musk—who loves to troll and to float ridiculous ideas in public—will actually do to the platform. But it is impossible to ignore that his tenure is an inflection point for the company and, perhaps, for the 2.0 generation of social-media companies, which have been battered by misinformation, a techlash, and changing online behaviors. Platforms and networks rise and fall and even die out naturally—just look at MySpace—but there’s not much precedent for what’s happening with Twitter: A culturally resonant and politically influential platform could, quite suddenly, flame out as the result of new ownership.Naturally, this has led me to wonder, and to ask those with experience at large platforms, what could Elon Musk actually do to kill Twitter?[Read: An unholy alliance between Ye, Musk, and Trump]Those I spoke with agreed that Musk likely couldn’t flip a proverbial switch to destroy the platform immediately. Any harebrained, Muskian idea for a new feature couldn’t get implemented overnight. One former senior employee I spoke with also argued that high-profile, controversial decisions (like the reinstatement of Donald Trump or Alex Jones) would certainly drive some people off the service but would be unlikely, on their own, to cause a mass exodus. They cited past mass-quit movements like #DeleteFacebook and #DeleteUber as historical analogues, suggesting that it’s pretty hard to get huge numbers of people to log off as part of a moral stand. That said, Twitter already appears to be hemorrhaging power users, and it’s unclear how much more the platform can take.But Musk could certainly kneecap Twitter via inept management. If he really does cut a significant chunk of Twitter staff, that would cause an organizational nightmare. Even if one assumes there’s bloat in the company, former employees argued that Twitter could still lose all kinds of institutional knowledge in the shuffle. That institutional knowledge would be useful in a crisis—the kind that social-media companies have all the time, such as when high-profile users go renegade, or the site goes down, or traffic unexpectedly surges. Those I spoke with were especially worried about losing site-reliability engineers and members of the internal trust-and-safety team, which handles content moderation.Even if Musk’s cuts don’t affect these departments, his ownership could possibly trigger a wave of resignations from employees in key infrastructural roles.“These sites—no matter how talented the engineering organization—are often held together by a series of fragile, legacy systems, the precise functioning of which is only truly known to a few people,” Jason Goldman, a member of Twitter’s early team, a former board member, and the company’s former vice president of product, told me. “Without even factoring in nefarious intent, it is easy to imagine scenarios where big mistakes happen because of the kind of disruption Twitter is about to endure. The exact nature of the mistake is impossible to predict, but the increased likelihood of a mistake happening is a reasonable assumption. And it’s more likely to be from some small error that compounds than it is from the large decisions that often end up in the spotlight.”Sources described a few nightmare scenarios that could legitimately hobble Twitter, which is still used by more than 200 million people every day:1. Outside hackers and/or hostile foreign governments focus their hacking efforts on Twitter. Because of the massive layoffs and org-chart chaos, Twitter is unable to adequately address the attacks, causing catastrophic breaches, loss of personal information, or extended outages.2. A stripped-down trust-and-safety team is unable to deal with government subpoenas or complex law-enforcement requests. A bare-bones team might, for example, accidentally assist outside efforts to identify anonymous dissidents and activists in foreign countries.3. The trust-and-safety team is unable to stop coordinated efforts from fraudsters orchestrating low-level scams. Similarly, a strapped trust-and-safety department is unable to combat or monitor child-sexual-abuse material, sex-trafficking efforts, nonconsensual pornography, and copyright violations.4. An inexperienced engineer pushes some buggy code and part of the site’s functionality goes down, but the people with expertise in that area of site reliability are not there to help restore it.5. Musk does indeed roll back Twitter’s content-moderation rules and reduces tools for monitoring and reporting abuse on the platform. As Kate Klonick, an associate professor at St. John’s University Law School who studies content moderation, argued recently, a lack of speech governance, or a dismantled trust-and-safety apparatus, will result in a bad product, less engagement, lower ad revenue for the company, and, ultimately, more radicalized communities.These scenarios are hypothetical, but they illustrate a truism about platforms: They do not run themselves. They are made up of humans, many of whom have complex jobs overseeing niche parts of the social network, much of which is unseen to the average user.One former trust-and-safety engineer for a large social network told me that many elements of the job that seem boring or straightforward are actually incredibly fraught, like how to define and take action on different kinds of spam. Trust-and-safety officers in charge of such efforts aren’t just dealing with Viagra ads or crypto-scam bots; they’re figuring out how to handle bulk messages from legitimate political organizers exploiting the platforms for mass messaging. As one person put it, there are good actors and bad actors and also “spammy but not necessarily malicious businesses trying to get you to buy things in between, and all those things can look very similar to machine-learning models.”[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]Those with trust-and-safety experience at the platform told me that a big percentage of the job is dealing with the messy edge cases that are difficult for a computer to decipher. Programs might be able to address specific product quirks if a user files a clear help ticket reporting an obvious problem. “But if I wrote in, ‘My account has been hacked because it “accidentally” liked a porn tweet on 9/11 and I’m U.S. Senator Ted Cruz,’ that’s going to be a lot for a computer to unpack,” Brian Truebe, a former Twitter trust-and-safety professional, told me over email.“A lot of things humans say and do are only easily interpretable/decoded by other humans,” he continued. “And when all speech is happening in a few places, those few places need more humans to review, not fewer.”Reactionary tech figures such as Musk like to imply that content-moderation teams act as a kind of thought police. But these teams largely work on protecting users’ privacy, complying with laws, or keeping the site from becoming overrun by the kind of spam that no human wants to encounter. “To really have a robust security-and-abuse team, you need a massive amount of actual humans to respond and filter things that need to be filtered out,” Southey Blanton, a systems technician who worked in trust and safety at MySpace, told me. Blanton said that cuts to his team led to a skeleton crew of moderators, who had to rely on imprecise AI tools to get rid of bots and spam—which led to many legitimate human accounts getting banned as well. “Overall, a social-media site is under attack, as well as being overwhelmed, basically 24/7, 365,” he said. “I am fully convinced that if Musk does what he is saying he will do, it will be an absolute shitshow.”Klonick echoed the sentiment. “Language and the meaning of language always evolves, but on the internet, that happens a billion times faster,” she told me. “And if what online speech governance does is manage the harms of how people communicate, it has to be constantly working and changing. It’s not like an oil change.”Even under leadership that values moderation, Twitter isn’t exactly known for peace and harmony. There are numerous reasons for this. The tech journalist Ryan Broderick suggested in his newsletter that “Twitter has never been able to deal with the fact its users both hate using it and also hate each other,” and that the platform’s architecture causes such frequent context collapse and infighting that its least aggressive and obnoxious users tend to leave or just lurk. If Twitter is struggling with this now, imagine the impact if Musk does decide to turn the platform into a maximalist speech Thunderdome. The truth that the anti-“woke” warriors refuse to acknowledge is that the economic success of platforms depends on thoughtful, swift content moderation that strikes a balance between open dialogue and chaos. This morning, in a letter to advertisers in which he used the bloodless, platitudinal language of a veteran social-media executive, Musk wrote that Twitter cannot become a “free-for-all hellscape.”Most of us understandably think of technology platforms in abstract terms. When tech titans like Musk or his text-message friends wonder what all those employees at Twitter are doing, they are, quite foolishly, looking at a social network as if it were a basic piece of machinery. “There’s often a supposition that sites like Twitter must work like a car; maybe they need some routine maintenance every year, but under the hood they mostly just work,” Goldman, the former Twitter VP, told me. But Twitter isn’t a car; it’s a living, breathing, dynamic entity.Living, breathing things do one thing quite reliably: They eventually die, for all kinds of reasons. They die of natural causes, or because of direct harm. They die because of unforeseeable events. Musk very well could kill Twitter out of malice or hubris, or through calculated, boneheaded decisions. But one possibility seems more likely than others. If Twitter dies at the hands of this billionaire, the cause is likely to be tragically banal—neglect.

Earlier this month, two young people visiting room 43 of the National Gallery in London shed overcoats to reveal T-shirts printed with the name of their activist group, JUST STOP OIL. Then they poured tomato soup across one of Vincent Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings, turned around, and glued their hands to the wall. “What is worth more: art or life?” one of the activists asked. “Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?”Then it happened again, and again. Last weekend, two activists associated with Letzte Generation, a German climate-activist group, splattered mashed potatoes across a Claude Monet painting of haystacks on display in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, and glued their hands to the wall. This morning in The Hague, another pair of Just Stop Oil protesters mixed it up: One activist appeared to glue his own head to Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, and the other poured tomato soup over him.If these protests outrage or upset you, well, that’s the point. As one of the German activists put it: “We are in a climate catastrophe, and all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a painting.” The protesters want to piss you off, because, hey, why aren’t you just as pissed off about the climate crisis? Climate activism has entered its shock—or is it schlock?—era.But set aside that somewhat sociopathic logic for a moment. There’s something poignant and undeniably resonant about the first two incidents in particular, in which activists raised in the 21st century attacked some of the most famous cultural heritage of the 19th century. Climate change, after all, implicates a particular vision of middle-class prosperity—a vision of paved roads, bustling factories, and coal-fired power plants—that took shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And the impressionists, who stood in sunlit fields and on Parisian balconies and captured the feeling of industrial modernity breaking into the world like a yolk from a shell, are as linked to that vision as the automobile. No wonder climate activists, the rebels of this century, are targeting them.That doesn’t justify the vandalism. Nor does it resemble how the activists themselves have talked about their actions. The aim of Just Stop Oil and Letzte Generation has been to wheedle people for not caring more about the climate crisis. Yet even if one were inclined to defend their tactics—and argue, for example, that the activists showed admirable restraint by choosing to defile paintings that were protected by a pane of glass—the protests still fail on their own terms.James Ozden, a researcher who runs the Social Change Lab, in London, is one of the most prominent early supporters of the protests. In a widely shared Substack post, he has argued that empirical evidence supports the approach—or at least does not suggest that it is harmful to the broader fight against climate change. Just Stop Oil epitomizes what he calls the “radical flank effect,” “where more radical factions of a social movement can increase support for more moderate factions.” He cites a handful of studies showing that radical flanks may increase donations, mobilization, and political support for the moderate arm of a movement.But when I looked closely at these studies, they didn’t seem to have much bearing on the soup protests. In an experiment from one of the studies that Ozden mentions, researchers asked online respondents about their views on animal cruelty, had them read accounts of a “radical” and a “moderate” activist group’s views and protest tactics, and then polled them on their views again. The moderate-group account described a campaign of peaceful mass protests against factory farming, and the radical-group account described something far more disruptive: Vegans had blocked traffic and “doused streets and meat-delivery trucks with the blood and entrails of animals slaughtered in factory farms … and in some cases advocated violence against animal farmers.” The online respondents said they thought better of the moderate factions after reading about the radicals. (This is, I should note, not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement of radical tactics.)Ozden also refers to a study from last year, which included an experiment comparing the effects of two different protests against racist policing. In the first, Black activists held peaceful marches and sit-ins; in the second, “a large portion of the African American community” refused to pay tickets and fines to the police. The study found that white people who identified strongly with being white were more likely to endorse concessions to the movement after reading about the latter protest. The lesson of both studies, according to Ozden, is that a mix of disruptive and conventional protest tactics can work better—in the sense of increasing support for the broader cause—than the standard activist repertoire of demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches can alone.But even if we stipulate that finicky social-science experiments have something to tell us about politics, Ozden isn’t making the point that he thinks he is. In the experiments described above (and in almost all of the others cited in his blog post), the “radical” activists directed their aggressive and even violent tactics toward the group causing their grievance. The animal-rights radicals targeted meat and leather producers, for instance, not elementary schools. The Black activists went on a ticketing strike against police departments, not the IRS. And the radical climate activists in another experiment advocated for violence and vandalism against fossil-fuel companies, as opposed to impressionist painters, museum curators, or members of the art-viewing public. (Even before the mashed-potatoes-on-Monet incident, Ozden wrote a follow-up post recognizing that the first protest may have lacked an “action logic”—a harmony of tactics and target that would help onlookers understand its nature and purpose. “I’m quite unsure if it was overall good or bad for the climate movement,” he wrote.)This lack of connective logic has irked many otherwise sympathetic climate advocates. “Regardless of whether you think protests like this are effective or not—and as a climate scientist, I’ve spent 30 years on this issue, so my sympathies are with the protesters, of course—I find it weird to target museums and nonprofits that help all of us,” Jonathan Foley, the executive director of the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown, told me. Foley is an influential environmental scientist who has studied the planet’s ecological boundaries and deforestation, but he also knows something about museums: From 2014 to 2018, he led the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, one of the largest science museums in the world. And the protests worry him.It’s true that the targeted paintings were protected by glass panes—but those panes aren’t designed to protect against seeping liquids (or whatever mashed potatoes are), Foley said. They keep out ultraviolet light and dust. Nor are museum-security staff prepared for the challenge of patting down every potential visitor for wayward appetizers, which is what insurance companies will now likely demand, he said. Furthermore, because staging protests at art museums has now happened a few times, he said, every art museum could see its insurance and security costs increase by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Museums may also put paintings—and even sculptures—behind the kind of boxlike cases that today protect only a few world-famous works, such as the Mona Lisa.“You’re hurting organizations that are often in debt, that are often struggling financially,” he said. And he rejected the connection that some academics have made between the art world and the wealth inequality that fuels climate change: “People say, ‘It’s fancy art for billionaires.’ But no, the billionaires keep their art in their homes, and it’s insured. You’re not hurting them by doing this. You’re hurting the public.” Climate activists and museum workers are “on the same team,” he insisted: They’re both trying to preserve a priceless intergenerational gift for the public. “I don’t understand, in the name of preserving something we cherish, damaging something we also cherish.”[Read: Just how safe is great art?]So we don’t know that the protests are effective, and we do know that they’re likely to cause financial problems for many museums. Here I will add my own concern: The activists look so silly. Food-throwers at the targeted museums attached their body to the wall under a painting, or to the painting itself. This required some anatomical logistics: Each activist had to remove a hidden tube of superglue from their pocket or bra, grasp it with one hand and twist off the lid with the other, then carefully squirt out the adhesive. It is awkward to describe; it is even more awkward to behold. There is no dignified way to squeeze a tiny bottle of superglue. Aesthetics matter in politics: Think of Che’s upward-and-to-the-left gaze on a T-shirt; a civil-rights protester’s head held high against police dogs in a black-and-white photo; or even the arc of a Molotov cocktail through the air. The soup-and-superglue movement fails an important test of youthful, radical politics: It does not look cool.The activists’ stated rationale—that they are calling out the public for caring more about art than the climate—is just as awkward. If you and I were standing next to, say, a tranquilized horse, and you punched the horse, I would probably say, “Stop punching that horse!” I might even try to get you to stop. It would be highly irregular for you to respond, “Why do you care about this horse more than climate change?” The answer is, I do care about climate change, but right now you are punching the horse. Leftists sometimes resent mainstream economists for imagining trade-offs where none actually exist. But that’s exactly what they have done here.And yet, the kids mean well, right? When you’re thinking about a problem as consequential as climate change, it’s tempting to grade for effort. Well, these activists really care about climate change, and it’s such an important issue … shouldn’t we listen to them? But the story of the past 40 years, the thing that the activists say they resent, is that politicians have claimed to fight climate change for decades and have met only occasional success. Getting angry about climate change is the easy part; actually finding ways to cut carbon emissions, to disrupt the fossil-fuel-powered economy that has dominated since Monet, is something else. The soup protests don’t make sense, aren’t obviously justified by bank-shot social science, and—worst of all—they look bad. Humanity is already doing enough to tarnish its precious inheritance. We don’t need extra help.

Traditional religiosity in America has rapidly decreased of late, especially among young people. Surveys consistently show that Millennials and Gen Z adults are less likely to declare any religious affiliation than previous generations, a phenomenon that is often called “the rise of the ‘nones.’” Some lament this as a symptom of societal decline; others celebrate it as a mark of progress.Less remarked upon, however, is the fact that Americans are still far more likely than people in other developed nations to practice religious or spiritual behavior—such as praying daily, even if they don’t follow a particular religion. And indeed, only about 18 percent of Americans claim to be neither spiritual (believing in the transcendent, or sacred) nor religious (holding beliefs within particular religious communities), according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. A solid 48 percent said they are both religious and spiritual, and another 27 percent said they are spiritual but not religious. (Only 6 percent are religious but not spiritual.)[Read: How will young people choose their religion?]The persistence of spirituality in the U.S. is quite baffling to many in my professional circle of social scientists. Social science has long predicted that our society is moving toward secularization as data, technology, and science replace beliefs in unseen forces.A closer look at recent research, however, makes this persistence a lot less surprising. Spiritual experiences—traditionally religious or otherwise—give us unique insights into life and positive benefits we simply can’t get elsewhere. Leaving aside debates about the underlying rightness of religious claims and the authenticity of various spiritual experiences, most people can find a greater understanding of life, higher well-being, and more love through an exploration of the transcendent.People often engage in religious and spiritual behaviors because they want to understand life’s meaning in a confusing world. They may have found that this insight is not available through their ordinary routines, or through worldly diversions such as entertainment and consumption. Many also seek a source of experiences that are “bigger” than what daily life can provide, such as a sense of awe, a feeling of oneness with others or the divine, and a loss of the boundaries of space and time.These kinds of experiences have a strong neurological basis, and a lot of evidence reveals that the brain reacts in particular ways to religious and spiritual encounters. The psychologist Lisa Miller, the author of The Awakened Brain, has done extensive work with her colleagues on the neurological mechanisms of transcendent experiences. She has found, for example, that compared with remembering a stressful experience, remembering a spiritual experience reduces activity in the medial thalamus and caudate—the brain regions associated with sensory and emotional processing—thus, perhaps, helping people escape the virtual prison of overthinking and rumination. By studying behavior in patients with brain lesions, other scholars have linked self-reported spirituality to activity in the periaqueductal gray, a brain-stem region associated with (among other things) the moderation of fear and pain, and feelings of love.[Read: What happens to the brain during spiritual experiences?]Memories of especially strong spiritual encounters—such as, for example, union with God—have been observed using electroencephalogram technology. In one experiment on Carmelite Catholic nuns, neuroscientists in 2008 compared the sisters’ brain activity when they were instructed to recall the most mystical experience of their lives versus when they were asked to remember their most intense state of union with another person. The mystical condition (compared with the control condition) induced a significant increase in theta waves in the brain, a pattern also associated with dreaming. In follow-up interviews, the nuns spoke of feeling God’s presence during the original experiences, as well as unconditional and infinite love.Religious belief is strongly correlated with searching for—and finding—purpose in life. Psychologists writing in 2017 in the journal Personality and Individual Differences measured 442 people’s stated level of religious commitment, and found it strongly correlated with their sense of meaning. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the strong association between having a sense of meaning and happiness, religion and spirituality have been shown to protect against depression recurrence and anxious reactions to mistakes.Several of my colleagues have shown the same pattern for physical ailments. Patients undergoing treatment of serious illness, commonly consigned solely to the medical domain, reported better quality of life if spiritual-care professionals (such as chaplains) were involved in their care along with doctors and nurses, compared with those whose spiritual needs were left out of their care plans.Religion and spirituality pursued in community with others can also lower people’s sense of isolation. This might be obvious insofar as people tend to practice religion in communities and there is a lot of evidence that it strengthens social bonds. But spirituality itself appears to potentially lower loneliness as well. Scholars in 2019 asked 319 people to evaluate statements such as “I have a personally meaningful relationship with God.” They found a strong negative correlation between spiritual affirmations and loneliness, leading to higher levels of mental health.Let me emphasize once again that none of the research I have surveyed here suggests which spiritual or religious practice—if any—is the right one, in terms of metaphysical verities. What it does say is that an exploration of life beyond the material world around us can be enormously rewarding, and yield all kinds of valuable benefits. Many readers likely already know this, and have long-standing practices in place, such as meditation or traditional religious observance. But if this is a new and tantalizing concept for you, yet you are unsure how to begin, let me offer three ideas.1. Start simply.I have a friend who is a professional trainer, specializing in clients who haven’t exercised in many years, or perhaps ever. I asked him what he tells them to do first. Is there a complicated battery of tests and a step-by-step protocol of exercises? No, he told me—for the first few weeks he tells them to do something easy and active for one hour a day. Usually, that means going for a walk.Similarly, when people ask me how to get started on a spiritual path, I don’t recommend beginning with a 30-day silent retreat in the Himalayas, sitting in the lotus position—the equivalent of trying to deadlift your body weight on your first visit to the gym. Rather, I recommend something easy and simple—like going for a walk before dawn without devices, with a mind and heart open to going where they will. Or if you have a distant memory of a religious practice—perhaps from your youth—you might just slip into a service and sit in the back, observing without judgment or expectation.2. Read more.A transcendental practice requires learning. Start reading widely from the wisdom literatures, including your own tradition, if you have one. In a similar spirit as my last piece of advice, I don’t recommend starting with the densest texts. Rather than trying to get through the Buddha’s discourses in the original Pali, try Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness. Instead of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, read The Way of a Pilgrim. In my own adult spiritual development over the past 40 years, these simple books have meant the most to me, and installed fundamental ideas and practices I have never abandoned.3. Let go.One of my greatest personal faults is the intellectual death grip I put on everything. My wife jokes that I might as well say, “I have data that strongly indicate that I love you.” This has always been an impediment in my spiritual journey, which often requires an intuitive attitude more than an analytic one—to allow myself, in a childlike way, to have experiences I don’t understand, as opposed to strangling them with facts and knowledge. I realize the irony in mentioning this, but scholars have shown that people who have a more intuitive reasoning style—who answer questions based on “feel”—reported stronger religious beliefs than those who were more analytical. This finding was independent of differences in education, income, political views, and intelligence. In other words, I have data that show that you should rely on data less.You won’t change your fundamental character or learning style. But you can strive to be more accepting of certain experiences at face value, as opposed to rejecting them until they can pass some level of empirical scrutiny.If you find yourself bereft of transcendent experiences and regret it, this essay might have sparked a little anxiety. Perhaps deep down you think you are missing a piece of cognitive software that allows one to receive spiritual signals. Many times in my adult lifetime, people close to me have said, “I envy you that you have those feelings.”But that is a misunderstanding of the transcendental journey. It isn’t a reaction to a feeling; it is a decision to seek new truths, notwithstanding any feelings or lack thereof. It is a commitment, not a mood; indeed, one of the things you transcend is your own feelings. It is like a Lewis-and-Clark expedition: Without knowing what you will find, or how discouraged you might be on a given day, you rise and move west. Little by little, the discoveries accumulate and you expand the frontier of your soul.

TAIPEI, Taiwan – Now that the Chinese Communist Party congress is over, we’re getting a clear picture of President Xi Jinping’s new team — the result of a broad purge of senior officials who might stand in the way of his rising economic nationalism and aggressive foreign policy. By surrounding himself with hard-liners and loyalists, Xi has consolidated control and accelerated the demise of the era of engagement in U.S.-China relations.

Over the past two weeks, as the party endowed him with the new title of “core” leader, Xi has purged his rivals and elevated his confidants and cronies in a manner even more drastic than most outsiders anticipated. Apparently, he coldly ordered the removal and humiliation of his predecessor Hu Jintao at the closing ceremony of the congress. Perhaps Xi did not want the ex-president to see that the new Politiburo Standing Committee of the CCP would no longer include two of Hu’s associates — Li Keqiang and Wang Yang — who were both evidently seen as less committed to Xi’s hard-line policies.

Additionally, two senior CCP officials who were key to the relationship between Washington and Beijing have lost positions in Xi’s Politburo: Liu He, who negotiated the “phase one” trade agreement with the United States during the Trump administration, and Yang Jiechi, who had been China’s top diplomatic interlocutor with the Biden administration until now.

On the rise are officials who have demonstrated their obedience to Xi or proved their hard-line credentials. Shanghai Party leader Li Qiang, who oversaw a disastrous two-month covid-19 lockdown, is positioned to be named premier, second only to Xi. China’s ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang, a hawkish “wolf warrior” diplomat, was promoted to the Central Committee and is rumored to be in line to become foreign minister.

Until now, the CCP attempted to maintain at least an appearance of checks and balances inside the top leadership by including members from different factions. But Xi has done away with that pretense. Nathan Law, a former Hong Kong legislator now living in exile in the United Kingdom, told me Xi’s consolidation of total power means less stability and less predictability.

“We are going to witness a more threatening, more unpredictable and more reckless regime in China,” Law said. “It brings more insecurity to the world.”

Other moves Xi made this week seem to foretell a more aggressive stance toward Taiwan. In his speech, Xi said China will “never promise to renounce the use of force” to reunify China and Taiwan. Congressional delegates amended China’s constitution to add a line promising to “resolutely oppose and contain Taiwan independence.”

“We just have to factor in that this more reckless government in Beijing may make more risky decisions in terms of military action to Taiwan, so the calculation of the risk has to be recalibrated,” Law said.

Even as President Biden reiterated this week that the United States does not seek conflict with China, his officials acknowledged that they are increasingly worried by Beijing’s behavior. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that the Chinese government had made a decision that the status quo across the Taiwan Strait “was no longer acceptable” and was speeding up its plans for reunification.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen issued an even more ominous warning in remarks Tuesday to the Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy here in Taipei.

“At this moment, democracies and the rules-based order are facing their greatest challenges since the end of the Cold War,” she said. “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is a prime example. It shows that authoritarian regimes will do whatever it takes to achieve expansionism. The people of Taiwan are all too familiar with such aggression.”

There’s a tendency in Washington to look at Xi Jinping as a weak leader because he is dealing with economic challenges, an unpopular zero-covid policy and an international backlash to his expansionism. But U.S. leaders shouldn’t lull themselves into this false comfort, Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, told me.

“Washington should clearly see they are dealing with a totalitarian regime with a powerful but insecure dictator, with a nationalist agenda to take Taiwan,” he said. “It’s time to develop an effective response to this.”

Xi’s accumulation of totalitarian power presents a heightened danger to his neighbors and the world. Like it or not, the opportunities for cooperation and engagement with Xi’s government will be few and far between in the years ahead. The best the United States and its partners can do is to remain clear-eyed about the nature of Xi’s China and plan accordingly.

So when patients with PEM say effort exhausts them and even worsens their condition, they’re viewed with suspicion — medically and culturally. Their complaints don’t mesh with societal expectations that we should exhort ourselves to push through. We boast of working through sickness. We celebrate how grit can deliver results.

That might also be one reason that medical doctors have often been skeptical of M.E. and PEM. They had to push through 16- or even 24-hour shifts during hospital training. No wonder many of the (too few) scientists and doctors working on M.E. have family members with the disease.

Over decades, patients devised their own approach to the disease, figuring out that resting and pacing after a crash provided the best hope for regaining more of their already limited capabilities. Many also practice resting, sometimes for days, before an important activity, to enable them to function better. Early in the pandemic, many of them urged long Covid patients to stop, rest and pace. Many long Covid patients told me that advice allowed them to finally make sense of their condition.

For these patients, rest often means lying in darkened, quiet rooms, often in pain, and even going to the bathroom can be an ordeal.

Many told me that before they understood their illness, they pushed themselves because that’s how things worked for them before or because that’s what doctors advised them to do. But then they crashed so hard that they never fully recovered.

And that’s what those protesters were risking that day. How do you protest when the very act is a dire threat to what little ability you have left?

These activists wanted to follow the playbook that AIDS activists used years ago, escalating civil disobedience. First, they marched a bit in front of the White House. They chanted. Then they lay down in front of the White House fence, in violation of their permit.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhile covering Donald Trump, multiple journalistic outlets published articles questioning his mental fitness. In Pennsylvania, Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is running for the Senate while recovering from a stroke, stoking debate between critics who say he is too sick to serve and supporters, including his wife, who say he is a victim of ableism. Some colleagues of Senator Dianne Feinstein similarly say that she is mentally unfit to serve due to problems related to her advanced age, a critique that others have characterized as ageist. Joe Biden’s age and mental sharpness are also prominent in discussions of whether or not he ought to run for reelection in 2024. How should voters assess the physical and mental fitness of politicians, and how should the press cover such matters?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteIn Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States fought abhorrent enemies. That made it harder to make sound decisions. In war, some people always lack the ability to distinguish between dissent and disloyalty; questioning any strategy or tactic being deployed against particularly odious enemies such as Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, or the terrorist militias that succeeded them felt to many like siding with evil.Hindsight lays bare our folly. Now that the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are widely regarded as failures, we can see that, instead of stigmatizing dissenters, we would have been better off encouraging dissent and using the best insights that emerged to improve upon failed approaches. That ought to be our posture in all foreign-policy matters, including the war in Ukraine. Instead, Vladimir Putin’s depravity and the immorality of Russia’s invasion are being treated as if they delegitimize debate in the United States about how America might best respond.On Monday, the 30 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to the White House urging President Biden to pursue direct negotiations with Russia about the war in Ukraine. The letter began by praising the Biden administration’s “commitment to Ukraine’s legitimate struggle against Russia’s war of aggression” and its determination to avoid direct conflict with Russia before noting “the risk of catastrophic escalation” and what they believe it implies.In their words:
We are under no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in engaging Russia given its outrageous and illegal invasion … However, if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine, it is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.
… We agree with the Administration’s perspective that it is not America’s place to pressure Ukraine’s government regarding sovereign decisions, and with the principle you have enunciated that there should be “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But as legislators responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars in military assistance in the conflict, we believe such involvement in this war also creates a responsibility for the United States to seriously explore all possible avenues, including direct engagement with Russia, to reduce harm and support Ukraine in achieving a peaceful settlement.
The letter was measured and reasonable, whether or not one agrees with the call for direct negotiations. It was met with substantive disagreements from people with different perspectives, as is appropriate. “There is moral and strategic peril in sitting down with Putin too early,” Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, argued on Twitter. “It risks legitimizing his crimes and handing over parts of Ukraine to Russia in an agreement that Putin won’t even honor.”[Read: 10 reader views on the varieties of anti-racism]But the progressive call for direct diplomatic negotiations also provoked the sort of wartime intolerance for dissent that can deprive nations of rigorous public discourse. For example, after The Washington Post published a news article about the letter, headlined “Liberals Urge Biden to Rethink Ukraine Strategy,” the CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis tweeted, “The Washington Post made this its lede story. A small minority of the caucus spoke with their dreadful opinion and the Post is rooting against Biden and Ukraine and democracy. Darkness looms.”While I dispute that the letter from lawmakers was “dreadful,” I don’t begrudge Jarvis that opinion. But he is wrong to conflate a call for direct diplomacy with “rooting against” democracy, and casting mere reporting on the letter as “rooting against” democracy is as pernicious as it is preposterous. The press ought to report wartime dissents from Congress prominently.Bill Kristol tweeted this about the letter:
Enough! The leftists—or if you wish progressives—who signed this letter are not ‘liberals.’ It's time finally to reclaim this honorable term. Liberals believe in liberty and the rule of law—and in fighting for liberty, not appeasing brutal dictators.
But there is nothing illiberal or ant-iliberty about urging diplomacy, particularly while clearly stating that the aim of negotiations is trying to determine “if there is a way to end the war while preserving a free and independent Ukraine.” Contra Kristol’s characterization, the letter explicitly values Ukrainian liberty and implicitly favors ongoing fighting against Russia. His claim that the letter favors “appeasing brutal dictators” flagrantly misrepresents it.Unfortunately, similarly inaccurate and corrosive attacks were everywhere on social media. On Tuesday, the Congressional Democratic Caucus withdrew the letter, saying it had been written in July and that a staff error was to blame for its release. Instead of a debate focused on the substantive merits or demerits of direct U.S. negotiations with Russia, officials and pundits are now focused on discussing the timing and politics of the letter. Having seen even carefully qualified criticism met with flagrant demagoguery and vilification, lawmakers averse to being pilloried and misrepresented may shy away from subjecting U.S. foreign policy to the scrutiny every high-stakes matter warrants, even when existing policy is correct.The last time the U.S. foreign-policy establishment successfully suppressed dissent by stigmatizing criticism of their approach to a war, the war itself was a catastrophe of historic proportions, and it set the stage for a political backlash that likely culminated in Donald Trump’s election as president. Have they learned nothing from recent history?An Underreported CatastropheThe Guardian editorializes on a conflict that is seldom discussed in the United States outside of the Ethiopian diaspora:
Millions displaced. Brutal attacks on civilians. A soaring death toll. Deliberate attacks on infrastructure. And little hope of a negotiated exit. Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region is enduring probably the most brutal and deadly war being waged in the world today. Tens of thousands of combat fatalities have reportedly followed the failure of a ceasefire in August. Yet the world is paying little heed.
Assessing the true toll is impossible given that most communications have been cut off. Researchers at the University of Ghent have estimated that between 380,000 and 600,000 civilian lives alone have been lost, with 30,000-90,000 killed in direct attacks, but most dying for lack of food or healthcare. In a region already beset by hunger, but which had made some significant strides, food has become a weapon of war. Nearly half the population is in severe need of food aid. There is clear evidence of war crimes by all parties, including widespread sexual violence, although civilian casualties are believed to be overwhelmingly Tigrayan.
On Compelling and Forbidding SpeechAs Republican legislators in various states sought to ban public schools from teaching or promoting what they typically called “critical race theory” or “divisive concepts,” I published an article explaining an insurmountable challenge for anyone trying to craft such legislation: “Any prohibition broad enough to exclude pernicious dogma risks prohibiting or chilling legitimate instruction,” I wrote, “while any bill so narrow as to avoid a chilling effect is unlikely to effect significant change. The needle is extraordinarily difficult to thread.”Similar logic applies to attempts to compel speech, as Tim Shampling points out in a City Journal article about DEI statements:
Defenders of DEI statements often ask how such a practice can be problematic. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are positive values, the argument goes; what kind of person would not support them? The implication is that the DEI statements contain an affirmation of self-evident goods to which no good person could object, obvious truths beyond the realm of reasonable contestability. Being asked to testify to one’s support for DEI could give no pause to any sensible person’s conscience. But if the statements are platitudinous and banal, why have they become so popular? Applicants for a position aren’t required to profess allegiance to happiness or good times or kindness or doing the right thing. Departments don’t issue statements acknowledging that the sun rises in the morning, that one should provide for one’s children, or that it is good to try the best one can …
… The more obvious interpretation is that DEI statements have been adopted across academia with such passion and pervasiveness not because they are empty vessels, but because they do express a particular value system and political outlook. DEI statements demonstrate, and align universities with, a way of looking at the world fashionable among faculty and (especially) administrators. But if these professions are meaningful at all, then they curtail academic freedom and abet already-rampant discrimination in academic careers. When demanded in the context of hiring and promotion, DEI statements either serve to downgrade and exclude candidates who are honest about holding views that dissent from progressive orthodoxy on race and gender, or they enjoin applicants to mislead about their views and violate their consciences …  Constrained professions of belief have the tragic quality of being most effective at keeping out people with integrity, people unwilling to distort or lie about their beliefs to get ahead. But this is exactly the kind of person whom academia should prize.
Better to reject all top-down attempts to impose sameness of thought on educators.[Read: What lies beyond the L.A. City Council debacle]Desperate Times Call for Mellow MeasuresIn the newsletter Sex and the State, Cathy Reisenwitz argues that loneliness is self-reinforcing:
Being starved of something often makes it harder to get enough of it. If I go into a social interaction starved for connection people often pick up on it. Research shows that humans are really good at picking up on subtle cues about the other person’s emotional state.
Any awkwardness, lingering eye contact, nervousness, etc. can betray that I’m lonely. People tend to want to avoid lonely people. They are often afraid a lonely person will violate their boundaries, afraid that the person is lonely because they suck, afraid that loneliness is contagious. Often, all this is even harder because it’s operating subconsciously. Neither I nor the other person might even be consciously aware that I’m lonely.
The vibes will simply be off.
Reisenwitz goes on to offer advice for overcoming loneliness in spite of that dynamic, a task eased by the fact that, in her telling, making connections tends to be a self-reinforcing phenomenon too.While accepting an award at the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, the economist Glenn Loury delivered the following remarks about the limits of what academics can know:
Social science can capture only a part of the human subject. Our methods project human beings onto those materialistic dimensions that we can then try to fathom. That is, as the objects of scientific inquiry, human subjects must ultimately be treated as mechanisms. Yet, in so doing we social scientists leave out that which most makes a person human. We leave out the soul—what some derisively refer to as “the ghost in the machine.” Still, my fundamental conviction is that we human beings are not defined by our desires at a point and time. Indeed, I even deny that we are defined by our biological inheritance. “God is not finished with us when he deals us our genetic hand,” is how a poet might put it, and poetry has its place. I claim that, as spiritual creatures, the full extent of our humanity transcends that which can be grasped with the deterministic vision that an economist, a sociologist, or a psychologist brings.
If this is right, then it is crucial to grasp the implication that the behavior of freely choosing, socially situated, spiritually endowed human beings will in some essential way be indeterminate, unpredictable, and even mysterious. For, when human agency is driven by what people understand to be meaningful—by what they believe in—then the intersubjective processes of social interaction and mutual stimulation that generate and sustain patterns of belief in human communities become centrally important. But such processes of persuasion, conformity, conversion, myth construction, and the like are open-ended and only weakly constrained by material conditions.
What we believe about the meaning of life powerfully shapes how we act in a given situation, but these beliefs themselves are not deducible as a necessary consequence of our situation. We can always agree to believe differently or more fervently, particularly if those with whom we are socially connected are undergoing a similar transformation. Thus, religious revivals and reformations can sweep through our ranks and change our collective view of the world virtually overnight. We can be moved to make enormous sacrifices on behalf of abstract goals. We are ever capable—as the Czech playwright-turned-politician, Vaclav Havel, has said so well—of “transcending the world of existences.” Put differently, that “ghost” doesn’t dwell within the human “machine.” Instead, it emerges from the intersubjective fervor of the crowd.
All of which is my way of suggesting that “epistemic modesty” is an indispensable virtue for those who would take up the vocation of social scientist.
That’s all for today––see you next week.

Discussion of the widening class divide tends to focus on money –the top 1 percent’s share of total income, trends in median income, wealth inequality, intergenerational mobility, and so on. The preoccupation is understandable: Economics is preeminent among the social sciences in prestige and influence, and economists naturally look to economic indicators. But if you examine contemporary socioeconomic inequality through a purely economic lens, you will fail to see the true depths of the problem.
Why? Because although the data show top incomes growing considerably faster than the rest during recent decades, they show median income up as well. Further, the best estimates reveal that poverty has declined sharply. When you translate dollar figures into the stuff that money buys, it becomes clear beyond serious dispute that material living standards have continued to rise, for ordinary people as well as elites. People live in much bigger homes, have many more clothes and other personal possessions, have access to much better food, travel more, and of course enjoy all kinds of goods and services – from smartphones and video games to cochlear implants and mRNA vaccines – that previously weren’t available at any price.
So looking at inequality as just an economic phenomenon leads you to a fairly mild assessment of the impact on human well-being. Yes, progress is skewed toward the top, but still there’s been continuing progress overall.
The class divide, I believe, is much more troubling than that. Its reemergence since the 1970s isn’t just a matter of lopsided progress; it marks a great U-turn away from progress. As I wrote in an earlier essay a few years back:
Outside a well-educated and comfortable elite comprising 20-25 percent of Americans, we see unmistakable signs of social collapse. We see, more precisely, social disintegration—the progressive unraveling of the human connections that give life structure and meaning: declining attachment to work; declining participation in community life; declining rates of marriage and two-parent childrearing.
In this essay I want to focus on the root causes of the new class divide – and what they tell us about our prospects for a more inclusive future. My take, alas, is a sobering one: The conditions of mass affluence push strongly in the direction we’ve been going down, and they constitute formidable barriers against pushing back in a more inclusive direction through public policy.
Progressives with egalitarian sensibilities are strongly inclined to see the bad effect of inequality as the result of some equally bad cause – namely greed and selfishness enshrined in regressive public policies. At the extreme this can devolve into silliness like “every billionaire is a policy failure,” but more sensibly there’s a focus on specific policy shifts like tax cutting, hostility to unions, and financial deregulation. As a co-author of The Captured Economy, I’m here to say that upward redistribution through policy has absolutely been a contributor to rising inequality. But it’s important to see why policies shifted this way and not in the opposite direction. It’s my contention that deep, strong currents were pushing political economy away from inclusiveness.
In my view, the fundamental reason for the inegalitarian turn – not just in the United States, but throughout the advanced economies – was a qualitative downward shift in the leverage and status of ordinary people. The contributions that ordinary workers are able to make to the organized division of labor are simply less important than they used to be, and as a result those workers and their families have suffered a loss of collective power and a decline in social status.
Economists point in the right direction when they talk about “skill-biased technical change” and “declining relative demand for less-skilled labor.” But their technocratic terminology portrays the issue as dollars on the margin, when really, it’s existential.
Back in the industrial era, technological and economic progress required the mass mobilization of huge inputs of physical and routine clerical labor. As I’ve written previously, this was capitalism’s original sin: All the amazing new machines and their miraculous productivity, all the new goods and services now available, all the immense wealth heaped up in such astonishingly short order, rested on brutal, dangerous, dirty work that broke bodies by the millions, whether in an instant or over decades.
The dependence of progress on domination and suffering was a source of profound conflict and instability. Workers everywhere pushed back against the harshness of factory work, from spontaneous individual protests through absenteeism and occasional sabotage to worker solidarity, unionization, and strikes, all the way to a global socialist movement that sought to do away with the wage system and private property altogether. Revolution and totalitarian rule in the name of socialism killed a hundred million people; the nuclear showdown between the United States and the Soviet Union threatened the fiery destruction of civilization. It’s hard to get more unstable than that.
Yet this curse also brought with it a great blessing. The need for strong men to work the machines, stoke the furnaces, dig the coal, and load and unload the cargo created unprecedented opportunity: an escape from age-old rural poverty and a slow but steady climb toward material plenty. As the ongoing application of technology and organization led to fantastic increases in output per worker, competition drove wages upward to reflect that rising productivity – and the successes of the labor movement and social democracy in the most advanced economies contributed further uplift.
As the 20th century unfolded, capitalism in the Global North offered something entirely unprecedented: mass inclusion of ordinary people in the promise of a better life. What they enjoyed was not what we would call high quality of life; the working class did not “live wisely and agreeably and well.” But they did experience rapidly rising material living standards; they did enjoy comforts and conveniences that in earlier days would have made kings jealous. As Adam Smith once wrote, “The rich man glories in his riches,” while “the poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty.” The rise out of poverty not only reduced physical suffering, it also swelled pride and self-respect.
Furthermore, the dependence of progress on mass contributions of ordinary people gave them something more than a piece of the growing pie; it also gave them power and status. Everyone knew that the magnificent machines of industrial capitalism would not deliver their bounty all on their own; they needed workers to tend and maintain them. Everybody knew as well that workers’ willingness to do this vitally necessary work, their consent to endure the dangers and domination they experienced, could not be taken for granted. The risk of a strike was always hanging in the air; the risk of revolution could not be dismissed. The landmark 1950 contract between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, which guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments and productivity-based wage hikes, was referred to (by a young Daniel Bell, then writing for Fortune magazine) as the “Treaty of Detroit” – a turn of phrase that recognized the clout that the working class now possessed.
To quote myself:
At the zenith of working-class fortunes, the combination of law and collective action gave labor leaders powers that extended far beyond the factory floor to matters of macroeconomic and geopolitical significance. This capacity to affect domestic politics and international relations further bolstered the position and influence of the working class. When steel or autoworkers went on strike, the resulting disruptions extended far beyond the specific companies the unions were targeting. Labor unrest in critical industries affected the health of the overall U.S. economy, and any threat to the stability of America’s industrial might was also a threat to national security and international order.
This considerable power translated directly into status. As Yuval Noah Harari has written:
In 1938 the common man’s condition in the Soviet Union, Germany, or the United States may have been grim, but he was constantly told that he was the most important thing in the world, and that he was the future…. He looked at the propaganda posters — which typically depicted coal miners and steelworkers in heroic poses — and saw himself there: “I am in that poster! I am the hero of the future!”
Workers as heroes, workers as the linchpin of the future: Aaron Copland captured this majestic vision in four stirring minutes of brass and percussion, the title of his piece inspired by a recent speech by Vice President Henry Wallace on “The Century of the Common Man.”
The leverage and power of the working class, and its heroic image, were further buttressed by the requirements of war. Just as with industrial production, industrial warfare depended upon the mass mobilization of strong young men willing to place their bodies on the line. From the levée en masse of the French Revolution through the enormous battles of World War II, governments were able to draw on the appeal of nationalism to recruit and command mass armies whose capacity to project power dwarfed that of ancien régime militaries. And as documented by John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth in Forged Through Fire, the dependence of modern states on masses of young men was a major force for democratization: Manpower ultimately translated into voting power.
But just as working-class power had brought about the postwar golden age of social democracy and unprecedented inclusiveness, the continued progress of capitalist development worked to systematically dismantle that golden age’s foundations. Through an ongoing combination of automation and globalization, productivity growth outstripped growth in demand for heavy industries even as supply began to move abroad to take advantage of cheap foreign labor. Employment shifted from manufacturing to services, and the technological frontier shifted from the smokestack sector to microelectronics, telecommunications, business services, and health care. The new high-tech industries employed both offshoring of labor-intensive operations and domestic outsourcing of noncore functions to independent service providers to keep their own payrolls lean and skewed toward white-collar “knowledge workers.” In sum, technological progress weaned itself from dependence on large cohorts of ordinary workers in the home markets of the frontier economies.
From the standpoint of purely physical wellbeing, this development was a humanitarian blessing of the first order. Old-style factory work was brutal and dehumanizing; no one should wish it back. But in a grim irony, this physical deliverance ended up exacting a heavy spiritual toll. The result was a new class divide that was a mirror image of the old one: Just as industrial class conflict sprang from progress’s dependence on mass labor, class conflict in the information economy developed out of the growing disconnect between progress and ordinary workers. In the old class war, workers struggled mightily in the face of domination and oppression; today’s workers drift passively in the face of growing irrelevance.
There remained plenty of work for ordinary people without specialized skills, at least when labor markets operated without too much friction. (In Western Europe, stronger protections against dismissal led to weaker incentives for hiring, so deindustrialization was often accompanied by persistently high unemployment.) But no longer were ordinary workers massed at the frontiers of technological change; they were now consigned to the economic hinterlands, providing services that may embellish comfort and convenience but are in no way of comparable social significance to the blue-collar work of old.
Ordinary workers thus lost a hard-won source of great spiritual wealth: their sense of pride and self-respect born of the generally acknowledged necessity and importance of their work. No current-day Diego Rivera is painting boldly colored murals of fast-food workers, Walmart greeters, and delivery drivers striking heroic poses.
Because of the changing nature of work, ordinary workers lost their cohesive identity and sense of solidarity, and thus much of their capacity for collective action to exert power. The labor movement was a product of the unique conditions of the factory: large numbers of workers in close proximity, working with vast and immensely productive accumulations of capital, subordinated to harsh and authoritarian management, and doing exhausting, debilitating work that resulted in frequent maimings and deaths. Workers’ physical concentration facilitated organizing and common action; the oppressiveness and danger of their work gave them the solidarity of the foxhole and the willingness to fight back even against terrific odds; the accumulations of capital made employers especially vulnerable to concerted work holdups.
By contrast, what has taken the place of the industrial working class today – what the sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls the “would-be working class – the individuals who would have taken the industrial jobs we used to have” – is now widely scattered among service occupations in relatively small-scale establishments without a great deal of heavy, expensive, specialized equipment: think wait staff, cleaners, retail attendants, and drivers. And while the work may be tedious and demeaning, it’s rarely life-threatening. It’s no wonder that workers’ sense of a cohesive identity, common enemy, and high stakes at issue has faded, and thus that their ability to engage in effective collective action has diminished. In the United States, this has played out with the gradual collapse of unionization in the private sector – a trend that dates back to the early 50s (when U.S. union density peaked) as unions struggled to organize in the expanding service industries. In Europe, unions remain larger and stronger than in the U.S., but the trend has still been in the same direction: union density down, days lost to strikes down.
Ordinary workers also lost the dream of a brighter future. Although the secure, high-paying factory jobs of midcentury were never the norm for blue-collar workers, they were numerous enough to be aspirational. Members of the working class were thus buoyed by the possibility of advancement and “making it” to a standard of living indistinguishable from middle-class standards. Nothing comparable exists in the contemporary information economy. Working life no longer seems to hold the possibility of building toward anything; aspirations for arriving on easy street have given way to a never-ending struggle to keep one’s head above water.
Material living standards continued to rise: more spacious homes, better food, more travel, more captivating entertainment. But the improvements paled in comparison to the skyrocketing ascent in a generation or two from direst poverty to decent comfort. And as a result, they failed to compensate for what was being lost: nobody “glories” à la Adam Smith in their flatscreens, year-round fresh fruit, and Spotify accounts.
Meanwhile, the changing character of the elite in postindustrial society served to deepen the spiritual wounds inflicted on everybody else. As technological progress outgrew its dependence on mass labor, it came to depend on a new mass elite of managers and professionals. Such occupations only constituted about 10 percent of the U.S. workforce back in 1900; they account for 35 percent today. When the elite was tiny, those outside of it took comfort in their numbers; there was no shame in being an ordinary working stiff, and plenty of basis for pride. But as the industrial working class dissolved and the new elite bulked up, being outside the “meritocracy” started to feel more and more like failure.
With the mass of ordinary workers no longer as important to the health and progress of the system, and a new mass elite empowered to push society forward, it seems unsurprising that politics has likewise shifted toward favoring elite interests over worker interests. That’s a whole story in itself – how the socioeconomic marginalization of ordinary workers’ contributions under conditions of mass affluence has been exacerbated by their political marginalization. And that will be the subject of my next essay.
But the roots of capitalism’s crisis of inclusion lie in the changing nature of work. In a pattern we will see play out again and again, as capitalism crossed the threshold of mass affluence it caused people to shift their attention from physical welfare to spiritual welfare – and then proceeded to create conditions that made the newly salient spiritual values especially hard to attain. Economic progress delivered the workplace from physical discomfort and danger, but in so doing robbed work – for most people, anyway – of its greatest spiritual satisfactions.
The post The declining leverage and status of ordinary people appeared first on Niskanen Center.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it every week.On Monday, the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its first national “report card” since the beginning of the pandemic. The unmistakable conclusion: Student achievement plummeted during COVID. The survey of fourth and eighth graders found that math scores fell in nearly every state. No state showed significant improvements in reading. The lowest-performing students saw the largest declines in achievement.So my follow-up question is: How much of this historic decline was the direct result of school closures?I’ll begin to answer this extremely fraught question by stating the obvious: School closures were not the sole pandemic disruption to kids’ lives that might explain a decline in achievement. Students also suffered from sick and absent teachers, the death or severe illness of parents and other family members, and just a general loss of focus during a stressful period.Several mainstream news organizations took pains to say that the latest NAEP study offered only murky evidence that school closures were the biggest culprit. For example, Texas opened its schools relatively early but still saw declines in math scores in line with the national average. California opened its schools relatively late, and its students’ scores declined less than the national average. According to one school-tracking site, Los Angeles schools stayed closed longer than those almost anywhere else, and it showed surprising gains in eighth-grade reading proficiency. (The district’s superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, credited “strong attendance for online courses and summer classes,” according to The Wall Street Journal.)But other studies have established a clearer connection between school closures and learning loss. A 2022 paper published by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research concluded that the shift to remote or hybrid school during the pandemic “had profound consequences for student achievement.” Using testing data from more than 2 million students in 10,000 schools across the country, a team of researchers from CALDER, the Northwest Evaluation Association, Harvard, and Dartmouth College found that learning gaps in math “did not widen in areas that remained in-person.” But they found that, especially in high-poverty areas, students lost more ground the longer they were remote. “If the achievement losses become permanent,” they wrote in their conclusion, “there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality.”A 2022 Ohio State University study of declines in student achievement from March 2020 to spring 2021 came to a similar conclusion. Districts with fully remote instruction saw declines in test scores “up to three times greater than districts that had in-person instruction for the majority of the school year,” the researchers wrote. Once again, the declines were particularly stark for lower-achieving and minority students. Finally, a forthcoming paper from several economists, including the Atlantic contributor Emily Oster, finds that in-person learning softened the blow of the pandemic on achievement scores. Comparing students within commuting zones, those who attended school fully in person saw smaller declines in pass rates on standardized tests than those who went remote. Once again, the penalty for moving away from in-person learning was greatest “for districts with larger populations of Black students.”Advocates of school closures make the case that in the fog of pandemic, these policies were made to save lives. Doing the brute utilitarian math of death versus learning, one might argue that a decline in test scores was a fair price to pay for avoiding deaths.But school closures were not a universal response to the pandemic. Schools remained open in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy in late 2020 and early 2021. (Some European schools were later closed briefly during the height of the Omicron wave.) Compared with their counterparts in the U.S., European policy makers seemed to place more faith in reports that schoolchildren did not play a major role in community transmission, and in evidence from Ireland, Singapore, Norway, Israel, South Korea, and North Carolina that young children were less likely than adults to get severely sick from COVID.Opponents of school closures like to lay the blame at the feet of Washington bureaucrats such as Anthony Fauci. I personally wish that Fauci had been much clearer about the relative risk of COVID to children and the wackiness of cities that opted to open bars while they kept their schools closed. But remote learning was a surprisingly popular policy that never polled as horribly as its critics wanted it to. An Axios poll of roughly 2,000 parents in January 2022 found that a majority still said that “schools should move to remote learning to prevent COVID exposure.” Other polls have shown that low-income and minority parents were the most likely to support remote learning. Black and Latino parents were less likely than white parents to say that schools should re-open in the first year of the pandemic. According to one CDC survey, more than 80 percent of Latino parents in 2020 said they would prefer to homeschool their children until a vaccine is available.Now for the good news: Although learning loss is terrible, not all bad things are permanently bad. According to the latest COVID-19 School Data Hub report, Mississippi students have completely recovered in their reading scores, and an Ohio study found that the current pace of recovery in reading would soon eliminate that state’s learning loss. Matt Barnum, an education writer with Chalkbeat, reported that younger elementary-school students across the country have made up ground in the past year; however, older students are recovering more slowly, and gaps by students’ race and family income are still larger than before the pandemic.We can’t change the past. But we can learn from it. Democrats’ disproportionate support for school closures was very likely an unforced error that has contributed to worse achievement gaps between rich kids and poor kids, and that has set children back several years in math classes in which they were already struggling to demonstrate proficiency. I believe the school closures were a mistake, not only because of their direct effects on achievement but also because of the message they’ve sent about the blue cities and states where closures were concentrated. To steal a vibe from Matthew Yglesias: Democrats shouldn’t just want to be the party of government. They should want to be the party of government that actually works. With little evidence that school closures saved lives and ample evidence that they hurt kids, this is a policy that failed. To make government work better next time, we have to see reality clearly.

It sort-of feels as if the pandemic is at least partially over, or at least sliding into the next phase where COVID is more endemic, like the flu. It’s something we have to deal with every year in the background, but life goes on as normal. The problem is – the pandemic is not over.

After the initial phase of the pandemic, prior to the vaccine, we started to tamp down new cases and reduce the severity of infections through better treatment and later through vaccine protection. Then the variants started hitting giving us additional waves of infection, often evading earlier immunity. The WHO warns that we seem to be getting into the next phase of the pandemic, marked by swarms of multiple subvariants.

This is how evolution works. The virus has hit upon a successful configuration of proteins in the Omicron variant, and now is developing variations of the Omicron variant that further evade existing immunity. The new subvariants are all Omicron, but labeled with additional letters and numbers, such as BA.2.75. In this nomenclature, all subvariants are contained within the category prior to each period. So the BA.2 subvariant contain all those that start with BA.2, regardless of any further numbers. Essentially these are variations on variations. The virus is further fine-tuning its ability to infect and avoid immunity.

All these Omicron subvariants have tweaks to the binding region of the spike protein, the place where an antibody will bind to the virus in order to destroy it. By altering the binding location, antibodies are less able to identify and bind the virus. Those viruses better able to evade immunity are more likely to spread, so these variants increasingly dominate and generate even more tweaked subvariants. The WHO tracks variants that impact transmissibility, severity, or immunity, and the list of such variants is growing.

All of this likely means that we are in for another wave of COVID this winter, fueled by these subvariants. It won’t be anything like the initial waves of COVID, because at that time the virus was spreading into a “naïve” population without any pre-existing immunity. Now most people have at least partial resistance, and again, we have effective treatments such as Paxlovid.

How can we shore up our immunity to prevent getting hit by this likely winter wave? The answer by now should be obvious – be up to date with your vaccines. The new COVID booster available is a bivalent vaccine, which means it covers the original variant of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), but also the BA.4 and BA.5 variants of the virus. This booster, therefore, is a lot closer to the subvariants likely to be spreading this winter.

It’s important to remember that immunity is not black or white, either with complete immunity or none. Antibodies have a certain amount of affinity for specific binding sites, which can vary anywhere from zero to 100% (perfect match) affinity. Immune effectiveness is partially determined by the number and affinity of circulating antibodies. The booster accomplished two goals – increasing the affinity and numbers of circulating antibodies.

So the answer is simple – get the new booster (when you are eligible). Don’t wait, get it now. Even if you have been previously boosted, or previously infected. These new subvariants can evade your waning immunity. You want the highest number of antibodies that are as close to these new subvariants as possible.

While you’re at it, get the flu vaccine. Experts predict a worse than average flu season, because the last two flu seasons were very mild (because masks and social distancing work, and these prevented most flu infections). But this also means that there is less native immunity out there. Again – the best way to maintain your immunity without having to suffer through the flu is to get vaccinated every year.

It is safe to get both vaccines together (coadministration). This is recommended because it increases the total number of people who get up to date on all their vaccines. There is only a slight (11% vs 8%) increase in side effects from coadministration – not worth the risk of missing out on one of these important vaccines.

What does the existence of these new subvariants mean for the pandemic? First, basically – we blew it. Our COVID response was not a complete failure, but the initial response was, and later compliance was simply not enough to really knock down the virus. Lackluster vaccination rates are what has allowed these subvariants to multiply. India, for example, is about to destroy 100 million doses of unused and expired COVID vaccines because of lack of demand. Only 79% of Americans have received at least one dose of COVID vaccine, and only 68% are considered fully vaccinated. We need these numbers to be in the 90+% range. As a result the US has had 97 million cases of COVID and 1.06 million deaths.

The result is that we likely have more waves of COVID coming. This pandemic is not over yet. It will eventually burn itself out, as more people gain partial immunity through getting infected if not vaccinated. That doesn’t mean it will go away. Expect to get your annual COVID booster along with your flu vaccine for the foreseeable future.

Experts also believe that pandemics in general are likely to become more frequent, due to increasing populations, long-distance travel, and exposure to wild animal populations. We need to improve our global pandemic readiness. The problem is, we seem to have short memories. Our failures with COVID did not prepare us for the later monkeypox. Although this is now getting under control, we did not jump on it as fast as we should have.

Experts are also warning about a new Ebola outbreak, with a variant that evades the Ebola vaccine. This new outbreak has already spread to Kampala, a city of 1.5 million people. This is very concerning. It’s also disappointing. After the 2014 outbreak, for which we were completely unprepared, world governments vowed to be more prepared next time. While readiness has improved, it has not improved to the point that we are really prepared for a major outbreak. We keep taking our eye off the ball.

Many fear the same is happening with COVID. People have COVID fatigue, and are tired of the precautions. But the pandemic is not over, and new pandemics are looming. We need sustainable preventive measures, and we need to have the endurance to maintain them. The world has changed, and we need a cultural change to match it. We need a more robust infrastructure to monitor and respond to outbreaks. And we need to strike a sustainable balance between living our lives, and taking reasonable infection precautions.

This means, above all else, get vaccinated. Further, the anti-vaccine movement is now a threat to global health, and it needs to be treated that way. This is not some fringe we can ignore.

When, in September, Boris Johnson left office after two-and-a-half turbulent years as prime minister, he defended his record with some jokes and a sprinkling of classical allusion. “Like Cincinnatus, I am now returning to my plough,” he said.As many commentators were quick to point out, the reference to Cincinnatus contained a coded meaning. After this Roman consul left office, he returned to his small ancestral farm to till the fields, only to be recalled to government at a moment of great crisis. Johnson was hinting that he might himself soon enjoy a similar fate.His prophecy nearly came to pass. For a brief spell over the weekend, Britain’s Conservative Party seriously considered the idea of calling Boris Johnson back to power.In the end, of course, the party anointed Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the Exchequer who lacks both Johnson’s charisma and his irresponsibility, as its leader—and thus the country’s prime minister. Sunak’s ascension is easy to understand. After the extended chaos of the Johnson years and the short-lived debacle of Liz Truss’s premiership, Sunak was virtually the last remaining Conservative of any public standing who could credibly promise a modicum of competence and stability.Harder to parse is why Johnson was in contention at all. How could Johnson have come so close to returning from the political wilderness less than four months after disgrace forced the  announcement of his departure from office?The story of Johnson’s near resurrection, though remarkable, is less peculiar than it might seem. Charismatic populists have a knack for making unlikely comebacks, even if their own friends and allies have long given them up for dead. And irresponsible politicians can do very well when they have a good feel for the pulse of public opinion. For this type of demagogue, Johnson’s enduring appeal is the norm, not the exception.The plausible, if short-lived, prospect of Johnson’s return to Downing Street should be a warning sign of what is to come in other countries. For it illustrates three underlying truths about populist leaders that will continue to shape the politics of the United Kingdom and other democracies, including the United States, for years to come.[Derek Thompson: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]First, populists have extraordinary staying power, showing virtual immunity from the sort of scandal, disgrace, or failure that can finish a conventional politician’s career. Second, policy counts nearly as much as style: The degree to which a populist’s program is actually popular really matters. Third, because most of the politicians who are attacking democratic institutions at the moment come from the right, conservative parties have a crucial part to play in preserving democracy.Critics like to describe Johnson as a populist, placing him into the same category as America’s Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and India’s Narendra Modi. That label has never been a perfect fit for Johnson. While he has, at times, been willing to play dangerously fast and loose with democratic rules, he never attempted to concentrate power in his own hands or to impede its peaceful transfer. A second term for Trump would presage a genuine democratic emergency; a return of Johnson would have been more likely to turn into a depressing farce.And yet, Johnson does share some important similarities with other figures in that political constellation. Like them, his appeal has much to do with his willingness to break the ordinary rules of politics. Like them, he has a larger-than-life personality that gives him a direct connection with his supporters. Like them, he manages to suck the oxygen out of every political situation, making himself the red-hot center of debate for years on end. And like them, he shouldn’t be counted out just yet.Populists around the world have proved to have remarkable staying power, even after they were hounded from office in ignominy. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi left office in disgrace after being sentenced to a term in prison and ruining his country’s finances (he later successfully appealed the criminal conviction). Now he is a crucial partner in the country’s new government. Peru’s Alberto Fujimori was pushed out of office because of corruption after his right-hand man testified that the president had handed him suitcases stuffed with cash. Yet his loyal daughter Keiko remains a high-profile politician who came within a hair of winning the country’s presidency last year. In the United States, Trump seemed to lose his hold over the Republican Party after the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Now he appears poised to claim the party’s nomination for the 2024 presidential election. Orbán in Hungary, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Marcos family in the Philippines have all shown similar durability.The next twist to the story involves the populist’s platform. Johnson’s success is often chalked up to his personal charm. But because Johnson’s personality is larger than life, many commentators have overlooked the deft political positioning that also made him popular.On cultural issues, Johnson was robustly center-right. He preached an unapologetic patriotism and opposed the dismantling of statues of Winston Churchill. But he also championed a nation that was comfortably inclusive, courted voters from ethnic minority groups, and presided over a notably diverse cabinet.[Read: Boris Johnson is still afloat]On economic issues, by contrast, Johnson presented himself as robustly center-left. He opposed tax cuts for the rich and promised ambitious investments in the comparatively poor regions of England’s north. During the coronavirus pandemic, his government moved quickly to distribute generous financial aid to prevent economic hardship. And though himself an unabashed product of class privilege, Johnson could speak about the less fortunate with real conviction. “If I had one insight into human beings,” he once said, “it is [that] the genius and talent and enthusiasm and imagination are evenly distributed throughout the population, but opportunity is not.”A similar deviation from right-wing orthodoxy also helps explain how Trump managed to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party in 2016. On cultural issues, Trump was more extreme (and alarming) than his adversaries in the primaries, and much more so than Britain’s Johnson. But on economic issues, Trump initially took positions that tempted millions of Americans who did not traditionally vote for the GOP. He promised to defend blue-collar workers, to spend enormous sums on infrastructure, and to provide a universal health-insurance plan. Trump failed to deliver on these promises—but they played a crucial role in helping him secure his first term in office.Johnson’s unusual blend of policies also helps explain why his successor proved to be so hapless. When Truss took office, she turned sharply to the right on economic policy, slashing taxes for the very wealthiest. And when her program forced the Bank of England to raise interest rates steeply, hiking mortgage payments for middle-class Britons, she quickly became far more unpopular than Johnson had ever been. Her downfall was precipitated not just by her personal weakness but by her deviation from Johnson’s more moderate economic policies.Johnson’s ability to retain significant support offers valuable lessons for the future of democracy. But so does the fate of this comeback attempt. Why—this time, at least—did he fail in his mission?The overriding factor was simple: Senior figures in the Conservative Party did not want him back, and they were able to take effective action to prevent his return.As the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt demonstrated in his 2017 book, Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, which includes a painstaking analysis of interwar Europe, the survival of democracy has often depended on those very parties. Where mainstream right-wing parties resisted the rise of authoritarian movements, as they did in the United Kingdom, they succeeded in containing the threat to democracy. Where mainstream right-wing parties thought that they could co-opt extremist groups, striking a deal with their leaders, as in Germany, the conservative establishment ended up being a handmaiden to the death of democracy.[From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos]How conservative parties choose to act, in turn, depends on two important factors: political will and practical capacity. To resist the temptation to turn in an authoritarian direction, they need to care more about preserving democratic institutions than about implementing their policy goals. And they also need to have enough control over rank-and-file members and ambitious newcomers to punish those who deviate from that commitment. Although the stakes are lower in modern Britain than they were in Ziblatt’s period of study, this framework helps explain how moderate political parties are able to close off a demagogue’s path to power.Given the shambolic state of Britain’s Conservative Party, whether it retained the will and the capacity to stand up to a resurgent Johnson was not a given. When Johnson was prime minister, he threatened to suspend Parliament in order to push through the Brexit deal he wanted—which would have been a clear breach of democratic norms. Most of the party’s parliamentary members supported him in this attempt (which was ultimately blocked by Britain’s Supreme Court). And the party’s recent record of internecine conflict also put in doubt whether it would rally around a candidate who could keep Johnson out of office. Nevertheless, to prevent Johnson from capitalizing on his popularity among the party’s grassroots, Conservative members of Parliament closed ranks around Sunak, making him the sole candidate and thus enabling his installation as prime minister without a vote of party members.To keep other demagogues, including Trump, out of office, their party colleagues and erstwhile allies have to choose to put democratic norms ahead of their pet policies. And they need the institutional capacity to retain control over their organizations, ensuring that politically extreme activists who do not represent the democratic majority cannot take control.All of this, though, should worry American readers. Like other populists who have left power under ignoble circumstances, Trump retains significant public support. If he runs in 2024, he can count on the passionate supporters who make up a large portion of the Republican Party’s primary electorate. And unlike some right-wing parties, the GOP seems to have neither the will nor the capacity to stand up to its most radical members. Before Trump has even declared his candidacy, most senior members of his party are scared to criticize him.The attack of one zombie populist has, for now, been beaten back. But the next one could break through.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The races in the midterm are tightening up, but everyone who cares about democracy should resist the urge to turn the election into a referendum on inflation.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Michael Flynn’s desecration of the Christian faith
The wreckage of neoliberalism
Why Biden’s block on chips to China is a big deal
More Than the Price of GasLast summer, it seemed like the Republicans were going to face a reversal of political gravity, and the Democrats would keep their majority during a first midterm election under a Democratic president. Historically, this is hard to do: Voters, for many reasons, usually trim congressional seats from a first-term president’s party. But the Democrats have benefited from the Republican plunge into extremism. The GOP still refuses to abandon Donald Trump and his violent insurrectionist movement; it is running ghastly candidates; and like a dog chasing a car, it smashed its snout into the bumper of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturning Roe v. Wade, angering millions.But autumn is here, and Democratic candidates are now struggling against this parade of election deniers, religious bigots, and conspiracy theorists who once would have been beyond the pale of modern American politics. The revelations of January 6, as I wrote earlier this month, seem irrelevant to many voters, some of whom still refuse to believe that anything bad happened on that horrible day. (If the police officer Michael Fanone had a heart attack during the riot, one Pennsylvania voter told MSNBC, he “shouldn’t have been a cop.”)Some of this is the result of Democratic miscalculations. Abortion rights and Donald Trump were never going to win this election on their own, and though foreign policy is a Democratic bright spot, it does not usually play much as an issue in midterm elections. (That didn’t stop 30 House Democrats from issuing and then retracting a clumsy and pointless letter to Joe Biden this week about seeking negotiations with Russia.) Yes, inflation is high, and Americans always blame the party in power for such indicators. But there is another reason the Democrats could lose to this bizarre parade of otherwise unelectable candidates: The coalition to protect American democracy has failed to present a narrative of what life would look like—politically and economically—if this Republican Party returns to power.This is a daunting challenge, but it is much harder now that the Republicans have convinced their opponents (especially among the Democrats) to internalize a Republican narrative: that the economy is the only thing voters care about, and that only a change of party can fix it. Ironically, even Republicans aren’t bothering to run on that same narrative, other than to say that Democrats are responsible for all bad things, including inflation. Republicans know their base, and have not bothered to put forward anything like an economic plan. The GOP response to everything is a Gish Gallop of fearful messages about crime and immigration and gun rights and trans people, and for their voters, it works.Recall, for example, that in Ohio, J. D. Vance early on was trying to run something like a moderate primary campaign—including putting distance between himself and Trump—and found himself losing to an extremist. Vance learned his lesson. He started talking about “degenerate liberals” and accepted Trump’s humiliating embrace. Likewise, it’s not because of gas prices that in Arizona, Kari Lake is running an ad featuring a homophobic and Islamophobic pastor. Doug Mastriano is not running as a Christian nationalist in Pennsylvania because milk is more expensive.And Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock are not in a tight race because Georgia voters think that Walker understands the problems of the common folk (unless the problem is men not acknowledging the children they’ve fathered). It is risible to believe that GOP voters are hoping Walker is going to take a seat, say, on the Finance Committee and start proposing solutions for inflation.But the economy and democratic freedom are related—and the voters are capable of understanding this, if anyone would bother to make the case. Instead of preemptively apologizing for inflation or trying to undermine Biden’s foreign policy, perhaps the Democrats and others supporting a prodemocracy coalition should ask Americans if they’d like their votes nullified and to see the U.S. eventually transformed into a democratically challenged country like Turkey, where an autocratic president cracks down on his opponents and presides over an 83 percent inflation rate. Perhaps they’d like to be Hungary—a country now loved by many on the American right—where democracy is floundering, inflation is 20 percent, and teachers are marching in the streets.Perhaps those of us who believe democracy is on the ballot could take a page from Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 pummeled Jimmy Carter both on the economy and foreign policy and won. And yet, by 1982, his victory seemed to be in ashes and predictions of a single term were common. The Cold War was frozen solid, people were scared, and the economy was in a brutal recession. Reagan’s answer was not “I feel your pain,” or “It’s the economy, stupid,” but rather: “Stay the course.” He asked the public to stand by him rather than return to the situation they had just left behind.The need to stay the course is even more important now. Voters concerned about democracy should remind their fellow citizens that a GOP majority will not fix the economy or face down the Russians. Instead, state-level Republicans will issue partisan challenges to our constitutional process while cowardly national Republicans nod their approval. By 2025, Republicans at the state and national level might be able to simply ignore any election result they happen not to like.To believe that voters can only think of one thing at a time is a remarkably elitist position, especially when Americans have repeatedly proved that they can vote on multiple issues. To reduce everything in 2022 to inflation and gasoline is to demean and infantilize the voters, to treat them as if they are cattle whose only concern is the price of feed. But all of us need to make the case for democracy and prosperity—and to remind ourselves that these blessings cannot exist without each other.Related:
Why politics has become so stressful
How far would a Republican majority go?
Rishi Sunak officially became Britain’s prime minister and began appointing members to his cabinet.
A Russian appeals court upheld the WNBA player Brittney Griner’s sentence on drug-smuggling charges.
Adidas ended its partnership with Ye (formerly Kanye West), citing the artist’s recent anti-Semitic comments.
Brooklyn, Everywhere: “While living amid biblical levels of joylessness … our friendships can provide us with individual sources of joy and meaning,” writes Xochitl Gonzalez. 
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.
(Getty / The Atlantic)
Adoption Is Not a Fairy-Tale EndingBy Erika Hayasaki
In America, popular narratives about adoption tend to focus on happy endings. Poor mothers who were predestined to give their children away for a “better life”; unwanted kids turned into chosen ones; made-for-television reunions years later. Since childhood, these story lines about the industry of infant adoptions had gradually seeped into my subconscious from movies, books, and the news.
Then, following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the tropes proliferated. Photos of smiling white couples holding signs that read “We will adopt your baby” went viral this summer, quickly inspiring online mockery. Many U.S. adoption agencies prepared for a potential increase in adoption in states that have made abortion illegal, despite limited evidence that a need for these services will increase.
The media are still making the same mistake on Trump.
Why did Cotopaxi leave San Francisco?
Images of Diwali: the festival of lights
Steve Carell in The Patient. (FX; The Atlantic)
Read. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery’s debut collection of linked stories, is a biting tale of sibling rivalry and a moving family saga.Or try another pick from our list of books that show no one can hurt you like a sibling.Watch. The series finale of The Patient, the latest in a recent group of TV shows to explore the dramatic potential of confinement.Play our daily crossword.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.The past few months have been rough for the United Kingdom. Energy prices are soaring. National inflation has breached double digits. The longest-serving British monarch has died. The shortest-serving prime minister has quit.You probably knew all of that already. British news is covered amply (some might say too amply) in American media. Behind the lurid headlines, however, is a deeper story of decades-long economic dysfunction that holds lessons for the future.In the American imagination, the U.K. is not only our political parent but also our cultural co-partner, a wealthy nation that gave us modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. But strictly by the numbers, Britain is pretty poor for a rich place. U.K. living standards and wages have fallen significantly behind those of Western Europe. By some measures, in fact, real wages in the U.K. are lower than they were 15 years ago, and will likely be even lower next year.This calamity was decades in the making. After World War II, Britain’s economy grew slower than those of much of continental Europe. By the 1970s, the Brits were having a national debate about why they were falling behind and how the former empire had become a relatively insular and sleepy economy. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, markets were deregulated, unions were smashed, and the financial sector emerged as a jewel of the British economy. Thatcher’s injection of neoliberalism had many complicated knock-on effects, but from the 1990s into the 2000s, the British economy roared ahead, with London’s financial boom leading the way. Britain, which got rich as the world’s factory in the 19th century, had become the world’s banker by the 21st.When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain’s economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O’Toole called “the dull anxiety of declining living standards,” conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness. A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one. The predictable results are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth. Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. “Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. “It’s more like the people are taking the robots’ jobs.”That might sound like a quirky example, because the British economy is obviously more complex than blokes rubbing cars with soap. But it’s an illustrative case. According to the International Federation of Robotics, the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovakia. One analysis of the U.K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.Thus, the U.K., the first nation to industrialize, was also the first to deindustrialize. Britain gave rise to the productivity revolution that changed the world, and now it has some of the worst productivity statistics of any major economy. What was once the world’s most powerful globalized empire has now voted to explicitly reduce global access to trade and talent. Since Brexit, immigration, exports, and foreign investment have all declined, likely reducing the size of the U.K.’s economy by several percentage points in the long run.Americans who have visited the U.K. may not recognize the portrait I’m painting. That’s probably because they’re familiar with London, not the country as a whole. As the economics writer Noah Smith notes, London’s financial prowess has concealed the overall economy’s weakness in innovation and manufacturing. Or, as the economic analyst Matt Klein puts it, “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”Today, Britain seems trapped between a left-wing aversion to growth and a right-wing aversion to openness. On the academic left, the U.K. has lately been home to a surging movement called degrowtherism, which asserts that saving the planet requires rich countries to stop seeking growth. On the right, the electorate is dominated by older voters who care more about culture wars than about competitiveness. “In 2019, when Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party won a big majority in the House of Commons, most people of working age did not vote for them,” Weldon told me. “I’m pretty sure that’s the first time that’s ever happened. You have this post-economic, older, economically insulated voting bloc that could afford to be anti-growth almost as a luxury, because they don’t have to care about economic outcomes.”The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners. Having offshored industry in favor of finance, its economy wasn’t resilient. The resulting erosion in living standards made the public desperate for something to blame. Blame-seeking conservatives spotted bogeymen abroad. Brexit cut off the economy from further growth and set the stage for a rolling political circus.The U.S. has a different menu of problems from the U.K.’s. But here too, politicians are navigating an industrial sector in structural decline, a political left that is often skeptical about the virtues of economic growth, and a political right that is organized in part around hating foreigners. Enemies of progress can criticize the legacy of industrialization, productivity, and globalization. But the U.K. shows us what can happen when a rich country seems to reject all three. Rather than transforming into some post-economic Eden of good vibes, it becomes bitter, flailing, and nonsensical.

As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves -- not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley.

The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser.

It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn't afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir, T.H. Huxley, and Bertrand Russell. The entry for Catullus, several of whose poems I could recite from memory in Latin, read: "The greatest lyric poet of Rome." I loved the certainty of that judgment -- one that scholars today would not, I suspect, make, much less print.

There were days when I could not write. I would sit in despair, overcome by emotion, unable to cope with a sense of loss, of hurt, and the hundreds of violent images I carry within me. Writing about war was not cathartic. It was painful. I was forced to unwrap memories carefully swaddled in the cotton wool of forgetfulness. The advance on the book was modest: $25,000. Neither the publisher nor I expected many people to read it, especially with such an ungainly title. I wrote out of a sense of obligation, a belief that, given my deep familiarity with the culture of war, I should set it down. But I vowed, once done, never to willfully dredge up those memories again.

To the publisher's surprise, the book exploded. Hundreds of thousands of copies were eventually sold. Big publishers, dollar signs in their eyes, dangled significant offers for another book on war. But I refused. I didn't want to dilute what I had written or go through that experience again. I did not want to be ghettoized into writing about war for the rest of my life. I was done. To this day, I'm still unable to reread it.

The Open Wound of War

Yet it's not true that I fled war. I fled my wars but would continue to write about other people's wars. I know the wounds and scars. I know what's often hidden. I know the anguish and guilt. It's strangely comforting to be with others maimed by war. We don't need words to communicate. Silence is enough.

I wanted to reach teenagers, the fodder of wars and the target of recruiters. I doubted many would read War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. I embarked on a text that would pose, and then answer, the most basic questions about war -- all from military, medical, tactical, and psychological studies of combat. I operated on the assumption that the simplest and most obvious questions rarely get answered like: What happens to my body if I'm killed?

I hired a team of researchers, mostly graduate students at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and, in 2003, we produced an inexpensive paperback -- I fought the price down to $11 by giving away any future royalties -- called What Every Person Should Know About War.

I worked closely on the book with Jack Wheeler, who had graduated from West Point in 1966 and then served in Vietnam, where 30 members of his class were killed. (Rick Atkinson's The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966is the story of Jack's class.) Jack went on to Yale Law School after he left the military and became a presidential aide to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, while chairing the drive to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

He struggled with what he called "the open wound of Vietnam" and severe depression. He was last seen on December 30, 2010, disoriented and wandering the streets of Wilmington, Delaware. The next day, his body was discovered as it was dumped from a garbage truck into the Cherry Island Landfill. The Delaware state medical examiner's office said the cause of death was assault and "blunt force trauma." Police ruled his death a homicide, a murder that would never be solved. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

The idea for the book came from the work of Harold Roland Shapiro, a New York lawyer who, while representing a veteran disabled in World War I, investigated that conflict, discovering a huge disparity between its reality and the public perception of it. His book was, however, difficult to find. I had to get a copy from the Library of Congress. The medical descriptions of wounds, Shapiro wrote, rendered "all that I had read and heard previously as being either fiction, isolated reminiscence, vague generalization or deliberate propaganda." He published his book, What Every Young Man Should Know About War, in 1937. Fearing it might inhibit recruitment, he agreed to remove it from circulation at the start of World War II. It never went back into print.

The military is remarkably good at studying itself (although such studies aren't easy to obtain). It knows how to use operant conditioning -- the same techniques used to train a dog -- to turn young men and women into efficient killers. It skillfully employs the tools of science, technology, and psychology to increase the lethal force of combat units. It also knows how to sell war as adventure, as well as the true route to manhood, comradeship, and maturity.

The callous indifference to life, including the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, leapt off the pages of the official documents. For example, the response to the question "What will happen if I am exposed to nuclear radiation but do not die immediately?" was answered in a passage from the Office of the Surgeon General's Textbook of Military Medicine that read, in part:

Fatally irradiated soldiers should receive every possible palliative treatment, including narcotics, to prolong their utility and alleviate their physical and psychological distress. Depending on the amount of fatal radiation, such soldiers may have several weeks to live and to devote to the cause. Commanders and medical personnel should be familiar with estimating survival time based on onset of vomiting. Physicians should be prepared to give medications to alleviate diarrhea, and to prevent infection and other sequelae of radiation sickness in order to allow the soldier to serve as long as possible. The soldier must be allowed to make the full contribution to the war effort. He will already have made the ultimate sacrifice. He deserves a chance to strike back, and to do so while experiencing as little discomfort as possible.

Our book, as I hoped, turned up on Quaker anti-recruitment tables in high schools.

"I Am Sullied"

I was disgusted by the simplistic, often mendacious coverage of our post-9/11 war in Iraq, a country I had covered as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times. In 2007, I went to work with reporter Laila Al-Arian on a long investigative article in the Nation, "The Other War: Iraq Veterans Bear Witness," that ended up in an expanded version as another book on war, Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians.

We spent hundreds of hours interviewing 50 American combat veterans of Iraq about atrocities they had witnessed or participated in. It was a damning indictment of the U.S. occupation with accounts of terrorizing and abusive house raids, withering suppressing fire routinely laid down in civilian areas to protect American convoys, indiscriminate shooting from patrols, the large kill radius of detonations and air strikes in populated areas, and the slaughter of whole families who approached military checkpoints too closely or too quickly. The reporting made headlines in newspapers across Europe but was largely ignored in the U.S., where the press was generally unwilling to confront the feel-good narrative about "liberating" the people of Iraq.

For the book's epigraph, we used a June 4, 2005, suicide note left by Colonel Theodore "Ted" Westhusing for his commanders in Iraq. Westhusing (whom I was later told had read and recommended War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning) was the honor captain of his 1983 West Point class. He shot himself in the head with his 9mm Beretta service revolver. His suicide note -- think of it as an epitaph for the global war on terror - read in part:

Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name] -- You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff -- no msn [mission] support and you don't care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied -- no more. I didn't volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

The war in Ukraine raised the familiar bile, the revulsion at those who don't go to war and yet revel in the mad destructive power of violence. Once again, by embracing a childish binary universe of good and evil from a distance, war was turned into a morality play, gripping the popular imagination. Following our humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the debacles of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, here was a conflict that could be sold to the public as restoring American virtue. Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein, instantly became the new Hitler. Ukraine, which most Americans undoubtedly couldn't have found on a map, was suddenly the front line in the eternal fight for democracy and liberty.

The orgiastic celebration of violence took off.

The Ghosts of War

It's impossible, under international law, to defend Russia's war in Ukraine, as it is impossible to defend our invasion of Iraq. Preemptive war is a war crime, a criminal war of aggression. Still, putting the invasion of Ukraine in context was out of the question. Explaining -- as Soviet specialists (including famed Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan) had -- that expanding NATO into Central and Eastern Europe was a provocation to Russia was forbidden. Kennan had called it "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era" that would "send Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking."

In 1989, I had covered the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania that signaled the coming collapse of the Soviet Union. I was acutely aware of the "cascade of assurances" given to Moscow that NATO, founded in 1949 to prevent Soviet expansion in Eastern and Central Europe, would not spread beyond the borders of a unified Germany. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, NATO should have been rendered obsolete.

I naively thought we would see the promised "peace dividend," especially with the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reaching out to form security and economic alliances with the West. In the early years of Vladimir Putin's rule, even he lent the U.S. military a hand in its war on terror, seeing in it Russia's own struggle to contain Islamic extremists spawned by its wars in Chechnya. He provided logistical support and resupply routes for American forces fighting in Afghanistan. But the pimps of war were having none of it. Washington would turn Russia into the enemy, with or without Moscow's cooperation.

The newest holy crusade between angels and demons was launched.

War unleashes the poison of nationalism, with its twin evils of self-exaltation and bigotry. It creates an illusory sense of unity and purpose. The shameless cheerleaders who sold us the war in Iraq are once again on the airwaves beating the drums of war for Ukraine. As Edward Said once wrote about these courtiers to power:

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's own eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.

I was pulled back into the morass. I found myself writing for Scheerpost and my Substack site, columns condemning the bloodlusts Ukraine unleashed. The provision of more than $50 billion in weapons and aid to Ukraine not only means the Ukrainian government has no incentive to negotiate, but that it condemns hundreds of thousands of innocents to suffering and death. For perhaps the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with Henry Kissinger, who at least understands realpolitik, including the danger of pushing Russia and China into an alliance against the U.S., while provoking a major nuclear power.

Greg Ruggiero, who runs City Lights Publishers, urged me to write a book on this new conflict. At first, I refused, not wanting to resurrect the ghosts of war. But looking back at my columns, articles, and talks since the publication of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in 2002, I was surprised at how often I had circled back to war.

I rarely wrote about myself or my experiences. I sought out those discarded as the human detritus of war, the physically and psychologically maimed like Tomas Young, a quadriplegic wounded in Iraq, whom I visited recently in Kansas City after he declared that he was ready to disconnect his feeding tube and die.

It made sense to put those pieces together to denounce the newest intoxication with industrial slaughter. I stripped the chapters down to war's essence with titles like "The Act of Killing," "Corpses" or "When the Bodies Come Home."

The Greatest Evil Is War has just been published by Seven Stories Press.

This, I pray, will be my final foray into the subject.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” America has a two-party system. And if you go by the language we use, we’ve had the same two-party system since the mid-1800s — Republicans and Democrats. That is the essential, unchanging competition that defines American politics. But the stability of that language obscures really big upheavals in what those parties are. Democrats were once the party of racist hierarchy. Later, they became the party of civil rights and Barack Obama. Republicans were once the party of Abraham Lincoln. Later, they became the party of reaction and Jesse Helms. But you don’t just have to look on the time scale of centuries. This, what we are in right now, has been an era of profound party change. The Republican Party of George W. Bush is not the Republican Party of Donald Trump. Hell, the Republican Party of Paul Ryan, which existed during the Republican Party of Donald Trump, is not the Republican Party of Donald Trump. If Republicans win in 2022 and even more so in 2024, the Republican Party that will take power then will be different than the one that took power in 2017. That was a party in uneasy coalition with Donald Trump and the forces he represented and channeled. Now Donald Trump is the establishment of the Republican Party. He is its power broker. He is its center. Power in the party flows from his favor. If many Republicans, I think probably most elected Republicans, in 2017 wanted to use Donald Trump to their ends, in 2022 they’re eager to be used by him for his ends. What does it mean for that party to win power? What even is that party? This year, Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at “The Atlantic,” published a unique book on the Trump era. It’s one that hit a side of it that has been the most fascinating to me personally. “Thank You For Your Servitude,” his book, isn’t about Donald Trump. It is about the Republicans who bent the knee to him. It is about why they did it, and how they justified it, and how they came in many cases to enjoy it, to love it, to be proud of it. And so what Leibovich ends up tracking with really extraordinary access to some of these key players and politicians is the way the Republican Party changed in the era of Trump through the eyes of individual Republicans who were changing. So what does that tell us about what this Republican Party will be if it is in charge of Congress next year and the White House a couple years after that? As always, my email — for guest suggestions, for feedback, for recommendations of things we should read or listen to or watch: ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Mark Leibovich, welcome to the show.

mark leibovich

Ezra, great to be with you.

ezra klein

So tell me how the Republican Party that might win the midterms in 2022 is different than the one that won the midterms in 2010.

I think it’s different because the stakes are higher. I think it’s different because we’re at the next degree. I mean, Donald Trump has basically rewritten the script of nihilistic behavior within the Republican Party. It’s not too much to say now that democracy is somewhat on the ballot, and things like peaceful transfers of power and majority rule and rule of law are all things that have been thrown into some turmoil over the last few years by the Trump era. And it’s so bizarre to say, but in 2010 what were we talking about? I mean, the weird — whatever the Tea Party represented, it was kind of ephemeral. There was anger at Obamacare. I mean, that at least was a policy proposition. So now it feels much more foundational.

ezra klein

Does the Republican Party believe different things or have a different vision for the country today than it did then?

It’s hard to say what their vision for the country is now except for — I mean, you could put a large blanket around the two and say they were both driven by self-perpetuation and fear, whether it was of getting primaried by Tea Party candidate X in 2010 or getting attacked by Donald Trump and winding up on the wrong side of him and on the wrong side of a Republican primary that was going to put you out of work. But I think to some degree I don’t, even looking back, don’t remember any great sort of policy imperative other than the reflexive tax cuts or kill Obamacare, which I don’t even know they were sincere about then. Now I don’t think there’s any policy framework at all to what they’re doing except for the cult of personality around Trump, the fear of winding up on the wrong side of that cult, if you want to call it that, and what have you. But no, I just think it’s gone from one flavor of nihilism to the next.

ezra klein

That’s interesting. Let me try to push you on this. So when I think of the Republican Party that I covered in 2010, it’s around the time that Paul Ryan is beginning to rise up. He’s got these really intense budgets. And I remember being one of the early people to cover those budgets. And my argument about them and why they’re worth taking seriously is here’s a Republican finally saying and putting to paper with a lot of magic asterisks and bad budget math — but still — what they really believe and what they want to do. They want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor in a really profound way. They not just want to repeal Obamacare. They want to privatize Medicare and cut Medicaid to the bone. And Ryan previously had been a big advocate of privatizing Social Security. Ryan, a couple years later, of course, becomes vice-presidential candidate and nominee and then speaker. And so there was a sense to me that the Republican Party was this very extreme policy coalition, that they had policies that were unbelievably unpopular, and they tried very hard to figure out how to either not talk about them or muddy up what it was they were talking about. But they believed in something. And now I think it’s almost the reverse, that they believe in really nothing policy-wise. Some of them will still make Ryan-like sounds, if you read some of the random budgets that various conservative backbenchers will put out today. But the party seems animated much more by a sense of resentment, a will to power, a fear that the people who have captured the commanding heights of American society under the banner of wokeness are going to annihilate them. And whatever policy they ever believed in has more or less collapsed. Whatever you have to say to win that power is just fine. So they’ve become, in a weird way, less extreme on policy, but much more extreme in the threat or their views on the fundamental political system they’re part of.

You might be challenging me, but I basically agree with you 100 percent. So I mean, I would agree. I mean, I think Paul Ryan was criticized a great deal. He was dismissed as a lightweight. I’ve been criticized over the years for taking him, I think, more seriously than many people in the media did. At least there was a policy framework around then. I think it sort of started chipping away fairly early on after 2010. I think if you look at when some of the early Tea Party members of Congress sort of were forcing John Boehner into the debt ceiling gamesmanship, I mean, that to me was a brute force tactic against not so much Obamacare or the debt ceiling per se, but just as a way to mess with the incumbent president. And then when you sort of jump ahead a few years, Mitch McConnell blockading Merrick Garland’s nomination, that was the same bizarre, dramatic busting of norms which became a sign of blunt force that usurped any kind of policy proposition whatsoever. It was about keeping the government closed or sort of holding Obama hostage. It was about basically stealing a Supreme Court seat. And then Trump was that blunt force expression of a candidate of politics in general and, again, like any policy underpinning whatsoever, got lost. Now, yes, I would say their big policy victory was tax reform or tax — whatever the neutral way of saying it was. It turned out to be not that popular. It blew up the budget. But at least Paul Ryan had that box checked before he retired. Now, again, four years out from that, there is nothing. It is just nothing but brute force. And instead of Social Security being at risk or Obamacare being at risk, it’s, again, peaceful transfers of power, Democratic elections being at risk, and, again, things that I still find myself struggling to get my head around. So yeah, I agree. I just think that we’ve seen this erosion over time that keeps getting scarier and scarier.

ezra klein

It sometimes seems to me that the stability in the names of the parties belies how much is going on here. I mean, it was called the Republican Party then. It’s called the Republican Party now. But I want to ask you about a contrast here. You go back to — again, let’s use 2010 as our example. And you look at who the leaders of the Democratic Party. You have Barack Obama. You have Joe Biden. You have Nancy Pelosi in the House. You have Steny Hoyer as her deputy. You have, in the Senate, Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer. And Harry Reid has died, but there’s been a tremendous amount of stability in the leadership of the Democratic Party. Now, Bernie Sanders rose up. A.O.C. rose up. But in terms of who still has institutional power today, it is held almost eerily steadily. I mean, the level of stability in the House Democratic caucus is weird. And then you look at the Republican Party in that period and who are the leaders or about to be the leaders. So I think John Boehner, Paul Ryan is rising. You have the Bushes maybe, the Cheneys maybe. John McCain was just the nominee. Mitt Romney will be the next nominee, Mitch McConnell. And with the only possible exception of McConnell, who I think is viewed with at least some suspicion, every one of these others is now something like a heretic within the party. Tell me about just the collapse of the relationship between the entire leadership class of the Republican Party circa 2010 and today.

Well, I mean, McCarthy became whip after that election. And he didn’t really stand for anything then, and he doesn’t stand for anything now, I mean, except, again, just survival, being in the frame, being in the young guns back in that period and now being on the right side of Trump and hoping that he can still be someone who can work with him. But you’re right. I mean, I think Trump himself has — not only did he just storm the gates and get the nomination, and then win the presidency, but the seed corn of the Republican Party have been this cast of somewhat outlandish but in many cases very effective imitators of him, whether it’s Ron DeSantis or then even far downstream you have — if Dr. Oz, or Herschel Walker, or Marjorie Taylor Greene are ascendant. I mean, so yes. I mean, these are all people who came from the completely dramatic reinvention that Trump reimposed — or imposed on the party in 2016. I don’t think the Democrats’ problem right now is the lack of new or fresh blood, to be honest with you. And I don’t think the Republicans’ problem right now is the lack of or need for newer fresh blood. I mean, I think the personalities themselves have sort of written this story. And the tension is — it is what it is. Yeah, I think it would be wonderful if Biden didn’t run again. I think it would be wonderful if Pelosi retired. I think it would be wonderful personally if Democrats keep the Senate and someone like Tim Ryan or John Fetterman or Mandela Barnes or Val Demings or someone could all of a sudden become a national figure. But again, I mean, that’s why these elections are so consequential in addition to everything else.

ezra klein

So you wrote this book that is, I think, distinctive in the Trump literature because it’s not really about Trump. It’s about all the people in the party who bend the knee to him and what their individual and collective rationalizations for doing it are. Why focus there? Tell me about the genesis of the project.

I thought it was an untold story. I didn’t want to try to out-Woodward Bob Woodward or out-Maggie Maggie Haberman. I mean, God bless them both. But I didn’t feel like I had anything to add to the story of who Donald Trump is; what kind of White House intrigue happened; what happened around Jan. 6; who are the Trump supporters out in Ohio that we didn’t understand; and so forth. Now, I wanted to keep pounding home the message that it is the Kevin McCarthys and the Lindsey Grahams and the Marco Rubios and the Mitch McConnells — and to some degree the Paul Ryans and the Mike Pences that allowed him to happen and continue to allow him to happen. I mean, it is an astounding thing to me that Donald Trump survived everything he survived. But even after Jan. 6, because we all remember the time when it seemed like this story finally had ended or was winding down, and he continues to be propped up. And I wanted to write a book about what Washington was like and what these years were like through the experience of the enablers and what was the psychology behind the Lindsey Grahams and the Kevin McCarthys of the world that allowed them to make the deals they did, to live with themselves the way they did. And bizarrely, they mostly talked to me and were pretty transparent in ways that I didn’t expect. But again, I think that the story is much broader than Trump. I think the story is what has happened to the Republican Party and the people who have continued to allow this to happen. Because I think that this is a uniquely dangerous time we’re living through. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So when I was reading the book, I began thinking about this taxonomy of the way people justified working for Trump. I think it’d be helpful to go through it in some version of this and talk about the individuals as exemplars. Because behind each one person you profile, there are 30, 50, 100 who are doing the same thing in a less obvious way.

Less egregious way, yeah.

ezra klein

So five categories dominated for me. I want to run them by you, and then we can go through them or through them with any modifications you want to make. So to me, I could see that there were people who understood themselves early on as martyrs. They’re there heroically, working in this clown house to prevent terrible things from happening. There are pragmatists who see themselves as making a transaction with Donald Trump to pass tax cuts or get Supreme Court nominees, or whatever it might be. There are climbers who attached to Donald Trump to further their own career. There are — I don’t know how to put this — like Democratic accommodationists, people who take the view that whatever you say, I represent these Republican voters. Donald Trump clearly represents them better than I do. They like him more than they like me. So as a representative, it’s on me to accommodate this, to try to see what he’s seeing, and voice it as best I can. And then, of course, there are real believers. First, does that feel like a fair breakdown?

It does. There definitely are true believers. OK. And then what was the fourth one? Because the fourth one made me —

ezra klein

Accommodationists.

Accommodationists. Yeah.

ezra klein

The people who are not saying exactly that they believe in him, but it’s a lot of, well, you can’t deny that he has picked up something about the country, and you can’t deny that my voters are out there yelling at me, telling me that he’s right, and he’s our president. And I do represent them in a representative democracy and so.

No, correct. I mean, that’s a big — I mean, there’s a lot of overlap between all these categories. That is a big one. And what I find truly offensive about that category is that it completely forecloses any possibility of leadership. Now, on the same time you would say, OK, so Liz Cheney has demonstrated leadership by speaking her truth, speaking what I think is an objective truth about what happened Jan. 6, what happened with the election, and so forth, and she will no longer have a seat in Congress in a few months. So maybe she wasn’t pragmatic enough. I would start from a lot of overlap here. I mean, start from a position that virtually everyone except for category five, the true believers, has serious, serious ambivalence at best, contempt at worst for this person and did from the start. Now, a lot of this is on the record from Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan and so forth back from 2016. Paul Ryan is an interesting category because he wasn’t necessarily a climber because he became speaker before Trump was nominated. He, I think, probably was a little too ostentatious in talking about, oh, I never wanted this job. I just want to be chairman of ways and means. I don’t want to be speaker. So he was speaker. Anyway, he was, but he did not use Trump to make him speaker. But from a policy position, he did — tax cuts and deregulation were two of his real cherished babies over the years. And he did get them by way of Trump.

ezra klein

Well, let’s talk about him. And so to me — and you can tell me if you think this is wrong. Let’s start with the pragmatist category because I think that was a pretty big one. A lot of people didn’t think Trump was going to win the election, including among the Republicans, then he does. They are there in Washington presumably to do something. Politics is a transactional business. And I think the calculation many of them make, and I think a lot of them think that calculation came out pretty well in the end — I mean, Paul Ryan tells you in the book he would do it all over again the same way — is, if I work with this guy and I defend this guy when he needs defending and I tell reporters I’m late for lunch when they’re asking me about his latest tweet, I can get these tax cuts passed. I can get maybe Obamacare repealed. It doesn’t work out, but Donald Trump would have signed it. I can get Supreme Court nominees appointed, which they do. And that has had really profound reverberations across American society and made good on very longtime promises to the right wing of the party. So I think you have this world of the pragmatists who it’s not that they’re exactly pro-Trump, but they’re pro using their power. And to use their power, they have to go into alliance with this guy. And Paul Ryan strikes me as a very, very good example of that, but so too does Mitch McConnell.

Yeah, I think Mitch McConnell is almost better. I mean, Mitch McConnell is still putting up with the day-to-day grief, whereas Ryan is sitting on boards, including the Fox News board, and still claiming to be sort of an adult. But no, you’re right. And when I was writing about Ryan, I remember, in 2018, I mean, he kept throwing the counterfactual back in my face, which was, all right, so I could just pick a fight with him every day, and we would be at war, and we would get absolutely nothing done. And now because I’ve worked it this way, we have our tax cut. And so there is that. I mean, I think there’s another piece of Ryan where he was a big proponent — you had a lot of White House people saying this, where they said it would have been so much worse without me, without what I did here. I was an adult in the room.

ezra klein

Yeah, these are the martyrs.

These are the martyrs. And look, I have been dismissive and even disdainful of that line of thinking and that rap for a number of years. However, if I’m being honest, people who even at extremely late times, whether you’re Mike Pence or Bill Barr, being an adult in the room, again, it may have been way, way, way late, and it might have been the bare minimum, probably were forces for good. Now, does it justify everything to that point? No, absolutely not. But I don’t want to be too glib to say that there is no place for an adult in the room. That’s just a rationalization. Or there’s no place for a Paul Ryan being a pragmatist so you can get your deregulation and get your tax cuts and so forth. Because yeah. I mean, I think it’s a perfectly legitimate argument in the other direction. So I think in the large sort of sweep of time, I’ve come to appreciate that perspective maybe more than I had as it was happening.

ezra klein

Tell me a bit about how you understand the way Mitch McConnell sees American politics at this point. What is, as best you can channel it, Mitch McConnell’s view of what’s going on here?

Yeah, I think — look, he’s very shrewd. I mean, people say he’s a strategic genius. He’s very disciplined. All of that is true. I don’t think he has any sense of where this was headed. I don’t think he has control of the situation. Look, he got his three Supreme Court judges in a whole bunch of other appeals court judges. And I mean, that was, he would say, his baby, that and keeping the majority. And look, he’s got a decent shot of getting the majority back in a few weeks. And if that happens and he’s elected majority leader, which I assume he will be, he will have won. He will have defeated the Democrats. And he will have ostensibly defeated Trump, because Trump, at least in 2023, will not have deposed him. And then we would have 2025 to look forward to if McConnell is still in that chair and Trump somehow gets elected and comes back to the White House. But look, I think McConnell is made the most of an extremely untenable situation. And look, he’s 80 years old. I mean, he’s in the exact same cohort as the whole group that you mentioned before — Hoyer, Clyburn, Pelosi, Biden. I mean, go down the list. And after a while, it just sort of becomes a how long can you race the clock until someone tells you you can’t come anymore? So my guess is — and I haven’t talked to him in a long time — that he is just — he’s just playing it out and hoping to just sort of be in the chair for as long as possible, and that’s really all that matters to him.

ezra klein

Within the pragmatist subcategory here, I think it’s interesting to contrast Ryan and McConnell as two different weird species. I don’t think Paul Ryan’s decision to resign from Congress and the speakership is some kind of honorable decision. And then to go sit on the Fox News board, you’re definitely not outside of what is coarsening American politics when you’re getting paid off of Tucker Carlson’s checks and fame. But Ryan clearly makes a decision that he doesn’t want to be here, being the face of this thing anymore. And he’s going to leave. And McConnell makes a decision that he might not like a lot of this thing, but he’s going to stay and try to wield his power as best he can. And what neither of them make the decision to do — and this includes around things like Jan. 6, the Capitol being actually invaded while they are there, while their colleagues are there, while Donald Trump cheers it on — what neither of them at any point decide to do is fight, is to actually say in any real way, yeah, this shouldn’t happen. I’m willing to go here, but not further. I think if you had described the situation to both of them in 2006, just a hypothetical situation to these people who love to call themselves constitutional conservatives, they would have told you that in that case, of course, that’ll be a profile in courage. And actually, maybe it wouldn’t even take that much courage. Because I mean, this is such a weirdly outrageous example you’re giving me. Give me a hard hypothetical here. Why don’t they ever try to fight? Why is there not a point of, OK, I am in my late 70s here. I don’t just want to quietly resign. I don’t just want to accommodate myself to it. I want to make sure that I’m not somebody understood as having traded tax cuts and Supreme Court nominations to help erode the very foundations of the country and the political system that at least I claim to love.

Great question. I mean, it’s a question we from the outside have been asking for years now. Is it really worth it? Is the indignity that you are demonstrating really worth it? Is the job really that — you can’t really envision yourself without the job. Is it just that unthinkable to be tweeted about by Donald Trump in a disparaging way? When I reported the book and I had these conversations with people, one of the more depressing things I realized was that it was not a decision of virtue or a decision of — I mean, there was certainly pragmatism, but it was not a decision of principle or character. A lot of the time it was just abject fear. And sometimes — and I mean that literally sometimes. I think people talk abstractly about, oh, yeah, well so-and-so is getting death threats and so forth. I mean, there is a whole lot of testimony out there now from people who said, yes, I wanted to do this. I wanted to say this. I wanted to vote a certain way. But I was worried about my family. And yeah. I mean, a lot of them just walked away. I mean, Paul Ryan walked away. He didn’t really fight. I do think people — I mean, Republicans love to point to Liz Cheney as like, oh, well, she’ll be irrelevant soon because she’ll be out of a job. Or look at Jeff Flake. Where is he now? And McCarthy was always saying to me when I put this question to him, where’s the statue to Jeff Flake in the Senate or in the House?

ezra klein

He would actually say that to you?

He did. He said it explicitly.

ezra klein

Oh my god.

He basically said — he said, oh, yeah, the Jeff Flake thing. I would ask him, and I would ask Graham this. I asked him all variations on the do you worry how history will remember you question or how your grandchildren think about you if they ever read about you. And they would all just shake their heads and roll their eyes. And McCarthy would say, oh, yeah, yeah, the Jeff Flake thing. And I said, what do you mean the Jeff Flake thing? Well, Jeff Flake, where is his statue? OK, he was principled, and where is he now? Like Biden’s ambassador to Austria? Who’s going to remember him? And so extremely dismissive. And again, it’s part of the same nihilism. I mean, it’s anti-history. It’s anti-character. It’s anti-patriotism. It’s just doing everything for self-preservation and fear. So again, I mean, none of this is flattering at all, but unfortunately it is a pervasive reality of how these people are thinking when they decide to just go along and get along. And it’s stunning to me. It is absolutely stunning to me from a point of view of pride or principle or character — whatever big words you want to throw out there. But it happens every day. I mean, I guess there was a moment in — was it the Republican debate — or the Senate debate in Ohio the other day when Tim Ryan went after J.D. Vance for just having no pride. And Trump said, J.D.‘s been kissing my ass; he wants my support so bad. And Ryan said, you just went right up there, and you just continue to do it because that’s what you needed to do. And how could you do that? In my world — and he’s probably channeling a diverse — or macho Ohio football clique sensibility of manhood or something. But the point is the same, which is that is the job really that important? Are you really so scared of this guy that you know or I’m pretty sure you have not a lot of respect for privately. Because again, I don’t think most of them do. But again, it’s a really, really depressing window into the character or lack thereof of a lot of the people who are putative leaders now and could be running the country again in a few months.

ezra klein

Let me take a quick detour into J.D. Vance, and then I want to talk about Kevin McCarthy. So J.D. Vance, Senate candidate from Ohio, a Peter Thiel protégé, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” which is a book on Appalachian whites. Which if you read “Hillbilly Elegy,” it is very much about how that area of the country is responsible for its own problems. It’s a very strange book, given what his career becomes, because it is not a fan of systemic analysis. It takes the old cultural pathology arguments that used to be used on Black communities and applies them to white communities. And then Vance flips and becomes a systemic guy and says, you’re all against my friends here. I interviewed Vance in those periods, know him a little bit. A lot of people know him. He was a very, very anti-Trump guy, a guy who was a very preening, moralistic guy, very into civility in the way we treat one another and healing the country. And at some point, he talks about whether or not Trump is going to be our Hitler. And what always strikes me about him — and I’ve reached out to him. You don’t get an answer when you do that. He’s actually said in interviews, which I just find so weird — he’s like, David Brooks and Ezra Klein were these people you used to be able to talk to, and then they really change in the Trump era. And it’s such a weird psychology because we didn’t change at all. I believed what I believed about Trump in 2016 and 2020. I believed what J.D. Vance believed about Donald Trump in 2016. And J.D. Vance doesn’t believe that in 2022. There is something about the ability to rationalize out your own sense of self. I’m not a big fan of how will history judge you. I think the people who say that is a secular yearning for divine punishment or basically write about it. But I do think about the question of how do you judge yourself. And I don’t think these are folks without a sense of self-awareness. And I can understand how you rationalize certain versions of this, how you’re angry at how you become an anti-anti-Trumper or something. But something like the J.D. Vance pivot to full ass kisser and full culture warrior, and to totally overhaul your own personality into this just bloodied gash of resentment, I don’t understand how you maintain any stability in your self-conception. And you watched a bunch of people do this. I mean, Lindsey Graham’s someone we’ll talk about. And I’m curious what you think of that because that strikes me as the hard thing to get over.

It does. And the examples, as you said, are legion — I mean, Cruz, Rubio, I mean, everyone who basically ran against him in ‘16.

ezra klein

You have a very funny section in the book of all these people calling Donald Trump a cancer.

Yeah, cancer.

ezra klein

As you say, it’s very brave how they all learn to live with cancer.

Yes, exactly. Now, cancer, they loved that metaphor. But yeah, they’re cancer survivors. No, you’re right. And I do agree with you. I mean, I do think the verdict of history thing is a cliché. And in some ways they have assumed the Trump lesson of rationalization, projection in some ways because Ezra Klein and David Brooks changed. I mean, that’s classic projection coming from J.D. Vance. I don’t think I could do it. I honestly don’t. I mean, I don’t think being a senator from Ohio would be worth it. But again, I’ve never been in front of a crowd with Donald Trump before. I’ve never been offered a job that powerful, that visible, before a crowd that big. Maybe there’s something there, or maybe there’s something just so terrifying about being denied that, or something so magical about the spell of Donald Trump. I don’t think so. I mean, I spent way more time than I would have wanted to in late ‘15 for a magazine profile of him, and I didn’t get it. But I mean, maybe it does exist because some people do. I do think though if you look at the profile of the educated voter and how they typically feel about Trump, whether they go to Harvard or Yale, or wherever J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz went, it’s a real, real reach to think that they are able to suspend disbelief, or self-criticism, or self-assessment to the degree that they do without just playacting and knowing that they’re playacting. But again, it’s depressing. I also think it’s just worth condemnation at the highest levels. I mean, I cannot tell you the level of contempt I still have for many of these folks that are far greater in some ways for Donald Trump himself because — I don’t know — I think he’s his own pathology and is a stand-alone thing. But yeah, no. I mean, unfortunately, that dynamic is what is propelling the Republican Party right now.

ezra klein

If you look at the polls, you look at the forecasts, Kevin McCarthy is likely to be speaker after the election, then McConnell is to be Senate majority leader, which isn’t to say they both won’t get their hope for jobs. But tell me about Kevin McCarthy. How should somebody who doesn’t know that much about him understand what he is, what he wants, what kind of House speaker he’d be?

Yeah, I don’t think he’ll be a very good House speaker. I think he would be — I think it would be a miserable experience for him. But I also think that backing up, he’s a very personable guy. If you’re someone who can play the game of sitting down and having dinner, and gossiping about politics and talking about sports and talking about Washington and do you know this person, do you know that person, I mean, he’s a thoroughly back slappery Paul to have dinner with. He’s not, I don’t think, that smart, but I don’t think he’s that principled. I think he is more star struck than anything else. I mean, I had dinner with him a couple times in Bakersfield, his district. And he just spent a lot of it just showing me pictures of himself with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump, Gavin Newsom, I mean, anyone — Kobe Bryant, I mean, anyone famous that — he’s got this full iPhone of, hey, get a load of me and this person and that person. And look, we’re on Air Force One, and we’re with Jerry Brown here, and Paul Ryan was in town, and Arnold was — I mean, it was like being with a 15-year-old at a —

ezra klein

He’s actually showing these to a reporter?

Yeah, he is. Yeah, just showing me across the table. And he wouldn’t — and I’d be asking him pretty serious questions about Jan. 6 and stuff, and he’d be scrolling through his phone. And I thought maybe he was getting urgent text messages or something, but then he had flipped the phone around and say, yeah, here is me and my high school buddies. This guy is the assistant football coach at Stanford now. And oh, yeah, here’s me and Trump when he came through Bakersfield. Oh, here’s me and Pompeo. It really — it was — and I’m always amazed at how unselfconscious people who should be that accustomed to being assessed in such a public forum can be that way. But look, he’s a back slapper. He wants to be liked. He basically just wants to be speaker. He wants the gavel. He wants to be able to say for two probably miserable years, because he’s going to be led around by the nose by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Jim Jordans of the world, I suspect, and Donald Trumps of the world, I suspect, that, look, he will be able to go through his entire life as a former speaker of the House. And his mentor Bill Thomas, the longtime ways and means chair of the House, his mentor used to work for Thomas. Thomas has a terminal at the Bakersfield Airport named after him. Terminal A is now the Bill Thomas Terminal. Now, if Kevin McCarthy gets to be speaker, he might get the Bakersfield Airport. That’s his calculation. He’s like, Bakersfield Airport could be the Kevin McCarthy Airport. And that would redeem everything. It would redeem the abuse he gets from Trump, whatever machinations the Freedom Caucus makes him go through, the distrust from so much of the base. So look, that’s McCarthy. He just wants the job. And if he can be speaker of the House, it’ll all be worth it in his mind.

ezra klein

I was just thinking while you were saying that that when I read out that list of plausible leaders of the Republican Party a couple years back, I actually forgot somebody, who is Eric Cantor. And when we talk about the young guns, it was Paul Ryan, it was Eric Cantor, and it was Kevin McCarthy. They were the three up and coming Republican House members. And Cantor was the bet everybody made to be the next speaker — not Ryan, not McCarthy. And Cantor loses in this really spectacular way. Can you talk a bit about that and what effect you think it had on McCarthy in particular, but also possibly — because I do think of it as a bit of a forerunner to the Trump stuff on the Republican Party and politicians more generally.

Yeah. I mean, so Eric Cantor, like you said, I mean, he was seen to be the speaker in waiting whenever Boehner retired. And all of a sudden — I guess it was 2014 — he was cruising to victory like he always did in his Virginia district. And yeah, he gets primaried by this guy named David Brat, who was a college professor, real Tea Party or whatever the 2014 version of a Tea Party person was — very conservative, very ideological. And somehow he upset Eric Cantor out of nowhere, which was — as you said, it was really — it was a seminal moment because no one — I think that was a real congressional primary upset. And it became a cautionary tale of, this can happen to you too if you don’t cater to the crazies sufficiently. And I think McCarthy, who was actually in line to be speaker a year, a year and a half later, took that as like, I will never allow myself to be defeated by the what is now known as the base. And look, Cantor is rarely heard from anymore. He’s in private equity. I talked to him a couple years ago when I was writing about McCarthy. And he seems pretty depressed from the outside about what he sees. I don’t think he would say that he would be willing to do half of what Kevin McCarthy has been willing to do to placate Trump and Trump supporters and so forth. But yeah, no. Eric Cantor is a classic and as you said an oft-forgotten figure in this in that he was the classic up and comer and speaker in waiting a decade ago and just slunked away. And McCarthy, I think, took the lesson of him and Paul Ryan and said, OK, I’m just not going to be outpandered or outmaneuvered by anyone. I’m just going to do whatever it takes to stay on the right side of the people who can make me speaker of the House.

ezra klein

I think it’s easy to see McCarthy as a comic figure. I think he’s often played that way in Washington, somebody people know is going to have, has, and will have a lot of power, but even the way you describe him here, not somebody people take very seriously. But I want to draw this out just a little bit. Because look, I don’t think Paul Ryan, as I’ve said, was any profound profile in courage. But House speaker is incredibly powerful. And he really did set the Republicans’ actual agenda under Donald Trump. And then in the back half of the Trump presidency, Nancy Pelosi was speaker. So if you imagine McCarthy becoming speaker after the 2022 election, even after 2024, and a Trump or Trump-like figure winning in 2024, even compared to Ryan, you’re talking about a much more servile speaker —

Oh, 100 percent.

ezra klein

— and House than we saw in 2017 or 2018. And I’m curious what effect you think that would have. How is it meaningful for a Donald Trump or Trump-like figure to have a Kevin McCarthy as speaker as opposed to the opposition party or even somebody with a little bit more spine in their own party?

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s extremely meaningful. I mean, if you look at — if Donald Trump were to get elected again, one, presumably, he would be term limited. So he would not have to face voters again. So that would uncheck him that much more. And also presumably, the people in power around him will be that much more accommodating. So you would have McCarthy instead of Paul Ryan. And again, I mean, Ryan wasn’t a great person of backbone, but he at least — he condemned Charlottesville. He retired. Apparently, they had a lot of arguments in private.

ezra klein

Ryan’s big line is, you have no idea what I prevented.

You have no idea what I prevented.

ezra klein

And that could mean nothing, actually.

It could mean nothing.

ezra klein

Or it could mean something.

It could mean — at least he was a — I don’t know. I don’t discount that totally. But either way, McCarthy is not going to instill fear in anybody, both in his caucus, I don’t think, and certainly in the White House if Trump is in there or someone like Trump is in there. And unfortunately, that’s the tip of the iceberg. I mean, you could have Vice President Kari Lake, and you’d be longing for the profile and backbone that was former Vice President Mike Pence or Attorney General — I don’t know — John Eastman. I don’t know. I mean, look. I mean, I have no reason. And this is — I mean, it sounds absurd on its face, but four years ago the thought of the Capitol being stormed on Jan. 6 would have been absurd on its face. But look, I can’t think of a member of the Republican Senate outside of maybe a handful who are going to say, no, this is a bridge too far. I’m going to vote against the nomination of Attorney General Eastman, or Secretary of Defense Flynn, or Secretary of State Kushner. I don’t know. I mean, the scenario of him getting elected, again, brings all kinds of adjacent scenarios that are really hard to get your head around. But again, we’ve seen this stair stepping of possibilities come true. And who knows what we’ll be seeing is possible in a couple of years?

ezra klein

I think of McCarthy as a canonical climber, but another person in House leadership who is sometimes even more extraordinary to me in their trajectory here is Elise Stefanik. Tell me a bit about her.

Elise Stefanik is — she was — it’s funny. When I was writing about Ryan in 2018, they were dying for me to talk to Elise Stefanik because she loved Paul Ryan, and she loved Liz Cheney. These were her idols. These were the people she kept talking about as people she wanted to be like. And moderate, very big advocate for getting more women involved in Republican policies, condemned Trump quite a bit, went to Harvard, had a reputation as a real young, female, bright, moderate who really could be the future or play a real role in the future of the Republican Party. And I remember she was on the first impeachment committee on the intelligence committee. And I remember thinking, sitting in that room, yeah, you had the Jim Jordans and the Louie Gohmerts, and you knew what the hardcore Trumpers were going to say and what their lines were going to be. But I remember looking to Elise Stefanik and thinking, OK, this is where the gray matter of this committee and so much as there is any on the Republican side is going to be. And maybe she will play a more critical role. And on day one, her going after Adam Schiff and saying this witch hunt against Donald Trump. And I just remember my heart sinking. And look, I mean, she has gone all in. She clearly knows better. She’s quite distrusted within her own caucus, by the way. I mean, most — and I assume there are a lot of people who are going to be competing for the same leadership positions if McCarthy’s speaker. But look, Trump loves her, and she’s a made woman inside MAGA world at this point. But it’s extremely depressing because the journey she made from just a couple of years ago — we’re talking two or three years ago — is breathtaking. But again, I guess maybe we should stop using terms like breathtaking because it’s happened over and over and over again, the other people who I’ve been surprised by. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

They’re obviously the politicians whom it’s just very pure ambition. And for a lot of them, that’s a big part of it. It’s very easy to justify what your self-interest needs you to justify. But something I see sometimes with a Stefanik, with a Lindsey Graham, with a bunch of them is what I’ve come to think of as the anti-anti-Trump ratchet. So you start out not pro-Trump, but you’re a Republican. You don’t hate everything about the guy. You do think the media is unfair to him. You think they’re really unfair to his supporters, who are many of your supporters. And so you pick some fights because it’s good for you to pick some fights on behalf of him when you’re critical of him elsewhere or you’ve been critical of him in the past. You step out when you think you can. And then you get a big reaction backwards, a big blowback, like how dare you. We thought we knew you. And every one of them has their moments in this. I think for Lindsey Graham, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were a big moment. Stefanik has hers. I’ve heard this from a bunch of people. But there’s this way in which you start out not exactly Trump positive, but open. And you’re Republican, and you also don’t really like liberals because you’re not a liberal. And something about the back-and-forth of stepping out for Trump a bit, then getting this blowback, then stepping out a bit more and getting this blowback. And soon your friends are totally different, your enemies are totally different, who likes you is different. And I’ve watched this in politicians before as a psychological dynamic. And I’ve actually seen it in pundits too. As a psychological dynamic, this is often a pathway to a very different politics in three years. You can look at a Glenn Greenwald like this, I think.

Yes. Interesting.

ezra klein

You see this a lot, the social dynamics of odd bedfellows becoming a greased path towards ending up in a place that, I think, four years ago you could have never imagined yourself being. I’m curious how much you saw that and how you understand it operating.

I think that’s a great point. You see it a lot. You shouldn’t underestimate the power of the bunker mentality, but also yeah. I mean, you realize that your only supporters are these people now. So you sort of throw in with them. And there’s a passage in my book in which Adam Schiff is talking about Devin Nunes. And the two of them had a real — it sounds like a pretty authentic working relationship in the maybe early mid-teens. I mean, they were both on the intelligence committee. I think they were chair and ranking coach. I mean, they were both pretty high up in seniority on their respective sides. They’re both from California. They worked together fairly closely. They had a working relationship. And Schiff spoke pretty — not nostalgically for it, but it sounded like a pretty good advertisement for the kind of productive relationship a Democrat and Republican could have. Nunes used to be considered one of the sane ones, although Nunes had a few — not blind spots, but very Trumpy pet interests like around the deep state, around the F.B.I., around things that Trump had a real being despondent about. And Nunes had a similar aversion. And he became very, very enamored of Trump, and he endorsed him fairly early. But then what happened was Nunes started doing some really weird stuff. He did that midnight run where he had this information around the Russia investigation. He went to the White House at midnight and tried to share it with the White House before sharing with the rest of the committee. He has to recuse himself. I mean, the blowback was insane. And Schiff talked about seeing him become suddenly a pariah among many of his centrist Republicans, but many Democratic friends. Because this was still — I mean, it sounds a long time ago. It was seven years ago. But this was still a time when institutional respect meant something from a bipartisan perspective and so forth. And Schiff describes just this spiral that Nunes went down essentially into madness and a cultic Trumpian loyalty that turned him into the hyper-Trumpist that he became at the end of his career, that he abruptly retired from Congress for and is now, I guess, last I heard running Truth Social or something. I mean, you shouldn’t underestimate the seductive power of having allies and also just the trauma of the level of contempt that is coming back at you from people that you probably on some level have always respected and probably on some level know is probably right, which creates a great deal of dissonance, which in some ways hardens your loyalty to the side you’re now affiliated with.

ezra klein

And just makes you more open to their arguments. I mean, to make this argument against interests so it doesn’t just sound like something I’m saying about Trumpists, you really see this, in my view, with the Never Trumpers. So I’ve known people like Bill Kristol or Jen Rubin or a bunch of the Project Lincoln folks for a very long time. And eight years ago, we had similar views on Donald Trump and very different views on taxes or Obamacare. And over time, a bunch of these folks — it’s not just that they’re anti-Trump. It’s that they’ve developed views closer to mine on taxation, on health care, on other things. And I’m not against that. I want people to hold my views —

Yes, sure.

ezra klein

— on domestic policy. But I do think there’s an interesting dynamic where when the people who were once your allies turn on you because they feel you’ve turned on them, then it’s not just that you like the people who were once your opponents, your antagonists a lot better, but all of a sudden you’re also open to other things they say. I mean, the world is complicated. On some level the fundamental, empirical, and ontological choice we make every day is simply, who do we trust? And we tend to trust people we think like us and who we like. And so it’s just a very — I just think this is a very powerful and underappreciated sociopolitical dynamic.

Yeah. No, it’s true too. I mean, I’ve had — I mean, first of all, it is bizarre and ironic, and I would never have predicted this, but if you want to look at real profiles of courage on the right, I mean, a lot of it comes from the consultant world or the sort of people we would have called hacks many years ago. But I’ve been — intellectually speaking — and I don’t know — I think you might agree with this — I’ve found I have had much more common cause with conservatives over the last half dozen years than I ever had before. I’ve read more conservative writing. And the power of the unity around norms, around democracy, around basic seriousness has been a very powerful thing that I think has brought the classic right and the classic left together. Now, one unfortunate symptom of what we’ve all been living through is I think the term conservative has been really perverted. I mean, I think now people say, oh, well, the real Trumpists like Roger Stone and John Eastman or Steve Bannon, they are hyperconservatives. And the people who go to Trump rallies are the real hardcore conservatives. They’re not conservative, I mean, not in any classic sense. They’re Trumpists. And I realize that people — I mean, the term Trumpist is not all that satisfying because it basically just everything associated with Trump. But again, I think conservatism in its purest form has had some very, very eloquent advocates over the last few years that I’ve sort of appreciated listening to and learning from. And I think, again, a conservatism that doesn’t so much exist in the political square as it did maybe 10 years ago I have a greater appreciation for.

ezra klein

Let’s talk a bit about the true believers. Because one thing about this category, particularly inside official Republican circles, is it wasn’t very big in 2017, and it is very big now. I would make the argument that in this typology, that in 2017 you were very tilted in Congress towards pragmatists, maybe some accommodationists, maybe some martyrs. And now it’s much more accommodationists and true believers. So tell me a bit about the true believers. Who comes to your mind there, and what sort of Republican are they? How are they different than a Kevin McCarthy?

Well, part of it is just numbers. I mean, I think in around 2018, 2019, David Wasserman of — was it Cook Political Report? He’s at Cook, right? He’s the congressional expert, real guru. He calculated that about half of the Republicans who were in office in Congress in 2016 on Election Day had either been defeated, retired or were planning to retire — not running for re-election. So basically right there take half of whatever the mainstream of the Republican Party in the House was in early 2017 and just sort of sweep them out — the Kevin Bradys, the Mark Sanfords. I mean, there’s just a lot of retirements — Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, moderates, pure conservatives, and so forth. And yeah. I mean, they have been replaced by Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I guess — I don’t know when Paul Gosar came in. But they have all ascended — I mean, Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows before he left to go to the White House. But these were fringe figures in 2015, and now they are core figures. They will extract, if McCarthy becomes speaker, pretty high-level leadership positions as chairman, whether as whips or majority leaders and so forth. And also many of the people who were here in 2016, we talked about before, have, I think, had a fairly center-right orientation, were very enamored of Paul Ryan very enamored of even Lindsey Graham early on, and then quickly saw where the passion in the party was and transformed themselves into basically election deniers. I mean, they all voted against certification, which would have been a radical act in any previous election. And so you have the people who would have been considered potentially serious members of Congress elevated to powerful kooks, or you have authentic kooks like Marjorie Taylor Greene getting elected. And she, again, will have an inordinate amount of power over Kevin McCarthy, partly because Trump likes her and because she has a level of following. So yeah. No, it’s a very different Republican Party now than it was four or five years ago.

ezra klein

And this strikes me as, again, a way, if Republicans take the House, take the Senate, take the White House in 2024, I think there is more of a sense of continuity in that than would actually be true. Because I think for the time period in which Donald Trump held the presidency and held Congress, he was working with a Republican Congress that was trying to mostly bend Donald Trump to their agenda. He didn’t have that much of his own agenda. They didn’t really like him that much. It was a weird alliance of convenience and political necessity. And so they were trying to get him to do what they wanted and in many cases I think did to everybody’s political detriment — the tax cuts, the efforts to repeal Obamacare. But I think if Donald Trump or some other Trump-like figure wins in 2024 and has Congress, they’re going to be working with a Republican Congress that is much more oriented towards wanting to support the president’s agenda or wanting to help the president convert or translate his intuitions into an agenda. Whatever tension there was — and I’m not saying it was greatly protective for the Republic or anything, but I do think there was friction in the system. I think that friction is basically gone.

I completely agree. To be honest with you, I think the greater peril is not so much that there might be another massive budget-busting tax cut or something, or deregulation, but something like leaving NATO, something like formalizing the election denialism, the kind of fascist, semi-fascist, whatever you want to call it, ideas that Trump was promoting at the end. So yeah. Again, that’s where I would leave policy behind for a second, which I’m loathe to do. Because obviously, theoretically, policy is what everyone is here for, but that’s not really the case anymore. I mean, we’re talking about a perch of power where they could re-engineer the basic rules of our government and our democracy in a way that would make it very hard for not only Democrats to get anything done in a Trump White House, in a Republican House or Senate, but actually win elections going forward. So again, I mean, to me this feels a lot more existential than whether we’re debating a tax cut or not.

ezra klein

Do you think Donald Trump as a candidate at this point is all that unique inside the Republican Party and inside its presidential jockeying? Or have we hit that point where — I was talking to the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt. And he was saying that he thinks people think that the danger of Trump is unique, but he wonders if it’s become more like Bonapartism. There was sort of Napoleon, and then for a long time Bonapartism, even arguably still is just a strain, a coherent strain in French politics. And Ziblatt’s view is that Trump is becoming just a strain in American politics. Even if Trump himself leaves the picture, there are so many candidates who have become something like him that there’s no way of excising that from our politics, much less from the Republican Party.

Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. I mean, just for starters, I don’t want Bonapartism in our country either. So let’s put that on the record. I think Trump is obviously not new anymore. I don’t think Ron DeSantis would scale particularly well, especially if he runs against Trump. I mean, I think everyone’s like, oh, well, DeSantis is like Trump with a brain and with discipline. But no. I mean, DeSantis doesn’t have any of the appeal of Trump. I mean, he’s a very different character and so forth. But yeah, no. I mean, Trump unfortunately is not an unknown entity anymore. There’s nothing new about him. But very unfortunately, we know exactly what he’s capable of and might try next. I mean, like any authoritarian, he is going to do whatever he can get away with until he is stopped. And I believe — and again, this was one of the reasons I wrote the book. I mean, I think the place to do this is the Republican Party. I mean, if it’s going to be a serious party, if it’s going to be a major party, that’s where this needs to stop. Otherwise, they continue to be this person, this set of ideas, and frankly this pile of incredible resentment to so much of what we would like to think that what used to be called the civilized world would represent. So I don’t think Trump was that interesting then. I don’t think he’s that interesting now. But unfortunately if he runs for the nomination, he’s probably going to win it. And then it’s 80-however-year-old Joe Biden against him, and who knows who’s going to win?

ezra klein

Let me then end by asking a question about the Democrats. So given what the Republican Party is now, given what Trumpism is, given what they are facing as a coalition, what is your sense of how they should engage with it? And I guess I mean that in terms of politics, but also how do they engage a Republican Party that they actually do govern alongside? Should the Democratic Party be treating Republicans as beyond the pale? How do you see the counterreaction in the Democratic Party? Is it sufficient? Is it insufficient? Do they appreciate what they’re looking at? What’s your view?

That’s a great question. I mean, I think, first of all, the Democrats, as we know, are not that organized. So there is not exactly a cohesive or coherent strategy here. I mean, I think — look, they have proven that it’s hard enough just to govern on its own. I mean, I think that Biden gets a great deal of mockery, I think, from the left, especially for his talk of unity, his talk of trying, hoping against hope that he can find some common cause with Republicans. I do think that that’s probably the correct instinct. I think eventually, if you keep trying, you can maybe pick away. I don’t think the Republican Party is going anywhere. But at the same time, it’s painful to have to talk to Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s painful to have to talk to Kevin McCarthy. It’s painful to have to convince an election denier that, no, Joe Biden really was legitimately elected as your 46th president. So I don’t know. I mean, I think —do you just have to hold your nose that much harder? Maybe. But ultimately, I would be a lot more frontal in attacking Trump and the level of menace that Republicans have imposed upon the country. I do think that the existential threats to the country now reside inside the Republican Party. I think Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney have said as much explicitly. I don’t think that’s overstated. And look, I don’t think it’s — everyone’s like, oh, don’t mention Trump, or don’t make it about Trump. Focus on kitchen table issues, and we’re going to help you keep your health care and so forth. I mean, yeah, all of that is compelling and probably very effective at a district-wide level. But I don’t know. I think that in some ways, Republicans haven’t been vilified enough by Democrats. I think the contrast could be a lot more sharply drawn than it is. I don’t know if Biden is the one to do it necessarily. I don’t think he really has it in him, and I don’t I don’t think he wants to govern that way. But I don’t know. I would think that Republicans could be called out a lot more directly than they are now.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good place to come to an end. Always our final question, what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

I love Tim Miller’s book, “Why We Did It.” I hope I’m saying it right. Tim Miller is a longtime Republican operative who basically wrote about his journey to disenchantment in the Trump years. Reading our colleague — or actually not our colleague because I don’t work here anymore, but Maggie Haberman’s book. Enjoying it. A little burnt out on the Trump genre, but I’m enjoying it. I’m reading a fiction book by someone who works for my agent’s office, and it’s called “NSFW,” Not Safe For Work. And it’s by a very talented young writer named Isabel Kaplan. Everyone should buy it. I grabbed it off of her desk or off my agent’s desk, read it when I was on a plane, and thoroughly enjoyed it. So read “NSFW.” I always get those four letters right. So yeah, those are three, three recent ones.

ezra klein

And your new book is “Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission.” Mark Leibovich, thank you very much.

Ezra, thanks so much for having me.

ezra klein

Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on October 22, 2022This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The Russians have accused the Ukrainians of preparing to use a “dirty bomb,” because they want to rattle the West and keep the use of Russian nuclear weapons on the table.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The great pandemic hand-washing blooper
Herschel Walker and the plight of the true conservative voter
The making of a leftist
Rationalization for Escalation?Over the weekend, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called his counterparts in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and—interestingly—Turkey. In these calls, Shoigu claimed that Ukraine is about to use a “dirty bomb,” which would ostensibly allow Russia to open the door to retaliation with nuclear weapons. Today, General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, called his American and British counterparts to press the same case.What is a dirty bomb, and what was the point in making this claim now?A dirty bomb isn’t actually a nuclear bomb. It is, to use the clunky term professionals apply to it, a radiological dispersal device, which is just another way of saying that it is a conventional explosive wrapped around a lot of dangerous radioactive material. When the bomb explodes, it is not a nuclear detonation, but only the normal explosion of something like TNT or other munitions. The difference is that this conventional explosion spreads around a lot of radioactive material, poisoning anyone nearby and rendering the area highly dangerous—perhaps even impassable. The gunk inside a dirty bomb could be anything that is highly radioactive: nuclear reactor waste, the leftover pieces of a nuclear weapon, even radiological materials from a hospital.This dirty-bomb charge could be part of the preparation for a Russian “false flag” operation, in which the Russians will explode their own dirty bomb, perhaps in the occupied territories of Ukraine or close to the Russian border; blame Ukraine; and then demand that Ukraine surrender or face nuclear retaliation. It could also be a way of trying to scare off Ukraine’s Western supporters with threats of escalation.Let’s hope that this is just the Kremlin trying to engage in scare tactics. If, however, Putin and his circle are really considering a dirty-bomb provocation, it is likely because they would see such a plot as solving multiple problems at once. Russia would probably try to flip the script, and go from an aggressor likely guilty of multiple war crimes to the victim of a nuclear “event.” It might then issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainians that elevates the war to a nuclear crisis (which is probably the only way Moscow thinks it can win, now that the Russian army lies in pieces on the battlefield).The Russians, in such a gambit, would likely be betting that a faked dirty bomb would alleviate the “first use” stain from any Russian decision to attack—or as they would almost certainly say in this scenario, “retaliate”—with a nuclear weapon. With nuclear weapons now in play, the West would have to decide just how much to commit to nuclear deterrence on behalf of Ukraine.Why are the Russians now pushing this plot? I suspect the attempt to put nuclear issues back in play is rooted in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s realization that he has, yet again, humiliated himself in his harebrained scheming to prosecute a war he’s been losing since its first days. In particular, his attempt to conscript 300,000 Russian males has been a political disaster; some reports suggest that twice that number of Russians have already fled their country, and even Putin has admitted to “mistakes” and is winding back at least some of the mindless dragooning of his young men.Thus, threatening this dirty-bomb ruse and risking subsequent escalation makes sense if you’re in a bunker under the Kremlin (which is why I think it’s Putin’s reasoning), but in reality, it is utterly unhinged and reckless.For one thing, no one is going to believe the dirty-bomb story. The Americans, French, and British have already told the Russians as much. (We do not yet have a readout on the response from the Turks, but I cannot imagine they’re buying this fantasy any more than the other NATO allies.) That may not matter to Putin, who would probably care only that enough Russians believe it. But that plan, too, may backfire: One Russian-made dirty bomb followed by a nuclear crisis might panic the Russian public more than Putin expects.And although the Russians may think that calling their nuclear attack a “second” use in retaliation will get them off the hook, it won’t. Putin is likely betting that the world will back off after some routine condemnations, but the story around the dirty bomb will collapse pretty quickly, and Russia will stand revealed as a nuclear aggressor, which might finally lead the rest of the world to the conclusion that this regime is an intolerable threat to global peace and security.Putin could then find himself in a nuclear standoff with the West that neither he nor we want, but that will come anyway because of his own inability to foresee the consequences of his actions. (Ironically, one of the reasons the Russian president is in this mess is because he has a remarkable and completely unwarranted confidence in his ability to control events.) I do not want to speculate on how such a larger crisis could occur, but if the Russians choose this desperate path, there are multiple roads that could lead to a major East-West nuclear confrontation.Putin, once again, is gambling with the lives of his own people and the world, and we can only hope that Moscow now understands—through warnings from Washington, London, Paris, and (ideally) Ankara—that we see through this attempted fraud, and that such escalation will only hasten Russia’s defeat and endanger the stability of the Russian nation itself.Related:
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A gunman killed two people and injured at least seven others at a high school in St. Louis. The suspect died after exchanging gunfire with the police.
Rishi Sunak has been named the leader of the U.K.’s Conservative Party and will become the country’s next prime minister following Liz Truss’s resignation. He will be Britain’s first prime minister of color.
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Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares reader thoughts on the attitudes about race and ethnicity that society should adopt.
(Courtesy of Sean O'Brien and Brittany Means)
The Pet-Name Trend Humans Can’t ResistBy Katherine J. Wu
Long, long ago—five years, to be precise—Jeff Owens accepted that his calls to the vet would tax his fortitude. When the person on the other end asks his name, Owens, a test scorer in Albuquerque, says, “Jeff.” When they ask for his cat’s name, he has to tell them, “Baby Jeff.” The black exotic shorthair, a wheezy female with a squashed face and soulful orange eyes, is named for Owens, says his partner, Brittany Means, whose tweet about Jeff and Baby Jeff went viral this past spring. The whole thing started as a joke several years ago, when Means started calling every newcomer to their home—the car, the couch—“Baby Jeff.” Faced with blank adoption paperwork in 2017, the couple realized that only one name would do.
Why wasn’t I canceled?
Truffles are everywhere now.
On murders especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel
Rhaenyra Targaryen in the finale of House of the Dragon (Ollie Upton / HBO)
Read. “The Green Tram,” a poem by John Freeman.“In my 46th year there / are so many things / I want to tell you. / How everyone is / drunk at Wimbledon, / and a fox has come to live in our / garden. We feed / him duck livers from a can.”  Watch. The House of the Dragon Season 1 finale, which aired on HBO last night. The Game of Thrones spin-off attempted to fit 19 years of story into 10 episodes—and actually pulled it off.Listen. The latest episode of our podcast How to Build a Happy Life, about how to spend time on what you value.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I often lament that foreign policy usually doesn’t get much play in off-year elections—or, for that matter, in any elections at all. (As I wrote about Afghanistan, the majority of Americans managed to ignore our presence there almost completely as an election issue for nearly two decades.) So I am glad to see, in the Ohio Senate race, that J. D. Vance’s shameful position on the war in Ukraine has caused some consternation among Ukrainian Americans. What is Vance’s position, you ask? He doesn’t care. I am not paraphrasing. “I gotta be honest with you,” he said earlier this year. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”That’s an applause line for the Putin fans in the Tucker Carlson audience, but Ohio—which Vance claims to know as a native son—has more than 40,000 people of Ukrainian ancestry. I’m not sure whether Vance’s know-nothing isolationism will matter in the end, or whether he will be handed the defeat he deserves; I suspect that Ohio will stay Republican. But I’m glad that Vance’s ignorant gaffe has reminded at least some voters that oversight of U.S. foreign policy is still among the most important jobs of a U.S. senator and should be taken more seriously than someone like Vance apparently believes it should.— TomIsabel Fattal and Kate Lindsay contributed to this newsletter.This newsletter previously misstated the Turkish capital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are likely to add the COVID-19 vaccine to the immunization schedule for children and adolescents. Last week, an advisory panel voted unanimously to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans ages 6 months and older, and the full agency is almost certain to sign off on this decision.
Such a move would not automatically make the vaccines mandatory for children: In theory, CDC guidance is optional. But in practice, many municipalities will be inclined to require whatever the CDC recommends. During the pandemic, cities and states controlled by Democratic political figures frequently rubber-stamped federal health officials' extremely cautious coronavirus recommendations relating to masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. Blue municipalities took their cues from their local health departments, which in turn copied the CDC's guidance wholesale into formal policy. When frustrated, caution-weary constituents would ask their local officials about timelines for getting rid of mask mandates and reopening schools, their answer was usually something like, "When the CDC says so."
This means that adding the COVID-19 vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule will create a tremendous incentive for blue states to require it for public school children. This would be a profound mistake.
In general, the rationale for vaccine mandates is public health: Public school children are required to get vaccinated for measles, for instance, in order to prevent the spread of measles to other, more vulnerable individuals. This same logic does not hold for the COVID-19 vaccines, which have largely failed to prevent the spread of infection, particularly for the COVID-19 variants. The vaccines do a tremendous job of preventing elderly and at-risk people from suffering severe illness and dying, but most children are spared the worst effects of COVID-19, anyway—particularly if they were already infected, which is the case for nearly nine out of every 10 kids, according to the CDC.
Some European countries have looked at the data and determined that there isn't enough net benefit to merit childhood vaccination. Denmark, for instance, is no longer recommending COVID-19 vaccines for otherwise healthy young people under the age of 18. This is not because Denmark's government was overtaken by anti-vaxers, but rather because there are reasonable arguments both for and against the policy. Thus, leaving the matter to individual families and their doctors is wise. Indeed, even in the U.S., less than 40 percent of kids under the age of 11 have received the vaccine. Most parents have evidently decided that this course of action is not strictly necessary for their children, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Requiring children to get the COVID-19 vaccine could, on the other hand, create several problems. Parents who are disinclined to give their children the COVID-19 vaccine might start to wonder whether the other vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule are similarly unnecessary—which could have dire results for public health. Unvaccinated children might simply end up dropping out of school, which would worsen the pandemic-driven crisis of learning loss. Low-income students and students of color will be hardest hit; attempts by Washington, D.C., to require public school children to get jabbed were delayed after it became clear that a disproportionate number of unvaccinated black and brown young people would be banned from school under such a policy.
"If mandates become the norm, unvaccinated children will be displaced to virtual school, home school, or perhaps no school at all," writes Vinay Prasad, a health researcher and professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. "The harm to kids from substandard education—after nearly two years of disruption—far exceeds any gains from compliance."
Some states have already signaled that they will not require the COVID-19 vaccine of school children, even if the CDC schedules it. Given the reality of COVID-19—most children already have some protection from it, and getting vaccinated does not substantially prevent outbreaks of it—this is the right move.
Let individual families talk to their doctors about vaccinating their children and make this decision on a case-by-case basis. The government does not have a legitimate rationale for butting in.
The post Adding the COVID-19 Vaccine to the Childhood Immunization Schedule Is a Mistake appeared first on Reason.com.

There are plenty of reasons why Americans should be alarmed by 2022’s dismal National Assessment of Educational Progress report. In nearly every state and across all demographic and ethnic divides, fundamental skills like math and reading are on the decline. Only 26 percent of all eighth-grade students achieved proficiency in math this year, down from 34 percent in 2019. Just 31 percent of eighth graders were proficient in reading, which is down to levels America hasn’t seen since 1992. Students are struggling to comprehend what they read. They cannot register the basic contours of geometric shapes or perform basic conversions. Experts fear this learning loss has produced a generation of young people unprepared to navigate the world outside the classroom.

This is, according to Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, “a jarring reminder of the pandemic’s impact on academic achievement.” But the consequences of these policies won’t be felt until this ill-served generation descends on the American workforce. In the meantime, apparently, there are more urgent concerns to worry about. The New York Times has identified a more acute menace in the NAEP’s findings: the ammunition it gives to Republican critics of the Democratic Party’s Covid mitigation measures.

“The test results could be seized as political fodder—just before the midterms—to re-litigate the debate over how long schools should have stayed closed, an issue that galvanized many parents and teachers,” the Times warns. The risk that Republicans could pounce, seize, capture, appropriate, or commandeer America’s students’ abysmal test scores is somehow more alarming than the scores themselves.

There is already a rear-guard action underway among educational professionals to prevent observers from drawing any unwanted conclusions. “There is nothing in this data that allows us to draw a straight line from remote learning to student performance,” said National Center for Education Statistics Chair Dr. Peggy Carr. “There is no straight line like people want to draw.” There is, in fact, a very straight line—one drawn by another critic of overly broad conclusions about the pandemic’s effect on educational outcomes, Harvard University professor Martin West.

As shown above, West concedes that there is a substantial gap between how eighth-grade math students performed in red states (they lost “7.2 NAEP scale score points”) vs. blue states (an 8.8-point loss). He further notes that the “clustering of red states at the left of the figure confirms that states that went for Trump were, in fact, more aggressive in reopening schools for in-person instruction.” But the effect is not uniform across the board, and “NAEP data are not well suited to parsing out the relative effectiveness of different modes of learning.”

Fair enough, but one “mode of learning” we can safely judge to be suboptimal is remote learning. If this disappointing report doesn’t feel like a bombshell, it’s only because Americans saw it coming from a mile off.

Study after study of the impact remote and hybridized learning had on the performance of primary- and secondary-school students has found that they contribute to underperformance across the board. “But really,” National Public Radio said of no fewer than six such studies, “this should surprise no one.” True enough. But the only reason this is conventional wisdom now is that critics of school closures were incessant about it. They would not be shouted down or emotionally blackmailed into keeping their concerns about their children’s welfare to themselves.

As early as the summer of 2020, poll after poll showed that parents with school-aged children were panicked. Their kids’ academic performance was suffering, and their mental health was deteriorating. Few failed to notice the brewing backlash. Accordingly, left-leaning municipalities from San Francisco to Chicago to New York City committed to a phased return to in-person schooling before the winter. But teachers’ unions and school administrators intervened.

A poll of educators that summer showed that fully two-thirds preferred to keep schools closed indefinitely. One-in-five teachers told USA Today/Ipsos pollsters they’d rather quit than put their health at risk, and nearly eight-in-ten teachers told NPR/Ipsos they were unconcerned about their absence from students’ lives relative to the risk posed by Covid in the classroom. They won the argument, and most American schools stayed dark.

Nothing so comprehensively explains the backlash Democrats faced at the polls in November 2021’s off-year elections than a reaction to the experimental social policies that were implemented under the cover provided by the pandemic. Educational policies were only one group of these, but they were arguably the most salient. Post-mortem verdicts on races that produced a Republican governor in bluish Virginia and almost unseated a Democratic governor in dark blue New Jersey attributed the GOP’s strength to its opposition to school closures and impediments to learning such as mask mandates. Still, parents were admonished for daring to think, much less say, that Covid protocols were the problem.

Even by the time most schools were again open to students, too many districts clung to crippling mitigation measures such as social distancing and masking. Once again, those who objected to these talismanic initiatives on substantive grounds were dismissed or chided for their indifference to the health of their more “vulnerable” neighbors. “My daughter had a meltdown about having to put sneakers on to go to kindergarten. She got used to wearing sneakers in school,” said New York Gov Kathy Hochul of mask mandate critics. “They adapt better than adults do.” If the polls are accurate, Hochul is facing the fight of her political life just to preserve Democrats’ hold on the governorship in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by two-to-one.

The New York Times coaches its readers into concluding that the problem isn’t school closures but—always and forever—the distinct-funding deficit with which American schools are saddled. While the U.S. “made its single largest investment in American schools” in 2021, at least one study found that $123 billion was “insufficient to address student learning loss.” But the Times concedes that “districts were given wide latitude” regarding how they spent Covid relief funds, even those earmarked for educational purposes. Indeed, some of those funds found their way into the pockets of DEI consultants tasked with implementing “implicit bias” and “anti-racism” training protocols. As one Department of Education document insisted, America needed to undergo a “culture shift” if it was to “reopen equitably for all students.”

If all this did not serve as “political fodder” for those who insist on the need to “re-litigate” the policies that brought low America’s students, it would be a national embarrassment. America’s pandemic experience must be re-litigated if only so it will never again be repeated. And if the GOP is the only party inclined toward self-critical retrospection on this issue, Republicans will deserve all the credit due to the party of competent, capable government. If Democrats cede that mantel to the GOP, they deserve what’s coming to them.

       FILE- In this Jan. 31, 2018, file photo, a Lyft logo is installed on a Lyft driver's car next to an Uber sticker in Pittsburgh. On Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, a California judge ordered ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees, not contractors. It's the first ruling in what is expected to be a drawn-out legal battle over implementation of a new state law relating to the gig economy. The companies will likely appeal the ruling, which would delay its implementation. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File) Gene J. Puskar/AP   Labor Department's independent contracting proposal endangers both freedom and prosperity   Walter Olson  October 24, 02:57 PM October 24, 02:57 PM  “Biden wants to let gig workers be employees,” reads the headline on a Washington Post story. The lead paragraph says the Biden Department of Labor intends to “make it easier” for independent contractors to be considered employees, “granting them access to benefits and federal labor protections.”  “Let” is truly a bizarre wording here, reinforced by words like “easier” and “granting.” The proposed Labor Department regulation doesn’t grant permission, it imposes a requirement. It would force employee status on many workers who actively wish to remain independent contractors. Unless you grasp that, you’re not going to grasp the mounting anger among many freelancers, independent truckers, and others whose livelihood is threatened by DOL’s proposal to sharply restrict independent contracting in the workplace.  We’ve seen this before with California’s disastrous AB 5, which was repeatedly revised to exclude lines of business in which it was causing havoc. While media coverage of the issue tends to focus on platform‐based gig‐workers, workers hurt by AB 5 included many tutors, performers in music and theater, plumbers, nurse practitioners, writers, photographers, contract software developers, and many others, notably owner‐operators and other independent truckers.  And we’ve also seen this at the federal level in its previous go‐round as the Obama administration’s 2015 initiative along the same lines (although this version would go even further). As we noted then, the intended restrictions on franchising and subcontracting would endanger the thriving white‐van culture of small skilled contractors by which so many tradespeople now find upward mobility, trading it instead for clock‐punching at some company division. And it would force tech, creative, and startup firms that currently outsource functions like cafeteria, janitorial, and landscape maintenance to take on much wider direct employment responsibilities they may not be particularly well equipped to handle.  Most of the jobs the new regulation would endanger aren’t “gig economy” jobs at all and have nothing to do with platform apps. Nonetheless, it’s worth emphasizing that, as Ike Brannon and others have shown, the platform/“gig” sector of the economy makes possible flexibility on time and hours that is highly valued by many current workers and would be threatened under an arrangement in which employers would have strong reason to terminate contractors who put in time sporadically or for only a few hours a week.  The public can file comments here through November 28.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA  This article originally appeared in the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the Cato Institute.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

If Rishi Sunak wants to survive for longer as prime minister than his predecessor, he must now unite the Conservative Party. That could prove difficult for the former chancellor. He inherits a fractious party and the government’s immediate task remains the divisive job of raising enough money to fill the fiscal gap left by Liz Truss’s mini-Budget. That means that in the coming weeks Sunak’s government will likely have to impose tax rises and spending cuts, which will be deeply unpopular with Tory MPs.
There are positive signs for Sunak. Tory backbenchers were bursting with enthusiasm after he gave his victory speech to the 1922 Committee meeting this afternoon. He’s attracted support from both the right and the left of the party. Backers of Boris Johnson, such as the former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi and the European Research Group (ERG) favourite Suella Braverman, endorsed him before his victory was declared. The Brexiteers of the ERG and the One Nation grouping of more centrist MPs have both promised to support him.
That unity may not last long if his policies prove unpopular, however. Truss faced a significant rebellion over plans not to raise benefits in line with inflation; will Sunak attempt the same? If not, then does he intend to keep the “triple lock” that means state pensions rise with average earnings, inflation, or by 2 per cent, whichever is higher? Which department budgets will he cut? Will he scrap plans to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP and risk the resignation of Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary? The trigger for Truss’s resignation was a smart parliamentary move by Labour that forced Conservatives to vote on the return of fracking. How will Sunak navigate similar opposition ploys to divide the party?
Tory MPs are now seasoned rebels. The chaos of last week was yet another blow to party discipline. And these tensions will only be exacerbated by the economic problems that remain. The Conservatives may now enjoy a boost in the polls – albeit from a calamitous low point – but once mortgages start to rise next year because of higher interest rates, real-terms pay falls further and the energy price guarantee expires in April, discord may return.
Ultimately, Tory MPs desperately want to avoid an early general election given the state of the polls. Few MPs will want to destabilise the government after the chaos of the past six months, particularly if Sunak appoints MPs from across the party to the cabinet. But that doesn’t mean they won’t cause problems for the new PM as the reality of renewed austerity becomes clear.
[See also: Rishi Sunak to become prime minister after Penny Mordaunt withdraws]

Sixth article in a series on bureaucratic autonomy; the first installment can be found here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here, and the fifth here.In their campaign against the “deep state,” the Republicans want not just to reform the civil service—a bureaucracy that genuinely needs reform—but to gut it from top to bottom. If a Republican is elected president in 2024 this will almost certainly happen, even if the candidate is Ron DeSantis or someone else other than Donald Trump. Hostility to the permanent civil service has become one of the unifying issues of the new, populist Republican Party.This hostility was expressed by J. D. Vance while campaigning for Senate in Ohio. In the interview, he suggested that if Trump were to win the presidency again in 2024, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say—quoting Andrew Jackson—’the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'”The Republicans already tried to do this. On Oct. 21, 2020, the Trump administration issued Executive Order 13957, which created a new “Schedule F” category for federal employees and ordered all agencies to move large numbers of their employees into this category. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___This order would in effect strip the newly re-categorized employees of their civil service protections and leave them vulnerable to termination. Had Donald Trump won a second term, he would have been able to dismiss large numbers of protected civil servants (like Dr. Anthony Fauci or Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch) and replace them with his own political appointees.One of the first acts of the incoming Biden administration was to reverse Schedule F. Like many actions taken by the outgoing administration, the executive order was not planned particularly well, and few executive agencies complied with it. There is reason, however, to believe that the Schedule F executive order was not simply a one-off parting shot by an outgoing administration, but the opening salvo in a larger conservative plan to weaken the career civil service. To date, 28 Republican-dominated states have moved their state bureaucracies to at-will employment. The federal-level strategy would revolve around getting the Supreme Court to determine that merit-based hiring is per se unconstitutional, and that the entire classification system that has existed since passage of the 1883 Pendleton Act needs to be replaced with what amounts to at-will hiring and firing. The Schedule F executive order was simply to be a stalking horse for a coming legal challenge that would force the Supreme Court, now with a strong 6-3 conservative majority after the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, to address this issue.The ability of Congress to regulate appointments and removals seemed a matter of settled law through most of the 20th century but in recent years has come under renewed attack by conservatives who echo many arguments raised in the 1930s against the New Deal administrative state. The most far-reaching of their claims is that the delegation of authority to agencies by Congress is per se unconstitutional.The constitutional argument is made on two separate grounds. The first is built around the theory of the “unified executive,” which sees the U.S. Constitution as giving the president rather than Congress clear authority over the entire executive branch. The current federal executive is anything but unified, with an alphabet soup of agencies led by multimember boards and independent bodies like the Federal Reserve. A second constitutional argument concerns separation of powers.  Many federal agencies in effect perform legislative, judicial functions, such as the decisions by administrative law judges who are not Article III jurists. The APA tacitly acknowledges that federal agencies are performing quasi-legislative acts when they issue new rules; the ex ante procedural constraints it specifies merely limit their extent.The right of presidents to appoint senior officers like cabinet secretaries with the advice and consent of the Senate is uncontested, and was affirmed in jurisprudence going all the way back to Marbury v. Madison. Article II, Section 2 states however that “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” It is on this ground that the Pendleton Act has been deemed constitutional over the decades; the real issue would seem to be the location of the dividing line between “inferior Officers” and their superiors.However, as noted in my previous post, presidential appointment and removal power were never considered equivalent, and extensive removal power had been accepted since the decision of 1789. But in the post-World War II period this power was limited by an increasing number of procedural rights to appeal by career civil servants.The case for enhanced removal power can be made on the grounds of government efficiency. Bureaucrats are not necessarily impartial public servants, but individuals with their own policy preferences who might seek to obstruct policy changes resulting from an election that brings a new party to power. In addition, civil servants seek to protect their own self-interest in ways that often do not correspond with public interest. From the beginning of the Progressive Era, civil servants organized themselves into public sector unions that sought not just to protect the merit system but also incumbency. While the existing system permits for-cause removals, judicial protections have expanded so substantially under union pressure in the second half of the 20th century that public managers find themselves unable to remove incompetent employees. Conservatives argued a pragmatic argument that disciplining the federal work force had become nearly impossible. Moreover, the clear vesting of removal power in the head of the executive branch affords in theory greater accountability since voters can eject the president if they don’t like his decisions.As the J. D. Vance quote cited earlier suggests, however, there is a second, less legitimate argument in favor of increased political control which has to do with political patronage. The merit-based civil service system was created to deal with problems of patronage and corruption that had plagued American public administration since the 1820s, preventing the emergence of a high-capacity bureaucracy sufficient to meet the demands of a complex and rapidly-changing economy and society. Patronage power nonetheless remained a powerful demand on the part of politicians. Needless to say, the conservative agenda of abolishing civil service protections under something like “Schedule F” will vastly increase opportunities for patronage and the prospect that capable professional civil servants will be replaced by political appointees whose main qualification is their partisan loyalty. We have already seen a preview of what this would look like in the Trump presidency, when competent civil servants were replaced by poorly qualified Trump partisans. The damage was limited then by the paucity of qualified loyalists. As Jonathan Swann has documented in Axios, the Republicans are spending their time out of office compiling lists of political appointees they would put into bureaucratic posts should they recover the Presidency in 2024.It is hard to describe the damage that will be done to American government if these plans are carried out. While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies will take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government.  When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions?  Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.This is not to say that the current system under which the federal bureaucracy operates is a good one, or that public sector reform isn’t urgent and necessary. But there are better ways of going about this other than the wholesale destruction of the career civil service, which I will detail in my final post.Image: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Flickr: Gage Skidmore)

Long, long ago—five years, to be precise—Jeff Owens accepted that his calls to the vet would tax his fortitude. When the person on the other end asks his name, Owens, a test scorer in Albuquerque, says, “Jeff.” When they ask for his cat’s name, he has to tell them, “Baby Jeff.” The black exotic shorthair, a wheezy female with a squashed face and soulful orange eyes, is named for Owens, says his partner, Brittany Means, whose tweet about Jeff and Baby Jeff went viral this past spring. The whole thing started as a joke several years ago, when Means started calling every newcomer to their home—the car, the couch—“Baby Jeff.” Faced with blank adoption paperwork in 2017, the couple realized that only one name would do.Baby Jeff is a weird (albeit very good!) name, but it’s not as weird as it would have been a century or two ago. In the U.S., and much of the rest of the Western world, we’re officially living in an era of bequeathing unto our pets some rather human names. It’s one of the most prominent reminders that these animals have become “members of the family,” says Shelly Volsche, an anthropologist at Boise State University, to the point where they’re ascribed “agency and personhood.” The animals in our homes commonly receive so many of the acts of love people shower on the tiny humans under their care; pets share our beds, our diets, our clothes. So why not our names, too?The names and nature of the human-animal bond weren’t always this way. Kathleen Walker-Meikle, a medieval historian at the Science Museum Group and the author of Medieval Pets, has found records from the Middle Ages describing dogs with names that alluded to some part of their physical appearance (Sturdy or Whitefoot), or an object that appealed to their human (a 16th-century Swiss wagoner once owned a dog named Speichli, or “Little Spoke”). Details on cats are sparser, Walker-Meikle told me, but some Old Irish legal texts make mention of a few felines, among them Cruibne (“little paws”) and Bréone (“little flame”).
Jeff (right) and Baby Jeff (Brittany Means)
Even when people-ish names did appear during this era, and the few centuries following, they trended zany, cheeky, cutesy, even pop-cultural—nothing that would be easily mistaken for a child’s given name. The 18th-century English painter William Hogarth named his pug Trump—perhaps an anglicization of a Dutch admiral called Tromp, according to Stephanie Howard-Smith, a pet historian at King’s College London. Catherine Parr, the last of King Henry VIII’s six wives, had a dog called Gardiner, after the anti-Protestant Bishop of Winchester. “This was her enemy, who wanted to destroy her,” Walker-Meikle told me. The idea was “to take the piss out of” him.Then, as the Victorian era ushered in the rise of official dog breeds, people began to reconceptualize the roles that canines could play in their homes. Once largely relegated to working roles, dogs more often became status symbols, and items of luxury—and as their status grew, so did the list of names they could acceptably bear. People no longer considered it such “a slight, necessarily, to share your name with a dog,” Howard-Smith told me. Diminutive names for animals—Jack or Fanny rather than John or Frances—became more common, too, paving the path for even more overlap down the line.[Read: Humans can’t quit a basic myth about dog breeds]The big boom happened in the 20th century, and by its latter half, lists of the most popular dog and baby names were getting awfully hard to tell apart. Nowadays, you could probably “go to a playground and shout ‘Alice!,’ and perhaps both dogs and girls would come rushing to you,” says Katharina Leibring, an expert in language and dialect at Uppsala University, in Sweden. Cats, meanwhile, seem to “have been kind of behind the curve in getting human names,” or perhaps receiving any names at all, Volsche told me. Even in 19th-century texts, Howard-Smith has spotted accounts from families who named their dogs, but would refer to “the cat” as only that.Findings such as these have held true across several countries, but pet naming trends have never been universal. In Taiwan, for example, dogs and cats might get food names, onomatopoeic names, or even English human names, such as Jasper or Bill. They don’t, however, “get Chinese human names,” which hold particular significance, says Lindsey Chen, a linguist at National Taiwan Normal University. “We love them, but they’re not humans.” In Togo, the Kabre people sometimes name their dogs with pointed phrases—such as Paféifééri, or “they are shameless”—that, when spoken aloud, communicate their frustrations with other humans without confronting them directly.American animals who lack human-esque names aren’t loved any less, but the degree of intimacy we have with modern companion animals may almost demand anthropomorphism. Joann Biondi, a photographer in Miami, does not view her Maine coon as a “pet”; a frequent model for her artwork, he is her travel companion, her roommate, her business partner—“a creature who shares my life,” she told me. When she adopted him 13 years ago, she wanted a name befitting of his dignified features. But he also “looked like a hairy Italian soccer player,” Biondi told me, so she chose Lorenzo, sometimes tacking “Il Magnifico” onto the end.
Lorenzo the cat (Joann Biondi)
Several experts told me they’d feel a bit uncomfortable if a close family member decided to name a new pet after them. “There is still a reluctance to call animals things that really make them sound indistinguishable from a human,” Walker-Meikle told me. But some pet owners are downright inspired by that uncanny valley, including Sean O’Brien, an enterprise-software salesperson in Iowa, who deliberately sought out a very human name for his cockapoo, Kyle. “It’s just funny to see people’s reactions, like, ‘Did you say Kyle?’” he told me.[Read: Why so many Millennials are obsessed with dogs]
Lucy the pug (Shelly Volsche)
A smidge of the species barrier can still be found in the ways some owners play with their pets’ names. Howard-Smith’s family dogs, Winnie and Arabella, have been gifted some unhuman monikers: Babby Ween, the Weenerator; Bubs, Bubski, Ballubbers, Ballubber-lubbers. Volsche’s pug, Lucy, is frequently dubbed Pug Nugget, Chunky Monkey, and Lucy, Devourer of Snackies, Demander of Attention. My own cats, Calvin and Hobbes, enjoy titles such as Chumbowumbo, Chino Vatican, Fatticus Finch, Herbal Gerbil, and Classic Herbs. Children with nicknames this unhinged would suffer all kinds of public humiliation. But with pets, “I think we can be a bit freer,” Howard-Smith told me. It’s funny; it’s embarrassing; it’s “a snapshot into someone’s relationship with their pet.” These are the impromptu names that are offered up in private, and the animals can’t complain.Means and Owens, Baby Jeff’s people, plan to keep giving their animals starkly human names. In addition to the cat, their home is also shared by a quartet of chickens: Ludwing van Beaktoven; Johenn Sebastian Bawk; Brittany, Jr. (named for Means, of course—“it was my turn,” she told me); and Little Rachel (named for their human roommate). The next bird they adopt will be named Henjamin, in honor of Means’s brother Ben. But Means and Owens, too, have a sense for which names just don’t feel quite right. “I knew this guy with a cat named Michael,” Means said. “Every time I think of it, it blows me away.”​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

An extraordinary thing happened in China at the final meeting of the party congress over the weekend. Hu Jintao, the previous president of China, was sitting next to President Xi Jinping when two men approached from the rear. Hu rose and appeared increasingly surprised and then alarmed. A few others sitting at the lead table also appeared openly surprised, while most seemed unconcerned or were blank-faced out of discipline. Hu was escorted behind Xi, who appeared as if nothing significant was happening. It seemed to me that Xi did finally glance at him, I think with a look of contempt, but that is likely not the case, as the point of this drama seemed to be that dismissing Hu was routine. Although videos of Hu’s departure could be viewed around the world, they did not appear in China. The Chinese now have said, however, that Hu was not feeling well.

This is not the way party congresses have typically been covered in China. In the past, they were a carefully framed portrayal of the absolute unity of the Chinese Communist Party. Every public element was controlled, with no spontaneity permitted, let alone drama of this sort.

Hu may have had to go to the bathroom and needed help, or it may have been some other prosaic event. But I doubt that would require a national blackout. It is always difficult to interpret actions involving individuals. My view of the world is that individuals are defined by the world, not the other way around. So let me take a shot at seeing how China created the television drama we all saw.

The economic crisis of the past two years had to have created political divisions. After Mao, China was defined by consistent and massive growth. There was an expectation in China, shared by much of the world, that the Chinese economic miracle would continue for a long time, making China a great power.

A second problem was the South China Sea and the inability of the Chinese military to break out of America’s effective blockade. There was much talk in China and elsewhere about the surging power of China’s military and particularly its navy, but there were no actions taken that demonstrated that power. The alliance with Russia proved another serious misjudgment.

Xi came to power at the height of the Chinese growth surge. He also came to power on what appeared to be the dawning of Chinese military power. In all of this, he was attempting to surpass his predecessor, Hu Jintao. Hu had built the economy and the military and had made China into an economic presence. Xi was going to make China an economic, military and global force. It didn’t happen. During Xi’s most recent term, all of these hopes seemed to shatter.

Hu was a symbol of what China was going to become. Xi is the symbol of what China did not become. Hu, as a former successful leader of China, hovered over him, and every time Hu spoke, Xi felt the tremors. I don’t know what went on in the Chinese Politburo. Hu may have criticized Xi, as a president who succeeded when success was easy. Xi may have rejected what was said, claiming that success had become more difficult to achieve and that Hu, in his place, would do very poorly indeed. Or perhaps no words had to be exchanged, because Xi understood that he was being measured against Hu. Perhaps Hu was organizing a coup or allowing himself to become the coup’s symbol, and Xi felt he had to contain him with a very public act so that the country knew where power lay. And more important, maybe Xi wanted to frighten any enemies from acting, by showing them what could happen.

It’s hard to understand precisely what happened, but it’s easy to understand what brought us to this place. This is politics, and failure, no matter how good the excuse, is unforgiving. Xi chose to act where success would redeem him. Of course, it is possible that a battle is now raging in secret over Xi’s action. He acted, it seems, without the senior staff being told. If so, they may fear for themselves next and move on Xi. But then Xi may have anticipated this. And so the murky world of Chinese politics has yielded us a coup against a retired president. It was the act of a worried man. He will be worried until the next act.

Is Paul Newman’s memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man” (Knopf), really Paul Newman’s memoir? As best I can piece together the story, in 1986, the year he turned sixty-one, Newman sat down with an old friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, and began recording on a cassette player material for an autobiography.

This continued for several years, during which Stern also interviewed some of Newman’s buddies from college and the Navy, his two wives, his brother and other members of his family, friends and show-business colleagues, including screenwriters, directors, producers, agents, and actors—pretty much everyone he could find who’d had some relationship to Newman. By 1991, Stern had recorded more than a hundred interviews. Then Newman asked him to stop. In 1998, Newman took the cassettes to the dump and burned them all.

Newman died, of cancer, in 2008. About ten years later, some of his children (he had six altogether; his only son died in 1978) approached Ethan Hawke to discuss making a documentary. Hawke learned that Stern (who died in 2015) had had transcripts of the tapes made—maybe Stern had worried that Newman might destroy them—and he used the transcripts to put together a six-part series on the lives and careers of Newman and his second wife, the actress Joanne Woodward. It’s called “The Last Movie Stars,” and it aired this summer on HBO Max. Meanwhile, the transcripts were edited by David Rosenthal, and made into the book that Knopf has just published.

A lot of the television series is Ethan Hawke Zooming with his pals, few of whom knew either Newman or Woodward, and most of whom present onscreen like they just rolled out of bed. (The lockdown look, I guess.) The friends read from the transcripts, each having been assigned a part. Laura Linney reads Woodward, for instance. (Linney actually does know Woodward, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2008 and is still living.) George Clooney does an uncanny Paul Newman. One anomaly is that Stern appears to have done a lot of interviews with Gore Vidal, who knew both Newman and Woodward, and although Vidal is expertly impersonated in the series by the actor Brooks Ashmanskas, he’s entirely absent from the book.

Clips from Newman and Woodward’s movies (they made around ninety films between them, some of which are forgettable) are used to “illustrate” incidents in the actors’ lives, a device that doesn’t work perfectly. There are more recent interviews, with people like David Letterman, who teased Newman about his charity work but became a convert, and Martin Scorsese, who directed Newman in “The Color of Money,” the role for which he won his only Oscar. Newman’s children and two of his grandchildren are heard from as well. “He was a really excellent grandfather,” one of the grandchildren says. The children’s feelings seem a bit mixed.

Hawke was able to fill in the years after the tape bonfire, when Newman was involved with his philanthropic activities. (He is said to have raised and given away more than half a billion dollars, much of it profits from his Newman’s Own brand of food products.) And the series includes classic scenes from the best movies, along with amusing fugitive bits, like a 1953 episode of the television program “You Are There” called “The Death of Socrates,” in which Newman plays Plato. When it’s Paul Newman, you want to see him, so the show is a lot more satisfying than the book.

One question that no one involved in these otherwise worthy enterprises addresses is why, more than twenty years ago, Newman burned the tapes. Was it because he didn’t like what other people were saying about him? Was it because he didn’t like what he was saying about himself? Was it because he decided, after five years of reminiscing, that he wasn’t a very interesting person? Whatever the reason, the auto-da-fé at the town dump seems a pretty clear indication that Newman did not want a memoir. But now he has one. And he obviously had no say about what got put into it.

Another question is why Newman’s children wanted all this stuff to come out. They say it was to set the record straight. As with any star of Newman’s magnitude, a lot of myth and rumor accrete to the image. (See, e.g., “Paul Newman: The Man Behind the Baby Blues: His Secret Life Exposed,” by Darwin Porter.) But even though the memoir was put together by friends and family, it has a slightly diminishing effect.

Newman was self-deprecating, well past the point of modesty. He was self-deprecating about his self-deprecation. It can grow a little monotonous. The memoir’s title is apt: Newman thought of himself (or he said he thought of himself) as nothing special, just an ordinary guy—who happened to look like a Greek god, but that was an accident of birth, a burden as much as a gift. It was not something he could take credit for.

Newman grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside Cleveland—his father ran a successful sporting-goods store—and he felt that he embodied a suburban, middle-American blandness all his life. He always considered himself Jewish, although his mother was not. He was politically liberal, and served as a Eugene McCarthy delegate from Connecticut at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, where police beat antiwar protesters in the streets. He later made it onto Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” a point of pride. But socially he was, in many respects, a square. He once described himself as “an emotional Republican.”

His insecurity goes all the way back to childhood. “I got no emotional support from anyone,” he said. He disliked and distrusted his mother and believed that his father thought he was a loser. (The father died in 1950, before Newman had had any professional recognition.) He told Stern that, as a teen-ager, he was a “lightweight.” “I wasn’t naturally anything,” he said. “I wasn’t a lover. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a student. I wasn’t a leader.”

He became involved in theatre at Kenyon College, which he attended after being discharged from the Navy, but he claimed that he “never enjoyed acting, never enjoyed going out there and doing it. . . . I never regarded my performances as real successes; they were just something that was done, nothing more important than someone working hard and getting an A in political science.”

He said essentially the same thing about his early acting career in New York: “I never had a sense of talent because I was always a follower, following someone else with stuff that I basically interpreted and did not really create.” He got into acting, he claimed, to avoid having to take over the family business. “I was running away from something,” he says. “I wasn’t running towards.”

Newman described himself as completely unprepared to be a parent—he had children because that’s what people did when they got married—and he worried that he never related to his kids as people. “I would not want to have been one of my children,” he told an old college drama teacher of his. When his son, Scott, died from an accidental overdose after a troubled life, Newman felt remorse for not having connected with him. “Many are the times I have gotten down on my knees and asked for Scott’s forgiveness,” he told Stern.

Like his own father, Newman was a functioning alcoholic. He was said to drink a case of beer a day, followed, until he gave up hard liquor, around 1971, by Scotch. He would often pass out. Woodward called his drinking, before he cut back, “the anguish of our lives.”

Newman attributed some of his success as an actor to luck—the death of James Dean in a car crash opened up some big roles for him—and the rest to perseverance. He thought that performing came much more easily to other people—for example, to his wife. Acting is like sex, she once said. You should do it, not talk about it.

Newman always had to talk about it. He needed to understand his characters’ psychology; he studied movements and accents he thought he could use in his roles; he asked writers and directors endless “What’s my motivation?” questions. During the making of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Robert Redford, an instinctive actor, had to get used to standing around while his co-star prepared for the shot.

I have covered enough wars to know that once you open that Pandora's box, the many evils that pour out are beyond anyone's control. War accelerates the whirlwind of industrial killing. The longer any war continues, the closer and closer each side comes to self-annihilation. Unless it is stopped, the proxy war between Russia and the U.S. in Ukraine all but guarantees direct confrontation with Russia and, with it, the very real possibility of nuclear war.

Joe Biden, who doesn't always seem to be quite sure where he is or what he is supposed to be saying, is being propped up in the I-am-a-bigger-man-than-you contest with Vladimir Putin by a coterie of rabid warmongers who have orchestrated over 20 years of military fiascos. They are salivating at the prospect of taking on Russia, and then, if there is any habitation left on the globe, China. Trapped in the polarizing mindset of the Cold War--where any effort to de-escalate conflicts through diplomacy is considered appeasement, a perfidious Munich moment--they smugly push the human species closer and closer toward obliteration. Unfortunately for us, one of these true believers is Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

"Putin is saying he is not bluffing. Well, he cannot afford bluffing, and it has to be clear that the people supporting Ukraine and the European Union and the Member States, and the United States and NATO are not bluffing neither," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned. "Any nuclear attack against Ukraine will create an answer, not a nuclear answer but such a powerful answer from the military side that the Russian Army will be annihilated."

Annihilated. Are these people insane?

You know we are in trouble when Donald Trump is the voice of reason.

"We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in world war three" the former president said. "And there will be nothing left of our planet--all because stupid people didn't have a clue ... They don't understand what they're dealing with, the power of nuclear."

I dealt with many of these ideologues--David Petraeus, Elliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland--as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Once you strip away their chest full of medals or fancy degrees, you find shallow men and women, craven careerists who obsequiously serve the war industry that ensures their promotions, pays the budgets of their think tanks and showers them with money as board members of military contractors. They are the pimps of war. If you reported on them, as I did, you would not sleep well at night. They are vain enough and stupid enough to blow up the world long before we go extinct because of the climate crisis, which they have also dutifully accelerated.

If, as Joe Biden says, Putin is "not joking" about using nuclear weapons and we risk nuclear "Armageddon," why isn't Biden on the phone to Putin? Why doesn't he follow the example of John F. Kennedy, who repeatedly communicated with Nikita Khrushchev to negotiate an end to the Cuban missile crisis? Kennedy, who unlike Biden served in the military, knew the obtuseness of generals. He had the good sense to ignore Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff and head of the Strategic Air Command, as well as the model for General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove," who urged Kennedy to bomb the Cuban missile bases, an act that would have probably ignited a nuclear war. Biden is not made of the same stuff.

Why is Washington sending $50 billion in arms and assistance to sustain the conflict in Ukraine and promising billions more for "as long as it takes"? Why did Washington and Whitehall dissuade Vladimir Zelensky, a former stand-up comic who has been magically transformed by these war lovers into the new Winston Churchill, from pursuing negotiations with Moscow, set up by Turkey? Why do they believe that militarily humiliating Putin, whom they are also determined to remove from power, won't lead him to do the unthinkable in a final act of desperation?

Moscow strongly implied it would use nuclear weapons in response to a "threat" to its "territorial integrity," and the pimps of war shouted down anyone who expressed concern that we all might go up in mushroom clouds, labeling them traitors who are weakening Ukrainian and Western resolve. Giddy at the battlefield losses suffered by Russia, they poke the Russian bear with ever greater ferocity. The Pentagon helped plan Ukraine's latest counteroffensive, and the CIA passes on battlefield intelligence. We are slipping, as we did in Vietnam, from advising, arming, funding and supporting, into fighting.

None of this is helped by Zelensky's suggestion that, to deter the use of nuclear weapons by Russia, NATO should launch "preventive strikes."

"Waiting for the nuclear strikes first and then to say 'what's going to happen to them.' No! There is a need to review the way the pressure is being exerted. So there is a need to review this procedure," he said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskovsaid the remarks, which Zelensky tried to roll back, were "nothing else than a call to start a world war."

The West has been baiting Moscow for decades. I reported from Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War. I watched these militarists set out to build what they called a unipolar world--a world where they alone ruled. First, they broke promises not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany. Then they broke promises not to "permanently station substantial combat forces" in the new NATO member countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Then they broke promises not to station missile systems along Russia's border. Then they broke promises not to interfere in the internal affairs of border states such as Ukraine, orchestrating the 2014 coup that ousted the elected government of Victor Yanukovich, replacing it with an anti-Russian -- fascistaligned -- government, which, in turn, led to an 8-year-long civil war, as the Russian populated regions in the east sought independence from Kiev. They armed Ukraine with NATO weapons and trained 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers after the coup. Then they recruited neutral Finland and Sweden into NATO. Now the U.S. is being asked to send advanced long-range missile systems to Ukraine, which Russia says would make the U.S. "a direct party to the conflict." But blinded by hubris and lacking any understanding of geopolitics, they push us, like the hapless generals in the Austro-Hungarian empire, towards catastrophe.

We call for total victory. Russia annexes four Ukrainian provinces. We help Ukraine bomb the Kerch Bridge. Russia rains missiles down on Ukrainian cities. We give Ukraine sophisticated air defense systems. We gloat over Russian losses. Russia introduces conscription. Now Russia carries out drone and cruise missile attacks on power, sewage and water treatment plants. Where does it end?

"Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to this conflict, through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia?" a New York Times editorial asks. "Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration's goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war--and if so, how does crowing about providing U.S. intelligence to kill Russians and sink one of their ships achieve this?"

No one has any answers.

The Times editorial ridicules the folly of attempting to recapture all of Ukrainian territory, especially those territories populated by ethnic Russians.

"A decisive military victory for Ukraine over Russia, in which Ukraine regains all the territory Russia has seized since 2014, is not a realistic goal," it reads. "Though Russia's planning and fighting have been surprisingly sloppy, Russia remains too strong, and Mr. Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down."

But common sense, along with realistic military objectives and an equitable peace, is overpowered by the intoxication of war.

On October 17, NATO countries began a two-week-long exercise in Europe, called Steadfast Noon, in which 60 aircraft, including fighter jets and long-range bombers flown in from Minot Air Base in North Dakota are simulating dropping thermonuclear bombs on European targets. This exercise happens annually. But the timing is nevertheless ominous. The U.S. has some 150 "tactical" nuclear warheads stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Ukraine will be a long and costly war of attrition, one that will leave much of Ukraine in ruins and hundreds of thousands of families convulsed by lifelong grief. If NATO prevails and Putin feels his hold on power is in jeopardy, what will stop him from lashing out in desperation? Russia has the world's largest arsenal of tactical nukes, weapons that can kill tens of thousands if used on a city. It also possesses nearly 6,000 nuclear warheads. Putin does not want to end up, like his Serbian allies Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic, as a convicted war criminal in the Hague. Nor does he want to go the way of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. What will stop him from upping the ante if he feels cornered?

There is something grimly cavalier about how political, military and intelligence chiefs, including CIA Director William Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, agree about the danger of humiliating and defeating Putin and the specter of nuclear war.

"Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they've faced so far, militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons," Burns said in remarks at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who also served as Defense Secretary under President Barack Obama, wrote this month that U.S. intelligence agencies believe the odds of the war in Ukraine spiraling into a nuclear war are as high as one in four.

The Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, echoed this warning, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in May that if Putin believed there was an existential threat to Russia, he could resort to nuclear weapons.

"We do think that [Putin's perception of an existential threat] could be the case in the event that he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine, and that NATO in effect is either intervening or about to intervene in that context, which would obviously contribute to a perception that he is about to lose the war in Ukraine," Haines said.

"As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength...Russia likely will increasingly rely on itsnuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its internal and external audiences," Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier wrote in the Defense Intelligence Agency's threat assessment submitted to the same Armed Services Committee at the end of April.

Given these assessments, why don't Burns, Panetta, Haines and Berrier, urgently advocate diplomacy with Russia to de-escalate the nuclear threat?

This war should never have happened. The U.S. was well aware it was provoking Russia. But it was drunk on its own power, especially as it emerged as the world's sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, and besides, there were billions in profits to be made in arms sales to new NATO members.

In 2008, when Burns was serving as the Ambassador to Moscow, he wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests."

Sixty-six U.N. members, most from the global south, have called for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine, as required by the U.N. Charter. But few of the big power players are listening.

If you think nuclear war can't happen, pay a visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These Japanese cities had no military value. They were wiped out because most of the rest of Japan's urban centers had already been destroyed by saturation bombing campaigns directed by LeMay. The U.S. knew Japan was crippled and ready to surrender, but it wanted to send a message to the Soviet Union that with its new atomic weapons it was going to dominate the world.

We saw how that turned out.

I really don't want to write about him any more. I'd rather not even think about him. Honestly, I'd rather forget he existed.

Rather than ignore him, we must demand that Trump be prosecuted. Instead of pretending the poison he released into the American system is behind us, we must acknowledge that it is spreading.

But he looms over the 2022 elections like a sword of Damocles. Trump continues to dominate all political coverage. In many respects, he is still the center of American politics--if anything, bigger and more dangerous than he was when he left the White House.

First, consider all the action in federal and state courts.

Just within the last two weeks, Trump has been subpoenaed to appear before the January 6 committee, his appeal to the Supreme Court challenging the FBI's seizure at Mar-a-Lago of secret documents he stole from the White House was rejected, his former aide Steve Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, a federal appeals court denied a request by Sen. Lindsey Graham to be shielded from testifying in an investigation into Trump's interference in the 2020 election in Georgia, other aides were observed after testifying before a grand jury in the criminal investigation of Jan. 6, his name was featured in text messages read aloud at the Oath Keepers trial, and his decision to form a new company (Trump Organization II) was criticized by the New York attorney general, who is suing him.

Never before in history has a former president, his aides, and supporters in Congress been as entangled in legal proceedings stretching years beyond his administration. Never have the legal maneuvers attracted more media attention.

Second is the continuing speculation about whether Merrick Garland will indict him.

The Jan 6 committee has done an outstanding job, but it has also helped Trump become a more historically significant. As Politico's John Harris noted,

"The usual journalistic crutch when assessing political legacies is 'for better or worse,' but in this case it is only for worse. Trump's historic significance flows from how effectively he has made people doubt what was previously beyond doubt--that American democracy is on the level--and how brilliantly he has illuminated just how much this generation of Americans looks at one another with mutual contempt and mutual incomprehension."

While the Jan. 6 committee has dismantled Trump's deceptions and denialism surrounding the 2020 election, it has also helped build Trump into something larger than he appeared two years ago--a political force too serious to forget. That's not a bad thing; we must not allow ourselves to forget what he has done to America. But it does cast his shadow over our future in ways few former presidents have ever managed.

Third is the groundwork for an undemocratic coup that Trump and his henchmen continue to lay.

That groundwork is being prepared step by step. A majority of Republican candidates for office in the 2020 midterms are election deniers, including several candidates for the crucial election jobs of secretaries of state and governors.

The tactics they and their supporters used in primary elections force us to brace for a range of new challenges in the upcoming midterms and in 2024, including disruptive poll watchers and workers, aggressive litigation strategies, voter and ballot challenges and vigilante searches for fraud.

He will almost certainly declare his candidacy for president in 2024 within the next few months.

Just as menacingly for 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court has taken up the "independent state legislature" doctrine. If upheld, this doctrine would allow state legislatures to do exactly what Trump tried to do in December 2020--appoint their own slates of electors, regardless of the popular vote.

Finally, Twitter and Facebook are poised to allow Trump back on--to continue to spread his lies on the largest megaphones in the world.

Trump is not only a sociopath. He is also a masterful conman. Social media will soon allow him to continue to spread his lies and hate. (Elon Musk has virtually guaranteed it for Twitter if, as expected, Musk takes over that platform. Facebook has signaled it will do the same.)

A sociopathic conman on social media is terrifying.

It is our terrible misfortune that Trump came to power and continues to infect America and the world just as the tangled weave of other crises--near-record inequality, bigotry (racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia), the climate, the pandemic--have made many Americans vulnerable to his demagoguery.

I didn't want to write about him today or even think about him. But none of us dare turn our eyes away in revulsion.

As opposed to dismissing him, we must deal with him and the lawmakers who are enabling him head-on--and stop him, and them, through every non-violent means possible.

Since the mid-1990s, the United Nations has been launching global climate summits — called COPs — which stands for Conference of the Parties. Last year was the 26th annual summit and took place in Glasgow. COP26 was supposed to be “a pivotal moment for the planet,” but the outcomes fell way short of the action needed to stop the climate crisis from becoming utterly catastrophic. This year, COP27 will be held in Egypt in the midst of an energy crisis and a war that is reshaping the global order.
Will COP27 end up as yet another failure on the part of world leaders to slow or stop global warming? Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin share their thoughts and insights on the climate crisis conundrum by dissecting the current state of affairs and what ought to be done to stop humanity’s march to the climate precipice. 
Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environmental and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most cited scholars in modern history and a critical public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs, and climate change. Robert Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. One of the world’s leading progressive economists, Pollin has published scores of books and academic articles on jobs and macroeconomics, labor markets, wages, and poverty, environmental and energy economics. He was selected by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2013.” Chomsky and Pollin are coauthors of Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (2020).
C.J. Polychroniou: The 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will take place in Egypt from November 6-18, 2022. Nearly 200 countries will come together in yet another attempt to tackle climate breakdown. COP26, held in Glasgow about the same time last year had been hailed as “our last best hope,” but it did not achieve much as too many compromises were made. The hope for COP27 is that the world will set more stringent greenhouse gas emissions reduction requirements considering the ever-clearer consequences of global warming. Noam, is this a significant climate meeting? Can we expect a breakthrough, or will it end up yet another futile international effort to reverse climate change? Indeed, what’s standing on the way of governments’ failure to slow or even reverse global warming? Isn’t the evidence already overwhelming that the world stands on a climate precipice? What prevent us from stepping back from the abyss?
Noam Chomsky: Decisions by governments tend to reflect the distribution of power in the society. As Adam Smith phrased this virtual truism in his classic work, “the masters of mankind” — in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England — are the “principal architects” of government policy and act to ensure that their own interests will be “most peculiarly attended to” no matter how “grievous” the effects on the general welfare. Insofar as governments have failed to act in the ways that will prevent catastrophe, it is because the principal architects of policy have higher priorities.
Let’s take a look. The U.S. government has just passed a climate bill, a pale shadow of what was proposed by the Biden administration under the impact of popular climate activism, which in the end could not compete with the power of the true masters in the corporate sector. The final shadow is not meaningless. It is, however, radically insufficient in its reach, and also burdened with measures to ensure that the interests of the masters are “most peculiarly attended to.”
The bill that the masters were willing to accept includes vast government subsidies that “are already driving forward large oil and gas projects that threaten a heavy carbon footprint, with companies including ExxonMobil, Sempra and Occidental Petroleum positioned for big payouts,” the Washington Post reports. One device to satisfy the needs of the masters is “a vast wad of money” for carbon capture — a phrase that means: “Let’s keep poisoning the atmosphere freely and maybe someday someone will figure out a way to remove the poisons.”
That’s too kind. It’s much worse. “The irony of carbon capture is that the place it has proven most successful is getting more oil out of the ground. All but one major project built in the United States to date is geared toward fossil fuel companies taking the trapped carbon and injecting it into underground wells to extract crude.”
The actual cases would be comical if the consequences were not so grave. Thus “The subsidies give companies lucrative incentives to drill for gas in the most climate-unfriendly sites, where the concentration of CO2 in the fuel is especially high. The CO2, a potent greenhouse gas, is useless for making fuel, but the tax credits are awarded based on how many tons of it companies trap.”
It’s hard to believe that this is real. But it is. It’s capitalism 101 when the masters are in charge.
Other cases illustrate the same priorities. Arctic permafrost contains huge amounts of carbon and is beginning to melt as the Arctic heats much faster than the rest of the world. Scientists of one oil major, ConocoPhillips, discovered a way to slow the thawing of the permafrost. To what end? “To keep it solid enough to drill for oil, the burning of which will continue to worsen ice melt,” according to the New York Times.
The exuberant race to destruction is far more general. New fields are being opened to exploration. There is a huge expansion of oil pipelines, with “more than 24,000km of pipelines planned around world, showing ‘an almost deliberate failure to meet climate goals.’”
The only solution here is mass organizing that is capable of holding all politicians accountable.
Corporate lobbyists are even pressing states to punish corporations (by withdrawing pension funds etc.) that dare even to provide information on environmental impacts of their policies. No stone is left unturned. Every opportunity to destroy must be exploited, no matter how slight, following Marx’s script of capitalism going berserk.
It is not really surprising that once Reagan and Thatcher launched the current era of savage class war, removing all constraints, the masters used the opportunity to pursue their “vile maxim, all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else,” as Smith advised us 250 years ago.
There is a certain logic behind it. The rules of the game are that you expand profit and market share, or you lose out. For self-delusion, it suffices to hold out the thin hope that maybe our technical culture will find some answers.
There is an alternative to the resolute march toward suicide. The distribution of power can be changed by an aroused public with its own very different priorities, such as surviving in a livable world. The current masters can be controlled on a path toward elimination of their illegitimate authority. The rules of the game can be changed, in the short term modified sufficiently to enable humankind to adopt the means that have been spelled out in detail to “step back from the abyss.”
Polychroniou: Bob, can you give us an estimate of where we stand on climate change and what needs to be done for the world to become carbon neutral by 2050?
Robert Pollin: Where we stand with climate change is straightforward and was expressed clearly in the most recent two massive reports, of this past February and April 2022, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative mainstream resource on climate change research. In summarizing its February report, the IPCC said that “Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit.” The February report describes how “Increased heatwaves, droughts and floods are already exceeding plants’ and animals’ tolerance thresholds, driving mass mortalities in species such as trees and corals. These weather extremes are occurring simultaneously, causing cascading impacts that are increasingly difficult to manage. They have exposed millions of people to acute food and water insecurity, especially in Africa, Asia, Central and South America, on Small Islands and in the Arctic.” I would note that reputable climate scientists regularly criticize the IPCC for understating our dire ecological condition.
What we need to do to have any chance of stabilizing the climate is also straightforward. By far, the biggest driver of climate change is burning oil, coal and natural gas to produce energy. This is because burning fossil fuels to produce energy generates CO2 emissions. These emissions, in turn, are the main cause of heat being trapped in our atmosphere and warming the planet. This is why, in its landmark 2018 special report, “Global Warming of 1.5° Celsius,” the IPCC set out the overarching goals of cutting global CO2 emissions by about 50 percent as of 2030 and for the globe to reach net zero emissions by 2050. The IPCC concluded in the 2018 report, and emphasized even more emphatically in its 2022 studies, that stabilizing the global climate at 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) above pre-industrial average temperature levels is imperative for having any chance of reducing significantly, much less preventing the “dangerous and widespread disruption in nature affecting the lives of billions of people around the world.”
It is clear then that the single most important project for advancing a viable climate stabilization program is to phase out the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas for energy production. As the fossil fuel energy infrastructure phases out to zero by 2050, we concurrently have to build an entirely new global energy infrastructure whose centerpieces will be high efficiency and clean renewable energy sources — primarily solar and wind power. People are obviously still going to need to consume energy, from any available source, to light, heat and cool buildings, to power cars, buses, trains and airplanes, and to operate computers and industrial machinery, among other uses. Moreover, any minimally decent egalitarian program climate stabilization program — what we may call a Global Green New Deal — will entail a significant increase in energy consumption for lower-income people throughout the world. 
The other major driver of climate change is corporate industrial agriculture in its multiple manifestations. This includes the heavy reliance on natural gas-based fertilizers along with synthetic pesticides and herbicides to increase land productivity. It also includes deforestation, whose main purpose is to increase available land for cattle grazing and still more industrial farming. Addressing these causes of climate change is, at least in principle, also straightforward. It requires replacing industrial agriculture with organic farming practices that rely on crop rotation, animal manures and composting for fertilizer and biological pest control. It means humans eating less beef, and thereby freeing up the cattle-grazing land to be used for organic crop cultivation. It then also means stopping deforestation, most especially in the Amazon rainforest i.e., “the Earth’s lungs.” This is why, as Noam emphasized in a previous recent interview, it is absolutely imperative, just on the climate issue alone, that Lula defeats Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential election on October 30. Bolsonaro has no compunctions about obliterating the Amazon rainforest if there is money to be made, while Lula is committed to rainforest preservation and reforestation.
If we only pay attention to China, the U.S. and the European Union countries, we still are neglecting the countries responsible for generating nearly half of current total global emissions.
So, in response to both of your questions — where we stand today on climate change and what needs to be done — we will have a clearer picture after Brazil’s October 30 election. We can also generalize from Brazil’s situation. That is, everywhere in the world, we need to elect people like Lula and to defeat all climate deniers and apologists for the fossil fuel industry, that is, all the Bolsonaros in all regions of the world.
At the same time, electoral politics by itself is never going to be a sufficient action program. Even principled political leaders like Lula can become susceptible to backsliding from a robust Green New Deal program in the face of the enormous pressures from fossil fuel corporations who continue to cash in on destroying the planet. The only solution here is mass organizing that is capable of holding all politicians accountable. There has been tremendous climate activism throughout the world in recent years, led by young people. This activism simply needs to intensify and continue to become increasingly impactful.
In terms of some specifics, the investments required to dramatically increase energy efficiency standards and equally dramatically expand the global supply of clean energy sources will be a major source of new job creation, in all regions of the world. This is excellent news, as far as it goes. But there is no guarantee that these new jobs will be good jobs. After all, we are still operating within capitalism. Climate activists therefore need to join forces with unions and other labor organizers to fight for good wages, benefits and working conditions for these millions of new clean energy jobs. At the same time, the phasing out of the global fossil fuel industry will mean large-scale losses for workers and communities that are presently dependent on the fossil fuel industry. Providing a just transition for these workers and communities also needs to be at the center of the Global Green New Deal. 
There have been some recent positive developments with respect to the energy transition. Clean renewable energy investments have increased for the past two years, at a rate of about 12 percent per year. This contrasts sharply with the five years immediately after the major COP21 conference in Paris in 2015, during which global clean energy investments rose by a paltry 2 percent annual rate. 
This recent spike in clean energy investments is being fueled by the fact that the costs of solar and wind power are falling dramatically and are now lower than those for fossil fuels and nuclear. Thus, as of 2020, the average cost for fossil fuel-generated electricity ranged between 5.5-14.8 cents per kilowatt hour in the high-income economies. These cost figures then rose sharply in 2021, due to the post COVID lockdown supply-chain breakdowns in the fossil fuel industry and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. By contrast, as of 2021, solar photovoltaic installations generate electricity at 4.8 cents per kilowatt hour and onshore wind is at 3.3 cents. Moreover, average solar costs fell by roughly 90 percent between 2010-2021. The average cost figures for solar and wind should continue to decline still further as advances in technology proceed as long as the rapid global expansion of these sectors continues.
At the same time, these positive developments must be weighed against the grim bottom-line reality that, to date, there is still no evidence that global CO2 emissions have begun falling. A modest reduction did occur in 2020 due to the global COVID lockdown. But as of 2019, global CO2 emissions stood at 37 billion tons. This is a 50 percent increase relative to 2000 and a 12 percent increase relative to just 2010. Overall, the transition from a fossil fuel dominant to a high-efficiency and renewables dominant global energy infrastructure, to rainforest preservation and an organic farming dominant agricultural infrastructure needs to be dramatically accelerated for there to be any chance of hitting the IPCC’s climate stabilization targets.
We also need to recognize that this transition needs to occur everywhere, in all countries, regardless of their current emissions or income levels. This becomes clear through some simple global emissions accounting. As of now, China and the U.S. are by far most responsible for current total emissions. China’s emissions represent 31 percent of the current global total and the United States accounts for another 14 percent. So, adding emissions from China and the U.S. alone gets us to 45 percent of the global total. But we can look at this same statistic from the opposite direction: Even after combining the emissions levels for China and the U.S., we still haven’t accounted for fully 55 percent of total global emissions. We can then include the emissions totals for the 27 countries of the European Union along with China and the U.S. This adds another 8 percent to current total emissions, getting us to 53 percent in total. This means that if we only pay attention to China, the U.S. and the European Union countries, we still are neglecting the countries responsible for generating nearly half of current total global emissions. The point is that every place does matter if we really are going to hit the target of net zero global emissions by no later than 2050. Zero emissions has to really mean zero, everywhere.
Polychroniou: COP27 has been called Africa’s COP. Indeed, Africa contributes only 3 percent to greenhouse gas emissions but suffers disproportionately from its negative effects. To be sure, the issue of who should pay for “loss and damages” from the climate crisis will occupy center stage at COP27. What are your thoughts on this matter? We already know, for instance, that the EU won’t back climate damage funds talks at COP, and I don’t think we should expect a different attitude from the United States. Is there a case to be made for climate reparations? Is there a better alternative?
Pollin: From an historical perspective, the high-income countries, starting with the U.S. but also including Canada, Western Europe, Europe and Australia are almost entirely responsible for loading up the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions and causing climate change. They therefore should be primarily responsible for financing the Global Green New Deal. But more recently, as I noted above, China is producing much larger emissions than any other country. China can therefore not be let off the hook as a source of climate financing.
But we also need to recognize that high-income people in all countries and regions have massively larger carbon footprints than everyone else. The average carbon footprint of someone in the richest 10 percent of the global population is 60 times greater than of someone in the poorest 10 percent. From this perspective, the financing of a Global Green New Deal must fall disproportionately on the rich in all countries.
However, more generally, it is not accurate or constructive to consider the issue of financing the energy system transformation as simply a question of who bears how much of the overall burden. We also need to recognize that the overall burden is actually not excessively large and that building a global green economy will also generate huge benefits and opportunities. Consider, for example, just the following:

According to my own research and that of others, a global climate stabilization program capable of achieving the zero emissions goal by 2050 will entail clean energy investment spending of roughly $4.5 trillion per year through 2050. This totals to about $120 trillion over the full period. These are eye-popping numbers from one angle. Yet they amount to an average of only about 2.5 percent of total global income (GDP) between now and 2050. In other words, we can transform the global energy system and save the planet while still spending something like 97 percent of total global income on everything besides clean energy investments. This is also while average incomes are rising over time.
Creating a clean global energy infrastructure will pay for itself over time and save money for all energy consumers. This is because energy efficiency investments, by definition, mean spending less money to get the same amount of energy services — like keeping one’s home well-lit and warm in the winter. Moreover, as I noted above, the costs of delivering a kilowatt of electricity from renewable energy sources is already lower, on average, than getting the same kilowatt from fossil fuels or nuclear power sources, and the costs of renewable energy are falling.
Building the clean energy infrastructure will be more decentralized than the current highly capital-intensive and big corporate dominated fossil fuel infrastructure. Solar energy systems can be installed on rooftops and parking lots and in one’s neighborhood. Wind turbines can be located on farmland without sacrificing productivity in crop or livestock cultivation. This, in turn, will create opportunities to expand access to energy into low-income communities throughout the world, including in the rural regions of low-income countries. Roughly half the people living in these regions do not currently have access to electricity at all.

Overall then, building the global clean energy economy should be understood as a great opportunity for investors and consumers, including especially small-scale investors such as both public and private cooperative enterprises.
That said, it will of course still be necessary to deliver the up-front money to pay for the initial investments. There is no shortage of big pots money that can be tapped in equitable ways for this purpose. We can start with transferring funds out of military budgets for all countries. Since the U.S. military budget amounts to 40 percent of global military spending, transferring, say, 5 percent of all military spending into global climate investments will mean that the U.S. share of the funds will also amount to about 40 percent of the global total. We can also eliminate existing fossil fuel subsidies in all countries and convert them into clean energy subsidies. The central banks of rich countries can purchase green bonds to support investments both within their own countries as well as globally. They then will receive the revenues that will be generated by these investments. The central banks of rich countries did not hesitate to provide massive bailout funding to financial markets during the COVID lockdown, at levels of 10 percent or more of their countries’ respective GDPs. The global green bond fund could amount to perhaps one-tenth the size of these bailout programs. Finally, carbon taxes can be a viable source of funds as long as the tax burden falls mostly on high-income consumers and most of the revenue generated by the tax is rebated back to middle and low-income energy consumers.
The financing of a Global Green New Deal must fall disproportionately on the rich in all countries.
The global financing project will then also need to be supported by private investors, at a level at least equal to that of government funds. Yet we know that private investors will never deliver sufficient funds without public policies in place that enforce hard limits on profit opportunities through fossil fuel investments, if not eliminating such profit opportunities altogether. The windfall tax on oil company profits proposed in the U.S. Congress by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Ro Khanna is one good place to start.
The need for such measures has become ever clearer since the fiasco surrounding the pledges made by major private financial institutions coming out of last year’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. Perhaps the biggest single story coming out of the Glasgow conference was the formation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group of roughly 500 financial sector firms holding $130 trillion in overall assets — i.e., something like one-third of total global private financial assets. At the conference, GFANZ members committed their institutions to supporting investments that will deliver a zero-emissions global economy by 2050. But now many of the biggest players in the coalition are abandoning their pledges. The explanation is simple, as reported in Bloomberg Green: “The revived fortunes of fossil fuels, especially coal, may explain some of the weakened resolve for decarbonization. Global bank lending to fossil fuel companies is up 15 percent to over $300 billion in the first nine months of this year from the same period in 2021.” Justin Guay, director of climate finance strategy at the Sunrise Project summed up the matter perfectly in commenting: “Banks were happy to sign up to a big pageantry contest at COP26 and get a bunch of applause. But when they realized the world expected them to make good on what they said they would do, they have looked for convenient excuses to wiggle out of that responsibility.”
Polychroniou: Noam, what do you think about this matter? The so-called “triple crisis” — i.e., responsibility, mitigation and adaptation — need to be addressed by the countries most responsible for climate breakdown, according to both climate activists and various governments of the Global South, including Egypt, the host of COP27.
Chomsky: We can refine the question. More accurately it is the rich in the rich countries who are most responsible for climate breakdown, and much more. Right now, working people in the super-rich United States are suffering from severe inflation, much of which is caused by the sharp rise in oil prices triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile the profits of the fossil fuel industrial complex are booming. One short-term remedy would be a tax on their rapacious pursuit of the vile exam, proposed in legislation aimed at oil price gouging introduced by Senators Sherrod Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse, with receipts going directly to consumers. Much more far-reaching steps can easily be envisioned.
These questions should be considered against the background of the neoliberal class war of the past 40 years, which has transferred some $50 trillion to the pockets of the super-rich 1 percent. Bob Pollin reminds us that the steady rise in real wages ended in the ‘70s as the business campaign against working people and the poor was taking shape, with the floodgates opened by Reagan and Thatcher. If real wages had continued to track productivity gains, “the average worker’s hourly wage in 2021 would have been $61.94, not $25.18.” And if the assault on the public had been curbed, big corporate CEO pay would not have risen “from being 33 times higher than the average worker in 1978 to 366 times higher in 2019—i.e., a more than tenfold increase in relative pay.” That’s only one part of the serious blows against working people and the poor that we expect, on institutional grounds, once the reins are cast off.
All of this is background for considering the “triple crisis.” The Global Green New Deal should confront these issues directly and forcefully, not just by proper concern for the countries that have been victimized by global warming but also by dismantling the class basis of the depredations of past centuries, sometimes taking truly savage forms as in the recent neoliberal years.
The immediate crisis is too urgent for the radical social change that we should seek, but efforts to carry it forward should proceed in tandem with addressing urgent demands. If basic capitalist institutions remain in place, the Global Green New Deal will not proceed as far as it must if we are to have a livable world that values freedom and justice.
Polychroniou: The Global Green New Deal may represent our only hope for an effective opportunity to address the challenge of global warming while also setting the world economy on a new course of sustainable development. Yet, it wasn’t part of COP26’s decarbonization concerns and it doesn’t figure in the agenda of COP27. Why?
Chomsky: Who meets in the stately halls where agendas are devised?
Let’s return to our discussion of the achievements of COP26. The most exciting, eliciting much euphoria, was the commitment of the great private financial institutions to devote up to $130 trillion to such noble projects as wiring Africa for solar power. The market to the rescue! — with a small footnote, as political economist Adam Tooze was unkind enough to add. The giants of finance will gladly make their lavish contribution to the Global Green New Deal if the International Monetary Fund and World Bank “derisk” the loans by absorbing losses and “there is a carbon price that gives clean energy a competitive advantage.”
As long as the vile maxim is firmly in place, their munificence has no bounds.
We return to the same conclusions. The Global Green New Deal cannot be delayed, but it must go hand in hand with raising consciousness and implementing measures to constrain and ultimately dismantle the institutional structures of capitalist autocracy.
Polychroniou: Bob, you are one of the leading advocates of global Green New Deal. Why isn’t this project gaining traction? Too idealistic for the taste of the real world where national interests still reign supreme? If so, what needs to be done?
Pollin: As I have tried to convey in my responses above, I don’t see the Global Green New Deal as idealistic. I rather see it as the only viable program that can achieve the IPCC’s climate stabilization goals in a way that also expands decent job opportunities and raises mass living standards in all regions of the world, at all levels of development. That includes increasing peoples’ access to low-cost energy throughout the world. As such, the Global Green New Deal should attract overwhelming support, both among people who are committed around climate issues as well as those whose primary focus may be paying rent and keeping food on the table.
Achieving this level of support can only be achieved through organizing and educating. To take one example, for over a decade, labor and environment activists, such as those associated with the Labor Network for Sustainability and the BlueGreen Alliance in the U.S., have been working to build strong coalitions. Against steep odds, they have started to win some significant victories. This includes the endorsement of a robust green investment and just transition program in California by the union representing the state’s oil refinery workers.
Of course, these and similar initiatives face relentless opposition from fossil fuel corporations and the full spectrum of interests aligned with them. A clear and coherent global Green New Deal program will serve as one useful tool in the ongoing struggle to save the planet.

Lately, it has felt difficult to evade the late-’80s countenance of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, an ordinary-looking and affectively blank man with neither the dramatic Jim Morrison locks of his fellow murderer Richard Ramirez nor the sleazy, sinister showmanship of their compatriot Ted Bundy. Rather, Dahmer’s recent star turn has emphasized his utter plainness as a kind of counterpoint to his inhuman, almost otherworldly violence—a familiar formula in serial-killer cultural production, in which the criminal’s charm, looks, or evident mundanity are balanced against their deeds to provoke a question: What can we make of the fact that such a person could do such things? I suspect that solving this riddle is the honest, if lurid, intention of so many artworks dedicated to Dahmer (and, in different measures, to killers such as Ramirez and Bundy, whose ostensible appeal serves as the counterpoint to their brutality). Acts of such unprecedented, unprovoked destruction cry out for meaning, and the mystique of any given perpetrator handily offers a potential source: Meaning is often hidden inside mysteries, and is perhaps so here.[Read: The grisly, all-American appeal of serial killers]Yet in so many meditations on these killers and their murders, one never seems to find more than a recapitulation of the crimes or life of the criminal, with varying degrees of attention appointed to suggest sites of potential meaning—the serial killer’s troubled past, his warped notions of love, his explanation of his own purity of purpose or grandiosity of character. Therein might lie some information that could supply clues about these most spectacular of killings, which would at least situate them in an orderly moral matrix, where things with meaningful effects happen for meaningful reasons. But the answer itself—the piece of knowledge that renders the killer or his motives intelligible—never comes. The experience of watching serial-killer shows or documentaries is therefore almost always identical: One now knows more about the grisly nature of what took place, but without the satisfaction of understanding why it had to happen or what to think of a world in which such things occasionally transpire. The viewers—and the victims’ families—pay the price for investigating the problem, but they are swindled out of a verdict.This is because there is no reason, and no meaning, in wanton destruction. It is exactly what it appears to be. It does not entail a greater theory, purpose, or truth of some kind that we could use to our benefit, for prevention or healing, if only we could discover it. It does not respond to the demands of morality or reason, because a moral, reasonable person would not commit acts of vile degradation against other people. What the most spectacular of killers do directly infringes upon the sphere of meaning by eliminating its more common sources in our lives: relationships, plans for the future, love. Dahmer had no reasons, because he was himself a foreigner to reason; what he did had no meaning, but rather, destroyed it. You could climb inside his mind and have no clearer sense than he did of what anything in his miserable life meant, and you would be the worse for it.Case in point: This year, the state of Florida put Nikolas Cruz on trial in order to sentence him to death for the murder of 17 and the attempted murder of 17 more during his 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Cruz had already pleaded guilty, at the time of his sentencing trial, to every count the state had arrayed against him. Everyone knew what he had done. All that was left for a jury to decide was whether, all mitigating factors in the young man’s troubled existence accounted for, Cruz’s murders were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel”—or premeditated with a special disregard for any pretense of justification—according to Florida’s capital-punishment statute.[Elizabeth Bruenig: Should the Parkland shooter die?]In order to make the case for killing Cruz, the state relied on a meticulous rehashing of the man’s crimes, including an in-person tour through the mostly untouched and closed school building where the murders took place, a thorough review of surveillance-camera and cellphone footage of the event itself, and a careful reconstruction of how injured survivors felt at the moment they were assaulted. Somewhere in those accounts or in the autopsy photos or in the witness testimony, the prosecution contended, was proof that Cruz’s murders were of a unique and distinct type that would, once revealed through close consideration, necessitate another event, the killing of the killer—and that through that event, some sense of justice would be restored to a community of people who had been radically, catastrophically robbed of such by the murders themselves.Yet the jury was unable to arrive at a consensus that Cruz should die, with three of the 12 refusing to vote for his death. The reason for the defection appears to be that the prosecution’s case did not, in fact, conflict with the defense’s in any significant sense. One could believe everything the prosecution said—that Cruz’s murders were as unthinkable, as profoundly destructive, as evil as they seemed—without disagreeing with the defense’s contention that Cruz had done such irrational, unthinkable things because he is, and has been since birth, an irrational, unthinking person. “His brain is broken,” Cruz’s attorney Melisa McNeill said in her opening statement to the jury. “He’s a damaged human being. And that’s why these things happen.” The defense needed only one juror to realize that that sentiment is entirely compatible with, and in fact credited by, the prosecution’s assertion that what Cruz did was “without any pretense of moral or legal justification.” Three eventually did.Their refusal to sentence Cruz to death has already prompted talk of striking jury unanimity, a relatively new requirement in Florida sentencing law, from the state’s statute—as though the frustrated momentum of the prosecution’s case must find some other outlet. (Had it won, its energy would’ve likely had to be held in reserve for years, maybe decades, of appeals, as is so common in capital cases.) In the meantime, the trial’s participants and witnesses, the general public included, know everything they knew before the lengthy meditation on Cruz’s crimes—but worse, more painfully.We live in spectacularly violent times, not in the sense that our era is more violent than any other before, but rather, that our episodes of especially atrocious violence tend also to become spectacles that play out in the press and culture long after the carnage is over. Part of our fascination is grim curiosity, and part is based, I think, in the sense that some moral work must be left undone, some central mystery left unresolved, if no species of detailed explanation or court action can ever really answer the limitlessness of the void they create in our shared lives. Still, we look into the emptiness. One draws closer and closer, but never comes nearer to anything.

If ever there were a time and place for a thoughtful, patriotic conservative to vote third party or perhaps even vote for a reasonable Democrat, it’s the 2022 election in Georgia. Herschel Walker’s past is, if possible, even more checkered than Donald Trump’s. After all, no one ever claimed that Trump threatened one of his ex-wives with a gun.Recent evidence that Walker paid for an abortion is just one more revelation about his thoroughly debauched past. Yet personal scandal is hardly the only problem with Walker. He has a long record of election denial and false claims of mass election fraud. Every voter should presume that Walker, if he wins, will do exactly what Trump demands.[David A. Graham: Herschel Walker is demonstrating the new law of politics]Moreover, Walker’s personal failings aside, there is an overwhelming case that these are not ordinary times, and that the 2022 election is not an ordinary election. So thoughtful, patriotic conservatives should swallow hard, forsake the policy victories they hope for with a Republican Congress, and either stay home or vote Democratic, right?If that’s the argument, someone needs to tell the Democratic Party what’s at stake. Because right now, it’s making an unsustainable demand of Republican voters: You sacrifice the policies that you believe are best for our nation and its people; we sacrifice nothing.There’s no better example of this approach than Raphael Warnock’s stance on abortion rights. He was one of 49 Democratic senators who voted for the Women’s Health Protection Act. This bill doesn’t just “codify Roe.” It would preempt hundreds of state laws that existed before the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs, including, for example, waiting periods, 20-week abortion bans, and ultrasound requirements.It would permit pre-viability abortion for any reason. It would allow for even post-viability abortion to protect the life or health of the mother, where health isn’t limited to physical health. That leaves the health exception broad enough to include permitting late-term abortion if just one health-care provider concurs with the mother that her emotional or psychological health is at stake.If that law were to pass, America would immediately become an outlier nation on abortion rights, more permissive than the overwhelming majority of its peer countries in the developed world. And Warnock voted to stop a Republican filibuster against this bill even though Georgia—one of the nation’s more religious states—is so anti-abortion that it enacted a heartbeat bill before the Supreme Court decided Dobbs.Think of the dilemma for thoughtful conservatives, particularly those who are deeply anti-abortion. Vote for the spouse-abusing election denier? Vote for the man who’s diametrically opposed to you on a life-and-death issue that is more important to you than any other? Or vote for someone else, knowing that you’re costing the GOP your normally reliable vote?Versions of this dilemma are being put before GOP voters in different races across the country. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania recently and explicitly reaffirmed that he doesn’t support any limits on abortion rights. In his view, the decision should be between a woman and her doctor at every stage of pregnancy.What makes these stands all the more extraordinary is that they’re actually unpopular. For example, a recent Harvard/Harris poll indicated that 37 percent of Americans would support banning abortion except in cases of rape and incest; another 12 percent supported bans beyond six weeks. That left only 28 percent of Americans who supported abortion rights beyond 15 weeks. Gallup polling has long demonstrated strong opposition to legal abortion in the third trimester and solid majorities against legal abortion in the second trimester (at the same time, large majorities support legal abortion in the first three months of pregnancy).Right now the message to conservative anti-abortion voters is that they should risk a potential policy loss on what is for many of them their single most important issue, because the republic could be at risk. Yet, key Democrats—sensing opportunity in the weakness of Walker, or of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania—are refusing to compromise on that same issue.They’re even using the moment to push an unpopular position on the most contentious issue in the culture wars. They see the Republican crisis as more of an opportunity than a risk to our national union.[Jemele Hill: Herschel Walker’s candidacy is just insulting ]There is no moral standing to scorn Republicans for refusing to risk their preferred policies for the sake of democracy if prominent Democrats are doing the exact same thing. Compounding the challenge is the knowledge that Democrats poured millions of dollars into ad campaigns to try to persuade Republicans to vote for extremists in GOP primaries. Is democracy at stake, or not?I happen to believe that it is. I watched the events of January 6 and knew that they represented the most dangerous moment in modern American political history. Revelations since the attack on the Capitol have only reaffirmed that danger. If Mike Pence had said yes to Trump’s scheme, our nation would have been plunged into the worst constitutional crisis since 1861.Defenders of democracy are in need of allies. And though I understand that millions of Republicans will vote for a Trump loyalist no matter the character of the man or woman on the ballot, a substantial number of conservative voters are deeply troubled by the party’s dark turn. They understand all too well the vital importance of character in American politics. And yet they are left with no good choices.Opposition to Trump or concerns about election conspiracies don’t make them any less anti-abortion, and the unwillingness of Democrats to compromise tears conscientious conservatives in two. So don’t be surprised if some voters still bite the bullet and vote for policy over character. In my view, that’s a potentially catastrophic mistake (character should never be optional), but it’s a mistake made all the more likely and understandable when the opposing party wants to take your vote—and give you nothing in return.

There's an entire genre of "things are better than you think" books, stretching back at least a couple decades. In these sunny tomes, academics push back against pessimistic claims that, for example, middle-class incomes are stagnant, the poor are getting poorer, and inequality is exploding thanks to the gains of the evil top 1 percent. Think It's Getting Better All the Time from Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon; Myths of Rich and Poor from W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm; Factfulness from Hans Rosling; Enlightenment Now from Steven Pinker; and The American Dream Is Not Dead from Michael Strain.
Joining them is The Myth of American Inequality from former senator Phil Gramm and coauthors Robert Ekelund and John Early, all three of them economists. The U.S. government is getting key concepts all wrong, they say, including income, inflation, poverty, and inequality. They detail how some often-cited metrics are calculated—and how various corrections change the numbers.
It turns out things are better than you think!
Kidding aside, this is an impressive, clearly written book that can introduce everyday readers to the sausage-making process behind the numbers they see cited in the media. It also leaves room for disagreement about the authors' corrections to the official estimates, as well as their policy recommendations.
The book's core is a series of chapters taking on numerous concepts the government tries to measure.
Income? They're counting only cash income—leaving out in-kind transfers like food stamps and employer benefits, as well as failing to subtract taxes. Inflation? They're overestimating it, which means they assume more of our gains are eaten up by rising prices than is really the case. Both of these problems, meanwhile, affect the measurement of poverty, which depends on whether a family's income exceeds a threshold that is adjusted for inflation over time. Inequality also hinges on what is counted as income, and to make matters worse, international comparisons are sullied by the Census Bureau's failure to conform to the reporting rules other countries follow. These aren't wild conspiracy theories; they're backed up with careful explanations and citations, and for the most part already well known to people who follow these academic debates.
Even more interesting is the authors' attempt to present a fresh picture of American households' finances—both in terms of the current income distribution and in terms of trends over time—by accounting for problems like these.
Ranking households by their earned income (including employer-paid benefits and investment income), there's a 60-to-1 disparity between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent. The official Census Bureau numbers, including all cash income, put the disparity at about 17 to 1. But add in all transfers and subtract taxes, and the gap shrinks to 4 to 1.
Government transfers to the lowest-earning quintile are enormous, totaling about $45,000 per household—about $19,000 from old-age entitlements, $2,500 from disability, $10,000 from Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, and $1,500 from food stamps, plus $13,000 from other programs. The mix is different for elderly and non-elderly households, but the authors report very similar total results when the elderly are excluded, with bottom-quintile non-elderly households also receiving about $45,000 in total.
Indeed, by Gramm et al.'s calculations, the bottom 60 percent of households have been made startlingly equal. The bottom 20 percent end up with roughly $50,000 after taxes and transfers, versus $54,000 for the second quintile and $66,000 for the middle one. If one further adjusts for household size, the lowest income quintile slightly beats the second-lowest, which works more but sees less government largesse and has more mouths to feed.
Regarding poverty, the official rate has stayed within a narrow range of about 10 percent to 15 percent for decades. But when the authors add in government benefits the official measure fails to count, the rate is more like 3 percent, and it falls even lower if the inflation adjustment is improved as well. Gramm et al. also cite work from Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan that reached similar numbers by measuring poverty based on consumption rather than income.
Has inequality been rising over time? Yes, in terms of earned income, for a number of reasons. Lower-skilled men have been working less, higher-skilled women have been working more (and marrying similarly high-earning men), the returns to education have increased, etc. But growing redistribution has counterbalanced these trends—and, simultaneously, encouraged declining earnings at the bottom, by promising benefits to people who don't work.
Things are better than you think, but they could be better still, as the authors urge policymakers to enact a suite of reforms to improve opportunity. These include broader use of work requirements for government aid, which will probably be the most contentious aspect of the book among the left. A central thrust of the authors' empirical analysis, after all, is that counting anti-poverty spending as income makes things look a lot better—and then they turn around and recommend cutting anti-poverty spending, because it's unfair for people to have similar incomes despite large differences in work effort.
Such reforms could increase work, as shown by the 1996 welfare reform, and there is also a strong moral case that taxpayers shouldn't support people who refuse to help themselves. At the same time, given the results presented in this book, even a reformed safety net will likely need to achieve substantial redistribution to keep poverty (and inequality, for those worried about it) suppressed.
Gramm and his coauthors are correct in their central claim: Official government statistics measure things in odd and inaccurate ways, and on balance this tends to make things look worse than they are. Those who follow academic work on these topics (and read the other books in this genre) have known this for years.
But it's also worth flagging that, however clear it is that the official numbers are skewed, "unskewing" the data is at least as much art as science, with numerous debates about which adjustments to make. Gramm et al. explain what they do clearly and provide additional documentation for those who want to dig in, but readers should think about the consequences of each decision.
Take, for instance, the authors' finding of an eerie income equality among the bottom 60 percent after adjusting for taxes, transfers, and household size, to the point that the bottom quintile makes slightly more than the next group up. A lower-income group has higher income than a higher-income group—a "blockbuster" finding.
This is possible because the authors rank households according to their earned income, then recalculate each group's income with the adjustments. If a single elderly man has little to no earned income, but more than $50,000 in Social Security and Medicare benefits, he's placed in the very bottom tier of society, and then the adjustments help to make that bottom tier look well-off. But one can argue for redoing the rankings themselves with the adjustments too, in which case that man wouldn't be assigned to the bottom tier to begin with, and it would be mathematically impossible for a lower quintile to have higher income than a higher one. This case is easiest to make with the household-size adjustment, which reflects basic economic realities rather than policy, and old-age benefits, which differ in kind from other government transfers.
Other subjective decisions abound. For instance, how does one place a value on public health care benefits, which are an enormous proportion of government spending on both the elderly and the poor and thus can dramatically change the numbers? The authors value health benefits at the amount the government pays for medical services. They present this as a conservative choice because the government underpays for these services, forcing providers to charge higher rates to the privately insured, and because their measure does not include the programs' administrative costs. If the government paid $2,000 for someone's medical care, that person received $2,000 in government benefits. Fair enough.
On the other hand, you can't eat Medicaid. Unlike, say, food stamps, this spending does not function anything like cash for the folks on these programs. It doesn’t necessarily improve their well-being in a dollar-for-dollar fashion, and the benefits are something of a lottery—invaluable for those who fall severely ill, helpful for those who avoid out-of-pocket costs or get routine care they'd otherwise skip, and just some peace of mind otherwise. It's a judgment call whether and how to account for these issues. In a 2016 report, for instance, Scott Winship decided to value medical benefits at one-quarter of their "market value" as determined by the Census Bureau. (See the discussion of the issue in Appendix 1 here.)
Correcting the poverty rate is also fraught with difficulties. In measuring trends over time, the rate should obviously consider government benefits and properly account for inflation. But what standard of living should the poverty line represent? If we start at the onset of the War on Poverty, with roughly a fifth of Americans officially considered poor, and just track improvement from there, we can say that the war is over and we won: Hardly anyone is poor by mid-1960s standards anymore.
But as standards of living rise in general, should our sense of what it means to be poor change as well? Critics noted that the aforementioned Meyer/Sullivan consumption measures, which suggest a poverty rate of around 3 percent in the late 2010s, were "anchored" to the official poverty rate in 1980. As a result, the late-2010s poverty thresholds were just $13,000 to $18,000 for a family of four (with the exact number varying across measures). Anchoring to 2015 (as Meyer and Sullivan also did in their reports) instead raises the poverty rate to about 12 percent and the thresholds by more than $5,000 each. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, the Census Bureau's own attempt to create a poverty metric that actually makes sense, has similarly classified around a 10th of Americans as poor in recent years.
There are any number of ways to fix the official numbers, and Gramm et al.'s approach is just one of them. But they have done a stellar job of critiquing the statistics at the heart of so many economic debates and providing a thought-provoking alternative.
The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate
by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early
Rowman & Littlefield, 255 pp., $29.95
Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The post A Better Read on the Economy appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

If you find that land, you move on to step two: Get the entitlements (local approval) and permits. That, too, takes a year or so, if all goes well. But often all does not go well. The neighbors fight you, and frequently they sue you. In Venice — home of the legendary boardwalk — the Venice Dell Community project is trying to turn a parking lot owned by the city into a 140-unit building for homeless residents, low-income artists and families, all of it designed by a star architect. The development is being fought and even sued by a collection of local homeowners who charge, among other things, that “Venice desperately needs this parcel to address our chronic parking shortage,” that the new housing would be “an eyesore completely divorced from sound architectural principles” and that it is being developed “with no environmental review in a designated tsunami zone and FEMA Special Flood Hazard Zone.” (When do Angelenos want affordable housing? Now! Where do they want it? Not here!)

Surviving the gantlet of local opposition often means agreeing to a range of concessions that send costs ballooning. To try to neutralize local attacks, developers hire pricey architects, redo plans repeatedly, make all kinds of aesthetic and architectural concessions or additions, hire extra lawyers and auditors, and on and on. Even if a project does survive all this, it does so at a higher per-unit cost, which then, of course, becomes one more data point that gets wielded in opposition to the next project.

This is a place where Caruso’s anger at Los Angeles’s slow pace and high cost of development collided, in our interview, with his sympathy toward (or his need to win votes from) angry homeowners. Caruso is a developer known for classy megaprojects like the mall at The Grove and Palisades Village, and he leaned heavily on the lessons of those efforts. “There’s always community concerns,” he told me. “You always take enough time to listen to the community, take in their comments, and find common ground. I’ve gotten every one of my projects proposed around the L.A. area approved, and approved quickly.”

When I suggested to him that communities may have a different response to housing the homeless than hosting upscale movie theaters and chain stores, he didn’t buy it. “When you go into neighborhoods like Venice, what I hear is they’re very supportive of having affordable housing, of having housing for the homeless in the area. They just want the project designed and operated in a way reflective of their neighborhood. I don’t think developers or the city should be arguing with that. It’s the right thing to do.”

Listening to residents, he went on, means recognizing that “scale matters. Consistency with the community matters. Architecture matters.” And all that may be true. But as everyone who builds affordable housing told me, once you agree to everything that local homeowners want in those domains, you end up with small, expensive projects. Caruso wants to build more homes, more cheaply. He’s very excited about low-cost, prefabricated projects. He also wants to listen more to local homeowners and honor their preferences more fully in these projects. There’s a tension between these two visions that he has not resolved.

Lis Smith is a veteran political strategist affiliated with the Democratic Party. Most recently, she was senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg in his 2020 presidential campaign. Her memoir is Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Lis Smith discuss what she looks for in a successful candidate; the lessons she takes from years of courting independents and voters from across the aisle; and why she believes that Biden should run for reelection.The views expressed are those of the speakers, not those of Persuasion. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Yascha Mounk: What are the main things political candidates should be doing, but aren't? And what are the main things that they shouldn't be doing, but are?Lis Smith: The number one piece of advice that I give to candidates—and it shouldn't be this complicated—is to just be normal: talk like a normal person, communicate in simple ways and with simple concepts. That's a lot harder for a lot of political candidates than it should be. I worked for Pete Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar, but he was someone who, like Bill Clinton, another Rhodes Scholar, had a gift for taking really complex ideas and reducing them to points that everyone could understand—whether he was on CNN, at a think tank, or in front of a crowd in rural Iowa. It's really important to act and speak like a normal person, and it's something politicians don't do enough. We get into a sort of wonky speak, or as James Carville says, “faculty lounge” speak. Speaking in front of a camera, or to a crowd, is really daunting to a lot of people. If they were just talking to friends around a dinner table, or at a bar, they would speak one way; but the second a camera turns on, they feel the need to speak in this stilted way. Or they're just terrified of making a gaffe, so they end up speaking in this political gobbledygook.You have a lot of political candidates who maybe watched too much of The West Wing or had advisors who watched too much of it. But unless you're a poet, you should not engage in any poetry. If you're not John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama, don't try to speak like them. Look: like a lot of Democratic operatives, I went to an Ivy League college. I grew up in Bronxville, New York. But the difference between me and a lot of other Democratic operatives is that I cut my teeth in red states, places like South Dakota, Missouri, Ohio, and Kentucky. And so I understand how to speak to voters in a way that is not rooted in SAT words or advocacy group language.  I wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post about this recently, because I was seeing these special interest groups put out things saying that “pro-choice” is harmful language; you need to say “pro-decision.” But no-one has ever heard anyone describe themselves as “pro-decision.” And so, you do see staffers who come out of this advocacy world, who have surrounded themselves with people who only share their worldviews—who think like them, talk like them, and live in bubbles where they don't communicate with normal people. I think that distorts how politicians talk. Mounk: What are some of the big mistakes that candidates make?Smith: Candidates should really limit how much time they spend on social media. It's a good thing that younger candidates are more fluent in social media and modern technology. But there are some downsides. There is a distortionary effect that happens on social media, including really toxic group-think: e.g. the idea that unless you embrace the position that is popular online (which is oftentimes the most far-left position), you're a Republican in disguise and you can't be trusted. And if you take your cues from the online group, you’re going to be extremely out of touch with voters. We saw that when some prominent Democrats and Democratic groups embraced absolutely toxic, nonsensical slogans like “defund the police.” There was a time when, if you went online and said, “defund the police is a really bad slogan and it’s going to backfire on Democrats,” you would have gotten absolutely piled on. Now, I think people have come to realize this. After seeing the millions and millions of dollars that were spent against Democrats—even ones who had never even embraced that, just because certain Democrats had gone out there and embraced it—they understand that it was stupid. But that's a problem that every campaign is gonna have to deal with. And it's not just the candidates, it's also the staff. A twenty-something year old staffer is not going to have the wherewithal to understand that just because some Twitter accounts are saying these things, it doesn't mean that those views are held by the majority of voters. What's really important is to get out and talk to the voters you're trying to appeal to. If winning Twitter is your goal, you're probably not going to win an election.Mounk: Why is it that when Donald Trump goes around the country saying whatever comes to his mind—not moderating his message in any way, saying many unpopular things—he's electorally viable? Whereas when Democrats go around and give red meat to the base, saying things that are not popular among the general population, they lose elections? Or do you think that moderation pays on both sides of the political spectrum?Smith: I think it does pay on both sides of the political spectrum. Trump has a unique bond with his base, right? There is a little bit of a cult of personality going on. He's got a vise-like grip on his base. But if you look at the best two recent cycles for Democrats, they were—in very different ways—2018 and 2020. If you look at the ads that the Democrats who picked up Republican seats ran, whether it's Colin Allred in Texas, or Abigail Spanberger, or Lauren Underwood, or Elissa Slotkin or Mikie Sherrill—they didn’t go out and run on “Medicare for All” or the “Green New Deal.” They talked about how they wanted to protect Obamacare, how they wanted to create jobs. It's not a social media message. But it resonated with people. They made it a choice: “We're trying to do these good things for you that will put more money in your pocket, and the Republicans are trying to take away your health care.” In 2020, similarly, Joe Biden was the embodiment of the more moderate, reasonable wing of the Democratic Party. And I think that is why he was able to get a lot of swing voters, a lot of independents, a lot of people in the suburbs who otherwise would think about voting for a Republican. So for Democrats, we've got to look at what has worked for us. When we embrace more moderate candidates, we tend to do better.See also: James Carville on How Democrats Self-SabotageMounk: So you've run many campaigns, and been involved in even more campaigns. But you're most famous for having run Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, in which he went from being the mayor of a reasonably small town to being a very serious presidential contender. When you sat down at the very beginning of this and thought, “Look, I have a candidate here who's really eloquent and really smart, but who doesn't have all that much name-recognition, and who seems like a longshot candidate”—what strategy did you come up with?Smith: When I first met him, it was over the phone in December 2016. He was thinking about running for DNC chair, and that was a longshot race for him. And one thing that was immediately clear to me was that he was a very unique communicator, and very different from other Democrats at the time. December 2016 is when the Democratic Party, sort of rightly so, was in full freakout mode, because no one could believe that we had lost to Donald Trump. And the media was in full freakout mode too because so few people had predicted this. All the polls were wrong. And Donald Trump seemed to fly in the face of everything that we thought America is and was. Yet he was able to prevail. So, Democrats sort of over-corrected—overreacted I think—at that moment. In the weeks afterwards, certainly in the years afterwards, you had Democrats going out there and saying, “To beat Trump, we have to be like Trump, and we gotta yell, we gotta scream. When they go low, we go lower. We kick them in the teeth.” But David Axelrod always talks about the theory of opposites, which is that in presidential races, voters tend to go between people who are complete opposites. You go from Bill Clinton—who, yes, he can be an everyman, but he was also a very cerebral guy—to George W. Bush, who was more a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy. No one would say that he was particularly intellectual. Then you go back to Barack Obama, a very cerebral guy, brilliant orator…then you go to Donald Trump. What Pete understood was that you have to offer counterprogramming. Even when he was just running for DNC chair, he approached Trump very differently from other Democrats. He understood that it’s important not to play Trump's game—which is to say something outrageous, watch people's heads explode, dominate the news cycle for days, and then rinse and repeat. I'm sort of seeing the same thing happening with Ron DeSantis. He's picking these fights, he's saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters—whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is—have the same freak out. Then everything revolves around Ron. He's setting the debate, and he's setting the debate around an issue where Democrats are probably weakest right now with voters: immigration. Pete understood that the best counterprogramming to Trump was to be the antidote to him in terms of style presentation, how he talked—but also in terms of policy. Pete was a guy who served his country, an eminently decent guy of faith. He's a loving husband. He is a well-educated intellectual who speaks seven languages and does not hide from that. When John Kerry spoke French, the Republicans attacked it. Candidates wouldn't speak foreign languages in public. But Pete sort of embraced that, while, as I mentioned before, being really brilliant at taking very complex ideas and communicating them in simple ways for voters. So, although we had no name recognition and no national fundraising base, the one thing we did have access to was the media. And because he was such a good communicator, we essentially just put him out there as much as possible.During the presidential campaign, a prominent Democratic consultant contacted me after one of the debates and said, “Could you tell him to pause before he gives an answer? Because it's almost robotic, what a perfect answer he's giving. It almost sounds rehearsed.” When Pete was asked, “Well, you're gay. How do you eat Chick-Fil-A?” He replied, “I do not approve of their politics, but I kinda approve of their chicken.” He was extremely comfortable in his skin and his values. He could always bring things back to basics like freedom, fairness, faith, and family. He is someone who is unabashedly patriotic, and will talk about how Democrats need to really be the patriotic party. It made it a lot easier for voters—including those who didn’t necessarily identify with the Democratic Party—to understand and to identify with him. Mounk: So, how do you build a campaign from there?Smith: When he finally got to the CNN town hall—that's the first time you get 45 minutes. It’s a national platform. And of course, not everyone wants to do cable news. Ratings are what they are. Most people don't watch cable news. But if you have a viral moment, if you have a great performance, then what happens on CNN doesn't just stay on CNN. It's gonna get picked up everywhere. That was the moment that everything changed. His fundraising exploded. We'd set a modest—frankly, sort of sad—goal of raising a million dollars in the first fundraising quarter. But within a couple of weeks, we raised $7 million. In the next quarter, we raised $24 million. And once you're able to raise that sort of money, then you're able to put together a good team, and a great operation. We put together what I think was the best Iowa operation, while continuing to do things sort of differently. It was always very important to him to never change who he was because of what the staff said or what people online were saying. There was a big disconnect oftentimes between the online discourse—and the discourse among political reporters in the bubble—and voters on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire. We really saw that in October, November, and December of 2019, when he started to draw contrasts with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on Medicare for All, among other issues. Online, of course, if you read the reaction, you would have thought the guy kicked a puppy on live TV. But then the reporters who actually went and spent time with voters on the ground were like, “What the hell? Every voter I'm talking to is saying that Pete Buttigieg is either their first or second choice.” If you know who you are, know what your values are, and are willing to stand by them and understand that they are rooted in common sense, and are in line with where the voters are—that's your path to success. That's one of the reasons why, despite the fact that he was the youngest candidate, he was able to do so well.Mounk: What do Democrats need to do to win in 2024?Smith: Well, first, we have to win in 2022. And to win in 2022, we've got to stay focused. I'm getting a little nervous. All this immigration stuff recently has made me very, very nervous. And yes, there is inflation, and that is going to be a problem going into the election. But at least the Democrats are trying to offer financial relief to the American people, whether it's allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, or capping the price of insulin for seniors (all the stuff that was in the Inflation Reduction Act). And we could say, “What is the Republican agenda to lower your costs? It is nothing, it is zero. They want your cost to go up as much as possible, because they think it will help them win the election.” There's no doubt that the biggest game-changer in this election was the Dobbs decision. It lit a fire under the Democratic base. If you look at Kansas, a majority of the voters who turned out were Republicans, but the abortion measure failed by a lot. That means that a lot of Republicans voted to protect a woman's right to choose. So, Republicans have been blocking all economic relief, while Democrats have been campaigning effectively on abortion and using it as a cudgel against Republicans. That was very favorable terrain for Democrats. And you really saw that in the polls. But I'm very nervous now. After seeing immigration dominate the news, it speaks to why Democrats just cannot take the bait all the time from Republicans. We cannot let them define what the national debate is. Because if we go into 2022 with immigration as the top issue, we're screwed. Voters give Republicans a massive, massive advantage in terms of how they handle immigration—which I understand is not rational, because it is Republicans who blocked immigration reform, and who are partially to blame for this crisis; but voters aren't always rational. We've got to stop taking their bait; we've got to focus on talking to people about how we're making their lives better, how the Republicans are out of touch on issues like abortion, and how they want to take away your democratic rights. In states across the country, we have candidates running for state legislatures, running for governor, running for secretary of state, running for attorney general, who are essentially saying that they will not accept the election results if their states elect Democrats in the future. And even if they lose their elections, they're not going to accept the election results. I understand democracy is not at the top of the priority list for voters. But we can simplify the message, and make it clear that this isn't just about January 6, this isn't just about 2020—this is about your future rights as a voter.Mounk: But how do you effectively change the topic in politics? Because I often hear this advice. If the dominant topic is immigration, that really gives an advantage to Republicans. If you're a Democrat or a Democratic adviser, then you really want to change the topic to something like abortion, education, or economic issues. My skepticism about that advice is that if voters perceive you as being out of touch on some issue that is important to them, and then you simply change the topic, they won't trust anything else you say. If you change the topic before you play defense on the issue on which you're weak, you just lose permission to speak about anything else.Smith: I think the response to Ron DeSantis from most Democrats has not been effective. They've played his game. And Pete would always talk about this in the 2020 campaign. With Donald Trump, if you get into a back and forth with him, then you give him oxygen. It's like when you're a kid and you're playing with a finger trap—the harder you pull, the more stuck you’re gonna get. And I feel like it’s the same with DeSantis: if you're just yelling, screaming, huffing and puffing and hyperventilating, then you're giving him all the attention that he wants, and you're not addressing the underlying problem, which is that voters don't trust Democrats to effectively handle immigration and the border. That’s the reality—and I deal in reality. What makes more sense is for Democrats to acknowledge that things are not great; that we have way too many people coming over the border every day; that our border towns are being thrown into chaos, and they don't have the resources to handle this. We need to acknowledge that frustration, and we need to have solutions that address that. You can pivot to: Democrats are the ones who've been trying to address this for years, and Republicans haven't lifted a freaking finger to reform our immigration system. Part of the reason why we have this crisis at the border is because of the Republican Party and Republican leaders. Jake Auchincloss was on Fox the other day and he did a really good job of answering this. He began by acknowledging that these frustrations are real, and that Democrats cannot ignore them. Then he pivoted into, “And here’s the way that I would handle this.” You have to establish some credibility on the issue before you move on. You can't just yell and scream in incomprehensible grunts and then just say abortion and think that you're going to change the topic of conversation. You've got to acknowledge the frustration, the reality, before you move on. I would like to see a little bit more of that from Democrats, and a little less hyperventilation.Mounk: Let's say we get through these midterms: perhaps Democrats managed to hold the Senate, perhaps Republicans take the House. Do you think Joe Biden should run again? And if Joe Biden doesn't run, what should people look for in a candidate who can beat Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or somebody else in 2024?Smith: I think Joe Biden is going to be the nominee. It would be completely ahistorical for him not to be the nominee. I understand that his numbers are still underwater right now. But look at Barack Obama's numbers in 2010—they were in a similar place and at some points got worse. I worked for him in 2012. He was able to come back and win pretty handily. But at this point in 2010, there were editorials saying Barack Obama should not run for reelection, and instead, Hillary Clinton should take his place, which is really funny in retrospect. But Barack Obama was able to successfully rehabilitate his numbers, and part of that was turning the election from a referendum into a choice. Democrats have done a better job in 2022 than they did in 2010 in making this more of a choice election, versus a referendum. I think Biden is looking back at history. He's looking at Obama, Clinton, and Reagan's numbers, and seeing that presidents after the first couple years of their term sort of suck. He's looking at history and seeing that you can bounce back. And just because the numbers right now aren't great, it doesn't mean that he won't be able to win the election. One of the arguments I hear the most is that he's too old. I think age matters if it affects your ability to get things done. But if that is what matters most about age, then I don't really think that applies here with Biden. He has been very, very prolific in recent months and has signed into law a lot of important legislation, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS. He's had some foreign policy wins, killed the head of al-Qaeda, all of that. His age clearly isn't impacting his effectiveness. And I do hear people say, “Well, he's not a great communicator.” I don't know where the rest of these people were throughout Joe Biden's career, but I remember in 2012, when he was out there as a surrogate for President Obama, and he was making the same gaffes, mixing up the states he was in. But that's part of Joe Biden's appeal. He doesn't speak in perfect paragraphs like Pete, and he doesn't give these beautiful oratorical speeches like Barack Obama. But guess what? 99.9% of people don't. He speaks like a regular person. In 2008, he would say, “Good morning, Ohio!” when he was in Pennsylvania. He would mix up senators' names. I think that's just part of who he is. He was never a super smooth communicator. And to some people, it's an endearing quality. It's like the “Uncle Joe” part of it. I haven't seen a compelling argument yet for why he wouldn't be the strongest candidate for 2024, especially when we know that incumbency gives you a lot of advantages.Mounk: It’s interesting that when you look at the FiveThirtyEight averages today, you see that Joe Biden is underperforming Barack Obama and George W. Bush (who was very popular at the time because 9/11 was recent), and George H.W. Bush. But you also see that he is overperforming Donald Trump, he's exactly even with Bill Clinton, and he is overperforming Ronald Reagan. And one of the things that's interesting about this is that the numbers at this point in a term don't seem to bear any particular correlation with who gets reelected.I think it's always tempting to make your views about policy align with your views about who the best candidate is. What are your instincts on this?Smith: When I look at some of the candidates who are doing best and who are overperforming, it's people like Mark Kelly in Arizona, people like Raphael Warnock in Georgia. As a political consultant, sometimes you do want your candidates to go out there and just rip their opponent a new asshole and light the world on fire, and break out the red meat. But part of the reason why some of these candidates are able to succeed is because they don't do that. And it's not the sexiest thing in the world. But sometimes voters reward candidates who are sort of boring, who don't embrace conflict, who don't try to be flashy on TV and don't try to give speeches to rival Barack Obama. They’re workhorses, and they're not talking about the flashiest issues, they're not taking the bait on the immigration stuff. They're going out and building “Republicans for Warnock” groups, and just talking about healthcare costs and jobs, and things like that—the least sexy things in the world. And I think sometimes we have to understand that boring plays in politics, and voters reward just simple common decency. Both Warnock and Kelly are able to get crossover voters because they don't think that any everyone who voted for Trump is inherently evil or stupid. And they don't talk to people that way. They don't run around with their hair on fire, embracing radical policies.Sometimes you do want to have candidates who give you that thrill up your leg. But that's not always who's going to play the best with voters. We need to meet voters where they are. And sometimes that’s not going to get a lot of retweets. It's not gonna get you booked on cable news. It's not gonna get you named a hero in liberal publications and invited to give keynote speeches at dinners. But God damn it, it's going to help you win. And that's how we change the trajectory of this country.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

“Deeds, not words,” is the motto of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, a credo that befits a fighting unit that has seen service from the Civil War to Iraq. But wars are won by words as well as deeds, which is one of the reasons why President John F. Kennedy said of Winston Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” And now, in Ukraine, the United States and the West in general need much better words to put into the fight in addition to the long-range artillery and guided missiles, air-defense systems and drones, accurate artillery shells and bullets that they are shipping—belatedly, insufficiently, occasionally hesitantly—into battle.President Volodymyr Zelensky, the most inspiring Western war leader since Churchill, knows the power of language. “I need ammunition, not a ride,” will make the history books. His speeches to Congress, the U.K. Parliament, and the Bundestag were outstanding examples of impassioned persuasive speech. But something more is needed from the president and prime ministers of his friends and allies.[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending the values Americans claim to hold]The United States and its allies have had a remarkably, perhaps perilously easy time in persuading their people to go along with extensive aid to Ukraine, despite high inflation and energy shortages. To some extent, this is the result of the West’s muscle memory from the Cold War, when Soviet ideology was relentlessly hostile and Soviet internal practice stunningly brutal. Soviet external behavior, from the subjugation of the Baltic states and Eastern Europe to the invasion of Afghanistan, was menacing as well as repellent. And even though the Cold War is more than a generation behind us, when the Russians behave like brutes—“orcs,” as the Ukrainians refer to them—that muscle memory is triggered.Americans are used to seeing the Russians as the bad guys, and thus our institutions, including the armed forces and the CIA and its foreign counterparts, have a deep repertoire of actions ready in response. The Russians launched an unprovoked war against Ukraine, committed atrocities on a massive scale, and have daily compounded their crimes by attacking civilian infrastructure abroad and brutalizing their own people at home. It is easy (and correct) to conclude that they remain the bad guys today. That we can see the bombed playgrounds and hospitals and the tortured bodies of their victims on Twitter makes it so much easier to mobilize against them.The tests are coming, however, particularly if Europe has a cold winter that makes Russian cutoffs of energy supplies bite. In the United States, the likely next speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, in a gesture to the neo-isolationist wing of the Republican Party, has indicated that it is time to curtail aid to Ukraine. The motley collection of so-called realists (who think that Russia’s crimes are irrelevant), isolationists, admirers or tools of Russia, and America-Firsters have kept up a running if muted line of criticism, not so much of the Zelensky government as of the American burden in supporting him.McCarthy’s views have nothing to do with principle, because he has none. Rather, he is a weather vane, acutely sensitive to the winds that blow from Mar-a-Lago and the wing of his party that has always resented America’s presence in the outside world. The isolationist and even xenophobic traditions of one faction in the Republican Party run deep. Suppressing them for the past several generations was the great achievement of politicians like Dwight D. Eisenhower and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. But they are back and need to be addressed, as do comparable movements on the left of the Democratic Party.Even more important, average Americans, properly worried about inflation, recession, and a bitterly divided political class, need to hear why it is important to weigh in, wholeheartedly and with vigor, on Kyiv’s side.[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Russia just showed why it’s floundering in Ukraine]Two kinds of words are needed: those explaining why the fight for Ukraine is important to American security and welfare, and those making the case on moral grounds. No American policy can succeed in the long run without addressing both our interests and our values. When the two coincide, as they did during World War II and the Cold War, the United States can show remarkable perseverance. When they diverge or are weak, as became the case in America’s interventions in Afghanistan and the Middle East, policies collapse.A good speech on Ukraine will not invoke the phrase “rules-based international order,” which might resonate in a freshman introduction to international relations, but not with an audience of normal people. Rather, Americans and Europeans need to hear about the consequences if Russia were to crush Ukraine; about the invasions and depredations that would surely come next in the Baltic states, and quite likely beyond; about the conclusions a no less ruthless Chinese government would draw; and about how a failure to take a stand here would mean something much bigger and more dangerous in a few years’ time. They need to hear how staunchness now, even in the face of nuclear threats, is infinitely better than a large-scale, possibly global war in a decade. They need to hear that world war is not just the stuff of history books or their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ lives, but a possibility for us if we are not prudent now.They also need to hear about the semi-genocidal nature of the Russian attack on Ukraine—not just the extensive torture, murder, and rape of the civilian population, but the kidnapping of thousands of children, and the attempt to wipe out Ukrainian language and culture.Americans also need to hear a celebration not only of Ukrainian courage and tenacity, but of their skill. On January 20, 1940, Churchill gave a speech in which, among other things, he reflected on Finland’s astonishing early defeats of the Soviet armies that had attacked it a few months before.
Only Finland—superb, nay sublime—in the jaws of peril—Finland shows what free men can do.
And he issued a warning:
If the light of freedom which still burns so brightly in the frozen North should be finally quenched, it might well herald a return to the Dark Ages, when every vestige of human progress during two thousand years would be engulfed.
Now is a moment for Churchillian rhetoric and insight, suitably modified to the limitations of those who may share his instincts but lack his brilliance.[Listen: Zelensky is everywhere]Modern politicians very rarely speak this way, but they need to try, and they will be heard if they do so. They do not have to reach Churchillian heights. The opposition to aid to Ukraine is still divided, hampered by its own crankiness and embittered introversion, and undermined daily by Russian barbarity, and no less, the astonishing Julius Streicher–like candor with which its propagandists howl for the blood of innocents.Ukraine’s struggle for freedom and for its very existence is the struggle of a much larger order, not just in Europe but globally, and indeed of the human spirit. It needs to be understood not only in the somnolent rhythms of bureaucratic choice or academic analysis, but in language that sings. The situation calls for sound policy, no doubt; it also calls for eloquence that soars. There is an epic speech to be delivered here; let us hope that there is someone who can deliver it.

What do you get the contrarian billionaire who has everything? Try a social network to call their own.It certainly seems like the hot new thing. Almost one year ago, Donald Trump, freshly banned from mainstream platforms, ginned up a Twitter clone called Truth Social, which he claimed would constitute the first “non-cancellable” global community. Elon Musk appears to be going through with his acquisition of Twitter. And earlier this week, many awoke to the news that Ye, formerly Kanye West, plans to acquire Parler after getting the boot from Instagram and Twitter over anti-Semitic rants. If the deal does happen, he’ll inherit the social-media equivalent of a gutted city mall filled with the echoing cries of January 6 defendants and racists.Soon, we may enter an era where mercurial celebrity landlords dictate the terms of service on their own social networks—ones that are explicitly positioned against content moderation and in favor of a facile understanding of free-speech maximalism. Although the rhetoric they’ve chosen to use to gain support for their stewardship is cribbed from a larger, years-long political battle against Big Tech’s influence, their actions are personal and, in two of the three cases, born from the desperation of running out of major platforms to publish on. None of these men has signaled any desire to create something new as much as they wish to roll the clock back to some shallowly conceived digital Wild West, where the powerful and hateful alike can inflict damage and experience no consequences.[Read: Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius]Celebrities have always had vanity projects in the tech space that have allowed them to tap into and monetize their adoring fans (let us not forget the Jeremy Renner app—RIP). These projects almost always wither away in part because they’re weird, but also because they’re walled garden environments, or private spaces. Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.One way to look at the existence of these would-be social-media barons is as a logical, if depressing, conclusion of the “techlash” that started shortly after Donald Trump’s election. His campaign managed to activate and mobilize communities of trolls to make endless memes and organize harassment campaigns for their “god emperor.” Less than a week after winning, the Trump campaign touted Facebook as “the single most important platform to help grow our fundraising base” and later on extolled the company’s ad targeting as a helpful tool in attracting voters. Employees at both Twitter and Facebook very publicly fretted over the way their tools might have played a role in the 2016 election.By 2017, Facebook was in front of Congress testifying about ads linked to Russian election manipulation. An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required). The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journalists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy. People can and will argue over the utility and lessons learned from all these debates and scandals, but the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power. On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power). Put another way, the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts (as evidenced by the Texas social-media law that aims to tell big platforms they can’t moderate the content on their sites). Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.Because of this stark divide, there’s been more grandstanding than actual policy changes. And because these platforms are massive networks, connecting billions of human beings—and because speech issues and First Amendment law are complex and sometimes counterintuitive—one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.[Read: Stop putting lasers in Joe Biden’s eyes]Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad because his tweets violated Twitter’s terms of service. Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues. They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers. It’s not clear they even believe in unfettered speech as much as they believe in their own right to take up as much oxygen as possible and face zero penalties.Another component of this new ownership era is the long-tortured relationship between celebrity and social media. Platforms are a minefield for famous people who post from the hip without PR teams. But for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they want to their legions of fans, who sound a lot like the yes-men whom billionaires surround themselves with IRL. But the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base—that is, the people who are not exempt from following a platform’s rules—is so galling to these men that they declare the entire system to be broken.Though the three all embody the various ways platforms can amplify ideas and confer power, they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying (or in the case of Trump, cloning)—and perhaps they don’t even care. None of these platform acquisitions is a particularly sound business decision. Musk, Ye, and Trump could be doing plenty of more useful or effective things with their money. Instead, they are using a culture war to justify carving out their own safe spaces.These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict. They couldn’t possibly solve the problems around free speech and power that these three men are nominally compelled by—but we can rest assured that they’ll find a way to create more of them.

For as long as my marriage lasts, my household will be divided by reactions to vaccines.I am, fortunately, speaking of physical reactions rather than ideological ones; my partner and I are both shot enthusiasts, a fact we verified on our first date. But if my immune system is a bashful wallflower, rarely triggering more than a sore arm in the hours after I get a vaccine, then my spouse’s is a party animal. Every immunization I’ve watched him receive—among them, four doses of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine—has absolutely clobbered him with fevers, chills, fatigue, and headaches for about a full day. When he got the flu shot and the bivalent COVID jab together a few weeks ago, he ended up taking his first day off work in more than a decade. As usual, the same injections caused me so few symptoms that I wondered if I was truly dead inside.“Why don’t you feel anything?” my spouse howled at me from the bedroom, where his sweat was soaking through the sheets. “Sorry,” I yelled back from the kitchen, where I was prepping four days’ worth of meals between work calls after returning from an eight-mile run.If this is how every autumn will go from now on, so be it: A few hours of discomfort is still worth the rev-up in defenses that vaccines offer against serious disease and death. But it’s not hard to see that gnarly side effects will only add to the many other factors that work against COVID-vaccine uptake, including lack of awareness, sloppy messaging, dwindling access, and spotty community outreach. Back in the spring, when I spoke with several people who hadn’t gotten boosters despite being eligible for many, many months, several of them cited the post-shot discomfort as a reason. Now I’m getting texts and calls from family members and friends—all up to date on their previous COVID vaccines—admitting they’ve been dillydallying on the bivalent to avoid those symptoms too. “I don’t know if we’re going to continue to get strong buy-in from the public if they have this sort of reaction every year,” says Cindy Leifer, an immunologist at Cornell University.[Read: America created its own booster problems]The good news, at least, is that experts told me they don’t expect this bivalent recipe—or future autumn COVID shots, for that matter—to be worse, side-effect-wise, than the ones we’ve received before. It’ll take a while for data to confirm that, especially considering that more than a month into this fall’s rollout, fewer than 15 million Americans have received the updated shot. But Kathleen Neuzil, a vaccinologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has studied the performance of COVID vaccines in clinical trials, pointed out to me that the mRNA shots’ ingredients have been swapped out before without altering the rate of side effects. As the alphabet soup of variants began to sweep the world in early 2021, she told me, vaccine makers started to tinker with alternate formulations, sometimes combining multiple versions of the spike protein into a single shot—“and they’re all comparable.” (If anything, early data suggest that bivalent shots containing an Omicron variant spike may be easier to take.) The same goes for flu vaccines, which are also retooled each year: When measured across the population, the frequency and intensity of side effects remain more or less the same.On average, then, mRNA-vaxxed people can probably expect to have an annual experience that’s pretty similar to the one they had with their first COVID booster. As studies have shown, that one was actually better for most people than dose No. 2, the most unpleasant of the injections so far. (The math, of course, becomes tougher for people getting another vaccine, such as the flu shot, at the same time.) There are probably two main reasons why side effects have lessened overall, experts told me. First, the spacing: Most people received the second dose in their Pfizer or Moderna primary series just three or four weeks after the first. That’s an efficient way to get a lot of people “fully vaccinated” in a short period of time, but it means that many of the immune system’s defensive cells and molecules will still be on high alert. The second shot could end up fanning a blaze of inflammation that was never quite put out. In line with that, researchers have found that spacing out the primary-series doses to eight weeks, 12 weeks, or even longer can prune some side effects.Dose matters a lot too: Vaccines are, in a way, stimulants meant to goad the immune system into reacting; bigger servings should induce bigger jolts. When vaccine makers were tinkering with their recipes in early trials, higher doses—including ones that were deemed too large for further testing—produced more side effects. Each injection in Moderna’s primary series contains more than three times the mRNA packaged into Pfizer’s, and Moderna has, on average, caused more intense side effects. But Moderna’s booster and bivalent doses contain a smaller scoop of the stimulating material: People 12 and older, for instance, get 50 micrograms instead of the 100 micrograms in each primary dose; kids 6 to 11 years old get 25 micrograms instead of 50. (All of Pfizer’s doses stay the same size across primaries and boosters, as long as people stay in the same age group.) People who switch between brands, then, may also notice a difference in symptoms.It’s a tricky balance, though. Sometimes, the immune system adjusts the magnitude of its protection to match the danger posed by a pathogen (or shot), a bit like titrating a crisis response to the severity of a threat—so it’s important that vaccine makers don’t undershoot. For better or worse, the mRNA-based COVID vaccines do seem to cause a rougher response than most other vaccines, including annual flu shots. One of the offending ingredients might be the mRNA itself, which codes for SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. But Michela Locci, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that the mRNA’s packaging—a greasy fat bubble called a lipid nanoparticle—may be the more likely culprit. For some people, in any case, the side effects of COVID shots might be on par with those of the two-dose Shingrix vaccine, one of the most infamously reactogenic immunizations in our roster. Leifer, who has received both, told me the second dose of each “floored” her to about the same extent.The fact that I get fewer side effects than my spouse does not imply that I’m any less protected. A ton of factors—genetics, hormone levels, age, diet, sleep, stress, pain tolerance, and more—could potentially influence how someone experiences a shot. Women tend to have more reactive bodies, as do younger people. But there are exceptions to those trends: I’m one of them. The whole topic is understudied, Locci told me. Her own recent experience with the bivalent threw her for a loop. After her first, second, and third dose of Moderna each ratcheted up in side-effect severity, she cleared her calendar for the couple of days following her bivalent, “afraid I was going to be in bed with a fever again,” she said: “But it was a light headache for a morning, and then it was over.” She has no idea what next year will bring.Either way, side effects such as fevers and chills tend to be short-lived. “Very few side effects are severe,” Neuzil told me, “and COVID continues to be a severe disease.” Still, Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, hopes that scientists will keep developing new COVID vaccines that might come with fewer post-shot issues—including the very rare ones, such as myocarditis—without sacrificing immune protection. Lee doesn’t tend to react much to vaccines, but her daughter “always misses school the next day,” she told me. “I plan her shots for a Friday afternoon so she can lay out all Saturday.” Early on, when hardly anyone had immunity to the virus, signing everyone up for somewhat reactogenic shots was a no-brainer—especially given the hope that two doses would yield many, many years of protection. Now that we know it’s a repeated need, Neuzil said, “the equation changes a bit.”People aren’t totally helpless against side effects. Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, had an “awful, terrible” experience with his second and third doses, which slammed him with 102- and 103-degree fevers, respectively. He weathered the side effects without intervention, worried that a painkiller would curb not just the agony, but also his protective immune response. This time, though, armed with new knowledge from his own lab that anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving drugs don’t blunt antibody levels, “the first sign I feel even the slightest bit shitty,” he told me, “I’m dosing up.”I’ll probably do the same for my spouse the next time he’s due for a vaccine of any kind … likely while I chill on the sidelines. Bhattacharya’s spouse, too, is kind of an immune introvert, a fact that he bemoans. “Her only side effect was she felt thirsty,” he said. “It’s just not fair.”

Liz Truss’s swift fall from power appears to have resulted from a clash between what economists call fiscal dominance (the government’s spending promises) and monetary dominance (the central bank’s price-stability mandate). But thinking about what happened to Truss in these terms misses an important and surprising part of the story.

PRINCETON – The resignation of Liz Truss, the United Kingdom’s shortest-serving prime minister, completes a powerful case study of how not to make fiscal policy. But the lesson goes deeper than the idea that British politics was torn apart by a traumatic struggle pitting the government and the Treasury against the Bank of England. The real failure was overlooking major risks built long ago into the plumbing of the financial system.

The fiscal-policy lesson is powerful because it is so easily personalized. Truss will go into history books alongside Lady Jane Grey, the nine-day queen who died (by execution) in the religious turmoil of sixteenth-century England. In fact, the modern UK is facing the equivalent of a sectarian clash of its own.

The mistake – on the face of it – was the government’s announcement of a £45 billion ($50 billion) unfunded tax reduction, amounting to 2% of GDP, which included a small cut in the basic rate and the removal of the higher income band. The originators of the scheme believed, probably erroneously, that it would stimulate initiative, investment, and thus growth. There was also a more expensive package to subsidize energy consumers, at the time the most generous such program in Europe, amounting to some £200 billion, or 9% of GDP.

These are large figures, of course, but the UK’s public debt level was well below that of the United States, not to mention Italy or the even more extreme case of Japan. The new expenditures and income shortfalls should not, by themselves, turn the UK into a new Greece or Argentina.

Truss’s real mistake may have been to take seriously loose talk about how the era of cheap money and effectively negative interest rates made any kind of public spending a free lunch, since the debt would not have to be paid off and the cost of servicing it was falling. For a while, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which used a balance-sheet approach to show that government debt was really an asset of citizens, captivated markets. But then rising inflation – owing to pandemic fiscal packages, supply-chain disruptions, and soaring food and energy prices – obliged central banks with a legal price-stability mandate to tighten monetary policy and consequently to increase the cost of government funding. That cost brought Truss down.

In the interwar period, the central banks in Britain and France pressed left-wing governments running relatively small deficits, generating a widely believed story about a Bankers’ Ramp – what the French called the wall of money. The term was used by the center-left coalition of Édouard Herriot in 1924, when it was shaken by financial instability and eventually collapsed. Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government met a similar fate in 1931, in the middle of the world depression.

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The equivalent story for today is already circulating: action by the central bank, as well as the advice of international financial institutions, destroyed a Conservative government that promised to revive growth by fiscal stimulus. The Bankers’ Ramp and international finance now brings down the right, not the left. The countdown to disaster for the Truss government was given when the Bank of England announced that it would end the support scheme for government debt (gilts) on October 14. It was entirely predictable that that would be the day when the government had to promise to rethink its fiscal stance, which Truss did by sacking her chancellor.

Truss’s fall thus appears to have resulted from a clash between what economists call fiscal dominance (the government’s spending promises) and monetary dominance (the central bank’s price-stability mandate). And this time monetary dominance won out, because a new narrative about government profligacy and political responsibility has gripped financial markets, replacing the MMT-infused narrative about the beneficence of public spending and deficits.

But thinking about what happened to Truss in terms of clashing fiscal and monetary policies misses an important and surprising part of the story: the vulnerability of a key part of the UK financial sector to rising interest rates and falling bond prices. The pension-funds industry, committed to paying out on defined-benefits policies, had leveraged its holdings of government debt in order to chase higher returns. If the price of public debt fell because of a rise in interest rates, the funds faced collateral calls. And now, UK pension funds, holding some £1.5 trillion in this kind of scheme, faced a shortage of bonds that could be easily sold. The BOE’s intervention explains the odd shift in government debt prices, with prices for index-linked or inflation-proofed securities falling more than those for regular securities simply because pension funds held so many indexers. Rather than fiscal or monetary dominance, this was financial dominance, with pension obligations paralyzing policy choices.

This trap had been set a generation ago, by the UK Pensions Act of 2004, which was intended to provide greater security or protection for pension-holders by making it harder for pension funds to hold equities. The funds thus had to move into bonds – and into the leveraging strategies, which depended on the bond markets always being liquid. The risk and policy constraints that this created are a much more compelling rebuke to central bankers and financial regulators than the idea of a politicized intervention in October 2022. The fact that the BOE was not directly responsible for financial regulation back in 2004 is a rather feeble excuse.

There was a clear failure by regulators and the broader policy community to identify a mechanism that laid a trap for governments. Truss triggered a peculiarly British mine that might have detonated at any point over the past decade. There may well be other mines out there, in other financial systems. Truss’s failure means that fiscal populism, shared by her predecessor, Boris Johnson, is now ruled out in Britain. But it is also now more dangerous elsewhere. Politicians are no longer free to make big wagers on the future.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “Why are men and boys struggling? What should we do about it?” No other question has elicited so many responses, and they were especially varied, so this is a long edition.Tim argues that we are confronting a perennial problem, not a new one:
The modern world is no harsher to men than the ancient or early industrial world. There have always been drunkards, criminals, vagabonds, and hermits, and more men than women among them. Men account for the overwhelming majority of megalomaniacs, warlords, sexual predators, and terrorists, past and present. I don’t know why men are more likely than women to engage in violent, self-destructive, or antisocial behavior, but we’ve been that way since the dawn of history. The only difference: Modern boys and men are going head-to-head with girls and women for the same grades, school placements, and jobs, instead of living in a completely different sphere.
In contrast, Alice believes that today’s world is unusually alienating to men and boys:
Largely due to social-media influences, males are expected to be “more sensitive” to women’s issues, while at the same time what makes them male, and therefore different from women, is being ignored or harshly criticized. While there is no harm in trying to raise boys to understand women a little better, I think it is equally important for women to understand that men are not women. They are men. And men and women are different in a number of ways.
We would never tell women to try and not become good mothers—this would go against every notion that we have about women. Yet men are constantly being denied (in a subliminal way) the right to be masculine. They are being cut off from the things that make them happy to be male. And these things are not exactly the same things that make women feel (essentially) feminine.
I grew up with three brothers. We liked to watch different TV shows and do different social things, but we always stayed close. We need to teach our young girls that boys are different from them. Despite a lot of criticism, most men are wonderful people. We girls are grateful to have them in our lives. So, let’s stop trying to feminize our boys; it is about as unnatural for them to do this as it is for a fish to try and breathe out of water. Both sexes should be allowed to grow and develop as God intended for us to do.
Glenn believes today’s moral culture is ill-suited to boys and men:
Imagine that you can be loved or respected, but you can’t have both. Given that false choice, I suspect most women would choose to be loved and most men would choose to be respected. Today’s culture gives boys plenty of opportunities to be loved, but young men shrivel on the vine for lack of a balanced diet of social nutrients. Give them an opportunity to earn respect and watch them thrive. Respect is not antithetical to love; it is, to some extent, an expression of love written in a masculine emotional language.
Stephen writes from the perspective of a man in a nontraditional role:
I earn nothing. I’ve read the entire Harry Potter series aloud, more than twice.
I quit my job of 10 years to become a stay-at-home dad. When I began, people looked at me as if I had stolen a baby. Then the “Mr. Mom” jokes began. Many could not fathom that I could actually change diapers and read bedtime stories, or that I would even try to do so. I do struggle to feel like I contribute to the well-being of the family, and I don’t typically feel like that as much as my wife does—but I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s.
A myth is “a traditional story accepted as history.” [Myths] tell us how the world works, and what we should do in it—what we should be. If your myth of “what a man is” results in a belief that no longer holds true in this world, what happens to your identity?
The world is different. Many have begun to acknowledge that women are equal to men, when traditionally this was not the case. However, virtues once set aside for men and women separately are not appreciated equally. Should men be beautiful? Should women be big and strong? Should a husband bake cupcakes? Should a woman repair the car? What if Mom is the breadwinner? What if Dad does the laundry? Do we even think these things are virtues, or are these just lazy stereotypes? We invest in identities that no longer fit the world we live in. We should simply try and become good people, yet we no longer seem to know what that means and grasp at predetermined roles from bygone days.
As a father who stayed home to raise boys: You help them to become what they will become and encourage them to be someone they can be proud of being. They want to be good people. Ask them what that means; they’ll tell you. You don’t decide who someone else should be anymore.
Finding yourself can be hard. Pretending you’re someone you’re not is acting, or fooling yourself. Our myths are too old––we need new ones that are worth believing in.
[Read: The trouble with boys and men]Mike’s time serving his country informs his own identity and how he believes boys and men could be helped:
Addressing this issue sometimes forces you to say things that are sort of cringey, but in the interests of honesty, I feel like I earned my “man card” by entering the military as a young college-educated officer. Although I was only “in” for about seven years (Operation Desert Storm veteran) my service is a critical part of my self-identification and confidence. I think we have a confluence of issues which could be well-addressed with a national service requirement. We need to infuse boys/men with purpose, and shared work in service of a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, if you haven’t heard the term) is a great way to do that.
I would reasonably reduce the active-duty military and put more money into the National Guard/Reserves. This opens up more realistic options to young men who would benefit from crawling through the mud with their fellow soldiers during training and committing themselves to something bigger. We should take our military-worship (“Thank you for your service,” etc.) and begin to cultivate similarly elite designations for wildfire fighters and other climate-related units (post-hurricane rebuilding). Climate change isn’t a shrinking problem. Those western firefighting jobs are frankly more dangerous and studly than virtually all military jobs. We can tie “America First” from the right (e.g., working to defend Americans rather than Iraqis or Ukrainians) with “Environmental Adaptation” from the left (e.g., acknowledging that climate change is a common threat). Yesterday: “My brother is a Navy SEAL.” Tomorrow: “My brother is a smoke jumper.”
Stephen worries that “a society which prizes competition overly much as we do in the U.S. condemns a majority to failure.” He writes:
Most of our students will not be valedictorians or quarterbacks. Schools have to reorient their criteria for success. The responsibility of each student is to learn who he or she is. And it is a life-long process. We should be abandoning class rank and ensuring that each child has mastered the skills deemed necessary (reading, rhetoric, and reckoning). Then the child should be given a say in what else they will learn as they discover who they are. Every person has a unique set of gifts, and society will benefit from all of them as long as they are not poisoned by a sense of inferiority created by a misguided effort to teach everyone (and test everyone) on the same standards.
Andrew is similarly skeptical of the prevailing socioeconomic ethos:
American culture is uniquely unsuited to “helping” boys and men because our core drive, over and over, is “success.” In that framing, what does it mean to “help” boys and men? Does that mean helping them Succeed but Better in the same role they’ve been doing forever—provider, big boss, hard worker—and just accepting that liberal capitalism has successfully defined both men’s and women’s ideal roles?
The “man” box is enforced both overtly and subtly by everyone you meet, if you’re a boy or man. Unlearning these roles makes you unattractive to both the job market and the dating market. It’s as much economics as sociology—men just need a damn break.
Nicole wishes that her late father’s evangelical religious community had taught a different message about manhood:
My dad was a good man, a loving father, and my mom’s best friend. He died by suicide at 52. The world is a worse place without him. His suicide was a shock—we didn’t even know he was struggling. There is no single cause of suicide, no single person or entity to blame. That said, I feel anger towards the gender stereotypes that dominate evangelical churches. I felt constrained by the church’s definition of a “good woman,” not to mention rampant gender-based abuse. I left the church my family belonged to; my dad didn’t. And I never considered how the church’s messaging might affect him, too.
My dad listened to Christian music, regularly read his Bible, and would quote scripture as a source of wisdom and inspiration. He internalized the supposedly “biblical” message that men are to be leaders, to be rocks, to be strong, to be providers. He carried that burden alone, despite a relatively egalitarian marriage. He never asked for help, never communicated pain. The church taught that anxiety and depression are symptoms of a faith defect, rather than a complicated biological disease. He quoted verses saying, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication let your requests be known to God,” as an argument against traditional psychiatric medicine. He thought that more faith and more prayer was the answer to mental illness.
The church plays a role in the prevalence of dangerous mental-health and gender myths. Too many men stifle their emotional needs to maintain a facade as a “strong man of God.”
Jim offers a psychological account of what ails men:
Boys and men struggle because so many of them have no idea how to deal with their advantages. There has never been a lack of males willing to use their advantage over smaller or weaker individuals. By taking advantage, [men and boys] create for themselves a metaphysical debt and impoverish those whom they disadvantage. Instead of holding their advantages in abeyance for when they’re needed to protect the weaker, they keep taking and taking in order to accumulate wealth and/or influence. Accumulation has one good purpose, and that’s to aid all.
So men and boys become indebted to their de facto subordinates and have no idea how to dispense with their debt, leaving them with no ruling principle besides hypocrisy. It is not a simple thing to assign blame. Too many are victims of an overwhelming global system that relies on consumption and acquisition. Besides the harm to the social fabric, struggling men frivolously waste their energy on acquiring, protecting, and spending their treasures, exhausting themselves physically, intellectually, spiritually, and ethically. The gentle methods of cooperation and care are not out of their reach, but are the opposite of what they’ve been taught to value. If men exercise their advantages to protect, there will be no place in their hearts for selfishness or aggression to enter. If advantages are used to nurture, the strong party gains the trust of the weaker, plus resiliency for their community. The weaker gains security, acceptance, and opportunity.  
Travis has a theory about what causes some boys to give up relatively early in life:
As a teenager I did a two-year stretch in juvenile detention. I was a C student at best in high school. Then I went into the Marines and became a three-time combat veteran by 21. I almost never went to college because I thought I was still as dumb as I had been in high school. My ex talked me into it by saying, “You don’t understand how many truly stupid people have diplomas. You’re actually smart; you’ll be fine.” She turned out to be right. I went to college on the GI bill, graduating at 26 with a 3.9 GPA in a hard-science major.
I believe the decline in success rates for men follows the increase in successful folks tending to date or marry other successful folks. If getting into the upper 10 percent of society seems to require one postcollege professional marrying another postcollege professional, you might as well give up on that if you’re not one of the guys who will do well in college. How does a blue-collar man who doesn’t think of himself as being cut out for college plan to get into the top 10 percent––[winning] the lottery, or somehow marrying a doctor without also being a doctor?
Many men give up before even trying. If individual college-earned success paired with marrying someone similar is what determines who makes it in this country, then it’s very easy for a lot of men to give up on themselves at very young ages.
Mitch reflects on vulnerability as his father related to it:
I am the son of a Minnesota farm boy who was the first person in his family to go to college. Stoicism isn’t a practice for Minnesotan boys who grew up on the farm—it’s the default way of being. I once saw my dad fall off an eight-foot ladder putting up Christmas lights, his femur landing directly on the concrete step leading into our house. My mouth hanging open, I watched him get up, grimace, and proceed to “walk it off” (he was a running back in high school, and no, he didn’t break his leg). He didn’t cry. He didn’t say anything. The message was clear. A man doesn’t show vulnerability, especially when in pain.
To be clear, my dad is a crier. I’ve seen him sniffling at weddings and dabbing his eyes at the climax of a movie. It isn’t about crying; it is about vulnerability.
In a world where connectivity is prized but we’re separated by filter bubbles; where so many entry-level jobs are dehumanizing (I’ve been a cook for years); where the male role models evincing stereotypical masculine ideals are obvious hypocrites, it would make sense to open up about one’s concerns with a trusted confidant. But this is antithetical to the consciousness of most men. Asking for help is a sign of failure, but internalizing an inflated sense of responsibility in an uncontrollable world is necessarily going to provoke feelings of despondency and inadequacy. Cue the guilt that comes for not living up to standards. And then the subsequent repression of that guilt leads to more problems.
What do we do about this aversion to vulnerability, among the other issues hamstringing men and boys? Find a way to communicate to boys that expressing emotions other than anger and ambivalence are legitimate ways to be a man. If you’re in pain or confused, it’s okay to ask for help—it doesn’t make you lesser; it makes you stronger. There’s no reason to feel guilty about falling short of an ideal masculinity that has been repeatedly revealed to be less than ideal (to put it lightly) over the course of history.
R., a professional statistician, got an unusual glimpse into how boys and young men think about the future:
Four years ago I was asked to analyze data for an organization that traditionally serves boys but also serves girls in middle and high school. The survey was about college and career plans. More girls than boys intended to go to college, but what caught my eye were the leading career choices. In middle school, the top careers for both boys and girls were actor and musician. By the middle of high school, the top choices among girls were nursing and teaching. Among boys, it was professional athlete, actor, and musician. The lack of realism among high-school boys as they are making decisions about their future (often without realizing it) struck me. Maybe it’s a disparity in maturity, or maybe it’s in the way girls are taught (probably both, and more, like most phenomena).
High-school education needs to include mandatory counseling, perhaps even a daily class inclusive of household economics and financial literacy, coupled with some form of career exploration, to introduce teens and especially boys to the facts of adult life and steer them to jobs and careers and the training for them, especially for those who aren’t college-bound. I’m not suggesting we track kids (though it’s not the worst idea), but that we formalize guidance so that it’s something every student receives, not just those who seek it out. We’ve instead let boys figure out their prospects through hard experience.
[Read: 12 readers on what the rest of the world does better than the U.S.]Karen presents a different argument about failing schools:
Ordinary schools do not work for most boys, and one primary reason is the expectation that children will sit still for long periods of time. All three of my children found this challenging, but my eldest, who also had a severe learning disability, struggled most.
In the end, we wound up with our kids first in a Catholic school and then in expensive private high schools. In the Catholic elementary school, the teachers were expected to get the children moving—running around the school a couple of times was common—between the regular recess and lunch breaks. The boys’ high school required not just in-school PE but a mandatory three further hours of physical activity each week, on non-PE days, fulfilled either on competitive teams or via things like bike clubs. Meanwhile, the public schools continued to cut requirements for PE. Initially, we barely afforded the schools our kids needed—my husband was a pastor. We lived for a long time with all three kids in one bedroom. We took only camping holidays. In the end, all three children were on full scholarships for high school. We were unbelievably fortunate.
My grandson is highly gifted (he was reading at a grade-11 level at 7) and has mild ADHD. Once again, our family is working to keep a child in a private school. The psychologist who did his testing described his needs in a way that made it clear no public school could meet them. He’s happy as a clam—or perhaps some more active animal––because he learns best when moving, and both in his school, where he can study his subjects at his actual level, and in his beloved Saturday Mandarin classes, he’s allowed to stand and move around, so long as he isn’t disruptive. The results are astonishing. He’s years ahead in Mandarin because they tried letting him walk quietly around the edge of the classroom and discovered he learned faster than anyone else in the class.
Joseph’s observations about schools build to a controversial suggestion:
I have spent a lot of time in very gender-specific environments: I am both an aerospace engineer (very male workforce) and a figure-skating coach (very female sport). Observing as a coach, young boys are very different developmentally from young girls. It’s often hard to keep the boys in my classes under control for the length of the class, so I cannot imagine how these same boys could sit still in a classroom for six hours a day. The whole structure of the school environment seems like an unnatural fit for boys.
We need to deliberately recruit more male teachers so that boys have role models for proper male behavior, possibly by offering scholarships only open to men (scholarships only open to women have long been standard in engineering; we should consider the reverse in other fields). Boys are often wild and should have time in the school day to be so. Recess needs to be mandatory, and recess environments should not be completely sterile/rubberized. And teachers need not just deploy methods to help boys focus on learning, but also to occasionally allow them to learn through not-so-focused methods.
Boys are also far more frequently the receivers of discipline in school. We need rules and consequences to teach boys that certain actions are unacceptable, but many of these actions are inevitable and the punishments need to be minimally disruptive to boys’ learning. Making a boy sit outside because he is distracting other students means he is missing out on direct (i.e., from the teacher) and indirect (i.e., social skills with peers) learning. Having a time-out during recess is an illogical punishment; if the boy cannot sit still now, why try to make him do so later too? These punishments only serve to further slow kids’ development. I’m not entirely sure what would make a good discipline system, but to be honest, I think there is some merit to whacking wrists with rulers. While there are downsides to this, it does make an immediate and quick intervention.
Neyda argues that “red-shirting” boys, as the author Richard Reeves suggests in our October issue, is an imperfect solution:
I taught high-school English and journalism for 16 years at a public high school. I agree that children do often benefit from being “red-shirted,” but I worry about the implications of making “red-shirting” a rule. Ideally, education would be treated as an ongoing process. If a student wasn’t prepared to move from kindergarten to first grade, they wouldn’t. Unfortunately, that is not how it works. There is fear and disappointment (mostly from parents) at being held back. That could impact a kid’s self-esteem. But only if we treat it that way. Not being ready to move up a grade does not have to be considered a failure. When our kids were infants, pediatricians told us that kids often reached milestones (talking, walking, etc.) at different rates. But public education is not built that way.
Lynne also critiques the proposal to “red-shirt” boys: “I totally get why you would want to have boys start a year later than girls,” she writes. “But I don’t want my 14-year-old girl in classes with boys of 15 and 16.”Nels asks a pointed question:
Are boys actually getting worse at school, or are girls simply showing that, when placed on an equal footing, they can surpass us? We have always known that boys are more likely to make bad decisions and become criminals, so it seems likely that this was an inevitable thing to happen to a society that becomes equal. Perhaps it is natural that girls should be more highly educated and more suited on average to work that requires more education.
Jaleelah wants women to be treated as role models for boys:
My generation is purposeless and lonely. That loneliness, however, is not equally distributed: My generation is populated by lonely, angry men. In my experience, women are great at getting along with men in non-romantic contexts. Women understand that friendships can be deeply rewarding; they see men as more than just potential opportunities for sex. Large numbers of men, however, can’t envision a happy life without a loyal female partner. That’s because people refuse to see women as sources of skill and knowledge. Society laments the lack of empathetic male role models for its sons. Why can’t it teach boys that women’s friendship-building skills are admirable and useful? The solution for men’s anger isn’t to convince women to return to being their domestic servants. Society must teach boys to look up to empathetic women, who can in turn teach them to build stronger platonic and intellectual relationships.
Robin wants to bring back the tradition of teaching skills:
My suggestions are to revitalize the Boy Scouts, or a new version of it, and to reinstitute “maker” courses in high schools, such as woodworking, mechanics skills, welding, etc. The common theme is to teach boys skills that used to be a source of pride and achievement. I think of my husband’s upbringing in Scouts and the joy the boys had at a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. They cooked on a wood-fired stove; they hiked in mountains where they had to watch for rattlesnakes; they tied knots; they brought water up from a creek; they played pranks on the men by way of letting them know they adored them; they taught the younger boys. It reminds me of David McCullough remarking, in1776, that George Washington’s army was made up of coopers and farmers and men of practical skills who could install cannons in Boston Harbor overnight without the British hearing them. Learning practical skills is a source of accomplishment and grounding that could help our boys and men.
Melanie argues that childhood trauma is an underacknowledged factor in this discussion:
Why are boys and men struggling? Because we allow children, as a whole, to suffer vast, largely preventable trauma; we don’t recognize or mediate it; and we get it especially wrong with boys. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study published in 1998 demonstrated that two-thirds of all the children in a sample experienced a childhood trauma so profound that it had the potential to affect physical, mental, social, and financial health throughout their lives. When today’s children are asked the same questions, a huge and rather similar number reveal significant traumatization.
This traumatization causes massive pain and massive destructive tendencies; boys and men have traditionally tended to direct that pain outward. Women and girls have traditionally directed that pain inward. Addiction and suicide measure pain directed inward; crime measures both (since so much crime is related to drug use and some is related to violence). We shouldn’t see the rates of suicide and deaths due to long-term alcohol and drug use as a result of a sudden paradigm shift, but rather the cumulative consequences of a lifelong struggle with pain. Suicide can be conceptualized similarly––someone who was dealing with significant emotional pain as their backdrop lost their grip on something that was keeping them from plunging into the abyss. That can mean the loss of a relationship, a status, such as a job or role in the community. The traumatization also causes difficulties in formal educational settings and employment.
Not only have we failed to invest in the programs that prevent adverse childhood experiences, but we have failed to normalize discussion of surviving them in any meaningful way. This takes a particular toll on men. According to the ACE Study 15 percent of boys are sexually abused as children; it typically takes survivors decades to disclose, and it typically takes male survivors longer than female survivors. We have yet to embrace child sexual abuse as a social issue that deserves concerted attention (current right-wing hysteria around “grooming” does not count!), and we have yet to consider the voices of abuse survivors as distinctive and worthy of being heard. The delay in disclosing abuse is related to a delay in how survivors process and acknowledge abuse; that this trauma is predictably processed in middle age could be another factor contributing to the increased suicides and substance abuse among men in this age bracket.
And Shawn urges advances in storytelling:
All the statistics in the world won’t change most minds, but good stories can change the world. The problem is, we really like stories of powerful men who accomplish great things and hate stories of ordinary men who fail. Since we mostly tell stories of powerful men who succeed, we think men must be powerful. Anything that contradicts this idea won’t ring true, even if it is. Most people won’t address the problem because they can’t believe it is real. I don’t know how to tell a story of a struggling man and make people want to hear it. Until someone figures that out, helping men will never gain much traction.

[MUSIC]

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” The midterm elections are just about two weeks away. And things are looking a bit different than I would have expected. So Biden’s approval rating is hovering around 42 percent. Inflation is very high. And add in that midterms tend to swing against the president’s party and we should be on track for a massacre. But if the polls are to be believed, we’re not. Democrats are favored to hold the Senate. Republicans are favored to win the House, and not by some giant landslide. No chamber looks set for the kind of wipeout we saw in 2018, or 2010, or 1994. And maybe the polls aren’t to be believed. That’s something we cover in this episode, too. But maybe there’s more than that at play. My guest today is Matt Yglesias. Matt and I, we go way back. We were early political bloggers together back when the blogosphere and the internet and we were young. We co-founded Vox together. Now Matt writes the newsletter “Slow Boring” and he co-hosts the podcast “Bad Takes.” And in recent years, Matt has become more focused on party strategies. How do Democrats and Republicans present themselves to the public? Who governs and shapes that presentation? What do they actually do when they govern, and how does that affect how they’re seen? And Matt has particularly become a critic of a Democratic party that he often argues is in hock to a highly educated staffer class and has lost sight of the voters it most needs to win over. So I wanted to have him on the show to talk about where Democrats are on the eve of this year 2022 election. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Matt Yglesias, welcome to the show.

matt yglesias

Hi. It’s good to be here.

ezra klein

So let’s start with where we are. Joe Biden’s approval rating is about 42 percent in the averages I’m seeing. At the same time, the polls and forecasts give Democrats, I’d say it’s fair to say, a fighting chance in the midterms, a two in three chance of keeping the Senate, a one in four chance of keeping the House. Those two things seem at odds to me, particularly given where inflation is and the general mood of the country. So how do you see what’s happening here?

I think, obviously, part of what’s happening in the Senate, like everybody would tell you, is Republicans have gone with a lot of bad candidates in a lot of races. And that is helping Democrats out. I mean, I think you see this really significantly in New Hampshire, in particular, where Maggie Hassan I think was thought to be very vulnerable early in the cycle. John Sununu, who would have been her strongest opponent, didn’t run for the seat. Then Democrats ran some ads kind of encouraging Republicans to vote for this guy Bolduc, who’s like super duper right wing. And so now she looks really safe there. I do think another thing is that my guess is that the polling is biased in favor of overstating Democrats’ chances. It’s hard to be super duper certain about something like that. But if Nate Silver wanted to bet with me, I think those 538 odds have Democrats too high in the Senate.

ezra klein

Nate, I should say, has written a bit about this and said that if he was going to imagine why his forecast is wrong, it would be polling bias towards the Democrats. At the same time, his argument here is that we’ve only seen that in two cycles. There have been a bunch of other cycles that go in other directions in terms of polling bias. We don’t really know if pollsters are able to account for this, but they’re certainly trying to. They know they missed the same thing in 2016. They know they missed it in 2020. The big misses were in presidential years, not in, say, the 2018 midterm election. And so he thinks Democrats have begun to think of anti-democratic polling bias as a kind of fact of nature when you shouldn’t think of it that way.

I mean, that’s — I think there’s two ways of looking at this, right? I mean, one is what you just laid out there. That polling error happens. By definition, these are statistical samples. They’re not 100 percent correct all the time. But you expect the errors to even out over the long-term. I think the case that there’s a systematic problem is you look at the pattern of these 2022 races. So in Nevada, the polling looks pretty bad for the Democrats. Cortez Masto, I think, is set to lose narrowly, according to polls, in a blue-leaning state. Then you look at Ohio. Tim Ryan is also slightly behind in the polls, but Ohio is a much more conservative state. So Tim Ryan’s polling looks really good. Cortez Masto’s polling looks pretty bad. Now, if you look back at 2020, Nevada is a state where the polling was extremely accurate and Ohio is a state where the polling was very biased toward Democrats. And I think if you go across the landscape, that’s what you see. Exactly the states where Democrats are maybe doing better than you would expect in the polls are the states that had the large polling errors. And in the states where the polling was most accurate, like Nevada, things are looking rougher for Democrats. So that gives me reason to believe that the issues with the 2020 polling have not really been fixed. That you cannot do simple demographic-based adjustments to rewrite your polls. That there is just a strong correlation between inclination to answer surveys and partisan voting behavior and the methodologies are off. I mean, now, I should say I’m not like 90 percent sure on this. I’m more like 60 percent. You know what I mean? If you asked me to bet with Nate Silver’s forecast, I would go low, but I wouldn’t put huge amount of confidence on it. The problem with elections is they don’t run that many elections. So you can’t — it’s really challenging to test these theories out. We do what we can and we’ll see, right? If the 2022 polling turns out to be biased, I think everyone’s going to say, OK, we now have enough in a row that we need to say there’s a fundamental methodological problem here. On the other hand, if it just swings back the other way, people will say, you know, shit happens, surveying is hard, statistical sampling is imperfect. And we’re going to have to see what happens. But that is my best explanation of the seeming mismatch between a bleak national political climate for Democrats and this kind of surprisingly strong Senate polling is that the state-level Senate polling is just off.

ezra klein

So the assumption is Democrats are going to lose the House if the polling is worse for Democrats than it appears to be or the reality is worse for Democrats than the polls are. They’ll lose it by more than people expect. In the Senate, what seats does this mental model you have expect to go to Republicans that the polling might not say will? Because Ohio, I think, people are, like, good job, Tim Ryan. This is a strong race. And Democrats are hoping to see it break their way. But I don’t think that is bought into most of the views about what Senate — most of the predictions about which seats Democrats will control in 2023.

Well, I agree, except that, I mean, if you look at how these sort of models work, the long tail opportunity for Democrats to win Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, actually does have an impact on the kind of —

ezra klein

Oh, it definitely has an impact.

— statistical aggregate. Because if you look at the core battleground — we’re looking at Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania — the issue there is just that these are all close races. But to hold the Senate, Democrats need to win all of them, which is just a tough bar. And so if Republicans win, it’ll probably be because they take the seat in Nevada and they hold the seat in Pennsylvania. Those seem like the decisive battlegrounds. Democrats definitely have a shot in Pennsylvania. Dr. Oz seems like a very poor candidate who is potentially blowing a super duper winnable race over there for them. There’s also this weird situation in Arizona, where I think, on paper, Mark Kelly seemed like he should be very vulnerable, but Blake Masters appears to be doing quite poorly and is also in these constant fights with Mitch McConnell about who’s going to put money into that race. So I mean, the —

ezra klein

And Arizona and Georgia weren’t bad polling states for Democrats before.

Exactly.

ezra klein

The polls have been pretty good in those states.

Yeah. And Georgia as well. I mean, Republicans in a bunch of these key races — I mean, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona — these are states that they’re not gimmes for Republicans, but they’re places where Republicans would have a very good shot to win. And in all three of these races, they didn’t nominate just a regular politician. There’s just lots of Republican Party elected officials in Georgia. And instead they went with Herschel Walker, who even aside from these terrible scandals, it’s just like — he’s not conversant in public policy issues. He has all the — and Blake Masters, the same thing, who I guess doesn’t have any particular scandals, but he’s a real weirdo and he doesn’t talk like a normal politician. And people always say that they want political outsiders and people who won’t be poll-tested automatons, but we always see that professional politicians do much better on average than random walk-on businessmen or football stars, things like that. And this is just kind of the weirdness of where Republicans are. I saw earlier today, before we recorded, Paul Ryan reemerged from hiding and was talking about 2024. And he was like, I don’t think Trump’s going to be the nominee. Everybody knows Republicans would be better off with a different candidate. And I mean, Paul Ryan knows that. And I guess I know that. But I just — I don’t have his confidence. If Republicans were good at selecting strong candidates, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about Herschel Walker and a television doctor from New Jersey running in Pennsylvania. I don’t exactly know what they’re doing. But they have developed a taste for eccentric characters.

ezra klein

One of the things we don’t seem to be seeing, and doesn’t really look to be in the cards even if you imagine a two to three point polling error against the Democrats, is a 2018, 2010, ‘06, 1994-style wipeout. And I don’t know, if you had told me a year or two years ago that Joe Biden’s going to be the president, inflation is going to be generationally high, unbelievably high, 80 percent people are going to not like where the economy is, two-thirds of people are going to say the economy is getting worse even as we speak, Biden will be in the low 40s, his disapproval will be in the mid-50s. What does that Democratic midterm look like? I’d be like, oh, that’s going to be a massacre. Do you think Biden and the Democrats have played the political hand they have well here? Are they actually doing more with what they have than one should expect?

It’s interesting, right, because definitely the framing you gave, it’s like, oh my god, how are they doing this? Well, then, on the other hand, if you say, well, OK, suppose Democrats advance this fairly modest, super popular policy agenda, successfully stay out of huge, weird, crazy controversies, I’d be like, yeah, like this is a blueprint for success. What’s interesting is that Biden’s approval has been so low really. Because there’s this kind of push and pull of the economic situation is difficult, the agenda Democrats have been advancing in Congress has been, I think, a very — it’s not just that it’s been a popular one, but there’s been no counter-mobilization to it. There’s no national protests against the Inflation Reduction Act kind of thing, the way you saw when Trump was passing his legislation or when Obama was passing legislation. So on that level, I mean, I think Democrats have done a great job of minimizing thermostatic backlash and governing in a way that is at least acceptable to the vast majority of people. But then you have this inflation background, right? And so I think people are going to argue for a really long time how much of the inflationary situation in 2022 is due to policy errors that Congress and the administration made. Were the alternatives actually any better? I mean, I would say, in defense of the substantive choices that were made, that, of course, everybody would like to think that it would be better to have inflation at 2 percent right now rather than 8 percent, but I think if you’d actually taken the steps that would have capped inflation at the 2 percent target level, that things would be much worse today. You would have much higher unemployment. And people would be saying, oh my god, we’re never going to recover from the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I understand politically this is a really challenging thing for the White House and congressional leaders to talk about. But when all these people get sick from a new virus, there’s going to be an economic impact of that. And having the impact take the form of this high-rising prices and high-pressured labor market is probably — you don’t want to say optimal, but it was one of the better ways to handle it, realistically, given the alternatives on the table.

ezra klein

I don’t know that I would frame the policy choices exactly as you did there, because, I mean, go back to 1994. Bill Clinton doesn’t pass much. What he does try to do at some point in the polls looks totally fine. 2010, obviously, there was a lot of policy that happens. And some of it by the end is quite unpopular, like the Affordable Care Act. But it’s also made unpopular. And one thing that has been weird watching Republicans after a political career covering this kind of thing is it never seemed to me that they cared to try to make the Inflation Reduction Act into a giant issue. I mean, there are big tax increases there. There’s all kinds of stuff that you can make look a little strange in the climate side of the bill. The prescription drug stuff is popular, but there’s a lot going on in the American Rescue Plan, a lot of random stuff in the background happening. I mean, I think we should talk about Dobbs here, which, on the one hand, is clearly mobilizing in the Democratic Party’s favor. Democrats also push a very expansive abortion bill in the aftermath of that in the Senate. You might have imagined Republicans trying to make hay of that. Compared to previous periods in American politics, it doesn’t actually seem to me that Republicans are united enough on, or care enough about, policy to do to Biden what they did to an Obama, or, in another way, a Clinton. They have not attempted against the Inflation Reduction Act what they did against the Affordable Care Act. They didn’t attempt against the American Rescue Plan what they did against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There does seem to be a structural difference, too, in just what the Republican Party is fired up about nowadays.

Yeah, and I mean, some of that is obviously so much of the Republican mobilization has focused on crime. And I guess they characterize it as the border, immigration stuff. And it’s not that these are non-policy questions, because obviously the federal government has a substantial role in law enforcement and criminal justice policy, but Republicans are not saying, well, there’s some bill that Nancy Pelosi passed that has caused crime to be high. And I’ve been trying to draw some conservatives out over the past couple of days as to what exactly are they saying. And what conservatives believe is that the racial justice and anti-police protests of 2020 and some of the statements and claims made by local and, to some extent, state politicians have created a big increase in crime. What they really, really think, though, is not even that mayors caused this crime increase. They say that the cultural climate became so hostile to, and skeptical of, police officers making judgment calls in dangerous situations, that police responded to this social demand for much more caution, for many fewer stops, et cetera, et cetera, and that’s caused this increase in crime. But it’s what has given, I think, a lot of the politics this strange feeling. Because Republicans are running against the kind of attitudes and social mores of American progressives broadly construed, much more than they are running against specific legislation that Democrats have passed or things that Joe Biden is saying or doing. And the fact that this happened actually while Trump was president, I mean it raises the question of — there’s this idea — you scratch a Republican conversation and like, aha, we’ve decided that we can’t just be neutral and that the government has to come in and do battle for us in the culture wars. And it’s never really clear to me what that amounts to exactly. But it seems like it’s going to win them the House of Representatives at a minimum, because as Mitch McConnell said, people don’t pay any attention to who the House candidates are. So candidate quality doesn’t — I mean, it’s a really funny thing where he’s like trying —

ezra klein

It’s a very funny quote.

He’s trying to explain why his guys are doing worse than Kevin McCarthy’s. And he’s like, because people know who my candidates are and they’re terrible. So it’s a weird situation.

ezra klein

The exact quote I believe is, “Candidate quality matters.” “In the Senate, candidate quality matters.” Something like that.

But it’s like — I mean, anyway. It’s a weird situation. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

One of the things I’m hearing from you here is actually a fairly positive take on how the Democratic Party is officially construed, is operating. I think it had become known in the past couple of years as having a more critical sense. The Democrats are losing touch. They’re becoming too in hock to a college-educated staffer class. They’re talking about too many unpopular things. Do you feel that’s changed or do you feel that’s still happening in a different part of the sector? You’re sounding a little bit more bright about Democrats than I’ve heard you sound in a while.

Yeah, I mean — but look, I mean, I think so much, though, of the relatively bright picture for Democrats right now is parasitic on this very poor candidate choice by Senate Republicans. And Democrats have not done, I think, a great job of bringing coherence to the set of things that they say about American politics. Democrats have developed the idea that the Republican Party has radicalized against democracy itself and cannot be trusted with power or else, as Joe Biden said, a semi-fascist regime is going to come to power. I both find that to be a little bit overstated, but not totally crazy. I mean, I think that’s a reasonable concern to have. And yet, as your colleague Ross Douthat and other moderate conservatives are always whining, Biden is not really reaching out to be, like, I want a grand coalition of all Democratic forces to come together. I mean, who’s very insistent on we’ve got this whole agenda. We need to take people’s guns away. We need to have this expansive pro-choice agenda, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of their actual legislation, they got really edited by Joe Manchin down to a much more modest and I think much more politically viable agenda than the big picture agenda that 46 or 47 Democrats have signed on to. People will sometimes do these memes, like if only Cal Cunningham had kept it in his pants, look at all this stuff we could have done. If Cal Cunningham had kept it in his pants — and, I mean, you’ve got to nuance a couple other things. But if Democrats had —

ezra klein

The Democrats had 54 seats —

Right.

ezra klein

— in the Senate.

And they had ended the filibuster, and passed this assault weapons ban, and passed the women’s reproductive health — I forget the exact name of that bill — passed the full $3 trillion Build Back Better. If they had done all that stuff, I think then we’d be looking at a much more typical midterm with a huge counter-mobilization of people going like, holy shit, I wanted to get Donald Trump out of the White House because he seemed unstable and I didn’t sign on for this sweeping transformation of all of American society. You think about the water Biden is taking on over asylum seekers. And you imagine if he had passed the path to citizenship with no stepped-up enforcement bill that he proposed on his first day in office, people would be really upset. Republicans have made some gains on that issue. But it’s limited because I think the White House can legitimately say, what do you want from us on all these topics? But that’s because they haven’t done this gigantic progressive agenda that Chuck Schumer, in some theoretical sense at least, signed on for. So I’m pretty positive on what Democrats actually did and pretty negative on what at least they tell themselves they wanted to have done.

ezra klein

One thing that strikes me about your thought here is you seem to me to be positing a pretty clear connection between what actually happens in politics and how the voters feel about what actually happens in politics. A clear one that I would probably say, when I go back to, say, Obamacare discourse in 2010, I don’t think it was all that related to what was in the Affordable Care Act. There are some things there, but there was a lot of death panels, a lot of just random lying about things. I don’t know, when we talk about political vibes and political aesthetics, you know, I look at somebody sometimes like Bernie Sanders, or, in a different way, a John Fetterman, and it makes me wonder a little bit about the policy literalist tendencies I have or maybe that you have, because I think both get pretty far with a much more expansive agenda of some things that are popular and some things that are maybe unpopular — some things that are unpopular, actually — by just their political directionality, seeming to voters, to be a kind of on your side, don’t like the bad rich guys, tired of corruption in Washington. And so I’m just wondering both how much policy communication, but also policy reality, matters. It’s just it’s hard for me to believe that the connection is really that close between more modest pieces of legislation or whether something passed the Senate but died in the House as opposed to didn’t pass the Senate in the case of the post-Dobbs abortion bill. How do you think about the connection between what actually happens and what voters feel about what’s happening?

Yeah, I mean, I’m a little bit torn, because to some extent, I’m trying to get people to think harder on the margin. And I think that 20 years ago, there was a conventional wisdom that was comically literal about the relationship between politics and public opinion. And so if George W. Bush won an election, that must show that people really liked the details of his leadership in the war on terror, rather than just there was a rally around the flag effect that just kind of happens. I tend to think, though, that progressive-minded journalists and advocates and just people who talk on social media have gone overboard in terms of what do you get with the vibes and the atmospherics. I think that there is a desire to believe that if you just put a guy who looks like Jon Tester out there, that he can vote like Kristin Gillibrand and win everywhere. But if you look at Jon Tester, until quite recently, he really broke from the Democratic Party on important substantive issues related to guns. He was against the DREAM Act when that came up in the Obama years. And I don’t think that that’s a coincidence. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Joe Manchin and Susan Collins do much better than their overall party brands. Or that a guy who lost, like Collin Peterson, still massively overperformed the fundamentals in his district because people knew him, knew what he was. And I think that there’s a real backlash dynamic that when you do things — whatever it is you do — you alienate some people, because, I mean, there’s nothing you can do that makes everybody happy. But that people respond to getting mad at incumbents more than to being delighted about them. And that if somebody does 11 big things and you like two of them, you hate two of them, and you’re OK with the other seven, that tends to hurt the incumbent in the midterms. And the fact that Biden hasn’t actually delivered sweeping change on immigration is sort of — I think it’s substantively bad and maybe contributes to inflation and other things that hurt him politically, but I do think that it’s limited the kind of blowback that Republicans have been able to mobilize. Because one thing we know is Republicans love to talk about the border. And what I’ve seen in experiments is that getting people to think about immigration helps Republicans. But if you’re not watching a lot of Fox News, you actually don’t hear that much about the situation at the border, because mainstream journalists think it’s kind of demagogic and think it’s kind of unfair. And Biden isn’t doing big dramatic policy announcements. When Ron DeSantis came up with this kind of clever, kind of shitty scheme to get a lot of attention, that seemed like that worked well for him. But I think it’s mostly worked well for Biden to keep focus off that stuff and keep people —

ezra klein

Do you think that scheme worked well for Ron DeSantis? It seemed to me that it ended up in very much too clever by half.

Eh, I mean, I feel like Republicans mostly liked it and appreciated it all things considered. I mean, I guess there’s some chance that he’s going to turn out to have broken the law and might get in some kind of trouble for that. But I feel like it was pretty good. And I don’t know how things are where you are out in California, but in D.C., they’ve successfully gotten the mayor to be like, oh, man, this is a lot of asylum seekers. It’s a real problem for our city. We need some help. And so I think that that basically works as a tactic. And conversely, that Biden not delivering on his promise of sweeping change has kind of worked for him. But if I was to offer a strong criticism of the Biden administration, which I sometimes do, and the Democrats more broadly, it’s that I don’t think that they’ve set priorities very clearly across this whole set of issues. That they have operated as this kind of checklists, log roll. If you’re in a safe seat, it doesn’t matter. You can just be for everything that everybody asks for, and not think that hard about it, and use the word “crisis” for everything, and it’s all good. But when it has come time to actually govern, they’re quite tangled up and betwixt in between both on this, like, are we in a popular front against fascism or are we not? But even when OPEC announced that they were cutting oil production the other day, the members of Congress — I spoke to a couple of members of Congress and I saw statements from dozens of them. And they were like, this is bad. None of them were like, this is amazing. It’s going to help us meet our climate goals. So if Democrats agree that high oil prices are bad, that it’s bad for the economy, it’s bad for them politically, it’s bad for the American people, it raises the question of why did they come into office and cancel all these oil and gas leases. And now — I mean, I talk to everybody and don’t give me a hard time, White House Communications Office, I know that if you get attacked now and saying that Joe Biden is the cause of the expensive oil, they’ll be like, they eventually did do the leases and production is close to record highs. But that’s because they were blocked in court. They came into office with the intention of reducing American oil and gas production. They were blocked in court. They then reversed their own policy when oil got expensive. And now when Saudi Arabia increases the price of oil, they’re like, maybe we need to rethink our whole alliance structure. But that reflects a failure to think this whole issue through from first principles and be like, what do we actually believe about this? And we eventually got to the point where I heard from people who work for Deb Haaland, who’s a very progressive person at Interior, that they want the advocacy groups to get off their backs. They’re like, you’re asking us to do stuff that’s not within our legal authority and it’s embarrassing to lose in court. But that’s a contrast to — there was this good story in the Semafor about anti-abortion groups wanted Senate Republicans to sign on to a bill that anti-abortion groups love, that would have been toxically unpopular. And they told them, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to try to win the election. And we’ve done great things for you guys and you got to give us a break. And that’s a problem that progressives keep confronting, I think, across the issue space is that there’s not a forum through which people are setting priorities, telling people no, et cetera, et cetera. Instead it’s all been left to Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin to do the edit.

ezra klein

There’s something weird here that I’d be curious for your take on. So I covered policy design in the White House and Congress pretty closely in the Obama era — covered it now. I would say there’s just much less of a policy design process in this Democratic Congress. I think the stimulus — the initial stimulus in the Obama era had also that flavor of the Christmas tree —

Yep.

ezra klein

— where it’s like they were coming in, they needed something really, really quickly, and they just threw the doors open in Congress. Everybody bring us your ideas and we’re going to put them into a gigantic bill. But the other bills didn’t work like that. The Affordable Care Act was this year-long policy design fight. And a lot of things people wanted ended up out of it. And the things that ended up in it, for the most part, people would explain to you why they were there. I think you can say the same with Dodd-Frank, which had a really serious policy design process behind it. The point here isn’t that I agree with every decision made, either political or substantive, in these bills, but you could really watch the way the prioritization process was working. And sometimes there was a backroom deal that came to a settlement. Sometimes it was arguments. But there was a structure through which things got said yes to and things got said no to. And it took quite a lot of time to play out. And nothing has really looked like that to me in this Democratic Congress. I mean, the American Rescue Plan kind of had a similar flavor to the stimulus. So I think I’d put that a little bit to the side, though, obviously, there are Democratic economists, like Furman and Summers, who think it was much too big. But after that Build Back Better, which you did have quite a bit more time to figure out, had this same flavor of, all right, everybody throw everything you can into the pot. And there wasn’t even much debate over how the individual things were designed. I mean, you did some coverage on things like the paid family leave and the child care sides of it, which I agreed with, that were just very strangely, to some degree, poorly designed. CHIPS, which is a big deal, was a very weird design process that I don’t think anybody actually understood. And so part of the prioritization question is like a top-down thing, right? Does Joe Biden come out and say, here’s what I really care about. Could a voter give you an account of the three things Joe Biden thinks are the most important things? But there’s also a genuine procedural question about why policymaking right now seems to be a little bit more — I would also put this, by the way, on the democracy bills, which work this way, too. Just throw everything related to the topic or the topics in the Build Back Better system into this bucket. But nobody’s really saying no to what goes into the bucket, which is different than it has been at other times when I’ve covered these things.

Yeah, I mean, there’s two aspects to that. One is health care emerged clearly as Democrats’ top priority for 2009 — before 2009. I was talking to a Democratic Senator who 2009 was his first year in the Senate. And I was trying to ask him, as a reporter, I was like, how did health care become your top priority? How was that communicated to you? How did they make you prioritize this? But I guess I’m not good at asking questions. And he, I think, thought I was asking a rhetorical question and threw it back at me. He was like, I don’t know. I wasn’t here. How did they do that? And I was like, I don’t know. But it definitely happened, right? And I think you and I were both in conversations with Nancy Pelosi, with Barack Obama in 2008, 2009, in which both of them expressed some diffidence, actually, about that prioritization, just some ambivalence about it. But it was the decision that was made and they were going with it, even if they maybe thought that climate and energy was more important than health care. And Max Baucus was laying groundwork for the approach that became the Affordable Care Act before the election. And it was already mapped out then that —

ezra klein

I remember this event he threw that I covered —

Yeah.

ezra klein

— that it was called “The Prepare to Launch Event.” And when it started — and Max Baucus is a very weird speaker. He’s a former Senate Finance Chair. And it just — he made everybody watch a video of the space shuttle launching. Like as a metaphor, like we’re getting ready to launch. And when this happens, we’re going to be ready to go. But it was a lot of work that went into that.

Right. And then somebody, a staffer for a progressive Senator, who was also new in 2009, I remember was talking to me relatively early in the process. And she was very frustrated with Baucus and the moderates and where things were going. And she was like, do you think — are we even going to be able to get a public option? And I was telling her, I was like, no, you’re not, because this has all been orchestrated long in advance what’s going on here. And I knew that. Whereas, I’m more knowledgeable and better-sourced, I think, in 2021 than I was in 2009. But I had much less of a sense of what was going on. And I think that’s because there wasn’t like an answer to that question. It was genuinely very improvisational. And part of that is a lot of people decided that Obama didn’t throw enough long balls. That ultimately the moderates in Congress are going to cut down whatever you propose. So it was foolish of him to have come out of the gates so reasonably and that he should have been, like, we’re doing single payer health care, and then let Baucus come back with the public option or something like that. And that’s something that I think, like, I had said in 2010, 2011, so I don’t want to completely divorce myself from it. But that turned into the idea that you should just do whatever and just make it someone else’s problem to decide what actually happens. And that is what happened. The White House signed off on all kinds of stuff. And then ultimately Joe Manchin decides what happens. But that’s actually abdicating your power in a weird way to not engage constructively and be like, here’s what we’re doing. The democracy bills I think was the — in some ways, the most egregious example of that, where they had all these campaign finance reform provisions in there that no one could explain exactly why they were in there. It was something that progressives had been really fired up about 10 years ago, so it just made it onto the list and people put it there.

ezra klein

I mean, the reason for that is that the primary author in the House was Sarbanes. And Sarbanes is a long-time campaign finance guy.

Right. I mean, that’s an explanation. But that’s not a reason. I mean, a lot of people were left very worried about the state of American democracy by what happened in the 2020 election, in the lame duck on January 6. And public financing of House elections is just not what that is about at all. It’s an idea that was completely out of left field. And then meanwhile, they went actually very soft on gerrymandering reform, because a couple of Southern CBC members and the Massachusetts —

ezra klein

Congressional Black caucus.

Yeah, Congressional Black Caucus and the Massachusetts delegation did not want strong anti-gerrymandering rules. Because, in particular, in Massachusetts, strong anti-gerrymandering rules would make it go from nine seats that are safe for Democrats to probably nine seats that are all strongly blue-leaning but not 100 percent safe. So gerrymandering is actually a really big deal in terms of democracy in a way that I think campaign finance isn’t. And it was just a kind of — I mean, it’s tough, right? I mean, if key members don’t want strong anti-gerrymandering provisions, maybe you can’t get it done. But then you could just focus on something else. I guess we’re going to have this Electoral Count Reform legislation may really happen in the lame duck, which could have been non-controversial. But it was just odd to have votes on this total overhaul of the campaign finance system when that had nothing to do with what anyone was upset about. I think, fortunately, for everyone involved, barely anybody even remembers that that happened. But it’s a little bit embarrassing. Public financing also polls terribly. And in the current alignment, it would disadvantage Democrats. So it was a particularly odd thing to focus on. I mean, maybe just high-minded of John Sarbanes that he has this principled view that we need to have public financing. But it’s weird, right? And there’s been this kind of lull nothing matters attitude, I think, that took over in a way that it wound up not being — maybe not being damaging because none of these poorly written bills passed anyway. But it just makes you wonder what was everybody doing for the four years that Donald Trump was president. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

A couple of minutes ago, you said something interesting that I want you to unspool, which is that you’re trying to push people to do more thinking along the margin.

Yeah.

ezra klein

And that in, let’s call it 2005, there was an almost absurd policy literalism — or 1998. And that now you think it’s flipped to the other side. And this is something, I think, that’s come to define your work in the past couple of years. Tell me about it, as you see it, the almost regime change in how Democrats think about elections, the dominant political theory of how you win elections and brand yourself as a party.

Well, yeah, so I mean, after 2012, Obama got re-elected and Republicans still controlled the House. And what Obama’s team really wanted to do was pass an immigration reform bill. A lot of Republican elites seemed open to that idea, which is part of what made it a reasonable thing for Obama to push for. You know what I mean? There would be no point in pushing for a climate bill because it wasn’t going to happen. An immigration bill really might have happened.

ezra klein

And Marco Rubio went on Sean Hannity’s show. And the two of them agreed this was a good idea.

Right. So a big part of selling that immigration push was selling the idea that Republicans had really lost touch with the growing Latino electorate and that this was really, really important. And I think a lot of things were said in the wake of that election that were not analytically true but were well-intentioned. There was an overstatement of the centrality of the Latino vote to that outcome and of the centrality of the immigration issue to the Latino vote. And you look at a map — people know that a surge of Hispanic turnout is not why Obama won Wisconsin. I wrote an article in the wake of that election, being, like, I don’t know, guys, Nevada, Colorado maybe, but Obama — just he won all these Midwestern states, right? But Obama did get a very strong performance from Hispanic voters. That is true. So there was just more focus on that fact than that fact bore in analytical weight. And then if you talk to people who worked on the Obama campaign, they say, look, our Latino messaging just did not involve that much immigration stuff. It involved some, but it was a lot of health care and education. But in the wake of the election, there was a lot of discussion on the Latino vote and a lot of discussion of immigration’s role in the Latino vote because that was to back up a legislative agenda, right? I mean, they don’t just run these campaigns for their own amusement. They’re trying to pass bills. The bill wound up not passing. But this idea that Democrats were going to win by mobilizing the forces of demographic change and that they were going to mobilize those forces primarily by emphasizing progressive ideas on identity and cultural issues kept going forward. And, if anything, snowballing in the wake of the failure of what was really a legislative strategy, not an election-winning strategy. Because, again, if you look at the campaign, it’s not like they forgot that they had to win these Midwestern states or that they couldn’t count how many Mexican-Americans live in Iowa. Some but not that many. And they knew that, right? But it kind of rolled forward to the point where everybody starts making the case for their own ideas in these electoral terms. And so, I mean, we know why environmentalists care about climate change. It’s because greenhouse gases lead to warmer temperatures on the planet and sea levels rise, et cetera, et cetera. But Sierra Club and other groups start putting out all this stuff about how young voters are demanding action on climate change and that to garner turnout, we need this strong environmental agenda. And the evidentiary basis for that kind of claim was just always really, really weak. But people got very dug in on mobilization, mobilization, mobilization as a kind of ethos, in part, because they believed it, because certain demographic facts got read wrong. But I think, in part, because it just became the coin of the realm. This is how everyone was supposed to talk about their ideas was how it’s going to contribute to base turnout. And if you came to a meeting being, like, I just think it’s a really good idea to do this, but keep it quiet and do it under the table, people were like, no, you’re so weird. You’re supposed to talk about how you’re going to mobilize the base. And we saw in 2016, and then we saw again in 2020, these extremely high turnout elections, which is nice from a civic standpoint. I mean, I guess it’s good to see people participate. But it doesn’t alter the partisan composition of the electorate in the kind of way that I think a progressive in 2010 would have told you it would. People would have said, oh, if we get this surge in turnout, it’s going to push things way to the left. And that just turns out not to be true, which is fine in some ways. But it just means that a lot of stuff about demographics and turnout and mobilization I think has really not aged well as a take or as an analysis. And a lot of old conventional wisdom about swing voters and boring stuff like that, I think is at least approximately true.

ezra klein

So let me try to frame this slightly differently, or the version of it I’ve watched happen, which is I think it’s useful to keep in mind who it is politicians think they are trying to persuade and of what. I would say when I got into politics — I started covering professionally in the early 2000s. I was paying attention in the ‘90s. Democrats, in particular, had a sense that what they truly believed was reviled by the electorate. They had lost three times — Reagan, Reagan, Bush. Bill Clinton won, but he was this great compromiser who sort of won by repudiating parts of the Democratic or at least a liberal agenda. And so the implicit question that dominated — it wasn’t the only one people asked, but the people who asked this one seemed to be the ones who were in charge — was what would somebody who doesn’t ideologically or culturally agree with us, but is open to us, think about this? The somewhat mythical moderate. And I think that the implicit version of this that became stronger over time, which did reflect changes in the electorate — the Obama coalition doesn’t exist in 1988. So the idea that you can run Barack Obama and that he will win and win really big —

What’s the famous number is that Obama and Dukakis got very similar shares of the white vote —

ezra klein

In 2012, yes, in the white vote. I think that Obama slightly underperforms Dukakis in the white vote in 2012, if I’m not wrong. But he wins. And so the marginal voter, I think, becomes a younger, not that interested, but pretty liberal person. So it’s, like, are you trying to convince somebody who is interested but doesn’t really agree with you versus somebody who is kind of uninterested and is mainly suspicious and cynical of you, who thinks you’re just another bought and paid-for politician who won’t actually do what they want? And to me, in a bunch of different ways — and I want to talk about other things that happened at the same time — but that’s the main shift in the cognitive structure of the way the Democratic Party sees politics. And I think it’s also worth noting that it is accompanied by a shift in the Republican cognitive structure that I’d honestly have somewhat more trouble articulating in a clear way because Donald Trump emerges in the Republican Party in such a burst of his own intuition, to put it lightly. So I don’t think it’s as clearly stated anywhere. But the Republican Party also shifts from, I think, having a little bit more of a sense of the wind at their backs, but also being somewhat more cautious, to being completely YOLO in their approach to politics. And because Donald Trump wins, even if he doesn’t win with the popular vote, which Democrats typically can’t do, there’s a sense that he’s proven something. I mean, I think this actually ends up affecting the way Democrats think. That if the Republicans can do this and not just get away with it, but be rewarded for it, and more people agree with Democrats, in theory, than agree with Trumpist Republicans, then the question of, can you win elections through mass mobilization, begins to seem very relevant. And then I think the third thing is there is a not just a kernel, a reality, an analytical reality under this, which is ticket splitting goes way down. The number of floating voters goes down. It’s not down to nothing, but the number of voters who shift parties election to election has gone down quite a bit over the years. And so there actually are fewer persuadable voters. I mean, that middle is shrinking. And so the sense is there more voters you can pull off the sidelines rather than more voters you can pull out of the middle. I think that’s a lot of the shift.

I want to put a pin in the ticket-splitting thing, because to me there’s a big question as to have the ticket-splitters gone away or have the politicians stop trying so hard to get them? But I think a lot of what you said is right. And I would also throw in there — I mean, not to make too much a deal out of one thing, but David Broockman wrote this paper that I think we’ve both written about, that wasn’t single-handedly influential —

ezra klein

It was the “Political Scientist.”

“Political Scientist.” Part of what changed people’s thinking was the discovery that self-identified political moderates have a lot of immoderate opinions. I think a lot of people read that as saying that it doesn’t matter what you say or do in politics, or issues don’t matter to anybody. I think the right way of reading that is just much more literally. That some widely-held views are also just coded as extreme in conventional wisdom circles. So at the time the paper comes out, no big time people in American politics were for marijuana legalization. But marijuana legalization polled perfectly well. So something that’s happened since it came out is there’s been all this legalization of marijuana. And it’s been perfectly popular, right? And so the fact that a congressional reporter would have told you — that’s a really marginal opinion. But a survey researcher would have told you — no, that’s actually a very mainstream opinion. So that’s an important fact that is different from an old-fashioned elite-centric way of doing politics. So Trump comes along. And the other thing that happens with Trump is that people have very strong reactions to him. And it’s like I know how strong the reactions are, so I just — I want to be careful in what I’m saying. But Donald Trump’s stated policy views are just not that extreme. The positions he took on immigration are pretty similar to the positions Mitt Romney took on immigration. The positions he took on economic policy are much more moderate than the ones Romney took in 2012. His wildest ideas — like we should completely ban Muslims from entering the country — poll better than lots of more, quote unquote, “mainstream” opinions. So in some sense, if you were to tell someone, OK, Republicans would nominate someone with more moderate opinions on Social Security and Medicare, but also he has a lot of scandals and so he would do OK but not great, you’d be like, yeah, that’s really boring. But we were all there. We all watched Donald Trump. There was nothing boring about it. It was the craziest, most captivating thing that’s ever happened in politics. So it was just really hard to shrug that off as, like, eh, this is how we thought the world worked. Instead, you wanted to react like, oh my god, this upends everything we know. But what did it really upend on some level? Because he didn’t come out there and say, hey, we should privatize Social Security and get crowds cheering for him. What he did was he was like, let’s not do the most toxically unpopular stuff that the Republican Party used to stand for. Let’s just pound the table on status quo cultural politics. And it worked not that well even.

ezra klein

Let me give you a contrary view of this, because I agree that people underestimate that Trump shifted the Republican Party’s economic policy substance a little bit more centrist from where it was under, say, Paul Ryan. So I want to grant that point.

Well, what he said. I’m not sure about the substance.

ezra klein

What he said, yes. I mean, but he was out there, he said he was going to raise taxes on people like himself. And he said he was going to cover everybody with really great health care. I mean, there was something to that. But two things, I think, happened in 2016, which are really, really blow up anybody’s sense that they understand what is going on in American politics. One is Trump, who I think the thing that you’re not giving enough credence to just in the way you frame that is that what Trump did was excite people by breaking every basic rule of political behavior. I think people thought you couldn’t be that cruel and have folks stand by you. That you couldn’t be that insulting. That you couldn’t say some of the things he said. That you couldn’t tell Ted Cruz that his wife was ugly and his dad probably helped kill J.F.K.

Right.

ezra klein

The question Donald Trump raised wasn’t how could you be a major anti-immigrant politician in this country, but it was if you can act like that and survive it, because you are exciting to the people who like you, and then ultimately win, then what does that imply? And then on the other side is Bernie Sanders. And in some ways, I think Bernie Sanders and his run in 2016 is as or more important in seeing how liberal thinking changes than Trump, because, one, running as a socialist was supposed to be absolute poison in politics. That you just couldn’t do it. It would have been ridiculous 15 years before. Two, you have Hillary Clinton lose. So her brand — to Donald Trump — so her brand of politics and the politics around the mainstream lane of the Democratic Party becomes somewhat discredited. Bernie Sanders was exciting. He had huge rallies. People loved him. Now all the journalists are on Twitter and all the political professionals are on Twitter. And you can see on Twitter that the energy is all people with little red roses after their profile. It’s all these Brooklyn socialists. And so something is happening where, on the right, Donald Trump breaks a bunch of rules of political behavior and prospers for it. On the left, Bernie Sanders breaks a bunch of known rules of political behavior and prospers for it. I mean, when he announced his run, I think the conventional wisdom was, well, too bad for the left Elizabeth Warren didn’t get in the race.

ezra klein

Right? Instead, you’ve got this marginal figure who’s going to get seven percent. But no, he does really, really well. The center of the Democratic Party becomes somewhat discredited. And I mean, I remember this feeling very well. It’s like, oh, maybe the boundaries aren’t what anybody thought they were.

Exactly.

ezra klein

And Clinton, I think, in particular, I think Bears too much of the brunt of this, but I think there was a real sense that you couldn’t win without enthusiasm.

But that’s what I mean, though. I’m being deliberately obtuse about Trump, because I was there, and I saw it, and it was shocking, and it changed how everybody thought. I’m just saying if you weren’t there, if you didn’t know anything about the Trump campaign other than — if you were reading about it in an obscure foreign country, you’d be like, yeah, OK, that’s just — it kind of makes sense, right? And as you say, it changed our view of what the limits were. But one inference that people drew from it is, oh my god, there are no limits.

ezra klein

Right.

Right? And I think that that is the wrong inference. It just it turns out that certain norms of conduct are not as constraining as people might have thought before. That you can be really mean about your political adversaries and people will shrug it off. And there’s things that are a little bit nuanced. That you can be — if you’re a Republican, you can be negative on America’s global role and people won’t read that as unpatriotic. They’ll just read it as, well, he’s tough. Things like that. And there’s a lot, I think, we can learn from it. But there was an implication drawn that if Trump can get away with making fun of John McCain’s wartime service, then we can say we’re going to abolish ICE. But those things don’t follow from each other. And life is a learning process. I’ve been on this journey as much as anybody else. Trump was, in fact, quite surprising to people’s expectations. And the Bernie thing, though, captured something that is very real, which is before 2016, self-identified liberals are not just a minority of America, they’re a minority of Democrats. So you could consolidate all the liberals and just lose. Lose the primary. And that has changed. The demographic bulk of the Democratic Party is more left wing than it used to be. And you now can win a Democratic Party primary, at least, by saying F all this moderation. We should be like a European social democracy, right? Not this — Bill Clinton did a lot of really overt triangulation. But Obama did a lot of light triangulation where he would be like, I’m not an ideologue. I’m just a guy who looks at the facts. I’m interested in pragmatic solutions. And, OK, 90 percent of my solutions are progressive stuff, but that’s just the facts have a liberal bias. That’s who I am. You can now win a Democratic primary by saying what Bernie Sanders said, which is I’ve looked at it and I think Denmark is a fundamentally more just society than the United States of America. We should have a wholesale transformation of our social and economic model to be like the economic model of a foreign country. And you never before, in American history — you wouldn’t have been able to get any lift-off with that, right? And the fact that you could now was really striking. And I think we both saw at Vox, in the early days of Bernie’s campaign, how articles would just pop on the internet if somebody would be like it would be better to be Scandinavia. Like 20 billion clicks. You’re like, whoa, OK. Because the fact that there was a different social model in the Nordic countries and that it was admirable in many ways was like — that was a known piece of information in the universe, but it didn’t seem like there was much public interest in it. And then suddenly there was a lot. And you could get people to come to your rallies. It was a whole thing. That’s just very different. That’s a different landscape from the one when we started our careers.

ezra klein

Well, something else happens in this period that I think you touched on there, which is interesting, which is the signals of, and then capacity for those signals to amplify into real world outcomes, of enthusiasm become much more mirrored and much more clear. So how would you really know enthusiasm very early in a primary year 25 years ago? There actually aren’t that many ways. I mean, OK, if the rallies are big. But they’re just in Iowa and New Hampshire for a couple of months. Who really cares? But by the time you get past the Dean campaign, which I was an intern on, and I remember the unbelievable rise of national small donor online fundraising. So you have that capacity. So enthusiasm that is diffuse but is able to find a website can turn into money. And money really does matter in politics, particularly in primary campaigns. Then, two, you have attention. The Bernie Sanders articles keep popping to the top of Reddit. Or you can feel on Twitter because all the journalists are on Twitter all the time and you can feel that there’s a lot more energy around Bernie Sanders, around Donald Trump, than there is around some of these other candidates. That leads to, particularly, now for media outlets that are competing with each other, that have analytics inside of them — you don’t really know who read what in your newspaper 25 years ago, but you know exactly who reads what on your website, you know which quarter hour of your cable news show rates the best, you know as a journalist or just a user of Twitter, which tweets of yours or around you are getting the most retweets. So all of a sudden this capacity for ideas that are maybe not — I don’t want to say broadly popular, because the ideas before weren’t always broadly popular either, but mainstream within the political institutions — but ideas that rather than having that kind of support, have intense minority or majority, but in this case, I think minority support online.

Well, there’s no gatekeeper.

ezra klein

They can really quickly — yeah, there’s no gatekeeping. But there’s also amplification. This is, I think, a really big difference. It isn’t just that there is some kind of random poll happening here. The better something does, the better it does. The more Bernie Sanders gets to the top of Reddit, the more articles get written about Bernie Sanders from outlets that are trying to get to the top of Reddit. The more journalists notice that a really, really sharply-worded tweet in this direction or that direction will get 25,000 retweets, the more of them you get, this can also become money over time. I mean, it becomes Donald Trump just owns attention in 2016. I do think that has a pretty big effect on changing political incentives on what people are actually hearing about. And then it also has a compositional effect. I mean, you mention here that liberals are slowly becoming a larger part of the Democratic Party. But there’s also a conversion. I mean, when you’re hearing constantly about how great Bernie Sanders is, that’s going to create more people who might have been curious and open to Bernie Sanders’ style ideas are going to learn about them and become Socialists than would have back when Sanders would have had a harder time getting covered by the political system or by the media. And so I do think you end up in this structural shift towards ideas that have super die-hard fan bases, instead of ideas that are maybe good enough for as broad a swath of the electorate as you can possibly get to.

Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s right. I mean, especially of the internet of some years ago. I mean, the internet has changed again since 2015.

ezra klein

Yeah.

And it’s in a way — I mean, I say this — you probably know this better than me in the Bay Area, but these tech guys are incredibly upset all the time about left wing figures in the media. And I always feel like, you did this. The old guys of journalism were not sitting around in 2014 and saying it’s amazing that this weird left wing content is going viral all the time. The technology platforms altered the objective incentive structure of the media landscape. There have been many iterations of further alteration. I have no idea what would perform well on a TikTok. Podcasts have a completely different ideology and demand structure from Facebook, social sharing, Google is weird. But it was this moment when politics stories could go very viral on Facebook, in particular. And that really opened the door to not more extreme in spacial view of ideology, but much more — I mean, when we used to help people with headlines, I don’t know exactly how you would put it, but there’s a certain kind of emotional stridency that was really, really selling there. A complete alignment of fact, value, and emotion, all behind this is obviously right. And that lent itself to a certain style of politics that was really different from — traditionally you needed all these elite validators. And that’s a different world. And old-time politicians, media people, political actors struggle to learn how to operate in a new media environment. And I don’t think that that actually means that all of those old ideas are obsolete. But the ideas about what to do in a mechanical, tactical, logistical sense maybe were obsolete. And it’s been a real kind of struggle I think for party establishments in both sides.

ezra klein

Let me end on this question before we go to books. Let’s say that there is polling bias this year, but it’s a two-point bias towards Republicans. So Democrats wake up after the election and they have kept the House and they’ve kept the Senate.

Yep.

ezra klein

Let’s say it’s basically what they have now — 50/50 and then a slim majority in the House. I’m doing some reporting on this, but my basic view is Democrats have no idea what they would do if they woke up in that situation. What do you think they should do if they wake up in that situation?

So one thing is that I think that would show that the voters are actually more concerned about the sketchy authoritarianism of the Republican Party than they seem to be, which would be nice. I mean, that would be validating, I think, for our society. And I think that that would suggest that Democrats should try to sure up those institutional bases of the country. I mean, I’ve been talking about gerrymandering a number of times. Electoral Count Act Reform is on the table, but we don’t know if it’s going to happen. Really digging in, I think, on telling people we are pulling out of this emergency situation. We are going to try to ensure that there are free and fair elections on an ongoing basis going forward. We are going to act very boldly and decisively on those topics. And then we’re going to try to make inflation be lower. I think the risk would be, OK, we just want to replay 2021 and wish away Joe Manchin. And we’re going to pass all these bills that people have forgotten about entirely. Sorry, I should also — I should mention the abortion issue. We haven’t talked a lot about Dobbs. But that was a big momentum-shifter, because it’s unusual when Democrats control Congress and the White House to have such a big conservative policy win. If Democrats do really well, they obviously have to do something on abortion rights. But I think they should try to do something like set a national floor, guaranteed legality through 12 weeks, something like that. And then allow for some state to state variation. But not poke the bear of federal funding and some of the other things that are in the Women’s Health Protection Act just because you want to try to minimize backlash. You want to try to get things done that will be sustainable and that people will like. And so I think — I always urge caution.

ezra klein

And then always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience?

So I recently read Cormac Ó Gráda book, “Famine: A Short History,” that’s old and I bought when it first came out, but it’s super fascinating. And I mean, it does what it says on the tin. It’s a history of famines, which used to be a huge problem and have now become a not that huge problem, which is really good. Brad de Long’s book called “Slouching Towards Utopia,” which is a broad-based history of economic growth over the course of the long 20th century is really, really good. I do want to recommend Rachel Aviv’s book. It is called “Strangers to Ourselves.” A friend of mine recommended it to me. And it has just really blown my mind. It is a fresh perspective on mental health that loyal Ezra Klein listeners probably know all about. But I found it really, really enlightening. I think the hardest thing about books is I always read books about topics I’m interested in. But then I know so much about them already that I just get annoyed by the books. Whereas this one was it was like, yeah, I’m expanding my mind. I’m becoming a stranger to myself, as I learn about new things, and it’s great.

ezra klein

Matt Yglesias. Thank you very much.

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Rana Foroohar, a CNN analyst and associate editor at the Financial Times, about her new book, Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World (Crown Publishing, October 2022). Even before worldwide geopolitical conflicts of recent years highlighted vulnerabilities in the global supply chain, some companies were already beginning to deglobalize trade. Now, between a resurgence of homegrown manufacturing and a rise in stakeholder capitalism, Foroohar says regionalization will be the new economic order. An edited version of the conversation follows.

What does a values-based technology and trade policy look like for America?

Video

My book looks at where we’ve been with globalization in the last 50 years and why, going forward, the world is not going to be flat but bumpy, and what the challenges and opportunities of that will be, not only for the US but for the world.

When I think about a values-based framework for trade, I would step back a little bit and look at what trade policy has been over the last 40 years or so. If you go back to the Reagan administration, there was certainly a deregulation of finance and capital, but you didn’t see trade being so de-linked from foreign policy and national interests. In fact, Reagan, contrary to popular belief, was a fan of industrial policy. He very much thought about trade in the national interest.

When you move into the 1990s, you start to see a neoliberal swing in the trade paradigm. When I say “neoliberal,” I define it the same way the IMF [International Monetary Fund] does, which is as a free movement of capital goods and people wherever they want to go across borders, with the assumption that they will end up where they are most productive.

The Clinton administration, in particular, really embraced that framework. They said NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] was great for everybody and that having China in the World Trade Organization by 2001 was great for everybody. The truth is that even though globalization and free trade have lifted all boats at a global level, there have been major hollowing-outs within countries.

In particular, there have been regional pockets that have really suffered. That’s why you began to see, I think, the Far Left and Far Right populism that is a hindrance to trade and to business. When I think about a new framework for trade in the US—and, really, in any country—I think you have to have a re-mooring of national interest and the global economy. You have to make sure that those two things don’t move too far apart.

In the US in particular, what this is going to mean is much more focus on labor and much more focus on buffering labor from any shocks that might come from trade—also, more focus on community, the environment, and sustainability.

There has been a sense in the last 20 years or so that as long as share prices for companies were increasing, that was the be-all and end-all of what was good in terms of cross-border trade. Now, there is a sense that there needs to be a broader group of stakeholders that companies and governments are looking after.

That’s how I would frame the idea of a shared moral framework for trade: it has to be about stakeholders—not just shareholders. It can’t be just about enriching multinational companies, which can fly 35,000 feet over national interests. It has to be enriching at both the global and the local level.

What is ‘patriotic capitalism’ and how does it play out in a tripolar world?

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It’s really interesting when we think about the framework for capitalism today. It has to be said that there’s not one kind of capitalism. Geographically, there are many forms of capitalism, and, historically, there have been many forms of capitalism.

The term “patriotic capitalism” is used today to set the stage for the idea that companies have to be operating somewhat in the national interests of the countries where they are located. That gets really tricky, as I explore in my book, for very global companies.

In this new world, where you have a bipolar digital-tech and trade framework between the US and China that is going in different directions—it could be multipolar depending on where Europe, India, and other large regions end up—how do big, global multinationals operate? The answer is: very carefully.

When I think about a new framework for trade in the US—and, really, in any country—I think you have to have a re-mooring of national interest and the global economy. You have to make sure that those two things don’t move too far apart.

I think there is going to be a lot more consideration of the “political” in political economy. In some cases, particularly in strategic sectors—like high tech, semiconductors, electric vehicles, and rare-earth minerals—companies may be forced to make choices about where and how they operate. That’s a very new notion, and it’s going to have a big impact not only on how global business functions but on markets.

If you look at globalization over the last 40 years, it’s been predicated on three things: cheap capital, which is now ending; cheap energy, which is also largely ending, particularly cheap energy from Russia to Europe; and cheap labor. Costs are rising everywhere at the moment. We are in a totally new world, and companies are going to have to reconfigure how they think about their operations.

Regionalism versus nationalism: How do they fit into your postglobal world?

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When I think about nationalism, I think about trends that involve deglobalization, populism, and things that are politically problematic and generally negative. You see a lot of Far Right, Far Left, xenophobia, and protectionism, the kinds of deglobalization that are really problematic and worrisome.

When I think about regionalization and regional hubs—or “friend-shoring,” as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen put it to me—I think about those things as positive because they’re about asking, “What are our values as a nation? Who else shares our values, and how can we trade with them? How can we do business with them?” I think that’s appropriate and welcome.

I also think that, in the context of the deglobalization that we’re seeing, there are certain kinds of regionalism and even localism that are actually good. Even before COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine, a lot of companies went, “You know what? The wage and energy arbitrage of complicated supply chains through the South China Seas doesn’t make sense for me anymore. When I think about the cost of energy, when I think about the cost of emissions, maybe I want to hub production and consumption more closely together in different regions.”

Companies were doing that already, and it’s just sped up. The McKinsey Global Institute has done a lot of interesting research on that, some of which I quote in my book.

How should America look at Europe these days?

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Europe, as always, has this dynamic of wanting to be an economically integrated region without necessarily being a politically integrated region. I think that we’ve reached the end of pure economic globalization.

Countries are going to have to decide if they share each other’s values. If we don’t, it’s going to become more and more problematic to form trade and business alliances.

On the periphery of Europe in general, you were already seeing—even before the election of a Far Right leader—Italy, Greece, and other parts of Southern Europe being pulled into the Chinese orbit via One Belt, One Road.

Europe may not operate as a single bloc anymore. There may be multiple Europe’s. I suspect that there will be a core Europe led by Germany and France that will align with the US in many things, as they have aligned with the US over Putin’s war in Ukraine. However, you may see countries, smaller countries in particular, start to go in different directions or side with another global bloc.

What makes you optimistic about a resurgence of manufacturing companies in the United States?

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Manufacturing is an area that I have focused on for years, and I think about it deeply. I grew up in a manufacturing family. My father is a Turkish immigrant, he was educated in the US, and he formed a small manufacturing business in Indiana, which is where I grew up.

I saw the effects of trade policy in the 1980s and ’90s and moving forward, and the hollowing out, frankly, of a lot of the US industrial base. There is a flip side, however, and it’s a very interesting flip side. The industrial companies—particularly small and midsize companies—that ended up surviving the last couple of decades of “Schumpeterian Creative Destruction” are Darwinian case studies of how to run a business.

In the US, there are already a lot of highly efficient midsize or smaller manufacturing and industrial companies that are almost Germanic in the way that they run. I look at some of these companies in my book. They’re often private and tend to be family owned or community based. They’re often working as collaborators and competitors within an ecosystem.

I looked at this in the textile industry in the Carolinas, and it’s quite fascinating. These companies plow about 80 percent of their profit margins back into productive capital expenditure. They don’t have the pressures of the public market so they’re able to do a lot more in that way without a shock to share prices, and they’re highly efficient.

For example, when the pandemic struck, you saw textile makers in North and South Carolina saying, “OK, nobody’s buying T-shirts anymore, maybe we’ll make masks.” That was useful at a time when China was, understandably, keeping a lot of its own domestic production of masks at home. Suddenly, regions like the US and Europe that are used to buying three-cent masks from China are asking, “What are we going to do?”

I think that we’ve reached the end of pure economic globalization. Countries are going to have to decide if they share each other’s values. If we don’t, it’s going to become more and more problematic to form trade and business alliances.

A mask in the US had cost 30 cents to make, but industrial hubs working together in areas like textiles, cotton, and retail were able to drive down the price of masks from about 30 cents to ten cents over the course of a year or so. There’s still a gap, of course, between what you would see in more of a developing country—if you can still call China a developing country—in Asia versus a rich country in terms of production, but the fact that we were able to close the gap that quickly shows that there is more industrial strength in the US than one might imagine.

When you begin to nudge that a bit with industrial policy—as we are seeing with the Biden administration’s push around things like electric vehicles—suddenly you start to be able to connect the dots. An electric-vehicle production facility in South Carolina could perhaps connect with a textile maker in North Carolina, who then might be able to move from making clothing to making upholstery for an electric vehicle or, potentially, a cloth to cover wind turbines. I see a lot of potential there, and I think we’re only at the beginning of it being realized.

What is a ‘resiliency czar’ and why does the White House need one?

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I’ve argued that one of the things that we could do in the US to help industry, government, and citizens would be to appoint a White House–level resiliency czar: someone with a logistical background, possibly a business-continuity background, who could connect the dots.

The truth is that we have a lot of talent in manufacturing and industry. We have a lot of deep thinking in the private sector and in the public sector around how to localize growth and how to create a more inclusive economic ecosystem, but the dots are sometimes not connected. If you think about what companies are doing to locate talent, for example, oftentimes companies are starting their own educational programs. They may be copying best practices of other firms elsewhere in different states.

There are things being done in trade policy that may negate other things being done in, say, financial policy or in the Commerce Department. We need someone that can cut through all of those silos and quickly help government and the private sector to understand: Where are the assets? Where are the liabilities? Where are things needed in terms of talent, infrastructure, and assets?

The resiliency czar is someone who can connect all that quickly. That would be a great way to move forward with this more inclusive economic agenda.

What do you see emerging and sticking from the pandemic?

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One thing that is definitely going to stick is the move away from efficiency toward resiliency. That doesn’t mean it has to be either-or, but for the last 20 or 40 years—wherever you want to put the marker—we’ve definitely had a just-in-time business culture focused on driving down costs and moving production, moving IP [intellectual property], and moving assets to the cheapest location. That’s been the way business did things.

Not only due to the pandemic, but because of climate change and because of geopolitical strife, this is not always a resilient model. At the same time, there are a lot of interesting new technologies—like additive manufacturing and 3-D printing—right at the top of that list of things that are emerging. There are also decentralized currencies, sovereign-backed digital currencies, and decentralized technologies that are allowing countries and communities to produce things and trade things more locally—in some cases, even in local currencies.

3-D printing is something that has just been growing gangbusters: over 20 percent year-on-year for the last few years. That’s something that played a big role in increasing resiliency during the pandemic in Europe, in Asia, and in the US. And I think that that’s absolutely going to stick.

An electric-vehicle production facility in South Carolina could perhaps connect with a textile maker in North Carolina, who then might be able to move from making clothing to making upholstery for an electric vehicle or, potentially, a cloth to cover wind turbines. I see a lot of potential there, and I think we’re only at the beginning of it being realized.

The idea of multiple currencies is something that we’re going to hear more about. The dollar is still the global reserve, but you’re seeing China, for example, wanting to do more trade in its own currency. You’re seeing other countries say, “We want to have a little more flexibility.” Digital sovereignty is going to be a bigger deal, financial markets will become more decentralized, and I think that there will be bumps along the way to this new, more heterodox world.

Ultimately, it’s about creating resiliency and redundancy in order to reduce risk in the system, particularly in inventory. Inventory in our current moment is a bit like liquidity in 2008: if you don’t have it, the whole system breaks down.

Video Rana Foroohar on the homecoming of global business

It’s become hard to find a poll of American voters ahead of next month’s midterm elections that doesn’t portend disaster for the Democrats. Voters are breaking in the GOP’s direction, and the issues Republicans dominate—from inflation to crime to immigration—are cutting through the noise. Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling to generate traction on abortion. They’re emptying out America’s petroleum reserves at a record pace. And Democratic groups are cutting seizure-inducing ads designed to sexy up what amounts to a bribe aimed at getting young people to vote.

The tea leaves aren’t hard to read. All Republicans have to do to maximize their environmental advantages is not make any sudden moves. At this point, House Speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy careened through the drywall like the Kool-Aid man bearing plans almost no one asked for and which are all but certain to become a liability for the party he hopes to lead.

“I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession, and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News reporters this week when asked how a GOP House majority would approach Russia’s war of conquest and ethnic cleansing. “They just won’t do it.” While “Ukraine is important,” McCarthy added, the Republican majority’s priorities would be primarily domestic.

It would be imprudent to dismiss the notion that a Republican majority could be less inclined than Democrats to provide material support to Kyiv. More worryingly, Republican efforts to talk down the legitimacy of Ukraine’s cause and underemphasize the vital U.S. interests at stake in Europe could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Republican voters have followed their party’s leadership into box canyons before. But it would take work to convince rank-and-file Republican voters that cutting off Kyiv should be their priority.

Reuters polled American adults in early October and found that 73 percent continue to support the Ukrainian war effort, including two-thirds of self-described Republicans. One month earlier, Gallup found that 66 percent of all Americans support Ukraine’s effort to retake its territory by force, and most Republicans agreed with them. A July poll conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs pegged the GOP’s support for arming Ukraine at 68 percent compared with 72 percent of all respondents. These numbers are generally reflective of polling—both of American adults and Republican voters—from the outset of this conflict. From the initial invasion, to the siege of Kyiv, to the collapse of the Russian lines around Kharkiv, to today, with Ukraine putting pressure on territories Russia and its proxies have occupied since 2014, Americans’ views of the conflict have been largely static.

If the GOP majority hopes to defund Ukraine over the preference of a majority of voters, Republicans in leadership are going to have to make the case to the public. Every minute they spend doing that is a minute that isn’t spent addressing inflation, securing the border, supporting local law enforcement, curbing the efforts of social engineers to teach progressive cultural values in the classroom, and so on. In other words, the Republican majority would have to abandon the issues that got them the majority in the first place, and only to satisfy the fixations of a loud minority of populist agitators.

Not only would McCarthy commit his members to an uphill messaging campaign, he’d also be incepting internecine conflict within his own conference. Rep. Michael McCaul, who will likely chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a Republican-led House, told reporters just last week that the Biden administration isn’t doing enough to back Ukraine. He supports sending “longer-range artillery and additional air-defense systems” to the frontlines. “Better arming and equipping of Ukraine will help save lives and give Ukraine the capacity to end this war faster,” said Sen. Jim Risch, McCaul’s counterpart on foreign affairs in the Senate. Aides close to Mitch McConnell insist that he “is not going to shy away from continuing to support Ukraine,” which suggests even a GOP-led effort to let Ukraine’s funding quietly expire isn’t going to be so quiet.

Would McCarthy commit to an unpopular course of action that pits him against his own members? That seems unlikely. The prospect is rendered even less likely given how boneheaded the objections to backing Ukrainian security are.

Sure, Republicans back Ukraine, but not without any oversight of these funds. That’s a reasonable concern, which is why the aid appropriated by Congress for Ukraine was accompanied by provisions that require regular pertinent reports from the Pentagon and funds additional oversight via the State Department. Could there be more oversight? Of course. But the idea that there is “no meaningful oversight” of these funds, as populist weathervane Josh Hawley insists, is false.

Okay, but Americans aren’t going to be thrilled about a “blank check” for our partners abroad when Americans are hurting at home. In fact, a majority of the funds that are appropriated by Congress end up in American pockets—at least, those pockets that line the pants worn by American defense contractors and their employees. If the populist factions on the right are consistent in their support of taxpayer-backed industrial policy that subsidizes U.S. manufacturing jobs, this wouldn’t be an easy one to scrap.

As for the legitimately terrifying prospect that Vladimir Putin could suffer enough battlefield setbacks that he would use unconventional ordnance to even the playing field, it’s unclear how America’s retreat from the conflict would deter him in ways its looming presence does not. Nor does America’s contributions render it less prepared to confront Chinese aggression. In the zero-sum game of geopolitics, a loss for China’s junior partner on the Eurasian continent is a loss for Beijing, and every Russian battlefield casualty makes the prospect of retaking Taiwan by force that much less tantalizing.

Given how little sense McCarthy’s gesture makes, we must leave open the prospect that he was just saying what he thinks his audience wants to hear. As David Arakhamia, head of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party in parliament, told Financial Times reporters, McCarthy personally assured him, “Ukraine in its war with Russia will remain a top priority even if they win in the elections.”

When it comes to supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, the path of least resistance for a Republican congressional majority would be continuity. Even if McCarthy wanted to mount a crusade against Kyiv’s cause, his fellow Republicans have a proven track record of ignoring him. The most troubling signal McCarthy’s comments send is that he is just as keen as everyone else to view the coalition he leads through the distorting prism of Twitter and primetime cable news. If his comments on Ukraine were a mistake, we can safely expect many more similar errors in the near future.

The Marxification of Education Workshop, Session 1 of 4
Education has been stolen from us and from our children. Yes, stolen. It was deliberately transformed from within into something that is barely education at all anymore. Instead, it’s a systematic program of thought reform (brainwashing) into neo-Marxist belief and activism. How has this been accomplished? The formal name for the transformation is “the critical turn in education,” which “turned” education from traditional models of pedagogy to “Critical Pedagogy,” the application and teaching of Critical Theory to and through the education system. Its purpose: to overcome what Marxists refer to as “the problem of reproduction,” by which stable societies reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, especially through institutions involving children like religion, family, media, and especially education. Here, New Discourses Founder James Lindsay summarizes this “turn” in this first of four presentations on the Marxification of Education delivered in late July 2022 in Arlington, Virginia, on location in the now-famous Loudoun County, ground zero for the fight for America’s schools.
As a result of the research that produced this lecture series, Lindsay has written a detailed and accessible book on the issue titled The Marxification of Education, which is available for preorder now.

The audio version of this presentation is available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or by RSS.
The post The Critical Turn in Education appeared first on New Discourses.

When the Harvard-trained physician and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee talks about a “new human,” he doesn’t mean “Keanu Reeves in a black muumuu,” as he writes in his new book, “The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human.” Instead, Mukherjee’s new human is more like the paradoxical ship of Theseus. Over time, each of the vessel’s original planks is removed and replaced with new wood. What if a human could be rebuilt the same way — with healthy replacements for aging or malfunctioning cells? Is that the same human or a new one?
In “Song of the Cell,” set to be published next week, Mukherjee explores these questions and others  through stories from his own life: his efforts to diagnose and save patients (including one who barely survives a literal bloodbath), his own battle with a stubborn depression during the pandemic, and his father’s death. He talked about the experiences and research behind the book in a conversation with the Gazette. The interview was edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Siddhartha Mukherjee
GAZETTE: Throughout the book, you reference not just historical scientific figures but also poets and philosophers, going as far back as Aristotle. How can ancient ideas help us understand modern medicine?
MUKHERJEE: It’s often forgotten that Aristotle was probably as much a biologist as he was a philosopher. The distinction between a natural scientist and philosopher was much blurrier then than it is today. For people like Aristotle, questions like, “Where do we come from?” and “What are we made of?” were very much questions of the natural sciences as well as philosophy.
GAZETTE: Many of the stories you include are about medical failures — or attempts to find cures that didn’t go quite right. Like, for example, when a physician tried to cure a patient’s psychiatric symptoms with an infusion of cow’s blood. Or more recently with the first bone-marrow transplants.
MUKHERJEE: In principle, why can’t human beings be transfused with cow’s blood? It looks similar under the microscope. What is it about cow’s blood that’s different from human blood? These failures are, in some ways, the beginnings of successful journeys. They also showcase science as a human endeavor that’s full of flaws. We make mistakes. We misunderstand things. We misunderstand each other.
I had this impromptu meeting with the nurses who worked on the first bone-marrow transplants, and they spontaneously started talking about the massive litany of failures. They cried; they hugged each other. They remembered the little boy in the bunker, the pilot who was fogged by plutonium and died from leukemia. And then they started talking about the successes. That was one story that really stuck with me.
GAZETTE: You dedicate a chapter to the pandemic and how it exposed “such deep and fundamental shortcomings in our knowledge of the biology of a system that we had thought we knew.”
MUKHERJEE: In all the sciences, you get to a point where you develop a kind of hubris and then something walks you back. There was a kind of hubris about Newtonian mechanics or understanding electricity and magnetism or atomic structure until suddenly people realized that if you go deeper into those areas, what was known didn’t compute. The pandemic demanded a kind of re-evaluation of what we do and don’t know. And not just about the immune system, because COVID impacts the immune system, our intestines, our respiratory systems, all the things that we thought we understood at a very deep level. All are being re-evaluated in the context of this virus and perhaps other viruses that will come after it.
GAZETTE: In the book’s last chapter, you talk about understanding cellular songs — how individual cells work together like an orchestra. Why is that such an important frontier to explore?
MUKHERJEE: To understand or build an organism, you ultimately need to understand the communications between individual parts of the organism. We are beginning to understand the parts but not the sum of the parts — the communications that go between organisms, or what I would call cellular ecology. The example that comes to mind is the famous conundrum of cancer metastases. Why aren’t there metastases in the spleen? The liver is a frequent site of metastasis — why? Is it the anatomy? Is it the ecology of the cells around it? I’ll give you one more example. Why are there such frequent metastases in what’s called the axial skeleton, the central skeleton, but very few in the distal skeleton in your fingers or in the other bones in your body? The answer, or answers, have to do with understanding not just anatomy but how cells communicate with each other; in this case, how cancer cells build homes around each other. That’s one of the mysteries that we need to understand. And that’s why the book is called “The Song of the Cell.”
GAZETTE: You also introduce the idea of a “new human,” which could be built rather than simply born. Today, many fear this kind of cellular manipulation, but you seem to caution people against that fear.
MUKHERJEE: I like that — “cautioning people against fear.” I’m not blithe about it either. I have my reservations. I’ve seen bone marrow transplants go horribly wrong. I don’t think it’ll all be smooth. But a new science is being born. We are manipulating cells at a level that we haven’t before. We’re building artificial pancreases and artificial hearts. The first time blood was transfused from one person to another — this was in the 1800s — people thought the person who emerged would be a different human being: They’d acquire the psyche of the other human. Blood was thought to be so important to your soul; it was who you were. And then blood was transferred from one human to another and nothing happened (when it was matched properly). But the person who emerged clearly carried at least some part of another human being within themselves.
So, I use the term “new human” very provocatively. In the first chapter, I say we’ve started thinking of “new human” as some kind of science fiction character. But the new human I’m talking about is one whose units are built new, but who might look like you and me. If someone receives a blood transfusion, that person is two people in one in some ways. For a long time, philosophers thought about human beings in toto. You were you, and that was the end. Now we’ve started building humans with cells or organs from other places, parts that may be enhanced or genetically altered. And yet we still take you as you. I think that’s a very interesting conundrum.

Last February, three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood up in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and made a remarkable speech. Scholz, a Social Democrat without much of a track record on military issues, told his country—conditioned since the 1990s to believe that it no longer needed a real army—that he would add 100 billion euros to the defense budget this year. Germany, he said, needed “airplanes that fly, ships that can set out to sea and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions.” He declared that decades of increasing dependence on Russian energy would cease and that Germany would begin preparing alternatives. And after weeks of refusing to send weapons to Ukraine, he declared that Germany would now be sending anti-tank weapons and Stinger missiles.Scholz called this a Zeitenwende, or historical turning point, and not everybody was ready for it. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the chair of the Bundestag’s Defense Committee (and a Liberal Democrat, part of the government coalition) watched the faces of politicians from Scholz’s own party. She could see that many were stunned. Still, she thought that the “turning point” would begin right away. Instead, she told me, it was as if Scholz “said these big words and then had to sit down and rest.”And this is where we are now: Ever since the speech, Germans have been arguing over what helping Ukraine really means, which weapons can be sent and which cannot, which might provoke some kind of extreme reaction from Russia and which might help win the war. Even as more and more German weapons have flowed to Ukraine, the argument about them remains far more contentious in Germany than anywhere else. It’s hard to imagine a major American talk show spending an hour talking about whether or not to send tanks to Ukraine, but one German talk show recently did (I know, because I was on it). Opposition politicians have been loudly critical of the government on this as many other things, but Strack-Zimmermann and other politicians within the ruling coalition have criticized the pace and nature of the assistance too. Anton Hofreiter, a Bundestag member from the Green Party, which is also in the coalition, told me that heavy-weapons deliveries only happened because so many people “pushed and pushed” for them. I had a glimpse of the emotion in these arguments during a series of meetings in Berlin last week, in which I watched people throw questions at Wolfgang Schmidt, Scholz’s chief of staff. More than once, he was asked about tanks.[Read: Europe’s sleeping giant awakens]Some background: Germany has tanks that it could offer to Ukraine, but it doesn’t. The German government has prevented other European countries that own German-made tanks from sending theirs as well. Yet Germany has sent many other heavy weapons, including some that look like tanks (the anti-aircraft Flakpanzer Gepard has gun barrels and the heavy metal treads that most people associate with tanks, and is already in Ukraine). Thanks to these deliveries, as well as other air-defense systems that were knocking missiles out of the sky over Kyiv this week, Germany has become the third-largest supplier of weapons to Ukraine, after the U.S. and the U.K. Meanwhile, Poland and other countries have given Ukraine Soviet-style tanks that they had in their stocks (and Ukraine has picked up quite a few more of these, left behind by the Russian army). Large, modern, Western “main battle tanks” that can be used to attack Russian forces could give Ukraine an advantage. But none are on the way. Quite a few Germans think this refusal is a form of dithering or hair-splitting, and when they talk about it, they get angry quite quickly.So why not send tanks? During a panel that we shared, Schmidt gave a series of explanations. Some had to do with logistics: Tanks, he noted, require long supply chains and repair systems, and these would take a long time to set up. Some had to do with optics: “If tanks were captured with the German Iron Cross,” he said, “it would be the perfect occasion for Russian propaganda to say, look, this is NATO attacking us.”But logistics can be fixed. The optics, at this point, are hardly a concern. Putin knows which side the German government is on, and anyway German tanks sent to Ukraine would be painted with the Ukrainian flag, not German insignia. In truth, the clinching argument is political. As Schmidt said, “nobody else is delivering” modern tanks—not the French and most significantly not the Americans. And the Germans, or at least Scholz and Schmidt, are waiting for someone else, especially the U.S., to go first.Again, why? Germany could create a consortium of all the countries that own German tanks—among them Poland, the Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Greece —and deliver them jointly, a move that would help solve the logistical problem too, since more tanks and trainers would be involved. A group of Green and Liberal Democratic politicians this week issued a statement calling for exactly that, a “coordinated action among our partners and allies. Let’s move forward together!” But no Social Democrats appear likely to join them until the chancellor decides to act. And for the moment Scholz isn’t moving because this isn’t really an argument about tanks; it’s an argument about Germany. And that argument is not yet resolved.The clue is in the statement’s historical reference: “As a country responsible for the worst human rights crimes in Europe—especially in Poland and the countries of the former Soviet Union—we have a special obligation to restore and secure peace” and to prevent human-rights violations. This group of Green and Liberal Democratic politicians is arguing, in other words, that the lessons of German history compel Germany to prevent another genocide in Europe, even if that means a military engagement. They and others feel this strongly and say it often.But for the past three-quarters of a century, and especially in the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union and the reunification of their country, many other Germans have drawn exactly the opposite lesson from history. The lesson of 1945, as broadly understood until now, was that Germany should prevent war at all costs by refusing to engage in one, no matter what the stakes, especially in Europe. The lesson of 1989 was often understood in exactly the same way. If Americans think the Cold War was won because of nuclear weapons, the decades-long presence of American troops in Europe, and Ronald Reagan’s push to increase that commitment, many Germans, especially in Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, think that compromise and trade—most notably the construction of mutually beneficial pipelines to Russian gas deposits—ended the conflict.[Tom Nichols: The stakes in Ukraine have not changed]The interests of business, especially the big German companies that invested in the pipelines, play a role here too. Talk to a German industrialist or an economist, and you can often hear real angst: When will the war be over? When will we get back to normal? Alongside zero military engagement, the old lesson of German history also implied a green light for doing business with Russia, turning a blind eye to the growing evidence of Russian aggression, and assuming that a high level of economic interaction would sooner or later make Russians more friendly too. The mantra Wandel durch Handel—“change through trade”—gained traction both because it sounded nice and because it was so profitable. While Strack-Zimmermann and Hofreiter are among the many Germans who have accepted the collapse of this paradigm, not everybody else has. The specter of a similar break with China, which buys billions of euros worth of cars and machinery from Germany every year, now looms very large indeed.  Each new weapon sent to Ukraine is more evidence that normal isn’t coming back anytime soon.Fear plays a role too. Perhaps because the memory of burnt-out cities is still alive in Germany, German media have played up the danger of Russia’s nuclear arsenal ever since the war began. Claudia Major, a defense analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me that her team had compiled a 100-page-long list of nuclear threats to Germany from Russian public officials and state propagandists, speaking either on Russian television or to the media. These scare tactics work. The calls for some kind of deal—for a forced settlement of the war—are just as loud in Germany, especially on the far right and the far left, as they are in similar pro-Russian political circles in America.Of course, this message very much suits the Russians who want to make the occupation of eastern Ukraine permanent—a fait accompli that would allow them to regroup, rearm, create a massive refugee crisis in Europe, and then attack the rest of Ukraine in a few years time. A temporary cease-fire would empower Russian President Vladimir Putin, who could claim victory now and continue the war later. Germany would not be safer, but more endangered, as the borders of an aggressive, emboldened Russia moved farther West. Even though some in Germany’s political center logically understand this, many are still scared—which is why every category of weapons becomes the focus of a new debate, and perhaps part of why the chancellor doesn’t want to be the first to use any of them. Will the transfer of airplanes trigger the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine or maybe even the bombing of German cities? Long-range artillery? Tanks?But the rancor of the debate itself reflects the deep changes that have already taken place. Of all the Western democracies, Germany made the biggest bet on Russian trade and Russian gas, as well as the biggest bet on Putin’s rationality. Germany is now paying the largest economic price for the war too. Support for the Ukrainian military defense nevertheless remains very strong. In a September poll, 70 percent of Germans surveyed still said they want to help Ukraine win even if it means higher energy prices.Scholz himself recently spoke about the Russian “crusade” against liberal democracy, acknowledging that Putin is committed to the destruction of the world in which Germany formerly existed and prospered. Schmidt likes to say that the vigor of the argument about tanks and other weapons in Germany reflects the fact that Germans are not used to leadership, that they are still “in our teenage years,” no longer followers but not quite ready to lead.He is clearly right, though I would put it differently: In truth, some Germans are ready to lead, some Germans have re-learned the lessons of history, and some Germans are beginning to convince their compatriots that the world has changed, and that they have to change along with it. They haven’t quite won that argument yet. When they finally do, Europe will be ready to defend itself, Russia will no longer be able to count on the advocates of appeasement, and the Zeitenwende will finally become real.

In just 44 days, Prime Minister Liz Truss tanked the British economy, crashed the value of the pound, prompted a major bailout by the Bank of England, then resigned. When she leaves office next Friday, she will be, by far, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. It isn’t even close. The previous record holder, George Canning, lasted 119 days and had a rather good excuse for his temporary tenure: He collapsed and died in 1827 while in office. Truss was just incompetent.Truss was forced out after a month of unprecedented chaos. She fired her top minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, for announcing a disastrous “mini-budget” that she personally endorsed. Just about every time she stepped in front of a camera, markets plunged and borrowing costs rose. And on Wednesday night, she threatened to expel any members of Parliament who stood up to her, only to back down on that threat, then reinstate it with a text sent to the press at 1:33 a.m. One tabloid ran a livestream on YouTube featuring a head of lettuce wearing a blond Trussian wig with the caption: “Will Liz Truss outlast this lettuce?” to see who would go off first. The lettuce won.As an American living in the United Kingdom, I am tempted to marvel at the disarray and breathe a sigh of relief: In the transatlantic political sweepstakes deciding which political system is more broken, Britain has, at least briefly, retaken the lead from the United States. But a victory lap would be misplaced. When you juxtapose the events of the past 44 days in Westminster with the past six years in Washington, it’s clear that America’s democratic dysfunction is far worse.Paradoxically, Truss’s downfall shows that British democracy is still working. Polarization is so toxic in the U.S. that Trump never dipped below about 35 percent approval, no matter what he did. Truss, who was incompetent but far less dangerous, saw her approval ratings flirt with single digits before she was forced out. Her political party and political base turned on her.[David Frum: How to hold a charismatic charlatan to account]Democracy relies on a two-way street of responsiveness. Governments act, citizens react, then governments adjust, and the cycle repeats. Unlike in dictatorships, the evolving views of the public are supposed to be considered not just to win elections, but between elections. Without that back-and-forth between the citizenry and their representatives in power, there can be no political accountability, and government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” becomes merely a comforting myth.But what if the views of the public barely change because polarization reigns supreme? When that happens, democracies stagnate, accountability disappears, and politicians can get away with anything.Consider the political offenses of Truss and Trump against their political trajectories. Trump presided over the separation of migrant parents from their children, advised Americans to inject disinfectants during the deadliest pandemic in a century, told thousands of lies, tried to pass a bill that would take health-care coverage away from roughly 20 million Americans, repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, then incited an attempted authoritarian takeover of the United States government on January 6. Despite all that, Trump’s approval rating barely budged. At his highest, Trump commanded the support of 49 percent of the American electorate. At his lowest, he still had 34 percent on his side. Given that polls have a margin of error of a few percentage points, Trump’s real overall approval rating likely stayed within a band of about 10 percentage points during his entire presidency.Truss, for all her incompetence, was far from the malicious authoritarianism of Trump. She tried to usher in tax cuts for the very wealthy and her plans led to mortgage payments rising for millions, but she didn’t encourage a violent mob to descend on 10 Downing Street, praise racists and dictators, or get people killed with unhinged medical advice. And yet, the only YouGov poll taken during her time in office saw her with the support of just 11 percent of the electorate, whereas 44 percent of voters backed her political party in the last general election.Similarly, Boris Johnson—who was frequently compared to Trump—saw his approval ratings soar and plummet during his time in office. In April 2020, his approval rating reached 66 percent. Just over two years later, his approval rating had hit 23 percent, meaning that he had lost the support of roughly half the people who had voted for him in the first place. And Johnson was ultimately brought down by ethics violations that seem positively quaint compared with the Trump-era scandals and alleged criminality.[From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos]The volatility of public support for leaders functions as a rough proxy for democratic health, with greater swings reflecting a healthier system. Polling volatility is by no means the only measure, but it can offer important clues. The healthiest democracies are home to an electorate in which voters change their minds when the facts change, punishing governments who fail and rewarding those who succeed. But in most American presidential elections, virtually anyone with D or R next to their name can be assured of the support of at least 40 percent of the electorate. Had Truss been a politician in America, she’d still command that level of support.What accounts for the difference, then? Trump intensified American polarization through extraordinarily divisive tactics, turning politics into a sport akin to professional wrestling. Policy mattered less while making “the right people” angry mattered more.America’s media environment is also far more fractured than Britain’s, giving partisans the option to “choose your own reality.” Whenever Trump did something egregious, his supporters could consume a steady diet of commentary that consistently explained why it was a “hoax” or a “deep state” plot, or, if all else failed, that the Democrats were still worse. In Britain, TV and radio are far more regulated and far more centrist. As a result, audiences hear more discussions of how to solve problems than arguments over whether a problem is real or not. And despite Johnson’s infamous shamelessness, it’s clear that shaming politicians still works in the United Kingdom.Finally, British electoral districts are, on the whole, drawn fairly. That has a profound effect on competitiveness, such that hundreds of members of parliament genuinely fear losing their jobs in the next election. In contrast, due to gerrymandering and demographic sorting in the United States, just 31 seats out of 435 in the U.S. House of Representatives are considered a toss-up in the upcoming midterm elections, and only 20 more “lean” Republican or Democrat. That means that 88 percent of the members of the House have nothing to fear from voters, which is not only unhealthy for democracy but also ensures that those elected officials rarely turn on their own. Republicans fear losing a primary if they whisper the mildest criticism of Donald Trump. Tories in Britain feared losing their seats if they whispered praise of Liz Truss.The past six weeks have been disastrous for Britain. Liz Truss will likely be remembered as the worst prime minister in history. But the speed with which she was chucked out is a positive sign for British democracy. Because in order to function properly, democracy requires an electorate of voters who are willing to change their minds.

Calls for negotiations to end Russia’s war with Ukraine tend to be directed more at Kyiv or Washington than Moscow, as if it were the former two that were the main stumbling blocks to peace. Yet it is Vladimir Putin that is demanding that this war leads to a fundamental change in borders and political arrangements – which he has no right, on any reading of international law, to demand. Putin does not preclude talks, but only so long as Russia is allowed to hold on to occupied territory, even territory from which it has had to retreat. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky demands withdrawal, and while at the start of war he might have been ready to go back to the position of 23 February 2022, he now expects to return to the borders of eight years ago – before Russia annexed Crimea.
The problem is not just that this demands gap looks, for the moment, to be unbridgeable but also that Putin has so far refused to scale down his demands to match his diminished position. His past duplicity undermines any confidence Ukraine might have that a deal once reached would be honoured. Not only are the two sets of demands incompatible but there is no trust. There are any number of proposals around describing “deals” that might end the war, as if this was equivalent to a business transaction that could be settled with a handshake. Ending this war in a way that leads to as stable a relationship that is possible between these two countries, after one has been viciously attacked and the other humiliated in battle, will require addressing issues that would be complex under the best of circumstances, and these are the worst.
Those who urge a “deal” based on mutual concessions that has any chance of being turned into treaty language need to recognise that this will not stop the war in short order, because nothing can be agreed or even implemented in short order. We need to think in terms of a two-stage process (and possibly more). This requires separating the fundamental territorial issue, which is now the main driver of the fighting, from all the other consequential issues that will have to be addressed in a proper peace process. When we get to that stage, the main factor influencing the process may well be the sanctions imposed by the West, and this will therefore require a direct role for the US, EU, UK and other interested parties. The first stage may well require mediation and devices such as international observers and even peacekeepers, but it will need to be kept as simple as possible if it is to be linked to a ceasefire.
The early negotiations
In a recent press conference after a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) military alliance in Kazakhstan, Putin answered a question on negotiations. First, he acknowledged that he was being pressed by India and China on the “importance of dialogue and peaceful resolution”. While respecting their position as “our close allies and partners”, he also commented on Kyiv’s position: “[T]hey kept saying they wanted talks, and even sort of asked for them, but have now passed an official decision that bans such talks. Well, what is there to discuss?”
He also repeated a claim that has become something of a theme of Russian propaganda on the subject of negotiations: “We have always said that we are open. We reached certain agreements in Istanbul, after all. These agreements were almost initialed. But as soon as our troops withdrew from Kyiv, the Kyiv authorities lost any interest in the talks. That is all there is to it.”
This claim needs examining, not only because it is relevant to the question of who is to blame for the failure of negotiations thus far. More importantly, it can also help us understand some of the issues that would emerge should negotiations resume.
Direct talks between Ukraine and Russia began a couple of days after the Russian invasion. The gap in objectives was soon evident. Russia claimed that it was ready to stop its military campaign “in a moment”, but that would require not only that Ukraine halt hostilities but also acknowledge Crimea as Russian territory, accept Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, and change its constitution to preclude entry into Nato or the European Union. The demands for Ukraine’s “demilitarisation” and “denazification” were never quite withdrawn.
During this early period it is clear that Zelensky assumed the main concession needed by Putin was a promise not to join Nato. On 8 March, when explaining that he was ready for dialogue, Zelensky explained that “I have cooled down regarding this question a long time ago, after we understood that… Nato is not prepared to accept Ukraine. The alliance is afraid of controversial things and confrontation with Russia.”
He also sounded conciliatory on the question of Donetsk and Luhansk: “I think that items regarding temporarily occupied territories and pseudo-republics not recognised by anyone but Russia, we can discuss and find a compromise on how these territories will live on… What’s important to me is how the people in those territories who want to be part of Ukraine are going to live.” When it came to Crimea he added that he could “not recognise it as the territory of Russia but that it will be difficult for Russia to recognise that this is the territory of Ukraine”. This implied some form of joint sovereignty or shared citizenship.
The first high-level meeting between the two foreign ministers – Ukraine’s Dmytro Kuleba and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov – took place in Turkey on 10 March. Kuleba described the Russian proposals for ending the war as a demand for surrender. Nonetheless, the Ukrainians, including Zelensky, began to sound more hopeful, noting that Russia had moved away from “ultimatums”. There was then a brief moment of optimism, with stories in a number of newspapers, such as the Financial Times, about a 15-point peace plan. The aim appeared to be to draft a document for Zelensky and Putin to sign.
[See also: Iran tests out its deadly weapons on Ukraine]
The core deal put a ceasefire and full Russian withdrawal at the price of Ukraine abandoning plans to join Nato – although the Ukrainian side of this deal appeared to be more developed than the Russian. Zelensky repeated on 15 March his previous point: “It is clear that Ukraine is not a member of Nato. We understand this. For years we heard about the apparently open door, but have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and must be acknowledged.”
Tellingly (and contrary to claims that he opposed the potential deal) the then UK prime minister Boris Johnson, one of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Nato, observed that “everybody has always said – and we’ve made it clear to Putin – there’s no way Ukraine is going to join Nato anytime soon. But the decision about the future of Ukraine has got to be for the Ukrainian people.”
The concession from Russia was apparently that neutrality, while precluding membership of Nato and foreign bases, would not require full demilitarisation. Nonetheless the Ukrainians also wanted security guarantees from other foreign states to prevent attacks on Ukraine. These might not come from Nato and instead from a pool of allies, but it would still offer the main benefit of Nato – security guarantees – without actual membership.
One problematic aspect of these discussions was that, while Russian withdrawal was envisaged, it was not clear how, if at all, this would include Luhansk and Donetsk. And most importantly, whether this would be integral to any deal or could be taken as a separate matter for discussion once a ceasefire was in place.
Part of the optimism then, in addition to the assumption that Nato really was the big issue for Russia, was that Russian forces would be obliged to leave Ukrainian territory soon anyway because Ukrainian forces were fighting back so effectively. Russia had failed to take any cities, was suffering heavy losses in equipment and personnel, and was experiencing unexpectedly severe economic sanctions.
The optimism did not last long. The regular talks failed to make progress. Zelensky proposed direct talks with Putin to end the war: Lavrov said the two sides would need to be much closer to a settlement before there could be direct talks. Moreover there would be procedural issues even if a deal could be reached on neutrality. Any security guarantees, once agreed, would need to be ratified by the guarantors’ parliaments. In addition, Zelensky promised that any deal would be put to a referendum. If agreed it could take up to a year before Ukraine’s constitution could be amended.
It soon became apparent that Ukraine needed to sort out the big territorial questions as part of any deal. Once a ceasefire had been agreed, there would be few incentives in Moscow to discuss the return of any newly occupied territory. The Russians were also pushing for agreements on restoring Crimea’s water supply, pledging not to try to retake the peninsula by force, and the protection of the Russian language in Ukraine. All of this would add to the complexity of any negotiations and the time required for implementation.
Despite the Russian Ministry of Defence’s announcement at the end of March that it would be leaving the area around Kyiv and elsewhere in the north as a “goodwill gesture” to support the peace talks, as opposed to a concession to military realities, the Ukrainians were now disillusioned with the effort. Their chief negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak wrote that: “Any agreement with Russia isn’t worth a broken penny. Is it possible to negotiate with a country that always lies cynically and propagandistically?” Zelensky said the only person worth talking to was Putin, since he made all the decisions. “It doesn’t matter what their foreign minister says. It doesn’t matter that he sends some negotiating group to us… all these people are nobodies, unfortunately.” Discussions continued, with Russia conceding that it was no longer demanding “denazification” (though only Russia thought that Ukraine was “nazified”) and allowing membership of the EU.
When it came to a treaty on neutrality and security guarantees, the Russians lost interest when the Ukrainians brought forward their own draft which diverged significantly from the one they had tabled. By mid-May the talks were effectively over. Lavrov now claimed that the West was using the conflict for its purposes and did not want it to end. More to the point, Ukrainian attitudes were being reshaped and hardened by Russia’s brutal conduct of the war and the evidence of war crimes revealed by the liberation of areas previously occupied by Russian forces near Kyiv. Russia’s focus on taking all of Donbas and not just the two annexed territories, highlighted the territorial issues. On 25 May, Zelensky stressed that Ukrainians are not ready to accept that their land belongs to Russia.
What can we conclude from these early talks? First the reason why the talks failed was not simply because Kyiv abandoned a deal close to signature but because the territorial issues had not been resolved and Russia’s conduct of the war made Ukraine determined to liberate all occupied areas.
Second, the ideas canvassed at this time to address some of the issues at the heart of the war might still be relevant. Those on neutrality and security guarantees were the most mature. But these reflected a misapprehension that the only thing that really mattered to Putin was keeping Ukraine out of Nato, and his objectives in Ukraine were in some way secondary. There were ideas from Kyiv on ways to enable those living in Ukrainian territory to identify as Russian if they so wished but they were less developed, and evinced no interest from Russia – though they might become relevant in the future.
Third, even were these issues addressed in good faith, they could not be settled quickly, and any agreements would take a long time to implement. A full peace negotiation would not necessarily be a quick route to end the fighting.
Discussions about discussions
As it has become clearer that Russia had embarked on a war of conquest it has become even harder to imagine a negotiated solution. If the end-state is to be based on territorial holdings when the fighting stops, both sides have an incentive to keep fighting. Putin has never claimed to be abandoning talks but at all times his terms suppose that he would be negotiating from a position of strength, which he would expect Ukraine to recognise.
(The news outlet Meduza, run by Russian journalists now working out of Riga, has published interesting work on the current thinking about negotiations in both Moscow and Kyiv.)
The line taken by Russians in meetings with foreigners, as with Putin at the CSTO, is that they are ready to talk but only if their conditions are met. On 6 October, the Russian Federation Council speaker Valentina Matvienko proposed inviting Ukraine’s delegation to a preparatory meeting for November’s G20 summit and that the two countries begin peace negotiations “today”. She urged that the two sides should “try to understand each other, find an agreement”. Later however she made it clear that she was not expecting to discuss Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s occupied territories, adding, “We’re willing to put an end to further military action in Ukraine, but on the terms offered by Russia.”
[See also: Will Putin go nuclear?]
There have been reports that Moscow is encouraging the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to convince Ukraine to return to negotiations with Russia. Most intriguingly there has been the so-called Elon Musk plan, proposed by the Tesla billionaire, and short enough to fit into a tweet:
1. Redo elections of annexed regions under UN Supervision. Russia leaves if that is the will of the people.2. Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).3. Water supply to Crimea assured.4. Ukraine remains neutral.
It has been alleged that Musk proposed these ideas after speaking with Putin (although this has been denied). The Russia expert Fiona Hill has reported that Musk was trying these ideas out at various forums during September.
The last three points fit with past Russian demands, and reflects their case for holding on to southern Ukraine in addition to the Donbas. The idea of “redoing” the referendums of the annexed regions is something of a joke given the sham way they were conducted in the first place. It is hard to see how they could be conducted reliably, whatever the UN role, while the Russians were still in occupation (and depopulating the areas) and also fighting to hold on to them. If they were conducted after withdrawal, Russia would soon lose interest.
The Ukrainian view now is that any discussions on “postwar coexistence” depend on Russia completely withdrawing troops from all the territory of Ukraine, including the annexed regions and Crimea. The defence minister Oleksii Reznikov has acknowledged that this is different from Ukraine’s March position, when it was only asking for a return to the positions of 23 February. “Back then, it was possible. But now they have passed more than one point of no return, and this option has long been impossible.” Zelensky now refuses to negotiate with Putin; only with his replacement. The feeling is mutual. Putin does not want to grant Zelensky any legitimacy or status by meeting with him.
All this confirms the conclusion from the earlier talks that even under more propitious conditions there is no obvious basis for a peace settlement and that any attempt to negotiate one will be prolonged and difficult and not provide a quick way to end the fighting.
Ceasefires and disengagement
An alternative approach to a full peace settlement has always been to agree to a ceasefire. This would mean postponing full talks that might lead to a durable settlement. These could then be undertaken under less pressure and without one eye always on what is happening in the battle. Meduza reports that the Kremlin has been considering a scenario in which, instead of a “full-fledged peace treaty”, Ukraine is persuaded to agree to a temporary ceasefire. “Russia’s leaders believe this could be arranged through negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian troops – without the involvement of either country’s president,” the report reads.
It goes on to note that Putin sees the main benefit of this not as a means of ending the war but as part of a “strategy to buy time for training conscripts and replenishing supplies in order to launch a ‘full-scale offensive’ in February or March”. Unsurprisingly, because this thought has also occurred to Kyiv, Ukraine rejects such proposals as a snare and a delusion. Podolyak is quoted as saying in that same Meduza article: “What does a ceasefire give Ukraine, in the Russian scenario? A chance to fix a de facto new line of separation and hastily dig up Russians in the temporarily occupied territories? Can they really believe we’re going to agree to that? Especially against the backdrop of the counteroffensive.
“A clear operational pause for the brutally battered Russian units, so they can at least train a few hastily mobilised soldiers and send a new quantity of death-bound men to the battlefield? What would we want that for?”
Podolyak believes the main Ukrainian interest now is in defeating Russia militarily: “Because that’s the only thing that will allow us to truly end the war, gain the opportunity to brutally punish the war criminals through legal channels, and indirectly facilitate the launch of a scenario in which the Russian political system of Russia itself is transformed.”
All this explains why Ukraine is unlikely to agree to a ceasefire. At the very least it would allow Russia to freeze the existing lines of contact and continue with its occupation. A truce would allow it to prepare for the next stage of the war.
One thing that might change Ukrainian attitudes could be greater Russian success in holding defensive lines and preventing further retreats. But even assuming continued military success for Ukraine, Kyiv needs to develop its own scenario for ending the war. If Russia pushes for a ceasefire under any circumstances, including the fear that it will be pushed back even further, there will be many in the West eager for Ukraine to accept.
Ukraine’s best response to proposals for immediate ceasefires is not to dismiss them out of hand, but to agree that it will ceasefire while Russian forces withdraw back to internationally recognised borders, and that all attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure stop. This could be conducted in principle on a military-to-military basis without Putin and Zelensky being directly involved, when they are unwilling to talk to each other, but also enabling them to reserve their positions on the form that a long-term settlement might take.
Even if this approach was accepted in principle, which probably requires that the Russian high command realises that it is facing an even more calamitous defeat, this is still not necessarily something that could be agreed easily or quickly – just more easily and quickly than a full peace settlement. What is decided at this point would have implications for any future deal. The largest and most obvious issue is Crimea. There would also be questions about whether this was a disengagement agreement, which might be easier for Russia to accept if it meant that Ukrainian forces would not move into the land that Russian forces were leaving. The Ukrainians would be worried that this would leave local people feeling unsafe and uncared for, and also that evidence of war crimes would be lost. It would also require a UN force or something equivalent to move in. There would also be issues about prisoner swaps, which have loomed large in past armistices (although a number of these have already been implemented), and, more difficult, the fate of the many residents, including children, that the Ukrainians believe have been taken from occupied territories.
The next stage would be a proper peace settlement, which would need to define the border between the two countries, agree the status of Crimea, possibly offer measures to deal with residents of Ukraine who might identify more as Russians (far fewer now than before), considers questions of neutrality and security, and address issues of reparations and war crimes. The point about this stage is that other parties would need to be involved simply because it is hard to see how Moscow could agree to much while the many layers of sanctions were still in place. These layers could only be removed with confidence as agreements were being fully implemented. Just stating a possible agenda illustrates the problems facing a conference intended to produce a durable peace.
And that is before the Putin question, the one with which we always seem to end. So long as he remains in power can there be a serious negotiation at all, and will the US, UK and EU feel that they can lift sanctions? The concessions required would probably be too much for Putin to accept but would that mean Russia was left economically and politically isolated?
None of this is predictive, for how all this works out depends on future military and political developments that will shape the bargaining positions of the two sides and how they approach talks. They are, however, all issues that are worth thinking about now.
[See also: Letter from Helsinki: Finland’s challenge to Russia]
Lawrence Freedman is a regular contributor to The New Statesman. A version of this piece originally appeared on his Substack “Comment is Freed“.

Young and old people have different opinions and tastes on everything from fashion to politics. That might sound truistic, but it really matters if we’re trying to work out what the future might look like when today’s twenty-somethings are running our major institutions. This is especially true when looking at the entrepreneurs and innovators who will have an outsized impact on how we live and work.
So, we at The Enterpreneurs Network teamed up with Youth Business International to ask a simple question: What do young entrepreneurs think? How are they different from older entrepreneurs? And what can we do to best support them?
Our main finding is that young entrepreneurs, here defined as those under 35,  are more altruistic than older entrepreneurs. They are twice as likely (39% vs 18%) to say that their business’ primary aim is to solve a social or environmental problem. Interestingly, that figure actually rises to 47% for the most successful entrepreneurs (founders of businesses with a turnover of over £1m). 
It is unclear whether this is because young people of every generation are genuinely more altruistic, and that altruism is something they grow out of, or if this generation is actually more generous-hearted than its predecessors. I suspect both are true. Evidence suggests that adolescents are more sensitive to social pressure than children or adults and, perhaps, that young entrepreneurs in their early twenties will be less agreeable and more antisocial when they are older. But it is also clearly true that as today’s young people have aged, we have seen a rise in pro-social business practices and an increasing focus on ESG metrics and B-Corp accreditation. 
Some theorists suggest that people in wealthier countries hold more universalist ideas and that as your society becomes richer the people expand their moral circles to include people outside of their country, animals and the broader environment. If this is true, then it makes sense that young people are more altruistic. The past was a much poorer country, after all. GDP per capita in the year 2000 was about 10 times higher than it was in the 1970s. Meaning that young people today were born into a world much wealthier than the world of their parents’ – to put it in some context, the difference between then and now is similar to the gap between the UK and Cambodia today.
If there is a concern about this outpouring of entrepreneurial altruism, it’s that it can seem unfocussed. Entrepreneurs who say that the primary purpose of their business is to solve a social or environmental problem (29%) are also more likely to say they choose suppliers that are good for society even if their business suffers (60% vs 37%), and that they focus on promoting diversity at the expense of their business (55% vs 23%), and that they have an important role to make sure their employees have well-rounded lives, even if their work suffers (41% vs 23%).
Socially conscious businesses attract impact investors, altruistic staff, and socially conscious customers, and they may be stuck having to fulfil the wants of their myriad stakeholders, losing sight of their initial vision. If a business is focusing on a major global challenge, like trying to create nuclear cold fusion or finding a cure to diabetes, it should be laser-focused on that aim.
So what can we do to support young entrepreneurs and help them tackle big global issues? In our report we suggest three main policy interventions. 
The first is embracing tried-and-tested ways to help people, of all ages, start and scale businesses. They need access to good networks so they can find people to mentor them, collaborate with, and just so they know the ins and outs of running a business. The second is that we should bring back the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which my co-author Sam Dumitriu has written about before.
The third recommendation is what I think is most relevant to the question about enabling young entrepreneurs to solve big problems. Many of the issues that the world faces have solutions that are difficult to profit from. Say you found a safe way to remove all the excess carbon dioxide from the air, you could reverse much of the damage of climate change and make the world happier and healthier. And while this would make you very popular, it is not clear that you would have paying customers. That makes it difficult to attract the initial investment that you need to do research or build a factory.
Governments often solve these problems for us. They build roads and provide healthcare to people who can’t afford it. If a safe form of carbon capture were invented, governments might choose to pay to use it. But that is far from certain. Governments might simply steal the technology or hope that some other government pays instead – all of which deters investment.
One way around this problem is for governments to credibly commit to buying these technologies if they are created or award Challenge Prizes for their invention. The UK government did this with the Covid-19 vaccine and NASA did something similar to find ways of supplying the international space station.
The advantage of Challenge Prizes is that they are solution-blind. Unlike Innovate UK grants, the Government wouldn’t need to evaluate proposals for blue-sky research and decide what seems like a plausible solution. Instead, we empower entrepreneurs to come up with ideas and then find backers in the private market who believe in their proposal. It’s win-win for taxpayers too because the Government only needs to pay-out if a novel solution really is found.
Today’s young people are the healthiest, best educated and, apparently, most altruistic generation on record. Throughout the world there are bright young minds thinking up clever solutions to the problems we see around us – our role, as policymakers, is to give them the tools they need to deliver.
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The post Entrepreneurs are more altruistic than ever – but how can we help them make good on their ambitions? appeared first on CapX.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.In the 13th canto of “Purgatorio” in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the 14th-century Italian poet describes the ultimate punishment of people who in life had fallen prey to envy, one of the seven deadly sins. He shows them perched precariously on the edge of a cliff. Because envy started with what they saw, their eyes are wired shut. To avoid falling, they must support themselves upon one another, something they never did in life. This is a pretty grim punishment—not surprising, perhaps, given that envy is the only sin that is forbidden by not just one of the Ten Commandments in the Catholic tradition, but two.Perhaps you are less concerned than Dante with punishment in the hereafter. There is plenty of evidence that envy—the resentful longing for what someone else possesses—can give you a little bit of hell or purgatory in the here and now. We all know how envy feels—how it sours our love and desiccates our soul. How it brings out the ugly, spiteful phantasms inside us that take pleasure in the suffering of others for no other reason than that their good fortune makes ours feel insufficient in comparison. As the essayist Joseph Epstein has written, “Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”Envy, in short, is a happiness killer. Unfortunately, it is also completely natural, and no one escapes it entirely. But if you understand it better, you can stop fueling it and step back from that cliff’s edge.The possible explanations for the natural, evolutionary roots of envy are easy to imagine. Social comparison is how we gauge our relative place in society, and thus how we know what to strive for in order to stay competitive for resources and viable in mating markets. When we see that we fall behind others, the pain we feel often spurs us to build ourselves up—or to tear others down. All of this could have been life-and-death in troglodyte times, but it feels largely anachronistic today. You are unlikely to die alone because your social-media posts are less popular than others’. But the pain can still be just as acute.[Read: Margaret Atwood on envy and friendship in old age]How people act in the face of this pain has led some scholars to distinguish between benign envy and malicious envy. The former is miserable, but is met with a desire for self-improvement and to emulate the envied person. In contrast, malicious envy leads to wholly destructive actions, such as hostile thoughts and behavior intended to harm the other person. Benign envy occurs when you believe that admiration for the other person is deserved; malicious envy kicks in when you believe it isn’t. This is why you might envy a famous war hero but wish him no ill, while enjoying the news that a handsome Hollywood actor’s ninth marriage has just failed.Envy—especially when malicious—is terrible for you. To begin with, the pain is real: Neuroscientists find that envying other people stimulates the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with both physical and mental pain. It can also wreck your future. Scholars writing in 2018 in the journal Social Science & Medicine studied 18,000 randomly selected individuals and found that their experience of envy was a powerful predictor of worse mental health and lower well-being in the future. Ordinarily, people become psychologically healthier as they age; envy can stunt this trend. Even though other studies have shown that benign envy might spur your ambition, this one did not find that envy predicted later economic success at all.Different people envy different things. For example, I can see people with fancy boats and cars all day and be utterly unmoved. But show me a full head of hair on a man my age, and well, you might as well set me out on the cliff with my eyes wired shut. Scholars have noted some general patterns in envy, however. For example, some research suggests that what people envy tends to change with age. Young people may be more envious than older folks of educational and social success, good looks, and romantic fortune. Older people generally shrug at these things, but tend to envy people with money. Men and women tend to envy different qualities. According to one pair of studies, men most envy social status and prestige. For women, it was physical attractiveness. For both genders, the second greatest source of envy was success in attracting romantic partners.To feel envy, you need to have exposure to people who appear more fortunate than you. That is simple enough in ordinary interactions. But the conditions of envy explode if we expose people to a wide array of strangers curating their lives to look as glamorous, successful, and happy as possible. Obviously, I am describing social media. In fact, academics have even used the term Facebook envy to capture the uniquely fertile circumstances that social media creates for this destructive emotion. And in experiments, scholars have shown that, indeed, passive Facebook use (although no doubt this is not limited to Facebook) measurably decreases well-being through increased envy.If I could snap my fingers and eradicate envy from my life, I would, and I bet you would too. But envy is natural, and getting rid of it would be impossible for all but perhaps the most enlightened. Cosimo de’ Medici in the 15th century had a more workable approach. He compared envy to a virulent, naturally occurring weed. The job is not to try to eradicate it, which would be futile; rather, he taught, just don’t water it.1. Focus on the ordinary parts of others’ lives.The main way that we water that terrible weed is with our attention. We focus intently on the qualities we want but lack. For example, you might envy an entertainer’s fame and wealth, and imagine how those qualities would make your life so much easier and more fun. But think a little deeper. Do you really believe that entertainer’s life is so great? Is her money and fame bringing a healthy marriage? Does it eliminate her sadness and anger? Probably not; perhaps the contrary.[Read: To be happy, hide from the spotlight]Psychologists have shown that you can use this observation to blunt your envy. In 2017, researchers asked a group to think of demographically similar people whom they considered to have exceptionally good circumstances in their lives. They found that focusing only on these circumstances led to painful contrast with participants’ own lives, and thus to envy. But when they were instructed to think about the everyday ups and downs that these people surely also experienced, envy was diminished.2. Turn off the envy machine.Social media increases envy because it does three things: It shows you the lives of people more fortunate than you; it is easier than ever for anyone to flaunt their good fortune to the masses; and it puts you in the same virtual community as people who are not in your real-life community, making you compare yourself with them. Celebrities’ and influencers’ posts are a particularly potent—and unnecessary—source of envy. The solution is not to ditch social media; it is to unfollow people you don’t know and whose posts you simply look at because they have what you want. Use social media to keep up with real friends, learn interesting and empowering things, and maybe have a few laughs. There’s enough envy among friends—don’t expand it to the world’s population!3. Show your unenviable self.While you are working to curtail your envy of others, stop trying to be envied yourself. Wanting to display your strengths and hide your weaknesses from strangers is natural. This might feel good, but it is a mistake. Obscuring the truth to yourself and others is a path to anxiety and unhappiness. And as my colleague Alison Wood Brooks and her collaborators showed in a 2019 study on entrepreneurs in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, when the participants were honest not just about what they did right but also about how they failed along the way, observers experienced less malicious envy. But be careful: Your failures have to be authentic. So-called humblebragging, in which a boast is disguised as humility, can be perceived a mile off and makes you less likable to others.In 1807, the British poet Mary Lamb wrote a few stanzas on the misery of envy, in which she imagines a rose bush that cannot appreciate its own gifts because it frets about not bearing violets or lilies. She concludes, “Like such a blind and senseless tree / As I’ve imagined this to be, / All envious persons are: / With care and culture all may find / Some pretty flower in their own mind, / Some talent that is rare.”This is probably the best antidote of all to envy: gratitude and appreciation for your own gifts, whatever they may be. Lots of research shows that gratitude extinguishes envy, but you already knew that. So put this knowledge to good use: Next time the hound of envy barks inside you, quiet it with thoughts of the people who love you, the things you enjoy, the good fortune you have had.

Turn on a television in any state with a competitive Senate or gubernatorial race, and you’ll see that the criminal-justice reform agenda is under constant attack.Republicans are pinning higher crime rates on Democrats who have expressed sympathy for almost any aspect of the movement to confront racial inequities in the criminal-justice system. In New York, a conservative super PAC opposing Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul is slamming her for defending “the state’s disastrous cashless bail experiment” and refusing to “remove liberal prosecutors, like [Manhattan’s] Alvin Bragg, who too often downgrade charges for dangerous criminals.” In Pennsylvania, the National Republican Senatorial Committee links John Fetterman to “sanctuary cities, weak prosecutors, crime skyrocketing—failed liberal policies, making us less safe.” In Wisconsin, Republican ads ominously ask, “What happens when criminals are released because bail is set dangerously low?” and accuse Mandela Barnes, the state’s lieutenant governor, of wanting to completely eliminate cash bail (not surprisingly, the full story is more complicated).These attacks assume that the changes in criminal-justice policies that some states and many cities have pursued over the past few years are undermining public safety and fueling higher crime rates.[David A. Graham: America is having a violence wave, not a crime wave]But an exhaustive new study released today by the Center for American Progress refutes that allegation. Conducted by a team of seven academic researchers, the study compares cities that have elected so-called progressive prosecutors with places whose district attorneys continue to pursue more traditional approaches.Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery. “I think it’s really important to emphasize the extent to which we looked for a relationship and found none” between a prosecutors’ commitment to reform and crime rates, Todd Foglesong, a fellow in residence at the University of Toronto and one of the co-authors, told me.The data, from CAP, a liberal think tank and advocacy organization, reinforces the message from a study released earlier this year by Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. That report found that per capita murder rates in 2020 were 40 percent higher in states that voted for Donald Trump than in those that voted for President Joe Biden. The study found that eight of the 10 states with the highest per capita murder rates in 2020 have voted Republican in every presidential election in this century.Progressive prosecutors have made major electoral gains since the mid-2010s, winning elections in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, among other big cities. In a recent interview, Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s aggressively reform-minded DA, told me that about 20 percent of the nation’s population now lives in jurisdictions with a progressive prosecutor, compared with about 10 percent a little more than two years ago and essentially none 10 years ago. Fueled by the mass protests for racial equity that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, these prosecutors have pursued a range of common policies, including reducing reliance on cash bail, prosecuting fewer (or no) juveniles as adults, diverting more nonviolent offenders from prison to treatment programs, discouraging prosecution of quality-of-life violations associated with homelessness (such as public urination), and prosecuting more police misbehavior.But rising crime rates—and, just as important, a sense of disorder linked to pervasive homelessness in multiple big cities—have forced the movement onto the defensive. San Francisco voters recalled Chesa Boudin, their progressive DA; polls showed that George Gascón, the like-minded Los Angeles district attorney, had a very good chance of being removed as well if opponents had collected enough valid signatures to qualify their recall effort. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled state legislature in Pennsylvania, citing Philadelphia’s high homicide rate, is exploring whether to impeach Krasner (although he, and other legal scholars, say it lacks the legal authority to remove him).Amid this storm, the CAP study represents probably the most comprehensive attempt yet to quantify the progressive prosecutors’ effect on crime rates. Looking at the period from 2015 to 2019, for instance, the study found that murder rates increased in a smaller share of cities with progressive prosecutors (56 percent) than in those with traditional prosecutors (68 percent) or prosecutors who fell in the middle (62 percent). (The study used a classification system for local DAs developed by a former federal prosecutor who is a critic of the progressive movement.) What’s more, the absolute number of murders increased by more in the cities with traditional and moderate prosecutors than in those with progressive ones. When homicide rates jumped from 2020 to 2021, the study found, the increase was slightly lower in the cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with traditional prosecutors.[Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin]Similarly, the study found that from 2018 to 2021, robberies fell about as much in the cities with progressive prosecutors (down 5 percent) as they did in those with traditional DAs (down 8 percent). Trends in larceny looked about the same in both kinds of cities as well.Foglesong told me that, despite all the political fire directed at progressive prosecutors, it shouldn’t be surprising that their choices haven’t exerted a notable influence on crime rates. Police make arrests only in a relatively small percentage of offenses, he said, and typically only about half of arrests result in prosecution (because of lack of witnesses or other factors). Small shifts in how prosecutors handle the very limited circle of cases that result in actual charges, Foglesong said, are mathematically too incidental to affect a community’s overall crime rate.Conversely, it remains an open question whether the progressive prosecutors are advancing their stated goals of reducing the justice system’s racial bias. Foglesong said that although “some signs of evidence” point toward fewer racial disparities in charging practices, those trends have not been “thoroughly researched yet.”But as the CAP report notes, the political problem for progressive prosecutors is that there’s no clear alternative explanation for rising crime.  And so long as that’s true, the authors write, criminal-justice reforms will remain a tempting target, as the 2022 electoral season is dramatically demonstrating. “Our sense is that answers assigning blame to prosecutors and their policy changes will remain attractive in the absence of a more credible account of the interactions between crime and justice,” the authors conclude.In fact, few areas of social science generate as much dispute—or as great a tendency for researchers to throw up their hands in uncertainty—as the long-term cycles of rising and falling crime. Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, told me we know “not anywhere near as much as we should for a problem that is as pervasive and destructive to lives and families and communities, and ultimately to our democracy.”The overarching trend in crime rates shows a significant decline from the heights of the early 1990s through roughly the middle of the last decade. Nationwide, according to federal statistics analyzed by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, the per capita homicide rate fell by more than half from 1991 through 2014, as did the per capita rate for all violent crimes. After 2014, though, the decline reversed, and both homicides and all violent crimes edged back up through 2016.The rates then roughly stabilized again for the next few years, before exploding during the pandemic. Though both homicide and violent-crime rates remained far below their peaks in the 1990s, each was significantly higher in 2020 than at the low point in 2014. Murder rates continued to rise in 2021, though as the CAP report authors note, more slowly than in 2020 in every city experiencing increases.The picture for 2022 is, as usual, complex. In a midyear tabulation of crime trends, the Council on Criminal Justice found that despite continued high incidence in some cities, the overall number of homicides slightly declined through this year’s first half (though they remained well above the pre-pandemic levels of 2019). But the data found that aggravated assaults and robberies increased from 2021, as did multiple measures of theft, including residential burglaries and motor-vehicle thefts. At the height of the pandemic, as the council noted, homicide increased and property crime fell; now those patterns have essentially reversed.Criminologists broadly agree on the reasons behind some of these long-term shifts. Gelb can rapidly tick off the accepted explanations for the decline from the 1990s through the early 2010s: the waning of the crack epidemic, more effective policing (through the adoption of community policing), a better economy, more sophisticated anti-theft and security technology, and more incarceration of dangerous offenders. (More liberal analysts dispute that final point.)[Jeff Asher: The FBI’s next set of crime data is going to be a big mess]There’s also broad agreement that the pandemic itself was a crucial driver for the historic increases in homicide during 2020, though the exact mechanism for that isn’t clear. (One explanation is that shutdowns disrupted government services and increased the social isolation of the young people most prone to violence.)But although competing theories abound (such as more guns or less conscientious policing amid increased scrutiny of their behavior), there’s no real consensus about why crime picked up again starting around 2014. Nor is there any consensus on whether it will now recede from its pandemic heights.Rick Rosenfeld, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and one of the authors of the CAP study, told me some evidence suggests that homicide rates have peaked. But property crime is likely to continue rising, he said, largely because the high price of conventional goods amid soaring inflation has increased the market for lower-cost stolen goods, which creates more incentives to steal. “We live in a multicausal world,” Rosenfeld, a former president of the American Society of Criminology, told me. “Some things may be pushing up crime rates at the same time other things are pushing them down.”“Multicausal” is far from the world most Democratic candidates are living in these final weeks before Election Day. The CAP study makes a thorough case that the new policies the progressive prosecutors are implementing can’t be blamed for the rising incidence of crime. But the slugfest on the campaign trail underscores an equally important truth: that as long as crime rates are elevated, those criminal-justice reforms will remain politically vulnerable anyway.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about a ridiculous Nature article titled, “Outcry as Men Win Outsize Share of Australian Medical-Research Funding.” Its author, Holly Else, appeared to welcome a petition calling for the imposition of gender quotas on the awarding of “investigator grants” by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). The petition was created by two female biology researchers and concluded with this:We are calling on the NHMRC to improve equity for women in STEMM by allocating the same amount of funding to each gender (including a separate pot for non-binary applicants) and to set quotas at each of the Investigator Grant (fellowship) levels for each gender to ensure that all academic levels are supported with equity. Please sign with your support for equitable funding for women in STEMM.Those who read past Nature’s inflammatory heading, however, encountered facts that belied the apparent need for gender quotas. “At the most junior level,” Else reported, “women as a whole secured equal amounts of funding to men.” It was only in the most senior area where a disparity in the opposite direction appeared. In that quintile, women received just over 20 percent of funding, while men received almost 80 percent.This would represent a serious and potentially inappropriate skewing of funding, but for the fact that at the senior level there were four times more male than female applicants—corresponding almost exactly to the funding split. So, the probability of receiving funding was essentially identical for male and female applicants, with no evidence of gender disparities in grant success rates. Why, then, are there more men applying for funding at the senior level? The most obvious answer is also the most simple—there are more men than women in the senior ranks of Australia’s health and medical researchers. This reflects the fact that scientific fields were, until a few decades ago, almost entirely dominated by men. That era is now over, and Australian medical schools have achieved gender parity, which is reflected in the funding of male and female researchers in mid and junior ranks today.So, it appears that funding reflects gender demographics in a reasonably predictable way, and demonstrates a clear move toward gender equality. Moreover, to address any further misconceptions about gender imbalances, the NHMRC CEO Anne Kelso added last year that funding rates for men and women were nearly equal in regards to the NHMRC’s entire $1.1 billion budget. (Those concerned about sexism at NHMRC should bear in mind that, of its CEO, general manager, and three executive directors, only one is a man.)In spite of this evidence, the activists behind the “Fund Women in STEM Equitability” petition demanded a systemic gender bias in favor of females (and, without any obvious rationale, in favor of non-binary applicants as well) by the NHMRC. That bias has now been officially instituted. Last week, the NHMRC announced plans to award half of its research grants for researchers at the mid-career and senior level to women and non-binary applicants.‘Game-changing’ gender quotas introduced by Australian research agencyFrom next year, the National Health and Medical Research Council will give half of its investigator grants for mid-career and senior scientists to women and non-binary applicants.NatureBianca NogradyAnna-Maria Arabia, chief executive of the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra, has already called the new policy a “game-changer,” which she believes will address the “significant under-representation of women at senior levels.” A more rational approach might have been to address that under-representation directly by simply allowing the natural promotion process for the current equitable crop of female junior researchers to run its course. Any remaining inequities in funding demographics could then be investigated for bias before resorting to gender quotas.The NHMRC is no stranger to gender preferences for female applicants, however. In 2017, it introduced “structural priority funding,” which reserves additional money—around eight percent of the overall grant budget—for high-quality “near-miss” research applications led by women. Amazingly, they are continuing this policy, even for junior-level researchers, where the gender imbalance has already been reversed! From 2019–21, more applications for investigator grants at the earliest career stage came from women, who were awarded 137 grants compared to 123 for men. Remarkably, with regard to this latter statistic, CEO Kelso stated, “We found that we hardly needed to use any structural priority funding for the more junior levels.”Gender politics seem to have trumped basic standards of fairness when it comes to support of STEM research, at least in Australia. The inclusion of non-binary applicants in the new regulations offers a clear indication of this shift. Nowhere in the claimed disparities has there been any evidence of bias for or against this group. The inane preoccupation with bean counting based on gender or identity may seem appealing on the surface as an attempt to ensure “equity,” but equity really ought to imply equal treatment of all individuals, irrespective of their gender or other aspects of their self-identity.The national consultation on options to reach gender equity in the Investigator Grant scheme informed the development of gender equity initiatives to commence in 2023. Thank you to everyone who contributed during the consultation period. https://t.co/Jjp4CairZ8 https://t.co/AzFNgQwJOz— Professor Anne Kelso (@ceo_nhmrc) October 12, 2022
Equal opportunity, not equal outcome, should be the goal of a free society. What the NHMRC is now doing, by capitulating to an activist group of petitioners, is quite the opposite. Assuming that next year’s applicant pool is not significantly different than this year’s, senior female researchers will be favored in the selection process compared to males by a factor of four to one in order to achieve equal grant reception. As I argued a year ago, quotas have a chequered history, and were often used to discriminate against minorities rather than assist them: Today, we properly regard such policies as shameful, both for discriminating against individual human beings and for misdirecting society’s scientific resources. Medical science is a life-and-death endeavor, and decisions about how that science should be funded must be based on the quality of research proposals, not the skin color or sex of those submitting them.Last year I was protesting a flawed proposal. This year, that flawed proposal has become policy.Note: This article is also appears on the Critical Mass Susbtack.

Shortly before the Government’s ill-fated budget, I had coffee with a Conservative MP who was keen to stress that the Tory party was heading towards disaster. It isn’t going to work, the MP told me, likening Truss’s breakneck dash for growth to the Barber budget of 1971, which created sudden unsustainable GDP growth followed by a calamitous economic crash — “a naive, irresponsible gamble”, as Dominic Sandbrook has it, “based on rosily optimistic predictions that were never, ever vindicated”. The MP was right, up to a point: we got the bust without the intervening boom.
Instead, Truss’s dash for growth spooked the markets, which disbelieved her tax cuts could ever create enough growth to pay for her massive borrowing, and in a desperate attempt to mollify them we’ve been suddenly plunged back to the grim economics of austerity. Learning nothing from the last time, public spending will be slashed, along with investment in research and development, hobbling prospects of future growth. At this stage, and in such a deteriorating international climate, a return to stagnation would seem almost like a blessed relief. But there’s another way of looking at the problem, as the MP wondered out loud: “do normal people even care about growth anyway?”
It’s a good question. As the authors of The Future is Degrowth remind us, despite being taken for granted by economists and ordinary people alike, GDP growth as a measure of economic health is a very recent phenomenon, the product of the need to measure the success of investment and to track industrial capacity during the Second World War. As they observe: “Before 1950, there was almost no interest at all in economic growth as a policy goal in political statements or economic literature.” Rather, full employment, stability and reconstruction were the government’s priorities.

The one-off conjunction of spectacular growth rates and rising living standards following the Second World War led, they argue, to a folk association of GDP growth and personal prosperity. As they argue: “The fact that key democratic, social, and cultural rights were… fought for in the context of expansive modernity, and that within the growth paradigm societal progress became conflated with GDP growth, has laid the foundation for a powerful common sense, based on lived experience, that social improvements do indeed require economic growth and the development of the productive forces.”
It’s not an unreasonable deduction: of course, post-war “high growth rates did translate to a certain democratisation of prosperity”. Yet the relationship between GDP growth and prosperity is far from exact. Britain’s economy grew 7.5% last year as we came out of lockdown, dwarfing the post-war boom, though few would claim we’ve never had it so good as in the halcyon days of 2021. The highest ever upward GDP swing came in 1939 as Britain pivoted to a war economy, though the Second World War was hardly a golden era of mass prosperity. At the peak of Britain’s industrial, economic and political might in the 19th century, growth rates averaged 1.1% — significantly below GDP growth during the 2010s, commonly experienced as an era of stagnation and falling living standards. The unsettling prospect of an imminent nuclear exchange would, after what would admittedly be a sharp fall in GDP, surely unlock a great deal of potential for long-term economic growth as the survivors rebuilt Europe’s irradiated ruins. Most people would, nevertheless, prefer it not to happen. There are, simply, many more aspects to prosperity than abstract GDP growth: the map is not the territory.
More from this authorLiz Truss has betrayed conservatismBy Aris Roussinos
So much for the abstract: in the real world, living standards are dropping sharply, as public spending cuts have led to a collapsing health service, creaking transport infrastructure and the police’s withdrawal from their basic functions of providing law and order. The stratospheric upward rise in housing costs functions, on paper, as GDP growth, even as it erodes actual prosperity. Desperate attempts to make the line go up on the chart — whether through Thatcher’s sell-off of public assets, the shifting of industrial production to the Far East, or the conversion of Western economies to debt-fueled speculative bubbles — have all brought temporary bursts of GDP growth even as they made the economy’s fundamentals weaker and brought lower living standards in their wake. We need a different way. The problem is, no-one agrees what that way is.
It is reasonable to assume, as has now swiftly become common opinion, that just as the economic crash of the Seventies swung the pendulum of economic orthodoxy away from Keynesianism towards free-market capitalism, so is the pendulum now swinging violently back away from what it is politically useful to term “libertarianism”. But to what?
The Labour Party, after some prevarication, seems to have settled on a modest version of the Green New Deal, an attempt to revive economic growth through massive investment in sustainable technologies. In doing so, it has emulated Biden’s Green Neo-Keynesianism, emphasising that once again, where American politics leads, economic orthodoxy eventually follows. Whether or not such a course of action will save the planet — and the reality is that there is no obvious replacement for fossil fuels without massive expansion of nuclear energy — the Green New Deal can be understood as an attempt to restart the stuttering engine of GDP growth through a second industrial revolution, this time undoing the unintended consequences of the first.
Will it work? Whether or not the markets will look as favourably on a Starmer government’s push for green industrial investment as it does those of America remains to be seen. There is a great danger that Truss’s botched push for growth has queered the pitch for any future radical attempt to escape stagnation. But then, if we disentangle the quest for prosperity from that for GDP growth, the answer is that it almost doesn’t matter.
Suggested readingKwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of cleverBy Dominic Sandbrook
If the country has a reliable energy supply, has the industrial capacity to sustain the levels of technological sophistication to which we are accustomed, and can provide secure food and housing to its population, the hard years we are entering may still be experienced as an era of basic comfort. As a number of economists have declared, the age of growth may, in any case, have already gone for good, with all the advanced economies following Japan into a long cycle of secular stagnation, at best a broadly comfortable steady state economy with no dramatic peaks or troughs. As the “post-growth” economist Tim Jackson observes: “Low (and declining) rates of economic growth may well be the ‘new normal’.”
Such a vision accords with the vision of the sociologist Michael Mann, who, in the 2013 book Does Capitalism Have a Future?, breaks sharply with the predictions of his co-authors that global capitalism will collapse some time between 2030 and 2050. Instead, he argues: “Why should a growth rate of 1% be a capitalist crisis? Why cannot capitalism continue as a low-growth global system, which it was for much of its history? The 20th century — more precisely, the period 1945 to 1970 in the West and the end of the 20th century in the East — would then be seen as exceptional.” Even China’s spectacular growth rate “might be reduced down to the 1% level of the historic British success story” so that “all of humanity might live in an almost steady-state economy”. The future of capitalism, he suggests, “might not be tumultuous, but boring”.
But in the current international climate, steady and boring would look like an almost unattainable win. In general terms, despite every desperate attempt for a quick fix, the global economy has never recovered the sustained growth rates of the post-war era, and probably never will. Battered by the Seventies’ oil crisis, the global financial crash of 2008, the response to Covid and now by the war in Ukraine, the world economy still has the effects of the looming conflict between the US and China to prepare for, along with the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change.
It is just as possible, indeed probably more likely, that we have entered an age of growing, compound crisis. Almost a decade ago, the authors of Does Capitalism Have a Future? warned that “something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession”. As we await the blackouts and disorder of the coming winter, and try not to think about the prospects of nuclear war, it would be reasonable to act on the assumption this crisis has already begun.
Suggested readingThe Tories are the anti-growth coalitionBy James Sean Dickson
In these bleak circumstances, a focus on shoring up near-term national resilience ought to take precedence over the prioritising of long-term growth. When the confrontation between the United States and China begins — and the US government is now briefing that the invasion of Taiwan can be expected sooner than we thought — none of the current market orthodoxies will still apply. Whatever economic plans are laid now, no matter how palatable they are to the markets, will not survive.
In planning his invasion of Ukraine, Putin evidently priced in Western sanctions and Russia’s ejection from the international banking sector, gambling that its vast mineral resources and energy resources would count for more in the world today than the economic commonsense of yesterday. As winter approaches, it is not yet clear that Putin has lost this bet: like the First World War, the conflict in Ukraine makes no conventional economic sense, but has created its own new reality. Similarly, to win a protracted Pacific war against the greatest industrial power in human history, the United States would have to reorient its entire economy around the war effort. The panicked reactions of the market to Truss’s mini-budget no more reflect the approaching colossal reordering of the global economy than Westminster lobby gossip and Downing Street psychodrama reflect the great geopolitical trends already reshaping the world around us.
At times like this, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the End of History. Like youth, it will not come again. It would have been far better if the decades of bad decisions that brought us here had not been made. But they were, and now we must suffer the consequences as best we can. Even the years of austerity following the 2008 crash now seem a lost hinterland of wasted opportunity: we could have invested in state capacity to see us through the hard years we have now entered. We could have expanded gas storage facilities, instead of shutting them down. We could have built nuclear power plants, high-speed rail, and all the infrastructure on which modern life in a developed nation depends, at a time when borrowing costs were practically non-existent.
Instead, we feel the absence of investment just when we need state capacity the most, and are least able to afford it. Like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, we frittered away the summer without providing for the winter to come, and now we shudder as the first cold winds begin to whip around us. But at least the line on the chart went up, a little, as the government of the day reassured the markets.
More from this authorCan Europe survive the age of strongmen?By Aris Roussinos
Just as we now perceive that we should have used better times to prepare for today, so it will swiftly become clear that we should be using the time we have now to prepare for the worse ones fast approaching. What we perceive as crisis is still a period of relative normality. At a time when the international situation is as menacing as it is, it would be comforting to have, at the barest minimum, a functioning government. Instead, we have Liz Truss, sitting on the front bench staring blankly into space as her party and country crumble around her.
Is she in charge? Is anyone? It ought to be impossible for Truss to blame the deteriorating international situation for her political woes without also proposing some measures to mitigate Britain’s exposure to the global crisis. But instead she broke her premiership and the country’s government chasing GDP growth it may never have been in her power to attain.
When Starmer wins the next election, he will be required to spend vast sums of money in rebuilding Britain’s decayed infrastructure, fixing the roof while the rains lash down. Given the international situation, Labour is correct in framing its proposed investment in infrastructure as much as a question of national security as a path to economic growth. Debt will grow, and it will have to: survival comes first, and abstract economic growth must be subordinated to this very basic goal. When even Europe’s economic giant, Germany, is trying to stave off industrial collapse, the idea that growth can be attained in the current circumstances seems entirely divorced from reality.
As eminent American economists now emphasise, near-wartime situations such as ours are not won with peacetime economies: the old rules do not apply. In any case, the feeble growth we experienced in recent years accumulated at the top, without bringing mass prosperity: voters are unlikely to punish a government that offers them higher living standards through redistribution, even without GDP growth. In the absence of growth, Labour must provide the basics of common comfort: if people can still eat, heat their homes and shelter themselves from the weather, they will count themselves prosperous, even if the GDP charts say otherwise.
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Last week, just a couple of hours into a house-sitting stint in Massachusetts for my cousin and his wife, I received from them a flummoxed text: “Dude,” it read. “We are the only people in masks.” Upon arriving at the airport, and then boarding their flight, they’d been shocked to find themselves virtually alone in wearing masks of any kind. On another trip they’d taken to Hawaii in July, they told me, long after coverings became optional on planes, some 80 percent of people on their flight had been masking up. This time, though? “We are like the odd man out.”Being outside of the current norm “does not bother us,” my cousin’s wife said in another text, despite stares from some of the other passengers. But the about-face my cousin and his wife identified does mark a new phase of the pandemic, even if it’s one that has long been playing out in fits and starts. Months after the vanishing of most masking mandates, mask wearing has been relegated to a sharply shrinking sector of society. It has become, once again, a peculiar thing to do.“If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” President Joe Biden declared last month on 60 Minutes. That’s an overstatement, but not by much: According to the COVID States Project, a large-scale national survey on pandemic-mitigation behaviors, the masking rate among Americans bounced between around 50 and 80 percent over the first two years of the pandemic. But since this past winter, it’s been in a slide; the project’s most recent data, collected in September, found that just 29 percent have been wearing masks outside the home. This trend may be long-standing on the population level, but for individuals—and particularly for those who still wear masks, such as my cousin and his wife—it can lead to moments of abrupt self-consciousness. “It feels like it’s something that now needs an explanation,” Fiona Lowenstein, a journalist and COVID long-hauler based in Los Angeles, told me. “It’s like showing up in a weird hat, and you have to explain why you’re wearing it.”Now that most Americans can access COVID vaccines and treatments that slash the risk of severe disease and death, plenty of people have made informed decisions to relax on masking—and feel totally at ease with their behavior while paying others’ little mind. Some are no longer masking all the time but will do so if it makes others feel more comfortable; others are still navigating new patterns, trying to stay flexible amid fluctuating risk. Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me that she’s now more likely to doff her mask while dining or working out indoors, but that she leaves it on when she travels. And when she does decide to cover up, she said, she’s “definitely felt like more of an outlier.”For some, like my cousin and his wife, that shift feels slightly jarring. For others, though, it feels more momentous. High-filtration masks are one of the few measures that can reliably tamp down on infection and transmission across populations, and they’re still embraced by many parents of newborns too young for vaccines, by people who are immunocompromised and those who care for them, and by those who want to minimize their risk of developing long COVID, which can’t be staved off by vaccines and treatments alone. Theresa Chapple-McGruder, the public-health director for Oak Park, Illinois, plans to keep her family masking at least until her baby son is old enough to receive his first COVID shots. In the meantime, though, they’ve certainly been feeling the pressure to conform. “People often tell me, ‘It’s okay, you can take your mask off here,’” Chapple-McGruder told me; teachers at the local elementary school have said similar things to her young daughters. Meghan McCoy, a former doctor in New Hampshire who takes immunosuppressive medications for psoriatic arthritis and has ME/CFS, has also been feeling “the pressure to take the mask off,” she told me—at her kid’s Girl Scout troop meetings, during trips to the eye doctor. “You can feel when you’re the only one doing something,” McCoy said. “It’s noticeable.”[Read: Mask mandates are illogical. So what?]For Chapple-McGruder, McCoy, and plenty of others, the gradual decline in masking creates new challenges. For one thing, the rarer the practice, the tougher it is for still-masking individuals to minimize their exposures. “One-way masking is a lot less effective,” says Gabriel San Emeterio, a social worker at Hunter College who is living with HIV and ME/CFS. And the less common masking gets, the more conspicuous it becomes. “If most people met me, they wouldn’t know I was immunocompromised,” McCoy told me. “There’s no big sign on our foreheads that says ‘this person doesn’t have a functioning immune system.’” But now, she said, “masks have kind of become that sign.”Aparna Nair, a historian and disability scholar at the University of Oklahoma who has epilepsy, told me that she thinks masks are becoming somewhat analogous to wheelchairs, prosthetics, hearing aids, and her own seizure-alert dog, Charlie: visible tools and technologies that invite compassion, but also skepticism, condescension, and invasive questions. During a recent rideshare, she told me, her driver started ranting that her mask was unnecessary and ineffective—just part of a “conspiracy.” His tone was so angry, Nair said, that she began to be afraid. She tried to make him understand her situation: I’ve been chronically ill for three decades; I’d rather not fall sick; better to be safe than sorry. But she said that her driver seemed unswayed and continued to mutter furiously under his breath for the duration of the ride. Situations of that kind—where she has to litigate her right to wear a mask—have been getting more common, Nair told me.Masking has been weighed down with symbolic meaning since the start of the pandemic, with some calling it a sign of weakness and others a vehicle for state control. Americans have been violently attacked for wearing masks and also for not wearing them. But for a long time, these tensions were set against the backdrop of majority masking nationwide. Local mask mandates were in place, and most scientific experts wore and championed them in public. With many of those infrastructural supports and signals now gone, masking has rapidly become a minority behavior—and people who are still masking told me that that inversion only makes the tension worse.San Emeterio, who wears a vented respirator when they travel, recently experienced a round of heckling from a group of men at an airport, who started to stare, laugh, and point. Oh my god, look at what he’s wearing, San Emeterio recalls the strangers saying. “They clearly meant for me to hear it,” San Emeterio told me. “It didn’t make me feel great.” Alex Mawdsley, the 14-year-old son of an immunocompromised physician in Chicago, is one of just a handful of kids at his middle school who are still masking up. Since the start of the academic year, he’s been getting flak from several of his classmates “at least once a week,” he told me: “They’re like ‘You’re not gonna get COVID from me’ and ‘Why are you still wearing that? You don’t need it anymore.’”Alex’s mother, Emily Landon, told me she’s been shaken by the gawks and leers she now receives for masking. Even prior to the pandemic, and before she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and began taking immunosuppressive drugs, she considered herself something of a hygiene stan; she always took care to step back from the sneezy and sniffy, and to wipe down tray tables on planes. “And it was never a big deal,” she said.[Read: Put your face in airplane mode]It hasn’t helped that the donning of masks has been repeatedly linked to chaos and crisis—and their removal, to triumph. Early messaging about vaccines strongly implied that the casting away of masks could be a kind of post-immunization reward. In February, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky described masks as “the scarlet letter of this pandemic.” Two months later, when the administration lifted its requirements for masking on public transportation, passengers on planes ripped off their coverings mid-flight and cheered.To reclaim a mask-free version of “normalcy,” then, may seem like reverting to a past that was safer, more peaceful. The past few years “have been mentally and emotionally exhausting,” Linda Tropp, a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. Discarding masks may feel like jettisoning a bad memory, whereas clinging to them reminds people of an experience they desperately want to leave behind. For some members of the maskless majority, feeling like “the normal ones” again could even serve to legitimize insulting, dismissive, or aggressive behavior toward others, says Markus Kemmelmeier, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno.It’s unclear how the masking discourse might evolve from here. Kemmelmeier told me he’s optimistic that the vitriol will fade as people settle into a new chapter of their coexistence with COVID. Many others, though, aren’t so hopeful, given the way the situation has unfolded thus far. “There’s this feeling of being left behind while everyone else moves on,” Lowenstein, the Los Angeles journalist and long-hauler, told me. Lowenstein and others are now missing out on opportunities, they told me, that others are easily reintegrating back into their lives: social gatherings, doctor’s appointments, trips to visit family they haven’t seen in months or more than a year. “I’d feel like I could go on longer this way,” Lowenstein said, if more of society were in it together.Americans’ fraught relationship with masks “didn’t have to be like this,” Tropp told me—perhaps if the country had avoided politicizing the practice early on, perhaps if there had been more emphasis on collective acts of good. Other parts of the world, certainly, have weathered shifting masking norms with less strife. A couple of weeks ago, my mother got in touch with me from one such place: Taiwan, where she grew up. Masking was still quite common in public spaces, she told me in a text message, even where it wasn’t mandated. When I asked her why, she seemed almost surprised: Why not?

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekA child born today will turn 18 in 2040. What attitudes and actions toward race and ethnicity would we adopt today if we had the best interests of that rising generation in mind?Conversations of NoteLos Angeles erupted in protests last week after covertly recorded audio emerged of three city council members, Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, and Kevin de León, conversing with a labor leader about how to manipulate the municipality’s once-per-decade redistricting process. They sought to increase the political power of Latino politicians at the expense of other groups––and managed to speak about Black people, Oaxacans, Armenians, Jews, Koreans, and white people in ways so glaringly offensive that people on all sides of the culture wars were united in disgust.“This entire ugly incident blows a massive hole in the narrative that many would like to believe about Los Angeles—and about California—being some sort of multicultural mecca, where Black and brown people build alliances to work together in solidarity toward solving problems,” Erika D. Smith wrote in the Los Angeles Times. (White Angelenos are also engaged in that problem-solving project, but set that aside.) “It’s true that South L.A., once a stronghold for Black Angelenos, is no longer that. Today, Latino residents make up roughly half of L.A.’s population but represent less than a third of the council’s districts. That raises questions about fair representation. But the answer cannot be a city run by Latinos only for Latinos.”Many people would agree with that conclusion––but there are significant disagreements about the root causes of what went wrong on the Los Angeles City Council and how best to move forward.“We have had a long-running debate in this country over how to think about racial categories,” David Brooks wrote in The New York Times. In his telling, one side sees American society “as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. They center race and race consciousness when talking about a person’s identity. Justice will come when minority group power is used to push back on white supremacy.” Another side argues that “racial categorization itself can be the problem,” because racial categorization was a crude lie from the start, and so long as it is an organizing foundation of our politics, essentialist bigotries will follow.I see why some people sense the pernicious ideology of white supremacy in the recordings. Councilman Mike Bonin, who is white, has an adopted Black son who is 3 years old. The kid was apparently being rambunctious, as toddlers are wont to do, on a parade float. “They’re raising him like a little white kid,” Martinez said on the recording. “I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner, and then I’ll bring him back.” Was she suggesting that Black children require beatings by their parents in a way that isn’t true of white children?What’s more, Martinez used a Spanish word for “monkey” to refer to the child and told her colleagues that Oaxacans, who hail from a region of Mexico with a large indigeneous population, are short, dark, and ugly. “In Mexican culture there’s always been colorism,” Erika Aquino, an immigrant from a village in Oaxaca, told the Los Angeles Times. “Myself, as a brown person, I have always felt and seen how our own kind sometimes favor someone of lighter skin. It’s always been an issue. And I think more hurtful when it comes from someone you know is your own.”White supremacy and colorism should be opposed wherever they arise.Still, I agree with Brooks that “if we use rhetoric that assumes that we’re all locked into rigid racial blocs and that group conflict is the essential element of public life, then group conflict is what we will get—Balkanization on a continental scale.” Across time and cultures, humans have discriminated against those they regard as “other” and––for better or worse––who we regard as “other” is highly malleable. If we center racial identity in municipal politics, so that people regard candidates of the same race as “us” and those of different races as “them,” prejudice and bigotry will follow, even if white supremacy is utterly eradicated.After all, there are many kinds of prejudice and bigotry.As Karen Stenner, a social psychologist who studies authoritarian personality types, once put it, “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone Blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings,” though anti-Black, ideological racists do of course exist, and humans are harmed regardless of what in particular drives intolerance toward them. “Ultimately,” Stenner found in her fieldwork and the data generated from it, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”How ought we handle these issues in a world with difference-ism in it?“I do understand that politics is a full contact sport and that it divides people into groups,” Charles M. Blow writes. “Sometimes those groupings are around policy and vision. Sometimes they are around more basic things like identity and culture. To be clear, I believe in representative distribution of political power. Los Angeles is nearly half Latino. There should be strong, unapologetic Latino political power in that city. In fact, underrepresentation is a problem that continues to plague the Latino community.”Los Angeles should never return to the all-white city leadership of its white-supremacist past. But given that Black Angelenos are currently overrepresented on the city council relative to their population, Blow’s logic would seem to imply that some of those councilmembers ought to step down, because if any racial group is overrepresented then another is underrepresented. Insofar as race is the organizing factor in L.A. politics and underrepresentation is seen as a plague, city politics will involve zero-sum competition along racial lines.  The Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian focused on this exchange from the recording:
City Councilman Kevin de León spoke of what he called the “Wizard of Oz” effect. Black Angelenos, he implied, are overrepresented in the city’s corridors of power, because they make so much noise. “When you’re at the side of the curtain, it’s like this big voice, it sounds big,” De León tells his colleagues. “It sounds like there’s thousands. And then, when you actually pull the curtain, is that you see the little Wizard of Oz. You know what? It’s the same thing.”
Labor leader Ron Herrera, who has since resigned, agrees that Latinos have more voting power than Black Angelenos: “It’s real simple,” he says. “You have 100 people, 52 of them are Mexicanos … I feel pretty good about my chances of beating your ass.”
City Councilmember Gil Cedillo then pipes up. “Twenty-five or so are Black, and the 25 Blacks are shouting.”
“But,” says De León, “they shout like they are 250, when there’s 100 of us.”
That’s what hyper-focus on representative distribution of political power yields in practice, at least when the elected officials aren’t aware that anyone else is listening: aggrieved resentment any time one racial group in the city achieves influence that another racial group covets. What’s more, if by magic the L.A. City Council always corresponded perfectly to the racial demographics of Los Angeles, that wouldn’t mean the body was actually representative of Angelenos unless one presumes phenotype is more important than other characteristics. For example, “while renters account for 63 percent of occupied housing units in L.A. and represent a majority in 12 of L.A.’s 15 council districts,” L.A. Curbed reports, “none of L.A.’s councilmembers are renters,” and “according to one estimate, a majority of them are landlords.”I have no objection to a racially diverse Los Angeles City Council. All else equal, it’s what I would choose. But what I want more are better policies than Los Angeles now offers, a municipal politics where race is not at all a predictor of whether a politician shares one’s interests, and voters who pay no more attention to race than whether a candidate is right or left-handed. We aren’t there yet. I understand why. But that ought to be the goal that we’re moving toward, because continuing to raise the salience of race will cause more bigoted othering.[Read: Do sports matter?]More in Bigotry NewsResponding to a recent celebrity interview, Bari Weiss inveighs against another perennial scourge:
Some have argued that we cannot judge [Kanye] West—that he is mentally ill, and therefore isn’t in full control of what is coming out of his mouth. Let’s grant that argument. What you are left with is the reality that West has been made into a vessel for antisemites keen to amplify and memeify the most destructive lies about Jews. There is a moment in the interview when he says: “I want Jewish children to look at their Jewish daddies and say, ‘why is Ye mad at us?’” To which one of the hosts gives a Michael Barbaro-style “hmmm,” as if the musician has just made a profound and compelling point. The tens of thousands of comments on YouTube saying “great interview” and calling West a “genius” confirm it. More to the point: Ice Cube and Nick Cannon are not mentally ill. They have expressed the very same ideas as West with little consequence.
Theirs is just one variant of the ancient poison that has been unleashed and now nestles comfortably in so many corners of American life. In Brooklyn, where it’s now dangerous to be visibly Jewish. At U.C. Berkeley, where there are now nine major student groups that have banned any speaker who supports “the apartheid state of Israel”—in other words the vast majority of Jews who do not, in fact, want the Jewish state destroyed. (Under their rules, the current dean of the law school would be barred.) In Los Angeles last week, several billboards were defaced with a sign declaring, “Zionist Jews Control America”—Ye’s dark, twisted fantasy blaring in bold letters.
The Changing Politics of Building StuffJosh Barro is optimistic about federal reform legislation that would make it easier to build things such as housing in high-cost cities and infrastructure for energy that emits fewer greenhouse gasses. Thanks to a new law in California, he wrote, “the state’s public colleges and universities will soon be able to build on-campus student, faculty and staff housing without going through an environmental impact statement process.” Because permitting reform is a longtime Republican priority that passed in a deep blue state, he anticipates a political shift at the national level away from gridlock and toward a new bipartisan policy alignment:
Environmental laws that are about burying projects in red tape are great if your environmentalism strategy is largely about stopping things from getting built. But if you want more green things to get built—solar farms, electric transmission lines, transit projects, new homes in walkable locations with moderate climates—then you need an environmental review regime that makes it easier to build. That is, you need an environmental review regime that is … not identical to, but quite a bit more similar to the one Republicans have wanted all along. I remain optimistic that Joe Manchin’s permitting reform package, or something like it, will become law fairly soon, even though Mitch McConnell killed the plan to include it in the stop-gap government funding bill that Congress is passing before rushing out of town. I am optimistic because, as with the college housing issue in California, Republicans and Democrats now have an increasing degree of ideological alignment on an underlying policy question:
How easy should it be to make investments in projects that ease the production and transmission of energy within the United States?
While there are a lot of disagreements over details, both parties have now staked out a clear position that it should be significantly easier than current law allows—which will entail, in certain circumstances, reducing the ability of state and local governments and private litigants to interfere with the construction of infrastructure.
What Use Is a European Vacation?After going on such a trip, the economist Scott Sumner pondered what about it added to his life and concluded that the waking hours spent abroad are actually just a fraction of the answer.Here’s how he described the utility of his trip:
I see a number of factors:
a. The utility derived from planning the vacation—dreaming about what you will do.
b. The utility derived during the vacation. Some of that is the direct experience, some is daydreaming about how you’ll report the results to those back at home (which I’m doing now).
c. The utility derived from reminiscing about your vacation after the fact. In some cases, such as my Australian adventure of 1991, that’s almost all of the utility. I honestly don’t know whether I even enjoyed that vacation at the time, but I get massive utility out of recalling the events, over and over again. Even more than 30 years later.
d. The utility derived from extra vivid dreams during the vacation. When not on vacation my life is boring and my nighttime dreams are dull. On vacation, time slows down and my life becomes full of novel events, and this triggers much more intense and vivid dreams at night. I have a hard time estimating the importance of this factor, but it might well be more important than all of my daytime utility during the vacation.
To summarize, when it comes to vacations the utility is mostly in dreams, with relatively little in actual events like sightseeing and dining out.
When I travel, I take a good camera and try to take good photographs. I get utility from the archive of those photos—not only the best of them, but also bad photos that capture something I’d forgotten.[Read: The case against the death penalty]Provocation of the WeekIn The New Atlantis, Jon Askonas argues that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show starring Jon Stewart anticipated, and helped establish the formula for, the Fox News Channel show Tucker Carlson Tonight.He writes:
Stewart’s theory of what made Fox News so effective—that it was narrative infotainment for a loyal niche audience—took explicit form in the spin-off show he produced, The Colbert Report. Launching in 2005, it featured former Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert in-character as a bombastic conservative pundit … In the premiere episode, Colbert’s character proclaimed himself the emperor of “truthiness.”
“We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart,” he explained. The point was to offer the gentle viewers smug assurance that they still lived in the world of facts while the sheep over at Fox believed whatever felt right. To illustrate, Colbert used a clip of President George W. Bush defending the nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court: “I know her heart.”
But the quote was actually taken outrageously out of context. The punchline hit big, not because of anything brilliant Colbert had said, but because he understood exactly what his liberal audience already believed about the nomination. In calling out the scourge of truthiness, Colbert was being truthy. Then again, wasn’t that what Stewart had been doing all along?
Wasn’t it even what he promised?
What Stewart insisted on night after night was imposing his own context on the news, a narrative and meaning he decided. He argued that good journalism needed to do this too, that there was no such thing as “objective” journalism because the most powerful decision a journalist could make was to decide what was important.
Wrapped in layers of irony and humor, Stewart had already been relying on truthiness for years, reflecting the incredulity and ire his audience felt about politics and media back to them. The dark secret of Stewart and Colbert’s pastiche of conservative infotainment was that it only worked because their liberal audience wanted the same thing, adjusted for taste. “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.”
Skip ahead to 2020:
Tucker Carlson Tonight surpassed Hannity to become the highest-rated prime-time cable news show, going on to break the record for highest-rated program in U.S. cable news history. More than any other pundit or comedian, he became the successor in stature and in style of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose real lessons he studied better than anyone, and without pretense. Today, journalism is truthiness all the way down.
Carlson hosts hard-hitting interviews, field segments that underline the outrages and absurdities in American life as his audience sees it, and clip compilations that emphasize the show’s underlying themes. He is a master at sifting through masses of information to find the material that shows how hypocritical, foolish, and insane his adversaries are. Just like Stewart, Tucker has the receipts. He makes no bones about where he’s coming from, routinely exercises editorial authority to highlight stories others have ignored, and takes as valid how his audience feels about the state of the world today, even as he often tries to adjust their understanding of the facts on the margins. His goal, and that of all his lesser imitators: to tell the story of America that weaves a compelling reality for his subscriber community.
The tragedy of it all is that this isn’t just a nightmare version of the world Jon Stewart dreamed of. It’s a world he built. In his quest to turn real news from the exception into the norm, he pioneered a business model that made it nearly impossible. It’s a model of content production and audience catering perfectly suited to monetize alternate realities delivered to fragmented audiences. It tells us what we want to hear and leaves us with the sense that “they” have departed for fantasy worlds while “we” have our heads on straight. Americans finally have what they didn’t before. The phony theatrics have been destroyed—and replaced not by an earnest new above-the-fray centrism but a more authentic fanaticism. Jon Stewart pioneered “fake news” in the hope it would deliver us from the absurdities of the old media world. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
There’s lots more analysis in the quite lengthy article. And that’s all for this week. See you Monday with some reader responses.

Roberts and Zuegel on Argentine Inflation and Crypto By: David Henderson

The latest EconTalk, Russ Roberts’ interview with Devon Zuegel, is first rate. It shows how someone who’s not an economist, Zuegel, but who pays careful attention, can suss things out. She makes the point early on that she’s not alone: dinner conversations in Argentina ultimately turn to the issue of how to protect one’s assets in a country with high inflation where you can’t trust the government or even the banks. Interesting story after interesting story.

Some highlights follow.

Argentine’s GDP Per Capita 100 Years Ago

Many economists, including me, have spoken or written about how bad economic policies brought Argentina from being one of the highest per capita income countries a little over a century ago to one that’s basically in the middle today. According to Zuegel, we’re half right. She argues that Argentina during World War I had unusually high income per capita because of its exports of high-priced agricultural output. I haven’t checked, but it seems plausible.

Long-Term High Inflation

“In the last hundred years, Argentina has seen an average of 100% annual inflation.” By the way, that doesn’t come close to hyperinflation, which is typically defined as inflation of 50% per month, but it’s high and destructive nevertheless. See Michael K. Salemi, “Hyperinflation,” in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Bricks as an Inflation Hedge

You read that right.

How Law-Abiding are Argentinians?

And, I think in the United States people tend to be kind of bashful about breaking the law, at least in my friend circles. In Argentina everybody breaks the law. Every single day. Because otherwise you get half the income, and like, you can’t pay your rent. And so people–everyone knows exactly what the black market rate is at all times. Politicians will even quote it. Like, it’s well understood that this is out there. Long story short: Everyone tries to be in the black market as much as they can. There are certain transactions where that’s really difficult, but for the most part people will try to exchange their money in the black market.

The only thing I know of that comes anywhere close in the United States is sellers of used cars cooperating with buyers to understate the price of the transaction to save the buyer on sales tax. A huge percent of people who have sold their used car have told me that they do so if the buyer asks.

German Wheelbarrows

Russ Roberts says:

When you read about hyperinflation, say, in the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War I, you’d read about people who would take wheelbarrows of cash to the store–literally–because it took so many pieces of paper to buy stuff, suddenly.

He could have added, because it’s true (although I can’t find the reference immediately), that in one case the person left the wheelbarrow with money outside while entering the store and returned to find the money on the ground and the wheelbarrow stolen.

Buying Houses Depends on Trusting Third Party

Read the part about avoiding banks and relying on a third party to hold the money in escrow.

Extended Discussion of Cryptocurrencies and How They Are Vital to Argentinians in a Way That We Americans Have Trouble Imagining

Absolutely worth listening to or reading. I have nothing to add.

Inflation Propagates Unevenly

As Russ points out, this could be simply big changes in relative prices due to big changes in supply conditions. But I do think she’s making a good point. In economics, we call them Cantillon effects.

The Tragedy of Wasted Minds

Zuegel says:

The most interesting thing Quinnipiac University pollsters found when they surveyed New Yorkers ahead of November’s elections was not that the Republican candidate for governor is within four points of ousting his opponent, the incumbent Democratic governor. That poll’s exploration of how partisan voters are navigating the dominant political issues in this election cycle is even more intriguing.

Among Republican voters in the Empire State, crime has surpassed inflation as this year’s most urgent issue. Crime is a salient electoral issue (it’s the primary concern among independent voters, too, followed closely by inflation). But New York’s Republican candidates have emphasized crime, which conveys to Republican voters that crime is what they should be talking about. That phenomenon works both ways. When Democrats in the state are asked about the issues they regard as paramount, they cite “protecting democracy” first, followed by crime and, in a distant third place, inflation.

Political parties and their candidates emphasize their strengths. Democrats have done little to neutralize the GOP’s advantages on crime save for their efforts to tar Republican candidates with the stain of January 6, which doubles as a way to shoehorn “protecting democracy” into the national conversation. But voters are not thinking about historic black swan events when they say they’re worried about public safety. Just the opposite: It’s the casual, everyday violence they hope to avoid.

Crime is, however, a localized concern, and being unable to navigate the issue will have localized consequences. Inflation is another matter. On a national scale, it’s hard to find a poll in which inflation and its effects on the economy are not the number one issue on voters’ minds. If Democrats are priming their voters to say (if not believe) that inflation is a tertiary issue in 2022 only because their candidates don’t know how to talk about it, that would be an act of political self-sabotage of the highest order. But that’s what they seem to be doing.

“Inflation’s an issue, but it’s global,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said this week in an attempt to provide her party with more rhetorical ammunition on the subject. If part one of Pelosi’s strategy is to downplay the shock of an 8 percent increase in consumer costs in a single year, part two is to pretend that no one knows how to get their hands around it. “They ain’t got nothing” on inflation, Pelosi said of the GOP. Indeed, she suggested the overheated economy is a good thing insofar as it is a function of lower unemployment, which makes you wonder why we haven’t experienced an inflationary cycle like this in 40 years despite periods typified by full employment. And anyway, who cares? “I think we’re in great shape,” Pelosi concluded.

The president agrees. “Our economy is strong as hell,” Joe Biden insisted during a weekend campaign stop in Oregon. Ponderously enough, the president’s prepared remarks concede the legitimacy of the GOP’s contention that Democrats are indifferent to rising consumer costs. “When it actually comes time to do something about inflation,” Biden warned, “Republicans in Congress” will balk. Even voters who are leery of the GOP’s economic preferences cannot fail to note that the president apparently believes the time to address inflation is later.

This is bewildering because the president and his party claim that they already tackled inflation in the form of the “Inflation Reduction Act.” It is, however, hard to find a Democrat that emphasizes the anti-inflation provisions in a bill supposedly dedicated to that purpose. What the party likes—and, therefore, what it talks about—are the provisions that led preliminary analysts of law to conclude that it would actually make inflation worse in the short term.

“What are some parts of the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ this amazing new law, that you are most excited about?” Vice President Kamala Harris was asked this week at a Bay Area climate-change conference. “I have a particular fondness, I must tell you, for electric school buses,” the vice president inexplicably replied. “I love electric school buses!” What do electric school buses have to do with inflation, you ask? “A lot of it has to do with a real intentionality that we have to re-shift industries,” she continued, “and to do that in a way that we are emphasizing the importance of U.S investment in U.S.-based R&D.” If you sift through all the empty managerial jargon, Harris’s emphasis on “U.S. investment,” e.g. the emptying of the Treasury into an already overheated economy, you can see why analysts are skeptical of the law’s impact on inflation.

As maladroit as the performances these Democrats turned in may be, they look like Baryshnikov compared to how Stacy Abrams handled the issue. In a Wednesday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor managed at once to appear indifferent to inflation and disturbingly cold-blooded on the issue of abortion.

“Let’s be clear,” Abrams replied after she was confronted with her party’s messaging failures on the signature economic issue of our time. “Having children is why you’re worried about the price [of] gas. It’s why you’re worried about how much food costs.” She inadvisably continued: “You can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child.” Abrams did not follow her own logic to its own monstrous conclusion, but any sentient observer must. After all, a Swiftian decimation of the surplus population would surely decrease aggregate demand.

Inflation blots out the sun. It is the prohibitive issue that will decide how most voters cast their ballots in three weeks. And the party that has presided over an explosion of higher costs doesn’t know how to talk about it. If Democratic lawmakers really believe that the time to deal with inflation is tomorrow, the time for Democratic voters to panic is right now.

Here’s a very popular tweet: “she’s a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.”Solid. Concise. I can see why people would relate to the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as hot? And further, who doesn’t already think of themselves as emotionally complicated enough to shed a tear on a day that is supposed to be happy? Nearly 246,000 accounts liked this tweet, and I have no problem with that.There’s a whole universe of big accounts that post content like this—little snippets of language with mass appeal. They often regurgitate the same messages. That “she’s a 10” tweet was posted by @itspureluv, an account with roughly 200,000 followers; an almost identical tweet was posted by @spicybabew, another account with nearly 200,000 followers, three months earlier, and by dozens of others at various times.
“are u ok” no but i’m pretty
— ♡ (@itspureluv) October 10, 2022I started noticing this phenomenon last year and followed about a dozen of these accounts out of a curiosity that felt kind of sick—they gave me a chill! They were so good at spitting out (or selecting and copying) sentences and fragments that hundreds of thousands of people related to, and they were doing it to no obvious end. They were shameless about retweeting themselves or tweeting several slightly different versions of a thought to see which one would hit biggest.Other people on Twitter had noticed them as well and referred to them (usually with irritation) as “gradient accounts,” because many of their profile pictures are not of human faces or anything else, just color gradients. Gradient accounts have usernames that sound like AIM usernames: @f41ryluvrr, @urf41ryg1rl, @moonlouvrr, @newmoonbaby2, @glitteryxhearts. Through their tweets, they identify as overthinkers and dreamers and hot people, and they often profess melancholy and romantic longing. The romantic longing sometimes clashes with casual misanthropy; the all-lowercase disclosures of trauma and malaise are mixed with playful Gossip Girl memes. Their content is more popular than I can possibly explain, and they know it. Some provide links so that people who enjoy their content can send them tips on PayPal. Others promote small businesses; a few lead to porn.Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in digital media and society at the University of Sheffield, in England, told me she’d also noticed gradient accounts last year. She described their presentation as an “infantilized version of femininity.”“I was initially surprised to see these accounts on Twitter, because I’d assumed its demographic skewed older than these posts seem to speak to,” she said. She saw influences of the currently voguish Y2K nostalgia—a trend associated with Gen Z—including the use of baby pink and the early-text-message abbreviation u instead of you. But she reasoned that Twitter was a good platform for creators who wanted to be mostly anonymous and grow their following through text-based posts.The facelessness of the accounts is what gives them a strange, bordering-on-sinister allure. Who is posting all this stuff, and why? @maybeeevirgo, which doesn’t use a gradient profile picture (just a solid circle of baby pink) but falls into the same category, has more than 359,000 followers and discloses no personal information besides a bio that reads “made in heaven.”[Read: The personal brand is dead]“Having a blank yet highly aesthetic and communicative profile picture is an unsurprising move in an era of hyper-self-presentation,” Gerrard told me. “It adds to the appeal of the accounts, because followers aren’t connecting themselves to a persona. Instead, they’re connecting themselves to the familiarity and relatability of the posts.” The entities behind the accounts don’t have to personally win anyone over the way they might if their faces were visible, she added.To some, that’s charming; to others, it’s alarming or annoying. Viral “relatable” Twitter threads have been used to rope people into scams in the past, which is a good reason to be wary of them. And the repetition from all of these accounts makes them seem somehow callous or inhuman—they’re copying or they’re being copied, or what they’re saying is so generic that it just keeps bubbling out of the ether. (Try searching for saying nvm instead of explaining or “of course i remembered” is a love language.) Naturally, this leads some people to make the assumption that the accounts are bots.
what am I about to experience... pic.twitter.com/JBxiVl8EGv
— bobby wasabi (@bobbyteriyaki) August 5, 2021“I want to set the record straight,” Andrew Zaffina, the 25-year-old behind @itspureluv told me when I messaged him on Twitter and asked him to call me. “I’m so sick of people thinking we’re bots. I’m literally just a really relatable, chill, fun internet personality.”Zaffina uses his Twitter to drive attention to his other accounts and to his businesses—he is a spiritual medium, teaches online classes about spiritualism, and sells hoodies explaining different angel numbers. Relatable content is easy for him to come up with, he says, because he looks at Twitter all day, every day, and his brain has started to operate in the language of the site.And in 2022, the language of Twitter is the language of a hot, anxious girl. She was the MySpace girl, and then the Tumblr girl, and then the TikTok girl. There has always been a version of her on Twitter, and now there is this one. Girl culture has long been highly visible on social media, so it makes sense that people who spend time on social media would relate to tweeted bits of micro-fiction reflecting its tropes. “Obviously, relatable things are relatable, but are people interested in this because they identify as a hot, anxious girl?” Alice E. Marwick, an associate professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, asked me rhetorically. “Or are they interested in inhabiting the persona of a hot, anxious girl?” She found the accounts’ posts to be “aspirational, in a way,” and suggested there was an emotional component to their success as well. “The ability to articulate sadness, I think, is really highly valued,” she said.When Zaffina posts a new tweet, it needs to get 1,000 likes within the first hour; otherwise, he thinks it was a mistake and should be deleted. When a new tweet goes really viral, that means it’s time to cool down. To avoid getting suspended—or “s-worded”—Zaffina tries to stay off of Twitter’s radar. He suspects it flags accounts that go viral too often. (Twitter did not comment on this when I asked.) “I can go viral multiple times a day if I wanted,” he said, “but why would you work so hard for something to get taken away?”
if u look for a painful thing u will find 100 gradient accounts with the same tweet pic.twitter.com/gHljsVl6A9
— andy (@bigbearbucks) September 20, 2021Some gradient accounts make money by promoting junky products or bad music videos, which Zaffina thinks makes their page look aesthetically offensive. According to Zaffina, super-popular Twitter accounts can also sell “retweet packages” (a flat fee to retweet content to their audience a certain number of times) or collect money for “repping” smaller accounts (helping them gain followers by simply liking or replying to their tweets). Once they’ve reached a mass audience, they can also “flip” their accounts by selling to a lazier user who just wants a ready-made audience. (Some of this violates Twitter’s terms of service.) Zaffina said he has done paid promotion before, but he didn’t want to name specific clients or his prices. He would only say that some accounts can charge up to $200 for a single retweet.“It’s not always about the money for me,” he told me. “I genuinely do Twitter because I love Twitter.” He admitted to liking the power of being an influencer. If he’s interested in a trend, he can promote and sustain it just by putting it in an accessible package: “It’s not a trick, but the secret is just being a relatable person.” He thinks of relatable content all the time—he was thinking about tweets while we were talking, he said. He can get a hit whenever he wants, with posts like “sharing music is a huge love language for me” or “sexy people overthink everything.” He’ll often riff several times on a similar premise or format, and each iteration performs beautifully: “she’s a 10 but she needs attention 24/7” (66,300 likes), “she’s a 10 but she doesn’t talk when she’s upset” (290,700 likes, even better than the aforementioned 10 who tears up on her birthday).[Read: The many, many beautiful cartoon women of Web3]Justifiably, gradient accounts have often been accused of stealing tweets. Zaffina responded to this criticism by insisting that most of his content is “pretty much” original. At the same time, he argued, many of these posts are interpretations of linguistic memes, which means that anyone who takes credit for them is kind of just flattering themselves. If you start with “she’s a 10” and then add something relatable, you’re probably going to end up writing the same tweet as someone else. And if something is totally recycled, well: “We don’t really think of it as, like, stolen content,” he said. “It’s just cute tweets.”The other criticism of gradient accounts is that their tweets are bad. Another way to say “relatable” is “lowest common denominator.” (Marwick called them “banal and uninteresting.”) A little more than a year ago, according to Zaffina, Twitter users turned on the gradient accounts and started calling for their heads (“these gradient accounts are a fucking plague,” “ban all gradient accounts pending federal investigation,” etc.). Many of them stopped posting in August and September of 2021, and Zaffina’s is now one of the few huge accounts remaining. “A lot of people actually changed their profile pictures,” he told me. “They changed their whole accounts, changed how they tweet, they changed everything.” Then, earlier this year, Twitter announced a policy update that would “limit the visibility” of duplicate content, or “copypasta”—some read this as a harbinger of the true end days of gradient accounts, though many have continued to thrive.
sometimes the color gradient accounts feel like therapy.... like so true marsbby444 i am not my past self
— britt⁷ 🎃 (@bonsailesbian) September 14, 2021As long as people are drawn to the disembodied girl in the machine, and as long as there are any spoils to be had from racking up the highest number of impressions and the greatest amount of engagement possible, these accounts will proliferate and confuse those who don’t have the magic touch. Most of us may be relatable, but that doesn’t mean we know how to tweet relatably. Does that make sense? “People just don’t know what other people like,” Zaffina told me. “I think there’s two types of people in the world. You know, there’s just regular people, and then there’s entertainers. I’m an entertainer. I know what people like. I know what they’re gonna vibe with.”

Most trips to the grocery store are not particularly memorable, but there’s one I’ll never forget. It was the spring of 2019, and my then-four-month-old was in a car seat nestled into the shopping cart while her sister squirmed in the built-in seat. I was going about my usual business as a newly minted stay-at-home mom of two under 2—desperately cramming my to-do list into the brief and unpredictable windows between nursing sessions, diaper changes, and temper tantrums—when an older woman cut into my bleary-eyed view. “Enjoy it,” she told me. I nodded, smiled, and turned away to reach for something on a shelf, and she doubled down: “I’m serious, enjoy it. It goes so fast.”This is something parents of young children hear ad nauseam and in a variety of ways: Don’t blink; cherish every second; it will be gone in a flash. It’s simple-enough advice—so simple that it hardly seems worth saying at all. Yet people feel compelled to give it, perhaps because it’s very difficult advice to follow.[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]I’ll stop to make the usual caveats: I love my daughters. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. But there’s no question that the first few years of their lives have been the hardest of mine. Some stretches, particularly at the height of the pandemic, were nothing short of grueling. Things have gotten more manageable since, but I’ve never turned down an opportunity to get away from my kids for a couple of hours. I rejoiced when my 3-year-old started preschool this fall. I wouldn’t say I’m cherishing every second.It is a small comfort that I am not alone in struggling to relish this phase of parenthood. Research on parenting and happiness is mixed, but much of it suggests that child-rearing isn’t particularly enjoyable. In the United States (and in some but not all other advanced industrialized nations), becoming a parent takes a toll on well-being, which doesn’t recover until the kids leave the house. Nevertheless, if my elders are any indication, many people come to recall the chaotic early years of parenting very fondly. There is even some data to back this up: In a study published last year, researchers asked people over the age of 50 in several European countries to retrospectively assess when they were happiest. Respondents consistently pointed to their early 30s—a finding partially explained, for those who had kids, by the fact that those years lined up with when their kids were born.It’s hard to know what to make of the knowledge that in time, I’ll pine for these days I often find myself laboring through. By some accounts, the me of the future will simply misremember what life is like right now. The sociologist Daniel Gilbert once likened a day spent caring for a 3-year-old to a baseball game that remains scoreless until the bottom of the ninth. Fans remember the thrilling moments of the game-winning home run and not much else. According to that theory, I’ll forget the screeching and the mess of getting my 3-year-old out the door in the morning, and remember only the delight that passes across her face when we first make eye contact at school pickup.But conversations with parents of children who have flown the nest suggest it’s more complicated than that. Most of those I consulted had not forgotten the crushing difficulty of that era. Yet they found themselves longing for it anyway.Alison Woods, a children’s-book author and mother of three, told me that when her kids were small, she once told her own mother that she wished she could run away. Christine Hohlbaum, an author and a mother of two, has spent much of her writing career calling attention to the chaos and strain of caring for small children. Still, they and other parents I spoke with admitted that as their roles and relationships with their kids evolved over time, they came to view those early years in a new light.For one thing, as parenting gets easier in some ways, it gets harder in others. The earliest years of parenting are most demanding of time and energy, most likely to cause “role overload,” and most disruptive to one’s sleep, work, and marriage. Yet they are not necessarily the worst for well-being. According to some research, parental satisfaction and fulfillment declines, and stress rises slightly, as children age into school and then adolescence. This makes some sense: Although the duties of caring for a small child who can do nothing for himself are all-encompassing and relentless, they are also fairly straightforward. But as children age, their problems become more complex. “Instead of ‘I have a boo-boo; I need a kiss,’ you’re looking at ‘I’m not sure what I want to do with my life’ and ‘My crush doesn’t love me back,’” Vered DeLeeuw, a food blogger with two grown daughters, told me. And while a parent’s responsibility to solve their children’s problems diminishes as those kids approach adulthood, the desire to do so never does; the pressure of tending to their children’s every need is supplanted by the helplessness of being unable to do so. “All you can do is give advice when they ask for it, then step aside and let them deal with life’s challenges,” DeLeeuw said. That means watching your kids make mistakes and accepting that there is suffering in this world from which we are unable to shield them.[Read: There is no road map for the longest phase of parenthood]Other parents note that the nature of the relationship between parent and child changes over time in ways that are hard to stomach. One of the reasons parenting gradually gets less demanding is that parents become less central to a child’s happiness. School and friends, and eventually partners and work, take precedence, and parents shift into the child’s periphery. Although the utter physical dependency of a small child on their parents can be overwhelming, it comes with an intimacy that is impossible to preserve as the child matures. “I have a great relationship with my daughter now,” Marie Graham, a mother of one from Salford, England, who runs a wellness company, told me. “But the intensity of the relationship you have with your young child, you’re never going to re-create.” Regardless of how close my daughter and I remain, there will come a time when she no longer seeks comfort by crawling into my lap. Whatever liberation comes with that transition will be bittersweet.All of this is difficult to appreciate as it happens, for various reasons. Beyond the particular financial and logistical strains of raising kids in modern industrialized economies, early parenting is physically uncomfortable, Hohlbaum pointed out. It’s hard to admire the curl taking shape in a child’s hair when you haven’t had a full night’s rest in months and are covered in another human’s bodily fluids. Likewise, the joys of parenthood can be overshadowed by the fear of screwing it up. “We’re really trying not to make any life-defining mistakes,” Woods said. Graham suspects that the singularity of the bond between a parent and a young child gets lost in the overwhelm and monotony of living it every moment of every day.Only with distance from the minute-to-minute anxieties of caring for a small child does its sweeping beauty come into full view. But this isn’t so much a shortcoming of youth as it is a gift of age. The experiences that follow early parenthood enrich our understanding of it, allowing us to ponder it anew. Hindsight allows us to put suffering into context and recognize the purpose it served in our lives. Hohlbaum likened it to laying bricks in a road: Only after we find out where the path leads are we able to see the purpose each brick served in getting us there. People with grown children have a deeper appreciation for the initial years of parenthood, because they are observing it from a perspective that only time can grant.There’s no sense in trying to cherish every moment of early parenting as it happens, Graham told me. Too much is going on, and much of it isn’t enjoyable. But keep an eye out for the precious moments amid the tumult and chaos, she said. Do what you can to imprint them in your memory—write them down, or share them with friends. Collect them like gems, so that when your arms are finally free and your eyes are a little clearer, you can turn them over in your hand.

“Not merely is his cultural range perhaps without equal,” the Marxist historian Perry Anderson once wrote of the conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell, “but in the cast of his intelligence, he is quite unlike most reporters or commentators.” Currently a contributing opinion writer for the Times, and formerly a prominent voice at the Financial Times and the now defunct Weekly Standard, Caldwell has written for many years about European politics. (Anderson’s comments came in the course of a review of a book by Caldwell about Muslim immigration to Europe.)

More recently, Caldwell has become a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, which has been one of the leading publications supporting Donald Trump and the MAGA movement—or what its adherents might call Trumpism. Caldwell is also a harsh critic of American foreign policy toward Russia, as well as a defender of Viktor Orbán’s far-right government in Hungary; his writing about both Vladimir Putin and Orbán suggests his own disappointment with current American cultural trends. “Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO,” he once said of Putin. “He is not a transgender-rights activist.” More directly, he referred to Putin as “a symbol of national self-determination.” (Caldwell called Orbán “brave, shrewd with his enemies and trustworthy with his friends, detail-oriented, hilarious.”) Caldwell’s most recent book, “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties,” argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act had “legislative outgrowths” that led to the over-empowerment of bureaucracies and courts, and eventually paved the way for a countermovement in the form of Donald Trump.

I recently spoke by phone with Caldwell. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the Republican Party should deal with election deniers, why Russia is viewed by certain conservatives through the lens of American domestic issues, and how to judge Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

In your most recent Times column, about the January 6th committee, you write that “the committee members are pursuing their case in a grandiose and ideological manner, tarring Mr. Trump’s voting base as a bunch of authoritarians and election deniers.” Is that a false characterization, or do you think that, regardless of whether it’s true or false, you can’t talk to voters that way?

Maybe a mix of those things. The committee is trying to prove a grave constitutional trespass here, and serious constitutional damage. The thing that I object to most in this particular case is that they conflate real constitutional misbehavior, such as violence during a vote count, with just sharing an opinion with the President, or sharing an opinion with those who committed violence during the vote count. I quoted something by Liz Cheney. There’s often a tendency to think that the opinion that the election was poorly managed is constitutionally culpable, and I don’t think it is.

Yes, you write, “Ms. Cheney recently complained that Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, ‘is, right now, campaigning for election deniers.’ She went on: ‘Either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure or you don’t.’ But, of course, it is not unconstitutional to question the integrity of an election, and a person who does so is not necessarily an enemy of democracy.”

Right.

We see in polls that sixty or seventy per cent of Republicans believe that Joe Biden was elected illegitimately. It’s a complicated question, how political leaders should talk to people who have false beliefs. But a majority of the Republican Party believes the election wasn’t fair—that’s a problem.

It depends on how it’s done. It’s the same thing that Stacey Abrams did with the Georgia governor’s election four years ago. It’s just an opinion. It’s an opinion about the working of the system. Like a lot of opinions, if it becomes widespread, it can be the source of great instability. But it is a protected opinion. What’s not protected is acting as if the election were therefore illegitimate, like to say that Joe Biden is not the President, so the laws don’t bind me. That’s the line I would draw. I would police any misbehavior that resulted from it, but not the opinion.

I think Cheney’s point is that, if people like Ron DeSantis are campaigning for candidates who say that the election was stolen, or who say that they will only accept the election results if they win next time around—which, for example, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona said in the past week or so—then you’re setting up the election to essentially be stolen next time, because you’re putting into office people who will not abide by the rules. That seems like a reasonable fear, especially when you’re talking about officeholders, where the distinctions between speech and action could become less solid over time.

Yes, I agree. This distinction between speech and action is proving kind of blurry, and you certainly see it in some of the things that Jair Bolsonaro has said in the most recent Brazilian election. In a much milder way, I was uncomfortable with certain things that Biden said in his Philadelphia speech, where he was talking about Republicans campaigning for secretary-of-state positions on the grounds that they’ll be able to influence the election counts. Democrats are doing similar things. But I think it lays a predicate that is worrisome.

Wait, which is worrisome: Biden’s comments, or the Republicans running for these offices?

It’s more Biden saying it. I’m not exactly sure what the Republicans and Democrats are doing, but, in an election that has been as hotly contested as this one, I think it’s totally natural that the parties would want to campaign for the positions that have authority over electoral counts.

Brad Raffensperger, who’s campaigning in Georgia, seems pretty committed to upholding election results. I think Biden would probably say that he was more concerned about the ones who say that they would not accept election results.

Yeah.

Candidates are running who say the election was stolen. It’s a tricky problem. How do you deal with that?

Yeah, it is really tricky. The problem is right where you say it is.

Go on.

I have sympathy for people who are uneasy about the last election. If the rules of the last election were O.K., then why haven’t we always had them? The answer is that they were required by the COVID emergency. And the increase in access is accompanied by, probably, a decrease in accountability, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to worry about, whether it happens or not.

I’m not saying that Trump’s absolutely truculent, dug-in refusal to accept the results was inevitable, but unease on the part of the loser was inevitable. His margin in those four states that would’ve changed the election was something like eighty thousand votes. If those eighty thousand votes had gone the other way, and Trump had pulled it out at the end of Election Night, I think that there probably would’ve been a real examination of the ballots. Maybe I’m wrong.

You’d be forgiven, at this point, for believing in what the MSNBC host Chris Hayes calls the “gas prices monocausal theory” of American politics. Every major political dynamic, every twist and turn in approval polling and legislative possibility, seems driven by whether gas prices are going up or down.Consider Joe Biden’s presidency. When Biden took office, he was broadly popular, helping the narrow Democratic majority in Congress pass a COVID-19 relief bill and send out $1,400 checks. And in Biden’s honeymoon phase, gas prices were comfortably below $3 a gallon, until May 2021.You know what happened next: The United States pulled out from Afghanistan as gas prices were already climbing, and Biden’s popularity tanked. When Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, oil prices soared. In June, a gallon of gas cost more than $5 in the U.S., higher than ever before in history, and Biden’s approval rating reached a nadir.But then gas prices began to fall the following month—and the president started ticking items off his to-do list. Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, and Dark Brandon became a meme. By late August, gas prices had fallen below $4 a gallon, and according to Gallup, Biden’s approval rating climbed to its highest level in a year. (More recently, gas prices have risen, and Biden’s party looks to be in a worsening position with the midterm elections looming.)Even if some of this is a coincidence, the power of gasoline prices is hard to overlook. When the numbers on gas-station signs tick up or down, it leads to downstream effects that trickle out across the rest of American society. Naturally, why gas prices have fallen over the past year has garnered a lot of attention—including from me. But one of the biggest reasons for the dip that has corresponded with the best few months of Biden’s presidency has gone underappreciated: China’s policies helped crash global oil prices.Since March, President Xi Jinping’s aggressive zero-COVID policy has imposed intermittent lockdowns and travel restrictions throughout China, essentially subjecting hundreds of millions of people to house arrest across the country. Those restrictions—plus China’s preexisting economic slowdown—have drastically reduced the country’s apparent demand for oil, easing up the global market in the process. Yesterday, China indefinitely delayed the release of its third-quarter GDP data, an ominous sign that its economy may have deteriorated even more than anticipated.For many oil-industry specialists, China’s COVID policy “is the boogeyman that encompasses everything,” Rory Johnston, an oil analyst and the author of the Commodity Context newsletter, told me. Although China has aimed to prevent any COVID cases since the pandemic began, its policies became more draconian and widespread in the spring after the more infectious Omicron variant became dominant. At a moment when widespread shortages imperiled the world economy, Xi’s pandemic policies took “a huge amount of pressure out of the global commodity system” by massively crimping domestic demand, he said.The reason for this crash in demand is quite simple. During the first half of the pandemic, China’s zero-COVID approach was able to keep cases to a minimum through widespread testing and by heavily restricting travel in and out of the country. By August 2020, thousands of people were able to attend a crowded music festival in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic began, while much of the West was still dealing with the daily threat of COVID.But even as the rest of the world has gotten vaccinated and effectively moved on from the pandemic, China has doubled down on zero COVID—even after the Omicron variants made it all the more difficult to stop transmission. Hundreds of millions of people—including almost the entire population of Shanghai, China’s most populous city—spent some of the spring locked down. As of last week, nearly 200 million people remained under some form of lockdown in China, according to The New York Times.The policy has obliterated China’s gasoline use. “If you lock down one-quarter of the country and don’t let them drive anywhere, they will consume less fuel,” Johnston said. One nice thing about the oil market is that it’s really easy to think about. The world consumes about 100 million barrels of oil a day, give or take. Since April, lockdowns have reduced the country’s oil demand by about 2 million barrels a day, or about 2 percent of global oil demand, Johnston said. Earlier this year, before the lockdowns began in earnest, China consumed about 15 million barrels a day, an all-time high, he said. (For reference, the U.S. is the world’s largest oil consumer and uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.)The oil market has undergone a global switcheroo: Back in the spring, Johnston expected that about 3 million barrels of oil production would vanish during the war, nearly all of it from Russia. Instead, Russia’s supply remained online, and 2 million barrels a day of Chinese demand vanished. “That was a net swing of 5 million barrels a day, in terms of what we expected and what we got,” Johnston said. “This year was supposed to be Armageddon for oil, and it ended up being Lucy and the football.”And the lockdowns are unlikely to end soon. Some onlookers had hoped that the Communist Party might loosen the policy after the party congress this year, where Xi Jinping will almost certainly be named to an unprecedented third term as the country’s president. But those hopes appear dashed.At this point, news of a fresh lockdown or outbreak in China can shift the oil market more than an announcement from OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries. Earlier this month, a group including the OPEC countries and Russia announced that it would cut production by about 2 million barrels a day. The move was widely understood as a bid to raise oil prices and a rebuke to the Biden administration. Yet since then, the U.S. benchmark crude price has slightly fallen, in part because of a new COVID flare-up in China. (Gasoline, which is made from refined petroleum, is still getting more expensive, although prices have fallen in the past week.)What do low oil prices have to do with climate change? Quite a lot. Just on a mechanical level, when oil is cheap, more people can afford to burn it, so more carbon pollution streams into the atmosphere.But oil prices also shape the rest of the political environment in which climate policy—and all policy, for that matter—is made. Again, when gasoline spiked earlier this year, President Joe Biden’s popularity collapsed; when prices receded, it rose. You could argue that Biden’s two biggest legislative accomplishments—the IRA and the CHIPS and Science Act—were possible only because gas got so inexpensive over the summer. (Senator Joe Manchin finalized a deal only days after gas prices had clearly started to fall.) One of the great ironies of this year is that both of those laws targeted China’s industrial economy: The IRA is meant to re-create a renewable-energy industry in the U.S., cutting into China’s advantage on solar panels and batteries, while the CHIPS and Science Act is meant to boost American semiconductor manufacturing. But both may have only happened because of Chinese policy in the first place.There’s a broader lesson here, too, for climate hawks. The United States has now passed climate policy at the scale of the full economy; climate policy has, for better or worse, merged with industrial policy. Yet fossil fuels remain the economy’s principal energy source. Given oil’s continued importance—even just on a raw political level—policy makers can’t ignore the old energy system even as they build a new one.

Good sleep is important for health and optimal function. That much is pretty clear from the totality of sleep research. Lack of sleep also exacerbates many chronic conditions, can be a trigger for things like migraines and seizures, and correlates with poor cognitive function and memory. Having good sleep habits, and good overall sleep is therefore an important lifestyle factor for health and function.

A new study adds to this data by showing a correlation between decreased sleep duration and chronic illness in older adults (>50), but the data is complex. Most mainstream outlets oversimplified the outcome of the study in a way similar to this BBC headline: “Five hours’ sleep is tipping point for bad health“. This is ultimately a misunderstanding of how statistical significance works, but let’s review the study itself: “Association of sleep duration at age 50, 60, and 70 years with risk of multimorbidity in the UK: 25-year follow-up of the Whitehall II cohort study“.

The Whitehall II cohort study follows a group of UK civil servants starting in 1985. The strength of this data set is the long duration, several decades, and size (it started with 10,308 individuals). These are large numbers for a study, but not really for an observational study such as this. Experimental studies where some variables are determined typically involve 50-100 individuals at the low end, with larger studies in the hundreds and rare very large studies in the thousands. Observational studies come in various types but they look at people in the world without determining specific variables. Observational studies can have tens of thousands to millions of individual subjects, depending on their methods, and can also follow subjects for long periods of time.

It is generally difficult to make causal conclusion from observational studies, which can only determine correlations by themselves. We can say, for example, that some potential risk correlates with a negative outcome based on observational data, but we cannot say it causes it because subjects were not randomly selected to be exposed or not to the risk. There are therefore multiple confounding factors and possible causal relationships.

So while this is a decent-sized cohort study, it is not a particularly large one, and since it is observational we have to be on the look out for possible confounding factors. Let’s look at what they found:

Compared to 7-hour sleep, sleeping ≤5 hours at age 50 was associated with an increased risk of a first chronic disease (1.20, 1.06 to 1.35; p = 0.003) and, among those who developed a first disease, with subsequent multimorbidity (1.21, 1.03 to 1.42; p = 0.02). Sleep duration ≥9 hours was not associated with these transitions. No association was found between sleep duration and mortality among those with existing chronic diseases.

Multimorbidity simply means two or more diseases out of the 13 chronic illnesses they tracked. Therefore, sleeping less than 5 hours a night had an increased risk of developing chronic illness but not of dying when compared to those who sleep 7 hours a night. This does not mean that 5 hours is a “tipping point,” it just means that the results did not become statistically significant until this point. It is possible, even probable, that the risk of association is continuous. That is how the researcher plotted their data, although they did not have very much resolution as they broke down sleep duration into one hour increments.

You may also wonder why <5 hours is compared to 7 hours. That’s because 7-hour sleep duration had the lowest morbidity association. The relative risk curves are actually U-shaped, with increasing risk for 8 hour and >9 hour sleep durations (although did not reach statistical significance primarily because of the small numbers of subjects in the >9 hour category). The U-shaped risk curve is interesting, and may suggest a strong possibility that at least some of this risk association has a reverse causality – chronic illness causes poor sleep, rather than the other way around. This cannot be excluded by this study.

In fact clinicians often think of poor sleep as “comorbid” with specific chronic illnesses – they likely worsen each other, and it is difficult to tease out the specific cause and effect. For example, poor sleep can exacerbate weight gain, and being overweight can worse sleep quality.

Another issue is that the sleep duration was mostly self-reported, with some data from subjects wearing sleep trackers. Sleep duration is not the only measure of overall sleep benefit. It’s possible that some of the long sleepers are staying in bed for 9 or more hours because their sleep quality is very low.

What about the fact that in this study (because of how it was conducted) short sleep duration preceded the development of chronic illnesses? This does not preclude confounding factors. Poor sleep can be an early symptom of a chronic illness. This is true for some neurological diseases, like dementia and Parkinson’s disease, for example. Also, other factors may cause poor sleep and chronic disease, such as being overweight, lack of physical activity during the day, or chronic conditions not on the list followed by this study.

There are a few take-aways from this study and other sleep research. First, given the totality of data it is reasonable to conclude that poor sleep is a risk factor for many chronic illnesses, exacerbates many symptoms and can impair function. None of my criticisms of this study or its reporting change that. For any individual, optimizing their sleep quality is likely to have health benefits.

For many of these lifestyle risk factors that are difficult-to-impossible to control for in an experimental setting, and therefore we have to do our best with observational data, we tend to take a practical approach. This gets back to the “comorbid” approach – I cannot necessarily tease apart the exact lines of cause and effect, so essentially we treat everything in hopes of reducing the complex of comorbidities – optimize sleep and lose weight and treat the depression, for example.

Also, if your sleep duration or quality is poor, or you do not feel rested in the morning, see your physician. This can be a primary sleep disorder, a risk factor, or it can be a symptom of an existing chronic illness. Either way, poor sleep is just as important to discuss with your health care provider as other chronic symptoms.

Further – observational data is complex, with many possible arrows of causation and confounding factors. Be skeptical of simplistic reporting about correlations found in such studies. This study does not show that 5 hours of sleep is a “tipping point” for chronic illness. It shows a complex correlation between mostly self-reported sleep duration and the risk of developing certain chronic illnesses, and provokes as many questions as it answers.

Follow up research can include more objective measures of sleep duration and quality, higher resolution data, larger cohorts with a more representative sampling, and gather data that can help address some of the possible causal relationships. But no single study is going to answer such complex questions. The relationship between sleep and chronic illness is one of those questions that will take dozens of high-quality studies to flesh out. This study is a good addition to the overall data, but we have to recognize its limitations.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral argument about an Andy Warhol illustration of Prince, which he based on a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith—a fun copyright case that appeared to be a welcome respite from the gloom surrounding the Court, amid its overruling of abortion precedents last term, its likely overruling of affirmative-action precedents this term, and the general pall on its legitimacy. Justice Clarence Thomas let it be known from the bench—to ribbing from Justice Elena Kagan and laughter from the audience—that he was a Prince fan in the nineteen-eighties. Chief Justice John Roberts name-dropped the artists Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. But the contrast between the case, in which Warhol is accused of changing too little of Goldsmith’s work, and the Court itself, which is lately accused of changing far too much, created a tense sort of levity. The Court’s grappling with Warhol’s cultural criticism may end up being its most revealing comment this term on the nature of its own role in contemporary culture.

In 1981, Goldsmith—whose work as a rock-and-roll photographer included portraits of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, and Bob Marley—was assigned to shoot photos of Prince for Newsweek. Her closeup portraits were not published, but she kept them in her files. Three years later, after “Purple Rain” was released, Vanity Fair wanted an image of Prince to accompany an article, “Purple Fame,” about his megastardom. Warhol was commissioned to create the illustration. For four hundred dollars, the magazine licensed Goldsmith’s portrait of Prince as an “artist reference” for this assignment, and it agreed to credit her with the source photograph for the illustration. Using the photo, Warhol created the Prince Series: fourteen silkscreen prints and two pencil drawings. One of the prints, “Purple Prince,” was published alongside the article in Vanity Fair.

When Prince died, in 2016, Condé Nast (the parent company of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker) wanted an image of him for the cover of a single-issue commemorative magazine called “The Genius of Prince.” It paid more than ten thousand dollars to the Andy Warhol Foundation, which holds the artist’s copyrights, for a license to use a different print from the series, “Orange Prince.” The image was published without any credit or payment to Goldsmith, who—seeing it for the first time and recognizing her work—claimed copyright infringement. The Warhol Foundation asserted that Warhol’s use of her photo was “fair use,” in which copying that would otherwise infringe an author’s copyright is allowed, “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . scholarship, or research.” So, for example, under fair use, Condé Nast didn’t need a license to use the images of Prince discussed in this article, for the purpose of commentary and reporting on a case about those images. Whether the Prince Series is fair use turns on whether Warhol “transformed” the photo on which he relied—and the answer to that turns on what exactly “transformative” means.

The legal narrative of the case is that Warhol’s work (right) conveys a meaning or message different from Goldsmith’s photo (left). Left: Photograph © Lynn Goldsmith; Right: Art work from The Andy Warhol Foundation

The last time the Supreme Court substantially addressed fair use in an artistic context was in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, in 1994, about 2 Live Crew’s “Pretty Woman,” which was based on Roy Orbison’s rock ballad. The Court held that 2 Live Crew’s song was fair use because it was a “parody” that ridiculed Orbison’s song, commenting on and criticizing it. In the opinion, Justice David Souter wrote that 2 Live Crew “juxtaposes the romantic musings of a man whose fantasy comes true, with degrading taunts, a bawdy demand for sex, and a sigh of relief from paternal responsibility”—commenting on “the naivete of the original of an earlier day.” Souter, who is famously unenthusiastic about pop culture and highly unlikely to have come across 2 Live Crew’s rendition himself, pointedly added that the Court would “not take the further step of evaluating its quality.” But, as much as judges deny it, evaluating a work’s quality is often intertwined with interpreting its meaning.

In Campbell, Souter wrote that the central question for assessing whether the second work is “transformative” is whether it “adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.” The Warhol Foundation wants the Court to stick closely to those words. It asserts that Goldsmith’s naturalistic black-and-white photo depicts Prince as “fragile and vulnerable,” and seeks to “humanize” him. By contrast, the Foundation argues, Warhol’s silkscreen process created “a flat, impersonal, disembodied, mask-like appearance” that comments on the dehumanizing nature of celebrity. In other words, Goldsmith depicts Prince intimately but Warhol conveys an image of an icon.

Goldsmith does not dispute the Foundation’s reading of the two works, but she takes issue with the idea that merely adding a new meaning or message renders a work “transformative” for copyright purposes. That definition is too vague, she argues, given that “artists, critics, and the public often disagree about what art signifies.” “Copyists could always assert a different intent and claim fair use,” she submits. Goldsmith instead proposes interpreting Campbell to say that, for fair use to apply, the copying of a work must be necessary for an artist to express his or her meaning or message. She focusses on an aspect of Campbell that suggested that 2 Live Crew needed to copy the original in order to comment on it. Warhol’s images of Prince surely provide comment—about Prince, fame, the dehumanizing culture of celebrity—but they did not require copying Goldsmith’s original work.

Judging from oral argument, the Justices seemed to lean toward deciding for Goldsmith. Several of them seemed particularly concerned that deciding against her might result in upending the general understanding that an adaptation of a book into a movie or a television show is not fair use and requires payment to the author, even though Hollywood often adds new meanings—including altered plotlines, themes, and characters—to the original material. If those changes were considered “transformative,” the entire industry’s assumption that book authors are to be paid for use of their intellectual property would be disrupted, giving Hollywood a windfall. But, given Campbell’s words, it is more difficult for the Court to decide in favor of Goldsmith, because the Court would have to depart somewhat from Campbell and say something rather “original” to this case. Unlike artists, judges are supposed to strive to avoid “originality” and follow precedent. But, in order to both follow precedent and side with Goldsmith, the Court will have to engage in some transformation of the meaning of its earlier case.

Copyright cases concerning artistic works always bring out anxieties about judges, whose legal training seemingly puts them at a remove from art criticism. Justice Samuel Alito aired the obligatory worry, saying, “Maybe it’s not so simple, at least in some cases, to determine what is the meaning or the message of a work of art. There can be a lot of dispute about what the meaning or the message is.” Chief Justice Roberts underscored lawyers’ self-understanding as philistines, telling the Warhol Foundation’s attorney, “you and I might think there’s no difference” in meaning between a blue painting and a yellow painting “but I’m sure there’s art critics who will tell you there’s a great difference between blue and yellow.” But, as legal interpreters, judges are critics whose craft is to apply precedents by making fine distinctions that have huge consequences. And when they instead throw out precedents, they open themselves up to charges of not acting like judges, like those that accompanied Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The Warhol Foundation’s arguments suggest that the iconic status of Warhol himself, and his unmistakable style, contributes to his copying being fair use. Kagan acknowledged that “we know who Andy Warhol was, and what he was doing and what his works have been taken to mean, so it’s easy to say that there’s something importantly new in what he did with this image.” But that would create more leeway for those who are culturally influential—that is, the famous and powerful—to claim to be “transformative” for copyright purposes and borrow from others without paying them. Goldsmith objects to a more permissive attitude toward iconic artists that would only enhance their privilege: “Fame is not a ticket to trample other artists’ copyrights.”

The legal narrative of this case is that Warhol’s work conveys a meaning or message different from Goldsmith’s photo, by flattening dimension, shading, and nuance to comment on what happens when a human being’s personality is flattened for consumption in popular culture. That, in turn, is an unwitting commentary on what happens when courts decide what things mean: a flattening of human reality and experience occurs in the legal process, no less than in Warhol’s silkscreen process. Alito mused that “maybe it’s not so simple” to determine the meaning of a work—months after eliminating abortion rights based on what he determined the Fourteenth Amendment meant at the time of ratification. The question hanging over this term is how the Court, which wants to appear as unoriginal as possible, will be affected by enacting so many transformations. ♦

Fed officials and staff members have met with investors and economists both during normal outreach and on the sidelines of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings last week in Washington.

Fed researchers asked about three big possibilities during the meetings. They wanted to know whether there could be a trade or an investment class in the United States similar to British pension funds that could pose a significant and underappreciated threat.

They also focused on whether problems overseas could spill back over to the United States financial system. For instance, Japan is one of the biggest buyers of U.S. debt. But Japan’s currency is rapidly falling in value as the country holds its interest rates low, unlike other central banks. If that turmoil caused Japan to reverse course and stop buying or even sell U.S. Treasurys — something that it has signaled little appetite for, but that some on Wall Street see as a risk — it could have ramifications for U.S. debt markets.

The final threat they asked about focused on whether today’s lack of easy trading in the Treasury market could turn into a more serious problem that requires the Fed to swoop in to restore normal functioning.

What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source. Learn more about our process.

None of those areas appear to be at immediate risk of snapping, analysts told officials. The pension system in the United States is different from that in Britain, and the government debt market may be choppy, but it is still functioning.

Yet they also voiced reasons for concern: It is impossible to know what might break until something does. Markets are large and intertwined, and comprehensive data is hard to come by. Given how much central bank policy has shifted around the world in recent months, something could easily go wrong.

Craig Ridley died in 2017 after corrections officers paralyzed him and left him in solitary confinement for days without access to food. A medical examiner ruled Ridley's death a homicide—yet state and federal prosecutors brought no charges in the case.
An investigation recently released by the Miami Herald sheds further light on the incident, which occurred in 2017—and includes video of officers repeatedly refusing to believe the injured Ridley's claims that he couldn't walk and had been paralyzed. Ridley's death marks the third time in recent years that corrections officers have broken Florida inmates' necks during prison beatings. It is yet another abuse case inside Florida prisons with seemingly no consequences for those responsible.
Craig Ridley was an inmate working in the kitchen at the Florida Department of Corrections Reception and Medical Center, serving a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence for attempted murder charges. According to the Herald, on September 8th, 2017, an altercation occurred in which Craig Ridley was tackled to the ground face-first by corrections officers, dislocating his neck.
"My neck is broke," Ridley told officers shortly after his injury, "I'm paralyzed." According to the Herald, which obtained a 383-page report about the incident, one inmate later claimed that an officer told Ridley, "you're bullshitting . . . You're just trying to get a lawsuit."
After a short medical exam, correctional officers took Ridley to solitary confinement, placing Ridley on the cell's toilet. Ridley shortly fell off it, breaking his nose. The Herald reports that Ridley's cellmate, Moise Cherette, began banging on the cell's door and calling for help—though no staff immediately came to Ridley's aid. Eventually, Ridley was taken to be examined by a prison doctor, who found that Ridley was not injured.
In the coming days, other inmates alerted officers to Ridley's condition. However, the Herald reports that officers and nurses did nothing—walking by Ridley's cell 173 times over five days. "For five days I watch them starve him," Cherette wrote to Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators. "[T]hey ain't feed him or nothing every time they stop he tell them that he can't move the nurse laugh an make jokes and keep going."  
According to The Herald, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's report of the incident showed that "At least 11 inmates in his cell block reported that Ridley never moved from his bunk, did not pick up his food trays, and that the officers ignored him and said he was faking."
On September 12th, Corrections Officer Jesse Mallard noticed Ridley's unusual behavior, with FDLE stating that Mallard "stated something did not feel right with how Ridley was acting." The Herald reports that Ridley was again taken for medical examination, after which prison doctors sent Ridley to Memorial Hospital in Jacksonville in the early hours of September 13th, where he was intubated.
Ridley died one month later, on October 12th. A medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, citing the cause of death as "blunt impact" to the head and neck, a spinal cord injury, and "complications of quadriplegia."
"There should have been criminal charges to come out of this," Aubrey Land, a former investigator with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, told the Herald "There is serious medical neglect, evidence of falsifying documents, and a man that died. It looks mighty bad."
Ridley's death is part of a larger pattern of behavior by guards in Florida prisons. In 2018, inmate Cheryl Weimar was paralyzed from the neck down after prison guards beat her nearly to death. In 2020, a Florida corrections officer brutally beat handcuffed inmate Christopher Howell, breaking his neck and killing him. 
"This was an inhumane death caused by an abysmal lack of medical treatment," Diane Ridley Gatewood, Ridley's sister, told the Herald, "it was torture."
The post Florida Corrections Officers Paralyzed A Man, Then Left Him in Solitary Confinement appeared first on Reason.com.

Instead of studying living people, Dr. Barreiro, Dr. Poinar and their colleagues examined the DNA of people who lived centuries ago, extracting genetic material from human remains buried in three London cemeteries. They found fragments of DNA in 318 skeletons that had lived between 1000 and 1500. The remains included 42 victims of the Black Death.

Comparing the bones from before and after the plague hit, the scientists found a striking difference in DNA: Hundreds of mutations in genes involved in immunity became more common after the epidemic.

This shift was not proof on its own that the mutations conferred some evolutionary advantage. Biologists have long known that mutations can become more common in a population thanks to the vagaries of history — a process called genetic drift.

It can be challenging to determine if a common mutation came to be because of genetic drift or natural selection. One way to tell the difference is speed: Under extreme conditions, natural selection can make a mutation spread far faster than genetic drift can.

To compare natural selection and genetic drift, Dr. Barreiro and his colleagues went back to the DNA of the Londoners for another look. They took advantage of the fact that large stretches of our DNA contain no working genes. Mutations that strike those stretches are unlikely to cause any harm. They’re also unlikely to bring any benefit. They only spread thanks to genetic drift.

Dr. Barreiro and his colleagues found that some of these neutral mutations became more common after the Black Death. But 35 of the mutations in immune genes spread far faster than the neutral ones — so fast that only natural selection could account for their success.

Bestselling author John Green told a true story of recklessness and suffering Friday as a way of urging his Harvard audience to rise to the “the biggest shared challenge facing the human species”: climate change.
Green, who rose to fame with the 2012 publication of his young adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” a moving tale of two teenage cancer patients who fall in love, is a social media star with millions of followers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. A long line of fans snaked across the Yard outside Memorial Church before the doors opened.
The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity, introduced Green by highlighting his work as a writer, public thinker, and philanthropist. The author supports numerous charities and serves on the board of trustees of Partners In Health.
In a talk titled “How the World Ends,” the first of the William Belden Noble Lecture series, which will examine moral and ethical questions surrounding climate change, Green lamented the state of the world and humans’ role in the crisis.
“One of the great ironies of humans worrying so much about our apocalypse is that we often forget that for many species, we are the apocalypse,” said Green. “We’re not the first species to become so powerful on Earth that we muck up the climate and threaten the planet’s biodiversity by altering its atmosphere, but we’re the first species to know what we’re doing while we do it. We’re the first catastrophic life form to understand that we are catastrophic.”
But climate change is not the only threat to the planet, Green noted. Poverty is not natural or inevitable, he said. He bemoaned the 4 million children who will die this year before reaching age 5 due to poverty-related diseases such as diarrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis, and the heightened vulnerability of poor people to global-warming-related natural disasters.
“I don’t believe climate change will herald the end of the world, but in a way if we don’t respond aggressively to the challenge, while simultaneously building more just and inclusive systems, I think what’s coming could be worse than a mere apocalypse,” said Green, whose talk was interrupted several times by applause.
A graduate of Kenyon College, Green spent six months as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, an experience that helped shape “The Fault in Our Stars.” He said he takes inspiration from Jesus’ teachings and commitment to the poor. His work, he said, is driven by hope. He encouraged the audience to find ways to change the world.
“I do not need to tell the many of you in this sanctuary working to bring about a more just world through activism, education, and solidarity that such work is messy and complex and full of frustrations and heartbreaks and too often incremental change, but that is truly, so far as I understand it, the Lord’s work, and for me anyway a path, the only path I’ve found to encountering the divine,” he said.
Asked how to respond to the fear of living in a world on the brink of collapse, Green urged the audience to resist being consumed by “apocalyptic anxiety.”
“It’s very easy to be paralyzed by fear,” he said. “It’s important to be afraid, but also important is not to despair … I cannot imagine what it is like for you all to live through this difficult period of human history as young people, but even so I think despair never tells the full human history.”

If I had started reading the recent column by Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, “Free trade has not made us free,” in the middle of the piece, I would have first come across this sentence: “Our system of neoliberal globalization has created more wealth at a global scale over the past half-century than ever before.” And based solely on that powerful—and accurate—assertion, I might have assumed the column was a stirring defense of “neoliberal globalization,” and how supporters need to push back against those who would undermine it. 
But as the column’s headline suggests, I would have been wrong. Foroohar nestles that almost concessionary—almost boilerplate, really—sentence inside a broader argument that suggests a need to move beyond “neoliberal globalization” due to the “huge growth in inequality within many countries.” Well, that and the new need to “friendshore” supply chains to strategic allies. Also, climate change is in there, too. Foroohar:
The point here is that the current system of economic globalization isn’t going to magically dissolve political differences. We are heading towards a new, post-neoliberal paradigm in which values, rather than just “everyday low prices” as the Walmart retail slogan goes, become a more important consideration in economic policy decisions.
A few points:
First, let’s not downplay that bit about “wealth at a global scale.” While that phrase might make you think of Apple shareholders, I think of this wondrous fact from Our World In Data: “There are more than a billion fewer people living below the International Poverty Line of $2.15 per day today than in 1990. On average, the number declined by 47 million every year, or 130,000 people each day.”
Second, let’s be parochial. How have American workers been doing since 1990? Analysis by my AEI colleague Michael Strain—which can be found in his 2020 book The American Dream Is Not Dead (But Populism Could Kill It)—finds that over “the past three decades, wages for typical workers have grown by 20 percent using the CPI. And using the PCE—the better measure of inflation—finds a one-third increase in wages.” And with stronger productivity growth, wage growth might well have been even stronger.
Third, while Foroohar might hope that this “new, postliberal paradigm” will mean a greater commitment to “values, including human rights and commitments to climate change,” I would note that the right-wing populists who are also pushing for a new paradigm care nothing about those values. Be careful what you wish for. Populists want iPhones made in Cupertino, not Bangalore.
Fourth, about this “friendshoring” thing, I would refer to an excellent piece by FT columnist Alan Beattie. Here’s one of many strong points:
. . . the tools authorities have to refashion supply chains along strategic lines are clumsy and expensive. On the export side, governments can restrict sales of sensitive technology, as the US and EU have done over semiconductors and other products for Russia and China. But with imports, companies will go for cheap inputs and it will take serious fiscal or regulatory effort to make them shift suppliers on a large scale. That has implications for public finances or product prices, or both.
Fifth, markets work. As Cato Institute trade scholar has pointed out, “Many large chip-consuming companies are already adjusting their supply chains to account for geopolitical tensions.” And incentive-driven market moves are going to be a lot more effective than government mandates.
Finally, many globalization skeptics are still stuck in “China trade shock” mode. So let me highlight this 2017 podcast chat I had with Gordon Hanson, one of the author along with David Autor and David Dorn of the paper, “The China Shock.” Hanson:
If you wanted to say that trade with China has been bad for workers in Southern Ohio, parts of Tennessee and North Carolina, parts of Pennsylvania, that would be hard to argue with. But you can’t go from that conclusion to say trade’s been bad for the United States as a whole.  … And so if we want to embrace globalization, we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the policies in place that help workers who are the losers from expanded international trade. And I think what we’ve learned after the fact and what we’ve learned from many folks’ perspective too late is that we have a counter set of policies in place when it comes to helping labor markets adjust. … So on the trade agreement side, that’s not where the failings were. The failings were that we didn’t appreciate the importance that China was going to mean for a relatively small number of places in the United States that were directly in line of competition with low-wage economies in the rest of the world.
Learn more: A Few Thoughts About Capitalism and Inequality  | More on the Trade-Offs of Rejecting Nuclear Energy | Housing Prices and Elections | Think About Student Loan Reforms Rather Than Forgiveness
The post Some Thoughts on Moving Beyond ‘Neoliberal Globalization’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Once a “rising star” inside the Democratic Party, Tulsi Gabbard’s star has since fallen. Republicans, in all their wisdom, have decided to pick it up, dust it off, and follow it into a cul-de-sac.

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party,” Gabbard revealed last week. She said that the party she vied to lead just two years ago is “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” Today’s Democrats stoke “anti-white racism,” have no respect for the Constitution, are hostile to “people of faith and spirituality,” and support teaching “explicit sexual content” in schools.

Here, the former congresswoman has deployed all the empty bluster that people who spend their lives on the internet find intimidating. And for some, it’s also affecting. Who doesn’t love to hear their own ideas expressed by a recent convert to their cause? And yet, conscientious conservatives less susceptible to the flattery of mimicry might ask the former congresswoman where she’s been all these years. The contours of modern Democratic politics she denounces were readily apparent when she was one of its “leading voices.”

We can’t blame Republicans for being susceptible to emotional manipulation. After all, the white-hot denouncements Gabbard’s heel-turn elicits from Democrats are a function of her betrayal. Apostasy is a greater sin than heresy, and everyone in this story is human.

And humans make mistakes, which is what explains the efforts by Republican candidates to make Gabbard into an avatar for the New Republican—a species within the GOP’s taxonomy that generally rejects Republican orthodoxy. In her first foray into the campaign trail in New Hampshire, Gabbard made headlines for herself—not the candidate she was there to support—when she insisted that, like Joe Biden, Hitler probably had the best of intentions. The strategic brilliance is positively blinding.

Any Republican who invites Gabbard to share his spotlight deserves the discomfort he’s likely to experience as a result. Gabbard is a known quantity. Her passions, which seem aroused mostly in opposition to American strategic interests abroad, have led her to sidle up alongside some of the world’s worst actors.

Gabbard’s “road to Damascus” first led her, quite literally, to Damascus. Armed with all the benefits of the intelligence to which she was privy, to say nothing of media reports anyone possessed of sufficient curiosity could consume at their will, Gabbard went out of her way to bestow legitimacy onto Syria’s mass murdering despot Bashar al-Assad. She couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for the plight of the Syrians being gassed, tortured, and slaughtered by their government. Nor was she capable of making the distinction between the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, or al-Nusra militants and anyone else engaged in resistance against that regime. Gabbard reserved her contempt for the West’s efforts to protect vulnerable populations inside Syria. Indeed, the model of geostrategic propriety to which we should aspire, she said, was Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria,” she said. “Putin did.” That restatement of Moscow’s line on the conflict in Syria forces those who adhere to it to disregard the fact that Assad materially supported the ISIS caliphate when it was a useful foil. It also elides the distinctions between Islamist terrorists, free Syrian rebels, Kurdish proxies, and many other actors with distinct motives and values. Papering over those distinctions was crucial to Moscow because it justified Russian support for starvation campaigns targeting whole cities and the bombing of hospitals.

Gabbard’s views didn’t change when it was U.S. forces engaging directly with Russian militia groups and threatening to target U.S. soldiers. Indeed, she believed that was all our fault. At the time, she warned that Western efforts to oppose Russia’s bloody ambitions in Syria could “result in a nuclear war” with Russia. Likewise, she says that the West’s support for Ukraine as it struggles to resist a naked campaign of territorial conquest is similarly naïve and dangerous.

Joe Biden is heedlessly “escalating their proxy war with Russia” in Ukraine, Gabbard charged this week. He is “discouraging diplomatic efforts and bringing the entire world closer to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.” She coupled this allegation with a full-throated endorsement of Ukrainian capitulation, which the West should somehow engineer. Gabbard’s penchant for conspiratorial thinking is on full display in a statement that presupposes the West is so omnipotent that it can dictate terms to every other actor on Earth and also so malevolent that it declines that duty.

What you can say about Gabbard is that she’s a true believer. It’s not as though she’s advocating a popular view of the conflict in Ukraine. Last week, three out of every four Americans told pollsters they supported arming Ukrainian forces despite the risks; this included two-thirds of self-described Republicans. That high level of support has been remarkably stable since the start of this war, despite the fluidity of the conditions on the battlefield. Of course, a dedicated ideologue is free—even obliged—to take unfashionable but principled stands. But what does it gain Republican candidates in closely contested races to shackle themselves to someone so committed to saying unpopular things?

Indeed, what kind of political powerhouse are Republicans acquiring for themselves in Gabbard? What crossover appeal is there in someone who dropped out of the Democratic presidential nominating contest in the spring of 2020 after winning just over 270,000 Democratic votes? Republican voters don’t seem to share her enthusiasm for Russia’s geostrategic interests, nor are GOP-leaning independents starved for pro-Assad content. Is the Republican base just salivating over the restoration of Roosevelt-era banking regulations or the chance to team up with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to provide Americans with a monthly stipend at taxpayer expense?

Gabbard contributes to the populist right’s campaign to discredit the party’s commitment to extroversion abroad and limited government at home. If Gabbard’s supplication before the GOP presents the party with any opportunity at all, therefore, it is the chance for Republicans to humiliate themselves. And if history is any guide, the GOP will take maximum advantage of it.

“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” –Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
As you can see, according to Karl Marx, Communism, true and proper, is the self-conscious solution to “the riddle of history.” Of course, in reality, where things have to work, there is no riddle of history. The “riddle of history” Marx referred to is, in fact, dialectical anthroposophy (which is a really fancy for man-centered heretical nonsense), thus any claim upon a solution to that riddle is pure pretense and dangerous hubris. The true solution to the riddle of history, if we should even allow such a phrase, must begin with the outright rejection of Communism and the dialectical framing in which the riddle is posed in the first place, including the underlying assumption that History has a purpose and is thus a riddle to be solved.
Karl Marx did not reject that assumption, however; he began with it. What, to Marx, was the riddle of history, solved, other than just to say “Communism,” as described above? It’s socialism that can produce, that can “deliver the goods,” one might say. Productive socialism that allows Man to escape toil, exploitation, suffering, and work, which arrives when Man is freed from the existence of private property and thus the division of labor, which was his Fall, is the pathway to the “transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement,” as Marx had it. The problem is that “productive socialism” is a functional oxymoron.
The history of the twentieth century is basically the story of productive socialism not existing, either in reality or in actuality (these are different to Marxists). So far, all bids to create it have fallen flat on their faces, universally after starving and people by the millions in the pretense of having finally got it right—or, at least good enough for government work. The reason is straightforward: history is not a riddle, and the dialectic in which it is framed as such is bogus and ultimately a power grab for people who do not know how to wield power. We therefore have every reason to expect the newest “solution” to the “riddle of history,” which believes that it knows itself to be that solution, is going to fail and do a ton of avoidable damage so long as we keep giving it any countenance. Utter failure has never slowed a Communist down, however, so they’re doing what they always do when confronted with failure: keeping their bogus product the same while giving its branding a face-lift.
The fancy, new-fangled “solution” to the non-existent “riddle of history” therefore now tends to go by the name “sustainability,” or more specifically, “sustainable capitalism.” In sustainable capitalism, the economy will be “circular,” and “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” We’ve heard this kind of talk before, always from the mouths of the emissaries of Mordor. It’ll be great, a “better future” that is both “sustainable and inclusive.” Our systems will be more “resilient,” and we won’t waste so much because we’ll be reusing most of our waste. Didn’t you see the video of Bill Gates smiling as he drank a glass of water pressed out of human sewage? We’ll eat far less meat and, one presumes, far more soy and bugs. Western values like individual liberty and the ownership of private property will hit their breaking points and be abolished, and the United States will no longer be the world’s superpower because room has to be made for China and a new mirror-image supranational West governed by the United Nations. Most importantly, this whole scam will be “sustainable” for the planet we live on, the people we live among, and, even more most importantly, for the Regime that administers it for us. That’s the rub, too. We’ll need someone to administer this unnatural, nonsensical, expensive crap for as long as it lasts because in that Marx was wrong about us being a “species-being” who has forgotten his true nature, nobody is going to sign up for or maintain this disaster for themselves willingly.
Lenin understood this. That was the point of his vanguard strategy, which he located in the Bolshevik Party. Thanks to the need to administer the proposed solution to the riddle of history, you may have heard of sustainable capitalism referred to by another name, “stakeholder capitalism.” That’s adorable. Lenin would smile. Administration of the sustainable capitalism has to be done by a council of expert stakeholders who, in their greater wisdom and perspicacity, make sure all the real stakeholders’ stakes are accounted for, after being passed through the supremely informed and equitable filter of their claim to expertise. That’s why it was called the Soviet Union, don’t you know? The Russian word for the deciding “council” is совет—Soviet, as it gets rendered in English. The совет акционеров, the stakeholders’ council, will administer the sustainable capitalism that us rubes are too dumb and selfish to produce and maintain for ourselves.
Where sustainable capitalism is the solution to the so-called riddle of history, stakeholder capitalism is little more than its mechanism of implementation. Phrased more historically, where sustainable capitalism “is the riddle of history solved” and “the positive transcendence of private property,” to riff from Karl Marx, stakeholder capitalism is the supranationalist Leninist-style vanguard program that will implement it for us—rather, on us. That is, because we won’t be sustainable in the right sense by ourselves, our elite betters are going to have to implement it upon us for us—for the greater good of all. Though we can only speculate, this might be why Klaus Schwab, alleged father of the stakeholder capitalism model, has a bust of none other than Vladimir Lenin on the bookshelf in his office. In other words, stakeholder capitalism being offered as the vehicle to sustainable capitalism is just further proof that this whole giant socioeconomic Ponzi scheme is going to fail catastrophically. It actually gives away the game that they’ve tucked away and hidden inside of a fancy new Western technofuturist box.
What we’ve already realized, however, is that there’s another term that could pass equally well for what is meant by “sustainable capitalism,” understood as “the riddle of history solved.” That term would be productive socialism, which, if administered long and hard enough, will result in the People undergoing the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement as they remember that they are and always were Communists in their essential being. That’s what Marx characterized it as. Communism, as he had it, is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.” The problem is that through the “inversion of praxis,” which is how the existing society allegedly brainwashes people into accepting its terms and thus reproducing it, people can’t solve the riddle of history. They have had the wrong values “introjected” into them through the inversion of praxis, as it was phrased in 1969 by the Critical Marxist Herbert Marcuse in his infamous Essay on Liberation. They need to be freed from those and have new values—a New Sensibility—introjected into them instead so that they can establish a true (biological) foundation for socialism.
This, “productive socialism,” is what they pretend to have in China under the CCP now. Communist China can be looked at as the test-run for this brilliant new global scam. They introject the correct values into the population not only through the usual old-fashioned methods like 鬥爭 (dòuzhēng, struggle) and 洗腦 (xǐnǎo, brainwashing) but also through forced compliance with a pervasive social credit system that makes you behave, shall we say, productively and sustainably. The Marxist doctrine of the inversion of praxis instructs that if you force people to live and practice the new values system, eventually it will determine their character. They will become socialists by being forced to live as socialists.
This is easily enough said, but how did it get here? The case for my claim—that “sustainable capitalism” and “productive socialism” are synonyms—derives from my reading of the leading Critical Marxist Theorist of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse. Particularly, in my view, the second and ninth chapters of his magnum opus, titled One-dimensional Man and published in 1964, constitute the conceptual bedrock for the development of “sustainable capitalism,” and that this concept represents nothing more than a West-palatable brand name for what would be more honestly called productive socialism. I think this book rephrases the so-called riddle of history while never admitting the slightest doubt that “socialism” might not be its solution. Of course, in the religion of Marxism, questioning the completion of History as truly transcendent capitalism (which resolves the Fall of Man as the division of labor) is roughly the same as asking a Christian to doubt the Resurrection (which resolves the Fall of Man as the Sin of Adam). It’s not going to happen.
In One-dimensional Man, which reached and influenced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Leftists in the 1960s and 1970s—Leftists who went on to become your college professors and your kids’ teachers’ college professors, among other world-building professionals—Marcuse wrestles with a number of mid-century challenges to the sputtering Marxist sophistry, which was barely chugging along on fumes everywhere outside of East Asia and, to a degree, Latin America. Prominent among them, and essentially the thesis of his second chapter, is the dialectical relationship between capitalism in the West and socialism in the East (and South). What that means is that capitalism and socialism are in some obscure sense the same thing viewed in different, incorrectly opposing lights. Both are partial answers to the riddle of history, which finds its solution on a higher plane of understanding that synthesizes them both into a single program. Putting capitalism and socialism in a dialectical relationship, in fact, might have been Marcuse’s most significant contribution to Leftist thought because it, in a sense, poses the two great warring systems as two key insights to the so-called riddle of history.
For Marcuse, part of the solution exists in what he sees as the chief problem of capitalism. The problem is that capitalism “delivers the goods.” It enables the middle class to rise and the worker to have a good life that he enjoys. He has stuff. He isn’t hungry or cold. He isn’t miserable. Though he is allegedly still exploited, he’s conditioned by the goodness of his life (the inversion of praxis) to accept and even enjoy it—and, he admits, it’s absolutely true that his life is a good life. That makes him “one-dimensional” and completely ruins his revolutionary potential. To be a revolutionary, the worker has to be radicalized by making him miserable through the abuses of monopoly-capital and exploiting that misery. “Advanced capitalism,” as Marcuse called it, had fairly effectively put a stop to these abuses, thus flattening Man and conditioning him to accept and even love his largely meaningless and static one-dimensional workaday-consumerist life.
For Marcuse, the working class was removed from his historical position as a revolutionary base by this evil success of advanced capitalism, so much so that he insisted that a new working class would need to be found through identity politics, racial, sexual, feminist, and more, led by the more easily programmed college students (Mao preferentially xǐnǎo-ed the youth too, and Marcuse knew it). In Marcuse’s telling, besides flattening Man and thus locking his essential nature (as a socialist) away from his consciousness, this successful dimension of capitalism creates an impending disaster of excess. Capitalism delivers the goods, but it turns people into relentless consumers whose needs multiply as fast as they can be satisfied. Meanwhile, in his telling, it profiteers off deliberately wasteful practices like planned obsolescence and the destruction of the limited natural environment. Capitalism works, in Marcuse’s dialectical view of it, but it works too well and simply isn’t sustainable.
On the other hand of the grand riddle of history, socialism has the right view of things, the right sensibility, argues Marcuse, but it’s a dump. Socialist nations were undeniable shitholes—in fact, far worse than that because they were brutally totalitarian and abusive. Marcuse pinned these failures on the abuses of bureaucracy and their tyrants, but those in turn were, to him, the result of a specific problem that Marxists of his era didn’t know how to solve. That problem is sometimes called the problem of production. Stated simply, socialist societies can’t produce. They cannot even manage to meet the basic needs of their people, and in their mounting failure to be able to produce, they become brutal. Socialism, for Marcuse, has it right, but it doesn’t work. If it did work, it would be both productive and sustainable, and the people would be happy.
That “riddle of history,” which I will insist defined Marxist Leftism (a redundancy, frankly) in the tumultuous 1960s and stagnating 1970s, was the framing in which stakeholder capitalism and the notion of a “sustainable and inclusive” future emerged, I believe. The Soviet Union, for all its might, was toast, so the model was tested first in China. It developed not under Mao Zedong—though important meetings between leaders like him, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger proceeded, perhaps to that theme—but under his successor Deng Xiaoping, who rose to Chairman of the CCP within a couple of politically tumultuous years following Mao’s death in September 1976.
The “productive socialism” experiment, as it might now be called, was to open up restricted markets within China and Chinese industry to Western markets. “I don’t care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice,” Deng famously remarked, so why not experiment with a markets-driven solution to the problem of production? In some sense, it worked. China was rapidly enriched and went from being a broken, backwards, and extremely populous nation with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s to a global financial superpower in just a few decades. They had, it seemed, cracked the code on productive socialism.
The trick, it seemed, was to open up quasi-capitalist markets like little controlled terrariums inside the socialist architecture of the command-driven Communist state. The trick, in reality, was probably little more than turning that humongous, impoverished, and easily exploitable population base into a gigantic manufacturing base for Western consumer goods, which is only good so long as it lasts. (The check might be coming due on this now, for what it’s worth.)
If the model could work in China, why not in the West—and thus, in some sense, everywhere? The West, obviously, would naturally fall behind the rising command-economy behemoth in the East if it didn’t transform as well, right? That makes for one hell of a sales pitch, one that many of our Western elites seem to have bought hook, line, and sinker. To get productive socialism in the West, especially in the United States, where socialism is largely anathema, what changes would be needed there?
Herbert Marcuse told us. You’ll definitely need a radicalized youth that believes it can’t even live without socialism, and getting one of those is as simple a matter, more or less, as getting hold of the education system and disrupting family, faith, and national identity. More would be needed, too, though. A right understanding of capitalism, the basis of the West, that synthetically moves it toward “productive socialism” would also be needed.
Again, to believe Herbert Marcuse on the issue, the problem with Western capitalism wasn’t that it couldn’t produce; it’s that it isn’t sustainable. The problem of advanced capitalism isn’t production and the satisfaction of needs, argues Marcuse; it’s overproduction and thus the insatiable production of newer and newer false needs. “In the contemporary era, the conquest of scarcity is still confined to small areas of advanced industrial society. Their prosperity covers up the Inferno inside and outside their borders; it also spreads a repressive productivity and ‘false needs,’” he tells us.
What’s to be done about these “false needs” generated by the excessive successes of advanced capitalism? Says, Herr Marcuse, “The process always replaces one system of preconditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.” Of course, consciousness (the Marxists’ Gnostic counterfeit of Christian discernment and Greek wisdom) is needed to distinguish the two. True needs are the actual basic needs of life, not more, which a government of productive socialism should provide thus liberating Man from needing to provide them for himself. False needs, on the other hand, can be identified through critical consciousness as well, however.
We may distinguish both true and false needs. “False” are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.
So much for relaxing and having fun in the socialist utopia, comrades! That’s not all, though! “Liberation of energy from the performances required to sustain destructive prosperity,” advises Marcuse in the ninth chapter of One-dimensional Man, “means decreasing the high standard of servitude in order to enable the individuals to develop that rationality which may render possible a pacified existence.” It “also presupposes reduction in the future population,” he points out in the next sentence (written in 1964 when the population was roughly half what it is today), but let’s not digress into the uncomfortably obvious. To achieve the parallel of productive socialism in the West, capitalism would have to be modified to free up the “energy…required to sustain destructive prosperity,” and the denizens of Western capitalistic nations would have to accept generally a lower standard of living (and smaller population). In other words, capitalism would have to be made sustainable (and inclusive). So we’re back to the socialist shitholes, but in the new sustainable ones, you’ll be happy, not merely comfortable, relaxed, and euphoric.
I believe “sustainable (and inclusive) capitalism” is little more than the capitalist-side solution to this false riddle of history posed in 1964 by Herbert Marcuse, and that it knows—rather, believes—itself to be this solution. The “productive socialism” of China under the hybrid system currently run by the CCP is the socialist-side solution to the same, and, in fact, these two are not significantly different in any noteworthy way. These two, sustainable capitalism and productive socialism, are the two great systems dialectically reframed as part of a greater whole: the impending shithole world of the New World Order. Thus, in China the Communism is on the outside and the fascistic market structure is contained within to produce “productive socialism,” and in the West, perhaps mostly due to some combination of marketing constrains and dialectical wizardry, the fascistic “public-private partnership” is on the outside with the “equitable and inclusive” redistribution scheme hidden within. This, though is a distinction without much difference. Both are in a position for ultimate synthesis into the great tyranny of the twenty-first century. In a bizarre twist of ironic inversion, the Chinese model will be the nationalistic one. The West will not be allowed to be so lucky.
Karl Marx said of the true sort of Communism that it is “the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be the solution,” and this is characterized by “the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being.” Sustainable capitalism phrases this more plainly: “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.” Marx said about it that it, “as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man.” The sustainable capitalists explain that it’s environmentally and socially responsible, or sustainable and inclusive. Inclusion as a Communist ideal is obvious, of course, but what about (environmental) sustainability? Karl Marx explained this too, though a bit more abstrusely,
Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art—his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible—so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body—both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. (EPM)
We—as a collective—are nature, apparently. We, as individuals, sunder ourselves from nature, both as nature itself and as the necessary window into our true human natures—as Communists. Sustainable capitalism managed by Klaus Schwab’s совет акционеров, a.k.a. “stakeholder capitalism,” allows the properly conscious to remedy this primordial Marxist evil, and it knows itself to be the solution.
So, I think I’ve made my case. Karl Marx instructed in 1844 that the true Communism is the self-conscious solution to the riddle of history, and Herbert Marcuse 120 years later framed the riddle of history for the stage of “advanced capitalism” and faltering socialism to be how to synthesize them into a single functional system. While “productive socialism” is not a term in the common use, its Western brand name, “sustainable capitalism” is. These are not different, however. They’re both approximately the same new iteration of Communism, a Neo-Communism based on Marcusian Neo-Marxism instead of Marxian Marxism.
The whole thing is a scam, and it will do incalculable damage if we allow it. We don’t have to allow it, though. We have a choice. We can understand what we’re dealing with beneath the jargon and slick branding, and we can say no. Marcuse said that overcoming the tyranny of the system he hated required what he called a Great Refusal—“the protest against that which is”—and to that much, I say yes. We can refuse this scam, whether we call it “sustainable capitalism” or “productive socialism” (which is an oxymoron) and get back to living history as it unfolds instead of falling on our faces by thinking its a riddle we can or should solve.
The post The Riddle of History, Solved appeared first on New Discourses.

In an interview with the BBC last night (17 October), the Prime Minister said: “I’m sticking around because I was elected to deliver for this country.”
That is not entirely accurate. Only 81,326 Conservative Party members – or 0.17 per cent of the national electorate – voted for Liz Truss in the summer. In any case, many of the policies and principles she was elected on have now been scrapped. Besides, the Prime Minister has already departed drastically from Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto, implementing policies the Conservative majority wasn’t elected to deliver. A majority that the past week has proved she is unable to command.
This lack of authority has led to speculation about – not to mention calls from opposition parties for – a snap general election. A prime minister with no mandate, opponents of Truss argue, should go to the country to regain one.
However, the chances of Truss calling an election are slim to non-existent. Firstly, because her poll ratings are dire – the PM is nearly as unpopular as Vladimir Putin. Secondly, Tory MPs would probably replace Truss if she tried to force them into an election considering the high probability, per the polls, of them losing their seats.
A more interesting question is whether an election might be more likely if the Conservatives oust Truss and appoint yet another leader.
The argument goes that if a new prime minister was chosen by Tory MPs rather than voted for by members in a full leadership contest, they would have even less of a mandate to govern than Truss. If Rishi Sunak became PM, perhaps he could argue that he received 60,000 votes from the membership in the summer’s contest – but that’s a stretch of legitimacy even for the Tory party. Like Truss, the new prime minister would be implementing a policy platform far removed from what was promised in 2019. Therefore, seeing as no one voted for austerity wouldn’t they be tempted to cement their validity by going to the people?
The answer is probably not. Britain has a parliamentary system: it was the Conservative Party – not Boris Johnson – that was elected in 2019 with an 80-seat majority. That (now slightly diminished) majority gives whoever is party leader a mandate to be prime minister. The crises of Covid, the war in Ukraine and market turbulence since the mini-Budget gives the new PM a “doctor’s mandate” to divert from 2019. As long as they can command a majority of MPs (something that Truss almost certainly cannot do), they will be able to struggle on for two more years until the end of the parliamentary term.
Unless the polls change significantly, hanging on is far more appealing a prospect than an election in which the new PM risks losing. If a general election was to be held tomorrow, the New Statesman’s election model predicts the Conservatives would lose 324 seats – leaving them with fewer MPs in Westminster than the SNP. Electoral annihilation wouldn’t be the top priority for any new prime minister.
Another wildcard is the redrawing of constituency boundaries in late 2023; they are due to change for the first time since 2010. The Conservatives are expected to gain a slight advantage from this because of fewer seats in northern England, Wales and Scotland, but this benefit may not be as large as has been expected – and some prominent Tory MPs may find their seats at risk. There have been estimates of ten-seat boundary gains for the party, but even that pales in comparison with its projected losses. Nonetheless, the moves will surely play on the mind of a new leader deciding when to go to the polls.
Whether a general election is called will be down to political momentum. If the Tories pick another leader and see a popularity spike in the polls, perhaps they will take their chances before a predicted mortgage crisis hits and the spending cuts begin. Or perhaps they’ll savour their time in No 10 and hold out, hoping the situation will improve before January 2025, when the parliamentary term runs out. In either case, they’ll have to get rid of Truss first. 
[See also: The race to succeed Liz Truss begins]

The government made perhaps the biggest retreat in economic history yesterday. Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, scrapped nearly all of last month’s mini-Budget and went further by cancelling the Boris Johnson administration’s planned cut in the basic rate of income tax.
The energy price guarantee was also reduced from two years to six months. This was the policy Liz Truss had used to shield her tax cuts from criticism and distinguish herself from Labour. It was the biggest part of the mini-Budget, the Prime Minister said. Now that asset has gone. As I wrote yesterday, the humiliation of appointing a Chancellor to gut your own budget has hastened her exit.
Indeed, Truss seemed to be in hiding yesterday, smarting perhaps from her authority-sapping press conference on Friday. Maybe she’d been advised to avoid public speaking as much as possible but her absence allowed her rivals to fill the void. The contest to replace Truss began on the floor of the House of Commons yesterday.
Penny Mordaunt, who came third in the Conservative leadership election over the summer, stood in for the Prime Minister during an urgent question. Her confident, wry appearance threw Truss’s stylistic weaknesses into sharp relief. Mordaunt didn’t try to hide her relish. “I fully appreciate the optics of me appearing at the dispatch box,” she said – tellingly.
Later in the afternoon Hunt assumed the role of prime minister in all but name. Liz Truss sat beside him in the Commons chamber, unmoving, as he decimated the policies the party membership elected her to deliver. Higher taxes and spending cuts have now replaced tax cuts and deregulation. Her government’s mandate has been extinguished.
Nonetheless, the direction of Tory MPs is uncertain. While most accept that Truss’s time is up, there is no agreement on the mechanism for her removal or her replacement: some may want Mordaunt, others Hunt, others Rishi Sunak. The calming of the market turmoil unleashed by the mini-Budget has also made Truss’s exit seem less urgent. Her performance at Prime Minister’s Questions tomorrow could give the rebels momentum but they don’t know what they’ll do yet, so we can’t know either.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; subscribe here.
[See also: Will Liz Truss call a general election?]

Credits

Rana Foroohar is CNN’s global economic analyst and the global business columnist and associate editor for the Financial Times. This is a modified excerpt from her latest book, “Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World” (Crown, October 2022).

In the United States, corporations capture the state. In China, the state rules corporations. It’s a One World, Two Systems paradigm that will continue to fundamentally change the global economy — and the way businesses everywhere must operate in the 21st century. There is no longer a single global paradigm for capitalism, but a collection of local and regional paradigms to which companies will have to adjust.
Both the United States and China have, in different ways, benefited tremendously from the last 40 years of globalization, financialization and neoliberal economic policy. And in both countries, tech companies have been among the biggest winners.
The intangible nature of their businesses — they traffic not so much in hardware, as in software, data and ideas — makes it very easy for them to offshore profits to favorable tax locales and pay less of their enormous wealth to governments as a percentage of revenue than other businesses. They also employ legions of lobbyists and lawyers to push the tech companies’ own narrow interests, and they crush those who get in their way. What’s good for Apple, it turns out, isn’t necessarily good for the United States or any other individual country, for that matter. And yet Big Tech firms also like to pretend that they are national “champions” of innovation that deserve protection from the U.S. government, even as they focus on maximizing shareholder value by trying to do as much business in China as possible.
The truth is that both Big Tech and China operate as monopolies — it’s just that the former exists in the private sector aiming at private gain, whereas the latter operates under the guise of a state clearly focused on maximizing collective national advantage. This disparity represents a crucial disadvantage for Western companies and countries. While Chinese companies have the protection and support of the state, U.S. and, to a lesser extent, European firms are either left to their own devices or even find themselves fighting the government of the country in which they are supposed champions.
It’s clear what the vectorial direction of China today is — toward more, not less, top-down control of what is already the world’s largest surveillance state. The United States, Europe and all other nations now face a choice: either be looped into the Chinese orbit or forge a new model for a post-neoliberal world.
Assuming the choice is the latter, both businesses and governments will have to change the way they operate. In a world in which we have to compete with state-run giants in China, which think on 50-year time horizons, quarterly capitalism simply doesn’t cut it anymore (not that it ever really did). Most countries today have some form of national industrial strategy to ensure the well-being of citizens rather than just shareholders, and the United States needs one, too.

“The United States, Europe and all other nations now face a choice: either be looped into the Chinese orbit or forge a new model for a post-neoliberal world.” 

Consider, for example, the plight of Qualcomm, the U.S. multinational that designs the wireless chips that are the smartest thing in your cellphone — and whose story makes clear that companies can no longer fly completely above the concerns of the nation-states in which they operate.
For the last four years, Apple battled Qualcomm on three continents in an effort to reduce the licensing fees it charges for the designs that power the chips Apple needs for all its iPhones. Qualcomm has depended on that income, which in 2020 amounted to more than half of its global profits, to support its research to win the global 5G competition. Stymied by Apple, Qualcomm relied more and more on its profits in China. But because the Defense Department had deemed China the chief strategic adversary of the United States, this posed new security concerns, particularly as the Trump trade war heated up.
Qualcomm was a crucial source for next-generation technologies that would be essential to America’s future. Should China have access to these technologies, increasing the risk that it could hack into the United States’ critical infrastructure — or even to the chips made by one of the United States’ top telecom innovators (chips that powered any number of devices, which could in turn be compromised)? Suddenly, policymakers on both sides of the aisle were beginning to ask these questions.
To neoliberals, this was of no concern; multinational companies should be able to do business wherever they liked. (Although these same policymakers turned a blind eye to the fact that, as China’s size and status in the global economy had changed, the playing field for that business had become increasingly unlevel.) But as China grew ever more threatening to the United States’ global competitiveness, Washington began to reconsider. Perhaps the government should step in. But, of course, to think that way was to admit what it had long denied: that the government did indeed have a role to play in directing the national economy in the national interest. There was, as it turns out, a place for industrial policy.
Multinationals like Qualcomm, which once found themselves at the center of the era of neoliberal globalization, sit uncomfortably in the middle of this new world. And they raise key questions for the next era of capitalism: Can the fruits of a global corporation be harvested at home? Is it possible to be both global and local? I believe the answer is yes. But, in a world that will have at least two, if not three, separate tech/trade and digital tax paradigms, it will require a new social compact for business.

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Paradigm shifts are challenging, but already COVID-19 has presented some very interesting new opportunities for reinvention. Start with what’s happening in the business sector itself. If there is a silver lining to the COVID-19 crisis, it is the remarkable creativity shown by the many businesses that thrived by transforming themselves in unexpected ways during the pandemic. There is the airport security company that made plans to launch a vaccine-tracking app after the travel business tanked. Or the mall and store owners renting out empty retail areas to schools that needed more space for students to socially distance during lessons. Or the in-person event companies that quickly transitioned to digital businesses.

“Industrial policy isn’t a silver-bullet solution to the economic woes of this new world, but it is a politically smart nod to the fact that we are in one.” 

More new business applications were filed in 2020 in the United States than in any previous year on record — applications were up 24% from 2019. But 2021 was even better: Applications rose 42% in the first nine months compared to the same period in 2019. Yes, brick-and-mortar retail is still lagging, and the travel and tourism industry may never be what it once was, but areas like ecommerce, fintech and health care are positively booming. This kind of Schumpeterian creative destruction is just what you want at a time like this. But the rise of entirely new kinds of businesses also creates new challenges for both capital and labor. I’d point to three particularly pressing issues that will require more attention from policy makers.
First is the question of how to value and protect intangible assets, which, after the pandemic, will probably double as a percentage of corporate investment — assets like software, patents, digital data and the brains of the “knowledge workers” whom every country must now cultivate. Most big business battles today are over who owns what slice of the digital pie. Consider the court case between Epic Games and Apple over App Store commissions. Or the fight over pandemic exemptions to World Trade Organization rules around intellectual property to bolster vaccine production. Or Google and Apple battling it out with SAP, Siemens and BASF over patent protection in Germany. As the percentage of corporate wealth held in intangible assets inexorably rises, these types of conflicts will only increase. This underscores the desperate need for a 21st-century transatlantic alliance around technology regulation and digital trade rules. China is going its own way on many of these matters, but Europe and the United States must not. Regional unity can, and should, replace laissez-faire globalization that denies the incongruities of the One World, Two Systems paradigm.
The second big issue is that the expansion of intangible assets will probably mean fewer jobs in the short term, even as it creates new businesses and entirely different industries over the longer term. Neither the public nor the private sector in the United States is grappling fully with this problem. In the United States, for example, with the exception of groups like the Freelancers Union or the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the labor movement is focused largely on protecting traditional 40-hour-a-week work that comes with benefits. Companies are meanwhile trying to push more and more people into gig work and to replace as many jobs as possible with technology.
There are ways to bridge the gap. Portable benefits have long been proposed by politicians such as Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat. They would allow independent contractors to carry health and pensions coverage with them from job to job, rather than having them tied to employment with a single company. I’m also a fan of the idea of taxing and redistributing some of the massive wealth captured by corporate data collectors. This includes not just the big platform giants, but many other types of companies, from online retailers to consumer goods brands. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already proposed a “data dividend” for consumers, a version of which could be implemented in both the United States and Europe. The proceeds could go to workforce training or to improve public education. Both would act as a buffer against looming digital labor shocks.
Third, while antitrust action is desperately needed to ensure a level playing field in the age of platform monopolies, we need to stop looking for a silver-bullet solution on competition. I suspect there are going to be a lot of different solutions for different companies. A company like Amazon could easily be broken up into a retail platform and a logistics provider. Others, like Google, might be turned into tightly regulated public utilities, which would mirror the way corporate behemoths of the past, from railroads to telecom, were put in check when they became too large and powerful. Real-world rules and regulations must be made to apply to the online world as well. Otherwise, digital players can easily use regulatory arbitrage to jump around even the largest incumbents in the most powerful industries.
This process will require state coordination of public and private resources. That’s not about picking winners or losers, and it’s certainly not about becoming a top-down Big Tech-run version of the Chinese surveillance state. It’s simply about bringing a smidgen of strategic and long-term foresight to the way the U.S. economy is run. Indeed, the U.S. did successfully implement a mini-industrial policy with its COVID-19 vaccine effort. The federal government supplied about $14 billion worth of subsidies to pharmaceutical companies to produce a vaccine as quickly as possible. By guaranteeing massive orders up front and covering other costs (retrofitting manufacturing plants, for example), Washington eliminated most private-sector risk. This enabled corporations to throw everything at finding a rapid solution. The National Institutes of Health also supplied companies with much of the sequencing work and access to its vast databases. As a result, the country went from a virus sequenced in January 2020 to phase three trials by October of that year. In the history of medicine, nothing like this had been achieved. “This is a historic, unprecedented achievement,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told a think tank webinar in December 2020.

“Neoliberal thinking decrees that state involvement in the economy is verboten. But that’s actually antithetical to America’s origins.” 

And yet, the United States has a long way to go to regain its muscle memory about how to achieve broader goals for industrial policy. The neoliberal thinking that has defined globalization in the West since the ‘80s decrees that state involvement in the economy is verboten. But that’s actually antithetical to America’s origins. Until very recently, the United States itself did exactly what China today does — funnel capital to the most productive places, connect the dots between job creators and educators and link the public and private sector to pursue goals in the national economic interest. That’s industrial policy — which has been a dirty word in the United States for decades now, but it wasn’t always.
Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers and the first U.S. treasury secretary, supported the creation of a national bank, which he viewed correctly as a “political machine of the greatest importance to the state.” He also started a public-private partnership to provide cheap water power and financial capital to investors in the early republic. Subsequent administrations — from Lincoln to Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy — took pages from his book. The U.S. auto industry, for example, was a crucial part of the rampup for World War II. Public- and private-sector actors worked together on economic strategy geared toward preparing for battle. Bill Knudsen, then president of General Motors, was tapped by Franklin Roosevelt to lead the retooling of civilian industry for wartime production. The production lines that were created not only helped win the war, but also increased productivity and bolstered growth and competitiveness in the postwar period.
You can draw an invisible line directly from this strategy back to Hamilton’s own “Report on the Subject of Manufactures,” published at the end of 1791, which outlined why manufacturing had an importance to the nation that went far beyond security: it would not only protect citizens, but help them diversify their own industrial efforts, raise productivity and wages as a result and bolster investment. That’s exactly what China does so successfully today, using industrial policy and state subsidies to protect industries, investors and workers and moving people and infrastructure where it makes the most sense.
This strategy has always made sense for the United States, which is a large economy with plenty of food, fuel and consumer demand. It makes sense for China, too (which doesn’t have access to as much of an agricultural base as the United States, but which has bought farmland and ports in other countries to ensure its own security). It makes less sense for smaller nations like the United Kingdom, birthplace of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the father of today’s neoliberal trade theory. Ricardian economics has shaped today’s trading system. But it’s arguably not the best formula for a bigger, more self-sufficient nation like the United States or China (or even a region like the European Union, which can essentially act as a large self-sufficient bloc). In a world that is more regionalized, there are inherent tensions within the Ricardian model, and cracks that are only just now beginning to show. Industrial policy, which is increasingly supported by politicians of both stripes, isn’t a silver-bullet solution to the economic woes of this new world, but it is a politically smart nod to the fact that we are in one.
Biden, for his part, has been trying to reboot the U.S. industrial base, and a big part of that has been about reshaping the narrative and moving it away from a half century of neoliberal received wisdom. In June 2021, the head of the president’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, gave a speech laying out how the Biden administration plans to build more supply chain “resilience” by using the purchasing power of the federal government (and its allies) to drive private-sector investment into four key areas: semiconductors, large-capacity batteries (like the kind used in electric vehicles), rare earth minerals needed for electronic devices and most tech equipment, and key pharmaceutical ingredients. It was a truly historic shift, a return to industrial policy in a way we haven’t seen for decades — one that, as Deese put it, rests on the fundamental belief that creating more shared and equitable growth is necessary not just for the economy but for saving liberal democracy. This should involve allies who will help bolster demand and also innovation across a newly revamped ecosystem that will make everyone less reliant on Taiwan, where most of the world’s high-end chips are produced.
If anything, the U.S. plan isn’t radical enough — yet. We could do more to help build back better, stronger and faster; one way to cut through the bureaucracy would be to appoint a resiliency czar who would answer to the president. Such a person could bring together all the various departments across government faster, addressing things like the most-needed critical infrastructure, connections between the public and private sector and areas where there is low-hanging fruit to be plucked to create more resiliency. Industrial policy, by its very nature, requires action at the top, but the process shouldn’t become too cumbersome or involve too many different budget-line sheets or vested interests, lest it drag along too slowly to do any good.
China has made quite clear its aims to be independent of Western technology. The West must now focus on building its own digital ecosystem. That means investing in production capacity in strategic industries like semiconductors, green batteries and the like. It means making sure that large U.S. incumbents don’t crush innovation. It means providing the educational reform is desperately needed to train workers for jobs where they will not be displaced by robots. And it means thinking more carefully about how to balance foreign and domestic concerns when thinking about trade policy. We can best bolster growth by investing in our own industrial commons and creating a 21st-century digital ecosystem that supports, rather than degrades, liberal values and democracy.

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In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the United States is trying to impose a new world order, one designed to control Russia, China and Europe, as well as the lesser powers of the world. It’s tempting to write it off as the ranting of a leader at war, but there’s more to it than that. Ignore the fact that Washington’s seeking a unipolar world assumes a level of planning that runs counter to the American reality. What Putin is trying to come to terms with is that in planning for war in Ukraine, Moscow completely misunderstood the nature of the world.

Specifically, Russia misunderstood American subtlety. The United States did not commit major military force to block Russia’s advance, nor did it cede any part of Ukraine. The United States understood the threat posed by Russia on the border with NATO – that is, a new Cold War – and it understood Ukraine better than Russia did. So it sent massive amounts of weapons to Ukraine, the power and sophistication of which could not be matched. It struck blow after indirect blow.

Moscow also failed to understand America’s relationship with Europe. Time and again, Europeans bemoaned that Washington had abandoned its European commitments. That that was never the case didn’t stop U.S. think tanks from validating the idea, nor did it dissuade Russia from believing it. In times of peace, the U.S. could do without the prior relationship with Europe, bickering over trade rules and Russian energy dependence. But when the war broke out, the relationship rapidly transformed. Germany, for example, did not value Russian fuel as much as it valued American security guarantees. The Europeans knew that Russia could hurt them, and they did not really trust the Russians, but when push came to shove, they knew American interests lay in Europe. Putin, I think, was stunned when he learned the Germans stood with the Americans. He lacked a sophisticated understanding that there are different types of power and that the power projected by Russia was too blunt to work. Putin could not understand the power of appearing uncertain.

Still, the worst mistake Putin made concerns the U.S. relationship with China, a country in deep economic crisis. Moscow could neither hurt nor help China. The U.S. can do both – help by increasing investment and buying more goods, and hurt by blocking the sale of, say, certain microchips. China believed it did not need the United States to recover, and it convinced itself that Washington could be intimidated by naval and related power. Instead, Beijing discovered that its threats around Taiwan and other areas simply generated more vessels and weapons to be deployed against it. The utility of an alliance with Russia was shattered by the realization that the U.S. could respond militarily in Ukraine and, simultaneously, in the South China Sea.

All of this should have been obvious, and I think China was more aware of U.S. capabilities than Russia was. Chinese President Xi Jinping knew when to cut his losses. Putin kept doubling down. This seemed to be validated over the weekend by a spokesman for the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, whose statements were paraphrased by China’s Global Times newspaper as follows:

“If one of the most important events in international relations in the past 50 years is the restoration and development of China-U.S. relations, which has benefited both countries and the world, then the most important thing in international relations for the next 50 years is that China and the U.S. must find the right way to get along with each other. The key for China and the U.S. to find the right way to get on with each other is mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation proposed by General Secretary Xi Jinping. Common interests between China and the U.S. far outweigh differences, and a sound and stable China-U.S. relationship serves the common interests of the two peoples.”

We are used to China hurling threats at the United States. Now, it is searching for ways to accommodate the U.S. It has noted the American performance in Ukraine, both subtle and brutal, and has decided that an alliance with the U.S., however loosely defined or temporary, is far more attractive.

It’s no surprise, then, that Putin sees the U.S. as a force trying to create a unipolar world, because in some notable ways, it is a unipolar world. The U.S. is the largest economy in the world, its current problems notwithstanding. It also has a sophisticated military, able to bring overwhelming force to bear, train an army at war in new weapons, and use subtle force to shape the world. American power isn’t absolute, and it can be outstripped. But it is sufficiently mobile to act sequentially when simultaneous action is impossible. Put simply, the United States is the most powerful economic and military force in the world – when it chooses to act. Inaction can be confused by men like Putin as weakness. The U.S. has learned that with its inherent power it has time to react.

The American public often sees the United States as weak and mismanaged. There’s a tendency to label Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as criminals or morons or both. The same charges were levied against Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Contempt for the commanders-in-chief is a prerequisite, to prevent tyranny, even if it has its drawbacks. The America First movement opposing U.S. participation in World War II interfered with Roosevelt’s ability to make decisions. It had a direct impact on Pearl Harbor and caused a painful initiation for the U.S. into war by the Japanese, which of course ended in catastrophe for them.

The perception of American weakness is a global one, shared even among Americans. Being underestimated has its uses, as does sporting a public that doesn’t trust its president. But only enormously powerful nations can afford the contempt. The past few months haven’t taught us that the United States is finagling a new world order. It’s taught us that Russia is weakening, that China is managing its relationship with the U.S. carefully, and that the international architecture created after World War II, though more complex, essentially remains in place. It is a unipolar world.

A North Carolina man was jailed for 24 hours for contempt of court last week. His offense? Refusing to wear a mask in court.
On October 10, Gregory Hahn arrived at a Harnett County, North Carolina, courthouse to report for jury duty. There were no local mask ordinances in place and no mask mandate at the courthouse. 
"There were signs saying no masks were required," Hahn later told WRAL, a local news station.
However, Judge Charles Gilchrist had his own rules. After arriving, Hahn and the other 98 potential jurors were informed that masks would be required in Judge Gilchrist's courtroom. "You can go in any district courtroom without a mask, you can come into superior clerk court without a mask and the [district attorney's] office without a mask, but with Judge Gilchrist he has a mandate that you must wear a mask," Clerk of Superior Court Renee Whittenton told WRAL, adding that, of the superior court judges in the county, Gilchrist is the only one with a mask mandate.
When Hahn refused to mask, he found himself behind bars. 
While judges have wide latitude to find individuals in contempt of court—including for failing to abide by the personal rules of the judge—this case shows how easily judges can abuse their power to punish people for seemingly innocuous offenses.
According to WRAL, Hahn was sent to speak with Gilchrist directly about his refusal. After Gilchrist asked him again to wear a mask and he again refused, Gilchrist sentenced Hahn to 24 hours in county jail, after which he was swiftly taken into custody and held with no bond. 
"The irony of all this whole thing is the judge was talking to me without a mask on," Hahn added.
Hahn, a single father, says Gilchrist denied him the ability to call his son. "I was dumbfounded," Hahn told WRAL. "I never thought this could happen in this country."
While Hahn was shocked by Gilchrist's response, there's nothing illegal about it. In the United States, judges are given broad power to jail, fine, or otherwise punish individuals for contempt of court. "I'm not surprised," Lisa Wayne, the executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, tells Reason. "The judge has complete jurisdiction to make rules within their courtrooms, as long as it is not inconsistent to any kind of constitutional right that someone might have." Wayne notes that she once "had a judge who would not allow women to wear pants in the courtroom—pantsuits. That was the rule of the court, or we would be found in contempt."
Hahn may not have broken any laws when he refused to wear a mask in Judge Gilchrist's courtroom—but he was jailed nonetheless. While judges should be able to maintain order in their courtrooms, a particularly draconian judge can easily make offending their personal preferences into a jailable offense. Hahn's run-in with such a judge is a perfect example of how this power can be abused—and how easily one can fall victim to an overzealous enforcer.
The post A North Carolina Man Was Jailed for Refusing To Wear a Mask in Court appeared first on Reason.com.

[MUSIC]

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Nora K. Jemisin is one of the most highly decorated writers in fantasy and science fiction today. Her “Broken Earth” trilogy won three consecutive Hugo Awards, pretty much the highest honor in science fiction writing. First time anybody had ever done that. She has since won two more Hugo Awards, including for a recent “Green Lantern” series, “Far Sector.” It’s got to be a heavy shelf in her house. I’m a huge fan of these books. I love the “Broken Earth” trilogy. I love the “Inheritance” trilogy, which is earlier, and I recommend if people have not read it. What sets Jemisin’s work apart is her ability to use these fantastical worlds to explore really deep urgent themes; how the systems in our world operate. How people work with and against each other when their world is under threat. How oppression replicates itself throughout history. And behind that is Jemisin’s skill at world building. In a past conversation I did with her, we talked about that really explicitly. You can search for that if you’re interested. But there is a way in which she creates for herself these very, very clean models of how world works. And then she hits him with a shock, and then she sees what happens. Her newest series is a little bit different. It’s set in a much more familiar world. A recognizable, though alien-infested and magical version of New York City. And this series includes books “The City We Became,” and most recently, “The World We Make.” And these books are in dialogue in a much more direct way with the world we’re in now and the politics of the world we’re in now. So I invited Jemisin on the show to take stock of the past few turbulent years, not just in her worlds, but in ours. What the pandemic showed us about the systems we build to organize our society. What is happening to cities — these books are very much about cities — in an age of exorbitant wealth and sky high housing prices. How change and oppression happen over time, and replicate over time, and interact over time — a central theme in her work. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Nora K. Jemisin, welcome to the show.

nora k. jemisin

Thank you for the welcome. Hi, again.

ezra klein

So the new books are set in a multiverse. And I feel like multiverses are big right now. The whole new Marvel sequence is multiverse. I just read “Sea of Tranquility,” by Emily St. John Mandel. That’s multiverse. We had “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which is I feel like one of the great movies of the year. Why do you think multiverses are so in?

I mean, my layperson’s idea is just that people are trying to imagine different ways of doing life, different ways that the world could be, personally and more globally. And with a multiverse, it’s a kind of handy way of exploring what if the world had been X instead of the way it is. And there’s a lot of fun in that. It can be silly. I also loved “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s a great movie. Everybody should go see it. But it can also be terrifying, because then it’s a way to see also what could be worse. It’s the same appeal that exists for the science fiction field, I would say — just the idea of exploring what if.

ezra klein

There’s this kind of fascinating idea that I’ve heard from the philosopher Thi Nguyen, and then the sci-fi writer Ted Chiang, that this is actually a pretty big shift in storytelling. Chiang wrote that, quote, “For much of human history, stories reinforced the idea of fate. They told us that events unfolded the way they did because of destiny or the will of God.” And that now we have these stories that are much more about the reality of contingency, that there is no one way it could turn out. That’s actually a bigger shift maybe in our collective unconscious or maybe even conscious than we give it credit for.

I think it’s very conscious. Yeah. I mean, the exploration of what if and what also might be is not new by any stretch. But I would agree with Ted and the idea that people aren’t happy right now. People do not commonly perceive the world to be in good shape. I think we’re all painfully aware of climate change, and the encroachment of fascism, and the imminence of possible war, and all kinds of things like that everywhere. And we’re looking for alternative viewpoints, alternative ways of being, I think, and ways of thinking. And that can be good. In a way, it is revolutionary thought. If those thoughts don’t take any turn into action, then even without the action revolutionary thought is a good thing. It is a way of imagining that the world can be different. If you are willing to at least acknowledge that change can happen, then you might be more willing to actually take action to make those changes happen in the real world. The catch is that revolutions hurt people. Revolutions — the most vulnerable people who are already struggling now will fall off a cliff when such a time actually happens. So revolution isn’t always a good thing. But it means something. I do think it means something that people are in much larger numbers imagining better worlds or just different worlds.

ezra klein

I want to pick up on that. All through your work, I think there’s a very deep attentiveness to the idea that revolutions, even that things you might really want, things we might really love have dark sides. It’s literally true for the way cities are born, or at least one of the ways cities can be born in the series. It’s very present, I think, in the “Broken Earth” trilogy. You’ve talked about how cities themselves, just in our actual reality, they change weather patterns, they’re spaces in some ways of violence to the world around them. Tell me a bit about how you balance this idea of wanting to believe in, and be oriented towards change, and also seeming to me to have a pretty acute consciousness that all magic, all creation, comes at a price.

That’s how change works. If you’re going to be writing about whether it’s magical change or real world change, it’s inaccurate to describe change as the universal good. And I just believe that if you’re going to explore the ways in which a change can upend a society in good ways and bad, then you owe it to all the people that have been through revolutions and wars and upheavals in the past, to acknowledge the reality of what that entails. It means that some people are going to die. It means that some people are going to suffer horribly. It can also mean that the world becomes overall a better place. But to me, there’s no — I’m not interested in a facile re-imagining of the world in which everything is suddenly better. That’s a fairy tale. I’m not exploring realistic material because I’m exploring rock people and magic and things like that. But I am interested in keeping the people realistic, keeping the human part of the story plausible. And to do that, that means that I’ve got to explore multiple facets of what change happens, what change turns into.

ezra klein

This felt to me, though, like your most realistic book by a lot, which is not to say there are not fantastical elements to it. But that the New York that is inhabited in the book, doesn’t feel like it’s on the far off branch of the multiverse. I mean, it feels very much like the New York of 2020 or 2021. The politics are very recognizable. The questions are very recognizable. You seem to be much more in our world this time. And I’m curious about that choice.

Oh, that was just I felt like writing about our world. And if I’m going to do that, then I would do the world a disservice by treating it as some fantasyland where — I don’t even want to depict New York — as much as I love it, I don’t want to depict New York as all joy, and all light, and all happiness. I don’t want to depict cities, though I am a city girl at heart, as all joy, light and happiness and rural life is evil. That’s what they do. That’s what people on that other side of the political divide like to do. The us-ing and them-ing of reality. I just want to explore what that turns into. If the us-ing and them-ing is treated as taken to an extreme, where does that go? But I mean, more than that, it’s just, as far as I’m concerned, fantasy can explore other political realities as well as other laws of physics — whatever you want to call it. And that for me has always been the appeal of fantasy. That you can use it to explore people and their differences if you change elements of society. In this particular case, it’s just a change of perspective more than anything else. The avatars of New York City start to see the world in a more global way, and also that includes the multiversal way of viewing the world. And that changes how they react to the city. So that’s the thing that always interests me is how do people react to these changes, whatever those changes might be.

ezra klein

You grew up partly in Alabama. You spent your summers with your father in New York City. What is your contingency? What did the two sides form in you? And what do you imagine you’d be without either one of them?

Well, I’d be a much worse cook if I hadn’t grown up in Alabama. I think it’s just the complexity of who I am. And anybody that’s lived any kind of bicoastal or multicultural existence has developed a degree of flexibility, a degree of, hopefully, a keen-eyed view of both. Like, I don’t choose to live in places like Alabama. I don’t choose to live the rural life. But I don’t have any hatred or disrespect for it. It’s just not a thing that is adherent to my personality. And I guess a sort of bigger perspective shift that it’s caused for me is I realize — I have a better understanding of how people I guess stereotype the other way of living and doing and thinking. Every time I go home to Alabama, I run into somebody who’s like, isn’t it dangerous there in New York? Aren’t you living a really dangerous — isn’t it scary with whatever movie — Charles Bronson film conceptualization of New York that they have in mind. And I have to point out to them that the violent crime rate is actually much higher in Mobile than it is in New York. That there is a massive methamphetamine problem in these rural places that you’re imagining as being so idyllic. Perception is not reality. And I just like playing with both, perception with reality, with people’s beliefs about the world. But I still try to depict what I honestly see to add that plausibility realism element.

ezra klein

One of the things I really loved in the books is the depictions of what creates a city soul. And you have this way of literalizing that into imagery and power and a kind of magic in it. But behind that is a lot of work I think you had to do in trying to decide, well, what is a city soul? What part of this is the city’s vibrancy? And what part of it is just life? I’m curious what that process was like. How do you make those decisions as you try to define what gives New York its New Yorkness?

I chose things that were relevant to me. Because that’s pretty much the only thing you can do. New York is such a huge city. Every individual citizen’s experience of it is so wildly different that there was no way I was going to capture New York in any kind of objective way that everyone would agree with. I expected that. I went into it sort of planning to piss off a few of my friends from New York. But I just understood that New York is a personal experience. It is a relativistic thing. My experience of New York is what I decided to draw upon. I’m a Black New Yorker. I am a woman. I’ve lived here partially, but also, like you said, in a more rural, small town in Alabama. So I have comparison and contrast experiences that I think a born and bred New Yorker who’s never left here would not have. I also have experiences that, you know, the “Friends” and the “Seinfeld” set did not have. To some degree, I wanted to specifically address that because a lot of people’s conception of New York is based on TV shows that depict a very narrow slice of New York reality. And in some cases, that is the wealthy, white, upper class New Yorkers that have never left the Upper East Side or Upper West Side or whatever. That is the perception of New York that they’ve been getting. Or the “Girls” depiction of New York. And that’s just never been my experience of New York. I grew up among artists. I grew up among Black people, and queer people, and Latino people. I grew up walking down street festivals noshing on some chicharrón and listening to people argue in Polish. I mean, that is — that to me is as much New York as whatever Hollywood has been putting across. But I haven’t been seeing that New York. So that was just my attempt to readdress that.

ezra klein

Some of the book seems animated by a fear that New York is, on some level, dying or being at least threatened. Is that how you feel about it? Do you feel something about the soul of New York is being lost?

Yes. People have mixed feelings about gentrification. I hear people point out all the time that New York, back in the day — the crack epidemic, the ‘80s, things like that, where the city was nearly bankrupt, and bad things were happening, mistakes were made. A lot of people think of that New York as worse. And yet, in some ways, it definitely was. I’m not even going to pretend that that’s wrong. But it was also a New York where you could be yourself, where various subcultures could grow and thrive because it was a place for you to find your people. That is the part of New York that has been affected most by gentrification. Gentrification homogenizes. It is changing New York in the sense of bringing it up to a single standard. And that standard is that of the middle class or the upper middle class and their conceptions of what New York is and should be. There’s not as much room for subgroups to thrive in that New York. In fact, there’s no room in some cases for those subgroups to thrive. And so it is being lost when the artists that I grew up around, because my father is an artist — but when the artists that I grew up around end up leaving the city because they can no longer afford to be here and be artists — this is the city that is the capital of the art world, or at least it used to be. And we’re losing that. It used to be the capital of the drag world ballroom scene and that kind of thing. We’ve lost that already. Well, not completely. But so when those subcultures are fading and I don’t see very many new subcultures rising to take their place, that uniqueness of New York in that it was the place where you could find your people, that’s going away. And, you know, it’s a very gentle erasure of that complexity that used to be New York. And it arrives on the feet of a coffee shop. All cities change with time, I understand that. But at certain points, you have to ask yourself whether those changes are better for the city or not. That is a kind of erasure.

ezra klein

So I live in San Francisco these days. I’m very attentive to the book because I might move to New York over the next year. So I’m trying to think about New York.

Well, you’re experiencing your own version of that in San Francisco already.

ezra klein

Well, that’s what I was going to say. And I recognize that me moving to New York is also maybe the problem you’re pointing out. But San Francisco — I come from Southern California. I went to school up in Santa Cruz. San Francisco always meant something very specific to me. And it’s a subculture, and it’s queer subcultures, and it’s — and then I was out on the East Coast for 15 years, and I moved back here. And it’s been really striking. It’s been really striking. And one of the things you see with enormous clarity here — and I suspect there’s a lot of it there, too — is just you really can’t have the kind of ferment that makes cities great with really, really high housing costs. Like, low housing costs are the platform upon which experimentation, and new people, and new ideas can be built. And high housing costs are a fortress around a city.

Yeah.

ezra klein

And it’s been very strange. It’s a much stranger feel being here than I had anticipated.

Yeah. I only visit San Francisco. But my first impression of it — and my impressions of cities were the inspiration for “The City We Became.” The fact that I would travel, and I would go to a city, and I’d step off the plane and immediately have a sense of whether this city was a place where I could be comfortable or whether it was a place where I needed to keep my trip as short as possible and get out of town before the city expressed its distaste for me in some way. But when I first visited San Francisco, probably 20 years ago, my immediate sense was, oh, I could live here. This is the kind of city where I’d be comfortable. It is an artsy city, a bookish city, a city that likes new things, and new cultures, new tastes, new flavors. And I visited again just a few years ago. And yeah, I saw the same thing you saw. Huge cities, tent cities of homeless people just kind of struggling to get by. The same people who a few years before would have been part of those subcultures and living in the apartments that were part of those subcultures, now can no longer afford to live in the city. And it is changing in a negative way. When you’re losing the things that make that city a desirable place to live, then it is in some ways killing the spirit or the culture of a city.

ezra klein

There’s something very specific about the way your book thinks about gentrification. And I think that word can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But you just got at it where you’re saying that it tries to raise it to a very certain standard. And it seems to me that the idea of the book is that there’s this tension in cities at a certain point, particularly at a certain point of wealth, between the desire for order and the appreciation of a certain kind of chaos, a certain ferment when a lot of different kinds of people are living in very close proximity and having to accustom themselves to each other’s lives. Can you talk a bit about that tension for you between the appeals of order, and predictability, and quiet, and safety, and those of chaos, and creativity, and ferment, and all that comes with it?

Well, personally, I think of it as the difference between order and a different kind of order. Because there’s nothing chaotic in diversity. There’s nothing chaotic in a city with many different subcultures all interacting and going about their business. That is an order of its own. It’s just — it looks different from the suburbs. And, yeah, the tension that you feel of those with wealth and power trying to turn the city into a place that is more homogeneous, more stable from their perspective, but also more predictable and boring. We use gentrification because it’s a word that flows better off the tongue. But I always think of it as like the suburbification of a city because that’s really what they want. They want all of the comforts and conveniences and the quiet of the suburbs, but they’ve chosen to come to a place where people’s conception of convenience and comfort is all very different. And a city inherently needs to be a place that can welcome all of those different perceptions of comfort. Sometimes they clash. Sometimes the person that needs the self-care of a house party that bumps til 3:00 a.m. is going to bump up against the person with a one-year-old that needs the self-care of being able to put them to bed.

ezra klein

Sometimes we were that person two years ago and now we’re the other person.

Oh, no. Well, I mean, and that is part of city life. That ability to adapt, that ability to find ways to make those things that appear to be in conflict work together. And sometimes it doesn’t always work out. It’s not always possible to — we’re not all getting along here. But we’re able to live together. And that is part of city life. The attempt to reshape that city life and that complex chaos into a simpler chaos is deadly to cities, in my opinion. And I don’t blame the people who come from more flatly complex places. I don’t blame them for trying to create what they are familiar and comfortable with. But on the other hand, I don’t blame the people who live in the cities who say, I’ve been here, this is how it is here, from fighting back. And as long as they are still able to effectively fight back, then the city can thrive. When their voices get silenced, when they get pushed out of housing, when they get arrested and charged with felonies, when they attempt to make change from the grassroots level and the city does not respond, but someone else speaks to the manager and they’re able to get change, when just the regular people stop having any power in a city, that city is, in my opinion, doomed.

ezra klein

There’s a connection in our politics that I think is pretty poisonous between this idea of — I keep coming to the word ferment — a kind of density in crime, which is built on ideas of New York in the ‘80s, or, frankly, D.C., where I lived for a long time in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I mean, and it was even dangerous when I was living there. I mean, a lot of — one of my roommates was shot. I mean, a number of other people I knew were beaten up on the streets. The danger was not and is not, for that matter, fake. And on the other hand, there are a lot of cities in the world that are not suburbanized, to use your language, which I think is useful, but also have quite low crime rates. And I think it’s been the tying of these two things together that has turned the politics around cities very complicated and very sad in a bunch of ways.

Well, I mean, first and foremost, New York’s crime rate is actually quite low. I also spent a lot of time here in the ‘80s during the crack epidemic. And I hear people say all the time, well, crime is so bad now. And I’m like, what are you talking about? When you actually look at the crime statistics, we are at like the bottom of a 20-year low. And we’ve had some blips, but that’s the resumption of normal city crime does not make a crime wave. But there are people who have a vested and financial interest in manipulating this perception. And you’ve kind of touched on that. It is tied to politics and the ability to gain power. It is tied to wealth and the ability to redistribute that wealth. There was a big push a few years ago to defund the N.Y.P.D. And then almost immediate backlash, we ended up with a cop for a mayor who immediately diverted funding from education into the N.Y.P.D. So I mean, there are those who stand to benefit financially from manipulating people’s perceptions away from what is actually happening into what they want everybody to think is happening. And some of that is tied to the tension of the gentry class, the gentrifier class of them wanting everything more homogenized and less complexly chaotic. And one of the ways that they get that sense of control is to increase the number of police. They feel safer with police in their purview. So I mean, it’s tied to money and it’s tied to power. It’s not actually tied to the crime rate.

ezra klein

Well, this was actually something that I found some tension in with the book. When you say, though, that it’s not the case for the rest of us — and I was thinking about the Eric Adams election. And in the book, I think these ideas and these desires are very much — I mean, in a very literal way — tied to whiteness, to the woman in white, to a Trump-like white candidate for mayor. But then in New York, in 2021, I mean, as you say, a former N.Y.P.D. policeman, Eric Adams, wins the mayoralty. But he does so — he’s a Black man — and he does so on a Black and Hispanic coalition. White voters went for Kathryn Garcia. And I’m curious how you experienced the election of Adams, because I think it scrambles the politics of this in interesting ways.

You can support whiteness and be not white. It’s a system. There are a lot of people who kind of subscribe to the idea that talking about whiteness means that you are talking about white people. And that is not the case. Whiteness in and of itself as a concept is a homogenization of Europeans. European immigrants came to this country with their own languages, their own culture, their own foods. And in order for the powers that be in this country to forge a coalition that could push back against the very multicultural masses, the working classes, one of the things that happened was the creation of this identity that could suck in the Irish immigrants, and the Italian immigrants, and the wealthy uptown British-descended people, and things like that, and form them into a single coalition that could work back against all of those competing forces. And that homogenization is harmful to white folks. It is — wouldn’t you want to retain some aspect of your own home culture that your grandparents fought and struggled to come to a place where they felt that they would be free to practice? So I treat whiteness in the book as a symbol of homogenization because that effectively is what the concept of whiteness is. And I’ve encountered people who’ve read the books and are like N.K. Jemisin doesn’t like white people. No, I don’t like whiteness. White people are people. I have great feelings about some of them. I have not great feelings about others because that’s what happens when you’re interacting with people. But when you are dealing with a sociopolitical construct that was designed to funnel wealth and power into one group and to disenfranchise other groups, that needs to be addressed. And I stuck tentacles on it and made it funny. But that’s one of the things that I wanted to explore.

ezra klein

Well, I definitely want to get to the tentacles. But I guess I want to push on this a little bit around the idea of whiteness as a useful badge for this. Because one thing in my head here is I grew up in a community — so my father is a Brazilian immigrant. The community I grew up in is very, very heavily Asian immigrants and Hispanic immigrants. And I think at this point is — I think about equally Asian and white. And if you put Asian and Hispanic together, that’s majority. And something I really saw growing up there — I mean, and it’s a suburban community. To your point about suburbanization, it’s like the suburban community — Irvine. But is that desire for a very, very stark kind of safety, a very stark kind of predictability — it was very strong among the immigrant families. They weren’t coming there — I don’t know that I would call their politics whiteness, or to the extent that one would, I think then we’re stretching the term in a weird way. That when we’re starting to describe a politics that is immigrants from China and South Korea, and Black and Hispanic voters in Queens and Brooklyn, it just seems to me that calling it whiteness is slightly confusing whose politics we’re actually ultimately talking about.

It can be confusing if you continue to look at it in a granular individualistic way. It makes perfect sense to me that immigrant communities, particularly people who are coming from conflict, people who are possibly descended from refugees or are themselves refugees, would want safety. I mean, everybody wants safety. I live in Bed-Stuy, which is a historically Black community that is rapidly being gentrified. But I talked to a lot of the old folks there who’ve been there for 20, 30, 40 years, and they tell me, we used to just beg the police to show up in our neighborhood because they wouldn’t even bother. And it’s suddenly strange to hear these young people saying that we don’t want the police in our neighborhood. But when you look at the police as a system, when you look at the police on a more global level, and you see the ways in which historically they’ve been deployed as strikebreakers, and as ways to keep certain communities in line or destabilized. And they can keep those communities destabilized by not showing up or by showing up and overpolicing. It is the same thing. At the end of the day, it is a way to keep a block of citizens whose interests are probably different from those of the people in power, it is a way to keep that block of citizens destabilized and less powerful. That is serving whiteness. Now, you can call that also a class structure, too, because it’s not serving all white people. Individually, it’s serving specifically those who are wealthy and have power. But it is designed to protect and enshrine that particular kind of power. And that doesn’t mean that it isn’t useful to other groups of people. It is 100 percent useful to a group of immigrants who have come from a chaotic background to find a place that is safer, that is quieter, that is healthier, whatever. There’s nothing wrong with seeking that. You just need to understand that it’s not going to be provided in a way that is meant to primarily help you. It is meant to primarily help other people. If you find it useful in the meantime, great. That could change. And that’s the more global understanding that people sometimes develop and sometimes not. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

One of the things that struck me about Panfilo, who’s the Trump-like candidate in the book, is that he was in some way significantly less ridiculous and explicit than Donald Trump is himself. And I’ve seen this actually a couple of times in post-Trump fiction. That there’s something so —

Post-Trump fiction, my god.

ezra klein

— fictional about Trump as a character — like, himself, not as a character in a book, but as a human being — that going beyond him becomes unbelievable because he’s sort of unbelievable. And then but before him, it’s like you’re not even able to fully get at the outrageousness of what we really saw. And I’m curious what it was like for you writing a character like that as Donald Trump is still a live force on the scene.

Yeah. Donald Trump is a badly written character, completely implausible. And you cannot include him in fiction in any way that makes sense and keep the story logical or working. The hilarity is that this book, “The World We Make,” probably would have been written a couple of years earlier if not for Trump. Because my original plan for it was to write about New York being attacked by the president who was a demagogue and who would frame New York as this den of iniquity that needed to be brought under heel and control. And as you know, that actually happened. And at that point, I basically had to redo the entire plot of the book because I got — my idea got stolen by Trump. So I should sue him. Anyway. But what it boiled down to was that I didn’t want to base this on Trump. I decided that — after he stole my idea, I decided that I was just going to kind of keep things local and I borrowed from several local New York politicians who are pretty well-known in this area. And Panfilo is an amalgamation of those New York-specific politicians. And they are less over the top than Trump. He’s not really a New York politician. So that was where that came from.

ezra klein

And talk to me a bit about the woman in white, because she, I think, reflects something else that’s also present in a bunch of your books, which is she emerges first in the first book — you experience her as a kind of personal villain, like a big boss. And there’s something to that. But over time — and I don’t think I’m spoiling too much — you understand that she is a system and also in a way a slave to a system. And that idea of even the villains are system seems to me to be true in a bunch of your different books. I’m curious how you think about that, that relationship between systems and the individuals who carry out their bidding.

It’s just a thing that I’m constantly noodling on some level. As I was saying with individual immigrants who might basically espouse an agenda that, in my mind, I think of as serving whiteness, but it is an agenda that suits their needs. It is constantly a necessity in American politics to look not just at individuals. You cannot look even at single communities. You have to understand it as a politics of systems. Because in a lot of cases, you see people trying to work against all of that. You see individual politicians come in who are reformers and they genuinely believe that they can do something against predatory policing or the school to prison pipeline. They genuinely believe that they can help. And they try. And they do make a dent. But then there’s an immediate backlash or there’s some sort of energy that they didn’t anticipate. And in order to prepare for that backlash and those energies to make real change, you need to understand that these systems defend themselves. And it’s not even necessarily individual people or individual choices that are contributing to that. It’s just the way things are designed to work. It’s the way any society is designed to work. That’s what creates stability. It’s not a bad thing for the status quo to defend itself and to maintain itself. In some ways, that’s one of the reasons why we were able to survive a Trump presidency, because so many of these systems existed and they were so difficult to change that even he couldn’t break them all. However, you do still need to understand that those systems are now vulnerable and shaky, because the people who are trying to destabilize those systems, get it. Whenever you see the ways in which the Republicans have strategically seated activist judges throughout the entire U.S. judiciary, and you start to see the reasons why they’ve done this, that’s a plan that they’ve been working on for years. And that’s a thing that they’ve been putting in place for years. You’re going to need to do that same granular level of change in order to fix it. And I think a lot of people think of these systems and these flaws and these problems as the result of individual people. Trump was a symptom of a greater problem. He was not the cause of it. I mean, I think that if we are to fix and address all of these issues, we have to start thinking systemically about how to do so. And that means sometimes you may have to have some compassion for your enemies. That means sometimes you have to recognize that if the city has elected a Black man, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s not serving a white supremacist goal. These things are complicated.

ezra klein

I think a pretty profound question that raises is, how do you decide when you want to say people are acting of their own volition? A voter is right about what they want. A person is carrying out their role in society because it is a role they believe in. And when we ascribe them their actions to a system. Because it also occurs to me that in the same way that ascribing people’s actions to a system can, in some cases, be compassionate — you’re saying that this is not only on you — it can also be a way — particularly if we do it more to some than others — a way of accusing others of not truly knowing their motivations and so not truly being actors whose integrity of their actions does not carry the weight it otherwise would, their voice doesn’t get as much validity to speak for itself.

I mean, if that is how it’s coming across in my fiction, then I’ve done something wrong. What I’ve always tried to do — and compassion is not the word I like to use. I prefer empathy. Empathy is not necessarily sympathy. Empathy is understanding why a thing happens or understanding all the factors that go into a person making a choice. In the way that that person — you understand it as that person would understand it. It doesn’t mean that they are absolved of the consequences of that choice. I do not believe in treating people as irresponsible for their actions. I want to hold them accountable for the choices that they make. And I try to insert into my fiction — I try to make it visible that they’ve made a choice. That this choice was influenced by X, Y and Z factors, and that they probably felt like they didn’t have a choice, but they still made a choice.

ezra klein

Oh, that I think is true. And I actually meant this from the other direction. I don’t think you absolve people of what they do on behalf of systems at all. I think you’re actually very attentive to that. I actually was noticing, as we were talking about this, though, that as you were saying a minute ago that many of the voters who voted for Eric Adams were voting on behalf of an agenda that was not their own. But the folks on the other side I don’t think get characterized as servants of a kind of counter-system. That I think there’s more individuality given to, say, the other avatars of New York as opposed to the Panfilo voter. And so it’s actually a way in which I don’t think it absolves them, but I think that there’s a sense that the systems are working in the malign direction. But sometimes that the people working on the set of light are more individuals whose volition is more their own.

Oh, not necessarily. I am definitely biased. Every person is. And there’s definitely one way of dealing with the world that is my way of dealing with the world. And the fact that I’m willing to acknowledge that other ways of viewing the world are, to those people, equally valid doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t agree with my own perception. It’s just that I can understand them and still disagree with them. But what it really boils down to with Adams is those same Black neighborhoods crave stability, same as those immigrant communities do. Many of the people who voted for Adams remember the old days, which weren’t that old. When you’re talking about a 60-year-old Black woman who managed to buy a Brownstone after working for the M.T.A. for 30 years and retiring with decent money, to her, she wants the stability of the borough president that she knows, the face that she finds familiar, the person who helped her auntie three blocks over when her aunt had a problem with the water department. Those individual choices and that individual centering of the world, those people are voting in their own interests. I am not trying to say that they are serving the interests of white supremacy by doing so. They are choosing to serve their own interests, obviously. But when you are voting for a candidate who was a cop and who is very committed to the idea of making sure that the cops have much more money, much more power, you’ve chosen a double-edged sword. You’ve chosen stability but it’s going to take a different form from what you think it will. You’ve chosen something that feels familiar and comfortable, but it may not necessarily come back to help you. It may come back to bite you on the ass. So I just want to explore that tension that exists on an individual level as well as a systemic level.

ezra klein

So one layer of the book is systems and another layer of the book in a way that I think is really striking for the eras in which these books came out is this idea of organisms and particularly cities as organisms. And I remember reading the first book, “The City We Became,” right as the pandemic hit. And so, of course, it was written before the pandemic hit. But that idea that under threat, cities, which are composed of all these individual peoples, all of a sudden begin operating at moments of crisis as something closer to a unit, something closer to an organism, something closer to one thing, it felt really odd. Because particularly, cities at that moment, anywhere that was really dense, we all had to act as one. We all had to either not go out or go out a lot less — obviously there are essential workers and people breaking the rules — or everybody would get really, really sick. And I’m curious about how that must have felt having spent a long time thinking about, at a metaphorical level, how a city would turn into a more singular organism during a crisis and then watching cities around the world have to all of a sudden develop closer to singular organisms, although different ones during a crisis.

Well, I mean, I guess my own perception of living systems is that they are collections of systems. The human body is a collection of systems. I have a doctor friend that sort of talks about the body as pumps and pipes. So if you think of the body as an individual organism, as a collection of your circulatory system, and your nervous system, and da, da, da, da, and, yeah, they all have to interact in more or less healthy and regular ways for your body to continue operating. A city is no different. We have political systems. We’ve got infrastructure. We’ve got various individual groups of people that have competing needs. And they do have to work together for that city to function. So that’s just how I tend to depict large complex systems of every kind as possibly living. It’s probably reflecting my own philosophy about the universe as a whole. I suspect the universe might be alive too, but that’s a longer conversation.

ezra klein

A panpsychic?

I don’t know what to call it. I just believe very much in Carl Sagan’s understanding of the world, which is just that people tend to think of themselves as small and unimportant — maybe super important but just within the small sphere of their own existence. But we are ultimately born of the hearts of exploding stars. We are all made of star stuff. And holding both understandings in my head at the same time tends to affect how I view just reality as a whole. I think of it as a complex, and breathing, pumping, changing thing. And I think that that just comes through in my writing sometimes. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

When we last spoke, we talked about how you build worlds and then introduce a shock, something that changes them, and watch how the system responds. I mean, our world just went through that — is going through that, actually, still to a large degree. But in an unusually clarified way. I mean, there are always a lot of shocks happening. But Covid was this global shock you could really watch. How did the system respond differently or interestingly to what you thought? How did watching the world get hit by that shock change your model of our societies?

It didn’t. What it did show me was that certain forces with a great deal of power have also noticed the systemic nature of reality and are weaponizing that in ways that maybe aren’t new, but which we haven’t been quite as used to, I guess. I’m being very global. Case in point — in New York, for quite some time after the start of the Covid pandemic, there was the 7:00 p.m. clap where people go up on the rooftops or out on their fire escapes and bang pots or whatever to signal their support for health care professionals. A year and a half later, health care professionals are getting attacked in hospitals by people who’ve been deluged with counter-energy, counter-media basically telling them that the health care professionals are their enemies, effectively, for trying to immunize them, for trying to teach them best practices to protect themselves. And that did not happen organically. We’ve already seen some evidence of, quote unquote, “grassroots movements” that have been backed and financed by large groups. And of course, a number of the politicians spouting some of that rhetoric are also backed by some of those same groups. So what I think is standing out to me is that we’re not really seeing organic change happen in our society right now. One of the ways that the status quo is defending itself is by trying to make itself seem bigger, trying to make itself seem more reasonable, louder, whatever, and to drown out the voices that are rightly suggesting change.

ezra klein

I think this is interesting and I want to think about it for a minute, because I don’t want to say there’s no such thing as organic change. But I think that when I look at change on both sides, including the 7:00 p.m. clap, which I don’t know its exact origins, but at a certain point was promoted officially by a lot of different players. We had something like that here, too, which I loved. It was beautiful. But I wonder when we say changes organic versus not — because, at the same time, the people who wanted to see a lot of change in the pandemic — and I was, frankly, one of them — and who hoped that there was suddenly a wide opening — but that had institutions, and political figures, and money, and so on behind it, too. I mean, the people arguing for a moment of radical reorientation, the number of big think tanks and top politicians and it felt to me, like, for 18 months to two years, everybody was like and now more than ever, my agenda. And it’s not that that wasn’t organic. I mean, they were real about it, right? When A.O.C. wanted to say that this was an opportunity for something different, I mean she believes what she believes organically. It’s not — this is no ascription of sinister intent. But I do wonder about seeing one side as organic and the other side as anything less. I mean, I think of reactionary dimensions of our society as organic as the revolutionary dimensions of our society. And I’m curious if you see that differently.

I do not see the reactionary elements of our society as organic. What I see these days is voices being amplified, particularly on, say, social media. It’s turned out over the last few years, a lot of the public freak-outs that have happened over various popular media — Black people in “Star Wars,” for example — it’s turned out that a lot of the voices speaking out against that were bots programmed and purchased by various forces that wanted to elevate their own voices. Those reactionary voices have always existed in our society. Those individual voices are not — I’m not saying that there’s anything inorganic about those. What is inorganic is the amplification of those voices. They are amplifying, in this particular case, a minority voice. And so, you know, it’s important to point that out. One of the things that the right wing in this country, in general, has always done is inflate its own numbers. That’s not really a new thing. But the methods and mechanisms by which they are doing it are a little different right now. And again, in order to get control of, or resist the system, or this series of systems, we need to understand it. And we also need to think systemically.

ezra klein

Tell me more about that idea of understanding it. When you say that there’s a process of change, that those who want to see change need to better understand, what’s your model of change?

I was raised — not raised, but I was trained as a psychologist. And there are several models of change that inform my thinking. The model of change that Lewin, I believe, used, basically talks about the fact that there’s a series of stages that you go through. You have a complacent stage. Then that complacency gets shaken up by either some incident or some people. And then — and this is a huge paraphrase — and then the destabilized system does what it can to restabilize itself. And that’s been the model that I’ve used to try and kind of view political changes and so forth that have happened over the last few years. But that’s also just my own observations. When the current model of workers going off to work, commuting on their own dime for sometimes very long distances to go into an office and sit there and not necessarily be more productive than they would have been at home, when that current model got challenged by the pandemic, we immediately began seeing pushback against the natural complaints of workers who’ve been exposed to a new way of doing things and may want to continue doing that new way of doing things. We’re seeing the system try and restabilize itself by pulling people back into what used to be. I don’t blame those people for trying to push back. I mean, a large corporation that has spent a great deal of money on New York City real estate is not going to want to just leave that real estate sitting empty. They want that real estate to be used. I get that. But when it short circuits a natural conversation that was already having because they’ve amplified their voice by buying articles in various newspapers or by buying politicians who can push back against the natural grassroots push to make change, I just think that needs to be noted.

ezra klein

Tell me about this book’s relationship with H.P. Lovecraft.

Well, I mean, I think of it as a single story — just a note. The duology is the first and second part of a single whole. There’s less direct address of Lovecraft in “The World We Make.” But the reaction is still there. I will say that I consider the book to be inspired by Lovecraft in the sense of his way of viewing New York City as evidenced in some of his letters and some of his fiction, like the “Horror at Red Hook.” His view of New York City as an organism populated by infectious disease agents, which are people of color — he had an issue with the Portuguese. Just people he didn’t like. In his mind, New York was this terrible place teeming with this infestation that was gradually going to destroy it. I see New York in a very similar way, I believe. We can’t read his mind. But I also look around New York and I also see New York as being populated and teeming with large numbers of people who are contributing to making it the organism that it is. The only difference is I see that as a good thing. You know, I don’t walk through Chinatown and think the degenerate people around me who are subhuman and don’t have souls as he did. I walk around and I see people. I see some of them are nice to me and some of them are not nice to me. And some of them are indifferent to me, and I’m indifferent to most of them, and that’s how it is. And I just see that as life. And he saw it as a threat. So it’s inspired by him, but it’s also speaking back to him and just saying that his perspective — his way of viewing the world is populated by threats. I decided to counter that by viewing the world as populated by energy, by people who are making the world interesting and stronger. Making the city a place of multiple languages where new slangs get invented, and new dances get invented, new cuisines get invented. Because when you have large groups of people interacting like that, that’s what happens. I see it as an engine of creativity. And he saw it as death.

ezra klein

You won a Hugo Award this year for your “Green Lantern” series. There’s a reference to the “Avengers” in “The World We Make.” And I was thinking about that because the books together, the story together, it really feels, in a cool way, I thought, as craft, like a comic book. And in particular, it’s unbelievably visual in a way that almost no other book I can remember reading is. I mean, you can really see it.

Wow.

ezra klein

But I’m curious how much writing in comics or reading comics — because I know you’re a comics fan — has influenced that.

I mean, when I was in college, I was a huge “X-Men” fan. I had to stop in college because I was a poor college student and that was around the time when storylines started ranging across six different books and I just couldn’t afford to keep up. I hear a sigh of familiarity there. But so obviously I grew up on “X-Men” and all of that stuff. And there’s some obvious me pushing back against a lot of the ways in which those books contended with issues of race on an allegorical level. The treatment of the mutants as an allegory for Black people or an allegory for oppressed groups in general was not handled in the best way. And I had some feelings about that. And that has shown up in my writing in a lot of different ways. But I would actually say that the biggest influence on this particular series, “The Great Cities,” would probably be more Japanese manga than American, because I just mentally envisioned the five boroughs of New York City as a giant robot, more like Voltron than anything else. And I wanted to see the five boroughs form like Voltron with New York as the head and fight a giant monster. That’s really what it came down to. I’m as influenced by silliness as I am by more serious topics.

ezra klein

If you’re somebody who’s not read much manga, which I am — I’ve been a comic books fan for a long time, but I’ve not read much manga — what should people read?

Oh my gosh. I haven’t read anything recent, but some of my all time overall favorites would be “Fullmetal Alchemist” by Hiromu Arakawa, if I’m not mangling her name. “Fullmetal Alchemist” is great at exploring and skewering systems. And it’s actually kind of inspired by European history and the whole Nazis versus the Western Europe conflict, and religious conflict, and ethnic conflict, a whole bunch of other things. But it is deep. It is fun. And I highly, highly recommend that one.

ezra klein

I know you’ve done a lot of work thinking about space. I know you’ve attended workshops with NASA and it’s something that you’ve had an interest in. And I think it’s been a really big couple of years with space. There’s been a lot of talk of U.F.O.s. There’s the amazing asteroid collision that NASA just managed to pull off. There are pictures from the new telescopes that are just remarkable. I’m curious how that is playing into what you’re thinking about the world, or I assume you’re following it. What’s shaking loose for you there?

It is — I will just say that my next idea — I am not ready to talk about it yet. But the new thing that I am working on is more space-oriented, I’ll just say.

ezra klein

I know you do a lot of travel for research for your books and I know you’ve done a fair amount of disaster travel. Are there places you’re going to go for this one? Are there things you want to look at?

Yeah, I haven’t narrowed down. I’m at the super earliest beginning stages of an idea for this one. I have jotted down exactly five sentences for it at this point. But I can kind of tell already that I’m going to need to do a lot more historical research into a particular figure and more theoretical physics probably. It’s going to be a far future — I don’t even want to call it a space opera. Yeah.

ezra klein

Well, then let me ask always our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Well, let’s go with “Fullmetal Alchemist” for my first one. I have not been reading a lot of new fiction. The pandemic’s effect on me was that for a while I just stopped reading. I don’t know what it was. And I hear a lot of people say that they’ve responded with either their own struggles to read or they suddenly became like voracious readers during the pandemic. So it is starting to fade, though. And what I’ve been doing is reading a lot of older material that I knew I loved and just rereading it, refreshing myself on it, learning new things from it. So off the top of my head, I’ve been doing a lot of nonfiction as usual. I’ve been rereading a friend of mine’s novel, but also just a very good novel, called “Mechanique,” by Genevieve Valentine. It is a story set in a post-apocalyptic world and focusing on a circus of mechanical and partially mechanical people, and just exploring their lives and their interactions with this world. Beautifully written. Just haunting prose. Also, recently read — I’ve been making room for books by authors that I genuinely love on a regular basis. And Martha Wells is consistently one of my favorite authors. She’s got a new book coming called “The Witch King” that I absolutely loved. It should be out in a few months or so. And I’ve been rereading, possibly because the book is coming out and I knew I was going to need to do some promotional stuff for it — but I’ve been rereading Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of American Cities,” which is nonfiction. It’s a systemic look at how cities function and why city design and its actual application is often detrimental to the goals that city planners have in mind. So it’s just a really interesting way of reconsidering how cities operate and ways in which we might improve them with not a lot of money spent, but with a lot of changes to assumptions and misconceptions and so on.

ezra klein

Nora Jemisin, thank you very much.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked readers, What role should sports play in a society? What role do they play in ours?Timothy is a critic of contemporary Western sports culture:
In some societies, sport competitions stand in for military competitions. Unfortunately, not ours. In some societies, sport competitions and betting on the outcomes was pacification of the masses by the emperors and kings of the time. Our sports mostly represent that, with citizens willing to destroy their bodies, searching for glory and in most cases wealth for the entertainment/pacification of others. The days of sports teaching teamwork and good sportsmanship have unfortunately left us in pursuit of the holy dollar.
Sharon prefers informal play to athletic teams:
My children rejected all “organized” sports because they are inevitably organized by adults. They gloried in “disorganized” sports in which participants made up their own rules, played in some unorthodox manner, and had barrels of fun. I never heard quarrels or had consolation chores over some critical championship lost. We had no pulled muscles, no concussions—just healthy exhaustion and a run on lemonade and cookies.
Aaron looks down on fandom:
Sports-fan identity is an excellent example of the author Kurt Vonnegut’s “granfalloon”: the mistaken belief that because you share a particular and singular interest, you are part of a meaningful group identity. Screaming and cavorting fans, stuffing their mouths with food and drink instead of being active and exercising themselves, seem like a metaphor for a dystopian future—or perhaps a dystopian present, if you compare their antics with the crowd events on January 6.
In contrast, Kathryn writes:
In the United States, identifying as a fan of a particular professional sports team is often a healthy outlet for the temptation to join an in-group. It’s obvious that I arbitrarily like my favorite soccer team because they happen to play in my city, not because there is something intrinsically superior about them, but I still get chills clapping and chanting in unison with tens of thousands of fans as the players walk out before a match. I feel a sense of civic pride when the whole region unites to support a local team on a playoff run, or to celebrate a championship with a victory parade. I try to be suspicious of this same group-joining impulse in other domains, but I lean into loving my favorite sports teams.
Beth laments the place of sports in educational institutions:
There is way too much emphasis given to sports, especially in schools. We need to disassociate schooling and sports teams, much like other countries do. I taught high-school math for a few years and there were several times when parents, a student athlete, or even the principal would ask me to reconsider a star athlete’s grades because the athlete did not meet the academic requirements necessary to play their sport. They wanted me to just change the athlete’s grades so that they would be eligible to play.
The purpose of attending school is to learn. It is not to play sports so you can go into professional leagues. Gym class teaches you the basics and provides a physical outlet. But when you look at the state of our schools, where money is hard to come by for books and to pay teachers and all of the other aspects of running an education system, and then you look at the multimillion-dollar stadiums built for sports, you can see where society’s priorities are. Sports should be played at a club level independent from schools.
For those that can’t afford the club, there should be scholarships available. We should get rid of college sports, again to emphasize education and research, which are the true foundations of universities and colleges, and have minor-league opportunities for athletes to participate in either in conjunction with college or completely outside of college.
Whereas MR believes that sports complement education:
“Mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body) is a motto by which my grandfather raised my father to be a Ph.D. student and Olympic athlete. Learning to work within a set of rules, to support teammates, to treat opponents with respect, and to have self-discipline were building blocks that resonated throughout his life. The desire to push oneself to learn and develop, in sports, music, art, or any other activity, is a driving factor for success. Sports is an activity most kids can use to learn that lesson. The goal is not winning; it is about learning to do better than you thought you could.
Steve asserts that sports are less important than art and music:
Sports are fine as a form of entertainment. I enjoy a good baseball or football game as much as the next guy. But as schools gut or eliminate their music and art programs to concentrate on athletic superiority, our students suffer the loss of these skills that have been proven time after time, in study after study, to contribute to their intellectual well-being.
In contrast, Mike argues:
Sports deserve the same role in society as literature, performing arts, sculpture, cinema, and other expressions of human culture, skill, and creativity. Like many arts, sports have rules and expectations that their most creative and memorable practitioners find ways to bend or move in a new direction. Sport may be enjoyed directly––even if you are a rank amateur––as well as viewed as a spectator when one wants to watch an expert performance. Team sports especially can provide a collective joy (and sorrow), civic pride, and even elements of transcendence that the finest art aspires to.
Dianne remains confounded by the popularity of sports into old age:
I’ve never understood the fascination with sports that is a huge part of our culture. Many sporting events are incredibly violent. And if not violent, then abusive to the participants and any animals involved. Thoroughbred horses? OMG! I lived in Kentucky where the discussions about how horses were trained and managed made me sick. Reading about that football player, Tua [Tagovailoa], who suffered a dramatic neurological event while playing his game and then was not treated immediately? That man will suffer for the rest of his life! Of course, he did sign up for it, and he knew the risks, didn’t he?
I attended the University of Kentucky in the mid-1970s, where sports was THE most important aspect of the school. Students outside sports had to wait for the entire sports program’s participants to get their classes selected before anyone else could be confirmed in a class. Don’t get me started about people my age (I’m in my eighth decade) who still live and breathe their college football team’s every move. Their lives revolve around sports, and football and basketball seasons are the worst! Why can’t these people move on? Rabid adherence to every aspect of the games is just amazing and confounding to me! I read somewhere that if the highest-paid faculty member in a school is a coach, then it’s not really a school; it’s a sports venue with an academic side hustle!
[Read: The case against the death penalty]Whereas Dave believes today’s Americans undervalue sports:
Sports are among mankind’s greatest achievements and an essential part of the human condition. We’ve had sports in some form as long as we’ve had civilization. Yet their importance to society is undervalued as we live more of our lives online, staring at phones or TV screens. Physical education in the U.S. continues to be underfunded in spite of an obesity epidemic. We all could stand to spend more time outside playing, as human beings just weren’t built to be spending 12 hours a day staring at a computer screen.
I dislike how popular culture often presents athletics to be incompatible with academics––like we’ve internalized the logic of ’80s teen movies where nerds and jocks are mortal enemies. Just the other day I read a fascinating New York Times article about NFL players who play chess. The NBA great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has proven himself to be a great writer, providing insightful commentary on the issues of the day.
I’d also point you to Jon Bois’s hypertext web novel, 17776. It posits a future where humanity unexpectedly becomes immortal, but at the cost of being able to have children. Famine is eradicated, war is meaningless, and money holds no value. In such a world there’s not much to do, but humanity overcomes existential ennui through sport. Football fields are expanded to take up entire states, and games often last millenia.
When everything has lost meaning, we’ll always have sport.
And Merideth’s longtime skepticism toward sports changed in motherhood:
I am uncoordinated and didn’t play any sports growing up. I never understood why many people are passionate about sports, or why some people who are as uncoordinated as I am are passionate about watching a certain sport, even to the point of flying their favorite team’s flag outside their home. My perspective has changed, both because I accept that different people have different passions and because I have a teenager who demonstrated an aptitude for coordinated movement from the time he learned to walk at 10 months old. He tried soccer, but it wasn’t for him. Same thing with basketball. And then he discovered volleyball when he started high school. He is passionate about playing volleyball. He has practiced bumping, setting, and spiking almost every day. He loves practicing with his teammates (his team is co-ed, which I love), and he is learning to manage the intense anxiety he experiences when he’s on the court.
Based on what I have witnessed in my son and his teammates, sports are beneficial for youth that enjoy them. While I believe there is too much emphasis on sports teams whose players have million-dollar contracts, and while I am concerned that many boys perceive sports as their ticket out of poverty, I also believe that young people who have an interest in sports should be supported in their sports interests just as other kids are supported in their music, coding, dance, and activism interests. Or their passion for reading, which is the passion that I expected to pass on to my volleyball-obsessed son.
C’est la vie.
Most correspondents defended sports against its critics in one way or another. Claire regards sports as a useful teacher:
Youth should be encouraged to participate in anything that helps them move through life with competence and effectiveness. Sports offer conditions that reinforce: discipline, self-possession, graciousness, leadership, fearlessness, camaraderie, and the spirit of play and adventure.
Ann waxes poetic:
My son is 25, coaching both an 11- and 14-year-old girls’ and boys’ program as part of the Red Bulls Academy youth soccer program. Having grown up in the inner city, [attended] public schools, and with a learning profile different from the “one-size-way’ education system offered by the Department of Education, he embraces soccer as the world’s diversity liberator and global equalizer. The “beautiful game” [is] a physical in-/out-of-body expression combining mind/strategy, heart/relationship, and of course soul/team identity.
Sports teams ping a string within us that is still resonant from many eons ago, mimicking the tribes of our not-so-distant past. They allow the full exuberant expression of identity, yet within an unwavering framework of authority, a vital context allowing different ideologies regarding how to play the game. For sure, each team’s leader, at any given time, puts forth a particular prescription for success by developing an organization with a specific culture based on prioritized values, beliefs, rituals, and behaviors. I often contemplate how we might capture the magic of this condition at a grander scale.
Cathy focuses on how sports have benefitted her personally:
I am a 75-year-old Chinese American. As a kid, I played school softball and public-park tennis. I have played tennis my whole life, even now. I walk the golf course. I hike. I love to move my body. Sports focus my mind. And I have many friends from these activities.
Brandt touts the value communities find in sports:
Sports is more than just a game. It is the lifeblood of a community, and it can bring people from different backgrounds, cultures, and religions together. I am currently taking a course about the history of baseball. We talked about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. For the people in Brooklyn, this loss was visceral; it was real, and it endured for generations.
Sports [affiliation] can be [a part of] one’s identity just as much as other demographic characteristics. Although my dad has spent more than twice the time on the East Coast than in Cleveland, Ohio, he still roots for the Browns, Guardians, and Cavaliers as passionately as in his youth. I was with my dad on Father’s Day in 2016 when the Cavs broke the “Cleveland Curse.” He had not spent time in Ohio for close to 30 years at that point, but he exuded happiness and utter joy. Watching the countless people come out for the Cavaliers championship parade astonished me and brought to mind how unifying sports can be for a city, especially a city that had been downtrodden for decades. Remember the joy that communal sporting events can bring to billions of people.  
Glenn muses on high-school football in the South:
It is not unheard of for more people to crowd into the bleachers of the local high school on any fall Friday night in Texas than the census number posted at the city limits. Is that healthy? I don’t know, but I enthusiastically imbibe in the spectacle of it all. It is a real instance of community in a culture where the word is overused but seldom realized.  
I love the sport. I managed to play, as a young boy, back when we all thought we were bulletproof. But was it healthy? I don’t know. I enjoyed watching my boys play the game, but I slept better when they no longer played, because I knew they were not bulletproof. Was that healthy? I don’t know. I still enjoy watching grown men play a kids’ game and get paid obscene amounts of money to satisfy our voyeurism for a violent sport. Is that healthy? I don’t know, but I still tune in and get emotionally involved.
I won’t defend or denigrate the sport. But growing up in the deep South, I can tell you there is one aspect of the game that is very important. There is something similar to a soldier’s-fox-hole brotherhood that develops between teammates over the long course of a season. It starts with two-a-day practices in the blistering heat of August and continues with the smelly locker rooms, long bus rides, wins, losses, injuries to body and pride, and brief moments of shared glory, all lending to a unique bond among teammates.  
In the early days of desegregation in the South, football was a sanctioned opportunity for racial animosity and violence. But over the long course of a season you come to value ability over skin color and, after all, you all share the same jersey and mascot. Football is a merit-based and color-blind obsession in the South, in the bleachers and on the field and in the locker room. It is a means of social mobility, both up and down the social ladder. This is true not just for the gifted athlete that moves on to the next level but for the small-town local boys that get invited to parties and events, and sometimes just to hang out in homes and neighborhoods they would never visit were it not for the game. Our politics may be vastly different, but on Friday night we are all involved in a common purpose and pulling for a common team. Is that healthy? Absolutely!
Don praises golf:
I was a professional golfer many years ago. Playing an individual sport taught me many great lessons: integrity, honesty, perseverance, sportsmanship, accepting defeat, and more. These lessons have stayed with me and guided me throughout my life. In addition, it made it possible for me to attend a great university on scholarship. There is a real push to encourage minority and underprivileged kids to play golf. Golf has always been thought of as an upper-class white man’s game, but many charities and the PGA are doing great work, and a generation of kids are being exposed to a sport that probably has more emphasis on rules and values than any other professional sport.
[Read: 21 reader views on the masculinity crisis]Errol is grateful to have become a sports fan as an adult:
Growing up, I would fail gym class because I refused to dress out. I found sports so boring and annoying, yet a part of me always felt like I was missing out, because I would see people just have the best of times when watching or attending these events. It’s difficult to get into sports as an adult, however, because no one wants to teach you anything about the game. You’re supposed to just inherently know what third and forever means, or the difference between a fastball and slider, or the terms center-back, dribble, biscuit, etc. With a subject that was so far removed from my experiences, [watching televised sports] was like watching complicated math equations in another language on the screen.
That is, until I started dating a woman who was wildly into every single sport you can imagine. Soccer, baseball, basketball, F1, tennis—everything! But football was her favorite by far, and I would sit on the couch with her on Sundays while she would (begrudgingly) give me insight into what was happening. I remember once she was visibly angry that her college team was losing, and I saw a touchdown and said, “Hey, they got a touchdown!” To which she gritted her teeth at me and said, “That’s the other. Fucking. Team.”
Just like that, my sports fandom was born. We’re not together anymore, but I have four jerseys in my closet, all from different teams. As I was born and raised in a state with no [professional sports] team, I chose to be a true American and spread my fandom across the country. When people walk in my apartment and see Bengals, Saints, Dodgers, Royals, Lightning, and Blackhawks, they’re confused. But I don’t care. I get to enjoy it my way, and my fandom is no less than anyone else’s. I love how sports can give instant camaraderie when you see a stranger wearing the same logo, and bring people together in ways no other form of entertainment or activity can. It’s about history, rivals, human excellence, teamwork to the highest degree, and in cases such as tennis and golf, it’s also about individual concentration and dominance. There’s an excitement to seeing stories unfold with heartbreaking and uplifting turns that no one can predict as people put every aspect of their brains and bodies on the line. I’m so grateful that someone took the time to educate me on professional sports, because even on the bad days when all my teams lose, I didn’t spend one second of that day wishing I had done anything else. It can be dark, and toxic fans can and do exist, but that’s true of just about anything.
Perry praises youth sports, save for a subset of its spectators:
My family was immersed in sports of all kinds since our children were old enough to play. T-ball, Little League baseball, youth football, youth soccer, and youth basketball were all played by my sons. It is not always an even playing field, much like life. Many lessons, both good and bad, can be learned playing sports. Players learn early that not all things are fair or done fairly. For my sons it was a way to be an individual and to play with friends. Sports helped one son graduate high school and another stick it out and get his college degree. Most of all, the sports that they played were with kids from school or nearby towns. The friendships and memories they made can last a lifetime.
The downside is the parental aspect. I have coached, managed, officiated, and been an officer for several sports and organizations. At one time, I was the problem. Early on, I was a type A parent: loud! Obnoxious! Rude! Then I began to officiate. The shoe was now squarely on the other foot. I went back to a lot of my colleagues who were still officiating and apologized. They just laughed and said I would be paid back, and then some. They were right. In youth sports, it takes adults to ruin things most of the time. I have always tried to remember that the players are the most important part of youth sports.
Patrick grew up in a college-football family––his father played at the highest level, and he played on scholarship in a lower division––but he believes there is too much money in pro sports:
There is value in camaraderie associated with cheering for the home team, giving people something to be interested in, and providing excuses for neighborhood get-togethers.
But we radically overvalue those games. Dak Prescott got a four-year, $160 million contract. That’s too much for playing a game. I don’t blame Dak. He’s getting his market value. It’s not his fault. I don’t even really blame Jerry Jones, though that’s a closer call. He knows what the team and the players he pays to be on it are worth in the market. He’s maximizing his own profit by escalating the “value” (the cost) of everything.
It’s our fault. When the average cost for a family of four to go to a pro-football game is $600, we should balk. If people would stop paying those prices, costs would come down. If we, the football-going public, simply said, “Sorry. We’ll spend $300 for a family of four instead of $600,” the owners then might spend only $600 million, instead of $2 billion, to build the next stadium, and they’d be able to pay Dak $10 million a year instead of $40 million.
Everyone would still be happy. At least I would.
In contrast, John argues that “professional athletes are UNDERpaid.” He writes:
I can’t recall how many conversations I’ve had with fans bemoaning ridiculously high salaries. Yet, these athletes have clearly measurable performance metrics driving their salaries. Their work is performed in the most public way, where every mistake is magnified. There is only one Aaron Judge; he just set the American League home run record. People buy his jersey, with his name on it; they fill stadiums and they watch on TV.
The whole, very profitable league is directly benefiting from Judge’s abilities. He will make $19 million plus endorsements [this year alone], because he is one of one. There is no other Aaron Judge. There are certainly other great ball players, but that skill goes in storied history books. Now, compare pay for athletes with pay for CEOs. I just Googled CEO pay, and every single CEO on the list makes more than Aaron Judge. Their performance is measured in dubious ways (for example, a CEO can direct his company to buy back their own stock, artificially driving up the price), and their pay is routinely separate from their performance.
Peyton wants the revenue that college athletics generates to go to the athletes:
As someone who was a college athlete and has an interest in collegiate athletic policy, I think the importance of college sports is often understated. The current college system is broken beyond repair, BUT the vision for what it could be holds massive promise. Reform of collegiate athletics presents a unique opportunity to break a cycle of generational poverty every year for thousands of athletes who otherwise might not have that opportunity. While it is common to hear stories of professionals in the NFL or NBA buying their parents a house or car, they represent a minuscule percentage of college athletes. Using college athletics, specifically revenue sports like football and basketball, to transform the economic gains of so many would give the industry infinitely more importance.
Finally there is Luke, who writes:
Rooting for sports teams is an outlet for the tribalistic urges that are best left out of more important realms. Liberals and conservatives, Christians and atheists, urbanites and rural folks, etc. shouldn’t see themselves as enemies or combatants but rather appreciate the nuance of their differences and come to understand each other. But good-versus-evil narratives are simple and compelling. Sports allows a thoughtful person to put their thoughtfulness down for a couple hours and embrace hating the Yankees.
I found Luke’s perspective very sensible, until I got to the final two words and found that they weren’t “the Celtics” (though to be honest, I can’t muster the hate I had for the 1980s-era team today).Go Lakers!

Not all problems have solutions. As it turns out, democracy is one such problem. What makes it great is also, apparently, what makes it frightening. Should democracy be as frightening as it has become? Is there a way to temper it, constrain it, and make it more digestible for its jittery consumers? I think the answer is yes—with caveats. As many of you know, I’ve been working on a book for almost the entire duration of Wisdom of Crowds’ existence. Life can be judged not in years but in podcast eras, a great philosopher once said. I don’t think this book would have become what it is today without this broader community of like-minded thinkers, writers, listeners, and readers. Damir pushed me to clarify my “priors” (a word which I had never used prior to meeting Damir). That’s precisely what I tried to do. And so I thought and wrote about the democratic idea, in the hope of offering up an alternative interpretation of that idea, updated for our current moment. This past weekend, on October 15th, marked the culmination of this perhaps over-ambitious effort. My book, suggestively titled The Problem of Democracy, was officially released. I’m really excited to share it with you and hope that many of you will get a chance to read it, one way or another. Buy it, barter for it, borrow it from a friend, check it out at your local library (libraries still exist, one hopes). This is where I lay it all out on the line, to use a sports metaphor, although I must confess that I don’t know quite which sport this would be a reference to. With all that said, I wanted to personally invite all of you, dear readers and listeners, to stop by for the virtual launch of the book today at 4pm EST with three scholars who have had a profound influence on me, including the great Francis Fukuyama, author of the book on liberalism’s discontents. I guess I’ll be talking about democracy’s own discontents. I’ll be laying out some of the core arguments of my book and reflecting on how I’m feeling about democracy, or the lack thereof, in light of recent developments. I expect there will be some constructive disagreement as well. The coolest part of this is that anyone who registers to attend will receive a 30% discount (!) on the book. So, if the topic interests you, do consider tuning in and/or getting a copy. You can register here. You can also submit questions or comments on Twitter at #DemocracyProblem. If we don’t get to them during the event, I’ll be using the hashtag to engage with readers in the coming days, if you want to commend, criticize, or perhaps even skewer me for my bad (or good) ideas.Speaking of which, usually when I use the words “bad” or “good,” I use scare quotes. This isn’t to say I’m some sort of moral relativist, God forbid. But, as time passes, I feel increasingly uncomfortable making judgments about what constitutes a good or bad democratic outcome. For example, I’d be more agnostic about wokeism if more people actually subscribed to it. Part of what grates about wokeness is that it has limited democratic legitimacy while also seeming completely uninterested in seeking popular consent of any sort. Instead, it accumulates tremendous political and cultural currency despite being, in effect, a minority faith. There is the madness of crowds, but there is also the wisdom of crowds. And, at least on this, the crowds appear to be wise.I suppose I'd say that all other things being equal (a big if), the fact that more rather than less people believe something makes it more legitimate, which in a sense makes it more true (or at least more likely to be true). In a flight of fancy some time back, I tweeted the following:If people keep voting for something (assuming it doesn't violate the constitution), then it's probably not as bad as we think, although it could still be a disfavored outcome.Upon re-reading this sentence today, I found myself thinking: wow, I said that? Do I really think that, or was I caught up in the moment, stretching myself too far and placing a burden on the democratic idea that it couldn’t bear? For now, I’ll leave this as an open-ended question, because there are different ways of answering it. Just as not all problems have solutions, not all questions need answers, at least not right away.

Fifth article in a series on bureaucratic autonomy; the first installment can be found here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here.Many conservatives argue today that Americans are living under the tyranny of an out-of-control administrative state, in which unelected bureaucrats together with their allies in the courts make critical decisions affecting their lives. There are in fact any number of ways by which political principals control bureaucratic agents.  The real problem is rather different: Democratically elected legislators want the government to do things, without issuing clear mandates as to how that is to be done, and they fail to use the controls available to them. The bureaucrats are then left to fill in the gaps on their own.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Kate Bersch of Davidson College and I have written an article for the Annual Review of Political Science on how to measure bureaucratic autonomy. This came out of the Governance Project that I have been leading at Stanford University since 2011, which has sought to come up with better measures of state capacity. We wanted to capture Weberian aspects of bureaucratic quality like autonomy and meritocracy that were often passed over in existing measures, and contributed to a survey instrument developed by the Global Survey of Public Servants in collaboration with a number of other academic institutions.Kate and I realized that we couldn’t adequately measure bureaucratic autonomy because we didn’t have a theory of what bureaucratic autonomy was. So in the course of writing the article we dove into the academic literature in administrative law to understand how political principals control bureaucratic agents in the United States. The United States has perhaps the longest and most extensive set of controls over its bureaucracy, and we thought it could serve as a template for measuring other executive branches.There are five basic mechanisms by which political principals control bureaucratic agents in the United States. These mechanisms include:1.    ex ante procedural limitations on discretionary authority;2.    ex post review;3.    appointment and promotion power;4.    removal power; and5.    ad hoc interventions by political authorities into bureaucratic decision-making, including the use of emergency powers.In addition, political principals control bureaucracies through their power over the budget, but we regard this not as a separate mechanism but rather a component of each of the other five. We can sketch each one briefly here.Ex ante procedural controls. The primary control over bureaucratic behavior was the landmark 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which mandated that any new rule proposed by the bureaucracy be publicly posted and subject to notice-and-comment. New rules would have to take these comments into account, and could be contested ex post through a system of administrative law judges (ALJs).  In addition, Congress often mandates that agencies write detailed enabling legislation circumscribing their powers. For example, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act enjoined a series of regulatory agencies to write hundreds of new rules strengthening the federal oversight of financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 subprime crisis.Ex post review. In addition to ALJs, there is a huge body of law surrounding ex post judicial review under the heading of Chevron Deference. This arose out of the 1984 Supreme Court decision Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council created a two-step rule under which the Court first decided whether the legislative statute clearly specified the nature of the delegated authority. If the law was ambiguous or unclear, the Court would move to the second step; if the agency judgment was considered a reasonable interpretation of the statute, the court would defer to it. The court moreover created a “major questions doctrine” exempting certain cases from the general rule. Conservative justices (including Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) have expressed reservations about the Chevron framework, arguing that it wrongly cedes judicial authority to the executive and violates separation of powers. In its June 2022 ruling West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court expanded the scope of the major questions doctrine, but left intact the Chevron Deference itself, for the time being.Appointment power. Article II of the Constitution endows presidents with “executive power,” charges them to “faithfully execute the laws,” and allows them to demand “written opinions” of high officials. Congress for its part is given the power to vest the appointment of “inferior officials” (the definition of which is not clearly stated) in some other part of government.Drawing on the latter provision, a second major mechanism for limiting the President’s appointment power involves extensive rules for the hiring and promotion of lower level officials. The most important such legislation was the 1883 Pendleton Act mentioned in my previous post, which created the U.S. Civil Service Commission and mandated a system of merit-based hiring and promotion.Removal power.  The central fight being waged by conservatives today is over expansion of removal power, that is, the power of political principals to fire lower level officials. They argue that the federal bureaucracy is filled with left-learning Democrats and that they cannot exercise political control unless they can purge them.While it might seem that a president’s powers to appoint and remove executive branch officials are equivalent, they have never been treated as such since the founding of the Republic. The Constitution specifies the president’s power to appoint high officials with the advice and consent of the Senate, yet is silent on removal. The first Congress engaged in a sophisticated debate over removal power, ultimately granting that power to the president alone in something that came to be known as the Decision of 1789. James Madison and others argued that while Senate refusal to approve a presidential appointment limited the chief executive’s power, the president could always simply appoint another person. The inability to remove a recalcitrant official, by contrast, constituted a much more significant limitation of executive power.Discretionary removal power came to be limited after World War II with expansion of a federal employee’s ability to contest removal from office through an administrative or judicial process. Precedent for formal appeals of removals was set first for veterans, then for the federal workforce more broadly. Removals became so procedurally difficult that many political principals avoided them, thereby decreasing political control over bureaucratic behavior. Conservatives want to weaken those procedures and shift to at-will hiring and firing.Ad Hoc Interventions and Emergency Powers. A final category of political control over bureaucracies concerns ad hoc interventions by political officials into the decision-making processes of bureaucracies. These interventions can either be legal, with all parties operating within their legislated mandates but violating established norms controlling their use, or illegal and/or unconstitutional.With regard to legal interventions, the U.S. Constitution gives presidents certain extraordinary powers, most notably as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and pardon power. Former President Donald Trump made full use of these powers, for example by pardoning former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher who had been court martialed in a procedure strongly supported by the Navy hierarchy. While Trump had a legal right to make this decision, he violated a longstanding norm that deferred to the military hierarchy on issues of military justice.In addition, President Trump sought to use illegal means to stay in office as president, as detailed by the January 6 Committee.The current attack by conservatives on the administrative state builds on the established framework of American administrative law.  The two chief lines of criticism concern Chevron Deference, which they argue unconstitutionally cedes too much power to the executive branch, and removal power, which is based on the Pendleton Act and is itself unconstitutional as it usurps the executive's inherent powers. I will deal with these two rather inconsistent lines of argument in next week's post.Image: An engine order telegraph. (Flickr:wicker_man)

As Bruno Latour confided to Le Monde earlier this year in one of his final interviews, philosophy was his great intellectual love. But across his long and immensely fertile intellectual life, Latour pursued that love by way of practically every other form of knowledge and pursuit – sociology, anthropology, science, history, environmentalism, political theory, the visual arts, theatre and fiction. In this way he was, above all, a philosopher of life in the comprehensive German sense of Lebensphilosophie.
Lebensphilosophie, whose leading exponents included figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, enjoyed its intellectual heyday between the 1870s and the 1930s. It was a project that sought to make sense of the dramatic development of modern science and the way it invaded every facet of life. In the process, it relentlessly questioned distinctions between the subject and knowledge and the foundations of metaphysics. It spilled over into the sociology of a Max Weber or the Marxism of a György Lukács. In France, writer-thinkers such as Charles Péguy or Henri Bergson might be counted as advocates of the new philosophy. Their heirs were the existentialists of the 1940s and 1950s. In the Anglophone world, one might think of the American pragmatists, William James and John Dewey, the Bloomsbury group and John Maynard Keynes.
A century later, the project of a “philosophy of life” acquired new urgency for Latour in an age of ecological crisis when it became crucial to understand ourselves not as free-floating knowing and producing subjects, but as rooted, or “landed”, beings living alongside others with all the limits, entanglements and potentials that entailed.
The heretical positions on the status of scientific knowledge for which Latour became notorious for some, are best understood as attempts to place knowledge and truth claims back in the midst of life. In a 2004 essay entitled “How to Talk About the Body?” he imagined a dialogue between a knowing subject as imagined by a naive epistemology and a Latourian subject:
“‘Ah’, sighs the traditional subject [as imagined by simplistic epistemologies], ‘if only I could extract myself from this narrow-minded body and roam through the cosmos, unfettered by any instrument, I would see the world as it is, without words, without models, without controversies, silent and contemplative’; ‘Really?’ replies the articulated body [the Latourian body which recognises its relationship to the world and knowledge about it as active and relational?] with some benign surprise, ‘why do you wish to be dead? For myself, I want to be alive and thus I want more words, more controversies, more artificial settings, more instruments, so as to become sensitive to even more differences. My kingdom for a more embodied body!’”
The classical subject-object distinction traps the knowing subject in a disembodied, unworldly position that is, in fact, tantamount to death. As Latour wrote in a brilliant passage in the same essay on the training of noses, the expert smell-testers who gauge perfume, or tea or wine: “A direct and unmediated access to the primary qualities of odours could only be detected by a bodiless nose.” But what kind of image of knowledge is this? “[T]he opposite of embodied is dead, not omniscient.”
For a Burgundian – Latour was born in 1947 into a storied family of wine négociant in Beaune – this was an obvious but profound truth. To really know something, the way a good Burgundian knows wine, means not to float above the world, but to be a porous part of it, inhaling, ingesting fermentation and the chemical elements of the terroire, the irreducibly specific terrain.
For Latour, claims to meaningful knowledge, including scientific knowledge, were generated not by simple rules and procedures that could be endlessly repeated with guaranteed results, but through immersion in the world and its particularities. This implied an existential engagement: “Knowing interestingly is always a risky business,” he wrote, “which has to be started from scratch for any new proposition at hand.” What made for generative scientific discovery was not the tautological reproduction of a state of affairs by a “true” statement, but the “fecundity, productivity, richness, originality” of good articulations. Distinctions between true and false were, more often than not, banal. Only anxious epistemologists and methodologists of science worried about those. What mattered to actual scientific practice was whether a claim was “boring”, “repetitive”, “redundant”, “inelegant”, “simply accurate”, “sterile”.
If Latour was a sceptic when it came to naive claims of “detached” scientific knowledge, this also applied doubly to naive sociologies of knowledge. Critical analyses of power, whether anti-capitalist, feminist or postcolonial, were productive and inspiring. But unless it was subject symmetrically to the same critique to which Latour subjected naive claims to scientific knowledge, social theory, even that which proclaimed itself to be critical theory, could all too easily become a snare. If the relationship of life and knowledge was the problem, then, you could not cut through that Gordian knot by invoking sociology to explain physics. What was sociology, after all, but a form of organised social knowledge? For better or for worse, all you were doing in such an exercise was multiplying the articulations from one scientific discipline to another and not necessarily in a helpful or illuminating direction.
In refusing the inherited authority of the 19th and early 20th-century canon of critical social science, Latour sought to create a form of knowledge more adequate to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Latour thus belongs alongside Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as one of the French thinkers who sought to escape the long shadow of Marxism, whether in its Hegelian (Sartre) or its anti-Hegelian (Althusser) varieties.
[See also: As good as gold]
In place of an overly substantive notion of “the economy” or “society”, Latour proposed the looser conception of actor-networks. These are assemblages of tools, resources, researchers, means of registering concepts, and doing things that are not a priori defined in terms of a “mode of production” or a particular social order. Think of the lists of interconnected objects, systems and agents that have held our attention in the past few years: shipping containers, the flow of rainwater in Taiwan, giant freighters stuck sideways in the Suez Canal driven off course by unpredictable currents and side winds. Each of these supply chain crises has exposed actor-networks, of which we were previously oblivious. During such moments we are forced to ask: what is macro and what is micro? What is base and what is superstructure? These are Latourian questions.
One of the productive effects of seeing the world this way is that it becomes irresistibly obvious that all sorts of things have agency. This realisation is disturbing because it seems to downgrade the privilege of actual human existence and the social relations between people. But Latour’s point was never to diminish the human, but instead to emphasise the complex array of forces and agencies that are entailed in our modern lives. Our existence, Latour tried to show, depends not on the simple structures that we imagined modernity to consist of – markets, states and so on – but on the multiplication of what he calls hybrids, “supply chains” in the widest sense of the word.
Latour was not a class militant. But that does not mean that he did not have a cause. His lifelong campaign was for modernity to come to consciousness of itself, to stop taking its own simplifications at face value, to recognise the confusions and hybridity that it creates and endlessly feeds off. His mission was to persuade us, as the title of his most widely read book has it, that We Have Never Been Modern (1991). The confusion of a world in which lipid bubbles, aerosols and face masks have occupied our minds for years is what Latour wanted to prepare us for.
What Latour sought to expose was the pervasive animism that surrounds us in the form of hybrid actor-networks, whose force and significance we consistently deny. “Hybrids are everywhere,” he said, “but the question is how do you tame them, or do you explicitly recognise their strengths, which is part of the animist power of objects?” What Latour diagnosed is that modernity, as part of its productive logic, systematically denies this animation of the material world. “Modernism is the mode of life that finds the soul with which matter would be endowed, the animation, shocking.”
This repression of hybrid, animated material reality, is exposed in the often-racialised embarrassment of those who believe themselves modern when they encounter human civilisations that make no secret of their animist beliefs. It also accounts for the embarrassment triggered among true believers in modern science and its ideology by the revelations of the best histories of science, such as those by Simon Schaffer, to whom Latour owed a great debt. To Latour’s delight Schaffer showed how Isaac Newton, in the first instance, saw in gravity the manifestation of the power of angels.
The modernist impulse is to dismiss such ideas as hangovers of an earlier religious world-view and to relegate African art to the anthropology museum. But at the risk of provocation and scandal, Latour’s response was the opposite. Rather than finishing the purification of modernity and expunging angels and animism from our view of the forces that move the world, he urged that we should open our ontology to encompass the giant dark matter of hybrid concepts and real networks that actually sustain modern life.
From the 1990s onwards this made Latour one of the foremost thinkers in the ecological movement. And once again he reached for the most radical and encompassing animist notion with which to frame that commitment – the Gaia concept, which postulates the existence of a single overarching living being, encompassing global ecology. This is an eerie, supernatural, non-modern idea. But for Latour, if we settle for any more mundane description of the ecological crisis – if we fit the environment into pre-existing cost-benefit models as economists often do – we fail to recognise the radicalism of the forces that we have unleashed. We fail to understand the peril that we are in: that Gaia will lose patience and toss us, snarling, off her back.
Latour’s emphatic embrace of life, plenitude and articulation did not mean that he shrank from finitude or death. Rather the opposite. It is only from a thoroughly immanent view that you truly feel the weight of life lived towards its end, and the mysterious and awesome finality that is death. It is only from an embrace of life as emphatic as Latour’s, that you truly register the encroachment of deadening forces of the mind and the body. For Latour, life and death were intertwined by the effort of those left behind to make sense of death, by every means at their disposal, sometimes at very long distance.
In September 1976 the body of Ramesses II, the third pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty of Egypt, was flown to Paris. He was welcomed with the full military honours appropriate for a great ruler, and then his body was whisked to the laboratory to be subject to medical-forensic examination. For Latour this fantastic juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern was an irresistible provocation. The naive position was that the scientists discovered that Ramesses died of tuberculosis 3,000 years ago. He was also, a racially minded police forensic scientist claimed, most likely a redhead. For Latour, the question was more basic. How can we debate claims made self-confidently about a death that took place thousands of years ago? We were not there. There was no modern medical science then. When Ramesses ceased to live, TB was not even a “thing”. It was not until 1882 that Robert Koch in Berlin identified the bacillus. And even then, no one could have made any sensible claim about Ramesses. Making the naive, apparently matter-of-fact claim – that Ramesses died of TB in 1213 BC – in fact involves giant leaps of the imagination.
[See also: The Cézanne conundrum]
What we do know and can debate are what Latour would call “articulations”. We know that as a result of the intervention of the French president Valéry Giscard D’Estaing the Egyptian authorities were prevailed upon to allow the decaying mummy to be flown to Paris for preservation. We know that in Paris, what was left of the body was enrolled in modern technoscientific systems and testing procedures leading us to venture hypotheses about the cause of death in the distant past. Every single one of those “articulations” can be tested, probed and thereby multiplied. Entire bodies of thought can be built on different hypotheses about the corpse. So, Latour maintained, rather than those who assertively claim to know what actually happened 3,000 years ago, the journalist who declared vertiginously that Ramesses had (finally) died of TB in 1976 came closer to the truth in registering both the gulf that separates us from an event millennia in the past and the radical historical immanence of our current diagnosis. In his effort to shake us out of the complacent framework of certainty that modernity had created around us, counter-intuitive provocations of this kind were part of Latour’s method.
Unlike Ramesses’ cause of death, Bruno Latour’s was well mapped. In the 21st century, a cancer diagnosis has immediate and drastic implications. It enrols you as a patient in the machinery of the medical-industrial complex. Among all the hybrids that modern societies have created, the medical apparatus is one of the most complex. It grows ever larger and imposes its urgency in a relentless and merciless fashion. If you take your critical vantage point from an early 20th-century theorist of alienation, like Lukács or Weber for instance, it is tempting to think of this technoscientific medical apparatus as a steel-hard cage that relentlessly objectifies its patients, as bodies and cases. But for Latour, this again falls into a modernist trap. To start from the premise that objectification is actually achieved is to misunderstand and to grant too much. “Reductionism is not a sin for which scientists should make amends, but a dream precisely as unreachable as being alive and having no body. Even the hospital is not able to reduce the patient to a ‘mere object’.”
Rather than reducing us, modern medicalisation multiplies us. “When you enter into contact with hospitals, your ‘rich subjective personality’ is not reduced to a mere package of objective meat: on the contrary, you are now learning to be affected by masses of agencies hitherto unknown not only to you, but also to doctors, nurses, administration, biologists, researchers who add to your poor inarticulate body complete sets of new instruments.” The body becomes a site of a profuse multiplicity: “How can you contain so much diversity, so many cells, so many microbes, so many organs, all folded in such a way that ‘the many act as one’, as [Alfred North] Whitehead said? No subjectivity, no introspection, no native feeling can be any match for the fabulous proliferation of affects and effects that a body learns when being processed by a hospital… Far from being less, you become more.”
It’s a brave image. Perhaps it was one that sustained Latour as the cancer and the agencies deployed to fight it laid waste to his flesh. Not for nothing people describe the illness as a battle. Like a war, it can go on for years.
Latour liked military images. Perhaps because they better captured his vision of history, as mysterious, opaque, complex and contingent. Military history is one area of the modern world in which even the most high-minded analysts end up talking about tanks, bridges, rivers, Himars, Javelins and the fog of war. In the end, it is often for want of nails that battles are lost. The original French title of Latour’s famous book on the 19th-century French microbiologist Louis Pasteur – Pasteur: guerre et paix des microbes suivi de Irréductions – paid homage to Tolstoy. In the English translation that reference was lost. The Pasteurization of France (1988) replaces the French’s titles nod to War and Peace with ugly sociologese.
Latour’s own life force was strong. In his apartment on Rue Danton, Paris, with the charred remains of Notre Dames in background, he shared wines with visitors from around the world from vineyards planted in response to climate change. Covid lockdowns left him impatient. As soon as global traffic resumed, in 2021 he was assisting in the curation of the Taipei biennial. Latour’s final book, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis appeared in English in 2021. It carries his voice into the present inviting us to imagine ourselves in an inversion of Kafka’s fable, as happy termites emerging from the lockdown on six hairy legs. “With your antennae, your articulations, your emanations, your waste matter, your mandibles, your prostheses, you may at last be becoming a human being!” No longer ill at ease, “Nothing is alien to you anymore; you’re no longer alone; you quietly digest a few molecules of whatever reaches your intestines, after having passed through the metabolism of hundreds of millions of relatives, allies, compatriots and competitors.”
As he aged, Latour became more, not less radical. Often dismissed on the left for his scepticism about classical critical social theory, the ecological turn made Latour into nothing less than an eco-warrior. His cause was the overturning of the dream world that systematically failed to recognise or grasp the forces unleashed by the modernist apparatus of production and cognition. We needed to come down to Earth, to land. Only then could we begin the hard work, with other actors, of arriving at a sustainable modus vivendi. The urgency was that of war and his mobilisation was total. The range of projects that he spawned in recent decades – artistic, political, intellectual – was dizzying. All of them aimed to find new political forms, new parliaments, new articulations.
Unlike many commentators and politicians, in response to populism, and specifically the gilet jaunes protests of 2018, Latour did not retreat to higher levels of technocracy, but instigated a collective project to compile cahiers de doléance – books of complaint – like those assembled before the French Revolution of 1789. The aim was to enrol people from all walks of life in defining what they need to live and what threatened their livelihood.
Part of the project involved an interactive theatrical exercise enacted by Latour with the architect and performance-art impresario Soheil Hajmirbaba. In a kind of ritual game, the participants arranged themselves and the forces enabling and threatening their lives – ranging from sea level rise to the increased prices for diesel – on a circular stage marked out with a compass. It was, as Latour described it, “like a children’s game, light-hearted and a lot of fun. And yet, when you get near the middle, everyone gets a bit nervous… The centre of the crucible, where I timidly put my feet, is the exact intersection of a trajectory – and I’m not in the habit of thinking of myself as a vector of a trajectory – which goes from the past, all that I’ve benefited from so as to exist, to grow, sometimes without even realising it, on which I unconsciously count and which may well stop with me, through my fault, which won’t go towards the future anymore, because of all that threatens my conditions of existence, of which I was also unaware.”
“The amazing result of this little enactment,” he continued, “is that you’re soon surrounded by a small assembly, which nonetheless represents your most personal situation, in front of the other participants. The more attachments you list, the more clearly you are defined. The more precise the description, the more the stage fills up!… A woman in the group sums it up in one phrase: ‘I’m repopulated!’”
Thus, Latour reinvented the role of the engaged French intellectual for the 21st century. And in doing so he forced the follow-on question. Was he perhaps the last of his kind? Who comes after him? As far as intellectual standing is concerned, Latour would have been impatient with the question. He was too preoccupied with new problems and projects, too enthused by the networks of collaborators, young and old whose work he drew on and that he helped to energise. But in a more general sense the question of succession haunted him. That, after all, is the most basic issue posed by the ecological crisis. What comes after us? What is our responsibility to the continuity of life?
In his effort to enact the motion of coming down to Earth, Latour faced the question head on. “With my feet on the consortium’s compass, I consult myself: in terms of my minuscule actions, do I enhance or do I stifle the lives of those I’ve benefited from till now?” Asking that question, never content with complacent or self-satisfied answers, during the night of 8-9 October 2022, Bruno Latour died aged 75 in Paris, of pancreatic cancer.
[See also: “Justice cannot be the lodestar of a new society”]

Russia says that it has expanded. On September 30th, President Vladimir Putin signed a document that ostensibly accepted four Ukrainian regions as members of the Russian Federation. The residents of those regions, Putin said in a speech, “have become our citizens forever.” He made this assertion as the Ukrainian Army was liberating territory to which Russia was laying claim. He was not just trying to snatch propaganda victory from the jaws of evident military defeat; he was laying the groundwork for fighting for those lands ever more aggressively. A week and a half earlier, he had ordered the military to draft hundreds of thousands of new soldiers, and had threatened to use nuclear weapons.

A Russia that includes parts, or all, of Ukraine and untold other lands is the Russian World, a vague and expansive idea pioneered by the self-styled philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, some of whose ideas have been adopted by the Kremlin. In August, his thirty-two-year-old daughter, Darya, also an imperialist pundit, was killed by a car bomb that may have been intended for him. Last week, the Times reported that U.S. intelligence believes a part of the Ukrainian government may have been behind the attack. If true, this suggests that the government puts strong, probably unfounded, faith in the power of the concept of the Russian World.

Putin, in his speech, described both the Russian World and the larger world as he sees it. According to him, the West destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991, but Russia came back, defiant and strong. Now the West wants to destroy Russia. “They see our thought and our philosophy as a direct threat,” he said. “That is why they target our philosophers for murder.” The ultimate goal of the West—specifically, the United States and Great Britain—is to subjugate people around the world and force them to give up traditional values, to have “ ‘parent No. 1,’ ‘parent No. 2,’ and ‘parent No. 3’ instead of mother and father (they have completely lost it!),” and to teach schoolchildren that “there are some other genders besides men and women and offer them sex-change operations.” Putin has said, repeatedly, that only Russia can save the world from this menace. This is the story of a world in which his war in Ukraine—and the draft, and even, perhaps, a nuclear strike—makes sense.

But when the world shaped by the feedback loop of propaganda collides with the world of facts on the ground, things begin to crack. On October 5th, two videos circulated widely on Russian-language social media, including in normally pro-war quarters. The videos show a crowd of men in uniform. They say that there are five hundred of them and that they were recently drafted. They complain of “animal-like” conditions, of having to buy their own food and bulletproof vests, and of a lack of organization. “We are not registered as part of any detachment,” one man says. “We have weapons, but these are not officially issued to us.” Meanwhile, some Russian television propagandists have been acknowledging Ukrainian victories, and urging Russians to prepare for a long wait before their country can attack again.

It’s too early to make assumptions about where these tiny cracks may lead. It is not too early, however, to think about what a future, militarily defeated Russia might look like. This is what Alexey Navalny, the opposition politician who has been in prison since January, 2021, has been doing. The Washington Post recently published an op-ed, smuggled out by Navalny’s legal team, in which he writes that Russia deserves to lose the war and that, once it does, it must be reconstituted as a parliamentary, rather than a Presidential, republic. This, he argues, will insure that no one person can usurp power in Russia as Putin has.

Navalny’s op-ed serves to illustrate Putin’s wisdom, of sorts—the wisdom of keeping his most important political opponent behind bars. Navalny seems to have missed a cultural turning point. In the seven and a half months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country. Many of them are journalists, writers, poets, or artists, and they, along with some who are still in Russia, have been producing essays, poems, Facebook posts, and podcasts trying to grapple with the condition of being citizens of a country waging a genocidal colonial war. Some of their Ukrainian counterparts have scoffed at their soul-searching. Ukrainians, indeed, have bigger and more immediate problems. But they also have certainty—they know who they are in the world, while for Russians nothing is as it once seemed to be.

One of the earliest examples of this outpouring was a poem, by the children’s-book author Alexey Oleynikov, about the incongruity of trying to flee Russia with a pet hedgehog in tow. One stanza reads, “We will not wash the shame off until our old age, until we die / There have been worse times, but there has never been a more ridiculous time.” Posted on Facebook, the poem went viral in March. May’s viral poem, by the actress and poet Zhenya Berkovich, tells of a young Russian man visited by the ghost of his grandfather, who fought in the Second World War; the ghost asks his grandson to forget him, lest the memory of his valor be used to justify the current war. This month’s viral poem, by Eli Bar-Yahalom, an Israeli Russian, is a dialogue between God and a Muscovite who hopes to return home someday. “There is no resurrecting Bucha, no raising up Irpin,” God says, referring to suburbs of Kyiv where Russians appear to have committed war crimes. There are also at least two Russian-language podcasts devoted to the issues of individual and collective responsibility for the war. And Linor Goralik, an acclaimed Russian writer born in Ukraine and living in Israel, has founded an online journal called roar (Russian Oppositional Arts Review), which has published three packed issues.

The last time people were writing in Russian so urgently was in the late nineteen-eighties. Soviet citizens back then had been confronted with their past—the Stalinist terror. That moment gave Russia, among other things, Memorial, the human-rights organization that, along with Ukrainian and Belarusian activists, won the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Now Russian citizens are being confronted with their present. The writers in exile have physically fled their country (as has much of Memorial’s leadership) and are trying to write their way to a new Russia. Their imagination extends far beyond the Russian constitution to a world that’s radically different, and better than not only Putin’s revanchist Russian World but the world we currently inhabit. ♦

August Wilson wrote 10 plays chronicling Black life in the 20th century. His favorite, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, is set in 1911 in a boarding house in Pittsburgh's Hill District. The play's title comes from "Joe Turner's Blues," written in 1915 by W. C. Handy. That song refers to a man named Joe Turney, the brother of Peter Turney, who was the governor of Tennessee from 1893 to 1897. Joe Turney transported Black prisoners, chained in a coffle, along the roads from Memphis to the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. While en route, he handed over some of the convicts, for a commission, to white farmers. The prisoners he leased to the farmers worked for years in a system of convict leasing--slavery by another name.

Their goal is to keep the underclass illiterate, or barely literate, and feed them the junk food of mass culture and the virtues of white supremacy, including the deification of the white male slaveholders who founded this country.

In Wilson's play, Herald Loomis, a convict who worked on Turner's farm, arrives in Pittsburgh after seven years of bondage with his 11-year-old daughter, Zonia, in search of his wife. He struggles to cope with his trauma. At a boarding house, he meets a conjurer named Bynum Walker, who tells him that, to face and overcome the demons that torment him, he must find his song.

It is your song, your voice, your history, Walker tells him, which gives you your identity and your freedom. And your song, Walker tells him, is what the white ruling class seeks to eradicate.

This denial of one's song is instrumental to bondage. Black illiteracy was essential to white domination of the South. It was a criminal offense to teach enslaved people to read and write.

The poor, especially poor people of color , remain rigidly segregated within educational systems. The backlash against critical race theory (CRT), explorations of LGBTQ+ identities and the banning of books by historians such as Howard Zinn and writers such as Toni Morrison, are extensions of this attempt to deny the oppressed their song.

PEN America reports that proposed educational gag orders have increased 250 percent compared with those issued in 2021. Teachers and professors who violate these gag orders can be subject to fines, loss of state funding for their institutions, termination and even criminal charges. Ellen Schrecker, the leading historian of the McCarthy era's widespread purging of the U.S. education system, calls these gag bills "worse than McCarthyism." Schrecker, who authored No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America and The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s,writes:

The current campaign to limit what can be taught in high school and college classrooms is clearly designed to divert angry voters from the deeper structural problems that cloud their own personal futures. Yet it is also a new chapter in the decades-long campaign to roll back the changes that have brought the real world into those classrooms. In one state after another, reactionary and opportunistic politicians are joining that broader campaign to overturn the 1960s' democratization of American life. By attacking the CRT bogeyman and demonizing contemporary academic culture and the critical perspectives that it can produce, the current limitations on what can be taught endanger teachers at every level, while the know-nothingism these measures encourage endangers us all.

The more social inequality grows, the more the ruling class seeks to keep the bulk of the population within the narrow confines of the American myth: the fantasy that we live in a democratic meritocracy and are a beacon of liberty and enlightenment to the rest of the world. Their goal is to keep the underclass illiterate, or barely literate, and feed them the junk food of mass culture and the virtues of white supremacy, including the deification of the white male slaveholders who founded this country.

When books that give a voice to oppressed groups are banned, it adds to the sense of shame and unworthiness the dominant culture seeks to impart, especially toward marginalized children. At the same time, bans mask the crimes carried out by the ruling class. The ruling class does not want us to know who we are. It does not want us to know of the struggles carried out by those who came before us, struggles that saw many people blacklisted, incarcerated, injured and killed to open democratic space and achieve basic civil liberties from the right to vote to union organizing. They know that the less we know about what has been done to us, the more malleable we become. If we are kept ignorant of what is happening beyond the narrow confines of our communities and trapped in an eternal present, if we lack access to our own history, let alone that of other societies and cultures, we are less able to critique and understand our own society and culture.

W.E.B. Du Bois argued that white society feared educated Blacks far more than they feared Black criminals.

"They can deal with crime by chain-gang and lynch law, or at least they think they can, but the South can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man," he wrote.

Those, like Du Bois, who was blacklisted and driven into exile, who pull the veil from our eyes are especially targeted by the state. Rosa Luxemberg. Eugene V. Debs. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King. Noam Chomsky. Ralph Nader. Cornel West. Julian Assange. Alice Walker. They speak a truth the powerful and the rich do not want heard. They, like Bynum, help us find our song.

In the U.S., 21 percent of adults are illiterate and a staggering 54 percent have a literacy level below sixth grade. These numbers jump dramatically in the U.S. prison system, the largest in the world with an estimated 20 percent of the globe's prison population, although we are less than five percent of the global population. In prison, 70 percent percent of inmates cannot read above a fourth-grade level, leaving them able to work at only the lowest paying and most menial jobs upon their release.

You can watch a two-part discussion of my book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, and the importance of prison education, here and here.

Like Loomis, those freed from bondage become pariahs, members of a criminal caste. They are unable to access public housing, barred from hundreds of jobs, especially any job that requires a license, and denied social services. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates in a new report that 60 percent of the formerly incarcerated are jobless. Of more than 50,000 people released from federal prisons in 2010, the report found, 33 percent found no employment at all over four years, and at any given time, no more than 40 percent of the cohort was employed. This is by design. More than two-thirds are rearrested within three years of their release and at least half are reincarcerated.

You can see a two-part discussion on the numerous obstacles placed before those released from prison with five of my former students from the NJ-STEP college degree program here and here.

White members of the working class, although often used as shock troops against minorities and the left, are equally manipulated and for the same reasons. They, too, are denied their song, fed myths of white exceptionalism and white supremacy to keep their antagonisms directed at other oppressed groups, rather than the corporate forces and the billionaire class that have orchestrated their own misery.

Du Bois pointed out that poor whites, politically allied with rich southern plantation owners, were complicit in their disenfranchisement. They received few material or political benefits from the alliance, but they reveled in the "psychological" feelings of superiority that came with being white. Race, he wrote, "drove such a wedge between white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest."

Little has changed.

The poor do not attend college, or, if they do, they incur massive student debt, which can take a lifetime to pay off. U.S. Student loan debt, totalling nearly $1.75 trillion, is the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages. Some 50 million people are in debt peonage to student loan companies. This debt peonage forces graduates to major in subjects useful to corporations and is part of the reason why the humanities are withering away. It limits career options because graduates must seek jobs that allow them to meet their hefty monthly loan payments. The average law school student debt of $130,000 intentionally sends most law school graduates into the arms of corporate law firms.

Meanwhile, fees to attend colleges and universities have skyrocketed. The average tuition and fees at private national universities have jumped 134 percent since 2002. Out-of-state tuition and fees at public national universities have risen 141 percent while in-state tuition and fees at public national universities have risen 175 percent.

The forces of repression, backed by corporate money, are challenging in courts Biden's executive order to cancel some student debt. A federal judge in Missouri heard arguments from six states attempting to block the plan. To qualify for the debt relief, individuals must make less than $125,000 a year or $250,000 for married couples and families. Eligible borrowers can receive up to $20,000 if they are Pell Grant recipients and up to $10,000 if they haven't received a Pell Grant.

Education should be subversive. It should give us the intellectual tools and vocabulary to question the reigning ideas and structures that buttress the powerful. It should make us autonomous and independent beings, capable of making our own judgments, capable of understanding and defying the "cultural hegemony," to quote Antonio Gramsci, that keeps us in bondage. In Wilson's play, Bynum teaches Loomis how to discover his song, and once Loomis finds his song, he is free.

It's not just the Big Lie. Republicans are telling three other lies they hope will swing the midterms.

They involve crime, inflation, and taxes.

Here are the GOP's claims, followed by the facts.

1. They claim crime is rising because Democrats have been "soft" on crime.

Rubbish. Rising crime rates are due to the proliferation of guns, which Republicans refuse to control.

While violent crime rose 28 percent from 2019 to 2020, gun homicides rose 35 percent. States that have weakened gun laws have seen gun crime surge. Clearly, a major driver of the national increase in violence is the easy availability of guns.

The violence can't be explained by any of the Republican talking points about "soft on crime" Democrats.

Lack of police funding? No. On average, all cities--whether run by Democrats or Republicans--saw an increase in police funding in 2022.

Criminal justice reforms? No. Wherever bail reforms have been implemented, re-arrest rates remain stable. Data shows no connection between the policies of progressive prosecutors and changes in crime rates.

In fact, crime is rising faster in Republican, Trump-supporting states. In 2020, per capita murder rates were 40 percent higher in states won by Trump than in those won by Joe Biden.

Republican policies have made it easier for people to get and carry guns. Republicans are lying about the real cause of rising crime to protect some of their biggest supporters, big gun manufacturers and the NRA.

2. Republicans claim that inflation is due to Biden's spending, and wage increases.

Baloney. Biden's spending can't be causing our current inflation because inflation has broken out everywhere around the world, often at much higher rates than in the US.

Besides, heavy spending by the US government began in 2020, before the Biden administration, in order to protect Americans and the economy from the ravages of COVID-19--and it was necessary.

Wages can't be pushing inflation because wages have been increasing at a slower pace than prices--leaving most workers worse off.

The major cause of the current inflation is the global post-pandemic shortage of all sorts of things, coupled with Putin's war in Ukraine and China's lockdowns.

The biggest domestic culprit for America's current inflation is big corporations that are using inflation as an excuse for raising prices above their own cost increases, resulting in the highest profit margins since 1950--while consumers are paying through the nose.

The biggest domestic cause of inflation is corporate power. Republicans are lying about this to protect their big corporate patrons.

3. Republicans say Democrats voted to hire an army of IRS agents who will audit and harass the middle class.

Wrong. The IRS won't be going after the middle class. It will be going after ultra-wealthy tax cheats.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in July, provides funding to begin to get IRS staffing back to what it was before 2010, after which Republicans cut staff by roughly 30 percent, despite increases since then in the number of Americans filing tax returns.

The extra staff are needed to prevent high-end tax evasion, which is more difficult to root out (the ultra-wealthy hire squads of accountants and tax attorneys to hide their taxable incomes). It's estimated that the richest 1 percent are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS.

The Treasury Department and the IRS have made it clear that audit rates for households earning $400,000 or under will remain same.

Republicans are lying about what the IRS will do with the new funding to protect their ultra-wealthy patrons.

None of these three lies is as brazen and damaging as Trump's Big Lie. But they're all being used by Republican candidates in these last weeks before the midterms.

Know the truth and share it.

From what, you might wonder? In 2014, most of his then $20 million revenue came from selling supplements like “Super Male Vitality,” according to testimony Jones gave in a court case. After he was banned from major social media platforms in 2018, he expanded his sales, offering a 50 percent discount for at least one of his alleged testosterone boosters to “push back in the fight against globalist agenda” — a bargain at $34.95. Also available at the time was “Survival Shield X-2 — Nascent Iodine,” which Jones’s website describes as having been developed using “Thermodynamic Pressure Sensitive High Energy Sound Pulse Nano-Emulsion Technology.” A newer version of the product is described as derived from “ancient sea salts” found “thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface” and formulated “with our fellow patriots in mind.” Really, it’s a steal at $19.95, all major credit cards accepted.

During the Texas trial, a producer of his show testified that their online store generated over $165 million in revenue during a span of time encompassing a few months in 2015 and the period from 2016 through 2018, by selling survivalist gear, supplements, what-have-you. The trial also revealed that the families had pleaded with him for many years to stop airing lies about their murdered children, because they faced not just direct threats and confrontations, but people who said they’d defile their children’s graves. According to the families, Jones ignored them as those lies increased product and supplement sales.

One might think it’s just this one con man who found a lot of marks (a lawyer for Jones once called him a “performance artist” who is merely “playing a character”), but others have used the same approach.

Fox News required its workers in New York City to be vaccinated against Covid in the winter of 2021, and at least in the summer of 2021, even vaccinated workers were still required to put masks on in closed spaces with multiple people, You hardly would have realized that from watching all the antivaccine and antimasking content that was routine on Fox News.

Many viewers appear to have paid a huge price for that cynical disparagement of lifesaving vaccines.

A recent study in Nature found that areas with higher levels of Fox News viewership had lower Covid vaccination rates, which are associated with higher hospitalization and death rates. This impact of Fox News was independent of local health care capacity or even partisanship. Plus, much of this effect was concentrated on people younger than 65, who might have thought they were safer from Covid, the study authors noted, and perhaps more open to messages of vaccine hesitancy and refusal.

Even foot soldiers of the movement who sincerely bought into the antivax nonsense, suffered. According to a report from The Boston Globe, at least five conservative radio talk show hosts who campaigned against the vaccines died from Covid-19 over just a few months in 2021.

Shashank Joshi is Defence Editor for The Economist and serves on the Advisory Board at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Shashank Joshi discuss the state of the war in Ukraine, whether European solidarity will survive a cold winter, and why countries like India and China remain tied to Russia.This conversation was recorded on October 6th, 2022. The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You've been covering Ukraine a lot over the last months. What can we ultimately expect in terms of the relative strength of the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and what might that mean for the ultimate outcome of the war?Shashank Joshi: There was a real chance the Russian lines would have collapsed had Vladimir Putin not done what he had tried so hard to avoid doing for the whole war—mobilizing manpower from across the country. That was an indication of failure, and an admission that the war was going very badly. And now that it's happened, he's still on the back foot. He's still being chased back, indeed, as we speak, in Luhansk province in the east and in Kherson province in the south. But Russia still sits on about 15% of Ukrainian territory, which is huge. And not only that, but it sits on Ukraine's access to much of the Black Sea. It controls much of the breadbasket of southern Ukraine and big industrial areas in the east. So I think Russia is losing this conflict. But that doesn't mean it's lost. It's still in a territorially strong position. What is really going to determine this is who comes out stronger in the spring, in March and April. The reason is the weather. The Ukrainians are doing really well. But their attacks are probably going to slow down, barring some kind of surprise collapse of the Russian lines. It's going to get wet and muddy. You can't get your tanks off-road, so they have to go on the road, which means they can be spotted more easily. You can't get drones up in the air, because it's foggy and difficult to see. People have to spend more time just keeping warm.Mounk: On that point, Russia’s mobilization is really going to matter, because many of those people need real training in order to be effective. And as long as the Russian lines hold through the winter, Russia now has four or five months to get them ready for combat. Do you think that the recent Ukrainian successes are a reason to be very optimistic about Ukrainian capabilities in the spring as well? Or do you think that, because of the arrival of Russian reservists, the situation may look very different in the spring?Joshi: What matters more in warfare, mass or quality? This situation is a crucial test of that long-running debate. My own view is that Russia is going to struggle to turn its manpower advantage into an effective battlefield advantage. It has a lot of bodies. It can literally dragoon these people into service. But can it equip them? Can it arm them? Can it give them armored vehicles? Officers to lead them? Can it train them? I'm really skeptical. The sullen 16-year-old pulled off the streets of Vladivostok and told “Hey, you're defending the Motherland in our new frontiers, in a place you've never heard of before, in Kherson province”—how are these people really going to fight? I think the Ukrainians are fighting for survival. And not just that, but they're being trained by us. Literally, where I'm sitting in the UK, we're training up huge numbers of Ukrainians, helped by trainers from across Europe, the US and other places like Australia and Canada. I think that advantage is going to make itself felt in the spring if—and here's a really big if—we keep giving them weapons.Mounk: I guess there are two big political question marks here, and one is about the extent of Western solidarity with Ukraine. We obviously have a hard winter coming up in which energy prices are going to be very high. It's possible that certainly parts of industry and possibly even private households are going to struggle to get the energy they need. Might all of that give an opening to political forces within the West who want to reduce support to Ukraine?Joshi: I'm really optimistic about European cohesion. You know, back in the summer when Ukraine was on the backfoot in the east, I was worried. And I was worried about European energy in particular. We in the UK are going to have a really tough winter with gas prices and gas supply, as will a lot of other countries. But overall, I think we're in a much stronger position than anyone had a right to expect back in the summer. European governments have spent about $500 billion to insulate citizens from energy price spikes. It's not going to solve the problem. But they have basically thrown money at the problem to try and insulate their citizens from feeling the effect of this. European gas storage is more than 89% filled—well above the average for this time of year. We will have a huge problem next winter, and the winter after that could be incredibly miserable. But for this winter, I think we're gonna get through it. A few weeks ago, 74% of Germans told pollsters that they basically favored maintaining support for Ukraine despite rising energy prices. And that was up from 70% in July. And this is Germany—not the most Russia-hawkish country out there. If that's the mood in Germany, you can imagine what it's like in other places. So overall, I think European cohesion is looking really impressive. The midterms, yes, could be an issue. But even if you look at elections in other countries, the Italians—the Italians, thank God, have managed to find the one far-right leader in Europe who is not pro-Putin. I don't think we could have asked for more than that in the current circumstances that we're in.In the short term, the absolute priority is just trying to substitute for Russian gas in any way we can. And Norway is a huge part of this. Norway is not a member of the EU. But it's replaced the Russians as the EU's biggest supplier of gas, and it's looking to try and boost gas production. And this is really important right now, because we have just seen, for example, an attack on the Nord Stream pipelines that run through the Baltic Sea. They weren't actively providing gas to Europe: they had been shut down in various forms. But I think it was a shot across the bow that says, “We took out these pipelines; we can also take out Norway’s pipelines.” And if there is a disruption to those pipelines, that would be much, much more difficult for Europe.Mounk: To draw out the implication here: you're assuming that it was Russia that was behind these attacks?Joshi: I've spoken to a lot of European officials in recent days and weeks. I was in Helsinki not long ago. Every single senior European official I spoke to said they haven't got hard proof, at the time that we're speaking, of Russian culpability. But let me tell you: not a single one doubted that it was anything other than Russia. I know we've had some more wild speculative theories that it could have been the Americans trying to sabotage the pipeline or the Poles trying to drive a wedge between the Russians and the Europeans to drive escalation—I think that's nonsense. Occam's Razor: it was the Russians.Mounk: I find it really hard to imagine Jake Sullivan (Biden’s National Security Advisor), who was a guest on this podcast, and Joe Biden greenlighting this attack on European gas pipelines. It just feels so much out of character with the mainstream foreign policy thinking of the Democratic Party. I don't mean to be naive about this. Obviously, they are running big drone campaigns against terrorists in parts of the world and so on, and it's clear to me that parts of the US security state are certainly less than polite. But there's something about the huge risk involved in undermining the infrastructure of America's closest allies in this kind of way—I find it very, very hard to see the current administration greenlighting it. Joshi: It doesn't fit with what we know of their approach to escalation in this conflict, which has been very focused and very cautious and very incremental and steady, and ramping up support to Ukraine bit by bit, whilst trying to manage all of the other escalatory dynamics around that.But just to finish on energy: it's not just gas, it's not just the pipeline. Europeans are also reliant on countries like Qatar and Algeria. And of course, this is why the decision by OPEC+ to effectively cut production and raise oil prices was such a blow, because we had hoped they would ease energy pressure right now. Instead, they've tightened it. It shows us that energy is still so fundamental to Europeans in a way that it's not for Americans. America is energy independent by and large; Europe is not. And this really changes the way Europe approaches crises. It also creates a horrible tension between the liberal values inherent in the Ukraine war—fighting for a democracy against a state that is increasingly fascist, unfortunately—and the potential need to go cap-in-hand to some pretty unsavory Middle Eastern regimes and others to say, “Would you please bail us out of this energy predicament so that we can keep fighting the fascists?”Mounk: When will Europe actually have decreased its reliance on Russian gas on a more sustainable footing?Joshi: This is a really difficult question, because it touches upon some big European divisions. We see France, for example, where there's a strong emphasis on saying, “Look, this is our opportunity to take advantage of this crisis and move towards net zero. Let's emphasize nuclear power.” And then of course in Germany (although the debate is changing), coalition politics means nuclear power is still something to work around. And in other countries you have politics getting in the way. Now, with the caveat that I'm not an energy person, my understanding is that the Netherlands has Europe's biggest gas field, which is almost dormant and effectively switched off. They could turn that on and immediately transform Europe's energy prospects dramatically. And yet, the coalition politics of the Netherlands doesn't permit that. So, the state that Europe will be in in a few years doesn't just depend on infrastructure choices, such as whether we can plow enough money into Liquefied Natural Gas terminals. It also depends on those big European debates that are playing out within the EU and in other places.But to be absolutely honest, I think some European governments will be hoping that things don't get that far: “Let's hope the war ends, and maybe Putin goes, and we can go back to business as usual by next Christmas, and save our citizens rebelling on us because we haven't given them enough gas to keep their houses warm.”Mounk: I would hope that the European political elite has finally realized that if it wants to be sovereign, it needs to end its reliance on Russian gas in the long term.The second topic I want to address is the hope that Putin might somehow go. It's really hard to predict the downfall of authoritarian regimes, and it certainly is difficult to predict when particular dictators are replaced by potential successors. But how realistic are the prospects of real change in the Russian government, and would it matter? Would it actually change Russia's posture in this war?Joshi: A few months ago, I would have dismissed the idea that Putin is going to fall as being overly optimistic. But I look at it now, and Putin’s support is really looking cagey. He didn't want to mobilize for a reason: a war that he could prosecute while sparing his population and keeping them quiescent is going to become very different once young men are hauled off to be fed into the meat grinder. It is already provoking protests, particularly in poor areas and among ethnic minorities in places like Dagestan. People who were willing to tolerate the conflict because it didn't really affect them are now going to find that the war is touching them in interesting ways. 200,000 Russians have fled to Kazakhstan. 70,000 to Georgia. 66,000 to the European Union, even though Latvia, Estonia and Finland have basically shut their borders. We are witnessing a massive exodus. When we hear the Russians talk about 300,000 reservists, I don't believe that this is going to be a rolling campaign of mobilization—as many as it takes, for as long as it takes—because Putin hopes that European cohesion will crumble. I think that his position is much shakier than we've previously thought. Look at the astonishing attacks on him from people who are effectively Kremlin loyalists. Now, who replaces him? This is a really interesting question, because the people around him are all ex-KGB, and they're in their late 60s. They're all heavily sanctioned. It's not as if there are liberals-in-waiting who can hit the reset button the minute he's off the scene. There may be shock scenarios where he leaves in chaos—it's possible, and we in Europe have to be prepared for it. But I think we’re just as likely to see a kind of post-Khrushchev scenario: being eased out by his cabinet gently, quietly. Or the post-Brezhnev transition: it took several years to get to a Gorbachev-like figure who could really reset relations with the West. The regime has united around this conflict. But that doesn't mean they wanted it. That doesn't mean they were hungry for it. And the upside of an end to the war would be huge. I think Russia's economy is due to contract by about a third next year. And the longer this goes on, the greater the impact of the enormous brain drain that is crippling Russia's economy, the sanctions that mean that it can't get semiconductors and other absolutely vital components, and the reorientation of its energy and economic relationship to the east, to China, in which it's a junior partner. The opportunities for a successor regime to try and stabilize the situation, and to enjoy a kind of ceasefire dividend, would be enormous. But the Europeans are no longer naive. I think that the idea of going back to normal with Russia is over, even for the German government. That's all finished and done. But I worry that in the circumstances of withdrawal, Russians would think, “We've left Ukraine, we've ended the war. Surely we can go back to how things were?” And the Europeans will think, “No, you committed something resembling genocide in parts of Ukraine. Hand over your war criminals, have a reconciliation and truth committee, commit to never doing this again and to rebuilding Ukraine and then maybe we can talk.” That mismatch of expectations between Russia and the West—I think that could be a really toxic relationship, in ways we haven't fully appreciated yet.Mounk: There's one more big question mark in this war, and it's the scariest one: whether Putin or one of his successors might be willing to use nuclear weapons, if Russia's back is up against the wall. How likely do you think it is that nuclear weapons will come into play in this conflict, and what would that look like? Would there be some use of tactical nuclear weapons, which essentially is a sort of symbolic breach of a very important taboo, but doesn't transform the basic dynamics of a war; or are we talking about mass atrocities within Ukraine, similar to when nuclear weapons were used at the tail end of World War II? Are we even talking about a significant chance of a nuclear conflagration between Russia and the United States?Joshi: What we must remember is that this is not the first time a nuclear country has considered using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country. Douglas MacArthur pushed for it in Korea. Richard Nixon considered it in the Vietnam War in order to coerce the Vietnamese to negotiations and defeat. Indeed, the Bush administration even toyed with the idea in case Saddam used biological weapons in 1991. This is not some kind of completely alien circumstance. Putin is absolutely desperate, much more desperate than all of those American leaders were in those campaigns, and his personal survival is staked on this conflict. And while we tend to think of nuclear weapons in the context of Mutually Assured Destruction, a nuclear country versus another nuclear country, this is different because Vladimir Putin and the Russian state is not vulnerable to Ukrainian retaliation. Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons. For all of those reasons, as the Russian lines begin to collapse, and as defeat looks possible, I do worry that nuclear use is a possibility. And I have grown more worried about it as I've seen Vladimir Putin’s speeches, particularly his speech on September 30 when he announced the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces, and redefined them as Russian territory. He implied that he would use all available means (which is a code for nuclear) to defend Russia's territorial integrity—in other words the newly annexed territories. And most ugly and chilling of all, he talked about America setting a “precedent” in 1945 in Hiroshima. That's a weird thing to say, unless you're trying to threaten nuclear use. Now, if it happens, I imagine it would likely be limited or tactical nuclear use—in other words, not a strategic intercontinental ballistic missile aimed at a city, but a small low-yield nuclear weapon, 5-10 kilotons, perhaps targeted on an empty piece of territory (some people have suggested Snake Island in the Black Sea, maybe a Ukrainian military base). It would be designed, not for battlefield advantage, but for psychological shock; to say, “I am willing to break a taboo that has stood since 1945. And that shows you how seriously I take this. And if you don't negotiate, or you Europeans don't stop sending weapons to Ukraine and make the Ukrainians talk to me, who knows what I'll do next, maybe I'll take out a city?” In other words, this will be coercive use. What tempers my gloom is the knowledge that Putin has so much to lose from that, not just the military retaliation that would very likely follow from the US and its allies against his army in Ukraine, but also the end of his relationship with the Indians and the Chinese and the huge economic damage that would result from that. Russia would be an absolute pariah. And for those reasons, I think not only that he would think twice before using nuclear weapons, but I also think the people around him, the people who may have to help authorize or transmit nuclear orders—like Shoigu, the defense minister—would be potential, not guaranteed, but potential brakes on that kind of process. But I absolutely don't think it can be taken for granted. Sending the Russians a signal that they would meet with severe consequences—and more importantly, working with the Indians and the Chinese to make sure that they are sending those signals—is so important right now at this stage of the conflict.Mounk: You've talked about the relatively cohesive support for Ukraine in Western and Central Europe and in North America. I think they’ve done better than many people feared. The negative surprise is the extent to which many countries around the world have sat on the sidelines in what is very clearly a war of choice for Russia. Help us understand how governments feel in countries like Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, or Pakistan? And tell us a little bit about the extent to which they are in tune with their populations? Is it that public opinion around the world is on the side of Russia?Joshi: Sadly, I feel that the ambivalence towards the war—if not outright sympathy for Russia—that one sees in a large segment of the Global South is very much in tune with what ordinary people believe. I will point to several factors here. One of them is just straightforward self interest. The Indian Army depends for its equipment on Russian arms, ammunition and resupply. Without Russian assistance, it would be in real trouble. So if you're India, even if you felt this was an utter abomination (and they don't), you'd hesitate to condemn Russia, because to do so would be to risk having your weapons supply cut off. I don't know the Hungarian polls, but my suspicion is that the population is considerably less pro-Russian than you will see in many other places, or than Viktor Orban’s actions might suggest. But in India, there's also a deep ideological aspect to this. It is a kind of outright sense of sympathy for the Russian narrative, that the arrogant West and NATO has expanded right up to Russia's borders, has provoked it, and has been hubristic since the end of the Cold War. It's anti-American, in part, but it's also anti-Western. And it's something that the Russians capitalize on very well, which is the sense of multipolarity. The Russians ask, “Do you want a world dominated by the Americans and their lackey, imperialist running-dogs in Europe?” That resonates with Indians, for example, who spent the Cold War effectively being lectured by the Americans, and they didn't like it. But the other aspect of it is a little bit more subtle, I think: a sense that the world is changing, and you need to catch up with it; that Europe and America are not the center of the world anymore. A few weeks ago, the Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar had a very interesting comment. He said, “Europe needs to realize that the problems of Europe are not the problems of the world.” And what he meant is: “when China was pressing us (the Indians) on our border with troops and surrounding and provoking us, where were the Europeans? Were they standing up for us? No. Now they have a European country invaded, and they think of this as a kind of global apocalyptic problem for which we all need to drop our various things and rush to their assistance, even if it means energy prices spiking and people going hungry. Well—screw that.” That's the attitude, and I think it's quite powerful. We ignore that at our peril. Mounk: I think it's important to talk about China in this conversation. I've long heard a slightly glib line that the Chinese government “works very well in practice, but not in theory.” Now, in fact, it works only somewhat well in practice, as we've seen, especially in terms of its COVID policies. Since I've asked you all the other impossible questions, let me ask you one more: what's going to happen to China and its role in the world?Joshi: I think a great deal of it depends on what China does in Taiwan. For me, China is a very impatient country. It felt like after the financial crisis, it emerged confident and (then overly confident) towards its neighbors in the South China Sea, in Southeast Asia, and then towards America. And while it would have done very well to continue biding its time, building up its strength (I could reel off military statistics: it has the world's biggest navy: the amount of ships it produces every year outstrips a dozen European countries put together; and it has leading capabilities in air defenses) the fact of the matter is, China isn't ready for preeminence in Asia. And yet, its policy has been to come running out of the gates, bullying its neighbors, provoking a coalition, not just from the US and others, but also from Europeans. Sitting in the UK, but also looking at other European debates, we are saying stuff about China and the Chinese threat that we would never have said three years ago. The pandemic has fundamentally changed our willingness to treat China as a systemic threat. You have the quad—India, Japan, Australia, America—getting together as the informal balancing coalition. China has actually constrained its place in the world by its unseemly haste to come out as a great power and challenge American dominance. If it decides to invade Taiwan—the risk of which has gone up considerably in the past year, I would say, in the indicators we've seen—I think it would be a catastrophic war for the Chinese. It would ruin the global economy, but it would also completely change China's position in Asia. If it shows patience, if it plays its cards right, if it goes slowly and cautiously, it can do much better. It can build up strategic alignments with small countries who want to play it off against America. And we see this, for example, with its inroads in the South Pacific Islands. These countries don't want to be lectured by the Australians or the Americans. I think a great deal depends on whether Xi Jinping is eager to cement his legacy. He's a leader for life, but he's not getting any younger. If he decides that he needs to fulfill his legacy, and that this requires ejecting America from Asia, reunifying (in his view) Taiwan with the Chinese mainland, I think he's going to wreck China's position and bring misery to his people. But if he can be patient, I think that China's position is going to be much, much more difficult to assail, particularly if US democracy becomes inward-looking and wracked by domestic political problems. Running a strategic contest with China would then be exceptionally difficult.Mounk: What can Western governments—and what can listeners to this podcast—be doing to support Ukraine?Joshi: I think the important thing to remember is that in February, and I was guilty of this, we were viewing the Russian army as unstoppable; we thought there was going to be an insurgency, but that the Ukrainians would lose the initial round. I was completely wrong. And every time, the Ukrainians have surprised us. The rot in the Russian army runs very, very deep. Profoundly deep. To me, this is a force that is not fixable in a few months. It is corrupt, it doesn't want to fight, and it treats its soldiers like crap. I think Russia can lose this war. And I think the most important thing is to stay firm in the difficult winter months, knowing that if we get to the spring, and if we keep providing Ukraine with arms—particularly us Europeans, because we absolutely have to step up and not let the Americans do all of the heavy lifting, otherwise we'll get to 2024 and be in real trouble… But if we stay the course, and we stay firm, I think that Russia can lose this campaign. Ukraine can win against all the odds. And that would be one of the greatest military triumphs since the 20th century. It would be absolutely historic, but it can be done. My biggest warning is to avoid fatalism. Don't think the Russians can wait us out, that the Ukrainians can never win. This can happen. As someone who was a skeptic in the summer, I now see real possibilities of Russian defeat.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The final hearing of the House January 6 Committee made clear that a duly elected and sworn president of the United States tried to overthrow the constitutional order. When are we going to act on that knowledge?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
There’s only one group to blame for how Republicans flocked to Trump.
Don’t patronize John Fetterman.
One Ukrainian city in the way of Putin’s new total war
Unnatural DisasterThere are days when the presidency of Donald Trump seems like just another natural disaster that we can allow to recede into history after we count its victims and repair the damage. But earthquakes and volcanoes do not have will and cannot choose to return and destroy again. Trump, however, is like a hurricane pacing just offshore, waiting and plotting to flatten and flood our political system, perhaps for good.And the hell of it is, we Americans know he’s there. We know what he’s done and what he can do (again). Yet millions of us would gladly welcome his landfall again. Millions more of us have thrown up our hands in exasperation as Trump and most of his regiment of Renfields have, for now, managed to escape any consequences for their actions.Yesterday, in what was likely the final hearing of the January 6 committee, the nation was told, once more and without ambiguity, that Donald Trump, the commander in chief, actively sought to subvert our democratic order. My Atlantic colleague David Frum summed up the committee’s findings—and the nation’s reaction—in one tweet: “Decisive [and] irrefutable documentary evidence that the 45th president of the United States tried to overthrow the US Constitution by violence, no big deal, just another news day.”For years, I have been wondering when Americans would draw the line on Trump and his minions. We could rehearse the litany of Trump’s awfulness: his vulgarity, his racism, his callous disregard for veterans, his pathetic submissiveness around Vladimir Putin. We could remind ourselves of the attempt to pressure the Ukrainian government that got him impeached (the first time).None of it seems to matter, because for a large swath of the American public, nothing really matters. And here, I do not mean only the “MAGA Republicans,” loyalists who are already a lost cause. (Trump was tragically prescient when he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they would not abandon him.) Nor do I mean the people who have attached their parasitical careers to their Trumpian host.No, I mean the ordinary Americans who shrug at a violent insurrection and the near-miss of a coup. As the historian Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC last night after the hearing, Trump “probably wanted to declare martial law.” He also pointed out that the insurrection was a close-run thing, noting that if “Trump and those rioters had been a little bit faster, we might be living in a country of unbelievable darkness and cruelty.”But who cares? After all, inflation is too high, and gas is still too expensive, and that’s a bigger problem than the overthrow of the government, isn’t it?The worst of the worst, however, are the people in public life who know better but who refuse to condemn the candidates flying Trump’s banner. Ohio Senator Rob Portman, for example, supports J. D. Vance, a former Trump critic who now slathers himself in the stink of Trumpism like a teenage kid with his first bottle of cheap body spray. Portman is retiring and had nothing to lose—well, nothing except his long-standing reputation as a decent man—but he declared his support anyway. Apparently, with a Senate seat in play, Portman thought it gauche to be too judgmental about Vance emulating Trump, the president who put his own vice president in mortal danger.In a country that still had a functional moral compass, citizens would watch the January 6 hearings, band together regardless of party or region, and refuse to vote for anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump, whom the committee has proved, I think, to be an enemy of the Constitution of the United States. His party, as an institution, supports him virtually unconditionally, and several GOP candidates around the country have already vowed to join Trump in his continuing attack on our democracy. To vote for any of these people is to vote against our constitutional order.It’s that simple.Many GOP supporters, particularly in the conservative-media ecosystem, would reject all of this as guilt by association—as if somehow, a candidate who embraces Trump may be excused for supporting lawlessness and sedition. This is how, for example, The Wall Street Journal justified endorsing Kari Lake in Arizona. Lake is one of the most extreme election deniers and Trump sycophants in the GOP, but the Journal thinks she’d be great on the issue of school choice, as though the funding of education would be the big issue if Lake conspires with other Trump cultists across the United States to deliver the final blow to the notion of the peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.In the confusion of the moment back in January 2021, it was easier to believe that perhaps the mob was spontaneous, that elected Republicans were sincere in reviling Trump for his part in creating it, and that the GOP might come to its senses, at least where Trump is concerned. Today, thanks to the January 6 committee and the evidence it has amassed, we know better. To vote for anyone still loyal to a party led by the narcissistic sociopath who put our elected officials and our political system itself in peril is to abandon any pretense of caring whether the United States remains a constitutional democracy. The question is whether enough of us will care, in little more than three weeks from now, to make a difference.Related:
The January 6 hearings changed my mind.
Americans deserve to hear from Trump.
U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss reversed a tax plan that has caused turmoil in the global financial markets.
Putin announced that his mobilization of army reservists to Ukraine will be complete in about two weeks. The call-up of troops has been highly unpopular among Russian citizens.
Five people, including one police officer, are dead after a mass shooting in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The Third Rail: David French weighs in on the Alex Jones verdict, concluding that the “fabrication-industrial complex” is on thin legal ice.
Wait, What?: If one of two major political parties no longer believes in free and fair elections, Molly Jong-Fast writes, how can democracy still function?
Books Briefing: Maya Chung on one of the bravest things a book can do.
(David Sewell / Alamy)
Pregnancy Is a War; Birth Is a Cease-Fire  By Katherine J. WuEvolutionarily speaking, every human is a bit of a preemie. The nine months most babies spend in the womb are enough for them to be born with open eyes, functional ears, and a few useful reflexes—but not the ability to stand, sprint, climb, or grasp onto their parents’ limbs. Compared with other primates, our offspring are wobbly and inept; they’d probably get their butts kicked by infant lemurs, gorillas, and even tiny tarsiers, which all come out more fully formed. Think of it this way: Researchers have estimated that, for a newborn human to be birthed with a brain as well developed as that of a newborn chimp, they would have to gestate for at least an extra seven months—at which point they might run 27 inches from head to toe, and weigh a good 17 or 18 pounds, more than the heftiest bowling ball on the rack.More From The Atlantic
The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation.
Photos of the week: a space fingerprint, blooming jacaranda trees, and more
(The Atlantic / Getty)
Read. You can tear through any of these short novels in a weekend.And if you’re looking for some even shorter fiction, try “Acting Class,” a story by Nick Drnaso.Watch. Decision to Leave, in theaters now, is this century’s first great erotic thriller.Or stay home with one of these 25 horror movies for every kind of viewer (ranked by scariness).And there’s always the option to stream Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Disney+), one of the silliest movies Angela Lansbury ever appeared in.Listen. The latest episode of our podcast How to Build a Happy Life explores the gap between what we crave and what’s really good for us.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I still get a Sunday paper. I know I can read it in bits and pieces on the internet, but there’s something about Sundays that just makes me want to spread newsprint all over the place. Maybe it’s nostalgia; as a child, of course, I snatched up the funnies, and I am one of the cranky older people who today laments the shrinkage in size and length of the comics (which I still read first even now). In college and graduate school, the Sunday paper came along to brunch, for a group of friends to share and discuss.But I also come back to my phone or desktop for some weekend reads, and you should too, starting this Sunday, October 16, when we launch The Atlantic’s new culture-focused weekend edition of the Daily. Every Sunday, our writers will provide answers to interesting questions about many areas of culture. This week, the debut installment includes recommendations on what to read, watch, and listen to from the Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, a 2022 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. In response to “What was the last thing that made you snort with laughter?,” she answers, “This is going to make me seem unbearably basic, but I believe it was a facial expression Kelly Bishop made on Gilmore Girls when Lorelai did something irritating.”— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In the 480 B.C. Battle of Himera, Greek forces defeated the invading Carthaginians in a victory that ushered in a period of peace and prosperity across their world. But while historians such as Herodotus hailed the victory as a triumph of Greek heroism and fortitude, studies of recently discovered mass graves have revealed that the combatants included substantial numbers of non-Greek fighters. A new study found that the men who died violently likely hailed from as far away as the Baltic region and the Eurasian steppe, giving insights into the nature of these wars and movements of people over extraordinarily long distances in the Classical world.
The new paper, “The diverse genetic origins of a Classical period Greek army,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a genomic look at those foreign fighters. A previous study used isotopes to identify three-quarters of those in the mass graves as “non-local.” Now, the archaeologists from that study — including Professor of Genetics and Human Evolutionary Biology David Reich, co-first authors Laurie Rietsema (University of Georgia) and Britney Kyle (University of Northern Colorado), were able to carry out an in-depth dive into genome-wide data from 16 individuals from these mass graves (as well as 38 other ancient people from Sicily). Their analysis revealed that individuals from the mass graves, assumed to be largely mercenaries, hailed from places as far-flung as Ukraine, the Baltic region (modern-day Latvia), and Thrace (modern-day Bulgaria), said Reich.
Going into the study, “We already had an idea that people from lots of regions must have participated in this battle, but there was no clue yet as to where they came from,” said Alissa Mittnik, the postdoc in Reich’s lab who led the genetic analysis and another co-first author.

“Such data is similar in quality data to what one gets from sending your DNA to a personal ancestry testing company.”
— David Reich, professor of genetics and human evolutionary biology

History was no help. “Much was written about this event from the historical records, but all historical information has biases,” said Reich. Documenting the apparent heroism of the Greeks at this battle, as well as at battles with invading Persians around the same time at Salamis and Thermopylae, the other end of the Greek world, “was important to Greek identity in this period.”
One aspect of these accounts has been the makeup of the armies. “While it is known that in this period in time mercenaries were widely used, Greek historians didn’t mention the participation of mercenaries at Himera,” said Mittnik. “They would have been people that would have been considered by the Greeks as foreign barbarians.”
Using DNA mined from bones and teeth, the team provides surprising information about the origins of these non-Greek fighters. “We have data from tens of thousands, and sometimes even more than a million positions in the genome,” explained Reich. “Such data is similar in quality data to what one gets from sending your DNA to a personal ancestry testing company.” The data allowed the team to compare the ancestry of the people from ancient Sicily with the ancestry of others with “exquisite accuracy,” said Reich.
“Combining the genetic and the isotopic results tells us about the genetic ancestry of people and gives powerful clues about where they grew up.” For example, he said, “Two individuals have ancestry typical of the Baltic region at the time, two have ancestry typical of the Northern Balkans, and two have ancestry typical of the steppes north of the Black Sea.”
These findings shed light on patterns of movement through the ancient world. “This provides direct evidence of people traveling long distances in their lifetime and shows that a motivation for such travel would have been not just trade but participation in warfare,” said Mittnik.
“War,” added Reich, “seems to have drawn people from particularly far-flung places.”
For Mittnik, who has started her own research group in Germany, this work fits well within a larger program. “I’m interested in using ancient DNA to gain insight into the dynamics of communities,” she said.” “I also work on reconstructing family trees and studying patterns in these pedigrees to learn what they can show about social organization.”
Reich said the possibilities are global. “Genetic data complement isotopic and archaeological data, and by combining them, we obtain a richer and more nuanced understanding of the past.”

At a time when U.S. neighborhoods are segregated by politics and different news sources shape views of different issues, many Americans are tempted to dismiss others as ideological lost causes who aren’t worth engaging in political discourse.
Wrong, says Anand Giridharadas. In his new book, “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy,” the Harvard Radcliffe Fellow argues that debate is a bedrock principle of democracy that we cannot afford to abandon in the face of anti-democratic threats.
Giridharadas spoke to the Gazette about the book and what he’ll be working on during his time at Radcliffe. He will speak with Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor and now co-director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School, on Wednesday at the Brattle Theatre. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Anand Giridharadas
GAZETTE:  Why is persuasion such an essential part of democracy?
GIRIDHARADAS: For most of human history, the dominant idea of how to make decisions about the future was that kings and queens and emperors and tyrants should do it. It was too hard, too complicated, too messy to let all of us make the future through debate and conversation and choice. In the last few hundred years, there was a radical turn where it became the dominant view that it is best when we make the future — people make the future — through debate and discussion and argument and then, acts of choosing. And that these decisions are better made, and certainly more legitimately made, when everybody gets a say in them.
Right now we are at a moment when we are backsliding from that democratic consensus. We see a fascist threat rising on the right. The political right in the United States is essentially now a fascist movement: There’s a belief in overturning elections, discounting the will of the people that way; there is a belief in political violence as a legitimate tool of achieving your ends. But also, more subtly throughout the culture, rather than on just any one side, there is a kind of great write-off, where people generally assume that people who disagree with them or are on other sides of various divides are irredeemable, are monolithically committed to those views, and never going to change. We have come to a crisis of persuasion that is, in many ways, a crisis of liberal democracy. If we as society lose faith in the idea that we can change things by changing minds, that we can make the future by arguing and haggling and having it out with each other through words and votes, then we’re essentially asking for civil war, we’re asking for tyranny, we are asking for these decisions to be made for us.
I became very alarmed by what seemed to me was the rise of a kind of anti-persuasive culture — this idea that we will never be able to change those who disagree with us — and decided to spend time with a bunch of people who have refused the great write-off, organizers and activists and people in politics who are still committed believers in persuasion and changing things by changing minds.

“The fundamental incentive of social media is toward the inflammatory rather than any kind of bridge-building or empathetic response.”

GAZETTE: What’s driving our willingness to write each other off so quickly?
GIRIDHARADAS: Social media is a very big part of the story. The fundamental incentive of social media is toward the inflammatory rather than any kind of bridge-building or empathetic response. It’s inspired many of us, myself included, to rely on shame and peer pressure as political modes in ways that have no basis in evidence as being effective. It also has to do with billionaire-owned media that, in a different way, has profited from division.
There’s also the fact that a politics of civility and comity and having faith in the other side has not really delivered much if you’re under 40. There’s a reason you see Gen Z and millennials turning away from those political values. I think there is also a sense that there are very wealthy and powerful people, which is what I wrote about in my previous book, who are hell-bent on grabbing more and more wealth and power who have done so incredibly effectively. Appealing to kindness is simply not adequate to the kinds of depredations of that group. So, for a lot of reasons, you have a more strident political culture, a more confrontational political culture.
GAZETTE: Which strategies and techniques of persuasion are most effective at cutting through the noise?
GIRIDHARADAS: One of the most interesting myths is that persuasion has grown impossible. It is certainly true that political persuasion is harder in an age of polarization. The number of people who flip back and forth, certainly between the parties, is lower than at other moments in history. However, on issue after issue, there is well-documented evidence that a significant number of people, enough to make an enormous difference in the shape of your life and my life, are changing their minds all the time about all kinds of things. Donald Trump won the first time and lost the second time. You can say “Everyone who voted for him is this” or “Everyone who voted for him was that.” I said as much of that stuff as anybody. But it is a fact that some people liked him the first time, didn’t like him the second time. What a lot of organizers are showing is that there is still room to move significant numbers of people — maybe not half the population, but 5, 10, 20, 30 percent of people — on certain issues.
Here’s some of what I learned that the pro-democracy movement needs to pick up and embrace. One is meeting people where they are. Having more space in movements for people who don’t fully get it, who don’t use the right terms, but their hearts are in the right place. Who, frankly, are suspicious or nervous about some of the ideas they hear from portions of the pro-democracy side, but who like overt racism and white nationalism even less. We’re often more interested as a movement in policing their entry, rather than saying, “Come on in.”
Secondly, I think the pro-democracy side needs to be more conflict-prone, more willing to pick fights. The idea of going high when they go low has been a disaster. What you see in folks like [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom and others is the hunger a lot of Democrats have to see candidates who are able to pick fights and name villains when there are villains. It’s OK to be a little angry and mix it up a little bit for the sake of making people’s lives better.
GAZETTE: Both Democrats and Republicans are telling prospective voters that democracy is on the ballot in November because of the actions of the other party. Is that accurate? How do you see the midterms shaping up?
GIRIDHARADAS: Just because both sides are telling you the other side is going to end democracy doesn’t mean both sides are going to end democracy. There may be people who are excited, committed fascists in the leadership of the Republican Party and others who are just ’fraidy cats. But it doesn’t really matter if no one is advocating for the view that elections are things that cannot be overturned and political violence is something that plays no part in politics.
And so, the burden for the left, and for the pro-democracy side right now, is immense. It is running to sustain the idea of democratic life — of liberal democracy itself. And my concern at the heart of this book is that it is not up to the task as it now stands. It has the right ideas; it has many of the right policies; it has its heart in the right place. But there is a moral complacency. No matter how righteous you think you are, no matter how much you may be on the right side of history, it is not enough to be right about the future — you have to sell it, especially to those who are skeptical. And what I see is a pro-democracy movement that is not even turning on many of the key engines of persuading people. They’re not even really competing.
GAZETTE: What will you be working on at Radcliffe this year?
GIRIDHARADAS: All my books are based on my own reporting. It’s exciting to have that first-person connection to subject matter, but it also limits the range of what you can cover. So, I am attempting something very different. It’s the seed of a book, but who knows? Maybe an art project, it may be a documentary. I don’t know the final form it should take. But it’s an attempt to take a more complex, variegated biopsy of the American body politic in this moment of confusion and fracture and pain and aspiration.
Part of the angry, confrontational, polarized culture we have gotten into is that it makes us forget the complexity of people. It causes us to think of other people as facilely being one thing, having one story. But it’s almost never true and it diminishes our political possibilities when we start to assume that there’s only one story about people. I’m trying to do a project that showcases how complicated people are, different Americans who, in a conventional way, would seem to be on different sides of an issue, but in fact may have more common than we’d think.

By Shadi Hamid, Daniel S. Hamilton, Ryan Hass, Bruce Jones, Patricia M. Kim, Suzanne Maloney, Amy J. Nelson, Michael E. O'Hanlon, Natan Sachs, Bruce Riedel, Melanie W. Sisson, Mireya Solís, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Andrew YeoOn October 12, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration released the 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS). Brookings experts reflect on the document and what it reveals about the United States’ security trajectory.

Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid)
Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy
It is little surprise that the NSS has a lot to say about democracy in theory as well as practice. The long struggle between democracies and autocracies, as systems of government, has become the distinctive mark of Biden’s foreign policy.
In the past, I have been critical of the administration’s tendency to instrumentalize democracy by suggesting that its strength and value hinges on its ability to produce “good” outcomes. As I argue in “The Problem of Democracy“, this way of thinking about the democratic idea can easily lead to incoherence. Policymakers have little choice but to be incoherent, some of the time; the world is complicated. Still, identifying these tensions is worthwhile, in anticipation of when they might cause problems for U.S. foreign policy. In this case, they almost certainly will, because they already have.
The NSS says, for example, that “many non-democracies join the world’s democracies in foreswearing these behaviors.” The behaviors in question include “waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries [and] leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion.” The strategy singles out Russia and China as countries that do not forswear such behaviors. But the reason they don’t is related to the fact that they are non-democracies. Either regime type is relevant, or it’s not.
The incoherence is most striking in the Middle East section, which calls for “a more integrated Middle East that empowers our allies and partners will advance regional peace and prosperity, while reducing the resource demands the region makes on the United States over the long term.” Our Arab allies and partners are among the world’s most repressive regimes, so how might empowering them fit into Biden’s insight into the relevance of regime type? To put a finer point on it, the NSS’s discussion of the Middle East seems to contradict — or, at best, lie in direct tension — with much of the rest of the document.
One might take issue with my assessment and highlight Arab non-democracies as the good ones that forswear the aggressive behaviors listed above. But even this wouldn’t be accurate. Two of our closest allies in the region — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — wage wars of aggression (Yemen), actively undermine democratic processes in other countries (Tunisia, Egypt), and leverage technology or supply chains for coercion. Again, the reasons are instructive. It is in the nature of authoritarian regimes, when they are regionally dominant, to undermine democratic processes elsewhere in the region. The mere existence of democratic counter-models offers up a constant reminder that another way is possible. And, for such regimes, another way is not possible.
These days, the Middle East is easily dismissed as a distraction. But, as far as regions go, it remains a laboratory for the contradictions at the heart of American policy. To the extent that a “democracy-first” strategy is an organizing principle in the confrontation with China and Russia, U.S. administrations will — sooner or later — have little choice but to reckon with the realities of the world’s most undemocratic region. If organizing principles are only relevant when they are convenient or serve a particular purpose, then they’re not exactly organizing principles.
Daniel S. Hamilton (@DanSHamilton)
Nonresident Senior Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe
The NSS clearly articulates U.S. values and interests in a new age of disruption, and offers a compelling strategy for protecting and advancing them. It addresses China’s challenges and Russia’s threats without conflating them, as previous strategies have done. It frames these state-centric tests within a context of growing transnational challenges that the United States will be unable to address alone. It is a sober yet confident strategy that builds on the ingenuity and resilience of the American people, the unique strengths of our oft-maligned democracy, and the capacities offered by our vast and unparalleled networks of alliances and partnerships, reinforced by agile diplomacy and a strong military.
The strategy underscores how U.S. interests are threatened by those who weaponize the interdependencies that were created during the now-bygone post-Cold War era. The United States and our like-minded allies and partners have long been accustomed to protecting our territories. We must now be equally focused on protecting our connectedness – the values that bind us and the critical flows of goods, services, energy, people, and technology that underpin our security and well-being. This is not a strategy of decoupling; it is a strategy to redefine the terms of our interdependence in a competitive and dangerous world. In this new age of disruption, our national security rests on our resilience – as a society, as a partner and ally, and as a global power.
Ryan Hass (@ryanl_hass)
Senior Fellow, Center for East Asia Policy Studies and John L. Thornton China Center
Whereas the 2017 National Security Strategy treated China and Russia as an interchangeable threat to America’s security and prosperity, this strategy draws distinctions between them. This NSS clarifies that Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “pose different challenges” that demand differentiated responses. The NSS explains that the United States “will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia.”
This shift in how the United States views China and Russia is subtle but significant. It suggests the United States has opted against embracing fatalistic conclusions that nothing can be done to affect the China-Russia relationship and that the United States must simply gird for ideologically infused bloc confrontation. The Biden administration was wise to reject such oversimplified analysis. There is no profit for the United States to treat China and Russia as interchangeable foes. If it did so, Washington would find few followers.
To be sure, the United States’ relationship with both countries will remain confrontational for the foreseeable future. The China-Russia relationship is animated by shared antagonism against the United States. There is virtually no chance the United States will drive a wedge between China and Russia, as it did during the Cold War.
At the same time, painting China and Russia with black and white brushes obscures that those countries do not have perfectly aligned interests. Russia is more of an arsonist of the existing international order, whereas China seeks to be an architect of a revised order. China and Russia have different perspectives on Central Asia and the Arctic. Since China is still rising while Russia is not, Beijing has more to lose and hold at risk than Moscow. Recognizing such distinctions is a critical step toward crafting approaches to act upon them.
Bruce Jones (@BruceBrookings)
Senior Fellow and Director, Project on International Order and Strategy
The new NSS puts to rest the least edifying debate in Washington: Should geopolitics or transnational threats primarily pre-occupy U.S. foreign policy? The obvious answer, decisively rendered here, is both. There’s no escaping the reality of great power contestation, and the strategy embraces it. But there’s also no escaping the fact that American lives have been profoundly shaken by transnational challenges. The NSS kicks off a needed debate, too, about how to sustain some type of cooperation against shared challenges while contesting vigorously in the strategic domain. But as Chrystia Freeland reminded us in her barn raiser of a speech on October 11, in the Cold War we know how to both contain and engage; time to re-learn that lesson.
The NSS also takes U.S. strategy to a better place in diplomacy, putting the president’s emphasis on the democracy/autocracy divide in a wider context. The text — and even more so, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in his launch speech — makes clear that the United States will work with any state, of whatever regime type, that is willing to work within the framework of the key treaties of the order, especially the U.N. Charter, including China when that is in our interests. Engaging in that way will put us in a stronger position when push comes to shove — as it likely will, in one form or another — and we need to rally support to push back, when China or Russia or others engage in more pernicious behavior.
Patricia M. Kim (@patricia_m_kim)
David M. Rubenstein Fellow, John L. Thornton China Center and Center for East Asia Policy Studies
The 2022 NSS reinforces key themes that have been consistently emphasized throughout the Biden administration — strengthening the United States at home, aligning with like-minded partners, and competing responsibly with China to advance U.S. interests and its vision of a “free, open, secure and prosperous world.” It wisely makes the case the United States must pursue a “dual-track approach” that involves working with both like-minded allies and partners, as well as geopolitical rivals, to address the many global challenges, from climate change to food insecurity, that pose an existential threat to all.
Laudably, the NSS directly confronts the sheer challenge of advancing cooperation among great powers on transnational threats in an era of heightened geopolitical competition. While making clear that the United States rejects China’s attempts to link cooperation on shared challenges to concessions in other areas, the document does not offer any answers on how, then, Washington will actively spur Beijing’s constructive contributions and unlock a “race to the top,” as the NSS puts it.
To be fair, these are extremely difficult questions to answer, and the document sets low, if realistic, expectations for the bilateral relationship with China. The NSS concludes that the United States government will “continually assess and reassess our approach” in the implementation of the strategy, which is a welcome statement as it will be critical to grasp for more imaginative roadmaps, be it with rivals or less like-minded counterparts, to secure the foundations for a more stable and prosperous future in this “decisive decade.”
SUZANNE MALONEY (@MaloneySuzanne)
Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy
The long-awaited public release of the NSS contained no real surprises, arriving as it did well after the scaffolding of the administration’s approach to the world had been made tangible over the course of the first half of Biden’s term in office. With an emphasis on the essential synergies between America’s strength at home and on the world stage, the NSS showcases the administration’s industrious track record of initiatives to make progress on both fronts. And it offers a compelling narrative that seeks to reaffirm the president’s stirring rhetoric around the contest between democracy and authoritarianism as the foremost challenge of our times without handcuffing the U.S. policy with intractable Manichaeism or instigating a new Cold War.
However, as with any articulation of strategy, the document inevitably elides the messy tradeoffs inherent in advancing core U.S. interests. As has already been evident, Biden’s stirring rhetoric faces real world complications in its implementation – how to balance the urgent (Russia) with the essential (China); how to build multilateral coalitions that are both “inclusive” and effective; how to counter Beijing’s military and economic aggression while preserving capacity for cooperation around the global commons, especially the climate crisis; and how to strengthen democracy at home and abroad even as the forces threatening these values are amplifying.
This is one of several reasons why the document’s short shrift on the Middle East, while understandable, seems particularly unfortunate. If there is one region where the best of intentions and an enormous investment of strategic energy and resources has come up short in advancing our values or durably securing our stated interests, it is there – in large part due to our disregard of the yawning chasm between our rhetoric and the reality. The NSS is right to decisively draw an end to the 9/11 era, but a reckoning with our own track record will be essential to prevailing in addressing the even more daunting challenges of strategic competition.
Amy J. Nelson (@amyjnelsonphd)
David M. Rubenstein Fellow, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
The NSS reflects an approach to national security that is increasingly inclusive of non-defense factors. It also really amplifies the role of technology in national security, and is particularly notable for its integration of foreign policy with technology policy. The result is an approach that is consistent with the notion that foreign policy and tech policy are increasingly one and the same.
On emerging tech, the NSS calls out its transformational effect on warfare, and the need to invest in technologies for cyber, space, missile defense, AI, and quantum. Importantly, it notes that security requires new tech to be delivered quickly — an age-old struggle for the Department of Defense. Historically, innovating tech and protecting have lived in separate spheres. Because they actually go hand-in-hand, it was good to also see the intent to continue to evolve the U.S. approach to strategic trade controls to protect sensitive technologies and maintain technological superiority and advantage.
The NSS also discusses the role of allies and partners in implementing the strategy at length, leaning heavily on collective action through multilateral partnerships. It notes, for example, the “connective tissue — on technology, trade and security — between our democratic allies and partners” and the “allied techno-industrial base.” This amounts to perhaps a renewal of ties that had frayed under the previous administration, a doubling down on the proliferation of “minilaterals” as strategy, and, critically, the acknowledgement that national security requires technology cooperation among allies.
Also striking is the repeated mention of the word “competition” (44 times) — as if the post-Cold War era is being replaced by one predominantly characterized by a pervasive and unavoidable competition: “We will use impulses released by an era of competition to create a race to the top and make progress on shared challenges.” In this way, competition is described as an unavoidable force that will continue to drive behaviors and shape outcomes. Competition is linked to pervasive technology and its innovation: “Competition to develop and deploy foundational technologies that will transform our security and economy is intensifying.” And competition is again discussed in the context of allies: even among allies, we will experience competition. In this way, the NSS seems to note the implicit tension between the need to work together with allies and partners, pooling “technical expertise and complementary industrial capacity,” while in an era of competition. And this will be a major challenge for decades to come.
Michael E. O’Hanlon (@MichaelEOHanlon)
Senior Fellow and Director, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
Given that I have recently written a fairly positive assessment of the administration’s achievements to date, I will content myself in this short blog with several specific critiques of what is otherwise a solid (if acronym-laden) document. Specifically:

The elevation of China as our top national security concern seems incongruous with the reality that Russia is waging a hot war and making nuclear threats on the other side of the planet. Although the language used to describe China is carefully chosen, and muted — it is a “pacing challenge,” or our “most consequential strategic competitor” according to the NSS — one cannot help but walk away with the sense the administration views China as public enemy number one. To me this is wrongheaded. China wants to bend the existing global order in a direction it desires, but unlike Russia it does not generally seek to break it, and the distinction is important.
The specific accusation that China is committing genocide against the Uighurs of Xinjiang province is also a mistake. I don’t care what the State Department lawyers say: What China is doing there is plenty bad, but it is not genocide. That loaded and inflammatory term has a powerful historic meaning and whatever the PRC’s other flaws, it is not currently guilty of genocide. We need to stay cool in handling this relationship and avoid pushing Beijing closer to Moscow unnecessarily.
Sullivan emphasized in his discussion at Georgetown University on October 12 that we mean no ill will against the Chinese people; our beef is with the PRC government. That is a reasonable point, but it implies that the Chinese people do not share their government’s views on key issues. In fact, however, the Chinese people are themselves nationalistic, and they are themselves insistent that Taiwan is part of China, so it would be wrong to view the current government in Beijing as somehow an outlier on many of the key issues that create discord in the U.S.-China relationship.
North Korea policy remains too purist. We are not going to negotiate complete nuclear disarmament with Pyongyang anytime soon; we need a more serious and incremental strategy that seeks to verifiably dismantle North Korea’s nuclear production capacity and ban future nuclear as well as intercontinental ballistic missile tests in exchange for a partial lifting of sanctions and caps on the size of U.S.-South Korean military exercises. To stay on the current course is simply making the problem worse (as Pyongyang keeps building and testing weapons) and risking another major crisis (we can closer to war in 2017, as well as 1994, than many realize).
Latin America remains close to an afterthought at a time when the opioid crisis is killing 100,000 Americans a year, largely due to drugs coming over the southern border, and when immigration and crime and border issues remain hugely divisive in American politics. The administration needs a big idea akin to a Marshall Plan (or, at a minimum, something on the scale of former U.S. President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR initiative on AIDS) for Central America and Mexico.

Natan Sachs (@natansachs)
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Middle East Policy
The NSS is an ambitious and impressive articulation of a new era of American foreign policy. The Middle East is an uneasy fit: It was the central theater of the past, not the present, and it strains the democracy-themed world order Biden envisions. The NSS thus tries to thread a needle: “The most pressing strategic challenge…” is not from autocracies, per se, but “from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” This leaves the door open to partnerships with autocracies if they “subscribe to the rules-based international order.”
The NSS articulates “a new framework” for Middle East policy. It emphasizes freedom of maritime navigation (implying energy supplies), coalition building and diplomacy (an attempted return to the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). It stresses military deterrence — primarily against Iran — but eschews the military-based approaches of the past (read: Bush 43). It embraces regional integration (invoking the Trump-era Abraham Accords and further efforts under Biden, including the India-Israel-UAE-U.S. quad, aka “I2-U2”, that is still in search of substance). It breaks clearly with former U.S. President Donald Trump in a rhetorical commitment to “promote human rights” and in calling for an Israeli-Palestinian two-state solution “along the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps,” a far cry from the Trump plan.
The new framework for Middle East policy is thus appropriately modest: “It is time to eschew grand designs in favor of more practical steps”. As a secondary theater, the Middle East is now meant to fit into a broader global agenda, rather than dominate it.
BRUCE RIEDEL
Senior Fellow, Center for Middle East Policy and Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, and Director, The Intelligence Project
Biden’s new national security strategy faces an immediate and urgent challenge in the Middle East. America’s oldest ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, has opted to support Russia in its invasion of Ukraine by dramatically cutting oil production to raise prices which benefits Moscow. Since the president unwisely journeyed in July to Jidda to embrace Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, the Saudis have also dramatically stepped up repression of domestic critics, especially women.
So Saudi Arabia fragrantly violates the human rights provision of the new strategy and partners with Russia against NATO. MBS’s closest Arab partner, President and Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates Muhammed bin Zayd, has just traveled to Moscow to support Russian President Vladimir Putin in person. The Saudis and Emiratis have backed the loser in the war enthusiastically.
So the administration has to show it intends to live up to its promise to support human rights and democratic states against autocratic regimes. It should immediately suspend military cooperation with the kingdom and halt provision of spare parts to the Saudi military. It should rally our NATO allies including Britain and France to do the same. American military forces in the kingdom should be redeployed to Qatar.
The Saudis are led today by a reckless and dangerous prince whom the president rightly said two years ago should be treated as a global pariah. The new strategy is being challenged by that prince, and the administration needs to fight back.
Melanie W. Sisson (@MWSBrookingsFP)
Fellow, Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology
Reading the Biden-Harris administration’s 2022 NSS calls to mind the advice famously dispensed by Coco Chanel: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” In this case, it’s the many criticisms of China – which range from oblique references to unnamed autocracies that “abuse the global economic order” to specific opprobrium of China’s “unwillingness to cooperate” with the international response to COVID-19 and “genocide…in Xinjiang” – that distract the eye from the strategy’s considerable strengths. These inclusions interrupt the overall message, which is that the administration (rightly) is focused on what the United States needs to do at home – invest in the enablers of human security, talent, and productivity – to be able to do what it wants abroad: create conditions that are conducive to the global movement of people, ideas, investments, and goods, and that disincentivize governments from using violence to pursue their national interests.
So too does delivering these demerits in the administration’s marquee document provide Beijing yet more fodder with which to reinforce its narrative that the United States unfairly, and zealously, seeks to contain, constrain, and suppress China. While the administration’s intent may be to draw an explanatory and compelling contrast between the two nations’ visions for international relations, the effect is an unhelpful dilution of its affirmative, pragmatic message and an avoidable addition to China’s negative one.
Mireya Solís (@solis_msolis)
Senior Fellow and Director, Center for East Asia Policy Studies
The NSS is rightly focused on the need to shape the rules of the road on trade and technology, and recognizes that the U.S. must work with allies and partners to achieve these objectives. It is wise in calling for robust competition with China while leaving room for cooperation on transnational issues. But pairing this strategy document with recent developments on economic diplomacy and export controls underscores some inconsistencies, a potential mismatch between goals and policy tools, and a strong vein of unilateralism that will irk some of our “like-minded” partners.
The NSS seems to be of two minds when it comes to the benefits of globalization, touting the increased prosperity it has delivered at home and abroad, while also blaming it for the harms caused to American workers and the environment. It asserts the need to leave behind traditional trade agreements (which have been anchored on trade liberalization) while showing no awareness that our partners and competitors in the Indo-Pacific continue to see free trade agreements as powerful tools to promote trade and codify new economic rules.
Time will tell whether the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework can deliver on the rulemaking ambitions of the Biden administration, but color me skeptical that it will secure ambitious and enforceable labor and environmental commitments from our counterparts in the absence of market access benefits.
A few days before the release of the NSS, the Biden team dramatically redefined technology competition with China. The strictest export controls to date will curtail China’s access to advanced chips in supercomputing and AI. Notably, they are unilateral measures to be applied extraterritorially. Many of our Asian partners have embraced economic security to protect against technology leaks, eliminate infrastructure vulnerabilities, and boost supply chain resilience. But they may balk at the implications of following up with export controls geared at stalling China’s technological development.
CONSTANZE STELZENMÜLLER (@ConStelz)
Senior Fellow and Director, Center on the United States and Europe and Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and trans-Atlantic Relations
For Europeans, there is much to like, to respect, and to work with in the Biden administration’s sober and nuanced new national security strategy. Despite endorsing the strategic competition framing of its 2018 predecessor document, it emphasizes the need for cooperation — even with autocrats and adversaries — on global challenges and public goods. It is reassuringly tough on Russia. Even more remarkably, it is both clear-eyed about China’s intent to reshape global order to its liking, and moderate in offering to work together with Beijing on issues of common concern. It acknowledges the importance of democratic allies as essential leverage for American strategic purposes; but it rejects messianic advocacy of democratic transformation and promises repeatedly to work with non-aligned countries that do not share the West’s vision. Despite the United States’ unquestioned leadership in the conflict with the Kremlin, it highlights Europe’s contribution “at the front lines” of the fight to defend Ukraine; and it calls the European Union an “indispensable partner.”
Critics of America — especially in Germany — might note the document’s explicit rejection of some of their favorite strawmen (decoupling from China, bloc-building, a new Cold War). But above all, Europeans should take to heart its strong tone of urgency (“we are in the early years of a decisive decade for America and the world”). The midterm elections may well reinforce that note.
Andrew Yeo (@AndrewIYeo)
Senior Fellow, Center for East Asia Policy Studies and SK-Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies
The NSS is bold and ambitious in its aim to protect a “free, open, prosperous, and secure world.”  But can the United States sustain international order if it remains preoccupied with “out-competing” China?
Competition emerges as a dominant theme throughout the 2022 NSS. Terms such as competition(s), competitor(s), and compete(s) appear no less than 25, 21, and 15 times, respectively. In contrast, cooperation, cooperate, and collaboration/collaborate appear 19, five, and five times, respectively. Including “partnership(s)” adds an additional 18 words.
The Biden administration clearly believes the United States must gear up for serious competition with adversaries in the next decade. The NSS fact sheet also acknowledges the a priori nature of competition, declaring, “We cannot compete successfully to shape the international order unless we have an affirmative plan to tackle shared challenges, and we cannot do that unless we recognize how heightened competition affects cooperation and act accordingly.”
The United States should take a strong stand against actors wishing to undermine a free and open order. However, there is a danger in overselling competition against China. It may unnecessarily create blind spots for opportunities of engagement with China and other adversaries. It can also spook potential partners who may choose to stay on the sidelines rather than become embroiled in zero-sum competition. Finally, it may ultimately harden the lines of a growing bifurcated global order and undermine the inclusive form of governance that is needed to address future problems confronting all of humanity: climate change, pandemics, and nuclear non-proliferation.

Evolutionarily speaking, every human is a bit of a preemie. The nine months most babies spend in the womb are enough for them to be born with open eyes, functional ears, and a few useful reflexes—but not the ability to stand, sprint, climb, or grasp onto their parents’ limbs. Compared with other primates, our offspring are wobbly and inept; they’d probably get their butts kicked by infant lemurs, gorillas, and even tiny tarsiers, which all come out more fully formed. Think of it this way: Researchers have estimated that, for a newborn human to be birthed with a brain as well developed as that of a newborn chimp, they would have to gestate for at least an extra seven months—at which point they might run 27 inches from head to toe, and weigh a good 17 or 18 pounds, more than the heftiest bowling ball on the rack.The technical jargon that scientists use for underdone newborns like ours is altricial, though when experts are on the phone with journalists, they’re sometimes more apt to toss around words like useless or pathetic. “It’s almost embarrassing how helpless we are, when we compare ourselves to the wild world,” says Jared Stabach, a research ecologist at the Smithsonian. “It makes me wonder how we got to 7 to 8 billion people on this planet.”Among animals, humans aren’t alone in emerging in such a state. Most songbirds are altricial, hatching in large clutches of chicks that come out pink, naked, blind, and struggling to keep warm, making them super dependent on their parents; much of the same is true for bears such as pandas, which deliver young that are just one-900th of the mother’s size and can’t pee without outside help. The pressures wild animals face—intense predation, food scarcity, environmental stress—can sometimes push certain species to emerge from eggs or wombs earlier. But experts don’t fully understand the reason people are born so vulnerable. One hypothesis, called the “obstetric dilemma,” holds that human hips, which shrank and slimmed as our species evolved to walk upright, are now too narrow to accommodate baby heads of any larger size. Another posits that birth is the termination of an unsustainable lease: Human parents may evict their fetal tenant around nine months to unburden themselves of its thirst for nutrients, or perhaps the baby gladly vacates the premises, having hit the point of diminishing returns.[Read: Do you even lift, embryo?]However you look at it, pregnancy is marked by intergenerational strife, if not an all-out war between an offspring and its parent. Birth, then, in addition to welcoming new life, can bring about an end to the harshest hostilities—and its timing partly reflects the terms of a tightly negotiated truce.That idea might be tough to square with the common conception of pregnancy as “this joyous, wonderful, great time, with the fetus and the mom working toward the same shared interest,” Jessica Ayers, an evolutionary social psychologist at Boise State University, told me. The goals of child and parent, however, don’t always align, even when one is growing inside the other. Fetuses may maximize their chances of surviving after birth by extracting as many resources from their parent as they can. Their tool for mooching is the placenta—technically, the very first organ that any human produces, Ayers said—which allows a fetus to access its mother’s blood vessels and siphon out nutrients. The human placenta actually entrenches itself so aggressively into the uterine wall that it sometimes leads to severe hemorrhaging at birth, Ayers told me, when the tissue starts to rip away.For the mother to prioritize her own well-being—and her chances of bearing more offspring—her body must hoard at least a few nutrients for herself. “So there’s a conflict over allocation,” says Ava Mainieri, an evolutionary biologist who studied maternal-fetal conflict at Harvard. The fetus repeatedly attempts to remodel its parent’s interior—her circulation, her blood sugar, even her immune system—in an effort to drain a few more drops of the reserves that she is vying to save.Human mothers, then, may have forged a delicate détente with their offspring by delivering them in a feeble, naked, clingy state. But that’s not the only resolution that can be reached.Plenty of other creatures give birth even sooner, yielding offspring in a more altricial state. Marsupials, in particular, take this strategy “to the extreme,” David Haig, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, told me. A red kangaroo, for instance, will gestate her fetus for just four or five weeks before plopping a pink, hairless, jelly-bean-size joey into her pouch, where it will remain for another eight or so months. When little roos are born, their legs “aren’t even properly developed,” Haig said. Roughly 100,000 times smaller than their mother, the joeys are basically a mouth with giant forepaws, built to crawl into the pouch, grab onto teats, and suckle—and do little else. “The rest of the body catches up later,” Haig said.Lactation is a massive chore for moms, often requiring many more calories than even gestation does—and some animals are born so underdeveloped that they have to nurse for an exhaustingly long time. But an early birth can still quell some of the roughest aspects of the maternal-fetal tussle. Offspring “have less negotiation power once they’re born,” Amy Boddy, a biologist and evolutionary theorist at UC Santa Barbara, told me. A pregnant animal can only do so much to keep a fetus from stealing nutrients from within; a new mother, meanwhile, can choose to pause feeding or coddling its newborn at any time. Chicks, pups, and infants may beg, cry, or whine to extort food from their parents—but these efforts aren’t as direct as what occurs in utero. “The solution to being completely manipulated by the baby is, kind of, to give birth,” said Boddy, who has two children of her own. (In that way, birds have a good gig: They package all the nutrients that their developing offspring need into an egg, then shuttle out the whole shebang … though this does mean that certain species, such as the kiwi, must first haul around eggs that can take up 20 percent of the space in their body.)Yet other animals have struck an armistice with compromises of a different kind. Their offspring are precocial, born so well formed that they’re able to leapfrog nearly all the feeble travails of infancy. That self-sufficiency comes in handy for creatures that can’t afford to dote on their infants for long, or that are constantly on the move, like antelope, cattle, and horses. But it exacts a parental tax: The babies of precocial species tend to gestate longer—vacuuming up more of their parent’s internal stores—and emerge much larger. “I think of it as front-loading the investment, versus delaying it,” Boddy told me.Wildebeest, one of the most precocial mammals known to scientists, must weather an eight- or nine-month pregnancy while migrating hundreds of miles across the savanna, often as they nurse an older calf—all before popping out a fresh kiddo that might weigh more than 40 pounds at birth, more than 15 percent of the mass of typical females. To carry such gargantuan offspring, an animal must be in tip-top shape—and constantly seek out resources to nourish her growing load. Still, the prenatal sacrifices really pay off: Just a few minutes after a wildebeest calf is born, even before the amniotic fluid on its flanks has dried, the animal is standing up and galloping around its parents; by the next day, it will be sprinting at almost full tilt, fast enough to keep up with the rest of the herd. It’s almost like giving birth to a “much more coordinated toddler” with the gams of a track-ready teen, says Anna Estes, a wildebeest expert at Carleton College,. All of that certainly behooves (sorry) the calves in question: “If they’re not moving, they’re dying,” Stabach, the Smithsonian ecologist, told me.[Read: The great thing about mass wildebeest drownings]Some superprecocial mammals have evolved ways to mitigate the toll of a heavy, extended pregnancy. The placentas of wildebeest and other hoofed creatures, Haig told me, aren’t as invasive as the ones that human fetuses produce—which makes birthing long-gestating, big-bodied calves less risky. When the little ones are delivered, “the placenta comes away very cleanly,” Haig said. Just as her newborn does, “the mother can also get up and walk off very quickly.”That’s certainly not the tack that humans take. Our “childhood” tends to last for almost two decades in many parts of the world—far longer than the measly stretch a fetus spends camped out in the womb. Giving birth may offer a cessation of certain parent-offspring clashes. But the peacetime ends up being only temporary: When generations stay this tightly knit, more disputes are sure to follow.

Ever since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived. The theme is clear: Look what you made us do. The argument is simple: Democratic unfairness and media bias radicalized Republicans to such an extent that they turned to Trump in understandable outrage. Republicans had been bullied, so they turned to a bully of their own.No aspect of that theory has been more enduring than what I’ll call the Mitt Romney martyr thesis. The Republicans nominated a good and decent man—so the argument goes—and the Democrats and the media savaged him. Republicans respected norms, Democrats did not, and now those same Democrats have the gall to savage the GOP for Trump?I happen to agree that there has been, in fact, a Mitt Romney radicalization process. But it is quite the opposite of what this narrative suggests. It isn’t rooted in Republican anger on behalf of Romney but in Republican anger against Romney, and over time that anger has grown to be not just against Romney the man but also against the values he represents.The Mitt Romney martyr thesis is important to understand. Like many popular (but mistaken) theories, it’s based on some grains of truth. Many of the attacks against Romney were definitely extreme, most notably when in 2012 Joe Biden told an audience that included hundreds of Black Americans that Romney’s policies would “put you all back in chains.”Biden wasn’t referring to literal slavery but rather the “chains” of, in his view, unfair economic rules. But the language was indefensibly inflammatory. When Biden launched that attack, I was personally infuriated. I was a Romney partisan from way back. In 2006, just as Romney planned his first run for president, I formed a group—along with my wife, Nancy, and a small band of friends—called “Evangelicals for Mitt.”Our goal was to persuade evangelical Christians to vote for a Mormon candidate. We built our case around Romney’s competence and character. (It was sadly naive to believe that the bulk of evangelical voters truly cared about personal virtue in politicians.) We spent countless hours supporting Romney through two separate campaigns, and in 2012 Nancy and I both were Romney delegates to the Republican National Convention.A partisan mindset is a dangerous thing. It can make you keenly aware of every unfair critique from the other side and oblivious to your own side’s misdeeds. I was indignant about attacks against Romney, for example, while brushing off years of birther conspiracies against President Barack Obama as “fringe” or “irrelevant.”[Mitt Romney: America is in denial]Then, of course, Republicans nominated Trump, the birther in chief, and the scales fell from my partisan eyes.And now, in hindsight, the real Romney radicalization is far more clear. You could see the seeds planted during the 2012 Republican primary. On January 19, two days before South Carolina primary voters cast their ballot, Newt Gingrich had a moment during the GOP primary debate.The CNN host John King asked Gingrich about claims by one of his ex-wives (Gingrich has been married three times) that he pressed her in 1999 to have an open marriage. Gingrich responded by condemning the “destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media,” declared that he was “appalled” that King would begin a presidential debate on the topic, and said that it was “despicable” for King to make Gingrich’s ex-wife’s claim an issue two days before a Republican primary.The crowd interrupted Gingrich with cheers and hoots of approval. But why? Wasn’t King’s underlying question fair? After all, Gingrich had admitted to cheating on his first and second wives, and he admitted to cheating on his second wife at the same time that he was speaker of the House and leading impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his own extramarital affair.Moreover, Gingrich was having his affair after the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America and a key Republican constituency, had passed a Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials that contained the following statement: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”Surely, heavily evangelical voters in a key Republican stronghold would be concerned about Gingrich’s scandals? No, they were far angrier at media outlets than they were at any Republican hypocrisy.[From the November 2018 issue: The man who broke politics]Gingrich went on to win the South Carolina primary in a “landslide” powered by evangelicals. It was the only time in primary history that South Carolina voters failed to vote for the eventual GOP nominee. But South Carolina voters weren’t out of step; rather they were ahead of their time. They forecast the Republican break with character in favor of a man who would “fight.”To understand the emotional and psychological aftermath of Romney’s loss, one has to look at the cultural break between the GOP establishment—which commissioned an “autopsy” of the party in 2012 that called for greater efforts at inclusion—and a grassroots base that was convinced that it had been hoodwinked by party leaders into supporting the “safe” candidate.They wanted a street brawler, and when (they believed) Romney campaigned with one hand tied behind his back, they were angry. Yes, there was anger at Democrats and reporters for their treatment of Romney, but the raw anger that really mattered was their anger at Romney for the way he treated Obama and the press. They were furious that he didn’t angrily confront Candy Crowley when she famously fact-checked him in the midst of the third and final presidential debate of 2012.And so the Republican establishment and the Republican base moved apart, with one side completely convinced that Romney lost because he was perhaps, if anything, too harsh (especially when it came to immigration) and the other convinced that he lost because he was too soft.Trump’s nomination was a triumph of that base. Well before Romney came out against Trump in the primary and well before Romney’s first impeachment vote, Trump supporters scorned him. They despised his alleged weakness.When Trump won, the base had its proof of concept. Fighting worked, and not even Trump’s loss—along with the loss of the House and the Senate in four short years—has truly disrupted that conclusion. And why would it? Many millions still don’t believe he lost.The Mitt Romney martyr theory thus suffers from a fatal defect. It presumes that large numbers of Republicans weren’t radicalized before Romney’s rough treatment. In truth, they already hated Democrats and the media, and when Romney lost, their message to the Republican establishment in 2016 was just as clear as it was in South Carolina in 2012. No more nice guys. The “character” that mattered was a commitment to punching the left right in the mouth.

No matter which party wins control of the House and Senate next month, the results are virtually certain to reinforce the paradox powering the nation’s steadily mounting political tension.American politics today may be both more rigid and more unstable than at any other time since at least the Civil War. A politics that is rigid and unstable sounds like a contradiction in terms. But the system’s instability is a direct result of its rigidity. Because so many voters—and so many states—are reliably locked down for one side or the other, even the slightest shifts among the few voters and few states that are truly up for grabs can tilt the balance of power. The consequence is a politics in which neither party can sustain a durable advantage over the other, and political direction for a country of 330 million people is decided by a tiny sliver of voters in about half a dozen states—maybe a few hundred thousand people in all.These twin forces largely explain why so many Americans now find politics so stressful. People across the country nervously parse the choices of distant voters in a handful of states to see which party will control the federal government. The balance always remains so wobbly that a momentary mood swing in just a few subdivisions outside Atlanta, Phoenix, or Philadelphia can determine whether Democrats are empowered to pass a new law codifying a national right to abortion, or Republicans are positioned to impose a national ban. Everything is always at stake—and nothing seems to break the deadlock.[Barton Gellman: How six states could overturn the 2024 election]Just how few states determine which side prevails? Probably no more than eight, and arguably as few as six. The list of genuine swing states extends no further than Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with New Hampshire and North Carolina plausibly added to that roster, though at the federal level the former measurably leans toward Democrats and the latter toward Republicans. The parties still dream of occasional statewide wins in other places—say, Colorado or Minnesota for Republicans and Ohio or Florida for Democrats—but they know that such victories will require unusual circumstances and candidates.This small band of true swing states holds the balance of power between the massive red and blue blocs that are, as I’ve written, behaving as if they constitute different nations. Five states in this small group effectively decided the last presidential election by shifting from Donald Trump in 2016 to Joe Biden in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Almost all of the highly competitive Senate races that will determine control of the chamber this year are unfolding in those eight most competitive states, too. Partisans who obsessively checked the poll results from those few states in 2020 have found themselves in a political Groundhog Day, scanning the FiveThirtyEight election-outcome probabilities on pretty much the same places two years later. Two years from now, in the 2024 presidential contest, they are almost guaranteed to be fixated on the same states again.What’s more, the balance of power within those few swing states is also precarious; the outcome of elections teeters on microscopic shifts in turnout and/or voter preferences. Biden won the five states he flipped from 2016 by only a combined 279,265 votes, and more than half of that total came in Michigan alone. Few observers would be surprised if almost all of this year’s major Senate contests across the swing states come down to photo finishes.In a new book on the 2020 election, The Bitter End, three prominent political scientists describe modern American politics as “calcified,” meaning that the majority of voters are firmly locked into support for one party based primarily on their views about cultural and demographic change. But the UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck, one of the co-authors, says that equating “calcification” with “stability” is a mistake. “Being stuck, or calcified, doesn’t mean we are stuck with one outcome,” she told me. “It means that because of that rough partisan parity, we are stuck on the knife’s edge. Anything is tipping these outcomes.”The best evidence is that the modern Democratic electoral coalition is at least somewhat larger than the GOP’s. Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. But the Democratic edge hasn’t been decisive enough to overcome the party’s inability to compete in large swaths of the country. Nor can Democrats overcome the structural advantages provided to the GOP by its dominance of smaller, preponderantly white and mostly Christian interior states, whose influence is magnified in the Electoral College and the Senate.  Barring a major surprise, next month’s election seems guaranteed to extend the longest period in American history when neither party has been able to establish a lasting advantage over the other.If Democrats lose the House or Senate, or both, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president went into a midterm with unified control of Congress and the White House and then lost it. (That happened to Bill Clinton in 1994, George W. Bush in 2006, Barack Obama in 2010, and Trump in 2018.) No president since Jimmy Carter in 1978 has successfully defended unified control of government through a midterm election. Since 1968, in fact, either party has held unified control in Washington for just 16 of 54 years. In the 72 years before that (from 1896 to 1968), one party or the other held unified control for 58 years.This isn’t the first extended period of political instability for the U.S. One party or the other managed just eight years of unified control in the tumultuous two decades before the Civil War. The era from 1877 to 1896 may have been the period most like today: The two sides managed just six years of unified control over those two decades, and never for more than two years at a time. Divided government was also the rule through the 1950s. But none of these earlier periods of instability persisted remotely as long as today’s.[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]All of the earlier periods without a dominant party were notable for the lack of clear differentiation between the sides. In the decades before the Civil War, for instance, the need to mollify northern and southern wings prevented either the Whigs or the Democrats from taking a clear position in opposition to the spread of slavery.Now it’s the gulf between the parties that largely explains their standoff. In their current ideological configurations, neither side can consistently win enough states to sustain an advantage. Democrats dominate the coastal states most integrated into the 21st-century Information Age economy; the heartland states centered on the 20th-century powerhouse industries of manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture are a sea of Republican red. Neither side has managed more than idiosyncratic incursions into the other’s terrain (like Republican Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 gubernatorial win in Virginia and Democrat Joe Manchin’s three Senate wins in West Virginia).Generational and demographic change may strengthen Democrats over time, but as long as attitudes about American identity remain the principal dividing line in our politics, Vavreck, like many others, doesn’t see either side breaking out of today’s trench warfare. And she expects that identity-centered division—what I’ve called the collision between the Republican “coalition of restoration” and the Democratic “coalition of transformation”—to remain the central focus of our politics for years. “This is the dimension of conflict we are fighting on for the foreseeable future,” she said. “COVID didn’t dislodge it; the murder of George Floyd didn’t dislodge it; the Capitol insurrection didn’t dislodge it.”One way to measure how dug in we’ve become is to look at the consistency of presidential-election results over time. Forty states, or four-fifths of the total, have voted the same way in each of the four presidential elections since 2008: 20 for the Democratic nominees, 20 for the Republicans. That’s a modern peak for consistency. Thirty-four states voted the same way in the four presidential elections from 1992 through 2004. In the four elections from 1976 through 1988, only 25 did. Even in the four consecutive elections won by Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1932 through 1944, only about two-thirds of the states voted the same way each time.What’s especially relevant for next month’s election is a corollary trend. Not only are more states reliably voting the same way for president; they are also, to a greater extent than earlier, aligning their votes in congressional elections with their preferences for the White House. Republicans hold just one of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states that have voted Democratic in at least the past four presidential elections (Susan Collins in Maine), and Democrats hold just two of 40 in the four-time Republican states (Manchin in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana). Republicans this year might capture a Senate seat in Nevada—a state on the Democratic list—and solidly Republican Utah, of all places, looks reasonably competitive, but otherwise the November results are unlikely to change those numbers.With each side realistically contesting Senate seats in so few states, it’s no wonder, as I’ve written, that the parties are much less likely than in the past to accumulate comfortable Senate majorities—and thus much more likely to quickly lose control of the upper chamber after winning it. Neither side has held the Senate majority for more than eight consecutive years since 1980, a span unprecedented in American history.[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]The fact that control of Congress appears within reach for both sides in virtually every election, as it does again this year, heightens the sense of urgency and intensity around each campaign. So does the awareness that, because the parties have become so polarized in their goals, each shift in control can produce enormous changes in policy, no matter how wispy the change in voter attitudes that precipitated it. “The difference in policy now between the group that has 51 percent and the group that has 49 percent is so enormous because of the polarization and divergence of the two parties,” the longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. Such big change resting on such small shifts, Ayres added, “is not healthy for democracy.”Trump’s emergence has further raised the stakes over control of Congress and the White House. Many independent students of democracy and authoritarianism believe that if restored to unified control over government, Trump—and the many Republicans embracing his discredited fraud claims—will seek to tilt the electoral rules in a way that makes it more difficult to again remove him from power. A similar dynamic is already evident in the 21 red states that responded to Trump’s 2020 defeat by passing laws making voting more difficult. “If the Republican Party manages to get control one way or another, including both legal and illegal things, and rig the system a little bit more, we could have a period of more continuity [in unified control of Washington] but it would be minority government,” the political scientist Thomas Mann, a co-author of a seminal 2012 book on congressional polarization, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, told me.Which is to say that you can likely add the future of American democracy to the list of issues that will soon be decided by a relative handful of voters in the handful of states at the tipping point of our internal cold war.

Thursday's final hearing of the January 6 committee is a segue to the criminal case that federal prosecutors are piecing together, bolstered by the recent issuance of dozens of grand jury subpoenas and court-authorized searches of some of Donald Trump's top allies.

The committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to answer questions before the committee under oath. Elizabeth Cheney, committee vice-chairman, said "he must be accountable. He is required to answer for his actions." But subpoenaing Trump seems largely a symbolic gesture -- unless Trump decides he wants to present "his side" to the American people and is prepared to lie up the wazoo, regardless of legal consequences. Although the legal issues involved in subpoenaing a former president may pass legal muster, the length of time it would take to litigate the issue will all but certainly carry on beyond the select committee's tenure, which ends in January.

Thursday's hearing provided the final piece of the puzzle for making a criminal case against Trump: his state of his mind--what he knew and intended in committing at least two federal crimes: 18 U.S.C. 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and 18 U.S.C. 1512, obstruction of Congress. The issue of criminal intent will be central to any criminal trial.

Thursday's hearing comes 27 days before a critical midterm election in which most Republican candidates deny that Biden won the 2020 presidential election--not because of any credible evidence but solely because Trump has continued to make the baseless claim that he won, and has convinced almost two-thirds of Republican voters of that Big Lie.

Recap of the first seven hearings:

Thursday's hearing recapped much of the first seven hearings, including:

An Oval Office meeting on December 18, where Trump had to choose between what Trump's campaign manager Bill Stepien called "Team Normal" and what some Trump advisers called "Team Crazy." In that "unhinged" meeting , "Team Crazy," including Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, produced a draft executive order they had prepared where they proposed that the U.S. military seize state election machines. "Team Normal" opposed the plan.

"unhinged" meeting draft executive order On December 19, just hours after the draft Executive Order was rejected and the hours-long meeting ended, Trump sent his "will be wild" tweet. The evidence presented made clear that the far-right militia and other figures understood that tweet as a call to violence.

Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, both of whom Trump had pardoned during the time between the election and January 6, had direct relationships with violent right-wing groups. One rally organizer explained that Trump wanted to surround himself with such people because they were "very very vicious in publicly defending him."

pardoned explained Trump endangered the safety of Vice President Pence and his family on January 6 by tweeting criticism of Pence, which unleashed the mob to go after Pence, chanting "hang Mike Pence." Trump watched the riots unfold on television for hours without lifting a finger to protect the Vice President, his family, or Members of Congress, despite pleas from Trump family members, White House advisors, and Republican congressional leaders.

Trump sought to name a Justice Department minion as the new Attorney General who then planned to send letters to Trump-friendly state legislatures alleging widespread fraud in their states - without a shred of evidence. The proposed letters would urge these friendly state legislatures to exploit the "failed choice" loophole in antiquated 19th-century laws and substitute their own Trump presidential electors for the Biden electors that had been chosen by the voters on Election Day. Trump's own top Justice Department officials killed this scheme to steal the presidency.

Thursday's hearing:

Thursday's final hearing also presented damning new evidence about Trump's state of mind. As committee vice-chair Liz Cheney stated: "Today we will focus on his state of mind. Trump had a premeditated plan to claim the election was stolen before Election Day. Trump was better informed about the absence of widespread election fraud than almost any American."

The committee then showed evidence that:

1. Trump concocted his plan long before Election Day. Knowing that mail-in votes would be more likely cast for Biden and would not be counted until possibly days after Trump had taken the lead on Election Day, Trump planned to give a false election victory speech on the evening of Election Day. Even though the networks were starting to call the race for Biden, Trump declared victory and demanded that voting counts stop. "This is a fraud on the American public, an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election, we did win this election."

2. Trump knew he lost. He also knew that there was no evidence of fraud or irregularities sufficient to change the outcome. In none of 62 court cases was he able to establish election fraud. His Attorney General told him there had been no fraud. His advisors repeatedly told him there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. The Supreme Court rejected his case on December 11. Electors voted on December 14. His senior staff advised him to concede. Nonetheless, Trump's intended to ignore the rule of law to stay in power.

3. Trump was personally and directly involved in a plan to remain in power, regardless.

(1) He knew he was lying when he told the public that Dominion Voting machines were rigged against him, when he told the public there were more votes than voters, and when he told the public about a "vote dump" in Detroit. He purposely and maliciously repeated these lies to the public over and over again.

(2) He knew his allegations of fraud in Georgia were false. But he nonetheless sought to pressure the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger into giving him the votes he needed, saying "I want to find 11,780 votes." When the secretary of state demurred, Trump threatened that he'd be prosecuted.

(3) He also tried to pressure election officials in Arizona and Michigan, knowing he lost those states.

(4) Knowing he lost the election, he also pressured the Justice Department to change the results of the election until Justice Department officials threatened mass resignation.

(5) He sought to replace real Biden electors with fake Trump electors on January 6. He knew this was illegal.

(6) He tried to get Vice President Pence to unilaterally disregard the electoral count. Trump knew this was illegal.

(7) He intentionally summoned his supporters to the Capitol, and then, knowing they were armed, intended that they march to the Capitol.

(8) Even before his Ellipse speech, he knew there would be violence. He knew people coming to Washington planned to attack the Capitol and that multiple users online were targeting members of Congress. The Secret Service had this information at least 10 days before the attack. On January 6, during his speech on the Ellipse, Trump knew the crowd was armed and dangerous.

4. Even when Trump knew about the violence unfolding at the Capitol on January 6, he refused to call off the mob.

Next steps?

This is probably the last of the committee's hearings. If Republicans succeed in their drive to win the House majority (which seems likely), they will almost certainly disband the committee in January and shut down any official accounting by Congress for the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.

This means the panel has less than three months to finish up its investigation, write and release its final report (likely in December), make any legislative recommendations, and decide whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

The January 6 committee, led by Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), has done America a great service -- giving the nation exactly what it has most needed: an accounting of what occurred January 6, why it occurred, and Trump's role in it.

Whether this will lead to Trump being held criminally accountable does not depend on the committee making a criminal referral. Regardless of whether it makes such a referral, that decision is solely up to the U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland (who would now be sitting on the Supreme Court had it not been for Mitch McConnell and a Republican Senate majority).

But the committee's work -- its investigation and its public hearings -- have played a part in persuading Garland to move forward with a criminal case against Trump. If you'd asked me six months ago, I'd have said Garland would not do so, for fear of dividing the nation even more deeply. Now, I believe he will.

[MUSIC]

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Rachel Maddow’s nightly show on MSNBC debuted on September 8, 2008. You read that date now and it’s clear what a hinge moment that was between political eras. Before that, you have the 9/11 era, the George W. Bush era, the era of politicians constantly wearing and fighting over flag pins on their lapels. By the time Maddow’s show hits the air, though, Barack Obama is weeks away from winning the presidency. Lehman Brothers is days away from collapsing. American politics is on the cusp of reorganization. Maddow helmed that 9:00 p.m. slot for 14 years. Her show really defined an era of liberal cable news. MSNBC’s whole lineup was reoriented to work around her style, to try to learn her lessons. And let me risk understatement by saying a hell of a lot happens over the course of that 14 years that Rachel Maddow is in that chair. And she is, that whole time, a pretty serious observer and even, at times, shaper of it. And so I want to talk to her about the ways that American politics and media changed over that time, what she saw, and why she thinks it happened. And now as she steps back — she’s taken her show to once a week. She signed up to do a lot of other kinds of content, including a new podcast about a really remarkable moment in our history, called “Ultra,” that we talk about here. I wanted to get a sense of why she’s become so interested now in what the past can tell us about the present and particularly about the future. As always, my email for guest suggestions, for thoughts on the episode, for things we should read, or watch, or hear, or just not miss, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Rachel Maddow, welcome to the show.

rachel maddow

Ezra, it’s great to see you, my friend.

ezra klein

You were the very first guest on this show in its original version back in — I just looked at this — February of 2016.

We were such children then. We were so naive.

ezra klein

We were young. What we didn’t know. What we didn’t know. How are you?

I’m good. I am — I have a different job now. I mean, I have some of the same job. But my job has changed. And the thing that I’m crashing on right now is this podcast that I’ve been working on for a few months. And I’m absolutely insane. I’ve pulled multiple all-nighters. It’s all I can think about. I’m totally crazed. I feel like I’m learning something for the first time, even though I’ve done this kind of thing before. I feel like I’m in a universe that is completely pulling me over.

ezra klein

I mean, I know you’ve dominated nightly cable news for roughly 15 years. But congratulations, I mean, podcasts are a whole different league. It’s really hard. It’s a whole different thing.

Yeah, the word dominated there has just been redefined in an interesting way, too.

ezra klein

So that’s a great bridge, because I want to talk about how the world changed over the course of “The Rachel Maddow Show.” So you began that show in September of ‘08. And I wanted to talk through how some of the events and actors that when we go in the Wayback Machine to then, that were dominating things then — to stick with that word — have changed politics and affect us now. And I want to begin with the Iraq War. What role do you think the Iraq War plays in our politics now? How does it shape what we’re still in?

I think that the Iraq War has already settled into a universally acknowledged cautionary tale. That certainly it had a partisan divide and it had a lot of emotion behind it, but the folks who argued for the Iraq War, I think, would almost universally be acknowledged in U.S. politics, left, right and center, that those people were wrong. And enough of them have publicly repented that I think that even if you polled them, they would admit that the country believes it was wrong. Certainly there are still some “die-hards,” to coin a phrase. But because of that, the way that works, I think, in general, in politics, is when you’ve got something that people really advocated for, that turned out terribly, and then everybody acknowledged after the fact that was a bad idea, that ought to be a cause for a little bit of a realignment. It ought to be a cause for looking back at the premises that were wrong that led the people who earnestly advocated for that war to advocate for it. And I don’t think that we’ve had that kind of course correction. But I do think that we’ve laid the groundwork for it by at least all agreeing that we shouldn’t have done it.

ezra klein

In a way, though, you make me wonder, saying that, if we did have the realignment. And I’d offer two thoughts on that. One, do you think Donald Trump takes over the Republican Party from the Bush family without the Iraq War being this wedge he uses? And, two, thinking about Joe Biden pulling out of Afghanistan. I mean, Joe Biden who voted for the Iraq War and was understood in that period as a Democratic hawk. In certain ways, I wonder if more realignment has happened than sometimes we even give credit for.

I think with the Trump side of it, he was sticking his finger in the wind and realizing, oh, that could be used. I mean, you look back at his record of comments about the Iraq War and it’s not like he had been a Cassandra on that, right? He had —

ezra klein

Right. totally.

— always just gone along with whatever everybody already feels. And so I sort of feel like his using that issue against establishment Republicans and the Bush era Republicans is just another example of him finding something in the wild that he could use for his own purposes. It helps us diagnose that problem more than he does catalyze it. On the Biden side of it, it’s interesting because Biden’s history on Iraq is nuanced, right? So he’s for the Iraq War for sure, is definitely seen, as you said, as a bit of a Democratic hawk. But then is also seen as an expert on the Iraq conflict, and spends lots and lots and lots of time in Iraq, and gets very invested, in part, through his son Beau, but gets very invested in Iraq War veterans issues as well. And so he ends up sort of being deeply steeped in the factual record of what happened in a way that I think gives him credibility to, essentially, acknowledge that it was wrong, that we shouldn’t have done it, and to take steps to end the war in Afghanistan so that it doesn’t trail indefinitely into the future. So it’s interesting. I mean, I think Biden — the thing that is encouraging to me about Biden is that I feel like he earnestly engaged with the issue, including what were the mistakes of it. And that as poorly as the withdrawal from Afghanistan went, I think his determination to get out of Afghanistan was informed by how much work he did around Iraq.

ezra klein

So your show began on September 8. We were looking back at this. Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15.

Thank you very much.

ezra klein

I forgot how close those two epochal events in American history were.

It was really a lot of work that first week.

ezra klein

I can imagine.

I had to collapse Lehman Brothers, launch the show.

ezra klein

So a lot of sabotaging of the U.S. housing market. How do you think about the role that the financial crisis played in shaping American politics after that?

I feel like we’ve never gotten out of it. I mean, we have, plainly, in factual terms. But I feel like mindset-wise, we’ll never trust the economy. People of our generation will never trust the economy the way we did before then. It had felt before then, with various financial calamities, that they’d been one-offs, that they’d been historical moments, that the thing sort of worth saving the newspaper from that day for. And since the collapse in 2008, it just feels like when we’re not in a moment of economic collapse, we’re just in an interregnum. And what’s the next one going to be? Do you feel that way at all? I mean, I —

ezra klein

The economy is either always about to collapse, collapsing or we just collapsed. We’re just recovering from the collapse. There’s a feeling for me that I don’t know — you mentioned our generation. And I can’t tell if it’s just that I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s and things were a little — that that was unusually calm. Because I have this feeling that I can’t decide if it’s after 2001 and 9/11 or it’s starting in roughly 2008, but a speeding up of history, a speeding up of the things that — I think about it this way — that the history books won’t skip over. That they will have chapters on. But then I look back at the 20th century and a lot happened then. It just mostly happened before I was paying attention. So I can’t tell if my sense of normal is what is actually abnormal or this has been an abnormally fast time of economics, and geopolitics, and plagues, and crazy happenings in American politics.

I think that — we have a saying in our family. Susan’s father used to say something before he died. He said, as you get older, you realize that it’s basically just shorts, Christmas tree, shorts, Christmas tree, shorts, Christmas tree. Like as you get older — the number of things that matter and your perception of the passing of time, it adapts mostly to the length of perspective that you get by being an older person. I feel like that perception, that so much of such consequence is happening now and it’s happening so quickly, to me, my cure for that is to spend a lot of time in history. I unoverwhelm myself with the pace and magnitude of today’s events by spending time in 1940 or spending time in 1973 and thinking about how disorienting, and destabilizing, and scary, and momentous, and fast-moving things must have seemed the people living in big years like those.

ezra klein

But I want to go back to something you said about the financial crisis and the trust in the economy, because I think that’s really sharp. I do think there is a sense that you cannot trust the economy and also you cannot trust the people running the economy. I do think there is a collapse in trust in the people who are supposed to know what they were doing. That has never changed. It is part of the Bernie Sanders saying. It’s part of the Donald Trump thing. And it just holds.

That said, there is a through-line for that that goes all the way back to the beginning of the American economy. I took a long haul train trip as my family vacation this year. We put it off twice for Covid and finally were able to take it this year. And when we were taking the train out of New Orleans heading to Texas and going over the Huey Long Bridge, I put on — because I’m that jerk in the family vacation — I put on a bunch of Huey Long speeches, just clips that you could play off of YouTube. And it was riveting —

ezra klein

Really?

Yeah, I was terrible. Don’t ever go on vacation with me. This is how I relax. But I mean hearing Huey Long, everybody got quiet and was listening to it, because, I mean, A, he’s an amazing orator, but B, he was just giving this very modern-sounding riff on distribution of wealth and the people who are running the economy. And how it is not designed for you, and that there’s no reason that we need to live under an economy like this because it’s supposed to work for us. And there’s the inherited wealth versus the ability to earn wealth and set things up for your family and your kids and their grandkids is an imbalance that is incompatible with American democracy. I mean, he’s making a great case. I mean, Huey Long is both a great populist and also an incredibly corrupt demagogue. And so it’s uncomfortable to hear it through both of those lenses knowing what kind of dictatorship he was running in Louisiana at the time. But that criticism that the economy doesn’t work for most people, and it’s because the people running it don’t want it to, don’t need it to, and the real point of politics is to make them need it to because to make them accountable to us, I think that’s a very live sentiment right now. And you can see that over time in all sorts of different economic circumstances over the last 100 years.

ezra klein

So I was trying to think back to how politics felt in ‘08. And I was thinking back a couple of years before that to when Barack Hussein Obama became a figure in politics. And there’s a long time when the idea that he could be — that a skinny Black kid with big ears, with the middle name Hussein and the last name Obama, could be a national figure in American politics was treated as a little ridiculous. I think people who weren’t in politics in ‘04 and didn’t feel the rejection that Bush’s victory that year felt like, and the sense that Republicans had the heartland and Democrats weren’t real Americans, they were these coastal liberals, and then the swing over to Obama who sort of emerges as a liberal and something new in politics. And now I think it’s treated as a kind of milquetoast dad jokey figure. That shift of what he represents is really interesting to me. And so I’m curious how you see both the rise and the mainstreaming of Obama. How do you think politics is different for him?

I wonder if that is the last time a convention speech is going to be a breakthrough moment in a positive way. I mean, I do think that we’ve had convention moments post-2004 that will live on and, as you say, have to be in the history books. Things like “lock her up” at the convention and things like that. Maybe even Ted Cruz’s bizarre speech at the end of the nominating convention for Trump in 2016. So there’s ways to get things wrong or at least to make scandal and get attention for what happens at conventions. But when he gave the “not red America, not blue America, but the United States of America” speech in 2004, that speech changed the course of history because that speech was so good. And I remember I was at Air America Radio at the time and I was doing a show — I had a morning show with Chuck D. from Public Enemy and Lizz Winstead who is the co-creator of “The Daily Show.” And we just played that speech and we were all kind of in tears in the room, having heard it live and then playing it the next morning and just saying, I don’t know where this goes, but this is something. This is something. And then the Democrats lost the election in 2004, and Abu Ghraib, and then Katrina, and everything. The George W. Bush presidency — I think about Cheney’s approval ratings by the time the 2008 election was rolling around. It was clear that a Democrat was going to win. It may be that the George W. Bush presidency had to collapse and had to crater so profoundly in order for us to get somebody as transformative as Obama. In a year that the race between the Republican and the Democrat might have been closer, maybe we would have had to have a Biden then instead of an Obama. But the moment was right.

ezra klein

I wonder about the ways in which parts of Obama have now fallen out of favor. I mean, talking about that ‘04 speech, I, like you, have gone back to it a number of times for pieces or for trying to think about what happened. And I wonder if you could get that kind of reception for that kind of speech today. There is a belief that Obama had and has in America, or in some version of America, or in some aspirational version of America, and in Americans, that I think is now seen as a little bit — by many liberals — as a little bit — I don’t want to say out of fashion — a little bit naive is also too far. But you see what I’m getting at here. There’s something about Obama wanted —

Twee.

ezra klein

— to recapture — twee —

Yeah.

ezra klein

Obama wanted to capture a kind of patriotism back for the left. That I always think of as his core project. He was creating a narrative of what it meant to be an American patriot and what America was, that actually drew a circle around the left and the reformers and the progressives and kept a bunch of conservatives and reactionaries on the outside of it. And now I think there’s more of an appeal towards a politics that says that there’s something more fundamental wrong in America. And so, in some ways, I think what seems radical about Obama then has begun to seem moderate in a way that makes it radical. Once again, it keeps coming around. Does that make any sense to you?

Yeah, it does. I mean, I think that there is a universal and timeless appeal to positive unifying appeals to Americans’ patriotism. I mean, I think that there’s something at the core of it that is universal and constant. And it’s not always the best electoral message, right? Or maybe it is in combination. Maybe you need people who are slashing critics of what’s wrong to galvanize people, to meet people where they are, to meet a frustrated electorate, particularly a economically frustrated electorate, where they are, and to give them some reason to hope that things can change. I mean, I don’t think we’re going to have another American carnage inaugural speech any time in the next 10 or 20 years. I mean, at least I don’t think we’re going to. I hope we don’t. I do think that even if you get electorally resonant criticism, you do need to tell people some reason why the Republic needs to endure that speaks to most Democrats and to most Republicans and to maybe half of independents. I think the independents maybe less so, just because I think sometimes people are independents because they don’t really believe in electoral politics. They don’t really believe that democracy is the way forward. It is twee and it is naive. And it does lead to stupid waiting around for Republicans to do constructive things that they’re never going to do. I think we saw that for sure in the Obama years. But there’s also something true and important about it. Positive messages aren’t necessarily galvanizing in bad times, but they are comforting and they are true.

ezra klein

One of the other things that is always striking to me about that period is that in ‘08, Obama is very much to the left of Joe Biden on policy. Biden is still understood as kind of D.L.C. Democrat. He’s got these very incremental plans. By 2020, Biden’s platform way to the left of anything the Obama administration considered — way, way, way to the left. Just this week, Biden pardoned every federal conviction for a simple marijuana possession, which is just like something the Obama administration never would have considered doing. How do you see the way the Democratic Party center has changed on policy in the time you’ve been commenting on it?

You know, I’m glad you brought up the thing about the marijuana convictions. The thing that I’m really interested in is to see if the Republican Party tries to problematize that. I mean, of course, they will try to problematize it. Joe Biden eating ice cream is a problem for them. But is there a — do they think there’s an electorally resonant critique of federal convictions for simple marijuana possession that’s going to resonate with people? Can you turn the evil weed into some sort of law and crime message that they think is going to be electorally sound? I mean, part of me thinks that while they may try that, they know in their heart of hearts it’s not going to work. And what that means is not that the Democratic Party has moved left on this issue, but that the American people and the American culture has moved left. And so the Democratic Party is willing to meet that moment where it is. And the Republican Party has to decide if they’re going to ignore it, or if they, too, are going to go that direction. The Democrats are a coalition party. The Republican Party is not a coalition party. The Democrats are always going to get yanked in a few different directions. Maybe as you say, the D.L.C. yanked to the right and the progressive yanked to the left. And they’re always going to be calibrating based on those contrary impulses from their various coalition groups. The Republican Party is always going to tack right. It’s led by the conservative movement, which is outside the Republican Party, which is always pulling it to the right, sometimes in electorally sound terms and sometimes not. But the basic idea of progressivism is that people want to get more free, and people want the country and the world to get more equitable and for people to have more opportunities and not less. And that that will progress over time and that we should help that progression and abide that progression and not stand athwart it saying, stop. This is one of those moments when the country is moving and the parties have to figure out how to deal.

ezra klein

I think there’s something really interesting in that that I want to try out on you as a theory. One of the things I used to write about all the time in the Obama era was how far Republicans had moved right on policy, like the Paul Ryan Republicans, and how much Democrats had actually — it was a common thing, I wrote it a bunch of times, that a large number of Obama’s policies looked like things Richard Nixon had pushed in the 1970s, right? There was a lot where you could just say Obama was a progressive moderate Republican. And then since then, I do think that has changed a bit. And I think the Democratic party has moved left on a lot of policy. And the Republican Party’s policy has gotten fuzzier, but they’ve polarized really hard on democracy and culture, right — democracy and what it means to be an American. I wrote a book about polarization. I think a lot about polarization, but it’s always what you’re polarizing over. And Democrats have moved more left on policy faster than I think I’ve seen them do before. And Republicans moved kind of right against the system of democracy itself — the elections, the institutions — than I would have thought plausible just a couple of years ago.

For structural reasons, right? I mean, when elections stop being the path to you staying in power and you can see that coming, you start trying to turn people against elections, right? It doesn’t — I mean, if you’re looking at it in structural terms, which I know that you’re very good at doing, I feel like that’s the — it’s not just that — what did Biden call it? Semi-fascism came into fashion or the internet made us start thinking darker thoughts. I really don’t think it’s that. I think it’s structural. And it’s, in part, demographic change. But it’s, in part, because we evolve as a people. Younger people get older and get power. The idea of rights and equity have appeal and progressivism is an attempt to tap into that and not stop it. And conservatism is against that. And so you end up having to do something about holding power that is either getting people very afraid and rallying them up, or stopping other people from being able to vote, or deciding that votes aren’t how we allocate power. I don’t feel like we need to do psychology about it. I think we just need to count. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

Let’s turn to the Republicans then for a bit, because I do think, in a weird way, the nature of their party has changed. I remember there was this very popular line for a long time about elections that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. And it seemed that way. The Republicans, after Reagan, they went with H.W. Bush. After Bush, they went with Dole. After Dole, they went with another Bush. After the other Bush, they went with McCain who’d been the runner up in 2000. Then Romney, the runner up in 2008. And then Trump. And I think it maybe starts before then. There was a Tea Party period, too. That at some point there, Republicans, who had been pretty predictable in how they ran their processes and who they nominated, became very unpredictable. The Republican Party lost a lot of control. Why do you think that was?

Because the Republican Party is a person walking a dog. And they kept getting bigger and bigger dogs. And eventually the dog became bigger than the person. And the person getting older got frailer and now the dog is taking the person for a walk dragging them around the park. When you are not a coalition party, when you are an electoral project attached to a conservative movement that has its own imperatives and its own ideology and its own theology, and it is demanding that Republican electoral politics follow along and sing its songs, you end up sometimes with a movement that makes internal sense to itself and makes no sense to voters. I mean, I really — I don’t think that has changed over the course of our lifetimes. I just think that the conservative movement has been a very effective political and social movement in this country. And its hitch with the Republican Party is sometimes problematic. Like Ronna Romney McDaniel being in charge of the Republican Party right now and Reince Priebus before her — you don’t get the sense that those folks are setting the course for what’s going on with the Republican Party, right? You don’t even necessarily get the sense that presidential candidates in the Republican Party are setting the course. It’s the Leonard Leos and it’s the conservative movement poobahs that are really running things. And sometimes it works at the ballot box and sometimes it doesn’t. And that incoherence isn’t matched on the Democratic Party. It’s a more unified project on the Democratic Party because nobody’s toeing the Democratic Party around.

ezra klein

How much do you think this reflects the conservative media infrastructure? There was a line from David Frum who worked for George W. Bush and was a conservative writer and now is more centrist or something. But he said — and I’m doing this from memory, so I might have it slightly wrong — that we thought Fox News and talk radio worked for us and it turned out we worked for them.

Yes. I think that’s true. And since Roger Ailes died and Fox has lost its organizational coherence, I would say, in the sense of what is being pushed on the air is no longer as organized and as unified as it used to be, I think you see a little bit of mixed messaging from Fox in a way that you didn’t before. But the principle still holds, right? Why does some presidential aspirant Republican governor send refugee applicants to a blue state in a cruel human stunt? Well, run the tape. Find out who on Fox News was proposing that on their shows before it actually happened in real life. I mean, you see that over and over again. And that’s still true. That’s not changing.

ezra klein

I would read an entire book on this one week in politics around the first Republican debate when Fox hosted it. And they had their more mainstream anchors. It was Megyn Kelly. It was Chris Wallace. It was Bret Baier. And it seemed like they wanted to let the air out of the Trump balloon. They really confronted him. There was this moment where Megyn Kelly confronts him with all these terrible things he said about women, which later leads Trump to saying she had the blood coming out of her wherever. There’s this moment confronting him with all of these non-conservative things he said. And it seemed to me they decided this had gone far enough. And then Trump didn’t back down. And there was all this reporting that came out around Fox that Trump was now not going to not come on the network. And then eventually Roger Ailes and him had a meeting. And Trump won. He won this confrontation with Fox News. And a year later, Megyn Kelly isn’t there now. Now Chris Wallace isn’t there anymore. And I think of that standoff between Trump and Fox and Trump actually winning it. And in many ways proving that he was like the more authentic avatar of their own audience. And now I think their line-up in what it says — and we’ll talk about this — looks a lot more like him than it does even the Fox News of that period. I always think of that as this moment the whole thing turned, where you really saw where the power lied. And Trump understood that in a way others didn’t.

Although, you do end up with the Fox versus the other smaller right-wing networks that are more Trumpy.

ezra klein

Yeah.

And you end up with Fox not being seen as sufficiently servile to Trump over the course of the Trump administration, to the point where as president he’s denouncing them and telling people not to watch them and criticizing them. I mean, you can see that as him keeping the whip on, continuing to tame them. But there is something that happens in terms of Trump being seen as bad for conservatism. And Fox is policing conservatism more than they are policing the Republican Party. And so the fact that there’s ongoing tension and that there isn’t just a — even after that week, there isn’t a total capitulation, I think also matters and is also evidence that the conservative media is part of the conservative movement, which is separate from the Republican Party. And even as Trump has completely taken over the Republican Party, just flattened it, there’s no resistance to Trump in the party structure itself, you do see the conservative movement still doing its own thing to a certain extent somewhat independent of Trump when necessary. And that shows you who’s more powerful.

ezra klein

You’ve had interesting relationships with some of the people I think of as really useful to look at in the shift. And people probably forget this. Pat Buchanan was an MSNBC analyst, a fixture on the network for a really long time. And for people who aren’t that familiar with Buchanan, he worked for Nixon. He runs as a Republican in primaries. He’s in many ways a proto-Trump. And he’s treated as this kind of crank for a long time. And now it’s clear he was early. And on your show early on, you had the segment that was called “It’s Pat,” where you talk about — and the point was that you disagreed, but it was also a kind of — it felt like safe disagreement because Pat Buchanan wasn’t that powerful. And then later on, it feels like the whole conservative movement — I’ve gone back and read his old books. He really sounds like the ideology Trump then tries to develop over time. How do you understand Pat Buchanan’s space in the story we should be telling about the Republican Party?

It is a great question. And I think that the time is ripe if anybody is right now looking for a modern American political history that ought to be written. And that would be very valuable, writing the history of Pat Buchanan, in Republican politics right now. I mean, there’s definitely — he’s not an obscure figure. It’s not like we don’t know who he is. But writing the history of Buchanan and Buchananism in light of the late development of the Trump era Republican Party, that is a good book. I would —

ezra klein

You just launched 1,000 book proposals.

I would read that book. I mean, listen — I mean, I’ve been fascinated with Buchanan for a long time. I did that podcast, “Bag Man,” about Spiro Agnew, and how he got pushed out of office, and the Justice Department’s really interesting role and how that happened. Getting rid of a sitting vice president, adjacency to Watergate, and all that stuff. Agnew ended up on the ticket with Nixon because, essentially, Buchanan put him there. And the reason Buchanan put him there is he was like, listen, he’s just the right kind of racist. We had Nixon worried about the influence of Henry Wallace, worried about, essentially, being seen as a squish by the right flank of his party, and needing to calibrate exactly the way he wanted to calibrate in ‘68. And Agnew was seen as being the right kind of, specifically, anti-Black racist border state personality. Pat Buchanan felt like he cooked him in a lab in order to provide him to Nixon, in order to play that role. And then becomes — Agnew following Buchanan’s lead becomes this poison tipped dart that just goes at the media, at the media, at the media, at the media for the whole Nixon administration in a way that actually lets Nixon stay a little softer in his image because Agnew was out there just killing the media, and the elites, and the pointy-headed professors in a way that Nixon then doesn’t have to do. And that’s all from Buchanan. Buchanan is a paleo-conservative. He is a white nationalist. He is an artist of white racial grievance as a driver of white working class votes, and white middle class votes, honestly. And he has been calling for revolutionary white nationalist politics on the right consistently and in the same way, without evolving at all himself, from the ‘60s until now. I mean, through his most recent books. The far right has figured that out. His books are required reading In the pro-Trump right-wing paramilitary groups, some of which are facing sedition charges now. But he’s the most consistent lyrical Republican racist of the mid-20th century and the start of the 21st. And that will be important for us understanding what happened to the right and to the Republican Party in this century over time. And it’s overdue for a deep look.

ezra klein

I always think of one of the very strange bits of politics being that period — I want to say it’s the Reform Party, and I think in 2000 — where one of the things Trump is saying then is that there’s no future for a Pat Buchanan-like politics. I mean, he’s very explicit about this.

Yeah, he thinks Pat’s too racist.

ezra klein

And then he later becomes the future of Pat Buchanan’s politics.

Yes.

ezra klein

I mean, you were saying earlier that Trump is very good at sticking his finger in the wind. And I don’t actually think it’s all that useful to think about sincerity and Donald Trump. I mean, my colleague David Brooks had this line about a huge amount of the analytical power of journalism, trying to analyze this guy’s psychology, when it’s just six fireflies beeping around in a jar. But there is something there about — I have wondered what it is that changed. And I’m curious for your thoughts on this, if you think it is that the media environment changed so that somebody with Pat Buchanan’s politics would have been more shut out at another time, or it’s that Barack Obama became president and so it created an arousal of the white nationalist politics and created a kind of space for backlash that wasn’t nearly as prevalent before, or something else. Why was Buchanan early as opposed to irrelevant?

Well, again, I think it helps to look at it from a broad historical perspective and just to realize that these impulses, and these arguments, and these ideas of racial grievance, and racial reorganization, and racial oppression, they don’t go away. And they don’t change very much. I mean, they get articulated with more or less flowery language over time. But when you build the Nixon/Agnew administration on the idea that the Civil Rights Movement is a bunch of communists, and it’s American patriotism to oppose communists and therefore to oppose civil rights. And that’s why anybody who calls you a racist is really a commie. And I mean, when that’s the politics of the ‘60 and ‘70s, and there is no corrective for it, you just evolve through it. When the Reagan politics around race and welfare claim and this idea, again, of exploiting racial grievance but with a smile persists through those times, when the deep racial radicalism on the right is kept alive, is continually stoked, those guys are continually fomenting what they foment and they fall in and out of favor depending on what I think the media environment and the electoral environment can tolerate. So even as I was poo-pooing before the idea that we should look to the internet for giving us darker thoughts, there’s a certain dynamic at work in which the internet is an always open lending library. And the things that may be out of fashion or seen as too extreme become just as available as The New York Times, just as available as even mainstream political current commentary. And so you can tap those things whenever you want to. But if we don’t police them and consider some of those things to be wrong, they do just come back up. And if somebody on their way to the White House is willing to play with that and kindle it, it just flares back up immediately. It never goes away.

ezra klein

Speaking of exploiting racial grievance with a smile, when I think of who is the opposite of Pat Buchanan back then, it was Tucker Carlson, who has this dynamic in that era and is also at MSNBC back then, as kind of a party boy libertarian, the Republicans are no fun, they’re in your business. He has this very funny book of political profiles in that period. You get your start in TV on Tucker Carlson’s show. How do you understand his shift over the years?

I don’t think he has shifted over the years. I don’t. I mean, I think he’s gotten older and I think people change as they get older in terms of their inclinations. But I think that while Pat was out there beating this white nationalist drum very aggressively, I don’t think that you’ll find that much difference between his willingness to use race for political advantage and his demagoguery around race. I don’t think you’ll find that much difference substantively between those two men. And the extent to which you articulate it, whether you articulate it with a smile or with a clenched fist, changes over time depending on how much power you have, what the media environment is like, and what the electorate can stand. But that perception that Tucker has changed over time, I don’t think that’s right. I think he’s always been exactly who he is.

ezra klein

I want to think about that for a minute. And I think you’re probably right on race. I think the thing that I think about with Tucker is his orientation towards I guess what would get called the elite, which earlier in his career — I mean, he’s born into a media family. He always has huge jobs in media. He’s always very celebrated in media. He sells himself as this kind of prep school. He’s got his bow tie for a bunch of it. I mean, he was 100 percent a Washington fixture. And he was into it. And I think something that is real about him is his resentment. There is some real resentment he has towards an elite power structure that he was very much part of. He was never the absolute top of, but he was very much part of. And there are certain ways in which I think Tucker is a truer Donald Trump than Donald Trump is. I think he believes in what looked like Trump’s ideology much more than Trump does. He has a more consistent version of it. And I think they both have this kind of weird relationship. They’re both clearly elites. They’re famous. They’re rich. They were part of the power structures in the cities they represented — New York for Trump, D.C. for Tucker. And then at some point, something curdles in them in that relationship. And their resentment towards the very people they were having lunch with forever becomes the driving force of their politics.

That’s interesting.

ezra klein

Does that feel like it’s anything to you?

I’m terrible at psychology. But I think the way I see the shift that you’re talking about is — you know how Tucker used to wear the bow tie and then stopped wearing the bow tie? And as you said, he had this image — this cultivated image — of prep school kid who knows everybody but doesn’t respect them. I think that his — I don’t want to say image. I don’t even know — because I don’t even know if it was false. I think the brand of him, the perception that I think people rightfully had, and that he cultivated, was of a gadfly, of somebody who was in on it, and at the right parties but on the outside. Maybe even like a peanut gallery person, kind of a critic, kind of throwing popcorn from the box seats, being a little bit of a troublemaker. So having access, but being outside it. I think that’s actually also what Trump had as an image. As an accurate perception by outsiders, but also somewhat cultivated. That, yeah, he knows all these people. He can get all these people on the phone. But he doesn’t — he’s not invited to their events. He’s not in the inner circle. He just has access to it. And so you, the rebel, should understand that he knows these people. He can tell us what’s going on with them. But he’s against them just like you are. And so he’s got access, and he’s rich, and he’s not a common man, but he’s around them and not of them. And then what happened with both Tucker and Trump is that they both became the boss. They both got to be in charge. They both got to set their own terms. And so now it can no longer be that there’s somebody else in charge and they’re throwing brickbats that they’re criticizing. And once you get to be the one in charge, there’s no more fun in saying the people who are in charge, they’re terrible. You and I know truth. You can’t do that anymore once you’re the leading person in primetime cable news and once you’re the president who’s actively sitting in the White House and running the federal government. And so then you become less fun. And your message becomes more dark. And the “them” who you are inveighing against becomes shadier and more dangerous. And the whole enterprise has less of a grace note anywhere in it.

ezra klein

How do you think cable news, as an industry, as a media format that plays a role in politics, how do you think its role has changed since 2008?

Not as much as people think. Everybody disagrees with me on this. All media journalists disagree with me on this. Everybody else in cable news disagrees with me on this. But I don’t think that the exact the make up of cable news matters that much. I mean, Larry King was the end all be all of cable news. And then he wasn’t. And Bill O’Reilly was the end all be all of cable news. And then he wasn’t. And Glenn Beck was the end all be all of cable news. And then he wasn’t. And when I went from five days a week to one day a week, it was like, people who like me at least were like, oh, this is really going to change. It doesn’t change that much. It really doesn’t. You mentioned the Fox News lineup for that first Republican debate. Chris Wallace went through this thing where he left Fox News. And it was, oh, he left Fox News and left for an interesting reason. And went to CNN+ and now CNN+ isn’t going to happen. And now he’s on CNN. Has our world changed very much? I don’t know. Chris Wallace is still working. Bret Baier has been a pillar at Fox News all of this time through all the changes that Fox News has been through. And I think that when Glenn Beck was the biggest thing on Fox News at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, when he was at the peak of his radicalism to the point where it even unnerved Fox News, Bret Baier was doing his thing, was doing solid journalism at Fox News. And he was doing it before Glenn Beck, and during Glenn Beck, and thereafter, and is still doing it now. I just don’t — I think that cable news does — we’re 24-hour cable news. It exists. We’re there. And the people who are able to exert influence through expressing compelling opinion, it’s always going to matter a little bit. But I don’t know that it matters that much. I don’t think we’re that big a deal. Do you disagree?

ezra klein

I would need to think about it. I don’t — I think you’re right that the precise makeup in any given moment — well, I’d have to go — I go back and forth on this, because in a way, I think you’re actually underselling yourself a bit. I think that after you, the MSNBC lineup begins to have more of your vibe, right? I mean, Chris Hayes. For a period of time, I was part of this. MSNBC gets very interested in smart people with glasses — which was not the main vibe before that, to just be blunt about it. I think that Tucker over at Fox demonstrates the power of really leaning into a certain form of populist Trumpism. And now the rest of Fox, particularly the primetime lineup, sounds a little bit more like him. But the place where I’m probably more on your side of this is that I think if it wasn’t those people, it would be someone else. That’s why the individuals don’t matter that much. At some point, the market is going to find the audience. It just is going to take a couple of tries. And so it’s not like I think if Tucker doesn’t take that Bill O’Reilly slot at Fox News, nobody at Fox figures out how to echo Trump in an effective way. I think that — in a similar way that I think if Donald Trump doesn’t run in 2016, sometime over the next 12 years, someone like Trump finds that part of the Republican Party and speaks to it.

Yes, that’s exactly right.

ezra klein

And so there’s this way in which I think individuals hasten or slow transitions, but I think that we often look at the flowers that grow and don’t look enough at the soil. And I think that a lot of what ends up mattering for cable news for anything is the soil.

And I don’t think that there is a singular figure of such importance. I mean, in short-term, sure enough. People can have individual — an impact as an individual who’s powerful in the media. But in the longer-term, I don’t think — people who are individuals and media phenomenon because of the way they present themselves in the media, I don’t think they affect fundamental transformation. I mean, if you — I’m doing this thing that’s based on a lot of stuff from the ‘30s and ‘40s right now. And I was shocked to look back at the Father Coughlin thing. I feel like — Charles Coughlin — he’s still a household name. We still think about the idea of a right-wing demagogue in the media and that’s the benchmark that we compare it against.

ezra klein

And Charles Coughlin, of course, being the Catholic priest, the very anti-Semitic, very conspiratorial Catholic priest with just a huge radio show in the 1930s.

Yes. But with Coughlin, at a time when there’s like 123 million people in the country, he’s got between 30 and 40 million people listening to him —

ezra klein

It’s astonishing.

— every week. I mean, a huge cable news audience for a totally dominant primetime hour right now might be 5 million people. The equivalent with our — if you adjust for population, with what Coughlin was doing every week, would have been 80 million people. We’re never going to have somebody that dominant again. There isn’t going to be that kind of a singular force in our politics. There wasn’t before him and there won’t be since. And that is a product of the way that our media works right now, but I think it’s also a good course corrective to be like, oh, don’t get too wound up about what somebody’s monologue was.

ezra klein

I think that’s right. Here’s the other side of it that I wonder about, though, which is, I think, particularly since the rise of social media, that while no individual media person or institution is as dominant as a Coughlin could be, as the three big networks were in the ‘50s and ‘60s, there’s much more herd behavior in the media. So things emerge on social media and then everybody is covering them, in a way that there was a lot just more geographic and time differentiation between different media outlets 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 80 years ago. I mean, I’m not that old. And I think all the time about how when I grew up. We got the L.A. Times. That’s what we had in my house. That was the sum total — there was an opinion section. That was the sum total of political opinion I had access to in a given day coming from professional media people. And CNN emerges. It’s later on that cable news becomes more opinionated. There’s some talk radio at that period. I’m not listening to it, so it’s not as central to me. But now there’s so much more and yet it’s so much more similar. So there’s a strange way in which it is simultaneously way less centralized. But Trump, I think, is a very good example of this. I think that what he ends up doing — he’s in some ways a creation of Twitter. I don’t think you can be Donald Trump in 2016 without Twitter. But I always think his power is misunderstood. His power on Twitter was that he got every journalistic outlet in the country to follow the lead of his tweets, not that his tweets themselves reached so many people. And so there’s this weird paradox of it, of decentralization, but with everybody having access to the same information and the same social media and audience analytics, much more homogenization.

It’s interesting. I think that part of that is the economics of the news industry. What you’re describing where something happens in social media, and then everybody follows it, everybody covers the same stories, I mean, the derogatory way to read that is laziness. I think the more nuanced way to read that is the underfunding of journalism. And so you take what’s easy. You take what’s literally fed to you as free content and you build your stuff around that. In the day of the big three networks and the L.A. Times being the printed source of material for you and your family and your neighbors in Los Angeles, the profession of journalism, what it meant to become a reporter, to become an editor, to work in that field, it was a more sustainable thing. I mean, now getting a reporting job at a local TV station, I mean, you have to have a couple other jobs. The professional support isn’t there because the business environment isn’t such that we’re supporting enough enterprise and independent journalism. That said, it’s not like journalism has collapsed. And I do think that the benefit, the other side of that is that beyond the lazy force-fed stuff that everybody’s covering because everybody has access to it, you can, in this media environment, if you’re willing to look — and this is part of what I tried to do at MSNBC — you are able to find well-reported stories everywhere all over the country, even just in politics, that you can platform to a national audience if you’re willing to do the work to make it interesting and to make it resonate, to make clear to people why it’s important. So the opportunity is still there but the struggle for us in terms of holding onto our democracy and the role of the fourth estate in doing that is to make sure that being a reporter is a good remunerative job and being an editor is a good remunerative job. And that professional journalism done with professional standards is something that not only doesn’t die, but expands and exists everywhere. And so as frustrating as it is, seeing philanthropic efforts and seeing almost crowdsourced efforts to make sure that local news gathering, local professional newsgathering lives, even in places where chain journalism has rotted out the infrastructure to do that in traditional terms, that’s very practical work towards saving the country.

ezra klein

There was a period of time when I guest-hosted for a lot of MSNBC’s shows, including yours. And one of the things that always struck me in that time, working with the producers of them, was how much attention you and your team — because I had some insight then into the process — gave to that search, gave to looking through local papers, gave to trying to find the stories that other people weren’t covering. There was a lot less in the kind of culture you built on your show of what is everybody talking about today and a lot more of what should we be talking about today. Tell me a bit about that orientation and that process, because that is a process you built.

Yeah, I mean, it just basically comes from the idea of wanting to be worth people’s time and attention. If you’re going to ask people to sit down, particularly if your name is Rachel Maddow and you’re asking people to sit down for something called “The Rachel Maddow Show,” first of all, that takes a lot of hubris. And second of all, you better —

ezra klein

Naming a show after yourself is ridiculous, I should say. We’ll be right back on “The Ezra Klein Show.”

But it creates — you’re then assigning yourself a responsibility to be worth it. And so the way that our news meeting process runs to this day is that there’s a staff news production note that is circulated among everybody and then I circulate my own competing one. And then we get on the air and I ask questions — or we get in the meeting, or on the phone, on Zoom together, and I ask questions about what’s in their stack of stuff that I didn’t know about and they ask me questions about what’s in my stack of stuff. And then we come up with basically kind of a filtered what I call the middle column, because that’s how we used to do it on the whiteboard, of stuff that we are considering potentially putting on the show based on the entire universe of news that we’ve been able to put together, both as me and a staff. And then crucial question. What are they doing at 8 o’clock? What’s Chris doing? And what’s Lawrence doing? And sometimes what’s being discussed all day on dayside, because I don’t always have a — I don’t ever have a TV on. And the reason that I’m asking what else is happening is not because I want to make sure that we’re covering those things. I just want to make sure we’re not covering those things. I don’t want to do the same thing that everybody is doing. And sometimes you do. I mean, sometimes the story of the day is the story of the day. But then all the more pressure to make sure that you’re bringing something new to it. And it’s not from any ideological place. It’s just about fear of failure and wanting to be important enough for people to spend time with, wanting to be worth people’s while. And I don’t need to hear more punditry on something that I’ve already heard about all day. And most people, I think, don’t either.

ezra klein

But how did the literal search work for you? I mean, did you have a list of the 15 metro dailies that you found most useful? Were there aggregators you turn to? I think a lot of people in journalism have the aspiration to be differentiated in what they cover, but people end up spending a lot of time on Twitter. Algorithms are now much more predictable. They kind of give you what they’ve given everybody else. You don’t have too much social media presence. Not that you’re not literally on Twitter, but you definitely don’t spend a lot of time there, or anywhere else in social media that I can tell. You’re clearly spending your time reading something. How are you deciding what?

In terms of producing the show, we’ve been through a few different structural forms to try to keep that process fresh and make sure that we’re not doing what everybody else is doing. There was a time when we used to have producers who were responsible for regions of the country. OK, we know there’s some interesting stuff going on around — I remember, like, there was a real structurally radicalizing moment in North Carolina Republican politics in the state legislature a few years ago. And so it was like, OK somebody’s got to read the press in the Carolinas every day and just report to us every day what’s going on from there. The Flint water crisis — people remember us covering that in a way that was new to the way the national media was talking about it. The only reason that we were on to that Flint story I think before other people were is because we were covering what I saw as an interesting radicalizing process that was happening under Governor Rick Snyder in Michigan that was about this emergency management process and getting rid of democracy at the local level and instead having state-imposed managers come in and effectively depose locally-elected officials. And I thought that was interesting in democracy terms. That’s why we were watching Michigan, which is why we were ears to the ground that allowed us to cotton to what these Flint activists were saying about this disaster that was happening in their town. It also helped us understand how it happened. So, in part, you need to be curious. You need to be interested in what’s happening around the world. You need to be cognizant of how much time you’re spending kibitzing about things that everybody else knows about. If you’re in the media, your job is to find stuff that’s important and that you understand well enough to be able to convey the importance to other people. And so that requires work. You have to go search stuff out. I’ll also say that talking about the business structure of journalism, we’re also in this moment right now where papers around the country are rising and falling in terms of their quality. And so knowing what particular paper or sometimes what state media consortium is particularly good, has particularly good reporters right now, that just sometimes — St. Louis has a lot going on in terms of journalism. Sometimes Western New England has a lot going on in terms of journalism. And sometimes it’s not exactly one paper. It’s a mix of alt weeklies, and the investigative unit at a local TV station that’s got to be in its bonnet, and occasionally it’s bloggers who are alerting you to stuff that traditional journalism formats aren’t. But you just have to put the work in. You have to go read. And there is an opportunity cost to spending too much time in the bubble. The opportunity that you are losing is the opportunity to go find stuff that’s of more interest. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

I think of the recent years on your show, the recent years really of American politics as being very much about this war for democracy, this question of democracy, the big lie and January 6, but before that, just the generalized Donald Trump attack on institutions. But you all were pretty early — well before Trump — at obsessing over predecessor fights that were happening at the state level. You mentioned North Carolina. But there have been a bunch of them. There have been fights like this in Wisconsin. There’s been fights like this in Michigan. And I think it’s kind of correct to understand Trump as a continuation of something that had begun with candidates we don’t really think of as Trumpy or figures we don’t really think of as Trumpy. They were there before him. But do you want to talk a bit about that continuity, because I think it actually prepared a lot of the ground for the coverage you now do of both Donald Trump and democracy, but some of the other projects we’re going to talk about that you’re working on around democracy.

Yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up, because I feel like that is — it’s an easy concept that for whatever reason it hasn’t caught on. Even when people are willing to talk about Trump being the latest iteration of something that’s been happening for a while on the right, usually what that means is we’ve had demagogic figures in the past. I think the important thing, the important continuity at least, is that in my lifetime — in the ‘70, ‘80, ‘90s, 2000s and to today — we have seen the Republican Party repeatedly experiment with, and increasingly commit to, minority rule structural changes. Structural changes that are designed to not just allow them to rule without the support of the governed, but to try to discredit majority rule institutions. And that is playing with fire. It always has been. When it accumulates over time, it gets worse and worse to the point where you’ve so weakened the edifice of democracy that it’s easier to push over. But I think that ought to be held accountable for doing things to try to separate power from the views and votes of the people. And we haven’t. We’ve seen it all as dirty tricks. We’ve seen it as playing hardball or we’ve seen it as going for short-term advantage. But it’s a project. It’s a project that all leans in the same direction. And I do think that it’s been toxic. And I don’t think that it has been a mirror image thing where it’s also happened on the left. It is something that has been happening in, particularly state governance, in North Carolina, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in states where Republicans have power and where they fear that future elections will deprive them of it. That’s how we got to a place where you’ve got a candidate saying that last election that elected me, that was fraud, there were millions of illegal votes. And no, I’m not going to accept the results of the next election. You can only get there, you can only do that once you’ve been pushing against small d democracy enough that it resonates, that it doesn’t strike people as wrong. It strikes people as a relief.

ezra klein

If you’re going back into the state houses, the pre-Trump period, for people who weren’t tracking this and think that this anti-democratic sentiment element strategy is something Donald Trump brought to Republican politics, what really stands out to you as the most vivid of these stories?

Well, I mean, this isn’t an obscure one, but there’s a president named Barack Obama and there’s an opening on the Supreme Court. And presidents make nominations to the Supreme Court and the Senate gives its advice and consent on that nominee. When that stopped and then just blatantly saying Amy Coney Barrett can be confirmed on election day, on the — whatever it was — the month before voting — on the other side of it, I mean, the Republicans celebrate that as this great example of hardball. But it’s telling the American people that power doesn’t accrue to those who’ve got the votes. That’s a fundamental thing. And you can regret what that meant in terms of the makeup of the Supreme Court, but more profoundly that is taking an ax to the roots of a tree that is old and fragile anyway in a way that I think was just really dangerous. And really not just mean-spirited, not just strategic and hardball, but deleterious to our future as a country. So that’s one. Do you have one in mind that you’re thinking about that you think worth to talk about?

ezra klein

I mean, I always think that what happened in North Carolina after that election was really remarkable, where they just change everything.

Yeah, so North Carolina Republicans decide that if you’re going to have a Democratic governor elected, well, the governor no longer has powers as governor. I mean, that’s — again, the question is, does power accrue to the person who received the votes? And when you separate that, you’re doing something profoundly un-American. You’re doing something that is about removing the basis of how we think of ourselves as a Republic in a democracy. And it’s just — it compounds.

ezra klein

Here’s something where I think my thinking has changed a lot since 2008. I think before that, I did not appreciate how much of American politics was not running according to its rules but according to its norms. How much that if you really went down to the rules of American politics, they said very, very little. I mean, I think a great example is just simply how the electoral college works. It just turns out you can kind of do almost whatever you want if you’re a state legislature. And we typically don’t.

Well, you wouldn’t dare. It would be terrible.

ezra klein

You wouldn’t do it.

People would be so upset.

ezra klein

It would be awful, right? But then all of a sudden people began to notice you could. And I think about this with McConnell and Garland. There’s no rule that he had to treat an Obama nominee fairly. Just that was how it was done. But he had the votes to not do it. I mean, I think a lot about polarization as being the key thing that began to erode this. But as the stakes rise, every time people begin to believe that the stakes of American politics are too high for niceties, too high to treat it like the system itself is something that needs to be taken into account, you just have this pressure to not observe norms and to play to as far as the rules can take you. And it turns out, in American politics, the rules can take you incredibly far. They can allow all kinds of trickery and screwery. And as you say, in a bunch of individual cases, we call that hardball. In a bunch of individual cases, we’re like, oh, what a bare-knuckle strategy from so-and-so. And then systematically, it’s like the system begins to collapse in on itself. Because if you are using power that way, then you also don’t have the power to rewrite the rules to make the game fair again. And once the gain becomes fair, you get a legitimacy crisis. I mean, to me, it’s like, do I think we’re going to find ourselves in complete crisis in the next 15 years? I wouldn’t give it more than 50 percent, but I wouldn’t give it less than 15 percent, which is higher than I would have done before.

Mhm. And there’s also a cost toward hardening the norms into rules. If we take the lesson of the post-2016 era as, oh, the norms are based on shame, and so therefore shamelessness is a get-out-jail-free card for all the norms. And so therefore they can’t be norms anymore. They can’t be based on shame and public rebuke. They have to be based on rules and enforceable orders. Well, that costs you something, too, in terms of us as a democracy. I’m thinking about Geoffrey Berman’s book. He was the S.D.N.Y. U.S. attorney who wrote the book about how he was interfered with as the U.S. attorney in S.D.N.Y., that he got pressure directly from the White House to let the president’s allies off and to bring politically motivated prosecutions against Democrats. It’s a terrifying book. It should have gotten more attention, I think, than it did. But first of all, I mean, just in practical terms, the Justice Department needs to contend with Berman’s record of what happened to him in a much more serious way than they have because that happened inside the Justice Department in a way that should never happen again and is likely to happen again now that we know that Trump was able to get away with it with no consequences. But at the same time, Berman has a final chapter in his book where he presents some potential fixes. And he says things like, if a US attorney has done a detailed and earnest review of the evidence and makes a decision to prosecute or not prosecute, main justice and no other U.S. attorney can take a contrary decision. And that kind of a rule would have solved some of the problems that he describes in terms of what happened to him. He was told to bring a politically motivated prosecution. His staff, in fact, did a full review of the Democrat who the Trump White House wanted him to prosecute, found that there was no basis for a prosecution. He declined. I mean, it’s troubling enough that they did the review and they didn’t think there was a predicate to do it. But they did the review, they declined, and then the Trump Justice Department shopped it and made another U.S. attorney bring that prosecution. So he’s saying that shouldn’t be allowed because we did a real review and that should have been the end of it. OK, that’s fine. But if you did have that kind of a rule and it was not Geoffrey Berman, but it was Trump getting reelected in 2024 and he puts Rudy Giuliani in as the U.S. attorney at S.D.N.Y. He gets his old job back. Well, yeah, in that case, a decision by Rudy Giuliani to do something terrible or a decision by some other bad actor to do something terrible, you would want main justice to be able to throw in some sort of safety net or some sort of stop strip into the road ahead of that racing car. I mean, the reason there are norms and not rules is because the basic idea is that you want good people in power. And when people are revealed to be bad power, you want there to be a way to take them out. We just have to make sure that’s true.

ezra klein

In a way, I see the Biden administration, and I guess specifically Merrick Garland right now, as a little paralyzed between this question of norms and rules with Donald Trump, and some other questions around Jan. 6 and maybe around the classified documents we’ll see. But there’s this question, I think, that they are facing and don’t know how to answer between, well, the rule is nobody’s above the rule of law and the norm is, in America, presidents don’t prosecute their predecessors for the most part. And there’s a feeling that if you open that door, particularly then somebody like Donald Trump gets back in and then it’s seen as something that just gets done. You’ve opened the door to something you see in other countries, very dangerously, where the law becomes a tool that different administrations or regimes wield against each other and their political enemies. How do you see that tension? Do you think they’re navigating that well? Do you think they’re overly in their heads about it?

I think it’s really hard. And I don’t think it’s their fault. I don’t think there is an easy answer. And I think that the thing that we did wrong as a country was put somebody with those kinds of criminal inclinations and stated intentions in a position where we had to decide, as a country, whether or not to let those apparent crimes slide, which is really bad, or become the kind of country where former presidents are prosecuted. Those are our choices. Those are terrible choices. And those are the only choices that we have. And the reason those are the only choices we have are because that guy got elected. The moral of the story is don’t give bad people lots of power. Because when you do, things break. And in a certain fundamental way — because that is the choice, right? If Trump is indicted, if Trump did some of the things that he’s credibly accused of doing and it results in prosecution, if he did those things and it results in prosecution, we have fundamentally changed as a country because we are a person who brings those kinds of prosecutions. If he did those things and doesn’t get prosecuted, because we’re scared of being that kind of a country, then we are the kind of country that’s elects people like that and then lets them get away with it because they have power. Both are terrible. And I have my own opinions as to which is more terrible. It’s not worth my sharing them, I don’t think. But I think it is worth appreciating this at an objective level that we’re in an impossible position. And this is not like choosing between two types of ice cream. This is like choosing between two types of car crashes.

ezra klein

I do sometimes wonder if the true actor who should be seen as more destructive than he is is Gerald Ford here. That the pardoning of Nixon in retrospect was a quite terrible mistake, particularly by a Republican who would have had credibility to say, look, these were crimes, I mean, and nobody’s above the rule of law. I do think that kind of entrenched an idea that the way America moves on from presidential criminality is by moving on. And it’s just an interesting alternative history to me what would have happened if in that moment when there was more consensus that wrong had been done — I mean, when the president had actually resigned — we had gone further.

There was more consensus, but not as much consensus as we think. The consensus was very recently arrived at. So Nixon had more support — dead-ender support — than you think until the very end when it broke. And then when it broke, it was the Supreme Court ruling, which not only had a substantive impact of releasing the tapes, but also gave total clarity that the judiciary was going to be no haven for him. Supreme Court ruling, tapes released, the C.I.A. cover-up smoking gun tape, and then the collapse of political support, the resignation, pardon. All happens very, very, very quickly. And up until that moment, I think it might have been reasonable to think that a prosecution of Nixon would have brought blood in the streets, and might have even, had Ford done it. And that doesn’t mean it’s not a reason to do it, but it does mean that that’s, I think, part of what was being earnestly weighed at the time. The only lesson is bad people shouldn’t get that much power. But we are — I mean, now that we’ve dealt with it at multiple levels — and we had to deal with — so Spiro Agnew was running a criminal bribery and extortion ring in the White House while Nixon was committing the Watergate crimes. Trump was doing all the things that Trump was doing while he was in the White House and thereafter. And this now means that we can’t see either of those things as an aberration. We’ve had to confront this multiple times over the course of a single lifetime. And our generation is going to have to be the one that figures out what kind of country we are to deal with this kind of criminality at the highest levels. We’re just going to have to do it. And it’s going to change the country for the worse either way.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good bridge to your new podcast. Tell me about “Ultra.” Tell me what it’s about.

It’s about sedition, at one fundamental level. The centerpiece in the plot of the story is the 1944 great sedition trial where the Justice Department put on trial, at the same time, more than two dozen defendants, charged them with trying to violently overthrow the country and being in cahoots with a hostile foreign power — Germany — to do that. And it was a failed prosecution. It didn’t work, which itself is an amazing story. But it’s also about authoritarianism and about American support, not just for Germany during World War II, which is an underappreciated story — which is I think there’s a little bit of a moment I think happening where people are starting to talk about Lindbergh and the America First Movement and American pro-fascists during the time. But it is American support for a foreign dictatorship that we were about to go to war with, but also American support for fascism and authoritarianism and a willingness to use violence to get there. And you get that confrontation between the Justice Department that’s onto it and trying to stop it. And then you get this amazing complication, which is that it turns out there’s a whole bunch of members of Congress and senators who are involved in it and who are connected to this very bad circumstance. And one of the things that goes wrong at the Justice Department is that sitting senators and members of Congress use their political power to shut the Justice Department down, to get prosecutor fired, to get the investigation derailed, and to let the bad guys get away, because they themselves are implicated in it. And just as I think the Justice Department needs to contend with what happened to Geoffrey Berman at S.D.N.Y. during the Trump administration, this is a history that I think that we need to contend with in terms of thinking about the suitability of the criminal justice system for dealing with crimes — politically motivated crimes by powerful people.

ezra klein

Who’s a character in the saga who, either as a hero or a villain, you wish were a household name today?

Oh, that’s a good question. I’m going to take the easy way out and tell you there’s a few.

[laughs]

I’m sorry.

ezra klein

You can give me a few.

I’ll give you a few. One of them is a prosecutor named John Rogge, R-O-G-G-E. And he’s kind of the main focus of the second half of the series. And the thing that’s fascinating about him is he’s this wunderkind prosecutor. I mentioned Huey Long earlier. After Huey Long is assassinated as a U.S. Senator, his effective dictatorship in Louisiana is still operating. They have this — the Huey Long machine in Louisiana is profoundly corrupt and has the state’s politics in a death grip. And the Justice Department dispatches this young prosecutor to go down there and face the real physical danger of confronting this machine. And this guy John Rogge, this young hot prosecutor, goes down there, and spends a lot of time down there and actually does it. Actually dismantles the Huey Long machine, which is something that has real historical import and for which — it was very unclear, at the outset of that, that he was going to succeed. Fresh off of that, he then gets dispatched. He gets a big job at main justice. And they put him on a sedition trial in 1940. Now, this is not the great sedition trial of 1944. This is earlier. This is 1940 when 17 members of father Charles Coughlin’s militia, the Christian Front, are all arrested and put on trial for sedition. They were actually arrested 80 years before the Oath Keepers were all arrested, which is bizarre. But Christian Front militia — you’ll hear about it in the podcast. They were planning something and working on something that was really quite terrifying. They got arrested. It was front page news all across the country. J. Edgar Hoover himself announces the arrests. And they bring in Rogge to prosecute these guys in New York. And it’s a slam dunk case. They had an informant inside the group. They have their guns. They have their bombs. They have all of their plans. And they get acquitted. And there’s a mistrial. And the whole prosecution is a disaster. And this was Rogge’s second act after he just blew up the Huey Long thing. So Rogge is kind of licking his wounds. And the administration and the Justice Department is kind of freaked out about the fact that these guys all got off. And in 1944, the great sedition trial is brought. And the members of Congress who are connected to this plot successfully pressured the Justice Department to fire the prosecutor. And the attorney general caves and fires the prosecutor under pressure from members of Congress who are implicated in the plot that’s being tried by this prosecutor. It’s terrible. And who do they give the ball to after they fire the prosecutor? Same guy, John Rogge. And he is the one who brings the sedition trial to its end. And it ends in disaster. And then he doesn’t give up. Part of this plot is that the accusations that these seditionists are working with the Hitler government to try to mount this violent overthrow attempt of the US government. And when the trial collapses, he goes to Germany. And he’s like, fine, I’m going to figure it out from the German side. And he interviews the Nazis who are supporting the American seditionists. And gets them to — oh, yeah, we’re working with this guy. We paid this guy. I mean, he interviews them in their cells at Nuremberg. And he collects all this information. And by then, we’ve won the war. And this prosecution was a disaster. And this is really embarrassing because there’s all these members of Congress and members of the Senate who are involved. And he comes back with this information and is like, I’ve got it, and we need to tell the American people what happened, and the Justice Department is like, we’re not bringing another prosecution. He’s like, but I’ve got the information. I’ve got it dead to rights. They fire him. And he goes public with it, which is wrong. The Justice Department should never collect information that it’s going to use anywhere other than in court. The Justice Department should only speak through its actions in court. It should not collect information, not bring an indictment, and then tell the American people what they found, James Comey. It should not do it. And Rogge did it, which is both wrong and totally understandable and is a really big deal. And I just — people ought to know who he is. I just told you the whole podcast. You don’t have to listen to it now.

ezra klein

Yea, but — there were some parts in that I’d like to hear more about. But I was waiting for the second character. You’re like, oh, we got a bunch. But you got —

We do. There’s another — there’s a guy who’s a big deal in the early part of the podcast, named Leon Lewis. And there’s a great book by a historian named Steven Ross called, “Hitler in Los Angeles.” That tells the story. He gets access to Leon Lewis’s files. Leon Lewis is an activist with the Anti-Defamation League. And the L.A.P.D. and the L.A. County Sheriff and the F.B.I. in Southern California does not want to hear it when, particularly the Jewish community in Los Angeles is weirded out by the fact that there’s an Aryan bookstore and there’s openly organizing Hitler Brownshirt meetings in L.A. and there’s increasing violence against the Jewish community. I mean, it’s bad. And the cops don’t care. And Leon Lewis organizes what is effectively a private spying and agent provocateur ring. It’s not actually Jews in the most case who he gets to work for him as spies. He convinces German-Americans and some of his fellow World War I veterans to go join all these groups, and report on what they’re doing and collect actionable evidence intelligence about what they’re doing to feed it to law enforcement. And then when law enforcement still doesn’t care to use it to disrupt these groups, to expose them, to disrupt them, to complicate their efforts, and he dies in obscurity. And you can tell the story through his files. But when law enforcement, both local and federal, weren’t willing to protect against an active Nazi threat as we were heading toward war against the Nazis in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, this guy privately took it upon himself to do it and did an amazing job. And he ought to be a household name.

ezra klein

I’m not going to make you reveal more of the show, although people can go find it.

I could go on. I’m totally obsessed.

ezra klein

I know, and that’s why people should subscribe and listen to “Ultra.” But let me get a little bit of what the bookcase looks like. Always our final question, which is, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Ah, well, I should recommend to you “Hitler in Los Angeles,” by Steven Ross. It’s amazing. There’s another book that’s set in Boston, which is around the same time, called “Nazis in Copley Square,” by a Jesuit priest named Charles Gallagher.

ezra klein

Sort of a headlining trend here.

Yeah, I know, I’m just — these are all things — I’m going to give you three for the podcast and then I’ll give you others. There’s another book — it’s similar title — called “Hitler’s American Friends,” by a historian called Bradley Hart. Those are all some primary source documents that we used in “Ultra,” and I can highly, highly recommend all three of those. If you don’t just want to do homework reading for my podcast, I did put some thought into this. And I have a novel to recommend, which is along the same lines as the storyline because it’s all I can think about.

ezra klein

“Hitler and Long Beach.”

Sorry, close. It’s a book called “The Oppermanns.” It’s a novel written by a guy whose name is Lion Feuchtwanger, which is F-E-U-C-H-T-W-A-N-G-E-R. And the Southern California connection is that he does, as a refugee from Germany, end up living out his days in Los Angeles. And I think his house is now used as like a writer’s retreat. He has this beautiful house in L.A. that’s now used by a foundation. But “The Oppermanns” is one of his novels that was one of the best efforts by anyone writing from inside Germany at the time to tell the story about the rising threat of what the authoritarian takeover in Germany meant for the citizens of Germany. And it’s just beautifully written, super engaging. It’s one of those stories where you know how it ends, but you also are completely held in suspense the entire time. It’s just a beautifully constructed, beautifully written novel that also reorients your brain to, I think, in a constructive way, in terms of thinking about real people’s lives, real people’s responsibilities and capacities to resist rising authoritarianism. So “The Oppermanns” I would recommend. A historian named Susan Dunn wrote a book on the 1940 presidential election, which is really, really worth reading. It’s just called “1940,” by Susan Dunne. That’s really, really worth it. And then I have a personal one, which is just a — literally just a thing from my heart today, which is that I have a dear friend who just died. He’s 45 years old. His name was Billy Sothern, S-O-T-H-E-R-N. And I just — I’m sort of dealing with the aftermath of Billy’s death right now and just really appreciating him. He was a legendary capital defense attorney in New Orleans. He came out of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative and represented men on death row in New Orleans. And also is just a lyrical, beautiful writer about New Orleans. Did some of the most moving, most illuminating, most deep writing about New Orleans and about Louisiana, particularly in the wake of Katrina. And so I’m just really feeling Billy right now because we just lost him. And he has a book called “Down in New Orleans,” which you should find and buy. And it’s — both as an elegy for my friend, which is why I want to say this, but also just because I reread it just after he died this past week and it’s just as moving as it ever was. So “Down in New Orleans,” Billy Sothern.

ezra klein

I’m sorry for your loss there.

Thanks, Ezra.

ezra klein

But it’s been wonderful getting to spend some time with you. Rachel Maddow, your new podcast is “Ultra.” Thank you very much.

Ezra, thank you so, so much. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

The dollar is king. This year the strength of the US currency has humbled the yen, the euro and the pound sterling. US interest rates are putting pressure on dollar debtors around the world.
This is not a surprise. It is often said that the dollar wins whatever the state of the world economy. It is a safe haven in crisis; in a boom, money surges into the dollar because US business is the prime generator of profits. But what is increasingly hard to ignore is how the dollar’s monetary pre-eminence is out of proportion to America’s actual economic standing in the world.
Thanks to the explosive growth of emerging markets such as China and India, the world economy is increasingly multipolar. As a result, the US accounts for little more than 20 per cent of global GDP and yet its share of currency reserves is closer to 60 per cent and the dollar is involved in 85 per cent of all foreign currency transactions. If currency is conventionally thought of as an attribute of sovereignty, then this preponderance of the dollar would seem to confirm the continued existence of a US financial empire. And yet in 2022 this is at odds with America’s polarised and dysfunctional politics and the great power competition it faces abroad. It seems almost anachronistic that the Federal Reserve still functions as the de facto central bank of the world, like a hangover from the era of the Marshall Plan in the mid-20th century, or the moment of unipolarity in the 1990s.
How long can this anomaly continue? Are there alternatives to the dollar? In times of war the question becomes an urgent one.
At the start of 2022 economists debated the possibility of a Sino-Russian axis (with India as a potential third member), and a new currency system based on commodities such as oil, wheat or minerals. Cryptocurrencies were touted as the unpolitical, private alternative.
Such speculation has faded and the exchange rate of the US currency is once more a dominant force on the world economy. Talk of alternatives to the dollar seems like an exercise in wishful or alarmist thinking, a sign of an unease with an unbalanced world, rather than a realistic analysis of likely macroeconomic trends.
[See also: Is your pension safe?]
The century of dollar dominance has always been marked by controversy. The dollar emerged as the commanding world currency owing to the First and Second World Wars. While the Europeans and Japanese consumed themselves in conflict, the Americans were war profiteers. That did not endear them to the rest of the world.
For the British elite in the wake of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the realisation that the future of the war effort, and with it the Empire, hinged on American money came as an unholy shock. In France in the 1920s, American tourists were both loved and hated for their purchasing power. Trotsky mocked the way Europe’s old elite humbled themselves before midwestern bankers such as Charles Dawes, who brokered the reparations settlement with Germany of 1924. Things were not helped by America’s aggressive deflations, first in 1920 and again in 1929, which tipped the world into recession, and by the ludicrously dysfunctional American policy mix.
Full-blown isolationism would at least have been consistent. Instead, while the American government refused to muddy its hands with the difficult business of reparations, Wall Street lent to European governments and businesses on a vast scale. Meanwhile, Congress imposed rigorous protectionism, making it impossible to service those debts. By 1933, not just Hitler’s regime but the governments of Britain and France had defaulted on their debts to the US.
When it came to devising a new currency system for the world after the Second World War, John Maynard Keynes was determined to avoid dollar hegemony. To tame America’s capricious policy, he proposed a system that would subject everyone to the same pressure to adjust domestic policy to international economic constraints. It is an idea that has repeatedly resurfaced, most significantly in 2009, in Chinese demands for a new currency system to be based on a synthetic global currency, presumably managed by the IMF or another global body. But the idea never stood a chance. Even under the gold standard, in the pomp of its power after 1945, Washington was not going to accept its subordination to a global monetary corset.
Instead, from the 1950s onwards, the gold reserves of Fort Knox were used to anchor the dollar and the rest of the world’s currencies that were pegged to the US currency. This made the US currency as good as gold – provoking protests from the French about exorbitant privilege. It was a highly unstable arrangement. How could the Fed, a national central bank, which had a commitment to national stability, ensure enough liquidity for a global system? As the Belgian economist Robert Triffin pointed out in 1960, if the Fed acted to correct excess demand in the US, it risked choking off the world economy. Once again, the call went up: world stability depended on a universal currency. In the 1960s the IMF created a synthetic global currency, the SDR, but like Esperanto it never caught on. Instead, the system was held together with swap lines that allowed the Fed to provide dollars to fellow central banks in addition to other interventions, such as bans on open trading in gold.
Then in 1971, facing even larger deficits than in the 1960s, Richard Nixon, the president, simply abandoned the dollar peg. Global currencies gyrated wildly. But as the White House tapes recorded, Nixon said he “didn’t give a s*** about the lira”. The dollar plunged, the price of dollar-denominated commodities like oil surged. The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) considered repricing oil in another currency. But the shift never happened. No one else wanted to be the global anchor, certainly not the Germans, whose Deutsche Mark was the obvious alternative. The government didn’t want to jeopardise Germany’s status as a champion exporter.
In 1979 Paul Volcker, chairman of the Fed, finally did the unthinkable. To end the inflation that had troubled the US (and world) economy since the late 1960s, he tightened monetary policy, driving interest rates up and unleashing the economic crisis that many had long feared. The US economy slumped and dollar debtors around the world went into crisis. The US had to bail out its own over-extended banks. Yet what emerged from the “Volcker Shock” was a new dollar system based on floating exchange rates, the further empowerment of Wall Street and the final defeat of organised labour. Budget constraints on the US were removed again, and from the 1980s it made full use of this freedom, borrowing on a huge scale from Japan and then from China. By the early 2000s analysts were warning of a dollar crisis ahead. Beijing would surely exercise the whip hand its ownership of trillions of dollars of US Treasury securities gave it. Enraged by Nato’s offer of membership to Ukraine and Georgia, in 2008 Vladimir Putin suggested a concerted Sino-Russian raid on the dollar. This would entail dumping their holdings of Treasuries so as to deliberately crash the market. The Russians sold out. The Chinese did not.
The crisis that year was one internal to the dollar system – the meltdown of bank balance sheets. But rather than plunging in 2008, the dollar rose. From Europe to East Asia, banks around the world were pleading for dollar liquidity. The Fed obliged, dishing out dollars on an epic scale. The same thing happened in 2020: faced with the Covid crisis, the Fed flushed the entire global financial system with the dollar. As ever, instead of overturning dollar hegemony a crisis reinforced the central role of the American currency.
The pattern repeated in 2022. In response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine the US and Europe imposed sanctions on Russia. In an unprecedented move they violated their commitment to honour central bank claims in favour of the Russian central bank. But after some feverish talk about alternatives to the dollar, what has happened? Instead of selling dollars and fleeing into any other currency, global demand for dollars is stronger than ever.
[See also: Could a house price crash tame the UK’s rental market?]
How does an inherently unstable system, whose emergence from 1916 was resisted and whose end has been repeatedly foretold, endure every crisis? What is the secret ingredient that holds the dollar system together?
The significance of Money and Empire, the new book by the economist Perry Mehrling, is that he takes us to the heart of this question. Like Mehrling’s previous books, Money and Empire uses the biography of a leading economist as a device for making a far more general argument. In this case, Mehrling’s medium is Charles P Kindleberger.
Charles P Kindleberger. Photo by The Truman Library
Kindleberger’s career began and took off in the years of the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Marshall Plan. Disillusioned with Washington politics and blacklisted on account of his association with American leftists by McCarthy’s witch hunts, Kindleberger made his career in the prestigious economics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kindleberger is best known for his argument that every successful phase in the world financial system has depended on the presence of a willing hegemon. The Bank of England played this role during Pax Britannica in the 19th century, as has the Fed in recent decades. The disaster of the interwar period, which Kindleberger chronicled in The World in Depression: 1929-1939 (1973), was partly down to the fact that there was no equivalent hegemonic central bank.
It is a compelling theory. But, as Mehrling shows, talk of hegemony is easily misunderstood. Hegemony suggests the authority of governments and states. And central banks, as we know them today, are national state institutions. But as their history illustrates, the state is not a given thing. It is made historically and through interactions with interests at large. And the boundaries of the state are porous. Private interests intermingle with state power. The Bank of England may have been founded in 1694 but it was not nationalised until 1946. The United States did not have a central bank at all until 1913. Its financial system was regionalised. New York was umbilically connected to the City of London. The regional Fed branches in the United States are to this day stacked with business executives from the districts they represent. Only the Fed board in Washington DC is a truly public institution.
Kindleberger was trained in the 1920s by a generation of American monetary economists who saw themselves as simultaneously helping to engineer a nationally integrated US financial system (centred on the Fed) and a global financial system (centred on the dollar). The First World War both created the US national financial system and began to remake the international system around the US. As the centre of finance shifted from London to Wall Street, the dollar emerged, according to Kindleberger, not so much as a national currency foreign to the rest of the world – in which they nevertheless borrowed, lent and transacted – but as the native currency of the 20th-century global financial system. In this sense the dollar was truly a successor to gold – the common denominator of the pre-1914 London-based regime.
As Mehrling argues, Kindleberger is best thought of less as an inter-national economist than as a cosmopolitan economic thinker. To describe the world economy and its currency system as international implies that its building blocks are national economies. For Kindleberger, what counted was the mesh of private financial transactions running from commercial centre to commercial centre, across national boundaries and in whatever currency happened to be most convenient and offer attractive margins.
Kindleberger was at odds with both the monetarist and Keynesian spirit of the post-1945 period. Despite their differences, over how best to control inflation and manage unemployment, both main schools of macroeconomics focused on the stabilisation of the national economy, while international connections were of secondary import. The world economy appeared as a series of national islands rather than what Hyun Song Shin, a senior economist at the Bank for International Settlements, would later call the interlocking matrix of private balance sheets.
For much of his working life Kindleberger was an economist at odds with his times. His career spanned the heyday of the national economy between the 1930s and the 1980s, whereas his conception of the economy was better suited to the world of globalisation before 1914 and the second phase of globalisation from the 1970s.
This tension was evident in Kindleberger’s confident insistence that far from being doomed by America’s budget deficit and its trade imbalance, the Bretton Woods international monetary system could be saved. What the US authorities needed to do was not to impose national restrictions on capital flows. On the contrary, the key was to trust to the logic of the US-centred financial system. Some money might flow out in the short-term, but it would come back and the safest way to ensure that was to not prevent its exit. After all, where was large-scale global money to go? Then as now, there was no real alternative to the dollar.
For Kindleberger, Nixon’s freeing of the dollar from gold, the deliberate destruction of an international monetary system for the sake of national economic and political priorities, was the disastrous denouement of the national economic point of view. But his own alarm also proved to be overdone. Rather than tearing the world economy apart, the end of Bretton Woods would confirm Kindleberger’s basic point: the resilience of the dollar system lies not in the robust health of the US national economy or its national politics, but in the strength of global financial network that is woven in dollars, and the willingness of the Fed to support that network as a lender of last resort.
This remains the central insight today. When we evaluate the world economy and conclude that the dollar’s role in global finance is disproportionate to its share of global GDP, that America’s trade deficit is unsustainable, that congressional politics is a mess and presidential leadership is dangerously erratic, we are conflating two fundamentally incommensurate visions of the world economy: the one cosmopolitan, the other national or inter-national. The resilience of the dollar is pre-eminently the effect of a cosmopolitan power structure. And as Mehrling writes, “while the United States may well have become unable to lead”, the global dollar system not only survives but expands, as private actors find ways through derivatives trades to insulate themselves against national shocks and the network of central banks centred on the Fed finds ever new instruments “to put a floor underneath the muddle”.
[See also: The true cost of Liz Truss’s energy price cap plan]

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Without going too far out on a limb, I believe almost everyone would like two things from their jobs and careers: success and happiness. They want to do relatively well financially, receive fair recognition for their accomplishments, enjoy their work as much as one can, and become happier as a person as a result. These are reasonable goals, but they can be a lot to ask—so many people, especially ambitious, hard-working people, simplify them in a logical way: They first seek success and then assume that success will lead to happiness.But this reasoning is flawed. Chasing success has costs that can end up lowering happiness, as many a desiccated, lonely workaholic can tell you.This is not to say that you have to choose between success and happiness. You can obtain both. But you have to reverse the order of operations: Instead of trying first to get success and hoping it leads to happiness, start by working on your happiness, which will enhance your success.Success and happiness are generally positively correlated, as many workforce studies have shown. For example, companies in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list saw an average 14 percent stock-price increase every year from 1998 to 2005, compared with 6 percent for the overall market. And as Gallup data have shown, among business units with employee-engagement levels (that is, employees who reported feeling heard, respected, and intellectually stimulated, and who had a best friend at work) in the 99th percentile, 73 percent perform above the company average, and 78 percent perform above the industry average.From this correlation, many assume causation—from success to happiness. During my years as an executive, I found that people strongly believe that pay increases—especially big ones—will have a large and long-lasting effect on their job satisfaction. The data tell us a different story, however: Large wage increases have only a small and transitory effect on well-being. Researchers in 2017 tracked the pay and job satisfaction (measured on a 0–10 scale) of nearly 35,000 German workers over several years. The study found that the anticipation of a 100 percent pay bump increases job satisfaction by about a quarter of one digit in the year before the raise. The raise increases that satisfaction bump by another fifth of a digit. By the fourth year, the increase has fallen to less than a fifth in total.In other words, say your job satisfaction is a six out of 10—not bad, but could be better. If your boss doubles your pay, it will get you to about 6.5, and then it will fall back to about 6.2. Maybe this isn’t the best strategy to help you love your job.And that doesn’t even take into account the cost that increased job success can have on overall life satisfaction. In 2016, psychologists measured career success by asking 990 college-educated full-time professionals to compare their career achievements to others’. They found that people generally enjoyed the money and status that relative success produced. However, success did not lead to total contentment: It indirectly chipped away at life satisfaction, likely via time constraints, stress, and impoverished social relationships.[Read: ‘Success addicts’ choose being special over being happy]Much stronger and more positive results emerge, however, when researchers reverse the order, looking not at success’s effects on happiness, but happiness’s effect on success. Scholars in 2005 surveyed hundreds of studies—including experiments to establish causality—and concluded that happiness leads to success in many realms of life, including marriage, friendship, health, income, and work performance.One explanation might be that happiness makes us more attractive, so we are rewarded by others. Alternatively, happiness might make us more productive. Novel experimental research suggests both are true. For example, scholars in 2021 studied Chinese livestream web broadcasters, for whom voluntary viewer tips are the primary source of income. They found that when they showed more positive emotion, their tips immediately increased, suggesting that people who appear happy are rewarded in the market. Another experiment involved British test subjects engaging in a time-limited arithmetic task and math test. The researchers found that subjects who were shown a clip of a comedy movie beforehand were about 12 percent more productive on the task and test than those who weren’t, and that the funnier they found the clip, the more productive they were.Whether you are an employee or employer, it is a better investment to increase happiness at work and in life, rather than simply trying to increase measures of success.The first thing to remember is that happiness requires balance. No matter how much you enjoy your work, overwork will become an obstruction to well-being. Researchers in 2020 studying 414 Iranian bank employees found that workaholic behavior (such as perfectionism and work addiction) strongly predicted workplace incivility (such as hostility, privacy invasion, exclusionary behavior, and gossiping). Workaholic behaviors also degraded the quality of family life (as measured in disagreement with statements such as “My involvement in work provides me with a sense of success; this, in turn, helps me to be a better person in my family”).[Read: Is there really such a thing as a ‘workaholic’?]You should guard against workaholism in yourself and help your friends and family who suffer from it. But just as important, employers should not encourage overwork—which will likely require effort and attention on their part, as research shows that executives generally underestimate employees’ struggles with well-being.Once work quantity is under control, happiness at work requires a sense of meaning and purpose. I have written in this column that the two key aspects of meaningful work are earned success and service to others. Earned success implies a sense of accomplishment and recognition for a job well done, while service to others requires knowledge of the real people who benefit from your work. Lots of research shows the importance of these work aspects. For example, Gallup has revealed that people who serve their communities and receive recognition for it self-report significantly less stress and worry in their lives than those who do not (either because they don’t serve their communities or do not receive recognition).Meanwhile, the most meaningful jobs tend to be those that are the most service-oriented. According to 2016 research by the Pew Research Center, proportionally, more workers in nonprofit and government sectors—i.e., work that is generally service-oriented—said their jobs give them a sense of identity than did private-sector workers. It’s harder to find the link to service in some professions than others, but it can usually be done. Years ago, I was working with a team of academic researchers creating policies for improved bank regulation. One scholar who was particularly passionate about the project told me he always remembered that his work mattered, because poor people need access to reasonably priced credit, and that requires less bureaucratic red tape.Even if you struggle to see who benefits, because the people you touch with your work are very far away or your work touches them indirectly, try looking a little closer—maybe even in the next cubicle. You can always enjoy the effects of service by helping your colleagues, and there is clear evidence that supporting co-workers can help ease negative emotions at work.Ultimately, although success and happiness are linked, the alchemy is mostly one-way—and not in the way that most people think. Working on your success to get happier is inefficient at best, and may blow up in your face and lead you to unhappiness. But working on your happiness gives you the best chance at getting both.Even if all of this makes sense to you, you may still find yourself falling into old habits of seeking happiness via worldly success at work. Don’t feel too bad—I do it too, even as a specialist in this field. Whenever I notice my hours creeping up to workaholic levels and my dreams of happiness revolving around some accomplishment, I like to reread a short story published in 1922 by Franz Kafka called “A Hunger Artist.” It features a man who starves himself in a cage for a living as a traveling carnival act. He is obsessed with his work and, as a perfectionist, seeks what he calls “flawless fasting.” The hunger artist is proud of his success, although he is always gloomy, and, Kafka writes, “if a good-natured man who felt sorry for him ever wanted to explain to him that his sadness probably came from his fasting … the hunger artist responded with an outburst of rage.”Over time, the hunger artist’s act falls out of public favor. In desperation to resuscitate his flagging career, he tries fasting longer than he ever has before. Instead, he is utterly ignored, and sits alone in his cage. In the end, the hunger artist starves himself to death. In a twist of absurdism—we might even call it Kafkaesque—the protagonist admits just before expiring that the only reason he had engaged in his art was because he could not find any food to his liking.I’m not that bad, of course, but I have a bit of a hunger artist in me, and you might too. Here’s my advice: You won’t find happiness by forgoing happiness. Don’t starve yourself. Your odds of success will increase if you eat.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat role should sports play in society, and/or what’s your assessment of the role they play in ours? Feel free to comment on professional, recreational, or youth sports; on team, individual, or extreme sports; on playing, watching, or boycotting sports; or anything else on this subject.Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteThis newsletter usually highlights stand-alone articles, but my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig’s exemplary case against the death penalty is best understood by perusing her body of work over time.Begin with “Not That Innocent,” where the premise is that “most people on death row are guilty” but “that doesn’t mean they deserve their fate.” In her assessment of the condemned, “innocence cases indicate that some capital sentences are unfair,” but failing to look beyond those cases can obscure the evidence that “a fair capital sentence is virtually impossible,” as suggested by “decades of studies on death-qualified juries; race, gender, and immigration-status bias among jurors; law enforcement and prosecutorial misconduct; weak forensic science and poor representation at trial.” For opponents of the death penalty, “the fight should be waged not against particular injustices,” she argues, “but against the unjust system itself.”Subsequent articles highlight concerning aspects of that system.In “The State of Texas v. Jesus Christ,” Bruenig highlighted an effort to deny a pastor the ability to pray aloud and lay hands on a condemned man during his execution. Her assessment of that legal fight:
A pastor praying aloud, holding a dying man’s hand, would bring too much flesh, too much humanity, into the thing. Execution theater is all about maintaining the illusion of mechanism. And if the [Supreme] Court rules that the state’s preference for executions with the aesthetic aspirations of a medical procedure outweighs Ramirez’s desire for a Baptist pastor to lay hands on and pray over him as he is killed, it is precisely that fleshly, embodied, humane tradition of accompaniment—even for scoundrels—in Christianity that the Court will deny by the letter of the law.
Redirecting her attention to a neighboring state in “Oklahoma Tortured John Grant to Death Because He Wouldn’t Commit Suicide,” Bruenig highlighted the jarring practice of states asking death-row inmates to name the method by which they want to be killed, and how that approach came about:
Since the Supreme Court’s strange and consequential opinion in the 2015 case of Glossip v. Gross, in which Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “because capital punishment is constitutional, there must be a constitutional means of carrying it out,” death-row prisoners who challenge their states’ methods of execution have been tasked with producing a suitable alternative … The Eighth Amendment, which theoretically bars cruel and unusual punishment, ought to—at least, per the interpretation of the Supreme Court—move the country ever further toward humane and civilized justice. Yet challenges to methods of execution that have produced clearly cruel deaths—such as that of John Grant (and others before him, including Clayton Lockett, also of Oklahoma)—have resulted in a freakishly sadistic execution schema in which people aren’t just killed by the state but are also recruited as participants in their own demise, in clear violation of their religious principles and despite the obvious psychological terror such a regime inflicts.
In “A Good Man, at One Time,” she writes about David Neal Cox, a Mississippi man who committed horrific crimes and became an advocate for his own execution. The essay defies easy summary, except to say that it probes a case as friendly to the perspective of death-row supporters as can be imagined and bites associated bullets, yet still finds striking moral complexity. (Bruenig gamely grapples with another tough case in “Should the Parkland Shooter Die?”)Most recently, in a series that includes “Can America Kill Its Prisoners Kindly?,” “Two Executions on a Thursday in America,” “Dead to Rights,” and “Dead Man Living,” Bruenig bears witness to executions. In effect, she convinced me of an argument she makes in the first of those pieces:
Among all the amendments in the Bill of Rights, the Eighth may be the noblest, because it ensures the protection of condemned criminals, the most friendless and vulnerable people. And it should be vindicated, not only for their sake—though mainly so—but also for our own.
In any of the executions described in those pieces, consider the psychic costs that state killing imposes on the judges, the executioners, the families of the condemned, and the witnesses, as well as the many millions of Americans who are troubled by killing done in their name.[Read: 21 reader views on the masculinity crisis]Great-Power StruggleJonathan Last argues in his Bulwark newsletter, The Triad, that the Biden administration has stymied China’s power in a significant and underappreciated way with the new export controls that it announced last week. Last explains:
Making computer chips requires a lot of advanced equipment. Much of that advanced equipment is made by American companies. The new rules from the Biden administration make it so that any company, anywhere in the world, using certain advanced American equipment to make chips can’t sell those chips to Chinese-controlled companies … At the stroke of a pen, China is getting cut off from the kind of advanced chips it can’t manufacture on its own. Which will cripple both military progress and tech-sector progress, too.
Sports and GenderToday’s “question of the week” about sports was inspired by an emailer who wrote this during our discussion on what ails men and boys:
I wonder about the effect on males of zero-sum competition and “hero” worship inherent in organized sports. If it’s impossible for the vast majority of men to be winners, they must either identify as losers or subsume their own value to that of the winner they’ve chosen. That pervasive, hypercompetitive model of being seems fundamentally flawed.
Reflecting on my years playing various competitive youth sports––soccer, basketball, and tennis most of all––it seems to me that among the most valuable things it taught me was how to lose well and that one can enjoy competing at many things without being the very best at them.For a thought-provoking essay from a different perspective, see “Nike’s End of Men” by Ethan Strauss, which probes the relationship between pro sports, sports marketing, and gender.Learning Your LimitsAt Persuasion, Freddie deBoer makes the case that failure is an important but underappreciated part of higher education:
Recently, an adjunct professor at New York University was fired. Once a celebrated tenured chemistry professor at Princeton, Maitland Jones Jr.’s employment at NYU was cut short because of a student petition. The students complained of an imperious attitude and lack of flexibility, but the fundamental issue was that Jones’s Organic Chemistry course was simply too hard—too many students failed, and too many students who were used to receiving As received Cs. It was a direct conflict between Jones’s standards and his students’ expectations of their own success.
This firing over a question of educational rigor has inspired a lot of concern, including from me. Of course, as this is a culture war issue, some have taken to the ramparts to insist that the fired professor must have been a bad teacher if so many students rebelled … Whatever the case, I want to suggest that the students who launched the petition were denying themselves a central element of education: figuring out what you’re not good at. Failing. Trying to learn, and failing to do so. This is an element of education as vital as learning what you’re good at, the act of self-discovery of one’s own lack of ability. All of us have limits, natural limits on what we can learn and do in academic fields. Some exceedingly rare individuals appear to be brilliant at everything, but for the rest of us, there’s a whole suite of topics and skills that we will never perform with any facility. And if colleges insist on reducing rigor to the point that learning those limits becomes impossible, something will have been lost.
Columbus Day versus Indigenous Peoples’ DayI’d thought that every angle in this annual debate had been exhaustively aired years ago, but Scott Alexander managed to break new ground in a delightfully dialogic post over at Astral Codex Ten.Overwhelmed by the CultureThat’s how the essayist, podcaster, and longtime cultural critic Meghan Daum is feeling for reasons that she explains at The Unspeakable:
Once upon a time I might have been described as someone who “inhaled culture.” In my twenties, as the internet was just beginning to peek out over the horizon, I had a pretty solid grasp on the “arts scene,” as we called it … I knew what films were in theaters … what important novels had just come out, what shows were worth watching on television, what venues my favorite musicians were playing, what big shows were at the big museums and even what was being performed on Broadway or at the Metropolitan Opera—not that I ever went. Back then, I went to the movies at least twice a week … One of the great pleasures of my filmgoing was rereading the reviews after having seen the movie … Suddenly you understood the big picture. You knew what everyone was talking about. Somewhere in the mid to late aughts, it stopped being possible to know what everyone was talking about. For at least the last decade I haven’t known what anyone is talking about and for the last several years I haven’t really cared.
There is, indeed, a torrent of content out there––amid it all, thank you for choosing to read Up for Debate.Ask Me AnythingAs an experiment, I’ll be trying to incorporate some of the questions you ask me into the newsletter. Reflecting on proposals to get more men into caregiving professions and more women into STEM, Brian, a reader, expresses support for both goals but discomfort with one way of achieving them.He writes:
I am super wary of so-called positive discrimination, and I therefore feel very conflicted about Richard Reeves’s proposal that we provide scholarships to men to move them into HEAL [health, education, administration, and literacy] subjects and offer funds to HEAL employers to encourage them to hire more men. I see the benefits, and I agree that there appears to be a need for doing it. But I still have a hard time getting past the discriminatory approach. Likewise, while it seems clear that scholarships have moved more women into STEM positions, efforts to increase representation have also been found to be discriminatory against men.
My feelings about such practices, and whether or not they’re fair and/or justified, are very mixed. How would you respond to the argument that both STEM scholarships for women and HEAL scholarships for men discriminate based on sex? I mean, clearly they do. But is it justified? When is positive discrimination acceptable, and when is it unacceptable?
There are at least two distinctions that inform how I think about these cases. One concerns the reason for seeking greater sex parity in a field. Is it because, as in early-childhood education, proponents believe that having more men or women will improve how well the job gets done? If so, that strikes me as a stronger case for affirmative action than instances where the driving force is a desire for sex parity as an end in itself, and would strengthen the case for something like privately funded sex-specific scholarships. The other distinction concerns method. Is the approach to attract a more sex-diverse applicant pool and fill openings in a nondiscriminatory manner, or are individual job candidates discriminated against? I tend to favor efforts to diversify hiring pools and oppose sex discrimination against individuals.[Read: The trouble with boys and men]Provocation of the WeekEsau McCaulley, a professor at Wheaton College, cares deeply about how ideas are presented to his children at school, but cautions against focusing on what material is taught. Instead, he counsels, consider whether students are given permission to think about whatever is taught:
How do we order society in such a way that increases human flourishing and limits suffering? What is the good, the true and the beautiful? How do we make sense of the sins of the past and the way the legacies of those failures follow us to the present? What is justice? What is love and why does it hurt us so? What is the good life? Is there a God who orders the galaxies, or did we come from chaos, destined only to return to it?
The answers to those questions that I received from my teachers varied. I do not judge the worth of my former educators by whether I agreed with them. I value those who made me think and did not punish me when I diverged from them … If parents and politicians truly care about their children’s education, they should not only ask what a teacher said about a controversial issue, they should also ask how the teacher said it, and whether students were assessed based on the quality of their work rather than conformity to a particular ideological perspective. This ability to hold fair and stirring conversation is the gift that all great teachers have. It is impossible to legislate. This is a gift that can either be honed or ground to rubble by unrelenting competing agendas. We must protect teachers who do it well and do not so overburden and underpay them that they despair of their vocation.
This perspective dovetails nicely with the educator Erin McLaughlin’s advocacy for a viewpoint-diversity curriculum.

F aculty, staff, and students in higher education regularly find in their inboxes emails from administrators addressed to the “university community” expressing solidarity, grief, and other forms of concern in response to national and international events. Natural disasters and the overturning of Roe v. Wade are among the inspirations for such messages. After rhetoric about the gravity of whatever has happened, such messages typically encourage potentially traumatized readers to seek relief through relevant campus resources. They avoid political claims. Administrators seem to feel expected to speak to their campuses, and to the world beyond, about current events, even though the content of their speech is often studiedly contentless — and even though most of us never open the emails. What are these messages for?

My colleague Margarita Rayzberg and I asked each other this question at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when these missives’ strangeness, and ubiquity, first become apparent to us. The University of Chicago, where I was then employed, had issued a statement from the dean of students and director of international affairs expressing “great concern” about “the invasion into Ukraine,” and its consequences for members of the university community from “Ukraine, Russia and Europe.” The two administrators then solicited readers affected by the conflict to reach out to the office of international affairs, set up a therapy session, or attend an online seminar about the political background of the conflict.

Anyone reading this message without already knowing the geopolitical context would be quite confused. Who had invaded Ukraine? The email never described “the invasion” as Russian. The war appeared as a terrible accident. There was no question of the university taking — or acknowledging that it was not taking — sides in a conflict, but only one of how to ease suffering and confusion through its channels of administrative support, academic discussion, and therapy. We were struck by the email’s pointlessness — as if what Ukrainians, Russians, and everyone else involved in the war needed were some Zoom counseling sessions and a webinar! We were struck too by its opacity. The university’s leadership apparently imagined itself compelled to say something (however substanceless) about the war, but chose not to reveal why, or why it had decided to express itself through these specific administrators offering this particular set of resources. Although these and other such messages speak on behalf of the university as a whole, members of the university community have little opportunity even to know how they are produced, let alone to shape them.

In recent years there has been concern among college presidents, who have historically been tasked with speaking on behalf of their institutions, with the limits of their ability to speak freely. But “university position statements,” as we conceive them, differ from the public speech of presidents. The latter tend to appear as something like embodiments of their schools. They speak both to the campus about itself and to the nation about issues affecting academic life. This is a complex role; presidents must balance their representative function, which stands for the university as a whole, with their distinct personal voice (usually avuncular and genially out-of-touch). University position statements on current events, on the other hand, are presented as collaborative documents, signed by multiple administrators, and are not consistently issued by any particular figure from the administration. They do not use the first person singular. Rather they appear as the university speaking to itself through no one human vessel, reminding itself what its feelings and opinions are, and framing whatever event has elicited this response as a problem to be managed with the resources of the administrative bureaucracy.

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Our initial, impressionistic searches through the last several years of the university inboxes to which we have access suggest that, while university position statements are becoming more frequent, they have long had a common structure. One of the first position statements we received — at the beginning of our graduate careers at Northwestern University in 2010 — shows the basic shape common to such documents today. It was issued in response to the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an undergraduate at Rutgers University, after his roommate secretly filmed him having gay sex.

This horrific incident generated much discussion in the media about homophobia, suicide, and privacy rights — all ways of connecting what had happened to issues of larger national import. Although there was no direct link to Northwestern, the university’s then-president, Morton O. Schapiro, along with the vice president for student affairs, issued a statement in response. In it they affirmed that Northwestern was “supporting the LGBT community” on campus, and they reminded readers of the university’s policies on harassment and discrimination, as well as of the existence of a variety of campus resources, including the LGBT Resource Center, the Sexual Harassment Prevention office, and mental-health counseling.

Why should impassioned declarations of supposedly unanimous feeling end with a list of university resources such as counseling programs?

All of this is an unobjectionable but also rather non-obvious response to events far away from Northwestern’s campus. The decision to make a statement presupposed that this suicide was emblematic of nationwide issues on and off college campuses, which Northwestern’s leaders were compelled to weigh in on, and which they had an obligation to combat. Presented as relevant to Northwestern’s campus community because of its purported status as a reminder of the problems of homophobia, sexual harassment, and mental health, Clementi’s death appeared as a justification for the university’s existing therapeutic-bureaucratic institutions targeted at precisely these problems. The university, speaking to itself through the position statement, could imagine its administrative apparatuses of care and surveillance (but not, significantly, the scholarly missions of teaching and research) as participating in a national struggle against violence and prejudice.

This framing is political in one sense; anti-political in others. Tying Clementi’s death and Northwestern’s policies together through a narrative of resistance to discrimination, harassment, and poor mental health, it positioned the university as an agent in a wide network working toward social change, and therefore as a political entity. Indeed, the very act of taking up any individual tragedy as a “case” of a broader problem is an inherently political act — perhaps the basic intellectual move of political mobilization. But insofar as political conflict is constituted by our debates about what exactly such tragedies are cases of, to which problems they testify, and how these problems, once identified, should be solved, Northwestern’s position statement was anti-political. It spoke as if the entire campus had already agreed that Clementi’s death was a case of homophobia, sexual harassment, and poor mental health, and that the solutions to these problems were to be found in the university bureaucracy’s therapeutic and surveillance mechanisms.

I n spotlighting an individual death unconnected to the university in order to reveal (and to commit themselves to struggling against) nation-wide dynamics of inequality and violence, the Northwestern administrators’ response to the death of Clementi already contains all the elements of the responses of universities across the country to the far more emblematic and politicized death of George Floyd 10 years later. The latter, it is true, appear very different in tone. While Northwestern’s statement on Clementi’s death was somberly restrained, its statement on Floyd’s death and the ensuing protest, “Northwestern Strives to Be an Instrument of Change,” began by registering the “anger and sadness” of its author, the university’s provost. The subject of the message immediately became an imagined universitywide “we,” however, a “we” sharing feelings of “immense grief, anger, fear and hopelessness.” The combination of emotions is striking — why “hopelessness”? And why should such impassioned declarations of supposedly unanimous feeling (it went without saying that no one on campus might be afraid of the violence that accompanied some protests) end with a list of university resources such as counseling programs?

The emotional intensity of the University of Chicago’s email in response to Floyd’s death might seem to have distinguished it from the university’s cautious rhetoric around Ukraine. In response to the Floyd protests, Chicago’s president and provost called on the university to participate in an “ongoing struggle for equality” across the country, one that would require the students, staff, and faculty to confront racism both on campus and in the city of Chicago. There was a conflict taking place, and the university could not be neutral.

On a closer reading, however, Chicago’s Floyd and Ukraine documents reveal themselves to be quite similar. They offer two variations in tone — but in tone only — on the model of Northwestern’s response to the death of Tyler Clementi a decade earlier. The “struggle for equality,” in Chicago’s email, seems as strange a conflict as the one in Ukraine. The enemy is never named. Black Americans are said to have been subjected to “slavery … violence and exclusion” — by who knows whom? Just as one email elides who has invaded Ukraine, the other remains purposefully vague on how all of these things had happened and were happening to Black people.

In their statement on the George Floyd protests, Chicago’s administrators frame the university as a participant in the conflict for equality; in their statement on Ukraine, they carefully write the university out of the conflict. In both cases, however, they present these conflicts not as truly political processes in which rival sides, each with their own interests and interpretations, confront each other, but rather as situations universally understood to be in need of specific redress. They disguise the fact that the problems they address are problems about which students, faculty, and staff disagree — about which, indeed, some of them are experts with opposing points of view. Although they often encourage “conversation” and “dialogue,” as a means of either healing trauma caused by the current events they discuss, or of better understanding them, they foreclose authentic discussion.

They offer debatable assertions that come already interpreted — readers are given no room for questioning (“whose war in Ukraine?”; “the struggle for equality against what?”). They locate solutions in the university’s administrative bureaucracy: therapy, identity-based groups, surveillance apparatuses, and in the academic mechanisms of organized discussion. This reflects a dangerous, and increasingly common, understanding among administrators of the therapeutic role of the university, one that is coming to replace an older understanding of the university’s special mission as a site of open-ended enquiry. The latter, ideally, increases our knowledge and helps us develop new interpretations of phenomena, which can be then used by policy-making institutions whose goals — again, ideally — have been set by democratic decision-making.

From this perspective, for the university to directly participate in political life as an avowed agent of social change is perilous both for politics and the university. Just as politics loses its specificity as a bounded domain of acknowledged, and therefore constrained, conflict over what is to be done, so does the university lose its distinction as a site in which individuals are free, or rather incited, to question certainties and consensuses in order to awaken clearer thinking. This understanding of the university has been the foundation of support for academic freedom of speech, which otherwise appears as a politically risky, ethically perverse, or simply futile permission to say things that are offensive, erroneous, or useless.

It is difficult to evaluate, of course, the extent to which administrators, who by now appear habituated to issuing such statements, conceive of themselves as acting on any coherent vision of the university or of political life. It is equally difficult to assess the actual impact of position statements on the climate of universities regarding freedom of speech. Everyone on every campus has seen such documents, has been summoned by them as members of an imaginary unanimous body to feel and think in common. But the process by which a statement is produced is nearly always opaque, as is its meaning to readers.

The history of position statements has not been investigated. We don’t know how they have become so commonplace, how they have emerged as apparently obligatory responses to current events. Each time one of these documents is disseminated, it comes as it were out of a black box, with no explanation of why the university is responding to this issue (but not others) through these administrators (but not others), with these resources (but not others). There is no archiving or accountability for their production. They are everywhere and speak for all of us — and they are no one’s responsibility. Taking them seriously, perhaps, will open a new opportunity to consider what the university should be, and what we are allowing it to become.

We were promised flying cars, and instead all we got was instantly accessible archives of all the knowledge and art the world has ever produced. But still, in 2022 – George Jetson’s birth year, apparently — where are the flying cars?Subscribe nowIn his 2021 book for Stripe Press, J. Storrs Hall asked the same question. Attempting to answer it led him to a much larger puzzle: why do we seem to have stagnated more broadly? He considers the question from every angle: culture, economics, politics, regulation, and more. Since the book has come out, the stagnation he identifies has seemed to become even more urgent. Are we stagnating? Why? And if we are, what can we do? Some of our favorite authors answer these questions in our first Special Issue of Works in Progress: read it here.Maybe it all comes back to energy. Storrs Hall revealed in his book that per capita energy consumption has basically flatlined since the 1970s. So maybe it’s no coincidence that the ‘Great Stagnation’ seems to have set in around the same time. Our lead essay, by Ben Reinhardt, imagines a world of energy abundance – a ‘fusionpunk’ vision of what might be if energy was too cheap to even meter. The illustration of the man and his not-yet flying car connected to the piece was created by Joshuah X. Miranda, a designer at Stripe Press. It was an early cover for the Press edition of the book. You can find more of his work here. Storrs Hall describes nanotechnology as being one of our highest potential technologies – something completely transformative that might already be affecting almost every element of our lives today if it had not been snuffed out. Eli Dourado writes that nanotechnology should be no more thought of as science fiction than artificial intelligence now is – not least because organic nano-scale technology is already ubiquitous in the natural world.Dying in a plane crash is pretty costly, and most of us are happy to pay a bit in terms of economic output to minimize that kind of danger in our lives. But how much poorer does regulation really make us? Is it possible that Americans could have incomes three times higher if government regulation hadn’t exploded since the 1940s, as Storrs Hall argues? Economists Ryan Murphy and Colin O’Reilly argue it isn’t, in their piece Anti-growth safetyism. As the title suggests, it is the societal tendency they term ‘Anti-Growth Safetyism’ might be holding us back anyway, even if it is not making us a full three times poorer.But what’s so good about flying cars anyway? Would you really prefer to have one if it meant giving up the internet, and all the access to knowledge, culture and communication that that’s given the world? Adam Hunt questions whether we really have slid into stagnation, or whether it’s the measurements that are wrong. We once lived in a caveat emptor world. If you bought snake oil, drank the snake oil, and it made you sick, you only had yourself to blame. But nowadays we hold businesses liable for the damage their products do to their customers. Seems fair enough – but did this kind of product liability strangle flying cars at birth? Brian Potter argues that, actually, litigiousness probably isn’t at fault, even if it did lead to some oddities (like DIY airplane kits replacing pre-built planes, so the liability fell with the purchaser).Finally, Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter interviews J Storrs Hall. Among other things, they discuss the ‘Machiavelli Effect’, where established figures in a field resist change because it threatens their positions and status. He reckons that this is a more or less unavoidable pathology of a wide range of institutional types, not just universities and scientific journals. If that’s true, then some kind of general solution to it, that would work across lots of different domains, could be pretty valuable.We experimented with small animations throughout the pieces in this issue. They were created by Venus Krier. You can find more of her work here. Let us know what you think of them too, and if you would like to see more in the future. We’ll be back next month with the next regular issue of Works in Progress.Notes on progressSince you are a subscriber of this newsletter, hopefully you have seen our new Substack exclusive releases, Notes on Progress. Notes on Progress are first person, diary-style reflections where a practitioner explains an idea and gives a bit of insight into what it is they do. There have been six posts so far:First, Stuart Ritchie described the process of doing a preregistered scientific study, and argued that we’re doing science backwards by only interrogating research methods when the research is already done. Then there was a case for showing the ugly bits of history, including shrunken heads, from William Buckner. After that, Rosalind Arden explained how understanding dog brains better could save us from Alzheimer’s Disease. Next, Our World in Data’s Hannah Ritchie wrote a viral post on why our brains make us bad environmentalists. Ellen Pasternack wondered whether we could breed chickens to be less upset by being farmed and killed.Most recently, Samuel Hughes reflected on his time in New York CityStay tuned for more. What we’ve been up toSaloni laid out the power of human challenge trials to speed up medical research.Ben started researching crime. He began with a simple question: How bad is it? It turns out that crime is really, really bad.Sam wrote about the divide between political “Boosters” who think growth is easy with the right policy reforms, and “Doomsters” who believe we’re stuck with low growth almost no matter what. Around the webStripe Press’s latest film, We Are As Gods tells the story of the inimitable Stewart Brand's life and work. You can find it on Apple TV. See also his piece in Works in Progress and keep an eye out for more from Brand in the future.Eric Gilliam discovers that in the 1920s, researchers believed there was a third way of academic science funding, as well as funding individuals and funding projects: funding departments. This may seem like a small difference, but may actually have quite profound effects on how science is done. So much plastic “recycled” in Britain is sent to places that dump it in the sea that it’s actually better to just bin it.There are different kinds of economic externalities, and we should only care about some of them.Isn’t it a coincidence that political moderates happen to believe what is the centre-ground view today, and not twenty years ago or in the future?Smart meters are more interesting than you think (plus, how Ireland’s energy grid works).Why Effective Altruism should try to be more like a religion.Adam Hunt has started a new podcast on evolutionary psychiatry.Higher interest rates make capital allowances affect business investment more. Cryogenics are bringing ferrets back to Wyoming.Houses are being built by pumping cement into giant walls made of balloons.An imaginary lab-grown meat restaurant exists in the Netherlands. You might want to try the knitted steak, and finish with some meat-flavoured in vitro ice cream.Jeremy Driver argues that studied ignorance actually makes people more effective thinkers about politics.Full genome sequencing for $200 is close (it was $10,000 ten years ago, and the first one cost $3 billion in 1990s money).How better APIs could get us bigger cities, and data standardization could speed up science.Alexander Kerensky lived in New York until 1970, where he befriended a young Ted Danson. If you enjoy this issue, please do tell your friends about Works in Progress, and tweet, post, email and otherwise share your thoughts. We have some exciting plans in the works for 2023. – Sam, Ben, Nick and SaloniThanks for reading Works in Progress's newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The GMC Hummer EV was always going to be divisive. Even its name, which ported one of the most famous gas-guzzling brands of all time to the world of zero-emissions vehicles, was a kind of taunt. But this month, a viral video gave a sense of what a flash point the $110,000 car may be.Edmond Barseghian, a Los Angeles–based influencer and entrepreneur who drives exotic cars, has one hand on the wheel of the new Hummer pickup. He accelerates out of a stop as the words “12,000 lbs truck out accelerates most super cars” flash across the screen.The Hummer gets up to 66 miles per hour in a few seconds. Barseghian moans in pleasure. Then he realizes that his vehicle is hurtling—at highway speed—toward three lanes of cars idling at a stoplight. “Oh shit,” he says, as he seems to slam on the brakes. “I forgot how heavy this car is.” Barseghian comes within a car’s length or two of a collision before fully stopping. “It did not want to slow down,” he says, cursing. “Whew! Knocked the air out of me.”The video, which got hundreds of thousands of likes on Instagram but has now trickled to other major platforms, provoked a divided reaction among viewers. For Barseghian and many of his followers, the Hummer seemed to validate EVs as legitimate road machines. “My new Hummer made me a believer in electric cars,” Barseghian wrote in the video’s caption on TikTok. But other people did not find themselves as revved up. “The EV Hummer is here and we should all be concerned,” tweeted one self-described car enthusiast. “These should not be street legal, unless obliterating people with cars is the goal,” posted Michael Eliason, an architect who specializes in sustainable construction.[Read: Big cars are killing Americans]The Hummer EV haters and lovers had discovered one of the most important facts about electric “super trucks”: They are very heavy, and they go very fast. If you imagine an ambulance that can accelerate as fast as a Formula 1 car, you’re imagining a vehicle only slightly more unwieldy than the new Hummer. I am not exaggerating: F1 cars can go zero to 60 in 2.6 seconds; the EV Hummer pickup can get there in three seconds flat. The Tesla Model X Plaid, an SUV that weighs a comparatively svelte 5,390 pounds, can get up to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds.Mikhael Farah, a spokesperson for General Motors, told me in a statement that the Hummer in the video was able to accelerate so rapidly because the driver was using a feature called “Watts to Freedom,” a “launch-control mode” designed to propel the car forward from a stop. The Hummer’s owners manual warns drivers that “Watts to Freedom is intended for use only on a closed course and should not be used on public roads,” Farah said.Of course, the fact alone that Watts to Freedom is shipped with street-legal cars reveals the unusually lax regulatory environment that cars face. Ebikes, for instance, are physically restricted by federal law from exceeding a maximum speed by motor alone; cars, meanwhile, can include a dangerous acceleration mode as long as the owners manual warns drivers to “make sure there are no people or objects around” before you activate it. Watts and freedom aside, the weight of EVs is a safety issue that drivers—and cyclists and pedestrians—will only have to keep worrying about as these cars go mainstream.Why are electric trucks so heavy? Lithium-ion batteries, the main type of energy storage used in modern EVs, are significantly less energy-dense than gasoline or diesel fuels. That means that, all else being equal, a battery pack that can propel an EV for 100 miles of driving will weigh more than the gasoline that will power a car the same distance.Of course, all else isn’t equal. EVs use their stored energy far more efficiently than gas cars do, according to Anthony Schiavo, a research director at Lux Research, a global advisory firm. “It turns out that combusting fuels is not that effective a way to generate energy,” he told me. Although batteries are heavier than gasoline, electric motors are much lighter than internal-combustion engines. Still, nearly all EVs are, for now, heavier than their gas-powered equivalents.The physical limitations of batteries mean that cars like my own, a decade-old Volkswagen that weighs 2,900 pounds and has about 400 miles of range on a full tank, would be tough to re-create as an EV using today’s technology, Schiavo said: Even if you could accomplish it on an engineering basis, the raw materials would probably cost more than the car’s original purchase price. (The Hummer EV’s battery pack alone, meanwhile, weighs nearly as much as my car.)Yet physics by itself isn’t to blame for the Hummer’s paunch. There’s no technical requirement forcing the Hummer to weigh 9,000 pounds, and in fact, the battery pack in the Hummer takes up only about a third of the car’s overall weight. “It’s absolutely a design choice and a marketing choice,” Schiavo said. “People like larger vehicles, and the reason why those larger vehicles are getting made is because they sell.” Since the Ford Explorer was first introduced in 1990, more and more Americans have bought big, truck-like cars—SUVs, crossovers, pickups.These big vehicles are dangerous. American vehicle deaths jumped to a 20-year high in the first part of this year; the U.S. leads the developed world in traffic deaths. These statistics, which have deteriorated since the pandemic began, seem to be even worse for pedestrians: Last year, pedestrian deaths reached their highest level in 40 years, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.Suffice it to say that cars as huge as the Hummer EV need to face some kind of regulation, especially in cities and towns, where they pose a distinct threat to the public. The federal government, specifically the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, must make good on enforcing the pedestrian-safety standards that it has said are coming. Perhaps the most innovative work being done is happening here in Washington, D.C., which is asking drivers of especially heavy vehicles to pay a higher registration fee to accommodate the greater road wear and tear that they will cause.“The customer’s safety is a top priority regardless of the type of propulsion or mass of the vehicle,” Farah, the GM spokesman, said in a statement. He shared a report suggesting that the rise in traffic deaths is “likely” caused not by heavier cars per se, but by a pandemic-era spike in speeding, drunk driving, and distracted driving. But the same report also said that infrastructure that has “prioritized the movement of motor vehicles over walking and bicycling” has worsened the traffic-death epidemic. And addressing that problem—by making cities and suburbs more bike- and pedestrian-friendly—is entirely in line with America’s climate goals. According to a recent report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy think tank, Americans must collectively reduce their passenger “vehicle miles traveled” by 20 percent in order to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Electrification cannot be an excuse for needless traffic deaths; nor can it let us cede our streets to cars alone for another half century.But if the Hummer EV’s weight can be brought under control—and if it still develops a reputation as so reckless that liberals resent it, or seek to ban it from their cities … I’m not sure that’s actually bad for the energy transition per se.[Read: Stop worrying and love the F-150 Lightning]One of the greatest remaining obstacles that EVs face in America is cultural opposition. People identify deeply with their cars; they expect them to say something about themselves, and right now, driving an EV sometimes but not always marks you as a liberal. Because political identity is often influenced by doing what the other side hates, it’s not unimaginable that tagging the Hummer EV as the Anti-Democrat EV could help the industry more broadly. But it’s also possible to imagine a world where Democrats and Republicans each find their own reasons to hate the Hummer, or where a few high-profile crashes lead conservatives to join liberals in balking at super-heavyweight EVs generally.Whatever happens, the drama around the Hummer EV is a reminder that the energy transition will not play out with the aesthetics that climate change has had so far. Last week, I wrote that people who have worked in climate change for a long time should prepare themselves to feel like old fogeys—and to welcome the deluge of insight from people just joining the field. The same is true for aesthetics. (And cars, for all their dangers, remain at least partially aesthetic objects.) For the kind of liberal communitarians who have cared a lot about climate change for decades—who have thought about their carbon footprint, bought conventional hybrids, and worried about flying or their meat consumption—sometimes winning on the politics of climate change is going to feel a lot like losing on the aesthetics.

Research shows the media is far more concerned about right-wing extremism than its left-wing counterpart.

Giorgia Meloni’s recent victory in the Italian national election prompted an outburst of references to far-right political extremism in American and European news media. Given the challenge of establishing a politically neutral reference point for determining precisely what counts as political extremism, it is natural to wonder whether media outlets are equally likely to denounce ideological extremism from the left as from the right. Our recent research shows that when it comes to calling out political extremism, media figures are much more likely to decry political extremism from the right than from the left. We have the data to prove it.

In our study, we conducted data analysis of millions of news and opinion articles from popular U.S. and U.K. news media outlets and quantified the media’s use of extreme qualifiers such as "ultra," "extreme," or "far" when speaking about right and left political orientation. That is, we counted the number of times different news outlets mentioned terms such as "far-right," "far-left," "radical right," "radical left," "right-wing extremism," "left-wing extremism," etc. Overall, we found that most mainstream news-media outlets mention the far right much more often than the far left.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The American Conservative

Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.

David Rozado is a researcher.

In the final weeks of Boris Johnson’s premiership you could feel his authority dissipate in successive Prime Minister’s Questions. PMQs today was reminiscent of those performances, except that Liz Truss is only on her second and she never had much authority to lose. 
Laughter is the telling sign. The guttural welcome from her MPs as she approached the dispatch box today was unconvincing and overwrought. The Prime Minister kept saying “I’m genuinely unclear”, which sounded more like an admission than an indictment of the opposition. Her own MPs could barely suppress their chuckles. When not laughing, they averted their gazes, their faces sullen with despair.
There was little for them to praise. Truss’s answers lurched from U-turn to U-turn. She said the government will launch a publicity campaign to encourage lower energy use days after refusing to do so. She said she would ban no-fault evictions days after briefings suggested otherwise.
This was not a reset, but a repeat of botched arguments. Truss needed to win the confidence of the markets as well as her MPs. When the Bank of England’s monetary intervention ends on Friday the markets are set to revolt. The government needs to state how the tax cuts announced last month will be paid for, and Truss only really has two options: deep spending cuts, or ditching parts of the mini-Budget.
She said today that she would “absolutely” not cut public spending to bring down debt, then said that debt will fall “not by cutting public spending, but by making sure we spend public money well”. How will the government make that happen? Inflation will eat away at public sector budgets in real terms without the nominal level changing, for sure, but that won’t suffice to bring down debt. Straight after PMQs, Mel Stride, the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, stood up in the Commons and called for the government to reverse the Budget’s “tax announcements”. With Truss’s authority shot, that pressure will only build.
[See also: Will Kwasi Kwarteng resign to save Liz Truss?]

Much public health data comes in the form of “X increases your risk for developing Y”. Sometimes this is colloquially stated as “X causes Y”, but this is less accurate. For example, everyone by now should know that “smoking causes lung cancer” by which we mean that smoking increases the statistical risk of developing lung cancer. Most risk data is correlational, because we cannot ethically expose people to a potential risk to see how much harm it does. So really what we mean is that smoking positively correlates with the risk of developing lung cancer.

Health care providers, regulators, and the public are awash in such correlational data, with recommendations that can often be overwhelming. I previously wrote about a study in which 50 common ingredients were chosen at random out of cookbooks, and then the literature reviewed to find correlations (positive or negative) with cancer. They found that 80% of the ingredients were shown to either correlate with increased or decreased cancer risk. Often the same ingredient will have both health benefits and health risks.

Most of this is likely just statistical noise, too eagerly reported by the media looking for sensational headlines (these common foods can kill you!!). In fact, in 2015, scientist and journalist John Bohannon deliberated carried out a crap study apparently showing that eating dark chocolate helps people lose weight. The media gullibly reported the results without the slightest investigation into the quality of the study.

There is a risk to reporting background scientific noise as if they are reliable findings that should guide our eating and health decisions. It creates a type of fatigue that can lead people to ignore actually good advice, or people who want to make an effort to be more healthy to waste time and energy on false leads. The system can be improved at every level – with better research design, clearly marking preliminary studies as such, more carefully crafted press releases (or more selective press releases), and better science journalism. But we can also use expert reviews that clear out the noise and focus attention on those risk factor correlations that deserve our attention.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a global health research organization at the University of Washington School of Medicine, has recently done that with a series of systematic reviews they call “Burden of Proof” reviews. They published their results in Nature Medicine, but also present their data in a useful interactive way on their website. You can, for example, look through the relative risk curves, matching possible risk factors with possible outcomes.

There are three big factors to consider when looking at any individual potential risk factor – what is the strength of the evidence, what is the magnitude of the risk, and what is the magnitude of the behavior necessary to trigger a risk. We can likely comfortably ignored alleged risks when the quality of the evidence or strength of the association is low, the magnitude of the risk is low, or the behavior would have to be extreme in order to trigger a meaningful risk.

There, of course, have been plenty of reviews looking at the evidence for apparent benefits or risks, but this effort conveniently puts a lot of information in one place in a user-friendly format that helps put actual risk into a more intuitive context.

With regard to the strength of the evidence they use a five-star system, with five stars being solid evidence, going down to strong, moderate, weak, and then possibly no association at one star. Based on this rating system alone, I think we should take four and five star associations seriously, comfortably ignore ones and twos, with three star associations being ambiguous (requires further study).

In their first crop of data they look at four risk factors: smoking, high blood pressure, eating too much red meat, eating too few vegetables. As you can see, most of the four and five star associations have to do with smoking. One deals with high blood pressure and ischemic heart disease. There is one diet-related three star rating, for too few vegetable and ischemic stroke, the rest of the diet associations have 1 or 2 stars. This should not be a surprise to regular readers here, or anyone very familiar with the evidence. There is very good evidence that smoking is bad for you, and that chronic high blood pressure is also a serious risk factor for vascular disease.

Diet-related risk factors, however, generally have very poor evidence. I discussed this previously with a 2019 systematic review that essentially concluded the same thing – nutritional studies tend to be of poor overall quality, mainly because they are observational with lots of noise and confounding factors.

In addition to the quality of the evidence being low, you can look at the risk curves here. If you look at smoking and cancer, there is a strong dose-response with relative risk increasing to 3-10 times baseline risk. If you look at eating red meat, the relative risks are in the 1.1-1.3 range. The “dose” also needs to be relatively high.

Looking through this data (and I am looking forward to seeing more data they plan to add) reinforces the bottom-line advice I have given in the past. Don’t go down the rabbit hole of chasing every small reported risk. Most of it is noise. What we actually know can be boiled down to some simple rules: Don’t smoke, don’t drink to excess, get sufficient sleep, exercise regularly, don’t eat too much and eat your vegetables. When it comes to lifestyle factors, everything else is mostly noise.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.The global economy is a mess, and getting messier. In the past few months, the Federal Reserve has rapidly raised interest rates to stabilize prices. But core inflation, a basket of prices that excludes food and energy, is humming along, and the U.S. labor market is galloping ahead, despite some subtle signs of a slowdown. And even as the Fed fails to tame inflation here, it’s creating other kinds of pain here and around the world.Those rising interest rates are leading investors to look for dependable rates of return. They’re buying U.S. bonds, which takes U.S. dollars, which is causing other currencies to lose value. In a so-called dollar-doom-loop scenario, countries with cascading currencies fall into recession, which further weakens their currencies against the dollar. All of this has contributed to what the economist Adam Tooze calls a “South Asian Polycrisis,” in which highly indebted countries struggle to pay their creditors and energy prices skyrocket. Other central banks are also raising interest rates to stabilize prices, which could contribute to a coordinated global slowdown. Global market risk is surging, and the United Nations now says a global recession is all but certain.The Fed might be the single most powerful economic institution in the world. So why has it been more successful at accidentally exporting global mayhem than at purposefully reducing core inflation at home?Here’s my best attempt to explain what’s going on. Let’s say you have a fever. It’s the highest temperature you can remember seeing on a thermometer in years. You go to your medicine cabinet and find that all you’ve got is Tylenol. So you go full goblin mode on those suckers. After a triple dose of Tylenol, you feel a mild stomachache. But the fever is still getting worse, so you take what you’ve got: more Tylenol. A few hours later, your tummy feels like a pin cushion with a dozen needles jabbing it. But the fever is still raging! So you take another Tylenol, and another …In this analogy, you’re the Federal Reserve. The fever is U.S. inflation. The medicine cabinet is the Fed’s limited tool kit, and the pills are interest-rate hikes. Around the world, the negative side effects of a mild acetaminophen overdose are taking shape before the positive direct effects of the fever mitigation.My analogy is a bit overwrought, I admit. But the fundamental point is serious: The Fed’s cabinet really is limited in its offerings. Its tool kit consists of interest-rate hikes, security purchases, and … saying stuff, all rather blunt instruments for a project like reducing domestic demand by increasing the unemployment rate. The U.S. is a service-sector economy, whose largest industries—health care, education, and professional services, such as marketing and media—aren’t sensitive to moderate interest-rate hikes. If interest rates go up by 100 basis points, nobody’s back pain goes away, and children still need to go to school.So the same way that ibuprofen doesn’t instantly reduce a fever, the effect of interest rates on service employment is somewhat indirect. Let’s say that the Federal Reserve wants to target inflation by weakening the labor market in the booming category of leisure and hospitality. Here’s one way that could work. The Fed raises interest rates, which increases the cost of borrowing money across the economy, which will make it more onerous for companies and households to grow, which will cause high-growth companies to stall, which will create hiring freezes in some sectors, which will reduce total wages by putting some people out of work, which will mean those people have less money to spend at hotels, which will mean fewer bookings at hotels, which will mean hotels have to lay off people, which will mean higher unemployment in the services industry, which will mean less demand among those households, which will contribute to lower inflation.Doesn’t that sound almost quaintly circuitous? It kind of is. Especially compared with fiscal policy. If a state government decides that the hotel industry is a nuisance, it can quadruple the lodging tax. If it decides hotel clerks are too poor, it can pass legislation to send a check to every household whose adjusted gross income was below the national average last year, and that will basically do the trick. But there is no simple mechanism for the Federal Reserve to commandeer the American travel industry and institute a hiring freeze in hotels.To be clear, I don’t think the Fed’s policy goals are evil, or unreasonable. If inflation continues unabated, it will devour real wage gains for years. Everything will feel more expensive. Even as your salary rises, your income will fall behind the price of food, apartments, chairs, phones, dinners, and diapers. This is about as desirable as living with an indefinite 103-degree fever.But right now, the Fed could afford to pull back on its ferocious rate-increase schedule to let the side effects of its fever-reduction strategy play out. Rent inflation, which peaked earlier this year, might not be visible in official government statistics for another quarter. If so, the Fed is further along in its goal to reduce core inflation than today’s numbers suggest. Some fevers take pills, and some take patience.
Remote work is already changing the way millions of people work and where they live. Register for Derek’s office hours on the future of this phenomenon. If you can’t attend, you can watch a recording any time on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I asked, “If you could change one thing about the culture of your country by adopting a practice or attitude or folkway from another country, what would you change and why?”Meg recommends “the Japanese practice of bowing, not only to each other as a way of greeting or farewell, but also to the rooms one enters and exits.” Here’s her pitch for wider adoption:
This moment of mindful respect for the people and spaces we encounter strikes me as a way to affect all of our interactions in ways that foster a deeper connection and a pathway to peace. On the giving or receiving end of this simple gesture, I feel blessed and honored.
Simone wants people in the United States to eat like the French:
If possible, I would change the American way of treating mealtimes as “on the fly” (eating at desks, fast food, lousy school-lunch choices). In France, people take time to eat together. They enjoy their meals. Families talk about their day, what happened at work or school, and offer opinions about current events. Children learn from their parents and peers that participation in conversation is encouraged and supported. In addition, more thought goes into meal planning. Not only do people eat a wider variety of fresh foods; school lunch menus are very careful to be balanced and nutritious for growing children. Their school lunch menus rival some of the best restaurant menus here in the States! Having more reverence for the foods that nourish our bodies and taking the time to enjoy meals together also translates into a more socially connected community.
Jaleelah wants her fellow Canadians to drink more like Jordanians do:
What do people find so appealing about alcohol? It tastes bad, hurts your body, and makes you do stupid things. I accept that different people enjoy different things, but I hate that bars are the center of all adult social life in Canada. I was raised Muslim, so I didn’t grow up around adults who drank wine or beer with every meal. Despite the fact that I don’t strictly observe Islamic law as an adult, I still see drinking as unnecessary and harmful.
I think that most people start drinking because they see everyone around them drinking, not because it’s actually fun or useful. I’ve spent time in Jordan, where alcohol and bars are legal and moderately popular, but the default social drink is tea. I’d change our drinking culture to Jordan’s. People should have the right to do what they want with their bodies, but I’d prefer a culture where they are encouraged to make healthy choices.
[Read: The unorthodox solution to the world’s migration woes]Kelsey wants to change America’s default greeting:
I am a 29-year-old first-generation American—my parents are both immigrants from Poland. In U.S. culture, the thing I would change to be more like traditional Polish culture would be to cease the use of “How are you?” as a casual greeting. In the U.S., I find myself asked by acquaintances or strangers in office corridors, at check-out counters, on phone calls to businesses: “How are you?” I know the appropriate response is “Good; you?” and the follow-up from the asker is “Good”— if there is any follow-up. Often, American askers will continue walking down the hallway without even responding to my response. This bothers me on several accounts: 1) “How are you?” in Polish culture is typically reserved for close companions, not acquaintances; 2) those in the U.S. who “ask” it as a casual greeting in passing are not truly asking; 3) it makes me feel like, Why are you asking me to lie to you and say I am good when I possibly am not? And maybe I was feeling overall fine until you prompted me to reflect on my state of being?; 4) now that I am reflecting on my state of being and you are walking away or continuing on with this transaction, I am left feeling alienated.
Kim wants to adopt a Spanish folkway:
I suggest the United States adopt the idea of siesta during the day. It is much needed in the workforce.
Ellie contrasts U.S. prison culture with the Norwegian approach to crime and punishment:
Because of our problems of prejudice and privatization, our prisons are designed to make life worse for convicted people. We need to make life better for them, so they are better citizens when released, and so they won’t get readmitted. In Norway, the only difference between a prisoner and a guard is that the prisoner does not have the freedom to leave at will. The Norwegians consider that loss of freedom to be punishment enough.
The prisoners’ accommodations are pleasant, though simple. There are no bars; guards are friendly to inmates; there is no solitary confinement; smuggling of drugs is illegal but is tolerated; drug rehab is a robust offering. Inmates cook their own meals and do their own cleaning and maintenance. Disruptive prisoners may be transferred out to a more secure, more supervised wing. But even there they get fairness, respect, and access to volunteer and self-improvement programs, same as the main block prisoners.
If you treat prisoners as valued human beings, you teach them how to be valued human beings, and how to treat others as such. Norway’s recidivism rate is less than a third of ours.
We need to get the profit motive out of our prison system, so that an increased incarcerated population is no longer a sign of a successful business model but is rather a sign of an unsuccessful model for preventing re-incarceration. In a prison system, a “repeat customer” should not be a good thing for anyone.
Tracking recidivism reduction will determine quantitatively which changes in prisons are working, and which successful changes are the best to make universal requirements.  Right now there is no accountability anywhere for recidivism. With adoption of Norwegian practices, first in a few but then in all prisons, the prisons can become accountable. Recidivism can go from being “a damned shame” to being “a damned sight better.”
Perhaps thinking of Amsterdam, Christa writes, “I’d like to have bicycle lanes everywhere in the United States, and the right to turn on red should be abolished so as to not kill or injure pedestrians and bicyclists.”Michele admits, “I’m not sure what culture has the strongest practice or attitude of forgiveness,” but that’s what she wants for the United States. She argues:
There is very real suffering and injustice that deserves sympathy and redress by civil society. However, polarizing grievances are not helping anyone. There is a growing culture of vengeful embrace of victimhood that is inflamed by misinformation and propaganda. New power structures exploit and stoke grievance passions. People can be too wrapped up in vengeance and fears to seek difficult truths that would produce understanding that might lead them to forgiveness, responsibility, and cooperation. Maybe another culture has a better way to deliver better outcomes. I just wish that, by magic, we could replace our culture of victimhood and vengefulness with powerful forgiveness to be able to move forward cooperatively and equitably for the greater good for everyone.
Barbara laments the treatment of one demographic group in particular:
Ageism is a fact of life in American culture. As an old person, I don’t expect to be worshipped. I would just like to be appreciated as a fellow, equal human. It would be nice to have my opinion valued. It would be nice to be seen as a member of the community. That happens in many other cultures around the world, such as Korea, Finland, and Denmark.
[Read: Nine reader views on the state of immigration policy]Jake prefers Canadian gun culture to American gun culture:
My whole life has straddled the U.S. and Canada. I was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, to parents who had moved from the U.S. the year before; I attended college and have lived the remainder of my adult life in various regions of the United States. Thus I have spent decades contemplating what is different, and what is not, between the two countries.
There is so much that I am grateful for in the United States. But if I could change one thing, it would be the culture of widespread gun ownership. I have no problem with hunting rifles and shotguns; I grew up around them and do not find them frightening. But I find the U.S.’s sheer ubiquity of gun ownership, and the everyday use of handguns and assault rifles designed solely to kill people, to be baffling and at times terrifying.
In Canada, everyday life is so similar to what it is in the United States, yet most people simply don’t have to consider the possibility that someone they will encounter in public will threaten them with a gun. The news blotters in Canadian newspapers are full of accounts of people who rob convenience stores with hockey sticks, and lack cases in which some driver fires at another one because they thought they cut them off on the freeway. Because legal gun ownership is so much rarer in Canada, there is much less opportunity for legal guns to be illegally used, or for legal guns to get sold on the black market. The result: The same lowlifes and hotheads that exist in Canada as exist here in the U.S. are much less likely to be packing. What would potentially be a lethal shoot-out here ends up as a punch-up or maybe a knife fight there, with much less chance of someone getting killed.
I fervently support gun-safety legislation in the U.S. and loathe the poisonous role of the [National Rifle Association] and other organizations that can’t countenance even the most basic reforms, some of which might have the effect of saving thousands of lives. It should be possible for reasonable people who disagree about guns to come together and agree on a suite of changes that would make a real difference: End liability shields for gun makers; aggressively prosecute illegal gun dealers or renegade gun-store owners; enact universal background checks; require extensive training and liability insurance for concealed carriers; end the ludicrous and politically inflammatory permission of open gun carrying; drastically increase the scrutiny of people who seek to purchase assault rifles; and so on.
But I know that even with these reforms, the U.S. will never have rates of gun violence as low as in Canada. The number of guns is approaching the number of people in this country. There is no realistic way to get rid of them that large swaths of the public will ever accept. So even with reasonable reforms, we will likely continue to have tens of thousands more people killed every year by guns than we would have if the U.S. had Canada’s gun culture and laws. Though that is unlikely to affect me personally, I live with the fear that some lunatic around the next street corner is carrying in his pocket the Godlike power to inflict death. If I could snap my fingers and make 95 percent of the guns in the U.S. disappear, I would.
Marilyn dislikes a different but perhaps related aspect of American culture:
If I could change one thing about my country’s culture, it would be our attitude toward rugged individualism. In the United States, prizing of individual freedom to the extent we do has fostered selfishness, insularity, toxic masculinity, isolation, and, most damaging, freedom from responsibility to anyone but “me and mine.” In countries where collective responsibility flourishes, there is much less violence, more considerate behavior, a willingness to contribute to the betterment of the whole society, and a belief that well-considered collective action can reap great rewards for everyone. We live in a global society now, and while individuality is a creative force, individualism can and often is a destructive force in far-flung places in the world where climate change caused by individual actions is wrecking lives.
And Barry wants to change an inclination that he observes in America but that exists in every country:
If I could change one thing, it would be the culture of advantaging one’s sons and daughters over others’. Conservatives give preferences to their progeny without hesitation or apology; it is consistent with their ideology. But ideological liberals also intend (belying their “equality” ethic) to give great advantages to their own children, sending them to the most prestigious prep schools, then on to the best universities. And all this perpetuates deep socioeconomic inequalities.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Every nation has fringe candidates and public spectacles in its political life, but today, the American right celebrates the abandonment of dignity and virtue.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The inevitable indictment of Donald Trump
Medium COVID could be the most dangerous COVID.
Trumpism has found its leading lady.
Clowns and CharlatansOhio’s U.S. Senate candidates, Tim Ryan and J. D. Vance, held their first debate last night in Cleveland. I wrote last year about why I find Vance so execrable, but my friend Jim Swift, a native Ohioan, argued today that while “Ryan gave a serviceable performance,” he “didn’t beat Vance into the ground, and given how far Ohio has gone in a MAGA direction, that’s what he needed to do.”One moment, however, struck me. At a rally in Ohio last month, Donald Trump declared, “J. D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad”—while Vance was standing right by the stage. Last night, Ryan slammed Vance for selling his dignity:
I don’t know anybody I grew up with—I don’t know anybody I went to high school with—that would allow somebody to take their dignity like that and then get back up onstage. We need leaders who have courage to take on their own party. And I’ve proven that. And he was called an “ass kisser” by the former president.
I understood Ryan’s exasperation. I’m not from Ohio, but I was raised in a working-class neighborhood. Where I grew up, if you sneered that a man was kissing your ass—and said it to his face—that other fellow might react by knocking you on that particular part of your anatomy. But Vance’s reaction to Trump calling him out as a spineless loser at his own rally was to run up to Trump like a puppy that just got a treat, wagging his tail for another tasty biscuit.It is possible, even likely, that Vance will gain a Senate seat. But he can never regain his dignity. He doesn’t seem to care—and neither, apparently, do voters.Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.We often failed, and sometimes we even enjoyed electing scoundrels, such as James Traficant and James Michael Curley. Democracies always welcome a certain amount of playacting and mischief as reassurance that our leaders are not too far removed from our own experiences as citizens. And yes, many politicians have used that as cover for their misdeeds. But even some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are. The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life. Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them. Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe. Instead, consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others. The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap Colosseum pleasures for its rank and file. Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque. Last night, Fox News—home to some of the loudest carny barkers on the freak-show midway—played a snippet of a 2018 phone call from Joe Biden to his son Hunter. The message revealed a father’s love and worry; the Fox host Sean Hannity tried to make it seem scandalous. Meanwhile, GOP leaders continue to defend the Georgia candidate Herschel Walker, whose callousness to his own children (and their mothers) is on full display. They ridicule Biden—a decent and good man who was worried that his son was going to die from addiction—and make excuses for Walker, who seemingly forgot about multiple children he’s fathered and has made incoherent responses to charges from the mother of one of those children that he financed an abortion for her. She has also said that he later asked her to undergo a second abortion; Walker continues to deny all of these claims.I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.Related:
The moral collapse of J. D. Vance
Herschel Walker’s candidacy is just insulting.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked G7 leaders for new air-defense systems after Russia launched assaults on targets across the country yesterday.
The 2020 presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard announced that she is leaving the Democratic Party.
Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez resigned from her role after a leaked audio recording revealed racist comments she made last year.
Humans Being: Kid Cudi’s animated Netflix movie, Entergalactic, has Jordan Calhoun believing in love again.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry reflects on four things she’s watched and read that offer a blueprint for life—and for hope.
Galaxy Brain: Charlie Warzel watched the Coinbase documentary so you don’t have to.
I Have Notes: R. Eric Thomas talks with Nicole Chung about writing prose, plays, and television scripts.
Brooklyn Everywhere: Nury Martinez shows that Latinos’ racism can still reaffirm white supremacy, Xochitl Gonzalez writes.
(Francois Lepage / Hans Lucas / Redux)
Scientists Can No Longer Ignore Ancient Flooding TalesBy Chris Baraniuk It wasn’t long after Henry David Inglis arrived on the island of Jersey, just northwest of France, that he heard the old story. Locals eagerly told the 19th-century Scottish travel writer how, in a bygone age, their island had been much more substantial, and that folks used to walk to the French coast. The only hurdle to their journey was a river—one easily crossed using a short bridge.“Pah!” Inglis presumably scoffed as he looked out across 22 kilometers of shimmering blue sea between Jersey and the French coast—because he went on to write, in his 1834 book about the region, that this was “an assertion too ridiculous to merit examination.” About 150 years earlier, another writer, Jean Poingdestre, had been similarly unmoved by the tale. No one could have trod from Jersey to Normandy, he withered, “vnlesse it were before the Flood,” referring to the Old Testament cataclysm.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
SNL needs to log off.
The Supreme Court has a perfectly good option in its most divisive case.
(Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty)
Read. “Litany for Dictatorships,” a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét, published in The Atlantic in 1935.Watch. One of these 10 “scary” movies for people who don’t like horror.Listen. A new episode of our How to Build a Happy Life podcast, about what happens when virtues become vices.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I often pester my Atlantic colleague Isabel Fattal about increasing her late-20th-century pop-culture literacy. (I do this to many of my younger friends and family; it’s probably not one of my more endearing habits.) Today, just before a meeting, a song jarred a memory of a movie. I mentioned the film to her and found that she has not seen it. Perhaps you haven’t either, but you should: The song was “Say You, Say Me,” by Lionel Richie, and the movie is White Nights, a 1985 film (widely available to rent online) whose plot was little more than an excuse to get Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gregory Hines dancing together. But do you really need more than that to watch two great dancers?The interesting wrinkle, and what makes the film a kind of Cold War timepiece, is that it is set in the Soviet Union. (This is why I went to see it at the time, to be honest.) Baryshnikov plays a ballet star who defects to the West, and he finds himself recaptured by the KGB after a plane crash in Siberia. He’s sent to go live with Hines, who defected to Moscow because of the Vietnam War and now lives in internal Soviet exile with his wife (played by Isabella Rossellini). The plot is paper-thin, but the dance scenes are great, Jerzy Skolimowski has a terrific turn as a nasty KGB colonel, and, in addition to Richie’s hit, the soundtrack features the lovely Stephen Bishop song “Separate Lives,” performed by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin.— TomSpecial announcement: We’re launching a culture-focused weekend edition of the Daily! Every Sunday morning, an Atlantic writer will share what they’re watching, reading, and listening to. Keep an eye out for the first installment this Sunday, October 16.Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here. Need help? Contact Customer Care. Explore all of our newsletters, including our special offerings for subscribers.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Public health officials agree that the end of the pandemic is in sight but not here yet. So where does it leave educators, top business executives, and public health experts? Adjusting to a world of constant vigilance for COVID flare-ups, accepting hybrid workplaces, hustling to make up for lost school time — and avoiding “lethal inflexibility” if the virus mutates into a more deadly threat.
Officials at the World Health Organization say that many nations have a pretty good handle on what’s going on given the spread of vaccines, rise of effective treatments, and immunity conferred by the large number who have had the disease. However, they said in late September that both the ongoing global death toll — 10,000 a week — and the prospect that the continuing, widespread transmission around the world will spawn a dangerous new variant prevents them from declaring an end to the COVID-19 emergency.
WHO director general Tedros Ghebreyesus and Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead of WHO’s pandemic response, said that though the advent of vaccines and effective treatments have transformed the fight against the ailment, doses remain scarce in some low- and middle-income nations. And the more the virus circulates, they said, the more chances it has to mutate into something worrisome.
“The refrain of the pandemic has been that no one is safe until everyone is safe,” Ghebreyesus said during a media briefing. “The pandemic is not over, but the end is in sight.”
William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology and co-director of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said despite the temptation to consider the pandemic over, past lessons caution us to wait and see. Last winter’s Omicron variant provided an unforgettable example of the need to not let our attention wander. Though not as virulent as other variants, Omicron’s constellation of mutations stunned scientists when it appeared last fall and fueled its breathtaking spread around the world in the weeks that followed. It rapidly displaced earlier variants and, though not as dangerous on a case-by-case basis, the sheer number of infections it caused have made Omicron much more deadly.
“The thing which most people would be nervously looking for is the possibility of a variant that has properties like Omicron, in terms of being able to infect lots of people but which also is more dangerous in the way that Delta was,” Hanage said. “If Omicron had been as virulent as Delta, things would have been much worse.”
Omicron has also proven disturbingly prolific, and subvariants continue to emerge. WHO officials said that though Omicron represents 99 percent of all SARS-CoV-2 out there today, there are some 300 Omicron subvariants that are being monitored, including BA.5 — widespread in the U.S. — BA.2.75 and its subvariants, BA.4.6 and its subvariants, and BF.7, itself a subvariant of BA.5.
With much of the world either infected or vaccinated — the WHO tallies some 12.7 billion doses given — the pandemic’s ebb and flow is determined by a complex relationship among variants, by rising and falling immunity among humans, and by apparent seasonal effects, Hanage said.

“If Omicron had been as virulent as Delta, things would have been much worse.”
— William Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology, co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics

Variants that spread rapidly gain the upper hand by efficiently infecting those still uninfected and those vaccinated or recovered whose immunity has waned over time. As people gain immunity to the new strain, the rate of infection slows, eventually favoring other variants that may not spread as rapidly, but that better escape the body’s immune response.
In the U.S., that complex dance appears to be playing out now, Hanage said, with the fast-spreading BA.5 subvariant appearing to have run its course, while BA.4.6, which has greater ability to evade immune defenses, is beginning to spread more widely.
With each of the past two winters seeing large surges in cases whose peak case counts came within days of each other, Hanage said it’s reasonable to expect something similar this fall and winter, even though widespread immunity and availability of a new variant-updated vaccine makes it unclear what that will look like in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Given recent trends, it’s likely that illness will be less severe than earlier in the pandemic, though Hanage cautioned that even mild illness, spread widely enough, can be disruptive.
“If everybody in the world got the common cold at the same time, it would be a big deal,” Hanage said. “That’s the thing about a pandemic of this nature. It’s not so much the individual fatality rate; it’s the fact that a respiratory virus is capable of infecting lots of people very quickly. And that means — as with Omicron — flight crews all go down at the same time because they tend to hang out with each other. Same thing with health care workers on a particular ward. Same thing with teachers.”
It is that backdrop of global uncertainty that has Hanage warning against “lethal inflexibility.” While hoping the current lull turns out to be more than that, Americans should get on with their lives, but with an eye on the global and national pandemic situation. In fact, Hanage said, it is only the pandemic’s already staggering toll that makes today’s fatality rates appear “good” by comparison. The virus has already killed more than 200,000 Americans this year, Hanage said, a rate more than four times that of a “bad” flu season.

“The overriding goal for this year is that school should look and feel a lot like it did prior to the pandemic.”
— Joseph Allen, associate professor of exposure assessment science

Even should a surge emerge, Hanage and Joseph Allen, associate professor of exposure assessment science at the Harvard Chan School and a healthy-buildings expert, said clear damage already done to children’s education, coupled with the low risk of serious illness for such a young population, means there should be a high bar set for steps that cause further disruption.
“The cost of school closures has been devastating to kids — talk to any parent,” Allen said. “And, whether it’s a second-grader who has never had normal school, or high schoolers who have missed sports or special events like a prom or just social gatherings with friends, this has had major impacts. The overriding goal for this year is that school should look and feel a lot like it did prior to the pandemic.”
Martin West, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, said August’s dismal test results from the nation’s 9-year-olds was expected given the widespread pandemic disruptions to schooling, but nonetheless disturbing.
“They show substantial declines in math and reading achievement for the average student. In the case of math, that’s the first time that student scores have declined in the 50-year history of the long-term trends assessment,” West said. “Not only were the average declines substantial, there were big differences in the amount of ground lost by higher- and lower-achieving students.”
Though the tests were only for 9-year-olds, other tests indicate such declines were pervasive in elementary and middle school. In high schools, there are other indicators of lost progress, such as increasing numbers of dropouts and lower numbers enrolling in college.
Since in-person schooling restarted last year, children appear to have resumed their prior progress, but that bit of good news doesn’t address the deficit they had coming back to their classrooms, he said. That can only be made up through additional instructional hours.
West said he would never rule out masking, school closures, or other steps should the need arise, but he thought risk might be balanced differently today than earlier in the pandemic, with effective tools to fight pandemic illness and a better understanding of the risk of staying out of school.
“In retrospect, over the course of the pandemic, we seem to have underestimated the costs of school closures, and perhaps also overestimated the value of school closures in preventing the worst consequences of the pandemic,” West said.

“Should people have to quarantine and they’re not very sick, they’ll keep at it. We’ve already seen a reduction in absenteeism with the presence of remote work.”
— Tsedal Neeley, professor of business administration, senior associate dean for faculty development and research

Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School’s Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean for faculty development and research, said that though another surge remains possible, businesses and workers are looking ahead not to more potential temporary measures, but to what the permanent, post-pandemic workplace will look like.
While Labor Day’s unofficial end of summer marked a time when many businesses required previously remote workers to return to the office, what that “return” looks like varies from place to place. What’s become apparent, said Neeley, who wrote a 2021 book on remote work, is that the hybrid model — where professionals, particularly so-called knowledge workers, spend a couple of days in the office each week and the rest working remotely — has won.
Many bosses, she said, would prefer workers return full-time — or at least most of the time — citing the need for in-person collaboration, to oversee and motivate staffs, and to foster corporate culture. But one indelible pandemic lesson is that employees can be effective working remotely, and, despite some wobbles, the economy continues to favor workers over employers.
“Many companies thought that they would have an upper hand because of the economic uncertainties, but employees continue to have power because the right people are still hard to hire and retain,” Neeley said. “Because of those dynamics, employers don’t have the number of people that they need in order to meet their objectives. It’s kind of a tricky place.”
A plus of the emerging hybrid workplace, Neeley said, is that it bakes flexibility into knowledge workers’ practices. And keeping remote work part of the picture keeps that workforce resilient against a pandemic resurgence.
“Should people have to quarantine and they’re not very sick, they’ll keep at it. We’ve already seen a reduction in absenteeism with the presence of remote work,” Neeley said. “The norms around digital tools have been so well established that it’ll be quite seamless.”

I am still afraid of catching COVID. As a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician, I no longer worry that I’ll end up strapped to a ventilator, but it does seem plausible that even a mild case of the disease could shorten my life, or leave me with chronic fatigue, breathing trouble, and brain fog. Roughly one in 10 Americans appears to share my concern, including plenty of doctors. “We know many devastating symptoms can persist for months,” the physician Ezekiel Emanuel wrote this past May in The Washington Post. “Like everyone, I want this pandemic nightmare to be over. But I also desperately fear living a debilitated life of mental muddle or torpor.”Recently, I’ve begun to think that our worries might be better placed. As the pandemic drags on, data have emerged to clarify the dangers posed by COVID across the weeks, months, and years that follow an infection. Taken together, their implications are surprising. Some people's lives are devastated by long COVID; they’re trapped with perplexing symptoms that seem to persist indefinitely. For the majority of vaccinated people, however, the worst complications will not surface in the early phase of disease, when you’re first feeling feverish and stuffy, nor can the gravest risks be said to be “long term.” Rather, they emerge during the middle phase of post-infection, a stretch that lasts for about 12 weeks after you get sick. This period of time is so menacing, in fact, that it really ought to have its own, familiar name: medium COVID.Just how much of a threat is medium COVID? The answer has been obscured, to some extent, by sloppy definitions. A lot of studies blend different, dire outcomes into a single giant bucket called “long COVID.” Illnesses arising in as few as four weeks, along with those that show up many months later, have been considered one and the same. The CDC, for instance, suggested in a study out last spring that one in five adults who get the virus will go on to suffer any of 26 medical complications, starting at least one month after infection, and extending up to one year. All of these are called “post-COVID conditions, or long COVID.” A series of influential analyses looking at U.S. veterans described an onslaught of new heart, kidney, and brain diseases (even among the vaccinated) across a similarly broad time span. The studies’ authors refer to these, grouped together, as “long COVID and its myriad complications.”But the risks described above might well be most significant in just the first few weeks post-infection, and fade away as time goes on. When scientists analyzed Sweden’s national health registry, for example, they found that the chance of developing pulmonary embolism—an often deadly clot in the lungs—was a startling 32 times higher in the first month after testing positive for the virus; after that, it quickly diminished. The clots were only two times more common at 60 days after infection, and the effect was indistinguishable from baseline after three to four months. A post-infection risk of heart attack and stroke was also evident, and declined just as expeditiously. In July, U.K. epidemiologists corroborated the Swedish findings, showing that a heightened rate of cardiovascular disease among COVID patients could be detected up to 12 weeks after they got sick. Then the hazard went away.This is all to be expected, given that other respiratory infections are known to cause a temporary spike in patients’ risk of cardiovascular events. Post-viral blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes tend to blow through like a summer storm. A very recent paper in the journal Circulation, also based on U.K. data, did find that COVID’s effects are longer-lasting, with a heightened chance of such events that lasts for almost one full year. But even in that study, the authors see the risk fall off most dramatically across the first two weeks. I’ve now read dozens of similar analyses, using data from many countries, that agree on this basic point: The greatest dangers lie in the weeks, not months, after a COVID infection.[Read: Long COVID could be a ‘mass deterioration event’]Yet many have inferred that COVID’s dangers have no end. “What’s particularly alarming is that these are really life-long conditions,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the lead researcher on the veterans studies, told the Financial Times in August. A Cleveland Clinic cardiologist has suggested that catching SARS-CoV-2 might even become a greater contributor to cardiovascular disease than being a chronic smoker or having obesity. But if experts who hold this assumption are correct—and the mortal hazards of COVID really do persist for a lifetime (or even many months)—then it’s not yet visible at the health-system level. By the end of the Omicron surge last winter, one in four Americans—about 84 million people—had been newly infected with the coronavirus. This was on top of 103 million pre-Omicron infections. Yet six months after the surge ended, the number of adult emergency-room visits, outpatient appointments, and hospital admissions across the country were all slightly lower than they were at the same time in 2021, according to an industry report released last month. In fact, emergency-room visits and hospital admissions in 2021 and 2022 were lower than they’d been before the pandemic. In other words, a rising tide of long-COVID-related medical conditions, affecting nearly every organ system, is nowhere to be found.If mild infections did routinely lead to fatal consequences at a delay of months or years, then we should see it in our death rates, too. The number of excess deaths in the U.S.—meaning those that have occured beyond historic norms—should still be going up, long after case rates fall. Yet excess deaths in the U.S. dropped to zero this past April, about two months after the end of the winter surge, and they have stayed relatively low ever since. Here, as around the world, overall mortality rates follow acute-infection rates, but only for a little while. A second wave of deaths—a long-COVID wave—never seems to break.Even the most familiar maladies of “long COVID”—severe fatigue, cognitive difficulties, and breathing trouble—tend to be at their worst during the medium post-infection phase. An early analysis of symptom-tracking data from the U.K., the U.S., and Sweden found that the proportion of those experiencing COVID’s aftereffects decreased by 83 percent four to 12 weeks after illness started. The U.K. government also reported much higher rates of medium COVID, relative to long COVID: In its survey, 11 percent of people who caught the virus experienced lingering issues such as weakness, muscle aches, and loss of smell, but that rate had dropped to 3 percent by 12 weeks post-infection. The U.K. saw a slight decline in the number of people reporting such issues throughout the spring and summer; and a recent U.S. government survey found that about half of Americans who had experienced any COVID symptoms for three months or longer had already recovered.This slow, steady resolution of symptoms fits with what we know about other post-infection syndromes. A survey of adolescents recovering from mononucleosis, which is caused by Epstein-Barr virus, found that 13 percent of subjects met criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome at six months, but that rate was nearly halved at one year, and nearly halved again at two. An examination of chronic fatigue after three different infections—EBV, Q fever, and Ross River virus—identified a similar pattern: frequent post-infection symptoms, which gradually decreased over months.[Read: It’s not just long COVID]The pervasiveness of medium COVID does nothing to negate the reality of long COVID—a calamitous condition that can shatter people’s lives. Many long-haulers experience unremitting symptoms, and their cases can evolve into complex chronic syndromes like ME/CFS or dysautonomia. As a result, they may require specialized medical care, permanent work accommodations, and ongoing financial support. Recognizing the small chance of such tragic outcomes could well be enough to make some people try to avoid infection or reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 at all costs.But if you’re like me, and trying to calibrate your behaviors to meet some personally acceptable level of COVID risk, then it helps to keep in mind the difference between the virus’s medium- and long-term complications. Medium COVID may be time-limited, but it is far from rare—and not always mild. It can mean a month or two of profound fatigue, crushing headaches, and vexing chest pain. It can lead to life-threatening medical complications. It needs recognition, research, and new treatments. For millions of people, medium COVID is as bad as it gets.

A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to replace the military commander in charge of the Ukraine war with Gen. Sergei Surovikin, and thus change the military culture of the conflict itself. It was an important move but not necessarily for the reasons offered by most of the media. It came after Ukraine, armed primarily by the United States, had seized the initiative on the Ukrainian battlefield. Putin’s credibility was at stake even among ostensibly pro-war elements who were now starting to criticize his performance.

The origin of the criticism is important. One of the loudest critics of Russia’s strategy in Ukraine has been Ramzan Kadyrov, Putin’s longtime functionary who used extreme brutality at Putin’s behest to keep the uprising in Chechnya under control. Kadyrov and Putin were both committed to halting the fragmentation of Russia and recovering what could be recovered. Kadyrov supported the invasion of Ukraine but was appalled at the weakness shown by the Russian army, particularly its high command. From his point of view, a ruthless operation against the Ukrainian public and military was required – in other words, a Chechen-type war. So here we have a stalwart Putin ally publicly lambasting the incompetence and softness of the Russian army, only for a new commander to be named.

Commanders who look good in exercises and staff meetings sometimes fail in battle. Sometimes, replacing a commander no matter the circumstance is critical. It happens all the time. It’s been clear for some time now that Russia’s war plan has been flawed from the beginning. A new war plan requires a new command. The new commander immediately ordered a barrage of missiles aimed at Ukraine.

War is about breaking the enemy’s will to resist; a ruthless assault in which everything is seen as a possible target is the first step. The second step is to make clear to Russian soldiers that they face extreme danger from their own side if they fail to perform on the battlefield. Morale and motivation are important, but they don’t work if the army is ill-equipped or its soldiers ill-trained. Firing missiles, then, signals what’s in store for the future, but that future won’t come only if troops are scared of their commanders. It comes with good training at all levels, with suitable weapons and other tools of modern warfare. Doing either, and ideally both, takes time. An opportunely timed missile barrage helps a little in this regard.

To buy more time, an attack from the periphery would help even more. There are reports of Russian forces in Belarus, for example, and rumors that the Belarusian army is readying for war. If true, a southward thrust out of Belarus might well buy time. It would force Ukraine to defend itself on another front, and it would threaten the Ukrainian supply line from Poland. This is easier said than done, of course. It’s unclear whether Belarus is capable of fighting high intensity warfare, and the mere act of getting Russian troops there is difficult.

A peripheral attack may have been possible before the Ukrainian army became battle-hardened and before the U.S. started supplying weapons to Kyiv en masse. Likewise, a peace treaty might have been possible as well – that is, if anyone was seriously interested in it. None of it is possible when Russia is, by its own standards, weak. A missile barrage, coupled with the reconstructed Russian military, is likely meant to create leverage for Russia where none had existed. The studied ferocity of the new commander could, in theory, create a basis for a settlement.

Ultimately, the U.S. controls the war’s course in Ukraine, and therefore Ukraine is hostage to American interests. But because Ukraine has lives at stake, it has a limit on how long and how intensely it will fight the war. The American goal is to keep Russian forces as far east as possible, away from NATO. The Russian goal is to regain all of Ukraine. So progress one way or another in this conflict depends to some degree on how credible the new Russian military leaders are and how they can motivate existing troops while building a new force come spring. Until then, they must demonstrate that the soldiers already there are to be taken seriously and that worse may yet be coming. They must frighten the Ukrainians and Americans. Next time, the criticism of someone like Kadyrov may not do. Production of weapons is the foundation of this war, and the U.S. dominates production. If Russia can’t rapidly match that, it has to make some concessions, possibly major ones. That is the battle problem facing the new command.

Within weeks of taking office, Britain's new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a radical new set of economic measures that echoed the trickle-down policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan -- heavy on tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.

Last Monday, after a backlash from investors, economists and members of his own party, Mr. Kwarteng reversed one of the proposals, deciding against abolishing the tax rate of 45 percent on the highest earners. But proposals for other tax cuts worth tens of billions of pounds remain intact, as the government insists it is on the right path.

What's bizarre about this latest episode of trickle-down economics -- the abiding faith on the political right that tax cuts and deregulation are good for an economy -- is that this gonzo economic theory continues to live on, notwithstanding its repeated failures.

Why has the public been repeatedly willing to go along with trickle-down economics when nothing ever trickles down?

Ever since Reagan and Thatcher first tried them, trickle-down policies have exploded budget deficits and widened inequality. At best, they've temporarily increased consumer demand (the opposite of what's needed during the high inflation that Britain, the US, and much of the world are experiencing).

Reagan's tax cuts and deregulation at the start of the 1980s were not responsible for America's rapid growth through the late 1980s. His exorbitant spending (mostly on national defense) fueled a temporary boom that ended in a fierce recession.

Trump's 2018 tax cut never trickled down.

Yet the US never restored the highest marginal tax rates before Reagan. And deregulation -- especially of financial markets -- continues to endanger the stability of the economy and expose workers, consumers, and the environment to unnecessary risk.

The result? From 1989 to 2019, typical working families in the United States saw negligible increases in their real (inflation-adjusted) incomes and wealth.

Over the same period, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans became $29 trillion richer. The national debt exploded. And Wall Street's takeover of the economy continued.

Meanwhile, and largely as a result, America has become more bitterly divided along the fissures of class and education. Donald Trump didn't cause this. He exploited it.

The situation in the UK after Thatcher has not been dramatically different.

So why is trickle-down economics still with us? What explains the fatal attraction of this repeatedly failed economic theory?

The easiest answer is that it satisfies politically powerful moneyed interests who want to rake in even more. Armies of lobbyists in Washington, London, and Brussels continuously demand tax cuts and "regulatory relief" for their wealthy patrons.

But why has the public been repeatedly willing to go along with trickle-down economics when nothing ever trickles down? What accounts for the collective amnesia?

Part of the answer is that the moneyed interests have also invested a portion of their gains in an intellectual infrastructure of economists and pundits who continue to promote this failed doctrine -- along with institutions that house them, such as, in the US, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Club for Growth.

Consider Stephen Moore, the founder and past president of the Club for Growth and a leading economist at the Heritage Foundation, whose columns appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on Fox News.

Moore helped draft and promote Trump's trickle-down tax. In recent weeks he praised Ms. Truss for her willingness "to challenge the reigning orthodoxy by sharply cutting taxes to boost growth," calling her package "a gutsy and sound policy decision," that "will bring jobs, capital and businesses back to the U.K."

Moore and others like him are happy to disregard the history of trickle-down's abject failures. They simply repeat the same set of promises made decades ago when Reagan and Thatcher set out to convince the public that trickle-down would work splendidly.

The public has so much else on its mind, and is so confused by the cacophony, that it doesn't remember -- until immediately after the next trickle-down failure.

But perhaps the main reason for the public's amnesia is that Democrats in the US and Labor in the UK have failed to offer what should be the obvious alternative: A bottom-up economics that invests in the education and health of the public, and the infrastructure connecting them.

This is the only true path to higher productivity and widely-shared prosperity.

I woke up this morning in Zagreb to news that several Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, were under attack. Russia had launched a set of cruise missiles and drones, many targeted at civilians on their morning commutes, and at children heading to school. Russian media seemed to be indicating that this was intended as a response to an unattributed attack over the weekend that damaged the new bridge over the Kerch strait, linking occupied Crimea to the Russian mainland. The bridge represents a vital supply link for Russia’s faltering war machine, with the attack possibly threatening all the territory it has occupied since 2014.Ukraine was officially silent about the Kerch incident, though there was much jubilation on social media by its well-coordinated army of internet activists. The attack came days after the New York Times reported a leak from US intelligence suggesting a Moscow car bombing in August that killed the daughter of a leading Russian nationalist ideologue was the work of Ukrainian spies.This is all unfolding as the war in Ukraine has ratcheted up tensions between nuclear armed powers to levels arguably unimaginable even at the height of the Cold War. Ukraine’s ground forces have seen spectacular gains on the ground against overstretched and under-equipped Russian forces strung out across the frontlines. This, in turn, has forced Russian President Vladimir Putin to both start a partial mobilization across Russia and to unambiguously threaten the use of nuclear weapons should Ukraine not sue for peace.The attacks on Kyiv this morning were clearly in response to the Kerch operation, Johns Hopkins University’s Dr. Sergey Radchenko argued on Twitter—an attempt by Putin to solidify his position at home, and show those in his administration baying for blood that he is as ruthless as they are. But the attacks were more than just that. He went on:Finally, and this is probably the key motivation, this strike aims to demonstrate capability, if not the intent, to obliterate Kyiv because of course there’s an implied nuclear threat behind each conventional strike into the heart of the Ukrainian capital. Putin is basically saying here that he cannot be outplayed in the game of oneupmanship simply because he suffers from no moral restraints. It’s a serious message and it’s not clear yet what our response to this will be.Radchenko gets to the heart of the matter: What is to be done? Where do we go now? For guidance, I warmly recommend two articles by two of my former colleagues and friends, one laying out a more aggressive path forward for US policy, and one arguing for staying the course.Walter Russell Mead’s column last Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal tightly lays out how the Biden Administration’s policies have gotten us to where we are. I have at times conceded that Biden played the run-up to the invasion well, eschewing escalatory rhetoric as Russian forces massed on the border. In doing so, it has seemed to me, Biden built up solidarity across Europe, and drew a line at NATO’s borders that has thus far firmly held. Had Biden pursued the policy I favored in January and February—of massing US troops on NATO’s borders, including potentially putting nuclear weapons in Romania, and threatening unspecified repercussions should Putin invade—it’s quite likely that the fickle Europeans would have split from us. Had Putin invaded anyway, many Europeans would have blamed the United States for triggering the war. Instead, we now have the West more or less standing firm, with Russia badly bloodied and increasingly isolated from even its erstwhile ally China and Ukraine pressing its advantage on the ground.That’s precisely backwards, Walter argues. Biden has set Ukraine, and by extension the West, up for a loss. By drawing a thick line between NATO and Ukraine, Putin was implicitly told that he had ultimate escalatory dominance in the actual theater of war. At the limit, Russia has nukes, Ukraine does not, and we clearly signaled that we would not get directly involved in the war beyond arming and tactically supporting Ukrainian efforts on the ground. As we approach that limit, the logic is predictably playing out. As Walter argued in an earlier column, anything short of Russia being seen to lose the current war, which would include some kind of armistice that solidifies Russia’s hold on territory beyond the 2014 lines, must be judged a win for armed territorial revisionism. This will prove “a massive blow to American credibility and power overseas.” Even a partial, Pyrrhic victory by Russia would set a precedent, emboldening the likes of China and Iran, and dispiriting allies like Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan. Drawing too firm a line at NATO’s borders in the Ukraine war will have circumscribed American power more broadly.Jason Willick, writing in the Washington Post, casts a different light on the current situation, and more clearly channels the Biden Administration’s case. This is exactly what victory looks like, Jason argues: Putin stands alone, his army is wrecked, his economy is battered, and no matter how the war ends, Russia will likely be a permanently diminished power in the world. The United States has deftly managed to lay low one of its rivals by creating an efficient meat grinder on its borders, at manageable financial cost to itself and with zero American lives lost.Stay the course, Jason counsels. Keep arming the Ukrainians, but do no more. The Biden Administration’s policy has always been to let the Ukrainians win back as much territory as they can at the cost of only their own lives. This is what the oft-repeated mantra of “we will not dictate to Ukraine the terms of peace” means in practice. At the limit, it suggests that it’s up to the Ukrainians to modulate the risks of triggering nuclear reprisals from Russia. Muddying the waters now, by trying to deter nuclear aggression by explicitly threatening direct involvement, would only embolden Ukraine to gamble more boldly, making a civilization-ending conflict all the more likely. Holding the current policy line forces the Ukrainians to more clearly face the choices before them. And indeed, a nuclear attack on Ukraine may not be enough to halt its resistance. If Kyiv decides to push through after nukes are deployed against its forces or its cities, we must continue supporting them, all the while maintaining the ultimate red line at NATO’s borders. In this perspective, the endgame is clear, no matter where the final lines are drawn: NATO is united as never before, Ukraine becomes a permanent garrison/buffer zone in Europe, and Russia remains a failure and a nuclear pariah. Normalization with Russia under Putin (or any leader ideologically similar to him) is already out of the question. Nuclear first use will only further marginalize pro-Russian voices in Europe, and perhaps more broadly in the world. Welcome to the 21st century.Regular readers will know that I am quite sympathetic to Jason’s framing. But I don’t want to somehow suggest that Walter’s points are easy to dismiss. Quite to the contrary, I can’t get them out of my head. The detonation of a nuclear weapon in anger would almost certainly scramble the world order, no matter what the final territorial outcome on the other side of it. Trying to avert such an event should preoccupy us at this moment. And Walter’s proposal is a serious one: Biden must undo the mistakes that led us to the current situation. He must abandon his approach of shepherding the West to consensus and instead start to lead more forthrightly.First, Biden must decide for himself that an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Russia is firmly in our interest. Any internal wavering will undermine next steps. Having done so, he must start building an actual war coalition, with all that implies. “Rather than playing down the danger, he needs to dramatize it,” Walter writes. The theatrics—emergency NATO summits, addresses to Congress, prime time speeches to the American people—need to convince Moscow that any nuclear attack on Ukraine will bring devastating consequences for Russia. The nuclear saber should perhaps remain sheathed, but only ambiguously so. Ambiguity ramps up uncertainty. Ukraine wielding Western weapons has already shown Russians just how badly outmatched they are against NATO tech. And Kyiv has achieved everything it has with no meaningful air or naval support. It could only get worse for Russian troops if the West were to really lean in. Loud threats should, of course, be accompanied by quiet diplomacy, Walter avers, with off ramps for Russia at the ready. But the final outcome must be unambiguous: Russia will have to visibly stand down.But how credible would these threats be? The American president has an enormous bully pulpit, and his word has to be taken seriously around the globe, by dint of America’s overwhelming might alone. Every pronouncement of even an erratic leader like President Donald Trump, who had uncertain control over his own administration, kept foreign capitals rapt. Joe Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he certainly should know how to play the deterrence game if he decides to do so. His words carry profound weight.And Russia, already badly bruised, would have to do some hard calculations of its own. What percentages does it assign to Biden being able to follow through? What percentage is it comfortable with? What does its future look like if its entire army is obliterated in Ukraine? The disastrous 1990s, as civil wars raged in far-flung provinces while Moscow helplessly watched from the center, is a formative memory of Putin’s generation of strongmen. This time would almost certainly be worse.The weakest point in this more aggressive approach, however, is found in the title of Walter’s own column (perhaps not written by him): “The Question on Putin’s Mind: Would We Risk New York to Keep Odessa Free?” This is what leaves me hesitant above all else. Building a real war coalition will be extraordinarily difficult, abroad even more so than at home. One might be able to fudge the existential question in Washington with stern speeches, but I seriously doubt that Europeans would easily fall into line, putting their own capitals at risk for Ukraine. Viktor Orban’s Hungary has for months argued that Ukraine’s war is not our own, complaining that Europeans are paying the price for inscrutable Slav blood-letting. A certain soft Russophilia remains a potent political force in Bulgaria, and a recent poll found that a majority of Slovaks were rooting for Russia to win. But none of those countries really swing the balance in any meaningful way. Germany, however, is a country of a different caliber. Its heretofore hesitant, halting approach to supporting Ukraine is a symptom of deeper forces at play. Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock understand the stakes, but are also keenly aware of just what their country will bear. An even bigger, European-wide tell was how quickly and curtly Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky’s plea for Ukraine to be fast-tracked into NATO was rejected last week. The hesitancy extends well beyond Berlin.If Putin is not a half-wit, he knows all this. Europeans might well empathize with Ukraine’s plight, and might even be willing to suffer some hardships in the coming winters as a result of too tightly coupling their economies to the Russian energy dynamo. But risk Berlin, or Paris, or Amsterdam, for Kyiv? I doubt it. The right approach for Russia, therefore, would be for Putin to continue threatening nuclear Armageddon while waiting for the European coalition to fragment as Biden barks.So much of this feels like the Cold War, including the part where the Soviet Union tries to crack the Western alliance along its German fault line with nukes. And the broader stakes that Walter lays out are similarly—depressingly—familiar. My dilemma is that I worry the old Cold War playbook might not work this time, given the nature of the weak-kneed coalition that the United States finds itself leading. This may feel like the Cold War, but I don’t sense that this is a Cold War Europe. At the end of the day, this war is economically damaging and morally offensive to most Europeans, but it is definitely not existential like the Cold War was. It can only become so if the United States pulls Europe in to directly participating in the fight. They will resist mightily, and publicly.That said, how much does that matter? Perhaps the Europeans could be brought on-side with stirring rhetoric, or at least put into an uncomfortable corner. After all, their options are limited. What could they do in protest? Western unity matters, but it is not an end unto itself, as many in the Biden White House seem to believe. Indeed, Washington could credibly stare down Moscow’s nuclear threat without Europe firmly by its side. In doing so, it will have to contend with bickering allies, and an empowered peace lobby across the continent demanding Ukraine make unreasonable concessions. It will have to invest more and more of its scarce resources in managing bruised egos.On second thought, maybe it is just like Cold War Europe after all…

By late September, Pennsylvania Democrats could no longer ignore U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman’s lingering health problems. As a result of a stroke he suffered in May, the state’s lieutenant governor “sometimes speaks haltingly,” ABC News reported last month, “pausing in the middle of sentences and slurring his words.” Republicans were accused of having “seized” on Fetterman’s post-stroke recovery, prompting “medical experts” to “reject as reductive” the GOP’s powers of observation. But when Democrats began convening focus groups in search of ways to disarm the attacks on their candidate’s health, it foreclosed on the notion that only partisan Republicans were alarmed by Fetterman’s medical issues.

But not everyone is convinced that Fetterman’s cognitive impairments are a legitimate issue. Readers of Rebecca Traister’s New York profile of the Keystone State’s Democratic Senate nominee will likely get the impression that questions about Fetterman’s health challenges are untoward, and his difficulties are actually a campaign-trail asset.

Following his stroke, Fetterman avoided in-person events for much of the summer. But by Autumn, he was “powering through his convalescence,” Traister notes, providing Pennsylvanians with confirmation that “his physical condition” was “visibly improving.” She paints a portrait of an engaged candidate who personally oversaw the “deft tormenting of his opponent via Twitter,” a “brutally successful” barrage of memes culminating in a positive segment on The View. And yet, Traister concedes that questions about Fetterman’s competency kept coming up, and the polls kept tightening.

In Traister’s telling, the Fetterman campaign was at first opaque about the candidate’s status. But that has not been the case since at least June, when the campaign first released a doctor’s letter detailing his cardiological infirmities and his refusal to take necessary medications or see a doctor. Since then, the campaign has been transparent to a degree that should put voters’ concerns to rest.

“Lack of transparency about a health condition would be unsettling,” Traister admits. But “there has been ample coverage” of Fetterman’s health problems, she claims. What’s more, the campaign itself revealed that the candidate assented to “neurocognitive tests.” As it turns out, Fetterman—whose labored and staccato delivery on the stump is impossible to ignore, who insists that the Philadelphia “Eagles are much better than the Eagles,” and who will be “kicking balls in the authority” if elected—falls “into the normal range” on the cognition spectrum.

“There’s no great mystery about whether or how well Fetterman can speak,” Traister writes. “You can watch him do so regularly on television.” Indeed, it’s also clear that the candidate struggles to “quickly process what he hears,” which is why he requires live closed-captioning services when conducting interviews. But even after acknowledging these deficiencies, the author castigates newspapers for “pushing for further documentation” about Fetterman’s condition “with some of the energy once applied to Hillary’s emails,” while “right-wing carnival barkers treat complete medical records as they did Obama’s birth certificate.”

These disparate and entirely unrelated grievances correspond to each other only in the most partisan minds.

Traister concludes with an ominous note, though, as she attempts to view the candidate through her “committed feminist” brother’s eyes. He watched Fetterman’s performance at a September rally—where the candidate famously announced that his new name is “John Fetterwoman!” To Traister, Fetterman “did fine” and the rally “went well.” But for her brother, the experience was excruciating. He related “how scared and uncomfortable he felt” watching the candidate talk, fearing that any mental hiccup would become ordnance to be deployed in the next meme war. It turns out Traister’s feminist brother just isn’t feminist enough.

“I wondered if my job, which has involved sitting exactly that way through every public appearance of the women in politics I’ve covered — understanding that any single slip or weird facial expression would be used to make them look weak or radical or dishonest or unhinged or stupid — had inured me to that feeling of raw and relentless exposure,” she wrote. “My brother, perhaps like Fetterman, isn’t used to it.”

Maybe Traister set out to defuse the potency of attacks on Fetterman’s faculties, but she never quite got around to it. He is impaired, yes, but asking too many questions about it is gauche. And if you’re discomfited by his performance on the campaign trail, your capacity to empathize with women in positions of power is conspicuously deficient. In the end, she comes around to the notion that Fetterman’s health complications are, in fact, a boon. “Fetterman has become even more familiar to voters, not because of his Everyman toughness but because of his struggles,” she insists. Voters know “what it’s like to recuperate from a health challenge.”

Traister doesn’t come right out and say it, but the pressure on partisan Democrats to avoid lending any credence to the the right’s attacks on Fetterman is as obvious as the candidate’s cognitive deficiencies. It’s easier and more satisfying to dismiss the charge as “leveraging ableism against a person with disabilities” and leave it at that. But that does nothing to disarm the allegation, and it doesn’t prevent keen onlookers from noticing the evidence of Fetterman’s condition. It only cuts off the conversation before partisan Democrats can get around to explaining why his condition is no big deal.

Traister admits that, given “how much is riding on this race,” Fetterman’s struggles have been “really, really scary.” But he gets better every week, and his story is an inspiring one, she says. It’s possible to rationalize yourself into that conclusion, but not as a consequence of emotional blackmail. Instead, voters are shamed for noticing that Fetterman, who should be recuperating, is being forced to perform a high-wire act for the benefit of his party and its ideological goals.

I’m interrupting my Valuing the Deep State series once again to catch up on the world’s big geopolitical developments. I have just returned from a week in Europe—my third in five weeks—where I was promoting the Dutch and German editions of Liberalism and Its Discontents. I got very receptive audiences in both countries to my basic message about the need to defend liberalism, and how Ukraine was critical to that struggle.  On the Sunday I arrived in Amsterdam (October 2), I tweeted the following:A much bigger Russian collapse will unfold in the coming days.— Francis Fukuyama (@FukuyamaFrancis) October 3, 2022
I was then asked by some journalists to expand on this, which I’ll do here. It seems to me that it is quite likely that the entire Russian military position in Ukraine may collapse by the end of the winter. After the breakthrough in Kharkiv, the Ukrainians have continued to advance to Lyman and are heading further south and east to the cities of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk that they lost over the summer. There has been a breakthrough in the Kherson region as well, with the Ukrainian army advancing on Nova Kakhovka.___STEADY_PAYWALL___In reaction to the Kharkiv setback, Putin announced his “partial” mobilization on Sept. 21. The latter has been a fiasco from the get-go, with military commissars sweeping up everyone regardless of age, ability, or former military service. This has led some 700,000 young Russians to flee, or attempt to flee, the country. The social deal they had with Putin to stay out of politics in return for peace and stability has been broken, and everyone is now feeling the effects of Putin’s war. These new draftees are apparently being sent to the front with no training and little equipment, and have already been turning up dead or prisoners.Last Friday, Putin announced the annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporzhzhia oblasts in a Moscow ceremony that reeked of fascism. The very next day, Saturday Oct. 8, the Ukrainians succeeded in bombing and seriously damaging the bridge over the Kerch Strait, which is the main Russian supply line into the peninsula. The town of Nova Kakhovka on which they are advancing is an important objective not just with regard to the defense of Russian-occupied Kherson, but also because the canal providing the Crimean Peninsula with drinking water originates from that area. With both the canal and the bridge cut, the Russians will have great difficulty supplying their military in Crimea, putting the liberation not just of Kherson but of the entire region into the realm of possibility.These Ukrainian advances, as I said in my last post on Ukraine on July 22, are critical for maintaining external support for the war effort, both in Europe and in the United States. And indeed, recent poll data indicates that this support has actually increased since the summer. A stalemated, frozen conflict would create inevitable pressure for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, but now the Ukrainians have shown that there is light at the end of the tunnel. With Europe having stored sufficient gas over the summer, it seems very likely that governments there will be able to sustain sanctions and continue to supply weapons to Ukraine this winter.There has been a lot of talk and nervousness about the possibility that a desperate Putin will resort to nuclear weapons to save himself.  This possibility must be taken very seriously, but there are many reasons to think that he will not cross this threshold. In the first place, the military gains from escalation will be small, since nuclear weapons—even small “tactical” ones—are better at terrorizing civilians that destroying enemy forces. The blowback from any nuclear use will be enormous, with the narrowing support that Putin has received from the global south disappearing. More importantly, the United States and NATO have a huge number of options for responding, the majority of which do not require symmetrical nuclear use. For example, NATO has rightly resisted Ukrainian calls for a no-fly zone up to now, but this will be immediately on the table in response to a Russian use of nukes. NATO has many means of making the Russian military collapse even faster. Putin is not irrational; he is rather an extraordinary risk-taker, but this risk is likely one too far.When I tweeted that Russia would collapse, I was referring primarily to their military rather than their political system. But Putin may be in serious trouble at home nonetheless. There are plenty of reports of infighting among the siloviki and other elites in Moscow, with everyone wanting to point a finger of blame for the debacle they face. Putin’s legitimacy rested on the belief that he was a strongman, but he now looks like a foundering fool. There is no way of telling who might replace Putin; they may be even more hardline than him. But they will still lack real capabilities to reverse the defeat or avoid humiliation.Apart from Ukraine, there have been a number of other happy developments this past week:1.  The women of Iran have stood up in reaction to the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police and protests have continued in dozens of Iranian cities. While similar protests have been violently suppressed in the past, these seem different and far more widespread.2.  China is undergoing a slow-motion regime crisis on the eve of the 20thParty Congress set to begin in a few days. There appears to be no way out of the zero-Covid policy trap that Xi Jinping finds himself in, and the entire growth model, based as it was on state-backed real estate investment, is crumbling. The latest real growth estimates by the World Bank put it at less than 3 percent, below the Asia-Pacific average.3.  On a more personal note, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel prize to organizations led by two graduates of our @StanfordCDDRL programs, Oleksandra Matviichuk and Anna Dobrovolskaya, who have greatly repaid our investment in them by the work they have done on behalf of human rights in Ukraine and Russia.There’s still plenty of things to worry about. Populist parties made gains in Sweden and Italy, and the Republican Party here continues its descent into madness. American democracy will be at stake in 2024, and in the short run the Democrats will likely lose the House of Representatives next month, leading to two years of dispiriting deadlock and phony investigations. But we have to nonetheless acknowledge that it's been a pretty good week.Image: The Crimea Bridge over the Kerch Strait bridge following the Oct. 8 2022 strike.

The media keep telling us that the economy is a losing issue for Democrats. I know that this is the Republicans' talking point, but that is not what the data show.

For tens of millions of people, there is a huge amount of good news about the economy over the last year and a half. That doesn't mean that tens of millions of people are not struggling, they are. And, that is always true in the US economy.

The fact that a country as rich as ours does not have decent welfare state provisions that can ensure people adequate housing, food, and health care is an outrage. But that is a longer-term story, not something that just happened in the last year and a half. When the media suddenly choose to emphasize the struggling population, in ways that they have not done in the past, that is a political decision on their part, not one responding to a new economic reality.

Anyhow, with that issue out of the way, I'm going to emphasize some of the positive aspects of the economy which are getting little attention from media.

People Quitting Crappy Jobs

We have heard a great deal about the bad news from a tight labor market: rapidly rising wages are creating inflationary pressures, which the Fed is combatting with its aggressive path of interest rate hikes. For some reason, the flip side of this picture has gotten much less attention.

The tight labor market has meant that millions of workers have been able to quit jobs that they don't like. In the last year, there were 51.5 million voluntary quits from jobs. That is 9.3 million more than the number of people who quit their jobs in the year before the pandemic hit. (This number is for total quits, since some people quit more than once, the actual number of people who quit jobs would be somewhat lower.)

The increase was seen most clearly in the lowest paying jobs. The quit rate in the hotel and restaurant sector, meaning the percentage of workers who quit their job each month, has averaged almost 6.0 percent in the last year. That is 25 percent higher than the 4.8 percent average in the year before the pandemic.

It is also important to remember that we had a very strong labor market in the year before the pandemic, with the lowest unemployment rates in half a century. So workers have felt far more freedom to quit jobs they don't like in the last year than has been the case for a very long time.

Rising Real Wages at the Bottom

Inflation has taken a toll on workers in the last year and a half, but the impact has been hugely exaggerated. If we look at the real average hourly wage for all workers since the start of the pandemic in February of 2020, it was down by 0.7 percent, as of August. (We don't have inflation data yet for September.)

This is bad, but hardly unprecedented. For example, real average hourly wages dropped a full 1.0 percent in the year from November 2006 to November 2007, which was before the start of the Great Recession.

The picture looks somewhat better if we look at the data for production and nonsupervisory workers, which excludes most higher end workers. This series also goes back much further, historically. As of September, the real average hourly wage was down by less than 0.1 percent from its February 2020 level. That's the wrong direction, but not exactly a crisis.

By comparison, this measure fell by 3.8 percent from January of 1980 to January of 1989, a period in which the media were touting "morning in America."

The story looks better if we look to the lowest paid workers. Real average hour earnings for production and nonsupervisory in the leisure and hospitality industry (hotels and restaurants), rose by 3.9 percent from February 2020 to August. (Arin Dube and David Autor have been doing careful analysis with the Current Population Survey documenting the sharp increase in pay for low end workers during the pandemic recovery.)

To be clear, we should want to see a better picture on wage growth, with workers across the board seeing pay hikes. But the experience in the last year and a half hardly stands out as being especially bad by any historical measure. Furthermore, we have been through a worldwide pandemic and are now seeing the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. It would be a bit nuts to think we could pass through these events without any disruption to the economy.

The Benefits of Increased Work from Home

There has been a huge surge in the number of people working from home since the start of the pandemic. During the shutdown period in the spring of 2020, this was largely because there was no alternative. However, for the most part, people working from home at present are doing it by choice. In 2021, there were roughly 19 million more people (12.7 percent of the workforce) who reported that they primarily worked from home than in 2019.

This is a huge benefit for these workers. The average amount of time spent commuting in 2019 was 27.6 minutes for a one-way trip, or 55.2 minutes for the round-trip. If we assume an eight-hour work day, time spent commuting added an average of 11.5 percent to the length of the workday. We can think of this as equivalent to an 11.5 percent reduction in the hourly pay rate, compared to a situation where no time is spent commuting.

Commuting to work doesn't just take time, it is expensive. The average commuting distance to work is more than 15 miles. That means 30 miles for the round-trip. At federal government's mileage reimbursement rate of 62.5 cents per mile, this comes $18.75 a day or almost $4,900 a year. That is 7.0 percent of the annual pay of a worker earning $70,000 a year.

It's not just travel expenses that people save by being able to work at home. They can save on paying for business clothes, dry cleaning, and buying a purchased lunch at work. For many families, working from home may also save on childcare, insofar as they are able to care for young children without seriously disrupting their work.

In short, the option to work from home can mean large savings in time and money. Also avoiding traffic jams may mean a major quality of life improvement. It is true that the option to work from home is available primarily to the top half of earners, and especially the top fifth, but this is still a very large number that extends far beyond just the rich.

Also, these higher paid workers have on average not seen their pay keep pace with inflation since the start of the pandemic. Insofar as they are able to save time and money by working from home, many are still likely coming out well ahead of where they were before the pandemic, if they can work from home at least part of the time.

Mortgage Refinancing

While the Fed's rate hikes have pretty much put an end to the refinancing boom we saw in 2020 and 2021, this boom has meant much more money in the pockets of tens of millions of homeowners. More than 17 million homeowners refinanced their mortgages in 2020 and 2021 combined. The average amount of money in a refinance mortgage was close to $250,000. If people refinancing saved an average of 1.0 percentage points on their interest rate, this would imply savings of $2,500 a year.

Savings of this magnitude go a long way towards covering the increases in the price of milk and meat. For some reason, there is very little mention of the money saved by refinancing in media discussions of economic well-being during the pandemic recovery.

While homeownership, like the option to work from home, also skews towards the higher end of the income distribution, it goes much further down. Nearly two-thirds of households are homeowners. Furthermore, those most likely in a situation to benefit from refinancing are younger families, as older homeowners have likely paid off most or all of their mortgage. This means that a large share of very middle-income families are likely to be among the group that has benefitted from refinancing a mortgage at a lower interest rate in the last two and a half years.

Telemedicine

There has been a huge surge in telemedicine since the start of the pandemic which will likely continue going forward. According to a recent survey by the Department of Health and Human Services, almost one-in-four adults reported having a remote appointment with a health care professional in the four weeks prior to the survey.

While telemedicine will never completely replace in-person visits, it can provide enormous benefits to patients. It saves the time and expense that are involved in physically visiting a doctor or other health care professional. This is an especially big deal for patients who are in bad health, who are the ones most likely to be having appointments with health care professionals.

Telemedicine also radically increases the access of patients to specialists who may be in other parts of the country. A person with a rare condition, can use telemedicine to have an appointment with a leading expert on the other side of the country, rather than undertaking an expensive and exhausting trip to visit them in person.

It is likely that we will see increased use of remote services in a wide variety of areas going forward, saving large amounts of time and money on in-person visits. Also, the remote provision of many of these services, such as college classes, is likely to improve through time as better technologies are developed and people become more accustomed to using these tools.

The Score on Living Standards

If we try to get a fuller picture of the economic situation it is hard to find the dismal economy that is front and center in economic reporting. As noted, the lowest paid workers have seen pay gains that have exceeded inflation since the start of the pandemic, so the story of increased suffering among this group is not accurate, based on the data we have.

Tens of millions of more middle-income workers have seen their pay slightly lag inflation, but this is not a phenomenon unique to the Biden presidency. There have been many periods in the last half century where the typical worker's pay has not kept pace with prices, most notably the eight years of the Reagan presidency, which are often described as the "Reagan boom."

In addition, millions of middle-income workers have been able to save thousands of dollars in annual interest payments by refinancing their mortgages at the low rates available in 2020 and 2021. A large share of the people in the top 40 percent of wage earners have also benefited by the explosion in remote work. These people have been able to save a large amount of time and money on commuting costs.

It is worth pointing out an oddity in our economic accounting. The money that workers save on commuting by working from home does not appear as a reduction in the cost of living in the consumer price index or other measures of inflation. For purposes of accounting, the money people spend on their drive to and from work is treated no differently than the money spent on items that actually provide direct benefit, like food, clothing, or shelter.

If a worker can save $4,000 a year on expenses associated with working in an office, this does not show up as a benefit anywhere in our accounts. Similarly, if a patient can substitute a remote video conference for a three-day cross-country trip to visit a specialist, this does not appear as any sort of gain. Tens of millions of people are experiencing these benefits as a result of changes brought on by the pandemic, but they are not picked up in our usual measures of living standards.

Just to go back to a point made the beginning, there are tens of millions of people who are struggling in today's economy. Almost 12.0 percent of the population is living below the poverty line, that translates into almost 40 million people. We can add in people living at less than twice the poverty line and get more than 80 million people who are facing serious hardship.

But the point is that this is always true. With the poor quality of its welfare state, and its large number of low-paying jobs, the United States will always have a huge number of people struggling to get by even in the best of times. The decision made by the media to put these struggling people at the center of the economic story during Biden's presidency is a political decision, not one driven by economic reality.

President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he is "pardoning all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession." This is a welcome move but a modest one, since it provides relief to only a small share of U.S. citizens with federal marijuana records. And despite that declaration that he's pardoning "all" offenders, the pardon's language specifies that only "current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents" are eligible for relief.
According to David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, someone wouldn't be eligible for a pardon if they committed an offense while unlawfully present in the country, "even if you subsequently received a green card or U.S. citizenship." The pardon's language even excludes people, such as tourists, who are here lawfully but are not permanent residents.
Noncitizens comprise a significant share of people with federal marijuana possession records. From 2015–2021, the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) recorded 6,276 federal offenders with marijuana possession charges. Of those, it listed 4,341—roughly 70 percent—as noncitizen offenders. Nearly all of them were reported in districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. The number of noncitizen marijuana possession offenders has dropped from 1,670 in FY 2015 to just six in FY 2021.
A USSC report covering FY 2013 found that 94.3 percent of border offenders were noncitizens, while 16.5 percent of non–border offenders were. "Nearly all" marijuana simple possession offenders apprehended at the border that year "had little or no prior criminal history." They were carrying a median weight of 48.5 pounds of marijuana, which the USSC says "does not appear to correspond to simple possession."
Rather, those may have been the result of "marijuana drug trafficking cases in which the offender was sentenced only for a possession offense," the USSC reports. Nearly 98 percent of simple possession offenders at the border in fiscal year 2013 received prison time, with a median sentence of six months, while 26.4 percent of non–border offenders got jail time. That same year, per a 2016 report from the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), less than 1 percent of those deported were drug traffickers.
By contrast, the DPA notes, simple marijuana possession was "the most common cause of deportation for drug law violations" in 2013. Failing to pardon people who aren't citizens or lawful permanent residents keeps them at risk of removal. "A pardon wipes out the grounds of deportability for a noncitizen," says Bier, so noncitizens without "legal permanent resident status (e.g., refugees, asylees, etc.) would still be deportable based solely on a marijuana conviction."
That's true of noncitizens with state and federal marijuana records. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University organization that analyzes immigration data, over 45,000 people were deported for marijuana possession from FY 2003 to August 2018. Noncitizens who have consumed, sold, or possessed marijuana may be barred from entering the U.S. or receive denials on their citizenship applications.
Even as states—and now the Biden administration—have relaxed their stances toward marijuana use, someone's immigration status can lead to drastic punishments for drug convictions. Though Biden's marijuana announcement called for a review of how marijuana is classified under federal law, he issued no such request that government bodies review the Immigration and Nationality Act to remove marijuana use, possession, and distribution as grounds for a migrant's inadmissibility. Even if Biden had extended his pardon to noncitizens, Bier explains that immigrants would "still be subject to the controlled substance grounds of inadmissibility."
Biden rightly notes that marijuana relief will help people "who may be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities" by virtue of their drug convictions. That line of reasoning applies just as much to noncitizens as it does to citizens.
"There is no good reason to exclude any noncitizen from this order," says Bier. "The president lays out all the reasons why Americans have come to believe that marijuana [possession] convictions lack legitimacy and impose unnecessary harms, yet he still wants to apply those penalties and others to noncitizens as well as to U.S. citizens and green card holders who were once here illegally."
The post Biden Says He's Pardoning 'All' Federal Weed Possession Offenders. He Isn't. appeared first on Reason.com.

PayPal is a company that facilitates financial transactions. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, billionaire entrepreneurs who have both talked about the importance of free speech and civil liberties, have been involved in the company at various stages.
Last week, PayPal rolled out an updated user agreement.
That agreement prohibits "the sending, posting, or publication of any messages, content, or materials" that "present a risk to user safety or wellbeing" or contain "misinformation." The policy notes that what counts as misinformation is at PayPal's "sole discretion." Violate the policy, and PayPal can deduct $2,500 from the offending user's account.
That's $2,500 per infraction. Someone who spreads quite a bit of so-called misinformation could stand to lose a great deal of money.
PayPal has now backtracked.
"An AUP notice recently went out in error that included incorrect information," a PayPal spokesperson said. "PayPal is not fining people for misinformation and this language was never intended to be inserted in our policy."
That's a welcome clarification, because the policy as written was deeply misguided.
Efforts to police misinformation are prone to significant error and overreach. Governments, media organizations, and tech platforms have all made serious attempts to limit the spread of misinformation by cracking down on speech they thought was wrong or dangerous—but time and time again, these measures have resulted in censorship of legitimate discourse.
Facebook, for instance, took great pains to prevent users from theorizing that COVID-19 emerged from a lab. Twitter faced pressure from the Biden administration to purge accounts that criticized the mainstream consensus on vaccines, masks, and other subjects. YouTube's policies prohibited content creators from spreading so-called COVID-19 misinformation, including statements like "masks don't work" or "COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu." Some of those statements have more validity than others, but they're no longer considered outside the bounds of acceptable conversation. What the gatekeepers termed "misinformation" is now just information.
The government's so-called misinformation experts have performed no better than media organizations or social media platforms. Remember Nina Jankowicz, who was chosen as director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board? Though she had wrongly flagged the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story as fake Russian nefariousness, the department picked her to advise elite law enforcement and national intelligence on misinformation trends.
It would be completely reasonable for PayPal users to fear that misguided misinformation policing might end up costing them money, and the company is well-advised to reverse course.

This incident inspired Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA and writer for The Volokh Conspiracy, to take a closer look at the policies PayPal already has in place. What he found alarmed him: PayPal prohibits "activities that … relate to … the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime."
Violating that policy can also result in a $2,500 fine. Volokh warns that sharply criticizing a religion or government officials could be construed as the promotion of hate—and could theoretically violate that policy.
"Sounds like a good reason to think twice about using PayPal," he writes. "I've just withdrawn the $1000+ I have in my PayPal account, and I'm starting the process of disentangling myself from the service to the extent possible."
PayPal is free to put in place whatever policies it thinks are best, but the company shouldn't be surprised if people don't trust it to correctly define terms like misinformation, hate, or intolerance—and, thus, take their business elsewhere.
The post PayPal Says It Won't Fine Users $2,500 for Misinformation, but It Will Fine Them for 'Intolerance' appeared first on Reason.com.

This is the speech given by Chris Hedges outside the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. on Saturday October 8 at a rally that called on the U.S. to revoke its extradition request for Julian Assange.

Merrick Garland and those who work in the Department of Justice are the puppets, not the puppet masters. They are the facade, the fiction, that the longstanding persecution of Julian Assange has something to do with justice. Like the High Court in London, they carry out an elaborate judicial pantomime. They debate arcane legal nuances to distract from the Dickensian farce where a man who has not committed a crime, who is not a U.S. citizen, can be extradited under the Espionage Act and sentenced to life in prison for the most courageous and consequential journalism of our generation.

The engine driving the lynching of Julian is not here on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is in Langley, Virginia, located at a complex we will never be allowed to surround - the Central Intelligence Agency. It is driven by a secretive inner state, one where we do not count in the mad pursuit of empire and ruthless exploitation. Because the machine of this modern leviathan was exposed by Julian and WikiLeaks, the machine demands revenge.

"The real centers of power, in the corporate, military, and national security sectors, were humiliated and embarrassed by WikiLeaks."

The United States has undergone a corporate coup d'etat in slow motion. It is no longer a functioning democracy. The real centers of power, in the corporate, military, and national security sectors, were humiliated and embarrassed by WikiLeaks. Their war crimes, lies, conspiracies to crush the democratic aspirations of the vulnerable and the poor, and rampant corruption, here and around the globe, were laid bare in troves of leaked documents.

We cannot fight on behalf of Julian unless we are clear about whom we are fighting against. It is far worse than a corrupt judiciary. The global billionaire class, who have orchestrated a social inequality rivaled by pharaonic Egypt, has internally seized all of the levers of power and made us the most spied upon, monitored, watched, and photographed population in human history. When the government watches you 24-hours a day, you cannot use the word liberty. This is the relationship between a master and a slave. Julian was long a target, of course, but when WikiLeaks published the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the hacking tools the CIA uses to monitor our phones, televisions, and even cars, he -- and journalism itself -- was condemned to crucifixion. The object is to shut down any investigations into the inner workings of power that might hold the ruling class accountable for its crimes, eradicate public opinion, and replace it with the cant fed to the mob.

I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent on the outer reaches of empire in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I am acutely aware of the savagery of empire, how the brutal tools of repression are first tested on those Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth." Wholesale surveillance. Torture. Coups. Black sites. Black propaganda. Militarized police. Militarized drones. Assassinations. Wars. Once perfected on people of color overseas, these tools migrate back to the homeland. By hollowing out our country from the inside through deindustrialization, austerity, deregulation, wage stagnation, the abolition of unions, massive expenditures on war and intelligence, a refusal to address the climate emergency, and a virtual tax boycott for the richest individuals and corporations, these predators intend to keep us in bondage, victims of a corporate neo-feudalism. And they have perfected their instruments of Orwellian control. The tyranny imposed on others is imposed on us.

From its inception, the CIA carried out assassinations, coups, torture, and illegal spying and abuse, including that of U.S. citizens, activities exposed in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House. All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA is a rogue and unaccountable paramilitary organization with its own armed units and drone program, death squads, and a vast archipelago of global black sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared.

The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. The CIA has a well-oiled apparatus to kidnap, torture, and assassinate targets around the globe, which is why, since it had already set up a system of 24-hour video surveillance of Julian in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, it quite naturally discussed kidnapping and assassinating him. That is its business. Senator Frank Church -- after examining the heavily redacted CIA documents released to his committee -- defined the CIA's "covert activity" as "a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists."

All despotisms mask state persecution with sham court proceedings. The show trials and troikas in Stalin's Soviet Union. The raving Nazi judges in fascist Germany. The Denunciation rallies in Mao's China. State crime is cloaked in a faux legality, a judicial farce.

If Julian is extradited and sentenced and, given the Lubyanka-like proclivities of the Eastern District of Virginia, this is a near certainty, it means that those of us who have published classified material, as I did when I worked for The New York Times, will become criminals. It means that an iron curtain will be pulled down to mask abuses of power. It means that the state, which, through Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs, anti-terrorism laws, and the Espionage Act that have created our homegrown version of Stalin's Article 58, can imprison anyone anywhere in the world who dares commit the crime of telling the truth.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight against powerful subterranean forces that, in demanding Julian's extradition and life imprisonment, have declared war on journalism.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to fight for the restoration of the rule of law and democracy.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to dismantle the wholesale Stasi-like state surveillance erected across the West.

We are here to fight for Julian. But we are also here to overthrow -- and let me repeat that word for the benefit of those in the FBI and Homeland Security who have come here to monitor us -- overthrow the corporate state and create a government of the people, by the people and for the people, that will cherish, rather than persecute, the best among us.

You can see my interview with Julian's father, John Shipton, here.

Bret: I would just suggest our more liberal readers read another superb report by The Times’s Jennifer Medina from Brownsville, Texas, which was published in February. I can’t do it justice with a summary, so let me quote: “Democrats are destroying a Latino culture built around God, family and patriotism, dozens of Hispanic voters and candidates in South Texas said in interviews. The Trump-era anti-immigrant rhetoric of being tough on the border and building the wall has not repelled these voters from the Republican Party or struck them as anti-Hispanic bigotry. Instead, it has drawn them in.”

Gail: The country needs to be reminded we’re talking about people whose goals and needs are the same as the venerable immigrants who’ve come here throughout our history. And that we’re desperately in need of more immigrants to shore up an aging population.

Bret: Totally. Let’s just not give the far right a winning issue in the process.

Gail: In an ideal world — or even a rational one — Congress would put together a smart, humane system for quickly processing people who show up at the border, but that’s never going to happen as long as one party insists on making everything about the border a nasty, frequently racist election issue.

Bret: First, Democrats have to show they’re serious about border security. But, speaking about unseriousness, can we talk about Herschel Walker?

Gail: I know I’m acknowledging a character defect but I love to talk about Herschel Walker.

Bret: He’s so absolutely awful, so completely catastrophic, so epically embarrassing, so hilariously hypocritical, so incandescently idiotic, so stratospherically scandalous, so volcanically vomitous, that he may actually serve a purpose.

Gail: Go on, go on!

Bret: Walker’s revelatory candidacy is to today’s G.O.P. what the odor of rancid chicken is to the chicken itself: It warns you to steer clear. This should have been the Republican’s race to lose, simply because Georgia still elects conservatives, it’s a midterm election, the Republican governor is probably going to be re-elected, and there’s an unpopular Democratic incumbent in the White House. Instead, Walker’s candidacy looks like a cross between the Atlanta Falcons in the 2017 Super Bowl, squandering a 28-3 lead, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, minus the finesse.

Ugh. Now watch him win.

Gail: Well, he’d be voting with your side in the Senate. That wouldn’t make it worth something?

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week I wrote, “A child born today will turn 18 in 2040. What attitudes and actions toward race and ethnicity would we adopt today if we had the best interests of that rising generation in mind?”Bekke writes, “We just need to be kind to each other, and remember the Golden Rule, which is taught in many religions and societies: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”Claire wants people to be judged based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin:
Matters of identity have no material relevance (other than the aesthetic texture of local details). One should learn to discriminate between: decency and cruelty, sublimity and vulgarity, liberty and oppression, and other relevant tensions. An individual’s work or action is simply to embrace Column A (decency; sublimity; liberty) and reject Column B (cruelty; vulgarity; oppression). However ostensibly well intentioned, those who traffic in racial tropes invariably veer into Column B (see especially: politicians). One’s moral clarity or individual talent cannot be accurately predicted by his skin tone, pocketbook conditions, whether one was born nearer to a palm tree or a glacier, or any similar detail.
Michele urges “a shift away from individual identity around race and ethnicity” toward “cultivating a common humanity that celebrates differences and varied excellence.” She expounds:
As my kids’ schools segregate classmates into “affinity groups” that force students to “pick their tribe” and separate from one another to “safely discover their inward identity,” I instead encouraged my children to look outward to cultivate their differences and recognize those wonderful bits of common humanity that help us connect with each other. In that process they learned to celebrate others’ differences with sincere appreciation and curiosity and to find ways to develop their own excellence without fear of not fitting in.
I am foreign-born and grew up with a foot in two very different cultures. I never aimed to “code switch.” I learned to not care so much about being different from my peers. That attitude served me well as I began to reach for achievements that made me stand out even more. I navigated against discrimination by being able to connect with the common humanity we are all able to find in each other, if we practice looking for it enough.
My upbringing shaped my parenting goals. Throughout the young lives of my boys, I pushed against the shallow “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs that students marinate in to encourage my children to expect more of themselves than personal identity. My boys learned how to act and live to fearlessly pursue their own excellence and curiosity, and to constantly cultivate profound respect for a common humanity we all share, always discovering how varied and surprising such commonalities really are. My boys are young adults now. They truly stand out with these fine qualities. Thanks for the opportunity to share … busy living them, I had not spent time distilling these views before.
[Read: What lies beyond the L.A. City Council debacle]Two readers believe that ethnic and racial intermarriage is likely to result in progress. J. writes:
Be absolutely truthful. Tell youth that racism was not long ago an intractable problem. It began to ebb only after interracial marriage became common. This is because the most politically correct boss or neighbor can always be suspected of hiding their personal contempt for racial minorities. But people who marry lovers from minority groups are much more believable in their rejection of racism. Tell the youth of today to get behind interracial marriage. The surest way to get rid of racism is to get rid of races. That may be a problem for traditionalists, but it will be much better for generations of the future.
That viewpoint dovetails with Jerome’s experience:
“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” is good foundational advice. My recommendation to young people is to broaden their horizons and make an effort to acquire a diverse group of friends. Fifty years ago, I had the good fortune to marry a wonderful woman of a different race than mine. A subsequent generation has added even more racial and ethnic diversity to our family. Racial and ethnic antipathy are not an insuperable source of disagreement between people who truly care about one another. Within our family we live a post racial existence, no longer conscious of race among ourselves.
Jaleelah argues that “we shouldn’t raise children to immediately capitulate to any claims of offense,” as doing so allows others to weaponize concern for social justice in unreasonable ways.She writes:
Take the issue of the Hong Kong protests. In 2020, the Students’ Society of McGill University released a statement expressing support for the pro-democracy protesters. A group of mainland Chinese students didn’t like this. They published a petition accusing the SSMU of causing “tremendous psychological distress” to Chinese [students].
Should we stop supporting democracy simply because someone claims it is traumatic to [members of] their ethnic group? Many progressives dismiss questions like this by claiming that very few marginalized people would take advantage of this benefit of the doubt. While I agree that most individuals who speak up about racism are truthful, it’s naive to assume that no one twists the truth. There are lots of conflicts between racial and ethnic minority groups. Some would jump at the chance to use social-justice ethos to turn Americans against their opponents. I’ve been called anti-Semitic for identifying myself as a Palestinian (on the grounds that the term is revisionist and “erases Jews”). If your reaction is “surely that never happened, because everyone is reasonable,” you have bought into a lie. There are unreasonable people, and they can cause great harm when people take their claims of offense as law.
Teresa wants to see better support for public education:
Several years ago my husband and I bought a house in an American city. Since that time, I’ve been astonished by how many people have told me, without me soliciting their opinion, how terrible the school district is; how we’ll probably change our minds and move once our kids start school (we did not even have kids at the time; we now have a 1-year-old); how we better get out if we want our kids to have a good future; and so on.
The city we live in is majority white. But the city school district is majority Black. And what I want to ask these people is, “Why should a school that isn’t good enough for your child be good enough for any child? If you believe that everyone deserves an equal shot in this country, shouldn’t that start as early as possible? Shouldn’t we be demanding that every school has ample resources to meet their students’ needs and offers opportunities so that all students can thrive?”
We should aim for our classrooms, and our nation’s ability to serve all children within their walls, to be a source of national pride, no matter the district. But we aren’t, and we don’t seem to want to, either. It’s almost tribal, the whole school-district thing, and it makes me feel icky. So that’s what I would change.
D.P.’s experiences as an immigrant inform his perspective:
I first arrived in California as a foreign student in late 1973, then became a refugee after the fall of Saigon, a permanent resident, and finally a citizen. At first I learned about the Asian American experience, then about other races, and finally about the immigrant experience of many white ethnics. I married late, so I have a 22-year-old and twin 18-year-olds.
I wish I could tell my children that we can optimistically look to a mixed-race future with a majority of American mestizos. That state of affairs would potentially be confusing, but the reality remains even more so. The vaunted future of “people of color” uniting to fight the “white” oppressors is an illusion pushed by self-appointed “leaders” who are, shall we say, in it for themselves. A century ago, the term white only included Anglos, and northern Europeans like the Dutch and Scandinavians. Later, it evolved to encompass Southern and Eastern Europeans, and now Iranians, Armenians, and Arabs. However, I doubt that the term white would ever include [Black Americans] or Asian Americans.
I think if there is a pause in immigration, this country will be able to better integrate newcomers. In the meantime, I caution young people not to make assumptions about what they see or think they see. Better to ask questions, and listen instead of thinking you have all the answers. Americans are notoriously unskilled when they discriminate—killing Sikhs because they wear turbans and “look like Arabs,” failing to distinguish between Pakistanis and Indians, mistaking Koreans for Japanese and Vietnamese for Chinese.
In the spirit of old American propaganda little observed in practice, we should celebrate differences as well as what unites us as Americans. We should try harder on both scores: learning about other cultures, and especially learning about the Constitution, the law, all those unique American concepts that kids are taught in high-school government class but don’t seem to retain. I would advise the young to embrace the Bill of Rights.
Alan describes and recommends his own attitudes toward identity, then explains why they are unlikely to be widely adopted:
I subscribe to the “Why Do I Care” philosophy. Why do I care if you’re Black, white, brown, yellow, purple, pink, or polka dot? Why do I care if you’re Catholic, Methodist, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, Baptist, Jewish, Romuvan, or atheist? Why do I care if you’re gay, straight, bi, trans? Republican or Democrat, American or Chinese, rich or poor, athletic or clumsy, it affects me not at all. I care how you treat me, how you treat others, how you impact the world. I don’t even care if your impact is neutral; as long as it's not negative, what do I care? I don’t even care if you’re an alien from another planet as long as your intent is not evil. It’s a largely selfish philosophy centered on how you impact me, which should make it quite amenable to the masses, though that is clearly not the case. And yet, were this to be fully realized, peace on earth might well reign.
Of course, such an attitude is antithetical to the functioning of the human brain. We are wired to see differences, largely because the portions of our brain that retain our animal beginnings see different as dangerous. The brain is a threat-detection machine built to maximize survival. If it is different and unfamiliar, initial processing returns a value of red, meaning danger. Additional instances of different things that are similar to other different things create a category (a feral cat sees a human and classifies it as dangerous; the next human is sufficiently similar to the first and so will be added to the category and judged as dangerous). A single negative interaction with an instance of a different thing will cause all instances of that category to be judged negatively (the feral cat is beaten by a human and thus sees all humans as dangerous). The initial judgment, particularly if reinforced even once through a negative interaction, remains until there is sufficient positive interaction to disprove it. Anchoring heuristic makes overcoming that initial judgment very difficult; the power of consciousness is not enough. It requires great effort to overcome such intrinsic, instinctual brain function. In today’s polarized world, that much more effort is needed to break out of the echo chambers so many of us live in.  While I believe that wide adoption of such an attitude would greatly benefit future generations, I’m not sure it’s a realistic option. But it helps me, so I cling to it.
[Read: Do sports matter?]Finally, Pierre agrees that humans evolved to be aware of difference and identifies as “post-racial,” an approach he describes as attuned to our evolutionary psychology and how to overcome it. He goes on to describe an ambitious program of anti-racist acculturation that is significantly different from what progressives who call themselves anti-racists tend to champion.He writes:
[The year] 2040 is a good time frame because it invites creative thinking that might take an entire generation to accomplish. Americans have much to be hopeful for if we can define our future as a post-racial meritocracy—and focus on mindsets and actionables that fit that vision.
Post-racials are intellectually curious, proactive, and highly committed to further developing America as a post-racial meritocracy. We are highly attuned to what experts in cognitive science have learned about inborn “self-similarity preference” in infants. We are aware that our own behavior is not 100 percent under conscious control, and therefore that automaticities become an important part of the equation. Post-racials are self-aware and realistic (not romantic or ideological) about sources of racial bias—it is a matter of commitment to furthering a post-racial meritocracy that we first develop ourselves as post-racials. After that, it becomes a matter of how to raise our children for the future we want them to inhabit—to grow up to cooperate and compete in a meritocracy where immutable characteristics like race and ethnicity are largely inconsequential—and where a biologically based immutable like sex retains its distinctions (in dating, marriage, reproduction, child rearing, and kinship-system replication across generations) while otherwise affording maximal career freedom to men and women.
Babies are not born as tabula rasas. We come with a broad range of innate social instincts—not optimized for the 21st century but for survival in nomadic tribes of 20 to 300 individuals. Knowing what we know about DNA and genetics, why would you expect anything else? Tribal affiliation and loyalty posited great survival value 200,000 years ago when our current social instincts were being shaped … every human infant inherits that legacy “us vs. them” instinct and will live with it to varying degrees for their entire lives.
Cognitive scientists have established that three-month-old babies not only are aware of racial differences when placed in mixed company; they show preference for self-similar adults and children. Karen Wynn and Neha Majaran published these findings starting in the 1990s. While progressives rail against accepting this kind of science, post-racials welcome it as a concrete step on the path to enlightenment. It opens the door to actionables not yet attempted—relevant to raising post-racial children.
For example, if we assume that an infant’s racial bias at three months results from a combination of innate wiring and early imprinting, then we would explore having parents expose newborns to a post-racial social environment starting shortly after their baby has bonded with them. I call these occasions “post-racial imprinting parties,” festive events where adults of various racial backgrounds socialize in close quarters and have fun. The aim is for a baby to begin to discount the social significance or racial differences in appearance. Baby will still perceive those differences … that’s innate wiring—the goal is build trust rather than default-suspicion around those appearances.
As toddlers gain mobility and agency, post-racial parents are prepared for day-care situations as teaching moments. For example, child psychology shows that “us vs. them" bias tends to emerge strongest in situations of conflict (as is to be expected from interacting toddlers). Rather than taking a punitive approach, the parent lovingly coaches the child in private about impulses that arise during conflict that stiffen and alienate, and how to ignore such impulses while negotiating away conflict. The post-racial parent teaches their child what to expect in terms of socially unproductive impulses (e.g., dominance-submission ideation), and how to rechannel these impulses so that objectives can still be reached, perhaps more slowly, with comity and reciprocity. The parent teaches self-awareness gradually and supportively. The toddler is coached that there is no racial pecking order, and to never assume racial bias as the explanation for being thwarted (learning not to play the race card as a competitive tactic).
As children mature into taking on positions of leadership among other kids, yet more post-racial social skills need to be developed. Serving as a leader who can be attendant to merit and demerit while discounting racial/ethnic/gender cues is a learned skill. It requires practice. It requires a parent/coach to prepare the budding leader in advance for how to manage conflict and competition fairly, honestly previewing impulses toward bias that could spring forth from the ancient brain—and how to overcome them in the moment. It helps to learn how random choice can be used effectively (coin flipping, roshambo) to vanquish perceptions of racial bias. These youthful experiences prepare for later adulthood, and the diplomatic responsibilities of leading human groups away from conflict back toward harmony (or at least equitability).
There also needs to be much more clarity about early child development, preparation for parenting, family formation, and the need for fathers to imbue sons and daughters with a spirit of exploration and risk taking. We live in a competitive society. Those cognitive dispositions, formed starting early in life, are NOT optional for child raising. We must have a candid, non-defensive dialog about family structure and advantage conferred.  The rationalizations built up around single-mom households (and grandma-mom households) as being co-equal to nuclear families need to be dismantled. What’s best for children growing up to thrive in a competitive meritocracy needs to be paramount. The “comfort-seeking” needs of adults has taken on too much importance.
You’ll note that these post-racial development techniques are 100 percent free of the public shaming, denunciation, and groupthink methods that “woke” progressives are flirting with. To post-racials, good intentions are not enough. Results are what counts. And they need to be measured in terms of interracial goodwill, trust, working synergy, and interracial marriages. Yes, policies can be “color blind,” but, based on psychology research, the term doesn’t accurately describe humans and our inborn perception apparatus.
Building upon America’s mixed racial demographics, our Constitution’s promise of equal rights under the law—and our positive, good-natured, future-seeking mentality—the next step in perfecting a pure meritocracy is cerebral and individual, or at most accomplished through discreet nurturing and coaching of children. Absent some kind of forced integration of housing as exists in Singapore, the success path for post-racial America comes through enlightenment and self-awareness learning.  
Browbeating does not work.
The bias that remains to be overcome for the majority of Americans is latent bias, which springs forward from innate “us vs. them” automatic perceptions, fears, and uncalibrated responses in difficult situations. It also flows from the unconscious setting of lowered expectations, or as President George W. Bush eloquently quipped, “the soft bigotry” thereof.
Warping the definitions of merit and criminal offense with racial “compensations” to achieve racial parity will not work. Our high-tech society runs on merit and deterrence of criminality. To squander hard-earned, race-blind definitions of merit and demerit is a fool’s errand.  
It is going backward rather than forward.
Thank you for all of your emails, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

On Saturday, the Ukrainians hit the Kerch Strait Bridge, which leads from Russia to Crimea, with something—a missile, explosives planted by naval commandos, a truck laden with explosives. No one who knows is saying for sure. As is the way of military commentary in 2022, experts—real, fake, self-proclaimed—are studying the imagery floating around Twitter and insisting that they know just what happened. Those pictures show a two-lane span dropped into the water, an adjacent pair of lanes still standing, and, on a parallel rail bridge, a train hauling tanker cars that are burning fiercely. The Russians have already run a new train across the rail bridge, but no one knows whether there was anything in it, to serve as a real test of whether the span can still bear the weight of a full load, or whether it was simply intended to create the illusion of normalcy—the creator of Potemkin villages for Catherine the Great was, after all, a Russian general.The tactical questions of how the Ukrainians pulled off this strike and of whether lasting damage has occurred are interesting and important but currently unresolvable publicly. What can, however, be more profitably discussed is what this tells us about where the Russia-Ukraine war is headed.“Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough. The strike on the Kerch Strait Bridge was not a battle, but it was an important contributor to one of the great inflection points of this war—the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing. The retreat of Russian forces from Kyiv in the early spring could be awkwardly explained as an unreciprocated gesture of goodwill. It did not involve a rout. The Ukrainian counteroffensive that liberated the Kharkiv region was a more difficult-to-swallow “repositioning” accompanied, however, by video images of the surrender and slaughter of retreating troops. Both could be understood as the result of poor decisions by military leaders who could be sacked and replaced.The Kerch Strait Bridge attack, by contrast, inflicted at most a couple of casualties but packed multiple punches. It struck a prime symbol of the project of Russian imperial restoration, an expensive structure designed to link a Crimea reincorporated into Russia with the motherland. It damaged a crucial supply route. It showed that Ukraine could reach deep behind Russian lines to hit, with exquisite precision, a key and extremely well-defended target. It was, above all, a personal as well as a national humiliation: This was Vladimir Putin’s pet construction project, and it was the most unwelcome gift possible on his 70th birthday.Russia’s military predicament is going from bad to worse. Occupying a thousand-kilometer front and reliant on massed firepower, the Russian military depends on creaking supply lines that run parallel to the front and that are increasingly vulnerable to Ukrainian precision attacks. The one exception—the route through Crimea—just received a dramatic blow.Meanwhile, Russia’s military mobilization is a deeply unpopular botch, as more Russian men flee the country than can be inducted into an army that cannot equip them, cannot train them, and cannot lead them. The Russian military faces threats from a Ukrainian army that can strike in the east (Donbas), the south (Kherson), or even possibly the southeast (Melitopol) wherever it sees the chance. That Ukrainian army is far better led, increasingly better equipped, and better informed thanks to Western support, and has infinitely higher morale.More disasters await. Ten thousand to 20,000 of Russia’s best remaining troops are bottled up in the city of Kherson, their backs against the Dnipro River and the bridges behind them unusable for heavy traffic.The Kerch Strait Bridge attack’s most important consequence, however, will be to accelerate the transformations within Russia’s political and military leadership already under way. For the first time, the war in Ukraine has a single military commander, General Sergey Surovikin. Unity of command is one of those military principles most often observed in the breach, but the fractured command and control of the Russian invasion, which at one point had more than half a dozen separate commands, was egregious.Surovikin—his face set in the menacing scowl of most Russian generals—will not be able to create a unified command organization overnight. Nor is he likely to escape the micromanagement from the Kremlin that seems to have plagued Russia’s war effort. What he will do, however, is repeat the brutalities over which he presided in Syria, where the Russian military gained experience not in fighting but in butchering civilians. Small wonder that the immediate Russian response to the bridge attack was a volley of missiles aimed at civilian apartment buildings in Zaporizhzhia.Until now, the Russian high command has consisted of the docile, if corrupt, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the gnomelike Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. There was no danger of either becoming a popular figure. Putin may now face the unappetizing choice between picking a more effective, colorful, and (on the nationalist right) popular set of subordinates who could turn on him, or sticking with the loyal but failed mediocrities who have absorbed the obloquy associated with Putin’s system and the president himself.Dictatorships built solely on fear and self-interest are brittle things, and in Russia the cracks are showing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the criminal head of the Wagner Group of mercenaries that does the Kremlin’s bidding, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the no-less-thuggish ruler of Chechnya, have created private armies. They have been open in their view that some generals should be not only cashiered but shot, a stance echoed by the head of the Russian propaganda outlet, RT, Margarita Simonyan. They may very well be preparing the way for their own bids for power. Other armed organizations—the FSB secret police, the GRU (military intelligence), the national guard, and the army itself—might be willing to engage in violence at home and not just abroad. Sooner or later, violent words casually bandied about lead to violent deeds.Running throughout the open conduits of opinion, primarily on Telegram, is boiling discontent with the military, the conduct of this war, the absurd insistence that it is not a war but a “special technical operation,” the incompetent mobilization, and, by implication, Putin himself. Paranoid by professional training and personal inclination, Putin must now look within as much as he looks without. At the same time, Russian paranoia about the West, a combination of grievance and thwarted desires to restore an imperial state, has created an atmosphere in which measured policy is impossible.All of this suggests that predictions of stalemate are wrong, at least so far as the higher conduct of this war is concerned. The impulse of General Surovikin will be to destroy civilians, power plants, and hospitals, because he cannot beat the Ukrainian army. He will probably press harder for the use of chemical weapons, and possibly nuclear ones as well. The infighting of the Russian elite can only worsen, and internally directed violence will, at some point, ensue.Nor will the battlefield stand still. A few more good strikes on the Kerch Strait Bridge and it will become virtually unusable. A tenuous Russian logistical system will come under greater and possibly unsustainable strain during bad weather, which may slow, but will not stop, Ukrainian attacks. A much larger psychological disaster for Russia will ensue if and when Kherson falls and the largest city that Russia has taken is lost to Ukraine, together with thousands of Russian prisoners. That would be the real inflection point, a great battle, and as Churchill also put it: “Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.”The Kerch Strait Bridge attack was an awful birthday present for Vladimir Putin. Almost as awful however, was the missing birthday card from China’s Xi Jinping, a symbolic distancing particularly significant in the sorts of systems ruling both countries. Russia is isolated from its neighbors, who are either openly hostile or walking away from its Ukraine enterprise. It is only one more way in which Russian prospects will continue to darken during a winter of destruction and death in Eurasia. A difficult season awaits, lightened only by the heroism and competence of Ukraine, and by the wisdom of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, who, when asked by a reporter about an off-ramp for Vladimir Putin, responded succinctly “For Russia to leave Ukraine” and walked off, the ghost of a grim smile on her face.

(Photo by STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images)On February 24, the world’s most powerful Christian nationalist went to war, at the helm of what many people considered to be one of the world’s most potent militaries. Russian President Vladimir Putin spent more than two decades—exercising more power than any American president could ever hope to possess—forging church, state, and culture into an (allegedly) mighty instrument of raw, anti-woke national power.And what have we seen? An incompetent army has raped, looted, and murdered its way across the Ukrainian countryside. Even its elite units lie in shattered ruins outside key Ukrainian cities, and a Ukrainian counterattack is breaking the Russian line. While the Russian elite cries for “holy war” in front of a listless crowd of state employees, the men who would be holy warriors run for the border, eager to escape conscription by any means possible. There are spiritual lessons here. When advanced nations collide in sustained combat, it’s not just armies that confront each other, but systems and civilizations. Hidden strengths emerge. Hidden weaknesses are exposed. And as we watch history unfold in eastern Ukraine—Russians retreating on the battlefield, Russians fleeing their own country en masse to avoid the fight, and a panicked Putin threatening a genocidal response—we are watching in real time a profound and meaningful example of the fatal weakness of Christian nationalism.It’s not a model of national renewal. It’s a blueprint for corruption, brutality, and oppression. To understand what I mean, it’s necessary to understand the modern Christian nationalist project. It has multiple salient characteristics. First, it begins with a case for extreme crisis, typically rooted in the argument that modern “wokeism” or the “globalist uniparty” has not only seized absolute control of every key cultural and economic institution, it also aims to wipe out the church and destroy traditional Christian civilization.Second, it declares that this existential threat can only be met and addressed with government force. The government—goes the argument—is the last institution still open to defenders of the faith, and it is to the government they must turn to, for example, “reward friends and punish enemies.” Third, government power should explicitly tie itself to a specific allegedly Christian moral vision. The hard version of this is Catholic integralism, which would create strong bonds between the Catholic church and the state. The soft version is slightly more ecumenical and embodied in the national conservatism “statement of principles” signed by all the leading lights of new right nationalism: “Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.”Fourth, character isn’t just optional in the pursuit of power, character can be an impediment to necessary political victory. This last sentiment doesn’t just reflect elite nationalist sentiment, it also reflects popular Evangelical will. As our own Nick Catoggio pointed out last week, Evangelicals have gone from the American demographic allegedly most concerned about the importance of character in politicians to the least concerned. When you understand these elements, it becomes much easier to understand pre-war right-wing fascination with Putin’s regime and even the post-war rationalization of his brutal invasion. Putin has spent years tying himself to the Russian Orthodox Church and portraying himself as a defender of Christian civilization. All the way back in 2014, former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler was sounding the alarm about Putin’s “Orthodox jihad.” Putin forged an ideological “fusion” between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the FSB. The ROC even dedicated a church at the FSB’s Moscow headquarters.Here was Christian nationalism in the most formal sense, and the church went right along. Here’s Schindler:ROC agitprop, which has Kremlin endorsement, depicts a West that is declining down to its death at the hands of decadence and sin, mired in confused unbelief, bored and failing to even reproduce itself. Patriarch Kirill, head of the church, recently explained that the “main threat” to Russia is “the loss of faith” in the Western style, while ROC spokesmen constantly denounce feminism and the LGBT movement as Satanic creations of the West that aim to destroy faith, family, and nation.Russia has even gone so far as to adopt a term called “spiritual security” which “gives the ROC a mission in defending Russia from negative Western spiritual influences, in partnership with Moscow’s intelligence agencies.”This rhetoric was constant from the Russian church and the Russian president, and American nationalists took notice. In 2021 my friend Rod Dreher praised a Putin speech that attacked western “cancel culture” and gender ideologies with these words: Whatever else you think of him, Putin is telling the God’s honest truth here.See, this is the thing. Putin, Orban, and all the illiberal leaders that our baizuocracy loves to hate are all completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism. (Emphasis in original.)In the run-up to the Ukraine war, Tucker Carlson condemned “hatred” of Vladimir Putin and famously asked, “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” In a podcast just prior to Russia’s invasion, Steve Bannon declared “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” His guest, Blackwater founder Erik Prince, said, “The Russian people still know which bathroom to use.”Even well after the war, the rationalizations continued. In a viral video (now viewed almost 2.5 million times) Jordan Peterson excused Russia’s invasion like this:And are we degenerate in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes. The idea that we are ensconced in a culture war has become a rhetorical commonplace. How serious is that war? Is it serious enough to increase the probability that Russia, say, will be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine merely to keep the pathological West out of that country, which is a key part of the historically Russian sphere of influence?Moreover, parts of the right didn’t only like Putin’s attacks on the woke west, they also loved his masculine propaganda, especially in contrast with the “feminized” United States. We can’t forget how popular right-wing personalities (and even a U.S. senator) fell for outright Russian military propaganda. We can’t forget this bit of snark, posted the day of the Russian invasion:Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlogRussian military recruitment vs military recruitment in the US
There’s a reason Putin doesn’t fear us 8:17 PM ∙ Feb 24, 202215,249Likes3,979RetweetsHow has the Ukrainian government defied expectations? And how could Russian Christian nationalism fail so badly? How could two decades of state power and indoctrination create a debauched army, a listless population, and a series of catastrophic, bloody military defeats? And if the west is so decadent, how did a liberalizing, westernizing Ukrainian military produce a series of military victories that have astounded perhaps even themselves?Why did Christian nationalists get Russian power so wrong?Historians will soon be debating and exploring these questions at book-length, but let me open with three simple explanations of Russian weakness and depravity. Power corrupts, christendom dilutes Christianity, and brutality isn’t strength.Power corrupts. If you speak to any close observer of the war, they’ll note immediately that the Russian military, Russian government, and much of Russian society is thoroughly corrupt. They’re corrupt to the extent that the Russian military that existed on paper was almost completely fictional. In reality, units were undermanned, underequipped, and improperly serviced. It’s a simple law of human nature that the more unaccountable power one accumulates, the more prone one is to corruption. That law applies to religious power (or Christian nationalist power) just as much as any other form of power. This is especially true when the alleged “emergency” of the moment not only makes character optional, but also scorns a commitment to character as evidence of “weakness” or “softness” in the face of the enemy. Yet combine power with vice, and you only compound the corruption that hollows out institutions. Corrupt leadership does not create healthy nations.Christendom dilutes Christianity. When Christian nationalists speak of the use of state power to advance and fortify Christian values and support the Christian church, they are truly talking about sustaining and protecting Christendom, not Christianity. Think of the distinction like this: Christianity is the faith, Christians are the believers in the faith, and Christendom is the collective culture and institutions of the faith. The danger of a focus on Christendom rather than the radical personal renewal and redemption that is the heart of Christianity is exactly what Søren Kierkegaard identified in his Attack on Christendom. In a series of essays, Kierkegaard aimed directly at the malignant impact of the Danish state church on authentic Christianity, and his complaint applies across other churches in other nations. I’ve written about this before:The University of Chicago’s Russell Johnson has argued that “for Kierkegaard, an essential part of the Christian life is self-examination and imitation, finding oneself confronted by Christ and beckoned to follow.” But as Kierkegaard himself wrote, “the imitation of Christ is really the point from which the human race shrinks.” In that sense, he was profoundly pessimistic. “If there is emphasis on this point,” he wrote, “the stronger the emphasis the fewer the Christians.” If, on the other hand, “there is a scaling down of this point”—on the imitation of Christ—“so that Christianity becomes, intellectually, a doctrine,” then Christianity may well grow. But regardless of numbers, the more the imitation of Christ is lost, the more the actual faith is diminished. This is the “abolition” Kierkegaard feared, the end of the faith regardless of the power of its institutions or the numbers of its members. And what is Putin’s Russia but an unchristian instrument of violent Christendom? Its citizens overwhelmingly identify as Russian Orthodox, but they don’t go to church, and the percentage of citizens who identify as “highly religious” (only 17 percent) makes Russia only half as religious as America’s least religious state.In fact, Christendom doesn’t just dilute Christianity, it can clash with it. Some of Christianity’s most famous martyrs were executed under the authority of corrupt Christendom. Even today, courageous and faithful Ukrainian Christians are on the front lines confronting Russian Christendom, and faithful American Christians are pouring humanitarian aid into Ukraine. Christendom is not Christianity, and we should stop pretending it is. Brutality isn’t strength. Nor is it masculinity. I should be surprised by right-wing gullibility in the face of “masculine” Russian propaganda, but I’m not. We’ve spent the last seven years watching the MAGA movement absurdly recast Donald Trump as a defender of American masculinity and Trumpism as an inherently masculine political movement. Bullies look strong. They strut and peacock. Russians bomb civilians. They rape women. They loot empty homes. They’re ruthless. They make commercials casting themselves as fearless, fearsome warriors. And now they’re fleeing by the thousands, thrown into headlong retreat by a far smaller nation, fighting with a fraction of the resources, in one of the most shocking military setbacks in modern times.  Brutality is meeting courage, and courage prevails.Russia is not America. We have too many checks and balances for any person to assume Putin-like control over the United States. But those who see the left as an existential threat, who seek ever-greater Christian power to punish their enemies, and who believe character is optional (or an outright luxury) in leaders should look across the Atlantic. Fields of burning tanks, throngs of fleeing civilians, and shouts of “holy war” to listless crowds should remind us all that the health of the church is not rooted in the authority of the state. The failures of Putin’s brutal Christian nationalism serve as a terrible reminder that the cannonade contradicts the spirit of the cross, and that only sacrificial love can truly redeem a land that is lost.A preview of coming attractions …I’m going to be writing very soon about an absolutely fascinating survey of the beliefs and values of American college students. I would have written about it this week, but the news from Ukraine was simply too pressing. There is one statistic that stood out, and it’s this:Homeschooled and parochial schooled undergraduates are as or more likely to identify as LGBT or non-binary as those from public or private school backgrounds.I’ve got a homework assignment for you. In the comments, tell me why you think this is true. I’m not familiar with parochial school culture, so I don’t have many useful thoughts. But I’ve been immersed in or adjacent to Evangelical homeschool culture my entire adult life, and I have thoughts. Before I share mine, however, I want to hear yours.One more thing …This week’s Good Faith podcast was one of my absolute favorites. We talked to James Choi, a professor of finance at Yale University, and it was just chock-full of practical financial and spiritual wisdom. The conversation starts with a survey of Christian self-help commentary about personal finance, and it ends with a discussion of Professor Choi’s decision, early in his adult life, to be very public about his faith even as he pursued a career in the elite academy. Give it a listen. You’ll be glad you did. One last thing …I live in the same neighborhood as one of my favorite artists, JJ Heller, and I run into JJ and her husband David all the time. They’re wonderful folks, and this new song is beautiful. It’s grounded in grace and begs us to see the humanity in our neighbors, even when we disagree. Enjoy:

Elon Musk does not care for public transit. The main reason appears to be that it forces you to spend time around other people, and, to him, other people are disgusting:

“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time. It’s a pain in the ass. … That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”

It should be no surprise that the world’s richest man does not like the idea of spending time near random strangers, and considers them all potential serial killers. There is nothing more discomforting to a rich man than having to spend time in the company of the plebs. Musk’s own transportation solutions—tunnels for Tesla cars to catch fire in, a hyperloop that’ll fling you across California at high speed—have been underwhelming, and his innovation has mostly been in making luxury electric cars cool through branding.
But some of what Musk points out here about American mass transit is true: a lot of it is painfully inefficient. It can take hours to get across a U.S. city on a bus, when driving would take a fraction of the time. Commutes on mass transit tend to take about twice as long as commutes by car. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not take public transit to work—76 percent of Americans commute by driving alone in a car (another 9 percent carpool), while only 5 percent use mass transit. Only 4 percent of workers live in households that don’t have a car.

The dominance of the personal automobile is unfortunate for a few reasons. Cars kill a lot of pedestrians and drivers, among myriad other harms, as George Monbiot explains:

“Traffic mutes community, as the noise, danger and pollution in busy streets drive people indoors. The places in which children could play and adults could sit and talk are reserved instead for parking. Engine noise, a great but scarcely acknowledged cause of stress and illness, fills our lives. As we jostle to secure our road space, as we swear and shake our fists at other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists, as we grumble about speed limits and traffic calming, cars change us, enhancing our sense of threat and competition, cutting us off from each other.”

Cars are also terrible for the climate. Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, and while electric cars promise to help, when the electricity itself comes from fossil fuels, these cars are not as environmentally friendly as they seem. Because of the U.S. energy sector’s fossil fuel intensity, Carbon Brief reports that “when compared to the most efficient conventional [gas-powered] vehicle, the climate benefits of the EV [electric vehicles] were near-zero or negative in large parts of the country.” Powering EVs with renewable energy is critical to ensuring electric vehicles deliver on their promise, and differences in the energy sources mean that the same electric car can be much better for the environment if it is driven in France or Norway than if it is driven in Minnesota.

Cars do not have to be our future despite what the cynics might say about mass transit. Randall O’Toole, a libertarian urban planning scholar, argues that those advocating mass transit in the U.S. simply need to give up, because cars are this country’s past, present, and future:

“I have a message for these anti-auto activists: The war on the automobile is over. The automobile won. More accurately, auto drivers and users won. It is time for those engaged in this war to stop wasting their time, and everyone else’s, and start doing something productive. People concerned about the impacts of the automobile should give up trying to reduce driving, which has never worked, and instead encourage new automobiles and highways that are safer, cleaner, and more energy efficient.”

But the war on the automobile cannot have been “lost,” because it was never fought in the first place. Instead, the car waged war on the American city. The car triumphed only in part because of its inherent advantages; it also succeeded because the city was adapted to accommodate it, and car use was incentivized and subsidized. In today’s car-centric cities of the U.S., pedestrians are killed by automobiles at alarming rates compared to peer nations, and the law has been used to make places very unfriendly to pedestrians in terms of sidewalk and street crossing availability. A city with successful transit, on the other hand, has to be more pedestrian friendly. Since everyone has to walk to a stop or station, designers would necessarily have to create safe crossings and sidewalks. It’s impossible to make mass transit work in places where just getting around as a pedestrian requires crossing dangerous roads. It’s no wonder the car “won” in places where the law and development combined to make alternative modes of transportation like biking and walking the equivalent of taking your life in your hands.
Cars are popular in part because they grant their owners a sense of freedom. You don’t have to follow someone else’s schedule or route; you can just get in and go where you like. Those particular freedoms can never be equaled by mass transit, which by its nature involves serving the needs and desires of more than one person at a time. A bus is a compromise between different people’s preferences about where to go. But great transit can provide other kinds of freedom, like the freedom from the burden of having to own and insure a car. When I lived in the Boston area, having a car was a pain, because finding parking was a pain and getting stuck in traffic was a pain. Riding the subway was fantastic, because it was cheap, skipped the traffic, and usually got me pretty close to where I needed to be, fairly near to the time I needed to be there. I had a car, but it was burdensome rather than liberating.

Since the U.S. is a car country, electric vehicles are going to be a crucial part of reducing transportation sector emissions. But we are also seriously lagging behind when it comes to mass transit. Transit is staggeringly efficient; one New York City L train can carry as many commuters in a single hour as 2,000 cars. If the 2.4 million people who work in Manhattan all had to drive to work, the parking spots needed to accommodate all of their cars would take up more space than the island itself. From a climate perspective, the benefits of efficiently transporting large numbers of people in a small space can be huge. While a typical passenger car with one person gets 25 passenger miles per gallon, a conventional bus at capacity gets 163 passenger miles per gallon.
Note, though, that this is a bus at capacity. Running an empty bus is a huge waste of energy. Building public transit infrastructure is not going to help anyone unless people actually use it. And there we run into some of the problems outlined in Musk’s rant: mass transit is not always a very good way to get you where you need to go. It is often the transportation of last resort, used by people who cannot afford cars. In dense cities like New York City and Boston, riding public transit may actually be preferable to driving. But in many parts of the country, those who ride the bus have to ride the bus, and buses have a negative public image in part because they are seen as being for those who can’t afford cars. This has not been helped by decades of automaker branding that has painted car ownership as a sign of being successful in life, and mass transit’s image will have to be reversed if we are ever going to alter its downward ridership trends (which had begun even before COVID-19 badly damaged transit ridership).

The main problem, though, is not bad branding but bad service. People don’t take public transit because it’s not giving them what they want. Some of this is because of a decades-long history of bad American land use policies which have encouraged the development of places that require a car to get around. Undoing car-centric sprawl is a very long-term project, but well-designed, well-run transit can be successful even in places seemingly ill-suited for it. Houston, for instance, redesigned its bus routes with a focus on giving people frequent, reliable service and saw a substantial increase in ridership. Charlotte’s light rail system has seen healthy ridership numbers and boosted development. The U.S. is not automatically doomed to have unreliable public transit that serves as the “locomotion of last resort.” As Bloomberg notes,

“There are good, viable models of transit systems that … are successful both at attracting riders and at being financially viable, from places that have more in common with American cities than one might expect…. [Yet] all too often, transit planners—and even advocates—find themselves resigned to fatalism about the prospect of transit in American suburbs. They’re convinced that these spread-out and car-centric spaces are fundamentally irreconcilable with public transportation.”

Christof Spieler’s fascinating book Trains, Buses, People: An Opinionated Atlas of U.S. Transit profiles the transit systems of dozens of U.S. cities, showing how some places are succeeding where others are failing, and demonstrating the principles that make for quality transit that attracts riders.

Some of those principles are straightforward. Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives lists seven demands that potential public transit riders have, which will determine whether they decide to actually use the system:

It takes me where I want to go.
It takes me when I want to go.
It is a good use of my time.
It is a good use of my money.
It respects me in the level of safety, comfort, and amenity it provides.
I can trust it.
It gives me freedom to change my plans.

Seems straightforward, but plenty of cities lack transit systems that meet the criteria. For instance, here in New Orleans, the average person can reach 89 percent of the jobs in the area with a 30-minute commute via car. They can only reach 12 percent of area jobs with a 30-minute commute on public transit. This means that those who can’t afford cars are severely limited in the work they can accept. Transit is not taking them where they want to go.
A lot of transit systems are disappointing because they’re not built around reaching these intuitively obvious basic goals. But when public transit delivers great service at a low cost, people will use it. Plenty of improvements can occur without redesigning entire cities, and Walker argues that cities often measure the wrong things, seeing expanding transit in terms of adding more miles of rail or making sure the entire city is covered by bus routes. Such approaches may appear successful because they make lots of impressive lines on a map (and allow for mayoral ribbon-cutting ceremonies), but cities can end up spending a lot of money to serve areas with few riders.
Some improvements that attract new riders are decidedly unromantic. Increasing the frequency that buses arrive, for instance, makes it much easier to incorporate bus travel into one’s day, which is why part of Houston’s bus system overhaul focused on frequency. (“Frequency is freedom,” Walker says.) Dedicated bus lanes and stoplights that give buses priority will keep buses from getting stuck in traffic. Making sure the routes, fares, and schedule are all easy to understand will make transit less of a headache, and thus make people more likely to consider it. It should be obvious: the more public transit is an attractive alternative to driving, the more people are likely to consider it. In general, research shows that the thing people want most is for the transit system to get them places efficiently; they don’t care nearly as much about whether they’re riding a beautiful, comfortable train or a janky old bus (so long as that bus is reliable).
Musk, then, is right that the central measure of public transit’s success is whether it gets you where you want to go, but he’s wrong in thinking that cars will always and everywhere beat public transit on this measure. We can have a public transit paradise, but we have to keep the goals in mind. Public transit should not just serve as a form of unsatisfactory transportation welfare for the carless. It should be able to liberate all of us from dreadful, environmentally harmful commutes in vehicles. We need to be committed to mass transit that truly serves the people, that people do not take because they have to, but take because they want to. It can be done, but getting world-class mass transit in the U.S. will require taking on the Koch brothers and steadily redesigning cities, in ways both small and large, to be for people rather than their cars. 

Within weeks of taking office, Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a radical new set of economic measures that echoed the trickle-down policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – heavy on tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.

Last Monday, after a backlash from investors, economists and members of his own party, Mr Kwarteng reversed one of the proposals, deciding against abolishing the tax rate of 45% on the highest earners. But proposals for other tax cuts worth tens of billions of pounds remain intact, as the government insists it is on the right path.

What’s bizarre about this latest episode of trickle-down economics – the abiding faith on the political right that tax cuts and deregulation are good for an economy – is that this gonzo economic theory continues to live on, notwithstanding its repeated failures.

Ever since Reagan and Thatcher first tried them, trickle-down policies have exploded budget deficits and widened inequality. At best, they’ve temporarily increased consumer demand (the opposite of what’s needed during high inflation that Britain and much of the world are experiencing).

Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation at the start of the 1980s were not responsible for America’s rapid growth through the late 1980s. His exorbitant spending (mostly on national defense) fueled a temporary boom that ended in a fierce recession. The Donald Trump White House’s tax cut never trickled down.

Yet the US never restored the highest marginal tax rates before Reagan, and deregulation – especially of financial markets – is a continuing legacy.

Over the same period, the wealthiest 1% of Americans became $29tn richer. The national debt exploded. And Wall Street’s takeover of the economy continued.

Meanwhile, and largely as a result, America has become more bitterly divided along the fissures of class and education. Trump didn’t cause this. He exploited it.

Even during the past decade of economic growth, social progress on many fronts – from education and healthcare to rights and tolerance – has declined in Britain. According to the Social Progress Index, the UK is one of only four countries to have slid backwards since 2011 (the others are Syria, Venezuela and Libya).

The easiest answer is that it satisfies politically powerful moneyed interests who want to rake in even more. Armies of lobbyists in Washington, London, and Brussels continuously demand tax cuts and “regulatory relief” for their wealthy patrons.

The answer is that the moneyed interests have also invested a portion of their gains in an intellectual infrastructure of economists and pundits who continue to promote this failed doctrine – along with institutions that house them, such as, in the US, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and Club for Growth.

Moore helped draft and promote Trump’s trickle-down tax. In recent weeks he praised Ms Truss for her willingness “to challenge the reigning orthodoxy by sharply cutting taxes to boost growth”, calling her package “a gutsy and sound policy decision” that “will bring jobs, capital and businesses back to the UK”.

Moore and others like him are happy to disregard the evidence and history of trickle-down’s abject failures. They simply repeat the same set of promises made decades ago when Reagan and Thatcher set out to convince the public that trickle-down would work splendidly.

The public has so much else on its mind and is so confused by the cacophony that it doesn’t remember – until immediately after the next trickle-down failure.

It is a mark of the problem that The Persuaders seeks to describe that I had to force myself to sit down and read it. Anand Giridharadas, well known in the US as a journalist and TV political pundit, has written a thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already – namely, the feedback loops, filter bubbles and interference of Russian bot farms that have led to extreme polarisation in the US and beyond. Giridharadas describes this state of affairs as “Americans’ growing culture of mutual dismissal”, leading to a mass “writing-off from a distance” and the inability of anyone to change their minds about anything. In overview, it looks like a book borne of Twitter discourse, and who needs that?

As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read.

Which is not to say it didn’t annoy me. That’s the point, I suppose. The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions, a dynamic from which the author himself isn’t spared. In the chapter on the Women’s March, the Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, one of the organisers, describes how alienated she was by the movement’s roots in “white feminism”. There are readers who, presented with other names from the Women’s March leadership team, will have an equally forceful recoil, thanks to their perceived links with antisemitic figures.

The concern around white feminism is given many pages of thoughtful discussion. The latter worry, triggered by support among some march organisers for Louis Farrakhan, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, is given half a sentence. One requires understanding; the other is largely dismissed.

The effect of this, deliberately or otherwise, is to underscore the need for everyone to consider the alternative view. Multiple interviewees with decades of activism behind them express frustration at the present state of leftwing politics and its habit of either occupying a drippy middle ground or else digging into the narcissism of small difference. In the era of no microaggression going unpunished, the book makes the case through various veteran activists that not only is the purity spiral counterproductive to broadening the movement, it is, for those pursuing it, almost addictively recreational. As the author writes: “Social media rewarded the hunt for apostates more than the conversion of non-believers.”

Loretta Ross, a pioneering activist and theorist in Black radical feminist tradition, puts it this way: “I think the 90-percenters spend too much time trying to turn people into 100-percenters, which is totally unnecessary.” She means those ostensibly on the same side who say: “If you’re not working on my issue from my angle, then you’re erasing my issue. If you’re championing economic justice, you’re problematic for minimising race. If you’re championing racial justice, you don’t post enough about the ills of capitalism. If you’re focused on long-term climate change, you’re neglecting the here-and-now needs of poor communities.” These fights only hurt the progressive cause. It’s OK to call people out, but understand what you’re reaching for, she says. “You can’t change other people. You can’t even change the person you’re married to. You can help people. You can expose people to different information and help them learn – if you do so with love.”

The left has often made the mistake of tailgating on the right’s framing of a discussion, piping up 'We too are tough on law and order!' rather than calling out the right’s way of sowing disagreement

What this means in some contexts, argues Giridharadas, is shelving what feels good for what actually works. One chapter studies a fascinating programme trying to stop rapists reoffending by educating them on feminism, which requires a huge emotional effort on the part of the female educators to overcome what Ross calls “the justified instinct to focus on those hurt by the problem, not those perpetrating it”. Who wants to put resources into engaging with a rapist at the expense of funding his victims? But if it’s the most effective way to reduce rape, it’s at least worth considering.

The most skippable stretch of the book is a long, Wikipediaesque biography of Ocasio-Cortez, all well-rehearsed information by this point. And there are occasional, inadvertently funny passages. An account of a consciousness-raising group of white people trying to become better educated about their own race privilege contains a testy back and forth over whether the description “recovering racist” implies that they are, in fact, racist, that is pure Monty Python.

By far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study is that of Anat Shenker-Osorio, the communications strategist for progressive causes, whose tactics, pegged to the data, have exposed a lot of shortfalls in leftwing political campaigning. Shenker-Osorio points out that when people get frightened, they skew right; when they feel compassion and common cause with their fellow humans, they skew left. The left has often made the mistake of tailgating on the right’s framing of a discussion, piping up “We too are tough on law and order!” rather than calling out the right’s way of sowing disagreement between groups. “What is it about winning that is distasteful to you?” she says drily to a campaigner fixated on small differentials in language. She also counsels the left to cheer up. “Many progressive and Democratic messages basically boil down to ‘Boy, have I got a problem for you!’” – proven to be a big downer at the polls. “You’ve got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.”

Exacerbated by new technology, these are, nonetheless, very old problems. As Saul Bellow put it in The Adventures of Augie March: “That’s the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what’s real.” This enjoyable, helpful read may, paradoxically, suspend our solipsism for long enough to better prosecute that recruitment.

Then there’s the unusual aftermath of the Trump presidency, which reverberates throughout our politics. The Jan. 6 investigation is ongoing, and the F.B.I. raided Mar-a-Lago to reclaim classified documents that Trump is alleged to have taken with him inappropriately. (Trump, for his part, recently told Sean Hannity that the president can declassify documents “even by thinking about it,” which, sigh.)

Trump also bears responsibility for some of the lackluster candidates causing Republicans such problems. Trump pushed J.D. Vance in Ohio and Herschel Walker in Georgia and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania — all of whom are underperforming in their respective matchups. In a speech to the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Mitch McConnell admitted Republicans might not flip the Senate and observed, acidly, “Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”

Trump’s efforts to stay in the news, however, are matched by Biden’s efforts to stay out of it. Biden gives startlingly few interviews and news conferences. He doesn’t go for attention-grabbing stunts or high-engagement tweets. I am not always certain if this is strategy or necessity: It’s not obvious to me that the Biden team trusts him to turn one-on-one conversations and news conferences to his advantage. But perhaps the difference is academic: A good strategy is sometimes born of an unwanted reality.

Biden simply doesn’t take up much room in the political discourse. He is a far less central, compelling, and controversial figure than Trump or Obama or Bush were before him. He’s gotten a surprising amount done in recent months, but then he fades back into the background. Again, that’s a choice: Biden could easily command more attention by simply trying to command more attention. When he picks a fight, as he did in his speech on Trump, the MAGA movement and democracy in Philadelphia last month, the battle joins. He just doesn’t do it very often.

Which isn’t to say Biden doesn’t do anything. He governs. Just this week, Biden pardoned all federal convictions for simple marijuana possession. Before that, he canceled hundreds of billions dollars in student debt (though legal and administrative questions continue to swirl around that plan). He signed the Inflation Reduction Act. But then he moves on. He’s not looking to take his policy ideas and turn them into culture wars.

Biden didn’t win the Democratic nomination in 2020 because he was the most thrilling candidate or because he had legions of die-hard supporters. The case most often made for Biden was that other people would find him acceptable. And that proved true. Biden was able to assemble an unusually broad coalition of people who feared Trump and considered Biden to be, eh, fine. That strategy demanded restraint. A lot of politicians would have vied with Trump to make the election about them. Biden hung back and let Trump make the election about him.

I suspect that’s part of why Biden’s approval rating is, and has been, soft. Biden’s appeal to Democrats has been transactional more than inspirational. You don’t need to love, or even really to like, Biden to support him. You need to believe in him as a vehicle for stopping something worse. That’s still true today.

Not Yet the End of History By: Pierre Lemieux

As we are contemplating a non-insignificant probability of nuclear war, the end of history (that is, the end of social discontent and major wars) envisioned by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man (Simon and Schuster, 1992) seems very, very far away. Moreover, his triumphant liberal democracy was conceived as very democratic but still far from liberal in the sense of classical liberalism. In the Fall issue of Regulation, I review Fukuyama’s this widely debated book as well as the author’s most recent Liberalism and Its Discontent (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022). I show how, between the two books, Fukuyama’s thought has moved closer to classical liberalism, although many weaknesses remain. (See “Fukuyama: Interesting Books, With Some Baggage,” Regulation 45:3 [Fall 2022], pp. 48-53; also in html version.)

Fukuyama now clearly admits the need for constraining democracy, but he his practical proposals are often incoherent with the theoretical principle. One example I give in my review:

There is no reason, [Fukuyama] explains, “why economic efficiency needs to trump all other social values,” a moot point when one understands that economic efficiency is simply a way in which voluntary exchange reconciles, without coercion, the preferences and values of all individuals. As an example of desirable democratic choice, Fukuyama proposes the primacy of work over consumer welfare. The question is whether “human beings” are “consuming animals” or “producing animals.” “This is a choice that has not been offered to voters under the hegemony of neoliberal ideas.” The absurdity of putting such a choice before voters is easily shown by imagining a referendum that would ask “the people”: “What animal do you (or we) want to be, a consuming animal or a producing animal?” Ask yourself what would be the meaning of X% (< 100%) deciding one way or another. “We are all producing animals and now get back to work!” More realistically perhaps, we may imagine complex baskets of practical policy measures and electoral promises related to such a choice and proposed to the rationally ignorant voters, who would understand the consequences of the measures even less than their proponents. The only liberal solution, of course, is to let each individual decide for himself what sort of animal he wants to be, given the impersonal constraints generated by the equally free choices of all other individuals.

EconLog readers may find other interesting points in my critique, as well as in Fukuyama’s books themselves. This reflection helps pull together many threads in the critique of illiberalism.

Joshua Coleman is a psychologist and senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families. He is the author of Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties and How to Heal the Conflict.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Joshua Coleman discuss why there is a growing number of estrangements between parents and their adult children, how political identification has increasingly become a source of family conflict, and the best strategies for how estranged parents and adult children can heal their relationships.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You've done some really fascinating research, which, at first sight doesn't feel like it's of direct political relevance, but which I think says a lot about our society and perhaps about our political moment as well. It’s about the striking extent to which adult Americans lose touch with their parents. How frequent is this? How many adult Americans have very little contact with their parents?Joshua Coleman: The current estimates, based on a number of wide-ranging studies, show that it's around 10% with mothers and close to 20% with fathers. One large study out of Cornell found that 27% of adult children over the age of 18 have no contact with some family members. One survey of mothers found that of those mothers who are 65 to 75 years old, with at least one living adult child, 11% were estranged from one child.Mounk: What do you think explains this? Is this new?Coleman: I think it is relatively new. We've always had estrangements and conflicted relationships between parents and adult children. But I think it is relatively new to view cutting off contact with family members, your parents in particular, as an expression of personal growth and identity, and a form of protecting your mental health. Today, cutting off a parent can be a marker of existential courage or identity or self-definition, whereas I don't think that was nearly as true in the past. With parents and adult children today, the adult child feels like, “If you failed me in your responsibility as a parent”—in ways, of course, that are increasingly hard to define—“then I owe you nothing as an adult child.” I think that that explains a lot of the estrangements and low parent-child contact that aren't explained just by abuse or toxic behavior.Mounk: You sometimes hear people say about romantic relationships, that one of the problems with an overly romantic conception of partnership is that you start to assume that your partner needs to fulfill you, make you happy, be your soulmate and all of those things. And when they inevitably fail to live up to that, that leads to relationship instability, because you say, “Well, if you're not fulfilling me every day, then you must be the wrong person.” Is there a sort of odd parental parallel here?Coleman: I'd say it's completely parallel. It has to do with what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as the evolution of “pure relationships.” Giddens writes that as our identities became disembedded from the institutions that have governed family life for millennia—like religion, gender, community, neighborhood, and so on—we began to develop what he calls “pure relationships.” This is the idea that our relationships are purely constituted upon the principles of intimacy: Does this relationship feel good, or does it feel bad? Has it advanced my feelings of identity and well-being, or does it inhibit those? And that’s not only true in romantic relationships; it’s come to define relationships between parents and adult children, so that today, nothing obligates or guarantees the relationship between a parent and adult child beyond whether or not that adult child wants that relationship. And on the one hand, that can make the relationship good or strong, because parents are working much harder than they ever have to have a good relationship. On the other hand, it makes it much more fragile, because if the adult child feels like the parent’s behavior isn't in line with their ideals for happiness and mental health, then they're much less likely to see this parent or spend time with them.Mounk: And how does that relate to the concept of a therapeutic culture, and the role that psychotherapy might play?Coleman: Today's therapists are really the high priests that make these decisions about who to have or not have in your life. The definition of what's considered healthy has also radically changed. For an earlier generation, say, pre-1960, the role of a therapist was probably to help the adult child to have stronger family values and to be more in line with ideals around duty and responsibility. Today, by contrast, notions like duty, obligation, or even caretaking, guilt, or shame—those are all considered to be potentially problematic obstacles on the path to self discovery. So from my perspective, there has been a shift in the moral framework away from “Honor thy mother and father” and “respect your elders,” to a much more personal psychological perspective of health. The other moral framework that's emerged is this idea of, “I have to only have relationships that are protective of my mental health.” That’s something that I hear a lot from adult children about their parents: “I can't have you around me or my children, because it's not good for my mental health.” Now, on the one hand, fair enough, right? Nobody wants anybody in their life that's problematic to their mental health. But the idea of what causes mental illness is also highly problematic. We still live in a culture that's very captured by a psychoanalytic, psychodynamic definition of adult outcomes, where we assume that if you arrive into adulthood with significant anxiety or depression or low self-esteem, then it can all be dialed back to hidden or prior traumas or family relationships. The Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz says, “What’s a dysfunctional family? It's a family where your needs weren't met. How do you know that your needs weren’t met? By looking at your present condition.” So, if you have problems, you assume that it has to do with your parents—and sure, sometimes it does. But it’s also random good luck, random bad luck, genetics, cohort, siblings, and other important relationships. We have enormous problems in this country with social isolation, loneliness, depression, and high rates of mental illness, and that’s partly because we are increasingly atomized. We are cutting off not only friends, but family members and parents. And a lot of the parents in my practice are really willing to “do the work.” If they're willing to go to therapy, they're willing to make amends for their mistakes. And the adult children are saying, “No, since you failed me, I owe you nothing.” And I think that’s a very problematic way to run a society.Mounk: How deep do you think this problem of social isolation goes in the United States? Is it connected to the broader sense of malaise and anger that we have in the country at the moment? Coleman: We're becoming increasingly atomized; our definitions of what constitutes a good relationship makes us very fragile. The notion of boundaries, however useful they are, means we're constantly evaluating whether a relationship is good or bad for us. That puts enormous pressure and stress on the self. It also creates a lot of anxiety. So everybody's sort of looking for their tribe, but tribes can be very fragile, and they aren't necessarily able to provide the kind of corrective feedback that we all need, and that we're more used to getting from family and closest friends. Now, this isn't to idealize the family, because I think, to your point, families can be very hurtful and disruptive and traumas are a real thing and can occur in families. It's just that what is considered to be traumatic, harmful, abusive or neglectful behavior today, has radically changed. There was an important article by the Australian psychologist Nick Haslam, who talked about how in the past three decades, there's been an increasing “concept creep” in terms of what we define as being harmful, abusive, neglectful behavior. On the one hand, that's great. It provides us a much more detailed way to talk about feeling injured or hurt or misunderstood by others. On the other hand, it pathologizes the fairly normal slings and arrows of family life, and it presents an idealization of the possibilities of parenthood that isn't very realistic.Every day there's some new article like “10 Signs That You're with a Narcissist,” “How to Deal with a Narcissist,” or “Why You Should Go No-Contact with Your Parent.” These things give a kind of a legitimacy or authority to cutting off people for reasons that, in other generations, would have been considered obnoxious, maybe irritating or burdensome. But the idea that you should just be constantly wiggling out of problematic relationships because they're upsetting to you is very problematic. And we're constantly confusing conflict with abuse. So many things today get called abusive which are just conflictual. And the difference between them is that if you conceptualize something that's conflictual, then there is a remedy for it. We can sort of assume that there's a pathway. But if you consider it as just abuse, narcissism, borderline personality disorder or any of those things, you've essentially dehumanized the other person, and you've also closed off the possibility that the relationship can be healed.Mounk: This is something that you see often in areas of social life as well, right? Countries go too far down one path politically, which has the effect of making them soon swing exactly the other way politically. It's very plausible to me that an extreme form of helicopter parenting makes the child feel constrained, and if they don't know how to fight for their space, then the only way they might have to do it is to say, “I'm cutting you off completely.” If parents of young children are listening to this, what advice do you give them for the next years and decades to minimize the likelihood of this adverse outcome? To put it more positively: how can they maximize their chances of having a meaningful relationship with their adult children in the future?Coleman: I think the answer is for those parents to recognize that, as their child becomes an adult, their capacity to influence them is significantly reduced; that in the same way research shows that long-term romantic relationships have friendship as their core, that principle can be true of our adult children as well. Now, it's problematic when you're raising young children, because you don't necessarily just want to be your child's friend. You have to have your own authority, autonomy, and ability to set limits. And I think many parents are very confused about what's an abusive set of limits versus a reasonable set of limits. But in general, holding true to the idea that the ground has shifted, and you can't guilt-trip your children into a relationship with you, it has to be in line with their ideals, which may be to spend less time with you, to be more separate from you. The good news about all of this is that the majority of parents today say they feel closer to their adult children than they believe that their parents felt to them, and many parents have really close confiding relationships with their adult children. That's the good news: parents have become much more psychological, invested, conscientious and educated about child-rearing, which has produced much better parent-adult child relationships. The downside is that the adult child now has much more power to set the terms of the relationship when they're grown, and that makes the parents’ authority much more diminished in ways which aren’t necessarily good for either party.Mounk: What advice would you give to parents of teenagers or adult children who feel their kids pulling away? What is the best way to preserve or to hope to improve the relationship under those kinds of circumstances?Coleman: Well, one of the things that I talk a lot about with parents, particularly if they're estranged or on the path to estrangement, is to really empathize with what the child is saying. Assume that your child has good reasons for their behavior. So, if a child has cut off contact, I commonly advise parents to say something like, “I know that you wouldn't do this unless it was the healthiest thing for you to do.” Now, from the parents’ perspective, it isn't the healthiest thing for them to do. But from the adult child's perspective, it is. So the parent has to form some kind of an alliance with what the child is doing and why they feel like they need to do it. Part and parcel of that is making amends for the mistakes that the parent has made. Even highly conscientious, educated, caring, loving parents could still, in many ways, have made mistakes that were problematic for their adult child, which the adult child felt, when they were younger, were hurtful, problematic, or disruptive for them. Helping parents to take responsibility, to make amends, to not be defensive or not explain away their actions—I find that to be the most powerful behavior that a parent can do towards reconciliation.Mounk: Do you see any kind of patterns in what types of families—whether that is by income, by education, by political ideology, by geography, by culture of origin—end up with those kinds of estrangement?Coleman: In terms of my research, it's primarily Euro Americans, white, middle class families and above. I very rarely see Latino or African American families. I'm seeing more Asian families, but I'd still say that they're fairly rare. We don't have great international statistics about the estrangements, but I would argue that in general, you're going to see less of that in countries that have preserved a sense of filial obligation. Politics are increasingly becoming a cause of estrangement. I read one study that said that something like 1/3 of families have become estranged over political differences. And that's important because politics have become such a powerful defining factor of identity—e.g. who is my tribe and who isn't my tribe. The fact that this extends to families is relatively new. 20 years ago, people weren't getting estranged or even having that much conflict about political differences, whereas today, they do.Mounk: If you're saying something like: a therapeutic culture is one of the causes of people being overly quick on the trigger towards estrangement, I would assume (though that itself may be wrong) that this kind of therapeutic culture is most widely spread in metropolitan, affluent America—which is, of course, also more liberal-progressive.Wouldn't you expect some kind of ideological differences, where people who self-define as left-wing would be more likely to undergo estrangement? And if that's not the case, doesn't that somewhat undercut the therapeutic hypothesis?Coleman: It's an interesting question. Politically, it seems fairly distributed to me. It may be more a matter of class than of politics. I certainly have plenty of conservatives in my practice who are being estranged by their children who are also conservatives. And the therapeutic culture, I think, is an outgrowth of individualism, and there are different types of individuals. For example, the sociologist Amy Schalet contrasted American individualism versus Dutch individualism in her book Not Under My Roof. What she found was that American individuals are more likely to follow what she described as “adversarial individualism,” which is the concept that you become an adult through an adversarial relationship with your parents. Whereas in Dutch societies, they're much more likely to drink with their adolescent children or allow them to have an overnight stay with their boyfriends or girlfriends, starting at the age of 16 or 17. In the United States, it's “not under my roof.” So, I think in some ways, the most important factor is the kind of individualism per se, rather than the political spectrum. But I could be wrong—we don't have great statistics on that yet.Mounk: You mentioned earlier that one of the drivers of estrangement is the spouse of a child. Now, of course, sometimes the spouse of a child may be the person who helps them realize that their parents really are toxic and abusive. So there can be a positive element to that, again. I'm not trying to imply that estrangement is always a bad thing. But also, of course, a lot of the time, it can be the spouse of a child who is a toxic person, who is jealous of a relationship that spouse might have with their parents and so on. Do parents have any kind of agency in empowering their children to make better choices? Coleman: I think you have to accept that you don't have very much control over who your child chooses. And a lot of estrangements happen as a result of the parent voting against that potential boyfriend or girlfriend early on, and being critical of them or worried about them. And it’s problematic when that becomes interwoven with the child's own desires to be autonomous and to say, “Well, this is my life. I get to choose who I want to choose and love who I want to love.” So I strongly encourage parents to be very circumspect, and not to say anything critical about somebody's potential spouse, and to be very cautious, even if it's just somebody that they're dating. That can have very problematic consequences later down the line.Mounk: Undoubtedly, given the numbers, there are many people listening to this podcast who are estranged from their parents or considering becoming estranged from their parents. Perhaps, there are also parents who feel that they would like to have much closer contact with their children than they do. What is your advice to them?Coleman: The advice for the parent is to find the kernel of truth, if not the bushel of truth, in your child's complaints; to show empathy and compassion; to assume that if they're complaining about you, there may be good reasons for that that you don't understand; to be committed to understanding, and to taking responsibility for the mistakes that you made; to adhere to the principle of separate realities, which means that you could have objectively done a good, dedicated job as a parent, yet your child may still feel like you didn't do the things that they really needed, or wanted you to do. I think those are really the most important principles towards healing a fractured relationship with an adult child.Mounk: How should children assess whether or not seeking that kind of estrangement is the right course of action for them?Coleman: I think the issue is whether they have done their due diligence. I don't, as with you, think that all estrangements are bad. I think that some parents are so unrepentant or critical and negative or hostile, that the adult child in these cases does have to choose their own mental health over the relationship with the parent. But I think it's important for the adult child to do due diligence, to give the parent the opportunity to heal the relationship, to do family therapy, and to approach the complaints that they have about the parent in a way that makes it possible for the parent to hear and respond. You're not going to get a great response from your parent if you enter it saying that they're toxic or narcissistic, or that they have a borderline personality disorder. You're just going to shut down the conversation. It's far better to start with what you like or appreciate about the parent, and also to be mindful that parents really do the best that they can, even if that best is terrible. If your parents did fail you in important ways, it's probably because of their own childhood traumas or their own genetics or life circumstances or who they were married to. And so, to have a certain degree of compassion for that doesn't mean that you have to accept whatever they say in terms of the relationship. It means providing a framework where the relationship can be actually healed and moved forward.Mounk: What would you say to those estranged from a parent, or with very low contact, who may be thinking, “How can I build on that contact in a way that's sustainable, where I don't invite my parent to rush back into my life and overwhelm me so that I feel the need to put these very extreme boundaries back up?” Coleman: When I work with parents and adult children in reconciliation therapy, that's very much the model. I tell parents that they have to defer to the adult child's pacing, in terms of frequency of contact and the quality of the contact, which may mean that the parent has to not say anything remotely critical or give advice about parenting, or say anything about the daughter- or son-in-law. I think that it's reasonable for the adult child to say that they want to be in control of the pacing. I always tell parents to take that deal, because it's the only way to begin the process of healing.I support the adult child's boundaries, almost whatever they are. But it becomes problematic when the adult child wants the parents to make amends for things that the parent strongly believes never occurred. That's often the most problematic territory. If the adult child is considering reconciliation, then it's good to give the parent things that they can actually respond to, to find some degree of shared reality. That doesn't mean that the adult child has to accept the parent’s version of their childhood—they can still believe what they believe and maintain that the parent is denying things that occurred. But if the adult child is open to having a reconciliation, then I think that they do get to set the terms, even if the parent feels that those terms are very limiting.Mounk: Do you think that these trends are going to continue and accelerate, or is there any hope for a change in the culture whereby we might see a reestablishment of family bonds and the strengthening of these lifelong relationships?Coleman: To me, it seems like we're getting more and more atomized, more and more anxious, more and more agitated. And those things tend to breed more conflict in families and more division. I wish I could end on a really hopeful note about this. But if I were to predict a trend, I would predict a continuation of a trend in the wrong direction. Still, you're having podcasts like this, and there's more information out there about how to reconcile. And, you know, many of the things that cause estrangement are fixable. Perhaps, if that awareness becomes much more a part of the popular culture, the trend will slow down.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

“Democracy is at stake,” US President Biden told a gathering of Democratic Party governors on September 28th. His warning about the global spread of illiberalism followed the stunning gains made by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, the latter of which he mentioned directly. “We can't be sanguine about what's happening here either,” he added. Biden has already called much of his own domestic opposition “semi-fascist,” and fears of anti-democratic violence remain following the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2020, by rioters attempting to overturn his own election. But these worrying developments on the political Right reflect only one expression of the new authoritarianism. The Western Left, once advocates of free speech and tolerant of markets, now embrace a massive expansion of state power, complete with expansive curbs on expression and speech. Perhaps most ominous of all, expanded state power and intolerance are also now being embraced by some of the world’s most powerful corporations, which have benefited greatly from liberalism, the rule of law, and open inquiry.Beyond the West, full-bore authoritarians are already in power—Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey. At the end of the Cold War, the world seemed to be traveling on a natural “arc” to a more democratic future. But authoritarianism has been on the rise for almost two decades. Most critically, China’s rise offers an alluring—at least to some—model of a new corporate state that, perhaps more than anything, recalls the European fascist regimes in the 1920s and ’30s. “Democracies,” Xi is said to have told Biden, “can’t be sustained in the 21st century.”Historical precedence and critical pre-conditionsAutocracy’s appeal lies partly in the sense of certainty and enthusiastic commitment it provides. In his 1995 work, Nazi Germany: A New History, the historian Klaus Fischer argues that the 20th century’s dictatorial regimes thrived by offering “a version of traditional religiosity with its own dogmas, priesthood and inquisitions.” Their preferred terroirs are societies experiencing economic decline and the loss of traditional social, spiritual, and political moorings. In the 1930s, radical cultural changes and depressed economic conditions fostered nationalist extremism in some places, while others rejected constitutional democracy for the siren song of Stalinism.Without the Depression and the sense of societal unraveling during the Weimar Republic, it is unlikely Hitler would have gained power. “Fascism,” noted historian F.L. Carsten in The Rise of Fascism (1967), “was the product of a deep economic and social crisis, a crisis of European society.” Today’s social turmoil and economic decline is all too similar. North America and Europe both face the growing threat of a serious global economic downturn. Today, 57 percent of Americans, according to Rasmussen, worry that a major depression is on the way. This belief may not be justified, but it offers a snapshot of growing public anxiety and pessimism.The generational aspect is critical here. Pew has found that 56 percent of residents in advanced economies believe their children will do worse than they did. This is not an unreasonable assumption—in 2018, half of all recent college grads in the US made under $28,000 annually, and another recent study suggests that most underemployed graduates will remain that way permanently. The frustrations of the young provide particularly effective kindling for extreme politics. In prewar Germany before the Nazis took power, notes historian Frederic Spotts in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2002), National Socialism was all the rage among university students and young people in general; these disgruntled youngsters also filled the ranks of the communist militias.By contrast, support for market-centered institutions and free speech tends to diminish in hard times. Even before the current economic woes, an Edelman survey reported that a majority of people in 28 countries around the world said they believe that capitalism does more harm than good. More than four-in-five worry about job loss, particularly from automation. Rising inequality and general fear of downward mobility have boosted support for expanded government and greater re-distribution of wealth.Faith in the democratic model, meanwhile, has fallen steadily for almost a decade, with disapproval of democracy now well over 50 percent globally, a phenomenon clearly evident in the United States. A 2020 global survey of opinion by the Cambridge-based Center for the Future of Democracy that combined data from over 4.8 million respondents—43 sources in 160 countries between 1973 and 2020—found faith in democracy falling most precipitously among Generation X and millennials.The revival of the populist RightThe revival of the populist Right represents the clearest face of resurgent authoritarianism. Its illiberal parties and movements reject the basic logic of economic globalism and constitute a reaction to the perceived contempt with which many leading institutions treat national, religious, and family values. This is made explicit in the program of the Brothers of Italy.Support for right-wing populism has most obviously been driven by mass migration, fears about which demagogues have not been slow to exploit. After support for mass immigration from the Middle East appeared to surge during the Syrian civil war in 2015, support for a liberal border policy soon receded. A year later, Pew Research found that a median of 50 percent of respondents across 10 EU countries said immigrants were imposing a burden on their country, while in “no EU country surveyed did more than four-in-ten say that having an increasing number of people from many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities makes their country a better place to live.” In 2018, Pew found that 71 percent of Italians, almost 58 percent of Germans, 52 percent of Swedes, and 41 percent of French citizens wanted either fewer or no new immigrants; a median of just 10 percent wanted more.Despite calls for mass immigration to make up for Europe’s deepening demographic decline, an overwhelming majority in virtually every European country favors stronger border controls at the EU frontier, and opposes the arrival of large numbers of unskilled people. Indeed, even as immigration has dropped (due in part to the pandemic), European policies towards migrants have toughened while attitudes have generally hardened.The rise of crime associated with immigration has riled once-safe Sweden, which now suffers the second-highest rate of deadly shootings per capita out of 22 European countries. Illiberal, nativist politics have turned Hungary’s Victor Orbán into a celebrated figure on the populist Right in both Europe and North America. Some anti-immigrant movements espouse unambiguously racist views, but others are inspired by opposition to the kind of open-ended immigration favored by the prevailing corporate and bureaucratic apparatus. Some have even found inspiration in the Middle Ages and the example of the Frankish king Charles Martel, who defeated Muslim invaders in the eighth century.Economic underpinningsBut it’s economic dislocation that will provide the populist Right’s resurgence with its critical fuel. The key may lie with what historian Eric Weitz identifies as “the proletarianization of the middle class” in his book, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Today, as in Germany during the 1930s, many shopkeepers, farmers, and artisans feel threatened by inflation, and by the growing power of large corporations, Wall Street magnates, and tech oligarchs. In 2020, small-business owners in America were among Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, while shop owners across Europe still face potentially disastrous conditions.Increasingly, “neoliberalism”—defined by historian Gary Gerstle in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022) as “a creed that favors free trade and the free movement of capital goods and people”—is falling out of favor among large parts of the Western population. Unlike traditional conservative groups, but like the authoritarians of the ’30s, the new populist Right rejects laissez-faire conservatism, generally supports a strong welfare state, and has tended to take an anti-capitalist, collectivist line during its drive for power. After all, Mussolini had once been a radical socialist and proffered fascism as meeting “the demands of the working class.” Canadian historian Robert Gellately has demonstrated that socialist ideas, including a planned expansion of the welfare state, were also a critical element of Nazi ideology.By rejecting neoliberal dogma, the populist Right has been able to appeal to working-class voters, who are ditching their traditional ties to Democrats in America and to social-democratic parties across Europe. This working-class shift could be accelerated by the adoption of draconian green policies—and the high energy prices they produce—which is already sparking support for right-wing populists, particularly in the eastern reaches of Germany.In the coming years, ever-stricter environmental controls on households and businesses, and the surge of energy prices and reliability shortfalls, seem likely to spark the kind of grassroots rebellions first seen in the gilets jaunes protests that swept France and received sympathetic support across the populist Right. Some resent seeing the well-to-do advertize their environmental virtue while the policies they recommend impose extraordinarily high energy and housing costs on whole economic sectors.There are some differences between today’s populist Right and the fascists and National Socialists of the 20th century. While the Nazis, notes historian Spotts, enjoyed strong support among university students and the intelligentsia, today’s populists have little purchase among the cognitive elites. Nevertheless, this alienated population is served by a thriving alternative media ecosystem, parts of which have tried to turn the malcontents of January 6th into folk heroes and martyrs. The fact that “stop the steal” rhetoric has been adopted by nearly a third of Republican candidates suggests that much of that once-great party have embraced conspiratorial and paranoid far-Right persecution fantasies.From left liberalism to authoritarianismHistorically, progressives saw themselves as the arch-enemies of right-wing authoritarianism. And indeed, many of the great accomplishments of liberalism—from the civil rights movement to the rights for women and gays—came about in the face of stiff opposition from the reactionary Right. In recent decades, however, the Left across the West has become increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of dissenting views.This shift has occurred as progressives have grown to dominate many of society’s most critical institutions such as academia and the media, and have sought to fortify their position with the tools of authoritarianism. This near-total dominance of the cultural heights of Western societies has been marked by increasing political dogmatism, a penchant for censorship, and contempt for those who diverge from their orthodoxies. “The current religion of Western liberals in politics and media,” notes writer Glenn Greenwald, “is censorship: their prime weapon of activism.”Universities have been the prime incubators of this shift. Once a bastion of open inquiry, higher education is now defined by ideological homogeneity, particularly among the faculty. This, according to a recent study, has been particularly true at liberal arts colleges, some departments of which have become entirely “Republican-free.” The skew is especially acute in fields that most affect public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley—institutions that graduate many of the nation’s leaders—describe themselves as conservative.Similarly, although roughly half of British voters lean to the right, less than 12 percent of academics do. These trends are common across Europe and in Canada, and the resulting imbalance has transformed much of academia into something resembling an ideological reeducation camp. Prominent schools of journalism have also moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting in favor of advancing a “social justice” agenda. Even some progressives, such as the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, have acknowledged that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”This kind of de facto indoctrination combined with diminished economic prospects appear to be driving some young people into the arms of the populist Left. In France, the Socialist Party, which previously maintained support for free speech and free markets, is now part of an alliance committed to anti-capitalism and a program of enlightened social control under the leadership of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an admirer of the late Hugo Chávez. In this year’s Presidential race (as in 2017), those under 35 favored either the aged Trotskyite or populist-Right standard-bearer Marine Le Pen over technocratic centrist, President Emmanuel Macron.Similarly, in the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have rejected the liberal elements of the old Left for more draconian stances on both capitalism and property rights. In the 2016 primaries, the policy agenda of socialist Bernie Sanders included giving close to almost half of all corporate seats to employees and expanding federal power over all aspects of economic life. He easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined among under-30 voters. In 2020, he also did very well among young people, even as the older cohorts decisively rejected him. Socialism, long anathema in America, has gained currency among the younger generations. A poll conducted by the Communism Memorial Foundation in 2016 found that 44 percent of American millennials favor socialism while 14 percent chose either fascism or communism. The emerging Left in America is also now among the most enthusiastic supporters of censorship, apparently perceiving any opposition to be essentially illegitimate and caused by racism, sexism, or some other social dysfunction. In his 2018 book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, political scientist Yascha Mounk reveals that while more than two-thirds of older Americans still embrace democracy, only one-in-three millennials do. Overall, it is white progressives, not right-wingers, who constitute the most intolerant group in America, and who are also far more likely to eschew contacts with political opponents than any group.The corporate authoritariansArguably the most potent, if least understood, authoritarian drive comes not from political populists but from the convergence of dominant corporations and the bureaucratic establishment. Increasingly, the West’s economy looks more like rule by corporate giantism—the giant Japanese zaibatsu, the German prewar cartels, and the big family industrial groups in Mussolini’s time. A tenth of the US economy is made up of industries where four firms dominate more than two-thirds of the market, with finance and information technology now among the most concentrated. Europe, too, has experienced a steady growth in corporate concentration over the last two decades.Capitalism has increasingly lost the competitive character that shaped its ascendence. Today, its giants often collude even as they fight among themselves—like the daimyo in medieval Japan. What competition remains comes from other giants rather than from plucky upstarts. Microsoft now controls 90 percent of all operating system software. Three tech firms now account for two-thirds of all online advertizing revenues, which now represent the vast majority of all ad sales. Once paragons of entrepreneurial vigor, these firms have morphed into exemplars of “tollbooth capitalism,” and receive revenues on transactions that far exceed anything they lose in failed ventures and acquisitions.Finance, too, has become markedly more concentrated, with the number of banks in the US down a full third since 2000 while Europe experiences a slower, but similar consolidation. Global investing is now dominated by a handful of companies, the five largest of which control over 45 percent of all assets in the US compared to under 30 percent 20 years ago. The five largest investment banks control roughly one-third of investment funds; the top 10 control an absolute majority. For the most part, these firms hated Donald Trump. This partly owed to understandable revulsion at his character, but it was also due to his hostility to China, his opposition to the cheap labor provided by immigration, and his support for efforts to break up big tech firms. They therefore united to make massive contributions to electoral efforts to remove him, a move later celebrated in Time magazine.The dominant social media players also clearly wanted Biden in the White House. They had little trouble covering Trump’s numerous lies and misdeeds, but never censored some of the equally absurd anti-Trump conspiracies, as Greenwald pointed out. The quashing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and Facebook, not to mention the social media ban imposed on Trump himself, represented a remarkable and frightening exercise of arbitrary power. Although many liberals did not disapprove of these acts—anything, they reasoned, was okay if it helped to get rid of Trump—foreign observers with actual experience living under despotic regimes, like German chancellor Angela Merkel and the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, were less impressed. Like Donald Trump, the new Italian prime minister has already had a viral YouTube video removed for supposedly violating the platform’s community guidelines.In contrast to the confrontations with Trump, the corporate elite and the Biden administration have promised to work harmoniously to control information. At US News, journalist Robert Epstein has argued that Google’s algorithms have made it “the world’s biggest censor,” creating what Jenin Younes, writing in Tablet magazine, has called “a privatized censorship regime.” As Ellie Mae O’Hagan in the Guardian put it: “If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like this, there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence.”In the coming years, control of information will be used to shape public attitudes about the “climate emergency,” the mindless dogmatism of which the WSJ’s Helen Raleigh has compared to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Last year, Google announced a “crackdown” on climate policy skeptics—including well-known scientists—a policy eagerly embraced by the EPA’s director, Gina McCarthy. As environmental activist Michael Shellenberger has pointed out, there’s little appetite to be found at the major media outlets for challenging misleading statements from Biden’s energy and environmental spokespersons, another service to the current White House.The corporate authoritarians have also started to use their financial power to promote their preferred policies. The current craze among corporate leaders, particularly the big investment banks, for “stakeholder capitalism” means the imposition of environmental race and gender perquisites on investments. This approach has the strong backing of the Administration. At the same time, PayPal now feels free to demonetize the accounts of those with “unacceptable” views on such topics as climate change, gender “fluidity,” and race.Ironically, as the most powerful media, corporate, and government officials fret about resurgent fascism, their actions echo the fascist notion of melding corporate power with the state’s objectives. Benito Mussolini wanted the state to become “the moving center of economic life.” He successfully coopted Italian industrialists to build new infrastructure and the military, while stamping out Italy’s historically militant and socialist-oriented unions. Not all big capitalists were devoted fascists, but they were careful to maintain what Mussolini called “formal adherence to the regime.”Is there a way to resist authoritarianism?Whether under the control of Right or Left political regimes or powerful corporations, technology allows for the kind of surveillance that would have delighted Stalin, Hitler, or Mao—a greatly enhanced ability to monitor where people go, what they buy, and what they say to their associates. This poses a major barrier to any kind of pushback from the lower classes. Perhaps, as Aldous Huxley warned in his 1932 novel Brave New World, “A thoroughly scientific dictatorship will never be overthrown.”China offers the obvious model. Chinese authorities understand that a “conflictual-competitive system,” like that usually dominant in America, “will hold back national economic priorities and damage the social fabric.” Under the rubric of “Corporate Social Responsibility,” the state still holds the command keys, and although entrepreneurs are allowed to get rich, they cannot deviate much from the state orthodoxy.In the West, this kind of centralized control—albeit without the Maoist garb—is supported by prominent liberals like New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman and the former Obama budget adviser Peter Orszag, who believe that climate and other issues are too complex for elected representatives. Instead, some of them recommend ceding power to credentialed “experts” in Washington, Brussels, or Geneva. Jerry Brown, a former governor of California with close ties to China’s climate efforts, openly favors applying “the coercive power of the central state” to achieve environmental goals and the “brainwashing” of the uncomprehending masses.For much of the upper echelons, liberal democracy has become a mere totem, cited but not widely backed by corporate executives who were once devotees of free markets and ideas. Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, waxes enthusiastic about a “common future in cyberspace” with China’s surveillance state. Wall Street actively lobbies on behalf of China, while oligarchs like Michael Bloomberg describe China, a country of business opportunity for his firm, as “ecologically friendly, democratically accountable, and invulnerable to the threat of revolution.” Furthering his flattery, he has stated that Xi Jinping is “not a dictator.”If liberal ideas are to survive, middle- and working-class people will need to advocate against the rising authoritarian state, in any of its forms. We have not yet reached Huxley’s Brave New World or even the institutionalization of China’s high-tech police state. The sinews of civic culture still remain—churches, independent journals, local associations, small businesses—that can flex against the imposition of a “scientific dictatorship” and restore economic opportunity to the vast majority.But ideas are not enough. Liberal democracy must also find ways to restore hope for economic improvement, particularly among the young. To halt the spread of authoritarianism, true liberals must also develop an answer to the economic malaise that spurs its growth and provides its rationale. Growing class inequities need to be addressed by a new commitment to broad-based economic progress.Ultimately, the survival of liberal civilization depends on citizens who embrace both its freedoms and its obligations. Activists on both the Left and the Right have fostered a narrow identity politics that cannot sustain a pluralistic democracy. Corporate autocracy revolves not around greater opportunities for most but preserving both their self-defined virtue and their positions of power. To fight the growing authoritarian challenge—Right, Left, and corporate—we must confront the conditions that create it in all three forms.

With just over four weeks to Election Day, the Democratic Party still has time to realize its limitations, which have led to them losing winnable races, or barely squeaking by at the federal and state levels. Imagine the worst, most corrupt, lying, dictatorial GOP since its creation in 1854 having their most dangerous and extreme candidates win elections.

Democrats need to escape the controls of their incarcerating political/media consultants.

To liberate the many policies, messages, strategies, rebuttals, and ground-level ways to get out more votes, Democrats need to escape the controls of their incarcerating political/media consultants, who are too often conflicted by their ongoing corporate clients and their 15% commissions received from placing repetitive, vacuous video ads.

With their ample funds, the Democrats have to aggregate the case against the GOP's morbid opposition to humanity and contrast it with the Democratic Party's own lawmaking, votes, and positions. For example, the Dems need to compare all their pro-children work with the GOP's ugly record of cruelty to the little ones once they are born. (See my column: Big Campaign 2022 Issue: GOP's Cruelty to Children). Trump's GOP went out of its way to keep federal Medicaid funds from insuring children in GOP-dominated states, lunged to revoke an Obama rule to ban a pesticide, especially deadly to young children, and blocked all attempts to enact paid sick leave, family leave, and daycare. In 2017 the Republicans also slashed the already low tax rates for their Rich and Powerful paymasters.

Dems should move fast with a winning "Protect and Nurture ALL Our Children" platform.

The GOP is chronically antagonistic to freedom and equality for women. Republican opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay mandates, corporate marketplace discriminations and reproductive choice, and other serious biases can form the basis for a Democratic "Freedom for Women" platform plank.

With lives and public infrastructure being regularly destroyed by floods, ocean surges, winds, and wildfires from global warming, GOP candidates respond with a curled lip: NO! Republicans voted against, or successfully blocked the public works bills backed by congressional Democrats, costing lives, jobs, community stability and using tax dollars not to benefit the people, but to the corporate greed hounds of Wall Street and its plutocrats.

Most Democrats have been reluctant to take on the 800 lb. gorilla in the political arena--widely despised, by both liberal and conservative voters, Big Business controls coercions, bailouts, and exploitations over people's livelihoods. Over 70% of people, regardless of political labels, bear the brunt of abuses by corporate barons every day where they live, work, and raise their children. Plenty of press reports, pointed studies, and litigation data make the case that Democratic candidates who commit to All the parents, All the workers, and All the consumers to make giant companies our servants, not our masters, will garner large majority voter support. People are tired of double standards. They want corporate crooks to go to jail. They want runaway CEOs to be held accountable. Such stands would immediately contrast with the GOP's coverups of Wall Street, the big banks, insurance companies, and avaricious drug and health insurance companies. Many Democrats can point to their pending legislation holding these Goliaths to account that the Republicans have stifled.

The central point of these proposals--among others available--is to energize Democratic candidates and enliven their repetitive daily campaign routines and rhetoric. It is time for the Dems to go on the offensive against the GOP's made-up fake accusations and give a hungry media compelling substance. Reporters are tired of covering campaigns as horse races, and mainly reporting on campaign contributions and polling results.

Headlines could emerge by injecting fresh issues and slogans to grab more of the 120 million eligible voters who are expected to stay at home. Some examples follow.

Exposing the GOP's Death Cult that can't help opposing the concrete existing and proposed health, safety, and economic rights of American families, will motivate voters.

"Go vote for a raise to $15 per hour, you've earned it and it's long overdue." The GOP hates the very idea of a minimum wage and has frozen the federal minimum at $7.25 per hour, while letting the likes of Apple's CEO Tim Cook, make $833 per MINUTE with low tax rates! Raising the minimum wage will help over 25 million voters.

"Go vote to extend the $300 a month child tax credit that reached 58 million children and cut the child poverty rates by a third, until the congressional GOP blocked its extension in January 2022."

Democrats who show they mean what they say, stay on the offensive, and hone debating skills to provide memorable contrasts with the GOP can win a working majority in the legislatures to get things done. Moreover, exposing the GOP's Death Cult that can't help opposing the concrete existing and proposed health, safety, and economic rights of American families, will motivate voters.

GOP Florida Senator Rick Scott, in charge of electing Republican Senators, wants to sunset laws, including Social Security and Medicare, as indicated in his "An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America." Run against this outrage daily.

These contrasts can be summarized on a single-sheet Voter Self-Help Guides distributed in the tens of millions everywhere on paper (and online). One side can poll the voters on a dozen positions. The other side can show that the Democratic candidate is "On Their Side" and the GOP candidate is not (supported by the facts and their record).

Together with civic leader Mark Green and two dozen experienced and accomplished civic advocates, we compiled a collection of such policies, strategies, and messaging to attract voters and retire GOP candidates who follow their leader, Herr Trump, in further wrecking our fragile climate, democratic institutions, voting procedures, and public health with their early denial of the Covid pandemic.

The Winning America effort has been endorsed by Senator Edward Markey, Reps. Hakim Jeffries, John Larson, Jim McGovern, Peter DeFazio, Jamie Raskin, and Carolyn Maloney, among others.

There is still time for candidates to listen, learn, and self-galvanize electoral energies. The question is: Will Democrats in the close House, Senate, and state legislative races be willing to break out of their managed cocoons and become Winning Monarch Butterflies on November 8, 2022?

Will the Democratic Party stop the GOP Party of Anxiety, Dread, and Fear from anointing Trump lackey Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker of the House and the corporatist Mitch McConnell ("The Guardian of Gridlock" who says he "will tell you what we're going to do AFTER we win the Election") to resume his control of the Senate?

Voter turnout will decide which future awaits America.

See https://winningamerica.net/

The worldview behind Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine assumed the following premises: The West and America are declining, decaying and internally divided. The globalized world is becoming multipolar, with “civilization-states” re-emerging and competing to claim their spheres of influence. And Russia and China in particular represent potent alternatives to Western liberalism that stand ready to contend for global dominance.

As badly as the war has gone for Putin, some of this analysis still holds up. The world has indeed responded to the Ukraine War along multipolar lines. Saudi Arabia’s snub of the Biden administration’s plea to pump more oil is just the latest example of how the anti-Russian coalition is essentially a Western coalition, with India, China and the Arab world playing more cynical and complicated parts.

Meanwhile, the West’s unity, while obviously more impressive than Putin expected, is still a thin netting flung over deeper vulnerabilities. There has been no sustained post-Covid boomtime, no new era of good feelings. The populist wave is not receding; since the war in Ukraine began the European establishment has suffered political disappointments and defeats in Sweden and Hungary and Italy. Two of the governments most committed to the defense of Ukraine, Joe Biden’s administration and Britain’s Tory government, are well underwater in approval polls. Europe has only just begun to feel the cost of its naïve energy policies, and Western economies are caught between measures that feed inflation and solutions that might induce recession.

So in key respects the world still looks as Putin imagined it more than seven months ago, with clear opportunities for a potent challenger to the liberal world order. But now we know something that he didn’t when he ordered the invasion: Russia isn’t that potent challenger, and its claims to represent an alternative to the liberal West have melted into Ukrainian mud.

(Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (Including Ben Sasse who is, sadly, transitioning to Florida Man),Last week, I once again floated my admittedly flawed and extremely unlikely idea of Joe Biden pardoning Donald Trump in exchange for Trump never running for public office again. I got a lot of criticism for it, and that’s fine. Again, it won’t happen and it has a lot of drawbacks. But I didn’t fully explain why I think it would be preferable to a lot of other options. Don’t worry, I’m not going to dwell on this, I’m just trying to set up a different topic. So as Frankenstein said when he took a grizzly with him as his plus-one to a party, bear with me. I think having Trump be the Republican nominee would be terrible for—in no particular order—the country, conservatism, and the Republican Party. But as bad as all that would be, it pales in comparison to how bad it would be for the country if he became president again. Most of the accomplishments people attribute to Trump were achieved largely in spite of him. He had people around him—let’s call them grown-ups—who kept things on the rails. I’m not saying they were all heroes, but I’m also not saying they were all sellouts either. They’re a mixed bunch. Just consider William Barr. Many of his detractors insisted he was nothing but a Trump yes-man and enabler, but it turns out things were much more complicated. Like so many in the Trump administration, he believed he could ride the orange tiger for the good of the country and the conservative cause. When Trump wanted Barr to help him in his scheme to steal the 2020 election, Barr said no. Instantaneously, he went from being a hero of the Trump right to a villain. Before him, Jeff Sessions, John Kelly, James Mattis, John Bolton, and countless others were good guys—in Trump’s eyes—until they refused to be his enabler on one scheme or another. But here’s the thing: Whatever you think of these people, they would not staff a second Trump administration. He would surround himself with toadies, demagogues, psychos, lickspittles, and pillow salesmen. The only qualification Trump and the Bannonites would care about is personal loyalty to Trump. His judicial picks wouldn’t come off any Federalist Society list, but from the list of hacks and nutters who populate OAN and Newsmax. Remember, he feels betrayed by his Supreme Court picks because they didn’t cooperate with his scheme. If you think the Mar-a-Lago search was banana republic stuff, you haven’t seen anything yet. He’s already said he wants to pardon January 6 rioters and give them a formal apology. Look at what has happened to so many institutions of the right, just since he lost the election. The damage of a second Trump presidency is incalculable to me. What pardons are for.That’s why I see my pardon deal as attractive. Almost the whole point of the original pardon power was to pardon people for treason. That’s because there were only three crimes mentioned in the Constitution: piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Remember, this was a new country that had just fought a revolution that divided whole communities. There were lots of militias around with very passionate views about the role of government. The pardon power was deemed crucial to get people to lay down their arms. Not everyone agreed. George Mason warned that “the President of the United States has the unrestricted power of granting pardons for treason; which may sometimes be exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime and thereby prevent the discovery of his own guilt.” Sounds familiar, eh? But the argument that won was that the president should be able to pardon treasonous behavior in order to, in Hamilton’s words, “restore the tranquility of the commonwealth.”In short, the pardon power is a tool of statesmanship. Think of it like jury nullification. I’m pretty skeptical of jury nullification in most instances, but sometimes the law is inadequate to the question of a greater justice. For instance, I am at a loss to justify Mike Pence’s actions on January 6 on purely constitutional grounds. For about three hours, Pence was the president of the United States, instructing the military to deal with a riot at the Capitol. The problem is, nothing in the Constitution gives the vice president that authority. Trump wasn’t incapacitated, he simply refused to act because he wanted to see whether the riot might play out to his benefit. Or, if you want to be generous—which I am not inclined to do—he was simply frozen with petulant indecision. Either way, nobody invoked the 25th Amendment. Pence just simply stepped into the breach in a way that technically violated the Constitution, but he did so for good reasons, reasons that can only be described as statesmanship.Still, I think the fact that Trump forced Pence into that situation is part of the greater indictment of Trump’s actions that day. What Pence did could be a terrible precedent. I can come up with all sorts of scenarios in which a future vice president could step into the breach with very bad motives claiming Pence’s actions as a precedent. Again, Pence did the right thing, but the right thing has costs. Lincoln admitted that his suspension of habeas corpus was illegal, but it was the right thing to do. A pardon done right, under the right conditions, would be an act of statesmanship. A kind of one-man preemptive jury nullification letting Trump off the hook for—as of now mostly hypothetical but potentially real—crimes. That would have costs, too. But I think the alternatives make those costs preferable. The cult of experts.But let’s talk about statesmanship outside of the context of Trump. Because if you think you have Trump fatigue, I have Trump narcolepsy. Elon Musk recently tweeted a fairly gross and stupid proposal for ending the war in Ukraine. His solution? Let’s have a “real” referendum in the annexed territories of Ukraine administered by the U.N. It’s gross because the Russians have murdered, displaced, or kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from these areas. His proposal erases those deaths and ignores those facts. I suppose I’d be more open to it if every dead or exiled Ukrainian was automatically counted as a vote for staying in Ukraine. It’s stupid because Musk has a thumbless grasp of the political reality on the ground. He looked at some election return maps from 2013 and deduced that he understands the aspirations and desires of Eastern Ukrainians in 2022. As many have pointed out, even his reading of the maps was wrong. To be clear, I admire Musk for many of his accomplishments. But knowing how to get a rocket into orbit or an electric car to market doesn’t make you a Ukraine expert. We discussed this on The Dispatch Podcast the other day and David French reprised his longstanding gripe about the billionaire cult in America today. A bunch of people think that being very successful at X qualifies you to fix Y or Z.  Among this population are some billionaires. To paraphrase David, “I created PayPal, so now let me explain to you how to solve race relations in this country.” This is just the latest iteration of a very old idea in American politics. If you listen for it, you’ll hear someone say almost every day, “The government should be run like a business.” This was Trump’s argument in 2016, but we’ve been hearing some version of it for a very long time. It was part of Herbert Hoover’s pitch, though he also leaned pretty heavily on his status as the “Great Engineer.” In the Progressive Era, engineering was seen both literally and figuratively as the key to political reform. “Social engineer” has a negative connotation today, but it didn’t back then. Musk isn’t running for president—constitutionally, he can’t—but he inhabits a Hooverish place in the popular imagination—and his own. The thing is, the government can’t be run like a business—or an engineering project—because it isn’t one. British philosopher Michael Oakeshott distinguishes between a civil association and an enterprise association. Businesses, charities, militaries, and countless other organizations are enterprise associations because they are inherently managerial with clearly defined goals, metrics, and deliverables. Civil associations lay out the legal framework for membership but are silent about what members pursue. Put more plainly, an enterprise association is concerned about ends—the product, be it a widget or spiritual salvation. A civil association is the rules of the game. It’s a bit of a strained and faulty analogy, but the Yankees are an enterprise association while “baseball” is a civil association. The Yankees care about deliverables—i.e. wins—and “baseball” describes the context of those wins. Major League Baseball has elements of both. It has deliverables—ratings, attendance, etc.—but it also works to ensure the game is played with integrity and by the rules. So long as people keep showing up to games or watching TV, MLB doesn’t have a stake in who wins and who loses. For Oakeshott, politics should be conducted like a ship with no final destination: “men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.”My friend—and personal Oakeshott tutor—Doug Brosz has been pestering me for years to dump the “left-right” paradigm for the Oakeshottian civil-vs.-enterprise scheme as the Rosetta Stone of politics.  He has a good point. Because as Oakeshott argued, all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes—regardless of ideological or theological flavor —operate as enterprise associations. Whether it’s Calvin’s Geneva or Lenin’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Germany or Khomeini’s Iran, the idea is to direct the whole of the people toward a single unified goal. No doubt in part because I’ve read more Burke than Oakeshott, I’m still partial to the Burkean formation. Burke believed that the state exists to create space for society and individuals to flourish on their own terms. His intellectual adversary, Thomas Paine, believed that the state should be like a shepherd marching everyone in the same direction to the utopian sunny uplands of History. Yuval Levin rightly argues in The Great Debate that these two worldviews define the difference between right and left in the Anglo-American tradition. Alas, if things keep going in the direction they’re heading on the American right, he may need to update the book, because a lot of people on the right have been seduced by the idea that the government should operate like an enterprise association. Which brings me back to this idea of running government like a business. As Oakeshott would be the first to concede, all existing governments necessarily have elements of enterprise associations to them. Sanitation workers, soldiers, and social workers all have obvious deliverables. I want most government agencies to behave like enterprise associations and, as I keep saying, people would trust the government to be more ambitious if it wasn’t so crappy at doing the stuff it’s supposed to do. But a free society requires that the people at the top offer their first loyalty to the concept of civil association. As a free-market guy, I want the government to be supportive of business and commerce. But barring some very clear and specific national security consideration, I don’t want it to support any specific businesses. I want the government to be supportive of religion, but I don’t want it to support a specific faith. Christian nationalists disagree. More concretely, presidents aren’t the boss of the government the same way CEOs or owners are the bosses of businesses. By design, the president has exactly zero formal power to boss around a senator, congressman, or governor. They have independent power and authority and, put crudely, different bosses. The people who elect a governor aren’t necessarily the same people who elect a president or senator. The president can fire people in the executive branch, but that’s it. Heck, he can’t even fire the vice president. Joe Manchin’s (temporary) defiance of Joe Biden enraged a lot of Democrats, but Manchin was under no obligation—other than some misbegotten notion of party loyalty—to do what the president wanted. Armies and grocery stores don’t work like that. Kings and dictators can boss everybody around. In America, the defining ethos of our political order is that politicians aren’t the boss of me. Statesmanship is really just a word for politics at a very high level. And politics is very different from management. Obviously, there’s politics at play in corporate boardrooms, war rooms, and executive suites, but these are wildly constrained by a fairly narrow and unified incentive structure. Every manager profits from profit, every general from victory. The idea that a businessman—or businesswoman—can seamlessly take their skills and apply them to politics is a category error because we’re all stakeholders in government. And the stakeholders don’t all agree on what the deliverables should be. What all stakeholders should be able to agree upon are the rules. Yankees fans and Red Sox fans disagree on many things, but they all agree that the batter is out at three strikes or if his pop fly gets caught. There are lots of books that try to define statesmanship. For me, it boils down to doing what’s required to ensure the Oakeshottian ship stays on course when the wind or currents blow in the wrong direction, or when the crew wants to pull into harbor in pursuit of treasure. The vast majority of the time, that means making sure the rules are followed even when doing so is politically inconvenient. As Lincoln said, “Let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his own and his children’s liberty.” But he also said in defense of his suspension of habeas corpus, “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?”Businessmen, engineers, and generals can all go on to make good presidents. But what makes them good presidents is a broader and more capacious wisdom than the mere expertise that made them successful at their prior vocations. That wisdom is called “statesmanship.”Various & SundryCanine update: It’s been a rough week for me, but the beasts are doing fine. As I write this, Gracie is monitoring a rain pipe by the side of the house in which a chipmunk is up to no good. Pippa is becoming much, much more demanding in the morning. First, she believes it is vital to move into my spot when I get out of bed so that she can sponge up all of my vestigial body heat and do a kind of spanielly backstroke on my pillow. Second, she will not get off the bed to go out until I rub her belly for an appropriate amount of time. And even then, she will not leave the front yard without a lot of coaxing, ideally in daylight. The weird thing is that she acts like she’s terrified to go for a walk until suddenly some switch goes off in her head and she races for the car like she’s been assured there’s no danger. Zoë has very little patience for any of this. She aroos at me the whole time I’m attending to Pippa, but oddly doesn’t begrudge the silly spaniel for her demands on my attention. Other than that, Zoë continues to mellow. In her youth she was like a novice Secret Service agent who thinks every threat should be greeted with maximum physical output. Now she’s like some old Israeli bodyguard who’s seen it all and she does most of her work visually, appraising the threat matrix from afar. She’s got Tom Cotton eyes. She’ll still burst into action when required, but she now knows that wasted energy is a vulnerability. Also, her breath has reached the point where it’s a secret weapon; think the unwashed dumpster at the pier’s fish-cleaning station on a hot day. Other than that, they’re all very happy girls. ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileLast weekend’s RuminantThe (Japanified) Remnant with Chris StirewaltThe anti-war right’s misguided view of PutinWednesday’s “news”letterKlon Kitchen guest hosts the Remnant with Luke CoffeyThe Dispatch Podcast on the ongoing midterm madnessAnd now, the weird stuffFacing factsMario partyI, robotGone girlMiracle meatBusiness in the front

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.President Biden has warned the Russians that the use of a nuclear weapon in Ukraine could lead to a wider nuclear conflict. He’s right to be worried—and he’s right to warn the Russians yet again not to take that fateful step.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Why Putin made peace with the Soviets’ archenemies
The power of Millennial and Gen Z voters in the South
The Brightest Red LineThe president of the United States said last night that he is concerned about nuclear war. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” he remarked, seemingly off-the-cuff, at a Democratic fundraiser. The reactions were what you’d expect: Strategists and foreign-policy experts tried to unpack his statements, while right-wing pundits declared that the old man is too unsteady for the job. Many Americans are, understandably, scared.I have criticized Biden for intemperate remarks in the past. I gladly stipulate that I never want any president talking about nuclear war extemporaneously (and I wonder what moved the president to speak out this time). But I understand the message Biden is trying, in every possible venue, to send to Russia, and I’m glad that he’s trying to shake us—and Russian President Vladimir Putin—out of our complacency about this potentially cataclysmic issue.What I suspect Biden knows, and what Americans and their allies should realize, is that Putin is almost certainly talking a lot about nuclear weapons because he wants to accustom the West to the idea that he has the right to use them. From the first day of the war, Putin has woven nuclear threats into both his offensive against Ukraine and his warnings to the West. Like other Russia-watchers, I think the chances that Putin will resort to nuclear use are low. But I have been worried about it since the moment Russia’s military started collapsing on the battlefield.Now the Russian president is making sure to keep mentioning tactical nuclear weapons, smaller bombs delivered over short distances. These arms, however, are “small” only relative to the massive weapons on bombers, submarines, and intercontinental missiles; even the tiniest of them can do immense damage, especially against civilian areas.By raising the threat of tactical nuclear weapons, Putin is trying to play both sides of the nuclear game. He wants the rest of the world to internalize the idea that a small nuclear attack isn’t really all that different from any other kind of bombing, while still shattering the nuclear taboo, with all the anxiety that word provokes. He might see this as allowing him to use a nuclear weapon to achieve the trifecta of terrorizing the Ukrainians into surrender, holding the West at bay, and escaping the consequences of crossing the military world’s brightest red line.Putin has played the same game with other breaches of international norms. He talks about doing something terrible, does it, and then assumes the rest of the world will absorb it all as a new reality and just live with it. It’s a gamble that has paid off for him in the past, especially when he seized Crimea.Tactical nuclear use would be far riskier than the Crimean adventure. But Putin is not the only one who thinks the West might simply take it if Russia uses a nuclear weapon. When the writer Eric Schlosser interviewed former Secretary of Defense William Perry in The Atlantic just a few weeks ago, Schlosser noted that Russia has already engaged in various atrocities and that a very small nuclear weapon “might not seem too controversial.” Perry agreed: “I think there would be an international uproar, but I don’t think it would last long,” he said. “It might blow over in a week or two.”I think that President Biden, however, is right that the first use of a nuclear weapon is only the beginning of a slide toward global disaster. The world would be different the moment Russia ushered in a new age of nuclear combat. And the uproar would not die, because television cameras would show the world what even a small nuclear attack looks like: Unless Putin chose to do something dramatic but militarily useless, such as an explosion out at sea, there would be ghastly burns, people dying of radiation sickness, and fires that would make the current images from Ukraine seem like the results of mere skirmishes.Such an attack would demand a response. Despite Perry’s fears—and whatever Putin’s hopes—there is virtually no chance that the United States, NATO, the European Union, and even other nuclear powers such as India and China will simply shrug if Putin makes nuclear weapons just another form of usable ordnance. More to the point, Biden has already said to the Russians publicly and privately that America and its allies would impose “catastrophic consequences” on Russia and its military. I am reluctant to predict what those measures might look like, but they could functionally end Russia’s ability to make war in Ukraine and the Black Sea region.

At that point, Putin—if he is still in power—would either have to accept defeat, or escalate and throw the dice yet again. (And, as even Secretary Perry noted, the United States would have to “take off the gloves the second time around.”) Putin might then claim that the U.S. and NATO are presenting an existential threat to the Russian state, and go to a full nuclear alert that directly threatens all of Europe and North America.The United States would have to respond and go to a similarly heightened status. Putin, as the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it during the Cuban missile crisis, will have tied the knot of war, and each side’s actions would then run the risk of pulling it tighter. Even the slightest miscalculation could lead to an apocalyptic outcome. The only option that avoids such a disaster is agreement to Putin’s terms, an immediate Ukrainian surrender, and general Western abandonment of East-Central Europe. This is likely what Putin expects, but it would be one more mistake from a Russian dictator who has underestimated his opponents and made horrendous miscalculations at every turn.Putin is trying to normalize the use of nuclear weapons for imperial conquest. If he succeeds, he will not stop. The United States did not fight two world wars and the Cold War merely to bow to blackmail and accept the demands of a despot holding the entire global order of peace and security hostage with a nuclear bomb. It was Biden’s duty—as it would be for any American president—to say clearly and directly that the use of nuclear weapons runs apocalyptic risks.Related:
What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?
Putin’s nuclear threats are a wake-up call for the world. (March 2022)
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to human-rights organizations in Russia and Ukraine, and to a Belarusian activist.
The U.S. added 263,000 jobs in September, falling just short of expectations. The labor market remains strong.
The Uvalde, Texas, school district suspended its entire district police force amid outrage over officers’ response to the school shooting in May.
The Third Rail: David French on why dictators underestimate democracies.
The Books Briefing: Kate Cray explores the simple pleasures of baking.
(Everett Collection; The Atlantic)
The Unexpected Power of Seeing Yourself as a VillainBy Mary Retta
Monsters in horror films aren’t just scary, or dangerous. They also “make one’s skin creep,” the philosopher Noël Carroll wrote: “Characters regard them not only with fear but with loathing, with a combination of terror and disgust.” It’s no coincidence, then, that horror is strewn with characters who are openly, or coded as, queer and transgender—and that they’re almost always the dirty, lecherous, bloodthirsty villains, seldom the victims. Think of films such as The Silence of the Lambs and Psycho, with their suggestion that the gender confusion of their “cross-dressing” villain is the impetus for their violent desires.
An ode to crying babies
Biden goes to pot.
Photos of the week, including a giant duck and the Bubble Tram
Karen O performing with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on October 1, 2022, at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York (Ellen Qbertplaya)
Read. “Hill Station,” a short story by Madhuri Vijay about an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilled mother.Or try one of these books that our writers read too late—and that you should read now.Watch. One (or two, or five) of these 25 horror movies for every kind of viewer.On TV, Abbott Elementary is a perfect comfort watch.And don’t give up on SNL yet. Last week’s premiere signaled surprising potential for the new season.Listen. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They’re the band that invented Millennials.Play our daily crossword.P.S.The news cycle once again thwarted my hopes of leaving you with something lighter on a Friday. So let me suggest to you some retro television comfort food that you can stream on Hulu or buy on iTunes. I have a great affection for Boston, the capital city of my state of birth, and I am a sucker for almost anything set there. When you think of Boston television, you think of Cheers, of course, or maybe Spenser: For Hire or Crossing Jordan.But don’t overlook one of the quirkiest and best dramas ever set in Boston, St. Elsewhere. The fictional hospital St. Eligius was an impoverished dumping ground nicknamed “St. Elsewhere,” and the series was both a satisfying medical drama and a weird innovation in television. (One of the characters visits another character in hell during a near-death experience. That’s not your standard doctor show.) Some people didn’t like the finale; I loved it. And it’s hard to make a bad show with Denzel Washington, Alfre Woodard, and David Morse alongside veterans such as William Daniels and Norman Lloyd. So when you need to tune out the news, get on the Orange Line, turn on the show’s great theme song, and stop in at St. Eligius.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

ATLANTA—The three dozen young Black men and women who gathered in a church meeting room last Friday night were greeted with a rousing exhortation that had the added benefit of being true.In welcoming remarks, Bryce Berry, a senior at nearby Morehouse College and the president of the Young Democrats of Georgia club, told the group that none of the party’s national-policy accomplishments of the past two years would have been possible without people like them. “Without young Georgians, young Black Georgians,” Berry said for emphasis, “there would be no Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, no American Rescue Plan … no Inflation Reduction Act, no student-debt relief, and no gun-safety bill.”It was the sort of thing speakers always say to motivate a crowd at political rallies. But in this case it was historically accurate: Massive turnout and huge margins among young voters, especially young voters of color, were crucial to the twin runoff victories of Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January 2021 that delivered Democrats their unexpected majority in the upper chamber.Young adults have become an essential electoral asset for Democrats—and loom as a potentially decisive factor in determining whether the party can avoid the worst outcomes up and down the ballot this November. In particular, young voters may decide whether Democrats can preserve the fragile hold on the Senate that Georgia provided to them.A sharp generation gap is among the most consistent findings in public polling across almost every competitive Senate race this year. Here in Georgia, for instance, an array of recent public polls (including surveys by Quinnipiac University, Marist College, Monmouth University, and the University of Georgia) have found Warnock leading the Republican Herschel Walker by as much as two to one among young adults from about 18 to 34 and consistently by a margin of about 10 percentage points among those in early middle age. Polls almost always show Walker at least slightly ahead among those in their later working years, and solidly leading among those 65 and older. (This week’s explosive allegations about Walker—the claim that he allegedly funded an abortion for a girlfriend and the subsequent accusations of domestic violence from his son—seem likely to weaken him, perhaps substantially, with every group, but are unlikely to erase these sharp generational differences.)[David A. Graham: Herschel Walker is demonstrating the new law of politics]These patterns are so common across the competitive states that it’s hard to imagine Democrats maintaining their Senate majority unless young voters like those who gathered at Atlanta’s Allen Temple AME Church turn out in substantial numbers.Compared with older generations, Millennials and members of Generation Z are more racially diverse, more likely to hold postsecondary degrees, and less likely to identify with any religious tradition. Both cohorts have leaned sharply Democratic since the first Millennials entered the electorate in large numbers in the 2004 election; the party has routinely carried about three-fifths of young adults in recent presidential contests. In 2018, Democrats hit a peak of support among young voters, winning two-thirds of those younger than 30 and three-fifths of those ages 30 to 44, according to estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm.Millennials and Gen Z are especially crucial to Democratic fortunes across Sun Belt states like Georgia and Arizona. In this region, younger generations are far more racially diverse than the mostly white, older voters who provide the backbone of GOP strength. In Arizona, for instance, Latino voters and other people of color compose almost three-fifths of the population under 30 but less than one-fifth of the population over 65, according to calculations from census data by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro. In Georgia, Black voters and other people of color represent half of eligible voters under 45 but only three in 10 of those over 65. The gap between what I’ve called “the brown and the gray”—the diverse younger and the mostly white older generations—is comparably large in Texas and Nevada and nearly as big in North Carolina, Frey’s data show.For Democrats, this year’s nightmare scenario of losing both the House and Senate is a repeat of 2010 and 2014, when the GOP midterm sweeps were turbocharged by a catastrophic falloff in turnout among young people from the presidential race two years earlier.The anemic youth turnout in those off-year elections during Barack Obama’s presidency fueled a widespread perception that Democrats now faced a structural disadvantage in midterms because the electorate in those years was destined to be much older and whiter than in the presidential contest. But the 2018 results upended that assumption: Much more robust turnout among young adults helped power the Democratic gains that allowed them to recapture the House of Representatives. Compared with 2014, youth turnout increased in every state in 2018, more than doubling across the country overall, Circle, a think tank at Tufts University that studies young voters, has calculated. Some of the biggest increases occurred in Sun Belt states where the youth population is the most racially diverse, including Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.The turnout surge continued into 2020, when exactly half of adults younger than 30 showed up to vote, a big increase from the 39 percent in 2016, Circle concluded. Georgia again ranked among the states with the biggest youth-turnout increase compared with 2016—a key factor in the Democrats’ razor-thin victories there in the presidential race and the two Senate runoffs.Democrats this year are highly unlikely to win as big a share of youth voters as they did during their 2018 sweep (they didn’t even equal it in 2020). But one of the pivotal questions remaining for the 2022 election is how close Democrats can come to matching the strength with young voters they displayed while Donald Trump was in the White House.Democrats face some serious headwinds. Never enthusiastic about President Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic primaries, young people have given him lackluster approval ratings throughout his presidency. Generally operating with less of a financial cushion than older voters, young people have also been more affected by the highest inflation in four decades. “The cost of living is going up, but our salaries are not,” Alexia Brookins, a manager at a construction company, told me at the AME event sponsored by the group Millennials of Faith last weekend.In a mid-September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, just 37 percent of Millennials and Gen Z said that Biden’s actions had strengthened the economy; 55 percent said that he had weakened it. In a late-September Yahoo News/YouGov survey, only about one-fifth of young adults ages 18 to 44 said life was better for people like them since Biden took office (the rest said it was unchanged or worse).[Annie Lowrey: Generation Z doesn’t remember when America worked]Terrance Woodbury, a partner at HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young voters of color, worries that these verdicts will make it difficult for Democrats to reach the turnout and margins they need among young voters. In polling that HIT recently conducted for the NAACP, he told me, three-fourths of Black adults younger than 50 said their lives had not improved since Biden took office.Woodbury told me that although the media seem fixated on whether potential Republican gains among men will widen the Black gender gap this year, he expects that the “generational gap” in the African American community will be much wider. “Younger voters are much more likely to say Democrats take Black voters for granted, much less likely to approve of the direction of the country, and much less likely to approve of the performance of Democrats in Congress and the White House,” he told me. “All of that is significantly higher by generation than by gender. I actually do think there is a real risk of Democrats underperforming with young voters, and specifically young voters of color.” Equis Research, a Democratic polling firm that specializes in Latino voters, raised similar warnings about young Hispanic voters in a late-September memo analyzing the upcoming election.But other factors may help Democrats approach, if not necessarily match, their recent advantages with young voters.More young adults may vote in 2022 simply because so many of them registered and voted in 2018 and 2020. One reason for that is structural: “There are more young people on the voter rolls because of the [2018 and 2020] elections, which is a huge boost, because it means they are more likely to be contacted by parties and organizations,” and those contacts increase the likelihood of people voting, Abby Kiesa, Circle’s deputy director, told me.The other key reason is attitudinal: Higher youth turnout may mean that not only is voting becoming a habit for those who have already done it; it is also becoming more expected among the 18-year-olds who age into the electorate every two years (more than 8 million of them since 2020, Circle projects). At the AME event, for instance, Kendeius Mitchell, a disability-claims manager, told me that youth engagement in Georgia is feeding on itself. “Just having it around so much in the conversation now is making people take accountability,” he said.John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, sees the same trend in the institute’s national surveys. “Voting … could be becoming a part of this new generation and how they think,” he told me.[Read: The GOP’s demographic doom]Also lifting Democratic hopes is the party’s summer succession of policy advances on issues important to young people. Della Volpe said the “No. 1” criticism of Biden among young adults in the Harvard poll was “ineffectiveness.” But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its sweeping provisions to combat climate change, and the president’s decision to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers have provided Democratic organizers and ad makers something they lacked earlier this year: evidence to argue to young adults that their votes did produce change on things they care about. Biden gave organizers another talking point yesterday afternoon, when he announced a sweeping pardon of all people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law.On the ground in Georgia, Keron Blair, the chief organizing and field officer for the New Georgia Project, a grassroots political organization founded by the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, told me that with the Democrats’ recent successes, “it feels a little bit easier” than in the spring to make the case to young adults that their vote counts.Looking across the overall record of Democrats since they took power, “people aren’t like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” Blair told me. “But people are clear that some of the wins and the political and economic shifts that we are seeing [are] the result of the [voting] choices that people have made.”Also working for Democrats is the gulf in values between most young voters and the Trump-era Republican Party. Fully 70 percent of adults younger than 30, for instance, said in a Pew Research Center poll this summer that abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, by far the most of any age group. That places them in sharp opposition to a GOP that is intensifying talk of passing a national ban on abortion if it wins control of Congress. “If we maintain that [recent] surge among young voters and voters of color,” Woodbury said, “they are voting against the crazy on the other side.”Although different public surveys have sent different signals about youth engagement, the latest IOP youth survey, which is considered a benchmark in the field, found that as many young people said they “definitely” intend to vote this fall as did in 2018.That prospect points toward an incremental but inexorable power shift. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Gen Z roughly equaled Baby Boomers and their elders as a share of eligible voters. By 2024, the younger generations will establish a clear advantage. As their numbers grow, so does their capacity to influence the national direction. There’s no guarantee they will exercise that inherent power next month by turning out to vote in large numbers. But more young people appear to be recognizing how much their choices can matter. Berry, the young Georgia activist, told me that his message to his friends is centered on understanding the strength in numbers that they are accumulating: “I really impress on folks, ‘Look at what happened because of you. You understood the moment in 2020; now you have to understand the moment in 2022.’”

This morning, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on jobs and wages for September. I have to chime in on this because the mainstream media coverage is so awful. The coverage makes it sound as if the economy is bounding ahead, when in fact we're in the first stages of a major slowdown.

Big corporations continue to use inflation as a cover to raise their prices and increase their profit margins.

The most important takeaway is that workers continued to become poorer in September, as average hourly earnings again failed to keep up with increases in the costs of living. Hourly earnings climbed 5 percent from a year earlier, while prices rose 6.3 percent.

As wages continue to fall behind prices, wages continue to reduce inflationary pressures.

You'd think this would lessen the likelihood of another Fed interest-rate hike - which makes it more costly for consumers to borrow, reducing their purchasing power even further. But Fed officials continue to fixate on wage growth rather than the major forces pushing up prices--especially corporate profits.

"Continued strong wage increases will likely put further upward pressure on service price inflation," Lisa D. Cook, a Fed governor, said in a speech on Thursday.

Another Fed governor, Philip Jefferson, said in a speech this week, "In a market with more job openings than workers, the competition to fill vacancies is leading to rapid wage gains now, and the resulting salary compression may lead to further upward wage pressures in the future,"

What can they be thinking? A new report shows that unfilled job offerings fell sharply in August. As Goldman Sachs puts it, almost half of the gap between jobs and workers has been eliminated over the past few months.

Filings for unemployment benefits last week also rose. Companies, including Walmart and Amazon, have announced slowdowns in hiring, while others, including FedEx, have frozen hiring altogether.

Other signs of a slowdown appear in the Bureau's job numbers for September.

Employers added 263,000 jobs last month on a seasonally adjusted basis--down from 315,000 in August. The unemployment rate also fell.

Meanwhile, big corporations continue to use inflation as a cover to raise their prices and increase their profit margins.

As William Meaney, the CEO of Iron Mountain (a data storage and management company with a current market capitalization of $12 billion) told Wall Street analysts in late September, high levels of inflation helped the company increase its margins--and that for that reason he had long been "doing my inflation dance praying for inflation." A few years before, Meaney explained "I pray for inflation every day I come to work because ... our top line is really driven by inflation. ... Every point of inflation expands our margins."

The Fed's rate hikes will eventually hit corporate profits because corporations depend on workers (who are also consumers) to buy their goods and services. But by the time the rate hikes hit profits, jobs and wages will likely have been crushed in a recession.

Beware.

By Michael E. O'Hanlon

Two cheers for Biden’s national security record	

Two cheers for Biden’s national security record 

Michael E. O’Hanlon 

October 6, 2022	

Almost two years into his presidency, U.S. President Joe Biden’s hopes that his lifetime of foreign policy experience in Washington would make national security a natural political strength have encountered rough seas. After a reasonably good start in early 2021, his popularity took a nosedive that summer and has not really recovered, remaining around 40 percent or less ever since. The botched Afghanistan withdrawal and unseemly unveiling of the AUKUS deal took the sheen off his young presidency that year. COVID-19’s persistence, inflation’s return, and the Ukraine war have since taken a further toll. Most of the latter scourges may not have been his fault, but incumbents are rewarded or penalized for what happens on their watches, whether fair or not.

Twenty months into the Biden presidency, his team had not even released national security or national defense strategy documents — probably out of uncertainty about how to spin their vision and purpose amidst so many troubles. An interim national security strategy in early 2021 underscored several principles that would undergird Biden’s foreign policy — to include multilateralism, cooperation with allies (especially democratic allies), an emphasis on America’s middle class (translating in part into a reluctance to push a traditional free-trade agenda), and a focus on the new transnational threats like pandemic disease and climate change, as well as traditional military challenges. The public summary of his classified national defense strategy prioritizes China as the “pacing challenge” and Russia as the “acute threat.” But these limited pronouncements do not themselves add up to an integrated approach to the world. Moreover, some of these priorities are in clear tension with each other. For example, how can we successfully address climate and pandemic disease while treating China as an emergent adversary? And why is China the main problem if it is Russia that is violently challenging the global order more than any other power in 2022?

[Biden’s] national security record may not deserve three cheers, but it does merit two. 

However, despite these mistakes and this inchoate grand strategy, Biden’s national security track record is better than widely perceived. (About 40 percent of Americans give him good grades, while more than 50 percent typically give him an unfavorable assessment in recent polls.) The reason is this: the country is still reasonably safe. That is the key metric by which to judge any grand strategy, and any president’s performance. Biden inherited a turbulent world in 2021; avoiding large-scale conflict in that world should count as a major accomplishment. Unlike his immediate predecessor, who took the nation closer to the brink of war against North Korea in 2017 than is commonly appreciated, and unlike certain prominent Republicans who have suggested the country consider recognizing Taiwan independence even at heightened risk of war with China, Biden has been calm and de-escalatory, yet resolute on core matters of national interest. His national security record may not deserve three cheers, but it does merit two. 

Consider some of the big challenges that Biden and team have tackled to date:

UKRAINE AND RUSSIA

On the Ukraine conflict, the Biden team’s record is mostly good so far. Biden rightly decided that the United States should not directly enter the conflict and risk World War III over a part of Europe that, while important, is not vital to U.S. national interests. We take that decision for granted, but it remains enormously important, given the potential for escalation in any direct fight between nuclear-armed superpowers that involves a major interest of at least one of them. Biden did, however, help lead a Western response in the economic realm that has cut off most high-tech cooperation between the West and Russia (even if it has not yet substantially reduced Russian oil and gas export earnings or brought the economy to its knees).

In addition, Biden decided to provide massive security and economic assistance, and unprecedented intelligence support, to Ukraine in order to help its military forces and protect its government. As of this writing, Ukraine has received some 10,000 precision missiles (mostly Javelin and Stinger) from the United States, some 20 helicopters and a similar number of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, hundreds of thousands of artillery shells, communications equipment, counter-battery radars, support vehicles — all in all, around $15 billion in weapons from the United States alone, as well as considerable intelligence support so that those weapons can be well employed, and lots of cash to keep the economy afloat. Meanwhile, NATO is united, and strengthening. 

Creating an alternative security structure would have been difficult to do at the barrel of a gun, given Putin’s bullying brinkmanship.

The record is not unblemished. Biden could have tried harder to prevent the war. Much of the U.S. intelligence community and many top administration officials were convinced by late 2021 that Russia intended to attack, yet the reaction in Washington seemed fatalistic more than entrepreneurial, with Biden himself at one point in January of 2022 predicting that Putin “has to do something” given the magnitude of his military preparations. There were not the kind of overtures to the Russians that President John F. Kennedy undertook in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or Kissinger during the 1973 October War, for example (for the interested reader, one of my favorite books on this subject is McGeorge Bundy’s “Danger and Survival”). Without conceding core principles, the United States could have tried to discuss alternatives to eventual NATO membership for Ukraine with Moscow, provided that any such alternatives would impose verifiable obligations on Russia and not compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty. As former U.S. Ambassador to Russia (and current CIA director) Bill Burns has written, in his fine memoir “The Back Channel”, the history of NATO expansion — particularly the NATO proposal in 2008 to someday bring Ukraine and Georgia into the alliance, a vision reaffirmed in the U.S.-Ukraine charter of November 2021 — caused deep resentment in Putin’s vindictive and imperial mind. But creating an alternative security structure would have been difficult to do at the barrel of a gun, given Putin’s bullying brinkmanship, so I cannot fault Biden too strongly for the mistake. 

We are of course far from done with this tragic conflict. The Biden team may need to lead the way in creating more intense economic pressure on Russia in the months and years ahead — and may need to look for some more creative diplomatic solutions or compromises that it could encourage Ukraine to consider in the future as well. So the record is of course incomplete. But its fundamentals are generally sound to date.  

CHINA

On China, the Biden team risks overdoing it, in rhetoric, messaging, and diplomacy. It pits China as something close to an adversary, and accuses it of genocide — a loaded term if there ever was one. It designates China as America’s top national security challenge, even as Russia, not China, wages the most horrific war fought in Europe since 1945. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s big foreign policy speech of March 2021 held out collaboration as one of the three pillars of the Biden administration’s China policy (along with competition and, when unavoidable, confrontation); his May 2022 China speech dropped the cooperation dimension. But on specific policies pertaining to China, the Biden administration decisions have been generally sound.

Biden has been right to keep some Trump-era tariffs on general trade with China, use the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to impede Chinese acquisitions of American high-tech jewels, and otherwise push back against Chinese economic theft. The latter of course has national security ramifications, since advanced commercial technology can have many military applications. In addition, the Pentagon has correctly described China as the “pacing challenge” and focused the Department of Defense’s long-term modernization and investment strategies on that country. 

[Biden and Xi] have maintained a degree of cordiality and professionalism in their personal rapport that provides some strategic ballast in the broader relationship.

Biden’s frequent misstatements, if in fact they have been mistakes, about how he would authorize a U.S. response to any Chinese attack on Taiwan have probably been good for deterrence, even as White House staffers would always then walk back Biden’s words and reaffirm the longstanding policy of so-called “strategic ambiguity” about a possible U.S. military defense of Taiwan. Abandoning the latter in favor of “strategic clarity” would be a mistake for two reasons: it would inflame relations with Beijing, and it would promise a military protection of Taiwan that, depending on the scenario, the United States might not be capable of providing reliably. But U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s concept of integrated deterrence, as well as the West’s collective response to the Ukraine invasion, signal strongly to Beijing that whether we intervened militarily or not, we would largely decouple economically from China in the event of a conflict. To be sure, such a process would necessarily be painstaking, gradual, and piecemeal — but it could also be sustained and expanded over time, just as we are now witnessing in regard to the West’s dealings with Russia. That integrated deterrence concept, plus Biden’s verbal gaffes, plus U.S. military modernization focused on China actually add up to a fairly strong deterrent posture.

Even as he shores up deterrence in these ways overall, Biden keeps talking to Chinese President Xi Jinping, through the thick and thin of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s, and U.S. Senator Edward Markey’s visits to Taiwan, among other events. The two men have maintained a degree of cordiality and professionalism in their personal rapport that provides some strategic ballast in the broader relationship — evidenced, for example, by the fact that Xi promised Biden in August 2022 that he was not seeking war over Taiwan, even as China carried out threatening military exercises following the Pelosi visit. Naming the extremely able, and calm, Nick Burns as U.S. ambassador to China helps further in this regard.

DEFENSE AND THE MILITARY

On American military strength, Biden has benefited from bipartisan support in Congress for a strong defense budget. That has allowed him to maintain or even improve high standards of military readiness, maintain an excellent all-volunteer military even in a COVID-19-stressed labor market, and create new bases as well as new forms of military presence in both the Pacific and Eastern Europe. 

The nation is devoting more resources to military research, development, testing, and evaluation than ever before in its history.

The nation is devoting more resources to military research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) than ever before in its history (RDT&E is one of the four big areas of the Department of Defense budget, along with procurement, military personnel, and operations and maintenance). The resources are being used for traditional purposes, such as development of more advanced aircraft, submarines, and air and missile defense systems. But they are also being used to develop hypersonic weapons (one type for each of the three big military services), to employ artificial intelligence and other advanced digital capabilities more effectively in new weapons, to build smaller satellites for the new Space Force that are less vulnerable to enemy attack, to make the Marine Corps more maneuverable and deployable, to build uncrewed ships for the Navy, to provide the Army with tilt-rotor aircraft to replace slower helicopters, and to make communications systems more resilient and survivable. Most of these RDT&E programs will typically make the transition to procurement later in the decade.

Again, the record isn’t perfect. There is inadequate sense of urgency about buying the munitions needed to replenish those we are sending Ukraine (munitions still aren’t sexy for most four-stars), and about finding ways to station munitions and sensors in the Western Pacific region to deter a Chinese invasion attempt against Taiwan. We, and Taiwan, still depend too much on large fixed bases and large visible aircraft carriers to prevent such an amphibious assault. So there remains ample room for improvement.

INFRASTRUCTURE, RESILIENCE, AND ECONOMICS

Despite having to settle for a very modest or “super-skinny” version of his Build Back Better agenda as reflected in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Biden has in fact achieved at least two major domestic achievements that have national security ramifications.

The first was the bipartisan infrastructure bill of 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It was passed amidst a sea of headlines about how the Build Back Better agenda was not succeeding in Congress as hoped or expected. But the infrastructure bill did pass, and it provides an important way for the country to give a sustainable boost to elements of its domestic and economic power that are relevant to military strength, given what they do to bolster GDP. Several Brookings scholars consider it quite substantial in scale and likely impact.

The second achievement was the big bill of summer 2022 — the CHIPS and Science Act — funding semiconductor factories and scientific research. It will reduce the nation’s dependence on key high-tech goods from East Asia and strengthen the nation’s underlying science and technology base.

Biden has not been able to reduce the partisan discord over politics, Donald Trump, and elections.

The nation’s economic foundations are crucial to its long-term strength, domestic cohesion, and military power. Its high-tech sectors are also crucial to defense innovation. As such, these bills are important not only in their own immediate right but as part of a larger national-security strategy for the country. Over the longer term, the semiconductor and science law in particular may help produce technologies that help us address other serious 21st century threats as well — threats not just to the United States and its allies but to Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and other regions — to include climate change, pandemic disease, and cyber dangers.

More broadly on the domestic front, Biden has not been able to reduce the partisan discord over politics, Donald Trump, and elections. The country is still in serious trouble on such fronts. But it is hard to blame Biden himself too much for that. Still, in this general vein, he and other national leaders will need to give continued serious attention, imagination, and resource allocation to the country’s serious internal challenges. They range from an economically imperiled middle class to mental health care trends to gun and traffic dangers to opioid addiction and other health care dilemmas. These serious and often growing problems collectively pose serious threats to the nation’s ability to function effectively as a polity — and as such, beyond their implications for the well-being of many individual Americans, constitute a major national security challenge as well.

MISTAKES AND FAILURES

To be sure, there have been big mistakes, as well as failures of imagination and creativity.

The Afghanistan decision was indeed an unforced error. Pulling out on four months’ notice left the Afghan government with inadequate time to develop a military triage plan or figure out how to keep its U.S.-provided planes flying without American contractor support. The impressive achievement of getting more than 100,000 Americans and U.S. friends out of Afghanistan by the end of August 2021 was severely tainted by the fact that we left many friends behind, and that 13 Americans died in a tragic attack in Kabul on August 26. Although the rapid Taliban takeover of the country spared the country a massive bloodbath, the ineptitude and extremism of the Taliban government have led to a situation in which the World Food Program estimates that roughly half Afghanistan’s population of 40 million is at risk of famine, and almost 20 percent at extreme risk. The killing of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri by a U.S. drone after American intelligence located him in a Kabul “safe house” in July 2022 suggested that “over the horizon” counterterrorism is not completely impossible against a known target. But his very presence in a house belonging to the Haqqani network suggests that there may be future collaboration between the Taliban and al-Qaida. All of this to end a U.S. military presence that had already been downsized more than 95% from peak by the time Biden took office, and to honor a 2020 agreement with the Taliban that the latter had already violated multiple times over.

The main consequence of the withdrawal is a humanitarian one, the well-being of the Afghan people.

Still, any fair assessment of the Biden national security record must place the Afghanistan debacle in geostrategic perspective. That country is of limited global import compared with many others. To date, the main consequence of the withdrawal is a humanitarian one, the well-being of the Afghan people. That assessment could change if al-Qaida or ISIS launches a big attack on the West from Afghanistan, but to date the likelihood of such a tragedy seems fairly low.

There are other problems with the administration’s foreign policy too, naturally. Notably, if Afghanistan was a sin of commission, North Korea policy is one of omission. The Biden team seems strangely passive on dealing with Pyongyang. They are content to tell Kim Jong Un that we will negotiate anytime he wishes, but to leave the content of any such possible talks a mystery. Instead, Biden or his secretary of state or national security advisor should propose a halfway deal with Kim Jong Un — an agreement that would cap the size of his nuclear arsenal (by verifiably dismantling nuclear production facilities) while instituting bans on nuclear and long-range missile testing, all in exchange for a partial lifting of sanctions. The prospects for a deal are probably better here than with Iran, given the tight time horizons associated with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (whose provisions and restrictions on Iranian nuclear activity start to loosen as early as next year) and the deep partisan discord surrounding that 2015 accord. Yet the administration is giving far more time and attention to Iran. If anything it should reverse its priorities and make a greater effort towards North Korea.

A bigger idea for Latin America should be a top priority, too. Traditionally, this region is not seen as a top U.S. national security concern, largely because it does not pose a classic military challenge. However, the witches’ brew of illegal narcotics flows, immigration challenges, and weak economic performance as well as law enforcement performance of several countries to America’s south has contributed to a staggeringly deadly opioid epidemic in America — as well as a top-tier source of political discord in the nation. Especially in light of the administration’s uneven performance on helping developing countries confront the COVID epidemic, Biden needs a signature initiative analogous in scope and scale to George W. Bush’s PEPFAR effort against AIDS. Latin America seems the right place to make the try.

HOW TO IMPROVE FUTURE ADMINISTRATION PERFORMANCE

Where Biden has gone wrong, it is worth trying to understand why. Only with such an understanding can the administration perhaps rethink some of its existing practices and methods, and the rest of us try to apply political and intellectual pressure to encourage a shift in approach. Biden should keep his “resolute restraint” — being firm on defending allies and core interests without looking for war or succumbing to escalatory pressures when crises arise. His desire to avoid escalation and war during crisis is commendable. He should, however, be more strategic on some key issues, carefully weighing costs and risks while prioritizing big issues over smaller ones, and perhaps not trusting his instincts quite so much, as he may have done to a fault on Afghanistan, North Korea, NATO expansion, and even aspects of COVID response.

Where Biden has gone wrong, it is worth trying to understand why.

The Biden national security team appears to do well at the classic Democratic Party thing: understanding, considering, and ultimately reflecting the views of a wide array of interest groups. There’s a seat at the table for democracy promoters, human rights champions, American-middle-class advocates, alliance repairmen, and other multilateralists/globalists, domestic politics specialists, China bashers, NATO expanders, defense hawks, defense moderates, regional experts, and grand strategists. Not to mention those fixated on the 21st century transnational challenges: climate, cyber, pandemic disease. Not to mention experts on domestic politics and horse trading.

For the most part this is as it should be. But sometimes policy seems designed primarily to satisfy just one or two of these concerns or groups — and grand strategy takes a back seat. Every foreign policy team has its strengths and weaknesses, of course. In Biden’s case, he built a team of individuals with high integrity, excellent work ethics, and considerable intelligence. But it is probably fair to say that he did not build a team of rivals made up of strong-willed individuals with their own powerful views on strategy. As such, there is a risk that policy process triumphs over robust debate in the Situation Room, and that sometimes a decision is based either on Biden’s instincts or on the particular druthers of a given interest group. In short, the administration still needs to be more strategic — more reflective about how different priorities affect each other.

A good specific example is continuing to call the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs genocide, (reiterating what Pompeo said in late 2020). That is a hugely loaded and incendiary term and not correct except in the most technocratic legal sense. It adds insult to injury at a time when we cannot afford needless provocation of China. To be sure, China’s repression of the Uyghurs should be documented and penalized, and the recent U.N. report had the right tone on this. The problem in U.S. policy was in letting the lawyers and human rights purists and China bashers carry the day with the term genocide.

Another example is North Korea policy, where there seems to be no creativity in diplomacy, perhaps partly out of fear that attempting to talk to Kim would open the Biden team to political attack. The domestic political team and the nuclear nonproliferation purists seem to have won this one, again at the expense of broader and more holistic national interests.

A third example was the reckless reiteration of our goal of bringing Ukraine into NATO last November, when a U.S.-Ukraine strategic charter was signed. Most Americans didn’t notice that document; Russian President Vladimir Putin surely did. I do not mean to blame the United States or Biden for the Ukraine war morally. But the bipartisan idea dating back to George W. Bush that Ukraine belonged in NATO someday was always flawed. On this one, we let an ideology of democracy promotion and alliance expansion lead us to unwise choices, dating back to 2008. And reiterating our goal so publicly and prominently in 2021 was unwise, especially since we had no real intent of acting on our words.

Still, the Biden record holds up reasonably well. The core job of any American president on the national security front is to keep the world as safe and stable as possible so that the nation will be secure. Biden deserves no Nobel Prizes yet for solving any of the key overseas challenges that make today’s international environment very dangerous. And he has made plenty of mistakes. But focusing on the big picture and the fundamentals — especially China and Russia, especially defense policy and national economic and scientific strength — it has not been a bad first two years so far.

About the Author	

Michael E. O’Hanlon	

Director of Research – Foreign Policy	

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology, as well as the Defense Industrial Base working group, and is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He also serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense. O’Hanlon was a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. O’Hanlon is now writing a book provisionally entitled, “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.” 

Acknowledgments	

Editorial: Alex Dimsdale 

Web layout: Rachel Slattery 

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“You know what I am?” then-President Donald Trump asked his supporters at a 2018 rally. “I’m a nationalist, okay? Nationalist,” he continued. “Use that word, use that word.” His audience didn’t need the encouragement. The pragmatist president was merely adopting a label that was already being applied to him (his initial resistance notwithstanding), and it had been subsequently embraced by his devotees. It was necessary to classify Trump’s politics in terms that placed him somewhere on the spectrum of the American political experience, in part, because his politics rejected a half-century of intellectual history.

American conservatism, as it was understood prior to 2016, departs from its European variants insofar as what it is trying to “conserve” are the liberal values of the Enlightenment that informed the Founders. Those values expressly rejected blood and soil as criteria that determined nationhood. Postwar conservatives took pride in a nation dedicated to competition—between industries, among the states, and even within the federal government itself. Nationalists, who tend to emphasize national unity and cultural homogeneity, don’t have much use for all that infighting. But their vision of what America should be is not what the nation objectively is. This conflict gave rise to a passionate debate on the right in the Trump years over whether nationalism and patriotism were synonymous, or if they were even compatible.

Savvy political operators on the left now spy an opportunity in the right’s newfound tendency to highlight and dwell upon America’s faults. Patriotism, some maintain, is suddenly up for grabs, and the party that can harness the potency of that idea will reap the political rewards. They’re not wrong.

Back in November of last year, center-left economics blogger Noah Smith posited a simple premise: “Americans love America.” Or, at the very least, they “want to like their country.” The Trumpified right, with its emphasis on America’s social maladies and a paranoid fixation with the domestic institutions that were out to get them, stopped articulating the notion that America was, at root, a noble country populated by good-hearted people. Not that the left was much better. Leftist activists believe that the United States, founded in racism and soaked with blood, is only worthy of a delusional patriotic affection from the naïve. The market for a sunny view of the American experience, therefore, has been wholly underserved these past years.

Last week, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart observed the same gap in the rhetorical marketplace, but some of his co-partisans are trying to fill it. “We have to take back this mantra of patriotism,” said Maryland gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore in an interview with the Post’s editorial board. Capehart noted that Democratic lawmakers are reframing transgender rights issues as “narratives of ‘Christian’ and ‘family’ values,” and California Gov. Gavin Newsom has gone after pro-life Republicans by attacking their commitment to “freedom.”

Longtime Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira’s take on the subject has attracted the most attention. Democrats, he writes, would be well served if they were to distance themselves from progressives, the loudest of whom insist “that America was born in slavery, marinated in racism and remains a white supremacist society, shot through with multiple, intersecting levels of injustice that make everybody either oppressed or oppressor on a daily basis.”

Following Teixeira’s prescription is much easier said than filled, and not just because Democrats have a proven record of knowingly driving themselves head-first into a brick wall only because progressives are enamored with brick walls. The chief technocratic conceit, one that is common to social reformers of all ideological stripes, is that the public doesn’t know what’s best for them. They’re too parochial, too bound to tradition and custom, and too obdurate to be led to water, much less drink the stuff. It takes a beneficent hand to guide them in the right direction. If necessary, that hand must smash the barriers that stand before the public and a more healthful and harmonious future.

Teixeira writes, “One of the only effective ways—and possibly the most effective way—to mobilize Americans behind big projects is to appeal to patriotism, to Americans as part of a nation.” He’s not wrong. But for the larger left, there’s a potential sticking point when it comes to one of patriotism’s defining qualities: unconditional love.

Progressives hear that phrase applied to the United States and often rush to the conclusion that anyone possessed of such an undiscerning affection for their country is blind to its myriad faults. Given the pace of cultural change and the misguided priorities of the governing class, the right is increasingly inclined to reject the premise, too. They share a misapprehension about what the phrase entails.

Unconditional love of one’s family doesn’t foreclose on the idea that some dynamics are unhealthy can can be improved. Unconditional love of one’s children doesn’t lead any parent to the conclusion that they emerge from the womb a finished product. Unconditional love of one’s home does not—indeed, cannot—reject a full understanding of its history, its frailties and faults, and the work that must be done to maintain and improve it. That kind of love is a tool only in the evolutionary sense. It cannot be discarded at will or deployed only advantageously. It’s certainly not something you can talk yourself into.

The nationalists and progressives on either end of the horseshoe arc towards one another when it comes to patriotism because both see a nation that is not meeting its potential. One side imagines a romantic past, to which the country’s present iteration pales in comparison. The other envisions a utopian future that may be forever out of reach if the public cannot be made to understand what’s best for them. Taken to an extreme, these dispositions can lead those who subscribe to them toward the resentment of their time and place, to say nothing of the people with whom they are surrounded. What’s more, these dispositions are reinforced by a political dynamic in which both coalitions increasingly embrace the idea that the country is in need of radical reform.

The party that doesn’t qualify its patriotism will benefit. But both political coalitions seem to be captured by activists for whom abiding affection for one’s country is a mark of unsophistication. They would sacrifice the political gains available to the party of patriotism only to satisfy their own egos. And there’s just no unconditional love left for country when it’s already exclusively devoted to themselves.

On September 26th, prisoners in Alabama began a work stoppage to protest their living conditions and several of the state’s tough sentencing and parole laws. (It’s one of only seven states that do not pay prisoners for their labor.) In response to the strike, Kay Ivey, the state’s Republican governor, called the prisoners’ demands “unreasonable.” Prisoners have reported retaliation by guards. The A.C.L.U. and other groups have documented overcrowding, abuse by guards, and sexual assault in Alabama’s prisons; these issues have long been a concern for human-rights advocates. During the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice sued the state and its Department of Corrections. In the last five years, parole rates have declined precipitously, exacerbating issues such as overcrowding. Meanwhile, deaths in prison have increased by more than fifty per cent, and suicide and drug use are rampant.

Beth Shelburne is a journalist in Alabama who has been covering the state of Alabama’s prisons. As part of the A.C.L.U.’s Smart Justice Campaign, she is also the author of many of the organization’s reports on Alabama’s prisons. (Her Substack column is called “Moth to Flame.”) We recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the historical roots of the current problems in Alabama’s prisons, why conditions have deteriorated in the past several years, and divisions among the prisoners about how far to take their current protest.

There have been concerns about Alabama’s prisons for a long time. What was the impetus for this protest to happen now? What pushed things over the edge?

It’s been percolating for many, many years. It’s important to frame what’s happening right now in the prisons correctly. Most of the coverage has portrayed the event in terms of incarcerated people uniting against the prison system, but I think the situation is much more complicated and nuanced and volatile. I haven’t been calling it a “strike.” Because of these dynamics, I think “work stoppage” is more accurate. I do think that the incarcerated population is in unanimous agreement that the conditions inside the prisons are so dire, so desperate, so violent, chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous, that something absolutely has to change. And any remedy that might have resulted from the Department of Justice just hasn’t happened. The disappointment in things not changing as a result of the Department of Justice coming in has led to this work stoppage.

There are different factions inside the prisons involved in this action, and the tactics being used to achieve the stoppage vary by facility. I’ve talked to people who were involved in the organizing and they’re in complete support of doing this, however long it takes, through any means necessary, even if it ends in bloodshed. I’ve talked to people who support the demands that have been put out but don’t support tactics involving threats and intimidation. And then I’ve talked to people who absolutely don’t support this at all, but they’re going along with it out of fear. There are all kinds of dynamics at play. It’s not exactly a kumbaya moment inside the prisons. There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty—and a sense of dread—regarding how this will end, and I fear it will not end well.

To take a step back, how would you fundamentally describe the state of Alabama’s prisons, and how would you say they differ from the prisons in other parts of the country, if you think that they do?

Yeah, I do. The problems in Alabama are different, just because of scope and scale. The problems of overcrowding, understaffing, violence, and corruption are fundamental to our carceral system, and exist in every jail and prison across the United States, but in Alabama they’re all on steroids. In the past ten years or so, which is about the time that I’ve been consistently covering these issues, you have had a hemorrhaging of staff, coupled with an insistence on keeping people in prison as opposed to creating pathways out of prison, and an explosion in the contraband trade that, of course, is facilitated when there’s a lack of staff, or corrupt staff, in place.

Again, these issues exist everywhere, but they are so widespread and so normalized inside Alabama’s prison system that they exist around the clock. Any sentence can turn into a death sentence, and the level of violence, exploitation, sexual abuse, and extortion is just off the charts. It sounds like hyperbole when you start talking to people in the system because you just think there’s no way that all of it can be true. It sounds like “Lord of the Flies.” But I’ve been tracking the data, particularly the death data—it backs up all of these stories about the lawlessness that is pervasive throughout the system.

What data have you collected that particularly stand out to you?

Since 2018, I’ve been looking at the number of deaths inside the prisons, particularly deaths due to prison violence, like homicides between incarcerated people, homicides due to excessive force, drug-related deaths (which include overdoses and things such as disease or sepsis due to long-term I.V.-drug use), and also suicides. Over that period, we’ve seen this astonishing increase in deaths due to these causes.

What has really blown me away is the number of drug-related deaths. That skyrocketed during COVID. These are overdose deaths due to lethal levels of fentanyl, methamphetamines, and synthetic drugs that make their way through the prison. These are widely available, and very easy to obtain. They’re used out in the open, and trafficked by staff and incarcerated people. The people who end up in prison as a result of substance use are really the ones who are suffering, because they are immediately exploited and can very easily end up in debt. Their families are extorted, and they are regularly the victims of assault and murder.

In 2021, I tracked about forty deaths due to these causes. About twenty of them were drug-related. This year, I am at sixty such deaths, and we’ve just started October, so we’ve got three months to go. Forty of the deaths were connected to drugs—the number of drug-related deaths from last year to this year has doubled. These problems persist because there is an unwillingness to admit that the main source of this contraband trade is staff, and you can’t fix what you can’t admit.

The Department of Corrections will publicly announce arrests of officers who are caught with drugs, but I hear time and again from staff and from incarcerated people that those arrests really amount to low-hanging fruit. They have not chopped off the head of the snake, and this corruption is pervasive throughout the agency. It goes all the way up the food chain. Until they do that, these problems will continue.

We’ll link to the A.C.L.U. report that you did on these deaths, but can you explain why you think it’s gotten so much worse since 2018? We know that prisons were particularly hard hit by COVID. What has caused things to deteriorate so much in the last four years or so?

It’s interesting because it times out exactly as the Department of Justice has gotten actively involved in investigating Alabama’s prisons, releasing findings about the unconstitutional conditions, and then ultimately suing the state. You would think that the opposite would happen. You would think that things would improve. That hasn’t been the case.

I think there are a number of factors happening at once. Some of them we’ve already been talking about: the corruption and understaffing, which have only gotten worse. There’s been a real hemorrhaging of staff inside the agency. It’s more nuanced than just staff levels; the administration of the Department of Corrections made some decisions on how to address the understaffing that have not worked out well. Basic correctional officers are limited in their power; some very young, inexperienced, and unqualified people are filling a lot of these empty positions. As you can imagine, that creates a lot of discomfort among the staff. There has been an exodus, not just of officers but of a lot of the more seasoned lieutenants and captains and sergeants, people that are management-level correctional officers, because they’ve grown so frustrated with this dynamic of having to train very young, inexperienced people who have no idea what they’re walking into.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.“We have willfully sinned,” millions of Jews around the world prayed in their Yom Kippur Viduy, or confession, over the past week—confession of sin being a core tenet of Judaism (as it is in many faiths). “We have committed evil … we have gone astray, we have led others astray. We have strayed from Your good precepts and ordinances, and it has not profited us.” For all people, Jews and gentiles alike, this prayer lays bare one of the greatest puzzles of human behavior: We voluntarily commit transgressions for which we are truly regretful, and they don’t even benefit us.If you observed the holy Day of Atonement, I doubt you said, “I am sorry for the sins I committed this year. But I still chuckle when I think of the lies I told and the people I hurt. And the coveting—that was the best!” It almost seems like a glitch in the matrix of life, a faulty algorithm programmed into us that makes us think we will be happy if we commit certain acts, when in fact they make us miserable.But we are not helpless. With effort and perhaps no small amount of divine guidance, we can find a better formula for living. By learning to live by our principles instead of by our impulses, we can make true moral progress and increase our own well-being.As a kid, one of the weirder features of my lower-middle-class Seattle neighborhood was a religious hippie commune. Barefoot young adults with long hair and no visible means of support sat on the porches of oddly painted houses, playing guitars and—as my father speculated darkly—“probably taking drugs.” I remember talking to one young convert, who said he’d joined because traditional religions had “too many rules,” whereas in this sect, he could do what felt good.In truth, we all have a little hippie inside us—a sense that we can’t go too wrong if we do what we feel. Traditional religion feels restrictive, and, in a way, unnatural. That’s not good for happiness, right?Wrong. There is no evidence that doing what comes naturally delivers happiness. On the contrary, humans have evolved to survive and pass on our genes. In many cases, it is not happiness but unhappiness that makes this possible. Fear and anger, for example, are most probably fight-or-flight survival mechanisms. Envy of what others have keeps us competitive in mating markets, and sexual jealousy helps make sure we keep our mates and don’t inadvertently raise another’s offspring.These instincts that helped our ancestors survive and multiply—often unhappily—led us as a species to a crossed moral circuit in the way we relate to things and other people. Left to our devices, we too often love the former and use the latter.We hear constantly about the scourge of addiction in our society—about the dangers of opiates, alcohol, gambling, and even the internet. But arguably the most ubiquitous of our addictions is materialism—the inexorable human drive for more stuff. As the proverb teaches, “The eyes of man will not be sated.” This disordered love for things spawns engines of misery such as social comparison, malevolent envy, and consumerism. Nothing could be more natural: Accumulating stuff is the human equivalent of the peacock’s audacious tail—a way to show off to other members of the species. It’s inefficient for sure, but that’s the point: It says “I have more than I need, so mating with me will give you a life of abundance and ease.”[Read: Why kids want things]Meanwhile, we regularly use people for our own personal gain. Little in life is more natural than lying to improve our circumstances—children do it from the earliest ages, despite the fact that it hurts us and others. I suspect lying makes an appearance in almost every penitent’s confessions. We often cultivate close alliances simply to further our own interests—we have deal friends, not real friends, which does not bring us satisfaction. And pursuing the most intimate relationships without love—the very epicenter of “If it feels good, do it”—can lead to distress and sadness. Once again, the evolutionary imperative is clear, but at odds with happiness.To love things is a kind of idolatry; to use people is to place ourselves at the center of the universe. The combination creates a third problem—perhaps the greatest of all. In his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the late author David Foster Wallace said, “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Research seems to support Wallace’s claim. Materialism and self-centeredness are, you might conclude, disordered forms of worship, and neither of them is likely to improve your life.You might find it discouraging that our natural impulses so often lead us to unhappiness. Alternatively, you might see it as a source of transcendence. Left to our animal instincts, we will head right into the gutter of misery and harm to others. But if we believe we are made in God’s image—b’tzelem Elohim in the Torah—then we see that we are not limited by our evolutionary proclivities. Fanning the spark of divinity within, we can defy our instincts and self-create a consciously better path to follow.There is a certain feeling of futility in a life in which we pursue the same formula over and over, hope for happiness, and instead find sorrow. As the psychologist George A. Kelly dryly put it in his 1955 text, The Psychology of Personal Constructs: Volume Two, “We may define a disorder as any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation.” Allow me to suggest a way out through a simple transposition of verbs and nouns: to use things and love people. And from there, ordered worship might fall into place.[Read: Regret is the price of free will]I am no renunciant of the world’s material delights, and poverty should not be your goal. The key is to keep inanimate things in their proper place. An older friend of mine, who had made a lot of money, always used to say he would never buy a second home. “Just another huge thing to worry about,” he explained. But then one day, he did exactly that. When I asked him what changed his mind, he explained that he wanted a beautiful place where his children and grandchildren would all come together for generations to come. The point of the purchase wasn’t the house—it was the relationships within his family.Here is the practical lesson: Use your resources joyfully, without guilt or shame for your abundance. But use your bounty in service of the love you have for others. Beyond your ordinary needs, buy time and experiences with your loved ones. Support the people and causes you care about. Invest in getting to know others deeply.While you’re at it, beyond your generosity with your money, give more of yourself by sharing your heart with honesty and defenselessness. Tell more people you love them, even when it is a little awkward or scary.When you no longer fall prey to material idolatry or inordinate self-centeredness, you will find your worship can rightly migrate from yourself to something worthier. This is a ticklish subject, to be sure. I could simply say “Worship God,” but perhaps you and I disagree about faith and its manifold ambiguities. You and I must ponder for ourselves what worship means, given our beliefs, or even lack thereof. Is it following the laws of our parents and grandparents in a spirit of respect and tradition, even when inconvenient? Is it returning to times of prayer and reading the scriptures, perhaps for the first time in a long time? Is it talking about faith and tradition with our children, who might find it strange? Is it in adopting rituals and symbols that remind us of who we are and what we value? Find your own way and make it an offering.Whether you spent yesterday in atonement or not, if you implement the right relationship to people, things, and worship starting now, this coming year will give you more joy and less to regret when confession time comes again.I suppose I should disclose that I present this advice not as an observant Jew but rather as a committed Roman Catholic. If you wonder how I have such nerve, my answer is contained in the Book of Deuteronomy: “And you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your means.” As a social scientist, the ideas in this essay are my means. And I try to love the Lord through an offering to you as your little brother, as some Catholic leaders have taught us to regard ourselves in relation to the Jewish people.Naturally, you might look askance at advice coming from a Christian “little brother” like me. Fair enough: Following a little brother’s counsel is not always prudent or desirable. But I offer it to you with what a little brother should properly have in abundance for his elders, and which I have for you: admiration and love, and my prayer that you and your family be inscribed in the book of life.This essay is adapted from remarks by the author presented on October 5, 2022, at Temple Emanuel in Newton, Massachusetts.

Near the end of Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries, there’s a sentence that made me stop for a moment in disbelief. Perhaps it was meant to. F.R. Leavis was by far the most dogmatic of the twentieth-century critics with whom the book is concerned, and Eagleton writes that the Cambridge don held that “literary criticism was the best training ground for the development of a free, unspecialised, disinterested intelligence, which could be brought critically to bear on social existence as a whole.” I read those words with something like wonder. The best…the whole? Really? I can’t imagine anyone today making that broad claim, even leaving aside the increasingly specialized nature of such criticism and our current skepticism about the very possibility of disinterestedness in itself. We wouldn’t have the confidence, or the nerve, though the objections hardly stop there. By “literary criticism” Leavis meant the study of English literature—all other traditions were ancillary at best—and though Eagleton is far from sharing those opinions he does an effective job of ventriloquizing his subject’s attitudes.

English studies stood for Leavis as the “centre of humane value and judicious judgement”; it was a discipline that when properly taught would produce a body of “cultivated administrators and civil servants,” along with a cadre of intellectuals who might exert some meaningful influence on public policy. Properly taught—that is, by him or his disciples, by his students or the contributors and readers of Scrutiny, the pugnacious quarterly that he edited from 1932 to 1953. The usual argument here is that the study of literature puts a unique emphasis on one’s ability to draw fine distinctions, to discriminate between closely related meanings and possibilities, even to entertain several conflicting ideas at once.

Yet I can’t see any but self-serving reasons why English might be thought to do that better than history, or political theory, or environmental science. Leavis held that critical debate began with one person saying, “This is so, isn’t it?” and another answering, “Yes, but…” Only here the answer has to be “No.” Not for all of us, and especially not when one thinks of the particular burden of Leavisite criticism, with its emphasis on the evaluation of individual texts, on the ranking of one writer or poem in relation to others. Even this reviewer wants to laugh at the idea that there is something crucial for our “social existence as a whole” in coming to the correct estimation of Pope or Shelley.

There’s a part of Eagleton that wants to laugh too, I suspect, and it’s to his credit that he doesn’t. Critical Revolutionaries recaptures the moment when literary critics in Britain began to see themselves as monitoring “the spiritual health of the modern age,” a job that put their responsibilities on a par with “those of the priest, prophet or politician.” That was especially true of Leavis, but in different ways the description holds for each of the figures discussed in the book. The others, all of them in some way associated with Cambridge University, are I.A. Richards, William Empson, the American-born T.S. Eliot, and the rather younger Raymond Williams, an outlier in his thinking as well, but someone with whom Eagleton worked closely.

All but Eliot spent their lives as university teachers, though none of them had conventional academic careers, and the work of all but Williams had its roots in Eliot’s early poems and essays. Together they represent both “a specific intellectual formation” and the tradition in which Eagleton was trained at Cambridge at the beginning of the 1960s. These were the critics who made him, however much that training was supplemented by both his Catholic schooling and his study of Marxist theory. I am younger and read only Eliot and Williams as an undergraduate. Still, the others were ever-present names on the lips of my teachers, through whom that tradition had filtered down to a Massachusetts college at the end of the 1970s. How much of it survives? What use or relevance does it have today?

Eagleton has published something like a book a year since the mid-1960s, and his early work included volumes on Shakespeare, the Brontës, Walter Benjamin, and Samuel Richardson. But he made his name with Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), which remains both his best-known and his most consequential work. It is far more than an introduction. It begins by attacking the concept of disinterested value judgments for which Leavis spoke, and then proceeds to undermine the idea of literature itself. There is, Eagleton argues, no use of language that is always and only “literary,” and though his polemic relies far too heavily on extreme cases, it does at least earn its “Yes, but…” The book ends by suggesting that we substitute rhetorical for literary analysis, concentrating on a text’s “discursive practices” in the pursuit of a self-consciously political criticism, though it’s notable that this might draw on some of the same forms of attention as the study of poetry.

In between, Eagleton provides an exceptionally lucid account of the origins of English as a discipline, including the figures in Critical Revolutionaries along with the American New Critics, and then a reliable summary of the approaches that challenged its founding assumptions: the methods and questions loosely known as “theory,” from Russian formalism to the poststructuralism of Roland Barthes and beyond. Literary Theory says little about the then-new field of feminist criticism and nothing about the nascent terrain of postcolonial studies, but its conclusion bears on them both and I will return to it.

Criticism has always liked and needed to borrow from other disciplines. Literary Theory examines both linguistics and psychoanalysis, but something newly in play at the time it appeared was the history of science, in particular Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Younger scholars looked to its concept of a paradigm shift as a way to jolt the overfamiliar interpretive fictions of their own fields in new directions. “Normal criticism,” we might say, stood in for what Kuhn called “normal science,” a period in which one works comfortably along on problems whose guiding assumptions are already known—so well known, in fact, that they barely need to be stated. Some problems are, however, anomalous. They can’t be resolved by remaining within the explanatory theories of a given age, and the resolution of the friction or struggle between those theories takes the form of a new paradigm in which one can begin to ask better questions.

Einstein replaces Newton; truth shifts, and often suddenly. Kuhn’s work was sometimes used to characterize a disturbance within a particular subfield. I remember a conference session in the early 1980s in which his terms were applied to antebellum American literature by scholars for whom the idea of an all-white and all-male “American Renaissance” no longer seemed sufficient. Often, though, that change is a larger one. Here “theory” itself, a critical revolution that in retrospect coincided with Eagleton’s book, stands as the best example: a paradigm shift that seemed fully emergent only at the moment of its consolidation, and even as its practitioners, in the American academy at least, felt that they were still insurgents.

Eagleton doesn’t use this language, but Critical Revolutionaries is meant to define an older shift, one in which what we still call criticism—evaluation and interpretation—replaced a set of earlier models in the study of English. Or perhaps we could call it “close reading,” a refusal to take “the words on the page” for granted and an attempt to offer instead what Eagleton calls “a rigorously detailed analysis of tone, pace, pitch, mood, rhythm, grammar, syntax, texture.” He gives a chapter apiece to each of his five figures, moving easily from text to text, quoting, paraphrasing, thinking his way inside their skin, and at times noting what their arguments miss. These aren’t chronological, book-by-book accounts of their work and thought; they’re portraits, sketches or summations of a sensibility, and written with both wit and asperity. But in sticking so closely to them, Eagleton often loses sight of the institutional history that made them possible. I’m willing to accept that what he calls “Cambridge English” represents a paradigm shift, and not only because its practitioners all agreed that they were doing something new. But just what was the ancien régime that these critical revolutionaries pushed aside?

“Genteel amateurism,” Eagleton says at one point, “impressionistic prattle” at another, and then “aesthetic waffle.” His bugbear is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse. Quiller-Couch held the university’s most prestigious chair in English literature from 1912 to 1944, and his teaching, Eagleton writes, involved banging on “for an hour or so about the twin mysteries of the soul within and the exquisitely designed universe without.” Still, what gets said in the star turn of a public lecture is often different from the work of a seminar room or tutorial. Eagleton notes that the English curriculum had been the subject of a “radical reform” in 1917, in which Anglo-Saxon was pushed aside for a “course of study that was overwhelmingly modern, critical and literary (rather than linguistic) in orientation.”

That change made the work of Richards and his followers possible. But how did it happen, and what exactly was replaced by what? How did the material on which students were examined change, and how might that have shaped the revolution to come? After 1917 there was, one imagines, less than there had been in the way of literary history, of sources and influences; less about what was written when, and who insulted whom. Fewer facts for one’s notebook, less about Beauty, and less too about the history of the language, though philology would find a curious echo in the later work of both Empson and Williams. Here, however, one wants chapter and verse, and from Quiller-Couch too; one wants to compare how he works with a poem to the way Empson does. He may be just as bad as Eagleton says. Probably he is—but there’s something sketchily straw man about this account of the past.

The best Victorian critics almost never wrote in detail about the language of their subjects. Henry James might quote at length, but he didn’t need to linger over another writer’s sentences in order to capture their distinctive voice and tone. Yet a part of the critical revolution involved learning to trust—to insist on—the value of one’s own independent judgment rather than relying on some constituted authority, and for Eagleton’s figures the best way to do that was indeed by quoting. Set down a few lines and then say something about them. Don’t just admire. Put some pressure on the words you’ve chosen, as Eliot did in his essay on the metaphysical poets, singling out Donne’s alliterative “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” from “The Relic.” Eliot threw out one predecessor after another—Milton especially—before he became a constituted authority himself, and in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he presented literary history as a series of paradigm shifts, a perpetual sequence of shocks in which the present remakes the past. He got his readers to look and to listen, and through a mixture of bluff and persuasion he made them share his tastes.

Most literature classes still work this way. We read a passage aloud and then go back over what we’ve read, sometimes word by word. We remind our students that in writing they need not only to quote but also to demonstrate that quotation’s relevance; gloss it, don’t simply take it as self-evident. And each semester I have to tell a few puzzled STEM kids that in my course those quotations are their data. Many of the questions we ask are different from the ones that interested Eagleton’s subjects, but the classroom protocols are much the same.

So it’s a bit of a shock to find that the most basic of them—look at the words on the page—originated in an act of remediation. As an instructor at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the young Richards devised an experiment in which he gave his students a sequence of poems from which all context had been stripped away—titles, authors, dates. He asked them to provide detailed comments on each poem and found that “the most literate section of the population was effectively unable to read.” They couldn’t reliably date those poems on the basis of internal evidence alone, distinguishing one century’s language from another, and they preferred what he saw as Victorian drivel to Hopkins or Donne. Their ears hadn’t been trained, and any pedagogy meant to provide that training would therefore have to begin by teaching them to read slowly—“the kind of reading,” in Eagleton’s terms, “which clings tenaciously to the shape of the sentences,” to the choice of this word and not that.

Practical Criticism (1929), the book Richards made out of this experiment, isn’t one to read for pleasure, not with its many chapters of quotations from student responses and Richards’s often repetitive analyses of their failings. It’s a book about education rather than about literature, and it was almost immediately superseded by one of those students, who showed that close reading needn’t be remedial at all. Empson was only twenty-four when he published Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). It could just as easily have been four types, or fifteen, but seven is a lucky number and there are also the seven deadly sins. An ambiguity for Empson is “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”; the types themselves are but a frame on which to hang a series of brilliantly playful accounts of English verse.

The young Empson is a showman, someone who does card tricks with words. He’s tremendously digressive, he likes and follows all linguistic loose ends, and at times he seems horribly pleased with himself. Eagleton describes him as “the closest reader of all,” the maker of the finest distinctions, but looking at his pages is exhausting, and for all his brilliance—because of his brilliance—I can take only so much at a sitting.

Still, Empson was right about the nature of the English language itself. Any piece of it seems susceptible to “alternative reactions,” or as Joseph Conrad once wrote, “No English word has clean edges.” They all, the novelist thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than “instruments for exciting blurred emotions.” Eagleton’s subjects thought hard about the nature of that language. Richards spent years exploring the idea of Basic English, and Leavis thought that English vocabulary was something much more than referential. At its best—its most poetic—it seemed to him to grow from the land itself, and in consequence, Eagleton suggests, “it performs what it speaks of, creates what it communicates, so that you cannot slide a cigarette paper between the words and the experience they record.”

One of Williams’s best books is an idiosyncratic dictionary called Keywords (1976), a set of historicized definitions that explore both the derivations and the ever-shifting meanings of over a hundred central concepts in the social sciences—“hegemony,” say, or “jargon.” But Empson pushed that fascination the furthest, in a book that might have been written with Conrad in mind. The Structure of Complex Words (1951) examines not ambiguity as such but rather the relation between the “different but determinate meanings” of the same word, including some that seem simple indeed. “Dog” is one of them, “honest” too. Empson tracks that one through its different appearances in Shakespeare and finds that “he never once allows the word a simple hearty use between equals”; it’s always shaded by irony or used to mark a social difference. And sometimes both at once: “honest Iago.”

The Structure of Complex Words is a long book, and a hard one. At times Empson appears to rummage through the drawers of his mind, as if hunting for something he’s mislaid; he is an antiquarian of language, in search of a lost button of meaning. At others he becomes a character in his own argument, open-minded yet testy, garrulous, and marked by a self-deprecating confidence; he says that “I shall now put forward my little bits of machinery” before launching into a particularly difficult piece of logic.

Yet despite its difficulty, it keeps you reading, as Seven Types of Ambiguity does not, and I thought as I did so of his contemporaries, the American New Critics. Cleanth Brooks saw poetry as determined by “the language of paradox,” which stands as only one form of complexity, and not the most interesting. He claimed that paraphrasing a poem was a sort of heresy, and some of his purist contemporaries thought that neither the author’s intention nor the reader’s response could have any part in a proper critical argument. Empson has the flexible individual voice they lacked; he’s less rigid and rule-bound, more persuasive and more fun. Time hasn’t been kind to the written legacy of the New Critics, however much their pedagogical practices endure. The legacy of Cambridge English, however, looks stronger than ever.

Eliot thought one of criticism’s major functions lay in “the correction of taste.” That claim now sounds stuffy, and taking it seriously can quickly become absurd; Leavis’s once-influential The Great Tradition (1948) not only argued that there were just five major English novelists, but also that much of their work was inadequate. Still, I wonder. Let’s go back—forward—to 1983 and Eagleton’s closing suggestion in Literary Theory that criticism should refound itself on the study of rhetoric, should return to its ancient origins and consider “discursive practices…as forms of power and performance.” Here’s a short list of some lasting works of criticism produced around that time in the American academy: Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), and Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). One stands as a founding text of postcolonial studies, another is an early masterpiece of feminist literary history, and the third is the central document of what became known as New Historicism, in which the close reading of the New Critics was explicitly brought to bear upon questions of “power and performance.”

But Said does that as well, and Gilbert and Gubar too. They each bend theory back toward historical scholarship, exposing the unspoken assumptions of the texts they write about, and the question of rhetoric is central to them all, of “speaking and writing,” in Literary Theory’s terms, “as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers.” So Eagleton was right, he found his moment’s current, and we are living and writing in it still. Though so, in a way, was Eliot. All these books effect a “correction of taste,” however much they overstate their arguments. They shift our sense of what matters; they change our feel for the past, our understanding of what Eliot called the tradition; and they do it by asking a new set of questions, not just of individual works—Jane Eyre, say—but of the entire discursive field in which those works have their being.

And in that disruption a once-occluded history may find a new currency. Eagleton claims in the first sentence of Critical Revolutionaries that his purpose is the recovery of “a vital tradition of literary criticism [that] is in danger of being neglected.” That’s true enough, and yet it’s not the only story we could tell about the study of English in the 1920s and 1930s. The men in Virginia Woolf’s family had all gone to Cambridge; so had her husband and most of her male friends. In the fall of 1928 she was invited to lecture at Girton and Newnham, the university’s two women’s colleges. We know the results as A Room of One’s Own (1929), her great book about the relation of women to the institutions of English literature and to the whole of the social world around them; it begins by describing her inability, as an unaccompanied woman, to enter the library of Trinity College in order to consult a manuscript her own father had donated.

One of the things Woolf calls for, in the printed version of those talks, is the gathering of a “mass of information” about women’s lives. She wants to fill the shelves with “books that were not there,” to learn the history that nobody has thought to write, and suggests that that might indeed be a job for “some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton.” One of the young women listening to her at Girton was Queenie Roth, a recent graduate who was just beginning a Ph.D. under Richards’s supervision. A year later she was married to Leavis and soon afterward began publishing as Q.D. Leavis. Her dissertation appeared under that name as Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), and it does indeed gather “a mass of information,” not about women’s lives per se but rather about the history of publishing, the literary marketplace, and both the changing audience for and language of popular fiction.

She described her work as “anthropological,” and it stands as a pioneering example of what today is called book studies. It’s also something to push against; for both Leavises held, in essence, that taste was less in need of correction when fewer people could read. Still, nobody had done her kind of research before, and she went on to write a long series of still-valuable essays about nineteenth-century fiction, Austen and the Brontës in particular. Her husband was an astonishingly good reader of the poetry he liked but quarrelsome about everything else, Woolf included. She was too, but her interests were broader and her scholarship more probing. She had the historical imagination he lacked, and the story of Cambridge English is incomplete without her.

As for Woolf, the question now barely needs to be asked. Her connections with Cambridge were far more sustained than Eliot’s, and yet however formidable her presence she did not have his influence, on academic criticism in particular—not immediately. But the feminist scholarship of the 1970s and after is inconceivable without her. She laid down its program, even as that scholarship allowed for the revaluation of her own achievement. Paradigms shift, and the past and present remake each other. None of Eagleton’s chosen figures can match the free intelligence of her prose, and not even Eliot’s essays are as widely read or quoted today. She too was a revolutionary, and A Room of One’s Own does indeed speak to our “social existence as a whole.” It’s not only the most important work of literary criticism to have emerged from Cambridge, but the most necessary of its century in English.

The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act was signed last month by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). The law requires that online businesses create robust privacy protections for users under 18.
However, critics of the law have raised concerns about its vague language, which leaves unclear what kinds of business might be subject to the law's constraints and what specific actions companies must take to comply with the law.
For instance, due to the law's strict age requirements, online businesses may resort to invasive age verification regimes—such as face-scanning or checking government-issued IDs. While digital privacy protections are important, particularly for children, California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act could have unintended consequences in its vague, sweeping attempt to accomplish that end.
The law applies to any "business that provides an online service, product, or feature likely to be accessed by children" and mandates that these businesses act in the "best interests of children." Tech companies must conduct a rigorous Data Protection Impact Assessment, judging whether their products have the potential to "harm" children. Further, businesses must estimate the age of child users, configure children's default settings to have a high level of privacy, and provide and enforce privacy policies and other information in child-friendly language. The law also mandates that businesses make it obvious to children when they are being monitored or location-tracked (by a parent, guardian, or any other consumer) and provide accessible means for children or their guardians to report privacy concerns.
Businesses are banned from collecting, using, selling, or sharing children's personal information—including geolocation—without a "compelling reason" or gathering information estimating the child's age range in a way that is not "proportionate" to the "risks" of the online service. The law does not clarify what makes a "compelling reason" for collecting information or how businesses should gauge whether their data collection practices are "proportionate" to the apparent "risks" of their product.

Further, the law says businesses are prohibited from using "dark patterns" to encourage children to share unnecessary personal information or take actions that the company should know are detrimental to the child's mental and physical health. 
Finally, the law prevents businesses from using children's personal information in a way it "knows, or has reason to know, is materially detrimental to the physical health, mental health, or well-being of a child."
Businesses that flout the law face fines of up to $2,500 per affected child for "negligent" violations and $7,500 for each "intentional" violation. However, the bill also contains a "right to cure," giving noncompliant companies 90 days to fix their violations and avoid financial penalties.
Critics worry that the vague language of the law leaves businesses with no clear path to compliance. "The requirement that companies consider the 'best interests' of children is incredibly difficult to interpret," TechNet, a tech sector lobbying group, and the Chamber of Commerce wrote to California legislators.
"As currently written, we believe that the standard businesses are asked to consider—'the best interests of children'—is too vague and perhaps incoherent," wrote Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Legislative Activist Hayley Tsukayama in a letter to Gov. Newsom. "No service provider that operates with any kind of scale can make such decisions for an individual child unless there is a specific case, incident, or set of facts. Any service provider that operates with any kind of scale will face many different groups of children with different vulnerabilities. There will always be reasonable disagreements about what's 'best' in this larger context."
Further, many critics are concerned that the bill could lead to complex and invasive age verification schemes. "Post-AADC, users will first be required to prove their age before they can visit any new site—even if they just plan to visit for a second, and even if they never plan to return," wrote Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University Law School, in The Capitol Weekly about the measure. "The actual process of age authentication usually involves either (1) an interrogation of personal details or (2) evaluating the user's face so that software can estimate the age. Neither process is error-free, and either imposes costs that some businesses can't afford. More importantly, the authentication process is highly invasive."
Instagram has already adopted such a scheme. In June, the site announced that if a user attempts to change their birthdate from under 18 to over 18, they will be required to prove their age with a photo of a government ID, a "video selfie," which will be reviewed by a facial analysis company, or by having three adult mutual followers "vouch" that the person is over 18. Ironically, online businesses could soon enact invasive age-verification requirements to comply with what is supposedly a digital privacy law.
The post A California Law Designed To Protect Children's Digital Privacy Could Lead to Invasive Age Verification appeared first on Reason.com.

Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods.

If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”

It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?” While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.

The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”

Wrong again.

As for Feuchtwanger, the same year that “The Oppermanns” was published, the German Jewish author was stripped of his citizenship and had his property in Berlin seized and his books burned. He was banned from ever publishing in Germany again.

By the time the book was published, Feuchtwanger had already settled in France, where he was later imprisoned following the German invasion. He ultimately escaped to the United States, where he lived for the last 17 years of his life.

Is this still the same country where he’d find refuge?

Tetyana Ogarkova: ‘We write and read to understand reality’

Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist

War takes away the ability to speak from many. Many writers say that they cannot write. A number of readers claim that they cannot read. The reality of war is something that can deprive you of the most important things – your life, your time and your capacity to think. It is difficult to write, to think and to dream when a missile hits the very heart of your reality.

But literature is still important. We write and read to understand reality. We write and read to invent a reality. When there is a war, you desperately need both.

When there is a war and you lose something valuable, if not everything valuable, you might think that everything is meaningless. In a way, war and violence are the pure absence of meaning.

That’s why there is no excuse for someone who starts an aggressive war. But those who defend themselves have to search for the meaning of their resistance every single day.

They say that wars are won by those who stand on the battlefield under heavy artillery fire and do not retreat. But no one can bear this if he does not understand the meaning of his resistance. Before being invincible on the battlefield, you have to find the words to justify your future victory.

Literature, among other things, provides us with an opportunity to find these words.

Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Yuval Noah Harari: ‘Peace begins in the mind of a poet’

Israeli professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of books including the global bestseller Sapiens

Wars are usually fought over stories. People think that like wolves and chimpanzees, we fight over territory. But that is rarely true. Wolf packs and chimpanzee bands fight over hunting grounds and fruit trees, without which they would starve to death. Humans fight over the fantasies that they attach to certain places. Israelis and Palestinians don’t really need Jerusalem in order to eat. Hitler didn’t invade Poland because Germans ran out of space to build houses. If people really fought over territory, then Russia – the largest country in the world – should also have been the most peaceful. What do Russians need more territory for?

Most wars originate in the mind of some poet. The generals come much later, and while they think they obey the laws of realpolitik, they actually follow the dreams of a mythmaker. What drove Putin to invade Ukraine are fairytales about imaginary threats, and fantasies about power and glory. The war can ultimately be traced to the stories Putin loved as a child in the 1950s, and to the stories Russian children still learn at school today.

But peace too begins in the mind of some poet, able to see a better world through the smoke of war. When the cannons roar, the muses must speak louder than ever, and be extra careful about what they say. In the midst of carnage, we are tempted to sow the seeds of future hatred. But it’s our responsibility to sow the seeds of future concord.

The second Crimean Fig anthology. Photograph: Crimean House

Alim Aliev: ‘The written word is an island of freedom in the storm of repression’

Ukrainian deputy director general of the Ukrainian Institute and co-founder of CrimeaSOS

Last week, the Russian occupation court of Crimea sentenced my friend Nariman Dzhelal to 17 years in prison. Dzhelal was falsely accused of blowing up the gas pipeline on the peninsula, but the real reason he was sentenced, I believe, is that he was the most powerful and courageous voice of Crimean Tatars – the indigenous people of Ukraine..

Dzhelal has been behind bars for a year, and during this time he has become an author of prose and poetry. There are more than 140 Crimean political prisoners like him, and some of them write texts in Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar languages, which my colleagues and I have published in the anthology Crimean Fig. The written word has become an island of freedom in the storm of repression.

Crimean Tatar literature has gone underground, with authors writing under pseudonyms and using Aesopian language to write about life under occupation, as well as historical topics. Some writers get together and hold meetings in private apartments where they read poetry and prose for a limited circle of “their people”. This helps preserve the Crimean Tatar language, which today is endangered, according to Unesco, and is a cornerstone of the identity that Russian colonial policy is trying to destroy.

The Last Colony by Philippe Sands. Photograph: Orion

Philippe Sands: ‘Literature allows us to imagine across time and place’

British and French lawyer and author of books including the recently released The Last Colony

A month after the war against Ukraine began, a friend wrote to say that the Russian language translator of my book East West Street, on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity in Lviv, in Ukraine, had been arrested. A lifelong defender of human rights, she was detained on the edge of Moscow’s Pushkinskaya Square, heading for the spot associated with acts of solitary, peaceful protest. She wanted to read a poem, written out on a large piece of paper.

The police spotted the rolled-up paper poking from her backpack. They stopped her and asked to see the paper. They read lines drawn from a poem, Listening to the Horrors of War. They were written in 1855, by renowned poet Nikolay Nekrasov, owner and editor of Sovremennik, a literary magazine, who had been inspired by stories submitted to him by Leo Tolstoy, recently returned from the war in Crimea. Nekrasov published them as the Sevastopol Sketches.

The translator was duly arrested. She was charged with “discrediting the current special operation by reading the text that Nekrasov wrote at the tail-end of the Crimean war, having been influenced by Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches.”

Literature allows us to think and imagine, across time and place. It helps us to understand, as Tolstoy hoped with his Sketches, that the horrors and futility of war allow only one hero: truth.

Rachel Clarke. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Rachel Clarke: ‘Bearing witness in a time of war is profoundly necessary’

British palliative care doctor and author of Dear Life

Even in a chaotic, overwhelmed NHS hospital, I am struck anew every day at work by the medicinal force of storytelling. There is morphine for pain, silk for lacerations, electricity to jolt broken hearts back to life – but so often a doctor’s most transformative act is the one in which they stop and listen to a patient’s story. In turn, a doctor’s words can encourage, console, instil hope, assuage fear. Titrated carefully, dosed just right, words can even take a dying patient from the depths of despair to a place of hope or serenity. I’m not sure any drug has more power.

War, in this respect, is surely like illness. Amid the fracturing of normal life, the losses and upheavals, the new uneasy state of uncertainty and fear, telling one’s own story has immense therapeutic potential. Bearing witness in a time of war may be perilous, courageous, reckless or defiant. It is also profoundly necessary.

Samar Yazbek. Photograph: Ed Alcock/MYOP Diffusion

Samar Yazbek: ‘Writing truth offers justice to the oppressed’

Syrian author of novels including The Crossing and Planet of Clay

When facing destruction, our weapons are our words and our freedom to use them. Literature exposes the ugliness of war and its impact on human destiny, always looking to the future. It will not stop the war, but it will confront its ugliness with its aesthetics and imaginative vision. Literature strips the face of war and delves into the horrors of its brutal machine and its impact on the tragic fate of man.

For me, when the popular uprising began in Syria and then the war followed, I did not hesitate for a moment in my full commitment to the act of writing – about war and against war – through my novels, my documentaries and my journalism, not only because writing against war and violence is part of inventing a better future, but because writing against war and about war is an attempt to make our words part of an act of justice and a movement for change. No matter how slight, writing truth offers justice to the oppressed. ***

Volodymyr Yermolenko: ‘Literature during the war is both a blasphemy and a duty’

Ukrainian philosopher, journalist, and presenter of the podcast Explaining Ukraine

Literature during the war is a blasphemy because the reality of the war cannot be expressed in words. The war makes you speechless, silent. You can never express the pain of loss of your beloved ones. Or the horror of the mass graves and burnt cars with people inside. Or the abyss of mothers who lost their children. Any attempt to break this silence of mourning seems to be blasphemous.

Yet literature during the war is also a duty. We have a duty to speak, to witness, to confess, to make testimonies. Evil which is buried in silence is an evil that will return. Ukrainians know this all too well. The attempt of genocide we are facing now from the Russian invaders is horrible not only because it is an embodiment of cruelty, but also because it is an embodiment of the repeated cruelty. Previous crimes in this region were kept in silence for too long, and people who attempted to tell its stories were sent to jails or killed en masse. Therefore, we should break this vicious circle of silence. This makes literature an act of revolt against evil.

Victoria Amelina. Photograph: May Lee/Lviv BookForum

Victoria Amelina: ‘There are wounds only stories can heal’

Ukrainian novelist, essayist and human rights activist

War erases stories: war criminals kill, then hide the evidence in hopes that the world will never learn even their victims’ names. After liberating each town, Ukrainians work hard to recover the names of the dead, bury them with dignity, and tell the world their stories. Often we succeed, but not always. As I write this, on my way to Izyum to document war crimes, the occupiers may well be destroying the evidence of genocide in Mariupol. Despite all our efforts, too many stories will never be known. As a human rights activist, I document war crimes and advocate for justice. Yet, as a writer, I know there are wounds only stories can heal.

I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal by Oleksandr Mykhed. Photograph: Nash Format Publishing

Oleksandr Mykhed: ‘Without the ability to write, I wouldn’t be here’

Ukrainian literary scholar, curator of art projects, and author of I Will Mix Your Blood with Coal

With a full-scale invasion, it’s difficult for me to focus on reading and listen to the undertones of moralising in great literature. A full-scale war shows everything with crystal clarity and adds fragility to the usual way of life and the people themselves.

A library of several thousand books is a burden that you cannot take with you while being evacuated. Only the memories of the books read can fit into an emergency bag. And with frequent relocations of a displaced person, these memories get lost.

However, the fear of Russian invaders of our books and culture restores my faith in the power of literature. Every time, the first thing they do in the occupied territories is rename the settlements in the Russian manner, bring back Soviet symbols, and purge libraries. The occupiers seek out “harmful” books as if they were as dangerous as flesh-and-blood “subversives”.

Literature does not fight, but writers have gone to war and are defending the country. At the same time, defenders who have not tried their hand at writing previously are trying to articulate their experience through books.

I still find it difficult to read. But without the ability to write and record the horrors of a full-scale invasion, I wouldn’t be here.

Margaret Macmillan: ‘Books can help us understand war’

Canadian history lecturer at the University of Oxford and author of The War that Ended Peace

Do we need to ask? War makes us confront our own mortality as well as the best and the worst in human nature. Books can help us understand. In the first world war ordinary French soldiers ordered copies of Tolstoy’s War and Peace to try to make sense of their grinding war in the trenches. Or we can escape, at least in our imaginations, our own wars. In the second world war two of the most popular books in English were Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, about lives and sorrows in a declining Welsh mining town and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, about that earlier great war. You may love or hate Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fable The Little Prince, published in the dark days of 1943 and one of the world’s best-sellers of all time. While it ends in the death of the wandering prince it also promises that wisdom can be found and love may, in the end, triumph. Hope matters too.

If the protesters who clashed with police and smashed their way through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, truly wanted to "stop the steal," perhaps their ire should have been directed a few blocks south.
While the chaos was unfolding at the Capitol, bureaucrats at the Small Business Administration (SBA)—three blocks away—were also apparently quite busy. According to a new report, some 1.8 million "flags" applied to loans issued as part of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) that indicated the loans might be fraudulent or otherwise incorrectly awarded were mass deleted from files on January 6.
The mass closure of those flags paved the way for billions of dollars of PPP loan debt to be forgiven in the final days of the Trump administration, seemingly without due diligence on the part of the federal bureaucrats charged with preventing fraud.
In all, the SBA flagged nearly 2.3 million PPP loans worth at least $189 billion, according to the report published Thursday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a watchdog group that obtained those data from the SBA via an open records request. "A flagged PPP loan does not necessarily mean there was fraud, but some flags—if accurate—indicate clear-cut reasons a recipient would have been ineligible for the taxpayer-backed loan," the report explains.
But the SBA has now cleared 95 percent of those loans. More than 40 percent of the clearances occurred on January 6, far more than on any other single day. "That means a substantial number of loans flagged as potentially going to fraudsters or ineligible recipients have now been forgiven," the POGO report concludes.
Perhaps that's why other reviews of the program have found that as much as $100 billion of the $820 billion distributed via PPP loans was stolen by fraudsters.
There were 57 different types of flags applied to various PPP loans, according to the report. The most common one indicated that the business applying for the loan did not exist before February 15, 2020—the cutoff date for applicants that was supposed to prevent fraudsters from starting new businesses to collect pandemic aid. That flag was applied to 785,089 loans.
Any loan exceeding $2 million was automatically flagged for review under a Department of Treasury policy adopted in 2020 to apply stricter scrutiny to the largest PPP loans. But the POGO report shows that 99 percent of the roughly 28,000 loans flagged for that reason were cleared during the waning days of the Trump administration in January 2021.
"The bulk closure of most of these flags" the POGO report states, "suggests that not all of these large loans received the 'full review' that then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin pledged they would get."
The details of the POGO report are worth reading in full. It is an illustrative look inside a government bureaucracy that seems to have been overwhelmed by the obligation to push unprecedented piles of money out the door. In the first 33 days after the PPP program was opened in April 2020, the SBA lent out more than 20 times as much as it had handled in any full year before that time. High levels of fraud and waste were inevitable.
Even when the money did go to an eligible, actual business, much of it ended up in the pockets of business owners—rather than the paychecks of employees—at tremendous cost to taxpayers.
"Only 23 to 34 percent of the program's funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs," a National Bureau of Economic Research study found. Another study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that taxpayers paid roughly $4 for every $1 of wages and benefits to workers.
"Initially, the PPP promised loan refundability to businesses that kept workers on their payrolls for eight weeks, essentially converting those loans into grants," Reason's Peter Suderman detailed in February. "But, as the pandemic dragged on and the program was topped up with additional funds, the requirements slipped, and the PPP eventually turned into something more like an all-purpose federally funded slush fund for small business owners."
In a report published in May, the SBA's inspector general pointed out that the agency did not have "a centralized entity to design, lead, and manage fraud risk" until February 2022—nearly two years after the PPP loans began being distributed and long after the bulk of them had been forgiven. That's obviously far too late to do much.
"The millions of flagged PPP loans worth billions of dollars," the POGO report concludes, "and the lack of scrutiny leading up to their forgiveness, shows the great pandemic swindle was aided and abetted by the SBA's lax oversight."
The post Millions of PPP Loans Were Flagged as Potentially Fraudulent. Many Were Never Investigated. appeared first on Reason.com.

       The bridge leading from Fort Myers to Pine Island, Fla., is heavily damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. Due to the damage, the island can only be reached by boat or air. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Gerald Herbert/AP   New York Times makes up its own climate science to attack Florida   Zachary Faria  October 05, 04:23 PM October 05, 04:44 PM  Video Embed When a hurricane hits, good liberal partisans must unleash their mockery upon the rubes who did not follow their climate change doomsday prophecies. Even if said partisans have to fabricate the science to support their claim. A CHANGED FLORIDA: PHOTOS SHOW DEVASTATING AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE IAN Such is the case with the New York Times, which needed two writers, Christopher Flavelle and Jonathan Weisman, to cobble together an incoherent piece mocking Floridians for not listening to them and electing Democrats to fight climate change. “Florida Leaders Rejected Major Climate Laws,” the headline reads. “Now They’re Seeking Storm Aid.” Flavelle and Weisman claim that Florida’s Republican leaders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, “don’t want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive.” They also claim that rising sea levels and warmer temperatures made Hurricane Ian worse and that Republicans are to blame for not supporting the Democratic Party’s climate change bill. (You know, the one they pretended at the time was about reducing inflation.) In reality, hurricanes are not becoming “more powerful and destructive.” There is no evidence for that claim. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts.” NOAA’s page on global warming and hurricanes has an “overview of current research results.” In summary, it concludes that there is "no compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.” That's enough to drop the mic already. But on top of that, as Michael Shellenberger notes, these hurricanes are causing more damage because more people are living in and developing these areas. “Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increasing damage,” Shellenberger writes. Is Hurricane Ian itself more dangerous as a direct result of climate change, as Flavelle and Weisman claim? No, there is no evidence of this. Acting NOAA Director Jamie Rhome specifically warned against tying climate change to any one natural disaster on CNN with Don Lemon, who was pathetically begging him to say otherwise. But Rhome insisted on sticking with the actual science. “I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event,” Rhome said. Those darn science deniers at President Joe Biden's NOAA strike again. Liberal activists (including the ones masquerading as journalists) preach about “following the science,” and yet they now claim to know more about hurricanes than NOAA. (Check Rhome’s credentials for yourself and ask how Flavelle and Weisman think they know more about hurricanes than he does.) They have been reduced to simply pointing at every natural disaster and crying climate change, then demanding everyone support whatever liberal boondoggle conveniently conforms to all of their prejudices on the topic. Climate change fearmongering has nothing to do with science, as the New York Times helpfully and unwittingly illustrated here. It is all about partisan politics, which is why the New York Times and others couldn’t wait to attack Florida for not submitting immediately to their destructive climate agenda. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhy are men and boys struggling? What should we do about it?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteThose questions are top of mind this week due to the Brookings scholar Richard Reeves and his just-released book, Of Boys and Men, which proceeds from the proposition that “men at the top are still flourishing, but men in general are not.” Men are struggling in school, in the job market, and in family life; they are the gender most likely to end up in prison and most vulnerable to “deaths of despair.”Reeves grounds those characterizations of males as in trouble in lots of statistics. Here are a few:
“In the U.S … the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.”
“Among men with only a high-school education, one in three is out of the labor force. For those who have a job, typical earnings are $881 a week, down from $1,017 in 1979.”
“Mortality from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related illnesses … are almost three times higher among men than women.”
In Reeves’s telling, the left and right both fail in their responses. The left tends “to pathologize naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity,” he writes, to see male struggles as individual failings rather than structural problems, to deny any biological basis for sex differences, and to proceed as if “gender inequality can only run one way, that is, to the disadvantage of women.” Though conservatives pay more attention “to the growing problems faced by boys and men,” he continues, their agenda is equally unhelpful. They “fuel male grievances for political gain, which simply creates more anger and discontent.” They “overweight the importance of biological differences for gender roles.” And they see solutions “as lying in the past rather than the future, in the form of a restoration of traditional economic relations between male providers and female carers” rather than “helping men adapt to the new world.”An example of a solution that he proposes: Because boys mature more slowly than girls, start them in school a year later, rather than starting both sexes at the same age despite their differences. Or, to echo a book excerpt that The Atlantic published in the magazine’s October issue, “redshirt the boys.” (For those of you who like listening to podcasts, Reeves’s interview with Andrew Sullivan is a good introduction to the book and its arguments.)In a New York Times column about the book, David Brooks writes:
I come away with the impression that many men are like what Dean Acheson said about Britain after World War II. They have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Many men have an obsolete ideal: Being a man means being the main breadwinner for your family. Then they can’t meet that ideal. Demoralization follows. Ambition doesn’t just happen; it has to be fired. The culture is still searching for a modern masculine ideal.
Whereas Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argues that the solutions proposed by the book do too little to address “political and economic decisions that have made American life brutal, in different but overlapping ways, for women and men both.” I look forward to your thoughts on this subject, especially if informed by observations from your life or people in your family, community, or industry. For more food for thought on this subject, see the Atlantic articles “The War Against Boys” (from 2000) by Christina Hoff Sommers and “The End of Men” (from 2010) by Hanna Rosin.“Is the Idea of Masculinity Worth Saving?”That’s the proposition anchoring a debate at The Nation between Laura Kipnis (who says yes) and Phil Christman (who says no).The Women of IranHistorically, most street uprisings are led by men. At Bloomberg, Bobby Ghosh argues that, amid protests prompted by the death of Mahsa Amini—a 22-year-old woman who died in police custody following her arrest for improperly wearing her headscarf—the Iranian regime is having the most trouble dealing with women:
A week ago, I worried that the anti-regime demonstrations in Iran might falter if the mostly young protesters didn’t get some help from grown-ups — like the trade unions, say, or the so-called moderate elements within the theocratic state. I reckoned it would take the participation of groups of that stature to rattle Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s ruthless supreme leader.
The adults have not yet risen to the occasion, but the tyrant and his theocrats have been confronted and confounded by an unexpected constituency: schoolgirls. They represent a new kind of challenge for a regime that usually deals with dissent by licensing its security forces to use torture and murder. Does Khamenei dare turn his thugs on children?
In The Atlantic, Roya Hakakian argues that these protests are unlike some past uprisings against Iran’s patriarchal Islamic regime:
The affluent residents of north Tehran have come out alongside the poor ones from the city’s south side. The youth are there—and so are their parents, even their grandparents. The metropolitan people are out, and so are the small-town folk.
The women of Iran are at the forefront—they who have most consistently resisted the regime’s tyranny and persisted in rebutting the myth that the hijab is an Iranian tradition. The sight of all the men at their side is a sign of the near-universal disdain for the regime’s official misogyny. With the risks these citizens are taking and the sacrifices they are making, they are proving that if any tradition needs defending 24 hours a day by armed men who have to beat people to embrace it, then it deserves to perish.
Russia and the BombThe writer Noah Smith is old enough to remember the time before the fall of the Soviet Union when many people expected nuclear war, and the optimism that took hold starting in the 1990s.Today, he wonders in his newsletter if it was irrational to stop worrying:
What if Vladimir Putin is the dictatorial equivalent of a suicide bomber? His dreams of restoring the Russian Empire were never possible given the means at his disposal, and the Ukraine war has only served to expose their impossibility even more. Given the choice between acknowledging the failure of his life’s dream and destroying both his own country and all his enemies in a final burst of apocalyptic spite, how sure are you that he will choose the former? I am not sure at all, to be honest. The man is 69 years old, and rumored to be in poor health. Perhaps eking out a few more years as a shattered failure of a man appeals to him less than being the man who blew up the world.
It is hard to be sure. And because of that, Smith reasons, the world finds itself confronting a terrifying question:
What happens when a nuclear-armed conqueror says “Let me conquer your country, or I will destroy the entire world, including myself?”. What do you do? Do you assume he’s bluffing and refuse him his prize? Or do you capitulate in the face of a possible madman, and let him take whatever he wants, because you don’t want to take the chance that you love your children infinitely more than he loves his own?
That is the scenario we now essentially face. Putin has shown no willingness to negotiate any sort of peace settlement, instead simply issuing unilateral demands for territory backed by vague nuclear threats. What happens if he gets his territory? If Ukraine gives Putin four of its provinces — condemning their populations to torture, rape, forcible relocation, and other horrific repressions — then will he be satisfied? It seems highly unlikely; a few months ago he was attempting to conquer the entire country. If Ukraine and the West capitulate to nuclear threats, why wouldn’t he just repeat the trick in a few months with the rest of Ukraine? And if that gets surrendered, what about Poland, the Baltics, or the other former territories of the Russian Empire with which Putin is so enamored? Do we just keep surrendering land after land, people after people, until Putin dies, in the hope that his successor will be less apocalyptic?
I am inclined to answer “No, we should not surrender,” but that’s not an answer that satisfies me.
Provocation of the WeekLooking back on the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the social-justice activism and upheaval within institutions that followed, the Atlantic writer Helen Lewis does a deep dive on how various controversies within the art world played out and reflects on the role of scapegoats:
The racial reckoning of 2020 was righteous, and overdue, but its targets were haphazard. Activists wanted sweeping changes; instead they got individual firings and forced resignations … In hindsight, the summer of 2020 was revolutionary, in both good and bad ways; noble goals were being pursued, but the ground was constantly shifting, and it was unwise to end up on the wrong side of the revolutionaries … As in any revolution, who survived and who fell foul of the crowd was often arbitrary.

Of all the nicknames I have for my cat Calvin—Fluffernutter, Chonk-a-Donk, Fuzzy Lumpkin, Jerky McJerkface—Bumpus Maximus may be the most apt. Every night, when I crawl into bed, Calvin hops onto my pillow, purrs, and bonks his head affectionately against mine. It’s adorable, and a little bit gross. Tiny tufts of fur jet into my nose; flecks of spittle smear onto my cheeks.Just shy of a decade ago, cuddling a cat this aggressively would have left me in dire straits. From early childhood through my early 20s, I nursed a serious allergy that made it impossible for me to safely interact with most felines, much less adopt them. Just a few minutes of exposure was enough to make my eyes water and clog my nasal passages with snot. Within an hour, my throat would swell and my chest would erupt in crimson hives.Then, sometime in the early 2010s, my misery came to an abrupt and baffling end. With no apparent interventions, my cat allergy disappeared. Stray whiffs of dander, sufficient to send my body into conniptions mere months before, couldn’t even compel my nose to twitch. My body just up and decided that the former bane of its existence was suddenly totally chill.What I went through is, technically speaking, “completely weird,” says Kimberly Blumenthal, an allergist and immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Some allergies do naturally fade with time, but short of allergy shots, which don’t always work, “we think of cat allergy as a permanent diagnosis,” Blumenthal told me. One solution that’s often proposed? “Get rid of your cat.”My case is an anomaly, but its oddness is not. Although experts have a broad sense of how allergies play out in the body, far less is known about what causes them to come and go—an enigma that’s becoming more worrying as rates of allergy continue to climb. Nailing down how, when, and why these chronic conditions vanish could help researchers engineer those circumstances more often for allergy sufferers—in ways that are actually under our control, and not just by chance.All allergies, at their core, are molecular screwups: an immune system mistakenly flagging a harmless substance as dangerous and attacking it. In the classic version, an allergen, be it a fleck of almond or grass or dog, evokes the ire of certain immune cells, prompting them to churn out an antibody called IgE. IgE drags the allergen like a hostage over to other defensive cells and molecules to rile them up too. A blaze of inflammation-promoting signals, including histamine, end up getting released, sparking bouts of itching, redness, and swelling. Blood vessels dilate; mucus floods out in gobs. At their most extreme, these reactions get so gnarly that they can kill.Just about every step of this chain reaction is essential to produce a bona fide allergy—which means that intervening at any of several points can shut the cascade down. People whose bodies make less IgE over time can become less sensitive to allergens. The same seems to be true for those who start producing more of another antibody, called IgG4, that can counteract IgE. Some people also dispatch a molecule known as IL-10 that can tell immune cells to cool their heels even in the midst of IgE’s perpetual scream.All this and more can eventually persuade a body to lose its phobia of an allergen, a phenomenon known as tolerance. But because there is not a single way in which allergy manifests, it stands to reason that there won’t be a single way in which it disappears. “We don’t fully understand how these things go away,” says Zachary Rubin, a pediatrician at Oak Brook Allergists, in Illinois.[Read: What they aren’t telling you about hypoallergenic dogs]Tolerance does display a few trends. Sometimes, it unfurls naturally as people get older, especially as they approach their 60s (though allergies can appear in old age as well). Other diagnoses can go poof amid the changes that unfold as children zip through the physiological and hormonal changes brought on by toddlerhood, adolescence, and the teen years. As many as 60 to 80 percent of milk, wheat, and egg allergies can peace out by puberty—a pattern that might also be related to the instability of the allergens involved. Certain snippets of milk and egg proteins, for instance, can unravel in the presence of heat or stomach acid, making the molecules “less allergenic,” and giving the body ample opportunity to reappraise them as benign, says Anna Nowak-Węgrzyn, a pediatric allergist and immunologist at NYU Langone Health. About 80 to 90 percent of penicillin allergies, too, disappear within 10 years of when they’re first detected, more if you count the ones that are improperly diagnosed, as Blumenthal has found.Other allergies are more likely to be lifers without dedicated intervention—among them, issues with peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, pollen, and pets. Part of the reason may be that some of these allergens are super tough to neutralize or purge. The main cat allergen, a protein called “Fel d 1” that’s found in feline saliva, urine, and gland secretions, can linger for six months after a cat vacates the premises. It can get airborne, and glom on to surfaces; it’s been found in schools and churches and buses and hospitals, “even in space,” Blumenthal told me.[Read: The next weird way we’re changing cats]For hangers-on like these, allergists can try to nudge the body toward tolerance through shots or mouth drops that introduce bits of an allergen over months or years, basically the immunological version of exposure therapy. In some cases, it works: Dosing people with Fel d 1 can at least improve a cat allergy, but it’s hardly a sure hit. Researchers haven’t even fully sussed out how allergy shots induce tolerance—just that “they work well for a lot of patients,” Rubin told me. The world of allergy research as a whole is something of a Wild West: Some people are truly, genuinely, hypersensitive to water touching their skin; others have gotten allergies because of organ transplants, apparently inheriting their donor’s sensitivity as amped-up immune cells hitched a ride.Part of the trouble is that allergy can involve just about every nook and cranny of the immune system; to study its wax and wane, scientists have to repeatedly look at people’s blood, gut, or airway to figure out what sorts of cells and molecules are lurking about, all while tracking their symptoms and exposures, which doesn’t come easy or cheap. And fully disentangling the nuances of bygone allergies isn’t just about better understanding people who are the rule. It’s about delving into the exceptions to it too.How frustratingly little we know about allergies is compounded by the fact that the world is becoming a more allergic place. A lot of the why remains murky, but researchers think that part of the problem can be traced to the perils of modern living: the wider use of antibiotics; the shifts in eating patterns; the squeaky-cleanness of so many contemporary childhoods, focused heavily on time indoors. About 50 million people in the U.S. alone experience allergies each year—some of them little more than a nuisance, others potentially deadly when triggered without immediate treatment. Allergies can diminish quality of life. They can limit the areas where people can safely rent an apartment, or the places where they can safely dine. They can hamper access to lifesaving treatments, leaving doctors scrambling to find alternative therapies that don’t harm more than they help.But if allergies can rise this steeply with the times, maybe they can resolve rapidly too. New antibody-based treatments could help silence the body’s alarm sensors and quell IgE’s rampage. Some researchers are even looking into how fecal transplants that port the gut microbiome of tolerant people into allergy sufferers might help certain food sensitivities subside. Anne Liu, an allergist and immunologist at Stanford, is also hopeful that “the incidence of new food allergies will decline over the next 10 years,” as more advances come through. After years of advising parents against introducing their kids to sometimes-allergenic substances such as milk and peanuts too young, experts are now encouraging early exposures, in the hopes of teaching tolerance. And the more researchers learn about how allergies naturally abate, the better they might be able to safely replicate fade-outs.One instructive example could come from cases quite opposite to mine: longtime pet owners who develop allergies to their animals after spending some time away from them. That’s what happened to Stefanie Mezigian, of Michigan. After spending her entire childhood with her cat, Thumper, Mezigian was dismayed to find herself sneezing and sniffling when she visited home the summer after her freshman year of college. Years later, Mezigian seems to have built a partial tolerance up again; she now has another cat, Jack, and plans to keep felines in her life for good—both for companionship and to wrangle her immune system’s woes. “If I go without cats, that seems to be when I develop problems,” she told me.It’s a reasonable thought to have, Liu told me. People in Mezigian’s situation probably have the reactive IgE bopping around their body their entire life. But maybe during a fur-free stretch, the immune system, trying to be “parsimonious,” stops making molecules that rein in the allergy, she said. The immune system is nothing if not malleable, and a bit diva-esque: Set one thing off kilter, and an entire network of molecules and cells can revamp its approach to the world.I may never know why my cat allergy ghosted me. Maybe I got infected by a virus that gently rewired my immune system; maybe my hormone levels went into flux. Maybe it was the stress, or joy, of graduating college and starting grad school; maybe my diet or microbiome changed in just the right way, at just the right time. Perhaps it’s pointless to guess. Allergy, like the rest of the immune system, is a hot, complicated mess—a common fixture of modern living that many of us take for granted, but that remains, in so many cases, a mystery. All I can do is hope my cat allergy stays gone, though there’s no telling if it will. “I have no idea,” Nowak-Węgrzyn told me. “I’m just happy for you. Go enjoy your cats.”

A gas line during the Colonial Pipeline crisis. (Photo by Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,Recent events have me thinking (as one does) about prices—or, more accurately, how seemingly no one in politics knows what they are. Just last week, for example, Jones Act lobbyists who opposed a waiver for that BP diesel tanker we discussed simultaneously claimed that there was no fuel supply problem in Puerto Rico, and that BP was charging “premium” prices there because of Hurricane Fiona. The same day, Florida officials took to the airwaves to warn against “price gouging” before Hurricane Ian made landfall, and President Biden warned oil and gas companies not to raise prices too.Getting politicians to grok prices has always been a problem, especially in emergencies, but things seem to have deteriorated recently, as the pandemic took hold and inflation reappeared. Now, high prices are a constant political target, price control proposals that we thought had been consigned to the Policy History Dustbin are popping up everywhere, and articles in several major media outlets have gushed about how, actually, price controls worked in the past and can work once again today.As you can imagine, this turn of events has frustrated and dismayed your humble correspondent, but it hasn’t surprised me: Politicians have a long history of shooting the messenger—almost as long as price controls themselves.So What Are Prices?Before we get to that, however, let’s cover briefly what prices are—beyond simply the dollar figure attached to something when you’re buying it. According to the textbooks, when the amount of widgets that consumers demand roughly equals the amount of widgets that producers supply, widget prices in that market will settle at the “the market-clearing price.” So, if a widgetmaker (just go with it) raised his prices above the market-clearing price, he wouldn’t sell all of his widgets, and if he lowered prices below the market-clearing price, he’d run out of widgets and have to turn away customers who still wanted to buy them. Thus, except in very rare circumstances, prices aren’t just some random number a (probably nefarious) profit-seeking company slapped on a good or service; they also reflect what a large number of cost-conscious consumers are willing to pay for it. (“Greedflation” conspiracists please take note.)

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“I see two tickets from Moscow to Istanbul for Saturday.”

“Anyone know someone who is at the Verkhny Lars border crossing in a car? A friend’s son has been on foot for thirty hours—he is looking for a place to rest.”

“T. is raising money to send her son, S., out of the country. Any amount helps.”

“They are putting a mobile draft office at the Astrakhan border crossing with Kazakhstan.”

Since Vladimir Putin announced, on September 21st, that Russia would be instituting a draft, these and hundreds of other similar messages have flashed across my phone screen, in group chats suddenly repurposed for coördinating an exodus. The Russian government claimed that the draft would be “partial,” aimed at assembling some three hundred thousand men to fight in Ukraine. But Novaya Gazeta Europe, an independent Russian-language newspaper in exile, recently reported that the actual goal is a million conscripts. Tens of thousands of people—possibly more—have left Russia since the draft began, crossing the border in the west, south, and east of the country, by plane, train, bus, private car, bicycle, and scooter, and also on foot. They are staying in hotels and hostels, in hastily rented rooms, on the couches of friends and acquaintances. About a thousand people have found shelter in a movie theatre in the city of Uralsk, in Kazakhstan.

Ivan Fayt, a twenty-one-year-old furniture refinisher from Moscow, felt desperate when he heard about the draft order. For months, he had been helping people whom the Russian government refers to as refugees—Ukrainians who have been forcibly transferred to Russia—and, he told me, “that taught me that there is no law. Even if they say that they are not going to draft college students, that means nothing.” Fayt had no idea what to do, so he prayed to his patron saint, John of Shanghai and San Francisco, who was born in a village outside the Ukrainian city of Izyum, in 1896, and died in Seattle seventy years later. And then a miracle happened: two childhood friends, Kirill and Anastasia, told Ivan that they were driving to Georgia and there was a seat for him in the car. On the morning of Saturday, September 24th—three days after the draft began—the three of them set out from Moscow.

“We kept hearing that the border was about to close,” Ivan said. Telegram chats and channels were rebroadcasting this rumor, as were the many traffic-police officers who stopped the car along the way. So far, Russian officials do not appear to have closed any border crossings, but they have opened temporary draft offices at many of them. The young people drove all day and spent Saturday night in Rostov, a bit more than halfway to the border with Georgia—and a couple of hours from the Ukrainian border. Authorities had set up checkpoints along the road, and every time the young people stopped they were approached by locals who offered to show them a shortcut to the border. They paid fifteen thousand rubles (about two hundred and fifty dollars) to follow a car through a field, bypassing the large city of Vladikavkaz. Later, they paid a young man a hundred dollars to get in the car with them as they passed through some checkpoints—the temporary passenger apparently had the connections to get them through. “The police even saluted him,” Ivan said.

By six on Monday morning, Ivan and his friends were moving toward a queue to the border. Cars were lined up four or five across on a two-lane road. Still, cars and bicycles kept passing on the side. It seemed that some people were ditching their cars, buying used bicycles, which were going for upward of nine hundred dollars, and riding to the border. The line wasn’t moving. Ivan and his friends decided to leave the car and start walking. They walked for two hours and arrived at the border at noon. The lone café near the crossing was selling half-litre bottles of water for the equivalent of nine dollars. Ivan estimated that about two thousand people who had come to the border on foot or by bike were waiting to cross. Border guards were letting people through in groups of five. Conflicts broke out when people tried to cut the line. A border guard kept threatening to call special forces to detain people and turn them over to the draft office.

Around seven in the evening—more than nine hours since they ditched their car—Ivan and Anastasia were allowed to cross. Kirill was taken in for questioning. After about twenty minutes, he rejoined them and they started walking again: another forty minutes to the Georgian side of the border. They had no water. Their phones were dead. There was a long queue to cross into Georgia on foot; people in line said that they had been standing there for twelve hours. Ivan, Kirill, and Anastasia found someone with a car who agreed to drive them about a hundred yards into Georgia, for ten thousand rubles, or about a hundred and seventy dollars. They finally got to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, on Wednesday, September 28th, four days after they left Moscow and exactly a week after Putin announced the draft.

“You can tell the people who just got here,” Grigory Sverdlin, a native of St. Petersburg, told me. Sverdlin left Russia for Georgia weeks after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, in February. “The people who left half a year ago look reasonably comfortable,” he said. “But the ones who just left have post-traumatic stress written on their faces.” Some quarter million people may have left Russia back in late February and early March. The current wave of escapees may prove even bigger.

Sverdlin, who used to run the oldest and largest organization for the homeless in Russia, has launched a nongovernmental organization aimed at helping people hide from the draft inside Russia, escape the draft by leaving Russia, or, if they have been drafted, to escape the military by surrendering to the Ukrainian side. Sverdlin, who now lives in Tbilisi, used his social media to announce the plan on Monday, September 26th. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told me when we spoke three days later. “We already have a team of six people and money to pay them salaries. We hadn’t even started a fund-raising campaign, and we are already hearing from people who want to make donations. On Thursday morning, we had a hundred volunteers. In the evening, we had three hundred volunteers, and by next week we’ll have fifteen hundred or even three thousand volunteers.”

Cheating is bad enough in any game, but it is anathema to chess. In so far as the game has a rationale, however recondite, it is the pursuit of truth. The grandest of grandmasters, Emanuel Lasker, put it like this: “On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.”
Hence the accusation of cheating at the highest level, emanating from the current world champion, has not merely scandalised the wider world, but called into question the raison d’être of this supremely gladiatorial battle of wits.
“I believe that cheating in chess is a big deal and an existential threat to the game,” Magnus Carlsen declared, justifying his refusal to play Hans Niemann, the young American who had sensationally defeated him at the elite Sinquefield Cup tournament on 4 September.
Carlsen, 31, who has held the world title for nine years, quit the tournament and hinted that Niemann, 19, had received computer assistance at the board. When he faced his rival again in an online tournament Carlsen resigned after just one move, implying that playing a cheat was beneath his dignity.
[See also: How The Queen’s Gambit inspired a great chess revival]
Then, on 26 September, he issued a statement alleging that Niemann, who has admitted cheating online several years ago, “has cheated more – and more recently – than he has publicly admitted”. Even now, however, Carlsen claims that he is limited in what he can say “without Niemann’s explicit permission to speak openly”. Presumably, he fears litigation – rightly. The reputations of chess masters are fragile. So, too, are their egos.
The rarefied world of grandmaster chess is now bitterly divided. Many have taken the side of the accused. Where, they ask, is the evidence? Shouldn’t Carlsen have provided chapter and verse before trashing the career of an unknown teenager? For the former world champion Garry Kasparov, Carlsen (who had been unbeaten in 53 games) was just a bad loser. For the British grandmaster Nigel Short, “it’s death by innuendo”.
Carlsen’s camp cites Niemann’s previous admission of cheating in online chess, albeit only twice, aged 13 and 16. Niemann is now banned from Chess.com, the world’s largest chess website. According to Carlsen: “Throughout our game at the Sinquefield Cup, I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”
How, though, could Niemann have had computer advice sent to him during a game – given that phones and other electronic devices are banned from tournament playing areas? This is where the controversy takes a salacious turn. Flying around social media has been the claim that Niemann may have used a sex toy – vibrating anal beads that could be controlled wirelessly – to have moves transmitted while evading detection. There is no proof that he made use of such a method, but Niemann himself took it seriously enough to declare: “If they want me to strip fully naked, I will do it. I don’t care, because I know I am clean.”
The Carlsen-Niemann cheating saga will doubtless have more twists before it is resolved. Meanwhile, it is a reminder of the unique hold that chess exercises upon our cultural imagination.
The game was already several centuries old when the Vikings brought it to Britain – and bequeathed us the marvellous chessmen found on the Isle of Lewis. In his essay “The Glorious and Bloody Game”, Arthur Koestler, who considered himself a “passionate duffer” at chess, recounts a tale from St Olaf’s Saga about King Canute, who could no more command the 64 squares than he could the waves. When playing Ulf, one of his earls, Canute blundered a knight, then retracted the move and made another. In other words, the king cheated. Ulf was so angry that he overturned the board in his rage. Fearing the royal wrath, he took sanctuary in a church, only to be butchered by Canute’s henchmen.
Chess is a wargame and its aim is indeed murderous – “checkmate” is a corruption of a Persian phrase meaning “the king is dead” – but its whole purpose is to sublimate violence. Perhaps this subtext explains the number of bloodthirsty conquerors who have succumbed to the charms of chess: from Charlemagne to Tamburlaine the Great to Napoleon Bonaparte.
In our time, the uniquely exalted status of chess in the Soviet Union enabled it to become a substitute for nuclear war. For all the speculation about Vladimir Putin’s skill at chess, the truth is that he is merely a bad poker player, with tragic consequences for Ukraine and the entire world.
Chess is a test of the intellect, not merely of low cunning. No other game has had so many books devoted to it; none has inspired fiction of the quality of Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game, Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defence or Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. To Marcel Duchamp, chess was a higher vocation than art: on his honeymoon he paid more attention to the game than to his bride. In revenge she glued his pieces to the board; divorce ensued.
[See also: The degradation of Marilyn Monroe]
Scientists, too, from Albert Einstein to Alan Turing have paid homage to the tantalisingly elusive relationship of chess to mathematics, codes and computing. Most recently, the British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur Demis Hassabis has penetrated more deeply into its mysteries than ever before. His team at DeepMind have created a chess programme, AlphaZero, that goes far beyond anything even imaginable in 1950, when Claude Shannon’s pioneering paper “Programming a Computer For Playing Chess” was published. The gap in playing strength between humans and machines is now immeasurable. Hence the stakes are high in the Carlsen-Niemann affair.
When my own love affair with chess began as a boy, among my mentors was the New Statesman’s chess correspondent, Heinrich Fraenkel. His columns, written under the pseudonym Assiac, were an eclectic mélange of anecdote and analysis by a German-Jewish émigré who, when I enthused about a performance of Brecht and Weil’s Threepenny Opera, replied: “Ja, Danny, I was at the first production in Berlin.”
In the half-century since I have been blessed to have played amateurs, from Michael Foot (at a New Statesman–Tribune cricket match) to the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, and grandmasters, from Kasparov to Jon Speelman. Nobody should be intimidated by its complexity, let alone by vanishingly rare cases of cheating. You can play chess for fun as well as for blood. The frontispiece of Assiac’s book The Pleasures of Chess has a diagram of the chessboard before a move has been made, with the caption: “The most difficult position of all.” Underneath, the author has inscribed the book to me in his spidery hand: “Not all that difficult after all.” 
Daniel Johnson is the author of “White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was Fought on the Chessboard” (Atlantic)
[See also: The cutting wit of Alan Rickman]

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a research note about America’s new climate law that went nearly unnoticed. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank argued, is even more important than has been recognized so far: The IRA will “will have a profound effect across industries in the next decade and beyond” and could ultimately shape the direction of the American economy, the bank said. The report shows how even after the bonanza of climate-bill coverage earlier this year, we’re still only beginning to understand how the law works and what it might mean for the economy.  The report made a few broad points in particular that are worth attending to: First, the IRA might spend twice as much as Congress thinks. Many of the IRA’s most important provisions, such as its incentives for electric vehicles and zero-carbon electricity, are “uncapped” tax credits. That means that as long as you meet their terms, the government will award them: There’s no budget or limit written into the law that restricts how much the government can spend. The widely cited figure for how much the IRA will spend to fight climate change—$374 billion—is in large part determined by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of how much those tax credits will get used.But that estimate is wrong, the bank claims. In fact, so many people and businesses will use those tax credits that the IRA’s total spending is likely to be more than $800 billion, double what the CBO projects. And because federal spending tends to catalyze private investment, that could send total climate spending across the economy to roughly $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s significantly more money flowing into green-energy industries than the CBO projected, though it’s unclear if that additional money will lead to more carbon reductions than earlier analyses have projected.  Second, the U.S. is “poised to become the world’s leading energy provider,” according to the bank. America is already the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. The IRA could further enhance its advantage in all forms of energy production, giving it a “competitive advantage in low-cost clean electricity and hydrogen production, infrastructure, geologic storage, and human capital,” the report states. By 2029, U.S. solar and wind could be the cheapest in the world at less than $5 per megawatt-hour, the bank projects; it will also become competitive in hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and wind turbines. (The law will help America’s battery industry, but the bank doesn’t see the U.S. becoming the world’s biggest battery producer, given that China already has such a dominant advantage.)Perhaps rosiest of all was the bank’s view of major risks to the IRA. The bill passed with not even a single Republican vote, but the bank concludes that the GOP is relatively unlikely to repeal the law, even if they take the White House in 2024. That’s because it would hurt their own voters most: “Republican-leaning states are likely to see the most investment, job, and economic benefits from the IRA,” the report claims. Instead, the IRA is most likely to stumble because America still struggles with building out its energy infrastructure: The country might not be able to get government approval to permit enough power lines, green infrastructure, and carbon-injection wells for the law to matter, the bank said. This risk is all the more heightened now that Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting-reform bill—which, for all its flaws, would have clearly allowed for more renewable transmission construction—has failed. Powerful business groups are also lobbying to revise the most transmission-friendly sections from that bill if Congress revisits it.The Credit Suisse report is truly remarkable. What stuck with me most was this declaration: For big corporations, the IRA “definitively changes the narrative from risk mitigation to opportunity capture.” In other words, companies should no longer worry that they might be unprepared for future climate regulation, such as a carbon tax. They should be scared of missing out on the economic growth that the energy transition (and the IRA) will bring about.If the bill’s passage wasn’t signal enough, the report shows that climate change as a political issue—and frankly environmental protection more broadly—has arrived to a wholly new place. For decades, the country’s biggest climate advocates have tried to reduce the harm that the economy causes to the environment. Now they find themselves tasked with the biggest story in the economy itself.Perhaps most strange, even if the United States slips into recession in the next year, the IRA will only become more important. Historically, economists and businesses have treated helping the environment as a product of prosperity—if the economy is good, then companies can afford to do the right thing. But the IRA’s programs and incentives will keep flowing no matter the macro environment, which makes betting on clean energy one of the most certain economic trends of the next few years. Clean energy is now the safe, smart, government-backed bet for conservative investors. It’s really a shocking reversal of the past 40 years. It is such a change that it hasn’t yet been metabolized by the world of people involved in the issue.So inspired by the vigor of Credit Suisse’s forecast, let me venture a few predictions of my own. The number of Americans working in a climate-relevant industry is going to explode. It is going to undergo what you might call a techification. I was a nerd and a dreamer in high school in the late aughts, which meant I paid attention to the start-ups of that era—such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr—in their early years. I remember that fateful moment around 2010 when the valence of the industry switched—it was right around when The Social Network came out—and working in tech went from being a career choice for dorky optimists to the default career track for many ambitious college students. A similar switch is coming for companies working on climate change: The opportunity will be too large, the money too persuasive, the problems too intriguing.Finally, those of us who have long worked in climate change—and here I include myself, who started covering this topic in 2015—should have some excitement and even humility about this deluge of new talent. Even setting its arduous politics aside, managing climate change is a legitimately difficult technical and cultural problem—it’s going to require as many attentive and enthusiastic brains as possible, and the path to decarbonizing always required an infusion of new workers, investment, and good will. If you don’t yet work in the industry, but have always cared about climate change as an issue, well, this is your moment to get involved. These companies are going to need engineers, yes, but also programmers, accountants, marketers, HR staff, general counsels—there is space for everyone now.The fight against climate change is going to change more in the next four years than it has in the past 40. The great story of our lives is just beginning. Welcome aboard.

This fall, unlike the one before it, and the one before that, America looks almost like its old self. Schools and universities are in session; malls, airports, and gyms are bustling with the pre-holiday rush; handwashing is passé, handshakes are back, and strangers are packed together on public transport, nary a mask to be seen. On its surface, the country seems ready to enjoy what some might say is our first post-pandemic winter.Americans are certainly acting as if the crisis has abated, and so in that way, at least, you could argue that it has. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” President Joe Biden told 60 Minutes in September, after proclaiming the pandemic “over.” Almost no emergency protections against the virus are left standing; we’re dismantling the few that are. At the same time, COVID is undeniably, as Biden says, “a problem.” Each passing day still brings hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations; untold numbers of people continue to deal with long COVID, as more join them. In several parts of the country, health-care systems are struggling to stay afloat. Local public-health departments, underfunded and understaffed, are hanging by a thread. And a double surge of COVID and flu may finally be brewing.So we can call this winter “post-pandemic” if we want. But given the policy failures and institutional dysfunctions that have accumulated over the past three years, it won’t be anything like a pre-pandemic winter, either. The more we resist that reality, the worse it will become. If we treat this winter as normal, it will be anything but.By now, we’ve grown acquainted with the variables that dictate how a season with SARS-CoV-2 will go. In our first COVID winter, the vaccines had only just begun their trickle out into the public, while most Americans hadn’t yet been infected by the virus. In our second COVID winter, the country’s collective immunity was higher, but Omicron sneaked past some of those defenses. On the cusp of our third COVID winter, it may seem that SARS-CoV-2 has few plot twists left to toss us.But the way in which we respond to COVID could still sprinkle in some chaos. During those first two winters, at least a few virus-mitigating policies and precautions remained in place—nearly all of which have since come down, lowering the hurdles the virus must clear, at a time when America’s health infrastructure is facing new and serious threats.The nation is still fighting to contain a months-long monkeypox outbreak; polio continues to plague unvaccinated sectors of New York. A riot of respiratory viruses, too, may spread as temperatures cool and people flock indoors. Rates of RSV are rising; flu returned early in the season from a nearly three-year sabbatical to clobber Australia, boding poorly for us in the north. Should flu show up here ahead of schedule, Americans, too, could be pummeled as we were around the start of 2018, “one of the worst seasons in the recent past,” says Srinivasan Venkatramanan, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Virginia and a member of the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub.[Read: Fauci addresses ‘The pandemic is over’]The consequences of this infectious churn are already starting to play out. In Jackson, Mississippi, health workers are watching SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses tear through children “like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” says Charlotte Hobbs, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. Flu season has yet to go into full swing, and Hobbs is already experiencing one of the roughest stretches she’s had in her nearly two decades of practicing. Some kids are being slammed with one virus after the other, their sicknesses separated by just a couple of weeks—an especially dangerous prospect for the very youngest among them, few of whom have received COVID shots.The toll of doctor visits missed during the pandemic has ballooned as well. Left untreated, many people’s chronic conditions have worsened, and some specialists’ schedules remain booked out for months. Add to this the cases of long COVID that pile on with each passing surge of infections, and there are “more sick people than there used to be, period,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. That’s with COVID case counts at a relative low, amid a massive undercount. Even if a new, antibody-dodging variant doesn’t come banging on the nation’s door, “the models predict an increase in infections,” Venkatramanan told me. (In parts of Europe, hospitalizations are already making a foreboding climb.)And where the demand for care increases, supply does not always follow suit. Health workers continue to evacuate their posts. Some have taken early retirement, worried that COVID could exacerbate their chronic conditions, or vice versa; others have sought employment with better hours and pay, or left the profession entirely to salvage their mental health. A wave of illness this winter will pare down forces further, especially as the CDC backs off its recommendations for health-care workers to mask. At UAB Hospital, in Birmingham, Alabama, “we’ve struggled to have enough people to work,” says Sarah Nafziger, an emergency physician and the medical director for employee health. “And once we get them here, we have a hard time getting them to stay.”[Read: The strongest sign that Americans should worry about flu this winter]Clinical-laboratory staff at Deaconess Hospital, in Indiana, who are responsible for testing patient samples, are feeling similar strain, says April Abbott, the institution’s microbiology director. Abbott’s team has spent most of the past month below usual minimum-staffing levels, and has had to cut some duties and services to compensate, even after calling in reinforcements from other, already shorthanded parts of the lab. “We’re already at this threshold of barely making it,” Abbott told me. Symptoms of burnout have surged as well, while health workers continue to clock long hours, sometimes amid verbal abuse, physical attacks, and death threats. Infrastructure is especially fragile in America’s rural regions, which have suffered hospital closures and an especially large exodus of health workers. In Madison County, Montana, where real-estate values have risen, “the average nurse cannot afford a house,” says Margaret Bortko, a nurse practitioner and the region’s health officer and medical director. When help and facilities aren’t available, the outcome is straightforward, says Janice Probst, a rural-health researcher at the University of South Carolina: “You will have more deaths.”In health departments, too, the workforce is threadbare. As local leaders tackle multiple infectious diseases at once, “it’s becoming a zero-sum game,” says Maria Sundaram, an epidemiologist at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. “With limited resources, do they go to monkeypox? To polio? To COVID-19? To influenza? We have to choose.” Mati Hlatshwayo Davis, the director of health in St. Louis, told me that her department has shrunk to a quarter of the size it was five years ago. “I have staff doing the jobs of three to five people,” she said. “We are in absolute crisis.” Staff have left to take positions as Amazon drivers, who “make so much more per hour.” Looking across her state, Hlatshwayo Davis keeps watching health directors “resign, resign, resign.” Despite all that she has poured into her job, or perhaps because of it, “I can’t guarantee I won’t be one of those losses too.”This winter is unlikely to be an encore of the pandemic’s worst days. Thanks to the growing roster of tools we now have to combat the coronavirus—among them, effective vaccines and antivirals—infected people are less often getting seriously sick; even long COVID seems to be at least a bit scarcer among people who are up-to-date on their shots. But considering how well our shots and treatments work, the plateau of suffering at which we’ve arrived is bizarrely, unacceptably high. More than a year has passed since the daily COVID death toll was around 200; nearly twice that number—roughly three times the daily toll during a moderate flu season—now seems to be a norm.Part of the problem remains the nation’s failed approach to vaccines, says Avnika Amin, a vaccine epidemiologist at Emory University: The government has repeatedly championed shots as a “be-all and end-all” strategy, while failing to rally sufficient uptake. Boosting is one of the few anti-COVID measures still promoted, yet the U.S. remains among the least-vaccinated high-income countries; interest in every dose that’s followed the primary series has been paltry at best. Even with the allure of the newly reformulated COVID shot, “I’m not really getting a good sense that people are busting down the doors,” says Michael Dulitz, a health worker in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Nor can vaccines hold the line against the virus alone. Even if everyone got every shot they were eligible for, Amin told me, “it wouldn’t make COVID go away.”[Read: America created its own booster problems]The ongoing dry-up of emergency funds has also made the many tools of disease prevention and monitoring more difficult to access. Free at-home tests are no longer being shipped out en masse; asymptomatic testing is becoming less available; and vaccines and treatments are shifting to the private sector, putting them out of reach for many who live in poor regions or who are uninsured and can least afford to fall ill.It doesn’t help, either, that the country’s level of preparedness lays out as a patchwork. People who vaccinate and mask tend to cluster, Amin told me, which means that not all American experiences of winter will be the same. Less prominent, less privileged parts of the country will quietly bear the brunt of outbreaks. “The biggest worry is the burden becoming unnoticed,” Venkatramanan told me. Without data, policies can’t change; the nation can’t react. “It’s like flying without altitude or speed sensors. You’re looking out the window and trying to guess.”There’s an alternative winter the country might envision—one unencumbered by the policy backslides the U.S. has made in recent months, and one in which Americans acknowledge that COVID remains not just “a problem” but a crisis worth responding to.In that version of reality, far more people would be up-to-date on their vaccines. The most vulnerable in society would be the most protected. Ventilation systems would hum in buildings across the country. Workers would have access to ample sick leave. Health-care systems would have excesses of protective gear, and local health departments wouldn’t want for funds. Masks would come out in times of high transmission, especially in schools, pharmacies, government buildings, and essential businesses; free tests, boosters, and treatments would be available to all. No one would be asked to return to work while sick—not just with COVID but with any transmissible disease. SARS-CoV-2 infections would not disappear, but they would remain at more manageable levels; cases of flu and other cold-weather sicknesses that travel through the air would follow suit. Surveillance systems would whir in every state and territory, ready to detect the next threat. Leaders might even set policies that choreograph, rather than simply capitulate to, how Americans behave.We won’t be getting that winter this year, or likely any year soon. Many policies have already reverted to their 2019 status quo; by other metrics, the nation’s well-being even seems to have regressed. Life expectancy in the U.S. has fallen, especially among Native Americans and Alaskan Natives. Institutions of health are beleaguered; community-outreach efforts have been pruned.The pandemic has also prompted a deterioration of trust in several mainstays of public health. In many parts of the country, there’s worry that the vaccine hesitancy around COVID has “spread its tentacles into other diseases,” Hobbs told me, keeping parents from bringing their kids in for flu shots and other routine vaccines. Mississippi, once known for its stellar rate of immunizing children, now consistently ranks among those with the fewest young people vaccinated against COVID. “The one thing we do well is vaccinate children,” Hobbs said. That the coronavirus has reversed the trend “has astounded me.” In Montana, sweeping political changes, including legislation that bans employers from requiring vaccines of any kind, have made health-care settings less safe. Fewer than half of Madison County’s residents have received even their primary series of COVID shots, and “now a nurse can turn down the Hepatitis B series,” Bortko told me. Health workers, too, feel more imperiled than before. Since the start of the pandemic, Bortko’s own patients of 30 years, “who trusted me with their lives,” have pivoted to “yelling at us about vaccination concerns and mask mandates and quarantining and their freedoms,” she told me. “We have become public enemy No. 1.”[Read: The pandemic’s soft closing]At the same time, many people with chronic and debilitating conditions are more vulnerable than they were before the pandemic began. The policies that protected them during the pandemic’s height are gone—and yet SARS-CoV-2 is still here, adding to the dangers they face. The losses have been written off, Bortko told me: Cases of long COVID in Madison County have been dismissed as products of “risk factors” that don’t apply to others; deaths, too, have been met with a shrug of “Oh, they were old; they were unhealthy.” If, this winter, COVID sickens or kills more people who are older, more people who are immunocompromised, more people of color, more essential and low-income workers, more people in rural communities, “there will be no press coverage,” Hlatshwayo Davis said. Americans already expect that members of these groups will die.It’s not too late to change course. The winter’s path has not been set: Many Americans are still signing up for fall flu and COVID shots; we may luck out on the viral evolution front, too, and still be dealing largely with members of the Omicron clan for the next few months. But neither immunity nor a slowdown in variant emergence is a guarantee. What we can count on is the malleability of human behavior—what will help set the trajectory of this winter, and others to come. The U.S. botched the pandemic’s beginning, and its middle. That doesn’t mean we have to bungle its end, whenever that truly, finally arrives.

The good news is that the FDA recently approved for use in ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) only the third drug meant to slow the progression of the disease – Relyvrio. However, the approval was highly controversial, because the data for the efficacy of this drug combination is questionable. The approval raises critical questions for what it means to take a science-based approach to medicine.

ALS is a neurodegenerative disease, similar to Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. These have proved to be a challenging class of diseases to understand and treat. In ALS motor neurons (both upper and lower motor neurons – the nervous system cells that allow for voluntary movement) die over time, causing weakness and the atrophy and death of muscle tissue. This is a fatal disease, with survival being between 2-5 years from time of first symptom. It is also relentlessly progressive, spreading throughout the body until eventually patients are not strong enough to breath on their own. At that point they are either placed permanently on a ventilator to help them breath, or they will die from the ALS.

More precisely, ALS is a type of disease, defined as degeneration of the motor neurons. But there are at least several, and perhaps many, specific pathophysiological diseases that cause ALS. It can be inherited, for example, or sporadic. It can be caused by a neurotoxin in some cases, and can occur with other neurodegenerative symptoms. But most patients with ALS are sporadic (no family history), idiopathic (no known cause), and follow a typical pattern of progression. It is a challenging disease to understand because many things happen at the cellular level on the way to these neurons dying, and it is difficult to know which processes are causing the progression and which are just a result of the cause. There also may be many causes working together, and when the cumulative stress gets beyond a certain point, the cells start to die.

There are currently three drugs approved to slow the progression of ALS, riluzole, edaravone, and now Relyvrio. The first two have a modest effect, prolonging survival by a few months. This can be significant for ALS patients, however, and the hope is that eventually we will build up a cocktail of drugs, each perhaps with modest effect but cumulatively with a significant effect. The ultimate goal, of course, is a “cure” which can be defined in this case as stopping progression (hopefully early enough to prevent functional decline). Reversing existing muscle loss is a different problem.

Relyvrio is a combination of two drugs, sodium phenylbutyrate and taurursodiol. The mechanism of action in ALS of the two drugs is currently unknown. However, phenylbutyrate enhances a pathway by which nitrogen is removed through the kidneys. It may also have effects on misfolded proteins, which can be a contributor to progression of ALS. Taurursodiol is a bile acid that may interfere with apoptosis – cellular death. These are speculative mechanisms, but not implausible.

Why is the FDA approval of this combination controversial? It’s because the data they relied on for approval is preliminary and not very convincing. It is, in fact, a phase II trial that focusses mainly on safety and only preliminarily at efficacy. Typically the FDA relies on two or more phase III trials, which are larger and more rigorous than a phase II. The study, called the CENTAUR trial, was published in the NEJM . The study enrolled 137 patient with ALS, with two-thirds in the treatment group and one-third in the placebo group. That is a relatively small trial for a clinical study, but not uncommon for ALS studies as it is a rare disease with short survival. Here are the results:

In a modified intention-to-treat analysis, the mean rate of change in the ALSFRS-R score was −1.24 points per month with the active drug and −1.66 points per month with placebo (difference, 0.42 points per month; 95% confidence interval, 0.03 to 0.81; P=0.03). Secondary outcomes did not differ significantly between the two groups. Adverse events with the active drug were mainly gastrointestinal.

The effect size is small and the statistical significance is slight. But actually, the results are much more suspect than that if you delve into the details. Here is a nice analysis published in a blog post on the Science website, which I will summarize. First, there were problems with randomization. The first 18 patients were all assigned to treatment, because the placebos had not yet shipped when the trial started. The next nine were then assigned to placebo, and then normal randomization took over from there. This is a small problem, but it partially unblinded the study and given the small numbers of subjects, small anomalies can be significant.

In my opinion the most significant issue is that 12 patients in the treatment group were on either riluzole or edaravone, the other approved drugs for ALS, while only two patients in the placebo group were. This is a critical asymmetry. Further, the primary outcome of the study is changes to a scale used to assess neurological function in ALS patients (the ALSFRS-R scale). The question is, do patients with ALS progress linearly along this scale as their disease worsens, or does progression follow another pattern? The study assumed a linear progression, but this may not be true.

Does all this matter? Absolutely. In fact, the FDA’s own analysis showed that if you make any changes to the choices made by the researchers in terms of how to analyze the data, the results become non-significant. If this sounds like p-hacking, that’s because it is. The company running the trial, Amylyx, chose the one analysis that showed a barely significant result.

Looked at from this perspective, the results don’t look good. If you ask – should SBM support the FDA approval of a drug combination with unknown mechanism of action based on a single preliminary study that is barely statistically significant and only as a result of clear p-hacking, the answer might seem obvious. But there is another layer to this case that makes it more complicated.

In a letter to the FDA [PDF], ALS clinicians asked them to approve Relyvrio for ALS. They write:

There is no cure for ALS, and most people with the disease die within 2-5 years of diagnosis. The unmet need is critical and pressing. That means that therapies that provide benefit, even if the effect is incremental, need to be available to ALS specialists and neurologists who are in the front lines providing care and treatment to people with ALS.

I actually know some of the people who signed this letter and worked with them. They are all serious and dedicated scientists and clinicians, and their opinion should be taken seriously. Because ALS is an almost universally fatal disease with few treatment options that are not very effective, we need to consider the risk-vs-benefit of using speculative treatments based on preliminary data. This drug combination is not magic – it has some reasonable plausibility. It is relatively safe. So the risk vs benefit, even if the possibility of benefit is small, is reasonable. What they are saying is – give us as clinicians treating these patients the option to decide if this is worth it for our patients.

I would consider Relyvrio to be an experimental treatment for ALS, despite the FDA approval, and its use to be compassionate care, not proven therapy. This is all well-established and ethically valid practice. The question is – how should the FDA have handled this? They have clearly moved recently to the position of approving treatments for neurodegenerative diseases at a lower standard than normal because of the seriousness of these diseases.

Also – there is a phase III trial in the works for Relyvrio, with results likely available in 2024. A larger and more rigorous trial should answer the question. I would not be surprised if the new trial shows no efficacy, although of course I hope that it confirms a clinical benefit. If it does prove with better data to be worthless, then the FDA should withdraw approval. In the end, that is a reasonable approach, as long as the more rigorous trials are done and the results affect approval and practice.

However, there is a final concern – whether it will be possible to recruit patients for a placebo-controlled trial when they can get prescribed the drug. Why take a chance on getting the placebo? If that turns out to be the case, then that would cast the FDA’s decision in a much more problematic light.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Several weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their jobs. I thought we might receive several dozen replies. Instead, we received several hundred. We heard from teachers and professors; from opera singers and orchestra musicians; from corporate executives and tech workers; from screenwriters, playwrights, and book editors; and from sailors and summer-camp directors.Last week, I read all of your emails. Today, I’m presenting more than two dozen replies in alphabetical order—from A(id workers) to T(impanists for metropolitan orchestras). I’ve provided a one-line summary of each respondent’s answer to the prompt followed by an edited and often condensed quote.I hope you have as much fun reading these answers as I did. You’ll learn that humanitarians aren’t as nice as you dreamed; that some pastors prefer funerals to weddings; that chief executives still have bosses they’re afraid of; that many pharmacists are anti-medication; and that for screenwriters, talking is a more important skill than writing.Aid WorkerIt isn’t about charity. It’s about politics and stability.International aid is almost never handing out bags of food or clothes to people. It is about working with national partners and hosting governments to build systems that deliver better for people. It is a lot more complicated than giving stuff away.International aid is not charity. It is an investment in geopolitical stability. And it is less than 1 percent of the federal budget in the US. And many other countries devote higher percentages of their GDP than the U.S. Think about that in relation to military spending when things fall apart, and you see it’s really a bargain.Book EditorIt’s a sales job.A book editor spends 90 percent of their time working on selling a book, that is, publishing, and only 10 percent of their time working with its author to make that book the best it can be, that is, actually editing.ChefIt’s not like being a visual artist with food. It’s more like being a middle manager (with food).As a chef, most people assume that I spend my day eating food and making up new dishes. The reality is that I am a middle manager who spends most of my time managing my employees, writing schedules, completing checklists, and placing orders. So much less glamorous than most expect.Corporate Communications ExecutivePeople think the job is just writing. Nope.I work in corporate communications for a Fortune 500 company, and people often think they can do my job. They think it’s just writing and they can do it themselves. Uh, no. Yes, strong writing is required as part of the job, but corporate communications is more than that.As communication professionals, we communicate company strategy and purpose to our employees, protect its reputation among the public, and connect employees to company culture through our work. Great communicators are thought leaders to senior leadership who intimately understand the business to develop and deliver communication strategies that result in increased employee awareness, adoption, or engagement.We can work long hours, sometimes under tight deadlines with colorful personalities or in stressful situations. It’s not for everyone, but hey, I love my job.Data scientist No. 1STEM jobs are creative too. I’m writing as a data scientist and wanted to give the common misconceptions about AI/machine learning more broadly:It’s just math, not magic. A lot of people talk about machine learning in a very sci-fi manner. People worry if AI is becoming “sentient” or “too smart.” People tend to anthropomorphize the word learning in machine learning. ML is effectively math. All of these algorithms—even the complex deep-learning neural nets—are a mix of linear algebra and nonlinear equations. In middle school/high school, we learn to fit lines given data with the equation y=mx+b. This is what is called a parametric equation—we have to solve for two parameters: m and b. It’s a relatively simple equation, one that we can often do by hand or with minimal calculations. AI fits equations like this, but instead of simple equations with two parameters, these can be insanely complex and have millions or billions of parameters. The emphasis on machine in machine learning is the fact that these equations are just too complex for people to do by hand, so we rely on computers to do all of these calculations at speeds that no person could ever dream of doing on their own. So to summarize: When people refer to machines “learning,” they are referring to a computer filling in the appropriate parameters to a complex mathematical function; these parameters are determined from the data used to train this function.STEM people are creative! There seems to be this stereotype that people in STEM—especially engineers—are super robotic. We think about them as just about as far away as possible from those in the arts in terms of creativity, but I think this is wrong! The best engineers are incredibly creative. Building good programs and writing good code is not just about knowing a coding language. You are constantly hitting roadblocks that require creative solutions. There are always tons of ways to make a script run, but it’s on you as the coder to design a solution that is efficient, scalable, easy to follow, and won’t cause future tech debt. This is not something a single-note thinker would be able to do well.Data Scientist No. 2Coding is a smaller part of tech jobs than the average person thinks.The most common misconception about data science is the amount of time we actually spend coding. Coding is probably only 10 percent of our time and is often done in chunks of time (i.e., three days of lots of coding and then not much for a while). The vast majority of our time is Googling how to troubleshoot a bug, brainstorming how to code or solve a specific problem, learning new technologies/softwares, designing technical diagrams, using low-/no-code tools, and communicating with stakeholders. Coding is likely a smaller component of most tech jobs than the average person believes.Debate Coach for High SchoolIn this field, facts are less important than the presentation of logic.There are lots of things people don’t understand about competitive debate. For one, people tend to overestimate the importance of rhetoric and formality. Using pretty words in a presidential debate might help score you some polling points. But nine times out of 10, competitive-debate rounds are won on logic, not polish.For another, people tend to overestimate the importance of facts. I know that sounds bad. What I really mean is that citing individual studies and statistics is unlikely to score you points with judges. It makes sense if you think about it: There is so much data out there that no individual number can capture the full scope of reality. Who cares if a poll shows that 60 percent of workers hate their jobs? Your opponents can point to another study claiming that only 15 percent of workers hate their jobs, and unless judges want to spend hours scouring the internet to fact-check every single cited source, no one will get anywhere. Logic is much more convincing.Personally, I think everyone could benefit from a year or so of debate coaching. Debating helps you gain confidence, think critically, and BS your way through job interviews and presentations. But competitive debate is not an accurate re-creation of any kind of real-life argument: There are strict and sometimes unintuitive standards that define what constitutes a persuasive case, and anything else is noise. Is it better for discussions about gun control and health care to take place in a simulated, unrealistic environment? Well, that’s up for debate.ER DoctorYes, the job is incredibly stressful. That’s why you have to be incredibly prepared.I am retired now, but the most common reaction when I tell people that I was an ER doctor for 40 years was “OMG, how stressful that must have been!”The truth is, unless you are a rookie, you have experienced many, many heart-wrenching situations where very bad things happen to people. Similarly, you encounter innumerable situations in which you must make critical decisions without much information when the well-being of a fellow human depends on that decision. But, like the Boy Scouts, we are prepared. We are trained; we have necessary equipment; and we have a team to work with. We don’t feel helpless; we feel we are doing what we are there for. Having said that, I experienced anxiety almost routinely in situations where I was behind and people were waiting hours to be taken care of. That was stressful!Financial AnalystThe job is about numbers. But everyone thinks in stories.I am an analyst by profession. I read a lot; I write a fair amount; I build a lot of presentations and speak to lots of CEOs, boards of directors, ministers, and the like. Here is what people don't get about my job: Everyone thinks in stories. Perhaps data drives that story (or data IS the story), or maybe compounding anecdotes drive the story. Whatever it is, it’s a story. We are narrative creatures, and we want to be told stories, whether it is about scientific progress or human frailty or what the world will look like a year, a decade, a century from now. And not only that—most of the people that consider themselves the most rational/objective are the most prone to storytelling-path dependence, particularly as they become very successful. Story becomes mythos.Humanitarian“The biggest misconception I’ve found is that people think I must be a lovely person.”I’m a humanitarian, currently in a war zone. My friends often assume I am standing on the back of a truck handing out supplies. But in fact I am currently sitting on a bench balancing my computer on my knee while I try to get enough internet to request more supplies from my logistics team and an updated budget from the finance team, and more time to finalize a report that was due a week ago to a donor.The biggest misconception I’ve found is that people, especially on dating sites, think I must be a lovely person. Not saying I’m not nice. But I wouldn’t have gotten very far in this job if I weren’t ambitious, determined, and downright stubborn at times. The assumption seems to be that I do this out of the goodness of my heart. But actually I’m highly qualified (I don’t think I know anyone in the job without a master’s) and reasonably well paid (not compared to the private sector but you can’t spend much in a lockdown, so my finances are okay). I do it because I love it, not because I think I should. I’m also not naive, and even on my best days I don’t think I can save the world, or even the very small part of it I’m hoping to help. I’m just trying to stave off the worst until people and communities can start to get back on their feet.Government ConsultantGovernment employees have become glorified project managers.I work for a private-consulting engineering firm, but I’m among the hundreds of thousands of consultants that functionally operate the government. Since the ’90s the federal budget has quadrupled, but the workforce has remained the same. Rather than paying for federal employees, that money has gone to private consultants that do all the research, write all the reports, and recommend all the policy. Government employees have become glorified project managers. This is the model of small-government efficiency we’ve settled on as a nation.Grape Grower“The best fertilizer is the farmer’s boots on the ground.”Our farming uses immigrant labor, provided by a farm labor contractor. We don’t ask if they are legal because the contractor is responsible for payroll. But if farmers didn’t use immigrants, we wouldn’t have the variety of food and the price would be far, far higher. Do Americans really want higher-priced food with less variety?Farming requires patience, perseverance, flexibility, and ingenuity to fix things when they break. I never realized how clever my husband was until he fixed every piece of equipment we use.The best fertilizer is the farmer’s boots on the ground. Walking your property tells you where water runoff occurs, where animals pose a threat, which micro-area needs a little more compost. Big commercial operations treat everything the same and do it mechanically, albeit at a lower cost but without the expression of the unique terroir inherent to your property.IT Project Manager“I have a B.A. in geography and do just fine.”Most people assume I was a developer or have a computer-science or engineering degree and that I couldn’t possibly be a good IT project manager without this background. Actually, I have a B.A. in geography and do just fine in the IT world. Sure, I have limitations when the techies get into the weeds but I can also use my lack of formal technical skills to my advantage. For one, I’m not too proud to ask the dumb or obvious questions that my tech colleagues avoid for fear of looking less, well, tech savvy. No one expects me to know better.Lobbyist No. 1“Most people assume lobbying is legal money laundering. Most people are quite correct.”I have worked as a lobbyist at the Texas Capitol for more than 20 years. Most people assume lobbying is legal money laundering, and most people are quite correct. However, not all lobbyists are money changers in the temple. In fact, many of us do not make campaign contributions, wine and dine legislators, or even work for big corporations or special interests. Many lobbyists also represent low-income families, nonprofit organizations, and, well, the not-so-horrible stuff.Lobbyist No. 2The industry isn’t just a bunch of unethical fat cats. (However, it includes unethical fat cats.)First, I don’t buy elected officials. The money is used to build a relationship and keep them in office. I NEVER buy votes or access.There are bad apples; we see them all the time. Most of us are ethically bound to never blend the line of an “ask” (for a vote or favor) and handing over a check.Second, I’m not a fat cat. While there are some exceptions, a reception grip and grin is basically it. Sure, I can eat and drink well, but we spend 90 percent of our day walking from office to office.Third, the American process isn’t broken, it’s just super, super slow and complicated. Hundreds of bills are signed into law each year. Getting those done is a considerable lift because only small groups care about them versus, say, the big transportation bill, clean-energy investments, or the CHIPS and Science Act. The small laws change people’s lives a lot more than anyone knows.Partisanship is real and a myth at the same time. The GOP hated Trump! The Dems don’t all like Biden! The question is do they have the muster to admit it publicly? There are good people on both sides, but more often than not, the names you hear a lot of—a few southern and New England senators—are totally in it for the headline. The rest want to get stuff done.NeurologistThey don’t all make “boatloads of money.” If I were a procedural neurologist in private practice, I could make boatloads of money. I am an academic neurologist with a low-paying procedure and make a little over $200,000 a year. That is after 13 years of education and training and 25 years post-internship residency and training. The most we are able to receive in raises is 3 percent per year. I got one as well as a $7,500 productivity bonus this year. In the private sector you lose or gain money based on how much income you generate, or relative value units (RVUs). In academics we get an email each month telling us where we are on the expected RVUs. I am way over expected as I am classified as mostly clinical. The research and teaching I do is barely considered in calculating my salary. So, I just work harder, see more patients, and don’t make more money. I came to academics from the private sector for a variety of reasons and took a 50 percent pay cut.I hate when I try to engage a patient in their care only to hear, “I’ve done my research.” So, your Dr. Google or Fox News is equal to my training and years of practice? Wow, you must be super smart. This was very evident when discussing COVID vaccinations with patients who were immunocompromised and at greatest risk.Neuroscientist“Drugs are weird. Brains are weird. Put them together, and it gets ineffable.”Right now I'm running a study in which I give people psychedelics (think LSD, magic mushrooms, etc.) and then measure what happens to their brain activity. When I tell people what I do, the first thing people don’t get is that this is, in fact, a real job. It’s all legal and happening at a real university. I’ve had people just simply not believe me!The second question I tend to get is: “How do you make sure no one gets addicted?” The answer is that we don’t really have to. Psychedelics carry very little addiction risk. They are about as addictive as meditation, or travel. I often forget how few people know this.I also have to make sure no one has a so-called bad trip. This is certainly a complex task, but one thing I wish more people understood was that bad trips are not completely random. Though psychedelics are always a little bit unpredictable, it’s not like you take LSD and have a 50 percent chance of hell. The risk of anxious reactions can be greatly minimized if you know what you’re doing, and we don’t see bad trips in our lab very often. A lot of people I meet are surprised at how safe working with these drugs can be, mentally as well as physically.But it’s also hard for people to get what I do because the effects of psychedelics in general are really tough to explain. Psychedelics cause an intensely altered state of consciousness in which normal, everyday existence can seem unrecognizable. They affect everyone very differently, and they can cause both absurd hallucinations and sensible personal insights. Many people simply find it hard to fathom that a drug could cause insightful, meaningful experiences for some people—“trips” that they cherish for a very long time. But this is routine. Even though it’s [prompted by] “just” a drug, most of my study participants say afterwards that the experience was one of the most meaningful in their entire lives (it usually makes the top five, or at least the top 10).I don't really blame people for not getting my job, though. Drugs are weird. Brains are weird. Put them together, and it gets ineffable. If I didn’t love that, I wouldn’t be studying it.Managing DirectorEven when you run a company, you still have a boss.The things most people don’t get about running a company are:1) You still have a boss. You may have the ultimate power in terms of making decisions around the future of the company, but if you are not the majority shareholder, then you need to have those decisions approved at board meetings. Even if you do own the company, you may have a bank loan, so you have to do what they want (e.g., covenants), or you may have a significant client or supplier, which means you have to do what they want.2) It’s all about people. To be honest, I didn’t get this before I moved up from CFO. However you want to phrase it—I prefer “right people in the right seats”—that’s pretty much all I think about. Why is that team failing? Is it the management, or the workload, or the dynamics within that team? Stuff fails and succeeds because of people, not tech.NurseThe air-traffic controller of the health-care systemPatients in the hospital have no idea how much bullshit, danger, and negative experiences we keep from reaching them. Even when we’re not physically with you, we are advocating for you and coordinating your care. We collaborate with pharmacy, respiratory, doctors, consulting teams, case management, social work, dietary/nutrition, imaging, physical therapy, occupational therapy, lab, phlebotomy, central supply, environmental services, transportation, even the chaplain. We are the middleman for all of those for every single patient. There’s so much going on in the background in addition to what patients see.Opera SingerMore like a professional athlete than you’d thinkOne thing I’d say people don’t understand about this job is that it’s not all about "talent.” It's more about actual hard work. Working as an opera singer is more like being a professional athlete, rather than being a delicate “artiste.” You start out with some natural talent, then spend years of your life and a lot of money developing and honing and perfecting that talent to be viable and appealing to opera companies and other performing-arts organizations. The amount of success you may achieve (and whether that success allows you to make a living as a performer) is very much a crapshoot, dependent on luck and a whole host of factors over which the singer has little to no control.PastorThe funerals are more interesting than the weddings.I have served as pastor of a few churches over the past 20 years. In addition to the weekly preaching, Bible study, and pastoral-care calls, I also have the blessing of officiating at funerals and weddings.The experience of preparing for and officiating a funeral is infinitely more interesting and more important than the same work for weddings. The whole of the community is much more honest and real around funerals than weddings. It is on the occasion of death that we get down to the truly important things in our common life together.Pharmacist“I think most people would be shocked to learn how anti-medication some of us are.”Most people have no concept of how their health insurance works or that we as pharmacists have no say in what insurance charges them for medications. Patients would be well served to review the details of their policies and compare coverage for the medications they need.Additionally, many patients are unaware that we are charged a fee every time we submit a claim for insurance or a discount card. Lastly, as a pharmacist I think most people would be shocked to learn how anti-medication some of us are. Medications are seldom the sole factor when it comes to addressing health issues, and polypharmacy leads to countless adverse reactions, increases the risk of medication errors, and ultimately enriches drug companies who want you to remain unwell.Postal WorkerOnline orders have a hidden cost: “back-breaking” labor and unusual work hours.What I want people to know about my job is that people are doing grueling, back-breaking work at all hours around the U.S.A. to get your Amazon and UPS packages to you. COVID might be starting to go away, but ever since people got used to ordering things from their couch, Amazon is bigger than ever. It never stops. I work at a local post office. Amazon now brings its first truck at 1 a.m., so that’s the time I have to go to work. It used to be 5 a.m.Your package arrives in a shipment of large cardboard boxes and shrink-wrapped pallets. We break those down, scanning the barcode of each package and placing them in separate bins for the different carrier routes. It is grueling, almost soul-killing work—very physical. Another truck arrives anywhere between 3 and 5:30 a.m. Sometimes there’s a third truck. (Full-time workers are required to take a one-hour lunch on weekdays; part-timers are not. In an eight-hour day, we are allowed two 15-minute breaks. If it turns into a 10-hour day, we are allowed one more break.)Sunday is no different, except that only two of us are there, and the carriers come in earlier. Holidays are the same as Sundays. I would like to ask people if they really need to have their packages delivered on Sundays and holidays. Workers are giving up much-needed physical rest and much-needed family time to process and deliver on those days. (Luckily there is a local union rule that management has to give us eight hours between the end of one day’s shift and the beginning of another shift. It’s nowhere near enough time to rest. But if it were up to management, there would be far fewer hours in between, that’s for sure.) For the first one and a half hours of the 1 a.m. shift, the building’s air-conditioning is not on.Real-Estate BrokerThey do more than just sit around and check Zillow. And most don’t work on a salary.As a residential real-estate broker, I often encounter the perception that everything is on Zillow or Redfin and that all I’m needed for is my access to these listings. Your Realtor does so much more! Sure, you can find the listings, but we know of homes being sold off-market (pocket listings, they're called). More than that, we are your advocate for buying or selling a home. We have your back and will work so hard to help you earn or save the most money while buying or selling the right house.Other broad misconceptions are around how we get clients and how we get paid. Every real-estate agent is out there marketing themselves, working by referral for the most part and not being fed leads (unless they buy them, and those are expensive and rarely pan out). Very few brokers work on a salary; we work on commission, period.And while real estate is widely understood as a sales profession, we are truly here to help! We want to be a resource for our clients. I get so much satisfaction from having just the right contractor for a client at just the right time. The relationships built during these very emotional transactions ([a house] is probably your biggest asset!) are deep and lasting and make this a very rewarding line of work.Sailor“If something goes very very wrong, who are we going to call for help? Buzz Fucking Lightyear?”I am a sailor by profession. A delivery skipper, to be exact. My husband and I deliver brand new sailboats all over the planet. Before anyone gets their panties all in a wad, let me just inform you that, yes, swearing like a sailor is a real thing. Because, well, we all fucking swear like sailors. Here are some big myths about my job and the actual reality that it is."You guys are living the dream!" If one more person says that to me I am going to fucking throat-punch them. Of course we are not. Whose fucking dream is it to have a goddamn hurricane form overhead while they are working? We have had it happen, and it sucks. There is nowhere to run or hide.“You must have a great time out there, watching the sunset, kicking back, having a beer. What a life!” Fuck you. We don’t drink while sailing. You would be an idiot to drink while sailing, even on your own boat. When things go wrong at sea, things go wrong very very fast, and it’s usually a cascading series of events. If you are hanging around out here being a drunk fucking slob, chances are you are going to get hurt, hurt someone else, die, or all of the above.“It takes that long to get to Tahiti? Don’t you stop?” What are you a fucking moron? There’s nothing out there. Look at a goddamn map. At one point, in the middle of the Pacific, we are in what is called the Null Zone. We are actually closer to the people on the International Space Station than we are to actual land and people. It’s a very cool fact, but also intimidating. If something goes very very wrong, who are we going to call for help? Buzz Fucking Lightyear? When I am sailing the boat, my husband sleeps and vice versa. We see each other at watch change and our one big meal a day, dinner. Unless something goes wrong and then it’s all hands on deck until it’s not wrong anymore. That could be anywhere from four hours to four days. Or more.”ScreenwriterMost of the job involves talking, not writing.﻿I went to film school with the intent of becoming a writer/director like Paul Thomas Anderson or Spike Lee but ended up focusing on screenwriting because I was bad at making friends and raising money, both of which you needed to be able to do to progress through the directing program by making short films at the college I attended. Productions cost money and need crews, who knew?I like writing. I like the battle that goes on between my brain and the blank page. I’m up against it on my own, and it suits me. But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you decide you want to be a screenwriter and especially a TV writer: Most of your job involves talking, not writing. You have to sell producers on your ideas, then you have to discuss their notes, then you have to do it all over again with the studios and networks, and then you have to do it even more as your script veers quixotically toward production as more and more collaborators get involved. You have to talk to directors and actors. It’s endless.The business of writing in Hollywood then is really the business of talking. And those who are good at talking can be very successful—while also being not that great at writing. Contrarily, if you can’t talk to other people but can write beautifully, you are likely screwed, because the process of making film and TV is so collaborative you have to be able to communicate your ideas verbally. If you only want to write, don’t come to Hollywood.Software Engineer“It’s amazing that any of this shit works at all.”I work in the field of site reliability engineering, a niche within the tech industry at the intersection of software engineering and operations. Site reliability engineers are the folks tasked with making sure the largest websites, apps, and networks in the world are up and running. All. The. Time. They are often the first ones on the job when one of those things goes down.There are two things the world should know about the work we do:1. It's amazing that any of this shit works at all. The simple act of performing a search for Best Burger in Minneapolis from your phone requires not only hundreds of software systems to execute code in less than one second, but also communication via radio waves, copper cables, and fiber-optic lines. It’s mind-boggling that it even works, let alone that it works almost all the time.2. Everything is broken all the time. The internet is incredibly resilient. The network, and the software systems that run on it, are designed to expect failures and minimize disruption from them. Which is a good thing, because failures happen constantly. Could be a bug in the new code, a ship drops an anchor on a fiber-optic line, or—and this my favorite—some of these systems grow to be so big that they take on emergent properties that no one intended or predicted, resulting in unexpected failures.So next time you can’t post a snarky tweet because Twitter is down, or you can’t buy an organic cheesecloth because of an esoteric error message, just remember how crazy it is that any of this works at all.Stenographer“I am certified to capture the spoken word, up to 260 words per minute, and instantly create a written record of what was spoken. I do so with 99.5 percent accuracy.”I work as a freelance deposition reporter. The transcripts that I produce are often used in court to impeach a witness, to support a party’s claims, to provide information in a trial when a witness is not available to appear live, or for any other reason deemed appropriate by the court.The keyboard is the part of my job most people find fascinating. With just 21 letter keys (plus an asterisk key, a number bar, and eight number keys), I can write any word in the English language with just a few keystrokes. (There are specialized keyboards for many different languages; each one is configured to best suit that language.)The stenographic keyboard is a marvel and I could go on for days about its beauty. Here’s a basic explanation [from the Made in Chicago Museum]: “The left side keys represent initial consonant sounds, the right side represents ending consonant sounds, and four bottom keys (operated by the thumbs) create your vowels. ‘The genius of the Ireland keyboard—the simplicity of it is fantastic,’ Robert Wright later said. ‘Every sound is in the position it is on the keyboard because of the frequency with which it occurs in the language, and, secondly, the sequence in which it occurs. You have two total phonetic systems under each hand.’”Stenography is a phonetic, syllabic language. To write a word, I may depress one or, usually, multiple keys at one time, and many words require more than one keystroke. These keystrokes are represented in letters, but the letters often do not mean what they look like. For example, to write the word background, I would tap the keyboard twice, first for the sound “back” and second for the sound “ground.” The stenographic output would be: /PWABG/TKPWROUPBD. When I write, I also have to be mindful of homonyms, regional accents, proper names, punctuation, certain nonverbal actions, prefixes and suffixes, identifying who is speaking, and probably a hundred other things that by now I don’t even think about, I just do. All while folks are speaking up to 300 words per minute.Summer-Camp DirectorFolks, it’s a desk job.I am a summer-camp director, and people don’t seem to realize that it’s not all fun and games. Imagine you rent a boat with all of your friends. Everyone gets to hang out, waterski, and have a beer. But someone has to drive the boat. They’re still out on the boat, but they don’t get to waterski or have a beer. Honestly half of the time in this analogy the camp director isn’t even the boat driver; they’re the rental manager stuck inside behind the desk making sure all the boats are insured, properly repaired, and getting rented to the right people.Timpanist“Most of my non-percussion colleagues don’t understand my job … Many of our conductors don’t either!”I’m a principal timpanist for [a prominent big-city orchestra]. The timpani are the big copper drums in the back—think 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike a snare drum or a bass drum, timpani produce specific pitches. Now, we play a lot of operas by Italian composers, like Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini. But the thing is, back when they were composing in the early 1800s, the quality of timpani in their pit orchestras was really poor; most of their timpani didn’t generate a recognizable pitch. So those composers basically wrote for “high boom” and “low boom.” Fast-forward 200 years, and the expectation today is to perform these operas on modern instruments. Therefore, whereas the rest of my colleagues receive their part from the music library in “basically ready to play” condition, my part is often woefully incomplete: I have to rewrite it, in many cases from scratch, in order to meaningfully integrate with and support the harmony. It’s a lot of homework! Funny thing? Most of my non-percussion colleagues don’t understand this is part of my job. Funnier still? Many of our conductors don’t either!

Shilling for anti-U.S. dictatorships is one of Washington’s most time-honored bipartisan traditions. But what if getting paid to lobby for the United States’ enemies — who happen to be the world’s worst tyrants — were no longer allowed? A bill pending in Congress is bringing Republicans and Democrats together in an effort to make immoral financial arrangements with these regimes illegal as well.

When foreign dictatorships try to affect U.S. politics and policy, they often hire former U.S. officials and lawmakers to launder and promote their agenda by petitioning our government, Congress and society writ large. Under the current rules, so long as Americans who are advocating for foreign governments, politicians and corporations disclose these activities, they can legally be paid to work against America’s interests. The theory underpinning the current system was that transparency would lead to accountability, which would in turn protect our democracy.

That system is clearly failing. President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, one of his top lawyers and his first national security adviser have all been credibly accused of violating the foreign agent registration rules. Tony Podesta, the brother of President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff (who is also a current adviser to President Biden) reportedly was paid $1 million to lobby the Biden administration on behalf of the sanctioned Chinese tech company Huawei. Former GOP House speaker John Boehner works for a lobbying firm that represents the Chinese Embassy. Former Republican senator David Vitter lobbies for a Chinese company called Hikvision that has been accused by the U.S. government of complicity in genocide — as did former senior Democratic senator Barbara Boxer, until she got embarrassed and quit.

Pushing the agenda of the United States’ adversaries is big business in Washington. The huge scale of these relationships became painfully clear after Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, when the U.S. government expanded sanctions against Putin’s cronies, sending the D.C. lobbying industry scrambling. Big lobbying firms such as BGR, Squire Patton Boggs, the Glover Park Group, Mercury Public Affairs and many others have been taking millions from Russian oligarchs, Russian banks or Chinese tech companies to help their clients navigate the risk of U.S. sanctions, try to shape U.S. laws and influence U.S. public opinion.

These U.S. firms will often defend their actions as legal and protected on free-speech grounds. Nobody is arguing that exercising free speech, even on behalf of an anti-U.S. dictatorship, should be illegal. But neither do Americans have an explicit right to profit from working for the United States’ enemies.

That’s the thinking behind the Stop Helping Adversaries Manipulate Everything Act, also known as the Shame Act. The title harks back to a time in Washington when lobbyists had at least a little shame and would stop taking money from despots when they committed atrocities. But if the lobbying industry once had any shame, those days are long gone.

The new bipartisan bill would bar any American from taking money from any foreign adversary of the United States or any of their agents for lobbying, public relations or representational services of any kind. This would also ban Americans from being paid to represent any foreign company that is either directly or indirectly controlled by a foreign adversary.

The legislation would amend both the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Lobbying Disclosure Act and would apply to all countries on the Commerce Department’s official list of “foreign adversaries,” which currently includes China (including Hong Kong), Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

Introduced Tuesday, the bill has two Republican and two Democratic co-sponsors: Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.).

“D.C. lobbying firms are making millions from our greatest adversaries,” Banks told me. “The American people are taking it from all sides. Nobody is sticking up for them, they’re fed up, and this has got to stop. It’s time to drain the swamp.”

A big part of the foreign malign influence problem is that much of this work is directed at influencing the American people, Cohen told me, through promotion of propaganda and disinformation. The legislation would also apply to celebrities who push the propaganda of foreign adversaries.

“It’s important that we deter all Americans from doing the work of U.S. adversaries,” Cohen said. “We must disincentivize this type of work, and that begins with cutting off the money.”

Of course, these former officials and celebrities could still support whatever tyrant they like — they just wouldn’t be able to charge for it anymore.

“Free speech is a bedrock of our Constitution, but that has never meant massively profiting on the corruption of the likes of the Chinese Communist Party, the terrorist regime in Tehran, war criminal Putin, and mass murderer Bashar al-Assad,” Wilson told me.

Everyone knows why this bill faces an uphill climb in Congress: because so many lawmakers plan to shill for dictators after leaving office. But everyone also knows that containing despotic influence in Washington is the right thing to do — and that it is long overdue. We have to drain the foreign dictator influence swamp, once and for all.

When I co-wrote a profile of Alex Jones back in 2018, I thought it was somewhat noteworthy that for all his popularity, he had never published a book. My theory at the time was that because Jones is so dependent on his unique, shall we say, personal charisma for the effectiveness of his message, any attempt to spell out his theory in writing would expose how little sense his actual worldview makes. 
I confess that I was a little surprised, then, to look at the Wall Street Journal’s list of Nonfiction Bestsellers this month and find on it a new book credited to one Mr. Alex Jones: The Great Reset: And The War For The World. It has not, as far as I can tell, been reviewed by any mainstream outlet, but if the Journal is accurate, it is selling briskly. It comes with blurbs from Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, and Steve Bannon, as well as from Dr. Mercola, “founder of Mercola.com, the most visited natural health site on the internet for the last twenty years.” (Mercola has repeatedly been in trouble with the FDA and FTC for making false claims about the products he sells, and the New York Times calls him the country’s leading purveyor of coronavirus misinformation.) Mercola says that Jones’ book does “an excellent job of bringing the globalists’ plans into the light.”
Indeed, The Great Reset finds Jones banging the same drum as usual: a conspiracy of “globalists” is attempting to seize control of the world and establish a repressive totalitarian state.1 The conspiratorially-minded often make strange choices in deciding who the world’s leading villains are (George Soros, for example), seemingly selecting some wealthy plutocrat at random to cast as the leading plotter. In The Great Reset, Jones’ nemesis is Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum that meets annually at Davos. Schwab has written some very boring books on global economic trends, and Jones spends many pages presenting extracts from them as if they are diabolical manifestos for creating the new world order. 
The result is amusing. When the Financial Times reviewed Schwab’s book Shaping The Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in 2018, the reviewer found the book so dull and platitudinous that they wondered whether it could really have been written by a human being. It’s a TED Talk of a book about how “the world is at a crossroads,” making the point that new technologies seem like they might change society a lot. It’s full of sentences like “considering the economic pressures can also highlight where incentives problematise an entire class of technologies.” 

For Jones, however, Schwab’s writings are a blueprint for a world takeover. Schwab writes that we are “witnessing profound shifts across all industries, marked by the emergence of new business models, the disruption of incumbents and the reshaping of production, consumption, transportation and delivery systems.” Jones comments that this is full of “subtle calls to increase control over your life.” When Schwab writes that “governments and institutions are being reshaped as are systems of education, healthcare, and transportation,” Jones says that when “translated,” the sentence means “they just want to control the schools, the medical system, and your freedom of movement.” Or consider this passage from Schwab: 

“The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a new chapter in human development, driven by the increasing availability and interaction of a set of extraordinary technologies, building on three previous technological revolutions. This revolution is only in its early stages, which provides humankind with the opportunity and responsibility to shape not just the design of new technologies, but also more agile forms of governance and positive values that will fundamentally change how we live, work, and relate to each other.”

Jones comments: 

“What are these ‘more agile forms of governance’? A summary execution by firing squad without the benefit of a trial? Maybe the continued illegal detention of January 6, 2021, protestors, many of whom languish in jails more than a year after the event, who have been denied a speedy trial?” 

Jones promises to go through “all parts of Schwab’s strategy to use the Great Reset to achieve an unprecedented amount of control over your daily life” and expose that we are in a “war to control the future of human development and capture control of the human species.”
That means page after page in which Jones will quote Klaus Schwab saying something banal about “empowering stakeholders,” and Jones will comment that “whenever you hear the word ‘stakeholder,’ you should think of it as a weapon Schwab and company will use to deprive a person of their rights.” (Jones takes meaningless corporate buzzwords more seriously than anyone else does.) Jones quotes Schwab saying:

“The pandemic struck at a time when many different issues, ranging from climate change activism and rising inequalities to gender diversity and #MeToo scandals, had already begun to raise awareness and heighten the criticality of stakeholder capitalism and ESG [environmental, social, and governance] considerations in today’s interdependent world. … [N]obody can deny that companies’ fundamental purpose can no longer be simply the unbridled pursuit of financial profit; it is now incumbent upon them to serve all their stakeholders, not only those who hold shares.”

Jones says this passage proves the globalists use climate change and inequality to scare people into letting the globalists take charge:

“Remember when I said that the globalists will use any issue to promote their plans? There’s COVID-19, climate change, inequality, gender diversity, and now the #MeToo movement, all part of the globalist plan to create maximum chaos and fear, the better to implement their authoritarian agenda. The issue really doesn’t matter because the answer is always the same: globalism.”

You can see that the evidence Jones uses to support the existence of the globalist conspiracy is, to put it mildly, thin. He presents empty platitudes as smoking gun evidence. I do think I was correct to believe that because Jones relies so heavily on the theory that if you just shout your opinion loud enough people won’t be able to respond, the attempt to lay out his ideas in writing was doomed to fail. You can see when you pick up The Great Reset that Jones’ belief in a globalist conspiracy depends on fanciful creative interpretations of banal texts. 
And yet: it is also important to remember why Jones succeeds at drawing in large numbers of people. Frequently there is some kernel of truth in what Jones is saying. For instance, Jones portrays the wealthy and well-connected people who show up at the Davos conferences as a nefarious elite bent on world domination. They’re not that exactly, but they are interested in preserving the wealth and privileges of the global 1 percent. The “great reset” of Jones’ title is a real initiative put forth by the World Economic Forum, and when you look beneath the buzzwords, it’s indeed very fishy. Ivan Wecke of OpenDemocracy notes that while the WEF’s “stakeholder capitalism” plans might not have the “malicious intent” that people like Jones posit, they do foresee a world in which giant global mega-corporations have an outsized role in policy. Wecke notes that when people like Jones talk about the WEF’s “great reset” proposal, they characterize it as something like “the global elite’s plan to instate a communist world order by abolishing private property while using COVID-19 to solve overpopulation and enslaving what remains of humanity with vaccines.” (Indeed, Jones writes in The Great Reset that he believes the “most likely scenario” was that COVID-19 was “released on purpose by the globalists to terrify us into accepting their authoritarian rule, complete with dangerous vaccines that would kill or maim a large part of the population, requiring further government support.”) But Wecke shows that when the WEF talks of “multi-stakeholder inclusivity,” it appears to mean giving corporations a greater say on issues that are—and should be—decided by the UN and democratically-elected governments. 

Time and time again, Jones hits on issues where he almost has a point but then definitely doesn’t. He sees the Trilateral Commission and the late Zbigniew Brzezinski as major villains in the plotting of a technocratic world government. Not exactly, but they certainly haven’t been reliable allies of authentic democracy. Jones says that the term “public-private partnership” can be understood to mean “fascism.” Not quite, but you should be suspicious of the term, because it can mean handing control of public assets to unaccountable corporations. Jones spends an entire chapter attacking Yuval Noah Harari as a promoter of the new world order, and while Hari might not quite be that, he is an overpraised thinker whose work does help to rationalize Silicon Valley’s worst and most anti-democratic ideas. Jones discusses the risks that artificial intelligence poses in enabling governments to track and oppress their citizens, asking us to “imagine a world where your every movement is tracked. Your opinions would be analyzed by artificial intelligence (AI), and you could be instantly penalized for wrong thinking.” He seems to be envisaging a world where people who question vaccines are “penalized,” but the more likely outcome (at least in the United States) is that police and prosecutors will be furnished with new tools that help maintain our brutal system of mass incarceration. 

Jones raises concerns about central bank digital currencies, warning that they would give governments the ability to more easily impose financial penalties on dissidents. That’s not a totally unreasonable worry. But Jones, as usual, takes an issue where he might have a point into the loopiest territory imaginable. He sees a plan to integrate people’s bank accounts with systems that track their vaccination status and carbon footprint as part of the “world ID surveillance system.” He cites a Ukrainian government initiative to “put the state in a smartphone” that would have allowed people to more easily access government services and benefits online, and suggests that Putin invaded Ukraine to stop it from building its totalitarian app: 

“You’re talking about a centralized system totally controlled by the government that not only tracks and knows everything about you, but can freeze your account as it sees fit! Not only that, but these Ukrainian Digital ID services will also feature vaccination, electronic passports, and Ukrainian Covid Certificates. Ukraine was pioneering a system that governments all around the world could use as a template to control their populations. If we look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine with that perspective, do Putin’s actions seem as difficult to understand?”

As I say, Jones can begin with an observation that might, if further developed by someone with greater regard for evidence, form the basis of a valuable point. Other times, however, he just comes up with weird nonsense, as with his idea that efforts to stop climate change by rolling back fossil fuel use are part of a plan to “destroy everything” and create “global corporate government”: 

“The plan is simple: destroy the fossil fuel industry, send prices soaring, manufacture an energy crisis, blame fossil fuels, and shut down reliable global energy, without a viable immediate alternative. This is what the Great Reset is all about. If you want a global corporate government that rules over humanity, you have to destroy everything first.”

Yes, in the Jones conception of the world, corporations hate fossil fuels. Meanwhile, here in the real world, the battle to shut down fossil fuel use is a battle against the “corporate government.” 
One would hope that at this point, not many people take Alex Jones seriously. The Sandy Hook cases have exposed that he is a serial liar who cruelly attacked traumatized parents and caused them to have to live in fear of his deranged followers. Sadly, the fact that his new book is a bestseller shows that there is at least some audience for his theories, and it’s alarming to look at, for example, the comments section on his Joe Rogan appearance and see how many people concluded that Jones made a fair amount of sense. 

“I want you to see all of this as part of a plan.” — Alex Jones

The tragedy is that the people who listen to Jones sense there is something deeply wrong and unjust about the world, and they turn to him to explain to them what it is. And instead of telling them the banal truth about the way that people with status and wealth maintain that status and wealth, he weaves them a fantastical tale about Klaus Schwab giving them COVID in order to sow chaos. Jones terrifies them and leads them astray, correctly telling them that the Davos elite are up to no good, but then directing their ire against such targets as grieving Sandy Hook parents.
I actually think we should be careful before dismissing “conspiracy theories.” Some conspiracies are true, after all, and an explanation isn’t insane just because it posits that a small group of people did something without telling the public. But Jones’ book shows where paranoia can take you, and why skepticism and critical thinking are crucial if we are to maintain our ties with reality. You can end up seeing issues of major concern to the public such as fossil fuel use, vaccination, and overuse of technology as all being manipulated in part of some Big Plan. In fact, most of the issues we face are just different aspects of the same old unjust mess that no one person landed us in. Klaus Schwab seems like a neoliberal, but he is not a supervillain. The world doesn’t have supervillains, though it has a lot of greed and cruelty. The task of an intelligent person is to try to understand how it all works without drifting into madness. Want to understand corporate power? Look to Ralph Nader, or read Dollars and Sense magazine. Want to understand pharmaceutical greed and profiteering in healthcare? Read Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family, and follow the writings of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are plenty of sources for dissenting views that are critical of elites but deeply concerned with factual accuracy. 
The Great Reset is a useful cautionary tale, showing how far from reality it is possible to end up. 
Note that one Amazon reviewer of the book loved it but was disappointed that Jones said “globalists” throughout instead of “Jews,”  when the reviewer thought Jones must clearly really mean Jews. Indeed, much of Jones’ theorizing resembles anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-Semites do use “globalists” to mean Jews, but while Jones has pushed anti-Semitic conspiracies before he does not do so explicitly in the book. ↩ 

I want to write about cruelty and slander and how those dark sins are wielded as weapons of political and cultural warfare in the worst corners of the online right. While politics has never been a gentle pursuit, the advent of Trumpism and the Trumpist ethos has spawned a host of popular voices who embrace lies as a tactic and character assassination as an objective. Consider my last few days as a case study. It all started, as so many of these online mobbings do, with a lie. A person who works for The Blaze and who trolls me constantly accused me of calling management to complain about his tweets. I did no such thing. The claim is completely false, and I told him so. And that, I thought, was that.But no. His completely false claim was picked up by a gutter website called “Twitchy.” Twitchy’s business model is to package right-wing Twitter attacks into news stories, slap inflammatory headlines on them, and gleefully claim that this or that person has been shamed, destroyed, humiliated—often by a set of random Twitter trolls. I tend to ignore Twitchy even though I’m a rich source of content for them (just google “David French” and Twitchy and feast your eyes on the theater of the absurd), but as a symbol of the dysfunction of the right-wing infotainment complex, they’re one of the top 20 most-trafficked right-wing websites on the internet. It’s one thing when they write a series of juvenile insults. It’s another thing when they repeat completely false claims.Oh, but that’s not all. A semi-famous anonymous blogger named “Ace of Spades” also picked up on the story and wrote a vile, expletive-laden screed that’s too obscene to link. And he upped the ante. He claimed that I not only tried to get a Blaze employee fired, I’d also unfairly tried to get a writer at American Greatness named Julie Kelly fired. This is another flat-out lie, but this is also where things get really gross. Four years ago, Kelly tweeted that my wife, Nancy, “screwed around with her pastor when she was a teen” and condemned a piece that Nancy wrote at the Washington Post. In it, Nancy argued that if Brett Kavanaugh was guilty of the charges against him, he should not serve on the Supreme Court. Nancy was responding to arguments that Kavanaugh’s conduct wouldn’t have been disqualifying if it was true. I shared her opinion and still share her opinion. I also happen to think that the case against Kavanaugh is way too thin to be believed. Why is this so gross? Because Nancy didn’t “screw around” with anyone—she was molested by a pedophile pastor. And this happened not when she was a “teen” but when she was 12 years old. It was dreadful abuse. I called out Kelly’s lies. She refused to apologize. I called out her lies while on an Aspen Institute panel with her boss (you can hear the entire exchange here, starting at the 5:24 mark). He lied to my face and told me that Kelly had apologized. She had not. I did not call for Kelly to be fired. I called out her lies.The story gets grosser. American Greatness published (and then deleted) a poem called “Cuck Elegy” that was breathtakingly, brazenly racist, and then put my picture as the “share image” that came up when you tweeted the piece. Don’t take my word that it was racist. The New York Times’s Jane Coaston has the screenshots:Jane Coaston @janecoastonJuly 16th 201912 Retweets134 LikesLet’s chronicle the lies so far. Gutter right trolls lied that I called Blaze management. Gutter right trolls lied that I tried to get Kelly fired. Kelly misrepresented my wife’s age at the time of her abuse (and refused to apologize or delete her tweet after she was corrected). All of this, of course, has been accompanied by an online campaign of vicious insults directed at me and my wife.But am I done with this nonsense? Not by a long shot. Rather than deal with the fact that multiple people lied multiple times, the gutter right goes right back to, yes, drag queen story hour. Here’s Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter (he also is a frequent Hugh Hewitt guest host). He tweeted to his almost half-million followers, “The drag queen story hour guy is mad again. Shut up, [David French]. You’re not getting Julie Kelly fired. You’re not getting anything, except mocked.”Here we go again. This refers to the false claim that I once called drag queen story hours a “blessing of liberty.” As I’ve written (and it’s been fact-checked), the “blessing of liberty” is a phrase I use to refer to our constitutional rights of free speech and free association, the rights that allow any of us—from Christian student groups to, yes, drag queens—to exercise our rights of free speech on an equal basis. What makes all of this even more insane is the way Kelly and others claim victim status throughout the entire affair. Even though they lie and even though they attack, when you push back and tell the truth, that’s “cancel culture.” They claim victim status. It’s extraordinarily cynical.By the time this entire little online fight ended, I’d trended on Twitter and Nancy and I had both been subjected to countless vicious, slanderous attacks.Why tell the story? Because it’s important to understand how this slice of the right operates, it’s important to understand the dilemma that faces people of good will, and it’s important for understanding how toxic lies spread through the right-wing infotainment ecosystem.I know there are readers who are yelling at their screens, “Why do you respond to this, David? You’re giving them oxygen!” And I agree with you, mostly. I rarely respond to online lies and online attacks. There are right-wing publications that have “David French” tags that link to articles that are chock-full of vitriol. They’re often written for the purpose of goading me into a response. I rarely give them what they want.But why is the answer “rarely” rather than never? For the simple reason that a sufficient number of attacks made over a sufficient span of time can crush your reputation if there’s no response. I can’t tell you the number of times that people of good will have asked me about some of the worst lies because they googled my name, and the lies popped right into their feed. Unrebutted lies can cause people of good will to be automatically skeptical of anything you write. “Oh, he’s the Never Trumper who tries to cancel people who don’t agree with him and thinks drag queen story hours are a blessing of liberty.” The only thing truthful in that sentence is my opposition to Trump. The rest is a pack of lies told these last weeks, months, and years—often from people who hold themselves out as devout Christians who are seeking to save the church in America. There’s one last aspect to address. I hope it won’t happen, but online attacks—especially those that escalate so much they trend on Twitter—often trigger real-world doxxing and real-world threats. What starts online doesn’t always stay online. The message is simple. Shut up, fall in line, or you will be made to pay. I hate writing about this stuff. Indeed, the online right also mocks you and derides you when you expose their conduct. They call it “crying” or “whining” or “complaining.” But it’s important to expose a version of a process that is playing out time and again, with public figures and even private dissenters, in communities and families across America. Cross the hard right, and you will be made to pay.I’m at Duke University this week speaking at a number of events, and just this morning I spoke to a person who described the vitriol within her own family, directed immediately at anyone who departed from the Fox/talk radio line. Other journalists and politicians can tell stories far worse than mine. But this is not the time to give in. This is not the time to shrink back, join the “exhausted majority,” and cede the public square to America’s worst voices. Instead it’s vitally important for Americans—in public and in private—to live the political values they seek to advance. It’s not enough to wish for a change in American culture. It’s important to model the change, as well as imperfect people can.  To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we can resolve to live our lives with integrity. The lies may come into the world, they may even triumph. But not through us.One more thing …On Dispatch Live tonight, we’ll be discussing the astounding transformation of the Ukrainian battlefield’s, Russia’s possible military collapse, and the threat of a Russian nuclear response. This Eliot Cohen piece is your homework. It’s a sober examination of the catastrophic costs of giving in to Putin’s nuclear blackmail. This part is especially salient:To yield to nuclear blackmail, however, would be folly. Give in now, and anyone with nuclear weapons will learn that the secret to success in a negotiation is to froth at the mouth, roll up one’s eyes, and threaten a mushroom cloud. To yield to Putin would be, as Churchill said in a different but not entirely dissimilar context, to take “but the first sip from a bitter cup.” What then to do, and to threaten to do, particularly if Russia does indeed detonate one or more nuclear weapons, either as a signal or against some Ukrainian target?More:China has a stake in this, too: A world in which the nuclear taboo is broken is one in which Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea may feel that they need the security of their own nuclear deterrents. India, facing a Pakistan that may have more nuclear weapons than it does, and whose politics are terrifyingly unstable, has no interest in seeing nuclear use become acceptable. Those who can still talk to Moscow should be urged to convey that message to Russia’s leadership—if they are not, in fact, doing so already.Read the whole thing.One last thing …This newsletter has been dark. So let’s end on a happy note. It’s October, and that means the NBA is (almost) back. Preseason basketball is underway, and that means Ja Morant and a casual 360 degree dunk. Athletic greatness.Ballislife.com @BallislifeJa Morant had 22 PTS, 7 AST, 4 REB, 3 STL, 1 BLK & this 360 dunk in just 22 MINS! October 4th 2022251 Retweets2,307 Likes

There’s a great and frustrating irony about Marxism. On the one hand, it is extremely simple—almost cartoonishly so. On the other hand, millions of pages of extremely complicated writing exist trying to make it true. Simplifying Marxism, then, is no simple task. Truly, being one of the most influential pseudo-intellectual religious currents of the last century and a half, a great deal could be said about Marxism in an attempt to simplify it to its basic essence. Most people go about this incorrectly by assuming Marxism is a complicated economic and social theory of political economy.
Marx certainly wrote quite a lot in that direction, but something that can be said for certain is that the basic essence of his work is not an economic or even a social theory. In fact, it’s not a theory at all. Instead, it’s something much deeper that uses economic and/or social theories as the relevant moving parts. That’s its own complicated story, and one for another time. To keep the matter relatively simple, however, let’s start by saying that what constitutes the belief system identified with Marxism is, essentially, a theory of man and a theory of the world.
For Marx, these theories are not actually separate. As he wrote in his 1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society.” That is, what makes man human is that he is the product of the world that he, himself, creates. Marxism is a circular theory of Man’s self-creation. The theory of the world at the center of the Marxist belief system is therefore wholly dependent upon the ontological and teleological theory of Man that is also at the center of Marxist faith.
Nevertheless, these can be teased apart and at great generality, and the result is a clarified understanding of Marxism that makes a tremendous amount of sense out of the myriad “bizarre” features of today’s world. These include Critical Race Theory, Queer and/or Gender Theory, and all the other Theories of Identity Marxism and also what’s happened to our educational systems and even political currents presently flowing at the supranational level.
Marx’s Theory of Man and the World
The world of man—state, society—as Marx had it is the social structure that he creates for himself and that he, indeed, imprisons himself within. Man creates society and embodies that creation in the State, and the society, shaped by the State, in turn creates Man. Marx called the creation of society “praxis” and the creation of Man by society “the inversion of praxis.” Praxis is theory-informed activism, so activism or “the work” done in light of Marxist Theory. It is the transforming activity done by Man on the world of man. The inversion of praxis is social conditioning. The society that Man has created for himself socially conditions him almost completely deterministically. Man is limited and thus psychically incarcerated by the limitations of his social conditioning through the inversion of praxis.
Power in the world of man is not equal, however, thus neither is the capacity to create society and through it to create Man. There is a division of labor, which, like the Fall in Genesis, has estranged Man from other men and, in fact, from himself. As he wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Communism is the answer to Man’s estrangement from himself, and thus man’s estrangement from man:
Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. (pp. 96–97)
Because Man is estranged from himself and from others by the existence of private property, power is unequal. He is forced to live in an alienated state in an alien world in which the power dynamics that maintain private property prevent him not only from his birthright (in the Garden, where no one works) but also from knowing himself as a perfectly social being, which is as someone entitled to be there, in Eden, on his own terms. Thus, strange as it sounds, by maintaining his belief in private property, Man condemns himself to toil and death so that the Original Sin of owning things as individuals can be maintained.
These power relations flow from property, however, because ownership confers power. The owners are the ones who set the terms of society, and thus they set the terms to justify the injustices that make their lives possible. They, through ownership, stratify society and place themselves in the position of exploiting all but themselves while excusing themselves from any recognition that they engage in wholesale dehumanization for their own benefit. In this regard, property owners declare themselves the demiurgic creators of a corrupt and evil society. They do this by writing a religious mythology justifying their own privilege, what Marx called “ideology.” At the bottom of ideology is the belief in property ownership itself, by which the demonic forces of privilege fool people into believing the division of society—of man from man and thus (Social) Man from himself—is fair, just, and even natural.
Society, then, which conditions man through the inversion of praxis, is stratified. It’s separated into a class of people with access to that special form of property and those who are excluded from it but forced in some way to maintain it—to the sole benefit of the people who have access to it. The property holders grant themselves access to property effectively by fiat. They then write their ideology to rationalize this hierarchy of society and their position within it as natural and just, and people on both sides of the line of stratification are induced to accept it as “just the way it is.” Where religion is the opiate of the people, wrote Marx, ideology is the medical theory that prescribes it.
Society, as the world of Man, then, is ordered in an illegitimate hierarchy by people who had not right to claim status over others in the first place, according to Marx. Certain people, having laid privatizing claim to a special form of property that advantages them, have structured society so that their privilege and the exploitation that enable it are accepted. They get to write history, and they write it so that their divisive sin is rationalized and they’ll continue to be the winners. Society is stratified into those privileged by access to the special form of property and those who are oppressed by exclusion from it so that Man forgets who he truly is, creator and product of a social system called society and thus a perfectly social being. In one of his great rejections of God and, both presumably and ironically, his parents, Marx wrote,
A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life—if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life. (EPM, p. 106)
The direct reading of this passage is easily understood in the singular personal I Marx writes it in (even while he lived completely dependently on his family, his wife’s family, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels). When we realize it actually speaks not of the individual Marx but of Man as a collective—mankind itself—using Marx as an example, and remember that through creating his own society (collective) Man creates (collective) Man and (individual) men, it takes on another meaning. Man isn’t independent; he is interdependent. Man owes his existence to society, neither dependent (as its object) or independent (as its sole subject), but interdependent (subjectivity and objectivity in dialectical relationship). Self-appointed property holders have no right to create or maintain the lives of others, forcing them into dependence and life by their grace. Man is therefore Socialist in his nature, as this is the only possible solution to this “riddle of history” in which the source of Man’s life becomes Man, not in the singular but in the collective. Men, in the individual, owe their lives to Man, in the collective, which is only possible when men understand who they always were and thus who they are intended to become through the magical cycle of praxis and its never-ending inversion.
Marx’s Purpose for Being
Throughout his writings, Karl Marx was obsessed with explaining why Man is no mere animal. There may be no God, but Man is not an animal (or a machine). He is something higher. He is, in fact, the one species on the planet that creates himself. What makes Man into Man, rather than mere animal, is his capacity for bringing into existence that which he can envision in his imagination. His subjectivity is what makes him human, and his capacity to be a conscious subject aware of his own subjectivity and capacity to create from within it is what defines his humanity.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx gives a long and fairly tortured account of the genealogy of man that utterly fails to account for the infinite regress he invokes.
Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings—a species-act of human beings—has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect—the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist? (EPM, pp. 106–107)
Needless to say, Marx was weird and weirdly imperious when confronted with an obvious flaw in his self-begetting conception of Man. The false resolution Marx seems to have had in mind, however, is that Man became human by lifting himself out of animality bit by slow bit through the endless dialectical cycle of praxis and the inversion of praxis. Thus, Man made himself, though mostly unconscious of the fact that he was making himself and of the (dialectical) means by which he was making himself. How, though, did Man make himself and thus sublate himself above the other animals? Sociality. Man made himself socially, through his society, which he created for himself in the first place. Thus, Man is a social being, and if he hadn’t fallen through the invention of private property and thus his own self-estrangement, he would still realize he is a social being. Marx’s antiquated word for this is “species being,” a man who lives for the benefit of his species and who knows it:
For labour, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need—the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species—its species-character —is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.
The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life activity. Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labour reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence. (EPM, p. 73)
For animals, they are their “life activity.” That is, they are what constitutes their survival. This isn’t actually different for Man, but the “life activity” of Man has a different character because of Man’s consciousness. Man’s life activity is the construction of society, by which he constructs himself through himself. It is something he can sit apart from and contemplate and act upon willfully, envisioning how he wants it to be created. Man therefore owes his consciousness to his society, to others and his interdependent relationships with others. In fact, his “life activity” is primarily this: the conscious creation of himself and his society—thus the future of himself.
In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty. (EPM, pp. 73–74)
The problem is that the division of labor has alienated man from this true nature of himself, which he could know if he didn’t believe labor as it occurs under the division of labor is what he’s supposed to be doing with himself.
The division of labour is the economic expression of the social character of labour within the estrangement. Or, since labour is only an expression of human activity within alienation, of the manifestation of life as the alienation of life, the division of labour, too, is therefore nothing else but the estranged, alienated positing of human activity as a real activity of the species or as activity of man as a species-being. (EPM, p. 122)
What’s the resolution? Communism. As we read from him before, “communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.” How is it to be achieved? According to the Communist Manifesto, “communism can be summarized in a single sentence: abolition of private property” (ch. 2). In other words, man is to abolish private property and thereby undo his Fall and reinstate his true nature as a “species-being,” which is essentially, and not at all crudely, Communist: he is a being that has arrived at (or, more accurately, returned to) the positive transcendence of private property.
Of course, that doesn’t really answer how the abolition of private property and the division of labor that sustains it is to be accomplished, especially given that man confuses labor under division as the labor he’s meant and made to be doing. Before explaining the how, briefly note why man is so wrong about what he believes he’s supposed to be doing: the inversion of praxis. Being raised in a divided labor condition, his subjective range is limited to his own estrangement, which socialized him to believe that’s what he should be doing. Escaping this issue requires him to be conscious of himself as someone who could do something else. That’s where the how in Marxism appears. Returning to the point as Marx had it, leaving out the parts distinguishing Man from animal and continuing to the essential point further down the page,
In creating a world of objects by his practical activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as its own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being. … It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears, as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of Man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. (EPM, pp. 73–74)
The Fall of Man through the division of labor really is characterized as a Fall of Man. Man becomes estranged from himself in the same way he became estranged from God in the Fall from Eden—but now he is to be seen as his own creator, through the demiurgic powers that manifest in society itself. The result of his Fall is that Man comes to believe himself to be an individual, and thus he doesn’t and can’t know who he is.
In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form. (EPM, p. 73)
In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him. … Estranged labour turns thus [m]an’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means for his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect. (EPM, p. 74)
For Marx, Man’s “human aspect,” the quality in him that makes him essentially human instead of animal, is that he is a Communist. Thus, Marx named his view “humanism” and claimed conscious Marxist praxis “humanizes” Man, society, and the world.
The abolition of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object—an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use. (EPM, p. 101)
The goal of this project is making each and all—Man, society, and world, including nature—fit for Man as he truly is, if only he could transcend his depraved (property-owning) false nature, which he wove into himself through generations of the inversion of praxis within the Fallen (property-owning) society he sinfully created for himself.
[T]he social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man—as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him—and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature—the true resurrection of nature—the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature. (EPM, p. 98)
As a religion, the point of Marxism is to teach Man to remember who he is. Notice I didn’t say “to teach people…” or “to teach men who they are.” All of Man, as a collective species, has to remember who he is. He is a species-being. His true nature is a fully social animal that hasn’t Fallen by seizing private property, declaring “this is mine.” Thus he declares “I am because I am someone who can possess.” This is a man who has forgotten that he is social because he’s been socialized to believe he is not. Because Man is always creating society (praxis, conscious or not) and society is always creating Man (inversion of praxis), Man is always a social being. The question, for Marx, is merely whether or not he is conscious of it.
The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life—even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others—are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much—and this is inevitable—the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life. (EPM, p. 99)
The individual for Marx is someone who can assert “I am someone who can have this thing that I withhold from you” while pretending that’s not a social relation, and the Communist is someone with the “human” consciousness that returns him to his social nature.
As a corollary, we see Marx’s theory of alienation by labor. Because you might value that thing and want it or something similar, or the advantage it confers, my assertion of having something enables me to require you to work for me to gain access to it. Thus, I estrange you from who you are, someone who can subjectively imagine and then create objects and see yourself as their creator, because you’re creating objects for me out of my vision. We become estranged, and the power that follows from possession, thus individuality, estranges us. It is sin, and the wages of sin are toil and death.
First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him—that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. (EPM, p. 71)
This, in turn, inverts Man and animal, reducing Man to a mere animal that only feels human when engaging in animal activities like eating, drinking, and having sex. That which is divine within Man—his essential human nature and what every other Esoteric Religious sect before Marx recognized as his immortal spirit—is not merely lost but debased so that in its depravity it repeats for itself the Fall by seeking itself in the mundane, corporeal, Fallen world of bodily need and gratification. Man, for Marx, is thusly debased, depraved, and dehumanized by the existence of private property and the social relations it produces.
As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. W hat is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. (EPM, p. 71)
Marx offers a solution to this problem, as we have already seen: Communism. He believes it follows from consciousness, or gnosis, of this true nature of Man and his conditions. Under Marxism, as a religion, Man is (not merely “men are”) to be made conscious of their true nature and the structural conditions engendered by that which has caused their Fall, which is private property. In turn, they have a duty of conscience to do the work in praxis to transform the world so that the next dialectical turn of the inversion of praxis will expand people’s consciousness further. Writes Marx, attempting to justify the utility of his own theorizing amid so many appeals to hard labor, “my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being” (EPM, p. 99).
This process is to continue and continue and continue until Man remembers who he is, a species-being who lives collectively, and thus transcends private property. As his own creator who knows himself to have created himself thusly, he re-enters Eden on his own terms. There’s no need for a Savior because Man, as a singular collective, saves himself. Not faith, but arbeit, macht frei.
The essential reason for this is the dialectical faith at the center of Marxism. Man makes society. That’s praxis. Society, in turn, makes Man. That’s the inversion of praxis. Man, thus far, has Fallen and thereby made himself unconscious of the dialectical conditions that shape his reality and thus himself, but he can conscientize. He can become aware of the conditions that shape his reality and himself, and thus he can make himself as he should be, recollecting (in the Hermetic sense) his true nature as a species-being, which Marx later called “Socialist Man.” The creation of Man through society—through his State as Man’s self-made messianic Savior—can be consciously directed back to where it should have been all along. The prison of Being can be escaped. Man can return home and know himself to have come home. “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”
The only question, then, is what aspect or aspects of society make Man through the inversion of praxis. For Marx, who was a material determinist, economic conditions make Man, so in order to consciously seize the means of producing society and Man, one must seize the means of material production. The economic theory of Marxism misses what Marxism is entirely. It merely identifies one potential software routine in the underlying dialectical operating system (faith) of dialectical transformation of Man through the seizure of his means of self-production, and there are others. Thus, classical economic Marxism gave way to Cultural Marxism gave way to Critical Marxism gave way to Identity Marxism gave way to Woke Marxism is giving way to Sustainability Marxism today. Same religion, different plug-in for determining what drives the inversion of praxis.
Marxism in Full Generality
Marxism, in full generality, then, posits the existence of a special kind of “bourgeois” property (generally, “capital”) to which some people grant themselves access while excluding everyone else. This property empowers them to shape society for their own benefit while casting everyone else into enstrangement and alienation—a prison at the level of their very being.
To fully understand Marxism, the special property or capital under consideration must be conceived of very broadly. There is material capital, cultural capital, social capital, intellectual capital, human capital, and so on, and access to any or all of these has to be considered. The currently dominant versions of Marxism view these various forms of capital, or special “bourgeois” property, to be intertwined with one another and impossible to understand in isolation. Their power is “intersectional.”
The special access to a form of bourgeois property “stratifies” society into a class that has it and a class that does not have it. Access to the property confers advantages to the people who have it, leading them to want to keep it and rationalize keeping it through what Marx named “ideology.” It also confers power, which they use to structure society to their own advantage. The power they create is therefore systemic or structural in nature, and it results from the interplay between the privileged class and those they exploit to maintain their privilege.
The classes produced by this structural Fall of Man are therefore intrinsically in conflict with one another over access to the special property and the means of possessing it. Thus, the overclass erects a system that estranges the everyday individual (for Marx, the worker) in the underclass from the product of his efforts and thus his ability to fully and truly be. Those with the power to direct this system of power (currently referred to as “privileged”) generate elaborate mythologies, called “ideologies,” that justify their access to the special property and the power it confers while exploiting others to increase the amount of it they have. Marx claimed that ideology “mystifies” reality and that Marxism “demystifies” it.
Ideology functions in such a way as to ensure neither group is conscious of the “true” nature of society, which is “structural.” The goal, however, as Marx and Engels note in The Communist Manifesto can be summarized in the single idea of “abolition of private property” of this special kind. Marxism bills itself as the sole path to “the end of ideology”—not this ideology or that ideology, but ideology itself, in toto. It is therefore the only system of thought of its kind that somehow manages not to constitute an ideology, but this is just another way Marxists consider themselves better than everyone else and thereby trick themselves.
It will be instructive to see this abstract expression of Marxism in several more concrete forms. We therefore now turn to a number of descriptive examples.
Many Faces of Marxist Faith
The basic structure of Marxism repeats itself through every evolution of Marxist Theory and is always adhered to religiously and with the zealot’s fervor. In every case, a special form of property is at the center of the “Theory,” and the liberation of man depends on its abolition, by which is meant its “positive transcendence.”
For Marx, the special property was capital. Its ideology is capitalism, a caricature of market economies. Its winners are the bourgeoisie, and its losers the working class, who become a proletariat when awakened to class consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by structural classism which is materially deterministic. The goal of Marx’s economic-material Marxism is the abolition (or transcendence) of private property.
In Cultural Marxism, the special property is cultural capital, the power to define and set culture. Its ideology is (cultural) capitalism, a form of cultural dominance. Its winners are the culturally elite, who are mostly the bourgeoisie, and its losers are those of low culture, who were readily identified with the working class. They can be awakened into a (cultural) proletariat by awakening their class consciousness, which includes an understanding of how cultural mores define the haves and have-nots in society. The structure of this society is enforced by cultural hegemony, which includes both classism and cultural classism, which are materially and structurally deterministic. The goal of Cultural Marxism is to abolish the existing means of production of cultural values and to establish a counter-hegemony that favors Marxism within culture-producing institutions (e.g., family, religion, education, media, and law) in order to abolish (or transcend) bourgeois culture and class society.
In Critical Marxism, the special property is acceptability. Its ideology is positivism, by which is meant strict rationality and legalistic thinking, at least in professional circles. Its winners are the culturally elite and the normal (“one-dimensional man”), and its losers are the culturally excluded. They can be awakened into critical theorists by adopting critical consciousness, which is the understanding that a better society cannot be articulated in the terms of the existing society but that the features of the existing society they find “dehumanizing” can be critiqued. The structure of this society is material, cultural, and social classism and is maintained by commodification, which is materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition of the existing terms of society (a Great Refusal).
In Postmodern Marxism (not an onymoron), the special property is discursive dominance, which is the ability to control how ideas and their networks of meanings are understood. Its ideology is a belief in the stability and universality of meaning. Its winners are the socioculturally elite, and its losers are the socioculturally excluded and marginalized. They can be awakened into postmodernism (or postmodern/radical skepticism), which is a general belief that all meaning-making is an expression of power, so, essentially a consciousness of how power operates within and through society within its meaning-making apparatuses. The structure of this society is discursive structuralism, which is structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition of privileging of meaning-making.
In Critical Race Theory, as I argue in Race Marxism, the special property is whiteness. Its ideology is white supremacy. Its winners are whites and white-adjacents. Its losers are people of color. Either of these can become antiracists when awakened to race consciousness (instead of colorblindness). The structure of this society is enforced by systemic racism, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of whiteness.
In (Marxian) Feminism, the special property is maleness. Its ideology is patriarchy, that men should lead society. Its winners are men. Its losers are women and, to a certain extent, at least sometimes, homosexual men. These can become feminists when awakened with feminist consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by misogyny, structural sexism, phallagocentrism, gender normativity, and sex essentialism, which can be both materially and (in multiple ways) structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of patriarchy.
In Queer Theory, the special property is normalcy. Its ideology is cisheteronormativity, that it is regarded as normal to be straight and not trans. Its winners are cisheterosexuals and people who pass as such. Its losers are the abnormal. These can become allies or queer when awakened with queer consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by homophobia, transphobia, and other bigotries of normativity, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of normalcy and, with it, normativity, i.e., all norms and socially enforced categorical expectations.
In Disability Studies, the special property is able-bodiedness. Its ideology is ableism, that it is in general better and more normal to be able-bodied instead of disabled in some way. Its winners are the able-bodied. Its losers are the disabled (who are disabled by the failure of society to accommodate disability as fully as it accommodates ability, which is realized when disability is in no way any disadvantage at all). These can become disability activists when awakened with a critical consciousness of ability status. The structure of this society is enforced by dis/ableism, which is both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of ableism.
In Fat Studies, the special property is thinness. Its ideology is thinnormativity, that it is normal for the human body not to be overweight (in fact, the term “overweight” is problematic because it implies thinnormativity by suggesting an ideal weight exists). Its winners are the thin. Its losers are the fat and bodies of size. These can become fat activists when awakened with a critical fat consciousness. The structure of this society is enforced by fatphobia along with healthism (that it is important and valuable to be healthy), which are both materially and structurally deterministic. Its goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of thinnormativity and expectations about weight and body size.
In Freirean education, the special property is formal education or literacy. Its ideology is one of “educated society,” which values being educated and literate in ways acceptable to the existing system. Its winners are the formally educated and literate, regarded as knowers, and its losers the illiterate, who are actually knowers in their own right, though the system excludes them, their ways of knowing, and their knowledges. They are awakened through political literacy, and conscientization is the process of their awakening. The critically conscious or conscientized are those who have been awakened. The structure of this society is enforced by expectations on literacy and formal education, which are materially and structurally deterministic, relegating the underclass to a “culture of silence,” as Freire has it. The goal is the abolition (or transcendence) of formal education and objective knowledge, and thus the immediate goal is the reappropriation of education into a process of conscientiation and “humanization.”
In Climate Justice, the special property is not being impacted by human-caused climate change. Its ideology is energy abundance (through non-Green energy sources), which are enabled by neoliberalism and imperialism. Its winners are the first world, the fossil-fuel industry, and all privileged classes, who are believed to suffer fewer impacts of climate change. Its losers are the developing and undeveloped world and everybody, especially members of oppressed classes, who benefit least from existing energy sources and suffer the consequences of climate change the most (allegedly). They are awakened through Green activism (and Blue), and they have a climate consciousness. The structure of the existing society is largely enforced by petro-capitalism, which runs a capitalist enterprise on the back of energy abundance produced by oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, all of which are backed by neoliberalism (with regard to energy policy), which have material and structurally deterministic effects. Its goal is the abolition of “Black Energy,” full reliance upon “Green Energy,” the end of the oil, coal, and gas industries, and environmental and Climate Justice (redistribution globally according to alleged climate change production and damages). Its primary objective in branding is “sustainability.”
We could go on (into postcolonial theory, health equity, and on and on), but we will not. In all cases, the mechanism is for the “conscious” to seize the means of production in the relevant domain and use that control to force redistribution and new norms that work toward abolishing the relevant form of special property by abolishing the special access or even its fundamental meaning. Doing so will abolish the special property and thus undo its contribution to the Fall of Man, thus ending the estrangement the existence of that form of special property and its attendant power dynamic produce.
What we see here is that Marxism, once understood properly as a Esoteric faith of societal division and transmutation (in alchemy, by: “divide and unify” or “dissolve and precipitate”), has reared its head in many different forms but has not lost its essential character. One additional example that grows significantly out of all of these preceding but especially the Critical Marxist line bears describing.
In Sustainable Marxism, which obviously has a double meaning, the special form of property is production capacity (in general). Its ideology is shareholder capitalism. Its winners are the one percent. Its losers are the ninety-nine percent, especially women, gender minorities, sexual minorities, racial minorities, residents of the Third World, and all other members of “marginalized groups.” These can become activists on behalf of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and its 2030 Agenda and by behaving in ways that are ESG compliant (stakeholder-determined Environmental, Social, and Governance standards comprise ESG compliance). Its goal is to abolish shareholder capitalism and replace it with stakeholder capitalism, or “sustainable and inclusive” capitalism, which is not actually capitalism at all but a market-containing command economy not unlike the one in China under the CCP.
The Last Word
It’s time we understand Marxism for what it really is: a cult-religious ideology of transforming the world “back into Eden” by undoing the Fall of man into producing stratified power dynamics through allegedly self-granted access to special property. It arises from a singular error, which is the inability to perceive the legitimacy of a legitimate hierarchy, and thus proceeds by means of ignorant destructive envy. No matter which form of special property is under consideration, it is always the same, and so are its fruits. Restoring liberty and goodness to our lives depends on understanding this.
The post The Many Faces of Marxism appeared first on New Discourses.

Recently, at a fancy arts complex in Manhattan, the billionaire Frank McCourt led a three-day series of talks and workshops about the future of the internet—part of his expensive effort to “fix technology, save democracy.”In the lobby, attendees networked in a cocktail bar created by the superstar restaurateur Danny Meyer; in front of the main stage, they held up blue and orange glow sticks to record their votes in polls like “Which will kill us first?” (AI or climate change) and “Who would you rather take care of your children?” (a surveillance robot or TikTok stars). The agenda for this conference, Unfinished Live, was almost random in its diversity: Attendees could learn about how Indigenous communities were using decentralized technology to create their own maps, and they could also learn about importing products into the metaverse, starting with a sweater that has a microchip in it. (This allows the sweater to “accrue value based on who owned it last.”) The Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen invoked several times the necessity of a Mothers Against Drunk Driving for social media. Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, vaped onstage and responded coolly to questions about how blockchain tech is used to fund the defense in Ukraine. “There’s nothing particularly magic about cryptocurrency,” she said. “It’s a tool, like a road or a gun.”The disparate threads could all be tied to the same point of origin: It feels like things have gone wrong on the internet. Decades removed from the gonzo highs of blinging GIFs and wacky blogs, the web is now a place where many people feel exploited, manipulated, and tracked; where freedom of speech is being tugged around in a strange culture war; and where the rich get richer.  Among this set, one solution seems to be the consensus favorite. If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that decentralize power? This has become a key issue for Brewster Kahle, the 61-year-old founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit and digital library created in the late 1990s. (You might know it from the Wayback Machine, which has crawled and snapshotted billions of webpages for posterity.) When I introduced myself to him at a morning workshop on water scarcity, he was wearing a Jansport backpack and black shoes that appeared to be nonslip, possibly appropriate for work at a high-volume restaurant, and he was open to sitting down immediately for a 90-minute conversation about the major problems facing the web.Kahle would remake the web as an endless library, which could hold copies upon copies of everything you’d want to know and mimic “the robustness that we have in the physical world.” Today, the tech giants have tremendous authority over the information that passes through their platforms. These platforms can remove any data on a whim; they might do this intentionally, for their own obscure purposes, or they can be subject to copyright takedowns, geopolitical demands, and other outside threats. They collect and track personal details and target content against them. Centralization, the logic goes, makes all of this possible, and leads to all of the problems that result.[Read: The internet is rotting]In 2015, Kahle put out a call for a “decentralized web,” or a web that looked more like the one that early visionaries such as Tim Berners-Lee had imagined. “The way we code the web will determine the way we live online,” Kahle wrote at the time. “So we need to bake our values into our code. Freedom of expression needs to be baked into our code. Privacy should be baked into our code. Universal access to all knowledge.” Pivoting to a decentralized version of the web—evading massive platforms, sharing peer-to-peer—could enable much of this by giving ordinary people control of their own data and a broad range of options for publishing or accessing information. His manifesto instigated a movement called “DWeb,” which began with a star-studded summit, and has continued with annual retreats in California, which are referred to as “DWeb camp.”At Unfinished Live, Kahle and several of his colleagues from the Internet Archive were finally participating in a major decentralized-web conference with big money behind it, and though the focus was on repairing social media—not Kahle’s personal bailiwick—he found it exciting. “We have structural problems in how this technology works,” he said. “We need another run at it. And I’m encouraged. I’m optimistic. Look at this—people coming together in New York and not to talk about how to make their next deal.”The decentralized web that Kahle and others have envisioned for years has yet to receive major mainstream attention for an obvious reason: It never promised to get anyone rich. But the Web3 movement certainly did. A close relative—or dark foil, some would say—Web3 is defined by blockchains and cryptocurrencies and NFTs. Like all kinds of things that are marketed to adults of my generation, much of this was sold by celebrities, or in the language of empowerment, or with sleek branding that promised to make participants part of a stylish future, nevermind what else that future might entail (as long as it included a vertical profit line). Not an insignificant fraction of the population was repulsed by this, I should say. Nevertheless, people jumped on the bandwagon, leading to hype and then a crash.It reminds Kahle of the dot-com boom, when the internet first moved out of an academic-government space and into the commercial sphere. (“Scams galore!”) “The hype has gotten ahead of things,” Kahle said. But it’s also given the movement an opportunity to readjust—and, perhaps, realize its dreams.The difference between DWeb and Web3 is material or semantic, depending on whom you ask. The terms are “in some ways superficial,” according to Glen Weyl, an economist and a co-author of Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. “On the other hand, they’re very important.”In a recent webinar series, the Internet Archive defined the decentralized-web movement as an effort to break apart “all the layers” of the current online experience. It’s helpful to think about this idea in terms of what it opposes: Meta, for example, centralizes messaging, media sharing, data collection, and much else, so users are subject to its content-moderation policies and can’t help but submit their information to its sprawling marketing apparatus. Amazon owns so much of the infrastructure that the internet runs on that you could hardly function without it.The DWeb movement is interested in subverting this status quo through tools that would give individuals greater control over their online identities and information. “I’m trying to channel the confusion that you’re looking at me with right now,” Kahle told me, when I asked him to explain it. “How do I help other people understand what the heck is going on here?”Some things would be really different for the average web user—she might no longer rely on Facebook or Google to verify her identity when logging in to various sites or be followed around by advertisements that know all about her. Other changes would ideally be unnoticeable to her. For instance, a decentralized version of The Atlantic’s website might look the same, but the underlying machinery would be quite different—it might be hosted on any number of independent servers owned by users around the world, rather than through a major provider controlled by a big tech company.Web3, according to the Internet Archive’s series, has a narrower technical definition: It’s “the ‘blockchain-ification’ of the web, using blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies to verify transactions, pay for services, and certify content such as NFTs.”The two communities—or perspectives, or movements—overlap, and the boundaries are fuzzy. Filecoin, a decentralized storage project, is funded and funds other decentralized projects with a fortune raised through an initial coin offering, or ICO (the crypto equivalent of an IPO); the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit established to support projects related to the titular blockchain, is a sponsor of the Internet Archive’s annual DWeb camp; and Twitter is experimenting with crypto and working on a new decentralized social-network protocol simultaneously.At the conference, speakers used “Web3” interchangeably with “decentralized web.” They come up in the same breath because crypto is fundamentally decentralized itself, and because their proponents have a shared cause. “There’s an underlying agreement between Web3- and DWeb-aligned people that they care about user self-determination,” Mai Ishikawa Sutton, a fellow at the Commons Network and one of the organizers of the past two DWeb camps, told me. “They care about being able to control your data, at some level having information that is transparent, that the system is transparent, and that it’s not about having one entity controlling everything, in theory.”Sutton was part of a group that published a set of “organizing principles” for the DWeb movement in 2021—a process that took several years. By dint of having principles at all, DWeb became a smaller tent than Web3. People who disagree on a lot of things can agree on a technical system, Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent writer on collectivism and tech, told me. “DWeb asks more,” he said, and dwells on two key questions: “What do we actually want socially, and how do we center those values in our technical designs, so the technical becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?”This ethos is expanded on in the new digital magazine Compost, edited by Sutton. Compost is also an example of the decentralized web in practice; you can access it on your regular browser, Google Chrome or whatever you use, and you can access it via Hypercore or IPFS, peer-to-peer protocols you probably have not heard of. Those protocols offer advantages: If you like what you read, you can download the magazine in its entirety, ensuring that you can read it later in a decentralized browser like Brave or Agregore without being connected to the internet. By making this copy, you can also become a node in the decentralized network, so that when someone else asks to see the magazine, your computer may be the one that serves it. As long as individuals keep sharing the content, it remains accessible—not so with a PDF hosted on a company’s web server.This technology wouldn’t fall under some definitions of Web3, because it doesn’t use a blockchain. In fact, the underlying mechanics have been around for a long time—it’s the same basic idea that made Napster work in 1999, or BitTorrent in 2001. And there are other elements of the DWeb that definitely wouldn’t be called Web3, like community-owned mesh networks, which serve as last-mile infrastructure for internet service or help groups maintain their own private intranets without relying on a service provider like Verizon.These decentralized technologies, it could be said, are focused on empowering individuals; “pump and dump” cryptocurrencies and NFT projects, perhaps less so. Sutton has been saddened by the conflation of the two ideas. “When I say I’m working on a crypto project or I’m working on the decentralized web, it sounds like I’m part of this movement to build a series of exploitative pyramid schemes,” they told me.This was the discrepancy that motivated my original curiosity about DWeb and Web3 as entwined by separable strands. How must it feel to start something idealistically, in obscurity, and then watch it become a global phenomenon for reasons that you would never have chosen? But this question turned out to be more complicated than I thought. Some rejected the question itself. Weyl, for one, acknowledged that the projects and products that got the most attention over the past two years were “horrible, hyper-capitalistic, financially exploitative idiocy,” but also argued that all of the other DWeb stuff I was talking about “wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the attention they’ve gotten, including your interest, if the whole Web3 thing hadn’t happened.” The moral distinctions I was buying into were, at some level, petty tribalism, he said. DWeb may have existed first, but “as a practical matter they’re riding on the coattails of Web3.”The polar-opposite perspective would be that Web3 acolytes appropriated the decentralized-web movement, corrupted it, and are ruining it. Danny O’Brien, a senior fellow at the Filecoin Foundation, has espoused that point of view fairly literally; his Twitter bio currently contains the text “THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION // NOW WE’RE STEALING IT BACK.”He describes a “dramatic split” between DWeb and Web3 as a recent phenomenon—back in 2019, at the last DWeb meetup before the pandemic, they had a lot more overlap, but they’ve become like “tectonic plates” separating in the past year or so. He attributes this to the growing concern about the ecological impact of Bitcoin, the conspicuous consumption of the NFT craze, and some aesthetic and cultural quibbles: “The traditional decentralized-web community is uncomfortable with the idea of the tech bro,” and with people who “were coming in because of the delicious smell of money.”Capitalism has crushed idealism in many of the historic fights for the soul of the web—see, for instance, the battle between “free software” and “open source” in the ’90s—but O’Brien feels up to the challenge. “You start something idealistically in the tech world, it gets taken from you,” he said. “You have to steal it back. You can’t just sit there and let them do it. Right?”[Read: The internet is just investment banking now]The DWeb people have long been aware and wary of “dark forces,” as Schneider put it, “who see an emerging technology as an opportunity to consolidate their own power and wealth.” Although the rhetoric is dramatic, the work of the DWeb movement steadily continues as it always has: The community takes funding and attention where it can, moves from ideas to demos, and hopes its projects become useful to someone.It’s not dazzling stuff. Kahle analogizes the effort to rebuilding the internet’s “plumbing.” Especially after the crypto boom rightfully put skeptics on guard, he sees the challenge as convincing people that it’s worth it to push forward—that the internet really can be different, and better. “When there’s a new technology, people gravitate towards it with their existing anxieties,” he told me. “And unfortunately, you roll time forward, and people are disappointed by the technology, right? It didn’t fulfill their dreams. But it’s not because their dreams were wrong. It’s because we didn’t build good-enough technology.”How do you inspire the boring work of iteration? In a recent essay about digital real estate for the Austria-based art magazine Spike, the sociologist Ido Nahari wrote about a longing for a return to the original ethos of the web, which at its best “demonstrated the democratic desire not only to idly exist within the world, but also to take part in its collective creation.” It doesn’t much matter what you call it, so long as you can get people feeling that way again.

It’s difficult to engage productively on the hot-button political issue of the day if we don’t even agree on our terms. Some shared assumptions and universally understood definitions are a necessary starting place. Basic stuff, like, for example, where does the government’s money come from? You might know that taxpayer funds are drawn from the Treasury as a consequence of lawful appropriations, which must originate in the House of Representatives. Your opponents, however, could be operating on the assumption that national largess rains down on its intended targets only when it is disbursed from “the president’s wallet.”

That’s how Politico characterized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “history of using federal relief cash to fund his priorities.” The governor “has been a critic of Biden on nearly every policy front,” the outlet tweeted. “But he sure does like the president’s wallet.” The pathologically addled news hook that justifies the premise is, of course, the Sunshine State’s pursuit of congressionally authorized disaster aid following one of the worst hurricanes in the state’s history. Politico further notes that Florida’s governor has used federal funds, like Covid-related relief, to finance unrelated programs. If that’s hypocrisy, it’s not uncommon.

Tell me how the pandemic justified a $5 million disbursement to Boston’s Edward M. Kennedy Institute. What public health emergency necessitated renovating Colorado Springs’ golf course irrigation systems? Did Seattle need to devote over $28 million to downtown apartments for the city’s homeless population, or was that one of the city’s esoteric “priorities?” Has anyone strapped on green eyeshades and audited L.A. County’s $5 million “creative works” jobs program for the city’s moribund “artists?”

Beyond the fact that cash is fungible (another elementary concept we apparently need to review), these are not the unintended consequences of the Covid relief bill. The various relief bills were designed to be oversized, subject to minimal oversight, and nimble enough to plug unanticipated holes wherever they appeared. The lack of interest from the press in the abject waste this program produced would be conspicuous enough. That we’re seeing fiscal prudence now, and only when it may damage a top-tier Republican political prospect, is beyond suspect.

The White House’s allies in media may just be echoing a form of ignorance the White House itself has deployed. President Biden’s political operation seems to have genuinely convinced itself that it could rebut criticism of his lawless transition of private student loan debt onto taxpayers’ shoulders by noting that some of them had taken advantage of Covid relief funding themselves. Some Republicans, they noted, received forgivable Paycheck Protection Program Act loans even as they criticize the president for stealing unappropriated funds from the Treasury to pad the pockets of a favored Democratic constituency. Gotcha!

The only good-faith justification for this is ignorance. The administration and its allies simply don’t comprehend the distinction between the lawful activation and disbursement of national resources—including the Disaster Relief Fund and FEMA—and the president just doing whatever he wants. Given the simplicity demanded of those who might believe this, a less charitable rationale for the White House’s conduct has more explanatory power.

But that is only one weapon in a multi-front attack on DeSantis. Another allegation maintains that DeSantis warms to disaster aid only when he is poised to benefit from it. When other Americans are in dire need, DeSantis defaults to miserly fastidiousness and pointless cruelty.

This week, the New York Times reminded its readers that, in the Northeast’s time of need, DeSantis used his platform in Congress to tell its residents to pound sand. Following the swath of destruction Hurricane Sandy cut across the Mid-Atlantic in 2012, DeSantis voted against an emergency appropriations bill, saying it contained “extraneous stuff.” This, the Times intones, is evidence of the governor’s inconsistency on disaster aid. Indeed, readers of this dispatch are guided to the conclusion that the only lodestar the governor follows is what he thinks will be best for his political brand.

The Times observes that, with the exception of Rep. Ted Yoho, DeSantis was the lone Republican member of Florida’s congressional delegation to oppose that aid package, but he wasn’t so isolated in his conference. DeSantis was joined by 57 other members of the Republican House majority in opposing the bill’s many dubious provisions. “This legislative abuse is an insult to families facing real emergencies in the wake of the storm,” said then-Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan of the “non-Sandy expenses” in the bill. Among them, cash to repair shoreline erosion near the Kennedy Space Center, funding for fisheries from Alaska to American Samoa, a 9-figure disbursement for Head Start facilities, and $16 billion in fungible Community Development Block Grants.

As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler observed, the bill also contained $669.5 million for environmental projects and weather forecasting technology. “But that’s less than 2 percent of the total,” he wrote, to which the Republicans who opposed this bill would reply, “exactly!”

What is DeSantis’s sin here? Is he guilty of favoring Florida only to advance his own political prospects? Even the Times contradicts that narrative. “In 2017, as he was poised to run for governor,” the report continued, “Mr. DeSantis supported an aid package after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria as places like Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico strained to recover.” Okay, so is he a hypocrite by failing to join the Republicans who rejected those aid packages, too? The Times and Politico failed to make that case, lest they undermine the implicit narrative that opposing storm aid for any reason is a moral failure. Fine. So, he’s recklessly profligate with taxpayer funds, screams the party that just spent $4 trillion and only got this lousy t-shirt.

The only consistency we can divine from these scattershot attacks on DeSantis and his fellow Republicans is that it is somehow untoward to approve of and duly allocated federal funds while being critical of Democrats and their political priorities. Tough.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of RT and one of Russia’s top propagandists, has in the space of seven months gone from supreme confidence that Kyiv would fall in days to something like despair at Russia’s shambolic mobilization and battlefield defeats. In addition to confessing to “terrible grief,” she admits that she now sings Russia’s national anthem using the old Soviet lyrics. That choice is appropriate, because Moscow now specializes in Soviet-style bluster and hysteria. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nuclear threats issued by President Vladimir Putin.In his speeches announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts that his battered army does not fully control, Putin raised the specter of nuclear war. In the finest tradition of Soviet whataboutism, he spoke of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calling them an American precedent for … what, he did not exactly say, but the meaning was clear. Since then, the menace has been amplified by subordinates like Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s security council, as well as panicky tub-thumpers like Simonyan’s colleague Vladimir Solovyov.[Andriy Yermak: We must reject Russia’s nuclear blackmail]Any threat to use nuclear weapons by a country that possesses them has to be taken seriously. That’s particularly true of Russia, a country whose military doctrine has always entertained the deployment of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons in a war. To be clear, low-yield can mean a detonation equivalent to 5,000 or 10,000 tons of TNT. When Soviet war plans for Europe were revealed after the Cold War, analysts blanched at the magnitude of the nuclear assault the Soviet general staff had contemplated as the preparatory bombardment for a potential drive to the English Channel.Putin is making these threats for several reasons. Russia is losing the war in Ukraine and losing it badly. It was routed out of Kyiv in the first phase, its forces were driven from Kharkiv oblast in the second, and its defenses—manned by ill-equipped, demoralized, and badly trained units whose positions have probably been compromised by no-retreat orders from Moscow—are being breached by Ukrainian offensives in the third. The fall of Lyman was but the first disaster; a still bigger blow will occur when the city of Kherson, which may have 10,000 or 20,000 Russian soldiers in it, falls to Ukrainian troops. In the meantime, in the words of the retired Australian general Mick Ryan, Russia’s logistics and command system are being corroded by incessant precision attacks.Putin, one must always recall, is a former secret policeman, for whom mind games are always the first and rarely the last resort. Is former German Chancellor Angela Merkel known to be uneasy around canines? Bring a dog to the meeting. Fear is the Chekist’s chief weapon. Because some Western politicians and many Western pundits are known to get the shakes at the mere mention of nuclear weapons, Putin has an opening for the biggest mind game of all. Judging by continued and credible reports that the United States and Germany, among others, are withholding some types and quantities of weapons from Ukraine, it’s working.Almost as bad is the chorus of cries to open negotiations, because “sober adults think about [the] world as it is,” as William Ruger of the American Institute for Economic Research put it. “Putin is more in a corner than anyone would like him to be, because that’s not good for anybody,” John Kerry, the current special presidential envoy for climate who cannot help but remind listeners that he is a former secretary of state, recently said. And thus, of course, he urges negotiations on current Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. So too does Pope Francis. So too do many well-educated observers who do not trouble to think hard about what lies behind the well-orchestrated pronouncements from Moscow.[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]To be sure, underlying the Russian threats is a stream of Russian paranoia about the West, which finds expression in all kinds of wild claims about satanism, the abolition of gender, and plans to turn Russians into soulless slaves. To the extent that this paranoia is not purely synthetic, it draws on a deep well of Russian ambivalence about the West—resentment and fear of it, a sense of inferiority toward it, and yet a deep awareness of its allure, which is why even Russia’s current leaders have sent their children west to be educated, their mistresses west to luxuriate, and their billions in loot west to be safe.To yield to nuclear blackmail, however, would be folly. Give in now, and anyone with nuclear weapons will learn that the secret to success in a negotiation is to froth at the mouth, roll up one’s eyes, and threaten a mushroom cloud. To yield to Putin would be, as Churchill said in a different but not entirely dissimilar context, to take “but the first sip from a bitter cup.” What then to do, and to threaten to do, particularly if Russia does indeed detonate one or more nuclear weapons, either as a signal or against some Ukrainian target?The West’s economic sanctions arsenal is far from empty. The United States, in particular, has not brought out the biggest weapon of all: unlimited secondary sanctions on anyone doing business with Russia, save under licenses granted by the U.S. Treasury. Nor has it moved yet to confiscate the roughly $300 billion Russia has in accounts held abroad. Use of nuclear weapons by Russia would justify that and more.Militarily, American air power could take Russia’s dire situation in Ukraine and make it catastrophic. The Russian air force is a negligible factor at this point, as its astonishingly poor performance in Ukraine indicates. Western air forces understand Russian air defenses very well and have long worked on ways to dismantle them; the U.S. and its allies have plenty of air power available in Europe to do so.Finally, diplomacy does indeed have a role to play here—but most definitely not in compelling Ukraine into a negotiation it abhors while a brutal invader occupies its lands. The diplomatic option consists rather in reminding key Russian leaders that should Moscow use nuclear weapons, it will soon see them sprouting in self-defense in Poland, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and quite likely Finland and other countries. That will not make Russia safer or stronger.China has a stake in this, too: A world in which the nuclear taboo is broken is one in which Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea may feel that they need the security of their own nuclear deterrents. India, facing a Pakistan that may have more nuclear weapons than it does, and whose politics are terrifyingly unstable, has no interest in seeing nuclear use become acceptable. Those who can still talk to Moscow should be urged to convey that message to Russia’s leadership—if they are not, in fact, doing so already.[Tom Nichols: We have no nuclear strategy]The fight in Ukraine is not, despite what some have said, an existential war for Russia. No one is claiming Russian territory, and no Ukrainian army is going to drive to Moscow. It may very well be an existential fight for Vladimir Putin as a leader and even as a human being, but that is a separate matter. He has not been put in a corner, but rather has put himself in one. For him to use nuclear weapons, many others—hundreds, if not more—have to go along. The United States and other countries probably have the means to communicate to each and every one of them that they will personally pay a price if they do so, if not at the hands of Ukraine’s friends, then under a successor regime in Russia that will have to hold them accountable in order to be readmitted to the economy of the developed world.The Ukraine war may be approaching its culminating point. All along, the prospect of Russian military collapse has been real: Many wars end with one or more spectacular defeats that dramatically change moods and atmospheres, front lines and governments. Russia’s call-ups are not a mobilization but rather a press-ganging of those too unfortunate or poorly connected to avoid service. Sending men with decrepit weapons and kit and minimal military training into ill-housed and depleted units filled with veterans suffering from post–traumatic stress is a recipe for more crack-ups and many more body bags headed back across the border. It will lead to further failure at the hands of an ever more skillful and victory-inspired Ukrainian military keen on liberation and vengeance for the pillage, torture, kidnapping, and massacre inflicted on its country. The sooner the ultimate shock is delivered and Russian forces shattered and driven from occupied land, the quicker the suffering ends, and the more swiftly the uncertain cloud of nuclear threats dissipates.Pope John Paul II, who knew the Soviets all too well, repeated incessantly during dark times, “Be not afraid.” We should heed his counsel. And inspired by Ukrainian heroism as well as rational calculation, we should send them more and better weapons and ammunition now.

The reason for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was clear: Moscow wanted strategic depth. Nothing Russia has done since, however, has been clear. The military has suffered several reversals, but this alone is not unexpected. Reversals are part of war, and prudent commanders anticipate and respond to them. Ideally, the responses are meant to solve or at least mitigate the problem as the war continues. Moscow is behaving as if the challenges it faces are a surprise.

Russia assumed from the beginning that it would bring overwhelming force to bear on a much weaker military. The expectation was that the Ukrainian military would fragment and thus be unable to offer much resistance. Moscow thought Ukraine believed the same. That the Kremlin was wrong isn’t the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that the Russian command structure, starting at the top with Vladimir Putin, didn’t banish their confidence. An invading force should be built on the assumption it is dealing with a powerful and motivated enemy, and that it needs to prepare for a tough war.

Meanwhile, Russia also did not expect the sheer amount of aid and weaponry the United States would send. It saw the U.S. as too disjointed politically and socially and with too strong an opposition to make much of a difference. The Russians have been very effective in waging psychological warfare as a key dimension of combat and engaged, as was reasonable, in creating division over the war in the United States. Moscow believed the U.S. would see the fall of Ukraine and the deployment of Russian troops to NATO’s eastern frontier as a potential recipe for another Cold War. Washington would probably want to respond but would be too fragmented to do so, or so the Russian thinking went.

These failures were evident from the outset of the war. Russia deployed three armored formations to break Ukrainian resistance, which it believed would be far inferior and isolated from American assistance. Neither was the case. The Russians were blocked by logistics problems of their own, as well as Javelin anti-tank missiles. Russian tanks froze in place or made little progress. With the Ukrainians emboldened, the Russians were forced to reevaluate their adversary.

But it seems as though they changed their tactics without changing their opinion of their enemy. Though they consolidated their forces in Donbas and fought an extended battle for control there, they didn’t advance to western Ukraine. They simply retreated toward their own border.

This was a crucial moment for Russia. It was clear that the Ukrainians were a significant and coherent fighting force, and it was clear that the United States was not going to limit its support, even as the Poles intensified the training of Ukrainians. All the while, both tactical and strategic intelligence mapped Russian forces and anticipated Russian moves. In many cases, Ukrainian forces were able to attack Russian forces at the most vulnerable point or retreat when Russian offensives appeared too costly.

It was at this point that the Russians should have reevaluated their likelihood of success. Offensive operations had had only limited success. The Ukrainian force outnumbered the Russian force and fought with discipline, while U.S. resupply and intelligence flowed. Russia retained enough potential power to alarm the West, power it ought to have used to seek peace through negotiations. In other words, Russia should have followed German Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s advice about what should be done near the end of World War II. His answer: “Make peace you fools.”

Given the confidence with which the initial attack was launched, making peace was unthinkable. All the dead, all the confidence, all of the well-spoken politicians would have been seen as a fraud. Putin has sought to turn the war from a Russian invasion to an American invasion of Russia. He has threatened nuclear war. He has mobilized truculent thousands, who may be trained by the end of winter, or perhaps never.

The most difficult part of a war is ending it without victory. The United States suffered through this in Vietnam. It is the wars that appear to be easy that are sometimes the hardest to fight and always the hardest to concede. No one doubted, in Russia or America, that World War II would be long, hard and possibly lost. Neither Russia nor the United States thought it could lose in Afghanistan.

It is an odd thing about confidence. Within the confines of reality, confidence is essential to fight a war. The hardest war to fight is the one in which the commander thinks victory is a given. When Russia started the war, it believed the mere sight of Russian tanks would scatter the Ukrainian army. Every reversal since has been dismissed by Moscow as simply an accident of war, instead of what it was: a war begun with certainty now confronting the reality of an enemy force superior to its own. Concern can be productive. Denial is the preface to desire. In war, the continued denial of reality is deadly.

Putin is responsible because he is the president. But the general staff and intelligence services share the blame. What has happened in Ukraine is a systemic breakdown of leadership that lead the country into a poorly understood war, insisting that victory is just around the corner if it simply holds the line. Wars like this usually end in political deaths. Vietnam finished Lyndon B. Johnson, World War II the Japanese and German regimes. Each fought with the hope of something turning up. It never did. The pivotal question is: What makes Russia think it can win next week when it hasn’t won in seven months? There is sometimes an answer to that kind of question, but Russian politicians are now laying blame on others for the failure. Making peace sounds easy to those who didn’t start the war.

Wither the far-right? Apparently not. The fact that the far-right is doing better than anyone might have imagined—in Italy and Sweden no less—suggests that such parties may not, in fact, be on the “far-right.” They are increasingly mainstream and popular, which suggests that they can no longer be considered on the fringes of the ideological or political spectrum. Or, to put it differently, if one still wishes to locate them on the far-right of a traditional left-right plot, it indicates something perhaps more troubling—that a growing number of voters have moved in their direction, rather than the other way around. The “center” has veered sharply to the right.If the center insists on being this volatile, then it calls into question the wisdom of crowds. This is the animating question of my new book on the “problem of democracy”: what do we do when democracy produces “bad” outcomes? The thing about not only the wisdom of crowds but just plain-old wisdom is that it’s supposed to accumulate over time and in light of experience. This is why we associate wisdom with old people and gray hair. Of course, there are counter-examples. Take Morrisey, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, or Kingsley Amis, each of whom settled into irascible reactionary poses as the decades passed. (Or maybe it’s just an old British person thing?). Similarly, in the case of Italy, the weight of experience has not had as much of a chastening effect as observers might have hoped. It is difficult to overstate just how remarkable the results of Italy’s September 25th elections happened to be. The Brothers of Italy—it seems reasonable to assume that any group with “brothers” or “brotherhood” in its name is not on the left—won a clear plurality, with 26 percent of the popular vote. Just four years ago, they were an afterthought, having won only around 4 percent. For the first time in the postwar era, Italy is likely to have a far-right prime minister, as part of a coalition government that includes yet another far-right party, The League, which came in third. It is also worth noting that, despite being the leader of the Brothers of Italy, Georgia Meloni is not herself technically a “brother,” which means she would be Italy’s first ever female prime minister to boot. Italy has had a rather vigorous right-wing party scene for some time now, with The League having been part of an “all-populist” government from 2018 to 2019, after it came second in the 2018 elections. (And that’s even before mentioning Forza Italia led by the quite Trump-y Sylvio Berlusconi). During its brief time in government, the League performed unimpressively—it seems hard to govern impressively almost anywhere these days. This, in turn, reminded Italians of the utility of having a non-partisan, technocratic prime minister with expertise in managing the economy. As economists tell it, that somewhat colorless technocrat—Mario Draghi, also known as “Super Mario”—performed admirably, but apparently not admirably enough for voters to remain content. Italy’s devastating experience with COVID probably impressed upon voters the importance of having a steady, if unexciting hand guiding the affairs of state. I remember thinking something similar at the start of the pandemic. In times of crisis, stability seems all the more appealing. I’m not the biggest Joe Biden fan, but I thank the lord that Biden’s in charge while a war in Ukraine rages and confrontation intensifies with China. There is something to be said for the idea (if not necessarily the reality) of competence. But this is clearly not a universal inclination. However entertaining it might be, I generally find politics exhausting, so I’m not sure I’d have much tolerance for far-right leadership, no matter how bad a Biden or Draghi happen to be. Many Americans and Italians differ, however. For them, crisis means opportunity, including the opportunity for something new and even radical. The thing about new things is that they don’t stay new. I’m not sure about Americans, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Italians start missing a certain super Mario.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] In “Strangers to Ourselves — Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us,” Rachel Aviv considers the philosophical and even the narrative dimensions of mental illness. At its core, this book is about a topic that I’m a little obsessed with. You hear it come up on the show a lot, actually. How do the stories we tell change who we become? How do we know when we’re telling a story about ourselves to ourselves that is no longer true? How do we talk ourselves into a new story when that is needed? Aviv’s book, as you’ll hear, is about this question in its extreme forms. It’s about the intersection of story, the ones we tell about ourselves, ones other people tell about us, and truly severe mental illness. But it raises a question of relevance to everyone. If story can mean so much to a mind that has lost control, how much might it mean, both for good and for ill, for all of us? I want to note that this episode contains a mention of suicidal ideation. If you’re having any thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Rachel Aviv, welcome to the show.

rachel aviv

ezra klein

I want to begin with a story you mentioned early in the book that seems to maybe have motivated some of the book but that isn’t mainly told there. Tell me about resignation syndrome.

So in Sweden, there were children — starting in the early 2000s, they would apply for asylum in Sweden. Many of them had come from former Soviet states, and their families applied to asylum in Sweden. And when their families would be denied asylum, the children would stop eating and stop speaking. And the condition would sort of snowball to the point where they would basically be in what looked to be comas. And Swedish doctors didn’t really know what to make of the condition, and they called it resignation syndrome. And there were investigations to see if this was a phenomenon occurring in other Nordic countries. And basically, it seemed to be an illness specific to Sweden and specific to children from former Soviet states.

ezra klein

And you went to see some of these children, right?

Yeah, I was interested in — to see the way that biology interacts with a very specific set of social conditions. In this case, no one had resignation syndrome unless they had had troubles with the Swedish asylum system. That sort of dynamic felt so confusing to me. And I think there was this desire to see the children as faking it. They have to be pretending because one of the complicated dynamics was that Sweden, which prides itself on being this charitable warm place for refugees, started saying that for the families whose children have resignation syndrome, they will automatically grant them residency. So it became — there was this secondary gain component, where there was something that the families got out of this illness. But what I was struck by when I met the children was that it didn’t feel willed at all. It felt so — I mean, these children were unconscious. There was no way to access them. So it was some confusing mix of distress and maybe rewards for expressing a distress in a particular way. And then they kind of lost control over it. The body took over.

ezra klein

I always wondered — I read this story when you wrote it in The New Yorker, and it stayed with me for years. And one of the things I’ve always puzzled over with it is if you have ever met any children, it’s very hard for them to stay still.

Yeah.

ezra klein

Or a person, if you’ve ever tried to meditate for 10 minutes. So now imagine not eating, not moving for days, weeks, months. That doesn’t feel to me like it is typically within the self disciplining power of a person.

For me, in a way, I think I approached it from a slightly different — that wasn’t the question I had. The question I had was, why does that feel so familiar to me? I felt like that had been a form of helplessness and anger that was available to me as a child, but I didn’t have the — maybe that’s not quite the way of framing it. But in a way, it felt relatable to me. And so the more interesting question was, how is it taking such a specific, consistent form among so many children? But even though I agree that that question is really — yeah, it is hard to have that kind of self-discipline. But then I think there’s something contagious about self-discipline, and once you start, it’s really hard to get out of it. It becomes a psychological and biological — there’s just this momentum. And once you’re on a track — I could really relate to that experience of not being able to pull yourself off of it.

ezra klein

I want to go into what made that relatable. But before we do, one of the things that felt important to me about that story for this book is that in the end, it seemed like what you were describing. There was a mimetic illness, an illness that almost spreads as a kind of story. Is that right?

Yeah, I think eventually I did realize that most of the families with children who had resignation syndrome knew someone who had it. And I was just amazed by the kind of power of — I don’t think any of these children went into this experience with the desire to have resignation syndrome. But to be in a situation where your family’s safety is at risk, I felt that there was a groping for answers. And if you know that another child did this, why not take to your bed because you are so depressed and then sort of let it go? There’s just that mixture of following someone else’s script but also feeling like it’s really true to you. I mean, I think that was part of what happened. I remember reading this scholar — Ian Hacking had studied these Swedish children and he compared it to Pascal’s wager, that if you believe — that no one knows whether God exists, but you might as well believe in God because if he does — what’s Pascal’s wager? That you might as well believe in God. You have nothing to lose. But he writes about how when you do believe in God, at first, you’re pretending. You’re kind of willing yourself to believe. But eventually, that belief kind of sticks and something that you had been imitating then becomes authentic.

ezra klein

There’s this idea that to say an illness is psychosomatic is to say that it is in some sense not real or at least not real in the way that a flu or a tumor is real. How do you think about that?

I guess I have two slightly conflicting thoughts. One thought is that there is this motto within mental health advocacy that we want to make mental illness just as legitimate and real as any other disease. People often say, I need to take my psychiatric medications just like someone with diabetes needs to take insulin. And I always feel that that is just so simplifying. And why do you need to — why do you need to leave out the ways in which — psychology is more complicated than sugar in the blood. So why do we need to simplify it that way? What is so scary about acknowledging some confusing mix of the way we are thinking about things and how our own personality and way of making sense of things actually can influence the course of an illness? But then, on the other hand, I think there’s this idea that if an intervention is not through a medication or through some sort of medical procedure, then it doesn’t count. It’s not biological. So if praying helps you feel much better in a way that’s actually quite real, why is praying not seen as acting on your biology? It’s seen as a placebo effect. And that kind of distinction always felt arbitrary and unfair and maybe a distinction that excludes forms of treatment that really help.

ezra klein

I want to get at something here that you alluded to, which is that resignation syndrome felt familiar to you, relatable to you, because you had had an experience as a six-year-old, which was shocking to me and reading it, with your own kind of illness of self-denial. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, it related to me because I felt like the early impulse there was the same. There’s some sense of I can’t stand what’s happening in my family and in my community. My parents were recently divorced, but it was still very messy. And I don’t feel I have any control over the way my life is going. I have control over very few things in my life, but one of those is what I put into my body. So I’ll just stop eating. That will be the way to signal that things are not right and that I won’t go along with it. And I did that when I was six. My mom took me to a pediatrician. And it was the late ‘80s. And the pediatrician said, OK, this is anorexia. She’s not eating. She’s lost — I don’t know — it was like 2 percent of my body weight, which at the time was probably like 3 pounds. It wasn’t much. So then she took me to the hospital in Detroit. And I was diagnosed with anorexia there, too. And then they had this new anorexia unit for girls. They were all girls then. And they were all in their teens or they were teenagers. And suddenly, this impulse to not eat was given a name. And I learned that name and found this social circle of other girls who were doing the same thing.

ezra klein

And so there’s a way in which that experience for you seems haunted a little bit by the fact that it went in the reverse direction, that you developed your illness here before you had access to a story of it. But there does seem to be a sense in that chapter in the end of your book, a fear looming over it. That if you had had this story, if you were a little bit older, if you had better understood anorexia, if you had better known how to fit in to being an anorexic, that your life could have gone very differently, that something in your impulse could have connected to something in the story and the intertwining of the two might have been irreversible. Is that right?

Yeah, no, I think that’s a good way of putting it. I got out of the hospital. I went back to school. I didn’t tell anyone I had been diagnosed as anorexic. And that word would have been meaningless to my peers. It had been meaningless to me a few weeks earlier. And it just never became part of my identity. And I guess I wonder if I had — if you get out of this very altering experience in a hospital and you feel alone and you’re trying to immerse yourself in a community and it’s a struggle — and I could see how you come back to that diagnosis and feel like, well, those people did understand me. And on the one hand, I think that can be really comforting. But I wonder — my parents were given an option to put me in a school for special needs children. And I just think there were these little moments along the way where there were choices to define myself as someone who had been mentally ill and choices to define myself as someone who just had this kind of strange experience that I didn’t want to talk about. And I think in my case, maybe having a strange experience that I couldn’t label or the label just felt ridiculous because I was too young for it, maybe that helped me find other sources of meaning in that initial transition moment of feeling alone and weird and like you don’t fit in but trying to find a way.

ezra klein

There’s a quote early in the book that it gets at this. It gets at what I think the book is about in this central — I don’t know if I want to call it a tension, a fear. But you write, quote, “There are stories that save us and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness, it can be very hard to know which is which.” And that quote embeds the other side of this, that for a lot of people, a diagnosis is a relief. For a lot of people, being able to have a story, a name that makes sense of an experience or having that takes it off of them and them alone can be a safety. How do you think about when a story is trapping somebody and when it’s saving them?

I guess I would emphasize just the sense of unpredictability that we just don’t know. And I think maybe we’ve always assumed that the name is good. The name gives us a community. The name gives us a way of communicating. And I think all that is true. We need names. It’s practically impossible or bureaucratically impossible not to have diagnoses. But I think there is a sense in which names and labels and the explanation for your illness is just that. We assume that it just captures what we’re experiencing as opposed to thinking that this is not neutral. This actually acts on us, too. It’s not just the diagnosis has described me. It’s that I am interacting with this diagnosis somehow and maybe I kind of subconsciously develop in ways that better embody the way that I feel explains me. So I think it’s that sense of just not assuming that this is just about matching person with explanation but that the explanations do things to us and change the way we think about the future and change our expectations for who we can be and who we can meet.

ezra klein

Have you ever read or come across Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on emotions and how they work?

No, no.

ezra klein

I know it’s — people argue over how emotions work. But a basic theory is that we have certain things inside of us that we can feel. Our bodies take in sensory data. Some amount of that sensory data is available to us. That’s interoception. And then we have these concepts that we have to use to decide what it is that that sensory data is revealing and that depending on what concepts are socially available to us or individually available to us, you get very different answers. She tells a kind of funny story in the book about being out on a date that she didn’t feel was going well. But she was flushed and her heart was racing a little bit and her stomach had butterflies. And she’s like, there must be something here. But actually, she just had a stomach flu. So she was getting the wrong information. But she’s trying to attach a cognitive interpretation to this data. I had an experience — I mean, still do to some degree. I have always been an anxious person. Basically, everybody in my family are anxious people. But it got bad for a number of years. And I actually needed to develop an almost identity as somebody who was anxious just to be able to understand what was going on. And then as things got better for me, I realized that that identity was leading me to interpret a pretty huge range of data that in another world I might have understood as excitement, as anticipation, as anxiety. And I was becoming averse to all kinds of experiences that were, not in the sexual way, just in the nervous system way, arousing.

Yeah.

ezra klein

And it just — what you’re saying here reminds me a little bit of that, that there’s some interaction here, in a pretty deep way, between how we know how to think about what is happening to us, and then over time, then how much of what is happening to us gets read into that way of thinking.

Yeah.

ezra klein

And so it becomes a kind of momentum of that understanding of our ourselves. Does that resonate?

And so I’m curious what happened then. Would you stop going to things that you wanted to be going to because you assumed that you were an anxious person that wouldn’t respond well to it?

ezra klein

I would say it was actually more in my work. That for a period of time — my work has a certain amount of conflict built into it and a certain amount of being willing to make people upset. And as somebody who for a while just didn’t want a lot more of that energy in me, I became a little more cautious with what I would do, or what I would say, or what I’d be willing to look at in terms of feedback. And then there were things that were happening in my life, too, not so much in terms of where I would go, but just in terms of how I would experience things interpersonally. And it wasn’t debilitating. I don’t want to overstate anything. But it is a place where — one thing I was thinking reading throughout your book is that this is a book, of course, about people with very serious mental illness. But the central question about the stories that we tell ourselves that can trap us or the stories we tell ourselves that can uplift us and the difficulty in knowing which is which and then also the difficulty in the way those stories interact with the stories that are told about us by others or by society. I mean, that’s not simply a question for someone with serious mental illness. In many ways, it’s almost a more salient question for people without, part because they have more control over the stories.

Yeah. I mean, I’ve always felt like one of the great things about aging is that I know the situations I can handle and the situations I can’t handle. I no longer am this naïve 20-year-old who will put myself in situations that make me anxious. But then I think I also wonder if you lean too heavily on that story and make excuses for yourself and it becomes calcified and limits you. I no longer — you can just become a more limited person. But I think there are times when stories outlive their usefulness. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

One of the first stories you tell in the book is about a man who ends up suing a hospital where he spent some time — Chestnut Lodge in Maryland — for trying to get him to change and alter his stories, for trying to understand his illness as a story rather than medicating him. And at the same time, he becomes very trapped in obsessive storytelling. So tell me a bit about him and about the narrative role he’s playing for you.

So I was interested in Ray Osheroff. I’d seen his story in textbooks as this case that represented the triumph of biology and — it was sort of the triumph of a biological approach to psychiatry. And I was drawn to him because he had been treated at this psychoanalytic hospital called Chestnut Lodge. And it was really the only place in the country that had this kind of utopian idea that it didn’t matter what a person’s diagnosis was. It didn’t matter how sick they were. If you really talk to them, you could see that no person is unreachable. And so he was this doctor who went there because he was depressed. And he was the kind of person — I mean, a number of people have said, oh, he reminds me of this uncle that I can’t stand being with at Thanksgiving or whatever. He was a certain type that agitated people.

ezra klein

And what is the story that Ray keeps telling and revising so compulsively?

His story is that he was a successful father and society man. And he got sick, and he could have been treated with medication. But instead, these kind of evil psychoanalysts wanted him to plumb his unconscious. And in the process of doing that, he lost everything in life. He lost his children. He lost his marriage. And if only he had been treated with medication, he could have been the man that he felt entitled to be. And he kept reworking that story over 30 years. And with time, he became an even greater man, and the hospital did even more evil things. And I think he agitated his doctors and they didn’t like him. And so his unlikeability got in the way of their beautiful theories about how if you just really understand someone, you can help them become the best version of themselves. And so he asked for medication and they said, no, you just need more self-awareness. You need more insight. And eventually, he just completely deteriorated. And his mother pulled him out of the hospital and put him into a hospital that would give him medication. And very quickly, as if it were a miracle — he wrote about this experience, and I read it in his medical records. You can just see him become human again. And it’s an amazing thing to watch — someone who was so depressed and so repetitive — his depression just took this very repetitive form. And suddenly, he didn’t need to think about the same things anymore. He could entertain new thoughts. And it was so clear that the medication gave him that. And so then he had this revenge desire for the hospital that had deprived him of these medications. And he sued them in more or less one — I mean, they settled. But in the way that the case was written about it, it was presented as his victory.

ezra klein

I’m surprised you ended the retelling of it there, because it seems to me that the point of your telling it is that it wasn’t quite a victory in that way. And that’s why I ask about the narrative role it’s playing, because on the one hand, that’s a pretty straightforward story that you just told. But maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about this in terms of story at all. If something is amenable to medication, then who the hell cares what story you’re telling about it? But at least as I read that chapter, that isn’t where you feel it ends.

Yeah, I think I got really captivated by just that moment of medication working, which is like a dramatic moment. But yes, then the story goes on, and he really doesn’t recover. And he becomes consumed and obsessed with his desire to reclaim his lost status as a father and a figure in society. And he has this idea that what will allow him to re-enter the world as a respectable person is this memoir that he’s working on. And he spends like three decades writing drafts and drafts of this memoir. And I think what I wanted — I began the book that way because it felt like this is often the story that gets told about psychiatry — that it’s this confrontation between these two different paradigms: the paradigm that says that your suffering comes from your family, and if you understand it well enough, you can get better, and the paradigm that says this is about your biology. It’s a disease. We can fix it if we just find the right technology.

ezra klein

The reason I ask what role he’s playing for you is that for a book about the ways in which the stories we tell maybe trap us and I think implicitly is about the way in which better stories might free us, he seems like a very complicated case where it’s pretty clear in the reading that the storytelling is at the pathology for him, that it is a way his pathology is manifesting. He endlessly, endlessly, endlessly repeats himself to his children, alienating all of them. He writes version after version after version after version of these memoirs. There’s no version of the memoir that would have worked. And so there was a way in which — my question with him was, are the stories just orthogonal? Maybe the stories don’t trap or free us in these cases. Maybe the problem is believing they have any real power at all when it is this underlying volcanic compulsion that does. When I was younger — I mean, I still have a bit of this — I had quite a bit of OCD, and I used to count things repetitively. But there was no count that would have solved it. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the right number in my head. It was this underlying compulsion. The counting was its expression, not its cause nor its solution.

When you were setting up that question, I mean, I did think that the story in that chapter is the story that psychiatry has told that has trapped psychiatry, this idea that somehow we have to sort out whether it’s psychodynamic or biological. I mean, this is a simplification that I’m saying. But I do feel like that has been a trap, that there’s some sort of binary and that it’s always one versus the other. And then there’s this other binary that’s like psychiatry is the solution versus psychiatry is the problem. And that is like this other binary that I think has been a kind of trap. But I think there was something I admired about Ray’s — the way he wrote about himself. And there would be these moments of really capturing the experience of what depression feels like or what it feels like to suddenly have it relieved by medications. And I noticed that over the years, as he kept writing his story, it seemed to become less and less honest. It became more of a story about a story about a story and less about his actual raw experience. I also wondered, why couldn’t he accept the story he was telling? Why couldn’t he see that as revealing and meaningful? Why did he need an expert to come down from on high and authorize it as the right thing? I thought that that disconnect was telling. And maybe in all the people I wrote about, they had this such elegant, beautiful writing about their own experiences. But they felt like they needed someone to confirm, yes, this is true. This is real. There’s a reason you’re feeling this way. They didn’t feel they could trust their own way of describing and seeing it.

ezra klein

I’m curious about your trust in it, though. I don’t mean to embarrass you here. But you’re journalist. But more than that, you’re a storyteller. A lot of the best journalists I know say you’re their favorite journalist because of how good you are at finding and telling stories, where a lot of us just end up going the lazy route and asserting what it is we want to say. And this book felt, in many ways, like a confrontation that you were having maybe with the limits or the dark side of the very kind of magic you’ve devoted yourself to.

That’s a good question. I think one way of hedging that problem was that I told multiple stories in this book. How did I end up writing this book? I have so many of these issues I was thinking about for the last, I think, like 10 or 12 years. And I recently read the first piece I wrote for The New Yorker, which was also about this issue of insight. I was surprised by how much I was reworking those questions that had been prompted by this piece like 12 years earlier. And I think it was amazing to be able to look at one issue but to tell five stories about it and to not expect that the reader leaves story number one with a sense of what is true and what is real and what is the right way to proceed with these complicated questions or to know that, then they move to story number two and start doubting all the things they felt about story number one. It’s not just the telling of different stories, but it’s also the fact that I think this form maybe allowed for more acknowledging that when you write about one story, it’s always diminishing all the stories that would sort of challenge the takeaway from that one story.

ezra klein

A lot of what I read in the stories in the book ended up not being so much about the stories people told about themselves as offering any real path to redemption. It was very hard for me, honestly, to find an instance in the book where I thought the person could have told a different story that would have radically changed what happened to them, maybe with the exception, actually, of you. But what did seem there was connection. What often seemed to me to have had a possibility of saving someone — or in one case, which we’ll talk about with Naomi, maybe did save someone — was connection. And that’s actually a little bit more about the stories others tell about us or maybe tell about themselves in relation to us. But that there’s something about the difference between a story that is told that isolates us and the story that is told, or even a way of telling a story, that connects us, which is much less in our control, that seemed really important. But the lifeline here seemed to be other people, not other narratives. The story of Bapu gets into some of these issues we’ve been discussing. So tell me a bit about who Bapu was and how she began to change.

Bapu was a Brahmin woman. As she became a mother in Chennai, she had an arranged marriage. And after having her two kids, she started becoming more and more religious. She wanted to spend all her time in her prayer room. Her family at first kind of respected that she was praying more and that she was writing these beautiful poems about Krishna. But increasingly, they felt like she was neglecting her children and neglecting her duties. And it became sort of an unacceptable expression of spirituality. And as Bapu became more religious, she started running away from home. So she would slip out in the early morning hours and take a train and go to the south of the country where she could live in healing temples. And her family would have no idea where she had gone. So she would run away to these healing temples. And the family would be searching for her, and they would — sometimes the police would end up bringing her back and she would be bound in rope. And she would be sort of mute and just enter the house, and no one would look at her or talk to her. It felt so much for her that she couldn’t tolerate being seen as a schizophrenic in her home. And then she had to go to a place where that wasn’t going to be the way she was described.

ezra klein

She had a story about herself. In some ways, I think the implication, as you say here, is maybe it was even the right one for what she needed, that she was a mystic. And she couldn’t get, until very late in her life, others to validate that story. And then the deep sadness of that tale to me is that it was in her death that people began to, that more people were willing to see her as a mystic, that the town came out and instead of looking at her as a crazed person, they saw her as — as you said, somebody somewhat in touch with the divine. And I guess it also raises this kind of obvious question, which is, how do you think about that borderland between mystic and madwoman, because the two are not — I mean, there is a matter of perception here on whether or not the rest of the world agrees that you are hearing words from God or not.

Yeah, I mean, she had two children, a son and a daughter. And her son was really adamant that his mother had been a mystic. And her daughter started a nonprofit organization devoted to people with mental illness. And she clearly saw that her mother was suffering from a mental illness. And something that her daughter said was that she had this sense of her mother as this radiant creature who filled the house with these beautiful songs and prayers. But then there was this time that she saw her at the healing temples, and she was hungry, and she was so dirty and thin and physically ailing. And she said, that’s real suffering and that’s real disability. And she was having these moments of ecstasy, but you also can’t deny that she was also really suffering. And I wonder if maybe one way to think about it is in this pragmatic way of, if a mystic is able to live her life in a way without that suffering, maybe she’s doing OK as a mystic. But if she’s not eating and she’s near death, that framework feels very romantic.

ezra klein

Tell me about Bapu’s poetry.

So I was able to read about 800 pages that she had left of her poetry. And it was all — most of it was about Krishna and her deep love for Krishna. But some of it was about her children and how angry she was at Krishna for taking her away from her children. And it fit within a very clear tradition of these female poets in India kind of writing about both the radiance of the sense of being married to a God and the tragic nature of never being able to touch God, never being able to kind of — you’re chasing after him and you’ve had this experience of oneness, but you never can hold on to it as long as you want to.

ezra klein

Particularly in this chapter, I was left thinking a bit about a similarly named book by another New Yorker writer, “Strangers Drowning” by Larissa MacFarquhar, which is a book I love. And it’s about extreme altruists, people who kind of can’t shut themselves to the suffering of the world and so begin giving everything they have, working crazy hours, having almost nothing for themselves, trying to give all their money to get malarial bednets for children in Africa, or to save farm animals. And it gets at this question of what we think of as normal. And there are certain kinds of — I mean, saying this word without judgment — abnormalcy that are very extreme forms of believing things that we tend to believe are normal and good and marks of being a good person to believe. So in Larissa MacFarquhar’s book, it’s very much about this question of — well, we want people to be good people. But we don’t want them to be, in a way, too good, too self-sacrificing in a way that is upending to society or makes the rest of us feel bad, that if you really believe what is obvious to believe that the life of a child somewhere else counts as much as your life has and begin acting on that. People begin looking at you really, really askance. But it’s true religiously, too, I mean, in the culture Bapu is in, in the culture I’m in, a lot of people, or most people, even, are religious or have been at some point. There are things that one claims to believe in those traditions, books one says the words of allowed. And it’s like it’s good to believe that to a certain degree and go to church or go to temple. But if you believe it too much, if you really act the way that might imply you should act, then either you become a monk or an ascetic and get understood as a kind of higher plane person, or you’re really seen as somebody who’s gone mad. And it strikes me as something really interesting. I mean, there are certain kinds of diversion from what we see as normal that are just diversions from what we see as normal. But there’s also kinds that are extremities of what we see as normal, and yet we see them as almost just as abnormal if not more so. I’ve just always been fascinated by these spaces where it’s like if you really listened to what you were told as a kid about being a good person or being in Sunday school, you can pass a point where people think you’ve listened too much and you have kind of lost a grip on society.

It kind of reminds me of something I’ve thought about, that if you see the world really clearly, you’re actually depressed — this idea of depressive realism. One of the problems with people who are depressed is that they’re just seeing things too clearly. They realize they’re going to die. They realize the world is getting worse every day. Their families are going to get sick. Why not be depressed? And so that, to be healthy, requires some significant degree of hiding the reality of your world. And so the people that Larissa writes about are seeing the world quite clearly. Why not do that? That is the logical response. But it’s like that clarity feels threatening and extreme and dangerous and problematic in all sorts of ways, because they’re not operating according to the illusions that people have agreed to operate according to in order to live in a way that’s tolerable. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I think that’s a door to what was by far the hardest chapter for me to read in the book and the one I most have the most trepidation about talking about. But tell me a bit about Naomi?

Naomi — she was a young mother with four kids. She was 24. And she became completely overwhelmed by her life. She had grown up in Chicago in a public housing complex where there was an incredible amount of poverty and violence. And at some point, she started reading a lot of books about the history of Black people in America. And suddenly, she felt like she was having a series of epiphanies about what it meant to be a Black mother in America raising children. And she reached this point of fear that she felt like people were going to harm her children, they were going to lead this awful life. And she went onto a bridge in Saint Paul, Minnesota and jumped off with her two young twins and one died and one survived. And one of the reasons I decided to write about her is I was reading the interview she’d given in her hospital bed after jumping off. And the police officer was trying to ask her questions, and she was — her explanation — she said, I didn’t want my children — I see how brown and Black children are treated in this country, and I didn’t want them to grow up leading a life of ridicule or inferiority. And she kept — the officer was just so frustrated because the way that Naomi kept explaining what she’d done was through an analysis of the experience of discrimination and racism for her family.

ezra klein

And there was also — it seemed in the way at least you told the story — a deep sense of paranoia. That she believed that the government was coming to kill her and her children.

Right, no, there was like a true element of psychosis as well. She had thoughts that if she didn’t jump off the bridge, she’d be killed another way and the other way would be far more — it would — the other way would be a kind of torture.

ezra klein

And the really brutal tension at the core of Naomi’s story is this idea that she somehow had too much insight to be seen as fully insane. You write quote that — and this is around the question of having an insanity defense — quote, “The evaluators seemed distracted by the truth of her sociological insights. Delusions are not spun from pure fantasy.” Tell me about that.

It was a strange reversal because before she threw off her children from the bridge, before she jumped off the bridge, she had been hospitalized a few times and had tried to talk about the painful realization she was having about how other people were treating her and viewing her. And the doctors said she didn’t have insight into the fact that she had bipolar disorder. She was talking about these other things that were unrelated to the medical problem. And then after she committed this crime, they — she was evaluated. And they said, she’s actually protesting against the conditions of society. That is a sane thing to do. Therefore she’s not insane enough to not be charged with this crime. And I think that was this dilemma for her throughout her time in prison, too, is that her delusions were delusions. They departed from reality in a lot of significant ways. But they all connected to her sense of having been hated by people because she was Black, because she had grown up poor, of feeling like she had been excluded from aspects of society.

ezra klein

That idea that delusions are not spun from pure fantasy I think is an important one here. And I guess it raises this question of — I mean, where her story goes is far beyond depressive realism. I think it’s really important to say that and make that clear. She’s not somebody who — I mean, you don’t look at injustice in society and throw your kids off of a bridge. But there is a way here in which I think the question that is being asked in the chapter is whether other people being able to take her seriously and whether society having a different way of understanding her would have changed things. And so tell me a bit about the role, for you, that story is playing for her, a story — do you think if it wasn’t injustice of society, it would just have been something else, that she has a disease and it was going to find something to latch onto? Or do you think that there was some kind of connection here?

I think that is a good question, though. I think about that a lot with religious delusions. You have this feeling that people are watching you. And maybe there is something inherent to certain ways in which the brain can function incorrect. Why is it so common to feel as if you’re being watched? Something about the way consciousness changes in mental illness that I think makes that a common experience and then it does depend what culture are you in? What metaphor do you reach for to understand that? And in India, you might say that’s because Krishna is — I’m in a relationship with Krishna and he is watching me. And I think for Naomi, it made more sense to say the FBI is watching me, and they’re going to do what they’ve done to Black people for the last 100 years. Or maybe a better way of saying it, the police are watching me, and they’re going to treat me the way that they’ve treated people like me for many years.

ezra klein

I guess I’m asking whether or not there’s a counterfactual story here. I mean, this is a book about the way stories interact with mental illness. And there’s one version of seeing Naomi’s story where it says her psychosis latched onto a story about racism. When the racism story is true and this like — but if she had not latched onto that one, the psychosis would have carried forward no matter what. Do you understand these stories as having a counterfactual? In a book about the way stories can trap us or free us, is the story relevant to Naomi? Or is really the illness relevant, and what we needed was a different social structure where she would have gotten more compassionate help, probably with significantly more treatment from much earlier?

Yeah, I think if her story was, there are aliens invading my body, I do think that story would have — there would have been less reinforcement for that story everywhere she looked. So I guess I think if I play out that counterfactual, it’s hard when you have a story that is — there are signs everywhere and you suddenly see them. And so you don’t know if you’re suddenly seeing the world clearly. She felt like she was suddenly noticing all the pieces of evidence for her story. And so I — the counterfactual that I sometimes think about is when she was walking on the bridge, right before she jumped off, she kept saying, I was just looking for someone who would smile back at me. And I did wonder, what would have happened if someone smiled at her? And is — are lives so arbitrary that if some — if a different person had gone to the grocery store and walked along that way and smiled at her, her entire life wouldn’t have happened the way it had.

ezra klein

One thing the chapter circles — and, again, her story is very distinctive and ends in — or moves through a true horror. But I did think one thing that the chapter was circling was this question I hear much more often now, which is whether living — and I mean this here for mentally well people, too — living within the truth and totality of historical crimes and sins is psychologically destabilizing. And so there’s this kind of analysis of what we are as a country or where we are as a society— or climate change or racism or all kinds of things that are very real. But that to fully absorb their realness and their size and how far they reach back and what they might mean going forward is such a psychological kind of self-harm, that whatever the truth content, it should be discouraged on exactly that ground. If you read the book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Haidt and Lukianoff, they make this argument that you have cognitive behavioral therapy which teaches you in a healthy way to tell better stories about the world, more generous ones. And that has a tension with this way of looking at injustice which teaches you to tell a much grimmer story about the world and a much more suspicious one. And I’m curious how you thought about that after the reporting but also reporting with her family, where this seems to come up a lot.

I sometimes think about mental illness in terms of porousness. There are some mental illnesses where one of the major problems is you’re too porous. You’re letting the world in, and it’s — you can’t resist it. For Naomi, every — you can’t live if every single slight is affecting your identity so deeply. And then I think there are other illnesses where you’re so closed off from the world. You’re not letting the world in. I mean, I think resignation syndrome would be something like that. And it was almost like Naomi couldn’t calibrate her receptivity to all this injustice that she was reading about and that she was seeing. And she wanted more and more of it. Even that impulse to know more instead of to protect herself from it contributed to what happened to her. I remember her mom saying she learned too much about our history too quickly. But I just can’t imagine any world in which denies — I mean, yes, maybe young children shouldn’t be taught every aspect of the history too soon. But the idea of denying a person their own history to protect their mental health, I don’t know where that would lead people.

ezra klein

But you can imagine versions of it that aren’t full on denial. You can imagine versions of it, which I think are the contested ones today, that are more about a question of believing yourself to have an independence from the past, believing in that we have a land to some degree of opportunity, that quite a lot is up to our individual agency, and believing that systems bear down on us with such force that there is little we can do given that we are within their grasp. And I do think it is contested. I think you can understand a lot of the fights over curriculums and even in politics as a fight between these narratives. And I think that both can include some similar facts but with very, very, very different interpretations.

It’s hard because I think that for Naomi, once she was in prison, she started reading about Black mothers and the grief and the melancholy of Black mothers. And then she did find a way into that history that made her unmanageable experiences feel quantifiable in some ways. Yeah, maybe it was not the book that she read on lynching that was helpful. But it was the sense of, oh, I was being placed in the position that so many Black mothers have been placed in, where there’s no option to be depressed because we’ve always been told to carry these burdens. And if we have any trouble, we just pray about it or take a nap. And we aren’t entitled to feel sad about this. So I do think there was a version of that story of the history that was actually very productive for her, because it made her aware of why for so long she had kind of resisted the idea of being mentally ill or depressed and felt like she had to live up this — be this very strong, indestructible figure who couldn’t ask for help.

ezra klein

I think that’s really interesting and then gets to this, I think, other social concern that I see pretty often now. There’s been this very sharp rise in mental illness and suffering among teenagers. You’re seeing more self-harm, more kids ending up in the hospital. And one of the reasons I sometimes hear suggested is that there’s been this mainstreaming of narratives of mental illness, of identities of being depressed, of being anxious, of having bipolar disorder, where for a long time, there was much more stigma around these. And there’s been a sense that reducing the stigma would help. I think there’s also people who now feel that reducing the stigma has made them — to go back to a word I used earlier in the conversation — more mimetic. They’ve become more common stories. And as such, more people are beginning to understand their experience in those terms. And then with some of the dynamics we’ve discussed, that’s developing a momentum in their own lives. Having done all this work on stories and mental illness, at this point, are you more or less concerned about that? Do you think part of the rise in mental suffering we’re seeing is a result of stories that are becoming too widely told or too widely believed?

I thought a lot about that with suicide. I do wonder — I think early on, I remember I was writing a story about the Sandy Hook shootings. And I remember reading that Adam Lanza, who had shot all those children at Sandy Hook, in his bedroom had a lot of cutout magazine articles of other people who had shot people at schools. And that did really scare me about writing about Sandy Hook. I, for the first time, felt I can’t write about this person because I’m putting a piece of information to the world that might make it feel more possible for some other very lonely, unhappy young male teenager to start thinking this is a way of expressing solidarity with other men like this or communicating the same thing that Adam Lanza had been communicating. So that’s with mass shootings in schools. But I worry about something similar with suicide, that a lot of people are going to get depressed. But the idea that suicide is what depression leads to or is a way out of depression, I do think that there’s a social influence for when that idea comes to people, not that it’s not built into people’s — I do think that’s real. And some people will say suicide feels like its own kind of disease. But I think especially for young people who make these really impulsive decisions, it does seem scary to be in an environment in which suicide feels domesticated or something. Other people are talking about it. If I’m feeling like A, B, and C, then I’ll start thinking about suicide because that’s what people do when they feel these things.

ezra klein

I think suicide is a really tough and interesting example here. I think back to — there was a Netflix show called “13 Reasons Why,” and it’s about a suicide among a teenager. And it was criticized pretty harshly by researchers because they felt that it could have this mimetic force. And then there were studies, or at least a study, that came out finding an otherwise very hard to explain increase in suicide among the predicted group of teenagers in the month that the show came out — a real spike. And you hear this a lot, that suicide is contagious. And I’ve never known what to do with this because, presumably, it’s not just suicide.

I actually had a conversation with one of the people who made that series. And I mean, I think it’s just so frustrating because the logic is that if we talk about this, it destigmatizes it, and we want people to talk about suicidal impulses that will help them ask for help. I guess I have this impulse toward telling the truth about something and speaking openly is always a force for good. But I think suicide is just so impulsive. And so if the idea is available to someone, it’s hard to know what they’ll do with that idea. And so it’s really hard to know — I know that in my own — when I think of what stories to write, I do tend to think I should avoid something that will plant an idea for something. I guess I’m respectful enough of — I kind of fear the reality of that mimetic process.

ezra klein

Now, let me end on this, which is a question that’s related to something I asked you in the beginning. You’ve now done years of work on this book about the ways the stories people tell can trap or free them. Has it changed the way you think about the stories you tell yourself? Even if that’s hard to change, does it make you — is there any way that’s changed the way you want to approach your own process of self-narrativization?

I mean, I think I mentioned this before a little bit. I am — as I get older and certain stories about myself become more successful in a way, I can rely on them. I’m a self-disciplined person who cares about these certain things. Yeah, I do get scared that it’s limiting and that it will close me off and that it will not allow me to change in the way that I need to change to — yeah, there’s a risk of a story working too well, and you lack a flexibility that you need or that you want.

ezra klein

Did anything come to you in reporting these stories about what dislodges a story somebody is otherwise telling?

I think it’s like a person so much — finding a person who you feel that sense of connection with and who challenges your way of understanding yourself or sees your way of understanding yourself. With Naomi, she developed this incredible relationship with the librarian at her prison. And the librarian could kind of say, you think you don’t need these medications, but I know what you care about. And I know that when you’re not taking these medications, you’re not able to do the things you care about. And I think that challenged this easier story Naomi had about being free from the influence of these white doctors imposing their newfangled treatments on them. So yeah, I mean, I do think it’s those deep connections. And this kind of goes back to Chestnut Lodge — that there was something so powerful about the ideas there, that if someone understands you well enough and really listens, they might be able to challenge yourself conception in a way that is healing for you.

ezra klein

And then always our final question, what are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

I loved “Madness and Modernism” by Louis Sass. I think that that was one of the books that made me want to write about psychosis. He kind of compares modernist literature to the schizophrenic experience as a way of saying we’ve misunderstood schizophrenia. It’s not this kind of romantic genius going against the grain of society. It’s this intense self-consciousness and the sense of dissolving of boundaries between self and other and that all these ideas are showing up in modernist literature. And he kind of maps quotes from Kafka onto clinical records. And it really made me think I had no understanding of what psychosis was until I read that book. Another book related to psychiatry is T.M Luhrmann’s “Of Two Minds.” She’s an anthropologist and she looks at the way that psychiatrists are trained and how the training has created this divide in psychiatry between these two different ways of seeing the mind. And I guess I would recommend anything by Grace Paley. I was recently reading her story “Wants,” because I remembered that it had been my favorite story when I was like 18. And I reread it and felt like my understanding of it had completely changed. And it wasn’t about ex-boyfriends anymore. It was about aging and trying to figure out what you want in life. So that story among all of her stories I would recommend.

ezra klein

Rachel Aviv, your new book is “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.” Thank you very much.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I am taken aback, and not for the first time, that terrible and shocking things now just flow over Americans as if chaos is part of a normal day. We don’t have to accept the new normal.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Tim Alberta on the bad losers
Florida’s fatal attraction
Liz Bruenig: Dead man living
The Widening GyreI began the morning, as I often do, with a cup of coffee and a discussion with a friend. We were talking about last week’s nuclear warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin, and while we were on the subject of unhinged threats, I mentioned Donald Trump’s bizarre statement over the weekend that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a “DEATH WISH,” with a racist slam on McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, added in for good measure.“Oh, yeah,” my friend said. “I’d forgotten about that.” To be honest, so had I. But when I opened Twitter today, The Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell’s tweet that “we are still under-reacting to the threat of Trump” jumped out at me. She’s right.We are also, in a way, underreacting to the war in Ukraine. Our attention, understandably, has become focused on the human drama. But we are losing our grip on the larger story and greater danger: Russia’s dictator is demanding that he be allowed to take whatever he wants, at will and by force. He is now, as both my colleague Anne Applebaum and I have written, at war not only with Ukraine, but with the entire international order. He (like his admirer Trump) is at war with democracy itself.And somehow, we have all just gotten used to it.We are inured to these events not because we are callous or uncaring. Rather, people such as Trump and Putin have sent us into a tailspin, a vortex of mad rhetoric and literal violence that has unmoored us from any sense of the moral principles that once guided us, however imperfectly, both at home and abroad. This is “the widening gyre” W. B. Yeats wrote about in 1919, the sense that “anarchy is loosed upon the world” as “things fall apart.”For many years, I have often felt this way in the course of an ordinary day, when it seems as if I am living in a dystopian alternate universe. A time of hope and progress that began in the late 1980s was somehow derailed, perhaps even before the last chunks of the Berlin Wall’s corpse were being cleared from the Friedrichstrasse. (This was a time, for example, when we started taking people like Ross Perot seriously, which was an early warning sign of our incipient post–Cold War stupor.) Here are some of the many moments in which I have felt that sense of vertigo:
In my lifetime, I have seen polio defeated and smallpox eradicated. Now hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead—and still dying—because they refused a lifesaving vaccine as a test of their political loyalty to an ignoramus.
After living under the threat of Armageddon, I saw the Soviet flag lowered from the Kremlin and an explosion of freedom across Eastern Europe. An American president then took U.S. strategic forces off high alert and ordered the destruction of thousands of nuclear weapons with the stroke of a pen. Now, each day, I try to estimate the chances that Putin, one of the last orphans of the Soviet system, will spark a nuclear cataclysm in the name of his delusional attempt to turn the clock back 30 years.
As a boy in 1974, I delivered the newspaper that announced the resignation of Richard Nixon, who was driven from office in a political drama so wrenching that part of its name—Watergate—has become a suffix in our language for a scandal of any kind. Now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is a former president who is a walking Roman candle of racist kookery and unhinged conspiracy theories, who has defied the law with malicious glee, and who has supported mobs that wanted to kill his vice president.
Against all this, how can we not be overwhelmed? We stand in the middle of a flood of horrendous events, shouted down by the outsize voices of people such as Trump and his stooges, enervated and exhausted by the dark threats of dictators such as Putin. It’s just too much, especially when we already have plenty of other responsibilities, including our jobs and taking care of our loved ones. We think we are alone and helpless, because there is nothing to convince us otherwise. How can anyone fight the sense that “the center cannot hold”?But we are not helpless. The center can hold—because we are the center. We are citizens of a democracy who can refuse to accept the threats of mob bosses, whether in Florida or in Russia. We can and must vote, but that’s not enough. We must also speak out. By temperament, I am not much for public demonstrations, but if that’s your preferred form of expression, then organize and march. The rest of us, however, can act, every day, on a small scale.Speak up. Do not stay silent when our fellow citizens equivocate and rationalize. Defend what’s right, whether to a friend or a family member. Refuse to laugh along with the flip cynicism that makes a joke of everything. Stay informed so that the stink of a death threat from a former president or the rattle of a nuclear saber from a Russian autocrat does not simply rush past you as if you’ve just driven by a sewage plant.None of this is easy to do. But we are entering a time of important choices, both at home at the ballot box and abroad on foreign battlefields, and the center—the confident and resolute defense of peace, freedom, and the rule of law—must hold.Related:
Putin in the bunker
Three conversations with Donald Trump
Russian officials admitted setbacks in the war in Ukraine; over the weekend, the Ukrainian army reclaimed the eastern city of Lyman and further advanced on the Russian-annexed southern region of Kherson.
The trial began for Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers, as well as four other defendants. Rhodes is accused of seditious conspiracy and other felony charges for his role in the January 6 Capitol attack.
Indonesia announced that it will set up a commission to investigate the incident at a soccer stadium over the weekend where at least 125 people were killed.
Humans Being: Ramy, back on Hulu for its third season, takes viewers outside their American bubble, Jordan Calhoun writes.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg explains what his “favorite” anti-Semite taught him about forgiveness.
Up for Debate: Readers tell Conor Friedersdorf what the rest of the world does better than the U.S.
Famous People: Kaitlyn and Lizzie attend a birthday party inspired by a 1996 movie about death.
Scott McIntyre / The New York Times / Redux
Why the Florida Fantasy Withstands Reality
Five years ago, after Hurricane Irma pummeled Florida’s Gulf Coast, I rode a boat through the canals of Cape Coral, the “Waterfront Wonderland,” America’s fastest-growing city at the time. It was a sunny day with a gentle breeze and just a few puffs of clouds, so as I pointed to the blown-out lanais and piles of storm debris, my guide, a snowbird named Brian Tattersall, kept teasing me for missing the point of a magical afternoon. He said I sounded like his northern friends who always told him he was crazy to live in the Florida hurricane zone.
“Come on. Does this feel crazy?” he asked, as we drifted past some palm trees. Cape Coral is a low-lying, pancake-flat spit of exposed former swampland, honeycombed by an astonishing 400 miles of drainage ditches disguised as real-estate amenities, but to Tattersall it was a low-tax subtropical Venice where he could dock his 29-foot Sea Fox in the canal behind his house. When I asked if Irma would slow down the city’s population boom, he scoffed: “No way.”
The playful return of SNL
The Guggenheim’s scapegoat
University of hypocrisy
Disney+
Read. A new poem by Mairead Small Staid.“Though each night he cried out, each night / no angels came, no ministers of grace to save the son / from the spotlight glare of grief.”Watch. Hocus Pocus 2, on Disney+. The sequel wears its ridiculousness so proudly that it’s impossible to disdain.Play our daily crossword.P.S.My colleagues will be writing the Daily for the next few days; I’m back on Friday. But I don’t want to start off the week on such a grim note, so let me suggest a bit of light reading if you’re looking for an escape from the news.Often, when I see a reference to the Yeats poem “The Second Coming” (which includes the expression “the widening gyre”), I think of one of my favorite books, The Widening Gyre—an entry in the Spenser detective series by the late Robert B. Parker. Spenser, an urbane and wisecracking Boston gumshoe, was played capably on television by Robert Urich (and later by a woefully miscast Joe Mantegna), but the books are a delight, especially if you read them in order. The Widening Gyre, however, is great as a quick stand-alone read. Written in the mid-1980s, it’s a political blackmail mystery set in Boston, Washington, and my hometown area of Springfield, Massachusetts. It has some wry laughs in it too: Spenser, good Bostonian that he is, rolls his eyes at Washington’s inability to deal with snow, protects his clients while calling himself a “policy implementation specialist,” and downs a thug with what he considers “maybe the best left hook ever thrown in Springfield.” It’s a nice visit back to an earlier and simpler time—especially in politics.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

In June 2007, Jean-Philippe Cotis, the chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, declared that 2008 was going to be a great year.
The economic situation was “better than what we have experienced in years”, he wrote, and the central forecast of the OECD, representing the world’s 38 wealthiest countries, “remains indeed quite benign”. He tipped “a soft landing” in the United States and “sustained growth” in OECD economies, with “strong job creation and falling unemployment”.
That forecast – relying on the OECD’s “state of the art” economic model – proved, of course, to be spectacularly wrong. In 2008 the global financial crisis hit, the worst economic shock since the great depression.
Many critics, including myself, were not surprised. These “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” models make assumptions that even died-in-the-wool mainstream economists can’t stomach. In 2010 the Nobel laureate Robert Solow told the US Congress they “did not pass the smell test”.
The OECD’s then secretary-general, José Ángel Gurría, took this failure of conventional economics to heart. In 2012 he established an internal think tank called New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) to explore new ways to analyse and manage the economy. He deliberately set it up outside the OECD’s economics department so it could be free to consider ideas that mainstream economics ignored.
NAEC was a breath of fresh air in the normally stale world of economic policy debate. It heard from all manner of researchers – anthropologists, neuroscientists, physicists and engineers, as well as mainstream and non-mainstream economists – who used techniques mainstream economics remained resistant to, even after its obvious failures. 
Those of us who worked with NAEC or spoke at its public seminars enjoyed the freedom to think and talk outside the mainstream economic box. I spoke at several seminars, including on climate change and financial crises.
Cormann changes tack
That came to an end with Gurría’s successor, Australian Mathias Cormann.
Cormann, who took over as OECD secretary-general in June 2021, had been Australia’s finance minister from 2013 to 2020 under the the centre-right Coalition government. He had a reputation as an “economic dry”, and someone who trusted the advice of economists.

Read more:
Six questions about Mathias Cormann, newly appointed Secretary General of the OECD

One of his first actions at the OECD was to move the NAEC unit into the economics department. He also terminated the think tank’s regular public seminars, restricting them to the OECD’s ambassadors (one from each of its 38 member countries).
I and many other leading academics – including Nobel prizewinner Joe Stiglitz and Stephanie Kelton, the best-selling author of The Deficit Myth – felt this was a classic case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” 
Why unconventional thinking is needed
We need new economic thinking for today’s many new challenges, because the record of mainstream economists on these issues is frequently terrible. 
Take, for example, the work of William Nordhaus, who won the 2018 Nobel economics prize for his work on climate change. He assumed manufacturing, services and finance won’t be affected by global warming because they happen in “carefully controlled environments” – otherwise known as indoors. (I’ve written about this and the appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change in the journal Globalizations.)

Read more:
Climate change: how economists underestimated benefits of action for decades

We’re even facing problems that “conventional” economics is meant to understand, but which mainstream economists themselves admit they’re confused by. 
For example, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote last week that he had underestimated the persistence of inflation, while also suggesting the US Federal Reserve was overreacting with its interest rate rises, which he said “will surely cause a major economic slowdown, quite possibly a recession”. 
If economists can’t work out what to do with conventional economic problems, how likely are they to know what to do with unconventional ones such as climate change or the energy crisis facing Europe? 
If ever out-of-the-box economic thinking was needed, it’s now.
Getting a response
In January we wrote to Cormann asking him to reverse his NAEC decision. Our letter said:

As academic and professional economists, we know that economic orthodoxy can be wrong. The history of economics and economic policy is one in which certain theoretical frameworks and policy approaches frequently become orthodox, and then are later superseded. This is often because the empirical evidence changes; sometimes because rival theories come to be more convincing; in some cases both. In these circumstances it is important that an organisation providing advice to governments, like the OECD, is at the forefront, not just of the present orthodoxy, but of competing views, theoretical frameworks and policy approaches. 

We got no acknowledgement, let alone a reply. 
Therefore we decided to publish an an open letter to Cormann on September 27. I’m happy to report Cormann has already replied to this letter. Noisy diplomacy works.
His response defends moving NAEC inside the OECD’s economics department (a decision with which we still respectfully disagree), but he also promises to invite past contributors to NAEC’s public seminars to a discussion on NAEC’s future work.
I look forward to receiving my invitation.
Steve Keen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

No one who has followed Democratic rhetoric around the president’s constitutionally dubious executive order transferring the student debt burden assumed by millions of borrowers onto taxpayers’ shoulders could mistake it for sound, neutral policy. This is and always was a persuasion play with the midterm elections in mind.

“This is really good politics because it is in fact promises being kept to these young voters who were a pillar of his coalition,” said Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher. College Democrats of America President Jalen Miller agreed. “This is a great step forward to get the youth vote invigorated for Biden in the midterms and 2024,” he observed, adding that it’s only a prelude to total “student debt cancelation.” Progressives, like Hollywood writer-director Adam McKay, finally saw some signs of life in their party’s superannuated leader. “That is exactly what people have been begging for for years,” he insisted. “I think it changed the whole trajectory of the midterms.”

It did not. A summer slump in the polls notwithstanding, Republicans remain on roughly the same trajectory toward a successful midterm cycle they’ve followed since the autumn of 2021. And as legal challenges mount over the president’s lawless disbursement of somewhere between $400 billion and $1 trillion from the Treasury, the political arguments in favor of this initiative are evolving.

“I know I’m being banged up by the Republicans, but bring it on,” Biden told the audience at a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation event over the weekend. It is not, however, “Republicans” who will be responsible for any court-ordered injunction that might halt the president’s debt-transference scheme. Some Republican-led states have brought a suit against the government, but so, too, have private groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation. The Biden administration has been haphazardly scaling back the parameters of their debt-transference scheme—curtailing the number of privately held federal loans eligible for relief, and emphasizing a newly discovered “opt-out” option to avoid giving any plaintiff space to claim harm and, therefore, standing before the court. But all this concedes that the Democrats’ opponent here isn’t the GOP but the independent judiciary and the Constitution. Neither of which will be on the ballot on November 8.

Democrats appear to have convinced themselves that Biden’s debt scheme is a win-win situation. If it holds up, Democrats will bask in the admiration of enthusiastic young adults. If Biden’s initiative doesn’t withstand scrutiny in the courts, Democrats will benefit passively from the anger this demographic will unleash on the GOP. Either way, the party in power is betting that inchoate sentimentality will save them.

Will voters head to the polls to vote against Republican members in Congress to punish the federal judiciary, the members of which are appointed by the president? Maybe. But the White House isn’t betting that student debt holders will head to the polls with the Senate Judiciary Committee foremost on their minds. They’re betting that ire will consume them, and they’ll take their wrath out on anyone whose name appears in the Republican column. The Republican Party, too, is banking on the anger of voters, but the party out of power will have a much easier time making its case.

Republicans contend that this reckless injection of even more money into an economy typified by rising consumer costs will contribute to inflation. They don’t have to make the case; Democrats are making it for them. “Pouring roughly half trillion dollars of gasoline on the inflationary fire that is already burning is reckless,” wrote the chair of Barack Obama’s council of economic advisers, Jason Furman.

Republicans insist that Biden simply does not have the constitutional authority to do what he’s done. Here, too, Democrats have made the case. “If the issue is litigated, the more persuasive analyses tend to support the conclusion that the Executive Branch likely does not have the unilateral authority to engage in mass student debt cancellation,” read a memo authored by Charlie Rose, the general counsel for the Department of Education in Obama’s first term. For good measure, the White House’s attempt to locate the legal authority for student loan forgiveness in a post-9/11 law designed to support those who served in the armed forces adds insult to constitutional injury.

Finally, Republicans argue that the president’s maneuver provides a taxpayer-funded handout to Americans who are least in need of it. Republican ad-makers have bedecked their spots with working-class Americans seething over the administration’s subsidization of white-collar knowledge workers and artists. As the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate in Ohio, Rep. Tim Ryan, observed, it “sends the wrong message to the millions of Ohioans without a degree working just as hard to make ends meet.”

In the end, if Biden’s power-grab does not survive in the courts, the GOP’s arguments against it will still stand. The debt transference scheme will still be lawless, inflationary, and a brazen giveaway to a core Democratic constituency at the expense of the taxpaying public. We will have been spared its effects only by the imbecility of the program’s design. Democratic voters who back this initiative will still be struggling to regain their footing having had the rug pulled out from under them when the Biden administration demands that they organize a rear-guard action. The party in power will demand vengeance—not because it will salvage their preferred policy (it won’t), but because it would jam a thumb in some deserving eyes.

Even if Biden’s debt scheme isn’t struck down, that would only invalidate the GOP’s claim that the maneuver was unconstitutional. It will still be an act of “stolen valor.” It will still be inflationary at a time of soaring inflation. It will still be a handout to the wealthy and those with the highest earning potential. Democrats will insist that the courts could find no one who was “harmed” by this initiative, but Republican ad-makers most certainly will.

Joe Biden set out to make Democrats’ lives easier as they navigate a difficult political environment. His debt transference scheme seems likely to produce the opposite of its intended effect.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In his first Conservative conference speech as Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng wanted to double down on his budget and set out a vision for a growing, thriving economy. But since its announcement ten days ago, a poor market reaction and soaring borrowing costs have diminished the Chancellor’s reputation. So much so that this morning (3 October) he dismantled a key pillar of the Budget: the abolition of the 45p top rate of tax.
Nonetheless, Kwarteng’s speech made clear that he would continue in the same vein. He acknowledged there had been a “little turbulence” in recent days but said “we need to focus on the job in hand; we need to move forward. No more distractions.” Is the Bank of England’s emergency £65bn intervention last week a mere distraction?
This was a speech riddled with contradictions. Kwarteng sauntered towards the podium with a jaunty confidence, but then his delivery was nervous. He compared the government’s “growth plan” to the Industrial Revolution, but then spoke about tax cuts, not industry and infrastructure. He recommitted to reducing government debt as a share of GDP in the medium term but wouldn’t explain how that will happen. He said his plans would lead to “more money for public services” but wouldn’t increase public-service budgets in line with inflation – potentially costing them £18bn a year. 
Still trying to blame today’s problems on the last Labour government, Kwarteng said the Conservatives had reversed a “story of national decline”. But then said his policies were necessary because, after 12 years of Tory rule, “the path ahead of us was one of slow, managed decline”. Which is it?
The atmosphere in the conference hall was stunted, nervous. Standing ovations came hesitantly. The applause was sparse. After the unexpected announcements in the Budget, there was a sense Kwarteng could produce another surprise. “Absolutely anything is possible,” the Chancellor said at one point, the sweat sparkling on his head. Yes – that is part of the problem.
[See also: Liz Truss has already proved to be the worst Conservative prime minister yet]

Two Important Points on GDP and Economic Growth By: Pierre Lemieux

In his latest Financial Times column, “Undercover Economist” Tim Harford reminds us of two important points about GDP per capita and economic growth: they are not a measure of welfare (think about Middle East oil plutocracies), but they are highly correlated with individual welfare. Individual welfare is of course the only thing we should, or even can, be concerned with. While voicing some proper caveats, Harford expresses the two important points as follows (“Liz Truss’s Growth Delusion,” September 30, 2022):

Gross domestic product is not, and never has been, an attempt to measure the wellbeing of a society. … Nevertheless, it is striking how countries with a high GDP also have flourishing citizens. Pick your issue, from life expectancy to child mortality, from opportunities for women to the protection of basic human rights, cleaner streets, lower crime, even better-quality art, from TV to opera. Somehow, people who live in richer countries are likely to be enjoying more of the good stuff.

Having much command over goods and services is not a sufficient condition for individual happiness, but it usually helps.

Note that Harford does not criticize Liz Truss, the new British prime minister, for focusing on economic growth, but instead for neglecting some of its essential and constituent conditions:

Her rant about the “disgrace” of cheese imports suggests someone who hasn’t appreciated the importance of free trade in goods to a prosperous modern economy. … Her vast and open-ended energy price cap is a kick in the teeth for market forces. By some measures the largest fiscal event in living memory, it feels closer to Mao than Thatcher. And it is unnecessary: a truly pro-growth government would have achieved the same social goal by letting prices rise, but giving an offsetting cash grant to each household.

On the benefits of trade—whether domestic or international does not matter—remember James Buchanan, who was expressing a very Smithian idea (James M. Buchanan and Richard A. Musgrave, Public Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State [MIT Press, 1999], p. 245):

Fourth article in a series on bureaucratic autonomy; the first installment can be found here, the second here, and the third here. You can also watch a video version of this article here:Before we can get into an analysis of the pathologies of the deep state, and of the pathologies of the current conservative attack on it, we need to talk a bit more on an abstract level about why delegation is necessary in any hierarchical organization, and why some degree of bureaucratic autonomy is therefore necessary.In democratic theory, legitimate authority comes from the people, who are sovereign and have the ultimate right to make political decisions. They vote for legislators and, if they have a presidential system, a president with equal democratic legitimacy; these elected officials then go on to empower a bureaucracy to carry out their will.Those bureaucrats are in theory simply mechanical agents whose only job is to carry out the mandates imposed by their political superiors. The principal-agent theory used by economists maintains that dysfunctions in hierarchical systems like corruption arise when the agents follow their own interests rather than simply carrying out the mandates of their principals.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Anyone who has studied real-world bureaucracy, however, knows that this is a highly oversimplified view of things. The great Herbert Simon in his classic work on public administration noted that authority in organizations often flows in the opposite direction, from agents to principals because the bureaucratic agents often have greater expertise and knowledge of conditions on the ground than their political principals.We can illustrate this with regard to military organization, and the war that is currently playing out in Ukraine. The world’s most effective military organizations delegate huge amounts of authority to the lowest possible command levels, because it is those junior officers in contact with the enemy that understand best the threats and opportunities they face. This was true of the German army in World War II, the Israeli Defense Forces, and the contemporary U.S. Army.The latter in its post-Vietnam reorganization adopted the German practice of Auftragstaktik under the heading of “mission orders” or “commander’s intent,” where senior commanders were taught to delegate authority down the chain of command and avoid micromanagement. (You can read about this in the last study I completed for the Rand Corporation, The ‘Virtual Corporation’ and Army Organization’ written with Abram Shulsky back in 1997). This was codified in FM 100-5, the Army's combined arms manual, and taught in U.S. staff schools. The superiority of this approach was amply demonstrated during the two Gulf Wars, and is the practice that has been taught to the Ukrainians in the period following the annexation of Crimea.  The Russian military, by contrast, adheres to a rigid hierarchical system in which senior officers fail to delegate authority and are themselves directed from above. There are reports that Vladimir Putin has himself taken to giving operational orders to his own military, much as Saddam Hussein did during the Gulf Wars. This centralized system has led to disastrous results as local Russian officers are unable to respond to rapidly changing developments on the ground.This military example illustrates a broader truth about all hierarchies: principals mandate broad strategic directions, but the actual work of the organization is often done by lower-level agents acting on their own authority. All organizations in human history have had to balance the need for political control against the requirements of bureaucratic autonomy.At some point in the late 1990s, it hit me that the central issue in all administrative theory—and therefore in politics itself—was the problem of delegated discretion. I have been thinking about this problem ever since.The need for delegated authority applies to the U.S. government writ large: bureaucratic autonomy is widespread and necessary for the government to function, given the need for expertise and local knowledge. Thomas Koenig recently wrote in these pages about the Constitution’s non-delegation clause, echoing arguments of many conservative critics of the administrative state. It is a nice vision of an American democracy “of the people, for the people, and by the people” that citizens through their elected representatives should deliberate on policies and retain the broadest possible control over decision-making. But this is a very naïve view of how contemporary American government functions, and runs up against two big obstacles.The first has to do with expertise. Back in the 1820s, the main functions of American government were collecting customs duties and delivering the mail. Andrew Jackson may have been right at that time that any ordinary American could perform these tasks (though even then, when most citizens had at most an elementary school education, this might have been hard—it’s hard to read a postal address if you’re illiterate). Today the U.S. government does things like model the weather, manage the flow of funds through an incredibly complex financial system, operate national laboratories and fund scientific research, allocate spectrum, send spacecraft to the moon and beyond, and protect the health of its 330 million citizens. These are not functions that ordinary citizens or their elected representatives know terribly much about or have time to deliberate; what they can do is set broad mandates regarding the outcomes that their agencies are expected to achieve. Do we want Congress to be debating how many parts per million of a list of thousands of toxins are acceptable, or what specific changes Boeing must make in its manufacturing process to keep its airliners safe? The United States, like most other advanced countries, has granted substantial autonomy to its central bank, the Federal Reserve, precisely because we do not want elected politicians to be setting interest rates.The need for bureaucratic expertise can be illustrated by examples from early 20th century administrative law. Many U.S. states and municipalities sought to regulate electric utilities and railroads that were exercising monopoly power in their jurisdictions. They needed to establish a “reasonable” rate of return that would protect consumers but yet keep the utilities economically viable. But what constituted a “reasonable” rate? Legislatures found they couldn’t set these, nor did the courts have the economic expertise to do so, so the function was necessarily delegated to expert regulatory agencies.The second big problem with a doctrinaire attachment to non-delegation has to do with the legislative process itself. It is not as if the U.S. Congress is a highly effective deliberative body that is able to come up with wise solutions to pressing national problems. It was always the case that democratic legislatures do not make the best decisions: after the Civil War, many states mandated racial segregation and created a system that could be dismantled only through the exercise of federal power. Congress’ performance has only deteriorated over time: it is captured by powerful interest groups, and increasingly polarized in ways that prevent it from performing its most basic functions like passing budgets under regular order. With the politicization of virtually every issue coming before it, the idea that Congress could issue clear mandates on, for example, how to deal with carbon emissions or regulate large internet platforms is rather fanciful. The default outcome is congressional inaction, which leaves a vacuum to be filled by courts and bureaucracies.This is not to say that these unelected bodies can legitimately make policy on their own. There are plenty of examples of judicial and bureaucratic overreach, which I will discuss in a subsequent post. It would be very nice if the U.S. Congress stepped up to its responsibilities and issued clear mandates on how the country was to deal with carbon emissions, immigration and asylum policy, digital speech, and any number of other pressing issues. But Congress has never been in the business of issuing clear mandates to its bureaucratic agents, and is unlikely to do so in the near future. Into this breech have stepped bureaucracies and courts to try to sort out the confused or absent mandates set by Congress. The question is therefore not a categorical rejection of delegation, but a proper setting of a balance between legislative control and bureaucratic autonomy.In the next post, I will explain how political principals have controlled bureaucratic agents in the United States over time, and what the conservative attack on the administrative state portends for the future.

The concept of Impossible Trinity in international macroeconomics says that a country can only have two out of the following three options,

(i) free capital movement (absence of capital controls),

(ii) an independent monetary policy,

(iii) a fixed exchange rate.

In most of the time period before, and during, the shocking ten days, Britain, like the US and many Euro-using countries in the EU, has chosen (i) and (ii), by forsaking (iii).

It seems that, during non-war peaceful times, only today's most advanced DM countries are able to safely choose this (i)+(ii) combination.

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Unlike the US, which has a global hegemon currency that is the US dollar, Britain in the recent past has had to suffer more in the form of a much bigger extent of depreciation of her own currency, the Pound, in the global FX market, during war-time, especially when the battlefield is also near her own country, and when (i) is still chosen by her.

Britain's recent pound predicament, a big and unusual drop of the currency to almost parity with the stronger and stronger US dollar, has also been aggravated by her lack of imposition of a certain degree of capital control in her country.

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The latest drop of the Euro to below parity with the US dollar can be similarly explained.

Note that the current continued relative strength of Russia's gas-ruble in the global FX market is also strongly supported by Russia's imposition of very strict capital control in her country during her ongoing military conflicts with Ukraine, even though her capital control has recently been relaxed.

Other Asian countries during the Ukraine War, including China, allow their currencies to keep depreciating rather massively against the much strengthening US dollar, and so the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 1990s will not be repeated this time, because their accumulated relatively massive FX reserves will no longer run out as quickly and destructively as in the late 1990s, even though many of those Asian countries are still suffering from their now much bigger US-dollar-denominated external debts following the non-trivial depreciations of their own currencies vis-a-vis the US dollar.

China, always with the help of her traditional rather strict capital control, has been able to artificially manipulate and therefore control the degree of devaluation of her yuan against the US dollar in the past months, to suit her own macroeconomy.

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Chris Thomas has made democracy his life’s work. A 73-year-old attorney, Thomas spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state. He served under Republicans and Democrats alike, and his mandate was always the same: protect the ballot box. He trained local election workers; sought out and fixed weaknesses in the voting system; investigated errors committed while ballots were collected and tabulated; and, ultimately, ensured the accuracy of the count. Thomas was one of 10 people named to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in 2013. He earned a reputation as a nonpartisan authority on all things elections, and took pride in supervising a system that was stable and widely trusted.Which is why 2020 shook him so badly. Thomas had retired from the secretary of state’s office a few years earlier, confident that Michigan’s elections were in good hands. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, prompting changes to election protocols nationwide, and President Donald Trump began warning of a Democratic plot to steal the election. As Michigan rolled out new voting rules—some that had been decided prior to 2020, others that were implemented on the fly during the pandemic—rumors and misinformation spread. Wanting to help, Thomas accepted a special assignment to supervise Election Day activities in Detroit, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction.What followed was surreal—a scene that Thomas could scarcely believe was playing out in the United States. Michigan had recently expanded absentee voting, allowing any resident to vote by mail for any reason. Because Democrats are likelier than Republicans to vote absentee—and because Detroit is predominantly Democratic—Thomas and his colleagues had to process an unprecedented number of absentee ballots. Complicating matters further, Republican lawmakers in Michigan refused to let election workers start counting absentee ballots until Election Day.The effect was predictable. Because of the backlog of absentee ballots, Trump took a big lead on Election Night. As Thomas and his team worked into the early hours, Trump’s lead shrank. By Wednesday afternoon, it was clear that Joe Biden would overtake him. “That’s when things got out of hand,” Thomas told me.Incited by Trump’s acolytes in the state party, hundreds of Republican voters swarmed the event center in Detroit where Thomas and his workers were tabulating votes. Republicans had their allotted number of poll watchers already inside the counting room, but party officials lied to the public, saying they had been locked out. So people busted into the event center, banging on the windows, filming the election workers, demanding to be let into the counting room. Fearing for their safety—and for the integrity of the ballots—the people inside covered the windows. Thomas says the decision was necessary. But within minutes, video was circulating on social media of the windows being covered, and before long, it was airing on Fox News with commentary about a cover-up.[Read: The Michigan Republican who decided to tell the truth]Trump was alleging a national plot to steal the election, and now Detroit—and Chris Thomas—were right in the middle of it.The GOP assault on the legitimacy of Biden’s victory has led to death threats against election workers and a lethal siege of the United States Capitol. But perhaps the gravest consequence is the erosion of confidence in our system. Late this summer, a Quinnipiac poll found that 69 percent of both Republicans and Democrats believe that American democracy “is in danger of collapse.” They hold this view for somewhat different reasons. Republicans believe that Democrats already rigged an election against them and will do so again if given the chance; Democrats believe that Republicans, convinced that 2020 was stolen despite all evidence to the contrary, are now readying to rig future elections. It’s hard to see how this ends well. By the presidential election of 2024, a constitutional crisis might be unavoidable.I’ve met men and women like Thomas in small towns and big counties, public servants who have devoted their career to safeguarding the infrastructure of our democracy. Over the past two years, they have been harassed, intimidated, and in many cases driven out of office, some replaced by right-wing activists who are more loyal to the Republican Party than to the rule of law. The old guard—the people who, like Thomas, committed their career to free and fair elections—are witnessing their life’s work being undone. They are watching the rise of Trump-mimicking candidates in this year’s midterm elections and wondering if anything can stop the collapse of our most essential institution. “This election,” Thomas said, “feels like a last stand.”The irony is that America’s voting system is far more advanced and secure than it was just two decades ago.The 2000 election was a catalyst for reform. Mass confusion surrounding the showdown between Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida—butterfly ballots, punch cards, hanging chads—demonstrated that murky processes and obsolete technology could undermine public confidence in the system. Recognizing the threat, Congress passed a law to help local administrators modernize their voting machines and better train their workers and volunteers. Elections officials from around the country began collaborating on best practices. Several states introduced wholesale changes to their systems that allowed ballots to be cast more easily, tracked more accurately, and counted more efficiently.There were hiccups, but the results were overwhelmingly positive. One study conducted by MIT and Caltech showed that the number of “lost” votes—ballots that because of some combination of clerical rejection and human error went unrecorded—had been cut in half from 2000 to 2004. Florida, once synonymous with electoral dysfunction, now has arguably the most efficient vote-reporting program in the U.S.At the same time, the machinations that Americans observed—poll workers studying ballots through a magnifying glass, teams of party lawyers and CNN camera crews looking on—bred a public skepticism that never quite went away. In the years following Bush v. Gore, the number of cases of election litigation soared. The small chorus of congressional Democrats who objected to the certification of Bush’s 2000 victory swelled to several dozen following the president’s reelection in 2004, with 31 House Democrats (and one Democratic senator) voting to effectively disenfranchise the people of Ohio. Republicans could not return the favor in 2008—Obama’s margin of victory was too wide—so they sought to delegitimize his presidency with talk of birth certificates and mass voter fraud, introducing measures to restrict voting access despite never producing evidence that cheating was taking place at any meaningful scale.Much of this can be attributed to what Richard Hasen, a law professor and an elections expert, has called “the loser’s effect”: Studies have shown that voters report more confidence in our elections after their party or candidate has won. But partisan outcomes are no longer the decisive factor: In October 2020—weeks before Trump lost his bid for reelection—Gallup reported that just 44 percent of Republicans trusted that votes would be cast and counted accurately, “a record low for either party.”This isn’t entirely surprising, given Trump’s crusade to undermine our democratic institutions, which began well before he was ever elected. In 2012, he called Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney “a total sham,” adding: “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.” In early 2016, after losing the Iowa caucus to Ted Cruz, Trump called the chair of the Iowa GOP and pressured him to disavow the result; when that failed, he took to Twitter, denouncing the “fraud” in Iowa and calling for a new election to be held.By the time November 3, 2020, arrived, Trump had already constructed his elaborate narrative of a rigged election. Republican leaders did little to keep their voters from falling for the president’s deception. In fact, most of them enabled and even participated in it. What began as a fringe movement after Bush v. Gore has spread into the GOP mainstream: Polls continue to show that more than half of all Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.They are acting on Trump’s lies, flooding into local party offices, demanding to be stationed on the front lines of the next election so they can prevent it from being stolen. They have nominated scores of candidates who deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory; seven are running to become the chief elections official in their state. Several of these Republicans—Mark Finchem in Arizona, Kristina Karamo in Michigan—are hinting at administrative actions that would reverse decades of progress in making elections more transparent and accessible, in turn leaving our system more vulnerable.The great threat is no longer machines malfunctioning or ballots being spoiled. It is the actual theft of an election; it is the brazen abuse of power that requires not only bad actors in high places but the tacit consent of the voters who put them there.This makes for a terrifying scenario in 2024—but first, a crucial test in 2022.In August, when Michigan held its primary elections, all eyes were on the Republican race for governor. It had been a volatile contest; two of the perceived front-runners had been disqualified for failing to reach signature thresholds. Most of the remaining candidates were champions of Trump’s Big Lie, but none more so than Ryan Kelley, who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol and was arrested this past June by the FBI on misdemeanor charges. (Kelley pleaded not guilty in July.)When the returns came in and Kelley lost, he refused to concede. Instead, he called for a “publicly supervised hand recount to uphold election integrity.” But Kelley had a problem: He had finished in fourth place, capturing just 15 percent of the vote and losing to the Republican nominee by 25 points.It was a similar story in another closely watched Michigan race. State Senator Lana Theis, a Republican who’d co-written a committee report debunking Trump’s voter-fraud allegations after the 2020 election, defeated a MAGA conspiracy theorist, Mike Detmer, by 15 points in their primary contest. Detmer’s response? “When we have full, independent, unfettered forensic audits of 2020 and 2022 I’ll consider the results,” he wrote on his Facebook page. This pattern has played out in races all across the country, with sore Republican losers doing their best Trump impressions, alleging fraud to explain a drubbing at the ballot box.“This gives me real hope,” Thomas told me in early September. “Because people understand, when there’s a margin like that, you lost. And if you’re going to insist you didn’t lose, well, now people are going to be skeptical of what you’ve been telling them all along. Is the sky really falling? You can only tell a lie so many times before people stop listening to you.”His optimism struck me as misplaced. For one thing, these were just primary elections. Tudor Dixon, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, is herself a 2020 conspiracy theorist. In fact, all three Republicans on top of the statewide ticket this fall—Dixon, as well as the nominees for attorney general and secretary of state—have claimed that Democrats stole the election. Michigan’s GOP lawmakers have not allowed changes to vote-processing laws despite the chaos of 2020. In the event of close Democratic victories in November, we can expect another “red mirage,” in which the Republican nominee jumps out to a big lead soon after the polls close, only to fall behind as the backlog of absentee ballots is counted. The conspiracy theories will practically spread themselves.Sensing my skepticism, Thomas told me there was additional cause for hope. Two years ago, the Republican volunteers who monitored the vote-counting in Detroit on behalf of the party were completely out of their depth; most had never worked an election, and thus confused standard protocols for what they swore in affidavits were violations of the law. Following the grassroots outcry of November 2020, the Michigan GOP recruited hordes of new volunteers who have since received enhanced training. Thomas says his first encounter with this new class of Republican poll watchers came this summer, on primary day in Detroit, where he was once again tasked with overseeing the count. “It was night and day from 2020. They were respectful,” he said. “There were no issues.”Hours after I finished speaking with Thomas, CNN published a report exposing a Zoom training seminar in which Republican leaders in Wayne County, Michigan—home to Detroit—instructed poll watchers to ignore election rules and smuggle in pens, paper, and cellphones to document Democratic cheating. That seminar was held on August 1—the day before Michigan’s primary.I want to believe our system of self-government is durable enough to withstand all of this; I want to believe Thomas, that everything will be all right. But as we spoke, it struck me that, despite his expertise, and despite his ringside seat to the unraveling of our democracy, Thomas is like millions of other Americans who can’t quite bring themselves to face what’s happening. Like so many of them, he clings to fleeting hints of a return to normalcy and ignores the flood of evidence suggesting it will not come. He still trusts a system that is actively being sabotaged.Thomas has never belonged to a party. He remains proudly nonpartisan. But he acknowledges what must happen in 2022 for America to swerve off the road to national calamity. The Republicans who have made election denying the centerpiece of their campaign must lose, and lose badly. They will cry fraud and demand recounts and refuse to concede. They will throw tantrums sufficient to draw attention to their margins of defeat. At that point, Thomas says, maybe a critical mass of GOP voters—the very people who supported these candidates in the first place—will finally realize that they’ve been duped. Maybe they will abandon the lies and choose a different path before it is too late.But based on the number of candidates who sold a lie to earn their spot on the November ballot, in Michigan and beyond, I fear it may already be.This article appears in the November 2022 print edition with the headline “Bad Losers.”

I remember the first time I encountered a pierced eyebrow. I was sixteen, travelling with the debate team from my high school in the quiet suburbs of Bangalore to the busy city center for a regional meet. I had managed to get the team together only by promising the other boys that there would be girls there. But the girls we were ranged against, who went to a “progressive” school for which we had an unreflective contempt, were creatures from another world. They all wore a kind of shapeless tie-dyed garment that couldn’t be part of any uniform, spoke in a slack, almost American drawl, and, with their air of casual privilege, were amused by our prissy diction—our try-hard idea of what proper English was supposed to sound like—and our evident lack of ease around them.

Being well practiced, we won the debate. But, chatting with the girls afterward, we found that they disdained our pleasure in victory, along with our hand-me-down polyester ties and blazers, our identical short-back-and-sides haircuts. I awkwardly asked the one with the pierced eyebrow whether her piercing had a “meaning.” She smirked a little. “Self-expression,” she said. “But what does it express?” I asked, entirely in earnest. She repeated herself very slowly, as if to a total doofus, “Self. Expression.”

I thought that I’d eventually understand what she meant, but even now I’m not sure I do. The episode came to mind as I read Andrea Wulf’s “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self” (Knopf). Wulf’s book concerns a period, from the mid-seventeen-nineties to the early eighteen-hundreds, when Jena, a small German town on the river Saale, became home to a formidable coterie. Here, she writes, was “a group of novelists, poets, literary critics, philosophers, essayists, editors, translators and playwrights who, intoxicated by the French Revolution, placed the self at the centre stage of their thinking.”

There we have that peculiar thing, “the self.” Wulf sometimes allows us the German original: “The Ich, for better or worse, has remained centre stage ever since. The French revolutionaries changed the political landscape of Europe, but the Jena Set incited a revolution of the mind.” If Wulf is right, the girl with the pierced eyebrow was part of an unfolding world-historical drama that began on the banks of the Saale.

In the manner of such works—and consistent with the Ich philosophy that she chronicles—Wulf tells us a fair amount about her own self. I discovered that she was, like me, born “in the riotous colours of India”; studied, as I did, philosophy in college, a subject that pulled her “into an intoxicating world of thinking”; and now lives, as I do, in London, “a big dirty metropolis full of people.”

Wulf had, as I did not, parents who taught her “to follow my dreams,” having done so themselves when they left Germany to do public-spirited work in India. She had a daughter when she was twenty-two and moved, when that daughter was six, from Germany to England: “It was a snap decision. I quit my studies, sold my few possessions and moved to London.” Wulf was “a single mother with a half-finished education, a trunk full of books, no income, and a seemingly never-ending supply of confidence,” she writes. “Maybe some of the choices were reckless, but they were mine.”

She acknowledges, of course, that all this spontaneity rested on “the privilege of knowing that if it all went wrong, I would always have been able to knock on my parents’ (middle-class) door.” A great deal of freedom, it’s clear, came from her “clever, liberal, loving and academic parents” and from her E.U. passport. Perhaps the reason I am reluctant to join her ardent advocacy for the Jena Set has something to do with the ways in which my own path to philosophy differs from hers: no E.U. passport and only a grim told-you-so awaiting me on the other side of a knock on the parental door.

The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte is supposed to have declared in his first lecture at Jena that “a person should be self-determined, never letting himself be defined by anything external.” Let’s put aside the fact that the world, with its passport controls and its subtler hierarchies, makes not being “defined by anything external” a harder task for some people than for others. Does the broader Romantic fixation on the autonomous self make sense where it matters?

“Magnificent Rebels” is a buoyant work of intellectual history written as what was once termed the “higher gossip.” Wulf’s story, as the movie ads used to say, has everything. There’s the handsome young poet in love with a sickly pubescent girl; the brilliant woman whose literary work was credited to the men in her life; the passionate friendships shattered into fierce feuds. There are writers who struggle to write and others who struggle to stop. A steady and ominous undertone to all the cogitation and copulation is the rise of Napoleon, a Romantic figure in his own way, from the ashes of the 1789 revolution in France.

Such drama, such freedom—in so small a town, and in so unfree an age. How was it possible? Wulf believes that the atmosphere of intellectual and (to a point) political freedom was sustained by the sheer difficulty of censorship in a “splintered and inward-looking” Germany, still a “patchwork of more than fifteen hundred states,” in the dying days of the Holy Roman Empire. Thinkers and writers of a progressive stripe were drawn to Jena by what an older member of Wulf’s ensemble, Friedrich Schiller, described as the unusual prospect of “complete freedom to think, to teach and to write.” And, of course, to read the books, newspapers, and pamphlets pumped out by a thriving publishing trade.

The background to the new Ich philosophy was the revolutionary work of Immanuel Kant. He was now entering his eighth decade, but his writings were still being discussed by readers in Jena, Wulf tells us, “with the same passion as others did popular novels.” “What is Enlightenment?” Kant had asked, answering—in a phrase that still retains something of its original spine-tingling power—that it was nothing more or less than “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” More pithily, he challenged his contemporaries, “Dare to know.”

Kant had primed people to focus on how their knowledge of the world was conditioned by their minds; in Wulf’s précis, “We’ll always see it through the prism of our thinking.” Even time and space were not “actual entities” but, rather, belonged to “the subjective constitution of the mind.” They were, as Wulf puts it, the “lens through which we see nature.” We were to distinguish, then, between a thing as we perceive it and the “thing-in-itself.”

Ever since Fichte read Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” in 1790, annotating frenetically as he went, he had, he declared, “been living in a new world.” He was moved, it seems, by a grand picture of the self as “a lawgiver of nature,” a conception that encourages what Wulf vaguely terms “a shift towards the importance of the self.” Fichte wanted to expand the role of the Ich still further, removing its blindfold and abolishing the idea of an inaccessible thing-in-itself; the self after Kant became “creative and free.”

The rhetoric of freedom and self-determination must have appealed to the young Fichte, the son of a ribbon-weaver in Saxony. He had gained a spot at an élite boarding school after a beneficent visiting baron heard him recite, from memory, a sermon that he had listened to when he was looking after livestock by a church. Fichte remade himself in the time-honored way, unlearning his rube’s accent and marrying a civil servant’s educated daughter. Yet amid his dense metaphysical publications was a pamphlet, circulated in 1793 (and prudently unsigned), extolling the revolution in France. “Just as that nation has torn away the external chains of man,” he wrote later, “my system tears away the chains of the thing-in-itself, or external causes, that still shackle him more or less in other systems, even the Kantian. My first principle establishes man as an independent being.”

Arriving at the University of Jena in 1794, Fichte began to cultivate a messianic persona. “Gentlemen, go into yourselves,” he shouted from his lecturer’s pulpit. (To judge by Wulf’s verbs—“thundered,” “roared,” “bellowed”—Fichte had no indoor voice.) “Act! Act!” he exhorted. “That’s what we are here for.” He left the auditorium followed by a gaggle of reverent students, “like a triumphant Roman emperor.”

For long-suffering readers of his treatises, the adulation that Fichte inspired is hard to understand. Perhaps one needed to be there, to feel the force of his presence, his prophet’s manner. Little else could explain how people kept a straight face at such pronouncements as “My will alone . . . shall float audaciously and boldly over the wreckage of the universe.”

What’s easier to grasp is the human appeal of the other figures who populate the pages of this book. They were, of course, the original Romantics, at a time when the German word for the sensibility (romantisch) hadn’t yet acquired its modern significance. One might call Wulf’s telling novelistic, although only a nineteenth-century Russian novelist would have a cast of protagonists with such inconveniently similar names: Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel. There is another Friedrich—von Hardenberg—who wrote under the name Novalis. There are two Johanns and two Carolines. Wulf and her publishers have gone several extra miles to help the reader keep them all straight: informative chapter titles, a careful index, and a dramatis personae with minibiographies.

Looming over the young blood of Jena was that national icon Goethe, who, early in Wulf’s book, rides picturesquely from his home in Weimar to his friends in Jena on a hot summer’s day across wheat fields at harvest time. His youthful novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (1774) had captivated a generation a couple of decades earlier; in imitation of the title character, readers dressed in yellow waistcoats and breeches. Imitation didn’t stop there: so many young men were said to have taken Werther’s lovelorn example to heart and killed themselves that, Lord Byron jested, Goethe had claimed more lives than Napoleon. By the seventeen-nineties, Goethe was a senior statesman, less a member of the Jena Set than its “benevolent godfather.” But it was his friend Friedrich Schiller, the celebrated playwright, who persuaded him to take thinkers like Fichte seriously. Goethe had considered himself a realist, dedicated to the observation of nature; Schiller was inclined toward idealism, and the inward-turned interrogations of the soul.

By the mid-seventeen-nineties, the brothers Schlegel—August Wilhelm and Friedrich—were also in Jena. So were the brothers Humboldt—Wilhelm and, on regular sojourns, Alexander (the subject of Wulf’s previous book). Schelling had survived his early years as a child prodigy and, later, enrollment at a forbiddingly austere Protestant seminary to publish work in which he argued that the Ich was identical with nature. The dashing Novalis visited when he could, sharing his hopeless love for a dying girl with his friends, along with the poetic-philosophical fragments that made him famous. His may be the most resonant formulation of the Romantic essence: “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.”

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So much for the men. The women are equally remarkable, none more so than Caroline Böhmer Schlegel Schelling. (She was married to August Wilhelm Schlegel for seven years and then to Friedrich Schelling for six.) She was essential to, although never properly credited for, what have become canonical German translations of Shakespeare. “She ticked syllables, tapping her fingers on the table as she transformed August Wilhelm’s text into melody and poetry,” Wulf writes. Her marriage to Schlegel, in 1796, was her second, and came after many years of her rejecting him. “Schlegel and me! No, nothing is going to happen between us,” she said, like a rom-com heroine resisting the inevitable. She eventually decided that he might be just the thing after all, but not before several rumored affairs, a pregnancy that resulted from a one-night stand after a ball, and a stint in prison for suspected revolutionary sympathies.

My friends,

Make no mistake: Donald Trump is effectively on the ballot in the midterm elections, five weeks from tomorrow (voting has already begun in several states). Even if he decides not to run, he's laying the groundwork for authoritarianism.

In the upcoming midterms, 60 percent of us will have an election denier on our ballot, most of them endorsed by Trump.

In the upcoming midterms, 60 percent of us will have an election denier on our ballot, most of them endorsed by Trump. In the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, Republican candidates who embrace Trump's Big Lie have won almost two-thirds of Republican nominations for offices with authority over elections.

Many are running for secretaries of state--the chief elections officers in 37 states, who will be overseeing voter registration and how elections are conducted. In the 2020 presidential election, people who held these positions were the last line of defense for our fragile democracy, upholding Joe Biden's win despite heavy pressure from proponents of Trump's Big Lie.

Which is why Trump and Trump's lieutenants, including Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn, are trying to fill these positions with Big Liars.

Michigan's GOP candidate for Secretary of State is Kristina Karamo--who rose to prominence in conservative circles after falsely claiming to have witnessed election fraud as a pollster. Karamo has claimed that Trump won the 2020 election and that Antifa was behind the January 6 insurrection.

Arizona's Republican candidate for Secretary of State is Mark Finchem, a QAnon-supporting member of the Oath Keepers militia, who participated in the January 6 insurrection. He cruised to victory in the GOP primary by claiming that Trump won the 2020 election.

Nevada's GOP's candidate for Secretary of State is Jim Marchant, who won his Republican primary by making Trump's baseless claims of election fraud a cornerstone of his campaign. He also falsely claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, and wants to eliminate it altogether (despite the fact that he has voted by mail many times over the years).

In Wyoming, state representative Chuck Gray, who won last month's GOP primary for secretary of state, faces no opponent. Gray has repeated Trump's lies about 2020 being "rigged," traveled to Arizona to watch a partisan review of ballots that was derided as deeply flawed and proposed additional regular election audits in Wyoming. In Alabama, state Rep. Wes Allen, the nominee for secretary of state, says he would have signed onto a 2020 Texas lawsuit to overturn Biden's win (that case was swiftly thrown out by the U.S. Supreme Court).

Trump-backed candidates for governor are also on the ballot in key states where governors play a critical role in certifying votes and upholding the will of the people.

Pennsylvania's Republican gubernatorial nominee is Doug Mastriano. If he wins, Mastriano would appoint Pennsylvania's top election official. Mastriano was also at the Capitol on January 6, and has even been subpoenaed by the January 6 committee to testify about his involvement. Mastriano also helped lead the push to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

Arizona's GOP gubernatorial nominee is Kari Lake--who has said she does not recognize Joe Biden as the nation's legitimate president, and would not have certified Arizona's 2020 election results had she been governor.

Wisconsin's Republican gubernatorial nominee is Tim Michels. Michels still questions the results of the 2020 election and refuses to say whether he will certify the state's 2024 president election results. Right now, elections in Wisconsin are overseen by the bipartisan Wisconsin Election Commission, but if Michels wins he supports scrapping the Commission in favor of a plan that could shift oversight of the state's elections to the state's Republican-dominated legislature.

I don't know about you, but all these Big Liars terrify me. If any one of them wins in a state that's likely to be a battleground in 2024, they could tip the balance in a tight presidential election to Trump. What terrifies me even more is they could tip America away from democracy to authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, a third of all state attorney general races currently have an election denying Republican candidate on the ballot--including Alabama's Steve Marshall, Idaho's Paul Labrador, Texas's Ken Paxton, South Carolina's Alan Wilson, and Maryland's Michael Peroutka.

Attorneys general also have key roles in election administration--defending state voting laws and election results in court, taking legal action to prevent or address voter intimidation or election misconduct, and investigating and prosecuting illegal attempts to suppress the vote.

I haven't even talked about all the local and county election officials who are also Big Liars, and also on ballots in many states--and who could play roles in the 2024 election.

How can we fight back?

First: Spread the word about the Trump-GOP's plans to capture the election process and undermine American democracy.

Inform your friends and family--including young voters who often don't turn out in large numbers--about what's at stake in the midterms.

Second: Make sure you and they vote down the entire ballot.

Too many Democrats vote for federal offices but disregard state races. A recent analysis of the last three presidential elections in ten swing states showed that Democrats voted down the ballot far less than Republicans. (Democratic presidential nominees at the top of the ticket received more votes 87 percent of the time than Democratic state legislative candidates, while Republican presidential nominees received more votes just 45 percent of the time than Republican state legislative candidates.)

Control of many state legislatures is often determined by a handful of races that can swing in either direction based on a relatively small number of votes. In the 2020 election, very small margins in a number of battleground races prevented Democrats from gaining control of state legislatures.

Had Democratic candidates received just 4,451 more votes in the two closest races in the Arizona state House, they would have flipped the chamber. In North Carolina, had Democrats received 20,671 more votes (just 0.39 percent of the votes cast) in the ten most competitive legislative districts, they would have flipped the state House--thereby preventing Republicans from gerrymandering the state and federal maps, which Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has no ability to veto. In Michigan, just 8,611 more votes for state Democratic candidates in the four districts with the closest margins would have flipped this crucial swing state, too.

Third: Familiarize yourself with state and local candidates, and share this information.

You may want to get your ballot early so you have ample time. Some great organizations to help you are Sister District, The States Project, Bolts Magazine, and People's Action. (I'm linking to them here, but feel free to leave a comment with other local resources you've found helpful.)

***

As I said, Trump is effectively on the ballot in the midterms. Which means--regardless of whether he decides to run again for president--our democracy is on the ballot. The midterm elections in five weeks will lay the foundation for all future races.

My friends, I cannot say this with more concern: Trump's anti-democracy movement has been making astounding progress. We must stop it.

Republicans, confident that voters will be more focused on inflation and public safety than abortion rights, have largely let the issue go unanswered. Many have sought to avoid the topic altogether, and in some cases upon entering the general election cycle they have edited or removed sections about abortion on their websites used to differentiate themselves in crowded Republican primaries.

Mr. Kildee’s opponent, Paul Junge, said during a 2020 Republican primary debate that Roe v. Wade extended “made-up rights” to women and that he was “pro-life” and “supports life at all times.” House Democrats’ super PAC featured the comments prominently in an advertisement that included an OB/GYN.

Ms. Craig’s opponent, Mr. Kistner, who served nine years as an officer in the Marine Corps and lost to Ms. Craig by two percentage points in 2020, called himself “100 percent pro-life” on his campaign website during his primary last cycle, a descriptor that Ms. Craig has latched onto. Mr. Kistner has said that he would support abortion if the life of the mother were in danger and in cases of rape and incest, and that the issue should be left to the states to decide.

During her primary contest, Ms. Scheller said she would be “open” to supporting federal legislation that would make it a criminal offense for a doctor to perform an abortion if cardiac activity is detectable. But she added that she would support abortion in cases of incest and rape. (That has not stopped Democrats from running ads accusing Ms. Scheller of wanting to criminalize abortion “even in cases of rape and incest.”)

Democrats have even extended the attacks against Republicans who are broadly supportive of abortion rights. A carefully worded television advertisement against George Logan, a Republican and former Connecticut state senator who is running against Representative Jahana Hayes, intones that he “refused to support Roe v. Wade” and would vote for a party leader in the House who would push a national abortion ban.

Mr. Logan is one of the few Republicans running for Congress across the country who have explicitly said they do not support a national ban.

“I believe it should be up to the states,” he said after a rally in New Britain hosted by the Republican National Committee, according to The Connecticut Mirror. “Right here in Connecticut, we have codified a woman’s right to choose. That’s what I support.”

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Maggie Haberman hails from a New York City very different from Donald Trump’s dominion of glitz and criminality, but she knows that dominion well. Raised in the household of a traditional shoe-leather New York Times reporter and a well-connected publicist, and now herself ensconced at the digitized Times, Haberman’s earliest assignments involved covering City Hall and its satellite ethical sinkholes for the New York Post and the Daily News. That singular education in New York corruption has stuck with her and sets her apart from her peers reporting on the Trump presidency and its seditious aftermath. It now distinguishes “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America” as a uniquely illuminating portrait of our would-be maximum leader.

With a sharp eye for the backstory, Haberman places special emphasis on Trump’s ascent in a late 1970s and 1980s New York demimonde of hustlers, mobsters, political bosses, compliant prosecutors and tabloid scandalmongers. This bygone Manhattan that Tom Wolfe could only satirize in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is the fundament to any understanding of what makes Trump tick. “The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s,” Haberman observes, “stayed with Trump for decades; he often seemed frozen there.” Zombielike, he swaggers and struts and cons on the world’s largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists fawned over him as The Donald; and he will continue his night of the living dead, with menacing success, until someone finally drives a metaphorical stake through his metaphorical heart.

The rote rap on Trump is that he was a bumptious, hyper-ambitious real estate developer from Queens who never earned the respect of the Manhattan society pooh-bahs and who vowed to beat them at their own game — a vow that eventually led him to the Oval Office, astonishing even Trump. That storyline appears in “Confidence Man,” but Haberman knows it is superficial.

For one thing, there were countless other outer-borough operators on the make in 1980s New York, one of whom Haberman astutely calls Trump’s “mirror image” despite their obvious differences: the Rev. Al Sharpton of Brooklyn, both men shameless headline grabbers who smeared opponents and basked in newfound glamour; they were slightly clownish intruders who refused, she writes, “to be thrown out of their new ring” by a disdainful city establishment.

Inside that cauldron of fakery, Trump, no rugged individualist, and padded with his father’s millions, gravitated to a specific milieu of arrivistes whom he equated with supreme power, class and ruthlessness. He held in especially high regard the bully George Steinbrenner, from the outer outer borough of Cleveland, and became a constant presence in the Boss’s Yankee Stadium box. (I’d not known until reading Haberman that Trump, a wimp when it came to sacking underlings, found his tag line for “The Apprentice” by impersonating Steinbrenner barking “You’re fired,” over and over, not least at the Yankees’ oft-discharged manager Billy Martin.)

Off to one side there was the raffish schemer Roger Stone, a well-digger’s son from Norwalk, Conn., who got his start as one of the political saboteurs for Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, and whose Washington lobbying mega-firm (with Paul Manafort as one of his co-partners) came to represent the Trump Organization’s interests. From the outermost borough of Adelaide, Australia, there was the unscrupulous media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who had already turned the liberal tabloid New York Post into a right-wing scandal sheet and who in 1985 completed the acquisition of 20th Century Fox that would eventually give the world Fox News, commanded by another member of the New York gang, Roger Ailes. There was also the high-profile, media-savvy U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani, from Brooklyn like Sharpton, and he and Trump would circle each other until they seriously hooked up some years later.

Trump’s chief mentor, and a consigliere to most of the big shots named above, was the legendary underworld and overworld fixer Roy Cohn. The pampered son of a kingpin in Bronx Democratic politics, long notorious for his McCarthyite Red Scare grandstanding, Cohn, as Haberman details, connected Trump with Stone as well as with organized crime while giving him master classes in high-stakes con-man strategy and tactics. Whenever Trump today intimidates the press with threats of retaliation, whenever he defends his aggressions by claiming to be the victim, whenever he calls his accusers (especially if they represent the federal government) life-destroying, treasonous “scum,” he is channeling his mentor, Cohn.

Haberman offers plenty of material about how these men did it all with virtual impunity. Of course, there would be the occasional fines and sealed judgments — and Cohn was disbarred weeks before he died of AIDS, abandoned by Trump, who knew the score on being heartless. But as Haberman describes, Trump went to great lengths to square himself with a paragon of the city’s power elite, the longtime Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, including making generous donations to Morgenthau’s pet charity, the New York Police Athletic League, the one charity commitment, Morgenthau would joke warmly, that Trump could be counted on honoring. Not until Cyrus Vance Jr., who had a fine pedigree but was no crusader, succeeded Morgenthau in 2010 did Trump and his properties, after Vance backed off for years, finally face serious investigation by the D.A.’s office — and even then, prosecutors on the case quit in protest when Vance’s successor suddenly seemed to drop it.

“Confidence Man” likewise enlightens about the massive oversights by the press and the broader world of publishing, especially in New York, not simply in failing to expose the corruption that Haberman catalogues but in creating and then abetting Trump’s celebrity. There were certainly exceptional naysaying reporters, notably Jack Newfield’s protege at the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett, who, at Newfield’s urging, dug deep into Trump’s shady dealings. Barrett’s and the Voice’s condemnations sparked a brief aborted federal investigation, but they weren’t about to shake the inertia at the most influential outlets, topped by the New York Times. Neither did the late lamented Spy magazine’s bull’s-eye satirical shots at the “short-fingered vulgarian” provoke inquiries, although they did provoke Trump to threaten lawsuits and are said to anger him to this day.

Indeed, the higher- as well as the lower-end media became Trump’s vehicles, sometimes absurdly. Haberman relates, for example, how in 1984 Cohn, the grand wizard of press manipulation, placed a profile story in The Washington Post’s Style section, followed up independently by another piece in a magazine called Manhattan, Inc., that — though skeptical and even arch about Trump — fed impressions that the brash young dealmaker might seriously serve President Ronald Reagan in top-level arms-control negotiations. Much later, in 1997, when Trump had fallen into one of his disastrous business troughs, a New Yorker profile, though as unguarded as any such piece was likely to be, helped advance his latest comeback. More famously, the queens of tabloid gossip, Cindy Adams and Liz Smith, aided by the New York Post’s garish Page Six, rendered Trump an epic figure. Long before “The Apprentice” completed his makeover as America’s fantasy mogul, driving the phony image to the credulous beyond the Hudson, the publishers, editors and scribes of the Manhattan press, forgoing the facts, had crowned him the king of New York.

Some of the episodes in Haberman’s later chapters on Trump’s presidency have already stirred controversy. Beneath the buzz, though, many of the richest storylines from the Trump White House, as reported in “Confidence Man” and elsewhere, have a distinctly New York ring. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump snapped in 2018, in anger at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the very conservative former senator from Alabama, who had recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whom Trump eventually ousted.

Before he was twice impeached, Trump found his man, yet another New York mouthpiece, William Barr, who as attorney general happily did Trump’s bidding in, among other things, lying about the damning Mueller report on the Russian interference — until Trump lost reelection and Barr, well-schooled in transactional loyalty and with his reputation as a supposed “institutionalist” tarnished, declined recruitment into Trump’s coup and at the last minute jumped from the sinking ship. The manic and often antic crimes of Stone, pardoned and unpardoned, add another layer of continuity, a louche link with the old Cohn-centered netherworld.

Haberman’s contribution in “Confidence Man,” though, is much larger than its arresting anecdotes. Later generations of historians will puzzle over Trump’s rise to national power. The best of them will have learned from Haberman’s book that none of it would have been possible but for a social, cultural, political, media and moral breakdown that overtook New York beginning in the 1970s, a fiasco of trusted institutions that, having allowed the Trumpian virus to grow, failed at every step to contain its spread, then profited from, aided and even cheered its devastation.

“It’s up to you, New York, New York,” runs the song that became a city anthem in these years, and so it truly was up to sophisticated, cosmopolitan New York with respect to checking Trump. But New York blew it on every level — and alas, even with “Confidence Man” in hand as a guidebook to that failure, it may be too late to start spreadin’ the news, with American democracy now at stake.

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.”

Confidence Man

The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

By Maggie Haberman

Penguin Press. 597 pp. $32

A note to our readers We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

The past few weeks have been a liminal period in British politics; one in which we have been presented with real political choices for the first time in a long time. The great spectacle of the Royal funeral achieved what state funerals are expressly designed to do: reassert the unity of the British nation in a shared, sacral ritual of belonging, beyond sterile rationality, as the tribe interred its fallen chief with great pomp and ceremony. But more, the fundamental contours of British politics were exposed by the near-simultaneous accession of both the King and Liz Truss.
In King Charles, we have a post-liberal monarch who furiously rejects the marketisation of ever more aspects of human life. There are, in his writings, elements of the “Tietjens Toryism” of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, whereby the paternalistic concern of the central character, the “last surviving Tory”, for social harmony and widespread prosperity delineate the point at which “the High Toryism of Tietjens [meets] the extreme Radicalism of the extreme Left of the Left”.
Yet on the other, baleful side of the ledger, we have been foisted with a career politician who seems to view the laziest Left-wing caricatures of Toryism as a political roadmap: a pure zealot of unrestrained capital with no vision of the good beyond libertarian think tank pamphlets and a burning faith in the might and power of the market’s invisible hand. Alas, Truss’s faith in the markets is not rewarded by the markets’ faith in her: the invisible hand has already reached down to flick her from the history books.

Her plan for massive borrowing relied on the faith of international opinion that it would be amply repaid by her simultaneous tax cuts for Britain’s very richest, and an economic boom occasioned by vague promises of future reforms. To pay for her budget, and for its unintended consequences, the Government now looks set to slash spending on the infrastructure and research and development projects on which long-term prosperity depends. Unfortunately for Truss and for the country, the international markets, the IMF, the Bank of England, and those notorious Left-wing radicals the Financial Times and the Economist recoiled in horror. When even the Telegraph warns that the ”Peronist policies” of a “a careless, ideological government” set on “a course of sheer madness” put “this country in serious jeopardy”, we can be certain that we are in a new era. There are fashions in economics as in all things; outside the Conservative party, the rest of the world has firmly rejected the Seventies dogmas that brought Britain decades of stagnation and underinvestment — even in a far rosier international climate than the one we currently inhabit.
It is like the story of The Monkey’s Paw: after so long demanding a Conservative leader committed to bold and decisive action, the one the party chose was a suicide bomber. The only questions now, surely, are how much harm she can cause the country in the time remaining, and whether she will bring down the Conservative party with her. Because Truss forgot that the British public also has a vote. Dreading an economic winter harder than anyone has previously experienced, the voting public looks to have decisively rejected Trussonomics, and will deliver Labour the greatest parliamentary majority in British political history. The story of the past few years, from Brexit to the 2019 Conservative landslide, and now Labour’s coming victory, is of a British public desirous of radical change, and of a political class struggling to comprehend what this means, let alone how to deliver it. The Conservatives were elected on a simple mandate to reform Britain’s failing economic model and slash our current, record-high levels of immigration; instead, Truss is doubling down on both.
It is a matter of great, cosmic irony that in the same week Truss lost the Red Wall with a platform encapsulating everything the Brexit vote was against, Keir Starmer won it back with a postliberal message, centred on direct investment in state capacity, public services and home ownership through the simplest supply side reform, housebuilding. The libertarian think tanks who so gleefully rushed to take ownership of her budget when it was announced, must now take ownership of the results: they have destroyed the party they have hollowed out and stripped of any vestiges of Tory thinking.
Though a disaster for the Conservative party, the mini-budget was, apparently, a triumph for the IEA, the free-market think tank which has long advanced this ideology — as well as having groomed Truss and Kwarteng. And as the party has been warned time and time again, what they have cooked up is as repellent to ordinary voters as it is to traditionalist Tories.
Suggested readingThe mythic power of King Charles IIIBy Aris Roussinos
The ideologues have crashed Britain, and the Conservative party, into a cliff, and the party now requires time out of office to relearn Toryism from first principles, shorn of the libertarian accretions that have driven it to chaos and the edge of extinction. The wreckers must be entirely driven out from British conservatism, in whose stolen clothes they have made mischief for far too long. But until then, there is no Tory case for voting for the Conservative party. A party that puts its own short-term survival above the national interest has no business running a country.
It is the tragic irony of British conservatism in 2022 that just as the only reason to now vote Tory is to own the Cons (like the IEA’s Julian Jessop and Kristian Niemitz welcoming Truss’s push for massively increased immigration), so does the only means of restraining the self-destructive zealotry of the economic liberals now seem to lie within the Labour Party. Some of the warmest responses to Starmer’s conference speech, in which he warned that “decline is not inevitable” and promised that the Labour Party is now the party of reindustrialisation, national self-reliance, home ownership and support for ordinary people came from Tory commentators aghast at Truss’s radical liberal vision.
It is those Tories representing the party’s paternalist social conscience who have been most struck by the contrast between Truss’s wrecking ball and Starmer’s softly postliberal vision. For as Gavin Rice of the Conservative Centre for Social Justice think tank observes, “Starmer just laid out a postliberal Brexit: controlled immigration, pride in community, democratic control, buying, making and selling more in Britain and the potential of active government. Tories shouldn’t be allowing them to control this turf.” But this is the path they chose, and when the voters punish for them for it, the party only has itself to blame.
It is remarkable to observe that Truss’s mentors in the IEA still found time to release a paper — Taking Liberties: Why postliberals are wrong about personal freedom, by Jamie Whyte — denouncing the rival postliberal trend in conservative thought: the very same political philosophy whose faintest echoes have rewarded Labour with the prospect of a historic landslide. The paper did not gain much traction, true: it was a poorly argued mishmash of philosophical sophistry against an amalgamated strawman version of very distinct political tendencies. But that they thought it necessary to release is in itself indicative of where the intellectual energy now lies within conservatism, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Suggested readingKemi Badenoch has saved the ToriesBy Aris Roussinos
Yet the paper presents a fascinating insight into the worldview of a crankish doctrine the British public so visibly and overwhelmingly rejects. Throughout, the author rejects any notion of a common good, the essential building block of both modern postliberalism and traditional Toryism, associating the idea with compulsion at the hands of the state. So, the author writes, postliberals “believe politicians should take a view about the good life – specifically, the postliberals’ traditionalist view – and use the powers of the state to make sure that people live it”, in what he describes as a “proposed way-of life authoritarianism”, and a “regime in which politicians use state power to make them live ‘the good life’”.
To reach this conclusion, the author conflates the two very different American and British postliberal strands of thought, currently at war with each other through a heated exchange of open letters in the American Conservative. He adopts the framing of the harder-edged, American postliberalism’s vision of the Catholic-administrative state to condemn British postliberalism, which is in truth a conservative variant of socialism, infused with a traditionalist Tory discomfort with modernity, and drawn from our nation’s distinct historical path. British Postliberals, like other social democrats, do indeed believe that the nation’s good as well as prosperity would be enhanced if everyone were to be given support by the state to settle down, form families and own their own homes: this is, or was, a very basic tenet of Toryism, too. But this is quite a different thing from state compulsion: there will be no roaming squads of tweed-jacketed postliberals forcing otherwise happy singletons to marry, and frogmarching them into suburban semis.
But then, even this very basic expression of the common good is a vision of hell to the radical IEA liberal, who warns that “policies that cause more people to marry, perhaps by way of tax incentives, can still harm them. For being in a good and sound marriage involves forgoing other sources of happiness. John might also gain happiness from travelling the world alone” or “from seducing strangers at nightclubs”. Indeed he might. Yet reordering the British economy, and the lives and prosperity of the British people, around our hypothetical John’s mission of global seduction is simply not conservatism in any form, and a party that can prioritise this philosophy over the national good fully deserves the disaster coming its way.
But even as the paper asserts that the postliberal claim that liberalism leads to social atomisation and the construction of obstacles to the formation of family life is false, it argues against state support for those who wish to do so, in the seeming belief that helping those who wish for a secure and settled domesticity to attain it will somehow impinge on John’s absolute freedom. We should be clear: a postliberal government would not prevent John, or other liberals, doing as they wished with their own lives; it would instead simply support those who wished for the very basic goods of home ownership and domestic comfort and security to attain them. Yet even this is apparently anathema to the IEA, and we must now sadly assume, to our own notionally conservative government.
Suggested readingBoris Johnson's squandered chanceBy Aris Roussinos
Coercion by global market forces is, simply, no liberation. It is this exact vision, of the entirety of social life from the family to the nation being subject to and torn apart by the destructive power of the unrestrained market, that postliberals as well as British voters reject; and it is precisely this outcome which liberals in their purest form, like Truss and the think tanks which formed her worldview, try to summon into being through ever more painful rites of destruction and self-sacrifice. If earthly salvation has not yet been attained, then ever more of what society holds good must be hurled onto the flames: this is neither politics nor economics, but the frustrated religious impulse that drives all liberalism.
Like communists, who wave away the misery and destruction every attempt to apply their vision in practice has so far entailed, free market fundamentalists like Truss and the think tanks around her assert that the only problem with their failed vision is that it has never yet been properly applied. Instead, guided by Tory pragmatism, postliberalism rejects fantastical visions of the future in favour of a future partly shaped by the forms of social and economic life that existed before capitalism: a world which was far from perfect, but whose failings are known and therefore capable of being effectively ameliorated.
But as it stands, there is no home for postliberal Tories, always wary of the free market as a force destructive to tradition and social order, in the Conservative party that now exists: instead, we must be grateful that when given free rein, the libertarians have discredited their doctrine as electoral poison in a few short and tumultuous days. Just like the state funeral, Truss’s accession was itself a great symbolic moment. It marked the nadir of Tietjens Toryism as a philosophical tradition within the Conservative party, and the total victory of a radical form of economic liberalism which, like an alchemist turning gold into lead, has transmuted 2019’s electoral landslide into disaster. If any Tory case can be made for Truss, it is a purely accelerationist one: that the catastrophe she has brought in tow may finally exorcise Thatcher’s unquiet ghost, and allow the party — or whatever form of conservative politics succeeds the party that put her into power against so many warnings — to reflect upon what Toryism actually means.
But until then, it is Starmer’s Labour, which learned the lessons of Brexit and 2019, that has rejected radical economic liberalism and pledged to deliver the common good. Certainly, there is still space for him to lose: just as the Conservatives failed to restrain their economic liberal extremists, so must Starmer restrain the extremist social liberals in Labour’s ranks whose views the ordinary voter deems equally strange and repulsive. But on basic bread and butter policy, the contrast between a Labour party pledging to build more homes, and a Conservative government about to lose many Britons the homes they already own is absolute.
If they achieve just this one aim, let alone their promises to deliver a Brexit that works for the entire country, or to return manufacturing capacity to British shores through state investment, then Labour deserves to win the landslide victory the Conservatives chose to squander. In choosing Truss, the Conservative party chose to make the Tory case for Labour.
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The Hill has fired Katie Halper from its morning show, Rising, for describing Israel's policies as tantamount to apartheid. It's a blatant act of censorship to silence a pro-Palestinian journalist.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
 
For all the strides the Palestinian cause has made in terms of American sympathies, criticism of the Israeli government and its treatment of the Palestinians is still the major taboo in US political discourse. Just look at what happened to Katie Halper this week.
The Intercept reported today that Halper, a popular left-wing podcaster and cohost of Useful Idiots with Matt Taibbi, was earlier this week let go from Rising, the Hill’s political morning program, for which Halper had been doing a once-weekly weekend show for the past three years. After taping a monologue, this time covering the recent controversy over Rashida Tlaib’s comments about Israeli apartheid, Halper was at first told her “Radar,” as the monologues are known on the show, was being delayed while it underwent a review.
Before long, Halper was informed it wouldn’t run at all by Hill editor in chief Bob Cusack, who told her it was “not in our sweet spot of coverage.” When Halper asked him explicitly if the segment was being nixed because it was about Israel, he confirmed that that was the “rationale,” and that the Hill’s focus is largely on domestic, not foreign, policy. Soon, she was told by an executive in an email that they wouldn’t need her to record a show the next day. “We wish you all the best,” was the sign-off.
It’s not clear what Cusack was referring to when he said that the Hill doesn’t cover foreign policy. In the past week alone, Rising’s other cohosts have run segments on the Brazilian election, Italy’s new neofascist prime minister, the South Korean president’s hot mic scandal, and multiple segments on the war in Ukraine. And while Halper’s monologue was largely devoted to laying out the evidence for Tlaib’s labeling of Israel as an apartheid state, it had a domestic element, too, given what a major flashpoint it became in US politics and the intraparty factional war among Democrats, with establishment, pro-Israel officials piling on the socialist Tlaib in concert.
This appears to be a new editorial line for the program. According to Ryan Grim, who broke the Halper story and who himself recorded more than 150 Radars as a cohost for Rising, “There is no approval process.” The hosts simply upload their script to a teleprompter and record. Krystal Ball, who co-helmed the show for years, says that while she and cohost Saagar Enjeti faced occasional pushback on certain topics, they were “never blocked from guests or topics.”
It’s hard to know what’s driving this. But one thing that has changed since Ball and Enjeti’s stint on the show is a changeover in ownership of the Hill, which was sold to media conglomerate Nexstar Media Group, Inc., for $130 million last August. This month, Psagot Value Holdings Ltd., an investment firm based in Tel Aviv, bought 6,100 shares in Nexstar, to the tune of more than $1 million.
But there were signs of a possible tilt in the Hill’s editorial line on Israel even before that. In late August, Nexstar filled the position of deputy managing editor of NewsNation, its cable channel, with Jake Novak, a journalist who spent the preceding year and a half as the media director of the Israeli consulate general in New York. Novak most recently achieved infamy for being embroiled in the Matt Gaetz underage-sex controversy, where he appeared to admit to Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, of all people, that he was involved in the extortion attempt on Gaetz’s rich father in order to funnel millions of dollars to a “commando team leader” to free a US hostage in Iran.
Novak has written approvingly of Donald Trump’s dropping of US support for the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he has advocated for Israel to build more illegal settlements on the land that would make up a hypothetical Palestinian state, saying it “would bring more peace, prosperity, and freedom to both Israelis and Arabs.” Six days before the announcement of his hiring, Novak led a presentation at Bar-Ilan University titled, “Defending Israel Against Media Bias — How to fight news media and social media bias against Israel: The best defense is a good offense.” It was an update of a talk he had given in 2016 about defending Israel’s reputation, which the host described as “an absolute master class in public relations in diplomacy.”
There is certainly a political tilt in Nexstar’s political donations. Over the 2016 election cycle, the company’s PAC gave 80 percent of its money to GOP-affiliated PACs, a number that rose to 100 percent in the 2018 cycle. Its CEO donated six times as much to high-ranking Republican congresspeople as he did to Democrats over the past ten years, no matter which party was in power. Its giving is more balanced now, but the Democrats Nexstar does donate to tend to be of the more centrist, establishment, and pro-Israel variety, like Jerry Nadler, Jamie Raskin, Kathy Castor, and Hakeem Jeffries.
If Nexstar is being driven by a pro-Israel slant that it enforces in its programming, it’s a serious concern. After buying Tribune Media in 2019, Nexstar became the largest local broadcast TV owner in the country, outstripping the explicitly right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group. According to an August 2022 filing with the SEC, the company now reaches nearly 40 percent of all US television households, and it owns, operates, and provides services to 199 television stations and one AM radio station across Washington, DC, and thirty-nine states. In the filing, the company notes the Supreme Court’s April 2021 striking down of FCC limits on local media ownership.
Halper is far from the first left-wing commentator to be fired for pro-Palestinian speech. Marc Lamont Hill lost his position at CNN for a speech calling for “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” while Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson lost the regular column he had written for the Guardian for four years after sarcastically tweeting that Congress “is not actually permitted to authorize any new spending unless a portion of it is directed toward buying weapons for Israel.” This month, a report Facebook itself had commissioned determined the company’s censorship policies “have had an adverse human rights impact” on Palestinians, thanks to the company’s double standard on “moderating” Palestinian posts versus Israeli ones.

Heather McGhee is an author and policy advocate with a focus on reducing inequality. She is Board Chair for the organization Color Of Change and trustee emeritus of the think tank Demos. McGhee is also the author of The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Heather McGhee discuss why progress for one ethnic group does not come at the expense of another; how racial animus has been used in the past to divide Americans who share fundamental interests; and what the stories of those who bridge racial divides teach us about building a better America.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I really enjoyed your book, and I've really been enjoying your new podcast. The core of your work seems to me to be the idea that we can only prosper together, and that we should think of the world in more positive terms. It’s also about how much we lose when racial competition—and other forms of competition—damages the social fabric.How is your framework different from the ways in which we tend to talk about this topic in America today?Heather McGhee: I spent nearly 20 years working at a think tank and in public policy advocacy, squarely focused on economic inequality, and the political inequality that feeds and creates it. I’ve made a couple of shifts in that time. The dominant way of seeing the relationship between class and race in my field of center-left economics was that inequality is driven by policies: tax, trade, etc. That was one bit of conventional wisdom. But it really blinded us from seeing the way in which racism itself, in our politics and our policymaking, is actually the driver of inequality in many instances. And it makes inequality worse for everyone, not just people of color.The other shift is, in some ways, a more challenging one. Oftentimes, we talk about racial competition—about the story of race and who you are to one another—in such a way that even those of us who want to see racial equality end up invoking a sort of zero-sum paradigm. This has its most offensive articulation in the idea that there are winners and losers; that progress for people of color must come at white folks’ expense; that we can't share the good things in life; and that we are in a sort of competition for dominance.I think that sometimes, when those of us who want to see a fairer and more just world are trying desperately to pull the wool up from over the eyes of so many people who want to ignore the existence of systemic racism, we insist on talking about white privilege and all of the different advantages that come from being white and the disadvantages that come from being a person of color. And in some ways, we're setting up the same paradigm: that what's good for one group is bad for the other. And because the voices with the ugliest zero-sum story are so loud right now, not just in the US but across the globe, I think that, as communicators, it's incumbent upon us to finish the sentence: “Yes, there are all of these advantages to being white, and to being a descendent of people who were on the upper end of a strict racial caste system. And yet, the world that we are seeking to create is not one where white people have less health care, worse-funded schools, more contact with the police, and more polluted water and air. We want a world where we all prosper.”Mounk: I think those are two very helpful frames. So let's delve a little bit more deeply into each. What does it mean to say that racism has really made inequality worse? And how is it that in the course of American history, racism has been an obstacle to economic equality, and an obstacle to building public goods that could have sustained a more equal and flourishing society?McGhee: I grew up professionally trying to figure out what had shifted in our economic policy paradigm between the era of the New Deal—the Great Compression, the era of shared prosperity—and what came after. There are a lot of ways that economists and advocates describe the period roughly between the 1930s and the early 1970s, when economic and income growth was fast and relatively evenly distributed. In fact, that period of time saw the lowest paid households’ incomes grow faster than the highest paid households’. It was the period of the American Dream, of the greatest middle class the world had ever seen. It was brought about by a policy regime of higher marginal tax rates, massive public investment, a lot more regulation, high levels of unionization, a minimum wage that was roughly half the median wage, lots of benefits with work, etc. We really had a very dramatic break from that policy regime in the 1970s, accelerating in the 1980s, and 90s. And it ushered in what I call the “inequality era” of today, where 1% of the population owns more wealth than the entire middle class, and half of adult workers are paid too little to meet their basic needs. In order to put an end to the era of inequality, you first need to figure out what happened: what were the policy shifts? You can write an economic history of what changed in our regulatory policy, or tax and trade policy or labor policy. But what I didn't understand—and this often made me feel like I was sort of crazy—was why the country that invented this thing called the American Dream decided to just shut the lights out on it and tolerate galloping inequality? So I quit my job running a think tank in 2017, and I set out on a series of trips that took me across the country multiple times. I started reading and talking to scholars of different disciplines. And I found a better answer to the question of why it is that we can't seem to have nice things anymore—things like universal childcare, paid family leave, universal health care, or a well funded school in every neighborhood. What I came upon was a real thing that I actually walked across, physically, but which was also a powerful metaphor for the political and social dynamics that shifted the economy from the golden age of shared prosperity to the inequality era. It was in Montgomery, Alabama, in their central park called Oak Park: a wide, flat expanse of grass, ten feet beneath which was the carcass of a swimming pool. It used to hold over a thousand swimmers, a lavish public swimming pool that was built as part of a boom in the 1930s and ‘40s of building public goods: roads, bridges, schools, libraries, parks. These swimming pools were sort of this glittering reflection of a deeper ethos that said, “The government is going to ensure an ever increasing standard of life for its citizens.” They were New Deal, WPA creations in many of these places. But of course, the public goods that I cared more about were things like: social security for the elderly, massive investment in housing that workers could afford, mass homeownership (an unprecedented commitment to the idea that working-class people could own something that would be an intergenerational bedrock of wealth, and would appreciate over time), the GI Bill, the labor standards and collective bargaining rules in the New Deal. These were all public goods; but they were all, in one way or another, racially exclusionary. But then the Civil Rights Movement empowered black families, who got the courts to agree with them that it was their tax dollars that funded those public goods all along. And so in the case of the swimming pools, they want their kids to swim. But many towns and cities across the country did what Montgomery, Alabama did. They drained their public swimming pools rather than integrate them—they literally drained out the water and backed up truckloads of dirt and gravel. This image of the drained pool means so much, because it happened all over the country, not just in Alabama, but Ohio, West Virginia, New Jersey, California, Washington state—it reveals what a white population that has been taught to disdain and distrust their fellow Americans will do as a result of a zero-sum mentality. They feel that there has to be someone on top, and they'd rather destroy a public good than share it. This was mirrored in a really radical and sudden shift of public opinion among the majority of white voters away from public goods of all kinds. This was popular with 70% of white American voters in 1960. But by 1964—the height of the Civil Rights Movement—the share of white voters who wanted a muscular government guarantee of economic security had halved. And so for me, the drained pool phenomenon became a better answer to why the American majority would turn their backs on a formula that had created such middle-class prosperity, and instead say, “We're willing to go it alone.”Mounk: As you were saying these last few sentences, I was reminded of an old joke, which I think originates in Polish socialism. A fairy turns up and promises a man that he can have one wish fulfilled, no questions asked, but whatever he gets, his neighbor will get twice as much. He thinks for a long while (he’s really tortured by this), and finally, he says, “Kill half of my cows.” There is this deep human psychology of competition, such that you would rather be poor yourself as long as the people with whom you're in competition are kept down at a lower rung of the social ladder. Your argument is that this kind of psychological mechanism, in the context of American racism, helps to explain not just racial disparities between white and black Americans, but also the turn away from the public goods-oriented policies of the 1950s and 1960s, which had sustained Social Security and investment in local public schools and libraries and all of those kinds of things. Your point is that when black Americans gained access to those facilities, people started to say, “Well, actually, I'm hoping for some of my cows to die as long as all of their cows die, too.” Is that roughly the causal story here?McGhee: Sociologists would call it “last-place aversion.” In my book The Sum of Us, I really try to underscore that this isn't only human nature. This is also a reflection of the fact that everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. And there are power dynamics. There are political actors, there are self-interested elites who are setting up a system where being on the bottom of the social hierarchy is so miserable, that anybody worth his salt would try to climb over his neighbor to get away from that bottom rung. As well as the economic history of all this, there was also a political movement that was thrilled to capture white voters away from the Democrats—the party of the New Deal—and move them over to the political right, to a politics of racial grievance, especially once the party of the new New Deal also became the party of civil rights. When Lyndon Johnson (the last Democrat, by the way, to win a majority of white voters when running for president) signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, and at that moment lost the South, he said: “If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice that you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” That means voting for cuts to government services, destruction of union power, shipping jobs overseas, tax cuts for the wealthy. That economic program was something that the majority of white voters gladly voted for, even though many of them suffered under that economic system. They emptied out their pockets, in some ways, in order to preserve what they believed was the core of American identity, which was reflected in the power structures of mostly white men. Mounk: I have a question about this line of argument, which is sort of parallel to a debate that's been happening in political science about Europe. Some articles have claimed that support for generous welfare state policies go down in various European countries when there's high levels of immigration, and it seems to me that the logic here is very similar to what you were just talking about. Meaning, people essentially think, “Sure, we're in favor of general programs to provide public goods and so on, as long as ‘people like you and me’ benefit. Suddenly, people whom I don’t trust and to whom I feel superior are getting some of the benefits. In that case, perhaps we better abolish it.” What's strange is that that is treated like a conservative argument—even though the political scientists who have published those papers tend to be, like most political scientists, on the left—because it would seem to imply that if we want a strong welfare state, we shouldn't have immigrants. Obviously, the political scientists don't want that conclusion.How should we think about this tension, where it feels like there is a liberatory potential in what you're saying, but where people also draw the conclusion of, “Well, things just don't work when you have more immigrants. Perhaps it's just too hard to make this multiracial democracy in America work in the kind of way we would want.”McGhee: Well, as you say in your book, multiracial democracy is a “great experiment.” We haven't figured it out yet. How do you create a democracy that is equal and where everyone thrives? It’s hard. My intervention in the field of progressive economics has been to examine why so many of my peers—who are mostly white, and class-focused—didn't have a language for why their great ideas about making everybody's lives better were falling on deaf ears among white voters. Many of them didn't know that the majority of white voters had rejected the Democratic Party, at the presidential level, since LBJ. There was sort of an ignorance about the correlation between racial resentment and the Democrats’ weakened support. Liberals riding on their pro-government horse didn't have a language for what was going on. But like you, I'm a hopeful person. I think it's worth fighting for this “great experiment.” Mounk: What made you more hopeful? What empowers some people to see the positive-sum potential and what, conversely, drives other people into that zero-sum mentality?McGhee: I'm reminded right now of a podcast episode that we did, where I went to a small town in rural Maine. We're losing tremendous amounts of farmland, and huge numbers of farmers are aging and selling their land. And it's a massive problem for local food systems, and for our rural economies in particular. In that podcast episode, we focused on a group of Somali, ethnic Bantu refugees and immigrants who came to Maine after the Somali Civil War, and who were met with a grassroots-level welcome of charity and immigrant integration at the local level—but also with fire and brimstone, with anti-immigrant politics at the state and municipal levels. It was sort of a proto-Trump demonization of immigrants, by tying them to welfare, etc. And yet, amidst all of that is this group of Somali Bantu people who were farmers in their homeland. They had community associations led by an amazing man. Everyone's working in bakeries, factories, and retail stores—but what they really want to do is farm, and so this man looks around and sees all of the green land and wonders, “How does one go about getting some of this land to put to productive use?” As you can imagine, a refugee Muslim, a black man, looking to buy land in Maine—what could go wrong, right? In the summer of 2020, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, comes a mass consciousness-raising, the largest social demonstration movement in American history. Many people across the country who are white begin to ask questions of themselves, their lives, their communities. And so the small, organic, family farmer community in Maine (the whitest state in the country), begins to ask why there is nary a black farmer in Maine. It's at that same time that the Somali association is fundraising to buy land in a community land trust, and they're looking to buy the land of a third-generation dairy farmer who is a white conservative, probably a little bit libertarian. The fundraiser ends up taking off like wildfire because of the mass consciousness-raising that was happening at the time. And the farmer ends up becoming, I think, more willing to sell his land to a group of two hundred African refugees, Muslim farmers, because of the popular conversation at the time. The mass demonstration moment of the summer of 2020 played an outsized and pivotal role in each of the stories that I ended up finding over the course of 2022.Mounk: It's interesting to think about how the impact of 2020 was very different in already liberal, progressive contexts than it was in more conservative parts of the country, where people were perhaps not as aware of some of these injustices, or hadn't asked those questions of themselves before.I have a question about one of the shifts you've seen in the last few years, which is the embrace of race-sensitive policy—or more broadly, the embrace of the goal of “equity.” Now, there are different interpretations of each of those terms, and they mean very different things in different contexts. But I wondered, as I was reading your book, how you felt about some of those policies. I think you clearly share the goal of overcoming the deep inequality that continues to exist in this country for historical reasons. I also wondered whether you think there is a risk of moving back towards talking about racial competition and zero sum games. One example would be the relief fund for small businesses and restaurants during the pandemic. Originally, under the Trump administration, there was an order of priority, which was simply based on the amount of revenue you'd lost: if you'd lost 70% of your revenue, you were first in line; if you lost 50%, you were second, and so on. But the Biden administration tried—though it was contested in the courts—to shift it such that the order of priority was based on who owned the business, so that people of color and women were first in line. And that mattered because it wasn't just about when you'd get the money. There were limited funds available. Do you worry that the embrace of these kinds of race-sensitive public policies, which actually distinguish how the state should treat individual people on the basis of their race, primes people to think in zero-sum terms?McGhee: If you start the story with, “For some reason, the government is playing favorites and picking black people and brown people and women over white men,” then it does seem unfair, if I'm a white man. But you can start the story differently—for example, in the case of the PPP loans, with the data of how many times over, even controlling for other factors, white-owned businesses and larger businesses received PPP loans than black and minority-owned small businesses, and how much under the Trump administration's rules, minority and women-owned businesses were the last in line. If you start the story like this, it makes more sense to say that it's necessary to fix the rules. Part of the challenge is that there's been such willful blindness about existing inequalities, and about how policies that appear to be race neutral ended up creating wildly unfair advantages for white people. The sum result was that white businesses were overrepresented among PPP loan beneficiaries. Then, when there's any tweak that “names” race—as if the “neutral” thing that still had these wildly unfair impacts wasn't racialized—the critique ends up focusing on the racial redress, and not on the original unjust system. Only .1% of black farmers, for example, received any of the $26 billion of economic aid provided to farmers during the Trump administration’s trade war. You start at a very recent example (PPP), which comes on top of the decades and decades of discrimination that has been well-documented and litigated. And then the Biden administration comes in and says, “Given all of the debt relief that farmers of color have not gotten, while white farmers have, we're going to have a program that’s specifically for farmers of color, who were sort of the original people who made up the agricultural system in this country.” And that was immediately litigated and frozen, so it never happened. I think a mature society that had a real understanding of where the starting line began, would be willing to say that one size doesn't fit all, and would be willing to attribute some of the current higher economic and social position that white Americans have to an unjust system that needs to be corrected. And it would say that a world that includes those slightly race-conscious policies, those well-targeted forms of redress, is not a world in which white people are at the back of the line. It is a world where people are equal. There's the old saying that when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Mounk: I believe much of what you just said, and I find your framing of the race-class narrative quite compelling. Racial disparities in wealth and income are a very real concern that I'm not trying to minimize or dismiss. And I agree with what I think is basically the narrative of your book, that it's really important that we're able to fight for our common interests, and that certain people do try to exploit racial divisions between us in order to make us incapable of having wonderful public goods and overcoming larger inequalities. Let's also say for the sake of argument that normatively, all of these programs of redress are 100% right and justifiable. You think that if we're going to build this hopeful future, we have to overcome the pitfall that progress for one group is viewed as subtracting from another. In that case, shouldn't we nevertheless abstain from many of these kinds of policies, which are going to be framed in this way? Where many people in the country are going to say, “Hang on a second, why are you giving this grant to a restaurant because they filled out a form and ticked one race rather than another? Doesn't this put us in direct competition, and if we're going to be in direct competition, shouldn't I fight for the interest of my group?” Shouldn't we be nervous about that, in terms of our ability to achieve the future that you're hoping for?McGhee: I think the Biden administration has been pretty consistent in trying to make the case, whenever the president speaks about racial equity, that it's in our best interests as a country. I talk about the “zero-sum framing.” Biden’s folksy version of it is, “For too long, we believed that $1 more in my pocket must mean $1 less in yours.” He does his own riff on the zero-sum framing, by naming it and calling it out. I think the president, or at least his speechwriters, have understood that it's important for him to make the case for racial equity in a way that explicitly names and rejects the zero-sum framing, and that says: you can't be a successful team if you have so many of your players on the sidelines because of debt and discrimination and disadvantage. And I think it's a really important story for him to keep telling.What gives me hope? In the first episode of my podcast, I traveled to Memphis to see how black Memphis and white Memphis (neighborhoods in Memphis are 99% black and 99% white to this day) came together because an oil pipeline was threatening the black neighborhood. People were threatening to sue little black ladies for an eminent domain to get their land to run this pipeline through. And that's a story as old as time right? Black people are twice as likely to live near toxins as white people. That was going to be an open-and-shut case of environmental injustice, and only black people and bleeding-heart liberals would have cared. But ultimately, the pipeline was also going to threaten the whole of Memphis’s aquifer—the source of their drinking water, some of the cleanest, best-tasting drinking water in the United States. And parts of white Memphis woke up, realizing (this is again in the wake of the summer of 2020) that they did need to defend the little old black ladies. Because, ultimately, the injustices that target one community make systems more dysfunctional and put everybody else at risk, too—just not as much, because the burden is always borne disproportionately by the targeted community. But the story of the Memphis aquifer and the pipeline, which black and white Memphis came together to stop, is a really great example of how environmental justice is actually good for white people. If we don't let there be sacrificed zones, where polluters can dump their poisons, then our water and our air will be cleaner for everyone. I do believe that a type of equality (and in fact, equity) that is eyes-open, and not willfully blind to the data that shows where the problems are concentrated, is the way to make systems fair and better for everyone. Black-white economic inequality has cost the US’s GDP $16 trillion dollars over the last 20 years. The world in which a black college graduate has enough cash in the bank and home equity to start a great small business, is a better world for our economy and society. We've got to know that when students who are predominantly of color have $23 billion less of public funding in their school districts than majority-white school districts, that means we’re losing out on a heck of a lot of heart surgeons and neuroscientists and poets and lawyers and judges and future presidents. And that's not a zero-sum game. It’s really about recognizing that we need each other, and we are interdependent. And frankly, if a multiracial democracy can't work here, and can't work on the energy of this, the most diverse generation in American history, then I don't know where or with whom it will work.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

And the deepest pain falls, as it so often does, on the poor and the jobless. High interest rates can shift the decisions richer people make about spending. If it’s a bad time to buy a house, even a multimillionaire might wait a few years. But higher interest rates won’t change how much child care they buy or whether they upgrade their phones or how much they spend on clothes. And it’s the spending of the better-off that drives the economy: In 2021, the top income quintile was responsible for almost 40 percent of total spending. The bottom income quintile accounted for less than 10 percent.

It would be nice to have policies that could work alongside interest rates so adjustments could be less severe. It would be particularly nice to have a policy that targeted the rich rather than the poor and did so in a way that didn’t hurt long-term investment. Such a policy exists.

For years, Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell, has argued for a progressive consumption tax on the ground that it would discourage the rich from spending on luxuries and give them more reason to save and invest. The way it works is simple: Instead of reporting your income to the I.R.S. and being taxed on that, you report your income minus your savings, and you’re taxed on that. That’s a consumption tax: Your taxable income is what you spend, not what you save. Congress can make it progressive by adding a hefty standard deduction and applying a much higher tax rate to people making much more money, just as we do now.

Frank wasn’t writing in a time of high inflation, so his argument centered elsewhere: He considers much of the spending among the rich to be harmful, not just wasteful. Take wedding spending: The rich compete with one another to throw ever more lavish weddings. That competition cascades to the near rich, who want to appear rich and so increase their spending, too. The pressure then shifts to the next group down the income ladder and the next group and so on, until everyone is spending more on weddings because the frame of reference on how much they “should” spend on a wedding has changed. You can find similar dynamics in spending on everything from homes to schools to cars and jewelry.

I’ve always liked Frank’s argument, but now I’m more interested in another feature of the progressive consumption tax: the ability to dial it up and down to respond to different economic conditions. In a time of recession, we could drop taxes on new spending, giving the rich and poor alike more reason to spend. In times of inflation, we could raise taxes on new spending, particularly among the wealthy, giving them a concrete reason to cut back immediately and to save and invest more at the same time.

Even better, we could make it automatic, as Posen suggested to me. Perhaps for every percentage point increase in unemployment above 5 percent, the tax rate would fall by three points, and for every percentage point increase in inflation above 3 percent, it would rise by four points. Other rules could apply for periods when unemployment and inflation moved together. The tax code would become responsive to the economy by default, rather than only through new acts of Congress.

Are we likely to create a progressive consumption tax right now? Of course not. Congress isn’t likely to do much of anything right now. But over the past two decades, we’ve seen a giant recession during which Congress passed far too little stimulus and now an inflationary crisis that Congress and the Federal Reserve were too slow to address. Maybe it’s time to think about policies that move at the speed of economies and psychology rather than the pace of institutions.

Additional research by Rollin Hu.

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If Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget survives the storm it triggered, a banker on a million-pound annual salary stands to receive £50,000 of income tax relief – on top of the extra bonuses the bank can throw in, now that the Liz Truss government has removed the cap on them. Meanwhile, a Deliveroo rider gets a pep talk on the emancipatory value of aspiring to be wealthy, presumably as an incentive to pedal harder. This is the gist of the government’s growth strategy or, according to former Brexit minister David Frost, its antidote to stagnation and defeatism.

While it’s tempting to draw the obvious analogy between zombie ideas such as the trickle-down growth effect, and the classic Hollywood horror film Night of the Living Dead, a more appropriate response to the seriousness of the situation is to follow the banker’s extra cash. The government claims the banker will invest it, thus promoting growth. If it were not a blatant lie, it might have passed as a touching example of unfounded faith. But unlike Adam Smith’s bakers, butchers and brewers, who would invest any spare cash into better and more bread, ale and meat, the banker will buy into some fund that will, in turn, purchase shares, derivatives and bonds.

These recipients of the banker’s extra money have a long track record of not investing in actual productive capacity. Why would they, when the masses out there can’t afford to buy new, high-value products? Instead, big businesses use any funds that come their way either to buy back their own shares (to boost their share price and, consequently, their bonuses) or to speculate in the derivatives market or in real estate. The dirty secret behind the zombie idea of trickle-down economics is that only one thing can prevent the vicious financial cycle from spinning out of control: the government’s (and, sometimes, the central bank’s) power to feed it.

Margaret Thatcher, whom Liz Truss pretends to idolise, understood this dirty little secret. She learned the hard way that tax cuts for the wealthy merely shifted income to the ruling class without delivering growth dividends. For her neoliberal policies to deliver a semblance of growth, she had to throw into the vicious financial cycle pre-existing public wealth: council houses and public utilities (gas, electricity, water) in particular. In short, Thatcher’s policies boosted growth not because trickle-down worked, but because swathes of society’s common wealth was liquidated at cutdown prices and thrown into the City’s cauldron.

Thatcher’s business model for the UK has remained more or less the same ever since. While the last Labour government did use its revenues from taxing the City to fund the NHS and social services, the UK’s productive capital base continued to shrink. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown not only maintained the financialisation cycle that Thatcher had begun, but boosted it in two ways: by removing all remaining regulatory constraints on the City, and by throwing into its circular flow the proceeds from deregulated public services.

Then, in 2008, under the weight of its hubris, the financialisation vicious cycle had its famous collapse. At once, the Bank of England combined forces with the government to re-float it. To that splendid example of socialism exclusively for the financiers, George Osborne added austerity, which, by suppressing aggregate demand further, eradicated any remaining drive toward actual investment in Britain’s productive base.

Four decades after the neoliberal experiment began, the evidence is in: trickle-down economics is dangerous make-believe. Growth is in fact impervious to the top income tax rates. Paul Krugman recently showed that neither Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts nor Bill Clinton’s tax hikes affected the US’s income path significantly. Similarly in the UK, the data dispels the Tory conviction that Thatcher put Britain on to a brave new path to higher growth. We find that in 1979, the output per hour worked in the UK was trailing France and Germany by 17% and 18% respectively. Did the UK catch up after four decades of trickle-down tax policies and assorted deregulation measures, which never happened in France? No, in 2019, France’s productivity remained 18% higher than the UK’s, and Germany’s 17%.

From this historical perspective, the recent backlash against Liz Truss seems almost unfair. Sure enough, the new prime minister and her chancellor blundered monumentally. Nevertheless, it is disingenuous of the Truss trashers to try to pin on her the sins of a business model inspired by Thatcher, modified by Blair, shored up by Osborne, undermined by Brexit and neglected by Boris Johnson. The hapless new PM’s rookie mistake was to try to beat Rishi Sunak (while also jettisoning Johnson’s levelling up agenda) by doing … a Thatcher. Alas, because she lacked Thatcher’s access to plentiful public assets to be injected into the financial sector, and with the Bank of England too spooked by inflation to print more money to revitalise financialisation, Truss ended up trying to achieve the impossible: to do a Reagan, but without the mighty dollar in support.

The problem with zombie ideas that refuse to die is that, once they re-emerge, they encourage other deadly undead ideas to rise up too. There are already signs that Kwarteng, instead of killing off the trickle-down zombie, will instead revive the austerity zombie. Impervious to the fact that tax cuts never generate growth, and austerity never arrests the growth rate of public debt, the UK is destined to be haunted by these two zombies for two more years.

The silver lining is that Trussonomics has almost guaranteed the Tories’ defeat in the next election. And then? Does Keir Starmer’s Labour have a plan to break up the doom-loop of state-maintained wealth appropriation centred upon the City? The UK’s future, and any hope of undoing four decades of unnecessary damage, will depend on it.

Is there anything to say in defense of the stumbling prime minister? Only this: When politicians return, with seeming irrationality, to ideas that seem zombielike and ill-suited to the present moment, it’s often a sign that the problems of the present moment just don’t have clear solutions. The defaults of the past may be wrong, but at least they feel attractively familiar.

This is European conservatism’s predicament at the moment. It can win power because the old establishment, the supposedly sensible center, helped create and failed to solve three interconnected problems. First, globalization and European integration enriched the core more than the periphery, the metropole more than the hinterland. Second, wealth, secularization and economic stagnation drove down European birthrates, threatening depopulation and decline. Third, the preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash — even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.

Only the populist right talks consistently about all three problems; thus its current political advantage. But does the populist right know how to address them? Not exactly. Boris Johnson, Truss’s ill-fated predecessor, promised a rebalancing of investments that would benefit the neglected non-Londonian regions of Britain, and you could argue that a larger rebalancing is what all these problems should provoke. A shift from public spending on the old to spending on young people and parents. A shift from welfare spending to industrial policy. A shift from relying on immigrants to boost your gross domestic product to investing in domestic growth and regional renewal. A shift from deregulation on behalf of finance to deregulation on behalf of young families who presently can’t afford to buy a home.

But each of these ideas requires extreme care with the details — What kind of industrial policy? What kind of family policy? — and many of them might take a generation to bear fruit. Meanwhile, a lot of conservative voters have an interest in the status quo; they don’t like how things have changed, without acknowledging how they’ve contributed to the problems. Older voters, especially, are likely to resist rebalancings that trim their pensions or the value of their homes, even if such a rebalancing is necessary to restore the societal vigor that they miss.

Then add in the spending limits suddenly imposed by inflation and the wartime energy crisis, and you have a scenario in which populists might end up as right-wing custodians of the same sclerosis that helped bring them to power — ruling as defenders of a fusty chauvinism rather than actual tradition (because a secularized continent is not actually traditional), preserving a museum culture for as long as possible against further waves of immigration, with some of the rage against a civilizational twilight that Meloni offers in her fiery speeches, but no actual plan to turn societies with empty cradles and budget shortfalls around.

(Photos by Angela Weiss and Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (even those of you who are taking a break from setting up your profile on the hot new conservative dating app),I have literally no more than 120 minutes to write this “news”letter. I tell you this in advance because I won’t be annoyed if you opt not to read it. I’m telling you in advance that I’m merely going for the Arby’s of “news”letters here: It will meet the absolute minimum expected of such fare. Anything beyond mediocrity will probably depend not on the effort going in, but on the hunger of the consumer. Or maybe you’ll grade me on the curve of your low expectations: “That wasn’t a great piece of writing, but pretty impressive for less than two hours at the end of the day.” In other words, think of me like a cat playing a piano—pretty bad for a pianist, but wildly impressive for a cat. (If you want a more substantive and considered G-File, please read the Wednesday edition, which we’ve made available to non-Dispatch members. I’ll try to respond to my critics next week, if it seems worthwhile.)Joe Biden presents something of a challenge for me. I’ve been making Joe Biden jokes for a very long time. Two decades ago, when Biden was a youthful fiftysomething, I was pointing out that he was the rhetorical equivalent of a Dada painting. His sentences would go on and on like a drunk guy chasing a blind spider monkey through a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit. And when he’d catch a moldering teddy bear that had been left at the bottom of the pit he’d show it to you and say something old-timey, like, “And you can take that to the bank!” Or when he was acting like the verbal equivalent of a melting clock with caveman feet, he’d stop dead in his tracks and say something in the loudest whisper you’ve ever heard: “And that’s why unicycles don’t have wings.” A few things have changed since the old days. He has more hair than he used to. That’s true for many of us, but usually the new crops sprout up elsewhere. Also, he doesn’t flash his new teeth the way he used to. I don’t intend this to be mean, it’s just that he used to do this thing where he would punctuate his monologues with these giant oral semaphore flashes of teeth that he didn’t have as a younger man. It was almost like his teeth were in a kind of open rebellion with his mouth, like an untrained rider atop a stampeding elephant, screaming for all to hear, “I’ve got no brakes!” To his credit, it does seem like the teeth eventually won the battle, because he’s not nearly the loquacious talker he once was. He still produces gaffes—he’s called himself a “gaffe machine” for years. He also said chipmunks taste blue. Actually, no he didn’t. But you believed me for a second, didn’t you?His relative succinctness—measured against his previous performances at least—is probably in part an impressive victory over a very real challenge he once had with stuttering, a condition I wouldn’t ever want to mock. But it’s also a victory over his younger arrogance of thinking the 10,000th word from Joe Biden was more important than the first word from one of his Senate colleagues or the hearing witnesses he was nominally questioning.Oh, and one other thing has changed: He’s gotten old. And that’s a challenge for me. Making fun of Biden’s schtick 10 or 20 years ago was fair game. But now it feels mean-spirited. I don’t like all the mockery of Biden’s age and mental decline in part because it has the weight of truth. It’s sort of like Michael Scott in The Office explaining that he would never call someone who is actually gay, “gay.”But here’s the problem: It matters. We can all debate how much it matters. We can all debate how big a problem it is. But the White House’s approach seems to be to simply deny, deny, deny. I don’t mean that they deny it’s a problem or that it matters. They deny the obvious reality of the situation. This week at a White House event, Biden called out a congresswoman who died just over a month ago. “Jackie, are you here?” he asked. “Where's Jackie? She was going to be here.” It was painful—for everyone. And what made this episode different from all the previous ones is that the press corps—beyond Peter Doocey at least—had to acknowledge it. Much to the consternation of press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.Since we’re wandering down memory lane here, like Biden telling NATO about CornPop, it’s worth pointing out the double standard Biden benefits from. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s age was a source of constant worry and even mockery. Here’s the 1986 music video for Genesis’ “Land of Confusion,” which portrays Reagan as such a doddering old fool he launches a nuclear missile by mistake. Reagan was two years younger than Biden is today when it was made. Indeed, Reagan did not turn 78 until after he left office. This November, Biden will turn 80.A few things are worth noting. First, it’s true Reagan showed his age at the time, but he was at least as “together” as Biden is today. The second thing worth noting is that everybody noted Reagan’s age. The third is that we are far closer, by any measure, to a nuclear conflagration today than we were back then. But it is inconceivable that a prominent artist today would mock Biden the way Phil Collins did.I don’t have a great answer to any of this, and I don’t think the Biden administration does either. But even if I wasn’t the Trump critic I am, I think it’s insane that people are seriously talking about rerunning the 2020 election with the same old men who ran in the last one. I have no problem, in theory, with old people being in charge. But surely we can do better? And surely there can be room to say so? Add up the ages of Biden, Trump, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell, and the most powerful politicians in our country right now are older than the United States itself.Of course, one of the hitches for the Democrats is that the person waiting in the wings—Kamala Harris—has proven to be … a less than ideal understudy. The same week Biden had a séance of sorts calling out to a deceased congresswoman, Harris spoke of our “very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea.” In one sense it’s a minor gaffe, but given how she has fumbled such occasions so many times, you’d think she’d go to great lengths not to give credence to the argument that she was picked to be vice president for reasons that had little to do with her ability to do the job. During the 2020 election, BET declared that people should vote for her because she walked off a plane with “wheat timbs”—short for wheat-colored Timberland shoes.BET @BETSteppin’ off the jet with the wheat timbs?! Hurry up and register to vote! #KamalaHarris #VOTE September 16th 20202,412 Retweets14,057 LikesTwo years later, it’s impossible to separate the wheat (timbs) from the gaffes.Pardon?If I had the power to cut the Gordian knot of our politics, I wouldn’t go all Logan’s Run and blow up the top ranks of our gerontocracy. But one—only slightly less plausible—solution would be to persuade Joe Biden to pardon Donald Trump in exchange for him agreeing to never run for office again. Biden would have to lean on some state prosecutors to agree to the deal, but that’s doable. There would be nothing illegal about it. The president’s pardon power—which I think has outlived its usefulness for reasons Andy McCarthy has laid out—is very broad and can be conditioned however he sees fit.Now if Biden did this, it would almost certainly cost him any chance of reelection, which would be fine with me. But the more important point is that it should be fine with him, too. He’s in no shape to run again. Pardoning Trump would let him go down in history as a statesman who put the nation’s interest ahead of his (perceived) political interest. It would be a face-saving way of retiring from the public stage as a “successful” one-term president who could spend his retirement years saying he could have won against Trump, but he didn’t want to put the country through such an ugly ordeal. This would take away what is really the only argument for him to run again anyway. Whenever Democrats say they want someone else—and all of the polls say that’s what Democrats want—Biden points to the fact that the polls say he would beat Trump.Trump clearly wants to be president again. But he also doesn’t want to lose again, which is why he wants to announce before anyone else in the hopefully vain hope of preemptively clearing the field. He wants a coronation.But if Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, and the rest make it clear he won’t get a coronation—and if the Republican Party recaptures a modicum of its integrity and patriotism and refuses to once again become Trump’s personal plaything—he might decide not to run. More to the point, if he’s in such legal jeopardy—still a major “if”—that he thinks he could end up in the dock, he might accept the pardon deal simply to give himself a face-saving way to avoid losing fair and square (again). Of course, this too would depend on all of these actors putting the interests of the country and their party above their perceived personal interests.My hunch is that Harris would end up going down with Biden amid all the uproar from the left, which has convinced itself that anything short of Trump making wine in a prison toilet for his cellmates would be a disappointment. She might break with Biden and try to run anyway, but without an actual incumbent in the race, there’s no way Gavin Newsom and his very important hair don’t jump into the breach. And I suspect they wouldn’t be alone.Again, I’m highly confident none of this will happen, for all sorts of reasons. But the most important—and dismaying—one is that I have no confidence in any of these players mustering the required effort or resolve to overcome the layer upon layer of collective action problems—as well as the selfish ambitions that create such collective action problems—and put the country first. After all, we live in a country where even very old and very rich people would rather cling to, or regain, power than head to retirement, either in Delaware or Palm Beach.Various & SundryCanine update: All of the beasts are well. Gracie has adapted to her robot litter box with fitting grace. She has developed a very cute, but exceedingly annoying, habit, though. You know how both Zoë and Pippa will paw me to demand payment in scritches and belly rubs? Grace does it too. But her approach is to sit next to me in the chair, extend a single claw like some cartoon cat about to cut a circle in glass, and poke my arm with it until I pay her the attention she demands. It doesn’t hurt, it just implies she could hurt me if I continue to ignore her. Zoë, meanwhile, continues to mellow. Warren blocked her path to the shotgun seat, and rather than responding in tooth and claw, she merely stared at Warren in incomprehension. Both girls just love the weather, especially when Sammie joins the crew or when they get to run the bases. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. 114 minutes, baby. ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileLast weekend’s RuminantThe Remnant’s long anticipated “rat episode”A Dispatch Live potpourriWednesday’s “news”letter If only the GOP had nominated the RINOs The Remnant with Richard ReevesThe Dispatch Podcast on the Nord Stream sabotageMy interview with Reason on Italy’s supposed return to fascismGLoP enters the UberverseAnd now, the weird stuffBlood suckingCrime never looked so goodGrave mistakesHearing voicesDraft dodgingSomething squirrelly

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Putin announced his attempt to lay claim to eastern Ukraine with his most unhinged speech yet, intending to terrify the rest of the world into submission. We should instead continue to show courage and steadfastness.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Ed Yong: The pandemic’s legacy is already clear.
Elon Musk’s texts shatter the myth of the tech genius.
Escaping Hurricane Ian
Major EscalationRussian President Vladimir Putin, in a speech at a ceremony to incorporate partially Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, finally and explicitly declared an end to more than seven decades of international order. During a meandering rant, Putin defended raw Russian imperialism while he spooled off about a number of topics, including the fall of the U.S.S.R., the power of Western hegemony, and the American use of nuclear weapons on Japan. But his underlying goal was to warn the rest of the world to cease its opposition to his war of conquest in Ukraine.Putin’s incorporation of these areas into Russia is a major escalation in his seven-month campaign against Ukraine, and it raises the same question that has haunted many in the world regularly since the first days of the invasion: How worried should we be about this war becoming a larger European conflict and eventually a global cataclysm? My initial reaction: We should be worried, but we should also stand fast and tell Putin that if he means to destroy peace and order across the entire planet, we will oppose him just as we have helped Ukraine oppose him in Europe.Putin’s rant was meant to make the world quail in fear. In reality, Putin is likely more terrified than anyone right now: He’s a Russian dictator losing a war of aggression, and he knows how that could end for him. In his speech, he justified the war in Ukraine using everything from the boundaries of ancient Russia to what he sees as the illegitimate dissolution of the Soviet Union. With sheer brass, he then complained about Western colonialism and human-rights violations—this, from the leader of a country with a long and bloody history, from the tsars to Stalin and beyond, of enslaving and murdering millions.Most of Putin’s complaints are merely warmed-over Soviet-era cant—evidence yet again that Putin, whatever his former goals as a supposed reformer, has never been able to dislodge the hammer and sickle from his political DNA. More to the point, however, Putin said today that this Western decadence was, in fact, the foundation of the global order and thus needed to be overthrown:
And all we hear is, the West is insisting on a rules-based order. Where did that come from anyway? Who has ever seen these rules? Who agreed or approved them? Listen, this is just a lot of nonsense, utter deceit, double standards, or even triple standards! They must think we’re stupid.
Of course, the current international system was constructed after World War II with the participation of the Soviet Union itself, and the Russians have been beneficiaries of that order—and its economic rules and stability—for decades. Putin once supported it, before he mired himself in a war he could not win.And then the speech really got wild.Addressing the regime in Kyiv and “their real bosses in the West,” Putin dove into a steaming vat of paranoia, grandiosity, and inferiority, a stew whose toxic fumes have always permeated the Kremlin. He claimed that the West hates “Russian philosophy and thought,” as if people in Washington and London spend a lot of time thinking about any of that. He fulminated about trans people—almost certainly hoping that the usual useful idiots in the right-wing American press will pick up on it—and referred to the “overthrow of faith and traditional values” in the West as equivalent to “Satanism.”Putin might well believe at least some of this, but like most Russian elites, he somehow manages to maintain a pretty cozy relationship with the banks and fashion houses run by those ostensible devil worshippers. He is also, however, trying to rally the most retrograde segments of Russian society while seeking to split the West with his usual rhubarb about defending Christian values.What’s really going on here is that Putin, facing military collapse along the Ukrainian front, is desperately trying to deter Ukraine and its supporters from another round of offensives. He is trying to flip the script, to turn Russia from the aggressor into the defender, and to recast his botched adventure as the Great Patriotic War 2.0, a defense of the Motherland against fascist invaders. To do this, he has turned occupied Ukrainian territory into “Russia” and magically transformed subjugated Ukrainians into “Russians.”We can’t let him get away with it. Many readers of The Atlantic know that I have for months counseled American caution and restraint while also supporting military aid and money for Ukraine. I still do. But Putin has now said that he is at war with everything that the nations of the world—including Russia—have built since the end of World War II. His demand is to be allowed to brutalize whomever he chooses and seize whatever he wants. His threat, no longer even barely veiled, is that if he is not allowed to run amok and create bloodbaths by fiat, he will use nuclear weapons.We didn’t stand down in the face of the Soviet system that created this gangster, and we should not stand down now. As NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said today, Ukraine has every right to recover its own territory and free its people. If Putin’s position is that this is cause for an even wider and more reckless conflict, then it is his choice, not ours.I will have more to say about all of this in a longer analysis. But for today, the threat against all of us—Ukraine and the rest of the world—continues to mount. Opposing this Russian attack on the international order might require great sacrifice, but we must face the reality that no community of free nations can survive if it acquiesces to blackmail.Related:
Putin’s newest annexation is dire for Russia too.
We must reject nuclear blackmail.
Florida officials said that at least three dozen deaths can be linked to Hurricane Ian so far. They expect the storm’s death toll to rise in the coming days.
The Biden administration scaled back its student-loan-forgiveness plan yesterday, a change that will mainly affect borrowers who took out loans before 2010.
Trevor Noah announced that he is leaving The Daily Show after seven years as its host.
The Third Rail: Tucker Carlson’s conspiracy theories show that hatred makes fools of us all, David French argues.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry on what natural disasters say about our colonial conditions.
The Books Briefing: All the world is a scheme, Nicole Acheampong writes.
(Olivia Arthur / Magnum)
An Ode to King Charles IIBy James Parker
The trees groan like Morrissey, the rain comes down
and an owl hoots confidentially, knowing something I don’t.
Millions will mourn your departed mother
and millions won’t.
South from Scotland to darkly dripping London,
flag-draped and ghostly illumined
in the back of the glass-topped hearse,
her coffin swooped over the Westway,
dawdled round Hyde Park Corner
and into the next age. Your age. Which will—we trust—be worse.
Chicago could be a model for the future of Miranda rights.
Orhan Pamuk’s literature of paranoia
Photos of the week: water-chestnut collection in India, a wearable-art show, and more
Billy Eichner and Luke Macfarlane in Bros (Universal Pictures)
Read. Our staffers recommend the novels they wish they’d read when they were younger.In the mood for a short story? Try “Hill Station,” a new work of fiction by Madhuri Vijay.Watch. In theaters, Billy Eichner’s Bros is a rom-com as entertaining as it is therapeutic.The original Avatar has been rereleased (too bad Hollywood learned all the wrong lessons from it, our critic argues).On TV, the Hulu comedy Ramy is back for a third season. And, of course, Hocus Pocus 2 is on Disney+, if you’re looking to get into the Halloween spirit a bit early.Listen. Björk walks you through how to listen to her powerful 10th album, Fossora.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I went and got my second COVID booster shot today, and as I sat thinking about the past two years of the pandemic, I thought of the greatest television series that not enough people have seen: Counterpart, starring J. K. Simmons. If you need a break from the constant bad news, I can’t say that this is a cheerful show—and I won’t say more about the role a pandemic plays—but if you’re into Cold War spy fiction, alternate histories, or both (especially both!), you should stream both seasons of this series, available on Amazon Prime Video.I am not a professional television critic, but I will say that it is one of the most intelligent shows I’ve ever seen. It will not only intrigue you but make you think about fate, chance, the limits of science, and the problem of free will. Not bad for an excursion into “spy-fi,” and all with the amazing Simmons playing himself—twice. (And that’s all I’ll tell you about that.)— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Yesterday, the world got a look inside Elon Musk’s phone. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is currently in litigation with Twitter and trying to back out of his deal to buy the platform and take it private. As part of the discovery process related to this lawsuit, Delaware’s Court of Chancery released hundreds of text messages and emails sent to and from Musk. The 151-page redacted document is a remarkable, voyeuristic record of a few months in the life of the world’s richest (and most overexposed) man and a rare unvarnished glimpse into the overlapping worlds of Silicon Valley, media, and politics. The texts are juicy, but not because they are lurid, particularly offensive, or offer up some scandalous Muskian master plan—quite the opposite. What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”[Read: Elon Musk, baloney king]Few in Musk’s phone appeared as excitable as the angel investor Jason Calacanis, who peppered his friend with flattery and random ideas for the service. In the span of 30 minutes, not long after Musk’s bid to take the company private, Calacanis suggested a five-point plan for Twitter that would introduce a membership tier, creator revenue splits, algorithmic transparency, and changes to the company’s operations—including but not limited to moving the company from San Francisco to Austin. After pledging his loyalty (“You have my sword,” he texted Musk), Calacanis pushed new ideas for weeks. “Just had the best idea ever for monetization,” he wrote out of the blue, before suggesting a way that users could pay Twitter in order to spam their followers with promotional DMs.“Imagine we ask Justin Beaver to come back and let him DM his fans … he could sell 1m in merchandise or tickets instantly. Would be INSANE,” he wrote, apparently adding an unfortunate instance of autocorrect to the historical record. According to the court document, Musk didn’t respond. Later on, Musk chastised Calacanis for trying to whip up public investments to finance Musk’s acquisition. This leads to a string of messages that read straight out of Succession:            Musk:Morgan Stanley and Jared think you are using our friendship not in a good wayThis makes it seem like I’m desperate.Please stop.            Calacanis: Only ever want to support you.During Musk’s April media frenzy, the billionaire frequently demonstrated a shallow understanding of Twitter, suggesting contradictory policies such as banning spam and bot armies but also leaving up all content that is “legal.” (Spam, bot armies, and crypto scam hawkers are all technically legal.) Many of the ideas coming from his peanut gallery were equally poor. Döpfner, who is in charge of numerous media companies, including Insider and Politico, offered to run Twitter for Musk but seemed woefully unprepared for the task. In a novel-length text, Döpfner laid out his “#Gameplan” for the company, which started with the line item: “1.),, Solve Free Speech.” He alluded to vague ideas such as making Twitter censorship resistant via a “decentralized infrastructure” and “open APIs.” He’s similarly nonspecific with his suggestion that Twitter have a “marketplace” of algorithms. “If you’re a snowflake and don’t want content that offends you pick another algorithm,” he wrote Musk.At one point in early April, Musk appears infatuated with his own idea to replace Twitter with a blockchain-based payment-and-message system. In a string of texts to his brother, the entrepreneur Kimbal Musk, he manages to convince himself that the idea could be huge and a way to crush spam while preserving free speech. In this preposterous scenario, users would have to pay a fractional amount of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin to post or retweet. Roughly 10 days later, Musk sends a different text noting that “blockchain Twitter isn’t possible.”[Read: Elon Musk already showed us how he’ll run Twitter]The texts also cast a harsh light on the investment tactics of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest. There’s Calacanis’s overeager angel-investing pitches, and then you have the more chill tactics of people like Andreessen, who in a tossed-off Twitter DM offered Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” “Thanks!” Musk responded. In a separate exchange, Musk asks Ellison if he’d like to invest in taking Twitter private. “Yes, of course,” Ellison replies. “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” Easy enough.“This is one of the most telling things I’ve ever seen about how investing works in Silicon Valley,” Jessica Lessin, the founder of the tech publication The Information, tweeted of the Andreessen exchange. Indeed, both examples from the document offer a look at the boys’ club and power networks of the tech world in action. Is it surprising that rich people (including one of the world’s 10 richest men) are throwing money at their friends the way you might on a low-stakes poker night? Not really—and especially not when that man is the richest man in the world. But the eagerness to pony up for Musk and the lazy quality of this dealmaking reveal something deeper about the brokenness of this investment ecosystem and the ways that it is driven more by vibes and grievances than due diligence. Looking at these texts, it seems much easier to understand Andreessen Horowitz’s recent $350 million investment in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new real-estate start-up, or Bankman-Fried’s admission that most venture-capitalist investments are not “the paragon of efficient markets” and driven primarily by FOMO and hype. “Like, all the models are made up, right?” he infamously told Bloomberg last April.What’s immediately clear is that many of the men in Musk’s phone are having fun with his Twitter escapade. It is an opportunity to blithely throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. They toss out phrases like “hard reboot” and “Day Zero. Sharpen your blades boys”—to cleave through what they see as an unnecessary and ineffective workforce, perhaps. They imagine massive revenue opportunities and sweeping changes that only they can usher in. For this crew, the early success of their past companies or careers is usually prologue, and their skills will, of course, transfer to any area they choose to conquer (including magically solving free speech). But what they are actually doing is winging it.“I’m on 20 threads with people,” the former social-media executive told me. “And it’s literally like, Damn, they were just throwing shit at the wall. The ideas people were writing in, in terms of who would be CEO—it’s some real fantasy-baseball bullshit.” Despite all the self-mythologizing and talk of building, the men in these text messages appear mercurial, disorganized, and incapable of solving the kind of societal problems they think they can.There is a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see. We ascribe shadowy brilliance or malevolence, which may very well be unearned or misguided. What’s striking about the Musk messages, then, is the similarity between these men’s behavior behind closed doors and in public on Twitter. Perhaps the real revelation here is that the shallowness you see is the shallowness you get.

By Shadi HamidShadi Hamid reimagines the ongoing debate on democracy’s merits and proposes an ambitious agenda for reviving the lost art of democracy promotion in the world’s most undemocratic regions.
What happens when democracy produces “bad” outcomes? Is democracy good because of its outcomes or despite them? This “democratic dilemma” is one of the most persistent, vexing problems for America abroad, particularly in the Middle East–we want democracy in theory but not necessarily in practice.
When Islamist parties rise to power through free elections, the United States has too often been ambivalent or opposed, preferring instead pliable dictators. With this legacy of democratic disrespect in mind, and drawing on new interviews with top American officials, Shadi Hamid explores universal questions of morality, power, and hypocrisy. Why has the United States failed so completely to live up to its own stated ideals in the Arab world? And is it possible for it to change?
In The Problem of Democracy, Hamid offers an ambitious reimagining of this ongoing debate and argues for “democratic minimalism” as a path to resolving democratic dilemmas in the Middle East and beyond. In the seemingly eternal tension between democracy and liberalism, recognized by the ancient Greeks and the American founders alike, it may be time to prioritize one over the other, rather than acting as if the two are intertwined when increasingly they are not.
At the end of the Cold War, the democratic idea was victorious, so much so that it took on more meaning than it could bear. Democracy became a means to other ends, whether it was liberalism, economic development, or cultural progress. What if, instead, democracy was reconceptualized as its own end? What if the people are right even when they’re wrong?
The problem of democracy is no longer just a Middle Eastern problem. The polarizing effects of identity, culture, and religion are now haunting the world’s oldest democracies. At home, a growing number of Americans are realizing that respecting election results when the other side wins is easier said than done. To look then at the democratic dilemma abroad is to consider a deeper set of questions around why we believe democracy is good as well as whether we think it is good for other nations and cultures.
Learn more »

Vladimir Putin today announced his annexation of four provinces of Ukraine—four provinces that he does not fully control, that did not vote to join Russia, that have been the site of mass murder and mass deportation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. With this statement, the Russian president is also declaring war. But this is not merely a war on Ukraine.Putin’s war—Russia’s war—is also a war on a particular idea of world order and international law, an idea upheld not just by Europeans and North Americans, but by most of the rest of the world, indeed by the United Nations itself. One core principle of this world order is that larger countries should not be able to grab parts of smaller countries, that mass slaughter of whole populations is unacceptable, that borders have international significance and cannot be changed through violence or on one dictator’s whim. Putin already challenged this idea in 2014, when he annexed Crimea. At the time he also held a sham referendum, but he convinced many outsiders that it had some validity. Although some sanctions followed, the world largely gave him a pass. Commerce and diplomacy with Russia continued.This time, Putin is no longer able even to pretend that the farcical votes he has staged in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson have any validity, and no one, anywhere, believes that they do. The simulation was played out: Armed men went house to house collecting so-called ballots, and some people, left destitute by the war, were bribed in exchange for showing up to vote. But in regions where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have been evacuated, deported, or murdered, where violent conflict continues and where an active resistance is raging, nothing remotely like an actual vote could ever have taken place. Even as Putin was speaking in Moscow, the Ukrainians announced that they were surrounding and cutting off a large group of Russian soldiers in Lyman, a strategically significant city in Donetsk province.Russia’s actions under these circumstances show contempt not only for international lawyers in European capitals, but also for Chinese politicians who like to talk about sovereignty and African diplomats who have agreed that borders matter, even when they are arbitrary. In the upside-down reality that Putin has created, he will now claim that Ukrainians, by defending their own land and their own people, are somehow attacking Russia. He will even raise the stakes, will try to frighten Ukraine and the West by calling Ukraine’s self-defense an existential threat to Russia that requires an extraordinary response—perhaps even a nuclear response, echoing a threat he has made repeatedly since he began his invasion.[Tom Nichols: The Russian clocks are all ticking]This annexation is also more specifically a declaration of war against the democratic world, a statement of contempt for democracy itself. Putin has been treating democracy as a tool for decades, using fake parties, creating fake opponents, and rigging elections. For a long time, he and his spin doctors promoted a form of “managed democracy,” a system that allowed some space for public opinion, while at the same time ensuring that he always remained in power. With today’s announcement, he no longer pretends or plays games. This deliberate farce mocks the very idea of referenda, of voting, of popular opinion. Nothing about this act has any legitimacy, and that is also part of the point. In his world, there is no such thing as legitimacy. Only brutality matters.Finally, this annexation marks the culmination of a two-decade war against any Russians whose vision of their country differs from his. Some of those Russians belong to ethnic minority groups—Dagestanis, Buryat, Tuvans, Crimean Tatars, all of whom have been subject to vigorous mobilization drives, as if Putin wants to use his genocidal war against Ukraine to eliminate them as well. Some simply want to live in a country governed by different rules, a country that does not have murderous designs on its neighbors, a country that is not a menace to the world. Although thousands of such people have fled the country over the past decade, the invasion deliberately sparked a new exodus. Putin’s propagandists have celebrated the departure of anti-war Russians as a form of cleansing; Putin himself has said that the nation should “spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”Since the war began, the crackdown at home has also accelerated, because the war provides the context in which dissent can be portrayed as treason, and because any criticism of the war is a crime. Newspapers, websites, social-media channels, and civic groups of all kinds have been shut down. More than 16,400 Russians have been detained in prison for protesting. In the past few days, some protesters have received draft notices after being taken to jail. Others are now the focus of special efforts to undermine and destroy them. Alexei Navalny, the Russian politician who came the closest to creating a grassroots, anti-Putin, prodemocracy movement, received a nine-year jail sentence in May and is now locked in a maximum-security prison. He has spent most of the past several weeks in an isolation cell, as punishment for tiny (or invented) infractions of jailhouse rules. Other inmates are forbidden to speak with him and even to look at him. But his anti-corruption foundation continues to function in exile (I am an unpaid member of its advisory board). And when he was allowed to speak in an internal prison court last week, Navalny responded to Putin’s call for the mobilization of military reservists without mincing words: “It is already clear that the criminal war that is going on is getting worse and deeper, and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in this. He wants to smear hundreds of thousands of people in this blood.”Vladimir Kara-Murza, another opposition politician who has played an important role in campaigning for individual sanctions, is also in prison, where he remains equally defiant. “It continues to amaze me,” he told an interviewer via smuggled messages, “how many serious Western analysts buy the Kremlin’s propaganda on the ‘overwhelming popularity’ of Putin and of the war. If this were true, the authorities wouldn’t need to rig elections, muzzle the media, or imprison and murder their opponents. The Kremlin knows the real situation—and the only thing it has left in the toolbox to prevent protests in Russia is fear.”Today’s annexation, along with the mobilization that has been launched to defend these occupied territories, has also been designed to increase that fear. The battle against independent thinkers is now expanding beyond Putin’s opponents and is reaching even Russians who felt too distant, too apathetic, or too afraid to protest in the past. If, once upon a time, the threat of the gulag was used to keep all Soviet citizens in a state of permanent fear, the threat of the war in Ukraine is now being used in exactly the same way against Putin’s subjects. The regime is now treating ordinary citizens exactly as if they were expendable prisoners, throwing untrained, poorly equipped men into the battlefield, where some are rumored to have already died. New draftees are being driven to empty fields with no shelter and no food, just as new prisoners were once abandoned in the 1930s to build their own labor camps. Putin, like Stalin, believes that his sinister, unbalanced idea of collective glory matters more than the prosperity, well-being, happiness, and even physical existence of ordinary Russians.[Brian Klaas: Putin didn’t think he would fool anyone]But nothing lasts forever: “Your time will pass,” Navalny told his jailers last week. Kara-Murza, in a prison interview published this week, said the same thing: “None of us knows exactly how and when the Putin regime will end—but we know that it will.”And they are right. We don’t know how and when it will end. Nor do we know what kind of regime will follow. But there is nothing predestined about Putinism or his form of kleptocratic autocracy. There is nothing “forever” about the annexation of territories that aren’t even under full Russian control, and none of the people who were at the annexation ceremony today will live forever either. Russia’s sham annexation of Ukrainian land will end, whatever false words are spoken this week.

Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of “semantics,” but the facts we are living with can speak for themselves. COVID still kills roughly as many Americans every week as died on 9/11. It is on track to kill at least 100,000 a year—triple the typical toll of the flu. Despite gross undercounting, more than 50,000 infections are being recorded every day. The CDC estimates that 19 million adults have long COVID. Things have undoubtedly improved since the peak of the crisis, but calling the pandemic “over” is like calling a fight “finished” because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face.  American leaders and pundits have been trying to call an end to the pandemic since its beginning, only to be faced with new surges or variants. This mindset not only compromises the nation’s ability to manage COVID, but also leaves it vulnerable to other outbreaks. Future pandemics aren’t hypothetical; they’re inevitable and imminent. New infectious diseases have regularly emerged throughout recent decades, and climate change is quickening the pace of such events. As rising temperatures force animals to relocate, species that have never coexisted will meet, allowing the viruses within them to find new hosts—humans included. Dealing with all of this again is a matter of when, not if.In 2018, I wrote an article in The Atlantic warning that the U.S. was not prepared for a pandemic. That diagnosis remains unchanged; if anything, I was too optimistic. America was ranked as the world’s most prepared country in 2019—and, bafflingly, again in 2021—but accounts for 16 percent of global COVID deaths despite having just 4 percent of the global population. It spends more on medical care than any other wealthy country, but its hospitals were nonetheless overwhelmed. It helped create vaccines in record time, but is 67th in the world in full vaccinations. (This trend cannot solely be attributed to political division; even the most heavily vaccinated blue state—Rhode Island—still lags behind 21 nations.) America experienced the largest life-expectancy decline of any wealthy country in 2020 and, unlike its peers, continued declining in 2021. If it had fared as well as just the average peer nation, 1.1 million people who died last year—a third of all American deaths—would still be alive.America’s superlatively poor performance cannot solely be blamed on either the Trump or Biden administrations, although both have made egregious errors. Rather, the new coronavirus exploited the country’s many failing systems: its overstuffed prisons and understaffed nursing homes; its chronically underfunded public-health system; its reliance on convoluted supply chains and a just-in-time economy; its for-profit health-care system, whose workers were already burned out; its decades-long project of unweaving social safety nets; and its legacy of racism and segregation that had already left Black and Indigenous communities and other communities of color disproportionately burdened with health problems. Even in the pre-COVID years, the U.S. was still losing about 626,000 people more than expected for a nation of its size and resources. COVID simply toppled an edifice whose foundations were already rotten.In furiously racing to rebuild on this same foundation, America sets itself up to collapse once more. Experience is reputedly the best teacher, and yet the U.S. repeated mistakes from the early pandemic when faced with the Delta and Omicron variants. It got early global access to vaccines, and nonetheless lost almost half a million people after all adults became eligible for the shots. It has struggled to control monkeypox—a slower-spreading virus for which there is already a vaccine. Its right-wing legislators have passed laws and rulings that curtail the possibility of important public-health measures like quarantines and vaccine mandates. It has made none of the broad changes that would protect its population against future pathogens, such as better ventilation or universal paid sick leave. Its choices virtually guarantee that everything that’s happened in the past three years will happen again.The U.S. will continue to struggle against infectious diseases in part because some of its most deeply held values are antithetical to the task of besting a virus. Since its founding, the country has prized a strain of rugged individualism that prioritizes individual freedom and valorizes self-reliance. According to this ethos, people are responsible for their own well-being, physical and moral strength are equated, social vulnerability results from personal weakness rather than policy failure, and handouts or advice from the government are unwelcome. Such ideals are disastrous when handling a pandemic, for two major reasons.First, diseases spread. Each person’s choices inextricably affect their community, and the threat to the collective always exceeds that to the individual. The original Omicron variant, for example, posed slightly less risk to each infected person than the variants that preceded it, but spread so quickly that it inundated hospitals, greatly magnifying COVID’s societal costs. To handle such threats, collective action is necessary. Governments need policies, such as vaccine requirements or, yes, mask mandates, that protect the health of entire populations, while individuals have to consider their contribution to everyone else’s risk alongside their own personal stakes. And yet, since the spring of 2021, pundits have mocked people who continue to think this way for being irrational and overcautious, and government officials have consistently framed COVID as a matter of personal responsibility.Second, a person’s circumstances always constrain their choices. Low-income and minority groups find it harder to avoid infections or isolate when sick because they’re more likely to live in crowded homes and hold hourly-wage jobs without paid leave or the option to work remotely. Places such as prisons and nursing homes, whose residents have little autonomy, became hot spots for the worst outbreaks. Treating a pandemic as an individualist free-for-all ignores how difficult it is for many Americans to protect themselves. It also leaves people with vulnerabilities that last across successive pathogens: The groups that suffered most during the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 were the same ones that took the brunt of COVID, a decade later.America’s individualist bent has also shaped its entire health-care system, which ties health to wealth and employment. That system is organized around treating sick people at great and wasteful expense, instead of preventing communities from falling sick in the first place. The latter is the remit of public health rather than medicine, and has long been underfunded and undervalued. Even the CDC—the nation’s top public-health agency—changed its guidelines in February to prioritize hospitalizations over cases, implicitly tolerating infections as long as hospitals are stable. But such a strategy practically ensures that emergency rooms will be overwhelmed by a fast-spreading virus; that, consequently, health-care workers will quit; and that waves of chronically ill long-haulers who are disabled by their infections will seek care and receive nothing. All of that has happened and will happen again. America’s pandemic individualism means that it’s your job to protect yourself from infection; if you get sick, your treatment may be unaffordable, and if you don’t get better, you will struggle to find help, or even anyone who believes you.  In the late 19th century, many scholars realized that epidemics were social problems, whose spread and toll are influenced by poverty, inequality, overcrowding, hazardous working conditions, poor sanitation, and political negligence. But after the advent of germ theory, this social model was displaced by a biomedical and militaristic one, in which diseases were simple battles between hosts and pathogens, playing out within individual bodies. This paradigm conveniently allowed people to ignore the social context of disease. Instead of tackling intractable social problems, scientists focused on fighting microscopic enemies with drugs, vaccines, and other products of scientific research—an approach that sat easily with America’s abiding fixation on technology as a panacea.  The allure of biomedical panaceas is still strong. For more than a year, the Biden administration and its advisers have reassured Americans that, with vaccines and antivirals, “we have the tools” to control the pandemic. These tools are indeed effective, but their efficacy is limited if people can’t access them or don’t want to, and if the government doesn’t create policies that shift that dynamic. A profoundly unequal society was always going to struggle with access: People with low incomes, food insecurity, eviction risk, and no health insurance struggled to make or attend vaccine appointments, even after shots were widely available. A profoundly mistrustful society was always going to struggle with hesitancy, made worse by political polarization and rampantly spreading misinformation. The result is that just 72 percent of Americans have completed their initial course of shots and just half have gotten the first of the boosters necessary to protect against current variants. At the same time, almost all other protections have been stripped away, and COVID funding is evaporating. And yet the White House’s recent pandemic-preparedness strategy still focuses heavily on biomedical magic bullets, paying scant attention to the social conditions that could turn those bullets into duds.Technological solutions also tend to rise into society’s penthouses, while epidemics seep into its cracks. Cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, and education, who then move on, leaving the communities most affected by diseases to continue shouldering their burden. This dynamic explains why the same health inequities linger across the decades even as pathogens come and go, and why the U.S. has now normalized an appalling level of COVID death and disability. Such suffering is concentrated among elderly, immunocompromised, working-class, and minority communities—groups that are underrepresented among political decision makers and the media, who get to declare the pandemic over. Even when inequities are highlighted, knowledge seems to suppress action: In one study, white Americans felt less empathy for vulnerable communities and were less supportive of safety precautions after learning about COVID’s racial disparities. This attitude is self-destructive and limits the advantage that even the most privileged Americans enjoy. Measures that would flatten social inequities, such as universal health care and better ventilation, would benefit everyone—and their absence harms everyone, too. In 2021, young white Americans died at lower rates than Black and Indigenous Americans, but still at three times the rate of their counterparts in other wealthy countries.By failing to address its social weaknesses, the U.S. accumulates more of them. An estimated 9 million Americans have lost close loved ones to COVID; about 10 percent will likely experience prolonged grief, which the country’s meager mental-health services will struggle to address. Because of brain fog, fatigue, and other debilitating symptoms, long COVID is keeping the equivalent of 2 million to 4 million Americans out of work; between lost earnings and increased medical costs, it could cost the economy $2.6 trillion a year. The exodus of health-care workers, especially experienced veterans, has left hospitals with a shortfall of staff and know-how. Levels of trust—one of the most important predictors of a country’s success at controlling COVID—have fallen, making pandemic interventions harder to deploy, while creating fertile ground in which misinformation can germinate. This is the cost of accepting the unacceptable: an even weaker foundation that the next disease will assail.In the spring of 2020, I wrote that the pandemic would last for years, and that the U.S. would need long-term strategies to control it. But America’s leaders consistently acted as if they were fighting a skirmish rather than a siege, lifting protective measures too early, and then reenacting them too slowly. They have skirted the responsibility of articulating what it would actually look like for the pandemic to be over, which has meant that whenever citizens managed to flatten the curve, the time they bought was wasted. Endemicity was equated with inaction rather than active management. This attitude removed any incentive or will to make the sort of long-term changes that would curtail the current disaster and prevent future ones. And so America has little chance of effectively countering the inevitable pandemics of the future; it cannot even focus on the one that’s ongoing.If change happens, it will likely occur slowly and from the ground up. In the vein of ACT UP—the extraordinarily successful activist group that changed the world’s approach to AIDS—grassroots organizations of long-haulers, grievers, immunocompromised people, and others disproportionately harmed by the pandemic have formed, creating the kind of vocal constituency that public health has long lacked.More pandemics will happen, and the U.S. has spectacularly failed to contain the current one. But it cannot afford the luxury of nihilism. It still has time to address its bedrocks of individualism and inequality, to create a health system that effectively prevents sickness instead of merely struggling to treat it, and to enact policies that rightfully prioritize the needs of disabled and vulnerable communities. Such changes seem unrealistic given the relentless disappointments of the past three years, but substantial social progress always seems unfeasible until it is actually achieved. Normal led to this. It is not too late to fashion a better normal.

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ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” So forgive me, I’m going to take a moment to set this conversation up. It is a conversation about crypto, but it is not really about the part of crypto people are most familiar with. So I want to give some context. So there’s crypto as this frothing, speculative, hyper financialized market. Crypto as an investment where the promise or the hope is that, over time, the line just keeps going up, and anyone with the wealth, and the courage, and the foresight to hang on will become a millionaire many times over. I find that crypto pretty easy to have an opinion on. You can go see my conversation a few months ago with Dan Olson for more on that. But there’s this other side too, this more idealistic side, the side of crypto that is not just interested in, but truly obsessed with blockchains and protocols as a way of bringing governance and community into the digital era, as a way of unlocking new forms of cooperation. There’s an idea from the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen who’s been a guest on the show, actually. He makes a distinction between object arts where the value of the art lies in the object itself, how beautiful it is, how intricate it is, what we think of it, and process arts where the value of the art lies in the audience’s appreciation of what the art makes them do, of the process it gets them to engage in or allows them to engage in. C. Thi Nguyen is talking there about games. But I think it’s actually a very good way of thinking about this divide in crypto. Some people, they’re interested in crypto, because of the thing crypto creates at the end of the chain. They want their ape cartoon to be worth $5 million. They want their Bitcoin holdings to make them rich or to be really useful. They want this financial tool to make them a lot of money or to help a lot of people. Success there is judged by what the final crypto object ultimately does. And that’s object crypto, and it gets most of the press and, I think, is more comprehensible. But there’s this other side of crypto that is really important to why the ecosystem has been so vibrant for so long through so many crashes. And it’s full of people interested in the processes crypto can enable, the way it can decentralize decision making, or create new forms of transparency, or bind a whole community, or project, or even company to rules and protocols that can never be broken. They obsess over quadratic voting mechanisms, and coins tied to city governance, and decentralized autonomous organizations. And when you’re looking at these things, they often seem really complicated and inefficient. And it’s only when you spend a lot of time talking to people that you realize that that complexity, that inefficiency, that level of participation and creation is actually what is so obsessing about it. And these are the people who stick through crypto’s low periods, like the one we’re in now. These are the people who are trying to make a future for crypto that is more interesting than: it’s just some payment infrastructure operating in the background of the internet. The central figure on the set of crypto is Vitalik Buterin. Buterin co-founded Ethereum. He wrote the white paper for the ideas behind it when he was just a teenager. And his insight — and it was a big one — was that, if you could program a currency like Bitcoin that cut out the need for a central authority, then you could use that same cryptographic technology to make almost a programming language that could then program any kind of digital agreement or contract and bind anybody who agreed to it in almost any digital way. And that meant that it could do almost anything. Bitcoin can be digital money, but Ethereum can be digital infrastructure. It can be the structure — a binding structure — of how people cooperate online. And Ethereum took off. Its cryptocurrency, Ether, is the second most valuable behind only Bitcoin. And Ethereum is just much more central to the grand visions of how crypto can change or rebuild society than Bitcoin is. And Buterin himself is a big part of that. The founder, or founders, of Bitcoin, Satoshi — totally unknown — we have no idea who he is, she is, they are. But Buterin is here. He’s Ethereum’s benevolent dictator, and he’s become something like the philosopher king of crypto. He writes long, thoughtful essays on new governance strategies. He co-authors white papers with economists. He’s on the cover of “Time” magazine’s first NFT issue. And he’s a kind of compelling, unusual person. He’s a digital nomad who lives out of a backpack and seems to think about really nothing but blockchains and what can be built on them. When people want to imagine crypto being more than a frothing, speculative get rich quick market, Buterin and his vision is often the vehicle they do it through. And Buterin just guided Ethereum through a massive technological change. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum was built on a protocol called proof of work, which is just unbelievably energy intensive. For years, he’s been trying to move it to proof of stake, which is estimated to cut energy use by more than 99 percent. Just an insanely hard technological challenge, because you are shifting a currency, a programming structure that is currently running to a new technological platform. And if you break something along the way, you can lose everything. But they did it. They did it. The merge worked. And I would have thought that after the merge, given that it’s a much stronger platform for Ethereum to be on, the value of Ether would have gone up. But it didn’t, surprisingly. It went down. But Ethereum is now in this more stable, much less energy-intensive platform. And Buterin sees this as a really important step towards building this crypto future. He’s releasing a book laying out his vision. It’s called “Proof of Stake: The Making of Ethereum and The Philosophy of Blockchains.” And it’s that philosophy of blockchains, this idea that blockchains enable new philosophies and approaches to governance, that really interests me. I find myself caught between two warring impulses when I spend much time in the world of crypto’s idealists. One impulse is that governance will become digital at some point. We are not going to govern forever the way we govern now. And it’s very possible that blockchains will be a key technology there. And maybe in that transition, very new worlds become open. To just be the guy sitting around telling people that nothing can change is to, in a sense, embrace stagnation. And you’re probably right in any given year. But over long periods of time, eventually, you’re going to be profoundly wrong. But that sense is mixed for me as somebody who covers governance and institutions with frustration at what often seems to be a real detachment from why institutions fail today, or why things don’t get fixed, or whether you can properly represent society in code. And really the core of this tension, for me, is the word trust. Crypto really claims to solve problems of trust. And I often think they get almost exactly backwards what the problems of trust are and how most people actually define trust. And so I wanted to bring Buterin on to talk about what he imagines crypto can become and also get some answers to the questions that keep nagging me about that vision. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Vitalik Buterin, welcome to the show.

vitalik buterin

Thank you very much, Ezra. I’m happy to be here.

ezra klein

Congratulations on the merge. That’s a big piece of business.

Yeah, no, it’s a really big milestone for the entire Ethereum ecosystem really. I think a lot of us are just so happy that this thing that we’ve been working with, in a lot of cases, for almost a decade is finally here.

ezra klein

So one thing that has been striking to me about the merge is that it was really well done. I mean, this is something I’ve been watching to see if it would happen. It did not break the system. You all actually did deal with a huge, both actual, and, I think, political, vulnerability for Ethereum. And one of the things that was surprising to me about the aftermath of it is that, when I went to look at the value of Ether, last November at the sort of height of the crypto bull market, it was tracking around $5,000 for an Ether. The other day when I looked, post-merge it was around $1,400. That was unexpected to me in the aftermath of doing something that big and so obviously beneficial for the future of the platform. So why do you think it is?

That is a good question. I think the post-merge price drops, I mean, really surprised me. They really surprised everyone. There is an expression, by the rumor, sell the news. And I’ve never really known how seriously that expression should be taken or how often that kind of pattern actually plays out in real life. I guess, the reason why something like that would happen psychologically is that everyone gets very excited and confident running up to an event. But then when the event actually happens, it just feels, in retrospect, almost less significant than what everyone had been expecting going in. And then there’s this wave of disappointment, and the price of it ends up dropping a bit. So if you look at it just from a price point of view, like ETH and even like ETH BTC ratio, they’re still considerably better off than they were a few months ago before this kind of merge cycle started. But at the same time, it does feel like maybe that kind of buy the rumor, sell the news pattern is what just, for whatever reason, ended up happening here. So that’s one explanation. The other explanation is that crypto does, I think, also, actually, to a lot of people’s surprise, correlate with a lot of the broader tech markets. And I believe the broader tech markets have also not been doing very well for the last couple of weeks. And obviously, there is energy markets.

ezra klein

It’s a bad time for markets in general.

Yeah, exactly. There’s just lots of energy, and geopolitical, and macro, whatever, stuff. And that stuff affects crypto too.

ezra klein

So let me ask you about that side of it. When I go back to a lot of the longtime arguments for cryptocurrencies. And I mean, I’m not talking about all the way back right at their launch. I mean, Jack Dorsey saying, we’re in the age of hyperinflation, time to get into crypto, just over the last year. There’s a real belief that a reason we needed cryptocurrencies was central banks were doing too much easy money, that, over time, they would inflate their currencies, and that, as inflation took hold, you’d really need crypto. You’d want crypto as a hedge. Crypto would not be correlated with the inflation that you saw in more traditional currencies. Or if it was correlated with it, it would go up during inflation, because it would be safer. And we have not seen that at all, that, as inflation has risen, cryptocurrencies have plummeted. They’ve been correlated in a way that’s really quite worrying. What do you think the crypto community missed there?

I mean, I think the correlation between the cryptocurrency prices and broader tech and stock markets is definitely something that has surprised a lot of people. And you’re right. Two or three years ago, many people really did believe in the anti-correlation narrative. I would say — I mean, it’s hard to come up with an explanation that I feel really confident is correct, because it feels like I’m just kind of backfilling an entire story to what’s realistically only one or two years of evidence. But if I had to do that —

ezra klein

Welcome to my job.

Of course, so if I had to do that, I would probably say, one way to think about it is that the narrative of crypto is that it is this kind a very safe and robust shelter from the storm kind of thing. But if you look at where crypto is today, just in terms of its trajectory, it’s still this very early stage, untested, and risky thing. There is a case for why cryptocurrency could replace gold. Gold has an $11 trillion market cap. Most of that is not industrial or jewelry-related. It’s just investment value. And the younger generation just honestly thinks gold is pretty lame and is much more comfortable with digital things. And you could easily see cryptocurrency flip into that. But that’s a multi-decade long narrative that would probably take up until 2040 or 2050 to play out. And in the meantime, cryptocurrency is still ultimately this nascent baby where lots of crazy things that are typically associated with nascent baby concepts are playing out. And there’s still huge events happening regularly that increase or decrease the chance that crypto is kind of going to make it in some big way in the world by a factor of two or five. And so people, today, are largely, kind of, mentally putting it into a more disruptive tech stock-like bundle than a stodgy, stable, dependable gold sort of bundle. And the prices reflect. So that would be one way of putting it. Another possible narrative, of course, is that cryptocurrency was never about providing that kind of stability. It was more about providing stability in the sense of, let’s say, protection against asset seizures in places like Argentina, or third world dictatorships, or Russia, and places like that where the political situation is much less friendly to people. So it’s more about these more political properties of it. And if that was true, then, I mean, of course — well, that narrative also doesn’t really fit the facts perfectly either, because we saw a lot of geopolitical instability in 2022, and crypto prices went down along 2022. We saw a lot of geopolitical instability in 2016. And I think on the day of Brexit, Bitcoin went up. And it’s hard to fit things to this. I think, realistically, different people value and believe in cryptocurrency for different reasons. And people value and believe in blockchain technology for different reasons. Sometimes, people even have separate narratives for the two. So it’s still early. But those might be some of the possible stories that I would guess at.

ezra klein

I’m really interested in the political dimensions of crypto. And to signpost the conversation, I think we’ll probably spend most of our time there. But I do want to ask about another piece of the crypto market we saw over the past year, couple of years. I’ve always been very conflicted on crypto where a lot of the idealistic arguments for it and the experimentation in it, I find really inspiring. And then some of the V.C. culture around it, the speculation around it, I find really concerning. And one thing that really turned me emotionally, and, actually, substantively, on a lot of crypto over the past year, was watching the crypto companies spend huge sums of money advertising to bring in people who they knew did not understand these currencies or these markets. I mean, I think of the Matt Damon ad telling you to invest because fortune favors the brave. I think of the Larry David ad, which was explicitly telling you to invest, even if you don’t understand it, because the people who didn’t understand it were going to miss out on the gains. And I mean, that was clear to me, as somebody who studied and reported on bubbles, you’re looking at a top of the market kind of thing there. And then I’m sure a lot of people did get in. And we know a lot of people lost a lot of money, many of them who really couldn’t afford to do it. And it was all just clear. It was being played out I thought with a very high level of cynicism. Not by you, but by people who often talk in very starry eyed ways about what all this can do. I’m curious how you understand the effect that the financial run-up, the markets’ run-up in crypto, had on the crypto culture during those boom years.

Yeah, I think I personally would not blame anyone for being suspicious of the crypto space, because I think most sane people within the crypto space are themselves — ourselves — suspicious of large parts of the crypto space. And sometimes, this is even true with different groups being suspicious of each other. Like, I’m going to be telling you which parts of the crypto space I think are a scam. But then, if you ever get a Bitcoin maximalist on the show, then they’re going to tell you that I and Ethereum are a scam. But there definitely is a large part of the space that is very money oriented and that’s very growth at all costs oriented. And that side of crypto is a side that absolutely comes out during the bull markets. And a lot of people in crypto, they even welcome the bear to some extent, because the bear is a return to sanity when the money types no longer have something to cheer about every week on Twitter. And so the only thing that you can cheer about is actual progress in the technology. And so people start caring about that much more again. So it’s a real dynamic. And there’s definitely parts of the crypto space that are much more like that.

ezra klein

So any time you make a cut like this, you’re going to leave out a lot of people who are on both sides of it. But as a thought, it often seems to me that there are a set of people who are very interested in the crypto technology because of the products it can create, and, in particular, in this case, because of the money it can create. And then there’s also this set of people who seem drawn to it very deeply for the processes the technology can support. But there almost seems to me to be a set of crypto people who are primarily there for the output, and then a set of them who are primarily there because they think what is revolutionary is the input, and the modes of participation, and the modes of governance. And I often think of you as leaning towards that latter side. But for a lot of people for whom that would be obscure, why? What about crypto is interesting from a governance perspective? Why should I understand this technology as some kind of political enabler?

Sure. So I think of blockchains as being like a Lego for mechanism design. So what I mean by that is that blockchains give you these tools that let you create computer programs that directly control money, computer programs that directly hold money, the ability to collect inputs from particular people, and use whatever function of those inputs that you want, and do things with assets or potentially other kinds of things in response to those inputs. So basically, whatever system of rules for the economic interaction, or, potentially, even some kinds of financial and non-financial interactions that people want to have, blockchains are great at encoding those rules. They’re great at implementing those rules without requiring you to trust any one single actor. So in that sense, they put everyone on the same playing field. It’s like whether you’re a elite programmer with decades of experience or if you’re an anon, if you just publish a contract, then other people can go and inspect it. And if it looks correct, then people can choose, and they can go and start participating. Whereas, in any other kind of system, basically, the only one who would really be in a position to actually build U mechanisms would be someone who has a lot of some kind of trust or reputation so that people would be actually willing to trust them. So this can be used for a lot of things. So you can use this to issue assets. You can experiment with different kinds of financial infrastructure, different ways for exchanging between assets. So Uniswap would be one example. It’s this very simple, decentralized exchange that launched in 2018 that just made it very easy for users to trade from one asset to another. And potentially, you can do lots of even more advanced stuff. And all of these things have this theme of allowing large groups of people to collaborate with each other and have rules around that collaboration without needing to trust a particular person, both to not rug everyone and steal the money, but also to just stay online and not get bored. If the Uniswap team got bored and quit tomorrow, Uniswap would keep running. And anyone who is building on top of Uniswap today doesn’t have to worry that Uniswap is going to disappear tomorrow. And so all of these properties make it really easy and really powerful to just build all of these different structures that talk to each other. And I think the thing that excites me is just the question of, well, what kinds of things could you build? What kinds of things doesn’t make sense to build? What kinds of things can we learn from people trying to build various projects and some of them succeeding more than others? And I guess what excites me about continuing to work on Ethereum is that it’s both a decentralized, open blockchain platform and it’s a system that supports this general purpose programming language. So it actually is general enough that people can go and build all of these things.

ezra klein

There’s sometimes a shimmering quality for me to some of this thinking where you’ve described in different places a possible future for blockchain technology, which you call the Linux of finance. It’s a underlying internet utility structure that has made a certain set of things more efficient, that runs in the background of some things — not all of them — that could be a pretty big business, or at least enable a lot of quite big businesses, as Linux has. People talk about digital gold. And when you give a lot of the examples you just gave, like Uniswap, that’s what I think of, that something that is running there on decentralized networks and could potentially be part of practically the financial infrastructure of digital life. But then it also — there’s something about blockchain separate from other technologies. People don’t talk this way about APIs exactly. There’s something about blockchain that leads to, enables, encourages a lot of ideas about how you would rebuild society quite fully on top of its structure. People think about coin cities, and they think about new nations, and they think about upending virtually every major institution from central banks to governments to big corporations like Facebook you can think of. And so tell me a little bit about that jump. There’s something here about imagining this acting far beyond the walls of a computer, far beyond what you might imagine something that can execute code could do. Why? What is it about blockchain that makes it appealing as a sort of imaginarium for rebuilding society on top of it?

I think the idea here basically is that, if blockchains do become successful enough, and they survive long enough, they have a good enough track record of actually being the base layer for many kinds of interactions, and we fast-forward a couple of decades into a future where it’s just considered normal for there to be a trillion dollar assets that are managed on Ethereum, for people to, say, instead of having Facebook accounts that they used to log into everything, have Ethereum accounts that they use to log in to everything, and more and more stuff gets built. Then you get this question of, if you’re even a government and you want to try to build some aspect of your society in a way that’s more open and democratic in some way, possibly more accessible to the outside world in some way, more credibly neutral in some ways, then you might imagine you might be one of those governments that not a lot of people trust you. But if you go and build some thing on a blockchain, then whatever rules you write are going to end up constraining you. And at the same time, whatever rules you write are going to give confidence to whoever participates in that. So if you end up issuing some kind of central bank digital currency or if you end up issuing assets, whether it’s city coins, or potentially tokens representing land ownership, or potentially things like — identity is another example. I don’t think — basically, if people start having identities that are these kind of decentralized blockchain-based identities, then it might start to even make sense for governments to, instead of having completely separate identity packages, essentially, we start issuing what we call attestations, like cryptographically signed claims that say, this existing identity is also a citizen of this country that has these other attributes. And so instead of the governments being an entire route infrastructure provider, the government has this kind of more circumscribed role where, in this particular case, that’s basically providing this service of verification and trust. So if blockchains do manage to become actually stable and reliable to that extent, then we might end up actually seeing a future where it just makes sense to build stuff on top of them, because you just get a lot of interoperability from all of the other applications that are based on blockchains. You get this kind of automatic auditability. You get a lot of this automatic verifiability and trust properties. So that’s the more wild-eyed dream. And that corresponds to the — I forget what name I used in the triad. It was like the triad was either blockchains are Esperanto, or blockchains are Linux, or blockchains are the internet. That was the third one. People use the term “the internet of value,” like this global neutral network, except instead of just being for transmitting packets of data, it’s for keeping track of value or these kind of longer term records. Then that’s what blockchains as the internet of value world would start looking more like.

ezra klein

I want to ground this in a couple of use cases. But before I do, I want to pull out a word you used a couple of times there that I think is really important, which is trust. And as I understand it, a lot of the argument about what problem is being solved in terms of transactions, in terms of financial markets, in terms of how institutions might be built, even in terms of how governments might be run is trust. There’s a view that crypto, for a variety of reasons, is able to create trustworthiness, even in contexts where trust would normally be hard to come by. And I want you to poke holes in whether or not I understand this correctly. Because it often seems to me that what is being said here about trust, if you unpack it, is that what creates trust is transparency, rule boundedness and a kind of predictability, that you know what’s going on, you know that the rules will be followed. There’s not that much room for discretion where people could pull one over on you. You know that the protocols are going to automatically execute. And the idea is, if you add those features to a lot of institutions in our lives, they might become more trustworthy. And if they became more trustworthy, the ways we could cooperate would magnify. Is that a fair description of the vision here?

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, I would say the main pushback that I would anticipate and that I think pretty much everyone who is trying to actually do things in the space already agrees with is that, obviously, there are lots of things that have a lot of room for discretion. And there’s a lot of things where, if you just try to automate everything and replace things with open code as much as possible, then there’s cases where that’s just not good enough. And so in those cases, blockchains definitely cannot do or be everything. But there are a lot of cases where, if you want to give people some kind of guarantee that things will be done according to the rules that you specified, then blockchains can be a good way to do that.

ezra klein

OK. I just want people to keep that in mind, because I do think that’s an important — both the pushback there, which I share and will probably give voice to, but also the vision there, because, I think, as we go through some of the cases here, that’s useful to keep in mind. So I want to start with one that I think is a pretty base layer case, which is remittances. How do remittances work right now? What are they? How do they work? And then how could crypto technology make them work better?

Sure. So the concept of remittances, I mean, generally, refers to the pattern of people usually in wealthier countries working, and earning money, and sending money back to their families in usually poorer countries. And this is a significant portion of G.D.P. in a lot of places. It’s something that a lot of families in places like Southeast Asia, or Africa, or Latin America ends up relying on. And it’s something that is notably inefficient with traditional finance in — far from all cases — but definitely in at least some cases. So remittances through the traditional banking system, they often either go through complicated intermediaries and it takes some time for the money to get through. There’s various kinds of fees. Sometimes places are just not well connected to global financial networks. And cryptocurrency, I think, even today already is offering some people a more efficient channel for doing that. So even today, there’s a bunch of people in a lot of these places where the person who’s working in, let’s say, for example, the United States or Europe, they buy some crypto. If they’re an enthusiast, then they would just buy the Bitcoin, or Ether, or whatever else, and they would hold it. But if they’re just trying to minimize the risk, then they would probably convert it to what’s called a stablecoin, like either Dai, or U.S.D.C., or some popular ones. And then they would send that cryptocurrency to their family members in the poorer country. And in the poorer country, there would be some local cryptocurrency exchange. And the recipients would take those stablecoins, deposit them in the exchange, and convert that into whatever the local fiat is, and they would withdraw it. And in a lot of cases, the fees on this are lower. In a lot of cases, it’s faster. And this is something that there aren’t huge remittance focused startups that are making huge amounts of money on this. This is the thing that I think people try to do much more of back in the day. They’re like, oh, you know, crypto remittance is a thing. And so we’ll just try to make a crypto remittance startups. So I think, instead, it’s much more of a kind of D.I.Y. thing where, OK, you get cryptocurrency. You move cryptocurrency over. You sell cryptocurrency. And there’s just a whole bunch of exchanges on both sides of that process that are facilitating the transaction.

ezra klein

So it’s actually, in a way, the exact process you name there right at the end that makes me wonder about it a little bit. And let me offer two questions here, or two observations maybe. One, we can make the remittances process much more technologically efficient before you ever get to crypto. I mean, it is, like a lot of the financial plumbing in the economy, quite bad and has not been updated, in most cases, for a very long time. But you can imagine a million ways to update it. And so I think you need a very clear theory of why none of them have happened. I have heard theories. You’re dealing with pretty poor people here who are very scattered. So on any given transaction, there’s not much money to be made in it. You’re dealing with so many different countries, and so many different approaches, and people who might be refugees, and all these different very, very complex problems that it’s actually hard to harmonize a system in a real way. And I’ve noticed a little bit of the same thing happening at the end of the game on crypto there, that, in part, for the same reason, there actually isn’t a ton of money to be made by it. You end up with a quite complicated D.I.Y. system, which people could do, but they don’t do it in very large numbers now. And D.I.Y. systems don’t tend to work out that broadly. So I guess one question here — and this is one that’s going to come up for me a few times — is, is the remittances problem a technical problem that is amenable to a technical solution, or is it a problem of incentives, power, political structures that the same obstacles that have made it very difficult to create something better, despite the fact that many people would like something better, also afflict crypto where nobody really has the incentive to spend enough money to make something that will scale big enough that people who are not highly tech savvy are going to be using it as their main approach?

I would say that it’s definitely more about power and incentives, and it’s just various path-dependent issues than it is about which technology is better in some kind of platonic absolute sense. I think it’s often the case that trying to reform a system into something that works more effectively using new technology — in this case, by new technology, I just mean the internet — is more difficult than creating a new system that’s just internet-native. And in this case, cryptocurrency is very internet-native. It follows a email and website-like pattern of caring much less about which country you’re in, just having one global standard for addresses, for how to send funds. And you just have one global thing that everyone is plugged into. And in this case, it’s just easier to get that started than to start from the remittance thing and move it into something optimal, especially once you take into account the political difficulties that happen whenever you end up reforming or trying to reform any kind of existing thing. So that would be one argument that you could make. I mean, another argument — of course, cryptocurrency does have this speculative aspect to it. And it could even be the case that the fixed costs of building the infrastructure for the exchanges on both sides are basically paid for by speculators. And that creates enough volume and kickstarts it. And that’s what allows the fees to get low enough so that the remittance users, and international businesses, and other more boring users like that are just able to piggyback off of that infrastructure and, essentially, get it at very low rates. I mean, a third option, of course, is that, sometimes, financial transfers become difficult not just because of efficiency, but more because of just various kinds of political factors. So sometimes that’s a particular country that gets repressive for whatever reason. Sometimes that’s different countries that ends up not trusting each other. Then, of course, this gets into the philosophical debate of — basically, on the one hand, you’re improving efficiency and you’re really improving a lot of people’s lives by helping them just have savings in U.S. dollars, which is something that’s not possible in a lot of cases, versus, on the other hand, there are times where restrictions are put into place by people, and those people have various goals for implementing and maintaining those restrictions. And cryptocurrency does end up interfering with that sometimes.

ezra klein

There’s an interesting tension here, I think, that I sometimes think of as almost like a Motte and Bailey dimension of crypto where you’ll talk about an argument being made that crypto can become the system. It can replace the dollar, which is something very, very big crypto people have said. I’m not making that one up. Or it will overturn the banks, or overturn Facebook, or revolutionize institutions. And then you’ll press — or I will press — and there will be a sort of — I’m not accusing you of this, but I want to note this dynamic and get your thoughts on it — there’d be a kind of retreat to, well, look, I’m not saying crypto is going to replace a system in countries that have strong institutions, because actually that’s a pretty high bar to clear. But when you’re talking about a Venezuela, you’re talking about a North Korea, maybe you’re talking about people trying to flee Russia, that there’s a lot of room for it there. And I think that’s probably true. But there’s just a really big difference between something that is a technology for getting around systems on the margin for people who can figure that out and a technology for becoming the system. And I find that people shift between which one they seem to be telling me crypto is likely to become fairly often.

This is true. I think the story that I would tell that puts those two pictures into harmony with each other, it would be that this is an instance of leapfrogging, right? This kind of pattern where often less developed countries end up getting certain kinds of new, cool things even faster than the wealthier and more established economies do, basically because for a newer technology to really beat the older technologies in the network effects game, like it can’t just be one step better, it has to be at least 10 steps better. And so in places where the old thing is crappier, sometimes is the case that only there is there enough activation energy for the new thing to really properly come in, because in other places, the new thing might be one step better, but like, whatever, one step isn’t really enough to really radically inspire and motivate people to get over a network effect humps. And so in the places where the stuff works worse, those are the places where the new stuff ends up working better. So that would be one argument for how both of those could end up being in harmony with each other. Another way to put it, I think, is that I do think there is a very real dynamic where cryptocurrency and blockchain technology appeals to people in different parts of the world in different ways. I’ve actually gone to a lot of these places, whether it’s Africa, or Argentina, and Southeast Asia, Ukraine. I was just there a few weeks ago. And in those kinds of places, the vibe does tend to be more pragmatic in the sense that people really understand that they have a specific need of I want to move money between the United States and my country. Or I want to create a company with 10 people, and I don’t want to trust the legal system or any one of the people to manage the funds. Or I wants to create a decentralized insurance project because people actually do need insurance for lots of various small scale things. And then they go from there. But in the richer countries — I mean, this is obviously a stereotype, and a very broad smothering of a complicated dynamic. It’s more often the case that in rich countries, the vibe is more I want to use cryptocurrency to express my political values, or I want to enjoy gambling with $3 million monkeys, or I enjoy being in one blockchain tribe and trolling on Twitter about how my blockchain tribe is the great one and the other ones are the scammers, and these kinds of higher level self-expressive motives. And it does seem sometimes the case that if you want to look for these providing lots of genuine value for people today kind of cases, then either poor countries or sometimes marginalized people within wealthy countries are the places that you want to look at. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

Let me ask you about another use case, which I’ve heard you talk about, which is intergovernmental digital currencies, that could be used to track transactions or publicize transactions between government agencies, and therefore reduce corruption. Can you talk a bit about that idea and the way you think it would provide benefits?

Sure. So here, the core idea is basically you would have a digital currency. So basically, digital cash issued by the central bank. Legally it could be structured to be equivalent to a paper cash or some other format, except this would be limited to use within individual government agencies. So federal governments, local governments, probably one level up and down the supply chain to employees and suppliers. And the idea would just be that all of the transactions that happen within the government would just be done in the public, and they would be traced. And people would be able to see what’s going on. This would achieve the idealistic dream that a lot of people have of being able to actually see where their individual tax dollars are going and what kinds of projects that they are contributing to. Idea there would basically be to also make it easier to just inspect the graph and make it more difficult for various kinds of corruption to happen. This is something that I have talked about to government officials in a bunch of non-Western countries. And there’s definitely some where it gets some interest and positive attention. I think, realistically, the challenge is it is a deep systemic reform of existing stuff and deep systemic reforms of existing stuff are hard. And of course, that the kinds of people who benefit from corruption would definitely do their utmost to put the brakes on this kind of thing. But if you were starting, say, a new charter city in one of these countries, or you do have some kind of blank slate opportunity, I think it’s definitely something that’s worth always looking into.

ezra klein

I think this is a really interesting case because I think it gets at that earlier set of questions about what creates trust in institutions. So I want to interrogate it a little bit. So here’s an observation just as somebody who covers politics in America, primarily, which is that over the past, let’s call it 70 years, our institutions here have just gotten way more transparent. We have C-SPAN, we have FOIA requests, we have much more public budgeting, we have G.A.O. reports. We have — I mean, particularly for a journalist, my ability to track what is going on in government is far, far, far beyond what it would have been ever before. We have visitor logs at the White House. It’s actually quite a bit. It’s not to this point of this currency we can track every dollar, but it’s further than it was in 1950. Over that same period of time, trust in those institutions has completely plummeted. And something I’ve often noted and written about is that when you look at the U.S. government, it’s often the less transparent institutions that are more trusted. So the military, police, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court. Things and institutions that do not have nearly as much oversight tend to maintain a higher level of public trust. And even those institutions are suffering today as they become more transparent, as their internal workings become more known. And so it looks to me like there’s an inverse relationship here that when things get more transparent, or at least pass a certain level of transparency, the ability of the institution to operate internally begins to break down, or the ability of the institution’s enemies or critics to publicize what is going wrong rises up. And the outcomes of that are not things people like as much as they think they’ll like it in advance. The outcome of that tends to be less trust in institutions, not more. How do you think about that?

Yeah, I mean, this gets into these challenging questions of governance, even the attempts to create various forms of governance within crypto, like all of these DAO experiments, they often end up running into similar kinds of problems like where if you try to put maximum global democracy in charge of everything, it often ends up making worse decisions than something that can still have some kind of separation of concerns. So it’s a good point. Obviously, it’s not an argument to throw away transparency in its entirety, right? Yes, there are many forms of corruption that people do get away with basically because they benefit from obscurity. So I suspect the answer lies in the middle. And we can probably figure out more detailed pictures of what kinds of things it makes sense to have more private and what kinds of things it makes sense to have less private. And this is also one of those places where I think Ethereum-style programmability really shows its power, right? Because it actually makes it possible to very easily try to create those different structures and basically say, OK, we’re going to do this thing where this component runs according to these rules, and this other component runs according to these other rules. And then we’re going to see how that works. And then someone might create a different system where you kind of flip those, and you make the first component less transparent, and the second component more transparent, and you get to see what happens. So actually, one very specific case where non-transparency in governance is a very good thing, right? And this is one that I’ve talked about in my writing a lot is secret ballots in voting, right? Because if you don’t have a secret ballot, then you can either threaten or bribe people to vote in a particular way. And so the theory is that to prevent that, not only do votes have to be private, but you need this very strong level of privacy where you can’t prove to other people how you voted, even if you want to make that kind of a proof. And the hope is that by creating this field of experimentation, we might actually have more of an opportunity to see what combinations of privacy in particular places and transparency in particular places actually end up making the most sense, right? So I think, in general, I’m definitely with you on just the core idea that more privacy, good — applied naively and especially cranked up to infinity, eventually starts leading to all kinds of problems. And I think the thing that I’m more in favor of is basically that, hey, we have tools so that if we want more privacy we can have a lot more privacy. We also have more tools so that if we want more transparency, we can have a lot more transparency. And you can have privacy of what individual decisions are plus transparency that some rules are being followed. So whether it’s money out equals money in, or whether this is actually a correct vote counting, and all of the votes are being counted correctly, and everyone who wanted to vote was given a chance to vote. And what we would actually be able to see better over time which combinations of these kinds of things are able to work.

ezra klein

It’s very much my favorite thing about the crypto community is that just the amount of governance experimentation. But that’s a little bit why, as a governance person, I want to press on this question of whether or not blockchains are the tool that one would want to use. I mean, I do think — I’m sure you know the old James C. Scott book, “Seeing Like a State.” Sometimes it seems to me to be like a seeing like a blockchain dynamic that emerges, where things that — if you’re going to work with the blockchain, you have to work with things that would be visible to a blockchain. And this idea of trust, I mean, I’ve said many times publicly that I think the crypto community has evolved a very unusual definition of trust, which is not the way most people use or experience the term or the sentiment, where it often seems to me that in crypto world, trust is about rules being transparent and rules being followed, and having full confidence in that. And for most people, I think trust is about trusting that the outcomes are going to be fairly just towards you. That if you get spoofed on your Visa, they’re going to return the money to you or something. And so the reason I think this kind of question of would it be better or worse, if we could track every dollar in the government, is interesting, is that I think it’s worth thinking about that from the perspective of, well, would that make government more efficient? And if it didn’t, would it still make it more trustworthy? And I’ll give another example. I was having a conversation the other day with somebody who is working fairly high up in the U.S. government on let’s call it scientific response to ongoing challenges. And something they were telling me they were doing, because Congress has not been appropriating money for some things Congress should very much be appropriating money for, is they were trying very hard to move money around within the boundaries of literal legality. So things that are more outdated in terms of the challenge they pose to us are getting a little bit less, and as much as possible as going towards the threats we actually face now. And it’s not for me to blow up their spot here and go into too many details. But I hear stuff like that a lot. The difficulty with bureaucracies is that they are very rigid. And the people who we end up seeing as heroes later on are the people who are able to make them, by hook or by crook, sometimes by outright defiance, more flexible. And the crypto community seems to me to have a slightly dual consciousness on this, where, on the one hand, there’s a very, very widespread view, correctly I think, that a lot of modern institutions have become rigid, bureaucratic, inflexible, hard to move, we need new things, and then a view that you’re going to get that by making things that are in code, more rigid, more trackable, more transparent, harder to make flexible, easier to punish somebody if they try to do something against the rules or harder for somebody to do something against the rules. And that doesn’t just seem to me to be a tension of programming. That actually seems to me to be a real question about these tools and their applicability to some of the challenges people want to have them solve.

If you try to make every single decision maximally accountable to the entire community, that just often leads to worse results. And you need room for iconoclasts. You need room for crazy geeks that have weird ideas about how the biggest problem in the world might actually be A.I. is turning us into paperclips. Regardless of how we think about the issue, it’s good that there’s somebody putting a few cycles into checking it just in case that’s a big deal. We need groups of very smart people who have space to advance particular visions about what kinds of public goods are really worth funding. We need even people who are willing to take risks, what I call entrepreneurial public goods, the intersection of goods that don’t have a business model, so they’re not going to get funded by traditional venture capital and where their value isn’t immediately obvious to a global public until long after they’re done. And so they’re not going to get funded by a perfect democracy. So I’m very sympathetic to the need for some kind of pluralist vision for funding those kinds of things. My view on that is pragmatic, right? I’m not left or right on that issue in the sense that if billionaires can help solve the problem, that’s great. If government funded DARPAs can help solve the problem, that’s also great. But from a zoomed out architecture point of view, it shows that you want a structure that isn’t just this perfect circle where everyone’s voting on everything. You want to have a structure that has layers. You want to have a structure that creates room for different sub-bubbles to emerge. You want to have a structure that opens up room for people who have some hypothesis that they believe in, but nobody else believes in, to still have time to flesh out that hypothesis and see if they can bring it to life, at least far long enough that people do start to believe in them. And I mean, these are also issues that I’ve thought a lot about because there are very relevant to public goods funding within the cryptocurrency community, to the design of DAOs, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, within the crypto space. When I was visiting Ukraine a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to one of the co-founders of Ukraine DAO, which is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization on Ethereum that is supporting various Ukraine-related projects. And Ukraine DAO got a lot of flak for not having a governance token, right? A lot of people in the crypto space deeply believe in this idea that in order to really be decentralized, you have to have a token. Where if you have the token, you can vote, and you can contribute to making decisions, and anyone should be able to go and buy that token. And Ukraine DAO co-founder just steadfastly refused this, and the Ukraine DAO model of decentralization is more holacracy-inspired. There is this concept of pods where each individual pod operates very autonomously. And it gets some resources from the core, and the core is governed in a somewhat more distributed way, but still not using a token, because they really want the governance to be aligned, right? And they definitely don’t want 30 percent of the governance token to just get bought up by Russian government or whatever, right? And these are definitely ideas that blockchain communities are starting to play with more and more. I think the conception of how governance should happen — it’s already changing to some extent, right? I think if you looked at crypto governance thought five years ago versus crypto governance thought today, crypto governance thought today is already more nuanced. It’s already learned from some of its early successes and some of its early failures. It understands the limits of financialization more. It understands the need for some of these more complicated designs and these designs where you do sometimes intentionally have levels of interaction a bit more. So it is starting to come a little bit more into balance in that sense.

ezra klein

I want to stay on the core idea here a little bit more before I move on to another use case, because I think what you just said actually helps me sharpen a point I’ve been trying to circle here, which is I think there are two very different definitions of trust and how one would achieve it on the table. And one way of thinking about trust, which I think is more dominant in crypto, even if only kind of implicitly in how it works, is how do I make it so i don’t need to trust you? People used to use the term trust lists about crypto a lot. And I have some disagreements with whether or not you can truly get that. But there’s a version of this where the question is, how do I not need to trust you in order to still work with you? And what, then, if we can achieve that, can we unlock in terms of human cooperation? And then there’s this other question of trust, which I think people in my job think about a lot, which is how do I make it possible to trust you enough so I don’t have to constrain you? How do I make it possible such that I have enough trust in you that I give you the discretion to do what you need to do, because that is typically a more flexible way for human beings and institutions to work. And I think that’s the thing I’m trying to untangle here, whether particularly when we think about political institutions and governance institutions separately from, say, a financial transaction, whether we’re dealing with a question where the problem is how do we make it so I don’t need to trust you because your actions are well-constrained versus how do I make it possible to trust you so that your actions don’t need to be so constrained? And a lot of blockchain-based solutions seem to me to be really circle that first question, when it often seems to me that the problem of our society is more built around the second one.

I would say it’s not a binary so much as it is a spectrum, right? Like, I think in both cases, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to give people more freedom and more empowerment to do things that you would want them to do. But at the same time, take away their ability to completely break things, right? And I think that’s true in politics as well, right? Like, the reason why a lot of people are against like monarchy or dictatorship as a form of government for example, is that you don’t want to trust one person to be a good guy. And I think in that context, that’s something that’s very easy to relate to. And the goal of not being a dictatorship or monarchy there is — it is trustlessness in the sense of wanting to avoid trusting one particular person. But at the same time, you’re explicitly saying, well, you might be OK trusting a couple of hundred people, where those 100 people themselves have some kind of regular democratic elections as a feedback mechanism. So it’s still moving up on the ladder from a huge amount of trust to a somewhat lower level of trust. And then something like Uniswap is going all the way and saying, well, can we try to get all the way to a zero level of trust? And Uniswap, in particular, is one of the few things in crypto that I think actually does get you to the 0 level, though with the caveat that practically using Uniswap, like generally, involves trading between different assets, and those assets themselves almost always have some kind of trust component in them, even if it’s a very distributed form of trust. And I think in crypto as well. There are real benefits that you do get from the trust reductions. And often, the worst disasters that happen in crypto happen in the parts of the systems that haven’t been a kind of trust-minimized in any crypto way. Right? So back in 2014, the Mount Gox collapse, where Mount Gox got hacked for about $400 million, at a time when $400 million was a huge chunk of the entire crypto market cap. That was a centralized exchange that got hacked and then two years later, Bitfinex got hacked. And then, I think that series of hacks was part of the motivation for the excitement to move toward this decentralized exchange model, where instead of there being so much attention and money on the centralized exchanges, we would have these stablecoins. And stablecoins would still be trusted to hold dollars. But in order to do the actual trading, you would just do it on chain. And so you don’t need centralized intermediaries to hold things on the cryptocurrency side. And I think that actually has improved things. The times when it hasn’t improved things, probably the biggest one was the Terra Luna collapse of a few months ago, which was interesting because I think there was a combination of two causes. One of them was that the mechanism behind Terra Luna was just fundamentally bad economics. Lots of smart people were saying, hey, this is fundamentally bad. And it’s basically a Ponzi and it’s going to break at some point. But then the other part of it was there was this reserve in Bitcoin. This wasn’t Bitcoin, right? And Bitcoin, the blockchain does not have this whole smart contract stuff. And so if you’re holding Bitcoin, the asset, that means there is like an actual person or institution that’s holding Bitcoin, the asset. And nobody knows what the Luna Terra team were doing with Bitcoin or the asset. And they made a lot of promises. And look, they really tried hard at making these kind of very centralized efforts to manipulate the market and prop up their coin. But it ended up eventually failing, right? So I think that story is instructive, because it shows like to some extent, decentralization by itself doesn’t solve every problem. Because if the algorithm is bad, then even a fully open and transparent implementation of a bad algorithm is going to break. But at the same time, it does still show the difference between the decentralized and trustless part of the ecosystem, where lots of people were able to see ahead of time what was going on. And lots of people were able to warn about what could happen, versus the totally opaque and black boxy part, where you ended up not even having that. Right? And a lot of the disasters in the crypto space that have happened recently, the disaster report has happened on this kind of more completely untransparent and more centralized side of the problem. So I don’t think of trustless versus trustful as being a binary. I think of it as you can make a system that relies on you trusting one person, you can make a system that relies on you trusting 40 people with checks and balances. Or you can try really hard to get as close to zero trust required it as possible. The right points to choose in different applications is always going to be very different. And this is one of those things where, again, I think the space has gotten better at thinking and having nuanced perspectives than it was something like five years ago, where basically there were just the two extremes of like, hey let’s zero trust everything versus like, hey, we’re humans at any attempts to try to reduce the need for trust as sociopathic in some way. And now we’re seeing the entire spectrum, which I think is great. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

Tell me about the idea for soulbound tokens, which is definitely my favorite name of any idea in the crypto space.

So the concept of a soul soulbound token, the name comes from “World of Warcraft” so where there was a type of item that you can get called a soulbound item. And so the idea is that once you pick the item up, you cannot trade it. So you cannot give it to someone else. You cannot sell it to someone else. There is no way that you can transfer it to someone else. And often, you would get soulbound items as a reward for completing difficult quests, and, or, killing very difficult monsters in dungeons, right? So it’s like the item actually becomes a badge that says something more interesting about you than like I have a lot of spare time, or I have a lot of money. And what I think is interesting about that concept is that there’s a lot of applications, even just in the real world, that could really benefit from that. So all of these different what we call attestations that people make about each other, right? I attest that you attended this conference. You attest that I participated on “The Ezra Klein Show.” Or Bob attests that Alice is a unique human and Bob attests he trusts her. And all of these different claims about things that we’ve done, relationships that we have, these are all things that can be valuable inputs into a lot of different things, right? So governance is just one example. You generally want the people who govern a project to be people who care about that project, to be people who have experience in understanding that project and its ecosystem. Right? So going back to the case of Ukraine DAO, all right? Like you want the governance of Ukraine DAO to be run by Ukrainians. You don’t want it to be run by whoever controls the crypto stash of the Kremlin. That’s probably the most extreme possible example that I could come up with. But there is a lot of milder versions of that kind of misalignment pretty much everywhere in projects that people are making today in the crypto space. And so if instead of having governance tokens, be it tradable tokens, what if we have governance that somehow gated by soulbound tokens? By tokens that are not transferable and that actually do reflect the facts that you actually participated in some community, that you actually went to some number of events, that you actually completed some training course, that you have some particular piece of knowledge that you personally did something good for the ecosystem at some point in the past. Like, attributes that are about yourself. Another example might even be like who do you accept as a member into a particular kind of club? Who are you going to be more willing to give loans to? If he wants to issue a new currency, then who do you give more units of that currency to? So in a lot of these cases, like you want to have more visibility into what kinds of relationships someone has, what kinds of things that someone has done. And you wants to really avoid this effect where all of this gets collapsed down to a single dimension and we call that dimension money, right? Because if we make all of these tokens perfectly tradable then what happens is that they basically just become isomorphic to money. And so the only thing that anything you build can be aware of is basically what level of resources each individual person has access to. So the question is, well, can we try to move away from that? And if we can have this internet where people can make proofs and claims about these more detailed things, about what communities they have more participation in, according to whom are they more trusted. Various kinds of proofs that they are unique person, proofs that they’ve participated in some things, proofs that they’ve learned some things, then there is just all kinds of applications that could really make use of that kind of information. And these are things that happens in an informal way all the time already, right? And the challenge is basically, well, how do we formalize it, and get the benefits of being able to formalize it, and being able to have these applications run across bigger social distances. But without that formalism basically collapsing into something that completely destroys the information.

ezra klein

And I think it’s a really interesting problem for the internet. I think we’ve all had the experience to some degree of beginning to upload markers of our identity online, and then feeling that either we got flattened by that, flattened by our Facebook profile. And I no longer like the bands I liked when I was 19. Or weirdly, pushed more into an identity that we only held weekly, right? That I’m somebody who doesn’t like dogs, and then all I get is — I do like dogs, but somebody who doesn’t like dogs, and all I get is a lot of hilarious anti-dog content. And I got into a fight about dogs on Twitter and now soon, I’m like the anti-dog guy. And I wonder how you think about what can be seen here and what is lost in trying to see it? Because I, on the one hand, I think the idea of using much more of the fuzzy kind of recommendations of each other, I guess LinkedIn tries to do this a little bit, with recommendations, but that’s for more professional context. Makes a lot of sense. And then on the other, I can imagine a lot of people who, if an idea like this took off, people for whom the internet was a respite from a light that socially didn’t go the way they had wanted it to. Where they didn’t to some degree have the networks and connections, and not succeeded in the place they were. And the internet was a place to abandon that. And now it’s become a replicant of that. But in a thinner way, where all you can see is it is what you don’t have, rather than the sort of story behind it. I guess it’s just circling again the question of what it is like to see as a blockchain. But I’m curious if you have reflections on that, as somebody who I think is probably very attuned to the way it’s sort of a mixture of the ability to socialize, and the ability to not be your offline social identity, that has made digital worlds great for so many.

Yeah, so this, I think, can all be viewed as a subset of good hearts law. When a measure becomes a target, then it ceases to be a good measure. So when you come up with a way of measuring something, and then you make other things actually depend on that way of measuring things, that gives people the incentive to try to optimize for it. And once you start optimizing, then all of the divergences between the measure and the thing that the measure was trying to get at like really suddenly come into the foreground. And sometimes the harder you twist on optimizing, the greater the divergence between the two becomes. And this is a pattern that occurs everywhere in any kind of formalized measurement of just human traits that other people care about. Like, university admissions is one of those politically charged topics lately. And there are standardized tests, and standardized tests end up having various misalignments, and people end up teaching to the test, which is just a completely tragic waste of a lot of people’s time. Because when you learn how to do the test, you don’t actually learn anything that’s useful to solving real life problems that humans care about. But then if you scrap that and you rely on more fuzzy and informal measurements, then there’s a lot of other — different ways in which that’s unfair, and a lot of difference in other ways in which people can optimize for that. And people get the idea that they should join like some BS nonprofit humanitarian things, not because they actually care about the cause, but just because it makes them look good on a resume. And these kinds of patterns are patterns that occur pretty much in any context when you try to measure things about people. And I think it’s a good reason to be careful about that sort of thing. But at the same time, it’s also not a good reason to shy away from it entirely, right? Because there’s no such thing as not measuring people. Because if you don’t measure people formally, then the fundamental need to find people who are more appropriate to some particular task or position, or relationship, is still there. And you’re going to end up trying to fit people to it informally, and the informal ways of fitting people have all kinds of problems of their own, and have had those problems for 10,000 years. So the general patterns that make sense in at least trying to reduce the level of misalignments, right? I mean, one is don’t rely on one measurement, really in many measurements. And ideally rely on the many measurements that have been developed independently. This is a pattern that I think generally comes up again and again. And if you look at how just modern A.I. works, versus how people try to create A.I. using rules-based systems in the 1980s, right? Like, rules-based systems in 1980s were more like oh, check if it has ears, and check if it has whiskers, and if it does, then it’s a cat. And that sort of stuff is just like incredibly hard to code, and it just breaks horribly but what the more modern AIs are trying to do as they’re basically extracting millions of different traits, like millions of different sub measurements, and millions of sub measurements on top of other sub-measurements, and trying to create some kind of composite score out of all of those. And even there, you sometimes get at what are called adversarial examples, things that you can create an image that you a human looks like a dog, but to a particular classifier looks like a cat with a 99.9 percent score. And everyone’s like WTF mate, what happened here? But that’s still harder than if you just rely on one thing. And so I suspect that soulbound token-based stuff, or like any kind of stuff is going to depend a lot on combining multiple measurements. The other one is to be willing to adapt, right? Like, if you have a relatively rapid adaptation loop, then you might be able to kind of catch the misalignments pretty early. And hopefully you’re able to fix at least some of them. And that’s interesting because the ability to rapidly adapt does a kind of conflict with the, I guess, crypto idea of set the rules once forever, and then you forget about them. And so there’s definitely a challenge of like, well, what is the thing that we want to preserve in order to make sure that the thing is still secure versus what is the thing that actually does have to adapt in order to make sure that it’s still secure? And it’s a difficult balance, and there’s definitely even philosophical questions in there. But the hope is that in this kind of more decentralized context, where it’s decentralized in the sense of you just naturally have lots of different metrics, and you get these attestations coming in from huge numbers of people. And so it is going to be more difficult for people to optimize for any one thing in a pathological way. And you’re going to get something that’s more secure. So that’s the hope, right?

ezra klein

Well, let me ask about one of the possible uses of it that you all lay out in the paper, which is very close to my heart, which is around the question of deepfakes. And what we’ll be able to trust on the internet in the coming years, or even right now. How do you imagine having this sort of more bound layer of online identity could help with that?

Yeah, so I think in the age of deepfakes, it definitely becomes more and more important to start like basically splattering any images that we make with as many kinds of these different cryptographic claims as possible. So one very simple thing that you can do is when you take a picture, you can immediately ship it off to a service that then bundles up a million hashes, and makes a tree of those hashes and sticks that in the blockchain. And what you have then is that you have this cryptographic proof with a maybe 15-second window that says this picture was made before this time, right? And then the hope is that it’ll be sometimes you’d be able to take that picture and then combine it with evidence inside of that picture that tells you when the picture was supposed to be taken, and you have this cryptographic evidence of when it was produced before. And that might reduce the chance that it could have been manipulated, at least with some techniques. So that’s one thing that you can do. But in a lot of cases, that by itself might not be enough. And so then you might want to also add different other cryptographic tags. Like one simple cryptographic tags you would add is who took the picture. You might add other tags of just other people who saw that picture being taken, and that happens to have been there at the same time, right? You might want to have some kind of a trusted hardware solution where the camera, as a device, would add some kind of attestation that it took the picture. And then you also have attestations about the particular person that has uploaded that picture. And you could even look up and see, hopefully, whether or not there have been serious claims of whether they have published deepfakes in the past. So the more stuff that you cryptographically sign, the more stuff that you commit to, the more stuff that there just is information floating about, the more of these pieces of information you can combine together to improve your confidence about whether or not some particular picture is real. I guess one very concrete analogy might be if there is some human rights abuse happening in Tehran right now, and there’s both three Iranian locals, and a BBC journalist, and in Indian journalist who all take pictures, and they have this software that immediately blockchainifies it. And they cryptographically sign it, then you have attestations about them. Then all of that information taken together should be able to get you an automated, pretty good impression that event actually did happen. And it wasn’t just invented by really good deepfake software. So that’s the hope.

ezra klein

I think there’s an interesting question here, which I think is a nice wrap on a lot of what we’ve been talking about, which is we’ve been talking in a lot of different ways about how to trust each other and how to work with situations where I think we want to trust each other. But for one reason or another, it’s hard to do. We don’t know each other. We’ve had bad experiences in the past. It’s complicated. And I often think of the deepfakes problem, and a lot of misinformation generally, as being about cases where people actively don’t want to trust each other. You want to believe something that makes somebody else look bad. I don’t think we verify things as well as what you’re talking about adding that amount of cryptographic proof to it. But I work for The New York Times. If people wanted to look up information, or try to see if things were true, or find established purveyors of information, they can. And the really hard thing that nobody really has a good answer to is often they don’t. And that’s true for people who agree with me, not just people who don’t agree with me. And so there’s a kind of interesting thing here. And then the other piece of it is that particularly around leakable information, there’s so much cover for pseudonimity, right? If you were whoever leaked the Mitt Romney 47 percent video, you’d a good reason not to do so from an account that in any way could have helped people triangulate who you were at that fundraiser. And that’s true for a lot of things. And as such, you can imagine a world where it’s very normalized, or at least it’s a plausible argument that oh, like the reason this doesn’t have a kind of soulbound token attached to it, or social attestation attached to it, is because it would be dangerous for the person doing it. Which is all to say, how do you think about the situations where we’d want to be building a society or people have attached markers of trust to them, but as we’ve seen in a bunch of different anti-establishment, or motivated reasoning cases in our own world, people often — they’re motivated by the desire not to trust. And to validate their reasons for not trusting. And it’s sort of those more cultural forces that pull us apart. How amenable is that to sort of better technology?

Yeah, so sometimes it is and sometimes it’s totally not. So the thing that technology sometimes can do is it can, just at least, delay the problem really bear in front of everyone’s faces. So you see this, some piece of information comes out and then some people believe one thing about it, and some people believe a different thing about it. And then 12 hours later you get like some really strong actual confirmation or actual denial. And one of those two camps looks ridiculous to some extent, right? And this is one of those cues that I think probably both of us, and a lot of people use to try to check like well, which political tribe should we actually trust in the first place? So sometimes, you can do things like that. But then sometimes there is definitely an extent to which what there are lots of people where what they’re looking for is not the truth, but a sufficiently compelling kind of justification that lets them feel good about coordinating around the narrative that they wanted to coordinate around anyway. And I mean, in some cases like the wrong kind of technology being developed first without other technologies to counterbalance it that even make the problem worse, right? There’s definitely certain kinds of evidence and statistics, and logical arguments, where in the wrong hands, like that just gives people more ammunition with which to create arguments that are very convincing to them. And to some extent, just can’t solve that problem. And sometimes, what you’re really hoping for is — or the best that you can hope for is that if there is something that’s incorrect, but a lot of people really are motivated to believe it, like can you get the percentage of people that still stick with it down from 35 percent to 25 percent? Sometimes technology can also, especially some of the cryptographic technology that we work on, it can give us some interesting options that can change the social dynamics. So like for example, you could give people the ability to say something anonymously but at the same time, prove something about who they are, right? So you could, using something called ring signatures, this has been actually around for years. But I think it’s only going to be really practical starting around now just because of infrastructure, you can make a leak and you can sign it with a signature that proves that you are a senator of the United States without revealing which senator. And that lets you reveal truthful information without compromising your own social situation. Another use cases of this as rather than revealing truthful information, you might just want to speak in opinion. Like, if there is a political opinion that you deeply believe in, but let’s say there’s some rich and powerful individual, even an authoritarian regime, that has a habit of canceling people who will loudly speak that opinion, then you as a celebrity, or a politician, or even just a mass of regular individuals, you can go and prove some things about who you are to give weight to your words without revealing everything about who you are. So those kinds of tools are going to give some interesting new options in the social landscape of truth-telling and signaling of a lot of different things. And there’s definitely many kinds of equilibria that that sort of stuff will break. But the kinds of equilibria where it’s just that people just don’t care about the truth and they believe what they want to believe. I mean, yeah, there’s a limit to the extent to which we can solve any of that. I mean, I do think that as time progresses, ultimately the beliefs do have to get somewhat less crazy because there’s just more and more evidence about reality. And people just have to try harder to come up with something that people are going to be willing to accept. But at the same time, you could argue that the crazies are getting more sophisticated at the same rate as the anti-crazies. And I definitely don’t claim that either blockchains or cryptography, or even social technology, is able to solve every problem. I think every era is going to have its own challenges and its own issues, and we’ll see.

ezra klein

Let me end on this question, before we do book recommendations. Which is in 10 years, what is the problem that you most think is unsolved now that blockchain and crypto will solve, that we all feel in our lives? Like, what is the solution you’re most excited about but that most people don’t realize is coming yet?

Hmm. So I think right now the biggest impact that blockchains have had has been in the area of international money transfers. I think there is a lot of good reasons for that. Basically, just because the existing infrastructure for finance is just crap, in a way that the existing infrastructure for email, for example, is not crap. Right, like centralized email was centralized, but at least you can send an email from Kyrgyzstan to Guatemala within one second. In the future, I expect in addition to obviously get international payments continuing to get more effective, I expect at least one or a couple of some of these other sectors that people are trying to build out with blockchain. So some form of what we call DAOs, I do expect that concept is going to get stretched to the limit. Like, as you expect that a lot of things that people call DAOs are just going to be like basically groups of five people where they agree that you need three of those people to agree on transferring money to someone. And they think that’s just like a form of organization that will just be very easy to deploy, and pragmatic, and useful in at least some applications. So that can start getting used in a lot of contexts. Some of this blockchain for identity stuff, using identity in a very broad sense to cover ENS and people having Ethereum accounts instead of Facebook accounts, so the concept of attestations, the concept of soulbound tokens, and the big, long list of stuff surrounding that. So far, ENS has been by far the most successful non-financial blockchain application. And I expect that to continue to be true for a while, though I expect a kind of other particularly identity related non-financial blockchain applications to do really well. In the blockchain gaming space, I expect that probably medium amount of success. But I expect that the blockchain games that succeed are going to be a games that are actually fun, even not taking into account the blockchain aspect. And with things like the Dark Forest game, like we have seen some examples but then we’ve seen things like Axie Infinity that just have not done a very good job of that aspect of being fun without the finance. And that’s part of why they haven’t really been able to recover well from the challenges that they’ve had recently. In the space of like governance mechanisms, I expect there to be a lot of intersections of blockchains and zero knowledge proofs. And I also expect there to be a lot of use of blockchain-inspired zero knowledge proof stuff make its way into various kinds of government, civic applications. I expect some of that will be blockchain based, and some of that will be based on things like zero knowledge proofs. Some of that will be even based on ideas that kind of got nurtured into the blockchain space, and then sort of works their way up in various ways. So I think in each of those spaces, I probably have some medium level of confidence that it will turn into something very big. But I think if any one of them does really well, then the world could look very different in a lot of ways 10 years from now.

ezra klein

And then always our final question, what are three books that have influenced you that you’d recommend to the audience?

Oh, this is a good question Yeah I guess technically not a book though parts of it I think have been retroactively made into books in various forms. The whole kind of early rationalist canon, the kind of Eliezer Yudkowsky blog posts. There were a lot of very fascinating insights in some of those earlier things on questions like, what are political tribes? What kind of irrationality do we have and should we watch out for? The fact that just being aware of irrationality doesn’t by itself magically make you rational. And just all of these kind of deep issues that have to do with the like basically how to think better. Like, a lot of my thinking on various kinds of issues ended up being really influenced by that. In a somewhat totally different space, history and a very deep and intense history, “The Rise And Fall of The Third Reich.” I read this one last year and it was just a fascinating, inside view tome into basically how this country really descended into one of the scariest totalitarian regimes that humanity has seen in quite a long time, and on a large scale. And seeing what happens on the inside, why were people in Germany leading up to that situation even welcoming the changes that were happening at the beginning. And how those different actors felt, who resisted, who ended up not resisting. I mean, I guess it was good that I read that less than a year before the whole war in Ukraine started. I think it even — it helped me be less surprised by some of the things that I’ve unfortunately been disappointed by that happened in that whole situation. So that gets to two. Fiction, I don’t know. I mean, “Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality,” I mean, I don’t know it’s kind of cheating because it’s also in rationalist lands but it’s just like such a lovely tome —

ezra klein

That’s also an Eliezer Yudkowsky joint.

It is, yeah. Yeah, it’s a great mix of just like great fun and total ridiculousness. But at the same time, teaching you some fascinating ideas around things like logic and game theory. And then, other ones might be — there’s definitely been specific textbooks that have really taught me a huge amount. There was one textbook on game theory that I forget the name of it now. I think it’s like something like “Algorithmic Game Theory.” But that taught me just some of the finer points of game theory, some of the finer points of like particularly how things break down, when you have some — you start to bring in assumptions of where people can coordinate with each other. Like, people talk a lot about how economics is unrealistic because it assumes things like perfect information and perfect rationality. But one of my contrarian takes is that actually those aren’t even the big problems. The big problem is that economics often assumes what’s called the individual choice assumption, that people don’t talk to each other and don’t coordinate with each other outside of whatever the game is that you’re making. And how things break down once that assumption breaks. The topic of what’s called cooperative game theory. So unfortunately, I can’t remember the exact name. But I feel like all of the textbooks that I’ve seen on cooperative game theory are very enlightening on that particular topic.

ezra klein

I think that’s a great set. Vitalik Buterin, thank you very much.

Thank you too, Ezra. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

Hurricane Ian is one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit Florida. A day after the storm made landfall, hundreds of people have been rescued and, as of this morning, millions were without power. President Joe Biden has indicated that early reports suggest “substantial loss of life,” but no firm numbers have been confirmed. With such a catastrophic storm coming after the string of disasters this summer, some commentators have tried to link Hurricane Ian to climate change.   But while climate change is clearly fueling some disasters, such as heat waves and wildfires, it has a more complicated effect on hurricanes. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations–led panel of hundreds of climate scientists from around the world, has said that it’s an “established fact” that industrial carbon pollution has led to an increase in “frequency” or “intensity” of extreme weather. But the report uses more circumspect language such as “likely” to talk about tropical cyclones. (Tropical cyclones are only called hurricanes when they’re above a certain wind speed and in the Atlantic or North Pacific Ocean.)Climate change is changing hurricanes in a few ways. “First of all, you can have more intense hurricanes in a warmer climate. That finding goes back well over 30 years now,” Kerry Emanuel, an MIT meteorologist and an expert on how climate change affects hurricanes, told me. “For that reason we expect to see more of the highest-category storms—the Cat 3s, Cat 4s, Cat 5s, more of the Ian-style storms.”  [Read: How Hurricane Irma is sucking Florida’s beaches dry]In effect, climate change raises the speed limit on storms, he said, allowing hurricanes to attain a higher wind speed than they would otherwise. Why does this happen? It arises from the brute-force physics of a hurricane colliding with the inescapable presence of greenhouse gases. “A hurricane is a heat engine,” Emanuel told me, turning heat from the ocean into wind energy. This transformation happens because as water evaporates from the sea surface, it transfers heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, essentially speeding the storm. (The underlying phenomenon here is also why “if you’re wet, you feel cold, all else being equal,” Emanuel said.)So how does the ocean get hot in the first place? There is really only one way for heat to enter the ocean and only two ways for it to leave, he said. Heat always arrives in the ocean as sunlight; it always leaves as infrared radiation, which is emitted back into space, or as evaporation from the sea surface. But carbon dioxide and other climate pollutants prevent infrared radiation from escaping the ocean—that’s the “greenhouse effect” that gives greenhouse gases their name. Because heat has nowhere else to go, the rate of sea-surface evaporation has to speed up, which means more heat energy can pass into the storm.In other words, climate change “creates the conditions for water to evaporate faster,” Emanuel said, which means more heat can enter a given storm—and it can get windier.Second, researchers agree that hurricanes can now strengthen far faster than they could in the old climate. The number of tropical cyclones that have undergone “rapid intensification”—a term of art meaning a storm’s top wind speed has increased by at least 35 miles per hour over a 24-hour period—has “likely” risen over the past 40 years, the IPCC has found.“The forecaster’s nightmare is going to bed with a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico and waking up to a Cat 4 bearing down on a city” that has no time to evacuate, he told me. Even when meteorologists can safely predict that a storm will rapidly intensify, they can struggle to communicate its risks to the public.Hurricane Ian looks like a textbook case of rapid intensification: On Monday morning, its top wind speeds were 75 miles per hour, barely qualifying the storm as a hurricane; just 48 hours later, its winds howled at up to 155 miles per hour—just shy of Category 5 status—as it made landfall in Cayo Costa, Florida. Indeed, people may feel like every hurricane to hit the United States recently has undergone a similar metamorphosis. Last year, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana as a powerful Category 4 storm only 74 hours after it became a tropical depression; the storm formed and came ashore faster than New Orleans could evacuate. In 2018, Hurricane Michael rapidly exploded into Category 4 status before it walloped the Florida Panhandle; a year earlier, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma also experienced rapid intensification before they made landfall.Finally, climate change is making hurricanes rainier, Emanuel said. That’s actually true of most storms, tropical or not, but it’s especially important for hurricanes, because rain from a given hurricane can combine with other impacts to increase a storm’s overall danger.[Read: Did climate change intensify Hurricane Harvey?]“If you have a more intense storm and an elevated sea level, you’re going to be more susceptible to surge flooding,” when the storm pushes the ocean ashore, he told me. Then, surge flooding and “freshwater flooding” from all that extra rain “can gang up,” he said, creating a brackish flooding disaster. “It looks like that’s what happened in Fort Myers,” which has seen some of the worst damage, he told me.So that’s what scientists do know about climate change and hurricanes. But much remains unclear or unknown about how the two interact. There’s essentially no agreement on what a warming climate will do to smaller hurricanes in the Category 1 or 2 range, Emanuel said. Historically, these less intense storms form far more often than major storms, and they dominate the raw numbers of hurricanes that form each year (although major hurricanes still cause by far the most damage). But “we just don’t know if the number of those smaller storms will be more or fewer or stay the same.”Climatologists also don’t know what will happen to the diameter of hurricanes. The size of hurricanes is an overlooked but important aspect of a storm’s danger, Emanuel said. For instance, Hurricane Ian made landfall in almost the same place that Hurricane Charley did in 2004, but Ian is a much wider—and thus a much more destructive—storm. Charley, in fact, could almost fit entirely within Ian’s eye. Idealized computer models show that climate change will likely make these monster storms more common, Emanuel said, but so far “nobody wants to carry that over to the real world,” which is far more complex than a simulation.So what can we say about climate change’s effect on Ian? Stepping back, it seems safe to say that it showed some symptoms of climate change. It rapidly intensified. It dumped huge amounts of rain. You could even argue that it showed evidence of that “higher speed limit.” But asking questions beyond that is folly, Emanuel said.“I don’t like the question ‘How did climate change affect this storm?’” he told me. “If you had a grandparent who died of lung cancer and who smoked two packs a day, you wouldn’t ask, ‘How much did smoking contribute to his lung cancer?’ Because sometimes people get lung cancer without smoking at all. You just can’t answer that question.”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekIf you could change one thing about the culture of your country, as if by magic, by adopting a practice or attitude or folkway or tradition from another country, what would you import and why?Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.Conversations of NoteAs a coda to our recent discussion of immigration, which focused on policies in the United States, I’ve been thinking about how the world might collectively address the issue. Economic migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees will be with us for the foreseeable future, and their numbers may rise with climate change. Already, there are far more people leaving home for their own safety, or to seek a better life, than there are spots in wealthy countries willing to accept them. Even if the United States significantly increased the number of newcomers that it welcomes, an ongoing crisis would persist; lots of European countries, meanwhile, seem to be growing more hostile to immigration.Can anything be done? I submit an ambitious solution for consideration and study: the creation of a new quasi-country, administered by the U.S. and its closest allies, that has an open border, which is to say, free entry or free exit for anyone in the world who wants to go there. This would not take the place of immigration as it now occurs; it would be in addition to it. The hope would be to create the sorts of conditions that allowed places like 19th-century America and 20th-century Hong Kong to thrive while absorbing massive numbers of newcomers, and undermining tyrannies where too many people are trapped. The obstacles and challenges would be tremendous, but the status quo is an ongoing tragedy. So on to the first challenge: identifying the ideal piece of territory for this experiment …  Caregiving in CrisisMy colleague Annie Lowrey writes about a corner of the workforce where what she calls “the burnout crisis” is especially potent:
An untold number of nurses, teachers, and child-care workers are asking themselves Is this worth it? and deciding that it is not. Nurses are walking off their jobs and quitting in droves, while those still at the bedside are experiencing high rates of depression. Shortages of teachers are prompting some school districts to institute four-day weeks and hire educators without a college degree, and more than half of educators report wanting to quit. The child-care workforce is shrinking, spurring parents to camp out overnight to win coveted day-care spots and pushing mothers out of the workforce.
She argues:
Two mutually reinforcing trends are at play. Occupations that were always difficult have gotten only more so because of coronavirus-related safety concerns and disruptions, as well as pay that is not keeping up with the rising cost of living. And the tight labor market has provided an opportunity for workers to switch to better, less fraught jobs—straining their colleagues who remain and spurring still more workers to consider leaving.
The author Naomi Schaefer Riley has partly overlapping concerns about the field of child welfare, where people “are tasked with understanding which kids are at risk and, if possible, keeping them safe from parents and other adults who would do them harm.” In Quillette, she argues that the field is in crisis:
From the study of this topic … to the training of professionals, it seems that child welfare has become almost completely divorced from the actual welfare of children. Finding, training, and supporting qualified individuals to do this important work has become all but impossible. A report from Casey Family Programs estimates that the average turnover rate at child-welfare agencies in the United States is approximately 30 percent ... That was before the pandemic and the current labor shortage. Another study found that, “for those workers who remain on the job, burnout manifests in the workplace as work avoidance, apathy toward the well-being of clients, and feelings of cynicism and futility.” And relative to their peers, “workers with high levels of burnout are more likely and quicker to conclude that children in hypothetical cases are at no risk of harm.” So, how are we ensuring that child welfare agency employees are well-trained? At the top, the field is plagued with theoretical abstractions divorced from human nature.
[Read: Nine reader views on the state of immigration policy]Tomorrow’s Nuclear ChallengeIn The Bulwark, Eric S. Edelman and Franklin C. Miller reprise testimony they gave to the U.S. Senate, arguing that while Russia “remains today the only existential challenge to the United States because of the size of its nuclear arsenal,” the military rise of China poses “the most complex configuration of questions about nuclear weapons since the onset of the nuclear age.” Edelman and Miller write that this is due to “the potential that the United States will have to deal simultaneously with two near-peer nuclear powers” in “trilateral nuclear competition with both Russia and China.”Their argument for that conclusion:
The Chinese nuclear arsenal is expanding rapidly. The commander of Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richards, described the growth of China’s arsenal as “breathtaking” and former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten called it “unprecedented.” For many years, China was thought to maintain an arsenal of about 200 nuclear warheads. That estimate has since grown to about 350, and could expand to 1000 or more by 2030. As it acquires more warheads, the People’s Liberation Army is also developing a full nuclear triad much earlier than most observers anticipated, as well as capabilities that could call “strategic stability” into question. In addition to China’s first air-refuellable bomber and its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent, the test last year of what seems to be a fractional orbital bombardments system raises the prospect of a short or no-warning attack—an extremely destabilizing development.
Enforced Ideology in AcademiaJonathan Haidt, the New York University social psychologist, announced last week that he is resigning from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology––the most significant professional association in a field where he is one of the most significant scholars––unless it repeals a new rule that it imposed on those attending its annual conference.He writes:
In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining “whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.
These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll just add one additional concern: Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly. The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism.
Haidt’s objections are best understood in light of his beliefs that truth-seeking, not social justice, is the telos of a university; that the field of social psychology is becoming a tribal moral community; and that political diversity would improve the quality of scholarship in the field.State Secrets and the Fourth AmendmentThe ACLU is challenging an NSA surveillance program that conducts secret, warrantless searches of Americans’ internet communications. In the past, the federal government has invoked the state-secrets privilege to avoid adjudicating such legal challenges—a tactic that the civil-liberties organization hopes to end. After all, what good is a constitutional right if all attempts to enforce it in court are dismissed?“Historically, the state secrets privilege was not a basis for dismissing cases,” the ACLU argues in The Guardian.The organization goes on to state:
When the privilege developed in the early English and American courts, it allowed the government to withhold specific pieces of sensitive evidence. As with other privileges—like the attorney–client or priest–penitent privileges—the sensitive information was excluded, and the case would go forward without it. Sometimes the plaintiff would prevail using other available evidence, and sometimes they would lose. But they would have the chance to make their case in court. In recent years, however, the government has invoked the state secrets privilege not as a shield but as a sword, to seek dismissal of cases even where the plaintiff can make its case using public evidence.
[Read: The constitutional case against a federal abortion ban]Running to the RightThe Time magazine political correspondent and former Atlantic staff writer Molly Ball, who profiled Charlie Crist for The Atlantic in 2014, traveled down to Florida recently to check in on Crist’s attempt to win the governor’s mansion away from the incumbent, Ron DeSantis. She doesn’t like his chances. America’s most populous swing state is trending red, she argues, and DeSantis has consolidated power in a way that is especially appealing to Republicans:
The typical purple-state political strategy would be to tack to the center, but DeSantis has not done that either. The fact that he has gone hard-right and remained broadly popular—one recent poll put his approval rating at 51 percent, vs. 43 percent for Crist—is a major component of his appeal to Republicans. Just as Bernie Sanders’ liberal acolytes contend that his socialist vision would galvanize the electorate more powerfully than the centrists the Democrats tend to nominate, DeSantis’s many fans in the GOP see him as proof that right-wing policies, far from provoking a backlash, actually appeal to voters. He would, they hope, do to America what he’s done to Florida: turn the political current to his will rather than bending in the wind. The bigger the margin he’s able to rack up as he sails to reelection, the greater the currency this argument would have in a GOP presidential primary. Many conservatives see him as a smarter version of Trump, with the shrewdness and focus to implement a vision Trump only flailed at haphazardly.
Provocation of the Week: Cops for AmericaYou’ve heard of Teach for America? Matt Yglesias proposes a similar program but for policing:
Right now, very few people with progressive values or any qualms about the status quo in the criminal justice system are willing to consider a career in policing. But that dynamic is only going to make everything people worry about in policing even worse. We’re both exacerbating ideological selection into and out of policing, and also making general staffing problems harder. This only makes chiefs more reluctant to dismiss bad cops and more likely to accept retreats who’ve washed out for misconduct elsewhere.
If we accept that policing is important and that high-poverty, high-crime communities want to see policing improved rather than defunded, it would be more constructive to create a program that challenges people who believe policing can be done better to actually roll up their sleeves and do it.
It seems to me that almost every profession that tilts heavily toward people with one ideology would benefit from an influx of people with a different ideology, so I endorse Yglesias’s proposal while also urging a new influx of conservatives into the field of social psychology.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Last week, I asked readers to tell me what people don’t get about their job. In an economy with thousands of occupations and hundreds of sectors, and where many people within the same large company have no idea what their colleagues do all day, I thought hearing from dozens of people about the reality of their work would be valuable.I received several hundred replies—from opera singers, TV screenwriters, chefs, neuroscientists, and more. However, no category of workers wrote back more than teachers and professors. Given that education has become polarized and politicized, it makes sense that educators feel misunderstood and underappreciated.By a wide margin, the most common reply among college and university professors was that teaching is just a small part of the job. “Standing in front of a classroom full of undergraduate students represents about 5 percent of my time,” said a tenured geology professor in Canada. He continued:
Each hour of classroom time requires a similar amount of preparation time. If I create a new course, I am busy full time for roughly half a semester, doing background readings, assembling display materials, and writing lecture notes. I have a group of 12 research students; for each of them I must write grant proposals to generate the funding they need.
I interact regularly with funding organizations, meet the students regularly to review their progress, take them into the field for weeks of training and orientation at the start of their projects, read background literature so I can remain up to date on their widely varied research topics, and edit their reports and manuscripts for submission to journals.
I review other people’s work constantly. The scientific peer review process requires two or three formal reviews for every paper or thesis that is published. If I and my students publish 10 papers each year then I need to do as many as 30 reviews just to balance the amount of review work we are generating for others in the system. I also sit on several administrative committees that require regular meetings, which requires hours of preparation by reading and, again, reviewing documents.
Somewhere among all those demands I have to try to find time to work on my own research projects, which are the fun part but which generally get shoved to the back of the queue.
Several professors pointed to the irony that they are primarily thought of as teachers by their students and the public, even though they are promoted based on factors that are basically unrelated to teaching, such as publishing articles in obscure journals and raising grant money for a university.“People think my job consists of giving a lecture for a few hours per week, with a lot of freedom and free time after that,” said one professor at a public university in California. “Teaching is just something to motivate the legislature to send taxpayers’ money to the university. Legislators think the purpose of funding the university is so Johnny or Suzy can go to college and get a degree and a better-paying job thereafter, and pay taxes to the state. What drives the campus culture, and takes the most time, is research.”So, a professor’s job is a strange bundle: teacher, administrator, researcher, and grant-wrangler. “You see the disjunction here?” wrote Jon, a professor at a state university in Texas. “Undergraduate teaching is the backbone of most universities, yet at institutions like the one at which I work there is no reward for quality teaching.”The incentive structure of education also came under sharp criticism from Kory, who said he’s taught “at least two years at all four major levels of public education: elementary, middle, high school, and undergraduate.” Kory wrote:
We talk about and reward teachers as becoming better at their craft the older their students are. College professors … make more money. But anyone who actually works in education knows that elementary teachers are, pound-for-pound, the best at what [they] do. First grade teachers move mountains everyday. Fourth grade teachers would make our best cult leaders if they weren’t justifiably exhausted all the time.
Perhaps the most bizarre and borderline-exploitative part of the work is that today’s professors often write free articles for academic journals that they have to pay to access. “When we write articles for academic journals, we are not paid for the articles,” said Caitie, an associate professor. “And the journals are incredibly expensive, so in some cases, I can’t even access a journal article I’ve written because our university doesn’t have a subscription to that journal. When I review journal articles, I’m not paid for that work either.” Several readers referred to an observation from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith that academics are the most self-exploited class of workers.We also heard from several high-school teachers, who addressed the idea that they’re lucky to take the whole summer off. “I spend my ‘summers off’ reading books to improve my teaching, find new texts to teach, write [the] curriculum, and plan for the upcoming school year,” said Amanda, a high-school English teacher from Colorado. “Teaching is a constant, year-round career.”Many readers argued that teaching—whether K–12 or college—is more demanding than most people think. “I’m at school from 6:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day,” Amanda continued. “When there is a school dance, I chaperone from 7 to 11 p.m. on a Saturday. We frequently have meetings after school, extra days of training, parent-teacher conferences, weekends spent grading, and time spent just attending student events like plays, concerts, and sporting events.” Sylvia, an English professor at a small liberal-arts college, added, “You’re never not working. I never even go to a movie without thinking, ‘Can I use this in my class?’”So, if being a teacher or professor is often so grueling, why does anybody do it? “Despite the meager pay and the constant criticism in the media, many people will never understand that the wide majority care about kids,” said Donna, from Maine. “There is nothing more rewarding than seeing the lightbulb go on when a student masters a skill or grasps a concept.”“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” said Amanda, the high-school English teacher. “I love getting to talk about big ideas with kids still forming their opinions, I love teaching them how to write and share their thoughts, I love teaching them to be curious and ask questions.”

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.In 1995, decades before she began assisting with research on this column, Rena Rudavsky and her family were selected to participate in a novel psychology experiment: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University would install a computer in their dining room and connect it to the internet. At the time, only 9 percent of Americans used the internet (in 2020, nearly 91 percent did). Rena, then a middle schooler, recalled sitting in front of the computer day after day, participating in chat rooms and surfing the internet. When she finished, another family member would take a turn.Strangely, this experiment didn’t spark much discussion in her household. “We did little conversing in the dining room when the computer was on,” Rena told me in an email. Furthermore, “none of us shared our private internet experiences with others in our family.”[Read: When people feared computers]Rena’s experience was typical, as the researchers showed when they published the now famous “HomeNet” study in 1998. “Greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants’ communication with family members in the household” and “declines in the size of their social circle,” the researchers wrote. More ominously, it led to “increases in [the participants’] depression and loneliness.” Rena says her experience bore out these findings.HomeNet could be (and has been) interpreted as an indictment of the internet, or screens, or modern communications technology in general. In truth, it illustrates a much simpler truth about love and happiness: Technology that crowds out our real-life interaction with others will lower our well-being and thus must be managed with great care in our lives. In order to reap their full benefits, we should use digital tools in ways that enhance our relationships.The coronavirus pandemic has created a fertile environment for research on social connection. Anytime the circumstances of social life suddenly change, researchers like me rush in with our clipboards in hand, asking annoying questions. One of the most common areas of inquiry over the past couple of years was how our sudden mass shift to digital communication—away from face-to-face—affected overall social connectedness. In one paper in the journal New Media & Society, researchers studied nearly 3,000 adults during the pandemic’s early months and found that email, social media, online gaming, and texting were inadequate substitutes for in-person interactions. Voice and video calls were somewhat better (although later research also questioned the value of those technologies).[Read: Ignoring people for phones is the new normal]Social connectedness is a key to happiness. Lower it, and you will be worse off—and so will your loved ones, especially your kids. One 2014 survey revealed that 62 percent of U.S. children thought their parents were too distracted to listen to them; the No. 1 reason was parents’ phone use.The way that solitary diversions such as scrolling or surfing reduce social connection is clear: You do them instead of interacting. But virtual communications such as texting are by design interactive and should theoretically be less harmful. The problem is that with these technologies, we lose dimensionality. Text messages can’t convey emotion very well, because we can’t hear or see our interlocutors; the same goes for DMs on social media. (More often, social media is used not to communicate with one individual but to broadcast to a larger audience). These technologies are to in-person interactions what a black-and-white, pixelated version of the Mona Lisa is to the real thing: identifiable, but incapable of producing the same emotional effects.With low-dimensionality communications, we tend to hop from person to person and thus swap depth for breadth. That’s why face-to-face conversations tend to be more expansive than those conducted over text. Research has shown that deeper conversations bring more well-being than short communications. Meanwhile, in a recent longitudinal study, teens who texted more often than their peers tended to experience more depression, more anxiety, more aggression, and poorer relationships with their fathers.It might seem strange that—even outside the circumstances imposed by the pandemic—we would voluntarily adopt technologies that hurt our happiness. There are two major explanations: convenience and courtesy. Vegetating in front of a screen (which nine in 10 American teenagers say they do to “pass time”) is simply easier than talking with a person, and virtual communications such as texting are faster and easier than a visit or a phone call. Think of these technologies as grab-and-go food at a convenience store: It’s not great, but it sure is easy—and after you eat enough microwave burritos, you forget what the real thing tastes like.As texting and social media have proliferated, many people worry that reaching out via old-fashioned communications will be cumbersome for others. I once asked one of my adult kids when he was texting a friend why he didn’t just punch in 10 numbers and talk to the guy. “It would be rude,” he answered. In 2019, researchers found that long-distance families often favor asynchronous communications such as texting to minimize intrusions into others’ time. That’s not to say the trend is universal; I call all of my kids almost every day on FaceTime (and pretend not to notice their annoyance).Abandoning the internet and eliminating virtual communications from your life is clearly not the answer. Doing so would isolate you and compromise your ability to make a living. Based on the research, however, you can learn to use technologies to complement, rather than substitute for, your relationships. Here are two ways to do so.1. Choose interaction over vegetation.There is nothing revolutionary about this rule—45 years ago, I was told by my parents to go outside with my friends instead of watching television. The difference now—besides the fact that the television didn’t fit in my pocket—is empirical evidence: Today, we know that, in excess, solitary and screen-based diversion lowers happiness and can lead to mood disorders such as depression and anxiety.To knock you out of suboptimal habits, make use of device options that inform you of the time you are spending on social media and the internet, and limit yourself to an hour a day or less. Another popular approach, which has not yet been tested in academic research, is turning your devices from color to grayscale. My son did this and swears it has massively lowered his vegetation time.2. Create a communication hierarchy.It’s unreasonable to expect anyone to stop texting, but you can turn to it less if you have an “order of operations” in place for talking with your friends, co-workers, and loved ones. When possible, make an effort to meet in person—especially with your intimates. A 2021 study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports revealed that the more face-to-face communication people had with their partners, the more understood they felt and the more satisfied they were with their relationship. When meeting up is impossible, use face-to-face technology or the phone. Text or use similar technology for only impersonal or urgent matters.Rena’s formative childhood experiment made her think deeply about the internet’s effects and has had a lifelong impact on her use of technology. She had a Facebook account in college but deleted it after graduating, and she’s never gone back. She avoids other social-media networks, and her children have no internet presence.By today’s standards, her life might sound old-fashioned. Her daughter knocks on neighbors’ doors to visit. The family sits on their stoop after dinner, chatting among themselves and with passersby. She writes and sends letters. When she does use technology, it’s as a complement to her relationships, not a substitute for them: She maintains a parent text group, for example, but only to set up in-person activities.For most of us—especially people who grew up with it—the internet is an unquestioned part of the ecosystem of life, seeping into every crack and crevice independent of any conscious decision on our part. We’re not going back to life before this kind of technology, of course. We can and should, however, use it mindfully in service of love.

Pat Buchanan. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images.)“I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”When Barack Obama said this in 2009, a lot of conservatives—me included—rolled up our sleeves and got our whacking sticks.Now, there’s a legitimate argument that we were unfair to Obama if you read his quote in full. But that’s beside the point. It’s also true, as I’ve argued countless times, that this whole framing of “American exceptionalism”—starting with the question from Ed Luce—was misguided. American exceptionalism in its original meaning never referred to American foreign policy leadership or the idea that America was better than everyone else, as Luce implied. The word “exceptional” has come to mean “superior”—“exceptional students,” “exceptional rice pudding,” etc. But the obvious core meaning of the word is different—an exception to the norm. In a Seinfeldian way, you could call someone’s very ugly baby “exceptional” and the parents would take it as a compliment even if you meant something different. Going back to Alexis de Tocqueville or the German political scientist Werner Sombart or even the Communist Jay Lovestone, the idea behind the term was that America was just different from other advanced nations. We were more religious, more violent, more skeptical of government, more bourgeois, and less class-obsessed than our European counterparts. That last bit—not being obsessed with class—was seen as central by many theorists. The legacy of centuries of feudalism made socialism much more attractive to Europeans, while Americans (the white ones at least) descended from people who wanted a fresh start in the New World.But again, that’s all beside the point, or at least beside my point. Even if American conservatives were being unfair to Obama, they were nonetheless expressing a view of America as different to—and, yes, in their telling, better than—Europe. Not everyone argued that we’re better according to some objective metric (though many did); some merely noted that we’re better by subjective metrics. In America we do things our way, and we like it better than the way they do things over there.I think the reason so many of us flew off the handle was that Obama seemed to be confirming an idea that had already jelled in the conservative mind: that Obama’s version of progressivism treated America and American culture as a kind of problem to be fixed by policy (remember all that “bitter clingers” stuff?). In Europe—and China according to Tom Friedman—political elites were more enlightened and sophisticated and imposed optimal policies from above, in both foreign and domestic policy. This is a very old idea—I’ll get to that in a moment—but it had new salience under Obama.Indeed, a month before Obama’s remarks, Mark Steyn had written a cover story for National Review titled “Prime Minister Obama,” which asked, “Will European statism supplant the American Way?” One could argue—and many did—that the American right was suffering from a severe case of “Europhobia.” Some of it built on Robert Kagan’s 2003 book, Of Paradise and Power, in which he famously proclaimed that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” But Kagan’s (excellent) book was simply the latest in a very long tradition of American conservatives believing that America was what put the “new” in the New World.Which brings me to this very old idea.I don’t think it’s remotely controversial to say that America was founded on a kind of anti-Europeanism. Yes, yes, the Brits—or at least many of them—insist they are not part of Europe, but from early American eyes Britain was definitely part of the Old World. This wasn’t an explicitly conservative thing in the 18th or most of the 19th century. “I know nothing so charming as our own country,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1788. “The learned say it is a new creation; and I believe them; not for their reasons, but because it is made on an improved plan. Europe is a first idea, a crude production, before the maker knew his trade, or had made up his mind as to what he wanted.” The hostility to “entangling alliances,” Jefferson’s term, was built not just on foreign policy realpolitik but also on the deeper assumption that we have a good thing going here and the last thing we need to do is import Europe’s mess to our shores.At the end of the 19th century, this general consensus started to change. A whole generation of American intellectuals and academics were heavily influenced by German thought and many were trained in German universities. Otto von Bismarck’s “top-down socialism” inspired the fledgling crop of American political scientists, a new academic discipline at the turn of the century. Bismarck’s approach, according to liberal historian Eric Goldman, became “a catalytic of American progressive thought.” A young Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's Prussia was the most “admirable system ... the most studied and most nearly perfected” in the world. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the first six officers had studied in Germany. At least 20 of its first 26 presidents had as well. In 1906, a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America—more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year.Longtime readers know where I’m going from here. American progressives believed that their ideas transcended national boundaries. Progressivism was a global movement. "We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe," proclaimed progressive journalist William Allen White. “Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaurès in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.” When Jane Addams seconded Teddy Roosevelt's nomination at the Progressive National Convention in 1912, she declared, “The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action.”Fast forward to the 1930s, and you have intellectuals of the left treating all sorts of Marxist, socialist, and progressive movements like one giant philosophical smorgasbord. Many American liberals—the new term for progressives after they ruined that brand—looked to Russia, Italy, and even in some cases Germany for policy inspiration. Rexford Tugwell, a prominent member of FDR’s Brain Trust, described Italian fascism as “the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious.” “We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages,” declared New Republic editor George Soule. Throughout the preceding decade, The New Republic, under its founder Herbert Croly, ran numerous articles extolling Mussolini’s “experiment.” Charles Beard, arguably the most important progressive economist of the era, said that Mussolini’s Italy was consistent with the “American gospel of action, action, action.” Beard also warned against being too fastidious about the harshness of Mussolini’s tactics:It would be a mistake to allow feeling aroused by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the Fascist process (as all other immense historical changes) to obscure the potentialities and the lessons of the adventure—no, not adventure, but destiny riding without any saddle and bridle across the historic peninsula that bridges the world of antiquity and our modern world.Of course, the Soviet Union loomed larger in the imagination and admiration of many on the left. But that’s a more familiar tale, at least to people with a minimal understanding of American history (I dwelled on the fascism stuff only because I’ve heard so many dumb things being said of Italian fascism in the last couple days that I thought it was worth offering this corrective.) Suffice it to say that the Soviet Union was a source of immense inspiration for American progressives even before Lincoln Steffens returned from Russia in 1919 and declared, “I’ve seen the future and it works!” And long after New Deal intellectual Stuart Chase asked, “Why should Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?”During the Cold War, the anti-European sentiment was subsumed and transformed into anti-communism. But you can see as many points of continuity as of change. America added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance to highlight our differences with foreign, atheistic communism. The fight against the Red Menace was framed as a battle to protect the “American way of life,” which is just a more folksy way of saying “American exceptionalism.” And for good and ill, modern American conservatism—and the conservative project more broadly—was born of this idea. To one extent or another, it informed nearly every ideological and political fight between the right and left for more than a century, on domestic and foreign policy.All of the highfalutin culture war arguments going back to the 1960s revolved around left-wing intellectuals regurgitating left-wing philosophers and academics from Europe. If you’ve ever heard right-wingers—including me—complain about Frankfurt School Marxists or “cultural Marxism,” you know what I’m talking about. The one thing conservative intellectuals spoke in nearly one voice about was that the whole crop of existentialists, postmodernists, structuralists, hermeneuticists, Marxists, and critical theorists were either foreigners or worshippers of foreign ideas that had no place in the American way of politics. Yes, we looked to some foreigners, too. Most were British or Scottish, but there was the occasional Frenchman or Austrian. But Montesquieu and Hayek, for instance, were part of our pantheon precisely because they leant heft to the vision of the Founders. And in America, to be a conservative meant conserving the broad tradition of the American enlightenment, which was a continuation of, and improvement upon, the English, French, and Scottish enlightenments.  American nationalism, until very recently, was a leftish idea. FDR was a nationalist. The American nationalist movement was a populist-socialist movement (as I explained here). Even isolationism, an idea that many claim (incorrectly in my view) is a core conservative tenet, was really a fight over American exceptionalism. Right-wing isolationists argued that America was a shining city on a hill that shouldn’t get dragged into foreign muck. Right-wing interventionists argued that America was a shining city on a hill and the only way to protect it was to engage the enemy (Huns, commies, jihadis, whomever) over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Left-wing isolationists typically started from the premise that we’re no better than these other countries—or that we’re worse—so we have no right to impose our will or system on anybody.So why the long history lesson? Because all of a sudden, this whole idea is under assault by people claiming to represent authentic conservatism. I confess to being partly motivated by personal pique. I’m constantly told I’ve changed my positions because of my irrational Trump hatred. But I still believe in American exceptionalism in both the rah-rah and the analytical sense (unlike Trump, who champions American nationalism, but not American exceptionalism). And I really can’t emphasize this enough: Virtually every conservative of any prominence or influence from, I dunno, 1960 to 2015 felt pretty much the same way. I didn’t leave conservatism, self-described conservatives left me.No, not all of them. Since I’m running long, I’ll spare you all the ways that national conservatives sound like the German historicists who influenced American progressives a century ago, or how all of their Dwight Schrute-like lectern pounding about industrial policy and bringing independent institutions to heel sounds very much in the mold of corporatism—the economic doctrine of fascism. I’ll also forgo recounting all the name-checking of Marcuse or mentioning the cult of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which seems to occupy the headspace for many on the right that Russia and Italy did in the ‘20s and ‘30s or Cuba or Sweden did in the post-war era. I do wonder if anyone has come back from one of these Hungarian junkets and declared, “I’ve been to the past—and it works!” Not surprisingly, Steve Bannon—who has described himself as a “Leninist”—is a fan of self-proclaimed “superfascist” Julius Evola. Compact magazine is running pieces in praise of critical theory, because of course they are. And let’s take pass on dwelling on the sick and twisted boosterism of Vladimir Putin, who has convinced some on the right that he’s one of “us” because he hates America or gays or NATO as much as “we” do. But I will say, you knew the GOP was taking a strange turn when people started wearing T-shirts that said, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”Gladden Pippin has an interesting interview—conducted in Hungary, of course—with a “post-liberal” conservative Italian comrade who explains that “our conservatism has two pillars. One is the Roman Empire: our conservatism was born with the idea of the mos maiorum of the Roman Empire. And in the second respect, our conservatism was born with the idea of the Catholic Church.” Again, interesting stuff, but I think everyone can agree that’s useful information for constructing Italian exceptionalism, not American exceptionalism.But since we’re on the subject of Italy, let’s talk about the reaction to the election of Giorgia Meloni, who has roots in some neo-fascist parties. For now, I’m not joining the liberal freakout over her election for a host of reasons we can surely discuss another time. I’ve just heard too many people on MSNBC discuss Mussolini’s fascism—which was very bad—as if it was indistinguishable from Hitler’s Nazism to join that riot of ignorance. Meloni has said things I don’t like and things I agree with. She has troubling associations and reassuring ones. But a Europhilic member of the Aspen Institute who only got 1 in 4 votes in the election and who supports aiding Ukraine, doesn’t exactly scream, “Let’s invade Ethiopia!” to me.My objection here is simply that the cheering is a sharp break with conservatism as we knew it.  I highly doubt all of the people gushing about Meloni’s victory know very much about her, and I’m sure they have even less of an idea of what she’ll actually do. I suspect nearly all that these Republican politicians and Twitter radicals know can be boiled down to a few flimsy facts. She gave a clever speech, she calls herself a conservative, and liberals are freaking out that someone with ominous-sounding ties to fascism has won an election. In short, like so much in right-wing land these days, she’s a hero because the people who hate her are villains. And in us-vs-them world, that’s enough.For instance, here’s Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation.Kevin Roberts @KevinRobertsTXIf exit polls are right, then conservatives will come to power in Italy, just weeks after conservatives in Sweden won. This can be a trend: conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as what it is—US vs THEM, everyday people vs globalist elites, who’ve shown they hate us.September 25th 20221,845 Retweets8,935 LikesThere’s so much I could say about this. But I’ll be brief. For starters, the Heritage Foundation is, by any sane reckoning, an elite institution and it admits as much to donors. Second, this us-vs.-them framing implies that the “everyday people” of Italy have more in common with the “everyday people” of America, which is 31 flavors of nonsense for all sorts of reasons, not least that Italians aren’t Americans. Conservatives used to understand that the old Marxist idea that members of the working class were united against the ruling class regardless of nationality—“Workers of the world unite!”—was folly. But now, “Everyday people of the world unite!” is the rallying cry of a leading conservative think tank?Now, I can’t put “conservative” in scare quotes the way I’d like to, because I think Heritage can still claim to be conservative. But let’s have no illusions: It’s not the same kind of conservative it used to be. Heritage used to champion American exceptionalism with gusto. As Heritage co-founder and longtime president Ed Feulner put it, “And while, in the heat of political battle, we naturally focus on the differences between liberals and conservatives, and their contrasting visions of our country’s future, it is important to remember that regardless of party or political philosophy, we are Americans, we love our country — and we are patriots.” In 2019, Heritage even founded the Feulner Institute for American Exceptionalism, which seems to have had as much impact as the Goldberg Institute for Healthy Living—neither organization even has a website.If these populist, corporatist, nationalist, ultramontane, oh-so-European ideas succeed in replacing conservatism as we once knew it, they will be called conservatism. But as Friedrich Hayek argued, this conservatism will be “Old World conservatism,” because the conservative in America is necessarily a defender of the liberal tradition of the founding.In 1996, Patrick Buchanan was read out of conservatism by Heritage, the American Conservative Union, and other institutions because he represented European conservatism. As David Keene, the then head of the American Conservative Union (which runs CPAC) said, Buchanan is “articulating policies that are more reminiscent of European than American conservatism, who is challenging many of the economic foundations of the conservative movement and philosophy and who, therefore, is a disquieting figure to many traditional conservatives.” Ed Feulner was more succinct: “What he's been saying is goofy. Huey Long is not one of us."At the National Conservative conference, which was in part a Buchananist revival meeting, Kevin Roberts reportedly said, “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement, but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.” Don’t tell me I’m the one who’s changed.

When people die, our whole bodies die with us. The heart stops pumping; the gut stops digesting; every cell that carries a person’s genetic blueprint eventually extinguishes, until their molecular signature is extinct. This is the curse of humans’—really, most animals’—multicellular makeup: The cells within our bodies are so specialized, so interdependent, that their fates are lashed together even in death.Multicellularity does not have to manifest this way, however. Just a hop, skip, and a jump over from us on the tree of life are the choanoflagellates—little marine and freshwater creatures roughly the size of yeast. Choanoflagellates commonly appear as single cells with a long, whipping tail, a bulbous head, and a frilly collar, resembling, as my colleague Ed Yong has memorably described it, “a sperm wearing a skirt.” But under the right conditions, choanoflagellates can also bloom into many-celled bodies, joining individual cells together into single entities that, with some squinting and imagination, bear curious resemblances to the bodies of animals. Their bodies, like ours, are usually genetically identical all the way through; their bodies, like ours, can bend and flex, as if composed of muscles in motion. Their bodies, like ours, can even harbor tiny communities of bacteria that may help them survive.When blown apart or sliced, though, choanoflagellate bodies don’t bleed or collapse into fleshy bits, like ours do. They disaggregate back into single cells, each now free to wander away from its former compatriots and go off on its own. There’s no theoretical limit to this resiliency, experts told me: Were a predator to consume 99 percent of a choano coalition, whatever single cells remained could persist—the rough equivalent of a single human finger, left over from an explosion, crawling away to start existence anew.In a single lifetime, a choanoflagellate can “completely change its way of interacting with the environment, in truly fundamental ways,” says Nicole King, a choanoflagellate biologist at UC Berkeley. It can shift its means of being in this world. This flexible form of multicellularity isn’t one that the animal lineage kept, but its existence could reveal a lot about our origins all the same. The study of these little creatures has helped reshape how humans conceive of complex bodies, even what it means to be an individual—a notion that gets challenged every time a cell successfully separates itself from the body it once belonged to.For any creature that can pull it off, managing multicellularity comes with obvious perks. Bigger bodies move more rapidly, use nutrients more efficiently, and more easily resist life’s stressors; they’re harder for predators to swallow and better at chasing down prey. In the course of evolution, multicellularity has proved to be such a boon that it’s thought to have arisen up to 25 separate times—maybe more—in the past 800 million years or so, begetting today’s fauna, flora, fungi, and more in all their wild and wondrous forms. But the modern members of the animal lineage—millions and millions of species of them that flit and fly and sprint and swim and wriggle and crawl—can all trace their origins to a singular uni-to-multi switch. “Everyone agrees that multicellularity in animals evolved once,” says Pawel Burkhardt, a neurobiologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway.[Read: A 558-million-year-old mystery has been solved]Just how our ancestors pulled this off, however, remains a big mystery. Choanoflagellates offer a crucial clue. The creatures are widely considered to be the closest living unicellular relatives of animals: a sister twig on the tree of life that grew up alongside ours. That positioning makes choanoflagellates one of the best modern glimpses of the branch from which the animal lineage once sprang, says Flora Rutaganira, a biologist at Stanford University.More than 100 species of choanoflagellates have been identified so far by scientists. As far as experts can tell, the creatures are quite content to remain on their own in many circumstances. In their default unicellular state, they spend their days swimming and grazing on bacteria; when it’s time to make more of themselves, single choanos double in size, then split cleanly in two. Sometimes, though, choanos decide that a lonesome life is not enough. Instead of fully separating after division, newborn cells that might have once meandered off stay tethered together. In the species Salpingoeca rosetta, even the cells’ innards may interconnect, a bit like an umbilical cord between parent and child that never gets fully cut.By repeating this process, choanoflagellate colonies can swell to contain dozens, even hundreds, of cells, King told me, and take on a menagerie of shapes. As Thibaut Brunet, a biologist at the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, has found, some, like the acrobatic Choanoeca flexa, can assemble into cup-shaped colonies when exposed to copious light; a plunge into darkness, meanwhile, prompts the groups to invert so that their wiggly ends face out instead of in, a conformation that makes it easier for the coterie to swim. Other species, including S. rosetta, blossom into the lumpy rosettes that give them their name when in the presence of certain types of bacteria. Take a careful gander at some of these orb-like colonies, King told me, and they might look a shade familiar: Roughly, thematically, they look almost like animal embryos, ballooning outward into bodies, ready to be born.Choanoflagellate colonies aren’t really built to last. In the laboratory, scientists can disperse colonies by shaking them or starving them, even squeezing them through a tight space. What was once a body then “just disintegrates” into its cellular components, Burkhardt told me, as if it was never whole. This toggling is an eerie ability, and a powerful one. As great as big bodies can be, they’re also cumbersome, especially when food becomes scarce. Single cells are easier to sate with limited nutrients and reproduce more rapidly; they’re more adaptable to changing conditions, because they don’t have to wait for dozens of their comrades to “come to consensus,” Rutaganira told me. Earth’s mass-extinction events have disproportionately impacted large animals, while sparing the speedy and small, says Pedro Márquez-Zacarías, an evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute.Such flexible strategies might be an odd way to think about multicellularity, at least for humans, whose notions hew to the traits of our own bodies: stable, codependent, composed of cells that can survive only if they’re a part of a larger whole. That’s how King first conceived of the concept when she started her lab more than a decade ago. Now, though, “I’ve seen that multicellularity exists along a continuum,” she told me. Cooperation can manifest in a multitude of ways, from transient affiliations—cellular small talk—to permanent mutual reliance.[Read: The search for the world’s simplest animal]Humans have had their notions of independence challenged before. Super-social creatures such as bees and naked mole rats, for instance, live in such tight-knit familial societies that they can operate only as a collective; animal guts harbor bustling communities of microbes that evolve alongside their hosts. (Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, certain choanos also seem capable of housing a bespoke microbiome while in colony form, as a team now being led by UC Berkeley’s Alain Garcia de las Bayonas has found.) It is not unusual to turn many into one. But choanos are among the creatures that flip that narrative and interrogate the worlds that exist within us. When in colonies, they are individuals made up of individuals; when they fragment, they make many out of one. Choanoflagellates’ definition of self “can exist at multiple stacking levels, like Russian dolls,” says María Rebolleda-Gómez, a biologist at UC Irvine. As long as natural selection and evolution can act on an entity—a group, a creature, a cell, a gene—there is arguably an individual lurking within.By comparison, humans’ obligate multicellularity may feel strict and suffocating. But we probably shouldn’t be too jealous. A creature that “had a lot of cells that could decide to go off by themselves at any moment would have a lot of problems,” says Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo, a biologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, in Spain—a kind of horror movie in the making. That’s sort of what happens with cancer, wherein cells start to mooch off of their colleagues, Márquez-Zacarías told me. It’s microscopic treason, a breaking of the implicit multicellular pact: Individual cells reacquire the kind of autonomy they once lost.Human multicellularity works best when sustained by countless acts of societal good: the repeated coming together of cells. Each of our cells has made the ultimate sacrifice—of its own independence and, in most cases, the chance to reproduce. But rebellions do occur. Cooperation, even within individuals, hangs by a thread: a truce that, at any moment, can break. Even a once-collaborative choanoflagellate will refuse to go down with its ship.

The war in Ukraine has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Putting to rest his own ludicrous claim that the invasion of Ukraine constitutes a “special military operation,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a military call-up and staged “referendums” — votes to join Russia — have been conducted in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, there are calls for more weapons from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and even demands that Russia be removed from the United Nations Security Council. The political and military ramifications of these developments are profoundly disturbing, says Noam Chomsky in an exclusive interview for Truthout. They indicate “a plan for a long-drawn-out war of attrition.” Chomsky urges that the U.S. join the rest of the world in calling for negotiations, not because Putin can be trusted, but because negotiations are our best hope for averting disaster. There’s no certainty as to whether this process would result in peace, but as Chomsky says, “There is one and only one way to find out: Try.”
Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most-cited scholars and a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. His latest books are The Secrets of Words (with Andrea Moro; MIT Press, 2022); The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power (with Vijay Prashad; The New Press, 2022); and The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (with C.J. Polychroniou; Haymarket Books, 2021).
C.J. Polychroniou: Seven months after Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine, the war has reached a turning point. It has come home to Russia with Putin’s call for “partial mobilization,” and annexation referendums have been staged. What does the bolstering of Russian forces in Ukraine mean for Russia and Ukraine? Are Putin’s orders for military call-up an admission that Russia is no longer conducting a “special military operation” in Ukraine?
Noam Chomsky: What has come home to Russia is unclear. There are reports of protests and forced conscription, alongside of appeals to defend Mother Russia from yet another Western invasion, which, like those [going] back to Napoleon, will be crushed. Such appeals might have resonance. Historical memories may be deep. What the outcome will be we can only guess.
From the first day, it was a criminal invasion, never a “special military operation,” but the pretense in the Kremlin is still maintained. The mobilization is unlikely to have much effect on the war for some time to come, and what kind of effect is unclear. The failures and incompetence of the Russian military have been a continuing surprise to most well-placed analysts. That may well extend to mobilization, training and supply of equipment. Any meaningful bolstering of Russian forces from these efforts is likely to be well ahead, probably after the winter months. I suppose Russia could move forces from other regions, but whether the leadership has the capability or will to do that, I don’t know.
The mobilization and referenda seem to indicate a plan for a long, drawn-out war of attrition. If the mobilization does succeed in shifting the tide of the war, that increases the risks of inducing the West to up the ante with more advanced weapons, perhaps reaching to Russia itself as President Zelenskyy has requested, so far rebuffed. It’s not hard to envision scenarios that lead on to catastrophic consequences.
That’s just the beginning. The impact of the war goes far beyond: to the millions facing starvation with the curtailing of grain and fertilizer exports, now partially relieved though there is little information about how much; and most important of all and least discussed, the sharp reversal of the limited international efforts to address the looming climate crisis, a colossal crime against humanity.
While huge resources are being wasted in destruction and the fossil fuel industries are gleefully celebrating the opening up of new fields for exploitation to poison the atmosphere even more, scientists are regularly informing us that their dire warnings have been far too conservative. Thus we have recently learned that the Middle East region, not far away from embattled Ukraine, is heating almost twice as fast as the rest of the world, with an estimated 9ºF rise by the end of the century, and that sea levels in the Eastern Mediterranean are expected to rise a meter by mid-century and up to 2.5 meters by 2100. Of course it doesn’t stop there. The consequences are almost impossible to envision.
Meanwhile the region continues to be the global center for heating the world to the brink of survivability and soon beyond. And while Israel and Lebanon may soon be sinking into the sea, they are squabbling about which will have the honor of virtually destroying both of them by producing the fossil fuels at their maritime borders, acts of lunacy duplicated around the world. Escalating the war in Ukraine in the face of such realities reaches levels of imbecility that are hard to capture in words.
Russia hopes to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine with staged referendums. Russia used this tactic before, in 2014, with the Crimean status referendum, although the two situations may be quite different. The voting in the Russian-held Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine is clearly illegal under international law, but I suppose this hardly matters to a power that has launched a criminal invasion against an independent country. What does Russia hope to achieve with the “referendums”? And what happens next, especially since Russia has had a difficult time so far establishing order in the occupied territories?
The referenda in this case lack any credibility. It was different in the case of the Crimea referendum in 2014. For one thing, the Russian takeover of Crimea didn’t happen in a vacuum. For another, there’s reason to suppose that Crimeans looked to Russia more than to Ukraine. Though the referenda were not internationally accepted, it was recognized by many that the results were not very surprising. That’s not the case with the current referenda.
Like the mobilization, the staged referenda indicate Russian plans for long-time occupation and a war of attrition. Though they clearly pose another impediment for negotiations over the fate of the regions where they take place, they may not completely close the window, as Anatol Lieven discusses.
It’s true that international law means as little to Russia as to the other great powers that launch criminal invasions against independent countries, the U.S. well in the lead. With impunity, thanks to its power.
What does Russia hope to achieve? As we’ve discussed, there are two ways to approach this question.
One way is to explore the depths of Putin’s mind, as George W. Bush did when he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his “soul,” and pronounced it good. And as many amateur psychologists do today, with supreme confidence.
A second way is to look at what Putin and his associates are saying. As in the case of other leaders, this may or may not reflect their hidden intentions. What matters, however, is that what they say can be a basis for negotiations if there is any interest in bringing the horrors to an end before they get even worse. That’s how diplomacy works.
The second way suggests that what Russia hopes to achieve is primarily neutralization of Ukraine and “demilitarization and denazification.” The former means cancellation of the programs of the past years to integrate Ukraine de facto within NATO. That approaches President Zelenskyy’s proposals as recently as last March for neutralization with security guarantees. The latter would be a topic for discussion in serious negotiations. It might be spelled out as an agreement to refrain from placing heavy weapons aimed at Russia in Ukraine, no further joint military maneuvers, etc. In short, a status rather like Mexico.
Those are topics for negotiations — if, of course, there is a serious interest in ending the conflict.
We might recall that most of the world, including a large majority of Germans and much of the rest of Europe, is calling for negotiations now, while the U.S. insists that priority must be to severely weaken Russia, hence no negotiations.
There are other issues to be settled, primarily Crimea and the Donbass region. An optimal solution would be internationally sponsored referenda on the various options that have been proposed. That is presumably not possible now, but a serious effort on negotiations might improve the prospects. Recall that we have good evidence that as recently as last April there were serious Ukraine-Russia negotiations under Turkish auspices and that the U.S.-U.K. opposed them.
As to what happens next, that will depend on choices made by those involved, primarily Ukraine and Russia of course, but we can hardly pretend to be merely observers from afar. See again Lieven’s commentary, just cited.
Lieven is not the only informed analyst who regards peaceful diplomatic settlement as a diminishing but still live option. Another is John Quigley, who has been deeply involved in these issues since the early ‘90s, when he was the U.S. State Department representative in the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] efforts to resolve contested issues in Ukraine after the collapse of the USSR, particularly the status of Crimea and Donbass, his special concern. We have already discussed some of his current thinking, as of June 2022.
Quigley recognizes that though negotiations are currently stalled, “At some point, however, hopefully sooner than later, there will be a negotiated settlement that will need to deal with the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine” as well as Crimea. On Crimea, he recommends pursuing Zelenskyy’s suggestion that perhaps “the two sides could arrange a process of discussion about Crimea, a process that he said could last 15 years.” On Donbass, Quigley writes that “if Ukraine does anything even close to implementing the Minsk agreement [the 2015 Ukraine-Russia agreement under French-German sponsorship which called for a degree of autonomy for Donbass within a federal Ukraine], Russia could say that the aim of its invasion has been accomplished,” and a settlement could be reached.
Only a few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been more closely involved in current negotiation efforts than any other figure, expressed somewhat similar views on CNN. In his opinion, at the time of Zelenskyy’s election in 2019, a settlement favorable to Ukraine could have been reached along the lines of the Minsk agreement. He also feels that options for diplomacy remain open.
Whether such assessments are accurate, we do not know. There is one and only one way to find out: Try. That won’t happen, Quigley concludes, if “the U.S. goal is less to force Russia out of Ukraine than to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian” — a “reasonable” assessment he reluctantly comments.
That is the one factor in the mix that we can hope to influence, something that cannot be emphasized too strongly.
President Zelenskyy urged the United Nations (UN) to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine by stripping it of its security council veto vote. Just a few days ago, the EU president made similar calls. While, technically speaking, a country can be expelled from the UN for “persistent violation” of the principles of the Charter, isn’t this a misguided proposal? Isn’t it also true that the argument that Russia may not even be a member of the UN is invalid on account of the fact that the continuation of the USSR’s membership by the Russian Federation, which Ukraine itself accepted in 1991, is in line with long established procedures within the UN? 
One can easily appreciate President Zelenskyy’s sentiments, but whatever the technicalities may be, the very fact that the proposal is being seriously considered is enlightening. Did anyone consider punishing the U.S. in this manner when it invaded Iraq, to take only one example of its “persistent violation” of the core principle of the Charter that bars “the threat or use of force” in international affairs (with exceptions irrelevant here)? These violations that are not just persistent but extremely serious, matters we need not review even though they are virtually unspeakable in the U.S. mainstream.
We should, I think, keep our minds focused on what should be the central issue for us: U.S. policy. Should we accept the official U.S. position of fighting the war to severely weaken Russia, precluding diplomatic settlement? Or should we press the U.S. government to join most of the world, including Germans and other Europeans, in seeking a way to end the horrors before they bring further tragedy, not only to Ukraine but also far beyond?
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Democrats never fully appreciated the service Joe Manchin provided them over the first 18 months of Joe Biden’s administration.

Even when his party convinced itself that its fluky Senate majority conferred a mandate to remake the American social contract and spent trillions in its pursuit despite the effect on inflation, Manchin was there whispering “thou art mortal” in Democratic ears. Those susurrations became louder in direct proportion to the threat to American pocketbooks posed by rising consumer costs. Almost alone, Manchin lent the Democratic Party some needed credibility on the foremost economic issue of our time. And then, Manchin just gave up. The senator set his hard-earned reputation alight, and the conflagration may yet consume his political career.

Manchin’s courage first failed him in July. The Democratic Senator whose office had spent more than a year insisting that “we cannot add any more fuel to this inflation fire” while “millions of Americans struggling to afford groceries” settled for a fig leaf. Democrats had cobbled together a bill consisting primarily of federal spending on climate-change initiatives, but they called it the “Inflation Reduction Act,” and that was enough.

By backing the bill, Manchin sacrificed more than he got in return. “Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession,” the senator said last year. By this summer, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Manchin insisted that this particular spending bill “can’t be inflationary.” After arguing for months that taxing businesses and burdening consumers with rising costs was grossly unjust, he argued that tax hikes and costly regulations on the fossil-fuel industry were merited by cosmic notions of “fairness.”

But Manchin’s display of supplication didn’t go unrewarded. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer assured the senator that he would attack a proposal to fast-track fossil-fuel permitting to a must-pass resolution that would keep the government open into December. Progressives balked at the concession to a figure who had stymied their ambitions for so long, but assurances had been made. Schumer handed Manchin a loaded gun. All the senator had to do was demonstrate the mettle to hold his party hostage with it. That’s when the senator’s courage failed him again.

Facing mounting resistance to his attempt to offset the “Inflation Reduction Act’s” new costs with some relief, Manchin backed down. On Tuesday night, he agreed to move forward with a vote to fund the government without his permitting proposal. Manchin tried to clean up after himself by insisting that, if he had stuck to his guns, a government shutdown would follow, and that would “embolden leaders like [Vladimir] Putin who wish to see America fail.” The naivete demanded of the audience for a statement like this suggests they’re too young to vote, much less follow congressional machinations.

It’s been a mortifying experience for the Senator, one with long-term implications for his party. Manchin’s acknowledgement of the fact that Schumer cannot deliver his own caucus despite his assurances to the contrary renders the Senate majority leader a diminished figure. The secretive way in which the deal was struck infuriated the environmentalist left, while the reconciliation process that produced the “Inflation Reduction Act” scuttled any chance that Republicans would rescue Democrats from their activist class. But the most profound humiliations are Manchin’s alone to bear.

Here was a man who bestrode the Congress like a colossus. Manchin was “the man who controls the Senate,” a figure who wielded “an unfathomable amount of power over the president’s agenda,” and who chose “as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity.” He was harassed in his residence, savaged by his colleagues in Congress, and demonized in the national press. It was all endurable, he repeatedly claimed, because he served only the interests of his West Virginians.

In the end, according to his own terms, Manchin betrayed his constituents’ interests. And they’ve rewarded this betrayal in kind. As of April, Manchin enjoyed the approval of 57 percent of West Virginians, up from just 40 percent in the winter of 2021. By the end of August, however, Manchin had become not just the least popular figure in the country, but the object of scorn in his home state where just 26 percent of respondents approve of the senator’s conduct in office.

The senator still reportedly clings to the hope that his permitting plan might slip through before the end of the year, but his comments betray his state of resignation. “It’s revenge towards one person: me,” Joe Manchin complained of Republicans in the Senate, who refused to rescue him from the consequences of his bad judgment. Inauspiciously referring to himself in the third person, Manchin insisted he had “never seen” the kind of “revenge politics” of the sort that would have the “extreme liberal left siding up with Republican leadership” at the expense of good policy.

That’s not “revenge politics.” It’s just politics. Moreover, it’s a political bind Manchin would not have faced if he had just stuck to the principle he spent over a year and untold sums of political capital establishing. As smooth an operator as West Virginia has known for a generation, Manchin spent the past three months retreating from defensible terrain. He deceived his voters, duped those who took his anti-inflation credentials at face value, and discovered that the environmentalist left’s true believers don’t do transactional politics.

For all his hardships, Manchin has saddled his party with an even more tarnished reputation on the issue of inflation. He has exposed how little control his party’s majority leader has over his caucus. He has secured for them a fraction of what they sought in the “Build Back Better” bill while encumbering consumers with higher costs. And in 2025, his seat in the Senate is likely to be occupied by a Republican.

Where once stood a consummate legislator, there is little more than a punchline in his place. Though it is hard to summon any sympathy for the senator’s plight. It’s so rare to see a politician punished for abandoning principle in the pursuit of parochial political advantage. If that’s “revenge,” a just universe is its author.

In national elections on Sunday, forty-four per cent of Italian voters opted for right-wing candidates, all but insuring that the next Prime Minister will be Giorgia Meloni, whose party—Fratelli d’Italia, or Brothers of Italy—won more than a fourth of the total votes cast. Meloni, who has previously expressed admiration for Mussolini, ran a campaign based on anti-L.G.B.T.Q. and anti-immigration themes, while promising continued support for Ukraine. She is likely to govern with two other right-wing leaders: Matteo Salvini, the Putin-admiring former Interior Minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Putin-admiring former Prime Minister. An election was called after Mario Draghi, the outgoing Prime Minister, was unable to keep his governing majority together. A former president of the European Central Bank, Draghi had led the country through much of the COVID pandemic, assembling a broad coalition of the center-left, the populist Five Star Movement, and even Salvini, who, after he joined the Draghi government, saw some of his supporters rally to Meloni.

I recently spoke by phone with Alexander Stille, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School and the author of several books about Italian history and politics. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the center and left were unable to keep the far right out of power, where Meloni is most likely to focus her governing attention, and why a political system often seen as dysfunctional is well equipped to prevent the far right from enacting a wide-ranging agenda.

You have also written extensively about France, and it seems as if every time there’s an election in France between a far-right figure and a more mainstream figure, there’s a popular front, to use a loaded term, against the far right, even if this popular front has been weakening over the past twenty years. Taking into account that Italy has a different electoral system, why didn’t we see a popular front in its recent election?

There are a couple of reasons. No. 1, as you mentioned, is the nature of the electoral system. Because the French have a two-round system, you end up with a very stark choice between one candidate and another. On top of that, Marine Le Pen’s party’s long history of close ties with Russia and Vladimir Putin made it, particularly in the current climate, feel like a much riskier choice. Giorgia Meloni rather shrewdly tacked very hard toward the center and adopted a very strong anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine position, which prevented that.

In fact, the party in Italy that most resembles Marine Le Pen’s in terms of its foreign policy positions was the Lega, which had a real electoral collapse. Its leader, Matteo Salvini, very foolishly proposed going to Moscow on a trip paid by the Russian government to broker a peace agreement. When the public was outraged by that possibility, he had to cancel it. It was an embarrassing misstep on his part. He also criticized the sanctions. Silvio Berlusconi made some very incautious declarations about the Russia-Ukraine situation, suggesting that Putin had been forced into this invasion and that he wanted to install what Berlusconi called a governo perbene in Ukraine, which means a nice, respectable government. That, of course, backfired on him. Meloni’s clear, unequivocal, pro-Zelensky, pro-Ukraine position was rewarded.

Meloni’s party had been moving ahead in the polls for a long time, even before the invasion of Ukraine. Do you think her success had to do more with Ukraine, or rather with her not agreeing to become part of the previous government, which seemed to hurt Salvini?

You’re getting warmer there, in that the parties that did well were those that went against Mario Draghi’s government. Meloni was always in the opposition, and that made her popular. The other party in this election that arguably comes out well is the Five Star Movement, which surprised people, but Giuseppe Conte’s decision to bring down the Draghi government was rewarded, in effect. Salvini, Berlusconi, and the [center-left] Democratic Party all suffered at the polls—and they were the pillars of the Draghi government. One can read this as a protest vote that rewards the parties out of power.

While I think people in America see this as a kind of political earthquake, it feels much less that way to me. Remember that the predecessor party of the Brothers of Italy, Alleanza Nazionale, was in the government during many of the Berlusconi years. There have been further-right governments—not radically different from what we’re seeing now—that Berlusconi headed, which included the Alleanza Nazionale and the Lega. The first Conte government, in which Salvini was Minister of the Interior, was quite right-wing, with a very populist feel to it. So this seems less radical to me than it may to people who hear about the kind of genealogy of Fratelli d’Italia and conclude that the Fascists have returned to power. I don’t quite see it that way.

How do you think this government might differ from Berlusconi’s?

The underlying problems that Italy faces have been around for a long time. In the early nineteen-nineties, when Berlusconi came to power, Italy was in a remarkably good position in many ways. They’d come close to matching the U.K. in terms of G.D.P. per capita, or G.D.P. in general, although the country had a very high national debt. Since then, Italy has been one of the slower-growing economies in the world. The unemployment rate is high, and the national debt remains very high, which limits the country’s ability to spend its way out of some of these problems. All those problems remain. The Berlusconi governments were particularly unable to deal with them. The governments of the center-left were only marginally better.

How this government will deal with [these problems] is unclear. On top of that, they inherit a very complicated situation with high inflation and escalating energy costs, which may get radically worse during the winter, given the situation in Ukraine and Russia. And then what happens, almost inevitably, is that once you’re in the government, you start paying the cost of public dissatisfaction. This government should have a very large majority in parliament, so it should have the political means to deal with these problems. But these problems are difficult, and, even with all the votes, how you actually enact policies that address some of these issues is far from clear. They have a very tough assignment. They’ve been in the opposition, which means that discontent flows naturally toward them. And now it’ll start to work in the other direction.

What do you think inspires Meloni? What do you think she cares about?

She has not stood out in terms of pushing a particular economic program. The things that she’s said publicly are really more about identity politics than economic politics. She titled her autobiography “I Am Giorgia.” And part of a speech—in which she said, “I am Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother . . . I’m Christian”—was turned into a techno remix in Italy, which was meant to mock her but ended up making her quite popular. These are all identity statements. She was attacking the ways in which an E.U.-governed world was stripping away the traditional markers of Italian identity and making a kind of bland, unisex form of identity, an international cosmopolitan type of identity, stripped of all of its Italian specificity. I think the most radical thing that she has done is attack the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, and stress traditional forms of identity. That seems to be where her passions lie.

But what you really can do about that in political terms is not very clear to me. She has a twenty-five-point program that her party published, and at the top of it is: helping Italian families have more children. Italy, like most wealthy countries in the world, has an extremely low fertility rate, something like 1.3 children per woman. Very few countries have been successful in moving those numbers much. Oddly enough, France, despite not going toward the far right, is one of the countries that’s had a little bit of success in that regard. Meloni has programs that would reward families with children.

I’m going to lay out the optimistic case for her not doing too much damage: she can’t make too much of a dent in social policy; she is somewhat hemmed in on economic policy by being part of the E.U., and needing the E.U.’s pandemic-recovery funds; and she’s already taken a fairly moderate line on Ukraine. This suggests someone who is either unable or unwilling to go to extremes, except maybe on immigration. You mentioned Salvini as Interior Minister, when the stance toward migrants was often grotesque.

Dear Capitolisters,Imagine one day you turn on the TV news, and the lead story is a major natural disaster in a landlocked U.S. state—say, Arkansas or Vermont—that, simply because of its geography, gets hit regularly. The situation on the ground is bad—the residents of this state are relatively poor and are without power, food, energy, medical supplies, and construction materials. So they’re on TV telling their stories and asking their fellow Americans for help. It’s a common scene, and one that—thanks to our nation’s tremendous generosity in times of national crisis—is usually accompanied by heartwarming private efforts to help U.S. communities in need. In this particular case, however, aid can’t flow freely to this troubled locale because federal law prohibits delivery trucks from servicing the state unless they're made in America, owned by Americans, and operated by Americans. To make matters even worse, there are only a handful of eligible trucks available, only a few eligible points of entry, and no alternate train service to the area. Adding insult to injury, many foreign-made/owned/etc. trucks regularly pass by the state. Yet, by law, they can’t help—even as supplies run low. Unbelievable and outrageous, right? Well, it’s happening in Puerto Rico right now—in the wake of Hurricane Fiona—thanks to the Jones Act.I covered the Jones Act and other U.S. maritime “cabotage” laws in a previous newsletter, so go there for the gory details on these laws’ details and national harms. In short:The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 was presented as a plan to ensure adequate domestic shipbuilding capacity and a ready supply of merchant mariners in times of war or other national emergencies. Section 27 of the law—the “Jones Act”—revised existing U.S. cabotage laws and today restricts the domestic shipping of waterborne goods to vessels that are U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-flagged, and U.S.-staffed. As a result of the Jones Act, the United States has one of the most (if not the most) restrictive shipping systems in the world.As I noted at that time, the Jones Act has—for obvious reasons—particularly acute harms for parts of the United States that rely heavily on waterborne transportation because of their geography. In short, the law grants a small cadre of Jones Act carriers an effective monopoly on bulk shipping to these places, thus reducing supply and increasing prices of food, energy, and most other bulk commodities and consumer staples. While other U.S. locations have transportation alternatives, particularly trucks and trains, these places don’t, and air transport is prohibitively costly for most goods. So, while the Jones Act harms us all, our fellow Americans in these places suffer a lot more.And there’s nothing they can do about it.

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Many American schools are failing to provide all students with a quality education, and policy makers don’t seem to know what to do about it. Even before schools closed during the pandemic, 30 percent of graduating seniors failed to reach a basic level of competency in reading, and 40 percent failed to do so in math, according to national data. Performance gaps across race and socioeconomic status in both subjects have persisted to some degree for decades. Meanwhile, teachers are among the most stressed-out workers in America, and though concerns about educators leaving in droves have yet to materialize, the number of young people entering the profession has been dwindling for years.Over the past two decades, government officials have made various attempts to improve the state of American education—ramping up standardized testing, expanding charter schools, and urging states to adopt uniform benchmarks for student achievement—to little avail. Perhaps understandably, these efforts have mostly fixated on what takes place within the halls of America’s K–12 public schools. But less attention has been given to another profound influence on our educational system: our nation’s family policy. My reporting suggests that many of the elements fostering children’s academic success have roots outside of school—and that if America wants to help teachers, it will have to do a better job of supporting parents.The United States is a difficult place to raise a kid. Paid leave and affordable child care, common benefits in many of our peer countries, are not guaranteed. Available supports, such as tax credits or (unpaid) job-protected family and medical leave, sometimes exclude the poorest citizens. Many aids targeted specifically at needy families can be very difficult to access or come with employment requirements—a big ask in a country with little infrastructure to back working parents. These conditions not only make life unnecessarily difficult for caregivers; they also compromise the entire project of teaching American kids.[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]A child’s education begins the moment they are born, Dana Suskind, a founder and co-director of the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health at the University of Chicago and the author of Parent Nation, told me. The majority of physical brain development occurs within the first few years of life, before most children ever step into a classroom. This is a sensitive time, when kids are both particularly vulnerable to stress and well primed to gain cognitive ground. Parents play a major role during this stage as “children's first and most important brain architects,” Suskind said. Engaging kids in rich interactions—tuning in to what interests them, talking and reading to them, and letting them “talk” back—helps stimulate and strengthen the neural connections that build brain power and lay the foundation for learning. Many parents, such as those without paid leave or with punishing work schedules, have fewer opportunities to devote such attention to their children. Wealthier families can outsource the labor to professionals, but, as the country grapples with a massive shortage of child-care workers, more parents and kids are on their own.When children don’t get early support, their ability to learn suffers. According to Suskind, the nurturing back-and-forth between caregiver and child is linked to achievement in literacy, math, spatial reasoning, and self-regulation—all of which are all crucial to academic success. Without sufficient engagement, children risk entering school already behind. By one estimate from the 2017–18 school year, half of American 3-to-5-year-olds aren’t “on track” in at least one area of scholastic readiness, such as math and expressive language, or emotional development and behavioral management. “Asking teachers to try to make up the difference … is basically impossible,” Suskind said. Policy makers often point to universal pre-K as a potential solution, but although that could certainly help, it doesn’t start early enough. As young as nine months old, low-income children score worse on cognitive-development tests than their wealthier peers, and the disparity widens as they enter toddlerhood.[Read: The problem with kindergarten]The trouble may begin in early childhood, but the strain on American parents can continue to create issues once children start school. As caregivers, parents are expected to do a lot to support their children’s education: drop them off and pick them up, buy supplies, attend meetings with teachers, manage the logistics of extracurriculars and sports, help with homework. And if a child has a learning difficulty related to their health, such as trouble with their eyesight or hearing or a developmental disorder, parents are responsible for making and taking them to appointments and sometimes even implementing strategies learned in therapy at home. This high level of involvement in a child’s education is a powerful predictor of academic success, but it’s very difficult for many to undertake. “If you’re not able to either predict your work schedule, or get time off from your job to do those kinds of things, that kind of wipes out” your ability to be so engaged, Jennifer Lansford, the director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, told me.For low-income parents, the challenges can be more extreme. Children cannot learn effectively when their basic needs—food, shelter, sleep, safety—are unmet. Stress at home can lead to misbehavior in class and cycles of learning disruption, Lindsay Popilskis, a psychologist in Clarkstown Central School District, in New York, told me. When children act out, they miss class time, fall behind, and become frustrated. “So then they act out again,” Popilskis said. Although teachers employ a variety of strategies to manage classroom disruptions, with some success, they can only do so much if they can’t address the source of the problem.Suzanne Langlois, who has spent the past 17 years teaching at a public high school in a wealthy part of Maine, has no doubt that the resources among her students’ families make her job easier. She told me that she rarely sees the behavioral issues that she used to when she worked in a district with much higher levels of poverty. She finds it much easier to engage teens who aren’t distracted by concerns about their family’s health or employment. Having grown up with so much support, her current students are generally more confident learners. They still have problems, as all kids do, but those tend to be less pressing and easier for her to address. “It’s amazing how much more I get to actually teach,” Langlois told me. “When I was in [my previous district], I always felt like I had so many kids who had needs and I wasn’t meeting any of them. It felt terrible.” Now, with fewer kids in crisis, she has the bandwidth to check in with anyone who is having a hard time. “I get to feel more successful. And that brings more energy to the teaching.”Schools can be a lifeline and haven, especially for those with difficult home lives. “Right now we are and have been the unacknowledged social safety net for America,” Theo Moriarty, a teacher in Seattle, told me. Schools not only provide food, care, and vaccines, but also connect families with various community aids, or assist them as they navigate the labyrinthine process for obtaining Medicaid, housing, and other services. But this is a lot of responsibility to put on one institution. And ultimately, a child’s ability to succeed in the classroom is strongly influenced by the level of support they receive at home. Addressing the forces holding back American education is not possible without assisting America’s families. Leaving it to schools to play catchup is unfair to teachers and parents alike.

The map of competitive Senate elections is shrinking—and not just for November.Though Republicans began the year expecting sweeping Senate gains, the party’s top-grade opportunities to capture seats now held by Democrats have dwindled to just two—Nevada and Georgia—and both are, at best, toss-ups for the GOP. And while Democrats, somewhat astoundingly, have emerged from the primaries with at least as many plausible flipping chances as Republicans, Pennsylvania is the only GOP-held seat clearly favored to go blue, and even that isn’t guaranteed. It remains entirely possible that November’s results will leave the Senate divided again at 50–50, something that has not happened in consecutive elections since the Seventeenth Amendment established the direct election of senators more than a century ago.[Matthew Yglesias and Steven M. Teles: A moderate proposal]This standoff partly reflects the volatile dynamics of the 2022 election, in which Republican advantages on the economy have been largely neutralized by public unease over gun violence, the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling, the resurgent visibility of former President Donald Trump, and the GOP’s nomination of weak, Trump-aligned candidates. Yet the possibility of a virtual draw—after a campaign season in which the two sides have already poured more than $850 million into just the 10 most expensive Senate races—reflects larger changes in the electoral competition.One of the most powerful trends in modern politics has been for each party to consolidate control of the Senate seats in the states it usually captures in the presidential election. That’s lowered the ceiling on the number of Senate seats each party can win. And that lowered ceiling, in turn, has diminished each side’s ability to maintain control of the Senate majority for any extended period.The Senate is therefore frozen in the sense that neither side, in normal times, can seriously contest more than a handful of the seats held by the other party. Paradoxically, it’s unstable in the sense that the shrunken playing field leaves each side clinging to tiny majorities that are vulnerable to small shifts in voter attitudes in the very few states that remain consistently competitive.Throughout the 20th century, it was common for one side to build a comfortable majority in which it held at least 55 percent of the Senate’s seats. Republicans hit that level of dominance in 10 of the 15 Congresses from 1901 through 1930. Then, from 1932 to 1980, Democrats regularly reached the 55 percent threshold. (The big exception to this pattern came in the 1950s, when the ideological lines between the parties blurred and neither won more than a two-seat Senate majority through four consecutive Congresses.) Even from 1980 to 2000, one side or the other reached 55 seats seven times. Since 2000, though, the parties have controlled at least 55 seats only three times: Republicans immediately after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 and Democrats immediately after Barack Obama’s presidential victories in 2008 and 2012.Smaller margins have reduced both parties’ ability to defend their majorities for any extended period. Since 1980, neither party has controlled the Senate for more than eight consecutive years. That’s unprecedented: The U.S. has never gone four decades without a Senate majority that survived for more than eight years.Both the thin margins and frequent turnover are rooted in a third trend: the growing alignment between states’ votes for president and Senate.Especially through the second half of the 20th century, states routinely supported presidential candidates from one party and Senate candidates from the other. After the landslide reelections of Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, for instance, Democrats still controlled about half of the Senate seats in the states that voted for them both times.But as American politics has grown more partisan and parliamentary, those split-ticket senators have virtually gone extinct, which has reduced the number of states each side can realistically contest.[Read: Voters don’t split tickets anymore]After the 2020 election, the GOP held 94 percent of the Senate seats in the 25 states that voted for Trump both times while Democrats held 98 percent of the seats in the 20 states that twice voted against him. Democrats have squeezed out their current 50–50 Senate majority by winning eight of the 10 Senate seats in the remaining five swing states that switched from Trump to Joe Biden.Last spring, Republicans anticipated a midterm red wave that would break this stalemate, followed by a push toward a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority in 2024.Both parties identified Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Raphael Warnock in Georgia, Mark Kelly in Arizona, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire as the most vulnerable Democratic senators. Beyond that, Republicans hoped to seriously challenge Michael Bennet in Colorado and Patty Murray in Washington. The 2022 electoral environment remains unsettled, and it’s possible that continuing discontent over the economy could improve GOP prospects before election day. But for now, with Colorado, Washington, Arizona, and New Hampshire all moving toward the Democrats, it appears that the list of fully plausible GOP Senate targets has fallen to just two: Nevada and Georgia.All polls in Georgia show a tight race between Warnock and the Republican nominee, Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia football star. And with Republican Governor Brian Kemp holding a steady lead over Democrat Stacey Abrams, it remains possible that a Georgia crimson tide (pun intended) might carry Walker to victory. But Walker may be the most obviously unqualified Senate nominee in recent memory, and he’s facing a seemingly endless procession of personal scandals. Walker’s vulnerabilities might allow Warnock to survive even a strong Republican current; indeed all but one of the five most recent public polls have shown Warnock in the lead.That leaves Nevada as the best chance for Republicans to capture a seat Democrats hold now. A state with legions of low-wage workers, Nevada has heavily felt the effects of coronavirus shutdowns and inflation. The state also lacks the large pool of college graduates and white-collar professionals heavily motivated by abortion and other social issues lifting Democrats elsewhere. But even with all that boosting them, Republicans can hardly be confident about Nevada: For longer than the past decade, Nevada Democrats, operating the political machine assembled by the late former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have shown a knack for turning out just enough of their voters to win very close races.Democrats, unexpectedly, have kept a larger roster of GOP Senate seats in play. The Senate race most likely to change hands between the parties remains Pennsylvania, where Republican Pat Toomey is retiring. Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, although some polls show his margin narrowing, remains favored over Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee. Oz is laboring under strong unfavorable ratings and will likely face an undertow from the governor’s race, where Doug Mastriano, among the most extreme GOP nominees anywhere this year, could face a crushing defeat.Polls also show Democrats Mandela Barnes and Tim Ryan locked in margin-of-error races in Wisconsin and Ohio. Barnes and Ryan have given themselves a realistic chance to win against GOP opponents who are also laboring under high unfavorable ratings, Senator Ron Johnson in Wisconsin and J. D. Vance in Ohio. But those are both states where Democrats often struggle to find the last few percentage points of support they need, and this will especially be the case while Biden’s approval rating is depressed among the white non-college voters so plentiful in each.[Read: What the primaries reveal about the future of Trumpism]In North Carolina, Democrat Cheri Beasley is likewise step for step in polls with Republican Ted Budd—though, since 2008, that state has functioned as a kind of heartbreak hill for Democrats, who have suffered a succession of narrow defeats there. Florida has become an even tougher state for Democrats, but polls have consistently shown Democratic Representative Val Demings remaining closer to Republican Senator Marco Rubio than most analysts initially expected.This playing field still leaves Republicans a path to a majority, but one much narrower than they anticipated. If the GOP loses Pennsylvania, which remains likely, its most plausible path to retake the Senate is to win both Nevada and Georgia, while simultaneously holding off the Democrats in both Wisconsin and Ohio, not to mention North Carolina and Florida. Republican upsets in Arizona or New Hampshire, or Oz surging past Fetterman during the final weeks in Pennsylvania, would ease that pressure. But today, none of those outcomes look probable.Yet even if Democrats hold the Senate, it will likely be with a very narrow majority, and perhaps with nothing more than another 50–50 tie that Vice President Kamala Harris will step in to break. Democrats would still remain at substantial risk of surrendering their majority in 2024, largely because they will be defending all three of the seats they hold in the states that twice voted for Trump—Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. That won’t be easy in a presidential-election year.Early in Biden’s presidency, some Democratic strategists, such as the data analyst David Shor, ominously warned that the party could face an extended period of Republican dominance in the Senate, largely because of the GOP’s hardening advantage in heavily white interior states. The GOP probably does hold an edge in the long-term battle for Senate control because it is regularly winning slightly more states than Democrats in presidential contests. But the fizzling of the GOP’s Senate opportunities this year shows how difficult it may be for either side to secure a sizable, much less durable, majority.Political scientists and strategists alike usually find far more meaning in elections that deliver resounding change than those that reconfirm the status quo. Yet it will send a powerful message if neither party in November can break through the forces that have left the Senate so precariously balanced. It will show that the two sides remain locked in a grinding trench warfare where neither can overwhelm the other’s defenses and the handful of states in the no-man’s-land between them hold decisive power to tilt the national direction. That’s a recipe for more years of bitter but inconclusive conflict between two political coalitions that are now almost identical in size—but utterly antithetical in their vision for America’s future.

The men who summarized the news at the bullet-point-loving start-up Axios—Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz, and Jim VandeHei—may now be driving it. They may have tried to tamper with their book’s position on the New York Times best-seller list, Defector reports.
The three men recently published Smart Brevity, a book that champions the direct, abrupt style of the Virginia-based centrist tabloid. But the men have now adopted a new and innovative practice that has media insiders raising their eyebrows.
The intrigue: An internal Axios memo encouraged each employee to buy six copies of the trio’s new book. Workers could then get those purchases expensed by the company—a practice that could cost Axios more than $70,000, according to Defector. 
📈 If employees followed through, such a practice could send Smart Brevity soaring up the New York Times best-seller list. But it’s not entirely fair play, publishing insiders say.
Why it matters: Becoming a New York Times best seller can bring fame and notoriety—not to mention five-figure speaking gigs at big companies and conferences. It’s no wonder that Axios’s co-founders are chasing that kind of clout.But: The Times is wise to these kinds of ploys. The paper has long attached a typographical mark called a dagger (†) to titles that may have been bought in bulk by authors hoping to worm their way onto the list.
🔪 The paper also reserves the right to kick anyone off its list—for any reason.

📚 “Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors,” says the paper’s website.
But, but: A few best-selling-book insiders told me that they thought Axios’s method was deliberately designed to evade these controls. “It sounds to me like they’re trying to dodge the dagger,” one deeply connected columnist said.
Axios has more than 500 employees. If each employee buys six copies of the book, that may not show up as a single bulk purchase, evading the Times’ filters, algorithm experts told me.
The numbers: Every Axios employee could buy six books.
Count it up: One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. That’s six books.

No matter how you look at it, that’s more than five—but less than seven.
Driving the news: This is a weighty time for Allen, Schwartz, and VandeHei.
Axios was recently acquired by Cox Enterprises for $525 million, one of the largest media start-up acquisitions of the past few years. Only the Times’s own acquisition of sports-news giant The Athletic—and Axel Springer’s recent purchase of Politico—were bigger.

But online-media insiders say that the company’s most promising product remains the software that it uses to send its emails—and the distinctive style that it uses to write them. Axios hoped to license that product—and its trademark approach—to companies communicating with their own employees.
But, but, but, but—but: That core technology wasn’t actually included in the sale to Cox. It was spun off as a separate B2B company, dubbed Axios HQ.
💸 Axios HQ plans to raise its Series A next year. Axios’s board—on which Allen, Schwartz, and VandeHei all have seats—controls the board of Axios HQ, according to the company.

Corporate-governance and bullet-point insiders told me that Axios HQ’s success is riding on HR departments wanting to use the company’s distinctive style. If Smart Brevity looks like a best seller, that may make Axios HQ’s sales pitch easier.
Go deeper: Even if Allen, Schwartz, and VandeHei did try to shortcut their way onto the list, they wouldn’t be the first. They may have learned from one of Washington’s most famous recent residents: President Donald Trump.
President Trump’s 1987 The Art of the Deal only climbed the list because his company bought “tens of thousands of copies,” according to a later tell-all.

That didn’t stop the future president. The cover of every subsequent edition of the book has said No. 1 Best-Seller at the top.
Go deeper-er: “Smart brevity” is a literary tradition of its own. William Strunk and E. B. White’s classic book about writing, The Elements of Style, commands writers to “Omit needless words.”
Maybe that’s just what Allen, Schwartz, and VandeHei are doing. After all, Strunk and White didn’t say anything about skipping needless book orders.
Be smart: Six may seem like a lot—it’s more fingers than most people have on one hand—but it’s not the biggest number, according to numerological insiders.
Eighty-four, 3 bajillion, and seven are all bigger numbers than six, The Atlantic has confirmed.

But be careful. If a number has a negative sign in front of it, then it’s not bigger than six. “-9” is smaller than six, insiders cautioned. Let’s hope Axios employees kept that in mind.

What if the Senate passed an international climate treaty—a pact so powerful that it could avert nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming—and nobody noticed?That’s more or less what happened a week ago. Last Wednesday, the Senate ratified the Kigali Amendment, a treaty that will phase out the world’s use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, a climate pollutant used as an industrial refrigerant and in sprayable consumer products. Because HFCs are hundreds of thousands of times more potent at capturing heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, the Kigali Amendment, which has already been adopted by 137 countries, is the most significant environmental treaty that the United States has joined in at least a decade.But just as striking as the fact that the United States joined the treaty was how it did it. The vote to ratify Kigali was bipartisan, with 21 Republicans and 48 Democrats voting in support. Yet the move didn’t break through to the extent that other recent climate news has. “It’s very important, and nobody’s picked it up,” Michael Oppenheimer, a geosciences and international-affairs professor at Princeton, told me. In fact, even he didn’t know the treaty had actually been ratified until I told him.It deserves more attention. The Kigali Amendment was finalized by negotiators in Kigali, Rwanda, six years ago, updating the Montreal Protocol, a three-decade-old treaty. That pact was first adopted to eliminate chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, a class of chemicals that were found to be destroying the ozone layer. It has proved to be one of the biggest environmental victories of the past decades: CFCs have since been successfully phased out—and the gap in the ozone layer that those chemicals opened has begun to close.[Read: ‘The biggest thing to happen in international climate diplomacy in decades]The Montreal Protocol was updated four times before the Kigali Amendment, but this tweak is different. Instead of helping protect the ozone, this tweak was designed to specifically reduce greenhouse gases.Regardless, the muted response after the Senate’s move might be in part because the United States had already essentially decided to comply with the treaty, even if it declined to ratify it. In December 2020, Congress passed stringent targets for eliminating HFCs from the economy as part of its lame-duck COVID stimulus bill. (The same piece of legislation sent $600 checks to every American.) That bill is projected to eliminate the equivalent of roughly 900 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide pollution by 2036, more emissions than Germany produces in a year. But America’s full ratification and participation in the treaty will keep the legal regime that underpins the agreement strong.   The Montreal Protocol and its successive amendments are binding treaties with an enforcement mechanism: While the affected chemicals get phased out, only countries that are party to the treaty can trade the chemicals or goods that include them with other countries. This creates a form of lock-in for American companies exporting their products, Nina Kelsey, a political scientist at George Washington University, told me. American industries have tended to support the Montreal Protocol because they benefit from it. That has been true since the 1980s, when DuPont, the sole company that made a replacement chemical for CFCs, argued that the Reagan administration should join talks over the deal that became the pact.That’s one big reason the U.S. has remained so engaged in the Montreal process even as it has taken a far less active approach in other international treaties. It’s also why Republicans have historically remained friendlier to the Montreal approach relative to other climate policy.Even so, it wasn’t a sure thing that the United States would join this treaty, even if it had already agreed to abide by it. That the Senate got it done caps an unprecedented year for American climate policy. “Ratifying the Kigali Amendment, along with passing the Inflation Reduction Act, is the strongest one-two punch against climate change any Congress has ever taken,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, said before the vote. Normally, such partisan triumphalism is worth ignoring. But in this case … I think he’s actually right?In fact, after so many years of doing next to nothing on the climate, America seems like it’s in the middle of a mini–golden age for climate policy making. Apart from the IRA, Congress has also passed smaller bills, including the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act, that implement a dramatic new industrial policy and could increase federal spending on energy R&D.[Read: Congress just passed a big climate bill. No, not that one.]At the same time, California has vowed to ban new sales of gas-powered cars by 2035, and American automakers have made multibillion-dollar investments in a future where they mostly build and sell electric vehicles. The issue isn’t solved, of course: More legislation and executive action is needed, and the IRA could still fail as a policy experiment. But Congress is doing more now than it’s ever done.And it’s taking action through alternate channels, too. The success of the Montreal Protocol “shows that even if the major international focus on dealing with greenhouse gases under the Paris Agreement has been less effective, there are other ways to take a bite at the climate problem,” Oppenheimer said. “In this case, quite a big bite. There is a lot more activity around [addressing climate change] than the stultifying lack of progress in international negotiations sometimes makes it look.”

Cancer remains a severe and challenging health problem. It remains the number two killer in developed nations, after heart disease. It is also a complex category of diseases that are very difficult to treat. Despite that, progress has been steady, with cancer survival increasing by about 1% per year over the last few decades. This adds up – with cancer survival increasing by 32% from its peak in 1991 to 2019. There is no single reason for this increase, it is the cumulative effect of multiple new treatments and advances.

This is important to keep in mind when interpreting news reports of new cancer treatments. There will likely never be (at least not anytime in the foreseeable future) a “cure for cancer”. Rather, there will be a series of incremental treatments. New treatments always sound incredibly promising, and sound as if, in theory, they should eradicate all cancers. Then in clinical trials it turns out they are an effective treatment, but far from a cure. Yet they add to the total set of tools we have to fight cancer, chipping away at the problem and contributing to the increase in survival.

We also have to recognize the time it takes to develop these ideas into safe and effective treatments. Often there is a 20-30 year delay from original concept to making a significant impact in the clinic. At the beginning of my career in the 1990s I remember hearing about monoclonal antibodies and how powerful they were. Already they were an important tool for research. But it is really only in the last decade that monoclonal antibody therapies have taken off, and now it appears there is a monoclonal therapy for almost everything.

Viruses

The use of viruses as a tool for treatment also has a long history. The first virus was discovered in 1892, and soon after it was observed that viral infections could be associated with tumor regression. Deliberate viral infections were used to treat cancer, but they did not work very well and the viruses also causes significant morbidity in healthy tissues. There was a resurgence of research in the 1950s and 1960s, but ultimately this went nowhere. Now we are in the middle of another resurgence of anti-tumor (“oncolytic”) viral therapy spawned by increasing technology in genetic manipulation, where we can engineer viruses to be more specific and more deadly to cancer cells.

The new study

A recent study illustrates where the research is. The researchers are using an enhanced herpes simplex virus (the virus that causes cold sores) called RP2 which they have modified in two ways. The first is to add a GM-CSF (granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor), a fusogenic protein. Fusogenic proteins allow cells to fuse together. They also have effects on immune activity, and may both stimulate and repress tumor growth. So the effects are complex, but in this study the researchers were hoping that this protein would help target cancer cells, activate the immune system against them, and be directly oncolytic – killing cancer cells by causing them to fuse with neighboring cells.

They also added anti-CTLA-4 antibody-like molecules, which are a type of checkpoint inhibitor. This is another relatively new cancer treatment. Checkpoints (discovered in 1995) are proteins that keep immune T-cells from killing other cells, as a way of protecting host cells from auto-immune damage. Cancers often evolve these checkpoint proteins in order to protect themselves from the immune system. Checkpoint inhibitors are designed to inactivate these proteins selectively on cancer cells, allowing T-cells to target and kill them.

The RP2 virus, therefore, should target cancer cells, directly killing them and activating the immune system against them. Sounds promising. For some patients they also combined this therapy with a proven monoclonal antibody therapy – nivolumab (nivo), to see if there is a synergistic effect. Here are the results:

Objective responses with RP2 monotherapy were observed in 3 out of 9 pts including 1 CR for ≥15 months in mucoepidermoid carcinoma, 1 PR for ≥18 months in esophageal cancer with liver metastases, 1 PR in uveal melanoma with liver metastases that progressed at 15 months. Objective responses with RP2 + nivo treatment were 44.4% in cutaneous melanoma (4/9), 25% in uveal melanoma (2/8), and 33% in SCCHN (1/3) pts. All seven responding patients had previously failed anti-PD-1 therapy, with all but one response durable to date for >425 days.

Again, not a total cure, but these are promising results for such an early-stage study mostly designed to evaluate safety. Anti-PD-1 therapy is another checkpoint inhibitor. So these patients have already failed standard therapy, including similar advanced therapies. Any response is therefore likely incremental, meaning it can contribute to overall cancer survival.

Obviously a lot more research has to be done, and it may be another 10-15 years before these treatments become standard. So far it seems that the RP2 virus is well tolerated, but there is a lot of concern with safety when deliberately infecting patients with viruses. In this case the virus is directly injected into tumors, which does help with targeting, but viruses reproduce and spread so there is always concern they can cause harm to the host beyond the targeted tumor.

Conclusion: The hope and the hype of cancer treatments

Advances like this need to be looked at in two ways simultaneously. First, we need to be realistic about how long it takes to develop such treatments, and the ultimate impact they will have on cancer survival. They take a long time and generally have incremental effects. On the other hand, we are living in a science-fiction future from the perspective of just a few decades ago. We are using advanced genetic engineering and monoclonal antibodies to target proteins we didn’t even know existed in previous decades, and enhancing immune function in highly specific ways. It is imperfect and messy, but powerful. Improvements in cancer survival times are not only steadily increasing, they are accelerating.

This is what real science looks like, and it is far better then chasing our tails looking for magical or “alternative” therapies.

A referendum to end discrimination against gay couples in marriage and adoption just won big in Cuba. That’s a victory for the core values underlying the socialist project.

Cuba has just approved a new Family Code that ends discrimination against gay couples in marriage and adoption. (Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images)
 
Two-thirds of Cuban voters approved the country’s new Family Code on Sunday, itself a result of an extensive revisions process in which millions of Cuban citizens participated. The new code ends discrimination against gay couples in marriage and adoption. It also strengthens women’s rights by promoting “equal sharing of domestic rights and responsibilities between men and women.”
Preliminary results show that almost three-quarters of eligible voters participated in the referendum — and even bitter critics of the Cuban regime don’t seem to be suggesting that the results were falsified. The Catholic Church and evangelical churches on the island were strident in their opposition to the code, but they convinced less than a third of the Cuban public. That result is a huge victory for gay rights in a country where extreme and disturbing homophobia was official government policy just a few decades ago.
It also brings Cuban society closer to realizing the core values underlying the socialist project.

Socialism and Democracy in Cuba
A full and fair description of the Cuban system would include plenty of elements that merit criticism from a democratic socialist perspective — from the lack of democracy in most workplaces to the lack of a free press and real multiparty elections in the national government.
Of course, it’s always advisable for American critics to take a beat to remember the role of the United States in exacerbating the authoritarian features of that system by posing a massive external threat to its existence — from attempting to invade Cuba to spending decades sponsoring terrorism on the island to imposing brutal economic sanctions.
Even so, we should be able to walk and chew bubble gum when talking about Cuba. We can acknowledge the country’s very real accomplishments in fields like health care and education, and its real contributions to the rest of the world like helping to dismantle apartheid in South Africa, without denying the many dysfunctional and undemocratic features of its system. Similarly, we don’t have to choose between portraying the island as a perfect socialist democracy with a flourishing culture of political dissent and buying into the nonsense of American commentators who portray it as a tropical North Korea.
You can reasonably argue that the vote on Sunday was unfair in so far as the state-run media reflected the government’s support for the referendum — but it’s hard to argue that was meaningless. Almost a third of Cubans felt free to vote no, and multiple factors combined to give those voters more access than they’ve had in the past to alternative perspectives. First, this was the first referendum to take place in an era when most Cubans have access to the internet and social media. Second, a “no” vote was urged by some of the most important nongovernment institutions on the island: its churches.
As the BBC noted, some secular dissidents urged a no vote less out of any opposition to the substance of the new Family Code than because they saw it as a “unique opportunity to hand the country’s communist government a defeat at the polls.” It’s difficult to be sure how much of the no vote reflected such sentiments — especially since it took place against the background of a “serious energy crisis” spurring frustration with the government. But the main opposition seems to have been religious.

Liberal and Socialist Values
The Catholic Bishops of Cuba, for example, put out a statement insisting that the new code violated “a child’s right to have a father and a mother” and that “marriage between a man and a woman, which is the natural basis of the family, cannot be displaced or deformed to make way for other legally constructed ways” of forming families.
Of course, marriage between men and women isn’t being “displaced.” No one’s dissolving the marriages of Cuban heterosexuals. The issue is whether gay people should enjoy the same freedom to get married and start families. And whether children have a right to be adopted by parents who want to provide them with a loving home, whether or not the Bishops approve.
This is a basic question of liberal rights — which can be more fully realized in a socialist society than in a lasseiz-faire capitalist one. John Stuart Mill famously talked about “experiments in living” in his 1859 book On Liberty. He thought it was important for human flourishing that, in the one lifetime any of us get, we all receive a chance to figure out what will help us to live thriving and happy lives. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, telling people that they’re free to live however they want is a lot less meaningful if you don’t also give them the economic support to live however they want. Plenty of people stay in terrible relationships, for instance, because they can’t afford to move out — or have trouble keeping together good ones due to factors stemming from or exacerbated by economic stress.
A socialist society where everyone’s material needs have been met, and workplaces are more like economic republics where everyone has a voice and a vote than economic dictatorships where everyone has to shut up and do as they’re told, would have the potential to realize liberal values in a far more complete ways than even a very liberal capitalist one. But that has to involve formally securing, as Cuban voters finally did on Sunday, the basic rights against discrimination that have long been in place in many liberal capitalist societies.
Without a baseline commitment to egalitarianism, it’s hard to make sense of the normative foundation of socialist politics. One of the most powerful moral arguments for socialism comes in the Canadian Marxist analytic philosopher G. A. Cohen’s short book Why Not Socialism?. Cohen roots the socialist project in the values of equality and community.
The part about equality is straightforward. Capitalist economic structures distribute access to power, material resources, and other advantages on the basis of criteria like whether you were born into a rich family or a poor one, or whether you happen to have been born with just the right cocktail of dispositions, preferences, and cognitive skills to climb the ladder of some professional career. All of this is as morally arbitrary as creating a society where green-eyed people have access to advantages that blue- or brown-eyed people do not. Or, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, stopping gay people from being able to enjoy the same rights as straight people.
And even where people do end up with a smaller share of society’s resources as a result of their own free choices, and those choices are objectionable in some way, socialists don’t believe that the price of bad choices should be destitution. We think everyone has a right to a reasonable baseline. One way of understanding Cohen’s point here is to say that while even an advanced socialist society might have some inequality as a result of different personal choices, if you value someone and see them as part of a larger community with which you identify, you won’t want to see them fall dramatically below the quality of life you enjoy. Here, too, the connection between liberal and socialist values is obvious: if you care about gay people as much as straight people, why wouldn’t you want them to be able to get married and start families? And if you care about women as much as men, why wouldn’t you want full gender equality within straight marriages?
The Cuban vote is a vindication of all of these values, and should be celebrated as such. It’s also important and valuable that social equality in Cuba was instituted by the will of the voters.
Some critics casting around for grounds for criticizing the vote without opposing equality have tried to portray this as a negative. Juan Pappier, who works as a senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch, told the Washington Post that the fact that Cuba’s government is “asking people what they think about the rights of a minority shows they don’t really understand how democracies work.” There’s an obvious level on which that’s hard to take seriously. Marriage equality was instituted in the Republic of Ireland by a national referendum in 2015, for example, and I’ve never heard anyone suggest that this reflects poorly on the Irish understanding of democracy.
On a deeper level, the idea that this is the “wrong” way for equality to be instituted gets things exactly backward. It’s good that equality in Cuba doesn’t hang by the thread that similar protections hang on here in the United States — the opinions of the panel of nine graduates of elite colleges we’ve empowered to rewrite our laws. As we recently found out in the case of abortion rights, where the Supreme Court tossed out the Roe precedent and Kansas voters had to go to the polls to enshrine abortion rights in their own state constitution, building majority support for basic rights through a process of activism and education is a far more durable basis for social progress than counting on a panel of unelected philosopher-kings to do the right thing.
If Clarence Thomas gets his way, American voters in red states may soon have to follow Cuba’s example and reinstate their lost rights by passing pro-equality ballot measures. Meanwhile, anyone who cares about human rights should celebrate the decision of an overwhelming majority of Cuban voters to institute a Family Code that more consistently reflects the egalitarian values that animated their revolution in the first place. For all the very real flaws of Cuba’s system, on this question, today, all there is to say is: Viva la revolución.

J.D. Vance. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images.)I’m a fan of ironic nicknames: big men named “Tiny,” bald dudes who go by “Curly,” etc. But in politics there’s no nickname more ironic than RINO, short for “Republican in Name Only.”Originally it was supposed to describe Republicans who went along with Democrats for political expediency. In the 1990s, when RINO really took off as a conservative epithet, it was usually aimed at either liberal Republicans like Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter or obnoxious Republicans who relished opportunities to break party ranks, also like Arlen Specter.Today it basically just means “not MAGA” or “insufficiently Trumpy.”And that’s the irony, because the so-called RINOs are pretty much the only politicians who actually care about the Republican Party.The hopes of the GOP in retaking the U.S. Senate in November depend entirely on a handful of first-time candidates: celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, former football star Herschel Walker in Georgia, retired general and active crank Donald Bolduc in New Hampshire and, in Arizona, Blake Masters, a former libertarian minion of billionaire Peter Thiel.Aside from being hand-picked by former President Trump, what they all have in common is not just little-to-no political experience but also shallow roots in the Republican Party. And yet, they all vow to take on the RINOs controlling the GOP, and the RINO-in-Chief, Sen. Mitch McConnell.McConnell is a lifelong Republican who beat Bob Dole’s record as the longest-serving GOP Senate floor leader. He has earned Democratic animosity for decades, not least for orchestrating the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court. But in MAGA land he’s a liberal stooge. Stop laughing.Meanwhile, Trump, a former Democrat and Reform Party presidential wannabe, had to be talked out of leaving the GOP to start his own party. He’s never put the needs of the party ahead of his own. He uses the term RINO to describe any Republican who crosses him—on impeachment, on his election lies, whatever. He says“ ‘Giveaway’ Mitch McConnell” is a RINO “who gives the Dems everything, and gets NOTHING for it—Never fights for Republicans!”But the obsession with RINOs goes beyond Trump. In a recent interview with MAGA mogul Steve Bannon, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that if Masters wins, he won’t vote for McConnell as leader, and that will amount to “cutting the head off the snake” by “defeating Mitch McConnell, the RINO that has controlled the Senate for years now.”Indeed, Greene believes that was the real reason McConnell’s super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, was pulling nearly $10 million worth of ad buys out of Arizona: “Because Blake Masters is not the type of senator Mitch McConnell wants in Washington.”Of course, it couldn’t be that the race is getting away from Masters, and McConnell is opting to support salvageable races elsewhere, including in Ohio where J.D. Vance, another newbie handpicked by Trump and Thiel, is struggling to win what should be an easy race. The Senate fund last month announced an infusion of $28 million to support Vance’s effort.Trump has more cash on hand, $99 million, in his Save America PAC than the $80 million the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee have combined. Trump spent some money in the primaries to take out incumbent Republicans who were insufficiently loyal to him, but since then Save America has given a total of $757,000 to federal candidates and $150,000 to the Republican Party, according to Open Secrets. In August alone, it spent $3.9 million on Trump’s legal fees.McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund is spending 10 times that in Georgia alone, to drag Walker across the finish line (On Friday, Trump allies announced a new super PAC—MAGA Inc.—that will allegedly give more money in the midterms, but the real goal is to create a new vehicle to fund a 2024 bid.)In all of these Senate races, a RINO would have fared better. Arizona and New Hampshire Govs. Doug Ducey and Chris Sununu would have won in a cakewalk but balked at the idea of running amid Trump’s wreckage. Oz barely beat David McCormick in Pennsylvania's Senate primary, thanks to Trump’s help, but McCormick would have been the better general election candidate. And pretty much any Republican capable of speaking in complete sentences would surely be doing better than Walker is doing right now in Georgia. But Trump put his own needs ahead of the party’s.Trump accuses McConnell of being a “a pawn for the Democrats,” but Democrats benefit when Trump is in the news, which is why President Biden and the Democrats are trying to make the midterms all about Trump and “MAGA Republicans.” It makes you wonder: Who’s the real pawn?

Sign up for Charlie’s newsletter, Galaxy Brain, here.Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that’s censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.  A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.[Evelyn Douek: The year that changed the internet]Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”Everyone I spoke with believes that the very future of how the internet works is at stake. Accordingly, this case is likely to head to the Supreme Court. Part of this fiasco touches on the debate around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, despite its political-lightning-rod status, makes it extremely clear that websites have editorial control. “Section 230 tells platforms, ‘You’re not the author of what people on your platform put up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clean up your own yard and get rid of stuff you don’t like.’ That has served the internet very well,” Dan Novack, a First Amendment attorney, told me. In effect, it allows websites that host third-party content to determine whether they want a family-friendly community or an edgy and chaotic one. This, Masnick argued, is what makes the internet useful, and Section 230 has “set up the ground rules in which all manner of experimentation happens online,” even if it’s also responsible for quite a bit of the internet’s toxicity too.But the full editorial control that Section 230 protects isn’t just a boon for giants such as Facebook and YouTube. Take spam: Every online community—from large platforms to niche forums—has the freedom to build the environment that makes sense to them, and part of that freedom is deciding how to deal with bad actors (for example, bot accounts that spam you with offers for natural male enhancement). Keller suggested that the law may have a carve-out for spam—which is often filtered because of the way it’s disseminated, not because of its viewpoint (though this gets complicated with spammy political emails). But one way to look at content moderation is as a constant battle for online communities, where bad actors are always a step ahead. The Texas law would kneecap platforms’ abilities to respond to a dynamic threat.“It says, ‘Hey, the government can decide how you deal with content and how you decide what community you want to build or who gets to be a part of that community and how you can deal with your bad actors,’” Masnick said. “Which sounds fundamentally like a totally different idea of the internet.”“A lot of people envision the First Amendment in this affirmative way, where it is about your right to say what you want to say,” Novack told me. “But the First Amendment is just as much about protecting your right to be silent. And it’s not just about speech but things adjacent to your speech—like what content you want to be associated or not associated with. This law and the conservative support of it shreds those notions into ribbons.”The implications are terrifying and made all the worse by the language of Judge Oldham’s ruling. Perhaps the best example of this brazen obtuseness is Oldham’s argument about “the Platforms’ obsession with terrorists and Nazis,” concerns that he suggests are “fanciful” and “hypothetical.” Of course, such concerns are not hypothetical; they’re a central issue for any large-scale platform’s content-moderation team. In 2015, for example, the Brookings Institution issued a 68-page report titled “The ISIS Twitter census,” mapping the network of terrorist supporters flooding the platform. The report found that in 2014, there were at least 46,000 ISIS accounts on Twitter posting graphic violent content and using the platform to recruit and collect intelligence for the Islamic State.I asked Masnick whether he felt that Oldham’s ruling was rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the internet, or whether it was more malicious—a form of judiciary trolling resulting from former President Donald Trump getting kicked off of Twitter.He likened the ruling to this past summer’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and took away Americans’ constitutional right to an abortion. “You had 50 years of conservative activists pushing for the overturning of Roe, but this Texas ruling actually goes against almost everything the conservative judicial activists have worked for for decades,” Masnick said. “You have Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, the [Masterpiece Cakeshop] case, which are all complicated, but at the core, they are rooted in how to conceive of First Amendment rights. And in all cases, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have been all about the right to expand First Amendment rights inside organizations, especially the right to exclude.”[Charlie Warzel: How the internet became a doom loop]If the case ends up before the Supreme Court, many of the justices would have to decide against their priors in order to uphold the Texas law. Specifically, Justice Brett Kavanaugh would need to directly contradict his opinion in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, a case where Kavanaugh clearly argued that private forums have First Amendment rights to editorial discretion.Keller, of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, has tried to game out future scenarios, such as social networks having a default non-moderated version that might quickly become unusable, and a separate opt-in version with all the normal checks and balances (terms-of-service agreements and spam filters) that sites have now. But how would a company go about building and running two simultaneous versions of the same platform at once? Would the Chaos Version run only in Texas? Or would companies try to exclude Texas residents from their platforms?“You have potential situations where companies would have to say, ‘Okay, we’re kicking off this neo-Nazi, but he’s allowed to stay on in Texas,” Masnick said. “But what if the neo-Nazi doesn’t live in Texas?” The same goes for more famous banned users, such as Trump. Do you ban Trump’s tweets in every state except Texas? It seems almost impossible for companies to comply with this law in a way that makes sense. The more likely reality, Masnick suggests, is that companies will be unable to comply and will end up ignoring it, and the Texas attorney general will keep filing suit against them, causing more simmering resentment among conservatives against Big Tech.What is the endgame of a law that is both onerous to enforce and seemingly impossible to comply with? Keller offered two theories: “I think passing this law was so much fun for these legislators, and I think they might have expected it would get struck down, so the theater was the point.” But she also believes that there is likely some lack of understanding among those responsible for the law about just how extreme the First Amendment is in practice. “Most people don’t realize how much horrible speech is legal,” she said, arguing that historically, the constitutional right has confounded logic on both the political left and right. “These legislators think that they’re opening the door to some stuff that might offend liberals. But I don’t know if they realize they are also opening the door to barely legal child porn or pro-anorexia content and beheading videos. I don’t think they’ve understood how bad the bad is.”NetChoice v. Paxton is likely an opening salvo in a long, complex, and dangerous legal battle. But Keller offered up a more troubling possibility: This law amounts to a legal speed run that could drastically alter First Amendment law in such a way as to quickly end the battle. “The Supreme Court could strike this down but offer a framework for future litigation that opens the door to new kinds of laws we’ve never seen before,” she said. “Who knows what rule set we’ll be playing with after the Supreme Court weighs in.”What does seem clear is that this law is an outgrowth of politicians waking up to the raw power of the internet as a communications platform. Lawmakers’ desire to preserve or destroy content moderation is a battle for the soul of the internet, the limits of free expression, and the direction of our politics. We, the users, are caught in the middle.

In the first five months of sending expanded child welfare payments to American families, the IRS wasted only about $1.1 billion.
In other words, this might be the federal government's most efficient pandemic spending effort—despite the huge amount of money sent to an estimated 1.5 million taxpayers who did not qualify for the payments.
An inspector general report for the Treasury Department released Tuesday details what the IRS got right (98 percent of payments were distributed correctly) and what it got wrong during the first five months of the expanded child welfare payments authorized by the American Rescue Plan, which cleared Congress in March 2021. The law increased the annual child tax credit paid to parents from $2,000 to $3,000 per child (and $3,600 for children under age 6) and made the tax credit fully refundable—meaning that parents could receive the benefits even if they paid no federal income taxes. Taxpayers with more than $75,000 in annual income or couples that earned more than $150,000 received smaller payments that phased out as income levels rose.
Effectively, it turned the child tax credit into a subsidy paid out by the IRS to parents in monthly installments. The boosted payments applied only during 2021, but the structural changes to how the child tax credit operates are permanent.
From July, when the law took effect, through November of last year, the IRS distributed more than $76 billion in child welfare payments. Of that total, about $1.1 billion was distributed to people who did not qualify for the payments, while another $3.7 billion should have been paid to about 4 million taxpayers who qualified, according to the report.
That means the IRS made about $200 million in fraudulent or wrong payments each month, which is simultaneously a staggering total and also a remarkably efficient result for a government spending program.
Compare that to other pandemic-era efforts that have been plagued by fraud. Earlier this month, federal prosecutors charged 47 people connected to a Minnesota nonprofit with allegedly stealing $250 million from a pandemic-era federal food program. That's the largest scheme uncovered to date, but it's only one data point in a constellation of wasteful and fraudulent pandemic-era spending.
An estimated 10 percent of the Paycheck Protection Program's $820 billion was stolen by fraudsters, and taxpayers ended up paying roughly $4 for every $1 of wages and benefits to workers. Meanwhile, the federally boosted unemployment benefits were an even more costly mess, with as much as 20 percent being wasted, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Maybe the most wasteful effort of all was the federal aid to state and local governments, with taxpayers dropping about $800,000 per job saved, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.
The child welfare payments likely benefited from some structural arrangements that made the program less pervious to fraud. For one, the IRS already has piles of data about taxpayers and their dependents from years of filed tax returns. And rather than creating a new stimulus or welfare system out of whole cloth, the boosted child subsidies were merely piling more money and a different distribution system onto an existing tax credit. Eligibility for the boosted child subsidies was based on taxpayers' 2019 and 2020 tax returns, which were already filed before the program was announced.
In short, if your goal is to defraud the federal government, it's easier to do that with a fake company or a fake unemployment claim than with a fake child.
Still, the fact that this program resulted in more than $1 billion in wrongful payments in just five months despite all the structural advantages that it had over programs like the PPP says something too. Even when the federal government has all the tools it needs to effectively and correctly redistribute wealth, a large pile of money is going to be wasted in the effort.
By any reasonable standard, $1 billion in waste over just five months would be a failure. Grading on the government curve, however, makes this look almost like a success.
The post IRS Sent $1.1 Billion in Child Welfare Payments to the Wrong People appeared first on Reason.com.

Economist Russ Roberts is known for his extraordinary gift at finding creative ways of communicating the power of free market capitalism to the general public. 
He's the host of the wildly successful podcast, EconTalk, which has been running weekly episodes since 2006. He's the author of three novels and, along with filmmaker John Papola, he created the blockbuster Keynes vs. Hayek rap videos.  
More recently, his interest has turned to the fundamental inadequacy of his chosen discipline to comprehend what matters most to people. "I came to realize that economists…tend to focus on things that can be measured," he tells Reason. "Dignity is hard to measure. A sense of self is hard to measure. Belonging is hard to measure. A feeling of transcendence is hard to measure. Mattering—that you are important, that people look to you. [These sorts of things are] about the life well-lived and they're not about getting the most out of your money. They're not about what the interest rates are next week. And economists truthfully have virtually nothing to say about these things."
Robert's new book is called Wild Problems and it deals with the decisions that define us: whether to marry, whether to have kids, what kind of work to pursue. He says these are the sorts of questions that can't be figured out with economic modeling and cost-benefit analyses.
Reason talked with Roberts about how he makes sense of a world that is richer than ever in material resources and yet suffers increasing numbers of "deaths of despair." We discuss his own life, from earning a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s to becoming president of Shalem College in Israel to the central role that religion plays in his life.
Photo Credits: Russell Roberts, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Music Credits: "Little Eyes—Instrumental Version," by Yehezkel Raz via Artlist.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor and Adam Czarnecki.
The post Russ Roberts: Why Economists Suck at Explaining Life appeared first on Reason.com.

In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, Michael Chui talks to Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University, who serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. With colleague Alex Tabarrok, Cowen is coauthor of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and cofounder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.

00:00 Audio Forward Thinking on talent, state capacity, and being hopeful with Tyler Cowen

Podcast transcript

Michael Chui (co-host): Janet, what makes you hopeful about the world?

Janet Bush (co-host): Well, there are so many challenges, but I have been reading about climate change and evolution and it is really interesting that there is already evidence that organisms are changing—evolving—very quickly in response to climate change. Not all of them but a lot of them. So that gives me quite a lot of optimism. But obviously our modern world is incredibly complex, and we talk a lot about that on the podcast. So it would be really great to find out where we can be more hopeful because solutions are actually coming.

Michael Chui: That’s one of the topics that today’s guest thinks a lot about, and his answer is to identify and follow the talent. He also recently coauthored a book about talent, specifically how to identify people who will bring energy, creativity, and care to solving big problems.

Janet Bush: Of course, that is incredibly topical. MGI has recently published a report on human capital and how it is developed in the world of work. So I am fascinated to hear what he has to say.

Michael Chui: Tyler, welcome to the podcast.

Tyler Cowen: Happy to be here, thank you.

Michael Chui: I’d love to start with, how did you end up where you are today? Where’d you grow up? What did you study? What are the things that led you to where you are?

Tyler Cowen: I was born in northern New Jersey, where I grew up. Very early in life, I was a chess player. That shaped how I think a great deal. I quit chess completely at age 15—by 14 figured I wanted to be an economist. And since then I’ve worked on a lot of different projects, not just academic ones. But I think of myself as a creator of ideas in internet space now, most of all.

Michael Chui: You never play chess anymore?

Tyler Cowen: I watch chess, so I love Magnus Carlsen. But, yes, I literally never play chess. It’s an all-or-nothing thing, and by the time you get older it’s better just not to do it, I would say.

Michael Chui: Got it. Why is that?

Tyler Cowen: Well, it’s somewhat addictive, right? If it’s going to be your thing, that’s fine. But my things are economics, and talent, and reading and writing on the internet, and travel, and also food, and I think those are ultimately more rewarding to do. But to watch chess in an open browser window, and devote five to ten minutes a day to watching the game, it’s still a lot of fun, and it’s a nice break from work.

Michael Chui: Fascinating. You mentioned talent. You recently coauthored a book with Daniel Gross entitled Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. What was the central thesis of this book?

Tyler Cowen: That talent is remarkably important. That we’re doing a poor job, misallocating talent. And there are a variety of ways, outlined in the book, we can do better. This book tries to be “the” talent book: a one-stop shopping guide to how to think about identifying talent.

Michael Chui: What are the macro implications of [the] lack of good matching? Is this a potential for accelerating productivity, for instance?

Tyler Cowen: We have slower economic growth when we don’t match talent well. We have a lower level of per capita income. When a recession comes, as was the case in 2008, labor markets adjust much more slowly. The consequences for human welfare are considerable.

Also, if one thinks about women or minorities, you get persisting injustices because we’re not in every way good at identifying talents in those areas, either. So identifying talent better, it’s one of the most important things we could do. And at a global level, there are billions of people who don’t have the opportunities they could have. Work from a distance is enabling some of that, but all of a sudden there’s a mad scramble on to find all this talent and put it to work.

Michael Chui: There’s this old phrase about talent being highly distributed, but opportunity not being so. Your book is a bit of a how-to book—not a bit, it is a how-to book. How widely do the prescriptions within the book have to be applied in order to achieve matching that’s actually going to matter at a high level?

Tyler Cowen: One lesson of the book is to always consider the context you’re operating in.

The interview questions you should ask in one part of the world, or for one sector, are not always the same you should ask for another sector. But there are some very general principles that mostly hold true. One of them would simply be to engage people conversationally to get them out of the interview mode, to do something other than test for their advance prep, which rapidly becomes boring for everyone.

And, yourself, get used to the notion of being surprised and dealing with different cultures. It could be a different culture in South India, or it could be a different culture in West Virginia. It varies, but to have a greater breadth of mind as an interviewer and be culturally much more open. And that’s good advice for dealing with people just about everywhere.

Michael Chui: That makes tremendous sense. I’m curious, though: you had mentioned previously the challenges that women, and in some cases ethnic minorities, other folks, for whom sometimes in an interview context, latent or other biases might manifest themselves. You also talked, in the book, about structured interviews: ask the same question, have a rubric for scoring them. That in some cases is described as one way to mitigate those types of biases.

And yet you suggest that maybe those aren’t necessarily the best things, as you talk about being open to surprise and asking these conversational types of questions. How do you think about those two things—this idea that there are bureaucratic ways to address these types of long-term biases, as well as your ideas around how to have a conversation that creates surprise?

Tyler Cowen: Bureaucracy is inevitable, especially when you’re hiring large numbers of people. Very often you need a standardized process. It’s not even a matter of choice. But, that said, when you have one, whether you like it or not, you end up selecting for credentials.

For my heart surgeon, I actually want credentials. But for a lot of opportunities, credentials may be overrated, especially at a global level. At the margin, Daniel and I advocate that people attach more weight to unstructured interactions.

For a lot of opportunities, credentials may be overrated, especially at a global level.

It may even just be how you chat with someone in the three minutes before the structured interview starts. Or maybe you met them some other time at a conference, and you have memories of a highly unstructured interaction. We both think the unstructured interactions are so much more informative.

And, especially for leadership positions, or more important positions, that what you really want to do is develop an understanding of, when the person is simply talking about things, what is their level of detail? What is their degree of enthusiasm? How well do they understand the social hierarchies they’re somehow engaged with?

It could be their model train hobby, but you will learn more than if you simply flatly, mechanically ask them, “Could you please tell us about a mistake you made at an earlier job?” Everyone is ready for that question. Everyone has their little anecdote that makes them look self-critical but not too terrible. It’s fine to ask it, but you’re just not going to learn that much, and mainly you’re testing for prep.

Michael Chui: If you do have these insights you didn’t expect, necessarily, and in many cases you have multiple interviewers, how do you calibrate that all together as you’re making a hiring decision—this candidate versus that candidate? What’s the “team” way that you integrate these insights?

Tyler Cowen: Again, it depends a great deal on the structure of the interaction. If it’s venture capital, I’m very much a fan of the model not to look for consensus, but if there’s one person who is extremely enthusiastic to go ahead and fund the project. You’re looking for “tells” so to speak. Maybe only 2 percent of your investments will go very well, but that means you have to take a lot of chances.

Now, if you’re trying to hire, say, a CFO for a reasonably large corporation, that is not the correct way to do it. What you want is someone who is extremely conscientious and who actually will be trusted by a lot of other members in the organization. In that case you probably would go for a more consensus approach.

But what I see in labor markets is more and more sectors are taking on properties of the venture capital approach, where a relatively smaller percentage of the employees add more and more of the value. And at the margin, people ought to be nudged in the direction of greater risk-taking, less bureaucratization, realizing that not everyone should have a veto in your interview process, and that some people will, ex ante, have to be taught to accept the idea that someone they objected to maybe is going to be hired anyway. To preinvest in trust is really the thing you need to do in those circumstances.

Michael Chui: Preinvest in trust in the interviewers, or the hiring group, in order to say, “Look, I wouldn’t have picked that person as my number one choice, but someone thought that was a terrific person, let’s bring them on, take on that risk”?

Tyler Cowen: And to say to someone with trust, “Well, I understand your objection to this candidate, but we see the upside, and we’re going to take a chance in this case,” and not have the trust within the organization be broken. That’s something you have to do preemptively.

If you just wait until the last minute and then upset everyone by picking a candidate some of them don’t like, probably it won’t go that well, even if the candidate is perfectly fine. So preexisting investments in trust, trustworthiness, and also building out your “soft network” of contacts so your institution has the opportunity to take a lot more chances—those are the things that institutions need to do.

Michael Chui: Your coauthor is a venture capitalist. There are different asset classes, and their portfolios are constructed differently. You have index funds, and then you have VC funds, where one in ten is outright success, and the others all are failures. Are you suggesting that in the spectrum of hiring decisions, we ought to move towards higher levels of risk in general, in organizations as you’ve observed them?

Tyler Cowen: With caveats. Again, I don’t want my heart surgeon to be hired on that basis. But do I see the world as a whole as becoming more like tech, needing to look more for globalized talent, seeing a relatively smaller percentage of top workers adding a higher percentage of the value? That is absolutely the world I observe. Again, with qualifications—context always matters. But, yes, on average.

Michael Chui: You’d also authored a book, as we talk about a smaller number of people—and my colleagues have observed that, too, from a consulting perspective, creating more of the value within an organization—your book entitled Average Is Over.

It suggests that, in fact—and, again, you should tell me if I’m misreading it—that in fact you will have these superstars, and others have observed this as well, of course. And then, arguably, some of the average, the middle, might be hollowed out. Is that our future in the labor market?

Tyler Cowen: I would put it this way: for the world as a whole, income inequality has been falling fairly radically. So many parts of the world that were quite poor now have quite a few well-to-do people, or middle class, or even the poor people are just much better off—not living off a dollar a day, but actually subsisting in some meaningful way.

To the extent one cares about income inequality, that is going down, and that is good news. It is nonetheless the case, as you indicate, that within organizations, or in many cases within countries or within particular regions, income inequality is going up.

For instance, the very-best-selling author J. K. Rowling: she will be making more relative to the average author than might have been the case 30 or 40 years ago. We have this weird duality: inequality going up in some ways, down in others.

I don’t think it’s a perfectly ideal picture, but if you’re managing an organization, it’s one you need to be realistic about, and to maximize value for the world, you do in fact want to hire the most talented people. You’re not doing the world a favor by leaving them out there, doing something less valuable than what they could be doing.

Michael Chui: That absolutely makes sense from a corporate leader standpoint. If you put on your social welfare hat, how do you think about the evolution of labor forces? Again, as you said, on a global basis, we have many people who are no longer living in poverty, which is an amazing development. And, as you’ve described, economic growth as being an imperative for the species, I guess.

But you do see these localized places where there are folks you could argue are being left behind, even if they’re experiencing some growth in incomes over time. Any reflections? Thoughts? Sources of optimism? Or maybe that’s just the way the world is?

Tyler Cowen: I think it’s perfectly fair to argue that our government, or other governments, should take actions they’re not currently taking. I don’t have all the answers there. Some policy moves, to me, seem quite easy and obvious, like Medicaid expansion in more states. Most states have done it, some states haven’t, the ones that haven’t could do it—it’s very simple. It would just take one signing of the pen. We know how the program works. But if you’re asking, well, how do we get many fewer Americans to take opioids, again, whatever we should do, it seems to me far less simple. And we could make a lot of progress in those areas, but I don’t necessarily think I know how.

Michael Chui: Got it. Let me ask another question. You’ve also written about “excess credentialism.” You and others have talked about the fact that more and more occupations now have a four-year degree requirement, which doesn’t necessarily make sense in terms of the skills that somebody needs to have. Others have suggested we need to move more towards a skills-based labor market, basically reforming the credentials so that they’re more closely related to the skills necessary in a job. I’d love to get your reflections. Is that a possible path forward, in terms of being able to better match, in addition to being able to interview better?

Tyler Cowen: There’s one simple move that the state of Maryland has taken, and other states have not yet followed suit. But that is to take literally thousands of state government jobs that do not in any obvious way seem to require a college degree—it could even be, you know, a toll taker—and abolish the requirement for a college degree.

Now, that’s a simple step. It’s not going to solve all the problem, or even 3 percent of it. But it’s clearly a no-brainer once you think about it. We should start with the no-brainers, teach people that there’s nothing sacred about a four-year college degree. Have employers in some cases take more chances on, say, people who were formerly incarcerated, or maybe mothers who left the labor force or who didn’t finish college.

There’s an awful lot of talent in those individuals, but we keep on asking for more and more credentials. My father ran a chamber of commerce very successfully. He had no college degree. That’s unthinkable today. It was one of, I think, the ten largest chambers in the United States. He barely got through high school, was nonetheless charismatic, maybe irregular in some ways—he never did his homework. But the things he was good at he was very good at. And it’s harder to be like that today.

Michael Chui: How did this happen?

Tyler Cowen: It was all the good people who did it, not the bad people. College overall is a good thing. It’s great if people can go to a good college, get through college. But the cumulative effect of everyone moving in that direction has been excess stratification, too much credentialism, caring about college for its own sake, too much homework.

High school is too much something about how to get into a college. And I think the whole system now is just fundamentally offtrack. It’s not about curiosity and learning; it’s about the next set of hurdles. But at the end of the whole thing, we’re never quite sure what the goal really is anymore.

Michael Chui: Let’s pull on this thread about talent development. Actually, some of MGI’s research on human capital finds that human capital is about two-thirds of the wealth of an average individual, and that work experience, the skills you derive past your formal education, contribute about half that value across a number of different countries that were studied. To what degree can talent, as you are screening for and trying to match better, be something that one develops over time?

Tyler Cowen: Talent requires development. If all you end up with is what you start out with, you’re not going to be good, really, at anything.

One of our main problems is too many people, too quickly, get on tracks that are rather flat, that don’t have much of a potential upward curve. And this, in turn, gets capitalized into individual expectations. People think of themselves as not better than something, they think of themselves as people maybe who never would start a business, or who never would be very successful, or who never would do better than how their parents did.

And once you’re in these what I call “psychological traps,” it’s oddly hard to get out of them. External forces can do it—you could meet a mentor, you could have a formative experience at college—but most people actually don’t get out of them. And I don’t think we think carefully or explicitly enough of how can we bend upwards everyone’s what I call “aspiration curve” so they can strive for higher and better things.

Michael Chui: That actually tracks very well with the MGI research, too, which shows that those who have moved up, say, income quintiles, for instance, are typically those who have changed roles to ones where new skills were necessary. And that’s what helps build them. You mentioned mentors. What are the types of catalytic events or contexts that encourage or allow people to make those jumps or change their aspirations, as you said?

Tyler Cowen: I think for many young people in particular, one of the best things you can do for them is just to send them to an event. But send them to an event that has some top talent in whatever is the field they care about. They may not get one-to-one time with that talent, but they will absorb the energy of that talent, they’ll see how that person presents, how they carry themselves, what kind of charisma they have. The idea of top talent will become emotionally vivid to them.

Just sending people to events is one thing. Better yet, if the person can get a mentor, that’s harder. It’s costlier, but that’s better yet. And if the person can get a small group of peers who work on a similar problem, I call this the “small group theory.” The Beatles are a classic example of this. They all loved music, they worked together, they made each other much, much better. [In] the tech world you see so many examples of this—small groups of programmers, or people with a start-up working together.

So more mentors, more small groups, and more people going to events and just seeing how good the really good people are.

Michael Chui: What events do you send people who are interested in economics to?

Tyler Cowen: There is a young woman, I believe she’s 17 years old, she wanted to go to a biomedical conference in Belgium. I’m not sure she literally didn’t have the money, but she’s the daughter of immigrant parents. I had the sense they were not a very wealthy family. For the monetary constraint there to be eased, my program, called Emergent Ventures, we just sent her enough money to go and take the trip. And hang out with top biomedical scientists, and just see them.

That, to me, is more important than whatever factually she might have learned at the conference. So I do a great deal of that with my own programs, just send young people places, pay for it, make it easy for them.

Michael Chui: What is Emergent Ventures?

Tyler Cowen: Emergent Ventures is a program I founded four years ago. It is an attempt to de-bureaucratize philanthropy. There’s an application page, it’s online, you can Google right to it, it’s basically one page, it never asks where you went to school, no CV is required, there are no letters of recommendation.

It’s basically, “Write something for me and tell me what you’re up to,” and I see if someone can impress me. And, if so, there’s then a Zoom call, which may or may not go well, and possibly awards. That’s Emergent Ventures. We operate at 2 percent of overhead, which is far less than most of the rest of philanthropy.

Michael Chui: And how would you describe the degree of success you’ve had with it?

Tyler Cowen: It is not for me to judge. I find it enormously exciting. A lot of our winners are still very young. This young woman who went to Belgium, we cannot yet judge her a success or failure.

Someone emailed me this morning, someone I had forgotten about. He says, “Thank you for having taken a chance on me. We’ve now raised $27 million.” And I hadn’t heard from him. Sometimes it’s the people you never hear from who are doing the best, and he’s doing fantastically well. There’s a nonprofit we initially funded called Recidiviz, which has been very successful in getting people out of jail during COVID times. That’s a nonprofit.

There’s a testing company called Curative that, at its peak, was doing about 11, 12 percent of all U.S. testing for COVID. They got their start with money from us. Many other examples. We have a whole branch of it now called Emergent Ventures India, which is solely India focused. It is run by an Indian woman, not by me. But I just went to India, to our meet-up event, and met everyone, thought they were phenomenal.

Michael Chui: What’s the market failure, or philanthropic market failure, that Emergent Ventures is addressing? Is it just the bureaucracy of applying for funding?

Tyler Cowen: It’s hard to apply for small grants. If you’re very young, maybe you don’t even think of applying, or there’s not a simple way your application actually will be processed and taken seriously. But you have foundations with very large staffs, people not wanting to fire their staffs, they get captured by their staffs, they’re friendly with them, so they don’t really take many chances.

They want projects whose outputs can be easily measured across a short to medium run. Those may be good projects. I’m not against measuring value created. But at the same time, it leaves holes for weirder, younger, smaller requests that Emergent Ventures tries to pick up.

Michael Chui: Do we need more of this?

Tyler Cowen: We need more of this, absolutely. The good news is that a lot of philanthropies actually have copied Emergent Ventures. A lot of these effective altruist givers, the way they’ve set up their giving, heavier reliance on scouts, minimum of bureaucracy, quick decision, low overhead, willingness to take chances. It is being copied and it’s spreading, and I find this very heartening.

Michael Chui: So the EA [effective altruism] folks also are known for doing lots of analysis about benefits and all these discussions about what discount rate you should use and all these sorts of things. How does that square with this idea of quick decisions for small amounts?

Is it that an EA practitioner would say, “Look, these are the areas in which I want to fund, and if someone applies for a small grant, a young person with a small grant, I’m just going to go for it because I know that that’s a place that needs more innovation”?

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Tyler Cowen: I like what they do, but my approach is somewhat different from theirs. As I understand what they do, they first identify key areas that they think are super important. It could be antimalaria, it could be bed nets, it could be limiting evil AI from taking over the world. And then you look for people in those areas.

I’m not opposed to that, but it’s not what I do. I’m much more “person first.” I’m willing to consider, not any area—it ought to feel important—but I view it as more an investment in the person, and I have, I think, more faith that the person’s own understanding of what’s important will very often be better than mine. That would be the difference.

Michael Chui: VCs describe this, sometimes, as “funding the team,” right?

Tyler Cowen: And that’s how I view it, yes. And they’re somewhat more—I don’t mean to speak for them, but to me they look like more “funding the area.” “Because we’ve decided, well, animal welfare is important, or this is important.” And I’m not even saying I disagree with all of their rankings. I just think it’s so hard to find people who will succeed at all that it’s a luxury I feel I don’t quite have.

I want to go first with the successful people, and they have a whole career of doing great things, and they may get to these other areas later on. But I want to start with elevating the success first, not the area.

Michael Chui: What is it you’re looking for?

Tyler Cowen: Curiosity, enthusiasm, caring about things, a sense of self-potency, being different, maybe being someone who cannot fund themselves through ordinary mechanisms.

I just had a call with an individual in Mexico who is creating videos in Spanish to explain economics to other people in Mexico. We will be funding him at some level. And he’s just out there, you know? No formal affiliation, really; no one else to support him. He’s worked very hard so far. I’m not sure he can make this sustainable—in a way, I’m pretty skeptical. But I see the fire in the belly, and I think he’ll do good things in some way. And to give him a vote of confidence and some actual support, I’m all for it.

Michael Chui: Let’s swing from the opposite side of the spectrum, from individuals who have great promise to these broader ideas. In a blog post, you described “state-capacity libertarianism” and contrasted it with another, somewhat similar view. What is it?

Tyler Cowen: I would put it simply for those of you not familiar with all the arcane terms. I’m a big believer in capitalism, but I’m also a big believer that government needs to get some things right for capitalism and democracy to continue. And one of those things is to protect us against pandemics, another is national defense, another would be some version of a social welfare state so that people feel safe enough that they have a stake in the system and that they will continue to support capitalism and democracy.

So my term “state-capacity libertarianism,” it’s beyond awkward. I never thought it would take off as a term. It’s simply to express [that] “we need these two sides of the coin: a government that is efficacious on some basic issues, but also capitalism and democracy.” And that’s the core of my, what you might call, political worldview. It’s not linked to any party or any specific movement, but that’s what I think is important.

Michael Chui: The “state capacity” part is interesting, I think you described it as “higher-quality governance and government.” Question one is, is that currently a challenge? And two is, how do you achieve that?

Tyler Cowen: It’s always a challenge. I actually think American state capacity right now is a bit higher than many people think. We just did Operation Warp Speed, which was amazing, and it was the government that did it, in conjunction with the private sector, as was appropriate. But I recall in April of 2020 reading experts in the New York Times saying, “At the soonest, a vaccine will be four years.” And Operation Warp Speed did it basically in less than a year.

If you look at the war on terror, we made some enormous mistakes. But if you simply ask the question, “Have we stopped large-scale attacks on domestic U.S. soil?,” we have done that, often by cutting off flows of money. And we could have done that without all of the mistakes.

Our government still can get some things right. It’s not impossible, it’s not utopian. I just want, at the margin, that they do more of that and less of the nonsense where, say, the CDC “takes the lead” by banning all tests for COVID until they develop and send out their own. An enormous mistake at the time. But I know we can do better. We do better all the time.

Michael Chui: I’m curious—you talk about talent, and we talk about government and governance. To what extent do the lessons that you’ve drawn about matching, finding talent, apply in the public sphere?

Tyler Cowen: I worry that we don’t have enough talent in government, in some key ways. I think we have more talent than a lot of people realize. But especially at the state and local level, as the opportunities in the private sector become more lucrative, I think it’s just less frequently the case that the smartest person in town is the mayor than might have been the case 50 or 60 years ago.

I think senators are pretty talented. Our bureaucracy is full of talent, the Fed, Treasury in particular, but all over.

Michael Chui: Do we just need to pay more?

Tyler Cowen: Paying more helps, but I don’t think that’s the full solution. There’s something about prestige, and status, and social stratification, and even the mating and dating markets where the whole thing has to operate in sync. It’s related to how to get more people to be scientists.

I think simply doubling the wage for people who do nuclear physics—not saying it’s a bad idea, but that alone doesn’t do it. It’s like, what TV shows do people watch when they’re eight or nine, where they think, “Maybe I want to be a scientist”? How do their parents react when they say, “Maybe I want to be a scientist”? Who are the mentors available in their high school, and so on?

It’s really quite systemic, and it requires a lot of complementary pieces. There’s not a single magic bullet. But the fact is, in the past, in some ways, we did better than we do now, and we can do better again. It’s not utopian—it is possible.

Michael Chui: You’re so prolific, you do so many different things, and one of the things that you do is you have your own podcast, which is great, Conversations with Tyler. Quite famously, you had a recent episode in which you had Marc Andreessen, the noted venture capitalist, on. You were talking with him about crypto. Even in your latest book, you had mentioned you don’t share others’ degree of enthusiasm for crypto. You had asked Marc for different use cases of where these decentralized cryptography-enhanced technologies would be superior to other ways of doing things, whether it’s paying for podcasts or what have you. I’d love to ask you: what are your views on these types of distributed ledger, crypto, blockchain, et cetera?

Tyler Cowen: I consider myself a crypto hopeful but not a crypto convert. I think there’s a good chance a lot of these ideas will work out. If it’s Web 3.0, in particular, I view Web 3.0 as a new way of defining property rights for something like virtual worlds, or new worlds we would create on the internet in some fashion.

I think there’s a reasonable chance that 50 years from now, they will just obviously be a big deal. Now, again, I’m not a convert, but people got so upset at Marc’s answer. They said, “Well, Marc didn’t really have a convincing, specific comeback.”

I would just say this: if you go back to 1992, me, you, Marc, anyone, and someone says, “What’s the internet going to be good for?,” I don’t actually think a totally convincing answer would be that easy. And if you tried to make money off the internet in 1992, I’m not really sure what you should do. There’s not a Google or Facebook to put your money in.

Possibly Web 3.0 right now is in a similar position. I think people should be supportive, but critical in a way that leads to improvement. What you see on social media, there’s boosters. OK, that’s inevitable. But then people who are so viciously negative on Web 3.0, or [on] anyone who supports it, or in this case Marc, I think that’s utterly unjustified.

They don’t understand how venture capital works. You take a lot of chances. The talent of the people who work on Web 3.0 is really very impressive. It doesn’t mean they will succeed, but if you just ask, “What’s the stuff drawing really talented people?,” I have my own short list, but Web 3.0 and crypto definitely are on it. Doesn’t mean I’m convinced they’ll work—I’m not.

Michael Chui: I think Marc was actually writing the Mosaic browser back in ’92, or right around that time. [laughs] So he was busy—

Tyler Cowen: Maybe, yes. [laughs]

Michael Chui: —busy at that time. What’s on that short list of things that you might be hopeful for? Or not yet a convert?

Tyler Cowen: Here’s two things where I observe massive talent inflows, and I would say I’m more than hopeful on them. The first is computational biology. The number of young people I meet who say “I want to do computational biology” to me is utterly overwhelming. Now, I don’t think I have the technical expertise to evaluate computational biology. But, man, you look at how much smarts and effort it’s attracting, I’m super bullish on it, more as a judge of character than anything. I’m more optimistic on that than crypto, I would say.

And then the other thing that’s attracting talent in intellectual life is effective altruism. Which, as I said before, it’s not exactly my view. I agree with a lot of it, I don’t agree with all of it. But if I just look, if I meet a smart young person who wants to do ideas, be a public intellectual, it’s stunning to me how often that person is into effective altruism. I just think you have to take that seriously. Again, you don’t have to agree with all of it. But to wake up in the morning and say, “This is what the smart people are doing. I should in some way be relating to this that is constructive, and not just whining about it because it doesn’t pick up on all of my hobbyhorses.”

Those are the three areas where I see massive inflows of talent: crypto, computational biology, effective altruism.

Michael Chui: On computational biology, we had Jennifer Doudna [on] our premiere episode. I asked her what someone who’s interested in these topics should study in college. And to my surprise she said computer science. She actually said—

Tyler Cowen: That’s a great answer.

Michael Chui: — “Look, if you’re going to do biology, you need to actually understand how to do computer science.” And that was super interesting. Let me return to crypto just for another moment. You said “hopeful but not yet a convert.” What would make you a convert?

Tyler Cowen: If I saw actual marketplace products. Not just a crypto product to support some other part of the crypto space, but something that I would want to use, not because I think it’s cool—and I do—but because I actually say when I wire money to Mexico, “Rather than going to Western Union, might I use crypto?,” that day could come. But it is not here right now. And that would make me a convert. It’s possible, but I am still waiting.

Michael Chui: Do you think it will be in remittances or payments? Is that where you’re most hopeful? Or—?

Tyler Cowen: A while back Larry Summers asked me what I thought was the most likely major breakthrough for crypto, and I said, “remittances slash payments.” I think I would stick with that answer, but I’m quite sure that I don’t know. It’s like asking me about the internet in 1992. My answer, had I been asked, probably would have been quite poor. It just seems to me there’s a lot of money on the table, a lot of waste, a lot of room for disruption. But we’ll see.

Michael Chui: Got it. You mentioned effective altruism. Just a few years ago, you coauthored an article with Patrick Collison, who’s the co-founder of Stripe but also involved in the EA community, entitled, “We Need a New Science of Progress,” “progress” being “the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement.” How is that going? Are there progress studies now?

Tyler Cowen: I am very excited by the progress of progress studies, so to speak. Patrick and I called for more people to study economic growth, to study how to improve science. There are now multiple institutions out there studying, or in some cases even lobbying, as to how to improve science, with concrete policy recommendations, and talented people working on staff and producing actual outputs, and I’m thrilled to see this as a reality.

Areas like, how should the NIH be run? Three years ago, it was very hard to find anything intelligent on that question from any point of view. Now it’s a very live, active public debate.

Should we change the NSF? You know, the new part we attached to the NIH, should it be run more or less along DARPA principles? I would say yes, but again, the point is not that I have all the answers. But we now have a very live and vivid, active public debate, and I think we’re going to see a lot of improvement. And some of that has come from progress studies.

Michael Chui: We had Alec Stapp on recently as well.

Tyler Cowen: He’s an Emergent Ventures winner, by the way. We were the first funder of his Institute for Progress. And Alec was formerly a student of mine. He’s great.

Michael Chui: What about in academia? Are there progress studies being pursued, other than, of course, your own work?

Tyler Cowen: Heidi Williams at Stanford would be one example. But I would say this: there’s been plenty of progress studies for decades, indeed centuries. It’s just way too small a part of the whole puzzle. Take two very simple questions in economics: first, why did the East Asian economies grow so much? And, second, why did the West have an Industrial Revolution?

Whatever you think the answers are, in my view those should be 10 or 15 percent of the entire curriculum. They’re the most important questions. As it stands now, I’m not sure they’re 1 percent. They could be 1 percent, and still there’d be a lot of papers in those areas. Clearly there are.

But at the same time, in terms of where we devote our attention, what we actually debate, it’s way undervalued, questions like that. Or just how to improve science. The economics of science is still not yet a large field. It is growing quickly, but it should be, in my opinion, one of the top fields. It’s right now not in the top 30.

Michael Chui: Let me take things in a different tack. You do so many things: you’re a university professor. You’ve blogged every day for how many years?

Tyler Cowen: Oh, it will be 20 years, I think, within a week? I’m not sure, but it’s closing in on 20 years.

Michael Chui: Almost the anniversary. You do other writing. You’re a columnist. You run Emergent Ventures. A question that often comes up is how do you do all that? What are your time management tricks?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t think I have many “tricks.” Our child is grown. You could call that a trick, but that’s obvious. I barely watch television—that’s another obvious trick. The most important things I usually do first thing in the morning. I would say I work very steadily. I’m never burning the midnight oil, I’m never scrambling to make a deadline, never working at 3 a.m. Go to bed every night by 11:30, wake up around 7, and, just at a super-steady pace, try to always be ahead of things. I’m not sure that works for everyone, but it’s what I’ve done. And I don’t really think it’s tricks—I think it’s common sense.

Michael Chui: I think a lot of people would love to go to bed at that time, and wake up, and work a little every day. And yet you seem to do more. Is there anything else?

Tyler Cowen: But I don’t work “a little” every day. I work the whole day, the whole night. In that sense, the work doesn’t stop. And I don’t have a social life that differs from my work life. I’m very often out with people, talking with people, socializing with people. But it’s not separate from my work, so the two happen together.

Michael Chui: You often talk about practice, this idea of asking somebody, “What are the equivalents for doing scales for musicians?” I once heard from the basketball coach Bob Knight, “You know, the best conditioning is playing basketball. Well, why would you do something else?” To what extent is practice—should you do practice that’s different than the actual thing you’re trying to get better at? Or should you just do more of what you’re trying to get better at?

Tyler Cowen: Maybe both. I can tell you what I do for practice: I write every single day. I try to talk to smart people analytically every single day, don’t quite manage that. I try to read books and sometimes difficult material almost every single day. And I try to do some physical exercise every single day. It seems to me those help me a lot. Again, I’m not saying it’s “the” formula for everyone. Now, are those the things I’m doing? I don’t know, I just do it and it seems good.

Michael Chui: Very good. All right, if you don’t mind, instead of underrated/overrated, we’ll do a lightning round, a little bit—

Tyler Cowen: Absolutely. I’m ready.

Michael Chui: —more unconstrained. OK, here we go. Number one: what’s your favorite source for finding new things to read?

Tyler Cowen: People email me about books, or review copies arrive on my doorstep. On a typical weekday, it’s not surprising if I have five review copies, and typically from presses that would publish the more serious works of interest to me. And every day I discover new books, and, occasionally, on Twitter.

Michael Chui: How long does it take for you to read a book?

Tyler Cowen: It really depends on the book. I’m not an especially fast reader of fiction. But nonfiction, it’s common I read a few books a day. I just read very fast. I was born a hyperlexic—that’s one of my blessings. And it gets back to time management. If you can read much faster than comparably educated people, it’s a big advantage. And I’ve always had that advantage. Through nothing I’ve ever did, it just was automatically the case.

Michael Chui: Who is your hero?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t know that I have a hero. I think people are more good than bad, and most people have quite a bit of good in them. But I don’t think I have a specific hero.

Michael Chui: If you could live in a place other than Northern Virginia, where would it be?

Tyler Cowen: It depends what level of income you’re giving me. For living, I love Berlin, I love London, and I like to think I would love New York City, but I’m pretty sure I would hate it. So I’ll say Berlin and London. But London I would need to be earning well, or it’s just no fun. Berlin is fun at any income level, pretty much, as long as you manage it all.

Michael Chui: It’s getting more expensive is my understanding, though.

Tyler Cowen: True, but from a very low base. Oh, I love Los Angeles also. You’re a bit isolated out there, but I think it’s America’s best city: the best food, the best climate, the best scenery, the best comedy scene, an incredible music scene, excellent art museums, so many different parts of town to go to. That makes the list as well.

Michael Chui: Difficult traffic, though. What’s your favorite dish at a restaurant?

Tyler Cowen: My favorite cuisines are real Mexican food, Szechuan food, Indian regional cuisine, so those are by far my favorites.

Michael Chui: What’s your current go-to interview question?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t have one anymore. It used to be, “What are your open browser tabs at the moment?” But now too many people are gaming that because they’ve heard about it. One that’s very good for leaders is, “How ambitious are you?” But it’s not for general use. But it still works very well.

What I like to do most of all now is just get the person talking about a book, movie, TV show that they are passionate about and see what their understanding is of the social characters and their relationships in that tale. It’s not like a single question, but it’s a single thing to do. And that’s what I’m most enamored of in the moment.

Get more and better mentors, no matter what your station in life is, and your mentors can be younger than you.

Michael Chui: If you weren’t doing what you are nowadays, professionally, what would you be doing?

Tyler Cowen: I’m doing a whole bunch of different things today professionally. So, in that sense, the alternatives I’m doing, right? Could I imagine a career in publishing in some way? Well, yes, but I publish a blog, and I write for Bloomberg. I have a career in publishing. I don’t know what to say. I don’t think there’s many things I would be good at, and the ones I am, I’m trying to do.

Michael Chui: How do you think this interview is going?

Tyler Cowen: It’s been a lot of fun for me. And I think, for McKinsey people, they’re getting a very different sense than corporatized approaches to interviewing—but I think the world is ready for that.

Michael Chui: And what’s one piece of advice you’d have for listeners of this podcast?

Tyler Cowen: There are two pieces of advice I have for almost everyone; most other advice is context-specific. But I would say, “Get more and better mentors, no matter what your station in life is, and your mentors can be younger than you.” And “Work on improving the quality of your small groups, your small groups of peers that you trade ideas with, and exchange ideas, or you’re on WhatsApp together, or you go out for beers, or whatever it is you do. Improve the quality of your small groups, ever and always.”

Michael Chui: Tyler Cowen, thanks for sharing with us.

Tyler Cowen: Michael, thank you very much.

The United States and some of its European partners have decided to force a vote at the United Nations next week on whether to debate China’s atrocities against Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities — acts the United Nations’ own human rights commissioner has said may constitute “crimes against humanity.” But Beijing is working overtime to prevent the debate from ever taking place. This is a crucial test for both the United Nations’ and the Biden administration’s commitments on human rights.

On Monday, the United States filed a resolution, formally known as a “draft decision,” that — if passed — would add China to the agenda of the ongoing session at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. President Biden decided that the United States would rejoin the council when his administration took office. The Trump administration had withdrawn from the council because of its inclusion of several human rights abusers and its overall lack of substantive action. China’s human rights abuses have never been debated there before.

The debate would address the report on China’s abuses released by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Aug. 31, her last day in that post. The Chinese government had tried to thwart the release of the report and afterward called it “wholly illegal and invalid.” Now, Beijing is working to strong-arm countries that sit on the council, threatening them with economic and other punishments if they don’t vote to bury the Bachelet report, several officials and diplomats told me.

The 47-member body will vote before the current session ends Oct. 7. A simple majority is needed for the measure to pass. Although the Biden administration has declared that China’s abuses in Xinjiang constitute an ongoing genocide, the United States and its partners wrote the resolution as a simple call for debate over the Bachelet report, hoping to make it easier for squeamish governments to vote yes.

“We are taking this step deliberately, given an assessment that it is achievable," a senior administration official told me. "The goal is to put the issue on the agenda and pave the way for further action down the line.”

The Biden administration will reach out to any and all council members that it believes can be recruited to the cause over the next few days, both from the U.S. mission in Geneva and including senior officials in Washington, the official said. There’s no preliminary vote count, but the administration believes it’s going to be close.

“We are going to engage on a full-court press,” the official said.

Uyghur activists told me that this resolution represents their only hope that the United Nations might act on the plight of their family members in Xinjiang. The Uyghur American Association held a hunger strike in front of the White House last week to plead for the U.S. and other governments to introduce and pass this resolution.

“Free and civilized nations have come together to support Ukraine in order to defend the international world order. We believe it is the responsibility of those free and civilized nations to support Uyghurs in international forums to defend the same international order,” association President Elfidar Iltebir told me.

Many Uyghur activists are frustrated by what they see as the Biden administration’s lack of attention on this issue. In Biden’s defense, he did mention Xinjiang (briefly) in his speech to the General Assembly; a senior U.S. official spoke at an Atlantic Council event on the U.N. meeting’s sidelines last week. It’s also true that the administration pushed hard for the Bachelet report to be released in the first place.

But the Biden team erred by not introducing this resolution two weeks ago, when the Human Rights Council session opened, said former deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Kelley Currie. This gave Beijing a head start on the diplomacy, she said, and wasted the opportunity for senior U.S. officials to press the issue last week, when dozens of world leaders convened in New York for the General Assembly’s main events.

“Better late than never, and we all want this resolution to succeed. But this inexplicable delay was a totally avoidable misstep,” Currie told me. “Meanwhile, China has been aggressively lobbying against the resolution since August 31.”

To be successful, she said, the Biden team will need to deploy diplomatic resources to match or exceed China’s level of effort, with the understanding that many of the tools China uses — bribery, coercion and vote trading — are off the table for the United States.

This could be the last chance for the U.N. Human Rights Council to demonstrate its reason for being. If China’s genocide is not even worthy of a debate there, the council’s credibility will be unsalvageable, all those who criticized Biden’s decision to rejoin the body will be vindicated, and the Uyghurs’ cries for help will be muffled.

Is this it? Could this, finally, be the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran? As huge crowds of women and men surge through the Iranian streets, burning hijabs and calling for “Death to Khamenei!”, is an impossible dream finally about to come true?
The prospects certainly look better than in 2009, when the country’s protestors were primarily middle-class and more narrowly focused on the issue of Ahmadinejad’s election victory, rather than on dismantling the oppressive system in its entirety. Today, men and women, rural and urban, affluent and poor are all marching to bring down the Islamic Republic. Khamenei is also reported to be in very poor health, so the chants might just come true.
Yet senior US officials I have spoken to have cautioned against blind optimism. As they explained, we’ve seen many moments in recent Iranian history where the tide seemed about to turn, only to be disappointed. The same officials also warned that America is trying not to become too involved: the Biden administration isn’t supporting the protestors, but it isn’t explicitly discouraging them, either.

This isn’t an example of craven politics: I also fear that the end of the regime might not herald a brave new world, but rather a bloody mess, where Khamenei’s death is followed by internecine fighting for power between various Iranian factions. Would the overthrow of the regime lead to civil war, a military coup, or liberal democracy? Nobody knows.
None of this is to say that, faced with a possible uprising in Iran, America should avert its gaze. Perhaps more than anything, the wave of protests now sweeping the country is a perfect moment to remind ourselves of the shameful stupidity of US policy in the region in recent years. Take the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, which gave the regime time and space and money to strengthen its morality police and security infrastructure, as well as extend its regional influence. If no deal had been signed, perhaps the regime’s current crisis would have come sooner.
Nor should we forget the fact that Iran has recently tried to abduct and kill several American citizens on American soil; or that a number of senior US officials believe Iran is to blame for the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie last month. It’s a national disgrace that America’s politicians saw fit to break bread with the butchers of Tehran in the first place. And still too many think we can politely sit down with them again to re-negotiate the nuclear deal. I wouldn’t blame the brave men and women of Iran if they never forgave us for such short-sighted idiocy.
Still, while the response of the West should be limited to cautious optimism, there is one other conclusion we can draw, no matter what happens: the current protests are a unique, and uniquely inspiring, phenomenon. Nowhere else in the Muslim world — and I mean, literally, nowhere else — would we see what we are seeing right now in Iran: men and women, together, standing up for each other, the men demanding justice for the regime’s murder of a woman who dared to let her hair show. It bears repeating: the men of Iran are standing alongside women as they burn their hijabs.
This is the most dramatic evidence of something I have long suspected: Iran is different. I have many Iranian women friends who are highly accomplished. They are doctors and scientists and writers and artists. When I ask them how they do it, they tell me that they owe much of their success to their male relatives’ support of their ambitions. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the fire behind the protests was lit by Mahsa Amini’s family — in particular, her father, whose remarkable courage in accusing the Iranian authorities of a cover-up serves as an emblem of the solidarity many Iranian men have with their women.
Now, there are caveats to this. This phenomenon isn’t universal across Iran, and many Iranian women suffer terribly at the hands of their families (and some women are even vicious policers of “morality”). But the fact that even some men behave like this is distinctive in the Muslim world, and their appearence alongside women in these protests is not a sight that will soon be forgotten. In other Muslim countries, women suffer as much, if not more, at the hands of their male relatives as at the hands of the authorities. Men jealously guard women’s honour, beating, imprisoning, and even killing their female family members for bringing shame upon the family.
More from this authorSchools shouldn't fly BLM flagsBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
This is part of the reason why Iran is so unique: not only are men standing publicly with women, but women must also be aware that they are under no threat from their husbands and male relatives, otherwise they would not dare put themselves on the front lines like this. Consider, for example, the beautiful, inspiring videos of women tossing their headscarves into bonfires before dancing joyously away, for all the world to see. If they thought their fathers or brothers were waiting back home to punish them, I doubt we would see such sights on this scale.
Meanwhile, in the West, where feminism has proved more successful than anywhere else, anti-male grievance dominates the mainstream, with solidarity between men and women replaced by a desire for polarising identity politics. As America’s feminist movement collapses under the weight of it its own divisiveness, I can’t help but find its Iranian counterpart far more inspiring: men and women standing together, speaking up for each other’s rights. How much better this is than the violently woman-hating Taliban or the petulant privilege of so many Western feminists.
In March 1979, just as the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, the American feminist Kate Millett travelled to Iran to join a protest against his plan to make hijabs compulsory for women. The demonstration ultimately proved unsuccessful. Millett was arrested and expelled from the country; Iranian women were turned into second-class citizens. Yet, as we are now discovering, their revolutionary spirit was not extinguished. Iranian feminism has stood the test of time; it hasn’t been corrupted. If only the same could be said for the West.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Yesterday, I discussed the shambolic attempt under way in Russia to conscript hundreds of thousands of men. Today, one of Vladimir Putin’s minions again threatened the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. What do these threats mean?But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Teachers, nurses, and child-care workers have had enough.
Maybe we won’t end up like the dinosaurs.
Why quitting is underrated.
‘The Most Fearsome Weapon’One of Russian President Vladmir Putin’s cronies renewed Putin’s nuclear threats against NATO today. Dmitry Medvedev, in a post on Telegram, said that the West would not intervene even if “Russia is forced to use the most fearsome weapon against the Ukrainian regime,” because the “demagogues across the ocean and in Europe are not going to die in a nuclear apocalypse.”Medvedev is sometimes dismissively called “Little Dima” in Russia due to both his short stature and his utter subservience to Putin. Despite being a former Russian president himself, he may not have all that much power in Moscow, but no responsible American administration can simply wave away such statements. How worried should we be?Although Putin may be willing to take greater risks as the military situation in Ukraine deteriorates, he likely knows now that the cumulative effect of his multiple blunders in Ukraine has been to jeopardize the stability of his regime and the Russian Federation itself. Russia is a pariah state; the entire nation and its leading figures, right down to Putin’s rumored girlfriend, are under sanctions. Young men, supposedly Russia’s great macho warriors, are jamming the roads to Finland and Georgia trying to flee the country. Putin’s own commanders are asking for permission to retreat, and even some of Putin’s most gleeful warmongers in the Russian media, including the ghoulish Margarita Simonyan, seem freaked out by the accelerating disasters that have changed Russia’s image from a major power to a cornered weakling in only seven months.Medvedev correctly described Russian nuclear doctrine as allowing a resort to nuclear arms if the existence of the Russian state and its territorial integrity are under existential threat. The dark paradox here is that Russian doctrine says nothing about what to do if such a threat emanates from its own president.Nonetheless, I still believe that Russian use of a nuclear weapon is unlikely. This is only an informed guess, because my expertise on Russia does not extend to the interior of Putin’s skull. But Putin has almost certainly contemplated the high probability that using a nuclear weapon could bring about the end of his rule faster than any of the bungled decisions he’s already made. This is not because global nuclear war would break out—although any use of a nuclear weapon runs that risk—but because a nuclear attack on Ukraine could provoke a collapse of the Russian regime itself.Assume, for example, that Putin decides to shock the world by exploding a relatively small nuclear weapon, perhaps against Ukrainian forces close to the Russian border, claiming that he needs to halt a catastrophic Ukrainian offensive into Russia. Putin is a product of the Soviet system; his thinking has always shown a heavy reliance on old Soviet catechisms about the West, and he would likely expect such an act to produce panic, the fracturing of NATO, unrest in the United States and Britain, and a Ukrainian capitulation under pressure from Washington and Brussels.That could happen, I suppose, but the lessons of the past century, from the destruction of the Nazis to the defeat of the Soviet Union to the resistance in Ukraine, suggest that it is a bad bet. More likely, the entire world would coalesce against Putin, including China and others who have so far quietly tolerated this brutal escapade. Direct Western military action (something I have until now advised against) would become far more thinkable, especially if an international coalition—one that would almost certainly find support beyond NATO—came together to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine. (By the way, journalists should stop asking U.S. officials what, exactly, President Joe Biden would do if Putin uses nuclear weapons. No one will answer that, and no one should. Much of deterrence relies on uncertainty.)Putin may think he could weather such a storm, but chaos would also erupt in Russia: One of the reasons Putin’s been able to prosecute this war is that he promised it would be quick and painless. Risking nuclear war after trying to drag hundreds of thousands of men into the military, while radiation blows across Europe after a nuclear attack on Ukraine, would likely be the breaking point for Russian society and a fair number of its elites. As the writer Peter Pomerantsev said recently: “The war in Ukraine was meant to be a movie, not a personal sacrifice … If there’s one thing Russians fear more than Putin, it’s nuclear war—and now he’s the one bringing it closer.”Putin knows from history how fast an invulnerable position in the Kremlin can become exceedingly vulnerable. (For one thing, Putin is well aware that Stalin’s most feared lieutenant, the secret-police boss Lavrentiy Beria, fell from power in a matter of weeks and died in a basement, pleading for his life.) Other Kremlin figures likely know these risks, too. But if all is lost, and Russia is coming unglued both physically and psychologically because of this mad scheme in Ukraine, Putin might think that a nuclear bomb is his only option. Whether anyone would stop Putin from giving this order, or whether the Russian high command would carry it out, is anyone’s guess.Related:
We have no nuclear strategy.
The attorney Chris Kise, who was hired for $3 million to represent Donald Trump in the investigation into his handling of classified documents, has reportedly been sidelined from the case after less than a month.
European countries are investigating possible sabotage after suspicious leaks were found in two gas pipelines running from Russia to Germany. Russia has denied any responsibility.
Hurricane Ian made landfall in Cuba at about 4:30 a.m. ET, with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph. The storm is expected to reach the Sarasota, Florida, area on Wednesday as more counties impose mandatory evacuations.
Galaxy Brain: Charlie Warzel sings the praises of Trombone Champ, a viral new computer game that he calls “a phenomenal way to kill 15 minutes while belly laughing at fart noises.”
Brooklyn, Everywhere: Xochitl Gonzalez on the Spanish idiom that perfectly encapsulates the U.S.’s relationship with Puerto Rico.
(Katie Martin / The Atlantic)
Your Smart Thermostat Isn’t Here to Help YouBy Ian Bogost
Everything’s so smart now. Smartphones, smart speakers, smart lamps, smart plugs, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart thermostats. Smart things are smart not because they have smarts, but because they connect to the internet. Online connectivity allows them to be controlled, either locally or from afar—and in ways both visible and invisible.
The sales pitch for smart devices typically focuses on convenience. Rather than needing to fumble with a physical switch, you can turn a smart bulb on and off from bed (or from Bed Bath & Beyond), for example. A smartphone allows you to do work or doomscroll while you watch television and ignore your children. A smart thermostat allows you to tweak your home’s temperature from wherever. But why?
Read the full article. More From The Atlantic
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Photos: The aftermath of Hurricane Fiona in Eastern Canada
A still from Decision to Leave (CJ ENM / Moho Films)
Read. Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout, which takes place during the first year of the pandemic. It functions as both a time capsule and as a “beautiful” exploration of absence and grief, Lily Meyer writes.Watch. Currently streaming on MUBI and in theaters October 14, the South Korean mystery Decision to Leave earned the filmmaker Park Chan-Wook the Best Director award at Cannes, and might also be the “best-looking movie of the year,” our critic says.Stay tuned for the other titles on our list of the 20 most-anticipated films of the season.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I’m not sure if this will lighten the mood—we live in some grim times—but the story about Beria, that I mentioned above, reminded me of a joke from the old Soviet Union: “Why is the Lubyanka [KGB headquarters] the tallest building in Moscow? Because even from the basement, you can see clearly all the way to Siberia.” Suffering can lead to very dark humor, and the old Soviet Union had some of the best political jokes of the Cold War. (I love the American sense of humor, but it’s a different flavor.) It might not seem like much, but to joke about the KGB in a police state was an act of quiet resistance—and it was funny too. This one is a classic:Q: “Why do KGB agents travel in threes?”A: “One can read, one can write, and the third one keeps an eye on the two intellectuals.”— TomKate Lindsay contributed to this newsletter.

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower wanted by U.S. authorities for leaking highly classified National Security Agency (NSA) secrets in 2013, has expressed relief after being granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin.

Snowden has been living in Moscow since 2013, when he fled to the Russian capital to avoid espionage charges in his home country.

The former intelligence contractor was granted temporary asylum, which was repeatedly extended until he was given permanent residency in 2020.

After Russian citizenship was granted, Snowden tweeted: "After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our SONS.

"After two years of waiting and nearly ten years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them—and for us all."

After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our SONS.

After two years of waiting and nearly ten years of exile, a little stability will make a difference for my family. I pray for privacy for them—and for us all. https://t.co/24NUK21TAo pic.twitter.com/qLfp47uzZ4 — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 26, 2022

He accompanied the post with a photo of his wife, blogger Lindsay Mills, and their two sons.

Mills, who has also applied for a Russian passport, and Snowden were married in 2017. Their first son was born in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic.

Snowden announced he had applied for Russian citizenship in November 2020, saying he feared being separated from his family in an era of "closed borders."

He tweeted: "After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That's why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we're applying for dual US-Russian citizenship.

"Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love—including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the States, so the whole family can be reunited."

After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That's why, in this era of pandemics and closed borders, we're applying for dual US-Russian citizenship. https://t.co/cCgT0rr37e — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 1, 2020

Snowden shot to prominence in 2013, when information he leaked revealed the National Security Agency had collected telephone records from millions of Americans, and tapped into the servers of nine major internet firms to monitor online communications.

Then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper accused Snowden of causing "huge, grave damage" to U.S. intelligence, whilst President Obama said he'd undermined the government's ability to "keep our people safe."

In 2015, whilst in Moscow, Snowden described internet censorship and the treatment of the gay people in Russia as "fundamentally wrong."

Snowden was granted Russian citizenship just days after Putin ordered a partial Russian mobilization to support his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Russian authorities said they planned to conscript 300,000 people with former military experience, but there have been widespread reports of men without any military background being drafted.

This sparked ridicule online, with politicians and commentators asking whether Snowden could be conscripted into the Russian army.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted: "Now that Edward Snowden has been granted full Russian citizenship I expect he will be on the battlefield in Ukraine fighting for Putin any day now.

"Or could it be that he will be exempt while other Russian citizens are told to fight in a war of aggression on Putin's behalf?"

Now that Edward Snowden has been granted full Russian citizenship I expect he will be on the battlefield in Ukraine fighting for Putin any day now.

Or could it be that he will be exempt while other Russian citizens are told to fight in a war of aggression on Putin’s behalf? — Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) September 26, 2022

International security expert Aki Peritz added: "Snowden is now a RU citizen and under 50; he should now be mobilized, given a Czarist-era rifle, Soviet-era boots, rations which expired in 2012, and sent to the front lines of Ukraine. For the glory of the motherland, of course."

Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said his client doesn't meet the criteria for Putin's military draft.

Speaking to Russian news agency RIA he said: "Since Edward did not serve in the Russian army, he does not have either the practice or experience of military service, so he is not subject to conscription."

Italy elected a hard-right party in parliamentary elections held over the weekend. The result indicates that Italians are unhappy with the country’s reality. Italy has the third-largest economy in the European Union, after Germany and France, and its economic and social realities are very different from the Continent’s other top-tier countries in the sense that its economy is less productive and generates more debt. Italians believe, with some reason, that the European Central Bank is pursuing monetary policies that benefit Germany, which wants to maintain the value of the euro as a net creditor. Italy favors a very different policy of cheap money, a reasonable preference considering it’s a net debtor. A single European bank can’t serve both interests, nor can it readily split the difference. But given Germany’s size, its economic performance is a massive component of Europe’s financial well-being, meaning the ECB must support the German position.

Logic dictates that Italy would elect a hard oppositional government that sees the ECB as a threat to Italian prosperity. It has long been our position that the tension between Italy and Germany over monetary policy would represent the largest threat, perhaps a lethal one, to the European Union. Given the coming winter, European politicians will be protecting the interests of their own voters, and therefore following divergent policies. The ECB will not be able to harmonize the economies of Europe, and if the Russian embargo persists, competition between nations will be intense. The EU was created to ensure peace and prosperity, as its motto proclaims. Peace is shaky, and prosperity is slipping away. The Italian election signals a crisis.

Meanwhile, there was another issue that loomed over the election: illegal immigration. This issue has been facing Europe since 2015 when massive numbers of Muslim migrants came to the Continent. At the time, relatively open immigration was the EU’s policy, but the opposition was substantial. Proponents of the policy believed that member states had a moral obligation to admit migrants. But opponents argued that member states were expected to let in too many migrants, and that the bloc and its supporters, particularly those from wealthy countries, were strutting their moral superiority without footing the bill.

To understand these issues, I would insert my experience as a young immigrant to the United States, something I have done before. I’m an immigrant and certainly don’t oppose immigration. At the same time, I understand the stresses immigrants put on the system and the fear over immigration. That fear cannot be dismissed as simply racism. The cost of immigration is borne by groups that find the burden difficult to carry. However, the problem is not just financial. When immigrants arrive in a country, they do not live among the wealthy. Instead, they are channeled to live among the poorest of society, where an apartment might be barely affordable.

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Immigrants are also foreigners and often don’t understand the host country. The parents often go off to work in menial jobs, and their children are left to fend for themselves. Lacking parental supervision, immigrants from the same country huddle together and wars break out – between Jews and Puerto Ricans, Irish and Black people, Italians and Dominicans, to provide a sample of ethnic groups I grew up with. Crimes were committed, and residents were mugged and robbed in their apartments.

The point is that immigration is a brutal experience for the young and an even more horrible influence on the residents who had settled there years before. It was particularly a nightmare for the elderly. Anyone who could fled. Anyone who couldn’t stayed indoors. This was the experience of immigrants, and it was also the experience of the working class and retired. It was not the fault of anyone really, save those who championed the policy without understanding what large-scale immigration meant and made no attempt to mitigate the crisis it caused.

I noticed a pattern in New York that I see in Europe and elsewhere. The most passionate advocates of immigration do not live in the neighborhoods in which immigrants settle, nor do they have any sense of what the collision of cultures will result in or what unsupervised teenagers do. If none of this happens in their neighborhoods, it’s not that they are indifferent to the chaos; it’s that they simply can’t fathom it.

The rise in hostility to immigrants in Europe will surge when the immigrants are sent to the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest countries. Do not mistake me for an opponent of immigration. I am here in America as an immigrant. But I am also aware that there is no memorial containing the names of those who paid for it.

The immigration issue exists in all countries. But in Europe, it’s more divisive. America is a nation of immigrants, and all of us have an ancestor who came here or was brought here, save for the Native Americans, who were the ones who paid for the first wave. But I understand the Italian position on immigration, which can be summarized as: “Let them all go to Germany.” And this is where the economic and the immigration issues meet, creating a powerful new problem fueled by the contempt hurled at those who oppose immigration by the moral upper classes. The EU will be torn by these issues, and so will other countries.

President Joe Biden's sweeping student loan forgiveness plan will wipe all the budget savings created by the Inflation Reduction Act—and then some.
In a letter published on Monday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a nonpartisan federal agency, estimated that Biden's student loan debt forgiveness plan will increase the cost of student loans by $400 billion. That's more than the White House originally projected, and it means that the fiscally imprudent debt relief effort will end up swamping the modest budgetary savings achieved by last month's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act by more than $150 billion.
The letter notes that this cost is calculated by comparing borrowers' "projected repayments of student debt before accounting for the cancellation minus the present value of repayments after doing so." To get the $400 billion estimate, the CBO estimated that 95 percent of borrowers would be eligible for loan forgiveness and 90 percent of eligible borrowers would apply for forgiveness. 
Biden's student loan debt forgiveness measures, which were announced last month, would forgive up to $10,000 for most borrowers making under $125,000 annually and married couples making less than $250,000. For borrowers who received a Pell Grant, forgiveness is increased to $20,000. 
If anything, the CBO's estimates might lowball the true cost. That's because its estimates do not include possible effects of Biden's reconfiguration of income-driven repayment plans which would set eligibility for repayment at 225 percent of the federal poverty level, limit payments to just 5 percent of borrowers' income, and forgive remaining debt after 10 years of payment. This is a radical change, as most current plans start repayment at 150 percent of the federal poverty level, set payments at 10 percent of a borrower's income, and forgive loans after 20 years of payments.
That's likely why the CBO's estimate of the cost of Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is slightly more conservative than other predictions. The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a fiscal policy think tank housed at the University of Pennsylvania, places the cost of student loan forgiveness at between $469 billion to $519 billion over 10 years. 
Penn Wharton also notes that, depending on the precise details of future income-driven repayment plans and increased participation rates, the new income-driven repayment plan could add another $450 billion in cost, bringing the total cost of Biden's plan to over $1 trillion. 
Similarly, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget announced on Monday that it now estimates that the cost of Biden's plan—including IDR changes—could total between $500 and $650 billion.
If the CBO and Penn Wharton's estimates are correct, then Biden's student loan debt forgiveness plan will effectively wipe out the estimated $238 billion reduction in the national deficit made by the Inflation reduction act. In fact, the plan is likely to massively increase the national deficit by over $150 billion. Student loan forgiveness stands to be a massively expensive project—one that not only erases recent gains in spending reduction but manages to make the problem significantly worse than the status quo.
"As CBO's estimates help confirm, the President's student debt plan would wipe out the ten-year savings from the Inflation Reduction Act twice over, worsen inflationary pressures, and deliver benefits to millions of Americans with advanced degrees in upper-income households," wrote Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget. "This might be the most costly executive action in history." 
However, Biden administration officials argue that cost estimates for student loan forgiveness are too high. Instead, the White House estimates that the program will cost taxpayers  $240 billion over the next decade—assuming that only 75 percent of eligible borrowers participate in the program. The Biden administration is yet to release a detailed explanation of its estimate, though according to USA Today, officials wrote in a memo that "we would be thrilled if 90% of eligible middle- and low-income Americans applied for this program . . . But unfortunately, that's unlikely based on the data from other programs." Notably, no other loan forgiveness programs have gained as much media attention as this latest spate of forgiveness, making an only 75 percent uptake seem unlikely. 
Even if the Biden administration is somehow correct and the loan forgiveness plan only ends up costing around $240 billion, the program would still end up negating projected gains from the Inflation Reduction Act. Further, the plan would still leave nothing in place to actually reduce the rate at which Americans are accruing student loan debt—a fact that might "necessitate" further rounds of debt forgiveness in the future.
This latest estimate from the CBO is yet another reason to believe that Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is going to spell fiscal disaster. Not only will the program wipe out possible gains from the Inflation Reduction Act, but it will also go further and increase the deficit by over $150 billion. The real solution to this problem is to create a plan that will actually reduce the amount that students are borrowing to attend college. 
Rather than taking the harder, more effective path, the Biden administration seems dead set on taking a ridiculously expensive and ultimately ineffective approach to tackle the student debt crisis.
The post Biden's Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Plan Now Estimated To Cost $400 Billion appeared first on Reason.com.

After a nearly six-year legal battle, the deadlines for compliance with Washington, D.C.'s controversial licensing regulations for preschool teachers are nearing.
By this December, all early childhood education center directors must have a bachelor's degree with at least 15 credits of early childhood education classes. By December 2023, all preschool teachers and many at-home day care providers must have obtained at least an associate degree with a minimum of 24 credits of early childhood education classes. Even assistant teachers must obtain a Child Development Associate credential or an associate degree (in any field) by December 2023.
Critics of the requirement note that the new rules will likely increase D.C. day care tuition—already the highest in the U.S.—and put many qualified and experienced teachers out of a job. 
A 2019 study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that "the welfare costs of licensing"—the premium received by workers who meet licensing criteria—"appear to exceed the benefits." Study authors Morris M. Kleiner of the University of Minnesota and Evan J. Soltas of MIT found that "shifting an occupation in a state from entirely unlicensed to entirely licensed increases state average wages in the licensed occupation by 15 percent, increases hours per worker by 3 percent, and reduces employment by 29 percent." 
Imposing occupational licensing on a field that previously did not require it pushes some people up the income ladder while pushing others out of the industry altogether. Workers who already meet licensing criteria when the rules go into effect seem to make more money, as do workers who can quickly satisfy the criteria. Workers who cannot afford the new educational requirements—for lack of time, money, or English-language proficiency—must find other work. This reduces the number of day care workers. The number of children who need care, meanwhile, will not ebb simply because there are fewer teachers. And government-mandated teacher-to-child ratios prevent fewer day care workers from taking care of the same number of children.
In essence, unless every current provider can comply with the new licensing requirements or be quickly replaced by credentialed workers, the same number of children competing for fewer spots will drive up costs to families who need care.
"D.C.'s college requirement for day care staff is not just bad policy; it is also unconstitutional. The college requirement violates daycare providers' right to earn a living without unreasonable government interference," wrote the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, about its lawsuit challenging the regulations. "D.C. is imposing real burdens on day care staff and parents."
Supporters of the regulations have chosen to focus on the purported benefits of highly-credentialed preschool teachers, seemingly dismissing concerns over costs—both to parents, and to current teachers who don't meet the requirements.
Kathy Hollowell-Makle, executive director of the District of Columbia Association for the Education of Young Children (DCAEYC), wrote recently for The Washington Post that "studies consistently show that young children receiving high-quality early education develop expansive vocabulary, possess stronger language skills, and score better in math and science school-readiness assessments."
"This science is why every child—not only those whose parents can afford it—should have equitable access to a knowledgeable, competent, nurturing, fairly compensated early educator," she argued.
But even if Hollowell-Makle is correct that better-credentialed preschool teachers lead to higher educational attainment for toddlers and young children, she barely acknowledges the tradeoffs. "Delivering on quality has costs—but the benefits are public, and the investments must be, too," she writes.
"Day care providers like Ilumi worry about the time and money needed to obtain a college education while working full time," wrote the Institute for Justice, profiling one such worker who will be hurt by the new credentialing requirements. "Many are older women who have years of experience caring for children but no experience writing a term paper on Moby Dick. Younger people may have their own families to take care of."
As these new regulations go into effect, experienced and skilled day care workers—especially those who need to work to live—will be forced out of the market and away from the families who rely on them for child care, and parents will pay more for fewer options. 
The post D.C.'s Preschool Teacher Education Requirement Won't Help Working Families appeared first on Reason.com.

As of this week, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor is requiring that all posts include the phrase "Greg Abbott is a little piss baby" or else users will be banned from the forum, per reporting by TechDirt. Moderators have made explicit that they will be discriminating against all users posting viewpoints that go against the piss-baby line in protest of Texas' new content moderation law, H.B. 20, which forces social media platforms to host speech they find objectionable.
That law, which Reason's Scott Shackford has reported on in the past, was recently upheld by a panel of Fifth Circuit judges, "in what certainly appears to be a complete violation and abandonment of First Amendment protections for private companies," writes Shackford.
H.B. 20, which was first signed into law by Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2021, disallows U.S.-based platforms with over 50 million monthly users from banning users over their beliefs. Originally drafted by Republican lawmakers alleging viewpoint discrimination against conservatives, the bill has percolated through the courts. One federal judge summed it up well as he blocked the law from taking effect back in December of last year: "This Court is convinced that social media platforms, or at least those covered by [House Bill] 20, curate both users and content to convey a message about the type of community the platform seeks to foster and, as such, exercise editorial discretion over their platform's content."
Other judges have disagreed—most recently the panel of Fifth Circuit judges who upheld the law, claiming that the social media platforms challenging the bill "offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of course, protects every person's right to 'the freedom of speech.' But the platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person's enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation's unenumerated right to muzzle speech." (Emphasis theirs.)
Now, people are hilariously testing how far Texas will go in winnowing away at companies' abilities to decide which content they host. Reddit makes a particularly interesting case study due to the unique nature of the site's content moderation practices. The subreddit's moderators explain:
"Reddit falls into a weird category with this law. The actual employees of the company Reddit do, maybe, one percent of the moderation on the site. The rest is handled by disgusting jannies volunteer moderators, who Reddit has made quite clear over the years, aren't agents of Reddit (mainly so they don't lose millions of dollars every time a mod approves something vaguely related to Disney and violates their copyright). It's unclear whether we count as users or moderators in relation to this law, and none of us live in Texas anyway."
Courts elsewhere have "rightly recognized that the government has no legal authority to interfere with the way a private company decides to curate content that it presents to its customers, especially when their interference is politically motivated," explained Spence Purnell over at the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit which publishes this website) back in 2021.
Laws that attempt to treat social media companies as "common carriers" (like utility providers or telecommunication companies) are bad not just from a compelled-speech perspective but also because the "common carrier" definition probably should not apply to social media providers for a whole host of reasons (The Cato Institute's Matthew Feeney touches on that more here).
If pointing out the absurdity of such laws requires somewhat juvenile (but possibly truth-telling) Reddit stunts, so be it.
The post Subreddit Gets Users To Call Texas Gov. Greg Abbott a 'Little Piss Baby' To Defy Content Moderation Law appeared first on Reason.com.

Bulwark writer Will Saletan accused CitiBank of permanently locking some customers out of their bank accounts, even if they show up in person with an ID.

“Several weeks ago, I learned that [Citibank] locks some customers out of their accounts and refuses to release their money even if they show up with ID,” Saletan tweeted Monday. “This week, [Citi] sent an email explicitly affirming its right to do this ‘without cause.'”

“Your money is not safe at [Citi],” he added in the tweet.

Several weeks ago, I learned that @Citibank locks some customers out of their accounts and refuses to release their money even if they show up with ID. This week, @Citi sent an email explicitly affirming its right to do this “without cause.” Your money is not safe at @Citi. 1/8 — Will Saletan (@saletan) September 27, 2022

Citi also “reserves the right to close an account at any time and for any reason, with or without cause,” the bank stated in an email response to Saletan after he reached out, according to the journalist’s Twitter thread. (RELATED: Citigroup Announces A Woman To Be Its Next CEO)

Saletan further accused Citi of bilking customers through apparently dishonest word choice. While the account closure procedure takes 30 to 60 days, those numbers apparently do not include the days the account is frozen prior to closure, Saletan alleged, citing Citi’s email response.

In the email, @Citi repeats that the closure will take 30-60 days. That’s from Sept. 4, when they officially closed the account. They locked it on Aug. 16. So at a minimum, they’re withholding the customer’s money for 49 days. And reserving the right to keep it for 30 more. 5/8 — Will Saletan (@saletan) September 27, 2022

Citi will only return funds they “deem” as “belonging” to the customer, Saletan alleged in a subsequent tweet. “[Citi] reserves the right *never* to return the money,” according to Saletan.

President Joe Biden's plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt violates both federal law and the Constitution, according to a just-filed lawsuit from the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a libertarian law firm.
"This isn't how laws are supposed to be made," Caleb Kruckenberg, an attorney for PLF, tells Reason. "Only Congress has the power to pass laws and spend money under the Constitution. The administration's actions here are flagrantly illegal."
This is the first serious challenge to Biden's student loan forgiveness plan, which he announced last month. The lawsuit's plaintiff is Frank Garrison, who's also an attorney at PLF. Garrison borrowed federal student loans to pay for law school, but according to him, Biden's debt forgiveness plan will actually subject him to a financial penalty in the form of a state tax. This gives him standing to sue the U.S. Education Department, his lawsuit argues.
"Despite the staggering scope of this regulatory action, it was taken with breathtaking informality and opacity," the lawsuit claims. "In the rush, the administration has created new problems for borrowers in at least six states that tax loan cancellation as income."
According to Garrison, he is already receiving debt relief under Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), a federal program for borrowers who work in public service at nonprofit organizations. Qualifying borrowers who make a certain number of payments and meet maximum income requirements can have the rest of their debts forgiven by PSLF. Garrison expects to qualify in about four years.
Importantly, debt relief under PSLF is not subject to state taxes. Biden's broad forgiveness plan, however, will be taxed as income in Indiana—where Garrison resides—as well as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Garrison will be "stuck with a tax bill that makes him financially worse off than continuing with his repayment program under PSLF," according to the lawsuit. "He did not ask for cancellation, doesn't want it, and has no way to opt out of it."
"The administration's slapdash, lawmaking-by-press-release approach to student debt cancellation threatens to leave tens of thousands of borrowers stuck with a tax bill on money they'll never see in states like Indiana, where it will be taxed as income," says Kruckenberg.
While the Pacific Legal Foundation's theory is that this gives Garrison standing to sue the Education Department, the lawsuit's case against the Biden forgiveness plan is more straightforward: PLF is arguing that Biden has violated both the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, which give Congress rather than the president the power to make new regulations.
Biden's new plan will forgive up to $20,000 worth of debt for many borrowers. The plan could cost U.S. taxpayers anywhere between $300 billion and a trillion dollars. A low estimate of the cost per individual taxpayer is $2,100.
The administration has claimed that it has the power to unilaterally forgive student loan debts without consulting Congress. As justification, Biden has cited 2003's Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students, or HEROES Act. This law gave the president some authority to cancel or delay student loan repayments during national emergencies, with the clear intention of offering relief to borrowers who were serving in combat operations during the war on terror. Biden's view is that the COVID-19 pandemic counts as a national emergency, even though he has now declared it definitively "over."
PLF's lawsuit takes issue with the pandemic justification for debt relief, noting that the harms purportedly ameliorated with debt forgiveness are not a "direct result" of the "national emergency," as required by the HEROES Act.
"To the extent the statute can arguably justify the cancellation, the major questions doctrine requires a clear authorization by Congress of such an economically and politically significant action, which is lacking here," the lawsuit argues.
Loan forgiveness is set to kick in sometime next month.
The post 'Flagrantly Illegal': Law Firm Files Lawsuit To Stop Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness appeared first on Reason.com.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” This is a great conversation today. But it’s a tricky one to introduce, because the guest I have — I’m not having him on for the thing he’s best known for. So Patrick Collison — by day, co-founder and C.E.O. of the multibillion-dollar payments company, Stripe; by night, by weekend, I think, one of the most important thinkers now in Silicon Valley — certainly, one of the most quietly influential, someone who is forging and traversing an intellectual path that a lot of other people are now following. And it’s this second incarnation and role that I’m really interviewing him in today — the soft power side, I guess, of Patrick Collison. Collison’s work here centers around this question of progress. The argument is that human progress is much more precious and rare and fragile than we realize. We maybe take it for granted. We live in this time when things have been changing, atop decades and decades, even centuries and centuries, even millennia now, when things have kept changing. But for most of human history, that was not true. It was not true. There just was no market rapid advance in human living standards. It’s only in the past 10,000 years, and then practically in the past few hundred — just an eye-blink in the time human beings have been on Earth — that things kept changing, usually for the better. And the question is, why? And Collison’s particular meta question is, given the clear fragility of forward motion here, given how rare it has proven to be — and so how easy it might be to lose — why isn’t the question of the conditions of progress more central? Why isn’t the study of progress in a wide multidisciplinary way a more common and central discipline? Collison has written a few influential essays here, with the economist Tyler Cowen. He called for the inauguration of a discipline — they call it progress studies — and that now has people studying it. There’s people creating journals for it, creating syllabi and podcasts and books around the topic. It’s one of the more singularly successful calls for a research direction I have seen. Separately, in a piece co-authored with the scientist, Michael Nielsen, Collison and Nielsen argued that, though it is hard to measure, it seems like the rate of scientific progress is slowing down, and that’s particularly true if you account for how much more we’re putting into science, in terms of money, of people, of time and technology. Now, these ideas are not original to Collison. The point is not that nobody studied human progress before this or worried about the pace of scientific research. He wouldn’t claim that. It wouldn’t be true. But he is playing a distinctive role in their framing and their popularization, and in creating and funding a community around them. And what I see in my travels here is that it is working. Something is burbling here. But I can’t find many big pieces where Collison really lays out his worldview. There are a couple essays, tweets, interviews, but he’s not been primarily writing this down. What he has been doing is funding it through Fast Grants, which has been successful, but more than that, intellectually influential effort to show you can give out scientific grants quickly and with very little overhead, through the Arc Institute, a big biotech organization he’s creating to push a researcher-first approach to biotech, and through giving a bit of money, and a bit of time, and a bit of prestige, and a bit of networking to a lot of different projects that circle these questions. He’s got this funny quality of being nowhere in particular, but also somehow, almost everywhere, if you’re interested in these questions. So what I wanted to do in this conversation was try to get as close as I could to the Patrick Collison worldview, the underlying theory of the case here that animates his thinking his funding, and the ways in which he’s trying to nudge the culture he’s a part of, or the ways in which he’s trying to actively create a culture he doesn’t yet see. As always, my email — ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Patrick Collison, welcome to the show.

patrick collison

Great to be back.

ezra klein

So you’ve made the argument that science — all science — is slowing down, that we’re putting more money and more people into research, and we’re getting less and less out of it. Tell me about that.

Well, I want to separate two things. There’s a question as to whether science in its totality is slowing down, in terms of the absolute returns from it. I think that might be true. You can maybe divide up the first half of the 20th century and the second half and so on, and sort of try to compare one with the other. And we had general relativity and quantum mechanics and various other major breakthroughs in the first half. You can ask the question of, well, did we have as many in the second half? But in the second half, we did have the discovery of D.N.A. and molecular biology and lots of other things. So I don’t know that I would claim a total slowdown. The thing that I think is clearer and should be very concerning to us is, as you look at the number of scientists engaged in the pursuit of science, and if you look at the total amount that we’re spending, and as you look at the total output, as coarsely measured by things like papers and number of journals, all of those metrics have grown by, depending on the number, let’s say, between 20 and 100x between 1950 and, say, 2010. And if you look at it on a per-capita basis, or a per-unit-of-work basis, now used to divide all those total outcomes by a factor of 50, and it seems like if you imagine yourself as the median scientist, you’re meaningfully less likely to produce anything like as consequential a breakthrough as you would have, say, in 1920. And so Michael Nielsen and I, in order to try to put slightly more rigor on that question — we went and we surveyed a bunch of scientists across a number of universities in a number of different disciplines, and we presented them with different Nobel Prize-winning breakthroughs. And we tried to compute an approximate ordering of their significance in the eyes of these scientists. And the thing that would kind of have to be true — for the per-capita impact, we remain in constant — is we’d have to be discovering much more important things in the latter half of the 20th century in order to compensate for, to make it worthwhile, for us to be investing this 50-fold greater effort. And we didn’t find that. In physics, in the estimation of physicists, there was a kind of flat-to-declining trend. It’s not super obvious which way it points, but in as much as there’s a trend visible, it’s probably slightly downwards. And in other fields, it was maybe similarly equivocal, perhaps a slight increase, visible in some, but importantly, in no fields that it looked like we’re on this crazy, exponentially improving trajectory, which is what you would have to have for this per-capita phenomenon to not be present. And I think that should be something we’re interested in for multiple reasons. One, because presumably, as a society, we’re interested in just how much more scientific progress and technological progress and so forth, how much more innovation is there going to be over the next 10 years or the next 50 years or the next century. But also, because there’s kind of two possibilities. One possibility is, fundamentally, we’re running out of low-hanging fruit, and it’s just going to be harder to do this stuff. And in as much as we’re setting investment or making investment decisions around to what degree should be pursuing the stuff, I guess it’s important to know what we think the returns should be. Or the other possibility is, somehow, we’re doing it suboptimally. Something changed, and we were pursuing this process of discovery more effectively in the past, and presumably, for inadvertent reasons, something went wrong, and now, we’re just less efficient at it. But either explanation — and it doesn’t necessarily have to be fully binary — but either explanation is important, and either explanation, I think, has prescriptions for what we should do going forward.

ezra klein

Let me start with the low-hanging-fruit explanation, which I think is a more popular one. And you have — in the piece you did on this with Michael Nielsen, the sad, but in the very academic way, very funny quote from the physicist Paul Dirac, who says of the 1920s, there was a time when, quote, “Even second-rate physicists could make first-rate discoveries,” which I just kind of love. But the theory there is you can only make a lot of the big discoveries once. You discover quantum mechanics once. You discover the atom once. And most of them have just been made, so what you have now is more complicated, smaller, requires much larger teams of people, much more complicated experiments, with much more infrastructure. So we’re just structurally in a period where it’s going to get harder and harder and harder to make big gains. Do you believe that?

I think it’s possible, but even though it’s intuitively compelling on some level, I’m not sure that it’s true. It’s probably true to at least some degree for some particular research direction, right? We go after discovering the various subatomic particles, and initially, without too much difficulty, we discover the electron or whatever. And by the time we’ve discovered the nth quark, it’s now gotten super hard, and even with ever-larger particle accelerators, we’re not necessarily making breakthroughs of the same magnitude. So I think it’s pretty true for a given direction. But obviously, the question is, well, to what degree is progress in any area opening up other directions, right? And so I mean, you mentioned the Dirac quote and, say, physics in the early part of the 20th century. Those discoveries opened up new techniques and investigation methodologies and so on, that then gave rise to molecular biology in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. And so there’s kind of a combinatorial benefit, where discoveries over here or discoveries over there might unlock opportunities and major breakthroughs in areas that we could not have foreseen in advance. There are lots of, quote unquote, “low-hanging-fruit discoveries” made in computers and computer science in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Maybe we’re even still in that regime, right? We’re still making some pretty fundamental breakthroughs. And of course, again, those, quote, “low-hanging discoveries” would not have been possible without a lot of this optimization and discovery in other fields. And so I think it’s probably true for a given research direction, but the relevant question for society is, is it true in aggregate. And there, it’s much less clear to me that it is.

ezra klein

I want to read something provocative you said in an interview with the economist Noah Smith. And you said, quote, “Most systems get worse in at least certain ways as they scale. The idea that science could have gotten worse in significant ways sometimes sounds strange to people. Like, we’re doing so much more. How could that be bad? But I think that misses the many examples of sensitivity of scientific processes to institutions and culture. Swiss nationals have won more than 10 times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. 10 times. And yet, they’re neighbors. And Italy certainly isn’t lacking in scientific tradition — Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, et cetera. The ‘how’ of science just really matters.” And this seems, to me, to be where your exploration really goes. So tell me what you think might have gone wrong in the “how” of science.

So I think this point about the sensitivity of scientific outcomes to the specifics of the institutions and the cultures is very important and probably underappreciated. At the beginning of the 20th century, not only was the U.S. not a scientific powerhouse, but it barely had a presence in frontier research, whatsoever. To become a credible researcher in the U.S. in 1900, you almost certainly had to go and spend time in, most likely, Germany, and failing that, in France or England — you know, what have you. And by 1900, the U.S. was already a pretty prosperous place, and it had a well-educated society, as societies went. And yet, somehow — and it had universities, right? I mean, Harvard was hundreds of years old by that time. And so it checked many of the ostensible boxes, and yet, the sum total of the U.S.’ research output as of 1900 was still de minimis. When James Conant, who was later president of Harvard for 20 years — when he went to Germany as a chemist, which was his original training, in the 1920s, he recounts how dispirited he was by what he found there and how far ahead of Harvard German research was, as of the early 20th century. And then, for a variety of reasons, all sorts of cultural, institutional funding — various transformations happened. And of course, by the latter half of the 20th century, the U.S. was the unquestioned leader at the frontier of scientific progress. If you look backwards, you see where that locus has been, where the most successful and fertile scientific grounds have been — it has repeatedly moved. As we just said, maybe the 19th century, it was Germany. Before that, in the 18th century, it was plausibly France. They had a couple of these really successful École Polytechnique and Grande École and so on. And so as a kind of first-order empirical matter, we can just notice, huh, this really seems to matter — and then, the example you just gave of the divergence between Switzerland and Italy. And so then, if we kind of accept that, and we try to ask ourselves, well, specifically, what are the mechanisms? You know, what’s actually going on? It’s hard for me to say. It seems like the transmission of research culture by individual researchers matters a great deal. And you see these kinds of pockets of the cultural transmission repeatedly crop up, where Gerty and Carl Cori — you probably haven’t heard of — they ran a little biology lab in Missouri, and no fewer than six of their trainees, of students they trained, went on themselves again to win Nobel Prizes. And if we tell ourselves a standard kind of mechanistic story as to, well, it’s the funding level, it’s how much are we investing in science, or it’s something about whether there’s an institution in the courser sense, that can possibly be amenable to it, it’s very hard to explain these eddies where you see these pockets of excellence really produce these outsized returns. So I think it’s a complicated question. I think all of aggregate culture, funding, institutional characteristics, and so on all contribute to it. But if I had to isolate a single variable, it seems to me that the research culture set by specific people and the tacit knowledge transmitted through direct experience is probably the number-one thing.

ezra klein

This, I think, is where I sometimes fall into my own pessimism on this. Because I want to believe, as you do, that we can double the rate of scientific advance, maybe even go further than that. But I think the prediction — if I’m putting this on institutions, on culture, on pockets of transmission and mentorship — I think the prediction I would make is then, even if you believe, say, that America had a great 20th century, but its institutions have become sclerotic, and we’ve slowed down, and everything is piled in lawsuits and review boards now, somewhere else that didn’t have that, that has a different culture, that has different institutions, would be pulling way ahead. So you might think, well, China will be pulling way ahead. And you’ve noted this in some places. We’re getting a lot of peer-reviewed research out of China — huge number of citations out of China. We’re not seeing them dominate the big breakthrough advances of the era. It doesn’t seem like Europe is lapping us. And so if you think this slowdown is somewhat global, then that seems to me to militate against questions of individual institutions, cultures, how different labs work, because there is so much variation that you should have some of these labs that are doing it right, some of these places that haven’t piled on a little bit too much bureaucracy. But I don’t think we really see that.

This diagnosis of these phenomena to cultural, institutional, mentorship-related, interpersonal dynamics, and your observation that it’s not obviously the case, that there are other places we can pointed that are doing it so much better — for me, my takeaway is that, well, successful cultures are a pretty narrow path. Homo sapiens emerged 200,000 years ago. And as far as we can tell, for the first 190,000 years of our genesis, we think we were largely biologically equivalent to the people we are today. But as best we can tell, there was some kind of cultural capital that those people lacked for a very extended period of time before human societies in somewhat recognizable modern form started to emerge — agriculture, all the rest. And in a similar vein, we had many billions of lives and centuries elapsed before the Industrial Revolution., and before we started to put together many of the input ingredients or enough of the input ingredients that we can get sustained improvement in standards of living and ongoing economic growth and progress. And so your point about, well, as I look around, I don’t see anything or anywhere that’s obviously better, I agree with that. But again, my takeaway is that that’s what makes the question of how do we improve or how can we do somewhat better so urgent and pressing, where it’s many things have to go right. It’s not easy to be even as good as — or to get to a place where things are as good as they are today. What we have is very precious. And I think the threads and the themes that you’ve been pulling on of late — all of these dynamics underscore their importance.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good bridge to progress studies as an idea. And I want to have people hold in their heads that idea that progress is very narrow, that it is a very narrow bridge that we have walked on for a very short period of time. But let’s try to define it. When you say progress here, what are you actually talking about? Is it just shorthand for economic growth or G.D.P.? What is progress?

Well, I don’t know that I would claim to put forth some kind of definitive definition. And I think, to some extent, our intuitions around it are probably broadly correct. And so it might not matter to define it super precisely and finely. For, me it is something along the lines of our success in realizing a liberal, pluralistic and prosperous society, and a sense among people that their offspring can and probably will do better than they themselves have, and that more broadly, the future will be better than the past, and that we’re at least making incremental progress towards embodying values and morals that we collectively think we can be proud of. But I don’t think anything that novel in that. I don’t think my conception of progress would differ that materially from some kind of average aggregate over any other group of people in the country.

ezra klein

I do think there’s something interesting, though, which is that if you look at eras that I think progress-studies-type people and economic-growth people and historians of economic growth study most closely, actually, some of the periods where people feel a lot of rapid progress don’t fit that at all. You have, say, the Industrial Revolution, where life spans and lifestyle get worse for a lot of the people. I don’t think one will look at that period as unbelievably pluralistic. You have a lot of periods of war when you have very, very, very rapid technological progress, but it happens in context of much more martial societies. So there is an interesting tension, at least in periods — and some of them quite long, actually — where you can have fairly rapid economic progress, but it comes at a cost that I think isn’t always acknowledged, but is an important thing to think about.

Yeah. So I don’t think you could point to some of these periods in the past and say that they definitively embody to the extent that we would fully aspire to some of these broader traits and characteristics. But I think the question is more, what are they doing as — you have to judge it relative to the baseline that preceded them. And I don’t know that the 18th century in the U.K. is some ideal as a society. But if you compare it to the 16th century in the U.K., the ideals and ideas of natural rights and religious tolerance and so on — they were somewhat better embodied by the 18th century than they had just a couple of centuries previously. And similarly, in the U.S., say, during either war or the ‘30s or whatever, again, it’s not like that was any kind of perfect society, but assessed relative to the society of 1830, I think it compares relatively favorably. And I think it’s not a coincidence that Adam Smith — his first book, of course, was on ethics and morals and trying to instill better general ideals and behaviors across a society. And maybe after that, he then argued for and laid many of the foundations of what we would recognize as modern economics. So I don’t think it’s perfect. But on average, I think the correlation is positive.

ezra klein

So let’s talk about the Industrial Revolution for a little bit here. I think a lot of people locate a takeoff in human living standards — it continues to this day — there. And it’s strange in a way, right? “There” is a very geographically contiguous spot. It’s the U.K. — England, actually, I should say, at that point. And there is a moment in time that probably could have come at another moment in time, depending on how human history plays out in the counterfactual. I know that you have an interest in the theories of why then, why there. How do you work your way through them? What do you think is persuasive for why then, why there?

Well, you know, again, I caveat. With all of these topics we’re discussing through this podcast, maybe the first-order banner for all of them should be, I don’t know, these are my best guesses, and I think it’s important that all of us were pretty humble in the claims and the assertions and the beliefs that we hold. Recently, I’ve been reading a bunch of Irish and Scottish writers around then. It’s very interesting, because for both the Irish and the Scots, there was a sort of a pressing and kind of obvious question where England was much more prosperous than they were or we were. And there’s no super obvious explanation for that. There wasn’t an obvious climatic or natural resource endowment that England benefited from that was lacking in Ireland or Scotland. It wasn’t like England was actually a vastly larger polity. The orders of magnitude were comparable. And Bishop Berkeley wrote this book, “The Querist.” He was asking these questions directly, just like, what’s going on? What’s wrong with Ireland? You know, why can’t we do this? And then, you have the Act of Union in 1707, uniting Scotland and England — and sort of similarly, of all these Scottish thinkers being like, all right, we’re now literally the same country. Why are we so much more impoverished? And then, if you shift to England, there’s Joel Mokyr and — you’ve read his work — and more recently, people like Anton Howes. And in a similar vein, they go back to — I mean, the word, improvement, came from Francis Bacon, or it was kind of popularized as a concept by Francis Bacon. But that’s noteworthy, right? Like, that was not a pervasive broad concept in the 15th century. I mean, literally, the word, improvement, in this broader societal context, came from word, “translated,” at the beginning of the 17th century. And the ultimate conclusion that these historians and scholars and analysts of the Industrial Revolution come to — and I think it’s a correct one — is somehow, whether it’s through Bacon or Newton or various of the tinkerers who produced some of the earliest technological breakthroughs, that somehow, this improving mind-set became pervasive. You had societies explicitly — like the Hartlib Circle or the Lunar Society, or the Select Society, and the club, and so on — all these societies explicitly devoted to figuring out ways to advance the state of affairs that prevailed. And these societies were comprised of many of the leading people and thinkers and so on of the day. And it seems maybe a bit satisfyingly squishy to attribute it to something so hard to pin down. But as you run through all the possible other explanations, it’s differences in IP law. It’s difference in the Malthusian conditions. It’s difference in the prevalence of coal, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Through various cross-sectional analyses, you can exclude most of these in looking at all of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It really does seem to me that differences in the mind-set and in the culture are where you have to net out. And that’s not to say maybe that it’s fully sufficient. There might be other preconditions that are important. And then, maybe as a last thing to say, it is striking to me that many of these kind of original 18th-century economic writers and thinkers — and again, the kind of people we look to as the founders of much of the discipline — that they themselves were kind of centrally preoccupied with this. And yeah, they were in favor of free trade and specialization and human labor and lots of these concepts that we’re now very familiar with, but they really thought that general mind-set played a big role, too.

ezra klein

So let’s talk about Joel Mokyr ideas for a minute. So Mokyr is an economic historian. People should read his book, “The Culture of Growth,” which is really fascinating. He argues, as you’re saying, that in this period, this mind-set that we can increase the store of usable knowledge, and then use it to alter nature, to better the human condition, takes hold. That’s a new mind-set. It’s different than religious ideas of the past. It’s different than cultural ideas of the present. And that, plus a bunch of other things, particularly the republic of letters, the way people are writing letters back and forth, kind of combine into a culture that is able to grow. But one of the things that I really take from his work, that sits in my head, is he believes it’s all very contingent. He really believes it might have not happened. But the other is that I think it opens up this question that as a tech person, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on, which is, he really believes — Mokyr really believes — that there is a communications infrastructure that arises at that time, that has a kind of culture of generosity and argument and honesty in it, and is built on writing letters slowly to one another, and then copying those letters over to other people. And that culture is really good for intellectual advancement. I think one of the promises of the internet and the age we live in is, it’s all faster. We can write to people immediately. Things we write can go viral and be seen by 5 million people all of a sudden. And that was going to speed up economic growth really, really rapidly. And I would say, you don’t see that. So I’m curious how you think about communication cultures here and what you think for all the advantages of ours we might not have.

I mean, I think it’s hard to say in aggregate. I feel it’s pretty likely that the effects are very heterogeneous across different populations. And you’ve made the case that you think Twitter is bad for journalism and for journalists. And I guess you live this yourself with your now mostly inactive Twitter account, I guess, apart from announcements. And I think in the case of the internet, that it’s almost certainly a tremendously large gain that billions of people now have access to educational materials. And some of the otherwise hard-to-communicate tacit knowledge — that things like YouTube videos now made legible and available. And I think it’s true that there are various gravity equations that we see across different disciplines. I mean, in economies themselves, in trade, where you rapidly decline in propensities to trade as countries get further from each other — but you have versions of this in academic disciplines as well, where geographic distance correlates inversely with likelihood of the exchange of ideas and so on. And I think it’s clearly the case that the sort of reaction surface area has increased substantially by the internet there and represents a kind of efficiency gain for people looking to exchange in ideas. Many of the companies that Stripe works with are remote companies, and they might employ people across myriad countries, and that’s a kind of communication and efficiency gain that would certainly not otherwise be achievable. I think it’s worth recognizing that the aggregate amount of G.D.P. that we are creating or gaining every year is so much larger now than — I mean, the percentage might be the same. But the total amount of stuff happening, or the increasing amount of stuff happening, is so much larger now than it was 100 or 200 or 300 years ago. And so for all of those reasons, I think we should give superior communication technologies and faster communication technologies a significant amount of credit, even though the ways in which those are manifests might be hard to measure and somewhat prosaic. Take my mom, for example. My mom works with a hospital in Minnesota. Our youngest brother has a physical disability. And in the course of that, she trained herself in treatment for cerebral palsy, this condition, and she wrote a book about it, and she did a master’s in this. And now, she’s trying to improve treatment for this condition throughout Ireland, in the U.S. and other countries as well. She’s a retired Irish mother who spends some of her year living in the U.S. near her sons, spends the rest of her year living in Ireland, working at a hospital in Minnesota, who just got a proposal to have her book translated into German a couple of days ago. And that’s a relatively prosaic story, but literally, millions of these stories exist in kind of aggregate form around the world. To circle back to the initial thrust of your question, though, I think it’s at least possible that the internet is bad for civic discourse. I’m not saying it is, but it’s certainly in the realm of plausibility — and that perhaps both things are true, where there’s some kind of iceberg where there are these enormous welfare gains that are not that legible, not that visible, lie beneath the surface, and then certain of the most visible manifestations, like what we see on cable news or what we see written in the papers — perhaps that is worse, and perhaps, slightly more structural judiciousness would be desirable there.

ezra klein

I want to try to flip that and suggest that — because I’m going to push some counter ideas on why we maybe don’t see as much progress as we wish we did. But one is that I think possibly, very large welfare losses lie beneath the surface. And beneath the surface of stories like the one you just told about your mother, I think we all have stories of ways or people for whom the internet has unlocked a possibility. I mean, my whole career is built on the internet. I was an early blogger. I got rejected from my student newspaper. And if there was no blogging, like, god knows what would have happened to me. [LAUGHS] I mean, nothing too terrible, probably, but I wouldn’t have the career I have today. And at the same time, I think that the group of people who, by luck or by temperament, proved very, very good at using the internet, to some degree, distracts from the many, many, many people for whom the internet is fundamentally a distraction machine, or for whom the internet is creating, because of what we built on it. You know, shorter attention spans — how many people would have had an idea, sitting in a room by themselves, or taking a walk, that they never have now, because they never have to have a moment where they’re thinking alone? And so one thing that I think we’re all loathe to do is we’ll talk a lot about how it’s weird that we have so much more knowledge, but productivity isn’t increasing faster. It’s weird that we have so much more rapid communication between researchers, but science isn’t advancing faster. And then, the idea that maybe there are things happening to us that makes us less able to use that increasing stock of knowledge well, or makes us less able to collaborate in a useful way, I think, gets dismissed rather quickly. But I don’t think it’s totally implausible. Now, I don’t want to say, like, the greatest technology we ever had was letter-writing. Obviously, the greatest technology we ever had was blogging in the early aughts when I became a blogger. And whatever happened in your 20s is, like, as good as it was ever going to get. But I do wonder about these questions. And I think something Mokyr is right to put a lot of attention on is communicative cultures. Communication is how we collaborate. And if communication is in any way getting worse, it’s going to have pretty big macro effects. The other thing is if you believe these cultures matter, weirdly, as big as we’re getting, the internet allows a certain disciplines culture to stretch boundaries and borders in time in a way that it would have been harder. I suspect that labs were more different 50 years ago than they are today. The countries and the disciplines of researchers and the cultures of researchers in countries or cities are more different from each other 50 years ago than today, which is great if we have the best of all cultures today, but it’s not that great if you actually think variation is really important.

Let’s wrap up there. So first, I agree, as a basic matter, that there are welfare losses occurring across society that we should be worried about, and probably everybody listening to this is familiar with the Stephen Pinker case for optimism, and rather than focusing in the headlines, you zoom out, look at these long-term time series. And once one does that, things seem a lot more encouraging, whether you look at it by income or life expectancy or infant mortality or choose your metric. Something that’s been striking to me of late is if you change the x-axis on those time series, and look at many of those phenomena and trends over a much shorter window, the valence changes substantially, and life expectancy in the U.S. is now, in fact, declining. According to C.D.C. data, 54 percent of teenage girls now report persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. And you could say, well, teenagers were never stereotyped as the most cheerful lot, but we do have some degree of longitudinal data here, and that number is up from being in the 20s as recently as 2009. 1/2 the population now is either prediabetic or diabetic — again, according to the C.D.C. Basically, point is, when we look at more recent windows, I think there are plenty of aggregate, emergent, complicated outcomes and phenomena that should give us concern. On the degree to which we should attribute the diagnosis to the internet or to our kind of communication media more broadly, it’s less clear to me in that — not saying it’s not true, but presumably, the life expectancy one is not — or at least if it is, the mechanism has to be very complicated. There are a bunch of other health-related ones. So take, for example, say, the incidence of diabetes or pre-diabetes. And you could say, OK, fine, all those things might be true, but they’re totally different. I guess the question I wonder about is, well, we know that lots of basic biological outcomes are correlated with mental states and so on. And so to what degree is there some more nuanced and complicated relationship there? But I think it’s a fair question, and I wonder a lot about it myself.

ezra klein

Let me ask you about how you think, over the long period here, about the relationship between technology and equity or egalitarianism. And something specific is in my mind. I flicked earlier at the way the Industrial Revolution, for an extended period of time, seems to have reduced a lot of people’s living standards. And it wasn’t till later you had changes in redistribution in labor unions and labor protections that the amount of material prosperity that was generating created more broad-based prosperity, particularly at a very high level. I don’t know that you can sustain that kind of thing today. We have much more a small-d democratic culture. If things aren’t working for people, it’s much easier for them to organize and be heard. I think there’s a much more direct and complicated relationship now between whether or not people feel benefited by technology, and whether or not they are going to accept the conditions and the risks of rapid technological advance. But I’m curious, from your vantage point, how you see that both kind of historically and currently.

I agree with that. I worry a lot about the basic stability of a society that does not successfully generate and make sufficiently broadly accessible the benefits of economic growth. The world simply has too little prosperity. And if it is not the case that people in the U.S. or people in any country — if they either feel like things aren’t progressing, or if they feel like maybe somewhere distant from them, things are progressing but they personally will never be able to benefit from it, I think we put ourselves in a very dangerous and likely unstable equilibrium. And if you go back to — well, you don’t have to go back very far in history to see, obviously, plenty of instances where this kind of instability brought the whole house of cards down. And so as a consequence of that, I worry a lot about, how do we simply make sure that — or one of the small things we each individually can do to try to make sure that society is generating enough economic gain and enough broadly experienced welfare gain that the whole compact can be maintained? And again, I don’t think there’s a ready neat kind of singular answer to that. Maybe Stripe as part of our small little contribution in one little fissure. But I think the central question you’re getting at is super important.

ezra klein

And one of the questions I wonder about there — we’ve talked about the way progress has been very geographically lumpy, let’s call it, right? There’s a lot that happens in very small places, and it ends up affecting the whole world. Obviously, then, the gains of progress sometimes have that quality, too. And I do think of one of the politically destabilizing effects of the past, let’s call it, 30 or 40 years of digital progress, is being the concentrations of wealth. We just used to have a lot more spread. Even putting the questions of rising inequality aside, just where rich people were was different. And so where they were giving a lot of money to the local hospital was more spread out, say, across the country or in other countries across the land. But here, even as the internet is supposed to democratize distance, and in many ways, has — I mean, telework is not a fake phenomenon. It has really concentrated the wealth of that to, literally, where we’re sitting, but to New York. There’s a lot of money now in Austin. And then, on top of that, you often have barriers of entry, in terms of how many homes can be bought. So it’s not even like people can move to the place where all the economic opportunity is happening. And I do think that creates some of the skepticism you see of technology. I don’t think a lot of people’s — I think people are really excited about a lot of the goods they’ve gotten from it. But in this kind of macro political sense, as you’re saying, in a period of a lot of change, a lot of folks with real backing in the data don’t feel life has gotten better at the macro level. Life expectancy, happiness, political stability — it’s not like you can look around and say, well, I got this computer in my pocket, and everything else is going great, too. It’s like, I got this computer in my pocket, and what it keeps telling me is that everything is going to hell. Now, maybe it’s telling me that a little bit too much, but there is validity to the narrative.

Yeah. So again, vehement in agreement on the sort of central importance of making sure that improvements in the standard of living are actually broadly realized across the society. That, too, I think, could serve as a manifesto for some of these Progress Studies ideas. On the internet in particular, or on technology and the technology sector and so forth, I think it’s complicated and difficult to try to sort of fully collapse or linearize it or something, where on the one hand, you have some of these concentration dynamics you identify. At the same time, of course, it is also a tremendous and incredible dispersal agent in making some of those possibilities and opportunities be more broadly available. I think it’s dangerous to take an excessively U.S.-centric perspective here. If you interact with or look at survey data, or otherwise try to assess what’s the sentiment of people in Poland, what’s the sentiment of people in India, or what’s the sentiment of people in Indonesia, they view the internet extremely positively. And I think correctly so, where their opportunities for advancement would be substantially curtailed in the absence of much of what the internet makes possible. I think in places like the U.S., or actually, even at home in Ireland, some of this story is complicated by lots of other things, but including — and I think, substantially — dynamics around housing policy, where there’s an extensive literature showing that, for example, a very substantial moderating effect on the increase in wealth inequality that would otherwise have happened, or income inequality, was geographic reallocation and people responding rationally to, OK, things in New York are going great, or things in California are going great. And if you look at the rate of increase of the Californian population, say, through the 1960s, that was a tremendously potent mechanism for us redistributing some of the economic gains that were being realized at the time. And of course, now, we have this crazy position, where California is losing population at the same time where the market caps of these companies and the profits of these companies are increasing very rapidly. But as one assesses that dynamic and tries to ask the question of, well, why aren’t these gains being better or more broadly distributed, it’s certainly not clear to me that the answer even lies in the realm of technology qua technology. And I think it’s certainly more broadly, again, some of these considerations like geographic allocation.

ezra klein

Let me ask one more question on the geographic dimension, and then I’ll move on to it. And it’s on my mind, in part because when I try to think about progress, when I try to think about what inventions and innovations are coming really quickly, I actually see a bunch here. And I’ll use A.I. as an example. I’ve met people who are trying to automate a bunch of legal contracts. It makes a ton of sense. People pay a lot all over the country — to some degree, all over the world — to get fairly basic legal contracts drawn up — wills and real estate documents and merger agreements and all kinds of — from the small to the large. If you imagine that getting really effectively automated, though — you think about Saint Louis, Missouri, where some of the people who are important pillars of the community work in law firms there, and what they do is contracts. They do estate planning and all the things that people have to do in contracts. And if it actually does get concentrated to really, really great contracting firms in the Bay Area or in New York, on the one hand, the democratizing potential will really be realized. Those contracts will get cheaper. There’s also a theory in crypto of smart contracts. And on the other hand, you really will have a lot of that — the gains of that, economically, going to smaller areas and aggregated across a bunch of different domains. So graphic design, in all kinds of areas of the country — midlevel graphic designers get paid to make logos for local businesses. It’s pretty clear they’re going to be able to do that really, really easily on things like DALL-E pretty fast. So you can imagine a lot of that area getting wiped out. And you kind of run through a couple of these. And before you get to really unbelievable and sci-fi-like dimensions of artificial intelligence, you just have a thing that is going to democratize a lot of capabilities in a way that’s going to put the money for those capabilities both a little bit back into the pockets of the people who need them, and then a lot into the people who run the best A.I. rigs and is going to have a really weird geographically destabilizing effect. And that paradox of the internet both democratizing geography, and then concentrating wealth and capital in very small areas is, to me, a central challenge. Because if you get that wrong, if it goes too much in the concentration area, I think we’re going to lose a lot of the political stability we need here. But you’re more on top of these technological advances than I am. Do you think the trends there are going to play out differently than I’m worried they will?

First, yeah, it’s not — I don’t think it’s foreordained whether or not these are going to be centralized technologies. I don’t know. And on the one hand, there’s, I think, an obvious feature we can contemplate, where there are only three A.I. models, and they are rooted in the hegemons, the citadels of Silicon Valley technology, and we all are digital serfs who are subsistence-farming on their gains. I think there’s also a very plausible story where these technologies prove substantially less defensible than we might have expected, and where, instead, they have this enormously decentralizing effect. Because otherwise, economies of scale that only large firms could benefit from can now be realized and pursued, even by massively smaller firms. And if we look at the recent history of A.I. — I don’t think any clear story there, but it does feel to me that it has been more biased towards the second story than the first. There are now multiple companies with large language models. There are a number of very successful open-source A.I. efforts. Actually, there was a really cool example from Replit, which is a service — it’s a programming I.D. in the browser, used by kids learning to code, but also increasingly used by people who are pursuing serious programming. And they recently released a GitHub copilot-like technology, where it will kind of autocomplete your code in the editor, and where you can do some pretty cool things. Like, you can highlight a block of code and ask it to be explained, and it’ll turn code into natural language, into English, and say, hey, here’s what this code is doing. Anyway, they wrote a blog post about how they built this, and they describe how it was built by one guy over the course of a couple of weeks. And maybe that’s only the case in the early days of this AI technology. I mean, in early computer games, the first games were built by a single heroic person, and now, it’s these gigantic studios and enormous CapEx budgets. And so I think the fact that this is the case today doesn’t mean that it will remain the case through time. But my takeaway is that at least not foreordained that AI or any of these other technologies will be centralizing forces. And then, the other thing to observe is that when we talk about these being centralizing, I think there’s a question as to, do we look at it in relative or absolute terms? And my contention would be that, both from a moral standpoint, but maybe more importantly from kind of a political-economy standpoint, what will matter is whether, on an absolute basis, people feel like they are realizing opportunities, their lives are improving, that things are getting better, that their kids will be in a better situation and so forth. And exactly how much value is realized by the companies themselves doesn’t actually matter that much, compared to that former question. And whether A.W.S. or whether any of these organizations has super high or super low profit margins, I don’t know is nearly as important as what is the actual effect on these communities and individuals across the society. And so in as much as one means — by centralizing, one means a large share of the profits, I think it is probably a more useful framing to look at it instead in terms of absolutes, and in particular, the absolute surplus generated by the users. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

What have you come to believe about the relationship between progress and war?

I am somewhat skeptical that war is as conducive to breakthroughs as we might intuitively conclude, or as is sometimes claimed. You’re probably familiar with Alexander Field’s work on the ‘30s here. And his basic claim is, the productivity gains we often attribute to the Second World War in the U.S. — like, those foundations actually were laid in the ‘30s, and then the first half of the ‘40s were a period of decreasing productivity as we massively, inefficiently reallocated our economic resources for the purposes of winning the war, which was probably a good thing to do, but inefficient in narrow economic terms. And he has a new book coming out, I think, next month, that sort of extends this argument into the ‘50s. And as one takes stock of the scientific breakthroughs — and so Stripe Press recently republished Vannevar Bush’s memoir, where he takes stock of this. And obviously, you have, say, the Manhattan Project, and that’s a big deal, certainly. But it doesn’t feel to me that had the Manhattan Project not occurred, that peaceful development of nuclear technology would have been massively stymied. Maybe it would have taken another 10 years, but it was already happening to some meaningful extent. And then, as you take stock of all the other breakthroughs that took place in the U.S. during the Second World War, there were some meaningful stuff like blood plasma and blood transfusions. There was some significant breakthroughs there. Some of the first antimalarial medications, radar, the proximity fuse, which I’m not sure is all that useful outside of military applications. But by the time you get down to invention 6 on the list, I don’t know that as you compare that list to, again, some counterfactual of what would otherwise have ensued, that it looks radically better as you take stock of the Cold War and the enormous fraction of our economic resources and human capital that were devoted towards us, that the gains necessarily look that impressive. And so again, it’s super hard to judge. You don’t have proper controls and so on. But I’m skeptical.

ezra klein

Let me take the other side. So there’s a question of, during war, how much did we invent during World War II. And that’s a question of how much the threat of war or the competition with an adversary ends up charging up innovation and convinces us to put resources, both in terms of people and in terms of money, and maybe in terms of institutions, into projects we wouldn’t otherwise have done. I think there’s an argument, at least, that we went to the moon because of the Soviet Union. It would not have done that for some time. Probably would have eventually done it, but also, who knows? As Derek Thompson, who I’m working on a lot of these ideas with, likes to point out, the Apollo Project was unpopular. It was not something that commanded wide popular support. Even now, if you look at the CHIPS Act that passed, it passed, with all that spending on semiconductor research and other kinds of next-generation technologies, under the framework of, let’s compete more effectively with China. If you look at all the things Darpa has done or been part of, the fact that “defense” is the first word in the Darpa acronym, I think, is meaningful. There’s something about what threat persuades societies to do, and persuades them to do technologically or what risks it allows otherwise-more-cautious governments to take, or what failures they could justify that allows them to have big successes. Something there doesn’t seem to small to me. And maybe it’s my political side, where I so often see scientific funding justified in Congress in terms of countries we’re competing with or are adversaries with. And I see what the defense industry can do that other institutions cannot, because they don’t get a lot of political blowback. But I don’t know. I worry a little bit about how much we seem to need the threat of another to accelerate things. And in a small way, maybe, we see what the pandemic — where we were willing to move much, much quicker on things like mRNA technology than I think we would have outside of it.

Yeah. So I think it’s certainly true that the crisis can cause the discontinuous shifts that have large effects, which in your example, say, are probably super beneficial. I don’t know. If you take Darpa as an example, it started as Arpa, as a more open-ended research institution and set of programs, and then with the Vietnam War, had the D pretended to it. And we decided, in the face of threat, to make it more applied, to take more seriously its translational and kind of, quote unquote, “competition-oriented mandate.” And I think that was bad for Darpa. And the internet, which arose under Arpa — it’s hard to think of innovations of similar magnitudes that then occurred in then-Darpa’s subsequent, say, two decades. If you take, say, U.S. science in general, the war — the Second World War — to some extent, the first, but much more so the second — precipitated an enormous centralization of U.S. science in its aftermath. Because we really marshaled together all of the — or a significant fraction of the scientific capacity of the U.S. in service of the war effort. For, example the 50 percent overhead, the fraction of government grants that goes to universities — that was chosen in the early days of the coordination of the war effort, and has now become a kind of a pillar of academic and research funding in the U.S. And in the aftermath of the war, we sort have this question of OK, we’ve kind of pulled everything together. Now, what do we do? And that became, in various ways, the N.I.H. and the N.S.F. and so on. I mean, the N.I.H. predated it, but the growth of the N.I.H. really occurred after the war. And the federal government, shortly thereafter, for the first time, became the majority funder of US science. And all that centralization — and I mean, you pointed out the benefits of variety and of experimentation and of heterogeneity, and having some degree of institutional and structural diversity and so on, I totally agree with all of that. And I think all of that was very meaningfully curtailed by, again, the aftershocks of some of the threats that we faced during the war. And if you think about the things that we’re maybe happiest about having happened — the founding of the major new U.S. research universities in the latter parts of the 19th century or the revolution in health care and kind of medical practice that first happened at Johns Hopkins, and then kind of codified in the Flexner Report, or the great industrial research labs of Bell and Park and so on — or excuse me — Xerox — they didn’t obviously come from a place of fear or a threat. They came from a place of hope and optimism and opportunity. And maybe there are some inventions that you’re more likely to get to from some of these external pressures. But yeah, if you gave me a dial, and I can kind of turn up or down the threat or fear index of society, it’s not super obvious to me that one would want to turn it up if what one cared about was the aggregate rate of progress.

ezra klein

That’s a good bridge, I think, to the question of institutions. And I take one of the main concerns of yours, of progress studies, as being around institutional slowdown. You have this idea that we don’t meta-maintain institutions very well. They start in one place, and then over time, they crust over, and we don’t really know what to do with that. Give me a little bit of your thinking there.

I think institutions, the cultures they instill and act as kind of coordination points and training sites for — those of enormous consequence — I think much of the success of the U.S. and of various other Western countries has, in substantial part, been attributable to successful institutions. Most people would accept, I think, that there is, to some extent, consistent trends that tend to happen with institutions through time. Just maybe most basically, the problem that gives rise to an institution in the first place is probably a pretty real and significant problem. No one would have taken the time to found the institution if it wasn’t. And there can be some degree of drift there, where we don’t necessarily decommission the institution once the problem has subsided or abated. And then, you tend to attract a certain kind of person in the early days of an institution — people who are slightly less status and reputation and procedure-oriented, because a new institution almost never has that. And then, through time, the sort of collective or the mission-oriented incentives of the institution can kind of drift somewhat from the individual incentives that particular people are subject to. I think all this stuff exists. And the thing that I observe, or that I just find myself thinking about is, we’ve had eras of institution formation in the U.S. It has not been kind of a constant rate through time. And the New Deal maybe, and say, the 30 years afterwards, and the Great Society — we bookend it with those start and endpoints. That was a period of tremendously active institution construction and formation in the U.S., Darpa being — or Arpa originally being a good example, and indeed, NASA. And I guess I find myself wondering, one, if we didn’t have any of these institutions — and I’m not saying we should get rid of them. But if we didn’t have them, what institutions would we found today, first, and how high in the list would NASA be, for example? And then, secondly, in as much as we accept that some of these institutional dynamics exist, like the fact that sclerosis as an emergent property arises, what do we do about that? And lots of people have told us it’s pretty — doesn’t need a lot of teasing apart to see it as one compares NASA and SpaceX and the respective budgets, and the respective achievements, and so forth, I think it’s hard to not at least wonder about their respective efficiencies. And say, if society could only have SpaceX or NASA, which one would we choose, and what should we conclude from that, and to what extent do those phenomena generalize elsewhere? I don’t have answers to these questions. But I find that in the political discourse — not that anybody is celebrating that, but in the discourse, it’s very easy to get, I think, very wrapped up in questions of optimal funding levels, and should this number be 10 percent or 50 percent or higher or whatever, whereas to me, a lot of our satisfaction with the outcomes seems to hinge on deeper questions about the nature of the institution. I don’t know that the problem or benefit, or anything good or bad about NASA is attributable to the budget, per se. It seems more, kind of, resonant in some of these deeper cultural questions. And then, in the recent pandemic, or in the — I don’t know. I was going to say, ongoing pandemic. But I guess as of two days ago, with the President’s verdict, it is now over.

ezra klein

It’s over. Congratulations, everybody.

Exactly. But anyway, I think that was maybe a vivid demonstration of many of these dynamics, where I don’t know this any of the story about the institutional response to the pandemic should be primarily one of funding. I think it’s much more about the dispositions and the attitudes and the cultural biases of entities like the N.I.H. and the F.D.A. and the C.D.C.

ezra klein

I find the NASA SpaceX example an interesting and provocative one. Because on the one hand, I think what you’re saying is completely true. And where a lot of the NASA programs and projects have gone in recent decades, is just — it’s sad. It’s just a sad story. And on the other hand, the idea that you — the thought experiment of choosing between NASA and SpaceX — the thing that it immediately asks is, well, you can’t. Because without NASA, there is no SpaceX. And one way the private sector handles a lot of these questions — I mean, I’m always struck by how much of the way biotech research works is that big pharmaceutical companies acquire small biotech firms that have made a breakthrough or have come up with a very promising candidate. This is kind of an accepted thing that the big companies — they do a fair amount of research, but a major, major innovation transmission there is small groups do more, quicker, and they’re just going to buy them. And the NASA SpaceX example has a little bit of that dynamic to it, although with a different mechanism of financing. And I don’t know. I wonder if there aren’t deeper lessons there.

Yeah, I don’t mean here in the NASA example — like, I don’t think reducing it to a simple binary of this-or-that is correct. It’s more, what should we make of the differences in these two organizations? And given those observations or beliefs, what do we then think an efficient outcome might look like? And do we think that where we are today — this prevailing status quo — is optimal? Or are there other things we can do better? And maybe an important thing to say within all of this is, to the extent that these are all kind of inevitably determined outcomes, maybe it doesn’t really matter if we think things would be better or worse. We’re going to end up in the same place, regardless. But I think for all of these, it’s super contingent. And various aspects of both funding decisions and, kind of, the precepts and methodologies of the N.I.H., how we design I.P. law, how we regulate and require and run clinical trials — there are tons of individual contingent decisions that we kind of have collectively made that give rise to the biotech and to the pharma ecosystem. And certainly, in the case of space, you know, like, it doesn’t have to be this way other. Universes, no pun intended, are possible. I think perhaps the thing that people underappreciated with science in the U.S. is, it has been very different in the not-too-distant past. Peer review is a relatively recent invention. Modern journals are a relatively recent invention. As I mentioned, the federal government being the primary funder of basic research is a relatively recent invention. And molecular biology was, in significant part, a thesis by Warren Weaver at the Rockefeller Foundation. There’s a thing here, and we should aggressively pursue it. But importantly, it was not — it required an institution, an organization, that was not part of the standard apparatus, for want of a better term. And the Broad Institute, over the last 25 years, has been enormously successful in the field of genomics and functional genomics and CRISPR, et cetera. And the Broad Institute is itself a kind of structural innovation, breaking somewhat from the more traditional prevailing university model. And so I think the fact that so many of our successes are associated with some degree of structural and institutional change should be somewhat thought-provoking for us.

ezra klein

You’ve been trying to work in the space of institution-building here, too. I want to talk about Fast Grants and about Arc a little bit. So let’s begin with Fast Grants. What is it, and what has it taught you?

Well, it’s mostly “what was it.” In the early days of the pandemic — well, I should preface all of this by saying — well, I’ll reaffirm my preface that I don’t know, to every question. But more importantly here, I will say, my now-wife is herself a scientist. We’ve known each other since we were teenagers. We spend a lot of time talking about science in various forms.

ezra klein

You met — am I allowed to say this? You met at a science competition.

That is true. We met at a science competition, 100 teenagers, and —

ezra klein

And she beat you.

And yes. I was the runner-up, and she was the winner. I had created a programming language and a new dialect of lisp, and she had created a new treatment for urinary tract infections. And so I really don’t envy the judges for having to figure out what framework one should use to make all these comparisons and lots of other people.

ezra klein

You sound a little bitter, man.

[CHUCKLES] I was gonna say, but no, we can all agree this the correct outcomes ensued. Anyway, so we were living together in March of 2020, holed up. And a number of her friends and colleagues were unsurprisingly with, I guess, a large fraction of all biology scientists, were trying to urgently repurpose their work to figure out, well, could they do something that would be somehow benefit to accelerating the end of the pandemic? And by early April, so a couple of weeks into lockdown, when it was becoming apparent and striking to us, which was it is difficult for these people to get funding for their work. And that might sound a bit, kind of, surprising, because you think, well, don’t they have some degree of money already? And couldn’t they just go and just spend that? But there are, obviously, significant rules around and restrictions around that which one can do with one’s grant money. This is money provided by the government for a purpose. And so it’s not like you can go and readily spend it on something totally unrelated. And the money is administered by the university, and so you have to go through their proper procurement processes. Point is, lots of restrictions on scientists’ pecuniary ability to suddenly repurpose the research agendas. And we kind of thought, well — we assume maybe in the early weeks, that presumably various bodies — I don’t know who — some kind of amorphous other, some combination of C.D.C., F.D.A., N.I.H., philanthropies — whatever. Somebody will come along and just give these scientists the obvious money that society clearly should, so they can go, and they can pursue these programs. Didn’t seem to be happening. I mean, to be fair, I don’t want to give us too much credit. Various people were doing things right off the bat in various different places, but we just personally knew of lots of specific examples of really good scientists who were unable to make progress of their work to the extent that they would like. So we tried to set up what we thought would be a pretty small initiative, and called Fast Grants. The basic idea would be, you send us some kind of proposal. And initially, within 48 hours, you would get a funding decision and either receive money or not. We started out with a pretty small amount of money. The initial donors — we were among them, but there were a number — contributed, best I recall, about $10 million. Launched the website early April 2020. Quickly inundated with, I think, four and a half thousand applications, which, given our promised 48-hour turnaround, was somewhat challenging. I should say this was myself. This was Silvana, my wife, and this was Tyler Cohen. So we had an immediate question as to, how do we actually run a philanthropic endeavor? And how do we stand it up in very short order? And he, through Mercatus and through Emergent Ventures, had some experience of very efficient and somewhat-scaled grant-giving. And so the three of us worked together to put it together over the course of a week or so. We proceeded over the course of, roughly speaking, the next year, slightly more, to make about 200 grants, eventually dispersing almost — or slightly over, actually — $50 million in total, to universities around the world, though primarily in the U.S. And you ask, kind of, what did we learn? A big surprise was how slowly other parts of the establishment mobilized. And various of the projects we funded or the labs we funded and so on — they’ve gone on to now do — none of them were directly implicated in the vaccine research project that ended up yielding so much fruit. So again, I don’t want to give Fast Grants too much credit. Eventually, the thing that really mattered, we had nothing to do with. But versus the projects, things like Saliva Direct, which was in the summer an early discovery that saliva tests work basically as well as the nasopharyngeal swabs we were all being subject to, or various discoveries around possible therapeutics, some of which are — still continue to go through clinical trials, and may still turn out to matter to a significant extent. And that 500 people are still dying in the U.S. per day from Covid, and — despite the existence of the vaccines and so on. So anyway, various discoveries ensued that I think will prove to be important. And the second thing we learned, which is not really related to Covid or the pandemic, but has certainly been significant for us, is — it just got us thinking more deeply and broadly about the questions of, how do scientists choose what to do? And what are the constraints they’re subject to as a practical and applied matter? And this gets back to all this discussion about both culture and institutions. And towards the end of Fast grants, we ran a survey of the grant recipients. And these are essentially all people who don’t normally — certainly don’t normally work on Covid. Covid didn’t exist. But they don’t even normally work on viruses, for the most part. These are basically kind of broadly drawn as a cross section across biology. And we just asked them, as a general matter in your regular research, if you could spend your grant money however you want, how much would you change your research agenda? So not an increase in the funding level, which tends to be what we discuss in as much as we’re discussing science policy across society. But much more specifically and narrowly, if you had complete autonomy in how you spend whatever grant money you’re getting, how much of your research agenda would change? And our intuition was that maybe a third of people would like to be doing something meaningfully different to what they actually are. But of these scientists, and these are really good scientists, four out of five told us that they would change their research agendas, quote, “a lot.” We gave them three options. Not much, or not at all, a little, and then a lot. Four out of five chose the maximum option on our survey. So I just find this incredibly thought-provoking. Basically, we seem to be in a situation where most of our top scientists aren’t doing what they think would be best for them to do. And we could say, no, our various committees and governing bodies and decision-making apparatus and so on, they know better. And I’m not saying it would be completely unreasonable for one to maintain that. But that would seem to be a very central question about the construction of our scientific apparatus. And I think that should give us some pause.

ezra klein

There are a couple things there. One is that it is a consistent observation I have learning about new areas that there is a way we’re taught the thing works, or people think the thing works, and there’s this huge middle layer. Right? So in politics, which I know very well, and legislation, you have the “Schoolhouse Rock” version of how a bill becomes a law. And then it’s, like, a filibuster is how a bill becomes a law or does not become a law. We were talking about drug innovation earlier. I think the folk way people think it works is we make a discovery about a drug, and then, like, we make a drug out of it after some tests. But you talk to people who work on pharmaceuticals and just clinical trials. And in science — I think if you had asked me as a high schooler, had some science classes, I’d have told you something about the scientific method. And then you talk to a scientist, and it’s grants. Like, grants are how science works. Grants are the middle layer between — you are a scientist, and you can do some science. And grants are how the N.S.F. and the N.I.H. work. They’re how a lot of the universities work. There’s fund-raising. I mean, there are different ways that it happens. To make the question of “Are we doing science well?” a little bit more precise, I think one version of that question is, “Are we doing grants well?” And I think that question is more tractable. People don’t feel as defensive about it. But I’ve talked to a lot of scientists in the course of my work. I’ve covered health care for my entire career. And I don’t know any who think we’re doing grants well. I don’t know any who will not complain to you for hours. And they may be wrong. And I do want to note — because they also just have somewhat different incentives. I mean, I was noting earlier, and I think it’s very real. The government, particularly when it gives out grants, needs to worry about the reputational cost of the grant. If the grant goes wrong, if not enough of the grants pay out into useful research. If Rand Paul can stand up in Senate and make what you did sounds silly, these things really end up mattering. And so you get a process that is optimizing for a lot of different things. But the question of whether or not we do grants well ends up being really, really, really important in every country that does major capital science that I know of, and is just not the main question for a bunch of different reasons we ask.

Yeah. Another question we asked in our survey was how much time they spend on the grants. I think to some extent, this is perhaps — at least, of those who’ve spent some amount of time interacting with scientists, kind of more broadly known than perhaps the finding with respect to how they do — or the degree to which they can choose what they work on. But we found that — or they reported to us that they spend on the order of 40 percent of their time on grant administration. And even if one were to maintain that the decision-making apparatus around what scientists do is somehow efficient, I think it is a very tenuous position to also try to argue that 40 percent of the best scientist’s time is optimally allocated towards grant applications, authorship and administration. And we’re not talking about an inconsequential 40 percent here. I mean, this is 40 percent of the time of this super-elite 10,000, 100,000, whatever it is, some relatively finite number of people. And we’ve chosen to take and to redeploy almost half of their time in service of technocratic, bureaucratic undertaking. And getting back again to this point about people perhaps falsely assuming that things have been more inter-temporally consistent than they have, that percentage has increased very substantially over the last couple of decades as the overall edifice of science has grown, and as the kind of acceptance rates and the various thresholds for various grants has become more exacting.

ezra klein

How we allocate people’s time is really important. But also, just how we allocate talent is really important. And it brings me to something you said that I wanted to ask you about. This was in response to a question about whether big tech companies are hogging all the talent in society. And you said, quote, “I don’t think that the ambitious upstarts who go into high speed rail in America, anyway, are going to have a great time or have much success in convincing their friends to follow them. And I suspect that for various reasons, too many domains look somewhat like high speed rail.” And so you go on to say that there’s a view that the internet is a frontier of last resort, and that you don’t think that’s totally wrong. So tell me about that. Tell me about the idea of the internet as a frontier of last resort. But behind that, this idea that other frontiers where talented people might want to go and make their mark on society have closed.

You’re familiar with and you’ve probably written about the Stephen Teles idea of kludgeocracy. And I kind of like the term “kludgeocracy,” because rather than making some of the inhibitions that people might encounter in pursuing something like high speed rail, rather than casting those as being deliberate, the valence is more that it’s this kind of emergent, inadvertent and kind of complicated phenomena that nobody perhaps particularly wants or chose. And I think the case of California’s high speed rail is quite striking, where — you’ve written about this and kind of similar projects and the New York subway expansion and so on. And congestion pricing and so on. But it’s striking where it’s not actually obviously a question of first order political will. Like, we’re willing to fund the high speed rail in California. We’re clearly willing to invest in building the subway expansion in New York. But somehow, somewhere between that first order decision and desire and our actual ability to kind of instantiate it, something really goes wrong. And you contrast that with stories of — in the case of, say, California, Henry Kaiser and these various other early part of the 20th century operators in the physical realm. And for a variety of reasons, but mostly prosaic state and county-level complications and things that would extend the time horizon of one’s project, it has simply become meaningfully less-appealing for those people to undertake these initiatives. I mean, Foster City, not too far from where we are now, that’s named after the eponymous Mr. Foster. He was a developer. He decided, well, with reclaimed wetlands, I’m going to build a city. California is growing quickly. The Bay Area is a — kind of propitious and will be a long-term successful area. And I think this place simply needs more housing. And he, with that kind of founder energy, was able to give birth and rise to the city that now bears his name. I haven’t met anybody pitching me on a similar city on the shores of the Bay in the last couple of years. But I would imagine that were one to adopt that ambition today and to propose that maybe the San Jose Marsh wetlands should themselves be an expansion of San Jose, I don’t think one would get very far. And in fact, even for much more sort of limited things, like additional runways or runway expansions at S.F.O., even they have now been stymied for decades at this point. That ability to translate that into something enunciated has dissipated and deteriorated. And then I think the kind of individual version is, and if I want to be that heroic solar farm entrepreneur or railway magnate, that my practical ability to do so has been meaningfully curtailed.

ezra klein

Yeah. I mean, that’s what I’m getting at here a little bit, which is talent really matters for a society. Where the most talented people go really matters for society. And a lot of those people want to go somewhere where they can have a really big effect. I think there’s been a huge rush to digital land because you can build on digital land. You can build quickly. I mean, it’s interesting to some of the dynamics we’re talking about, the temporal dynamics we’re talking about, that you see this dynamic even within the tech world. There was a while where it was really exciting to go join Facebook, go join Google, go join one of the big companies. Because you could do so much. And that’s still, to some degree, true. But they got really big. And so crypto got — whatever you think of crypto, one thing that is exciting about it to people is the idea that it’s open land. That you can go in there and have a really big effect on it. Build something new just with a couple of friends that might change the whole direction of the field. And on some level, it’s always going to be harder for, say, putting high speed rail through the middle of California. Right? I mean, just building things in the world is just going to be tougher. But on the other hand, if you make building things in the world too hard, if you make grants too difficult — if you — I know a lot of doctors who their advice to young people is don’t become a doctor. And it always breaks my heart a little bit. We need really great people to be doctors. And their point is not, don’t go heal sick people. Their point is, being a doctor is too hard now. The amount of time you spend dealing with insurance agencies and malpractice insurance and boards, and this and that, it’s just too much administration. When industries become very complicated to operate in, you want to select for people who are good at operating complicated industries, which may be different than the people who are good at moving really fast and changing things dramatically. But two, you kind of subtly bias where different kinds of people in your society go. I think in China, if you want to change a lot, you still probably go into infrastructure construction, among other things. Right? The idea that you might be a genius rail mind, in China, that’s great. There’s probably a lot of rail you can make. That’s not true here. And the point is not to make too much of the rail example, but to make a lot of the idea that talent flows towards where it can have an effect and people can live the kinds of heroic lives they want to lead. And if we have subtly pushed a lot of people into maybe not the right — not the socially optimal directions, that over time will have a pretty big effect on a society.

I think a constant is that some number of ambitious young people will want to do something, as you say, heroic. And yeah, I think maybe two things have changed. For one, for whatever reason, our predisposition to putting those people in positions of authority has diminished. And then secondly, even if placed, their ability to actually execute, again for various reasons, has been attenuated. I’ve been reading about the university founders and presidents and those associated with some of the great US research institutions. And one thing that is striking is how many of them were so young when placed in those positions of authority. You know, Daniel Coit Gilman at Johns Hopkins, or William Rainey Harper at the University of Chicago. I think he was 32 when he was appointed president of the University of Chicago. Even in the recent past. So my dad was in the first year of the University of Limerick in Ireland. Or at the time, it was called N.I.H.E. It kind of acquired university status later in its life. And the Irish guy who founded it and was really the dynamo behind it, I think he was 29 when he was put in charge of that project. And I think it was in 1970 or ‘71 that he was charged with this mission. But as recently as 1970 in Ireland, we were willing to put a 29-year-old — I mean, that’s a person meaningfully younger than me in charge of the project of overseeing the creation of a major new research institution. And I don’t know that I have compelling or confident observations to offer in terms of the etiology underlying these changes. But I think the changes themselves are important, or at least we should assume they’re important if we come from a place of humility, where this is what has worked in the past. Enabling these ambitious young people who are willing to contemplate spending multiple decades in pursuit of some ambitious and idiosyncratic vision. And maybe we’re more enlightened now. Maybe we figured out how to get all the same innovation and all the same breakthroughs without unleashing that force. But I guess my starting point, at least, would be, well, we should — before getting super confident in that or before really being deliberate about it, I think we should give some kind of credit and credence to the prescription and the methodology that’s worked heretofore.

ezra klein

And before books, let me end on this. We’ve talked a lot about scientific slowdown, about technological slowdown. But let’s say in the next 15-year time frame, what are the three technological or scientific possibilities you’re most excited by? If in 20 — I guess it’d be 2037, we’re having a conversation about how dumb this conversation was because it was right on the cusp of so much incredible stuff happening, what do you think is likely to be on that list?

I don’t know that I’ve super non-consensus answers. I think that there are fundamental a priori reasons to believe that the rate of progress in biology could increase substantially over the years, and to your question, kind of decades to come. So if in 2037 we are enormously impressed and struck by the discontinuity there, that would not shock me. Clearly, over the past couple of years, there’s been acceleration in progress in A.I. And kind of far for me to try to point estimate for kind of where that is in 2037. But I would be surprised if that is not somewhere on that list. And then I think there’s something about education in the broadest sense that feels to me like a very significant, and hopefully very positive change happening in the world right now. Maybe best embodied by YouTube. But also by Twitter and by blogs and Substacks and even Zoom and kind of the growing ease of being in some kind of cultural proximity to people one aspires to emulating, or following in the footsteps of, or otherwise kind of being more like. And to the extent that one believes my story about the significance of sociology, and culture, and mentorship, and the kind of delicate transmission of tacit knowledge, it has until very recently only been possible for that to happen to a meaningful extent through physical co-location. And the fact that we’ve now thrown open those doors to such an extent feels to me like a really compelling and plausibly transformative change. And if it were the case in 2037 that we have multiplied by 20 the number of people who can — who have the initial mental models and understanding to become successful entrepreneurs, or successful scientists, or successful writers, or successful in whatever one might choose one’s domain to be, again, I think that would not be shocking. And I think it’s a pretty hopeful fact about the world.

ezra klein

And then always our final question. What are the three books you’d recommend to the audience?

Well, I’m right now reading “Revolution and Empire,” which is a book about Edmund Burke. And it is just fabulous. I very highly recommend it. Edmund Burke, Ireland’s foremost political philosopher. And I’m embarrassed to say that I have known less about him than I feel like I ought to have. So I recommend that very highly. And the autobiography by Warren Weaver, who I mentioned, at Rockefeller. I can’t remember if it’s called “Scene of Change” or “Scene of the Action.” But it’s Warren Weaver’s autobiography. That’s not a great book in the sense that you don’t read it — you don’t find it to be a vivid, compelling page-turner. And your mind is not blown on every page. But I find myself thinking back to it quite a lot and having various parts of it sort of ricochet to my mind. And then it all depends on what people are interested in and all the rest. And you should read the things you like. But I have on my desk at home right now “A Widening Sphere,” which is a history of M.I.T. And I was re-reading it recently. And my —

ezra klein

Who doesn’t re-read the histories of M.I.T.?

[LAUGHS] Well, William Barton Rogers, the founder, was the son of an Irishman, and started M.I.T. substantially with his brother. And I find it very inspiring, I guess back to what we were saying earlier, how motivated he was and they were by a kind of broad-based desire for societal betterment. Like, M.I.T. didn’t inadvertently end up being a significant contribution to American prosperity and ingenuity and welfare. He was really immersed in that milieu. He paid a lot of attention to some of the cultural dynamics we were describing in England, and the Darwins. And the early writing on M.I.T., if you go and just read the first two pages of the founding manifesto, it wasn’t utopian in some kind of implausibly lofty sense. But it was somebody who knew they weren’t founding a run of the mill nth technical college. And I feel like it’s easy to get cynical always. It’s easy to assume that the things that really worked out worked out through happenstance, as opposed to optimism and ambition. But yeah, I find the history of MIT to be a kind of inspiring reminder that sometimes these implausible, lofty, ambitious, long-term initiatives can work out much better than one would hope. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

Patrick Collison, thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Vladimir Putin’s massive conscription of Russian men is yet another calamity of his own making.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Italians didn’t exactly vote for fascism.
Long COVID has forced a reckoning for one of medicine’s most neglected diseases.
A Darker Motive?Russia continues to lose in Ukraine. A dramatic Ukrainian counteroffensive, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, has recaptured about 2,000 square miles of territory and sent Russian forces reeling. Putin, like many authoritarians, relies on an image of personal invulnerability, and so he rightly fears the political risks of military defeat. At home, even his most loyal sycophants are demanding that he do something to stem the losses in Ukraine.Putin has answered this call by making two foolish moves. First, he is now getting personally involved in some of the operational decisions in Ukraine; second, he has begun a conscription drive that is supposed to mobilize an additional 300,000 men into the Russian military. Both of these decisions will speed up the clocks on the many growing threats to his regime, including sanctions, social unrest, and military collapse, among others.Putin, apparently, is now directing some of the military activity on the ground in Ukraine long-distance from Moscow—he is reported, for example, to have denied requests from some units for permission to retreat from Kherson. Such interventions are always a risky choice for civilian leaders far removed from the battlefield. The Kremlin boss assuming command is, of course, easy fodder for Hitler-in-the-bunker memes, but even Russian imperial history should be a warning to Putin: When Tsar Nicholas II decided to assume command of the Russian empire’s forces in World War I, his own advisers warned him that personal association with failure could destroy his reign. “Consider, Sire,” one wrote to him, “what You are laying hands on—on Your own self, Sire!” (Another warned him bluntly: “The army under Your command must be victorious.”)Putin is running the same risk. One of the many looming deadlines he faces is the onset of winter, when fighting will slow, Russian morale will sink even lower, and supply issues will worsen. The Russian high command and its officers almost certainly want to win this war as a way to recover from the shame and dishonor of their staggering incompetence over the past seven months. But if they lose more men and territory because of some harebrained order from Putin, will they again stand silently and take the blame?The mobilization order is so pointless that I am left wondering who in Moscow thought it might be a good idea. It was a decision guaranteed to generate massive protests for no apparent military benefit. There is no way for the poorly supplied and corrupt Russian military to train, house, clothe, and arm 300,000 men anytime soon, and certainly not before winter arrives. In reality, Putin doesn’t even have 300,000 men; he has roughly 300,000 names of male Russian citizens, many of whom will never set foot on a military base. As a strategic matter, this measure is pure idiocy.One gruesome possibility, however, is that Putin and his commanders have decided simply to throw bodies at Ukraine. The generals may have resigned themselves to feeding the Ukrainian meat grinder, and think they can just dragoon non-Russian minority kids from the Russian Federation’s boondocks and thus keep the call-up limited and off of Russian televisions. The actual implementation, however, has so far been stupendously incompetent, and protests and chaos have spread across the country.There may, however, be a much darker motive at work here.Putin’s fantasy of a “special military operation” to liberate fellow Slavs from a Nazi regime went to pieces in a matter of days, but many Russians remained supportive of the invasion as long as it did not touch them. Putin’s deal with the Russian public is essentially the old Soviet social compact: Leave those in power alone, and they will leave you alone. But drafting young men to go and die in a losing war—as the Soviets learned in Afghanistan—invalidates that contract.Sending untrained men into battle only to die may be part of Putin’s plan. He is furious about losing, and (as I wrote months ago) he has been spoiling to turn the invasion into a nationalist war against NATO as the only way to save face and motivate the Russian people to endure more sacrifices. And therein lies Putin’s dilemma: How can he infuse that sense of fervor into Russians who couldn’t give a damn about fake republics in Luhansk or Donetsk?The answer, for Putin, is to annex Ukrainian land while claiming that the war is now “to defend our motherland, its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” making it a holy war to protect Russia itself against Ukraine, NATO, and the entire West. Putin then turns Ukraine into “Russia” by taking Russian men from their families, shipping them to Ukraine, getting them killed, and letting their blood soak into the dirt. He could then say, to his own people and to the world, that the buried bones of so many Russian men make Ukraine hallowed ground from which Moscow will never retreat.Soviet leaders treated Eastern Europe the same way. In 1968, for example, Leonid Brezhnev told the leaders of then-Czechoslovakia that they had no right to rebel against the U.S.S.R., because their nations had been bought with the blood of Soviet soldiers and that forevermore their borders were also the Soviet Union’s borders. Putin, facing failure, may be counting on the same idea—while once again refusing to learn from history.The Russian president is facing multiple countdowns that could end in disaster, all of them set in motion by a series of his own stupid and reckless decisions that has cost thousands of lives and put world peace at risk. There is one last mistake he has not yet made—the use of a nuclear weapon—and we can only hope that all the other clocks run out before he even considers the most dire misstep of all.Related:
‘An army of zombies is leading us to hell.’
The Kremlin must be in crisis.
A hard-right coalition led by Giorgia Meloni prevailed in Italy’s national election, all but guaranteeing that Meloni will become prime minister.
Related: Italians didn’t exactly vote for fascism.
Putin granted Russian citizenship to Edward Snowden, nine years after the former security consultant and whistleblower fled the United States to Russia to avoid prosecution.  
Hurricane Ian has rapidly intensified and is projected to make the closest pass to Tampa Bay by a major hurricane since 1950. The Florida National Guard has activated 7,000 soldiers, and Hillsborough County issued evacuation orders for parts of Tampa.
Up for Debate: Readers share their thoughts on U.S. immigration with Conor Friedersdorf.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung advises an aspiring author worried about the pressure to use social media.
Famous People: Kaitlyn Tiffany and Lizzie Plaugic attend a housewarming party—10 years late.
(Erik Carter / The Atlantic. Images courtesy of John Temple; Judith Cohn.)
How I Finally Learned My NameBy John TempleThe email came from a stranger. “Dear Mr. Temple,” it said. “My name is Andrea Paiss, and I live in Budapest, Hungary. I do not know whether I write to the right person. I just hope so.”It reached me in San Francisco on January 1, 2020, and told of a “Granny,” then 92, who wanted to know what had happened to her cousin Lorant Stein. Andrea had found a document online about Lorant in the Central Database of Shoah Victims at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It had been submitted by someone named John Temple. Could I be that same John Temple, she asked, the one who had filled out the form by hand 20 years earlier? “I would be happy if you could tell me how you [are] related to Lorant, as we have no information about relatives in America.”Read the full article. More From The Atlantic
Dear Therapist: We’re cutting my husband’s parents out of our lives.
China’s mistakes can be America’s gain.
When’s the perfect time to get a flu shot?
Bella Ramsey as Catherine in Catherine Called Birdy (Amazon Studios)
Read. The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, a historical novel about women and girls in mid-century France that reads more like a fairy tale.Watch. Catherine Called Birdy, in select theaters now. Lena Dunham’s adaptation of the beloved YA novel is “a supremely playful romp,” our critic writes.Or keep an eye out for the other titles on our list of the 20 most-anticipated films of the season.Play our daily crossword.P.S.The United Nations has proclaimed today the “International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.” (My teenage daughter reminded me of this, which made me both happy that she pays attention to the stuff her dad works on and sad that she has to be aware of such things at all.) Although I don’t believe abolition is possible—or at least not until we develop a Men in Black neuralyzer that can make us forget how to construct such things—it is a worthy benchmark by which we can measure all other policies about nuclear weapons.If you’re new to the subject, I would recommend a recent book by Michael Krepon, one of the great scholars of the field who, sadly, died earlier this year. It’s titled Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control, and though it’s a pretty hefty read, it’s about as up-to-date and comprehensive a history of nuclear issues and arms control as you’ll find.—TomKate Lindsay contributed to this newsletter.

The Crowd is flying solo (duo?) again for this week's episode, focusing on recent developments in the war in Ukraine, Iranian protests, and Europe's under-the-radar political upheavals. The Russian government recently declared a "partial mobilization" to aid in the war effort, and Vladimir Putin threatened to defend Russia's gains with nuclear weapons. How much affect will mobilization have on the course of the war? What kind of precedent does it set to seize territory, then defend those gains with nuclear threats?Then, we turned to the recent protests shaking Iran—and a larger discussion of how authoritarian regimes hold onto power. Have governments become better at crushing dissent in recent years? And why do dictators seem to love running a dictatorship–an often unpleasant job–so much?

In Part 2 (available here for subscribers), we talked about the recent success of far right parties in Europe. The Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in neo-fascism, have become the second biggest political party in Sweden's parliament. If Sweden is as tolerant as many Americans would like it to be, what explains their rise? The country's recent rise in Muslim immigration, as well as crime, might point to an answer, although we disagree on the "solutions." Can a crackdown on crime forestall a far-right backlash? Is Muslim integration helped or harmed by such methods? And why do hobbits come into it?Required Reading:“'Nothing Has Really Changed': In Moscow, the Fighting is Worlds Away,” by Valerie Hopkins (The New York Times).“Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy’s Potential New Leader,” by Jason Horowitz (The New York Times).“How Italy is facing a crucial election,” Gideon Rachman’s interview with Nathalie Tocci (The Financial Times).“Will Jean Monnet’s Vision for Europe Win Out?” Damir’s interview with Nathalie Tocci for the Atlantic Council.The Happiness Lab’s episode on Denmark.“Europe’s Growing Muslim Population,” a report from the Pew Research Center.“Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element,” Kevin Drum (Mother Jones).

Third article in a series on bureaucratic autonomy; the first installment can be found here, and the second here.We now come to the American state. Having spent a lot of time thinking about public sector reform in developing countries, it seemed to me important to look at the dysfunctions of the American public sector as well.In the course of my career, I have had the enormous fortune to study under several great academic mentors: Alan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield, who taught me political theory; Samuel Huntington who exposed me to the idea of political development; and Seymour Martin Lipset who helped me secure my first academic position and was a colleague at George Mason University.I’ve often said that everything I know about American politics came from Marty Lipset. I had never taken a political science course on American politics either as an undergraduate or in graduate school, and so was self-taught in this area. When I first started at George Mason, Marty had just published his book American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, where he talked about the unique features of American political culture. He and I taught a graduate seminar together built around this book, a course that I went on to teach myself at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and at Stanford.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Marty argued that hostility to the state was one of the most enduring features of American political culture. This proclivity arose out of the American Revolution, and the colonists’ struggle against British monarchical authority. Distrust of state authority existed both on the Right and Left; while the Left tended to want more government programs, it often had an equally cynical view of government being controlled by malign elites.According to Lipset, American anti-statism was manifest across the board in American political development. The American state was less extensive and slower to develop than its counterparts in Europe. While Germany began a social security program in the 1880s, America did not follow suit until the 1930s. While virtually every other developed democracy created a government-mandated system of universal health insurance early in the 20th century, America succeeded in getting this in place in 2010 with Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which the Republicans denounced as “socialism” and spent the better part of the next decade trying to repeal.The American state nonetheless grew enormously during the 20th century, first during the Progressive Era, then under the New Deal, and finally during the 1970s with the addition of a host of new federal agencies dealing with issues from occupational safety and health to environmental protection. Most observers of comparative state-building would argue, however, that the American state (while extensive) tends to be of lower quality than its rich country counterparts. State modernization came later than in Europe’s most advanced democracies, and has regressed over time.In the second volume of my Political Order series, I looked at state modernization efforts across a variety of countries: the creation of the grands écoles and Conseil d’État in France; the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia; and the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms in Britain. I was strongly influenced by Martin Shefter’s theory that such modernizations had occurred under authoritarian regimes facing national security threats; in Prussia/Germany, France, Britain, and other countries their autonomous bureaucracies then survived into a democratic era. By contrast, countries such as Italy and Greece opened up the democratic franchise before such state modernization had occurred, allowing democratically-elected politicians to use the state for patronage purposes. This led to widespread clientelism and corruption, which was subsequently hard to reverse.The United States was a country that both demonstrated the Shefter thesis but also contravened it. It began to open up the franchise to all white men beginning in the 1820s, and politicians seeking votes found that the easiest way to mobilize support was to bribe voters with a Christmas turkey or bottle of bourbon, or else to give them a job in the post office. This widened franchise brought to power our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, who on being elected in 1828 declared, first, that he won the election and therefore could decide who would serve in government, and second, that any ordinary American could fill a government position. Thus began the so-called patronage or spoils system, in which virtually every U.S. official from cabinet secretaries to fourth-class postmasters got their jobs as a reward for supporting a politician. The patronage system defined American bureaucracy for much of the next century; the U.S. government was, in political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s words, a “state of courts and parties” lacking a modern European-style bureaucracy.State modernization in the United States began in earnest in 1883 with passage of the Pendleton Act. The driver here was not military competition, but the recognition by both the business community and a nascent civil society that the spoils system was not delivering the kind of quality government required by a rapidly industrializing society. The Pendleton Act created a U.S. Civil Service Commission and established merit-based criteria for hiring and promotion into the federal service.  George PendletonExisting patronage politicians fiercely resisted the act because it took away the currency they used to get elected, and would not have passed but for the assassination of newly elected President James A. Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker. Expansion of the classified service continued over the next decades at a slow pace, and it was not until the time of the First World War that the majority of federal bureaucrats had been hired under it. (By contrast, Chinese bureaucrats were being selected for office through competitive examinations already at the time of the Qin unification in 221 B.C.) Local party machines like Tammany Hall in New York or the Daley machine in Chicago didn’t get cleaned up until nearly the middle of the 20th century.In line with Marty Lipset’s general observations about American exceptionalism, the U.S. bureaucracy still remains less professional than its European or Asian counterparts. In most other democracies, a change in administration after an election leads to the turnover of the cabinet and perhaps a handful of each ministry’s senior staff. In the United States, by contrast, each election leads to the appointment of 4,000-5,000 Schedule C political appointees, a thousand of whom need Senate confirmation. The Partnership for Public Service, the country’s premiere organization concerned with reform issues, recommends sharply reducing this number given the slowness of the appointment process and the poor quality of many of the appointees.The U.S. federal bureaucracy has been in desperate need of reform for several decades. But the kinds of reform now put on the table by Republican opponents of the “deep state” would actually seek to dismantle the entire merit-based bureaucracy in favor of “at-will” employment that would in effect return the U.S. government back to the situation that existed prior to the Pendleton Act. The grounds for this reform will be the topic of the following posts.Image: A caricature of Andrew Jackson as "King Andrew the First," likely published in the fall of 1833. (Library of Congress)

A few years ago, I stopped to fill up the tank of my mother’s Fiat 500 at a gas station close to our family home in southern Tuscany. When I went into the store to pay, I noticed that it had started to sell lighters bearing the face of Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader who ruled Italy as a dictator from 1925 to 1943.This came as a shock. Tuscany has historically been a left-wing region. The Monte Amiata, a densely wooded mountain on whose slopes my village perches, served as a base for partisans who fought the Nazis during World War II. Why would our local gas station be selling fascist memorabilia?I put the question to the attendant. He squirmed. “I don’t like it either. Headquarters sent us those a few days ago,” he told me. Then he perked up, happy to think of something that would, he assumed, be sure to mollify me. “Don’t worry: Next week, we’re getting in some lighters with the face of Che Guevara!”The Italian constitution, which came into force in 1948, is resolutely anti-fascist, yet the country’s political culture has never made a clean break with its extremist past. For a German gas station to sell items that commemorated Adolf Hitler would be truly shocking (and probably illegal); in Italy, the sight of Mussolini memorabilia for sale in stores is not that unusual. Similarly, mainstream German political parties shun far-right extremists such as the Alternative for Germany; in Italy, parties with roots in fascism have long been an accepted part of the political scene.[Read: The return of fascism in Italy]Even so, Sunday’s electoral success for Giorgia Meloni and her party, Brothers of Italy, is unprecedented. It marks the first time in Italy’s postwar history that a party with fascist roots has won the most votes in a national election. Meloni, who received just over a quarter of votes cast, is now very likely to become prime minister at the head of a far-right coalition with the League, led by Matteo Salvini, and Forza Italia, headed by Silvio Berlusconi.How will the new government change Italy? And how much damage could it inflict on the country’s democratic institutions?Italian history gives reason to worry about what lies ahead.Brothers of Italy is descended from the Italian Social Movement, or MSI, which was founded in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians who had played a significant role in the Republic of Salò, the pro-Nazi puppet regime that governed the northern half of Italy after the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943. Meloni’s party has as its symbol a green, white, and red flame, which many regard as intended, in its original design, to express enduring loyalty to Mussolini.Meloni herself, who has led Brothers of Italy since 2014, grew up in Garbatella, a working-class neighborhood of Rome, and cut her teeth in the youth wing of the MSI. Today, she regularly inveighs against immigrants and the gay-rights movement, and has made common cause internationally with far-right parties and illiberal leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. In June, she spoke at a campaign event for Vox, a rightist party in Spain. “Five hundred thirty years ago, the capitulation of Granada put an end to the Reconquista, Andalucia turned Spanish, and Europe became Christian,” she said. “Today, the secularism of the left and radical Islam threaten our roots.” Compromise with such opponents is unthinkable: Parties of the right such as Vox and Brothers of Italy, she said, needed to say a clear no to the “LGBT lobby,” to “gender ideology,” and to “mass immigration.”[Read: Italy’s answer to populism]The prospect that a far-right party with fascist roots may soon lead Italy has understandably spooked international observers. “Giorgia Meloni May Lead Italy, and Europe Is Worried,” read a recent New York Times headline. “Is Italy on the Verge of Returning to Fascism?” a Foreign Policy podcast asked. But things aren’t always what they seem in Italy. Although there are strong grounds for dismay at the prospect of Prime Minister Meloni, the actual likelihood that Italy will return to the darkest hours of its history is low.Part of the reason is that Meloni has, to an extent, distanced herself from her party’s past. She has declared that “fascism is history” and suspended members who persisted in praising fascist leaders. Meloni has also sought to demonstrate that she would prove a reliable partner for Italy’s European and North American allies. She has, for example, moderated the party’s criticism of the European Union, emphasizing that she wants the country to stay in the eurozone. And unlike many other far-right leaders in Europe, Meloni has been a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin and a staunch supporter of Ukraine.But the chief reason to doubt how much Meloni will change Italy is simply that she is neither as popular nor as powerful as her electoral victory may suggest. Her star is burning brightly now, but it may dim just as quickly.In the country’s previous national elections, in March 2018, the Five Star Movement stunned international observers by winning nearly a third of the vote; Meloni’s Brothers of Italy took just 4 percent. Over the next three years, two consecutive governments collapsed amid chaos and acrimony, making it impossible for any political parties to form a cohesive governing majority. Out of options, all of the major factions in the Italian Parliament agreed in February 2021 to form a technocratic government of national unity under the leadership of Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank.Meloni’s Brothers of Italy alone stayed in opposition. As many observers predicted at the time, that holdout position practically guaranteed her ascent. Given the economic stagnation and pandemic pain the country has experienced lately, Brothers of Italy’s rapid rise in popularity was hardly surprising.This suggests that Meloni’s victory on Sunday has less to do with nostalgia for Italy’s fascist past than with anger at the country’s parlous present. But by the same token, Meloni’s popularity may soon wane after she takes on the responsibility of governing. The fate of the last newcomer hyped as the future of Italian politics is instructive: Since its surprise success in 2018, the Five Star Movement has lost more than half of its vote share and now languishes on the sidelines.[Read: The ‘identitarians’ are the successors to Europe’s far right]Even how long Meloni will be able to stay in office is unclear. Although she now heads the biggest faction in the Italian Parliament, she will need to maintain the support of both cantankerous coalition partners: Salvini will do what he can to take the limelight and is likely to clash with Meloni on foreign policy (he is, for instance, much less willing to help Ukraine), and Berlusconi, ever the opportunist after three terms as prime minister himself, will have little compunction about selling out a political partner if it suits him. Given how volatile these personalities are—and how unstable coalition governments in Italy have proved in the past—a collapse of Meloni’s government within a year or two would not be shocking.The most immediate concern about Italy’s new government is not any threat to the country’s democratic institutions, still less a return to fascism. Rather, it is what the electoral dominance of the far right will do to the hard-won progress that immigrants and sexual minorities in Italy have made over recent decades.Italians of the postwar era lived and breathed politics to an unusual degree. The country’s major parties had millions of members. Campaign events in the run-up to national elections drew huge crowds. More than 90 percent of eligible voters typically turned out to the polls. The political stakes seemed existential.Today, despite appearances, those times appear to be over—at least for now. In the towns and villages I visited over the past week, public space reserved for campaign posters remained half empty. In one Tuscan hilltop town, a campaigner for a right-wing party spoke passionately and at length, but drew only a handful of spectators. In another town, an elderly left-wing candidate attracted a few onlookers when he played a hit by Fabrizio De André, a singer-songwriter of the 1960s and ’70s, from the van he had repurposed for his campaign, but quickly lost their interest when he started telling them about his campaign promises. Voter turnout in this election fell below 70 percent, a record low.Most of the Italians I have spoken with in recent days await the new government with weary equanimity. One neighbor, an outspoken woman in her 70s who, like most people in her village, has voted for the left all her life, told me of her intense dislike for Giorgia Meloni. But when I asked her whether she was worried about what the leader of Brothers of Italy would do to the country, she gave a nonchalant shrug. “In the end, the new government won’t be that different from all the others,” she said. “It’ll fail to get much of anything done. And then it’ll collapse.”I hope she’s right.

Kira Stoops lives in Bozeman, Montana—a beautiful mountain town where it sometimes feels like everyone regularly goes on 50-mile runs. Stoops, however, can’t walk around her own block on most days. To stand for more than a few minutes, she needs a wheeled walker. She reacts so badly to most foods that her diet consists of just 12 ingredients. Her “brain fog” usually lifts for a mere two hours in the morning, during which she can sometimes work or, more rarely, see friends. Stoops has myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). “I’m considered a moderate patient on the mild side,” she told me.ME/CFS involves a panoply of debilitating symptoms that affect many organ systems and that get worse with exertion. The Institute of Medicine estimates that it affects 836,000 to 2.5 million people in the U.S. alone, but is so misunderstood and stigmatized that about 90 percent of people who have it have never been diagnosed. At best, most medical professionals know nothing about ME/CFS; at worst, they tell patients that their symptoms are psychosomatic, anxiety-induced, or simply signs of laziness. While ME/CFS patients, their caregivers, and the few doctors who treat them have spent years fighting for medical legitimacy, the coronavirus pandemic has now forced the issue.A wide variety of infections can cause ME/CFS, and SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is no different: Many cases of long COVID are effectively ME/CFS by another name. The exact number is hard to define, but past studies have shown that 5 to 27 percent of people infected by various pathogens, including Epstein-Barr virus and the original SARS, develop ME/CFS. Even if that proportion is 10 times lower for SARS-CoV-2, the number of Americans with ME/CFS would still have doubled in the past three years. “We’re adding an immense volume of patients to an already dysfunctional and overburdened system,” Beth Pollack, a scientist at MIT who studies complex chronic illnesses, told me.The U.S. has so few doctors who truly understand the disease and know how to treat it that when they convened in 2018 to create a formal coalition, there were only about a dozen, and the youngest was 60. Currently, the coalition’s website lists just 21 names, of whom at least three have retired and one is dead, Linda Tannenbaum, the CEO and president of the Open Medicine Foundation, told me. These specialists are concentrated on the coasts; none work in the Midwest. American ME/CFS patients may outnumber the population of 15 individual states, but ME/CFS specialists couldn’t fill a Major League Baseball roster. Stoops, who is 39, was formally diagnosed with ME/CFS only four years ago, and began receiving proper care from two of those specialists—Lucinda Bateman of the Bateman Horne Center and David Kaufman from the Center for Complex Diseases. Bateman told me that even before the pandemic, she could see fewer than 10 percent of the patients who asked for a consultation. “When I got into those practices, it was like I got into Harvard,” Stoops told me.ME/CFS specialists, already overwhelmed with demand for their services, now have to decide how to best use and spread their knowledge, at a time when more patients and doctors than ever could benefit from it. Kaufman recently discharged many of the more stable ME/CFS patients in his care—Stoops among them—so that he could start seeing COVID long-haulers who “were just making the circuit of doctors and getting nowhere,” he told me. “I can’t clone myself, and this was the only other way to” make room for new patients.Bateman, meanwhile, is feverishly focused on educating other clinicians. The hallmark symptom of ME/CFS—post-exertional malaise, or PEM—means even light physical or mental exertion can trigger major crashes that exacerbate every other symptom. Doctors who are unfamiliar with PEM, including many now running long-COVID clinics, can unwittingly hurt their patients by encouraging them to exercise. Bateman is racing to spread that message, and better ways of treating patients, but that means she’ll have to reduce her clinic hours.These agonizing decisions mean that many existing ME/CFS patients are losing access to the best care they had found so far—what for Stoops meant “the difference between being stuck at home, miserable and in pain, and actually going out once or twice a day, seeing other humans, and breathing fresh air,” she told me. But painful trade-offs might be necessary to finally drag American medicine to a place where it can treat these kinds of complex, oft-neglected conditions. Kaufman is 75 and Bateman is 64. Although both of them told me they’re not retiring anytime soon, they also won’t be practicing forever. To make full use of their expertise and create more doctors like them, the medical profession must face up to decades spent dismissing illnesses such as ME/CFS—an overdue reckoning incited by long COVID. “It’s a disaster possibly wrapped up in a blessing,” Stoops told me. “The system is cracking and needs to crack.”  Many ME/CFS specialists have a deep knowledge of the disease because they’ve experienced it firsthand. Jennifer Curtin, one of the youngest doctors in the field, has two family members with the disease, and had it herself for nine years. She improved enough to make it through medical school and residency training, which showed her that ME/CFS “just isn’t taught,” she told me. Most curricula don’t include it; most textbooks don’t mention it.Even if doctors learn about ME/CFS, America’s health-care system makes it almost impossible for them to actually help patients. The insurance model pushes physicians toward shorter visits; 15 minutes might feel luxurious. “My average visit length is an hour, which doesn’t include the time I spend going over the patient’s 500 to 1,700 pages of records beforehand,” Curtin said. “It’s not a very scalable kind of care.” (She works with Kaufman at the Center for Complex Diseases, which bills patients directly.) This also explains why the cohort of ME/CFS clinicians is aging out, with little young blood to refresh them. “Hospital systems want physicians to see lots of patients and they want them to follow the rules,” Kaufman said. “There’s less motivation for moving into areas of medicine that are more unknown and challenging.”ME/CFS is certainly challenging, not least because it’s just “one face of a many-sided problem,” Jaime Seltzer, the director of scientific and medical outreach at the advocacy group MEAction, told me. The condition’s root causes can also lead to several distinct but interlocking illnesses, including mast cell activation syndrome, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, fibromyalgia, dysautonomia (usually manifesting as POTS), and several autoimmune and gastrointestinal disorders. “I’m still amazed at how often patients come in with Complaint No. 1, and then I find five to seven of the other things,” Kaufman said. These syndromes collectively afflict many organ systems, which can baffle doctors who’ve specialized in just one. Many of them disproportionately affect women, and are subject to medicine’s long-standing tendency to minimize or psychologize women’s pain, Pollack told me: An average woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome typically spends 16 years getting a diagnosis, while a man needs only four.People with long COVID might have many of these conditions and not know about any—because their doctors don’t either. Like ME/CFS, they rarely feature in medical training, and it’s hard to “teach someone about all of them when they’ve never heard of any of them,” Seltzer said. Specialists like Bateman and Kaufman matter because they understand not just ME/CFS but also the connected puzzle pieces. They can look at a patient’s full array of symptoms and prioritize the ones that are most urgent or foundational. They know how to test for conditions that can be invisible to standard medical techniques: “None of my tests came back abnormal until I saw an ME/CFS doctor, and then all my tests came back abnormal,” said Hannah Davis of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who has had long COVID since March 2020.ME/CFS specialists also know how to help, in ways that are directly applicable to cases of long COVID with overlapping symptoms. ME/CFS has no cure but can be managed, often through “simple, inexpensive interventions that can be done through primary care,” Bateman told me. Over-the-counter antihistamines can help patients with inflammatory problems such as mast cell activation syndrome. Low doses of naltrexone, commonly used for addiction disorders, can help those with intense pain. A simple but rarely administered test can show if patients have orthostatic intolerance—a blood-flow problem that worsens other symptoms when people stand or sit upright. Most important, teaching patients about pacing—carefully sensing and managing your energy levels—can prevent debilitating crashes. “We don’t go to an ME/CFS clinic and walk out in remission,” Stoops told me. “You go to become stabilized. The ship has 1,000 holes, and doctors can patch one before the next explodes, keeping the whole thing afloat.”That’s why the prospect of losing specialists is so galling. Stoops understands why her doctors might choose to focus on education or newly diagnosed COVID long-haulers, but ME/CFS patients are “just so lost already, and to lose what little we have is a really big deal,” she said. Kaufman has offered to refer her to generalist physicians or talk to primary-care doctors on her behalf. But it won’t be the same: “Having one appointment with him is like six to eight appointments with other practitioners,” she said. He educates her about ME/CFS; with other doctors, it’s often the other way round. “I’m going to have to work much harder to receive a similar level of care.”At least, she will for now. The ME/CFS specialists who are shifting their focus are hoping that they can use this moment of crisis to create more resources for everyone with these diseases. In a few years, Bateman hopes, “there will be 100 times more clinicians who are prepared to manage patients, and many more people with ME/CFS who have access to care.”For someone who is diagnosed with ME/CFS today, the landscape already looks very different than it did just a decade ago. In 2015, the Institute of Medicine published a landmark report redefining the diagnostic criteria for the disease. In 2017, the CDC stopped recommending exercise therapy as a treatment. In 2021, Bateman and 20 other clinicians published a comprehensive guide to the condition in the journal of the Mayo Clinic. For any mainstream disease, such events—a report, a guideline revision, a review article—would be mundane. For ME/CFS, they felt momentous. And yet, “the current state of things is simply intolerable,” Julie Rehmeyer, a journalist with ME/CFS, told me. Solving the gargantuan challenge posed by complex chronic diseases demands seismic shifts in research funding, medical training, and public attitudes. “Achieving shifts like that takes something big,” Rehmeyer said. “Long COVID is big.”COVID long-haulers have proved beyond any reasonable doubt that acute viral infections can leave people chronically ill. Many health-care workers, political-decision makers, and influencers either know someone with long COVID or have it themselves. Even if they still don’t know about ME/CFS, their heightened awareness of post-viral illnesses is already making a difference. Mary Dimmock’s son developed ME/CFS in 2011, and before the pandemic, one doctor in 10 might take him seriously. “Now it’s the flip: Only one doctor out of 10 will be a real jerk,” Dimmock told me. “I attribute that to long COVID.”But being believed is the very least that ME/CFS patients deserve. They need therapeutics that target the root causes of the disease, which will require a clear understanding of those causes, which will require coordinated, well-funded research—three things ME/CFS has historically lacked. But here, too, “long COVID is going to be a catalyst,” Amy Proal, the president of the Polybio Research Foundation, told me. She is leading the Long Covid Research Initiative—a group of scientists, including ME/CFS researchers, that will use state-of-the-art techniques to see exactly how the new coronavirus causes long COVID, and rapidly push potential treatments through clinical trials. The National Institutes of Health has also committed $1.15 billion to long-COVID research, and while some advocates are concerned about how that money will be spent, Rehmeyer notes that the amount is still almost 80 times greater than the paltry $15 million spent on ME/CFS every year—less than any other disease in the NIH’s portfolio, relative to its societal burden. “Even if 90 percent is wasted, we’d be doing a lot better,” she said.While they wait for better treatments, patients also need the medical community to heed the lessons that they and their clinicians have learned. For example, the American Association for Family Physicians website still wrongly recommends exercise therapy and links ME/CFS to childhood abuse. “That group of doctors is very important to these patients,” Dimmock said, “so what does that say to them about what this disease is all about?”Despite all evidence to the contrary, many clinicians and researchers still don’t see ME/CFS as a legitimate illness and are quick to dismiss any connection between it and long COVID. To ensure that both groups of patients get the best possible treatments, instead of advice that might harm them, ME/CFS specialists are working to disseminate their hard-won knowledge. Bateman and her colleagues have been creating educational resources for clinicians and patients, continuing-medical-education courses, and an online lecture series. Jennifer Curtin has spent two years mapping all the decisions she makes when seeing a new patient, and is converting those into a tool that other clinicians can use. As part of her new start-up, called RTHM, she’s also trying to develop better ways of testing for ME/CFS and its related syndromes, of visualizing the hefty electronic health records that chronically ill patients accumulate, and of tracking the treatments they try and their effects. “There are a lot of things that need to be fixed for this kind of care to be scalable,” Curtin told me.Had such shifts already occurred, the medical profession might have had more to offer COVID long-haulers beyond bewilderment and dismissal. But if the profession starts listening to the ME/CFS community now, it will stand the best chance of helping people being disabled by COVID, and of steeling itself against future epidemics. Pathogens have been chronically disabling people for the longest time, and more pandemics are inevitable. The current one could and should be the last whose long-haulers are greeted with disbelief.New centers that cater to ME/CFS patients are already emerging. RTHM is currently focused on COVID long-haulers but will take on some of David Kaufman’s former patients in November, and will open its waiting list to the broader ME/CFS community in December. (It is currently licensed to practice in just five states but expects to expand soon.) David Putrino, who leads a long-COVID rehabilitation clinic in Mount Sinai, is trying to raise funds for a new clinic that will treat both long COVID and ME/CFS. He credits ME/CFS patients with opening his eyes to the connection between long COVID and their condition.Every ME/CFS patient I’ve talked with predicted long COVID’s arrival well before most doctors or even epidemiologists started catching up. They know more about complex chronic illnesses than many of the people now treating long COVID do. Despite having a condition that saps their energy, many have spent the past few years helping long-haulers navigate what for them was well-trodden terrain: “I did barely anything but work in 2020,” Seltzer told me. Against the odds, they’ve survived. But the pandemic has created a catalytic opportunity for the odds to finally be tilted in their favor, “so that neither patients nor doctors of any complex chronic illness have to be heroes anymore,” Rehmeyer said.

For about 60 years, health authorities in the United States have been championing a routine for at least some sector of the public: a yearly flu shot. That recommendation now applies to every American over the age of six months, and for many of us, flu vaccines have become a fixture of fall.The logic of that timeline seems solid enough. A shot in the autumn preps the body for each winter’s circulating viral strains. But years into researching flu immunity, experts have yet to reach a consensus on the optimal time to receive the vaccine—or even the number of injections that should be doled out.Each year, a new flu shot recipe debuts in the U.S. sometime around July or August, and according to the CDC the best time for most people to show up for an injection is about now: preferably no sooner than September, ideally no later than the end of October. Many health-care systems require their employees to get the shot in this time frame as well. But those who opt to follow the CDC current guidelines, as I recently did, then mention that fact in a forum frequented by a bunch of experts, as I also recently did, might rapidly hear that they’ve made a terrible, terrible choice.“There’s no way I would do what you did,” one virologist texted me. “It’s poor advice to get the flu vaccine now.” Florian Krammer, a virologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, echoed that sentiment in a tweet: “I think it is too early to get a flu shot.” When I prodded other experts to share their scheduling preferences, I found that some are September shooters, but others won’t juice up till December or later. One vaccinologist I spoke with goes totally avant-garde, and nabs multiple doses a year.[Read: Should your flu and COVID shots go in different arms?]There is definitely such a thing as getting a flu shot too early, as Helen Branswell has reported for Stat. After people get their vaccine, levels of antibodies rocket up, buoying protection against both infection and disease. But after only weeks, the number of those molecules begins to steadily tick downward, raising people’s risk of developing a symptomatic case of flu by about 6 to 18 percent, various studies have found. On average, people can expect that a good portion of their anti-flu antibodies “are meaningfully gone by about three or so months” after a shot, says Lauren Rodda, an immunologist at the University of Washington.That decline is why some researchers, Krammer among them, think that September and even October shots could be premature, especially if flu activity peaks well after winter begins. In about three-quarters of the flu seasons from 1982 to 2020, the virus didn’t hit its apex until January or later. Krammer, for one, told me that he usually waits until at least late November to dose up. Stanley Plotkin, a 90-year-old vaccinologist and vaccine consultant, has a different solution. People in his age group—over 65—don’t respond as well to vaccines in general, and seem to lose protection more rapidly. So for the past several years, Plotkin has doubled up on flu shots, getting one sometime before Halloween and another in January, to ensure he’s chock-full of antibodies throughout the entire risky, wintry stretch. “The higher the titers,” or antibody levels, Plotkin told me, “the better the efficacy, so I’m trying to take advantage of that.” (He made clear to me that he wasn’t “making recommendations for the rest of the world”—just “playing the odds” given his age.)Data on doubling up is quite sparse. But Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist and flu researcher at Hong Kong University, has been running a years-long study to figure out whether offering two vaccines a year, separated by roughly six months, could keep vulnerable people safe for longer. His target population is Hong Kongers, who often experience multiple annual flu peaks, one seeded by the Northern Hemisphere’s winter wave and another by the Southern Hemisphere’s. So far, “getting that second dose seems to give you additional protection,” Cowling told me, “and it seems like there’s no harm of getting vaccinated twice a year,” apart from the financial and logistical cost of a double rollout.[Read: The strongest sign that Americans should worry about flu this winter]In the U.S., though, flu season is usually synonymous with winter. And the closer together two shots are given, the more blunted the effects of the second injection might be: People who are already bustling with antibodies may obliterate a second shot’s contents before the vaccine has a chance to teach immune cells anything new. That might be why several studies that have looked at double-dosing flu shots within weeks of each other “showed no benefit” in older people and certain immunocompromised groups, Poland told me. (One exception? Organ-transplant recipients. Kids getting their very first flu shot are also supposed to get two of them, four weeks apart.)Even at the three-ish-month mark past vaccination, the body’s anti-flu defenses don’t reset to zero, Rodda told me. Shots shore up B cells and T cells, which can survive for many months or years in various anatomical nooks and crannies. Those arsenals are especially hefty in people who have banked a lifetime of exposures to flu viruses and vaccines, and they can guard people against severe disease, hospitalization, and death, even after an antibody surge has faded. A recent study found that vaccine protection against flu hospitalizations ebbed by less than 10 percent a month after people got their shot, though the rates among adults older than 65 were a smidge higher. Still other numbers barely noted any changes in post-vaccine safeguards against symptomatic flu cases of a range of severities, at least within the first few months. “I do think the best protection is within three months of vaccination,” Cowling told me. “But there’s still a good amount by six.”For some young, healthy adults, a decent number of flu antibodies may actually stick around for more than a year. “You can test my blood right now,” Rodda told me. “I haven’t gotten vaccinated just yet this year, and I have detectable titers.” Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me he has found that some people who have regularly received flu vaccines have almost no antibody bump when they get a fresh shot: Their blood is already hopping with the molecules. Preexisting immunity also seems to be a big reason that nasal-spray-based flu vaccines don’t work terribly well in adults, whose airways have hosted far more flu viruses than children’s.Getting a second flu shot in a single season is pretty unlikely to hurt. But Ellebedy compares it to taking out a second insurance policy on a car that’s rarely driven: likely of quite marginal benefit for most people. Plus, because it’s not a sanctioned flu-vaccine regimen, pharmacists might be reluctant to acquiesce, Poland pointed out. Double-dosing probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance as an official CDC recommendation, either. “We do a bad enough job,” Poland said, getting Americans to take even one dose a year.[Read: America’s flu-shot problem is also its next COVID-shot problem]That’s why the push to vaccinate in late summer and early fall is so essential for the single shot we currently have, says Huong McLean, a vaccine researcher at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin. “People get busy, and health systems are making sure that most people can get protected before the season starts,” she told me. Ellebedy, who’s usually a September vaccinator, told me he “doesn’t see the point of delaying vaccination for fear of having a lower antibody level in February.” Flu seasons are unpredictable, with some starting as early as October, and the viruses aren’t usually keen on giving their hosts a heads-up. That makes dillydallying a risk: Put the shot off till November or December, and “you might get infected in between,” Ellebedy said—or simply forget to make an appointment at all, especially as the holidays draw near.In the future, improvements to flu-shot tech could help cleave off some of the ambiguity. Higher doses of vaccine, which are given to older people, could rile up the immune system to a greater degree; the same could be true for more provocative vaccines, made with ingredients called adjuvants that trip more of the body’s defensive sensors. Injections such as those seem to “maintain higher antibody titers year-round,” says Sophie Valkenburg, an immunologist at Hong Kong University and the University of Melbourne—a trend that Ellebedy attributes to the body investing more resources in training its fighters against what it perceives to be a larger threat. Such a switch would likely come with a cost, though, McLean said: Higher doses and adjuvants “also mean more adverse events, more reactions to the vaccine.”For now, the only obvious choice, Rodda told me, is to “definitely get vaccinated this year.” After the past two flu seasons, one essentially absent and one super light, and with flu-vaccination rates still lackluster, Americans are more likely than not in immunity deficit. Flu-vaccination rates have also ticked downward since the coronavirus pandemic began, which means there may be an argument for erring on the early side this season, if only to ensure that people reinforce their defenses against severe disease, Rodda said. Plus, Australia’s recent flu season, often a bellwether for ours, arrived ahead of schedule.Even so, people who vaccinate too early could end up sicker in late winter—in the same way that people who vaccinate too late could end up sicker now. Plotkin told me that staying apprised of the epidemiology helps: “If I heard influenza outbreaks were starting to occur now, I would go and get my first dose.” But timing remains a gamble, subject to the virus’s whims. Flu is ornery and unpredictable, and often unwilling to be forecasted at all.

Lichen is made up of at least two organisms: fungus and algae, photosynthesizing in symbiotic harmony. The other day, the Brooklyn Museum was overtaken by lichen of unusual com­position. The vast ruffled puddles that spread out across the museum floor—swirls of green, pink, brown, red, and yellow—were composed of approximately twenty thousand chrysanthemums, carnations, zinnias, and cockscombs.

They were the work of Emily Thompson, a New York flower designer whose tastes run toward the wild and the overgrown. Lichen is a pet fascination. “I grew up in a place with very beautiful rocks,” Thompson, who is from Vermont, said. “And, of course, the best rocks are the ones that have developed lichen.” Thompson trained as a sculptor before turning to flowers, and has created projects for fashion shows, res­taurants, and the White House. At last, she’d found a client willing to realize her long-standing fantasy of lichen-­inspired floral arrangements—the fashion designer Ulla Johnson, whose Spring-Summer 2023 collection was making its début in the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts atrium.

Johnson’s show was scheduled for 10 A.M. on Sunday, and flowers began arriving at 8 A.M. on Saturday. Thompson had biked over to greet the trucks. She was working with a team of fourteen other florists, who wore mostly black; Thompson, who has curly hair and wore reading glasses attached to a thick green chain, was dressed in a sturdy cotton shirt and forest-green pants; she compared her look to a park-ranger uniform. After several freight-elevator loads of blooms had been ferried upstairs, she gathered her team in a circle at the center of the ten-thousand-square-foot space. She handed around clipboards with a floor plan, reference photographs of lichen in psychedelic colors, and pictures of a sample lichen flower mosaic she’d assembled at her Manhattan studio.

“This is not a map you’re going to follow,” she said. The floor plan showed what looked like five continents of irregular size and shape, to be carpeted with the stemless heads of flowers placed flat on the ground. “What I really want to see is your own ideas of how the colors blend and contrast,” she explained. Also marked on the plan was the “Vogue shot”: the path down the runway that press cameras would capture in their definitive photographs of each outfit. Ideally, things would not get too pretty. “Seduction-repulsion, always!” Thompson said.

The florists set to work laying flowers on cotton tarps they’d spread across sections of the floor. Thompson started building a wall of crab-apple branches, one of the few elements of the installation to rise more than an inch off the ground. “It’s just like being a beaver,” she said. Her dam aloft and sturdy, she paused to take a lap around the atrium to examine the patterns taking shape on the tarps. Chrysanthemums with pale-lavender petals tipped in neon green nestled beside crinkly burgundy carnations edged in pink, interrupted by ripples of yellow cockscombs.

“I love this awful gray-purple,” Thompson said, pointing at a clump of carnations. “It’s like a corpse, a rotting corpse.” The progress excited her: “It’s so much better than when we made it in the studio. It’s so much better with all these human brains.”

The progress, however, was slow. (Actual lichen often grows less than a millimetre a year.) “Smoosh your carns,” she advised the team—that way the blossoms would take up more space. “We’ve got to crank. I want to see fifty per cent soonish.” After lunch, she walked to the vantage point of the Vogue shot and surveyed the space, hands on hips. She considered pitching in on the tarps, but she trusted the other florists more, because they’d been at it for hours. “There’s a weird communion that happens,” she said. “Your minds meld a bit.”

Ulla Johnson was scheduled to inspect the lichen early that evening. (“I’m very hands on,” she explained.) Thompson spent the remaining time calling in favors from flower venders; more pink mums were on the way. “Florists are always making something out of spit and toothpaste,” she said.

Johnson, when she arrived, worried that the patches of green and brown looked too much like camouflage. “The brown is killing me a little,” she told Thompson.

“She’s taking out the ugly,” Thompson said to a colleague. But this was to be expected. The work of the mind-melded florists was being subsumed into the event’s larger ecosystem.

A minutes-long fashion show brought into existence a teeming biome that dissolved almost as quickly as it took shape. By Saturday night, the atrium was full of photographers, electricians, lighting technicians, carpenters, and musicians with dramatic hair, in addition to Johnson’s pack of closely conferring, mostly blond staffers. A migratory flock of models arrived on Sunday morning, followed by the show’s three hundred and twenty-five invited guests—many of whom paused to photograph the pools of flowers before taking their seats.

The scavengers, a team from an event-cleanup service called Garbage Goddess, were the last to appear. They came after the show, wearing plant-dyed overalls, and transported the now wilting flowers to a compost facility on Long Island. ♦

At Alcova, an apple atop a swooning tower of red and green fruit wore a lacy Gohar World vegetable bonnet—which, as its name suggests, is a bonnet for produce. As with many of the pieces in the collection, it is defiantly inessential. No one needs a Battenburg-lace apron for a wine bottle, or a wrought-iron chandelier that can hold eleven hard-boiled eggs. The charm of such items lies in their roguish refusal to pretend otherwise. And the tactile, handmade look of Gohar World is an emphatic rejection of the sleekly anonymous and tech-inflected millennial aesthetic that has dominated consumer goods in recent years. “It’s the opposite of a screen,” as Gohar put it. She wished that she had brought the egg chandelier to Milan, but her sister, generally the more practical of the two, had thought it would be too cumbersome to pack. Nadia oversees sourcing in Egypt—where the family is from—while Gohar takes charge of promotion; they devise the products together.

Place settings from the Laila Gohar x HAY collection, 2022. Photograph by Adrianna Glaviano

Gohar was in town for a flurry of projects timed to the Salone del Mobile. After the Alcova installation opened, she would host a party with Gucci celebrating Gohar World’s capsule collection for Gucci Vault, the brand’s “experimental concept space” (a Web site). Then she would unveil a multi-tiered “Pigeon Table” that she’d created with the Belgian design team Muller Van Severen, inspired in part by Egypt’s pigeon houses. In between these commitments, she would take a brief trip to Florence, so that she and Nadia could attend the runway show for Chanel’s Métiers d’Art collection—a showcase of traditional trimmings and handicraft, similar in spirit to the artisanal work that the sisters had enlisted for their own line’s lace and linens. Then Gohar would leave for Copenhagen to preview housewares that she would release this fall with the Danish design brand HAY.

The photographer and filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman has collaborated with Gohar throughout the years, and counts her as a close friend. Last year, he shot her for Tiffany; she wore an Elsa Peretti cuff and held an egg. Zuckerman, who was at Alcova to show a new collection of wallpaper from a brand that he founded with his wife, told me he saw Gohar’s work as embodying “a new luxury.” Her installations are so otherworldly that you could imagine one of them appearing “twenty years from now, thirty years from now,” he said. At the same time, “you can imagine, almost, one of Laila’s installations happening for Marie Antoinette at Versailles.”

Gohar was born in 1988 in Cairo, to an Egyptian father and a mother of Turkish descent whose family had been in Egypt for many years. Gohar’s father, Mohamed, started his career as a cameraman for Egypt TV and for a time was the personal photographer of President Anwar Sadat. Eventually, he founded a news-production company called Video Cairo Sat, which grew into one of the country’s largest privately owned media organizations. He strove to raise his children in a largely secular environment. Laila and Nadia, thirteen months apart, attended school at Cairo American College, near the family’s home, in the suburban neighborhood of Maadi. (They also have a younger sister and brother, who were born nearly a decade later.) Their classmates were the children of foreign diplomats and wealthy Egyptians, and, though the family could afford to move in these circles, Gohar remembers feeling alienated from the haute-bourgeois conformity that prevailed. She and Nadia would go to school dressed in custom outfits that a seamstress friend of their mother’s sewed from upholstery scraps. The effect, which Gohar failed to appreciate at the time, was a bit “like if Comme des Garçons made children’s clothing,” she said.

Gohar was, by her own assessment, “a difficult child.” Her mother, Nevin Elgendy, remembers her as “a very difficult child” who was “not into rules very much.” In an early family photo, Elgendy is radiant, with a bright smile and fluffy nineteen-eighties hair. Baby Nadia is wide-eyed and grave, transfixed by the camera. Meanwhile, Laila, mouth open, eyes shut, is howling with toddler rage. (“Forever mood,” she wrote when she sent me the picture.) Once, in elementary school, she was given three days’ detention for acting out in Arabic class. Her father was troubled to learn that the punishment entailed sitting in the principal’s office and doing nothing, so he took three days off work and spent them chatting with his daughter in detention. “The first day, I remember walking across the school with my dad and just thinking, I am untouchable,” Gohar said. (In her father’s telling of this story, she was sixteen, and had been disciplined for kissing a boy.) At school, Nadia was easygoing and popular. Laila was not, but she had the kind of precocious charisma that appealed to her parents’ friends.

Her father was an inventive occasional cook, but Gohar’s first forays in the kitchen were largely inspired by her dislike of the foods that her mother prepared. “My mother is just one of those people who eats to survive,” Gohar told me. (“I don’t have a problem eating something that is not amazing,” her mother said.) Gohar remembers mushy peas in tomato sauce, schnitzel with breading that peeled off like skin, and, most of all, omelettes. “They would smell like sulfur—like gross pee-eggs,” she said. “You know when that happens with overcooked eggs? And they were rubbery.” The first recipe that she attempted on her own, at around age ten, came from a United Nations children’s cookbook—it was chicken teriyaki, the entry from Japan. “I just became obsessed,” she said. “I would make it almost every day.” She started sneaking into the kitchen at night with Nadia to teach herself to make meringue. Elgendy remembers coming down in the morning with their housekeeper to find the kitchen looking like something had exploded.

“Loaf,” a collaboration between Gohar, the designer Sam Stewart, and the bakers Millers & Makers. Photograph by Brian W. Ferry

Gohar knew from a young age that she wanted to get out of Cairo, and, when the time came to apply to college, she researched scholarships for international students in the United States. The University of Miami appealed to her: it was hot (Gohar loves the heat), and it was unfamiliar. “I remember arriving in Miami and thinking, This is amazing,” she said. “I don’t know anyone, I don’t understand anything that’s going on, I know nothing about this place. And I just felt so free.” In her first week of school, she told a classmate that she was from Cairo; the student replied that she’d grown up twenty miles from there. She meant Cairo, Georgia. “People always think it’s so exotic that I’m from Egypt,” Gohar told me. “As far as I’m concerned, growing up in a suburb of the U.S. is really exotic.”

While studying in Miami, she worked in restaurant kitchens, and as an assistant to a local artist. She began cooking lunches at his studio, and the meals soon attracted other artists and neighborhood friends. Gohar stopped when a reporter expressed interest in covering the gatherings. “It just made me feel uncomfortable,” she said. “I wasn’t doing it for any other reason than for us to be fed.”

This was not Gohar’s first brush with media attention. Early in her time in Miami, she had been photographed in her swimsuit for a street-style spread. Her mother remembers the day when, back in Egypt, the housekeeper delivered the news: “Madam, Laila is in Teen Vogue! ” Gohar moved to New York City after college for a job at a now defunct food Web site, then enrolled in a New School program in media studies and worked in the kitchens of restaurants that she prefers not to name. She is impatient with the “hype-y” culture around brand-name chefs and restaurants. “It’s so fetishized,” she told me. “I think the only thing that establishes credibility is your own work.” (A general tendency, almost a reflex, with Gohar is to resist efforts to pin her with a particular job or label. Her Instagram occasionally nods to artists and designers she appreciates—Louise Bourgeois, Isamu Noguchi, Schiaparelli—but she avoids claiming straight lines of inspiration.) At the same time that Gohar was working in New York restaurants, she started to build a catering business called Sunday Supper. An old friend from Miami had relocated to the city for a fashion job, and he introduced her to a social swirl of magazine parties and brand-sponsored benefits. A number of Gohar’s early clients emerged from this world, which is one of several that her career has allowed her to move between.

Today, Gohar calls the Argentine psychologist Susana Balán her “therapist,” though she concedes that the term isn’t quite right: they speak regularly, but Gohar does not pay for sessions. “It’s more like I’m a subject she’s studying,” Gohar explained. The two met after Gohar read Balán’s self-published children’s book, “Link and the Shooting Stars,” and identified with its hero. The story follows a young misfit horse, Link, who sets out to find a life that can accommodate his many talents and interests. The book is intended to illustrate a concept that Balán has developed called the “Link personality,” which she feels Gohar exemplifies. Such people have “many ‘I’s,” Balán told me.

In the past ten years, as the world’s attention went digital, Instagram became central to the marketing strategies of fashion and luxury brands. But successfully using this new platform required a different tone than that of the glossy ad campaigns that once fattened magazines. On Instagram, the essential quality was “authenticity.” This could mean enticing potential customers through spokespeople (from the emergent field of so-called influencers) tasked with appearing to like your products. It could also mean inspiring consumers to advertise your products themselves. Brands have long sponsored events in the hope of drawing publicity, but when smartphones and social media effectively turn every guest into a potential party reporter the goal takes on new urgency.

Many of Gohar’s pieces are arresting enough that it is not immediately apparent how or whether to go about eating them. Photograph by Hanna Grankvist

Gohar’s career coincided fortuitously with this shift. Mainwaring, her agent, started working with her in 2015, a period when she had wound down Sunday Supper and was beginning to move in more experimental directions. Mainwaring recalls that guests would arrive at an event and see, for example, a mountain of five thousand marshmallows, which Gohar once produced for Tiffany, “and instantly they would take their phones out.” They would post pictures, tag the brands, tag Gohar. “The brands were, like, Well, this is fantastic,” Mainwaring said. “People are coming and they’re doing the job that we actually always want them to do.” No one pulls out her phone to take a picture of sliders or mini quiches—here was a way to turn catering into viral marketing. Gohar’s growing online following made her an ideal subject for quick-hit fashion-media interviews and photo shoots, setting in motion the cycle of publicity and discovery by which people who seem as if they could be famous actually become kind of famous. Eventually, brand representatives would interrupt Mainwaring mid-presentation: Oh, wait, hold on, this is @lailacooks!

Fashion often turns to other fields to burnish its intellectual credibility and lay claim to eccentricity that defies commercial appeal. A menu wherein the food is “not the point” satisfies this particular craving. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, has followed Gohar’s career throughout the past decade, as food gained currency as a vehicle for social commentary in the design world. She sees Gohar’s work, in contrast, as more “experiential” than critical. “She seemed, in my interpretation of her work, less about using food as a starting point for critique—whether it be about foodways or consumer culture or aesthetics—than as a way of bringing people together and creating these delightful, unusual, novel experiences,” Cameron said. In her view, Gohar is engaging with craft and tradition. “There is always such intimacy in what she’s creating.”

Energy and food bills are soaring. Under the onslaught of inflation and prolonged wage stagnation, wages are in free fall. Billions of dollars are diverted by Western nations at a time of economic crisis and staggering income inequality to fund a proxy war in Ukraine. The liberal class, terrified by the rise of neo-fascism and demagogues such as Donald Trump, have thrown in their lot with discredited and reviled establishment politicians who slavishly do the bidding of the war industry, oligarchs, and corporations.

The bankruptcy of the liberal class means that those who decry the folly of permanent war and NATO expansion, mercenary trade deals, exploitation of workers by globalization, austerity and neoliberalism come increasingly from the far-right. This right-wing rage, dressed up in the United States as Christian fascism, has already made huge gains in Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Bulgaria and France and may take power in the Czech Republic, where inflation and rising energy costs have seen the number of Czechs falling below the poverty line double.

By next spring, following a punishing winter of rolling blackouts and months when families struggle to pay for food and heat, what is left of our anemic western democracy could be largely extinguished.

Extremism is the political cost of pronounced social inequality and political stagnation. Demagogues, who promise moral and economic renewal, vengeance against phantom enemies and a return to lost glory, rise out of the morass. Hatred and violence, already at the boiling point, are legitimized. A reviled ruling class, and the supposed civility and democratic norms it espouses, are ridiculed.

It is not, as the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill points out, as if fascism ever went away. "The U.S. did not defeat fascism in WWII," he writes, "it discretely internationalized it." After World War II the U.S., U.K. and other Western governments collaborated with hundreds of former Nazis and Japanese war criminals, who they integrated into western intelligence services, as well as fascist regimes such as those in Spain and Portugal. They supported right-wing anti-communist forces in Greece during its civil war in 1946 to 1949, and then backed a right-wing military coup in 1967. NATO also had a secret policy of operating fascist terrorist groups. Operation Gladio, as the BBC detailed in a now-forgotten investigative series, created "secret armies," networks of illegal stay-behind soldiers, who would remain behind enemy lines if the Soviet Union made a military move into Europe. In actuality, the "secret armies" carried-out assassinations, bombings, massacres and false flag terror attacks against leftists, trade unionists, and others throughout Europe.

See my interview with Stephen Kinzer about the post-war activities of the CIA, including its recruitment of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and its creation of black sites where former Nazis were hired to interrogate, torture and murder suspected leftists, labor leaders and communists, detailed in his book Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, here.

Fascism, which has always been with us, is again ascendant. The far-right politician Giorgia Meloni is expected to become Italy's first female prime minister after elections on Sunday. In a coalition with two other far-right parties, Meloni is forecast to win more than 60 percent of the seats in Parliament, though the left-leaning 5-Star Movement may put a dent in those expectations.

Meloni got her start in politics as a 15-year-old activist for the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, founded after World War II by supporters of Benito Mussolini. She calls EU bureaucrats agents of "nihilistic global elites driven by international finance." She peddles the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory that non-white immigrants are being permitted to enter Western nations as part of a plot to undermine or "replace" the political power and culture of white people. She has called on the Italian navy to turn back boats with immigrants, which the far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini did in 2018. Her Fratelli d'Italia, Brothers of Italy, party is a close ally of Hungary's President, Viktor Orban. A European Parliament resolution recently declared that Hungary can no longer be defined as a democracy.

Meloni and Orban are not alone. Sweden Democrats, which took over 20 percent of the vote in Sweden's general election last week to become the country's second-largest political party, was formed in 1988 from a neo-Nazi group called B.S.S., or Keep Sweden Swedish. It has deep fascist roots. Of the party's 30 founders, 18 had Nazi affiliations, including several who served in the Waffen SS, according to Tony Gustaffson a historian and former Sweden Democrat member. France's Marine Le Pen took over 41 percent of the vote in April against Emmanuel Macron. In Spain, the hard-right Vox party is the third largest party in Spain's Parliament. The far-right German AfD or Alternative for Germany partytook over 12 percent in federal elections in 2017, making it the third largest party, though it lost a couple percentage points in the 2021 elections. The U.S. has its own version of fascism embodied in a Republican party that coalesces in cult-like fashion around Donald Trump, embraces the magical thinking, misogyny, homophobia and white supremacy of the Christian Right and actively subverts the election process.

Economic collapse was indispensable to the Nazis' rise to power. In the 1928 elections in Germany, the Nazi party received less than 3 percent of the vote. Then came the global financial crash of 1929. By early 1932, 40 percent of the German insured workforce, six million people, were unemployed. That same year, the Nazis became the largest political party in the German parliament. The Weimar government, tone deaf and hostage to the big industrialists, prioritized paying bank loans and austerity rather than feeding and employing a desperate population. It foolishly imposed severe restrictions on who was eligible for unemployment insurance. Millions of Germans went hungry. Desperation and rage rippled through the population. Mass rallies, led by a collection of buffoonish Nazis in brown uniforms who would have felt at home at Mar-a-Lago, denounced Jews, Communists, intellectuals, artists and the ruling class, as internal enemies. Hate was their main currency. It sold well.

The evisceration of democratic procedures and institutions, however, preceded the Nazis' ascension to power in 1933. The Reichstag, the German Parliament, was as dysfunctional as the U.S. Congress. The Socialist leader Friedrich Ebert, president from 1919 until 1925, and later Heinrich Bruning, chancellor from 1930 to 1932, relied on Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to largely rule by decree to bypass the fractious Parliament. Article 48, which granted the president the right in an emergency to issue decrees, was "a trapdoor through which Germany could fall into dictatorship," historian Benjamin Carter Hett writes.

Article 48 was the Weimar equivalent of the executive orders liberally used by Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to bypass our own legislative impasses. As in 1930s Germany, our courts -- especially the Supreme Court -- have been seized by extremists. The press has bifurcated into antagonistic tribes where lies and truth are indistinguishable, and opposing sides are demonized. There is little dialogue or compromise, the twin pillars of a democratic system.

The two ruling parties slavishly serve the dictates of the war industry, global corporations and the oligarchy, to which it has given huge tax cuts. It has established the most pervasive and intrusive system of government surveillance in human history. It runs the largest prison system in the world. It has militarized the police.

Democrats are as culpable as Republicans. The Obama administration interpreted the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force as giving the executive branch the right to erase due process and act as judge, jury and executioner in assassinating U.S. citizens, starting with radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, a U.S. drone strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Anwar's 16-year-old son, who was never linked to terrorism, along with 9 other teenagers at a cafe in Yemen. It was the Obama administration that signed into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, overturning the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military as a domestic police force. It was the Obama administration that bailed out Wall Street and abandoned Wall Street's victims. It was the Obama administration that repeatedly used the Espionage Act to criminalize those, such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, who exposed government lies, crimes, and fraud. And it was the Obama administration that massively expanded the use of militarized drones.

The Nazis responded to the February 1933 burning of the Reichstag, which they likely staged, by employing Article 48 to push through the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State. The fascists instantly snuffed out the pretense of Weimar democracy. They legalized imprisonment without trial for anyone considered a national security threat. They abolished independent labor unions, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, along with the privacy of postal and telephone communications.

The step from dysfunctional democracy to full-blown fascism was, and will again be, a small one. The hatred for the ruling class, embodied by the establishment Republican and Democratic parties, which have merged into one ruling party, is nearly universal. The public, battling inflation that is at a 40-year high and cost the average U.S. household an additional $717 a month in July alone, will increasingly see any political figure or political party willing to attack the traditional ruling elites as an ally. The more crude, irrational or vulgar the attack, the more the disenfranchised rejoice. These sentiments are true here and in Europe, where energy costs are expected to rise by as much as 80 percent this winter and an inflation rate of 10 percent is eating away at incomes.

The reconfiguration of society under neoliberalism to exclusively benefit the billionaire class, the slashing and privatization of public services, including schools, hospitals and utilities, along with deindustrialization, the profligate pouring of state funds and resources into the war industry, at the expense of the nation's infrastructure and social services, and the building of the world's largest prison system and militarization of police, have predictable results.

At the heart of the problem is a loss of faith in traditional forms of government and democratic solutions. Fascism in the 1930s succeeded, as Peter Drucker observed, not because people believed its conspiracy theories and lies but in spite of the fact that they saw through them. Fascism thrived in the face of "a hostile press, a hostile radio, a hostile cinema, a hostile church, and a hostile government which untiringly pointed out the Nazi lies, the Nazi inconsistency, the unattainability of their promises, and the dangers and folly of their course." He added, "nobody would have been a Nazi if rational belief in the Nazi promises had been a prerequisite."

As in the past, these new fascist parties cater to emotional yearnings. They give vent to feelings of abandonment, worthlessness, despair, and alienation. They promise unattainable miracles. They too peddle bizarre conspiracy theories including QAnon. But most of all, they promise vengeance against a ruling class that betrayed the nation.

Hett defines the Nazis as "a nationalist protest movement against globalization." The rise of the new fascism has its roots in a similar exploitation by global corporations and oligarchs. More than anything else, people want to regain control over their lives, if only to punish those blamed and scapegoated for their misery.

We have seen this movie before.

Zoning Reform Backfires By: Veronique de Rugy

Over at Reason, Christian Britschgi writes about how federal money meant to encourage zoning reform ended up in the hands of those who want to further restrict housing construction.

If you want a recap of why land and zoning deregulation is one of the most important policy matters that no one cares about, read Bryan Caplan on this issue and watch this. As Caplan notes, “we’re talking trillions of dollars of annual gain, implying an astronomical present value” that would materialize from even just modest housing deregulation (and immigration liberalization). Housing deregulation would increase the supply of housing, which in turn would lower the cost of housing, and allow workers in low-productivity regions to move to higher-productivity regions.

One idea that has been offered by my colleagues at the Mercatus Center, but also by other scholars, is to use federal funding to incentivize states to loosen zoning rules. The Biden administration tried to do something similar with grants to state transportation departments and port authorities:

The White House made a big splash in May 2022 when it announced that its Housing Supply Action plan would use competitive transportation grant programs to reward jurisdictions that remove regulatory barriers to new housing construction. The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in November 2021, also dramatically boosted funding for these grant programs—giving the feds a lot more carrots with which to reward governments for removing red tape on new development.

However, in practice it didn’t work all that well. Britschgi explains:

But as the grant awards from these retooled transportation grant programs trickle out, there’s little evidence the money is going to reformist jurisdictions. Late last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the recipients of $1.5 billion in grants from the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) program—one of five grant programs the administration said would be used to encourage zoning reforms. Of the 26 INFRA grant awards this cycle, 19 are going to state transportation departments or port authorities that don’t set zoning regulations or issue residential building permits. These bureaucracies can’t be incentivized to change regulations they don’t have any power over in the first place.

He adds:

It was a similar story with $2.2 billion in RAISE grants awarded last month, another one of the programs the Biden administration said it would retool to encourage zoning reform. Few of the awards appeared to have much to do with zoning. One of the largest RAISE awards went to San Francisco, which is currently being investigated by California’s state government for shooting down new housing in violation of state law.

I can’t say that I am surprised.

Before I explain why, I want to offer two caveats. I totally get why this idea is appealing—it’s not as if we have been very effective at convincing politicians to put an end to most zoning rules the old fashioned way- despite some bipartisan support from scholars—and I also don’t have any idea if there are other instances outside of the ones mentioned in the piece where this approach has worked.

That said, there is always a danger in using government funding—in addition to the money spent—to create incentives to deregulate rather than press for deregulation directly. That’s in part because the incentives within government are rarely the ones that appear on paper.

Obviously, public choice economics has a lot to say about this. Unlike in the marketplace, the incentives for government officials to manage public funds prudently are very weak, not least because personal accountability for bad decisions or misspent money is almost nonexistent. In addition, the pressures are intense on government officials to reward both their friends and special interests. After all, it’s not their money.

To be fair to scholars who suggested using government to create incentives for zoning reforms in the first place, they are explicit about the fact that the grant program must be specifically designed to achieve zoning reforms. The Biden grants were set to incentivize zoning reform- alongside many other goals. Unfortunately, the “if only we could get the right design, it would work” assertion is omitting the reasons why it is unlikely for the government to produce and to stick to the necessary design for this plan to succeed. In other words, there is a reason why the grants weren’t designed simply to encourage a loosening of zoning rules. That’s the same reason why bills meant to reduce inflation or at keeping the government from being shut down are always loaded with pork barrel projects. Incentives to add all that junk are powerful.

The same is true in many other areas. For instance, the literature of austerity tells us exactly what a government should do when it wants to reduce its debt-to-GDP ratio. The legislature must adopt a fiscal adjustment package that is mostly based on spending cuts – including cuts to entitlements – rather than tax increases. However, researchers have shown that 80 percent of the fiscal adjustment packages that are adopted are based on tax increases or the so-called balanced approach (which in practice means that taxes are raised, and spending doesn’t get cut). That’s because the special interests that help to fuel the fiscal problems in the first place still exert influence on legislators and stop them from cutting spending.

Now, it’s not as if I have great ideas about how to get zoning reforms pronto, except to continue fighting the battle of ideas and trying to convince the American people – who could eventually put pressure on those who rule us. This is what has happened in some states with occupational licensing, Certificates of Needs restrictions, and school-choice reforms. Hope springs eternal…

Veronique de Rugy is a Senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and syndicated columnist at Creators.

(Stock photo via Getty Images.)Have you heard of a group called “F3”? I confess that I hadn’t. At least not until Saturday morning, when I read this outstanding Ruth Graham report in the New York Times. The group’s name is short for “fitness, fellowship, and faith.” The goal is ambitious. John Lambert, the group’s CEO, told Ruth that the aim is nothing less than solving “middle-age male loneliness.”The concept is simple. Get a group of men together in the “predawn gloom,” get them to push themselves and each other in a series of grueling workouts, and then join in fellowship to talk and sometimes pray. It seems to work. The group was founded in 2011, and there are now 3,400 chapters across the country, and many of its members credit the group with changing their lives. Ruth’s story communicates a central theme: The workouts are important, but the relationships are transformative. Friendship matters, and here is a place where thousands of men are finding friends.The more I think about the challenges afflicting America’s men and boys, the less I think about ideology and the more I think about technology. While left and right fight furiously over who’s to blame for the fact that young men are falling behind in school, men are overwhelmingly more likely to die of despair, and men are suffering a crisis of loneliness and friendlessness, we’re neglecting the most mundane and powerful of explanations—the world changed, and men have been struggling to adapt ever since.Let’s think of the first several millennia of human history. It’s not just that life was punishing and fragile, it was also remarkably physically strenuous. From our comfortable 21st-century viewpoint, it’s hard to imagine the pure physical challenge of premodern existence. From raising crops to building homes to fighting in wars, there was an enormous premium on raw, physical strength. This physical premium meant that men—by their physical nature—were going to dominate every active physical field of life. They were (with vanishingly few exceptions) going to be the builders, explorers, and soldiers. Moreover, the lack of effective birth control compounded the physical differences. During their physical prime, women were going to be preoccupied with bearing and raising children. Combine that fact with the reality that U.S. life expectancy was much lower when families were much larger, and you have the recipe for an unalterable formula: a biological reality that dictated gender roles. During their shorter and harder lives, the differences between men and women were amplified and solidified. But then came the industrial revolution. Then came the information revolution. In a remarkably short span of time (especially in contrast with the hard, but relatively stable realities of the previous thousands of years), life got easier. The world population exploded:Automation meant that it was simply easier to live. Birth control meant that parents could regulate the size of their families. And that meant that many of the previous sharp divides between men and women no longer made sense. If physicality became less important than mental acuity—and if women’s lives were no longer dominated by the demands of serial pregnancies—then why would workplaces remain male-dominated? What was once more natural quickly became unnatural, and the patterns and habits that built up over centuries no longer made innate sense. The old reality could not hold. And to the extent it was propped up by artificial barriers, maintained by discriminatory laws, it should not hold.Even the most traditional male strongholds transformed. The military became more cerebral and less physical. And while there is still a need for an enormous amount of raw toughness, the much smaller, less infantry-focused U.S. military could cut through the mass-mobilized forces of old like a hot knife through butter. And have you been in an American factory lately? There is still a need for physical strength in some jobs, but the entire workplace is far, far more accessible to women than any factory at the dawn of the industrial age. What does all this mean for men? In the times before the combination of the industrial and information revolutions, men didn’t just possess a clear default purpose (builder, protector, and provider), they also had a clear path to forming meaningful friendships. Demanding male work created spaces for rich male relationships. As men confront this new world, it thus should not surprise us that many are experiencing both a crisis of purpose and a crisis of relationships. In his outstanding new book Of Boys and Men, Brookings Institute senior fellow Richard Reeves documents these immense social and economic changes more effectively than anyone I’ve read, and he does something else truly important—he argues that our ideological wars over masculinity are making everything worse. Men would have a difficult enough task orienting themselves around new realities, but that task is made even more difficult by ideological combatants who are both galloping to extremes and blaming the other side for the crisis. Writing about the cultural left, Reeves notes that “It is one thing to point out that there are aspects of masculinity that in an immature or extreme expression can be deeply harmful, quite another to suggest that a naturally occurring trait in boys and men is intrinsically bad.” He argues that the phrase “toxic masculinity” is “counterproductive.” It teaches men and boys that there is “something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcized.”But the right is riddled with its own problems. If parts of the left are going to label stereotypically “male” characteristics, such as “achievement,” “risk,” “competitiveness,” or “aggression” as harmful, then parts of the right are going to glory in the stereotypes. You see this all over the populist right. There’s an obsession with “manliness,” and manliness is defined far more by physicality and aggression than by courage or wisdom. Perhaps the apex of these shallow obsessions and definitions came when Ted Cruz and other right-wing personalities praised Russian military propaganda before the Ukraine war. Russian military ads portrayed an Army full of heavily-muscled, stone-cold killers. This alleged dominance didn’t survive first contact with the western-trained Ukrainian military. If left and right are leading us astray—and if the world has changed irrevocably—what can we do to provide men and boys with a sense of virtuous purpose? I think we find the answer in the arenas where men struggle the most—as husbands, fathers, and friends. Do we want to know where men are indispensable in American society? Yes, there are still jobs that it takes mainly men to do, but those kinds of careers aren’t the answer to the crisis of masculinity. The answer to the crisis lies much more in distinct, virtuous masculine relationships. Only men can be husbands. Only men can be fathers. And men need male friends.I don’t have the space to fully recount how fatherlessness, singleness, and friendlessness are blasting apart American men, but a few statistics should suffice. At the start of this piece, I noted how single men disproportionately suffer from deaths of despair, but sometimes you have to see a visual to truly understand the depth of the crisis:As the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Patrick Brown writes, “[W]e don’t talk enough about the opioid epidemic in general, and we really don’t talk enough about how single and divorced men are the ones bearing the brunt of this scourge.”Moreover, fathers are so powerful in a young boy’s life that even living around the presence of other fathers can have a positive impact on a boy growing up without a dad. The mere presence of a paternal male role model can change a life.And what about lost friendships? I’ve written about this before. American friendships are in decline, but men are hardest hit. Almost half of all men report having three close friends or fewer. Between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of men who reported have no close friends quintupled, from three percent to 15 percent. The percentage who reported ten or more close friends shrank from 40 percent to 15 percent. This Saturday Night Live skit is sad and funny, in part because it’s describing something real:That which was once more natural now has to become more intentional. Families that once stayed together out of necessity must now stay together out of choice. Male friendships that once formed as the natural result of the proliferation of exclusively male spaces now often require deliberate cultivation. That’s where groups like F3 can change lives. Not many men will be on a football team, and football teams are fleeting. Not many men will be in an infantry platoon, and that life is temporary as well. But men can still choose to gather together and bond through shared experience and hardship. Moreover, increasing our cultural emphasis on the male roles of husbands, fathers, and friends also serves the purpose of largely liberating men from the ideological battles over the trappings or stereotypical affectations of masculinity. There are many ways to fill those roles, and the diversity of masculinity can find its home in the diversity of those relationships.This doesn’t mean men should define themselves entirely by hearth and home. There is great meaning in work, and there are still many professions that require disproportionate numbers of men to meet their physical demands. But it is the presence or absence of those key relationships that is far more critical to a man’s ultimate identity and purpose. Those relationships are both challenging and attainable. Not everyone can or should get married or have children, of course, but virtually everyone can form friendships. Telling men that true masculinity is found in heroism or adventure or physical strength, by contrast, can lead to a profound sense of loss or emptiness when real life turns out to be far more mundane, and it can trivialize and minimize the immense purpose and value of diligent work and steadfast love. Let’s end where I began, with Ruth’s portrayal of F3. She painted a beautiful portrait of the power of friendship. She talked to a middle-aged account manager named Glenn Ayala. The group stood by his side when his marriage floundered and when he struggled to connect with his son. Those are the exact crises that would destroy many men, perhaps even costing them their lives. Yet Mr. Ayala’s friendships hadn’t just sustained him, they’d helped him grow. “I’m not the same person I was when I started,” Ayala told Ruth. “I’m not where I want to be, but I would definitely say I’m a better version of myself.”Friendship enriched Ayala’s life. It saved him in a time of crisis. Yet I have no doubt that Ayala’s friends were enriched by the relationship as well. There is profound meaning in coming to another person’s aid, and there is real purpose in lifting up a friend in need.What is the short story of modern men? Life has changed forever. Ideologues pull men and boys into destructive and unsustainable extremes. Yet virtuous purpose can still be found in the fundamental building blocks of the good life. Only a man can be a husband, only a man can be a father, and men need male friends. If a man can fill those roles with integrity and courage, then doubts about his masculinity should not ever darken his heart. One more thing …In the most recent Good Faith podcast, Curtis asked—and we try to answer—a fascinating question: Is evil weaker and more brittle than we think? The conversation is inspired by the war in Ukraine, but the answer doesn’t depend on the outcome of that conflict. Evil can be strong, but is it truly as strong as it appears? We say no, but I’d love to read your thoughts. I’ll read as many comments as I can.One last thing …In his newsletter this week, my friend Russell Moore reflected on the 25th anniversary of the death of Rich Mullins. Russell and I have many things in common, including the way in which Rich’s songs have stayed with us our entire lives. Here is Russell’s list of top Rich Mullins songs, which I think is largely right:"Hard to Get""If I Stand""Land of My Sojourn""While the Nations Rage""Elijah""You Did Not Have a Home""Hold Me Jesus""Here in America""Let Mercy Lead""Sometimes by Step"Here’s a beautiful cover of one of those songs, “Hold Me Jesus,” by Jon and Valerie Guerra:

Comfort sure sounds nice.

The problem is for many people, it’s no more comfortable dragging the whole kit and caboodle into the workplace than it is showing up every day on a relentless basis. Nor is it necessarily productive. Not everyone wants their romantic life, their politics, their values or their identity viewed by their colleagues as pertinent to their performance. For some people, a private life is actually best when it’s private.

So here’s an alternative: Let’s everyone bring only — or at least primarily — the worky parts. You remember those fragments: the part that angsted over every résumé punctuation mark and put a suit on for the first interview, the part whose mom urged her to put her best face forward in the workplace? It’s that old-fashioned thing we used to call “being professional.” Heck, it’s the you you were for your entire corporate history, until the prevailing H.R. doctrine abandoned buttoning things up.

But “bringing your whole self to work” is a cheap benefit — easier for employers to provide than, say, a raise — and one vague enough to be largely meaningless. Nor is it available to the majority of the American work force. Nobody is asking a line worker or customer service representative to add more personal vulnerability to the enterprise. For most gainfully employed people, it’s not work’s job to provide self-fulfillment or self-actualization. It’s to put food on the table.

After all, the office isn’t the only place you exist — why should they get to have all of you? If you only bring the best parts of you or at the very least, the part of you that does the actual work, you’re more likely to get rewarded for it. One friend and former manager of Boomer vintage told me she credited her own success to religiously bringing her best self to work — and making sure the crabbiest, most critical part of her personality stayed home. Why deprive people of the ability to complain about work to their husband or roommate the moment they walk through the door? That’s where it generally belongs, despite the current misguided effort.

Nor is it fair to ask the workplace to deal with all your hopes, dreams and problems. “A lot of staff that work for me, they expect the organization to be all the things: a movement, OK, get out the vote, OK, healing, OK, take care of you when you’re sick, OK. It’s all the things,” an executive director for an advocacy organization recently told The Intercept. “Can you get your love and healing at home, please?”

Look, it’s understandable that things have gotten blurred. During the pandemic, many of us inadvertently shared a lot more of ourselves than we might have otherwise — partners yammering in the background, the occasional toddler, that weird wallpaper in the kitchen. Why are all your plants dead?

Set aside for a moment the fact that our profligate use of coal, oil and gas and rampant destruction of green spaces are heating the planet to a point where human life will become increasingly uncomfortable, if not impossible. Climate change costs are also mounting, and pollution, habitat destruction and consumerism are profoundly affecting global human health and survival.

Other than fear of change or of upsetting the status quo, there's no rational reason for the slow pace at which the world is tackling the climate emergency. We'd all be healthier, happier and better off economically by quickly employing the many available and emerging solutions, and working on new ones.

A study co-ordinated by the World Meteorological Organization illustrates our predicament and how we might get out of it -- but we have no time to lose. UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said the "United in Science 2022" report shows we're "heading into uncharted territory of destruction" with mounting climate impacts.

Although governments worldwide have agreed to try to keep the planet from heating more than 1.5 C over pre-industrial levels, the report concludes that's increasingly unlikely -- especially as commitments and actions fall far short of what's needed. It finds a 48 per cent chance that "during at least one year in the next five years, annual mean temperature will temporarily be 1.5deg C higher than in 1850-1900."

It also notes emissions continue to rise and "returned to 2019 pre-pandemic levels after a large, but temporary, absolute drop in emissions due to widespread lockdowns." And it points to the danger of climate "tipping points" that "could have significant global and regional consequences."

"A tipping point is when a temperature threshold is passed, leading to unstoppable change in a climate system, even if global heating ends," the Guardian explains, reporting on another major study that found the world is nearing several "disastrous" tipping points and may have already passed five.

That study identifies nine global and seven regional tipping points, including collapse of the Greenland, west Antarctic and two parts of the east Antarctic ice sheets, partial and total collapse of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (including the Gulf Stream), Amazon rainforest dieback, permafrost collapse and loss of Arctic winter sea ice.

Collapse of Greenland's ice cap could cause a huge sea level rise, collapse of the Gulf Stream could disrupt rain billions of people depend on for food and abrupt permafrost melting could release methane into the atmosphere, the Guardian reports.

Climate disruption is already causing devastation worldwide, and it will accelerate unless we step up our global game. One-third of Pakistan is deluged in water, Europe has sweltered under punishing heat waves, China, and the U.S. are afflicted with drought and parts of Africa face famine.

According to the "United in Science" report, "By the 2050s, more than 1.6 billion people living in 97 cities will be regularly exposed to three-month average temperatures reaching at least 35C."

"The terrifying picture painted by the United in Science report is already a lived reality for millions of people facing recurring climate disasters," Climate Action Network executive director Tasneem Essop told the Guardian. "The science is clear, yet the addiction to fossil fuels by greedy corporations and rich countries is resulting in losses and damages for communities who have done the least to cause the current climate crisis."

Scientists, activists and others are calling on world leaders to commit to redoubling their efforts when they meet for the COP27 climate conference in Egypt in November, especially on funding for those already suffering under climate change impacts.

Although cost was never an excuse to ignore or downplay climate change, it's become clearer that addressing the crisis is an economic winner. Oxford University researchers found shifting from carbon-intensive fuels could save the world US$12 trillion by 2050.

And, "United in Science" notes, "Climate-related disasters are causing $200m in economic losses a day."

As volatile gas prices, global conflict and the climate emergency illustrate the precarious position of countries with fossil fuel economies, the costs of renewable energy such as wind and solar continue to drop faster than expected.

Acting now is critical and will save lives and money. A better world is possible, but we must come together without delay.

During the first few decades of the post-war era, the U.S. considered Iran one of its closest geostrategic allies, especially after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Iran’s leader. However, since the 1979 revolution, which abolished the monarchy and established an Islamic republic, the U.S. and Iran have been mortal enemies, largely due to the role that Israel occupies in the region. In this context, during the last couple of decades, the thorniest issue in the U.S.-Iran relationship has been Tehran’s nuclear program, which, Iran says, is focused on energy, not weapons. Israel has been adamantly opposed to the program, even though it is accepted beyond dispute that Israel itself is a nuclear power. In 2015, Iran and several other countries, including the United States, reached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreement, according to which Iran was willing to dismantle much of its nuclear program and open its facilities to nuclear inspections in exchange for billions of dollars of relief support. However, the Trump administration withdrew U.S. support from the agreement — and Israel continued its policy of sabotage and assassination of scientists.
Current talks between Washington and Tehran’s rulers to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement have been stalled, and there is little hope that progress will be made any time soon. Naturally, the U.S. places the blame on Tehran. However, U.S. propaganda grossly distorts the reality of the situation, Noam Chomsky points out in this exclusive interview for Truthout. The barriers to diplomacy are none other than Israel and the United States, says Chomsky.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S. and Iran are at odds with each other, having difficulty even talking to each other. Why do they hate each other so much, and how much of a role does Israel’s shadow play in this continuous drama?
Noam Chomsky: At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’d like to say a few words, once again, on why I feel that the entire framework in which this issue is discussed is seriously distorted — yet another tribute to the enormous power of the U.S. propaganda system.
The U.S. government has been telling us for years that Iranian nuclear programs are one of the gravest threats to world peace. Israeli authorities have made it clear that they will not tolerate this danger. The U.S. and Israel have acted violently to overcome this grave threat: cyberwar and sabotage (which the Pentagon regards as aggression that merits violence in self-defense), numerous assassinations of Iranian scientists, constant threats of use of force (“all options are open”) in violation of international law (and if anyone were to care, the U.S. Constitution).
Evidently, it is regarded as a most serious issue. If so, we surely want to see whether there is some way to lay it to rest. There is: Establish a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, with inspections — which, we know, can work very well. Even U.S. intelligence agrees that before the U.S. dismantled the joint agreement on nuclear weapons (JCPOA), international inspections of Iran’s nuclear program were successful.
That would solve the alleged problem of Iranian nuclear programs, ending the serious threat of war. What then is the barrier?
Not the Arab states, which have been actively demanding this for decades. Not Iran, which supports the measure. Not the Global South — G-77, 134 “developing nations,” most of the world — which strongly supports it. Not Europe, which has posed no objections.
The barrier is the usual two outliers: the U.S. and Israel.
There are various pretexts, which we may ignore. The reasons are known to all: The U.S. will not allow the enormous Israeli nuclear arsenal, the only one in the region, to be subject to international inspection.
In fact, the U.S. does not officially recognize that Israel has nuclear weapons, though of course it is not in doubt. The reason, presumably, is that to do so would invoke U.S. law, which, arguably, would render the massive U.S. aid flow to Israel illegal — a door that few want to open.
All of this is virtually undiscussable in the U.S., outside of arms control circles. On rare occasions, the major media have come close to bringing up the forbidden topic. A year ago, New York Times editors proposed “One Way Forward on Iran: A Nuclear-Weapons-Free Persian Gulf.”
Note: Persian Gulf, not Middle East. The reason, the editors explain, is that Israel’s nuclear weapons are “unacknowledged and nonnegotiable.” Filling in the gaps, they are unacknowledged by the U.S. and are nonnegotiable by U.S. fiat.
In brief, there is a straightforward approach to addressing this grave threat to world peace, but it is blocked by the global hegemon, whose power is so enormous that the topic can barely even be discussed. Rather, we must adopt the framework imposed by U.S. power and keep to the deliberations over renewing some kind of agreement over Iranian nuclear weapons.
Another matter that must be sidelined, though it is so obvious that even the grandest propaganda system cannot entirely efface it, is that the current crisis arose when the U.S. unilaterally destroyed the JCPOA, over the strenuous objections of all other signers and the UN Security Council, which had endorsed it unanimously. The U.S. then imposed harsh sanctions on Iran to punish it for the U.S. dismantling of the agreement. Again, other signers strenuously objected, but they obeyed: The threat of U.S. retribution is too awesome, as in many other cases; notoriously the crushing Cuba sanctions, opposed by the whole world apart from the two usual outliers, but obediently observed.
Again, I apologize for continually reiterating all of this. It must, however, be understood. Having made that gesture, let’s accept reality, subordinating ourselves to the mighty U.S. propaganda system, and keep to the permitted framework of discussion.
Turning finally to the question, first, Israel’s role is more than shadow play. Israel is right at the center of the story, both in its constant violent attacks on Iran and in the “unacknowledged” nuclear arsenal that blocks to path to diplomatic settlement, thanks to its superpower protector.
On mutual hate, we should remember that we are talking about governments. The U.S. and Iranian governments were close allies from 1953, when the U.S. overthrew the parliamentary government of Iran and reinstalled the Shah’s dictatorship, until 1979, when a popular uprising overthrew the Shah and Iran switched from favored friend to reviled enemy.
Iraq then invaded Iran and the incoming Reagan administration turned to lavish support for its friend Saddam. Iran suffered huge casualties, many from chemical weapons while the Reaganites looked away and even tried to shift responsibility to Iran for Saddam’s murderous chemical war against Iraqi Kurds. Finally, direct U.S. intervention swung the war in Iraq’s favor. After the war, President Bush Sr. invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production, a serious threat to Iran of course. And the U.S. imposed harsh sanctions on Iran. So, the story continues.
U.S. charges against Iran are too familiar to need reviewing. 
Unsurprisingly, nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran have stalled again and it is unlikely that there will be a deal any time soon — if at all — to restore their 2015 nuclear deal. First, what do you see as the stumbling blocks in these talks? And didn’t Iran already make a huge concession when it agreed to the 2015 nuclear agreement without requiring that Israel does away with its own arsenal of nuclear weapons?
Negotiations, through European intermediaries, seem to have been put on hold until after the U.S. November elections, at least. There are outstanding disagreements on a number of issues. The most important, for now, are reported to be Iranian foot-dragging on inspection of traces of uranium that bear on whether Iran had an undeclared weapons program before 2003. In contrast, Israeli nuclear weapons programs are nonnegotiable by U.S. fiat, not even subject to inspection.
Iran’s relationship with Russia has been further strengthened since the start of the Ukraine war. Do such moves on the part of Tehran’s rulers indicate the possibility of a complete break from the West?
It’s hard to see how the break should go much farther. Iran’s closer relations with Russia are part of a general global realignment, its contours unclear, involving the major Asian states and Russia-China links.
How likely is it that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?
Israel has repeatedly attacked these facilities with sabotage and assassination. It is likely to proceed with further efforts to prevent Iran from gaining the capability to produce nuclear weapons — which many countries have.
Iranian leaders have consistently claimed that they have no intention of producing nuclear weapons. I have no idea what their strategic thinking might be. Perhaps they are thinking along the lines of U.S. nuclear doctrine: that “nuclear weapons must always be available, at the ready, because they ‘cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict’” (Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, STRATCOM 1995). As Daniel Ellsberg has emphasized, in that respect nuclear weapons are constantly used to enable other aggressive actions with impunity.
Whatever the motives, for Iran or any other state, these weapons must be eliminated from the Earth. NWFZs are a step in this direction. A more far-reaching step is the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), now in force though without the participation of the nuclear states. Iran was active in negotiation of the TPNW and was one of 122 states that voted in favor its adoption, though it has not yet signed it. These are concerns that should be uppermost in our minds, for all states, for the security of all of life on Earth.

Richard Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Dream Hoarders and, most recently, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Richard Reeves discuss how the upper middle-class has cornered the market on economic opportunity; why helping men does not mean undoing progress for women; and whether the problems facing men and boys are more structural than we often think.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Yascha Mounk: I want to start by talking about one of your previous books, which is called Dream Hoarders. It makes a convincing case that the problem in the United States is not necessarily, as Bernie Sanders says, the “millionaires and the billionaires,” but rather the people who are in the upper middle classes, the people in the top 20% of society. It's not the super rich who hoard all of the dreams, but rather (probably) you, me, and many of the people who listen to this podcast—people who are highly educated, who have nice jobs, who aren't plutocrats by any stretch of the imagination. Tell us a little bit about the “dream hoarders” and why we should think about inequality and lack of opportunity in America in those terms.Richard Reeves: I think that's where the real economic cleavage is. It’s not so much the difference between the top 1% or 0.1% and everyone else. It’s the folks who are measuring their income in hundreds of thousands of dollars (not hundreds of millions of dollars) and everybody else. The bottom 80% of the income distribution in the US looks pretty similar today to how it looked in the late 1970s. There hasn't been much increase in income inequality there. What's happened is that the people at the top pulled away from everybody else. And that really started to happen with the top 20% or top 15%. These people are comfortable, with six-figure incomes, college degrees, probably married, etc. I think that's an important cleavage for a number of reasons. One, there are a lot more people in the top 20% than in the top 1%. More votes, more political power. It's easy to talk about how plutocrats have all the political power—but combined, the upper middle classes run everything: every institution, every media outlet. They are the professional class. Second, they can do all kinds of things to secure their position. They can rig the housing market in such a way as to exclude other people from affordable housing. They can rig education by making it incredibly expensive and hard to access, and by pulling all kinds of strings to get their kids in. They can essentially rig two of the most important markets for opportunity, housing and education, in favor of themselves, which means that their kids are likely to inherit an upper middle class position, too. I think that's what's driven a lot of our political divides. I think that a lot of the populist anger we're seeing is not against the plutocrats, as much as Bernie Sanders might wish it to be. It's against the professionals. Mounk: So, there’s a growing divide between the top 20% and the people below that. But why isn't there a kind of trickle-down phenomenon? Why is it that the success and the improvement of living standards for the top 20% during the last 30 or so years has come at the expense of everyone else?Reeves: There are two mechanisms by which this group, the upper middle class, are able to sustain their position and pass it on to their children. One is through standard meritocratic processes. They acquire for themselves huge amounts of human capital—but they also acquire it for their kids. And so the kids win in the race, fair and square, but helped by the fact that they've had such an incredible start. Now, that's “fair” in the narrowly meritocratic sense. This is obviously something you've talked a lot about on this podcast, including with Michael Sandel. The “holding” aspect comes in because they’re not just winning in those markets; they are rigging those markets in ways that benefit themselves and exclude others. The way the housing market works, for example, is that you have a mortgage interest deduction, which allows people to buy expensive houses. And then they use zoning to exclude others from their neighborhoods. We know that the more liberal areas have more exclusionary zoning, which also means exclusionary access to other goods, like the schools in those areas. (It's a notable fact about the US that, whereas racial segregation in our neighborhoods has declined somewhat, economic segregation has increased.) In addition, through the application of various mechanisms, like early admissions, legacy preferences, gaming of scholarships, etc., they're also able to hold more of the places at higher education institutions.Complexity is the friend of the upper middle class. Take the Byzantine college application process: complexity is great if you know how to game it. Complex systems are harder for other people to navigate. Simplification is the friend of equality.Mounk: You have an exciting new book coming out called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.Why should we think that men and boys are struggling?Reeves: Quite a lot of modern boys and men are struggling in a number of domains, in particular in the education system, in the labor market, and in terms of their relationships within family life. The broad story here is that we have moved towards gender equality, generally, as women and girls have caught up with and in many cases overtaken boys and men on some fronts. That both allows and requires us to take more seriously some of the inequalities that run the other way. The gender gap in getting a four year college degree today in the US is wider than it was in 1972, when the Title IX laws were passed— but now it’s the other way around. Back then, men were 13 percentage points more likely to get a four year college degree; now, women are 15 percentage points more likely to get a four year college degree. There is now a bigger gender inequality in higher education than when Title IX was passed. And there are lots of other examples in the labor market. Most men in the US earn less today than most men did in 1979. A separate problem is that some men are dropping out of the workforce altogether. A lot of traditionally male jobs, if they haven't disappeared, have seen significantly reduced wages in areas like manufacturing, heavy industry, and so on, in part because of growing competition from overseas and in part because of growing competition from automation. The value of that labor has declined. If we go back to earlier periods, before international competition came along, some of the unskilled men were actually being overpaid against productivity, so they were gaining some rent there as well, as a result of very high levels of unionization and the exclusion of other groups who could be competitive. It's worth saying that men at the top of the distribution today are doing better than men at the top of the distribution were before. The dream-hoarding men are still doing very well indeed, although they haven't seen increases quite the same as women at the top. And then in the family, the dramatic alteration of the economic relationship between men and women, as a result of the entirely positive increase in women's economic power, has posed hard questions for the role of men in the family. 40% of children are born outside marriage now in the US, four times as many as back in the late 70s. Marriage has become much, much less common for those lower down the socioeconomic scale. More importantly, fathers who can't fulfill this obsolete model of fatherhood, which was primarily about breadwinning, are benched. Given the economic trends I've just described, that's not surprising. Rather than reinventing fatherhood, recasting it for a world of greater gender equality, we’re allowing it to become somewhat obsolete. And we see men getting detached from family life and from their kids as a result.Mounk: But why are men struggling? One way to explain it is to say that women have been excluded in deep ways for a very long time, and now, thankfully, we've overcome many (but not all) of those obstacles. Perhaps, men are also suffering a little bit from the loss of rent they were able to gain in the past. And another interpretation would be to say that there are parts of our society that actually favor women over men.How do you think we can explain why this transformation has been so rapid and so extreme?Reeves: There's some truth to all of those stories. But it's false to say that the decline or the difficulties of many men is a result of the rise of women. That's a false, zero-sum calculation, in my view. I think there are separate reasons by and large, particularly in the economy. Now, it might be true that some men are feeling a sense of loss of the status that was automatically attributed to them as a result of being male. My former colleague Dayna Bowen Matthew says “Equality always feels like a loss to the people who were previously unfairly ahead.” I think there's some of that going on. But I think it’s mostly a decline in absolute terms.And nor, I think, is it because there's some sort of inherent weakness in men, that if men could just get over themselves (as the left would say), or get back to themselves (as the right would say), they'd be okay. That mistakes the problem, which is largely structural. There are structural disadvantages facing boys and men in the current education system which were invisible until the women's movement really took the brakes off what women could do; structural problems in the economy, which we've already touched on; and I think there are structural problems in the family: the basic glue that used to hold families together—the economic dependency of women on men, the role of men as breadwinners, which tied them to both women and children—has been successfully dissolved by the women's movement. That means that the men who are on the other side of that equation don't quite know what their role is. Maybe the reason why one in four boys are now defined as having a developmental disability isn't actually because one in four of our boys are disabled in that way. Maybe it's the system that's not serving them very well. It's not to say there aren't individual issues here. But I'm very troubled by the fact this is a very, very rare instance of a debate where both left and right are incredibly individualistic in their analysis of the problem, rather than looking at the structures that are affecting us.Mounk: Talk us through the case of education, which I think has the most striking set of disparities. What are the structural disadvantages? Surely, boys have the same opportunities, because statistically speaking they are born to the same families with the same socioeconomic standing. And the parents are as keen to give them educational advantages as they are to their daughters. So where's the structural disadvantage?Reeves: This is why the gender gap is very interesting, precisely because everything else is equal. The fact that you see huge gender gaps in education, especially at the bottom of distribution, I can't emphasize that enough—the gender gaps just get bigger and bigger, the further down you go. Even with siblings, you can look at how girls and boys from the same families are doing at school. They are the same families, the same schools, the same parents, the same household income, the same neighborhoods. You've controlled for a lot of different factors, and you still see these huge gaps. I think the structural disadvantage is largely a result of two things. The big one is that the education system presumes that girls and boys mature at the same rate, when they don't. Boys mature much more slowly than girls. Chronological age is used as a proxy for development: when you should start school, when you should move on to the next grade, and so on. But there's actually a very big gap in the brain development of girls and boys, and that gap is at its widest in adolescence. A 15-16 year-old girl is between a year and two years ahead of a boy the same age, in terms of the development of the prefrontal cortex, sometimes called the CEO of the brain. That's the bit that says, “No, you should study, not go out, and you should turn your homework in, and you should plan ahead, and have you thought about which college you're going to?” Girls are better at that than boys anyway. But most importantly, they get better at it much sooner. The boys catch up in their 20s. That period is incredibly important in the US education system. And so, when you look at the GPA distribution, if you take the top 10% in GPA, two thirds of them are girls. That is no surprise to anybody that's actually done any brain science in this area. In all the debates about the differences between male and female brains, the biggest one of all is not how they develop, but when they develop. Now that we've taken the brakes off women, their natural advantage in the education system is leading to these incredibly superior performances. And the second thing that's happening is that the teaching profession is becoming more and more female over time. 76% of K-12 teachers now are female, and that's rising all the time. The evidence suggests that that actually does lead to worse outcomes for boys and men, for reasons that are a bit unclear. But the results nonetheless are pretty compelling. Mounk: I think this is another case where the political scripts on the left and right are flipped. In general, progressives tend to believe very strongly in the role-model effect: that it's incredibly important, for example, to have a teacher of your race or your cultural background, perhaps of your religion, because that really helps you see yourself as a potential future educated person and so on. I know that some economists like Tyler Cowen, who are pretty skeptical about a lot of this literature, actually believe that the “role-model” model of equity is strong. But I think a lot of progressives would say, “Well, if most teachers are women, that's fine, and why should we be worrying about these boys who are underachieving?” It could be that role-models are more strongly coded via ethnicity or race than they are by gender. But one should at least be open to the argument that, if you strongly believe in the role-model effect in a cultural or racial context, it would be a little bit surprising if it didn't also play some role when it comes to gender.Reeves: I think there’s an additional dimension to this. Gloria Steinem said that you get your ideas of what men and women are like from your infancy. It took me ages to persuade my own kids that they could be doctors or teachers, because all the doctors and teachers they saw happened to be female. There's a nice phrase from the women's movement, which is “You can't be it, if you can't see it.” But that's equally true in this era, too. So, if you take early-years education, here's where I think the fact that there are basically no men (it's like 2%) in pre-K and kindergarten classrooms is important. We have more women flying military jets, by a factor of two or three, than we have men teaching pre-K—proportionally, as a share of the occupation. Now, I'm going to risk people's wroth here and say, I think it's more important to get men into kindergarten classes than it is to get more women into the cockpits of fighter jets. What message are we sending our kids about the role of men, if there are literally no men in those pre-K classrooms? I would have thought that feminists in particular would be all over this issue, saying, “Look, if we surround our boys and girls just with women in these early educational settings, can we then be surprised if their views about gender are not changing very quickly?” Mounk: Joe Biden likes to say this in all kinds of contexts: to compete with other countries, we need to use the potential of everybody, and some people are not as productive as they might be. How do you formulate to people who listen to this that, among all the problems in this country, this should be a priority? Reeves: Well, we can have more than one problem that we're paying attention to. As it happens, my wife is trying to raise money now for a startup business, and so I know quite acutely that only 3% of venture capital money goes to female founders. There is still quite a bit of work to do there. But I think the really deep problem here is on a couple of levels. One is just basic human flourishing. In a just society, we pay attention to how people are flourishing as individuals and groups, and so if you have a group that is three or four times more likely to take their own life than another group, which is true for the suicide gap, we want to pay attention to that. If you saw a group that was going backwards economically, you'd want to pay attention to that. I don't know a single parent that doesn't want their son to flourish in the same way as their daughter, and vice versa. I just don't. I think that the failure to address some of these problems sensibly and responsibly creates a very dangerous cultural and political vacuum. It is an axiom of politics that if there are real problems that responsible people aren't addressing, irresponsible people will exploit them. If you do have these growing and genuine problems facing many of our boys and men, and if they don't hear responsible people visibly, audibly addressing them, we shouldn't then be surprised if they become vulnerable to the attentions of a demagogue or a populist. This dislocation that a lot of men are feeling, left unaddressed, can lead some people to the right. It’s not a coincidence that Donald Trump won in 2016 with the biggest gender gap in exit polling history. It's not a coincidence that he picked up some votes among black and hispanic men in 2020. And so that's why I want people of goodwill, particularly those on the center left, to say, “Okay, we should look at this issue, we should pay attention to this issue, we should do so explicitly.” And I think it is a huge political opportunity for them to do so.Mounk: It's striking just how much of a gender gap there now is in American politics, and not always on the topics where people assume there is one. In broader questions like, “Do you prefer Democrats or Republicans," and "how do you feel about Donald Trump?” and so on, there's now a very strong gender divide, which I believe is actually stronger among young people. A few years ago, everyone was debating about Jordan Peterson, which some listeners may have strong feelings about. I always thought that he said some things that were sort of straightforwardly true, along with many things that I disagreed with. But there was a visceral moment of media panic about his rise. And that really was the fault of everybody on the center left, because we were not able to speak in clear and orienting ways to young people who may be trying to look for a path. It would have felt very strange for anybody in my sort of social milieu to say, “I'm going to write a book that tries to appeal not exclusively, but in some ways primarily, to young men who are a little bit lost in life, and tell them: here are some basic rules for how you should go about conceiving of a meaningful life.” If we're not filling that space, it is unsurprising that somebody with whom I have some robust political disagreements, would end up becoming a star by moving into that empty space.Reeves: It's a vacuum. Anybody that doesn't take seriously the appeal of people like Jordan Peterson, especially to young men, just isn't paying attention. I treat some of his work in my book and have many criticisms of what he's done, but I also have a great deal of admiration in some ways for the fact that he does make a lot of these young men feel listened to. He clearly has genuine compassion for them. I don't like where his ideology goes, and he thinks out loud, so he's bound to say something stupid or crazy. Every ten sentences are going to contain three horrific ones. But there is this reservoir of unmet questions and a sense of dislocation and disequilibrium which he has been able to exploit as a public intellectual, but which successful populists are also able to exploit. We have a Gender Policy Council now in the White House. They just put out a report, and there isn't a single gender inequality it treats that goes the other way, not a single one. For me, that's just a huge missed opportunity. Let's say 90% of the things discussed were still about women, but it also talked a bit about deaths of despair, incarceration, how boys have fallen behind in education—just two or three issues. I think that would have paid massive political dividends. I don't think that's quite permissible on the left right now, and so it is leaving this gap, and I really do fear that it could get worse before it gets better. As we approach the midterms, I feel that the Democrats are doubling down in some ways on their current agenda, which I think may have the effect of worsening the gender divide even more than we've seen it in recent years.Mounk: Final question, very simple. What do we do about all of this?Reeves: Well, we start by not using the phrase “toxic masculinity.” If we could just abandon that, that would be great. We must allow ourselves to think two thoughts at once, accepting the fact that there are real problems being faced by many boys and men that are not of their own making, and which we should address as parents, as individuals, as community leaders and institutions, without in any way having to give up any pre-existing commitments that many of us have towards the women's movement and what needs to be done there. And we need to support those politicians and leaders who are actually willing to take this issue head-on in a responsible way. Right now, the responsible people are running silent on this issue, and the irresponsible people are making hay with it. Let's start to have this conversation in a way that's trusting and open. I think merely accepting there are some problems here that we should address is step number one, and I don't think we've made that step yet. But I sense in my early conversations around this that there is an appetite for it. And I do feel that if we don't start addressing it now, it'll be harder to address in ten years.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

“There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it. . . . If you’re the President of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it.” —Donald Trump

There is a secret. And that secret is how to make top-secret secrets not secret anymore using only your mind. All that stands between you and doing this is embracing the power of positive declassifying.

Let others submit formal written declassification requests to the proper agencies. You are special. You are powerful. You are going to jail.

The first step is gratitude. Close your eyes—but also maybe keep one open for the F.B.I.—and say meaningful thank-yous to those whose service you will be betraying.

Picture each spy in your mind and thank them for their heroic and unsung work—whether it was long years spent pretending to be Vladimir Putin’s “sports masseuse” or a terrifying night in an Iranian nuclear facility spent replacing uranium with a slurry of crushed Cheetos and Mountain Dew.

Then, with your heart full of appreciation, hum—more of a flat “mm” here, as “om” is now considered a little appropriative—and visualize each agent you may be sending to an untimely death. Now chant, in your mind, I declassify, I declassify, with my mind, I declassify.

At first, you may not even realize that the documents have, just like that, been declassified. You may not yet know your own power. As I always say, “Just because you are an autocrat doesn’t mean you know a lot about autocracy.” You can now take the files to your personal residence, or turn them into papier-mâché lampshades to sell on Etsy.

But—poof!—just like that, what was secret is now not secret, all through the power of your beautiful, enormous, manifesting mind.

As you become more practiced in the power of positive declassifying, you will acquire the ability to declassify entire tranches of documents in a single go. At first, even one document containing the address and spouse’s and children’s names of a spy will feel like a lot. But, in time, you will be able to think of a foreign country and, just by remembering what people from there smell like, declassify all files relating to it.

Use these powers for good. As Gandhi said in one of his lesser-known speeches, on document security, “Be the leak you wish to see in the world.” Let people know about the actually pretty surprising country that obtained nuclear weapons all because of a FedEx shipping error. (Hint: It rhymes with “toast a zika.”) Why not make Americans aware of all the coups the United States has orchestrated around the world throughout the years, and what really incited the Will Smith slap? Unshroud the truth about Ted Cruz’s father, while you’re at it!

When your term is over, you will find yourself back in your own home or tax-minimizing resort. Had you not learned these tools of manifesting, you might well think to yourself, Oh, shoot, I can no longer declassify intelligence files, because, according to multiple federal courts, I “lost.”

But you must break free from this loop of negative thinking. Instead, you must learn the practice of positive retroactive declassifying. Think back to where you were standing when you still had the constitutional authority to declassify documents, and try to recall what you were feeling, even if you are emotionally blocked because of how your father was and, actually, that kind of explains everything. Now chant, in your mind, I ex-post-declassify, I ex-post-declassify. And, voilà, those documents will be back-declassified.

Never let anyone tell you that you can’t reveal incredibly fraught secrets. The true secret is that there don’t have to be secrets. Not if you learn to be the special master of your fate. ♦

When the Queen died, I was on my way to Kyiv. My mind focused on the war in Ukraine, I found myself uncharacteristically lost for words when I was asked to comment. I took refuge in the complexities of the journey, which involved a delayed flight from Rome to Lublin, a frantic drive to Chelm on the Polish-Ukrainian border and then an overnight train through western Ukraine. It was a good excuse. The reality was I could think of nothing to say. I couldn’t have done an interview even if I’d been trapped in Broadcasting House.
Kyiv was, as NBC’s roving war correspondent Richard Engel had forewarned me, more exuberant than you might expect a capital city at war to be. The Battle of Kyiv was fought and won in the first phase of the war and now the fighting is to the south, around Kherson, and to the east, beyond Kharkiv. Central Kyiv looks positively cheerful. Only when you drive north-east, to the suburbs of Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel, do you see the blown bridges, destroyed houses and burnt-out Russian armor. I am haunted by the simple memorial to the victims of Russian war crimes buried next to the Church of St. Andrew and Pyervozvannoho All Saints in Bucha. It was only six months ago that they interred the bodies of more than sixty people here, many of them civilians executed in cold blood by Russian death squads. Ukrainian soldiers routinely refer to the invaders as “the orcs.” You soon see why.
There had been something thrilling about the train ride to Kyiv. Our group included old friends — Anne Applebaum, Radek Sikorski, Fareed Zakaria, Eric Schmidt — and there was a certain giddiness as we trundled eastwards in blacked-out sleeping compartments. Bucha jolted us out of that mood and prepared us for President Zelensky’s somber message that a “winter of discontent” was fast approaching, not just for Ukraine but for all of Europe. I’d met Zelensky before, five months after his improbable election in April 2019. I liked him. “Diminutive but energetic,” I wrote, “he radiates ingenuous bonhomie.” Over lunch, he confided that he had recently “had a very strange phone call with your president.” (The explosive readout of Donald Trump’s July call with Zelensky was released ten days later.) That night, by way of after-dinner cabaret, he appeared onstage with three other performers in his old comedy show. That jejune Zelensky has been entirely effaced by the war leader who on February 24 decided to stand and fight — “I need ammunition, not a ride” — staking his life in what seemed to many a doomed last stand against the Russian imperial steamroller. In an age when the democratic world has grown accustomed to phony leadership, it gives you a jolt to encounter the real thing. He is a hero of our time, perhaps the hero.
British historians are supposed to know about their monarchy. Having once embarked on a history of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha — as the royal family was known before 1917 — I ought to have been a fount of wisdom. But that book was never completed, despite many long hours in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. I moved to the United States nearly two decades ago and in 2018 I became a US citizen. Although we Britons are not obliged to relinquish our UK citizenship, I recall wincing when required, during the naturalization ceremony, “absolutely and entirely [to] renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty.” The Queen was in my mind’s eye as I said those words. I consoled myself that this was one of life’s necessary white lies.

Yet dual citizenship is more disreputable than a white lie. It is a hedge. When farcical things occur in Britain — such as the opera buffa premiership of Boris Johnson — I am an American. When the United States is being embarrassing — as during Trump’s attempted autogolpe on January 6 — I switch. The Queen’s death found me out. It was not the pageantry of the past ten days, magnificent though it was, nor even the Lone Piper’s pibroch, so much as the recollection of her role in my family’s history. My grandfather Thomas Hamilton was a Labour man when she ascended the throne. His wartime service in the Royal Air Force in Burma and India left him with roughly Orwell’s views of the British Empire and establishment. Yet he always made us sit and watch the Queen’s Christmas message and stood to attention when “God Save the Queen” was played. I have maintained that tradition, so even his youngest grandchildren grasped the significance of her death. To have been part of a nation in mourning must have been uplifting, too.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
The post Volodymyr Zelensky is a hero of our time appeared first on The Spectator World.

Long before the Covid pandemic, it was important to ask, where are the mass movements to enact in Congress majoritarian-supported changes and reforms? Another question: Whatever happened to the mass rallies that used to command the attention of our 535 members of Congress to whom we have given our sovereign power?

Let's start with universal healthcare, which President Harry Truman urged on a recalcitrant Congress in 1945. Proponents, including the labor unions, could not overcome the physicians' lobby in the form of the American Medical Association. President Lyndon Johnson wanted universal health insurance but had to settle for Medicare, with some limits, for the elderly and Medicaid for some poor families. Opponents cited the expense of the Vietnam War as the reason for such limitations.

Since then, there have been no mass rallies or marches for universal healthcare. Sporadic demonstrations by a few hundred people on the Capitol steps showed insensitive members, who have their own comprehensive health insurance, the decline of civic energy.

With the huge waste, gouging, corruption and preventable casualties documented in today's health delivery industry, and about 5000 people a week dying in hospitals due to what a peer-reviewed report by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine called "preventable problems" in hospitals, one would think there would be regular marches on Washington to pass Medicare-for-All. The Canadians did this nearly sixty years ago. (See, singlepayeraction.org). Too many people are suffering or ridden with anxiety, dread and fear, without adequate or any health insurance, while too few people are demanding action by Congress.

Senator Bernie Sanders' insurgent presidential campaign in 2016, sabotaged from victory for the nomination by Hillary Clinton's Democratic Party apparatchiks, could be seen as a mass voter action. However, Sanders has yet to take this huge support and mailing list and convert it into a mass movement. And so, the painful years keep passing.

Other majoritarian reforms and redirections have similarly failed to coalesce into mass movements, as occurred for Civil Rights and environmental protection in the Sixties and early Seventies. Reforms such as living wage, to allowing workers to more easily form unions' bargaining with big business, ending the student loan gouging and rackets, eliminating the huge tax escapes for the wealthy and corporations, investing in rebuilding communities' public works all over the country, cracking down on the corporate crooks draining consumers' pocketbooks, harming their safety and ending the corrosive impact of corporate campaign contributions. All these measures have broad public support.

What are some reasons for a sedentary citizenship in a country? Remember our Constitution starts and ends with "We the People," not "We the Corporations." You, the readers, know all the ways powerful forces keep people down, feeling powerless and distracted with 24/7 so-called entertainment, plus everything in between. Many aggrieved people have a hard time just getting through the day.

Imagine if, despite the obstacles to action, just one percent of the citizenry got knowledgeable and mobilized for Congressional reforms that have a quieter, large majority of the people behind them. One percent of adults is about 2.5 million Americans spread throughout 435 Congressional Districts. In the Sixties, it took a lot less than that level of organized and committed people.

Someday, some leaders will emerge in the above-noted fields and other crucial areas of injustice and practice this one percent theory.

I wrote a small book, Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think, to explain how optimistic critical masses throughout American history worked together to improve our society. I described the kinds of changes that one percent of the people could advance to revolutionize politics for the common good and "the pursuit of happiness." For that to happen, a sufficient number of people have to civically believe in themselves and lock arms together on actions for a change.

The closest Cold War parallels might be Fidel Castro’s desire for Soviet nukes to defend his regime against invasion, or Douglas MacArthur’s request for permission to use nuclear weapons to forestall outright defeat in the Korean War. Both were cases like the current one, where the contemplated use was not an overwhelming Strangelovian exchange but a tactical intervention to prevent a conventional defeat.

Except with the added twist in this case that the key decision makers, Putin and his inner circle, are more immediately threatened — in the sense of a danger to their hold on power and ultimately their very lives — by the prospect of conventional defeat in the Ukraine War than the United States was threatened by the prospect of defeat in Korea or the Soviet Union by the prospect of Castro being toppled.

This doesn’t mean that we should expect Putin to use nuclear weapons (and it’s unclear from the Russian chain of command just how singular the decision would be). The world-historical recklessness of such a decision would carry its own potentially regime-destroying consequences — the possibility of escalation to outright war with NATO, the total abandonment of Russia by its remaining quasi-friends and the full collapse of its economy. It’s a reasonable-enough bet that even facing defeat, he or his regime would blink.

But you don’t bet on nuclear war the way you bet on other outcomes. Suppose there were “only” a 20 percent chance of the nuclear taboo being busted: That would still be a terrifying rather than a reassuring figure. And while the West’s Ukraine hawks, who are currently inclined to play down the nuclear risk, have gotten a lot right about this war, one of the key things they’ve been right about is that the aging Putin is more a reckless, ideologically motivated gambler than a cold-eyed statesman. What does that imply for nuclear peril? Nothing good.

So I return to a point I’ve made throughout this war. American support for Ukraine is good and necessary, but there is a point at which Ukraine’s goals and America’s interests may diverge, and the combination of Ukrainian military breakthroughs and Russian nuclear threats brings that point closer than before — the point where the Ukrainians want to go all the way, and we require negotiation and restraint.

I say this understanding why Kyiv might be willing to accept an unusual degree of nuclear risk, even absorb a nuclear strike, for the sake of its own territorial integrity. In a battle for their very freedom, the Ukrainians, no less than Buckley, want their children to look back and say that in the greatest crisis, the blood of their fathers ran strong.

Of course, any Republican majority will obstruct and investigate Biden, but the size and composition of a potential Republican caucus still matters. It will determine, among other things, just how many impeachments and government shutdowns we’re in for, and how often the House uses its power to protect Trump and reify MAGA conspiracy theories. The more candidates like Kent get elected, the less reason Republicans will have to make any concession to a reality that exists outside the Trumpist bubble.

In his speeches, Kent promised to impeach Biden on Day One, and then Vice President Kamala Harris (“one of the lead fund-raisers for antifa and B.L.M. during the summer of 2020”), Attorney General Merrick Garland and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas. At the town hall, he emphasized his willingness to shut down the government: “I used to work in the federal government,” he said. “It can shut down. It’s really not a big deal.”

In this environment, a Gluesenkamp Perez win wouldn’t just give Democrats an extra seat, or provide a shining example for how to run in purplish regions: It would be a cautionary tale warning Republicans that there’s a price for marching into the fever swamps.

As for Kent, his attempt to distance himself from Fuentes shows that he’s capable of modulating his political strategy. Most of the time, it seems, he doesn’t think he has to. A Kent victory would signal to other Republicans that even outside of ultra-red districts, there’s no need to appeal to moderates, and little price to be paid for courting the hard right.

On the stump, in addition to listing all of those people he would impeach, Kent promised to hold Anthony Fauci “accountable” for the “scam that is Covid.” I asked him what holding Fauci accountable means. “Criminal charges,” said Kent. But what charges, I asked? “Murder,” he replied, as it were the most obvious answer in the world.

(Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (except for any of you who considered making NyQuil chicken),Warning: This “news”letter contains dangerously high levels of whataboutium, the active ingredient in all instances of whataboutism. If you are allergic to whataboutism or have whatabout-intolerance, do not proceed. If you are unsure, consult a doctor before consuming this content. If you reject whataboutism but proceed anyway and your rejection lasts more than four hours, please seek medical attention.One of the time-honored tricks in politics is to drug a hostile senator and then take his picture next to a dead hooker so he’ll grant your gambling licenses. But that’s not important right now.Another trick with a long history of existence is to wrap a specific, narrow, and controversial demand in a giant gauzy bow of first principles or abstract ideals. As longtime readers know, Zorp worshippers called themselves “reasonablists” for similar reasons.Marian Wright Edelmen named her outfit the Children’s Defense Fund in part because it made it easier to say opponents of her preferred policies were “anti-child.” Now, I think some of the things CDF lobbied for are entirely defensible and even valuable. But there’s something annoying about saying, “You don’t like children” to anyone who points out that Head Start’s record is pretty mixed.The whole anti-racism racket depends on the same rhetorical sleight of hand. The term “anti-racism” exists in a kind of quantum state. In one context, it means exactly what it sounds like: “being against racism.” But in practical political terms it also refers to the specific policies pushed by activists who claim to be the arbiters of what counts as anti-racism. In other words, it’s not good enough to say you’re opposed to racism; it’s not even good enough to fight racism as you think best. You have to support the policies of the anti-racist activists. Kramer’s debate with the ribbon bullies captures the dynamic well.Kramer’s against AIDS and he’s literally willing to walk the walk in the effort to combat it. He just doesn’t want to wear the ribbon.There’s virtually no ideal or abstract concept that hasn’t been yoked to a very specific, very controversial claim. Greta Thunberg is like the corporeal form of this rhetorical trick. Use a plastic straw and not only are you in favor of climate change, but a small child will scream, “How dare you!” at you for all eternity.This tactic is by no means the sole provenance of the left. Every day for seven years now, at least one person (or bot) has told me that to be “conservative” one must support and defend every wilted lettuce leaf and bloated greasy raisin in Donald Trump’s word salads.During the Iraq War, many conservatives used words and concepts like “patriotism” and “freedom” the same way. During the pandemic, if you believed in “liberty,” someone would insist you had to agree with whatever the anti-mask or anti-vax crowd said. Today, the various tribes of the “new right” employ this technique in a bonfire of question begging. We must use the state to advance the “Highest Good.” Okay, sounds plausible. But the actual program of the Highest Goodniks is a dog’s breakfast of debatable and dubious action items. I mean, is it really true that I’m against the Highest Good if I think it’s stupid to break up Facebook? I know the H and G are capitalized and all that, but capitalization is not a mic-drop argument unto itself.Anyway, you get the point. In logic, this stuff mostly falls under the either/or fallacy or reductio ad absurdum. But there’s also ample guilt-by-association and ad hominem in the mix as well, and if you can’t see that you’re literally Hitler.You can’t handle the truth.So let’s move on to the example I actually want to whatabout the stuffing out of: truth.For years now, there has been an enormous amount of table pounding about the truth. Now, for the record, I’m very pro-truth and truth-telling. One of the reasons I’m on the outs with so many folks on the right these days is that I think truth-telling is really important. I’ve only written a couple hundred thousand words on that point.Moreover, I often agree with most of the finger-waggers about the lies they’re upset about. Trump’s “big lie” about the election being stolen is contemptible and dangerous in myriad ways. But even before Trump falsely claimed the election was rigged and stolen, journalists made a huge fuss about the sudden new need to use the word “lie.”“This is the very unique situation that we find ourselves in as journalists and as a country,” Joshua Benton, the director of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, told the New York Times in 2017. “We have an administration that seems to be asserting a right to its own facts and doesn’t seem to be able to produce evidence to back those claims.”Again, I think Trump is among the most egregious and unapologetic liars ever to make a mark on our political and cultural life. And I don’t think that’s disputable.But one of things you may have noticed is that many people will attempt to refute the claim that Trump is a liar by pointing out the lies of other politicians. What about Obama saying you can keep your doctor? What about Bill Clinton claiming he didn’t diddle Monica Lewinsky? What about Dan Rather?Now, all of these people lied. But one of the problems with whataboutism is that it doesn’t actually refute anything. If you pay attention, you’ll realize that it actually concedes the point. “Everybody does it” isn’t remotely synonymous with “I didn’t do it.” I’ve actually heard pundits respond to something Trump did by beginning a sentence with, “What about the New York Times … !?” as if the Gray Lady was once president of the United States. How in Odin’s name the bad behavior of a newspaper justifies the bad behavior of a president is a mystery to me.The Soviets invented—or at least perfected—whataboutism as a way of deflecting criticism of their atrocities. "А у вас негров линчуют," which Kevin Williamson dubbed a “bitter Soviet era punchline,” roughly translates to “and in your country they lynch negroes.” And that—finally—gets me to my point: While whataboutism utterly fails as logical refutation, it is wildly successful at illuminating the selective outrage of political combatants. It was true that in America negroes were being lynched. It wasn’t exactly U.S. government policy the way the gulag was Soviet policy, but being outraged over lynching is entirely justified, even morally obligatory. Bill Clinton did lie, and lots of the people outraged by Trump’s lies worked themselves into the kinds of human knots that make autofellation possible by denying it. At least Obama’s lie about keeping your doctor was dubbed the “lie of the year” by PolitiFact.The problem with anointing yourself a champion of the truth is that you can’t be selective about it. Calling out Trumpist lies is good and entirely justified. But you can’t retreat back to the comfort of complacency about other lies.Well, truth be told, you literally can do exactly that, given that people do it every single day. What I mean is that if you do that—if you get all huffy about dishonesty or infidelity to the Constitution or democracy in one context but don’t care in another—you’ll undermine your credibility and invite people to think—with some justification—that your problem isn’t with lies but with Trump or Republicans or whatever. And once people think that, they’ll understandably assume you’re not some paladin of truth-telling but a partisan who picks and chooses which dishonesty to get mad about.Consider The Atlantic, where my colleague David French is a contributor and where my colleague Kevin Williamson worked for about 72 hours. They’ve published an essay arguing that, in effect, biological differences between men and women are a social construct and therefore, as the headline proclaims, “Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense.” The author, Maggie Mertens, writes: Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.The essay has anecdotes—a whopping two of them, I think—and some partial truths that make the whole thing sound superficially plausible. But if you step back the partial truths add up to a whole lie. In 2017, two Duke academics compiled performances in track and field. Among their findings: Just in the single year 2017, Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Tori Bowie's 100 meters lifetime best of 10.78 was beaten 15,000 times by men and boys. (Yes, that’s the right number of zeros.)The same is true of Olympic, World, and U.S. Champion Allyson Felix’s 400 meters lifetime best of 49.26. Just in the single year 2017, men and boys around the world outperformed her more than 15,000 times.Broadly speaking, female Olympic athletes do not want for resources or time when it comes to their training. Do we really think that with a few more encouraging “attagirls” the delta between them and their male counterparts will just evaporate?I can go on and I am sorely tempted to. But let’s stay on track. This argument is nonsense. I very much doubt that anyone at The Atlantic really disagrees. But maybe not. My point is that this isn’t a scientific argument aimed at illuminating the truth, it’s a political argument intended to obscure it. And that matters. The Atlantic did terrific work debunking anti-vax hoohaw in the name of truth and science. But this essay has more in common with phrenology than science.I don’t want to claim that this one article calls into question everything else The Atlantic has done any more than I want to claim that David French’s Aquaman boosterism calls into question everything we do at The Dispatch. But you know what? Lots of people do want to make that argument. The hypocrisy police are everywhere and they’re ravenous.I mean, members of the same crowd that devotes enormous amount of time and energy to attacking the notion of racial differences either support or stay silent about the campaign to deny sex differences. Take all morality and political allegiances out of the equation—it is simply a scientifically established fact that males can’t get pregnant. But the self-declared champions of truth and science who will leap into the breach to combat “race science” either yawn or applaud this new “gender science.” You can explain to me all you want that these are two very different things. You might even score some good points. But the fact remains that for the casual culture war combatant you’ve opened yourself up to a whirlwind of whataboutism. Last month, the New York Times ran an essay titled “Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created.” Apparently, mammalian biologists (and a gazillion mothers) were unavailable for comment.If you want to use the phrase “settled science” to protect your preferred climate change policies, you should show a little deference to the settled science on matters of biology. But my gripe isn’t just with the effort to deny settled biological science in an attempt, I assume, to gain social acceptance for a tiny number of transgender people. This sort of thing is everywhere.Every day, we’re told that anyone who argued that Congress should have given the election to Trump is a traitor and a personality cultist. Now, I have a sterling record condemning the Republicans who tried to do that. But there are at least three Democratic members on the January 6 committee who did much the same thing in previous elections. There are important distinctions to be made, the most important of which is that the Democrats knew it wouldn’t matter and were making a symbolic vote. Fine. But what they did still undermines the sincerity of their fervor. Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig argued for John Eastmanesque maneuvers to declare Hillary Clinton president. Stacey Abrams is still tying herself in knots to explain why her refusal to concede an election is so very, very different from what Trump did.I could go on and on. The New York Times peddled the idea that the real founding of America was in 1619. It was a highly literary—by which I mean deeply bogus—argument to be sure. But they would never support a similar project that took such liberties with the facts for a cause they disagreed with.I think part of the problem is that it has been very popular on the intellectual and campus left to play all sorts of games with the concept of the truth. All sorts of inconvenient customs, facts, and ideas are simply “socially constructed,” the various postmodernists, cultural Marxists, and critical theorists argued for decades. And whole generations of people were incubated in this intellectual amniotic fluid. Some of you are old enough to remember the Social Text controversy, where Alan Sokal published an intentionally fake paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in which he argued that quantum gravity was nothing more than a social and linguistic fiction. The New York Times published an essay by Stanley Fish that attacked Sokal’s hoax and defended the editors of Social Text for running the article. I always loved the idea that if you could convince everybody that gravity was a “myth,” planes would suddenly drop from the sky or everyone would start floating upward.Words aren’t magic. They can change some of our perceptions of reality, to be sure. But if you think a mackerel isn’t a fish because everyone calls it a duck, you’re not a champion of the capital-T truth.The moral of the story is, if you want to dedicate yourself to some abstract principle, be consistent about it or the whataboutists will not only come for you, they’ll come for your principle too.Various & SundryCanine update: I’d really like to keep going but I’m in Sioux Falls and I’ve to make a plane (please no one tell the pilots about the hermeneutics of quantum gravity before I get home).  The Fair Jessica reports that the girls are fine. They all got their treats. Pippa is really committing to her “No walks until the sun comes up and you rub mah belly” policy. (Also, thanks to all the folks who volunteered to treat Pippa the way she thinks she deserves to be treated.) They were very happy when we came home from the Dispatch retreat. Also, for the Gracie Is the Best Cat Ever file, we got a robot litter box that looks like it should be Darth Vader’s helmet polisher. Within an hour, Gracie was like, “I got this.”ICYMIMy appearance on the Making Sense podcast with Sam HarrisLast weekend’s RuminantThe Remnant with Michael StrainDispatch Live introduces Kevin D. WilliamsonBoth parties are to blame for the immigration crisisWednesday’s “news”letterThe Remnant with Nicholas EberstadtThe Dispatch Podcast on Putin’s nuclear threatsAnd now, the weird stuffBlack Hawk DownRoboCopQueen bee Equine therapyOut of cone-trolAuditory anguish

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Quinta Jurecic, Natalie K. Orpett, and Benjamin Wittes explained how the Wednesday evening ruling by a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit granting the Justice Department's motion for a partial stay puts the Mar-a-Lago investigation “back on track.”

Before the Eleventh Circuit issued its opinion on Sept. 21 granting the Justice Department’s motion for a partial stay, Kel McClanahan predicted it would do so. And he analyzed what other issues would remain to be resolved by the special master, Judge Raymond J. Dearie.

Orpett shared the Eleventh Circuit’s order granting the Justice Department’s motion for partial stay, allowing it to restart review and use of approximately 100 classified documents in its ongoing investigation of former President Donald Trump.

Hyemin Han shared Special Master Judge Raymond J. Dearie’s case management plan for the review of documents seized at Mar-a-Lago

Katherine Pompilio shared an order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon striking two provisions in her Sept. 5 order and modifying the original injunction to exclude the 100 documents labeled classified, pursuant to the order from the Eleventh Circuit that granted the Justice Department’s partial stay.

Han also shared former President Donald Trump’s response to the Justice Department’s motion in the Eleventh Circuit for partial stay of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s Sept. 5 order.

Jen Patja Howell shared an episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Quinta Jurecic sat down for a live conversation on Twitter Spaces with Wittes, Scott R. Anderson, and Alan Rozenshtein to talk through U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s latest ruling. They recorded before the Justice Department filed its appeal, but the conversation is a useful breakdown of Cannon’s somewhat off-the-wall orders. Namely: what, exactly, is this judge doing? And where is the case headed next?

Han also shared the settlement that was reached by Trump and the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Reform regarding the congressional subpoena served on Mazars, Trump’s longtime accounting firm.

Wittes sat down with Geoffrey Berman, former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York during the Trump administration. They spoke about political interference in the Southern District court’s work by Bill Barr, Donald Trump, and other government officials, contextualizing the Trump era against other famous instances of political interference.

Seth Tillman considered whether a plea bargain tied to Section 2071 could bar Trump from running for or holding the presidency again, concluding that the difficulties of crafting and enforcing such a plea bargain would render it unlikely to succeed.

Jonathan Shaub discusses how previously disclosed Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memoranda cover the scope and nature of executive privilege as well as the question of how constitutional disagreement between Congress and the executive branch about privilege can and should be resolved.

Rozenshtein argued that the Fifth Circuit opinion—released last Friday—in NetChoice v. Paxton overreaches in upholding Texas’s social media moderation law and makes a hash of the First Amendment in the process.

Jurecic sat down with Rozenshtein and Alex Abdo to discuss the recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in NetChoice v. Paxton, upholding a Texas law that binds large social media platforms to certain transparency requirements and significantly limits their ability to moderate content.

Han also shared the independent review of Meta's content moderation policies during the May 2021 escalation on the Gaza Strip, which found that Meta's content moderation policies had an "adverse human rights impact" on Palestinian users' rights—which include their freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and political participation.

In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Digital Social Contract paper series, Dan Byman presented content moderation options for technology companies, discussing how they work in practice, their advantages, and their limits and risks.

Howell shared an episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Rozenshtein sat down with Byman to discuss the ongoing debate about how much social media platforms should be doing to moderate extremist content, and how that debate often lacks nuance about the ways that platforms can moderate—especially in suggesting that moderation is an all-or-nothing proposition.

Andrew Fink and Marina Petrova discussed how search data provided by databases such as Yandex, Russia’s top search engine, can provide insights into Russian public opinion, something otherwise notoriously difficult to measure.

Han also shared the Biden administration’s executive order giving national security direction to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States

Tricia Bacon and Elizabeth Grimm wrote about the importance of the founders of terrorist organizations in establishing frameworks for the future leaders and explored the role of safe havens.

Amichai Cohen analyzed the Israeli Defense Forces’ final report on the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and its implications for rules of engagement in Israel-Palestine.

Esti Tambay and Sarah Yager argued that amid bipartisan support of the proposed Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act—which would give the United States the ability to prosecute suspected war criminals discovered within U.S. borders regardless of nationality—Congress must work to close other loopholes to promote justice for international crimes.

Howell shared an episode of Rational Security in which Anderson, Jurecic, and Rozenshtein sat down to discuss the week’s big national security news stories including: gang warfare and political instability in Haiti, a Fifth Circuit judge’s ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton, and more.

Aaron R. Cooper argued that cross-border data requests between states for abortion-related investigations may start to resemble cross-border requests between countries and trigger new conflicts of law following the Supreme Court's June ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

Justin Sherman discussed data brokers’ targeted ads for women seeking abortions, arguing that this collection and monetization of health information underscores how data privacy laws focused on these harms are sorely needed—and how state attorneys general may be able to punish or even preempt these abuses.

Howell shared the latest episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Jurecic spoke with Wittes and Paul Rosenzweig about Ken Starr’s legal legacy.

Howell also shared an episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Orpett sat down with Alex Iftimie, partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster, and a former Department of Justice attorney specializing in national security matters, including the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They discussed the criminal trial of Thomas Barrack, who served as an informal advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign and then as chair of Trump's inaugural committee, and allegedly acted as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates to influence U.S. policy.

David Priess shared an episode of Chatter in which Shane Harris sat down with Damien Lewis, author of “Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy,” to discuss Josephine Baker’s remarkable and little-known espionage career as an agent for French counterintelligence during WWII.

Jordan Schneider spoke to former Defense Department staffer Greg Allen about artificial intelligence technology in China and whether it gives China a military advantage.

And Nicol Turner Lee shared an episode of TechTank in which she was joined by Xochitl Torres Small, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Under Secretary for Rural Development, to discuss ongoing work to close the urban-rural digital divide, how the USDA has been working to meet different communities’ hyperlocal needs, and more.

And that was the week that was.

For people who suffer from prolonged symptoms associated with a Covid infection, so-called “long Covid,” the Biden administration knows that “it can feel like the world is moving on, while leaving them behind.” That was the verdict rendered in a statement provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. “We see you, we hear you, and we are taking action to help.” To hear the avatar of the nation’s public health apparatus tell it, moving on from “long Covid” is not an option. Indeed, “long Covid” may justify dragging everyone back.

“What is your metric for success?” Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith recently asked Dr. Anthony Fauci. “How do you analyze the numbers and say this is heading in the right direction?”

In responding, Fauci twice said that placing a “heavy emphasis” on “death and severe disease” is the most practical way to gauge the level of menace Covid represents. “However, there’s one wild card in there,” he added. “That is that infection—even mild to moderate infection—can lead to a syndrome called ‘long covid’ in a certain percentage of people. So, getting [an] infection for a certain proportion of people—we don’t know whether that’s 5 percent, 10 percent, some studies show as high as 20 percent—who have a residual of impairment of normal function that can last for months if not longer.” It, therefore, remains a public health imperative “to get such a control over this that even the infection rate is very low.”

While the doctor did not expressly advocate restoring or preserving Covid-related mitigation measures as a response to “long Covid,” it’s hard to avoid interpreting his comments in any other way. As a rationale for extraordinary public-sector interventions into American private life, the existence of “long Covid” is entirely unsatisfying. What little we know about this syndrome shouldn’t frighten the general public. Just the opposite, in fact.

Researchers have struggled to pin down this little-understood malady because its symptoms run the gamut of the human experience. According to a study published in the journal JAMA Psychology this month, they include, but are not limited to, “fatigue, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, persistent cough, muscle/joint/chest pain, smell/taste problems, confusion/disorientation/brain fog, memory issues, depression/anxiety/changes in mood, headache, intermittent fever, heart palpitations, rash/blisters/welts, mouth or tongue ulcers, or other symptoms.” The complexity and scope of the condition helps to explain why the National Institutes of Health has struggled to secure a fraction of the 40,000 subjects it needs to enroll in its lavishly funded ($1 billion) study on the subject.

The study in JAMA did, however, identify a feature that suggests an individual is at higher risk of suffering the residual effects of a Covid infection: “preexisting psychological distress.” People who struggled with a variety of psychiatric issues—anxiety, depression, loneliness, dysmorphia, and so on—were as much as 50 percent more likely to experience long-term Covid-related complications.

This study isn’t breaking new ground. An April study posted on medRxiv preliminarily found that “the odds of self-reported long COVID augmented by [an odd ratio of] 1.25 with every added worry about adversity experience, such as job loss,” and “worries about adversity experiences emerged as a persistent predictor of long COVID.” Even the analysis of who is more likely to be stricken with this malady suggests stress is a common thread. A Census Bureau survey found that trans and bi-sexual adults are far more likely to report experiencing “long Covid” symptoms compared with people who are either straight or gay and lesbian. Younger (and, therefore, healthier) people are more likely to identify as long haulers. There is no medical data to suggest that one’s gender identity or preference for both sexes increases one’s risk from Covid. By contrast, there’s plenty of psychological data to suggest that, like young adults, the process of formulating one’s identity is a stressful condition.

There’s also a chicken/egg debate over whether a negative psychological disposition begets “long Covid” or vice versa. A study published in the Lancet earlier this year observed that non-hospitalized patients were more likely to develop depression and experience prolonged symptoms associated with infection. A subsequent study in the May issue of Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine observes much the same. It noted, though, that the “neuropsychiatric manifestations of ‘long COVID’” may be exacerbated by the suboptimal environmental conditions that prevailed in the pandemic, “such as social isolation and uncertainty concerning social, financial and health recovery post-COVID.”

None of this is to say that this condition simply isn’t real. “There could be an underlying personality disorder or major depressive disorder that could be informing the cognitive symptoms from COVID or making them worse,” said University of Colorado psychiatry instructor Dr. Heather Murray. A bad outlook can contribute to bad outcomes, and the pandemic was accompanied by a lot of depressing circumstances that surely contributed to a more severe experience for many. All this concedes, however, that psychological disposition is a major contributing factor for those who suffer from this condition. There is little evidence to suggest “long Covid” is a wholly epidemiological phenomenon and quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

If the public health bureaucracy committed itself to advocating, if not outright enforcing, policies designed to mitigate what is at least in large measure a psychological condition, it would open the door to a lot of social engineering. For the activists who dominate the reporting on this subject, that seems to be the goal.

“We’re in the middle of the greatest mass-disabling event in human history,” said “long Covid” sufferer and advocate Charlie McCone in an interview with Time Magazine. He described America’s rushed return to the pre-pandemic status quo as a “crime against humanity,” and he’s hardly alone. According to the experts surveyed for this piece, the existence of this little-understood syndrome justifies the extension of mid-pandemic mitigation measures in perpetuity.

“A return to mask mandates would also be a good step,” argues one “long Covid” researcher, Hannah Davis, who also alleges (in Time) the claim that the British government’s statistics regarding “long Covid” sufferers is so low that the true figures are “being hidden intentionally.” Beyond that, she says the CDC should recommend longer self-isolation periods for those who contract Covid and “enforceable requirements” regarding air filtration and ventilation in private businesses.

So, what is the size of the population of “long Covid” sufferers for whom these and other extraordinary interventions into private American life are supposed to benefit? The Kaiser Family Foundation estimated last month that, based on survey data, anywhere from 10 to 35 million working-age Americans may have at one point struggled with the malady’s many symptoms. As of late August, according to the Brookings Institution, about 16 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 65 are similarly afflicted, and roughly 2 to 4 million of them cannot work as a result. It is not at all clear that these Americans would return to the labor market if the other 163 million in the workforce observed Covid mitigation protocols. Even if they did, such an indiscriminate remedy for such a discriminating condition isn’t justified by any rational assessment of the scale of this problem.

As anyone can attest, a Covid infection isn’t anything to take lightly. Even the vaccinated can experience a severe symptomatic response to the disease, and there’s evidence that symptoms can linger in some. But the totality of the evidence suggests there is a psychological component to this infirmity, which renders it difficult to nail down and even harder to mitigate via public policy. The global outbreak of a little-understood, airborne respiratory disease no one had yet encountered at least arguably justified extraordinary remedies, even if public health policy hands know they are a last resort. By contrast, using “long Covid” to justify the extension or readoption of those same remedies is a flimsy pretext.

My latest animated “bar chart race” visualization above (click the arrow to start) shows the format shares of recorded music sales annually from 1973 to 2022 based on new mid-year sales data that were released today by the Recording Industry Industry Association of America (RIAA) for the first half of 2022. The RIAA reports this summary for music sales during the first half of this year: 
U.S. recorded music revenues in the first half of 2022 rose 9% to $7.7 billion at estimated retail value, building on the strong growth experienced the prior year. The number of paid subscriptions grew to a record high of 90 million, with revenues up 10% to $5.0 billion and comprising almost two-thirds of the first half total. At wholesale value, revenues grew 8% to $4.9 billion.
In the visualization above you can see the following:
the dominance of vinyl records from 1973 through the early 1980s with more than a 50% market share in every year until 1984, and at least a two-thirds market share until 1980.the remarkable resurgence of vinyl record sales in the first half of 2022, which have exceeded the market share of CDs for the first time in 2020 (5.4% vs. 4%), 2021 (6.6% vs. 2.9%), and the first half of 2022 (7.4% vs. 2.6%). The 7.4% format share for vinyl records in the first half of this year was the highest share for LPs since 1988.the fall of 8-track tape sales from about a 25% market share between 1973-1976 to 0% by 1982 as cassette tapes entered the market. cassette tapes outsold 8-track tapes for the first time in 1980 and then outsold LPs in 1984 for the first time and maintained at least a 50% market share between 1984 and 1989.the gradual rise of CDs starting in 1983 when they were only 0.50% of recorded music sales, overtaking LP sales in 1987 and then cassette sales in 1991 before reaching a peak market share of 95.7% in 2002. This year CDs sales represented only 2.6% of recorded music sales, the lowest share since 2.4% in 1984, and CDs only accounted for 26% of physical sales revenues, while vinyl accounted for nearly 3/4 of physical format revenues. the rise in the market share of downloaded music (singles and albums) from 1.5% in 2004 to a peak market share of 41% in 2012 when it surpassed the CD market share for the first time. Through mid-year 2022, the market share for downloaded music fell to 3.3%, the lowest since a 1.5% share in 2004 when iTunes were first availablethe rise in the market share of paid digital subscription/streaming services starting from only a 1.2% market share in 2005 to surpassing the market share for CDs in 2014 (by 27.4% to 26.6%) and then surpassing the digital download music share (34.7% to 33.7%) the following year on the way to a majority market share in 2016 (52.4%) and then the new 84.2% record-high market share this year through June.
The rise and fall of music formats over the last half-century for vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, digital downloads, and now streaming music is a good example of the economic concept of “creative destruction” in the recorded music business. According to economist Joseph Schumpeter the “gales of creative destruction” describe the “processes of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionize the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old ones, incessantly creating new ones.” Physical music formats (LPs, tapes, CDs) have been “destroyed” and have now pretty much all been replaced with streaming music. And in each successive destruction and mutation, the music formats got better, cheaper, more widely available, and more convenient. 
Record music sales are on track to reach $15.4 billion by the end of the year, which is just a little more than half of the peak music sales of $26 billion (in constant 2022 dollars) in 1999. What that means is that consumers today spend much less out-of-pocket today for recorded music than consumers in decades like the 1970s (when vinyl records dominated) and the 1990s and 2000s (when CDs were more than 90% of recorded music sales) with one remarkable difference: Consumers today have convenient, low-cost streaming access to almost the entire collection of music that has ever been recorded with a Spotify subscription that costs only $4.99 per month for students, $9.99 for individuals and $15.99 for families, or even free with ads (with no price increases since last year). And music listeners today aren’t burdened with large collections of physical LPs or CDs that take up lots of physical space and are time-consuming to keep organized. Nor do they have to buy expensive stereo equipment (turntables, amplifiers, CD players, and speakers) like in the past. 
It’s another example of why it’s such an amazing time to be alive, especially if you’re a music lover. Recorded music today is cheaper, more abundant, and more convenient than ever before in human history. For $9.99 per month, you can conveniently access an unlimited amount of high-quality music. Think about it — for about 30 cents a day, the world’s entire music library is at your fingertips — what a tremendous bargain! (The great what?) 
Related: The abundance of low-cost (almost free) music also illustrates one of the shortcomings of traditional GDP accounting when it comes to measuring our economic well-being or standard of living. Americans’ “music well-being” is clearly at an all-time high for the reasons discussed above. But according to official GDP statistics that include retail music sales, the nation’s “music well-being” today (measured by $15.4 billion in projected sales this year) is about half of what it was in 1999 when music sales were $26 billion (in 2022 dollars)! According to official GDP accounting, the “Golden Age of Music” was back in 1999 during the era of CDs, when it’s obvious that we’re experiencing the most miraculous music renaissance in history with streaming music that isn’t remotely being captured by national income accounting. 
 
The post Animated Chart of the Day: Recorded Music Sales by Format Share, 1973 to 2022 appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Larry Krasner has been at the forefront of the progressive-prosecutor movement since becoming Philadelphia’s district attorney in 2017. Which means that he has also been at the center of an unending storm.Krasner has faced relentless battles with the police union, other local elected officials, and Republicans who control the Pennsylvania state legislature and are now making an unprecedented effort to impeach him. He’s also won support from many community leaders and criminal-justice-reform advocates. On Wednesday he reached a milestone: His office won a manslaughter conviction against a Philadelphia police officer for shooting a Black man in 2017—the first such conviction for on-duty action in Philadelphia in at least half a century.[Darcy Covert: The false hope of the progressive-prosecutor movement]Yet, like other progressive prosecutors in major cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to San Francisco, his political position remains precarious. These prosecutors received a huge burst of momentum from the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And they have an aggressive agenda aimed at reducing jail and prison populations, elevating alternatives to incarceration (particularly for juvenile offenders), emphasizing community services over tough enforcement to reduce gun violence, and imposing greater accountability for police-officer misconduct. (Beyond Wednesday’s conviction, Krasner is pursuing murder cases against two other police officers; previously no murder case involving a Philadelphia police officer had gone to trial in almost 40 years, The Philadelphia Inquirer found.)But rising crime rates have weakened these prosecutors’ standing. Though violent crime, particularly homicides, remains far below its peak, in the 1990s, the rates in many major cities spiked at the height of the pandemic to levels far above the totals earlier in this century—and have remained stubbornly high since. As of Monday, Philadelphia, for instance, has experienced 388 homicides this year, slightly more than in 2021 and double the number through that date as recently as 2015.Criminologists say the causes of these increases are complex. And crime rates often rise faster in places committed to traditional hard-line policing and prosecutorial policies, as the centrist Democratic group Third Way showed in an eye-opening report earlier this year. (The murder rate in red counties outside Pittsburgh grew much faster than Philadelphia’s did from 2019 through 2021, Krasner’s office pointed out to me.) Krasner and his allies in Philadelphia cite the Republican-controlled legislature’s repeated rejection of stronger gun laws, such as red-flag statutes and universal background checks, as a key cause of the city’s endemic gun violence.Yet none of this has insulated progressive prosecutors from an intensifying backlash. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled earlier this year; like-minded Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón narrowly avoided a recall election because opponents bungled their petition-gathering effort.[Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin]The decision by the Pennsylvania General Assembly to explore impeaching Krasner marks the latest challenge to the movement. Last week the chamber voted to hold Krasner in contempt when he refused to provide documents it demanded as part of the probe. Krasner, for his part, has filed suit in state court arguing that the legislature lacks the authority to remove him, primarily because its impeachment power, under the state constitution, is limited to state officials, not local ones.Craig Green, a law professor at Temple University, told me he thinks Krasner is likely to win that argument. The General Assembly, Green says, has “never tried anything” like this possible impeachment before, even in cases where local officials were guilty of gross misconduct and corruption, which no one has alleged against Krasner. Craig is dubious that the state supreme court will conclude that the legislature’s disapproval of Krasner’s policy choices meets the standard of “improper or corrupt motive” the court has set as justifiable grounds for a potential impeachment.Even if Krasner doesn’t win in court, Republicans don’t have enough votes in the State Senate to reach the two-thirds majority they would need to remove him should the House impeach him. But the controversy over his approach isn’t going anywhere, either, particularly as Philadelphia struggles with the wave of gun violence that has spilled out from long impoverished neighborhoods on the north and west sides into its rejuvenated Center City. More than 1,700 people have been shot in the city this year, police statistics show.Yesterday at The Atlantic Festival, I sat down with Krasner to discuss his battles with the state legislature, his diagnosis for the rising crime rate, and his continued commitment to rethinking how the criminal-justice system operates. Below are highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity.Ronald Brownstein: Mr. District Attorney, you have been in the center of the storm since your election in 2017. And you’ve certainly got one brewing now with the Republican-controlled General Assembly in Pennsylvania trying to impeach you. Why is this happening, and where is it going?Larry Krasner: It’s happening because progressive prosecutors keep winning elections. There is a misperception that we’re losing; that’s actually incorrect. They can’t beat us in elections, so they try to remove us from office in other ways: by recalls, by impeachment. In my situation, what occurred is, for the first time in the history of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the legislature is trying to remove an elected official for their policies. I repeat: policies. You can get removed for crimes or deeply corrupt activity. That’s what impeachment is for. But you’re not supposed to be removed because your policy won by a landslide.Brownstein: Can they remove, in your view, a local official as opposed to a statewide official?Krasner: No, in my view, they can only remove statewide officials, because there is a separate impeachment procedure for cities. And I happen to be in a city.[David A. Graham: How criminal-justice reform fell apart]Brownstein: Well, the policy dispute is obviously about your approach and what is happening with crime in Philadelphia. And [according to] the police department, there have been 388 homicides in Philadelphia. That was the figure through Monday. We are still not back up to the levels of crime that we saw in the 1990s, but we are at an elevated rate from earlier in the century, not only in Philadelphia but in many other cities. What’s driving this?Krasner: Well, there’s been an uptick really since 2014 in Philadelphia. That’s more or less the low point nationally. I think a lot of things are driving this. But the main thing I bring up is guns. There are more and more and more guns every year. And if you look at the number of guns that are actually removed from the street by law enforcement, they are at least doubled or tripled by the new legal gun sales that are occurring. We have seen an accumulation of guns in this country at this point where we have one and a half guns per human being, more or less. And we have an NRA that would like to see a loaded gun tucked into a diaper. This is an NRA that would like silencers, which hasn’t happened since the 1930s. They would like us to be able to print our guns at home on 3-D printers. [It’s] the most damaging organization to public safety in the history of the United States.Brownstein: Let me ask you about guns, because that is certainly one of the flash points in the debate about your approach in Philadelphia. It’s also been a flash point in L.A., where I live: what to do with people who are caught with guns but haven’t used them yet in a crime. Your view, as quoted recently in The New York Times, is that it’s counterproductive to focus on arresting and incarcerating people caught carrying firearms without legal permit. Why do you think that?Krasner: So that view is not correct. It’s counterproductive to prioritize that more than solving gun violence. The reality is that if you want to stop gun violence, you should pursue gun violence. That means you should solve homicides. You should solve shootings. The current solve rate, or at least the most recent measured solve rate for gun homicides in Philly, is 28 percent. The most recent solve rate for shootings in Philly is 17 percent. Our conviction rate for homicides is approaching 90 percent; better than our predecessors, but we only get the cases [police officers] solve.So a lot of what has happened all across the country is coming from [fraternal-order-of-police] sources, right-wing sources: that the real problem is guns; it’s not the homicides. And the reason they’re saying that is they’re having terrible difficulty solving the homicides. I do not say that, by the way, to besmirch the police. There are certain tools that they need. There are modern ways to actually solve these cases, including some absolutely unbelievable forensics that would blow your mind. But you’ve got to invest in them.Brownstein: You had a landmark conviction of a police officer this week, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But I want to just be clear: What is your view about what should happen to people who are found with guns who have not yet committed a crime? Are you saying that they should in fact be prosecuted on a routine basis?Krasner: Yes, they should. And the fact is that the House itself, before they decided to impeach me, did a study and found that the sentences for gun possession were longest in Philadelphia. Just so we understand what’s really happening here. This is not coming from some real concern about crime. Our city is giving out longer sentences, including under my administration. So that’s a total red herring.Brownstein: Many of the other progressive prosecutors have talked about treating gun violence as a public-health problem. Again, the statistics as of Monday: 1,700 shooting victims. In Philadelphia, what have you learned about the opportunities and limits of a public-health strategy to combat gun violence? Do you feel like it’s stemming the tide with those kinds of numbers?Krasner: I’ve learned we haven’t tried it. This is a country that has not used public health to try to deal with addiction. We have not used public health to deal with mental illness and homelessness. We haven’t used public health to deal with criminal justice. Even though we do have reform going on in ways that are constructive, all of the money that’s being saved, which is an enormous amount of money, is not going back into rebuilding the mental-health system that was torn down about 85 percent during the period of mass incarceration. All that money is not going into public schools. And in Philadelphia, public-school kids are funded at half the level of the surrounding counties. But that’s another enormous problem. If we don’t take the money that we’re saving from doing stupid and put it into smart, then all we’re doing is building another tax break for wealthy people, and there is going to be some level of failing to succeed as much as we could.Brownstein: So give me your wish list to reduce those 1,700 shootings.Krasner: On the enforcement side, the biggest thing that we should be doing is investing very, very heavily in modern forensics. You can do absolutely amazing things with cellphones that we could not do before. You can do amazing things right now with tiny bits of DNA. You can do amazing things that would solve an enormous number of cases. And until we do that, the notion of deterrence is really not there.I don’t know why we are allowing anybody to have an AR-15. I don’t know why we’re allowing [young] people … to get them. I don’t know why we have gun shows at all. I don’t know why we have unregistered gun parts. I mean, the whole notion of a polymer gun or a ghost gun is that it’s a loophole. You can get an unmarked piece of plastic and a bunch of unmarked pieces of metal that you can buy on the internet. You can put them together in your basement and you can sell an arsenal round out the back door. And we see more and more ghost guns that are showing up at crime scenes, and it’s doubling and tripling and quadrupling every year.[Read: The real reason America doesn’t have gun control]Brownstein: Some of the prosecutors elected as part of this movement have opposed cash bail, sometimes in all cases. But you have taken a different approach, a more nuanced approach. You support high cash bail in cases of gun violence.Krasner: There’s a general misunderstanding of what “no cash bail” is. No cash bail has happened in D.C. for over 30 years. There’s only two stops on this train. One stop is you get out without having to pay money. You may have to go to a place that provides homeless services or mental-health services or addiction services, because whatever they’re sending you to is associated with your interaction with police. And those are nonviolent offenses, for the most part. But then there’s the other group who sit in jail, no matter how rich they are.But the problem in Pennsylvania is you’ve got a legislature that likes its bail-bonds people, makes a lot of money in donations off of their lobbyists, and they are in love with cash bail. What we did in Philly is we tried to simulate a no-cash-bail system by asking for very high bail, which is a million or more in some cases. And then no bail; we don’t ask for these $10,000 bail, $50,000 bail amounts, because they just make things worse.Brownstein: You won a landmark conviction of a police officer for an on-duty shooting, a manslaughter conviction—the first one, I believe, in at least 50 years. You have several more in the pipeline. What is the message you are sending with these cases?Krasner: The message is what it always should have been, which is that justice applies to everybody. We probably cleared 150 or 200 shootings toward or of civilians by police in uniform. But we have charged three officers with homicide so far. And I mean, to me, this is not complicated. If you commit a murder, if you shoot an unarmed person in the back and you don’t have a lawful justification, the fact that you’re in uniform doesn’t excuse that.[There are] a lot of really great cops in Philly. They just have a rotten leadership of their union. But there are a lot of really good cops in Philadelphia who are trying to do it the right way. And every time we knock down a corrupt police officer or a vicious, brutal police officer, we’re just lifting up the good ones, which also hasn’t been done in forever.Brownstein: There’s a sense that this [progressive-prosecutor] movement is on the defensive now, as you noted, with the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, the attempted recall of Gascón, the fight that you are facing in Pennsylvania. Is it possible to maintain support for alternative approaches that focus less on incarceration while crime is going up?Krasner: The way to get it under control is criminal-justice reform, because doing things in a just way actually does make us safer. And I know that sounds like a platitude. But let me just give you an example of why I think they’re really at our throats.So, 10 years ago, there were essentially zero progressive prosecutors and no portion of the U.S. population lived in a jurisdiction with a progressive prosecutor. Two and a half years ago, 10 percent of the U.S. population [did]. Right now it’s about 20 percent; 70, 75 million Americans have elected or reelected a progressive prosecutor. They all want to talk all day about Chesa Boudin and his recall, all that. They want to talk about that. Who here knows that we have a new district attorney in Memphis who is a progressive and replaced a very conservative incumbent? Who here knows that in Alameda County, right across from San Francisco, Pamela Price is about to win and win big? And she lost four years ago. It is not the case that progressive prosecution is dead in action. The real case here is that even in this incredibly difficult time, it’s maintaining. I wouldn't say it’s growing, you know, doubling in leaps and bounds like it did around the events surrounding George Floyd. But it is maintaining. So the reality is we’re doing really well, and they can’t beat us in elections, and they’re worried about that.The truth is, conservatives don’t actually care very much about crime. They really don’t. What they’re really worried about is that criminal-justice reform is something that connects to voters who are unlikely voters who are alienated from the system, who finally are seeing some reason to go to the polls, which is why we had insane turnouts in our off-year, low-turnout elections both times I ran. And we’ve seen this in many other jurisdictions. If I am a MAGA Republican, the last thing I want to see is any progressive prosecutor still standing. Because what it could be is the salvation of democracy. And they are out to destroy democracy.

Deep down, I suspect we all know that it would be quite possible for students to get a sterling education at a university where every student was a white person from Colorado. Few graduates would muse that their education was incomplete because there were no kids from the Northeast or the South around. Any benefit would be auxiliary at best, not worth founding an admissions policy upon.

Yet many will say that if we stop evaluating students in part on race, we abandon social justice. Do we, though? I think that in the 2020s we should maintain a social justice mission in admissions, but base it on socioeconomics. Yes, that would mean middle- and upper-class Black and Latino students would no longer get special consideration. But on that, we must question the tacit, Jesse Jackson-esque “Yale or jail” assumption in much of the discussion of racial preferences, which sometimes implies that students not admitted to one of a few tippy-top schools are somehow seriously hobbled from achieving career success.

A 2012 study co-authored by the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono (who is participating in the suit against Harvard as an expert witness for the plaintiffs) suggests that Black students placed in schools to which their grades and test scores might not ordinarily gain them admission who initially choose to pursue majors in engineering, natural sciences, or economics are less likely to graduate in those majors. The implication, then, is that they would have successfully completed those subjects at a still respected but less competitive school. Other studies have suggested similar phenomena in law school and medical school.

To be sure, without racial preferences, the number of Black and Latino students at selective universities does go down. However, it does not eclipse. And there’s no tragedy in Black and Latino students attending other excellent if somewhat less selective schools. Theodore Shaw, a U.N.C. School of Law professor and the director of U.N.C.’s Center for Civil Rights, warns that eliminating racial preferences would have “severe” effects on Black and Latino students’ opportunities. But this seems to imply that students at schools other than the most selective ones are significantly hindered from attaining meaningful education, training, career opportunities and connections. The dedicated and talented people who teach at and staff such universities would be surprised to hear this.

Racial preference in university admissions was an admirable experiment in the era that immediately followed the civil rights advances of the 1960s and ’70s, when a much larger proportion of Black America lived in poverty and legal segregation was a recent memory. But there will always be those who question, with good reason, whether their effort should count for less than the same effort from someone else in deference to matters of history they did not experience. One need not be a bigot to feel that way.

Racial preferences should now be thought of like chemotherapy, a cure that can cause side effects that should be applied judiciously. We’ve applied the cure long past that point, and have drifted toward an almost liturgical conception of diversity that makes less sense by the year.

The public comment period for Education Secretary Miguel Cardona's proposed changes to official Title IX regulations ended in August. The Education Department received over 210,000 comments, with around 40 percent of those comments available on a public database.
In June, the department released over 700 pages of proposed regulations. The two most controversial provisions—a reversal of many of the due process protections for accused students during Title IX investigations and a redefinition of "sex discrimination" to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity—ignited a flurry of both criticism and praise from media commentators. It is unclear when official rules will be released or by how much, if at all, the proposed regulations will differ from the final rules.
While the comment period is theoretically meant to guide regulators' decisions and provide feedback on their rules, a large portion of the public comments appears to be expressing consternation over a subject irrelevant to this most recent spate of Title IX rules: transgender athletes in women's sports.
Cardona's proposed regulations purposefully left out specific rules surrounding transgender athletes, instead electing to "engage in a separate rulemaking to address Title IX's application to athletics."
Under the new rules, the Department of Education would understand "sex discrimination [as including] discrimination on the basis of . . . sexual orientation, and gender identity," The proposed regulations would also bar schools from "adopting a policy or engaging in a practice that prevents a person from participating in an education program or activity consistent with their gender identity." While these proposed regulations would likely apply to other sex-segregated facilities in schools, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, the department has explicitly waited to announce how they would apply to sports. 
(There is also reason to believe there will be a legal fight before the proposed regulations could even be enforced in some states. In July, a federal judge placed a preliminary injunction against the new definition of sex discrimination, arguing that it directly conflicts with existing laws in 20 states.)
Despite this, of the 88,000 comments available on the regulations.gov website on September 23, a significant portion appeared to be, at least in part, expressing concern about transgender athletes. For example, the terms "gender" and "sports" appeared in 28,301 comments. "Sex" and "sports" appeared in a similar 28,646 comments. The term "sports" alone appeared in 37,777 comments.
One common comment—presumably a sample letter provided by an organization, though I wasn't able to determine which one—read, "This proposed rule forces girls to give up their educational opportunities to males who perform better than they do." While it doesn't explicitly mention sports, this comment clearly seems to refer to the concern that trans women athletes will take sports scholarships or places on teams from female athletes.
In contrast, search terms relevant to due process concerns for students accused of sexual assault and other violations were far less common. The term "due process" gained 3,032 hits, and forms of "accuse" (other forms of the word, like "accuser" and "accusation," were included in the search) appeared in only 2,796 comments. The term "victim" appeared in 2,422 comments.
The intensity of the attention focused on transgender athletes, even as the subject has only tangential relation to the current regulations up for debate, indicates that public concern over the issue isn't going away anytime soon. The public comments submitted on Cardona's proposed Title IX regulations show how desperately comprehensive rules for transgender athletes are needed. In particular, we need a rule that recognizes that both women and transgender women are protected classes—both have liberties that need to be preserved.
However, the degree to which the subject has captured public attention will make it difficult to develop sensible policy. Good, minimally invasive policy is rarely compatible with a culture war. 
The post The Education Department Asked for Public Comments on Sex Discrimination. It Got an Earful About Trans Athletes Instead. appeared first on Reason.com.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] Russia invaded Ukraine on Thursday, Feb. 24. And everything we know about that invasion at its launch implies that Vladimir Putin expected a lightning victory. That’s what the battle plans seemed to be built for. And to be fair, that’s what many of the world’s intelligence agencies and military analysts thought that he would get — he did not get it. And then the conventional wisdom changed. Russia had misjudged, its military was weaker than we thought, but still, its size and power and money and might would overwhelm Ukraine, probably within a couple of months. And then that didn’t happen either. And at the beginning, Russia did conquer territory — quite a bit of it, particularly in the East. But then their advance slowed by a lot. And then in early September, Ukraine showed it could take territory back. It launched a counteroffensive in the Northeast that regained 3,400 square miles. And to put that in perspective, that is more land than Russia had gained in the past five months. The war today is not the war of February. The armies are different, both because of how many soldiers have been lost and also how much has been learned. The psychology of the two sides is different. The economies of the two sides are different. The weapons that Ukraine is receiving from the West are different. President Zelensky and President Putin’s positions, both internally with their people, and then externally, in terms of what they want, are different. And so I wanted to have a conversation about both where the conflict stands now, but also about how the balance of power, how manpower and money and equipment and geopolitics have changed, how the structure of the conflict is now different. Andrea Kendall-Taylor is director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She is a former intelligence officer, who from 2015 to 2018 led strategic analysis on Russia at the National Intelligence Council. When we spoke, she was very recently, as you’ll hear, back from Ukraine. And I should put one note here. We recorded this podcast on Monday, Sept. 19. We talked, as you’ll hear, about Putin’s clear reluctance to expand his army through conscription, but the fact that he might need to do it anyway. On Wednesday, Putin announced that he would call up roughly 300,000 reservists. It’s not full conscription, but it does underscore Kendall-Taylor’s analysis here. Russia is struggling in this war, and that’s forcing Putin to make more and more desperate and politically dangerous — for him — decisions. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Andrea Kendall-Taylor, welcome to the show.

andrea kendall-taylor

It’s good to be here, Ezra.

ezra klein

How would you describe the state of the Russia-Ukraine war in early August? And how would you describe it now?

I think looking at this war in early August, we were all prepared for a very long, grinding war, one that would continue for months and months, if it had any kind of resolution at all. And I think although we’re still expecting that the war will be long, we’ve had some developments in the last several weeks, notably, the counteroffensive that the Ukrainians have waged in the north of Ukraine, that have really shifted the momentum in Ukraine’s favor. They’ve really been able to seize the initiative in this war. And so I would say even though there’s a lot of challenges that the Ukrainians have ahead of them, I think that their ability to successfully recapture territory has shifted the tone of the war. And I would say it seems ever more clear to me that the trajectory of the war is now working in Ukraine’s favor, that they will eventually win this war. I was just lucky enough to travel to Ukraine, and to be there, and to be on the ground. And really for me, that trip, in combination with the victories that we’ve seen by the Ukrainian military on the battlefield, has strengthened my assessment that Ukraine will win this war in the end. And of course, there’s still questions about how long it will take to get there, and what will happen in the intervening period. But I did walk away more convinced that the trajectory of this war now favors Ukraine. And I think that’s really different from what we would have said in August.

ezra klein

Tell me a bit about why, because something I always want to be alert to is — it’s always hard for me sitting here to know when what I’m looking at is a temporary change in narrative and story line, or a genuine change in the direction of a war. You use terms here like the tone of the war and the momentum. Those feel very shifty to me. What changed here, substantively, that you are actually predicting a shorter timetable now for the conflict?

Well, I think there’s multiple things. I want to get at the shiftiness, though, because I do think even though that can be elusive — when I left Kyiv, I think one of the biggest takeaways that I had was this confidence in Ukraine’s ability to win the war. And of course, that is being played out also on the battlefield. And we can get back to the counteroffensive. But what I took away was much more on a societal level. And to me, that feels permanent and lasting. And I’ll give you a couple of anecdotes. The first for me was this awe of the resilience of Ukrainian society. So as part of this trip, we were able to travel out to Bucha and Irpin, which were two of the towns that were really torn apart by horrific Russian atrocities earlier in the war against Ukrainian civilians. But you’re there, and you can see that they’re putting the pieces back in place. People are returning. The life continues there. And of course, there’s bombed out buildings and rusting Russian tanks on the side of the road, but people are returning. And the same was true in Kyiv. There’s traffic, shops are open, and people are out at restaurants. And I think I understood that at an intellectual level — I know if you look at the polling, it’s something like 97 percent of Ukrainians believe they will win the war. And a very large proportion favor no concessions to the Russians at all. But being there, you can see that Ukraine as a society is prepared to weather this. And there was a cognitive dissonance about that, but it was this normalcy, I think, that gave me a sense that eventually Ukraine will be able to come out on top. And I think the second anecdote, which was really telling for me, that stuck with me, because it speaks to Ukraine’s resolve — and that is that many in the West here in the United States and Europe are really worried about Putin’s willingness to use a nuclear weapon, and I think rightfully so. But multiple people that I spoke with there in Ukraine were totally undeterred. To the person, they said that Putin’s use of a nuclear weapon will not change the outcome of the war, nor how Ukraine fights the war, that it will only increase the cost that they’re going to have to incur to get there. And so for all of these reasons, I left feeling like over time the Ukrainians will come out on top. There’s lots of other military reasons that we can delve into, too, when you talk about morale of the services, when you talk about the sustained support. Ukraine has the backing of the international community. Weapons continue to flow in. I think there’s lots of different reasons that to me point to a Ukrainian victory, although I am fully cognizant that it still may take a very long time until we get there.

ezra klein

What does Ukrainian victory mean? Does that mean Russia is fully ejected from Ukraine? Does it mean they only hold a very small rump of land in the East? What would count as a victory as opposed to an unhappy settlement?

I think there’s still a lot of open questions about that. As of right now — and you can see both side’s war aims have shifted as this war is continued. So Russia came in saying that they were going to basically de-Nazify Ukraine, that they were going to take over the entire country, to erase Ukraine as an idea. They were looking for the full thing. And given the blow that they were dealt in Kyiv, they had to kind of redeploy forces to the East. And you watched Putin, at least for the time being, downsize his war aims. I think that the momentum has shifted to Ukraine’s side. I think that their aims and their objectives are also shifting. So initially, we in the West, I think along with the Ukrainians, were thinking that a victory would be that Russia doesn’t occupy any Ukrainian territory that they didn’t hold prior to the invasion. Zelensky now talks in much bolder, grander terms. He is talking about very seriously restoring all of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea, and including taking back the territory that Russia has illegally held in the east of the country. So those war aims are shifting. And based on where we are now, I think President Zelensky’s definition of victory is that he will restore Ukraine’s borders to where they were prior to 2014. I think that is the vision of victory that he has in mind. But as we were talking about, things do change on the battlefield. And I do think that shifts, then, the goals that each side holds, as we’ve just discussed. And so it is possible that that could be walked back over time, and it could be that Zelensky and that the Ukrainian people are willing to settle for a victory that entails Russia not holding any additional territory prior to February 24. So I think it’s mercurial. It’s very closely tied to how they’re doing on the battlefield. But given where we are at this moment, those are the terms that President Zelensky is speaking in.

ezra klein

I’m going to come back to the way that the definitions of victory are changing, but I do want to talk a bit about the counteroffensive. What was it, and why did it matter so much?

I think it’s major. The Kharkiv offensive is the most consequential military action of the war since Russia lost Kyiv. As Zelensky has said, they liberated over 2,000 square miles of territory, and that includes some gains that they’ve had in the south near Kherson where they’re waging a concurrent counteroffensive. But I think this is important, because it’s the first time that we’ve had such clear evidence of Ukraine’s ability to go on the offensive and to retake territory. So what happened? There has been talk for weeks and maybe even months that Ukraine would wage a counteroffensive in the late summer or heading into fall. And President Zelensky himself has really been pushing for this, because he’s been very worried about his ability to sustain Western support for the war, given that we’re going into a very long, cold winter. So Zelensky was foreshadowing this because he wanted this counteroffensive to boost morale, both in Ukraine, but also among his Western backers, and to show people that Ukraine can retake this territory. And I think his theory of the case was that if he could show that, then he assumed that Western support would be more robust. And I think so far, he’s right. But back to the battlefield — so basically, Ukraine is broadcasting that they’re going to do this counteroffensive in the south. And so Russia in turn begins to redeploy their forces, moving them from the north and the eastern Donbas region down into the south to reinforce Russia’s positions there. And as they did this, as they moved their forces south, it creates these new vulnerabilities that then the Ukrainians were able to exploit. So this was extremely opportunistic. And it was a real surprise to the Russians. They achieved surprise, which is key. They broke through, and they routed these Russian forces. A lot of them fled. And Ukraine took back its land. I think that the reason why this counteroffensive was also important, other than demonstrating that Ukraine can do it, is it does have some strategic value. The territory that they took breaks up Russian supply lines that will make it harder for Russia to resupply other parts of the battlefield. And in particular, there is the town of Izium, where Zelensky just was last week. And by taking that town, I think it now makes it impossible for Putin to be able to achieve his stated goal of capturing the entire Donbas region. So that’s big. And as we’ve said earlier, this counteroffensive now has shifted the initiative to Ukraine. And so I think it says a lot about the future and where we’re headed. And the shift in perspective really is energizing military and economic support for Ukraine. And that’s key.

ezra klein

Part of the counteroffensive, as I understand it, is that you don’t just have to feint that you’re going south. You also have to effectively move reinforcements up north so that you have the strength to run that play. Now, you’d think that Russia has satellites. They have at least some wartime intelligence, but it doesn’t seem that they had enough good battlefield intelligence to see what Ukraine was doing. So on the one hand, that might be a very sophisticated operation by Ukraine. But on the other, it seems — and it has seemed, actually, throughout the war, that Russia’s information isn’t very good. Why not?

Well, that’s one of the things that we heard over and over on our trip to Ukraine. And we had the ability to talk with several senior officials in Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. And one of the things that they did talk about is, just as you said, Ezra, that the intelligence, the reconnaissance on the Russian side has been extremely poor. I don’t know why that is. I mean, there are so many things that have been surprising about this war. I think we have overestimated Russia’s capacity to do certain things that seem like basic tasks, so I don’t know why it is. The other thing that we’ve heard on our trip is not only have they done a poor job with the intelligence and reconnaissance, but there has been an inability on the Russian side to exploit opportunities as they’ve arisen. And so I think a lot of this has to do with the command and control, and the culture of the two militaries. In Ukraine, on the one hand, they have passed a lot of responsibility down. They have trust in different levels of their military. And they empower people who are lower on the chain — they empower them to make decisions on the spot, which allows the Ukrainian side to be much more nimble and agile, and take advantage of opportunities as they arise. The opposite is true for the Russians. It’s extremely rigid. They don’t have good command and control. They don’t delegate responsibility down. They don’t trust their subordinates. And so the Ukrainians talk about how there has been so many opportunities that they as a military have identified, where Russia could have leaned in and exploited opportunities that they just didn’t have the ability or the agility to do. And again, we’re talking about — why do I believe that over time Ukraine will have the ability to win this war? It’s stories like that, these anecdotes about the differences in the military culture and the morale of its soldiers, and their ability to do these different things where, again, it all points in Ukraine’s direction, and their ability to see this through.

ezra klein

I know that you worked for many years in the U.S. intelligence service, so I say this with caution — but before this, my estimation of our intelligence capabilities had gotten quite low. We had a lot of failures in Iraq. We had a lot of failures in Afghanistan. We seemed to consistently get very big things about the world wrong, and wrong in consequential ways. But my sense is that with Russia, we’ve actually been pretty right — that it’s clear now that the U.S. understood that Russia was going to do this invasion before really anybody else. The Europeans were skeptical. Ukraine was very skeptical, and that’s been well reported and talked through. And from my understanding, a lot of what has given Ukraine a reconnaissance and battlefield intelligence superiority is that we’ve been able to share quite effective intelligence with them. Why do we have such a strong bead on this one when we’ve had so much more trouble in other theaters?

That’s a good question. I do just want to underscore that the U.S. intelligence community was way out in front of Putin’s invasion. That is a major success of the U.S. intelligence community. They understood that Putin was going to in fact go through with this war, and they were very proactive and forward leaning with declassifying and releasing intelligence to support their case, and share it with the world, but also very importantly, European governments. And it’s just a huge success. It’s one of the reasons — I think it kept Russia, in the early days, when we were all wondering if they were going to do it — I think it got the Russians, put them on the back foot. But really, the key success was that it enabled the United States and Europe to be prepared. So before Putin went in, a lot of the sanctions work, the sanctions packages had already been drawn up. And it’s one of the factors why we’ve seen such a cohesive Western response to what Russia did, is because we were prepared. We weren’t surprised. And so it is a huge success of the U.S. intelligence community. So it’s not just all of the weapons that we see flowing into Ukraine — and that’s really, critically important. But the intelligence support has also been critical, I think, in allowing the Ukrainians, again, to seize opportunities as they arise, to be agile. And that’s not to take anything away from the Ukrainians, because it’s them who are on the front lines, and their bravery is admirable. But the United States has played a really important role not just with the provision of weapons, but also with the provision of intelligence. The one thing I want to note, Ezra, though, is where we did get it wrong. And I think what we got wrong was Ukrainians’ resilience to the Russian invasion. If you remember, in the early days of the war, the U.S. intelligence community, I think, assessed that Kyiv would fall just in a matter of days. The United States was out there offering President Zelensky help in getting out of the country, so we could keep him safe and he could lead from abroad. And that had consequences. And I think it continues to have consequences, because if we didn’t believe that the Ukrainians could defeat the Russians, and if you don’t believe that the Ukrainians can win, I think it really shapes your willingness of what you’re willing to do to support them. You’re not going to provide sophisticated weapons systems to a side that you believe is going to be the loser in a war because it wouldn’t be an efficient allocation of resources, and also because those weapons could end up in enemy hands.

ezra klein

I’m glad you went there, because that was exactly where I was about to take us. I want to talk more about what we got wrong with Russia, because it wasn’t just the intelligence community. Almost everybody I reported with in the early months of the war believed it was a matter of time until Russia won. Maybe it was going to go a little bit slower than they initially thought, but Russia had such an overwhelming superiority in force numbers, in economic might. The sanctions, at that point, were understood to be punishment for Russia. They were going to endure pain for what they were going to take in Ukraine. There was a sense that if Putin needed to — and to some degree, this is still true, but he keeps not doing it — he can move to conscription and expand the size of the Russian force dramatically. We got something wrong not just about the resilience of the Ukrainian people, but about the strength Russia could bring to bear on an invasion that was directly on their border. What did we get wrong about Russian might?

I think we first and foremost got this wrong because we didn’t know that Putin would concoct such a terrible plan. And for me, that’s largely a product of the type of political system that Putin built. This is a highly personalized, authoritarian regime. And I’ve studied a lot of autocracies. My lens on Russia is very much through an authoritarian, kind of comparative politics lens. And the Putin regime ahead of this invasion was by far one of the most centralized autocracies that I have seen. And in that kind of system, good information does not float to the top, right? They’re based on loyalty, and it’s not in anyone’s career interest to tell the boss bad news. So Putin, for one, was operating with terribly flawed assumptions. And so I think that’s number one for me of why we got it wrong. These personalist dictators make mistakes. So first of all, Putin and Russia misunderstood Ukraine entirely. They hold these very derogatory views of Ukrainians. And I think the Russians have entirely missed what’s been happening in Ukraine since 2014 — that Ukraine has built up a stronger national identity, that they have had this commitment to moving to the West. You know, Putin believed that they could get to Kyiv, decapitate the regime, and that the whole country would fall like a house of cards. So they fundamentally misunderstood Ukraine. We talked about them — along with the United States, the Russians also obviously underestimated and misunderstood Ukraine’s willingness to fight. So again, for me, I think we got it wrong because we failed to consider the weaknesses that begin to accumulate in these longtime, personalist autocracies. These countries, they’re inclined to make mistakes, these personalist dictators. And over time, these guys, they run their countries into the ground. And so the plan was bad, and the plan was bad because it was the product of Putin’s personal system. And I think we just didn’t factor that in. We were wrong about all sorts of things on the Russian military front too. And just quickly, I’ll say corruption was a really big issue. I think we failed to see the rot in the Russian military. We didn’t see just how pervasive it was. So yeah, we overestimated Russian capabilities, but I also think a lot of it was just misunderstanding how terribly wrong and disastrous the decisions that these personalist, authoritarian regimes can make. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

Back in June, you wrote that over the previous three months, Russia’s equipment had just been mauled. It had lost 25 percent of its active tank force. It had lost more than 30 aircraft, more than 10,000 troops. It has only gotten worse for Russia since then. So how has the balance of equipment, matériel, personnel changed since Russia invaded in late February?

So I don’t know exactly where we are in terms of how much equipment Russia has lost, but it’s been a lot, as you just said. And there is actually a joke in Ukraine that the Russians have been the single largest donor of tanks and armored personnel carriers than any other country. And sometimes, it’s even a little more derogatory than that. They’ll say that the Russians have donated more tanks than the Germans.

ezra klein

I want to tag that. We’re going to come back to the Germany question.

OK. They’ve lost a lot, but I think it would be misguided to believe that Russia is running out of stuff. And I think that’s something that the Ukrainians understand. I was actually surprised to hear from a senior military leader in the Ukrainian military, their belief that Russia will and does have the capacity to continue to regenerate forces. I think they are very realistic about the reality that Russia can continue this war for a really long time. Now, it is true that equipment is being run down. Things like their precision guided munitions are definitely on shorter supply. But it then means that they pull out less precise weapons that can cause more civilian harm. So I think yes, Russia has lost a lot. But they have the capacity to sustain this for a very long time. The Ukrainians, on their side, still don’t have enough military equipment. And that was something that we talked at length on in this trip. We had the ability to visit the transit hub in Poland, where a vast majority of NATO’s military aid comes through and flows into Ukraine. And we learned that that center is only operating at about 60 percent capacity. So they have the capacity to get a lot more weapons in. So for Ukrainians, they have the advantage in manpower. They have the whole country of military age men who would be willing to fight in the military. But what they lack is equipment. They don’t have enough equipment to train their soldiers. They’re now having problems sustaining the military equipment that they have, so spare parts and maintenance. And all of that is a shortcoming. So they have these reciprocal problems. Russia doesn’t have enough manpower, and that is a big question that’s looming, about whether or not Putin will call for a mass mobilization or not. Russia doesn’t have enough manpower. They have a lot of equipment. And then the opposite is true for Ukraine. Ukraine has a lot of manpower, but they still need more equipment in order to kind of do the job that they need to do to defeat Russia.

ezra klein

Let’s talk about the manpower question. So I’ve seen estimates that Russia has had 80,000 killed or wounded since the start of the war. Most people seem to think that is larger than the casualties on Ukraine’s side, though the numbers are a little fuzzier there. Why is Russia suffering such heavy manpower losses, and what does that mean for them? Are the people they could call up, particularly through conscription — are they as well trained, or are they capable? What is their morale — because replacing one soldier with another is not always a one to one trade. So where does Russia stand? And why are they losing so many people?

I think the other interesting thing to add to that is that a lot of Russia’s best soldiers were killed early on in the war. Again, they’ve been depleted. The people that Putin is sending now tend to come disproportionately from poorer regions in Russia. It comes from these private military organizations, like the Wagner Group. And it comes from a lot of forces from Luhansk and Donetsk, the LNR and the DNR in Eastern Ukraine, where a lot of people are being forcibly mobilized. You see terrible pictures on social media of men on the streets in those regions of being beaten and forced into war. There’s all of these stories about these efforts by Russia to take people out of prisons. They’re coming from mental institutes. So they’re coming up with all of these informal, ad hoc, piecemeal ways to try to sustain the manpower that they need. But as you’re saying, these people aren’t motivated to fight compared to Ukrainians who are defending their homeland. And so morale is a huge issue. In talking to some of the Ukrainian officials that we saw — we know in the counteroffensive in the north that many of the Russian fighters there just readily abandoned their positions. They flee — they ran away very quickly. And we heard that the morale of Russian soldiers in the south around Kherson, where the counteroffensive is still continuing, that the morale of the Russian fighters there is even lower — and they would say because at least the Russians who were fighting in the north had the Russian border behind them. They had some place where they could retreat or flee to. The fighters in the south have nothing but the sea. And so their morale, their propensity to abandon their positions and to surrender, is much higher. So again, these are the factors — when you’re looking at these things in terms of quality of troops and the morale, and their motivation to fight, this is another key area where I think it favors Ukraine. This is an existential question for Ukrainians. They are defending their homeland. They have no other choice but to fight. And these people who are being sent in on the Russian side, they don’t have that same motivation. And I think they increasingly see the disasters that are happening in war. By the way, there’s a bunch of people inside Russia now who are talking about the disasters that have been unfolding in Ukraine. Military bloggers are talking about just how disastrous the performance have been. So when you compare these two things, again, the Ukrainians have — they’re just much better positioned, I think, over the long term than in Russia.

ezra klein

There’s been this fear for a long time that Putin would turn to conscription, which in theory could radically increase the size of Russia’s forces. At the same time, without in any way suggesting he won’t do it, it’s clear he doesn’t want to do it. He didn’t do it at the beginning. He’s not done it yet. I’m not saying that his regime can’t survive doing it. I don’t want to make any claims larger than simply this. It doesn’t seem like a favored option for him. It seems like something he’s only going to break glass on if he really needs it. And to everything you’re saying, that implies to me that the people who could be conscripted would not obviously be well trained, but also would not want to be there, which is a pretty profound weakness on the battlefield. So how do you at this point assess the question of conscription on the Russian side?

It’s a really hard question, and one we’ve been thinking about for a really long time. I mean, I think you’ve laid it out perfectly, that Putin really faces a very difficult choice. If he forgoes conscription, if he insists to continue fighting this war that he will only call a “special military operation,” he is going to face significant problems regenerating the forces that he would need to accomplish his objectives in Ukraine. That much is clear. And just a word about that — Putin really has gone to great lengths to protect Russians from this war. He wants to shelter them. He wants Russians to believe that life is normal, because I think he understands deeply that this is a very politically unpopular war for large swathes of Russians. So he really is caught between a rock and a hard place, because as I said, if he doesn’t do it, he will have problems regenerating the manpower that he needs in order to accomplish his political objectives. And if he loses this war, it can also destabilize his regime. So he’s kind of flanked by these two sources of opposition — those Russians who don’t want to be in Ukraine, who oppose this war, but because of the repression are having to keep quiet. But on his other flank are very hawkish, nationalist Russians who are very vocally, including on state run media, calling on Putin to call this a war, to mobilize the public, to fight on a wartime footing so that they can accomplish these maximalist objectives that Putin set out in the beginning. So he’s really caught between a rock and a hard place, between those two things. And so watching and seeing what decision he ultimately makes, I think, is something that we’re all paying very close attention to.

ezra klein

Early on, we heard a lot about how punishing Western sanctions would be for ordinary Russians, for the broad Russian economy, for Russian oligarchs. There was an outside, though always unlikely hope that it could even destabilize Putin’s regime or convince him to withdraw. I get the sense now that people believe — certainly, his regime is weathering the sanctions more or less fine, but that the bigger effect is that a lot of the more targeted sanctions — not the big, macroeconomic ones, but the ones restricting the supply of things like microchips — are over time making it hard for Russia to resupply its more technologically sophisticated munitions, and that the longer the war drags on, the more effect that could have on Russia’s capability on the battlefield. Is that about right?

Yeah, I think that’s the goal of a lot of these sanctions. I think we had hoped that there would have been a broader kind of economic effect that would have made it more difficult for Russians, so that there would be more pressure on Putin. But there was also a secondary objective, which was to kind of constrict and constrain — and really, as Secretary Austin kind of controversially said earlier in the war, to weaken Russia. And I do think that is an objective. These sanctions, and especially the export controls, are designed to diminish Russian capabilities so that Russia cannot sustain aggression beyond its borders. And those things, as you said, Ezra, will have effect over the longer term. It will take time. The full brunt of those measures have not yet been felt. The thing that I worry about, though, is that Russia will pursue all sorts of efforts to bypass those export controls. They’ll use espionage and illicit trade networks. They may eventually try to develop things jointly with Russia or India or some of these other fence sitting countries. So Russia is going to work very hard to try to bypass those sanctions and to dilute Western support. And so as we look forward, things the United States will need to do is to invest very heavily in the enforcement of those measures. That’s kind of the next step of what people will try to do, is to try to tighten up sanctions and export control regime. And it underscores, though — and this broader idea for me is that a lot of people look at how Russia has fared in this war, and it’s been a military disaster. And we can see that it’s been kind of a strategic blunder for Putin. You’ve got Finland and Sweden joining NATO, and great Western resolve, and there’s a lot of people saying, oh, if Russia can’t even defeat the Ukrainians, then what do we really need to worry about? But I think that’s misguided. And one of the things that I continue to write about is this idea that Russia is down, but not out. And even if Ukraine and its backers are wildly successful in defeating Russia, it does not mean that the Russia problem will be resolved. They will continue to go after Ukraine. They will continue, even with a more vengeful — and nastiness. They’ll be less of a stakeholder in the international community, with the rules of the game. They’re going to be acting out, I think, in an even more egregious — and emboldened in the way that they use the tools that they have. So yes, the Russian military has been degraded significantly. But there’s all sorts of non-conventional tools. It’s things like cyber, like biological weapons, like nuclear weapons. They have a full arsenal of things that will continue to create challenges for the West. And so again, it’s just — I keep trying to advance this idea that Russia may be down, but it’s not out. And Ukraine and the international community is going to have to keep dealing with Russia over the longer term.

ezra klein

Let’s talk about the state of the Russian economy, then. I have seen wildly varying, wildly, wildly varying analyzes of where they are and where they’re headed, everything from one team of researchers saying economic oblivion looms, others saying they’re really managing to skirt around the kinds of recession or collapse that people thought was likely a couple of months ago. What is your sense of where they are now and where they’re going in the nearest term?

So the Russian economy has definitely taken a hit. I think the estimate that I put the most confidence in is the I.M.F.‘s estimate, which estimates that the Russian economy — that Russian G.D.P. will shrink by 6 percent in 2022. And as we’ve talked about, though, that will likely continue as export controls and other sanctions are continued to be felt in the coming years. And you can see the economic effects inside Russia on a lot of their industry. Car manufacturers, for example, don’t have parts. Lada is no longer being produced with airbags. I mean, they’re having to do all sorts of shortcuts. The airline industry inside Russia in particular has been hit especially hard. So there are economic ramifications, and there are kind of real economic effects of the sanctions that have been put in place. But I think it is wrong to assume that the Russian economy will implode. I mean, let’s not forget that Russia is still selling oil and gas. And even though the European Union, European countries are investing heavily in diversifying away from Russian oil and gas, that will take some time. And other countries, like India, China, they continue to buy Russian oil and gas, such that Russia’s government revenues haven’t been especially hit. I am seeing that they are declining over time, but it hasn’t been disastrous. And so I don’t think that in the near term we’re going to see an implosion of the Russian economy — but rather, it’s kind of like a slow asphyxiation. And the thing that I worry about which relates to this “Russia down, but not out” is as Russia is kind of written out of the economic international system, as they are no longer a stakeholder in that economic system, it allows them to flout the rules in different ways. I think it will only kind of embolden more aggressive behavior. And so that’s the thing again — yes, it will be economically weaker. The other thing we should remember, Ezra, is that Russia has never been an economic powerhouse, and yet they’ve still been able to challenge U.S. interests seriously in the past. I mean, people love to say that Russia’s economy is the size of Italy, or whatever small European country. But I think these raw economic indicators have never been a good measure of Russia’s ability to wreak havoc and to complicate and to challenge the United States. And so yes, it is important to focus on its economic fundamentals. And we do hope that sanctions will constrict and constrain, and make it more difficult for them to build and grow their defense, industrial base, and their military. But I think we have to understand that this threat doesn’t subside even as the Russian economy declines.

ezra klein

One thing you see is that Putin has a theory of maybe what the shock could be in the West. He’s thought that Russian energy exports are significant enough, particularly to Europe, that if he really ratchets the pain up on Europe, maybe support for Ukraine will crumble. So far, it’s been a consistent miscalculation, I think, that the West has been willing to take more upheaval economically than he anticipated. But Russia did just cut exports to Europe pretty substantially, saying the big Nord Stream pipeline — number one — is having technical issues, and so they can’t put the gas through it, which nobody really seems to believe. What do you think of that move, both in its potential to affect European support for Ukraine, but also for what it means for Russia going forward? I mean, it does seem like a way in which they are long term detaching themselves from exactly the kinds of economic supports that have kept them afloat in recent decades.

Yes. And you are right again. We’ve talked about all the ways that Putin has miscalculated. He has most certainly miscalculated on the West’s cohesion and resolve to stand up to him. What we understand now is that Putin is banking on this winter. He is trying to make this winter as painful and as cold and as expensive as possible for Europeans, in the hope that they will pressure their governments to stop providing military and economic support to Ukraine. That’s the play. And that was what President Zelensky was acutely aware of when he wanted to wage this counteroffensive, to try to demonstrate that Ukraine can win. He understood Putin’s playbook. He was genuinely worried that it could be effective, and he wanted to pre-empt that. And I think he’s done that very successfully. The thing I will say, in Europe — I mean, we shouldn’t kid ourselves. It will be a long, hard winter for most Europeans. And we’ve already seen some protests in the Czech Republic, and in some places in Germany, where because of very high inflation with energy prices and all of these things, that people are dissatisfied with their governments. And some are questioning whether or not their government should continue to provide support to Ukraine. So it’s already happening, and it hasn’t even gotten terribly cold yet. So we shouldn’t be fooled that this isn’t a really important time for this war, and for sustained European support. That said, if you look at polling in places like Germany, where Putin has just cut the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, you hear from most Germans, for example, that they are willing to pay a cost in order to support Ukrainians. You have a lot of governments in Eastern Europe who are telling their publics that we might have to pay a little bit out of our pocketbooks, but the Ukrainians are paying dearly with their lives and the destruction of their country. So I am optimistic. I think this is another time where Putin will have grossly miscalculated. I am optimistic that even though we might have some turbulence ahead in Europe, and maybe in the United States, that the support for Ukraine will persist. To your next question, though, about is this in Russia’s long term interests, or are they kind of cutting themselves out of the system? That’s exactly right, and it raises all sorts of questions about what Russia’s future will be. Because they are cutting oil and gas, they have obviously now demonstrated that they are not a reliable supplier of oil and gas. If there were any questions in Europe, which there were, it is painfully obvious now. And so they are moving away from Russian oil and gas. And that will be consequential for Russia, not just in terms of lost revenues over time, but it also takes away Russia’s leverage that it once had over Europe. And that too will leave Russia in a weaker position over time.

ezra klein

I just think the future now of the Russian economy looks unbelievably dire. They have proven themselves an inconsistent and dangerous supplier of energy to their main customers. So those customers are not going to come back at the level they were. They’ve accelerated the decarbonization efforts of the West. They’re seeing a huge brain drain of talented Russians who want no part of this, and are trying to get out and get their money out. They are under punishing and at this point indefinite sanctions that are reducing the technological and productive capacity of the economy, so innovation and specialization and all the other things you need to grow and be competitive are weakened. When you think about what this has cost them, not just now, but in 10 years and 15 years, it seems fundamentally catastrophic to me. But at the same time, it has also been catastrophic for not just Ukraine’s people, but the Ukrainian economy. And I want to read a quote here from the economic historian Adam Tooze, who’s been tracking the financial flows of the war very closely. And he writes, quote, to put it simply, Ukraine cannot afford the war it is fighting. The aid it is receiving, the substantial, is an order of magnitude smaller than Russia’s fossil fuel earnings, and is entirely inadequate to cover the running costs of the war. As a result, Kyiv is resorting to financing the war by printing money. It can only be a matter of months before Kyiv faces crippling choices between continuing to fight the war and upholding any semblance of normal economic life on the home front. How do you assess both Ukraine’s economy, but also its economic resilience to continue fighting this war?

I think this has been a very overlooked aspect of this war. The Western media really has not focused so much on the economic picture as it has the conditions on the battlefield, and the need to provide Ukraine with more military aid. And this idea about a weakened Ukrainian economy is not lost on Vladimir Putin. I mean, I think this is, in fact, part of the plan, that if you can undermine Ukraine’s economy, it leaves Ukraine vulnerable for a very long time to future Russian aggression and to Russian influence. And so it is, I think in many ways — and people have framed this conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a competition between democracy versus autocracy. I subscribe to that. And this period of, a, in the immediate kind of economic support to Ukraine, but in the longer term, reconstruction, is really critical. And we’re all going to have to think so much harder about this, because in the end, the goal is that we walk away — that the Ukrainians are given an economically successful, strong democracy. That’s kind of the stakes with this. And I think we shouldn’t underestimate just how impactful an economically strong, democratically successful Ukraine can be. In a lot of political science literature, there’s this great finding that regime type — so autocracy versus democracy — that regime type tends to converge in certain regions. And so if the United States and the Western backers working with the Ukrainians can get Ukraine into an economically viable, democratically successful place, it is likely to have ripple effects that emanate throughout the region. And so I’m thinking of Moldova, which has made its democratic transition, but is still, I think, a vulnerable democracy — but especially other countries in the region, like Armenia, like Azerbaijan, like Belarus. And with a successful anchor in Ukraine, it could help bring democracy to this region, which is so sorely needed in a time where we’ve talked for the last 15 years about democracy being in peril. Freedom House has talked — for 15 years straight, we’ve seen a decline in democracy scores. And the way that these things tend to work is in cascades, right? Huntington talked about the waves to and from democracy. And we know that democracy has been in peril for a very long time. But if we can help Ukraine finish the job and ensure it is resilient to future attacks from Russia, and a successful democracy, I think it has the possibility that it could kind of trigger a wave again towards democracy, or at least leave that region a better place.

ezra klein

I think that’s actually a pretty rich point. So before we keep going to the Ukrainian economy, I want to talk about it for a minute — this idea that this isn’t simply a humanitarian impulse on the part of the West, but actually something is owed to Ukraine here, that they’re playing at incredible, incredible human cost a really important geostrategic role. The historian Timothy Snyder has a new essay out in Foreign Affairs, which I really recommend people read. He makes this analogy to World War II, which I’m always careful about doing, about how differently things might have gone if Czechoslovakia hadn’t fallen so easily, if the leaders had held, if the Allies had held, if the Nazis had gotten bogged down there instead of having a lightning victory that convinced the world of their power and strength. And I don’t want to overdraw that, but I think if you — in addition to the question of showing a model, both in terms of values and, ultimately, in terms of rebuilding of democracy, but also as being a warning to other autocratic states thinking about expansion. If you imagine China here, the difference between Ukraine falling in days and the quagmire that Russia now finds itself involved in, it can’t make China feel a lot more excited about invading Taiwan. And to the extent it pushes a conflict there off, it’s of tremendous global value to the rest of the world. So there’s something here about what Ukraine has borne for everyone else that I do think should change the calculus a little bit, from something where we look at this almost as charity, to — this has been a very cheap form of national defense and international limit reinforcement.

Yeah, I agree. I love Tim Snyder’s work. I haven’t read that essay, and I will. But I think it is such an important point. And the way that I’ve talked about it, which maybe sounds similar to the way Tim Snyder did, is — I mean, I think that Ukraine has given Europe, the United States and liberal democracies a great gift. And I think to understand just what a gift it’s been, you have to imagine the counterfactual, which is kind of what you were talking about, Ezra. Imagine that Ukraine fell quickly in the earliest days of the war, as many people thought. If that had happened, I think we would be living in a very different world. We would have a Putin who was emboldened. Like, he would be even more convinced now that might makes right, and that borders can be changed through the use of military force. I think he would be entirely convinced, if he hadn’t been convinced already, that the West will not stand up to him. Like, he had already learned that lesson. There was Georgia in 2008, Ukraine, 2014, his attack on the U.S. election in 2016. But now —

ezra klein

His intervention in Syria.

And the intervention in Syria. I think he understood that, but here, with the stakes so high, he would have deeply understood that. And so he would have been ever more confident to step up his efforts to undermine liberal democracy. We know this is a Putin goal. We know that he fears democracy. We know that he sees democracy as something the United States does just to spread its own influence. We know that he views liberal democracy as a threat to his own regime. If Ukraine had fallen, we would be facing an ever more aggressive Russia. I think if Ukraine had fallen, it also would have been a disaster, or at least a tremendous strain, on the trans-Atlantic alliance. We already see some divisions now, but it would have been far worse. And so Putin, again, would have succeeded in another objective, which is breaking the cohesion in Europe, and between the United States and Europe. And just as you said, Ezra, it would have been a very clear signal to other autocrats, especially Xi, that again, this point that might make right, and that you can change borders by force. So for all of these reasons, it really is a tremendous gift that Ukrainians have given. And it’s up to us to help make something of it. And we’ve talked about the ripple effects it could have in the region. But I think that point is really important. Some countries — the Poles, for example — understand this acutely. It’s why they’ve been so forward leaning in sending military aid to Ukraine. They understand that their own security is at stake. And so I hope that the rest of Europe and liberal democracies everywhere can understand how important it is.

ezra klein

So I want to put some numbers to this. In August, inflation in Ukraine reached 23 percent year on year. By the end of the year, the central bank has warned it could reach 30 percent. Prior to the war, severe poverty, which we’re defining here as making below $5.50 per person, per day — that’s obviously very, very little money — that was pretty rare in Ukraine. At this point, the share of Ukrainians falling below that poverty line is expected to increase tenfold, to at least 21 percent in 2022. So 21 percent of people in Ukraine will be making less than $5.50 a day. A third of Ukrainians have been displaced, either internally or outside of Ukraine’s borders, by the war. I mean, this is just a tremendous amount of human suffering, even beyond the direct cost of the war, even beyond being killed by a shell or being wounded on the front lines. And then you read stats like these: so Foreign Policy magazine in early August wrote that total aid provision to Ukraine here is about $11 billion, still an order of magnitude less in payments to Russia for its hydrocarbons over the same period. A lot of the promised European aid isn’t materializing. They promised about 9 billion euros. They’ve only delivered about 1 billion. Why? Why particularly has European aid been so poor, even as they are spending so much money on Russian hydrocarbons?

Oh, Ezra, I wish I knew. I don’t have a good answer. I don’t know why — again, that point about the difference between the kind of aid that has been provided to Ukraine versus what’s been paid in oil revenue, it just blows my mind every time I hear it. Just two quick points — because again, it’s something that President Zelensky understands very well — I mean, he’s obviously fixated and focused on getting the job done on the battlefield. But he’s also working very hard to get commitments from Western backers, including the I.M.F. and World Bank and other multinational institutions. But one of the things we talked at length about, and he even brought this up in the meeting that we were able to have with him, is underscoring the importance of air defense. And so of course, our discussion was more focused on the military picture, but he brought this back to the economic and human toll that Russia’s war is having on Ukraine. And he highlighted how important it is for the United States and European backers to provide missile and air defense, because he said he needs to protect Ukraine’s most important asset, and that is the Ukrainian people. So you can’t disentangle kind of the battlefield with the toll that it is having on Ukrainian society, but for him, I also think top of mind is the economic picture. He needs those displaced Ukrainians, the women and children who have left, to return to Ukrainian cities so that they can engage productively in the economy. So that’s really key. If there’s one area that I hope that the United States and its European backers can continue to increase, it is on the air and missile defense, because that will be key to not only preventing future destruction, but giving Ukrainians some peace of mind that it’s OK to return and to be productively engaged inside Ukraine. The other point is, I think the right frame — again goes back to our conversation — is this is an investment in our future. And it’s that idea that by investing in Ukraine’s economy to get them back on their feet, and to see that they are democratically successful, it’s not just — it’s not a feel good thing. It is an investment in our own future. And I hope that is a frame through which, or a lens through which, people are seeing this challenge through.

ezra klein

But that makes the European response here weirder, because as much as it is an investment in our future, this is a land war in Europe. It’s really an investment much more directly in their future. And they’re being much worse on the aid. I mean, the excuse from the Europeans is that it has been held up in wrangling over the exact form, and loans, and grants. Zelensky has been searing on this. I want to read a quote from him: “Every day and in various ways, I remind some leaders of the European Union that Ukrainian pensioners, our displaced persons, our teachers, and other people who depend on budget payments cannot be held hostage to their indecision or bureaucracy. Such an artificial delay of macro financial assistance to our state is either a crime or a mistake, and it is difficult to say, which is worse in such conditions of a full-scale war.” And something he’s pointing out there — it’s not like Europe is not promising this money. It is not like they have said this is not worth doing. Their excuse is that they are haggling over its form. There was a lot of hope early on that we were seeing a new Europe emerging. Germany was making this big investment in defense. There was a move towards decarbonization. And in many ways, it seems like the old Europe is re-emerging. Which of those narratives, if either, do you think is true?

I think a new Europe is emerging, but it’s different than what you said. I think it’s a Europe in which the center of gravity of Europe is moving east. You hear that a lot, when you talk to especially East Europeans, who have been on the forefront, banging pots and pans in trying to cajole the Western Europeans to step up and do more. We’ve talked about the cohesion and the strength of the trans-Atlantic response. And I think that’s true. That is part of the story, for sure. And especially early in the war, I think Europe was even out in front of the United States in some cases with some of the sanctions packages. And at the beginning of the war, it was amazing to watch that the Western democracies could move as quickly and as boldly as they did. But that has given way — and as you said, there have been promises that haven’t been followed through. So now what I think we are seeing is a new Europe, where — and especially if the European Union is going to bring Ukraine into the E.U., we are seeing the shift in the center of gravity away from France and Germany, which have historically been the engine of European politics. Those two countries have been incredibly discredited within Europe by this war. People in Eastern Europe have been disappointed by Macron’s sustained desire to maintain dialogue with Putin, when it’s been clear for a very long time that we have nothing to talk to him about at this moment in time. And the Germans, even though they’ve moved towards more robust support for Ukraine, I mean, we’ve seen a very tremendous shift inside Germany. But most Eastern Europeans just say they’re disappointed and find that it’s not enough. And so those two countries, I think, in many ways have been discredited in the eyes of East Europeans. They’ve lost a lot of trust in their leadership within the E.U. And you do see this new collection of the Poles, the Finns, the Czechs — a lot of these Eastern Europeans who have been at the forefront in support for Ukraine pulling the rest of Europe along. And I think that is likely to have a lasting impact on the Europe that emerges from this crisis. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

I want to go back to something that we touched on a bit at the beginning, which is how as the war has changed, the negotiating positions, the possible end games that could be accepted by the two sides have changed. And I think for much of the war, we saw Putin as the primary actor here. But I think Zelensky is now very much — or if not the primary actor here. So you are saying that his war aims have expanded, up to and including taking Crimea back from Russia. How has that changed? I mean, do you think that where Zelensky is, given where his politics are, given how many of his people have been killed by the Russians, do you think there is a settlement the Russians could ultimately accept, that he could accept — or this really does have to be either a battlefield victory, loss, or stalemate now to find equilibrium?

It’s the million dollar question. Yes, I think his position has changed. I think back earlier in the war, there was a moment in time where the Russians and Ukrainians had the contours of some notional deal. And there was at least some sort of agreement there that they were at least discussing, that I think involved some sort of territorial concessions and exchange of Ukrainian neutrality. At that time, it was the Russians who felt emboldened in the war, who thought that they were on the march, who thought that time was on their side, and had no interest in moving forward with those types of negotiations or discussions. You had Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, not so long ago before the counteroffensive, talking about how the kind of geography of the battle had changed, and that therefore Russia was actually looking not just to take all of Donbas, but was interested in territory outside that region. So again, the war aims are often tied to what’s going on in the battlefield. And as you mentioned now, things have very much swung to the Ukrainian side. And Zelensky has moved in his position. As I understand it, his line now is that he’s not willing to seriously negotiate with the Russians until they are off of all Ukrainian soil. And that’s his going in position. And I think it reflects his confidence in Ukraine’s ability to militarily defeat Russia over the longer term. Again, we can debate that. It’s probably optimistic to say that the Ukrainians have the ability to repel Russians from all of their soil. But in this moment in time, that’s where we are. So it’s hard to say exactly where we will come out. It’s still very difficult for me to imagine that the Ukrainians would agree to give Russia any territory beyond what they held prior to February 24. But again, at this moment in time, the Ukrainians are looking past that. And Zelensky is talking very confidently about bringing Crimea back into Ukraine, because Crimea is Ukraine. And he is intent at this point in time on restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

ezra klein

If I go back to the theories of how the war could worsen from early on, though, as much as I understand — and his case, I’m sure, would have the same position as Zelensky, although not his bravery or courage or capabilities. It does seem like you can imagine a danger there. I think a strong early view was that the one thing Putin cannot accept is humiliation. He cannot accept something that in Russia would be seen as a true loss, and that he will do anything — and you’ve talked about this broader range of armaments he actually has and could put into play — to forestall that. And it also sounds like what you’re saying is that there is very little Zelensky at this point could accept — and I think morally, this makes total sense — than Russia’s complete humiliation and a total loss. And when you try to match those two together, it is hard to imagine an endgame to this war, while it is easier — maybe, I’ll say — to imagine ways this war could turn yet more catastrophic. So I’m curious how you see those ideas matching up.

I think you’ve put your finger on why it’s so hard to forecast how this war will evolve into the future, because I can imagine different scenarios — one in which Putin really could change his definition of victory and bring the war to a rapid end. I mean, I do think that is possible. Putin has such control over his domestic media. So few Russians are actually paying attention to what’s happening in Ukraine. I was shocked at some recent Levada polling. And I don’t remember what it is off of the top of my head, but a declining number of Russians are even paying attention at all to the war that is raging on their border. So in my mind, if perhaps we get to a point where Putin really does see that this is going badly, that he’s never going to accomplish his objectives, maybe he strings it out for a very long time to ensure that Russians aren’t paying attention, and then tries to somehow extract himself from the situation while calling it a victory. That’s plausible to me. It’s also plausible — what you said, Ezra — is that there are a series of ways that Russia could escalate this war, including through the use of a nuclear weapon. And it’s the Crimea question that probably makes me the most nervous about those possibilities, because Crimea is so kind of personally important to Putin. It’s how he has staked his legacy, that he’s brought Crimea back. And Russians approved of that. So when he illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin’s public approval went through the roof, up into the high 80 percents. And that’s something that made Russians feel good about themselves, and that Russia was a power to be feared, and that they could stand up to the West. So I think Crimea plays a different role in the psyche of Russians. And so losing Crimea, for Putin, could be catastrophic for him. And I think he would likely see that if he lost Crimea, he would have lost his legitimacy as a leader. I think he would potentially see it as calling into question the persistence, the viability of his own regime. And so you do get into scary territory where you worry about his use of a nuclear weapon. I come back to the point that I made earlier, which is that Ukrainians are undeterred by that. And again, you heard to the person that if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, it will not change the outcome of the war. It will not change how Ukrainians fight the war. It will only increase the costs. And so that’s where we are. But there are these scenarios, and it is extremely difficult to assign probabilities to which way it could go. And again, that’s what you get with these personalist dictators. I mean, these decisions are being made by Putin. And an incredibly small group, if anyone, is even weighing in at this point, on that level. And they make volatile decisions. These decisions are up to their own personal whims. And so getting into the head of Vladimir Putin and trying to understand, will he mobilize? Will he use a nuclear weapon? It’s really, really hard to game that out. And that’s why so many people have been reticent to make predictions about how the war will go, because it’s really hard.

ezra klein

One thing I find difficult to assess is the extent of Putin’s control of the narrative. So he controls Russia’s media. He’s jailed journalists. He has shut down independent media. At the same time, you hear a lot about narrative challenge that is emerging on his right from these battlefield bloggers and ultra nationalists who are the true believers. And in part, because they’re the true believers, they’re the most angry, and in certain ways I think the hardest to censor. Igor Girkin, who’s this ultra nationalist who led Russia’s offensive in Donbas in 2014, he predicted to his almost half million subscribers on Telegram a complete defeat for Russian troops, where he said, we’ve already lost, the rest is just a matter of time. You hear now a lot about this revolt from Putin’s right, from these people who are angry because they believed in Putin’s more maximalist vision of an expanded Russia, or Russia restored to something like a former glory. And all the reporting, I hear, is that they have become bolder. And so I wonder if Putin really has the ability to shut down the pressure on his right.

Yeah, that’s again such an important question. And the way that I’ve thought about it is the way we talked about earlier. You know, he’s flanked by these two potential pockets of opposition. There’s all the Russians who have been cowed, I think in many ways, by the repression because the costs have been so significant for saying anything. So it’s hard to understand the discontent that is on that end of the spectrum. But as you said, and this is kind of a mystery to me, why the Kremlin hasn’t tried to shut down the opposition that’s coming from the right. And as you’re saying, you know, Igor Girkin — I read that quote, but it’s also permeated into Russian state media, where you see some of these talk shows where analysts are critical of the war, and saying that Putin hasn’t gone far enough. And so to me, it’s a mystery why the Kremlin has allowed that to flourish or to continue the way that it has. That’s part of why I believe that Putin’s hold on power is less than it was before the war started. He faces challenges coming from multiple different directions. And I do think that he will have a hard time managing those groups. That said, the big question is, what would be their capacity to unseat Putin? Do they have ties with the security services, to people who have access to weapons? So I think that’s where we are, is Putin facing these two pockets of opposition. And it’s really hard to gauge where it will go from here. But my sense is that Putin’s hold on power is far less secure today than it was before he launched this invasion. And when I’ve looked at how these longtime autocrats leave power — so I’ve done a bunch of research with a colleague of mine, Erica Frantz at Michigan State. We looked at, well, how do longtime autocrats, these personalist dictators like Putin — in power, 20 years and more — how do they leave office? And the most likely trajectory, and this is what I would have told you before the invasion, is that they die in office, right? That they stay so long, they’re so secure, the regime is in such equilibrium that they’re able to hold on until the very end, until they die in office. And that was actually the case in 40 percent of the post-Cold War cases that we looked at. And if you actually looked at older dictators, these guys who are 65 years and older, personalists in power 20 years or more, half of them, 50 percent die in office. So that’s what I would have told you before this war. But my sense now is his hold on power is less than it was.

ezra klein

I think we often understand wars as narratives or as stories. We read military histories, and they’re about something that begins at one point and concludes at another. I think a lot of the narrative of this war, the way it gets reported in the media, lends itself to story line — right, who will win? Who will lose? What will the end be? But something that can happen for — I mean, this is a pretty young conflict — something that can happen for years, for decades, is simply stalemate, that there is a defensible amount of territory Russia has gained, that there is an offensive that Ukraine has been able to make, and it’s able to hold most of its country. But that nothing really ends — the sanctions on Russia simply continue. The fights on both sides, and skirmishes, go to a lower level, but they continue. The threat of total war is always present. How do you rate the possibility of no real end here in the foreseeable future, but a very, very unhappy stalemate?

Ezra, I think that’s the most likely outcome. You know, of course, we’ve talked about Ukraine’s ability over the very long term to win this war. It could happen sooner rather than later. But I do think that most likely, we are still looking at a long, grinding war. And of course, the counteroffensive was a huge success, but we have to be realistic and acknowledge that Ukraine still has a very long way to go in terms of taking back territory. Russia still holds large swaths of Ukrainian territory. You take the counteroffensive that Ukraine is waging in the South as an example, Russia has more advanced, more capable fighters who are fighting in the south. The positions that they hold there, they’re more dug in. They have more defensible positions than they had in the north, where they were overrun. So I think it is also plausible that looking at Ukrainian momentum, that Russia could retreat to more defensible positions and hold that line for a very long time. Again, getting back to the winter, maybe if they can retreat to a more defensible position, hold those lines, and make it through the winter, then if they’re able to regenerate some of their forces, then maybe Putin would be willing to try to reclaim more territory again sometime next year. So again, yes, Ukraine has seized the initiative, that momentum at this time seems to be on their side. But we do have to be realistic, to say that they have a long way to go. And so again, your scenario of a long, grinding kind of borderland war to me is still the most likely scenario.

ezra klein

I think that is a sobering but realistic place to end. As always, our final question, what are three books that you would recommend to the audience?

In large part, I’ll say — I have three kids at the moment, Ezra, and I don’t do a ton of reading. But the book that I have just started, and it’s a long slog, so I’m not so far through it is Steve Kotkin’s first in his series on Stalin. And I have just started that, and it’s remarkable. I love reading that book because it’s one where I feel like I can hear the author almost like narrating — I hear Steve Kotkin in his writing, which is amazing. So that is a remarkable one — again, gives a lot of context, a lot of fodder for understanding where we are today. And then, Ezra, that’s kind of all I’ve read in a really long time. And I hope people appreciate my honesty of being in this phase of my life. I am so inundated with this war for the last kind of nine months or so, focused so much on reading kind of the day to day and keeping abreast of what’s happening that I have honestly let my longer reading slide.

ezra klein

Well, let me ask you one alternative question here, which is are there things that you read to keep up on the war that a casual consumer, but an interested consumer of the news may not? Are there sources that you’ve come to really trust that you would commend the rest of us to bookmark?

I have learned who to follow on Twitter. And I think that having that has been a remarkable resource. I obviously listen a lot to Mike Kofman, to Rob Lee. I listen a lot to Mick Ryan. I think the I.S.W. has done a remarkable job putting out regular installments and updates of the war. So I have found that kind of following trusted sources to help curate what’s going on has been remarkably helpful, so that’s kind of how I keep up.

ezra klein

And we’ll put those Twitter accounts in the show description. Andrea Kendall-Taylor, thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

When dictators are called out by the international community for perpetrating human-rights abuses, they often attempt to deflect criticism by accusing their Western critics of hypocrisy. In April, for instance, China denounced the US State Department’s annual Country Report on Beijing’s human-rights practices as “a pretense the U.S. government uses to cover up its agenda of seeking hegemony” over such nations as Afghanistan. “The U.S. should immediately cease making irresponsible remarks,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian. “Instead, it needs to reflect on itself, mend its ways, and work earnestly to improve its own human-rights situation.”In substance, these attempts at moral equivalence lack credibility. But they can have the appearance of truth when our adversaries base their propaganda on self-incriminating statements made by the West’s own media figures and politicians.This week, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi took the rostrum at the United Nations General Assembly to deliver Iran’s habitual denunciations of Western “double standards.” While anti-hijab protests rocked numerous Iranian cities in the wake of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini’s death at the hands of Tehran’s morality police, Raisi went through a predictable laundry list of complaints, accusing Israel of creating the “world’s largest prison” in Gaza, and denouncing US detention policies at the Mexican border. But he also threw in an attack on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, declaring that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school.”As a Canadian, I found this element of Raisi’s performance maddening. Thanks to Canada’s own misinformation mill, the Iranian President didn’t have to go to the bother of inventing his own lies. My own country’s journalists and leaders did that job for him.The issue of supposed unmarked Indigenous child graves dominated the Canadian media in the latter half of 2021. But as I reported in Quillette several months ago, no “mass graves” were ever found. In fact, even the Indigenous groups that initially reported ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey results consistent with the possible presence of unmarked burial sites weren’t talking about “mass graves.” Rather, the invented mass-graves claim was popularized by a badly botched New York Times May 28th, 2021, story written by reporter Ian Austen. (For a definitive debunking, see Terry Glavin’s account in Canada’s National Post). In the 16 months that have passed since the unmarked-graves story broke in late May 2021, not a single body has been found, nor any human remains. And so even the less sensational allegation that 215 individual unmarked child graves lie buried under the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, now seems doubtful. Nor have bodies or human remains been recovered at any of the other former residential-school properties where GPR surveys were conducted. Yet that didn’t prevent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from lowering flags on Canadian public buildings for more than five months, nor from speaking publicly as if bodies were already being dug up. And aside from the National Post, not a single major Canadian media outlet has admitted its role in feeding the unmarked-graves social panic that exploded last year, and which often included lurid speculation that the supposed grave sites not only contained the remains of Indigenous children, but that these children had been murdered through methods worthy of a horror-movie plot. Given this, what can Canadian public figures say to Raisi now that he’s throwing spurious moral equivalences into our faces? Nothing. In making the false claim that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school,” the man is merely reading our own officially sourced misinformation back to us.   This isn’t the first time that Trudeau has managed to maneuver Canada into this kind of mortifying position vis-à-vis the world’s tyrants. Last year, when Canadian lawmakers voted to denounce China’s treatment of Uighurs in western Xinjiang as a form of genocide, Trudeau and his Cabinet abstained. The suspected reasons for that move were complex. But they included the fact that Canada was, by its own description, morally compromised on the genocide file: Back in 2019, Trudeau had explicitly acceded to the (absurd) claim that Canada, too, was guilty of “genocide”—this one against Indigenous women. Indeed, according to the official report that precipitated Trudeau’s mea culpa, this supposed Canadian genocide remains ongoing.  The leaders of Russia, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela know a good propaganda opening when they see one. Last year, these nations collectively called on the UN to investigate crimes against Canada’s Indigenous peoples—doing so, cleverly, on the same day that Western nations were launching a UN campaign to demand that China allow international investigators access to Xinjiang.Words have consequences—especially when they comprise the vocabulary of mass slaughter. The repetition of ghoulish hyperbole about Canada doesn’t just gratuitously harm the country’s reputation. It also helps the world’s autocrats get away with crimes that are anything but fictional. 

The pages of the Gazette are rich with research, history, analysis, debate — and voices. Over the years, we’ve heard from scholars, researchers, scientists, artists, and authors, of course, but also soldiers, activists, nurses, even a race-car driver. After taking a look back, we wanted to share what we found. This collection is necessarily and intentionally incomplete, and also very much alive. Read on, and then come back in a month to see whose inspired moment has been added to the list.
 
I am oddly mistrustful of ease.

— Claire Messud, author, Turns of narrative

I think I learned through art — through Dada, through surrealism — how to trust in myself. And when I learned how to trust in myself, the last place I wanted to be was inside. I wanted to go out, I wanted to be engaged in the world.
— Jeff Koons, artist, High king of middlebrow

Experience is the Higgs Boson of normativity – it’s the value that gives so many of our values their value. Why, for example, do we value honesty? You could say that honesty is valuable in and of itself. But would we value honesty in this gut-level way if it were not generally beneficial? When people are dishonest, it causes harm. It negatively impacts our lived experience.

— Joshua Greene, psychologist, “Deep pragmatism” as a moral engine

As the sun rose and it got hotter and hotter, we started passing the horses near the top of the mountain around mile 18. Passing those horses was one of the biggest thrills of my running life. I’ve also never felt so competitive. As I was racing those horses toward the end, I had an indescribably primal urge to beat them.

— Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist, How fast can we run?

Loneliness kills. It’s as powerful as smoking or alcoholism.
— Robert Waldinger, psychiatrist, Good genes are nice, but joy is better

I love writing essays and I hate writing books. The ideas for the books I’ve written generally come from things that I come across in the archives and that I think are important and that I wish people knew about. I wish someone else would write a book about them, so that I could read it, so that it could exist, and be read by other people. But since no one has already written that book, I feel like I have to. It’s awful.

— Jill Lepore, historian, The art of the matter

I remember walking on the street past a person who had been at the firm where I was, someone with whom I had worked, and the person just passed by me and didn’t even know who I was. I recognized him, he didn’t recognize me. And I remember thinking, I gave time to this enterprise that I could have given to my mother. It might have felt more justifiable in some way if I were actually doing something that I loved doing. I think she would have understood that. So that’s my regret. And she would say that that’s ridiculous. I didn’t have as much time with her as I expected I would have.

— Annette Gordon-Reed, historian, Experience

Good poetry all has a similar quality, which is it moves us; it sings to us; it says something perhaps surprising, or unexpected. Or maybe it says something we hadn’t realized we thought or knew or felt. It gives voice. But it also seeks silence.

— Kevin Young, poet, Kevin Young and a unified theory of Black culture — and himself

You walk in and there’s a performance, that one-time performance for that patient. You want the scar to be beautiful, because the kids are going to have that for, God willing, 70 or 80 years.
— Terry Buchmiller, surgeon and musician, Leaving a beautiful scar

If determinism — the predictability of the universe — breaks down in black holes, it could break down in other situations. Even worse, if determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either. The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity.

— Stephen Hawking (1942-2018), physicist, Hawking at Harvard

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

— J.K. Rowling, novelist, The fringe benefits of failure, and the importance of imagination

Ignorance acknowledged is an opportunity; ignorance denied is a closed door. And it takes courage to admit to the truth of what you do not know.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, novelist, Adichie: Protect and value the truth

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, historian, Experience

Life teaches that presence matters. People respond to commitment and deliberateness. When you put away your phone to have a conversation, that’s the decision that counts: People care about your offer of attention. Empathy is built on such little gestures, the ones that communicate that you don’t know what someone else has to say but that you want to learn.
— Sherry Turkle, psychologist, At PBK ceremony, a call to empathy

I’m not a writer who is hidden away from the world. My work is political. Part of the role of the writer, I believe, is to take dangerous positions on behalf of those whose voices are not so easily heard.

— Teju Cole, novelist and critic, Author will urge creative-writing students beyond genre limits

Expressions of goodness are never trivial in my work, they are never incidental in my writing. In fact, I want them to have life-changing properties and to illuminate decisively the moral questions embedded in the narrative.

— Toni Morrison (1931-2019), novelist, Good, but never simple

We don’t have a system that makes it possible to vanquish our foes and live for 1,000 years in power — for which I am grateful. And yet, that’s what you’d think if you listen to politicians, that we can treat each other with contempt and hatred, and win and silence our foes, and kick them off our platforms and campuses. That’s a way to be miserable, and ultimately, to lose.

— Arthur Brooks, social scientist, Happiness scholar cites three ways to start healing rifts

This romanticization of a ‘good death’ — you can’t have a good death if you’re a 23-year-old girl with a huge ovarian mass, like the one my colleagues just removed in Mirebalais, in central Haiti. You can’t have a good death if you’re the 17-year-old girl I saw in Mumbai last Monday with drug-resistant tuberculosis, her parents weeping as her options were running out. Holding someone’s hand as they die? Bullshit. Fight. They want you to.

— Paul Farmer (1959-2022), physician and co-founder of Partners In Health, Experience

An awareness of the infirmity of unaided human intuition should be part of the conventional wisdom of every educated person.

— Steven Pinker, psychologist, Anecdotes aren’t data

My ambitions on the racial front have shrunk. I feel chastened. That’s why I’m talking about ‘racial decency’ as opposed to ‘racial equality.’ My sense of what is possible in the foreseeable future has been diminished.

— Randall Kennedy, legal scholar, If Randall Kennedy ran the world

I understand that this is a question of vital importance to many people, particularly to other mothers who are artists trying to get their work done, and know that I feel for everyone in the struggle. But until I see a male writer asked this question, I’m going to respectfully decline to answer it.​

— Lauren Groff, novelist, in response to question, “Can you talk about your process and how you manage work and family?”, Alienation proves fertile state of mind for Lauren Groff

Drugs either contribute to the smooth workings of society and the economy, or they muck it up. Caffeine fosters a kind of consciousness that’s very sober and focused, and it gives people energy. It’s a great boon to capitalism that way.

— Michael Pollan, author and journalist, Michael Pollan digs deeper into drugs

She didn’t look like a glamorous woman, and she didn’t behave like a restrained woman. There’s this incredible personality at work there that somehow, against all odds, succeeds with the public.
— Marylène Altieri, curator, Becoming Julia Child

I think we know a lot more scientifically about love and the brain than we did a couple of decades ago … But do we think that makes us better at love, or helping people with love? Probably not much.

— Richard Schwartz, psychiatrist, When love and science double date

You often have the sense, with the very first note of a Beethoven piece, that it bursts into existence as a result of some uncontainable pressure that must have been building for a long time before the piece was born, a pressure that finally became unbearable.

— Matthew Aucoin, composer, Beethoven at 250

The voice I was reading on the page and writing on the page was the voice I really wanted for myself.

— Amanda Gorman, inaugural U.S. youth poet laureate, The poetic perspective

You should inform your gut and then trust it.

— Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, Negotiating the irrational

The older I have gotten, the less sleep I need. The older I get, the more I work because my sense is that time is shorter, and I want to make the most of it.

— Orlando Patterson, sociologist, Is 80 the new 60?

A beautiful narrative arc reassures us that the baffling events around us are meaningful — and this is why ‘Ulysses’ appeared to be an instrument of chaos, an anarchist bomb.

— Kevin Birmingham, author, Rocky path to publication for most dangerous book

I wanted to warn future social movements that listening only to one’s own side can generate dangerous amounts of unrealism. I worry that parts of the left may be falling into this trap today.

— Jane Mansbridge, political scientist, Experience

Insurgents detonated 30 to 35 pounds of homemade explosives below my feet. It took off both legs immediately. I sat up after hitting the ground thinking maybe I had a broken leg or something. But both legs were gone.

— Greg Galeazzi, veteran, Between Army and Medical School, a stop in hell

You miss certain features of reality when you’re trying to write down simple models of the world.

— Raj Chetty, economist, The personal side of economics

My philosophy is very simple. When you see something that’s not right, not fair, not just, stand up, say something, and speak out.

— U.S. Rep. John Lewis (1940-2020), Facing the future, Lewis and Faust see reason for hope

If you have the resources, invest in data quality far more than you invest in data quantity. Bad-quality data is essentially wiping out the power you think you have.

— Xiao-Li Meng, statistician, 2 early vaccination surveys worse than worthless thanks to “big data paradox“

In an unequal society, those who land on top want to believe their success is morally justified. In a meritocratic society, this means the winners must believe they have earned their success through their talent and hard work.

— Michael J. Sandel, philosopher, Toppling the myth of meritocracy

You either have to build up the courage to do something to stop the deaths of innocent children, or you eventually will lose your power in this country.

— Jaclyn Corin, March for Our Lives co-founder, Mass shootings reignite youth gun control push

Maybe we need to stop thinking, in some cases, about a cure for cancer. … Maybe they don’t need to be curable for us to have long, healthy lives.

— Timothy Rebbeck, Professor of Cancer Prevention, Bringing the cancer fight back down to earth

I believe in the power of choice to shape fate, even though I recognize the hugely important role that social structures play in limiting one’s choices. It is the heart of the debate between Ralph Ellison, who stressed the role of choice, of agency for Black people, and Richard Wright, who stressed the determining and deleterious effects of socio-economic structure.

— Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., historian, African-American folklore inspires meeting of the minds

We have created a grand con. And potentially a dangerous one, because we are convincing the rest of the society that technology can do things that it actually cannot do.

— Krzysztof Gajos, computer scientist, When will a robot write a novel?

I think we’ve really met a once-in-a-generation ‘take this job and shove it’ moment.

— Lawrence Katz, labor economist, “I quit” is all the rage. Blip or sea change?

We know what a healthy meal looks like. We know that exercise is good for you and that pollution is bad for you. But we know a lot less about the places where we spend all of our time.

— Joe Allen, public health expert, Is your home making you sick?

The problem really is not that democracy is being prevented so much as that democracy is occurring. … It’s precisely the citizens in the major carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and global trade.
— Jonathan Franzen, novelist, Some choice words for liberals

Slightly more women than men get Ph.Ds. in the classics in the U.S., and yet the vast majority of translations that readers read in English for classics are by men. This is an issue, and we should talk about it.

— Emily Wilson, classicist, New chapter for “The Odyssey“

How do I tell a neonatal intensive care unit nurse her assignment today is to hold the iPad for the family of a dying adult intensive-care unit patient so they can say goodbye?

— Mary Tenney, nurse, 14 nurses on life and work during COVID

Leadership, in my mind, is about managing change. If you’re not managing change, you’re not leading: You’re presiding. And I did not take this job merely to preside over Harvard.

— Larry Bacow, Harvard president, Larry Bacow’s listening tour

Most of writing is like plumbing, and laying the floor, and digging the basement, and then layering it brick by brick by brick until you have the edifice.

— Min Jin Lee, novelist, Researching and writing history

When you see death all the time, you go into this mode of increased energy and sharper focus.

— Max Essex, pioneering AIDS researcher, Experience

I’ve just seen dozens and dozens and dozens of every kind of bug imaginable attacking the dreamer: There are swarms of every kind of flying insect you’ve ever heard of; there are armies of cockroaches racing at the dreamer; there are masses of wriggling worms; there were some grasshoppers with vampire fangs; there are bed bugs, stink bugs.

— Deirdre Barrett, psychologist, What pandemic dreams may come

Nature is often alluring and attractive, yet natural materials are anything but safe.
— Robert Paarlberg, author, Only eat organic? You’re paying too much, and it’s not worth it

That the other officers so casually walked around, took notes, just stood there chatting, bespeaks a wall of everyday routine and indifference that has such profound cultural roots at this point that it’s not just unconscious bias.

— Lawrence D. Bobo, sociologist, The fire this time

In our lifetime [helium] might not run out, but for humanity it has a finite supply. We can’t make any more.
— Anthony Lowe, electronics technician, Global helium shortage slams brakes at Harvard labs

Maybe what’s happening is that after all these years my real face is finally emerging.

— Junot Díaz, author, Old masks, new face

People with disabilities get called inspiring so often, usually for the most insignificant things, that the word now feels like a euphemism for pity. Sometimes when a nondisabled person uses the word to describe a person with a disability, it’s a sign that they’re feeling overwhelmed or uncomfortable.

— Haben Girma, first deafblind woman to graduate from Harvard Law School, One L, only harder

Things are intriguing to me when they’re slightly edited, like these shoes.

— Virgil Abloh (1980-2021), designer, Ideas (and sneakers) were in the air

It’s never art for art’s sake, because even if I do it for myself in my head, I have an ideal.

— Yo-Yo Ma, cellist, “I want to make it felt“

That is an extraordinarily important thing, morally and economically. People who are healthier are more productive. People who are healthier are smarter.

— Lawrence Summers, economist and former Harvard president, Health as an economic engine

I’m convinced that all someone has to do to be considered a writer is write.

— Ruben Reyes Jr., launched student Latinx literary magazine, A writer’s journey

I don’t know how to take solace in religion.

— Art Spiegelman, cartoonist,  Fathers, killers, God, and “Maus”

Are there other people who — if they had a couple of years to be inventive — could have done a ‘Revolver’ or ‘Rubber Soul’? Every bone in my body cries out, ‘No!’ But my brain whispers, ‘Maybe.’

— Cass R. Sunstein, studies behavioral economics, Why do some bands rocket when others sputter out?

We must acknowledge the harm that Harvard has done. But it is also important that we do not — as has been done in the past — bury stories of Black resistance, excellence, and leadership.

— Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Radcliffe dean, Slavery probe: Harvard’s ties inseparable from rise

When my son was diagnosed, I knew nothing about diabetes … I changed my research focus, thinking, as any parent would, ‘What am I going to do about this?’

— Douglas Melton, stem cell researcher, Breakthrough within reach for diabetes scientist and patients nearest to his heart

They gave me a choice between swimming in the women’s and the men’s team. The University was supportive of my decision, but if I have to break it down, the coaches were absolutely key. They were behaving like parents who love their kids first, and that was incredibly important.

—Schuyler Bailar, first openly transgender swimmer in NCAA Division I, Schuyler Bailar races toward his authentic self

Native students are using education not as a tool of assimilation to strip us of our identities, but instead to uplift and advocate for our own tribal communities.

— Samantha Maltais, first Wampanoag to attend Harvard Law, Student of history makes history

I was on the top of the world — a Navy SEAL going to Harvard — and I couldn’t write my own name.

— Sergio Lopez, veteran, A Navy SEAL who cheated death finds his voice

Facts and truth are matters of life and death. Misinformation, disinformation, delusions, and deceit can kill.

— Marty Baron, Washington Post editor, The danger of “misinformation, disinformation, delusions, and deceit“

It is harder for me to imagine a female actor striking a female comedian who made a comment or a bad joke. Then I start thinking: Is gender a piece of this?
— Anna Precht, director of McLean Hospital’s 3East Boys Intensive Program, Wait — what if Will Smith was just being a man?

Humans are the most social animal on the planet and conversation is the bread and butter of social life. We may not live by bread alone, but we die without it.
— Daniel Gilbert, social psychologist, Know why conversations either seem too short or too long?

I always joke that I live in Boston and it’s a city of 3 million people but I actually socialize more and meet more people when I’m at the South Pole.
— Marion Dierickx, researcher, Life on the ice

Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression.

— E.O. Wilson (1929-2021), biologist, Experience

What the hell — why don’t I just go to Harvard and turn my life upside down?

— Drew Faust, former Harvard president, Experience

People often ask me if I could go back in time, what would I most want to see and do in the world of the American Revolution? And my answer is: I’m a woman. I wouldn’t want to go back in time for five minutes.

— Jane Kamensky, historian, When abortion wasn’t a legal issue

Our individual liberties are not givens. Democracy is not something we can take for granted. Neither is peace, and neither is prosperity. But if we break down the walls that hem us in, if we step out into the open and have the courage to embrace new beginnings, everything is possible.

— Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, Merkel advises graduates: Break the walls that hem you in

There are so many bad things that can happen well short of civil war that I wish we, as a country, were talking more about.
— Jay Ulfelder, political scientist, We don’t need a civil war to be in serious trouble

In late 1969, had you asked the question, ‘What do you think about the environment?’ I think the most common response would have been, ‘What is the environment?’

— Denis Hayes, Earth Day co-founder, How Earth Day gave birth to environmental movement

Think about it: Grey parrot outperforms Harvard undergrads. That’s pretty freaking awesome. We had students concentrating in engineering, pre-meds, this, that, seniors, and he just kicked their butts.
— Hrag Pailian, researcher, When a bird brain tops Harvard students on a test

Psychologists have a certain way of studying intelligence. They have a certain notion of what intelligence means and how to test for it. I was kind of a bull in a china shop when I came out with my theory. Psychologists never liked my ideas. Educators found that it spoke to them.

— Howard Gardner, psychologist, Experience

Psychologists say that humans can handle four independent variables and when we get to five, we’re lost. So AI is coming at the perfect time. It has the potential to rescue us from data overload.

— Robert Truog, bioethicist, AI revolution in medicine

Both in politics and in everyday life, one of the worst things we could do is get used to death, treat it as unremarkable or as anything other than a loss.
— Susanna Siegel, philosopher, How death shapes life

That would be Natasha Rostov in ‘War and Peace,’ who goes from a most vital, enchanting, and unpredictable girl to the most boring and conventional of women, completely ruined by motherhood (and, of course, Tolstoy).

— Gish Jen, novelist, Who is your favorite literary hero, villain?

My own reactions to hearing music or seeing dance or theater that I really love is the almost irresistible urge that I have to leave as soon as possible.

— Laurie Anderson, artist, O Superwoman

The mere fact that you started with something … does not mean you were entitled to it.

— I. Glenn Cohen, law professor, One thing to change: Question that status quo

The real core of someone telling another to put on a mask is fear.
— David H. Rosmarin, psychologist, Soothing advice for mad America

It was really like direct action. It was like the radical feminists invading the Miss America contest, or the Black Panthers standing in front of Oakland City Hall with rifles.
— Michael Bronski, author of “A Queer History of the United States,” Stonewall then and now

In this situation, we don’t simply want to frantically struggle to restore the status quo because the status quo wasn’t operating at an effective level and certainly wasn’t serving all of our children fairly.

— Paul Reville, former Massachusetts secretary of education, Time to fix American education with race-for-space resolve

There is this idea of America as the shining city on the hill, as this example of democracy achieved, as the redeemer nation. … Baldwin is insisting, and I agree with him, that if we’re going to grow up as a nation, we have to confront that fantasy. We have to confront that lie.
— Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, Black progress, white anger

There’s an irony in the fact that a country that has always been predicated on reinvention and looking to the future now seems to draw its greatest strength from an event that happened 80 years in the past.

— Elizabeth D. Samet, West Point scholar, How “Good War” wasn’t all that good

For centuries, we’ve demonized the curiosity of women like Eve and Pandora, blaming them for bringing sin and evil into the world. Yet curiosity has served women well in our cultural imagination.

— Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Genuine heroines

I kept wondering what Venus as an enslaved person would be. Would she have ever imagined a future in which someone like me attending Harvard was possible?

— Suzannah Omonuk, poet, A poem for Venus

I see archives, now, as the richest source of real life. You never know what detail, what strange twist, will come together and open up a new picture for you.
— Irina Klyagin, archivist, Prized manuscript — and valuable lesson — unearthed in Soviet archive
 
Everyone has called me intense with that bad connotation, like, ‘You won’t smile.’ I’m proud that I’m intense. I’m not going to apologize for that.

— Aurora Straus, professional race car driver, Life in the fast lane

I went from thinking, ‘She’s my oddball great-aunt’ to thinking, ‘She’s really a genius.’

— Philip Deloria, historian, A colorful figure

Clarity is, of course, important. But for me, the really important thing in translating, even prose, is that all writing has a kind of music to it.
— Arthur Goldhammer, translator, In translation, he found his raison d’être

You cannot outrun a bad diet, nor can you outeat an inactive lifestyle.

— I-Min Lee, epidemiologist, Gorge today, sweat tomorrow? That’s not how it works.
 
Being at sea is a really pure form of living. All you care about are the basics of sleeping, eating, taking care of yourself, taking care of the boat, making sure everything’s working, and being totally aware of the weather.
— Jim Hammitt, professor of economics and decision sciences, Sailing alone, under the stars, and fast
 
Last week, about fifty Latin American asylum seekers were flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard on two flights arranged by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. A number of people aboard the planes had told reporters that a woman who identified herself as “Perla” had approached them at a shelter outside San Antonio and promised that, after being flown to Boston, they would receive work opportunities and housing assistance. It was, by all accounts, a callous political stunt, but a similar practice has been under way throughout the summer, with thousands of people sent by bus from Texas and Arizona to Washington, D.C., and New York. The Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, has threatened legal action against Texas, as has a group of lawyers in Massachusetts. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has asked the Justice Department to consider kidnapping charges in the case of the people sent to Martha’s Vineyard. President Joe Biden has accused Republican governors of “playing politics with human beings, using them as props.” Speaking at a gala for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, he said, “What they’re doing is simply wrong.”

As refugee experiences go, though, being put on a bus or a plane and ending up thousands of miles from a place one might have wanted to go, or thought one was going, is ordinary. When people fleeing violence and disaster seek protection from national governments and international organizations, they learn that beggars at the citizenship table cannot be choosers. A national government may decide to house them, for an undetermined period of time, in a hotel, a dormitory, or a detention facility; they may have limited freedom of movement or none; they may not be allowed to seek work to provide for themselves and their families. An international body such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees may recognize a person who has had to flee their country as a refugee and place their file in a giant pool of applications from which another country, some years down the road, may choose the person for resettlement. The U.N.H.C.R. currently views twenty-seven million people in different parts of the world as refugees; twice as many, by the agency’s own estimate, have been displaced but have not had their need for international protection formally recognized. Every year, less than one per cent of refugees are permanently resettled in a country that is willing to offer them the prospect of eventual citizenship.

Hannah Arendt—who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, lived in France as a displaced person, and came to the United States in 1941—observed that a refugee, a stateless person, who exists outside the framework of national laws, is by definition stripped of all rights. While we may claim, and believe, that people have rights by virtue of being human—that these rights are inalienable—in actuality, to exercise rights, a person has to be a member of a political community. Arendt called stateless people “rightless.” Their calamity, she wrote, “is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them.”

None of this means that asylum seekers should be put on buses or planes and sent to places they never meant to go—only that the preconditions for such treatment have existed for decades. The relative novelty is the weaponization of asylum seekers. “We take what’s happening at the southern border very seriously, unlike some—unlike the President of the United States, who has refused to lift a finger to secure that border,” DeSantis said, after taking credit for chartering the planes to Martha’s Vineyard. “We are not a sanctuary state. It’s better to be able to go to a sanctuary jurisdiction.” In other words, if Democrats like asylum seekers so much, they should take the responsibility for housing them. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, was more direct. After buses dropped dozens of asylum seekers in front of Vice-President Kamala Harris’s house, Abbott told a Texas radio station, “She’s the border czar, and we felt that if she won’t come down to see the border, if President Biden will not come down and see the border, we will make sure they see it firsthand. . . . And listen, there’s more where that came from.”

Abbott and DeSantis did not invent the tactic. In 2021, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenka arranged for thousands of people from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and other countries, who were in need of international protection, to fly to Minsk, from where they were escorted to borders with European Union members Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. Years earlier, Vladimir Putin’s Russia appeared to facilitate the passage of people fleeing Syria—where Russian troops were waging war on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship—to Finland and Norway, apparently as part of a larger plan to destabilize European democracies.

The Republican governors’ strategies, like those of the Eastern European dictators, rest on the cynical assumption that no one actually wants to offer refuge to people fleeing adversity. From Putin’s or Lukashenka’s point of view, the gambit worked. The influx of refugees from Syria fuelled the rise of far-right parties even in countries as traditionally welcoming as Sweden. Poland has created an open-air prison at its border which locals refer to as the “death zone,” where refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere continue to suffer inhumane conditions, even as the country has willingly received millions of Ukrainians fleeing the war with Russia. Six months on, however, Europeans are starting to run out of compassion for white Christian refugees, too.

What Putin and Lukashenka probably believe that they have proved—and what Republican governors assume they will prove—is that all talk of welcoming people in need of protection is just that: the sentiment will crumble in the face of actual asylum seekers. The Trump Administration, in both rhetoric and policy, shattered the historical myth that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The Biden Administration has done little to reverse the effects of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, including the Muslim ban, the first iteration of which—in January, 2017—sparked mass protests. The Administration seems to assume assurances that the border is secure will forever be more popular with the public than policies that can be interpreted as encouraging immigration.

Abbott, DeSantis, and their supporters are indeed calling the Democrats’ bluff. They may well succeed in fomenting tension and resentment, not unlike what Putin and Lukashenka have done in Europe. It’s not so much that residents of Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, D.C., will quickly tire of people seeking protection; it’s that the fundamental inhumanity of existing refugee and asylum policies suggests that they—that we—are indeed hypocritical to the core. ♦

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.One night several years ago, after filling up my car at a gas station and pulling away, I noticed a strange sound behind me in traffic—sort of a metallic clanking noise. It sounded to me like someone was dragging a muffler or bumper, so I started looking for the car to alert the driver. But no matter how fast or slow I moved, or where I turned, I couldn’t locate the car. At this point, I noticed people on the sidewalk pointing and laughing—at me. I stopped and found the gas hose still attached to my car. I immediately pulled out the hose and drove back to the gas station, where I was educated on the economics of breaking a gas pump.My memory of that night is odd because I was judging the behavior of another person, who then turned out to be me. The absent-minded professor was some other guy. Philosophers might say that in these rare minutes, my “I-self” (the seer of things around me) and “me-self” (the one seen) were mentally separated.This kind of separation is unnatural. Making it your permanent state of mind would be difficult and perhaps even undesirable. Each of us can, however, purposely change the balance of time we spend as observers and as the objects of observation—even without doing something as ridiculous as I did. And working to observe more than you think about being observed can be an excellent way to get happier.When you look into a mirror, you see yourself almost as if you were two different people—one who sees, and one who is seen. That may sound confusing, but bear with me here, because both versions of you are important. As the philosopher William James explored in depth, you must be an observer of things around you to survive and thrive, but you must also observe yourself and be observed by others to have any consistent sense of self-concept and self-image. Without observing, you would get hit by a car or starve. Without being observed, you would have no memory, history, or sense of why you do what you do.The trick for well-being is balancing your I-self and me-self. But most of us spend too much time being observed and not enough time observing. We think constantly about ourselves and how others see us; we look in every mirror; we check our mentions on social media; we obsess over our identities.[Read: You’ve probably seen yourself in your memories]This brings trouble. Research has shown, for example, that focusing on the world outside yourself is linked to happiness, while focusing on yourself and how others see you can lead to unstable moods. Your happiness goes up and down like a yo-yo, depending on whether you see yourself positively or negatively in a given moment. This instability is hard to bear; no wonder self-absorption is associated with anxiety and depression.Seeing yourself as an object rather than a subject can also lower your performance in ordinary tasks. Researchers have found in learning experiments that people are less likely to try new things when they are focused on themselves. This makes sense: When you pay too much attention to yourself, you ignore a lot about the outside world.The idea that people should spend more time thinking about the world than about themselves predates modern science and philosophy. For example, it is a core focus of Zen Buddhism, which is fundamentally an attitude of pure outward observation. “Life is an art,” the Zen master D. T. Suzuki wrote in 1934, “and like perfect art it should be self-forgetting.” My colleague Robert Waldinger, a psychiatry professor and Zen priest, explained it to me via email in this way: “When I’m aware of the self I call ‘Bob,’ it’s me in relation to the world. When that falls away (in meditation, or when I’m standing in awe of a waterfall), the sense of a self that is separate from everything else subsides and it’s just sounds and sensations.”In some traditions, the I-self is not just a ticket to happiness but a connection to the divine. Hindus seek to reveal their atman, which is characterized by an innate state of awareness in which one witnesses the world but does not get embroiled in it. Atman is considered a direct link to Brahman, the ultimate divine reality. This is consistent with Jesus’s teaching that “anyone who wishes to follow me must deny himself.”You will never eradicate your me-self, nor should you want to. But you can certainly increase your happiness by adopting conscious practices that lower the amount of time you spend in an objectified state. Three conscious habits can help us transcend this tendency.1. Avoid your own reflection.Mirrors are inherently attractive, as are all mirrorlike phenomena, such as social-media mentions. But mirrors are not your friend. They help even the healthiest people objectify themselves; for people with self-image-related maladies, they can be sheer misery. In 2001, researchers studying people with body dysmorphic disorder (those who think obsessively about perceived flaws in their bodies) found that the longest time the participants spent looking in the mirror (and thus focusing on the source of their distress) was 3.4 times longer than the longest mirror-gazing session of those who didn’t have the disorder.Take steps to make the version of yourself that the world sees less likely to pop up in front of you. You might consider literally removing all but one or two mirrors from your home and making a rule to not look at yourself more than once in the morning. I would also recommend turning off your social-media notifications, adopting an absolute ban against Googling yourself, and turning off self-view on Zoom.2. Judge not.To judge is to take observation of the world and turn it inward. For example, if you say, “This weather is awful,” you have just made a judgment about your own feelings—meaning you are now observing yourself (and assigning a negative mood to something outside your control).Making judgments about the world is normal and necessary; we need to do it in order to make cost-benefit decisions. However, many judgments are unhelpful and gratuitous. Do you really need to decide that the song you just heard is stupid? Try instead to observe more around you without regard to your opinions. Start by making more purely observational statements rather than values-based ones. Reframe “This coffee is terrible” as “This coffee has a bitter flavor.”3. Stand in awe.In his research, the UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner focuses on the experience of awe, which he defines as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” Among its many benefits, Keltner has found, awe diminishes the sense of self. For example, in one study, he and his colleagues asked people to consider either an experience in nature that was very beautiful or a time when they felt pride. Those who thought about nature were twice as likely as those who thought about pride to say that they felt small or insignificant, and nearly a third more likely to say that they felt the presence of something greater than themselves.[Read: To get out of your head, get out of your house]Spend more time enjoying things that amaze you. My friend and fellow happiness specialist Gretchen Rubin visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art almost daily. I listen to Bach’s music every single day and never fail to feel awe. Incorporating awe into your daily life might mean making sure you see the sunset as often as you can or studying astronomy—or whatever it is that blows your mind.One last exercise you might try if you have a free day: Use it to wander. In one famous Zen koan (a story that requires philosophical interpretation), a junior monk sees an older monk walking and asks him where he is going. “I am on pilgrimage, following the wind,” the senior monk says. “What are you on pilgrimage for?” the junior monk asks. “I don’t know,” the elder answers, adding, “Non-knowing is most intimate.”Some of the most intimate experiences in life come when you can observe your journey without expectation of some external payoff. Dedicate just one day to being like this senior monk. Start the morning by saying, “I do not know what this day will bring, but I will accept it.” Go through the day focusing on things outside yourself, resisting judgment, and avoiding anything self-referential. You could get in your car and go on a day trip with no set destination. But if you buy gas, do remember to put the hose back on the pump.What was your cleverest parenting moment? Please record an audio clip no longer than three minutes with your phone and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Your story could be featured on Arthur’s upcoming season of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast. Please include your name and location in the email or audio file. By submitting this clip, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and it may be edited for length and/or clarity.

 Good ideas/ShutterstockPoliticians from mainstream parties in the UK and Germany post far fewer links to untrustworthy websites on Twitter and this has remained constant since 2016, according to our new research. By contrast, US politicians posted a much higher percentage of untrustworthy content in their tweets, and that share has been increasing steeply since 2020.
We also found systematic differences between the parties in the US, where Republican politicians were found to share untrustworthy websites more than nine times as often as Democrats.
For Republicans, overall around 4% (one in 25) links were untrustworthy compared with around 0.4% (one in 250) among Democrats, and that gap has widened in the last few years. Since 2020, more than 5% of Republican tweets contained links to untrustworthy information. Democrats have remained stable and predominantly share information that is trustworthy.
Over the five-year period we studied, mainstream elected UK MPs shared only 74 links to misinformation (0.01%), compared with 4,789 (1.8%) from elected mainstream US politicians and 812 (1.3%) from German politicians.
Building on earlier work that showed how former US president Donald Trump could set the political agenda using Twitter, we conducted a systematic examination of the accuracy of the tweets of parliamentarians in three countries: the US, the UK and Germany. 
Together with colleagues David Garcia, Fabio Carrella, Almog Simchon and Segun Aroyehun, we collected all available tweets from former and present members of the US Congress, the German parliament and the British parliament. Altogether we collected more than 3 million tweets posted from 2016 to 2022.
To determine the trustworthiness of information shared by the politicians, we extracted all links to external websites contained in the tweets and then used the NewsGuard database to assess the trustworthiness of the domain being linked to. 
NewsGuard curates a large number of sites in numerous different countries and languages and evaluates them along nine criteria that characterise responsible journalism – for example, whether a site publishes corrections and whether it differentiates between opinion and news.
Our team looked at MPs from the UK’s Conservative and Labour parties and from Germany (Greens, SPD, FDP, CDU/CSU) as well as US Republican and Democrat politicians.
Members of the conservative parties in Germany (CDU/CSU) and the UK (Conservatives) shared links to untrustworthy websites more frequently than their counterparts in the centre or centre-left. However, even conservative parliamentarians in Europe were more accurate than US Democrats, with only around 0.2% (one in 500) links from European conservatives being untrustworthy.
We repeated our analyses using a second database of news website trustworthiness instead of NewsGuard. This robustness check was important to minimise the risk of possible partisan bias in what is considered “untrustworthy”. 
The second database was compiled by academics and fact checkers such as Media Bias/Fact Check. Reassuringly, the results matched our primary analyses and we find the same trends.

Read more:
Three reasons why disinformation is so pervasive and what we can do about it

The world has been awash with concern about the state of our political discourse for many years now. There is ample justification for this concern, given that 30%-40% of Americans believe the baseless claim that the presidential election of 2020 was “stolen” by President Biden, and given that around 10% of the British public believes in at least one conspiracy theory surrounding COVID-19.

One in 25 websites that elected national US Republicans shared were found to be untrustworthy, compared with one in 250 among Democrats.
Andrea Izzotti/Shutterstock

Much of the discussion of the misinformation problem — and much of the blame — has focused on social media, and in particular the algorithms that curate our newsfeeds and that may nudge us towards more and more extreme and outrage-provoking content. There is now considerable evidence that social media has been harmful to democracy in at least some countries.
However, social media is not the only source of the misinformation problem. Donald Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency and there are political leaders in Europe who have a poor track record. 
However, compared with the plethora of research that has focused on the role of social media, and the relationship between technology and democracy more generally, there have been few attempts to systematically characterise the role of political leaders in the dissemination of low-quality information.
Our results are interesting in light of several recent analyses of the American public’s news diet, which have repeatedly shown that conservatives are more likely to encounter and share untrustworthy information than liberals. To date, the origins of that difference have remained disputed.
Our results contribute to a potential explanation if we assume that what politicians say sets the agenda and resonates with members of the public. By sharing misinformation, Republican members of Congress not only directly provide misinformation to their followers, but also legitimise the sharing of untrustworthy information more generally.

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 964728 (JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from the Australian Research Council via a Discovery Grant to Ullrich Ecker, from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google), from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN), and from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. He also holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (no. 101020961, PRODEMINFO) and receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s Honesty Project). He is also the recipient of a Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He has worked with the European Commission on issues relating to social media governance and regulation.Jana Lasser receives funding from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 101026507.

Liz Cheney delivering a speech on Constitution Day. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)Hey,So, true story. About half an hour ago, I opened a great email from a Dispatch member (don’t worry, this isn’t a pitch). It was heartwarming and sincere, and it told a great story about how much The Dispatch means to him, his father, and their relationship. It was precisely the sort of email we love getting because it makes it all seem worthwhile. I forwarded it to a bunch of colleagues, saying, “Great email.” And then, right after I hit send, a ball of foulness that reason tells me was crow feces but that I strongly suspect was actually a fist-sized globule of orc phlegm landed right on my laptop keyboard, spraying stygian, chthonic foulness everywhere. It got in every conceivable groove and cranny of my computer. It ruined a perfectly good, just lit cigar, and it immediately sent my germaphobia into at least a 24-hour spike. I have now washed my hands so many times they look like I forgot to put   on rubber gloves when dissolving one of my victims in acid.What’s the lesson here, other than “fecal matter occurs”? I don’t know. As Immanuel Kant said when he wrote the theme song for The Facts of Life, “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life.”[Editor’s note for you young’ns: The Facts of Life was a TV show in the ‘80s. When it ended it was one of the longest running sitcoms in history until that point.* It was set in a girls’ boarding school. It wasn’t great, But back then we had only a few channels. The main character, Mrs. Garrett, had been the housekeeper on Diff’rent Strokes—a much more popular show—and she dispensed wisdom to the girls in her care.]But what do we mean by the facts of life? Let’s dispense with the materialist interpretation quickly. Science and philosophy don’t overlap as much as they used to, but one place where the Venn diagram is at its darkest is the nature of reality itself. Entropy is a fact of life, and that means for people, planets, and the universe itself, time is a scarce resource. Even in a world of infinite abundance, if you spend time doing X you will have less time to do Y or Z. You can’t even experience X again the way you did the first time. You can only read a book or fall in love for the first time once. Tradeoffs are simply written into the metaphysical fabric of reality.

Read more

At least for now the tide appears to be turning against Russia in its attack on Ukraine, which has recaptured wide swaths of land in recent weeks. The Ukrainian successes have spurred discussion in the West about the prospect for negotiations to end the aggression and at what cost. This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin began calling up 300,000 military reservists in the country’s first mobilization since World War II to replenish its badly depleted armed forces. Putin also said he would defend his country with nuclear weapons, if threatened by the West.
Philip Short is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow for the BBC, the Economist, and The Times of London, and author of the new book “Putin: The Man Behind the War in Ukraine.” He gave a virtual talk about Putin and Ukraine hosted by the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project at Harvard Kennedy School Wednesday.
Short spoke to the Gazette about Putin’s escalations of the war and whether there is growing reason to worry about how he will respond if Ukraine continues to make gains. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Philip Short
GAZETTE:  How does Russia’s position look right now?
SHORT: There are a number of elements which one has to bear in mind. One, and the most important, is that the war is not going well for the Russians. That may seem an obvious thing to say, but it’s the basis for everything that is happening.
Putin catastrophically miscalculated on several scores: He did not expect the Ukrainians to resist as strongly as they have done. There was never any question that he thought they were going to be welcomed with flowers. That was the kind of propaganda myth that was put around. But he didn’t expect them to rise up as a nation and oppose the Russians. He didn’t expect Zelensky to remain in Kyiv and lead the resistance. And he miscalculated terribly over the capacities of the Russian army and how extremely poorly it has performed in military terms. So, it’s not going well.
Is it a disaster? Not yet. One has to be very cautious about evaluating this because it is an ongoing situation. But clearly, they just don’t have enough troops on the ground to do what he wanted to do, so he’s had to escalate. This is a significant escalation, but he’s doing it pretty cautiously. He’d much rather avoid any mobilization at all because it risks fomenting discontent among the Russian population. He’d much rather that the war continued, or the fighting continued, as something far away which wasn’t really affecting most Russians daily lives. But that’s no longer possible. And now, we really are going into uncharted waters because it’s not at all clear that this partial mobilization will be sufficient.
If you look back at the last 20 years of Putin’s time in power, this is the first time he’s taken a major initiative that has gone seriously wrong, so there’s nothing really to guide us in how, in the end, he’s going to react. My instinct is that he will continue to escalate until he reaches a position where he’s sure he can present whatever the result is as an acceptable outcome for him. But we’ve never been in this situation with Putin or Russia before so, we don’t know how it’s going to play out.
GAZETTE: Should the U.S. and the West take advantage of this moment as it helps Ukraine put maximum pressure on Russia to end the war militarily? Or is that potentially too risky, and would it be better to seize this time to stabilize the situation through negotiations?
SHORT: I don’t actually see a contradiction between the two. The more that the Ukrainians can push the Russians back, the stronger their negotiating position will be. Eventually, all wars end either with complete defeat, in other words in a Ukrainian flag flying over the Kremlin, and that is not going to happen, or with negotiations. In this case, we’re looking at negotiations. And it was Emmanuel Macron, the French president, who said, “Geography is stubborn.” Well, it’s true. Ukraine is not going to physically move anywhere, and nor is Russia. They are going to continue to be neighbors, and eventually, they are going to have to find a way to live together. So, negotiations, yes.
On this business of pushing Russia back, one has to be very careful about or very much aware of Crimea. It’s possible to push Russia back perhaps. If the Russian army really continues to underperform, and the West continues to arm the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians continue to fight very fiercely, it’s possible to imagine pushing the Russians back to where they were before Feb. 24. I don’t believe it’s possible to push them out of Crimea. That I think would be a casus belli. Then kind of all bets would be off about how the Russians might react. Although Zelensky says we can push them out completely, and that’s very understandable in morale terms for the Ukrainians, it ain’t going to happen, at least not as far as Crimea is concerned.
GAZETTE: If Putin starts to feel as if he is losing the upper hand in the war or losing face at home, are people right to worry how he might react?
SHORT: He’s not reckless. He’s normally very cautious in what he does. And I think this “partial mobilization,” rather than a full-scale mobilization, is an example of that caution, a kind of an incremental approach. He’s not going to lash out totally unpredictably. That is something I don’t think is going to happen. The problem is, he is being pushed into a corner and if that continues, it’s very difficult to say, “He won’t do this” or “He won’t do that.” Because if he feels that his own position is threatened — which is not the case at the moment — or if he feels that Russia as a nation, Russia as a whole, is at a very serious disadvantage, then I don’t think you can completely rule out anything. When I say “anything,” I don’t see this leading to World War III. But the use of battlefield nuclear weapons if it gets to a really difficult state for the Russians? I don’t think you can rule that out. It could happen.
GAZETTE: What indicators will you be watching for to gauge what Russia’s game plan may be as winter approaches?
SHORT: On the Western side, it’s a question of how Europe manages to survive the winter. There are already fault lines you can see in NATO and the EU about how to react, what the long-term plans should be in Ukraine. But the fault lines have been very much kept under control for now. So that’s Europe. There’s the United States: What’s going to happen in the midterms? What is the buildup going to be to the presidential election in 2024? It’s not that far away. All those things on our side are going to be absolutely critical. On the Russian side, I think we are going to need to watch very carefully how public opinion reacts to this partial mobilization. And finally, what it all in the end depends on is the situation on the battlefield.

Welcome to Up for Debate. On Wednesdays, I round up timely conversations and ask readers a thought-provoking question. Later, I publish some of your thoughtful replies. (Were you forwarded this email? Sign up here.)Question of the WeekWhat are your thoughts or views about immigration? Feel free to write about politics, policy, culture, or personal experience. Emails about the recent controversy in Martha’s Vineyard are fine, but you needn’t address that particular news story to participate this week.(If you’re looking for fodder to get you thinking, here’s a New York Times article that gives a sense of how quickly border towns can be overwhelmed by an influx of migrants; an argument for opening America’s borders by Shikha Dalmia; Matthew Yglesias with an immigration policy argument favoring a bipartisan compromise; David Frum and I debating immigration politics; Frum’s skepticism about Ron DeSantis’s approach; a time capsule of how immigration was debated in a Republican primary circa 1980; and Reihan Salam, author of Melting Pot or Civil War, sharing his perspectives on immigration.)Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteDo you remember the text of the 14th Amendment? Every time I recall that it was the basis for finding a right to abortion in the Constitution, I have to look it up anew to do a close read:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Of course, Dobbs overturned Roe’s theory of the Constitution and returned abortion to the states. But now the Republican Party is divided about whether abortion policy ought to be decided exclusively in 50 different state legislatures or if federal restrictions are warranted to protect the life of the unborn––an approach some justify by pointing to the text of the 14th Amendment, reasoning that abortion deprives the fetus of its right to life without due process of law.Enter Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who surprised his fellow Senate Republicans last week by proposing a federal law that would ban abortion at 15 weeks, with exceptions in cases of rape and incest or if the life of the mother is threatened. His proposal is dividing Republican officials, in part because support for legal abortion varies by state and they see the bill as a political loser as the midterms approach. (Many Republicans would much rather be talking about inflation.) But a National Review editorial made the case for the proposal. “A national 15-week limit—two weeks into the second trimester—is a bit later than the legal abortion limit in several European countries,” the magazine states, “but it would nevertheless save the lives of tens of thousands of babies killed in America each year in gruesome late abortions.”Numerous counterarguments from a pro-choice perspective will already be familiar to readers––if they are unfamiliar to you, do check out the relevant bygone installments of this newsletter. Because today I want to focus on one of the reasons Graham’s bill divides the right, including some people who favor laws against abortion: because some of them really do believe in state’s rights and the tyranny-checking, power-sharing provisions of the Constitution.Put another way, the GOP coalition is divided on whether the Constitution permits a federal ban. National Review’s editorial states, “We are persuaded that the undoubted federal power to defend basic civil rights under the 14th Amendment extends to this issue, as Republicans have held in their platform for decades.” But the magazine’s staffers are divided on the question. On a recent episode of its The Editors podcast, Charles C.W. Cooke, who is himself pro-life, explained why he believes that Senator Graham’s proposed 15-week ban is unconstitutional:
The Constitution as written was intended to leave the federal government as a limited partner with the states. And the Constitution accords only a handful of powers to that federal government and leaves everything else to the state. So it's not a question of whether or not the founders and those who came after them after the Civil War were prepared to protect unborn life. It’s a question of at what level that protection is sanctioned by the limited powers that the Constitution accords. And I think that’s to turn around, having argued for 50 years, correctly, that the problem with Roe vs. Wade was that it federalized a question that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution––that it preempted the states at the federal level on the basis of mystical, inchoate, wishful thinking––and then to indulge that wishful thinking in the other direction is a profound mistake.
Roe was nonsense. It was unmoored from the Constitution’s text and history and original public meaning. We can’t really argue, can we, that the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment was to protect unborn life? …And so I don’t look at this proposal and reject it on the merits. I look at this proposal and reject it structurally. Certainly it cannot be justified under the Commerce Clause. I would assume everyone on the right agrees with that. Abortion or the prohibition of abortion are not commerce. They’re not interstate in most cases either. And it cannot meaningfully be justified under the 14th Amendment. I also think––and this is both related to the constitutional argument and unrelated––that this is a political mistake. I think it would be entirely fair for Republicans as a party to say, This is what we want to achieve in all 50 states. But I think the American public would be forgiven for regarding what Lindsey Graham just did as something of a bait and switch. I mean, again, forget the constitutional question; the rhetorical tone of the anti-Roe movement, [of] which I’ve been a longtime member for a long, long, long time, has been that this is a question for the states. That’s how it’s been sold.
Sorry to interrupt, but Cooke is about to talk about “substantive due process,” and some of you will find it helpful to skim this summary of what that means before continuing. Now back to Cooke:
We have just fought a half-century-long war against substantive due process, the purpose of which is to read into the various provisions of the 14th Amendment license for judges to make decisions that were not and are not warranted by the original public meaning. Now, I would love it if the original public meaning of persons applied to the unborn. But it doesn’t. There’s no indication that it does. There’s no legal case that it does. There is no historical record of the authors or debaters of the 14th Amendment proposing that it does. I just do not think that we can retain our credibility and... adopt our own form of substantive due process that has the same structural effect but different outcomes.
It is always interesting to see how intellectuals react when constitutional principles they have long touted suddenly advantage a different side in a debate that they care about. I admire Cooke’s consistency and the honest grappling of his podcast conversation partners.[Read: The weight of Trump]Gender Identity and Early Childhood EducationLast spring, I asked readers of this newsletter, “What, if anything, should minors be taught or told about sexual orientation and gender identity before puberty?” Your responses were thought-provoking; one wound up informing the feature I just published, “What to Teach Young Kids About Gender.” To write it, I spent a lot of time poring over actual lesson plans taught to preschoolers, kindergarteners, and elementary-school students in the earliest grades. I wound up focusing on a representative curriculum from a school district in Evanston, Illinois.Among my arguments:
Although American society’s approach to matters of gender identity is clearly still in flux, and reasonable people disagree on how best to engage students on the subject, some educators are writing progressive activists’ views into detailed lessons for young children. An alternative approach might promote inclusion in the broadest, plainest possible terms and reassure children: There’s no wrong way to be you. Instead, District 65 and other systems err on the side of saying too much and mistaking dogma for established fact.
While researching the piece, I also wound up in a phone conversation with Zoe, the Up for Debate reader whose words I found so helpful. Ultimately, there wasn’t room in the piece to quote her at greater length, but her thoughts were so smart that I thought I would share a bit more here.What to tell the youngest children about gender identity is perhaps the trickiest question, Zoe told me. “I don't think we can teach a theory of gender that will make sense to preschoolers, because in my high-school class on gender theory—that was mostly student-led, where we read academic work on gender theory—we couldn't come up with a theory of gender that made sense,” she said. She believes kids, even more than adults, possess imaginatively expansive notions of how diverse humans can be, and should be exposed to diversity of gender expression, as well as the fact that some people get labeled in ways that don’t fit how they feel.However, she thinks it is useful to distinguish between what we teach children about the world as it exists and how we teach them to understand themselves. If a child introduces a question like “What does nonbinary mean?” we should describe how it is used in the world as best we can. But we should also hesitate to introduce or emphasize labels in early childhood, because young children needn’t understand the labels adults impose on the world to see and respect difference––and emphasizing labels (even as adults contest their meaning) might constrain rather than expand their ability to understand themselves and their unlabeled feelings and affinities.“We’ve taken what are fiercely contested ideological issues and put them in a place that’s going to drive up the most opposition, which is young children,” Zoe said. “But there’s a middle ground where we’re not teaching ideology and theory, but just opening up a classroom so everybody can be a human. As long as they’re getting an inclusive worldview that allows all people that exist in their world to exist in the world, you’re set up for later questions of how do they understand themselves, because you've created a world in which any way they choose to understand themselves will not subject them to judgment or fear or loneliness or outright hate.”I hope you’ll give the rest of my piece a look.Talking It OutI’ve lately come across three examples of people with significant disagreements attempting constructive conversations about them in the audio medium. At The Fifth Column, my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams joins Kmele Foster and Adam Davidson to interrogate the concept of white privilege. At The Weekly Dish, Louise Perry discusses her recently published book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, with Andrew Sullivan. And at Common Sense, Patrick Deneen and Bret Stephens debate whether we have too much or too little freedom.A Republican Voter Explains HimselfEarlier this week I aired your explanations for how you’re voting this fall––and lamented that so few current Republicans wrote in with their thinking. A young man who describes himself as a conservative-leaning independent and civil libertarian replied by explaining his support for GOP candidates:
I’m currently in school abroad, but I would be voting Republican if I could. I’ve moved away from the Republicans on many issues recently (mainly abuse of government power in the culture war) and do not like the trend of Republicans walking away from federalism. In an ideal world I would vote libertarian. But that would be futile, because New York has yet to implement ranked-choice voting, so I am a tactical voter. I will vote against Democrats, who I believe are worse on most issues. I hope this helps you in your search for Republican perspectives, even though I am not going to be identifying as a Republican.
I asked him to expound on what specific issues Republicans perform better on than Democrats, in his estimation. His reply was a bit too long to include in full but here is a condensed version:
I’m a short, skinny white guy who lives in a majority-minority neighborhood. I have heard gunshots too many times. I’ve been chased by unsecured dogs and shouted at by groups of teenagers. I don’t feel safe at all. (Neither do the cops; they work in two-person cars only in my neighborhood.) I’ve seen condoms in the road, a syringe, and a guy injecting himself. There are broken bottles everywhere. I don’t care what you think about the police, but the Democratic regime is not working. Racist officers are bad, and should be fired, but policing is not racist. Democrats have overplayed their hand by buying into the messaging of BLM. I will not vote Democrat for any local race for that reason.
I am a traditional, religious person.
I dislike the moral direction that the country is taking. I don’t think that the answer is legislation, but I also don’t want Democratic legislation that cuts in their direction. Say what you will about Trump’s morals, at least he’s beholden to the religious right for political support.
The culture wars are morally important to me––but if Republicans really believe that “politics is downstream of culture,” they might not want to legislate the culture. Culture-war legislation is an unnecessary expansion of government that will backfire when Democrats take power. I don't like any form of LGBT education in public schools, but the conservative solution is school choice, federalism, and foot voting, not speech restrictions.
I don’t like the climate-change alarmism on the left. I think environmentalism should be more about immediately harmful pollutants, and less about greenhouse gases. I like some of the left’s infrastructure ideas, like trains, public transport in general, and a nationwide charger network, but that’s no reason to vote Democrat when the Democratic activist class is going to prevent that infrastructure from getting built anyway.
I am against most forms of gun control, but I think Republicans are being evasive at best when they deny that more guns = more deaths, even if it is not a linear relationship.
Republican election messaging is horrific, but I do think you ought to be required to present yourself in person and show proof of eligibility to vote. Immigration is not bad, but I think we should recognize that they are coming for America as it is, not the country it will be if we don’t assimilate immigrants properly. We cannot assimilate 2 million people a year. The U.S. is a superpower and should act like it. We are the greatest country in the world, and we should make people wait for us to take them in. That said, it is ridiculous that TSMC (a semiconductor-manufacturing company) was having issues bringing staff over. Skilled professionals willing to become citizens should be given an easy process, especially when they work in a field vital to national security.
As you can see, I basically agree with much of the Republican policy platform even if I’m not on board with their messaging, or occasionally I agree with their basic positions even when I disagree with their policies. I see general-election voting as a means to choose between two basic sets of policies. As I currently see it, the Republicans are the better option on policy, abhorrent as their mascot is. I hope I’ve offered a useful perspective.
[Read: What to teach young kids about gender]Provocation of the WeekIn Tablet, four faculty members at Princeton University have co-written an article, “Academic Administrators Are Strangling Our Universities,” that indicts recent trends in academia:
A new cohort of administrators zealous to reshape life on campus and off has fastened itself on institutions of higher learning—promoting their own welfare and power as a class through bureaucratic fads and mindsets that are far removed from the values of critical thinking and free inquiry. The speed of this hostile takeover is astounding. To take just one prominent example, the number of administrators employed by Yale University has risen three times faster than the undergraduate student body since 2003... The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that “noninstructional activities such as admissions, student activities, libraries, and administrative and executive activities” now make up 67% of the expenses of private for-profit four-year institutions.
What are we getting for this huge commitment of resources …? Today most universities lack core courses in the basics, but they do eagerly issue speech “guidelines”—overseen by the new bureaucracy—to police how faculty conduct classes. Similarly, campus administrators are reshaping students’ lives in their campus residences, mandating student attendance at freshman orientation sessions and panels aimed at forming morals and attitudes on subjects ranging from sexuality to identity to “privilege” …
Much of what looks to outsiders like student-led protests and campaigns is in fact the product of the determination of the new administrative class to shape campus norms… which not coincidentally make the case for the importance of their own jobs. The power of this class, which is parasitic on the mission of the university, is quite considerable: first, they select who gets onto campus … Once students arrive, they are pressured to think in approved ways, with those who dissent in particularly visible or annoying ways being subject to star chamber–like proceedings overseen by the administrators themselves.
That’s all for today––enjoy the beginning of autumn, and I’ll see you next week.Would you like to share feedback on this or any of The Atlantic’s other newsletters? Please fill out this survey.

If an American president announced a major speech, booked the networks for 8 p.m., and then disappeared until the following morning, the analysis would be immediate and damning: chaos, disarray, indecision. The White House must be in crisis.In the past 24 hours, this is exactly what happened in Moscow. The Russian president really did announce a major speech, alert state television, warn journalists, and then disappear without explanation. Although Vladimir Putin finally gave his speech to the nation this morning, the same conclusions have to apply: chaos, disarray, indecision. The Kremlin must be in crisis.In fact, no elements of the delayed speech were completely new or unexpected. Russian authorities have long intended to hold sham referenda in the Ukrainian territories they occupy. Putin and his television propagandists have been making subtle and unsubtle nuclear threats since February. Quietly, a creeping mobilization has been going on for many weeks too, as the Russian army has sought to recruit more men to replace the soldiers who it still does not admit have been killed, wounded, or exhausted by the war. But now that Ukraine has successfully recaptured thousands of square miles of Russian-held territory, the sham referenda are being rushed, the nuclear language is being repeated, and the mobilization expanded. These are not the actions of a secure leader assured of his legitimacy and of the outcome of this war.In part, the crisis stems from Putin’s fears that he will lose whatever counts as his international support. No ideology holds together the global autocrats’ club, and no sentiment does either. As long as they believed Russia really had the second largest army in the world, as long as Putin seemed destined to stay in power indefinitely, then the leaders of China, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, along with the strongmen running India and Turkey, were happy to tolerate his company.[From the October 2022 issue: The man who chased history]But Putin’s supposedly inevitable military victory is in jeopardy. His army looks weak. Western sanctions make problems not just for him but his trading partners, and their tolerance is receding. At a summit in Uzbekistan last week, he was snubbed by a series of Central Asian leaders. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told him that “today’s era is not an era of war,” and Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his “concerns” as well. On Monday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told PBS that he had urged Putin to end the war: “The lands which were invaded will be returned to Ukraine.” And those lands, he made clear, should include Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, following a sham referendum much like the ones it now plans to stage in other parts of occupied Ukraine.But while losing support abroad is bad, losing support at home is worse, and there are some signs of that too. Putin might not care much about the Russian liberals and exiles who oppose the war, but he may worry (and should worry) about people who are supposed to be on his side—people such as Alla Pugacheva, a Soviet-era pop star who has millions of mainstream followers and has recently proclaimed both her patriotism and her opposition to the war. Putin may also worry about the disappointed, pro-war nationalist bloggers, active on social media, who have been criticizing the conduct of the war for some time. “Mobilization is, let’s put it bluntly, our only chance to avoid a crushing defeat,” one of them recently wrote. No one has stopped or arrested these critics, perhaps because they have protectors high up inside the security services, or perhaps because they are connected to the heavily armed mercenaries who are now doing much of the important fighting in Ukraine. If their loyalty isn’t assured, then Putin isn’t secure either.At the same time, the Russian president has to balance the discontent of that heavily armed minority against the wishes of the mostly apathetic, mostly silent majority. For the past six months, Putin has been telling the latter that there is no war, just a special military operation; that Russia has suffered no losses, just some temporary setbacks. Given that the army is victorious and everything is fine, most people need not alter their lives in any way. Now events have forced Putin to change his language, but it seems there are limits. Thus he speaks not of a true mass mobilization—which would involve conscripting young men in enormous numbers—but of partial mobilization: no students, no general call-up, just the activation of reservists with past military experience. Supposedly Russia has 300,000 such people, though it’s not clear how many of them are actually fit to fight or whether there are enough weapons and gear for them either. Presumably, if better equipment were available, it would already be on the battlefield.Finally, and perhaps most important, the speech and a series of legal changes announced yesterday reflect a crisis inside the military. In truth, the Russian army faces not just a logistical emergency or some tactical problems but also a collapse in morale. That’s why Putin needs more soldiers, and that’s why, as in Stalin’s time, the Russian state has now defined “voluntary surrender” as a crime: Under a law approved by the Russian Parliament yesterday, you can be sent to prison for up to 10 years if you desert your guard post in Donetsk or Kherson (or change into civilian clothes and run away, as some Russian soldiers have done in the past few weeks). The state has also decreed new penalties for mutiny—“using violence against a superior”—and stealing while in uniform. If the Russian army were a reliable, enthusiastic, dedicated fighting force, then the state would not need to declare harsh punishments for deserters, looters, and mutineers. But it is not.[Anne Applebaum: It’s time to prepare for a Ukrainian victory]Over the next few days, the bogus referenda will gather headlines, and the nuclear threats will create fear, as they were designed to do. But we should understand these attempts at blackmail and intimidation as a part of the deeper story told by this delayed speech: Support for Putin is eroding—abroad, at home, and in the army. Everything else he says and does right now is nothing more than an attempt to halt that decline.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.About a year ago, one of the worst things that can happen to any climate journalist happened to me: I started to care about power lines.I began to care, specifically, about transmission lines, the subset of power lines that traverse great distances and carry electricity from one region of the country to another. You’ve definitely seen transmission lines—they run along those steel structures you sometimes notice on the highway, unlike distribution lines, which hang from telephone poles and connect to your house. (Thankfully, I do not care about distribution lines.) In the world of climate policy, caring about electricity transmission is roughly like developing a sincere rooting interest in the New York Jets: You have chosen to suffer.Transmission lines are the circulatory system of America’s power grid. Lately, that grid has been very sick. The U.S. experienced 64 percent more power outages in the last decade than it did during the decade prior, according to a new study from Climate Central, a nonprofit research group. That’s in part because the grid is getting old. Most of the country’s roughly 437,000 miles of transmission lines were built in the 1950s or 1960s and designed to last 50 years; those lines are now reaching the end of their life in a hotter, stormier, and more extreme climate than they were built for.Even if the grid was holding up fine, though, we would still need more lines. We need to electrify most of the economy in order to eliminate carbon pollution; by 2050, the country must build new transmission lines at twice the pace it does today, according to Princeton’s Net-Zero America report.But we aren’t doing that. Not even close. America has somehow slowed down its rate of new transmission construction over the past decade; last year, the U.S. built only 386 miles of new transmission capacity.[Read: A very California lesson on just how weird electricity is]There’s a way to fix this sorry state of affairs. Senator Joe Manchin’s so-called permitting-reform bill, which is due to be released today, will likely make it easier, faster, and cheaper for the country to build the kind of major new transmission lines that climate change requires. Yet these measures will come at a cost for environmentalists: The bill may authorize some fossil-fuel projects, and it may make it harder for green groups to block new infrastructure projects in court. The trade-offs may be dicey for climate advocates to accept, but its transmission components, considered alone, could very well amount to a win for the climate.One of the oddities of America’s economy is that there is no national electricity market. This is weirder than it might seem at first. After all, you can find iPhones, pickup trucks, or a loaf of bread at roughly the same price anywhere in the country. Even the price of natural gas is set at just one place—the Henry Hub pipeline nexus, in Louisiana—and it trades within a few cents of that price everywhere, Michael Skelly, a renewable developer and the CEO of Grid United, told me.But the cost of electricity varies enormously by where you live. It costs about 11 cents to run a dishwasher in Oregon, 12 cents in Florida, 18 cents in New York, and 22 cents in California. The problem is that the U.S. has three independent grids—an eastern region, a western region, and Texas—that divide into 22 subregions and thousands of utilities. Unifying those grids into one, which is possible by building new lines that go from region to region, would remedy one of the economy’s most glaring inefficiencies.Fixing the grid is also essential to encouraging the growth of renewables. Although the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow all the time, one of the two is usually happening somewhere in the country. The U.S. has unusually well-balanced renewable potential, in fact: In the West, wind and solar generate huge amounts of electricity during the summer, while midwestern wind goes gangbusters in the winter, Skelly said. The only way to tap into America’s renewable potential is by moving electricity across large parts of the country.But it’s much harder to build transmission than it is to build other types of energy infrastructure. If you want to build a new natural-gas pipeline, for instance, then you only need to go to one place: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, an independent agency. But if you want to build new transmission, then you need to win the approval of every state, county, city, and in some cases, landowner along the proposed route.These players tend to block new lines either by withholding their permission or by raising endless objections during the environmental-review process, a move that is possible even when a new line is in the obvious best interests of the environment. In 2009, Skelly set out to connect the wind farms of the Oklahoma panhandle with transmission lines in Tennessee. Because the Tennessee Valley Authority hooks into the East Coast’s transmission network, the project would have effectively supplied cheap, zero-carbon energy to Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. But as Russell Gold describes in his excellent book Superpower, that effort failed—after eight years of wrangling over permitting.The onerous permitting process can even hamper the government itself. In 2009, the Bonneville Power Administration, a federally owned public utility, set out to build the I-5 Corridor Reinforcement Project, a transmission line that would have connected Seattle and Portland, Oregon, to untapped but plentiful wind resources east of the Cascades. The agency prepared an 883-page environmental-impact assessment justifying the project … but after seven years, it could not get the permits to continue.That’s where permitting reform comes in. This summer, when Manchin agreed to support the Inflation Reduction Act, he forced Chuck Schumer to swear that he would introduce a separate bill later in the year to reform the onerous environmental-review process. Permitting touches many aspects of American infrastructure, and Manchin wasn’t necessarily thinking of transmission lines: He wants to expedite the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which will bring natural gas out of West Virginia to the East Coast. Since then, we haven’t learned a lot about the actual content of the bill, save a one-page bullet-point list and a brief draft reportedly watermarked with the initials of the American Petroleum Institute. (The lobbying group has denied writing or editing the legislation.)It’s possible to make a wholly conceptual case for permitting reform: In order to decarbonize, the country really does need to build more infrastructure than it’s built in a generation, and the nation’s environmental-review laws should accelerate that process as much as possible. But it’s also possible to build a conceptual case against it. Even without details on the text of the bill, Democrats such as Senator Bernie Sanders have called it a “huge giveaway to the fossil-fuel industry.” And Republicans have already demonstrated a desire to roll back environmental-review laws in ways that no Democrat would agree with.We don’t yet know permitting reform’s net effect on emissions, or even if the bill will become law, but upgrading America’s approach to transmission is poised to be the best part of the bill. Everything we know about the permitting bill so far suggests that it would significantly improve the country’s ability to build the transmission infrastructure that we need.Read: Not even a single Republican voted for the climate billBased on what we do know, the permitting bill will likely make three big changes to existing law to accelerate the sort of infrastructure we need to build more transmission lines. First, it would let the government declare that a transmission project is “in the national interest,” which would let FERC, the same agency that approves interstate pipelines, run a streamlined permitting process and issue a construction permit. Second, it would let the government set permitting-review deadlines for major transmission projects, so that projects could not get buried under an avalanche of procedural concerns. Finally, it would let FERC say who will pay for a transmission project.The most important of the three changes might be the final one, the question of who pays for a new line, Rob Gramlich, the founder and president of Grid Strategies and one of the country’s foremost transmission lobbyists, told me. Most transmission projects are not made by the federal government or by developers such as Skelly, but by utilities, who then must divide up the cost of construction among their ratepayers.“Transmission is a classic ‘public good problem,” Gramlich said, in that it brings lots of small benefits to many people, but nobody wants to pay for them. The bill instructs FERC to allocate the costs of transmission to the customers who will benefit from it the most.These changes to transmission would reduce U.S. carbon pollution by “hundreds of millions of tons a year by 2030,” according to a memo circulated by Gramlich’s group. That estimate might be a little high, John Larsen, the head of U.S. climate research at the Rhodium Group, an independent energy-research firm, told me. But “more transmission is very good for the country,” he said, “making it easier and faster and cheaper to get a cleaner grid.”For instance, if you don’t have an easy way to transport electricity across long distances, you might build three mediocre wind plants instead of one stupendous facility. Over the entire electricity grid, those costs start to add up; a recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory study found that it cost 25 percent more to decarbonize the electricity grid if you tried to avoid building new transmission at the same time.Building more transmission makes sense, and it’s one of the cheapest ways for Americans to reduce their energy costs while fighting climate change. That doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing. The same dynamics that make building new transmission hard may also make it tough to reform the system. We don’t yet know if Manchin’s compromise is, overall, a good deal for the climate. We don’t even know if it will pass yet. But we do know that like it or not, everyone is going to have to care about power lines.

Many, many millions of years ago, an HIV-like virus wriggled its way into the genome of a floofy, bulgy-eyed lemur, and got permanently stuck.Trapped in a cage of primate DNA, the virus could no longer properly copy itself or cause life-threatening disease. It became a tame captive, passed down by the lemur to its offspring, and by them down to theirs. Today, the benign remains of that microbe are still wedged among a fleet of lemur genes—all that is left of a virus that may have once been as deadly as HIV is today.Lentiviruses, the viral group that includes HIV, are an undeniable scourge. The viruses set up chronic, slow-brewing infections in mammals, typically crippling a subset of immune cells essential to keeping dangerous pathogens at bay. And as far as scientists know, these viruses are pretty uniformly devastating to their hosts—or at least, that’s true of “all the lentiviruses that we know of,” says Aris Katzourakis, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Oxford. Which means, a long time ago, that lemur lentivirus was likely devastating too. But somewhere along the way, the strife between lemur and lentivirus dissipated enough that their genomes were able to mix. It’s proof, says Andrea Kirmaier, an evolutionary virologist at Boston College, that lentivirus and host “can coexist, that peace can be made.”Détentes such as these have been a fixture of mammals’ genomic history for countless millennia. Scientists have stumbled across lentiviruses embedded in the DNA of not just lemurs, but rabbits, ferrets, gliding mammals called colugos, and most recently, rodents—all of them ancient, all of them quiescent, all of them seemingly stripped of their most onerous traits. The infectious versions of those viruses are now extinct. But the fact that they posed an infectious threat in the past can inform the strategies we take against wild lentiviruses now. Finding these defunct lentiviruses tells us which animals once harbored, or might still harbor, active ones and could potentially pass them to us. Their existence also suggests that, in the tussle between lentivirus and host, the mammal can gain the upper hand. Lemurs, rabbits, ferrets, colugos, and rodents, after all, are still here; the ancient lentiviruses are not. Perhaps humans could leverage these strange genetic alliances to negotiate similar terms with HIV—or even extinguish the modern virus for good.When viruses assimilate themselves into animal genomes in a heritable way, a process called endogenization, scientists generally see it as “kind of a mistake,” says Daniel Blanco-Melo, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Once cemented into one host, the virus can no longer infect others; much of its genome may even end up degrading over time, which is “certainly not what it evolved to do.” The blunders usually happen with retroviruses, which have RNA-based genomes that they convert into DNA once they enter cells. The flip allows the viruses to plug their genetic material into that of their host, which is then forced to manufacture its pathogen’s proteins alongside its own. Sometimes, a retrovirus will inadvertently stitch itself into the genome of a sperm or an egg, and its blueprints end up passed to its host’s progeny. If the melding doesn’t kill the animal, the once-pathogen can become a permanent fixture of the creature’s DNA.Over time, the human genome has amassed a horde of these viral hitchhikers. Our DNA is so riddled with endogenous retroviruses, ERVs for short, that they technically occupy more space in our genomes than bona fide, protein-manufacturing genes do. But on the long list of ERVs that have breached our borders, lentiviruses are conspicuously absent, in both our genomes and those of other animals; up until the mid-aughts, some scientists thought lentiviruses might not endogenize at all. It wasn’t a totally wonky idea: Lentiviruses have complex genomes, and are extremely picky about the tissues they invade; they’re also quite dangerous, not exactly the kind of tenant that most creatures want occupying their cellular real estate. Or perhaps, some researchers posited, lentiviruses were endogi-capable, but simply too young. If they had only begun infecting mammals within the past few hundreds of thousands of years, there might not have been time for such accidents to occur.Then, some 15 years ago, a team led by Katzourakis and Rob Gifford, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow, discovered an endogenous lentivirus called RELIK in the genomes of rabbits and then in hares, a hint that it had lodged itself in the animals’ mutual ancestor at least 12 million years before. In an instant, the lentivirus timeline stretched, and in the years since has kept growing. Scientists have now identified endogenous lentiviruses in a wide enough array of mammals, Gifford told me, to suspect that lentiviruses may have been a part of our history for at least 100 million years—entering our very distant ancestors’ genomes before the demise of the dinosaurs, before the rise of primates, before the land masses of North and South America kissed. “That tells us just how long virus and host have been connected,” Katzourakis told me. Through those eons, lentiviruses and the mammals they afflict have been evolving in concert—the pathogen always trying to infect better, the animal always trying to more efficiently head its enemy off.Knowing that lentiviruses are so deeply laced into our past can help us understand how other mammals are faring against the ones that are still around today. Two species of monkeys, sooty mangabeys and African green monkeys, have spent so much evolutionary time with a lentivirus called SIV—the simian version of HIV—that they’ve grown tolerant of it. Even when chock-full of virus, the monkeys don’t seem to suffer the severe, immunocompromising disease that the pathogen induces in other primates, says Nikki Klatt, a microbiologist and an immunologist at the University of Minnesota. The key seems to be in the monkeys’ ultra-resilient, fast-healing guts, as well as their immune systems, which launch more muted attacks on SIV, keeping the body from destroying itself as it fights. Such immunological shrugs could enable certain retroviruses to eventually endogenize, says Lucie Etienne, an evolutionary virologist at the International Center for Infectiology Research, in Lyon, France.Many mammals have also developed powerful tools to prevent lentiviruses from reproducing in their bodies in the first place—proteins that can, for instance, mess with viral entry or replication, or prevent new viral particles from busting out of already infected cells. Viruses, too, can mutate and evolve, far faster than animals can. That’s given the pathogens plenty of chances to counteract these defenses; HIV, for instance, has no trouble sidestepping or punching through many of the shields that human cells raise against it.[Read: Could genetics be the key to never getting the coronavirus?]But take the equivalent immune-defense protein from a monkey, and HIV “cannot degrade that,” says Michael Emerman, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Other primates have had different infectious histories from ours, which have shaped their immune evolution in distinct ways. Studying those primates’ genomes—or maybe even the genomes of mammals that are carrying lentiviruses as neutered genetic cargo—might eventually inspire therapies that “augment our immunity,” Emerman told me. At the very least, such experiments could point scientists to lentiviruses’ common weak spots: the parts of the virus that ancient immune systems once targeted successfully enough that their hosts survived to tell the tale. “Evolution has already taught us the best places to target retroviruses,” says Maria Tokuyama, a virologist at the University of British Columbia. “Why not push for the types of interactions that we already know have worked?”Another, perhaps more radical idea might yet give way to an HIV cure: speeding the path toward endogenization—allowing lentiviruses to tangle themselves into our genomes, in the hopes that they’ll stay permanently, benignly put. “We could figure out a way to silence the virus, such that it’s there but we don’t care about it,” says Oliver Fregoso, a virologist at UCLA. One of the holy grails of HIV research has always been cooking up a vaccine that could prevent infection—an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. But if some sort of gentle armistice can be reached, Boston College’s Kirmaier told me, “maybe we don’t need to go that far.”Cedric Feschotte and Sabrina Leddy, virologists at Cornell, are among those pushing for such an intervention. They’re capitalizing on HIV’s tendency to go dormant inside cells, where it can hide from some of our most powerful antiretroviral drugs. The virus essentially “plays dead,” Leddy told me, then reawakens when the coast is clear. But if HIV could be silenced stably, its rampage would end when it jammed itself into the genome. “We’re hoping to emulate this natural path that ERVs have taken,” where they’re effectively locked in place, Leddy said. The imprisoned viruses could then be excised from cells with gene editing.The idea’s ambitious and still a way off from yielding usable treatments. But if it works, it could produce an additional perk. After setting up shop inside us, our viral tenants can start to offer their landlord benefits—such as fighting off their own active kin. In recent years, researchers have found that some animals, including cats, chickens, mice, primates, sheep, and even humans, have been able to co-opt proteins from certain endogenous retroviruses to create blockades against incoming viruses of similar ilk. Blanco-Melo and Gifford were part of a team that made one such discovery in 2017, describing an ERV that ancient monkeys and apes might have used to strip viral entryways off the surfaces of their cells. When encountering an ERV-ed-up host, the infectious, still-pathogenic version of that ERV would no longer have been able to get in.
Eventually, the active retrovirus “just went extinct,” Blanco-Melo told me—an outcome that he thinks could be attributable to the antics of its endogenous counterpart. It’s a devious move, essentially a way to “turn the virus against itself,” Kirmaier said. This sort of friendly-fire tactic may already be at work among lentiviruses, duking it out inside and outside host genomes: Species with endogenous lentiviruses usually aren’t bedeviled by active lentiviruses, at least none that has been identified yet, Fregoso told me. With any luck, the same could someday be true for HIV, the virus little more than a memory—or an idle fragment in our cells.

A recent study of multivitamin use and memory in older adults is getting a lot of press and definitely needs to be put into perspective. Let’s begin with a quick review of the literature so far.

The clinical question is whether or not vitamin supplementation can improve memory or decrease the decline in memory as we age. Obviously there are a lot of subquestions here – if so, in which subpopulations, supplementing with which vitamins, and at what dose? There are also many possible outcomes to measure – attention, immediate recall, long term recall, verbal performance, and prevention of a diagnosis of dementia. There is an incredible amount of permutations. However, we can start with the most basic question and then try to drill down from there – is there any cognitive benefit to taking a multivitamin (MVM) in the general population or the general older population?

This question is actually hard to answer in the literature, as there are many study differences, overall study quality is generally low, and the findings are mixed. This 2021 systematic review specifically looked at B-vitamins and cognitive decline. B-vitamins are of special interest because they can decrease a metabolic product in the blood known as homocysteine. High levels of homocysteine are linked to poor vascular health and can increase the risk of blood clots and contribute to dementia and cognitive decline. The review found that B-vitamins specifically can delay cognitive decline in older adults, but larger and more rigorous clinical trials are needed to confirm this benefit.

Of note, a 2016 review looking specifically at different trials of B-vitamins in dementia found:

Most homocysteine-lowering trials with folate and vitamins B6 and/or B12 tested as protective agents against cognitive decline were poorly designed by including subjects unlikely to benefit during the trial period. In contrast, trials in high-risk subjects, which have taken into account the baseline B vitamin status, show a slowing of cognitive decline and of atrophy in critical brain regions, results that are consistent with modification of the Alzheimer’s disease process.

In other words, the protective effect of B-vitamins may only occur in those with baseline low B-vitamin levels and/or high homocysteine levels.

Other systematic reviews of MVM use in the general population find either no benefit or limited benefit. For example, the linked review found small benefit for immediate recall only, with no benefit for delayed recall or other cognitive functions measured. And also, the reviews generally conclude that the existing data is insufficient to adequately address the question. So there is definitively room for a larger and more rigorous study, and that is exactly the hole the current study seeks to fill.

The researchers in the current study actually had four treatment groups – cocoa extract plus placebo, MVM plus placebo, cocoa extract plus MVM, and just placebo. There were 2,262 subjects total enrolled in the study and evenly divided among the four groups. This was a three-year study, and so is larger and longer than other studies of MVM use and cognition. The assessment of the subjects was done over the phone, which is actually fine as the various cognitive exams can be done entirely verbally.

They found that all groups improved on all measures over the three years. This was expected and is due to the practice effect – subjects get better at the cognitive tasks with practice. They also generally plateaued between year 2 and 3 – also an expected pattern with the practice effect. So comparisons to baseline were essentially meaningless. All that mattered was comparison to placebo. There was a pretty high drop out rate:

Of enrolled participants, 2082 (92%) completed the cognitive assessment at Year 1, 1906 (84%) at Year 2, 1790 (79%) at Year 3, and 1732 (77%) in all 3 years of follow-up.

It’s hard to know the effects of this on the outcome, but such high dropout rates are a problem. That aside, the results showed a benefit for cognitive performance in the MVM vs placebo. There was no benefit for the cocoa extract vs placebo, and no addition benefit for adding cocoa extract to MVM. However, the authors also did a pre-planned subgroup analysis, looking at subject with baseline cardiovascular disease (CVD) and without. Those with CVD had a greater benefit from MVM use, and were the only subgroup that had a cognitive decline in the placebo group (as I stated, all other groups improved throughout the study). There was still a benefit for the non-CVD group, however, just not as dramatic.

For me, there is one glaring omission in this study – they did not evaluate baseline vitamin level or homocysteine levels. It is therefore possible that the entire effect seen in this study comes from the effect of B-vitamins on lowering homocysteine levels, which is consistent with the fact that the group who seemed to benefit the most from MVM use had baseline CVD. Also, I just want to emphasize that CVD is a major risk factor for dementia and cognitive decline.

This may all seem pedantic, but messaging to the public is critical. First, there is no evidence that MVM use improved cognition, as many mainstream outlets are reporting. It is far more likely, as the authors acknowledge, that MVM use simply decreased the decline in cognition in this older population. Therefore young healthy people should not expect any cognitive benefit to MVM use.

Further, it seems likely that the observed benefit here may be due to simply treating low B-vitamin and/or high homocysteine levels in this population, something which is already fairly well established. It is far better for people to have regular medical care in this age group, which includes measuring vitamin and metabolic levels and targeted supplementation, with monitoring, when appropriate. We would like to know, for example, which vitamins levels in particular are low. Also, not everyone responds to oral B12 supplementation and may require B12 injections. Thinking that a daily MVM will have you covered, therefore, may be counterproductive.

Also, this study only looked at cognition. Large reviews of hundreds of thousands of subjects have found not only is there no benefit to routine MVM use, some vitamins (like vitamin E) may be harmful in high doses. Routine MVM use, therefore, appears to be a harmful strategy, wasting money for most people and potentially resulting in excess supplementation with harmful effects. The proper messaging, in my opinion, is that older patients should be getting regular health visits, part of which will include monitoring nutritional factors which may lead to targeted evidence-based supplementation.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.Several years ago, I asked readers to tell me what other people didn’t understand or appreciate about their job. I got hundreds of fascinating, funny, outraged, counterintuitive, and illuminating replies. Now I want to do it again. What’s the one thing that most people don’t understand or appreciate about your job? Email me a sentence, a paragraph, or an essay—anything you want, really—to AboutMyJobWIP@gmail.com. In two weeks or so, I’ll publish my favorite replies.I’ll default to publishing anonymously. But I’d love to include a little bit of detail (which can make for a better reading experience). So if you feel comfortable, let me know your first name, or even your first initial, and your city.  I want to do this for three reasons.The first is that I think other people’s jobs are just plain interesting.Second, I live in an economy of labor specialization, which means that my life depends on a tapestry of labor that is ultimately inscrutable to me. I buy coffee that I don’t know how to harvest or package. I drive a car that I don’t know how to build or repair. I live in a home that I don’t know how to construct—or even, as my wife would attest, how to fix when something in it breaks. I’d like to be a bit less alienated from the production of my own existence.Third, in an age of political polarization and internet-mediated interactions, certain stereotypes have accreted around certain jobs that are considered high status versus low status, and conservative versus liberal. Emerging from our bubbles to hear about the lives of people we might not usually come across is always useful, and especially now.That’s all from me. I want to hear from you! Please write from the heart. If you need any inspiration, here are four of my favorite replies—short, medium, and long—from the last time we ran this experiment.The Opera Singer“We sing without microphones about 99% of the time.”The Journalist“The purpose of opinion journalism is: to generate ideas … to get on television … to make money.”The purpose of opinion journalism is …1)  … to make money.2)  … to attract an audience.3)  … to influence people.4)  … to generate ideas.5)  … to advance conversations.6)  … to help air different sides of a debate.7)  … to help the political prospects of your ideological coalition.8)  … to disparage ideological adversaries.9)  … to raise the political price of trying you or your former colleagues for war crimes.10)  … to earn a living as a writer.11)  … to get on television.12)  … to produce an intellectually honest argument.13)  … to accrue social prestige.Insofar as you see animosity among opinion journalists, the root of it is often different value judgments about which of these things, or combination of these things, is or should be our object.The Professional Soldier“Some of the most free-thinking people in the United States are in the US Army.”Hollywood portrays Soldiers in many different ways. Sometimes we are burnt out social misfits that are incapable of fitting in and plagued by PTSD and associated terrors.  Sometimes we are the devil-may-care thrill seekers that are an equal danger to the enemy and ourselves.The reality is very different. The thing that surprises people is that some of the most free-thinking people in the United States are in the US Army. The problems that we have to contend with require innovative solutions and given the breadth of educational backgrounds of Army Officers, you find some incredibly adaptive people.The Fashion Model“Here it is, plain and simple: Some girls eat, some don’t.”Number 1: Do you have aspirations to be on America’s Next Top Model?I already have an agency. They found me, they instilled some belief that I will make them money. They gave me a contract, now they send me out on castings that will (fingers crossed) get me work. I go to my castings, I give clients my book and comp(osite) card, I leave. There is a 99 percent chance I will not get it. I move on to the next. Reality show be damned, this is a business.Number 2: Wait, so you must make a ton of money, right?Well, you can. And people do. I know models and commercial actors who can go for 10,000 dollar days—and then get residuals. It’s madness. It changes by the person, the ‘look,’ the size, how you looked at someone wrong or right, or if the casting director was hung-over or not that day. It also depends on how your agency is promoting your specific look to a client. If you are more of a commercial model, you won't be submitted for a fashion editorial and vice versa—once again, all depending on the client and the requirements.The large markets (New York, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles) are very model-saturated and it’s harder and harder to get clients to book new people when they have used a lot of the same models for years. This is especially so in the commercial industry, (Target, Old Navy, Payless, Amazon, etc). So, just as anyone in the freelance world knows—it’s trial by fire. You live on an everlasting roller coaster ride that takes you wherever it pleases.Number 3: But it’s okay when you book a job, right? Because they pay you right away and you just move on to the next job?I wish it were that easy. By agency/client relations, they have 60-90 days to pay their till. That in itself is not binding, let alone enforced. Some of the biggest money jobs I’ve had have taken almost six months to pay, while the smaller jobs (think in the 300-500 dollar range, editorial rate—if there is one), pay within the bracket. You would think those massive clients would be more than happy to shed off a grand for your time within those three months? [Insert sad jalopy horn sound here] They are more likely to take their time, knowing that they are a huge company who books continuously through your agency—and they will.Number 4: Well, when you do get your money finally, it must be pretty rewarding?It is, it really is. It’s even more so rewarding when you see those images/commercials that you are in and were actually paid for. It keeps you in it and keeps you working hard.But, don’t forget that as an agency-signed model, you are contract bound. They do find you the work, send your book to clients, print your comp-cards, host your digital book on their website—so they will take a percentage and charge where necessary, as they should. Though, it is in your own self (business) interest to check and recheck where the money is going and how often it’s going out with every paycheck you’re doled out.Number 5: So, you’re a model. You don’t eat then, right? None of you eat, that’s just what you do.I cannot tell you how much this is asked of me, it’s even more of a stigma propagated within my own work environment. It is also something that gives me the most anxiety about the way that my industry is viewed. Here it is, plain and simple—some girls eat, some don’t. Some work for the measurements on the back of their comp-card, some don’t at all. Some are forced to lose weight by their agencies; some are dropped from their contracts for it. It’s a variant situation with a lot of sad outcomes. As an appearance-only based profession, no one cares how you can deliver a line or cry on cue like an actor—it’s solely based in the way you appear on camera and how a piece of clothing looks on you. This is a topic I can go on about forever, but I will spare you.When I tell people what I do, and receive such questions, I always say, “It is about a bottom line, and you are it.” All you can do is enjoy your time, go to your castings and give it your best—all without losing yourself. It’s possible. I’m sure it is.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was quite clear when he spoke to former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Tuesday. When the United States ponies up more weapons and ammunitions for Ukraine, other nations will follow, Zelensky said.

"When the USA gives Ukraine artillery, then other countries support us and also provide it," Zelensky said during a teleconference with Clinton and a panel of "The Clinton Global Initiative" (CGI).

Zelensky continued: "When the USA recognizes [Russia] as a sponsor of terrorism, the democracies of Europe will also support this initiative. Therefore, when you ask me what the USA can do to help, to be leaders."

The Ukrainian president was gracious for any munitions received so far, but said the United States' influence upon other Democratic countries was necessary to help stockpile Ukraine as war against Russian aggression wades its way into not just the seventh month, but begins a curve into the winter season.

"They have the artillery we need, the appropriate weapons. And politically, the United States could put pressure here," Zelensky said.

26K views, 3.1K likes, 407 loves, 350 comments, 251 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Володимир Зеленський: Щире та продуктивне онлайн-спілкування із 42-м Президентом США Біллом Клінтоном під час...

Zelensky also used the opportunity to chat with Clinton to call upon world leaders who remained neutral in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which began its latest chapter on February 24, 2022.

"You can't balance between good and evil, light and darkness. You have to choose a side. Every subject, every state is open, free. So they can choose a side, but they can't be in the middle," Zelensky said.

Zelensky furthermore said the United States and Great Britain should spearhead efforts to keep Ukraine secure, leading the way for the European Union to follow suit.

"I think it is very important that the USA become the first country to sign these security guarantees with the Ukrainian side," Zelensky said.

When it was all said and done, Zelensky called his encounter with Clinton, the 42nd U.S. President, sincere and productive."

The war of Russian aggression enters its 28th week on Wednesday.

Russia began building troops along Ukraine's northern and western borders in late January, and they began attacking Ukraine on February 24. Since then, there have been heavy casualties on both sides. That includes Ukrainian civilians, foreign fighters, Ukrainian military and nearly 55,000 Russians.

Russia has called upon more volunteers in recent months to help form a new group of fighters for the war in Ukraine. A "lucrative" cash bonus was offered to those who would eventually become the country's 3rd Army Corps.

Recent intelligence indicates the 3rd Army Corps is moving to the front via rail lines.

"In recent days, our volunteers discovered photos and videos of the transportation of Russian military equipment by rail. The video shows the full warehouse of the Buk complex, and the photo shows T-80BV and T-90M tanks," Newsweek reported.

Sociology professor, author, and social theorist Vivek Chibber is joining KK&F this week for an engaging and wide-ranging conversation. In his latest book, Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It, Chibber dives into how capitalism works, the dysfunction and inequality it inevitability creates, and how we might create a more just system. Chibber’s latest work is right on time. We are watching in real time what a disaster neoliberalism has been for human flourishing. War, famine, homelessness, and the threat of planetary annhiliation all loom large in the present moment. At the same time, there are some astonishing green shoots in American politics. Workers are joining in solidarity and demanding more. Just this week we learned that workers at a Philly Home Depot are the latest to join the union organizing wave. The labor movement has energy and momentum we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. Subscribe nowAs always, if you can’t wait for this week’s episode and you’re looking for up-to-date coverage of the latest in the news, we’ve got you. On Breaking Points, Krystal and her co-host Saagar discuss the “victory lap” the Biden admin has taken on the so-called resolution of the railroad strike — and its distance from the reality that railroad workers are facing. Then the major question: could we be about to witness the ousting of Nancy Pelosi? On Secular Talk, Kyle gets into a CNN report suggesting that the current Speaker of the House will lose her place if the Democrats lose their majority. What would that mean for the future of the Democratic Party?We’ll see you Saturday for the new episode (paying customers get to watch one day early via Substack). Everyone else can find Episode 91 on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.

The latest military assault by Azerbaijan’s oil-rich dictator Ilham Aliyev on tiny, democratic Armenia places the European Union, once again, in an awkward position. On the one hand, as EU leaders never cease to remind us, the continental bloc stands for liberalism and democracy against the rising tide of Eurasian autocracy. On the other, European leaders such as Ursula von der Leyen, who signed an EU energy deal with the very same Aliyev just a few months ago, feel somehow compelled to place the continent’s fate in the hands of anti-democratic strongmen, whether bullied by autocrats like Erdogan or Lukashenko pumping migrants towards Europe’s borders, or dependent on dictators like Putin or Aliyev for Europe’s energy needs.
It is unnecessary to debate whether this situation derives from hypocrisy or bad diplomacy. It is both, and at the heart of it, lies the fundamental conundrum facing EU geopolitics: how to defend Europe’s liberal-democratic ideology in a hard world where it is too weak to enforce its will, and the continent’s nearest neighbours are emboldened towards swift, decisive action by their total rejection of Europe’s moral norms. What the self-proclaimed moral superpower lacks is a basic understanding of power: where it lies, and how to use it. But worse, Europe’s leaders lack the fundamental willingness to act strongly and decisively in defence of European interests.
In his 1951 masterwork The Forest Passage, the writer and philosopher Ernst Jünger observed of pre-war German society’s meek subjection to the Nazi regime he despised that “long periods of peace and quiet favour certain optical illusions. Among them is the assumption that the invulnerability of the home is founded upon the constitution and safeguarded by it. In reality, it rests upon the father of the family who, accompanied by his sons, appears with the axe on the threshold of his dwelling.” A naive and self-regarding faith in the smooth functioning of liberal institutions serves only to render you powerless when faced with a challenger who does not respect the rules of your game: ultimately, freedom and security depend on your willingness to wield power yourself, and to actively defend your liberty and way of life.

Nearly seven months into Putin’s war in Ukraine, we see this is the essential challenge facing Europe today. The US security umbrella has rendered Europe weak and powerless, believing that it could sway the rest of the world towards its governing philosophy through offering trade deals as carrots, relying on America’s offstage presence to wield the stick. Yet the continent now finds itself a geopolitical pygmy, bullied by autocrats like Putin, Erdogan and Lukashenko, structurally at the mercy of more assertive actors. This winter we shall endure the results: just as Covid finally revealed our continent’s structural dependency on Chinese manufacturing, so has Putin’s invasion of Ukraine revealed our dependence on Russian energy to sustain not just our industrial capacity but the very building blocks of modern, middle-class life.
Commentators who once lauded figures such as Merkel have suddenly perceived, too late, that there is nothing very liberal or admirable about subjecting your people to the whims of illiberal tyrants. Yet Merkel’s sudden fall from grace shows us only half of the equation: the nature of European institutions, built around myths of ever-expanding liberal progress, remains the same. History has moved on, but Europe’s governance has remained infantilised, stuck in a vanished past. Even after Merkel, Europe remains ruled by Merkelians and institutions expressly designed to stymie the swift and decisive action a world of crisis and competition demands.
In his 2019 book The Strongmen, the German political theorist Hans Kribbe distils his rare policy experience of having worked for both the European Commission and Putin’s government to claim that to survive an anarchic world, Europe will have to adopt many of the manners of the archetypal strongman. It was no more a call for an actual European strongman than Hobbe’s Leviathan was a demand for rule by monstrous giants: Kribbe uses the term more as a metaphor for comfort with executive power than as a political roadmap.
The strongman, as he notes, citing de Gaulle as an example, differs from the dictator or the classic totalitarians of the 20th century in that his transcendence of the ordinary rules is always limited in time. Born of crisis, the strongman’s brief but decisive display of executive power aims to unblock a congested system — a great reset if you will — allowing the ordinary functions of the state to return, reinvigorated, once the crisis of the day has been surpassed. Unlike the fascists or communists of the past, he is not ideological: ”the strongman lives in an embattled, chaotic and post-ideological present, not an idealised future”. The language of consensus and persuasion can only work so far in an illiberal world: “Europe should be fluent in its liberal values, but it should also be strong. It must become aware that it is but one community in a pluralistic world that is potentially hostile, and that may destroy it.”
Kribbe likens 21st-century Europe to 19th-century China, which even as European powers seized its territory and imposed humiliating terms on the Middle Kingdom, retreated to a smug and self-defeating certainty in the superiority of its values and political system. “Only after suffering humiliation after humiliation did China conclude that its cultural sophistication would not protect its freedom,” Kribbe notes, adding that: “Today, if Europe clings to the notion that the world just wishes to emulate its model, be taught by it, it risks making the same mistake. It will tell strongmen like Putin and Erdogan to behave or go home, and they will only laugh and go about their business as before.” Indeed, Kribbe observes darkly: “if Europe’s position is that the truthfulness of its liberal values suffices to secure its sovereignty, it may need its own century of humiliation to discover that only the strong can be free.” As a vision of a better world, Europe’s idealism and commitment to persuasion and consensus may be admirable, but it is no roadmap to navigating an anarchic world of competing states.
There are echoes of Kribbe’s analysis in Macron’s landmark speech to the conference of French ambassadors earlier this month, in which he observed that for things to stay the same for Europe, everything must change. “The economic order, open, liberal capitalism… has gone out of order,” he said. “The reality is that the pandemic has fractured production lines. It has re-regionalised, sometimes re-nationalised, certain production chains. And I think it has permanently de-globalised a large part of world production.”
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Similarly, in the political sphere, Macron observed, “we are living in the beginning of an illiberal moment”. Indeed, “geopolitics is gradually being structured around a competition between the United States and China”, in which China “can legitimately challenge” the American-led order and “redefine the rules of the international game”. The result, for Macron, is that “we will also have to rearm ourselves morally”. Like Jünger, Macron understands that true liberty ultimately depends on strength and the capacity for self-defence. As he declared: “We must be a strong nation which, as I said, knows what the price of freedom is.”
What would a sovereign Europe, able to defend its customs and way of life against autocratic challengers look like? For Macron as for Kribbe, to avoid its looming fate as a helpless vassal of one great power or another, Europe must reclaim the language of power — and finally accept the reality that it is a sovereign polity among others, with its own interests to defend. Yet as Kribbe notes, for the ruling generation of EU politicians, the language and worldview of sovereign power is seen as somehow immoral, a fundamentally indecent relic of a less enlightened age. But delegating our security to America is no more moral or stable in the long run than delegating our industrial capacity to China, or our energy security to Russia: it leaves us at the mercy of non-European actors, whose interests are not identical to ours, and whose actions will always subordinate our security and prosperity to their own. As Kribbe warns, “Those who farm out their protection to the strong, also farm out their freedom. They can never eliminate the possibility of extortion.”
Adopting a Schmittian frame, Kribbe observes that it is only in the state of exception that sovereign power reveals itself. Yet, he warns, “given that they are designed as a bureaucratic and technocratic escape pod from the world of geopolitics and power, the EU’s institutions are not fitted out to project strength”. Citing Europe’s difficult and so far subordinate relationship with the strongmen of Eurasia as the necessary harbinger of a new age of European sovereignty, Kribbe terms the continent’s current predicament as “the age of encounter” — the encounter being with sovereign power itself, raw and vital. But we can take the Schmittian framing further: we still live in an age of exception, a period of ever-spreading, accumulating crisis, in which only those actors capable of bold and decisive action will survive. As Kribbe warns, Europe must decide just one great dilemma: “choosing strength. Is it a vassal or sovereign? … In a world dominated by power, no question is more important.”
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What the assumption of sovereignty would look like is hard to determine: it need not, and probably ought not, as Kribbe emphasises, mean the consolidation of supreme power in one person, but is better interpreted as an understanding of what sovereignty means, and a willingness to use it. In any case, Kribbe’s portrayal of the former EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as the continent’s chosen interlocutor with autocratic rivals appears misguided. Meanwhile, the longest-serving European leader, Viktor Orbán, though well-versed in the language of power, shows himself in practice more an accomplice to Europe’s autocratic rivals than their challenger. Perhaps Macron himself, one of the few theorists of statecraft and no stranger to a certain Gaullist temperament, would seem a better avatar — though the perennially hostile Central European response to his attempted geopolitical balancing act mitigates against his chances.
Arguably Poland’s decisive policy choices in Ukraine, and its rapid programme of rearmament is itself just such a form of swift, decisive action, which may soon make Poland the sovereign land power on the European continent — indeed, without the vital rearmament aspect, a similar case could be made for the UK. Yet what is certain is this: we live in an anarchic world of hard power, and the European Union’s current structure and idealistic worldview leaves the continent weak and almost powerless. Far from the nascent superpower it hovers indecisively on the edge of becoming, Europe, similarly wedged between rival empires, is as helpless at determining its own fate as tiny, luckless Armenia. The coming winter, and the years that will follow, will be harder than they needed to be. We must ensure at the end of this period of trial that we Europeans are never left this vulnerable again: Europe cannot survive another Merkel, nor prolong the vanished order of willed powerlessness she presided over.

Those visiting Romania for the first time will often be told that its association with vampires is really an unfair imposition, having mostly to do with Bram Stoker’s invention of a Transylvanian setting for his 1897 novel, Dracula. His tale, you will hear, is a typically Victorian confession of England’s own deepest fears — of pestilence; of pathologia sexualis, hopelessly interwoven with what would soon be called the “death-drive”; of uncouth swarthy continentals.
In the shadow of Bran Castle, once home to Vlad the Impaler, you might enjoy the irony of hearing this revisionist history lesson while surrounded by a whole gallery of vampire kitsch — kiosks with plastic fangs for sale; a Dracula face-in-a-hole board as diminutive and unthreatening as his descendants Count Chocula, of breakfast-cereal fame, or Sesame Street’s own Count von Count.
Listening to such lectures in the past, I would often find myself unable to suppress that exclamation, so completely taboo in our era of stay-in-your-lane deference: “Well, actually…” Because the truth is that tales of vampires existed in the Balkans long before Bram Stoker. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the figure of the vampire made the gradual transition from the proto-ethnography of the Balkans to the imaginations of Gothic littérateurs.

Most succinctly, we may say that the figure of the vampire emerges out of the confluence of three elements. The first is the real historical record of the actions of a certain Vlad Țepeș (1428/31—1476/77). The violent transgressions for which he became notorious were extreme — notably, impalement on rounded and greased spikes, carefully avoiding direct puncture of inner organs so as to prolong the victim’s misery. Woodcuts depicting his deeds were soon published in German books, and as these circulated the legends surrounding him grew beyond all human proportion.
The second element is the arrival of Germanophone Habsburg administrators in newly subordinated regions of Southeastern Europe, who had been influenced in their practices by the emerging culture of the Republic of Letters, which encouraged literate travellers in little-known places to note down and to report back to the metropole all rare or mysterious incidents. The third element, finally, are the ancient folk-cultural practices and beliefs that these humble clerks observed and documented.
Of particular importance in the revisionist lesson for foreigners in Transylvania is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism. “Dracula”, they explain, is simply the title, but not the name, of Vlad Țepeș, also known as Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler. He inherited it from his father, Vlad II, a member of the Order of the Dragon. In Romanian, dracul derives from the Latin draco, and simply means “the dragon”.
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It is not in fact in the castles, but in the villages of Romania that we typically hear rumours of the strigoi, which are in turn close cousins of the vrykolakas of Greece and the upior of the Slavic countries. These are, in all their regional variants, ghosts of the deceased, poltergeists who return to trouble the living. A common belief holds that one may prevent their apparition by sealing the coffin of the dead shut with extra nails, and by driving a stake through the chest of the corpse. Should one encounter a strigoi, some texts and traditions counsel the use of apotropaics such as garlic or holy water to ward them off. These folkloric characters thus share some, but not all, of the traits associated with the Stokerian vampire. There is as yet no strong association with bats, for example, or with hematophagy.
It is at least true, then, that Stoker’s rendition bumps the vampire up several social classes from where it had always resided in “authentic” folk culture, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. And it is the elevation of traditional village practices to a form of aristocratic decadence that enables Stoker to give his fiction a historical grounding, and to identify his own protagonist’s vampirism as part of an inheritance from none other than Vlad the Impaler:
“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode [a military leader] crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land?”
In portraying Vlad as a hero in the war against the Turks, the English novelist is channelling a historiographical tendency more commonly seen in Russia and the Balkans than in Western Europe. In the Orthodox lands, while his cruelty is acknowledged, Vlad is mostly seen as a valiant defender against the Ottoman menace, and therefore as a bulwark of Christendom. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, his significance as a military leader pales in comparison with his inhuman and gratuitous cruelty. Beginning as early as the 1460s, broadsides circulated describing the delight Vlad took in roasting babies alive and forcing their mothers to eat them, in hearing the low moans of his impaled victims as musical accompaniment to his meals.
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Horrific tales of Vlad the Impaler were not the only source of vampire mythology. Non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretches back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports, largely inspired by the learned journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666.
The first extant treatise on vampirism is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis [On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs], published in 1725, by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. In his work, Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that, within eight days [of his death], nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of 24 hours”. It is reported that: “As they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.”
The author of the report cited by Ranfft uses the word “vampire” in one of its earliest printed occurrences. He reports that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing”, the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:
“That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed.”
At issue in part was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way bodies decompose. While they often rot quickly, depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the presence of microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal breakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement only to be explained on the assumption that the corpse had been ingesting food — food, that is, or blood.
The difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death is a subject that reappears throughout the 18th century — not just in reference to vampires, but in numerous medical treatises. The most interesting example of such work is undoubtedly the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites several authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death”.
Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.” Soon enough, documentary sources such as this were sublimated into fictional stories about the undead, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Premature Burial (1844) being a prime example.
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The early modern explosion of interest in Balkan “superstition” is, as we have begun to see, in no small measure an effect of the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and in particular of the expansion of Habsburg rule into regions of the Balkans that had previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. This encounter triggered a long — and indeed still ongoing — habit of representing Southeastern Europe as a land of benighted and backwards belief.
In his contribution to the 1776 Dictionnaire philosophique, none other than Voltaire, who never misses an opportunity to scoff at people who happen not to be French, takes up the example of vampires not only as a measure of the distance between Enlightened Europe and those other parts, but also between the rationality of the ancient Greeks and the irrationality of their degenerated modern descendants. “Who would believe that the fashion of vampires came from Greece? This is not the Greece of Alexander, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Epicurus, of Demosthenes, but rather Christian Greece, which is, unfortunately, schismatic.”
Voltaire is a defiant atheist, but his polemical anti-clericalism brings him close to some of the themes of anti-Papism familiar from Protestant lands. For many Protestant authors, the difference between Catholicism and worship of the forces of darkness is but another case of the narcissism of minor differences. Voltaire, writing in this same spirit, speaks mockingly of a young sceptic who had dared to question the truth of a number of reported miracles involving the Virgin Mary, and who finally was won over to all manner of Catholic articles of faith as a result of exposure to folk-beliefs about vampires. In his satirical account, it was best for the weak-minded to shelter themselves from stories of vampires, if only because these can all too easily serve as a gateway drug to the Roman religion.
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Among Catholic authors, by contrast, we generally see not mockery of folk-beliefs about vampires, but rather a subtle, almost mischievous, effort to occupy the ambiguous space between affirmation and scepticism. Indeed, a convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. Which side, a reader constantly wonders, is the author really on?
Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Sceptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.
And yet it still seems to me that vampires are due a certain measure of rehabilitation. The vampire, I think, is at least as “good to think with” as the “philosophical zombie” that has historically been preferred by analytic philosophers. Zombies give us all of the conceptual problems about mind and consciousness, but none of the feeling, and are thus perfect water-carriers for whatever it is the analytics are trying to do. To “think with vampires” is by contrast to think about feeling, mood, and the dimensions of human existence these disclose.
In its essence, a vampire is a being that knows it is dead, and feels infinite sadness about its plight. This is a paradoxical situation to be in, since death is supposed to be the cessation of all consciousness. But it is also fairly close to what we imagine when we try, per impossibile, to imagine death. We do so, mostly, by feeling our way into it, until we can bear no more and recoil. We do so by allowing what that feeling discloses to us to count for something. And also in our dreams, notably, we encounter dead people with surprising regularity. They walk and talk, and give us tidings, yet there’s something off about them, by which we understand that they are dead. An impossible condition — yet there they are.

A longer version of this essay first appeared at Justin E. H. Smith’s Hinternet.

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Our writer Ian Bogost wrote two articles last month that both left me wondering: What do our modes of transportation say about who we are? I chatted with Ian about the end of the stick shift, the wobbly rise of the e-bike, and why how we get around sparks such strong feelings about our identities.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
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The End of ControlIsabel Fattal: You write in your article that you’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years. Why do you love them so much?Ian Bogost: The inspiration for the piece was the end of stick-shift manufacturing because of electrification. It made me sad on a visceral level, and I started to think, Why? If there’s a loss, what is the loss? I looked at a bunch of conversations on the internet and elsewhere, where people have this sense about why they drive their stick shift. They go through phases of justification for it. First they try to talk about its practical benefits, all of which don’t really apply today. Then you get left with this word: control. “I feel like I have greater control.” I feel like for me, and for a lot of stick-shift drivers, it’s a sense of being connected to a complex human-made machine that you feel in conversation with, rather than subject to its demands that you have to accept. That feeling is really rare now when it comes to interacting with devices of almost any kind.A lot of people have real qualms about the relationship we have with cars in America—it’s about masculinity, the taming of distance and expanse. But we don’t need those things to take the driver’s seat, as it were, all the time. I got so many emails; people sent me mail. I think a lot of readers had this same feeling, and they wanted a way not to think of the feeling as only being about the questionable or bad things about automobiles.Isabel: Right, missing your stick shift is not just some sign that you’re—Ian: A gearhead. And the reactions were not gendered in that way at all. But I had been worried about it. Oh my gosh, I’m going to do a piece on this, really? So it was gratifying to see that sentiment resonate.Isabel: You note that when the stick shift dies, we’ll lose “the comfort of knowing that there is one essential, everyday device still out there that you can actually feel operating.” Do you think it’s possible that any technology of the future will give us back that feeling?Ian: I’m really worried about this. I did a piece a number of years ago called “Why Nothing Works Anymore.” I wrote about the automated faucets in public restrooms—where you’re putting your hand out, like, Can I get the water to turn on? There was a story I told in that piece about going to a restaurant that had a throwback aesthetic, and in the restroom there was one of those towel dispensers where you just turn the crank, and the towel comes out.Isabel: I sigh with relief when I see those, honestly.Ian: Right. You feel that. They’re less and less common. The direction we seem to be going with everything is that there’s more and more layers of remove from its operation. One of the reasons I wanted to do the stick-shift piece was that this felt like the end of something. And I don’t know if we will get it back, unless we design for it anew.Isabel: You were much less enthusiastic about the topic of your next article, e-bikes. Can you explain why they’re “a monster made from bicycles and motorbikes,” in your words?Ian: I got this e-bike a while back, and it just felt off to me. I was really excited about all the things that make people want to ride an e-bike—commuting without my car, getting outside. But it wasn’t ticking any of the boxes quite right for me. The piece was about why it felt to me that the e-bike was in this strange no-man’s-land between bicycles and motorbikes.Isabel: Why do you think e-bikes haven’t managed to become cool?Ian: I got a lot of flack for this from the bike folks, and some of it’s in the eye of the beholder. But if you look at the way that both bikes and e-bikes are marketed as “cool,” they often do so by looking more like motorcycles. Everybody knows that motorcycles are cool. They have a tradition. I think the reason people like Vespa motor scooters is that they have a cultural tradition; you can imagine getting on one and cruising around Rome or something. If you’re a bike person, then bikes are already cool to you. But we need something outside the coastal cities that are enclaves of urban-cycling advocacy.Related:
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(Kristian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty)
The Man Who Could End the Netanyahu EraBy Jeffrey Goldberg
“Let us,” I said, “talk about the Netanyahu inevitability factor.”
Yair Lapid dead-eyed me as he formulated a comeback.
“Will you be kind enough,” he finally said, smiling, “to describe to the very smart readers of The Atlantic the office in which you are raising this issue?”
We were seated in the office of the Israeli prime minister. Not the principal office of the prime minister, in Jerusalem, but a satellite office at the Ministry of Defense, in Tel Aviv. Still, a prime minister’s office.
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A still from Spirited Away. (AJ Pics / Alamy)
Read. In her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, the writer Ariel Levy’s prose is immediate and often hilarious.And check out the rest of our list of the best books for a broken heart.Watch. Spirited Away, on HBO Max, is 20 years old, but rewatching the animated masterpiece is a gift.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Inspired by the concept of the “spirit animal,” I asked Ian what his spirit mode of transportation would be. It’s not a stick shift—it’s a sailboat. “I used to race boats in college, and it felt like the purest synthesis of nonmotorization and direct control I’ve ever encountered while moving myself through the world,” he said. (As for me: Does walking count?)— Isabel

President Volodymyr Zelensky is playing the role of a Ukrainian Churchill, minus some of the fantastical notions and with an infinitely better workout regimen. Like Churchill in 1940, he has been the indispensable man in a mortal crisis, without whom his country might well have been lost, and whose eloquence has rallied not only his fellow citizens but a larger democratic world.I recently met him in Kyiv, and found him as I had hoped—relaxed, optimistic but not cocky, determined, and on top of the details of the war for survival that his country is waging successfully. Zelensky’s key subordinates—generals and ministers alike—echoed his mood: realistic, courageous, and utterly committed to ridding their country of a brutal invader. They told our small group of American, British, French, and Australian experts brought together by the Polish foreign-policy think tank PISM what they needed and—guardedly—how they assessed the enemy’s military position.This was all reassuring and, with caveats, encouraging. But the trip also brought home the importance of that least romantic of military subjects, logistics. A visit to the transshipment points for aid to Ukraine, and discussions with Polish and Ukrainian military leaders, revealed some disquieting facts.[Read: Liberation without victory]In total, the amount of military aid being delivered to Ukraine is indeed impressive, and not all of it is publicly tabulated; some countries provide aid but prefer not to advertise it. But the supply system operated efficiently by Poland, the U.S., and others is underutilized, operating at just 60 percent capacity, according to the professionals with whom we spoke. More to the point, there is reason to think that it may be insufficient.Ukraine is waging modern, prolonged, industrial warfare of a kind not seen since World War II. Such wars are voracious consumers of all kinds of equipment and supplies. On some days the Russians have hurled 50,000 artillery shells at the Ukrainians, who have often lobbed as little as a tenth as many back. Yes, their guns now include superior Western models, but some of their suppliers produce fewer than 5,000 rounds a year. And yes, they are more accurate (some superaccurate, in fact), but as the Russian-military proverb has it, quantity has a quality all its own.And there are hidden difficulties as well. NATO has adopted 155-mm-caliber artillery pieces as its standard. That does not necessarily mean, however, that one country’s shell will work with another’s gun. Moreover, even when Ukrainian crews, who have put these systems into the field with astonishing speed, can operate them effectively, sooner or later every advanced piece of military equipment requires maintenance in a rear depot rather than on the battlefield. A large infrastructure immune from Russian attacks needs to be constructed for that.Some countries have courageously stripped their own arsenals to support Ukraine—Poland, for example, has handed over some 240 of its improved T-72 tanks (a third of its total inventory), even before American replacement tanks have begun to arrive. France has provided Ukraine with a comparable percentage of its extremely accurate CAESAR mobile artillery. But the sheer variety of aid, and the multiplicity of systems, means that the Ukrainians struggle to keep them all running and working together. They have displayed phenomenal technical ingenuity by, for example, firing American-made HARM missiles (which home in on and destroy radar systems) from their Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter planes. But in the end, now as for centuries past, nothing beats standardization.On top of all this, Ukraine is trying to rebuild its forces along Western-equipped lines, from scratch, and in the midst of war. As our Ukrainian interlocutors made very clear, they need a lot to win: the kinds of anti-air systems that will close the sky to Russian missiles and drones, so that Ukrainian forces can operate and their civilians can live free from fear; more long-range systems (particularly ATACMS missiles from the U.S.); infantry fighting vehicles; unmanned aerial vehicles for reconnaissance and strike; and much else. And they need those supplies at the appropriate scale.[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine is waging a new kind of war]That some countries supplying Ukraine trumpet their contributions is understandable. But the question must always be not how much has been given, but how much is needed. And here, despite the large quantities flowing to Ukraine, the fact remains that it is not enough, and that the logistical system can handle more.Some capable countries are unwilling to give at scale. Germany, which has supplied both military systems and a great deal of nonlethal aid, has declined to dip into its large inventory of mothballed tanks. Its foreign minister has insisted that in this crisis, Germany must lead; its defense minister has, in this regard, insisted that it must not.Most other countries, including the United States, continue to refrain from the level of industrial mobilization necessary. It is too much business as usual in the defense world, as one CEO recently told me. There are increased purchases, but nothing like the focus, resources, urgency, and willingness to sweep away bureaucratic obstacles and routine procedures that characterized America’s miracles of defense production in earlier eras.Some of the hesitancy, too, has stemmed from a patronizing wariness about Ukrainian capabilities. Yet if we have learned anything in this war, it is that the Ukrainians, smart and driven as they are, can absorb even the most advanced systems fast, and exploit them shrewdly. At this point, they know more about high-intensity warfare than we do.But most troubling of all has been dilatoriness explainable by self-deterrence. “We’re trying to avoid World War III,” The New York Times reports President Joe Biden as repeating often, in private and in public. Not surprisingly, when the other side gets wind of that, they threaten World War III. If the president’s guidance were that, at all costs, we must avoid provoking the Russians into painting their tanks neon yellow, one could be quite certain that we would see barrels of neon-yellow paint in Red Square lined up next to a hundred of Russia’s remaining tanks.Some of the delay is explained as well by the governmental conceit that the U.S. can “boil the frog,” supplying Ukraine new weapons in relatively modest increments without eliciting a major Russian response. Vladimir Putin is evil and has undoubtedly made large errors of judgment, but it is safe to assume that he is smarter than your average frog. He knows what is going on.Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl recently warned of Russia feeling “backed into a corner.” But that feeling is inevitable when you launch a war of aggression with all the advantages of superior arms and surprise and get beaten, and not just beaten but clobbered.Russia has shattered its army in Ukraine, its air force has shown itself to be timid and ineffective, and its navy has lost its Black Sea flagship and may even lose the ability to operate out of its traditional base of Sevastopol. Not only have Russia’s stocks of equipment been shown to be vitiated by corruption and even at their best inferior to that of their Western counterparts; its soldiers have in some cases mutinied, or fled the battlefield, or refused to go in the first place. It is reduced to recruiting convicts to fill the ranks.[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending the values Americans claim to hold]But this is only the start. Western sanctions have crippled much of Russia’s military industry and begun a slow squeeze on the rest. Russia’s oil revenues have begun to decline as Asian states demand steep discounts for its purchase. It has thrown away its natural-gas exports to Europe without securing alternative customers. It has lost some of its brightest young people to self-chosen exile.Meanwhile, China has not, thus far, stepped in to meet Russia’s needs, and has questioned the wisdom and even legitimacy of its junior partner’s war. Moscow may soon feel more like a vassal of Beijing than an ally. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a country long sympathetic to Russia, has publicly rebuked it, as has Kazakhstan, which clearly fears a Ukraine-like squeeze from Moscow—one that China has made clear it will not countenance. Russia has had to withdraw some of the forces that gave it a dominant position in Syria and Armenia. Contrary to Russian expectations, the supposedly decadent Western Europeans have braced themselves remarkably to adjust to the end of Russian energy supplies. It is unlikely now that they will fold under pressure.More humiliation awaits, when the soldiers of the embattled garrison of Kherson, on the west bank of the Dnieper river, who may number as many as 20,000, have to flee or else surrender to the Ukrainian forces. Ukraine has boxed them in, destroyed their bridges, and gradually chewed up their artillery support.The alternative to the cornering and humiliation of Russia would be for the United States and its allies to halt or reduce their aid to Ukraine and impose a stalemate. But that would mean delivering a victory to Russia, because it would still hold more Ukrainian territory than it did in 2014 and would have gone unpunished for pervasive war crimes, including mass murder. In three or four years, a rearmed Russia, thirsting for revenge for the losses and defeats it has suffered, would do the same thing again, and against a dispirited Ukraine. If that were to happen, it would be an utter disaster for American policy and Western security. Such an imposed stalemate would be profoundly immoral, but equally to the point, it would be profoundly stupid.So this is indeed a dangerous moment, because Putin will inevitably find himself humiliated and cornered and may very well look for a way to lash out. But as General James Wolfe said before storming the heights of Quebec in 1759, war is an option of difficulties. The error lies in thinking that one can titrate the application of violence to achieve exquisitely precise results. To the extent that the West continues to attempt to do so, it will merely ensure more mass graves like those of Bucha and Izyum, and more soldiers lying limbless or in the burn wards of Ukrainian military hospitals. So now, as ever, Churchill’s observation that courage is the virtue that makes all others possible holds, particularly for the leaders of the embattled West. Zelensky could not put it better himself.

Last week, I discussed the nature of tactical nuclear weapons. They are built for tactical effect, not strategic effect. Strategic nuclear weapons, such as the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can devastate a large area, with both the blast and the nuclear fallout. The blast area would be devastated, and the fallout would increase the lethality and carry it a significant distance downwind. However, it must be remembered that regardless of casualties, neither city was completely abandoned, and both were populated and functioning at a reasonable level about a year after the bombs were detonated. The power of tactical nuclear weapons (depending on the type) is less than 1 percent of the Hiroshima blast, and as important, they yield little nuclear fallout.

Tactical nuclear weapons can determine the outcome of a battle but not a war, and would not make the land unlivable. Therefore, Russia’s other nuclear option is strategic: to destroy Ukrainian cities with a Hiroshima-type weapon. This option has two weaknesses. The winds in Ukraine are variable and in eastern Ukraine, for example, blow to the northeast. A strategic nuclear detonation would send fallout blowing into Russia and in this example toward Voronezh, a strategic Russian city. Any use of a strategic nuclear weapon would likely affect Russian territory.

A second risk, however unlikely, concerns the Western response. The United States, the United Kingdom and France all possess strategic nuclear weapons. Any of them might take a Russian strike on Ukraine as a potential threat to themselves, triggering an exchange. This may be farfetched and none of the three might imagine it, but in a command center, fears are magnified. Given the limited value of tactical nukes and the potential disaster of strategic nukes, Russian nuclear threats are excellent psychological warfare (unless a Russian enemy takes the threat seriously) but cannot solve Russia’s military problem.

Its problem consists of four parts. The first is that the Russians are deployed in Ukraine as they began the war, on salients vulnerable to flank attacks, which happened. A retreat into more defensible formations would make sense but would also have serious political consequences, as it would indicate another retreat after the one in the north earlier in the war. A second problem appears to be insufficient, poorly trained and unmotivated forces with which to mount a counterattack sufficient to force a major Ukrainian retreat. A third problem is the long-standing Russian/Soviet problem: logistics. In order to mount a counterattack, the Russians must have not only initial supplies but also massive additional supplies arriving reliably where they are needed. This leads to their fourth problem. U.S. satellites are providing constant, accurate intelligence on all forces, including logistical movements. In addition, U.S. artillery of various sorts is capable of cutting the Russian line of supply, leaving an offensive paralyzed. And finally, Ukrainian forces are sufficiently dispersed that a last-ditch tactical nuclear strike would likely impact the Russian offensive.

It would seem that Russia has been forced into a permanent defensive posture. If this were World War II, Russia would be able to rebound. But Russia has not fought a multidivisional war for 77 years. We saw the Russians open the war with three armored thrusts largely unable to cope with logistical problems and anti-tank weapons. In effect, they were forced to retreat from offensive missions, regroup and wind up in the position they are in. They are fighting an enemy in the same position, but one that does not have a logistical problem thanks to the U.S., which has also had its share of failure but whose most robust capability is logistics.

The Russians must obviously change the dynamic of the war if they are not going to be forced into a political settlement. The key is to pose threats to the Ukrainians from multiple directions, both tactically and strategically. Indeed, their primary need is to diffuse U.S. logistics by creating a serious military threat to another American ally or directly attacking one. It is not clear that the U.S. would be unable to supply two fronts, but it might unbalance the U.S. and force it to reduce support for Ukraine, possibly opening opportunities for Russia.

Geography provides few options for this, but the most likely ones are Moldova and Romania, two countries connected to one another. It could not be an overland offensive but would have to take advantage of the Black Sea, landing significant forces in Romania, a NATO member and host to an American naval force. To achieve this, the Russians would have to first use missiles to eliminate Ukrainian anti-ship missiles like those that sank the Moskva. Having done this, they would have to achieve and maintain air or missile superiority over the Black Sea and then land and lodge sufficient force to compel Romanian forces into combat with substantial American forces. Given that there are American naval forces outside the Bosporus, and given that NATO’s mandate or sheer necessity would force the Bosporus shut, this would pose a serious threat to the Russians. Add to this an air attack on Russian forces, and this operation would likely fail.

There are perhaps other viable diversionary actions of sufficient significance to compel the United States to divert its forces, but all of them would be built on land movements at a time when Russia is hard-pressed. An attack on the Baltics would bring a significant Polish attack on Russia’s flank, and mounting an attack on Finland, for example, would be detected and anticipated. The same is true with Romania, but with somewhat lower opportunity.

Of course, the Romanian gambit itself is highly dubious, but here we are assuming that Russia has been forced to the defense and that it is unwilling to abandon the war. Few options are attractive at this point, but the political cost of abandoning the war is enormous. If they must continue and the Russians can’t regain the initiative, then a Hail Mary is the only option.

The final option is one I wrote about before, which is massing forces in the east and then attacking Ukraine with new forces. That remains the most likely solution for Russia, assuming it can mass, train and motivate a large force. If not, Russia might achieve a poor draw, but it cannot impose its will on Ukraine.

Though capitalism is more unleashed than ever, there are ways to transition into a sustainable future.

We live in extraordinarily dangerous times. Climate breakdown is upon us, yet nation-states and their leaders continue to pursue policies based on “national security” and the pursuit of geopolitical objectives. The transition to a clean and sustainable global energy landscape is hampered both by powerful interests linked to the fossil fuel economy and lack of international cooperation. In fact, the war in Ukraine, which runs on fossil fuels, is not only delaying climate action but has increased reliance on the very energy sources that drive global warming and poison the planet. Indeed, the war has been a godsend to the fossil fuel industry. “Drill, baby, drill” is back with a vengeance, and oil and gas companies are reaping unprecedented profits as families everywhere are struggling with skyrocketing energy costs.

To be sure, “savage capitalism,” as Noam Chomsky powerfully remarks in this joint interview with economist Robert Pollin, is unleashed today even more destructively than it has in the past. Yet, as Pollin so astutely points out, there are ways to tame global warming and make a successful transition to a sustainable future based on clean energy systems (which do not include nuclear power plants or so-called negative emission technologies). In fact, Chomsky and Pollin agree that, in large part, it is political will that stands in the way of securing the future of humanity and the planet. As Chomsky notes, the task of political education in the age of global warming is analogous to the task of philosophy as described by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”

Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Program in Environmental and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. One of the world’s most cited scholars in modern history and a critical public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure, Chomsky has published more than 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and world affairs, and climate change. Robert Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. One of the world’s leading progressive economists, Pollin has published scores of books and academic articles on jobs and macroeconomics, labor markets, wages, and poverty, environmental and energy economics. He was selected by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2013.” Chomsky and Pollin are co-authors of Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (2020).

C. J. Polychroniou: Noam, the systemic impacts of the war in Ukraine are enormous and they include economic shocks, food and energy security, geopolitical dimensions, and climate change. With regard to the latter, while it is difficult to make an accurate estimate of the climate impact of the war in Ukraine, it is crystal clear that it hinders current efforts to curb global warming and may even alter long-term strategy on climate action and action plan. How exactly are the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis connected, and why are governments doubling down on coal, oil and gas instead of doubling down on the clean energy transition?

Noam Chomsky: An independent observer looking at the world today might well conclude that it is being run by the fossil fuel and military industries, or by lunatics. Or both.

The scientific literature is harrowing, regularly showing that earlier dire warnings were too conservative and that we are careening towards disaster at a frightening pace. Even without reading the literature, anyone with eyes open can see that nature is saying “enough”: extreme heat, huge floods, devastating drought and severe water crises, large regions of the earth approaching the point where they will soon be uninhabitable.

How are we reacting? The basic character is captured by a clip from the marvelous satirical journal Onion — except that it is perhaps even beyond their imagination. It is real. And reported, with disbelief, in the mainstream:

In a paradox worthy of Kafka, ConocoPhillips plans to install “chillers” into the permafrost — which is thawing fast because of climate change — to keep it solid enough to drill for oil, the burning of which will continue to worsen ice melt.

In his bitter antiwar essays, Mark Twain wielded his formidable weapon of satire against the perpetrators. But when he reached the renowned General Funston, he threw up his hands in despair: “No satire of Funston could reach perfection,” Twain lamented, “because Funston occupies that summit himself…. [He is] satire incarnated.”

What is happening before our eyes is unleashed savage capitalism as satire incarnated. Even Twain would be silenced.

To see what is at stake, consider some basic facts. “Arctic permafrost stores nearly 1,700 billion metric tons of frozen and thawing carbon. Anthropogenic warming threatens to release an unknown quantity of this carbon to the atmosphere.… Carbon dioxide emissions are proportionally larger than other greenhouse gas emissions in the Arctic, but expansion of anoxic conditions within thawed permafrost and soils stands to increase the proportion of future methane emissions. Increasingly frequent wildfires in the Arctic will also lead to a notable but unpredictable carbon flux.”

The carbon flux may be unpredictable in detail, but the resulting devastation is all too predictable in its general outline. How then does unleashed savage capitalism respond? Simple. Let’s employ our best brains to find ways to slow the melting down a little so that we can pour more poisons into the atmosphere for profit, and as a side effect, release those Arctic permafrost stores into the atmosphere more rapidly so as to make life unlivable.

Unfortunately, the observation generalizes. We find satire incarnate wherever we turn, even in marginal corners. Thus, one argument against solar energy is land use. A real problem, especially in the U.K., where golf courses take up over four times as much space as solar power, so we learn from political economist Adam Tooze’s invaluable Chartbook.

Satire incarnate is just the cutting edge. It brings out dramatically the elements of dominant economic institutions that are lethal if unleashed. It would be hard to conjure up a more fitting epitaph for the species — or more accurately, for the institutions that have become dominant as what we call civilization marches forward.

The Ukraine war finds its natural place in this collective madness. One outcome of Putin’s criminal aggression and the consequent sanctions regime is to restrict the fossil fuel flow from Russia on which Europe relies, particularly the German-based system that is its economic powerhouse. Economic consequences for Europe are severe, though not for the U.S., which is largely immune; or for that matter for Russia, which at least for now is profiting handsomely from rising oil prices and has many eager customers outside of Europe.

Europe is seeking alternative sources of oil and gas, a bonanza for the U.S. fossil fuel industry, rewarded with new markets and expansive drilling opportunities to enable it to destroy life on Earth more effectively. And the military industry could hardly be more ecstatic as the killing and destruction mount.

People seem to have a different view. In Germany for example, where 77 percent of the population “believe that the West should initiate negotiations to end the Ukraine war.”

One can think of other reasons to bring the horrors to a quick end, but the fate of organized human society is surely one. The Ukraine war has reversed the limited efforts to address the mounting crisis of environmental destruction. While it should have accelerated efforts to move rapidly towards sustainable energy, that was not the path chosen by the political leadership. Rather, the choice has been to accelerate the race to the abyss.

What should be done at this critical moment is outlined perceptively by economist and political analyst Thomas Palley: “The European Union must build trade and commerce with Russia. That is an economic marriage made in heaven. Russia has resources and needs technology and capital goods. Europe has technology and capital goods and needs resources.”

And more generally, “What should be done is a profound recalibration that diminishes the influence of the US in Europe, strengthens the European Union, and aims for inclusion of Russia in the European family as envisaged by President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990,” in his call for a “common European home” from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military alliances, no victors or defeated, and a common effort to move towards a more just social democratic future — if not beyond.

“Getting there is beginning to look impossible,” Palley adds. But accommodation among the great powers must be achieved, and soon, if there is to be any hope for decent survival. The madness of devoting scarce resources to slaughter and destruction when cooperation to meet major crises is an absolute necessity simply cannot be tolerated.

Unleashed savage capitalism is a death sentence for the species. That has long been obvious, even before it reached the level of satire incarnated. The crucial word is “unleashed.” The leash should be, and can be, in the hands of those who have higher aims in life than enriching private power and enhancing the political forces that prefer global dominance to the Gorbachev vision.

We should not underestimate the barriers in economic and political realms, and also in the doctrinal systems that articulate and protect the structures of power. The matter is of particular importance in the U.S., for reasons too obvious to elaborate.

The barriers within the reigning doctrinal system are illustrated in a very revealing current essay in the major establishment journal. The authors are two well-informed foreign policy analysts at the more liberal end of received opinion, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent.

Their article illustrates graphically the extraordinary subordination to official doctrine that confines U.S. elites to an “alternative reality” that has little resemblance to the world. Confined within their self-reinforcing cocoon, they are simply incapable of comprehending the global reaction to their vocation of endless criminality.

Hill-Stent harshly condemn the Global South — most of the world — for its failure to join the U.S. in its profound distress “that Russia has violated the UN Charter and international law by unleashing an unprovoked attack on a neighbor’s territory.” The Global South even sinks so low as to “argue that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is no different from what the United States did in Iraq or Vietnam.”

Hill-Stent attribute this failure to rise to our level of nobility and understanding of global reality to Putin’s machinations. What else could account for such blindness?

Could there be a different reason, for example, the fact that outside the cocoon people actually look at the world and quickly discover that the U.S. is far and away the world leader in violating the charter and international law by unleashing unprovoked attacks — worldwide, even thousands of miles away? And could it be that they see that U.S. aggression in Iraq and Vietnam is an incomparably graver crime even than Putin’s aggression in Ukraine?

And as a minor footnote, perhaps these “backward” peoples are well aware that the Russian aggression, which they in fact harshly condemn, was in fact extensively provoked — as Western commentators tacitly acknowledge in their own curious way by conjuring up for this case alone the novel phrase “unprovoked attack,” which has become de rigeur in polite circles for the plainly provoked Russian aggression.

Given the climate of irrationality and subordination to doctrine that reigns in the U.S. it is necessary to reiterate, once again, that extensive provocation does not provide any justification for criminal aggression.

The Hill-Stent exercise in obfuscation is, regrettably, an instructive example of prevailing mentality among the more liberal sectors of doctrinal orthodoxy, amplified by conformist media and journals of opinion. These sectors of course play a prominent role in shaping the climate in which policy is designed and implemented, a matter of overwhelming significance in the most powerful state in world history, with no close competitor.

The realities of the modern world impose unique responsibility on Americans. Ludwig Wittgenstein described the task of philosophy as “to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,” the flies being philosophers who buzz about in conventional confusions. Analogously, one task for those concerned about the future is to try to help educated elites find their way out of the doctrinal cocoon in which they have confined themselves, and to liberate the general public from the “alternative reality” that elite circles have constructed.

No small task, but an essential one.

Military operations produce enormous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions as capacity for and use of military force depend on energy that comes in the form of fossil fuels. In fact, the U.S. military emits more carbon into the atmosphere than some countries do and has a long history of fighting wars for oil. Is it realistic therefore to expect serious climate action on the part of the world’s major powers if they continue to ignore how militarism fuels the climate crisis?

Chomsky: And, we may add, if they continue to ignore how the climate crisis fuels militarism. The climate crisis engenders conflicts. We’ve already witnessed that in Syria and Darfur, where migrations caused by unprecedented droughts provided a large part of the background for the horrors that ensued. There are looming crises that may put even these awful events in the shade.

India and Pakistan are at sword’s point, engaged in constant armed confrontations. Both are suffering severely from global warming. One-third of Pakistan is under water, sometimes many feet deep, following an intense heatwave and a long monsoon that has dumped a record amount of rain. In neighboring India, poor peasants in mud huts are trying to survive drought and heat reaching 50 degrees Celsius (50ºC), virtually unlivable, of course without air conditioning. Meanwhile the governing authorities race to produce more and better means of destruction. Another grim case of satire incarnates, perhaps. The sources of their water supplies are shared and diminishing. The rest can be left to the imagination.

What isn’t left to the imagination is that both are armed to the teeth, including huge nuclear arsenals, an unsustainable arms race for much smaller Pakistan. For both, it is an unconscionable waste of resources that are desperately needed to face their shared and devastating problems of global warming and other forms of destruction of the environment.

India-Pakistan is only one of many such examples of impending disaster. The U.S., though unusually privileged, is not immune, as we have seen in the past months.

As usual, the crises are not just human destruction of the environment. Scandals proliferate. The city that has been worst hit is Jackson, Mississippi, the state capital. The water system has been failing for years, and now its residents are literally without potable water — in a country with unparalleled wealth and natural advantages.

“Experts say this crisis was years in the making, a result of inadequate funding for essential infrastructure upgrades. For the past year, leaders of this majority-Black, Democrat-led city have pushed for additional funding from the White Republicans who run the state. Little has come of those appeals.”

Deeply rooted social pathologies make their own contributions to human misery, exacerbating those produced by destroying the environment and radical misuse of resources. The U.S. is, furthermore, far in the lead in accelerating the militarization of the world.

More tasks for Americans, and not them alone.

Bob, the world was falling short of meeting its climate goals even before the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Indeed, it’s obvious by now that climate goals cannot be reached without fast and radical action. In that context, can you talk a bit about the role that carbon tax and cap-and-trade play as strategies for reducing carbon emissions?

Robert Pollin: Let’s first be clear on what we mean by the world’s “climate goals.” The most basic goals were set out in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading global organization that brings together and synthesizes climate change research. In its landmark 2018 special report “Global Warming of 1.50C,” the IPCC established two primary goals: to reduce global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by about 45 percent in 2030 relative to the 2010 level and to achieve net zero emissions by around 2050. The IPCC argued that these goals must be achieved to have a reasonable chance of limiting global warming to 1.50C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC had concluded that limiting global warming to 1.50C above pre-industrial levels is needed to dramatically lower the likely negative consequence of climate change.

Just since the IPCC’s 2018 report came out, we have been seen much more severe impacts of climate change than what the IPCC had anticipated in terms of heat extremes, heavy rains and flooding, droughts, sea level rise and biodiversity losses. To take just one recent example, average daily temperatures were sustained at over 110°F during the heat wave in India this past May. The intensifying climate crisis is making such episodes increasingly frequent. As Noam discusses, the war in Ukraine is only worsening the situation. It is therefore fair to conclude that the IPCC’s 2018 targets should be understood as what is minimally necessary to move onto a viable global climate stabilization path. This conclusion has been affirmed by the IPCC itself in its even more extensive 2022 follow-up studies.

Where does the world stand today in terms of achieving the IPCC’s emission reduction targets? As of the most recent data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) — the best-known and thoroughly mainstream organization that develops global energy models — global CO2 emissions were at around 36 billion tons in 2019. This represents a roughly 70 percent emissions increase since 1990 and a 14 percent increase just since 2010. More to the point, according to the IEA’s projections for future emissions under alternative realistic scenarios, emissions will fall barely at all by 2030 and will not come close to achieving the zero emissions target by 2050.

Specifically, in its 2021 “World Energy Outlook” report, the IEA developed two scenarios for future CO2 emissions levels based on what it considers to be realistic assessments of the current global policy environment. One is what the IEA terms a “Stated Policies Scenario.” This scenario “explores where the energy system might go without additional policy implementation.” It is based on taking “a granular, sector-by-sector look at existing policies and measures and those under development.” In short, this scenario aims to project what CO2 emissions will be through 2050 if global policies remain basically fixed along their current trajectory. In this scenario, global CO2 emissions will not fall at all by 2030 and will decline by only 6 percent, to 33.9 billion tons, by 2050. In short, assuming we take climate science seriously, this is nothing less than a doomsday scenario.

Under a second “Announced Pledges Scenario,” the IEA “takes account of all of the climate commitments made by governments around the world, including Nationally Determined Contributions as well as longer term net zero targets, and assumes that they will be met in full and on time.” Under this more aggressive scenario, the IEA projects that emissions will still fall by only 7 percent as of 2030, and that by 2050, the emissions level will be at 20.7 billion tons — i.e. well less than halfway to achieving the zero emissions goal by 2050. In other words, even this more aggressive IEA scenario also is not too far from a doomsday scenario, assuming we take climate science seriously.

The IEA does also develop a scenario through which the world can reach zero emissions by 2050. The difference between the IEA’s stated policies and announced pledges scenarios relative to their net zero emissions by 2050 scenario is what the IEA terms an “ambition gap.” The question for getting to zero emissions is therefore to figure out how to close this “ambition gap,” i.e., how to avoid, somehow, a full-scale global climate catastrophe.

How much can carbon tax or carbon cap policies contribute here? Both of these measures aim to directly reduce the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas. This is critical since CO2 emissions from burning coal, oil, and natural gas to produce energy is, by far, the largest source of overall CO2 emissions, and thus, the major cause of climate change.

In principle at least, a carbon cap establishes a firm limit on the allowable level of emissions for major polluting entities, such as utilities. Such measures will also raise the prices of oil, coal and natural gas by limiting their supply. A carbon tax, on the other hand, will directly raise fossil fuel prices to consumers, and aim to reduce fossil fuel consumption through the high prices. Either approach can be effective as long as the cap is strict enough, or tax rate high enough, to significantly reduce fossil fuel consumption and as long exemptions are minimal to none. Raising the prices for fossil fuels will also create increased incentives for both energy efficiency and clean renewable investments, as well as a source of revenue to help finance these investments.

However, significant problems are also associated with both approaches. The first is their impact on the budgets of middle- and lower-income people. All else equal, increasing the price of fossil fuels would affect middle- and lower-income households more than affluent households, since gasoline, home-heating fuels and electricity absorb a higher share of lower-income households’ consumption. There is an effective solution here, developed initially by my PERI coworker Jim Boyce. That is to rebate to lower-income households a large share, if not most, of the revenues generated either by the cap or tax to offset the increased costs of fossil-fuel energy. Boyce termed this a “cap-and-dividend” program.

Another major problem with carbon caps is with enforcement. In particular, when these cap programs are combined with a carbon permit option — as in “cap-and-trade” policies — the enforcement of a hard cap becomes difficult to sustain or even monitor. So instead of measures that could be major contributors to fighting climate change, we end up with a mess of accounting tricks and exceptions. For the most part, this has been the experience thus far with cap-and-trade policies, both in the U.S. and Europe.

There are some easy fixes for this problem, as we have discussed in previous interviews. The most straightforward is to establish hard caps, such as utilities being required to reduce their fossil fuel consumption by, say, 5 percent per year, every year, with no exceptions and no cap-and-trade escape hatches. The CEOs of corporations who fail to hit these hard caps would face serious criminal liability.

Arguments in favor of the deployment of negative emission technologies, such as direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, are gaining ground these days in spite of their technological immaturity. Same goes for nuclear power plants and even geo-engineering in spite of the inherent risks that they entail. What role can such strategies play in the effort to make a complete break from reliance on fossil fuels?

Pollin: Neither negative emissions technologies nor nuclear power can likely contribute significantly to building an alternative global clean energy infrastructure. Indeed, it is more likely that they will create still more severe problems.

Let’s start with nuclear. It does have the important benefit that it generates electricity without producing CO2 emissions. But nuclear also creates major environmental and public safety concerns, which only intensified after the March 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan and still more, after Russia seized control of the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plants in the early stages of its invasion of Ukraine six months ago. Nuclear disasters at both Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia became active threats immediately. Just over the past month, the Zaporizhzhia plant has come under intense siege. Thus, as of August 3, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi stated that conditions at Zaporizhzhia are “completely out of control” underlying “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster.” By mid-August, the BBC described “the growing concern over safety at the site…as both sides accuse each other of shelling the area.” The BBC article quotes U.N. Secretary General António Guterres’s warning that “any potential damage to Zaporizhzhia is suicide.”

Negative emissions technologies include a range of measures whose purpose is either to remove existing CO2 or to inject cooling forces into the atmosphere to counteract the warming effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. One category of removal technologies is carbon capture and sequestration. A category of cooling technologies is stratospheric aerosol injections.

Carbon capture technologies aim to remove emitted carbon from the atmosphere and transport it, usually through pipelines, to subsurface geological formations, where it would be stored permanently. The general class of carbon capture technologies have not been proven at a commercial scale, despite decades of efforts to accomplish this. After all, as we have discussed in previous interviews, carbon capture would be the savior for the oil, coal and natural gas industries if the technology could be made to work commercially at scale. However, even if carbon could be successfully captured at reasonable costs, the technology would still face the threat of carbon leakages that would result under flawed transportation and storage systems. These dangers will only increase to the extent that carbon capture becomes commercialized and operates under an incentive structure in which maintaining safety standards cuts into corporate profits.

The idea of stratospheric aerosol injections builds from the results that followed from the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. The eruption led to a massive injection of ash and gas, which produced sulfate particles, or aerosols, which then rose into the stratosphere. The impact was to cool the Earth’s average temperature by about 0.60C for 15 months. The technologies being researched now aim to artificially replicate the impact of the Mount Pinatubo eruption through deliberately injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere. Some researchers contend that doing so would be a cost-effective method of counteracting the warming effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

However, the viability of stratospheric aerosol injections as a major climate solution has been refuted repeatedly by leading researchers in the field. For example, the Oxford University climate scientist Raymond Pierrehumbert, a major contributor to various IPCC studies, is emphatic in his 2019 paper, “There is No Plan B for Dealing with the Climate Crisis,” that this type of geo-engineering — what he refers to “albedo hacking” — does not offer a viable solution to the climate crisis. Pierrehumbert writes:

The excess carbon dioxide that human activities inject into the atmosphere has a warming effect that extends essentially forever, whereas the stratospheric aerosols meant to offset that warming fall out of the atmosphere in about a year. It’s just a matter of gravity –stuff denser than its surroundings falls — aided a bit by atmospheric circulations that enhance the removal. This is why the cooling effects of even a major volcanic eruption like Pinatubo dissipate after two years or so. Hence, whatever level of albedo hacking is needed to avoid a dangerous level of warming must be continued essentially forever.

Pierrehumbert further writes that “We simply do not know the way the climate will respond to these novel forcings, or how our social and political systems will respond to these disruptive and possibly ungovernable technologies.”

Renewable energy critics argue that wind and solar are not reliable sources because of their variability. Others argue that wind farms encroach on pristine environment and destroy a country’s natural habitat, as is the case with the installation of thousands of wind turbines on scores of Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. How would you respond to such concerns, and are there ways around them?

Pollin: Three major sets of challenges arise in building a high-efficiency/renewable-energy dominant global energy infrastructure. They include the two you mentioned, i.e., 1) intermittency with solar and wind energy; and 2) the land use requirements for renewables, especially solar and wind. The third major challenge is the heavy mineral requirements as inputs for the clean energy infrastructure. In the interests of space, I will focus on just the first two.

Intermittency refers to the fact that the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow, 24-hours a day. Moreover, on average, different geographical areas receive significantly different levels of sunshine and wind. As such, the solar and wind power that are generated in the sunnier and windier areas of the globe will need to be stored and transmitted at reasonable costs to the less sunny and windy areas. In fact, these issues around transmission and storage of wind and solar power will not become pressing for many years into the clean energy transition, probably for at least a decade. This is because fossil fuels, along with nuclear energy will continue to provide a baseload of non-intermittent energy supply as these energy sectors proceed toward their phaseout while the clean energy industry rapidly expands. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy now provide roughly 85 percent of all global energy supplies. Even with a phase out to zero by 2050 trajectory, fossil fuels will continue to provide most of the overall energy demand through about 2035. Meanwhile, fully viable solutions to the technical challenges with transmission and storage of solar and wind power — including around affordability — should not be more than a decade away, certainly as long as the market for clean energy grows at the rapid rate that is necessary. For example, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates that global battery storage capacity could expand between 17 — 38-fold as of 2030.

The issue of land use requirements is frequently cited to demonstrate that building a 100 percent renewable energy global economy is unrealistic. But these claims are not supported by evidence. Thus, the Harvard University physicist Mara Prentiss shows, in her 2015 book Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology, as well as in her more recent follow-up discussions, that well below 1 percent of the total U.S. land area would be needed through solar and wind power to meet 100 percent of U.S. energy needs.

Most of this land use requirement could be met, for example, by placing solar panels on rooftops and parking lots, then operating wind turbines on about 7 percent of current agricultural land. Moreover, the wind turbines can be sited on existing operating farmland with only minor losses of agricultural productivity. Farmers should mostly welcome this dual use of their land, since it provides them with a major additional income source. At present, the U.S. states of Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and South Dakota all generate more than 30 percent of their electricity supply through wind turbines. The remaining supplemental energy needs could then be supplied by geothermal, hydro and low-emissions bioenergy, which are all non-intermittent renewable sources. This particular scenario includes no further contributions from solar farms in desert areas, solar panels mounted on highways or offshore wind projects, among other supplemental renewable energy sources. However, if handled responsibly, all of these options are also viable possibilities.

It is true that conditions for renewable energy production in the United States are more favorable than those in some other countries. Germany and the U.K., for example, have population densities seven to eight times greater than the U.S. and also receive less sunlight over the course of a year. As such, these countries, operating at high efficiency levels, would need to use about 3 percent of their total land area to generate 100 percent of their energy demand through domestically produced solar energy. But using cost-effective storage and transmission technologies, the U.K. and Germany can also import energy generated by solar and wind power in other countries, just as, in the United States, wind power generated in Iowa could be transmitted to New York City. Any such import requirements are likely to be modest.

What about Greece? With co-authors, I am currently working on a study that considers the land use issues in Greece within the framework of achieving a zero-emissions economy there by 2050. I hope to be able to give more details on our results soon. For now, suffice it to say that there is no need for Greece to be installing wind farms on pristine sites. As with the U.S., there is more than sufficient land area in Greece to meet 100 percent of the country’s energy demand through investments in high efficiency and building a renewable infrastructure situated on artificial surfaces like rooftops, parking lots, highways and commercial locations, as well as, to a relatively modest extent, agricultural lands.

Noam, we are the only species to evolve a higher intelligence, but we are not making the right decisions over climate and the environment. Is it because of politics and the way the world economy functions, or perhaps because of fears that the challenge of global warming is too overwhelming so we might as well go on with business as usual, make some alterations along the way and just hope for the best?

Chomsky: Evolution of higher intelligence is an intriguing scientific problem. It is even possible that we are the only species in the accessible universe to have evolved what we call higher intelligence, or at least to have sustained it without self-destruction. Yet.

As for why the existential crises that may soon end sustainable life on Earth receive far too little attention, one can think of many possible reasons. There is also a deeper question lingering in the not too remote background. The question burst into consciousness with dramatic intensity 77 years ago, on August 6, 1945. Or should have.

On that fateful day we learned that human intelligence had registered a grand achievement. It had devised the means to destroy everything. Not quite yet, in fact, though it was clear that further technological progress would soon reach that point. It did, in 1952, when the U.S. exploded the first thermonuclear weapon, and the Doomsday Clock advanced to two minutes to midnight. It did not become that close to terminal disaster again until Trump’s term, then moving on to seconds as analysts abandoned minutes.

The question that arose with stark clarity 77 years ago was whether human moral intelligence could rise to the level where it could control the impulse to destruction. Can the gap be overcome? The record so far is not promising.

The game is not over unless we choose to end it. The choice is unavoidable. How humans will decide is by far the most important question that has arisen in the brief sojourn of humans on Earth. We will soon provide the answer.

This first appeared on TruthOut was was reposted with permission.

Photo by Anete Lusina

One of the most horrific legacies of Trump is the unwillingness of Republican candidates to commit to being bound by election results.

The same poison has now spread to senatorial and gubernatorial candidates who refuse to commit to November's election results.

Senate candidates who have refused to commit to accepting the results are Republicans Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, and J.D. Vance in Ohio, according to news reports.

Two candidates for governor have also refused to be bound: Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for the governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts.

It's one thing to reserve the right to call for recounts if elections are close and irregularities are evident and to appeal the results through the courts.

But that was not Trump's circumstance in the 2020 presidential election. Recounts were taken but showed the same results; Trump's appeals through the courts were rejected.

And that's not what these Republican candidates are asserting now, in Trump's shameful wake.

But tell me: If these Republican candidates are not bound by the election results, what are they bound to? These candidates are in effect issuing open invitations to their supporters to contest electoral losses in the streets.

American democracy is based on our commitments to be bound by the outcomes of elections. These are commitments we make to democracy over any specific outcomes we may want. The peaceful transition of power depends on these commitments.

Before Trump, these commitments were assumed. And at least since the Civil War they have been honored.

When losing candidates congratulate winners and deliver gracious concession speeches, they demonstrate their commitment to democracy over the electoral victory they sought.

And that demonstration is itself a means of reasserting and reestablishing civility. It sends an unambiguous message to all the candidate's supporters that the process can be trusted.

Think of Al Gore's concession speech to George W. Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Bush:

"I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of the country .... Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy. Now the Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. ... And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

Gore made the same moral choice made by his predecessors who lost elections, and for the same reason: The democratic process (even one that included the judgements of Supreme Court justices) was more important than winning a specific election.

This all changed in September 2020 when Trump refused to commit to be bound to the results of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

"Well, we're going to have to see what happens," he said when asked whether he'd commit to a peaceful transition of power. "You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster," Trump added, presumably referring to mail-in ballots -- which he baselessly claimed would lead to voter fraud.

This is when his poison began seeping directly into the bedrock of American democracy.

That poison spread deeper and faster after he lost the election, when he refused to concede--claiming, again without any basis in fact, that it had been "stolen" from him.

The poison came to the surface on January 6, 2021, when a group of his supporters--wielding weapons of war--invaded the U.S. Capitol and threatened the lives of members of Congress. Five people were killed.

The commitment to be bound by the results of an election is the most important commitment in a democracy. It is also the most important qualification for public office. It is the equivalent of an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Candidates who refuse to commit to being bound by the results of elections should be presumed disqualified to hold public office.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” This is a long episode. It is a hefty pod. And it is worth it. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time. The backdrop here is very simple. Decarbonizing the economy, it is the — or at least one of — the central tasks of our era. A lot of how we think about politics and policy has to work backwards from decarbonization and that means really understanding the path between here and there — what we need to do, what industries we need to change, what we need to build, what people need to buy, which policies and technologies we have to throw at this problem and which we still don’t. The challenge of doing an episode like this is finding someone who has all of that in their head all at once and can communicate it. But Jesse Jenkins can. Jenkins is an energy and climate expert at Princeton University. He was central to the Net-Zero America Project, which laid out some of the clearest and most detailed pathways to decarbonization. And then, he was really, really central to modeling the different versions of the climate bills to understand their effect on emissions and how it was changing as people added policies and took them out. And that made him a key source for almost everyone, the people inside the negotiating rooms, the people trying to cover what was happening in the negotiating rooms, everyone who is trying to understand what this legislation will do. When we spoke, Jenkins was just back from the White House celebration marking the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage. And what I wanted to do with him was try to get a holistic look at both the decarbonization that is needed, and then how the bill will make it easier, and then how there are things that have not been solved by this bill. And I think we did that. Even as someone who has covered climate policy for years, I learned a huge amount, doing the research here, and even more by having this conversation. And I hope you will too. As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Jesse Jenkins, welcome to the show.

jesse jenkins

Thanks for having me. It’s a real pleasure. I’m a big fan of the show.

ezra klein

I appreciate that. I’m a big fan of your work trying to pass climate bills. I want to begin the conversation here with what we’re trying to achieve. You’ll often hear this idea or this goal of net zero. Net-zero emissions — when, how? Talk me through what that actually means.

Yeah, net-zero emissions of all greenhouse gases, so all climate-warming pollutants. And that is basically the point where we stop digging a deeper hole. The first rule of holes is stop digging, right? Then you can figure out how to climb out. And until we reach the point where the total emissions of climate-warming gases from human activities is exactly equaled out or more so by the removal of those same greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year due to human activities, we’re basically contributing to the growing concentration of climate-warming gases in the atmosphere. And that’s what drives climate change, those cumulative emissions and the total atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide being the most important and most prominent, but also things like methane, nitrous oxides and several other climate-warming gases as well. So when we say net-zero greenhouse gases, we mean all of those greenhouse gases. And so that the total contribution of human emissions is exactly equaled out by the total contribution of removals from the atmosphere and storage of CO2 in either back in geologic storage, or in forests and agricultural lands and in the soils or in the oceans, things like that we can accelerate and increase due to human activities as well. So that’s the goal for the world to reach. That’s what is going to be key to stopping, preventing the worst impacts of climate change is reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally as rapidly as possible. Every year matters. Every tenth of a degree of warming matters in terms of the impacts and damages and suffering that can be avoided in the future. And so we need to get to net-zero emissions globally as rapidly as we can. If we want to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius, which is a goal that the IPCC has mapped out for us — the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — and the goal that the world community committed to at the Paris Climate Accords, we need to do that by 2100 or sooner. And if we want to have a reasonable shot at keeping global warming below one and a half degrees Celsius, which is the more aspirational goal that the global community has set, we need to do that quite a bit sooner, in the neighborhood of 2070 or earlier than that. That means that countries like the United States that have the wealth and the technological capability and, arguably, the moral responsibility given our historic contributions to climate change to date, we need to be on a faster track than that. We need to be reaching net zero by 2050 at the latest really. And that’s the goal that the Biden administration is committed to. That’s the goal that we looked at in the Net-Zero America Study. And that’s the track we’re trying to get on now.

ezra klein

So let’s take the big picture of that. It gets called decarbonization, but as I understand it, basically every theory of how to hit net zero by 2050 looks like this — you make electricity clean, you make much more clean electricity, you make almost everything run on electricity, and then you mop up the kind of small industries or productive questions that we have not figured out how to make electric. Is that basically right?

Yeah, that’s a pretty good summary. The challenge today is that about two-thirds of our demand for energy in the United States is for liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons, so that’s natural gas that we use to heat our homes, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, other liquid petroleum-based fuels, and then the petrochemical feed stocks that we use to produce plastics and medicine and all kinds of other things. And it’s just really difficult to find drop-in substitutes for those kinds of liquid and gaseous fuels at the scale that we consume them. And so the only way that we’re going to get to net zero is to knock down the scale of demand for liquid and gaseous fuels. And so that means growing the role of electricity and steam and hydrogen, and other carbon-free energy carriers that don’t contain actually any CO2 when we use them. If we can find ways to then produce those carbon-free carriers with carbon-free primary energy sources or inputs, then we can decarbonize a good chunk of the economy. And so we have to basically grow the one third share that we currently get from those carriers, like primarily electricity, to probably something more like two-thirds and knock down the scale of demand for liquid and gaseous fuels, so that we can use a combination of tools that are generally more expensive and less mature than clean electricity options to go ahead, and as you said, mop up the rest. And so that means a combination of carbon capture for large point sources of CO2 emissions, like say a steel or iron facility, cement production facilities, and large power plants, we can capture the CO2 emissions from those smokestacks and then store them safely in geologic basins. So that’s one way to keep it out of the atmosphere. The other option is to develop liquid or gaseous fuel substitutes that come from carbon-free sources originally. So say we take CO2 from the atmosphere or from plants that originally absorbed it from the atmosphere, and we add some hydrogen that we produce from clean electricity, and we add some more heat and some more electricity from carbon-free sources, well, we can make synthetic jet fuel or other liquids that way. It’s very energy intensive, but it can be done in a carbon-free way. And so we can then use some amount of those synthetic liquid fuels to, say, power aviation or other really hard to decarbonize sectors. And then the final option is — and this is really the fallback plan that we really want to use in limited quantities — is that we just keep using fossil fuels in the most high value applications, and then we remove an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere to offset that. That’s negative emissions. And there’s a limited amount of negative emissions that we can really do at any kind of sustainable scale. And so that’s really the final option that we want to keep to a limited scale.

ezra klein

So I’m going to break the fourth wall here and say, if you were listening to that, and you’re not deep in energy world, energy wonk world, and you’re a little lost, that the point of this podcast is, by the end of it, I hope all that is about to become clear. We’re going to sort of peel the different pieces of this apart. But I want to begin on the question of electricity because every path that I seem to see really puts that at the core of everything. And you write and your colleagues write in the Net-Zero Report that, quote, “expanding the supply of clean electricity is a linchpin in all net-zero paths.” So right now most electricity isn’t clean. If you plug something into the wall, you’re not necessarily getting clean electricity. I don’t think it’s completely intuitive why electricity is so much better than a liquid you put into something, even in a potential world for the climate. So why electricity? Why has electrifying everything become almost synonymous with decarbonization in climate world?

Yeah, there’s basically two main reasons why electricity is such a key linchpin. The first is that it’s a carbon-free energy carrier. And by that I mean it’s a way to move energy around in our economy and convert it and make use of it that doesn’t emit any CO2 directly when we do use electricity. So think about all our alternatives, we could move energy around in the form of liquid fuels, like gasoline or diesel in a tanker truck or a pipeline, or we can move natural gas around in a pipeline to our homes. But those are hydrocarbon fuels, and so when we consume them, we break the chemical bonds that link the hydrogen and the carbon, and we release CO2 into the atmosphere. And that’s the problem. And so electricity is a way to power our lives — heat homes, power factories, move cars around — that at least when we use the electricity on that end, doesn’t lead to any CO2, or frankly, any other air pollutants and other combustion-related pollutants that cause public health impacts. So then the challenge is we need to produce that electricity from a carbon-free source, and that’s the second reason why electricity is so key because we do actually have a lot of different ways to produce carbon-free electricity. Right, about 40 percent of our electricity today is already carbon free. About half of that comes from nuclear power plants that we built out over the ‘70s and ‘80s. And the other half comes from hydro power and more recently, the large-scale growth of wind power and solar power. And we have other options that could be coming down the line in the future as well. And so if we can grow the share of carbon-free generation, we can decarbonize both the front end of the supply of our energy carriers. And then when we consume that carbon-free electricity on the other end, it doesn’t emit CO2 either. And there’s just a lot more ways to produce carbon-free electricity than there are to produce liquid fuels or gaseous fuels, which are pretty much limited to biomass-based fuels, as the only way to kind of make a drop in carbon-neutral fuel that doesn’t itself use a lot of electricity to produce.

ezra klein

But this is a really big job. You had this statistic in a lecture that has been knocking around in my head — that it took 140 years to build today’s power grid. Now, we have to build that much new clean electricity again and then build it again, so we have to build it twice over in just 30 years to hit our goals.

That’s exactly right.

ezra klein

That seems really hard.

Yeah.

ezra klein

I mean, we never said deep decarbonization was easy. The good news, we can talk about this later, is it is actually pretty affordable and has a huge amount of public health benefits that go along with this path. But it is a massive transformation of our energy system, right? We’re going to have to rewire the country and change the way we make and use energy from the way we produce it, to the way we transport it, to the way we consume it at a very large scale. And so, yeah, that is the statistic. If you look at the challenge for electricity is really twofold, we have to cut emissions from the power sector, right? Which already is now the number two, used to be the number one, emitting sector of the economy. Since we have made some progress, electricity is now number two and transportation is edged into the number one position for biggest greenhouse gas polluting sector. But we have to knock out the rest of those CO2 emissions. That itself is a big enough challenge, right? To go from 40 percent carbon-free electricity to 100 percent as soon as we can. But at the same time, we have to dramatically expand the supply of overall electricity to power electric cars and to power heat pumps that can efficiently heat and cool our homes instead of relying on natural gas or to power industrial processes or make clean hydrogen, which is another option for an energy carrier when we can’t use electricity directly. And so our estimates are that demand for electricity by 2050 in the United States could grow by more than double, by about 115 to 170 percent across a range of different scenarios in the Net-Zero America Study. And so, yeah, we have to eliminate the large share of fossil energy generation in our grid today and more than double the overall amount of supply. And what that means is we have to basically build two U.S. power grids over the next 30 years.

ezra klein

The big technological project that America’s been engaged in, I think, in my lifetime has been digital. Like the dominant story of how America is changing technologically has been digital. And one thing about digital technologies, Facebook just doesn’t take up a lot of land in the real world. They have some offices. I’m sure they have some server banks. But this is a throwback, in a way, to times when we had projects of national size, like the interstate highway system or the original effort to electrify America that requires land. And so give me a sense here of the literal size of the land that you estimate we’re going to need to use fully or partially for electricity generation and transmission.

Yeah, in many ways, this is the return to growth in infrastructure that we really haven’t seen in my lifetime or yours, Ezra, right? We have been living off of the nation-building phase in the United States that really spans from the New Deal era through to the end of the 1970s. And since we were born, we’ve been kind of living off of and barely maintaining and expanding that national scale infrastructure that was built out, whether that was rural electrification and the hydro power dams and the nuclear plants and the whole grid or our national highway system or our ports and airports. We really just haven’t seen an era of significant investment in national infrastructure in a generation or two. And you can’t build a clean energy economy without rebuilding large amounts of that infrastructure. And so we are going to need to enter a new era of nation building, right? A new era of investment in physical infrastructure that can build a better country. There are huge benefits associated with this, but are going to mean, we are going to see large-scale construction, and infrastructure, and impacts on lives. And so we have to guide that process in a way that doesn’t recreate some of the harms of the last era of nation building, where we drove interstates right through the middle of Black and brown communities, and they had no say in the process. So that’s the challenge at a high level is like how do you build a national social license and sense of mission or purpose, and how do you guide the deployment of that infrastructure at scale, which doesn’t concentrate harms and spreads benefits amongst the people who really should be benefiting.

ezra klein

We’re going to get into all this. Give me the scale here. I want to hear the scale.

Yeah, so let’s go to the scale. The total like visual footprint or spatial extent of areas that would be sited with solar and wind farms —

ezra klein

Wait, hold on. What do you mean by visual footprint? Is this the land that things are going to need to go on or just the amount of it that we can see?

Yeah, so if you think about the — I don’t know if you’ve driven by a wind farm, but you’ve got wind turbines that are spaced out quite a bit. And that’s in order to avoid shadowing each other with the wakes of one wind turbine. That means they span a very large area. And so I’m talking about the total area around all of the wind turbines that make up a wind farm or all of the solar arrays that make up a solar farm.

ezra klein

Got it.

And so the visual impact is actually even further than that. Because if you think about a giant wind turbine, you can see that quite a bit further than the boundary of the wind farm site itself. So but as a proxy for that, it’s a similar order of magnitude. The most cost effective of our net-zero scenarios spans an area that is equal to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee put together. And the solar farms are an area the size of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

ezra klein

Holy crap.

So these are big, big areas.

ezra klein

And that’s in the efficient scenario where we make all great decisions and use our land as efficiently as possible to generate electricity?

Well, that’s in the lowest cost one. It’s not necessarily the most land-efficient scenario. There is a more land-efficient scenario that uses about half that much land area. But in order to unlock that scenario, we have to build a very large amount of new nuclear power plants, or natural gas plants, carbon capture, or advanced geothermal, other more energy-dense or compact technologies that are generally more expensive and less mature today. That could be an option too. But those technologies face their own siting challenges and their own social license issues. And there’s a scenario that actually used double that. If we want to go entirely renewable, we want to completely get rid of fossil fuels in any way and don’t use any carbon capture or continue to emit any CO2 and use negative emissions from fossil fuels, then we actually need double that amount of land area. So there’s a huge, huge scale here, and we get to choose which of those paths we want to go down, but we can’t really avoid the need to build large amounts of infrastructure.

ezra klein

I know it’s bad form to shout in audio formats. So there’s a weird tendency sometimes in a podcast when you’re talking about something completely insane, but everybody has a totally normal tone of voice. But I want to say that if you’re listening to that you’re like, oh my god, that sounds completely beyond anything that we have done as a country, functionally, in memory, I think that is correct. And there’s something from the report that I want to quote here. You write that achieving the required additions by 2030 of utility scale solar and wind capacity means installing 38 to 67 gigawatts a year on average. The U.S. single year record added capacity is 25 gigawatts, which we did in 2020. So we need to on average be somewhere between — be around doubling our best-ever year in solar and wind capacity installation year after year after year after year. By no means is that impossible, but it is a profound construction challenge. If you want to know why I have become so obsessed with building on the show, this is why. It is a building challenge that is a real step change from where we’ve been as a country for some time.

Yeah. It is a substantial project to build new infrastructure across the country. We can accelerate these rates. We have seen records smashed in the past. The challenge is to basically smash new records every year for the rest of our lives. So we just have to keep the pedal to the metal and keep growing. The good news is while we did hit that peak in 2020, as we reported in the study, which came out at the end of 2020, we actually have now exceeded that peak in 2021. And for solar, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates we’re actually on track to already have doubled the 2020 peak by the end of this year.

ezra klein

Wow.

We built about 10 gigawatts of utility solar in 2020. The E.I.A. thinks we’ll build about 20 gigawatts this year. So things change, we can grow.

ezra klein

That’s really exciting actually.

Yeah.

ezra klein

One thing that I want to hit on the other side of this is that as much as the scale of what we’re talking about here is pretty intimidating in a way. The fact that we can talk about it as a pathway is almost something close to a miracle that we’re only able to talk about these decarbonization pathways because solar, wind, and battery costs have just plummeted in price way, way, way beyond what was forecast over the past 10, 15 years. And even as our politics hasn’t moved as quickly as people hoped, the technologies here have moved much faster than even optimists expected. Can you talk a bit about that drop in price and what it has unlocked?

Yeah, this has been absolutely transformative. And I do think it’s the fundamental factor behind the increased policy ambition and the increased private sector commitments that we’ve seen in the last few years. Part of that’s the urgency of climate change, the fact that we’re seeing real damage all around the world from climate disasters every week, it feels like. But the other part of that is that the cost of action has transformed. The last time Congress took up and failed to pass climate policy in 2009 and 2010, solar PV cost 10 times as much as it does today, and wind, onshore wind farms, cost three times as much as they do today. So we’ve seen a 90 percent decline in the cost of both solar PV and lithium ion batteries, which are the major cost component in electric vehicles and our main source of growing grid scale energy storage to help deal with the variability of wind and solar on the grid. And so those costs have come down by a factor of 10, and we’ve seen about a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind over the last decade. And that changes the whole game, right? If you think about what it would take to get 10 times as much political will to act, that’s a huge effort, right? There’s a lot of organizing. There’s a lot of transforming politics to get 10 times as much political will. That’s basically what we unlocked by driving down the cost of solar PV and lithium ion battery packs by a factor of 10. We made it 10 times easier to take action. So for a given amount of political will, we can do 10 times more decarbonization in the power sector and in transportation, which are two most heavily emitting sectors than we could do a decade ago. And that’s, I think, what has enabled us to contemplate this audacious goal of building a net-zero America.

ezra klein

So this period we’re talking about, this is pre-Inflation Reduction Act, pre the decarbonization financing and investments and rules and ideas in that, in the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the Chips Act. So how does this set of bills, but I think it’s primarily the IRA, how does it make scaling wind and solar easier?

So what the Inflation Reduction Act does at its core is focus on making clean energy cheaper. And it does that in two main ways. The first way is with subsidies, right? So there’s a big package of tax credits that does the bulk of the work. But there’s also rebates for low-income households to do energy efficiency and electrification. There’s loan programs that can help offer lower cost financing for projects. There’s grants that go out to states, and rural utilities, and others to help install things. And all of that is designed to make the cleaner option the good business decision, the good household financial decision. So that when you’re a utility thinking about where you want to purchase new electricity from, or you’re a fleet manager for Amazon thinking about what kind of delivery vehicles to buy, or you’re you or me thinking about how we want to get around town, what kind of vehicle do we want to purchase when the current one wears out. All of those decisions, we basically are putting the thumb on the scale heavily for the cleaner option over the dirtier option. So that it just makes good economic sense. And that clean energy is cheap energy for everybody. That’s with subsidies upfront, but it’s also going to kick off the same kind of innovation and incremental learning by doing in economies of scale that unlock those tremendous cost reductions for solar, and wind, and lithium ion batteries over the last decade. The reason that these aren’t expensive alternative energy technologies, as we called them in the 2009 era, and are now mainstream affordable options is because we used public policy. We, in the broad human sense, right? So Germany and Spain and China and the United States and a whole bunch of different countries decided to subsidize the deployment of those technologies when they were expensive, create early markets that drove innovation and cost declines and made them into tremendously affordable options for the future. And so we’re going to kick off the same kind of processes as well with this bill, building on the demonstration and hubs funding and things like that in the infrastructure law for the next generation of technologies that can take us even further down the path to net zero beyond 2030.

ezra klein

So let’s dig into to some of the pieces at the core here. For most of the time I’ve been in politics, there has been a theory of what we’ll do about climate change. And that is that we will in some way or another price carbon higher, price activities that emit carbon and other greenhouse gases in some accordance with their true social cost, the true cost of climate change, and then the market will adjust to the new prices and create a clean energy economy. In this case, as you say, we are instead of pricing carbon, we’re subsidizing decarbonization. So what? So there are these clean energy production tax credits. How do you get one? What do they do? Like, what is the difference between the pricing theory that people may have heard about for years and years and what we’ve actually settled on, both have had in the past and are expanding now, which is tax breaks, tax credit, loan guarantee subsidy theory?

Yeah, so if you think about it — unless you are valuing either the damage caused by pollution and climate-warming greenhouse gases, or you’re valuing the public good of not emitting those things in our economy, you can’t expect businesses to just sort of magnanimously go and choose the cleaner option, at least not at the scale and pace that we need. And same with households. You shouldn’t expect everyone to just be altruistic. We have to make it make good financial sense for everyone to make the clean choice. And so there’s two ways to do that. You can make fossil energy more expensive to price in the true cost of consuming fossil fuels for society, which includes all of the climate damages that are going to occur down the line because of accelerating climate change, but also air pollution and public health impacts, water quality impacts, all the other impacts of our fossil energy system. So if you’re an economist, you want products to represent their true cost, right? That’s the most efficient way to orient an economy towards the best outcomes. And that’s true from an economic theory perspective, right? We want to make sure that when people consume fossil fuels, they know that they’re causing a certain amount of damage and that the benefits they’re getting from that consumption exceed those damages. And if not, don’t consume. Now, the challenge of that, of course, is that making fossil energy more expensive is not a very politically attractive proposition. I mean, look how challenging inflation and the run up in energy prices has been for politicians around the world over the last year. So the alternative to that, which is admittedly less economically efficient, but much more likely to succeed in the real world, is to recognize that cleaner energy sources deliver some public good. They deliver a benefit of cleaner air, less air pollution and deaths and mortalities and asthma attacks and less climate damages. And to subsidize their production, so that we get more from the clean sources. And that’s effectively what this bill is doing. And it’s essentially shifting the cost of energy consumption to some degree or the cost of investing in the energy transition off of household and business energy bills and onto the much more progressive federal tax base. And not just all taxpayers, but in particular, the Inflation Reduction Act is funded by a new 15 percent corporate minimum tax on companies that make a billion dollars a year or more that haven’t been paying much in taxes to date. And by expanding I.R.S. enforcement on tax cheats. So if I sort of sum up the whole bill in one nutshell or one tweet, it’s that we’re going to tax billionaire corporations and tax cheats, and use that money to make energy cheaper and cleaner for all Americans, and also to build more of those technologies here in the United States, which we can talk about later. And so if I sell it that way, that sounds like a lot better prospect from a political perspective, than, I’m going to make your fossil energy more expensive. So you consume less of it and spend more money on cleaner sources, which is effectively what the alternative strategy is.

ezra klein

So I want to talk through some of the challenges and criticisms here. And I’ll start with this one. The way you describe that, I think the way the bill really works is it implies, in a way, that the problem here is money. And one problem here, certainly, is money. That if there were more money to build these things, more subsidies, we would build more of them. But to what we were talking about a few minutes ago, the amount of land you need, the difficulties of permitting these in particularly places where you have richer constituencies that are very good at organizing against things, you have all these other difficulties. You have supply chain problems. Is the problem here just money? Pumping a bunch more money into the system, will that get us the deployment, the ability to permit the site to build fairly, to have good processes that we need? Because nothing in this bill really changes our capacity to plan. There’s no central coordinator, or the federal government doesn’t have vast new powers to decide where things go. So I worry a little bit that we’re solving the money problem, but there’s a lot of other reasons we end up building things slowly and over budget than just money.

Yeah, I mean, I worry about those things too. Those were big emphasis points in the Net-Zero America Study. Once you start to really unpack the scale and pace of change that we’re talking about, you inevitably start to be concerned with some of those other kind of rate limiting factors that constrained how quickly we can make this transition. But let’s also not forget that the money talks, right? That finances is a necessary condition, if not sufficient. But what this bill does is aligns all of the financial incentives, or at least most of them, behind making the right clean energy choices. And without that, there’s no way we’re going to make progress at the pace we need. So it is a huge shift in the economic calculus for everyone across the country that will make it so much easier to move down that path but, yeah, will not solve all of the problems. I do want to say, though, that all those problems, whether it’s expanding and permitting transmission, or growing the clean energy work force, or figuring out how we’re going to transition parts of the country that are dependent today on fossil energy for their local economy and give them a stake in the new clean energy economy. I mean, all those challenges exist already, absent this bill. But what changing the financial incentives does is it means there’s billions of dollars of profit for companies to make and billions of dollars of savings for local regulators to unlock for their ratepayers and energy consumers, there’s billions of dollars of economic development to secure by county officials and local elected officials if you can overcome those sorts of barriers. And so aligning the incentives isn’t sufficient, but it does mean we now have a lot more very clear reasons for a lot more constituents to try to get to work solving the next set of challenges. And so that’s a huge step forward.

ezra klein

One striking thing about the past decade in American politics to me, though, has been that money talks and sometimes politics really shouts. I covered the Affordable Care Act really closely, the Medicaid expansion was just backing dump trucks of money up to states to give them more capacity to put people on Medicaid. The Federal government paid at the beginning all of it, later on 90 percent of it. It has been a huge, huge, huge fiscal boon to states and still 12 states, primarily red ones have not expanded Medicaid for political reasons. So when I look at the report, I look at the top 10 states for wind capacity — Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, New Mexico, Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas. I look at the top 10 states for solar capacity — California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Missouri, Nebraska. It’s a lot of red states on there. In fact, a bunch of those haven’t expanded Medicaid even now. And so one of the risks I see here is politicization — that if solar and wind energy become part of the partisan culture war, you could see a sort of non-money based reason that a lot of states don’t do the permitting or fully participate in this. How do you think about that?

Yeah, I think that that’s a concern. But with Medicaid expansion, you are talking about state-administered programs that benefited largely constituencies that the Republican governors were not out to go win as their base of political support. The Inflation Reduction Act is primarily implemented through the federal tax code, so states don’t really have any role in implementing that. It’s the I.R.S.‘s guidance and Treasury guidance that says what are the rules for implementing these tax policies. And then it’s the private sector and individual households that go and make different decisions based on those financial incentives from the federal level. And so there’s really nothing that governors can do inserting themselves into the direct implementation of those policies. There are a few state-administered programs, like rebates for energy efficiency and efficiency upgrades in low-income households. And I do have concerns that those may not be universally rolled out across the country for political reasons. But the vast majority of the incentives and the vast majority of the emissions reductions work done by this bill is done through the tax code. The second reason that I think it’s a little bit different and by deliberate design is that the bill, in addition to making clean energy cheap, represents a substantial industrial policy that is designed to bring real economic tangible benefits to communities of different types all over the country and in many ways disrupt the current politics around climate and energy policy. And so for example, there are a set of tax credits for advanced manufacturing of solar, wind, battery and electric vehicle components and assembly in the United States, as well as critical minerals processing, as well as a set of incentives that encourage investment in new clean electricity and advanced manufacturing in communities that today are dependent economically or derive a lot of their economic activity from fossil energy activities. And both of those are designed to really deliver tangible economic benefits all over the country in a diverse range of communities, including in purple states, and red states and counties and areas across the country. And so maybe another analogy to think about is the way the defense industrial complex works, where we sort of scatter these facilities all over the country, so that every congressional district has some stake in the next military appropriations bill. In some ways, that’s what the Inflation Reduction Act is going to do. Not quite as directed and controlled as the military budget, but there are a set of incentives in the bill that are designed to make sure that a broad swath of the American public and a diverse range of communities have a direct tangible economic stake in expanding and continuing to grow the clean energy economy. And so when it’s not just some hypothetical thing that liberal states are proposing, but it’s a new battery assembly plant in your neighborhood that employs your friends or your cousin, or it’s the new advanced nuclear power plant that powers an old coal plant and sustains the tax base and the IBEW Union jobs in your community, those are the kinds of things that I think shift people’s real world experience around what a clean energy economy means and shifts the way they think about the politics and policy.

ezra klein

This is sometimes where I think Elon Musk’s turn into a conservative shit poster is a good thing.

[LAUGHS]

ezra klein

Because to have a major industrialist whose whole thing is the clean energy economy — Tesla and solar installations and building gigantic battery plants. To have him code it as very conservative, somebody who really doesn’t like the left anymore, strikes me on the margin as valuable.

Yeah, it drives me crazy, but I think you’re probably right in terms of the net impact on society. And there is, of course, our tribalism and identifying our champions, and who’s in or who’s out, and that kind of drives a lot of this. But I do think it’s going to be those on the ground realities that dictate, in the end, whether or not we can sustain these kinds of transitions or not. And so I do think it’s a really important element of this bill that it’s not just trying to make clean energy cheap to reduce emissions; it’s trying to make clean energy cheap so that people benefit in terms of lower energy costs and lower household bills. And it’s trying to distribute the economic investment and revitalization that is going to come along with all that building and all that manufacturing into communities that really need that benefit and will potentially transform their economic stake and therefore, hopefully, their political views about where we go next.

ezra klein

Well, let me get at that point about revitalization, about trying to spread a lot of this money geographically, widely. When I’ve talked to the Biden administration about this bill, something they’re always very keen to tell me is that it isn’t just money, it is standards. This bill is full of standards. And then when I talk to critics of the bill, one thing I hear is that a real problem is that this bill is full of standards. That if you just look at the decarbonization task — the land use we were talking about, the speed we need to do it. It is inhumanly hard already. But all over this bill is the tying of decarbonization money to other kinds of priorities, so project developers only earn one fifth of the clean energy production credit’s original value, unless they meet worker training and competitive wage conditions. Part of the credits value in a bunch of different places is based on whether you source components from domestic manufacturers. And I can keep going on like that. And all of these standards are getting at things that I support — good jobs, and geographic equality, and revitalizing a bunch of communities that need it, and we keep talking about it. But there is this concern that adding these standards on top of a task that is already so difficult, makes it that much less likely that the task is achieved. How do you think about that?

Yeah, I think that has it exactly backwards, really, because already the Inflation Reduction Act is insufficient. It’s a huge step forward. But our estimation from the Repeat Project is that it cuts about two-thirds of the annual emissions gap that we need to close in 2030. It still leaves about a half a billion tons of emissions on the table that we need to tackle with additional policies. And that’s just 2030. We still have to go all the way from there to net-zero in 2050. And that, of course, is assuming that we can build transmission in wind and solar at the pace that makes economic sense. So if we can’t do that, we’re going to fall even further short. So this is a big step down the road to net zero, but it is not the last step we need to take. And we need to sustain and accelerate this transition. And so when I think about the challenge of decarbonization, I think about how you unlock feedback loops and how you change the political economy of decarbonization by disrupting current interests that might oppose clean energy transitions and building and strengthening interests that would support them. And so the bill is not just trying to cut emissions at lowest cost through 2030, so we can hit some interim goal on our path to net zero. It’s trying to transform the economics, and therefore the politics, of the clean energy transition. And I don’t think we can get to net zero, unless we can do that. And so, yeah, you do have to onboard new workers through apprenticeship programs and pay them prevailing wages if you want to build wind and solar projects. OK, you can do that. That’s not going to slow down the clean energy transition in any significant way. But it is going to build the work force that we need and expand the number of people that are employed in good family-sustaining jobs in those sectors. So that when they see a wind project go up, they say that’s our economic future, not that’s this big eyesore, and money, and taxpayer dollars going to import stuff from China. I just don’t think we’re going to sustain the clean energy transition and diversify the set of communities that have a clear political stake in continuing that transition if we don’t drive some of these kinds of broad benefits that the bill is trying to do. And so I think that it may make things more challenging over the next couple of years as we establish these kinds of new standards and the industry gets used to complying with them. But in the long term, I think when we look back in 2030 or 2032, a decade from now at what this bill did and how significant it was, it won’t necessarily be the direct emissions reductions, it will be the way it has reshaped the politics of clean energy in America.

ezra klein

One of the places where I think this argument has a little bit more bite is around supply chains. So I agree with you that it does not slow down clean energy to do apprenticeship programs, to pay good wages. I’m pretty comfortable with those. There is a lot in this bill about how much of this or that needs to be sourced from American supply chains. We’ll talk about the electric vehicle tax credits later. But that’s a place where you have these very big tax credits that are looking for electric vehicles produced efficiently through a domestic supply chain, that most of them wouldn’t apply really to vehicles that are sold in America today. And same thing’s true on batteries, where there’s a really big push in the bill to create domestic battery supply chains. And I want all that. But supply chains are slow to build up. There’s mineral questions, resource questions, and that is a place where I could see the other goals of the bill, as laudable as they are, slowing things down — in some cases, substantially. So I’m curious how you think about that dimension of it.

Yeah, I do think those concerns are a little bit overwrought. They are real in the very near term in the sense that the personal vehicle tax credit that’s available to folks like you and I that might want to buy a new electric car, there will be a limited number of vehicles at the outset that qualify for that because of the domestic or North American sourcing requirements. And in particular, in a couple of years, the prohibition on sourcing any materials for the batteries or critical minerals that go into those batteries from China, in particular, which currently controls a good chunk of that supply chain. And so it may be that we don’t have a substantial number of vehicles that can claim that tax credit over the next couple of years. On the other hand, automakers are already selling every E.V. they can make. And that’s in an environment where the most popular electric vehicle makers, including Tesla, GM, soon Ford, Toyota, as well, have all run through the current subsidy. There’s a limit under the previous law that each manufacturer can only produce 200,000 electric vehicles before the subsidy expires. And so the most popular E.V.s I’ve already blown through that. And yet demand for them continues to be more robust than the manufacturing capacity. So in the near term, if you’re just worried about the speed of the transition, I don’t think there will be any impact either way whether or not we have this subsidy or not on the total volume of E.V.s sold in the next couple of years because we are still scaling up that supply chain and demand already outstrips supply. The question is, as we build out that supply chain, which we have to do in either case, do we build it in the United States or do we build it in China, or Europe, or elsewhere? And what the bill is emphatically saying is you should build it in North America. And in particular, we’ll pay you to do the battery assembly in the United States to the tune of a particular production subsidy, as well for battery materials and assembly in the U.S. And so there are going to be probably a trillion dollars invested in this sector over the next decade. We’ve already seen a couple hundred billion dollars of commitments made by automakers and battery manufacturers to open new facilities to meet the growing demand for electric vehicles. And what this bill is going to do is it’s going to drive that investment into the U.S., instead of elsewhere. And I think that, again, is really good in the long term for sustaining the economic interests and the political coalition that we need to continue down the path to net zero. So, yeah, I think the big headache is that they’re going to be in the near term models, they’ll be on the list, and then they’re off the list. And it’ll be hard for consumers to necessarily know what to expect over the next couple of years. But by 2024 or 2025, these new investments in factories that we’re seeing every week get announced are going to start coming online, and that’s going to really change the game. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

We’ve been talking here primarily about wind and solar, which I think is appropriate because they’re pretty core to the future that’s being envisioned. But they have problems. The sun doesn’t always shine; the wind doesn’t always blow. You have this nice analogy — that trying to build an entire grid on weather-dependent sources it’s like trying to win the NCAA finals with a team of all point guards. And I’m not really a sports guy, but I guess it’s probably hard to do that. So build out the rest of the team for me. Beyond wind and solar, what do you see as playing the central or most promising roles here?

Yeah, the other analogy I often use is that of a balanced diet. You can’t eat only bananas, and you don’t want to only eat burgers, you want to eat a diverse mix of different parts of your diet. And so whether it’s trying to have all the right star players playing the right position on the court or trying to balance out your diet, what we need to build is an effective energy system that consists of team of different roles. And we break it down in our research as basically three key roles. The first is the one that wind and solar fill and other weather-dependent variable renewable resources. And we call those fuel-saving resources. If you think about what a wind farm is, it’s a bunch of steel, and copper, and capital that you invested upfront that then has no fuel costs. You can’t count on when the wind is going to blow, but when you have it, you can stop using some other more expensive fuel-consuming resource, like a natural gas power plant or a coal plant. And by the way, also avoid the pollution and climate-warming gases that go along with using those power plants. And so the role of wind and solar is effectively to displace the fuel consumption of other potentially more dependable resources in the grid, maybe not necessarily to shut down the power plant as a whole, but to use it less and less. And that is real value because every time we burn natural gas or coal, we’re consuming something that costs money. And if we can avoid that, then the wind and solar farms are effectively delivering value in the value of the avoided fuel, and of course, the social value of the avoided emissions. Now that’s a big role, but it’s not the only role that we have. And because their output is variable, as well as demand for electricity which goes up and down. We need a second key role, which we call fast-burst or balancing resources. And that’s where batteries, battery energy storage, as well as smart charging of electric vehicles or other ways to flexibly move around when we consume electricity — or you live in California, I think, Ezra, the flex alerts that you got recently during the heat waves, people can cut back on their energy consumption at the most challenging times through demand response programs. They should get paid to do that, by the way, not just do it out of altruism. And all of those forms can give us kind of short bursts of flexibility that can help better align supply and demand with those variable demand and variable wind and solar resources. The problem with those is that you can’t really sustain their output for a long period of time. You might be willing to participate in that flex alert from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on a couple of really hot days, but you’re not going to do that every day for a month. And the batteries can go for a few hours, but you’re going to drain the battery after four or six or eight hours. And so those are really good for kind of within the day kind of variability or occasional needs. But what we need are technologies that are not constrained by the weather and are not constrained by a duration limit, that can go as long as we need them, whenever we need them. And that’s what we call the third category, which are firm resources or clean firm resources, because we want to replace the dirty ones with the clean ones. And so today, we rely on natural gas and coal and our existing nuclear fleet for that firm role. But if we want to build a clean energy system and we need all that new clean electricity, we’re going to need to build about an equivalent amount as we have coal and gas plants today of clean firm options, whether that’s new nuclear power plants, advanced geothermal or similar options like that.

ezra klein

OK, let’s talk about a couple of these. And I want to begin with the one that people are probably most familiar with, which is nuclear power. You’ve mentioned that nuclear power is currently providing about half of our clean electricity. My sense is the expectation is that doesn’t go up very much, but I also run into people all the time who think it should go up radically. How do you see both the likely path of nuclear and also what the possible path of nuclear could be?

Yeah, so when I think about nuclear power, I always try to think about there’s really two separate questions here. One is what do we do with that existing nuclear power fleet that, as you said, is providing about half of our carbon-free electricity, and, in my view, provides a really critical foundation to build on to enable more rapid emissions reductions. Because if we have to simultaneously replace all of those existing nuclear plants and try to replace the and nuclear and — I mean, the coal — and try to simultaneously replace the coal and natural gas power plants that are emitting CO2 and air pollution, we have to sprint twice as fast in a challenge that’s already incredibly difficult. And so there’s sort of an opportunity cost right now where until we’ve shut down the last coal plants and the last natural gas plants, every single megawatt-hour of new clean electricity, new energy efficiency that we can add to the grid that goes to replace a nuclear power plant is a wasted opportunity to accelerate our emissions reductions and get rid of those dirty fossil fuels. And so when it comes to the first question, what do we do with the existing fleet? I think it is critical that we preserve the operation of any nuclear power plant that can continue safely operating. So that’s the existing nuclear fleet. But you can’t grow that; it’s probably going to shrink. Those plants are getting long in the tooth and quite old. And so we are going to need to replace those resources eventually with new clean firm capacity. I just hope that we do that after we’ve already eliminated the coal fleet that is causing far more damage to public health.

ezra klein

But I also want to talk here about the path not taken. I get this question a lot. I’ve tried to look into it myself. We created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1974. Since then, almost no new civilian nuclear plants have opened in this country. We’re not on the kind of learning curve that we could be with nuclear, that we are with on other technologies. And there are a lot of nuclear fans who think this is the great sin of our energy policy — that since the ‘70s, we could have been on a path of making nuclear much cheaper, much safer, getting better at it, making the regulations more flexible, and we could just have all of this clean, nonpolluting stable non-intermittent energy by now. Next generation nuclear plants have been pretty safe. Even things like Fukushima didn’t have — the nuclear meltdown there did not have the death toll people think it does. It’s actually really hard to find anybody who died because of the nuclear issue there. And there’s just a feeling that we screwed this up and that we’re afraid of this energy source that could have been this tremendous generator of clean power without the land use that you need for wind and solar. Are those people right?

Well, I have less interest in rehashing the past than I do in thinking about the role it can play in the future. To the degree, we can learn from the past in order to inform our future for our decisions. That’s good.

ezra klein

Right, but if they’re right about the path, then we could take that path now.

Potentially. I mean, things have changed since the 1970s. And so I think that the challenge for nuclear primarily is not the regulatory conditions that exist around nuclear power plants. I think those regulatory conditions are what has kept the nuclear power fleet incredibly safe, which I think is a prerequisite for continuing to rely on nuclear fission. The challenge in the West — and this is not a challenge globally — is that we forgot how to build big complicated civil works projects. You know, yes, there were some shifting regulation that occurred while plants were under construction that added to costs of specific nuclear plants in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Those are concrete examples of where changing regulation midstream after you’ve already started building a project, clearly is going to add to the cost of that project. But I don’t think the regulatory standards that we have in place right now are the primary barrier to building new nuclear. In fact, we had this whole era of supposed nuclear renaissance in the 2000 when a number of — something like a dozen sites were permitted for new nuclear power plants. Only four of those started construction. Two reactors at two different sites — one in South Carolina and one in Georgia. It was a disaster. We tried to build large scale gigawatt scale nuclear reactors that provide enough electricity for about a million people each — huge reactors. And they cost tens of billions of dollars. They’re multiyear, incredibly complicated construction, procurement, and engineering projects. And the U.S. isn’t very good at that. And it’s not a thing that’s unique to nuclear. Look at how long it took to build the Bay Bridge East Span replacement. Look how long it took to do the Big Dig in Boston. We are not particularly good at large scale infrastructure like that in the U.S. because we’ve lost the practice. If you go to China or the Middle East, like the U.A.E., where they’re building four new nuclear reactors of a Korean design, they have experience building lots of infrastructure in recent memory. And they have much more efficiently and cost effectively built out new gigawatt scale nuclear reactors. So what do you do with that? Do you say, OK, we’re just going to go all in the U.S., and we’re going to take the huge costs of those first few reactors and just say you know what? It’s going to cost a ton, and we’re going to plow through that. And we’re going to commit to building, and learning how to do this again, and drive down those costs. That’s an option. It’s a really, really expensive and risky option. Because if it doesn’t work, you’ve committed something like a couple hundred billion dollars to building your first dozen plants. And so I just think that’s a challenge to try to get done politically given the risks involved. And so where I see the future for nuclear in the West, and I think where the bulk of the industry and the investment now is focused is on smaller and more modular reactors that instead of trying to power a million people per reactor are trying to power 50,000 or 100,000 people, like a 1/10 or a 1/20 the size of a large scale reactor. And that means that the bets on each individual one are so much smaller that you can build one for a billion dollars instead of $15 billion or $20 billion. And I think that makes it much more likely that we can get our muscle memory back and get the economies of scale and learning by doing and trained work force developed around building them in series. That’s going to be key to building low-cost reactors.

ezra klein

So then, something that does end up playing a huge role in a lot of the decarbonization pathways here, and a somewhat controversial one, is carbon-capture technologies. Can you tell me a bit about why they’re central, and a lot of the modeling, and just what they are?

So carbon capture is a term for a broad range of different processes that take CO2 from some kind of combustion or industrial process, capture that CO2 and then either store it somewhere back in geologic basins, the same place that we extract the oil and gas from that has kept it down there for eons or try to mineralize it. They’ve been demonstrated at a variety of scales. Some of them commercial scale and a variety of applications. Some of them at pilot scale. And so like new nuclear power plants or advanced geothermal, they’re all still very nascent. And we’ve seen the first demonstration or first a couple of examples of them. And the challenge will be can we scale them up to operate reliably and affordably? And somewhat uniquely for carbon capture, can we also build the network infrastructure to take that CO2 and do something safe or useful with it? Put it underground or use it in some industrial process. So there is a network challenge there to enable CO2 capture at scale, which is kind of similar to the transmission buildout challenge for wind and solar that building a new nuclear fleet or a geothermal fleet maybe doesn’t have to face.

ezra klein

I think this is another place where the physical scale of what we’re talking about is easy to miss.

Yeah.

ezra klein

I look around, I can’t really see any CO2 around me. So it feels like capturing a bunch of CO2 would not take up a lot of space, but your report says, quote, the scale of CO2 transport and storage in 2050 in these scenarios ranges from 1.3 to 2.4 times current U.S. oil production on a volume equivalent basis. So imagine all the oil we are producing and moving around the economy, you’re saying that the carbon capture that is being envisioned, which we don’t do all that much of now, is going to take up volumetrically — is more than that. That’s really striking to me.

Yeah, it is. And that’s if we scale carbon capture to roughly sort of a gigaton scale. We emit about 6 billion tons of greenhouse gases about five and a half now in the United States. And so this is something like roughly one-fifth of all of our greenhouse gas emissions today. If we want CO2 to be able to play that scale of role, like something like a fifth of the solution, then that is the scale of infrastructure that we’re talking about. Now on the one hand, we have already built that scale of infrastructure for oil and natural gas across the country. And if you add up both the natural gas side as well, it’s even larger than the amount we need for carbon transport and storage. So that shows that we can do it from a physical existence proof perspective. But the big difference here, of course, is that oil and gas are a really valuable product that you make a lot of money digging out of the ground and then using somewhere else. CO2 is a waste product that we are trying to dispose of. And so unless there’s a real economic value stream there, for someone to capture that CO2 and do something with it, it’s just not going to happen at anywhere near the scale that we’re talking about. And so that’s where, again the Inflation Reduction Act comes in, it increases a tax credit for capturing CO2 and storing it to $85 per ton up from a $50 per ton credit in place now. And we think that’s going to help the industry get off the ground in a variety of different sectors, including some of our most heavily emitting industries, like cement and steel production, where you have to deal with emissions not only from heat and combustion, but also from the actual chemical process used to produce steel or cement which directly emits CO2 as well. And so we have to find some way to eliminate that, also, and carbon capture is an option in those sectors as well.

ezra klein

So there is a segment of the climate movement that just hates this part of the bill, hates this part of the theory, does not want to see a substantial part of our decarbonization pathway built around things that allow us to continue producing fossil fuels in a putatively cleaner way. And I think there’s also some skepticism that it really will work technically in the long run. What is that critique? And why aren’t you persuaded by it?

Well, there’s two — I think, two elements of that critique. One is that fossil energy companies are themselves primarily responsible for our lack of progress on climate change. That because of their vested economic interests, they have actively disrupted efforts to confront climate change over the long haul. And so climate campaigners, in this view, are trying to delegitimize fossil fuel companies and industries as social actors, the same way that tobacco companies were villainized and basically delegitimized as legitimate corporate citizens. And so that’s an effort, that’s a political strategy, that’s meant to try to weaken the ability of oil and gas companies to impede progress. There’s a second, and more substantial or tangible reason to oppose carbon capture, which is that if it perpetuates some amount of fossil fuel use — it’s going to be dramatically less than today — but some amount of fossil fuel use, then it also perpetuates some of the impacts of the extractive economy and the transport and processing of fossil fuels that have primarily been borne by low income and Black and Brown communities and Native American communities across the country. And so there’s an environmental justice argument that continuing to use any fossil fuels is simply unjust and therefore unacceptable. And so I’m sympathetic to both of those concerns. And I think that I’m humble enough to think that they may be right in the end. And maybe that strategy is the one that will work. But I also am concerned that it raises the political bar to progress. Because if that’s your view, you have to defeat head on one of the most powerful industries in the economy — the oil and gas sector. And an alternative strategy to that is to provide an economic role for those industries in the future and to remove their reticence to embrace decarbonization by allowing them to transition, to find a way that they can transition to play a role — a diminished role, I think — but a role in the new net-zero economy. So it’s sort of a question, do you try to turn them, or do you try to beat them, or do you try to do some combination of both from the sort of political perspective? And then there’s the environmental justice argument, which is really one of, are we trying to minimize harm, or are we trying to eliminate harm? And if we can make more rapid progress on decarbonization and the reduction of fossil fuel use by using carbon capture, then by trying to wage and all-out battle against fossil energy companies, then that could actually improve environmental justice outcomes in some cases as well. So I think this is complicated. I don’t pretend to have a clear answer. And the Net-Zero America Study presents five pathways to get to net zero. One of which we explicitly exclude, carbon capture and any fossil fuel use to try to understand what that pathway would look like. And it’s relatively affordable. But by eschewing carbon capture entirely, it raises a whole number of other challenges that we have to be prepared to address as well. Like I mentioned before, doubling the amount of wind and solar deployed and the amount of transmission we have to build, for example.

ezra klein

Yeah, there’s a way of framing carbon capture as a political option. You need to do it because you couldn’t pass this bill through Joe Manchin. But when I read the Net-Zero America Report on this, that actually isn’t how it read, at least solely to me. I mean, obviously, that’s a dimension here. But if you don’t believe that we have a surefire shot of building the level of wind and solar installation you would need to do a full on renewable energy transition, which I just don’t think we do. When I look at those numbers, when I look at that land use, which is bigger than we’ve even talked about, I don’t think it’s plausible. In that world, this carbon capture becomes a hedge. I mean, you’re going to be using some transitionary fuels one way or the other over time. And it looks a little bit like given that we’re not going to do a rapid expansion of nuclear, it looks a little bit like you’re asking the question, are you going to use natural gas with carbon capture or without carbon capture. Because we’re just not going to get that kind of wind and solar build out that quickly. And I think people wish we didn’t have to do this middle thing. But given the realities of our building capacity, it seems to me this is playing not just a political role. But again, in a lot of the models I looked through, a kind of just unhappy, necessary role.

Yeah, I think that’s right as well. And that’s true for a lot of things, like not everybody wants to spend any money developing new nuclear technology, as well or not everybody wants to embrace geothermal energy because it involves drilling and some potential seismic impacts in certain cases. Every energy technology has certain impacts. And they also have certain kind of — it’s odd to see how much values and sort of personal, like supporting your own favorite sports team, you see in the energy world, like people have their technology that they feel like they’re part of the tribe, and that’s the technology they really prefer. And that’s because certain technologies align differently with different people’s values. People would prefer to only use the things that they like the most. And I think one of the challenges, and one of the things I have to try to communicate all the time when we try to unpack energy systems is that you just can’t use only the thing you like the most, right? Any time you try to do everything with one technology or a limited set of technologies, you’ll inevitably run into situations where you’re forcing a solution to try to play a role that it’s just not cut out to play. And that makes this already really hard challenge that much harder. You have to build that much more wind and solar because so much of the wind and solar you build is never used. You’re building it for that day when the sun isn’t very strong and the wind isn’t very strong, and you really just need a little bit more to top up your batteries. And the rest of the time, they’re producing way more solar and wind than you could possibly use or could afford to store in batteries or to turn into hydrogen or something. And so you’re building a ton of infrastructure that’s just poorly utilized if you want to pursue that strategy. And that raises the land use, and it raises the economic challenge, it raises the transmission buildout, mostly because you’re pushing wind and solar, again, to not be the star point guard but to do all five positions on the court. And so it is an important reality of complex energy systems that we need a complete team of resources, and we need a range of options because we’re a big, diverse country with different resource spaces, different geographic constraints and different values, frankly. So that some parts of the country really do want to build nuclear power or really do want to continue to use natural gas. Other parts don’t want to touch them. And we need solutions that work in all of those contexts. And so keeping our options open, rather than trying to constrain them is definitely the lowest risk way to proceed these days. Because if you bet on a set of limited set of technologies, and you bet wrong, you’ve bet the planet, and you’ve failed. The stakes are that high.

ezra klein

But there is a bet here that the technology works. And I’ve certainly seen a lot of people in the climate movement who are skeptical that carbon capture works or worry that there will be a lot of crappy installation of it, such that you’re not actually capturing what you think you are or you’re not storing it in a way that is long-term, that’s safe. And so there’s a confidence that when you build a wind turbine, you really are creating zero-carbon power. Are you confident that we have or are near to having the carbon-capture technologies to reliably capture, and store, or use carbon for very, very long periods of geologic time?

Yeah, I’m much more confident, I guess, than some of the critics that you’re talking about. But I’m not perfectly confident. I don’t know for sure that we’re going to be able to scale all of these industries up to the gigaton scale. I think about a decade ago, we know when you build a wind farm now, that we can reliably get carbon-free electricity from it. A decade or two ago, we were talking about whether or not the wind — we could even get to 10 or 20 percent wind penetration without the grid blowing up, without the variability of wind causing all kinds of havoc on the grid. And we didn’t think that was an affordable option. It costs three times as much as it did today, 10 times as much for solar. And so the reason we count on those as mature, sure things now is because we bet on them when they were risky, right? We didn’t bet exclusively on wind and solar; we supported a bunch of things. But wind and solar were the technologies that were the bet paid off over the last decade and where they’re now mature sure fire things that we can scale up to substantial levels, probably something like half or more of our overall electricity generation by the end of the decade. That is because we tried them out, and we deployed them at scale, and we got better and better at it over time. And so we don’t need carbon capture at scale this decade. The things that are going to do all of the emissions reduction work, really, the bulk of it, are technologies that we bet on a decade ago and are ready to scale now. What we need to do over this next decade is to repeat that same kind of success that we had for wind and solar and batteries with the full portfolio of options that we think we might need at scale in the 2030s and 2040s. And that includes carbon capture, and includes nuclear, that includes advanced geothermal, that includes all different ways to produce hydrogen, which is a critical energy carrier in the long run. And the policy environment is now finally aligned to do that with the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law providing both demonstration funding for the first kind of n-of-a-kind, first handful of projects in all of those categories, as well as the first market-ready deployment subsidies, so that we can scale up, and drive down the cost, and improve the maturity and performance of all those technologies over the next 10 years as well, just as we did for wind and solar.

ezra klein

I’m really struck by this International Energy Association estimate that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today. So we’ve kind of flicked at some of the things that are trying to be incentivized here that we don’t fully have figured out like advanced hydrogen or geothermal. What bets that are being made in this bill, in CHIPS, in the Infrastructure Bill are you excited about? What do you think when you look 15 years into the future we’re investing in that may come to be central in the way that wind and solar are central to our future now?

So I do think that we are going to see basically the full range of all of those clean firm power generation technologies get trialed out over the next few years and have a chance to scale. And that makes me confident that we’re going to complete the clean electricity tool kit that we need or the low carbon team for electricity production. We are seeing advanced geothermal energy technologies a couple different routes to producing reliable and affordable geothermal power across a much broader range of the world than is possible today. Those are being demonstrated on the first commercial projects and demonstration projects as we speak, like they’re being drilled right now. And we’re seeing a huge ramp up of federal funding for those kinds of efforts. And geothermal, unlike a big nuclear plant, they’re really modular. You only need to build them in 5 or 10 megawatt increments. And so they don’t cost a whole lot to demonstrate. We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate, rather than billions of dollars. And so I’m confident that we’re going to see a lot of success there. One thing we’ve gotten really good at in the oil and gas sector in the U.S. over the last decade, it’s drilling horizontal wells, and doing multistage fracturing, and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of that innovation can translate over into geothermal, plus we’re going to see new innovations applying those kinds of techniques in a new geology for a new purpose are going to unlock as well. We’re going to see the first nuclear power plants built at the end of the decade. There are a variety of technologies that are getting licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and are going to build their first commercial projects in the late 2020s. We’re going to see the first carbon capture projects in the power sector that use oxy-fuel combustion move forward over the next few years. Also and then there’s clean hydrogen production, which again, I mentioned at the beginning of this, the importance of carbon-free energy carriers. Hydrogen is just hydrogen. It’s not a hydrocarbon. So there’s no CO2, or carbon in those bonds. And there’s no CO2 emitted when we use hydrogen. And so it is an option as a gaseous fuel or just as an intermediate energy carrier and storage option that is itself carbon free like electricity. And if we can produce it from clean sources, from clean electricity, from nuclear power, from biomass that we can gasify and turn into hydrogen and then capture the CO2, and store it for actually negative emissions because that CO2 came from the atmosphere originally. Or if we can take it out of natural gas, which is CH4 — so take the carbon out and keep the four hydrogen atoms — we can make clean hydrogen that way as well. Again, all of those options are supported. Actually, probably quite generously — I argue in many cases maybe too generously — in the bill. And I think we’re going to see an explosion of investment in hydrogen over the next decade too. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

We’ve been talking about all the policies and efforts to generate a lot of clean power. But we’re also trying to move a lot of homes, and cars, and industries, and businesses to use clean electricity mainly, though not only. And let’s start on the consumer side of it. The things that people, like individual homeowners, might buy in the next 10 years with support from the bill. Tell me about that effort to electrify the transportation and home-heating industries.

Yeah, so transportation is the one that’s already really in full swing, right? If you look around, if you follow automotive news, or you’re following announcements of the automotive companies, they’re all kind out trying to outrace each other to transition their offerings to electric offerings and to invest in the manufacturing and supply chains to do that. That’s an area that’s going to be again dramatically accelerated. It’s a trend that’s already underway that will be accelerated by the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law. The infrastructure law is going to help build out the public charger networks that are going to make it easier for people to find a place to quickly recharge when they’re on the road away from their homes. And the Inflation Reduction Act is going to provide a new tax credit or a more robust tax credit for private sector charger deployment, whether that’s at an individual tax credit for homeowners or others or whether that’s a business tax credit for property owners or offices that are going to try to electrify their parking garages. And so that’s going to create the sort of infrastructure that will make people comfortable to tackle the range anxiety that is currently a kind of psychological limit to E.V. adoption. And then the other thing is that an E.V. today is already, according to “Consumer Reports,” cheaper to own over the first five years, including the upfront purchase cost than an equivalently outfitted and sized internal combustion engine car. And that’s something a lot of people don’t realize, that you save a ton on fuel and on maintenance because you don’t need to go in for regular oil changes and the brake pads don’t wear out as fast and other — there’s less moving parts to fix in an electric car. And so between cheaper fueling and cheaper maintenance, that offsets more than the — more than offsets the upfront cost premium today for buying an E.V. It’s just a challenge for a lot of people to go to the dealership and look at a car that costs $5,000 or $10,000 more and plopped down that money up front. And so what the Inflation Reduction Act does is it tries to remove that trade off by offering up to a $7,500 tax credit, again, if automotive manufacturers can meet the sourcing requirements for batteries and assembly, then they can get that full credit. And that will knock down that upfront cost. And our estimates are that by the mid 2020s, it will just be cheaper the minute you get to the dealership to buy an E.V. when you combine the cost declines we expect to continue for batteries and the scale of manufacturing that will be achieved for E.V.s and also lower cost with those tax credits. And so it’ll be cheaper the minute you get to the dealership, and maybe half the cost when you go home, and start using it, and charging it, and not going to the gas station. And so that’s going to, I think, really just supercharge the electric vehicle transition. There’s also I think an under-looked tax credit for business adoption of electric vehicles that doesn’t have any of those headache-inducing domestic sourcing requirements that we talked about earlier. It’s just a straight up $7,500 credit for light-duty vehicles and 30 percent of the purchase cost up to $40,000 for medium and heavy-duty vehicles. That means things like Amazon or UPS delivery trucks, or long-haul freight or the trucks that move things around in ports and consume a lot of diesel and pollute communities that are adjacent to ports. And so those credits are likely to electrify buses, and shipping and freight and fleet vehicles and rental car fleets, and things like that and aren’t tied to any of those domestic sourcing requirements. And so those are going to kick things into high gear in those sectors as well.

ezra klein

The worry I hear about the electric vehicle credits is that these are going to end up a pretty big corporate welfare program. You just mentioned that automakers are making as many electric vehicles as they can. They cannot make them fast enough to keep up with demand. If you add a $7,500 credit on top of that, maybe just get Ford selling the electric F-150 for $5,000 more than they otherwise would because you’ve changed the demand curve and consumers can afford $5,000 more, given there’s a $7,500 cut through the credit, or Tesla pockets it, or whatever. There’s a fear I hear that this just isn’t needed. And it’s going to end up being a big giveaway at taxpayer expense. How do you think about that?

Well, it’s possible that that’s the case. Any time you have a tax credit that goes on the business side of things, or for that matter a tax increase, like the corporate minimum tax in the bill, it isn’t usually passed on 100 percent to consumers. It really depends on how much competition and substitution there is in the market and how much consumers respond to changes in price. And so we are in a kind of unique environment right now where really all automotive — the whole supply chain is constrained. And so getting any car, let alone an electric car, is challenging and there’s you’re seeing markups and we’re basically seeing consumers being not particularly responsive to the price, right? Willing to pay whatever it takes because they need a new car. And that’s particularly true for electric vehicles in the short term, particularly because there’s just not that many of them available and there’s not that many models available from different automakers. So if you want an E.V. in a particular trim, in a particular class or size, there’s only a couple of options. And so in the near term, it’s possible that lack of competition will mean that some of the automakers can try to set higher prices and just absorb the value of that credit. But as competition expands and as more and more vehicles, there’s dozens of new E.V. models coming to the market over the next couple of years. As those come out in the market, one of those automakers is going to start pricing aggressively. And we tend to see pretty close price parity in the most competitive segments of the automotive sector where you have multiple manufacturers offering similar products. And so I’m much more concerned about this sort of capturing credits in places where you only have two or three players in the market, high degree of market concentration. But the automotive sector is incredibly competitive. You’ve got a lot of different automakers producing very similar vehicles and marketing them heavily. And I think that over time, as the range of E.V. offerings expands, you’re not going to see the ability to hold on to much of those credits.

ezra klein

Let’s talk a bit about heat pumps, both because I think it’s important and because our mutual friend, Leah Stokes, will kill me if I don’t talk more about heat pumps.

[LAUGHS] Yes.

ezra klein

How big of an issue is home heating? And for people who just don’t know what a heat pump is, what are we even talking about? If I wanted to have a heat pump tomorrow, what am I actually doing to my home? Who’s doing it? How is it getting financed? It’s actually a little bit of a big infrastructural upgrade that I think a lot of people aren’t familiar with.

Yeah, it’s a little bit unfortunate, the term heat pump. We’ve had lots of debates on Twitter about different branding for a heat pump. I don’t know if anybody’s come up with anything all that much better. But the reality is that you already have a bunch of heat pumps in your home. If you’ve got an air conditioning unit at all, that’s a heat pump. If you’ve got a refrigerator, it’s running on a heat pump. What a heat pump does is it just moves heat around. So it uses a little bit of electricity and a series of things that compress gases and expand gases to move the heat around. And it basically — if you think about your refrigerator. What it’s doing is it’s pumping heat out of your fridge and into your dining room or your kitchen. And if you think about an air-conditioner, it’s pumping heat out of your house and into the outside. In fact, if you stand next to your air conditioning unit as it’s blowing, like you can feel the heat coming out of it, right? And the reason heat pumps are magic, are so useful, is that they use very — they’re not making energy — so they’re not converting energy, they’re not taking chemicals and breaking bonds, and releasing energy from that by converting to some other source, they’re just moving energy around. And so they can take a very little bit of electricity and move a lot more heat around. And so for example, you could take one unit of electricity with a heat pump and pump a little bit of that ambient heat that’s outside even on a cold day into your home and get about three units of heat for every one unit of electricity you consume. And so the magic of a heat pump is think of it as just a reversible air conditioning unit. Where your air conditioning unit today pumps heat out of your house and into the outside during the summer, a heat pump just does both things. It does that during the summer and it pumps heat from the outside in the winter into your home to help heat your home. Or you can have a heat pump water heater that does the same thing to heat up your water for washing the dishes or taking a shower. And so they’re a key technology in the decarbonization challenge because, again, they don’t involve burning anything, so there’s no direct emissions of CO2 or all the pollutants that come from burning natural gas in our homes, in the form of our boilers in our basements. And they’re much more efficient than a boiler because you’re getting multiple units of heat for every unit of electricity that you consume. The same is true for E.V.s, by the way. They’re much more efficient at turning the energy in your battery, about 90 percent of that makes it to the wheels of your car, whereas an internal combustion engine only gets about 15 percent or 16 percent of the energy in your gas tank into the mobility or traction that you’re getting in the wheels of the car. So both electric vehicles and heat pumps are much more efficient in final energy conversion, converting the energy carrier to useful service. And they both use electrons, so they’re using a carbon-free energy carrier that we can then decarbonize by building all that clean electricity.

ezra klein

And what does the Inflation Reduction Act do to encourage heat pump adoption?

There’s — and this is an area, again, where I think it could have done more. There are two main things that it does. One is it offers a tax credit for homeowners or businesses to install heat pumps for both water heating and space heating. It maxes out at $2,000, though, for a heat pump. So $2,000 is not a huge share of the cost, particularly for a central air conditioning and heat pump system that might cost something like $15,000 or $20,000. So whereas, a lot of other credits will cover something like 20 percent to 30 percent of the upfront cost, this might only be covering more like 10 percent of the upfront cost. And that’s going to help, again, change the calculus, which right now is the same as an E.V. It’s pay more upfront, but save over time in lower energy costs. And it’s going to help take a couple thousand dollars off the upfront cost and help shift that calculus. But I don’t think it’s enough to make it universally, just like so obviously, good business sense for everybody that it will drive the kind of scale of adoption that we’re likely to see for E.V.s.

ezra klein

I’m going to leave the decarbonization of industry for another podcast. So I want to hit two more topics before we close up here. And one is transmission infrastructure. So we’re going to be making all this clean electricity somewhere. We’ve got to get it to all these cars, to these heat pumps, to these businesses. The report suggests we need a 60 percent increase in transmission lines and approaches. Just give me a sense of scale of that. How many moles of new transmission are we talking about? Are you confident that we can build that much new transmission this quickly? Like how much of a challenge is that?

Yeah, so the number that we came up with in the Repeat Project is that to make good on the kind of billion ton reduction in emissions in 2030 that we think the Inflation Reduction Act could deliver, we need to basically more than double the pace of transmission expansion that we’ve seen over the last decade. We need to grow and expand the amount of transmission capacity by a little over 2 percent per year to deploy all the wind and solar that we see in our modeling and to get that power to where we consume it. And over the last decade, we’ve built out, expanded the transmission grid at about 1 percent per year. So we’ve got a roughly double the pace. And that sounds hard. On the other hand, if we look back to the eras when electricity demand was growing, from the 1970s to about 2005, when we started to see electricity demand flatline, we expanded the grid by about per year, historically. So we’re coming out of an era of flat or stagnant electricity demand growth into an era of growing demand again due to all those electric vehicles and heat pumps. And we’re going to need a bigger grid to do that. And there are going to be more investment opportunities because of that growing demand for electricity. And so we have to basically get back on the same track that we were in the last era when the grid was expanding and off of the current track that we’re on where the grid grows that are really anemic pace of only about 1 percent per year.

ezra klein

So people may know that to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed, in that final deal with Manchin, Schumer agreed to attach this separate deal on permitting to must pass legislation, like the government funding bill. And part of that deal is trying to shorten and focus environmental reviews, part of that deal is this weird list of important projects, part of it is Manchin trying to get a carve out or getting a carve out for the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline, which environmentalists really don’t like. And I think for good reason. But then part of it, the part that people in Congress who’ve been working on this deal, who are climate hawks are excited about is an expansion of the federal government’s authority to site, to plan, to allocate the costs of interregional and interstate transmission lines. I’m curious, Jesse, if you’re kind of familiar with that piece of the permitting reform bill, and if so, what you think of it.

Yeah, so when you think about building out wind and solar, they’re really kind of three big challenges. First is where do you put it, right? So how do you actually get the siting of wind and solar facilities themselves done and get local community buy in for siting wind or solar farms. And the second is how do you move the power, right? So what transmission lines do you need to build out? And the third is how do you pay for it. How do you allocate the costs of those transmission lines? And there’s two main types of transmission lines that we have to be concerned about. One is connecting a wind and solar facility just to kind of get to the backbone transmission grid — or we sometimes call those spur lines or interconnection lines — because they primarily serve just that one wind facility. And then you have long-distance transmission, sort of upgrading the backbone grid, which in many cases can be multistate. It can span multiple state boundaries. And that’s really critical to get wind and solar from wherever we produce it to our cities. It’s also critical to enhance the resilience of the grid and to unlock competition because we can move power across broader parts of the grid, so that, for example Texas, which is not strongly interconnected with the grid — when it had the Texas freeze in 2021, they weren’t able to call on their neighbors to send in more power in areas that weren’t suffering from power plant shutdowns during cold temperatures. If we did have a stronger, more linked up grid, we could move power in bulk over long distances. And you could help out your neighbors when they’re in trouble, and you could also unlock greater competition and lower costs over a wider region. So those are all the reasons we want to build out a bigger grid. The challenge has been that unlike for natural gas or oil pipelines or interstate highways, the states are in charge of permitting all transmission lines, even those that cross Interstate boundaries or even those that are critical for interstate commerce. Which, if you know anything about the Constitution, is a little bit weird. Because generally speaking, the federal government has regulatory purview over interstate commerce. And so even though transmission lines are especially bulk transmission lines are clearly related to interstate commerce and that Congress has used the Commerce Clause and the fact that the federal government should regulate interstate commerce to enact all kinds of Federal Regulations over wholesale or bulk power generation, they have not expanded so far federal permitting authority to site and permit transmission lines of that are important for interstate commerce. The draft legislation at least would do that. It would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the same kind of authority they have over interstate natural gas pipelines to be the primary siting agency for transmission lines of national importance, I think is the way that language frames it. And there’s a few criteria. But basically, anything that’s important for national policy goals, for competition, and for grid reliability. And so that would really shift things. Because now, instead of having to go through permitting processes in four different states when you want to go from point A to point B, you would go to one central permitting process at the federal level. States would be consulted as stakeholders as part of that process, but the ultimate decision would be a single regulatory decision at the federal level. The other thing it does is it addresses that who pays for it question, particularly for inter-regional transmission lines that span different grid regions. It basically says that the beneficiaries of those transmission lines need to pay for those lines in proportion to how much they benefit. It’s a principle called beneficiary pays that’s really the kind of cornerstone of good transmission regulation and cost allocation. And the challenge right now, again, is that there are regional grid operators who can manage that kind of cost allocation for stakeholders within their region. But any time a line crosses between those two regions, there really isn’t any arbiter at the higher level to decide how much region one and region two are going to pay for those lines that link the two regions. And they end up fighting for long periods of time over how much to pay and that can often kill or delay projects for a long period as well. So the bill draft directs FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, to use this beneficiary pays principle to allocate costs between regions in proportion to how much those regions benefit, which would be a really good policy.

ezra klein

Yeah, I think that piece of it is exciting. And it gets at this, I think, broader thing, which is that if we’re going to be in this decade or multi decades of super intense infrastructure building, we’re just going to have to tweak a lot of how we build the regulations for how we build, the way we coordinate and plan and share cost to make all this go as fast as it actually needs to go. But I want to end on something that I don’t think gets talked about enough as a benefit which you’ve alluded to a couple of times in the conversation, of if we do get here. So climate change, people know, is having effects in the real world now. You see it in intensified heat waves, and drought, and natural disasters. But we are, to a large extent, trying to prevent the worst of what could happen. But there’s this whole other question of air pollution, which is so much worse for people than I think is broadly realized and does so much more damage and could be pretty substantially cut by a decarbonized America. So I want to see as we come to a close here if you can put some flesh on that, on what this could do as a secondary benefit for air pollution, and through air pollution for our health, our cognitive abilities, the world we live in.

Yeah, I feel like the more we learn, particularly about fine particulate matter, which is sort of the really small pieces of combustible material that are released by coal plants, and diesel buses and trucks, and gas vehicles, the more we learn about these fine particulates and their health impacts the more concerning it gets. These are very, very small particles that penetrate deep into our cardiovascular system. Because they’re so small, they get into our lungs, and they cross over into our blood. They get into our brain, and all over our body. And they cause a huge range of different impacts. And particularly, they cause premature deaths on the order of tens of thousands annually in the United States. And so we think of — we’ve made a lot of progress in air pollution in the U.S., and that’s true, I mean, compared to cities in China or India. It’s clearly

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Speaking in Ohio on Saturday, Trump tried to energize QAnon on his behalf—a new phase in his campaign of threats against the government and the people of the United States.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Why Bill Barr turned on Trump
How Democrats can turn the tables on DeSantis
The ascension of the hobbit king
A Reckless EscalationTrump rallies can often seem ridiculous, not least because Trump himself is inherently a ridiculous person. He grips the podium and shouts, his sweaty angst giving rise to a reddish tinge apparent even under the thick layer of orange-hued chemicals he slathers on his face. In these moments, stock phrases and gimmicky asides pop out of his mouth like lottery numbers churning to the top of a Powerball machine.But Saturday night’s Ohio rally was not a typical Trump carnival, and it was not just ridiculous—it was dangerous. His embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theorists represents a new expansion not only of Trump’s cult of personality, but of his threats to sow violence.Despite his seeming inability to remember anything from one thought to the next, Trump has a kind of lizard-brain awareness of danger—only to himself, of course—that guides him when he’s faced with threats. His reflex in such situations is to do whatever it takes to survive, including bullying, lying, threatening, and allegedly breaking the law. He is in political and legal jeopardy now, and he has decided to escalate his war against the rule of law, the American system of government, and the American people by embracing and potentially weaponizing QAnon.The QAnon movement might seem as ridiculous as Trump, but it is tragic and hazardous. As my friend Rob Tracinski wrote recently, it is “an online grift that got out of hand and became a worldview,” and millions of people now believe that there “is a global network of pedophiles who secretly run the world and control our politics so that they can abuse children.” This is no ordinary conspiracy theory about commies fluoridating the water; the emotional punch of threats to children has already led to near tragedies and, in some cases, disastrous outcomes involving unstable and violent people.Initially, of course, Trump only winked at the QAnon movement, accepting its support in the same way that he accepted, without acknowledging it, the support of groups such as the Proud Boys. That last microgram of hesitancy is now gone. Trump recently shared images of himself wearing a Q pin, and the Ohio rally seemed to meld a QAnon event with an evangelical meeting. As Trump closed out his remarks, orchestral music began to play—using a song apparently very similar to the favored theme of QAnon—and the rally-goers reacted by lifting their index fingers in the air. One theory (and I am not a Q expert) is that the finger is a somatic expression of the QAnon motto “Where we go one, we go all,” but you have to see it to really appreciate the weirdly cultish vibe of that moment.Why is Trump doing this? It would be easy (and reassuring) to assume that he has exhausted all his other reservoirs of narcissistic support, and now all that’s left is to pull in the most conned marks in modern American political history and bask in their adulation while emptying their pockets. I think we have to prepare, however, for a worse possibility: With many of his previous supporters in groups such as the Oath Keepers lying low after January 6, Trump is making a show of recruiting from a movement whose members might include people willing to do violence on his behalf.Unless Trump has become a QAnon true believer—and that is unlikely, as he believes in nothing but himself—it is difficult to imagine any other motive here but increasing apprehension both in Washington and among the public about indicting him or holding him accountable for his behavior in any way. If you want political support and are trying to help J. D. Vance (who so far hasn’t said a word about any of this) in his Ohio Senate run, you hold a rally and lambaste your opponents and plump for your guy—Trump’s done this before and knows the drill. You do not, however, play creepy music and present yourself as the leader of one of the most unhinged crusades of modern times. That kind of rally is not meant to gather voters. Instead, it’s meant to recruit a mob and let the rest of the country see who’s on your side if you are threatened in any way.Don’t think for one moment that there are “good” Republicans who are going to put their foot down about any of this. The Republicans, with exceptions you could count on one hand, are—yet again—too cowardly and too opportunistic to stop Trump. Supposed Good Republican Glenn Youngkin is going on the road for the extremist election denier Kari Lake. Longtime Good Republican Rob Portman is endorsing Vance, who is so thirsty for Trump’s approval that even Trump crowed on Saturday night, “J. D. is kissing my ass, he wants my support so bad.” Meanwhile, Elise Stefanik, whose Good Republican card expired years ago, chitchatted with Steve Bannon on his podcast.The people who fought for Trump on January 6 were not enough to save him. He is now searching for a new pool of recruits. I didn’t think American politics could get much darker, but here we are.Related:
A glimpse into a fearful, angry, imaginary world
The prophecies of Q (from June 2020)
Hurricane Fiona knocked out power in Puerto Rico, and more than 1,000 stranded residents have been rescued across the island.
Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin was lowered into the Royal Vault at St. George’s Chapel.
Mark Frerichs, an American abducted in Kabul more than two years ago, was freed in an exchange for an Afghan detainee in U.S. federal prison.
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I Have Notes:  Nicole Chung talked with the best-selling romance novelist Jasmine Guillory about how she plots out her books.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounded up readers’ thoughts on how Trump could hurt Republicans in the midterms.
Chess Is Just Poker NowBy Matteo Wong
It was as if a bottom seed had knocked out the top team in March Madness: At the Sinquefield Cup chess tournament in St. Louis earlier this month, an upstart American teenager named Hans Niemann snapped the 53-game unbeaten streak of world champion Magnus Carlsen, perhaps the game’s best player of all time. But the real uproar came the following day, when Carlsen posted a cryptic tweet announcing his withdrawal that included a meme video stating, “If I speak I am in big trouble.” The king appeared to have leveled an unspoken accusation of cheating—and the chess world, in turn, exploded.
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(Alex Majoli / Magnum)
Read. Gwendoline Riley’s two most recent novels, My Phantoms and First Love, argue that understanding your past won’t liberate you.Watch.  The best shows of 2022—including The Patient, The Bear, and Severance—have one thing in common.Play our daily crossword.P.S.My Atlantic colleagues will be filling in for me the rest of this week on The Daily because I am heading down to the Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C. You can register to attend in person or virtually, or learn more about the events at our flagship annual event, here. (If you’d like to attend in person, we even have a discount for you: Use the code TAFFRIEND for 50 percent off.) Speakers will include Janet Yellen, Constance Wu, Arthur C. Brooks, Ibram X. Kendi, Senator Chris Murphy, Neal Katyal, Barton Gellman, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Ed Yong, and TikTok icon Elyse Myers, among many others. You can also catch an update on Ukraine from Anne Applebaum, Franklin Foer, and George Packer; see a debate between Thomas Chatterton-Williams and Joy Connelly about the culture wars; and watch the world premiere of the first television docuseries based on The Atlantic’s reporting, Shadowland, directed by Joe Berlinger. (Watch the chilling trailer here.)I’ll be there as well, on our Ideas Stage. Hope you can join us!—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

By Fiona Hill, Angela Stent, Agneska Bloch

Putin’s war in Ukraine: A conversation with Fiona Hill and Angela Stent	

Putin’s war in Ukraine	

A conversation with Fiona Hill and Angela Stent	

September 19, 2022	

Editor’s note: This conversation between Fiona Hill and Angela Stent was moderated by Agneska Bloch and recorded in Washington, DC on July 28, 2022. It is part of the Talbott Papers, a series that assesses the broader implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Listen to the conversation

AGNESKA BLOCHIt is my pleasure to be joined today by two distinguished Russia experts, Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, to discuss the war in Ukraine.Today, Fiona, Angela, and I will examine the war’s implications for Russia, the West, and the rest of the world. But we will begin with a discussion of history. And more specifically, the version of history that informs [Russian President] Vladimir Putin’s actions and what this means for the months and years to come.I would like to start by asking each of you to articulate what this war is about and what Ukraine means to Putin.

FIONA HILLWell, thanks so much, Agneska. It’s always just a great pleasure to be not just with you, but with Angela. Collectively, Angela and I have been studying Russia for the best part of a century. So, history is also part of our own perceptions of this. And in fact, Vladimir Putin himself has made it very clear that this is about history and culture. And in his view, the right of Russia as an imperial power — he’s not even saying really as a former imperial power — to have to dominion over lands that once, or in his view, still currently belong in the sphere of influence.So, Putin’s made a number of statements. Putin himself has explicitly said that Ukraine belongs to Russia. Ukraine is not a stand-alone, sovereign, independent country. Ukraine is a colony, not a former colony, but still a colony. He said that quite recently. And he’s also, of course, said in the last 10 years, that the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. And what he meant by that was not the Soviet system, communism, or even the Soviet Union in its previous form during the Cold War, but really the Russian state.For Putin, like many similar-minded people around him, the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian Empire in a different form with a different name. It didn’t include all the territory that had once belonged to the Russian Empire. And that, I think, is the important point to bear in mind here. Some of the territories of the Soviet Union that moved away from Russia after the collapse back in 1991, perhaps Putin doesn’t have the same kind of affinity with, for example.But he’s made it very clear throughout this conflict, in fact, in the run up to this conflict, that this is all about his vision of what he sees to be the Russian world. And he wants to carry out, in terms of invading and attacking Ukraine, actions that will bring the Russian lands as he sees them, back into the fold.

ANGELA STENTSo, if I can maybe continue on that. Putin has recently likened himself to Peter the Great who “gathered in the lands” after he defeated Sweden. We’re talking about the Baltic States. But in fact, I also see Putin in the tradition of Catherine the Great, whose portrait also adorns the Kremlin walls, as well as Peter’s. She famously said, “that which stops growing begins to rot. I have to expand my borders to keep my people safe.” So, the idea of defensive expansionism is something that’s very much written into Russian history of the last few centuries.  And Putin, I think, sees himself as part of that tradition.Now, interestingly enough, when he first came to power in 2000, he said anyone who doesn’t regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart and then he said, but anyone who wants to restore it has no head. But he has certainly moved beyond that. He doesn’t talk about restoring the Soviet Union, as Fiona said. But he certainly is likening himself more and more in the tradition of the imperial czars.And the irony is [Russian] Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov has just made a tour of Africa and made a speech saying, we aren’t tainted with the filth of colonialism that Britain, France, and all of these other countries are. The talk [is], “we were never a colonial power.” But, of course, Russia was a colonial power inasmuch as it conquered the peoples contiguous to it. It created the largest country on earth and subjected them to Russification. It didn’t want them to have their own traditions for a long time.And then Lenin came along and changed that. And this is what Putin accuses Lenin of, creating a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. As Fiona said, the Bolsheviks didn’t want to appear that they were imperial. They wanted to say, we’re completely different from the czars. But in fact, they recreated the empire.So, I think that sense of history is very much with him. And I think subjugating Ukraine is the most important piece of this for him because he clearly has articulated that Ukraine and Russia aren’t separate nations.He published this 5,000-word essay in July of 2021 on that. But it’s by no means the last part of it. He’s talked about the potential restoration of a Slavic empire, which would include Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and possibly northern Kazakhstan, where a large number of Russians and Ukrainians live.And so, this is, I think, what animates him now. He’s about to turn 70. He’s presumably thinking about his legacy. But then we really have to ask him, what kind of a legacy is he going to leave after this war is over?

From left to right: Portrait of Emperor Peter the Great (1672-1725), painted by Jean-Marc Nattier; portrait of Catherine II of Russia (1729-1796), painted by a follower of Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder; montage of illustration from a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin, photograph by Jimmy Beunardeau / Hans Lucas.

BLOCHI’d love to come back to many of the things that you just mentioned, Angela. Specifically, we’ll talk in a minute about Lavrov’s trip to Africa and the messaging of Putin and others in his inner circle towards the Global South.But I want to follow-up with Fiona. One of the many narratives that we’ve heard over the past months is that this war is about NATO. Fiona, you argued in a New York Times piece that was published before the invasion in late January of 2022, that Putin, and I quote, “wants to evict the United States from Europe.” I’m wondering if this view has changed and how you see NATO, the United States, the West, maybe even democracy, figuring into Putin’s view of history.

While we think that the United States together with the allies — Britain, and France, and Russia — liberated Europe, Putin also thinks that both World War I and World War II brought an alien power into Europe, in the form of the United States.Fiona Hill

HILLWell, yes, I mean, this obviously is one of the major issues that has circulated around this conflict. Even Pope Francis has suggested that somehow perhaps Russia was provoked by the idea of NATO expansion. But what we have to think about here is the frame of reference, again, that Putin is bringing to the table. And this is where this idea of empire and the imperial state come in.I mean, we have our own narratives about World War II. But part of the Russian narrative of World War II, of course, is that it was one of the great victor states, and that it also helped to liberate Europe. In many respects, Putin has seen the United States — and look, other parts of the world see the United States, as Angela was alluding to during Lavrov’s trip to Africa, in the way that he’s articulated there — see the United States also as an empire.While we think that the United States together with the allies — Britain, and France, and Russia — liberated Europe, Putin also thinks that both World War I and World War II brought an alien power into Europe, in the form of the United States. Rather, as a liberator, America becomes a kind of alien imperial occupier.Now, I’m sure that people will be confused by that. But look, if you go around Latin America, South America, parts of Africa, and Asia, the United States does appear like an imperial power. In fact, the United States has invaded plenty of countries.It’s acquired all kinds of territory and has been engaged in imperial wars in the past — despite having been a colony of Britain — with France and Spain.And so, if you start to play it out there, all this history from Putin’s perspective, he sees NATO as the military wing of an imperial United States. And of course, during the Cold War, with the ideological juxtaposition of the capitalist system, the socialist system, and the communist system, that also fed into the idea. The United States was often called the imperialist, Zionist, capitalist state.Quite a mouthful because of also its support for Israel and the antipathy between the Soviet Union and Israel back then. That’s another dimension of this, a different story, of course, perhaps for another podcast.But, you know, here you have Russia depicting the United States as being an occupying force.And if we think back to December of 2021, it’s hard sometimes to think back to that point because of the carnage and all the events that have happened since. The United States was subjected to a number of demands along with NATO from Russia: Pull out of Europe, take all your bases and missiles with you, and also roll NATO back to what it was in 1997. As well as having Ukraine agree to no longer seek membership of NATO and to be neutralized.Putin believes that Russia withdrew — under duress, it has to be said — from Europe at the end of the Cold War, but the United States didn’t. So, in his mind, the United States remains in some fashion an occupying force in Europe and NATO is just a U.S. instrument. Putin completely rejects the idea that other members of NATO who joined NATO did so of their own volition and for their own reasons and that they have any agency. So, he depicts — quite successfully outside of Europe and obviously outside of NATO countries — NATO as an instrument of American imperialism.And now, I’m afraid a lot of people have fallen into that trap as well. Because Putin’s disinformation about all of this denies the fact that Poles, and Hungarians, and Czechs, you know, initially in the 1990s wanted to join for their own reasons. Baltic States obviously did. And a host of other countries at different points wanted to join. He basically denies the fact that they wanted to join something. He essentially depicts this image of something else inexorably expanding and enlarging at everybody else’s expense.Now, I think the kicker here, and of course, the piece that you quoted I wrote long before this — is the decision of Sweden and Finland to join NATO. And I’m sure Angela would have something to say about this as well, because Sweden just overturned 200 years of neutrality. And Finland, of course, wanted to have the option of joining NATO, but never really actually wanted to exercise that option until now.And as they have articulated very clearly, they saw the changed circumstances as very detrimental to them. They wanted to join an organization to build something for the future for European security, but also primarily for their own defense and deterrence of Russian aggression.

BLOCHAngela, is there anything else that you’d like to add on this topic of [the] battle between different narratives of the role of the West and the role of Russia in the world order?

STENTI think the essential thing here, and I would say this is mirror imaging, because if we look back at the Soviet Union during the Cold War, of course, it completely dominated the Warsaw Pact.If we look at any alliance structure, even the Collective Security Treaty Organization that exists, or the Eurasian Economic Union, this is still something dominated by Russia. And so, Putin depicts the United States as exactly the same. The idea that the Poles, and the Czechs, and the Baltic states, and Hungary would have voluntarily wanted to join NATO is something that maybe on some level the Kremlin understands, but they would never admit that.They have to depict the U.S. very much in the terms that they in fact act, which is as forcing its reluctant European allies to accept American hegemony. And I think during this war, they have sharpened this narrative. Because it’s clear that the U.S. is, of course, supplying the lion share of weapons and things like that to Ukraine. Europeans are as well, but they don’t have the wherewithal to do all of that.And so, I think that they’ve been reinforcing this narrative now. And that’s what they want the rest of the world to believe. If you read what the Chinese write or listen to what they’re saying about this, they’re all parroting that, including the Indians, by the way.

BLOCHI’d like to pick up on this idea that this narrative has been reinforced, and kind of press you on how long it can last and how long this narrative will work.Ukraine is usually the fourth largest grain exporter in the world, but since the beginning of the war, Ukrainian grain has been blocked in Black Sea ports contributing to the global food crisis. Will there come a point when countries in the Global South will feel compelled to take a different approach to Russia because of the pain the war is causing them at home? I’m wondering also if this is why Putin seemed to make an agreement to unblock Ukrainian ports to allow the export of grain. In other words, are we seeing the limits of Russia’s strategy of blaming the West for disruptions that they are causing today?

STENTI think one of the reasons why the Russians entered into this agreement — and let’s see if it works, we don’t have any ships yet that have been able to get out from Odesa and get the grain to where it’s really needed — I think one of the reasons was even though much of the Global South is susceptible to this idea that it’s the West’s fault, that this [food shortage] is all happening. The head of the African Union visited Mr. Putin in Sochi and that’s what he was told. They’re susceptible to it. But on the other hand, there are other narratives there and I think the Russians have to be very careful that the tide doesn’t turn. I don’t know if we’ve reached the limits of it yet.If you look at many African countries, countries in the Middle East — Latin America, which is having more and more left-wing governments now being elected — [there’s] this kind of suspicion of the United States, with seeing the United States, if you like, as a world bully, which was a phrase that the Americans talked about when they talked about the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But that [suspicion], I think, has very deep roots. And the other side of that is for countries in Africa, particularly, but [also] others, they see Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union, who supported them during the national liberation struggles, right?South Africa, anti-apartheid, the African National Congress was supported by the Soviet Union. People trained there. Fiona and I have both been at the Valdai Conference when [South African President] Thabo Mbeki sat on the stage with Putin and they embraced each other and, you know, they’re comrades. They look upon Putin as part of these comrades in arms, not realizing this isn’t the Soviet Union. And we don’t know whether [Russia] would support these kinds of movements anymore. But that runs very deep. So, I don’t think you’re going to — this is not going to change that quickly.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) chats with South African President Thabo Mbeki during the group photo of G8 leaders with African nation leaders, on the final day of the G8 Summit in Sea Island, Georgia, United States, June 10, 2004. (JAPAN POOL REUTERS/Eriko Sugita MMR/GN)

BLOCHIs there anything that could change in Russia that would change this perception that there is in Latin America, in Africa, across the Middle East?

HILLI think it’s actually incumbent on us to really try to find ways of pushing back on these narratives. I mean, it is pure disinformation. As Angela said, this is not the Soviet Union of the past. Putin doesn’t come out of that same kind of tradition. He’s never served in Africa, or Asia, or Latin America, for example, when he was in the KGB.His focus was always on Europe. He knows how to manipulate Europe. I mean, interestingly, his narratives are not getting as much traction as they used to in Europe. So, really the difficulty that we have now is what Angela calls in a book that she’s written relatively recently the West and the rest of the world. And that’s why we have to really concentrate. We have to also accept that we’re not necessarily ourselves the best messengers, meaning the United States, or the United Kingdom, or France, for example: the old colonial powers were the old empires that were active in Africa. Or more broadly in Asia as well. I mean, we do have quite a lot of baggage to overcome there.So, we’re going to have to figure out how we work with other powers within Europe and the Ukrainians to articulate a very clear message here.Now, on grain, I think it’s actually worth bearing in mind, as you’ve said, Agneska, very clearly that Ukraine was a major grain producer, but so is Russia. Russia was one of the dominant [producers] and so is northern Kazakhstan, of course. Angela mentioned that northern Kazakhstan is seen by Russia as part of its orbit. northern Kazakhstan, as Angela said, was settled by Slavs, Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarussians as part of the Virgin Lands expansion of agriculture in the Soviet period after World War II.And if Putin restored control over grain production and exports, and also its fertilizer, potash — salt fertilizer, for example — and other food oils like sunflower oil, which Ukraine is actually the largest producer of, then Russia would also have an enormous amount of leverage.And as we know, from energy manipulation with gas in Europe and also oil elsewhere, these precious commodities, I mean, food is the most intrinsic important element for human beings writ large. And if you think back to antiquity, most wars ended up with some kind of destruction of crops, agriculture, food, and stores to, in fact, induce famine. It was a way of getting populations to surrender. Putin knows that himself because his own family went through the siege of Leningrad during World War II where food supplies to Leningrad were cut off. And members of his own family almost starved to death in the case of his mother and did starve to death and die of disease in the case of his older brother. And so, Putin knows this. He’s manipulating this. And I think people have to get into their perspective: [that of] African elites and leaders, as well. I mean that they themselves don’t want to create more dependency on a hegemon, an imperial hegemon when it comes something as vital as food and food supplies. They are only increasing their vulnerability to Russia and the manipulation of all these commodity markets. Again, I don’t think we’re necessarily the best messengers for this. And so, I think that we have to be very creative and think very carefully about our public diplomacy and how we conduct this.

STENTJust maybe one thing to add. [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy for a long time was trying to meet with the African Union countries to explain the Ukrainian position to them. When he finally got a meeting with them, I think four of them showed up. So, there’s obviously many African countries that have bought this kind of Russian line that somehow the Ukrainians are at fault, that they’re somehow inferior, and they wouldn’t even bother to meet with him. So, I think that’s an indication of how strong these narratives still are, particularly in Africa.

HILLAnd I do think it’s also the kind of perception of a lot of countries that they’ve become trapped in other people’s narratives. And that when we talk about approaches, we usually do them from the Western perspective. And so, if we’re going to have a multilateral approach or a multinational approach, doing what was done with the United Nations framing the agreement for Ukrainian grain along with the Turks was pretty critical. But I think other countries want to have a say in everything. They don’t want to be forced to choose sides in this. They don’t want to be, you know, pushed one way or another and they don’t want to find themselves trapped between, you know, kind of these great power clashes as they were in the past.And certainly, I think you find that a lot of other countries are kind of systems neutral although they’re kind of buying the old narratives from the Cold War again. But they don’t see these bright, shining lines that there kind of used to be between ideologies or systems. And if Russia’s coming forward with things to offer just like China is, and the United States doesn’t seem to be having much of a policy or much traction in their region, they are asking themselves why should we be so supportive? So, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to actually help Russia actively in terms of breaking sanctions or in the war, obviously, you know, they’re not really in a place to do that. But they don’t necessarily then want to be taking very strong diplomatic action either.

BLOCHFiona, I want to press you a little bit on how you’re describing that we’re not the best messengers to fight back against the information and the narratives that Putin and others are pushing across the Global South. And you said that we should be creative in finding ways to help others perhaps push this message. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you could imagine and could recommend?

HILLYeah, I mean, it’s really like collective, strategic diplomacy; public diplomacy. I mean, we already have a lot of bilateral interactions and some multilateral fora like the United Nations and the General Assembly where we’ve been working. But I think, you know, sometimes we might want to let others get out there with the actual message while we’re providing support for them.So, the Poles, for example, who have been partitioned and subject to so much imperial machination, including by Russia. The Poles see this as intrinsic for them, vital for them. And they’ve been trying to help the Ukrainians with their messaging. The Balts, for example, the Finns, having now wanted to join NATO, and how they articulate why. I think they’ve been very effective, at least in the European context of explaining why.You have South Korea and Japan. Now, Japan, obviously, has its own imperial legacy in Asia but not so much in Africa. And both South Korea and Japan have these longstanding traditions of development assistance. They are well-regarded in many developing countries. And so, if they’re able to articulate that now [on] food and issues related to food, trade, [and] climate change, which of course, is all intertwined because we’re already worrying about what climate change impacts will be on food stocks.And here’s Russia now exacerbating all of this. If those are all tied together as a national security issue, not just as a development issue, and we have some of our other partners. Australia, as a major grain producer, for example has also been a great source of development assistance. Getting together a consortium of other countries, both to help frame and support the United Nations on the grain exports from Ukraine, but also getting the messaging out to the rest of the world that we really need to take this seriously. That we need to pull together for, you know, kind of the greater good here. I mean, that’s a hackneyed phrase, of course. But this is really vital. And I think that, you know, if Putin thinks that he can control grain flows just like he can turn the gas tap on and off to Europe, everyone’s in a whole host of trouble.

STENTYeah, he’s weaponizing both grain now and energy. And he, even though we can argue about how well Russia is doing in this war, he certainly has a lot of cards at the moment just because of the blocking of the Ukrainian ports and because, you know, Russia was until recently an energy superpower. And, the Europeans are worried about freezing in the winter.

A wheat field which is scheduled to be reaped in three weeks is pictured in Kyiv Oblast on June 30, 2022. Wheats will be stored in a warehouse as exporting is difficult due to the blockade of the Black Sea by Russia. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

BLOCHFiona, I want to come back [to you]. You mentioned a few countries in Russia’s neighborhood. You mentioned Poland, you mentioned the Balts. How are these other countries around Russia in its neighborhood, like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, making sense of the invasion of Ukraine and especially thinking about how it might relate to their own future sovereignty and security?

HILLWell, I think for a lot of those countries, it’s starkly evident that this affects them directly. Belarus, you know, we keep forgetting that Belarus is being practically absorbed by Russia at this point. And in fact, when I was in government, rolling back the clock a couple of years ago, all our briefings were really on Belarus as being the most vulnerable point of weakness. And we seem to have not even noticed. Because Belarus is now being used as this launching pad for the invasion in Ukraine [so] that, to all intents and purposes, Belarus is completely and utterly under the thumb of Russia. Now, Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, doesn’t really want to be and he’s trying to kind of wiggle his way out. But it’s almost a game over for Belarus, even though there’s opposition there and some different thinking behind the scenes.Moldova is extraordinary. I am worried, because at one point, President Lukashenko of Belarus had a bizarre press conference in which he had a map of the conflict and he pointed to Moldova as if, you know, Moldova is next. And, in fact, when we see the movement of the Russian military offensive, of course, the shelling of Odesa, and we see what they did back in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea when there was an attempt to spark up rebellions and insurgency against the central government in Ukraine, Odesa and the whole southern part of Ukraine along the Black Sea was also targeted, not just Donbas and areas around the Sea of Azov. And it looked like they were trying to kind of create a contiguous land bridge to Moldova. Angela can talk more about that as well, because it fits into history and to empire. Bessarabia, which incorporated some of modern-day Moldova, was another of the parts that were partitioned and part of it was taken into the Russian Empire.So, all the countries that have been incorporated at one point into the Russian Empire are deeply worried because of the way that, you know, we said earlier that Russia and Putin have been speaking. And, of course, in the case of Georgia, they were already invaded. We’ve forgotten — again — that Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. And there’s still a lot of questions. Georgia’s been sort of marginalized in all of this.Russia intervened in Kazakhstan, albeit at the request of the Kazakh president, President [Kassym-Jomart] Tokayev, after protests and what looked like a lot of inter-elite conflict there. Armenia has been recently again in a war with Azerbaijan, in which Russia seemed to have stoked the flames. And then [Russia] intervened and now has peacekeepers on the ground in Nagorno-Karabakh, which both Armenia and Azerbaijan have been trying to avoid for best part of 30 odd years. We’re continuously seeing moves behind the scenes by Russia to make sure that all of the immediate neighbors know that Russia calls the shots, or at least to make them think that they do.

STENTI think the Kazakh case is very interesting because, as Fiona said, Russian troops did intervene to help President Tokayev stay in power when the Nazarbayev Clan [the family of the previous president of Kazakhstan] wanted to try and get rid of him. But he has been singularly independent. I mean, he sat on the stage with President Putin at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and he said, we’re not going to recognize the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk, the two so-called independent republics there. Just as we didn’t recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And, you know, he has been quite critical of what’s happening.  The Kazakhs refused to send soldiers to Ukraine.I mean, one of the things is — and I think the same was true with Armenia — the Russians tried to get some of these other countries to send troops and they refused to. And then the Russians retaliated by cutting off Kazakhstan’s access — because, of course, it’s a landlocked country — to export its oil from the Caspian consortium there.But what’s fascinating in Kazakhstan and it may be happening in other countries, is that younger Kazakhs particularly, to get back to the question about colonialism and imperialism, they’re now saying, hey, we were the victims of Russian colonialism. [Russia] tried to suppress — you know, there wasn’t a Kazakh nation, but there were different ethnic groups or tribes that were part of this. And they’ve been trying to suppress our own history.And so, again, what Putin is doing in Ukraine I think is sparking this kind of questioning in a number of these post-Soviet countries about their own victimhood to Russian colonialism. I think that could spell trouble for Russia in the future too.

HILLI think that’s right. And another thing that’s happening is that Russians who do not want to be part of this are fleeing in droves to all these countries Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia.Initially, of course, Ukrainians were fleeing to places like Moldova, as well, on their way out further afield in Europe. So, this is having all kinds of knock-on effects, and they’re not always going to be positive of Vladmir Putin.

BLOCHI want you to both put your policy hats on for a second and ask – I want to talk a little bit about the response of the U.S. and Europe. How would you address the argument, which is being made across the political spectrum on both sides of the Atlantic, and by Sam Charap and our Brookings colleague, Jeremy Shapiro, in the New York Times, that the United States should open channels of diplomatic communication with Russia with the aim of achieving a cease-fire? I want to start with Angela on that one.

STENTWell, first of all, it takes two to tango. And we don’t really have any evidence that President Putin and the people around in the Kremlin have any interest in opening such channels. We do hear today, as we said, July 28th, that there will be a discussion between Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken and Foreign Minister Lavrov about a prisoner exchange with Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan on the one hand and presumably Viktor Bout in the United States. I mean, they haven’t been completely clear that it’s [him]. But there is some discussion going on.But the idea that the Russians want to sit down and discuss a diplomatic solution is just way off because — Lavrov has said this, other Russian officials have said this — the time for negotiation is over. They had these negotiations in March and early April but because of what the West has done, it’s over now. So, of course, there’s nothing wrong in engaging in diplomatic channels. But if you look, who has tried to engage with Putin? Both [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron and [German] Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and the Austrian chancellor, some other European leaders, but particularly those two. They’ve gotten nowhere. And they themselves have said that they sit there and they listen to a narrative, which they’ve heard many times before.And I think the idea that somehow this is going to solve anything at the moment, it belies the real reality on the ground, which is that Putin hasn’t given up yet. You know, the Russians have said that obviously they’re trying to take the whole of the Donbas now. But they haven’t given up other aims. Possibly going back to Kyiv, taking other parts of Ukraine too.The idea that somehow the United States and its allies are fanning the flames by providing weapons, I think it belies a reality. It’s true, if the West wasn’t supplying weapons, Ukraine probably would by now already have been defeated. But the Russians have made it clear that what they want — and again, they said this — is the capitulation of Ukraine and its surrender. And I’m not sure that that is the basis for a diplomatic negotiation when Ukraine isn’t losing at the moment.

The idea that the Russians want to sit down and discuss a diplomatic solution is just way off — because the time for negotiation is over.Angela Stent

G-7 Summit participants sit at the working session, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is connected via video conference. (REUTERS / Michael Kappeler/dpa)

HILLAnd let me just add to this. I mean, it’s even the framing of this, right? It’s something that the U.S. government itself, this administration said they don’t want to do, they do not want to be negotiating away Ukraine without considering what the Ukrainians want. And even if then, they should not be in the place to negotiate Ukraine’s future with Russia, Ukraine should be.They have repeatedly said the only thing that they possible can say, which is: we writ large are trying to provide Ukraine with the best possible negotiating position. Because what Putin wants — and I mean, this is what Angela and I are both saying — is very evident. To strip Ukraine of all agency, by first of all, saying it’s a proxy war that, you know, this becomes the Flanders killing fields of World War I.Ukraine is nothing but a place for trench warfare in a war between the West and Russia. That’s what Russia is basically saying. So, Ukraine is collateral damage.And in fact, Russians would say that to Ukrainians at the very beginning of the war. We’re sorry this is happening to you. This is between us and the West. When, in actual fact, the Ukrainians are very clear — it’s between us and you. You invaded us and you’ve basically said Ukraine shouldn’t exist. This is a war for liberation of Ukraine after a brutal invasion. What Putin wants us to do is to think that the stakes are too high for everybody and that we should capitulate, as Angela said, and we should negotiate away Ukraine. And, I mean, basically Putin is framing this in a 19th and 20th century way. So, what this is, is really an effort to partition Poland again.This is why the Poles are out there and the Finns are also out there now trying to help the Ukrainians. Because back in previous wars, the great powers got together and divided countries up. And this is basically what Putin’s saying. Here, come on, let’s go and divide up Ukraine.In fact, if we go back in time to just after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, just after that, and I guess it would be February of 2015, there was a Munich Security Conference. And there were many Ukrainian leaders there and [Russian] Foreign Minister Lavrov, Sergey Lavrov — I mean, remember in Russia most people just don’t change positions. They’re all there in place indefinitely like Putin is. Lavrov pretty much encouraged the audience to carve up Ukraine.He said Ukraine isn’t a real country. It’s a mishmash of Ukrainians, and Russians, and Poles, and Romanians, and Hungarians. And it was basically “have at it,” and Slovaks as well. And everybody in the audience was taken aback. It’s a rerun of earlier imperial history.So, what Putin wants more than anything else is the big boys to sit down at the table. He loves Scholz and Macron and everybody, you know, running to see them because he denies that the Ukrainians have any role. And the same thing happened after the invasion of Georgia. The Russians refused to treat the Georgians any differently from the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians and others.And Armenia and Azerbaijan, they wanted to have equivalency with the Nagorno-Karabakh separatists.  Russia always denies what is the object of its ire: any kind of sovereignty. Again, calling Ukraine a colony. It’s basically now saying it’s a colony of the United States.I myself, back in 2019, had a rather bizarre experience when I was in government where the Russians proposed a swap for Ukraine and Venezuela. Suggesting that as Venezuela — we were having a crisis with Venezuela, at the time after Nicolas Maduro was, you know, basically trying to stay in power indefinitely — that if we pulled out of Ukraine, they would pull out of Venezuela where they’d sent in some security people to help prop up Maduro. And it just reinforced the way that they think. And we should not play into that way of thinking.

STENTYeah, and similarly Radislav Sikorski says that when he was foreign minister of Poland, they suggested to him, why don’t we partition. You take the western part of Ukraine, which used to be part of Poland, of course, before or at some point was anyway before World War II in the interwar years, and we’ll take the eastern part. Because Putin always comes back to Yalta. Putin has repeatedly said, you know, the Yalta system was very good. It kept the peace. And so, again, you divide the world up. In that case between the Soviet Union and the United States. Now it would be a tripartite one with China.That is his vision. It’s a 19th century vision of, this is our sphere of [where] I would take control now. It’s no longer a sphere of influence. That’s what he wants. And then the other great powers have their own sphere. That’s what he’s aiming for.

BLOCHCan you say more about the difference between a sphere of influence and a sphere of control?

We’re in a sphere of control, which is what the Russians want: a government in Ukraine that is pro-Russian and where no pro-Western candidate would really ever win.Angela Stent

STENTSure. In a sphere of influence, I go back to the analogy of post-war Eastern Europe. So, a sphere of influence would be where the governments say you have a government in Ukraine that was more or less freely elected, but understood that, you know, its foreign policy had to be oriented towards Moscow, that it would give up any attempts to join either the European Union — of course, now it does have an official counted membership — or NATO. But domestically, you know, it would be somewhat different from Russia.But I think by now we’re in a sphere of control, which is what the Russians want: a government in Ukraine that is pro-Russian and, you know, and where no pro-Western candidate would really ever win. So, the foreign policy. And then domestically, having everything oriented again, toward Russia excepting that Russia has a droit de regard over this region but not seeking any further integration with the West. And that’s what the Russians have said.I think that’s where we are now. So, we talk about Putin, the idea of spheres of influence, but Putin’s gone beyond that already with what he’s doing in Ukraine and Belarus. I mean, Belarus [is] really being controlled by Russia now.

HILLAnd it’s not just the West either is it really? It’s because of just Ukraine having any kind of independence or autonomy. I mean, it’s basically now Ukraine would be just a subsidiary of Russia. Which is where, you know, Belarus was headed.Look, in the period of around 2014 when Armenia was also trying to secure an association agreement with Europe, the Russians told the Armenians, we own you. Don’t even think about it.Ukraine was already on the track of moving away. But Armenia was incredibly dependent on Russia for security protection, because of the whole war with Azerbaijan and the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and also [they] had a Russian base there. And Armenia’s economy was completely dependent on remittances from Armenians living and working in Russia. And the Russians literally said to them, we own you. Don’t even think about moving in that direction because they wanted Ukraine as well as Armenia. And what Angela mentioned before, the Eurasian Economic Union. So, in a way, Putin is a monopolist, you know, if we want to think of it in that regard. And he doesn’t want anybody franchising themselves off in a different direction.

BLOCHWhat should the U.S. and Europe be doing that they’re not doing today in the context of responding to this war if it’s not negotiating, which I have understood you to be saying buys into a lot of what Putin wants? Is there anything else?  Also, because you were saying we’re not the right messengers for countering the information war and the narrative.

HILLI think not negotiating is perhaps maybe too starkly put because, I mean, we do need to have ways of engaging with Russia. Every time you say words like this, one has a negative connotation, or some have a positive connotation. But we’re kind of stuck with the words that we have, right? Negotiation, as Angela is basically saying, implies that we actually have something there that we can talk about and we can compromise on and Russia doesn’t want to compromise.But in terms of some kind of engagement, it doesn’t mean a positive kind of engagement. We’ve got to figure out where we are with all of this. So, we can’t like basically cut off all channels of connection with Russia. We need to have deconfliction. We need to kind of create some degrees of restraint. There is actually quite a bit of restraint still going on in this conflict. This could be far worse than it already is. It looks terrible enough, but just to be clear, there is some restraint going on here because I don’t think that Russia really wants a full-on war with NATO. They’ve been avoiding that the entire way. They much prefer to do things by covert action. We have to remember we have actually had a shooting exchange with the Russians in Deir al-Zour Province in Syria in 2018, when covert operatives from their paramilitary organization that goes under the rubric of the so-called bargaining group shot at American special forces. And we had very clear lines of engagement and we said to them, if you shoot, we will shoot back. Now, the uniformed regular military didn’t do that.But, you know, the Russians are always trying to find how far can they go without getting some kind of major response. Now, they are getting [a] response from us because we’re supporting Ukraine in this defensive effort and this is driving Russia nuts. But we still have to keep these channels going behind the scenes because again, as the administration is saying quite rightly, if Ukraine wants to enter into a negotiation with Russia, then we have to give them the best possible negotiating position.What we have to do is — I mean, we’ve all talked about this — retain our unity. And trying to expand the group of countries that are being supportive of Ukraine and are calling Russia out. I mean, I really do think that at some point if Russia started to find that some of their critical bilateral relationships with the rest of the world were being negatively affected by this, then there might be some change. And we have to be able to constrain Russia’s ability. I think we have to be careful about how we talk about that. That’s the idea of [the American diplomat and historian] George Kennan in fact, during the Cold War: How do you constrain Russia from doing some of the things that it does? You know, how do you head them off at the pass on all kinds of ways in which they can exploit things, on grain, on energy, you know, our own systems, the way that they have done up until now.

STENTI agree completely. I think, yes, we have to maintain some kind of communication with Russia, but we really do have to maintain Western unity. But we’ve seen an example of this where, at the beginning of the war, the Israelis were very wary of criticizing Russia or doing anything because Israel really depends on a relationship with Russia, a deconfliction arrangement so that when it’s attacked by Hezbollah, it can strike back, and [so] that the Russians sort of intervene in a way that enables Israel to do that.But I think after lengthy discussions with the United States, the Israelis realized that they couldn’t maintain completely a position of neutrality. So, even if they haven’t joined the sanctions, what they’ve said and some of the things they’ve done have really irked the Russians and now we see Russia cracking down on, for instance, the Jewish Agency, which is the agency which, you know, in Russia — well, all over the world — but in Russia too, [people contact if they] want to emigrate [to Israel]. The Russians are not happy that so many people have emigrated there, particularly people with high tech skills. They’re really clamping down and they’re threatening the Israelis. There’s a delegation going there, I think, as we speak to try and work this out.But that is an example of a country that is a strong ally of the United States and of many European countries. And where even taking a somewhat more critical stance towards Russia than the Russians liked has met with a response from the Russians that the Israelis see [as] potentially threatening their own security.

HILLI think that’s actually one of the things that we need to do. We need to factor in all our other partners’ weaknesses and vulnerabilities and try to figure out how we address them with them. I mean, I think that that’s one of the reasons why the rest of the world — it feels like they really don’t want to commit here or to really do anything. Because are we going to have their backs? Are we going to help them? I mean, we haven’t got a great track record of doing that. Everyone is basically asking here, not just what is in it for us? But are you going to help us, actively, if something goes wrong? The United States has been incredibly supportive of Israel and we’ve got these very close relations. But are we addressing this? Are we trying to help them [to] think this through? We should be. And that’s kind of a larger pattern. Japan, South Korea, you know, many of our other allies and partners, we need to be working very closely with them consulting and trying to figure out how we all work together.

STENTAnd not have them subject to Russian intimidation because the Russians are very good at this, you know.  Putin is a [former] KGB case officer and intimidation is the name of the game. And they’re playing that quite successfully at the moment.

HILLWhat the Russians are doing to the Israelis, they’ve also done in a similar fashion to the Finns. Finland had a lot of intermarriage. And Finland is a place where a lot of Russians have gone. Not in the same way that they’ve gone to Israel, of course. But they’ve also played with the same kinds of things. You know, going after Finnish-Russian mixed marriages and the children and laying claim to the children of those marriages. Making it difficult for Finnish government bodies to act across the border, accusing the Finns of stirring up the Finno-Ugric populations inside of Russia itself. These kinds of tactics that they’ve now adopted and turned on the Israelis, this is a classic form. What we need to do is stand in solidarity with everyone and call it out. Say, look, this is what they do every single time. And it’s, if we get picked off, the divide and conquer, then this is exactly where our vulnerabilities and weakness will be.

BLOCHI think we only have time for one last question. And I want to ask, how does this end for Ukraine, for Russia, for the rest of the world? I’m going to start with Angela.

STENTIt doesn’t end very soon. You know, you might have the possibility by the end of the year of some kind of a pause. I mean, Russia has a manpower shortage. The Wagner Group that Fiona already mentioned has apparently been recruiting people from prisons to join the fight. The Ukrainians also have a manpower problem. They don’t have infinite numbers of people who can serve in the military. And both sides are losing, you know, the casualty and the death rate is very high.So, you could have a pause, maybe a cease-fire. But that would only be temporary. Because unless Putin is willing to redefine what he means by victory, and we haven’t seen any of that yet, he will want to continue fighting. The onus will really be to maintain Western solidarity and unity. It’s going to be, as I mentioned before, much more difficult for the Europeans, particularly for the Germans, for instance. This winter, if they’re freezing, if they’re not getting the Russian gas, if they don’t have enough alternative sources of energy, they’re going to say, well, maybe — and there are people arguing that already in Germany — we should take a different tactic because maybe then the Russians will come back and give us more gas. So, this could be a very long, drawn-out conflict. It’s very hard to see, I mean, we don’t know what the definition of winning is for the Ukrainians. Officially, President Zelenskyy and his colleagues there have said it means taking back all the territory from the Russians including eventually the whole of the Donbas and one day maybe Crimea. I think that’s not on the cards. But I think even to get the Russians to withdraw to where they were on February 23 [2022], the day before the invasion, is going to be very difficult.So, it could be a stalemate. It could be more of a frozen conflict. It’s obviously not a frozen conflict now. It’s a very hot conflict. That might be one outcome further down the road. But it’s very hard to see this ending anytime soon.

There’s a long history over the last 30 years of pressure being exerted on Ukraine and very clear goals of bringing Ukraine back into the fold. And we have to address that and not be deluded into thinking that there’s one fix for all of this.Fiona Hill

HILLI agree with that. And I think that what we have to be very mindful about is not being tempted to [enter] into negotiations when there is [a] pause in the action. That would then just create the space for Russia to regroup and press ahead again, because we’ve seen this over and over again. Since 2014, there’ve been all these agreements, negotiated agreements in the Donbas region, Minsk I, Minsk II. There seem to be endless Minsk agreements that shaped Ukraine’s past, present, and probably its future as well.And none of those have particularly held. And if we look at other conflicts in the region, in the case of Chechnya, for example, inside of Russia itself in the 1990s, there was the Khasavyurt Accord. I personally worked on it in 1997. It was all, it was just a truce. It became somewhat meaningless because the Russians didn’t want to compromise and they were just waiting to regroup to then press forward with the original sets of goals.The Ukrainian government has set up a task force, I guess one could call it, to kind of think about security guarantees for Ukraine to figure out how to prevent further outbreaks of war. We saw in the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, of course, you had a ceasefire back in 1994, and then continuous outbreaks of conflict resulting in a war again in 2020 and a complete change of things on the ground. We can’t think that that’s resolved either, unless you have all kinds of other mechanisms put in place. So, I think we have to bear that in mind and think about, what mechanisms can we put together? And how can we ensure that if there is actually some [deal], even if it’s a truce, how could we make it something permanent and not temporary? And not fall into thinking that there will be some compromise that will always resolve everything. I mean, we still have people who will say, well, this war could have been ended if we’d neutralized Ukraine and basically persuaded Ukraine to give up on its NATO accession. But I would argue that there would always have been something where Ukraine would have been accused by the Russians of overstepping the bounds. Because if we go back to the immediate period after Ukraine got independence, they were already in the crosshairs of Russian nationalists, putting pressure on Ukraine over a whole variety of issues before NATO or anything else was even on the cards there. So, there’s a long history over the last 30 years of pressure being exerted on Ukraine and very clear goals of bringing Ukraine back into the fold. And we have to address that and not be deluded into thinking that there’s one fix for all of this.

About the Authors	

Fiona Hill	

Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe	

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council. She is author of “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century” and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015). 

Angela Stent	

Nonresident Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe	

Angela Stent is senior adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and professor emerita of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004-06 she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. She is the author of “Putin%u2019s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest” and “The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.”  

Agneska Bloch	

Former Senior Research Assistant, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings	

Recommended reading
external bookPutin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest
external bookThere Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

Interview preparation: Lucy Seavey and Jonathan HoganEditorial: Alex Dimsdale 

Contact	

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers to discuss how they’re thinking about the upcoming midterm elections in the United States. I am disappointed that I didn’t hear from many current Republican voters, something that I’ve found informative in the past and that I’ll return to in future installments. I did get lots of responses from former Republicans, independents, and Democrats, and listening to them, Donald Trump seems like an albatross for the Republican Party.Steve cast his first presidential vote for Ronald Reagan. “Until President Trump, I was a lifelong Republican,” he wrote. “My major issue is whether a candidate supports Trump. He has crushed my vision of America. If a candidate even remotely supports Trump, they will never get my vote.”For correspondents alienated by the latest incarnation of the GOP, one issue loomed largest. “I’m an independent who was once a Republican,” Michael writes. “I left the party due to the January 6 insurrection and the GOP refusal to investigate it. The issue driving me is to defeat Trumpism.”Barbara has different ideological priors but the same focus:
I will vote for democracy. That means I will vote for those who uphold the rule of law, meaning that no one is above the law. I will vote for those who uphold our constitutional right to choose our representatives, and vote against those who are trying to restrict voting rights, or trying to give legislators the ability to throw out votes and choose their own winners. I will vote for those who support the peaceful transfer of power and against those who reject an election because they don’t like the outcome. I will vote for legislators who work for their constituents and against those who work for their personal benefit. I will vote for legislators who uphold their oath of office.
Additionally, Barbara alluded to abortion, the issue that loomed next-largest among my correspondents, writing, “I will vote for those who support a justice system where settled precedent and established rights are not overturned based on judges’ personal and political beliefs.”The same two issues stood out for Mark, though in a somewhat different manner. He writes:
1) I am pro-life to the core. To me, elective abortion is homicide and a loathsome evil. It can be justified only to save the life of the mother, or—as a compromise—in cases of rape or incest.  
2) To me, the integrity of our Constitution, the institutions it mandates, and even our federal union is at risk. All of this has come to be because of Donald Trump, who never should have been voted in as president. This man is a criminal and for all I know either an ally or a dupe of Vladimir Putin. I will never vote for Mr. Trump. I will not knowingly vote for anyone who endorses him or his take on many positions on items such as election results.
From when I was first able to vote, in 1972, to 2016, I voted Republican nearly 100 percent. I did vote for a few (fewer than five) Democrats and regretted it every time. The issue was that of abortion, that monstrous machinery of death that Justice Harry Blackmun built on the infamous day of January 20, 1973. In particular, it was most discouraging to see Democrats proclaiming themselves to be pro-choice, including some who once were pro-life. Pro-life people were not welcome in the Democratic Party. So be it. So I voted Republican.
Things started to change when Donald Trump ran for president as a Republican. Knowing his unsavory character, I took the position that I MIGHT vote for him but if I did, it would be like eating a turd sandwich. In the spring of 2016, I moved to the position of not voting for Trump under any circumstances. I considered voting for Hillary Clinton until I saw her at the DNC pumping fists with Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood. So I didn’t vote for her or Trump in 2016. I voted for Evan McMullin. After seeing Trump’s COVID response and, worse, seeing his starting to whine about the election being stolen even before votes were cast, I made up my mind to vote for Joe Biden, which I did. I would have sat it out if ANY OTHER Democrat ran for president.
We come to the here and now.  
The attempted coup of January 6, 2021, and the revelations of Trump’s involvement and, worse, the Republicans continuing to excuse Trump have made it so I will not vote for any Republican unless (like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney), he or she denounces and renounces Trump and his positions on things like our elections, race, Putin, and other “strong leaders.” However, in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, the Democrats are apparently running EXCLUSIVELY on protecting the right to choose death before birth for babies. The Republicans have handed them so many issues on which they could run, and maybe even secure my vote: issues like protecting our elections; our republican institutions; and our foreign policy, especially concerning Russia and Ukraine. But are Democrats running on those issues? No, of course not. Rather, they are running to protect a monstrous evil of abortion. On that, I will NOT vote.
So in 2022, I might consider it my patriotic duty to stay home. I may vote for some Democrats, but there are no guarantees. I even might vote for some Republicans if I see them dropping Trump.
CG, another voter who objects to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is torn about whether his fellow Democrats should talk about abortion when they talk about democracy.He writes:
The most important issue to me is stopping the MAGA candidates who still promote lies about election fraud. I’m torn by how the Democratic Party has approached this election. I think abortion is a much more complex issue than a right being stripped away, and dislike that it’s such a focus this year. I think that collapsing critiques of authoritarian tendencies within Republican/conservative leaders and voters with critiques of anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-climate science positions cloud the issue. I also dislike spending money in Republican primaries to elevate the crazy people because they’re easier to beat. It’s so dangerous; these crazy Republican candidates might win!
On the other hand, winning in November is really important. Even normal conservatives like Senator Sasse refused to impeach Trump. Normal conservatives supported McCarthy’s submission to Trump and punished Cheney for refusing to ignore that Trump tried to use deceit, fraud, and violence to stay in power. So I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between a normal conservative in Congress and a MAGA conservative. In which case, generating turnout by focusing on the Dobbs decision makes sense. Spending money to support repugnant, but weaker general-election candidates is justified. It might also have been necessary to highlight extreme positions earlier so that these candidates could not pretend to be normal now during the general election.
[Read: Who knows what Putin will do next?]Lucretia is energized by the fight to protect legal abortion:
Women’s right to bodily integrity—their place as a “person,” not just a human being—is under assault. That a party that saw the COVID vaccines as a denial of personal freedom would put itself in the position of controlling the most personal and female functions of more than half the population is a matter of mind-numbing hubris. I will vote Democratic.
B. concurs:
I’m not usually a one-issue voter, but this year there is no contest: I will be voting for a woman’s right to control her own body. I’m 87. I remember well what life for women was like before Roe. I joined second-wave feminism in the 1970s. I marched on the National Mall. I even shook Justice Blackmun’s hand to thank him for the Supreme Court decision. I can’t believe we are having to relive what women like me fought so hard for 50 years ago.
Jen shares the same values but isn’t going to vote:
As a woman, abortion is the most important issue to me. I have never voted. I have always felt voters have never really mattered in the political system. You get only a selection of candidates pre-chosen for you, so it’s a selection, not an election. And none of the candidates seems to have the socioeconomic status of their voters, who are mostly low-income or middle-class.
James is a likely nonvoter, too:
At 35, I’ve lost all sense of political identity or ideology. I see the harms in untruths across the spectrum, and I find it difficult to be on board with anything anymore. Sanity and reason never feel like they’re on the ballot. So much of our society, across the political spectrum, appears consumed by an ever-growing movement to make an authoritarian religion out of their personal and political identity. It feels deeply wrong to me. This isn’t what a self-governing society, or life, should be about. I want to vote. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to.
Climate change is the issue Sam cares about more than any other:
It will continue to be the most important issue for the rest of our lives. It is the most important issue in the history of our species. The economy is important, but nothing is more important than the future of all life on Earth. I care about this issue not just because of my daughter, but also because of me. I hope to have 50 more years of life on this planet, and the climate situation is currently dire. If any Republicans would put forth a real plan to address climate change, I might consider voting for them. They haven’t and they won’t.
Trump alienated Marty from the Republican Party:
I am 80. I have been a registered GOP voter most of my life. I could not vote for Hillary and I never voted for Trump. I voted for Biden, unhappily, because I could not vote for Trump.
I consider myself to be conservative on fiscal matters and liberal on social matters. As a partial libertarian, my view is that people should be allowed to do what they want to do … so long as they don’t ask others to clean up their mess. There is simply no political party that represents my views. I am not in the MAGA camp. I cannot register as a Democrat because of fiscal irresponsibility and the ghastly failure of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. I will vote for Val Demings instead of Marco Rubio for the United States Senate. Unless someone like Mitt Romney is nominated for the GOP in 2024, I will most likely vote Democratic. I am appalled at the Supreme Court’s destruction of Roe v. Wade. We need to legalize abortion and work to reduce unwanted pregnancies. I strongly believe we and the West should provide Ukraine with aircraft, Western tanks, and strong air-defense systems at an accelerated level. If we gave Ukraine these weapons quickly, I believe it could truly win this war. Ukrainians are fighting and dying for all the values we claim to support, so what is the problem?
Russell is a former Republican, too:
I am 62 years old and have voted in every election since I was 18. I voted for Ronald Reagan for president twice. While it has often been said that the stakes couldn’t be higher, it is my belief that this time that is empirically true. Republicans need to lose elections at every level, nationwide, regardless of integrity, to send a clear and unmistakable message that the present-day Republican ethos is unacceptable in a democracy. Millions of Republicans state out loud that my vote for Joe Biden should not count. Apathy is no longer an option for those who claim there is no difference between the two parties, unless they really do not care if they themselves are subjugated.
Meredith is a Gen X military spouse, a practicing Christian, a political independent, and a never-Trumper. She writes:
As a voter in North Carolina, I am heavily in support of Judge Cheri Beasley for Senate and will be turning out to vote for her. Beyond the fact that her opponent is awash in Trumpism, I genuinely like her for her character, compassion, and experience within the justice system. I am hoping we will see the first African American woman to represent NC in the Senate, because she is the most qualified person to fill the seat.
I used to believe in good-faith disagreements that led to understanding and compromise and would have considered myself a moderate Republican. But I no longer find a home in either party. We independents generally understand the deeper complexity involved in policy making and avoid the shallow, reductionist views that push the margins toward extreme tribalism. I hold many priorities in tension and find it difficult selecting one overriding issue. I care as deeply about police reform as I do about better support and advocacy for veterans. I am alarmed at the rate at which our society is trending authoritarian and want to protect voting rights and access for all citizens.
Democrats might enjoy my vote for the moment, but I am not naive about the influence of power on either party. Right now, the focus is on salvaging the executive processes that buffered the trend toward extremism and reforming a declining legislative branch.
Chuck is a married father in his 50s. He writes:
I strongly believe that voting is a civic duty and have voted in pretty much every election-—special, primary, and general—since I was 18. I was raised in a Roman Catholic, country-club-Republican family and supported the Republican candidate in most elections in my late teens and early 20s, but began thinking of myself as more of an independent in my mid-20s ... While the Democrats are not perfect, I am concerned about the trend in the Republican Party to win at all costs, even if that means perverting the normal rules—written and unwritten—that govern our elections. It concerns me greatly that so many Republican candidates are repeating the Big Lie that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election and that Biden and the Democrats “stole the election.” I will not only be voting but will also be sending contributions to Democratic candidates in close elections around the country, especially Senate candidates facing beatable, Trump-endorsed Republicans with minimal qualifications and wacky ideas about the election, nonexistent voter fraud, and outlawing all abortions.
Kristinia is unaligned and feels that the major parties are not a viable vehicle to advance her foremost priority: “a negotiated end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, instead of escalating it by sending billions of our tax dollars for weaponry. This will push me to vote for third parties, as I often do.”She writes:
Like soldiers anywhere in the dark abyss of war, most do not want to be part of their leader’s madness and would welcome any escape possible. That would be a negotiated truce, a pause in the fighting to work toward an imperfect settlement whereby both Russia and Ukraine can “save face” before more horrific loss of life occurs, before nuclear weapons are used, before the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. We hear nothing of that option for negotiation from Democrats or liberals, and only a few extremist, isolationist Republicans oppose the war spending, but for the wrong reasons. The U.S. government, the Pentagon, the war planners, and the neoliberals are hell-bent on making sure they achieve a unipolar world with “the West” at the helm, a proxy war with the “ends justify the means” goal of regime change, “weakening” Russia.
It is not understood by the U.S. populace that one can hold two thoughts (or more) at the same time: Putin’s aggression is wrong and imperialist, and the U.S. response in keeping the war “hot” is wrong and imperialist. One can believe both conceptions and push for the option of stopping the war, and still be in support of the Ukrainian people. Thus I’ll be voting for candidates who have the courage to speak in favor of ending the war. I’ll be voting my conscience. Because our flawed system is stacked against third parties, my candidates won’t win, but I will sleep at night knowing I voted to end the slaughter, for peace, for humanity.
B.A. is a single-issue voter, too, but his issue is the environment:
I am feeling the inflation, but in the long run, the loss of the planet we’re living on is apocalyptic. If there were a candidate with enough drive and power to introduce serious changes, I’d be voting for him or her. If this candidate opposed abortion, I’d still vote in their favor. We’re in a desperate situation, and there must be a dozen articles every day that emphasize the losses we are in the middle of, but there seems to be a kind of lassitude about it in the country. I no longer think my recycling efforts and all the other things individuals can do to make things better are going to make any difference until we massively alter our country. I know other countries like China are contributing to emissions, but that’s no excuse for America’s inaction. I’ll give up stuff—I’ll pay more—but I need someone to take charge.
[Read: 19 readers on the rise of dating apps]The same issue alienated Ryan from the GOP:
Politically I’ve been mostly independent in my life and have voted for candidates from both parties. That is until recent years, and the most important reason for this is the Republican Party's refusal to accept/engage in climate change. There are many topics that are important, but it’s hard to compare the importance of this or that with the issue of whether we will have a viable and sustainable planet to inhabit and share with all its wondrous life forms.
Harold is disgusted by the GOP on behalf of Trump supporters he believes it has manipulated and harmed:
I have always considered myself politically moderate. In the past I even identified as a conservative, and likely still would, had someone like John Kasich won the Republican nomination in 2016. Instead I voted for Hillary Clinton and split the rest of the ticket, voting for Patrick Toomey for Senate. Since then, I have voted only for Democrats in each subsequent election. Perhaps there are Democrats who are equally disillusioned by their party as I am with Republicans. We are prisoners of our experiences, and I can speak only of the failings I see in a group I once identified as being a part of. For me those failures are so great that the party needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up. Once it stood for principle and character. Now those in charge are opportunistic blobs preying off of people genuinely struggling for a sense of purpose. They have access to the truth, but they feed lies to their supporters. Countless livelihoods were ruined as they were sent off to fulfill quixotic fantasies of overthrowing the government on January 6 or defeating the “deep state” as they charged FBI field offices … We all deserve better, and therefore I will never vote Republican again so long as this sickness prevails. Something this broken can be found only in the crushed hopes, dreams, and lives of the individuals they trample on to ascend to power. It has to stop.
GE pledged to vote for the candidates who embrace individual freedom instead of central government:
This nation has 50 states, and each state is very different. The people in those states have different needs and desires. Allowing maximal freedom for local and state populations to decide on which laws will dictate social behavior seems more logical than a central government forcing a one-size-fits-all policy across 330 million people. I have no problem voting for any candidate regardless of party if they come down more on the side of individual freedoms.
Holly will vote for a losing candidate:
I intend to throw away my vote. By that I mean that I will vote for the candidates who show the most libertarian tendencies, in the vain hope that we can turn away from the left’s abiding faith that more regulations and government meddling will solve our problems, and from the right’s abandonment of free trade and of faith in individuals’ ability to serve their own best interests. Very few candidates have anything that could remotely be considered a libertarian point of view. Free speech and freedom of association have fallen victim to the intolerance of both left and right. I’m afraid my choices this November will be pretty limited, but I can’t bring myself to abstain from voting.
And Dorothy is an undecided voter:
This is one of the hardest election seasons to make sense of in my lifetime. I am 60, female, and highly educated, and have been registered as Democrat, independent, and Republican at different times. I abhor party politics in general, because I regard parties as marketing ploys. They are based only very loosely, if at all, on principle. Mostly, they are based on changes in where the wind is blowing at any given moment, with only the most macro, overarching concepts a constant. Republicans don’t like centralized authority; Democrats don’t like concentrations of wealth. Republicans think that government writ large is the problem; Democrats think it is a solution. The rest is up for grabs.
For what it is worth, I believe that government, as it actually exists in 3-D, is a huge problem. It invades spaces that should be left to private decision making, negotiation, and exploration. It is a barrier we all must cross, and nine times out of 10, there is little to no payoff for the impediments it throws in our way. We need regulation and law enforcement, but we most certainly do not need a bloated, corrupt, sluggish, inefficient bureaucracy that any sentient human can see now exists to protect its empire and feed itself.
I speak from some experience. I spent years living in Washington at the beginning of a legal career and later worked on Capitol Hill. I despise politics as religion, which it clearly has become. Both parties have come unhinged, and neither really cares about how its actions or words affect the country. They care about preserving and growing their power.
With that as the background, abortion rights (and other civil liberties) and the economy are tied in my mind as the most important issues in the upcoming election. That means I am in a bit of a pickle. I am too smart to fall for the comical justifications and falsehoods the Democrats offer for their endless tax-and-spend policies, which are hurting us very badly and will continue to do so. No household or company could afford to operate in such a fiscally irresponsible manner, and it is a massive betrayal of trust that our elected officials do so on a regular basis (with other people’s money) while draping themselves in the appearance of virtue. And I am far too principled and worried about our freedom to love whom we please and do what we like with our adult bodies to ever throw myself behind the piggish, repulsive desires of the Republicans who want to impose their own Leave It to Beaver fantasies on those of us who live in the real world.
I have no idea what will drive my vote this year. I will vote for whichever candidates are willing to do the hard work of governing with fairness, intelligence, and independence of thought.
I could publish a half-dozen more notes from former Republicans turned off by Trump and Trumpism, but we’re running long already. Thank you to everyone who wrote regardless of perspective, and if you’re voting for Republicans this November, I would love to hear from you, too.

“The pandemic is over,” Joe Biden declared on Sunday night. The president apparently arrived at this conclusion by casually surveying his surroundings. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” Biden said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” Though he caveated his observation—Covid remains a “problem,” and there’s “a lot of work” yet to do—the global coronavirus outbreak and all its attendant miseries are behind us.

This happy news apparently came as a shock to the Biden administration. The president’s decree “was not part of his planned remarks,” according to Politico, and his remarks “caught several of his own health officials by surprise.” It’s hard to blame them. The administration is not acting as if the pandemic is over, in part, because it cannot.

Just last week, the Biden administration went to court to argue that the president has the executive power to impose a Covid vaccination mandate on federal workers. During oral arguments, Justice Department attorney Charles Scarborough conceded that, unlike many other vaccination requirements, the Covid vaccines do not prevent the transmission of this particular coronavirus. But because the government has an interest in avoiding illness-related disruptions, and because Biden is functionally the “CEO of the federal workforce,” the power to impose such mandates must remain with the executive.

“The fact is that the science has changed,” Scarborough argued. While the argument in favor of a vaccination mandate to arrest the spread of the disease has “somewhat eroded,” he insisted that “there are still significant rationales at play here in terms of preventing serious illness for federal employees.” The administration has largely stuck to the jurisdictional case for the president’s preferences, but the unique nature of this disease and its presumed prevalence still informs the administration’s arguments.

The courts have conceded that the chief executive has all the Article II authority he needs to impose a vaccination mandate on America’s servicemen and women. The Biden administration argues, similarly, that such mandates are crucial to maintain America’s military readiness. In a letter to Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin, however, 47 members of Congress disagreed with the White House’s rationale.

“As a result of your mandate, eight percent of the Army’s approximately 1 million soldiers face expulsion,” they wrote, “Army recruiters cannot meet their FY22 target, and the Army has cut its projected FY23 end strength by 12,000 soldiers.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data, these lawmakers added, indicates that the demographic profile shared by most combat-ready service personnel suggests their risk of serious complications arising from Covid infection is minimal. In the absence of a true emergency, hamstringing the services in this fashion is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound.

As National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke observed, the rationale supposedly justifying Joe Biden’s already legally dubious fiat forcing taxpayers to pay others’ student debts is demolished by the president’s admission. The White House repeatedly invoked the state of “national emergency” represented by the pandemic and the authority that condition allegedly confers upon the president. In the absence of such an emergency—one that supposedly places artificial limits on a borrower’s ability to earn wages in a labor market that is starved for labor—nothing justifies the administration’s assault on constitutional propriety and the existing social compact.

The president’s unilateral declaration of victory over the virus has not been well-received in the press either. “Biden says ‘the pandemic is over’ even as death toll, costs mount,” read the palpably bitter headline of the Reuters report on Biden’s remarks. The writer is justifiably befuddled by the president’s assertion because the White House only recently asked Congress to approve another $22.4 billion in emergency funding for pandemic-related expenses. One reporter privy to the administration’s background briefing on the request revealed that the “funding would be necessary to replenish testing stockpiles that are not currently sufficient to respond to a potential fall surge.”

So, which is it? Is the pandemic over, or are we bracing for yet another wave that will overwhelm a nation still reeling from a virus that claims roughly 400 lives every day?

Earlier this month, a survey commissioned by the New York Times indicated to op-ed writer David Leonhardt that Covid had become “a good issue” for the party in power. “Americans give the Democrats significantly higher marks” than Republicans when looking back on the pandemic. Republicans should relish the opportunity to test that proposition in the real world, especially since such a gauzy retrospection cannot begin before the pandemic is truly in the rearview mirror.

Joe Biden’s instincts have led him to conclude that moving on is a valuable branding exercise for him and his party. His instincts are probably right, but too many of his administration’s initiatives are bound up with the pandemic to simply declare it over. That assumes this White House’s core constituent groups will sit back and let the pandemic slip away. After all, as CNN correspondent Nick Valencia wrote, “The pandemic isn’t over just because you’re over it.”

That sort of rote hostility toward those who take a dim view of the permanent pandemic was once reserved for Republicans alone. Not anymore.

They came in buses to pay their respects. Presidents, prime ministers, soldiers and royalty shuffled into Westminster Abbey in central London to attend the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Her coffin was carried through the Great West Door to the sounds of the “Burial Sentences” and the tolling of the abbey’s bell.
The Dean of Westminster called on the congregation to “commend Queen Elizabeth to the care and keeping of almighty God”. This explicitly Christian finale to the Queen’s 70-year reign was informed by the rites and passages of other royal funerals. 
The Speaker of the House Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, has said the pageantry and ritual would constitute the “most important event the world will ever see”. That seems unlikely. But for many the events of recent days have been deeply felt. 
The Queen’s coffin lay in Westminster Hall for four days. Hundreds of thousands filed past to pay their respects, many pausing to angle their heads, perform the sign of the cross, offer a namaste or salute. Some came with a symbol of their connection to the Queen, whether it was a clerical collar, military medals or a girl-guide neckerchief. One heard the cry of babies, occasional weeping and the clank of walking sticks. Many people would turn to look at the coffin one last time before they left the hall. Few among them walked out into New Palace Yard with their eyes dry.
These pilgrims had trudged for nearly five miles. At its longest, the queue was ten miles long with a waiting time of 24 hours. Every minute or so the queue would move forward, the motion rippling down the line. Firemen handed out bottles of water. An officious marshal chastised those taking photographs on the stairs near Westminster Bridge.
Queuing intensified people’s emotion. Strangers became friends and there was a sense of camaraderie. The experience made people more helpful, and more willing to ask for help. “It was as good as a queue could be,” said Stuart, an accountant. “It was a relaxed, peaceful way of coming here,” one vicar from Wakefield told me. “To get off the train and go straight in wouldn’t have felt the same.” 
“We stood for six and a half hours for one day in our lives. The royal family do this all the time,” said a woman called Penny. 
Near parliament, a statue of the Queen’s grandfather George V watched over the queue. Will Elizabeth now become a statue? There are plans for her to replace the sculpture of whipped cream and cherry currently on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. But some argue this position wouldn’t be sufficiently grand. Or what about an epithet? Elizabeth the Great, as Boris Johnson has recommended? The Good? British Pathé proclaimed her father “George the Good” in 1952 but no one remembers George VI as such today.
However her life is memorialised, the Queen has become a conduit for the personal grief many feel about their own relatives who have recently passed. Beside Westminster Hall, one man I tried to speak to simply held up his hand and said, “I think I’d rather just let it sink in.” A woman mentioned the recent death of her mother, and another said the Queen was the enduring link with her own childhood.
Outside Westminster Abbey, 4,000 military personnel formed a procession of more than a mile long to honour their commander-in-chief as the service came to a close. A group of NHS workers, elevated to a kind of royalty during the Covid-19 pandemic, joined the procession near the rear. The crowds gathered to watch. The last time that Britain buried a monarch, in 1952, hawkers sold small pieces of mirror to help those at the back see. They held up these squares of glass in the same way people raised their smartphones today. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said in his sermon, Jesus does not tell his disciples how to follow but who to follow, and for many, that was the Queen.

Really? We’re supposed to believe it will be easier to bring Republicans on board after the election? If the Democrats retain the Senate postelection, Republicans will have little reason to vote against their base. If the Republicans retake the Senate, they’ll have less incentive still.

Please. This just makes things easier on Republican lawmakers: A vote would force them to dissatisfy either swing voters, with whom same-sex marriage is highly popular, or their extremist base, with whom (to put it mildly) it is not. Easier for Republicans to scurry away from a proposal that’s politically risky, just as they did earlier last week with Lindsey Graham’s unpopular bill on abortion. And they’re doing this at the expense of the many Americans in same-sex relationships — married, engaged or on the cusp of commitment — for whom this just makes life harder and more precarious.

This is exactly the moment to hold Republicans’ feet to the fire. It’s the moment for those Republicans who are in favor of gay marriage to stand up for what has become a clear majority position in the country, or to cave spectacularly to the prejudices of their base. As Senator Elizabeth Warren put it: “Every single member of Congress should be willing to go on the record. And if there are Republicans who don’t want to vote on that before the election, I assume it is because they are on the wrong side of history.”

Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. They could be true believers, or they could simply be selling their souls in the interest of staying in office. But those who do support gay marriage need to act. Particularly given the ominous words of Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which many interpreted as a threat to revisit the landmark 2015 decision establishing the right to same-sex marriage.

After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis coordinated two flights last week to relocate dozens of migrants to Martha's Vineyard, critics of the move have questioned how he financed the stunt.
Though the payments have not been definitively linked to the Martha's Vineyard flights, DeSantis' Republican administration paid an aviation company $615,000 one week before flying nearly 50 migrants to Massachusetts on Wednesday. That would come to $12,300 per head. Public records indicate that the Department of Transportation made the payment to Vertol Systems Company Inc., which is based in Oregon but has a location in the Florida panhandle, for a "relocation program of unauthorized aliens."
That relocation program is funded by the state's 2021–2022 appropriations, which allocated $12,000,000 to implement "a program to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens from this state consistent with federal law." Funds not spent in fiscal year 2021–2022 roll over to 2022–2023 to be used for the same purpose.
Judging by DeSantis' recent comments, that money is still being spent. "The legislature gave me $12 million," DeSantis said at a news conference on Friday. "We're going to spend every penny of that to make sure that we're protecting the people of the state of Florida."
According to the 2022–2023 spending bill, the $12 million pot comes from "the interest earnings associated with the federal Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund." Part of the American Rescue Plan—a $1.9 trillion package passed last year against unanimous GOP opposition—set aside about $350 billion as relief cash for states and localities. The federal government attached few strings to how state and local governments spent the interest earned on those funds while they remained unspent.
Florida's migrant relocation fund is by no means the first example of questionably directed COVID-19 relief money, which was ostensibly doled out to cushion economic burdens imposed by the pandemic and the government's response to it. Nor is Florida the first state to use COVID relief money for immigration enforcement. Texas tapped into a similar pandemic fund to support Operation Lone Star, a border-securing program that has proven costly and controversial.
COVID relevance aside, are the Martha's Vineyard flights really "protecting the people of the state of Florida"? For one thing, the spending bill provides money for the transportation of migrants "from this state"—meaning Florida. But last week's flights originated in San Antonio, Texas. DeSantis has defended the use of his state's funds in this way by claiming Florida officials have been working in Texas "for months" to identify and divert individuals who were likely to eventually end up in Florida.
Even so, many of the immigration enforcement schemes embraced by DeSantis and other GOP governors come with hefty price tags, even if their results are sketchy. Florida's migrant transportation fund flies in the face of the fiscal responsibility DeSantis says he defends. DeSantis himself criticized the American Rescue Plan that now funds the migrant relocation program, saying the package was "designed basically to bail out the poorly governed states." When the governor signed the 2022–2023 state budget that funds the migrant relocation program, he vetoed $3.1 billion in spending and laid out tax relief for Floridians, touting his state's "responsible fiscal policies" as he did so.
Moral, legal, and economic concerns all linger, as DeSantis says there will likely be more migrants bused and flown to blue cities. Since immigrants contribute significantly to public finances through taxes, are less likely to use welfare than similarly situated native-born Americans, and are able to fill critical jobs, a fiscally responsible governor would be wise to drop the costly enforcement stunts.
The post Spending Down $12 Million in Pandemic Relief Money on an Immigration Stunt Isn't 'Responsible Fiscal Policy' appeared first on Reason.com.

Mayor of New York City is famously a dead-end job. The last New York mayor to win higher office was John T. Hoffman, and that was in 1868. He became governor. Every mayor since then has found the way up barred. And, for some, the way up turned into the way down.

The mayors are often a little surprised by this reversal of fortune. The assumption seems to be: If I can govern there, I can govern anywhere. This may or may not be true. What is true is that New York City’s mayors have had a hard time getting non-New Yorkers to vote for them. After all, you’re not likely to be elected President of the United States by promising to make the country more like New York. You basically have to run against your own home town.

When John V. Lindsay, who was elected mayor in 1965 and became one of the country’s highest-profile politicians, ran for President, in 1972, he was forced to drop out after finishing fifth in the Florida primary, where he had counted on getting the votes of retired New Yorkers. He quit politics after a 1980 New York Senate bid, joined two law firms, and made regular appearances on “Good Morning America,” but health problems and the collapse of both firms nearly wiped him out. In 1996, an ally on the City Council arranged for this once charismatic and commanding figure to be given two essentially ceremonial appointments in city government just so he could have health insurance.

Ed Koch (1978-89) ran for governor in 1982 and lost to Mario Cuomo in the Democratic primary after making disparaging remarks about life upstate. It’s a pretty basic rule in New York politics that you don’t do that if you want to be governor. After Koch left City Hall, his activities included movie reviewing, serving as a replacement for Judge Wapner on “The People’s Court,” and keeping alive his reputation as a great tummler.

Michael Bloomberg (2002-13), like Koch a three-term mayor, spent a billion dollars of his own money, a record, in the 2020 Presidential primaries and won a grand total of fifty-nine delegates before dropping out. He did carry American Samoa on Super Tuesday. He is now eighty years old and unlikely to run for anything in the future.

Bill de Blasio (2014-21) entered those Presidential primaries in 2019, while he was still mayor. His poll numbers hovered between one per cent and zero. This May, he announced that he was running for Congress in the 10th Congressional District, which includes western Brooklyn, where he lives. In July, after polls showed him running seventh, he dropped out. He says that he is leaving electoral politics.

Then there is Rudy Giuliani. Let’s pass over the dripping hair dye; the Pennsylvania parking-lot “election fraud” press conference, where a witness turned out to be a convicted sex offender; the on-air screaming matches with Piers Morgan, Chris Cuomo, and others; the embarrassing punking at the hands of Sacha Baron Cohen; his hosting a Russian disinformation agent on his podcast. At the end of the day, Rudy Giuliani is a lawyer whose counsel led to his client’s being impeached twice.

Since the 2020 election, Giuliani has had his law license suspended in New York and Washington, D.C. (Less consequentially, perhaps, Syracuse University is considering revoking his honorary degree.) Two of his former associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been convicted of federal crimes and sentenced to prison. Giuliani himself is a target in the inquiry into efforts to interfere in the results of the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, and some observers, including Ken Frydman, a former press secretary from his 1993 mayoral campaign, think he will be indicted.

And he is being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems for spreading falsehoods about its voting machines. He maintained, among other untrue things, that Dominion’s software had been invented in Venezuela for Hugo Chávez to steal elections.

During his last year as mayor, Giuliani claimed (amid divorce proceedings, so a grain of salt is necessary) that he was worth seven thousand dollars. But he got rich virtually overnight through a management-and-security consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, that he founded shortly after leaving City Hall—and shortly after September 11th had made him an international celebrity.

Giuliani Partners started out as a pure buck-raking operation. The Mayor and his partners had little if any experience in management consulting. And it would be a stretch to say that they had any experience in security, apart from having lived through the greatest security failure in American history. Many were cronies of the Mayor’s from city government.

As Andrew Kirtzman puts it in his lively new biography, “Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor” (Simon & Schuster), they evidently calculated that “Giuliani’s fame and reputation for integrity could be squeezed like a washcloth for all types of moneymaking ventures.” They calculated correctly. In 2002 alone, Giuliani took in an estimated eight million dollars in speaking fees. A spinoff outfit, Giuliani Capital Advisors, made $84.7 million in 2004. By 2007, Giuliani’s worth was estimated to be thirty million dollars. At one point, he owned six homes, including a nine-room co-op on the Upper East Side and a house in the Hamptons, and had eleven country-club memberships.

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But his work for Donald Trump has reportedly brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. When he tried to get paid for his services, Trump stiffed him. (Giuliani apparently failed to notice the one-way sign on the Trump loyalty street.) He now hawks collectible coins, health products, and cigars on his podcast, “Rudy Giuliani’s Common Sense,” and sells video messages on Cameo for four hundred dollars apiece. In April, he appeared on “The Masked Singer,” where he offered his rendition of “Bad to the Bone” in a rooster costume. This is someone whom Oprah Winfrey called “America’s mayor,” who was named “Person of the Year” by Time, who had an honorary knighthood bestowed on him by the Queen of England. What happened?

The rough answer suggested in Kirtzman’s book is that a posture of moral rectitude, instilled in Giuliani by his Catholic education and made into a powerful political weapon by a personality that, as a friend said, lacks the fear gene, succumbed to Mammon. Righteousness, as it often does, morphed into self-righteousness. After launching his career as a federal prosecutor and winning convictions of Wall Street inside traders like Ivan Boesky, Giuliani seems to have decided that riches were his due. Back in private practice, he began taking on all sorts of sketchy clients, from Purdue Pharma to the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an exiled Iranian militia group that, in collaboration with Saddam Hussein, had slaughtered Kurds.

Of course, bad guys need lawyers, too. The trouble was that Giuliani was cashing in on a reputation for honesty and probity with unseemly avidity. He evidently didn’t care about how it looked. “His descent was the result of a series of moral compromises made over the years as the temptations of power and money grew,” Kirtzman writes. “By the time he reached an advanced age all those compromises left him an empty vessel, filled with a desire for power and little more. Alcohol, and a toxic marriage, were exacerbating factors, though not the cause.”

The ruling oligarchs are terrified that, for tens of millions of people, the economic dislocation caused by inflation, stagnant wages, austerity, the pandemic, and the energy crisis is becoming unendurable. They warn, as Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, have done, about the potential for social unrest, especially as we head towards winter.

Social unrest is a code word for strikes -- the one weapon workers possess that can cripple and destroy the billionaire class's economic and political power. Strikes are what the global oligarchs fear most. Through the courts and police intervention, they will seek to prevent workers from shutting down the economy. This looming battle is crucial. If we begin to chip away at corporate power through strikes, most of which will probably be wildcat strikes that defy union leadership and anti-union laws, we can begin to regain agency over our lives.

"We must organize and strike. The oligarchs have no intention of willingly sharing power or wealth."

The oligarchs have spent decades abolishing or domesticating unions, turning the few unions that remain -- only 10.7 percent of the workforce is unionized -- into obsequious junior partners in the capitalist system. As of January 2022, private-sector unionization stood at its lowest point since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. And yet, 48 percent of U.S. workers say they would like to belong to a union.

As a result of crushing conditions workers have been subjected to for years, the nation is facing its first major rail strike since the 1990s. The transportation industry, of which most rail workers are a part, has a higher than average union density compared to other parts of the private sector. A rail strike could mean a loss in economic output of $2 billion a day, according to a trade group representing railroad companies.

It was announced by the Biden White House, which hopes to avoid the optics of forcing striking workers back to the job, that the leaders of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET), International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers Transportation Division (SMART-TD) and Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen (BRS), among others, reached a tentative agreement with major freight companies, including Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) and Union Pacific. The tentative agreement was made amid intense pressure from the Biden administration.

Union officials stressed that the wording of the agreement is yet to be finalized and workers may not see the details of the agreement for three to four weeks, after which point union rank-and-file members will still have to vote on the proposed settlement.

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and The Real News have done detailed reporting on the contract negotiations.

BNSF announced a net income of nearly $6 billion in 2021, up 16 percent from the previous year. Union Pacific reported a net income of $6.5 billion, also up 16 percent from 2020. CSX Transportation and Norfolk Southern Railway have also posted large gains.

The economic deregulation of Class 1 rail freight carriers in the 1980s saw the number of freight carriers drop from 40 to seven, a number expected to soon fall to six. The workforce has shrunk from nearly 540,000 in 1980 to some 130,000. Service on the nation's rail lines, along with working conditions and wages, have declined as Wall Street squeezes the big railroad conglomerates for profits.

It appears that the proposed contract will meet few of the railroad workers' core demands including redressing years of declining wages, the need for cost-of-living adjustments to deal with inflation, an end to onerous attendance policies, guaranteed time off and sick days, massive lay-offs that have put tremendous pressure on remaining rail workers and an end to the practice of one-man crews.

Rail moves roughly two-fifths of long-distance American freight and one-third of exports. It lies at the heart of a complex global supply chain that includes cargo ships, trains, and trucks. It is almost certain that the Biden White House would intervene to prevent a nationwide rail strike, which would be a body blow to the nation's tottering supply chain and shaky economy.

The oligarchs targeted unions after World War II. Through a series of strikes in the 1930s, unions pressured Franklin Delano Roosevelt into passing New Deal legislation. Unions gave workers weekends off, the right to organize and strike, the eight-hour workday, health and pension benefits, safe working conditions, overtime, and Social Security.

The red-baiting of the 1930s and 1950s was directed primarily at labor organizers and radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as Wobblies, or the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the crusade against "reds," the most militant unions and union leaders, some of whom were Communists, were turned into pariahs. A series of anti-labor laws, including the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and Right-to-Work laws, which outlaw union shops, were put into place.

When the Taft-Hartley Act was passed about a third of the workforce was unionized, peaking in 1954 at 34.8 percent. The Act was a frontal assault on unions. It prohibits jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, and secondary boycotts, whereby unions strike against employers who continue to do business with a firm that is undergoing a strike. It forbids secondary or common situs picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. Union officials are forced by the Act to sign non-Communist affidavits or lose their positions. Companies are permitted under the Act to require employees to attend anti-union propaganda meetings. The Federal government is empowered to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike imperils "national health or safety."

The Act disempowers labor. It legalizes the suspension of civil liberties, including freedom of speech and the right to assembly. U.S. courts, including the Supreme Court, with judges drawn from corporate law firms, have since issued a raft of new anti-union rulings to keep workers in bondage. The right to strike in the U.S. barely exists.

Widespread strikes, a necessity if we are to prevail, will be declared illegal, no matter which party is in the White House. Those who lead strikes will be targeted for arrest, and corporations will attempt to replace workers with scabs. It will be a very, very ugly fight. But it is our only hope.

An interview with Seattle Socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant about organizing tactics and the importance of union militancy can be viewed here.

The earlier generation of labor organizers understood that union organizing was about class war. "Big" Bill Haywoodtold delegates at the founding convention of the IWW in 1905:

Fellow Workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working-class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism. The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.

Let his words be our credo.

After the end of World War II, two generations of workers in the United States were blessed with a period of unprecedented prosperity. Wages for the working class were high. Jobs were stable and came with benefits and health insurance. Unions protected workers from abuse by employers. Taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations were as high as 91 percent. The public school system provided a quality education to the poor and the rich. The nation's infrastructure and technology were cutting edge. Steel workers, auto workers, mill workers, construction workers, and truck drivers were part of the middle class.

In 1928, the top 10 percent held 23.9 percent of the nation's wealth, a percentage that steadily declined until 1973. By the early 1970s the oligarch's assault against workers expanded. Wages stagnated. Income inequality grew to monstrous proportions. Tax rates for corporations and the rich were slashed.

Today, the top 10 percent of the richest people in the United States own almost 70 percent of the country's total wealth. The top 1 percent control 31 percent of the wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population hold 2 percent of all U.S. wealth. Infrastructure is outdated and in disrepair. Public institutions, including schools, public broadcasting, the courts and the postal service, are underfunded and degraded.

You can see an interview I did with Louis Hyman, professor of economic history at Cornell University and author of Temp: The Real Story of What Happened to Your Salary, Benefits and Job Security,about the decades-long assault on workers here.

The oligarchs, as they did in the 19th century, exploit workers, including child labor, in Dickensian sweatshops in countries such as China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh.

You can see my interview with Jenny Chan who with Mark Selden and Pun Ngai wrote Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of China's Workershere.

Workers, bereft of union protection and lacking industrial jobs, have been forced into the gig economy, where they have few rights, no job protection and often earn below the minimum wage.

The rise in global food and energy prices, coupled with the weakening of democratic institutions and impoverishment of workers, has become a potent recipe for revolt.

Weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, decreased by 3.4 percent from August 2021 to August 2022, and real hourly earnings fell by 2.8 percent in the same period. Hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, have fallen for the past 17 months. The lopsided priorities -- billions of dollars in "security assistance" being sent to Ukraine by the Biden administration and other NATO members -- predictably saw Russia slash gas supplies to Europe. Russia will not resume the flow until sanctions imposed on the country are lifted. Russia provides 9 percent of European Union (EU) gas imports, down from 40 percent before the invasion. Big oil, meanwhile, is posting obscene profits as it gouges the public.

The most vulnerable countries -- Haiti, Myanmar, and Sudan -- have descended into chaos under the economic onslaught. Social spending in such countries as Egypt, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe has been slashed. Nor are the industrialized nations immune. About 70,000 people in Prague took to the streets on September 4 to protest rising energy prices and call for a withdrawal from the EU and NATO. Industries in Germany, one of the world's top three exporters, are crippled, paying as much for electricity and naturalgas in a single month, post-Russian-invasion, as they did for all last year. Protesters from across the political spectrum in Germany have called for regular Monday demonstrations against the rising cost of living. In the U.K, already beset with 10 percent inflation, energy companies are expected to increase their rates by 80 percent in October. Electricity bills in the U.S. have increased 15.8 percent over the past year. Natural gas bills have risen by 33 percent in the U.S. over the past year. Total energy costs in the U.S. have risen by 24 percent in the last 12 months. Consumer staples, the food, and items needed for daily survival, have increased by an average of 13.5 percent. This is only the start.

Sign posted by Associated Supermarkets of Alphabet City on Avenue C and the corner of 8th Street in Manhattan.

At what point does a beleaguered population living near or below the poverty line rise in protest? This, if history is any guide, is unknown. But that the tinder is there is now undeniable, even to the ruling class.

The United States had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized nation. Hundreds of workers were killed. Thousands were wounded. Tens of thousands were blacklisted. Radical union organizers such as Joe Hill were executed on trumped-up murder charges, imprisoned like Eugene V. Debs, or driven, like Haywood, into exile. Militant unions were outlawed. During the Palmer Raids on November 17, 1919, carried out on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, more than ten thousand alleged Communists, Socialists, and anarchists were arrested. Many were held for long periods without trial. Thousands of foreign-born emigres, such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Mollie Steimer, were arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately deported. Socialist publications, such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses, were shut down.

The Great Railway Strike of 1922 saw company gun thugs open fire, killing strikers. Pennsylvania Railroad President Samuel Rea alone hired over 16,000 gunmen to break the strike of nearly 20,000 employees at the company's shops in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the largest in the world. The railroads mounted a massive press campaign to demonize the strikers. They hired thousands of scabs, many of whom were Black workers who were barred by union management from membership. The Supreme Court upheld "yellow dog" contracts that forbade workers from unionizing. The establishment press, along with the Democratic Party, were, as always, full partners in the demonization and defanging of labor. The same year also saw unprecedented railway strikes in Germany and India.

To prevent railroad strikes, which disrupted nationwide commerce in 1877, 1894, and 1922 the federal government passed The Railway Labor Act in 1926 - union members call it "The Railway Anti-Labor Act" - setting out numerous requirements, including the appointment of The Presidential Emergency Board, which Biden set up, before a strike can be called.

Our oligarchs are as vicious and tight-fisted as those of the past. They will fight with everything at their disposal to crush the aspirations of workers.

Alexander Herzen, speaking to a group of anarchists about how to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to save a dying system but to replace it: "We are not the doctors. We are the disease."

All resistance must recognize that the corporate coup d'etat is complete. It is a waste of energy to attempt to reform or appeal to systems of power. We must organize and strike. The oligarchs have no intention of willingly sharing power or wealth. They will revert to the ruthless and murderous tactics of their capitalist forebearers. We must revert to the militancy of our own.

This week we have a diverse selection of essays for you to peruse, from a tribute to the late American novelist Peter Straub, to an impassioned defence of truth-seeking in the discipline of history. Barbara Kay has penned a touching essay on the young Queen Elizabeth, and you will find an editorial co-signed by all Quillette editors in support of Ukraine. A few weeks ago we published an article by a young record collector, Max Wilson, about a Wisconsin prison band Upheaval. Upheaval produced a record which would go on to become one of the most sought after 45rpms of all time. Yet despite this prized record, the incredible story of the band had never been told until Max penned his article for Quillette. Max recently visited the last remaining survivor of Upheaval, Joe Hayes. Joe doesn't use the internet so Max printed the essay for him.  Joe Hayes of Upheaval. Photo: Max WilsonIf you missed Max's article when it was published, you can read it here. I can promise that you won't be disappointed:Lost Soul Behind BarsThe untold story of Upheaval, a prison band that recorded one of the most sought-after soul singles of the 1970s.QuilletteMax WilsonUntil next week,—ClaireFictionPeter Straub, 1943–2022Farewell to another of the Big Six novelists from the Golden Age of American horror fiction.QuilletteKevin MimsEducationMath for Future Scientists: Require Statistics, Not CalculusThe case for ending calculus requirements for science majors.QuilletteRobert C. ThornettActivism vs Academia Child Welfare Is Becoming a JokeThe field is mired in risible theory and impenetrable jargon, and increasingly divorced from concern with the welfare of children.QuilletteNaomi Schaefer RileyNever Apologize for Trying to Tell the TruthThose who repress inconvenient facts or produce fictitious evidence to nourish a politically convenient story are simply not historians.QuilletteJeffrey HerfHistoryThe Young Elizabeth, Seen Through a Child’s EyesThe diaries of Elizabeth’s wartime companion illustrates the special burdens faced by royalty—and Elizabeth’s fitness to bear themQuilletteBarbara KayPoliticsLessons from Hannah Arendt on Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’Fascism, communism, and transhumanism all lure us into rejecting the real human condition in favor of ideological constructs.QuilletteRoger BerkowitzHorseshoe Theory Comes to UkrainePutin’s Western apologists don’t reflect the usual conflict between Left and Right—but rather comprise an example of both poles making common cause against the center.QuilletteThe Quillette Editorial BoardFrom Around the WebThe Man Who Saw AmericaOlivier Zunz offers a new portrait of America’s most famous French critic, Alexis de Tocqueville.American PurposeGustav JönssonJanan Ganesh: The myth of western decadence https://t.co/ytbWXByVus— FT Opinion (@ftopinion) September 16, 2022

The first thing that should raise your suspicions about the “Effective Altruism movement” is the name. It is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly. 
We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity. It is as if one were to label a movement the Better And Smarter People Movement—indeed, when the Effective Altruists were debating how to brand and sell themselves in the early days, the name “Super Hardcore Do-Gooders” was used as a placeholder. (Apparently in jest, but the name they eventually chose means essentially the same thing.) 
Effective Altruism can be defined as a “social movement,” a “research field,” or a “practical community.” The Center For Effective Altruism says it’s about “find[ing] the best ways to help others, and put[ting] them into practice,” and is now “applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries.” It has received coverage in leading media outlets (e.g., the New Yorker, TIME, and the New York Times), and $46 billion has apparently been committed to Effective Altruist causes, although most of that appears to be pledges from the same few billionaires. 
When I first heard about Effective Altruism, back around 2013, it was pitched to me like this: We need to take our moral obligations seriously. If there is suffering in the world, it’s our job to work to relieve it. But it’s also easy to think you’re doing good while you’re actually accomplishing very little. Many charities, I was told, don’t really rigorously assess whether they’re actually succeeding in helping people. They will tell you how much money they spent but they don’t carefully measure the outcomes. The effective altruist believes in two things: first, not ignoring your duty to help other people (the altruism part), and second, making sure that as you pursue that duty, you’re accomplishing something truly meaningful that genuinely helps people (the effectiveness part).
Put this way, it sounded rather compelling. Some Effective Altruists started an organization, GiveWell, that tried to figure out which charities were actually doing a good job at saving lives and which were mostly hype. I thought that made plenty of sense. But I quickly saw qualities in EA that I found deeply off-putting. They were rigorously devoted to trying to quantify moral decisions, to decide what the mathematically morally superior course of action to take was. And as GiveWell says, while first they try to shift people from doing things that “feel” good to doing things that achieve good results, they then encourage them to ask, “How can I do as much good as possible?” Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer’s 2015 EA manifesto is called The Most Good You Can Do, and EA is strongly influenced by utilitarianism, so they are not just trying to do good, but maximize the good (measured in some kind of units of goodness) that one puts out into the world. 

To that end, I heard an EA-sympathetic graduate student explaining to a law student that she shouldn’t be a public defender, because it would be morally more beneficial for her to work at a large corporate law firm and donate most of her salary to an anti-malaria charity. The argument he made was that if she didn’t become a public defender, someone else would fill the post, but if she didn’t take the position as a Wall Street lawyer, the person who did take it probably wouldn’t donate their income to charity, thus by taking the public defender job instead of the Wall Street job she was essentially murdering the people whose lives she could have saved by donating a Wall Street income to charity.1 I recall that the woman to whom this argument was made became angry and frustrated, and the man making the argument took her anger and frustration as a sign that she simply could not handle the harsh but indisputable logic bombs he was dropping on her. (I don’t know whether she ultimately became a public defender.) 
As it turns out, this argument is a popular one among EA types. Singer makes it in The Most Good You Can Do, saying that those who aim to earn high salaries but donate to charity are “to a greater extent than most people, living in accord with their values.” An early talk by William MacAskill, an Oxford philosopher who is one of EA’s leading intellectuals (and the subject of a recent New Yorker profile), was entitled “Want an ethical career? Become a banker.” Here’s a Stanford student arguing that while getting a corporate job and tithing some of your income may “clash with a lot of people’s intuitions about how to do good and even sound a lot like ‘selling out,’” and many might “see their best ways of doing good as being something along the lines of research, lobbying or civic engagement, perhaps through directly working for an advocacy organization or charity,” in fact “good work is ‘replaceable’ when someone else would have done it anyway” and “a lot of nonprofit work is in fact replaceable.” (The student went to work at a Silicon Valley software company.)2 80,000 Hours, a leading EA nonprofit that gives career advice, also favorably profiles a man named Sam Bankman-Fried, who “inspired by these arguments, founded one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges” (in other words, started a business helping people commit fraud) and is now worth $22.5 billion. He has become a political mega donor, contributing to Joe Manchin, Joe Biden, and the DNC, among others, and trying to get Effective Altruists elected to office, plus of course supporting pro-crypto policies. 
GiveWell also makes the case that nonprofit work is an “easy way out” and that those who do more “learning and deliberation” will realize that “creating economic value” in the for-profit sector may be the morally superior course: 

“The conventional wisdom that ‘doing good means working for a nonprofit,’ in our view, represents an ‘easy way out’—a narrowing of options before learning and deliberation begin to occur. We believe that many of the jobs that most help the world are in the for-profit sector, not just because of the possibility of ‘earning to give’ but because of the general flow-through effects of creating economic value.”

The EA community is rife with arguments in defense of things that conflict with our basic moral intuitions. This is because it is heavily influenced by utilitarianism, which always leads to endless numbers of horrifying conclusions until you temper it with non-utilitarian perspectives (for instance, you should feed a baby to sharks if doing so would sufficiently reduce the probability that a certain number of people will die of an illness).3 Patching up utilitarianism with a bunch of moral nonnegotiables is what everyone ends up having to do unless they want to sound like a maniac, as Peter Singer does with his appalling utilitarian takes on disability. (“It’s not true that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents ought to have that option.”) Neuroscientist Erik Hoel, in an essay that completely devastates the philosophical underpinnings of Effective Altruism, shows that because EA is built on a utilitarian foundation, its proponents face two unpalatable options: get rid of the attempt to pursue the Quantitatively Maximum Human Good, in which case it is reduced to a series of banal propositions not much more substantive than “we should help others,” or keep it and embrace the horrible repugnant conclusions of utilitarian philosophy that no sane person can accept. (The approach adopted by many EAs is to hold onto the repugnant conclusions, but avoid mentioning them too much.) Hoel actually likes most of what Effective Altruists do in practice (I don’t), but he says that “the utilitarian core of the movement is rotten,” which EA proponents don’t want to hear, because it means the problems with the movement “go beyond what’s fixable via constructive criticism.” In other words, if Hoel is right—and he is—the movement’s intellectual core is so poisoned by bad philosophy as to be unsalvageable. 
It’s easy to find plenty of odious utilitarian “This Horrible Thing Is Actually Good And You Have To Do It” arguments in the EA literature. MacAskill’s Doing Good Better argues that “sweatshops are good for poor countries” (I’ve responded to this argument before here) and we should buy sweatshop goods instead of fair trade products. He also co-wrote an article on why killing Cecil the lion was a moral positive and argued against participating in the “ice bucket challenge” that raised millions for the ALS Association (not because it was performative, but because he did not consider the ALS Association the mathematically optimal cause to raise money for). Here’s a remarkable Effective Altruist lecture called “Invest in Evil to Do More Good?” arguing that people who think tobacco companies do harm should get jobs in them, and organizations devoted to preventing climate change should invest in fossil fuel companies:  

“How should a foundation whose only mission is to prevent dangerous climate change invest their endowment? Surprisingly, in order to maximize expected utility, it might use ‘mission hedging’ investment principles and invest in fossil fuel stocks. This way it has more money to give to organisations that combat climate change when more fossil fuels are burned, fossil fuel stocks go up and climate change will get particularly bad. When fewer fossil fuels are burnt and fossil fuels stocks go down—the foundation will have less money, but it does not need the money as much. Under certain conditions the mission hedging investment strategy maximizes expected utility. … So generally, if you want to do more good, should you invest in ‘evil’ corporations with negative externalities? Corporations that cause harm such as those that sell arms, tobacco, factory farmed meat, fossil fuels, or advance potentially dangerous new technology? Here I argue that, though perhaps counterintuitively, that this might be the optimal investment strategy. … It might be a good strategy for donors or even other entities such as governmental organisations that are concerned with global health to invest in tobacco corporations and then give the profits to tobacco control lobbying efforts. Another example might be that animal welfare advocates should invest in companies engaged in factory farming such as those in [the] meat packing industry, and then use the profits to invest in organisations that work to create lab grown meat.”

MacAskill wrote a moral philosophy paper arguing that even if we “suppose that the typical petrochemical company harms others by adding to the overall production of CO2 and thereby speeding up anthropogenic climate change” (a thing we do not need to “suppose”), if working for one would be “more lucrative” than any other career, “thereby enabling [a person] to donate more” then “the fact that she would be working for a company that harms others through producing CO2” wouldn’t be “a reason against her pursuing that career” since it “only makes others worse off if more CO2 is produced as a result of her working in that job than as a result of her replacement working in that job.” (You can of course see here the basic outlines of an EA argument in favor of becoming a concentration camp guard, if doing so was lucrative and someone else would take the job if you didn’t. But MacAskill says that concentration camp guards are “reprehensible” while it is merely “morally controversial” to take jobs like working for the fossil fuel industry, the arms industry, or making money “speculating on wheat, thereby increasing price volatility and disrupting the livelihoods of the global poor.” It remains unclear how one draws the line between “reprehensibly” causing other people’s deaths and merely “controversially” causing them.)4 
In fact, 80,000 Hours, the EA organization that advises people on how to do the most good with their careers, actually developed a career quiz to help would-be Super Hardcore Do-Gooders figure out how to find a job that gives something to the community. When I took the quiz, it informed me that my best option was to become a management consultant:

When I changed my answers to say that I sucked at math and science and was also bad at public speaking and writing, it said I should join the civil service.5 
In recent years, EA’s exponents have apparently begun to de-emphasize this aspect of the program, perhaps because the rising tide of left-wing populism meant that it became pragmatically unwise to try to pitch change-oriented young people on the moral case for investment banking and Big Tobacco. The “optics” of the Actually, Bankers Who Do Philanthropy Are Morally Better Than Social Workers argument were terrible, and MacAskill (who is very worried about “damaging my brand, or the brand of effective altruism”)6 admitted that giving too much “prominence” to the argument “may have been a mistake.” (The career quiz has now been taken offline, but you can still access an archived version.) 

Effective Altruism’s focus has long been on philanthropy, and its leading intellectuals don’t seem to understand or think much about building mass participation movements. The Most Good You Can Do and Doing Good Better, the two leading manifestos of the movement, focus heavily on how highly-educated Westerners with decent amounts of cash to spare might decide on particular career paths and allocate their charitable donations. Organizing efforts like Fight For 15 and Justice For Janitors do not get mentioned. Doing Good Better concludes with a what to do now section on how to actually become an effective altruist. It contains four suggestions: (1) regularly give to charity, (2) “write down a plan for how you’re going to incorporate effective altruism into your life,” with the listed possibilities being giving to charity, “chang[ing] what you buy,” and changing careers (perhaps into management consulting!) (3) “Join the effective altruism community” by signing up for its mailing list, and (4) “Tell others about effective altruism” by evangelizing to “friends, family, and colleagues,” since “if you can get one to make the same changes you make, you’ve doubled your impact.” That’s it. That’s the advice.
I have to say, my own instinct is that all of this sounds pretty damned in-effective in terms of how much it is likely to solve large-scale social problems, and both MacAskill and Singer strike me as being at best incredibly naive about politics and social action, and at worst utterly unwilling to entertain possible solutions that would require radical changes to the economic and political status quo. (MacAskill and Singer are not even the worst, however. In 2019 I was shown an EA voting guide for the Democratic presidential primary which did a bunch of math and then concluded that Cory Booker was the optimal candidate to support, one of the reasons being that he was in favor of charter schools. Sadly, the guide has since been taken offline.) If EA had been serious about directing money toward the worthiest cause, it would have been much more interested from the start in the state’s power to redistribute wealth from the less to the more worthy. After all, if your view is that people who work on Wall Street should give some of their money away, relying on them to make individual moral decisions is very ineffective (especially since most of them are sociopaths). You know what’s better than going and working on Wall Street yourself? Getting a tax put in place, so that the state just reaches into their pocket and moves the money where it can do more good. Taking rich people’s money by force and spending it is far more effective than having individual do-gooders work for 30 years on Wall Street so they can do some philanthropy on the side (and relying on them to maintain their commitments). In his The Life You Can Save, Singer, who has defended high CEO salaries and is dismissive of those who call for “more revolutionary change,” adopts a highly individualistic approach in which the central moral question facing us is how we should spend our money. At the end of the book he offers a seven-point plan to “make you part of the solution to world poverty.” The steps are:

Visit www.TheLifeYouCanSave.com and pledge to give a portion of your income to charity
“Check out some of the links on the website, or do your own research, and decide to which organization or organizations you will give.”
Work out how much of your income you will be giving and how often you will give it, then do it.
“Tell others what you have done” using “talk, text, e-mail, blog, use whatever online connections you have.” 
Ask your employer to set up a scheme that automatically donates 1 percent of everyone’s income to charity unless they choose to opt out. (Your coworkers are going to love you for this one. Note that it comes out of workers’ incomes rather than corporate profits.) 
“Contact your national political representatives and tell them you want your country’s foreign aid to be directed only to the world’s poorest people.” This is, presumably, Singer’s definition of doing politics. 
“Now you’ve made a difference to some people living in extreme poverty. ”

This is certainly the kind of poverty-reduction plan one would expect from someone focused on individual actions and not on movement politics. The likelihood that it will end poverty is approximately nil. 
Brian Berkey, in a paper defending EA against the criticism that it doesn’t care enough about systemic change, suggests that this isn’t really a critique of Effective Altruism, because it’s being made using effective altruist premises. In other words, if you say “effective altruists don’t realize that systemic change rather than individual charity is the most effective way to help people,” theoretically Effective Altruists should be comfortable with this criticism, because it can be construed as an internal debate over what kinds of actions do quantitatively maximize the amount of good. In fact, you could technically be a socialist Effective Altruist, someone who has just concluded that being part of the long-term project to replace capitalist institutions is ultimately the best way to maximize human flourishing. I believe that conclusion myself, and I share in common with the EA people a desire to meaningfully make the world better.

But we might here distinguish between as a general matter caring about other people and wanting to make sure your actions have good consequences and the actually-existing Effective Altruism movement, comprised of particular public intellectuals, organizations, programs, and discussion groups. Reading Singer and MacAskill’s manifestos, it’s pretty clear that they don’t know much about politics and aren’t very interested in it (although that EA crypto-billionaire has certainly gotten political, and Singer ran as an Australian Green Party candidate in 1996 and achieved 2.9 percent of the vote). Berkey notes that the “systemic change” critique is compatible with Effective Altruist premises, which is true, but it’s impossible to say that the movement as it actually exists is serious about the possible value of social change through social movements. Instead, its proponents tend to spend a lot of time debating how rich people should spend their money and what their think tanks should work on. 
The actually-existing EA movement is concerned with some issues that are genuinely important. They tend to be big on animal rights, for instance. But I’m an animal rights supporter, too, and I’ve never felt inclined to be an Effective Altruist. What does their movement add that I don’t already believe? In many cases, what I see them adding is an offensive, bizarre, and often outright deranged set of further beliefs, and set of moral priorities that I find radically out of touch and impossible to square with my basic instincts about what goodness is.

For instance, some EA people (including the 80,000 Hours organization) have adopted a deeply disturbing philosophy called “longtermism,” which argues that we should care far more about the very far future than about people who are alive today. In public discussions, “longtermism” is presented as something so obvious that hardly anyone could disagree with it. In an interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, MacAskill said it amounted to the idea that future people matter, and because there could be a lot of people in the future, we need to make sure we try to make their lives better. Those ideas are important, but they’re also not new. “Intergenerational justice” is a concept that has been discussed for decades. Of course we should think about the future: who do you think that socialists are trying to “build a better world” for?
So what does “longtermism” add? As Émile P. Torres has documented in Current Affairs and elsewhere, the biggest difference between “longtermism” and old-fashioned “caring about what happens in the future” is that longtermism is associated with truly strange ideas about human priorities that very few people could accept. Longtermists have argued that because we are (on a utilitarian theory of morality) supposed to maximize the amount of well-being in the universe, we should not just try to make life good for our descendants, but should try to produce as many descendants as possible. This means couples with children produce more moral value than childless couples, but MacAskill also says in his new book What We Owe The Future that “the practical upshot of this is a moral case for space settlement.” And not just space settlement. Nick Bostrom, another EA-aligned Oxford philosopher whose other bad ideas I have criticized before, says that truly maximizing the amount of well-being would involve the “colonization of the universe,” and using the resulting Lebensraum to run colossal numbers of digital simulations of human beings. You know, to produce the best of all possible worlds. 

These barmy plans (a variation on which has been endorsed by Jeff Bezos) sound like Manifest Destiny: it is the job of humans to maximize ourselves quantitatively. If followed through, they would turn our species into a kind of cancer on the universe, a life-form relentlessly devoted to the goal of reproducing and expanding. It’s a horrible vision, made even worse when we account for the fact that MacAskill entertains what is called the “repugnant conclusion”—the idea that maximizing the number of human beings is more important than ensuring their lives are actually very good, so that it is better to have a colossal number of people living lives that are barely worth living than a small number of people who live in bliss. 
Someone who embraced “longtermism” could well feel that it’s the duty of human beings to forget all of our contemporary problems except to the extent that they affect the chances that we can build a maximally good world in the very far distant future. Indeed, MacAskill and Hilary Greaves have written that “for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focussing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers.” To that end, longtermism cares a lot about whether humans might go extinct (since that would prevent the eventual creation of utopia), but not so much about immigration jails, the cost of housing, healthcare, etc. Torres has noted that the EA-derived longtermist ideas have a lot in common with other dangerous ideologies that sacrifice the interests of people in the here and now for a Bright, Shining Tomorrow.
Torres even quotes EA thinkers downplaying the catastrophe of climate change on the grounds that because it probably won’t render us outright extinct, it should be less of a priority. Indeed, the 80,000 Hours website is fairly “meh” on the question of whether a young Super Hardcore Do-Gooder should consider trying to stop climate change, and notes that “nothing in the IPCC’s report suggests that civilization will be destroyed.” Elsewhere, it tells us that climate change does not affect what should be our “first priority,” the avoidance of outright extinction, because “it looks unlikely that even 13 degrees of warming would directly cause the extinction of humanity.”7 While admitting that the effects of climate change will be dire, 80,000 Hours says if you choose to work on it you probably won’t be as morally good as someone who works on certain other issues: 

“We’d love to see more people working on this issue, but—given our general worldview—all else equal we’d be even more excited for someone to work on one of our top priority problem areas. … Climate change is far less neglected than other issues we prioritise. Current spending is likely over $640 billion per year. Climate change has also received high levels of funding for decades, meaning lots of high-impact work has already occurred. … [F]or all that climate change is a serious problem, there appear to be other risks that pose larger threats to humanity’s long-term thriving.”

Yeah, other people clearly have the climate problem under control. You should consider working on a higher-priority concern. (Note: this is not true in the least, the claims about climate science here are not correct, and we desperately need a larger and more effective climate justice movement.) 

What, then, does EA say is our highest priority, if it’s not the unfolding climate catastrophe? Fortunately 80,000 Hours has produced a list of the “highest priority areas” as determined by scrupulous research. They are:

Positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence
Global priorities research
Building effective altruism
Reducing global catastrophic biological risk

80,000 Hours does say there are other issues that “we haven’t looked into as much” but “seem like they could be as pressing,” and a “minority” of people should “explore them.” These are “mitigating great power conflict,” “global governance,” “space governance,” and a “list of other issues that could be top priorities.” Beneath this is a list of secondary priorities, where “we’d guess an additional person working on them achieves somewhat less impact than work on our highest priorities, all else equal.” These are “nuclear security,” “improving institutional decision-making,” and “climate change (extreme risks).”
Let’s consider the EA list of priorities. I will leave aside #1 (artificial intelligence) for the moment and return to it shortly. The 2nd priority is researching priorities. Again, this in a time when to me and many others, our priorities seem pretty fucking clear (stopping war, climate disaster, environmental degradation, and fascism, and giving everyone on Earth nice housing, clean air and water, good food, health, education, etc.) But no, EA tells us that researching priorities is more pressing than, for example, “nuclear security.” So is #3, Building Effective Altruism. Because there aren’t many Effective Altruists, and of course EA is about optimizing the amount of good in the world, “building effective altruism is one of the most promising ways to do good in the world.” This sets up a rather amusing kind of “moral pyramid scheme” (my term, not theirs) in which each person can do good by recruiting other people to recruit other people to do good by recruiting other people. This is considered a more obvious moral priority than stopping warfare between nuclear-armed great powers. 
The final highest priority, #4, is one that does make quite a bit of sense. 80,000 Hours talks about the risk of pandemics, and to their great credit, they were warning about pandemics long before the COVID-19 disaster. But even on this useful issue, the utilitarian philosophy of EA introduces a strange twist, which is an emphasis on preventing the kind of a pandemic that would render the human race extinct. Because of EA’s utilitarianism (and the various repugnant conclusions it leads to), stopping humans from going extinct is considered much more important than anything else (because if we go extinct, we are preventing many future Units Of Well-Being from coming into existence). They are quite clear on this:

“In this new age, what should be our biggest priority as a civilization? Improving technology? Helping the poor? Changing the political system? Here’s a suggestion that’s not so often discussed: our first priority should be to survive. So long as civilisation continues to exist, we’ll have the chance to solve all our other problems, and have a far better future. But if we go extinct, that’s it.”

Personally, I don’t really give this kind of importance to stopping human extinction. (Let the manatees have the planet, I say!) It’s more important for me to make sure the humans that do exist have good lives than to make sure humanity keeps existing forever.8 
But 80,000 Hours’ focus on extinction means their idea of the most critical risk of a pandemic is that there will be zero humans at the end of it.. They explain that “pandemics—especially engineered pandemics—pose a significant risk to the existence of humanity” and while “billions of dollars a year are spent on preventing pandemics … little of this is specifically targeted at preventing biological risks that could be existential.” What they’re talking about is a subcategory of risks within “biosecurity and pandemic preparedness” called “global catastrophic biological risks,” which are the ones that might actually wipe out the species altogether. Fortunately, the work that would prevent those extreme “engineered pandemics” does overlap with the work that would deal with pandemics and biological weapons more generally, and 80,000 Hours mentions the need to restrict biological weapons, limit the engineering of dangerous pathogens, and create “broad-spectrum testing, therapeutics, and other technologies and platforms that could be used to quickly test, vaccinate, and treat billions of people in the case of a large-scale, novel outbreak.” All very important and helpful. 
But there’s very little here about, say, ensuring that poor people receive the same kind of care as rich people during pandemics. In fact, since the reason for focusing so much on pandemics in particular is to avoid outright extinction, issues of equity simply don’t matter terribly much, except to the extent that they affect extinction risk. Bostrom has said that on the basic utilitarian framework, “priority number one, two, three, and four should … be to reduce existential risk.” (Torres notes that Bostrom is dismissive of “frittering” away resources on “feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy” like helping the global poor.) Torres points out that not only does this philosophy mean you are “ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty,” but one prominent Effective Altruist has even gone so far as to argue that “saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.”
So even in the one domain where Effective Altruists (at least those at 80,000 Hours) appear to be advocating a core priority that makes a lot of sense, the appearance is deceptive, because all of it is grounded in the idea that the most important problem with pandemics is that a sufficiently bad one might cause humanity to go extinct. Should we work on establishing universal healthcare? Well, how does it affect the risk that all of humanity will go extinct? 

But I have not yet discussed the #1 priority that many Effective Altruists think we need to deal with: artificial intelligence. When it comes to 80,000 Hours’ top career recommendations: working on artificial intelligence “safety” is right at the top of the list: 

In recent years, dealing with the “threat” posed by artificial intelligence has become very, very important in EA circles. One Effective Altruist reviewer of MacAskill’s What We Owe The Future says the book understates the degree to which people in the community think artificial intelligence is the most important risk faced by humanity, and readers might feel “bait-and-switched” if they are lured into Effective Altruism by the platitudes about caring about the future and then discover the truth that EA people are very preoccupied with artificial intelligence. Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded the EA charity evaluator GiveWell, says that while he used to work on trying to help the poor, he switched to working on artificial intelligence because of the “stakes”: 

“The reason I currently spend so much time planning around speculative future technologies (instead of working on evidence-backed, cost-effective ways of helping low-income people today—which I did for much of my career, and still think is one of the best things to work on) is because I think the stakes are just that high.”

Karnofsky says that artificial intelligence could produce a future “like in the Terminator movies” and that “AI could defeat all of humanity combined.” Thus stopping artificial intelligence from doing this is a very high priority indeed.
Now, I think it tells you quite a lot about Effective Altruism that someone can say in all seriousness “I’ve decided to stop working on evidence-backed poverty relief programs and start working on stopping Skynet from The Terminator, because I think it is the most rational use of my time.” But EA people are dead serious about this. They think that there is a significant risk that computers will rise up and destroy humanity, and that it is urgent to stop them from doing so.
The argument that is usually made is something like: well, if the computation power of machines continues to increase, soon they will be as intelligent as humans, and then they might make themselves more intelligent, to the point where they are super-intelligent, and then they will be able to trick us and outwit us and there will be no way to stop them if we program them badly and they decide to take over the world. 
It is hard for me to present this argument fairly, because I think it is so unpersuasive and stupid. Versions of it have been discussed before in this magazine (here by computer scientist Benjamin Charles Germain Lee and here by artificial intelligence engineer Ryan Metz). The case for it is made in detail in Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence and Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Generally, those making the argument focus less on showing that “superintelligent” computers are possible than on showing that if they existed, they could wreak havoc. The comparison is often made to nuclear weapons: if we were living in the age before nuclear weapons, wouldn’t we want to control their development before they came about? After all, it was only by sheer luck that Nazi Germany didn’t get the atomic bomb first. (Forcing all Jewish scientists to flee or be killed also probably contributed to Nazi Germany’s comparative technological disadvantage.) 
But one reason to be skeptical of the comparison is that in the case of nuclear weapons, while early scientists may have disagreed about whether building them was feasible, those who did think they were feasible could offer an explanation as to how such a bomb could be built. The warnings about dangerous civilization-eating AI do not contain demonstrations that such a technology is possible,9 and rest on unproven assumptions about what algorithms of sufficient complexity would be capable of doing, that are much closer to prophecy or speculative fiction than science.10 80,000 Hours at one point laughably tries to prove that computers might become super-intelligent by showing us that computers are getting much better at generating pictures of cats in hoodies. They warn us that if things continue this way for long, the machines might take over and make humans extinct.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I think so-called “artificial intelligence” (a highly misleading term, incidentally, because a core property of AI is that it’s unintelligent and doesn’t understand what it’s doing) has very scary possibilities. I’ve written before about how the U.S. military is developing utterly insane technologies like “autonomous drone swarms,” giant clouds of flying weaponized robots that can select a target and destroy it. I think the future of some technologies is absolutely terrifying, and that “artificial intelligence” (actually, let’s just say computers) will do things that astonish us within our lifetimes. Computing is getting genuinely impressive. For instance, when I asked an image-generator to produce “Gaudí cars,” it gave me stunning pictures of cars that actually looked like they had been designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí. (I had it make me some Gaudí trains as well.) I’m fascinated by what’s going to happen when music-generating software starts going the way of image-generating software. I suspect we will see within decades programs that can create all new Beatles songs that sound indistinguishable from the actual Beatles (they’re not there yet, but they’re making progress), and you will be able to give the software a series of pieces of music and ask for a new song that is a hybrid of all of them, and get one that sounds extraordinarily good. It’s going to be flabbergasting. 
But that doesn’t mean that a computer monster is going to suddenly emerge and eat the world. The fact that pocket calculators can beat humans at math does not mean that if they become really good at math, they might become too smart for their own good and turn on us. If you paint a portrait realistic enough, it doesn’t turn 3-dimensional, develop a mind of its own, and hop out of the frame. But those who think computers pose an “existential risk” quickly start telling stories about all the horrible things that could happen if computers became HAL 9000 or The Terminator’s Skynet. Here’s Karnofsky: 

“They could recruit human allies through many different methods—manipulation, deception, blackmail and other threats, genuine promises along the lines of ‘We’re probably going to end up in charge somehow, and we’ll treat you better when we do.’ Human allies could be given valuable intellectual property (developed by AIs), given instructions for making lots of money, and asked to rent their own servers and acquire their own property where an ‘AI headquarters’ can be set up. Since the ‘AI headquarters’ would officially be human property, it could be very hard for authorities to detect and respond to the danger.”

And here’s prominent EA writer Toby Ord, in his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity: 

“There is good reason to expect a sufficiently intelligent system to resist our attempts to shut it down. This behavior would not be driven by emotions such as fear, resentment, or the urge to survive. Instead, it follows directly from its single-minded preference to maximize its reward: being turned off is a form of incapacitation which would make it harder to achieve high reward, so the system is incentivized to avoid it. In this way, the ultimate goal of maximizing reward will lead highly intelligent systems to acquire an instrumental goal of survival. And this wouldn’t be the only instrumental goal. An intelligent agent would also resist attempts to change its reward function to something more aligned with human values—for it can predict that this would lead it to get less of what it currently sees as rewarding. It would seek to acquire additional resources, computational, physical or human, as these would let it better shape the world to receive higher reward.” 

To me, this just reads like (very creative!) dystopian fiction. But you shouldn’t develop your moral priorities by writing spooky stories about conceivable futures. You should look at what is actually happening and what we have good reason to believe is going to happen. Much of the AI scare-stuff uses the trick of made-up meaningless probabilities to try to compensate for the lack of a persuasive theory of how the described technology can actually be developed. (“Okay, so maybe there’s only a small chance. Let’s say 2 percent. But do you want to take that chance?”) From the fact that computers are producing more and more realistic cats, they extrapolate to an eventual computer that can do anything we can do, does not care whether we live or die, and cannot be unplugged. Because this is nightmarish to contemplate, it is easy to assume that we should actually worry about it. But before panicking about monsters under the bed, you should always ask for proof. Stories aren’t enough, even when they’re buttressed with probabilities to make hunches look like hard science.  

Worst of all, the focus on artificial intelligence that might kill us all distracts from the real problems that computing will cause as it gets more powerful. Ryan Metz, in his Current Affairs article, discusses how counterfeit images and videos are going to become easier and easier to produce and fakes harder to spot, which could easily worsen our misinformation problem. It will be easier for ordinary people to produce dangerous weapons (although we might also be able to 3D-print some Gaudí cars). Automation will of course disrupt a lot of people’s jobs, and it’s going to be very tough when even artists and designers find themselves being put out of work by art-generating robots. The good news is that if we harness our technologies for good, they may give us lives of ease and pleasure. Which path we go down depends a lot on what kind of socio-political system we end up living under, and it will take a huge struggle to make sure we can achieve very good outcomes rather than awful ones. 
Those who fear the “existential risk” of intelligent computers tend to think non-experts like myself are simply unfamiliar with the facts of how things are developing. But I received helpful confirmation in my judgment recently from Timnit Gebru, who has been called “one of the world’s most respected ethical AI researchers.” Gebru served as the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, until being forced out of the company after producing a paper raising serious questions about how Google’s artificial intelligence projects could reinforce social injustices. Gebru, a Stanford engineering PhD and co-founder of Black in AI, is deeply familiar with the state of the field, and when I voiced skepticism about EA’s “paranoid fear about a hypothetical superintelligent computer monster” she replied: 

“I’m a person having worked on the threats of AI, and actually done something about it. That’s also my profession. And I’m here to tell you that you are correct and what they’re selling is bullshit.”

Gebru is deeply skeptical of EA, even though they ostensibly care about the same thing that she does (social risks posed by artificial intelligence). She points out that EAs “tell privileged people what they want to hear: the way to save humanity is to listen to the privileged and monied rather than those who’ve fought oppression for centuries.” She is scathing in saying that the “bullshit” of “longtermism and effective altruism” is a “religion … that has convinced itself that the best thing to do for ‘all of humanity’ is to throw as much money as possible to the problem of ‘AGI [artificial general intelligence.’” She notes ruefully that EA is hugely popular in Silicon Valley, where hundreds of millions of dollars are raised to allow rich people, mostly white men, to think they’re literally saving the world (by stopping the hypothetical malevolent computer monster). 
Gebru points out that there are huge risks to AI, like “being used to make the oil and gas industries more efficient,” and for “criminalizing people, predictive policing, and remotely killing people and making it easier to enter warfare.” But these get us back to our boring old near-term problems—racism, war, climate catastrophe, poverty11—the ones that rank low on the EA priorities list because other people are already working on them and a single brilliant individual will not have much effect on them.12
Gebru’s critique points out the undemocratic and, frankly, racist aspect to a lot of EA thinking.13 EA proponents are not particularly interested in finding out what people who aren’t Oxford philosophy professors think global priorities should be. Peter Singer gave a very awkward answer when it was pointed out to him that all of the thinkers he seemed to respect were white men: 

“I have to say, I want to work with people whose ideas are, you know, at a level of discussion that I’m interested in, and that I’m progressing. If you’re thinking of the work of Africans, for example, I don’t know the work of many of them that is really in the same sort of—I’m not quite sure how to put this—participating in the same discussion as the people you’ve just mentioned.”14

In the past, I’ve talked to people who think that while some of Effective Altruism is kooky, at least EAs are sincerely committed to improving the world, and that’s a good thing. But I’m afraid I don’t agree. Good intentions count for very little in my mind. Lots of people who commit evil may have “good intentions”—perhaps Lyndon Johnson really wanted to save the world from Communism in waging the criminal Vietnam war, and perhaps Vladimir Putin really thought he was invading Ukraine to save Russia’s neighbor from Nazis. It doesn’t really matter whether you mean well if you end up doing a bunch of deranged stuff that hurts people, and I can’t praise a movement grounded in a repulsive utilitarian philosophy that has little interest in most of the world’s most pressing near-term concerns and is actively trying to divert bright young idealists who might accomplish some good if they joined authentic grassroots social movements rather than a billionaire-funded cult.15

The truth about doing good is that it doesn’t require much complicated philosophy. What it requires is dedication, a willingness to do things that are unglamorous and tedious. In a movement, you do not get to be a dazzling standout individual who single-handedly changes the world. It’s unsexy. You join with others and add your small drop to the bucket. It’s not a matter of you, but we. There’s already a form of effective altruism, and it’s called socialism. Socialists have been working for a better world for a very long time. Those who want to do “the most good they can” and serve the interests of humanity long-term are welcome to come on board and join the struggle. What are some of the best reasons to be a socialist? For one, the movement isn’t based on morally repugnant arguments that either have to be downplayed or dressed up with evasive language. And secondly, it is inclusive of all people, especially those who have been harmed by capitalism, who want to change the conditions of our society that create, right now, poverty and inequality and species-threatening climate change, to name a few.
Effective Altruism, which reinforces individualism and meritocracy (after all, aren’t those who can do the most good those who have the most to give away?), cannot be redeemed as a philosophy. Nor is it very likely to be successful, since it is constantly having to downplay the true beliefs of its adherents in order to avoid repulsing prospective converts. That is not a recipe for a social movement that can achieve broad popularity. What it may succeed in is getting some people who might otherwise be working on housing justice, criminal punishment reform, climate change, labor organizing, journalism, or education to instead fritter their lives away trying to stop an imaginary future death-robot or facilitate the long-term colonization of space. (Or worse yet, working for a fossil fuel company and justifying it by donating money to stop the death-robot.) It is a shame, because there is plenty of work to be done building a good human future where everyone is cared for. Those who truly want to be both effective and altruistic should ditch EA for good and dive into the hard but rewarding work of growing the global Left. 
Of course, this is also a serious moral indictment of all the existing Wall Streeters not donating their income, but this woman apparently had the moral burden of making up for their stinginess. ↩The highly individualistic focus on the things where you personally make the most difference means that EA discourages people from working on popular causes. 80,000 Hours says: “If lots of people already work on an issue, the best opportunities [!] will have already been taken, which makes it harder to contribute. But that means the most popular issues to work on, like health and education in the US or UK, are probably not where you can do the most good—to have a big impact, you need to find something unconventional.” Yeah, how can you morally justify something low impact like teaching little kids or caring for old people? Teachers, social workers, and nurses are not pursuing what the organization calls “high-impact careers.” ↩When asked “Should you feed a baby to sharks in order to reduce the probability that a hundred other people will die?” the normal human answer is “Are you crazy?” whereas the utilitarian answers “Well, let’s do the math and see.” Or “shut up and multiply” as one thinker popular among both EA and the neoreactionary right has put it. ↩The movement’s embrace of hilariously horrible utilitarian conclusions means it’s very easy to imagine an Effective Altruist supervillain. It would also be easy to write an Effective Altruist defense of Stalinism—gotta break those eggs to maximize the long-term moral omelet. I once wrote a kind of short story about an Effective Altruist who becomes a virus researcher after becoming convinced that serving humanity morally necessitates killing most of humanity, and wants to discover a pathogen that will do the trick. But only in order to do the most good he can. Hoel’s article notes that Effective Altruists insist that they do not embrace strict utilitarian ends. For instance, if a billionaire said he would donate enough money to charity to save 1,000 lives, but only if he was allowed to set a homeless man on fire, no moral person could countenance the deal, and I haven’t heard such a thing defended by an EAer. Still, arguments like “Invest In Evil To Do More Good” or Work At McKinsey To Donate To Malaria Prevention are not much different. Indeed, an EA who makes their money on planet-destroying cryptocurrency is just setting more people on fire. ↩I would again note the deep implicit devaluation of care work that runs through 80,000 Hours’ focus on jobs that supposedly maximize your impact rather than simply make you a helpful part of your community. ↩Émile P. Torres documents the EA obsession with PR and marketing. Amusingly enough, the New Yorker reports that MacAskill once made a moral argument that he should get cosmetic dentistry, citing research showing that people with nice teeth are more effective persuaders. Thus optimizing his effectiveness in serving the cause would justify, nay necessitate, having the gap between his front teeth fixed. ↩Nick Bostrom has downplayed the harms of climate change, saying: “In absolute terms, [the climate consequences of “business as usual” emissions] would be a huge harm. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, world GDP grew by some 3,700%, and per capita world GDP rose by some 860%. It seems safe to say that … whatever negative economic effects global warming will have, they will be completely swamped by other factors that will influence economic growth rates in this century.” ↩MacAskill acknowledges in What We Owe The Future that there is a widely-held intuition that we have an obligation to help the humans that do exist but not a moral obligation to create more humans. He rejects this intuition because he argues that it leads to a logical paradox. More on that is discussed in this highly critical review of MacAskill’s book. Quite a lot turns on the issue, because if you are a utilitarian who thinks Maximizing Future Value Units is the way to think about our core moral task, you will end up, like 80,000 Hours, thinking the avoidance of extinction is much more morally pressing than anything else, and will allocate your time accordingly. ↩Computer scientist Erik J. Larson, in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, notes that in contrast to nuclear chain reactions, “theories about mind power evolving out of technology aren’t testable,” and so the superintelligence theories, while “presented as scientific inevitability, are more like imagination pumps: just think if this could be! And there’s no doubt, it would be amazing. Perhaps dangerous. But imagining a what-if scenario stops far short of serious discussion about what’s up ahead.”  Larson adds in an interview: “[W]hat the futurists were talking about in the media and everywhere else, and I was thinking like, ‘How are we drawing these conclusions? I’m right here doing this work and we have no clue how to build systems that solve the problems that they say are imminent, that are right around the corner. Not only do they seem not around the corner, there’s a reasonable skepticism that we’re ever going to find a solution short of a major conceptual invention that we can’t foresee.’ … So if you have people declaring that humans are soon to be replaced by artificial intelligence that are far superior … It creates a real disincentive for us to do much to fix things in our own society.” [emphasis added] ↩There is commonly a poorly-defended assumption that sufficiently great computing power will be able to produce “intelligence” because the human brain is just a fleshy version of a computer, so when machines can match the “computation power” of the human brain they will be able to be “intelligent.” 80,000 Hours writes that: “We may be able to get computers to eventually automate anything humans can do. This seems like it has to be possible—at least in principle. This is because it seems that, with enough power and complexity, a computer should be able to simulate the human brain.” The use of “seems” should raise our suspicions. It does not seem that way to me, because I think that would require us to have a far more detailed understanding of how the human brain works. The dubious idea that a brain isn’t doing anything a computer couldn’t in principle do is often defended with bad arguments. Karnofsky, for instance, says that the fact that computers are not made of organic material is irrelevant to whether they can achieve human-like consciousness, which he proves using a “thought experiment”: if we replaced all of the neurons in our brains with “digital neurons” “made out of the same sorts of things today’s computers are made out of instead of what my neurons are made out of,” there would be no difference between the digital-mind and the organic mind. This, as you will immediately see, proves nothing, because it merely assumes the conclusion it seeks to prove, which is that everything done by the neurons of the brain can in fact be replicated by non-living machines. ↩There are many sound reasons to care about near-term priorities over million-year long-term ones. My own take is that we can let the next generation worry about the long-term, but our generation is the “pivotal generation” that has a particular set of responsibilities to solve a particularly pressing set of problems. If we succeed, then our descendants will be free to worry about that “long term” stuff, which by definition is not especially pressing right now. The belief that all humans in all time periods and places are equally worthy of your personal moral concern is also open to criticism on the grounds that we have particular obligations that come from being embedded in relationships—for instance, as a citizen of the United States, I have a particular duty to try to keep my country from committing hideous atrocities, and as a resident of a neighborhood, I might have obligations to my neighbors. ↩It’s worth reiterating how individualistic the EA approach to altruism is. 80,000 Hours emphasizes how you can maximize the difference that your presence makes, and thus encourages people not to pursue the projects where together we can collectively make a huge difference, but instead the projects where I, a single person, maximize the marginal difference caused by my decisions. EA helps you feel important. ↩Torres notes that “not only has the longtermist community been a welcoming home to people who have worried about ‘dysgenic pressures’ being an existential risk, supported the ‘men’s rights’ movement, generated fortunes off Ponzi schemes and made outrageous statements about underpopulation and climate change, but it seems to have made little effort to foster diversity or investigate alternative visions of the future that aren’t Baconian, pro-capitalist fever-dreams built on the privileged perspectives of white men in the Global North.” ↩Singer said in the same interview that his new “Journal of Controversial Ideas” was preparing to publish an article drawing “parallels between young-Earth creationism and the ideological views that reject well-established facts in genetics, particularly related to differences in cognitive abilities” and an article on “whether blackface can be acceptable.” ↩Incidentally, I’ve actually been rather surprised during my six years of running a magazine that no EA person has ever seemed to show any curiosity about the value of building independent media institutions, which perform a vital public service and produce huge “bang for the buck” in terms of their social good. We’re in a terrible time for journalism and media—it obviously needs funding and is a vital part of a healthy democracy—yet it’s nowhere on their priorities list. I have my tongue only partly in my cheek when I say that donating to Current Affairs is an extremely effective form of altruism and that if EA people took their stated principles seriously they would be writing large checks to this magazine right now. I am open to being proven wrong about their sincerity, however, so I invite them to prove that they do in fact believe in their stated principles by writing said checks. ↩ 

 Markus Spiske via Unsplash, FALYour great grandchildren are powerless in today’s society. As Oxford philosopher William MacAskill says:

They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market, And they can’t make their views heard directly: they can’t tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised.

But the things we do now influence them: for better or worse. We make laws that govern them, build infrastructure for them and take out loans for them to pay back. So what happens when we consider future generations while we make decisions today?

Review: What We Owe the Future – William MacAskill (OneWorld)

This is the key question in What We Owe the Future. It argues for what MacAskill calls longtermism: “the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.” He describes it as an extension of civil rights and women’s suffrage; as humanity marches on, we strive to consider a wider circle of people when making decisions about how to structure our societies.
MacAskill makes a compelling case that we should consider how to ensure a good future not only for our children’s children, but also the children of their children. In short, MacAskill argues that “future people count, there could be a lot of them, and we can make their lives go better.”

Read more:
Friday essay: 'I feel my heart breaking today' – a climate scientist's path through grief towards hope

Future people count
It’s hard to feel for future people. We are bad enough at feeling for our future selves. As The Simpsons puts it: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.”
We all know we should protect our health for our own future. In a similar vein, MacAskill argues that we all “know” future people count.

Concern for future generations is common sense across diverse intellectual traditions […] When we dispose of radioactive waste, we don’t say, “Who cares if this poisons people centuries from now?” 
Similarly, few of us who care about climate change or pollution do so solely for the sake of people alive today. We build museums and parks and bridges that we hope will last for generations; we invest in schools and longterm scientific projects; we preserve paintings, traditions, languages; we protect beautiful places.

There could be a lot of future people
Future people count, and MacAskill counts those people. The sheer number of future people might make their wellbeing a key moral priority. According to MacAskill and others, humanity’s future could be vast: much, much more than the 8 billion alive today.
While it’s hard to feel the gravitas, our actions may affect a dizzying number of people. Even if we last just 1 million years, as long as the average mammal – and even if the global population fell to 1 billion people – then there would be 9.1 trillion people in the future.

The future of humanity could be unimaginably large, so those people deserve some moral weight.

We might struggle to care, because these numbers can be hard to feel. Our emotions don’t track well against large numbers. If I said a nuclear war would kill 500 million people, you might see that as a “huge problem”. If I instead said that the number is actually closer to 5 billion, it still feels like a “huge problem”. It does not emotionally feel 10 times worse. If we risk the trillions of people who could live in the future, that could be 1,000 times worse – but it doesn’t feel 1,000 times worse.
MacAskill does not argue we should give those people 1,000 times more concern than people alive today. Likewise, MacAskill does not say we should morally weight a person living a million years from now exactly the same as someone alive 10 or 100 years from now. Those distinctions won’t change what we can feasibly achieve now, given how hard change can be. 
Instead, he shows if we care about future people at all, even those 100 years hence, we should simply be doing more. Fortunately, there are concrete things humanity can do.

Read more:
Labor's climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are missing

We can make the lives of future people better
Another reason we struggle to be motivated by big problems is that they feel insurmountable. This is a particular concern with future generations. Does anything I do make a difference, or is it a drop in the bucket? How do we know what to do when the long-run effects are so uncertain?

Even present-day problems can feel hard to tackle. At least for those problems we can get fast, reliable feedback on progress. Even with that advantage, we struggle. For the second year in a row, we did not make progress toward our sustainable development goals, like reducing war, poverty, and increasing growth. Globally, 4.3% of children still die before the age of five. COVID-19 has killed about 23 million people. Can we – and should we – justify focusing on future generations when we face these problems now?
MacAskill argues we can. Because the number of people is so large, he also argues we should. He identifies some areas where we could do things that protect the future while also helping people who are alive now. Many solutions are win-win.
For example, the current pandemic has shown that unforeseen events can have a devastating effect. Yet, despite the recent pandemic, many governments have done little to set up more robust systems that could prevent the next pandemic. MacAskill outlines ways in which those future pandemics could be worse.
Most worrying are the threats from engineered pathogens, which 

[…] could be much more destructive than natural pathogens because they can be modified to have dangerous new properties. Could someone design a pathogen with maximum destructive power—something with the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles? 

He gives examples, like militaries and terrorist groups, that have tried to engineer pathogens in the past.
The risk of an engineered pandemic wiping us all out in the next 100 years is between 0.1% and 3%, according to estimates laid out in the book. 
That might sound low, but MacAskill argues we would not step on a plane if you were told “it ‘only’ had a one-in-a-thousand chance of crashing and killing everyone on board”. These threaten not only future generations, but people reading this – and everyone they know.
MacAskill outlines ways in which we might be able to prevent engineered pandemics, like researching better personal protective equipment, cheaper and faster diagnostics, better infrastructure, or better governance of synthetic biology. Doing so would help save the lives of people alive today, reduce the risk of technological stagnation and protect humanity’s future. 
The same win-wins might apply to decarbonisation, safe development of artificial intelligence, reducing risks from nuclear war, and other threats to humanity.

Read more:
Even a 'limited' nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Things you can do to protect future generations
Some “longtermist” issues, like climate change, are already firmly in the public consciousness. As a result, some may find MacAskill’s book “common sense”. Others may find the speculation about the far future pretty wild (like all possible views of the longterm future).
MacAskill strikes an accessible balance between anchoring the arguments to concrete examples, while making modest extrapolations into the future. He helps us see how “common sense” principles can lead to novel or neglected conclusions. 
For example, if there is any moral weight on future people, then many common societal goals (like faster economic growth) are vastly less important than reducing risks of extinction (like nuclear non-proliferation). It makes humanity look like an “imprudent teenager”, with many years ahead, but more power than wisdom:

Even if you think [the risk of extinction] is only a one-in-a-thousand, the risk to humanity this century is still ten times higher than the risk of your dying this year in a car crash. If humanity is like a teenager, then she is one who speeds around blind corners, drunk, without wearing a seat belt.

Sam Harris talks to William MacAskill about longtermism and effective altruism.

Our biases toward present, local problems are strong, so connecting emotionally with the ideas can be hard. But MacAskill makes a compelling case for longtermism through clear stories and good metaphors. He answers many questions I had about safeguarding the future. Will the future be good or bad? Would it really matter if humanity ended? And, importantly, is there anything I can actually do?
The short answer is yes, there is. Things you might already do help, like minimising your carbon footprint – but MacAskill argues “other things you can do are radically more impactful”. For example, reducing your meat consumption would address climate change, but donating money to the world’s most effective climate charities might be far more effective. 

Beyond donations, three other personal decisions seem particularly high impact to me: political activism, spreading good ideas, and having children […] But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career.

MacAskill points to a range of resources – many of which he founded – that guide people in these areas. For those who might have flexibility in their career, MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours, which helps people find impactful, satisfying careers. For those trying to donate more impactfully, he founded Giving What We Can. And, for spreading good ideas, he started a social movement called Effective Altruism.
Longtermism is one of those good ideas. It helps us better place our present in humanity’s bigger story. It’s humbling and inspiring to see the role we can play in protecting the future. We can enjoy life now and safeguard the future for our great grandchildren. MasAskill clearly shows that we owe it to them.
Michael Noetel receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Sport Australia. He is a Director of Effective Altruism Australia.

Monkeypox cases are declining in many areas of the country, but the Biden administration is warning that the virus still poses a danger and pushing for lawmakers to approve its multibillion-dollar funding request to combat it.
More than 23,000 infections have been confirmed in the U.S. during the outbreak, but the growth has slowed. Cases have dropped about 50 percent in the past month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from an average of 440 cases a day on Aug. 16 to 170 cases a day on Sept. 14.
White House officials are cheering the updates and taking credit for the progress made so far.
"There’s no question that the work we’ve done to rapidly increase vaccine supply, get people vaccinated, [ramp] up the availability of testing and treatments, and educate individuals on how they can protect themselves is making a tremendous difference. The administration’s strategy is working," Bob Fenton, White House monkeypox response coordinator, said during a recent press briefing.
Officials are also preaching caution and warning that the virus remains a threat, especially if the administration does not have enough funding to help end the outbreak. 
"We should note that we have made strong progress, and we’re encouraged by the cases, the case rate of rise declining," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said.  "And yet we are keeping our — the gas pedal heavily, heavily downward — pedal to the metal — as we continue ... the vigilance here."
The White House requested $4.5 billion for monkeypox response in the upcoming government spending bill. The funding would go towards increasing access to vaccinations, testing, treatment and operational support, as well as helping to combat monkeypox globally. 
But Republicans have largely soured on providing any new money, and want the administration to work with what it already has.
"In my view, adding additional funding in that area would make it a very heavy lift for myself and other Republicans," Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told reporters. "There's ample revenue that's been provided to the administration to be able to deal with medical emergencies of this nature."
Last week, Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said Republicans had "zero" interest in providing additional funding.
"There's plenty of money still swirling around from previous COVID bills ... I mean, four and a half billion for monkeypox. That's a lot of money. And not sure how they're gonna spend it all," Thune said. 
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) ranking member Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told administration health officials during a recent hearing that the government's response to monkeypox has been plagued by ineptitude, and more money won't solve the problems. 
“It isn’t a question of authority; you have the authority. It isn’t a question of money; you have been given astonishing amounts of money," Burr said. “It’s a question of leadership. It’s a question of focus. It’s a question of squashing the typical bureaucratic roadblocks, arrogance and ineptitude."
Unlike with COVID-19, the administration has not previously requested money for the monkeypox response. The White House has been able to tap into its national stockpile of smallpox vaccines, but officials said they are running out of money to replenish it. 
In addition, federal officials said they can't just repurpose previously allocated COVID-19 funding for monkeypox, because legislative language in previous supplemental spending bills restricts the use of funds to COVID-19-related matters only.
Experts and public health advocates stressed the importance of continuing to put resources into the monkeypox response, even as case numbers fall.
"I think it's too early to make any kind of true definitive statements on where we stand," said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles who has studied monkeypox for decades.
"It appears that we haven't learned anything ... controlling outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics require a sustained effort over a lengthy period of time," Rimoin said. "If we're truly going to understand what happened and how to continue to prevent the spread of this virus, we have to put the resources in place to do so."
David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, said sexual health clinics don't have enough money to continue treating patients without additional resources.
"We have seen this song and dance before, with woeful COVID vaccination rates among minority communities leading to poorer outcomes, and we can’t afford to make the same mistake again," Harvey said in a statement.
Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation, said the frustrating part of the monkeypox funding stalemate is that it won't take nearly as much of an investment as COVID-19. 
"I think part of the White House argument to Congress and part of the public health argument is, we're in a window of opportunity here. If we can get the response right and make sure we bring cases down and sustain that," Kates said. "It's not a long term investment need."
During the recent Senate hearing with top administration officials, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the HELP Committee chairwoman, questioned whether the government can be trusted to adequately prepare for the next outbreak given the initial missteps in responding to monkeypox.
Still, she said the way to be sure the government is ready is to make sure they have the money they need to prepare.
“I know I’m not the only one here with concerns about the monkeypox response but we can’t just say 'this isn’t working' without providing the funding to end this outbreak and build the public health system Americans deserve," Murray said.

She and her co-author, Amélie Henle, found a pattern of messaging by influential amplifier accounts that sought to demobilize civil society activism, by pumping up intersectional critiques of feminism and attacking organizers.

Movements, Dr. Bradshaw argues, are fragile structures, often unprepared to weather well-resourced state-backed sabotage campaigns, especially when combined with algorithms that promote negative content. But healthy social movements are essential to democracies, she said.

“We’re not going to have a robust public sphere if nobody wants to organize protests,” she said.

Ms. Sarsour isn’t an academic, but she understood it well enough.

“Lord have mercy,” she said, glancing over Dr. Bradshaw’s findings.

Ms. Sarsour tried to get her head around it: All that time, the Russian government had been thinking about her. She had long had a sense of where her critics came from: the American right wing, and supporters of Israel. A foreign government — that was something that had never occurred to her.

“To think that Russia is going to use me, it’s much more dangerous and sinister,” she said. “What does Russia get out of leveraging my identity, you know, to undermine movements that were anti-Trump in America — I guess —” she paused. “It’s just, wow.”

Understanding what Russian trolls did would not change her position.

Still, it helped her understand that time in her life, when she had been at the center of a storm. It wasn’t just her fellow countrymen hating her. It wasn’t just her allies disavowing her. That had happened. But it wasn’t the whole story.

She placed a call to Ms. Mallory.

“We weren’t crazy,” she said.

Aaron Krolik and Milana Mazaeva contributed reporting.

Some problems persist: I have spoken to some of the researchers working on universal coronavirus vaccines and I’m stunned by how little help they’re getting. One described months of delay trying to find the monkeys needed for trials. You might think the U.S. government, with all its power and might, would name a point person that the teams working on these vaccines could call if they needed something, anything. Instead, many of our most brilliant virologists spend their work days trying to find lab animals and figure out how to conduct due diligence regarding manufacturing facilities.

And I have been puzzled by the Biden administration’s disinterest in building on the Trump administration’s central success: The Operation Warp Speed program that sped the vaccines into development. We could have Warp Speeds for so much more (and we are far from done with vaccines). I’ve asked this question of top Biden staffers, and I cannot say the answers I’ve heard have made much sense. I suspect the problem here relates more to crediting the Trump administration than with the possibilities of the Warp Speed program. Trump wasn’t exactly eager to build on Obama administration successes, either. But that doesn’t explain why Biden hasn’t launched Warp Speed-like policies under a new brand. Call them Moonshots. Call them Biden Bets. It doesn’t matter.

But what we have not done should not distract from what we have done. Vaccines, treatments like Paxlovid, improvements in hospitalization protocols and rapid testing — along, of course, with post-infection immunity — have uncoupled caseloads from death rates. The pandemic still exerts a terrible toll — hundreds still die each day from the disease — but it is far less than what it would be otherwise, and it could be far better were boosters more widely taken and therapeutics more widely used. Something like normalcy is possible for many people today, and pharmaceutical innovation and deployment is a driving cause.

What is true for Covid is true for many diseases that don’t receive as much daily coverage. Cost dominates Washington’s debates over health care. What we actually get for all that spending is a much more distant concern. It’s cliché, at this point, for politicians to brandish charts showing the stunning rise in projected health spending over the next 40 or 75 years. But those charts have always bugged me. Doesn’t what we get for that spending matter? You tell me if we’re living healthy lives until age 175, and then I’ll tell you whether spending a hefty share of G.D.P. on medical care is a scandal or a bargain.

The Inflation Reduction Act allows Medicare to negotiate down certain drug prices. Every other rich country lets the government negotiate drug prices, and for good reason. Pharmaceuticals are not a normal kind of market good. If you can’t afford the flat screen TV you want, you leave the store. If you can’t afford the last-ditch cancer treatment that might give your spouse 10 more years of life, you sell anything, you mortgage everything, to get it. Drug companies can charge whatever they want, and so they do. The median price of a year’s supply of a drug launched in 2021 was an eye-popping $180,000. Only governments have the negotiating power to curb those cost increases. Other governments do. Citizens of countries like Canada and Britain pay far less for drugs that were developed here, oftentimes built on publicly funded research.

The counterargument to this is that the high drug costs borne by Americans are subsidizing pharmaceutical innovation for the entire world — and as frustrating as it is, it’s worth it. I’ve never found this convincing. Should we then pay 50 percent more for drugs to wring even more innovation out of the system?

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The author of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, his most recent book is The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World.In this week’s discussion, Yascha Mounk and Robert Kagan discuss the danger that Donald Trump continues to pose to American democracy, what the “realist” theory of international relations gets wrong (and right), and how liberal democracies can defend their values around the world.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I want to open by talking a little bit about the study of international relations. With Russia's assault on Ukraine, we've gotten a little bit of a primer about different approaches to foreign policy, in part because of a debate between liberals, realists, and neoconservatives. My understanding is that although you are often called a neoconservative, you don't exactly fit into any of those views. Where do you anchor yourself relative to these theories? Robert Kagan: Well, categories are always problematic. I wouldn't know what to call myself because I think that my own views are grounded in realism, in the sense that I think that power is a critical determinant of international and political affairs, and that if you don't recognize the comparative power structure of the international system, you're not going to understand why nations are doing what they're doing. But where I think I part from people who are self-described realists is in believing that issues of belief, faith, ideas, ideology, the way people live and the way they want to live, are at least as powerful as any of the more tangible things that realists tend to focus on. Realists think that the nation state has a set of interests which are different from what the people in those nations want. I think that's just wrong and misleading. No nation is a unified collective. Every nation is a collection of competing interests, and foreign policy is set by whichever of those interests has become dominant.In democracies, obviously, there is a kind of a competition for control of foreign policy between people whose interests clash. A lot of conservatives up until the invasion of Ukraine found themselves very sympathetic to Putin, seeing him as a strong, anti-liberal Christian leader who somehow stood for the kind of nationalism that some conservatives would like to see in America—which, by the way, was also true in the 1930s, when conservatives, in general, were far more worried about communism than about fascism (and by default, really, were even sometimes sympathetic to fascists). And the liberals were more worried about fascism, so they were inclined to be soft on the Soviet Union but hard on Nazi Germany. You can’t understand what the outcome of a foreign policy debate is unless you understand how much of that foreign policy debate is actually rooted in domestic debate.Mounk: A realist might think that the relative peace that the United States has managed to keep in the world since the end of World War II has to do with structural features of great power competition during the Cold War period, or a kind of unilateral hegemony in the decades after 1989. But your explanation puts a little bit more emphasis on the nature of American power, if I understand that right. Talk us through that.Kagan: For whatever reason, realists tend to cling to a multipolar model of international relations. I think if you scratch them, you would find that their ideal circumstances are like the Congress of Vienna (1814-5) and the few years following it, where you had aristocratic diplomats getting together and arranging a balance of power. And there's a kind of moralism to the realist position which suggests that the only just world is a world in which multiple powers are balanced against each other. Because otherwise, you have hegemony and domination. Henry Kissinger wrote a book called A World Restored. He discusses the Congress of Vienna at great length. If you read biographies of Kissinger, it's pretty clear that that is the ideal situation for him. From it, he and other realists derive the idea that you can't let ideology get in the way of the stable balance of power that allegedly exists. At the Congress of Vienna, you had countries that didn't necessarily agree. Britain and Austria didn't share political or ideological perspectives. But they did share a desire to maintain the balance of power. If you go back and read Hans Morgenthau, realists’ greatest fear is Napoleon. Napoleon is the great disaster, because he had universalist pretensions, of which realists are all highly suspicious. In their view, communism and liberal democracy were in a sense equally messianic, and therefore equally likely to lead the world to destruction. They didn't think that because the United States was a democracy, it was necessarily better for world peace than the Soviet Union. That leads them to miss a lot of things. And I think the thing that they most miss is the success of the American order. They missed the possibility of a unilateral hegemon in the world, because it's not a theory. It's just a reality of geography and wealth and power, but it has turned out to be a very stable situation, as you mentioned. Realists also leave out the key element of that stability, which is that those within the American security umbrella, those who are willing participants in the American-led liberal order, are themselves liberals. That's critical, because Europeans, from the beginning, welcomed and even invited American power. I think that's because of ideological affinity. They knew that American power does not threaten their fundamental freedoms, whereas the rise of other great powers who don't share these liberal values would inherently threaten their liberal values. So, you do need to put the unique circumstances of American power together with the historically unusual fact that you have a universalist, liberal democracy that also happens to be the global hegemon, and those two things together create a highly unique set of circumstances which you can't really replicate in any other way. In a way, it's anti-theory. It just happened as a series of historical accidents. But it is a powerful force, nevertheless, as we've seen.Mounk: There is one obvious response to that, which is: but what about all of the ways in which the United States has used naked power, often in morally dubious ways—since 1945, with the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq—but also before that, with the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. control over the Americas? What might the world have looked like after 1989 if America hadn't been a democracy?Kagan: Well, things would have been worse, if you believe in democracy; if you don't believe in democracy, they would have been better. The interesting thing about Putin's invasion of Ukraine is that I think it reaffirms this. In the case of American power, or any other leader of a world order, the question is, “What is the actual alternative?” No sensible person would claim that the United States has behaved either flawlessly or with perfect morality or consistency. We are subject to hypocrisy and bad decisions and even immoral decisions. But if you don't have the United States in this position, what are you likely to have instead? I think that there is a tendency to feel that you would have a nice multipolar, stable world in which the United States wasn't throwing all its weight around.That has to be the assumption, because otherwise you would not say, “I'd rather have 30 years of global conflict instead of American hegemony.” I'm not sure you would be likely to make that choice, unless you were in Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. It seems like it's pretty clear that the alternative is not finding a new stable order, but rather, quite aggressive leaders taking quite aggressive and violent actions to reshape things. You're not going to get some wonderful 18th century monarch as your alternative; you're going to get Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Xi, Putin. And I think that once you realize that those are the actual choices in the era in which we live, it throws in somewhat starker relief the fact that American hegemony, for all its many flaws, is still a better situation than the absence of it in the real world.Mounk: This gets to the brilliant title of your last book, The Jungle Grows Back. What does it mean for the jungle to grow back, and is the war in Ukraine one example?Kagan: The premise of the book is that this historically remarkable, liberal democratic order that has been largely at peace in terms of great power conflict, is not somehow a product of the evolution of the human species. It’s not that the world had reached a new plateau, somehow, which is a classic Enlightenment, liberal perspective.They believed that in the years before World War I. There was the famous book by Norman Angell explaining how war had become obsolete for all kinds of reasons. If we know that that is not true, we should understand that the very nature of the international system means that there are dissatisfied powers who do not feel happy in the liberal world order, even if they benefited from it to some extent. I mean, China is a great beneficiary of the American-led world order. It's been great for China's security, which has allowed China to focus on its economy. But of course, the world was not shaped for China, so it's not unusual, even if it may be unwise, for China to want to reshape the world in such a way that benefits itself. We need to understand that those are natural forces, that the jungle is always trying to grow back, and that it requires the exercise of power in a variety of forms, not just military power, but economic, political, and diplomatic power, to keep those forces in check. But Americans have their own psychological hang-ups about how they feel about the world. We are very reticent in general about taking any action that has not been sort of forced upon us by an external event. We, in a way, don't even recognize that our great power is affecting the way other countries behave, and so we're not ready for their response. Whereas if we were more conscious of the role that we're playing, then I think we would have the capacity to be more conscious of what is necessary to reduce conflict. The problem is that we, Americans in general, begin with the prejudice that nothing out there in the world really can affect or hurt us. There is a certain truth to that, but what we don't realize is that there are things in the world that are frightening and intolerable. A shift in the global balance of power away from liberalism and toward autocracy would be damaging and worrying for us. But Americans spend a lot of time deceiving themselves about what they need to do and what they want to do, only to find themselves then doing it, and usually in the most disadvantageous situation possible. If you look at the history of World War I and World War II, we've always been able to eventually accomplish what needs to be accomplished, but at a much higher price than if we had been engaged all along.Mounk: One strain of realist thought is going to say that the United States is now rivaled economically by China; also, that it is, in limited ways, at least insofar as nuclear capability is concerned, rivaled militarily by Russia. That seems quite scary. But perhaps it's actually a good thing, because we'll get back to a kind of new Congress of Vienna-style balance of power. Now, we can try to negotiate that order to be as close to our interests as possible. Perhaps it is even possible to somehow make sure that Ukrainians can freely choose their own fate. But ultimately, we just have to accept that there are spheres of influence, and while our sphere is going to be significant, Russia, China, and the U.S. will have to sit around a table and make deals, and that's just the way it's going to work. You're saying that that's a mistake, because the jungle is going to grow back and this is going to have really bad consequences. What are those consequences, and what is the alternative?Kagan: It's very good to talk about spheres of interest, unless you’re the countries that live in those spheres. What people are really talking about, if they're honest, is consigning Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and who knows who else, to Chinese domination, which will, if they accept it, have all kinds of internal implications for the politics of these countries. I fear that when people talk about these things, especially realists, they posit a kind of smooth transition in which these countries just acquire their spheres of interest, and somehow there are no victims that we have to worry about, and there are no dangers. I think that is a very ahistorical view.Self-described realists thought that the United States was always too weak to accomplish anything other than accepting a balance of power. Henry Kissinger predicted that the United States would have to share a multipolar world because it didn't have the capacity to remain hegemonic. But as a result of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, we have seen how potent the liberal world order still is. Even I have to admit to some surprise myself, because after the Trump years, and even the Obama years, it was reasonable to assume that the the sort of the American security structure and alliances system had really frayed, and that countries were having real doubts about whether the United States was still in the game. But the response to the invasion of Ukraine has really been remarkable in that regard. The degree of unanimity among the democratic allies, and the degree to which the democratic allies have all looked to the United States to provide the essential leadership—militarily but also in terms of organizing the economic response—is proof that the United States still wields enormous influence in the international system.Mounk: I want to turn to the domestic political situation, and a much discussed essay of yours that you wrote after reflecting on January 6, arguing that the United States is now headed for a genuine and unprecedented constitutional crisis, perhaps in 2024, perhaps after. What makes you so worried about the American domestic political scene right now?Kagan: I actually wrote that article before we learned much about what had happened on January 6, and we certainly haven't gotten the detail that the January 6 investigating committee has opened up. There are more reasons to be concerned now than there were when I wrote that, but what I was basically getting at was, first of all: when you have the overwhelming majority of one political party, either actually believing or pretending to believe that the last election—about which there has been no question of its legitimacy—was, in fact, a fraud, then that is a constitutional crisis. And from the point of view of the people who feel that way, the only problem in the last election was that they didn't have their people counting the votes. They have now set about, since then, replacing as many of those people as possible. States have taken steps to grant legislatures increasing power to overturn the decisions of election officials. A contested election is enough to throw the United States into a constitutional crisis— and literally so, because the Constitution doesn't have an answer to this problem. One of the things we've learned since Trump took power is that a lot of things Americans thought were automatic structures in the system that spring into place whenever there's a threat to it—it turns out that there aren't any such things. The Founders, for a variety of reasons, were not able to establish a foolproof method of preventing dictatorship through this means. And therefore, it's really up to people. It's up to individuals all the way up, down, and across society, from the president, the vice president, the Supreme Court, the members of Congress, down to volunteer election officials (those are the people who saved us, in a way, in 2020). Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a legal or constitutional fix to what ails us. What I am most worried about is moving into a period where, let's say two or three states which hold the balance in the Electoral College are completely contested. There is every prospect of mass protests from both sides. People are increasingly tending to come to those protests heavily armed. We could be in a situation in 2024 where there is no obvious way out, and then we'll be left with President Biden, or whoever is in charge at that time, having to make what amounts to extra-constitutional decisions in order to save our democracy, because there is no constitutional remedy.Mounk: What would it mean to have to resort to extra-constitutional measures to guarantee the Constitution?Kagan: I'm always brought back to this wonderful speech that Daniel Day-Lewis gives in the film Lincoln, which I don't think Lincoln necessarily said, but which was brilliantly done by the screenwriters. He explains how the Southern secession basically threw him into a constitutional no man's land. When he made decisions about freeing the slaves, or he made decisions about how to treat a secession—he was very frank in understanding that he was charting his own course at that point. If you're a president in a situation where a couple of states are hopelessly deadlocked because you've got mobs in the street, how do you get out of that situation? At what point are you able to say, “No, I won,” or “they won,” and that's the end of it? Is he going to call out the National Guard? Is he going to call up the Army? Once you have gotten to the point where the established means of choosing a president and all that comes with that have been cast to the winds, you really are in an extra-constitutional situation. That just means that whatever a president does in that situation, the other side will accuse them of being a tyrant, just the way Lincoln was accused of being a tyrant—to some extent, justifiably so. I don't want Donald Trump to be president after 2024 because I think he will then dismantle American democracy. Because he doesn't have any belief in American democracy. But even before you would get to Trump being in office, you would be in this crisis where we do not have a legitimate president. That's what I'm worried about.Mounk: It's quite likely that Donald Trump, or somebody who is similarly willing to subvert free and fair elections, is going to be the Republican nominee. And if they should lose, they will try to put pressure on local elected officials to subvert the certification of the election in a place like Arizona, for example, or perhaps a place like Georgia, in an even more extreme way than they did in 2020. They may have a real chance at succeeding, and there has been no easy remedy to ensure that Donald Trump or another similar candidate doesn't get seated as president, or at least isn't in a position to convince a very large percentage of the US population that he should be legitimately seated as president. What would have to happen, not just for America to somehow get past the dangers in 2024, but for this broader moment of real danger to pass? Now, it strikes me that in a way, your answer to that might be a little bit more hopeful than mine. I've been worried about the rise of populism and some of the structural features that have fueled it. And so while I certainly recognize that Donald Trump is a uniquely dangerous individual, I am a little bit skeptical that if, let's say, Donald Trump had a heart attack and passed away next month, that would really make the danger pass. But you seem to have a slightly more personalistic interpretation of Trump's ability to present this danger. Kagan: I do think Donald Trump is special, and I personally will not be able to forgive Republicans who made it possible for Donald Trump to be Donald Trump, and who have been so cowardly in confronting him ever since. But comparatively speaking, I would be happy to have any one of them running for office rather than Donald Trump. Because I do think that in the absence of Trump, his movement itself is likely to splinter. I don't think there's anybody who has the particular type of charisma that Trump brings that these people find so attractive. I think in the absence of Trump, you probably have three or four pretenders to the throne, and probably things will divide up. So for me, Trump not getting the nomination should be everyone's first goal. But unfortunately, I'm not convinced that there is any way to stop him from getting the nomination. Now, non-Trump Republicans (I won't call them anti-Trump Republicans) are trying to convince themselves that Trump is finished. And so their view is that we don't have to worry about Trump ultimately.There's no question that there are conditions in the United States in terms of the way people feel about things, the way people behave, what they value and what they don't—that is a problem that exists apart from Donald Trump. And the question then is, has it always existed? Is there something new about what we're seeing today? I think there's a reasonable case to be made. But racism is certainly not new in America. White anxiety is not new. We never think about this, but the 1920s were a very similar period. What you had then was intense xenophobia, intense anti-immigration, anti-science in the Scopes Trial, the rise of the second Klan—these tendencies have, I think, always existed and are sort of inherent to the American experience, unfortunately. The 1930s were a time that was ripe for a Donald Trump, and the Donald Trumps were out there in Father Coughlin and Huey Long. The difference, I think, was that the nominating process at the time was such a smoke-filled, backroom negotiation, that they were never going to let any of those people get the nomination. I think one of the consequences of the democratization of the Republican primary system—something that Democrats, by the way, cured themselves of to some extent after McGovern—was giving an opportunity for someone like Trump. The question is, can anyone galvanize that movement in the same way that Trump does? There were thousands of Germans who agreed with almost everything that Hitler said, but they weren't Hitler. I do think that certain individuals come along that make a huge difference. Stalin didn't bring anything particularly new to communism other than his personality and his style. Ted Cruz says a lot of outrageous things. I would rather have almost anybody in the world president than Ted Cruz. But I don't fear Ted Cruz the way I fear Donald Trump. Maybe this is just irrational on my part, or too much wishful thinking, although I don't usually consider myself a wishful person. But I do think he's special. And as to these other problems that exist independently of Trump, we do need to work on them, and we need to fight that battle. And that battle now, as we can see, needs to be fought again, at every level of society. You know, you have to fight it at the school board and in the local community center. We are in one of those moments where we can't just wait for our elected officials to solve everything for us. But to repeat myself for the umpteenth time, I do think that Trump is special. And so I do think if we can get past Trump, yes, there’s a chance that this group, which has always been around, will be out there simmering, bubbling, and occasionally giving rise to some politician’s trajectory, but it won’t be the kind of comprehensive threat that Trump has turned into.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

London will be very busy in the coming days. More than three quarters of a million people are expected to file past the Queen lying-in-state in the Palace of Westminster. Then there’s the funeral. Royalty, presidents, current and former prime ministers, diplomats and dignitaries are poised to descend on London for the ceremony on Monday 19 September at Westminster Abbey, which can hold around 2,000 people. So who’s coming?
There was uncertainty over whether the US president Joe Biden would attend the funeral. He hasn’t come on a state visit to the UK since he entered office. But when asked by reporters last Friday (9 September), he replied: “Yes. I don’t know what the details are yet but I will be going.” It seems unlikely that Donald Trump will receive an invitation, not least because of the limited space within the abbey.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey has said that he wants to come. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has also confirmed he will attend. The UK’s political leaders such as the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, will be there. Former prime ministers – Boris Johnson, Theresa May, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major – are also likely to be invited.
Alongside the politicians, royalty from around the world are also expected to attend. The guest list for Prince Philip’s memorial service in April 2021 provides some idea of who might receive an invitation. Around 1,800 people attended the service, including Prince Albert of Monaco, Denmark’s Queen Margrethe, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, and Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia.
Emperor Naruhito of Japan, who ascended the Chrysanthemum throne back in 2019, has plans to travel to London for the funeral in what would be his first overseas trip since becoming emperor. It seems unlikely that the Chinese and Russian presidents, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, will attend. The royal family will also be in attendance, of course, including the new Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Catherine. Unlike for Prince Philip’s memorial, Harry and Meghan are in the UK and expected to attend.
The King is due to host a reception at Buckingham Palace the night before. World leaders have been asked to limit the use of their own cars, private jets and helicopters on the way to the event, according to Politico. The attendees will instead be bussed to Westminster Abbey from a location in west London. After the funeral, overseas leaders will be escorted to Dean’s Yard within the grounds of the abbey for a reception hosted by the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly.
[See also: This is a surreal form of grief, circling like a mawkish TikTok feed]

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Ron DeSantis’s hideous political stunt is a reminder that the GOP’s policies are no longer about achieving results, but gratifying the basest impulses of MAGA voters.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Nice democracy you’ve got here. Shame if something happened to it.
Gen Z never learned to read cursive.
What do dogs know about us?
Intention MattersI am from Massachusetts, yet I have never been to Martha’s Vineyard. I now live in coastal Rhode Island, less than a hundred miles from the Vineyard, so Ron DeSantis’s idiotic and cruel attempt to dump human beings on the island during the off-season is something of a local story for me—but one that carries an important national lesson.The Florida governor’s cartoonish assumption, apparently, was that liberal Bay Staters are just as racist as the Republican MAGA-base voters he’s trying to woo, and that they would prove it by reacting with outrage when a bunch of Latin Americans showed up on their doorstep. (He even sent a videographer, in the hopes of capturing the Vineyarders getting the vapors.) This bizarre miscalculation probably won’t help DeSantis much. As the journalist Josh Marshall said this morning, in politics, “weird can sometimes be worse than wrong.” In any case, the show was a fizzle: The locals provided the migrants with food and shelter, and sent students from an AP Spanish class at the local high school as translators.I’m proud of my fellow New Englanders for their reaction to DeSantis’s inane showboating. And yet, I consider myself an immigration hawk. I am the grandson of immigrants on both sides of my family, and I cherish and celebrate immigration—but I also believe in law and order. I was a young conservative working in Washington, and I winced when Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, the amnesty of 1986 that was supposed to solve much of our immigration problem. I gritted my teeth during the Obama administration, when what seemed to me to be another amnesty loomed.(I am also one of those people who finds the term “undocumented immigrant” Orwellian nonsense. It is a phrase meant to command empathy by implying that a person who has broken American law merely lacks documents. We can welcome people at the border, we can determine who needs asylum, we can fight human trafficking—and we can do all of those things without mangling language. But that’s an argument for another day.)At times, my frustration with illegal immigration led me to embrace some pretty hardline views, and I would even say that by the early 2000s, I was radicalized on the issue. As my colleague David Frum wrote back in 2019:
Demagogues don’t rise by talking about irrelevant issues. Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address: unemployment in the 1930s, crime in the 1960s, mass immigration now.
I’m still pretty vehement about border security: In 2019, I was yelling at the television during the Democratic presidential primary debates when Julián Castro talked about decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, apoplectic at the idea that nations can’t make laws about their own borders. I guess this makes me today something like a 1996 Democrat, back when the party platform said, “We must remain a nation of laws. We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it … Washington talked tough but failed to act. In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed.”But DeSantis and Donald Trump have talked me out of supporting tougher policies. Why? Because intentions matter. A policy implemented by sadists is not a policy. It is cheap political gratification masquerading as policy, and it will always do more harm than good.Trump’s ghastly child-separation debacle is a case study in hateful policy. The Trump administration, when it came into office in 2017, locked on to a truth about illegal immigration: It is difficult, for many reasons, to send families with babies and children back to their home countries. The children are blameless, even if the traffickers who brought them and their parents to America are not.Previous administrations held and then deported many of these people. But as my colleague Caitlin Dickerson showed in great detail, the Trump administration was populated by a menagerie of immoral and cowardly appointees who decided to stop illegal immigration by separating children from parents, intentionally inflicting pain on parents and kids as a deterrent in itself. This policy was not only brutal but executed with maximum incompetence, with no real plan for ever reuniting these families.And here we are again. Who came up with the idea of flying immigrants around the country? Was this motivated by some deep thinking in Tallahassee about our immigration problems? Or was it because some Fox host might have bloviated about owning the libs by sending immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard?As it turns out, Fox’s chief bloviator, Tucker Carlson, suggested this very idea in July. DeSantis, one of the thirstiest politicians in America, clearly spotted an opportunity, so the taxpayers of Florida ended up paying to send people—some of whom seem to be asylum-seekers we should be welcoming—from Texas to Massachusetts. According to an immigration lawyer assisting with the migrants’ cases, someone (I assume people working with DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott) appears to have lied to the group of some 50 people, coaxing them to board the planes by saying they would get a “surprise,” and that jobs and homes awaited them—a particularly nasty touch in an already vomitous business.I am against illegal immigration. But I am against the intentional tormenting of other human beings—especially children—even more. If my choice is the current mess or an immigration system run by ruthless opportunists such as Ron DeSantis—a man dancing on a chain while Tucker Carlson cranks the racist street organ—it’s not even close: I’ll stick with what we have. And I will never support anything, in any way, that runs the risk of handing power to people like DeSantis or his MAGA base.Related:
The secret history of family separation
If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will. (from April 2019)
Ukrainian investigators began exhuming hundreds of bodies that were found in  grave sites in the recently reclaimed city of Izyum.
Tropical Storm Fiona has prompted tropical-storm warnings for the British Virgin Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. The storm’s center is approaching Guadeloupe in the eastern Caribbean Sea.
U.S. stocks fell after FedEx—which is considered a leading market indicator— warned of a global recession.
The Third Rail: David French explains why a majority rejected the Republican approach to COVID.
Work in Progress: Quiet quitting is a fake trend, Derek Thompson argues.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry explores what she calls America’s misguided fascination with royalty.
Books Briefing: Historical fiction turns a life into a story, Emma Sarappo writes.
(Alamy; The Atlantic)
Don’t Trash Your Old Phone—Give It a Second LifeBy Kaitlyn Tiffany
The original iPhone SE is a great little phone, and I love it. It has a headphone jack—remember those? It fits in a butt pocket. It was announced in the Obama era.
Sure, the first one I owned, which I purchased in 2017, had only 16GB of storage. And yes, I was forced to stop using it after a terrifying incident in which it refused to update to the latest iOS, even after I deleted nearly everything on it, which prevented me from installing the Ticketmaster app that I needed to enter a Harry Styles concert that I had flown to California by myself to attend. (Would you believe someone at the arena simply agreed to print the ticket out? I was crying.) After that, I bought a refurbished iPhone SE with 64GB of storage for $165. I eventually stopped using this one, because the camera was so bad that it was upsetting my friends. Also, a small part of the screen stopped working—right in the spot I had to press to switch the keyboard from letters to numbers, which meant I had no access to punctuation and came off, via text, as very cold. And I couldn’t log in to my bank account.
Polio is exploiting a very human weakness.
What to teach young kids about gender
Hundreds of Americans will die from COVID today.
Photos of the week: Cliff diving, river ballet
Viola Davis in The Woman King (Ilze Kitshoff / Sony Pictures)
Read. These seven books offer genuine insight into the pain of heartbreak.Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv’s first book, examines the stories we tell ourselves about mental illness.And for the last official weekend of summer, we’re bringing back our summer reading guide, with 21 books for a variety of moods.Watch. The Woman King, in theaters, is an epic war film that complicates “good versus evil.”Love Is Blind—the reality show America can’t look away from—is back with new episodes on Netflix.Need more movie options for the weekend? Check out the 25 feel-good movies you’ll want to watch over and over, or the 10 must-watch indie movies of the summer.Listen. Hold the Girl, Rina Sawayama’s second album, shows how sacrilege can be its own expression of soulfulness.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Speaking of local stories, yesterday, The Boston Globe interviewed one of the men accused of murdering James “Whitey” Bulger in prison. Bulger was for decades among the most feared mobsters in Boston—and, in a twist ending worthy of the movies inspired by his exploits (such as The Departed and Black Mass), an FBI informant.Boston, despite being a center of learning and culture, seems to punch above its weight as a setting for crime movies. The granddaddy of them all is a classic that every generation should revisit: The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Based on the 1970 novel by the legendary Boston novelist (and former prosecutor) George V. Higgins, the 1973 movie stars an aging Robert Mitchum and a young Peter Boyle. The plot isn’t all that complicated: It’s a noirish study of sleazeballs in a sleazy world. But it captures the gray seediness of postindustrial Massachusetts, where I grew up, and although it’s not uplifting, it’s a lot more realistic than watching Jack Nicholson try to chew his way through a Boston accent.—TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Professor Brahama, great article but I have to say it is missing the entire point. Pakistan's security agenda is all the more blown up beyond any reasonable proportions. I live in Pakistan, and I have relatives in ISI. The Pakistanis who join the Pakistan army in officer cadre belong to lower middle class or middle class. Nearly all of them have never travelled the world and mostly educated in state run education institutions reading the state-run syllabus. If you say that Pakistan is harboring terrorists, I shall break it to you and I think you understand it also that they are not terrorists for majority of Pakistani people. Common Pakistani view America as an imperialist country with modern values that are mostly translated into values that are in direct contradiction with conservative Islamic and Eastern values. This part is similar in India also about the relevance of modern values to Eastern values but a lot is changing in India because of the growing middle class that comprise of educated youth who are quite in loop with modern values. The real deal is not those terrorists or conservative Muslim factions, but it is the elite capture. In World Bank, IMF, DFID, USAID, you will find the kith and kin of same terrorism promoting army and mostly representing those of senior army officers. All jobs are for them, and they are the ones who would be meeting US delegates or even travelling to US or Europe to meet the delegates that may include the highest leadership. They will ask for foreign resources to curtail poverty and what have you that is ailing Pakistan's economic and social sectors. It is a closed nit group. Rest of the mortals are exposed to the local anthropology that is driven by poverty and extremism if they ever to talk about human rights and equality. And I suspect and afraid to say that this kind of status Quo has been kept by the US. Thus in this perspective, there is no surprise that US is assisting Pakistan with F 16s because US government has all along been playing double game so that the common American is scared from a beard wielding Taliban or his supporters. But do Americans are to be blamed. Not at all. America is a independent state and Americans are only accountable about what they achieve for other Americans. Pakistani elites have readily provided their services to Americans or any other global power and even the lowest staff member of CIA posted in Islamabad understands this fact or for that matter World Bank or other donor agencies staff members. What else America or other developed nations can do for Pakistan. America can offer us money, intellectual assistance and that is about it. It is we in Pakistan that are responsible for what ails the country. India on the other hand is a nation of proud Indian people who have not taken dictation of foreign powers but with hard work made a mettle for themselves among comity of nations. Imran Khan tried not to take dictation and like great serves, Imran Khan was ousted by powers to be. Instead, what I tried to personally reason about leadership in Pakistan was to explain it to Imran Khan that there is no conspiracy against him but certain lobby that included India and PDM worked against him. I personally think America is our great friend because I personally like Americans and their way of life. I have written a lot about Pakistani's living a great American dream. But there has to be Pakistani version of it and it should not be associated to only elites. This is where India has gotten the lead where educated Indians are at perfect comfort with living modern life. But most importantly I use to tell my students at the leading Pakistani University namely University of Management and Technology (UMT) in their PhD class that bolly wood that is mostly producing movies depict a hero and heroin that live a modern life style and the biggest prize comes when the audience are comprised of millions of viewers that come from poorest back grounds and shanty towns. They visit the cinema and live a dream with their bolly wood hero and go back to their lives working hard instead of finding it at odds with their life styles. In short, I think Biden is in a fix, the same fix most probably every American leader faced and that is how to differentiate between Pakistani people with Pakistani elites and undertake slow and steady work towards greater application of human rights. That is what every decent person or nation who knows the worth of hard work would do.

In 1988, the World Health Assembly announced a very ambitious goal: Polio was to be vanquished by the year 2000. It was a reach, sure, but feasible. Although highly infectious, polioviruses affect only people, and don’t hide out in wild animals; with two extraordinarily effective vaccines in regular use, they should be possible to snuff out. Thanks to a global inoculation campaign, infections had, for years, been going down, down, down.But 2000 came and went, as did a second deadline, in 2005, and a third, in 2012, and so on. The world will almost certainly miss an upcoming target at the end of 2023 too. In theory, eradication is still in sight: The virus remains endemic in just two countries—Pakistan and Afghanistan—and two of the three types of wild poliovirus that once troubled humanity are gone. And yet, polio cases are creeping up in several countries that had eliminated them, including the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United States. Earlier this year, New York detected America’s first paralytic polio case in nearly a decade; last week, the governor declared a state of emergency over a fast-ballooning outbreak.This is the cruel logic of viruses: Give them enough time—leave enough hosts for them to infect—and they will eventually find a way to spread again. “You have to stop transmission everywhere, all at the same time,” says Kimberly Thompson, a health economist and the president of the nonprofit Kid Risk. Which means eradication will demand a near-perfect syncing of vaccine supply, access, equity, political will, public enthusiasm, and more. To beat the virus, population immunity must outlast it.Right now, though, the world’s immunological shield is too porous to stop polio’s spread. At the center of the new epidemics are vaccine-derived polioviruses that have begun to paralyze unimmunized people in places where immunity is low—a snag in the eradication campaign that also happens to be tightly linked to one of its most essential tools. Vaccine performance has always depended on both technology and human behavior. But in this case especially, because of the nature of the foe at hand, those twin pillars must line up as precisely as possible or risk a further backslide into a dangerous past.In the grand plan for eradication, our two primary polio vaccines were always meant to complement each other. One, an ultra-effective oral formulation, is powerful and long-lasting enough to quash wild-poliovirus transmission—the perfect “workhorse” for a global vaccination campaign, says Adam Lauring, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Michigan. The other, a supersafe injectable, sweeps in after its colleague has halted outbreaks one country at a time, maintaining a high level of immunity in post-elimination nations while the rest of the world catches up.For decades, the shot, chaser approach found remarkable success. In the 1980s, wild poliovirus struck an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 people each year; by 2021, the numbers had plummeted to single digits. But recently, as vaccine coverage in various countries has stalled or slipped, the loopholes in this vaccination tactic have begun to show themselves and grow.The oral polio vaccine (OPV), delivered as drops in the mouth, is one of the most effective inoculations in the world’s roster. It contains weakened forms of polioviruses that have been altered away from their paralysis-causing forms but still mimic a wild infection so well that they can stop people from spreading wild pathogens for years, even decades. In the weeks after people receive the vaccine, they can also pass the weakened virus to others in the community, helping protect them too. And OPV’s transportability, low price point, and ease of administration make it a “gold standard for outbreak interruption,” says Ananda Bandyopadhyay, the deputy director for the polio team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Since its mid-20th-century debut, OPV has helped dozens of countries—including the U.S.—eliminate the virus. Those nations were then able to phase out OPV and switch to inoculating people with the injected vaccine.But OPV’s most potent superpower is also its greatest weakness. Given enough time and opportunity to spread and reproduce, the neutered virus within the vaccine can regain the ability to invade the nervous system and cause paralysis in unvaccinated or immunocompromised people (or in very, very rare cases, the vaccine recipient themselves). Just a small handful of genetic modifications—three or fewer—can spark a reversion, and the mutants, which are “better at replicating” than their kin, can take over fast, says Raul Andino, a virologist at UC San Francisco. In recent years, a few thousand cases of vaccine-derived polio have been detected around the world, far outstripping the toll of wild viruses; dozens of countries, the U.S. now among them, are battling such outbreaks, and the numbers seem to be only going up. Vaccine-derived polio is still a true rarity: Billions of oral vaccines have been delivered since the global campaign began. But it underscores “the real problem” with OPV, Lauring told me. “You’re fighting fire with fire.”[Read: The epidemic that preyed on children]The injected polio vaccine, or IPV, which contains only chemically inactivated versions of the virus, carries none of that risk. To purge all polio cases, “you have to stop using oral polio vaccine,” Thompson told me, and transition the entire globe to IPV. (Post-eradication, countries would need to keep IPV in their routine immunization schedule for at least 10 years, experts have said.) But the injected vaccine has a different drawback. Although the shot can very effectively stave off paralysis, IPV doesn’t elicit the kind of immunity that stops people from getting infected with polioviruses and then passing them on. In places that rely on injected vaccines, “even immune individuals can participate in transmission,” Thompson told me. Which opens up a vulnerability when too many people have skipped both types of vaccines: Paralyzing polioviruses erupt out of communities where the oral vaccine is still in use—then can spread in undervaccinated areas. It might be tempting to blame OPV for our troubles. But that’s not the main threat, Bandyopadhyay told me. “It’s the lack of adequate vaccination.”As things stand, the goal in the endemic countries of Pakistan and Afghanistan remains achieving sufficiently high vaccine coverage, Bandyopadhyay said. But many of the communities in these nations are rural or nomadic, and tough to reach even with convenient drop-in-the-mouth vaccines. Civil and political unrest, misinformation, natural disasters, and most recently, the COVID pandemic have raised additional hurdles. So have intermittent bans on house-to-house vaccination in Afghanistan, says John Vertefeuille, the chief of the polio-eradication branch at the CDC. Cases of wild polio have experienced a recent jump in Pakistan, and have also been imported into the non-endemic countries of Malawi and Mozambique.But the toll of those outbreaks—all featuring type 1 polio—currently pales in comparison with those featuring vaccine-derived type 2. The last case of wild type 2 polio was detected in 1999, but that version of the virus has persisted in its modified form in oral polio vaccines. And when it reverts to its dangerous form, it gains particularly infectious oomph, allowing it to spread unchecked wherever immunity is low. Some 30 countries around the world are battling outbreaks of poliovirus whose origin can be traced back to the oral inoculations; vaccine-derived type 2 is what’s been circulating in Jerusalem, London, and New York, where it ultimately paralyzed an unvaccinated young man. The extent to which the virus is churning in other parts of the country isn’t fully known; routine immunization has dropped since the COVID pandemic’s start, and the U.S. hasn’t regularly surveyed its wastewater for the pathogen.The success of these vaccine-derived viruses is largely the result of our own hubris—of a failure, experts told me, to sync the world’s efforts. In 2016, 17 years after the last wild type-2 case had been seen, officials decided to pivot to a new version of OPV that would protect against just types 1 and 3, a sort of trial run for the eventual obsolescence of OPV. But the move may have been premature. The switch wasn’t coordinated enough; in too many pockets of the world, type-2 polio, from the three-part oral vaccine, was still moseying about. The result was disastrous. “We opened up an immunity gap,” Thompson told me. Into it, fast-mutating vaccine-derived type-2 viruses spilled, surging onto a global landscape populated with growing numbers of children who lacked protection against it.A new oral vaccine, listed for emergency use by the WHO in 2020, could help get the global campaign back on track. The fresh formulation, developed in part by Andino and his colleagues, still relies on the immunity-boosting powers of weakened, replicating polioviruses. But the pathogens within have had their genetic blueprints further tweaked. “We mucked around” with the structure of poliovirus, Andino told me, and figured out a way to make a modified version of type 2 that’s far stabler. It’s much less likely to mutate away from its domesticated, non-paralyzing state, or swap genes with related viruses that could grant the same gifts.Technologically, the new oral vaccine, nicknamed nOPV2, seems to be as close to a slam dunk as immunizations can get. “To me, it’s just super cool,” Lauring told me. “You keep all the good things about OPV but mitigate this evolutionary risk.” In the year and a half since the vaccine’s world premiere, some 450 million doses of nOPV2 have found their way into children in 22 countries—and a whopping zero cases of vaccine-derived paralysis have followed.But nOPV2 is “not a silver bullet,” Andino said. The vaccine covers just one of the three poliovirus types, which means it can’t yet fully replace the original oral recipe. (Trials for type-1 and -3 versions are ongoing, and even after those recipes are ready for prime time, researchers will have to confirm that the vaccine still works as expected when the three recipes are mixed.) The vaccine’s precise clinical costs are also still a shade unclear. nOPV2 is a safer oral polio vaccine, but it’s still an oral polio vaccine, chock-full of active viral particles. “You can think of it as more attenuated,” Thompson said. “But I don’t think anybody expects that it won’t have any potential to evolve.” And nOPV2’s existence doesn’t change the fact that the world will still have to undergo a total, coordinated switch to IPV before eradication is won.As has been the case with COVID vaccines, and so many others, the primary problem isn’t the technology at all—but how humans have deployed it, or failed to. “Vaccine sitting in a vial, no matter how genetically stable and how effective it is, that’s not going to solve the problem of the outbreaks,” Bandyopadhyay said. “It’s really vaccination and getting to that last child in that last community.”[Read: How the poor get blamed for disease]If dwindling vaccination trends don’t reverse, even our current vaccination strategies could require a rough reboot. In 2013, health officials in Israel—which had, for years prior, run a successful IPV-only campaign for its children—detected wild type-1 virus, imported from abroad, in the country’s sewage, and decided to roll out another round of oral vaccines to kids under 10. Within a few weeks, nearly 80 percent of the targeted population had gotten a dose. Even “polio-free countries are not polio-risk-free,” Bandyopadhyay told me. The situation in New York is different, in part because type-1 polio causes paralysis more often than type-2 does. But should circumstances grow more dire—should substantial outbreaks start elsewhere in the country, should the nation fail to bring IPV coverage back to properly protective levels—America, too, “may have to consider adding OPV as a supplement,” says Purvi Parikh, an immunologist and a physician at NYU, “especially in rural areas” where emergency injected-vaccine campaigns may be tough. Such an approach would be a pretty extreme move, and a “very big political undertaking,” Thompson said, requiring a pivot back to a vaccine that was phased out of use decades ago. And even then, there’s no guarantee that Americans would take the offered oral drops.The CDC, for now, is not eager for such a change. Noting that most people in the U.S. are vaccinated against polio, Katherina Grusich, an agency spokesperson, told me that the CDC has no plans to add OPV or nOPV to the American regimen. “We are a long way from reaching for that,” she said.But this week, the U.S. joined the WHO’s list of about 30 nations with circulating vaccine-derived-poliovirus outbreaks. The country could have avoided this unfortunate honor had it kept shot uptake more uniformly high. It’s true, as Grusich pointed out, that more than 90 percent of young American children have received IPV. But they are not distributed evenly, which opens up vulnerabilities for the virus to exploit. Here, the U.S., in a sense, had one job: maintain its polio-free status while the rest of the world joined in. That it did not is an admonition, and a reminder of how unmerciful the virus can be. Polio, a fast mutator, preys on human negligence; the vaccines that guard against it contain both a form of protection and a catch that reinforces how risky treating these tools as a discretionary measure can be.

For the foreseeable future, parents and educators will be grappling with this polarizing question: What, if anything, should prepubescent public-school students be taught about gender identity?  “Resources and lesson plans for those who want to teach about gender identity are becoming much more common,” The Washington Post reported in June. “Seven states now require that curriculums include LGBTQ topics. The National Sex Education Standards, developed by experts and advocacy groups, name gender identity as one of seven essential topics, alongside puberty, consent, sexual orientation and other subjects. And the federal government recommends that schools include gender identity in their sex education programs.”The push is to start young. California’s Department of Education urges kindergarten teachers to dispel gender stereotypes, laying groundwork “for acceptance, inclusiveness, and an anti-bullying environment,” because “some children in kindergarten or even younger have identified as transgender.” Some educators favor earlier interventions. The eight co-authors of the 2019 book Supporting Gender Diversity in Early Childhood Classrooms argue that too little emphasis is given to gender identity in the years before age 6, when educators have “a chance to prime all parents for supporting their children’s gender health” and “the opportunity to educate all children about gender diversity and introduce them to role models of a variety of genders.”But a rival faction has reacted by insisting, at the other extreme, that instruction involving gender identity has no place at all in early-childhood education. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law in March that prohibits public schools from presenting any instruction on gender identity until at least the fourth grade. According to NPR, at least a dozen other states are considering similar legislation. The issue could be a political winner for the Republicans who are pushing it. A recent survey sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers finds that 58 percent of likely voters in battleground states disapprove of the way students are taught about “sexual preference and gender identity.” Asked to explain why, 31 percent said “students are too young for [the] material,” while 27 percent said parents are responsible for teaching it.[Read: Want to understand the red-state onslaught? Look at Florida.]Some progressives believe that any such concern among parents is a moral panic driven by Fox News demagogues or the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which amplifies the most self-discrediting videos that leftist educators post online. By “nutpicking” on this issue, right-wing media does create misleading impressions. To better understand what is actually being taught—or what bans are prohibiting—I turned to Evanston/Skokie School District 65, a public-school system in the Chicago suburbs that is is laudably transparent about posting instructional material online. Last year, I reported on its Black Lives Matter at School curriculum. Its educators also post the lessons that they teach, starting in pre-kindergarten, during the district’s LGBTQ+ Equity Month. Gender identity is a major focus of the curriculum—which, I should note, is similar to curricula I’ve seen elsewhere from progressive educators.The District 65 instructional materials reveal a basic problem. Although American society’s approach to matters of gender identity is clearly still in flux, and reasonable people disagree on how best to engage students on the subject, some educators are writing progressive activists’ views into detailed lessons for young children. An alternative approach might promote inclusion in the broadest, plainest possible terms and reassure children: There’s no wrong way to be you. Instead, District 65 and other systems err on the side of saying too much and mistaking dogma for established fact.To be clear, I favor some instruction on gender identity. When I asked Atlantic readers last spring about what, if anything, minors should be taught about gender identity before puberty, some of the most compelling responses convinced me that you’re inevitably teaching young kids something about gender the minute you create (say) a preschool facility with boys’ and girls’ bathrooms. Very young kids receive countless signals about gender norms from the world at large—from parents, siblings, television, even a trip to the park or the supermarket––and school cultures teach similar lessons from the start. One of my correspondents, a 19-year-old queer woman named Zoe, noted that boys never wore dresses to her school, even in hot weather, and recalled that, as early as first grade, she was asked which boy she liked. To stay silent about gender in early childhood, she argued, “simply educates on this subject the way a dog may learn of the location of a newly installed electric fence: by receiving a shock anytime they dare cross a border they didn’t know existed until they learn to stay firmly within the bounds.”That’s a good description of how kids who didn’t conform to prevailing gender norms felt in the classrooms of my youth. Although nothing was explicitly taught about gender identity, a hundred tiny decisions implicitly acculturated kids into 1980s gender norms, including the sense that being genderqueer was shameful—a sense that exacerbated the sadistic bullying that too many queer kids in every generation are forced to endure.But while embracing many of the diversity-affirming values that I favor in public schools, the District 65 curriculum gives ideological goals precedence over what is age-appropriate.For example, in prekindergarten, five days of lessons are set forth, all oriented around the LGBTQ Pride flag. Students learn its history, each color’s meaning, and how to make their own arts-and-crafts version with rainbow colors, plus black and brown stripes to represent people of color. After reading Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag, the teacher provides some definitions:
As you heard in the story, sometimes people who look the same love each other, and sometimes people who look different love each other. Boys can love boys, girls can love girls, people can love people. When a boy loves another boy they can be called gay and when a girl loves another girl they can be called a lesbian or lesbians. When a boy loves a girl, they are called straight. When someone is not a boy or a girl, maybe they feel both, they are nonbinary or queer. This kind of love is for people not in your family.
In my view, kids should be taught the fact that some people identify as nonbinary at whatever age they can understand what people who use that label variously mean. At 4, children can likely grasp that there are boys and girls and people who feel like neither. But the District 65 curriculum risks oversimplifying complex matters. A tomboy who feels unlike her female peers might not necessarily be nonbinary; instead, she might be a masculine girl—and that’s okay. Nonbinary and queer are not synonyms. To some people, the latter word means gay or bisexual; to others, it broadly includes everyone who is not both cisgender and strictly heterosexual.Meanwhile, nonbinary remains a contested term among adults who have thought deeply about gender in society. Some define it in nuanced ways that are hard to explain to young children. The Yale philosophy professor Robin Dembroff, for example, has described nonbinary as “an unabashedly political identity” wielded “in service of dismantling a mandatory, self-reproducing gender system.” Some competing theorists are wary of nonbinary because they believe it problematically imposes false gendered assumptions on everyone, as if anyone’s relationship to gender is fully masculine or feminine. “Despite possessing female biology and calling myself a woman, I do not consider myself a two-dimensional gender stereotype,” the philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper writes. “Identity as ‘non-binary person’ depends upon the existence of a much larger group of so-called binary ‘cisgender’ people, people who are incapable of being outside the arbitrary masculine/feminine genders dictated by society.”I take no position in this larger debate about the merits or demerits of nonbinary, and doubt that exposing children to the label will harm them, even if they won’t understand all its niceties. But I do think that the District 65 curriculum is acculturating kids on one side of an adult debate before they can choose what they think for themselves. The age-appropriate time to instruct on the term is when they can grasp the disagreement about it.Other lessons in the curriculum stray from affirming the dignity of nonbinary and trans people to teaching contested and in some cases contradictory claims about the nature of gender. One kindergarten lesson calls for teachers to read I Am Jazz; My Princess Boy; and Jack (Not Jackie)—all books about trans or genderqueer kids. The following day’s lesson introduces “another important flag that has just 3 colors: light blue, pink and white.” The ensuing script reads, “People who identify as TRANSGENDER have their own ways of dressing, playing & acting that might not be what you expect. They might look to you like a boy, but dress and act like a girl.”But wait: How does a girl dress and act? By day five of the school district’s LGBTQ+ Equity Month, the kindergarteners have been taught that there are no such thing as boys’ toys and girls’ toys, or boys’ clothes and girls’ clothes—any boy can wear a dress and any girl can play with toy trucks. But then, when introducing terms such as trans and nonbinary, the curriculum relies on and arguably reaffirms gender stereotypes. For example, kindergarten students are shown a slide meant to represent a boy, a girl, and a nonbinary person. Its symbols are silhouettes of stereotypical male dress, stereotypical female dress, and a mash-up of the two:
An image from District 65’s kindergarten curriculum for LGBTQ+ Equity Month (Evanston / Skokie School District 65)
If you tell 5-year-olds that boys can wear dresses and play with dolls just as much as girls, but also that Michael feels like a girl, so from now on he’s going to wear dresses and play with dolls—act like a girl?—you’ve undercut the message that normative gender stereotypes are bogus.The curriculum goes on to promulgate the current politeness norms of highly educated progressives. In first grade, students are introduced to gender pronouns through the children’s book They, She, He, Easy as ABC. The somewhat familiar pronoun ze is introduced, as are more bespoke possibilities. On one page, “Diego drums and dances. Tree has all the sounds” (tree is Diego’s preferred pronoun). For a character named Sky, all of the pronouns are right. Soon students are prompted to choose their own pronouns. “Whatever pronouns you pick today, you can always change!” the script for the teacher states. “But remember that it is important to tell somebody to call you what you want to be called.” Some kids may receive this exercise as a new opportunity to feel more accepted for who they are. Others may try to fit themselves into boxes they only dimly understand. Kids can struggle with too little conceptual structure as surely as too much, and one wonders whether suggesting the pronoun tree, whatever that signifies, serves them well.[Read: Where gender-neutral pronouns come from]Is the progressive, upper-middle-class, Gen Z–teen approach to pronouns a new norm that will be with us henceforth because it makes society more inclusive? Or will the next generation find this approach stifling or unworkable or problematically essentialist, as some feminist commentators do? I don’t know, so my instinct is to wait for kids to develop their own norms around pronouns.Other parts of the curriculum describe reality in inaccurate and ideologically charged ways. Second grade begins with a video featuring a grandfather who is confused when his grandchild says her nonbinary friend is coming over. The family explains what that means to Grandpa. The accompanying script for teachers includes this statement:
“A lot of people believe babies are given the gender that they are when they are born, but we now know gender is a spectrum. When couples find out they are pregnant they have something called a ‘gender reveal party.’ But really, it should be called a ‘sex assigned at birth’ party!”
The notion that sex is something doctors assign (rather than record) at birth recurs in several places in the lessons. But this is misleading. A baby born with a penis, testicles, and a Y chromosome, and without a vagina, is male, even if that baby is born in a forest far from any doctor or nurse, or at a hospital to a doctor who erroneously records the sex as female. Recognizing that some children’s gender identity differs from their biological sex does not require any insinuation that their sex was assigned thoughtlessly or that it is socially constructed.Subsequently, second-grade students are introduced to the story of Cinderella, and “are encouraged to focus on stereotypes around gender, attraction and race.” Suggested questions include the following:
How would the story be different if Cinderella had short hair and wore jeans and tennis shoes to the ball? How would she be treated? Why? Who is included in this book and who isn’t included in this book? Are the characters in this book culturally similar to one another or is this a diverse community?
The next day, the teacher announces to students that, as a class, they are going to rewrite Cinderella “to make it more inclusive, relevant, and less sexist.” In the District 65 curriculum, nontraditional gender roles are affirmed as presumptively liberatory responses to oppressive social norms; traditional gender roles, like a young woman wearing a dress and pretty shoes to a ball, are problematized and deconstructed, rather than being affirmed as equally valid identities.To read the District 65 curriculum as a whole is to see one group of progressives repeatedly advancing their widely contested beliefs about gender identity as though they are fact. Amid so many competing theories and preferences, many of them relatively new, I oppose indoctrinating kids into any one viewpoint, regardless of whether the one being reified is Catholic or evangelical or feminist or Muslim or gender-critical or queer-theorist or individualist or that of an LGBTQ activist. Why should educators adopt any one faction’s understanding of sex and gender?Public-school districts in a democratic society cannot just decide that one activist faction’s favored approach to matters of sexual and gender identity is correct and then impose that view. One way or another, school systems have to reckon with the preferences of the communities they serve. In fact, in most places, if educators imbue their lessons with the cutting edge of queer theory, many who’d accept the lessons that humans vary in how they express their genders and that everyone ought to be respected will decide no instruction at all is preferable.Fortunately, there is a lot of middle ground between the most progressive activist approaches to teaching gender identity and the overly censorious state laws that would ban the subject entirely.If a girl at the public school nearest you tells her preschool teacher, “I want to play with the toy soldiers and wear a football jersey to school but the others say I can’t because I’m a girl,” the teacher could respond, “Don’t worry, you just be you. Play and dress however you like; there’s no wrong way to be a girl.” Alternatively, the teacher could respond, “Don’t worry, you just be you. Play and dress however you want, and maybe you’ll decide that you’re a boy or nonbinary.” Or the teacher could simply say, “Don’t worry, you just be you,” because labels are for later. Insofar as there is any position on early-childhood education that could satisfy most people in the debate, or at least mollify everyone enough to achieve compromise, that may take the form of insisting on tolerance, or even acceptance, without being any more prescriptive.This approach would still upset some parents. I suspect, however, that most people would embrace it, in contrast to the District 65 approach to the issue, which may be viable in America’s most progressive school systems but is not beyond them.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The hottest labor narrative right now is that everybody’s “quiet quitting.” Starting this summer, popular videos on TikTok with millions of views have used the term to refer to the art of having a job without letting it take over your life. The alliteration crawled out of that social-media petri dish into the mainstream-media landscape. Since August, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have published more than a dozen articles and podcasts about the phenomenon. In the past month, I’ve received countless PR pitches on quiet quitting, many of them referring to the same Gallup study alleging that quiet quitters make up “more than half” of the U.S. workforce. Quiet quitters are allegedly an “epidemic” that is allegedly changing the workplace and, allegedly, making bosses very mad.I’ve repeated the word allegedly because I want to convey that statistically speaking, quiet quitting is not actually a thing. Or, at least, it is not a new thing.Every year, Gallup asks thousands of American workers about their commitment to their job. From 2010 to 2020, engagement slowly increased. In 2022, it declined so slightly that it’s still higher than it was in any year from 2000 to 2014. Look at the chart below and tell me that this is anything more than two stable lines jostling within a margin of error. As a workplace phenomenon, workers’ mild disengagement is about as novel as cubicles, lunch breaks, and bleary-eyed colleagues stopping by your workstation to mutter, “Mondays, amirite?” What the kids are now calling “quiet quitting” was, in previous and simpler decades, simply known as “having a job.”
Gabriela Pesquiera / The Atlantic
I acknowledge that quiet quitting would seem to solve a major contemporary labor mystery. Labor productivity is falling after it surged in the first year of the pandemic. The best explanation for this decline, however, is not a sudden outbreak of TikTok-transmitted laziness. It is that record-high rates of job switching in the service sector have created an inexperience bubble such that many new workers at restaurants, hotels, and so forth aren’t fully trained.Still, the term has taken off in part because burned-out or bored workers are simply desperate for a fresh vocabulary to describe their feelings. Quiet quitting sounds to some like worker empowerment. Amelia Nagoski, a co-author, with her sister Emily Nagoski, of the book Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, told my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce that the term “makes a lot of sense” because it comes “from the perspective of folks who have been selling not just their time, but their selves to their employer."But realistically, the term is more likely to validate managers who think that their employees are slackers than to help ordinary workers reclaim their soul. The sheer number of quiet-quitting articles from the perspective of bosses in The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg strongly suggests that the term is current among managers too. It offers a convenient explanation for ostensibly lazy workers. Complex questions such as “Am I running my team effectively?” and “Is hybrid work actually working out for us?” can be reduced to the confident diagnosis that young people just don’t want to work.For some reason, news media seem eager to confirm these managers’ worst fears. Earlier this year, several outlets—The New York Times, New York, Teen Vogue, Recode—tried to convince Americans that “no one wants to work,” even as the economy added hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. The best evidence they had wasn’t evidence at all, but rather a misunderstanding of government data. As the official “quits rate” surged to all-time highs and the phrase Great Resignation made its way into headlines, some commentators perceived an overall disinclination to work. But most people weren’t quitting to retire; they were quitting to take a new job. The labor force, total jobs, and hours worked increased throughout a period of time when news organizations were telling everybody that work was dead. It was weird.The popularity of these empty-calorie labor trends suggests a divergence between statistical and deeper emotional truth. Several weeks ago, I wrote about another quasi-trend: the supposedly catastrophic national teacher shortage. Despite many news articles about a sudden scarcity of classroom teachers, I couldn’t find a single education expert who agreed with the media presentation of the story. What seems to be happening is that long-standing issues in public education—such as the difficulty of hiring special-ed teachers—are colliding with the fresh politicization of public school and the burnout of teachers to create an overwhelming feeling of badness. That feeling has found purchase in the idea of a national teacher shortage.Put another way, these quasi-trends are bad-vibe vehicles—delivery mechanisms for ineffable negative ideas about the world that demand the news-headline treatment. When people are looking for permission to feel their unnameable bad feelings, they’re satisfied when cheeky TikTok accounts or dyspeptic trend-chasing journalists give it to them. Just as the national teacher shortage is an overblown trend that marks the spot of a real phenomenon (declining job satisfaction among teachers), quiet quitting is a bit of novel nonsense that might stand in for chronic labor issues such as the underrepresentation of unions or a profound American pressure to be careerist.When a phrase takes off, it's often because the new words fill a space of uncertainty, like the coining of a new diagnosis. A lot of workers are seeking an efficient way to describe the colliding pressures of wanting to be financially secure, but not wanting to let work take over their life, but also having major status anxiety, but also experiencing guilt about that status anxiety, and sometimes feeling like gunning for that promotion, and sometimes feeling like quitting, and sometimes feeling like crawling into a sensory deprivation tank to make all those other anxieties shut up for a moment. If quiet quitting is fake, the popularity of anti-work neologisms is its own data point that deserves to be taken seriously as a cultural phenomenon.

Yesterday, Donald Trump threatened that if he is indicted on a charge of mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House, there would be "problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we've never seen before," adding "I don't think the people of the United States would stand for it."

Trump's rhetoric is dangerous. We have already seen the consequences of what happens when Trump invites a mob to the streets.

These words followed on last month's threat by Senator Lindsey Graham that if Trump is prosecuted, there would be "riots in the street." Trump appeared to endorse Graham's threat, sharing a video link on his Truth Social platform.

Trump's latest threat requires four responses:

1. Trump is daring the Justice Department to prosecute him, in effect asserting he is above the law. He is not above the law. The Justice Department is methodically and carefully sifting through evidence and presenting it to a grand jury.

Neither the Department nor the grand jury should be intimidated by Trump's latest threat.

2. Trump's rhetoric is dangerous. We have already seen the consequences of what happens when Trump invites a mob to the streets. Five people died on January 6, 2021. Many more--including members of Congress and the former Vice President--could have been killed on that day. Since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump's incendiary words have fueled death threats to numerous federal officials, judges, and lawmakers.

All Americans should condemn Trump's latest threat and incitement to violence.

3. We are dealing with a sociopathic narcissist who wants nothing more than to divide the nation over himself.This is not a matter of left versus right, liberal versus conservative, Democrat versus Republican. It is a question of the Constitution and the rule of law versus authoritarianism and tyranny. If Trump prevails--if he intimidates law-enforcement officials from doing their jobs over his attempted coup or his theft from the White House of secret documents--we lose our democracy.

The media must stop covering this as if there are two sides to this story.There are not.

4. The time has come for Republican lawmakers, candidates, and rightwing media owners and personalities to show some backbone and vigorously repudiate Trump. Their failure to do so before now has created a monster that threatens to consume this country. It is up to them to tell their constituents, followers, readers and viewers that there is no place in America for Trump's threats to law enforcement and his incitements to violence.

Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Rupert Murdoch, and others must say it loudly and clearly: We repudiate Trump and his threats. No person is above the law.

A nationwide rail strike has been averted for now. A new agreement grants railroad workers an additional paid day off and the ability to attend medical appointments without penalty. (The agreement now must be ratified by the workers.)

A strike could have crippled the economy at a particularly vulnerable moment.

A strike could have shut down nearly a third of the country's freight and about half of commuter rail systems (which run at least partially on tracks or rights of way owned by freight railroads).

In other words, a strike could have crippled the economy at a particularly vulnerable moment, when inflation is still soaring. And a strike would come at an especially awkward political moment, less than two months before the midterm elections.

What can we learn from this near economic disaster? Unlike most management-labor impasses, this one wasn't solely around wages. It was also around sick time and penalties for missing work.

Like so many workers deemed "essential" during the pandemic, the engineers and conductors who drive the nation's freight trains have been fed up. Their work schedules are unpredictable and inflexible. They've been penalized for taking days off when they're sick or tending to a family emergency.

Like most of us, they want a better quality of life--and they feel, with justification, that they deserve it.

The railroads have agreed to a 24 percent increase in wages. Good, but they should have agreed long before this.

Twenty years ago, the four leading American freight carriers--SX, KC Southern, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific--earned average operating margins of about 15 percent. Now, their margins are closer to 40 percent. Twenty years ago, the four railroads spent some $8.7 billion on worker compensation and benefits to generate $25.6 billion. Twenty years later, they spent about 10 percent more on worker compensation and labor--but their revenue has nearly doubled.

Until last night, railroad executives had refused to budge on a workplace attendance policy that can only be described as draconian. Railroad conductors and engineers were continuously on call (outside of paid vacation and personal leave days based on seniority). When told to report to work, they were given just 90 minutes to two hours.

Like many employers across America--hospital executives, school systems, Amazon and Starbucks--railroad management didn't get it. They didn't understand the importance to working people of having some control over when and how they work.

And like so many other industries, the underlying railroad problem has boiled down to soaring demand and unmitigated corporate greed.

Since the pandemic, cargo volumes have soared to record highs. But over the last six years, freight railroads have pared back their workforce by about 30 percent to reduce costs and increase profits.

They've also been running fewer and longer trains, and waiting until trains are full before leaving terminals.

As a result, the railroads have demanded that their workers put in more hours, but given them almost no notice of when.

Hopefully, now, we'll avoid a railroad strike. Congratulations to the Biden administration for helping broker this agreement.

But let's make sure the lesson here is learned, not just by rail management but across the nation in every industry: Workers need and deserve higher wages and better working conditions--which includes more control over their jobs.

[MUSIC]

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” I was on leave for most of August. And coming back has been a bit dizzying. Because the day that I left, the Biden presidency had stalled. The Build Back Better agenda, it was dead. And then came one of the fastest 180s I’ve seen in American politics. In quick succession, Biden passed the CHIPS Act, a major bill funding semiconductor manufacturing and scientific research. He passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which turned many of the major climate and tax ideas from Build Back Better into law. He canceled billions of dollars in student debt. All of a sudden, the Biden agenda was back. And so I wanted to step back and look at what Bidenism is. When you put the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act together, I think you see a legacy — or maybe not a legacy, maybe an approach begin to go here. And it’s an unusually physical approach. All of these bills are about building real things in the real world — roads, and bridges, and broadband, and wind farms, and solar panel arrays, and semiconductor manufacturing plants, and advanced battery supply chains, and thousands of miles of electrical transmission lines, and millions of heat pumps in houses, and god knows how many electric vehicle charging stations. And the list just goes on and on and on. Biden’s legacy, if it is to become a legacy, it’s not just going to be written into tax code and regulatory law. It’s not going to be sent out as checks. It actually needs to be built. And that means that the job doesn’t end with the passage of these bills, it begins. And to be honest, nothing in the recent history of how America builds should make you confident that it will be built quickly, affordably and fairly. This is not a case where passing the bill solves a problem. Passing the bill creates an opportunity to solve the problem. Felicia Wong is president and C.E.O. of the Roosevelt Institute. And she’s been, for a long time, I think, one of the clearest interpreters of what Joe Biden wants to do and the way he has changed. She has long argued that his agenda and his thinking is much more focused on directing and changing the productive capacity of our economy than people realized. And she was right. And particularly, she was right because that is a part of Bidenism that became law. But she’s also realistic about the challenges that are going to have to be surmounted before any of this can succeed. And that’s the messy, uncertain space we try to inhabit in this conversation. I want these bills to work. So does she. But that is far, far from a foregone conclusion. So what has to go right from here? As always, my email, ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Felicia Wong, welcome back to the show.

felicia wong

Thank you so much for having me, Ezra. Great to be here.

ezra klein

So you were last here in September of last year. And we talked about what you thought Joe Biden wanted Bidenism to be. And you described it really interestingly to me. It really stuck with me, this idea of a transformation towards a high care, low carbon economy. And a year later, he’s got some of that done, some of that not done. So what is Bidenism shaping up to be?

Yeah, I think that Bidenism is still what I sort of call the sunny side of post-neoliberalism, which to me —

ezra klein

Very catchy.

I know. Well, he wants all the good things about what a new economy could be. And I think he’s having to deal with some of the maybe bad things. But we can talk about that. Anyway, what I mean when I say I think this is about the sunny side of post-neoliberalism, like I think he is very much still about public investment in a future economy. All of the legislation that this administration has passed, right — the Inflation Reduction Act, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about, and the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure plan, and even the American Rescue Plan, right, was really about using public funds and the power of government to make life better for working people, for working Americans. And a lot of that, especially the most recent legislation, CHIPS and Science and Inflation Reduction, is really about putting government money toward new sectors of the economy that he, that this administration would like to see grow, faster and more universally. So I think that is still fundamentally what Bidenism is about. I would say two things beyond that. One is that that high-care, low-carbon idea — care is out of the current plan. And that is really bewildering to me, and really a terrible thing for the economy, and I think a terrible thing for the American people. And we can talk about that. But care is out. So that high care, low carbon economy, it looks like we’ve got a lot more money on the low carbon than on the high care for now. And then the last thing I would say is that in addition to the sort of public investment sunny side part of Bidenism, what surprised me is that this team has really shown a willingness to use other tools, like antitrust, anti-monopoly tools to curb corporate excesses, curb private power. And I think that this team, especially a National Economic Council team, can see both public investment and antitrust as two sides of a coin.

ezra klein

Let’s spend a minute on the collapse of the care agenda before we get into everything that actually did pass. So Biden had a big plan to expand pre-K. He had a big plan to make child care more affordable. He had a plan to make the Expanded Child Care Tax Credit, which is a very favorite policy of mine, permanent. None of that survived. What do you think it says about our politics that the hard infrastructure, virtually all of it, ended up passing, and all of what was being talked about at that time as care infrastructure, virtually all of it died?

Right. Well, I think part of it, the top level explanation or analysis is really that, well, the deal was cut by Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer. And it was really Manchin’s bill. The Inflation Reduction Act is not the Build Back Better full plan, right? And so Manchin got to write a lot of that. And care was never really part of what he cared about. So that’s, I think, at a very high level. I do think, though, that a deeper power analysis is that the parts of the care agenda that are really going to benefit families, particularly women, particularly parents, working parents, that’s just not what we have seen pass. To be honest with you, I don’t really know why. There were so many great things about the care agenda, especially the pieces that were going to have home health care workers really be able to negotiate not just with their individual family employers, but with perhaps state entities so that they could have higher wages. Some of that was really creative and interesting ways to think about using state power to help workers, in this case, female workers, women workers, women of color, mostly. I don’t actually have a super great analysis as to why that didn’t pass beyond a sort of general, you know, women don’t have as much power in this economy as they should. But I do think it is an enormous shame, not just for America’s families, but also for our economy. Because women back in the labor force, it’s good for the economy.

ezra klein

So let’s move, then, to the three big pieces of legislation that I think at this point look like together, they comprise or will comprise a lot of Joe Biden’s long-term legislative legacy — so the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least parts of the Inflation Reduction Act. And you’ve argued that these should be looked at less as separate bills and more as pieces of a broader, integrated effort to make our economy into something somewhat different. So tell me about how you see them connecting.

Absolutely. And I would actually also add the American Rescue Plan to that. So if you take all four of those pieces together, right — the Inflation Reduction Act, which is really about using tax credits and other kinds of loans to jump-start a clean energy economy. The CHIPS and Science Act, which has a lot of investments in basic science, which I’m a huge fan of, but also has $52 billion to invest in an American, made in America semiconductor capability; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Plan, which is already going. It’s over a trillion dollars to do everything from fixing roads and bridges and airports, to really importantly, fixing things like water systems in America’s cities — critically important as we look at what has been happening in Jackson, Mississippi. So those three pieces of legislation are really about using public funds to build sectors of our economy that many people, including, obviously, the people in the Biden administration, think ought to be built faster. Now, it’s not just about public money. It’s also about crowding in private investment. And if you talk to folks in the White House, they’re very proud that recently, Corning, the company Corning, has announced a new fiber optics manufacturing capability. And there’s a lot of new announcements about semiconductor manufacturing, about electric vehicle manufacturing. So that’s all private money, of course. But those three bills together are really about jump-starting, really, these new sectors of a future economy.

ezra klein

So let’s go into what some of these bills are. And I want to begin with the one that is least known, which is the CHIPS Act. Because I think it’s a really clean signal of what the Biden administration is trying to do. So how would you describe the CHIPS Act, both what made it seem necessary, and then how it tries to approach the problems it attempts to solve, to somebody who has never heard of the CHIPS Act?

Yeah, the CHIPS Act is actually one of my favorite pieces of this potpourri of legislative victories, so I’m glad you asked about it. There are really two parts. One is investment in basic science, so the National Science Foundation, et cetera. And I think this is really exciting. Maybe it’s because I’m a Californian who remembers, or at least has some kind of historical memory that much of Silicon Valley actually was built with government funding, government resources, government funding for the defense industry. Like, that’s what the precursors to sort of Apple and LinkedIn and Facebook really were in the Valley. So part of what the CHIPS and Science Act does is actually to put government funding into basic research that is very much reminiscent of some of what we saw in the 20th century. Obviously, this is important for future questions of everything from A.I. to other kinds of information technology. But I think it is critically important as we think about what the vision for all of this ought to be, which in my mind is, we should be seeing five, ten new Research Triangle Parks across the United States. That would be an incredible outcome in 10 or 20 years from all of this legislation. And I think some of the investment in basic science, which also asks that some of this money be spread through different kinds of research hubs throughout this country, that is just pretty exciting and pretty cool. So that’s the first part of the CHIPS and Science Act. And then the second part is a $52 billion investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing. That’s incredibly important because, as we all know, semiconductors are parts of everything these days — obviously our phones, our computers, our cars. And we used to make semiconductors in the United States. We don’t now make semiconductors in the United States. For the most part, they’re mostly made in Asia. And making sure that semiconductor supply chains are more resilient, meaning resilient to national security threats, resilient to other kinds of breakdowns in global trade, it’s really important, a little bit for jobs reasons, but also more fundamentally for supply chain resilience reasons, to start to build those in the United States. It’ll be really interesting, too, to see how the CHIPS office ends up being staffed in the Department of Commerce. That is a lot of money to try to really invest in the American economy. And I think it will be very important. A lot of progressives have criticized the CHIPS legislation so far as not having enough corporate guardrails. And so it’ll be very important, meaning you could see a very few companies get this money. You could see companies get this money and still end up mostly driving it towards executive profits rather than towards building semiconductor manufacturing. So how this gets implemented from that CHIPS office in the Department of Commerce will be incredibly important.

ezra klein

Let me hold on to the corporate welfare piece of it because I want to come back to that. But this is a pretty — what’s the way to put this? This bill, if they can do what they want with it and actually create the super sophisticated semiconductor manufacturing supply chain in America that they want, it’s going to be a pretty remarkable example of government power, and intention, and planning. I mean, countries all over the world constantly want to develop, some kind or another, highly advanced, highly competitive manufacturing capacity. And they’re constantly putting into play big programs in order to create it at home. And it often doesn’t work. You mentioned a minute ago that a lot of the semiconductor manufacturing is in Asia. And I think when people hear that now, they think China. But that’s not the case here. This is very much Taiwan —

ezra klein

— to some degree. South Korea, I think, has a significant hold on it.

ezra klein

This is unbelievably hard to do stuff. And the supply chain is really, really advanced. And I think, unlike green energy, which we’ll talk about quite a bit in a couple of minutes, you don’t have the kind of huge tailwinds where the economy has been orienting itself in this way for a long time. So you kind of have a standing start, right? We don’t have that semiconductor manufacturing supply, and we want it.

We used to, but we certainly haven’t for probably 20, 30 years. That’s right.

ezra klein

So how do we get it? And how does this avoid the graveyard of industrial policy, of well-meaning industrial policy efforts that we’ve seen, both here and in so many other countries?

That’s a really good question. I’ll be interested in two things. I’m not going to pretend to be a semiconductor expert or a semiconductor industry expert. And in fact, sorry, side note, that’s actually one of the problems. As we move towards this kind of industrial policy that requires sector by sector expertise in aluminum, in steel, in semiconductors, et cetera, most of the expertise in any of these industries is actually held by industries themselves. You don’t see a lot of academic knowledge about this. You don’t see this being taught a lot in business schools. You certainly don’t see a lot of think tanks with a lot of deep expertise in semiconductor manufacturing. So I do think that this is something where we’re going to actually need actually a lot more research, both in academia and in nonprofits to try to understand exactly what it means to develop stronger semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. So that’s one thing I would be looking for. The second thing I’d be looking for here is actually whether there are any spin-offs from this. I mean, one of the things to remember about the late 20th century economy, mid 20th century to late 20th century economy, is that all of that investment in defense manufacturing, basically in ballistic missile technology, there was all kinds of spin-offs, that that’s why you see the commercial or consumer-focused technology that’s now part of Silicon Valley’s DNA. So I have no idea, to be honest with you. And I think it would be hubristic of me to try to claim that I understood exactly how to do it. But I think it’ll be interesting to figure out whether that actually ends up opening new doors in our economy that we can’t even really see right now.

ezra klein

One thing that struck me as interesting about CHIPS is that of the three bills I’m focused on here, the Infrastructure Bill, the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS, I think CHIPS is actually the most ambitious statement of what we think government can do, in the sense that, again, it’s an incredibly hard industry to build, and we’re not building it on top of the decades now of investment and work we’re doing with climate, and nor is it like roads and bridges, which we do all the time, or broadband, which is a pretty structured space to invest in. But CHIPS was very bipartisan. It got a lot of Republican support. So it isn’t like this is something that only Democrats believe they can do. But the traditional critique of industrial policy on the right is that it’s just too hard for government to know everything it needs to know to build these kinds of industries. It doesn’t have the information. It centralizes too much information. It makes bets that end up being the wrong bets. It moves too slowly — that markets are able to figure things out by pricing and through aggregating decentralized knowledge in a way government never can. And so government often fails when it attempts to say, hey, we’re going to build this, and we’re going to build it this way. So speaking at a somewhat higher level of abstraction, as somebody who doesn’t believe in that right wing critique of what government can and can’t do, what do you think is wrong with it?

The question of — I mean, you hear this all the time — government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers. But I definitely don’t think that is what the intention of this legislation is. I think the point is to say that we care about this sector, right? It’s not about we care about this particular company. And that is quite different. And so saying that you want a strong semiconductor sector in this country, and asking what it’s going to take to crowd private money in, this is a question about whether or not we want to see some of this developed in certain regions of the United States, rather than having all the money run to Austin, Texas, New York or San Francisco. And I also think that it is about making sure that if there are any newer kinds of technologies or newer companies that might actually be able to compete in a market that has been dominated by a very few in this case — it’s primarily Intel in the United States — I think the goal is to try to experiment with a lot of new ways of thinking about semiconductor manufacturing. I will be very interested to see what happens here. And last thing I’ll say, I absolutely agree with you that it is the most ambitious. Because as compared to the Inflation Reduction Act, where most of this is about financing through tax credits, CHIPS is much more direct, right? There could be direct monies given out of this Department of Commerce office. And that’ll be different.

ezra klein

So I want to go back, then, to the corporate welfare question here, which also goes to your point about so much of the knowledge being inside the semiconductor industry. So I want to read a statement from Senator Bernie Sanders, who ended up opposing CHIPS. He said, “What I cannot understand is why so many in Congress are so eager to pay this bribe. When the government adopts an industrial policy that socializes all the risk and privatizes all the profits, that is crony capitalism. The five biggest semiconductor companies that will likely receive the lion’s share of this taxpayers handout — Intel, Texas Instruments, Micron Technology, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung — made $70 billion in profits last year. Does it sound like these companies really need corporate welfare?” So then what is the point of giving these companies this big boost of money, if they’re making so much money already?

I’ve thought a lot about Senator Sanders’ critique of a lot of this, including of the CHIPS bill. And ultimately, I think it is about two things. One is, even with all of these companies making significant profits, we really do see manufacturing itself in Taiwan, South Korea, as you just said. And so bringing manufacturing home and trying to create a more resilient supply chain — because a lot of the supply chain here is quite attenuated. That was part of what drove costs of cars up early in the pandemic. So I think that’s a really important thing that the government is trying to incentivize here. And then secondly, one of the important pieces of this legislation is that it does create regional hubs. And let’s just think about this for a second. One of the major problems with our current economy is inequality, not just between the top 1 percent and the lowest income earners, but it’s also regional inequalities. You see whole parts of this country that really have no jobs to speak of. And there are very few anchor institutions — schools, universities, community colleges, hospitals. You see whole places in this country that don’t have private sector investment, and also don’t have these kinds of public institutions. And they’re just not thriving. And it’s bad for our economy. It’s terrible for our politics. And I think part of what we are trying to see and do with CHIPS, or part of what this administration is trying to do, is to actually deal some of these regions back in. Now, I think this is going to be enormously challenging. And to me, that is one of the key things about implementing all of this legislation. But I do think that is one of the intentions. That’s where I think the actual ambition is. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone with the Biden folks about the Inflation Reduction Act. And there’s always, every time, a point in the conversation where they say, it’s really unfair to say these bills are just about money. They’re about standards. And it’s true. If you look at the Inflation Reduction Act and the climate spending, you get more money, and in some cases, you can only get the money if you pay prevailing wages, if you have certain work requirements, if a certain amount of the thing you’re making is made in America or is bought from America. In CHIPS, as you’re saying, there’s, among others, the secondary desire to create more geographic equality and sort of more manufacturing hubs across the country with very advanced jobs coming out of them. And I obviously support all of those individual ideas. But I can also see the critique, which I’ve heard from others, that this is part of why government-run industrial policy often does fail. Because they’re trying to accomplish too many things. I mean, it’s hard enough to build advanced semiconductor manufacturing. To also layer on a geographic equality requirement is going to make a job you might have already not been able to do even harder. Or it’s hard enough to decarbonize at the speed we need to decarbonize. To layer on buy American provisions or prevailing wage provisions, those things might be good, but you are making an uncertain job that much more uncertain. And it’s the, sort of, need to balance all these political objectives that ends up making government less effective than people wish it were when it does these very big industrial planning projects. How do you think about that critique?

Look, I think it’s pretty serious and pretty real. I think that what is happening now, the inflection point we’re at, where this administration has to think about implementing a combination of infrastructure plans, semiconductor plans, as we’ve just been saying, and then all of this green manufacturing, which is about many, many, many different, separate industries, right? It’s about solar. It’s about wind. It’s about heat pumps. It’s about, you know, electric vehicles. It’s about charging stations. First of all, it’s incredibly exciting. But let’s not kid ourselves — it’s incredibly difficult. And one of the reasons it’s difficult is that it actually has to do with implementation itself. We are talking about multiple different agencies. It’s the Department of Commerce, which we’ve just mentioned. It’s the Department of Treasury, which the lion’s share of the $370 billion is going to actually first run through the Department of Treasury. And this isn’t something they really have a history or expertise on, right? It is the Department of Energy. It’s the Environmental Protection Agency, which is where — the Green Bank, which is where some of these loans are going to come from, that’s at the E.P.A. So if you just think about trying to coordinate all the complexity you just laid out, and you lay that against these various, pretty complex government agencies, I am really looking for and listening for an overarching plan that I think is going to have to come from this White House, that’s going to say, these are the goals. These are some of the regions that we’re trying to reach. And look, let’s recognize that this isn’t a just one election cycle project, right? Literally, it’s a decade-long project. That’s what the legislation says. But it’s also a decades-long or even a multi-generational project in terms of trying to get all of this money out the door, and all of these investments into the American economy. And so this administration is going to have to coordinate across all of these agencies, and try to say, these are the most important things to do first. These are the most important things to do second. And I think of it both as an economic challenge, but frankly, also as a management challenge. So I agree with you that we are at this moment whereby, you know, everything or at least many of the things that could actually be the seeds of economic transformation towards at least the low carbon part of that high-care, low-carbon vision that I was hopeful for, that I remain hopeful for. But anyway, all of the seeds are there in the legislation that has already been laid out. But the question is, it’s going to be pretty hard to deliver. Now, I’ve got to tell you, Ezra, I don’t think we have a choice. I think it has been very clear that the market itself has not either built supply chains that are robust enough, you know, found ways to make sure that these jobs are high-paying jobs for the majority of Americans. I mean, there’s no question that the market itself is going to drive thinner supply chains and more inequality, just left to its own devices. So I do actually think that the government has to step in here.

ezra klein

I totally agree that we don’t have a choice. And I want to hold in the planning space of this for a bit. And I want to say, and I’ll probably say this in the intro, too, that if I’m picking at the pieces of this that seem hard, it isn’t because I don’t want to see the bills work. It is because I so badly want to see the bills work. I think we so don’t have a choice but to make these bills work. And I think there’s a fallacy where people think once a bill is passed, the problem is solved. And this is just the opportunity to solve problems. Like, all they have got in here — I wrote this in a column — it’s like they’ve created the conditions for this building to begin to happen.

I think they’ve earned the right to get on the field.

ezra klein

Yes, right. When I was reporting on trying to understand more deeply how the climate side of the Inflation Reduction Act worked, what we’ve really done there is layer a huge number of tax credits, loan guarantees, subsidies for this or that onto each other. What we really have not built out is planning capacity. And you were saying a minute ago that that will be a real challenge for the administration. I think that’s true. But what strikes me is that it is not a challenge that they have in any way given themselves a holistic set of new tools to address. In individual areas, there are new tools. They’ll tell you about the hydrogen hubs, and sort of the ability to ask for proposals from different states for how electric vehicle charging might work. I mean, they have certain things they can do. But I think if you go back 10 or 15 years in this conversation, there were two theories about how planning might work. One is that you would price carbon, and the market would do the planning for you. And we never were able to pass anything like that nationally. And it didn’t work that well in the places they tried that. I mean, there’s good books on how carbon pricing actually worked out. It’s helpful. I would like to see it, but it’s not a cure-all. And I think there are other countries where you have a lot more centralized planning and execution, where the government can simply say, this is a network of clean energy we’re going to build. And now we’re going to build it. And that’s how this is going to work. And we’re in this much more — I mean, at best, I think what we have is not planning here, it’s coordination, coordination across very, very different levels of authority where it’s like you often need cities to agree on permitting this particular clean energy installation, or whatever it might be. And I wonder how we’re going to get that much coordination done at the speed we need to do it, with the level of public administration we have. We’re adding a lot more people to the I.R.S. in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Which I’m super excited about, by the way.

ezra klein

Which is great, but you could imagine adding that many people into planning departments, or many more than that around the country. It just seems to me that coordination is actually underfunded in all this.

I think that is exactly right. And I think coordination is probably underfunded. And it’s certainly under-conceptualized or under-theorized.

ezra klein

Yes, that’s more important.

Look, I see this in three different buckets, the road ahead, the post-legislation. Now, we’re on the field. What are we going to do next, right? So I think the first bucket is actually North Star vision setting. It’s what I was trying to say earlier. In 20 years, Ezra, when your kids are young adults, what’s this country going to look like as a result of this legislation? Like, you’ve been to the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina. Obviously, you live in or near Silicon Valley. Are we going to see much more of that in places that we sort of derisively today call — at least some in the media derisively call the Rust Belt? Are we actually going to see that? And I do think that to know where we’re trying to go with all of this legislation, with this multiple trillions of dollars, I do think that somebody — and frankly, I do think it has to be the president. That’s kind of how our system works, right — has to set a North Star vision to say that I really want to see, in 20 years — or I’d like my kids or grandkids to see, in 20 years, these thriving. So I think that’s critically important as a first step. I think the second thing that they do need to do is to actually help coordinate across agencies, sort of what we just said. The Department of Transportation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Treasury — I mean, you’ve reported in some of these places. You’ve talked to some of these leaders. You’ve been in some of these buildings. These folks just don’t spend a lot of time together. I mean, maybe sometimes, the secretaries get together at a cabinet level, or the deputy secretaries get together. But by and large, each agency has its own mission, its own culture. And trying to coordinate across all of these and say, you know what, the most important thing to do first is x, the second thing is y, and the third thing is z — like, that’s actually a management challenge. And I personally would like to see the White House take a stronger role in this. I’m glad to see John Podesta in his new Green Energy Implementation role. I would like to see some of the policy councils, the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council, take a stronger role here. But I think otherwise, left to their own devices, the agencies are going to do what they would normally do. And it might be good, but the question is, is the whole going to be greater than the sum of the parts? So I think that’s really important, this kind of prioritizing implementation. And the third bucket, I think it’s staffing and capacity building. We all know how hard it is to staff a new administration. Who’s going to be the Treasury Secretary? Who’s going to be the Transportation Secretary? You know, and on down the line. I think now, we’ve done an initial analysis at Roosevelt. And there’s something like 300 new jobs just made possible by both CHIPS and the Inflation Reduction Act. So where are these folks going to come from? I mean, this feels like a small thing, or maybe a medium-size thing. But the truth is, you need great people in these roles. We just said these are really hard jobs. Where are we going to find these folks? And where are we going to find them on the timeline that is necessary for them to get in and begin to do their work while this administration is still in office? This is going to be a time when a lot of people actually perhaps begin to leave the administration. These are hard jobs. Being in one of these government jobs for a couple of years, it’s pretty exhausting. You don’t get a chance to see your family. I know many people who live in Georgia and work in the White House, and have three young kids. They’re tired. And so finding great staff, great human beings to actually think these problems through that you and I are just bantering about on a podcast, you know, where are we going to find these folks? I think it’s critically important.

ezra klein

There’s so much in there. And I’ll just say on that last point that nothing will disabuse you more quickly of the notion that people in government are lazy that spending a lot of time reporting with the people in government, who are constantly calling you at 9:00 p.m. their time after a full day of their job so they can get into their reporter calls. I mean, the people who do these roles really burn out, which is also long-term, a problem. I want to pick up on a few things there. One is, you alluded a few times in the show, including in the area I live in now, the Bay Area, to the way that defense industry money has often been the seedbed of later industries, of a lot of industrial planning in this country. And I sometimes try to think about what can we learn from that. And two things come to my mind there. One is that around the defense industry, we just waste a lot of money. And a lot of things don’t work out. And people are just OK with it in a way they’re not with other parts of the government. And I’m not saying I am personally OK with every wasted dollar that goes into American defense. I’m not. But in general, defense just doesn’t operate, and has not traditionally operated, under the tight scrutiny that other parts of the government does, which is why it’s able to make, often, bets where the ones that don’t pan out don’t kill the ones that do, or the ones that could. I always talk about the amount of flack that the Obama administration got for Solyndra. But that same loan guarantee program was a lifeline for Tesla. And the other thing that always strikes me as interesting is that defense is a place where we end up being risk tolerant and collectivist. I think we often think of there being — the things that are collectivist are cautious and bureaucratic, and the things that are individualistic are highly risk tolerant, right, like the heroic individual entrepreneurs. But particularly during wartime, but not only, defense is a place where we often will take big risks, but do so with some kind of national purpose in mind. And then a lot of things technologically, traditionally, have come out of that, particularly after war times. And I just wonder if there aren’t lessons somehow to take from that that can be applied here.

Yeah, it’s such a good question in part because — well, two reasons. One, it’s not enormous, but I think it’s important to note that one of the reasons that to some degree infrastructure, but certainly CHIPS was such popular legislation is because it was seen through a national security lens, right? It was seen through this lens of outcompeting China. And we can have a conversation about that. I have a lot of feelings about that. I don’t tend to think of it that way. And I don’t tend to frame the need for CHIPS in that way. But I do think that it’s one important reason that you see lots of support on both sides of the aisle for this. And I do understand that that kind of goes all the way back to Sputnik in 1957 being one of the reasons that we were able to see so much public investment in science, in higher ed, in K-12, et cetera in this country 80 years ago, however many — 70 years ago now. So at any rate, I do think that’s one thing to say. But I also think that your flagging of the defense industry and how little scrutiny it often gets, it’s really important. Because that kind of is a tell, right? That really shows us that our ideology and our beliefs around what is the values that we hold as important in this country, there is a kind of hierarchy of values that is conservative, small c. And it’s just worth saying out loud — I mean, I’m a progressive, and I’m not even trying to criticize this. I’m simply trying to point it out, that national security and safety is something that people are willing to spend a whole bunch of money on without really holding it to that same kind of efficiency standards that we might when we’re talking about investing in other pieces of our economy. And I think that we should be investing far more in things like, obviously investment, obviously child care, to get back to the high-care part of this economic future vision. And we should be willing to spend as much money there, in that kind of investment, as we are in things that ostensibly keep us safe. I think that is an ideological shift that is, at best, incomplete in our post-neoliberal vision. And I think it is critically important because I actually think that is about our safety. But we don’t conceptualize it that way.

ezra klein

I’d like to dig in on the word efficiency there. Because I think it’s actually a pretty toxic word, the way it has often been applied to government. There’s no doubt that many things a government does are actually inefficient, that from the perspective of somebody who would want to see them succeed, the way they are conducted is a huge problem. And that’s one kind of inefficiency. But another kind of inefficiency that I find the government often gets held accountable for, and in response becomes risk-averse and overly consensus-oriented and bureaucratic, is the idea that everything should work out. And that seems really quite wrong to me, that the private market is pretty good at funding things that are almost certainly going to work out. And you can try to accelerate it. But even if the government didn’t get into the electric vehicle charging station game too heavily, I’m not unbelievably concerned we would never have a nationwide electric vehicle charging infrastructure. I just think it would come later. Whereas there are a bunch of technologies — and some of them are being funded here, like advanced hydrogen and next generation geothermal. But you want to be funding, at fairly significant levels, technologies that very well might fail. Like, all that money might go for nothing. Because if one of seven of them pan out, it is such an unbelievable boon to the future of the country, the economy, the planet, that it’s worth it to have government. But we often end up, I think, in the wrong space here. Like, the right has done so much to make clear to the government that it will be held accountable for things that fail, particularly anything that fails that looks stupid in retrospect. And so then you often have government making, I think, overly safe bets. And people might turn around and say, look, this program worked out, look how many things paid off, when in fact, for the program to have worked out, for my definition, would have meant more things not paying off, but the things that did pay off being a higher reward for the higher risk.

Right, I think it’s such a good point. Of course I would think this, but I do think it’s also an ideological straitjacket, right? There’s no reason to think that government shouldn’t be trying to do things that are, in fact, more like moonshots. The moonshot was a moonshot when the Kennedy administration first conceptualized it. First of all, just on a purely political basis, that’s kind of inspirational. We would like some entity, some set of institutions to be thinking about what our collective future ought to be like in a very positive way. I think we’ve lost that in our politics. I think we absolutely need to get back to that. But on a slightly less visionary note and a slightly more practical note, I absolutely agree with you that it is important — who is thinking about fighting the next pandemic, right? And who is incentivized? And who has the job of thinking about fighting the next pandemic, or thinking about the next flourishing region of this country or regions of this country, as we talked about? The private sector is actually exceptionally good. I’m often critical of the private sector, but the private sector is exceptionally good at what it is good at. But not everything is a private sector job. And therefore, it means that we need to be thinking about government not in this very circumscribed, small way, but actually in a much bigger way. And to do that, I think we have to get out of this small government is always better mentality that I know you, Ezra, have heard me rail against before. But I just think it’s so important. As I was getting ready for this conversation, I was actually thinking a little bit about F.D.R. and the kind of vision that he had for what government could do in the New Deal. And he wasn’t sure that everything that he was experimenting with was going to work out, right? But if you just think about the things that his administration put into motion very early on, in their first 100-ish days, it’s the Civilian Conservation Corps. It’s the Tennessee Valley Authority. Did Roosevelt actually know that giving millions and millions of young men jobs in rural parts of this country — planting trees — did he know that that was going to work out? No, he did not, right? But when you think about the kind of creativity that the crisis that Franklin Roosevelt was living under, the kind of creativity that that made possible, I do think we have to get back to some of that now. So I don’t know. I think some of that conservative or right wing straitjacket, it’s kind of all in our heads. So I think we have to try very hard to push past that. And I do think that’s part of what this administration is trying to do. But look, it is very difficult. There’s no doubt. Trying to resell a vision of robust, energetic, imaginative, public-oriented government in this country, that is one of the biggest challenges for the future of this set of economic plans.

ezra klein

There’s the question of small government, and then there’s the question of overlapping government, of complicated government. One thing that is striking about both CHIPS and — actually, all these bills, is that they’re very deployment-focused. So government does, and traditionally does, less than people would like in recent years, but still quite a bit of funding, basic research, R&D. We have a big National Science Foundation, a big National Institutes of Health. What we’ve been less excited about doing, although with some exceptions, like some of what was in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, is trying to deploy new technologies at large scale. And that’s a lot of what this is about — trying to deploy a lot of wind and solar, a lot of electric vehicle charging, a lot, potentially, of demonstration projects that are going to have to be built into the physical world. Ultimately, a tremendous number of new energy transmission lines because we’re going to have to make our electric grid clean. And then we’re going to have to triple or quadruple how much electricity we can generate because we’re going to make all the cars, and all the homes, and all the businesses electric and running on this clean grid. But if you start digging in to how you get that stuff built, it’s not like the federal government can just wander over and say, hey, build it here. I mean, you were talking earlier about coordination between federal agencies. And I certainly agree with you that that is often less smooth than one would wish it were. But a lot of this is going to be coordination between multiple federal agencies, then multiple state agencies, often local agencies. I mean, in Oklahoma, every municipality independently permits or decides whether a transmission line can go through. And that’s just — I mean, when I worry about what could really slow this down, it’s those sort of mismatched authorities where a lot of the players who have to say yes to something don’t have the national North Star 15 - or 20-year vision or incentives in their agency in the same way that the federal government does. And I’m curious how you think about that piece of it.

Yeah, I think about that a lot, actually. I mean, I even think about it just with the American Rescue Plan, right? There was $350 billion in state and municipal money in the American Rescue Plan. Most of that’s gone out the door. I don’t have an exact count on it — not all of it, but most of that has left the Treasury Department now. But it’s sitting under state or city jurisdiction right now. And a lot of it isn’t going as the legislation had intended. Now, that’s for lots of complicated reasons. It’s not just Republicans don’t want to do what Democrats wanted them to do. But cities have their own priorities. States have their own priorities. So you’re absolutely right that the kind of federalism that we’re talking about here makes a lot of this really complicated. And I know you’ve also written about or talked a lot about of NIMBYism at the local level, which is especially problematic, and things like trying to develop more housing supply. So I agree with you that this multiple level — basically, the federalism that is the hallmark of American democracy also makes some of this building really challenging. We’re not living in Korea. We’re not living in Singapore, where some of this is just more straightforward, both by governmental structure and by culture. Like, some of this is just going to be challenging. So I agree with you. I worry a lot about coordination across agencies. I worry a lot about the federalism pieces. That’s also why I do think that a few demonstration areas — they don’t have to call them that, but a few areas where, like, look, it’s actually working here — can go a long way, a long, long, long way. I’m excited about this moment. But I would never pretend that this is just going to be easy. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

I was corresponding recently with somebody who works on state infrastructure projects, and has watched a lot of them flounder under local opposition, under the inability to get permitting. And something they were saying to me was that they didn’t understand why we spend so much time and money on all these lawsuits, on making and remaking plans, but we really don’t spend any directly compensating people for the fact that it actually is frustrating, or a pain, or in some cases worrying to have these projects located right near them. We’ve put all this money into these bills to give tax credits and loan guarantees and whatever to the companies that make these things. If you’re going to build a gigantic solar array, you’re going to get a lot of money for that. We’re really helping you out. If you’re in a town that all of a sudden is going to have a bunch of wind turbines go up — and for all that I think wind turbines are great, you know, your town will look different if they’re really big. And you can hear them. And we sort of say, you should just get on board with this because it’s good for the country, or good for the world, or because we’re doing it. We don’t really say you should get on board with it because actually, we’re going to pay you out a little bit, too. Like, yes, this is something that is going to make your life maybe a little bit worse. And no less than the company making the turbine, you deserve some compensation there. I’m curious why you think we don’t do that. Because I’m not as unsympathetic to what gets called NIMBYism as I sometimes sound like I am. It just seems to me that there are things that deserve compensation. And by mostly taking that possibility off of the table, we’ve made these very, very, very zero sum debates.

Look, if we really stop to think about it, I’m sure that the legal or distributional questions of compensation could start to get really complicated really quickly. But again, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t really try to think them through. Because I think that when it comes right down to what people want in their cities, in their towns, in their neighborhoods, there are two things that are really important. One is, is my property value going to go down? Is my view going to get worse? Is my street going to become more crowded? These are actual, real, material things that are — we often caricature them as concerns of upper middle class people. But I think they’re genuine concerns for quality of life everywhere. And of course, what’s happened in our history is that mostly Black, mostly Indigenous people have had to bear the brunt of that. And that is absolutely wrong. And so we should think of ways to actually compensate people, maybe even sometimes in reparative ways, if the building project is going to require something that is going to meaningfully and negatively impact their lives. So I think that’s one thing. The other thing that I think that people really want, and I think it is at the core of much of our political economy problems, people actually want voice, right? You and I have sometimes talked about this as countervailing power, whether it’s through unions, or whether it’s through some other kinds of civic institutions. But I do think that people actually want a say. They do not want things to be done to them. I think what they want is to have some kind of input into the process that is going to make decisions that are going to affect their lives. Now, I think the problem is, and you’ve written about this, we have pretty lousy ways of solving those conflicts. The ways that we solve those conflicts is, we sue each other. And that is just the worst possible way to deal with conflict. And maybe part of what could be possible, as we try to think toward this kind of new economic, sort of new thriving sectors, thriving regions of America vision — these conflicts aren’t going to go away, right? But are we going to have better ways to actually talk about and solve these problems, rather than either wishing they weren’t there, or then having them end up in court? I don’t know, but I would think about that.

ezra klein

I think you could imagine a world where — you were talking about Joe Biden’s multi-year, even multi-decade maybe, North Star. And I think one way of understanding the vision he’s putting forward is both that we are going to be a country that really builds again. This level of decarbonization, to say nothing of the infrastructure and CHIP investments, it’s a project no less large than the interstate highway system, than the original electrification effort. I mean, this is huge — the amount of land involved, the amount of transmission lines, the amount of next generation technology. It’s — what is really being considered here is vast. I think I’m somebody who grew up thinking America was built already. And it turns out we’re not, right? We modernized in the 20th century. And now, that’s become archaic. And we need to modernize just as completely again. And so you can imagine a world where that vision, to be a country that is rebuilding itself over the next 10, 20 years, that has a lot more downstream transformation than just what is in these bills, right, that what maybe has to come at some point is exactly what you’re talking about. And you can very much imagine it being piloted out in states like California that have a lot of problems with NIMBY issues. But is there a more useful framework, a more scalable framework for voice, where people both have more inclusion in projects, and how they’re designed, and how they’re figured out? They have more compensation from them, maybe, on some margin. But also, the way it’s getting managed is not an endless array of lawsuits after the fact that, frankly, don’t involve most of the communities that might be affected. I, a little bit, worry about the theory that we can just pass these bills and be done with it. Because I think creating the conditions for these bills to be implemented well and at the speed we want them implemented — there’s a really big difference between these bills going fast and them going slow from the perspective of the climate. You could really imagine this being a continuous effort. And I’m worried about it being a kind of Big Bang thing that then, people think, well, we passed them, so now the climate thing is supposed to be fixed, and we can just move on.

Yeah, well, there’s a couple of things to say there. First of all, I think one of the biggest challenges is the challenge of speed, right? Because yes, the climate needs us to do these things quickly. But our democracy and our, sort of, social fabric needs these things to be done, if not slowly, at least thoughtfully, inclusively, in ways that actually start to bring people back in. And I think that is going to be an enormous tension. But the other thing that your comments made me think about is, there really are some other examples of economic problem solving that aren’t just like, pass a bill, throw a bunch of money, and let it go, or just let the market do it all, let the large companies do it all. I think there are other models. They haven’t tended to scale very much. But I would ask us to look at them again. One is this question of participatory budgeting, which I actually haven’t really seen at scale. Some of your listeners or some of the other people that you’ve talked to might know more about how that might scale. But the question is, people have opinions about how to spend the public monies in their neighborhoods — libraries, parks, et cetera. And having a process where people can actually participate in that can be really important, far beyond the library or the park. So that’s the first thing I would say. And then the second thing is, you know, I spent a lot of time a couple of years ago trying to understand the power of cooperatives, like the Mondragon cooperative, and other kinds of economic entities. There’s the Evergreen Cooperative, which I think is in Ohio. I could be wrong about that. But anyway, there are different places where you had more worker ownership in different forms. Sometimes, it’s shares of a company. Sometimes, it’s whole ownership of a company. But I actually think that for a long time, we thought of those things as maybe a little bit naive and, oh, isn’t that nice that that one thing that happened in that small region of Spain or something — that’s the Mondragon cooperative. But I would encourage us, at this time where we have to build a lot of things, and we want to build a lot of things in ways that are small d democratic, I would actually encourage us to look at those again. What are the lessons that we can learn from that? It has to be adapted to an American approach that is, I think, unique both in our federalism and in the complexity of our system. And as we try to do this in a way that I hope is post-neoliberal — but let’s face it, we’ve got a lot of private power and a lot of big corporate power in this country. And that’s just the water we swim in. But I would encourage us to think about these other ways of both economic problem-solving and economic decision-making. Maybe some of that is possible at this moment when there’s so much legislation that now needs to actually get done.

ezra klein

We’ve talked a lot about Joe Biden here as the central agent. But this kind of building and executing that kind of vision, or just his vision, is very much an all of society effort, to some degree. And I wonder what you think has to happen within the Democratic party, what we might understand as American liberalism, what we might understand as the environmental movement. You’ve given reference a bunch in this conversation to decades of neoliberalism. I do think a lot of liberalism has been used to blocking things, or trying to pass big bills nationally. The idea of being in a period where it needs to build, actually build this alternative, I think is a little bit organizationally alien. And I wonder what you think the rest of society needs to be doing during this period. And I don’t mean every piece of it. But if you’re a political activist who has been working day and night to try to pass bills like these, that eventually got compromised down into these, or you’re a Democratic voter who cares about these issues, what do you think your role is in trying to take this opportunity to be on the field, and to actually winning the game that people felt that they were trying to play?

Yeah, I’m so glad you asked that question. Because I really worry about our civic infrastructure. I worry about our unions. I worry about whether it’s activist infrastructure, or the weird think tank infrastructure that I’m a part of. Because I don’t think we’re really suited to this moment. I think we think in issue area silos — you know, my job is to fight for a better child tax credit. My job is to fight for a better tax system. And those things are important. I don’t really think that’s directly about the kind of building that we’ve been talking about now. First of all, I worry that our institutions are very weak. I’ve been really excited to see some of the new labor organizing. But most of that new labor organizing, like at Starbucks or at Amazon, that’s been happening outside of traditional unions. Traditional unions, and I say this with great respect and love for the many people I know who are in traditional unions or run them, but the numbers are not great, meaning literally, their membership numbers. So I worry that all of those entities are not suited for this moment. I had spoken earlier about the Civilian Conservation Corps, the C.C.C. We don’t really have a lot of those kinds of entities right now, where those were literally — they were mostly guys — those are literally guys going out to build something. They were literally planting trees. That is a muscle in sort of the American civic infrastructure that has really atrophied. We’ve got a lot of groups that are really good at fighting. We don’t have a lot of groups that are really good at building. But I do think that — my kids are a little bit older than yours, Ezra, as my kids are teenagers. And they actually want to get out and build. They really do. Like, mom, what you do, I’m sure it’s meaningful. I’m sure it’s important. But boy, it takes a long time, you know, all those words, all those Zoom calls. They want to get out and build. And I actually think there is a kind of energy amongst Gen Z in this country, teenagers. They want to be out there building things. And I think institutions that can help, I would actually call for sort of — national service would be something that could be pretty exciting in all of this. I actually do think there’s a lot of room for new institutions, not just within government, but also on the outside that could move toward this. And I think if we’re going to do is, which — we had lots of national service like in the Clinton administration, for example. But I actually think that if we’re going to have a new set of outside actors, which I think would be terrific, I think we have to be far more attentive to the realities of political power, and corporate power, and actually capital, than we sometimes are. I think there is a less naive version of civic infrastructure that can build. And I’d be excited for lots of people who are in their 20s and 30s to start trying to build some of that. Because now would be the moment.

ezra klein

That’s a great place to end. So always, our final question — what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Well, my first book is Michael Tomasky’s “Middle Out.” And this one is kind of on brand for me, in part because Michael and I are actually the hosts of a new podcast called “How to Save a Country.” So Michael and I are kind of co-conspirators. The podcast launches in a few weeks. But I’m actually recommending this because it’s a long form, reported look at everything that you and I have been talking about today. Michael really looks at all of the people, and all of the academics, and all of the activists who have been pushing Joe Biden for so long, such that at the very beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden actually said he wanted to change the economic paradigm. So that didn’t happen overnight, Michael reminds us. So that’s the first book that I’d recommend. The second book is Olúfẹmi Táíwò‘s “Elite Capture,” which is this amazing book. It started as an essay in “Boston Review.” And it really argues for a constructive politics by bringing an almost radically strong class lens to race politics, to, quote, “identity politics.” It was such a pleasure to read. It’s kind of a weird book for such a short book. It includes these really long detours into the philosophy of games, or a history of the Black feminist Combahee River Collective. It was both complicated, but really straightforward. Like, you need class and race. That’s kind of what he’s saying. And to be honest with you, I didn’t really understand all of it, which is one of the reasons I liked it. It kept me going back to it. And then the final book is not yet a book. It’s just a draft. But it’s so good that I wanted to recommend it to your listeners. It’s Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce’s “Cords of Change.” So this was a book that I felt — as somebody who’s been in progressive politics for multiple decades now, it felt like it was a book that I’d been waiting to read without really even knowing it. I was able to review it for Deepak and Stephanie just a few weeks ago. And the subtitle of the book is called, “Seven Strategies Underdogs Use to Win.” So it’s kind of a strategic history of lots of different strategies for social change. And in part, it’s like a how to guide. And I think their core message is that we need multiple strategies, plural, not just singular, if we are going to win the kind of victories that we have been hoping for. And I think it reminds those of us on the left who sometimes feel like this is so hard, this is, like, a Sisyphean endeavor — but it reminds those of us on the left that we actually have a rich lineage of victory, whether it’s the abolition of slavery, or gay marriage and AIDS activism. So it’s a really powerful book. It’s not out yet. But when it comes out next year, I really think that all of your listeners should read it.

ezra klein

Building the hype early. Felicia Wong, thank you very much.

Thank you. Great to be here. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

At a press briefing earlier this month, Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID czar, laid out some pretty lofty expectations for America’s immunity this fall. “Millions” of Americans, he said, would be flocking to pharmacies for the newest version of the COVID vaccine in September and October, at the same appointment where they’d get their yearly flu shot. “It’s actually a good idea,” he told the press. “I really believe this is why God gave us two arms.”That’s how I got immunized last week at my local CVS: COVID shot on the left, flu shot on the right. I spent the next day or so nursing not one but two achy upper arms. Reaching high shelves was hard; putting on deodorant was worse. And it did make me wonder what would have happened if I’d ignored Jha’s teleological advice and gotten both jabs in the same arm. Maybe my annoyance would have been lessened. Or perhaps the same-side shots would have made the soreness in my left arm way worse. When I posed this puzzle to immunologists, vaccinologists, and pharmacists, I got back a lot of hems and haws. For the millions of Americans who will be getting two-shot appointments by fall’s end, they told me, the choice really does come down to personal preference in the absence of clear data: You’ve just gotta pick a side. Or, you know, two.On the one hand (sorry), there are the vaccine double-downers. Sallie Permar, a pediatrician at Cornell University, and Stephanie Langel, an immunologist at Duke University, both said they’d probably get both shots in the same shoulder; so would Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Personally, I’d rather have one arm that’s slightly uncomfortable than both,” Goel told me.On the other hand, we’ve got Team Divide-and-Conquer. Several experts said they’d follow the White House protocol of splitting shots left and right. Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me he’d prefer to have two slightly sore arms to one totally dead one. Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, a pharmacist at Loma Linda University, says she generally recommends that her patients get the vaccines on separate sides “for comfort.” Last year, she opted to get the flu shot and a COVID booster within a few inches of each other, and “I wanted to chop my arm off,” she told me. “Never again.”[Read: America’s fall booster plan has a fatal paradox]The deciding logic here should be pretty intuitive, Permar told me. Two shots on one side might be expected to double how sore that arm will get, though the experience of each vaccine recipient will depend on a bevy of factors, including the ingredients in the shots and that person’s infection and vaccination history, as well as their immune-system health. Also, for people like my husband—who’s prone to very heavy vaccine side effects—the choice may not matter at all. He was so knocked out by the fever and chills that came with his COVID-flu-shot combo, he couldn’t have cared less which arms got the shots.I dug around for studies examining the consequences of the one-versus-two-arm choice and found only one: a Canadian trial from 2003, which vaccinated a few hundred sixth-graders at two dozen middle schools against group C meningitis and hepatitis B at the same time. Roughly half the kids got both shots in the same arm; the others received one on each side. (Some kids in the latter group requested that their shots be administered by a pair of nurses who could plunge both syringes at the same time.) Among students in the same-arm group, 18 percent ended up with tenderness at the injection site that they rated “moderate or severe.” But those kids fared better than the ones in the two-arm group, 28 percent of whom experienced moderate or severe tenderness in at least one arm, and 8 percent of whom had it in both arms at the same time.But those results apply only to that group of kids in that setting, with those two specific vaccines; there’s no telling whether the same trends would be seen with flu shots and COVID shots when given to children or adults. Michela Locci, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she suspects that combining flu and COVID inoculations in the same arm could actually drive extra side effects: “The overall inflammation might be higher,” she said.Many pediatricians, who often have to administer four or five shots to a baby at once, are habitual splitters. “If there’s more than one vaccine syringe to give to a baby, generally, two legs are used,” Permar told me. (Kids usually upgrade to arm shots sometime in toddlerhood—it’s all about finding a muscle that’s big enough for the needle to hit its mark.) Doctors also have a nerdy reason to split shots between arms or legs. “If there’s a local reaction to the vaccine,” Permar said, “you can identify which vaccine it was if you separate them by space.” (For the record, I had a more painful reaction in my left arm, where I got the COVID shot. Others I’ve spoken with have reported the same disparity.)[Read: Families are going rogue with rapid tests]The CDC advocates for separating vaccination shots by at least one inch of space. Per the agency, if a COVID shot is being given at the same time as a vaccine “that might be more likely to cause a local injection site reaction,” the shots should be dosed into “different limbs, if possible.” Two types of flu shots cleared for use in people 65 years and older—the high-dose vaccine and the adjuvanted one—fall into that category. But the different-limb advice doesn’t seem to apply to other flu shots, including those cleared for use in younger adults and kids.However someone ends up taking simultaneous flu and COVID shots, the placement is unlikely to affect how much protection the vaccines provide. There could be an argument for letting “each side focus on its own thing,” says Gabriel Victora, an immunologist at Rockefeller University. “But it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.” Children routinely get combo vaccines, such as DTaP and MMR, each of which combines multiple disease-fighting ingredients in a single syringe. The triple-threat formulas work just as well as injecting their individual parts. The immune system is used to multitasking: It spends all day being bombarded by microbes, so there’s good reason to believe that with vaccines, too, our body will see simultaneous shots “as independent events,” Goel told me.Which arm gets picked for which shot, though, will affect where the jab’s contents end up. After a vaccine is injected, its immunity-inducing ingredients meander to the nearest lymph node, such as the ones in the armpits. There, hordes of immune cells fight over the vaccine’s bits, and the fittest and fiercest among them are selected to leave the lymph node and fight. Here, again, doubling up on one arm shouldn’t be an issue, Goel said: The immune-cell bootcamps in these lymph nodes have “a good amount of real estate.”It might even be a good idea to stick the same limb—and thereby, the same lymph node—every time you get another dose of a particular vaccine. After immune cells in a lymph node spot a particular bit of pathogen, some of them march off into battle, but others may hang around like reserve troops, mulling over what they’ve learned. A couple of recent studies, one of them in mice, hint that repeated delivery of the same ingredients to those veteran learners could give the body a slight edge—though the extent of that advantage “might be marginal,” Victora told me. Still, Langel, of Duke, told me jokingly that because she usually gets all of her vaccines in her “non-writing” arm, the lymph node beneath it could now be especially superpowered—a “nice bonus” for her defenses on the whole.That said, no one should stress too much about getting a shot in the “wrong” arm. “It’s not like you’re immune on the left side and not on the right side,” Goel told me. Immune cells travel throughout the body; there is no midline DMZ. Permar even points out that getting the newly formulated COVID vaccine, which includes new ingredients tailored to fight Omicron subvariants, on the opposite side from the previous rounds could help its ingredients reach a fresher slate of cells. “I think you could convince yourself either way,” she told me. Which, honestly, leaves me totally at peace with my choice. Apart from arm achiness, I had no other side effects—and in a way, I preferred the symmetry of the one-on-each-side injections.With all that said, it’s worth briefly acknowledging a third option: Splitting the flu and COVID vaccines into separate visits. I was, before my most recent COVID shot, some 10 months out from my previous dose. But it felt awfully early for my flu shot, which might be better timed for peak protection if taken later in the season. Still, the allure of getting it all over with was too tantalizing, especially because I happen to have a lot of travel up ahead. In the grand scheme of things, the bigger, more important choice was opting into the shots at all.

This is the inaugural issue of an AEIdeas series that will focus on elections and demographic voting patterns. During the 2022 campaign, we will look weekly at demographic subgroup averages from a month of polls. While Democrats have pulled ahead on the generic ballot, Republicans will be seeking to capitalize on areas of demographic weakness for Democrats come Election Day. This unique snapshot will provide a far better sense than any individual poll of key groups’ current preferences and how they are moving as we approach November 8th.
Generic Ballot Averages*
Aug. 9–Sep. 9
 Dem.Rep.Dem-Rep MarginNumber of PollsOverall44.9%42.4%2.517EthnicityWhite39.750.2-10.517 Hispanic51.432.219.213 Black70.913.557.415EducationWhite College53.240.412.85 White No College30.259.0-28.85 College51.939.112.86 No College42.646.6-4.06GenderMale42.245.8-3.614 Female48.337.810.514Income<$50k44.338.36.09 $50-100k45.042.72.26 $100k+48.542.36.26
Key Findings
The average Hispanic advantage for the Democrats in the last month is around 19 points. This is a further decline from the Democrats’ relatively low 25-point advantage among this group in the 2020 Presidential election and a big decline from their 35-point advantage in the 2018 midterm. The trend in the last month among Hispanics has also been negative for the Democrats, around a 2-point decline.The data indicate a yawning 42-point gap in the last month between the Democrats’ White college and White non-college support. The Democrats are carrying White college voters by 13 points while losing White non-college voters by 29. The analogous gap in 2018 was 27 points and in 2020, 33 points.In the last month, Democrats’ margin among White college voters increased by 6 points, while their deficit worsened by 5 points among White non-college voters. White non-college voters remain more undecided about their 2022 vote choice than their college-educated counterparts.Some polls show an astounding divergence between Democratic support among White college and non-college voters. The most recent Marist/NPR/PBS poll has Democrats carrying white college voters by 63-32 while losing White non-college voters by 60-31.Women support Democrats by 10.5 points, a margin 2.5 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020. This lagging support complicates arguments that women will vote for Democrats at higher margins because of the Dobbs decision.In a possible positive sign for Democrats, Black and Hispanic voters, who are generally more disposed to the party, are significantly more undecided than White voters. The averages (not shown here) suggest 15.6 percent of Black voters and 16.4 percent of Hispanic voters do not yet know for whom they will vote, compared to only 10.2 percent of White voters.
Demographic Margin Trends
Dem.Rep.Margin changefrom last weekMargin changefrom last monthOverall44.9%42.4%0.21.5White39.750.20.90.8Hispanic51.432.2-0.4-1.6Black70.913.52.8-1.6White College53.240.42.66.2White No College30.259.0-0.8-5.4College51.939.16.05.2No College42.646.6-3.9-3.6Male42.245.8-0.30.6Female48.337.80.21.7<$50k44.338.3-5.6-2.4$50-100k45.042.73.34.7$100k+48.542.3-0.20.9
Previous election data is drawn from Catalist crosstab estimates. Catalist is a Democratic data analytics organization.
*How we did this: This month-long average is a compilation of online and live caller polls that release crosstabs. Internal and explicitly partisan polls are excluded. This edition averages polls from the Economist/YouGov, Quinnipiac University, Morning Consult/Politico, CBS News, Emerson, The Wall Street Journal, Rasmussen, Echelon Insights, Marist College/NPR/PBS NewsHour, and Fox News.
Learn more: From the AEI Archive: Our Neighborhood, Part II | From the AEI Archive: Our Neighborhood | From the AEI Archive: AEI Policy Forums | From the AEI Archive: Early Impressions of Gorbachev and a Final Thought
The post Elections and Demography: Democrats’ Continued Slide Among Hispanics appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.“All men, brother Gallio, wish to live happily,” wrote the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca to his brother around A.D. 58, “but are dull at perceiving exactly what it is that makes life happy.” Seneca may very well have based that assessment on himself. He was a happiness expert, writing throughout his life about the ancient concept of eudaemonia, which roughly means “living in agreement with nature,” or perhaps, in today’s language, “inner peace.” Yet his life was anything but peaceful.After experiencing years of severe health issues, Seneca was exiled from Rome under Emperor Claudius, then returned to tutor and later advise Emperor Nero, by whom he was first beloved and then accused (probably falsely) of conspiracy—and thus compelled to take his own life. As the creator of the website Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday, remarked to me by email, “That he could even get out of bed in the morning, let alone smile, was a feat of sheer human endurance.”No doubt all of this is more harrowing than what you endure in daily life—you thought you had a bad boss?—but perhaps you can relate nonetheless. You want to be happy and well, but your messy circumstances bite and gnaw at you relentlessly, distracting you from the habits of thought and action that could help you find enjoyment and remember the meaning in your life.Want to hear more from Arthur? Join him for coffee and conversation at The Atlantic Festival on Friday, September 23. Register and find out more here.Seneca wrote his essay “On a Happy Life” during those difficult last years with Nero—written as advice to his brother, but no doubt advice to himself—on what one needs to do to maintain equanimity in the face of personal chaos. Every paragraph is a gem, and the whole thing is worth your time. But luckily for us, he also helpfully lists 11 of the most important lessons he believed one must follow to achieve peace. They are as pertinent today as they were two millennia ago.Lesson 1: I will look upon death or upon a comedy with the same expression of countenance.Seneca is not suggesting that you laugh at funerals or cry at comedies, nor is he saying that sadness and laughter are bad. He is simply exhorting you to manage your emotional extremes so they don’t manage you. And it’s great advice: In 2020, French researchers studied the relationship between an even state of mind and various measures of feeling and behavior. They found that equanimity predicted lower negative states such as rumination, catastrophizing, and neuroticism.Lesson 2: I will submit to labors, however great they may be, supporting the strength of my body by that of my mind.One of the great lessons from modern research is that physical and intellectual fitness are central to a happy life. Two of the lifelong habits of older people who are both happy and well are continuous learning and healthy exercise. As an easy rule of thumb, read and walk each day—two activities that are as revolutionary today as they were in Seneca’s time. Or, if you are feeling really efficient, walk while listening to a book![Read: The seven habits that lead to happiness in old age]Lesson 3: I will despise riches when I have them as much as when I have them not; if they be elsewhere I will not be more gloomy; if they sparkle around me I will not be more lively than I should otherwise be: Whether Fortune comes or goes I will take no notice of her.This lesson is much deeper than “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” Seneca’s assertion is that an attachment to riches will bring misery, and the research couldn’t support him more clearly. For example, writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in 2017, researchers showed that materialism can lower well-being and raise depression.Lesson 4: I will view all lands as though they belong to me, and my own as though they belonged to all mankind.This lesson expands on Lesson 3 to assert that misery comes not only from grasping for things but also from holding what one has too tightly. This idea is present in many religious and philosophical traditions. For example, it is akin to what Catholics call “solidarity”: the idea that we are all sisters and brothers, so (for example) my ownership of property is fundamentally one of stewardship for the greater good of all.Lesson 5: I will so live as to remember that I was born for others, and will thank Nature on this account: for in what fashion could she have done better for me? She has given me alone to all, and all to me alone.In other words, charity is a gift to the giver. Service to others is one of the easiest ways to get happier. Volumes of research attest to the fact that giving to charity and volunteering, spending money on others, and more radical acts such as donating blood and organs all raise well-being.[Read: Give your money. Give your time. Don’t tell anyone.]Lesson 6: Whatever I may possess, I will neither hoard it greedily nor squander it recklessly.This lesson is a version of the old saying “All things in moderation,” but it goes beyond the claim that moderation is morally superior: In Seneca’s view, it also leads to inner peace. Once again, research seems to support the claim. It is easy to see this in cases such as drinking and eating, but moderation even in virtues is warranted, such that, for example, hard work does not become workaholism.Lesson 7: I will think that I have no possessions so real as those which I have given away to deserving people: I will not reckon benefits by their magnitude or number, or by anything except the value set upon them by the receiver.The idea here is that the true value of what I do is not how much it costs me, but how much it benefits you. For example, the true value of your work is not your salary but rather how much it helps others. Altruism won’t pay the rent, but if you take this lesson to heart, it can change your priorities, and maybe even lead you to a better job.[Read: The secret to happiness at work]Lesson 8: I will do nothing because of public opinion, but everything because of conscience: Whenever I do anything alone by myself I will believe that the eyes of the Roman people are upon me while I do it.This lesson is a twofer: first, to resist social comparison; second, to act in private the same as in public. The first lesson is a staple in the psychology literature, and probably explains in no small part why social media—in which we compare ourselves with strangers and friends constantly—is difficult for so many people’s well-being. The second lesson asserts that integrity and consistency lead to happiness—and that hypocrisy leads to unhappiness. Researchers have shown that the “self-perception of disingenuousness” harms our human need to see ourselves as authentic, consistent, and coherent.[Read: No one cares!]Lesson 9: I will be agreeable with my friends, gentle and mild to my foes: I will grant pardon before I am asked for it, and will meet the wishes of honorable men halfway.This ancient teaching—“Love your enemies,” in the biblical formation—lies behind many of the philosophies that seek to disrupt the tendency to hate our foes. “Love has within it a redemptive power,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in a 1957 sermon. “And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals.” In my own research, I have shown that loving across differences is not only practical; it can also be a source of immense joy.Lesson 10: I will bear in mind that the world is my native city, that its governors are the gods, and that they stand above and around me, criticizing whatever I do or say.This advice takes part two of Lesson 8 up a notch: I should act not just as if others are watching; I should act like God is watching. One study showed that priming believers and nonbelievers alike to think about God or associated concepts before engaging in an experiment in which they could voluntarily give money to a stranger or keep it for themselves induced more than twice as much generosity as when religious concepts were not introduced. When secular moral institutions such as “civic” and “jury” are primed, the effect is almost as great. And remember what we learned from Lesson 5: Such induced generosity will benefit not only the people you give to but you as well.Lesson 11: Whenever either Nature demands my breath again, or reason bids me dismiss it, I will quit this life, calling all to witness that I have loved a good conscience, and good pursuits; that no one’s freedom, my own least of all, has been impaired through me.This lesson exhorts us to consider the good of others as the way to accept our own death peacefully. And indeed, a 2014 study of dying cancer patients found that peaceful patients were “other-person centered. They saw in their illness opportunities to give to others, whether it was by encouraging friends, teaching grandchildren about life, or participating in clinical trials in order to help future patients.” Seneca himself is recorded to have died with complete equanimity, forced to take his own life but doing so calmly and while speaking of courage in life and death. Peter Paul Rubens’s famous painting The Death of Seneca shows the philosopher dying standing up, signifying the Roman ideal of virtus: valor, bravery, and character.Wise as they sound, Seneca’s lessons can be difficult to implement. They contravene many of our natural impulses: to behave egotistically, to compare ourselves with others, to acquire as much as possible, to stay alive at any cost.[Read: A shortcut for feeling just a little happier]Seneca understood this tension full well and, alongside his rules, helpfully offered a secret formula for getting the benefits of these goals even if embodying them perfectly is impossible: try. “It is the act of a generous spirit to proportion its efforts not to its own strength but to that of human nature,” he wrote, “to entertain lofty aims, and to conceive plans which are too vast to be carried into execution even by those who are endowed with gigantic intellects.” These goals are not an exercise in futility but rather in effort and progress. The only way to achieve true peace of mind is by trying a little each day.If you had one extra hour every day, how would you spend it? Please record an audio clip with your phone, no longer than three minutes, and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Your story could be featured on Arthur’s upcoming season of the How to Build a Happy Life podcast. Please include your name and location in the email and/or audio file. By submitting this clip, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity

When Britain’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, died last week, a 73-year-old man ascended to the throne. King Charles III, né Prince Charles, is expected to continue his longtime focus on climate change among his many duties as the United Kingdom’s head of state. If he lives as long as his mother did, he could spend more than two decades as monarch.But a more consequential use of Charles’s reign would be to rule briefly and abdicate at 75––the age when British judges are compelled to retire from the bench––while touting the importance of passing the throne to Prince William in his son’s prime rather than his dotage.King Charles III ought to issue a royal proclamation underscoring that this approach is a royal rebuke to the international trend toward gerontocracy, whereby leaders delay handing off power to the next generation long past what serves the public good.[Read: Your professional decline is coming (much) sooner than you think]Of course, people work effectively past 75 in many professions. Some stay vital into their 90s or even beyond, and most societies would benefit from gleaning more wisdom from their elders. However, presiding over a nation-state is unlike most other jobs in the world. Charles, at least, holds a ceremonial post. The stakes for other world leaders are far higher, rendering cognitive decline an unusually fraught problem––and stress, grueling schedules, and sleep deprivation can exacerbate the effects of aging. How imprudent for a great power such as the United States to have presidential elections in which septuagenarians vie for the presidency while the public watches debates for signs of dementia. Seven U.S. senators are in their 80s. Some current and former members of Congress have struggled to carry out their duties without constant assistance from staff. Plus, representation matters. Young people should have more say in the future that they alone will inhabit.Alas, the United States, where the electorate bears ultimate responsibility for fixing that problem, is not alone in depriving post-Boomer generations of power in their prime of life. A long list of septuagenarians have taken or are holding onto power in Africa. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon are all ruled by men in their 80s. China and Russia are both led by 69-year-olds. Given the lengthening life spans of people with the best medical care, the ease with which those in power keep it, and the typical age at which cognitive decline begins, a norm where heads of state step down voluntarily at age 75 is more prudent than the status quo.Against all that, British royalty tends to be invested in tradition and continuity, and averse to American commoners like me agitating for change. The last abdication—that of Edward VIII, who quit to marry an American divorcée—seemed at the time like a genuine crisis. By giving up his royal responsibilities for personal reasons, Edward arguably undermined a system of government rooted in the divine right of kings. But I’d counter that the British monarchy would experience more continuity with a retirement age than without one.[Neal Acherson: After the Queen, what is Britain?]Queen Elizabeth II reigning at 96 was far from the norm for British monarchs. Indeed, Charles III is taking the throne at an age when most of his predecessors were dead. If he goes on to rule long enough to put Prince William in that same position, history may remember this as the era when modern medicine transformed the British monarchy—but not for the better.Better that Charles commit now to a retirement age, setting an example for the world and allowing us all to declare, “The Queen is dead––long live the King” without also endorsing many more years of gerontocracy.

The two major factors shaping the 2022 midterm elections collided in tumultuous fashion on Tuesday morning.First came the government report that inflation last month had increased faster than economists had expected or President Joe Biden had hoped. The announcement triggered a sharp fall in the stock market, the worst day on Wall Street in two years.That same afternoon, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.The inflation report captured this year’s most powerful tailwind for Republicans: widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s management of the economy. Graham’s announcement captured this year’s strongest Democratic tailwind: widespread unease about abortion rights.[Molly Jong-Fast: Of course voters care about abortion]The shift in the campaign debate away from Biden’s management of the economy and toward the GOP’s priorities on abortion and other issues has been the principal factor improving Democratic prospects since earlier this summer. But the unexpectedly pessimistic inflation report—which showed soaring grocery and housing bills overshadowing a steady decline in gasoline prices—was a pointed reminder that the economy remains a formidable threat to Democrats in November.These two events also underscored how, to an extremely unusual degree, the parties are talking past each other. As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans “agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are” and debate “different solutions” from the two major parties.Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.Few questions may shape the November results as much as whether the issues Democrats are stressing continue to motivate roughly as many voters as Republicans’ preferred issues. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, told me he believes that pocketbook strains will ultimately prove decisive for most voters, particularly those without a college degree. Those voters, he added, are basically saying, “‘I am worried about putting food on the table, and you are talking to me about all this other crap.’"Yet there is no question that Democratic candidates are performing far above the consistently bleak public assessments of the economy, and especially Biden’s management of it. In one sense, that’s not shocking: Over the past few decades, voters’ economic assessments have become less predictive of election results, in large part because those judgments are themselves so heavily shaped by partisanship. But even in light of that trend, the disconnect between voters’ views on Biden’s economic management and their willingness to support Democratic candidates for the House and Senate remains striking.[Read: How the Democrats rallied]Biden has positive trends in the economy to celebrate, particularly robust job growth. He’s been cutting ribbons at a steady procession of infrastructure projects and manufacturing-plant openings (like last week’s groundbreaking for an Intel semiconductor facility in Ohio) tied to the tax incentives and direct spending from the infrastructure, climate, and semiconductor bills that he’s signed. Those economic milestones—yesterday, for instance, the White House touted $85 billion in new private investments for electric-vehicle production since Biden took office—will likely be a political asset for him in 2024, especially in the pivotal states across the industrial Midwest. But those accomplishments won’t necessarily sway voters this November, and in any case, all of these favorable trends for now are being overshadowed in most households by the persistent pain of higher prices on consumer goods.Even before this week’s inflation report, voters gave Biden an extremely negative grade for his economic performance. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Institute poll released last week, just 34 percent of those surveyed said that his actions have helped the economy, while 57 percent said they have hurt it. Not surprisingly, that discontent was most intense among Republicans and also among white voters without a college degree (a stunning 76 percent of whom said Biden’s actions had hurt the economy.) But that belief was also shared by 63 percent of independents, 55 percent of Generation Z and Millennial voters, 47 percent of nonwhite voters, and even 16 percent of people who voted for him in 2020.However, the share in each of these groups that gave Biden an overall positive mark on his job performance was consistently five to nine percentage points higher than those who believed his actions had helped the economy. And the share in each group that said they intend to support House Democrats in the November election was higher still—enough to give Democrats a narrow lead on that crucial question. Independents, for example, were split evenly on which party they intend to support in November, even though they were negative on Biden’s economic performance by more than two to one.This stark pattern points to another consequential anomaly in the 2022 polling so far. One of the most powerful modern trends in congressional races is a correlation between voters’ attitudes toward the president and their willingness to vote for candidates from his party. Virtually all voters who “strongly disapprove” of a president have voted against his party’s candidates in recent House and Senate elections. In 2018, two-thirds of voters who even “somewhat disapproved” of Trump voted for Democratic House candidates, according to exit polls. In 2010, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Barack Obama likewise voted for Republican candidates.By contrast, in the Marist survey, and another recent national poll by the Pew Research Center, Democrats led slightly among those who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden—a stunning result.Murphy told me this disconnect has been evident since the outset of Biden’s presidency: Even when his approval numbers were high during his first months, she said of her polling, that didn’t lift other Democratic candidates, so she’s not entirely surprised that his decline hasn’t tugged them down. But Murphy, like others in the party, believes that concerns about Republicans—centered on their abortion-restriction efforts, their nomination of extremist and election-denying candidates, and their unflagging defense of Trump—also explain why Democratic candidates are consistently running ahead of Biden’s approval rating.“It should have been pretty easy for [Republicans] to put these races away, given how concerned voters are about the economy and inflation,” Murphy told me. Now, she said, “I do think they are having to go back to the drawing board.”Graham’s abortion legislation is certain to benefit Democratic efforts to shift voter focus from what Biden has done to what Republicans might do if returned to power. In a press conference, Graham flatly declared, “If we take back the House and Senate, I’ll assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” Although many Republican senators and candidates quickly distanced themselves from his proposal, his pledge meant that every Democratic Senate candidate can plausibly argue that creating a GOP majority in the chamber will ensure a congressional vote on a national abortion ban.Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who now consults for many party House candidates, told me that the abortion fight’s biggest impact will be to inspire higher turnout from liberal-leaning and young voters. Abortion, he said, “has energized a group of people that we saw in 2018 and we saw in 2020 that traditionally don’t participate in midterm elections and are much more motivated by the cultural fight.”[Read: Abortion could define California’s elections]Yet few Democrats believe that the political threat from inflation and general unease about the economy is behind them in this election cycle. In focus groups, Ulm, the GOP pollster, told me, “We hear more gripes about groceries than anything.” Sena largely agrees: “Jobs and paychecks still matter, pal,” he said.One Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified while discussing private campaign research, told me that inflation and crime—the principal issues Republicans are stressing on the campaign trail—remain tangible and immediate concerns in swing districts. In House district polling, the pollster said, the firm often asks voters whether they worry more that Democratic policies are fueling inflation and crime or that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and too soft on the January 6 insurrection. On balance, the pollster told me, most respondents in swing districts say they worry more about Democratic policies.Yes, the pollster said, the Supreme Court abortion decision, the revelations about Trump from the House January 6 committee hearings, and the Justice Department’s investigation into his stockpiling of classified documents have energized and awakened Democratic voters. But, the pollster added, it’s not as if everyone has decided that abortion and January 6 are more important than crime and inflation.Strategists and pollsters on both sides believe that these diverging agendas could intensify one of the most powerful trends in modern American politics: the class inversion in which Democrats are running stronger among white voters with college degrees and Republicans are gaining ground among white voters without them, as well as among blue-collar Latino voters.In white-collar America, inflation may be more of an inconvenience than an existential threat, which provides space for voters to prioritize their values on issues such as abortion or Trump’s threat to democracy. In blue-collar America, where inflation often presents more difficult daily choices and sacrifices, abortion and the fate of democracy may be less salient, even among those who agree with Democrats on those issues. In the Marist poll, twice as many white voters without a college degree picked inflation over abortion as their top concern in November, while slightly more college-educated white voters picked abortion than inflation.Even with inflation at its highest level in 40 years, Republicans appear unlikely to significantly cut into such key Democratic constituencies as college-educated white voters, young people, and residents of large metropolitan areas. And even such a seismic shock as the Supreme Court abortion decision may not significantly loosen the Republican hold on white women without a college education. Although there may be some movement around the edges (inflation, for instance, could help Republicans gain among Latino voters), the biggest story of 2022 may be how closely it follows the lines of geographic and demographic polarization that the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections have engraved.As in those contests, a handful of competitive swing states (Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) will tip the precarious national balance of power between red and blue areas that now behave more like separate nations than different sections. The November elections seem likely to demonstrate again that the U.S. remains locked in a struggle between two coalitions that hold utterly antithetical visions of America’s future—yet remain almost equal in size.

Green parties have become a significant political force in many Western nations and sub-national jurisdictions. While “Green”-branded platforms vary from one part of the world to the next, they all typically draw in heterodox left-of-centre political figures who trumpet ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, and social justice through non-violent means. In some nations, such as Finland, Germany, Ireland, and Austria, Greens have gained cabinet representation and membership in ruling coalitions. In Latvia, Green politicians have even served as prime minister and head of state.One might think that Canada, a country whose progressive ranks have long exhibited strong environmentalist tendencies, would feature prominently in the Green movement. But that’s not the case, in large part because Canada’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes it difficult for small parties to gain parliamentary representation unless they focus their appeal along narrow regional lines (as the Bloc Québécois has done in French-speaking Quebec since the early 1990s). Out of 338 Members of Parliament, Canada’s Greens have never had more than three MPs. They currently have two. And, for reasons described below, that number may soon be zero.Another problem for the Greens has been leadership. From 2006 to 2019, the Green Party of Canada was led by a former environmental lawyer and Sierra Club Canada director named Elizabeth May—an affable but occasionally bumbling figure who’s made a number of front-page gaffes. In 2011, she promoted pseudo-scientific theories to the effect that WiFi internet signals might give people cancer and kill “pollinating insects.” The party has been home to anti-fluoridation activists, as well as proponents of crackpot Russian theories about “abiogenic oil.” A 2013 draft version of the party’s platform called for government-subsidized homeopathy. Two years after that, an apparently drunken May stood up at Ottawa’s annual Press Gallery dinner and delivered a bizarre homage to a returning Guantanamo prisoner named Omar Khadr, whom she said had “more class” than the national government’s “whole fucking cabinet.” In the 2019 federal election, May played to Range Rover environmentalists with sanctimonious boasts about how she always used a reusable coffee cup, metal straw, and “my own bamboo utensils” as a means to avoid using disposable products—but then blamed her staff when it was discovered that a photo of her holding a single-use cup had been edited to make it look as if she were holding the reusable variety.Many grumbled that May was too slow to give up her leadership perch. Yet when she finally did step aside in 2019, the party learned that she’d been the only thing holding the outfit together. By the time the 2021 federal election rolled around, the Greens’ leader was a black Jewish woman named Annamie Paul, who got absolutely trounced in her own riding, winning fewer than 4,000 votes. Paul was then quickly run out of the party leadership during a complicated (and often farcical) internecine battle that involved public accusations of bigotry hurled in all directions, and which (predictably) repelled many of the party’s financial supporters. On Sept. 27 I began the process of stepping down as Green Party of Canada Leader. Today I sent formal notice of my resignation to the GPC. I will also be ending my membership in the GPC. It was an honour to work for the people of Canada and I look forward to serving in new ways.— Annamie Paul (@AnnamiePaul) November 10, 2021
One might think things couldn’t get any worse for the Greens. But, thanks to the installation of a 30-year-old interim leader named Amita Kuttner, they very much did.Kuttner self-describes as non-binary, transgender, and pansexual. When asked, “What are your preferred pronouns?” in a 2019 interview, the one-time astrophysicist replied, “they/them,” but then elaborated as follows: When I write my pronouns, I sometimes write all of them: they/them, she/her, he/him, because I don’t care. There will be days where I’m not always even aware of what my gender is, and I will notice it based on how someone addresses me and whether I respond. I was in choir for many years, and they’d say, “women sing now,” “men sing now.” And I would find myself starting with one or the other group, even though I was obviously supposed to sing soprano. I’d be like, “Oh, I guess I’m feeling that today.”And yet, despite the fact Kuttner apparently can’t always figure out “what my gender is,” and claims not to “care” in any case, the interim leader felt the need to issue a lengthy statement on September 6th detailing the allegedly devastating emotional effects that ensued when the pronoun descriptor “she/elle” appeared in the electronic caption that sat alongside Kuttner’s name during a Green Party of Canada Zoom call, instead of the Kuttner-approved “they/he/ille.” Indeed, Kuttner described the ordeal as evidence that the Greens were infected by a “system of oppression”:What happened here impacted me much more than a slip of the tongue. It made me feel hurt and isolated at a moment that should have been filled with inspiration and anticipation … This incident is reflective of a larger pattern of behaviours that a few in the party are perpetuating. Over the years, the party has documented reports which indicate a systemic issue disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, and racialized people and 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and I hope many more stories will be able to be shared so that this incident can be a catalyst for change … When things like this happen, people need to see those in leadership positions take some accountability, acknowledge how they have added to this system of oppression and what they must do to break the cycle.Kuttner’s attempt to weaponize this (apparently very oppressive) instance of miscaptioning forms part of an ongoing civil war that’s been playing out for weeks within the Green leadership. That battle goes to the question of whether the party should proceed with its ongoing party leadership race, or pause it so that Green functionaries can investigate all of the (vaguely expressed) accusations of antisemitism, racism, and transphobia that were flung in every direction during the tumultuous last days of the Annamie Paul era back in 2021. We invite Canadians to get to know the GPC's 6 2022 Leadership Candidates https://t.co/idjfvbET5E pic.twitter.com/o21ClKo4LF— Green Party of Canada (@CanadianGreens) September 3, 2022
On one side of this battle are the party’s leadership contestants, along with interim leader Kuttner, who’ve urged that the leadership race go ahead as planned. On the other side are members of the party’s Federal Council, who’ve urged that the race be paused. On September 9th, Krystal Brooks, the Ontario Representative on council, resigned her office (though she’s since changed her mind, apparently), authoring a J’accuse-style manifesto in which she alleged that council members had been inappropriately pressured to vote in favour of keeping to the current schedule. Most explosively, Brooks alleged that the Green Party’s only two MPs had threatened to abandon the party, and sit as Parliamentary independents, if they didn’t get their way. Making this even more explosive is the fact that one of these two MPs is none other than Elizabeth May herself, who—in another weird only-in-Green-Land plot twist—now says she wants to lead the party again.May also put her name to a dramatically worded group statement expressing “solidarity” for Kuttner, and declaring (somewhat ominously) that Captiongate was “but the latest in a number of similar behavioural patterns.” Altogether, four of the six Green Party of Canada leadership contestants signed that letter, including Jonathan Pedneault, a self-described “queer person of colour” seeking to become May’s “co-leader.” He solemnly denounced the incident as a symptom of “ignorance and hate”—and just to remind everyone, we are talking here about an incorrect Zoom caption—while promising to “prioritize a safe and inclusive space for all.”I stand in solidarity with @AmitaKuttner and those affected by ignorance and hate. As a queer person of colour, I understand and have experienced impact verses intention and we must do better. As Co-leader, I will prioritize a safe and inclusive space for all. #GPC pic.twitter.com/ewjRkQCwhH— Jonathan Pedneault (@j_pedneault) September 6, 2022
Another party official who resigned (this resignation hasn’t been rescinded yet) is Green Party president Lorraine Rekmans. Compared to Brooks, Rekmans was more precise with her critique, scathingly describing the Greens’ back office as being under siege by Kuttner and the party’s leadership contestants. Speaking with the CBC, Rekmans explicitly accused this group of using Captiongate to demean Rekmans and force her out of the party. It’s notable that Rekmans was the party’s first Indigenous president. Brooks, too, is Indigenous. And in a country whose progressive class still describes “reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples as its most morally urgent objective, that should count for something. But Kuttner has instead put pronouns on top of the Green agenda. And in this astrophysicist’s claims of caption-induced trauma, the leadership-contestant faction seems to have found a single cosmic trump card that, in this surreal Green game of intersectional poker, bests even a pair of Indigenous females.https://t.co/m051Rn6oDL— Lorraine Rekmans (@Goddessonloose) September 12, 2022
Those who’ve followed the general pattern by which pronoun politics tear progressive organizations apart will note that something similar has been happening in the UK. And just two years ago, the leader of an even smaller Canadian Green-style party, British Columbia’s Ecosocialists, was forced to resign when it was discovered that he’d (properly) defended J.K. Rowling from claims of transphobia. (Quillette readers may recognize his name.) In that case, too, the entire furor was largely sparked by a single gender activist—a trans woman named Nicola Spurling best known for once claiming that Rowling “couldn’t be trusted around children” (a claim that Spurling backed away from once Rowling threatened legal action).Is this kind of dogmatic attachment to avant-garde gender dogmas reflective of what rank-and-file Green (or Ecosocialist) voters really want—or just a fixation of tiny activist cliques? It so happens that there’s a natural experiment that allows us to answer this very question—thanks to none other than Amita Kuttner. You see, after I’d tweeted out some cheeky commentary about the Greens’ pronoun fixation a few days back, Kuttner tried to seize on my tweets as a fundraising opportunity. The interim Green leader christened the campaign, Let’s Platform Anti-Oppression, and sought to raise $68,321, one dollar “to counter each of Jonathan Kay’s followers on Twitter.”It’s a 12-day fundraising campaign that started a week ago. As of this writing, Kuttner has raised exactly $249.83. And $10 of that is from me.

Many European countries and Canada, for example, did a better job of making sure more of their population got boosters. Their cumulative death and illness tolls from the Omicron wave are sharply lower than those of the United States, where only about a third of eligible adults had gotten boosters, compared with two-thirds of adults in many European countries. The United States has had a death rate 80 percent greater than Canada’s from the Omicron wave — a similar pattern holds globally. Countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have about 80 percent or more of their adult population boosted, and their death tolls are even lower.

Many might also be wondering why bother with one more shot since 68 percent of Americans have had two initial vaccination shots, some of those have had booster shots already, and most likely about 60 percent of the country got some level of immunity from an Omicron infection.

Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist, told me that variants evolved to evade the first line of antibody protection generated by earlier vaccines or past infections, even though protections against severe disease remained fairly strong. But the new boosters can greatly decrease that evasion. When the initial vaccines were trialed, matching the strain that was then in circulation, they reported 90 percent to 95 percent protection against any symptomatic infection, which then declined against variants and with time. While exact numbers remain to be seen, all the immunologists I spoke with told me the updated boosters should again increase such protections.

Vaccines (and boosters) have already been shown to greatly reduce rates of long Covid among the infected, but obviously, if infection is avoided completely, that would directly sidestep the risk of long Covid. Shane Crotty, an immunologist, also noted that these boosters will probably further reduce the chances of more severe disease complications, which include long Covid, and says “the higher your level of immunity, the less viral replication you’re going to have, the less viral damage, the less likelihood of long Covid.”

And these new boosters can be expected to do even more going forward — including providing better protection against future variants, by better training both antibodies and memory cells, which are different parts of the immune system. As Bhattacharya told me, being exposed to different versions of the virus (as will happen with these updated boosters) further deepens and broadens the kind of antibodies that get generated, including ones that can work against future variants. Marion Pepper, an immunologist, told me a new variant vaccine can also “create new, more diverse memory cells that will help protect from Omicron variants and new variants that we have yet to encounter.”

Unfortunately we may face another problem we have witnessed throughout the pandemic: public health officials or prominent media doctors casting doubt on the boosters by focusing on their imperfections rather than their immense benefits and worrying about public reaction — like concerns about “vaccine fatigue.”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekWhat will determine your vote––or your decision to refrain from voting––in the 2022 midterm elections? What issue is most important to you? Which candidate or ballot measure do you want to see win or lose? No need to answer all of those questions, just pick something on this general topic that moves you. And briefly tell us a bit about yourself and your voting history, too. If you’re not American, what do you want U.S. voters to do?Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteThe fog of war is upon us.As reporters document major Ukrainian advances against Russian troops, I am heartened that some of the territory subjugated by a brutal invading force has been liberated. Although early accounts suggest a stunning victory that will be studied for decades, I remain warily cognizant that none of us knows what will happen next in the conflict.In The New York Times, the Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski observes that a faction of hawks in Russia believe that Vladimir Putin has been conducting the war on the cheap, and that it “can only be won if Mr. Putin mobilizes the nation onto a war footing and declares a draft.” But mobilizing more soldiers “could shatter the passivity with which much of the Russian public has treated the war.” If it’s true that “escalating a war whose domestic support may turn out to be superficial could stir domestic unrest, while continuing retreats on the battlefield could spur a backlash from hawks,” who knows what Putin will do, or even whether or not he will stay in power?  In Foreign Policy, Alexey Kovalev argues that “a new Russian protest movement is coalescing, but it’s neither pro-democracy nor anti-war. Instead, it’s the most extreme of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supporters, who have grown increasingly furious at the unfolding military disaster for Russia in the six-month-long war in Ukraine. They want Putin to escalate the war, use more devastating weapons, and hit Ukrainian civilians even more mercilessly.”My colleague Anne Applebaum argues that the United States must prepare for the possibility of Ukrainian victory because of the massive geopolitical challenges sure to accompany it. “When Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away,” she writes.Thus, per her reasoning:
When I write that Americans and Europeans need to prepare for a Ukrainian victory, this is what I mean: We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.
To be clear: This is not a prediction; it’s a warning. Many things about the current Russian political system are strange, and one of the strangest is the total absence of a mechanism for succession. Not only do we have no idea who would or could replace Putin; we have no idea who would or could choose that person. In the Soviet Union there was a Politburo, a group of people that could theoretically make such a decision, and very occasionally did. By contrast, there is no transition mechanism in Russia. There is no dauphin. Putin has refused even to allow Russians to contemplate an alternative to his seedy and corrupt brand of kleptocratic power. Nevertheless, I repeat: It is inconceivable that he can continue to rule if the centerpiece of his claim to legitimacy—his promise to put the Soviet Union back together again—proves not just impossible but laughable.
The possibility of a succession crisis in a nuclear power––and the added possibility that a figure more hawkish than Putin could prevail in such a crisis––is the stuff of nightmares. Now imagine instead that Ukraine wins the war, absent any significant escalation from Moscow. Even that will pose seemingly unsolvable challenges, Noah Millman argues:
We can always hope that battlefield defeat will awaken Russia to the folly of the course it has set on, and that neighborly relations with Ukraine become plausible in the wake of a Ukrainian victory, if not immediately then after a few years and a leader or two has passed from the scene. But hope is not a strategy … Ukraine today is succeeding on the strength of its own people, but with American and other allied arms and intelligence and with Russia substantially cut off by sanctions from key trading partners that it needs to resupply its own armed forces. Are we willing to sustain that posture indefinitely?
Can we, even if we want to?
Russia isn’t quite as formidable as it wished the world to believe, but it’s nowhere near as pathetic as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and after twelve years of containment and sanctions that failed to achieve regime change in that country we got fed up and decided to make the situation worse by invading. If it makes sense for the United States to support Ukraine against Russia in its current war, then ipso facto the United States must strive to achieve a better end-game than the one I describe above, and achieve it on the assumption that Russia’s conception of its national interests will not change in any material way. A Ukrainian battlefield victory, if it comes, will be a victory for a stubbornly independent people against an aggressive invader; it’s impossible for any lover of freedom not to cheer for such an outcome. Achieving peace in the wake of victory, though, is at least as important, and at least as challenging. Perhaps peaceful coexistence is impossible unless Russia changes fundamentally. But if you don’t believe Russia will change fundamentally, then that means peaceful coexistence is impossible, full stop.
What might that look like? To cite but one example, see this from Spiegel International:
Even as Putin turns off the gas tap to Europe, Russia continues to supply Belgrade with particularly cheap energy—and with weapons. In return, Russia wants loyalty, a demand that is tearing Serbia apart. “No one will be able to destroy our relations with Serbia,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently after his planned trip to Belgrade was canceled at short notice because Serbia’s neighbors denied access to their airspace. It sounded like a threat. Russia, after all, has made no secret of its desire to contain American influence in the Western Balkans.
The article goes on to quote Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama: “Russia would be thrilled if anything moves toward conflict in the Balkans. A good 80 percent of Russian Orthodox Serbs think positively about the way Putin is showing the West his balls in Ukraine right now, if I may put it that way.”Some News Is Good NewsIf some of that depresses you as much as it depresses me, now’s a good time to turn to my colleague Derek Thompson’s newsletter, Work in Progress, where he offers a compelling argument that the world is actually improving in striking ways. Citing a new report from the Gates Foundation that tracks progress on various global challenges, he writes:
Since 1990, poverty and hunger have declined dramatically while life spans have increased on every continent … The share of global smokers has declined by about 20 percent; children are roughly 30 percent less likely to be malnourished or stunted; rates of tuberculosis have similarly declined by about one-third; maternal deaths per live births have declined by 40 percent; the prevalence of neglected tropical diseases such as dengue and leprosy has declined by roughly 70 percent; and the share of the global population with access to toilets and safe plumbing has increased by 100 percent.
… Decades ago, public-health experts projected that about 5 million people would die of AIDS in 2020. In 2003, President George W. Bush announced a new policy, nicknamed PEPFAR, to combat the HIV epidemic around the world. At the same time, other countries and global-health organizations distributed millions of antiretroviral drugs throughout Africa, where cases were rising fastest. As a result, the number of global AIDS deaths has declined every year since 2005 to roughly 500,000 in 2020, according to the Goalkeepers Report. That means nine in 10 projected deaths were prevented thanks to the hard work and ingenuity of governments and public-health advocates …  
Another bright spot in global health is the decline of deaths in children under the age of 5. In 1990, more than 8 percent of children died before their fifth birthday. But that figure fell to 3.6 percent in 2021 … The number of famine victims in the 2010s was lower than in any decade on record … Today’s rate of famine deaths is about 99 percent lower than that of the late 1800s, despite the world’s population being roughly five times larger.
If humanity can avoid killing one another, even better times lie ahead.Monarch ButterfliesAt the Black Jacobin, Ralph Leonard opines on reactions to the Queen of England’s death, offering a critique of monarchy and the response of many people in Britain to monarchy––what he calls an “orgy of maudlin sentimentality and zealous adoration” that “has been nauseating and unbearable.”He writes:
This has always been one of the more bizarre practices of our culture. Only when the subject of monarchy and royalty is mentioned, do the British abandon every remnant of our supposedly typical stoicism, modesty, humour and reserve. We find it hilarious when North Korea invents fantastical tales of supernatural miracles around the life of their ‘Dear Leader’. Yet, the sight of clouds supposedly resembling the late Queen and rainbows being spotted over Buckingham Palace are widely reported as if it was a sign from the divine himself … We react with repulsion and mockery at other countries—usually dictators—where the hysterical veneration of mediocre individuals is part of official culture. Yet, we don’t recognise how unhealthy, how morbid the unwholesome cult of The Windsors is, in, for instance, the ubiquity of images of the late Queen wherever we may go, maintaining the precedence of the monarchy being the nation’s favourite fetish.
Even in countries with constitutional monarchies such as Norway, Holland and Spain, you do not see this level of collective psychosis colonise a culture. Alas, you can’t tell someone they’re not in love when they are. You can’t argue with someone’s faith and the intensity of feeling it arouses.
The monarchy, in our very secular society, more or less functions as a quasi-civic religion. A remnant of the sacred, of magic, of mystique, of tradition, of taboo, that many are desperate to cling onto in such a disenchanted world. It seems like a symbol of honest public service against the cynicism of mainstream politics. The flipside of this is a thin skin towards even the mildest criticism towards the monarchy and our society’s relationship with it, as demonstrated by the disgraceful arrest and jailing of a woman for simply holding a sign that read: Abolish The Monarchy!”, for breaking decorum in these sensitive of times.
Writing on the same subject at the Weekly Dish, the British-born Andrew Sullivan mounts a formidable defense of Queen Elizabeth:
You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy—but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery—two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger. The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay.
No one has expressed this better than C.S. Lewis:
“Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.”
The importance of this in a deeply polarized and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure. But it matters that divisive figures such as Boris Johnson or Margaret Thatcher were never required or expected to represent the entire nation. It matters that in times of profound acrimony, something unites. It matters that in a pandemic when the country was shut down, the Queen too followed the rules, even at her husband’s funeral, and was able to refer to a phrase—“we’ll meet again”—that instantly reconjured the days of the Blitz, when she and the royal family stayed in London even as Hitler’s bombs fell from the sky.
Every Brit has a memory like this. She was part of every family’s consciousness, woven into the stories of our lives, representing a continuity and stability over decades of massive change and dislocation. No American will ever experience that kind of comfort, that very human form of patriotism across the decades in one’s own life and then the centuries before.
A Controversy About ClassFor a brazen example of a politician exploiting the language of social justice to stigmatize legitimate criticism, read this quote and try to guess what behavior the elected official is defending:
As all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded and we are left to navigate alone. As the mother of a young child whom I live for, I am going to protect myself by any reasonable means in order to ensure I am there to see her grow into the strong woman I am raising her to be. Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn’t understand the world Black women walk in.
That is New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell righteously defending her decision to … bill taxpayers $30,000 for her first-class airline tickets rather than fly coach like the staff that accompanied her. You might be wondering why the mayor of New Orleans needed to fly repeatedly to Europe on city business. The “sister city” agreements that ostensibly needed signing just happened to be in what I would argue are fantastic destinations for vacation travel.“Her latest voyage to spark outrage was a $43,000 summer trip to France, where the mayor signed an agreement continuing an existing partnership with a small city on the Mediterranean Sea,” Nola.com reports. “The mayor’s airfare alone cost more than $18,000, including her upgraded seats.” If my city ever calls on me to do diplomatic outreach to Noto or Es Pujols or Le Lavandou or Split or Menaggio, I stand ready to serve, and I’ll settle for an exit row.Provocation of the WeekWriting in Reason, Stephanie Slade surveys the widespread claims that something has gone wrong in America, notes that the problem is often labeled polarization—as if the two major political coalitions are growing further and further apart from each other—and offers a different theory:
What if there’s a sense in which left and right are actually converging, and the nature of that convergence is the real source of the perception that something isn’t right? … The future of the parties is now a matter of live debate. But in both cases, the elements that seem to have the most energy behind them have something important in common: a desire to move their side, and the country as a whole, in an illiberal direction.
On the left, a new crop of socialists hope to overthrow the liberal economic order, while the rise of intersectional identity politics has supplanted longstanding commitments to civil liberties. On the right, support for free markets and free trade are more and more often derided as relics of a bygone century, while quasi-theocratic ideas are gathering support.
What has not changed—what may even be getting worse—is the problem of affective polarization. Various studies have found that Americans today have significantly more negative feelings toward members of the other party than they did in decades past. But partisan animosity suits the authoritarian elements on the left and right just fine. Their goal is power, and they have little patience for procedural niceties that interfere with its exercise.
That brings today’s installment to a close––thanks for reading.Would you like to share feedback on this or any of The Atlantic’s other newsletters? Please fill out this survey.

It’s late summer of 1998. Boy bands and Furbies are all the rage. Americans are being bombarded with unsolicited information about Brad and Jennifer’s nascent romance. And the nation is consumed by an entirely dishonest debate over the virtues of lying.

“Is it ever right to lie?” Philosophy professor Robert Solomon pondered in a syndicated op-ed. “Are all lies wrong? Or does deception serve such important functions as protecting us from harm, especially emotional harm?” In an infamous New York Times op-ed, author and JFK adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. answered in the affirmative to the latter question, especially as it relates to sexual peccadillos. “You lie to protect yourself, your spouse, your lover, your children,” he wrote. “Gentlemen always lie about their sex lives. Only a cad will tell the truth about his sexual affairs.” The question before the nation, the vanguard of Bill Clinton’s media praetorians insisted, wasn’t whether Bill Clinton lied in a deposition but whether he did so to serve some nobler end.

It’s no coincidence it was the 42nd president’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who distilled the scandal around the White House down to its most Clintonian essence. “If he’s lied, he should tell all now, apologize, and hope for the best,” Stephanopoulos wrote. “If he’s shaded the truth, it’s time to amend the record.” Thus, the debate around Clinton’s conduct was pulled from the Olympian heights of Kantian ethics back down to the grubby earth, where it belonged. The matter before America, in Stephanopoulos’s formulation, wasn’t whether Bill Clinton lied under oath. It’s whether he lied adroitly.

Much like your old AOL account and Nokia phone, this debate is adorably quaint today. What we used to consider proficient lying is a rare sight. When judging the performance of political professionals tasked with defending the indefensible, we used to gauge their acumen by how closely they adhered to the truth. Lying with aplomb involved lawyerly evasions, selective omissions, and careful emphasis—what we used to call “spin.” Bald-faced mendacities that any layman could disprove were considered, if not disqualifying, embarrassingly gauche. Today, “spin” is increasingly a thing of the past. Egregious untruths are an accepted feature of political discourse, so long as the lies are told boldly and without the slightest indication that the liar suffers from any pangs of conscience.

Though they did not pioneer the tactic, the Trump administration’s senior communications professionals refined its practice. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe,” former Press Sec. Sean Spicer insisted. This claim is easily debunked not just by readily available consumer data but the evidence of your own eyes. But it was the Atlantic’s Megan Garber who articulated why what Kellyanne Conway deemed “alternative facts” so offended the political class: It “isn’t merely their volume; it’s also their ineptitude,” she wrote. “The lies are lazy.”

The political class is no longer so offended by the lazy lie, it seems. Indeed, the lazy lie has become best practice.

“Prices have been essentially flat in our country these last two months,” White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre insisted on Monday in the wake of a report that found nothing of the sort. August’s consumer price index found food costs jumping by nearly a full percentage point in a single month. With the exception of gasoline, energy costs continued to rise. Shelter costs are up, as is the price of medical care, insurance, and education. Even a literal interpretation of the report’s topline finding that prices rose by 0.1 percent in August—a figure that would have been much higher but for the rapid decline in gas prices—doesn’t support Jean-Pierre’s claim, the caveat “essentially” notwithstanding.

This isn’t the sort of clever prevarication political media rewards, particularly since it was deployed to justify a pre-planned party on the White House lawn intended to celebrate the legislation the Democrats insist is anti-inflationary. Media’s initial impulse to tout how the report indicated that “inflation slowed for a second straight month” was soon replaced by casual contempt. “Biden celebrates ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ as food, rent prices climb,” Reuters reported later that day. After all, if the White House won’t play by the rules, why should the press?

“The border is secure,” Vice President Kamala Harris dissembled during a weekend appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” If there’s an immigration problem in this country, she added, it is only that Congress has failed to establish a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s illegal immigrant population. When pressed to restate her unbelievable claim, Harris again insisted “we have a secure border,” adding the caveat “in that that is a priority for any nation.” So, notionally at least, the border is secure insofar as nations tend to secure their borders.

No one needs to peruse Customs and Border Protection’s statistics on illegal border crossings to identify the vice president’s deception, though that’s easy enough to do. One need only be privy to the images of migrants crossing over America’s unsecured borders by the hundreds, in places where overwhelmed border-patrol officers can do little more than corral them into temporary shelters. Again, the maladroitness of the lie seemed to occasion as much frustration as the lie itself. “We have this administration—now including the vice president of the United States—lying to the American people,” said one incensed former CBP official in an interview published by CBS News.

The press is not above mercilessly fact-checking even Joe Biden when his misstatements are egregious enough to warrant the scrutiny. The New York Times took a scalpel to Biden’s factually deficient April 2021 address to the nation, in which he contended that he inherited no vaccination plan from the former president and that Covid had killed more Americans than all the wars the nation fought over the last century. During America’s bugout from Afghanistan, just about every major media outlet in the country savaged the president’s cravenly self-serving efforts to convince the public not to believe their lying eyes.

But that’s the low-hanging fruit. The press is willing to legitimize the administration’s tendentiousness when the lies are clever enough and, therefore, provide the president’s supporters with the chance to demonstrate their own cleverness. It’s a safe bet, for example, that the conventional definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth will make a return when it’s convenient. In that instance, the White House wasn’t lying; it was presenting to the public a highly curated version of the facts. Indeed so curated that the omissions may well constitute deception. But no one was telling untruths. They were merely spinning.

If there’s anything positive to say for spin, at least it makes a pretense of respecting your intelligence. Perhaps spin’s retreat from the political scene is an indication that the political scene no longer even pretends to have that level of respect for you anymore.

In July, the Swiss town of Lugano hosted dozens of high-level officials from around the world at a conference dedicated to the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine. “Recovery is a massive task,” the conference’s website announced, “and poses challenges of a magnitude that cannot be precisely measured at this point.”Thinking ahead and mobilizing resources for the period after the war is certainly praiseworthy. Future development assistance must not be not squandered or end up in the pockets of the self-seeking oligarchs who dominated Ukraine’s economy before the war.If Ukraine’s recent successes on the battlefield teach us anything, it would be a mistake to think of the country’s post-war reconstruction as an exercise that can be debated and planned for independently of the war itself. If anything, countries worried about Ukraine’s becoming a bottomless money pit for Western taxpayers down the road must be generous with assistance now, particularly military assistance. One single factor, above everything else, will determine if Ukraine becomes an economic success story or not: Whether or not it can decisively defeat the Russian invader.Here's a prediction. If Ukrainians do build on the weekend’s victories and restore the country’s full sovereignty, Ukraine’s reconstruction will be quick and easy—far outpacing the imagination of most experts. If they fail and some version of the territorial status quo degenerates through a ceasefire or through attrition into a frozen conflict, no amount of Western assistance, whether financial or technical, will make much of a difference.___STEADY_PAYWALL___The reason is simple. Post-war reconstructions are primarily about politics, not about finance or technocratic modalities of aid. If post-war politics goes right, all else will fall into place; if it goes wrong, everything else will go down the drain too.The post-war stories of Japan and Germany illustrate the point. In 1956, Japan’s per capita GDP was higher than in 1940, before the war. By the time that Marshall Plan funding started flowing to Germany and Western Europe in the late 1940s, much of the continent’s infrastructure had already been repaired.During the occupation period, U.S. financial assistance to Japan, worth $2.2 (a little over $30 billion in today’s dollars) represented several percentage points of Japan’s post-war GDP—comparable in relative size to, say, the EU’s funds flowing to “new” member countries—and primarily took the form of food assistance in the initial years. That assistance was quickly tapered off in the 1950s. The Marshall Plan was even smaller as a proportion of Western European economies—certainly far too small to make a macroeconomic difference.In both cases, what mattered was the broader political package that the assistance was a part of, which all together facilitated a new social contract that imposed itself through the fact of U.S. victory in the war, and which was conducive to democratic capitalism, albeit with local characteristics. By keeping dirigisme and Soviet-style planning at bay, it set the scene for some of the most extraordinary episodes of economic growth in human history: the “trente glorieuses” in Europe, and Japan’s catch-up growth that brought the economy to par with the leading industrialized nations of the West.To return to Ukraine: The success of its post-war reconstruction and the amount of aid it might require from Western donors is not a question that can be tackled independently from the outcome of the current war. If the conflict becomes a frozen one, with large parts of Ukraine under Russian occupation, the country will remain vulnerable to Russian destabilization. Presumably, there will be people moving back and forth and businesses that will want to operate both on Ukraine’s occupied territories and in free Ukraine. Those will represent a political challenge for the government in Kyiv—much like similar constituencies do for Moldova and Georgia. The all-but-explicit purpose of setting up such enclaves under Russian control is to provide Russia with a de facto veto over the politics of post-Soviet countries. It is hard to imagine either Moldova or Georgia joining the EU or NATO while such territorial disputes linger on; moreover, the Russia-backed “separatists” can always find ways to thwart the governments’ plans and extract concessions—oftentimes through the use of corruption or threats.The pro-EU government in Chișinău, for example, continues to tread very lightly around Transnistria not just because of the threat posed by Russia, but also because of the powerful economic interests that benefit from the status quo. Recently, the government renewed a license for Moldova Steel Works, a highly polluting steel mill mostly processing scrap metal in Rîbnița, Transnistria, which accounts for over half of the separatist region’s manufacturing output and which is currently owned by the separatist authorities. To avoid “double taxation,” the company does not pay any taxes into the Moldovan budget.Abkhazia and South Ossetia may be more insulated from the Georgian economy, but the Kremlin has found other levers over Georgian politics. The founder of the “Georgian Dream” party and the former Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, maintains significant business interests in Russia—while also retaining substantial clout in Georgian politics.The putative “federalization” of Ukraine under the Minsk agreements would have achieved the same outcomes through formal means: The two “people’s republics,” of Luhansk and Donetsk, while under Russian control, would get a seat at the table in Kyiv, including in the Verkhovna Rada. If the infamous deal were to have been implemented, Ukraine could have forgotten about EU and NATO membership—but more importantly, it would have had to scrap enacting reforms to eradicate corruption and strengthen the rule of law.Yet, as other Russia-sponsored “separatist” regions in Moldova and Georgia illustrate, the existence of a formal framework is not a necessary condition for such regions to become festering wounds on the body politic. Should the ongoing war in Ukraine result in anything other than a complete expulsion of Russia from the territories it occupies, it is almost guaranteed that the resulting dynamics would press against Kyiv’s efforts to get Ukraine’s social contract right.Imagine, in contrast, if Russian military efforts collapse completely and Ukraine retakes its territory, perhaps except for Crimea. Not only would the Kremlin be dramatically humiliated, but the opportunities for Russian interference into the political life of a victorious, self-confident Ukraine would be drastically reduced.

That does not mean that all of Ukraine’s problems would vanish. Iraq and Afghanistan provide examples of when an overwhelming military victory by the United States did not feed into a straightforward process of reconstruction and reform. The main reason there, arguably, was the lack of a genuine buy-in among the local population and elites—a non-existent problem in Ukraine, where the local population and increasingly also its economic elites have stood united in their embrace of deeper ties to the European Union and to the West.Getting the Russian military threat—and the Russian economy—out of the picture as much as possible is a necessary condition for progress within Ukraine, including on questions of the independence of its judiciary or domestic crony capitalism, involving Ukrainian oligarchs with ties to the Ukrainian government. One ought not to underestimate the geopolitical ramifications of a disastrous Russian defeat in Ukraine, which could present the West and pro-democracy, pro-market reformers across the post-Soviet space with opportunities similar to the end of the Cold War.In short, the rate of return on military assistance now exceeds by several orders of magnitude the rate of return Western donors can ever expect to receive on their aid once the war is over. If Ukrainians win this war, they will eventually be able to borrow internationally at tolerable rates, possibly even making future aid superfluous. If the conflict freezes and the Kremlin keeps its tentacles inside of Ukraine, Western money to repair roads, bridges, and hospitals will not change Ukraine’s grim political and economic prospects. It is past time Western governments set their priorities accordingly.Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor at The American Purpose. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.

This past May, June, and July, children detained in several Texas juvenile prisons were denied regular access to toilets, forced to urinate into empty water bottles and defecate on pieces of paper on the floor. According to The Texas Tribune, unable to keep the required child-to-staff ratio, staff at two Texas juvenile lockups kept children in their cells without access to bathrooms from 4:30 pm to 8:00 am on weekdays and up to 22 hours a day on weekends.
According to the Tribune, at Giddings State School "the children had no choice but to use water bottles, milk cartons, lunch trays or pieces of paper as makeshift toilets," during the longest periods of isolation. 
"During the July visit, the Ombudsman asked youth in all dorms whether this problem had improved. All youth stated the issue was the same or worse," state inspectors wrote. "Many said they still urinated in their water bottles or milk cartons, and three said they defecated inside their room, one in a lunch tray, one in a plastic bag, and one on a piece of paper. Multiple youth said they had submitted grievances … but nothing had changed."
Inspectors for the Texas Juvenile Justice System documented the accounts of incarcerated kids: "One said he would 'never forget' having to defecate in his room. Another said, 'Even animals are let out' to use the bathroom. A third said, 'This is inhumane.'" 
A similar situation appears to have occurred at another youth prison in North Texas, called the Gainesville State School, where juveniles reported that facility staff had given them cups to use as toilets, per the Tribune's reporting.
The children imprisoned at Giddings State School and Gainesville State School often have severe mental health problems. Hourslong lockdowns, during which children are denied access to basic hygiene, only exacerbate this.
Staffing shortages make monitoring severely mentally ill children difficult. According to the Tribune, nearly half of the youth in the state's prison system have been placed on suicide watch this year. One mother of a kid currently incarcerated at Giddings State School told the Tribune that her son "was able to cut himself because he wasn't being properly monitored, but the investigation was closed with no further action taken."
"[Kids] are self-harming because the mobile teams may take an hour to get there and they have to go to the bathroom. They are self-harming because they get to go to the clinic and the infirmary to have contact," Shandra Carter, the Texas Juvenile Justice Department's interim executive director, said during a June board meeting. Understaffing "could cause a significantly impaired ability to intervene in the increasing suicidal behaviors already occurring by youth struggling with the isolative impact of operational room confinement."
If a parent denies their child access to bathrooms for 22 hours a day, such actions are rightfully considered child abuse, and perhaps even grounds for the state to protect the child by removing them from their parent's care. When those children are imprisoned, apparently, state actors are free to deny young people in their custody even the most basic hygiene, with little recourse. 
The post Incarcerated Children in Texas Left Without Bathroom Access for 22 Hours appeared first on Reason.com.

Stewart Brand was born in 1938. In 1964, he was hanging out with Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters” at the center of the LSD counterculture described in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In 1966 he realized a satellite image of the Earth could be a powerful symbol for holistic environmental thinking, and launched a campaign to get such a photo released by NASA. In 1968, he succeeded, and the first satellite photo of the whole Earth, taken by the geostationary satellite ATS-3, appeared on the cover of Stewart’s famous counterculture zine The Whole Earth Catalog. Later that year, he was the cameraman for Douglas Englebart’s demonstration “Mother of All Demos,” which laid the foundations of interactive graphical computing. 
As a lifelong visionary and an adventurer with a unique mix of scientific education, Army officer experience, and classy pedigree, Brand participated in many of the key scenes and events of late twentieth-century American culture.
More recently, he is known for cofounding the Long Now Foundation, which has built a clock inside a mountain designed to run for 10,000 years to promote long-term thinking, and the Revive & Restore project, which is applying genetic technology to wildlife conservation, ideally including the resurrection of the woolly mammoth.
Stewart often warns that “we are as gods and have to get good at it.” Humanity has become a planetary force with an emerging planetary consciousness. What kind of civilizations emerge from taking that seriously? We called him up at his library north of San Francisco to discuss the future of man’s dealings with nature:
 
Wolf: We’ve recently been discussing where society ends and nature begins. How should we relate to ecosystem services and the ecosystem balance as parts of our industrial and social order?
Stewart: The only two magazines that I get anymore—I’ve got rid of everything else—are Palladium and Noema, Berggruen’s thing. Noema had this campaign—they interviewed Jerry Brown and me about it a while back—where they said, look, we’ve been thinking globally for a while now. And there’s some things for which it’s been great, when the global economy makes all the cities grow and we get out of poverty. But there’s also the planet, and the term “planetary economy” has no meaning. The dynamics of the planet are of a different order. And I think what you’re talking about here is getting those two whole-system bodies of thought to engage each other rigorously.
We used to talk about EGG: Emerging Global Governance. And the realization that, you know, it’s not done with black helicopters. It’s done with all the economists talking to each other and having a global economy to sort of share a frame of reference, and a body of economic thought to share thoughts about. Now that they’re using models instead of equations, they’re getting a little more predictive for a change.
That happened because of the Santa Fe Institute, where I served on the board for 14 years. The Institute was founded by bored nuclear physicists at Los Alamos. It’s often the case that biology moves forward when physicists get bored and decide that they can take their rigorous thinking and deploy it against biology. Sometimes that works. Mostly it doesn’t. But it worked to the extent that they were recognizing complex adaptive systems as being of a different order than those that had been studied before. So they reinvented cybernetics with computers. With the computers, they could do modeling. 
They got a bunch of economists and physicists together—basically their friends—and asked the question in a series of sit-down meetings in Santa Fe: “Is there anything we can talk about together? What we need to do first is become familiar with each other’s discipline enough to be able to talk at all.” So they flipped a coin to see who goes first—economists or physicists—and the economists went first. They had a Nobel Prize-winning guy (Ken Arrow) and some others in the group. They were really good economists. They got up and went to the board and started writing out the equations that were their current understanding of how you think economically. The physicists kind of glanced at one another. Finally, one of them raised their hand and asked, “What are you doing?” And the economists replied, “We’re writing the equations; we learned that from you!” And the physicist said, “We haven’t used equations in years.” And the economists said, “What do you use? You’re still doing physics, right?” And the physicists answered, “Well, we use models, don’t you?”
And what finally happened with the Santa Fe Institute is the economists said, “Okay, prove it. Model us some economics.” They came up with a concept which they called Bounded Rationality, which is what humans actually operate on. Most of economics up to that point had been based on “what would the rational person do?” and on a theory of games consisting of rational players, and so on. Then, they began to model large quantities of these creatures that had imperfect knowledge, or were doing the best they could with it. This was called agent-based modeling. And each of these players operated either on a different theory of the world, which we all do, or on different information that they had access to. How did they behave under those circumstances? The answer is that it’s a complex adaptive system. And there’s all of what goes on with chaos theory, like strange attractors and all of that—profound unpredictability in most cases. This then gave them the beginnings of a swing in economics actually, which flipped from witchcraft to become more predictive because they started to behave like weather forecasters.
This is Philip Tetlock’s contribution to intellectual thought: forcing people to make falsifiable predictions and state their degree of confidence in each prediction about what is going to happen and by when. You get the superforecasters who learned to do that and then learned from studying, basically, the video of the game. “How did that guy get by me on the basketball court? He did this other thing I’ve never seen before. Well, I’ve seen it now. Now it won’t happen again.” And so game two is different from game one. And that’s, ideally, what you can begin to do.
That’s why my wife, Ryan Phelan, who runs Revive & Restore, came up with the concept of “Intended Consequences,” which she immediately turned into a workshop and then into a paper. When we’re doing any kind of genetic work with wildlife that would lead to some kind of intervention on the ground, people would say, “You can’t do that because ecology is very complicated, and unpredictable. And you know, there will be unintended consequences, and you’ll be really sorry.”
So, it turns out nobody’s ever done the research to find out if that’s what actually happened with conservation interventions. All they knew about was things like cane toads in Australia, which was not done by conservation scientists. At the time, the scientists said, “Don’t do it! You will be really sorry!” And the agriculturists went ahead and did it anyway. And likewise, there were species introduced in Hawaii. Basically anytime you introduce anything larger than a bug to an island, it’s going to have deleterious consequences. That’s not so true on continents, by the way.
Anyway, some of our scientists did the research. There’s been about a thousand cases of intervention in the United States by wildlife conservationists where a species is introduced or reintroduced. And the “golden boy” story is the wolves of Yellowstone Park, or the beavers in Scotland, and so on. They’ve been gone for 400 years. They came back and immediately did good for everybody. So the question for these thousand interventions is, first, do they cause any harm? Because at the time, people often ran out of money fighting for the permission to try something that they knew damn well was going to work. Some things were surprising, but they didn’t matter. They were neutral. And sometimes the species didn’t take. So you’d say, well, it was a failure. But it’s not! It’s just that nothing bad happened, but no good thing happened either. But then, if they had the money, they would go back with the lessons learned from the first reintroduction and do it better the next time. And then even better the time after that. And by then, the animals are starting to learn how to behave in the environment, too. So they’ve got their own story going again. And that’s a success.
Nobody pays any attention when these interventions tail off into a success. It’s failures that are news. But we discovered that when it’s professional biologists doing the work, they don’t cause problems. There was one introduction in the southeastern United States which apparently led to the extinction of a local fish in the stream. It was just a local fish. And so the harm was local, and minimal. And only that one case!
Matt: I wonder if there’s some over-sensitivity in the biology world because there’s historical experience with pathogens. Today we could say, look at the dangers of gain-of-function research. But maybe those should be considered a totally different category.
I think it does. It’s mainly in medicine. Really only in the last century has it become worth your time to go to a doctor. From 1920 on, it started to become a slightly better bet to go to the doctor. Now, it’s a much better bet. And that has happened with an organism which we do not understand completely at all. We understand a whole lot. We can draw a map that is the size of the wall behind me of just the metabolic pathways, not only in humans but in any large animal. And so, are you going to have unintended consequences when you meddle in that? Yeah. But then you develop double-blind, phase-three research and whatnot to head off the possible harm. And by the time you finally deploy something, you have a lot of confidence it’s not going to cause any harm and it looks like it might cause some good. 
We are in the process of figuring out how to do that at a planetary scale. That’s what geoengineering is largely about. The best researchers, like David Keith at Harvard, are completely doing incrementalist research—way smaller than a volcano. I mean, the main information we have about solar geoengineering, so-called reflective stuff in the stratosphere, comes from the Mount Pinatubo eruption, and others which are way bigger than anything that humans would do. But we want to be able to do it for a while, and actually stop the temperature rise and even bring it down a bit. That way, we buy time to do all the other stuff so that climate is not an issue anymore. That will take one to two hundred years.
So anyway, I came to all that because of complex adaptive systems. You have to adopt the understanding that they are, in some senses, intractable to define in a way where you know for sure that it is going to do what you had intended. You never have complete enough knowledge to know that until you experiment in a number of small and illuminating ways. But once you do that, you can actually manage these very complex adaptive systems. And that’s what humans are taking on in this century, I think.
Wolf: So then, our big picture is this idea of complex adaptive systems in the context of the relationship between industrial civilization and our natural environment. A lot of people see human civilization and nature as opposed. Do you think we can find a more symbiotic relationship? That seems to be a theme in your work. What do you think that looks like?
I think it’s actually useful to keep the distinction between human activities and nature. I think that both nature and human activities in this century are in the process of learning to blend in with each other. But I think the distinction is actually helpful for doing that. What we do with intention, what we do with abstraction, what we do with language, and so-called culture involves a lot of Darwinian sorting. But it’s not Darwinian evolution in the sense that ideas have to individually reproduce in some fashion in order to carry on. We have broadcast capabilities that nature does not, for example.
What I know as a conservationist and from working with conservation biologists is that the rate of evolution has generally gone up since humans started having large impacts on all the kinds of environments that various creatures, plants, and microbiota live in. There’s this very good book, Inheritors of the Earth by Chris Thomas, that documents this increased rate of evolution. More and more, people are seeing wildlife in town: raccoons, foxes, coyotes in California. Everybody that shares a biome spends a lot of their time evolving in relation to one other.
And that’s coevolution, which is a profound concept. One of the most cited papers in all of biology is by Peter Raven and Paul Ehrlich, who was an advisor of mine at Stanford. He said it was a great paper to write with Peter because they didn’t have to do anything. They just had a couple of cups of coffee together, then reported on what they were finding in their research.
Coevolution is a profound concept that, I think, scales. It scales up from microorganisms to the planetary scale. Some of it is expressed in the Gaia hypothesis. Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis came up with that long ago and I got to print an early version of it. Actually, the Gaia hypothesis itself opened up a whole new avenue of nature and humanity, in a sense, taking each other seriously, and gave us the scale and scope to think about human activities having a planetary-scale impact. Gaia is different after humanity shows up and takes dominion. And presumably, Gaia never had a model of herself; the planetary self-regulating system got there by evolution, got there without self-consciousness, and got there without a model. But humans generate models all the time, we can’t help it. And the Gaia concept was a wonderfully inclusive model of engaging nature at planetary scale.
Wolf: One way that humans and nature then fit together, in a way that’s going to change both, is that we’re now in this position of modeling these planetary effects and the planetary ecosystem. And so we have to learn how to garden that ecosystem. And we have to learn how it affects us and how to integrate those things well.
A lot of this is kind of like medicine. And gardening in some respects, because of the “do no harm” injunction. In a way, the part humans are sorting out is moving beyond conquering nature. Danny Hillis made this point a while ago when we were starting the Long Now Foundation, that humanity’s story, up until pretty recently, has basically been humans learning to conquer nature, to master nature, to whip it to our aims. And that story is complete enough that we can move into the next mode, which is basically conquering ourselves in relation to nature and realizing that, while we can do everything, we should not do everything—we should only do some things and stop doing some things that cause undue harm.
And that’s part of why the idea and practice of de-extinction appealed to me, because it’s kind of a new level of thinking through undoing harm. We’re not going to bring back dinosaurs, but we can bring back the thylacine, the Tasmanian tiger. That one is well along right now. And it would be nice to have an apex predator back in Tasmania and in the parts of Australia that used to have thylacines. It’s not as crucial as something like a woolly mammoth, where we really need to get the mammoth steppe fully back, to help stabilize the climate over the long term.
Wolf: What distinguishes a reality-based framing on a problem like this as opposed to other ways of thinking about it? This is a concept you’ve used previously. Why is it important?
A guy named Rapoport said something that I quoted in the beginning of one of the books I did: “Knowledge will never replace respect in human dealings with nature.” You can know a lot, and generally the more you know, the better, but you’re never going to know it all. And so it’s about a certain amount of modesty. If you can’t manage humility, modesty will do. In the face of complex systems, it’s actually a prudent and usually necessary approach if you’re
doing anything that is going to stay useful. You can make big changes, but then they take on lives of their own. Some of the ways they go may not be what you wish would have happened. The models are always evolving. They’re evolving in terms of your ability to sense things, like getting knowledge of oceans at depth, for example. They evolve in relation to notions that people have of how to put ideas together in a way that’s effective in the world.
Science is about organized skepticism to determine what you keep having to come back to, because it’s the part that won’t change in relation to your opinions. And we’re sort of missing that in the public discourse right now: the idea that you can make up the world that you think the way you think is convenient, and then act on that. And that’s as important as what scientists turn up. It’s good that people got postmodernism and all that other stuff. Science is embedded in scientists who are human and fallible. But science takes account of that, in a way that strictly postmodern thinking doesn’t really allow for. There’s been this fashion these past years, maybe decades, to think of everything in terms of power relationships—gender, colonialism, and “late capitalism,” whatever that is, when those terms are not actually appropriate. It’s a simplistic filtering of experience and knowledge that you always want to bear in mind, but not fall completely into, where you can’t see anything else.
Wolf: You’ve mentioned that ecosystems and human society are complex adaptive systems. Can you say more about how we should approach those kinds of systems in theory and practice?
Back in the 1990s, climate scientists were getting worked up about what was happening with the Keeling Curve, that we were going to have way too much CO2 and methane, and that the atmosphere was going to heat up badly. And so they said, quite rightly, that we’ve got to mitigate the greenhouse gas getting into the atmosphere, which means we’ve got to mitigate the use of fossil fuels for energy. And then a guy named Jesse Ausubel, at Rockefeller University in New York, came up with a paper saying, absolutely, we need to do all that. And we’re probably not going to be able to do all of it as fast as we need to, just because there’s so much friction in the system. And so we need to think about adapting to temperature rises that are going to happen anyway. This was treated as a moral hazard violation [that adaptation would reduce the incentive to do the “right” thing, which is to mitigate fossil fuel use]. Efforts were made to destroy Jesse’s reputation. And so, adaptation was a taboo line of research and discussion for a decade or two. Now, could you have known at the time that this was actually a stupid thing to do?
Wolf: It seems pretty straightforward that you don’t want to shut down some line of questioning just because it might slightly take the pressure off some other important thing. There’s also a big dosing of bad faith in those things. There’s people who get attached to the idea of reducing fossil fuel usage, and bring in other unrelated motivations. It may be that for them, it’s not about global warming, it’s actually that they don’t like industrial society. And then anyone who’s providing solutions to the original problem becomes an enemy.
This is true of various kinds of intellectuals, including me, I’m sure. And this happened with my old teacher, Paul Ehrlich. He is a brilliant population biologist. He’s not a brilliant human population biologist, however, and so he actually became part of the problem by imagining that the authority with which he could speak about butterfly populations and co-evolution situations could be directly applied to human populations. And with his sense of humor, which is great, he became very persuasive on the Johnny Carson Show, and so on. And people who actually studied human demographics had a completely different view that was basically suppressed by Paul and my fellow environmentalists of that time— including me, by the way.
Wolf: This was the Population Bomb theory that human overpopulation was going to consume all the resources and cause a collapse?
Yeah, the Population Bomb theory probably appealed to us for a number of reasons. One of them is that it had this kind of algorithmic clarity. We weren’t looking at real data the way human demographers were at that time. And those demographers were seeing this thing in response to what they saw in the world, not in response to theory, which got named the “demographic transition.” It turned out that with the prospect of prosperity when women moved from the village to the city, they immediately stopped having seven children and had two instead. And then they would get them educated. So they’re trading seven ignorant children for two educated children. This is a good deal, and clear thinking by the women. And that is one of the mechanisms by which the demographic transition actually happens. But we still have people screaming about overpopulation.
Matt: There is this Weberian distinction between science and politics as vocations, that these are two fundamentally different domains that require very different types of thinking. They select for different types of individuals. If you look at the history of the twentieth century, did the fact that Oppenheimer was pivotal in the creation of the bomb give him some special privilege? Should the atomic scientists themselves have a special privilege to talk about the use of nuclear weapons, or is that actually out of their domain of expertise? This question of the relationship between sciences, and between science and politics, seems to be at the center of so many of our controversies.
On that particular subject, we saw the whole idea of nuclear winter. Friends of mine, like Carl Sagan, bought into it, and the JASONs [scientific groups that advised the U.S. government] looked at it. Freeman Dyson was part of the JASONs at that time, and they could not make sense of the numbers. And over a few years, some scientists did put in some time to try and understand it. They came up with, at most, a “nuclear autumn.” And that’s part of why Freeman then was dubious about climate change, because he had been through that thing with the nuclear winter exaggeration. And he feared that there was exaggeration going on with the climate. And there is, by the way, a lot of exaggeration in relation to climate. That is not to say it isn’t going on in the biggest way. But the main event gets put in apocalyptic terms, and I think that’s completely misplaced.
And then that shifts over into another discussion: is apocalyptic thinking good for anything whatsoever, other than excitement? My girlfriend in the 70s was Stephanie Mills, the woman who got up in front of the Mills College and was valedictorian or whatever she was, and said she was not going to have children, because the world is overpopulated. And it would be irresponsible of her to think about having children. To her credit, she never did. But it was actually a goofy thing that my generation got up to. It was based on nothing, it turned out.
Matt: You’re saying, it wasn’t just a pose or a theory to believe in overpopulation, people really changed how they lived.
Yes. And they are now! There are people figuring “I’m not going to have children because it’s going to be a hot world, and all these other bad things are going to happen.” And therefore, don’t reproduce. Part of it is, I think, a scale error. Maybe it’s even a pacing error of some kind.
David MacKay, who was Chief Scientific Advisor to the British government, wrote a great book on global warming. One of the things he addressed is people who are imagining that their personal behavior is going to save the world, like people who will unplug their phone charger when it’s not actually charging their phone. As if that was anything other than performative virtue signaling. He said, “Let’s look at the actual energy involved here. And then I’ll compare that to one bathtub that this person takes and the heating that was involved with getting the waters to the right temperature they like.” And how many mega-years of not having your phone charger plugged in does it take to match one bathtub? And so just keeping the scale of things in mind helps a lot.
So there’s over-personalizing stuff. “Live the change you want” is, in some respects, a really valid idea. But not in all respects, I think. It reminds me a little bit of landfills back in the day. In the 1970s, we got all worked up about landfills. And then this guy did a book that looked into what actually goes into the landfill. Is it those terrible burger-enclosing plastic things that you get along with your burger at a fast food joint?
Or is it building materials? Turns out, it’s mainly building materials in the landfills. It’s buildings and all the spare parts, all the spare leftover boards you can’t use after all, and all this kind of stuff. I’m becoming somewhat of a fan of landfills. I think it’s a great way to sequester carbon.
Matt: Does this mean you’re anti-recycling, Stewart?
Well, a lot of recycling is kind of like the newspaper drives during the wars, that I actually remember. In World War II, we had to go out and collect everybody’s newspapers, and they were bundled up and sent off to the government for some purpose that we never understood. And it turned out there was no purpose and actually, it was just something to mobilize citizens so they’d be part of the cause.
Wolf: It reminds me of this story in rural Canada during World War II: they had people guarding a bridge just in the middle of nowhere in the prairies, as if the Germans or whoever were going to show up.
Can you imagine how much fun that is? Actually spotting airplanes, and learning all the various airplane silhouettes and whatnot. There were aspects of World War II that were great fun, if you weren’t in combat.
Matt: All that gets to this important question about the scale at which we intervene to solve these problems. I think there’s a tendency, especially in the mass media age, to make everything about the individual: if only I were to sacrifice going on an airplane, and so would everyone else, then we would solve the problem. In fact, more often the scale has to be at the level of the state or of collective action.
I think with the climate, it’s useful to ask what the things are that actually function at the scale that you want for the result that you need—in this case, a planetary scale. And thinking through that reversed my opinion about nations, in the sense that nation-states still pretty much control their tax systems. To the extent that you want to use the tax apparatus to make coal and gasoline expensive and clean forms of energy cheap with a carbon tax, the UN can’t do that. Nonprofits can’t do that, businesses can’t do that. Only governments can pass laws and enforce them. And likewise with geoengineering, with sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere you don’t have to go to planetary scales to start finding out to what extent it can work. You do it in tiny, tiny amounts. It actually changes things in the direction that you want, without causing regional problems like stopping the monsoon— that would starve India, or cook India.
But unilateral geoengineering has been treated as the great crime that might come out of taking geoengineering seriously. Somebody might just go off and do it without asking everyone else’s permission. And this is where you get into a really interesting mode of this century, having to think through global permission for planetary actions. Do you need to get total unanimity of everyone on Earth saying, “Okay, let’s do it”? Do you need to get unanimity of all the nations? Of most of the nations? Measuring how? These kinds of things will be worked through in this century.
Wolf: To continue the question of scale of action, this also gets to sort of what time-scale we are acting on. It’s like your idea of pace layering: you want to act and learn at the appropriate pace in relation to the phenomenon, or else you risk reacting too fast or slow.
When I was studying organic chemistry for my biology degree, it felt like special cases all the way down. But that’s not actually true. Physicists like Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute came along and said, well, there is a scaling effect. It is clearly the case that—they call it Kleiber’s law—that large animals have slower heartbeats and live a long time, and tiny animals have very rapid heartbeats and live a short time. It turns out that mice and elephants both have the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. And the difference has to do with scale. Mice are small, but the network effects of being a mouse are quite different from the network effects of being an elephant.
Geoffrey West’s book Scale went on to look for Kleiber’s law in human institutions like cities. Cities, in particular, have a reverse relationship: the bigger they get, the faster they go, instead of slower. And this frightened him! At least, more than it frightened me. He believed that clearly the great thing about cities is, yeah, they create these extra problems, but because they’re faster at everything they can come up with solutions to the problems that they cause faster than they caused them. And therefore, they get bigger and more advantageous, and pretty soon you’ve got a whole urban global civilization. And then he just sort of hit some kind of interior wall, thinking “this can’t go on!”
He thought that infinite acceleration is not something that humans can live with, that it’s going to just slow down and break. So he was worried about a collapse that may come about from these cities getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster, until something breaks in a big way. I’m not persuaded by that. And maybe it’s because by training, I’m a biologist and he’s a physicist. I just see so many ameliorating Gaia-like mechanisms that biology has to manage big change.
I mean, the planet’s shift from anaerobic to aerobic life as the primary life form was a huge and seemingly catastrophic change. Certainly, if you’re an anaerobic microbe, you didn’t like it. But the great oxygenation worked out actually pretty well—so we oxygenating organisms say. You might think the anaerobic guys that have to hide down in the soil are saying, “Yeah well, fuck you! We’re down here hating you to this very moment!” But none of that happens. I’m pretty sure they don’t even know.
Wolf: You’ve been around for many decades working on all of these problems, meeting all the key people in the field and seeing how things have changed over time. What do you think are the most important lessons from these last decades that we need to be carrying forward?
I’m trying to figure out if apocalyptic thinking is actually destructive, or just a waste of time. How much longer will the term “existential threat” be something that we are constantly hearing in the high intellectual public discourse? It’s gotten so generalized, you can say it about anything now. “Is Trump an existential threat?”
Martin Rees, the former Astronomer Royal, is a friend in England. I was trying to think of the real existential threats. I thought, well, there are comets that are pretty rogue and are pretty big. We can head off asteroids pretty well now, but comets are probably not in that category. So I wrote Martin and asked him, should I be worried about a comet hurtling in and blasting into Earth? And he said that the odds of that are so close to zero that you might as well consider them to be zero.
This is a guy who came up with a bet with Steven Pinker about how there’s going to be a million people dying from bio-error or bioterror. And we thought that Steven won in 2020. But there’s still the question of COVID-19, which has killed more than a million people worldwide— was that a case of bio-error, getting out of the Wuhan lab? That’s still not decided yet. So those guys are relitigating the bet.
But anyway, Martin Rees is the one who was saying he expected a million people to die from a bioterror or bioerror. He’s not a biologist, but if it did escape from the Wuhan lab, he was right. Was that an existential threat to humanity? Not even close.
Wolf: There’s a lot of these sorts of risks that are very disruptive and cause a lot of trouble, but our ecology and our civilization are incredibly deep in their resilience. For example, the last time an asteroid big enough to matter hit Earth was 65 million years ago. That’s a long time. Like Rees says, statistically it’s not happening again any time soon. But even then, life goes on.
Even then, life goes on. Exactly. This is what I’ve sort of realized, you know, if we had a major nuclear exchange—life would go on. Differently, but mostly in recognizable ways. I did put this question up on Twitter the other day. I was thinking in the morning, pulled out the coffee—actually, I was reading Palladium—and I got thinking about civilization, thanks to you guys. And I put up this question: Individual civilizations come and go. Civilization continues. It has for five to ten thousand years. So when you think about a global civilization, does that mean that therefore it’s deeply fragile? Or deeply robust? Which lesson do you draw?
Wolf: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know the answer.
Matt: Well, while we have a global civilization at a certain level of analysis, we also have the diffusion of certain kinds of technologies, of certain ways of thinking and doing politics and economics. There’s still a lot of deep cultural distinction between, say, Japanese and Indians, or Africans and Americans and Europeans. So in a sense, that would make me optimistic about a sort of resiliency.
You have this modern, technological civilization that’s diffused among many different deeper historical cultures. These existential risk questions don’t really get resolved or mitigated by this phenomenon I’m describing. But what it might mean is that even if you had some major crisis in say, the Anglosphere or in India, it would not necessarily cascade or translate into a global catastrophe. When Rome collapsed, that culture was only one instantiation of their peak technological development. Or is that not the case now?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think that global civilization is robust, for some of the reasons we just discussed. There’s a fair amount 
of variety, and it’s one of the things that culture does. It’s one of the things that nations do. And even Jared Diamond’s book Collapse ends with him saying that all of these prior civilizations that collapsed didn’t know about each other. But we know about all of them, right? And ourselves. That awareness means that we do not take longevity for granted, which these other civilizations did.
And so in that sense, the concept of existential risk is a good one to have out there. It’s probably not one to obsess over. Yeah, things really can end, at any scale you want to think about. But at a giant scale there’s a lot of micro-robustness built in. There’s a lot of subsidiarity built in, of these various things operating regionally, at different rates, independently of each other. Or even contrasting enough between each other in terms of pace layers that the system can handle shocks.
Wolf: You know, it reminds me a little bit of the story of the Tower of Babel, where humanity comes together and builds this big central civilization to control everything. It’s fragile and hubristic. But once you do that, all the ambition in the system is towards differentiation, and the system fragments back down to some stability. God has a plan for this, so to speak.
I guess every now and then people get experimental. They learn the hard way, but it works out.
That was one of the things going on over the PA system at Woodstock. “Don’t eat the brown acid! Brown acid is bad acid!” That was all being managed by the Hog Farm, because they were running the overdose tent, the tripping tent. And you saw kids coming in really bad. And so you sort of ask them through there, what kind of acid did you take? Oh, the brown acid. Okay, no brown acid! That’s the Ken Kesey approach to science. “If you don’t boil rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won’t make you drunk?” And I think that actually, societies at various times get into that mode of “screw it, let’s do it!” And it’s a good thing. You know, some hippies died, some went crazy and stayed crazy. But that boldness, that fearlessness made it an exciting time to be around. And because everything was illegal, everything had to go by word of mouth. And we’re talking about reality: what’s the real world that you fall back on? Personal experience is the real world that you fall back on, to some extent. And if you have avenues to transmit that, talking with the hitchhiker you picked up because they were dressed like you are, information gets around.
And then that flew in the face of the going theories! “No hope without dope!” Well actually, there’s such a thing as too much dope. I just saw that Kim Stanley Robinson, in the beginning of his wonderful book The High Sierra, is talking about how when he was dropping acid in the 1970s, he grew up in Newport Beach in Southern California. And then he went up into the mountains. And he says, “I got high and I never came down.” And he’s been in love with the High Sierras ever since. What does that say? That youthful folly has its functions for society.

Wolf Tivy is editor-in-chief of Palladium Magazine.
Matt Ellison is Executive Editor of Palladium Magazine.
The post “Life Goes On” With Stewart Brand
 appeared first on Palladium.

In July 2021, President Joe Biden was asked by a reporter whether he had any message for platforms like Facebook. "They're killing people," he replied. "The only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people."
His press secretary at the time, Jen Psaki, and legions of Democrats rushed to his defense, saying Biden was referring to so-called "misinformation" spread on the platform by the "disinformation dozen"—some 12 or so accounts deemed responsible for the vast majority of the platform's vaccine-skeptical content. But Biden, Psaki, and others in the administration have frequently used White House podiums to make bold and inexact claims about the harm posed by social media companies, either implicitly suggesting or more explicitly demanding that these companies change their content moderation practices in line with the administration's preferences.
"Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts," Psaki said from her official perch, adding that "you shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation," as if one platform has any control over the decisions made by the other.
This type of government pressure, as well as "bullying, threatening, and cajoling" that attempts "to sway the decisions of private platforms and limit the publication of disfavored speech" is known as jawboning, and is the subject of a new report put out by Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. "Left unchecked, [jawboning] threatens to become normalized as an extraconstitutional method of speech regulation." More:
"Jawboning occurs when a government official threatens to use his or her power—be it the power to prosecute, regulate, or legislate—to compel someone to take actions that the state official cannot. Jawboning is dangerous because it allows government officials to assume powers not granted to them by law."
In summer 2021, for example, "Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on health misinformation, including eight guidelines for platforms," following the Psaki and Biden comments. "On its own, the advisory would have been inoffensive, but statements by other members of the administration suggested sanctions for noncompliant platforms," writes Duffield.
"White House communications director Kate Bedingfield completed the jawboning effort during a Morning Joe interview. Prompted by a question about getting rid of Section 230, she replied, 'we're reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable, and I think you've heard the president speak very aggressively about this …' By gesturing at changes to the intermediary liability protections that social media platforms rely on, Bedingfield added a vague threat to the administration's demands. …
By raising the specter of changes to, or the repeal of, Section 230, the Biden administration made a roundabout threat. Repealing Section 230 would not make vaccine misinformation unlawful, but it would harm Facebook by exposing it to litigation over its users' speech. By demanding the removal of misinformation and threatening repeal, the administration sought to bully Facebook into removing speech that the government couldn't touch."
Duffield has worked to track prominent examples of jawboning (database found here, replete with examples of censorship attempts by politicians of both parties). Though "not every demand is paired with a threat," he writes, "all the demands are made in the course of discussions about potential social media regulation."
"In general, we know that a lot of jawboning happens behind closed doors," Duffield tells Reason. "There were, prior to 2016, a couple of high-profile cases like Wikileaks," he notes, "but the current era of normalized platform jawboning really begins after the 2016 election." He highlights Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D–Calif.) social media crackdown attempts on purported Russian disinformation back in 2017, as well as the possibility that Twitter's decision to limit the circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story was due to how the company had come under fire, trotted before Congress, and subsequently strengthened their hacked materials policy. "If they didn't take that down, and it turns out to be a foreign op, and it changes the course of the election, they're going to be right back testifying in front of Congress, hammered with regulation and fines," noted disinformation researcher Clint Watts, according to the Cato report.
Some platforms have been broadly resistant to government officials' demands, whether explicit or implied. The cloud-based instant messaging service Telegram, Duffield notes, is "notorious for ignoring both requests and court orders," but this is probably due to the platform not being based in the U.S.; it thus has less reason to comply with U.S. laws than platforms like Facebook and Twitter. (Telegram, it's worth noting, is beating out competitors like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in much of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, including, interestingly, in both Ukraine and Russia.)
But Telegram's case is sadly an exception to the rule. Whether it's congressional staffers pressuring social media employees to make certain content moderation calls behind closed doors or sitting U.S. senators asking tech CEOs to testify before them—and sit pretty for their grandstanding and hectoring—"it is not the job of Congress to oversee, second guess, or direct the decisions of private intermediaries," writes Duffield. "Such oversight presumes a role in speech regulation that the Constitution specifically denies Congress."
It's not just Section 230, and changes to liability protections that members of Congress and Biden administration officials threaten companies with. "While some changes to Section 230 would change how platforms moderate speech, antitrust would harm or dismember the noncompliant firm," says Duffield.
This may well be the disturbing bipartisan future of jawboning.
The post How Government Officials Bully Social Media Companies Into Censorship appeared first on Reason.com.

Almost seven months into the Russia-Ukraine war, China is still claiming to be a neutral party, despite the evidence. And when Vladimir Putin meets Xi Jinping this week, the falsity of that claim will come into full and dramatic view. China’s increasing support for Russia is driving some in Ukraine to push for closer cooperation with Taiwan, a fellow democracy under threat.

The Ukrainian government has been careful to walk a fine line in its relations with Beijing and Taipei. Even though Xi and Putin pledged a partnership with “no limits” when they last met in February, the idea that Ukraine should develop closer ties with Taipei has been controversial in Kyiv. Now, a leading Ukrainian lawmaker is publicly calling for just that, arguing it’s in the interest of both democracies. And what’s more, he’s right.

Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a member of the ruling party, told me in an interview that although Beijing is not directly supplying weapons to Russia, Beijing is aiding Moscow’s war effort in many ways. China, he said, is helping Russia evade sanctions; purchasing Russian food, energy and gold; and promoting Russian disinformation about Ukraine through its state-run propaganda machine. Given that, Beijing’s offer to be a peace mediator is a nonstarter.

“I view China as an ally of Russia, an ally of the enemy. They are not neutral,” Merezhko told me. “They are working in support of Russia. How can they be honest brokers? I don’t see it.”

The Ukrainian government’s resistance to calling out Beijing and explicitly embracing Taiwan is understandable. China remains Ukraine’s largest trading partner, and Beijing often uses economic coercion to punish countries that move closer to Taiwan. But the usefulness of that policy is now outweighed by the need for Ukraine and Taiwan to work together, Merezhko told me.

In Kyiv, Merezhko has started a Taiwan friendship caucus for Ukrainian lawmakers, prompting complaints and pressure from the Chinese Embassy there. That’s the least Ukraine can do, he said, considering how much Taiwan has supported Ukraine since the war began. Taipei has applied sanctions against Russia and provided Ukraine with money, food and medical supplies.

Some Ukrainian leaders fear that China could begin to arm Russia if Kyiv moves closer to Taiwan, but Merezhko said that that fear is misplaced. Beijing is restrained by the threat of U.S. sanctions, not because it is militarily neutral. In fact, more than 2,000 Chinese troops are training with the Russian military right now.

Also, several other European countries maintain relations with both China and Taiwan, he pointed out, so why should Ukraine (as an aspiring European Union member) be any different? Ukraine can’t claim to be fighting to defend global democracy but then leave Taiwan to be preyed on, he said.

“If you don't stand up for democracy when it is threatened in other countries, eventually all democracies will lose,” he said. “We should stick together.”

Merezhko is in Washington this week for the first U.S.-based summit of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a grouping of international lawmakers who want to coordinate the democratic world’s response to China’s rise. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are Congress’s top representatives to the group.

Menendez and Rubio are supporters of the Taiwan Policy Act, a new bill meant to bolster U.S. diplomatic and military support for Taiwan. The Biden administration is reportedly concerned that the legislation could inflame already tense relations between Washington and Beijing. But Rubio said time is running out to save Taiwan from a brutal attack that will have global reverberations.

“If the Chinese Communist Party is successful in subjecting the people of Taiwan to living under tyranny, it will be a moment that will steer the course of human events for generations,” he said at the summit.

While in Washington, Merezhko is also trying to convince U.S. policymakers that Ukraine should be provided with greater numbers of advanced weapons, especially considering the remarkable success of the Ukrainian army’s current counteroffensive. Congress is about to consider a spending bill that would include a new Ukraine aid package totaling $13.7 billion. Some GOP lawmakers and political groups have expressed concerns about the funding.

“We have proved that we cannot only survive, but we can defeat the enemy. But we need more support,” Merezhko said. “We are very grateful. We are alive because of your support. But please give us more heavy weaponry.”

National security adviser Jake Sullivan told the Aspen Security Forum in July that giving Ukraine additional advanced weapons could further provoke Putin and spark World War III. Merezhko rejected that argument, calling it a Russian narrative meant to stop the West from helping Ukraine more.

“World War III has already started; it’s just that it has taken hybrid forms,” he told me. “We are already in this global war between democracies and authoritarian regimes.”

As the authoritarian bloc organizes against the West, the democratic side can’t afford to straddle the fence between China and Taiwan. Ukraine is moving slowly but surely to recognize and treat Taiwan as the ally that it is. All other democracies should follow suit.

Most people who have gone through a pregnancy, or watched someone close to them go through one, know that there are certain white-knuckle benchmarks. At 10 weeks, you can get a blood test that checks for some prenatal genetic disorders, but it can tell you only your risk level. “Most of the time we make diagnoses around things like fetal abnormalities, genetic abnormalities, at around 15 to 20 weeks, when we can do an amniocentesis,” said Dr. Kristyn Brandi, an OB-GYN and abortion provider in New Jersey and the board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

Then, at 20 weeks, pregnant patients are typically offered an anatomy scan, which checks, among other things, for problems like anencephaly, in which a fetus’s brain and skull fail to develop.

Graham would condemn every single woman who gets disastrous news from her amnio or her anatomy scan to carry a doomed pregnancy to term, unless she could prove that it was going to kill her. Whether thoughtless or deliberate, the cruelty of this is almost unfathomable.

Politically, Graham’s bill is a boon to Democrats. He seems to have been trying to shift the focus of the abortion debate to later abortions, where Republicans think they can paint their opponents as extremists. Instead, he has underlined Republican callousness toward the abortion patients likely to elicit the most public sympathy.

But Democrats shouldn’t be gleeful. Republicans have shown themselves willing to impose such draconian prohibitions in places where they have complete power. Recently, Kailee Lingo DeSpain, who said that in the past she was “your quintessential pro-life Texan,” told CNN about having to leave the state for an abortion after finding out that her fetus had heart, lung, brain, kidney and genetic defects and “would either be stillborn or die within minutes of birth.” How, asked DeSpain, “could you be so cruel as to pass a law that you know will hurt women and that you know will cause babies to be born in pain?”

At the moment, Republicans don’t have the ability to impose such a regime on the entire country. Nor are many of them interested in talking about national bans; some Republicans were furious at Graham for thrusting the issue into the spotlight. But Graham was probably right when he said, “If we take back the House and the Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” So far, Republicans have tried their best to give the anti-abortion movement what it wants. When Graham tells us what they intend to do to us, we should listen.

There was a party at the White House on Tuesday.
Folk singer James Taylor was on hand to entertain a crowd of hundreds gathered on the South Lawn. The crowd included union leaders like Randi Weingarten, executive branch officials, and prominent Democratic elected officials that, according to Deadline, the White House had invited from "far and wide"—at least as far away as K Street.
"This achievement is a testament to our unity, our optimism, our persistence, along with the tireless efforts of a devoted staff," said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) during her turn at the podium. "Mr. President, thank you for unifying and inspiring a vision of a stronger, fairer, safer future for all," she added. "Your extraordinary leadership has made this glorious day possible."
"That's an applause line," Pelosi paused awkwardly to remind the assembled crowd, which dutifully complied.
Meanwhile, in the real world, no one was applauding. Tuesday afternoon looked anything but glorious.
An ugly consumer price index report released earlier in the day by the Department of Labor showed that inflation was still untamed, and it sent the markets into a spiral. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 1,200 points, or nearly 4 percent. The S&P 500 tumbled by 4.3 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite took the worst beating of all, falling by 5.2 percent. Overall, it was the worst day for the stock market since June 2020, a painful reminder that Americans are stealing dealing with the twin scourges of rising prices and falling investment returns. We are paying more and getting less.
But at least the politicians had a nice party!
The White House probably couldn't have picked a worse day to celebrate the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Despite its name, the bill is mostly a package of Democratic domestic tax and spending agenda items. The biggest portion involves a series of subsidies for green energy. Whatever merits that might have, it's not going to reduce inflation.
The only part of the bill that does address the country's high and rising prices was a provision to use some new tax revenue to pay down about $300 billion of the federal government's staggering budget deficit. But that's already been wiped out, as President Joe Biden's decision to forgive student loans for an estimated 43 million people will end up adding even more to the deficit.
The hard truth is that there isn't much that politicians can do to bring inflation under control because it is a phenomenon of monetary policy. Reckless fiscal policy that demands heavy borrowing and printing can—and has—set off inflation, but once the tiger is out of the cage there is little to be done except wait for higher interest rates to cool the economy. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is largely responsible for actually combating inflation, has indicated that the fight won't be won quickly or easily. (The Fed is expected to raise interest rates again next week.)
All we can ask of politicians is that they stop making the situation worse by spending even more money, and that they stop celebrating the mess they've made while average Americans struggle to pay for groceries.
On Tuesday, Democrats failed on both counts. The only purpose the South Lawn party served—besides calling to mind George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech and that time John Kerry trotted out Taylor to sing "You've Got a Friend" to the victims of a terrorist attack—was confirming how hopelessly out of touch these elected leaders and their friends are.
Credit CNN's Alisyn Camerota for having the best reaction to what was unfolding. As she pivoted the network's coverage from the White House party to the bad news coming from Wall Street, Camerota said what we all were thinking: "Feels like it's hard to be celebratory."
But that's only true if you live in reality.
The post As Inflation Soars, Biden Hosts Cringey Concert Celebrating the Inflation Reduction Act appeared first on Reason.com.

I am sure you have heard someone you know comment that they think the United States is heading for a civil war. There are plenty of news articles and op-eds with ominous warnings that “the US edges closer and closer to civil war” (The Guardian) and that there is “an alarmingly persuasive case that the warning lights are flashing redder than at any point since 1861” (Financial Times). A widely-discussed book, Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start, purports to quantify the risk using the tools of political science, saying that (as the New York Times summarizes), “the United States is firmly within the ‘danger zone’ of a ‘five-point scale’ measuring factionalism and a ‘21-point scale’ measuring a country’s ‘polity index,’ where a full autocracy gets a -10 and a full democracy gets +10.” Stephen Marche, author of The Next Civil War, says the country “is already in a state of civil strife, on the threshold of civil war.” Marche’s book is based “upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts—civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists.” The book opens: “The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how.”
Marche is a novelist, and while his book is intended as a serious work of analysis drawn from those “sophisticated predictive models,” he mostly uses the techniques of dystopian fiction to try to scare the bejeezus out of his audience. A representative passage, taken from one of his various speculative scenarios about how the next U.S. civil war will start (this one about a conflict between a rogue sheriff and the U.S. military): 

“The morning will be a harvest of ashes. Bodies litter the banks of the river. Panoramas of the bridge and the town reveal shattered corpses and craters, a quiet rural town turned into the kind of battleground scene remembered from military adventures in the Middle East. A photo captures a severed hand in the street. An orphaned child wails in a whirl of dust. The army loads bulk groups of prisoners into buses for processing in a small POW camp in the neighboring county, under the watch of cameras at a distance. CNN mourns the death of a unified country. Fox News mourns the death of liberty. Factual descriptions of the battle are indistinguishable from the conspiracy theories that light up the internet with fantasies of imminent white genocide, Chinese infiltration of the Fifth Army, Jewish cabals, the nefarious influence of the CIA and other governmental agencies, alien invasions, stories of angels coming to the aid of the Sheriff, strange beams of light illuminating the battle. The horror overwhelms; the hunger for revenge grows with what it feeds on. The slaughter bolsters the righteousness. There is no collective mourning, only panicked preparations and fury.”

Walter’s book, too, contains descriptions of the specific way the next civil war might start: 

“In the United States, one could imagine the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers eventually forming an alliance. (Rebel groups in civil wars frequently join forces, if only temporarily.) The new unified group might then decide to sign a peace deal with the federal government, guaranteeing no future gun control legislation and a significant reduction in immigration—or any set of terms that would be acceptable to a majority of the group’s supporters. By definition, the most radical anti-government and white supremacist groups would be left out of this deal because no compromise would help them achieve their ultimate goal: the establishment of a white ethno-state. Their only recourse would be to try to scuttle the deal. And the best way to accomplish that would be to trigger a civil war.”

Who would be on the other side of this war? Armed leftists, apparently. On the other side might be “armed groups, such as the Socialist Rifle Association—which is dedicated ‘to providing working class people the information they need to be effectively armed for self and community defense’—and the Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC), a Black nationalist militia group that supports self-policing and firearms training in Black communities”: 

“Whether or not the United States will find itself in a security dilemma depends on whether those on the left—liberals, minorities, city dwellers—decide they should also arm themselves. There’s some evidence that this is already starting to happen: The loose affiliation of left-wing activists known as antifa, who define themselves in opposition to fascism, nationalism, and racism, have grown more active in the past few years. In the spring of 2017, for example, antifa launched hammers, pipes, and homemade explosives at alt-right protesters in California…”

Now, I am not certain whether Antifa members “launched hammers, pipes, and homemade explosives” at alt-right protesters (Walter appears to take the claim from an article that itself attributes the claim to the Washington Post, although the linked Post article contains no mention of hammers and explosives and instead says Antifa had “homemade shields,” “sticks,” “pepper spray,” and “water bottles.” The distinction may appear small, but if the effort is to scare people about Antifa, there is a difference in the lethality of explosives and sticks, and Antifa members tend to be more likely to get in fistfights or throw vegan milkshakes on people than to plot bombings—albeit with the occasional exception.) But either way, an intelligent person interested in carefully assessing the likelihood of a new civil war will ask whether these are a series of unrepresentative anecdotes or whether the Socialist Rifle Association really seems like it’s going to be party to a major war anytime soon.

I’ve previously noted, in critiquing the way the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) discusses “hate groups,”1 that the threat of particular groups is often unclear because their membership numbers are not reported. The SPLC lists the number of groups but not how many people are in them, and in doing so keeps us from understanding how widespread the phenomenon we’re seeing really is. If a new civil war is going to break out between “extremist” groups, it would help to know how popular these groups are. Antifa, to me, appears to be pretty limited in their reach. Their antics make the news, but they seem to be most active in Portland, and marginal everywhere else. I’m even a little skeptical of how influential the scary right-wing extremist groups are. Walter, for instance, cites the example of the “Boogaloo Bois,” saying that while “it’s not clear how the Boogaloo Bois plan to achieve their goals,” “what is clear … is that they can turn out in force.”
Is that clear? I’ve never seen more than a handful of them photographed at any given time, and I’ve never seen one in the flesh personally. With their combination of Hawaiian shirts and heavy weaponry, they are certainly a newsworthy spectacle whenever they do show up. But we have to wonder whether they are being sensationalized.
Don’t get me wrong: I think armed right-wing groups are very scary and could well commit serious acts of terrorism in the future. The Oklahoma City bombing, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, and the various mass shootings perpetrated by white supremacists (Charleston, Buffalo, El Paso, Pittsburgh) are all the proof we need that there is a serious threat from those who hold far-right views. But notably, the most serious deadly acts so far have been by individual mass murderers, not organized groups. The Oklahoma attack was a sign that right-wing extremist violence was a real threat, but it didn’t prove that America in 1995 was on the brink of civil war. 
In fact, Walter seems at one point to concede that when she argues America is close to civil war, she isn’t really arguing that we’re close to the kind of event that comes to mind when we think “U.S. civil war.” 

“When we in the United States think of civil war, most of us think about our country’s first Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865. We picture officers on horseback, and blue- and gray-clad infantrymen charging each other on enormous battlefields. We see in our minds the photograph of President Lincoln at Antietam, consulting with officers outside a Union tent in his long coat and stovepipe hat. Or we remember Pickett’s Charge, commemorated in paintings, when a mass of Confederate soldiers attacked a wall of Union soldiers on the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. We think of bodies littered upon empty fields. We think of muddy embankments and cannons. … But to think this way—to think of civil war only in these terms—is a failure of the imagination. That’s because civil wars look entirely different today. Those who wage war against their governments in the twenty-first century tend to avoid the battlefield entirely; they know they will almost certainly lose in a conventional war against a powerful government. Instead, they choose the strategy of the weak: guerrilla warfare and terrorism. And, increasingly, domestic terror campaigns are aimed at democratic governments. … If America has a second civil war, the combatants will not gather in fields, nor will they wear uniforms. They may not even have commanders. They will slip in and out of the shadows, communicating on message boards and encrypted networks. They will meet in small groups in vacuum-repair shops along retail strips, in desert clearings along Arizona’s border, in public parks in Southern California, or in the snowy woods of Michigan, where they will train to fight. They will go online to plan their resistance, strategizing how to undermine the government at every level and gain control of parts of America. They will create chaos and fear. And then they will force Americans to pick sides.”

One could go along with Walter and say that it’s a “failure of imagination” to think of the U.S. Civil War when we talk about a U.S. civil war. But if the thing that Walter is predicting will happen doesn’t match the popular understanding of a “civil war,” perhaps that means “civil war” is not in fact the right descriptor at all. Perhaps the term just confuses us. 
In fact, I think it does worse than confuse us. I think it actively misleads us about the problems we face. For one thing, it implies a kind of centrist view that “left-wing extremists” and “right-wing extremists” form two competing sides. In reality, as I’ve noted, the serious threat of domestic terrorism comes from the right, as law enforcement agencies themselves acknowledge. In order to fit the facts into an “impending civil war” narrative, we have to draw a kind of false equivalence between white supremacist terrorism and the small contingent of armed leftists like Redneck Revolt, which Walter notes “have shown up at protests to protect minorities and at gun shows, flea markets, state fairs, and NASCAR races to try to counter recruitment into white supremacist groups.” 
It’s very much possible that in the near future we will see more horrifying white supremacist terror attacks. But that’s not “civil war,” and I think the “civil war” situations that people envisage are implausible speculative fiction. For one thing, they forget the crucial fact that most Americans aren’t very interested in politics. This is often called a politically divided country, with “partisans” sniping at each other. In fact, it is a country where most people are not very active participants in the democratic process, and a huge number don’t even show up to perform the very minimal task of casting ballots in elections. (Not that I can blame them too much, given the choices they’re usually offered.) 

The real threat I see is that an energized right, who are active participants, will seize control of as many institutions as they can, and impose a hideous theocratic agenda. Will there be large-scale violent resistance to this? I doubt it very much. Instead, as our public sector is eroded (schools privatized, inequality exacerbated), I think we’ll just see a kind of sad feudalistic society develop, where the poor are too busy trying to survive to care about politics and the tiny number of rich people live in luxurious armed compounds. (That already describes much of the contemporary U.S.)
The idea of a “civil war” seems to assume that the “red versus blue” culture war is the most important divide in American politics. While I certainly find the Republican agenda disturbing and think Jan. 6 was a demonstration that the right will probably try to eliminate democracy altogether if it threatens to erode their power, I don’t look out at this country and see a nation of “partisans” ready to go to war with each other. I see a lot of people being crushed by working too hard, getting sick, and being threatened by climate disaster and warfare. I do not think it’s very responsible to make big prophecies about the long-term future of the country, but of the risks we face, I don’t think “civil war” is an accurate or helpful description of any of them. Those who take this idea seriously tend to be those who think “partisanship” is the problem we face, and it would be nice if we went back to The Good Old Days Where Everyone Got Along. As the Atlantic noted, Marche makes some incredible statements like, “A decade ago, American stability and global supremacy were a given … The United States was synonymous with the glory of democracy … a president was once the unquestioned representative of the American people’s will. … [Congress was] the greatest deliberative body in the world.” Now that’s imaginative fiction.
The civil war framing misleads us about what our problems are. It’s not going to be Antifa versus Proud Boys in the streets. Instead, there’s a class struggle between those who own the country and those who work, and there’s a political struggle over whether the right will succeed in diminishing our democracy and turning all of our remaining public assets over to the aforementioned owners of the country. In a sense that’s a war, and a civil one, but nothing is illuminated by a framework that encourages us to see our neighbors as enemies who will soon be taking up arms against us. It’s the right that want people to fear and hate others who share their same interests, and we on the left need to focus on uniting people around our shared commitment to building a future worth living in. 
I use quotes because the category is poorly defined. It was only in 2020 that the SPLC finally removed black nationalists from its Hate Map. ↩ 

       'Zuckerbucks' didn’t throw the 2020 election   Walter Olson  September 12, 04:27 PM September 12, 04:31 PM  In the lead‐up to the 2020 election, philanthropies backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan provided grants to local election offices around the country to aid in administrative tasks, voter communication, and other work made more challenging by the COVID-19 pandemic — a program sometimes nicknamed Zuckerbucks. Some Republicans have charged that the grants were improperly meant to assist Democrats by differentially increasing turnout of their likely voters, especially in bigger cities. Many backers of former President Donald Trump took the episode to heart as part of what they imagine to have been the rigging of the 2020 election.  As I’ve noted in this space before, there is reason to doubt that the grants, to the extent that they raised turnout at all, made any difference in the election’s major outcomes. In Wisconsin, one of the closest states, a study by the right‐of‐center Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty estimated that any extra turnout, if measurable at all, would not have been enough to swing the election. (In addition, as a legal matter, courts will not throw out otherwise lawfully cast votes even if they were encouraged by a voter turnout effort that violated some rule.)  In due course various complaints were filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) characterizing the grants as improper donations meant to influence an election. This summer, however, the FEC voted to find no reason for the allegations and dismiss the complaint, and more recently it explained its reasoning in detail in a 20‐page analysis. In both cases its decision was by a unanimous 6–0 vote.  That’s significant because, as many readers know, the division of the six‐member FEC between three D and three R appointees regularly results in even splits on issues that divide experienced party lawyers. That’s more or less the way the commission is designed to operate. Yet not one of the three Republican commissioners found reason to support the allegations.  Some states have lately chosen to ban these sorts of private donations to public election agencies, and to repeat a point I’ve made before, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have a debate about restricting them. (Shikha Dalmia has defended the grants here.) Even when the grants are offered to all comers, many localities will decline to participate, so at least in principle they might wind up stoking turnout in uneven ways. That their impact might have proved generally benign this time does not mean it will remain so in the future. They might, for example, afford ideologically committed donors an “in” to influence or at least scope out local elections policy. If you want to see many advocates on both sides do a fast switch, wait till some philanthropist offers to foot the bill for localities to prosecute, say, unlawful ballot harvesting. (Compare.)  But claims that the Zuckerberg grants were part of some vast scheme to rig the outcome? The evidence is simply not there. Another Stop the Steal theory is down for the count.  This article was originally published by the Cato Institute. It is republished here with Cato's kind permission.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, a person who came of age in the online era tweeted this question: “Literally BAFFLED as to how people found love before dating sites and social media. Was settling the norm? Or did everyone just happen to be romantically compatible with the person sitting nearest to them in class?” I asked readers to answer that question or to address whether apps are an improvement.Jenni worries that apps are displacing all alternatives:
I’m a 25-year-old woman, currently in grad school. I feel like (or at least hope that) I’m part of a silent majority of people in my generation who hate dating apps. I find them very surface-level and honestly struggle to see myself ending up with someone I met on an app. I also think they are negatively changing the rest of the dating landscape. The dating apps have created a culture in which people seem afraid to try for an organic connection in the “real world,” as the apps provide the illusion that the other people on them are ready for a relationship (a debatable premise). I also think they reduce the possibility of organic connections. When I started my graduate school program I assumed a lot of people would be single like me and looking for like-minded people to date; instead, almost everyone in my grad school cohort is dating someone. Many of them met on an app. Am I on the apps? Yes, but only as I feel like I [don’t] have much choice.
Sharon tried online dating––perhaps in Las Vegas?––but didn’t like the outcome:
I’ve tried these dating sites, which are pig-in-a-poke and not nearly as successful as moving around in many social contexts. I once filled out a long “application” process listing every imaginable interest and preference (I’m an overeducated classical musician). I was matched with an Elvis impersonator, complete with gold chains. If you can’t do better than that unassisted, there’s something wrong with you!
Alison met her match the old-fashioned way: CompuServe.
Back in the early days of the internet, when connection was dial-up and images were limited to type on the screen, there was a company called CompuServe, which ran various discussion boards called forums (yes, I know, they couldn’t be bothered with correct Latin and call them “Fora”). In 1992 or 1993, I joined one called RockNet, where people met to discuss rock music; I made a lot of friends all over the world and, eventually, “met” Chris, a Montrealer who shared my love of Billy Bragg and the Jazz Butcher (among many others). Lo, he had a trip planned to San Francisco, where we met in person and subsequently fell in love. Fast forward to 1996, when I moved to Montreal to be with him, and we married. And now, 26 years later, we’re still together and very happy. Is this an example of “finding love through technology,” or a simple matter of luck—because certainly proximity came last, not first! Either way, an outcome to cherish.
[Read: The uncertain forecast for Europe’s energy crisis]Alex is a deeply ambivalent dating-app user searching for love and marriage:
I’m a 32-year-old man seeking women, and in one sense, dating apps have been a lifeline. I work for a tiny company with only three or four colleagues, all men, and I’ve worked from home for almost five years now, so I’m not going to meet a potential partner through work. I’m not a churchgoer, so church is out. I live in a different state from my family and my friends have moved all over the country, so personal networks aren’t too helpful either.
Dating apps are an easy, ready-made way to meet people. At the same time, I lament the void left by the continued erosion of communities. My best friend is deeply involved in a tight-knit religious community. Gossipy church ladies will play matchmaker (“He should meet your daughter! They’re about the same age!”), friends will hook each other up (“I know somebody who knows somebody who’s single!”), and relationships and marriages happen quickly. My friend met his future wife through a mutual friend, proposed six months later, and married five months after that. I peer into this world from the outside and long for it. Even if it comes with gossip, politics, and drama, I long most of all for help, for a break from shouldering the burden of searching for a partner alone.
I’ve become a fairly experienced app dater out of necessity. I applied myself and learned the necessary skills: how to take great pictures (for God’s sake, straight men, ask a woman to take your profile pictures), how to write a killer bio (for God’s sake, say what you’re looking for), and how to suss out the vibe of potential matches from texting alone. I’ve met lots of interesting women and gone on good dates. Still, all my strongest feelings have been for women I’ve met in person. There’s a chemical reaction that comes from locking eyes with someone across the room that apps just can’t replicate.
So here’s what I would say to that original Twitter poster. If they’re still in school, I would tell them that is a wonderful gift: the best chance you’ll ever have to meet people your own age. Every semester brings new classes, new people, daily face-to-face contact (pandemics notwithstanding), every opportunity in the world for sparks to fly. The search for love looks a lot different when you’re sitting in a home office seeing the same four walls every day. I view apps as a necessary evil, based on the individualistic society we have and my life circumstances, but if I could, I’d ditch them.
Jack’s HR-noncompliant advice––meet at work:
I met my wife of 20-plus years by working with her on very high-stakes company projects we both were very excited by. I don’t think there’s a better way—intense discussions, deeply motivated to come up with genius ideas. She shared all kinds of brilliant thoughts that sent me home thinking about her thoughts. I found falling in love with her easy once I had seen such smarts in action … traits that would not have come out had our experience with each other been limited to scoring concert tickets and ski-lift reservations.
Katerina met her fiancé at a singles’ mixer organized by a local church and prefers the old-fashioned approach:
We never would have matched on a dating app. Not only would we have fallen outside of each other’s age ranges (I’m 28; he’s 37), but the way we were presenting ourselves on apps wouldn’t have appealed to the other person. I had all these political and lifestyle “filters” vetting dates on categories that ultimately didn’t matter to a stable, happy relationship. I went on seven first (dating-app) dates in a row and I remember the early excitement of each match, the slow build of the “talking phase,” and then in each case the disappointment when we didn’t connect well in person. His experience was similar. The more you can personalize a dating app like you would your DoorDash order, the more likely you are to be disappointed when someone doesn’t meet every single quality you set.
I’m so glad that he and I met in real life instead. We connected in part because just being at the event meant we shared a connection to this faith community that was important to us. And the differences we had ended up being sources of balance and enrichment in the relationship. But the important part was that we got to feel a “click” or “spark” before any of those differences made us filter the other person out. Dating apps give you a false sense of control over your romantic life. It’s not “settling” to find someone who shares the priorities that matter and is willing to work through the rest! For more lasting relationships I almost feel like apps need to give people fewer options, not more.
David has met three wives online:
In the 1980s, I was a very shy young man whose nonexistent romantic life was saved by online dating. Before online dating, I had to try to discern whether or not a complete stranger had any interest in spending time with me—a terrifying guess. With online dating, you know that the person is at least interested enough to meet, or not, without suffering any real-time in-person humiliation. Virtual humiliation was easier for me to take.  
Over the past 35 years, I found three wives online, and though two of them passed away, I am very happy with my romantic experiences, and my current wife is wonderful. I did not use dating apps but online services (Match and others), and I was always looking for potential relationships, not hookups. Algorithms did not choose dates for me; I chose potential dates based on posted profiles, and potential dates accepted or rejected me based on my posted profile. Sure, some profiles were more accurate than others, and I had my share of “bad dates,” but I typically arranged for a good meal so, at a minimum, both of us ate well even if we did not hit it off. I tried to set a high floor. I think that if one is patient, realistic, and honest, online-dating services can work well.
However, in older age groups, they tend to favor men over women because there are fewer older men. Great for men, but it can be tough for divorcées and widows of a certain age.  
As I am not perfect, I did not seek perfection but someone at my level (or just slightly above) with compatible values—honesty, kindness, empathy, independence, and resilience are way up there for me. I suspect that knowing what works for you, and being realistic about your appeal, and lack thereof, really improves one’s odds. What some may deem “settling” I see as retaining some humility and some semblance of objectivity. There are a lot of wonderful people out there who were not prom queens, valedictorians, heiresses, Nobel Prize winners, etc. I do not believe that partners often fix or save each other, but they can complement each other. I feel incredibly lucky to have found my current wife, and we would not have found each other without online dating.
Ben believes that a dating app for Mormons has given him insights into dating apps more generally:
I’m a member of a minority religious community (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also called LDS or Mormon), and some enterprising member of the church has created an LDS-specific dating app called Mutual to help members of the church meet up. The app is fairly widespread among young LDS people, and because of the unique cultural/religious aspects of its users, it avoids the most egregious problems with other dating apps. For one, it doesn't mix those looking for casual sex and those looking for longer-term relationships, since it is widely understood that members of the church don’t (for the most part) sleep together before marriage. Secondly, based on talking to women who use the app, dick pics are almost nonexistent.
It would seem that, with some of the worst sexual aggression, misbehavior, and manipulation eliminated, this app would lead to better outcomes, successful relationships, and more perfect power couples, right? And yet, every time I talk to someone who uses the app, the strongest positive reaction I can get is a “Meh,” or possibly “It's fun to go on and see who is there.” More often, the reaction is “I’ve felt better ever since I stopped using it.” Even in a community with clearer expectations around dating, a slower pace when it comes to sexual relations, and norms protecting against the worst misbehavior, these apps still don’t work well, because they encourage participants to dehumanize each other and themselves, to evaluate artificial performances of attractiveness and to put on one of their own. Apps perpetuate the myth that attraction is something that exists, that you either have it toward someone or you don’t, when in reality, attraction tends to build (or diminish) as you get to know someone.
In fact, the advantage of marrying a classmate, or a cousin’s friend, or someone from your old congregation is that you have an accurate picture of who they are, which you can evaluate in addition to physical and social aspects. In short, apps are wrong from the beginning about the way that good romances form for most people, and eliminating some of their worst aspects (whether that be sexual aggression or ghosting) won’t fix the fact that their solution doesn’t fix the underlying problem. Some people get lucky, and a broken tool still works for them, but by and large, people end up feeling more isolated.
Apps misapprehend the true bottlenecks that keep more people from finding partners. Seeing a sufficient number of attractive people is not the limiting factor in most people’s lives. Ironically, I think the original poster is correct, in that most marriages from “the old days” involved settling. But I also think that’s the right way to form a relationship; everyone settles for their partner, and everyone’s partner settles for them. There’s no such thing as a ready-made “soul mate” (if you get a soul mate, it is only through years of working on each other’s flaws and learning to appreciate each other more), and searching for one wastes time you could spend learning the hard work of loving another person and changing your life and personality to serve them, while they do the same for you.
M. is a 73-year-old woman. There was a time when apps might have helped her. She writes:
I got pregnant at 18. Was I in love? No. Did I opt to keep the baby? Yes. I decided to do it on my own. 1968. But my parents forced a marriage on me. We divorced three years later (he left me).
I was left penniless with a 3-year-old. It took a while to figure [out] my way forward. It took 12 years to find the man I wanted to be with through mutual friends. We have been happily married for 40 years. Would I have had better luck with a dating app? Over those 12 years, I suspect so.
Glenn is suspicious of modern love:
We live today with the romantic myth that love is some kind of wonderful and/or awful disease that we may or may not catch, and may or may not get over. What we fall into we can very easily fall out of. It happens to us, or does not happen to us, and we have very little say. This is the stuff of every cheap romance novel, movie, poem, love song, and Hallmark card. It is the modern version of the old pagan myth of Cupid hunting us down and inflicting us with uncontrolled destiny. It is strange that in such a modern, prosaic world we take such an ancient and poetic, even magical, view of our emotional lives. I will doubtless be cast aside as an unromantic clod for saying so, but here goes: Love is not a feeling that leads to a commitment. Love is a commitment that leads to a feeling! The emotional ties follow the commitment. The commitment does not follow the emotions. Our first inclination is to rebel against such a view. It certainly won’t be the plot line of our pop culture’s next great rom-com. But how else are we to explain the endless long succession of unfulfilled and unfulfilling relationships that litter our cultural landscape today? The high divorce rate? The unending series of deeply important obsessive relationships, until they turn out not to be so important after all as soon as we are distracted by the potential of something new and mysterious and other?
He counsels putting our trust in God and man:
Jesus commanded us to love one another. He was not asking us to conjure up some emotion out of thin air. He was commanding us to commit to one another. I don’t always feel in love, especially when last night’s dinner sits heavy on my stomach. We humans can often fool ourselves into equating lust with love, or atmosphere with emotion, or mere physical attraction with true spiritual virtue. Feelings are ephemeral, fleeting, and fickle things. My commitments are a much more substantial and ultimately sustaining bond than my emotions. My commitments are a truer and more lasting expression of my inner self. My emotions may lie to me; my commitments never do. I [have been] faithfully committed to the love of my life for 30 years now, and it feels great!
[Read: The question of defunding police]Dan wonders if Stephen Stills didn’t have it right:
In hindsight, I did settle. My ex-wife would say the same. We “settled” with each other, mostly because we both were young and insecure. But several fine children and grandchildren came out of our relationship. Settling wasn’t so unsettling after all. Perhaps we would have done better by committing to settling more; you know, “Love the one you’re with”?
Leila believes apps have been especially beneficial to queer people:
I’ve dated online and offline, in queer circles and straight ones. My biggest takeaway is that online dating is a reflection of my generation rather than a root cause of its problems. It’s harder for queer people to date offline. Approaching a stranger of the same sex in a coffee shop is outright dangerous in most parts of the world (and many parts of North America). Even if you’re not surrounded by homophobia, the numbers are against you—there are fewer gay people in the world than straight ones. As a result, queer people looking to date have three options: Move to a city, date a friend, or turn to an app.
I was lucky to grow up in a diverse city. Since it’s always been obvious that I’m attracted to women, I had no trouble finding queer communities in my teens. I met people at parties and picnics. With real-life dating, you get to learn your partner’s coffee order and the sound of their laugh, to experience a period of human intimacy even if you never end up having sex. Getting to know a potential partner as a person rather than a profile is rewarding. Scrolling through an app feels like a chore or a bad habit.
But apps can be useful if they can facilitate real-life connections. In the early days of the pandemic, I went out with a girl I met on Tinder. We planned outdoor dates for each other and talked about our lives. Getting to know someone far away from my social circle was refreshing. Other than the fact that our first conversation took place through a screen, the experience felt a lot like real life. Real-life connections, however, can have disastrous consequences. Falling in love with my high-school best friend was the most painful experience of my life. Losing a friend feels a lot worse than getting ghosted, so I can understand why many are eager to avoid dating people they know in the flesh.
Errol hates the turn toward apps:
Why do people seem more afraid of the person they meet at the grocery store than the guy who they matched with who wants to go on a hike outside the city? I’m retired from dating because of the unwritten rule that apps are the only way to meet people. Apps encourage you to view yourself as a product, and to make that product as appealing as possible. I’m pro-capitalism. But I have my limits when it comes to personal interactions. I love the apps for those who have trouble connecting to strangers, but let the outgoing go out.
Liam recounts his Irish youth:
I am 62 and grew up in Dublin when even phone landlines were not ubiquitous. To meet, you had to go to places where there were people, e.g., pubs, parties, other people’s houses, dances. You had to actually talk to people and deal with possible rejection. You had to learn to be charming, or at least interesting. You ended up meeting a lot of annoying people that you disagreed with. Some became close friends or lovers.
My secondary school and university were full of thriving clubs where people pretended to be interested in topics or activities so they could meet people. It wasn’t easy to get laid (or “hook up,” as younger people call it) which wasn’t helped by the fact that Ireland then was still very Catholic. But we did get laid. I never used a dating app (if I was single I would use it in a heartbeat), but getting to know people by chatting them up, then slowly falling in love, is not a bad way to spend one’s time. It is also a way to find out more about yourself. I suspect that it is a better way to find one’s soulmate than an algorithm.
Karen’s marriage wasn’t great, “but it was a durable one that survived across time and trouble,” and she doubts that she would have been better off in the app era:
A dating app is an illusion machine, or maybe a delusion machine. The fantasy is that there are always more possibilities out there, available to you with no more effort than brushing right or left. As long as you search online, you needn’t worry that you are seldom presentable. You can slide right past the person who failed to list similar interests. Disappointments are mostly quick and private. There’s no opportunity for chemistry until the brief encounter where you fail to find it. Strangers add up as though you’re working on some demented survey of the opposite sex. It’s always been hard to meet someone, especially after college, in a new town, at a new job or even an old one. The pool isn’t infinite; time isn’t either. Marriages are not statistical matchups made by cupid programmers. You choose a mate and then you have a marriage to work at, however you found the match.
Russ counsels meeting people in person and focusing on their best qualities:
I am a 62-year-old male, with vast experience dating literally hundreds of individuals. My worst two dates were women I met online. Scary even. I never wanted that third strike. But as to how to meet potential mates (or hookups): Obviously, get out of the house, and less obviously, perhaps, put your phone down and leave it down. If you see someone who intrigues you, determine right away whether they are appealing to your heart or your loins. Honesty is key to any good relationship and starts with being honest with yourself. Follow that with introducing yourself. Don’t use pickup lines; just be real. If you introduce yourself it is generally assumed there is some level or type of attraction. And finally, don’t be a snob. No one is perfect, so do not ignore warning bells, but try to view the person in favorable lights. Generally speaking, everybody has some good qualities.
I have a score of long-term relationships (more than one year); some were tall, some were short, some skinny, most chubby. Some were smart, some were very nice, some were Black, and some were white. But we seemed to always be compatible for a period of time; in love, even. Hundreds were just about the sex, and that worked both ways. But I have no experience or advice on how to maintain that for years without end.
Angelle’s story appears to have a happy ending:
I am female but my observation is that online dating works far better for us than for men. Men are still mostly the pursuers, and most still prefer to do the choosing. I am not afraid to ask for the first date, but it wasn’t often well received. Women get so many more contacts usually than men do. Especially the women who are the most attractive. I got enough interest to keep me busy, but those women could get 1,000 messages a day; they have a lot of choices. Men who are not in the same stratosphere have trouble getting responses; they get depressed and then some get angry and bitter.
A con, at least for me as a somewhat traditional woman, was the amount of unsolicited  body-part pix I got and the number of men looking for “intimate encounters,” who didn’t understand the phrase not interested. I actually experienced one attempted physical assault I didn’t see coming, on a first date; a verbal attack in public; and a few [instances of] getting stood up. Had I met these men in person, I think I would have picked up on this kind of thing right away.
I was on online-dating services (before smartphones) for about seven years. I had a lot of first dates and met a lot of nice guys. But I only ever had a few short-term relationships (a month or two) and one that lasted a year. I started the online-dating thing because there are just not many places where I am to meet men. Not going to hang out at bars … lol. I am still single, but I have met someone by chance through looking for a job after I lost mine because of COVID. This never used to happen, and now it has.
I am tickled because I think I may have finally found the right guy. We have taken time to get to know each other and have become really good friends, something I think should be the first part. Many from the dating site were in a big hurry to get to the end. Whichever end they wanted. I don’t believe in fate, but it seems the universe is on my side for once.
Marek recommends seeing how a potential partner handles the possibility of shipwreck:
I went on a two-week trip on a three-masted sailing ship, where we worked as unpaid crew. The woman I met there had much in common by virtue of also going (single and without knowing anyone) on the same trip. We’ve been happily married for 28 years. Seeking out an arena that reflects you is a good way of filtering potential partners. It’s also easier to bluff online than out on a yardarm in a storm. The latter provides true insight. My sympathy to young people. While their choices seem freer, they are that much harder to navigate.
And Earl, who also went to sea, shares the story of his romantic life:
In 1960, a fellow freshman at Tulane introduced me to his sister, a high-school student. Janet was intelligent, inquisitive, lively, and fond of literature. We became friends, occasionally having a date. By the time I graduated in 1963, she was at Tulane, and we were an inchoate version of a couple. She was at my side when I was commissioned from NROTC as an ensign, U.S. Navy. I left for sea duty and a career in the Navy. We promised to “keep in touch.” There was a sense of commitment, very soft, and not just a farewell phrase.
Keeping in touch from a ship in the mid-1960s was done by letters, handwritten or typed on my portable Smith Corona typewriter that I couldn’t use in heavy weather unless I tied it down. We wrote several times a month as I told her about Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. I would not be home for a year. We reconnected then, sensed the connection was stronger, but knew that her commitment to education and mine to the Navy precluded personal plans. I had three more years of obligated service.
In June 1965, I left the war zone in the South China Sea and came home for a couple of weeks. The brother who had introduced us was well into medical school, and Janet was determined to follow. Medical school and sea duty were not conducive to any romantic commitment. We kept together with more letters and, while in port, lots of quarters fed into pay telephones. At Christmas 1965, I was able to get home for a couple of weeks, but in 1966 the ship’s schedule became more intense. I was spending a lot of time at sea, usually three weeks or more at a time. I would not be able to come home for summer leave. Besides, Janet was taking a course at the University of Minnesota to ensure that she would be accepted into her second year of medical school.
In the summer of 1966, amid a huge airline strike, I was able to get away for a few days, flying from Charleston to Minneapolis with the aid of my summer-white uniform and sympathetic airline people. Those few days taught us that, whether we wanted to admit it or not, we belonged together. Back at sea I decided it was time to change my life. I resolved to apply to law school and to resign my commission when my obligation expired. In March 1968 we were married after eight years of what used to be called “courtship.” She was between her second and third years of medical school; I was a freshman in law school. We both graduated in June 1970 and became an oddity for those times, a doctor-lawyer marriage in which the doctor was female. Three sons and five grandchildren followed. Despite being a physician and many visits to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Janet died in January 2017, leaving me with many exciting memories.
Thank you to everyone who shared your stories, and may you all find (or keep) love.

Threats to democracy” have, according to NBC News’ August poll, become the “most important issue facing the country.” It has overtaken “jobs and the economy,” the “cost of living,” and even wedge issues like abortion and gun control. Americans increasingly suspect their neighbors have nefarious designs on the nation. Well, an Axios-Ipsos survey released on Monday suggests that these anxious Americans aren’t just being paranoid.

That survey found that a disturbingly large number of Americans were prepared to agree with some shockingly illiberal sentiments. While only one-third of all adults agreed with the idea that “strong, unelected leaders are better than weak elected ones,” a full 42 percent of Republicans supported this sentiment. Likewise, 42 percent of Democrats nodded along with the notion that “presidents should be able to remove judges whose decisions go against the national interests,” which only 35 percent of all respondents endorsed. About one-third of all adults said the federal government should be able to prosecute members of the press who make “offensive or unpatriotic” statements, with a similar share of Democrats and Republicans in agreement. Roughly 40 percent of all respondents, Democrats and Republicans alike, agreed that the “government should side with the majority over ethnic/religious minority rights.”

Leave aside for the moment that majorities—all adults and partisans alike—disagreed with or refused to endorse these offending sentiments. That’s cold comfort when considering that something approaching four-in-ten Americans have abandoned what Axios summarizes as “American values.” For the sake of argument, let’s also forget that these questions are worded so that they elide the fact that both partisan camps believe their opponents represent the greater threat to the institutions of American self-government. Taking these polls at face value, you could be forgiven for thinking that America’s commitment to individual liberty and republican self-determinism had reached a nadir. In many crucial ways, however, America’s institutions have never been more committed to minority rights than they are today.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the courts had generally deferred to a strict interpretation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on congressional interference in the conduct of religious practice to proscribe any blurring of the line between church and state. No longer. In this young century, the courts have interpreted religious-freedom statutes to mean that closely held private firms are free from federal regulations that violate owners’ religious beliefs. States are prohibited from discriminating against religious educational institutions if they also subsidize nonsectarian private schools. Nor can schools and municipalities punish those who perform religious observances on secular grounds.

America’s religious minorities aren’t the only minorities who enjoy the benefits of America’s commitment to pluralism. Of course, some of the primary legal barriers that prevented gay Americans from enjoying the fullness of public life have been either circumscribed by the courts or retired at the state level. What were for the most part social conventions that prevented women and Jews from ascending to institutions of higher learning are behind us. Those barriers are today being imposed on Americans of Asian descent, but only out of the misbegotten assumption that the success of Asian minorities comes at the expense of black and Hispanic minorities—voting blocs in whose success so much of America’s governing institutions are deeply invested. The reformers’ intentions aside, the Supreme Court appears set to apply its dim view of ethnic and creedal discrimination to the war on high-achieving Asian Americans, too.

A doctrinaire libertarian could mourn America’s diminished commitment to non-intervention in the private sector on a host of issues related to economic liberty and property rights. But when compared with much of the postwar period, Americans are certainly freer today than they were yesterday.

Americans are now freer to decide for themselves if they want to join a labor union, and they’re less likely to face penalties or suffer a loss of work if they decline. Those Americans who do not want to join a union in an organized shop are no longer required to pay a portion of their income to an organization to which they do not belong. In this century, unconstitutional restrictions on firearm ownership have fallen away, one after another.

Both of America’s two major political parties have deferred to small-d democracy to such a degree that they’ve sacrificed their institutional prerogatives to determine who is fit to represent those organizations on the national stage. Since 1968, America’s two major parties have dismantled the smoke-filled rooms and built new grassroots fundraising mechanisms, all in an effort to tear down the power enjoyed by a small cadre of institutional gatekeepers. The results of this experiment in radical democracy are decidedly mixed, but that it is an experiment in radical democracy is undeniable.

Still, the experts mourn. The number of Americans who seem to have no use for the conventions that protect minority rights is, indeed, shocking. As George Mason University Professor Justin Gest lamented, “these are things you’d think would be universal.” Of course, there is no such thing as a “universal” viewpoint in a vast republic as varied as ours. There has never been a nation as culturally committed to individualism, even contrarianism, as the United States. Our fundamental lack of universals is a feature of American exceptionalism.

Clearly, American institutions are not committed to violating minority rights in the ways a minority of Americans would like. The authoritarian sentiments endorsed by some respondents to the Axios poll—prosecuting journalists and ejecting Senate-confirmed justices from the bench, for example—are at odds with the Constitution. The menace posed by election deniers in either party notwithstanding, they have not yet demonstrated the capacity to actually deny an election.

It’s true that both political coalitions harbor and coddle intolerant elements. These elements have no use for the procedural niceties that preserve republican comity, and they’d break them down if given the opportunity. But this poll also illustrates the numerical superiority of the forces arrayed against the authoritarians in our midst. Moreover, a cursory survey of the American political landscape suggests America’s commitment to preserving minority rights against the depredations of the majority is as strong as ever.

An Oklahoma English teacher helped students apply for library cards so they could read banned books. Now she’s out of a job, receiving a barrage of threats from the Right, and the Republican state secretary of public education wants to take away her license.

Right now in Oklahoma, the state’s secretary of education is publicly advocating that a high school English teacher lose her teaching license because she helped her students apply for library cards so they could read banned books. (Shunya Koide / Unsplash)
 
A story I’ve heard many times in the last several years goes something like this: “Progressives used to be edgy and countercultural. Conservatives used to be all about conformity and censorship. But now the roles have switched!”
Sometimes this story is told by conservatives themselves. Sometimes it’s told by someone who either denies they have a political ideology or starts their self-description with “I’m a liberal, but . . .”
The part of the story that’s true is that many progressives have shortsighted views about, for example, censorship on social media platforms. There’s plenty to criticize there. But any suggestion that the Right has seen the light on the importance of free expression is a bad joke.
Right now in Oklahoma, the state’s secretary of education is publicly advocating that high school English teacher Summer Boismier lose her teaching license for bringing a “liberal political agenda” into her classroom. Boismier is already out of a job, but the secretary of education thinks she needs to be punished further. Some grassroots reactionaries have deluged her with messages about killing her or sterilizing her so she “can’t breed.”
Her crime was helping her students apply for library cards so they could read banned books.

Freedom to Read
The American Library Association (ALA)’s Freedom to Read Statement highlights several sources of persistent threats to the free flow of information — specifically including attempts to “censor content in schools.” The ALA’s statement, first adopted during the McCarthy era and updated several times over the course of the last seventy years, strongly affirms the importance of making available material that may be “unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority.”
The Brooklyn Public Library cited this as an inspiration when it announced its Books Unbanned initiative. Aiming to help teens access banned books, the initiative includes a link to report attempts to take books off the shelf, one where teens can get help finding frequently banned books at their local public library, and one where anyone aged thirteen to thirty-one can get a free Brooklyn Public Library card, allowing them access to the library’s full collection of e-books — even if they live in, for example, Norman, Oklahoma, where Boismier taught high school tenth-grade English until last month.
Arriving in class, her students were “greeted by red paper signs announcing the ‘books the state doesn’t want you to read’ accompanied by the QR code for the Brooklyn Public Library’s sign-up page.” That’s it. Her whole offense was referring to the existence of censorship and giving students a chance to check out any books they like by . . . getting a borrowing card at a public library.

Summer Boismier vs. HB 1775
The line about “books the state doesn’t want you to read” was a reference to House Bill 1775, Oklahoma’s contribution to the national panic about the alleged plague of “critical race theory” in K-12 public schools. In the usual fashion of such bills, it bars a series of “concepts” from Oklahoma classrooms, most of which are defined in a hopelessly vague fashion designed to keep everyone guessing about what could be held to violate it. Norman schools issued guidance for teachers to “review all texts” to make sure they comply with the law.
The original wording of the bill doesn’t include the word “book,” although the HB 1775 Emergency Rules available on Oklahoma’s state government website ominously include “librarians” among the school employees who can lose their jobs if they’re held to have violated the law. In any case, any doubt about whether Boismier was right to suspect that the law could be used to ban books was immediately removed when she was suspended from her job, under suspicion of violating HB 1775, for — again, this is really all she did — telling her students about banned books and giving them a link where they could apply for a library card.
After meeting with administrators to discuss her suspension, Boismier concluded that she wouldn’t be able to return to her job if she wasn’t willing to refrain from doing things like helping her students get library cards in the future. She resigned after nine years on the job.
At this point, you’d think, the censors would be happy. They got what they wanted. The dangerous library-card-promoter was out of the classroom. Instead, they started a larger campaign to demonize her.
The state’s secretary of education, Ryan Walters, has displayed a particularly unhinged obsession with her case. As of the time of this writing, almost everything he’s tweeted going back for more than two weeks is about Boismier. He’s posted a video of himself sitting in his car ranting about Boismier. He’s posted accusations that she wanted to “indoctrinate” her students with left-wing ideas. He’s accused her of trying to “sexualize” her classroom by sharing “pornographic” materials — since some of the books banned elsewhere that students can digitally check out of the Brooklyn Public Library include (generally pretty light) sexual content. He’s called again and again for her license to be revoked so she can never get another teaching job.
Even that might not be enough for some of Walters’s grassroots supporters. Boismier has told local authorities that she’s afraid to stay in her apartment because she’s been doxed and threats have been sent to her in social media messages.
There are a lot of things you can say about a political movement that gets this furious about an English teacher helping her students check banned books out of the library. But you certainly can’t say it values free speech.

The US Federal Reserve Board will meet again on September 20-21, and while most analysts anticipate another big interest-rate hike, there is a strong argument for the Fed to take a break from its aggressive monetary-policy tightening. While its rate hikes so far have slowed the economy--most obviously the housing sector--their impact on inflation is far less certain.

After a year of getting a lot of bad news about inflation and the supply-side factors behind it, we are now starting to get a lot of good news.

Monetary policy typically affects economic performance with long and variable lags, especially in times of upheaval. Given the depth of geopolitical, financial, and economic uncertainty--not least about the future course of inflation--the Fed would be wise to pause its rate hikes and wait until a more reliable assessment of the situation is possible.

There are several reasons to hold off. The first is simply that inflation has slowed sharply. Consumer price index (CPI) inflation--the measure most relevant to households--was zero in July, and it is likely to have been zero or even negative in August. Similarly, the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator--another often-used measure based on GDP accounts--fell by 0.1% in July.

Some will be tempted to credit tight monetary policy for this apparent victory over inflation. But that argument commits the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (to assume that because A happened before B, A must have caused B) and confuses correlation with causation. Moreover, most of the main factors behind today's inflation have little to do with curbing demand. Supply-side constraints drove inflation higher, and now supply-side factors are bringing inflation back down.

To be sure, many economists (including some at the Fed) expected the supply-side interruptions from Russia's war in Ukraine and the pandemic to be overcome very quickly. In the event, they were wrong, but only about the speed at which conditions would normalize. Much of this failure was understandable. Who would have thought that America's storied market economy would be so lacking in resilience? Who could have foreseen that it would suffer critical shortages of baby formula, feminine hygiene products, and the components needed to produce new cars? Is this the United States or the Soviet Union in its dying days?

Moreover, before Russian President Vladimir Putin started massing troops on the Ukrainian border late last year, no one could have predicted that there would be a major land war in Europe. And now no one can predict how long the war will last, or how long it will take for political leaders to stop the price spikes associated with it (some of which are simply the result of price gouging--"war profiteering").

Still, the overall inflation story is simple: Many of the supply-side factors that drove prices higher earlier in the recovery are now being reversed. Notably, the CPI gasoline index plunged by 7.7% in July, and private indices suggest a comparable decline in August. Again, this price reversal was predictable and predicted; the only uncertainty concerned the timing.

Other prices are following a similar pattern. In July, the core CPI (which excludes energy and food) rose by a relatively modest 0.3%, and the core PCE deflator rose by just 0.1%. That suggests an easing of the backlog of imported goods--the problem behind those empty store shelves and business disruptions earlier in the pandemic.

Recent data support this inference. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index has fallen sharply from its peaks last fall to just above where it was before the pandemic. While shipping costs are still well above their pre-pandemic levels, they are down almost 50% from last fall's peaks and likely to keep falling. After soaring during the pandemic and in the early months of Russia's war, the prices of a wide range of commodities have fallen back to pre-pandemic levels. The Baltic Dry Goods Index, for example, is now below its average level for 2019.

Auto manufacturers have also overcome the problems created by the worldwide semiconductor shortage. According to the Fed's own industrial production index, motor-vehicle output was actually above its pre-pandemic level as of July.

After a year of getting a lot of bad news about inflation and the supply-side factors behind it, we are now starting to get a lot of good news. And while no one would suggest that monetary policymaking should rest on just two months of data, it is worth noting that inflation expectations have also moderated, with both the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index and the New York Fed's Survey of Consumer Expectations edging downward in July.

The standard justification for Fed policy tightening is that it is needed to prevent a cycle of self-fulfilling expectations, with workers and businesses coming to expect higher inflation and setting wages and prices accordingly. But this cannot happen when inflation expectations are declining, as they are now.

Some analysts have suggested that the US needs a long period of higher unemployment to get inflation back down to the Fed's target level. But these arguments are based on the standard Phillips curve models, and the fact is that inflation has parted ways with the Phillips curve (which assumes a straightforward inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment). After all, the large rise in inflation last year was not due to a sudden large drop in unemployment, and the recent slowdown in wage and price growth cannot be explained by high unemployment.

Given the latest data, it would be irresponsible for the Fed to create much higher unemployment deliberately, owing to a blind faith in the Phillips curve's ongoing relevance. Policymaking is always conducted under conditions of uncertainty, and the uncertainties are especially large now. With inflation and inflationary expectations already dampening, the Fed should be assigning more weight to the downside risk of additional tightening: namely, that it would push an already battered US economy into recession. That should be enough reason for the Fed to take a break this month.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted a public forum last week to target "commercial surveillance and lax cybersecurity." While data privacy is a legitimate concern, FTC chief Lina Khan and her allies are vilifying legitimate business practices and increasingly overstepping their congressionally granted authority.
Many people are concerned about "surveillance" by anyone, no matter the intent. But the data practices Khan's agency is thinking of regulating aren't really surveillance at all. The advance notice of proposed rulemaking covers everything from the mere collection of data to specific questions about certain types of users' unique risks, which could eliminate many beneficial uses of data. Khan is conflating beneficial and risky data collection practices in an effort to kneecap successful business models she dislikes, without thinking about the impact on consumers.
In short, this is yet another example of FTC overreach.
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all advertisements and experiences. Consumers today want a far more personalized experience. We enjoy it when online clothing retailers offer us coupons if we leave things in our carts and when news aggregators recommend articles based on what we enjoyed reading in the past. Such benefits are possible because of data and because of tools like cookies.
Consumers now have a wide range of choices for how their data is used, and an increasing number of sites encourage us to customize our privacy settings. Users can select different settings based on how much they trust a specific service. If they want a more personalized experience, they can have it, or they can opt out for more privacy. In many cases, consumers make choices based on the sensitivity of their activity and information. For example, most of us would expect a payment site to have more security and privacy features than a local news site.
By overriding such choices, the FTC risks taking away features that improve the consumer experience. It would also misallocate the agency's existing resources away from those bad actors that are truly harming consumers. The FTC has successfully reached sizable agreements around cases involving harm from deceptive privacy practices and lax cybersecurity, such as the Ashley Madison case, in which the FTC reached a multimillion dollar settlement over the affair-promotion company's lax data security practices and consumer deception. This and many other cases the agency has brought show that the FTC already has the authority and resources to go after malicious actors.
Instead, the FTC wants yet more powers, and it wants to take them without a grant of congressional authority. Americans should be far more afraid of what an overzealous FTC might do to the internet than of the benign, voluntary data practices the agency wants to regulate.
The post The Federal Trade Commission vs. the Internet appeared first on Reason.com.

A trip to the grocery store costs considerably more than it did a year ago. Now Florida's congressional delegation wants to inflate prices even more.
On Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers—all of them from Florida—in submitting a petition to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai seeking "an investigation" into what the lawmakers call "the flood of imported seasonal and perishable agricultural products from Mexico." They ask Tai to invoke Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose "trade remedies" that will protect American growers from the scourge of…low-priced produce.
While they don't come out and say it directly, it's obvious from the letter that Rubio and his colleagues are seeking tariffs on Mexican produce. Section 301 is the same mechanism the Trump administration used to impose wide-ranging tariffs on goods imported from China. It's a law that grants the executive branch broad, unilateral power over trade.
Rubio and the other lawmakers say the Mexican government is subsidizing its domestic agricultural infrastructure as part of a scheme to undercut the prices charged by U.S. growers. "Mexico poses a direct threat to Florida's seasonal and perishable agricultural industry," they conclude.
The petition goes into more detail. A case of Mexican-grown bell peppers, for example, sells for about $5.85 less than a case of bell peppers grown in Florida. A flat of strawberries from Mexico goes for a few bucks less than the equivalent amount of strawberries picked in Florida.
And don't forget the cucumbers! The petition claims that a flat of Mexican-grown cucumbers sells for a whole "$1.32 less than the average price of a flat of Florida-produced cucumbers." What's more, "prices for Mexican cucumbers are their lowest in the months of April and May, which are the peak months for the marketing of Florida-grown cucumbers."
Anyone who has taken a basic economics class should be able to explain what's happening there. A high level of supply tends to push prices downward. Whether grown in Mexico or Florida, it makes sense that cucumber prices would be at their lowest when there are a lot of cucumbers in the market.
But that's not how Rubio and his colleagues see it. Instead, the petition describes this minor pricing difference as "a clear attempt to displace Florida cucumbers from the U.S. market."
Take a moment to enjoy the fact that some of the most powerful men and women in the U.S. government are freaking out over the idea that American consumers might get to save a few cents on their next cucumber purchase. Then amuse yourself with the optics of American agricultural special interests—which are, of course, pulling Rubio's strings here—complaining about subsidies, as if "direct government aid" doesn't account for nearly 40 percent of American farmers' annual income.
"These Florida politicians are following a time-honored tradition of trying to help their local constituents at the expense of Americans in other states, who benefit from low-priced fruits and vegetables regardless of where they are grown," says Bryan Riley, director of the free trade initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. Any discussion of how government subsidies are distorting the agricultural markets on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border should take into account the protectionist barriers to imported sugar, he notes.
Indeed, the American sugar industry has for decades enjoyed the kind of protectionism that Rubio and his colleagues would like to see extended to cucumbers and other produce. The results aren't great. Consumers pay billions more annually, the environment gets wrecked, and Americans end up eating less healthy sugar alternatives.
But the craziest thing about Rubio's proposal is the timing. Food prices are up 10.9 percent over the 12 months ending in July. That means they've risen even faster than overall inflation, which is up 8.5 percent over the same period. (August's inflation data will be released Tuesday morning.)
The whole point of special-interest protectionism is that the costs are diffused while the benefits are highly concentrated. All Americans pay for the federal government's dumb sugar policies, but we barely notice the added cost while the sugar-producing industry reaps billions of dollars in benefits every year.
Even so, openly calling for higher prices at the grocery store—and that is exactly what these lawmakers are doing—at a time like this? Are you serious?
It shouldn't matter whether a cucumber is grown in Florida or Mexico. And at a time when American consumers are beset by high and rising prices, it makes sense to welcome the import of cheaper goods that can put food on the table and put downward pressure on inflation. Rubio's petition should go directly to the compost heap.

The post Marco Rubio Wants To Make Your Groceries More Expensive appeared first on Reason.com.

Over the past six days, Ukraine’s armed forces have broken through the Russian lines in the northeastern corner of the country, swept eastward, and liberated town after town in what had been occupied territory. First Balakliya, then Kupyansk, then Izium, a city that sits on major supply routes. These names won’t mean much to a foreign audience, but they are places that have been beyond reach, impossible for Ukrainians to contact for months. Now they have fallen in hours. As I write this, Ukrainian forces are said to be fighting on the outskirts of Donetsk, a city that Russia has occupied since 2014.[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine is waging a new kind of war]Many things about this advance are unexpected, especially the location: For many weeks, the Ukrainians loudly telegraphed their intention to launch a major offensive farther south. The biggest shock is not Ukraine’s tactics but Russia’s response. “What really surprises us,” Lieutenant General Yevhen Moisiuk, the deputy commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, told me in Kyiv yesterday morning, “is that the Russian troops are not fighting back.”Russian troops are not fighting back. More than that: Offered the choice of fighting or fleeing, many of them appear to be escaping as fast as they can. For several days, soldiers and others have posted photographs of hastily abandoned military vehicles and equipment, as well as videos showing lines of cars, presumably belonging to collaborators, fleeing the occupied territories. A Ukrainian General Staff report said that Russian soldiers were ditching their uniforms, donning civilian clothes, and trying to slip back into Russian territory. The Ukrainian security service has set up a hotline that Russian soldiers can call if they want to surrender, and it has also posted recordings of some of the calls. The fundamental difference between Ukrainian soldiers, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and Russian soldiers, who are fighting for their salary, has finally begun to matter.   That difference might not suffice, of course. Ukrainian soldiers may be better motivated, but the Russians still have far larger stores of weapons and ammunition. They can still inflict misery on civilians, as they did in today’s apparent attack on the electrical grid in Kharkiv and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. Many other cruel options—horrific options—are still open even to a Russia whose soldiers will not fight. The nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia remains inside the battle zone. Russia’s propagandists have been talking about nuclear weapons since the beginning of the war. Although Russian troops are not fighting in the north, they are still resisting the Ukrainian offensive in the south.But even though the fighting may still take many turns, the events of the past few days should force Ukraine’s allies to stop and think. A new reality has been created: The Ukrainians could win this war. Are we in the West really prepared for a Ukrainian victory? Do we know what other changes it could bring?Back in March, I wrote that it was time to imagine the possibility of victory, and I defined victory quite narrowly: “It means that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its own leaders and make its own treaties.” Six months later, some adjustments to that basic definition are required. In Kyiv yesterday, I watched Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tell an audience that victory should now include not only a return to the borders of Ukraine as they were in 1991—including Crimea, as well as Donbas in eastern Ukraine—but also reparations to pay for the damage and war-crimes tribunals to give victims some sense of justice.These demands are not in any sense outrageous or extreme. This was never just a war for territory, after all, but rather a campaign fought with genocidal intent. Russian forces in occupied territories have tortured and murdered civilians, arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of people, destroyed theaters, museums, schools, hospitals. Bombing raids on Ukrainian cities far from the front line have slaughtered civilians and cost Ukraine billions in property damage. Returning the land will not, by itself, compensate Ukrainians for this catastrophic invasion.   [George Packer: Ukrainians are defending the values that Americans claim to hold]But even if it is justified, the Ukrainian definition of victory remains extraordinarily ambitious. To put it bluntly: It is hard to imagine how Russia can meet any of these demands—territorial, financial, legal—so long as its current president remains in power. Remember, Vladimir Putin has put the destruction of Ukraine at the very center of his foreign and domestic policies, and at the heart of what he wants his legacy to be. Two days after the launch of the failed invasion of Kyiv, the Russian state-news agency accidentally published, and then retracted, an article prematurely declaring success. “Russia,” it declared, “is restoring its unity.” The dissolution of the U.S.S.R.—the “tragedy of 1991, this terrible catastrophe in our history”—had been overcome. A “new era” had begun.That original mission has already failed. There will be no such “new era.” The Soviet Union will not be revived. And when Russian elites finally realize that Putin’s imperial project was not just a failure for Putin personally but also a moral, political, and economic disaster for the entire country, themselves included, then his claim to be the legitimate ruler of Russia melts away. When I write that Americans and Europeans need to prepare for a Ukrainian victory, this is what I mean: We must expect that a Ukrainian victory, and certainly a victory in Ukraine’s understanding of the term, also brings about the end of Putin’s regime.To be clear: This is not a prediction; it’s a warning. Many things about the current Russian political system are strange, and one of the strangest is the total absence of a mechanism for succession. Not only do we have no idea who would or could replace Putin; we have no idea who would or could choose that person. In the Soviet Union there was a Politburo, a group of people that could theoretically make such a decision, and very occasionally did. By contrast, there is no transition mechanism in Russia. There is no dauphin. Putin has refused even to allow Russians to contemplate an alternative to his seedy and corrupt brand of kleptocratic power. Nevertheless, I repeat: It is inconceivable that he can continue to rule if the centerpiece of his claim to legitimacy—his promise to put the Soviet Union back together again—proves not just impossible but laughable.To prepare for Putin’s exit does not mean that Americans, Europeans, or any outsiders intervene directly in the politics of Moscow. We have no tools that can affect the course of events in the Kremlin, and any effort to meddle would certainly backfire. But that doesn’t mean we should help him stay in power either. As Western heads of state, foreign ministers, and generals think about how to end this war, they should not try to preserve Putin’s view of himself or of the world, his backward-looking definition of Russian greatness. They should not be planning to negotiate on his terms at all, because they might be dealing with someone else altogether.[Anne Applebaum: ‘Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin’]Even if they prove ephemeral, the events of the past few days do change the nature of this war. From the very beginning, everybody—Europeans, Americans, the global business community in particular—has wanted a return to stability. But the path to stability in Ukraine, long-lasting stability, has been hard to see. After all, any cease-fire imposed too early could be treated, by Moscow, as an opportunity to rearm. Any offer to negotiate could be understood, in Moscow, as a sign of weakness. But now is the time to ask about the stability of Russia itself and to factor that question into our plans. Russian soldiers are running away, ditching their equipment, asking to surrender. How long do we have to wait until the men in Putin’s inner circle do the same?The possibility of instability in Russia, a nuclear power, terrifies many. But it may now be unavoidable. And if that’s what is coming, we should anticipate it, plan for it, think about the possibilities as well as the dangers. “We have learned not to be scared,” Reznikov told his Kyiv audience on Saturday. “Now we ask the rest of you not to be scared too.”

Queen Elizabeth II in 2019. (Photo by Yui Mok - WPA Pool/Getty Images.)I’m writing today from Ketchikan, Alaska, on the last leg of the first real vacation my family has taken in a very long time. For my Sunday newsletter, I thought about directing you to this marvelous tribute to Queen Elizabeth II by Andrew Sullivan and calling it a day. I don’t hold myself out as any kind of expert on the British royal family, and I certainly can’t fully grasp the nature of the connection between the queen and the British people. Andrew, however, helped me understand. He wrote this: You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy—but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery—two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.More:The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness.I’d urge you to read the entire thing, but he also included a C.S. Lewis quote I hadn’t remembered that struck me in a way that’s directly relevant to Americans and especially relevant to our time. Here’s Lewis:Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.I’m not sure I entirely agree with Lewis here (the choice isn’t necessarily between honoring a king and honoring celebrities), but he’s getting at something important. We are drawn to honoring individuals—especially when an individual represents a cause or place we love. Britain’s constitutional monarchy separates the functions of the head of state and the head of government. The head of state is doing her job when she’s explicitly not political, when she instead conducts the formal affairs of the state and embodies (as well as any human can) certain core national values.There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. As Andrew notes, when Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she “was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human—for the rest of her life.” Modern princes, for example, have served in the armed forces. Prince William served for more than seven years as a helicopter search-and-rescue pilot. Prince Harry served in the British Army as an Apache helicopter pilot. He secretly deployed to Afghanistan in 2007 and then publicly deployed again in 2012. Prince Andrew fought in the Falklands war, and Prince Philip fought in World War 2. Duty and honor without power—that’s the role of modern royalty. And that’s why personal scandal can be so crushing. When they fail and fall, it hits differently from the failures of ordinary politicians. Their fundamental purpose is to embody a certain national ideal. But there is also immense meaning when a monarch lives the values their role demands. Queen Elizabeth lived with honor and did her duty, and in so doing she helped bind together a fractious people. She helped give them a sense of shared identity. Again, we Americans can’t quite grasp this connection; to us the British royal family functions mainly as a different form of celebrity. But we can and should grasp something else—nations and cultures need people and institutions who transcend politics.Our republic combines the functions of head of state and head of the executive branch in one person, the president. But aside from singular moments—Ronald Reagan addressing the nation after the Challenger disaster, Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace at the funeral for Charleston church shooting victim Clementa Pinckney—politics tend to dominate a president’s life and legacy. Thus, for Americans, it’s not so much a who that defines us as a what—our constitution and our national story. It’s one reason why the fight over history is so deeply emotional. When political agendas distort the teaching of history, it feels like a deep transgression. When we fight over who is included in our stories about our national past, we’re also fighting about who is included in our national present. The politicization of everything is a threat to any nation, but it’s especially a threat to our nation. We’re simply too diverse and too different to turn every single institution into an instrument of red or blue. Just as we can’t have red history and blue history, we can’t thrive as a people when we have red coffee and blue coffee, red movies and blue movies, red sports and blue sports. Yes, of course there will be cultural variations and differences in taste, but those can and should be a source of delight, not division. There’s a difference between marveling at southerners and our love of college football and deciding “college football is a Republican sport.” In the present age, we’re expected to create institutions so that we can then use institutions. Corporations, for example, don’t just make or sell products, they’re expected to have a platform. They’re expected to use their wealth and power to “speak out.” It’s not enough to “merely” provide goods and services that people love and to provide a living for employees so that families can flourish. The same dynamic applies to our celebrities—the “millionaires, athletes, or film stars” that Lewis speaks about in the quote above. It’s not enough to be good at what they do. It’s not enough to be good men or women. They’re pressured to spend their personal capital on politics or they’re told they haven’t lived their highest purpose.Before I run too far down the field, let me tie this back to the Queen. She spent more than 70 years as the head of state of one of the world’s most powerful nations. She was one of the most-watched and most-famous people in the world. She had an immense platform, but more important than that, she had an institution to protect and values to uphold. It was not an institution to use for political gain or for political objectives, no matter the “fierce urgency of the now” or any other phrase we use to justify the politicization of everything. She knew her role, and she lived her role. Does anyone doubt the wisdom of her choice? None of us will be in an equivalent position, but each of us will be far more defined by who we are rather than where we stand, and no one should think for a moment that upholding our values, building our families, and preserving virtuous institutions compromises our life’s purpose. There are legacies that transcend politics, and in demonstrating that truth, Queen Elizabeth performed one last service for us all. One more thing …A few weeks ago I pointed readers to a powerful thread by Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm interpreting the Tower of Babel story through the nuances of the Hebrew Language. Readers loved it. Now here’s a new thread by Rabbi Lamm, and it’s about Samuel, Saul, and David. Read the entire thing:Ari Lamm @AriLammWhy Read The Bible In Hebrew?
Let's talk about the most important figures *in history* for understanding the rise of monarchy—the prophet Samuel, King Saul...and of course, King David.
Why did Saul fail, but Samuel and David succeed?
A thread (for non-Hebrew readers too!) 🧵 1 September 9th 2022116 Retweets701 LikesOne last thing …I’m mindful that this newsletter is hitting your inboxes on 9/11, and that date has a connection to Queen Elizabeth. There is a moment when she broke with tradition, and that moment chokes me up every time I see it:Charles Lister @Charles_ListerOn Sept 12, 2001 -- 24hrs after 9/11 -- Queen Elizabeth ordered the U.S. national anthem be played at the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace.
Nothing like that had occurred in 600 years.
🇺🇸🇬🇧
September 8th 20223,276 Retweets18,421 Likes

Once you’ve decided to argue, Seo says, know what it is you’re arguing about. To begin, determine the fact, judgment or prescription that you would like someone else to accept. Let’s say it’s “Jen is a team player.” In order to make that claim, add the word “because” and give your reason (“because she involves everyone in the department”). From there, you offer substantiation and evidence to back it up. (“She always goes around the room.” “She checks in with her crew weekly.”) That’s making your case.

Importantly, showing how someone else is wrong isn’t the same thing as being correct yourself. In debate, tearing down the other team doesn’t necessarily prove your team is in the right, nor is it likely to persuade anyone who didn’t agree with you in the first place. “No amount of no is going to get you to yes,” one of Seo’s coaches once told him.

Finally, never let a bully dictate the terms of debate. If faced with a brawler — someone whose aim is, as Seo puts it, “not to persuade but to silence, marginalize and break the will of their opponents” — your only hope is to restore the structure of the debate. In other words, see above.

Some say competitive debate is a flawed model for healthy discourse, whether for domestic disputes or political disagreements. In an essay in The Dublin Review, the novelist Sally Rooney, a former champion debater, characterized formal debate as overly aggressive and possibly immoral. “For the purposes of this game, the emotional or relational aspects of argument are superfluous,” she wrote. The novelist Ben Lerner, who also spent years as a debater, an experience he drew from in his 2019 novel, “The Topeka School,” told me he had to unlearn the idea “that every conversation ended with a winner and a loser.”

Whatever the shortcomings of school debate, our prevailing models for arguing — cable news and courtrooms — certainly don’t offer much hope. As Mark Oppenheimer, a former religion reporter for The Times and the author of a memoir about debate, told The New Yorker in 2010, “the sound-bite culture has ruined it all.” And that was 12 long years ago.

But Seo thinks we idealize a past of civil disagreement. “Those were times when people weren’t able to speak,” he told me recently. “The disagreements were there; they just weren’t visible. What we’re doing right now is unprecedented, which is to allow a diversity of people to speak.” Avoiding difficult conversations, he says, can “shade into contempt and otherness.”

Following the death of Elizabeth II, power is performing its truths, transforming princes into kings and dukes and children into princes. But as the British state becomes less legitimate, these processes are losing their potency. The late Queen is revered across the world but the monarchy itself has lost its magic. Charles is King, but the monarchy will not be what it was.

Monarchy was never above politics. It rested on it and on the Conservative party in particular. This was the party of the monarchy, the union, the constitution, the established churches and the empire. In 1936, it disposed of a king emperor who offended its bourgeois sensibilities, thus redirecting the royal line of succession down to King Charles III. It was a Conservative government of the 1950s that redefined the monarchy as a national rather than imperial one. A then-imperialist Enoch Powell, in his tilting at the royal titles bill, was appalled, but to no effect. In time, he would become an ardent nationalist, dismissive of empire as a passing phase and the Commonwealth as a racial danger to the nation.

Today’s Conservative party is radically different from that of the 1950s. It has taken up Powellite free marketism and nationalism rather than imperialism. It now cares little for church or constitution. Of course it celebrates the person of the late Queen, but monarchy is a subtly different matter.

For most of the Conservative party, Brexit was far more important than royal propriety. What to them would once have been an incendiary charge that, as prime minister, Boris Johnson “lied to the Queen” to get a politically convenient prorogation of parliament made little impact, despite being true. In fact, it was a weaker accusation than it might seem, for it was that the prime minister had told fibs to the particular cherished royal person rather than to the sovereign.

Another telling sign was given by our new prime minister. Having just kissed the hands of the dying monarch, she eulogised her wrongly. Speaking from outside Downing Street, Liz Truss said the late Queen “was the very spirit of Great Britain”. Clearly, no one in Downing Street knew to advise the notionally unionist Truss that her late Majesty was Queen of the whole undivided United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

That is telling. While it is a common error in the country at large, and in the media, it is an extraordinary one to be made by a Conservative prime minister on such a solemn national occasion and in the context of the politics of the Northern Ireland protocol. She and her advisers clearly did not know or care.

In a celebrated book, The Enchanted Glass, Tom Nairn, one of the great interpreters of British history, challenged the notion that the antique British monarchy was mere archaic mumbo-jumbo. Monarchy mattered. It embodied, and sustained, a backward antique state, one that made it impossible for a proper modern democratic British nation to emerge. It kept the nation, its politicians and its intellectuals infantilised. It also helped keep it stuck in an Edwardian time warp, incapable of transforming itself economically and industrially.

That thesis is not quite right. The problem of the monarchy is not its backwardness, but its particular modernity. Although not keen on bicycles, it was the very model of a modern monarchy. As author and historian David Cannadine revealed in the 1980s, the great royal rituals are inventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, created alongside the great royal processional way that is the Mall.

The monarchy spoke through radio long before most people had receivers. In 1953, the coronation was broadcast on television, to a nation of wireless listeners. The new Prince Consort started egging on the nation’s engineers in an era of heroic test pilots, sleek new jets and atomic power stations. That Dan Dare world is as long gone as the promise of the new Elizabethan age, but it had its moment.

This is not to say the monarchy was not surrounded by puerile propaganda or that it endures or doesn’t matter. On royal matters, the House of Commons, especially “at its best”, and the BBC cringeingly debase themselves. This is important in that it hides the power, not of the monarch, but of a monarchical state and the cravenness of the political class in front of it.

But something fundamental has changed. The invented traditions that sustained the performance of monarchical presence have their outward pomp but have lost much inner meaning. The voice of the monarchical state is, post-Iraq and Brexit, assumed to be dissembling or mendacious. The once wholly cringeing media now often report to greater powers who are less inclined to respect the official royal version. They have bigger lies to tell.

It is also the case that the prestige of the British monarchy depended on that of the British empire and then the British nation and the British state. That too has eroded. Recent prime ministers have been neither efficient nor dignified. Strikingly, the Conservative party has proved incapable of preparing for or managing the Brexit it so badly wanted. It is now hard to instinctively believe there is a particular British diplomatic or military genius.

The civil service hasn’t covered itself in glory either, partying in Downing Street while the rest of us obeyed the rules and, like the ministers it serves, staying on holiday in the midst of crisis and collaborating to cover up scandal. Lords temporal or spiritual do not command the respect they once did. In parallel, excepting the late Queen, the royal family is associated with inappropriate friendships and rejecting transfusions of energy from charismatic women, Diana, Princess of Wales, and Meghan.

Crucially, the Conservative party has changed. It has left behind its roots as the royal party, as the party of national capitalism and of a genuine union. Although it has increased its share of the vote in every general election since 1997, it is now an English party shackled to a dying electorate, a failing Brexit and powerful radical right, but not to monarchist impulses. It exercises its own power monarchically, satisfying the special interests of its own privy councils.

Meanwhile, the great silenced majority of the younger generation is neither monarchist nor Conservative. It is savvy about the mendacities of power and is rightly resentful at having its future being blighted by the fantasies of old people and all that is associated with them. Its monarchy will be very different. Indeed, they may well, like presidents from around the world, have warm words for the late Queen, but prefer a more modest, more modern, more democratic, more dignified republican constitution.

David Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation and professor of modern British history at King’s College London

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At the dawn of the 21st century, countries in both the Global South and the former communist bloc were falling over each other to lower their trade barriers, liberalize their capital markets, and encourage their best and brightest to study in the West. Multinational firms were expanding their supply chains to bring workers from Mexico, China, Vietnam, India, and Russia into their fold. The internet had created entirely new ways for information to cross borders. Labor productivity was soaring and global poverty was falling.
U.S. politicians largely embraced this trend. Republicans and Democrats cooperated to negotiate trade agreements with both longtime friends and former foes. All this took place in a context of public optimism: In January 2000, 69 percent of Americans told Gallup they were satisfied with the country's direction.
Two decades later, things have not quite worked out the way many champions of free trade hoped at the end of President Bill Clinton's administration. Neither China nor Russia turned into liberal, free market democracies. Two decades of unending war have been peppered by financial crises, populist uprisings, and pandemics. Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions are merely the latest shock to the system.
Countries are now falling over each other to erect new barriers to trade, impose capital controls, and restrict migration flows. U.S. politicians have embraced this trend too: The strongest throughline between the Donald Trump and Joe Biden presidencies has been their hostility to economic openness. All this is taking place in a context of public pessimism: In March, just 22 percent of Americans told Gallup they were satisfied with the country's direction.
The souring of the 21st century has triggered accusations and recriminations about who bears responsibility for the end of "the end of history." Free trade advocates note the enormous benefits that economic liberalization has brought to the global economy and decry the rise of neo-mercantilism in the United States and elsewhere. But free trade's critics offer a challenging rebuttal: They argue the last two decades have exposed the internal contradictions of neoliberalism. As they see it, we're witnessing the natural response of societies buffeted by the vicissitudes of the free market; economic openness sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
There is a kernel of truth to this. But a kernel of truth is not the whole truth, and globalization's proponents do not need to completely rethink their priors. The benefits of trade and international engagement persist even in the current era.
Advocates of free markets still have a strong case to make, and they need to make it. This particular argument against an open global economy has been made before. When it triumphed, the result was world war.
Polanyi's Challenge
To understand the intellectual roots of today's resistance to free markets, the book to examine is Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation.
Polanyi, writing in 1944, wanted to understand how the world had arrived at a low moment of depression, fascism, and war. Where writers like F.A. Hayek saw socialism's rise as a tragic result of state interference in free markets, Polanyi viewed it as the ineluctable backlash against those same markets' volatility.
There are three arguments in The Great Transformation that require recognition and response from free market enthusiasts. First, Polanyi pushed back vigorously against the assumption that unregulated markets were the "natural" state of the world. Governments take concerted action, Polanyi noted, to maintain the modern capitalist system.
One present-day example is intellectual property rights. To incentivize innovation and creativity, governments enforce laws that protect trademarks, patents, and copyrights. If the state did not do that, innovation would be lower but diffusion would be much more rapid, as films, software, and pharmaceuticals would be pirated almost immediately. The tradeoff of more innovation for less diffusion might be worth it, but getting there requires purposive government action.
Polanyi's second argument was that the ultimate result of laissez faire policies is "the demolition of society." According to The Great Transformation, human beings inevitably resist efforts to turn labor into a commodity. Market liberalization would produce rising inequality. And then, Polanyi's predictions turned rather gloomy: "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effect of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed."
Finally, Polanyi described what he called the "double movement." If the state consciously tried to create a marketplace disembedded from the rest of society, it would trigger blowback against markets. Exactly how that double movement manifested itself could vary. While socialists might call for expanded state support of the less fortunate, another possible response would be xenophobic nationalism. Polanyi drew a straight line from 19th century globalization to the horrors of the 1930s and '40s.
How accurate is all this in describing the current moment? If we look at the United States, we can see undeniable similarities. The hidden shocks from liberalizing trade with China and migration from Latin America, combined with the very prominent shock of the 2008 financial crisis, produced a lot of social disruption in the last 15 years. Throw in climate change, a pandemic, and great-power rivalries, and suddenly Polanyi's hyperbolic description of a society ravaged by the market starts to sound familiar.
Consciously or unconsciously, both left-wing and right-wing critics of the global economy rely on Polanyi's logic to connect the dots between neoliberalism and the current state of the world. In February, journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that Canadian trucker protests were "a long time in the making," saying the underlying discontent reflected "mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West." That sentiment, he said, was bound to "find still-more extreme expressions."
Tucker Carlson's rants on Fox News are often premised on a similar logic. In April, for example, he claimed that "neoliberalism is looting with a smokescreen of race and gender politics so you won't notice that it happened." That ideology, he said, is "a cover for the distribution of wealth, a distribution that has become more lopsided in our age than at any age ever," representing "a shocking discredit to capitalism."
Testing the Bicycle Theory
The Great Transformation is an important critique, and it is unsurprising that people like Greenwald and Carlson have gravitated to some form of its arguments. Still, there are clear problems with applying it to the modern world.
To begin with, the countries that heeded Polanyi's warnings the most are facing the most severe populist blowback. The entire ethos of the European Union was to integrate the continent's economies while supplying an ample social safety net for those in need. Despite these efforts to cushion the market's effects, 21st century populism was percolating in Europe well before Trump won the American presidency, particularly in the countries with the strongest social safety nets. Hostility to economic migration has been a recurring theme of European politics for the last two decades, from fears of "Polish plumbers" inundating Western Europe to more recent backlashes against Syrian and Afghan refugees. Even Nordic states such as Sweden have turned far more nativist in the last decade. It seems implausible to blame laissez faire capitalism for this blowback.
Research on the rise of populism provides further reason to be skeptical of that thesis. Most analyses of support for Brexit and Trump—most prominently from political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart—have found that cultural backlash was the predominant factor. To put it crudely, working-class whites reacted to perceived losses in social and economic standing by embracing a reactionary brand of politics and blaming immigrants and minorities for their troubles. As Cas Mudde, one of the deans of populism research, wrote a few years ago, the debate between cultural backlash and economic anxiety was debated by populist scholars for decades, and settled in favor of the cultural backlash hypothesis.
Also contrary to Polanyi's thesis, most Americans have not turned against globalization. In the United States, there is a striking mismatch between the way politicians talk about how voters think about trade and immigration and the way voters actually think about these issues.
According to the politicians, Americans are fed up with the job-destroying impact of international trade and the wage-lowering impact of immigration. That take was apparent in Congress' response to Biden's first State of the Union address. The biggest applause line was the president's promise that "when we use taxpayer dollars to rebuild America, we are going to buy American: buy American products to support American jobs."
Polling data paint a different picture. In 2021, according to Gallup, 79 percent of Americans viewed trade positively—a record number. While that percentage dropped to 63 percent in 2022, it was still considerably higher than it was during the heyday of globalization in the late 1990s. Gallup's results on immigration are similar: From 2000 to 2022, the percentage of Americans who wanted more immigration more than tripled, while the percentage who wanted less immigration fell by nearly half.
But even if hostility to globalization does not appeal to the median American voter, it does have some appeal to the pivotal American voter. In the last few election cycles, the key to victory has been through the Rust Belt, and that meant demonstrating fealty to the idea that America used to be great before globalization. Furthermore, supporters of free trade and immigration do not place a high priority on those issues, while its salience for opponents is much higher. That explains why U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is convinced that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in no small part due to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade pact among the United States and 11 other countries.
In response to this political reality, successive administrations have taken whacks at the open global economy. The Trump administration withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, sabotaged the World Trade Organization (WTO), raised tariffs across a wide variety of goods, launched a trade war with China, and expended significant effort to reduce migration to the United States. The Biden administration has continued most of these policies.
No progress has been made on reviving the WTO as a force for trade liberalization. There has been a moratorium on new trade deals. Tai has insisted despite all evidence to the contrary that the China tariffs provide bargaining leverage, so the trade war with China persists. The Biden administration has made scant effort to increase immigration flows.
The two administrations' signature foreign economic deals reflect their resistance to the open global economy. The Trump administration renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, which became the more restrictive United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). The Biden administration launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity to entice partners away from excessive dependence on China. The most telling fact about this proposed agreement is that it does not include what trade negotiators call "market access"—i.e., reduced import barriers. This is a trade deal with no additional trade in it.
Although critics like Greenwald and Carlson attack the current administration as neoliberal, Biden's team is just as prone to repeating Polanyi's critique as they are. "To Biden's officials," Politico noted in May, "the last four decades of neoliberal economic policy—pursued through tax cuts, weaker regulations and pro-globalization trade deals—are largely to blame for today's spiraling inequality and economic nationalism."
The response to Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine intensified the attack on global openness. The unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia have segmented the global economy, increasing food and fuel prices. More than 700 multinational corporations pulled back from their operations in Russia, far exceeding what was legally required. The longer the war goes on, the more permanent the spike in geopolitical risk seems. Little wonder that a host of investment letters joined BlackRock's Larry Fink in warning that Russia's invasion "has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades."
Once upon a time, when the United States was the international leader of trade liberalization, policy wonks talked about the "bicycle theory" of trade negotiations. The metaphor was simple: For all the benefits of freer trade, ideological and interest-group opposition to it was always strong. If trade negotiators continued to push for greater openness, the trade bicycle would maintain speed and be easy to ride. But if momentum stalled, the whole edifice would tip over like a bicycle that slows to a crawl. Protectionist forces would agitate for exceptions, carve-outs, and restrictions, making the global economy less and less free.
In the next few years, we will find out if the bicycle theory was right, because it is safe to say that U.S. economic liberalization has ground to a halt. Thanks to Polanyi's double movement, over the past five years the United States and the global economy have halted the push toward openness and are trending toward closure.
Making Economies Less Resilient
The Great Transformation posited that a shift toward unregulated markets would trigger a social backlash, leading to a re-regulated economy. But what happens when a more protectionist economy creates its own forms of economic malaise? Maybe the next double movement will force a return to a more open economy.
Inflation is the most obvious way that increased protectionism has been a drag on the U.S. economy. One underrated benefit of an open global economy is that trade increases productivity, which allows the economy to grow at a faster rate without triggering price hikes. This is particularly true of the United States. Greater demand for goods can be absorbed by greater imports; greater demand for labor can be met by a large influx of foreign workers.
During the pandemic years, the federal government sustained demand through fiscal and monetary stimulus. It paid considerably less attention to the supply side of the ledger, helping fuel a surge of inflation unseen since the 1970s.
Americans continued to buy imported goods at record levels, regardless of the tariffs, and that contributed to rising prices. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that if the United States ended the trade war with China, eliminated steel and aluminum tariffs, and ended softwood lumber duties on Canada, the inflation rate would be cut by 1.3 percentage points. "Removing the China tariffs is the single-largest policy lever to bring down inflation that President Biden has," economist Jason Furman declared in April. Within the Biden administration, both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and (now-former) Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh suggested lifting tariffs as one way of fighting short-term inflation.
By itself, trade liberalization will ameliorate inflation but not cure it. Indeed, many critics of globalization argue that the global supply chain stresses caused by the pandemic reinforced the case for insourcing. The Biden administration has echoed that argument, which overlooks something economists have been trying to explain for years: Countries that are more integrated into global value chains experience far fewer price shocks than less integrated countries.
The idea that globalization enhances economic resilience is counterintuitive, especially as China seems to shut down its port facilities on a regular basis. So, consider the baby formula crisis that emerged this spring.
This is a market where the United States is usually self-sufficient: 98 percent of infant formula consumed by Americans is manufactured in the United States. The market suffered a supply shock when the formula produced at one Michigan plant was recalled due to suspected bacterial contamination; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) subsequently shut down the plant.
That is exactly the sort of situation in which imports can smooth out supply. But thanks to the Trump and Biden administrations, that did not happen. Infant formula is subject to tariff-rate quotas of 17.5 percent after certain quantities are imported. The USMCA sharply limited how much formula Canada could export to the United States. The FDA prevented imports from the European Union over picayune disputes about labeling.
The result: By May, more than 40 percent of stores were out of baby formula, and the military was airlifting emergency supplies from Europe. "We're seeing what happens when we reduce trade with other countries for an essential good," The Atlantic's Derek Thompson observed. "We're more vulnerable to emergencies like a bacteria-infested plant in Michigan." Protectionism and excessive regulation make an economy less resilient during such emergencies.
An immigration shortfall, created by the pandemic and increased restrictions, is also taking a toll. Economists estimate that 2 million fewer working-age immigrants entered the United States than would have been the case if pre-2020 migration patterns had persisted. Contrary to public perception, most of these missing immigrants would have been college-educated. The sectors of the economy that are most dependent on immigrants, including hospitality, food service, and STEM-related fields, have seen especially high rates of unfilled jobs. And that, in turn, has helped push prices higher.
The Trump and Biden administrations have either imposed or maintained a welter of policies designed to restrict and regulate the cross-border movement of goods, services, and people. That has made the United States not more resilient but less productive and more vulnerable to local shocks. As Edward Alden recently warned in Foreign Policy, "it is often a small step from prudent self-sufficiency to damaging attempts at autarky."
The Next Reagan
One could argue that there have been three double movements in the last 150 years. In response to the 19th century era of globalization, the major economies of Europe launched a series of trade wars against each other in a prelude to World War I. The global economy opened up again in the 1920s. But as the Great Depression worsened, the large economies ratcheted up tariffs, restricted immigration, or engaged in beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the run-up to World War II.
The last double movement came after the United States went off the gold standard in 1971. The result was a decade of inflation, a surge in commodity prices, and an explosion of protectionism. But unlike the previous two waves, the backlash of the 1970s was channeled into President Ronald Reagan's sunny optimism of the 1980s.
Reagan was not a consistent free trader. His administration pioneered the practice of voluntary export restraints—in which the exporting country voluntarily restricts its exports, a tactic that hurts consumers while benefiting domestic producers—that Trump's chief trade negotiator embraced as his preferred tactic. But Reagan negotiated trade deals, supported increases in immigration, and repeatedly argued that globalization would benefit the United States and the classical liberal values it held dear. When Reagan made Americans more optimistic about the future, he made them more enthusiastic about an open global economy.
Americans are anything but optimistic right now, and critics will continue to use Polanyi-like arguments to blame the excesses of neoliberalism. But protectionists have been in power for the last six years, and their policies are partially responsible for steep inflation, goods shortages, and a faltering service sector. Perhaps this next decade will produce a successor to Reagan, someone who can marry hard-headed economics with the optimism necessary to sell it.
The alternative is dire. "The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed," Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation. "Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise….When it broke, the effect was bound to be instantaneous."
The post Goodbye, Globalization? appeared first on Reason.com.

“Money is not the only barrier to transmission infrastructure,” Reed said. “It’s been a problem and contentious when it comes to transmission, but it’s not, I would say, the most significant barrier to getting transmission built.”

There is no single framework for planning or community participation, and there is no accepted approach to compensating the communities or states that host infrastructure from which they don’t directly benefit (this is a good overview, if you’re looking for some light bedtime reading). There have been past efforts to give federal regulators more power over the process — particularly in the 2005 Energy Policy Act — but that authority often collapsed when challenged in court. There is some money in the Inflation Reduction Act to nudge regulators and utilities to be more ambitious and cooperative, but there are no dramatic new authorities or structures to make what was impossible yesterday possible tomorrow.

And that’s just transmission. The center of our decarbonization strategy is an almost unimaginably large buildup of wind and solar power. To put some numbers to that: A plausible path to decarbonization, modeled by researchers at Princeton, sees wind and solar spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers — which is roughly equal to the land mass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Ohio, Rhode Island and Tennessee put together. “The footprint is very, very large, and people don’t really understand that,” Danny Cullenward, co-author of “Making Climate Policy Work,” told me.

We haven’t built on this scale, in this country, in decades. Decarbonization is a construction project no smaller than electrification or the construction of the interstate highway system. And while there’s both public and private money for it, there’s no integrated approach to planning and executing it.

The old theory was that we would price carbon, and the market would take care of the planning for us. But we never passed a national carbon tax or cap-and-trade plan. Other countries rely on much more centralized planning by the national government, but our federal government doesn’t have that authority or that capacity. What we’re betting on now is coordination, in part greased by money. But it needs to happen at a scale and speed unlike anything in our recent history. We are already failing to build infrastructure on budget and on time. How will the fractured systems struggling to deliver those projects now begin building more projects, and building them at a far-faster pace?

This will be the focus of fights yet to come — and one of them is coming quickly. The deal that the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, struck with Senator Joe Manchin to pass the Inflation Reduction Act included a promise to attach separate legislation streamlining environmental reviews and permitting authority to must-pass legislation. The package is already splitting climate hawks, with some, like Senator Bernie Sanders, opposing it, and others, like Senators Brian Schatz and Ron Wyden, backing it.

Queen Elizabeth II died on Thursday, in Scotland, ending a reign of seventy years, which began in Winston Churchill’s second premiership, in the early nineteen-fifties. She is succeeded by her son, who will now be called Charles III. The Queen’s death has initiated a period of sustained mourning in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere around the world, and has kicked off debates about the value of constitutional monarchy. To discuss the Queen’s life, and the future of Britain, I spoke by phone with Simon Schama, a historian who is the author of many books on British history, a contributing editor at the Financial Times, and a professor at Columbia University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed whether the monarchy really is apolitical, as its proponents often claim, what admiration for royalty has in common with religion, and how the British people are likely to view their new head of state.

What is it exactly that you and other people are mourning?

The extraordinary thing is when you manage, against all the odds, to actually make the “family” bit of the Royal Family work, notwithstanding that three of your children’s marriages collapsed and there were sundry disasters. The marriage between her and Philip was amazingly durable. The weird flip side is that, if you succeed even on a fantastical level of having a nation as a kind of hugely extended family, you feel your mom is gone, really. You do feel a kind of mother or grandmother or auntie has left, even though you knew she was very much coming to the end of her allotted term of years. I think that’s what a lot of people are feeling.

One of the truisms, or platitudes, really, is that she’s the only monarch everybody has ever known. But not me. I’m so old that I remember her father quite well, who died in 1952. She had both an uncle and a father who didn’t really want to be king. Her uncle abdicated, and her father was stricken by shyness. He upped his chain-smoking during the war and afterward, and was dead of lung cancer. And so I kind of remember the transition from this relatively young but utterly wasted and collapsed father to this young woman who had to remake the institution all over again. Psychologically, everything’s a bit off-kilter, as it is with a family member passing.

Orwell said England was “a family with the wrong members in control.”

Right.

But how do you like that idea? What does that idea mean to you? Is it something to strive for as a country?

Well, why have a constitutional monarchy at all? In the nineteenth century, the answer was that it seemed to be better than autocracy on the one hand and revolution on the other. Even as Queen Victoria’s powers were stripped down, she reinvented the possibility of an authority that had not worked before. Walter Bagehot, the constitutional writer, made a case for constitutional monarchy as something that was morally exemplary, that had august ceremony built into it. But then he said something really much more interesting. He said it should be intelligible to ordinary people. And that’s where the family came in—if [people] could somehow see the royalty as the embodiment of the nation, the mysterious and magical inheritor of an endless past, but also, in some respects, as absolutely, recognizably human just like them, then you pulled off an amazing political stunt.

It’s a tricky thing to bring off, but it all begins with a sense of how the nation wants to see itself embodied in figures, whether they’re wheels of the political system, or a messianic despot like Vladimir Putin. Is there a way of actually constructing an identity to which you belong, which is above the egotistical abrasiveness of politics? That’s what the Queen represented, and that’s what Charles has to carry on.

You just said that the royals had pulled off an amazing political stunt, and then mentioned them being separate from politics. I’ve noticed this tension a lot in the obituaries, which talk about Elizabeth bringing unity and stability and upholding tradition. These are things people are welcome to be in favor of, but I would not exactly say that they’re apolitical.

That’s very interesting and astute. The institution of monarchy, like everything else, is necessarily a political choice. You’re probably right, but I think a much more interesting thing is that the Queen ostensibly stuck very rigorously to political neutrality. Was she for the E.U., was she for leaving the E.U., was she against leaving it? There was a hullabaloo when she wore a hat with the colors of the E.U. flag, complete with gold trimming. But I think the unexamined texts of her reign are her Christmas messages. I thought they would be the most anodyne, vanilla, absolutely nonpolitical statements. But, very famously, in the 1983 Christmas Day message, she said that the most serious problem the world had was the division between rich and poor countries. And she got into trouble for that. Similarly, she was known to be in favor of sanctions against apartheid South Africa, which is why Nelson Mandela loved her so much.

This brought about a certain amount of tension with the government of Margaret Thatcher.

That’s right, and that was why some thought she’d actually extended the royal prerogative illegitimately, as coded, or refined, or nuanced as it might be in a Christmas message. This was kind of an acceptable way of moving out of her ostensible neutrality. And then there was an attempt in Rhodesia during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence to say that it was what the Queen really wanted. That’s what [the Rhodesian Prime Minister] Ian Smith said, even though she followed the government line [in opposition to Rhodesian independence led by its white minority].

Right, we can sit here and say that we’re glad the Queen didn’t support the Universal Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia in the mid-sixties, and we’re glad that she wanted sanctions against South Africa in the eighties. Or we could talk about the recent Guardian series about certain laws the monarchy is exempt from. But all of these things are political. Not partisan necessarily, but political.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I think if we look around the world, not just to Putin but to someone like Narendra Modi, there’s this issue of establishing a sense of national community or national identity against the people who do not belong to it. That’s what Modi is doing. That’s what Xi Jinping is doing. That is emphatically what Putin is doing, and it’s what Trump was doing. So you are right to be skeptical about the possibility of the monarchy ever being a completely apolitical institution. But it’s a political institution that seeks to do the least harm. In that respect, it’s been improbably successful.

What did the Queen herself do that meant something to people? You’re laughing.

What is the fairy dust? Who the hell knows? On the surface, it’s so paradoxical. Lord Altrincham—John Grigg—who was a fierce critic of the monarchy of the Queen in the nineteen-sixties, described her as being the captain of the school hockey team or something like that, and therefore not really fit to know the world. Very interestingly, he took it all back, and said, “Well, the reason why she behaves decently is because she is authentically an absolutely decent person.” It’s very striking coming from him. It seems an extraordinary paradox that someone from that kind of remote, esoteric, and mandarin-like distant world of horses and hounds and courtiers should actually be able to communicate spontaneously with ordinary people. If you’ve seen her do it, that’s the way it is. That’s what she does. I suspect Charles will be able to do it, too.

I might argue that, if Charles is able to do it, it suggests that anyone who’s put in this position and given the surrounding pomp and circumstance will be able to do it. Maybe it’s more about what the people want to feel than what the monarch is actually doing.

You wouldn’t want to do it, because you’d have to do it every day, six times a day. Hospital here, a school there, old-age pensioners there, the Ambassador of Burkina Faso at three o’clock. You would not want to do this. At the time of the Diamond Jubilee, it was just absolutely bloody well pelting down with rain. The rain was coming down horizontally, but there were hundreds of thousands of people on the banks of the Thames. It was this vile day in May, British spring, of course, and there she and Philip were, hour upon hour. It was an absolutely appalling job, really. You have to not mind doing this over and over again. It’s a sense of vocation, which is simultaneously weirdly mystical, sort of quasi-religious. And she often sounded that way when she described it. It’s also unbelievably mundane—grindingly, relentlessly, exhaustively commonplace.

Chloé Valdary is a writer and entrepreneur whose company, Theory of Enchantment, aims to offer a “human approach” to diversity and inclusion training. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Chloé Valdary discuss the flaws of the dominant paradigm in diversity, equity, and inclusion; why many of today’s interpersonal conflicts stem from a larger crisis of meaning; and how to engage in big debates about social issues without becoming a combatant in the culture war.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I've been following your work for a long time and you're somebody who's pretty rare in that you write really interestingly about the world, but you're also a kind of entrepreneur and activist. You critique the way a lot of the diversity, equity, and inclusion space works, and rather than just complaining about it on Twitter, you're actually trying to build a better alternative. Let's start with why you are concerned about the way that many companies, institutions, and universities run those kinds of DEI training, what's wrong with the status quo, and then perhaps later, we can get to what you want to put in this place.Chloé Valdary: Funnily enough, I didn't intend to get involved in the diversity and inclusion space. I was building something that was established to basically teach people how to love. But folks who were part of companies that were bringing in diversity and inclusion trainings of a standard variety, were essentially experiencing the absence of love. They were experiencing an environment in which facilitators would come in and encourage people to judge one another based upon their skin color, or based upon other immutable characteristics that they might have possessed—encouraging people to self-segregate, even based upon skin color. This was oftentimes reported to cause havoc in the workplace, where people who didn't agree would be shunned, or their very disagreement would itself be deemed evidence of racism. This was causing discord between colleagues. I think that is what has been driving many organizations to look for an alternative approach. Mounk: One way that I've heard that described is that a lot of these trainings are based on a “common enemy” model, and that what other people are trying to put in its place is a sort of “common humanity” model. Is that a helpful way of thinking about it?Valdary: One could transform that premise in such a way that it doesn't have to be hostile, or it doesn't have to result in dehumanizing one another. You could position it to mean, “We all have a common enemy, and the common enemy is in each of us. It's ourselves.” But yes, I could also see it applying in that sort of limited way that you mean right now, where the common enemy is basically, white people—for lack of a better way of putting it. People with white skin color are basically given a sort of a metaphysical designation as being the representation of, and the source of, all evil in the United States, against which we all must fight, without end.The alternative that I try to present with my organization is an approach that essentially says: bigotry and prejudice is usually caused when a person or group of people are experiencing some kind of insecurity, usually of a psychological nature, and because they don't have the proper tools to deal with that, they project that insecurity onto other groups of people as a defensive mechanism. And so, if you want to tackle that in a sustainable way, you actually have to teach people how to get in a healthy relationship with themselves and with their own complexity, so that they're less likely to project in the first place. What that requires is a questioning of some of the dogmas of contemporary DEI, which may themselves be coming from a place of insecurity on the part of those facilitators who are promoting them. White Fragility was obviously a super popular book in 2020, and the idea was that white people are inexorably and existentially fragile when it comes to talking about race, and are basically always wrong if they have a different opinion on race. They're always wrong by the simple virtue of their skin color. And that resulted in the infantilization of people with darker skin color, this idea that black people are totally incapable of withstanding or dealing with disagreement or any diversity of opinion on this very specific topic. In accusing white people of being inherently racist, DiAngelo actually perpetuates the notion that she herself is racist. She also perpetuates certain ideas that are at the heart of white supremacy itself, because if you believe that every single aspect of black life in America is somehow desolate, or full of despair, and that all of that despair and desolation is actually caused by white people or whiteness, then you are conceding that whiteness is, in fact, an all-powerful, omnipresent force—this is an actual tenant of white supremacy. Mounk: On an intellectual level, what I found most striking about DiAngelo's theory is the ways in which it is unfalsifiable: “I have a very extreme view of the nature of racism in the United States, and if you don't acknowledge that in any kind of way, that's just all the more proof that you're racist, and of how strong the hold of white supremacy is.” There's no standpoint from which you can legitimately criticize DiAngelo's theory. What I find most striking is that she said on a number of occasions that when a white person interrupts a nonwhite person, they're bringing the whole apparatus of white supremacy to bear on that person. But that, I think, shows an inability to envisage a relationship of equals. Obviously, there can be an old white boss or faculty member or whoever who continually interrupts, in a disrespectful way, the young woman of color. Sure. We all know that that exists, and that's relevant to worry about. But when you're friends with someone, you interrupt them sometimes. That's just the nature of being friends. Valdary: Yes, it's funny you say that. I was recently thinking about acquiring a number of practices that John Vervaeke, the cognitive scientist out of the University of Toronto, describes as “serious play” —things like Tai Chi, meditation, dialogue, or even acting. All of these things are practices that require a kind of capacity to be present, which requires the capacity to be vulnerable. These are both necessary when cultivating deep friendship. But if you superimpose a superficial way of speaking towards each other, by virtue of skin color, then you actually make that kind of deep friendship-cultivation impossible, because you're not being present. You're not actually dialoguing with true vulnerability. You're just sort of anticipating what's going to happen next, because you've assumed all of these different things about your fellow dialoguer. That is really unhealthy behavior to encourage, especially right now. We just went through COVID and we were in isolation for a long time. We weren't able to connect to each other physically. We need to cultivate a capacity for deep friendship, especially now, because of the scarcity of friendship and real connection during COVID. Instead, we have quasi-movements that are encouraging us to go in the opposite direction, and that's really dangerous.Mounk: I think you’ve just expressed, in a very different language, something that I've thought about a lot and which helps to explain why I'm so allergic to people like DiAngelo. I grew up Jewish in Germany, and within that context, I was sort of a representative of a historically oppressed minority group. And the most alienating thing I experienced wasn’t anti-Semitism, which I experienced sometimes, but not often, which was certainly unpleasant—it was a kind of creepy philo-Semitism, where people were so aware of our respective identities, and were so careful in how they treated me and so desperate to prove to me how much they loved Jews and how sorry they were for the crimes of Germany's past. But it just felt impossible to have a genuine friendship with them. That is not the way to treat somebody as an equal.I think you've described very clearly and compellingly what the problem of some of those trainings is. So, what is the theory that underlies your work, and how do you try to put it into practice?Valdary: The Theory of Enchantment is the name of my organization, and we’re grounded in three principles: treat people like human beings, not political abstractions; criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down or destroy; and try to do everything in love and compassion, again, with the understanding that supremacy as a general, psychological tendency, is actually an extreme form of projection. (The supremacist has to be deeply insecure, because otherwise they would feel no reason to tear another person down in order to feel good about themselves. So it's a projection.) We have workshops, and also an online course that teaches people how to get in a healthy relationship with themselves, and how to start to accept their own diversity. Sometimes when I ask people about their vision of a racially harmonious society, they'll say, “When I see a snapshot of a graduation or something, I want it to have more diverse faces. I don't want it to be all white faces.” I tell that person, “At Theory of Enchantment, we believe that there's so much diversity in a single human being, let alone an entire group of people.” It's really the lens that we're trying to get you to obtain, one through it you can see that even in a room full of white people, there is diversity going on. You just have to know how to look in a way that goes beyond simply being skin-deep. And you can only do that by first learning how to do it with yourself. because when we stereotype others, we also simultaneously stereotype ourselves. By stereotyping a group of people as, you know, lazy, I'm denying the fact that in some contexts, I am lazy. So I'm pigeonholing myself even while pigeonholing others. All of our work is in the service of getting people to expand their perception—first, internally, and then working through that externally.Mounk: This sounds convincing to me as a theory of both what produces discriminatory viewpoints in people, and how to make people into whole human beings who are capable of loving. But are we aiming too high in an organizational context? If I'm running an institution or a company, I just want to make sure that people treat each other decently and get the job done. As much as I would love to have everyone in the institution become spiritually whole, some people just aren’t going to become spiritually whole. It's not clear that it's either my job or within the capacity of me as an institutional leader to transform people in that kind of way. Perhaps, in order to make sure that we get along in this complicated, diverse society, we should aim a little bit lower? Valdary: We’re not for everyone, that's for sure. But we know what we stand for. We are definitely, I would say, spiritually and psychologically-minded. But I also feel like there are certain emergencies going on in America right now, in terms of a collapse of meaning, and superficial identities causing discord and inciting polarization. All of these things, and especially the collapse of meaning, mean we must focus on the question of how we become whole. It would be one thing if there were just pockets, just little dams breaking here and there. But it seems to me that a tsunami is coming, and I think that that requires a holistic solution. And quite frankly, if you're running an organization, and the people in your organization are whole beings, the organization will run well, and it will run better just for the simple fact that the people will have better tools to deal with any conflict that might come up interpersonally, within the confines of the organization. That will affect how it's run and how it operates in many different facets. But I do think that we're facing a huge problem in America. It is an existential problem, and an epistemological problem. To go back to Robin DiAngelo—she was basically proposing an epistemology, right? A kind of way of knowing. When you get into that territory, you have to have something on that same level in order to tackle it. Band aids won’t do it.Mounk: So, what would you say to a critique which says, “Look, it's wonderful for people to become more whole and to work on themselves in that kind of way. But I think it is a fair critique to point out that some political cabinet is just all white people, and it probably shows that people have been excluded in some kind of way, because there is talent in every demographic in the United States”? Within your workshop, is there space for saying, “Hey, I feel isolated here, because people look at me weird because of my origin, or they have prejudices about my religion”, and so on? How do you build space for productive conversations about those real points of conflict?Valdary: We teach different modalities in the Theory of Enchantment that are, I would say, specifically geared toward facilitating those difficult conversations. For example, we teach nonviolent communication, which was a methodology pioneered by Marshall Rosenberg, who did this in conflict zones all around the world.Nonviolent communication is actually related to “serious play.” If we were to consider dialogue as a piece of serious play, and you get into conflict with another person, we have different practices like deep listening, empathy, or repeating back to the person precisely what they said, instead of immediately going into disagreement, so you can communicate to that person that you actually heard them. These are not easy propositions that come down from on high, or that are merely saying, “If you're experiencing someone being offensive towards you, then do X, Y, and Z immediately, and that will solve the problem completely.” Rather, we're giving people the emotional tools to be able to have empathy for each other even in the midst of profound disagreement. And our bet is that empathy, in the long run, will help people transcend the conflict. But let me be very clear, we are co-creating these things with our partners. What we're not doing is going into an organization and trying to superimpose some kind of apparatus. We're trying to co-create ways of handling difficult conversations, because yes, someone might be experiencing something in the workplace that's very harmful. But how do you address it without causing more harm? And how do you put practices in place that make it less likely that that will occur in the future? That's really what we're focused on.Mounk: Let's zoom out a little bit. You mentioned that DiAngelo has a kind of epistemology. She also has a basic political analysis, which says that the United States has always been defined by racism and white supremacy, and that we haven't made any significant progress. There are many reasons to worry about our political situation. I certainly get very depressed when I look at cable news, and I get very worried when I think about the 2024 election. But I also feel somewhat more optimistic than DiAngelo seems to be about the state of our society. What's your assessment of the ability of people all across the country to actually communicate with each other in a meaningful way across those kinds of boundaries?Valdary: There are definitely organizations working on depolarization. Broadly speaking, it's hard to tell, though, because I'm on social media. Social media is a bubble, but it gives me the perception that people are just constantly at each other's throats. So, to what extent that is the truth versus a bubble that I'm in is a very difficult question to answer. With that, plus the spike in mental health issues, which we've seen before but which got worse during COVID, especially among young people—I think that the combination of those two factors is very worrisome. Will we weather that storm in the next decade? I couldn't tell you. I have no idea. My perception has been that, growing up, these were not conversations that were happening in my elementary school. Let's just take race, for example. In my elementary school, and in my high school—I went to both predominantly black and multicultural schools—in neither of those environments do I remember this sort of approach to speaking about race that we've taken collectively now. We definitely talked about it, but it wasn't in this way, and it wasn't through this paradigm. So I'm not sure about the future. I only know that if we want to change the future, we have to do the work. We can't sit back and assume that it's going to be all peachy in 10 years. I'm sorry to say it, but we have to do the work of learning how to become whole. And the original model of the United States is E Pluribus Unum—”Out of many, one,” which is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish. Some might argue it’s impossible, right? But this is, I would argue, the legacy and the birthright of our nation and we have to really do the work in order to become that vision.Mounk: One question that I have is about what ultimately divides us at the moment. Often, according to how the media presents it, what really divides us is ethnicity, culture, and race. I think there's some interesting implications to that. The obvious development from the 1960s to today is that in 1960, parents did not object to their children marrying somebody of a different political party, and now they do. At the same time, in 1960, most Americans would have very strenuously objected to the child marrying somebody of a different race. Now, thankfully, most Americans do not object to that. Does that track with your experience leading these workshops, that the political divisions are the deepest? Or is there still this real cultural division and discomfort with each other along more identitarian lines? Where is the conflict occurring between people?Valdary: I think it's a false dichotomy between those two categories. People are polarized across political lines. But I think the reason for that is cultural. There are many reasons, but one of the reasons is the collapse of meaning. The thing that is most hotly discussed in my workshops is race—maybe the intersection of race and culture. But what's informing that is a paradigm that basically views the world as a fight between the oppressors and the oppressed, all the way down. Basically, that's the epistemology, and I'm familiar with that because I grew up in a very religious home that had a similar epistemology, which wasn’t quite the same, but similar, and not along racial, but religious lines. That was the constant framing. So I understand how the framing works, and I understand the allure. And that’s the most difficult challenge to contend with, because that framing is easy. It's enticing. It's alluring. There's a simple solution; it's us versus them. Carl Jung said that that view of the world is actually our default state, as human beings, because of our limbic system. So, when I say that we have to do the work of becoming whole, I'm really saying that we need to talk about how to improve systems, right? How to change the system, how to reform the system, how to overthrow the system—but we're walking around with the limbic system, which is millions of years old. We have to work on that system, first and foremost, because that is the lens through which we perceive and experience everything. And that's a tall order. I recognize that. But that's what I'm going for.Mounk: Another way to think about it is that you’re trying to give people a path through the culture wars that doesn't involve them becoming combatants on one side or the other. I understand that, for you, artists and the arts have a huge role to play in that. What does it mean to create art at a moment when the world is so polarized into warring ideological tribes?Valdary: Well, one of my favorite artists is Michaela Coel, a brilliant writer and actress. For her work on the amazing HBO drama I May Destroy You, which I highly recommend, she won an Emmy for writing, and in her speech, she actually talks about the importance of artists not being afraid to not be in the public eye all the time. We are being tempted constantly by social media, which asks you to pay attention all the time, to everything happening, all the time. And that can actually stunt one's creative process, because it's all external-facing. You're constantly wondering, “How many likes do I have? How many retweets? How many people outside of myself are externally validating my work?” Whereas in order to be a true artist, artists have to have the courage and the confidence to be with themselves in silence. She says, “Don't confuse visibility for success.” I often think of these concepts of whiteness and blackness, which are two terms that have entered our lingo very recently, actually, because of mass culture. I wonder what that has to do with philosophy coming out of academia. But does it also have something to do with people just wanting to create products out of identity, and sort of repackage and sell them to people? The artist has to be wary of that in order to maintain the integrity of her work.Mounkb: Finally, for listeners who are convinced by this and want to become more whole, what do you recommend they do if they don't happen to have the benefit of one of these trainings? What are some of the practices or readings you would suggest, if people want to either start out on that journey for themselves or help someone else along in that journey?Valdary: Well, I will start by saying that anyone can enroll in Theory of Enchantment at any time. The online course is available to anyone who would like to enroll. In terms of books, there are just too many books I could recommend. I'm interested in the way that human being works, fundamentally. I would check out books like The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist, which is about the brain. From a political perspective, I would check out The True and Only Heaven, by Christopher Lasch. For a sort of cultural commentary on race, I would check out the writings of Albert Murray. For Jungian psychology, which the Theory of Enchantment is heavily informed by, I would check out anything by Marion Woodman, Helen Luke, or Jung himself. That's a lot, but it’s the world I'm swimming in right now.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

But there is a range of scenarios within this hoped-for future, and each present dilemmas where realism and pessimism may be as important as optimism and resolve.

In the best-case military scenario, where the Russians end up retreating pell-mell from the current front lines, the danger is that desperation might push Moscow toward nuclear brinkmanship — especially given the Russian strategic posture that envisions using tactical nuclear weapons to reverse battlefield defeats. As the United States learned to its cost in the Korean War, when our push to the Yalu River reaped an unexpected Chinese intervention, the question of how far a victorious army should push is not an easy one, and whether in Crimea or the Donbas, there may be a line that’s perilous to cross.

Alternatively, there is a scenario where a Ukrainian counteroffensive goes some distance but still stalls out well short of the prewar lines of control. For instance, the Ukrainians might push the Russians back to the Dnipro, liberating Kherson, but find themselves unable to reclaim territory on the east side of the river. In that kind of situation, with victories followed by a return to stalemate, the arguments for seeking a cease-fire would be strengthened — not out of any optimism about Moscow as a partner in peace, but to keep Western support on a sustainable and balanced footing, and to give Ukraine space for economic and demographic recovery.

Throughout the war, the immediate policies of Ukraine hawks have been mostly vindicated even as their long-term strategy has remained more doubtful. This is likely to be the season where that gap closes, where the speculative becomes reality, and we learn more about what war in the longer term will mean.

In which case we should hope both for rapid Ukrainian advances, and for wisdom, care and caution to accompany any victories they may win.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.War is always a brutal business, but why is the Russian military so determined to inflict civilian casualties on neighboring Ukraine? I talked with a fellow Russia expert.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
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Run AmokI spent years teaching military officers who served in conflicts all around the globe. I am not naive about the viciousness of war, and I am grateful that I have never been touched by it. But I am startled by the sheer sadism of the Russian war on Ukraine. Russia’s armed forces are engaging in actions such as leveling cities, intentionally attacking civilian targets, and other apparent war crimes that we would associate with a war of extermination.I turned to a friend and fellow Russia expert for a more thorough consideration of this. Nick Gvosdev holds a Ph.D. in Russian history from the University of Oxford; he and I taught together at the U.S. Naval War College for many years. (He still teaches there, and his comments here are his personal views and not those of the U.S. government.) We are both Eastern Orthodox Christians ourselves, which adds an especially painful aspect for us to this immense tragedy. We have had many conversations about the war, the latest of which I now offer to readers trying to understand this terrible conflict.Tom Nichols: Nick, international-relations experts will hash out the “great power” dimensions of this war, but at the ground level of the actual fighting, why is the conflict so brutal? Is it really enough to say that the Russians are reacting to the humiliation of losing almost from the start?Nick Gvosdev: To some extent. At all levels of Russian society, from the cab driver in the street to the Kremlin insider, there was a strongly held belief that Russian forces would be greeted as liberators, especially in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine. Indeed, the initial Russian military plan was based on the assumption that Ukrainian soldiers would refuse to fight and Ukrainian politicians would defect. This turned out not to be the case. Even more striking, it was the two largest Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine—Kharkiv and Odesa–which proved to be focal points of the successful blunting of the Russian invasion.Nichols: That last point seems to be important.Gvosdev: Yes. Western Ukraine—at least those areas that were never under Russian imperial rule and were part of the Habsburg realm—stressed their separateness from the Russians and were always the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. But almost all the atrocities we’ve seen have targeted people precisely in those parts of Ukraine that are part of the Russian-speaking world. There does appear to be a strong undercurrent of giving these “traitors” their due recompense.Nichols: I don’t think this is fully understood in the West. The Bucha massacre, for example, was aimed at Russian speakers—almost as if they infuriated the Russians more than Ukrainian nationalists did.Gvosdev: Bucha was a special target, for sure, given its position as a bedroom community for Ukrainian government workers and military officers. But this is all a direct outcome of appropriating a World War II narrative in which the Ukrainian government is routinely described as a Nazi regime and those fighting the Russians are fascists. Meanwhile, Russian social media routinely uses the term “Allied forces”—with all the connotations from the Second World War that description carries—to characterize the Russian military and the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. So, think about it: If the Ukrainian military and government are the modern-day successors of the Nazis, then of course no quarter should be given to those who fight on the side of the fascists—and especially those who’ve betrayed their kin.Nichols: What about the Russian military? Is there something in their training and background that makes them harder to control? They certainly haven’t improved since the Soviet days in their effectiveness as a fighting force.Gvosdev: Russia tried to create a professional all-volunteer army, but it’s still living with Soviet-era “traditions,” including brutalizing its own recruits—the so-called dedovshchina—and a strict hierarchical command structure. Add to this the ongoing problem of corruption within the military and you create an ethos where brutalizing others is preferable to being subject to it yourself. One other point: The Kremlin is anxious to avoid calling for a general mobilization, and so, as the U.S. did during Vietnam, a number of soldiers fighting in the Russian military in Ukraine chose military service rather than prison.Nichols: I almost didn’t believe that when I saw it.Gvosdev: Worse, Russians have also been relying on mercenaries and militias, another place where people with criminal records can end up. In many of these cases, atrocities were the result of some of these people being allowed to run amok with no particular supervision or discipline from the top other than general directions to punish “traitors” or eliminate “Nazis.”Nichols: Ukraine, by contrast, figured out that having a solid and reliable noncommissioned-officer corps works wonders in the field.Gvosdev: Absolutely. Ukraine’s military reforms over the last several years, along NATO standards, also allowed its military to carry out more decentralized operations.  Nichols: It seems like the most powerful “force multiplier” in the Russian military is resentment: You’ve betrayed us, you live better than we do, you’ve elected your own government, and so … you’re Nazis and we can do to you what we did in World War II.Gvosdev: That’s the logical outcome, and how you get from “brothers and sisters” to wholesale carnage. Ukraine, in Russian eyes, has turned its back on its brother Russia, and by seeking to integrate with the Western world, has driven a sword into the heart of the “Russian world.” Russian politicians and pundits hammer those themes every day. This “betrayal” narrative is linked to the overall Russian resentment of Europe and the West. Some of it is connected to living standards, to be sure, but it is also driven by the sense that Europeans—and now Ukrainians as well—look down on Russia as not quite European, definitely not Western, and maybe not even civilized. And that resentment leads to a Russian determination to make others share in Russia’s misery, whether by bombarding Ukraine or by sparking an energy and economic crisis in the rest of Europe.Nichols: I’m feeling an uncomfortable parallel here with events in the U.S. and some other countries.Gvosdev: The politics of resentment are always the doorway to legitimizing mindless fury and anger—and ultimately violence—against those you deem to be traitors or evildoers as being a justifiable response to “being looked down on.” Russians don’t have a monopoly on this.Related:
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King Charles III delivered his inaugural speech on his first full day as monarch, emphasizing his sense of duty following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
A federal judge dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. Trump had accused the former secretary of state of spreading false information that his campaign had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential race.
The Justice Department asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon to lift her block on the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents. Earlier this week, Cannon granted Trump’s request for a special master, which could prevent federal prosecutors from accessing key evidence.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry on the uneasy link between the Little Rock Nine and today’s Jackson, Mississippi water crisis. 
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson offers five pieces of career advice particularly useful for this “wobbly economic moment.”
The Books Briefing: When writers draw from older stories, they have an opportunity to provide a new perspective, Maya Chung writes.
(Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty)
Crypto’s Core Values Are Running Headfirst Into RealityBy Will GottsegenCrypto was taking off, and governments were finally starting to act like it. In 2013, when a young writer and software developer named Vitalik Buterin wrote an impassioned screed defending the blockchain gospel for his publication, Bitcoin Magazine, cryptocurrencies were still a niche curiosity. But a series of regulations was spooking the nascent industry, threatening the sort of anti-government ethos that has always been core to the project. For Buterin the panic felt a little overblown. Crypto, he argued, couldn’t truly be regulated. After all, this was the whole point of the new system: an internet with no masters, no mediators, and no guardrails. “The future of crypto-libertarianism is fine,” he wrote. “Stop worrying.”Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
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Read. Ian McEwan’s new anti-memoir, Lessons, in which the author’s alter ego explores how McEwan’s “charmed life” could have gone wrong.Watch. How people across America celebrate their Saturday nights. From a queer bar in Florida to a havdalah ceremony in Massachusetts, our Atlantic interactive staff shares photos and videos from around the country.Do. Get your tickets for The Atlantic Festival, live at The Wharf in Washington, D.C., (as well as virtually) September 21–23. For a limited time, Daily readers can use the code SPECIALACCESS for complimentary in-person registration. Find out more here.Play our daily crossword.P.S.In Wednesday’s postscript, I noted the brief time when Russians looked with open eyes at their own history. One of those Russians was a Soviet army general and historian named Dmitry Volkogonov, once so hard-line a communist and so trusted by the regime as both a military officer and a scholar that even in the 1970s and early 1980s he was given access to highly restricted Soviet historical archives. Volkogonov (whose own father was arrested and shot during Stalin’s purges) was so shocked by what he found in the secret documents that he turned against Soviet communism. He later wrote several books drawing from these archives, including magisterial and damning biographies of Stalin and Lenin, for which many of his former comrades reviled him as a traitor. Shortly before he died in 1995, he said: “The only thing I can be proud of—the greatest merit of my life—is that I was able to fundamentally alter my views.” He left behind works that revealed the many sins of the Soviet regime, including Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, which makes for especially fascinating reading today as Vladimir Putin tries to re-create the old Soviet Union.—TomKate Lindsay contributed to this newsletter.

Karine Jean-Pierre. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images.)Dear Reader (excluding anyone who wants to mark the 9/11 anniversary with a “First Responder Flatbread”),In the 1993 movie Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays a bitter defense contractor who becomes unhinged. The plot doesn’t really matter, but the iconic moment comes when Douglas is finally caught by a cop and says, in authentic shock, “I’m the bad guy?”The movie was moderately well received by critics and generated a good deal of controversy because it was too polemical. These were the early days of the “angry white males” panic of the 1990s, which went into overdrive after the Oklahoma City bombing—and Bill Clinton’s attempt to pin some of the blame on Rush Limbaugh and conservatives. Prior to that the long-simmering gender gap had blown up. A Washington Post wire piece immediately after the 1994 midterm election proclaimed, “Polls show Angry White Males helped GOP.” I can’t find a link, but it’s in LexisNexis. The interesting thing about the article—which, you’ll just have to take my word for it, is utterly typical of the political conversation at the time—is that there’s literally nothing in the piece that supports the word “angry.” It begins, “Two years ago, it was the Year of the Woman. This time around, the election might become known as the Year of the Man, or the Year of the Angry Man.”The rest of the article just runs through the numbers of how the GOP did better in attracting male votes, in part because the GOP ran on issues like gun rights that appeal disproportionately to men.Women’s party preferences among these candidates were unchanged from1990, but the results represent a significant shift for men, a majority ofwhom voted for Democratic House candidates four years ago. And theyrepresent the return to the political stage of the Angry White Male, whofirst surfaced in the mid-1980s as a key player in American politics.Now, I’m not going to argue that some white male voters weren’t “angry”—for good reasons or bad. I’m sure many were, and lord knows plenty of white male voters are downright ornery these days. I’m also not going to wade into a media bias harangue about how the press was never troubled by “angry white females” or that few attributed Democratic success to ugly, irrational, feminine, anger. I will say that “anger” is an utterly amoral descriptor absent context. Surely, its salience depends on what you’re actually angry about. In the Year of the Woman, female candidates did really well in part by fomenting and exploiting anger at the Clarence Thomas hearings. This did not yield handwringing meditations on the dangers of preying on voters’ anger, resentments, or  fear. It’s sort of like when people say they reject “hate.” I dunno, I think it’s fine to hate some things, especially, you know, hateful things. I’m not going to get all scoldy of someone who says, “I hate the KKK,” even if they have a bumper sticker that says, “Reject hate,” or, “Hate is not a family value.” I get—and admire—the Christian admonition to hate the sin and love the sinner. But on a practical, human level, I’ve got no problem with people who say they hate their torturer or rapist. I’d give a lot of slack to any Ukrainian who says, “I hate Vladimir Putin,” while I’d actually think any Ukrainian who said, “Hate the authoritarian warmongering but love the authoritarian warmonger” was a bit off. Of course, lots of people mean something different when they talk about angry voters or the politics of hate. They mean those people have bad or irrational motives—not like us. For years, I was accused of being a “Clinton hater.” I honestly don’t think I was, but even if I were that didn’t mean the facts or arguments I made were wrong. Love Bill Clinton or hate him, he still played baron-and-the-milkmaid with the intern all the same. Today, I get called a “Trump hater,” as if saying that somehow erases any merit to my criticisms. Trump certainly subscribes to a version of this illogic. When Bill Barr told him there was no evidence the election was stolen, Trump replied, “You must hate Trump.” Similarly, my emotional state with regard to Trump didn’t make him abscond with classified materials or any of the other facts I point to.. Now, I certainly think that some claims of “derangement syndrome” attributed to Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump detractors by their defenders sometimes have some merit. Louise Mensch, for instance, clearly suffered from Trump derangement syndrome, just as Naomi Wolf suffered from Bush derangement syndrome. But the measure of derangement is in the arguments and claims they make, not in the motives. Disliking Trump didn’t prove Mensch was a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Y’know what did? All that crazy talk about how the marshal of the Supreme Court was about to arrest Trump because vests have no sleeves and box turtles smell like elderberries (I may have the details of her claims slightly off, but you get the point). But there’s simply no transitive property connecting the objectively deranged and the non-deranged just because they share some quantum of animosity for the same person. In other words, a lot of this is just shoot-the-messenger stuff. I think it was Hannah Arendt who said that one of the inventions of the communists and other totalitarians was to dispute facts by questioning motives. While she was certainly right about the totalitarians, I suspect this tactic is as old as politics. And so is the tendency to work from the assumption that your side is nobly motivated but the other side is not only wrong, but evil in its motivations. Again, plenty of people have evil motives because evil exists. But even most evil people don’t think they’re evil. Even most Nazis—very bad motives there—didn’t set out saying, “Let’s be villains! Let’s be remembered for centuries as the bad guys and be depicted by British actors in World War II movies as deliberately horrible people.”  It takes a lot of effort to even contemplate the possibility that we’re the baddies. That’s what always really bothered me about Falling Down. Yeah, I was annoyed by a lot of the heavy handed editorializing and all that. But what really got to me was how easy it is to point at the people you don’t like or don’t agree with and say, “They’re the bad guys.” Just to be clear: I’m not saying the people who do that are always wrong. I’m saying it usually takes precious little moral or intellectual courage to “speak truth to power” to the powerful forces you don’t like.  This is why I hate the perennial political preening at the Oscars so, so, much. Some liberal actor tells a room full of other liberal actors, as well as producers, and directors exactly what they want to hear and get lionized as a hero for saying it. It’s bravery on the cheap. Years ago, George Clooney proclaimed, “Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.” Now, we can parse what he meant by “liberals” and “social issues,” but a fair reading suggests he basically means liberals have always been right on at least non-economic or military issues. Without logic-chopping too much, I’d be slightly open to that claim if he meant classical liberals. But given his progressivism I doubt that’s the case. And that’s just nonsense as a historical matter, unless, of course, you subscribe to the view that whenever liberals do something bad they cease to be liberals. This is the view of Michael Tomasky. I often chuckle at his claim, made in a pathetic review of my first book, that whenever American liberalism “crosses the line into coercion, well, that is where liberals—I mean liberals who know something about liberalism—get off the train, and do their noncoercive best to derail it.”If this were true, one would think that when FDR rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in internment camps, he ceased to be liberal and the history books would be full of tales of “real” liberals resigning en masse from the Roosevelt administration. I must have missed it when Oliver Wendell Holmes authorized the forced sterilization of “unfit” women in Buck v. Bell and all those liberals jumped ship. We all recall when every liberal who knew anything about liberalism recognized the coercion in busing or forcing nuns to buy birth control and did their best to stop it. And who can forget how that baker who didn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding was defended by every informed and sincere liberal. Don’t even get me started on Woodrow Wilson. Democrats did what now?Which brings me to the current moment. Last week, in the wake of a report cataloging the catastrophic consequences of school closures, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre suggested that Democrats did everything they could to get schools open “in spite of Republicans.” Lots of folks have dunked on this ridiculous claim, though fact checkers seem to be mostly MIA. Obviously, some of this is just partisan B.S..But underneath it is exactly what I’m talking about. Forget Democrats and Republicans for a second. Liberals–good, decent, as pretty as George Clooney on the inside liberals—were overwhelmingly on the side of keeping schools closed. Teachers unions in particular behaved abhorrently and indefensibly—certainly, at least, in retrospect—in their effort to keep schools closed. When Donald Trump and countless others called for opening schools, they were accused of willingly endangering lives.  Now, while I think some teachers unions are literally villainous, I still don’t think they see themselves that way. And lots of liberals who were wrong—coercively wrong!—about shutdowns and school closings were surely trying to do the right thing as they saw it. But groupthink married to an invincible and unreflective confidence that your side is always right led to all manner of mistakes. Emily Oster was villainized and attacked for dissenting from the groupthink.Again, I have no objection to calling out the foibles of those you disagree with. That’s a huge and indispensable part of democratic and political discourse. It’s literally how progress is made in a free society. But an essential ingredient for such progress is an openness to admitting your “side” might be wrong. Epistemic closure is a human failing, not an ideological one. And while it can take courage to call out the people on the other side of an issue, a deeper political courage comes from being willing to admit that no one has a monopoly on political virtue—or facts. Sometimes, it helps to ask, “Am I the bad guy?” And – just sometimes – the answer might be, “Yes.”Various & SundryCanine update: Poor Pippa has had a rough couple days. Yesterday, I took her to the beauty parlor, and as I write this the Fair Jessica is at the vet with her (and Gracie) for her checkup. Pippa hates both of those places. We’ll make it up to her, but there was a disturbing development. We’ve counted ourselves lucky that Pippa has been entirely immune to the phenomenon of  “spaniel rage” (it apparently affects cocker spaniels the most). Pippa has been essentially the world’s most harmless dog. But very rarely, something strange happens with her when she gets separated from Zoë. When she comes back from a solo visit to the vet or the groomer, she can get weirdly and dangerously aggressive with Zoë. Because Zoë has mellowed it’s usually not reciprocated, but in the spirit of “Don’t pull on Superman’s cape,” it would be a very bad idea for Pip to write a check her wigglebutt couldn’t cash with the Dingo. Yesterday, Pip lunged and growled at Zoë with a sort of “You we’re supposed to provide security!” anger. We kept them separated for a few minutes and it all went away. But there’s just something disquieting about seeing what’s essentially a stuffed toy get all angry. Anyway, beyond that the girls are doing fine. Pippa looks great and Zoë keeps getting her way. And everybody is getting their fair share of scritches in an eternal recurrence kind of way. That said, Pippa may also be trying to murder me. ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileLast weekend’s drive-time RemnantThe Remnant with Marian TupyTrump is hurting the GOP’s midterm prospectsWednesday’s principled “news”letterThe Remnant with Rafael MangualThe Dispatch Podcast on the Mar-a-Lago investigationAnd now, the weird stuff.JapanificationFantastic voyageSuperstition Monkey businessNew heights

For me, the most striking aspect of Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign was her iron determination to be boring. In those seven decades, she very rarely let slip her views about any of the great political and public events over which she presided. She has never even hinted at her views on any of the glittering public figures with whom she dealt. We don’t know what she thought about Donald Trump or Barack Obama or Margaret Thatcher. And we never will. Elizabeth was the most disciplined public figure of the past century.

In a confessional age, when we post every idea, urge, impulse and image that pops into our heads, this woman kept her own counsel. As Tina Brown, author of the fascinating book “The Palace Papers,” notes, Elizabeth was careful even at her own family’s weddings and funerals, rarely smiling or weeping, always maintaining dignity and the appearance of detachment. That was her interpretation of her role as a constitutional monarch, one who leads all the people and never takes sides, and she played it better than anyone ever has. Even during the contentious debate over Brexit, she never let slip her own preferences. (Then-Prime Minister David Cameron had to apologize in person for revealing that she was pleased that Scotland voted down independence in its own referendum.)

It’s easy to think of Britain’s royal family as leading a charmed life. They get to live in grand palaces, enjoying the world’s attention and, for the most part, adulation. That is all true. But the queen demonstrated the other side of that coin: that doing it right, fulfilling one’s duty, can be hard and unsparing in its own way. An endless stream of public duties, large and small, must be fulfilled. Above all, it requires an abnegation of the self.

In a way, the odyssey of Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, reveals the challenge of the modern monarchy. Separate and apart from the incendiary charges of racism that they leveled against other royals, they seemed to chafe at the life of ribbon-cuttings and provincial visits, particularly given that, as minor royals, they were destined to live a comparatively modest life. (That’s reportedly why Prince Andrew was always hanging around rich people, hoping for a handout or more.) Given their fame, Harry and Meghan appear to have realized that they could break out, cash in and enjoy much greater affluence with far more personal freedom — and so they did. But they were acting as individualists, maximizing their satisfaction. The queen acted as an institutionalist, preserving the stature of the British government.

The 19th-century writer Walter Bagehot famously wrote that any constitutional system needs two parts — one “dignified,” the other “efficient.” One to awe the public and the second to make government work. Elizabeth perfectly exemplified the dignified aspect — something we in the United States could use more of in our constitutional system.

The U.S. president is simultaneously the head of government and the head of state. That combination has its advantages. It fuses power and prestige and makes the chief executive a commanding presence on the world stage. But it also can demean the office and American democracy itself. When Trump, as president, acted in particularly egregious ways, he was not just behaving badly as a person, but eroding norms for American democracy. Britain has had its share of weak and unimpressive prime ministers. But their behavior hasn’t had the same sweeping effect on the country’s image.

We live in an age in which few people think about institutions and even fewer are willing to make the sacrifices involved in upholding them. One who did was George C. Marshall, who served Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman in several senior posts and was regarded by many people as the man who organized the United States’ victory in World War II. Marshall refused to write a memoir of his time in office, despite being offered princely advances. He believed that to do so would be to improperly profit from government service.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is one of America’s last institutionalists. As a conservative jurist, he probably agrees with the conservative consensus that, as a matter of technical judicial reasoning, the Roe v. Wade decision was deeply flawed. But he also wants to preserve the legitimacy of the court, in a country where for nearly 50 years women had relied on Roe’s established rights and protections. So he reportedly tried to get his conservative colleagues to rally around a compromise, one that would maintain the basic constitutional right to abortion but considerably reduce Roe’s expansive protections. But not one of his conservative colleagues would side with him. For all of them, ideology trumped institutionalism.

We live life as individuals but also as part of a society. And to make societies function well, we have always needed some norms that ask the individual to step back, to sacrifice some ego, and to play a role in a larger project. No one has performed those duties better than Queen Elizabeth II.

A new report out of Etowah County, Alabama, reveals that a woman there was jailed for three months after admitting to smoking marijuana while pregnant. The type of law that led to her incarceration is not unique to Alabama, and such punitive laws don't achieve their goal of promoting healthy pregnancies. 
According to Al.com's Amy Yurkanin, Ashley Banks was arrested on May 25 after being found with "a small amount of marijuana" and a pistol that she was not licensed to carry. She admitted to having smoked marijuana on the day she found out she was pregnant, which led to her being charged with the "chemical endangerment" of her fetus. Despite having a high-risk pregnancy, the fact that she had admitted to smoking marijuana while pregnant landed Banks in jail. 
Under Alabama state law, women arrested for drug use who are pregnant or have recently given birth can be charged with chemical endangerment, which requires them to post a $10,000 bond and go to rehab to regain their freedom. 
Banks was incarcerated for three months without being convicted of a crime. During her incarceration, she experienced "bleed[ing] for five weeks in jail. She said she also suffered from hunger and fainting spells," according to Yurkanin's report. "Two times, specialists evaluated her for drug addiction and found [Banks] didn't qualify for free addiction services offered through the state." Yurkanin adds that investigators told Banks to claim she had a drug addiction so she could get into treatment and be bailed out of jail. 
Banks was finally released to community corrections on August 25.
According to Yurkanin's investigation, more than 150 Etowah County women have been charged with "chemical endangerment" of their pregnancies, even when their children are born healthy or do not test positive for drugs. A 2015 ProPublica investigation found that while other Alabama counties tend to enforce the law only when an infant tests positive for drugs, Etowah County "law enforcement officials have drawn what they call 'a line in the sand,' vowing to aggressively pursue all chemical-endangerment cases, starting from pregnancy." 
According to a 2022 report from the Guttmacher Institute, "24 states and the District of Columbia consider substance use during pregnancy to be child abuse under civil child-welfare statutes, and 3 consider it grounds for civil commitment." Additionally, "25 states and the District of Columbia require health care professionals to report suspected prenatal drug use, and 8 states require them to test for prenatal drug exposure if they suspect drug use."
Alabama, as Banks' case demonstrates, is especially punitive on this issue. That's because the state Supreme Court has held that any illicit drug use while pregnant is "chemical endangerment" of a child. The South Carolina Supreme Court established a similar precedent, Guttmacher notes, when it ruled that "maternal acts endangering or likely to endanger the life, comfort, or health of a viable fetus" constitute criminal child abuse.
These laws are intended to protect fetuses but fail even on those grounds. A 2015 report by researcher Rebecca Stone concluded that "policies that substance-using women find threatening discourage them from seeking comprehensive medical treatment during their pregnancies." What's more, jails and prisons are not favorable places to receive prenatal care. According to a 2019 study from Johns Hopkins researchers, in some states at least 20 percent of incarcerated women's pregnancies ended in miscarriage, far more than the national average of 10 percent to 15 percent.
It is particularly risible—even in a legal system that grants personhood to fetuses—to punish pregnant women for using cannabis. "Studies on marijuana use during pregnancy are inconsistent and inconclusive," Reason Senior Editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported in 2021. "But cannabis is not known to be teratogenic—that is, to cause birth defects—in humans. The bulk of scientific evidence suggests that risks posed to developing fetuses are relatively minor and babies exposed to marijuana in utero still fall within normal ranges of outcomes."
The post This Alabama Woman Was Jailed for 3 Months Because She Smoked Pot While Pregnant appeared first on Reason.com.

Brad DeLong's Strange Concept of Market Failure By: David Henderson

“There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,” he told me. “The market economy gives me and my preferences 200 times the voice and weight of his. If that isn’t the biggest market failure of all, I don’t know what your definition of market failure could possibly be.”

This is from Annie Lowrey, “The Economist Who Knows the Miracle is Over,” The Atlantic, September 3, 2022.

Don Boudreaux has made the point that it’s hard to claim this as market failure when Bangladesh is a country whose markets are most repressed by government. He points out that in the 2022 edition of the Annual Report on Economic Freedom of the World, about which I’ll have more to say in a day or two, Bangladesh ranks a dismal 139th out of 165 countries that are rated. That’s a major contributor to the water buffalo driver’s poverty. I won’t say more about that because Don said it well.

But there’s another point to make. The Bangladesh government is not the only government preventing that water buffalo driver from being an economist: governments in richer countries such as the United States also play a huge role. Whatever you think of restrictions on immigration, they are restrictions; they are heavy regulation of the labor market. If the United States substantially relaxed its restrictions and let, say 5 million Bangladeshis into the country, that water buffalo guy might actually get here and become an economics professor.

And Brad might be right: this former water buffalo driver might well do a better job than Brad at teaching what is, and what is not, market failure.

Update: Don Boudreaux reminds me of this dialogue that cleverly covers much of the same ground I covered above. It’s former co-blogger Bryan Caplan’s response to Brad DeLong.

If Voltaire’s maxim that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities holds true, then, last Thursday night, the President of the United States told the nation that we’ve already checked off that prerequisite for catastrophe. There are as many complexities swirling around Joe Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” speech as there are surrounding his Presidency, but the most important among them is the fact that, from the start of his term, he has operated in a context in which more than seventy per cent of Republicans do not believe that he was the legitimate winner in 2020. (In August, the Republican Party of Texas approved a resolution stating that Biden was “not legitimately elected.”) Nearly everything that has pushed us closer to the emerging political dangers of the past two years flows from that absurdist belief.

The speech marked a turn for Biden, whom critics on the left have tended to depict as being mired in a bygone era of civil disagreement and political compromise. The same Biden who, in 2019, inspired howls for fondly reminiscing about his working relationship with the formerly segregationist senators James O. Eastland, of Mississippi, and Herman Talmadge, of Georgia, told the nation that “there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.”

Coming nine weeks before crucial midterm elections, and a month after an F.B.I. raid at Trump’s Florida home—a search authorized by a federal magistrate judge that nevertheless inspired chatter about bedlam and civil war among right-wing social-media circles and Republican elected officials alike—the address seemed almost predestined to be read in some sectors as alarmist politicking and in others as a grave warning about our current predicament. In short, the polarized reaction to Biden’s speech reflects the reasons that he had to give it in the first place.

Presidents have spoken to the public about impending threats before, but, aside from condemnations of violent crime, they have seldom pointed to their fellow-citizens as the source of the danger. That practice is, most commonly, the province of demagogues. For that reason, it was almost easy for critics on the right to denounce the speech as scapegoating. On Twitter, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, accused the President of “demonizing half of the country,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida, took it a step further, expressing his hope that Biden didn’t “just declare war on Red State America.” As things stand, however, escalating rhetoric and tensions have already raised the spectre of political violence, and the climate is such that the safety of the nation’s elected leaders cannot be taken for granted. Our national prognosis would likely be brighter had Biden, the unfailingly moderate voice of the establishment, simply been trying to scare up enough votes for Democrats to retain control of the Senate and the House in November. But the grim truth is that he spoke to a real threat to American democracy that has been increasingly noted by academics and international observers but that Gaetz and Cruz and other elected Republicans have chosen to ignore, abide, or enable.

Throughout the course of both Trump’s 2016 candidacy and his Presidency, he laced his rhetoric with alarmist prompts that, if the nation fails to stop progressives, “we won’t have a country anymore.” His pleas leading up to the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., convinced his followers that they inhabited a moment as consequential as April 19, 1775, in Lexington and Concord. On Saturday, Trump responded to Biden’s address, falsely claiming that the President had called him and his supporters “enemies of the state.” In an assertion of the rubber-versus-glue principle, Trump went on to claim that Biden is the real enemy of the state. Two men, both elected to the Presidency, each claiming that the other represents a mortal threat to the Republic. Where, then, the neutral observer might ask, lies the difference?

Cynicism is central to authoritarian movements, because it allows demagogues to place truth and falsehood on equal footing. Trump’s call to arms—that the Presidency was stolen from him and, therefore, from his supporters—is a lie. But it now stands opposite the factual declarations about the Republican Party that Biden made last week. It matters that Trump has fed his movement an escalating series of lies, upping the system’s tolerance for mendacity. The path to our current predicament was paved with innumerable smaller absurdities. It also matters that the dynamics of partisan animosity emanating from the right that Biden spoke about have been well detailed in recent years. And it is worth thinking about what it took for Biden to arrive at this moment. On January 20, 2021, he was sworn in as President in a Washington so heavily ringed by security and regiments from the National Guard that it looked like a city under occupation. Not since Abraham Lincoln, who was similarly sworn in over bitter hostilities of his partisan opponents, had an American President been inaugurated in such circumstances.

After a brief flirtation with principled opposition to Trump, for stoking a mob that then attacked Capitol Police officers and threatened the lives of elected representatives, the leadership of the Republican Party largely fell in line with the former President and began minimizing the gravity of the coup attempt. Even this, apparently, was insufficient cause for Biden to deliver a formal warning about the state of our democracy. It took the F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents carelessly stored in Trump’s home and subsequent threats from some Trump supporters to bring Biden to the lectern. Still, he took pains to parse distinctions. “I want to be very clear, very clear up front,” he said. “Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.” But even this concession amounted to a bit of unwarranted bright-siding. A poll conducted after the F.B.I. raid found that sixty-six per cent of G.O.P. voters think that Trump should be the Party’s 2024 nominee. The problem is that the majority of Republicans are MAGA supporters. On some level, this explains the ease with which many in the Party are overlooking the national-security implications of an ex-President keeping highly sensitive national-security documents among personal items, including clothing, at Mar-a-Lago—a place that for years has been thought to be a target for espionage—and proceeding with a line of increasingly implausible defenses of Trump.

Biden’s statements brought to mind two previous addresses by American statesmen that warned of impending danger: Lincoln’s June, 1858, “House Divided” speech and William Henry Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict,” delivered four months later. Both spoke to the looming, inevitable national confrontation over the question of slavery; both prefaced the conflagration of the Civil War. Biden spoke to the nation in the context of a different reckoning on the horizon. The volatile reaction to the Mar-a-Lago raid confirmed a kind of apotheosis for Trump. He has gone from being a man who believed himself to be above the law to one who has convinced a sizable portion of the nation that he is. There will be no reckoning with Trump’s lawlessness without a similar and likely dangerous reckoning with those who most firmly identify with him. Senator Lindsey Graham’s intemperate remark that a Justice Department decision to charge Trump in connection with the documents would result in “riots in the streets” is only partially concerning because a U.S. senator appeared to be attempting to intimidate a U.S. Attorney General. The potentially larger concern is the possibility that in a nation five years after Charlottesville, and mired in the aftermath of January 6th, what Graham said is actually true. If absurdities can yield atrocities, the question remains how to undo the damage that continues to be done. ♦

For years, Queen Elizabeth II was a link to another age — an age of tradition, and respect, and restraint. Did that age ever exist in an ideal form? Of course not. But we still admire its echoes, which surrounded our conception of the Queen.

She was crowned in 1953, looking rather vulnerable at the age of 25. Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. Man had only just reached the top of Everest and was more than fifteen years away from reaching the Moon.

The Empire was crumbling but the young, elegant, stoical Queen kept alive a sense of British importance and stability. Her personal calmness and courage as she toured dangerous regions was noted (and would be later tested when Michael Fagan, a disturbed socialist, snuck into her bedroom).

Her popularity never faltered. Governments, institutions, actors, athletes et cetera have risen and fallen in their popular esteem but Her Majesty was always loved. Was this in part because our exposure to her was so limited? Of course. But there is something special in that. She never imposed herself upon the public. She was committed to the tiring, traditional, constitutional, life-affirming, often rather modest and unheralded duties that she had inherited. The monarchy is a lot more than one person, of course, but it took a special person to embody it.

All the way back in the 1950s, Malcolm Muggeridge warned that elevating royals to the status of celebrities would kill the institution. Who could deny that he was onto something? Princess Diana was drowned in prurience and sentimentality, and some of the Queen’s own descendants have disgraced themselves, to greater and lesser degrees, by embracing the sordid lifestyles and the haughty status of the rich and the famous. Throughout it all, Queen Elizabeth maintained her dignity and grace, and her focus on her own responsibility.

She never embarrassed herself — and she never embarrassed us

She never embarrassed herself — and she never embarrassed us. Nor did she ever act as if she had been burdened by responsibility — which is the case for many poorer people, of course, but which is not the case for many, many people who are rich and influential. To have been so graceful in a time of so much cynicism — a lot of it deserved — is her greatest achievement. Anybody who explains it with reference to PR alone has to explain why everyone else’s PR has been so ineffective.

“Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives,” the Queen said in her Christmas Broadcast in 2011, “But often a description of a community, organisation or nation.” In hostile times — with the continuing union and character of the UK bitterly contested — she offered a point of transcendent togetherness. Not everyone cares for royal rituals of jubilees and weddings, but at least they were focal points of broad communality that one could not reduce to passing trends of politics and sport.

Queen Elizabeth earned respect across the world. British republicans have groused about the absurd, baroque rituals of the state. Foreign people, on the other hand, know that they have their own absurd rituals — often with far less historical resonance around them, and with trivial and grotesque personalities at their heart. While advocates of British soft power have a regrettable tendency to reduce our culture to a series of museum pieces, there was something to the admiration the Queen commanded. It expressed a waning but enduring appreciation of nobility.

A lot of grim words will be pronounced about the state of Britain. Certainly, one cannot claim that the Queen has left a nation which feels confident and united. There will be a great deal to say about the nature of the monarchy in our times — and, indeed, in the times that preceded them. But a funeral is no time to speak of an inheritance. We should take time to think of Queen Elizabeth as she was — dutiful, dignified and strong. She is an example to us all. May we exhibit some of the same qualities in the days, weeks and months ahead.

       President Joe Biden listens during a meeting with CEOs in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington on July 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)   Has Bidenomics been worth the risk?   James Pethokoukis  September 08, 01:23 PM September 08, 01:27 PM  [This piece has been published in Restoring America to consider whether Biden's economic policies have hurt American workers more than they have helped.] “Has Bidenomics Been Good for Workers?” is the question posed by economist Paul Krugman in his latest New York Times column. And perhaps not surprisingly, the Nobel laureate answers in the affirmative. “More Americans — a lot more Americans — got jobs, and while those who were already employed suffered a decline in real wages, that decline reflected events in global food and energy markets, not U.S. policy,” Krugman writes. To a large extent — so far at least — “Bidenomics” is the monster-scoop of fiscal stimulus known as the American Rescue Plan (ARP), passed in March 2021. At $1.9 trillion, it was four times as big as the new spending in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act passed in the summer of 2021, while other big Biden bills — namely the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act — were passed only recently. Did the ARP contribute in a substantial way to America’s biggest inflation surge in four decades? (This inflation surge, by the way, means that even though average hourly earnings are up a whopping 5.2% from a year ago, consumer prices are up 8.2%.) Sure it did. Consider the output gap — the difference between what the U.S. economy could produce if firing on all cylinders and what it is actually producing — when the ARP was passed. The bill filled that gap many times over. Then consider the mid-range estimate of the fiscal multiplier, the effect of $1 of government spending on overall economic output. A simple model based on the output gap and fiscal multiplier — including reasonable estimates of their values — predicted that the ARP would “generate substantial inflationary pressure in 2021 and 2022,” noted AEI economist Michael Strain earlier this year. At the time, Strain estimated “around three percentage points of inflation in 2021 were due to the ARP.” In other words, the ARP-Bidenomics has been a substantial inflation driver and thus a substantial driver of the Federal Reserve’s monetary response. And if that response leads to a recession, then Bidenomics will have been a substantial cause. Even Krugman concedes that anything more than a brief downturn would undermine his case: “. . . controlling inflation ends up requiring a long period of high unemployment — I don’t think it will, but I could be wrong — workers could end up worse off, despite the current employment boom.” A bit about the history of shallow recessions: In a research note last July, Goldman Sachs observed that “even shallow recessions have been unpleasant” with the average unemployment rate rising about two and a half percentage points. Now we found out last Friday that the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 3.7%. So a typical shallow recession would nudge that number up to 5.2%. If the latter were the jobless rate today rather than the former — all else equal — there would be an additional 2.5 million American workers not working. That would be the equivalent of wiping out the past year of employment gains. Even a shallow recession would be a gut punch for many workers after the economic chaos since the start of the pandemic. Passing the supersize ARP was a historic economic gamble, especially coming just months after President Trump signed the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill in December 2020. Even if the Fed gets its Immaculate Disinflation and a soft landing, it will be far from clear that Bidenomics, adjusted for risk, has been good for workers. If you got a late start picking up a child from school, and you race down side streets to get there, you might well arrive on time. But was the risk worth it? This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

On Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual College Free Speech Rankings. The rankings are derived from a survey of almost 45,000 college students at over 200 universities in the United States. The survey has been conducted since 2020, collecting a wide range of information about the campus political climate at a swath of universities.
"Schools that have an administration that's very strong on free expression issues…typically have done well in the rankings," FIRE Senior Research Fellow Sean Stevens tells Reason. "Interestingly, a number of these schools in the top five for sure, have some of the most ideologically diverse campuses."
The University of Chicago took the top spot this year, ranking first in the categories of Administrative Support (which "measures student perception of their college's support for free speech") and Tolerance for Speakers. Kansas State University took second place, followed by Purdue University, Mississippi State University, and Oklahoma State University. With the exception of the University of Chicago, the top five schools were generally very ideologically diverse, with neither liberals nor conservatives gaining more than a 2–1 ratio.
According to the survey results released by FIRE, both discomfort in expression and outright censoriousness of unpopular viewpoints continue to be common problems on American college campuses.
Sixty-four percent of students were worried a misunderstanding of something they say or do could damage their reputation. Forty-eight percent reported that they would be "very uncomfortable" or "somewhat uncomfortable" expressing their views on a controversial political topic to other students in a public space on campus. Thirty-eight percent expressed that they would be uncomfortable doing so during an in-class discussion. And rates of discomfort are comparable across racial categories: 32 percent of black respondents, 39 percent of white respondents, and 37 percent of Hispanic respondents felt that wariness about expressing themselves in class. More than 40 percent of Asian and American Indian students reported discomfort.
In contrast, FIRE found that rates of discomfort varied widely across different political identifications. Twenty-seven percent of students identifying as "strong democrats" reported being "somewhat" or "very" uncomfortable to share their opinion on a controversial political topic during in-class discussion, whereas 44 percent of "strong republicans" did. However, despite the partisan divide, discomfort about expressing opinions in class is present across the political spectrum, ranging from affecting slightly more than one in four "strong democrat" respondents to one in two "independent, lean republican" respondents.
Many students report a willingness to actively interfere with others' ability to see controversial campus speakers, with 32 percent finding it "sometimes" or "always" acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus. Only a small percentage of students reported that the use of violence to prevent an unpopular speaking event would be acceptable, with 79 percent of students reporting that it would "never" be acceptable.
In fairness, it is difficult to know what proportion of college students would actually participate in violence to stop an unpopular speech or participate in a speaker shout-down even if they expressed conditional support for it in survey responses. However, such responses do give us a general idea of how likely some college students are to approve of such actions, even if they had no intention of participating themselves.
These new FIRE data provide yet more evidence that there is a two-pronged free speech problem on American college campuses. First, many college campuses—including public universities—still have strict speech codes that limit students' free expression. Many schools are also prone to caving to pressure to censor public events or punish students and faculty who make controversial statements. These policies and actions present a clear danger to the speech rights of thousands of American college students.
However, a more subtle element of this problem also deserves attention. Even at schools that boast robust protections for student speech, there is an increasing problem of students being too uncomfortable to actually operate under the protections they've been given. They still worry about expressing themselves on contentious topics and in common spaces.
A campus political climate unfriendly to the principles of free expression is a problem far greater than an uncomfortable social environment. It poses a direct threat to students' ability to learn how to think and how to form coherent opinions. How can we expect a young person to understand why they believe something if they can't hear the other side's perspective in good faith? The ability to consider a complex issue from multiple viewpoints is an incredibly important trait, but with the current environment on many college campuses, too many young people may have a difficult time developing it.
The post Almost 40 Percent of College Students Feel Uncomfortable Sharing a Controversial Opinion in Class appeared first on Reason.com.

The school year didn't start yesterday, as planned, for Seattle public school students, who have gotten an impromptu extension of their summer vacation due to striking teachers.
The Seattle Education Association (SEA) began its strike on September 7, demanding higher teacher-to-student ratios, particularly in special needs and multilingual classrooms, laptops for teaching assistants, and—naturally—higher pay.
The union notes on its website that 93 percent of its members "are working more than our assigned or contract hours," while a quarter of its members log an additional 10 hours per week. Meanwhile, "the cost of living in Seattle is skyrocketing, shortages of educators are getting worse, and our pay is not keeping pace," argues SEA. Accordingly, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) "must pay all staff respectful wages and must address the unacceptably low wages for Education Support Professionals."
But public employee salaries are searchable for the state of Washington, and some 40 percent of SPS' full-time teachers actually make more than $100,000 per year, according to 2020–21 salary data reported by The Center Square (and easily searchable via this database). The pay scale for SPS teachers, which depends on tenure and educational attainment, ranges from roughly $60,000 to $123,500 annually for 7.5-hour workdays (37.5-hour workweeks) and a shorter working year than people in the private sector typically endure. That's not including pension benefits, which can be quite generous depending on the number of years teachers log in the system.
It's unclear what about these wages aren't "respectful," but they are, nevertheless, one of the major sticking points—emphasized repeatedly in materials the union has provided on its strike—that is preventing some 50,000 students and families from starting the school year.
To be sure, many teachers are now burdened by making up for lost instructional time that resulted from COVID school closures (something teachers unions played no small part in lobbying to extend). Dealing with the challenge of learning loss, with some 40 percent of K-4 Washington state students not reading at grade level, will be no small feat for teachers this school year.
Still, while public employees attempt to negotiate pay and working conditions they want, it's public school parents who are left in the lurch, with no viable alternatives and no real means of holding their school district accountable—other than by taking the drastic step of pulling kids out of public school entirely, a threat more and more parents have made good on over the last two years.

The customer (as opposed to the employer) feels the pain when government school employees strike.
The employer has no incentive to change to help teachers or students.
School choice would fix this problem by providing real accountability.
— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) September 7, 2022

"I have gone from a cheerleader for public schools to a believer in school choice," one Seattle public school parent, who wishes to stay anonymous, tells Reason. "I have lost any faith I had in public sector unions. Top of scale teachers are making a ridiculous amount of money, more than I make as a senior-level tech worker," she adds, emphasizing that while she didn't always feel this way, the low quality of instruction provided by SPS over the years has been disheartening.
"My kid should be in the second day of her senior year, not playing video games on our couch."
The post Seattle Public School Teachers on Strike, Since 6-Figure Pay Isn't Good Enough appeared first on Reason.com.

When Carmen Goff received a letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last month asking her to visit the agency's Memphis office, she didn't have cause for concern. It said she needed to provide new fingerprints, pictures, and documents and would be given new reporting dates. She and her 10-year-old son Brandon, who was previously a St. Jude cancer patient, had been diligently reporting to the ICE office since arriving in Memphis years prior. Their green card application was in progress.
The letter "didn't set off any alarm bells for me because they explicitly said for new reporting dates, meaning we're going to set you a future check-in date," says Lily Axelrod, an immigration attorney who represents the Goffs. "But that turned out to be a lie, and they had already had her deportation flight booked."
Carmen and Brandon came to the U.S. from Honduras in November 2016, requesting asylum after crossing the southern border. At that point, Brandon had recovered from leukemia, which he was diagnosed with at just 18 months old. Carmen sought better economic circumstances and a better medical system for her son, fearing his cancer would return. She also hoped to flee violence in Honduras: A gang had killed her stepfather when he refused to give them money, she told Memphis' The Commercial Appeal.
Immigration authorities gave her a court date and allowed her to move to join relatives in the Atlanta area. Unfortunately, Brandon's cancer returned. Carmen brought him to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, which does not charge for treatment, and he eventually recovered. But their immigration status was on shaky ground.
"The judge did not grant her asylum case," says Axelrod, explaining that "it's pretty tough to win asylum cases" because "the law is a mess" and "the standard for evidence is extremely high." They didn't win their appeal either. "At that point, Carmen and her son Brandon had a final order of removal from the judge," Axelrod explains. "But the local ICE office, as they often do for cases that have some kind of a humanitarian element…allowed Carmen to have what's called an order of supervision."
Issued in 2019, that order allowed Carmen to stay in Memphis, keeping her son in treatment and the two of them out of ICE detention and deportation proceedings. It required her to complete regular check-ins with ICE and keep the agency apprised of new documents or addresses, which she did. In the meantime, Carmen met and married Jose Guerrero, a Venezuelan immigrant who recently naturalized as a U.S. citizen. The couple began to file the necessary paperwork for marriage-based immigration relief. Making good progress, the letter Carmen received on August 1 didn't seem like anything to worry about.
Carmen reported to the ICE office on August 11 with Brandon in tow. There, according to The Commercial Appeal, "officials told her to sign a document—she doesn't know what it said, because it was in English." The friend who had dropped Carmen and Brandon off became alarmed that they hadn't emerged from the office after several hours and that Carmen wasn't answering her cellphone. "We were able to check and confirm…that she had been detained," says Axelrod. "She and her son were held in the ICE office in Memphis for a while and were not allowed to contact an attorney or contact a family member."
Officials then took Carmen and Brandon to the Memphis airport, "where they told her that she was going to be flying to Texas"—but not that she and Brandon were being deported, Axelrod explains. Axelrod contacted someone high on the ICE chain of command in the region to note that agents had a St. Jude patient in custody. Axelrod sent ICE officials the family's latest documentation from St. Jude, where Brandon was still undergoing annual check-ups. That back-and-forth culminated in ICE letting Carmen and Brandon go home that evening.
"It was really traumatizing for her, as a mom more than anything," says Axelrod. "Everybody wants the best for their kids and to be able to tell their kids that everything is OK. She had that moment of not knowing what to tell him and not knowing how to protect him."
Last year, the Biden administration directed ICE to focus on deporting truly dangerous undocumented immigrants—those entangled in terrorism or serious crimes, for instance—rather than the vast majority who lead peaceful and productive lives in the United States. But in June, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Drew Tipton blocked that policy.
Axelrod believes that Carmen and Brandon's near-deportation wouldn't have happened if the Biden administration's enforcement priorities were still in place. "My theory is that during this period of injunction while there is no official guidance from on high, local ICE offices basically have the freedom to do what they want with their docket," she says. If the goal is "to deport as many people as possible…the easiest people to deport are people like Carmen, people who are going to show up to the ICE office when you tell them to and who have already given you all their travel documents, who you already know that they're nonviolent and compliant."
"This is sort of the low-hanging fruit in terms of effort expended to number of people deported," Axelrod continues.
The reversed enforcement guidance represents a significant blow to countless undocumented immigrants who have no criminal records, face violence if forced to return to their home countries, and have built their lives in the United States. Immigrants are already being deported without notice. Oklahoma immigration attorney Lorena Rivas told the Los Angeles Times that had happened to one of her clients, and she had heard of similar cases from other attorneys. One woman was deported to Mexico after a routine check-in in Memphis along with three of her children, who are U.S. citizens.
"ICE is designed to do exactly this," says Axelrod. "That's what our immigration laws allow." Though Carmen and Brandon ultimately weren't deported, other nonviolent, vulnerable migrants might not be so lucky.
The post ICE Almost Deported a 10-Year-Old Cancer Survivor and His Mom appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekToday’s question concerns affairs of the heart.Last week on Twitter, a presumably young person posted this question: “Literally BAFFLED as to how people found love before dating sites and social media. Was settling the norm? Or did everyone just happen to be romantically compatible with the person sitting nearest to them in class?” Thousands of people responded, including Kat Rosenfield, who mused on “the challenge of explaining to an entire generation that the frictionless matching achieved by algorithm is not only not better than the old-school kind, but generally, vastly inferior.”What do you think about the app era of dating or the in-real-life era that preceded it? Insights born of personal experience are encouraged but not required. I hope to hear from every age cohort.Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteEvery year, like any good Californian raised on The Beach Boys and Bruce Brown, I mourn the end of summer. But this year, writing from Europe as each day is shorter and temperatures fall with each week, I feel a special sense of foreboding about the coming months. After shutting down a major gas pipeline into Europe, Russia announced this week that it will not resume energy shipments until the West ends sanctions imposed over the war in Ukraine.Already, this week gas prices have surged 35 percent, even as the euro has hit a 20-year low. What will happen when winter arrives and much of the continent finds itself struggling to keep the heat on? Widespread political unrest is one possibility. “An estimated 70,000 people protested in Prague against the Czech government on Saturday, calling on the ruling coalition to do more to control soaring energy prices and voicing opposition to the European Union and NATO,” Reuters reports. “Organisers of the demonstration from a number of far-right and fringe political groups including the Communist party, said the central European nation should be neutral militarily and ensure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.”I wonder if large crowds will take to the streets of Berlin and Paris, and beyond, this December or January or February. Still, the economist Tyler Cowen is betting that Moscow’s gambit for leverage will fail. “Europe bears the full burden today, and rather soon in the winter to come,” he writes. “Over time, however, Europe will adjust and the Russian position and threat value will weaken each period. It would make sense as a strategy if Russia were about to start negotiating for peace, but that is not my prediction. It also would make sense if Russia thinks Europe is at the very end of its rope, and now will crack. That also does not seem correct for me.”The War in UkraineIn a Claremont Review of Books essay titled “Why Are We in Ukraine?,” Christopher Caldwell begins by arguing that the United States has made itself a central player in the conflict.He writes:
It is pursuing a three-pronged strategy to defeat Russia through every means short of entering the war—which, of course, raises the risk that the United States will enter the war. One prong is the state-of-the-art weaponry it is supplying to Ukraine. Since June, thousands of computer-guided artillery rockets have been wreaking havoc behind Russian lines. A second prong is sanctions. With western European help, Washington has used its control of the choke points of the global marketplace to impoverish Russians, in hopes of punishing Russia. Finally, the U.S. seeks to rally the world’s peoples to a culture war against an enemy whose traditionalism, even if it does not constitute the whole of his evil, is at least a symbol of it.
In Caldwell’s telling, things aren’t going well:
The economic sanctions, far from bringing about the collapse Blinken gloated over, have driven up the price of the energy Russia sells, strengthened the ruble, and threatened America’s western European allies with frostbite, shortages, and recession. The culture war has found few proponents outside of the West’s richest latte neighborhoods. Indeed, cultural self-defense may be part of the reason India, China, and other rising countries have conspicuously declined to cut economic ties with the Russians.
His lengthy analysis of the dangers the conflict poses to U.S. interests culminates in this advice:
The attempt to isolate Russia from the American world system has had a striking unintended consequence—the possible founding of an alternative world system that would draw power away from the existing one. Twenty years ago, under George W. Bush, the United States removed the Iraqi deterrent from Iran’s neighborhood, transforming Iran overnight into a regional power. This year, under Joe Biden, the United States has made China a gift of Russia’s exportable food and mineral resources. We are displaying an outright genius for identifying our most dangerous military adversary and solving its most pressing strategic challenge. The attention of China is now engaged. Joe Biden argues that any wavering in the cause of obliterating Russia will be understood by China as a green light on Taiwan. He may have a point, but the U.S. management of the Ukraine situation over the past decade has constituted encouragement enough.
Administration officials often describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war of choice. Although this may have been true at the outset, it is not now. Vladimir Putin and the Russia he rules cannot stop fighting. As long as the United States is involved in arming Russia’s enemies and bankrupting its citizens, they are quite right to believe themselves in a war for their country’s survival. The United States, thus far in a less bloody way, is also involved in a war it chose but cannot exit—in this case, for fear of undermining the international system from which it has drawn its power and prosperity for the past three quarters of a century. Now may seem like the wrong moment to make peace. But seldom in wars such as this one do the prospects for peace grow more favorable with time.
For a different perspective, see George Packer’s recent Atlantic essay, “Ukrainians Are Defending the Values Americans Claim to Hold.” As Packer sees it, “Moral clarity can be blinding, and most subjects worth writing about are complicated. But a few things are morally clear: slavery, and genocide, and Russia’s attempt to destroy Ukraine.” After traveling there to deliver medical supplies, he shared an anecdote that doubles as a case for international involvement:
The Russian way of war is a form of shock and awe whose intended effect is not just to leave cities and towns uninhabitable and undefended, but to overwhelm the survivors and render them utterly passive, as if they are facing not a recognizable human enemy but a force of nature, or some kind of supernatural power, an impersonal god that destroys whatever it touches.
But one evening something happened that put me in a different frame of mind. I was walking back to my hotel along Khreshchatyk, the main avenue that runs through Kyiv’s Maidan. The streets were nearly empty as the 10 o’clock curfew approached. An air-raid siren began to wail. Few Kyivans paid the alarms much attention anymore, but I quickened my pace. I passed two women in the orange uniforms of city workers. At this hour, they were sweeping out the gutters. I suddenly realized that Kyiv’s streets were incredibly clean, with hardly a scrap of trash anywhere. A lot of effort went into keeping the city, with its broad squares and grand facades in pale blues and pinks and yellows, orderly and pleasing. Everywhere you looked, lilac bushes were in bloom—they were blooming all around the ruins of Irpin and Bucha, too, and along the embankments of the railroad tracks between Lviv and Kyiv—and chestnut trees were covered in shaggy white flowers, and beds of red and yellow tulips spread out around monuments. None of this was natural, any more so than the destruction that artillery and missiles rained down on innocent people going about their lives. Human hands had tried to ruin the city, and human hands were keeping the ruins beautiful.
I had heard that so many people wanted to help clear the rubble from Ukraine’s destroyed cities, wait lists were needed to organize all the volunteers. But somehow it was the sight of those two women sweeping the street just before curfew that brought home to me the obscene wrongness of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Here was a country with a tragic history that had at last begun to build, with great effort, a better society.
What made Ukraine different from any other country I had ever seen—certainly from my own—was its spirit of constant self-improvement, which included frank self-criticism. For example, there’s no cult of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine—a number of Ukrainians told me that he had made mistakes, that they’d vote against him after the war was won. Maxim Prykupenko, a hospital director in Lviv, called Ukraine “a free country aspiring to be better all the time.” The Russians, he added, “are destroying a beautiful country for no logical reason to do it. Maybe they are destroying us just because we have a better life.” Shitting on the floor of a newly renovated house after killing or driving out its owners—that, in an image, is Russia’s war against Ukraine.
To Fight Climate Change, Get a White RoofEric Scigliano makes that compelling argument here.What Is School For?In a recent symposium on that subject, The New York Times published a number of different answers, including one by the authors Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray, who argue that “school is for making citizens.” To them, that means resisting efforts by some Republicans to restrict how educators are able to teach about race and gender. They write:
Contemporary attacks on teaching true history are authoritarian attempts to impose a sanitized curriculum. America’s book banners and anti-critical race theory zealots are following a path well worn by authoritarian regimes in Russia and Hungary, which have issued laws targeting the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues. In the current U.S. debates, both the authoritarians and those people committed to multiracial democracy recognize that education is inherently political, because it enables students to understand, question and change their world. For the latter, this is the point; freedom comes from having the tools to comprehend a range of good and bad experiences and weigh the options for charting their future. Despite wails to the contrary from activist groups like Moms for Liberty, who claim accurate teaching of America’s history will harm white children, research shows that all students benefit from reading accurate but critical accounts. Lessons about racism make students more likely to engage and empathize across race. Such cross-racial solidarity is essential for members of our most diverse generation.
Responding at Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias, who is also opposed to restrictions on educators, counters that schools are nevertheless making a mistake if they focus on advancing social justice rather than teaching reading and math.He writes:
Citizenship is important, and it is one of the functions of the school system, but the best (and most realistic) way for K-12 schools to foster effective citizenship is to teach kids foundational literacy and math skills. Incorporating works about history or politics into the curriculum is a great idea insofar as it helps keep students engaged, but it’s best to make those core skills the North Star and try to avoid hubris and tons of polarized fights about tangential issues. Unfortunately, the median American reads at something like a 5th or 6th grade level … Diving into the data does show that the foreign-born population brings the average down a bit, which doesn’t really reflect on the school system. The typical person born in the United States is probably at an 8th grade level rather than 6th. Still, that’s low. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Case for Reparations” scores … above the reading level of the typical American … All of which is to say that improving the level of basic reading competency is basic citizenship education. To read the books that progressives see as foundational to their understanding of race in American history, you need to be able to read better than the typical American can. And of course to really receive a well-rounded citizen-like education in these subjects, you also need to read good books written by people on the other side of some of these arguments.
I agree with Yglesias about the paramount importance of reading skills. As for how schools ought to handle contested topics, I’ve previously argued and still believe that a viewpoint-diversity curriculum is an underrated approach to acculturating young people to be good citizens.Provocation of the WeekTo mark the death of the journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, The Nation has resurfaced an essay that she wrote in 1983 about men, women, and how they ought to relate to one another in the modern world. An excerpt:
The old feminine ideal—the full-time housewife with station wagon and suburban ranch house—has been largely replaced by the career woman with skirted suit and attaché case. The collapse of the breadwinner ethic, and with it the notion of long-term emotional responsibility toward women, affects not only the homemaker who could be cut loose into poverty but the financially self-sufficient working woman. We face the prospect of briefer “relationships,” punctuated by emotional dislocations and seldom offering the kind of loyalty that might extend into middle age. If we accept the male revolt as a fait accompli and begin to act on its economic consequences for women, are we not in some way giving up on men? Are we acquiescing to a future in which men will always be transients in the lives of women, and never fully members of the human family?
I would like to think that a reconciliation between the sexes is still possible … But what would be the terms of such a reconciliation? We cannot go back to a world where maturity meant “settling,” often in stifled desperation, for a life perceived as a “role.” Nor can we accept the nightmare anomie of the pop psychologists’ vision: a world where other people are objects of consumption, a world of chance encounters of a “self” propelled by impulse alone. I see no other ethical basis for a reconciliation than the feminist principle that women are also persons, with the same need for respect, for satisfying work, for love and for pleasure as men. In a “world without a father,” that is, without the private system of paternalism built into the family-wage system, we will have to learn to be brothers and sisters.
As ever, thanks for all your emails, and dissents are always welcome. See you next week.

The way President Joe Biden tells it, Republicans are already laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 presidential election.
"They're working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election-deniers to undermine democracy itself," Biden warned in an ominous and overtly political speech in Philadelphia last week.
For Biden, former President Donald Trump's slapdash attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the chaos that some of Trump's supporters caused at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, are harbingers of what's to come. "I will not stand by and watch elections in this country stolen by people who simply refuse to accept that they lost," Biden pledged.
In some regards, this worry is a legitimate one. Fealty to Trump and his notions about the results of the 2020 presidential election has become a potent litmus test within the Republican Party. The results of this year's primary elections have made that much clear.
According to an analysis by data-nerds at FiveThirtyEight, 195 of the 529 GOP candidates running for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state, or attorney general this November have claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or have taken actions (including filing lawsuits or refusing to certify elections results) that attempted to block Biden's win. A mere 71 Republican candidates in those same races have said they accept the results of the 2020 election without reservations (and the rest are somewhere in the middle).
A sizable chunk of one of America's two major parties is now partially defined by its willingness not just to go along with Trump's election-denying scheme but to actively embrace it. Even if most of those candidates lose in November, those numbers represent a potentially serious problem for the country heading into the presidential election in 2024.
So Biden's not totally wrong to be sounding the alarm about this. But instead of lecturing voters or trying to score political points, maybe he could try giving that same speech to the Democrats in charge of Congress?
It's been months since a bipartisan group of senators unveiled the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, which is easily the most important and straightforward way to prevent a repeat of what nearly happened in January 2021. The bill would address the procedural mechanisms that Trump and his allies sought to exploit to overturn the 2020 election. It would head off future attempts by state lawmakers and governors to refuse to certify the results of a presidential election, and it would clarify that the vice president does not have the power to unilaterally reject the Electoral College results (as Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to do).
In short, the bill doesn't overhaul election rules in partisan ways or tell states how to conduct elections. But it does force states to abide by the results of the elections they conduct.
That's pretty important, but the bill seems to be getting shifted to the back burner in Congress even as Democrats ramp up their rhetoric about Republicans trying to destroy democracy.
Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine), one of the bill's sponsors, "would like to see pre-election consideration of Electoral Count Act reform," Politico reported earlier this week. But, for now, Democrats "are committed to little other than confirming judges and funding the government after a surprisingly fruitful summer session of legislating on firearm access, climate and taxes, microchip manufacturing and veterans' benefits." It's also possible that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) will cancel a two-week session scheduled for October so senators facing re-election this year can stay on the campaign trail, according to the same Politico piece.
Prioritizing winning elections over actually safeguarding them? Yep, that sounds about right. After all, Democratic campaign operations spent heavily to promote some Trump-loving, election-denying Republicans in primaries this year while simultaneously warning that those same candidates are existential threats to American democracy.
Playing those cynical games might help Democrats win a few elections they would otherwise have lost. But if Congress doesn't find the time to pass the Electoral Count Reform Act before the end of the year, there's little hope that it will ever reach Biden's desk—because Republicans are expected to take control of the House, at least, after the midterms.
Biden says Republicans aim to use their attempted subversion of the 2020 election "as preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections" in ways that "threatens the very foundations of our republic." All the more reason for congressional Democrats (and Republicans who refuse to be complicit in Trump's schemes) to do the important work of shoring up those foundations now, while they still have a chance.
The post Why Are Democrats Dragging Their Feet on the Electoral Count Reform Act? appeared first on Reason.com.

The rationale articulated in a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down the federal law that prevented states from regulating and taxing commercial sports betting could not have been clearer. “A more direct affront to state sovereignty is not easy to imagine,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each state is free to act on its own.” With that, Congress’s backdoor ban on state-level sports betting was no more. But while the constitutional propriety of this decision is sound, the gambling bonanza it created is not without its challenges. And it may reinvigorate—indeed, necessitate—a debate about the proper balance between freedom and responsibility.

Since that ruling, state after state has taken advantage of the new dispensation, and that trend is expected to accelerate this year. Tens of millions of Americans have wagered on the outcome of sporting events in what has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. Spectators are inundated with commercials advertising gambling, much of which is conducted by private enterprises, like casinos, though the state takes a cut of the action. But like all gambling, the game is not a fair one.

Prospective gamblers are sometimes tempted into the game by the promise of “risk-free” betting as a signup promotion; meaning that the house will cover your initial losses. But the only “risk-free” proposition here is the one in which the house is engaged. Like any game of chance, bettors will lose far more often than they win. Losing, not winning, is what makes gambling addictive.

Losing bets triggers in compulsive gamblers the desire to “chase” that wager with more or even larger wagers to recoup losses. The enticing promise of easy money soon gives way to the manic effort to merely break even. Though this may sound like torture to most, it is a stimulating experience for gambling addicts. “You can do a brain scan on someone using cocaine, and a scan on someone who spent the last 24 hours at a casino, and all the same parts of the brain are lit up,” said the Ohio Department of Mental Health’s Stacey Frohnapfel-Hasson.

A consequence of radical liberty is the risk that some people will indulge themselves to the point of self-destruction. Sports betting is no different.

“Being able to just sit in bed and go on my phone and gamble made it almost impossible to stop,” one sports betting addict told Vice’s Maxwell Strachan. “I could do everything you could do at a casino on my phone.” He confessed to burning through “a couple hundred thousand dollars” before joining Gamblers Anonymous, but he considers himself lucky compared to some of his compatriots in the program.

“Experts increasingly see the simultaneous rise of online sports betting, online casinos (legal or not), cryptocurrency trading, and day trading as the same root thing—gambling—with the same root issues,” Strachan’s report continued. About 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 44 engaged in some form of online gambling last year—nearly twice the number of Americans aged 45 to 54 who did the same. The personal and psychological toll on the growing number of young gambling addicts Strachan’s account details is hard to read, and it’s rendered that much harder by the vested interest the state has taken in their torment.

In New Jersey, the state that ushered in this new regime in the first place, revenue from sports betting is down by more than 8 percent in 2021. Even so, more than $860 million was wagered on sports via the Internet last year, with another $63 million in bets placed at retail sportsbooks. New Jersey took in roughly $100 million in tax revenue from the practice in 2021 alone. Illinois generated almost as much in tax revenue from legal sportsbooks since it was legalized in early 2020, while New York earned $267 million. It’s a perverse arrangement that creates incentives for the state to accept—even tacitly encourage—this crippling addiction.

Given the abject shallowness of our present political discourse, we have little reason to expect that this new set of distorted incentives will reignite a dormant debate over the importance of tempering the virtues of liberty with the forbearance and prudence that accompanies responsibility. But it should.

The Supreme Court was amply justified when it struck down a congressional effort to intervene in the state-level legislative process while pretending it had done nothing of the sort. The states and the enterprises therein are free to maximize the advantages provided by this new legal environment, and individuals can partake in these services if they so choose. But while it is outside the purview of government to prohibit access to gambling, should the state—and you, by extension—benefit from its promotion? And what are our individual and collective responsibilities to those whose injury sustains us?

Sports betting is only one of our recent national experiments in licensing addictive behaviors. New York City’s taxpayer-funded experiment with “safe sites,” where heroin users can slowly kill themselves with properly sterilize instruments and under proper medical supervision, is another. As an alternative to the failed war on drugs, making New Yorkers into passive collaborationists with a regime that encourages (indeed, extols the empowering virtues of) shooting up while observing best practices isn’t working.

At least New York’s judgement-free opiate-abuse zones are ostensibly designed to reduce the risks to the user. They are not, however, designed to minimize the risk to the societies in which they are situated, as California soundly affirmed with its governor’s decision to veto the establishment of such sites in the state. Gambling addiction, by contrast, doesn’t leave in its wake an army of highly visible and menacing zombies. Its consequences are hidden from view, and so we absorb the costs of this new licentiousness without fully apprehending the damage it is doing. But we are supporting it, and we are benefiting from it. What responsibility do we, therefore, share in our obligation to the afflicted?

We all have individual responsibilities. We either observe them or endure the consequences of their neglect. But a radical libertarian vision of social organization is blind to the fact that we are sometimes drafted into participating in a moral hazard. A radical libertarian vision of society also maintains that society must also preserve a robust “right of exit,” but where is the offramp for those who object to their compulsory participation in this morally compromised scheme? If you find one, let me know where I can get off.

On the not-so-infrequent nights when I’m plagued by insomnia, no combination of melatonin, weighted blankets, and white noise will do. Just one cure for my affliction exists: my cat Calvin, lying atop my shoulder, lulling me to sleep with his purrs.For veteran members of Club Purr, the reasons are clear. A purr is warm tea, a roaring fire, and fresh-out-of-the-oven cookies, all rolled into a fleece-lined hug; it is the auditory salve of a babbling brook; it is coffee brewing at dawn. It is emotional gratification incarnate—a sign that “we’ve made our pets happy,” which just feels darn good, says Wailani Sung, a veterinary behaviorist at the San Francisco SPCA.But purrs—one of the most recognizable sounds in the animal kingdom—are also one of the most mysterious. “No one, still, knows how purring is actually done,” says Robert Eklund, a phonetician and linguist at Linköping University, in Sweden. Nor can experts say, exactly, what purring means. Cats purr when they’re happy—but also sometimes when they’re anxious or afraid, when they’re in labor, even when they’re about to die. Cats are perhaps the most inscrutable creatures humans welcome into our homes, and purring might be the most inscrutable sound they make.There is, at least, some consensus on what purring is. In the strictest sense, the sound is a rhythmic, rumbly percolation that’s produced during both exhales—as is the case with most typical animal vocalizations—and inhales, with no interruptions between. Purrers also run their motor with their mouths entirely closed, like little feline ventriloquists; the sound simply springs out of the body at a frequency that roughly spans the range between 20 and 150 Hertz. Back in the 1960s, one scientist posited that purring was the product of blood percolating through the vena cava, a vessel that returns the body’s blood to the heart; that notion was later disproved. Now it’s generally understood that the source is the voice box: The brain pings electric signals to the vocal folds, prompting them to flutter open and shut like little muscular doors.[Read: Pay no attention to that cat inside a box]Lots of animals can imitate the sound of purring, among them bears and guinea pigs. But only a small number of creatures can cook up a bona fide version of the burbly noise: In addition to house cats, genets—little cat look-alikes native to Africa—can do it; so can lynx, ocelots, and dozens of other smaller members of the felid family. Eklund recounted for me how one captive cheetah, named Caine, emitted booming purrs from “the second he woke up to the second he fell asleep,” he told me. But lions, tigers, and jaguars can’t rouse the same rasps; scientists have not documented any cats that can both purr and roar. Scientists can’t say for certain what separates the purrs from the purr-nots. It may have something to do with the length, shape, or thickness of certain species’ voice box, or the tissue architecture that surrounds it; or perhaps it’s the squishiness of their hyoid, a U-shaped bone suspended in the throat. Or maybe not. Purring isn’t easy to study: Felines aren’t usually keen on producing the sound around researchers in labs.Whatever its mechanical basis, purring seems hardwired into certain cats from birth. They start revving their little locomotor engines within days of exiting the womb, while still blind and deaf. Kittens and mothers seem to exchange the sounds as a form of early communication, swapping essential messages such as I’m hungry and Hey, here comes Mom, says Hazel Carney, a cat veterinarian and purr expert based in Idaho, where she also cares for her own three cats—Wyatt Earp, Calamity Jane, and Hi Ho Silver. Those early, positive associations might be part of why purring sticks around through adulthood, reappearing whenever cats get content—curling up with their favorite humans, say, or chowing down on an especially tasty snack. Zazie Todd, an animal-behavior expert and the author of the book Purr: The Science of Making Your Cat Happy, told me that one of her cats, Harley, will sometimes rumble the moment Todd walks into a room, which is “really lovely.” For other felines, Sung told me, mere eye contact with a beloved human may be all it takes to get that engine going.TheAtlantic · Purring genet (Courtesy of Robert Eklund, Gustav Peters, Chris Wemmer)But the gears of purring can also turn under some far less cheery circumstances. Mikel Delgado, a feline-behavior expert in California, told me she once had a cat that would purr at the vet. Sung has even heard the noise while inserting a catheter into a patient. Scientists can only speculate about what’s going on. Carney told me that in some animals, purring could be a sort of vocal tic, like nervous laughter; cats might also be trying to send out pleas for help or warning messages to anyone who might dare approach. Or maybe bad-times purrs are self-soothing, says Jill Caviness, a veterinarian and cat expert at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and parent to a feline named Electron. They could even be a cat’s attempt to dupe its pain-racked body into a less stressed state.[Read: Cat owners can (almost) all agree on one thing]In the early aughts, a researcher proposed that purring might even have palliative properties for cats—pinging out vibratory frequencies that could, for instance, speed the healing of wounds or broken bones. The thought isn’t totally bonkers, Eklund told me. Vibratory therapy has shown some promise in animals such as rabbits; even NASA once pursued it, hoping to stave off or even reverse bone loss in astronauts headed for long stints in space. Carney has had plenty of clients who “swear that the cats lying in bed, purring beside them while they were ill, kept them from passing away,” she told me. But alas: Although cats can purr at frequencies that overlap with those used in vibration therapy, none of the research on these treatments has actually involved felines. “I don’t think we have any studies that are like, I sat with a purring cat on my broken leg for 15 minutes a day; I healed more rapidly than someone else,” Caviness told me; the same goes for the effects of purrs on the purrer. Carney’s more open to the healing idea, though she, too, admits: If people feel better around their cats, that might be less about purring’s direct mechanical effects on human tissues, and more about the entire companion animal being a psychological balm.TheAtlantic · Purring serval (Courtesy of Robert Eklund)With cat communication now undergoing a bit of a research boom, Eklund told me—new papers on the subject appear “basically every week”—purring is perhaps less perplexing than it’s ever been. But among its cat-vocalization cousins, its rumbles can still be unusually difficult to parse, not least because, across contexts, purrs just sound so similar. Meows can also be a bit cryptic, but they have more discernible logic: It’s not so difficult to parse Calvin’s Feed me; I am legitimately starving mewl from his Why am I in this cat carrier? yowl. Carney, who’s spent years listening to purrs of all sorts, told me that such differences may exist with purrs too: Contented rumbles tend to be more melodious and lower, while anxious revs trend higher and harsher. And one study, from a few years ago, suggested that humans could pick out their pet’s “solicitation” purrs—an urgent, pitchy sound that cats emit when seeking a meal—from other purrs that they made on the regular. But differences like those are very hard to pick out, especially in unfamiliar cats; even Caviness’s veterinary students can’t tell them apart in the clinic, she said.[Read: Why we think cats are psychopaths]And unlike many other cat noises, purrs stubbornly elude human imitation (though some people on YouTube might beg to differ). Humans can easily meow back at their cats; “it’s like a very rudimentary pidgin language,” Eklund said. But purring? Our brains and throats just aren’t set up for the stuff. Which, to me, is a soft tragedy: The rumbles of my two cats, Calvin and Hobbes, are missives of love, of joy, of bliss; they are tactile and auditory feedback to my touch. They are a token of affection I can receive, but cannot send back.Certain devices and soundtracks can offer substitutes. Some vet clinics play cat music in exam rooms, with a calming purr bass track; Delgado mentioned that a shelter she used to work at purchased surrogate nursing machines for orphaned kittens, which could be outfitted with a synthetic purr. Purr enthusiasts can even put on a podcast of an orange cat from Ireland named Bilbo purring for 30 minutes straight.Purring is a language barrier we have yet to surmount. Which, in some ways, is so, so cat. Humans have spent generations breeding dogs to emote in very people-esque ways, using their soulful eyes and slobbery, smiley mouths. Cats, though, continue to thrive on subtlety; their mugs aren’t evolutionarily set up for obvious expressions, defaulting instead to “resting cat face.” Even compared with other cat vocalizations, purring is subtle and intimate, a form of communication that hinges on proximity, on closeness, on understanding a cat’s wants and needs—and maybe, sometimes, on them understanding ours.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is the scene of an airstrike in 2016 in Yemen, on a busy hospital in a small city called Abs. Nineteen people were killed and dozens were injured. The pilot missed clear warning signs and ignored safety measures, like a no-strike list of protected buildings. Found in the debris, the remains of a U.S.-made weapon. America isn’t officially involved here. The fight is between a Saudi-led coalition and the Houthi rebel group. But it’s very much a U.S.-supported war. The fighter jets, the bombs, the training and intelligence — much of it is supplied to the Saudis by the U.S. It’s a brutal war. The Houthis have killed hundreds of Yemenis. The Saudi air campaign has been even more lethal. Over four years, coalition airstrikes have killed thousands of civilians and bombed well over 100 medical facilities, a Times assessment found. “If U.S. fighter pilots were doing this directly with U.S. bombs, would there be a change in behavior?” “If we were hitting hospitals, over and over, like what we’re seeing? Absolutely, there would be a change.” Which begs the question: What obligation does the U.S. have when it sells weapons to foreign militaries? U.S. officials claim their ally is doing everything possible to protect civilians. But this is simply not true, according to Larry Lewis, a former State Department official, who saw firsthand how the Saudi coalition failed to protect civilians and how the U.S. chose to look the other way. “Yemen has exposed a fundamental problem in the way we provide arms and the way we support partners. So we need to change the way we do business.” Lewis spent years working with the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan to try to reduce civilian casualties. He wrote a book on protecting civilians that’s issued to every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. And in 2015, the Obama administration sent him to work with the Saudi coalition in Riyadh. “There were some fundamental problems with how some of the targeting was being done that really needed to be fixed.” During his time there, he reviewed the Abs hospital strike with an investigations team he helped the Saudi coalition to create. “What did you learn from reviewing that airstrike with the Saudis?” “You look at the level of destruction in the nearby buildings and go, the pilot got it way wrong.” Let’s take a look at what happened there. Coalition warplanes attacked a Houthi checkpoint a few miles north of Abs. Medics say that a car transported casualties to the Abs hospital from the strike. The Saudi coalition tracked the car, believing a Houthi leader was inside. For some reason, they didn’t strike it on the open road. Instead, they waited until the car pulled into the hospital. It parked by the emergency room and was hit without warning. Three major failings were evident in the Abs strike, Lewis says, and these were repeated throughout the Saudi-led air campaign. “Doctors Without Borders say that they provided the hospital coordinates to the Saudi coalition.” “That’s right.” “So why did they still hit it?” “That information didn’t get to the cockpit.” The Saudi coalition is often praised by the U.S. for creating a no-strike list, a map of protected sites like schools, refugee camps and hospitals. The list is used to vet targets when airstrikes are preplanned. But that doesn’t happen for the vast majority of strikes, which are on-the-fly bombings or so-called dynamic strikes. “What can be done to limit the number of dynamic strikes, or at least force them to check the no-strike list?” “Mhm. This is not rocket science. It’s not hard to make a requirement for pilots to call back to higher headquarters and say, check the no-strike list and tell me if this object is on the no-strike list, or if there’s something that’s close by. It would take a minute or two.” Another problem? Over and over, Lewis says, pilots seem to ignore large roof signs that identified hospitals, including the one in Abs. We can see six of them in this satellite image taken before the strike. “So the pilot could have seen this marking and recognized, hey, this is a protected facility.” On top of all this, a major issue is a lack of common sense among pilots and spotters on the ground. “You have a pilot that’s not really so experienced, and then you have a person, who’s not even a military person, agreeing on what they think is a valid target, and then engaging that target. So, it’s really fraught with peril.” In Abs, a teacher named Hamza Ahmed Absi saw that peril firsthand. He rushed to the hospital from a nearby school. Muhammad Darm was badly injured in the attack. He’s an X-ray technician, who was helping patients near the hospital’s entrance when the bomb exploded. Muhammad was lucky to survive. He recently returned to work in the hospital. Once a sanctuary in a time of war, he says it no longer feels safe. For years, officials in both the Obama and Trump administrations have said they’re working directly with the Saudis to stem civilian casualties. “I think every Yemeni that is killed — any innocent person is killed — it affects all of us. And there are many steps that are being taken, and have been taken, to try to minimize that.” “The training that we have given them, we know has paid off.” “We are co-located with them in their operation centers to help them develop the techniques and tactics that will allow them to conduct strikes while mitigating civilian casualties.” But one problem with U.S. oversight, Lewis says: The U.S. wasn’t tracking how the American weapons it sold were being used by a Saudi military with little experience in war. In 2018, three years into the conflict, the head of U.S. Central Command said as much. “Is CENTCOM able to tell whether U.S. fuel or U.S. munitions were used as part of that strike?” “Senator, I don’t believe we are.” Lewis says they did have access to that information. They just weren’t using it. “Every flight by the Saudi-led coalition where they were doing airstrikes, that pilot would then make a report that talked about what target was it, what kind of weapons did they use and just information about the strike. They would file it and then that would go to populate this Excel spreadsheet that had every single strike in the campaign.” “And the U.S. and U.K. had access to that database? “They did.” “So if the U.S. wanted to know if American bombs were bombing hospitals, they could have done so?” “Yes.” A year later, after reporters disclosed the database, General Votel changed his tune. “Today, we do have that. We do have a database that does have that information and we have the ability to see that.” Lewis says the database could be a tool to increase U.S. oversight in reviewing foreign weapons sales. A State Department official told us this kind of data could be incorporated into its monitoring, but vetting it can be onerous, and it may be of little use to policymakers. After a Saudi coalition airstrike on a funeral home killed over 150 people in late 2016, the Obama administration, having brokered $100 billion in weapons sales, now sought to distance the U.S. from the coalition. “And their response was, clearly, the Saudis aren’t learning.” It paused sales of precision weapons, and pulled the plug on Lewis’s advising mission. “The U.S. said this is up to the Saudis to do their thing and investigate themselves.” When President Trump took office, the U.S. doubled down on weapons sales. “So we make the best equipment in the world. There’s nobody even close. And Saudi Arabia’s buying a lot of this equipment.” In Yemen, things for civilians continue to get worse. In 2018, the rate of civilian casualties caused by the Saudi-led coalition soared, Lewis says, to almost 50 per week. And in Abs, history repeated itself. Yet another medical facility was attacked in June of that year. The airstrike destroyed a vital cholera treatment center built by Doctors Without Borders to handle the worst outbreak of the disease in modern history. The Saudi coalition tried to shift blame to Doctors Without Borders, saying its buildings weren’t marked. But again, satellite images from before the strike show large red crescents were visible, even from space. And Doctors Without Borders say they shared the center’s coordinates at least 12 times. The Saudis deny this. The U.S. sells weapons to over 100 countries, but in Yemen, the scale of the devastation has become the story. And for the people living there, it’s the new normal.

"I came to realize that economists…tend to focus on things that can be measured," says Russ Roberts, host of the long-running podcast, EconTalk, and author of the new book Wild Problems. "Dignity is hard to measure. A sense of self is hard to measure. Belonging is hard to measure. A feeling of transcendence is hard to measure. Mattering—that you are important, that people look to you. [These sorts of things are] about the life well-lived and they're not about getting the most out of your money. They're not about what the interest rates are next week. And economists truthfully have virtually nothing to say about these things."
Roberts is an economist by training whose great theme over the past 40-plus years has been the fundamental inadequacy of his chosen discipline to really comprehend what matters most to the people it seeks to explain and understand. Wild Problems deals with the decisions that define us—such as whether to marry, whether to have kids, and what kind of work to pursue—that don't yield to anything like easy cost-benefit analyses.
I talk with Roberts about how to navigate the increasing amount of choice most of us have gained over the past 50 years and how to make sense of a world that is richer than ever in material resources but seemingly lacking in deeper meaning. We discuss Roberts' own life, from earning a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago in the 1970s to starting EconTalk, one of the longest-running podcasts around, to becoming president of Shalem College, a private liberal arts college in Israel, and the central role that religion plays in his life.
Previous Reason interviews with Russ Roberts:
"Why the Middle Class Is Better Off Than You Think," October 31, 2019
"Should You Be Optimistic About America's Future?" April 26, 2018
"Adam Smith's Surprising Guide to Happiness (but Not Wealth)," October 8, 2014
"Why Keynesians Always Get It Wrong (and Most Economists Too)," October 11, 2012
"The Price of Everything," October 23, 2008
"What You Need To Know About the Bailout," October 7, 2008
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The post Russ Roberts: Why Economists Are Irrelevant appeared first on Reason.com.

There was a moment in the second Conservative leadership debate when Liz Truss seemed to overcome her awkward speaking style. That moment is long gone. At a conference centre today a few hundred yards from parliament, Tory MPs, peers, and staffers gathered to welcome their new leader. Many looked beleaguered after the eight-week contest. The great and good of the Conservative Party shuffled around sharing holiday anecdotes to a soundtrack of light classical guitar. A smiling Tom Tugendhat embraced people. Potential cabinet colleagues looked each other up and down on the sidelines. Thérèse Coffey strode down the aisle minutes before the start of proceedings.
The chair of the party, Andrew Stephenson, took to the stage to declare that “today marks the culmination of the Conservative leadership election”, eliciting a few faint whoops from the front of the crowd. The chairman of the 1922 committee, Graham Brady, perched behind Stephenson, gripping a giant blue folder containing the result as Stephenson welcomed the candidates into the room. Truss bounced out from backstage with a grin. Sunak shuffled behind with a grimace. He’d forgotten to smile, then remembered too late.
We knew Truss had won, but Brady was there to tell us by how much. Fifty seven per cent to Sunak’s 43 per cent. Not quite the landslide the polls predicted. Her speech seemed written for a thumping victory, not the smallest winning margin in a Tory leadership contest in over 20 years. The result meant that shoring up unity in her party was key. But that didn’t seem to be her priority. She didn’t shake Sunak’s hand after the announcement. Her tribute to him was generic. She positioned herself as Johnson’s acolyte and addressed “Boris” directly. He was, she said, a hero from “Kyiv to Carlisle” – an honest appraisal of Johnson’s unpopularity in Scotland, but not a statement to bring together a party that had just defenestrated him. 
A question hanging over Truss’s victory is how quickly she can pivot from addressing the Conservative Party membership to the public. Today, Truss didn’t speak to the electorate; she spoke to her fans. “I know our beliefs resonate with the British people,” she said confidently. By which she meant “freedom, the ability to control your own life [and] low taxes”, even if only 10 per cent of 2019 Tory voters view the latter as a priority. Levelling up wasn’t mentioned. She nodded to the energy crisis but kept it short. At one point, she said “I will deliver for the NHS”. There was silence; the crowd waited for details. But none came – so they applauded anyway.
[See also: What could Liz Truss’s cabinet look like?]

Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who died last week, was a tragic figure. He tried to build a humane socialism on the rotten foundations of authoritarianism. Today, without the albatross of Stalinism, we can fight for an entirely different kind of socialism.

Former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev attends a literary festival in Cologne, Germany, 2013. (Ralf Juergens / Getty Images)
 
The final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was laid to rest on Saturday in Moscow. It wasn’t officially designated as a state funeral, although it had “elements of a state funeral,” and Russian president Vladimir Putin skipped it.
The snub isn’t surprising. Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) represented an attempt to liberalize the Soviet system from within. At the same time, he allowed the Warsaw Pact nations in Eastern Europe to determine their own destiny. As a militant Russian imperialist who presides over a brutally unequal society marked by very few vestiges of the socialist past, Putin has little reason to remember Gorbachev fondly.
Western media, for its own reasons, seems unsure of how to remember him. By the end of his tenure in office, Gorbachev was wildly popular in the West because he ended the Cold War and removed what had been the ever-present danger of mutual destruction. But in his later years, he railed against NATO expansion and warned that renewed great power rivalry could bring that danger roaring back — a message that’s unlikely to resonate with journalists who put Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios. After all, even if he wanted to reform Soviet Communism, he was a Communist.
From the perspective of those of us who hold out hope for a better kind of socialism than what existed in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev can be viewed as a tragic figure, ground down between “oligarchs in waiting” who were salivating for the return of capitalism and Brezhnevite hard-liners who thought the USSR’s authoritarian and deeply dysfunctional economic system, bitterly resented by much of its population, could totter along the way it was forever. His reform program failed, and the first group came to power — an outcome that generated an explosion of economic inequality and immense human suffering.
Perhaps Gorbachev couldn’t have succeeded. It’s possible that the system simply didn’t have the internal resources for successful reform. But at least he tried to find a third path. For that alone, he deserves to be remembered more warmly than either his Stalinist predecessors or his gangster-capitalist successors.
Meanwhile, we should recognize that the kind of socialism worth fighting for today has very little in common with the system inherited by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, or even the liberalized version that collapsed in 1991. If we’re ever lucky enough to achieve a fully socialist future, it’s going to have to be a kind of socialism that promises more freedom, more prosperity, and a deeper kind of democratic self-government than what exists in Western capitalist democracies, if only because that’s the only kind that will have any chance of securing popular support.

The Tragedy of Gorbachev
In his book Beyond Perestroika, the anti-Stalinist Marxist theoretician Ernest Mandel notes that at the meeting of the Politburo — the ruling body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — where Gorbachev was elevated to his position as general secretary, his candidature was formally proposed by Andrei Gromyko, one of the Politburo’s longest-serving members. Gromyko might have been chosen for this task because he knew how to reassure Brezhnevite hard-liners that Gorbachev wouldn’t change too much too quickly, and would be willing to defend the system by force if push came to shove — Gromyko’s speech is supposed to have included a line about Gorbachev having “teeth of steel” behind his “enticing smile.”
But Gromyko’s role on the occasion is also a potent symbol of the fact that long-serving party leaders like him understood that something would have to change. The Soviet economy had been declining for a long time, both because of its own internally generated dysfunction and the drain imposed by the Cold War arms race with the United States. Within the Soviet Union itself, and to an even greater extent in the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the alleged “workers states” were resented by the actual workers under their thumbs. The rise of the Polish trade union movement Solidarność had been quashed a few years before, but more such explosions were inevitable. The status quo couldn’t last forever.
Gorbachev’s reform program had three prongs. The first, and the most important in explaining Putin’s disdain for his memory, was that he wound down the Soviet Union’s de facto empire. He ended the Soviet war in Afghanistan — overseeing, as left-wing foreign policy expert Kuba Wrzesniewski writes in Sublation magazine, “a more dignified exit than Biden managed in 2021” — and negotiating an arms control treaty with the United States, a considerable diplomatic feat considering that he had “the arch hawk Reagan as his counterpart.” Even more consequentially, he formally abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine that asserted Soviet control over the nations of Eastern Europe. This in turn emboldened nationalists within the USSR itself and ultimately led to the dissolution of the union after Gorbachev lost power.
The second was perestroika, the economic restructuring that involved introducing market mechanisms within the basic framework of centralized state planning. The third, glasnost, was a gradual process of political liberalization.
Mandel believed that the second prong would fail because the third didn’t go far enough.
Socialist democracy is not a normative demand, nor is it an ideal to be realized little by little. It is an immediate practical necessity for the proper functioning of the Soviet economy and Soviet society. Without this democracy it is impossible for the planners to know the workers’ preferences both as producers and as consumers. Ignorant of these preferences, it is impossible to allocate the social product and the social surplus in the correct proportions. The mobilization of the potential knowledge and initiative which still remains hidden in the Soviet working class remains a mirage. Gorbachev’s plans remain suspended in midair, dependent on the good will of the bureaucrats.
Mandel was right about the information problems faced by Soviet planners, even in the Gorbachev era — though his proposed alternative is a bit vague. What ultimately happened was a catastrophe. Instead of the Soviet model of being replaced by a better, more democratic form of socialism, Gorbachev was succeeded by the openly pro-capitalist Boris Yeltsin, and a handful of oligarchs looted the state economy that had at least nominally been the collective property of the entire Soviet people.
Mandel was surely right that adding a bit of liberalization to the crumbling edifice of Soviet planning wasn’t enough to fix what was wrong with the Soviet economy. Meanwhile, trying to keep the basic structures of authoritarian control in place with a population increasingly unafraid to speak its mind, protest, and call for change was an increasingly difficult proposition. “Dissenting views,” Wrzesniewski writes, “could be expressed in increasingly less guarded ways, to the point of rising to a chorus in the late 80s.” The “peaceful decolonization” of Eastern Europe inspired Soviet citizens themselves “to protest and defy central authority, confident that they too would be spared the tanks, the secret police, and the camps of the Soviet apparatus of repression.”
Hard-liners nervous about the pace of reform staged an unsuccessful coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, and in the wake of their failure, the capitalist-restorationist faction led by Yeltsin seized the steering wheel of what, by December, was no longer the Soviet Union. The results were grim. Economic inequality grew to towering heights, and while opportunity and prosperity increased for those Russians who became part of the middle class, overall life expectancy sharply declined. Anyone who remembers reading news from Russia in the 1990s can remember article after article painting a picture of immiseration and lawlessness that sounded like something out of a dystopian science-fiction novel. Things have stabilized considerably since, but it’s hard to look back on the last thirty years of Russian history and think, “Gosh, I sure am happy that what replaced the Soviet system was capitalism.”

A Better Socialism Is Possible
Is there a version of Soviet history where Gorbachev succeeded in reforming the Soviet Union into something qualitatively different and better? It’s hard to answer that kind of counterfactual question with any kind of certainty, but one problem is that the Soviet working class wasn’t engaged in a democratic process of considering and deciding on reforms to a state they fundamentally recognized as theirs.
Wrzesniewski gives Gorbachev credit for the “socialist humanism” he displayed in trying to reform and defend the Soviet system without “spilling any more blood.” That may well be an accurate description of Gorbachev’s subjective intentions, but given the kind of system he was inheriting, much of the Soviet Union related to him not as their representative but as a more generous and liberal prison warden. And state officials who exercised actual power either saw him as a threat to the system with which they identified or as a roadblock that had to be swept away as they transformed themselves from state socialist bureaucrats to wealth-hoarding capitalists. In such a scenario, it’s hard to see how any result could have come about except a transition to capitalism, a reversion to the pre-Gorbachev status quo, or some Chinese-style combination of the two outcomes. At the outer edge of possibility, perhaps, there’s a timeline where Gorbachev steered the USSR (or just Russia) to a more humane and social democratic form of capitalism — “Sweden with nukes.”
Perhaps Gorbachev couldn’t have succeeded.
But a better version of a fully socialist society would have to come about in radically different circumstances. As Rosa Luxemburg presciently wrote as far back as 1918, when she wrote a pamphlet criticizing the authoritarian aspects of the early Bolshevik regime, socialist democracy can’t come about “as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.” If you want your socialism to end up democratic, it has to start that way.
But what would that actually look like? Mandel’s diagnosis of the problem with Soviet planning is convincing enough, but simply postulating “democracy” as the solution makes it sound like every decision regarding how to “allocate the social product and the social surplus” would be put to a vote — or worse yet, some endless mass meeting where everyone spends interminable hours searching for consensus. After all, it’s not easy to see how representative democracy could give planners detailed, fine-grain information about “the workers’ preferences both as producers and as consumers” — the absence of which led to the shoddy products and empty grocery store shelves that routinely infuriated ordinary Soviet citizens. Would every issue about which kinds of breakfast cereal to produce, which factories should have first pick of raw materials, and so on, be a campaign issue in the representatives’ elections?
In The Blueprint, a book I’m cowriting with Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Beggs, we lay out an alternative vision that disaggregates the issue of workers’ democracy from the issue of consumer preferences. The most important reason socialists have always advocated democracy at the workplace is that the workplace is the place where most adults have to spend at least half their waking lives most days of the week. No one should have to spend all that time taking orders from bosses over whom they can’t exercise any kind of direct democratic accountability. And the lack of democratic input in deciding what happens to the product of workers’ collective labor — the lack Marxists call “exploitation” — generates an utterly indefensible level of economic inequality.
But there’s no reason that democracy at the workplace, and marketless planning of those public goods where markets generate the most socially undesirable consequences, can’t coexist with the use of market mechanisms to solve the information problems that plagued even Gorbachev-era Soviet planners. In the model outlined in our book, full democratic socialism would entail not only domains like health care and education but banks and other commanding heights of the economy would be state-owned. The remaining quasi-private sector would be made up of competing worker-owned cooperatives that would essentially rent the physically means of production from the public as a whole through grants from state-owned banks. When all this is combined with a robust civil society, a free press, and real multiparty elections, it is possible that such a setup could give us a world fundamentally different from both what existed in the Soviet Union and the neoliberal order that’s become globally hegemonic since the USSR’s collapse.
Wrzesniewski expresses some discomfort with Gorbachev’s behavior in the decades after he lost power and accommodated himself a bit too comfortably to what came next. (Most notoriously, he starred in a Pizza Hut commercial.) But he offers a qualified defense. What came after Gorbachev left the stage — “the ‘shock therapy’ transition to capitalism, the plunder of national wealth by well-connected gangsters, the fatal solutions peddled by Western advisors, and the social, economic, and political catastrophe which still bedevils the post-Soviet state” — was neither “his intention nor his doing.” He tried to steer a different course.
Gorbachev himself doubtless made a multitude of errors as he set out on that course, and it’s impossible to know whether another man could have achieved a different result. But the more basic problem may have been that, as Rosa Luxemburg foresaw decades before Mikhail Gorbachev was born, a socialist democracy couldn’t emerge from any allegedly “temporary” or “transitional” dictatorship. If we want to achieve the kind of society where Pizza Hut is not just nationalized but placed under workers’ control, the road there is going to have to be a democratic one in which an organized and politically engaged working class is operating in its own interests. Most likely, this would mean first fighting for social democratic reforms and then fighting to go beyond social democracy’s limits. There are many ways to start on that road and never get to your destination — because your enemies have defeated you, or because of your own errors, or simply because you’ve lost popular support. But it’s the only one that leads where we want to go.

0:37 Intro. [Recording date: August 11, 2022.] Russ Roberts: Today is August 11th, 2022, and my guest is philosopher Will MacAskill of Oxford University. He was first here on EconTalk in 2015, talking about effective altruism and his book Doing Good Better. His latest book and our topic for today is, What We Owe the Future. Will, welcome back to EconTalk. William MacAskill: It's great to be back.

1:00 Russ Roberts: Your book opens with a rather fascinating thought experiment that you took from Georgia Ray's "The funnel of human experience," and it goes--I'm going to read this--the opening of your book goes like this: Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived. Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that second person dies, you are reincarnated as the third person, then the fourth, and so on. One hundred billion lives later, you become the youngest person alive today. Your "life" consists of all these lifetimes, lived consecutively....

Your life lasts for almost four trillion years in total. [Russ: "Aside, meaning there have been about four trillion years of human life on earth up till now."] For a tenth of that time, you're a hunter gatherer, and for 60 percent you're an agriculturalist. You spend a full 20 percent of your life raising children, a further 20 percent farming, and almost 2 percent taking part in religious rituals. For over 1 percent of your life you are afflicted with malaria or smallpox. You spend 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth. You drink forty-four trillion cups of coffee....

You experience, firsthand, just how unusual the modern era is. Because of dramatic population growth, a full third of your life comes after AD 1200 and a quarter after 1750. At that point, technology and society begin to change far faster than ever before. You invent steam engines, factories, and electricity. You live through revolutions in science, the most deadly wars in history, and dramatic environmental destruction. Each life lasts longer, and you enjoy luxuries you could not sample even in your past lives as kings and queens. You spend 150 years in space and one week walking on the moon. Fifteen percent of your experience is of people alive today.

That's your life so far, from the birth of Homo Sapiens until the present. But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammalian species (one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you....

If you knew you were going to live all these future lives, what would you hope we do in the present? How much carbon monoxide would you want us to emit into the atmosphere? How much would you want us to invest in research and education? How careful would you want us to be with new technologies that could destroy or permanently derail your future? How much attention would you want us to give to the impact of today's actions on the long term?

I present this thought experiment because morality, in central part, is about putting ourselves in others' shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future--where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies--comes to the fore.

This book is about longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time. Do you want to add anything? William MacAskill: No; thank you for the reading. It was lovely to be able to hear that. And, yeah, I mean, I think that can get us into the core issues, which, a little later on in the book, I state as just the idea is that future people count morally, there could be a lot of them, and we can really make a difference to their lives.

4:45 Russ Roberts: My first question is: Helping people today does help people tomorrow in many ways. So, in many ways we already take account of the people who will come after us. William MacAskill: Yeah, that's absolutely true. So, when we innovate or build better institutions or have a better, more moral culture, all of those things do benefit future people, too. It would be surprising though if that was the best way of helping people, the things that we all then[?] do. In particular, because there's things that negatively impact the future, as well. So, most famously now, marginal CO 2 emissions. But, I also think certain other forms of technology. So, advances in biotechnology, I think pose great risks for the present and for the future. And so, I think we should be attending to what we do today. What are the things that are really helpful, not just for the present but also for the future? What are the things that are actually most worrying when we take a longer-term perspective? Russ Roberts: Well, I think the hard question--I think most people would agree that people in the future matter. The question is: How much? And, you're arguing, I think, that we don't take account enough of the future because there'll be so many people--unless there's a catastrophe--there'll be so many people and they will live for, presumably, a very long time. So, I think you're arguing that morally, they count for more than we count because they're more numerous. So, a sacrifice on our part that leads to a benefit in the future should be morally demanded of us because so many more people will benefit than are harmed today. You're very much utilitarian, I think, in this book. Am I right? William MacAskill: Yeah. I'll clarify my view a little bit. Where that's close to correct, but not fully correct. So, I think people in the future have the same moral worth or moral status as people in the present. I do think there are additional reasons that are not about people being present, but are about relationships we have with people in the present. So, I think I have a different set of moral duties and moral reasons with respect to my mom, than with respect to someone who I've never met on the other side of the world. That being said, I still have a lot of moral reasons with respect to that person on the other side of the world. I can't willfully harm them. If it's easy for me to make their lives much better, I think it's morally important for me to do that. I also think you're completely right, that I think the numbers really matter. So, if I can save one life or save ten lives, it's more morally important to save the ten. And that's, again, because all people count equally, so the interests of ten are just more important than the interests of one. There's a tricky--you then mentioned sacrifice, and here there's just a tricky question of how much does morality require of one? The standard utilitarian answer is that is morality is extraordinarily demanding. If I can sacrifice myself in order to save the life of someone who I think will do a little bit more good than me, or in fact would even be a little bit happier than me--perhaps they just have more wellbeing--then I'm morally required to do that. That's the kind of most extreme view that one can have in terms of moral demandingness. And, it's not a view that I want to defend in this book. Because, at the moment we're, like, so far away from that margin--where, in terms of effort that we spend really trying to think about the long-term impacts of our actions and explicitly trying to positively guide the long term future--how much of world GDP [gross domestic product] is that? I don't know: 0.1%, 0.01% or something? It's very low. And so, on the current margins, if we get to 1%, I would be over the moon. And, that is a kind of far cry from having to answer the question of: Okay, if we did have to sacrifice 99% of the world's resources, would that be the right thing to do? Would we be required to do it? Russ Roberts: So, you're saying if we had to sacrifice 1% to achieve something good for the future, that's a relatively easy case to make in your view--because of the magnitudes involved? William MacAskill: Exactly. And, I think you don't need to have anything nearly as extreme as utilitarianism to justify that view. I think that should be true on a very wide level[?] variety of moral views.

9:51 Russ Roberts: Okay. Let me take the opposing view, which is the following. Those people in the future, they're going to be so much richer than us. They should be sacrificing for us. I mean, we are endowing them with a platform, a base level of wellbeing and intellectual knowledge, that's going to grow over time. So, 100,000 years from now, those folks are going to live such extraordinary financial lives. We can debate what kind of levels of real happiness they might have, and we'll get to that later--you deal with that in the book--but they're going to be wildly more materially better off than us at current trends, unless we mess up, unless somebody messes up in the next 100,000 years. So, why should we sacrifice anything for them? William MacAskill: Terrific. Excellent question, and I think there's two answers. So, the first is that, unlike the kind of assumption that's normally not argued for in economics, I don't think we should be certain that people in the future will be much better than us. To take the year 2300, I would say it's like 80% that are better enough than us, and maybe a lot better off--you know, given kind of compound technological progress. However, 20% chance that actually perhaps they're worse than us. I don't think that's crazy at all. I think there could be widespread catastrophe from the result of new technology, all-out nuclear war, worst case pandemics and engineered bio-weapons, or even just, like, stagnation and then decay of society, like kind of global fall of the Roman Empire. All of those things are just on my mind. The second thing is that this argument, that future people will be richer than those today, that only applies to what economists call marginal harms. So, if I'm making myself a little poorer in order to make someone in the future a little bit better off--and again, I completely agree that if that's what's going on, then yeah, that financial benefit in the future matters much less. But, now we take something different, like: Is that person in the future enslaved? It really doesn't matter where--how rich they were beforehand in this thought experiment. If they're now enslaved, that's not like a marginal harm, a marginal financial harm. It's something quite different. Or, if the person dies altogether. Or, something that raises more philosophical issues is if they never come into existence in the first place. But, in general, I am not looking at these, like, marginal differences in how well-off we are today versus in the future. Instead, I'm looking at either just, like, catastrophic events that would make the world much worse or much poorer, or changes to values where perhaps they have much greater resources than we do, but they're using them for bad ends. They're using them to purchase slaves or inflict enormous amounts of suffering. And, those things, I think the idea they'll be better off is either not true or isn't applicable. Russ Roberts: Well, if a nuclear destruction or pandemic spread by bio-weapon release, what's on your mind? I suspect you don't sleep very well at night, Will, but--I'm somewhat, a little worried about you. But, I understand what you're saying, especially having read your book. You're focused on preserving the opportunity for these billions of people in the future to flourish. William MacAskill: Absolutely. Russ Roberts: And, you want to make sure, and in not just that they will come into existence--meaning not just that we'll avoid a nuclear disaster or a global pandemic that's of unimaginably worse consequences--well, they're imaginably worse, sorry--with dramatically worse consequences than, say, COVID. And, you're also worried about the fact that again, to take an example, it's not exactly in your book, but it could have been, that an authoritarian leader would take charge of the world, inflict enormous pain on the billions of people that will come in the future. And, those are the kind of things that we ought to be focused on, but that preventing that and encouraging the survival of the race, human species going into the future to enjoy all these benefits. William MacAskill: Exactly.

14:37 Russ Roberts: Now, one argument that comes to mind is that, you know, we're doing pretty well without longtermism. That is, the focus that you want to bring to the moral calculus--to take more account of these future folks--you could argue we're doing pretty well, right? Nobody's been focused on these issues. You're trying to bring that focus; but hey, here we are 250 years or so into the Industrial Revolution; lifespans continue to rise. We've had some blips lately, but lifespans are rising, standard of living dramatically--dramatically--higher for enormous numbers of people. And, one could argue that the kind of focus that you want to have us have, of more concentration on steering the future wisely, is actually either hard to do or ill-advised. Because we don't know how to do it. What's the case for why we should care about this? Isn't it kind of going okay? William MacAskill: Yeah. So, my first thing I'll say is, like, I'm sympathetic to thinking at least as a baseline, what are the things that we've been doing in the past that have just, like, worked really well, including in unanticipated ways. And, we don't have, like, maybe a great story with detail about how that will transfer into the future, but let's just keep doing this kind of more of a good thing. I'm certainly sympathetic to that as a baseline; and I do think that supports kind of, you know, making institutions better and more trusting and open-minded and liberal culture, and of course, innovation as well. However, this argument, like, 'Hey, we've been doing well, things have been getting better,'--it does seem a little brittle to me. So, here's a question. What was the probability that the United States and USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] would have an all-out nuclear exchange? And, if I had to guess, it'd be something like one in three. Could have been higher. And now, let's go to that world where there was one. Would we be having a conversation which is like, 'Well, we're doing pretty well. Things have been[?] getting better. We've been, like, sure, we've been growing a lot. We've been having a lot of technologies that give us greater power. But it's generally been fine.' I think we probably wouldn't be having that conversation. And so, I would like us to be in a world where that risk of all-out nuclear war was not one in three: instead it was more like 1%, or 0.1%, or basically as low as we could get it. And, that's precisely because I think, in insignificant part, we have been doing, what I would say is surprisingly well, I mean, if you just look at what is human history like--and it's a dark place. People in the late[?] past had miserable lives. They lived--the majority of people were in some form of forced labor is my best guess. The world was extremely patriarchal. It was an enormous amount of suffering and ill health. So, I guess I kind of agree that, like, there's a certain set of culture and institutions combined with innovation that's, like, going pretty well. And, there are just meaningful risks of that not going well. And, we've seen the first warning signs in the 20th century on both the value side and the technological side. Technological side, we saw nuclear weapons. On the value side, we saw totalitarian regimes, even a rising out of democracies. And, I think it would be very unlikely that the Nazis won World War Two, given how history actually was. But, it's not a crazy--you know, it's not crazy to imagine a bigger role of history such that actually it was Nazi fascist values that took over. That they were successful in establishing a 1,000-year regime. And, again, if it were you and I looking at that world, I don't think we would be saying, like, 'Oh, well, things are going well. So, I just want to reduce those risks down.' Russ Roberts: Well, they weren't going well really in 1945, for sure. We don't have to have the Nazis win or nuclear war. We had--between Fascism and Nazism, I don't know, 100 million people died short before their time.

19:12 Russ Roberts: Now, that raises a different challenge to your claims, which is: you want to push the importance of morality and putting it front and center. The problem is which morality? Certainly the fascist and the communist thought they were doing something that was good. They enlisted the support of millions. They still have the support of millions. There are many, many people who still think Stalin was a good guy. Not so many for Hitler, but there are a few. And, it's hard to know what's right. And, I don't know if philosophy--you argue that we've bent toward a more moral world over the last few hundred years, 500 years. There's a lot of evidence for that, I agree, but there's some evidence that we're--maybe not. William MacAskill: Okay. So, the key distinction here, I think, is between fairly narrow totalizing moral views. And, basically I agree with you that moral ideology can be a very scary thing. The Nazis or Stalinists have some very particular vision of the future and wants to implement it and were willing to justify atrocities in the name of it. And, that's something that should really scare us. Here's a different perspective, though. This is a perspective of saying: We don't know what's morally right. We're probably still very far away from the kind of morally best view. If there even is such a thing as a morally best view. Such that more enlightened future people would think of us as maybe a little better than the Romans, but not enormously better. And so, what we want to do is build a society that can have a great diversity of moral views and a kind of culture and institutional setup such that those views can debate and reason and experiment. And, we can learn over time which the right moral view is. And so, the kind of best ideas went out on their merits rather than via conquest, for example. Russ Roberts: Well, I really like that. Although, as we know, things don't always win out on their merits or which merits are chosen. But, I think that there is a decentralized aspect of the book, for a few pages anyway, where you worry about the lack of diversity. A very thoughtful point you make that the worldwide response to COVID [coronavirus disease] was quite uniform. There were variations at how much people were locked down, how much authoritarianism was imposed, but there wasn't a lot of experimentation. Most of the countries of the world did something very similar; and we lost an opportunity to learn a lot. And, I think that observation is very important. William MacAskill: Absolutely. So, there's a theme in the book that I don't really make explicit but here it is, which is: attention, where some of the major risks of catastrophe are kind of failures of global coordination. So, the risk of a nuclear war, or development of technology that could destroy us, or carbon emissions as well--where the push there is towards greater centralization of the world. However, what I want to say is there are risks on that end, too, where greater centralization could mean we stall moral progress. In the worst case, the simplest case, you've got a world government; it's a dictatorship; there's another ideology that's locked in forever. But, even if we just have this gradual homogenization and people stop really trying to make moral progress, because people think like, 'Oh, we've gotten to the pinnacle,' in the way that maybe the Romans actually thought they were the pinnacle of civilization, I think that could potentially be a catastrophe, too. And so, when we're thinking about what sort of institutions do we want, we want to kind of thread this needle where you can have diversity of moral views, experiments, best ideas winning out, while at the same time kind of mitigating the worst risks. And I think we've seen some evidence. I mean, it's interesting. You know, I think of the U.S. Constitution as this bold and, like, by historical terms, a remarkably successful attempt to thread that needle. Obviously, I'm not claiming it's perfect, but shows that you can have both of these things at once. Though, it is notable that the forces, I think, push towards centralization because the United States--okay, well it could have been this kind of laboratory of democracy in all of these different states pursuing very different things, and maybe they have--each state kind of has--large state governments, and at the Federal level it's kind of more minimal. Historically that's just not what happened, of course: there was, like, consolidation. And, there's strong evolutionary reasons for that, because the United States is in competition with other nations. It'll be more powerful. And, again, I'm not making any comment on right[?], is this overall good or bad? But, it's something that we should notice as like a general trend. And, though it's less salient as a catastrophe that would wipe out 99% of people, the catastrophe that would result as then a failure to make moral progress over the long term, I think is just as real and something we should be talking about just as much. Russ Roberts: And, it's an interesting side note as to how much the rise of the Federal government, which I really think dates, actually fairly recently in U.S. history to the 1930s. But, that that phenomenon is in some sense an irresistible force in a world of competition. Certainly Europe has moved toward a more centralized situation, or tried to. Now, we also have to talk about the fact that it's not designed. It's not like people sitting around saying, 'Hey, it would be good if we were bigger.' Some of it is a grab for power, especially a grab for power without accountability, which I think is the reason the EU [European Union] has not gotten much, much stronger and more powerful than it otherwise is. And similarly, the United States: there is some pushback on that consolidation for reasons of fear of the kind of things you're talking about.

25:52 Russ Roberts: Let me read another--a short excerpt from the book. William MacAskill: Sure. Russ Roberts: You say, Future people count, but we rarely count them. They cannot vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can't bargain or trade with us, so they have little representation in the market. And they can't make their views heard directly: they can't tweet, or write articles in newspapers, or march in the streets. They are utterly disenfranchised. Now, I think that's not true. There's a sense of which it's kind of true literally, but it's not true in the effective sense because of the way people come into the world. And, I felt you neglected this aspect of the human experience. Which is to say: those future people you're talking about are our children, our grandchildren, or they're somebody's children, grandchildren, great-great grandchildren; and they're not disenfranchised. We care about them quite a bit. Now, it's true I care more about my child than my grandchild if my grandchild is not born, but the potential for my grandchild to be born, which I have in mind, is not ignored. I don't ignore it. Now you could argue, yeah, but 20 generations, so now is so distant, I don't think about it. But, the fundamental principle that the future is born out of the present through the family, seems to me to take care of some of the things you're worried about. William MacAskill: I agree that it takes care of some of the things. If we imagine a world where people didn't care about their children or their grandchildren at all, I agree we would be in an even worse place. However, you are right that this drops off pretty quickly. And, I mentioned earlier, lifetime of typical mammal species, about a million years, that would mean 700,000 years to go. Okay, let's take someone-- Russ Roberts: I just cheered. For those of us not watching the video, I just gave a silent cheer that Will reacted to. We have 700,000 more years--few, or worse. We've already used up 300,000 of our million. It's only 700,000 left. Could go the other way. William MacAskill: Yeah. I mean, we also--I think we could last much longer than a million years. Earth will be habitable for hundreds of millions, and I don't think the sort of natural catastrophes that typically kill off species necessarily needs to kill off humans. But yeah, so, people cared about the kids and their grandkids and that's an important force for some amount of concern for future generations. I don't think it nearly matches the scale of concern that would be morally appropriate given that the vast majority of people are not even people's great-great grandkids, but kind of live past that point. And, even secondly, my point about them being disenfranchised is that: if we take action for future generations, it's via the views and values of people who do participate in markets, who can vote. So, an analogy could be with non-human animals. Now, you might say--I might say--'I'm really concerned because there's a lot of non-human animals. I don't think people take them seriously enough.' And, you might say, 'Well, people care about nonhuman animals. They care about their pets.' And so on. And like, yeah, it's food, but they are also disenfranchised. Let's just look empirically at what happens to animals, then. Well, pets get treated pretty well: The 80 billion animals that are kept almost all in horrific conditions and then slaughtered, they have really terrible lives. And, I think there's an analogy between that and future people where, for sure, we have some amount of concern about animals; not nearly as much as we should have. And that means that we inflict enormous and unnecessarily suffering on them. And, I think the same thing kind of happens to the future where there is a certain amount of concern, but not nearly as much as I think there ought to be. Russ Roberts: Well, the animals' suffering is a really interesting issue. You're a vegetarian--you talk about that in the book. I'm not, but I think it's a serious moral question. And, I think a person who pretends to be moral, as I do, has to confront this. I like to think of myself as a moral person, so what the heck--what am I doing eating meat? And, I could say, 'Well, I don't eat it that often.' But that's not a very good--'Yeah, I at least only torture or torment animals a little bit.' I think, like slavery--an issue we'll come to in a minute, which you talk about quite eloquently in the book--I think most people who held slaves--many--found ways to convince themselves that it wasn't such a bad thing. And, I think many of us who eat meat have found ways to convince ourselves. And, we might be very wrong about that, just as those people, I think, who felt morally comfortable with slavery were wrong, certainly with the benefit of hindsight. So, I think that you make a good point: that, it could be that my concern for future generations is something that came to my concern for animals, that I have a story to tell, will probably be okay, they're going to be richer than me and I could therefore--maybe I'm just fooling myself and finding ways to do what I want to do rather than what is correct. That's very possible. William MacAskill: Yeah. Well, perhaps you'll have concluded one way or the other by the end of this conversation. Russ Roberts: Yeah. Well, I already read your book, Will, and you haven't won me over yet; but it could be this marginal hour could be that what puts me over the edge, for sure.

31:48 Russ Roberts: I'm going to ask you a tougher question, maybe. Maybe it's an easy one. William MacAskill: Sure. Russ Roberts: Let's say I don't have any kids. I actually have four and just had my first grandchild. So, I'm more focused on the future I think, than I was a month ago. William MacAskill: Okay. Congratulations. Russ Roberts: Thanks. But, let's pretend I don't have any kids or I'm not a very particularly emotionally connected parent or grandparent and certainly 10 generations from now just doesn't have any salience for me. And, let's suppose we believe that, say, climate change is going to have a catastrophic impact on humanity. I'm a little more agnostic on that and--well, not agnostic, I'm a little bit skeptical of that, of the catastrophic part. I'm open to the possibility that it could be bad, but the catastrophic part I think is a low probability; but you could say, 'Well, but still such a bad downside, you should be very focused on it.' Okay. Well let's say I'm not a particularly nice person and I ate a ton of meat because I don't care about animals and I fly everywhere because I'm not worried about carbon dioxide emissions. And, you're telling me I should worry about somebody 700,000 years from now? Why? Why should I care? Let's say they're never going to come into existence. That's a deep philosophical question, which you look at in some length in the book. But let's say they come into existence and their life's worse than mine, because there's a lot of plagues and there's bad moral views and institutions have degraded and there's been a loss of civilization. So, what? Why should I care about their happiness? I got my own. Why should I care about theirs? What's the argument there. They're not my kids. Because I don't care about kids or don't have any. Why should I care about them? Why isn't my happiness paramount? I think that's a repugnant view-- William MacAskill: So, I think it's first-- Russ Roberts: First, I should just say: I think it's a repugnant view, but I'd like to hear why you think it's repugnant. William MacAskill: Great. So, I think that, I mean there's one view you could have where you just reject any sort of moral reasons at all. You're just a pure egoist. Put that to the side and we can come back to it if you want. But there's a second view which is that: Yeah, I think of moral reasons to people who are in the same generation as me, that perhaps I interact with, but not with people in the future. And, I just think that's a very morally unintuitive view. So, imagine--I give this story in the book of I'm hiking along a trail. I brought some glass, the glass shatters. Should I clean up that [?] glass after myself? And, I think the answer is yes. And, why? Well, someone might come along and cut themselves on it. And, supposing we know that that will happen, does it really matter whether that person cuts themself tomorrow or in a year's time or a decade? or even if it was 100 years or 1,000 years? And, I think intuitively: no. As long as you're certain that that's going to happen, then harm is harm, just whenever it occurs. And, I think we can explain that on more theoretical grounds as well, where morality in part is about impartial. It's about taking seriously the interests of anyone who you're going to affect, especially when it comes to potentially harming them. And, does mere location and time matter? That seems like a pretty weird thing. Russ Roberts: Well, I agree with that 100%, but why should I care about today? So, I break the glass and it's a nuisance to pick it up. I'm in a hurry. Why should I care about those other people? Why do I have an obligation to them? William MacAskill: Okay. So, I mean, here are the fundamental questions-- Russ Roberts: By the way, one answer would be: Because I'm going to feel bad. I'm going to feel guilty. But I'm taking a case, a repugnant case, where I don't feel bad. In fact, I think I'm a sucker if I stop and pick it up. I'm going to just go on and do my thing. William MacAskill: Yup. Great. So, this is one of the deepest questions in philosophy, which is: Why ought I to be moral? And, I think ultimately there's no non-circular answer. Why should you pick it up? Because you have reasons towards other people. And, I should note that there's an equal argument for: Why should I care about myself? What reasons do I have acting in my own interest rather than acting in the interests of others? Supposing I take that position and this, like, anti-amoralist or something. What reasons could you give me for saying, 'Oh no, you should really care about yourself"? I don't think there would be any non-circular reasons. You would have to appeal to things like, 'Well, going to the movies will make you happy.' And, then I could always ask, 'Well, why should I care about being happy?' Or, 'It will give you a feeling of accomplishment to achieve this task,' and I could say, 'Well, why should I care about that?' Ultimately, if you ask this, like, 'Why should I care?' you'll always just at some point have to point to the reasons. So, in why should I go to the movies? And, you could say, well, because I'd be happy. And, I think that's a good reason. And, if it's, why should I not cut someone else? And, you would say, because they will suffer. And, I think that's the kind of bedrock reason. And, if I ask, well, why should I care about suffering? There's no further reason that one can give. Russ Roberts: Well, there is if you believe in God. I mean through most of human history, at least civilized human history, since the advent of monotheism at least, there was a feeling that you had an obligation to the Creator of some kind--different religions feel, look at obligation differently. But, I think without that, it's really hard to argue for why you should care about other people. And, I'm not saying it isn't--we've found ways to sustain--well, I wouldn't say that. It's not clear whether--and let me ask--well, go ahead. Sorry. So, I'll let you react to that. William MacAskill: Well, I just wanted to briefly say, I think God doesn't save us from this problem. Russ Roberts: Why? William MacAskill: Because you could ask the same thing. So, it's okay. Why should I pick up the glass? And, you say, 'Well, ultimately, because God wants you to.' And, I say, 'Well, why should I care about what God wants me to do?' Or 'Why should I care about what God says is right or wrong?' Or if it's like, 'Oh, I'll go to hell.' And, it's like: 'Well, that's back to the kind of self-interest question, why should I care about my own suffering?' So, again, at some point you are just throwing a line or the theist is just giving one additional kind of level of explanation. But, the why question can be applied to that, too. Russ Roberts: That's a great counter-argument.

38:39 Russ Roberts: So, let me try to pile on against my own position. You're saying that a person who embraces, say, the categorical imperative as a rule to live by--Kant's, how would you call it? Not advice. Kant's--what's the word I want? [inaudible 00:39:02]His prescription[?] that you should live and choose according to an imagining that this was a universal rule, that everyone would act this way. And, then you look at how that world would play out and say, 'Well, if it played out really'--my favorite example of this is you sample the grape at the grocery store when they don't want you to sample the grape. And, you say, 'Well, it's only one grape. But of course, if everyone did that, grapes are going to get more expensive; and it could be they want you to sample it, and so on. But, embracing Kant is no different than embracing the God of the Old or New Testament or of the Quran. It's just a belief that you've decided to take on for yourself that has no--you can't justify it. William MacAskill: Yeah. I mean, at some point you hit bedrock. And, this is true for not just moral beliefs, but other sorts of beliefs as well, where, let's say you are skeptical of climate change altogether--you know, is it even warming? And, I'm like, 'Oh yeah, of course, see these papers.' And, you're like, 'Why should I believe the papers?' And, I'm like, 'Okay, because of science and these experiments.' 'Why should I believe that? And, I'm like--maybe it goes all the way till I'm doing experiments in front of you. And, I'm like, 'Why should this experiment be [inaudible 00:40:24]-- Russ Roberts: Just a magic trick. William MacAskill: Yeah. Or it's, at some point I'm giving you reasons and if you're not accepting them as reasons, there's nothing more I can do. Or take an even simpler example. I'm like, 'Two plus two equals four.' And, you're like, 'Why should I believe that?' I'm like, 'Well, one plus one equals two. So, two plus two equals one plus one plus one plus one; and one plus one plus one plus one, it equals four.' And, you're like, maybe you're like, 'Oh, I got the first two, but just don't buy the second bit.' I'm like--what can I say in response to that? And, I think it's nothing. I've given you a reason that's a genuine reason for you to change your beliefs. If you're not willing to accept it, there's no way I can get you out of that what-we-might-call a kind of epistemic black hole. Russ Roberts: I do think, though, that religion as a social construct--not as an intellectual experience along the lines we're talking about--but as a social, cultural phenomenon has the potential to restrain some types of behavior while encouraging others. It could also be negatives that we have not shown for sure that intellectually pleasant writing, say, by Kant and Hegel can substitute for. William MacAskill: Is it sufficient-- Russ Roberts: Hard to know. William MacAskill: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this will surprise you but I completely agree, actually. I mean, I think of religion, it's like a technology or like a social innovation where, in particular, the thing that appeared was many different religious traditions, what's called Big Gods. These are Gods who are watching you while you're alone, while no one else is around-- Russ Roberts: It's a big breakthrough-- William MacAskill: and they care morally what you do. So, no one else is around. You could steal that bit of food. You could steal that money. No one would catch you. God could, though. God is watching you. Now, that's great as an innovation. If everyone believes that, then you get a lot less free riding. You get a lot less cheating. And, you are basically right. Like, how long have we had in a kind of post-religious era? I mean, we're not even there yet, really. The world is 16% atheists or agnostic. And, honestly, I just do worry about it. Perhaps you just do get free riding coming back. I guess at the moment, not: people are still morally motivated, maybe about [inaudible 00:42:45], something we should worry about[?]. Russ Roberts: It's fascinating. Fascinating question.

42:47 Russ Roberts: I'm going to ask a different version of it now. You have a thought-experiment where all but, say, 80 million people are destroyed in a nuclear war or a plague. So, we have a core group of survivors. And, you raised a fascinating question about how much technology would we be able to recover. Why don't you talk about that for a little bit; then I'll give you my variation on that and see what you think. William MacAskill: Oh, sure. So, I wrote this chapter because--what are the things that could impact, not just the present but the long term? Well, there's this enormously important question of, like: How fragile is civilization? If there was some catastrophe that really knocked us off course, killed maybe let's say 99% of the world's population, would we recover? So, it's obviously something we should just 100% try and prevent anyway, just because of the sheer loss of life it involves. But, would that also just prevent civilization from ever returning in the long run? And, I think probably no, actually. I think humanity is kind of remarkably resilient. And, there's a few reasons why I think this. One is just if you look at enormous but still smaller-scale catastrophes, like the Black Death in Europe, or even the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all those sorts of catastrophes, you see people having remarkable resilience in the face of that catastrophe. There's enormous amounts of suffering, but people respond, they build things, they restore society. And, then a second reason for thinking that we would bounce back is just how much knowledge would be preserved. So, there are tens of thousands of libraries in locations that wouldn't be threatened by nuclear war; which are sufficiently dry, that the paper would actually survive for a very long time. There's also just evidence of the tools that we've made. So, even if we go back all the way to the industrial technology, it's much easier to invent something if you've got this prototype of this thing, because the people will know, 'Oh, there used to be this more advanced technology, and now I've got this thing: it looks like a tractor. Like, what's going on there?' You've at least got the idea for it. And then the final thing is, if you just look at what resources--are there any particular resources that could be bottlenecks, that just simply prevent civilization from coming back to this state? I haven't found one, yet. There could be, but they[?] have been used up, so we wouldn't have access to them. I haven't found one yet, and so I think that's unlikely to be the bottleneck. Russ Roberts: The only thing I would add to that as an economist is something I've thought about a great deal, which is: How many people do you need to have a successful division of labor if they trade among themselves? And, the example I use: You put a hundred people on a desert island--not a desert island--you put a hundred people on an island that has really rich resources. All the minerals you might possibly want, really fertile soil. And, you get to pick who the 100 people are. You can pick the smartest, most talented; you can pick diverse people in terms of their skills and insights, their knowledge that they would bring that you're talking about of, say, technology and implementation. A hundred people are going to be really poor. I don't care how smart they are. I don't care how rich the island is in titanium. You just don't have enough opportunity to exploit the Smithian gains from the division of labor. And, one of the miracles I think of modern times that we don't appreciate is that trade allows seven, now eight billion people to specialize and do lots of different things they couldn't do if we were smaller. Interesting question, whether 80 million--how much time would we have to devote to just staying alive and keeping a subsistence level of wellbeing if all we could do is trade among ourselves, just those 80 million? How many people we need to devote to certain tasks, farming being one. At a non-current level of technology, we'd have a much lower level to start with. In the 1900, 40% of Americans were farmers. So, if that were true, in this post-apocalypse view, you've got 32 million of your 80 million people just doing farming. And now you're down to 48 million. And, how many of them could be making software for your smartphone? I mean, you'd be a long way from--it would take a long, long time, I think, to get back to anything like a modern standard of living. William MacAskill: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I was talking about when, kind of not how long and-- Russ Roberts: Whether. Yeah-- William MacAskill: In fact--sorry--whether. Yeah. Sorry. Whether, not how long. And it's absolutely--if the situation, if it's 80 million people left on earth, would be considerably worse in a situation where there's 80 million people, all in one location and this kind-of preserved civilization--in fact it could be spread out around the world. Like, in principle, I think you could have a self, I think, you know: if the United States were aware that all of the rest of the world was going to just disappear in 20 years' time and had to reconfigure its economy, I think it could probably do that with 350 million people without a massive drop in wellbeing. That's on future level of technology, future level of specialization. Perhaps that's not needed. Perhaps that's not true. With 80 million people, maybe I start to become a little more unsure, but certainly then with 80 million people around the world. I mean, yeah, I would just absolutely predict that living standards would drop enormously. I was even kind of assuming we'd lose out on industrial-level technology. I think that's probably not true, but we'd lose out on a lot. And it would be a miserable period of human history [inaudible 00:49:01].

49:03 Russ Roberts: So, your thought-experiment prompted me to think of my own. It's a variant of what we just talked about a minute ago. Your focus in the book is on technological knowledge, engineering knowledge, and the ability to innovate. I was thinking: What if the 80 million who survived had no religion and no knowledge of religion? So, they didn't have that technological thing you talked about of that someone is watching. Would it matter if we lost, say, the Bible, the Quran? And then I thought, how about The Iliad and The Odyssey? How about Plato and Aristotle? What if all we had left was--we'd lost literature, we'd lost philosophy, but we'd kept the technological knowledge that you're talking about. We have all the toys and all the knowledge to make the toys and to continue to make better toys--which is what human beings do. Would it make a difference or so is all this humanity stuff just--I don't know. I don't know, what would you call it? William MacAskill: Well, yeah, I actually think that this is enormously important and maybe even the most important in the longer term aspect of civilizational collapse. So, again, emphasizing that we want to prevent this, merely the facts of so many deaths in the near term is more than sufficient. But, I think, like, if the world came back, how would it be in terms of its values, in terms of its institutions compared to the world today? And over time, I've come to the view that again, in particular, this kind of egalitarian, liberal, democratic worldview and set of cultures and institutions that is prevalent today, we're at least somewhat lucky in that. I think there are certain forces that mean that this makes more sense given the current level of technological development, technological change than in the past. But, if you tell me that, kind of, there's a catastrophe, the world comes back, we get to this level of technological development, but slave-owning is very widely widespread, or the large majority of countries in the world are authoritarian rather then democratic, I'm not the least surprised--as in, I'm not like, 'Oh, that's an impossible fact.' And, I think that could make the world considerably worse, basically indefinitely into the future. Russ Roberts: You talk about contingency, what would've happened eventually. It's a very fascinating question you raise: you asked a question I think is quite profound. Slavery ended in England in 1807, I think, it was outlawed in England. William MacAskill: So, slave trading was outlawed in most of the British Empire in 1807. Owning a slave was outlawed in 1833. Russ Roberts: So, that was an amazing thing, which we sort of take for granted because of course slavery is horrible. And, then the Civil War comes along in the United States and the North happens to win. Didn't have to turn out that way. It could have lost, or they could have sued for peace and kept the South as a slave-owning alternative. Some people have argued the economics would've ended slavery eventually, but you make the case, I think quite provocatively, that that's not necessarily true and slavery could have persisted. And, therefore we should be very thoughtful about those kinds of social changes and the evolution of morality. So, talk about Benjamin Lay, a person who deserves to be--I'd never heard of him--talk about Benjamin Lay and this whole question of moral values, because I think the way I phrased it about the loss of the humanities--in other words, if we lost our whole knowledge of how the world had evolved up till now and our knowledge of history and the so-called lessons of history and philosophy, would we recreate it? And the answers you're suggesting: Probably not. So, this whole idea that things are not destined necessarily, and there's some individuals who push the path in a certain direction is very thought-provoking. William MacAskill: Yeah. And, in particular I think some things are destined and other things aren't. So, if I'm trying to build some new technology, I'm like, 'Hey, I'm making the world better.' And that's kind of true in the short term; but in the long term, I think the intense incentives across many different kind of cultures and moral views you could have for technological innovation means that I think by and large we'll get there eventually. With a case of moral changes, though, I think that's much less obvious; and at least in many cases, things could go either way. So, there have been many, many moral change-makers in the world. I just kind of highlight this one particularly notable example because the story is so wonderful. So, yeah, Benjamin Lay is a Quaker. He's a dwarf. He refers himself as 'Little Benjamin who beat Goliath,' like David who beat Goliath. And, he is among the earliest people to really push--that we have records of--to be really pushing for the end of slavery in a way that looks to us now kind of like a social campaign. And, he was born towards the end of 17th century, and most of his kind of actions were in the early 18th century. And, he just harangued the Philadelphia Quakers in particular, at kind of every opportunity about slave-owning, where he would engage in this kind of amazing guerrilla theater. So, he would kind of heckle the people who stood up to speak. They would be giving this moral sermon and then he'd be like, 'Oh, there's another Negro master.' And, he would get kicked out of the church; and he would just lie face down in the mud. So, that after, when everyone had to leave, they had to step over his body. Or, he would just stand in the snow in bare feet. And, when people were like, 'What are you doing?' he would point out the slaves had to be in the cold, just as he did, all winter long. In his most famous stunt he brought a Bible that was filled with fake blood to the 1738 meeting of the Quakers, and said it was as great a sin to keep enslaved people as to stab the Bible. And so, he stabs the Bible, and fake blood spatters all over the audience. And so, it's not exactly clear, like, his direct causal influence, although he was certainly influential on people like John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, who were then enormously influential, and that's kind of better-documented. And, his kind of era coincided with the Quakers' dramatically reducing the extent of their slave owning. And so, I kind of use him as a vivid story of--I mean, I call it a moral weirdo, but kind of moral agitator. So, someone who really had this moral view, that in retrospect we think was completely correct. It was heterodox at the time. He stood up for what he believed in and was willing to make major kind-of sacrifices. So, you know, he boycotted all slave-produced goods. He lived in a cave, so that he was, like, further opposing consumerism. He was vegetarian at the time--ties into our earlier conversation. And, ultimately he was part of this larger campaign that was enormously successful--maybe one of the most successful moral campaigns ever--which was that Quaker thought became the packaged as part of Enlightenment thought convinced the British elites and the British public, the British Empire chose to end slavery and tried to basically bribe or threaten other colonial powers as well to end slavery, too. And, over the course of, I mean, ultimately kind of 300 years, slavery went from utterly widespread--where, like I say, the majority of people in 1700, were in some form of forced labor, to now it being kind of unthinkable where even on a broad understanding of forced labor, that's only 0.5% of the world's population; and every country, it's illegal. And, that's just a remarkable thing. And, prior to learning about this, I would've thought, 'Yeah, this is inevitable. It's either just like the inevitable march of moral progress, or it's just the result of economic changes.' And, I no longer think that's the case. I think it was largely a matter of cultural changes, such that if the world--if you could just leave all history and you told me that we had today's level of technological development, but widespread, forced labor, widespread slavery, I wouldn't be, like, totally shocked.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was a fool who could be baited with a tweet. This past Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Joe Biden upped the ante by asking, in effect: What idiot thing might the former president do if baited with a whole speech? On Saturday night, the world got its answer.For the 2022 election cycle, smart Republicans had a clear and simple plan: Don’t let the election be about Trump. Make it about gas prices, or crime, or the border, or race, or sex education, or anything—anything but Trump. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. He lost control of the House in 2018. He lost the presidency in 2020. He lost both Senate seats in Georgia in 2021. Republicans had good reason to dread the havoc he’d create if he joined the fight in 2022.So they pleaded with Trump to keep out of the 2022 race. A Republican lawmaker in a close contest told CNN on August 19, “I don’t say his name, ever.”Maybe the pleas were always doomed to fail. Show Trump a spotlight, and he’s going to step into it. But Republicans pinned their hopes on the chance that Trump might muster some self-discipline this one time, some regard for the interests and wishes of his partners and allies.[David Frum: The justification for Biden’s speech]One of the purposes of Biden’s Philadelphia attack on Trump’s faction within the Republican Party was surely to goad Trump. It worked.Yesterday, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed a rally supposedly in support of Republican candidates in the state: Mehmet Oz for the Senate; the January 6 apologist Doug Mastriano for governor. This was not Trump’s first 2022 rally speech. He spoke in Arizona in July. But this one was different: so extreme, strident, and ugly—and so obviously provoked by Biden’s speech that this was what led local news: “Donald Trump Blasts Philadelphia, President Biden During Rally for Doug Mastriano, Dr. Oz in Wilkes-Barre.”Yes, you read that right: Campaigning in Pennsylvania, the ex-president denounced the state’s largest city. “I think Philadelphia was a great choice to make this speech of hatred and anger. [Biden’s] speech was hatred and anger,” Trump declared last night. “Last year, the city set an all-time murder record with 560 homicides, and it’s on track to shatter that record again in 2022. Numbers that nobody’s ever seen other than in some other Democrat-run cities.”Trump spoke at length about the FBI search of his house for stolen government documents. He lashed out at the FBI, attacking the bureau and the Department of Justice as “vicious monsters.” He complained about the FBI searching his closets for stolen government documents, inadvertently reminding everyone that the FBI had actually found stolen government documents in his closet—and in his bathroom too. Trump called Biden an “enemy of the state.” He abused his party’s leader in the U.S. Senate as someone who “should be ashamed.” He claimed to have won the popular vote in the state of Pennsylvania, which, in fact, he lost by more than 80,000 votes.The rally format allowed time for only brief remarks by the two candidates actually on the ballot, Oz and Mastriano. Its message was otherwise all Trump, Trump, Trump. A Republican vote is a Trump vote. A Republican vote is a vote to endorse lies about the 2020 presidential election.On and on it went, in a protracted display of narcissistic injury that was exactly the behavior that Biden’s Philadelphia speech had been designed to elicit.[David A. Graham: Trump can’t hide from the Mar-a-Lago photo]Every day since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago has brought new proof that Trump still dominates the Republican Party. He has extracted support even from would-be rivals like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—rituals of submission within a party hierarchy that respects only acts of domination.Republican congressional leaders desperately but hopelessly tried to avert the risk that this next election would become yet another national referendum on Trump’s leadership. Despite Trump’s lying and boasting, politicians who can count to 50 and 218—the respective numbers needed for a majority in the Senate and House—have to reckon with the real-world costs of Trump’s defeats. But Biden understood their man’s psychology too well.Biden came to Philadelphia to deliver a wound to Trump’s boundless yet fragile ego. Trump obliged with a monstrously self-involved meltdown 48 hours later. And now his party has nowhere to hide. Trump has overwritten his name on every Republican line of every ballot in 2022.Biden dangled the bait. Trump took it—and put his whole party on the hook with him. Republican leaders are left with little choice but to pretend to like it.

       The image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. “There's a whole fleet of them,” one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. “It's rotating." The U.S. government has been taking a hard look at unidentified flying objects, under orders from Congress, and a report summarizing what officials know is expected to come out in June 2021. (Department of Defense via AP)   Astronomer plans $1.5M expedition to recover possible alien technology in ocean   Luke Gentile  September 04, 07:00 AM September 04, 07:00 AM  Video Embed An astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is planning a $1.5 million expedition to recover what he believes could be alien technology resting on the ocean floor.  A meteor traveling at over 100,000 mph exploded and fell into the South Pacific eight years ago, and academics like professor Avi Loeb believe it was from another star system, according to a report.  By retrieving the debris of that meteor, Loeb said he hopes to discover its origins, going so far as to suggest it might be alien technology.  POLAND ORDERS GERMANY TO PAY $1.3 TRILLION IN WORLD WAR II REPARATIONS  The object is designated CNEOS 2014-01-08, and it was first detected by satellites in 2014, according to the report.  After receiving data from its detection, Loeb and Amir Siraj, who was at Harvard University at the time studying astrophysics, posited in 2019 that it was not from Earth's solar system.  "It moved very fast, roughly 40 kilometers per second, when it exploded in the lower atmosphere," Loeb said. "And from that, we can infer that it was moving much too fast to be bound to the sun."  The scientists' initial work was rejected due to incomplete data, but in April of this year, NASA released a statement that appeared to confirm the notion that the object was from another solar system.  With this new knowledge in hand, Loeb announced he would launch a privately funded expedition to recover the pieces of the object resting on the ocean floor, according to the report.  "It's just like mowing the lawn," according to Loeb. "We are planning to use a sled with a magnet that will scoop a very thin layer off the top of the muck."  When found, he hopes to study the object's composition.  "There is also the possibility that it will be made of some alloy that nature doesn't put together, and that would imply the object is technological," Loeb said. "If you ask what my wish is, if it's indeed of artificial origin, and there was some component of the object that survived, and if it has any buttons on it, I would love to press them."  The idea of the debris having extraterrestrial origins excites Loeb, but many other astronomers remain skeptical of the notion, the report noted.  They allege there are far more and far simpler "natural" explanations, the report noted, and that the data is incomplete and has been "sanitized."  "I think there's a case to be made that this could be interstellar in origin," Arizona State University planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa said.  "[But I would] add the caveat that none of the work so far on this is in the peer-reviewed literature. ... The science has not really been vetted to the extent that I would like to see it vetted."  Another critic appeared to have little faith in the idea of an expedition.  "If you want to invest in renting a submarine and going down to the bottom of the ocean on ... a wild-goose chase, you can do it," Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science communicator, said. "If you want to take all of your money and dump it into the middle of the ocean, you can do that too."  Loeb is undeterred by the criticism and called his expedition an effort in "interstellar archaeology."  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER  "My point is if a cave dweller were to find a cellphone, the cave dweller would argue the cellphone is a rock of a type that we've never seen before," he said. "And the only way to find out is to press some buttons on this cellphone and realize that it records your voice, it records your image. Then it will be clear that it is not rock."      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (Photo © 2022 - IMDb.)It is somehow fitting that the great cultural confrontation of the moment is between George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien. Within weeks of each other, two of the most expensive television series of all time debuted on competing networks. HBO is broadcasting House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel. Amazon Prime is streaming Rings of Power, a prequel to Lord of the Rings. I’m not here to compare and contrast the two shows. I’ve seen the first few episodes of both, and enjoy them both, but it’s way too early to know what either show will ultimately become. When Game of Thrones debuted on HBO in 2011, its good (but not great) pilot didn’t exactly forecast that the show would eventually become a world-spanning pop culture phenomenon. Instead, I want to talk about the spirit of the two authors, and the ethos of their two worlds, and why America desperately needs to remember Tolkien again. Back in 2017, just before the premiere of season seven of Game of Thrones—when the show was at the apex of its influence and quality—I wrote a cover story for National Review magazine about the reasons why it had become a sensation.There were the obvious elements: The story itself is compelling, the writing was (usually) masterful, and the performances were outstanding. But there was something else. Though set in an ancient, mythical land, its ethos felt thoroughly familiar. Aside from the fight against the White Walkers in the north, the heart of the story wasn’t a classic tale of good and evil, but rather something far more grim. As I wrote, the show (and books) depicted an “amoral society, unmoored from its traditions and full of entitled and ambitious men and women who compete for power with unrestrained viciousness.”Though there is some sense that one ruler might be better than another (see, for example, Daenerys Targaryen’s famous “break the wheel” monologue), the show took a sledgehammer to moral ideals. Honorable characters were picked off one by one, and the message seemed clear—pursuing virtuous ends by virtuous means was a fool’s errand.At the same time, Martin was clear-eyed enough to recognize that pursuing virtuous ends by vicious means had its own costs. Either way, virtue is lost. In a profound way, the books and the show made us look in a mirror–the show was a mirror of modern American sensibilities and showed the consequences of modern American morality.And what were those consequences? Here’s how I ended my piece: “Perhaps the true rule of the game of thrones isn’t “Win or die” but rather “Win and die.” The quest for power, unmoored from virtue, is the doom of us all.” Tolkien is fundamentally different. If Martin’s work is a mirror, Tolkien’s is stained glass. When you walk into an ancient cathedral, aside from the sheer grandeur of the building itself, the first thing you notice is the stained glass, but not just for its beauty. The glass is a source of light, and the glass typically tells a story—the story of sin and redemption.You can’t separate Lord of the Rings from Tolkien the man and Tolkien’s time. Tolkien had been to Mordor. He’d fought in the Battle of the Somme in World War I, one of the deadliest battles in all of human history. And it was fought across the blasted landscape of trench warfare, a place drained of all beauty and humanity. Tolkien had also lived through World War II. He started writing Lord of the Rings in 1937, when Hitler was on the rise. He finished after Hitler’s apocalyptic fall. Tolkien’s work is sophisticated, but it is not written in shades of gray. Evil is very, very real, and while the forces of good might be divided, uncertain, and all too fallible, they are still good. But there are deeper truths found in Tolkien’s work. The first is his profound suspicion of power. Writing in The New York Times, Wheaton professor Michael Drout put it well: What makes Tolkien’s work unique is the moral heart of his story and the consistency with which he maintains it. Rather than reveling in the acquisition and exercise of power, “The Lord of the Rings” celebrates its renunciation, insisting that the domination of others is always morally wrong.You see this in the contrast between two brothers in Lord of the Rings, Boromir and Faramir. Boromir is famously mystified that the beleaguered, outnumbered allies won’t use the great power of the One Ring to defeat their enemies. He ultimately reaches for that power, attempting to seize it by force. He fails, at great cost. Pages later, Frodo falls into Faramir’s hands, and Faramir learns what Frodo holds:The One Ring that was thought to have perished from the world. And Boromir tried to take it by force? And you escaped? And ran all the way—to me! And here in the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings. A pretty stroke of fortune! A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality!”This is the moment of maximum vulnerability. And yet, Faramir chooses a different path:I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.One cannot truly defeat the enemy with the enemy’s tools. The ends cannot justify the means, even if the cost of that virtue is ruin and destruction. Tolkien knew that the alternative, the grasp for ultimate power, meant that the contest between good and evil would be transformed into a contest between evils. The raw quest for power will corrupt all it touches.This is one of the central themes of The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s tale of the First Age of Middle Earth and the elves’ great war against Morgoth, an enemy even darker and more powerful than Sauron. While the elves are capable of great acts of courage and building a civilization of great beauty, they’re haunted and ultimately doomed by the Oath of Fëanor, a declaration of eternal enmity against anyone who would withhold the Silmarils (three great jewels) from Fëanor or any of his sons.But that disaster brings us to the other indispensable elements of Tolkien’s work, the elements that are utterly missing from Martin’s—faith and hope. “Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien once wrote, “is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” At the same time, he also said that it “is neither allegorical nor topical.” In fact, Tolkien said that he “cordially dislike[s] allegory in all its manifestations.”So don’t read his work like you C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. There is no direct Aslan/Christ figure in Tolkien’s books. But you cannot read this, one of the most famous passages in Lord of the Rings, and not see where Tolkien’s heart lies. This is written from Sam’s perspective, while he and Frodo struggle, hopeless, through the heart of Mordor on their fools’ errand to destroy the ring:There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.To become the shadow to defeat the shadow is to forsake that light and high beauty. It’s to substitute the small and passing for the great and eternal. This is a thoroughly biblical ethic, one grounded in the notion that “anyone who finds his life will lose it, and anyone who loses his life because of me will find it.”In Martin’s Westeros, the rule is different. When you lose, you lose. Thus, while he is grimly realistic about the consequences of the will to power, he offers no hope beyond it. His world is a world of unredeemed Boromirs, and the Faramirs are ground into dust. But the mirror can lie. The stained glass tells the full truth. Why does America need to remember Tolkien again? Because we’re mired in Westeros, playing the game of thrones. When you hear words like “fight fire with fire,” or “make them play by their own rules,” or “punch back twice as hard,” or “wield power to reward friends and punish enemies,” you’re hearing an ethos that declares, “win or die.”Tolkien wasn’t naive. He knew that world. He’d confronted it directly. That’s why characters like Boromir or Fëanor resonate so strongly. In the quest to confront the enemy, you become the enemy. Yet faithful people understand, in Faramir’s words, that they “do not wish for such triumphs.” Instead, they fix their eyes on the “high beauty” that is forever beyond the shadow’s reach. That’s not a retreat. In many ways, it’s the most courageous form of confrontation. It’s an act of faith that often defies our senses. Everything in us screams at us to claim the ring—to reach for power—and in our frailty, we often yield to that call. But there are no stakes high enough for such a compromise. Even if America is “falling in ruin” and we alone could save her, using the instruments of darkness “for her good and [our] glory,” we cannot become what we oppose. One more thing …How do we understand the times in which we live? In this week’s Good Faith podcast, Curtis and I discuss the problem of perspective, and how our recency bias can foster fear and panic. We talk about how God plays the long game, and we should also. Curtis has some fascinating insights. If you haven’t listened before, now’s a great time to start.  One last thing …Lately I’ve been listening to music by Rich Mullins, a Christian artist who meant a great deal to me in college and law school. He died in a car accident in 1997, and it’s hard to find good video recordings of his music on YouTube. But this recent cover of one of his songs “If I Stand” is wonderful. Enjoy:

Joe Biden’s message Thursday evening was clear. American democracy is under attack.

This was a rare primetime address on the most important challenge facing the nation.

But the media treated the speech as if it were just another in an endless series of partisan vollies instead of what it was – a declaration by the president of the United States that America must choose between democracy and authoritarianism.

The major networks didn’t broadcast the speech.

Friday’s media coverage of the speech was just more he-said/she-said reaction.

The New York Times quoted the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, as claiming Democrats are the ones “dismantling Americans’ democracy”.

The Times failed to point out that McCarthy’s claim is a lie. Nor did it state that McCarthy himself was one of 139 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election even after the attack on the Capitol.

The same Times article quoted Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, as calling Biden “the divider in chief” and accusing him of exhibiting “disgust and hostility towards half the country”. But there was no mention of McDaniel’s role in advancing Trump’s “big lie”.

The Times characterized a more general Republican objection to Biden’s speech – that he “was maligning the 74 million people” who voted for Trump in 2020. But the Times didn’t mention that Trump has illegally refused to concede the election.

It is dangerous to believe that “balanced journalism” gives equal weight to liars and to truth-tellers, to those intent on destroying democracy and those seeking to protect it, to the enablers of an ongoing attempted coup and those who are trying to prevent it.

Two Sundays ago, CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of the show Reliable Sources, put it well:

“It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.”

Not incidentally, that was Stelter’s last show on CNN.

On Friday, CNN White House reporter John Harwood said:

“The core point [Biden] made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true. Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us, as journalists, to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements. The Republican party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue.”

Harwood went on to say:

“Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well. And a significant portion – or a sufficient portion – of the constituency that they’re leading attacked the Capitol on January 6. Violently.”

Shortly after making these remarks, Harwood announced he was no longer with CNN.

A source told Dan Froomkin of Press Watch that CNN had informed Harwood last month that he was being let go. That was despite his long-term contract with the network. The source also said that Harwood had used his last broadcast to “send a message”.

Why must we wait until some of America’s ablest journalists are sacked before they are willing and able to tell America the truth?

It is not “partisan” to explain what Trump and his anti-democracy movement are seeking.

It is not “taking sides” to point out that the Trump Republicans are trying to establish an authoritarian government in America.

It is not “violating journalistic standards” to tell the unvarnished truth about what America is facing today.

In fact, a failure to call out the Trump Republicans for what they are – liars, enablers, and accessories to crimes against the constitution – itself violates the most basic canons of journalistic ethics.

“Balanced journalism” does not exist halfway between facts and lies.

Yesterday marked what would have been trade economist Henry George’s 183nd birthday; he was born on September 2 in Philadelphia in 1839 and he died on October 29, 1897. To honor Henry George’s legacy and his significant contributions to advancing the principles of free trade and warning about the dangers of protectionism, this is my annual tribute to one of the greatest trade economists of all time, Henry George!
The seven excerpts below are from Henry George’s 1886 book Protection or Free Trade, which was Milton Friedman’s favorite book on trade, according to Cato Institute‘s Jim Powell, who wrote about the Henry George classic in his 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed “Milton Friedman’s Favorite Book on Trade.” Friedman called it the most rhetorically brilliant book ever written on trade, and it was also the first book to be read entirely into the Congressional Record. According to Powell, Protection or Free Trade was probably the best book on trade written by anyone in the Americas and compared it to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. George Mason economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2009 that George’s 1886 book “remains perhaps the best-argued tract on free trade to this day.”
Some of the Henry George quotes below (italics added) were featured in Jim Powell’s 2016 Wall Street Journal op-ed but I’ve expanded on those by including some additional quotes from the full text of Protection or Free Trade, available online here from The Liberty Fund. As I wrote last year, this book should be required reading for Donald Trump, Peter Navarro, and all other protectionists/scarctityists who think that trade is win-lose, and who foolishly, mistakenly, and naively advocate tariffs and protectionism as a way to make the United States better off economically.
1. Maximize Imports, Not Exports. If foreigners will bring us goods cheaper than we can make them ourselves, we shall be the gainers. The more we get in imports as compared with what we have to give in exports, the better the trade for us. And since foreigners are not liberal enough to give us their productions, but will only let us have them in return for own productions, how can they ruin our industry? The only way they could ruin our industry would be by bringing us for nothing all we want, so as to save us the necessity for work. If this were possible, ought it seem very dreadful?2. Voluntary Trade is Mutually Beneficial. Trade is not invasion. It does not involve aggression on one side and resistance on the other, but mutual consent and gratification. There cannot be a trade unless both parties agree to it.3. Exposing Protectionist Fallacies. In a profitable international trade the value of imports will always exceed the value of the exports that pay for them, just as in a profitable trading voyage the return cargo must exceed in value the cargo carried out. This is possible to all the nations that are parties to commerce, for in a normal trade commodities are carried from places where they are relatively cheap to places where they are relatively dear, and their value is thus increased by the transportation, so that a cargo arrived at its destination has a higher value than on leaving the port of its exportation. But on the theory that a trade is profitable only when exports exceed imports, the only way for all countries to trade profitably with one another would be to carry commodities from places where they are relatively dear to places where they are relatively cheap. An international trade made up of such transactions as the exportation of manufactured ice from the West Indies to New England, and the exportation of hot-house fruits from New England to the West Indies, would enable all countries to export much larger values than they imported. On the same theory the more ships sunk at sea the better for the commercial world. To have all the ships that left each country sunk before they could reach any other country would, upon protectionist principles, be the quickest means of enriching the whole world, since all countries could then enjoy the maximum of exports with the minimum of imports.4. Exposing Tariff Fallacies. To every trade there must be two parties who mutually desire to trade, and whose actions are reciprocal. No one can buy unless he can find someone willing to sell; and no one can sell unless there is some other one willing to buy. If Americans did not want to buy foreign goods, foreign goods could not be sold here even if there were no tariff. The efficient cause of the trade which our tariff aims to prevent is the desire of Americans to buy foreign goods, not the desire of foreign producers to sell them. Thus protection really prevents what the “protected” themselves want to do. It is not from foreigners that protection preserves and defends us; it is from ourselves.5. On the Fallacy of Protecting Infant Industries. What are really infant industries have no more chance in the struggle for governmental encouragement than infant pigs with full-grown swine about a meal-tub. Not merely is the encouragement likely to go to industries that do not need it, but is likely to go to industries that can be maintained only in this way, and thus to cause absolute loss to the community by diverting labor and capital from remunerative industries.6. Protectionism = Force. Trade does not require force. Free trade consists simply in letting people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is protection that requires force, for it consists in preventing people from doing what they want to do. Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.7. On the Fallacy of Trade Retaliation. And in the same way, for any nation to restrict the freedom of its own citizens to trade, because other nations so restrict the freedom of their citizens, is a policy of the “biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” order. Other nations may injure us by the imposition of taxes which tend to impoverish their own citizens, for as denizens of the world it is to our real interest that all other denizens of the world should be prosperous. But no other nation can thus injure us so much as we shall injure ourselves if we impose similar taxes upon our own citizens by way of retaliation.
Happy Birthday to Henry George — his brilliant and timeless insights about international trade, protectionism, and trade retaliation are just as fresh and relevant today as in the late 1800s, maybe even more so today than ever before given the resurgence during Trump’s presidency of the popularity of the discredited trade “theories” of protectionism, mercantilism, and scarcityism.
The post A Birthday Appreciation for Trade Economist Henry George — He Wrote Milton Friedman’s Favorite Book on International Trade appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Brad DeLong felt confident that the story started in 1870.The polymath economist was writing a book on economic modernity—about how humans transitioned from eking out an existence on our small planet to building a kind of utopia on it—and he saw an inflection point centuries after the emergence of capitalism and decades after the advent of manufacturing at scale. “The Industrial Revolution is good. The Industrial Revolution is huge,” he explained to me recently, sitting on the back porch of his wood-clad Colonial Revival in Berkeley, California. But “as of 1870, things have not really changed that much for most people.” Soon after that, though—after the development of the vertically integrated corporation, the industrial research lab, modern communication devices, and modular shipping technologies—“everything changes in a generation, and then changes again, and again, and again, and again.” Global growth increases fourfold. The world breaks out of near-universal agrarian poverty. Modernity takes hold.DeLong had begun working on this story in 1994. He had produced hundreds of thousands of words, then hundreds of thousands more, updating the text as academic economics and the world itself changed. He kept writing, for years, for decades, for so long that he ended up writing for roughly 5 percent of the time capitalism itself has existed. The problem wasn’t figuring out how the story started. The problem was knowing when it ended.In time, he decided that the era that had begun in 1870 ended in 2010, shortly after productivity growth and GDP growth had collapsed, as inequality was strangling economic vibrancy around the world and revanchist political populism was on the rise. With a bit more writing, he finished Slouching Towards Utopia, one of this year’s most anticipated economics books, to be published on Tuesday. His long-gestating examination of what he calls the “long 20th century” is sweeping and detailed, learned and accessible, familiar and strange—a definitive look at how we arrived at such material splendor and how it failed to deliver all that it seemed to promise. His decision to end the story in 2010, and thus to finish his book, holds a message for all of us: Despite its problems and iniquities, the economic era Americans just lived through was miraculous. And now it is over.[Derek Thompson: Is this a recession? Wrong question.]As for the story of DeLong himself: He is an economic historian and a macroeconomist at UC Berkeley, a liberal policy stalwart, and one of the original econ bloggers, still publishing his thoughts almost daily, as he has done since before the word blog was invented in 1999. His story, I suppose, really begins in Washington, D.C., where he grew up as the science-fiction-obsessed, math-whiz son of a lawyer and a clinical psychologist. (His mother still sees patients.) He went to Harvard for an undergraduate degree and then a Ph.D. in economics, writing papers and forging close friendships with a teenage Soviet refugee named Andre Shleifer (now the second-most-cited economist on Earth) and Larry Summers (the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president). “Brad is the person you want to write with if you want a collaborator doing something that’s bold, potentially important, possibly wrong, and unlikely to satisfy pedantic academic referees,” Summers told me. “I’m a huge, huge fan of the guy.”Along with his academic work, DeLong served in the Clinton administration. He married the legal scholar Ann Marie Marciarille, an expert on health-care regulation; they had two kids, now adults. And he started blogging—the thing for which he is perhaps best known. Since 1999, he has written in his “semi-daily journal,” which is funny, erudite, and weird. (Over the years, he has flambéed no fewer than 11 people as the “stupidest man alive,” among them former World Bank President Bob Zoellick.)DeLong’s book project preceded the blog. In 1994, he read the socialist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, on the “short 20th century” between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, in 1914, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. “It makes a grand narrative arc, with communism as the tragic hero of the 20th century, hopelessly marred by the circumstances of its birth,” DeLong told me. He loved it, and decided to cast his own long arc, with capitalism as the tragic hero.The heroic part is heroic: For the first time in history, DeLong notes, the world managed to create enough after 1870. Enough to end subsistence agriculture in much of the world. Enough to reduce the global child-mortality rate from nearly 50 percent to less than 5 percent. Enough that many of the very poorest people on Earth have access to cellphones and electricity today. But the tragic part is tragic: This modern era also brought with it machine guns and atom bombs and the atrocities of the Holocaust, among other genocides. And even as so many economies succeeded, so many governments failed—to end racial injustice, to protect the most vulnerable, to ensure that everybody shared in the world’s prosperity, to conserve our common environment.[From the December 2020 issue: The next decade could be even worse]In his basement, his attic, and his office, DeLong kept assembling his book. He used the free-marketeer Friedrich Hayek and the social-protectionist Karl Polanyi as central figures and then braided in details about a huge cast of characters: Marx; Henry Ford; Keynes; Hitler; Gandhi; his own great-great-uncle, an economic historian named Abbott Payson Usher.His editors kept checking in. His friends inquired about the drafts they had read years before. The project ballooned in its complexity. “I have had editors who were saying [they were] going to drop me if I couldn’t get it down to 150,000 words,” DeLong told me. (The book ended up at 180,000, plus online notes and appendices.) But he kept learning new things. “I can start reading a book, and then from it I can spin up in my brain a sub-Turing instantiation of the author’s mind, which I then run on my wetware,” he told me. “I can ask it questions, and it answers.” Describing his own thought process, he added: “‘A rich inner life’ is one way to put it. Or perhaps a slight absence of grip on what is the real world and what is not.”In 1999, he thought the book could end by discussing what Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”—the idea, popularized in a book of the same name, that the fall of communism heralded the final triumph of democracy and free-market neoliberal economics. “There were these huge ideological struggles, but now we’ve kind of got it,” DeLong said, describing his mindset at the turn of the millennium. “There’s going to be some future alternation between right neoliberalism, left neoliberalism, and social democracy.” But then came 9/11 and the global War on Terror. “People seemed to be about to start killing each other in large numbers about religion,” DeLong said. Moreover, he added, “most of what we Clintonites had actually managed to do in terms of whacking economic policy into what we saw as a good state was to enable another round of tax cuts for the rich and another round of plutocracy.” And then came President Barack Obama and the “enormous failure to actually implement what I had thought was the standard playbook we’d learned in the Great Depression,” DeLong said.In time, DeLong concluded that neoliberalism and social democracy would not be gently taking turns. In political terms, the future instead would be about the “return of something that Madeleine Albright called fascism, and who am I to tell her not to,” he said. And in economic terms, it would be about high inequality, low productivity, and slow growth. “We may have solved the problem of production,” DeLong told me. “We certainly have not solved the problem of distribution, or of utilizing our extraordinary, immense wealth to make us happy and good people.”[From the January/February 2005 issue: Shaken and stirred]The story the book tells is compelling, though occasionally overpowering in its detail and telescoped in its argument. The global South—where the majority of humanity lives—gets cursory treatment. DeLong argues that fitting much of its economic history into his book would have been too complicated. And while gesturing to the evidence that colonial empires leeched prosperity from conquered land, he asserts that the North “causally led” the “advances” of the South. Yet the book is justice-minded and tenderhearted too. “There’s someone in Bangladesh who would almost surely be a better economics professor than I am and is now behind a water buffalo,” he told me. “The market economy gives me and my preferences 200 times the voice and weight of his. If that isn’t the biggest market failure of all, I don’t know what your definition of market failure could possibly be.”For all its problems, the long 20th century granted enormous prosperity to billions of people: cellphones, white-collar jobs, the birth-control pill, penicillin, space exploration, home appliances, electric grids, the internet. If, as DeLong claims, a remarkable period of prosperity has ended, then governments face the enormous task of strengthening representative democracy, reallocating the world’s immense resources more equitably, and reigniting productivity growth. As for DeLong, he has a more immediate challenge: figuring out what to do with the hundreds of thousands of words he trimmed out of Slouching Towards Utopia. He thinks he might write a history of the economy, full stop. That story might start in 6,000 B.C.

Damon Linker is a Senior Fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center and a former senior correspondent at The Week. He writes the "Eyes on the Right" newsletter. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Damon Linker discuss the odds that a prospective prosecution would be successful; whether it would harm or help Trump’s chances in 2024; and what those of us who want to rescue American democracy can do.The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: There has been a huge debate in the country for the last weeks and months about whether or not to prosecute Donald Trump—but there are not many people who have a long track record of opposing Donald Trump and who nevertheless have argued that it would be a mistake to prosecute him. You are the most prominent person in that category. Why do you think it would be a mistake to prosecute Donald Trump?Damon Linker: The simplest way to state it is that I believe that the federal government is engaging in a prosecution of a former president who might run for president again. And this prosecution, being done by an attorney general appointed by a Democrat (the president of the other party), would open a can of worms that we would never be able to shut. It raises very difficult questions about legitimacy and the rule of law. You don't need unanimity when you pursue a prosecution at the federal level, but you do need a kind of base consensus about what is legal, what isn't, and what actions violate that legality. Trump has been such an expert at muddying those waters that you have a significant portion of the American population who will, in effect, never accept the legitimacy of the process. That can poison things quite badly, and it's something we should do our very best to avoid.Mounk: For those of us who care about preserving American democracy, what then is the best course of action? There's a strong set of arguments that we need to prosecute Donald Trump in order to preserve American democracy: a core element of democracy is that nobody is above the law, and if we can't prosecute Trump because he has so many followers and such power, that means giving up a part of American democracy. The most consequentialist version of that argument says, “If we don't prosecute Trump, it shows that some people are above the law. And if he ever wins power again, he's going to be able to do whatever he wants, and other future presidents are going to be able to do whatever they want.” What do you say to people who argue that, actually, not prosecuting Trump is a danger to American democracy?Linker: These are powerful objections. Trump and what he represents are a tremendous threat to American democracy. The problem that I see is that those who make that argument don't spend enough time reflecting on the bad things that would happen by going in the other direction and pursuing a prosecution. You could say that the point of my op-ed in The New York Times on the subject was not so much to say, “We must never prosecute Trump.” It was that if we're going to do this, we better do it with eyes open and think through the consequences. What are some of those consequences? Well, I think if Merrick Garland decides to go forward with a prosecution—he arrests Trump, indicts him, puts him on trial, and ideally, from his point of view, convicts him and sends him to jail—through that entire process, Trump will be doing what he does best, which is acting as a classical demagogue. He will be pointing to every bit of evidence that he can think of that this is not a legitimate act; that it’s not the rule of law, but a political witch hunt by other means. Instead of trying to defeat him in an election, [he’ll claim], you have the guy who Mitch McConnell denied a hearing and a seat on the Supreme Court to, who is still embittered about this fact, trying to exact revenge against the Republicans and against the great Donald Trump, the head of the Republican Party.Mounk: You don't buy that story, but the fact that Trump is able to sell that story effectively is something we should take into consideration?Linker: Exactly. A large faction of the Republican Party has been increasingly radicalized by a kind of populist demagoguery over these last couple of decades, and it's getting worse. I don't buy that story about Merrick Garland at all, but I think that Trump would say it, and a large portion of the Republican Party would believe it, which would drive them even further outside of ordinary politics, which takes place under a kind of tent of the rule of law that all Americans are supposed to affirm: that whether a Democrat or a Republican is in charge in Washington, we can trust that the law and the legal proceedings will take place fairly. In both cases, Trump would be trying to teach the lesson that this is no longer true—all there is is partisanship. “This is the Democrats trying to destroy me, your champion and hero.” That could be polarizing and poisonous beyond anything that we have yet endured.Mounk: What is the outcome we're worried about here? Is it that a large number of Americans are going to say the prosecution of a former president is illegitimate? That's bad, and we want to avoid it if possible, but it doesn't feel like the most important consideration. Are we worried that it might lead to some kind of civic violence? In this kind of context, people are talking about the danger of some significant political violence in the streets, which would obviously be terrible, but is not the same thing as “civil war.”Or are we talking about a third kind of thing, which is that this makes it more likely for Donald Trump to win the 2024 election, or that it makes it more likely for the MAGA movement to remain in control of the Republican Party. Which of these outcomes are you most concerned about?Linker: I'm worried about all of it. I agree that “civil war” probably isn't the right way to put it, because it just doesn't make sense territorially. Would you have inner-ring suburbs and cities picking up rifles, shooting at people from the countryside? That just doesn't make sense. Although, I do worry about the rise of January 6th-style political violence metastasizing not only in Washington, but in state capitals around the country—maybe Timothy McVeigh-style attacks on federal buildings and things like that, which in our current context would be, I think, even worse than that single attack was in the 1990s. That's part of it. The other part of it has to do with the shape of the Republican Party and its increasing radicalization. The number of people who are members of the militia movement is very small, yet it exists. And it is widespread. It's in many states. Do we want to engage in an act that could increase that movement, so that people who are now kind of adjacent to them in the Republican Party, who aren't in militias, start to actually be persuaded by their more radical far-right arguments? That, I think, is definitely possible in that kind of a scenario. I worry about that as well. When it comes to the question of Trump's ability to win the presidency—that's a bit more complicated. I don't think that Trump getting indicted, convicted, and engaging in this kind of three-ring circus demagoguery for months as this is going on (maybe even running for president from a jail cell)—I don't think that in and of itself would increase his likelihood of winning. In fact, I think it would make it less likely, all things considered, that he would prevail. However, the very act of doing those incredibly civically poisonous things would be terrible for American politics. It would further radicalize the Republicans. And the fact of the matter is (as anyone who lived through 2016 is well aware): if he’s running, he could win. If he wins, you don't want an even more radicalized Republican Party to be taking the reins. Mounk: One of the key questions is simply, “Will the prosecution stick?”  The worst outcome I can think of is that Merrick Garland brings a federal prosecution, and Trump says, “This is completely illegitimate.” Then, in the end, he's acquitted by a jury or there's a mistrial, and he can go to the country and (however insincerely or wrongly) say, “I've been vindicated, I've been acquitted, and I am innocent.” That certainly would not achieve the purpose of showing that Trump is not above the law. It would not hold him accountable for his misdeeds, and it could even put him in the strongest possible position to win the Republican nomination and potentially re-election.Linker: That would be very, very bad, because he would be able to say, “See? I told you so.” It would convince a lot of the country that it was a politically motivated prosecution all along. And the evidence is that they couldn't make it stick. You know the old line: “If you're gonna come for the king, don't miss.”If he's indicted and there's a trial, there has to be jury selection. Just think of the problems that are going to be raised by jury selection. The prosecution will have the feeling that Trump voters are unpersuadable, they're so in the tank for Trump, it's like trying to do a murder trial with the victim's closest family as jury members. You're inevitably going to end up with a not guilty verdict or a hung jury, more likely. And then, of course, the defense will raise huge objections: “Trump won almost half the country and all twelve jurors are Democrats who voted for Biden, that's totally skewed. Don't you see? It's a politicized prosecution.” But if they allow roughly half to be Trump voters that raises the possibility that we're going to end up with a hung jury, because one or more of them won't be persuadable. It shows the very difficult situation of trying to enforce the law, which is supposed to be impartial and apply equally to all, intersecting with our political divisions in a way that might short-circuit the legal side of things.Mounk: My baseline position is: if possible, the way to beat authoritarian populists is at the ballot box. I know that we did that in 2020. But unfortunately, in a democracy you have to be able to do that more than once. Now, I do think that there is also a very strong argument that if you have committed a crime, then you should be punished for it, and it does violate an important democratic principle if we end up saying, “Unfortunately, you have so much support in the country that it would be really divisive if we put you in jail, so we will spare you.”But, clearly, we are not vindicating the principle that everybody's equal before the law by trying Donald Trump and failing to convict him because parts of the jury are working in his favor. I'm struck by how little of our public debate has considered this important question.Linker: I agree. My feeling is that a lot of the people who are most in favor of prosecution are so convinced that he's guilty that they almost presume that any fair presentation of the evidence will end in a conviction. They don't think that he could get off, because he's so obviously guilty. I think that it's much less clear than that. But I think there was really no choice but to try to impeach him after his behavior on January 6th, and I don't think impeachment raises the same kinds of issues that concern me about a trial, because it isn't really a legal proceeding, it is a political proceeding. It involves laws (and if he broke laws, that's further evidence for why he should be convicted in the impeachment), but an impeachment trial is a kind of political statement of whether we're going to declare you anathema. It's somewhat parallel to a no-confidence vote in a parliamentary system. I do think that that was a valid proceeding that had to go forward after what happened. Think of how good it would have been for American democracy to convict him after those actions. It wouldn't have taken all Republicans—just a group, a substantial group of Republicans—to join with Democrats and make a bipartisan statement that these actions of Donald Trump are beyond the pale; they are a violation of his oath of office and he must be declared anathema in that way, especially if the actual conviction could have been worded in such a way that he was precluded from ever running for high office again. That, in a way, would have been the happy ending. It’s no longer an option.Mounk: If the point of an impeachment or a point of a trial is to say, authoritatively, “We, the House and the Senate of the United States, find this person beyond the pale,” well, you better be able to get it through. I certainly hope that if the attorney general goes ahead with a prosecution, they’re pretty confident that they are going to be able to make the prosecution stick, because the outcome of a failed prosecution, symbolically as well as practically, would be quite disastrous.Linker: Yes, I certainly agree. The only thing I would add is, I even think that when it comes to the Mar-a-Lago business of the confidential documents, I would hope that Merrick Garland will not pursue a prosecution for obstruction of justice, alone. There have been some articles and news sources over the last few days pointing to the fact that that's really the main thing they think he might be guilty of. Ideally, you would prosecute someone, including Trump, for it. The problem is, if you or I are falsely charged with a crime, and we fight it by trying to thwart the investigation because we think we're innocent, that is an example of obstruction of justice. If that's the only charge, I think Trump would be very effective in saying, “You're trying to charge me for the crime of defending myself against the BS charge that you've raised against me. You're not actually charging me with having violated any other laws. Of course I tried to defend myself!” Legal terms are one thing—it is a crime and so, technically, he should be prosecuted for it if he's guilty of it. But in political terms, it would backfire, I think, quite badly.Mounk: Let's widen the lens a little bit here to consider what the potential prosecution of Trump and the debate about it says about the United States at this moment.Without going back to whether or not we should prosecute Trump, what do you think are the basic scenarios here? What would it look like for things to get much worse, and are there scenarios in which things do get better? Is there a way through this where, five or ten years from now, we might breathe a sigh of relief that the worst is over?Linker: Those are great questions and hard ones to answer. I am a Democrat. I've voted only for Democrats for about two decades now. I almost have a principle that I will not vote for a Republican, because I think the party is in such a bad way. I don't want to give them power at any level. And that speaks to the path forward, to something like the best possible outcome: which is Republicans losing. They have to lose for pulling this crap. The problem is that they've been doing remarkably well despite their extremism and demagoguery. And as long as that happens, they have no incentive to change course. Whether we're talking about the Labour Party in the UK, [their experience] under Thatcher and her successors in the Tory party; or in this country, when Reagan was president, and then the first Bush and the moderation of the Democrats that came with the rise of Bill Clinton in 1992—you see lessons learned by elective parties. If you lose again and again, there's a big incentive to change something. Until the Republicans actually have the lesson that they won't be rewarded for this kind of crap, they are not going to change course. In fact, Trump opened the possibility of a winning coalition for right-wing populism. I actually think someone like Ron DeSantis could potentially win a lot more votes than Trump, simply because he won't be hated by as many people. Trump is uniquely polarizing. His voters love him, but much of the country can't stand him and will never vote for him, so he has a very hard ceiling, which tends to keep him below his Democratic opponent at the level of the national vote. Another right-wing populist who isn't quite as negative could actually do better. That's a scary prospect—I don't think quite as scary as Trump. But that's something else we could debate. There's a dynamic to this having to do with negative partisanship. In the worst case scenario—as opposed to the happy ending of the Republicans losing, learning a lesson from it, and then moderating—the Republicans keep winning, in part, by provoking the Democrats to move ever further left, which convinces people to hold their noses and say, “I hate Donald Trump, DeSantis, and Kari Lake, but I'm more scared of the Democrats, so I guess I'll just vote for those right-wingers anyway.” This could occur at the same time as the Republicans are becoming more aligned with the extremists in the militia movement. You might see further centrifugal dividing from the center, with each extreme provoking the other to ever greater extremism. One of those two is always going to win, and whichever one wins then ends up provoking the other side to potentially be even more extreme in the next cycle. That's sort of the nightmare scenario that keeps me up at night.Mounk: It's always tempting to say that the most important election is the next one. But in 2024, there's a good case for that. If Donald Trump is running for a second term, and he manages to win the Republican nomination, that would be very worrying. Jonathan Rauch has a very good piece in The Atlantic on what a second term by Trump might look like. Perhaps it'll take until 2028 for Democrats and (hopefully) Republicans to be in a place to redefine themselves, if we've somehow made it through and have somewhat free and fair elections afterwards, which is an uncertain prospect.Let me ask you this as a last question. The question about whether or not Trump should be prosecuted is probably quite influential, and I'm sure that people who make some of those decisions are, in fact, following these debates. But these discussions are ultimately appealing to a few decision makers. What does that leave the rest of us to do? What advice would you give those who are deeply worried about Donald Trump and right-wing populism, who perhaps are in danger of reacting in short-sighted ways? What are some principles we should try to follow over the coming years to save the American republic?Linker: Keep your heads. I know how hard it is, especially on social media where you’re provoked all the time and marinating in so much ugliness. But I do think the best thing for Democrats—and people who want to see Trump go down and who want to see the Republican Party regain its senses—is to do everything we individually can to not give the political right evidence to confirm its conspiratorial demagoguery about us; to show that we recognize that our Trump-voting fellow citizens are fellow citizens, and not an invading force from some foreign country or planet. They are our fellow citizens, and we have to learn how to get along with them; to not in any way accept their caricature of us and what we stand for, but when we respond to actually respond with as much levelheaded substance as we can, to show that, if anything, we're just sort of boring, earnest people who want to do what's best for the country. We're not these lunatic people that you imagine on the left (some of whom are there), but we actually just want crime to be down, the economy to grow, jobs to be created, and people not to be put in bankruptcy by a medical condition—just basic “kitchen table” issues, as we Americans like to say.When I was a columnist at The Week, one of my colleagues was Michael Brendan Dougherty, who now works for National Review. He wrote a great column right around the time that Trump won in 2016, predicting that he would effectively break the mainstream media because he would so provoke them into these kind of apoplectic spasms of loathing that they would stop adhering to the strictest journalistic standards, rather than striving for a kind of journalistic objectivity that, even if it never actually was achieved, was the ideal. Dougherty predicted that the media would hate everything that this guy did for the next four years, and that its status in the minds of Americans overall would drop precipitously. I think he was right.The most ominous bit of public opinion that I can think of these days is the Gallup poll about confidence in American institutions, which continues to fall lower and lower. Many of our institutions—the presidency, the courts, Congress, the media, scientists, the medical establishment—are drifting lower and lower. Some of them are now in the single digits of public confidence. It's within that context that a Donald Trump or a Ron DeSantis-style demagogue actually can gain traction; by people not trusting in the rule of law, or not trusting in the Justice Department of a Democratic administration, to try a law-breaking Republican president. Anything we can do to buoy and to raise up that confidence—that we're not actually crazy and we do mean well, and we're your neighbors—will contribute in some small way to helping.The views expressed in this piece reflect those of the speakers, and not of Persuasion.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.communityPersuasionThe community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.By Yascha MounkPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan Ruberry. Podcast cover image by Joe O’Shea.Connect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYouTube: Yascha Mounk, PersuasionLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Joe Biden during his primetime presidential address. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (Especially the newest member of The Dispatch team, Allahpundit!),Full disclosure: I’m vexed. So I’m going to try to prevent—or delay—going full splenetic by easing into my first point.Remember those idiots who wanted to burn the Quran? I probably need to be more specific because I vaguely recall there were a lot of idiots who wanted to burn a lot of Qurans. But the moment I have in mind was probably this one in 2010, when a tiny fringe church led by Terry Jones in Florida—grandly called the Dove World Outreach Center—announced it would burn the Islamic holy book to make some point it thought was clever. In 2011, the church literally put the Quran on trial for six hours, found it guilty of all charges, and set it aflame.It was a dumb, hateful, un-Christian (spare me the lectures about the book burning at Ephesus) stunt intended to insult as many Muslims as possible. And it succeeded. Fatwas for Jones’ death were issued. A handful of protesters in various cities died in some riots. No doubt some terrorist attacks on Americans, Westerners, or Christians were at least partly inspired by the burning.   The whole thing sparked an intense debate about free speech, and I hated it. I hated it because it forced all sorts of people, institutions, and governments to take sides on the question of free speech for no productive purpose. It didn’t bring anyone closer to Christianity—or to free speech. Yes, forced to choose, I sided with his right to do it, but I was far more passionate in my belief that he was wrong to do it.In other words, being right about a principle isn’t enough. Think of it this way: We all have a constitutional right to be bigots. In no way is that a defense of bigotry. Burning the Quran forced people in favor of free speech to question their commitment to free speech. People in favor of free speech were put in the unnecessary and ugly position of defending an unnecessary and ugly act.Right, rights, and wrong.Some of the most important questions in our politics often get turned into arguments about whether so-and-so has the right to do wrong as a way to avoid answering the question of whether they were right to do it in the first place.For instance, in both of Donald Trump’s impeachment trials, his defenders argued that the president was within his rights to do the things he was impeached for. In the first impeachment, they argued that since he can bully a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponent for partisan ends, any further debate is irrelevant. He has the authority to withhold congressionally approved military aide in service to that bullying, so lighten up. In the second impeachment, people actually argued that since the frick’n president of the frick’n United States merely came close to the Brandenburg standard for incitement and (arguably) didn’t cross that line, senators shouldn’t rely on any other standard. Never mind that the standards for impeachment aren’t laid out in criminal law, but in the informal rules of statesmanship, stewardship, and decency. Also put aside the fact that allowing a president to come a hair’s breadth short of meeting the exacting standards of criminal incitement is to declare you have no real standards at all.The same thing happened during the Clinton impeachment. Diddling an intern isn’t against the law, countless partisans argued, so we have no right to apply any other standard. Indeed, any other standard becomes a mere matter of taste and partisan persnicketies.Time and again, the question of whether a president—or some goofball pastor—should do X is dismissed as pharisaical partisan sanctimony and replaced by lawyerly procedural sophistry. It’s pathetic, cowardly, and dangerous. Yes, I’m all for the rule of law. But the rule of law is the skeleton of the body politic. The flesh, blood, and sinew of a healthy society are the morals, customs, standards, and principles that define not just our culture, but our conceptions of right and wrong. If the only argument you can muster in defense of someone’s action is that they can do it, you’re conceding that you have no other defense.Soul of a campaign speech.Which brings me to Joe Biden’s speech last night. I thought it was a perfectly defensible campaign speech. I agreed with some of his points, particularly at the beginning. His spirited defense of America’s founding and the Constitution was welcome to hear from the leader of the party that gave oxygen to the 1619 Project and often talks of the Constitution as if it’s a relic—at least whenever it proves inconvenient to their preferred policies.But it wasn’t billed as a campaign speech. It was an official primetime presidential address, introduced by the Marine Band and guarded by Marines. I believe it was the first such official address in 40 years that neither made news in the form of an official policy announcement nor responded to a major event.Some people point to Donald Trump’s acceptance speech of the 2020 GOP nomination at the White House. I don’t know if that was billed as an official presidential address, nor do I care. First, his speech would have been covered by the networks no matter what. Second, and far more important, I thought using the White House as a political convention venue was grotesque and indefensible—and so did all of the people citing it as a precedent for what Biden did last night.Do you get the point? Countless defenders of Biden’s speech say he was perfectly within his rights to use a national monument and a presidential address for partisan purposes because Trump did that kind of thing all the time. They’re right that Trump did that kind of thing all the time, but if you condemned it for Trump, why are you celebrating it for Biden? For instance, when CNN’s Jeff Zeleny matter-of-factly noted Biden’s break with White House tradition, former Sen. Claire McCaskill blew a gasket.Claire McCaskill @clairecmcAre you kidding me Jeff? The last President did official Republican political events at the White House! And used the National Park Service as political event planners. How about political interview inside the Lincoln Memorial? Those are all examples of demolishing WH traditions. Jeff Zeleny @jeffzelenyThere’s nothing unusual or wrong with a President delivering a political speech — it’s inherent in the job description — but doing it against a backdrop of two Marines standing at attention and the Marine Band is a break with White House traditions. https://t.co/s3TSYHtkcASeptember 2nd 20222,886 Retweets17,480 LikesThis is the kind of garbage politics you get when everything is reduced to can rather than should. Your team did wrong and got away with it, so our team can now do wrong, but we’ll call it right because it’s our team doing it now. A morality that cites the authority of your enemies’ sins as proof of the same sins’ virtue when they’re yours is not, in fact, morality. As I wrote in the Wednesday G-File: My problem with whataboutism is that it’s virtually never a substantive retort. It’s an effort to paint simple truths as simplistic distortions. To take an example from today, lots of people respond to eminently credible charges that Donald Trump mishandled classified information by saying, “What about Hillary Clinton?”Well, what about her? If what she did with her server and emails was bad—and it was—that doesn’t make what Trump allegedly did good. If you were outraged by her mishandling of classified documents, saying Trump did the same thing should be an indictment of Trump, not an exoneration.This hypocrisy goes down to the bone on both sides. Right now, a huge swath of right-wingers are whining that Biden was mean to them because Biden said mean things about Republicans or MAGA Republicans. We can argue whether Biden was right or wrong about what he said, but my God, spare me the tears. Contrary to some absurd spin that Trump never disparaged whole categories of people, Trump disparaged whole categories of people all the time. Deal with it.But the problem is much bigger than mere hypocrisy. One of my complaints about the Quran burning stunt was that it divided Americans along partisan lines on an issue that should unite them. We believe in free speech in this country—or at least we’re supposed to. But because culture warrior right-wingers liked to dunk on Islam and identity politics besotted left-wingers patronizingly made allowances for Muslims they would never countenance for Christians, defending free speech rights got subsumed into the broader partisan food fight.Biden did something similar last night. He claimed to be delivering a high-minded speech about the sanctity of democracy—and some of it was exactly that—but he included in the stew all manner of partisan ingredients that indisputably ruined the flavor. He tried to connect contempt for democracy with opposition to abortion. He insinuated that if you agreed with him on the high-minded stuff, you should be onboard with his domestic agenda and vote accordingly. He played verbal games about just how many Republicans he was indicting as a threat to democracy, but he clearly wanted the persuadable voters he was talking to hear “pretty much all of them.” To be sure, he had all the requisite “to be sure” caveats that will give partisan defenders permission to defend his partisanship. But I doubt there’s a political professional on either side of the aisle that didn’t see that speech for what it was: a rallying cry for Democrats going into the midterms and an effort to make the election about Donald Trump. It was unifying if you agree with him, but that is true of virtually every partisan speech ever given.By melding a partisan agenda with an attack on what he claims—and probably believes—is a real threat to democracy on the cusp of the general election campaign, he made the debate about the threat to democracy even more partisan. And that’s reprehensible.Donning the cynic’s hat.But it might work. As a political strategy, making the election a choice between the forces of Trumpism and the forces of Bidenism is a hell of a lot smarter than making the election a referendum on Biden and his policies.It could also backfire.The Democrats’ fortunes were improving in no small part because Trump was back in the news thanks to his own unforced errors. I think a wiser course of action might have been to stay out of it. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, when your enemy is beclowning himself, best not to get in the way. It would be very bad for Biden—and the country—if Trump’s legal troubles seemed like the fruit of political persecution, which is precisely why Republicans are trying to spin it that way.One of the nice things about cynicism is it keeps you from taking things too personally. Save for my passionate and patriotic desire for Trump to never soil the White House again, I really don’t care which team benefits from all of this. I don’t have a partisan rooting interest here, which is why I see hypocrisy in every direction.Victim’s progress.But let me change gears a bit and address what I think is the generator of a lot of the hypocrisy soaking our politics: victimology. Conservatives love complaining about the liberal cult of victimhood. Indeed, many have convinced themselves that victimology is solely an animating spirit of the left. But conservatism these days is shot through with its own cult of victimhood.The whole “deplorable” fad was an exercise in victimhood. J.D. Vance’s struggling campaign rests on pandering to the grievances of people who blame their problems on them. The idea that you have to vote for Trump because the FBI was “unfair” to him is nothing if not some barmy epiphenomena of a collective persecution complex, as is the potted idea that if you insult or offend Trump, you’re insulting or offending the “74 million Americans” who voted for him. Kevin McCarthy demands an apology from Biden for saying some Trump supporters are semi-fascists. We can argue about the numbers, but it strikes me as unequivocally true that some Trump supporters are, in fact, semi-fascists. CPAC had some installation art intended to make peoples’ hearts bleed for the January 6 rioters. They even ran an electronic banner wallowing in their victimhood status proclaiming, “We Are All Domestic Terrorists.” Just this week, Trump promised that if elected he would issue pardons and an apology to the convicted criminals he encouraged to assault the Capitol. I can’t believe I have to say this, but if you willingly beat up a cop or defecated in the halls of Congress, you are owed neither an apology nor a pardon.Trump’s cult of personality fuels this cult of victimhood, but it’s a larger phenomenon. The right’s obsession with media bias and cancel culture—despite the obvious merits of many complaints—is only understandable in this larger context. Lots of avowed Christians see their victim status—and the politics that attend it—as an outsized source of their identity. White supremacists are nothing if not peddlers of theories of their victimization.Inherent to seeing yourself as a victim is bemoaning the unfairness of the system, double standards, etc. This only makes sense. If you thought you deserved your plight or some insult, you wouldn’t see yourself as a victim. Losers only whine like victims when they think they lost unfairly. The insulted only complain when they think the insult was misplaced.There’s plenty of room to complain about unfairness or even injustice without crossing the line into a quasi-religious theory that denies individuals of their personal agency and personal responsibility—two concepts that are foundational to both conservatism and the American project. Conservatives see this clearly when criticizing the left, but they are blind to it on their own side. That’s in part because populism has become institutionalized on the right, and populism as a political and psychological phenomenon is always about perceived victim status. They are against us, and we are righteous.Various & SundryI’m going to invoke author—and editor’s privilege—and give a small example of the above in defense of The Dispatch and specifically one of our writers. A few weeks ago, we ran a piece by our excellent reporter Alec Dent about the young new right in Washington. In the course of writing the piece, Alec came into possession of a recording of a Twitter Spaces chat in which Nate Hochman, a former Dispatch intern and current writer at National Review, engaged in a colloquy with Nick Fuentes, an infamous racist, antisemite, and white supremacist (though he denies these things through an incel’s coporaphagic grin). Alec included some quotes from that exchange and a fulsome statement from Hochman admitting his error in engaging Fuentes too generously and, at times, seemingly approvingly. Hochman says he did so to goad Fuentes into a more fulsome debate. Whether that was a good idea or not—I vote not—Hochman admitted the error, and we quoted the admission at length. “I said some really stupid things, which I don't actually believe,” he said. Personally, I think nothing good is gained from treating fever swamp bigots as a faction of the right with some valuable contributions to make, either as part of some broader popular front or as worthy interlocutors within the right. Over the years, National Review, sometimes painfully and tardily, exerted a lot of time and energy arguing for bright lines and fortified borders between such voices and respectable conservatism.Bethany Mandel disagrees, and that’s fine. She has every right to embrace a different strategy in dealing with bigots, and she thinks more is to be gained by trying to talk them out of their wrongness. This might be a commendable interpersonal strategy, but I think it’s profoundly wrongheaded as an institutional, public approach. We simply differ on this. Everyone has a right to their opinion.But not to their own facts. In a piece for The Spectator, “In defense of the ‘canceled’ Nate Hochman,” she accuses Dent and The Dispatch of shoddy practices. Note: She doesn’t say the story is wrong. She concedes that “the Dispatch’s reporting is accurate” and adds that Hochman “admits as much.”But she says that we tried to cancel Hochman. Having excellent sources when it comes to my own motives, not to mention our internal editorial discussions, I can report that this is false. Mandel might have known this if she actually called anyone at The Dispatch for comment, as you’d think she might in a piece opining on good journalistic practices.She also says that “the Dispatch sent the quotes, without context, to Hochman’s employers” and claims that the Fund for American Studies (TFAS) revoked Hochman’s Robert Novak Fellowship based on an email Dent sent TFAS asking for comment about Hochman’s praise for Fuentes. (In contrast with his manful admission of error, Hochman has recently publicly complained about the unfairness of Dent’s email, too.) The problem is that this isn’t true either. Dent talked with TFAS at great length and on numerous occasions and provided the organization with the full 75-minute audio file (which Hochman is free to release if he thinks more context will cast him in a better light or us in a worse one). This leaves out whatever other fact-finding TFAS did on its own. Similarly, we provided National Review with ample additional context—as did Alec’s actual article. Mandel is right that we didn’t provide more context beyond an initial email to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another sponsor of Hochman’s work. But that’s because ISI refused to talk to Dent, apparently preferring to feed a misleading tale to Mandel, who promptly wrote it up credulously.This is all very inside baseball and not worth even this much time or space. Nate Hochman’s a promising young writer, and I wish him well. But I think that he—like a lot of people on the very young, very online, so-called new right—is misreading the moment in myriad ways that are good neither for him nor conservatism. I think he made a mistake, and I was glad he admitted as much. I think he should have left it there and Mandel probably should have too. But as his initial admission seemed to confirm, he’s not a victim and Dent’s—by all accounts accurate—article doesn’t make us victimizers, never mind cancelers. And no amount of tiresome and uninformed grievance peddling on social media is going to change that fact.Canine update: The quadrupeds had a grand time in Maine and New Hampshire—when there wasn’t thunder. Gracie got in some very important sleeping. I think Pippa may more properly be called a New English Springer Spaniel, she likes that neck of the woods so much. Though who can doubt how much she’d like the mother country? But Gracie really didn’t like the drive—in either direction. She complained vocally for hundreds of miles. But man, she’s such a great cat. On the drive back, the Fair Jessica would let her out in grassy secluded spots and the Queen would find a shady spot to pee before trotting back to the car. Still, I think the days of long drives for Grace are at an end. Meanwhile, everyone is still struggling a bit to get back into the familiar routines here at home.  ICYMILast Friday’s comforting G-FileLast weekend’s RuminantThe Remnant with Sarah IsgurDeconstructing Biden’s student debt proposalGrading Gorby on a curveThe Remnant with Katherine Mangu-WardThe Dispatch Podcast on the DOJ’s disclosureAnd now, the weird stuff.Fiduciary troubleCasuallyDevilled Customer serviceGoated

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.We’re all parsing The Speech, Joe Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” address about the growing anti-constitutionalism of Republican extremism. But we should first consider how hard it is to evaluate a speech that no president should have to give.Before we turn to Biden, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Don’t believe the generals.
What if Joan of Arc wasn’t a woman?
Abortion could define California’s elections.
A Sad DutyJoe Biden told us last night that American democracy is under attack. He did so in plain language and left no doubt about either the dire nature, or the source, of the threat. Most important, he named names—including, finally, Donald Trump. The president took a political risk and spoke the hard truth: that a significant number of citizens of the United States of America, concentrated in the rotted-out shell of the Republican Party, have become extremists who are engaged in anti-constitutional opposition to our system of government.Whenever a president gives a speech, pundits, analysts, and citizens all jump to grade the exercise. Was it a great speech or just a good speech? Did it hit the right marks? Did it serve the right constituency? Did it help or hurt his party?This speech, however, defies such analysis. (I have some serious complaints about the optics and staging. I’ll get to those.) Instead, we should be deeply troubled that Joe Biden had to give this speech at all.And make no mistake: He had to give it. His duty demanded it. As Biden rightly said, the American democracy faces an “ongoing attack” from what he termed “MAGA Republicans” who do not respect the Constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people, or the results of free elections. No president could remain silent under such circumstances.Indeed, I’m not sure it was strong enough. I bristled a bit when the president spoke of the reasonable Republicans with whom he could work. (“Joe Manchin?” I wondered.) Who are these Republicans? Where are they? If you’re going to give a speech about how millions of people now live, as Biden said, in the “shadow of lies,” and you think there are also reasonable people among them, you should encourage them to come into the open and fight alongside you.As someone who once wrote speeches for a few politicians, I would also take points off here and there for a loss of focus. I’m sure it was important to some staffers to get in digs about prescription drugs, guns, and clean energy, but whoever took the final pass on the draft should have gotten out the red pen. This wasn’t the time.Mostly what I felt watching the president was both sympathy and a kind of horror that he was having to say any of this at all. And so I simply cannot judge it as anything but a sad duty, the same kind of speech a president must give in the face of a national tragedy. These are not speeches anyone wants to write or give. Nonetheless, if I had to pick out a line that will resonate in history, I think—or I hope—that it will be Biden’s reminder that democracy requires sensible, tolerant, and mature human beings in order to work:
Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: Either they win or they were cheated … You can’t love your country only when you win.
It really is that simple.Substance aside, if there’s one place this speech was a bungle, it was in the staging. Optics matter; bathing the president in red so that he looked like His Infernal Eminence, Joseph Biden, Lord of the Underworld, was a bad idea. The podium looked like it was set up for a reading from the Necronomicon. Biden, using light as a metaphor, should have been standing in actual light.I have also taken a galactic amount of steam on social media for being among those who objected to the placement of two Marines in semidarkness behind Biden. People on Twitter flooded me with pictures of presidents and military people, proving only that no one understood the problem. Yes, presidents routinely use military people as backdrops, something I rarely like seeing. It is almost always, however, at the White House, or on military bases, in front of military audiences, at military-themed events, and so on. Giving a speech about democracy in downtown Philadelphia and bringing your own Marines is not something I recall ever seeing. Frankly, staging Marines as if they are the president’s Praetorian Guards is the sort of thing Trump would love.In any case, Biden did what he had to do. We have reached a watershed in American politics. The president of the United States has told us directly that our system of government is under attack. What happens next is, in every way, up to us.Related:
The justification for Joe Biden’s speech
Biden gambles that “we the people” still exist
U.S. job growth slowed in August but remained generally strong, according to the latest jobs report from the Labor Department.
Russia is postponing the reopening of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline—one of Europe’s main gas-supply pathways. The country said it discovered an issue during maintenance.
A detailed inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search, released today, revealed that classified documents were mixed with personal items in storage boxes, and that officials found empty folders that had contained classified documents.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry gives eight pieces of college advice that people don’t offer enough.
The Books Briefing: Nicole Acheampong explores the boundaries that a romance novel can break.
You’ve Probably Seen Yourself in Your MemoriesBy Jacob Stern
Pick a memory. It could be as recent as breakfast or as distant as your first day of kindergarten. What matters is that you can really visualize it. Hold the image in your mind.
Now consider: Do you see the scene through your own eyes, as you did at the time? Or do you see yourself in it, as if you’re watching a character in a movie? Do you see it, in other words, from a first-person or a third-person perspective? Usually, we associate this kind of distinction with storytelling and fiction-writing. But like a story, every visual memory has its own implicit vantage point. All seeing is seeing from somewhere. And sometimes, in memories, that somewhere is not where you actually were at the time.
What babies hear when you sing to them
Photos of the week, from La Tomatina to a steam fair
(Obie Oberholzer / Redux)
Read. A writer and parent suggests five books that are helping her raise children in a broken world. And there’s still time to pick something up from our summer reading guide, which has a book for every mood.If you’ve been trying to read lately but nothing’s sticking, we suggest turning to this list of 12 books to help you love reading again.Watch. In theaters, Three Thousand Years of Longing showcases the whimsical, intellectual chemistry of its stars.At home there’s Benediction, available to stream on multiple platforms, a biography of a famed poet by an empathetic filmmaker. (Or check out the rest of the options on our list of the 10 must-watch indie films of the summer.)Looking to start a TV show? Rutherford Falls, on Peacock, is a buoyant comedy about a small town struggling to honor Native rights and traditions. (And be sure to read our full list of underseen TV shows you should watch.)Play our daily crossword.P.S.A while back, I wrote about my late-night television addiction, and specifically about the wonderful and weird network known as MeTV. Unfortunately, I can no longer get MeTV—rest assured, I’m working on it—so I thought I’d offer two offbeat movie recommendations for those of you who are insomniacs like me. Both of them are 1980s gems that take place in the middle of the night: Into the Night, directed by John Landis, and After Hours, a Martin Scorsese picture. I drove a taxi in graduate school, and what I love about both movies is how they capture the way a city, after the bars close, has a different personality. And they’re both fun. Both of them were flops when they were released within months of each other in 1985 but have since found their cult audiences over the years.Their plots, oddly enough, are similar: Young men (Jeff Goldblum in Los Angeles, Griffin Dunne in New York), restless late at night, venture into the city, stray too far from home, and get mixed up with beautiful but possibly unstable women (Michelle Pfeiffer and Rosanna Arquette, respectively). Dark comedy, violence, and general paranoia ensue. To say more would be to give away too much, but watch for a cameo by David Bowie in L.A. and a kooky turn by Verna Bloom in New York.The Daily is off for Labor Day, but I’ll be back with you on Tuesday. Enjoy your weekend.– TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

President Joe Biden’s primetime speech was ostensibly dedicated to itemizing domestic threats to the “soul of the nation,” all of which apparently emanate from the pro-Trump right. It was billed as an urgent call to action on a matter of grave national concern, but what the president turned in was a stump speech. In the process, he cheapened the moment, commodified the public’s apprehension over a rising tide of illiberalism on America’s political fringes, and strengthened the very menace he set out to condemn. Worst of all, these were not unintended consequences. That was Joe Biden’s goal.

Hours before Biden’s address, White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre gave reporters a preview of what they could expect. The president’s address would invoke themes he discussed in August 2017, in the immediate wake of racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. It would also harken back to his first inaugural address, where he was flanked by a Capitol Building still scarred from the January 6 riot. “You think about what we’re seeing today,” Jean-Pierre said. “You think about the battle that continues.”

Those two traumatic events had self-evident national significance, and Biden’s decision to weigh in on them met a delicate moment in American history with the aim of cooling the passions that fueled violence. But what occasioned Biden’s speech last night? It was not preceded by any episode of mass violence, no outpouring of primitive racial antagonism. The January 6 rioters are being systematically prosecuted by the legitimate executors of American justice, in whose crosshairs even the former president has found himself. What crisis is the American right precipitating? A keen observer might conclude that the acute “threat” to which the White House is responding is the Democratic Party’s political peril. If Democratic voters are not as anxious as the White House, the president’s party will lose political power to the GOP in America’s fair and impartial elections. How perverse.

Indeed, the goal of Biden’s demagoguery could only be to reinforce and accelerate the GOP’s amassing around Trump’s orbit, not to loosen the former president’s hold on his party. Biden opened with a perfunctory caveat, saying that the number of treasonous Republicans was likely to be small. But he then proceeded to draw the largest possible circumference around what constitutes the MAGA movement to capture as many conservatives as possible.

“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards,” Biden insisted. They’re after your “right to choose,” your “right to contraception,” your “right to marry who you love.” The president is here referring, in part, to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in Dobbs, in which he alone maintained that the Court’s decision imperils other precedents based on substantive due process. Disagree with that rationale all you like, but Biden equated this jurisprudential philosophy with street violence and the demolition of America’s institutions. There is no equivalence between those insurrectionary activities and the banal—indeed, proper—conduct of America’s courts. To make that connection in voters’ minds is reckless and irresponsible.

If it wasn’t yet obvious that the objective of this speech was to brand Republican voters “pro-insurrectionist,” the president’s whiplash-inducing swerve into a State of the Union address should be clarifying. What does Biden’s Covid-relief package, infrastructure spending, and gun-control legislation have to do with combating illiberal sentiments on the right? Biden is hoping that the case for Democratic governance enthuses otherwise listless Democratic voters. This served no other purpose than to incept in voters’ minds the idea that even opposing Democratic policy preferences renders you a little suspect. “American democracy only works,” Biden insisted, “if we respect our legitimate political differences.” By his own logic, therefore, the president is himself a reactionary.

Even the press’s formerly inexhaustible patience with this administration has been tested by this event. The Biden team baited reporters with the promise of a White House event only to deliver a campaign-trail speech festooned with the trappings of taxpayer-funded state power. To their credit, some prominent reporters refused to look past Biden’s decision to violate presidential norms as he was attacking his predecessor for the same. It may not last, but this address gave the press license to be a little less pliant.

Finally, with this ham-fisted attempt at psychological manipulation to raise Donald Trump from the political dead, the president has foreclosed on the idea that the Democratic campaign operatives spending millions to boost MAGA candidates in Republican primaries have gone rogue. This is a party-wide effort to elevate the very faction that supposedly represents an existential threat to the republic. The exquisite cynicism of this charade is breathtaking.

Had Biden set out to deliver a lofty sermon on the fragility of the American experiment and the Founders’ suspicions of ambitious men, it might have been a valuable exercise. The menace Joe Biden ostensibly sought to warn Americans about is real. But the president did not embark on a selfless effort to preserve American propriety and norms against anti-democratic forces. He did his best to strengthen the very movement he insists is a mortal threat to American democracy. He tethered himself and his administration to the Democratic Party’s material support for the MAGA movement. He undermined his mission, and he cheapened the office he holds.

If you’re inclined to accept Joe Biden’s premise—that “MAGA Republicans” represent “a threat to this country”—you should be furious at the way Biden commodified your solemn cause. Whoever conceived of this misadventure should be stripped of their capacity to debase the office of the presidency further. That does, however, assume that this wasn’t Biden’s idea in the first place. Given how incandescently boneheaded this spectacle was, we can’t rule that out.

President Biden’s abrupt move from the political outhouse to penthouse in a few short weeks has been head-spinning.
His approval ratings had been in a slump for nearly a year, hitting a low in July. The dominant media narrative was that he and the Democrats were accomplishing little despite having control of both Congress and the White House and that voters would make them pay in the November midterms. In fact, as Biden battled COVID through late July, some Democrats even started saying he should not run for re-election in 2024, intimating that he was too old and unpopular.
Then, things shifted. Democrats pushed through several major bills, including one on gun safety, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the surprise $2.9 billion Inflation Reduction Act, and suddenly these, along with Biden’s earlier legislative wins and foreign policy achievements, drew renewed attention in news stories and praise from pundits — and voters — saying the president is giving Democrats momentum heading into the fall.
The Gazette asked Thomas Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard Kennedy School who studied the media’s coverage of the 2016 and 2020 presidential cycles, to explain the hasty shift in tone on Biden. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Thomas Patterson
GAZETTE: All presidents go through ups and downs in the press, but this 180-degree shift on Biden seemed unusually swift. What happened?
PATTERSON: The press always does this. There is a meta narrative that settles into the news coverage and that frames even how journalists look at developments. With some of the bills coming through the Congress, there was more talk about what was dropped out of them than what benefits were in them, as if he was dealing with the same kind of Congress that Obama had. Obama, up until Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death, had a filibuster-proof Senate and a huge majority of the House. Biden has a very narrow House majority, and unless you keep all the Democrats together on these bills, most times you don’t have a chance.
There’s almost no accounting of the context in which leadership is taking place — that’s been a longtime complaint about the press back to the Hutchins Commission of the late ’40s. There’s very little context, very little attempt to put into a shape and a form and background that gives people a more complete understanding. They just go for the bottom line: “He’s not doing all that well.”
Those are longstanding tendencies and weaknesses in coverage and a lot of it goes to a space limitation. They don’t always have the time and space to dig into context, to let people know what’s actually going on, so they go for the quick and easy, which is “Boy, did he screw this one up.” He’s probably getting too much credit at the moment for the good things. A lot of the “turnaround” is the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

"Is Biden maximizing a very bad situation? He didn’t get dealt a good hand. Has he done as much as he could possibly have done with that hand? That should have been the question. It was never the question.”

GAZETTE: Was this a justified reaction to a spate of significant news that occurred within two weeks or was it a case of the press caught flat-footed on two huge stories — the Inflation Reduction Act and the death of an al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri — that sparked a collective reevaluation of the prevailing narrative of an ineffectual White House?
PATTERSON: I think you’re onto something here. Even if you go back and look at the abortion coverage and how Biden was portrayed, the reporting was all about why didn’t he have executive orders already in place? Why was he behind the curve? I wrote a book in the ’90s about media narratives. When your poll numbers are bad, almost everything that’s said about you is going to be bad because it fits the narrative. So, the press is always looking for where the weakness is that illustrates why you’re stumbling around. On the other hand, when things are on the rise, the press is picking out, from all the things going on at any given time, those things that shed someone in a good light.
GAZETTE: What does this episode tell us about how the press covers politics?
PATTERSON: If you think about political journalists, they read each other; they talk to each other a lot. There’s kind of a groupthink about where things are. And then, they have some common indicators, and, obviously, with Biden’s poll numbers being in the tank, it’s hard to tell a good story about a president. But, in some ways, that’s the point: It’s the external environment that often drives the narrative as much as the realities.
It’s died down recently, but age was a very big sub-theme of the narrative about Biden. I never saw a single story that ever connected his age to questions of how would a 50-year-old have dealt with a Senate that was 50-50? There was no accounting for how much is age and how much is other factors, but that became almost like gospel and then every time somebody talked about “maybe we need to change horses in 2024 because of age,” suddenly because age is on the radar, that’s more likely to be a story.
All the things we know about cue-taking within journalism are always in play and go a long way to explain these things. What studies have shown — the economy is a very good example of this — is usually the coverage is about a month or two behind the reality. The press turnaround in Biden’s case was pretty fast, but ordinarily, when the conditions on the ground change, it takes a while for that to work its way into the journalism narrative. You started this narrative; you’re building off this narrative. Pieces that support it stand out more when they happen because that is the way you’re looking at the world: “Biden’s weak,” “things aren’t going well,” “he didn’t get that done.” You start to see those things. We all do this; this is the way our minds work. It’s not just journalism. We’re looking at normal human behavior here.
GAZETTE: Has the coverage of President Biden generally been more negative than warranted? How does it compare to the way Trump, Obama, and other presidents were covered?
PATTERSON: I think it’s journalism as usual, even though I think he’s had a tough ride. Those may seem contradictory, but Trump had a better hand his first year. Congress was more favorably balanced for Republicans — he didn’t need all of them to get something done. He got one big bill through, that was the 2017 Tax Cuts and jobs bill. Biden has done a lot more than that.
It’s hard to compare him with Obama. Democrats had large majorities then, but they didn’t deal with “the Dreamers;” they didn’t deal with immigration reform; they didn’t deal with climate change in any significant way. And yet, Obama got quite good coverage. He also got much better coverage in 2008 than Hillary Clinton did. The press really hammered her. Press was as much the reason she lost that election as Obama.
Bill Clinton, in the first two years, had a much better Congress than Biden. He got quite a bit done, but he had the better hand. That, in my mind, means journalists have to look at the conditions under which presidents are operating. Once in a while, like LBJ in ’65, Franklin Roosevelt in ’33, you can do great things as president if you have huge majorities in the Congress. When you don’t have this kind of majority, you can’t. It’s just not possible. So, is Biden maximizing a very bad situation? He didn’t get dealt a good hand. Has he done as much as he could possibly have done with that hand? That should have been the question. It was never the question.
GAZETTE: The press came under heavy criticism, by you and many others, for coverage of the 2016 and 2020 elections. Which lessons remain unlearned?
PATTERSON: If Trump runs again, throw the rulebook out. Journalism covered Trump unlike anybody they’ve covered before. And it’s not a Republican thing; it’s much more the press as a watchdog of democratic norms. It’s an undervalued role that they play and a really important one. Those supersede any kind of journalistic norm about fairness, objectivity, and the like. At the moment, the Republicans have gone deep into the dark side of democracy, so it’s a little hard for journalists to ignore. That would really go against their centuries-long tradition. This is about small “d” democracy; this isn’t about partisanship. I do expect the press not to get into the “he said/she said” false equivalencies. And anytime that a party begins to engage in bigotry and use prejudice as a cudgel, the press needs to call that out as a violation of democratic norms.

The principles of classical liberalism that underlie the American political system emerged in an era, the late 17th century, when people were exhausted by violent religious wars. The philosophy that eventually created our democracy was therefore designed to “lower the temperature of politics,” as Francis Fukuyama has recently written, to take issues of existential truth off the table so that people could live in safety. In liberal democracies, citizens were persuaded to adopt a culture of moderation, restraint, and adherence to the rule of law; respect for the rights of others to think what they want; support for independent courts, checks and balances, and neutral institutions such as election boards. None of that has necessarily been very inspiring to people who want high emotion, feelings of unity, or moral crusades in public life. In Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama argues that the values of liberal democracy are by definition “thinner than those offered by societies bound by a single religious doctrine,” and he is right.[Shadi Hamid: America without God]This is the deep source of the most serious problem facing Joe Biden, and not just Joe Biden: how to energize citizens to defend moderation, how to create excitement about institutions that were designed not to be exciting, how to build enthusiasm for the political center—the people of all political beliefs who still respect the rules and understand why they are important. Above all, how to get Americans to see that the challenge presented by the “MAGA Republicans,” as the president called them in his speech last night, is not a normal political challenge. Trump’s political movement is not a threat to liberal democracy because of its beliefs about taxes, spending, welfare, immigration, energy policy, or even abortion, however vehemently some Americans might disagree with them. Nor is it threatening because it is conservative, for it is not conservative in the traditional sense at all.MAGA Republicans are rather a threat because their leader does not accept the outcome of elections when he loses them; because he does not believe that the rule of law applies to him; because he does not adhere to the culture of restraint, tolerance, and moderation; and because he is now seeking to help elect other politicians who feel the same way. In their drive to change the political system, and to ensure that they can retain power even if they lose, Trump’s followers have verbally and sometimes physically attacked Capitol police officers, election workers, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and civil servants. He and his acolytes use violent language, and they inspire violence in return. As Biden put it last night, they “tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”For most of his presidency, Biden has dealt with this problem by largely ignoring it, scarcely mentioning Trump at all. Instead, he sought to change the subject, to speak about infrastructure or climate policy rather than existential issues. As a way of dealing with violent political division, this tactic has a long history. It was used in Northern Ireland, for example, where the idea was to get people to talk about building community centers so that they would stop talking about killing one another. Some European politicians challenged by the far-right in their own countries have tried something similar. Pablo Casado, until recently the leader of the Spanish center right, once told me he wanted to focus on the economic issues underlying the culture wars. He hoped to build support among people who wanted a pragmatic conversation, not an ideological one.[David Frum: The justification for Biden’s speech]But in a culture as noisy as ours, and in a world where social-media algorithms automatically promote the most emotional thoughts and messages, this tactic can fail. Moderate language gets drowned out. Talk of infrastructure sounds boring; climate change seems too distant a prospect to matter. Restraint can seem like weakness or indifference. Another European politician, the Polish center-right leader Donald Tusk (who is also fighting an antidemocratic political movement), has told me that he thinks politicians have to be “willing to sacrifice something, risk something” or their voters won’t take them seriously. In Biden’s case, moderation can also seem like exhaustion, as if he is too old and too tired to care deeply anymore.But clearly Biden does care. And so he has taken the risky and genuinely brave decision to use emotional language in defense of our rules-based political system. The speech he gave last night at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the place where a lot of those rules were written, was indeed lit and orchestrated to evoke drama. It was also meant to evoke strong feelings of patriotism, unity, and connection. Biden referenced American history—”We, the people, have burning inside of each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall”—as well as American pride. He contrasted Trump’s dark, apocalyptic worldview with his own: “I see a different America, an America with an unlimited future, an America that’s about to take off.” The United States, he said, “is still the beacon to the world, an ideal to be realized, a promise to be kept. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred.”Biden in fact used the religious word sacred three other times, speaking of “sacred ground,” the “sacred flame,” and the “sacred proposition that all are created equal in the image of God.” But he sought to evoke anger as well as patriotism. When he excoriated the MAGA Republicans, he did not use the normal political language of disagreement but called their movement a form of “extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Finally he issued a call to action, telling Americans what he thought they should do about it: not commit retaliatory violence but “speak up, speak out, get engaged, vote, vote, vote!”The use of political emotion in a deeply divided society carries some dangers. It is guaranteed to provoke an equally emotional response on the other side, raising temperatures instead of lowering them. Angry language makes the other side angry too, and can also galvanize voters. Precisely that reaction rippled across pro-Trump media and social media last night after the speech. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared that the president had “crossed into a very dangerous, very dangerous place.” Biden was accused of “criminalizing political opposition.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Biden had chosen “to divide, demean, and disparage his fellow Americans.” The Republican Party will undoubtedly start fundraising among those Americans who do indeed feel demeaned and disparaged. I expect that some Democrats will feel uneasy about Biden’s speech for the same reason.Another danger is that the speech will be seen as partisan, as a plea for people to vote for Democrats, rather than as a call for all Americans to support liberal democracy. Clearly the White House was aware of this danger, which is why Biden addressed himself to “Democrats, independents, and mainstream Republicans.” That’s also why he went out of his way to note that “not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology. I know, because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.” Unfortunately, the timing of the speech, in the run-up to the midterm elections, will lead many to dismiss it anyway. So will Biden’s oblique and (in this context) possibly unnecessary references to abortion and contraception. Republican politicians and television presenters will deliberately frame the speech so that GOP voters interpret it as partisan, and many voters will only ever hear that commentary, and not listen to the words of the speech at all.Most dangerous of all, though, is the possibility that in a tribalized political system like ours, the Constitution, once it is championed by one political camp, may itself come to seem like a partisan cause, a thing that Democrats and maybe Liz Cheney care about, but nobody else. If, to be a fully paid-up member of the Republican Party, you have to go on pretending that the 2020 election was stolen and the January 6 insurrectionists were patriots, then you may eventually come to believe that rule of law is something to be defeated, not respected. Election laws become something that your enemies care about, not you.[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]Biden is betting that we are not at that stage yet. The language of his speech presumed that, in making an emotional appeal in favor of liberal democracy, he was still speaking to a decisive majority of the country. That’s why he kept using the expression we the people, a phrase that, of course, references the Constitution, but also expresses a sense of unity—a unity that should, in principle, still include people with a huge range of political tastes and views.  “We the people,” he said, “accept the results of free and fair elections.” We the people “see politics, not as total war, but mediation of our differences.” And once again: “We the people,” Biden said, “have burning inside of each of us the flame of liberty that was lit here at Independence Hall.”That sentence assumes that the 17th-century ideas debated in Philadelphia in the 18th century still mean something to the citizens who live by them today. Biden clearly believes they do. The future of liberal democracy in America depends on whether he is right.  

CERRITOS, Calif.—Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.“A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion” that would prohibit the procedure even in deep-blue California.“You name it, she’s on the extreme end of all these issues,” Chen said. “She’d be a complete outlier even in deep-red Kansas because even in Kansas they protected the right to an abortion. So for her to try to represent [this district] does not make any sense.”Chen’s exhortation captured the outsize role abortion rights could play across this year’s unusually large field of competitive U.S. House races in California, after the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this summer. The Golden State offers Democrats the nation’s single largest concentration of opportunities to offset losses elsewhere by flipping House seats now held by Republicans. And the abortion-rights issue offers Democrats their best chance to do so—particularly with a state constitutional amendment protecting access to the procedure also on the November ballot as Proposition 1.“Because we have this on the ballot, Republicans cannot run away from this issue,” says Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant who is advising Christy Smith, the party’s nominee against Republican Representative Mike Garcia in another Los Angeles–area district. “Every Republican in a competitive district is vulnerable with this issue at the top of the ballot as a constitutional amendment. I think it is going to drive turnout.”[Read: The Kansas abortion shocker]California will provide a crucial measure of how broadly the abortion issue may benefit Democrats this year. On both sides, there’s agreement that abortion’s increased prominence will strengthen Democrats in districts with a large number of white-collar voters—including the coastal seats south of Los Angeles now held by Democratic Representatives Katie Porter and Mike Levin. Less clear is whether the issue will prove as powerful in districts, such as those held by Republican Representatives Garcia and David Valadao, with larger numbers of blue-collar and Latino voters who may be acutely feeling the effects of inflation. The district in which Chen is challenging Steel demographically falls somewhere in between.“Presumably you’ll see coastal Republicans split with the party on things like choice,” predicts Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic strategist and the publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which analyzes state elections. “On the other hand, when you are looking at some inland and Central Valley districts, they are very different,” he told me. Although “there’s all this chatter that abortion is so important,” Sragow added, “I suggest most Americans do not wake up with abortion the thing they are most worried about,” particularly in working-class communities.Though solidly Democratic at the state level—Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is cruising to reelection this year without serious Republican opposition after defeating a GOP-backed recall effort—congressional contests in California have proved highly susceptible to swings in the national mood. As part of the “blue wave” in 2018, the party flipped seven Republican-held seats, reducing the GOP to its smallest share of California’s congressional delegation since the 1880s. But in 2020, Republicans recaptured four of those districts—a key part of their unusual success at gaining House seats nationwide while losing the White House.Earlier this year, when inflation was raging and the Democratic legislative agenda seemed stalled, Republicans were optimistic about advancing farther across California by potentially ousting Democratic Representatives Josh Harder in the Central Valley and Porter and Levin in Orange and San Diego Counties. Although Democrats acknowledge that those races (and another Democratic-held open seat) remain competitive, they now see the opportunity to go on the offensive against Steel, Valadao, and Garcia, as well as potentially Representatives Ken Calvert and Young Kim in Southern California; they also see an opportunity to contest a Republican open seat in the Sacramento area.Several other issues have also contributed to this reversal of fortune: increased attention to gun violence after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; renewed focus on Donald Trump amid the revelations from the House January 6 committee and the firestorm over his mishandling of classified documents; and climate change after the passage of the Democrats’ slimmed-down reconciliation bill. But analysts in both parties see the Supreme Court decision reversing Roe as the pivotal factor shifting the congressional landscape across California. “We are just seeing an unprecedented level of outrage,” Representative Levin told me in an interview.As in other states, Republicans continue to express cautious optimism that frustration over inflation and disenchantment with the performance of President Joe Biden will outweigh views on abortion. “Of course [abortion] is going to be an issue, way more than it was in May of this year,” Lance Trover, a Republican consultant advising Representative Steel, who ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020, told me. “But at the end of the day, the fundamentals of the economy are going to be key.”California Republicans face an unusually powerful headwind in moving beyond the abortion issue. Almost all Republicans holding or seeking congressional seats have staked out hard-line anti-abortion positions that directly collide with polls showing deep and broad support for abortion rights across the state.Polling in July by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that more than two-thirds of state residents opposed the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. That included about three-fourths of African Americans and Asian Americans, seven in 10 white voters, and just over three-fifths of Latino voters. About three-fourths of independents, whom Republicans need to compete in California, because they are so outnumbered by registered Democrats, opposed the ruling. Opposition to the decision was greatest in the big blue metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but even in areas where Republicans have traditionally performed somewhat better, such as Orange and San Diego Counties and the Central Valley, preponderant majorities opposed the decision.In another survey released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times, more than seven in 10 California voters said they intended to support the constitutional amendment inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution.“From a public-opinion perspective, it’s a settled issue in California,” Mark Baldassare, the PPIC president, told me. “We have seen what we would describe as overwhelming support for abortion rights in California consistently in our polls over many, many years … That’s pretty consistent across demographic groups and regions of the state.”The state’s Republican congressional delegation—as well as the party’s challengers in the key races—have placed themselves firmly on the opposite side of that consensus. Four of the House Republicans facing the potentially toughest contests—Steel, Garcia, Valadao, and Calvert—signed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. All of them but Calvert have co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, a Republican bill that would define the unborn as a person under the Constitution from “the moment of fertilization” and effectively ban abortion nationwide, legal scholars say. Representative Kim, another Republican facing a potentially competitive race in an Orange County district, did not co-sponsor that bill, but has described herself as a “proud pro-life woman” who believes “the rights of the child must be respected.” The GOP challengers to Harder, Levin, and Porter have also publicly declared their opposition to legal abortion.As signs have grown of the backlash to the Supreme Court decision—including the Democratic victory in a New York congressional special election and the resounding defeat of a Kansas ballot initiative that would have opened the door to state abortion restrictions—several of the California Republicans have tried to obscure their positions. For instance, although the Life at Conception Act offers no exceptions and Steel earlier this year said she supported legal abortion only when the mother’s health was endangered, she told me in a statement, “I am pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest, and the health and life of the mother, and baby.” In a statement to the Los Angeles Times this week, Representative Garcia backed the same exceptions—which, again, are not included in the “life begins at conception” bill he is co-sponsoring.In her statement, Steel downplayed the possibility that a Republican-controlled Congress would seek to ban abortion nationwide, though notably without disavowing the idea: “Discussions surrounding a nationwide ban on abortion are purely hypothetical at this point,” she declared.But such vague dismissals may not dispel the vulnerability California Republicans face over the possibility of a national ban on abortion, particularly amid the parallel debate over amending the state constitution.Though neither supporters nor opponents of the constitutional amendment have yet raised much money, Newsom, who is emerging as a national leader for Democrats on cultural issues, is expected to campaign heavily for it and raise its visibility this fall. “I don’t want to give away our plans … but I would expect him to play a very prominent role,” Sean Clegg, a senior strategist for Newsom, told me. Abortion rights and the constitutional amendment to protect them, he added, are “going to have an effect in every single race in California.”[Conor Friedersdorf: Gavin Newsom, the Ron DeSantis of the left]The proposed amendment on the ballot in November represents the third level of protection for abortion rights in California. In earlier rulings, the state supreme court has already decided that the procedure is protected under the state constitution’s guarantees of liberty and privacy. This amendment, placed on the ballot by Newsom and the state’s Democratic-controlled legislature, adds an explicit guarantee that “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom … which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”Yet even all those reinforcing levels of protection for abortion rights in the California constitution would be preempted if Congress approved a national ban, legal analysts agree. The Life at Conception Act would surely face legal challenges if a future Republican-controlled Congress passes it, but should the law be upheld, it would override any California action to guarantee abortion rights, according to Cary Franklin, a constitutional-law professor at UCLA and the faculty director of its Center on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy. “If Congress were to pass a national ban on abortion, that would trump state law, even state constitutional law,” she told me.That’s a message Democrats are likely to pound across the state in the campaign’s final months. “If Steel has her way, she will pass a federal ban on abortion, which will override our protections here, and I think Californians are coming to realize that,” Chen, a Naval reservist and the owner of a business that manages commercial properties, told me. By contrast, Chen, like the other Democratic incumbents and challengers, supports legislation restoring a national right to abortion.Opponents of the state constitutional amendment, such as Steel, say it would authorize abortions at any point in pregnancy, ending current state restrictions after a fetus is viable outside the womb (unless the mother’s life is endangered). Its sponsors deny that interpretation, but it will likely become the centerpiece of the campaign against the amendment. “Pro-life people may have had enough,” Susan Swift Arnall, the vice president of legal affairs at California’s Right to Life League, told me. “They may say, ‘This is too far. This is too extreme … And we want to send a message back to the legislature that we don’t support abortion on demand for all nine months and even into the birth of the baby.’”But the greater likelihood is that the amendment mobilizes turnout among the decisive majority in the state who support abortion rights. “There’s no question the [Supreme Court] decision has really created a great deal of increased interest from women voters for sure, and not just Democrats,” Levin said. “We are talking about independents, even some Republicans. Those who historically haven’t voted in midterm elections, I think, are motivated.”By solidifying Democrats in suburbia, abortion rights’ growing visibility, like the increased focus on gun violence and renewed attention to Trump, may narrow the range of House districts the GOP can realistically contest both in California and nationwide, and lower the ceiling on their potential gains. But not enough voters may prioritize abortion to neutralize Republicans’ other advantages in economically strained areas. Like so much else in modern American politics, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe seems likely to further widen the chasm between white-collar and culturally cosmopolitan metropolitan areas trending toward the Democrats and blue-collar, socially conservative smaller places hardening in their support for the GOP, even in staunchly Democratic California.

Ryan Bourne is the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at the Cato Institute. Young families and many child-care workers were dealt a huge blow last month when a court upheld a pernicious D.C. day-care regulation. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismissed a suit challenging the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s requirement that D.C. day-care providers require a college degree. When the rule kicks in from December 2023, the result will be more expensive child care and fewer work opportunities for many vulnerable workers.

Putting legalities aside, the rule has always been truly dreadful economics. D.C. already has the highest-priced child care nationwide, with full-time center-based care for infants costing an average of $24,378 per year and even home-based care costing $18,425.

These figures amount to 79 percent and 60 percent of local median income for single parents, respectively, making child care simply unaffordable for the poorest, absent government support. Putting two kids into a child-care center in D.C. costs 41 percent more than the local average mortgage payment and nearly twice the cost of tuition at a public university.

Enforcing a new standard that requires carers to have an associate’s degree in early-childhood education or 24 credit hours in that subject to supplement an existing degree will squeeze the number of carers further, raising prices higher still.

The time and financial costs of obtaining the ​credentials create a new barrier to those considering working in the sector and encourages exit for those without the 10 years’ continuous experience needed to avoid the rule. Previous research from economists Diana Thomas and Devon Gorry has found that state requirements for lead carers to have even a high school diploma increase prices by 25 percent to 46 percent. The D.C. educational hurdle is much more stringent.

The impact of this supply squeeze will be highly regressive. Proponents of the rule argue it will improve child-care quality, which will lead to better child-development outcomes. Yet research by economists V. Joseph Hotz and Mo Xiao has found that increasing the average required years of education for center directors in other states reduced the number of child-care centers open. The resultant higher prices mean many poor or middle-income families cannot afford child care that works for them even if they can find it, forcing them toward informal arrangements or forgoing work opportunities entirely. The impact on the development of children being raised in financially poorer households and makeshift child-care settings has so far been ignored.

Then there is the effect on potential carers. For those low-qualification workers and poorer immigrants for whom English is not a first language, obtaining this qualification will be a tall order financially and instructionally. People in these groups, often with vast experience in raising their own children, are therefore denied the opportunity to care for others’ children for a living, even when parents consent. This is mutually destructive. Indeed, one can imagine many families might value their child being exposed to a different language at a young age, but this rule smothers this opportunity.

In opposing the regulation, the plaintiffs pointed out that, as structured, child-care workers would have to take local college courses that incorporate classes or electives unnecessary for the care of infants and toddlers. The court, laughably, argued in return that advanced mathematics or courses in Shakespeare could still be useful, “as any adult who has been flummoxed by a two-year-old repeatedly asking ‘why’ can attest.” Why, exactly, a child-care worker needs a formal qualification to answer 2-year-olds’ questions, when parents do not, is unclear.

In fact, it’s worth bringing things back to first principles here: If parents, with personal knowledge of their children’s wants and needs, decide that a certain home day-care provider is best, what business is it of the D.C. government to say what qualifications the carer should have? The fact that this policy has been delayed in implementation again and again since its adoption in 2016, with more workers carved out for exemption, is acknowledgment itself that this rule is contentious.

In the past year, Democratic federal legislators have pushed for federal programs that would cap families’ child-care spending. One reason child care is becoming more expensive to provide, however, is precisely because of government regulations that restrain the number of available workers.

D.C. will take this occupational licensing to extremes through these new education requirements. It is difficult not to wonder whether lawmakers’ and staffers’ desire for more federal demand-side subsidies is in part a result of the supply-side dysfunction they experience for their own families in Washington.

One year after the Biden administration’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan, the results are undeniable. The country has become a haven for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The Taliban is as oppressive today as it was during its iron-fisted rule prior to 9/11. The world is also less safe.

It didn’t have to be this way. In April 2021, when President Biden announced his plan for Afghanistan, he gave us a false choice: the U.S. either had to ramp up forces to battle the Taliban or abide by President Trump’s disastrous agreement with the Taliban and immediately leave. Biden never considered a phased withdrawal that would’ve given the U.S.-backed government in Kabul sufficient time to reorganize its defenses and fall back to a perimeter its troops could hold rather than pretending to govern the entire country.

Ultimately, Biden chose an immediate withdrawal, hoping the Kabul government would survive long enough to become someone else’s problem. He ignored numerous warnings that Kabul would fall within weeks of an American departure.

As forecasted, the Taliban seized upon the hasty pullout of U.S. forces – and immediately went on the offensive in the three and a half months between Biden’s announcement of withdrawal and the moment the last U.S. soldier departed Kabul.

The Taliban’s offensive was swift and effective. By the end of July, the Taliban controlled or contested three-quarters of the country. Kabul fell on Aug. 15, 2021. By the time the last soldier’s boots were on a plane outbound on August 30, 2021, only Panjshir, the last bastion of anti-Taliban forces, remained. Panjshir fell less than two weeks later.

After nearly 20 years of fighting, the Taliban had something it couldn’t dream of before 9/11 – a country fully under its control, with billions of dollars in U.S. weapons, and much more in munitions, fuel, military and police bases, and functioning government institutions.

Biden was determined to leave Afghanistan, consequences be damned. The false choice he offered – withdrawal or renewed U.S. commitment – ensured that the former was chosen. The American public and much of the U.S. political class tired of the so-called ‘endless’ wars and sought to disengage from Afghanistan and other terrorist hotspots.

Still, Afghanistan didn’t have to become what it is today. A phased withdrawal would’ve given a fighting chance to Afghans who didn’t want to succumb to the harsh rule of the Taliban.

This option was never considered because it wouldn’t have been pretty. It would have required the Afghan government to make painful choices about which swathes of the country would be left to the Taliban so that the remainder would become defensible.

What would a phased withdrawal have looked like? First, after a two-decade presence of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Afghan decision makers were never convinced the U.S. would leave. The U.S. needed to make clear this was, in fact, going to happen, but it would be done in a manner that would give the Afghan government and military an opportunity to reorient to fight the Taliban on its own. The Afghans needed to regroup, and the U.S. needed to give them that time.

The Afghan people needed a wartime leader who could make hard choices and a government that was responsive to local needs. The former warlords, who were largely excluded from the government and left sitting on the sidelines as the Taliban rampaged, needed to be brought back into the fold to shore up support.

The Afghan military needed to restructure to wean itself from U.S. combat support technology and fight without the complicated weapons systems that required American maintenance.

Additionally, the Afghan government and military needed to make the difficult decision of what it could – and more importantly – could not defend. When Biden announced the withdrawal, much of the south and east were under effective Taliban control or heavily contested. Without a U.S. presence, the Afghans needed to pull back, defend Kabul and surrounding provinces, and retake key districts in the north and northwest.

This choice would have effectively created a Northern Alliance 2.0, where Afghans who resisted Taliban rule carved out territory and battled the terror group.

This would be by no means an optimal solution, and there are no assurances it would have succeeded. It would have required patience and an ongoing U.S. commitment. But it was a solution that could have precluded the complete and swift collapse of the country to the butchers of the Taliban.

Not only would a Northern Alliance 2.0 outcome have benefited all Afghans who sought to avoid oppressive Taliban rule, but it would also have given the U.S. a foothold to monitor and target threats inside Afghanistan. The presence of Ayman al Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s leader, in Kabul just one month ago is a reminder that the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance is alive and well, and the terror group’s top-tier leaders are being provided safe harbor there.

The strike that killed Zawahiri took months to plan and execute and by all accounts, was a difficult endeavor given the challenges of time and distance that are inherent in over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations. A Northern Alliance 2.0 would have allowed the U.S. to base CIA, special forces, drones, and other aircraft needed to effectively monitor terror groups in Afghanistan and strike swiftly when needed.

The Biden administration never offered this option. It was all or nothing. America’s national security is now suffering, and the Afghan people have nothing.

Bill Roggio is a senior fellow at FDD and editor of FDD’s Long War Journal, which provides original reporting and analysis of the Global War on Terror from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, Iran, and beyond. He is also president of the nonprofit media company Public Multimedia Inc.

For more than seven years, every actor in American political life has orbited around Donald Trump. Every policy debate, every electoral contest has been sucked into the event horizon of the man’s immense personality. But for most of those years, the vanguard of the pre-Trump GOP preserved its behind-the-scenes influence over how Trump governed as president and helped guide the party’s populist evolution. No longer. In 2022, the GOP has presided over a fully Trumpified spectacle of political incompetence, and prospective midterm election voters are not impressed.

As the Republican Party’s initial shock and outrage at the the January 6 riots was replaced with a resolve to shout down anyone who even suggested that Trump was at all to blame, the wing of the GOP that concerns itself with candidate quality found itself on the outs. Exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, the pathway to success in Republican primary politics demands adopting Trump’s irascible affectation and parroting his preferred untruths. A number of the GOP’s top-tier recruits for high office declined to so debase themselves.

Vermont’s Phil Scott, once America’s most popular governor, resisted the party’s efforts to recruit him to run for U.S. Senate. Likewise, Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey, Maryland’s Larry Hogan, and New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu each declined the chance to run again in a statewide race. Not because they were sure to lose the general election, but because getting to the general would be a crippling experience. By and large, the political neophytes who won Trump’s approval have turned in unimpressive performances on the trail and struggled to attract the support of a majority of their state’s voters.

Making the sale to general-election voters demands that capable candidates abandon the passions that fueled their primary victories and assume a less polarizing demeanor—a move that many of Trump’s preferred candidates have either botched or rejected outright. But executing that pivot adroitly costs money, and the GOP is not awash in cash. Republican candidates, committees, and political organizations have languished in the fundraising department. By contrast, the former president is rolling in donor dough.

“Save America, Trump’s PAC, issues dozens of email appeals daily and raked in $103.7 million this cycle,” the Washington Examiner reported. The former president appears inclined to sit on this windfall ahead of another presidential run, but the cannibalization of the GOP’s online donor base has some Republican political professionals gnashing their teeth in frustration (off the record, of course).

While Donald Trump has always loomed large over Republican politics, he did not hog the national spotlight for much of the Biden administration. As Democratic political prospects dimmed in 2021, the party’s embattled figures did their level best to exhume Trump from the political tomb to which 2020’s voters had consigned him. Their efforts failed to mitigate the party’s losses, in part, because the menace represented by the former president was an abstraction. Pocketbook issues, on the other hand, were real and urgent. The Justice Department’s search of the president’s Mar-a-Lago residence has provided voters with a substantive demonstration that the Republican Party isn’t just a generic vehicle of opposition to Democratic governance. It remains wholly dedicated to Trump’s personality cult.

In March, a poll commissioned by the Wall Street Journal found that Joe Biden and Donald Trump each had the support of an equal 45 percent of voters in a hypothetical rematch in 2024. That figure remained essentially unchanged from the Journal’s November 2021 survey. Today, however, Biden leads in the Journal poll with 50 percent of the vote to Trump’s 44 percent. Trump’s favorability ratings have declined in the same period, as have respondents’ retroactive assessments of how he performed in office. What explains this reassessment besides the former president’s sudden ubiquity on the national stage?

Left-wing partisans and political professionals deserve little credit for deftly navigating dire political straits. They would like to credit Democratic legislative initiatives, Biden’s reckless giveaways, or even the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case (and their candidates’ opposition to it) for their good fortune. These are all unsatisfying explanations for the Democrats’ rebound.

The Democratic Party’s climate-change legislation is likely to be as relevant to voters in November as the first federal gun-control bill to become law in the last 30 years—which is to say, not at all. The president’s legally dubious debt-cancelation fiat polls well for now. But so, too, did his extension of the CDC’s eviction moratorium and his edict that imposed a vaccination mandate on private businesses. Neither survived the scrutiny of the courts, and Republicans did not suffer political consequences for endorsing constitutional propriety. More than a month after the Supreme Court overturned the precedents in Roe and Casey, a Washington Post-Schar School poll found that those who support preserving access to abortion procedures were still less certain to vote in the fall. The generic ballot test and the enthusiasm gap still favored Republicans.

As the GOP presented itself as the generic opposition to Democratic governance, Republicans passively benefited from Democratic overreach and maladministration. Republican candidates aren’t “generic” anymore, sure, but the party hasn’t spoken with one voice in support of a set of policy preferences. To the extent that GOP lawmakers and office seekers are speaking with one voice on anything over the last several weeks, it has been to express their unequivocal endorsement of Donald Trump on a near daily basis. It is no coincidence that those same several weeks have seen the GOP’s support in the polls decline and Democrats outperform expectations at the ballot box.

Even if the Republican Party’s establishmentarians were still willing to rescue the party from its voters, they lack the institutional authority to do so. Trumpism is unshackled, and voters seem inclined to render the very same verdict on this philosophy they rendered in 2018 and 2020. If Republicans blow the prospect of historic victories in November, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

Review of True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party by Adam Hilton (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

As the new socialist left deepens its engagement with mass politics, it is beginning to grapple with many of the same problems and dilemmas our predecessors encountered many years ago. Chief among them is the question of how to hold socialist officeholders accountable to the principles and programs of the organizations they are part of — and what to do when these imperatives inevitably clash with the exigencies of public office. In a notable essay in the 2018 Socialist Register, political scientist Adam Hilton proposed an ambitious organizational project for the US left: “A geographically rooted network of mass-member civic organizations, oriented toward building a base within working-class communities and labor unions that can also act as an effective independent pressure group on the Democratic Party.” Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has taken important but still limited steps in this direction, and the relationship between DSA-backed politicians elected on the Democratic ballot line and the organization can be complicated. Andre Vasquez, one of the six DSA members on Chicago’s city council, voted to approve the mayor’s 2021 municipal budget. The other five members, in line with the chapter’s position, voted against it. The chapter therefore issued a statement censuring Vasquez and called on him to resign his DSA membership. According to former DSA National Political Committee member Marianela D’Aprile, this was the right decision. In her view, it gave the chapter an opportunity to educate members and focus their attention on the budget fight: “Hundreds of socialists across the city were tuned into the city council budget meeting and paying attention to what was going on because we knew we’d have to make a decision about what to do about Andre if he voted yes. So it was a big lesson in how to engage in local politics.” These decisions are not always so clear-cut. Last year, DSA’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Working Group and others criticized US congresspeople and DSA members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Jamaal Bowman for their votes on $1 billion in funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile system. AOC voted “present” while Bowman voted yes. Some DSAers circulated a call to expel Bowman from DSA. The Lower Hudson Valley (New York) DSA chapter, however, took a more measured approach. It criticized him in a statement, saying “We are particularly disappointed that Jamaal Bowman, whom we endorsed, voted” for Iron Dome funding. But it did not call to expel him, nor did it rule out support for his reelection. In the end, DSA’s National Political Committee did not expel Bowman but made clear that it “will not re-endorse Bowman unless he is able to demonstrate solidarity with Palestine in alignment with expectations we have set.” Faced with these dilemmas, it makes sense to seek the wisdom of history. Many of us have consulted the history of the Second International, particularly the record of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) in its classical period, for guidance on how to tackle these issues. This is important history, and every socialist cadre should have at least a passing familiarity with it. But its practical relevance to our contemporary political context is very limited. From the shape of our constitutional order, to the characteristics of our political parties, to the size and strength of our labor movement, our situation is simply too different from the German Empire for a historical download of this kind to be successful. Fortunately, we have an example that is far closer to hand and directly relevant to the challenges facing US socialists today. That is the New Politics movement of the 1970s, which sought to transform the Democratic Party into a centralized, disciplined, programmatic party with a mass-membership base similar to the labor and social democratic parties found throughout the rest of the world, and in which DSA’s main predecessor organization, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, played a key role. Adam Hilton’s True Blues: The Contentious Transformation of the Democratic Party skillfully demonstrates how the New Politics movement both succeeded and failed to achieve its goals. In his telling, the hard-fought battle between extra-party groups from the New Left — the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements and the labor unions allied with them — and established officeholders shaped the Democrats into the party it is today. The political realignment DSA founder Michael Harrington and others sought really did happen, at least in part. Southern reactionaries were driven into the Republican Party, and the fusion of racial and labor liberalism inaugurated by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s was consolidated. At the same time, however, Democratic counterreformers defeated the most far-reaching proposals for institutional party reform, giving rise to a party coalition that was in certain respects more ideologically progressive but organizationally hollow. This story may lack the drama and grandeur of socialism’s halcyon days, but it is crucial for grappling with the big issues on our agenda and understanding the recent history of the socialist movement.

Political Parties à l’Américaine Political scientists distinguish between two different types of parties: externally mobilized and internally mobilized parties. The former are established by outsiders looking to fight their way into the political regime, like the German SPD and other major socialist and working-class parties. The latter are established by, in political scientist Martin Shefter’s words, “politicians who do occupy leadership positions in the prevailing regime and who undertake to mobilize and organize a popular following behind themselves,” typically to gain advantage against an opposing faction within the governing class. The major American parties are among the leading examples of this party type, which in the US case was also closely associated with widespread patronage instead of a dues-paying membership base. Until the turn of the twentieth century, American political parties were private political associations like their counterparts elsewhere in the world. They even printed their own ballots (commonly known as “tickets”) and distributed them to voters on election days, a practice that seemed particularly corrupt to “good government” mugwumps. In the absence of national electoral administration, these reformers sought to restrain political parties at the state and local levels, and their policy innovations sought to undermine the strength of political machines and party bosses. The American party system is quite unlike any other in the world. One of the most consequential reforms was the direct primary, which accelerated the transformation of political parties from private associations to, in political scientist Leon Epstein’s words, “public utilities.” In the US-style direct primary system, parties surrender not just the printing of official ballots to the state, but control over the right to bestow the party’s label on candidates as well. In Political Parties in the American Mold, Epstein argues that the “mandatory state-administered direct primary clearly transforms party nominations from the private to the public sphere. Party action thus becomes state action. Or, for the purpose of nominating its candidates, a party is made into an agency of the state.” Their candidate-nominating process was thus opened up to include all voters who registered their party preference with the state, not just officeholders or activists. In its seminal call for a more “responsible” party government, the American Political Science Association quoted a 1923 speech by Idaho senator William Borah to highlight this ambiguity of membership in American-style political parties: Any man who can carry a Republican primary is a Republican. He might believe in free trade, in unconditional membership in the League of Nations, in states’ rights, and in every policy that the Democratic party ever advocated; yet, if he carried his Republican primary, he would be a Republican. He might go to the other extreme and believe in the communistic state, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the abolition of private property, and in the extermination of the bourgeoisie; yet, if he carried his Republican primary, he would still be a Republican. Of course, party elites sought in many cases to limit who could register to vote or participate in party primaries, and in the first decades of the twentieth century the new rules effectively organized many poor and working-class people out of political participation. One of the most notorious examples of this was the “white primary” Southern Democrats ran to shut black voters out of the political process. But that practice was invalidated in 1944, when the Supreme Court overturned a Texas state election law in the Smith v. Allwright case. In this and subsequent cases, the courts affirmed the idea that the candidate nomination process should be a public affair regulated by the state, rather than the private business of a membership association. The result of this long and complicated process of development was a party system quite unlike any other in the world. By the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic Party had become a strange bricolage of social, ideological, and geographical elements: the new labor-liberal alliance rooted in the CIO, the political machines of the urban North, and the reactionary Bourbon Democrats of the ex-Confederacy. The New Politics reformers were not the first to try to make the Democratic Party more ideologically coherent, programmatically oriented, and legislatively disciplined. Organizations as varied as Congress of Industrial Organizations – Political Action Committee (CIO-PAC), the American Political Science Association, and the Democratic Study Group all pushed in this direction in the 1950s and 1960s, laying the groundwork for those who came after them. But the New Politics arguably came closest to realizing this vision in practice, thanks to the political opening created by the seismic conflicts of 1968.

Party of a New Type? Hilton seeks to explain how the 1970s struggles over institutional party reform gave rise to a new kind of party type he calls the “advocacy party,” a contradictory formation reflecting the layered influence of both reformers and counterreformers over its shape. Hilton sums up the contradiction as the institutionalization of “greater party dependence on outside groups for legitimacy and support,” namely the interest groups, social movements, and nonprofits constituting the progressive advocacy world, which in turn are more dependent on “the administrative presidency for the satisfaction of their symbolic and substantive demands.” This development is particularly ironic, considering the New Politics reformers’ overriding concern with subordinating the presidency and the executive branch generally to the party organization, and holding presidents accountable to the party platforms hammered out at national conventions. Their aim was to empower the national party relative to state and local organizations, while reducing national-level officeholders’ scope of autonomy at the same time. The movement to transform the Democratic Party stemmed from the disastrous 1968 national convention, when the Chicago police beat antiwar demonstrators outside the convention hall as party barons bestowed the presidential nomination on Vice President Hubert Humphrey inside the hall — despite the fact that Humphrey hadn’t run in a single primary election. After Chicago, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) inaugurated a commission on party reform commonly known as the McGovern-Fraser commission after its two leaders, Senator George McGovern and Representative Donald Fraser. The nominal goal of the commission was to formulate a new set of rules governing the selection of delegates for the 1972 national convention. Strengthened by the intra-party crisis generated by Richard Nixon’s win over Humphrey, the regulars’ hand-picked nominee, the New Politics coalition used the commission as a vehicle to push for even more ambitious reforms to the Democratic Party’s institutional structure. What kind of party did the New Politics movement want? In 1971, reformers on the commission issued a proposed “Charter for the Democratic Party of the United States,” which sought to transform the Democrats from a loose confederation of state and local parties sometimes working at cross-purposes into a centralized national party. Their proposed structure kept the quadrennial national convention as the party’s national convention. It retained the DNC as the party’s leading authority between conventions, but the DNC chair would be elected by a new national policy conference that would meet during even-numbered, non-presidential years to set party strategy. A DNC executive committee would oversee the work of a new Educational and Training Unit charged with recruiting candidates and conducting policy research. It would also coordinate the work of the most innovative new office the commission proposed: a Membership and Finance Council, which would run a national dues-based membership program. Finally, it envisioned a new layer of regional committees, which would coordinate between the national level and the state and local parties. This amounted to a radical proposal to break with the long tradition of American-style political parties to make the Democrats more like their counterparts elsewhere. The goal was to weaken party insiders and empower racial minorities and women, the New Left activists who flooded the party through the 1968 campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, and the coalition of industrial, service sector, and public employee unionists who chafed under the leadership of old American Federation of Labor (AFL) stalwart George Meany. And, perhaps surprisingly, much of the intellectual and strategic energy behind this project came from a band of political refugees who had just been kicked out of the Socialist Party.

Waves of Contention By the mid-twentieth century, the Socialist Party (SP) had become a pale shadow of what it was in its Debsian heyday. According to historian Maurice Isserman, the SP could only count 691 members in good standing nationwide, most of whom lived in just four states. Faced with such bleak prospects, the party sought to bring other groupuscules on the scattered anti-Stalinist left together under the SP’s faded banner. One of those groups was Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League, which was also quite small but boasted dynamic young organizers like Michael Harrington, who later went on to become a best-selling author and DSA’s first chair. Shachtman, Harrington, and their allies in the SP’s “Realignment Caucus” advocated a new strategy oriented toward the organizations and social forces in and around the Democratic Party. As Isserman puts it in his biography of Harrington, the realigners “conceived of their own role as a kind of ideological matchmaker in a grand majority coalition of progressive forces.” They were small in number but punched far above their weight. They were not the only ones on the broad US left calling for a major realignment of political forces, and the idea went at least as far back as Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)’s failed attempt to purge Southern reactionaries from Congress in the 1938 primary elections. The CIO through Labor’s Non-Partisan League supported Roosevelt’s attempt at realignment, and by the late 1940s pop it dropped a previous commitment to forming a new labor party and formed CIO-PAC. Those unions would, in turn, become the anchoring group of a renovated, consistently left-liberal Democratic Party in an ideologically polarized two-party system. In his 1968 essay “For a First Party,” Harrington argued that “there must not just be a new majority but a new party as well.” Crucially, however, he didn’t think that a new party had to be created from scratch. In making this case, Harrington insisted that the important thing is to allow the public a choice of liberal and conservative alternatives. The names by which the options are called is not crucial. Indeed, currently the drive toward realignment is expressing itself mainly within the Democratic Party, where its Left and Right wings have been engaged in a bitter struggle for some time. And it is therefore quite possible that a new party will bear an old label: the Democratic Party. By the early 1970s, Harrington and the Shachtmanites had split, and the SP imploded under the weight of its conflicts over Vietnam and the Cold War. The party split three ways at its 1972 convention. Bayard Rustin became the chair of Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA), which kept the old party’s infrastructure and aligned with Meany’s hawkishly anti-Communist leadership of the AFL-CIO. David McReynolds helped to lead a small group into a new Socialist Party USA (SPUSA), which still exists. Harrington’s faction formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), which remained committed to the realignment strategy and oriented toward both the New Left and the anti-Meany tendencies in the labor movement. Despite the right-wingers in the Democratic coalition, this was where the Left had to be, because it was also where the elements of a mass base for left-wing politics was politically organized. In Taking Sides, Harrington argued that what distinguished DSOC from other tendencies on the Left was that “we were committed to coalition politics and electoral work in the liberal-labor wing of the Democratic Party.” This set DSOC apart from SDUSA, which was also oriented to coalition work in the Democratic Party but despised the New Politics movement; as well as SPUSA, which continued to insist on running its own candidates for office despite decades of membership erosion and electoral futility. Harrington summed up DSOC’s mission as a “prosaic, extremely difficult job: to unify labor and minorities and women and environmentalists and peace activists and all of the rest of the progressive constituencies. Together they might prevail; fighting one another they would lose.” Despite the continued presence of right-wingers in the Democratic coalition, this was where the Left had to be, because it was also where the various elements of any plausible mass base for left-wing politics was politically organized. This is what Harrington meant when he said that DSOC stood on the “left wing of the possible.” In the battle over party reform, DSOC stood with activists who came out of the “Dump Johnson” movement of 1968, the labor movement’s anti-Meany wing (above all the United Auto Workers), and the politically oriented wings of the feminist, antiwar, and civil rights movements. They formed a network called the New Democratic Coalition (NDC), which supported Senator George McGovern’s 1972 candidacy and backed the most far-reaching reform proposals. They locked horns with the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM), the network of counterreformers who came together to oppose both McGovern’s candidacy and the McGovern-Fraser commission. CDM drew on the support of establishment Democratic officeholders, a group of intellectuals in and around SDUSA who would soon become the vanguard of neoconservatism, and the Meany-led forces in the AFL-CIO. Under Meany’s leadership, the labor federation remained neutral in the 1972 presidential race — the first time labor stayed neutral since the AFL didn’t endorse FDR in 1932 — out of resentment toward McGovern and his supporters. They justified this decision by casting themselves as the defenders of the traditional, blue-collar working class against college-educated, white-collar reformers. McGovern’s landslide loss in 1972 handed the initiative to CDM and the counterreformers, who successfully mobilized to block the most ambitious organizational reform proposals. They watered down the commission’s affirmative action provisions for women and racial minorities, and defeated the proposal to establish a formal, dues-paying membership base. Three midterm party conferences were actually held in the 1970s, but they did not turn out as the reformers hoped. As Hilton recounts, these conferences were “an experiment that party leaders,” especially elected officeholders, “were not eager to cooperate with. They went out of their way to resist it, control it, and convert it into a bit of a photo opportunity for themselves.” They were abandoned by the 1980s and have not been revived since. Finally, CDM succeeded in turning back the efforts of the reformers, grouped by the late 1970s in a DSOC-initiated coalition called Democratic Agenda, to hold elected officeholders — namely President Jimmy Carter, who reneged on the 1976 national party platform’s commitments to full employment, labor law reform, and economic planning — accountable to national convention decisions. Democratic Agenda was the seedbed of Senator Ted Kennedy’s left-liberal 1980 primary challenge to Carter, which also succumbed to centrist countermobilization. By the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, an event that closed the window of opportunity for organizational innovation, the successive waves of intra-Democratic reform and counterreform produced an uneasy synthesis. Reformers successfully opened up the process of delegate selection and cemented the role of state-by-state primary elections in choosing the presidential nominee. At the same time, however, counterreformers succeeded in stopping nearly every significant proposal for institutional reform and maintained the relative autonomy of elected officeholders from party platforms and convention decisions. The result was something that nobody on either side of the battle expected or wanted. In Hilton’s words, “Many reformers harbored reservations about opening the party without also supplying the requisite organizational infrastructure to fashion a well-integrated Democratic Party. Counter-reformers’ ability to torpedo the latter, but not the former, set the Democrats on the path to the advocacy party.” If the disaster of 1968 opened the door to the New Politics movement, the disaster of 1972 allowed the counterreformers to start closing it. McGovern’s crushing defeat gave them the chance to stop the most far-reaching proposals for party reform, and it dealt a major blow to the labor-liberal alliance the New Politics sought to put at the forefront of the Democratic Party. Reagan’s victory over a bruised Carter in 1980 and his thrashing of Walter Mondale in 1984 — whom DSA misguidedly backed over Jesse Jackson in the primaries — gave further impetus to counterreformers, now led by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), to push the party further away from the labor-liberal alliance, itself weakened by deindustrialization and the corporate-conservative anti-labor offensive, in favor of Southern conservatives and suburban moderates. At the same time, however, the “New Democrats” grouped around the DLC — most prominently Bill Clinton and Al Gore — failed in their own attempts to remake the party organization in their image, leaving the advocacy party form fundamentally intact. Its logic would later be fully embraced by Barack Obama, who won two elections but presided over massive Democratic losses and organizational atrophy at the state and local levels during the 2010s.

Consider the Alternatives In his monumental work The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson sought to rescue his subjects’ resistance to capitalist modernity from what he called “the enormous condescension of posterity.” Something similar might be said about the history Hilton recounts in True Blues. It is easy to look back on the efforts of Harrington and others to transform the Democratic Party with a sneer, but from today’s vantage point it is more useful to ask: What were the plausible leftist alternatives, and what did they accomplish? The New Communist Movement (NCM), at its height in the 1970s, claimed roughly ten thousand members across an alphabet soup of Marxist-Leninist organizations. It attracted post–New Left militants inspired by the Chinese, Cuban, and Vietnamese Communist parties who wanted to destroy US imperialism from within. It placed a particular emphasis on fighting racial oppression and building a political base among the poor, and many cadres went into rank-and-file labor organizing. It is easy to look back on efforts to transform the Democratic Party with a sneer, but what were the plausible leftist alternatives, and what did they accomplish? NCM activists made some headway in this regard, but on the whole, the movement never developed beyond a proliferation of intensely dogmatic sects. According to the movement’s premier chronicler, Max Elbaum, the NCM was overly optimistic about the prospects for revolution in the United States and too infatuated with authoritarian governments abroad. It fell apart in the 1980s, and some of its key members went on to do important work in labor and community organizing as well as electoral politics, namely the 1984 and 1988 Jesse Jackson campaigns. Various Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist groups sprouted up or were revived in the late 1960s and 1970s, but this current was generally smaller than the NCM. During this time, the International Socialists (IS) and others emphasized the “turn to industry,” which entailed getting jobs and organizing in auto, steel, trucking, and other core industrial sectors. The ultimate goal was to cohere a layer of organic worker leaders, shop stewards, and local union officials into the core of a revolutionary socialist party. Like the NCM’s attempt to build a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist vanguard, this scenario proved to be wildly optimistic, and the militants who pursued it largely found themselves fighting defensive battles against deindustrialization and the corporate-conservative attack on labor. These groups never grew beyond their small numbers, though IS (and later, Solidarity) members made a major contribution in helping to establish Labor Notes, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and other rank-and-file labor formations. Many groups in this milieu have dissolved, with some former members joining DSA. Other post–New Leftists sought to walk a tightrope between revolutionary sectarianism and DSOC’s commitment to Democratic Party coalition politics. The most prominent example was the New American Movement (NAM). According to Isserman, “From the early New Left and civil rights movement, NAM took an emphasis on the importance of local community organization; from the later New Left it took a mixture of Marxism and feminism.” NAM members were active in the public sector labor movement, and made a strong contribution to feminist organizing. But the organization never really took off. In her memoirs, NAM leader Dorothy Healey observed that local chapters “searched for the proper ‘nonreformist reform’ they could organize around in the community, one that had the right racial, class, and gender dimensions to it. At the same time they viewed any proposals for national programs and strategy with great suspicion.” Moreover, NAM’s generally healthy rejection of revolutionary sectarianism often spilled over into an excessive looseness that undermined their capacity to build their own organization or exercise political leadership. These preoccupations, combined with an overly heavy emphasis on questions of internal process, meant that NAM was rarely able to participate in mass political activity in a meaningful way. Despite differences in strategic emphasis, NAM and DSOC had enough in common for the two organizations to consider a merger. Merger talks began in 1977, and it took years of discussion and debate to bring them to consummation. The merger was completed in 1982, and DSA was born. It stagnated along with the rest of the Left during the neoliberal ascendancy. But unlike other socialist groups it has survived and, more recently, even thrived. It became the main organizational vessel for the growth of interest in democratic socialism after the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and has continued to embed itself — if unevenly and sometimes with difficulty — in mass politics since then. In the end, the New Politics project to remake the Democratic Party was hamstrung by many of the same dynamics that prevented the emergence of a mass socialist or labor party in earlier periods — above all, the long-running split in the labor movement between craft and occupational unionists on one hand and industrial unionists on the other. It is no coincidence that George Meany, the scourge of the New Politics, was a plumber whose own father was president of the Bronx local of the AFL plumbers’ union. Far-reaching party reform was an uphill battle from the start, and the absence of labor unity only made it that much harder. A partial and incomplete labor-liberal alliance was not strong enough to overcome it.

Over the past two years, tens of millions of Americans have awakened to the fact that the “Dialectical Left,” which includes Communism, achieves its agendas most effectively by strategically changing the meanings of words. This is a tactic that is very effective until it is recognized, at which point it rapidly becomes counterproductive because it is so obviously manipulative and so easily resisted by demanding clear definitions, especially in policy documents. The challenge is that there are a lot of words that our society depends upon, which allows Communist activists to move on from one word to another, then to another, as their language games get exposed.
Some of these strategic equivocations about the meanings of words are more impactful than others. Currently, there are just three terms that have been profoundly subverted and are being used to transform our society by Communists for Communist ends. These are inclusion, democracy, and citizenship. All three are being redefined together. Understanding how this manipulation is taking place is key to neutralizing it, and that starts with understanding how these three words are being strategically misused. First, let’s discuss the general principle of how the Communist or Dialectical Left redefines terms to achieve its ends.
The Essence of “Critique”
The method of the Communist or Dialectical Left is “critique,” which is the specific kind of “criticism” that characterizes Critical Theory. Critical Theory, if you don’t know, is the operative tool of the dominant strain of twentieth century Marxist Theory, which is sometimes called “Critical Marxism” and is associated with the Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research). What it refers to is identifying and reframing concepts in terms of Marxist structural analysis.
In general, when Critical Marxists, including the Woke Marxists of today, say they are applying “criticism” to something, or considering it in a “critical” way, what they mean is that they are strategically redefining the key terms involved so that they are understood in terms of Marxist sociopolitical analysis. In other words, they’re reframing the meanings of words so that they are to be understood in terms of alleged exclusionary “power dynamics” that benefit one class of people and oppress another class of people. These, Critical Marxists believe structure every aspect of society, including how things are talked and thought about, and critique is meant to subtly reframe that.
For example, consider the term “justice,” which we often hear from Critical Marxists who claim to be in pursuit of “Social Justice.” The notion of justice has to be shifted from a perspective of individuals finding fair treatment under the law in an impartial way to a new perspective where “fairness” takes into account a belief that the law is not and cannot be impartial and thus favors certain groups over others in its very construction. As a result, the law and its application has to be tilted in favor of those groups who are theorized to be structurally disadvantaged by the existing system, so justice follows from an underlying but hidden assumption of a need for partiality to “level the playing field.” The concept of meting out justice remains intact, but impartiality under the law is replaced by intentional partiality under the law so that those Marxist Theory claims are “structurally disadvantaged” are given additional privileges relative to everyone else.
For another example, consider the term “education.” The concept of education has to be understood and then redesigned according to this paradigm also—as does everything in society. Critical Marxism, you see, believes that the very terms of society itself are corrupt and structurally unjust and thus must be retooled to move the marginalized to the center and vice versa. Thus, “education” is criticized for being an unjust credentialing mechanism that allows those who accept the (unjust, corrupt) terms of the existing society to move into positions of power and authority from which they can ensure it reproduces itself. A genuine “education,” or a “critical” education, then, is a political education that teaches people to understand society this way and to reject it. At present, we have been miseducating our children on these terms for at least thirty years.
In both cases, you can see that there has been a subtle shifting of the meaning of the term in question by “criticizing” it in a way that redefines it to the Communist Left’s advantage. This process is how they subvert words, institutions, and even society itself. Now that we have a sense of how it works, let’s turn to three key terms the Communist Left is using to subvert and transform society itself into something wholly under their control. These terms again are inclusion, democracy, and citizenship, and they build upon one another.
1. Inclusion
Of all the words the Woke Marxists strategically misuse today, few are more important than “inclusion.” Many people have awakened to the sense that something is badly wrong with that term and that it somehow indicates selective exclusion, and they’re right. Now that you know the trick, it’s easy to understand how it works.
To Woke Marxists, inclusion expresses the idea that nobody is excluded by virtue of the unjust power dynamics Woke Marxist Theory describes. For them, free societies with impartial laws don’t address the underlying structural power dynamics that create de facto exclusion or a sense of not being fully welcome. For example, racial and sexual minorities (and especially Woke activists within those groups) might be made to feel excluded, they insist, by virtue of a belief that straight, white men are the “defaults” in many positions of authority. Or, women might be excluded as a matter of circumstantial fact by the demands of motherhood, which quickly and neatly explains many of their views about abortion “rights” and the recently published notion in the New York Times that the material instinct is a myth created by men—that is, in Marxian terms, an oppressive ideological narrative that supports structural patriarchy.
When huge entities like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and United Nations (UN) say that their agenda is to transform the world to achieve a more sustainable and inclusive future, this is the subversion they’re relying upon. People who Marxist Theory says have been or are being excluded—i.e., for them, Leftists—must be actively included, which requires excluding everyone else, either by limits to occupancy or by deliberate censorship and purges.
2. Democracy
Democracy is supposed to be “rule by the people,” something America’s Founding Fathers had the good sense to realize was a bad idea (not least because they were watching the Democratic French Revolution descend into murderous terror as they wrote the Constitution). Rule by the people means all of the people, and Communists have seized upon this idea to redefine “democracy” and stoke resentment about supposed structural disenfranchisement for over a century.
In The State and Society, written in 1917, Vladimir Lenin explained that what we think of as “democracy” in capitalist societies is, in fact, “bourgeois” democracy—rule by the empowered minority in the bourgeoisie. “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society,” he wrote.
[I]n capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord. (Lenin, The State and Society, chapter 5)
Lenin explained, using critique, that democratic voting in a capitalist society isn’t truly democratic because it only serves the bourgeois minority. Democracy will only be genuine when everyone is equal, which only occurs under Communism. In the meantime, under Socialist rule in the USSR, a dictatorship of the proletariat will simulate true democracy by elevating the masses and suppressing the “exploiters.”
In modern parlance, what Lenin is describing would be—in fact, is—called “inclusive democracy,” and it utilizes the exact same trick on the definition of “inclusion” to achieve its aims. The underlying belief is that society is exploitative of certain groups (who are in the majority), and thus those people aren’t equal participants in the democratic process. They have to be made equal (the contemporary term for this adjustment of enfranchisement, opportunity, and privilege is equity; the term in Lenin’s day, which still has major purchase was Democratic Socialism).
When we hear players in politics or the media say that open discussion threatens to create “misinformation” that threatens “our democracy,” this is very likely to be what they are talking about. (Never mind that we live in a republic, not a democracy.) They view their democracy—the only legitimate democracy—as “inclusive democracy” and thus one that must adjust shares, i.e., discriminate and suppress, in order to achieve its aims. As Lenin pointed out, it’s not that they want to be unfair; it’s that they have to be in order to get their way so that their evils can “wither away of their own accord” when they’re no longer needed anymore (when Communism arrives). (Spoiler: Communism never arrives; it’s fake.)
3. Citizenship
It will at this point surprise you none at all to find out that they have done the exact same critique to “citizenship,” which usually denotes the relationship persons recognized as citizens have with the State. In republics like the United States, this relationship is that the State borrows political authority from the people, and in exchange for that authority, the State is to use it only to secure the inalienable rights of a free people, among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which Thomas Jefferson believed followed naturally from the right to one’s property. Communists do not like the right to private property. In fact, Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that Communism can be summarized in a single sentence: “abolition of private property.”
For Woke Marxists, citizenship is the other side of the coin of democracy—citizens are the people enfranchised and empowered to participate in a democracy. Therefore, one is only a full citizen to the degree structural power doesn’t disenfranchise that person, whether through exclusion or as a matter of fact. Inclusive citizenship is a Marxist model of citizenship that seeks to address this issue and thus to reframe what it means to be a citizen outside of any belief in an impartial State (which it believes is impossible and is always organized to maintain the privilege, power, and advantage of the already-advantaged).
A key example of this issue has already been raised. Motherhood detracts from full citizenship by placing demands (to the family, not direct civic participation) on women who become mothers. The impositions of motherhood exclude women from full citizenship, especially if they aren’t given complete authority and autonomy to decide if they will become (or remain?) mothers. Inclusive citizenship would demand a reprioritization to increase the enfranchisement of women as a class in order to correct for this imposition, not to mention their beliefs about structural patriarchy, exclusion from power due to sexism, and having to cope with misogyny. Similar impediments to full inclusive citizenship are believed to be imposed upon racial minorities, sexual minorities, and all other forms of “minoritized” groups by the structural power dynamics Woke Marxism exists to “critique.” Inclusive citizenship answers this alleged challenge by offering privileges to “historically marginalized” groups, particularly Leftist activists among them, and suppressing others, especially conservatives.
By redefining citizenship, though, Leftist activists can successfully subvert society entirely by rewriting its so-called social contract: the agreement between the State and its citizens that holds society together. Citizenship, as a concept, writes the terms of the social contract. By replacing citizenship with “inclusive citizenship,” Leftists create a social contract that inherently advantages Leftism while intentionally disadvantaging everyone that opposes Leftism. This, in turn, creates the Socialist Democracy Lenin insisted would pave the way to Communism, at which point true inclusion will finally arrive—and we will finally have Social Justice.
In closing, it’s worth noting that Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, wrote in his 2022 book The Great Narrative for a Better Future: The Great Reset, Book 2, that his explicit goal is to rewrite the social contracts of societies around the globe. What they should change to, he writes, would favor sustainability and inclusivity as primary values, and the purpose of the “Great Narrative” is to foster this fundamental change in values at all levels of society in every society at once so that they can better cooperate on solving what he calls existential global challenges. Inclusive citizenship, in other words, will give way to global citizenship, which will have to be inclusive and redistributive by definition. Never mind, I suppose, that this has always been the stated aim of Marxist Communism from Karl Marx’s earliest writings. Never mind, indeed.
 
The post Three Terms Communists Redefined to Subvert Society appeared first on New Discourses.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.If you are a parent, your greatest fear in life is likely something happening to one of your kids. According to one 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this), parents spend an average of 37 hours a week worrying about their children; the No. 1 back-to-school concern is about their safety. And this makes sense, if you believe that safety is a foundation that has to be established before dealing with other concerns.You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior. According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, on average, parents say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park. It also shows up in what parents teach their kids about the world: Writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2021, the psychologists Jeremy D. W. Clifton and Peter Meindl found that 53 percent of respondents preferred “dangerous world” beliefs for their children.No doubt these beliefs come from the best of intentions. If you want children to be safe (and thus, happy), you should teach them that the world is dangerous—that way, they will be more vigilant and careful. But in fact, teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success.Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The contention that the world is mostly safe or mostly dangerous is what some psychologists call a “primal world belief,” one about life’s basic essence. Specifically, it’s a negative primal in which the fundamental character of the world is assumed to be threatening. Primal beliefs are different from more specific beliefs—say, about sports or politics—insofar as they color our whole worldview. If I believe that the Red Sox are a great baseball team, it generally will not affect my unrelated attitudes and decisions. But according to Clifton and Meindl, if I believe that the world is dangerous, it will affect the way I see many other parts of my life, relationships, and work. I will be more suspicious of other people’s motives, for example, and less likely to do things that might put me or my loved ones in harm’s way, such as going out at night.As much as we hope the dangerous-world belief will help our kids, the evidence indicates that it does exactly the opposite. In the same paper, Clifton and Meindl show that people holding negative primals are less healthy than their peers, more often sad, more likely to be depressed, and less satisfied with their lives. They also tend to dislike their jobs and perform worse than their more positive counterparts. One explanation for this is that people under bad circumstances (poverty, illness, etc.) have both bad outcomes and a lot to fear. However, as Clifton and Meindl argue, primals can also interact with life outcomes—you likely suffer a lot more when you are always looking for danger and avoiding risk.[Read: Telling the difference between danger and fear]Teaching your kids that the world is dangerous can also make them less tolerant of others. In one 2018 study, researchers subjected a sample of adults to a measure called the “Belief in a Dangerous World Scale,” which asked them to agree or disagree with statements such as “Any day now chaos and anarchy could erupt around us” and “There are many dangerous people in our society who will attack someone out of pure meanness, for no reason at all.” They found that people scoring high on this scale also showed heightened prejudice and hostility toward groups such as undocumented immigrants, whom they stereotypically considered a threat to their safety. This study was conducted among adults, but it is easy to see how these attitudes would migrate to their kids.This is similar to the argument made by the writers Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Atlantic in 2015, and in their subsequent book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Lukianoff and Haidt contend that when parents (or professors) teach young people that ordinary interactions are dangerous—for example, that speech is a form of violence—it hinders their intellectual and emotional growth. It also leads them to adopt black-and-white views (for example, that the world is made up of people who are either good or evil), and makes them more anxious in the face of minor stressors such as political disagreement.[From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind]And to top it all off, negative primals don’t even help keep people safe. Researchers writing in the journal Psychology & Health in 2001 showed that a general state of fear can actually make a person less likely to take threats seriously (a self-defense mechanism to control our fear) and undermine precautionary behavior (by degrading the ability to address danger rationally).It is not in young people’s interest that we instill in them negative primals. In so doing, we might harm them by making them less happy, less healthy, and more bigoted toward others. To break this pattern, parents—and anyone who interacts with children—should instead work to cultivate a sense of safety. Here are three rules to help you get started.1. Heal thyself.Parents might feed their kids negative primals because they hold such views themselves. This is easy to do in a world where we are bombarded with news and information, which studies have linked to distress, anxiety, and depression—even when the news is not specifically negative. And research shows that many parents pass on their anxiety to their children.One way to allay our own fears is simply to look at the facts. As the journalist Christopher Ingraham has written, being a kid in America has never been safer. Since 1935, the number of childhood deaths between the ages of 1 and 4 fell from 450 to 30 per 100,000. It has fallen by nearly half just since 1990, and the decreases in other age groups are similarly impressive. Use this knowledge to counteract the media’s relentless focus on fear and danger. You might even print out a chart on declining childhood mortality (such as the one linked above) and put it on the fridge as a reminder of how good your kids have it.[Read: The magic of a little danger]2. Be specific and proportional.Grown-ups want to teach young people how to stay safe in the face of threats. However, the research is clear that a blanket attitude of fear can actually make them less able to do so. If you want to offer a child a warning to make them better prepared, focus on one specific danger they might face and how to deal with it. Instead of saying, “People will try to take advantage of you at college,” say, “If someone is trying to get you to drink too much, avoid that person.”When you do need to bring up a threat, make sure you keep it in proportion. For example, I don’t want anyone to be mean to my kids any more than the next parent. They know this. But it doesn’t help them for me to say that hostile words inherently make them unsafe. Social conflict is unavoidable, and making them fear it as an existential threat amounts to giving them a negative primal, rendering them less resilient.[From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid]3. Counteract negative primals from outside.Almost every day that my daughter was in high school, she was taught about the dangerous world—about bad people, dangerous forces in nature, and a bleak future for our country. She told us about the gloom and doom each evening at dinner, and my wife and I could see her growing pessimism. So we set about deliberately countering the scary narrative. We didn’t sugarcoat the threats; we simply tried to be specific about the kind behaviors we witnessed, and ways that the world was safer and more prosperous today than in the past. It was our way of sharing our genuine belief that on the whole, most people are good and things are getting better.Working hard to avoid instilling a fear-based primal belief in kids is good. But really, we should all be able to do better than that, and try to cultivate a positive primal belief that can truly improve their lives. For that, I turn to the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. “Through Love, one has no fear,” he wrote in the Tao Te Ching.[Read: Love is medicine for fear]Instead of teaching our kids fear primals, let’s teach them love primals, which neutralize fear and put something good in its place. Let them know that people are made for love—we all crave it, and we can find something lovable in just about everyone we meet. We don’t always give it or accept it, because we make a lot of mistakes, but love is what all our hearts desire. If you want to give your children a rule to live by, this one is a much safer bet.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

James Choi, a professor at Yale University, was interested in teaching a different kind of personal-finance course. He wanted his curriculum to mix the conclusions of technical economics papers with the takeaways from glitzy best-selling books.Several years ago, he started poring over dozens of popular personal-finance titles, which had sold tens of millions of copies, in order to get a sense of the counsel they were dispensing. “I got really interested in this universe of advice and how was it different from the advice that we academics were giving about savings and investment,” he told me. He realized that the most popular books tended to offer finance tips that were either significantly different from academic research or, in his words, “just dead wrong.”Choi distilled 50 best sellers’ lessons in saving, spending, and investing and lined them up against the takeaways of mainstream economics research. This month, he published the results in a new paper: “Popular Personal Financial Advice Versus the Professors.” His conclusion: Economists tend to offer more rational advice, because they are dealing with numbers; best sellers tend to offer more practical advice, because they are grappling with human behavior—with all of its mess and irrationality.Perhaps the starkest example of the difference between economists and popular authors was the advice for paying down debt. In economic theory, Choi said, households should always focus on prioritizing the payment of their highest-interest debt. Every other strategy is more expensive, since you’re just letting higher-interest charges linger on your monthly bill.[Read: I made one simple financial change and it lowered my spending]But popular authors such as Dave Ramsey have suggested a nearly opposite approach. According to Ramsey’s “debt-snowball” method, you should pay off debt from smallest to largest, gaining motivation and momentum as you zero out your accounts. This is far from the cheapest strategy for eliminating debt—Ramsey admits as much. But his debt-snowball method isn’t about technical efficiency. It’s about building willpower. When people overwhelmed by their debt see a smaller account hit zero, it’s so rewarding that they’re motivated to continue paying down their larger balances.Choi emphasized that he doesn’t necessarily think Ramsey’s approach is strategically wrong, even though it is technically fallacious: “I think of it like diet and exercise. You can tell people to eat broccoli and steamed chicken for their whole life. Or you can tell people about cheat meals to get their buy-in so that they’re motivated to stay on the diet.”The best sellers’ emphasis on building momentum and motivation sometimes tips into less reasonable suggestions. For example, popular books frequently insist that people should save at least 10 percent of their income no matter what. You can think of this strategy as “smoothing” your savings rate: Rain or shine, you’re advised to stock away a consistent share of income to build a savings habit over time.But life isn’t smooth. It’s spiky. Many people who barely earn enough to afford rent at 25 become rich enough to easily afford a suburban home at 40. Some parents deluged with day-care expenses find a huge chunk of cash freed up when their kids move on to public school. For this reason, Choi said, academics are more likely to defend low or even negative savings rates for young people in anticipation of higher savings rates in midlife. This is the opposite of smoothing your savings rate; it’s consumption smoothing.[Read: The internet is just investment banking now]These methods are more than competing personal-finance strategies; they’re almost like competing life philosophies. Smoothing your savings pays homage to a psychological reality: Habits require discipline and practice. If most people are bad at suddenly changing their savings behavior in middle age, then advising them to sacrifice while they’re young is reasonable.But consumption smoothing pays homage to an existential reality: Life itself is the ultimate scarce asset. The future is unknowable, and religiously maintaining a double-digit savings rate through the worst squalls of life is not of the utmost importance. Having that special dinner with friends at 23 is, for instance, more valuable than having a couple hundred extra dollars in your retirement fund at 73. By this logic, building a budget that makes you comfortable and happy in the short term, even if that means varying your savings rate from decade to decade (or year to year), is the better approach.This might be the deepest takeaway of Choi’s paper. Personal-finance best sellers succeed by blending theory and psychology in a way that takes human nature seriously and thus deserves the respect of economics professors. But those who spend a lifetime delaying gratification may one day find themselves rich in savings but poor in memories, having sacrificed too much joy at the altar of compounding interest.Perhaps many of the most popular personal-finance books could take a page from economic theory: There is more to life than optimized savings habits.

A few days ago, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the completion of a "Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan" promising institutional changes so that American warmaking kills fewer innocent people.

Across a considerable divide, they bicker over how far to go in making ongoing war more humane, against the background of ongoing American militarism--even as questions about whether, where, and how long war is fought are relegated to the margins.

The plan is a clear step forward in the humanization of endless war--the ethically fraught project I attempted to spotlight in my book, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War," which appeared a year ago and is out next week in a paperback edition.

The Pentagon commitment--and the dynamics that led to it--fit well with some of my arguments in the book. While making American war less brutal is an uplifting project when it works, it can also function by intentional design to create a new kind of war that results in greater legitimacy. The plan is entirely open about this. It begins: "The protection of civilians is a strategic priority as well as a moral imperative."

Abetted by critical outsiders and sympathetic insiders who decry the brutality rather than existence of wars, humanizing war reflects ethical progress in the fighting of American war, while entrenching its permanence.

Heroically, humanitarian activists have been dramatizing civilian harm for decades, and with special intensity since the Global War on Terror began after September 11, 2001. But when the order to develop an action plan came down in January, it was clearly in response to the extraordinary Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporting led by Azmat Khan, which gave unprecedented visibility to the costs of American warmaking on civilians by documenting the extraordinary levels of casualties in airstrikes.

As a New York Times editor observed, "Military officials credited the work of Azmat and the other Times journalists who rigorously reported on this subject as important factors in driving change."And it is no doubt quite an accomplishment to prompt that transformation.

As the plan explains, reforms will bring more concern for harm to military culture and organization. Read carefully, the plan amounts, for now, to a set of promises to hire more people at the Pentagon and in combatant commands to raise consciousness, in hopes of further remaking American war in the crucible of care. The plan will also provide a hub for information-gathering about far-flung operations conducted across service branches. The military, it says, should even consider acknowledging the episodes when it causes too much death and injury. The overall goal is to mainstream ethical compassion in American military operations without disturbing the eternal and necessary project of putting civilians in harm's way. But while good might come of it, for sure, more is at stake in such mainstreaming.

The plan is being called "sweeping" by Khan and other New York Times journalists, and welcomed as a great leap forward. "The Defense Department Finally Prioritizes Civilians in Conflict,"one prominent "targeting professional"put it.

Of course, there is a lot to be desired in the plan even before attempts to implement it get underway. A triumph of bureaucratic newspeak--there will be a "Center of Excellence" for civilian casualties!--the document that announces it and spells out some of the details leaves lots of room for maneuver when it comes to follow through. And it does not seem to apply to the Central Intelligence Agency, which pioneered drone strikes and continues to conduct them, as in the recent killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Perhaps most glaringly on its own terms, the plan says nothing about the international law governing the conduct of hostilities, and how essential rethinking the American interpretation of it clearly is. (Indeed, the January press release announcing the reform process presents the United States as already operating in line with its legal obligations not to kill too many civilians, on "a strong foundation of compliance with the law of armed conflict.")

But questioning whether the reforms pan out, or whether they someday come to guarantee even more humanity in warfare, misses the bigger point, which is that the humanization of war can work to legitimate war--especially when it works. When it comes from the Pentagon, indeed, that is the point.

As I narrate in "Humane," the humanization of American war dates from the aftermath of the Vietnam war, precisely when the international law requiring humanitarian care in the conduct of hostilities took its own great leap forward.

The American story has been driven from the first, I argue, by the alliance of critical outsiders composed of activists, journalists, and lawyers with sympathetic insiders within government and military. Across a considerable divide, they bicker over how far to go in making ongoing war more humane, against the background of ongoing American militarism--even as questions about whether, where, and how long war is fought are relegated to the margins.

Outsiders focusing selectively on brutality, and especially civilian harm, join a growing constituency of insiders within the military that hope to redefine the warrior's honor while managing public relations in the face of atrocious excesses. There could hardly be better proof of how these two forces work together in producing a relatively more humanized form of ongoing war than the new plan.

The results are a good thing if the choice is between relatively more brutal and relatively less brutal war--but, from the perspective of old and new calls for restraint in starting wars or fighting them forever, that is not always the choice. Humanitarians are characteristically silent about the justice or legality of war itself, while journalists also generally restrict themselves to factual proof of atrocity even when it takes place in the midst of aggressive war. For example, the pathbreaking New York Times series on civilian harm, which dealt substantially with the war against Islamic state in Syria, nowhere took up that that war is generally regarded as illegal as such under international law, quite apart from its civilian harm.

So there is a risk that the new reforms will abet a dynamic I described in the first 20 years of the GWOT. Questions related to the justice, propriety, and legality of America's gargantuan military footprint were sidelined as the efforts were rendered a little less offensive in some of their human costs. The plan makes more of the same possible.

No doubt, in the last year the geopolitics of American war have changed. Joe Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan has removed most of the reasons for military action there (though it remains highly interesting that few in activist or journalistic circles have condemned the assassination of al-Zawahiri there for its illegality in principle). Donald Trump's destruction of ISIS, which incurred so much of the atrocity that journalists spotlighted, enabled Biden to ramp down drone strikes for the time being, without giving up in principle on the illegal practice of targeted killings that successive presidents have normalized.

And while Biden followed through on Trump's withdrawal from Afghanistan, he has reengaged with special forces in Somalia, where drones have also been deployed in counterterrorist operations. Overall, there may be less American war for the moment, leaving aside the forms of our support for Ukraine's struggle against Russia. But it would be wishful thinking to conclude that any controls have been placed on our ongoing war posture--especially since Biden's moves have come along with doubling down on Trump's confrontational position towards China.

The Pentagon's promise of more humane war has to be put in that context. The controls that seem available concern how future wars are going to be fought, not whether a culture of restraint in fighting them at all ever takes root.

If you had any doubts that those in power have dropped the pretense of fighting for the working class, you can dispense with them after President Joe Biden administration's latest concessions to the laptop class. From student loan forgiveness to subsidies for people who drive pricey electric cars and profitable semiconductor company CEOs, this administration is working hard to shower its friends with handouts paid for by hardworking lower-wage Americans.
We learned of the most outrageous handout of them all, of course, when Biden announced that he will—unilaterally, mind you, and for no apparent reason that I can see—extend the pause on student loan payments until the end of the year and forgive up to $10,000 for those persons making less than $125,000 a year. This generosity with other people's money extends up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
As David Stockman, a former director of the Congressional Office of Management and Budget, reported recently, "Only 37% of Americans have a 4-year college degree, only 13% have graduate degrees and just 3% have a PhD or similar professional degree. Yet a full 56% of student loan debt is held by people who went to grad school and 20% is owed by the tiny 3% sliver with PhDs."
Picture two young married lawyers who together earn just under $250,000 and are on their way to making even more money in the future. They will be able to collect from Uncle Joe a nice bonus of $40,000, taken from the pockets of the many people who didn't go to college—perhaps because they did not want to take on debt—and from those who have responsibly already paid back their debt.
It's no wonder that so many left-leaning economists and policy wonks have loudly criticized this so-called student loan forgiveness. The Washington Post, for instance, editorialized that the decision is "regressive," "expensive" and "likely inflationary," nullifying "nearly a decade's worth of deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act."
Meanwhile, Jason Furman, who headed former President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, napalmed the plan in a brutal Twitter thread. He explained that, thanks to Biden's move, interest rates would have to rise by an additional 50 to 75 basis points to counteract the added inflationary effect. Furman made clear that he regards this outcome as remarkably unfair and regressive.
Then there's the Inflation Reduction Act's gusher of green subsidies, many of which disproportionately benefit wealthier Americans. Take the extension of the tax credit of up to $7,500 for the purchase of new electric vehicles. For those buying used EVs, the tax credit is now $4,000, little consolation for people who can't afford the luxury of buying electric cars, which remain much pricier than their gasoline-powered alternatives. The bill hopes to address this issue by making expensive EV cars ineligible for the credit, but it counteracts this provision with a requirement that only cars assembled in the United States are eligible.
To underscore how disconnected policymakers are from average Americans, the vehicle credits are limited to those making less than $150,000 annually (single filing) and $300,000 (joint filing), presumably to avoid criticism for subsidizing the rich. That still leaves about 93 percent of individuals or 97 percent of households able to seize the subsidy. And given that it's mainly been taxpayers with annual incomes over $100,000 using the credit in the past, this subsidy will mostly still serve a swath of fairly well-off people.
But politicians are not just showering higher-income individuals with subsidies; they do the same for companies. A quick look at the semiconductor subsidies in the CHIPS Act reveals that the well-publicized $52 billion giveaway will benefit well-connected and rich companies.
We could go on and on with more examples, such as Democrats' incessant demand to restore remarkably regressive state and local tax ("SALT") deductions to their pre-2017 heights. The only persons who will gain are high-income earners—and their big-spending elected officials—in high-tax blue states. They lost parts of these deductions when the Trump tax cuts were implemented, and they want them back.
If you're surprised by any of this, you haven't been paying attention to Democrats' recent record. Few are even pretending to be the party of anyone other than the privileged laptop class.
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The post The Biden Administration Is Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich appeared first on Reason.com.

One of the fun conditions of this project is that the three teams did not in any way collaborate with each other or get an advance look at what the others were going to say. As a result some recommendations overlap between teams in a positive way, some conflict, and many others simply don't engage one way or the other. For example, we at Team Libertarian reached very similar conclusions to Team Progressive on reforming the Electoral Count Act, but a mostly opposite conclusion (as Prof. Foley has noted) on whether government should seek to regulate false statements about elections. And although Team Conservative's comments on restricting presidential emergency powers both dovetail with ours and add useful detail, few of our other recommendations engage.
Although we and Team Conservative may have marched off in different directions, I and many Cato Institute colleagues are on board with much of what they say. Runaway administrative agencies usurping legislative power? Yes, a big problem. Congressional abdication of power stretching over for a half-century or more, shifting responsibility to the President and the judiciary? Definitely.  I agree too that there's a decent case for making it at least a bit easier to amend the U.S. Constitution. (Here's a Cato fellow writing in 2011 proposing a modest reduction in the threshold number of states needed for proposing and ratifying an amendment.)  The need to move past a broken primary system in which candidates with independent and crossover appeal get knocked out because they can't appease their party's most zealous base voters? Right again.
On the topic of elections, we're also in agreement with Team Conservative's observation that campaign finance reforms have backfired and that we should be repealing such laws rather than adding more. But let's also get real: the election world wasted much of 2021 in a battle over whether Democrats would succeed in ramming through an omnibus package expanding these laws yet further. As I've argued, this package, the so-called For The People Act, 1) put its thumb in the eye of libertarian and constitutionalist principle, and 2) was supremely irrelevant to the distinctive challenges of the events leading up to Jan. 6. Shouldn't we focus on reform efforts that have a chance of doing relevant good between now and the next grave election crisis down the road – which we might find ourselves in the middle of by a date as early as, say, 2024?
Which brings me to some policy disagreements with Team Conservative. I can't say I'm persuaded by the idea of letting Congress override presidential vetoes by simple majority vote, as Tennessee does. The Founders meant to establish serious checks and balances against the dangers of hasty legislation, and gutting the power of the president's veto would knock out one of the most important of those checks. (For what it's worth, my home state of Maryland sets its veto-override threshold at three-fifths rather than two-thirds – not that I'm recommending that, either.) On bringing back the legislative veto, I share the misgivings about that innovation expressed by Antonin Scalia, then editor of Regulation, many years ago.
Now on to Team Progressive. On one major point we agree strongly: it's incredibly dangerous when a controlling faction of one of the two great political parties wrongly contends that honest and correctly tabulated elections were stolen or rigged. The Progressive report gives this problem a central place in its analysis, and that seems right to me.
Yet there are differences of mood and terminology in our approaches as well. As I commented on Twitter the other day, I continue to search for phrases other than "Big Lie" and "election denier" that would let us criticize both these things without using terminology associated with you-know-what. Millions of persons sincerely believe the false claims in question. They are truly convinced that they, not we, are doing the right thing and standing up for fair and free elections. There are some genuine villains out there feeding them lies, as well as crazies irresponsibly stoking mass delusion. But the ordinary believers are also our friends, our relatives, and our neighbors. We cannot stop being those things to them if America is to gather back its wits and turn back down the road toward some semblance of unity.
As to policy, I'm a convinced advocate of ranked-choice voting, but I'd caution that its advantages are relatively subtle; it won't put out the fire of public disbelief in election results. The fact is that in some key states, election fabulists may presently be popular enough to win, or at least put up a strong contest, under whichever set of rules is used. (I also think the plain-vanilla version of RCV, sometimes called instant-runoff voting, is better suited to today's America than the more complex "round-robin" variant that Foley recommends.)
We and Team Progressive likely part company on some issues of federalism and decentralization. Ned Foley and Ilya Somin have already discussed this a bit as to foot voting, and I suspect that our teams may also diverge on to what extent the federal government should play a greater role in supervising the states in election administration; we caution against this at several points.
Also on the Foley-Somin exchange linked above, I'll mention for what it's worth that I'm probably a little more positive about civics education than Ilya is.  Still, I do recognize there can be difficult problems in legitimately educating the public about how the electoral system works, on the one hand, while avoiding the specter of taxpayer-funded propaganda campaigns, on the other. (As an example of the challenges involved, here's how the Nebraska Secretary of State set about refuting myths and rumors about the 2020 count.)
Thanks to the National Constitution Center for making possible this summer's exchange of views with writers and scholars we respect, and to the Volokh Conspiracy for hosting this shorter symposium this week.
The post Guardrails of Democracy, Extended: Comparing Notes On The Team Libertarian Report appeared first on Reason.com.

On Tuesday, a Virginia Beach court dealt a serious blow to would-be book-banners who were trying to restrict private bookstores from selling two books to minors.
Their lawsuit targeted Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas. Gender Queer has been at the center of many book-banning battles for its graphic sexual scenes, particularly its visual illustrations of oral sex. The petitioners argued that A Court of Mist and Fury is "sexually offensive in nature" for its illustrations of sexual acts and descriptions of "abusive and intrusive sexual contact." Circuit Judge Pamela S. Baskervill, who came out of retirement to try the case since all other judges recused themselves, dismissed the suit on free speech and due process grounds.
In May, former congressional candidate Tommy Altman and state Del. Tim Anderson (R–Virginia Beach), his legal counsel, filed two petitions under Virginia's obscenity law to have the books deemed obscene for minors. They attempted to require booksellers to obtain parental consent before selling those books to minors.
Virginia residents may file an obscenity petition when they believe someone "is engaged in the sale or commercial distribution of any obscene book." An obscenity petition may result in the court issuing "a temporary restraining order against the sale or distribution" of the book in question, which then assumes knowledge of the restriction among those who distribute the title even before a full trial has taken place.
In Virginia, obscenity involves "a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, excretory functions or products thereof or sadomasochistic abuse" as its "dominant theme or purpose." 
"Taken as a whole," a book must also lack "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value" to be considered obscene.
Altman and Anderson specifically sought to keep minors from purchasing Gender Queer and A Court of Mist and Fury from Barnes & Noble and independent sellers. Barnes & Noble filed a brief supporting motion to dismiss the petitions, noting that they fell "woefully short of the constitutional standards governing obscenity."
For one, even though the petitions allege the books have "no serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to minors," this is a conflation of "two statutes that employ different legal standards." Though Virginians may file petitions under the obscenity clause, nothing in that clause specifically names or applies to minors. Thus, Barnes & Noble argued that the books could not be considered "obscene only…to juveniles."
Nor did the petitioners make an effective case that the books meet the general standards for obscenity. Barnes & Noble's brief points out that the petitions single out only small portions of the books as inappropriate for minors, defying the established standard to consider material "as a whole" in order to deem it obscene.
The petitions "ignore the language of the Virginia statutes under which they were filed and assume that developments in First Amendment law over the past sixty-five years never occurred," notes Barnes & Noble's brief.
Baskervill didn't actually determine whether the books were obscene for minors, but she did find that the petitioners didn't "allege facts sufficient to support" a general obscenity finding. Moreover, Baskervill found that the Virginia Code's obscenity statute "is unconstitutional on its face." It "authorizes a prior restraint that violates the First Amendment and the Constitution of Virginia," she wrote, and "violates due process by authorizing judgment without notice to affected parties."
In some ways, this case was an unprecedented extension of the modern culture war's book front. Since 1973, the Supreme Court "has accepted no cases involving literary obscenity, nor has it found any book to be obscene," notes Barnes & Noble's brief. The Virginia Beach petitions also represent an unusual strategy by attempting to harness a little-used section of state law to block the distribution of certain books to minors. They were attempts "to manufacture jurisdiction" by "mashing together" unrelated statutes, according to the Barnes & Noble brief.
But this case was especially notable—and concerning—since the petitioners attempted to target private book distributors under a criminal statute. Rather than just affecting public schools, where many book battles take place, these petitions aimed to limit activities in the private sphere. Regardless of what one thinks about the literary value of these two books or the age level for which they're appropriate, these circumstances alone are deeply troubling.
The post Virginia Can't Force Bookstores To Card Kids for Books on Gender and Sexuality appeared first on Reason.com.

One week after a team of F.B.I. agents descended on his private club and residence in Florida, Trump warned that things could get out of hand if the Justice Department kept the heat on him. "People are so angry at what is taking place," Trump told Fox News, predicting that if the "temperature" isn't brought down, "terrible things are going to happen."

The two threats--one, from an increasingly authoritarian-fascist Republican Party; the second, from ever-larger amounts of corporate and billionaire money in our campaigns and elections--are two sides of the same coin.

But Trump and his allies are doing all they can to increase the temperature. Last Sunday, one of Trump's closest allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, warned of "riots in the streets" if Trump is prosecuted.

On Tuesday, Trump spent much of the morning reposting messages from known purveyors of the QAnon conspiracy theory and from 4chan, an anonymous message platform where threats of violence often bloom. Some of Trump's reposts were direct provocations, such as a photograph of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi with their faces obscured by the words, "Your enemy is not in Russia."

Online threats are escalating against public servants. Bruce E. Reinhart, the federal magistrate judge who approved the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, has been targeted with messages threatening him and his family.

How to respond to this lawlessness? With bold and unwavering law enforcement.

If Trump has broken the law--by attempting a coup, by instigating an assault on the U.S. Capitol, by making off with troves of top-secret documents--he must be prosecuted, and if found guilty he must be imprisoned.

Yes, such prosecutions might increase tensions and divisions in the short term. They might provoke additional violence.

But a failure to uphold the laws of the United States would be far more damaging in the longer term. It would undermine our system of government and the credibility of that system--more directly and irreparably than Trump has done.

Not holding a former president accountable for gross acts of criminality will invite ever more criminality from future presidents and lawmakers.

It is also important for all those in public life who believe in democracy to call out what the Republican Party is doing and what it has become: not just its embrace of Trump's Big Lie but its moves toward voter suppression, takeovers of the machinery of elections, ending of reproductive rights, book bans, restrictions on what can be taught in classrooms, racism, and assaults on LGBTQ people.

Last week, Biden condemned "ultra-MAGA Republicans" for a philosophy he described as "semi-fascism." Today he will deliver a rare prime-time speech outside the old Independence Hall where the Framers of the Constitution met 235 years ago to establish the basic rules of our democratic form of government. The speech is will focus on what the White House describes as the "battle for the soul of the nation"--the fight to protect that democracy.

President Biden's earlier conciliatory tone and talk of uniting Americans and "healing" the nation from the ravages of Trump has obviously not worked on most of the Republican Party. With the notable and noble exceptions of Liz Cheney and a few other courageous Republicans--most of whom have been or are being purged from the GOP--the Republican Party is rapidly morphing into an anti-democracy movement. With each passing week, it becomes more rabid in its opposition to the rule of law. Republican lawmakers who took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution are repudiating it in word and deed. Republican candidates are lying about the 2020 election and whipping up our fellow countrymen into angry mobs. And as Republican lawmakers and candidates exchange their political integrity for power, Fox News and other rightwing outlets continue to exchange their journalistic integrity for money.

The essential political choice in America, therefore, is no longer Republican or Democrat, right or left, conservative or liberal. It is democracy or authoritarian fascism. There can be no compromise between these two--no halfway point, no "moderate middle," no "balance." To come down squarely on the side of democracy is not to be "partisan." It is to be patriotic.

As Adam Wilkins suggested on this page yesterday, while today's Republican party does not have its own paramilitary, such as the Nazi's Brownshirts, the GOP is effectively outsourcing these activities to violent fringe groups such as the "Proud Boys," "Oathkeepers," and others who descended on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and who continue to threaten violence.

Yet Democrats cannot and must not take on this battle alone. They must seek common ground with Independents and whatever reasonable Republicans remain. As Eric T noted on this page, we must continue to appeal to truth, facts, logic, and common sense. We must be unwavering in our commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law. We must be clear and courageous in exposing the authoritarian fascist direction the Republican Party has now chosen, and the dangers this poses to America and the world.

It is also important for Democrats to recognize--and to take bold action against--the threat to democracy posed by big money from large corporations and the super-wealthy: record amounts of campaign funding inundating and distorting our politics, serving the moneyed interests rather than the common good.

Indeed, the two threats--one, from an increasingly authoritarian-fascist Republican Party; the second, from ever-larger amounts of corporate and billionaire money in our campaigns and elections--are two sides of the same coin. Americans who know the system is rigged against them and in favor of the moneyed interests, are more likely to give up on democracy and embrace an authoritarian fascist demagogue who pretends to be on "their side."

The battle to preserve and protect American democracy is the most important battle of our lifetimes. If we win, there is nothing we cannot achieve. If we lose, there is nothing we can achieve.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekOn Tuesday, Joe Biden declared that, “when it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police. It’s fund the police.” He was speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “I know we expect so much from our law enforcement officers, so we need to support them,” he said. “That’s why my crime plan is to help communities recruit, hire, and train nationwide more than 100,000 additional officers—accountable officers—for community policing.”Biden is more than old enough to remember the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the murder spike of the early 1990s, the 1994 crime bill (the Senate version of which Biden himself drafted), and the unexpected decline in crime that made major American cities feel safer in the aughts than they had in generations. He has also witnessed the more recent rise of cellphone cameras documenting egregious police abuses, the ascendance of Black Lives Matter (a movement that perhaps saw its influence peak in 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing), and the dramatic increase in homicides that disproportionately ended Black lives in 2020 and 2021, culminating in a Democratic president who sounds a lot like he did in 1994.What are your thoughts on crime and policing? Wide-ranging answers are welcome, whether about the politics of the issue, policy, or the rise and arguable decline of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’d also be interested in hearing observations from your life experiences, or testimony about what’s going on in your neighborhood today. If you want more fodder for reflection, just keep reading.Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteHere’s more from Biden on Tuesday:
I’m old enough to remember when cops used to walk the beat in Wilmington and Scranton, because they knew everybody. They knew the kid—they knew if something was trouble, they knew whose house to go and knock on the door and say, “Mom, your son just did … ”
Folks, when it comes to fighting crime, we know what works: officers on the street who know the neighborhood—not a joke—who know the neighborhood; who know the families they’re protecting; who get the training they need to be able to do their jobs well; who work to earn the community’s trust …  
And as we hire more police officers, there should be more training, more help, and more accountability. Without public trust, law enforcement can’t do its job serving and protecting all the communities. I’m being—I’m not being facetious. They knew the neighborhoods.
Biden talks like a man who believes himself to have solved this problem in 1994, only to have the nation forget what it took:
My deceased son, Beau, he was the Attorney General of the State of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down, in the east side, the—called the “Bucket”—highest crime rate in the country … And he’d go down and hang out and sit on a bench with my—my grandson, who’s now 17 years old. And the police used to be in the car—the local city police. And he’d walk up and bang on the window and say, “Get out of the car, damn it, and meet these people. Let them see you. Let them know you. Let them know who you are.”
Well, the truth was—remember what happened to community policing? We went from having enough cops on the street, to cities doing well, and then deciding they don’t need more police officers, so they reduced the police forces. So you didn’t have two cops in every vehicle; you had one cop in every vehicle. And I don’t blame one cop for not getting out of the car in certain neighborhoods … When my son was Attorney General, he’d go around in the tougher neighborhoods and he would ensure that every single cop gave his cellphone number to the local liquor store owner, the local church, the local grocery store, the local hamburger joint, so if there was a problem, they’d pick up the phone and call. Because what do people not want to do in tough neighborhoods? They don’t want to be the one identified as turning so-and-so in.
I remember going on the east side in Wilmington, in one of those old Victorian three-story apartment buildings, and going up to see a woman standing in that rotunda. She said, “Joey, I know what’s going on. They all plan it downstairs. I can hear them, but I’m afraid to tell anybody.” The gangs. So I got her a phone number for the local cops. She’d call. They promised not to identify her, because they knew there’d be retribution. And the crime rate began to drop. For real. Not a joke. You got to know people. And you got to be able to trust the police. And the police had to be able to trust the community. But we slipped away from that. And we have a hell of a lot fewer cops today than we did when I wrote that initial crime bill. But now, we’ve gotta get back to it.
This kind of rhetoric is dismaying to some Democrats, who associate their party’s 1990s approach to criminal justice with mass incarceration and police abuses. They don’t want to get back to that. “More cops without real reform is bad,” the journalist Isaac J. Bailey tweeted. “We’ve been down this road.”[Read: 19 readers on Donald Trump’s legal future]I sympathize most with that perspective when I see Biden, in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania speech, declaring, “My plan does something else really important: It addresses the opioid epidemic. You notice how many people are dying of opioid overdoses now? And, by the way, laced with fentanyl … But we’re going to impose tougher penalties for deadly fentanyl trafficking that’s poisoning communities across this country.” How can a 79-year-old believe, after so many decades of contrary evidence, that harsher penalties for trafficking will stop addiction or overdoses?Come on, Joe, what a bunch of malarkey! But I also sympathize with the majority of voters, overall and in every major racial group, who favor hiring more police officers to deploy to high-crime areas. “Solid data suggests that even if you take a realistic view of the police, spending money to hire more police officers—an idea espoused by both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—is a sound approach to the multifaceted problem of criminal justice,” Matt Yglesias argues in a 2019 article that goes deep in the weeds. “More police officers … doesn’t need to mean more arrests and more incarceration. More beat cops walking the streets seems to deter crime and reduce the need to arrest anyone. And some of the best-validated approaches to reducing excessive use of force by police require departments to adopt more manpower-intensive practices.”My own advice for criminal-justice-reform advocates is to abandon the politically and, in my estimation, substantively catastrophic “Defund the Police” orientation and adopt “Solve All Murders” as a lodestar.As I put it last year, the great insight of the writer Jill Leovy’s book, Ghettoside, is that a community can be over-policed and under-policed at the same time––and that reformers can end over-policing while also championing the proposition that more police resources are required to solve more violent crimes. In today’s context, that would mean a deal with the Biden administration that embraced his call for more cops—given mechanisms in place to ensure that, rather than being deployed in harassing ways (as they were during stop-and-frisk in New York City) or squandered playing whack-a-mole with fentanyl dealers, extra police officers would be used to solve more homicides, process more rape kits, and walk more community beats in ways that help people of all classes and races to feel as safe in their neighborhoods as wealthy folks do in theirs.Of course, merely getting back to the comparably low murder rates of the Bush and Obama years would save many more Black lives than today’s status quo, never mind the “defund” approach advocated by the ascendant faction in the Black Lives Matter movement. But getting back to the murder rates of the aughts and 2010s is not enough. We should also avoid repeating the excesses of those years. In a recent issue of the American Journal of Law and Equality, Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani argue in favor of a shift in outlook that could conceivably achieve both of those goods:
Since 2014, viral images of Black people being killed at the hands of the police—Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, and many, many others—have convinced much of the public that the American criminal legal system is broken. In the summer of 2020, nationwide protests against police racism and violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were, according to some analysts, the largest social movement in the history of the United States. Activists and academics have demanded defunding the police and reallocating the funds to substitutes or alternatives. And others have called for abolishing the police altogether. It has become common knowledge that the police do not solve serious crime, they focus far too much on petty offenses, and they are far too heavy-handed and brutal in their treatment of Americans—especially poor, Black people. This is the so-called paradox of under-protection and over-policing that has characterized American law enforcement since emancipation.
The American criminal legal system is unjust and inefficient. But, as we argue in this essay, over-policing is not the problem. In fact, the American criminal legal system is characterized by an exceptional kind of under-policing, and a heavy reliance on long prison sentences, compared to other developed nations. In this country, roughly three people are incarcerated per police officer employed. The rest of the developed world strikes a diametrically opposite balance between these twin arms of the penal state, employing roughly three and a half times more police officers than the number of people they incarcerate. We argue that the United States has it backward. Justice and efficiency demand that we strike a balance between policing and incarceration more like that of the rest of the developed world. We call this the “First World Balance.”
We defend this idea in much more detail in a forthcoming book titled What’s Wrong with Mass Incarceration. This essay offers a preliminary sketch of some of the arguments in the book.
The rest of their paper is here.Signing On and SinIn the course of urging his fellow Catholics to “log off” of the internet and the devices that they use to connect to it, the National Review editor Jack Butler shares opinions about technology that may interest people of any faith or none:
Technology has made our lives better. But it has not altered human nature. In fact, it has exacerbated some of human nature's worst tendencies, including the desire to sin. Modern social media makes this particularly obvious. Instagram, which allows users to convey their lives selectively, facilitates pride (in our own curated selves) and envy (of the curated selves others create). On many apps, infinite scroll invites sloth. And readier access to pornography has multiplied the scourge of lust. And then there's Twitter … If there is one sin most endemic to Twitter, it is wrath—wrath produced in ourselves by learning of things that anger yet don't really affect us; wrath spewed forth from ourselves toward some chosen foe; wrath at our own wrath. In this, it is deeply unhealthy.
Voter Fraud or Honest Mistake?Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern lambastes Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for efforts to prosecute voter fraud that ensnared people erroneously told by the state that they were eligible to vote:
DeSantis made a spectacle out of the round of arrests made by his election police force earlier this month, jailing 20 people on charges of voter fraud and promising more prosecutions to come … But it turns out that the individuals ensnared in DeSantis’ dragnet had no idea that they could not lawfully vote. The governor’s own appointees flubbed their legal duty to stop them from registering. And because of their sloppy errors, all 20 defendants may well be acquitted of crimes they did not intend to commit.
DeSantis’ misadventure traces back to Amendment 4, the ballot initiative that was supposed to restore voting rights to most people who had completed sentences for felony convictions. (Those convicted of murder and sex offenses were excluded.) Floridians overwhelmingly approved the constitutional amendment in 2018. Yet DeSantis and his fellow Republicans promptly sabotaged the amendment by enacting an unnavigable, incomprehensible system for individuals who wished to regain their right to vote. The state refused to establish a coherent process for people convicted of felonies to learn they are eligible to cast a ballot. Many Floridians with disqualifying convictions, including the defendants arrested this month, are therefore unaware that amendment 4 does not apply to them … It appears that most if not all of the 20 men and women arrested by DeSantis’ election police did not realize they were not allowed to vote due to disqualifying convictions. They believed, in good faith, that they could exercise their civil rights … As Politico’s Matt Dixon has reported, these defendants were told by Florida officials that they were legally permitted to vote. And because they believed these officials, they now face up to five years in prison for the crime of voter fraud.
Barred From the U.S. OpenNovak Djokovic won’t be allowed to compete in the tennis championship because he is unvaccinated. “This rule makes no sense from a medical or public health standpoint,” Vinay Prasad argues in Common Sense:
Djokovic is 35 years old, and he is in terrific health. He has had and recovered from Covid-19 twice. This—and the fact that current variants are less lethal than prior strains—means that Djokovic’s odds of doing well were he to get sick with Covid-19 again are remarkably good, and lower than his risk of seasonal influenza. If Djokovic gets a vaccine at this moment it would be against the ancestral, Wuhan strain of the coronavirus and there is no good evidence this would further improve his odds. Now consider Djokovic’s risk to others. At least 140 million Americans have had and recovered from Covid-19 as of January (this number is higher today), and both vaccinated and unvaccinated can spread the disease. Data shows, when infected, that vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals shed virus at similar rates and for similar durations. Forcing Djokovic to get vaccinated won’t protect others. Sars-cov-2 will circulate in the United States for a thousand years whether we let Djokovic in, or keep him out forever.
Then, there are the absurd contradictions in our current rules. Unvaccinated American citizens can move freely in and out of the country without testing. Unvaccinated people can pack the stadium to watch this year’s U.S. Open, where face masks are optional. There is no vaccine or testing requirement to attend. Worst of all, Djokovic competed in last year’s U.S. Open, where he made the finals before the travel rule barring his entry was in place.  
[Read: War on drugs logic and overdose deaths]Smart and Utterly SpinelessThe science journalist Elizabeth Preston asks us to consider the octopus among animals used in research laboratories:
Lab rats have rights. Before researchers in the United States can experiment on the animals, they need approval from committees that ensure they follow federal regulations for housing and handling the creatures humanely. The same is true of scientists working with mice, monkeys, fish or finches.
These protected animals share one thing in common: a backbone.
But invertebrates in research labs, including worms and bees or cephalopods like squid and octopuses, do not receive the same protections from the federal government. As researchers are more often working with cephalopods to answer questions in neuroscience and other fields, the matter of whether they’re treating the animals humanely is becoming more pressing. Governments in Europe and Australia have written these smart, spineless animals into their laws. But in the United States, “If you were in a research setting, and you wanted to buy some octopuses and do whatever you wanted to do with them, there is no regulatory oversight to stop you,” said Robyn Crook, a neuroscientist at San Francisco State University.
The matter of octopus intelligence and what, if anything, it implies for octopus rights is ascendant in recent years. (If you’re new to this fascinating subject, I highly recommend starting with “Deep Intellect” by Sy Montgomery and “The Octopus: An Alien Among Us” by Michael S. A. Graziano.) In my estimation, what’s far more significant than the treatment of octopuses in research facilities is whether humans begin to factory farm the species.Last December, the BBC reported on that seemingly imminent development:
The number of octopuses in the wild are decreasing and prices are going up. An estimated 350,000 tonnes are caught each year—more than 10 times the number caught in 1950. Against that background, the race to discover the secret to breeding the octopus in captivity has been going on for decades. It’s difficult—the larvae only eat live food and need a carefully controlled environment.
The Spanish multinational, Nueva Pescanova (NP) appears to have beaten companies in Mexico, Japan and Australia, to win the race. It has announced that it will start marketing farmed octopus next summer, to sell it in 2023. The company built on research done by the Spanish Oceanographic Institute (Instituto Español de Oceanografía), looking at the breeding habits of the Common Octopus—Octopus vulgaris. NP’s commercial farm will be based inland, close to the port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands according to PortSEurope. It’s reported the farm will produce 3,000 tonnes of octopus per year. The company has been quoted as saying it will help to stop so many octopus being taken from the wild.
So you have the claim that octopus aquaculture could lower food prices and relieve pressure on wild octopuses … And on the other hand,  the prospect of hundreds of thousands of extremely intelligent octopuses perhaps suffering terribly in an octopus slaughterhouse that would, if successful, perhaps establish more of the same every year in perpetuity.  The blogger Scott Alexander’s reaction:
Let’s be against octopus factory farming. Octopi seem unusually smart and thoughtful for animals, some people have just barely started factory farming them in horrible painful ways, and probably there aren’t enough entrenched interests here to resist an effort to stop this.
Provocation of the WeekIn Ordinary Times, the writer Sarah Baker notices that parts of the right are more and more enthusiastic about coercive central planning, and wonders how they square that with their rejection of leftist economics:
The entire reason some branches of the right increasingly embrace authoritarianism is that they see no remaining possibility to regain their roles as central planners of the culture without some use of government power. My question for them is how they can see so clearly the spiritual harm of economic socialism (as they understand it) and remain so blithely in denial about the spiritual harm of a centrally planned culture. Is it any less evil because it is a communism of the spirit and the culture instead of the economy?
I don’t believe we really have deep-seated differences of opinion about whether good parents should have some involvement in their kids’ curriculum. That’s thing-adjacent. The thing itself is a deep, existential argument about the relationship of individuals to society, the trade-offs between individualism and community, how much non-conformance the culture should tolerate, how to accommodate cultural minorities, etc. We should ask the questions on these terms, place debate in this framework. If you know we can’t centrally plan peoples’ jobs, why do you think we should attempt to centrally plan their genders or their lovers or what type of life they would find most fulfilling?
Thanks for all your emails. I read every single one. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Notes may be lightly edited for clarity. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

The Economist and the economists By: Alberto Mingardi

The Economist has published an article on books to read to understand how economists think. The selection starts with Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom,* which is always good. It includes Freakonomics, the old The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner (you can do worse for a broad introduction to economic thinkers), Capitalism, Alone by Branko Milanovic and Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong by Morten Jerven, which I haven’t read; thus I can’t comment upon.

What strikes me as funny is the broader tone. So the author writers about Milton Friedman:

Ignore the fact that Friedman was ultra-libertarian. It does not matter. Very often his arguments were plain wrong. That does not matter either. This book is perhaps the best way to learn to think about trade-offs, because that was how Friedman always thought about the world. For instance, consider minimum wages. Friedman accepts that the people who receive them take home more money. But then the trade-offs come steaming in. What, he asks, about the people who are now priced out of the labour market? Or take regulation of medicines. Unnecessary, he says. Yes, you may save some lives by insisting that pharmaceutical companies jump through hoops before taking a drug to market, as fewer dangerous drugs are sold. But those reviews will also cost lives, he says, by delaying the delivery of safe drugs to patients. (In 2006 we published this article on Friedman and his legacy.)

I wish this sounded more like: get rid of your ideological prejudices for a moment, read Friedman with a clear mind, and you’ll see he was an impressive thinker. But it does not quite sound like that. It sounds like an apology: I recommend a book by Friedman, but I must make it clear that his arguments (which ones?) were “plain wrong”. Now, mind that this is The Economist, not Jacobin.

The sad truth is that we classical liberals tend not to realize how far apart we now are from the mainstream of Western elites. You may tell me that this was always the case. Well, up to a point. Twenty years ago it was true of anti-war libertarians, a tiny group who were ostracized by right and left. But broadly speaking, a certain understanding of the market economy and the dangers of over-regulating it was shared by a good number of people who perfectly fit within the political establishment. Fear of inflation and appreciation of restrained monetary policy was mainstream. For a while, nationalizations were unpopular with the left, socialist parties presented proposals to make welfare more efficient, and it was commonplace, for Davos men and the business elite to say that globalization was a good thing. Now you need to apologize to the readers of The Economist before reminding them that, hey, there are trade-offs!!!

(Photograph by Luis Alvarez/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,With Labor Day right around the corner, the next few days are bound to feature even more political rhetoric about the “American worker.” I say “even more” here intentionally, as U.S. politicians have hyped “pro-worker” policies since at least the 2016 presidential election cycle. President Trump, for example, had a 2020 “Pledge to America’s Workers” that heralded past executive actions supposedly helping American workers, and President Biden has embraced similar rhetoric and policies (e.g., his “worker centric” trade policy and recent infrastructure, energy, and semiconductor laws that, he says, create jobs for American workers). And it seems like everywhere you go in Washington these days, you find some aspiring politician, bureaucrat, or wonk lamenting the supposed plight of today’s American worker and—of course—promising to fix it.Just How Bad Do Workers Have It? In some important ways, the plight of the typical worker has been oversold—a product, at least in part, of the widespread market pessimism that we discussed just last week. As previous Capitolisms and my other work have detailed, for example, the latest data debunk frequent populist laments about middle class income “stagnation,” ever-increasing “inequality,” the “hollowing out” of the American middle class, and the “two-earner trap.” AEI’s Michael Strain recently updated the income data, finding even bigger gains for real wages between 1990 and 2022: 50, 48, 38, and 39 percent increases at the 10th, 20th, 30th, and 50th (median) percentiles, respectively:Indeed, a lot of the “job-ism” in Washington these days—at least the stuff that isn’t simply wrong—seems to be stuck in a “post-Great Recession mindset,” ignoring that most economists in 2022 have been far more worried about the labor market being too hot—as indicated by record-setting job openings, the “great resignation,” quickly rising private sector wages, and omnipresent labor “shortages”—than too cold. Even now, after the Fed interest rate hikes, “recession” debates, and stock market troubles, the weak U.S. labor demand of, say, 2011 is nowhere to be found. It’s labor supply that’s the big problem.The Associated Press @APIntel says it needs about 7,000 construction workers to build two factories in Ohio for its $20 billion semiconductor manufacturing operation. But that need comes during a shortage of people working in the trades, and amid several other big Ohio projects. Wanted: 7,000 construction workers for Intel chip plantsJOHNSTOWN, Ohio (AP) — Ohio’s largest-ever economic development project comes with a big employment challenge: how to find 7,000 construction workers in an already booming building environment when there’s also a national shortage of people working in the trades.apnews.comAugust 22nd 2022193 Retweets402 LikesThat said, things certainly aren’t perfect out there for American workers. Before the pandemic, for example, various measures of “labor dynamism” (workers moving from job to job or place to place) had been in a decades-long decline. Business dynamism (firm births, deaths, etc.), had also been dropping—a particular concern for workers considering a new business venture. And, as we’ve discussed, there’s been real weakness in particular pockets of the workforce, such as less-educated working-age men, while all workers—regardless of income or education—have faced rising costs of essential goods and services, especially in recent months. It’s thus no surprise, really, that policymakers and wonks have dedicated a disproportionate amount of time and attention to the “American worker.”But has that time been well spent?Does Most ‘Pro-Worker Policy’ Actually Help Most Workers?Unfortunately, no. The most common proposals addressing the challenges facing American workers today—heavy on new government interventions in labor, trade, and other markets—ignore critical facts in critical ways, and might therefore not just fail targeted workers but also hurt the vast majority of others in the process.First, the policies usually overlook the laundry list of current federal, state, and local policies that—while they might enrich politically powerful interest groups—harm most American workers and breed broader economic sclerosis along the way. As we’ve discussed a lot around here, current and proposed policies on things like occupational licensing, housing, childcare, healthcare, welfare, “gig” work, tariffs, and even criminal justice can end up depressing most Americans’ real (cost-adjusted) wages, labor force participation, new business formation, or mobility (economic or geographic). Even more absurdly, many of these same policies (e.g., steel tariffs) are often cloaked in “pro-worker” rhetoric, despite their well-documented harms for most of the workforce (e.g., workers in steel-consuming industries, who outnumber steelworkers by as much as 80 to 1).Second, “pro-worker” policies routinely ignore the numerous market-based solutions that achieve the same objectives—boosting workers’ independence, mobility, wealth, resilience, or quality of life—without the inevitable economic and political problems that come with more spending and bureaucracy. Oftentimes, the solution is just to eliminate or reform the policies that are already screwing things up, but other issues, such as K-12 education, require new and creative solutions to longstanding problems—problems that other, more interventionist policies have failed to fix. In case after case, what’s needed isn’t some major new government program, “emergency” executive action, or fundamental rethink of capitalism (or whatever), but actually much the opposite: small, unsexy, but important increases in workers’ freedom to pursue the things they want to pursue (if governments would let them).And that gets to the final—and perhaps most important—error: Many of today’s “pro-worker” policy proposals fundamentally misunderstand that today’s American worker is far different from the cookie-cutter models (e.g., a middle-aged, sole breadwinner male in a unionized, 9-to-5, assembly line job, or a single, college-educated, urbanite female) that those policies most often target. Surely, some American workers conform to those stereotypes, but far more don’t—because the “American worker” politicians love to champion is actually a wildly diverse group of distinct individuals across a wide range of industries and localities, each with his or her own goals, desires, and skills.For example, while we continue to hear both Republicans and Democrats crow about “saving” American manufacturing jobs via protectionism and industrial policy, most workers today (female and male) work in industries other than manufacturing, whose share of the workforce (today about 8 percent) has declined steadily since 1953 (about 32 percent). As we’ve discussed, this isn’t because of politicians’ inattention or some sort of blind dedication to “free market fundamentalism,” but because of seismic global factors similarly affecting most every industrialized nation (and now China too).In 2021, in fact, the number of “blue-collar,” male-dominated nonmanufacturing jobs in the United States outnumbered nonsupervisory manufacturing jobs by a nearly 4-to-1 margin:Thus, ostensibly “pro-worker” policies that protect or subsidize manufacturing to help certain “disadvantaged” demographic groups (e.g., less-educated males) often do so at the direct expense of not only most of the American workforce but also other industries that are home to these very same American workers (and lots more of them). This makes little sense.The conventional wisdom on manufacturing also remains soaked in the aforementioned job-ism, which assumes that the current U.S. manufacturing job situation is due to a lack of demand for workers (caused by globalization or automation, for example). In reality, there’s little evidence of a widespread labor demand problem: In the first quarter of 2022, for example, there were about 850,000 unfilled manufacturing job openings, and new research estimates that this figure could hit 2.1 million by 2030. Other trends in manufacturing also defy the Beltway conventional wisdom. For example, two new Federal Reserve studies have found that non-management workers’ longstanding “wage premium” in manufacturing (versus the same workers in non-manufacturing jobs) has essentially disappeared. Furthermore, many of the manufacturing jobs of tomorrow will actually be in services (e.g., industrial robot maintenance and repair) or require advanced skills and post-secondary education—far different from the routine assembly line jobs of the past that required only a high school degree. As of 2021, in fact, more manufacturing workers above the age of 25 had an associate’s degree or higher (45.1 percent) than had, at most, a high school degree (40.2 percent), continuing a trend of increasing education in the sector that dates back decades.In short, there are plenty of “manufacturing jobs” out there—for those who want and can qualify for them. Far too many “pro-worker” manufacturing policies ignore all of this.This doesn’t mean, of course, that all American workers now must aspire to attain a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree—far from it. Today, for example, online educational institutions—driven in part by the pandemic—have become increasingly popular and well-respected, and companies like Google have launched certificate programs that they’ll treat as the equivalent of four-year degree:Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome"The $670B College-Industrial Complex Is Under Threat From Online School" wsj.com/articles/the-6… "Every student that opts for an online college degree—or the Google equivalent—is another student that won’t be shelling out for the far-higher cost of a traditional education"The $670 Billion College-Industrial Complex Is Under Threat From Online SchoolThe global health crisis took a big bite out of higher-education revenue. But the pandemic’s long-term effect on colleges and universities may be the changing attitudes about remote learning. Hundreds of American colleges are at risk.wsj.comJune 25th 20216 Retweets18 Likes Non-college pathways also are increasingly promising: Store managers at Whole Foods can make well more than $100,000 without a degree; employer-led apprenticeship and retraining initiatives successfully vault participants into a similar pay range; and massive retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target employ millions of Americans and are constantly pushing the compensation envelope (and each other). Heck, Walmart this year announced that store managers can make $200,000 per year, and first-year truck drivers will make up to $110,000, with both training and licensing paid by the company. (And they’re still struggling to find workers.) The assumed necessity of college might also be changing. For example, the “wealth premium” that American college grads long enjoyed over their noncollege peers has shrunk dramatically in recent years, and the unemployment rate for young college graduates has actually exceeded the rate for all workers since 2018 (though young college grads still enjoy some, albeit shrinking, employment advantage over non-college workers of the same age). A brand new study further finds that “[l]abor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents.”In short, college isn’t for everyone, nor does it need to be—and Americans appear to understand that (while many policymakers don’t):The pandemic has also accelerated fundamental changes to workers’ relationships with their workplace. Most obviously, there’s been a dramatic rise in remote work: The Census Bureau reports, for example, that 30 percent of employed adults reported in February 2022 that they worked remotely most or all of the time (up from 6 percent in 2019). The Los Angeles Times adds that, even with lots of workers returning to the office this spring, “about 30% of all paid workdays are still being done from home, up from just 5% before the COVID-19 outbreak.” Per McKinsey, this translates to tens of millions of additional American workers now working from home all or most of the time. They and others further report that most workers prefer these new arrangements, and that these new “teleworkable” jobs are available not merely to wealthy or college-educated workers, but also to those with less education or income. Independent (contract) work is also changing—and again in surprising ways. Between 2017 and 2021, for example, the share of workers categorized as “freelance” held steady at about 36 percent, but that share increasingly consisted of skilled workers—in computer programming, business consulting, marketing, information technology, and other services—while the percentage of temp workers declined. In 2021, in fact, more than half of all freelancers in the United States provided skilled services or labor. By contrast, IRS data show that only about 9 percent of all independent workers are employed in “gig” work.The pandemic-era increase in new businesses, which we first noted in late 2020, also has continued in 2021 and 2022:The data show, moreover, that this isn’t just about knowledge work or gig work—Americans are going out on their own in all sorts of industries:Trends in remote work, independent work, and new business formation show that many American workers, especially younger ones, increasingly value flexibility, autonomy, and lifestyle above higher wages or traditional office perks. New research finds, in fact, that many employers have offered remote work options to temper wage increases because their workers so value this new amenity more than a slightly larger paycheck. Freelancers say control over their schedule and location flexibility are among their biggest key motivators; gig workers report much the same. Even in manufacturing, prospective workers today increasingly value personal well-being, work flexibility, and geography above other employment attributes.Recent policies seeking to mandate wages and benefits, tie workers to specific places or firms, ban independent work, or restrict certain types of businesses and professions are again oblivious to these trends.These and other policies also seem unaware of recent changes in Americans’ personal lives. According to new research from the University of Texas, for example, approximately 70 percent of American mothers can today expect to be the primary breadwinner in their household for at least one year, and this trend is mostly about married moms, not unmarried ones. Meanwhile, COVID-19, remote work, altered family priorities, and other factors may be changing the long-held assumptions that decades of Americans moving to coastal cities and parents working away from home would continue indefinitely. Suddenly, Americans are moving back to the suburbs, and the country’s hottest job markets are in small or midsize cities in the Sun Belt and Midwest. And working parents, after juggling childcare and children’s schooling, have stronger preferences for flexibility, remote work options, and starting their own businesses.No, this doesn’t mean that cities are “dying” (ahem), or that no Americans want that pre-pandemic two-earner lifestyle. But it does mean that workers’ priorities are not only diverse but also constantly changing—something that static, presumptuous U.S. labor, housing, transportation, and other policies routinely miss.Finally, the American worker is increasingly globalized, contrary to the common assumption in Washington—sadly on both sides of the aisle—that protectionism and nativism are “working class” policies. For example, a new study has found that, while American companies engaged in international goods trade constituted only 6 percent of all U.S. companies in 2021, these “goods traders” accounted for half of U.S. jobs that same year (in a wide range of industries) and generated about 60 percent of all net new U.S. jobs since the Great Recession (mainly via startup businesses). Even in manufacturing, goods traders saw net job creation since 2011 because they adapted to new import competition and thrived thereafter; non-trader manufacturers, on the other hand, struggled (especially in labor-intensive industries like apparel and leather goods). Leaving aside the many other benefits of trade and foreign investment for the economy, this is a compelling case against “worker-centric” protectionism and for greater international engagement. Maybe somebody could tell the White House?So What Should “Pro-Worker” Policy Look Like?Overall, these trends show that the “American worker” in Washington and statehouses across the country often bears little resemblance to the U.S. workforce’s complex and ever-changing reality, and that a new approach is sorely needed. This doesn’t argue, however, for crafting new “pro-worker” policies based on today’s “new normal.” Instead, policymakers should generally (1) stop targeting a certain kind of American worker, promising cradle-to-grave protection from inevitable disruptions, or presuming to know tomorrow’s employment and lifestyle trends; and (2) embrace market-based policies that lower costs generally and maximize individual workers’ autonomy and mobility, so that they can choose the careers and lifestyles that they (not politicians) want and can more easily adjust to whatever “normal” comes next.There are oodles of potential policies that fit this bill, but some of the most important ones will be featured in a forthcoming book—officially released this winter but rolled out in parts throughout the fall—that I’ve been editing and writing, with several Cato colleagues’ help, for most of this year. (I revealed some early book cover ideas last week, if you’re interested.) Among the 17 subject chapters are the obvious issues like education, remote work, childcare, and licensing, but also ones that greatly affect many of today’s workers but get less attention, like home-based business, criminal justice, and essential goods (food, clothing, etc.). Each chapter will identify current problems and their causes, and then will suggest pro-market ways for federal, state, and local policymakers to fix them—empowering all American workers in the process. It’s a great project (if I do say so myself), and I’m excited to share more of it with you soon. (This column is a first taste.)As detailed in the book, market-based reforms across a wide spectrum of issues not only would boost American workers’ freedom and resilience, but would also likely make them better off—and not merely by lowering the prices of various necessities (though that’s certainly good too). According to a new study, for example, workers in more “fluid” labor markets like the United States enjoyed higher lifetime wage growth, lower unemployment, and greater productivity than their counterparts in places like Europe with more regulation and worker “protections.” By contrast, the same study finds that supposedly “pro-worker” policies that reduce mobility, raise employer costs, and pigeonhole workers into certain preordained jobs or workplace arrangements significantly reduce workers’ lifetime earnings, career advancement, and skills accumulation—thus harming a nation’s overall labor productivity and economy more broadly. Recent evidence reinforces these findings: Europeans with more labor “protections”—including many that are very much en vogue today in Washington—are today struggling with involuntary underemployment. The more dynamic and less-regulated U.S. labor market, by contrast, has fully rebounded.Put simply, pro-market policies are very much pro-worker policies too. And it’s time for Washington to relearn that lesson before it’s too late.Capitolism will be off next week to celebrate Labor Day (because, hey, I’m an American worker too).Chart(s) of the WeekForeign ownership of U.S. securities, in perspective:Beware authoritarian countries’ GDP proclamations:The LinksNew England governors beg for a Jones Act waiverCelebrate back to school season by… paying tariffs on everything your kid needs (more)“Forgiveness” isn’t the only problem with Biden’s student loan plan (more)On “greedflation” and human natureGood move by the White House to (eventually) un-paywall federally funded researchDisney parks are setting revenue recordsInstitutional investors are backing away from residential housingForeign automakers protest protectionist U.S. EV tax credit schemeThirteen states may tax “forgiven” loansFive years of Amazon + Whole Foods (and everything’s fine)U.S. rents hit new recordNational Review's Dominic Pino investigates former US Trade Rep. Robert LighthizerHow to make a wage tax a consumption tax"Powell’s 8-Minute Speech Erases $78 Billion From Richest Americans"Good California: Legislature passes several land use deregulation billsBad California: Legislature establishes a wage control board for fast food workers

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow, on Tuesday, at the age of ninety-one. In the last two decades of his life, he rarely granted interviews. So, in 2010, when he agreed to speak to someone from a Moscow magazine that I edited, I felt both awe and some misgivings: here was a unique opportunity that would almost certainly be wasted. Gorbachev was a notoriously terrible interviewee. He rambled; he went off on tangents; he almost never finished a sentence. In a desperate move, my colleagues and I asked readers to send in questions. Someone asked, “What could bring you joy now?” This time, Gorbachev was ready with a concise answer. “If someone could promise me that in the next world I will see Raisa,” he said. “But I don’t believe in that.” Raisa, his wife of forty-six years, had died, of leukemia, in 1999.

“I don’t believe in God,” Gorbachev continued. Raisa had not been a believer, either, but “she progressed faster than I did in this direction.” What he seemed to be getting at was that Raisa had stayed in step with her country, becoming a post-Soviet Russian, while Gorbachev remained a fundamentally Soviet man. His was the quintessential life story of an apparatchik: plucked from the southern Russia countryside by the Party when he was still a secondary-school student, university in Moscow, and a series of Party jobs that culminated with his appointment, in 1985, as the General Secretary of the Central Committee, the highest job in the U.S.S.R. At the time, Gorbachev was fifty-four—shockingly young. He was surrounded by octogenarians who expected deference and gratitude. But he had a greater love in his life, and a loyalty that superseded any debt he had to the Party and its doddering leadership. Gorbachev lived and worked to impress Raisa. They had met as students at Moscow State University, where he studied law and she studied philosophy. Raisa’s classmates were an extraordinary cohort of postwar Soviet thinkers, and that, perhaps more than anything else, helped shape the policies that will forever be synonymous with Gorbachev’s name: glasnost and perestroika.

Within weeks of becoming General Secretary, Gorbachev announced his intention to reform and modernize the Soviet Union. In June, 1987, he announced a new concept: perestroika, or restructuring, of Soviet policies in every area. Although he didn’t explicitly say so, what he meant by restructuring was liberalization: the Soviet Union would legalize limited private enterprise and relax censorship, allowing public discussion of topics that had previously been taboo. Censorship laws were never abolished, but the loosening of restrictions—the explicit aim of glasnost—produced an unprecedented explosion of writing, publishing, filmmaking, performance, and music. Obscure journals that published long, quasi-academic articles saw their press runs soar. People lined up to read the new issues of papers such as the Moscow News or to get into a theatre to see a newly staged play by, say, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The reason, more often than not, was that the journal, the newspaper, and the playwright tackled the previously censored topic of Stalinist terror. For the first time since Stalin’s death, in 1953, Soviet citizens were publicly talking about their past.

Years later, Gorbachev wanted to preserve this part of his legacy. In 2008, in coöperation with the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Gorbachev formed a working group to try to create a museum of Stalinist terror. As General Secretary, he said, he had received full access to the archives. This was when he had learned that terror had been truly random, that people had been arrested and executed not for any wrongdoing, nor on suspicion of wrongdoing, nor even on specious accusation of wrongdoing, but simply because every local law-enforcement entity had to fill its quota of arrests and executions. He had also learned that at the height of the terror, when thousands of people were executed every day, Soviet leaders had signed off on these executions by the page—with dozens of names per page. Gorbachev, who had created a commission that ultimately reviewed millions of cases from the Stalin era and repealed hundreds of thousands of guilty verdicts, seemed to shudder in disbelief as he talked about the things he had learned. Here was another quality that set him apart from any Soviet leader before him: he could be shaken. His world view could be challenged and changed; he himself, it seemed, could change. The same could not be said of his successors: it soon became clear that the museum Gorbachev wanted to build could not exist in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which was busy eliding the memory of Stalinist terror from its own version of Russian history.

Gorbachev is both credited and reviled for the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But he never set out to change the world in that way. In 1987, he released all Soviet political prisoners, who numbered several hundred at the time. (Russia is currently holding more political prisoners than it did in the nineteen-eighties.) His policies of glasnost and perestroika enabled critics of the Soviet structure to be heard. Andrei Sakharov, a dissident who was elected to the Supreme Soviet after Gorbachev released him from internal exile, argued against the monopoly of the Communist Party. Galina Starovoitova, an academic ethnographer turned politician, argued that the empire must be dismantled, and proposed a union treaty to replace the Soviet colonial structure. Gorbachev rejected both notions.

In 1989, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union released its grip on its European satellites—the countries that Moscow had effectively ruled since the end of the Second World War. One after another, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and others brought down their pro-Soviet governments. But, when Russia’s internal colonies—the countries that had been forcibly subsumed by the Soviet Union rather than simply dominated by it—reached for independence, Moscow reacted with violence. In April, 1989, authorities brutally crushed pro-independence protests in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, killing at least twenty-one people and injuring two hundred and ninety. In January, 1991, Soviet troops killed pro-independence activists in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, after the Baltic countries, which had been occupied by the Soviet Union during the Second World War, declared independence. Many tributes to Gorbachev have credited him with presiding over the “bloodless” dissolution of the Soviet Union—forgetting that blood was and, in some cases, continues to be shed in conflicts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Tajikistan, and elsewhere. In March, 1991, after not only the Baltics but also Russia and Ukraine—the largest Soviet republics—voted to secede from the Union, Gorbachev staged a referendum on preserving the U.S.S.R. Six of the fifteen constituent republics refused to participate, but Gorbachev claimed that the remaining nine validated the continued existence of the empire.

In August, 1991, a group of elderly hard-liners attempted a coup. They placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his summer residence in Crimea and declared a state of emergency, restoring censorship. Three days later, the coup had been routed, but Gorbachev returned to Moscow a lame duck: he had been supplanted by Boris Yeltsin, the leader of an independent Russia. In December, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus negotiated the end of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev resigned his post as the head of a country that no longer existed. He had been willing to use violence and rigged votes to try to maintain the country, but he made no attempt to use such tactics in order to stay in power himself.

Gorbachev was that rare sort of politician who acted on the belief that the world and the people in it—including himself—can be better than they often appear to be. The ultimate tragedy of his political life is that, for the past twenty-three years, Russia has been ruled by the opposite sort of politician. Vladimir Putin believes humanity to be rotten to its core, and all of his acts, in one way or another, are designed to validate this world view. Putin was a relatively junior K.G.B. officer in Dresden, in East Germany, for most of perestroika. He was not in Russia when the streets seemed to fill with the intoxicating air of freedom, but he was in East Germany when Moscow let it go. He has never forgiven Gorbachev for abandoning K.G.B. officers in Dresden, the satellite country itself, and the dream of a giant European empire. (Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said, on Tuesday night, that the Russian President would be issuing his sincerest condolences to the family.)

Robert Asahina: Antony Blinken told CNN in January that the purpose of sanctions is to deter aggression. Ironically, at that point he was arguing against imposing sanctions on Russia. After Putin invaded Ukraine in February, successive rounds of “unprecedented” sanctions by the United States and the EU have failed not only to deter Russia, but to stop the war’s escalation. Meanwhile, Russia has responded by holding Ukrainian exports hostage, essentially weaponizing food.So the question is what sanctions will accomplish in the long term, since they’ve mostly failed at their avowed purpose in the short term. But also: What will the international order look like down the road, now that sanctions, embargoes, boycotts and other geo-economic tools have effectively become weapons of war? That is, has the so-called neoliberalism of the past thirty years—which depends upon free movement of people and capital and technology and ideas—come to an end?Stuart Levey: Sanctions can be understood in tactical and strategic terms. On the tactical side, it’s clear that financial tools have become an important instrument of national security. I was at the Treasury Department from 2004 to 2011, and initially there was skepticism about whether financial measures could be effective. Over time we’ve learned they can be, if done well.They’re not magic, however. I think it’s unrealistic to believe they would have deterred Putin from invading Ukraine. Nonetheless, they have inflicted pain, thereby creating leverage for diplomacy with Russia in the medium term. There are a few important takeaways thus far. First, and to the Biden administration’s credit, the response has been decidedly multilateral. The United States and its allies have a well-established playbook to roll out sanctions and other financial measures efficiently, effectively, and quickly. With an exception I’ll come to, they showed some significant strength. A wide variety of measures—sanctioning banks and individuals, imposing import and export restrictions, restricting access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), banning travel—that normally would be disconnected, were all exercised in a concerted way.___STEADY_PAYWALL___Another thing that’s been done fairly well is the high level of focused effort to pursue corruption. Fighting corruption is often something where there is a lot of lip service paid. Everyone agrees that corruption is bad: There is a UN convention against it. Countries have signed up to all sorts of really great-sounding commitments. But in general, very little happens. It’s significant that this time the West has gone after oligarchs who became wealthy or are sustaining their wealth by supporting Putin. It remains to be seen whether we can turn that effort into something lasting beyond a one-time tactic of targeting Russia. But certainly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in some other places, there’s been a reckoning as to why so much of this wealth has been stashed in our societies.

The last point on the tactical side is the exception I referred to: While sanctions have been quick and pretty effective, there’s a gaping hole in the sanctions we have imposed which essentially allows Russia to continue to sell its oil and gas, bringing in lots of hard currency, including from Europe. There are other things that haven’t been done, and ways sanctions can be improved, but this is the really big problem that mutes their effectiveness overall.The multilateral coalition that exists is imperfect. A lot of countries haven’t joined the coalition, including of course China, but also India and other potential customers for Russian oil and gas. Our traditional Gulf allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have not been willing to cooperate by increasing production and lowering the price of oil. So the United States still faces challenges making sanctions work just on a tactical level.Francis Fukuyama: I don’t think people ever thought that sanctions by themselves would deter Russia. I think they were part of the calculation. Leading up to the war, Russia anticipated they would be hit with sanctions, and they protected themselves by building up their foreign currency reserves to over 600 billion prior to the war. They didn’t anticipate other central banks freezing a lot of those assets, but they clearly were worried and thought they had a way around anticipated sanctions.Stuart is right that the big problem is the energy exports. Russia still gets around $700 million a day in payments for oil and gas, which is why the ruble hasn’t fallen more than it has. That’s why Russia can continue to fund its war machine. Whether Europe can actually wean itself off of Russian oil and gas remains to be seen. They’ve been making some progress in that direction. I was part of a working group advising both the Biden administration and the Ukrainians about exactly what kinds of sanctions are necessary. I think they have a pretty good plan not to ban imports but to impose tariffs on imports so that the Russians don’t capture a big differential between the global price and their production costs. This also allows the Europeans to move in the direction of cutting off Russian oil and gas but in a more gradual fashion so they can start replacing those sources elsewhere.Other sanctions that may be highly effective are the blocking of technology exports, because a lot of Russian military equipment depends actually on Western technology. The Ukrainians shot down a Russian military helicopter that had a Garmin GPS system. Russian aviation uses Boeing jetliners, and they’re now cut off from spare parts. As time goes on, these kinds of blockages are going to start cutting much more deeply into the Russian perception of the costs of the war they’ve undertaken.Alternative Payment Systems and Digital CurrenciesSL: I agree that cutting off technology has been critical, and it’s been an important part of what’s worked well. The question of reserves, however, raises broader questions. The rest of the world—particularly China—will be watching what sort of sanctions we put on Russia. And while we look at sanctions and financial measures as critical national security tools now, other countries will be persuaded that they really must find a way to escape a system in which the United States can inflict this kind of pain relatively unilaterally. Remember, there’s no UN Security Council resolution here, as there was with Iran and North Korea. This is a “coalition of the willing” sanctions regime.If you’re China, you see that the West not only cut off Russia from access to its central bank reserves, but now the West is talking about confiscating those reserves in order to pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine. This may be justified under the circumstances, but it will have long-term implications for how the Chinese, for example, will react to the current norms in our financial system. Similarly, the Saudis or Indians might be wondering if this could happen to them—that their central bank reserves could be frozen and confiscated. These actions were always possible, but the current steps are very strong, so countries will be looking for ways to extricate themselves from the system that currently allows the United States to exercise coercive power.I don’t think the United States should be a hundred percent confident that it has the rest of the Western world behind it in these matters. Even the Europeans are pretty skeptical of U.S. unilateral power in the financial system, and have at times been resentful of it. So we should flag this as potentially a medium-term strategic challenge for the United States.FF: Underlying this issue is the position of the dollar as the world’s leading currency. There’s been discussion about alternatives to the dollar for as long as I can remember, and nobody’s really moved in that direction. But if these central banks are going to be confiscating dollar reserves held by other central banks, held by the U.S. Treasury, that’s a big incentive to start using currencies other than the dollar.The advantages that the United States gets by being the world’s currency are enormous. We get away with running such enormous budget deficits year after year because other countries are willing to hold their assets in dollars. If there’s a broad move away from that, it’s going to raise interest rates domestically and make it much harder to fund deficits. But what’s the alternative? The renminbi is not freely convertible, the Euro has problems, and the Japanese yen and Swiss franc are relatively small players in global markets. What are the prospects of the dollar losing its supremacy around the world?SL: Back in 2005, when I was a new under secretary at the Treasury Department and we instituted a unilateral sanction, I got a pretty strong lecture from some senior people about how unilateral sanctions would undermine the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. To date, that’s not been true. You’ve seen what’s happened in the intervening fifteen or sixteen years. We’ve continued to act unilaterally, and the dollar has remained strong—for exactly the reason you said. There is no real alternative. Of course, just because it hasn’t happened yet, doesn’t mean it won’t. But the dollar is currently the world’s safest currency, and it maintains its position for a variety of reasons, including the overall strength of our economy and the rule of law in the United States. That’s where our real leverage rests now.

One thing we should be concerned about though is whether it is possible to develop an alternative payment system with blockchain and digital or cryptocurrencies, creating an opportunity to move value without necessarily going in and out of dollars, and therefore not having to clear transactions through the United States. I was part of a working group at Hoover about the Chinese digital renminbi and how China is working on an infrastructure for such a payment system. There’s a risk China will want to develop payment rails free from U.S. domination. And there’ll be a lot of other countries willing and even eager to free themselves from the potential of U.S. financial coercion. If I were a policymaker in the United States right now, I would be trying to make sure that, as digital currencies develop, we maintain the ability to impose and enforce sanctions. Right now we could probably shape the development of a payment system based on digital currencies, but if we stand back and let the Chinese dominate—they are already well ahead of us—there’s a risk we could lose our leverage. This is also why it is critical that any such payment system be properly regulated.FF: The current meltdown in the cryptocurrency market does indicate the real dangers of this type of completely unregulated form of payment. And for environmental reasons and because of the transaction costs, crypto will never be a means of payment. But it could be a store of value. So even though you’ll never use Bitcoin to pay for your gasoline at the pump, you could use it to hold a few billion dollars in reserves.SL: There are ways to have high transactional volume on blockchains, though not at the moment with Bitcoin. You can’t just look at the limitations of Bitcoin transactions. There are digital stablecoins that could be used as payment tokens right now. Of course, we just witnessed the collapse of a so-called algorithmic stablecoin that wasn’t backed by anything. But imagine a true stablecoin—a digital dollar backed by real assets. You could use it as a token to move on the blockchain to make paymentsand potentially create an alternative payment network.Stablecoins are not big enough right now to support the massive volumes that are transacted, but theoretically they could. In fact, this is the aspiration of many projects in the crypto space. What is also being contemplated are central banks issuing their own digital tokens that could be moved very quickly on blockchains. The Fed is considering the possibility of issuing a digital dollar in the United States, though it’s a long time away. But meanwhile, the private sector does have alternative digital currencies, true stablecoins that could fill this role.If that sort of payment system develops on blockchain-based rails, the United States may not be able to implement sanctions effectively in the way that the traditional financial system does. Sanctions work in the traditional financial system because there are intermediaries along the way that know the parties to the transactions and scrutinize the transactions. Who’s the counterparty? What’s the purpose of the transaction? Sanctions work because those intermediaries have real incentives to be careful. The whole purpose of the blockchain is to eliminate those intermediaries and make the transactions frictionless, allowing parties to transact without even revealing their true identity into the ecosystem. And that is a risk to our sanctions programs and therefore to our national security.FF: But would anybody ever trust a private issuer of stablecoins that wasn’t heavily regulated by a government? That’s really the problem with existing stablecoins—they claimed they had adequate reserves, but they didn’t actually reveal what they were or whether they really existed. So would there have to be a government standing behind a stablecoin before people would truly trust it?SL: My position has always been that no issuer of a private stablecoin will ever be as trustworthy as the Fed. A digital dollar issued by the Fed would be most trustworthy. But sufficient auditing and transparency as to your reserves could make a private digital currency that people did trust, if it had an audited reserve of a hundred percent of the value issued, plus a capital buffer or FDIC insurance. Even now, there are billions and billions of dollars of stablecoins in circulation, and some people are trusting them.FF: Are the Chinese actually trying to create a digital renminbi, and if so, wouldn’t that mean losing control over their money supply? Or is this a parallel currency that will be used for transactions that will somehow be kept separate from the renminbi?SL: My understanding is that it is a digital representation of the renminbi, but with centralized control. There’s no aspiration for decentralization in China, as you’d imagine. They are using some of the same technology but with a different set of values. They’re telling people they’re going to preserve privacy—but in fact that will mean that only the central authority will have all the information about the transactions and who’s making them.At the moment, this digital currency is intended for domestic purposes. But the Chinese are creating the infrastructure needed to make it interoperable internationally. I believe they will eventually want to export this capability to countries who either want it or are coerced into taking it. In the long term, it’s part of an overall strategy for them to create a payment system where the United States doesn’t have the ability to control things.China has been pushing back a lot against U.S. sanctions authorities. They’ve passed laws that make it a crime to honor U.S. or other country sanctions in China because they want to exert their own market power. Their efforts in digital currencies are part of a larger strategy to get out from under a U.S. dominated financial system. My worry is that we are not taking that risk seriously enough.FF: Apart from the blockchain based digital currencies, there’s talk about an alternative payment system that the Chinese have been trying to set up, now that the Russians are being excluded from SWIFT. Could you say a little bit about how extensive that is and whether it actually could become an adequate alternative to SWIFT?SL: SWIFT is a messaging system, and theoretically China and Russia can set up their own messaging system. But I think the alternative to SWIFT that the Chinese are looking into will only have limited effectiveness. Who would want to join such a system? Maybe Iran and Russia and a few others, but that’s not the party everyone wants to be invited to.My worry is that digital currencies might enable the Chinese to create a larger party—a payment system where they can attract others by arguing that politics don’t play a role. Countries such as India might want to join that in order to escape a payment system where the United States and a few other countries can decide who gets to play. Even the Europeans will be somewhat open to that. My view is that this would not be in the interest of U.S. national security, that it is critical that we maintain our ability to protect the integrity of the financial system. We want to support technological innovation but not sacrifice our national security.FF: To return to sanctions: The Iran sanctions were thorough and effective because of secondary sanctions, but we’ve not really moved in that direction in the case of Russia. Is it impossible to contemplate them?SL: It certainly will not be easy. We had an even broader coalition regarding Iran as well as several UN Security Council Resolutions to rely upon. Think about the countries that are still doing business with Russia: India, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, UAE, Saudi Arabia—and, of course, China. That is a lot of countries for us to say that we will sanction entities within them that continue to do business with Russia. So secondary sanctions are somewhat more challenging though not impossible. You start by suggesting reduced transactions in exchange for not imposing secondary sanctions.Corruption and DemocracySL: I’d like to return to corruption for a second. There’s this notion that fighting corruption is an important part of promoting liberalism and the rule of law. Yet some of the most authoritarian regimes are very adept at using the tools of anti-corruption as a way to consolidate their own power. Think about Xi Jinping: When he came into power, the first thing he did was to get rid of mid-level leaders, some of whom were undoubtedly corrupt. An even better example is Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, who went on an anti-corruption campaign when he came to power. This was really popular with young people in Saudi Arabia. So MBS has consolidated his power not just through fear but also through popularity. How do you deal with the fact that anti-corruption drives can be used so effectively by the most authoritarian regimes?FF: This has been a pet peeve of mine—the assumption that the cure for corruption is more democracy and transparency and accountability. That’s not true just as an empirical historical matter. You can get effective and non-corrupt government under an authoritarian regime. The great bureaucracies that developed in Germany or Japan or South Korea or Britain all started in pre-democratic times, put in place by authoritarian regimes that wanted effective government. Charles Tilley’s classical theory was that war is actually what produces good clean government, because you can’t afford to have your incompetent cousin bleeding off money or running your army. So I don’t think there’s any necessary connection between good government and democracy.China and Singapore are the best poster children for that. Everyone would concede that they’re pretty good at doing what they do, but they’re clearly not democratically accountable. Some of the worst cases of corruption are actually democracies in which politicians have to give out favors. That includes the United States in the 19th century, where we had a patronage system that was fed directly by the need of politicians to get people into the polls and vote for them.Chris Carruthers wrote a book about Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive in China, as well as campaigns in other authoritarian countries. Carruthers concluded that Xi Jinping actually did reduce corruption in China. His methods were not democratic, but they were still effective, as similar drives were in other authoritarian countries. So we have to get out of this mindset that democratic elections and transparency mean effective government and lower levels of corruption. Corruption and anti-corruption can occur in any regime. Good governance and anti-corruption are achieved independently of democracy.Who Wins?SL: If Putin wins, that’s a disaster. If Putin loses in Ukraine, maybe he loses power at home, and that could be good for Russia. But there’s so much in the middle that’s not clear cut. How should we be planning for that? Should we be planning for a long-term sanctions regime that will last for years? What can our relationship with Russia be if Putin remains in power? It’s hard to imagine that these sanctions would ever get lifted. Even if they did eventually, it’s hard to imagine that the private sector going back into Russia if Putin is still in power.RA: This raises the strategic question that I wanted to get to, which is what the world is going to look like post-Ukraine—particularly if Russia and China become an alliance exercising not just economic but military power.FF: If the war devolves into a stalemate, that will be a Russian victory. If Russia holds onto southern Ukraine, Ukraine will be choked economically, a non-viable country. Putin will be able to say he’s accomplished his goals. More and more people, in this country but especially in Europe, will begin peeling off from the coalition, saying we need a ceasefire. Henry Kissinger made that case at Davos recently.

That is not a good outcome in my view, which is why I think that we should up the ante and continue to supply things like the multiple launch rocket systems the Ukrainians really need to beat back the Russians. Those might not be decisive weapons, but I would certainly support supplying them because Ukraine needs to drive the Russians out of the south of their country. If there are a lot of voices in the West calling for a ceasefire, then the politics get complicated because, as I’m sure Stuart knows, it’s really hard to get rid of sanctions.Without a very clear outcome one way or the other, we’ll be in for an extended period where we’re continuing sanctions and Russia is not triumphant but also not defeated. That’s going to make the world quite messy.SL: Let’s assume that Russia’s not definitively defeated, so we don’t lift sanctions. But Russia continues to try to cooperate with China. This plays into the dynamic we were talking about earlier, where countries want to set up a way to operate outside of U.S. coercion. If I were in the U.S. government now, I would be trying to make sure that that kind of alternative financial mechanism doesn’t become broader than a China-Russia channel. We’re not going to be able to stop China and Russia from doing whatever they want together, but how do we make sure that we don’t end up with other countries joining them? I would be working hard to ensure that India and our other Asian partners are not tempted to become part of this. The risk is that the important national security benefit we have from dominating the financial system could deteriorate over time. I don’t think we can afford to be too relaxed about this threat.RA: Stuart, you talked earlier about inflicting pain, but the pain is not just what we inflict on Russia. Russia inflicts pain on, to begin with, Europe regarding energy, and Africa and elsewhere regarding food. So which way is the pain going here?SL: You make a good point. Russia has leverage at the moment with respect to gas in Europe, and we’ve seen they have leverage over food. This is a rough game. As appalling as it is, but given the brutality they have displayed, we can’t be surprised that they’re using food as a weapon. Let’s put it this way: We certainly are not going to be able to shame them into stopping. We have to continue to use whatever tools we have to counter them.RA: Speaking of food, I’m reminded of Thomas Friedman’s remark of twenty-five years ago, which now seems comic, that countries that could support a chain of McDonald’s wouldn’t go to war with each other. McDonald’s has now pulled out of Russia. But it seems to me that Russia holds the cards, not McDonald’s. That is, we care more about Russia supplying food and oil than Russia cares about us supplying McDonald’s.SL: Western businesses’ abandonment of Russia is going to be painful and not easily reversible.  A lot of very big companies that are leaving won’t be returning anytime soon, even if the Russians wanted them to. And that’s going to have long-term implications for Russia, even post Putin. I think that he’s really inflicted damage on his society there.Even if the Ukrainians decided they wanted to sign a treaty or an armistice with Russia, and we lifted sanctions, the private sector’s not going to be comfortable doing business with Putin’s regime. We could end up in the same situation we had with Iran after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was somewhat comical to me. We entered into the Iran deal and we lifted sanctions on hundreds of Iranian entities. But Western banks said they would not be doing business again with entities that had been sanctioned ten minutes earlier for terrorism and proliferation. Then we had John Kerry flying to Europe to try to talk European banks into doing business with Iran, and of course he didn’t persuade anyone. I don’t see how the private sector is going to return to doing business with Putin in the future.RA: On the other hand, we have corporations like Google and Apple and Disney kowtowing to Chinese demands. Could something like that evolve with Russia?FF: It’s hard to see. China has such a broad, diversified, big economy. The Western interest in Russia, apart from the energy sector, is pretty minimal. There’s only one Russian consumer product that I purchase regularly. That’s vacuum tubes, because in high end audio, some of the best amplifiers are still tube amplifiers, and Russia is one of the few countries that still manufacture vacuum tubes. However, that’s not a large part of the global economy.RA: Still, Russia does account for 20 percent of nickel and 20 percent of agricultural products. It’s a bigger player than we imagine when thinking of it as having an economy the size of Spain. In terms of purchasing power parity, Russia is actually more like Germany than Spain.SL: For big Western companies, I think Frank is right that they have a strategic need to access the Chinese market if they want to continue to grow. Very few of them depend on the Russian market. There may be some natural resources that we need from Russia that we’d have to work through, but for these big multinationals, China’s a more important market. And China has much more leverage over these companies than Russia does.This conversation took place in the summer of 2022, and references to world events will reflect this timeframe.Francis Fukuyama, chairman of the editorial board of American Purpose, is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents (2022).Robert Asahina, an editorial board member of American Purpose, has been editor-in-chief of Broadway Books and vice president of Simon & Schuster. He is author of Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad, one of the Washington Post’s best nonfiction books of 2006.Stuart Levey was most recently CEO of the Diem Association. He previously served as Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the U.S. Treasury Department in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.Image: Flickr: Ganesh.Sundaresan

Credits

Yet for all the advances in material and cultural life, there remained a feeling that things had gone wrong … a screw had come loose and the wheels fallen out of balance. Prosperity was precarious, as the recent [crisis] had revealed. Inequality … was more obvious than ever. The capitalists controlled the government.
In this passage from “American Colossus,” historian H.W. Brands was describing America’s Gilded Age from 1865 to 1900 — but he could just as well have been describing present-day China.
Since opening markets in 1978, China’s economic progress has been nothing short of miraculous. GDP per capita grew 40-fold from 1978 to 2012, making it “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history,” the World Bank has said. But this spectacular progress came with many problems, not least soaring income inequality that by 2012 had come to exceed even that in the United States. That same year, the new General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping warned that corruption had reached “shocking” levels and would “doom the party and the nation” if left unchecked. Public and corporate debts were piling up to unsustainable levels. In 2021, when Evergrande, then China’s second largest property developer, failed to meet debt payments, it appeared that the long-anticipated bubble had finally popped.
As I argued in my book “China’s Gilded Age,” once the dates and names in 19th-century American history are removed, the parallels between that period and post-1978 China are striking. Both share a dramatic story of renewal after devastation and prosperity amid decadence. (The term “gilded,” not to be confused with “golden,” means that beneath the precious, glittering surface lies a hard, base metal.)
As Thomas Piketty and several others have observed, America is now also experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology. Globalization did not deliver on its promise of prosperity for all Americans; instead, the outsourcing of production to countries like China profited multinational companies while hollowing out industrial towns. During the 2008 financial crisis, elites on Wall Street received bailouts from the government, while people on Main Street lost their jobs and savings. Exploiting popular discontent, Trump parachuted into the presidential race in 2016 with rallying cries to “bring jobs back home” and “drain the swamp” — and to everyone’s surprise, he won.
Contrary to popular cultural tropes, America and China today are not caught in the “clash of civilizations.” Rather, as I earlier underscored in Foreign Affairs in July 2021, we’re witnessing a curious form of great power competition: the clash of two Gilded Ages. Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves. Both are struggling to reconcile the tensions between capitalism and their respective political systems, albeit with greater intensity in China’s nominally communist system. Both U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi have staked their legacy on ending the excesses of capitalism, except under different banners. Whereas Biden pledges to “build back better,” Xi dubs his campaign “common prosperity.”
To say that the U.S. and China are similar, however, does not mean that they are identical. America is a democracy with constitutional protections of individual freedoms, whereas China is a top-down political system ruled by one party. Thus, the two countries are pursuing progressive reforms very differently. At the turn of the 20th century, when America was an emerging industrial power, its society fought graft and inequality through political activism, civil service reforms, new regulations, and by voting corrupt politicians out of office. Today, facing a deindustrialized economy and outdated infrastructure, Biden’s agenda is focused on passing legislation on large public  investment and raising taxes on corporations. Xi, on the other hand, is trying to stamp out capitalist excesses through commands and campaigns to punish graft, eliminate poverty and rein in the “chaotic expansion of capital.” Like Biden, Xi aspires for fairer development — but with the CCP firmly in control.

“The parallels between 19th-century America & post-1978 China are striking. Both share a dramatic story of renewal after devastation & prosperity amid decadence.” 

The narratives we choose shape the realities we experience. The “clash of civilizations” implies that the U.S. and China are culturally — or worse, racially — destined to fight each other, and everyone else must choose one side. If you buy this narrative, a new Cold War can be the only outcome. By contrast, the “clash of two Gilded Ages” reminds us that the U.S. and China are rivals who share similar woes at home. Their competition should not be over who trips and outruns the other, but rather who fixes their own problems first. Competition can be a force for self-renewal instead of mutual destruction.
America’s Gilded Age
For a personification of the American Gilded Age, there is no better candidate than Mr. Leland Stanford, the railroad robber baron who would eventually endow the University that bears his name. Stanford entered into business serendipitously. After his Wisconsin law firm burned down in a fire, he moved to California and co-founded one of the largest railroad companies in the U.S., the Central Pacific Railroad. Connecting the east and west coasts of the United States by a transcontinental railroad was a revolutionary business that, along with his directorships of Wells Fargo Bank and the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company of California, eventually made Stanford one of the richest men of his time.
Constructing railroads was both expensive and risky. Thus, government support was indispensable. In 1861, just months after he founded the Central Pacific, Stanford was elected governor of California. Upon taking office, he badgered the state legislature into investing millions in public funds into railroad construction. Offering bribes and shares of the Central Pacific in bulging suitcases, Stanford’s associates convinced politicians to pass laws that would maximize their company’s profit while transferring the risk of failure to taxpayers. This culminated in the 1862 Railroad Act that granted railroad companies their wish list. To cut costs, Central Pacific imported “coolies” from China, contract laborers who worked for dirt-cheap wages and had no rights. When these workers waged a strike demanding a raise and safer conditions, management starved them into submission.
Many Americans assume that capitalism and democracy are natural, happy companions. American leaders see themselves as champions of both free markets and political liberty. Yet as Brands remind us, capitalism and democracy have always coexisted in tension in the United States:
Democracy depends on equality, capitalism on inequality. Citizens in a democracy come to the public square with one vote each; participants in a capitalist economy arrive at the marketplace with unequal talents and resources and leave the marketplace with unequal rewards.
Moreover, capitalism cannot operate without inequality, Brands adds. It is the promise of unequal rewards that drives individuals to invest their smarts and efforts into producing results; the more inequality, the stronger the drive. Collectively, this fosters innovation and national competitiveness.
Yet this same drive can also lead to greed and corruption. Rising to the top doesn’t necessarily require better products and services; instead, favorable laws, government handouts, tax breaks and regulatory exemptions can do just as well. The theme behind the stories of the Gilded Age is the triumph of capitalism over democracy. Capitalists were able to buy government. Sometimes, the capitalists were the government. Laden with political advantages, they exploited labor, monopolized markets and took excessive risks. Over the course of the 19th century, America suffered not one — but five — financial panics, all linked to speculative investment, overvalued stocks, and reckless debt.
Eventually, the simmering troubles of the Gilded Age could no longer be ignored. Discontented groups from various parts of society, some radical and some moderate, launched social movements across the country. The emerging working class waged strikes demanding labor rights, which were violently suppressed by their capitalist employers. To improve governance, middle-class progressives, on the other hand, pushed for civil service professionalization, anti-monopoly regulations, health and safety regulations, restrictions on corporate contributions to political campaigns, tax reforms and more. Muckraking journalists and transparency initiatives exposed corruption. This set of wide-ranging economic and political reforms came to be known as the Progressive Era, which lasted roughly from the 1890s to the 1920s.

“America is now experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology.” 

Progressives, wrote Brands, were “the democratic skeptics of capitalism.” On the one hand, capitalism raised standards of living for millions of Americans and turned America into the most attractive emerging economy for European investors at the time (the 19th century equivalent of contemporary China). On the other hand, the unchecked forces of capitalism threatened to splinter society and destabilize the economy. It became time for democracy to reassert its authority. “The captains of industry who have driven the railway systems across this content, who have built up our commerce, who have developed our manufactures, have on the whole done great good to our people,” said President Theodore Roosevelt, who launched a new age of progressive reforms. But, he continued, “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”
More than a century later and across the Pacific, the leader of another capitalist juggernaut would utter similar words — this time, under the rule of a Communist Party.  
China’s Gilded Age
If Stanford’s dominance in politics and business captures the American Gilded Age, then his equivalent in China would be a duo who represent the asymmetrical marriage of power and money.
Bo Xilai is a modern-day princeling — his father, Bo Yibo, was one of the pioneers of the CCP, rehabilitated by Deng after Mao died to steer China’s market opening as vice premier. While other senior party apparatchiks were colorless and recited speeches in monotone, Bo Xilai stood out for his good looks, charm and flamboyance. The BBC described him as “the nearest thing China has to a Western-style politician.” From 2007, Bo was the provincial party secretary of Chongqing, a Southwestern backwater. There, he rolled out a populist agenda with great fanfare, deploying welfare benefits for the poor, state investment, Maoist songs and crackdowns on crime. At the height of his popularity, Bo was a contender for the top post in the CCP. But after a shocking turn of events in 2012, Bo was ousted for corruption and sent to prison. Xi came to power amid Bo’s scandal.
Public trials of Bo’s corruption revealed the supporting role of his capitalist henchman, Xu Ming. For years, Xu financed the lavish lifestyles of Bo’s family, and in return, received lucrative government contracts and generous loans from state banks. At its peak, the business activities of his conglomerate spanned construction, sports, finance, and real estate. In 2005, Forbes named Xu the eighth richest person in China, with an estimated net worth of more than $1 billion. When Bo fell from power, Xu was arrested with him and died mysteriously in prison shortly before his release.
The great mystery of China’s rise isn’t simply a question of how China became rich. Rather, it is a more vexing question of how China became rich despite rampant corruption, as evident from numerous scandals like Bo’s and Xu’s. If we believe the conventional wisdom that corruption impedes growth and that Western economies like the U.S. prospered by first eradicating corruption and establishing good, accountable institutions, then China appears to be “a gigantic outlier.”

“Both U.S. President Biden and Chinese President Xi have staked their legacy on ending the excesses of capitalism, except under different banners.” 

In fact, if China is exceptional, it is only as exceptional as the real American experience — not the partial myths and reified narratives presented in mainstream political economy. 

According to renowned economists Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson, authors of “Why Nations Fail,” American capitalism flourished because European migrants brought “inclusive” and “non-extractive” institutions from Europe to North American soil. “It should therefore be no surprise,” they concluded, “that it was U.S. society, not Mexico or Peru, that produced Thomas Edison,” because “economic institutions that encouraged private property, uphold contracts [and] create a level playing field” fostered innovation and growth. 
But a recap of the history of America’s Gilded Age reveals a very different reality. Sure, a small section of society — elite white men — enjoyed secure property rights, while Native Americans, slaves in the South, indentured laborers from China, migrants, and women were excluded. Even among the privileged, it was no “level playing field.” Robber barons like Stanford publicly championed free-market principles while privately benefiting from state-supplied privileges and protection. And yet, American capitalism boomed for reasons similar to China’s: a particular type of corruption came to dominate the economy. I call it access money, the purchase of privileges by capitalists from those in power. This transactional form of corruption must be distinguish from extractive corruption such as embezzlement, extortion and petty bribery. The latter existed during the early stages of capitalism in both America and China, but they were steadily brought under control through administrative reforms and increased state capacity. Access money, on the other hand, exploded.
Access money functioned like the steroids of capitalism. It didn’t just spur any growth, but specifically risky and imbalanced growth. In China politicians were handsomely rewarded for serving capitalist interests. Together, they built, borrowed and invested more, all of which contributed to GDP. But in a feverish race for growth, politicians borrowed and built regardless of sustainability, and in the process, accumulated massive debts and a litany of white elephant projects.
Real estate was the hot spot of Chinese corruption. In exchange for kickbacks, local governments helped real estate developers drive away farmers and convert rural land into pricey urban properties. Flushed with easy credit and pre-payments from homebuyers, profit-hungry developers built more projects before completing existing ones. During the go-go days, Evergrande extended its business into selling wealth management products, which it is now unable to repay.

“If the American Progressives at the turn of the 20th century were democratic skeptics of capitalism then Xi is an authoritarian skeptic of capitalism.” 

Xi inherited a Gilded Age from his predecessors. While China is no longer impoverished as a whole, it suffers the ailments of a richer, crony capitalist economy. In thick party speak, the CCP’s historic resolution in 2021 acknowledged: although market liberalization has made “historic strides in raising the living standards of its people from bare subsistence to moderate prosperity … China faces no small number of long unresolved, deep-seated problems as well as newly emerging problems.” In particular, Xi believes it is time to rein in the “chaotic expansion” of private, free markets. “Capital is a critical component of the socialist market economy,” he pronounced in a speech in April 2022. But today, the CCP must “regulate and guide the healthy development of capital” because this concerns “the quality of development and common prosperity as well as national security and social stability.”
If the American Progressives at the turn of the 20th century were democratic skeptics of capitalism then Xi is an authoritarian skeptic of capitalism. He sees his historic mission as summoning China out of the Gilded Age and into a Red Progressive Era, using the tools of Leninism: commands and campaigns. For him, the end goal is not only to correct social inequality, but also to preserve the CCP’s grip on power even as China becomes more affluent and globalized. Upon taking office in 2012, Xi has in effect launched a platform of Red Progressivism, even though he did not call it that. This began with his anti-corruption drive, the largest in the party’s history, and his poverty eradication campaign. In 2021, baffled observers thought the CCP’s crackdown on big private companies and rich celebrities came out of nowhere; in fact, it was a logical extension of Xi’s Red Progressivism.  
Future historians should mark this peculiar moment in history: it is the first time a communist party has tried to order away the problems of capitalism after encouraging it to thrive. When the CCP’s regulatory storm in 2021 alarmed investors and wiped out billions in share value, Xi learned about the limits of commands. In a speech later that year, he told an audience of Chinese bureaucrats: “On fixing poverty, we have plenty of experience. But on managing capitalism, we still have much to learn.”
The Neoliberal Backlash
If the Chinese economy seems precarious, the situation in America is no better. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez reported a troubling pattern of rising income and wealth concentration in the U.S. since progressive taxation was cut back in the 1980s. In 1970, the top 0.01% earned 50 times more than average income; in 1998, that number jumped to 250 times. As inequality rises, social mobility falls. The share of 30-year-olds who made more money than their parents did at that age dropped from 92% in 1970 to 50% in 2010. According to a survey by Pew Research in 2021, 68% of U.S. respondents believe that today’s children will be worse off as adults than their parents.
Rising inequality and sluggish growth since the 2008 financial crisis constitute “a double whammy on Americans’ economic prospects,” say political scientists Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles. “The growth slowdown means that expected progress in living standards has evaporated; high inequality means that just looking at GDP growth understates the magnitude of popular economic discontent, as the gains of growth have shifted away from ordinary Americans to benefit a relatively narrow elite.” These are the conditions, they argue, that precipitated the rise of Donald Trump and could again encourage future demagogues like him.
Today, many experts blame the host of problems in the U.S. on “neoliberalism” — the doctrine that markets should be free and governments should not intervene. In fact, the real problem is not too little government, but too much of it. America is “the captured economy,” Lindsey and Teles argue. From housing and finance to intellectual property, “insider-protecting deals” have made the U.S. economy less dynamic and innovative.
Altogether, it is fair to say that the U.S. has entered a Gilded Age 2.0, with some parallels to the past but also notable differences. Unlike in the 19th century, America today is an advanced, post-industrialized economy, not an emerging one. It no longer enjoys the freedom of rebuilding from a blank slate; instead, it is hobbled by a heavy baggage of accumulated regulations, political deals and vested interests. Gridlocked and captured by narrow interest groups, the U.S. government struggles to deliver essential public goods that serve national interests — most notably, infrastructure. The once enterprising nation that built a transcontinental railroad is now barely able to repair decrepit Amtrak trains.

“Whichever nation ‘wins’ is the one who avoids self-inflicted wounds and makes capitalism work for the common good rather than for a small sliver of super-elites.” 

For the Biden administration, convincing American citizens and lawmakers to abandon neoliberal doctrine and take big government action is an imperative. Writing in The New York Times, Ezra Klein applies the term “supply-side progressivism.” Instead of meeting the needs of citizens only through welfare and individual aid, the U.S. government, he argues, should increase the supply of necessary goods and services — not only the ones needed today, but also those that would prepare American society for the future.
But Klein does not mention a controversial companion of supply-side progressivism: industrial policies, that is, policies and subsidies designed to boost selected sectors of the economy. Market fundamentalism dictates that governments should not “pick winners,” lest it leads to corruption and distortions. To justify industrial policies, the Biden administration and other U.S. politicians  invoke the threat of China. “The Chinese Communist Party laid out a plan called ‘Made in China 2025,’” warned Senator Marco Rubio, “and we have been complacent and distracted.”
For the past year, Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan seemed dead. In August, however, the president is suddenly on a winning streak: he signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law, designed to promote semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., and the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act to tackle climate change, health care and taxes. Alan Blinder, a former advisor in the Clinton administration, told Bloomberg, “This could be read as the best supply-side economics program since Eisenhower built the interstate highway system.”
For the past decades, textbook theories have asserted that free markets and private property rights are the primary causes of American capitalist success—as if that’s all it takes. In effect, this neoliberal narrative  props up the myth that privilege-holders want everyone to believe: they succeeded on their own. While private initiative should be celebrated and promoted,  we must not ignore the historical fact that the state has always played an active and critical role in American development, from infrastructure and housing to technological innovation. Today, that role is being revived in the context of a new Gilded Age, with politicians harnessing great power competition with China to justify big state actions.
The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages
Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1993, political scientist Samuel Huntington claimed:
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. … Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. … In conflicts between civilizations, the question is ‘What are you?’ That is a given that cannot be changed.
After Trump took office in 2016, his administration revived this set of ideas to frame U.S.-China competition. Kiron Skinner, then director of policy planning at the State Department, said, “This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology and the United States hasn’t had that before. … It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”
The appeal of the “clash of civilizations” is understandable — but dangerous. It is a fact that American and Chinese society have different languages, traditions and political systems. Huntington’s notion of “civilizations,” however, posits an identity that people inherit from birth, and that, in his words, “cannot be changed.” This provides a fancy camouflage for claiming that people of different races — Caucasians vs. non-Caucasians — as Skinner’s words imply, are destined to be divided and eventually clash.
In fact, the answer to “what are you?” can be changed, and nowhere is this truer than in the United States, a democratic multi-ethnic nation. The statue of liberty symbolizes not only freedom and justice, but also the welcoming of immigrants who seek hope and opportunity. Believing that “what are you?” cannot be changed means rejecting the American dream and values. Even in the so-called “civilization-state” of China, “what are you?” has evolved over thousands of years. The geographic boundaries of “China” changed from dynasty to dynasty; regional identities solidified and melted away.
Though they may seem esoteric, the narratives that politicians adopt to frame bilateral relations have real effects on the ground. A U.S. officer who read my first book told me that my description of China’s “directed improvisation” reminded him of the U.S. military, which is also a bureaucracy and hierarchical organization. Commanders articulated strategies from above but leave their technical implementation to ground-level agents like him. He concluded, “I would have been looked down upon by my peers and commanders if I admitted [these similarities].” When people in one society feel ashamed of sharing universal human problems with another society, it is troubling. War begins at the psychological level when individuals cease to perceive a common humanity between us and them.
Thus, understanding U.S.-China relations as the clash of two Gilded Ages has important implications. The two great rivals can and do share similarities — though they are never identical. Their different political systems lead to starkly different responses to the problems of a Gilded Age. As the leader of a democracy, Biden must win bipartisan and public support to pass his progressive policies. American civil society is freely and fiercely debating alternatives to the current political-economic model. In China, by contrast, Xi has imposed a series of Red Progressive campaigns from the top. What China’s future should be is decided by him and CCP leaders; the rest of China must obey and follow.
Ultimately, the contest between the U.S. and China is not about who will sabotage and outrun the other. The greatest crises facing each country are self-inflicted. No foreign competitor can desecrate the U.S. Capitol and undermine democratic principles the way Trump’s fanatical mob did on Jan. 6, 2021. No foreign rival can make China impose arbitrary regulations that diminished its most successful private companies and scared away investors. Their shared challenge is reshaping and managing capitalism. If there is a race, whichever nation “wins” is the one who avoids self-inflicted wounds and makes capitalism work for the common good rather than for a small sliver of super-elites.

The post The Clash Of Two Gilded Ages appeared first on NOEMA.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.Nearly seven years ago, a single mischosen word nearly killed the Paris Agreement.With only hours left to go on the final day of the talks, American diplomats noticed a discrepancy in the new climate agreement’s text. Where previous drafts of the pact had said that rich countries “should” take the lead on preparing greenhouse-gas reductions plans, the final draft replaced that word with the more definitive “shall.” If the new treaty had created new binding legal requirements for the United States, President Barack Obama would have had to submit it to the Republican-controlled Senate, which would have surely rejected it. After some tense bargaining, a revision was rushed through at the last moment.The episode reflected just how central the United States has been to international climate diplomacy: Although 174 countries agreed to the Paris Agreement, it was tailor-made to accommodate America.For decades, climate policy makers have had to navigate two extremes. On the one hand, humanity probably can’t solve climate change without the United States, and the rest of the world knows it. America is simply too big, too rich, and too powerful to ignore. On the other, America has treated the climate with tremendous negligence: Few countries have thwarted global climate policy—or done as much to cause the climate problem—as has the U.S.That may have started to change this month with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. The first comprehensive climate law in American history, the IRA mostly focuses on the domestic economy, aiming to cut emissions by supercharging the development of clean technology.But it will also influence the international politics of climate change. For the first time since the modern era of climate politics began more than 30 years ago, the United States can credibly claim to be a leader on climate change.“Genuinely, my view is that this is possibly the biggest thing to happen in international climate diplomacy in decades,” Joseph Curtin, the managing director for power and climate at the Rockefeller Foundation and a former climate adviser to the Irish government, told me. “That sounds quite dramatic, especially given that [the law] doesn’t have an international dimension. But it establishes the U.S. bona fides on the international stage.”Over the past week, I’ve talked with international climate experts working in the United States and around the world. They agreed that the IRA will permanently alter the world’s fight against climate change, even if it is not yet clear exactly how. Here are five takeaways from our conversations.1. The law finally gives America some climate credibility. Fighting climate change has been one of President Joe Biden’s biggest foreign-policy goals. During his first 100 days in office, he held a “Leaders Summit on Climate” from the White House, where he committed to cutting the country’s annual emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 compared with their all-time high. In international meetings, his administration has beseeched other countries to increase their emissions-reduction targets.This is a continuation of America’s approach to climate under previous Democratic presidents, most notably Obama. Yet for years, America has almost never matched its rhetoric with its action. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass a bill aimed explicitly at reducing U.S. carbon pollution; its pro-climate regulations have flailed in court. And since April of last year, the Biden administration has continued to promise major emissions cuts by 2030—while being unable to furnish any actual policy that will lead to those cuts.  [Read: Biden’s climate law is ending 40 years of hands-off government]The IRA has changed that dynamic. “We definitely needed something for the U.S. to have a modicum of credibility,” said Claire Healy, a former British Labour Party adviser who now leads the Washington, D.C., office for E3G, an international climate think tank. “There’s now a plan. And before, there wasn’t a plan; there was a gaping hole.”For years, America’s lack of credibility weakened the force of any pronouncements it made about climate change, and could (reasonably!) give the impression that Americans wanted only to pay lip service to the climate problem. Now its diplomats have a leg to stand on when they spar with their peers from other countries or talk to the world directly. “The U.S. can come to [this year’s UN climate conference] with the position of We’re not only talking the talk; we’re walking the walk,” Curtin said.2. It will reshape America and China’s relationship over climate change. Perhaps the only idea that has defined Biden’s foreign policy more than climate change—and that unified Biden’s and Donald Trump’s approaches to the world—is that America is locked in a global competition with China and must strengthen its position accordingly.The IRA fuses those two ideas, creating a new national industrial policy designed to reshore certain clean-energy industries and nurture U.S. competitors to Chinese EV companies. It joins other efforts, such as the recent bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, that enact a more muscular U.S. industrial policy than the country has seen in a generation.That makes the new U.S.-China competition real in a way that it wasn’t before, Alex Wang, a UCLA Law professor and expert on Chinese climate policy, told me. “There’s a lot of discussion from Biden about competing with China, but you’d have to say that it felt like talk, because the U.S. wasn’t acting. This is necessarily a big action. It should make everyone take the U.S. much more seriously,” he said.At the same time, the IRA more closely resembles China’s own approach to climate policy—that is, the law tries to decarbonize by making strategic investments in certain industries, not by regulating or taxing carbon emissions. “It’s a validation of that approach, which, in a sense, China has been doing all along, for the past 15 years,” Wang said.Chinese leaders will take note of the fact that U.S. clean-energy companies may soon compete with their own, he said, but they may also enjoy the indirect endorsement that America has just given their style of economic management. Other countries are paying attention too. “I think that’s positive—that state support is not viewed as a dirty word in the U.S.—and hopefully it validates that approach around the world,” he said.3. But America’s allies are wary of the law’s protectionist impulses. The IRA attempts to remake several clean-energy industries in ways that will benefit America’s trade balance. Some of its subsidies, such as its aggressive solar-manufacturing or hydrogen incentives, are available only to American firms making things on American soil, and it all but tries to entirely reshore the battery industry.That made allies’ response to the bill “a bit muted,” Healy, the E3G analyst, told me. “Other countries must be looking at this and [getting] worried about those local-content requirements,” she said, referring to provisions in the bill that say EVs will qualify for some subsidies only if the minerals used in their batteries were mined and processed in the United States or countries that it has a free-trade agreement with.   But America’s free-trade pacts don’t cleanly overlap with its list of security allies: The U.S. has free-trade agreements with Australia, Canada, and Mexico, for instance, but not with Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the United Kingdom. Representatives of those countries may now want to negotiate with the U.S. to see how they can soften the blow to their own industries, a process that will wind up integrating U.S. climate policy with the larger apparatus of American state power. The future may see more agreements like last year’s U.S.–European Union steel arrangement, where each jurisdiction agreed to subject its steel industries to higher environmental standards in exchange for looser trade restrictions.4. It will help developing countries by reducing the cost of green technology. Although a handful of places—such as China, the U.S., and the EU—dominate global emissions today, that won’t be the case in the future. By the middle of the century, some of the world’s most populous countries—such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria—will contribute a much larger share of the world’s emissions. (That’s assuming, at least, that they follow the same carbon-intensive development path that China, Japan, and the United States did before them.)Although the IRA is targeted domestically, it may help set up a green vortex, lowering the cost of wind, solar, batteries, and other crucial technologies for decarbonizing. That would make them easier for poorer countries to purchase, Fabby Tumiwa, an Indonesian climate expert and the executive director of the Institute for Essential Services Reform, an Indonesian energy think tank, told me.[Read: The best evidence yet that the climate bill will work]The IRA, he said, “is really good for a developing economy like Indonesia due to spillover effects because of lower costs.” Over the past decade, China and Europe have driven most of those spillover effects: They’re chiefly responsible, for instance, for the tenfold decline in solar prices that has helped fuel that technology’s explosive growth around the world. Now the IRA might fuel a huge boom in supply and demand from the U.S., driving further declines.In the Indonesian economy, Tumiwa said, those cost declines are crucial, because the cost of energy must be kept low as the country industrializes. One of Indonesian policy makers’ biggest concerns is that “the cost of energy will increase” too much at once, he said. “That will cause the loss of our competitiveness.”“In an emerging economy like Indonesia … we see emission reductions” as really having “to come from developed economies,” Tumiwa told me. “We need more time. So if developed countries like the U.S. and some EU members can make a significant reduction by 2030, I think that is good.”5. The IRA doesn’t help with one of the biggest hurdles to global decarbonization. In sub-Saharan African and several other regions of the world, the greatest obstacle to decarbonizing today is not the cost of an individual solar panel or wind turbine. “The key issue is not the cost of technology; it is the cost of money,” Saliem Fakir, the director of the African Climate Foundation, told me.In general, renewables can sometimes be more expensive to operate in sub-Saharan Africa than they are elsewhere in the world—not because the technology is any different, but because the financing costs are much higher, Fakir said. What these countries need above all, he said, is access to loans and other forms of financing at rates similar to those the United States and Western European countries can access. Not only do cheaper borrowing costs make it easier for countries to build more renewables in general, but they also hasten the arrival of the moment when it’s less expensive to build new clean-energy sources than it is to operate existing fossil-fuel power plants.  The IRA does nothing to change that status quo, even though this problem has been on the radar of policy makers in the West. Last year, the U.S. and several European countries agreed to help South Africa secure financing for its clean-energy transition, Curtin told me. But so far, the richer countries haven’t yet coughed up the promised capital.This is the inevitable problem with laws such as the IRA that are domestically oriented. For the past few years, Western governments have announced huge spending bills devoted to solving climate change or recovering from the COVID-19 recession, Healy said. But that money was always meant to help their own economies.“So if I was sitting in another part of the world, I’d say, ‘Great shakes, you’ve pulled out a pot of money to deal with COVID for Europeans and Americans, then you’ve pulled out another pot of money for climate. Where’s the pot of money for us?’ Where is the offer to those countries to build the modern economy?”

The one time I saw Mikhail Gorbachev in public was on November 9, 2014. I can pin the day down because it was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were in a very large, very crowded Berlin reception room, and he was sitting at a cocktail table, looking rather lost.Gorbachev had been invited to this event as a trophy, a living, breathing souvenir of the 1980s. He was not expected to say much of interest. The fall of the Berlin Wall had happened by accident, after all; it was not something Gorbachev had ever planned. He had not set out to break up the Soviet Union, to end its tyranny, or to promote freedom. He presided over the end of a cruel and bloody empire, but without intending to do so. Almost nobody in history has ever had such a profound impact on his era, while at the same time understanding so little about it.[Tom Nichols: Gorbachev was great because he failed]Gorbachev was born in Stalin’s Russia, but he began his career during the post-Stalin “thaw,” a moment when it became possible to acknowledge some truths out loud, but not too many. While he was still a student at Moscow State University, one of his closest friends was a Czechoslovak student named Zdeněk Mlynář. Both believed that communism could be reformed, if only the corruption and violence were removed. Mlynář’s convictions led him to become one of the leaders of the Prague Spring, a 1968 movement that started out by calling for “reformed communism” and “socialism with a human face.” That movement was crushed by Soviet soldiers, proving that corruption and violence were intrinsic to a system with no human face. Even cautious Czech reformers could not remove them so easily.Still, the language of “reformed communism” continued to appeal to Gorbachev, who revived it when he became leader of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985. But although he knew that Soviet society was stagnant and Soviet workers were unproductive, he had no idea why. In fact, his first instinct was not that the system needed democracy, or even free markets. Instead, he thought: Russians drink too much. Just two months after taking power, he restricted the sale of vodka, raised the drinking age, and started digging up vineyards. By some accounts, the resulting loss of tax income to the Soviet budget, plus the dramatic shortages—people were buying sugar and other products in bulk to make moonshine at home—were the tipping point that sent the Soviet economy into its final death spiral.  Real change had to wait until the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe of April 1986. News of the accident was initially hushed up, just as bad news was always hushed up in the U.S.S.R. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were allowed to march in the Kyiv May Day parade even as radioactivity spread silently across the city. But the scale of the disaster finally convinced Gorbachev that the real problem with his country was not alcohol, but its obsession with secrecy. His solution was glasnost—openness—which, like the anti-alcohol campaign, was originally meant to promote economic efficiency. Open conversation about the Soviet Union’s problems would, Gorbachev believed, strengthen communism. Managers and workers would talk about what was going wrong in their factories and workplaces, find solutions, fix the problem. No deeper reforms were needed, as he told a group of party economists early on: “Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers, but about the ship, and the ship is socialism.”But once glasnost became official policy, once Soviet citizens could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, factory efficiency was not their first choice of topic. Nor did they want to rescue the sinking ship of socialism. Instead, there was an explosion of debate and discussion about the past, about the history of mass arrests and mass murders, about the Gulag and Soviet political prisons. Historical accounts, memoirs and diaries that had been hidden in desk drawers, raced off the printing presses and became best sellers. Newspapers printed stories of sleaze and mismanagement in the economy, politics, culture, and everything else. Calls for the creation of a different kind of society, a more democratic society, a more law-abiding society, began immediately. The economists whom Gorbachev had silenced started openly talking about the end of central planning. Poles, Czechs, East Germans, Ukrainians, Balts, Georgians, and others then in the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself all began talking about the end of the empire too. Contrary to the retrospective Putinist historiography now prevalent in Russia, the glasnost era was a creative, exciting, hopeful time for millions of people, even millions of Russians.[Mikhail Gorbachev: The West could have saved the Russian economy]Gorbachev seemed bewildered, and no wonder. Having lived much of his life at the top of the Soviet nomenklatura, he never understood the depth of cynicism in his own country or the depth of anger in the occupied Soviet satellite states, most of whose inhabitants rejected even the reformed communism of his youth: They didn’t want the Prague Spring; they wanted to join Western Europe. He never understood the depth of the rot inside Soviet bureaucracies or the amorality of the bureaucrats. In the end, he wound up racing to catch up with history, rather than making it himself.Because he did not understand what was happening, Gorbachev also did not prepare his compatriots for major political and economic change. He did not help design democratic institutions, and he did not lay the foundations for an orderly economic reform. He removed the old system, put nothing in its place, and then seemed shocked and surprised when a Mafia state arose to fill the vacuum. Above all, he did not tell the Russians that their empire was oppressive and hateful to many of its non-Russian subjects, or that its dismantling represented a huge expansion of human freedom. He did not call for a full reckoning with the Soviet past, and no such thing ever took place. Even afterward, he failed to understand the significance of what had happened. After 2014, he repeatedly declared his support for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, an action that helped catalyze the wave of imperial nostalgia that has now brought us the war in Ukraine.Gorbachev did change some of his thinking, eventually embracing the idea of democracy, a term he was especially happy to use during his career as a wandering elder statesman, the kind who gets invited to anniversary parties in Berlin. He sometimes criticized Putin in public. But in truth, all of Gorbachev’s most significant decisions, his most radical actions, were the ones he did not make. He did not order the East Germans to shoot at people crossing the Wall. He did not offer the Polish communists a bailout as their economy crashed. He did not launch a full-scale war to prevent the secession of the Baltic states, or to stop the Ukrainians from declaring independence, or to prevent Russia from electing its own leadership too. He made some reactionary attempts to slow things down, and people died in the process, most famously in Vilnius and Tbilisi. But he was not as vicious as some of his predecessors and successors, and he did not, in the end, use mass violence to keep the empire together. Nor did he use violence to stay in power himself.Gorbachev’s inaction brought the world 30 years of relief from the Cold War nuclear standoff, 30 years of time for some genuine reforms to take hold in some parts of his former empire. Although none of the forces he accidentally set in motion prevented Russia from turning back into a tyranny, the end of Soviet Communism could have been far more bloody, far more violent, and far more like the current war in Ukraine. If someone else had been in charge, it might well have been.

In 2016 I wrote about the effect of air pollution on health, and the potential savings in terms of healthcare dollars and preventing premature death from reducing pollution. There have been a number of studies published since then, making an update appropriate. With more thorough analysis, the problem is much bigger than estimated six years ago.

It is challenging to estimate the health-related costs of air pollution because we first have to decide what counts. Early estimates focused entirely on the direct medical costs from emergency room visits and hospital stays, and ignored outpatient care. That problem was fixed with this 2020 study, which used employer data to capture the full range of direct healthcare costs, increasing the estimate by 40% – above the US annual $488 million for respiratory and $809 million for cardiovascular disease from hospital care alone.

Healthcare costs, however, typically also contain an estimate of lost productivity, in order to calculate the full cost to society. Respiratory and cardiovascular disease are major causes of premature death, in addition to disability. They are therefore substantial causes of lost productivity. A 2022 study tried to capture a more complete picture of the full costs to society from fossil-fuel related pollution, and found:

We use EPA’s CO-Benefits Risk Assessment screening tool to estimate health benefits resulting from the removal of PM 2.5 -related emissions from these energy-related sectors. We find that nationwide efforts to eliminate energy-related emissions could prevent 53,200 (95% CI: 46,900–59,400) premature deaths each year and provide $608 billion ($537–$678 billion) in benefits from avoided PM 2.5 -related illness and death.

That is more than 50,000 premature deaths per year (in the US alone) and over $600 billion is cost to society – just considering the health care related costs. This study looked at:

In this study, we estimate health benefits resulting from the elimination of emissions of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ), sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides from the electric power, transportation, building, and industrial sectors in the contiguous US.

But there is yet another source of negative health outcomes related to fossil fuel-based pollution – resulting from a warming planet. For example, increased risk and severity of heat waves causes heat-related negative health outcomes, including death. Wildfires cause direct harm but also release intense local pollution into the air.

A 2021 analysis found that increased heath care costs from climate change, due to increases in certain vector borne illnesses (from ticks and mosquitoes) and intense weather could add another $20 billion to this annual US cost. And of course, these climate change related healthcare costs are likely to significantly increase as temperatures continue to rise.

But even if, for some reason, you are someone who does not accept the scientific consensus on climate change, it’s important to note that the direct effects of air pollution itself cost the US over $600 billion per year. This means we could invest $3 trillion dollars over the next 20 years to phase out fossil fuel, and this would represent only 25% of the money we would potentially save from reduced healthcare costs. Actually, assuming a linear decrease in pollution and healthcare expense, that would be about 50% of the savings, but then we would save $600 billion every year after that – without even considering climate change. And, of course, we would be preventing 50,000 premature deaths per year.

One of the challenges of air pollution policy (more with climate change, but also pollution in general) is that the costs of mitigation are local and immediate while the benefits are perceived to be global and distant. But this is not true when it comes to the healthcare benefits. There is increasing evidence that the health benefits are immediate and regional.

That same 2022 study found that:

We also find that an average of 69% (range: 32%–95%) of the health benefits from emissions removal remain in the emitting region.

The range is wide because of geographical and weather considerations. In some locations the pollution remains mostly local, while in others it rapidly gets carried away to nearby regions. But in the US, we are still mostly talking about effects in the US – so while an average of 69% of the benefits remain regional, the vast majority remain national. (We don’t have to worry much about China stealing our good air and sending us their bad air.)

This analysis is backed up by other studies. This study, for example, looked at the effect of regional efforts to reduce air pollution in the South East and related that to reduction in ER visits in the Atlanta metropolitan area. They found:

During the final two years of the study (2012-2013), when pollution-control policies were most fully implemented and the associated benefits realized, these policies were estimated to prevent 5.9% of the RD ED visits that would have occurred in the absence of the policies (95% interval estimate: -0.4% to 12.3%); 16.5% of the asthma ED visits (95% interval estimate: 7.5% to 25.1%); 2.3% of the CVD ED visits (95% interval estimate: -1.8% to 6.2%); and -.6% of the CHF ED visits (95% interval estimate: 26.3% to 10.4%).

These are somewhat modest, but in line with the degree of pollution reduction. Essentially the point was to show regional benefits from regional pollution control.

Conclusion: Pollution is a health care issue

Pollution from the burning of fossil fuel is a major health care issue. Anything that causes 50,000 premature deaths per year and an annual cost in direct health care and lost productivity of over $600 billion is a public health issue. Framed entirely in this context, substantial investment in reducing fossil fuel related pollution is justified, especially since the benefits of doing so mostly remain local and are realized fairly quickly. This is messaging we do not hear enough, mainly because it has been lost in the artificial controversy surrounding climate change.

But the science is also becoming more clear, with better methods and more precise estimates getting closer to the true health-related costs of burning fossil fuel. The problem is much bigger than we thought just six years ago. But the good news is we also have better data on the benefits of reducing fossil fuel use and other industrial pollution. We have solutions and they work.

Sign up for Tom’s newsletter, Peacefield, here.Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, has died. Many testimonials will focus on his humanity and his vision. But these qualities are not what made him great. Gorbachev attained greatness by failing.This sounds odd in the West because Westerners have always loved Gorbachev more than his own people ever did, and the tendency outside Russia is to ascribe to him great achievements that were not his own. The night he died, for example, I watched a CNN reporter discuss how Gorbachev helped bring down the Berlin Wall. This is simply not true: Gorbachev made the decision not to deploy Soviet troops to prevent Germans from tearing the Wall apart, which is a very different thing.As you listen to the tributes, remember always that Gorbachev was trying to rescue, rather than destroy, the U.S.S.R. and Soviet Communism. We should all be thankful that he did not succeed in his mission. He was too decent for a job that required a fundamental lack of decency. In the end, he showed the courage and humanity not to use force to try to turn back the clock—a lesson lost on his latest successor, Vladimir Putin.The story of Gorbachev’s career is not a neat and unbroken narrative of reform. It is a very Soviet story of intrigue and gamesmanship, with a very Soviet ending of both disaster and dashed hopes.Although Gorbachev is now known as a reformer, he was a Soviet reformer. He was brought to Moscow under the aegis of his patron, General Secretary Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB. Andropov, too, was a Soviet reformer, in that he wanted a leaner and meaner Soviet Union, a more efficient Soviet state, and a more diligent, and more sober, Soviet workforce. He tried to develop protégés, such as Gorbachev, who would further this mission and save the U.S.S.R. from what the Soviets would come to call the “era of stagnation” under Leonid Brezhnev.This is not to say that Gorbachev was just another heartless apparatchik. He was smart, and unlike many of his older colleagues, he had not deluded himself about the parlous condition of the Soviet economy and society. He had a vision for the U.S.S.R. that was ambitious enough to worry the old men around him in the Kremlin, so much so that when Andropov died, in 1984, they stiff-armed Gorbachev and made him cool his heels for another year while a terminally ill nobody named Konstantin Chernenko was allowed to preside over the party and the Soviet government. When Chernenko died, in 1985, Gorbachev defeated one more challenger—a genuinely dangerous man named Grigorii Romanov—and he became the top Soviet leader.Westerners now laud Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, but again, these were not initially meant to be democratic reforms. Yes, glasnost allowed Soviet citizens to blow off steam, but the main goal was to foster better communication in the Soviet economy. Perestroika was aimed at ditching Brezhnev-era cronyism and shortcuts, and to kick-start glaciated Soviet institutions.Gorbachev, however, did not understand what he had set in motion. He thought he could control reform in pieces, accelerating it here, slowing it there, and never allowing any of it to turn into a challenge to the power of the Communist Party. He and his colleagues did not grasp the basic contradiction built into their own plans—that freedom means more disorder rather than less. And Gorbachev wavered in the face of political movements over which the regime quickly lost even the semblance of control. He was so taken aback (and perhaps worse, so taken by surprise) by the chaos he’d unleashed that he soon turned away from some of his own policies.So did others in the Soviet leadership. Perestroika, insofar as anyone even knew what it meant, was already in deep trouble by the time of a major party meeting in 1987, where it became evident that the hard-liners had effectively pushed back the reformers and their plans. These failures led to fights and shifting alliances within the Kremlin. Gorbachev then tried to encourage similar reforms in Eastern Europe as a way of seeking leverage against his opponents at home. Again, he unleashed forces, this time in the Soviet empire, that he did not understand and that he could not control.Why did he take such risks? Where socialism was concerned, Mikhail Gorbachev was a believer in a world of cynics. He believed he was going to revitalize socialism, and by doing so he would relegitimize the entire Soviet system. He really believed this, and his faith in the Soviet system thus led him into a fatal trap: If socialism was to be saved, then it had to be a choice made by the peoples of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe.But if socialism was to be a legitimate choice by his own people, Gorbachev could not then backtrack and simply impose it on the points of Soviet bayonets if they rejected it. When everything began to fall apart in 1988, Gorbachev was in a box. He had gambled on the resilience of both the Soviet system and socialism and lost. To use force not only would mean acknowledging final failure, but would likely spark civil war in a nuclear-armed nation of nearly 290 million people from dozens of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.By 1990, Gorbachev was either vacillating or paralyzed on matters of policy, not just because of his Hamlet-like personality, but because he could no longer control his most retrograde comrades in the leadership. He would try one more time to keep his job and keep the Soviet Union together by creating a new national legislature (thus bypassing moribund Soviet-era institutions) and winning election to a new national presidency. It was all pointless, but Gorbachev couldn’t give up; even after his own handpicked leadership tried to depose him in a coup, he tried to save the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, an effort that now seems almost pathetic in its naivete.On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev declared the Soviet Union dissolved, handed the Soviet nuclear codes to Boris Yeltsin, and left the Kremlin. In 1996, Gorbachev, ever the true believer, ran for the presidency of Russia. More than 74 million votes were cast. He got 386,000 of them.Much of this tragic story is obscured in the West by Gorbachev’s undeniable successes in foreign policy. Americans remember Gorbachev as a man of peace, and well they should. As with his faith in socialism, his belief in peace was sincere. It didn’t hurt that people like President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, avowed enemies of the Soviet system, turned out to be easier to deal with than the phobic autocrats of the Kremlin. Gorbachev and Reagan were both absolutely serious about ridding the world of nuclear weapons, a position no one in Washington or Moscow had regarded as anything but a talking point.In fact, Thatcher, according to U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, was one of the people stunned that Reagan and Gorbachev had talked about the full elimination of nuclear arms. Shultz later said that Thatcher had “hand-bagged” him, hitting him with her purse for not stopping Reagan. “But Margaret,” Shultz protested, “I agree with him!” Shultz, like Gorbachev, would later become one of the most prominent advocates of a nuclear-free world, but Gorbachev said it first.Gorbachev’s courage and decency were not in his attempts to save the Soviet Union, but in his decision to accept the inevitable rather than begin the last-ditch spree of repression demanded by the Soviet coup plotters. When all was lost, he accepted his fate, a decision for which he is still hated by millions of Russians. When he arrived in a courtroom for the 1994 trial of one of the conspirators against him (a Soviet general who demanded to be put on trial and who was acquitted), he was greeted by chants of “Judas! Judas!”The protesters were, of course, oblivious to the irony: Without Gorbachev, they’d have lasted a matter of minutes on a Soviet street before beginning their journey to a Soviet prison.Gorbachev helped usher in more freedom than Russians had ever known, while inadvertently unwinding the Soviet empire. His life ended as Putin tries to wind it back up again, including the use of repression at levels not seen in Russia in more than 30 years. Gorbachev thought there was a chance for a new Soviet future, and he took great risks to rescue his country and its ideology.He failed. And for that, we should be grateful. RIP.

The state of California is attempting to outlaw doctors from communicating what authorities deem COVID-19 "misinformation" to their patients.
AB 2089, which passed the California legislature earlier this week, designates the dissemination of "misinformation or disinformation" relating to COVID-19 as "unprofessional conduct" for doctors. The text of the bill explains that its aim is to prevent doctors from giving patients information that contradicts the "contemporary scientific consensus."
If California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signs the bill, doctors who violate its tenets could lose their licenses. It is unclear whether the governor currently supports the bill.
"Misinformation" is a highly dubious and debatable category. The scientific consensus has often expressed views relating to COVID-19 that were later contradicted. Official guidance with respect to masks has changed frequently. During the early days of the pandemic, White House coronavirus adviser Anthony Fauci initially downplayed the need for masks. Then, for more than a year, the scientific community urged people to wear any mask at all. Today, it is widely believed that only high-quality masks are offering meaningful protection. At various stages of the masking discourse, what many scientific experts had to say on the subject turned out to be inaccurate or at least incomplete.
The same is true of the COVID-19 vaccines. While they remain remarkable tools for preventing severe disease and death, particularly among older and more vulnerable populations, they do not substantially reduce COVID-19 case counts, contrary to what was said about them in late 2020 and early 2021.
Science is a deliberative process, and medical professionals need to be allowed to dissent from mainstream orthodoxies and challenge dominant perspectives. Patients deserve expert care, but it's unreasonable for the government to compel ideological conformity in this field.
Besides, the state has shown no particular aptitude for discerning what constitutes genuine misinformation. On the contrary, government actors have frequently instructed social media companies to be wary of perfectly legitimate points of view. This happened with the lab leak theory, which was brutally suppressed on social media at the behest of the government, and it happened with The New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story, which was wrongly branded Russian disinformation by top law enforcement agents, and punished accordingly.
It's also likely that this bill violates the First Amendment. Governments have the power to regulate medical care, but the compelled speech component of AB 2089 would probably perturb the Supreme Court. Even some legal experts who support the bill's goals concede that it will have a hard time surviving scrutiny.
"Initiatives like this will be challenged in court and will be hard to sustain," Michelle Mello, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford University, told The New York Times. "That doesn't mean it's not a good idea."
Policing misinformation is a fraught task, and the state inserting itself between doctors and their patients is usually a recipe for disaster. Newsom should let this bill die.
The post California Tries To Make It Illegal for Doctors To Spread COVID-19 'Misinformation' appeared first on Reason.com.

The United States and China struck an agreement last week that could allow Chinese corporations to avoid being kicked off U.S. stock exchanges. Wall Street firms are rejoicing, but the rest of us should be asking whether helping Chinese companies to continue accessing U.S. capital markets is a good idea. For both U.S. investors and U.S. national security, the answer is clearly no.

It is no surprise that the Chinese government publicly praised its new agreement with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), an independent nonprofit funded by the U.S. government. According to a law passed by Congress in late 2020, about 200 Chinese companies (valued at some $1.3 trillion) listed on U.S. stock exchanges could face trading bans as early as 2024 if the PCAOB can’t certify that China is allowing U.S. inspectors full and unfettered access to their audits.

The PCAOB conducts audit inspections in more than 50 countries, but it has not been able to conduct inspections in China or Hong Kong in over a decade. Expressing cautious optimism, U.S. officials said the first inspection is set for Hong Kong next month.

“The real test will be whether the words agreed to on paper translate into complete access in practice,” the board’s chair, Erica Williams, said on Friday.

Wall Street firms, which are increasing their ties with China, pushed hard for the deal. Huge Chinese companies such as Alibaba have seen their stocks suffer as they faced possible delisting. Chinese stocks rallied after the deal was signed.

In Congress, there is deep skepticism that Beijing will change its long and well-established practice of withholding most information about its companies’ operations and ownerships. Lawmakers in both parties actually want to speed up the enforcement process by passing a new law that would allow delisting of Chinese companies as early as next year.

“It’s not time to give China any benefit of the doubt — not when Americans’ savings are at stake,” Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), a sponsor of the legislation, told me. He said that the new law “would allow the SEC to kick lying companies off our exchanges even faster.”

Congress appears to realize that Beijing is likely using the new agreement to delay accountability and raise more U.S. investor cash before eventually withdrawing its companies from U.S. exchanges on its own terms. Just two weeks before the agreement, five massive state-owned conglomerates voluntarily delisted from U.S. exchanges and moved to exchanges in China. Beijing wants to bolster its own capital markets, where the Chinese Communist Party has complete control, and use them to advance its strategic objectives. But it still needs U.S. markets for the time being.

Wall Street firms argue that Chinese companies moving to Chinese or Hong Kong exchanges is bad for the United States — but that’s not the case. The United States has the most attractive capital markets in the first place precisely because they aspire to operate based on transparency, accountability and the rule of law. Chinese companies’ lack of transparency undermines the integrity of U.S. markets.

“U.S. capital markets are the envy of the world and afford substantial competitive advantage for those who access our markets,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told me. “Yet companies based in China have been allowed to play by a different set of rules.”

Setting the audit issue aside, U.S. investors have no recourse when the Chinese Communist Party decides to randomly crush a major corporation after it accepts billions from U.S. investors. Americans have already lost hundreds of billions of dollars invested in Chinese companies because of Beijing’s crackdowns on technology, education, gaming and other sectors. Moreover, U.S. investors have no legal recourse when a Chinese company is revealed to be perpetrating a fraud.

More broadly, as the Communist Party exerts more influence and control over all major Chinese corporations, U.S. investors are increasingly funding companies that supply the Chinese military and are complicit in the Chinese government’s mass atrocities. Through a policy Beijing calls “military-civil fusion,” all Chinese corporations are being co-opted to serve the goals of the state, not the interests of investors.

As the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission detailed in its 2021 report, “The Chinese government’s evolving control over China’s corporate sector blurs the relationship between commercial actors and the state, ultimately making distinctions between ‘state’ and ‘nonstate’ companies less meaningful.”

If Beijing insists on building state-controlled markets to fund state-controlled companies pursuing state objectives, that is its prerogative. But there is no good reason to continue to allow U.S. markets to provide financing for China’s economic scheme. And it is naive to think that Beijing is going to suddenly become open and transparent after signing one piece of paper.

China’s strategy, not U.S. policy, is leading to the decoupling of the two biggest financial sectors in the world. The duty of Congress and the U.S. government is to protect U.S. investors and U.S. national security, not to save Wall Street’s relationship with Beijing. If that means Chinese companies all leave U.S. capital markets, so be it.

Using aerial photos and artificial intelligence, French tax officials have reportedly identified more than 20,000 previously untaxed residential swimming pools—potentially netting the French government a windfall of more than 10 million euros ($10 million).
And that total likely represents only a fraction of the cheese-eating tax cheats out there. According to The New York Times, the photo-scanning A.I. tool developed in tandem by a French IT firm and Google has been deployed so far in just nine of the county's 96 administrative districts. But it has been so successful that French officials are planning a national effort in the coming months.
Swimming pools matter because the French property tax system is based on the theoretical rental value of a home and its surrounding lands. That means building additions to your house or improving the grounds—for example by adding a pool—can come with a costly tax bill. According to Ars Technica, a new pool adds about 200 euros to the average French property tax coffers. The General Directorate of Public Finance—their IRS equivalent—believes it could collect as much as 40 million euros in additional taxes when the A.I. tool is deployed across the rest of the country, per The Verge.
Because this is France, a lot of the political controversy stirred up by the use of aerial photos and A.I. to detect untaxed pools is not for the reasons you might expect—or perhaps exactly for the reasons you'd expect: The Times reports that the unions representing French tax collectors are opposed to the effort, fearing that it will "replace field work by tax collectors and surveyors" with algorithms.
Ars Technica notes that the French firm that developed the software is facing criticism for contracting with Google.
A more efficient tax collection service that requires fewer bureaucrats isn't necessarily bad. And Americans don't have to worry about getting a bigger federal tax bill if they improve the value of their property (though property taxes do fund other levels of government). But even if the IRS won't be spying on our backyards in the hopes of charging us extra next year, there's a warning here about what happens when you give tax cops more resources and more power: Lots of people end up having to pay more in taxes.
The expected 87,000 new agents that the IRS will hire thanks to the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act won't be literally sorting through photos of Americans' backyards, but they will be sorting through Americans' financial backyards. Despite what Democrats (and compliant media "fact checkers") claimed in the run-up to the bill's passage, there is little reason to believe the enhanced tax scrutiny will be focused exclusively on Americans earning more than $400,000. In fact, about half of the so-called "tax gap" that the bill envisions closing would have to come from Americans earning less than $200,000 annually, according to a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis.
Bigger tax authorities operating with more powerful technology will translate into higher tax bills for the poor suckers unlucky enough to live under those regimes. That's true whether your "tax crime" is having an unreported swimming pool or filling out the wrong form at your bank.
The post Artificial Intelligence Helps French Tax Authorities Find Thousands of Untaxed Swimming Pools appeared first on Reason.com.

The Judge Rotenberg Center is a residential psychiatric institution in Canton, Massachusetts. Since its founding in 1971, the Rotenberg Center has become infamous for its use of controversial methods to treat children and adults with behavioral problems and developmental disabilities. "Students" at the center are subjected to contingent skin shock, an extreme version of applied behavior analysis, which is a common treatment for autism and other developmental conditions.
The electric shocks given to individuals at the Rotenberg Center are severe. According to one expert, the shocks are at least six times more potent than the most powerful legal stun gun. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Center's practices have been condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, and six residents have died while in the center's care.
Despite scandals, according to FIRE, officials at the Rotenberg Center have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying government bodies to keep the center open. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally banned the electric shock devices used by the center because they "present an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury." However, the center successfully sued, reinstating its practices after a federal appeals court found that the FDA did not have the authority to ban the center's shock devices.
Disability rights groups have consistently opposed the Rotenberg Center's practices. While their efforts have not succeeded so far, shutting down the center remains a top priority for many autism rights groups and activists. However, one activist group now faces a lawsuit for speaking out against the Center's practices.
NeuroClastic is a small nonprofit and publication that runs stories by autistic writers who cover topics pertaining to disability rights. On its website, the organization writes that it seeks "to create a counter-point to messaging about autism that presents the autistic neurotype as a disease or disorder or a checklist of deficits."
In August 2021, NeuroClastic published "900 ABA Professionals Have Weighed in on the Use of Electroshock at Judge Rotenberg Center." The survey found that 89 percent of surveyed clinicians "strongly opposed" the practice, and 70 percent of respondents "believe the JRC should be shut down." 
On April 27, the Rotenberg Center responded by sending a cease-and-desist letter to NeuroClastic, claiming that the organization's statements "are false and defamatory and are causing harm to JRC." The letter singles out NeuroClastic's survey of ABA professionals, claiming that NeuroClastic published a litany of false statements about the Rotenberg Center.
However, "all of NeuroClastic's statements are true or substantially true, and NeuroClastic believes them to be true based on publicly available sources that it cited at the time of publication," wrote FIRE Attorney Gabe Walters in a response to the cease-and-desist letter. Walters continued "The other statements [the Rotenberg Center] identif[ies] are plainly matters of protected opinion."
As noted by FIRE, many of the allegedly defamatory statements are in fact verifiable. For example, NeuroClastic stated that the Rotenberg Center has shocked residents while they were tied down on the floor. The center claims this is false. However, according to FIRE, that statement is "based on a video of a resident strapped to a restraint board and shocked 31 times. CBS Evening News broadcast footage of the video nationally."
"NeuroClastic shouldn't face litigation for advocating for its mission, which is to be a voice for autistic people. The Center is delivering painful electric shocks to autistic residents to try to suppress their autistic behaviors and NeuroClastic is obviously opposed to that practice, and speaks out about it," Walters tells Reason. "It can't enter one side of the debate on this public issue, and then try to shut down the other side by intimidating them with a meritless defamation suit."
The post A Psychiatric Facility Punishes Residents With Painful Electric Shocks. Now It's Trying To Sue Its Critics. appeared first on Reason.com.

If you become an extremely successful author, your publisher is less likely to care about the quality of the books you write. If everything you write is guaranteed to sell well because you have built a large audience, then the editor may be disinclined to reject a new manuscript even if it is obviously terrible. Perhaps they will try to offer some constructive suggestions. Or perhaps they will just print whatever you submit, knowing that the purpose of a for-profit publishing company is to sell as many books as possible, not to sell the best books possible. 
J.K. Rowling’s new mystery novel The Ink Black Heart (published under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith) is 1,200 pages long. It is so long that even devoted online fans of her thriller writings are calling it “such a slog” and saying it “dragged on and on.” I would go further and say that it is almost literally unreadable unless you adore Rowling to the point where you would endure any torment that you thought she wanted you to undergo. I am a professional consumer of terrible books (I have read Jordan B. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning and most of the Ben Shapiro canon) but I simply could not get to the end of The Ink Black Heart. If one cannot write a review of a book without reading every word of it, then The Ink Black Heart is immune from being reviewed. 
The Ink Black Heart is not bad because it is long (my favorite book, the architecture compendium A Pattern Language, is a similar length). It’s bad because it’s what happens when an author spends too much time on social media and tries to spin their anger at Twitter trolls into a mystery story. It’s bad because it’s a sad demonstration that J.K. Rowling has had her brain destroyed by spending too much time online and letting criticism get to her. 
In The Ink Black Heart (spoilers), the murder victim is a young woman, Edie, who has become successful and wealthy by creating a popular fantasy series (in this case a YouTube cartoon called The Ink Black Heart, starring a disembodied heart named Harty). The Ink Black Heart spawns a toxic fan community who deluge Edie with misogynistic abuse and threats and complain that she has sold out since becoming successful. It gets so bad that we are told “in terms of the overall brand, The Ink Black Heart is starting to be almost as well known for the aggression of the fandom as for the cartoon itself.” Some of the bad reactions are from fascists, some are from those who criticize Edie “for being racist and ableist and… well, pretty much every ‘ist’ and ‘phobic’ you can think of.” The online abuser who ultimately turns out to have killed Edie is (spoiler) an incel, whose motive is that he despises women. As the Telegraph’s reviewer observed, we “don’t have to ask where Rowling gets her ideas from,” because she has spent years in battles online over her own transphobic comments. 

Part of what makes The Ink Black Heart tiresome is that it is so clearly an effort to settle scores with Rowling’s own Twitter trolls, and to arouse sympathy for a successful writer who must deal with negative reactions from their fans. In the book, the criticisms of The Ink Black Heart over racism and transphobia are treated as ludicrous, baseless, and vicious, and Edie is mercilessly bullied by men who resent her success. But the problem is not just that Rowling builds the book around her personal grievances with the online public, but that in order to do so she produces page after page of fictitious versions of Twitter threads, chatroom messages, and comments sections. These seem to drag on and on and are no more enjoyable to read than actual Twitter threads of people spouting a bunch of toxic bullshit. A non-exhaustive compendium: 

In this passage, Rowling appears to be parodying the Tumblr blogs of disabled people, in a way that the real-life targets of the parody will undoubtedly find cruel and offensive:

The best defense of the style itself is that this is the way people communicate nowadays. But incorporating dialogue from social media into fiction is a delicate task, because it is hard to make it sound natural and plausible. (I think Sally Rooney actually does a pretty good job of that in Beautiful World, Where Are You.) Rowling’s tweets do not sound like her actual critics; they sound like she thinks her critics sound (i.e., ridiculous). And it goes on and on and on and on. I don’t know how much you enjoy reading online comments sections full of people who are mad about a thing you’ve never heard of, but if this is not something you enjoy, then good portions of The Ink Black Heart will not be to your taste. 
I have never seen a novel more desperately in need of an editor. (Infinite Jest needed one but at least the individual sentences were brilliantly written.) I have never seen an author more negatively affected by spending time on social media. I think we can take a few lessons from The Ink Black Heart: First, every writer needs a good editor who can tell them when they have produced something that shouldn’t be published, and as you become more successful and sycophants begin telling you that your farts smell like roses, it is more important than ever to have people around who can say “no.” Second, too much time on Twitter is bad for the brain. It’s very easy to become obsessed with mean tweets, and everyone needs to make sure they have a healthy relationship with social media. Someone can make a billion dollars, enough to make many of their dreams come true, and still end up spending their days in bitter online feuds.
Let us take the latest J.K. Rowling novel as a cautionary tale, and a rather sad one. A talented writer can have the quality of their work destroyed if they become too distracted by what people say about them online. Twitter is a place where the general public can speak directly to rich and famous people, and some of the rich and famous people do not handle the results well. Learning to ignore trolls is key to maintaining sanity online. 

I previously wrote in more detail about Rowling’s decline here, including analyzing her pattern of transphobic remarks. 

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I’ve long resisted using the word fascism to describe Donald Trump and his Republican followers, but we have to overcome our reluctance to use strong language and admit that America is now beset by a dangerous antidemocratic movement masquerading as a party.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
The realist’s weapon in the fight for democracy
What I learned from the world’s last smallpox patient
The Hollywood comeback machine never rests.
A Pre-fascist InterludePresident Joe Biden has been getting a lot of static for referring to the ideology of Donald Trump and his followers as “semi-fascism.” It isn’t surprising that right-wing pundits, such as the Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway, are practically having to take out loans to buy extra strings of pearls to clutch. But even John Avlon at CNN and Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast are trying to warn Biden off from insulting millions of voters.It’s risky politics for the president to use words like semi-fascism, much as it was a needless fumble back in 2016 for Hillary Clinton to call people “deplorables.” For the rest of us, even to consider the word fascism feels like failure. It is a Rubicon we fear to cross, because it makes our fellow Americans into our civic enemies and implies that there is no road back for them, or for us.We cannot, however, let our understandable fear of words such as fascism scare us out of talking about the reality staring us in the face. The GOP itself might not meet the full definition of a “fascist” party—not yet, anyway—but it’s not a normal party, and its base is not an ordinary political movement. It is, instead, a melding of the remnants of a once-great party with an authoritarian, violent, seditionist personality cult bent on capturing and exercising power solely to benefit its own members and punish its imagined enemies among other Americans.Is that fascism? For most people, it’s close enough. A would-be strongman and a party of followers enveloped in racism, seized with nostalgia for an imagined glorious past, and drunk on mindless blood-and-soil nationalism all stinks of fascism. There’s a reason, however, that I still counsel against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.Fascism is more than a romance with a forceful right-wing leader. (And let’s remember: Trump is not a “strongman” in any way—he is one of the weakest and most cowardly men ever to serve as president.) A fascist takeover relies on a disciplined and organized mass party led by dedicated people who, once they gain the levers of government, will zero in on destroying the mechanisms—laws, courts, competing parties—that could dislodge them from power.Violent, tiki-torch-wielding nincompoops are dangerous, but a rabble is not a disciplined party. Ivy League Republicans stumbling around and losing to Democrats in a 50–50 Senate are not the iron ladies and men of steel who can build a fascist state. Faux intellectuals such as Steve Bannon blathering about Leninism are not capable of inspiring the masses. And real fascist street fighters do not start blubbering and shedding tears when they’re arrested. (To paraphrase Jimmy Dugan, there’s no crying in fascism.)This is why it’s a mistake to assume that every group of howling weirdos wearing “Trump 2024” capes and carrying bear spray is composed of  “fascists.” Some of these people are deluded, some are bored, and some are just idiots. If we build them into something more, we’re not only missing the chance to pull some of those people back into American democracy; we’re going to fail to spot the real fascists hiding among them. Glaring drivers jacked up on Fox News and talk radio flying “Fuck Joe Biden” flags on their cars aren’t fascists; they’re the raw material of fascism, the battering rams that actual fascists—cleverer and nimbler than the hapless overgrown adolescents who will end up in front of a judge—will use to knock down our institutions by goading them into violence.This might seem like a distinction without a difference. And I suppose, like so many people, I am prone to “normalcy bias”—a kind of innate denial that life could ever change dramatically. For those of us who remember the Cold War, it is a special humiliation to think that we defeated the Soviet Union only to find Americans in Budapest cheering on the likes of Viktor Orbán.But something has changed in American life. Trumpism, which has captured the base of the Republican Party, is authoritarian, antidemocratic, anti-constitutional, and anti-American. For now, Trump and the GOP activists are capable only of igniting scramble-brained jacqueries. But Trump’s most faithful followers are headed for fascism, and they will use the GOP as the vehicle to get there unless the rest of us remain true to a pro-democracy coalition.It is also important not to be overly distracted by Trump himself. We are in a prefascist interlude, but Trump himself is too incompetent, too lazy and selfish, to lead an actual fascist movement. But avoiding the word won’t prevent it from happening. What should really scare us is realizing that smarter and tougher American fascist leaders are out there, waiting. Trump has paved the way for them by corroding the guardrails of the American system, normalizing the kinds of rhetoric and attacks on opponents used by actual fascists, and convincing ordinary American voters that mass violence is an alternative to the ballot box.We can prove him wrong and stop this threat in its tracks. But time is growing short.Related:
Don’t succumb to MAGA fatalism.
Is it fascism? Is it socialism?
Fighting in Baghdad broke out after the populist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced his resignation from politics. Dozens of people have been killed in a violent escalation of Iraq’s political crisis.
Mississippi has declared an emergency in Jackson; the main water-treatment facility is failing, and the water is not safe to drink. The city does not have enough water pressure for flushing toilets, firefighting, and other necessities.
Donald Trump hired Christopher M. Kise, a former solicitor general for Florida, to join his legal team in the case about his handling of classified government materials.

Brooklyn, Everywhere: Xochitl Gonzalez put together an end-of-summer reading list that celebrates the spirit of Brooklyn—real Brooklyn, not Brooklyn (™), as she puts it.

Evening ReadScenes From Ukrainian Summer CampBy Andrea Stanley
Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Strokatienoty Camp
Summer camp, at its purest, is like Never-Never-Land—a place that exists only in childhood or in memories of it: lake swimming, tree climbing, secret telling, frog catching, and youth everlasting. When I found myself recently on a train platform in Lviv, Ukraine, surrounded by teenagers heading to summer camp in the Carpathian Mountains, such wholesome pleasures seemed almost ridiculously out of reach.The train was running late, for one thing. And shortly after we’d learned of the delay, an air-raid siren began to howl, starting an uncomfortable countdown that the locals knew too well.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic

House of the Dragon is cruel, messy, and fascinating.

The call that could save a farmer’s life

Is the internet killing the nude beach?
MGM via Everett
Read. Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead, has a sense for the rhythms of teenage speech—and for details that pivot between goofy and gutting.Watch. Three Thousand Years of Longing, in theaters, manages to make the genie-in-a-bottle story feel new.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I learned this evening that Mikhail Gorbachev has died. I was a graduate student in Soviet affairs when he came to power in early 1985, a time when it seemed that the United States and the Soviet Union were headed for war. No one would have predicted the demise of the U.S.S.R. only six years later.You will read a lot of headlines over the next few days about how he was the man who ended the Cold War and allowed the Soviet Union to collapse. Take those with a grain of salt. He never intended to destroy the U.S.S.R., and right to the end, he was so intent on saving the Soviet Communist Party that one of his own advisers told him he was trying to “serve tea to a corpse.” And when the Soviet nucleus began to fission, he presided over bloodshed in the Baltic states and Georgia.Nonetheless, he was serious about nuclear arms control and about living in peace with the rest of the world. He oversaw the Soviet withdrawal from what he called “the bleeding wound” of Afghanistan. And when the massive use of force might have been the only way to keep the U.S.S.R. intact, Gorbachev chose instead to be a human being. In the Soviet Union, such a choice was no small thing, and for that, at least, we should honor his memory. RIP.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Germany’s foreign minister suggested this week that Germany cannot send more of its own weapons to Ukraine because it has deficient supplies. If this story is true, it means that Germany, with the largest economy in Europe, does not have the facilities to rapidly produce more weapons – despite pledging money for the production of weapons for Ukraine. The money matters, but only to an extent. The capacity of other NATO countries to provide weapons to Ukraine has production limits as well. Although the German problem was anticipated from almost the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and Germany has provided cash in place of weapons, there are several considerations.

First, as is widely known, Europe and Germany are facing a very cold winter as Russian energy exports decline. It’s possible that the German weapons “deficit” is a concession to Russia, but it’s highly unlikely: Berlin could not do this without it being widely known in NATO, where member states’ weapons capacities are known and production is tracked. This would get out to the Ukrainians, Poles and Americans. We would have heard about this by now.

More important is what this tells us about NATO. NATO is supposedly the guarantor of Europe’s national sovereignties. Germany, Europe’s premier economy, had enough weapons to provide a small degree of support to Ukraine. But the hard truth is that the Ukraine war is a relatively minor, if tragic, conflict in the overall European picture. If Russia were to take Ukraine, including its far western border, it would theoretically be in a position to move farther west into NATO countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, Poland and potentially France have significant force capabilities, but the United States would shoulder, by treaty, the main burden. If this situation came to pass, another Cold War and potentially another U.S.-confrontation would follow. Therefore, Germany’s failure to create a defense industry commensurate to the size of its economy is inappropriate and raises questions about the rest of Europe’s production capacity.

This problem arose from the European myth that war is obsolete and that the primary purpose of Europe is to build perpetual prosperity. The EU motto, after all, is peace and prosperity. The former was regarded as obvious, and the latter followed. Europe compounded this myth by constructing a quasi-state, in the form of the European Union, that was solely focused on economic well-being, with the added purpose of creating a European identity. Military affairs were left to individual states. Since the United States was a member of NATO and, as such, anchored Europe’s military security, Washington became the de facto guarantor of European security.

Germany’s weapons deficit reveals as much. Given its position as the largest European economy and as a NATO member, it is reasonable to have expected Germany to maintain or build weapons production facilities out of a sense of responsibility. It could have also led the EU writ large in creating weapons production capacity or fostering the growth of a European military. Since the EU’s annual gross domestic product is roughly the same as America’s, that would have allowed the Europeans to absorb the risk of waging a Ukrainian war with European weapons and forces.

Since a war in Europe was farfetched when the EU really got rolling, no one wanted to fund such an undertaking, leaving it to NATO, and therefore the United States – a most cost-effective measure. But the underlying truth is that the EU consists of members who don’t much trust each other. The command structure of a European military would be hotly contested, and the growing power of some countries would surely be discussed.

It is dangerous to be rich and weak. Such nations are frequently seen as a tasty meal. That is how Europe appears to global predators. The United States, which is both rich and strong, has to defend Europe because the wealth, technology and knowledge of Europe in the hands of other states might imperil the United States. The Europeans have for centuries mastered the art of using weakness effectively.

I do not regard the German production shortfall as a cause for real concern. But in the long run, the European belief that the Continent faces no threats, or that the U.S. will assume the risk and cost of defending Europe from whatever risks do exist, can last only so long. It is better perhaps that Europe remain militarily weak. History shows that a well-armed, divided continent is savage beyond imagination. Armament and disarmament are both troubling. Something that is not an issue now always becomes a frightening issue in Europe eventually.

Dear Professor, Slavoj Žižek a very engaging article and kind of different take that is usually not being presented in Western media. But I would like to discuss the definition of neoliberalism. Economics, I can understand that the empirical evidence suggests that it is mercantilism where large corporation dominate the local economy and buy out key areas of economic activity, including land and as you mention this has been happening with the fertile lands of Ukraine, but President Zelensky is resorting to a referendum to allow further sale of Ukrainian farmland to corporations. You also talk about poor political institutions post 1990 where elites have dominated the economic and political landscape with high rates of corruption. I understand that this have been largely the prevalent outcomes in most developing countries that have embraced democracy and oligarchs have instead kept political and economic benefits to themselves.

This elite capture where the larger population is alien to Western culture and values create underdeveloped and exploited labor both in industry and agriculture. However, there are few explanations that need to be considered before suggesting that neo liberal economics has failed. I absolutely agree with you that the ones who can do best for Ukraine are the Ukrainian people not some westerner from IMF, World Bank or representative of a multi-billion dollars corporation. For example, in Pakistan, the part of China's one belt and one road initiative is implemented under the name of China Pakistan Economic Corridor and guess what? The benefits of CPEC have yet to see the light of the day for common public other than the roads infrastructure where domestic commerce has been better if road infrastructure is built in such domestic commerce hubs under CPEC. Why Pakistan couldn't get the best out of around 50 billion dollars' worth of Chinese assistance. The answer is simply because the subsequent governments didn't bring the indigenous advisory towards CPEC. A foreigner whether it is neo liberal white man or a communist Chinese would never understand the local dynamics of the economy. These local dynamics can be as local as a remote village around which an industrial zone is being planned. The foreigner will come with generic solutions and of course some valuable funding to the project. The project to make it successful, it is the local national/ indigenous understanding that would provide viable and sustainable solutions leading to economic, social and political progress.

Secondly I think the Western culture is wrongly identified as a culture of elites. For example, the most vocal critique of US for its assistance to Jewish lands of Israel are those little Philistinian boys and girls that throw small pebbles on Israeli soldiers. Do and should philistine youth abhor Western culture and western values. The answer is in opposite. If you look at the dress of all these philistines when they are protesting against Isralei's they are donning western dresses. Pakistan is a very vocal supporter of Philistine and rightly so. However, if assuming that Philistine is able to get the right over occupied lands with active assistance to Pakistan, would philistines feel greater cultural attachment with Pakistan. No, they won't, and if asked by liberated philistines where to spend their vacations, most of them would either choose Europe or the US instead of Pakistan. Yes, there are cultural intricacies that is even true with a New Yorker and somebody from Washington. In Pakistan, the culture of Lahore is different than a city that is few miles away from Lahore.

I think that actual issue with cultural dominance is if it becomes the culture of the elite to get certain facilities that should be necessities for everyday life. If the basic rights of the people are secured, then there is no issue how many billionaires are living amongst the populations. When the Bristish Prime Minster uses the same tube as common citizens to go to work is where the real empowerment happens that is not usually happening in developing countries or communist regimes. That is only happening in democracies where politicians are accountable to public despite having the company of world's richest oligarchs.

Can someone be a semi-liberal? Or a semi-Islamist? Or a semi-populist? There’s a reason you haven’t heard anyone use such terms. They are nonsensical. Which brings me to President Biden’s recent, controversial remark that the philosophy of Trumpism and MAGA-ism is akin to “semi-fascism.” Once you introduce the word “fascism” into a conversation, you can comfortably assume that it will cease being productive. I, however, made the mistake of wading into this controversy, with a tweet that took issue with Biden’s characterization. I said it “wasn’t a good look.” As the kids say, I got ratio-ed. According to custom, when you get ratio-ed, you’re supposed to “take the L” (“L” apparently means loss). In all of this, I was reminded that the fascism debate is as old as, well, fascism. George Orwell might have put it best, in his dry, biting fashion: “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”“Semi-fascism” grates on me because it doesn’t actually have any substantive content. If by "semi-Communism," you simply mean a little bit Communist or somewhat Communist, then what are you really even saying? If something is just a little bit Communist, then it's not in fact Communist. In short, once you start using the qualifier "semi-" for an ideology, it is no longer the ideology in question. Yes, yes. Maybe I’m being pedantic. I should get with the times. It is no longer fashionable to associate words with a distinct, intelligible meaning. With enough devotion, we can will words to be something other than what they are. We are all post-modernists, the bastard children of Derrida and Foucault. Okay, now that’s out of the way, I can get to more substantive preoccupations. My main objection is straightforward, that when you say the sort of thing that Biden said, you are effectively saying that tens of millions of Trump supporters are fascists (or, more precisely, semi-fascists.) Sometimes, I know that something I say will be controversial but for whatever reason I decide that it’s worth saying. But this time, that thought didn’t even occur to me. I thought what I was saying was relatively banal and innocuous, especially after the disaster of Hillary Clinton calling a big chunk of Trump supporters “deplorables” in the Before Trump Was President Era (BTWP.E.). Wasn’t this similar enough to elicit some amount of displeasure, caution, or worry? Or were the lessons of Hillary’s misstep no longer applicable because while we couldn’t be sure that they were deplorables then, there are no such doubts today? My brother texted me after he saw my tweets and basically said, “Shadi, why?” I sympathize with this. I, too, asked myself “why.” Why does the use of the word fascism bother me so much on substantive grounds? I soon found out, and what I found frightened me. At least Biden unwittingly qualified an otherwise categorical statement, introducing some doubt as to his true meaning. Most of the thousands of replies I received did not try to further qualify Biden’s statement, which would have been the obvious argumentative gambit. They could have said I was creating a straw man in order to destroy it. But, no. Most people, including various journalists at leading publications, adopted the position that tens of millions of Americans—perhaps as many as 50 million, or even more—were, in fact, fascists or at least supporters of a fascist ideology (which raises the question of what the difference actually is between a fascist and a supporter of fascism). This strikes me as a ridiculous argument. (And to clarify, since there appeared to be some confusion on the matter, I’m not doubting that tens of millions of Republicans wouldn’t mind an authoritarian outcome in 2024, or for that matter 2022, but authoritarianism is not the same as fascism). But ridiculousness, like beauty or terrorism, is in the eye of the beholder, so I will put it aside for a moment. My issue is this, and it colors much of my work in ways that may not seem immediately obvious: If words are meant to have meaning, then to say that tens of millions of supporters of the other party—the only other party—are fascists, fascistic, or semi-fascistic is to use the language of national emergency. To believe that your opponents are an existential threat to everything you hold dear is to transform them from adversaries into enemies. Once you start employing the language of existential threat, it becomes all the more easy to justify taking extraordinary action to suppress the threat. But maybe I’m taking this all too seriously. Maybe I should just chill. This is only Twitter, after all. It’s not real life, or anything.

Billionaire GOP mega-donor Steve Wynn has some free messaging advice for Republicans, which he proffered in a conference call last Wednesday with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and Newt Gingrich (the audio was obtained by Politico): He urged the GOP to run TV ads telling average working people that Democrats have funded the IRS to hammer them. Wynn even offered a script: "Tell them the IRS is 'coming after you if you're a waiter, if you're a bartender, if you're anybody with a cash business ... they're coming after you.'"

As a result, most other Americans have to pay more taxes to make up the difference, or not receive the sorts of public benefits (healthcare, unemployment insurance, assistance with childcare and elder care, free college) commonplace in most other advanced nations.

Unfortunately for Wynn, the funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act targets the very wealthiest Americans--such as Steve Wynn--whose complicated businesses dealings and small armies of accountants and tax attorneys require lots of IRS resources if they're to be audited.

Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers cut the IRS budget by roughly 20 percent--with the result that just 2 percent of the richest Americans had their taxes audited in 2019, down from 16 percent in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the richest 1 percent of Americans are estimated to be hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS, accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes. The newly-added IRS funding is projected to raise some $100 billion in net tax revenue over the decade, mostly from the very rich.

Wynn isn't the first to dream up the bogus story about the IRS going after average working people. Senator Ted Cruz warns of a "shadow army of 87,000 IRS agents," threatening Americans, and Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor, ties the increase in IRS agents to the FBI's search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago and concludes that, "Not a single one of us is safe." Many other GOP candidates are telling the same lie.

This lie isn't even consistent with the older GOP lie that the rich pay most income taxes and almost half of Americans pay none (remember Mitt Romney's 47 percent?), which isn't true when you include Social Security taxes, state and local income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes.

But the billionaire class will do anything to avoid paying taxes. Why do you suppose Wynn and others like him bankroll Republicans in the first place? (Hint: Republicans cut their taxes.)

During that same conference call last Wednesday, Wynn asked RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to recommend dark-money nonprofits to which he and other wealthy contributors can donate without their names being revealed. Some donors, Wynn said, "are self-conscious for reasons that are personal to them, business people and folks like that," and would rather give to the GOP anonymously. (Wynn should know. His big campaign donations became embarrassingly toxic in 2018 after TheWall Street Journaldetailed rape, assault, and harassment allegations against him.)

Recall that the Supreme Court's shameful 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision allows unlimited political spending by such nonprofits, to which billionaires like Wynn can secretly funnel unlimited donations.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported last week that electronics mogul Barre Seid gave 100 percent of the shares of his surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a dark-money nonprofit called the Marble Freedom Trust. The gift is worth a jaw-dropping $1.6 billion.

The Marble Freedom Trust is controlled by Leonard Leo, a former chairman of the Federalist Society, known for his decades-long campaign to fill the federal courts with conservative judges and for his legal challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, and measures to ameliorate climate change. Seid's $1.6 billion gift is the largest single donation ever made to a nonprofit political group. It would have been secret had an insider not tipped off the Times.

Dark money nonprofits also enable super-wealthy political donors to avoid taxes. Had Seid sold his company outright, he would have had to pay about $400 million in capital gains taxes on the increased value of Tripp Lite's shares. But because nonprofits like the Marble Freedom Trust are exempt from paying taxes, handing his shares over to the Trust enabled Seid to transfer the entire $1.6 billion to Leo--thereby having average taxpayers effectively subsidize Leo's political influence-peddling to the tune of $400 million.

What to do? At the very least, Congress should enact the Disclose Act, which would reveal to voters who's trying to buy their votes. The Act has been blocked in Congress for more than a decade by Republican filibusters.

Which brings me back to Steve Wynn's advice to the Republican Party to tell working-class Americans that Democrats are unleashing the IRS on them.

In truth, the Republican Party has been going all out to help its major backers avoid paying taxes. Those backers are among the wealthiest people in America--such as Steve Wynn--who have in recent years become far wealthier than ever before. Much of this is in secret. But as a result, most other Americans have to pay more taxes to make up the difference, or not receive the sorts of public benefits (healthcare, unemployment insurance, assistance with childcare and elder care, free college) commonplace in most other advanced nations.

My free messaging advice to the Democrats: Get this truthful story out.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Hey, it’s Ezra. I am off this month, but today — today is an exciting day. It is the guest hosting debut of our associate producer, Annie Galvin. Annie works very, very closely with me and Rogé, prepping and editing the show. She’s very much the cultural mind of the show. Episodes with Ada Limón and Margaret Atwood and Dan Olson owe so much to her brilliance. She previously hosted a season of the public scholarship podcast she created in her last job, “Public Books 101,” and she’s got a great episode for you here today. Enjoy.

annie galvin

During the hardest times in my life, no matter what it is I’m going through, I always find myself coming back to music. Music doesn’t solve everything, but it’s something that you can feel in your body. It can help regulate your emotions. There’s just something about it that resonates on a layer that’s deeper than our rational minds. There’s something about music that can be truly healing and hopeful, especially in times of darkness. It’s hard for me to think of anyone who embodies this quality quite like the musician Allison Russell. Russell has played in a bunch of bands over the years, mostly working in what we would call roots or folk music but also the blues, gospel, R&B, Celtic music, rock ‘n’ roll, and so much more. If you don’t know Allison Russell’s name yet, I have a good feeling you’ll be hearing it a lot more in the coming years. Her debut solo album, “Outside Child,” came out in 2021 to just tremendous critical acclaim. That music was nominated for three Grammy Awards, which is not bad for your first record, and her music is truly an intellectual project. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to invite her on the show. It explores race and history, how to wrestle with your own trauma and just the sheer human capacity for resilience. But more than anything, Allison Russell is my favorite currently-working singer, full stop. There’s something about her voice that shakes me to my core, and it moves me and it inspires me. And I want you to hear it too. So in that spirit, we have a real treat for you today. Russell will play a few of her songs accompanied by a three-piece band — so electric guitar, violin, cello, four-part harmonies, and then Russell and I will use those songs as jumping off points to explore some of those deeper topics and questions that run through her work. There’s just something about music that speaks to us at a different and more guttural level than other mediums, and so I really wanted to bring that out here and try to figure out what that quality is. And I think it worked. This conversation brought me a little dose of joy and hope. And I really needed it. And I hope it can do the same for you. As always, our email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

[music

“DIM STAR OF THE PALISADES,” BIRDS OF CHICAGO]

allison russell

(SINGING) Twilight, midnight, then dawn, a billion stars, then there was one. Twilight, midnight —

Alison Russell, welcome to the show.

Hello, Annie. Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be here with you.

Me too. So I want to begin by asking you about your journey into and through music. So if you think back to your earliest memories of hearing and performing music, what was it about music that called to you?

I just — there’s not a time before music for me. My mom is a beautiful piano player and was playing piano throughout my gestation, and of course listening to her Joni Mitchell records and Stevie Wonder records and Diana Ross records. And I just feel like there’s never been a time where — I don’t have a memory that isn’t associated with some sort of sound or music. And some of my earliest memories are of my mom’s piano playing, hiding under the piano, watching her feet on the pedals, feeling the resonance of the sound in my body. And it’s just always been how I translate the world — humming. I mean, I do think that’s our first instrument for all of us is our voice, of course, and how we cry for help, and how we get our needs met in any way. It starts with voice. And that is inherently musical.

Yeah. It’s probably one of the earliest things we have as humans, just realizing we had voices.

That’s right. Yeah.

I do want to dig into that a bit more for a moment, because I know that you engage with a lot of other mediums. You’re writing a memoir, which is really exciting, and you’ve done a lot of public speaking. You gave a really great TED Talk that folks should check out. And I can tell that you’re a big reader, and that probably started early. So I’m just curious, if you think about music in relation to these other mediums, what does music do to you, either as a fan or a performer, that, let’s say, reading a really great poem doesn’t quite do?

Right. I think that there is a physiological and neurological immediacy to the way we interact with music. There are vast fields of study now about what music physiologically does to us, how it changes our biochemistry. In the same way that, if we cry, it changes our biochemistry, listening to music can change our biochemistry too and slow down our heart rates, or speed it up. We react, physiologically and neurologically — and emotionally, of course — to music. And so I think that there is an immediacy to that. And there is an almost — to borrow a term from Rupert Sheldrake — a morphic resonance to it that, within a species, there’s an almost kind of like telepathy that happens, I feel like, with music, or a highly, highly heightened version of empathy where we can feel things together at the same time, which is rare — very rare, I think, now. Especially in our modern culture, there are very few places of public assembly anymore where we are having a shared kind of emotional journey together. And fewer and fewer of those times and places, I feel like, as our divides fracture and deepen. It’s a way to get us through — I mean, even think about the role that music has played over time. It’s always been very much — whether it’s a work song that helps you get through hard labor of a day, whether it’s a gathering, a party song, to dance and blow off steam, there has always been this communal element. And it’s only very recently that we’ve started to look at music as some kind of blood sport or competition. It never really was that, I don’t think, evolutionarily speaking.

Yeah, wow. There’s so much to unpack there. And I’m just really, personally, obsessed, just having experienced it so much, with music as a bodily phenomenon that then sort of activates your mind and your spirit and your empathy, as you say. So we’ll definitely get into that. And on that note, I’d love to hear a song from you band. And this is from your solo record, “Outside Child.” And the song is called “Persephone.”

So “Persephone” is really an homage to my first love. I grew up in a very abusive household, and I ran away when I was 15 because I really understood, at that point, that it was run or die, that I was safer sleeping on a park bench or on the Mount Royal Cemetery than I was in the home of the people that called themselves my family at the time. And I was very lucky because I found a community, through music, through art, through my alternative high school that was accepting and loving. And I met my first love, my first girlfriend, who shall be called Persephone for the purposes of this song. And she really saved me because she taught me what it means to love, consensually, freely, without fear or coercion, and loved me in my entirety and saw me as an equal. And it was the first time that I felt worthy of love or that I could be equal to anybody. And so she really did save me. So this is for her, Persephone.

Let’s hear it.

[music

“PERSEPHONE,” ALLISON RUSSELL]

(SINGING) Blood on my shirt, two ripped buttons, might’ve killed me that time, oh, if I’d let him. He’s slow when he’s drunk and he lost his grip on me. Now I’m running down La Rue St. Paul, trying to get out from the weight of it all. Can’t flag a cop. I know he won’t stop. I go see Persephone. Tap, tap, tappin’ on your window screen. Gotta let me in, Persephone. Got nowhere to go, but I had to get away from him. My petals are bruised, but I’m still a flower, come running to you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me. Let me taste your skin. Mouth to mouth, mouth to flower, salty sweet, you give me power. I feel you shake under my lips, your fingers, tender, find my secrets. Don’t make a sound. Don’t cry, love. Your parents are sleeping just above. I kiss you once, I kiss you twice. Fall asleep looking in each other’s eyes. Tap, tap, tappin’ on your window screen. Gotta let me in, Persephone. Got nowhere to go, but I had to get away from him. Oh, my petals are bruised, but I’m still a flower. Come running to you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin. [CLARINET SOLO] Light on your shoulder, light on your cheek, light telling me it’s time to leave. The birds are calling to the morning. Your parents’ feet above us stirring. I kiss your belly before I go, climb back out of your basement window. Back to the cold’s bite, back to the hard life, back to that harsh bright street. Tap, tap, tappin’ on your window screen. Gotta let me in, Persephone. Got nowhere to go, but I had to get away from him. Oh, my petals are bruised, but I’m still a flower, come running to you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me. Let me taste your skin. Oh, my petals are bruised, but I’m still a flower. Come running to you in the violet hour. Put your skinny arms around me, let me taste your skin.

Wow. [LAUGHS] I’m truly choked up. That was so beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you.

I mean, I have the huge pleasure of being in the room with you, and it’s making me think about how much I missed this during the pandemic. I mean, you could put on a record or put on headphones. My husband and I would have two-person dance parties in the kitchen. But it’s just so different to feel the harmonies and the cello truly in your body. And I’m curious what that’s like on the other side. I mean, what does it feel like to be able to play together in a room — with an audience of one here, but bigger audiences elsewhere. What’s that for you?

It’s joyful. I think to echo what Jon Batiste said when he won his Album of the Year at the Grammys, it’s not just entertainment. It’s not a show. It’s a spiritual practice. And for someone like me who — I don’t have the comfort of a religious conviction. I’m a hopeful agnostic at best. And I think, for me, this creative communion of actually playing music in a room with people and having others come to listen and sort of complete that circle of what, to me, is sacred creative energy, humanizing, empathy-growing energy, that takes the role of religious ritual in my life, I suppose. And so I missed it desperately during the pandemic. And livestreams were better than nothing, but you’re right. What you said — in your body, feeling the resonance in your body, we are resonating in the same way that the instruments are resonating, in the same way that the sound waves are resonating. We’re connected, physiologically and neurologically and emotionally and spiritually — not just auditorily.

There’s a lot of pain in the story and the memory that’s at the heart of that song, but it makes me feel so hopeful. I remember listening to it the first time, the day your record came out, going on a walk, and just feeling so hopeful and uplifted. And I had to listen to it a few times and then realize, whoa, this is about what you just prefaced that song with. And so if we were to take away the lyrics and replace them with babble or something, I’m just curious, when you were writing the song, what were you trying to do with the music, whether it’s the vocal performance, the melody, the chord structure, the instrumentation? What kind of feeling were you trying to give the listener apart from the lyrics?

I think that got it. I think it’s hope. And it’s survivor’s joy. And even in that time, which was, in many ways, the most difficult time of my life, that period of just finally breaking free from my abusive family and not having anywhere to go and climbing in through my secret high school girlfriend’s basement window — because her parents would have been horrified. They were a quite conservative family. It was also this joyful time of self-discovery and of reclaiming myself and my body and sexuality, and all of it was joyful. And so I did want the music to feel hopeful and joyful because it is that. Both things coexisted and were made even more intense by their contrast.

Yeah. I mean, as a listener, I think you very much accomplished that. And it’s really cool watching you perform it because you’re almost smiling. I mean, it’s just this really interesting contrast. But I think, for me, this song really brings out something that I think you do so well. And I imagine it’s really hard to pull off, but you’re able, in your music, to hold pain and trauma, on the one hand, and joy and hope and even exuberance on the other. I could name a whole lineage of other musicians who do that, and maybe I’ll do that in a second. But I’m just curious, I mean, how exactly do you do that? I think I understand why you do that and where that comes from, but I guess on a more craft level, what does it take to bring that kind of painful emotion together with this really exuberant — you could call it maybe musical package around it?

I think I just felt compelled to — I didn’t construct it in a conscious way other than I knew that I needed to start to tell my own story if I wanted to be part of breaking those endless loops and cycles of intergenerational trauma, violence, silence, bigotry. It’s like a terrible self-feeding monster. And I felt strongly, after I became a mom, that I had to be part of doing something about it. And I’m always saying to my daughter, use your words. And I started to question myself. Am I using my words as fully as I could be? And I realized I wasn’t. And by the way, this is not — to any other survivors listening, by no means am I saying — there are many people who will never speak of their trauma. And that is legitimate, valid, I respect it. I would never cast an aspersion or a stone at anyone who never wants to speak of it again. But I have felt compelled to do so because the way I move through the world is to write songs. And that’s just my compulsion. And so, eventually, I realized I would need to write songs about that aspect of my childhood too. But that embodiment of — I mean, that’s just how I feel. I just feel really joyful when I get to be making music with my friends and people actually come to listen. It’s the most miraculous, joyful miracle of my life, really. And that’s just how I feel. And I write about the realities that I’ve lived. And so there is pain in that. There is trauma. But that’s every human life — every human life. None of us are coming out of it alive, A, and B, without trauma. Our birth is traumatic, right? I thought about that so much when I was giving birth to my daughter because we were lucky in that we had no complications and I was able to have the natural birth I dreamt of. And I wasn’t sedated, and she wasn’t sedated, and so we were feeling it all. And that was what grounded me through that process, was thinking about how traumatic it was for this poor little being that has been in perfect comfort for, in her case, 10 months, like a baby whale.

Yeah. I was two weeks late. I was like, I’m good here.

You and Ida.

Don’t take me out.

You’ll have to meet Ida. That’s right. She’s like, I’m perfectly fine right here. It’s traumatic. There’s a reason we don’t remember birth. And we are ushered into the world with — here it all is. It’s shocking, completely earthquake-like pain, but also great, deep joy and unconditional love, when we’re lucky, from our mothers and all of it. But it’s all the things at the same time. Trauma is also a mother of joy. It’s hard to wrap our heads around that.

Yeah. I appreciate that you shared that about birth. I have a lot of friends who’ve given birth. And I remember one friend, I was just texting her, hey, what’s up? And she said, I’m on the way to the hospital. And then she just emerged, 48 hours later, and was like, I have a baby now. And I think you said a word that really jumped out there, as a musician — silence. And I wonder whether just about anything that’s kind of traumatic, that the question of silence after the trauma happens is the thing that you really need to reckon with. And I really appreciate how you said it’s fine either way. I don’t know many of my friends’ birth stories. And I’m like, that’s fine. I do not need access to that information.

The silence — and birth stories, for example, I do think it was so helpful to me when women — particularly when I was pregnant with Ida, when women shared their birth stories because it’s a terrifying event when you experience it for the first time. For me, it felt very sci-fi. And just I couldn’t believe that it was even really feasible that this person was growing inside my uterus. And I do think sharing these things and normalizing the daily traumas that we all live, but also the incumbent joys as well that are connected to those, often that’s — I do think that’s incredibly healthy. And we used to do that. I think, most of human history, we did share these things, and talk about them, and live more communally than we do now. And I feel like there has been — I don’t know, I chalk it up to the Victorian era, almost, like a holdover from that, of a shaming around all sort of bodily, human, reproductive — everything sort of being cloaked in shame. Literally they would cloak the piano legs. But she had 20 kids, so clearly healthy sex life.

Behind closed doors.

Had no problem popping out those babies, you know —

But the piano is —

She didn’t want to be doing, like —

— way too sexy.

— cover the piano legs, you know? I just think that there is this holdover from the kind of, I don’t know, British imperialism and Puritanism that is also part of the cultural architecture of what we are living currently doesn’t serve us well. It doesn’t serve us well to have so much silence around anything difficult. We are very capable of weathering difficulty. We are very capable of weathering trauma. And we are very capable of experiencing joy and happiness on the other side of those. So I just think it helps to hear those stories. And that was part of what my impetus for writing — I mean, I would write anyway, but for sharing “Outside Child” was I felt this need to be part of creating narrative that people can find themselves in who didn’t have parents that took care of them because there are lots of people who will never feel ready to talk about whatever abuses or traumas they’ve experienced.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that something that some of the most enduring music, whether it’s blues music or Civil Rights era, or really, I think, the music you’re creating can do is it can be specific but it can also be universal. I think, oftentimes, it’s the verses. Frankly, Taylor Swift does this really well. I don’t want to necessarily — I mean, you’re on a different plane, but the verses are so particular and very literary and evocative and descriptive, and then something like the chorus will open up to something that you and I are different people, we’ve had different experiences, but I can very much latch onto. Sometimes, when music is that lyrically potent — and I guess, in some ways, political — I think we sometimes miss the form. We really focus, well, if this were on paper, what are the lyrics saying? So I’d love to ask you, first, about melody, and then about your vocal style and delivery. And I think, with melody, just as a music lover and someone who actually likes to sing and play music in a very amateur way with friends, and cover songs, it feels to me like melodies are just these magical things that just pop out of the air. I listen to “Persephone,” and I’m just like, Oh, that just sprang out of nothing. But obviously it had to be crafted. So maybe we can anchor it in that specific song. How did you literally build that melody?

I mean, that was one that just playing around with — the melody really came first and the words came later. I knew that it was about her.

But the full flesh of the words didn’t come later. And often, when I’m messing around with a melody, I pay attention to the sounds you make pre-language, when you’re just like — what vowel sounds you’re making when you’re sort of humming. (HUMMING) Hmm, neh-neh-neh, nothing. (SPEAKING) You know, like that kind of thing. I try to pay — and I really learned this from JT Nero, my partner and writing partner — to pay attention to those initial sounds that you make as a melody is starting to form. Because you’re right. There is a mysticalness about where do the songs come from? Where does the music come from? And yes, you’re crafting it, but you’re also tapping into what I feel like is a vast subconscious of our species, and the slipstream, the mystery. And that definitely — the melody shifted a little bit as the words came too. So I think that sometimes it’s — very rarely I’ve had the experience of waking up from a dream, and there’s a melody fully formed in my head, and I follow that thread and I write lyrics to it. There was a song that I wrote a few years ago called “Barley” that was like that, where it —

I love that song.

— sprang, fully formed, into my head, the melodic part and the main motif, and then I followed the thread with the rest of it. (SINGING) Wind that shakes the barley will not shake me. The wind that shakes the barley, will not — But with most of the songs on “Outside Child,” it was more of a trial and error and what felt good to sing, and finding what felt good to sing and what stuck, and that. So I think “Persephone” was more like that.

Yeah. I’m actually glad to hear. I think what you were saying, there is a kind of magical element to melody. Obviously it’s a craft, very much so, like writing poetry, but there is this almost divine or spiritual vibe about it. I would love to talk about singing too. In your music, that was really the first thing that jumped out to me. I first heard your voice — I think NPR First Listen did a stream of “Real Midnight,” your Birds of Chicago record, which I just love so much. And you have one of those voices that just — I love this experience so much — it feels like it just grabs you. And it’s like, stop focusing on the road. I mean, focus on the road. Drive safely, but get out of your annoying internal monologue and just listen to this. We were speaking earlier about the ability of songs to hold pain and joy together. And I just think you’re one of the great dynamic vocalists. I truly mean this. I think about Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Brandi Carlile, Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come,” I think, one of the great dynamic vocal expressions that I can think of, at least from the ‘60s. And so with your vocals, I’m just curious, when you’re kind of modulating within a performance, are you thinking, OK, in this moment, I need to almost whisper like I’m talking to you? And then now I need to almost have this guttural —

No, it’s not as conscious as that. The way I approach singing is much more subconscious, I suppose. I mean, that’s one of the things that I love about performing, playing music, singing, being in creative communion with my chosen musical family, is that’s when my busy brain stops. When I can actually — that’s as close to being in the moment as I ever get, I think. I really struggle with meditation, still meditation. I have to do sort of moving meditations like running or yoga. But for me, singing, playing, communing in that way, being in the moment, listening to what’s happening in the moment, I feel very present in that and I’m not actually thinking about it in a sort of conscious choice way. I mean, that’s part of why I’m so hooked, I think, on live music performance, is because that’s when all of the kind of miserable internal monologue and dialogue stops and I feel connected. And that’s when I feel like the best shows are when you feel like that happened, together, as a journey for those on stage and those who’ve chosen to come listen. And we formed the sacred circle together and we exchanged something meaningful. That’s what I’m totally hooked on. And I see that in Brandi too. I see that in Joni. And to be even mentioned in the same breath is thrilling. [MUSIC PLAYING]

One thing that I think about when I hear you play this song is the concept of home, because you’ve talked about this really kind of interesting period in your life. You left home. Your home, in a sense, was the streets of Montreal. And I hear, in the song, a kind of transit between this really violent home and the streets. It’s set in the cold winter or cold night, and then the window of your lover. Could you just talk a little bit about that period in your life you left home and what that was like.

Well, you’re absolutely right to say that the streets of Montreal kind of became my home. What I remember the most from that period was just very much like I would walk for hours at night. And I was still going to my alternative high school. It was called MIND — Moving In New Directions. And it was one hallway of a larger arts high school called FACE, right across the street from McGill. So it was right in the McGill ghetto. And I would walk on the mountain at all hours. I would go sleep in the graveyard because no one ever bothered me there. And that was, of course, when it was warm enough, in the kind of summer. In the winter, I would sort of haunt the pews of the Notre Dame Basilica and St. Joseph’s Oratory. I would go to the Croissant Royale, which was this 24-hour kind of coffee shop, bagel place. And I would go play chess till all hours, creep into my school when it opened, and sleep in the student lounge for a couple of hours. It was very much this almost nomadic — I couldn’t sleep well. I was having such severe nightmares that I couldn’t sleep. So I was going through a period of chronic insomnia and pretending everything was normal at school, and really just getting to know my city through my feet. And I was really lucky in that I did not meet with violence during that time. And it was a kind of a restoration, where, finally leaving the violent situation, it was the first time I was not being violated at night. It was the first time I wasn’t being sort of forced to live a lie and live according to a very tyrannical set of rules. It was a time of very much being embraced by Montreal herself and somehow being protected by her, even in these precarious circumstances — sleeping in a cemetery, sleeping on a park bench, climbing in through my girlfriend’s window, hiding out at the Croissant Royale till I could go to the student lounge and nap there. It was exhausting in a way, but it was also a restorative time.

Yeah. It sounds like the city held you in a way, kind of caught you in a way that home didn’t. And I do just want to ask one more question about home because I think it’s such a fascinating concept. I used to teach a college class called Global Women Writers. And it was all about very migratory and diasporic literature. And we’d have a day where we talk about, what does home mean to you? It was so interesting to hear. I had a student who said, I can go to a hotel room — as long as I can unpack and set up my books, I’m home. So for you, I’d love to hear how you think about that.

That’s kind of home lately.

Yeah, right —

The hotel room with my books.

Yes, right, right, right. I mean, can home be a church bench that you sleep on one night? Can it be the body of someone like a lover?

I think so. I think the idea of your home, your shelter, your sense of safety coming from your chosen family, I think that is very much what home has meant for me and still means for me because only in the last year have I become a homeowner. And there’s a mystery about it. And of course, in this last year, I’ve also been touring and working and writing a book, and I’ve barely been there. And so home for me is when my daughter and my partner come visit on the road. That’s home. When I get to go physically home for any period of time, that’s also home. But being on the road with my chosen family is also home.

Yeah. That’s really inspiring. So speaking of migration and movement and the very vexed question of home, I’d love to hear another song from you and your band. And it’s called “Quasheba, Quasheba.” And I’ll just say that created it and originally recorded it with what I like to think of as a supergroup, Our Native Daughters. So it’s you, Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Amythyst Kiah. And so let’s hear that.

All right. We’ll play it. This is one — I’ve been thinking so much, in these troubled times, about those who’ve come before us, the ancestors whose shoulders were all standing on, and the fact that no matter what our perceived differences or perceived different lineages, if we go back far enough into our mitochondria, we all have the same mother, and we all come from long lines of survivors, and every single one of them lived through times harder than these. This is a song called “Quasheba,” and it’s for the great matriarch of my paternal lineage, in remembrance, in gratitude and in love.

[music

“QUASHEBA, QUASHEBA,” OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS] (SINGING) Quasheba, Quasheba, you’re free now, you’re free now. How does your spirit fly? Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength, we have life. From the golden Coast of Ghana to the bondage of Grenada, you kept the dream of hope alive. They burned your body, they cursed your Blackness, but they could not take your light. Quasheba, Quasheba, you’re free now, you’re free now. How does your spirit fly? Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength, we have life. Raped and beaten, your babies taken. Sold and starved and sold again. Ain’t you a woman of love deserving? Ain’t it something you survived? Quasheba, Quasheba, you’re free now, you’re free now. How does your spirit fly? Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength, we have life. You dreamt of home, you dreamt of freedom. You died enslaved, you died alone. But you came from warriors who once built empires, Ashanti’s kingdom carries on. Quasheba, Quasheba, you’re free now, you’re free now. How does your spirit fly? Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength, we have life, we have life. You were forgotten, almost forsaken, but your children founded generations. Your strength sustained them. We won our freedom. Traced our roots to find you waiting. Quasheba, Quasheba, you’re free now, you’re free now. How does your spirit fly? Blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength we have life. Quasheba, Quasheba, you’re free now, you’re free now. How far your spirit has flown. Blood of your blood, bone of your bone. By the grace of your strength, we are home. By the grace of your strength we are home. We are home. We are home. We are home.

Thank you. That’s just such an incredibly powerful song. Can you tell me a bit about the figure who’s named in that song and whose story is at the center of that song, a woman named Quasheba. How did you learn about her? And what have you learned about her life?

OK. So I was raised in a white supremacist household. My biological mother is Scottish-Canadian, and she had me when she was very young, 17 years old. And in those days, in Montreal, a Black mixed-heritage child born out of wedlock was quite a stigma. And she ended up — I was taken from her by Child Protective Services and placed in foster care for a number of years. And during that time, she was courted by an American expat who became my first stepfather and then adoptive father and also my primary abuser. And in the work of “Outside Child,” I refer to him as the jackal. But he is my primary abuser and the man who raised me, so my adoptive father. I met my Black family, my biological father, when I was 30 years old. My biological father, Michael George, is from an island called Grenada which is quite close to Trinidad and Tobago, in the West Indies, in the Caribbean. So it was invaded by French colonials who brought enslaved peoples from Africa and other parts of the world, and then it was taken by the British. Quasheba was a woman who was born, as far as we know, free. We don’t know where, but we know that she was kidnapped probably somewhere in West Africa and sold off the coast of Ghana, and that she made her way — survived the Middle Passage, survived a couple of plantations in Trinidad and Tobago, and wound up on a plantation in the North of Grenada. And we know that she was skilled in midwifery because there were notes of her so-called owner, her enslaver, being paid for her midwifery services from other plantations. So she brought some knowledge from the old world. And she is the great matriarch of my paternal lineage. And I learned about her when I met my Black family when I was 30 years old. And my father is one of 13 children, and my eldest Aunt, Denise, has gotten has gone deep on trying to trace our lineage and trying to reclaim and learn as much of our history as is possible. Because of course, with the Black diaspora and those of us who were descended of enslaved populations, language, history, original geography of where our people could have been from, most of that has been lost or encoded in ways that is difficult to decipher. And so I feel really lucky because I’ve been handed this kind of heritage and a more fulsome knowledge of it because of my aunt’s journey with trying to trace our family. And so learning Quasheba’s name, I just started weeping. It was this physical — deeply, I don’t know, emotional, physical, spiritual response to hearing her name and feeling this connection, like, I am here because of this woman’s — my daughter is here because of this woman’s unimaginable strength. I can’t imagine what that is like to be ripped from your language, from your culture, from your country, to never see it again, to survive the hold of a slave ship, to survive multiple enslavers and people stealing your children. And of course I know what it’s like to survive continuous sexual abuse, but that’s just scratching the surface of what she survived. And so I just felt this gratitude and this love and a sense of connection that the only reason I exist in this world and the only reason I survived what I did is because she survived what she did. And my daughter’s strength and backbone comes from her. I just knew it hearing her name. And so I wanted to pay homage and I wanted to celebrate her life and celebrate her survival, that that is not just something to mourn these horrific circumstances that many of our ancestors lived through, but to also celebrate their survival is really, really important.

Yeah. And I just want to underscore what you were saying there by recalling a really powerful line from that chorus. And it goes, “blood of your blood, bone of your bone, by the grace of your strength we have life.” And I think that that couplet captures kind of what you are saying, where it seems like, at the heart of this song is that you’re holding this incredibly complicated truth in your mind as you’ve worked through this and learned about her, which is that you would not exist, you would not have been born, your daughter would not have been born had she not survived the horrific, almost unimaginable things she did. And if you wouldn’t mind talking a bit, what is it like to just walk through the world and think about your life in that way?

Well, it was really in connecting with Quasheba and in connecting with that — beginning to know and learn the Black side of my family and the diaspora and what we’ve lived through that I started to see my own personal history in a different context, as part of not sprung out of some vacuum but part of this continuum, a direct line, that same kind of bigotry and extractive abusive practices that traumatized my ancestor that is connected to the trauma that I lived. And my primary abuser is an American expat. He was born in 1936 in a sundown town, who was literally taught that anyone who looked like me was 3/5 human and did not deserve the same human consideration, which set him up for, all these many years later, to become an abusive stepfather and then adoptive father of a Black child in Montreal all those years later. They’re connected. The kind of macro abusive practices of empire and country and colonialism are connected to these micro abuses as well — what we do to the land, we also enact upon women and children and nonbinary folks and trans folks — and men, of course, too. They are connected. And it was deeply affecting to understand that, but it was also galvanizing and it was also a source of strength, in a strange way, to understand and recognize that, and connect my history and Quasheba’s history and the greater story of the Black diaspora and all diasporas, really, and that, on the other, side of that survival, there is a deeper knowledge and understanding of how hard-won our human rights are, our freedoms are, our joy, our choice to live every day with some sort of open heart and love in our hearts. That takes courage, and it takes bravery, and it takes self-awareness and knowledge of the past as well. [MUSIC PLAYING]

One thing that I so deeply admire about the work that you do and that Rhiannon Giddens and so many other artists are doing right now is that I see your work as a deeply kind of scholarly and archival and historical project. Just in describing the origins of that song, you’re talking about records, you’re talking about books. I’m a former academic. So it’s just so rich. And not all music really comes out of that intellectual project. And so I did want to think for a moment about performance because I had the great honor of seeing perform with Our Native Daughters at Newport Folk Festival a few years ago, before the pandemic. I mean, it was just one most of transporting performances I’ve ever seen. But I’ve been thinking about how, when you perform, I imagine you don’t know who’s in the audience. You might have some friends or family members there. But on the one hand, you might have someone who’s hearing the music and really deeply identifying with it. You might have someone like me who doesn’t have the exact same lineage, but is very curious and is there to listen and really is actually attaching to certain parts, certainly not all. But then I imagine there’s also a listener, particularly at a festival, who’s just kind of like, it’s a nice day. I’m here to just chill. I’m here for the vibes. I’m here to have a beer with my friends, and I didn’t necessarily walk into this tent to think about slavery and trauma. And so I’m just really curious, when you’re either preparing to perform or when you’re really on the stage, do you think about those different types of listeners? And if you do think about that third, what are you maybe trying to say to that person or get that person to feel?

I don’t think I’m ever trying to get anybody to feel anything. I think, if people feel moved to engage with what we’re doing, then that’s enough. And if they don’t feel so moved and they want to get up and leave, I respect that. Nobody should ever feel like they have to be trapped at a performance. If you are uncomfortable with anything you’re hearing, you don’t have to be there. You can get up and go. And that is a beautiful thing. Can you imagine the tyranny of being forced to listen to something you don’t want to listen to? It’s terrible.

No matter who you are or what your experience is.

No matter what, you know. I totally get it and I respect it. It’s fine. Not everything is for everyone in every moment. And that is the beauty of the subjectivity of our human experiences. And we are each curating our own life’s experience. And if you’re sitting at a festival and you’re hearing something that’s harshing your mellow, you can get up and leave. You don’t have to listen to it. But there is a beautiful thing that occurs where sometimes people do stumble in and they don’t know and they’re not necessarily prepared for that, but they are open to it for whatever reason. And then that’s a kind of a beautiful act of discovery that can occur. And I’ve had people come and share that before, that, oh, we had no idea. And we were stopped in our tracks, and we had to stay. And there was an emotional resonance for them.

I think that’s a really generous and probably kind of healthy way to think about it, because some things are out of your control.

So many things.

Well, right, right. Basically everything, yeah.

Most things.

Yeah. And I mean, I do want to say, just for folks listening, having seen the work that you’re performing here and Our Native Daughters, I really don’t want to make it sound like it’s all dark and heavy because —

No. There’s a lot of joy.

— at that performance, people are up. They’re singing along. They’re moving, they’re clapping, they’re very much crying tears of — probably sadness, but also it’s almost like an exorcism, like getting something out of you. So I just do want to note that.

Yeah. We’re not all depressing all the time.

No. Oh my gosh. Totally the opposite. And I think, in the next song, we’re going to really, really hear that. And what you were saying there, I think it goes back to something we talked about very early on — about music as a medium. Because I think what you’re able to do by transporting people — it’s not like you’re forcing them to sit in a chair and listen to a dissertation or a written speech. You’re kind of easing or coaxing us in. And I’m sure that, at a festival like that, there are people who just stumble in because they’re intrigued, they’ve read about you, they’ve heard an interview, and then they are just totally awakened. And they’re just thinking, I thought I knew this music, this genre, and I’m truly learning so much more. And then I love the liner notes of Our Native Daughters. I had the pleasure of writing about that record. And I mean, I’m highlighting, I’m commenting. It’s a deeply kind of scholarly companion. And I learned so much just from reading about the banjo. So I just wanted to note that. So how do you feel about that kind of theory, perhaps, that music is a way of welcoming people into a kind of knowledge or maybe even a conversation —

I agree.

— that they would not enter. And so you agree. And is there anything more you’d want to say about really what it is about music that does that?

I think it’s a number of things. I think it helps us form — I mean, we know this. It helps us form, literally, neural connections between the hemispheres of our brain. So that just helps with lateral thinking and processing and all of it. I mean, think about even how we teach children. In every culture, in every language, we use music to teach children. We use it with learning the alphabet —

“Twinkle, Twinkle.”

— we use it with learning counting, we learn it with (SINGING) you brush your teeth ch ch ch, ch ch ch ch. You brush your teeth. (SPEAKING) Whatever it is, we make up these little songs. And that helps us process things and it helps us make it ritual that we can use and access daily. And it helps us enter things into memory. Like if I had to memorize all of the lyrics of songs without melody, I don’t know that I could do it. I don’t know that I could do it. Melody helps us memorize too, commit to a deeper memory as well and internalize. Music gets internalized in this really visceral way. And it does — it transports us. And it’s powerful. And it does — it connects us. And it leads to movement. Like dancing, doing something with synchronicity, is so difficult for us as the wildly individual often contentious beings that we are. But I do — you know, “music to soothe the savage beast,” that old expression, there’s a reason for the notion that, when we are having trouble self-regulating, music can help us do that. Just as our breathing can do that too, but music can help us regulate or breathing. So there’s so many layers to it. And there’s so much that I think we’re just scratching the surface of. We close our eyes, we lay our bodies down and are still at night, but our ears are never off. We are always processing. Auditorily, orally, we are always processing.

Yeah, I mean, and I think there’s something interesting that happens with a song like “Quasheba” which, again, has this beautiful melody, beautiful vocal part, beautiful harmonies, where even someone like me, who I have a very different heritage than you, but you know I have ancestors who survived the Irish famine and who escaped British colonial oppression, which was economic, political, social, bodily. And that’s a diasporic identity. In some ways, it’s again very different. But I’ll find myself singing along to that song. And it’s a little strange because I cannot claim this person as my ancestor, but I think what’s happening there is that the music is getting into your body, and then the lyrics are making you think. And that’s what’s opening someone up and educating them.

Yeah. And the thing is, yes, of course, there are different experiences with different communities — lineages, diasporic communities, but trauma is universal. And it’s not the Trauma Olympics, you know? [INAUDIBLE] talk about this all the time.

We need to put that aside.

It’s not the Trauma Olympics. Trauma is trauma is trauma. And it is a way to begin to have empathy for other communities that had a different traumatic experience but to understand, oh, that’s what that is. And to celebrate other communities’ experiences is beautiful, I think. And I think that we get so — we are so ensnarled, right now, around questions of identity, questions of appropriation, questions of who benefits and who doesn’t, that sometimes we can trip over our own feet where we start to accidentally resegregate in a dangerous way, in my opinion.

Yeah, for sure.

This notion that you can sing along to “Quasheba” at the top of your lungs and I’d be thrilled.

Thank you, because I’ve done that many times.

Thrilled. It’s thrilling to me.

[LAUGHS]

Just the way I sing along at the top of my lungs to, I don’t know, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which is not my experience, or Old Crow’s “Take ‘em Away,” and I’m not a white sharecropping farmer from the 1800s, but I love that song.

Sure, yeah, yeah.

And it’s not to appropriate it, it’s to celebrate another’s experience.

For sure. Yeah. And I mean, mentioning something like the division, the profound divisions that we are so riven by, that really made me think in a new way about the way that music — it would be cliché to say it — ugh, I don’t want to say it builds bridges, but it really puts you —

It does though.

— inside.

It really does.

Like you sing that song with your body, and then I sing it. So it really — it creates this very deep, I guess, connection or sort of transiting of thought and emotion. And so as we close up, I would love to think a little bit about transcending pain and trauma and joy. And so to do that, I’d love to hear another song from “Outside Child” called “Fourth Day Prayer.” So could you play that for us?

Yes, absolutely. This is called “Fourth Day Prayer.” I have a mantra that I’ve been saying every day since what was, for us, the first day of lockdown in Nashville, Tennessee, about a week after the tornado tore through, March 13, in the year 2020. And the mantra is this. We are not alone. We are not what we’ve lost. We are more than the sum of our scars.

[music

“FOURTH DAY PRAYER,“ALLISON RUSSELL] (SINGING) I was the queen of Westmount Park. It was all mine after dark. Old willow tree, it was my throne, till I, till I went home. Father used me like a wife. Mother turn the blindest eye. Stole my body, spirit, pride, he did, he did, each night. It’s one for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots, three for the children breaking through, four for the day we’re standing in the sun. [VOCALIZING] “These are the best years of your life”— if I believed it, I’d have died. Something told me that they lied. Oh I, oh I survived. I left home. I was just a child. Slept in the graveyard, end of the mile. When the sun came up and found my skin, I rose, I rose again. And it’s one for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots, three for the children breaking through, four for the day we’re standing in the sun. [VOCALIZING] Slipstreams and fever dreams. Do you see what I can’t see? Tell me, tell me, tell me. I want to understand. From the coast of Africa to the hills of Grenada, to the cold of Montreal, that whip, that whip still falls. It’s one for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots, three for the children breaking through, four for the day we’re standing in the sun. One for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots, three for the children breaking through, four for the day. One for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots, three for the children breaking through. Four for the day. [VOCALIZING]

Man, that’s such an interesting song, I think. And I’m really excited to dig more into it with you. I think that I’ve heard your collaborator, JT Nero, describe your music in Birds of Chicago as secular gospel. And I think I hear gospel influences there from the choir that’s in the background. And you’re not performing with an instrument, but there’s so much movement it’s impossible to listen to that and not move your body in some way. So I’m just curious if you also thought of a gospel influence there. And if so, what that music means to you and why use that for this song.

Well, I think all modern musicians are influenced, to some degree, by gospel, by music of the Black diaspora basically. I am definitely personally deeply obsessed with Mavis Staples —

Oh yeah.

— and the Staple Singers and have listened to a lot of that. So that certainly creeps in all kinds of places in my writing and informs the way I approach group singing for sure and harmony and the use of the voice as a rhythmic instrument as well. There’s really no one of her generation doing it the way she is. And that she is the last of her family, I feel in my heart really deeply. And that feels, in a way, sorrowful to me, but she’s carrying forward their legacy of radical love and inclusion and joy, and you know, stealing joy from the teeth of trauma and trouble and injustice. And she’s still marching that freedom highway. And we are so lucky to have her. And I think we should not take her for granted, ever.

Absolutely. So in that song, there’s some really painful lines. There’s “father used me like a wife” and “that whip, that whip still falls,” but it’s really — I mean, talk about a song —

The most painful line, to me, is “mother turned the blind eye.”

Oh, absolutely. But I think listening to it and watching you perform it, you don’t have an instrument. You’re really moving and you’re gesturing. It feels like you’re really reaching toward something that feels like transcendence and joy and overcoming. And I’d love to just hear a bit about the way the chorus is structured. Because when I hear it, it sounds like climbing a mountain. You know, when you start, you’re tired. You have to go through all these annoying rock scrambles and stuff. And then, when you get to the top, the whole world looks different. The light looks different.

And that’s the hope. That song is very hopeful. It is the most directly autobiographical about the abuse in one way, but it really is more about hope. And it is about that inner voice and that inner intuition that can guide us when we are able to quiet the world enough and quiet our minds enough to hear it. And “these are the best years of your life — if I’d believed it, I’d have died. Something told me that they lied, so I survived. I left home. I was just a child. Slept in the graveyard, end of the mile. When the sun came up and found my skin, I rose again. I rose again.” You know, there’s a sense of the resurrection, the rebirth, the second chance that starting to listen to our own intuition can give us. And it’s hard. And we especially, I think, as women in our culture, get trained not to listen to our own intuition. And it, for me, has been life-changing once I started really heeding that inner voice. And the chorus is very much the hope. Yes, “one for the hate that loops and loops”— hope doesn’t come from ignoring the realities of what is wrong, what is hurting us. We have to acknowledge what is hurting us in order to do better, in order to change the narrative, change the script. “One for the hate that loops and loops, two for the poison at the roots.” We can’t forget our history. “Three for the children breaking through.” I have so much hope in our generation and all the young ones coming up. I just see an incredibly high emotional intelligence, a sense of connection. They are the most anti-bigotry, just naturally, of any generation of humanity yet. It’s extraordinary. I mean, my daughter and all her friends have already kind of gone through, well, maybe, I’m nonbinary, maybe I’m — just talking about gender in this very — they do not have any of the baggage around gender that I had coming up. They just don’t. And then sort of cheerfully deciding, she and her friend, Lulu, oh, no, actually we are — we feel like we’re girls. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like —

That’s cool too.

That’s cool too. Just working it out, you know? And not shaming each other about any of it, you know? So “three for the children breaking through,” and then “four for the day we’re standing in the sun,” which of course is like — that’s the dream of more and more of us being drawn into these circles of loving protection, of being seen, of being heard, of being held, of being loved as we are and accepted as we are. Have no interest in tolerance. Tolerance is for mosquitoes. We tolerate mosquitoes. Humans require love. We require love. And we are suffering through an intense empathy impairment and deficit that comes from so many people feeling unloved. Like, that’s the root of it. And it is a dangerous, dangerous thing to ignore that kind of — we have to address it. And that’s part of what I feel like is so special about music. People can feel loved and cared for through a song. I did. I found that solace in music. My mom couldn’t express love in any kind of direct way to me, but I felt it when she played the piano. I felt it when she sang along, out of tune, to Joni Mitchell. I really did. And I think that we have to think really carefully about the importance of art in public spheres, in educational spheres, and to have that be accessible to everyone, because if I hadn’t had free art accessible to me, I don’t know that I would have survived my childhood.

Yeah. I love that point about public art. That’s just so important. And as we come to a close, I want to ask about a phrase that you’ve sometimes said and written, “survivor’s joy.” And I think one thing that I hear in a lot of these songs, certainly the ones that you’ve played, is what I might call the work of joy or the practice of joy because you’ve been through so much. And our society, collectively — pandemic, climate change, gun violence, I have personal things going on. And it’s not like we just wake up one day and joy goes off like a light bulb. It feels like a practice or even a form of work that you need to cultivate.

Yes.

And so if there’s someone in the audience who’s listening and is going through something really difficult — personal trauma, weariness at the world, sickness — what have you learned from your experience that you might share with them?

What I would say is that it is OK to be in that place of weariness with the world. It is part of our process, all of us. I don’t think that any of us escapes from this life without those times of feeling very overwhelmed. But what I will say is, please hang in there because you are needed. Someone desperately needs you. And your lived experience, everything that you’re feeling now, that is going to be of use to someone else at some point if you’re ever willing to share it. And who you are — we need you and your love in this world. And there are people who are going to love you just as you are. And if you’re trapped right now in a situation where you are not being seen or loved for who you are, please know that it can and does get better. If it did for me, it can for anybody. I really believe that. And you are going to find your people. You will find your chosen family. You will find your community. I just know that beyond a shadow of a doubt, if we can hang in — and that’s the hardest part, though, is to hang in when we are feeling so desperately overwhelmed and like it’s not worth it. And I’ve been there. And it’s like the little joys, hanging on to a little joy. And that’s the thread that can start to pull you through to another thing. For me, escapist reading was one of the main things, always, being able to disappear within a book. And “Another World” was incredibly important to me as a child. And I was lucky in that I was an early reader, and so that escape route was open and available to me always. And we had great public libraries in Montreal. And I spent many, many, many, many hours in them. There’s nothing wrong with self-preservative escapism — nothing wrong with it. In fact, it’s crucial to do that at times, to lie fallow at times, to go to ground at times, to hide at times. All of those things are absolutely necessary. But there is the time of emerging. And you will — I believe that you will find your people, if you have not yet found them. We’re all moving through this human journey briefly. And we go through the toils and troubles, but we can sing as we go. And the hour of miracles can arrive any time.

I think that’s a really hopeful and moving note to end on. And speaking of books and escapism and libraries, always our final question — and I know this one was tough for you — we’ll do it with a twist. What are two books and two albums that you would recommend to the audience that have been powerful and shaping for you?

OK, so the two books, one that I started reading first when I was 11 years old and return to almost yearly, is called “The Bone People” by Keri Hulme, H-u-l-me, Keri, K-E-R-I. She is a New Zealand author who recently passed away. It is one of the most important touchstone books to me, “The Bone People.” And I won’t go too much into it, but it is a story of a survivor. And the other book is actually a much more recent one, a book of poetry by a writer who I knew more as a music journalist initially, but I have now become an initiate into his poetry, and I think it is extraordinary. And this book in particular I’ve been returning to and returning to over the last few months. And it is called “A Fortune for Your Disaster” by Hanif Abdurraqib.

I love him so much.

He is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And actually, on that note of what we were speaking of hanging on or not, Hanif wrote an incredible piece about an artist who disappeared. And it’s a really deep exploration of choosing to stay and choosing to go. And I think it’s a beautiful piece I recommend.

We can link that. Yes.

Yeah. That’d be great. And the albums — I have to give a massive shout-out for my Our Native Daughters sister, my next-life wife, Leyla McCalla.

Love that.

Her new record, “Breaking the Thermometer,” I have not stopped listening to since it came out in May, earlier this year in May. And I cannot recommend it highly enough. Immerse in it. Give yourself the time to take the whole journey with it. But Leyla McCalla’s “Breaking the Thermometer,” which comes from a Haitian expression “breaking the thermometer to hide the fever.” It is brilliant. Go get it. And the other album that I’ve been obsessed with lately is Mavis Staples and Levon Helm — posthumous in Levon’s case — a record that they recorded together at his barn. And it’s really, really beautiful. I’ve just been listening and weeping because, of course, Levon — Levon is gone now, physically, to us, but to hear his voice and to hear him singing with one of his favorite singers and humans of all time, Mavis Staples, is really joyful. And we still have Mavis, as I say. So we need to celebrate. She’s a survivor of the Civil Rights movement, and she’s still carrying the torch. And when I listen to her sing, it gives me hope and strength and galvanizes me to keep going and to understand that we can survive and thrive through hard things.

Allison Russell, your solo album is “Outside Child.” Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much, Annie, for having me.

And we’ll go out on Allison’s song “Poison Arrow” from “Outside Child.” Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

[music

“POISON ARROW,” ALLISON RUSSELL] (SINGING) Poison arrow, be kind to me and I’ll be kind to you. It’s not just your poison, it’s the bow, the string, shaft and feather too. The rush of the wing, the blue sky above, the rain that soaked the ground to give me oleander love. Go in peace, be not afraid. Roll ‘em easy, namaste. All you sad and broken travelers, come on. Poison arrow —

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by me, Annie Galvin, and Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Our audience strategy is by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Erika Duffee. The band you heard playing with Allison is Monique Ross, Chauntee Ross, and Mandy Fer. Additional thanks to Jeff Gruber of Blue House Productions and Allison’s touring engineer, Ross Collier. The songs you heard Allison perform in this episode were written by Allison Russell, Jeremy Thomas Lindsay, Rhiannon Giddens, Amythyst Kiah, Leyla McCalla and Dirk Powell.

(SINGING) Roll ‘em easy, namaste. All you sad and broken travelers, come on. [CLARINET SOLO]

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The flap over Trump’s document cache at Mar-a-Lago has become a political fight, but it’s important for American voters to understand why classified documents are classified and how the GOP’s rationalizations endanger our security. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Trump’s second term would look like this.
A simple rule for planning your fall booster shot
The constitutional flaw that’s killing American democracy
The Details MatterLet’s talk about classified documents.Most people have never seen one and have no idea what might be in such material. Republicans know this, and they are counting on the public’s lack of familiarity when they try to downplay the intelligence nightmare former President Donald Trump created by carting off boxes of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. Even worse are the GOP challenges to release these materials to the public so we can all decide for ourselves if the stuff is dangerous, a patently stupid and irresponsible position advanced by people who know better.Breakdowns of the various levels of information classification are available online, but they’re not that helpful out of context. The unauthorized disclosure of “Secret” materials, according to the law, could cause “serious damage” to national security, while the release of “Top Secret” information could result in “exceptionally grave damage.” These broad categories of risk include many possibilities, from mere “disruption” of U.S. foreign relations to “disclosure of technical and scientific developments,” to far worse possibilities of “armed hostilities.”But how does any of this translate into concrete national-security threats? It all tends to sound like the scene from A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson, portraying an unhinged Marine colonel, says he was worried that one of his young Marines was in danger. “Grave danger?” asks a Navy lawyer (played by Tom Cruise). “Is there another kind?” Nicholson smugly responds.Some documents, such as war plans or technical specifications about weapons systems, have obvious intelligence value. Most classified materials, however, just aren’t all that sexy at first glance. They’re not likely to look anything like the “Non-Official Cover” list of spies from Mission Impossible; they’re not nuclear codes; they’re not pictures of foreign leaders in flagrante. That type of information exists, of course, but such materials typically have a short shelf life. (Codes and plans, for example, change regularly.) This is why spy agencies, including ours, try to develop assets who can deliver a stream of information over time.Nonetheless, there are plenty of things you can lug in a box that would be deeply dangerous to U.S. national security.Technical and scientific documents, for instance, are almost always highly valuable. Enemy engineers can figure out a lot from technical secrets, including how to close gaps with the United States in weapons development, which in turn can create direct threats to U.S. military forces.There are also other, less obvious threats to security than “here’s where our tanks are parked and here’s how accurate our missiles are.” This is why you often hear the phrase sources and methods when discussing classified information: One of the greatest risks is that an adversary will learn how we’ve discovered their secrets. If a classified document provides the Reese’s Pieces that would help a foreign intelligence organization backtrack and reconstruct how we know what we know, we could lose the sources—technological and human—that provided the material, which is a much deeper long-term problem. On occasion, revealing such sources can result in embarrassment or a minor scandal, perhaps involving a diplomat or some other friendly source in a foreign nation. Sometimes the consequences are much worse.Small things matter. The location of an air base or missile installation might not be a secret. But if a state gains our photographs of its bases, it will know many things: when we’re observing, what we’re looking at, and so on, and it can counteract our ability to keep watching.Even seemingly trivial details can put someone’s life in danger. Presidents and other senior U.S. officials, for example, are routinely given classified briefings on foreign leaders. Some aspects of a foreign leader’s life might be knowable only from sources close to that leader, and perhaps only from his or her own family. “Leader X speaks excellent English but pretends he does not know any English at all” is a good thing to know, but depending on how we know it, that detail might be classified; if Leader X finds out that we know it, he will immediately run through a list of people who are privy to that knowledge, which is how spies and informants end up in prison or even dead.Many materials at lower levels of classification, too, can be meaningful to a trained eye. I spent the first part of my career working entirely from open, unclassified sources on the Soviet Union. Like many Sovietologists of my day, I sometimes conferred with analysts from the CIA and the Pentagon, trying to piece together events inside the Kremlin. We were able to learn a lot, despite the Soviet regime’s tight control over a system that tried to guard almost everything about itself.Finally, it’s important to understand that, in many cases, what’s classified is not a particular set of facts but what the intelligence community thinks those facts mean. An adversary might not know what a president is thinking on a given subject, but if they can see the President’s Daily Brief or other classified reports, they can know what he’s been told by his nation’s analysts. That’s extremely valuable in itself.What Trump did was reckless and stupid. Any assertion that a few boxes of notes and papers isn’t a big deal is nonsense. Protecting such materials is a patriotic duty of anyone in public service, but the Republicans, once a self-styled party of national security, have decided that defending Donald Trump and his narcissistic demands is more important than the safety of the United States.Related:
The rising cost of Republicans’ investment in Trump
Trump has only himself to blame.
Heavy monsoon rains have caused severe flooding in Pakistan. More than 1,050 people have died since June, and nearly 500,000 are in refugee camps.
On the first day of the U.S. Open, Serena Williams s playing what could be the final singles match of her career.
Ukrainian officials said that they are planning a significant counteroffensive to retake areas in the south of the country.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung advises a reader on finding the motivation to write.
Famous People: Kaitlyn and Lizzie attend a sausage party in New Jersey—and glimpse Lizzie’s childhood, at long last.
Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on whether Donald Trump should be prosecuted for his handling of classified materials.
(Thomas Peter / Reuters)
What Color Is a Tennis Ball?By Marina Koren(From 2018)​​It seemed like an easy question.The query came from a Twitter poll I spotted on my news feed last week, from user @cgpgrey. “Please help resolve a marital dispute,” @cgpgrey wrote. “You would describe the color of a tennis ball as:” green, yellow, or other.Yellow, obviously, I thought, and voted. When the results appeared, my jaw dropped with cartoonish effect. Of nearly 30,000 participants, 52 percent said a tennis ball is green, 42 percent said it’s yellow, and 6 percent went with “other.”Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
Joe Biden looks east.
“It just seems like my patients are sicker.”
Dear Therapist: I don’t know how to help my best friend through her divorce.
(Apple TV+; Hulu; Netflix; Showtime; The Atlantic)
Read. “Museum,” a new poem by Edgar Kunz.“Tried not to look / at the stain. Tried to be respectful // like in a museum. Stood so long / in front of your dresser, my brother // touched my elbow.”Watch. Roar (Apple TV+), a darkly comic anthology series. As our critic Shirley Li puts it: “Think Black Mirror, if Black Mirror were about gender dynamics.”Or try something else from Shirley’s list of 15 underseen TV shows to watch now.Play our daily crossword.P.S.Over at Peacefield later this week, I’m going to write about why Superman is still America’s greatest superhero. In the meantime, however, let me point you to an interesting 1996 addition to the Superman canon titled Kingdom Come. It’s Superman and all of the other DC heroes in a world gone mad after they’ve been pushed aside by a new, reckless, and more violent generation of superhuman vigilantes. Superman gives up, retires, and leaves Metropolis. Wonder Woman heads back to her home island. Batman (a physically and emotionally damaged curmudgeon who lives in the ruins of his mansion) rules Gotham with an army of robots.When disaster finally strikes, a middle-aged Superman—graying and angry with his signature S now outlined in black—decides to come back and impose some order. As you might imagine, not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Kingdom Come, drawn by the legendary Alex Ross, has some of the most beautiful artwork you’ll see in a graphic novel. But it also asks troubling questions about democracy, violence, the law, and public order—problems that seem relevant again, to say the least.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Bear with me for a moment, but to understand the conservative case for preserving the guardrails of democracy, one has to understand the M1 Abrams main battle tank. Introduced in 1980, it was the most powerful land warfare vehicle ever devised by the mind and industry of man. In 2022 it is still unmatched on the battlefield.
But it's not quite the same M1. It's had gun upgrades, armor upgrades, and targeting upgrades (to name just a few of the improvements over more than 40 years of service). There was the M1, the M1A1, the M1A2, and now the M1A2 SEP. It's still the same tank. It even looks much the same. But it's substantially better—built to withstand the challenges of modern war.
And so it is with the Constitution and American democracy. First, there was Democracy One, the original document that was, at the time, a remarkable advance for democracy and human rights, but it was flawed. It permitted slavery. Its most potent human rights protections—the guarantees of the individual liberty in the Bill of Rights—didn't apply to the states. So the system was unstable. It was not going to age well.
And it didn't. The nation ripped itself apart in the Civil War, and the victorious Union created Democracy Two, with a substantially updated Constitution that, over time, extended the Bill of Rights to protect individual liberty from every organ of American government. But still, it wasn't enough. Black Americans continued to confront the "badges and incidents of slavery" in the form of a brutal system of racial oppression that depended on both public and private discrimination.
So along came Democracy Three, the post-Civil Rights era. The power of that state expanded dramatically. The government began to touch virtually every aspect of commercial life. The administrative state grew until it became the most potent branch of government. And while the United States is absolutely more just than it was—and citizens enjoy a greater degree of legal equality than in any previous iteration of the American experiment—the strains are beginning to show.
Congress, intended to be the most powerful branch of government, is now the weakest. Campaign finance reforms that were intended to empower the grassroots and disempower the wealthy elite have backfired. Radicalized small-dollar donors drive the financial bus. Progressive reforms that were designed to give power to the people through primaries have sidelined political parties. Now small minorities of activist primary voters exercise disproportionate power and further polarize our politics.
Taken together, these developments mean that the United States is less democratic where it needs the voice of the people, and more democratic where it needs the voice of the parties. And so the American constitutional main battle tank needs another overhaul–but not one as dramatic as the first two. Let's call ours Democracy 3.1.
Our conservative reforms are designed to revitalize Congress. Revival of the nondelegation doctrine and the reversal of the Chevron doctrine would together deter Congress from punting more power to the presidency. War powers reform would prevent the president both declaring and waging war. Filibuster reform would preserve procedural safeguards against bare majorities passing sweeping legislation while acknowledging that the present Filibuster standard paralyzes Congress. We also want a legislative veto, so that Congress can block executive branch lawmaking, even without the president's consent.
Critically, we also propose making it easier to amend the Constitution. The barrier is simply too high for meaningful constitutional reform.
Each of these reforms would make the United States more democratic, mainly by revitalizing Congress, the most democratic branch of the federal government. But lest anyone think we conservatives have become too enamored by the voice of the people, there are places where we also want less democracy, especially in party politics.
We propose eliminating individual campaign contribution limits. Every single effort to micromanage political expenditures hasn't just failed, it's backfired. No one can get money out of politics, but we can distort the ways in which it flows into the system. And presently money flows through radicalized small donors who are mobilized through alarmist rhetoric and captivated by celebrity.
Small dollar donations also undermine the power of parties. Give a political celebrity an email list, and they can build a movement. We want stronger parties. We want smoke-filled rooms. And if we can't have smoke-filled rooms, we want party conventions. If we can't have party conventions, we want tighter requirements for party primary voting.
The goal is to give voters and leaders a sense of institutional responsibility. We love American democracy, but not every institution in America needs to be democratic. We accept the power of accountable leadership in the military, the academy, and in corporate America. We need accountable leadership in our political parties as well.
Any discussion of American democracy should also include a discussion of American education. School choice is a vital value. Schools should compete for students, and within that spirit of competition there's a role for revamped curriculum. Our curricular culture wars are inherently oppositional. Does defeating CRT prepare our students to counter the economic and military challenge of a rising China?
A commitment to school choice allows for creativity, for new ways of teaching history and for different emphases in the STEM fields. Why do we mandate algebra and geometry, but not statistics and coding? That's an argument worth having—one that's far more impactful and interesting than whether a school's diversity PowerPoints are too problematic.
Finally, we want to make election day great again. The well-meaning desire to make voting easier has turned election day into election season, and perversely has put a premium on mobilization over persuasion. Now there's a focus on "banking" votes, and the presumption is that "your" voters are your voters, and the challenge is finding and collecting all your people.
But new information surfaces on candidates all the time. How many early voters in 2016 wished they had a second bite at the apple after, say, the Access Hollywood Tape or James Comey's letter announcing that the FBI was reopening the Clinton email investigation? Moreover, election day is an important communal civic event.
Even an election weekend would be preferable to an election season, and we can make election day a national holiday to help those who have difficult work schedules. We know that we won't go back to a single election day, but deadlines can and do concentrate the mind. Let's restore the sense of communal civic participation and make sure that we're all operating with the same access to information when we vote.
Not one of our reforms is as consequential as the Civil War Amendments or the Civil Rights Act. But even modest changes can make a profound difference if they're precisely targeted at the problems that are causing systemic breakdown. We've long enjoyed the benefits of the world's best constitutional system, but it still needs an upgrade.
We don't need a revolution. To return to the M1 analogy at the start. We don't need to scrap our tank. We just need the next iteration of the same basic system that has made the United States of America the most powerful and prosperous democracy in the history of the world.
 
The post An Upgrade, not a Rebuild appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers about Donald Trump’s legal problems, noting that some observers worry about prosecuting a former president while others insist that no one is above the law in America. Both perspectives resonate with me, but most of you who emailed want Trump to be prosecuted. “There is really no gray area here,” Elsa wrote. “Trump is an American citizen and no citizen is above the law. Period. Full stop. Once we begin making exceptions, it is a slippery slope.”Dave pointed out that Trump himself increased the legal penalty for what he is alleged to have done:
In 2018, Trump signed a bill making it a felony to misuse classified information, punishable by up to five years in prison. As far as I know, there are no exceptions in the law for U.S. presidents.
Jeff voted for Trump in 2016 and now wants him prosecuted:
Under normal circumstances I’d agree it would be unwise to prosecute a former president. However Trump is a special case: a “clear and present danger” to our democracy. He appears to hold himself and his actions above the law. It’s time for the hammer of the law to come down hard on him. I did vote for Trump in 2016, mainly in staunch opposition to Hillary Clinton. It’s too bad Joe Biden was not of a mind to run at that time. While some of what Trump accomplished in office was positive, his overall demeanor, coupled with the inability of the adults in the room to control him, forced me to vote for President Biden in 2020—the first time I have ever voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.
Harold argued that the Department of Justice has been acting with restraint, not capriciousness:
The former president was repeatedly shown mercy. Protracted discussions with his legal team were unable to yield any resolution. Even the search and seizure were done in such a way as to minimize the spectacle of the FBI serving a warrant at the residence of a former president. If he had not said a word, the public may very well still be oblivious to the search. The authorities showed a degree of patience and mercy that would not have been afforded to many other suspects under a similar investigation.
[Read: War on drugs logic and overdose deaths]Dennis regards this moment as a test. Recalling the moment when Trump opined that he could shoot someone on the street, in front of witnesses, and still not lose voters, he commented:
The current fracas over stolen documents at Mar-a-Lago is the final test of that Trumpian assertion. I don’t doubt that his diehard supporters will never find a behavior that puts them off their “dear leader.”
Nonetheless, I think the rest of us have to call his bluff by charging him for this last caper. The man [allegedly] took boxes of classified documents, some of them [reportedly] top secret. By all accounts, the National Archives has spent months patiently trying to get the purloined materials back, only to have Trump and his team grudgingly return some of them and then insist [that the rest were his to take]. At what point do we stop looking the other way and accept that the former president is a liar and a thief? This story doesn’t end here. One reason why Republican politicians are rallying so ferociously to the cause of their party leader is that the more that comes out about this, the worse Trump looks—and by extension, the worse they look for blindly supporting him. I say arrest him and try him.
Paul shares his experience with state secrets:
Having worked in the [Department of Defense] space for 20-plus years, I know firsthand what is required to be able to handle information. There is routine, annual training required, plus agreements to sign that state very explicitly how to do everything. Not only are one’s responsibilities clear, but also what one is supposed to do when seeing others not following those procedures. Knowing all this, I am quite sure Trump was never required to understand these procedures. It is unsettling that his entourage did not report his lack of compliance (or if they did, it had no effect). Knowing that anyone else would be fired from their job and potentially much worse, I see this as just the chickens coming home to roost. This is an open-and-shut case and should be prosecuted, and he should never be granted a clearance again. His intentions are moot. The laws are clear on that.
Chris warns against going easy on ex-presidents:
What would set a bad precedent would be treating Trump any more leniently than a low-level employee accused of the same infraction, for fear that the MAGA world will throw a tantrum. Under the same principle, I could avoid prosecution for robbing a bank if I could credibly threaten to have my friends attack the court. Merely posing the question as you have suggests that what’s supposed to be bedrock principle is in fact negotiable. We have a word for this approach: appeasement. What’s surprising is that some of its chief advocates are conservatives. What was all that talk about “moral clarity”?
Rob wants to pin down folks who oppose criminal charges on prudential grounds:
Should a former president be prosecuted? That’s the same as asking “What laws do not apply to a president?” Unless your answer is “No laws,” proponents of ex-presidential immunity owe it to us to spell out exactly which laws they think ex-presidents can break that the rest of us must follow. Traffic laws? Tax laws? All misdemeanors? All classes of felonies? Of course, we know the MAGA crowd’s answer: “Whatever laws Donald Trump wants to break.” But for the folks who aren’t sycophants of the former guy, which laws exactly are not worth upholding?
But Jaleelah pointed out that simply prosecuting anyone who breaks the law is not a tenable approach, nor the way our system works:
Prosecutors choose not to pursue cases all the time. This isn’t because they’re all soft on crime. It’s because they have to. It can take five minutes to rob a bank. It can take weeks, months, or years to prove that a bank robber is indeed guilty. Crimes will always outpace prosecutions, which means that prosecutors must ensure that they are strategic in choosing which potential perpetrators to pursue. Furthermore, many prosecutors choose not to press certain cases on moral grounds. Many prosecutors in liberal cities have publicly stated that they will not prosecute people charged with seeking or abetting abortions, and in the past, many did not prosecute men charged with sodomy … And if Trump is prosecuted, future presidents could use that precedent to do one of two things: to investigate their opponents for real crimes, or to investigate their opponents on bogus charges.
Still, she believes prosecuting Trump is the right course:
All presidents who commit heinous crimes on the job deserve to face consequences. I have no idea why so many pundits see further prosecutions as a bad thing. “Where do we draw the line?” they say. “Should we charge Obama for bombing civilians in Yemen?”
Yes, we should!
“What if future presidents are too scared to make the split-second decision to bomb civilians because they know they might end up in jail?” That would be a good thing!
Until someone puts forward a plausible scenario in which a president committing a crime benefits the nation without breaking international law, I will continue to believe that every lawbreaking leader should be prosecuted. The second scenario, in which the precedent is used to press bogus charges, is not that scary. It is difficult to frame powerful people for crimes they have not committed. Due process is incredibly thorough, and all former presidents have strong legal teams. Should Donald Trump be prosecuted if there’s strong evidence that he committed a crime?
Yes, it would be the right thing to do.
[Read: 13 reader views on dysfunction]Alan airs the concern that there are so many laws, most everyone is violating one of them:
If there were a shared belief that our laws are entirely appropriate and reasonable, then the argument for or against prosecuting Trump would rest on the quality of evidence. But it’s complex, largely because of a hidden assumption. The hidden assumption is that our laws are so convoluted that everyone is guilty of something. [By this logic] we know Trump is guilty and we know it was bad behavior with real societal consequences … Yet we still worry that prosecution could result in a precedent that affected a political leader who didn’t do any real damage. A case can be made for prosecuting him, getting the evidence out in the world and evaluated by a jury, and then commuting the sentence. It’s more important that Trump be seen for what he is than for society to exact revenge that could produce damage down the road.
David complicates the controversy by reminding us that a criminal trial will hinge on jurors who bring their own biases:
There is a practical problem for prosecuting even a very strong case of serious misconduct: How can one impanel a fair and impartial jury for a particularly polarizing celebrity and former president? Can 12 such people be found in any jurisdiction? And if so, would anyone trust 12 people who allegedly have no stake in the outcome of such a trial to be capable of rendering a just verdict? Can MAGA affiliation or political party be good cause to excuse a potential juror? One zealot would result in a hung jury.  
Any verdict would probably cause great damage to the legal system, because any verdict would be seen as a partisan manipulation, not as impartial justice, by half of the country. Even so, in a serious enough case, the law should attempt to hold even ex- presidents accountable for their unlawful actions. If the legal system is incapable of delivering justice due to the bias of the people, then the country will learn what minorities have always known: Justice for the rich and famous often differs from justice for the rest of us.
Others cast additional doubt on the wisdom of prosecuting. Robin recalled President Gerald Ford pardoning former President Richard Nixon for any crimes he may have committed “and how calming that action was.”She wrote:
The national peace that resulted was worth much more than a divisive trial for breaking election laws or even burglary, with its unsure outcome. Mr. Nixon had already paid a debt to society in the form of resigning his office, and little more could be exacted from him. Resignation was a unique punishment given his position as president, and the penalty was sufficient. I believe fervently in the rule of law, and am part of the legal profession, but there is a weighing to be done when great matters are at stake, and tearing the country apart over an uncertain outcome was rightly avoided by Mr. Ford.
Recently, a commentator said that electing Mr. Trump to a second term in the next election would incite civil war, which I think is correct. Likewise, bringing Mr. Trump to trial for negligence or malfeasance with classified documents would prolong our current “cold” civil war. Enough. The documents have been recovered; let that be the outcome.
But A. A. counters:
When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he set a dangerous precedent that could, and apparently has, encouraged the belief that presidents are above the law. It was the wrong decision then and could have disastrous consequences for our democracy now and in the future.
Says Jack:
Our leaders flushed Nixon quietly, not for his sake but for the country’s image and reputation. In what kind of countries do new presidents jail the outgoing leader? Not Britain. Not France. Brazil, sure. Philippines, likely. Russia, someday. But not the United States. Of course Trump deserves the full tawdry spectacle. But we don’t. Save our face. Just flush him like a sick goldfish—and for God’s sake, stop talking about him.
Actually, Jack is incorrect about France: The former French leader Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced in 2021 to a year in prison for campaign-finance violations. In 2022, “the Paris Court of Appeal sentenced François Fillon, the former prime minister, to four years in prison, three of them suspended.” (And Napoleon was banished to Elba, though that didn’t work out very well.)DC points out that Trump’s political ambitions are relevant:
It isn’t Trump’s status as a former president that makes a decision whether to press charges so fraught; it is that Trump has signaled his intention to run again. He is not a retired politician; he remains an active one, and an aspiring second-term president.
The appearance of impropriety—using the legal system to take out a political opponent—would be hard to avoid. A prosecution would also raise questions about the misconduct of other Democratic Party favorites, including Hillary Clinton’s apparent mishandling of classified information and her husband’s alleged sexual transgressions and perjury. There are gradations of culpability involved in comparing that conduct to, say, inciting an insurrection, but inevitable accusations about double standards and the politicization of federal law enforcement would have some basis in fact (even if a weak one) and would further damage the reputations of our political and justice systems. We just haven’t conducted ourselves like a society that believes no one is above the law. So why start now?
If the revelations provided by the January 6 hearings are not enough to deter a second Trump term, then what principles exactly would we be defending by prosecuting him?
Arun argues that, as yet, we lack sufficient information to determine the prudence of prosecuting:
I remember [Democratic Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey] opining in a townhall in 2007 that the suspension of habeas corpus, the torture, and the wiretapping without warrant under George W. Bush rose to the level of impeachable offenses, but that the American people at that time were mostly concerned about the threat of terrorism and less about civil liberties, and would not understand and rally around an impeachment, and so he was against impeachment. He would rather work to make it more difficult to suspend habeas corpus and so on. Something similar holds in this case. The good of the country is what matters. If the crime is grave and the prosecution of Trump will set markers so that no future president will transgress, prosecute away! If the damage sustained is severe, prosecute away. If it turns out that Trump committed severe legal violations but with minor actual damage, take the decision to prosecute much more carefully. With the limited reliable information now publicly available, no meaningful opinion can be had.  
C. is skeptical of the case for prosecuting Trump:
No individual, even an imperial president, is above the law, but this investigation is political theater with all sides eager to have a lead role. Proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump personally ordered the removal of classified documents or was even aware of his possession will be very difficult (if not impossible). Prosecutors make decisions every day to not pursue cases, because they aren’t significant or are not winnable. In my opinion, this checks both of those boxes, but obviously Attorney General [Merrick] Garland disagrees. As a lifelong conservative who rejects Trump and everything he represents, I am disheartened that this investigation will continue to nourish his narcissism and create a sustained fundraising opportunity for his various PACs.
Alex emphasizes the need for impeccable procedure:
The case against Trump must be airtight, beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest standard of legal scrutiny. There must be boatloads of evidence; the assigned lawyers must have the utmost of their colleagues’ respect; they must show up on time and follow the rules of the courtroom to a T. They must not weasel out of any uncomfortable requirements, and they must CERTAINLY never lie on the record. They don’t need to. The facts in Trump's case—no matter what he ends up prosecuted for—will speak for themselves.
And Bradlee trusts the process so much that he is in favor of everything that has happened thus far:
I don’t think talking in terms of “precedent” is relevant or useful anymore––not only because we have seen so many precedents broken but because we are in a culture hungry, on both sides of the political spectrum, for a break from the status quo. I’m glad the Department of Justice took action. I’m also glad President Trump is suing the DOJ. We should be acting and then reacting by testing and challenging those actions to see if we made a constructive or ethical choice. The courts are a key way of conducting those tests.
Thanks for all of your emails regardless of perspective. I’ll see you later this week.

As a baby-faced 22-year-old, I know I can expect to get carded every time I enter a bar or try to buy alcohol at the grocery store. Even when my similarly-aged friends aren't stopped by the bouncer or the waitress at brunch, I'll have to dig through my purse and fork over my driver's license, watching it get examined for the umpteenth time.
I can now expect the same rigmarole if I try to buy a can of whipped cream in New York.
Why is there an age limit for purchasing a dessert topping? Because the cans, also known as whippets, contain nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, so you can use them to get a brief high. And this prompted New York's State Assembly to pass one of the strangest bills of the drug war.
Since November 2021, it has been illegal for anyone under 21 to buy a canister of whipped cream in New York—though the law was little-known until a photo from an Albany convenience store alerting customers to the policy change started spreading online last week. Selling whipped cream canisters to anyone under 21 is a civil offense in the state, earning offenders a $250 fee for the first offense and a $500 fee for every subsequent offense.
"Used whippits piling up in our communities are not only an eye sore but also indicative of a significant nitrous oxide abuse problem. This law will help to protect our youth from the dangers of this lethal chemical while helping to clean up our neighborhoods," the bill's sponsor, Joseph P. Addabbo Jr., explained right after the bill passed. "Nitrous oxide is a legal chemical for legitimate professional use but when used improperly, it can be extremely lethal."
The evidence for the dangers of whippits is iffy. The main risk is asphyxiation from breathing in too much nitrous oxide and not enough air. But nitrous deaths almost always happen when people breathe in the gas through a mask, similarly to how laughing gas is administered at the dentist. Nitrous inhalers have also been known to die when using some other means to restrict their access to oxygen, such as putting a plastic bag over their head.
"When people pass out, they'll drop the balloon or whatever and start breathing air," Matthew Howard, an inhalant abuse expert at the University of North Carolina, told Vice in 2016. "If you've got a gas mask on, you won't."
Those who seriously abuse the substance can also develop subacute combined degeneration, a degeneration of the spinal cord due to vitamin B12 deficiency. But when treated quickly with a B12 injection, most affected by the condition will make a full recovery. Despite Addabbo's fearmongering, nitrous oxide rarely poses a long-term health risk—especially when inhaled from a whipped cream can rather than an industrial tank.
Further, whippits don't appear to be a particularly popular drug among teens. According to a 2015 study from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, only 0.4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds reported having done whippits in the past year. If used whipped cream cans are littering the streets of New York state, the under-21s aren't necessarily the ones to blame.
It is unclear how much this bill will impact whippit use. The small number of teenagers who actually want to get high off nitrous oxide will probably just purchase other household items that contain nitrous oxide canisters, such as sprayable cooking oil. Or they'll buy cheap nitrous oxide canisters online. And if you're one of the 99.6 percent of teens who don't get high this way? Then you just might need to pick a different ice cream topping.
The post New Yorkers Under 21 Can't Buy Whipped Cream Cans appeared first on Reason.com.

The events leading up to Inauguration Day 2021 posed a stress test for America's republican institutions, and we need to be ready should more such tests follow. In particular, proposals to overhaul the nation's electoral institutions should be judged in the light of the lessons of that brush with constitutional extremity.  Reforms that shore up what we now can see as critical weaknesses deserve high priority; reforms irrelevant to these dangers might well go to the back burner, if not be set aside for now; and proposals that would actually create new risks of constitutional crisis are unlikely to be right for the moment.
Thus argues my contribution to the Team Libertarian paper (which you can also read on SSRN) on elections and the democratic succession of power. Later in this post I'll summarize the other two sections, written by contributors Clark Neily and Ilya Somin.
Many institutions performed well under the stress of the weeks leading up to the 2021 transfer of power, including the courts, the state governments, nearly all local election authorities, the Electoral College and its participants, and most of the U.S. Senate as well as the Vice President. Key cabinet departments also pushed back against improper suggestions from the rogue White House.
Ironically or not, the institutions that proved wobbly under stress, White House aside, included one of those with the strongest claim on majoritarian legitimacy: the U.S. House of Representatives, in which 139 of 435 members, an outright majority of the 212-member Republican caucus, voted to support spurious challenges to Biden's electoral slates. Behind these was an unlovely fact: a majority of the GOP base had in fact been willing to tag along with Trump's claims of a stolen election, and the House, as the assembly most in touch with public passions, reflected this. While elite misconduct can endanger the democratic succession of power, so can populist anger and mass delusion.
I won't try to summarize each and every one of our prescriptions, but here are some highlights:

Electoral Count Act reform should confine each actor to its proper role after a presidential election, clear up ambiguous and confusing terms in the present law, and keep partisans from using the process to re-litigate the underlying election.
Congress should move to constrain the executive branch's resort to dangerous emergency powers. The law should make clear (or even clearer than now) that presidents do not have unbounded discretion to invoke the Insurrection Act, seize voting machines without a court order, declare martial law when civil order has not broken down, or in other ways use peremptory executive power to overturn or block an election.
Counter distrust with a credibility agenda, recognizing that in an age of distrust systems need to be both secure against fraud and bad practice, and visibly so. Examples: improve methods of keeping voter registration rolls accurate and up-to-date; strengthen audits. States should facilitate and where appropriate mandate reporting of substantially complete returns on election night, to counter the viral popularity of  "overnight steal" claims.
Look for ways to incentivize losing candidates to concede. Former President Trump has set the worst example in crying fraud after losing a contest, but he has not been the only offender.
Watch out for proposals to gather ever greater election say over election administration to Washington, D.C., which would provide a single attractive target for bad actors to pressure or subvert. We should be wary of what economist Steven Landsburg calls "centralizing the power to decide who will yield power."
Avoid innovations that invite succession crises. One example: the ill-thought-out National Popular Vote Compact, in which states pledge to cast their electoral votes for the national popular vote winner even though no way is offered to secure an authoritative tabulation of that vote so that it can be agreed who won.
Turn down the temperature and stop delegitimizing key institutions. Both sides need to listen on this. It's one thing to decry worsening polarization as if it were all the other team's fault. It's another to resist the partisan temptation to delegitimize the existing institutions and machinery of our republic  – whether the Supreme Court, the U.S. Senate, or local election administrators -- because they don't yield the short-term results you want.

I think classical liberals and libertarians can play a constructive role in a conversation about guardrails given our particular attachment to the rule of law, constitutionalism, checks and balances, and limitations on government power in general. By instinct, we understand and fear how a government is likely to start behaving once its top officials know that voters cannot turn them out of office.
I'll turn now to summarizing the other two sections of the report, by Cato colleague Clark Neily on the role of the jury and Volokh Conspirator (and George Mason lawprof) Ilya Somin on the benefits of choice between governments.
The right to trial by jury was often hailed as the palladium of Anglo-American liberties; it's enshrined in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, and relates closely to other Constitutional provisions on criminal procedure. As the Founders knew, oppressive regimes have used criminal law and prosecution throughout history to target enemies and exert social control, and they meant for the citizen jury to serve as a key guardrail against that abuse.
Yet, says Clark Neily, America has allowed the institution of the jury to decay to a point of near extinction in favor of an informal and opaque administrative system of plea bargaining. That is bad news for criminal justice, and may bear some relation to America's extraordinarily high rates of incarceration. And it also erodes a line of defense that will be critically needed should American political life take a turn toward the authoritarian and government administrators intensify use of criminalization and prosecution as a purposeful tool against opposition. In heedlessly allowing this institution to decay, we also lose an important instrument of popular voice in government; earlier generations understood that jury service was an important means by which the public participated directly in the public business.
Ilya Somin champions a fundamental human right that deserves a place alongside the ballot box and the jury box as protectors of liberty: the right to exit.
When people choose which jurisdiction to live in within a federal system, they vote, in effect, with their feet. In fact, for most individual citizens, this is by far the most powerful way they can alter the laws and policies they live under.  It almost never happens that they can make such a change by casting a vote (notwithstanding the one-vote margin just seen in an election in my county) nor are they likely to influence enough neighbors to change the outcome of even a single election for a single office.
Because foot voters can make a genuine change in their conditions of governance by moving residence, they have at least some incentive to inform themselves carefully about the differences – an incentive that ballot voters, alas, often lack.
The possibility of exit, Somin argues, operates as a crucial check on the tendency of political institutions to overreach themselves. In America, it is closely tied to principles of federalism and decentralization that are important to the country's hopes for preserving political stability despite sharp differences in local culture. Although not every issue can be handled at a local level, decentralization of policy makes it more likely that the varied populations of New York, Arkansas, Vermont and Utah can each live under a set of policies relatively well suited to the preferences of each group.  Despite worries in some quarters about ideological sorting, Somin sees reasons to think that polarization might also decline if we wisely lowered the stakes of national Red-Blue politics by curtailing the policy ambitions of the federal government.
The post Restoring the Guardrails of Democracy: A Libertarian View appeared first on Reason.com.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.Lizzie: Despite what you may have heard, I’m not so eager to attend a party that I’ll accept any commute in order to do it. For example, if the journey to your party location involves wading through some kind of mosquito marsh in August or walking over one of those rickety swinging bridges made out of two slats of wood, I’ll probably pass. But some parties are worth the commitment it takes to get there—you just never know which ones until you’ve already arrived.So you have to make some calculations, as was the case last weekend when my friend Colin invited us to his Summer Sausage Slam in Harrison, New Jersey, which would involve a weekend PATH ride. As someone who grew up in Hudson County, I’ve spent close to the majority of my life on the PATH, but it’s not always my first choice for a Saturday activity.Luckily, Kaitlyn is a committed train buff with a unique interest in the northeastern part of the Garden State, so when I asked her if she wanted to go, she agreed almost immediately, saying, “I want to see New Jersey so bad!!!”Kaitlyn: Honestly, that was me trying to hide my enthusiasm.For years, I have been begging to learn something of Lizzie’s childhood and adolescence. Though she has ridden in my parents’ car and gotten a stick-and-poke tattoo from my sister and eaten ice cream across from my high-school crush’s house, and though I am an open book and hide nothing from her, and though at one time I even pressured her to do “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” in a hot tub with me and Ashley so that I could reveal even more of myself than it had already occurred to me to reveal, I know much less than I would like to about the environment that made Lizzie into who she is today. And not for lack of trying. In early 2019, I even went so far as to sign up for a devastating three-hour Sopranos bus tour with someone who had theatrically dumped me just two weeks prior. I did this not only because I was experiencing, as you might guess, heartbreak-induced psychosis, but also because I was aware that several of the tour stops would be in Lizzie’s hometown.Go ahead and picture it: I’m fragile and freezing, wiping snot on a puffy coat, staring at a piece of sidewalk where Christopher Moltisanti once took a bunch of newspapers out of a newspaper box … Young Lizzie was here. My ex-boyfriend is like, “Do you want me to take your photo?” (No.)Moving on (and I have!). The barbecue invitation that Lizzie texted me was a work of art. On a blazing grill, Colin’s face smiled up from a crisping-sausage body. His cat’s face was part of a bell pepper and was not smiling. Seconds after I texted Lizzie back, I got down to barbecue business and Googled Martha Stewart pie recipe.[Read: We finally learn to shuck oysters]Lizzie: I asked Colin if he wanted me to bring anything and he said, “Only if you find something weird.”The plan was for Kaitlyn and Nathan to meet at my apartment so we could take our various trains together and I could dish out travel tips along the way, like, “You can use your MetroCard for the PATH as long as you have money, not time, on it, and remember, the turnstile is an insert, not a swipe.” Whenever I take someone new on the PATH I always hope it doesn’t do anything to disappoint me, like make us wait more than 10 minutes on the platform or stop and loiter too long at Journal Square.Our ride was mostly uneventful and the classic Journal Square pause gave us plenty of time to talk about the concept of being Final Destination-ed.Kaitlyn: I loved being walked through the Fulton Street subway complex and then the horrible alien-rib-cage mall that is attached to it. Lizzie led the way and pointed out the sights, such as a bunch of tourists who were confused by the MetroCard vending machines and a dim corner where there is sometimes a guy selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts.I was surprised to learn that the PATH looks basically exactly like the subway, if a bit cleaner. I don’t remember how we got on the topic of Final Destination during the 30-minute ride. If you’re unfamiliar, Final Destination is a movie about a group of teenagers who are claimed by Death in freakish ways after initially evading Death by getting off an airplane just before it blows up. The reason it’s fun to talk about is that—unlike those teenagers, who had the control group of the rest of the airplane passengers with whom they could compare themselves—you hardly ever know whether you have recently cheated Death, meaning you can’t ever be sure whether Death is now stalking you. When I get the strange feeling that I am approaching the end of my life via an improbable accident, I like to say that I am “Final Destination-ing.”Anyway, at this point Matt shared with the group that Lizzie has a habit of opening pairs of scissors and setting them down in unexpected places. This seemed to unlock something for him. “She also sets glasses right on the edge of the table,” he told us. I guess Lizzie felt the need to distract from the pieces that were being put together in Matt’s mind, because she suddenly pointed at Nathan, who was cradling the lemon pies I’d made, and asked me, “Does that make you want to have a baby?”We soon arrived at our destination and Lizzie was able to further distract us by leading another walk and pointing out local landmarks, such as a QuickChek and a bar that Colin goes to sometimes.Lizzie: Often I’ll set a glass down slightly over the edge of the table so that only 70 to 80 percent of the glass’s bottom is being supported. I have, of course, broken dozens and dozens of glasses this way. Sometimes I’ll try to set a glass down without looking where my hand is going and drop it right into the air! It’s slapstick.Back to the barbecue: After stopping at a liquor store for some Funyuns, Bud Light Lime, and multiple varieties of cream-based premade shots from a brand called “Twisted Shotz,” we made it to Colin’s. We were greeted by everything you could want at a barbecue: a tub of leis, buckets of Airheads, coolers stocked with near-infinite beverage options, a pre-batched lemonade cocktail, chips chips chips, enough seating for a small wedding, and, of course, a meticulously curated spread of sausages—both sweet and hot Italian, chorizo, kielbasa, andouille, some kind of chicken sausage—alongside multiple kinds of pickles and mustards.I started with a seltzer and downed half the bag of Funyuns before trying one of Michele and Jorye’s Limón y Sal Modelos, which I had been warned were “very salty.” The first sip was a little too flavorful, and the intense saltiness paired with the Funyuns made my veins throb. But, as my body is wont to do when presented with a new challenge I’ve given it, my taste buds (and veins) started to adapt.
You can't tell how large this Smirnoff is from the photo, but it's really large (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany).
Kaitlyn: It was a big day for artificial flavoring. Before most had even put on their sunscreen and settled in, Colin’s very beautiful sister, Amy, was tricked into picking up the biggest bottle of Smirnoff Ice I have ever seen (a cultural practice known as “icing”). She gamely kneeled on the pavement and chugged until everyone agreed she could and should stop. In our first hour at the party, I had the other half of Liz’s bag of Funyuns plus three watermelon Airheads and two Bud Light Limes. I could feel a film over my teeth by 3 o’clock. Then Colin asked if Lizzie and I would like to see a dead cicada he was keeping in a cabinet in his dining room, so we did that. Only when Colin picked it up did I realize that I had not seen a cicada before.  Back outside, I had an andouille sausage with ketchup and onions, a mini cupcake with “unicorn” frosting, several handfuls of Flamin’ Lime Turtle Chips (and of Seaweed Turtle Chips, which were not as good), plus a Modelo, a glass of lemonade, and a slice of the lemon pie. After a couple of Miami Vice novelty shots, I started asking around about Lizzie’s childhood home and how far away it was—might a girl get there on foot?  Lizzie: A girl could definitely get there on foot. I don’t know why I was being cagey about my youth—admittedly, this was a real hometown event. I’ve known Colin since first grade, and although I have no concrete memories of my childhood, I’m pretty sure he’s always been able to captivate a room, or a driveway. I laughed until I cried when Colin talked about his diabetic cat Ms. Zibby’s increasingly frantic attempts to eat anything in sight, including a tub of party nuts. I laughed until I cried again when he recounted his experience smoking a synthetic cannabinoid called “Down to Earth Climaxxx” out of a gourd 10 years ago (“I left out of the top of my head”).[Read: How to pivot on a Thursday night]Kaitlyn: Colin told us that he has to tape the freezer shut or Zibs will get in there and get into the English muffins! I had never even heard of a cat doing anything like that.Because of my sheltered childhood, I was also unfamiliar with the concept of “robo-tripping,” which Colin courteously explained at length. He even told me about a Robitussin cocktail called a “Tussi Temple” that, I have to say, it seemed like he made up on the spot. I can’t list them here, but he shared many things that made Lizzie say “Colin!” at a higher pitch than her usual speaking voice. He kept surprising and horrifying her, and in the process delighting her, which was thrilling to watch because she is normally cool as a cucumber. This was the highlight of the party because it felt like a real glimpse into Lizzie’s early life. It was a successful afternoon for me!After another round of novelty shots—these ones labeled “Buttery Nipple”—I asked for a piece of kielbasa out of a pile that someone was carrying around in his bare hand, which is as good a sign as any that it’s time to head back to the train.Lizzie: After Kait and Nathan left, it was more of the same, except darker outside. People started tossing around a watermelon and Colin tried to crush it with his thighs before giving in and using a knife. We ate watermelon and even more sausages and drank salty Modelos into the night, until everyone’s stomach hurt and it was time to go.Kaitlyn: When we got back to Brooklyn, Lizzie texted to ask how the PATH had treated us on the ride home. I told her everything went fine. Actually, my impractical sandal had slid wildly out from under my foot, leading me to trip. I just barely avoided falling down the stairs of the train platform … to my death? The rest of the way back to our apartment, I walked in the most careful way I knew how, which was by stomping.I could not shut up. I flung my arms out in front of me while I told Nathan: “Final Destination is a movie about the hubris of youth!”

The blades of the wind turbines on the mountain range opposite my window are turning especially energetically today. Last night's storm has abated but high winds continue, contributing extra kilowatts to the electricity grid at precisely zero additional cost (or marginal cost, in the language of the economists). But the people struggling to make ends meet during a dreadful cost-of-living crisis must pay for these kilowatts as if they were produced by the most expensive liquefied natural gas transported to Greece's shores from Texas. This absurdity, which prevails well beyond Greece and Europe, must end.

We need a large-scale Manhattan Project-like investment in the green technologies of the future (such as green hydrogen and large-scale offshore floating windfarms).

The absurdity stems from the delusion that states can simulate a competitive, and thus efficient, electricity market. Because only one electricity cable enters our homes or businesses, leaving matters to the market would lead to a perfect monopoly - an outcome that nobody wants. But governments decided that they could simulate a competitive market to replace the public utilities that used to generate and distribute power. They can't.

The European Union's power sector is a good example of what market fundamentalism has done to electricity networks the world over. The EU obliged its member states to split the electricity grid from the power-generating stations and privatize the power stations to create new firms, which would compete with one another to provide electricity to a new company owning the grid. This company, in turn, would lease its cables to another host of companies that would buy the electricity wholesale and compete among themselves for the retail business of homes and firms. Competition among producers would minimize the wholesale price, while competition among retailers would ensure that final consumers benefit from low prices and high-quality service.

Alas, none of this could be made to work in theory, let alone in practice.

The simulated market faced contradictory imperatives: to ensure a minimum amount of electricity within the grid at every point in time, and to channel investment into green energy. The solution proposed by market fundamentalists was twofold: create another market for permissions to emit greenhouse gases, and introduce marginal-cost pricing, which meant that the wholesale price of every kilowatt should equal that of the costliest kilowatt.

The emission-permit market was meant to motivate electricity producers to shift to less polluting fuels. Unlike a fixed tax, the cost of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide would be determined by the market. In theory, the more industry relied on terrible fuels like lignite, the larger the demand for the EU-issued emission permits. This would drive up their price, strengthening the incentive to switch to natural gas and, ultimately, to renewables.

Marginal-cost pricing was intended to ensure the minimum level of electricity supply, by preventing low-cost producers from undercutting higher-cost power companies. The prices would give low-cost producers enough profits and reasons to invest in cheaper, less polluting energy sources.

To see what the regulators had in mind, consider a hydroelectric power station and a lignite-fired one. The fixed cost of building the hydroelectric station is large but the marginal cost is zero: once water turns its turbine, the next kilowatt the station produces costs nothing. In contrast, the lignite-fired power station is much cheaper to build, but the marginal cost is positive, reflecting the fixed amount of costly lignite per kilowatt produced.

By fixing the price of every kilowatt produced hydroelectrically to be no less than the marginal cost of producing a kilowatt using lignite, the EU wanted to reward the hydroelectric company with a fat profit, which, regulators hoped, would be invested in additional renewable-energy capacity. Meanwhile, the lignite-fueled power station would have next to no profits (as the price would just about cover its marginal costs) and a growing bill for the permits it needed to buy in order to pollute.

But reality was less forgiving than the theory. As the pandemic wreaked havoc on global supply chains, the price of natural gas rose, before trebling after Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, the most polluting fuel (lignite) was not the most expensive, motivating more long-term investment in fossil fuels and infrastructure for LNG. Marginal-cost pricing helped power companies extract huge rents from outraged retail consumers, who realized they were paying much more than the average cost of electricity. Not surprisingly, publics, seeing no benefits - to them or to the environment - from the blades rotating above their heads and spoiling their scenery, turned against wind turbines.

The rise in natural gas prices has exposed the endemic failures that occur when a simulated market is grafted onto a natural monopoly. We have seen it all: How easily producers could collude in fixing the wholesale price. How their obscene profits, especially from renewables, turned citizens against the green transition. How the simulated market regime impeded common procurement that would have alleviated poorer countries' energy costs. How the retail electricity market became a casino with companies speculating on future electricity prices, profiting during the good times, and demanding state bailouts when their bets turn bad.

It's time to wind down simulated electricity markets. What we need, instead, are public energy networks in which electricity prices represent average costs plus a small mark-up. We need a carbon tax, whose proceeds must compensate poorer citizens. We need a large-scale Manhattan Project-like investment in the green technologies of the future (such as green hydrogen and large-scale offshore floating windfarms). And, lastly, we need municipally-owned local networks of existing renewables (solar, wind, and batteries) that turn communities into owners, managers, and beneficiaries of the power they need.

No one, including the most bullish supporters of Ukraine, expect the nation's war with Russia to end soon. The fighting has been reduced to artillery duels across hundreds of miles of front lines and creeping advances and retreats. Ukraine, like Afghanistan, will bleed for a very long time. This is by design.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems, and profligate waste.

On August 24, the Biden administration announced yet another massive military aid package to Ukraine worth nearly $3 billion. It will take months, and in some cases years, for this military equipment to reach Ukraine. In another sign that Washington assumes the conflict will be a long war of attrition it will give a name to the U.S. military assistance mission in Ukraine and make it a separate command overseen by a two- or three-star general. Since August 2021, Biden has approved more than $8 billion in weapons transfers from existing stockpiles, known as drawdowns, to be shipped to Ukraine, which do not require Congressional approval.

Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia's February 24 invasion. War takes precedence over the most serious existential threats we face. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion while the proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Our approved assistance to Ukraine is more than twice these amounts.

The militarists who have waged permanent war costing trillions of dollars over the past two decades have invested heavily in controlling the public narrative. The enemy, whether Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin, is always the epitome of evil, the new Hitler. Those we support are always heroic defenders of liberty and democracy. Anyone who questions the righteousness of the cause is accused of being an agent of a foreign power and a traitor.

The mass media cravenly disseminates these binary absurdities in 24-hour news cycles. Its news celebrities and experts, universally drawn from the intelligence community and military, rarely deviate from the approved script. Day and night, the drums of war never stop beating. Its goal: to keep billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the war industry and prevent the public from asking inconvenient questions.

In the face of this barrage, no dissent is permitted. CBS News caved to pressure and retracted its documentary which charged that only 30 percent of arms shipped to Ukraine were making it to the front lines, with the rest siphoned off to the black market, a finding that was separately reported upon by U.S. journalist Lindsey Snell. CNN has acknowledged there is no oversight of weapons once they arrive in Ukraine, longconsidered the most corrupt country in Europe. According to a poll of executives responsible for tackling fraud, completed by Ernst & Young in 2018, Ukraine was ranked the ninth-most corrupt nation from 53 surveyed.

There is little ostensible reason for censoring critics of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. is not at war with Russia. No U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine. Criticism of the war in Ukraine does not jeopardize our national security. There are no long-standing cultural and historical ties to Ukraine, as there are to Great Britain. But if permanent war, with potentially tenuous public support, is the primary objective, censorship makes sense.

War is the primary business of the U.S. empire and the bedrock of the U.S. economy. The two ruling political parties slavishly perpetuate permanent war, as they do austerity programs, trade deals, the virtual tax boycott for corporations and the rich, wholesale government surveillance, the militarization of the police and the maintenance of the largest prison system in the world. They bow before the dictates of the militarists, who have created a state within a state. This militarism, as Seymour Melman writes in The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, "is fundamentally contradictory to the formation of a new political economy based upon democracy, instead of hierarchy, in the workplace and the rest of society."

"The idea that war economy brings prosperity has become more than an American illusion," Melman writes. "When converted, as it has been, into ideology that justifies the militarization of society and moral debasement, as in Vietnam, then critical reassessment of that illusion is a matter of urgency. It is a primary responsibility of thoughtful people who are committed to humane values to confront and respond to the prospect that deterioration of American economy and society, owing to the ravages of war economy, can become irreversible."

If permanent war is to be halted, as Melman writes, the ideological control of the war industry must be shattered. The war industry's funding of politicians, research centers and think tanks, as well as its domination of the media monopolies, must end. The public must be made aware, Melman writes, of how the federal government "sustains itself as the directorate of the largest industrial corporate empire in the world; how the war economy is organized and operated in parallel with centralized political power--often contradicting the laws of Congress and the Constitution itself; how the directorate of the war economy converts pro-peace sentiment in the population into pro-militarist majorities in the Congress; how ideology and fears of job losses are manipulated to marshal support in Congress and the general public for war economy; how the directorate of the war economy uses its power to prevent planning for orderly conversion to an economy of peace."

Rampant, unchecked militarism, as historian Arnold Toynbee notes, "has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations."

This breakdown is accelerated by the rigid standardization and uniformity of public discourse. The manipulation of public opinion, what Walter Lippman calls "the manufacture of consent," is imperative as the militarists gut social programs; let the nation's crumbling infrastructure decay; refuse to raise the minimum wage; sustain an inept, mercenary for-profit health care system that resulted in 25 percent of global Covid deaths--although we are less than 5 percent of the world's population--to gouge the public; carries out deindustrialization; do nothing to curb the predatory behavior of banks and corporations or invest in substantial programs to combat the climate crisis.

Critics, already shut out from the corporate media, are relentlessly attacked, discredited and silenced for speaking a truth that threatens the public's quiescence while the U.S. Treasury is pillaged by the war industry and the nation disemboweled.

You can watch my discussion with Matt Taibbi about the rot that infects journalism here and here.

The war industry, deified by the mass media, including the entertainment industry, is never held accountable for the military fiascos, cost overruns, dud weapons systems and profligate waste. No matter how many disasters--from Vietnam to Afghanistan--it orchestrates, it is showered with larger and larger amounts of federal funds, nearly half of all the government's discretionary spending. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

An organization like NewsGuard, which has been rating what it says are trustworthy and untrustworthy sites based on their reporting on Ukraine, is one of the many indoctrination tools of the war industry. Sites that raise what are deemed "false" assertions about Ukraine, including that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and neo-Nazi forces are part of Ukraine's military and power structure, are tagged as unreliable. Consortium News, Daily Kos, Mint Press and Grayzone have been given a red warning label. Sites that do not raise these issues, such as CNN, receive the "green" rating" for truth and credibility. (NewsGuard, after being heavily criticized for giving Fox News a green rating of approval in July revised its rating for Fox News and MSNBC, giving them red labels.)

The ratings are arbitrary. The Daily Caller, which published fake naked pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was given a green rating, along with a media outlet owned and operated by The Heritage Foundation. NewsGuard gives WikiLeaks a red label for "failing" to publish retractions despite admitting that all of the information WikiLeaks has published thus far is accurate. What WikiLeaks was supposed to retract remains a mystery. The New York Times and The Washington Post, which shared a Pulitzer in 2018 for reporting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election, a conspiracy theory the Mueller investigation imploded, are awarded perfect scores. These ratings are not about vetting journalism. They are about enforcing conformity.

NewsGuard, established in 2018, "partners" with the State Department and the Pentagon, as well as corporations such as Microsoft. Its advisory board includes the former Director of the CIA and NSA, Gen. Michael Hayden; the first U.S. Homeland Security director Tom Ridge and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former secretary general of NATO.

Readers who regularly go to targeted sites could probably care less if they are tagged with a red label. But that is not the point. The point is to rate these sites so that anyone who has a NewsGuard extension installed on their devices will be warned away from visiting them. NewsGuard is being installed in libraries and schools and on the computers of active-duty troops. A warning pops up on targeted sites that reads: "Proceed with caution: This website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability."

Negative ratings will drive away advertisers, which is the intent. It is also a very short step from blacklisting these sites to censoring them, as happened when YouTube erased six years of my show On Contact that was broadcast on RT America and RT International. Not one show was about Russia. And not one violated the guidelines for content imposed by YouTube. But many did examine the evils of U.S. militarism.

In an exhaustive rebuttal to NewsGuard, which is worth reading, Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, ends with this observation:

NewsGuard's accusations against Consortium News that could potentially limit its readership and financial support must be seen in the context of the West's war mania over Ukraine, about which dissenting voices are being suppressed. Three CN writers have been kicked off Twitter. PayPal's cancellation of Consortium News' account is an evident attempt to defund it for what is almost certainly the company's view that CN violated its restrictions on "providing false or misleading information." It cannot be known with 100 percent certainty because PayPal is hiding behind its reasons, but CN trades in information and nothing else. CN supports no side in the Ukraine war but seeks to examine the causes of the conflict within its recent historical context, all of which are being whitewashed from mainstream Western media. Those causes are: NATO's expansion eastward despite its promise not to do so; the coup and eight-year war on Donbass against coup resisters; the lack of implementation of the Minsk Accords to end that conflict; and the outright rejection of treaty proposals by Moscow to create a new security architecture in Europe taking Russia's security concerns into account. Historians who point out the onerous Versailles conditions imposed on Germany after World War I as a cause of Nazism and World War II are neither excusing Nazi Germany nor are they smeared as its defenders.

The frantic effort to corral viewers and readers into the embrace of the establishment media--only 16 percent of Americans have a great deal/quite a lot of confidence in newspapers and only 11 percent have some degree of confidence in television news--is a sign of desperation.

As the persecution of Julian Assange illustrates, the throttling of press freedom is bipartisan. This assault on truth leaves a population unmoored. It feeds wild conspiracy theories. It shreds the credibility of the ruling class. It empowers demagogues. It creates an information desert, one where truth and lies are indistinguishable. It frog-marches us towards tyranny. This censorship only serves the interests of the militarists who, as Karl Liebknechtreminded his fellow Germans in World War I, are the enemy within.

Gail: After that, a serious look at overall price tags. The fact that loans are so easy to get has encouraged even very fine schools to charge too-high tuition in order to get money for programs that feed the ego of the administration more than the quality of the education.

And then … well, hey. Your turn.

Bret: It wouldn’t hurt, either, if colleges and universities started cutting down sharply on the army of administrators they’ve hired in recent years, who contribute a lot to fiscal and bureaucratic bloat and therefore to overall costs.

Gail: Watch out, administrators — if Bret and I are in accord, you’ve probably got a problem.

Bret: Longer term, we should help steer teenagers away from the idea that four-year college is their one and only ticket to prosperity, status and success. We should shift our funding toward community colleges, vocational schools and a wide range of adult-education programs. I’m also sympathetic to the idea of expanding opportunities for shorter enlistment times for young people who want to join any branch of the armed forces. It could help fund their future education, and it would make them more disciplined students when they do.

Gail: While we’re being hard-nosed about what we want students to get out of college, I feel obliged to point out that some of the less practical aspects of higher education can be terrific experiences. I went to graduate school and got a master’s degree in government, which I don’t think has ever once convinced a potential employer I was a superior candidate. But I had a great time, met some fascinating people, including my future husband, and learned a lot.

I paid for it through on-campus jobs, some of which you could argue amounted to a kind of public financing. Not saying this should be a universal goal. But when I’m cheerleading for the most practical possible approach to higher education, I feel obliged to toss it in.

Bret: True and fair. Liberal-arts education is great when students are engaged and teaching quality is high. Wish that were more often the case.

Just a few years ago, to be concerned with national resilience was to be seen as some kind of crank at best, and some kind of nativist radical at worst. Even at the height of Covid, to diagnose the fundamental problem facing Britain as one of eroded state capacity was often viewed by liberal commentators as some kind of quasi-Stalinist state worship, dangerously close to either fascism or communism. 
Today, however, the British state’s inability to provide the most basic of functions — stopping crime; providing adequate healthcare, housing and functioning utilities like energy and water — are the central plank of political discussion. We have won the argument, yet there has been very little reflection on what this means, or how we have reached this dismal state of affairs. Worse, the people who brought us here are still in charge.
But what is the alternative? In their 2015 book Inventing the Future, the Left-wing writers Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams used the example of the Seventies crisis, which ushered in our current political and economic model, to examine the way in which one governing ideology can supersede its predecessor as the common-sense frame of political argument, and become hegemonic. The previous, dominant Keynesian framework had no immediate answer to the economic crisis of the time, and thus ceded ground to the free-market ideology of neoliberalism, which had created an ecosystem of think tanks and journalistic popularisers biding their time for a moment of crisis: “The neoliberals… had both a diagnosis of the problem and a solution.” As a result, they observe: “Government officials who were uncertain about what to do in the face of crisis found a plausible story in neoliberalism.”

The fundamental problem facing Britain today is the collapse of this chosen model, the fruit of a previous, lesser era of crisis. Instead of shoring up the state’s resilience to the pressures of an increasingly unstable world, the reliance on market forces has left the Government increasingly unable to impose order, provide functioning healthcare, keep the lights on or put roofs over people’s heads: a state that cannot provide these basic functions is really no state at all. We are witnessing the death spiral of the world created after the Seventies crisis; even conservatives now understand that things cannot continue as they are. To argue in favour of the current system is now the marginal and eccentric position: half the ideological battle has already been won.
And yet, no single viable alternative model is waiting in the wings; both parties are ideologically inflexible, far more so than voters. The most likely outcome is Westminster’s desperate political preservation of a rapidly collapsing system in which no one believes. The model has failed, but the people who imposed it, who genuinely believed in it and somehow still believe in it, remain in power. 
There have been no consequences for their decades of failure, and the detachment of voters from the people who represent them has never been greater. This is a deeply dangerous, unstable situation, which has already given birth to conspiratorial political religions, such as QAnon, Russiagate, and the Great Reset, which will doubtless multiply as living standards continue to plummet and politicians continue to fail. They seek to discern some underlying logic or rationale to events, when there is only incompetence and a dying political system bereft of ideas. At a moment of grave national crisis, we require a statesman of historic stature, with the vision and will to steer us out of disaster. Instead, we’re getting Liz Truss.
Suggested readingHow to get over Boris JohnsonBy Dominic Sandbrook
But in reality, it no longer matters whether Truss or Sunak wins the battle to enter No 10. No one believes that either has any answers to the problems facing us, and the paper-thin dividing line between them is merely the narcissism of small differences. Similarly, the increasingly bitter battle over political control of the American state conceals the fact that whichever party wins will find themselves at the mercy of global forces they can no longer control. Across the Western world, the red lights are flashing in the cockpit, but no one knows how to fly the plane. 
Degrowth, the failed totalitarianism of the 20th century, political Islam; these aren’t useful alternatives, just fringe ideologies — more often used rhetorically by the current regime to justify its prolonged existence than sincerely adhered to. Fukuyama may have posited liberal capitalism’s victory because nothing had shown up to replace it; yet its failure looks more like the world we already inhabit, a world of niche micro-ideologies without any grand unifying project. 
To maintain the fiction of progress, we must believe that things are better now than they have ever been, even when they are demonstrably worse than any time in living memory. We are entering a post-progress era, where the achievements of the past decades, even centuries, will be reversed. We will, for the next decade at least, perhaps longer, be forced to live in a simpler, sparer way. The fat will be cut off, now we have entered the lean years. As Macron observed this week, “we are living through… what could seem like the end of abundance”. To describe the years since 2008 as an age of abundance seems absurd, but we may well soon be nostalgic for the stagnation of the 2010s.
It is as if we have entered a dark tunnel, and the political forms waiting at the end of it are too distant and obscure to make out. But there is no reason to believe things will get any better, and much reason to believe that there is much further for us to descend. We don’t know how the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine will end; there is the prospect of a grave escalation. We don’t know the consequences of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, now more likely than ever. But surely, given the West’s total dependence on China’s industrial base, it will dwarf the consequences of the Ukraine war. 
The term “crisis” implies an end state, like a fever breaking: but this is the new baseline normality. Next year will be worse than this year; the year after will be worse again. Previous attempts to stave off disaster, the mass demonstrations of the early 2010s and the populist wave that followed, were often inchoate attempts to correct our course: both failed. The ideological output of the 2010s, like fully automated luxury communism, posited a post-scarcity world of happy, abundant consumption derived through mining asteroids and other unlikely tech fixes. A decade later, we’re having to settle for energy rationing and trying to restore the very most basic competences of governance.
Suggested readingThe Tories are criminally blindBy John Oxley
As the Marxist thinker Wolfgang Streeck warns: “We are facing a long period of systemic disintegration, in which social structures become unstable and unreliable, and therefore uninstructive for those living in them…” It is a time, perhaps lasting centuries, when “deep changes will occur, rapidly and continuously, but they will be unpredictable and in any case ungovernable”. Life in such a society “offers rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”.
How are we to manage life in this hard new world, for ourselves and our children? The survival of the British state, our ark in the coming storm, is paramount. Yet whether the British state will even exist at the end of the decade is still a matter of helpless conjecture. We must demand a wartime level of mobilisation focused on state resilience: we are now far beyond nudges and quick fixes. This is a campaign for the basic functions of the state: streets that are safe to walk, homes to live in, healthcare for those in need, universal access to food, warmth and shelter. 
As Milton Friedman put it: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” That time has now come. Of necessity, in a world without a convincing successor ideology, this new model of politics must be pragmatic and non-ideological. Centred on restoring the basic functions of statehood, it must unite Labour voters as well as Tories, socialists and conservatives. It is a call, I propose, for Anglofuturism.
“Anglo”, because Britain should survive as an entity focused on the health and prosperity of the people, and not merely as a theme park for international capital. Through shifting domestic industry abroad and encouraging mass immigration of low-wage labour at home, policymakers were able to create the illusion of prosperity, conjuring the outward form of a middle-class existence even as it demolished its foundations. But this world has now gone forever, leaving us poorer and less resilient. 
The “futurism” is for the understanding that unlike our current political class, this approach looks beyond the electoral cycle. It is the idea that the state, and the nation, have interests to be safeguarded over the course of generations, and that infrastructure should be built now to secure the lives and prosperity of our descendents. “Futurism” also because it harnesses the optimism and high modernism of the post-war era, a vanished world of frenetic housebuilding and technological innovation where British scientific research could lead the world, and produce higher living standards through its fusion with well-paid, high-skilled labour. 
Suggested readingThe myth of Tory BirminghamBy Richard Vinen
The Anglofuturist vision of Britain is one where every county town has its own Small Modular Reactor providing clean, abundant nuclear energy. It is a country where cheap and reliable high-speed rail darts across the country, through the new towns where everyone who wants can have their own warm and spacious home, past the small family farms which provide the country’s food security. In the clean skies, electric airships move freight across the country; in our seas, teeming with fish, vast arrays of domestically-manufactured wind and wave power stations, the product of a revived industrial strategy, unite British ingenuity and manufacturing capacity in clean power generation that is the envy of the world. 
This is not a reactionary vision, for there is no going back: the Britain of the Fifties is gone forever, as is the Britain of the Nineties and the 2010s. Yet everything to come has been shaped by what has been before. Rooting our vision of the future in the best of our past, and Britain’s unique natural and cultural gifts, perhaps we can emerge from this crisis richer, happier and healthier than we have ever been. This requires a total, war-level shifting of the Westminster worldview, brought about by public pressure: after all, the political incentives currently in place are what brought us here. Like the austerity of the 2010s, which midwifed the weakened state of the 2020s, Truss’s desperate, cargo-cult Thatcherism promises only deeper, faster, harder collapse: it is the proposed cure that already ails us. We must look towards a pragmatic, emergency programme of rebuilding state capacity as a matter of national survival. Even as we enter a decades-long period of near-collapse, it is time to reject decline and embrace a better future: it’s time for Anglofuturism.
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Andrew Yang—an entrepreneur, a policy celebrity, and a proud nerd—recently co-founded Forward, America’s newest political party. During Yang’s gadfly bids for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and last year’s Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, his advocacy for a universal basic income gained him a cult following. His nascent third party is focused on democratic reform: restructuring American electoral processes so that elected representatives better capture the public will.Yang insists that he’s concentrating on building up Forward and enlisting candidates, not on running for office himself. Working with a budget approaching $10 million, Forward is seeking ballot access in 15 states this year, with the intention of eventually gaining access in all 50 states. It plans to release a party platform next year and field its first candidates in 2023 and 2024.[Read: Why Andrew Yang matters]Critics say that Yang’s new initiative is disconnected from how the political system functions. Democrats worry that, in practice, a third-party candidacy could return Donald Trump to the White House, much as the Green Party’s Ralph Nader helped tip the 2000 election toward the Republican candidate, George W. Bush.This week, I spoke with Yang about how his new party might alter the political system. The transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.Annie Lowrey: What is the Forward Party?Andrew Yang: The Forward Party is a unifying popular movement to try and restore American democracy. There are a group of structural problems that we’re trying to address—a few ways to meaningfully extract ourselves from the polarization we’re seeing and experiencing.Almost 50 percent of both Republicans and Democrats now view the other side as corrupt and a threat to the country, which makes comity and bipartisanship and working together actually not just unpalatable, but something that gets punished politically. The polarization is being amplified by the way our party primaries are set up and the noncompetitive nature of almost 90 percent of the congressional districts in the country.There is one-party rule in the vast majority of cities around the country, and up to 70 percent of the 500,000 local races around the country are either uncontested or uncompetitive. Most Americans aren’t experiencing what we think of as either a functioning democracy or even a two-party system.Lowrey: I am sitting in California, where Democrats hold every statewide elected office.Yang: There’s just one party in control! If you imagine yourself, let’s say, as a rural Democrat or a Republican in many blue cities, you have no meaningful say.[Read: The states where third-party candidates perform best]Lowrey: You say that Forward wants to represent rural Democrats and city-dwelling Republicans. Which policies are you pushing with this centrist party?Yang: I want to stress that it is the mechanics [of the electoral system] that could improve matters. The only Republican senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump who is on the ballot this November is Lisa Murkowski. She made it through her primary. That was in large part because Alaska had a different process in place. There was a nonpartisan open primary where anyone could vote for anyone. That changed her incentives, because she didn’t have to go through a party primary. If we can make a process change that rewards legislators for serving 51 percent of their communities, as opposed to 10 to 15 percent, that can dramatically affect policy.Lowrey: But which policies?Yang: That is one of the more interesting communications challenges for something like Forward. We’re so accustomed to something falling on a left-right political spectrum. You frame it as a centrist party, which does describe a lot of the people that are drawn to Forward. But we’re trying to set up a system where the majority will of the American people actually gets reflected in policy.Lowrey: Just to be clear, you are not defining the policy center. You’re not setting out any policies as you’re setting this party up. There isn’t a tax proposal or a health-care proposal that captures the will of the people unrepresented by the two parties. What does Forward stand for?Yang: We stand for what people want to see in their own lives, in their family’s lives, and in their own community. The principles that we are championing are free people, thriving communities, in a vibrant democracy. And it is true that people in Mississippi will pursue those things in a different way than people in California. And we think that’s great.Lowrey: What about Medicaid expansion? Is the Forward Party for the expansion of Medicaid to all adults in poverty?Yang: I personally would be for anything that’s going to help people and families. I would guess that the vast majority of the people that are drawn to Forward would similarly be in favor. But we’re not as a movement going to apply litmus tests in that way.Lowrey: Are there policy positions that would make a politician unwelcome to run under the Forward banner?Yang: If they were for things that run afoul of the principles of free people, thriving communities, and vibrant democracy. And we’re emphasizing the last pillar, because we do think American democracy is eroding and disintegrating before our eyes.Lowrey: Here’s a quote from an op-ed you wrote with David Jolly, a former Republican congressman, and Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, also a Republican. Both are now in Forward’s leadership:Most Americans don’t agree with calls from the far left to confiscate all guns and repeal the Second Amendment, but they’re also rightfully worried by the far right’s insistence on eliminating gun laws. On climate change, most Americans don’t agree with calls from the far left to completely upend our economy and way of life, but they also reject the far right’s denial that there is even a problem. On abortion, most Americans don’t agree with the far left’s extreme views on late-term abortions, but they also are alarmed by the far right’s quest to make a woman’s choice a criminal offense.In all three cases, the “centrist” position there is the mainstream Democratic position. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does not run the party, and the veto point among Democrats is a West Virginian who founded a coal business. Democrats don’t want to confiscate guns. They’re not talking about permitting abortion in all circumstances.Yang: I would make a couple of distinctions. First, the Forward Party would be inclusive of people who don’t agree on an issue, which is a very, very big distinction for a lot of Americans. The second thing is that for people who are supportive of these positions, if you say, “Hey, just vote Democratic,” the obvious question is: If they have been voting Democratic, why aren’t these things being enacted?Lowrey: Why is Forward a party, not a PAC or a think tank?Yang: Because so many Americans have been eager for a genuine choice on the ballot. We can improve matters! We’re in a country where 50 percent of Americans self-identify as independents and 62 percent say they want a third party. If we were just another nonprofit saying, “Oh, there should be these reforms,” they would not happen. The way we’re going to make it happen is by fighting for the reforms in both blue and red states, but also presenting people a meaningful actual choice in their politics where they live.Lowrey: The vast majority of independents are already reliable voters for one or the other party. Pew puts the number of true independents, with no political lean, at 7 percent.Yang: If you take an independent voter and say, “Hey, does this person lean one way or the other?,” odds are that they probably do. But if you ask that same voter, “Would you like a choice that’s distinct from these two choices?,” they say yes.[From the May 2021 issue: What if Andrew Yang wins?]Lowrey: Are independent voters and centrist voters the same thing?Yang: No, I mean, heck, there are some members of Forward who consider themselves independents who are very, very left-leaning. One of our goals with Forward was to build a very broad ideological coalition of people who could say, “Look, this current system is not giving me a voice!”We need to get off of this current dysfunctional two-party system. But I don’t think the ideal number of political parties in the United States is three—I think it’s probably something closer to five, six, or seven. The current Democratic Party should be two separate parties, the current Republican Party should be two separate parties, and there perhaps would be a party in the middle and one party on either extreme. That system would better reflect the popular will.Lowrey: I’m certainly not arguing that Democrats don’t gerrymander, because they do. But one party passed a national partisan gerrymandering ban through the House. The other side is trying to overturn the presidential election.Yang: There are asymmetries. I think you have to try to figure out how to make the system more resilient and sustainable in an environment where one of your two major parties is evincing antidemocratic tendencies.One approach is to say, “Let’s try to defeat that party in all districts from now until the end of time,” which I’m going to suggest is probably not a sound approach. Or you could look at the system and say that it is extraordinarily prone to authoritarianism, so let’s get to the root causes of that. I’d totally agree that there isn’t symmetry between the two sides. But the measures you’d need to make the system more genuinely resilient and lowercase-d democratic will run afoul of Democratic interests in different locations.Lowrey: I know that you know about Duverger’s law, which suggests that without a system of proportional representation, politics tends to become dominated by two parties. How do you plan to overcome that? Ross Perot runs. He gets one in five, one in six, votes. He gets zero votes in the Electoral College.Yang: We prefer ranked-choice voting. That would enable there to be a winner with majority appeal, and no spoiler effects to be concerned about. Ranked-choice voting has been demonstrated to help women candidates and candidates from underrepresented communities. It is pro-moderation, making it harder for someone who can really animate 25 percent of people to win.[Read: A step toward blowing up the presidential-voting system]Lowrey: In practice, how would a third-party option make ranked-choice voting more likely?Yang: Say there’s a critical mass of voters—Forward voters, who might be registered Republicans or Democrats or independents—coming together. There are two candidates in a race, a Democrat and a Republican. And Forward says, “We’ll get behind anyone for ranked-choice voting, because it’s better for reducing extremism.” One says yes. The other says no. You have an enormous win, whether there’s a Forward candidate on the ballot or not! Or maybe both candidates say yes. I am incredibly excited about this, because it shows we can make a positive change in the functioning of democracy without having a candidate win or even run in a particular race.Lowrey: In 2016, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein got 5 percent of the vote in Michigan, which Trump won by less than one percentage point. How do you think about the possibility of Forward tipping a close presidential election one way or another?Yang: Our focus is on the 506,000 locally elected officials around the country where, again, the vast majority of Americans do not have a meaningful voice. Why do people jump to the presidential? I get it because, hey, I ran for president. But this is not where Forward’s attention is, nor is it where my attention is. Our genuine mission is to create meaningful choices for people in communities around the country.The ideal situation for the entire country would be to have voting in the presidential election where you can vote for whomever you want, and if your candidate doesn’t win, then your vote flows through to the second person. There is absolutely nothing stopping us from doing that. There are other countries that already do that. But instead, we’re clinging to this creaking, increasingly dysfunctional duopoly. And then when someone says, “Hey, maybe we should modernize and upgrade the system,” then people point a finger at them and yell, “Ralph Nader!”Lowrey: But yes, Ralph Nader! What if Forward helped reelect Trump?Yang: Our intention is to make extremism less likely and dominant in races and communities around the country. We’ll be acting in that direction.Lowrey: You tweeted that the raid on Mar-a-Lago would raise the hackles of millions of Americans who would see it as unjust persecution. Could you unpack that for me? It seems the raid was justified by violations of the Espionage Act.Yang: I said it would inflame and activate a group of Americans who would see it in a certain light. It doesn’t necessarily mean the raid was the wrong course of action.Lowrey: What do you think should happen with Trump?Yang: Trump, unfortunately, is the most visible manifestation of tendencies that are going to outlast his time on the political scene. There are now dozens of people who have seen Trump’s path and are trying to follow in his footsteps in various ways. Our goal has to be to build a modern, representative, resilient, democratic system that can not just resist Trump himself, but also will be able to make it through what comes after.

(Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images.)This week has illustrated, better than most, the promise and peril of biblical arguments over public policy. It all started on Wednesday, when President Joe Biden announced his student debt forgiveness plan. The plan is relatively simple. All student borrowers who possess household incomes of less than $125,000 for single people and $250,000 for married people would be entitled to $10,000 of debt relief. Those who went to college on Pell Grants would receive $20,000 in relief. In addition, the plan would cap monthly loan payments at an amount equal to five percent of the borrower’s monthly discretionary income and forgive remaining loan balances after 10 years of payments, provided the remaining balance is $12,000 or less. Biden also extended the pause on student loan payments—first granted during the COVID emergency—through the end of the year. Student borrowers would resume payments in 2023. Importantly, Biden’s plan is not a legislative proposal. He’s not asking Congress to enact this reform. He’s initiating it through the executive branch only, asserting that the so-called HEROES Act, passed after the 9/11 attacks, grants him the authority to forgive student debt “in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”The reaction was intense, even for our polarized times, and part of that intensity was directly related to faith. Hours after Biden’s announcement, progressive pastor John Pavlovitz tweeted this:John Pavlovitz @johnpavlovitzConservative Christians are fully enraged at #studentloanforgiveness, missing the irony that their entire professed religion is based on the idea of a cancelled debt.
Way to lose the plot, kids.August 24th 20225,304 Retweets25,217 LikesIt was an obvious Twitter shot, but it was rooted in something real. The concept of debt forgiveness—including the forgiveness of monetary debt—is all over the Bible. Indeed, debt forgiveness is built into Mosaic law. Deuteronomy 15 declares, unambiguously: At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts. This is how to cancel debt: Every creditor is to cancel what he has lent his neighbor. He is not to collect anything from his neighbor or brother, because the Lord’s release of debts has been proclaimed.Leviticus 25 also sets aside every 50th year as a “Year of Jubilee,” when slaves are set free and debts are released. Roger Nam, a Hebrew Bible professor at Emory’s Candler School of Theology wrote a helpful piece for the Religion News Service in which he described the Old Testament’s commands of debt forgiveness as embodying a “spirit of compassion” that helped lift the poor from grinding poverty, debt slavery, and oppression:The same spirit is embedded in narratives like the fourth chapter of 2 Kings, when Elisha gives vessels of oil to a widow so she can rescue her two children from debt slavery. The Judeans embrace a similar sentiment in Nehemiah 5:1-13 as they commit to complete forgiveness of debt because “some of our daughters have been ravished” (Nehemiah 5:5). This spirit of compassion undergirds the line from the most famous prayer of the Gospels, “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Debt forgiveness figures directly in one of Jesus’s most famous parables—the parable of the ungrateful servant. It relates the story of a servant who begs for his king to forgive a crushing loan debt, the staggering sum of 10,000 talents. The king forgives and the servant rejoices, only to immediately refuse to forgive a tiny sum owed him. It’s a lesson in forgiveness that’s grounded in a reality that the people of Israel would understand. Forgiving debt can be an indispensable element of biblical justice. But does that mean it always is? Does that mean Christians should support Biden’s policy? Not so fast. I think there’s a Christian argument for Biden’s policy, but there’s also an argument against, and that argument against is also grounded in biblical conceptions of justice. In other words, the issue is complicated. First, let me say that I’m not persuaded that scriptures like Romans 13:7 (“Pay your obligations to everyone: taxes to those you owe taxes, tolls to those you owe tolls, respect to those you owe respect, and honor to those you owe honor”) or Ecclesiastes 5:5 (“It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay”) are all that relevant. They’re admonitions not to default. They’re not commands to refuse forgiveness. Thus, I think this—from Dave Ramsey’s radio program—is bad advice. A caller who stands to benefit from Biden’s debt relief is told to “write a check” and pay off her loan debt rather than accept loan forgiveness.Jake 🌊 🐢 @waveturtlejakeA caller on the Dave Ramsey show has ~$2,500 left in student loan debt, and wants to know if they should pay the remainder or let it be forgiven. Here’s the answer from these people, who totally have your best financial interest in mind. August 25th 202236 Retweets403 LikesThe “principle” at stake isn’t “pay off loans no matter what.” Rather, it’s “pay off debts that you owe,” and a debt that’s forgiven is not a debt that you owe. But while I think Christians can disagree in good faith, I see something out of alignment with the biblical precedents for debt forgiveness. The biblical precedents point time and again to debt forgiveness as relief for profound oppression. In his essay on biblical justice, Tim Keller highlights the biblical necessity of both “radical generosity” and “life-changing advocacy for the poor” as both individual and corporate responsibilities of Christians.I agree. Yet Biden’s program doesn’t meet those requirements. It’s radically generous, yes, but the generosity is backwards. It’s taking from those who have less and giving to those who have more. Rather than, say, a discharge of debts in bankruptcy—which relieves debts for the destitute—the decision to forgive student loans benefits America’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens. Earlier this year, CNN reported that the income gap between workers with college degrees and workers with high-school diplomas reached an all-time high. In July, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates was a paltry 2.9 percent. The total lifetime wage premium for a college education is $900,000 for men and $630,000 for women—an amount that’s many multiples of average college debt. And while lifetime earnings vary by major, the stereotype of the impoverished art history graduate just isn’t true. A 2020 Brookings study showed that there was a significant lifetime wage gap “for all 98 majors studied.” The long-term benefits of a college degree are easy to see:The reality is that the Biden debt relief plan will take money from those in the orange line (high school graduates) and transfer that money straight up to the green line. The total cost is estimated at roughly $500 billion. Moreover, that $500 billion is being spent in a time of terrible inflation, which hits poor families harder than those who have the resources to absorb cost increases.Why does this matter? In a Q&A in The Atlantic, Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Barack Obama’s council of economic advisers, put it like this:One group is getting $500 billion. And they’re going to spend more. They’re going to buy more housing. They’re going to be better off. The problem is that the economy is already producing the most it possibly can. If anything, the Fed wants it to produce less, not more. What will happen is that they will spend more and it will drive up the price of houses and everything else. Due to that inflation, every household will end up spending $200 more a year on what they need.There isn’t free money out there. There are consequences. Once you frame it as 320 million people paying for a benefit for 30 million people, it makes you think a lot harder. You’re giving a benefit to someone making $200,000 a year. How important is it to give them relief?Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe made the economic realities inadvertently stark when he tweeted on the day of Biden’s announcement, “Good news for thousands of my former students. I’m grateful on their behalf, Mr. President.”I’m a former Harvard Law Student, and I graduated with almost $80,000 in debt (in 1994 dollars). It was a tough burden for a time, and I didn’t pay off every loan until 2008. I was serving in Iraq, and Nancy literally sold my truck to pay off the last bit. I came home debt-free and truck-free. I passed up much cheaper options (including scholarships) to go to HLS. I did not for a moment believe that struggling families should endure one ounce of additional difficulty to ease my debt burden. Yes, Harvard Law students are an extreme case, but one of the fundamental flaws of the Biden plan is that it doesn’t just help those who need help. Instead, it imposes costs on those who need help to provide a substantial benefit to thousands upon thousands of college and graduate school graduates who don’t.In addition, the Biden plan might make the problem of college costs worse. Again, here’s Furman:There’s the expectation that debt relief will happen again. That will lead to shifts in the college-financing system, toward loans and away from grants. It will also raise college tuition, as colleges move to capture some of this spending. Our goal should be getting more people into college. It is not obvious that Biden’s plan helps with that goal. It might even hurt that goal.Finally, as I discuss all the time, the “how” of a policy can matter just as much as the “what,” and the legality of Biden’s plan is dubious, at best. In July 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi argued that Biden did not have the authority to forgive student debt. Here’s what she said:Here’s the thing. People think that the president of the United States—is this more on the subject than you ever want to know? Well, you’ll let me know. People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.Pelosi was correct. As stated above, the alleged legal basis for Biden’s $500 billion plan is found in a novel reading of the post 9/11 HEROES Act, which does grant the secretary of education broad authority to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV of the [Higher Education Act] … as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.”But even if one accepts the dubious proposition that this language includes the ability to waive payment entirely, the Biden administration would still have to show that the COVID emergency justifies the action. It certainly justified loan forbearance during lockdowns. But now the economy is fully open, and college graduates are sitting at 2.9 percent unemployment. Do we want presidents of any party stretching statutory language so far to spend $500 billion? According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, Biden’s plan will “consume nearly ten years of deficit reduction from the Inflation Reduction Act.” My friend Ian Bassin, a former Obama administration attorney and now the head of Protect Democracy, tweeted this:Ian Bassin 🇺🇦 @ianbassin“If Biden can use emergency powers to get around Congress, so can a president with autocratic ambitions.”
That’s why we oppose abuse of emergency powers regardless of who is president.
@protctdemocracy⁩ statement on ⁦@POTUS⁩ student loan action. Statement in response to the Biden Administration’s Invocation of National Emergency Powers to Address Student Loan DebtSearch for updates on the work we are doing to protect our democracy.protectdemocracy.orgAugust 27th 202225 Retweets149 LikesI’m not opposed to all debt relief for college graduates. For example, I’d favor legislation that adopts the Biden proposal to lower monthly payment limits to 5 percent of discretionary income. As income grows, so would the amount of payments. And if for some reason a graduate continues to struggle, the monthly debt burden would remain light. I’m also open to the proposal of forgiving debt after 10 years of payments—provided the debt forgiveness was targeted at truly low-income borrowers. Both of these policies are better representations of the “spirit of compassion” than a unilateral, half-trillion dollar benefit aimed at the cohort of Americans who possess the most economic opportunity in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. At the opening of this newsletter, I mentioned how the student loan debate illustrated both the promise and peril of biblical debates over public policy. The peril is obvious. The only thing worse than social media shouting matches is social media shouting matches infused with religious intensity. The promise lies in the richness of the biblical text and the inherent compassion of the biblical moral framework. When applied properly, they don’t necessarily dictate specific policy outcomes. (After all, economic issues are hard.) But they do certainly teach us to apply certain principles. And one of those principles is that we should not hurt the poor to benefit the rich. Our nation violates that principle all too often. But that’s not a reason to violate it once more.One more thing …I think you’ll like this episode of Good Faith. Curtis and I talk with Notre Dame philosophy professor Meghan Sullivan on college, God, and the good life. Professor Sullivan teaches one of the most popular courses at Notre Dame, and it will take you approximately five seconds of listening to her to understand why. This episode is about what we should expect from a college education, including a segment on how college can and should increase our sense of hope and belonging in the world. One last thing …It’s been a long time since I ended with this song, by Jonathan McReynolds. It’s so perfect for a contentious time. Enjoy: 

If only J.D. Vance had heeded Rule No. 2. Vance, whose 2016 memoir/manifesto “Hillbilly Elegy” was embraced as a thoughtful guide to Trump country by the blue-state establishment (“a detailed and moving account of American struggle,” according to The New Yorker), resurfaced this summer as a seething far-right crusader, having won the Republican primary for Ohio’s open Senate seat in the spring. In yowza comic book fashion, the same guy who tried to validate The Other Side came back showing us exactly how ugly The Other Side can be.

Enough, already.

And last, Rule No. 3: When you bring back a cast, you don’t have to bring back everyone. You can let go of the unwanted and the unnecessary. Yet in June, “Jurassic World Dominion,” the sixth major installment in the “Jurassic Park” franchise, requisitioned not only the leads from the previous movie but also seemingly every character who wasn’t dead from the first three. Similarly, did they really need to loop Professor X, from the “X-Men” franchise, into the chaos of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”?

If only the specters of yesteryear were limited to entertainment. Was anyone champing at the bit for Pence’s second act? Was anyone eagerly awaiting the return of the increasingly unhinged Mehmet Oz, who in June secured the Republican nomination for Senate in Pennsylvania, back like a rerun of “Oprah” best left off air? Do we need another round of Sarah Palin’s drama?

Fortunately, this season of onscreen sequels featured one comeback that was a return for the better. It pains me to admit it — having walked out on “Top Gun” when I saw it in a theater in 1986 — but the one saving hero of the summer of 2022 was “Top Gun: Maverick.” It managed to ditch its predecessor’s jingoism, misogyny and boorishness. It didn’t pander; it didn’t hit screens oozing cynicism and opportunism.

Best of all, it remembered the basics of character. It brought back Iceman — played by Val Kilmer, who lost his voice to cancer — in a sensitive way. It gave its new female lead a dose of respect. And while it retained that extraordinary extraterrestrial Tom Cruise, it took his toothy swagger down a notch.

I suppose this means that at least onscreen, even deeply flawed characters can improve the next time around. In a season nearly devoid of optimism and originality, that may count as something new.

Friday at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Federal Reserve chairperson Jerome Powell said the Fed must continue to raise interest rates, even though it will “bring some pain to households and businesses”.

This – with all due respect – is nuts.

True, inflation is near a four-decade high. But the Fed’s aggressive effort to tame it through steep interest rate hikes – the fastest series of rate hikes since the early 1980s – raises the risk of recession. Powell’s remarks signal that the Fed will probably increase rates again in September by another three-quarter of a percent, raising the risk still further.

The pain is already being felt across the land. Wage gains haven’t kept up with inflation. This means most Americans continue to lose economic ground.

Powell is in effect telling them they’ll lose even more ground. Higher interest rates, he admits, will slow economic growth and result in “softer” labor market conditions – a euphemism for lower wage increases and fewer jobs. But “these are the unfortunate costs of reducing inflation”.

Meanwhile, though, corporate profits continue to soar. Profit margins are at their highest since 1950, according to Commerce Department figures published Thursday.

Stop for a moment and let your mind dwell on this: the prices businesses are charging their customers are outpacing whatever increased costs businesses are facing for materials and labor.

In other words, wages aren’t pushing up inflation. The costs of production aren’t pushing up inflation.

Corporations are pushing up inflation. The biggest single unique source of inflation in the United States is the pricing power of corporations.

So why is the Fed raising interest rates? Because that’s what the Fed does when prices are rising. That’s the only tool in the Fed’s toolkit. To quote the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail – or, in this case, an interest rate to hike.

The problem: this mostly burdens working people and the low-income with fighting inflation. They’re the first to lose pay and jobs as the economy slows. They’re already getting hammered.

If the Fed continues to raise rates to slow inflation, they’ll get hammered even more.

This might be justifiable if corporations were investing their windfall profits in more productive capacity – adding factories, materials, warehouses, and jobs – which would expand their ability to meet future demand and thereby better guarding against inflation.

But they aren’t. They’re using their profits to buy back their shares of stock so that their share values won’t sag too much further after already sagging due to the anticipated Fed-induced slowdown.

At the beginning of the year, Goldman Sachs estimated that 2022 would see a record-breaking $1tn in buybacks. That’s unlikely to happen, but buybacks are continuing at a strong pace. In the second quarter, buybacks were up by about 7% over the year before.

Some economists argue that there’s no reason to think corporations would now exert more pricing power than they’ve had all along. Why would they wait for the costs of materials and labor to rise before increasing their profit margins?

The answer is simple. Inflation gives them cover. They can say – as many now do – that they have no choice but to raise prices in light of the rising costs of materials and labor. They’re just not advertising the fact that their profits are rising as they do so.

Which brings us to the central policy question: why can’t the burden of fighting inflation be placed where it belongs – on big corporations continuing to raise their prices in pursuit of larger profit margins and higher share prices?

The simple answer is big corporations have so much political clout that they’d never allow the sorts of policies that would have that effect – say, a windfall profits tax, price controls, higher taxes on themselves and the wealthy, and bolder and more effective antitrust enforcement.

Although the Democrats did pass a 1% percent tax on stock buybacks in the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act, they weren’t able to take these other steps. Not even a Democratic president and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress could overcome vested corporate interests.

So it’s all on Jerome Powell and the Fed. Which means, it’s all on working people.

The fallout from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) was even more bizarre and terrifying than the novel's opening sequence, in which a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain explodes over the English Channel and the two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin, are transformed into an archangel and devil, respectively.
While Gibreel—who has been transformed into the archangel Gabriel—falls into the Atlantic, he has several dreams, including one about an alternate-universe founding of Islam by a man named Mahound. (Mahound, another name for Muhammad, was used by Christians in the Middle Ages.) In these visions, the emerging religion allows the worship of several goddesses, and doubt is cast on the divine nature of the prophet's words. Rushdie went so far as to name the book's prostitute characters after Muhammad's wives.
Readers later learn that these visions were sent by the devil. But the fun house–mirror image of Islam nevertheless angered much of the Muslim world. In 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the author and those involved in the book's publication to be put to death. Clerics and government officials were, in essence, instructing Muslims to hunt and kill Rushdie, with Islamic organizations closely aligned with the government placing a $2.5 million bounty on his head.
The consequences were grim. Rushdie was put under police protection at his home in the United Kingdom for the better part of a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese translator for the book, was killed by an unknown attacker in 1991. An Italian translator of the book named Ettore Capriolo was stabbed (but did not die from his wounds) that same year. Aziz Nesin, a Turkish translator, was attacked by arsonists while praying with others; the fire killed 37 people, though Nesin survived.
In 1989, India banned the book, deeming it hate speech. "These persons, whom I do not hesitate to call extremists, even fundamentalists, have attacked me and my novel while stating that they had no need actually to read it," wrote Rushdie in The New York Times. "That the Government should have given in to such figures is profoundly disturbing." He noted that India's parliament described the ban as a "pre-emptive measure," since "certain passages had been identified as susceptible to distortion and misuse, presumably by unscrupulous religious fanatics and such. The banning order had been issued to prevent this misuse."
Rushdie summed up the government's tortured logic: "It is as though, having identified an innocent person as a likely target for assault by muggers or rapists, you were to put that person in jail for protection."
The post Salman Rushdie's <em>The Satanic Verses</em> Enraged the Muslim World appeared first on Reason.com.

And science, we should insist, better than any other discipline, can hold up to its students and followers an ideal of patient devotion to the search for objective truth, with vision unclouded by personal or political motive.
~Sir Henry Hallett Dale
Although the modern prestige bestowed upon science is laudable, it is not without peril. For as the ideological value of science increases, so too does the threat to its objectivity. Slogans and hashtags can quickly politicize science, and scientists can be tempted to subordinate the pursuit of the truth to moral or political ends as they become aware of their own prodigious social importance. Inconvenient data can be suppressed or hidden and inconvenient research can be quashed. This is especially true when one political tribe or faction enjoys disproportionate influence in academia—its members can disfigure science (often unconsciously) to support their own ideological preferences. This is how science becomes more like propaganda than empiricism, and academia becomes more like a partisan media organization than an impartial institution. An editorial in Nature Human Behavior provides the most recent indication of just how bad things are becoming. It begins, like so many essays of its kind, by announcing that, “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” When the invocation of a fundamental freedom in one clause is immediately undermined in the next, we should be skeptical of whatever follows. But in this case, the authors are taking issue with a view very few people actually hold. At minimum, most academics will readily accept that scientific curiosity should be constrained by ethical concerns about research participants. 🧵My latest editorial for @NatureHumanBehav on why ethics principles of benefit and harm should apply to all research about humans, not just primary research with human participants https://t.co/JP5Z1MKzi9— Stavroula Kousta (@KoustaStavroula) August 23, 2022
Unfortunately, the authors then announce that they also wish to apply these “well-established ethics frameworks” to “humans who do not participate directly in the research.” They are especially concerned that “people can be harmed indirectly” by research that “inadvertently … stigmatizes individuals or human groups.” Such research “may be discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist, or homophobic” and “may provide justification for undermining the rights of specific groups, simply because of their social characteristics.” Because of these concerns, the Springer Nature community has worked up a new set of research guidelines intended to “address these potential harms,” explicitly applying ethics frameworks for research with human participations to “any academic publication.” In plain language, this means that from now on, the journal will reject articles that might potentially harm (even “inadvertently”) those individuals or groups most vulnerable to “racism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia.” Since it is already standard practice to reject false or poorly argued work, it is safe to assume that these new guidelines have been designed to reject any article deemed to pose a threat to disadvantaged groups, irrespective of whether or not its central claims are true, or at least well-supported. Within a few sentences, we have moved from a banal statement of the obvious to draconian and censorious editorial discretion. Editors will now enjoy unprecedented power to reject articles on the basis of nebulous moral concerns and anticipated harms. Some argue that we should evaluate such research only on the basis of its scientific soundness and merit. I disagree.— Stavroula Kousta (@KoustaStavroula) August 23, 2022
Imagine for a moment that this editorial were written, not by political progressives, but by conservative Catholics, who announced that any research promoting (even “inadvertently”) promiscuous sex, the breakdown of the nuclear family, agnosticism and atheism, or the decline of the nation state would be suppressed or rejected lest it inflict unspecified “harm” on vaguely defined groups or individuals. Many of those presently nodding along with Nature’s editors would have no difficulty identifying the subordination of science to a political agenda. One need not argue that opposing racism or promoting the nuclear family are dubious goals in order to also worry about elevating them over free inquiry and the dispassionate pursuit of understanding. Suppose someone discovers that men are more likely than women to be represented at the tail end of the mathematical ability distribution and therefore more likely to be engineers or physics professors. Does such a finding constitute sexism, if only by implication? Does it stigmatize or help to negatively stereotype women? Are the authors of the editorial contending that journals should not publish an article that contains these data or makes such an argument? The very vagueness of these new guidelines allows—or rather requires—the political biases of editors and reviewers to intrude into the publishing process. As the editorial proceeds, it becomes steadily more alarming and more explicitly political. “Advancing knowledge and understanding,” the authors declare, is also “a fundamental public good. In some cases, however, potential harms to the populations studied may outweigh the benefit of publication.” Such as? Any material that “undermines” the “dignity or rights of specific groups” or “assumes that a human group is superior or inferior over another simply because of a social characteristic” will be sufficient to “raise ethics concerns that may require revisions or supersede the value of publication.” But no serious scientist or scholar contends that some groups are superior or inferior to others. Those who write candidly about sex and population differences, such as David Geary or Charles Murray, routinely preface discussion of their findings with the unambiguous declaration that empirical differences do not justify claims of superiority or inferiority. Nevertheless, the editorial is a warrant to attack, silence, and suppress research that finds differences of any social significance between sexes or populations, regardless of whether or not such differences do in fact exist. The empirical claim that “men are overrepresented vis-à-vis women at the extreme right tail of the distribution of mathematical ability” can therefore be rejected on the basis that it may be understood to imply a claim of male superiority even if no such claim is made, and even if it is explicitly disavowed.Sensing the dangerous and censorious path they are walking, the authors pause to offer a sop to those of us who still believe in the importance of academic freedom:  There is a fine balance between academic freedom and the protection of the dignity and rights of individuals and human groups. We commit to using this guidance cautiously and judiciously, consulting with ethics experts and advocacy groups where needed. Ensuring that ethically conducted research on individual differences and differences among human groups flourishes, and no research is discouraged simply because it may be socially or academically controversial, is as important as preventing harm.This is not at all reassuring. Asking ethicists to assess the wisdom of publishing a journal article is as antithetical to the spirit of science as soliciting publication advice from a religious scholar. Who are these “ethics experts” and “advocacy groups” anyway? I am skeptical of ethical expertise. I am especially skeptical of ethical expertise from an academy more inclined to reward conclusions that support progressive preferences than those that emerge from empirical study and rational thought. I am more skeptical still of advocacy groups, which exist to pursue a political agenda, and are therefore, by their very nature, a good deal more interested in what is useful than what is true.Imagine the outcry on the Left if a journal announced it would be consulting pro-life advocates before publishing an article about the effects of abortion on wellbeing. Or if it decided to consult conservative evangelicals when evaluating an article about the effects of adoption by homosexual couples. The journal is effectively announcing the employment of sensitivity readers, who it can safely be assumed, will invariably recommend the risk-averse option of suppression whenever the possibility of controversy arises. Before they set out their new guidelines, the authors take a moment to self-flagellate, with a cookie cutter denunciation of science for its dismal history of inequality and discrimination. Still, “with this guidance, we take a step toward countering this,” they say as if it were an act of atonement. I find that I am more positive about the science of the past than the editorial’s authors, and more gloomy about the social-justice-oriented science of the future they are proposing. Yes, humans are flawed and fallible and always will be, so we must accept that science will forever be an imperfect endeavor. But the best way to correct its imperfections is not to demand the capitulation of science to ideology, but to remain alive to our biases and devise mechanisms that can compensate for them. Trying to counter past bias by replacing it with a new kind of bias is self-evidently nonsensical—like trying to conquer alcohol consumption by replacing beer with hard liquor. Predictably, the proposed editorial guidelines focus on the needs and sensitivities of groups perceived to be marginalized and identified by race, ethnicity, class, sex, and sexual orientation, religious and political beliefs, age and disability. And naturally, the guidelines themselves are as vague and troubling as the rest of the editorial. The authors reiterate that they want to extend protections for research participants across the entire publishing process. “Harms,” they note, “can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication—for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health).”Like almost everything else in the editorial, this claim is unhelpfully ambiguous and politically contentious. Furthermore, possible real-world harms (or benefits) that result from the publication of academic papers are incredibly, perhaps prohibitively, difficult to anticipate and measure. Would a paper that finds homosexual men to be more promiscuous on average than heterosexual men result in the “stigmatization of” or “harm to” a “vulnerable human group”? The answer would depend in no small part upon the respondent’s view of homosexuality and how capacious or otherwise their definitions of “stigmatization” and “harm” are.  The notion that homosexual men are more promiscuous than straight men might produce some negative stereotypes about the former. But it could also raise awareness of the disproportionate dangers posed to homosexual men’s sexual health by unprotected promiscuity, which might in turn lead to a reduction in the rate of sexually transmitted infections. We simply do not know. This is precisely why peer review should only consider the plausibility and theoretical importance of articles, not their unknowable political and moral effects. The new guidelines state that even if a project were to be reviewed and approved by appropriate committees, editors “reserve the right to request modifications” or even “refuse publication … or retract post-publication” if it contains content that:Is premised upon the assumption of inherent biological, social, or cultural superiority or inferiority of one human group over another based on race, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, political or other beliefs, age, disease, (dis)ability, or other socially constructed or socially relevant groupings (hereafter referred to as socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings).Or:Undermines—or could reasonably be perceived to undermine—the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings.Or:Embod[ies] singular, privileged perspectives, which are exclusionary of a diversity of voices in relation to socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings, and which purport such perspectives to be generalisable and/or assumed.No examples are adduced, of course, so it is difficult to know what kind of content would commit these retractable iniquities. Could a discussion of group differences in cognitive ability “reasonably” be perceived to undermine the “rights and dignities of an individual or human group”? Would an exploration of sex differences in homicide rates? Would an analysis of political differences in cognitive rigidity? Would a test of the association between religiosity and pro-sociality? And who is to be the judge of what is and is not “reasonable”? And what does or does not constitute “undermining”? Ambiguity is piled upon ambiguity to expand the capricious purview of the censor. It does not require clairvoyance to predict that these criteria will not be consistently applied. It may be considered racist to point out that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by black Americans, but it will surely not be considered misandrist to point out that a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by American males. Even those who work ardently for the triumph of progressive ideas and values should shudder. Not only will these guidelines further degrade the already embattled prestige of science, but they offer remarkable deference to the idiosyncratic moral concerns of editors and reviewers which are subject to change at short notice. As radical feminists have recently discovered, those who sit within the progressive Overton window today may find themselves thrust outside of it tomorrow—victims of a censorious system they thought they were erecting in their own interests.The guidelines intended to combat racism begin by announcing that race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. This is a contentious claim (even if we could agree on what is meant by “sociopolitical construct”), and it is one that I happen to think is unsupported by either the data or by sound philosophical argument. Even so, the section goes on to assert that: Biomedical studies should not conflate genetic ancestry (a biological construct) and race/ethnicity (sociopolitical constructs): although race/ethnicity are important constructs for the study of disparities in health outcomes and health care, empirically established genetic ancestry is the appropriate construct for the study of the biological aetiology of diseases or differences in treatment response.This convoluted reasoning will surely only aggravate existing double standards in discussions of race and ethnicity—those who contend that society is teeming with racism can point to disadvantages experienced by racial groups, but those who contend that disparities are caused by behavioral differences are flatly told that race does not exist. Would these standards be consistently applied to a paper that examined racial disparities in police shootings and a paper that examined racial differences in crime rates? “Racism,” we are told, “is scientifically unfounded and ethically untenable. Editors reserve the right to request modifications to (or correct or otherwise amend post-publication), and in severe cases refuse publication of (or retract post-publication), racist content.” But since “scientifically unfounded” material can be rejected on that basis alone, there is no need to invoke potential harms to vulnerable groups as an additional justification. The authors’ implication seems to be that “racism” should be understood (unlike the “reverse” variety) to apply to some groups and not others, and that what the authors wish to oppose is research that might discredit the efficacy or justness of, say, affirmative action. But since the editorial and its guidelines provide no examples of supposedly racist content, it is difficult to know. The section on sex, gender, and sexual orientation is similarly vague and tendentious. The authors claim, for example, that, “there is a spectrum of gender identities and expression defining how individuals identify themselves and express their gender.” Well, maybe. But this is an ideologically provocative claim—and certainly one with which many people across the political spectrum will strongly disagree. Brazenly avoiding any pretense of objectivity, the authors then itemize the usual laundry list of putative gender identities, “including, but not limited to, transgender, gender-queer, gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, genderless, agender, nongender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and cisgender.” Gender norms, we are told, are “not fixed but evolve across time and space. As such, definitions will require frequent revisiting…” It is hard to imagine that more than five percent of conservatives would agree to this, but that is evidently of no concern to the authors. The chief purpose of this section seems to be to signal to other progressives, “We are on your side,” and to send a corresponding signal to conservatives: “You are not our people.”The editorial closes by declaring that, “Researchers are encouraged to promote equality in their academic research,” and that editors reserve the right to retract articles that are “sexist, misogynistic, and/or anti-LGBTQ+.” Again, no examples of these retraction-worthy crimes are offered, and so familiar objections resurface. Is a paper that contends that men are physically stronger than women “misogynistic”? Is a paper that examines the correlation between trans-identity and other mental illnesses “anti-LGBTQ+”? Science is a human activity, and like all human activities, it is influenced by human values, human biases, and human imperfections. Those will never be eliminated. The banner of science has undoubtedly been waved to justify, excuse, or otherwise rationalize appalling crimes and atrocities, from the racial pseudoscience of the Nazis to the blank slatism (and Lysenkoism) of the communists. But the correct response to these distortions is not to endorse a highly partisan vision of science that promotes a progressive worldview, alienating all those who disagree and further encouraging doubt about the objectivity of scientific endeavor. The correct response is to preserve an adversarial vision of science that promotes debate, disagreement, and free inquiry as the best way to reach the truth.

This is the 50th anniversary of our Congress Project that profiled in detail members of Congress. No citizen group has ever done this before or since.

Our 1972 Congress Project provides a context for measuring the decline of Congress, both in its near abandonment of its constitutional powers vis-a-vis the executive branch and its collective subservience to the many forces of corporatism over the people's necessities.

Congress was relatively productive in the early 1970s but could have done much more to address people's needs. While enacting groundbreaking legislation on consumer, environmental, and worker safety protections, Congress dragged its feet on full Medicare for All; strengthening the antiquated federal criminal laws; labor law reform to facilitate union organizing; housing and mass transit programs; and, of course, its oversight and constitutional duties regarding the Vietnam War quagmire.

Bills languished that sought to establish a strong federal regulatory presence for pensions, drinking water safety, and safer food products, from farms to families.

Strong amendments to the 1966 Freedom of Information law, pioneered by California Democratic Rep. John Moss, were blocked by both federal bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists.

With expectations for that Congress rising, commensurate with its constitutional authority and its visibility to the populace, our Congress Project embarked on an unprecedented profiling of every member running for re-election in November 1972--the year of the Nixon-McGovern presidential contest. It was a massive undertaking. We strove to produce magazine-size political biographies of each senator and representative. Teams of undergraduate, graduate and law school summer interns were supervised by full-time stalwarts to assure that each intern produced several high-quality profiles.

Other teams also worked long hours to produce books on key congressional committees such as Judiciary, Commerce and Rules. These efforts required digging, interviewing, and working with about 1,000 volunteers in all 50 states.

Personal interviews were conducted with the lawmakers, whether they liked it or not. Such was the presence of the "Nader Raiders" in those days when the mainstream media covered far more progressive civic initiatives than is the case today.

Preparing the profiles of 30 or more pages was a Herculean task, given the tight deadlines. An intern even traveled with me to Copenhagen, Denmark, where I attended an event, so I could review dozens of draft profiles on the plane so he could immediately fly back to Washington with the edits.

The leadership in the House and Senate reserved large rooms so that final drafts of the profiles could be reviewed for factual accuracy by the legislators themselves. On the appointed days, the lawmakers came to these rooms one by one and read every page. Whether they wanted to or not, they deemed it the better part of political prudence to accept our entreaties for maximum accuracy.

Imagine anything remotely like this response and humble spectacle occurring today. On publication day in the fall of 1972, we held news conferences in Washington and throughout the country with piles of printed profiles for reporters. We also prepared what turned out to be the best-selling book ever on Congress, titled Who Runs Congress? Requests for copies of the profiles poured into our office from citizens keen to learn more about their congressional representatives.

There never was another Congress Project of this magnitude by anyone. Passing years witnessed an increase in official source coverage of Congress, including C-SPAN, and a stiffening resolve by some members of Congress not again to be, in their inflated words, "humiliated," "ordered around" or "subjected to biased reporting" in such a very personal, specific manner.

The solons of Congress just didn't want the people back home to know much beyond what members of Congress said in their choreographed newsletters, radio and TV reports and occasional town meetings. Members of Congress didn't like their unedited voting records reported in detail. They intuitively knew that "information is the currency of democracy," and most of them, with few exceptions, wanted to determine what currency was released and printed.

Fast forward to today. The failings of Congress are historic in scope and regularity, given its constitutionally specified authorities, such as the power to declare war and dutiful executive branch oversight. Congress no longer works a five-day week--it's in on Tuesday, out on Thursday afternoon or evening, not counting ample recesses. Members of Congress spend enormous time raising campaign money, even though they exclusively can change how elections are funded nationwide.

Congress must come closer to and be more of the people's common good. Communicating with Capitol Hill is far more difficult in this Internet Age. Serious citizens who try all forms of communication often only have the option to leave desperate brief messages for an increasingly unresponsive voicemail Congress.

Two simple bills, if enacted, would go a long way toward making members of Congress identify with their sovereign voters, to be more part of "we the people" instead of "we the Congress."

Bill No. 1: Congress members will have no employment benefits that are not accorded to all American workers, including pensions, health insurance and deductible expenses. As for wage ratios, members will be paid no more than ten times the federal minimum wage.

Bill No. 2: Anytime the U.S. is engaged in armed warfare, declared or undeclared by Congress, all age-qualified able-bodied children and grandchildren of senators and representatives shall be immediately conscripted into the armed forces for military or civilian rendition of services.

Sharing in the benefits and burdens of the people would nourish the desire by members of Congress to become part of the solutions.

Who will introduce these bills and start this vibrant public conversation?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.President Joe Biden’s loan-forgiveness program will help a select group of people once, but nothing about the college-debt problem will actually improve until voters, students, and parents change how they think about college.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
David French on what the search-warrant affidavit tells us
No one knows what’s inside the smallpox vaccine.
Shopping for a DegreeI took a lot of static on social media this week after I wrote on Tuesday about my concerns that Biden’s executive order forgiving certain student loans for certain groups of borrowers might not be good politics for the Democrats going into an election. The anger is understandable. I think and write about politics, and I’m worried that centrist Democrats in tight races are already backpedaling away from the Biden plan. But for most people, “Will this help Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell?” is not the first thing that comes to mind if you offer to erase $10,000 of their debts.Today, however, I want to leave aside the fight over the bills for college education, and instead offer some thoughts about costs. Going to a top-tier university, if you can afford it, is a life-changing choice that will likely work out well. Going to an affordable public institution for particular professional skills (such as nursing or teaching) is also a life-changing choice that will likely go well.Going to an extremely expensive school that is neither selective nor known for a particular course of study and majoring in medieval Corsican poetry is a life-changing choice that is almost certainly not going to work out well.Likewise, dumping money on students in the name of “the public interest” solves nothing and is not always in the public interest. When America goosed the educational system after getting surprised by the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, it targeted the creation of spots for engineering and science (and Soviet studies), instead of just splattering money around for anyone who wanted to major in anything.I faced the problem of the boutique major myself as a college student. I began at Boston University—which in the 1970s was the very definition of a middling, not-very-selective, expensive urban school—as a chemistry major. My parents had no formal education and neither had graduated from high school. Science seemed like a job, so I majored in it. The only problem is that I wasn’t good at it; I might have struggled through and taught science, but I was never going to be a real chemist. So I decided to switch to political science.My parents were, to put it mildly, worried. (My dad blew his stack, actually.) But I had already sought out the counseling of a professor who’d advised me that political science plus a language such as Russian was, in those years, a highly employable major, especially for government work. After washing cars and driving a taxi with a master’s from Columbia, I landed a job with the Defense Department; it was only because Georgetown took a chance on me that I finished a Ph.D.Before readers object that my observations here lead to some sort of fetishizing of STEM education, let me say that I have always been a champion of the liberal arts. I think every degree should be based in the liberal arts, especially highly technical ones. I do not want to live in a world without art-history or French-literature majors. But is a degree in philosophy, mostly, a pursuit of people of means, who can afford to cover the gap between their degree and their future earnings?Yep.Unfortunately, teenagers seize control of this whole process far too early. They demand—and get—tours of colleges to which they have not yet even applied and whose costs they do not yet grasp. Tuition-dependent boutique schools are keenly aware that they are competing for students, as I wrote in my book The Death of Expertise:
This entire [shopping] process means not only that children are in charge, but that they are already being taught to value schools for some reason other than the education it might provide them. Schools know this, and they’re ready for it. In the same way the local car dealership knows exactly how to place a new model in the showroom, or a casino knows exactly how to perfume the air that hits patrons just as they walk in the door, colleges have all kinds of perks and programs at the ready as selling points, mostly to edge out their competitors over things that matter only to kids.
Add to this the choice of a boutique major—the humanities or the “interdisciplinary” majors that typically are just whatever the student’s adviser is willing to support—and the risks of disaster increase.For students who refuse to go to a public school (which, in most states, is still a good deal) but did not gain admission to a top-tier school, the beautiful boutique school is a tempting debt trap. Debt forgiveness is a Band-Aid. In order to fix the broken system of higher education in America, we need to start changing our culture and how we think about what it means to “go to college.”Related:
A Democratic economist’s case against Biden’s student-loan plan 
How college became a ruthless competition divorced from learning
The Justice Department has released a redacted version of the affidavit that investigators used to obtain a search warrant for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
The biotech company Moderna is suing Pfizer and its partner BioNTech for patent infringement in the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said in a speech that the central bank’s attempts to bring down inflation will lead to “some pain” for Americans.
The Third Rail: Biden’s debt-relief plan takes from those who have less and gives to those who have more, David French argues.
Unsettled Territory: Imani Perry explores what two 18th-century figures reveal about the influencer Andrew Tate and the nuances of racial ideology.
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson talked with the economist Raj Chetty about the secret to reclaiming the American dream.
The Books Briefing: Even when a biographer and her subject never meet, excavating a life can reveal unseen truths, Emma Sarappo writes.
(Edmon de Haro)
How Life Became an Endless, Terrible CompetitionBy Daniel Markovits(A 2019 story from the Atlantic archive)
In the summer of 1987, I graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas, and headed northeast to attend Yale. I then spent nearly 15 years studying at various universities—the London School of Economics, the University of Oxford, Harvard, and finally Yale Law School—picking up a string of degrees along the way. Today, I teach at Yale Law, where my students unnervingly resemble my younger self: They are, overwhelmingly, products of professional parents and high-class universities. I pass on to them the advantages that my own teachers bestowed on me. They, and I, owe our prosperity and our caste to meritocracy.
A risky monkeypox vaccine is looking better all the time.
Photos of the week, from Alaska to Jupiter
A still from "House of the Dragon" (Ollie Upton / HBO)
Read. Summer’s not over yet; there’s still time to pick up a book from our summer reading list, which has something for every mood.If you’re stuck, our critics put together a list of 12 books to help you love reading again, including Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Zadie Smith’s Intimations.Watch. Industry is the most thrilling show on TV. If you’re looking for less thrill and more comfort, try one of these perfect shows for a short attention span. (Our critics are less enthused about House of the Dragon.)If you’re in the mood for a documentary, Hulu’s new series about the Lakers, Legacy, is worth your time.In theaters, try Both Sides of the Blade, Claire Denis’ portrait of a marriage in quiet crisis.Play our daily crossword.P.S.This October will mark the 65th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first man-made object in orbit. The Soviet Union beating us into space was a national trauma: The prominent physicist Edward Teller compared the Soviet launch to Pearl Harbor and President Dwight Eisenhower’s approval rating cratered almost instantly. If you’d like to revisit this period in film, there’s a small but endearing movie from 1999 titled October Sky, based on the memoirs of the NASA scientist Homer Hickam, who got the bug to become a scientist after the launch of Sputnik. The story follows Hickam, a boy in 1957, as he and his friend try to make their own rocket. It is also something of a family drama: Hickam grew up in West Virginia, where his dreams of becoming a scientist did not go over well with his father or other members of his mining-town community.On Monday, NASA will launch Artemis 1, which could be the first step in our return to the moon. October Sky is a good reminder of how it all began.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Darya Dugina, a twenty-nine-year-old Russian television commentator, was laid to rest at an undisclosed location in Moscow on August 23rd. Three days earlier, Dugina had attended a festival called Tradition, a daylong event that, this year, included a lecture by her father, the self-styled political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, on the metaphysical dualism of historical thinking. The gathering concluded with a concert called “The Russian Cosmos.” Afterward, Darya Dugina drove away in a Toyota Land Cruiser. The car exploded, killing her. Aleksandr Dugin was apparently travelling in a different vehicle, and it seems likely that whoever killed Darya had meant to kill her better-known father. There has since been much speculation about the identity and motives of the killers, but little is known for certain. Still, some theories are better than others.

Western media accounts have portrayed Dugin as a sort of Putin whisperer, the brains behind the Kremlin’s ideology. He is not that, but his story tells a lot about recent Russian history and the current state of Russian society. Dugin came out of the Moscow cultural underground. The son of minor members of the Soviet nomenklatura, he was expelled from college and educated himself by reading banned and restricted literature. When I was researching Dugin’s story for my book “The Future Is History,” an ex-partner of his and the mother of his older child, Evgeniya Debryanskaya, remembered that Dugin, then in his early twenties, procured a copy of Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” on microfilm. He did not, of course, have a microfilm reader at home, so he rigged up a device designed for showing simple children’s reels and projected the book onto his desk. The arrangement was not ideal: it showed a barely visible mirror image of the text. Dugin read Heidegger backward, in the dark, and, according to Debryanskaya, lost some of his eyesight in the process. The symbolic potential of this story is staggering. Its literal meaning is informative: Dugin’s ability to self-educate was limited by censorship, isolation, and ignorance.

Dugin taught himself languages in order to read the thinkers who interested him most. By the late nineteen-eighties, these were apparently mostly far-right, traditionalist, and fascist philosophers. The first book that Dugin translated was by Julius Evola, an Italian philosopher currently popular with a faction of the right wing in the United States. Steve Bannon has deployed Evola’s ideas. To the extent that the Russian political world can be compared to that of the U.S., Bannon can serve as a useful reference: not only are his views related to Dugin’s—and not only are both Dugin and Bannon connected to European neo-Fascist networks—but Bannon’s and Dugin’s relationships to actual political power are complicated in similar ways. There were certainly moments, early in the Trump Presidency, when Bannon’s ideas seemed to exert great influence on U.S. political life. But, in the end, Bannon’s vision of the world—and himself in it—served Donald Trump for a limited time only.

Totalitarian leaders use ideology instrumentally. Contrary to popular perception, totalitarian ideologies are not coherent or consistent; rather, they are opportunistic concoctions of ideas and words that are useful in times of crisis and mobilization. Dugin spent the nineties and much of the early two-thousands getting only incrementally closer to the Russian political establishment—he co-founded a fringe nationalist party, then launched an obscure imperialist movement. But he also got his academic credentials and, for a time, held a chair at Moscow State University. His star seemed to rise in 2014, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time. Dugin had developed an entire arsenal of language for this occasion. He had called for the creation of a “Russian World,” a geographically non-specific concept that imagined Russia on a civilizational mission rooted in traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion. Annexing eastern Ukraine would have been the first step to building the Russian World. In 2014, the Kremlin, in its pivot from the politics of Soviet nostalgia to the politics of imperial resurgence, started speaking Dugin’s language.

Dugin’s right-hand person, Natalya Makeeva, told me at the time, “Our power is negligible, but our influence is infinite.” (Dugin knew that I was writing about him but refused to speak to me directly—likely because I am queer—so he sent a spokesperson to meet with me on his behalf.) Makeeva’s phrase seemed true at the time: Dugin was still nowhere near the Kremlin or the actual levers of power, but his words were everywhere. Still, influence cannot actually be infinite. In Dugin’s view, Putin didn’t go far enough in Ukraine eight years ago. Dugin railed against what he perceived as the Russian President’s weakness. In this role, Dugin was arguably just as useful to Putin as when he served as a sort of shadow ideologue. All political regimes need their critics to mark the margins, so that the leader can position himself at the imaginary center. Dugin’s imperialist ambitions made Putin look moderate.

Dugin’s daughter, Darya, followed a path similar to her father’s. She studied philosophy, spending a year in France. She wrote her master’s thesis on Plato. She also played in a band, performing in Moscow’s hipster clubs. The name of the band was Dasein May Refuse. (“Dasein” is a Heideggerian term that means a determinate being.) In her twenties, Darya started working more closely with her father, representing both him and his views, and she eventually left the music scene to devote herself fully to political propaganda. She signed her articles “Darya Platonova.”

On February 24th, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Dugina was elated. She wrote on her Telegram channel, “Last night I was walking down a deserted Moscow street and saw a Russian flag flying in the distance. Something whispered, ‘The Russians are coming.’ A woman’s intuition is mighty. There is a reason I noticed that quiet and that flag. In my mind I heard the slogan, ‘Empire, be!’ When I woke up, the empire had come into being.”

Most likely, whoever killed her believed her father to be more important—more influential and closer to the Kremlin—than he actually is. Russia immediately accused the Ukrainian government of the murder. But one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisers, Oleksiy Arestovych, who started out as an anti-Western activist, formerly ran in the same circles as Dugin; he even appeared with him at an event seventeen years ago. Arestovych knows that Dugin is no Putin whisperer. Another adviser to Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, denied that official Ukraine had anything to do with the murder. “We are not a criminal state like Russia,” he said. “And we are certainly not a terrorist state.”

A variety of outlets have floated the conspiracy theory that the Russian secret police staged the murder in order to mobilize the Russian population in support of the war. But Dugin is hardly a household name in Russia; the masterminds of the crime would have to be misinformed to believe that his murder, or his daughter’s, would spark widespread outrage. Plus, people who are actual household names in Russia tend to travel with security, which Dugin apparently did not. On the other hand, secret-police agents charged with tracking non-Kremlin-controlled political movements may be susceptible to the hype of those movements. It is possible that certain members of the state security service, the F.S.B., think Dugin is more prominent than he is.

Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian opposition politician who has been living in Ukraine for the past seven years, claimed that an organization called the National Republican Army carried out the murder. The National Republican Army was effectively unknown before Ponomarev mentioned it on social media. This may mean one of two things: either the National Republican Army is a new group using terrorist tactics, and it killed Dugina to show what it’s capable of; or this is, in effect, a marketing move, a rush to take credit. In either case—whether the National Republican Army is real or fictional—this version is probably inching closer to the truth. Dugina likely died at the hands of non-state actors, probably a newly created group or a newly radicalized person. There is nothing surprising about such a group or individual appearing nearly six months into the war, after tens of thousands of war crimes committed by Russian troops have been documented. To whoever killed Darya Dugina, targeting a propagandist may seem like a pointedly mild response to the deaths of hundreds of children and the erasure of entire cities like Mariupol.

(Photo by Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (including any of you whose names were redacted from the Mar-a-Lago affidavit),There’s an old borscht belt joke you’ve probably heard before. An older (Jewish) man is crossing the street when he gets hit by a car. A good Samaritan runs over to see if he can help him. He takes off his coat, puts it under the victim’s head, and asks, “Are you comfortable?”The man responds, defensively, “I make a living.”I bring this up because I’m going to start out by picking a small fight with my friend and colleague-twice-over (as both a Dispatch guy and an AEI dude) Chris Stirewalt. On The Remnant this week, we discussed his excellent new book, Broken News. During our conversation, Chris endorsed a slogan I’ve generally despised over the years, and I didn’t push back.He said that journalists need to “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”It’s an old line, cribbed and heavily modified from Finley Peter Dunne, a newspaper columnist from the old Chicago Evening Post, in his 1902 book Observations by Mr. Dooley. Dooley was an irascible, fictional bartender, who became a standard character in Dunne’s column (a bit like my couch in this “news”letter). When I say it was heavily modified, I mean its original meaning was completely flipped around. The full, original quote was an indictment of newspapers. You can read all about that here, as I want to keep moving.Now, before I let Chris off the hook, let me explain why I don’t like the idea that journalists must “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” It’s become a mantra for journalists, particularly of the Columbia Journalism School set. As this piece over at Pulitzer.org put it, the sentiment “captures a time-honored purpose in journalism: Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.”But here’s the thing: There is nothing inherently wrong with being comfortable, and afflicting the comfortable—or anyone else—without good reason is almost the textbook definition of being a jerk. According to the dictionary, to afflict is to "to distress with mental or bodily pain; trouble greatly or grievously.”“Hey, look at that guy sleeping comfortably in that hammock, let’s poke him with sticks!” isn’t some high-minded ideal of courage, it’s assholery reified. Taken literally, this credo is an open-ended warrant to be a jerk.But even figuratively, it’s got problems. Because buried within it is a very radical, very self-serving vision of what journalism is and who journalists are. If you start from the assumption that the “comfortable” are in the wrong for no other reason than that comfort qua comfort is prima facie evidence of complacency, unfairness, or wrongdoing, then you are starting your journalistic inquiry with a bias against the comfortable and putting the burden of proof upon them to justify their comfort. There’s another assumption in there: That it’s the journalist who has some special insight, some higher moral standing, to decide who deserves to be comfortable and who doesn’t.It’s not hard to see how this can serve as a Trojan Horse for a host of ideological commitments. “Behind every great fortune is a crime” is one such ideological commitment. This quote is often attributed to Balzac (no need for potty mouth!), but it mangles what he actually said. He never said this was true of all great fortunes, but merely some—which is obviously true. But it’s also obviously true that many great fortunes were made honestly. The popular and false version of the Balzac quote makes an observation about a specific case into a general rule. The specific case is a good story for a journalist to explore. The general rule is a radical indictment of wealth; a quasi-Marxist declaration about the “system.”Not all rich people are successful criminals or the heirs of successful criminals. Similarly, some comfortable people deserve to be “afflicted”—at least figuratively—but others don’t. And being comfortable isn’t, by itself, probable cause for afflicting anyone.While there are lots of journalists—and activists and politicians—who see material comfort as some kind of crime or transgression, the “comfortable” is often used to describe something else: ideological comfort. A lot of journalists think that disagreement with prevailing orthodoxies is proof of impermissible comfort. The Greta Thunberg crowd thinks that anyone not equally vexed by climate change needs to be needled, harassed, or shamed out of their comfortable complacency.Another form of unacceptable comfort involves race. “One of the tenets of journalism is to afflict the comfortable,” Errin Haines of The 19th told the Columbia Journalism Review. “Well, white people are too comfortable in America. And if we are not pointing that out and showing people the disparities and being honest about and clear out about those disparities, then things are not going to be different.”Now, I don’t think this is entirely wrong, but I do think it’s entirely too sweeping. America has racial problems, obviously. But the claim that white people need to be discomfited wholesale for not agreeing with the worldview or policy agenda of black journalists is not particularly helpful, in my opinion.All of this stuff is of a piece with the general cultural mantra that says, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” A whole generation of journalists have been empowered by the idea that it is their job to change peoples’ consciousness, to make them care about what a small caste of secular missionaries think is enlightened thinking. To be comfortably numb to the pieties and priorities of the comfort-afflicters is a kind of paganism or wrongthink.It’s no coincidence that “afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted” became a rallying cry during the Progressive era, when intellectuals like Walter Lippmann wanted to turn journalism into a kind of scientific, technocratic endeavor. Disinterested spelunkers would descend into the caverns of American life and shine their bright lanterns of truth on the backward masses and the privileged denizens of the mountaintops alike. A lot of great journalism was done during this period, but it was accompanied by a lot of ideological and condescending social engineering. Progressive journalists started from Balzackian assumptions about wealth and elitist, WASP-y beliefs about how to live the right way.The problem with a lot of elite journalism today stems from the fact that elite journalism itself is really quite comfortable—perhaps not always in the financial sense, but certainly in the ideological sense. When James Bennett and Bari Weiss commissioned a piece from Sen. Tom Cotton making a case for using the military to quell riots during the summer of 2020, they were demonized and defenestrated for afflicting the comfort of New York Times staffers. When The Atlantic hired my friend Kevin Williamson, his mere presence on the masthead was so discomfiting that he was spit out like my namesake from the whale. Stand-up comedians—whose job is, at least in part, to make people laugh by pointing out funny hypocrisies—are vilified if they poke holes in what a slender slice of the real establishment thinks is sacrosanct.In other words, the people most enamored with afflicting the comfortable have a highly selective and ideologically loaded conception of what counts as acceptable comfort. There’s a reason why most late-night comics have become so boring. They are defenders of the establishment’s groupthink.This points to another problem with the comfort-afflicters. They have tautologically ruled out the possibility that the “afflicted” in their worldview can be wrong, too, and that the comfortable can be right. I’ll give you an example. The other day I heard Al Sharpton make a halfway conservative point. He said that condemning police officers who unjustly kill people shouldn’t blind us from the problem of black-on-black crime. He didn’t say it that way, though. He called out police brutality by name, but referred to the rising murder rate as “gun violence.” The thing is, guns don’t commit murder, people do. It’s a subtle distinction, but a telling one. When police kill, the language is direct. When poor black people kill other poor black people, the language becomes passive and systemic. “Gun violence” is the problem. To frame it more accurately is to indulge in “victim blaming” of some sort.  The great irony is that the cultural establishment cannot accept that they are the establishment. Establishment progressivism is very weird this way. Progressives want to see themselves as rebels, change-agents, radicals, and outsiders, even as they inhabit and control the commanding heights of the culture. American progressives tend to believe their own press releases about themselves. I used to have great fun debating hostile campus liberals. I’d say something like, “Let me get this straight: Your professors are liberal. The administrators here are liberal. The publishing industry is liberal. Hollywood, the music and fashion industries, the big foundations, the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and the rest of the mainstream media are liberal. Most major corporations are operationally liberal. And you think you’re a rebel for agreeing with them?”Now, I’m fairly certain Chris agrees with all of this, which is why I’m letting him off the hook. The point he was actually getting at is entirely correct. Journalists, particularly reporters, are supposed to ask uncomfortable questions and report the answers to those questions. Sometimes the answers will be entirely correct. Sometimes they won’t. And very often, the answers will invite more questions. As Chris puts it, reporters are supposed to be skunks at the garden party because they don’t buy into the groupthink.My problem with the people who say journalists must afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted is that they use this mantra to comfort themselves and afflict those they disagree with.Various & SundryCanine update: We’re wrapping up our stay here in Maine. The animals don’t know it yet, but I actually suspect they’ll be happy to go home. They’ve had a terrific time, but they’re all of an age where they like their routines. That said, they’ve also upped their expectations in terms of what they feel entitled to. Apparently one trip to the beach per day is the minimum standard set by the canine branch of Amnesty International. ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileLast weekend’s RuminantThe Remnant with Chris StirewaltThe incredible shrinking GOPWednesday’s datafied “news”letterThe Remnant with Hal Brands and Michael BeckleyThe GLoP tuchus trioThe Dispatch Podcast on Biden’s debt forgiveness planAnd now, the weird stuffHigh timesTragedyNaturalismAu françaisSnake eat snakeMajority backing

As I reviewed the heavily redacted affidavit relating to the FBI’s warrant to search Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, after its release today, I was reminded of the phrase from the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth that “we see through a glass, darkly.” Yes, we are able to discern certain things, but the whole truth remains hidden; we must thus approach the matter with extreme caution.I’d compare the unredacted portions of the warrant affidavit to a case outline, a lawyer’s summary. We know the broad strokes of a potential criminal case against former President Donald Trump, and we know why the Department of Justice was alarmed by his conduct. But we don’t know the details, and in a potential criminal case, the details truly matter.So here’s the basic story, as far as we can make out from the affidavit. On January 18, 2022, Trump provided the National Archives and Records Administration with 15 boxes of records. When NARA reviewed those records, it found “184 unique documents bearing classification markings.” Of those documents, 25 were marked top secret. Moreover, several of the documents contained quite specific “dissemination controls,” including—most notably—“HCS” and “SI” markings.As the warrant explains, “HCS” refers to a form of “sensitive compartmented information” (SCI) that is “designed to protect intelligence information derived from clandestine human sources.” “SI,” which stands for “special intelligence,” refers to a form of SCI that is “designed to protect technical and intelligence information derived from the monitoring of foreign communications signals by other than the intended recipients.”To put it plainly, information that contains HCS or SI markings is among our nation’s most closely guarded secrets. Indeed, when Trump handed them over, he provided evidence that he’d already potentially violated federal law by illegally removing national-defense information from its “proper place of custody.”Because Trump handed over classified information, NARA contacted the Department of Justice. Interestingly enough, the affidavit describes how, the very same day that NARA informed Congress’s Committee on Oversight and Reform that it had found classified information in the former president’s records, a Trump spokesperson put out a statement on his behalf claiming, “The National Archives did not ‘find’ anything.”[David French: The people v. Donald Trump]At this point, however, the affidavit goes dark. Pages of redactions block sight of any additional details. Nevertheless, a few items of interest are still discernible.First, DOJ very obviously did not believe that Trump had turned over all classified national-defense information (NDI) to NARA. One of the subject headings states that baldly: “There is probable cause to believe that documents containing classified NDI and presidential records remain at the premises.”Indeed, news reports indicate that DOJ’s concerns were justified. On Monday The New York Times reported that DOJ had obtained additional classified information from Trump in June, and then seized even more classified information when it searched Mar-a-Lago earlier this month.Second, DOJ also stated that there was “probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction” would be found at Mar-a-Lago. These legal claims are not surprising. After all, the search warrant itself stated that it was based on evidence of violation of criminal statutes relating to improper handling of national-defense information and to obstruction of justice.Third, the warrant affidavit notably mentions the claim by a Trump spokesperson in May that the former president had declassified the documents, and it includes a letter from Trump’s counsel asserting that Trump had absolute authority to declassify the documents. As the Politico columnist and former prosecutor Renato Mariotti noted on Twitter, “Typically defense counsel have very limited information about criminal investigations, and their views are not presented by prosecutors to the judge when seeking a warrant.” As a result, the magistrate judge in Miami knew of Trump’s legal objections yet granted the warrant anyway. This was not simply a matter of the judge taking DOJ’s assertions “on faith.” He reviewed both DOJ’s assertions and Trump’s documented objections. Crucially, Trump’s lawyer did not assert that Trump had turned over all relevant national-defense information.What to make of all this? Here’s what the evidence indicates so far: Trump possessed top-secret documents; the Justice Department believed that he possessed them improperly and stored them improperly; Trump did not turn over all the classified material when asked; DOJ believes that evidence of obstruction exists; and DOJ knew about and disregarded (along with the magistrate) Trump’s declassification defense.[Adam Serwer: Conservatives believe Trump is above the law]At the same time, we don’t know—and may not know for a long time—the precise nature of the classified materials. We don’t know who had access to those materials. And we’re almost entirely in the dark about the reasons DOJ asserts probable cause to suspect obstruction of justice.This latter point is particularly important. The specter of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton haunts these proceedings. She was not charged after improperly storing classified national-defense information on a private server—including information classified at the same top-secret/SCI level as some documents located in Mar-a-Lago.When then–FBI Director James Comey announced that his agency was not recommending a prosecution of Clinton, he articulated a prudential standard that he said had governed prior charging decisions:
All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here. (Emphasis added.)
If that’s the prudential standard that was applied to Clinton, the same standard should be applied to Trump. This does not mean that he shouldn’t be prosecuted; it does mean that if DOJ chooses to prosecute, it should come forward with clear evidence of the exact misconduct identified above. The distinctions between Clinton’s case and Trump’s case would have to be transparently obvious.Of course, the search-warrant affidavit was not released to provide public justification for prosecution. We’re a long way from knowing whether sufficient evidence exists to warrant a criminal charge. The affidavit was released—albeit in redacted form—to provide public justification for the search. Although we don’t yet know all of the evidence supporting DOJ’s unprecedented decision to search a former president’s home, we do now have much greater insight into the key facts.Given that knowledge, the search looks less like a politicized witch hunt and more like an action of last resort—one the Department of Justice took only after it had tried and failed to obtain cooperation from the former president. The available evidence is pointing in one direction. Trump may be furious about the search, but he has only himself to blame.

This week, President Joe Biden announced debt relief for as many as 43 million Americans with government-issued student loans. The government is erasing up to $20,000 in debt for Pell Grant recipients earning less than $125,000 a year, and up to $10,000 for individuals who did not receive Pell Grants. In addition, the White House is planning to cap monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income and forgive the balance after a decade. The move, by various estimates, will cost the government $300 billion to $500 billion.Biden first committed to student-loan forgiveness during the 2020 presidential race. His announcement on Wednesday was met with relief and joy among borrowers, as well as exasperation from individuals who have already paid off their student loans. It has also caused angst among some policy experts—not all of whom are on the right.One of the most prominent voices criticizing the move is Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during President Barack Obama’s second term. Furman argues that Biden’s plan will lavish relief on individuals with high incomes or the prospect of high incomes, encouraging universities and colleges to jack up tuition rates and burdening future students with heavier loan burdens. He also worries about people who did not take out student loans—meaning most Americans—ultimately paying for the plan. I spoke with him by phone this week, and our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Annie Lowrey: Joe Biden has just erased the student-loan debt of roughly 20 million people, and decreased monthly payments by an average of $250 for borrowers who will still have a balance on their loans. You’ve criticized the move, but can you give me your best case for it?Jason Furman: The college-financing system has a lot of problems. We need to make a lot of reforms to it. Could I see a case for some form of debt relief for lower-income people? Maybe, but with a much lower income limit than the Biden administration has chosen.Lowrey: With that, let’s hear the case against it.Furman: With any public policy, you need to analyze the trade-offs. You can’t just say, “This person gets this, and therefore it’s good.” It’s always better for someone to get something rather than nothing. But that’s not how it works.If you’re giving $500 billion to one group, where’s that money coming from? One possibility is that the economy grows much more quickly, and so spending that money doesn’t hurt anyone. I think that’s extremely unlikely, given the highly constrained state we are in. And so I think most of that $500 billion that one group is getting is coming at the expense of everyone else.That doesn’t make it a bad idea. If we were covering a Medicaid-coverage gap, I’d say, “You know what? If everyone has to pay $50 more and poor people get health insurance and the inflation rate is a tenth of a percentage point higher, I’m all for that.” But we’re giving couples making up to $250,000, which is a lot of money, up to $40,000.[Read: Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem]Lowrey: So one concern is that this is not targeted toward people who really need help.Furman: Then, there’s the expectation that debt relief will happen again. That will lead to shifts in the college-financing system, toward loans and away from grants. It will also raise college tuition, as colleges move to capture some of this spending. Our goal should be getting more people into college. It is not obvious that Biden’s plan helps with that goal. It might even hurt that goal.Finally, I’m uncomfortable with this level of presidential power. You know, President Trump was being pushed by some of his advisers to index capital-gains tax rates to inflation, and do it by executive order. He ultimately resisted. I think the indexation of capital gains is a much worse policy than this one. And it’s possible the legal grounds were weaker. But he actually said, No. I’m not going to just change tax law by myself without checking with Congress. I think that’s a good rule to live by, and one we’ve mostly had up until now.Lowrey: This is the Biden administration forgiving debt by keystroke, without raising taxes. So how is the burden of that falling on everyone but the borrowers? Why is that problematic?Furman: One group is getting $500 billion. And they’re going to spend more. They’re going to buy more housing. They’re going to be better off. The problem is that the economy is already producing the most it possibly can. If anything, the Fed wants it to produce less, not more. What will happen is that they will spend more and it will drive up the price of houses and everything else. Due to that inflation, every household will end up spending $200 more a year on what they need.There isn’t free money out there. There are consequences. Once you frame it as 320 million people paying for a benefit for 30 million people, it makes you think a lot harder. You’re giving a benefit to someone making $200,000 a year. How important is it to give them relief?Lowrey: You said one of your concerns is that universities will increase tuition, with the expectation that there’ll be more debt forgiveness in the future. But there’s an argument that this might actually create more pressure to fix the underlying system of financing.Furman: We don’t control what universities do. They make their own choices, subject to incentives. The incentive of a diploma mill is to tell people, “Hey, you know what, it’s going to cost $10,000—but don’t worry, Biden’s going to do it again next year.”Lowrey: Let’s go back to the distributional consequences. Surely most people who finish college or a two-year degree set themselves on a higher-earnings trajectory. But a lot of people aren’t finding themselves on an upward trajectory, given the pressure on wages in the past decade. And a lot of young people have concerns about taking on debt, given the rising cost pressures everywhere else in the economy.Furman: I’d go back to the income limits here. If you’re a 24-year-old who makes $125,000 a year, you’re probably going to be okay in life. Even if what you just said was true, that’s an argument for a different plan, not for this plan. Make the limit $62,500 for a single person and $125,000 for a married couple.I do think there’s evidence the college premium stopped rising. I haven’t seen any evidence that it has fallen. For the median person who goes to college, they are getting an incredible return on their debt. They’re borrowing $30,000. But their lifetime earnings go up $500,000. You just don’t need to do something for them to get relief to people for whom debt is a problem.[Jerusalem Demsas: Who really benefits from student loan forgiveness?]Lowrey: What about the Black–white wealth and income dynamics? As you know, Black students are more likely to have loans, and their loans tend to be larger. And Black students are much, much less likely to come from family wealth.Furman: You also need to understand what this does to the wealth of the people who are ending up paying for it. They are disproportionately going to be Black, because a higher fraction of them have not attended college.Lowrey: Would something based on the familial wealth of a higher-ed student be better? It would be very hard to do. But you could imagine steering relief toward the kids who did not have parents who could help them with school.Furman: I’m not sure I agree with that. If somebody at age 30 is graduating from law school and is making $125,000 a year in their first job out there—even if they originally went to college on a Pell Grant—that’s someone who’s in a good position to pay their debt back. I’m worried about the 20 percent of students who are in a bad position. I don’t think you have to worry about the 80 percent.Lowrey: Say you were tasked by the president with spending, say, $200 billion on student-debt relief. How would you have done it?Furman: I really don’t like the premise of that question. But I would have had much lower income limits. And I would have designed it in a way that didn’t spend all the money.Lowrey: How worried are you about the inflationary consequences? We’ve had a pause on student-loan repayments. So is this really going to stoke a lot of new inflation?Furman: The plan is a $500 billion plan. I think the multiplier on it is less than 0.1—so for every dollar you spend, you are getting a dime in economic activity or less. People aren’t going to go out and spend $500 billion immediately. But even with that small multiplier, if you apply it to this huge initiative, you get about 0.2 or 0.3 percentage points of inflation. Some people could say that’s a small number. A rounding error. But for a typical family, you’re going to pay an additional $100 or $200 a year for everything you buy.[Joseph E. Stiglitz: Actually, canceling student debt will cut inflation]Lowrey: We haven’t talked about the emotional part of this, the human-welfare part. People hate having student loans. They hate having to pay a second mortgage, even if they know it might be working out for them on paper.Furman: People hate college debt more than they hate other types of debt. It’s not 100 percent obvious to me why. We’re not talking about forgiving car debt or mortgage debt. I do think shifting to a world with more grants, or an Australian-type system—where they collect the [student-loan payment] on your tax return, and if your income is too low, they just don’t collect it—would be better. You barely have to think about it. That would be a really good system, and it would be great to do something like that.I will say, of all the policy issues I’ve ever discussed, the level of vitriol directed against anyone who disagrees [with the debt-relief plan] is incredibly high. There is something that is so emotive for people. It has made it harder for analytic people to enter the conversation. And I think the odds of bad unintended consequences, imposed on people paying for the policy now or imposed on students in the future, have gone up a lot.

Just as it has a past, liberalism has a future. The only question is whether this future will be compelling enough for those who have lost faith. We have our doubts. Which is why we wanted to talk to Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man and perhaps the foremost thinker on the development of modern political order. In his new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama mounts a comprehensive and stirring defense of the liberal idea. But is it enough? We started by discussing Donald Trump—and other possible threats from the GOP to liberalism. Liberalism hasn't necessarily failed, but it has weakened. How and why did this happen? Is liberalism too "thin" to serve as the bedrock of American identity? Fukuyama argues that modern liberalism has become deformed and is no longer liberal. What would it mean to return to "classical liberalism" and is it even possible? 

In Part 2 of the conversation (available here for subscribers), Shadi questioned Fukuyama on whether ostensibly liberal states do in fact promote their own particular conception of the Good. For example, can state-enforced secularism, like France's, be reasonably considered liberal? Damir raises the point that the universalist assumptions behind liberalism may simply not be workable in a large, diverse, societies.Finally, we talk about the specific ways in which rising illiberalism could be beaten back. Fukuyama believes that the only way to defeat right-wing illiberalism is to defeat it decisively at the polls, through the Democratic Party moving towards the center and ditching its "woke" wing. In the long term, however, Fukuyama is optimistic about liberalism's prospects, and the chances for "partisans of human freedom" to succeed.Required Reading:“Paths to Depolarization,” by Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion).Liberalism and Its Discontents, by Francis Fukuyama (Amazon).The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama (Amazon).Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, by Francis Fukuyama (Amazon).The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education, by R. Shep Melnick (Amazon).The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning, by Eve Fairbanks (Amazon).

The Federal Trade Commission’s ambitious and diffuse advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) on “commercial surveillance and data security” comes against the backdrop of progress on privacy legislation in Congress. It was issued just three weeks after the House Committee on Energy & Commerce passed the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) and two weeks after the Senate counterpart approved two bills on strengthening privacy for children and teens. These bills would address many issues raised in the FTC’s ANPRM.

This context loomed large to FTC commissioners, who expressed differing views on the effect their proceeding could have on the passage of legislation. I once worried policymakers might think FTC action would forestall any need for congressional action, but now a comprehensive federal law to protect information privacy is a live possibility and the realities of the FTC proceeding bring home that legislation is a swifter, surer, and more comprehensive course.

The FTC has a complex and uncertain road ahead with its rulemaking. The rulemaking must follow the detailed and time-consuming steps to develop a supporting record required by Section 18 (b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 57a). And even then, the outcome of the ANPRM is clouded by uncertainties about the scope of the rulemaking and its vulnerability to a federal judiciary increasingly antagonistic toward administrative authority. Privacy legislation may face some legal challenges, but these would not be as all-encompassing as challenges to FTC privacy regulations. By contrast, if the ADPAA is enacted, most of the law would go into effect 180 days from enactment, with regulations and guidance from the FTC in place and an individual right to sue for violations applicable within two years

I have long thought the FTC has been too timid about exercising its authority to adopt regulations to specify unfair as well as deceptive practices in information privacy. Given the challenges of doing so and the contingencies of legislation, I believe the FTC is right to begin the process. As FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter explained her vote for the ANPRM: “The worst outcome … is not that we get started and then Congress passes a law; it is that we never get started and Congress never passes a law.” But if I had to put all my eggs in one basket, I’d stick with legislation.

This post explains why. Law firms and others have analyzed the ANPRM for its content, legal authority, and path forward more fully. I leave it to others like former FTC Consumer Protection Bureau chief Jessica Rich and colleagues at Kelley Drye & Warren; Kirk Nahra and Wilmer Hale; Omer Tene of Goodwin; and Jim Dempsey in Lawfare to explore these other aspects of the ANPRM. Below I focus more specifically on why FTC rulemaking is a poor substitute for comprehensive federal privacy legislation.

The Long, Tortuous Road of Rulemaking

FTC Chair Lina Khan correctly described the ANPRM as “the beginning” in “an extensive series of procedural steps” required to adopt trade regulations. These requirements are outlined in Section 18(b) of the FTC Act, originally adopted in the Magnuson-Moss Act of 1976 with the initial step of advance notice of proposed rulemaking added by the Federal Trade Commission Improvements Act of 1980. There are several additional steps in the process, as illustrated in Figure 1, from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (open this link for a larger view).

Figure 1. Depiction of “FTC Privacy Rulemaking: The Steps to Get There,” produced by IAPP and originally appearing in the IAPP resource center.

Notably, unlike most rulemaking, “MagMoss” rulemaking must include “informal hearings.” These can become more formal on-the-record hearings with cross-examination of witnesses if the commission finds it needs to resolve disputed issues of material fact as well as additional notice rulemaking and public comment.

Until earlier this year, the last time the FTC initiated rulemaking through these MagMoss procedures was in 1980. The average timeline for adopting rules in earlier MagMoss rulemakings was 5.57 years (involving narrower practices and sectors than the FTC faces in the privacy rulemaking). At that rate, the FTC will be hard-pressed to arrive at any final privacy rules within the current presidential term. A change of party in the White House would result in a leadership that could change direction, and a change in Congress could bring the Congressional Review Act into play, enabling Congress to repeal newly-adopted rules.

And when and if the FTC reaches a final rule, it will face the near-certain prospect of judicial review. In June, the Supreme Court provided appellate judges with a neutron bomb against agency regulations with its decision in West Virginia v. EPA. The court articulated a “major questions” doctrine, constraining congressional delegation to administrative agencies in “extraordinary cases” without an unusually clear and precise grant of authority. The Magnuson-Moss Act is a more specific grant of authority than the Administrative Procedure Act rule at issue in the West Virginia case, but a court may read its numerous checks on the FTC authority through a similar lens. Most of the commentary on the ANPRM linked above sees a shadow of West Virginia over it.

All of these hurdles and uncertainties loom large in light of the extraordinary sweep of the FTC’s ANPRM. It invites comment on virtually every issue that touches on information privacy and does so with emphasis on potential harms of digital data use, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making of all kinds. While the ANPRM is more sparse about potential benefits, it does invite comments on these, consistent with Magnuson-Moss requirements for the use of FTC unfairness authority.

Ultimately, the commission will have to narrow its expansive and amorphous set of issues in the course of the iterative process ahead. In turn, whether any rules implicate the major questions doctrine will depend on their scope, the record developed throughout the process, and the extent to which the commission can link that record to widespread unfair and deceptive acts within its existing authority.

The ANPRM and Federal Legislation

When FTC Acting Chair Rebecca Slaughter initiated groundwork for rulemaking early in 2021, Congress appeared deadlocked on privacy legislation. In turn, the FTC looked like an alternative path to strengthen information privacy protections. That initially appeared to be the direction the Biden administration was taking with its July 2021 executive order on promoting competition. This order seemed to task privacy regulation to the FTC, calling out the impact of data aggregation on the economic power of large platforms without mentioning privacy but requesting the FTC to consider rulemaking on “unfair data collection and surveillance practices that may damage competition, consumer autonomy, and consumer privacy[.]”

With the ANPRM, the FTC is now moving ahead on this request. In the meantime, though, the landscape has shifted. Members of Congress have reached bipartisan agreement on several privacy bills, and the ADPPA has advanced. In the 2022 State of the Union address, President Biden said, “It’s time to strengthen privacy protections” and called on Congress to pass legislation to ban targeted advertising to children. The White House has been paying attention to the progress of negotiations on comprehensive privacy legislation.

FTC commissioners are conscious that the ADPPA addresses many of the issues raised in their proceeding. In their statements on the ANPRM, each commissioner reaffirmed support for privacy legislation in general or supported the ADPPA specifically, and expressed cognizance of the legislation’s potential effect on the proceeding or of the proceeding on passage of the legislation:

Chair Lina Khan called recent steps to pass privacy legislation “highly encouraging” and said that if legislation is passed, the FTC “would be able to reassess the value-add of this effort and whether continuing it is a sound use of resources.”

Commissioner Slaughter said she “welcomes” congressional progress on legislation but that the FTC should not wait to see if Congress acts. She later told a webinar that she hopes the bill passes.

Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya gave a ringing endorsement of the ADPPA. He called it “the strongest bill that has ever been this close to passing,” said he hopes it does pass “soon,” and called out the bill’s chief sponsors for a “formidable and promising” accomplishment so far. He added that “[s]hould the ADPPA pass, I will not vote for any rule that overlaps with it” and that “[t]here are no grounds to point to in this process as reason to delay passage of that legislation.”

Commissioner Noah Phillips, in a broadside against what he saw as breadth and lack of specific focus in the ANPRM, said it should be up to Congress and not the FTC to resolve many of the policy issues, that he is “heartened to see Congress considering just such a law today, and hope[s] this Commission process does nothing to upset that consideration.”

Commissioner Christine Wilson , a strong supporter of privacy legislation who previously indicated she might entertain rulemaking on privacy, also praised the ADPPA: “I am heartened that Congress is now considering a bipartisan, bicameral bill that employs a sound, comprehensive, and nuanced approach to consumer privacy and data security. … [A]nd I hope to see this become law.” Like Bedoya, she name-checked the bill’s sponsors for their work, and she called out legislation on children in addition. Wilson attributed her vote against the ANPRM primarily to this support out of “grave” concern “that opponents of the bill will use the ANPRM as an excuse to derail the ADPPA.”

Some forces could derail the ADPPA, but I no longer see the prospect of FTC rulemaking as one of them. Leaders of the Commerce committees in both houses, as well as their members, have invested too much and gotten too close to leave the contours of privacy rules to the agency. And even the most sweeping FTC rules could not include major elements of legislation like preemption of state laws and a private right of action.

Reconciling FTC Rulemaking and Federal Legislation

Congress can “derail” the FTC rulemaking by enacting privacy legislation. This would obviate much of the rulemaking and give the agency a new set of tasks to provide required rules and guidance, carry out prescribed restructuring, and gear up for new enforcement responsibilities. These would certainly narrow its focus.

Congress can also help by being clearer about its reinforcement of agency authority and resources. It should be specific about the amount of funds authorized. The ADPPA has a provision (Section 407) that authorizes appropriation of “such sums as may be necessary to carry out” the law; by contrast, a privacy bill by Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., specified an appropriation of $100 million. While such a provision does not guarantee appropriation of such an amount, it would make clear Congress’s intention to provide resources to go along with additional authority and would answer critics (including the California Privacy Protection Agency and its allies) who say the FTC does not have the established capacity to carry out ADPPA enforcement mandates.

Ultimately, if enacted in this Congress, legislation like the ADPPA could affect information privacy practices sooner and with greater stability than FTC regulations. Even more significantly, federal legislation could also preempt states’ comprehensive privacy laws and provide individuals a right to sue for violations, which even the broadest conceivable FTC regulations could not.

While my Brookings colleague Mark MacCarthy and I have different assessments of the relative prospects for legislation and rulemaking, we agree that the agency should not wait. If Congress does enact legislation, the rulemaking process allows plenty of time and checkpoints to change course, as FTC Chair Khan stipulates. And, as Kirk Nahra and colleagues put it, the rulemaking would offer “at least a backstop” if legislation fails. Though rulemaking is a poor substitute for legislation, it can improve the current losing game in which neither individuals nor the law can keep up with the pace and scope of data collection.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.In 1940, a child born into an American household had a 92 percent chance of making more money than their parents. But a child born in the 1980s has just a 50 percent chance of surpassing their parents’ income. In 40 years, the American dream went from being a widespread reality to essentially a coin toss.No economist has done more to explain why than Raj Chetty. His team at Harvard University has spent much of the past decade mapping inequality of opportunity across the country. They’ve shown that in some parts of the country, such as Minneapolis, the American dream is very much alive, while in other parts, the poor are trapped in poverty for generations. Why are some neighborhoods in America like Miracle-Gro for opportunity? Is it parenting, social connections, pure economics, the presence of high-quality schools, or something else entirely?In an episode for my podcast, Plain English, Chetty and I talked about how elite colleges aren’t doing enough to help America’s poor, why moving to the right neighborhood is one of the most important decisions that parents can make for their child, and how the “friending bias” of rich Americans puts the American dream out of reach for everyone. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.Derek Thompson: One of your early papers showed that children who move from neighborhoods with historically low social mobility to neighborhoods with high social mobility reap huge returns over their lives. This says something both optimistic and pessimistic about America. The optimistic story is that opportunity exists. Families can move to a different city and change the trajectory of their kids’ life. The dark side is it suggests that talent in America is widespread but opportunity isn’t evenly distributed. So children have to either win the lottery by being born into the right family or move to where lottery winners already exist.Raj Chetty: When we saw that there’s tremendous variation in rates of upward mobility across different places and for different groups, the next question for us was: What is causing that? We tracked millions of families that moved across different neighborhoods in America, and, in a nutshell, we found that the earlier you moved to a place with high levels of upward mobility—say, from the Bronx to Queens, within New York City—every extra year that you spend growing up in one of these high-opportunity places, the better your outcomes look as an adult. You have higher earnings, higher likelihood of going to college, lower chance of teenage birth, and lower chance of incarceration. You could say there are “dosage effects.” Every extra year spent in one of these favorable environments seems to systematically improve kids’ outcomes in the long run.Thompson: This makes me think about the question “How much does parenting actually matter?” It’s very difficult to prove that lots of things that parents obsess about, like playing Mozart for their children when they’re 18 months old, have much effect. But where parents decide to live and raise their children seems to have extraordinary effects.Chetty: My takeaway in the context of parenting is yes, where you live or where you move is one of many important decisions that parents can make. Other decisions, like enrolling your child in music lessons, might have smaller benefits that accrue over time. But clearly, a big choice that parents make is where to live. It encompasses where kids go to school and who their friends end up being.Thompson: In your latest paper, you described what you said might be the single most important ingredient that you’ve identified in all of your work on this subject. It has to do with friendship.Chetty: We knew that it’s harder to rise up in more racially segregated neighborhoods. But there was always a sense that we hadn’t fully captured the picture. Social scientists have been thinking about the idea of social capital for a hundred years—including my colleague, Bob Putnam, in famous books, including Bowling Alone. We wanted to measure social capital systematically. So we teamed up with Facebook to use their data on friendships to measure what we call “economic connectiveness”— the extent to which low- and high-income folks are interacting with each other in a given place. These cross-class interactions turn out to be one of the strongest predictors of economic mobility to date. If you grow up in a place where low- and high-income folks are interacting more, you as a person growing up in a low-income family are much more likely to rise up in the next generation.Thompson: But you found that these cross-class friendships don’t form as often as we’d think, even when rich and poor people live near each other. You call this “friendship bias.” How does it work?Chetty: There are some places where, if you look at the lower-income folks on Facebook, they have many high-income friends. But in other places, they don’t. Two things are driving that variation. One is what we call “exposure,” which is just a simple idea that if low- and high-income folks go to different schools, attend different churches, live in different neighborhoods, they’re not going to be friends with each other.But there’s a second force we introduce in this paper, called “friending bias.” That’s the idea that even if you and I go to the same school, even if you and I live across the street from each other, we still might not interact with each other because we might go our own separate ways and hang out with people who look like us and spend time with people who have similar interests or similar backgrounds and so forth. What we end up finding is that about half of the social disconnection in America between low- and high-income folks is coming from the lack of exposure. But the remaining half is explained by friending bias. That means even if we were to perfectly integrate every neighborhood, every college, every school, and every recreational group, we would still have half of the social disconnection between low- and high-income folks left in the United States.Thompson: Another significant variable that you’ve identified in your research is “father presence.” You found that upward mobility was most strongly correlated with the presence of two-parent families in a neighborhood, but not necessarily in a home. I’m not sure I fully understand what’s going on here.Chetty: We’ve found that Black kids, and Black boys especially, have much lower chances of rising up in the income distribution than white boys. And yet Black boys have pretty good outcomes if they’re born in some places, like Silver Spring, Maryland. One of the predictors that comes up is that Black boys who grow up in neighborhoods where there are more fathers present—and Black fathers, specifically—have better chances of rising up. One possibility is that this is about role-model effects. When you see a set of folks from your own community, people who you can relate to, who work in stable jobs, you have a different sense of the path before you than if those adults had constant contact with the criminal-justice system and have been incarcerated. It connects back to friending bias. These things matter by shaping kids’ aspirations and by giving them information about opportunities they might not otherwise have thought of.Thompson: Let’s look at college for a second. I think a lot of optimists look to higher education as our engine of opportunity. But you’ve found that the most elite schools bring in very, very few poor students. At the most prestigious schools—Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT—a child from the richest 1 percent of families is 77 times more likely to attend than a child from a family in the poorest quintile. More kids in these schools are from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent. What does this tell us about the state of elite education in America?Chetty: These colleges have terrific outcomes for low-income students on average. But a school’s contribution to upward mobility is not just how well those kids do, conditional on getting there, but how many of those kids are there to begin with. On that front, I think the U.S. higher-education system unfortunately suffers a great deal. The colleges graduating the richest students—along with the leading politicians, business leaders, scientists—tend to have very, very few kids from low-income families. We want our education system to be an engine of opportunity. But instead, it’s an engine of stratification, because if you only have the richest kids attending the colleges that provide those pathways to those top jobs, then you end up calcifying society. It means if your parents happen to be wealthy, then you have access to a set of opportunities that are going to make you wealthy in the next generation. That puts the American dream out of reach for many kids.Thompson: Your paper found that several mid-tier schools—such as State University of New York at Stony Brook, California State University at Los Angeles, and Pace University, also in New York—do seem to be pretty successful at bringing in students who are lower- and middle-class, and graduating them into the upper-middle class. Do we know what they’re doing right?Chetty: This is where we are in terms of the frontier of understanding how everything works. When we started doing this work, I had the intuition that maybe it would be the state flagships—such as the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, UC Berkeley, and the big public schools that lots of folks associate with good outcomes—that would deliver the highest levels of upward mobility. But many of those colleges have very few low-income kids as well. There’s something about these mid-tier public institutions that are both serving many low-income kids and having pretty good outcomes. Now, I don’t think we quite know exactly what they’re doing. And some of this is probably about selection. The types of kids who are attending a place like CUNY or State University of New York at Stony Brook are often from immigrant families. But our sense is there is important value added by these institutions, and we haven’t quite figured out yet what it is.Thompson: What’s the most interesting question that you don’t know the answer to yet?Chetty: There are dramatic differences in upward-mobility rates between Black and white men—and, interestingly, not so much between Black and white women. Something I found quite shocking in our earlier work is I thought that past a high level of income, race would become less important. But what we find is even if you grow up in the most affluent families, go to the best schools, and so on, Black boys have a much higher chance of falling down the income ladder in the next generation than white boys do. I feel like I do not have a good answer to what exactly is driving those sharp disparities and outcomes for Black and white kids who grow up in the same neighborhoods.
Want to discuss more? Join me for Office Hours September 13 at 1 p.m. ET for a conversation exploring the next frontiers of cancer research. Register here and reply to this email with your questions. If you can’t attend, you can watch a recording any time on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

Among the many ironies and hypocrisies leading up to the 2022 midterms, one deserving special mention is Trump's and the GOP's unremitting claim that America has become more violent and dangerous under Biden and the Democrats.

The Trump Republican violence machine is affecting--and sometimes intimidating--election workers, flight attendants, school board officials, librarians, members of the Biden administration, and members of Congress.

"Our country is now a cesspool of crime," Trump said in a recent speech to the America First Policy Institute. "We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable because of the Democrat Party's effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement all throughout America."

The truth is that although Americans experience far more gun violence than the inhabitants of other advanced nations, that's largely because of widespread gun ownership--championed, encouraged, and defended by Republican lawmakers.

As to recent violence, shootings are down 4 percent this year compared to the same time last year. In big cities, murders are down 3 percent. If the decrease in murders continues for the rest of 2022, it will be the first year since 2018 in which they fell in the U.S.

The larger threat of violence is coming from Trump Republicans whose incendiary statements are fueling violence and threats of violence across America. In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, such threats and attacks have escalated.

Yesterday, a federal jury found Barry Croft and Adam Fox guilty in a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer at her summer home and to blow up a bridge that would stop rescuers from reaching her. They hoped to spark a second American Revolution.

The Trump Republican violence machine is affecting--and sometimes intimidating-- election workers, flight attendants, school board officials, librarians, members of the Biden administration, and members of Congress.

In Houston, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of "threats and attacks bordering on violence." His tires were slashed, he was harassed by residents at a council meeting, and followed near his home. "I was afraid what would they do next if I don't step down."

As I mentioned yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his family have received credible death threats and required a security detail. In December, authorities in Iowa arrested a California man with an assault rifle and ammunition, and a "hit list" that named Dr. Fauci and Joe Biden, among others. Congresswoman Liz Cheney has also received credible death threats, and also has a security detail.

Threats have been issued against the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, and against his family.

(In that search, F.B.I. agents carted away boxes of highly sensitive documents.)

During that search--from which F.B.I. agents carted away boxes of highly sensitive material--Trump described his home as "under siege." In the wake of the search, Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, erupted in calls for violence. Twitter saw a tenfold increase in posts mentioning "civil war" (according to Dataminr, a tool that analyzes Twitter data). There was also a spike in social media users calling for "violence toward law enforcement," as Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, and Stephen Lynch, chairman of its National Security Subcommittee, noted in a letter last week to eight social media companies.

Republican lawmakers have fueled the fire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, has accused the Justice Department of being "weaponized" against Trump. Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, have drawn comparisons between the F.B.I. and the Nazi secret police. Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington State, charged (on a podcast run by Stephen Bannon) that "we're at war." Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, declared: "These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the patriots who are working hard to save America," adding that, "if we accept it, America is dead."

The incendiary talk has led to violence. On August 11, a Trump supporter identified as Ricky W. Shiffer mounted an armed attack on an F.B.I. office in Ohio, and was killed. According to a subsequent review of his social media posts, Shiffer was incensed about the search at Mar-a-Lago and wanted revenge.

Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, has conducted half a dozen nationwide polls since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and repeatedly found that between 15 million and 20 million American adults believe that violence would be justified to return Trump to office.

Trump's claim that America has become more violent and dangerous over the last year and a half is true. But this is not because of Biden and the Democrats. It is largely because of Trump--and the Republican violence machine he has created.

America’s first-ever reformulated COVID-19 vaccines are coming, very ahead of schedule, and in some ways, the timing couldn’t be better. Pfizer’s version of the shot, which combines the original recipe with ingredients targeting the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, may be available to people 12 and older as early as the week after Labor Day; Moderna’s adult-only brew seems to be on a similar track. The schedule slates the shots to debut at a time when BA.5 is still the country’s dominant coronavirus morph—and it means that, after more than a year of scrambling to catch up to SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary capers, we might finally be getting inoculations that are well matched to the season’s circulating strains. Which is “absolutely great,” says Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona.In other ways, the timing couldn’t be worse. Emergency pandemic funds have been drying up, imperiling already dwindling supplies of vaccines; with each passing week, more Americans are greeting the coronavirus with little more than a shrug. The most recent revamp of the country’s pandemic playbook has softened or stripped away the greater part of the remaining mitigation measures that stood between SARS-CoV-2 and us. Calls for staying up-to-date on COVID vaccines are one of the last nationwide measures left—which puts a lot of pressure on shot-induced immunity to combat the virus, all on its own.[Read: The pandemic’s soft closing]The nation has latched on before to the idea that shots alone can see us through. When vaccines first rolled out, Americans were assured that they’d essentially stamp out transmission, and that the immunized could take off their masks. “I thought we learned our lesson,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University. Apparently we did not. America is still stuck on the notion of what Popescu calls “vaccine absolutism.” And it rests on two very shaky assumptions, perhaps both doomed to fail: that the shots can and should sustainably block infection, and that “people will actually go and get the vaccine,” says Deshira Wallace, a public-health researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As fall looms, the U.S. is now poised to expose the fatal paradox in its vaccine-only plan. At a time when the country is more reliant than ever on the power of inoculation, we’re also doing less than ever to set the shots up for success.In terms of both content and timing, the fall shot will be one of the most important COVID vaccines offered to Americans since the initial doses. Since SARS-CoV-2 first collided with the human population nearly three years ago, it’s shape-shifted. The coronavirus is now better at infecting us and is a pretty meh match for the original shots that Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson produced. An updated vaccine should rejuvenate our defenses, prodding our antibody levels to soar and our B cells and T cells to relearn the virus’s visage.That doesn’t mean the shots will offer a protective panacea. COVID vaccines, like most others, are best at staving off severe disease and death; against BA.5 and its kin, especially, that protection is likely to be durable and strong. But those same shields will be far more flimsy and ephemeral against milder cases or transmission, and can only modestly cut down the risk of long COVID. And when partnered with a compromised or elderly immune system, the shots have that much less immunological oomph. Then say a new immunity-dodging variant appears: The shots could lose even more of their strength.Vaccine performance also depends on how and how often the shots are used. The more people take the doses, the better they will work. But no matter how hard we try, this reformulated shot “is not going to cover everyone, either because they choose not to get it or won’t be able to access it,” says Katia Bruxvoort, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. People who haven’t yet finished their primary series of COVID shots aren’t expected to be able to sign up for the BA.5 boosts—a policy that Bhattacharya thinks is a big mistake, not least because it will disadvantage anyone who seeks a first brush with vaccine protection this fall. “The better the degree of breadth right at the beginning,” he told me, the better future encounters with the virus should go. Most kids under 12 remain in that totally unvaccinated category; even those who have completed their initial round of shots won’t be eligible for the revamped recipe, at least not in this first autumn push. Among people who can immediately get the new booster, uptake will probably be meager and unbalanced. “Realistically, the boosters are going to be concentrated in the places that have been the least impacted by the pandemic” and in people who have already had at least one boost, says Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth. Such widening gaps in protection will continue to offer the virus vulnerable pockets to invade.Crummy uptake isn’t a new issue, and some of the same deterrents that have plagued rollouts from the start haven’t gone away. Vaccines are a hassle and can come with annoying side effects. And in recent months, even more obstacles have been raised. The wind-down of COVID funding is making it much harder for people without insurance or other reliable health-care access to get boosted. And after nearly three years of constant crisis slog, far fewer people fear the virus, especially now that so many Americans have caught it and survived. A year into the Biden administration’s concerted push for boosters, fewer than a third of U.S. residents have nabbed even their first additional shot. With each additional injection Americans are asked to get, participation drops off—a trend experts anticipate will continue into the fall. “There’s a psychological hurdle,” says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic, “that this is over and done.”[Read: New COVID vaccines will be ready this fall. America won’t be.]The reality that most Americans are living in simply doesn’t square with an urgent call for boosts—which speaks to the “increasing incoherence in our response,” Sosin told me. The nation’s leaders have vanished mask mandates and quarantine recommendations, and shortened isolation stints; they’ve given up on telling schools, universities, and offices to test regularly. People have been repeatedly told not to fear the virus or its potentially lethal threat. And yet the biggest sell for vaccines has somehow become an individualistic, hyper-medicalized call to action—another opportunity to slash one’s chances at severe disease and death. The U.S. needs people to take this vaccine because it has nothing else. But its residents are unlikely to take it, because they’re not doing anything else.If all goes as planned, COVID tests, treatments, and vaccines will be commercialized by 2023—making these fall shots perhaps the last free boosters we’ll get. And yet, officials have neither a new strategy for buoying vaccine uptake nor the ammunition for clear messaging on how well the shots will work. In service of speeding up the availability of the BA.5-focused shots, federal regulators are planning to green-light the new formulation based on antibody data from mice. (Both Pfizer and Moderna have human studies planned or under way, but results aren’t expected to be ready until after the rollout begins.) The reliance on animal experiments isn’t necessarily concerning, Bhattacharya told me; the approval protocol for annual flu shots doesn’t require massive human clinical trials either. But the shortcut does introduce a snag: “We know nothing yet about the efficacy or effectiveness of these Omicron-focused vaccines,” Poland said. Researchers can’t be sure of the degree to which the shots will improve upon the original recipe. And public-health officials won’t be able to leverage the concrete, comforting numbers that have been attached to nearly every other shot that’s been doled out. Instead, communications will hinge on “how much trust you have in the information you’re getting from the government,” UNC’s Wallace told me. “And that is very tricky right now.”Shots, to be abundantly clear, are essential to building up a properly defensive anti-COVID wall. But they are not by themselves sufficient to keep invaders out. Like bricks stacked without a foundation or mortar, they will slip and slide and crumble. Nor is a wall with too few bricks likely to succeed: If the goal is to preemptively quell a winter case surge, “a booster that will have maybe 30 to 40 percent uptake is not something we can expect to have a huge population-level impact,” Bhattacharya told me.[Read: Vaccines are still mostly blocking severe disease]All of that bodes poorly for the coming fall and winter, a time when respiratory viruses thrive and people throng indoors. The nation could see yet another round of “incredibly high surges,” says Jessica Malaty Rivera, a senior adviser at the Pandemic Prevention Institute, further sapping supplies of underutilized or tough-to-access tools such as tests and treatments, and straining a health-care system that’s already on the brink. Cases of long COVID will continue to appear; sick people will continue to miss work and school. And “God forbid we get another variant” that’s even more severe, George Mason’s Popescu told me, further overwhelming the few defenses we have.Pinning all of America’s hopes on vaccines this fall, experts told me, may have ripple effects on our future COVID autumns too. Asked to counter the virus alone, the injections will falter; they will look less appealing, driving uptake further down. If this fall is meant to set a precedent for subsequent vaccination campaigns, it may unspool one of the worst scenarios of all: asking shots to do so much for us that they hardly accomplish anything at all.

When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping. These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about. During this phase, now called “REM sleep,” people tended to have vivid dreams. Maybe, Kleitman suggested, the eye movements reflected “where and at what the dreamer was looking” in their virtual world.Several researchers tested this “scanning hypothesis” in the ’50s and ’60s by waking sleeping volunteers when their eyes twitched and asking them what they had just dreamed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these crude methods failed to produce consistent results. But despite alternative explanations—maybe the movements lubricate the closed eye or arise from random brain activity—the scanning hypothesis remains popular. And through a clever experiment involving mice, Scanziani and his colleague Yuta Senzai, who are both neuroscientists at UC San Francisco, think they’ve finally shown that eye twitches are a direct line into an inner dream world.As a mouse moves, a group of neurons in its brain tracks the direction of its head, acting like an internal compass. Some of these neurons fire when the mouse turns left; others buzz when it turns right. By analyzing a mouse’s activity, a scientist can tell you where it is facing without ever looking at the rodent itself. And during REM sleep, even though a mouse’s head isn’t moving, its head-direction cells still fire as if it were exploring.Scanziani and Senzai reasoned that, by recording the activity of these neurons with implanted electrodes, they could work out where sleeping mice are looking in their dream worlds. They then showed that the signals from this internal compass matched the movements of the rodents’ eyes (which they could track because mice often sleep with their eyes slightly open). When a mouse seems to move its head around in its dream, its eyes flick in the same direction, to the same degree, and at the same moment. “The rodent is certainly exploring the environment in its dream,” Scanziani told me. “By looking at its moving eyes, we have a window into its dreaming brain.”These results suggest that “in their dreams, mice are attending to the events unfolding before them and interacting with them actively, intentionally, and dynamically,” says David Peña-Guzmán, a philosopher at San Francisco State University and the author of When Animals Dream. Many philosophers would regard that as “a clear indicator of consciousness,” he told me.But other sleep researchers are not convinced that Scanziani and Senzai showed what they think they showed. Sara Aton, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, told me that head and eye movements are so tightly coupled when mice (and humans) are awake that you wouldn’t expect them to suddenly disconnect during sleep. That they remain linked doesn’t tell us whether mice are perceiving a dream world, let alone gazing about it. “We simply can’t read that out from the brain,” Aton said. Mark Blumberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, agrees. “The link to dreams is gratuitous,” he told me. Scanziani and Senzai “assert that they’re peering into the virtual world of dreams, but they haven’t done so—nor can they.”At first glance, this might seem like a semantic argument: “I can say that we’re looking at coordinated activity of distinct parts of the brain occurring during REM sleep that strongly resembles the activity that the brain has when it’s awake, or I can call it a dream,” Scanziani said. But those things aren’t necessarily identical, and Blumberg argues that equating them could distract us from understanding the role of REM sleep.He notes that when eyes move during this phase, other body parts twitch too, including limbs and whiskers. These movements look like more evidence of dreams spilling into reality—sleeping dogs chasing imagined rabbits—but they might represent something simpler. Blumberg argues that the brain uses REM sleep to test-drive the body. The brain pings the neurons that control muscles, creating twitches; it then collects sensory information from those moving limbs. By testing those connections during times of stillness, it can refine and recalibrate the network to work more efficiently during times of wakeful chaos. According to this view, REM-phase movements aren’t about dreams at all. They’re the work of a brain that’s learning how to more effectively pilot a body.This explanation better accounts for aspects of REM sleep that don’t easily fit with the scanning hypothesis. For example, people who are born blind still move their eyes during sleep, even though they don’t dream visually and clearly aren’t looking around. Also, the REM phase of sleep is longest in newborn humans, mice, and other mammals whose infants are relatively helpless at birth. These are exactly the individuals whose brain would need the most time to get to grips with their body. By contrast, if the twitches are linked to dreams, “why would newborns twitch so much when they have so little to dream about?” Blumberg said.  Since its discovery, REM sleep has been associated with dreaming (even though we dream in non-REM sleep too). And because dreams are so fascinating, they became the focus of our attempts to understand REM—the sun that other hypotheses orbit around. But what if they aren’t central? Scanziani told me that dreams might arise because the brain replays memories after “a long day of experiences” to better organize what it has learned, or “generates and explores possibilities to help us make better predictions when we’re awake.” This is essentially what the test-drive hypothesis argues, except here, the brain is just testing the connections within itself, rather than those with the rest of the body. It’s intuitive to see the dreams and twitches of REM sleep as connected phenomena. But perhaps they’re two independent reflections of a brain that’s relentlessly recalibrating.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.Lately, my back has been hurting. I did something weird in the gym, resulting in a dull ache, and now I’m taking it easy. I appreciate the feedback the pain provides, because I would like to be able to walk upright for a few more decades and don’t want to risk a more permanent injury. Still, I don’t enjoy it, so I’ve been taking acetaminophen to blunt my discomfort.Back pain is normal, but a different sort of hurt is even more typical in my life, and probably yours as well: mental suffering. I don’t mean clinical depression or anxiety, which require professional intervention, but rather the routine, chronic grind of conflict, dissatisfaction, and sadness, which often constitute a dull ache in the background of our days. Many philosophers have considered this discomfort to be our natural state. In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal asserted that, at rest, man “feels his nothingness, his loneliness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.” Maybe that seems a little overstated to you, but research does show that people tend to experience negative or mixed emotions nearly half the time.Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handy tool to blunt everyday mental pain a bit? Not to become numb to life—just to take the edge off, especially when it is interfering with normal life, the way you can swallow a Tylenol when your back hurts. It turns out that there are safe and healthy methods to do exactly this, including taking the same sort of painkiller for what ails your body and your mind. And that’s only the beginning.Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The ancient-Greek writer Antiphanes believed that “all pain is one malady with many names.” He was right, neurologically speaking. Physical pain activates several parts of the brain, notably the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. Neuroscientists have found that our thrifty brains piggyback the experience of emotional pain in the same location. In one example, from 2003, researchers at UCLA and Macquarie University in Sydney conducted an experiment in which participants’ brains were scanned while they played a virtual ball-tossing game. At one point, they were excluded from the game in a way that mimicked social exclusion. Sure enough, their ACCs became active, much as they would if the participants had been experiencing physical pain.Physical pain has two basic parts: the sensory component (the physical sensation) and the affective component (the perception of unpleasantness). Mental pain shares this second component, leading researchers to some interesting findings. For example, in 2005 researchers reported the case of a patient with a congenital physical pain insensitivity who experienced an intense headache for the first time in her life only after the unexpected death of her younger brother.If we experience emotional and physical pain at least partially in the same area of the brain, it’s no wonder that the same substances can blunt them. For example, just as opioids such as morphine and heroin can relieve severe physical pain, they can also mute the distress people feel from social separation. This is likely why people often report that heroin feels like love and why loneliness can lead to higher levels of opioid abuse, especially among women. Similarly, the psychologist C. Nathan DeWall and his colleagues have shown that a daily acetaminophen dose can lower self-reported hurt feelings compared with a placebo by lowering activity in the ACC. (And unlike opioids, this analgesic is not addictive, nor dangerous in ordinary doses.)[Read: Mindfulness hurts. That’s why it works.]That’s not to say that maximum blunting is the right solution. Like physical pain, mental pain serves a purpose: It helps us avoid things like social exclusion. DeWall and his colleagues have argued that the fear and bitterness we feel when we’re excluded are remnants of an earlier time in human history when being a social outcast could mean not having the protection of a community, making survival hard or impossible. Now it can be maladapted, making FOMO feel like a toothache. You can know intellectually that being criticized for your opinions is not like being thrown out of your community and being forced to live in the woods alone. But your ACC doesn’t know the difference, giving you a lot of suffering for something you know intellectually is pretty inconsequential.Whether it’s a useful warning sign or a pure inconvenience, mental pain can get in the way of our lives. The trick is to safely make it manageable, without erasing it completely, like over-the-counter painkillers do for daily aches. Here’s how.1. Feel your mental pain physically.A lot of mental suffering has bodily manifestations. When I am anxious or stressed, for example, I tend to hold my abdominal muscles tight; other people breathe shallowly or clench their fists.Noticing such physical signs can help you actively manage the feelings causing them. Try to pay attention to when your body tenses up—it is a cue that you have stress to deal with. Purposively relax your shoulders and chest and take deep breaths, and you’ll likely find some instantaneous relief. People who get good at recognizing physical symptoms of emotional issues and taking them on in these simple ways have been found to have superior emotional regulation.[Read: To get out of your head, get out of your house]2. Get spiritual.A substantial body of evidence suggests that religious and spiritual activity helps alleviate pain. A great number of people experiencing chronic physical pain turn to religious and spiritual practices for coping and relief. Meanwhile, participating in traditional religion can raise the subjective well-being of people suffering from mental pain, such as bereavement. Simple prayer can alleviate stress, as can mindfulness meditation. And no surprise at this point: When researchers look at the brain regions involved in meditation, they find reductions in pain-related activity in the ACC.The next time you notice a dull ache in your soul, try offering it up in prayer or meditation. Catholics, for example, will mentally join their suffering to that of Christ. Buddhists will use sadness in meditation to understand with compassion the suffering of others. Find your own way, in your own tradition.3. Don’t suffer by yourself.Connection to other people is highly protective against all kinds of pain. Experiments have shown that social support alleviates physical pain symptoms; the evidence for emotional pain is even more abundant. In a 2007 study in the journal NeuroImage, researchers tracked people for a 10-day period and assessed their hormonal responses to social stressors. They found that people with more social support had milder responses to the hormone cortisol in the face of stress. Not surprisingly, they also had lower activity in the ACC.Having family or friends around you—as long as the relationships are healthy—is protective when it comes to the mental pains of life. Cultivating those bonds is like taking a daily vitamin: When you are especially vulnerable, the defenses you’ve built up will offer relief. And you can always “up the dose” by reaching out to these people for support when your suffering is acute.[Read: The type of love that makes people happiest]4. Take a pill.If all else fails, or you simply need easier relief to make it through a tough day, you always have acetaminophen. I wouldn’t recommend this as your first or only line of self-care, because it doesn’t address the root of your issues, just some symptoms. But in a pinch, it can help.In one way, mental suffering is entirely unlike its physical counterpart: You can soothe your own pain by soothing that of others. Follow the example of President Abraham Lincoln, who lost one of his dearest friends, William McCullough, in a Civil War battle in Mississippi. In his grief, he reached out to McCullough’s daughter Fanny, who was inconsolable.In a letter dated December 23, 1862, he wrote, “It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common.” He went on to promise her, based on his own life experience, “You are sure to be happy again … The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.”[Read: How to make the baggage of your past easier to carry]The letter was no doubt helpful to Fanny; I strongly suspect that it was also therapy for Lincoln. Studies have consistently shown that helping others in distress leads to better emotional regulation and lowers symptoms of depression. But you probably don’t need a study to remind you that giving love may in fact be the best strategy to reduce pain in this difficult life.

We lack proper studies under any definition. So, as with the study that led to the C.D.C.’s long Covid estimates in May, researchers cobble together data from electronic health records, often billing codes, which are standardized diagnostic codes for insurers. It’s already recognized that such databases are too imprecise for research purposes and may be biased because they collect information only on people in the medical system. Making the interpretation even thornier is that if billing codes weren’t in patients’ files before they had Covid and they appeared in the files later, the C.D.C. paper classified them as “might be attributable” to Covid, regardless of what they were.

Plus, some of the science has been truly weak. While poring over that C.D.C. paper, I noticed it didn’t control for prior health status and age between those who were infected and the control group; without that, I don’t even know how to interpret the already muddled results.

Perhaps the best sense of long Covid’s prevalence comes from an ongoing British national survey that asks whether people were experiencing “symptoms more than four weeks after you first had Covid-19 that are not explained by something else.” Unfortunately, it has no control group and likely includes people without Covid who may be suffering from some symptoms tied to a stressful pandemic. Plus, four weeks is not enough time to weed out temporary issues.

However, even with those imperfections, 2.8 percent of those living in Britain in July said they experienced ongoing symptoms they attributed to having had Covid. Encouragingly, those numbers indicated declines over the past few months. However, 2 percent of those living in Britain said those symptoms had affected their day-to-day lives, and 0.6 percent reported that their daily activities had been “limited a lot.”

Just that is a very large number. For the United States, 0.6 percent of the population would mean about two million people potentially facing a debilitating condition, comparable to those expected to be diagnosed with cancer this year. Plus, the prospect of increased medical issues adds another category of concern besides self-reported symptoms.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Although today’s big news from the White House is about student-loan forgiveness, we should note that it is Ukrainian Independence Day, which usually passes unnoticed outside of Ukraine. Today also marks six months into Russia’s attempt to extinguish Ukraine and its democratic government, so it is a day that should have special meaning for everyone who lives in a democracy.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
A prominent vaccine skeptic returns to Twitter.
Gavin Newsom, the Ron DeSantis of the left
An Unforced ErrorPresident Joe Biden has finally announced his program for alleviating the burden of student debt. Biden and his party have been on a winning streak for most of the summer: With a 50–50 Senate, they have managed to notch a string of legislative wins while gas prices have plunged, inflation has cooled, unemployment has remained low, and a dreaded summer COVID-19 meltdown has failed to materialize. And how will the Democrats spend this political capital? By celebrating a niche policy that will hand the Republicans a free issue in America’s ongoing culture and class wars, just as Biden and the Democrats head into the 2022 and 2024 elections.It could have been worse. Some Democrats were pressing the president to write off $50,000 of debt, an idea that I said more than a year ago would have been a political disaster. The current plan, by comparison, is merely bad and politically obtuse.The argument for loan forgiveness is not only that it is the right thing to do—I’ll come back to this—but that young, college-educated people are an important pillar of the Democratic Party’s base. It sounds moral and caring, at least within the bubble of a highly educated party, to advocate for relieving some of the cost of higher education. After all, everyone has to go to college, right? It’s practically a life requirement now. And kids don’t know what they’re signing up for when they take on boatloads of student debt—they’re only teenagers!The truth, however, is that most people don’t go to college, and the majority of those who do go manage to get out without life-destroying debt. Fewer than four in ten Americans over 25 have a four-year college degree. Only 13 percent have federal student debt, and the average undergraduate leaves college with an obligation about the size of a moderate car loan. (Graduate school is where the numbers really climb.)Worse, this policy is aimed at the young and college-educated, a group that is, in the main, composed of reliable Democratic Party voters—and who should by now be plenty motivated by the ongoing threat to democracy from the Republican Party. The legendary American general George S. Patton, describing his disdain for retreating and then having to retake the same ground, reportedly said that he hated to pay for the same real estate twice. But that’s what Democrats are doing: They are trying to buy a constituency that ought to be firmly in their camp. The point of a “base” is that it will vote for its own party come hell or high water. A “base” that needs to be enticed with a $10,000 bonus isn’t, by definition, a base.Instead, the whole business seems like class-based special pleading for a very specific and small group residing mostly within the Democratic Party. The right-wing narratives and Republican attack ads easily write themselves—and they will carry some sting with independent voters in swing states, many of whom are workers in blue- or gray-collar jobs, or in service, clerical, and other nonprofessional occupations. “Did you go to college? No? Tough luck. Your debts don’t qualify for forgiveness. Medical bills? Business failures? Too bad. Joe Biden is giving 10 grand to a select group of people as a thank-you, and you’re not one of them.”Yes, such ads will stink to the skies of rank hypocrisy. Republicans are happy to take bailouts when it suits them. And it will be unfair in the extreme to go after the Democrats for servicing an interest group in their party when the GOP is, in my view, nothing but a giant, cronyist pandering machine that hands red meat to its culture warriors and tax cuts and other breaks to its own special interests. But political messaging isn’t about fairness; it’s about messages that work, and this one is likely to land a punch that could cost the Democrats otherwise winnable votes. With democracy hanging in the balance, taking such risks for the transitory sugar high of a onetime hand-wave is irresponsible.I have said nothing so far about whether loan forgiveness is a good idea. It isn’t. Even if the Democrats controlled legislative supermajorities, I would still argue that one more bailout won’t solve very much (and might even contribute to reigniting inflation, according to Larry Summers and other economists). As my Atlantic colleague Jerusalem Demsas recently pointed out, some of the main arguments about who would benefit, and by how much, don’t hold up very well. “The issue’s prominence in our discourse,” Demsas writes, “has less to do with its merits than the changing political landscape that has stymied legislative efforts and given college graduates agenda-setting power.” The progressive political analyst David Shor has made the same point—and warned that the dominance of a college-educated elite in the Democratic Party could undermine effective messaging from the Democrats to the rest of America.My complaint here might seem pointless, since Biden’s decision is now done and dusted. And I think Biden’s doing a solid job—more than he gets credit for—as president. But I see this debt policy as an unforced error, and I hope that the Democrats do not make this a talking point in an election year. Republicans would be much happier debating college-debt forgiveness to households earning a quarter-million dollars a year instead of talking about how the GOP is a menace to American democracy.Related:
Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem. 
How the Democrats got radicalized on student debt
A Russian missile strike killed at least 22 people at a train station in central Ukraine. It was one of the deadliest strikes on Ukraine’s railways since another attack in April killed more than 50 people.
The Biden administration plans to offer updated COVID booster shots soon after Labor Day.
Representative Charlie Crist defeated Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried in Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, but polls show that he’s very unlikely to defeat Governor Ron DeSantis in November.
The Weekly Planet: The new EPA just quietly got stronger, Robinson Meyer reports.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores the link between War on Drugs logic and overdose deaths.
Work in Progress: There is no national teacher shortage, Derek Thompson argues.
(NASA / CXO / Fabian et al / Gendron-Marsolais et al / NRAO / AUI / NSF / SDSS)
The Spookiest Sound in AstronomyBy Marina Koren
Ah, the sounds of late summer. Pass a pool, and hear the happy yelps of kids splashing around. Sit outside at night, and bask in the soothing buzz of cicadas hidden in the trees. Open the internet, and hear the terrifying howling of outer space.
Thank NASA for that last one. The space agency recently shared a clip online of sound coming from a cluster of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth. NASA, always eager to show off its capacity to produce cosmic wonder, presented the audio enthusiastically, as if to say, Wow, check out this cool thing! And although the transformation of space phenomena into something detectable by our human ears certainly seems like an exciting exercise, the reality is—well, have a listen.
Why Alaska’s wildfire season was so unusual
Photos: Preparing for the launch of Artemis I
(John J. Custer / The Atlantic)
Read. The Good-Enough Life, a new book that challenges us to abandon the quest for greatness.Watch. Murina, perhaps the tautest and most gripping thriller you can see in theaters this year.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I am fully aware of the cost of college because I have a daughter attending school right now. But let me leave aside the arguments over student loans for a moment and reach out to those of you whose children, like mine, are leaving home for school—some for the first time, and some for their subsequent years of education. I don’t know about other parents, but for me, letting go after having my kid around all summer was, in some ways, harder than the freshman move-in.I am far too stoic and manly to admit to any tears here, but I have some recommendations for songs about children growing up that you should never play on a day like today. One of them, of course, is “The Riddle,” by Five for Fighting, in which a father and his child, pondering all of life’s big questions, realize that the “reason for the world” is “you and I.” Also, if you have a daughter, you might cross off “All-American Girl,” by Carrie Underwood. “That sweet little / Beautiful, wonderful, perfect all-American girl”—nope, not doing that one today. And under no circumstances should you let “The Circle Game” by Joni Mitchell cross your playlist on a day like this. This is not the time to think about how the “painted ponies go up and down” and why we’re “captive on the carousel of time.”Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s getting dusty in here again.–TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Question of the WeekObservers disagree about law enforcement’s case against Donald Trump, the former president whose Florida mansion was recently searched by federal officials in pursuit of classified documents. None of us knows whether Trump will face charges––or the merits of those charges if he does. Amid that uncertainty, some pundits warn that prosecuting any former president sets a bad precedent, especially when one of his political rivals is in the White House. Others counter that no one is above the law and anything other than following the facts is fraught. Noting that those perspectives are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive, what do you think?Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteThis week the War on Drugs is top of mind for me because of an article I happened upon that features a quintessential example of what I’ve regarded for years as “War on Drugs logic.” That’s when you point to the catastrophic consequences of drug use that took place under prohibition in order to justify continuing those same prohibitionist policies. The article was in The Washington Post, headlined “Colombia, Largest Cocaine Supplier to U.S., Considers Decriminalizing.” It carries a Bogotá dateline, notes that Colombia is “the source of more than 90 percent of the drug seized in the United States,” and proceeds to report:  
Two weeks after taking office, the country’s first leftist government is proposing an end to “prohibition” and the start of a government-regulated cocaine market. Through legislation and alliances with other leftist governments in the region, officials in this South American nation hope to turn their country into a laboratory for drug decriminalization.
“It is time for a new international convention that accepts that the war on drugs has failed,” President Gustavo Petro said in his inaugural address this month.
It’s a radical turn in this historically conservative country, one that could upend its long-standing — and lucrative — counternarcotics relationship with the United States. U.S. officials past and present are signaling concern; the drug was responsible for an estimated 25,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year. “The United States and the Biden administration is not a supporter of decriminalization,” said Jonathan Finer, the White House deputy national security adviser, who met with Petro here before his inauguration.
About those 25,000 cocaine-overdose deaths––they didn’t just happen under the current policy of drug prohibition; they are a direct result of drug prohibition. Don’t take my word for it. See this press release from the Drug Enforcement Administration (emphasis added):
Fentanyl-related mass-overdose events, characterized as three or more overdoses occurring close in time and at the same location, have happened in at least seven American cities in recent months, resulting in 58 overdoses and 29 deaths …
Tragic events like these are being driven by fentanyl. Fentanyl is highly-addictive, found in all 50 states, and drug traffickers are increasingly mixing it with other illicit drugs—in powder and pill form—in an effort to drive addiction and attract repeat buyers. These mass-overdose events typically occur in one of the following recurring scenarios: when drug dealers sell their product as “cocaine,” when it actually contains fentanyl; or when drug dealers sell pills designed to appear nearly identical to legitimate prescriptions, but are actually fake prescription pills containing fentanyl. This is creating a frightening nationwide trend where many overdose victims are dying after unknowingly ingesting fentanyl.
Fentanyl is driving the nationwide overdose epidemic. The CDC estimates that in the 12-month period ending in October 2021, more than 105,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, with 66 percent of those deaths related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Local health departments tell the same story. Here’s one from Illinois. Here’s another from Erie County, New York. And a third from Shasta County, California. Authorities across the nation basically agree that many people who want to buy pure cocaine are getting a fentanyl-laced product instead and dying in large numbers as a result, all under the current regime. Still, the Biden administration cites the overdose-death toll in the United States last year as if it is an argument for continuing the prohibitionist status quo rather than changing it.The Post article doesn’t mention fentanyl, but it does detail the fact that under the War on Drugs approach, “the Colombian trade has reached record levels,” tripling in the last decade, and that the U.S. is aware of the bloodshed in Colombia that prohibition guarantees. Put more simply, the status quo has immiserated a foreign country for decades, enriching its most sociopathic residents, while coinciding with record cocaine exports to the U.S. and spiking overdose deaths because a black market means no safeguards against fentanyl. The bipartisan consensus that continues to stand in defense of this deadly status quo is a moral abomination.Fear Not FailureOn what would have been Kobe Bryant’s 44th birthday, the NBA great, who died in a 2020 helicopter crash, was remembered in an unusual tribute published by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, perhaps the greatest basketball player of all time. Abdul-Jabbar notes that Bryant holds the record for the most missed shots in NBA history––then argues that the statistic is to Bryant’s great credit:
Some people—not just athletes—are motivated in life by the fear of losing. They strive and hustle and push because they don’t want to fail. That fear of failure is often rooted in anxiety about how they will look to others. They see themselves only as they are reflected in others’ eyes.
However, the great ones are driven not to win, but to exceed their own expectations. The goal is to strive to reach one’s fullest potential—and sometimes push beyond what even they imagined that potential might be. Winning is not the goal, it’s a happy by-product.
Kobe Bryant holds the record for most missed shots in NBA history. To some that’s a bad thing. To me, it means he wasn’t intimidated by missing, by losing, by failure. He didn’t hesitate by worrying, “What if I miss? What will the coaches think? The team? The fans?” He acted like the ultimate competitor: he took the shot. To take the shot is to embrace failure and success at the same time. To miss so much and yet feel confident enough to shoot again and again embodies the best qualities of human beings: to imagine something beyond what is, beyond what you’ve ever been able to do, and to strive to make that a reality, no matter how many times you fail. We love Kobe because he wasn’t afraid to take the shot.
I’m reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s call to “meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.” That’s how Bryant and other once-in-a-generation athletes excel over time.Surrounded by IlliberalismJonathan Chait is a harsh critic of post-liberal progressivism. He believes it poses “a problem that has anathematized dissent at many elite universities, private schools, media and entertainment organizations, nonprofits, and other progressive spaces.” Still, he is convinced the right is worse. “If you have serious concerns about the spread of these illiberal norms and feel tempted to vote Republican as a corrective measure, you should ask yourself a question,” he writes in a recent New York column. “Does electing Republicans make this problem better or worse?”He focuses on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, opining that “DeSantis has no principled objection to blacklisting, censorship, or propagandistic indoctrination. All he wants is for the whip to be in his own hand. Figures like Trump and DeSantis sell themselves as the masters of the cultural fight, striking fear into their quavering enemies.” In turn, the post-liberal part of the left, “for all its loathing of the right, also has a curious appreciation for it. Every time a reactionary poses as a champion of free speech on campus, the left erupts in smug mockery of the liberals who advocated those ideals in earnest.”Chait sympathizes with those caught in the middle, but is firm about the choice he believes they should make. “I understand perfectly well the frustrations of liberals and moderates who have watched progressives all around them lose their minds. The key thing to understand is that the illiberalism of the left is a subcultural phenomenon while the illiberalism of the right has state power within its grasp,” he writes. “There is no failure of liberal norms on the left that the Republican Party cannot make immeasurably more dire.” I have agreed in the last two elections.Is DeSantis the Successor to Trump?Kari Lake was a longtime TV-news anchor in Arizona. Now she is running for governor of the state. And last week, according to The Arizona Republic, she stood on stage at a political rally and praised DeSantis by suggesting to the crowd that beneath it all he is extraordinarily … well-endowed:
The guy has bigger ... Wait, let me think about how I want to word this. My staff always says, “Whatever you do, do not say balls.” So I'm not going to say it. That guy has a backbone made of steel. I’ll tell you what he’s got. I don’t know if you’d heard of this. He’s got “BDE.” Anybody know what that means? Ask your kids about it later. I call it “Big DeSantis Energy.” Right? He’s got the same kind of BDE that President Trump has. And, frankly, he’s got the same kind of BDE that we want all of our elected leaders to have.
At The Bulwark, Jonathan Last flags that moment to explain why he doesn’t believe DeSantis is the future of the Republican Party:
One of the fundamental appeals of Donald Trump was his unpredictability. You knew that when Trump took the stage, anything could happen. Depending on your view, this was either energizing or terrifying. DeSantis gives you none of that. He’s a disciplined pol. He’s never going to suggest that you ingest bleach or say that he’ll pay for your legal bills if you punch a protestor. Hell, he even outsources his Twitter triggering to his staff so that he’s not personally on the hook for the stuff he has them say on his behalf.
There’s a reason that Donald Trump did not need a Christina Pushaw, but Ron DeSantis does. All of which is to say that I suspect the real heir to Trumpism will be someone much crazier and less predictable.
Can you imagine DeSantis riffing about “Big Dick Energy” in front of a crowd? Because I cannot. Kari Lake gives you a frisson of danger similar to Trump. She’s more authentically crazy than DeSantis. She’s a better speaker and is better on TV than DeSantis. If she wins the governorship in Arizona, I think she instantly becomes the leading candidate for Trump’s VP and the most obvious heir to the MAGA throne. And whatever happens to Lake, I suspect that Trumpism’s heir will be more like her and less like DeSantis.
Damon Linker agrees:
The shit-talking side of Trumpism isn’t sufficient, but it is as necessary as the paleocon policy mix and the combativeness on cultural issues. And that might make Trumpism a uniquely American variant of right-wing populism. Pick your foreign alternative: Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, the AfD Party in Germany, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India—none of them lead Trump-style, insult-driven, shock-talk rallies before a live audience of thousands and a TV and digital audience of millions who delight in the boorish spectacle. (Though, come to think of it, there may be a bit of overlap in trashiness with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and the Five-Star Movement in Italy.)
A Trump rally (or one for Lake or Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano) is a blend of a standard political rally with an evangelical tent revival and a big-top circus led by a conman (or conwoman) who serves as a ringmaster of the (barely) controlled pandemonium. The bright lights, amplified music, and television cameras—not to mention the demotic crudeness—make it a modern event. But the form has deep roots in the American experience. Trump managed to tap into those historical antecedents with his rallies. And it may well be that the politician most capable of reproducing and even expanding on such public events is the one who will rise above the various contenders to succeed the former president as head of the Republican Party and leader of its right-wing-populist crusade.
Perhaps they are correct. But I’m not yet convinced, because it seems clear to me that no one else combines Trump’s celebrity, charisma, wealth, instincts, and extraordinary lack of shame. Here’s a case for the proposition that Trump’s successor as head of the Republican Party is very likely to be unlike him: That is usually how things happen in American politics. In 1988, the GOP would have loved another Ronald Reagan, but there was no one else like him. In 2000, the Democrats would have loved someone with Bill Clinton’s charisma rather than Al Gore’s lack of it. In 2016, the Democrats would have loved another Barack Obama, but nobody fit the bill. Even coalitions that want a carbon copy of the last big thing often cannot get it.Provocation of the WeekIn The New York Times earlier this month, German Lopez observed that:
America’s homelessness problem has the makings of an acute crisis. Shelters across the U.S. are reporting a surge in people looking for help, with wait lists doubling or tripling in recent months. The number of homeless people outside of shelters is also probably rising, experts say. Some of them live in encampments, which have popped up in parks and other public spaces in major cities from Washington, D.C., to Seattle since the pandemic began.
The Washington Post reports that “inflation is making homelessness worse.”I wish I knew how to solve this complex problem. My informed hunch is that building more housing would help, at least in California, the jurisdiction with which I am most familiar. Others focus on urging improvements to the mental-health-care system, drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation programs, or job-training programs, or even overthrowing capitalism in America.In history, Marxism has impoverished people more dramatically than it has lifted people out of poverty, but even it strikes me as more likely to help homeless people than the questionable focus of some housing activists: “Our unhoused neighbors are human, and the language we use should reflect that,” the L.A. Homeless Services Authority tweeted this week, continuing an ongoing trend. “Let's abandon outdated, ‘othering,’ and dehumanizing terminology- and instead, adopt people-centered language that emphasize personhood over housing status.” Instead of saying “the homeless” or “homeless people” or “the unhoused,” they urge saying “people experiencing homelessness” or “people who are unhoused” or “people living outside.”While I agree that our language should reflect the fact that homeless people are as fully human and worthy of love as anyone else, I reject the strange conceit that “people experiencing homelessness” vests them with more humanity than “homeless people.” I feel no less human if you call me a “writer” as opposed to a “person who writes,” and I deny that a “person who murders” is any more or less dignified than “murderer.” Substantively, both are killers. Whether you’re homeless or a person experiencing homelessness, I recognize your dignity––and I want these distracting word games to stop. Last year in Architectural Digest, Nicholas Slayton wrote:
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti and some members of the city council have embraced unhoused. In Seattle the city government uses the phrase person experiencing homelessness. That’s also what the Centers for Disease Control used in guidance for how to aid unhoused people during the COVID-19 pandemic; the word homeless is used only as an adjective. The change is happening in part as governments move away from punitive measures amid a deepening housing crisis. Past efforts have not resolved the matter, and both policy and messaging are shifting.
What was that messaging shift worth? Well, homelessness is up. So are the deaths of homeless people. And Los Angeles has just passed a sweeping ban on homeless encampments near schools, while, according to the Los Angeles Times, leaders in “liberal cities across the country” where “people living in tents in public spaces have long been tolerated” are “removing encampments and pushing other strict measures to address homelessness that would have been unheard of a few years ago.”The much-vaunted embrace of newspeak accomplished nothing. It tends to confuse most people who aren’t paying attention, annoy most people who are paying attention, and achieve no substantive good. To better help people, progressive nonprofits should stop making it a focus.As ever, thanks for all your emails, and dissents are always welcome. See you next week.

(Photograph by Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,As folks around here surely know by now, I tend to be an optimist about the ability of relatively free markets and free people to produce society-wide abundance over the long term. I’ve written at length about how pervasive economic doomerism in Washington systematically ignores decades-long trends in American wages and inequality and living standards and growth and industry and so on and so on. One thing I haven’t discussed, however, is why many normal Americans—not the Beltway planners incentivized to find doom everywhere—share in this economic pessimism. And since it’s still August and a few commenters have asked about this very thing, now’s a perfect time to dig in.Why We WorrySurely, a lot of things—the obvious allure of quick, easy, tradeoff-free solutions to complex problems, widespread innumeracy and other educational challenges, our tendency to treat powerful-but-isolated anecdotes as national data, and quite real and often-scary disruptions to our daily lives (especially over the last two years)—contribute to pervasive American pessimism about markets and the economy. For my money, however, three others stand out:First, market gains are typically slow, incremental, and messy—causing us to ignore or even mock new products and services when they first debut. Private companies in a competitive (mostly) global environment are always looking for tiny ways that they can improve the consumer experience and thus keep or win our business. This search leads to a ceaseless process of trial and error, with numerous failures and (less often) successes over time. Economist Diedre McCloskey notes in her new book, for example, “The stocking of US grocery stores evolves through the supplying and the demanding of 30,000 or 40,000 new packaged consumer goods every year, under one percent of which become regular items.” And we’re mostly oblivious to it all.

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The transition from Monkeypox Inoculation Plan A to Monkeypox Inoculation Plan B has been a smashing success—at least, if you ask federal officials. Just a few weeks ago, the U.S. had nowhere near enough of the Jynneos vaccine to doubly dose even a quarter of the Americans at highest risk of monkeypox, roughly 1.6 million men who have sex with men. Now that the administration has asked that every dose of Jynneos be split into five and delivered a different way, between the layers of the skin, the party line has changed. “Everyone that wants to get vaccinated within that group is going to have an opportunity to get vaccinated” by September’s end, Robert Fenton, the White House’s monkeypox czar, said on a podcast last week.But this new strategy of intradermal dosing “is a gamble,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, and its weaknesses are already beginning to show. It may be high time to start acting on a fallback plan for our fallback plan, should Plan B’s high-stakes wager not pay off.[Read: America’s new monkeypox strategy rests on a single study]The Plan Cs on the table aren’t very palatable—which is probably why they’re Plan Cs. One option, largely dismissed early on, could entail turning to ACAM2000, a hypereffective smallpox shot, with sometimes dangerous side effects, that the U.S. has stockpiled in spades. Already, three jurisdictions, including the state of California, have ordered more than 800 doses of ACAM from the government, according to Timothy Granholm, a spokesperson for HHS.Simply anticipating the possibility of Plan B’s failure might count as atypical for modern American public health—getting ahead of the virus du jour, rather than taking a reactive stance, says Stella Safo, an HIV physician in New York. Too often in the past few years, the institutions of public health have observed rather than acted, allowing SARS-CoV-2, and now monkeypox, to run roughshod over the American populace. “It would be really nice to not be saying, ‘Let’s wait and see,’” Safo told me. ACAM2000 may not be the country’s best or safest option for curtailing monkeypox, but the risk of not considering it may soon outweigh the risks of the shot itself.There’s a world in which the U.S. didn’t even need a Monkeypox Inoculation Plan B. Had U.S. leaders been willing to invest resources in heading off the pathogen, by offering aid to countries where the virus has been endemic for decades or by focusing earlier this year on tests, treatments, vaccines, and public communications, maybe America’s original immunization plan—using the full, subcutaneous Jynneos dose—would have been all the nation needed on the injection front.That didn’t happen, and instead the country adopted intradermal delivery, without real clarity on how well such doses might guard against infection, transmission, or disease. The notion that intradermal shots will work as hoped rests on a “chain of assumptions,” says John Beigel, an immunologist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, several of which may not hold during a large, fast-spreading outbreak that’s tightly linked to sex—a poorly studied form of monkeypox transmission. Jynneos’s original approval was based on an antibody analogue of protection, rather than efficacy against bona fide illness. And the FDA’s authorization of intradermal shots rests on a single study, which didn’t directly check the vaccine’s ability to stave off disease, either. The study also enrolled only healthy adults, most of them white—a poor reflection of the population now being hit. It’s a “big leap” to build a nationwide vaccine campaign on just those results, says Sri Edupuganti, a vaccinologist at Emory University and one of the study’s authors. (Beigel is now designing a clinical trial that will reevaluate the intradermal route among participants more relevant to the current outbreak. He and his team will also test one-tenth intradermal doses, which could further stretch supply.)[Read: America should have been able to handle monkeypox]The intradermal plan has logistical challenges, too. Administering in-skin shots requires extra training and special needles, burdening already stressed staff, especially in low-resource regions. Several jurisdictions are struggling to extract more than three or four doses from some vials, rather than the government’s promised five—a shortchanging of those hoping to increase their stocks by a clean 400 percent. Plus, some bottle caps are breaking before all the doses are withdrawn. Intradermal vaccination can also come with grating side effects, including redness and swelling that can stick around for days, potentially deterring people from returning for the essential second shot.Fenton, from the White House, noted in a press briefing last week that the switch to intradermal “increased our supplies significantly without compromising safety or effectiveness.” But that assertion seems “disingenuous at best,” says Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and AIDS activist at Yale’s School of Public Health. Even the CEO of Bavarian Nordic, the vaccine’s manufacturer, criticized the FDA’s pivot as too hasty. (The FDA attempted to counter the company’s criticisms.)Meanwhile, demand may continue to grow, especially if the epidemic starts to concentrate less among men who have sex with men. “The longer the outbreak lasts, the longer you have for jumping to other populations,” Gonsalves told me. College campuses, reopening now, “seem like the most obvious next stop.” And “if this gets into other networks,” says Ina Park, a sexual-health expert at UC San Francisco, Plan B “just won’t be enough.”Equity, too, is becoming an issue. “If we lived in a world where we had plenty of vaccine, you would go with subcutaneous,” Beigel told me. But in North Carolina, for instance, where 70 percent of monkeypox cases have been among Black men, some two-thirds of the subcutaneous shots administered before August 8 went to people who are white; similar skews have been noted in New York City. Now “Black and brown gay men are really angry,” says Kenyon Farrow, a writer and public-health activist based in Ohio. “They watched white gay men get full doses … and now they feel like they are getting less of a dose.” Farrow has pushed for everyone to get at least one subcutaneous shot—a strategy that advocates in New York City also back—but the Biden administration seems set on moving all jurisdictions onto the intradermal route.Mapping out yet another vaccination strategy won’t address all of these problems. (And no matter what, the administration should keep ordering more Jynneos, stat.) But the forecast for fall is murky. And should the present situation worsen, a fresh tactic could give the U.S. a head start—something the country hasn’t had on the public-health playing field in a while.Already, some experts are mulling the nuclear option: ACAM2000, the smallpox shot that the government has been hoarding to counter a potential bioterrorism attack. Doses of the vaccine are available by the many millions, and thought to be both effective and durable. It’s also, Edupuganti told me, “one of the vaccines with the highest amount of adverse reactions,” occasionally triggering side effects as serious as heart inflammation. The shot contains a replicating virus, and shouldn’t be taken by immunocompromised people, including many of those who are living with HIV. And just about everyone who gets the shot sprouts an oozy lesion at the injection site that can pass the vaccine virus to others. Against something like smallpox—a far more contagious virus that killed up to 30 percent of its victims—ACAM2000 would be “a no-brainer,” says Rafi Ahmed, a vaccinologist at Emory University. With monkeypox, though, Johns Hopkins’s Rivers told me, the risk-benefit calculation “is really hazy.”[Read: What should worry most Americans about our monkeypox response]It’s not time to trot out ACAM yet, Safo, the New York physician, told me. But maybe autumn will bring many more cases. Maybe monkeypox’s symptoms could grow more severe. Maybe the virus will start to surge in new populations. Maybe intradermal Jynneos will fall short in effectiveness or safety. In any case, containment with the current tools isn’t a guarantee. “If things do get out of control,” Ahmed told me, “you want to have some ACAM stocks ready to go.” No clear, perfect threshold can yet denote “out of control.” Still, a trend toward a worse outbreak would inch the country closer to tapping into its ACAM2000 supply, Park told me: “I don’t think we have another choice.” Which means that the FDA and CDC should probably start poring over the ACAM data now, Rivers said.  Resorting to ACAM2000 will also put the onus on officials to explain to the public what they’re getting into. If some are balking at intradermal shots, people further back in line could reasonably wonder why they’ve been stuck with a less-safe vaccine, Farrow pointed out. There could be a middle ground worth testing in a clinical trial: one shot of Jynneos, via either administration route, followed by a dose of ACAM2000, says Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah. One 2019 study hints that this shot, chaser approach could shrink infectious lesions, as well as cut down on ACAM2000’s side effects, while still offering an immunological boost—though that trial used two subcutaneous Jynneos doses first. In any case, the government would do well to pursue more options, even enroll people in trials comparing the different vaccines, Gonsalves told me. And transparency is tantamount. “Back in the days of AIDS,” he said, “many of us were saying, as new drugs were coming online, we wanted access and answers” about the options at hand. Right now, the nation’s short on both.That “we’re even having to ask these questions about ACAM,” Farrow told me, is a sobering reminder that “we didn’t get our shit together” early on. Instead, the U.S. has backed itself into having to reckon with its appetite for risk. Being too cautious with vaccines could allow the outbreak to further balloon; being too reckless with shots could compromise public trust. The administration firmly contends that Jynneos remains “the best available option,” according to Granholm, the HHS spokesman. (That said, ACAM2000 “is available upon request,” he told me.)
Such a position may feel like the safe one—it potentially sidesteps the gnarliness of ACAM. But perhaps it’s actually dicier, because it’s not properly preparative. “We can’t just say intradermal is going to solve all of our problems,” Park told me. Although the hope is that the country’s ACAM supply can stay stashed away, we need to be ready to use it, and quickly, should the need arise. If the country once again waits until “we’re in a pinch” to act, Rivers told me, “it’s going to be too late.”

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.America’s students are going back to school this month. According to many media sources, districts won’t have nearly enough teachers to greet them. The Washington Post has warned of a “catastrophic teacher shortage.” ABC World News Tonight called it a new “growing crisis,” and Rebecca Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, called it a “five-alarm” fire. The Wall Street Journal warned of a “dog-eat-dog” scramble to hire underqualified instructors, and results from a national survey found a surge of teachers planning to quit or retire early.For several weeks, I watched this Great American Teacher Shortage narrative bloom across the media landscape. Because of my reporting for my abundance-agenda series, I was predisposed to believe it was real. The U.S. is rife with shortages, including of infant formula and monkeypox vaccines. But I was also skeptical, because so many public-education controversies—see: the debates over remote schooling, the proper way to teach American history, and controversial laws regarding how teachers can discuss sex ed—are plastered with ideology.When I spoke with education researchers and writers to figure out what was really going on, a more complex narrative emerged. In parts of the country, schools are struggling to hire staff. But they are mostly the same districts that have been struggling for years to fill the same positions, such as substitute and special-ed roles. In the big picture, the new and catastrophic national teacher shortage is neither newly catastrophic nor, in any meaningful sense, national. Under one interpretation of the murky data, the country might even have a teacher surplus on its hands, because so many parents have pulled their children out of public schools since the pandemic began.American teachers and American schools absolutely do have real problems that deserve our attention.Teacher vacancies exist, and they are concentrated in specific states, districts, and positions. Many rural areas and the Deep South are experiencing shortages. Some high-poverty districts have struggled for decades to hire enough teachers. High teacher turnover is especially a problem in child care and special education. A recent study in Louisiana found that one-third of the state’s child-care centers lose more than half of their teachers every year. A 2022 government survey found that the vacancy rate for special-ed teachers is more than four times higher than that for physical-education instructors.Exhausted, underpaid, and stressed out, America’s teachers seem to be in a state of psychological and financial crisis. By some estimates, public-school teachers are the most “burned out” workers in America. The pandemic made things worse; some surveys show a big increase in the share of teachers who say they want to quit. Indeed, managing an elementary-school classroom via Zoom five days a week sounds to me like one of the lower rings of hell.So, if the question is whether some districts are struggling to hire enough teachers, or whether some specific occupations have shortages, or even whether many teachers are feeling crummy about their work, the answer is clearly yes. These things are all happening. But most of these things have been happening for a long time.“There has not been a mass exodus of teachers across the country,” Heather Schwartz, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation, told me. Chad Aldeman, who writes about education finance at Edunomics Lab, agrees. “The public narrative has gotten way ahead of the data and is even misleading in most cases,” he told me.The single most consistent message I heard from people I spoke with for this article: America’s national teacher shortage is dubious, but America’s education-data shortage is dire. “To date, there is little firm evidence to support claims of an unprecedented crisis,” Matt Barnum wrote on the education-news site Chalkbeat.Comprehensive national data on teacher-turnover rates (the share of teachers who quit each year) and national-vacancy rates (the share of open teacher positions that aren’t filled) are simply not available, or don’t go back far enough to tell us whether this year is different. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks employment in the category of “local government education.” But researchers told me that this category blends teachers, school administrators, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers, among other occupations.More than a year ago, Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, started to collect data for a paper on the education labor market during COVID-19. It was meant to be a review of the dreaded teacher shortage that so many educators had warned about. But the more Kraft read, the more he realized that he couldn’t make any definitive conclusions. “We had to walk back the entire first version of the paper because of the weakness of the existing data,” he told me.The data that we have don’t suggest anything approaching a “catastrophic” shortage. Data obtained by Barnum from five states and 19 large U.S. school districts, including in New York City and Houston, show that teacher-turnover rates haven’t actually increased despite more teachers threatening to quit. As for those polls of teachers who say they plan to quit en masse? Researchers told me that for every three teachers telling pollsters that they plan to quit in the next year, only one actually leaves their job. Teacher burnout might become a mental-health crisis in the near future, but to conflate it with an acute teacher shortage right now is neither accurate nor helpful.“I think we’ve actually gained classroom teachers in the last year, because of new hiring after the federal stimulus bills,” said Aldeman, the education-finance writer. Federal pandemic funds have given schools tens of billions of dollars to hire additional staff, including classroom instructors, teaching assistants, and bus drivers. For example, New Mexico has directed $37 million of its federal relief money to hire 500 educational assistants, as Education Week reported. When those positions go unfilled, they’re counted as additional vacancies. “There might be a shortage in the sense that a lot of new positions are going unfilled,” Schwartz told me. But is it useful to use the term shortage when, compared with staff numbers before the pandemic, more teachers might be employed in America’s public schools right now than in 2019?In fact, the clearest nationwide story isn’t a sharp drop in the number of public-school teachers. It’s a sharp drop in public-school student enrollment.Across the country, certain states—including Iowa and Texas—are hiring more teachers even as their enrollment numbers decline. “It’s super weird to be having a national conversation around teacher shortages while schools are adding teachers and losing students,” Aldeman tweeted last week. He pointed me to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, which project that the number of public-school students will decline every year for the rest of the decade. NCES anticipates that by 2030, fewer kindergartners will be enrolled in public school than in any year since 1998.Enrollment has plummeted so quickly in some school districts that it’s thrown school funding into chaos. Washington State’s Issaquah School District, just outside Seattle, faces a nearly $40 million shortfall this year, as thousands of students have left the district since the pandemic’s start. In New York City, K–12 enrollment dropped nearly 10 percent since COVID, and officials are expecting 30,000 fewer students this fall than last. The reasons are diverse: Some parents are frustrated by curricula that they see as too political; some parents don’t like the school-lottery system; and others have simply decided that tutors and homeschooling are better options.“I’m not confident about the education data, but I think we’ll eventually discover that public-school enrollment declined in the 2022–2023 school year even as districts hired more teachers than they had before the pandemic,” Aldeman told me. “If the student ratio goes down, it’ll be very hard to call that situation a ‘teacher shortage.’”With so many reasons to doubt the narrative of a national teacher shortage, why are news organizations running with this story?One cynical answer is that news media carry a negativity-bias hammer and tend to see the world as a bunch of negative-news nails. When you’re facing a murky narrative with conflicting data, communicating the message “This is a total catastrophe!” is easier than “Well, this is confusing, and a lot of things seem to be happening at once.”An even more cynical answer is that most ideologues have something to gain from the teacher-shortage narrative. Conservatives might thrill to a story about struggling school districts that have gone all “woke” on their students. Liberals would like more sympathy for public employees who share their political goals. And COVID-policy critics can point to public-school crises as evidence that the U.S. education system bungled its remote-school policy for children who faced little threat from COVID. (I tend to agree with that opinion.) The inclination to politicize a national education story might be especially strong given the renewed attention from both parties on school politics—Florida’s sex-ed law, debates about learning loss, and the proper way to teach American history. The teacher-shortage catastrophe simply proved “too good to check.”A more generous explanation is that the teacher-staffing story is pretty damn confusing. In some districts, there are too many students for the staff. In other districts, there aren’t enough students for the budget. One district might be struggling to find English teachers, while another district might only be struggling to find substitute ESL teachers. Thinking about these as equivalent phenomena is nonsensical. But many news reports might be doing just that, in part because the government doesn’t provide any clear historical record on total teacher vacancies. Oversimple narratives can surge in a vacuum of clear information.

There are different kinds of medical pseudoscience that we tackle here at SBM . Some therapies and claims are pseudoscience because they are not conceptually valid – they break the laws of physics, or rely on outdated, superstitious, or just wrong concepts of biology and health. Often they rely on phenomena such as “life force” which don’t seem to exist. Others are based on real scientific phenomena but grossly misapply them. Detox fits into this category. Toxins exist and can cause harm and so removing them can be beneficial, but popular detox treatments are not targeted against actual toxins, there is no evidence the treatments remove any toxins, and there is no evidence of any health benefits.

A third category of medical pseudoscience is perhaps the most pernicious, legitimate cutting edge medical science that is currently be researched and developed, but unscrupulous gurus make claims for specific treatments that are years or perhaps decades ahead of the science, trying to capitalize on the hype surrounding the science. Stem cell therapy is the poster child for this category – using stem cells to treat serious disease is an active area of research, but we are probably decades away from the sort of applications that people think of, and yet fraudulent stem cell clinics began popping up almost 20 years ago.

Brain stimulation also fits into this third category, using specific frequencies, intensities, and locations of electrical (either direct current or alternating current) or magnetic stimulation to alter brain function. Conceptually I have not problem with this approach and it should be considered perfectly legitimate. The brain is an electrical organ and its function depends on the electrical activity of specific circuits in the brain. Either increasing or decreasing the functional activity of specific brain regions or circuits should therefore be a possible mechanism of intervention.

As with stem cells, however, it is still early days for this kind of approach. My sense is that it is a bit further along, with some actual approved (if basic) interventions, such as treating seizures, movement disorders, or aborting migraine headaches. But brain stimulation is not a panacea. There is no evidence and no reason to think that it alters the biology of the brain (the health of brain cells), but it can immediately alter the electrical activity of the brain. The challenge is that there are many variables to consider, and so it will take a long time to do the research to dial in which specific interventions will have which specific effects in which populations of people. These variables include the type of stimulation (AC, DC, magnetic), the intensity and duration of stimulation treatments, the targeted part of the brain, and the frequency of the stimulation.

And yet, there are already a number of home brain stimulation devices on the market. What claims are made for these devices? A familiar list of vague and allowable claims, such as improved mood, focus, stress reduction, and improved sleep. Some include the “quack Miranda warning” that they are not intended to treat a disease. Because these are devices, and not drugs, they can easily obtain FDA “clearance” without having to prove efficacy.

Unfortunately, the background of legitimate research into brain stimulation inadvertently feeds into this unscrupulous industry, through less-than-skeptical reporting. A recent study shows where the state-of-the-art is for brain stimulation for memory function, and also how lazy reporting can be a problem. The BBC headline reporting on this study is, “Brain stimulation boosts memory for a month.” This makes it seem like memory function is improved for a month after treatment, but that is misleading. The study itself is actually quite good, but let’s review what it actually shows.

The researchers are extending existing research into brain stimulation to improve working memory (WM) and long term memory (LTM). Previous research has been inconclusive, as the authors of the current study summarize:

Rhythmic activity in the theta and gamma frequency ranges are thought to contribute to both WM and LTM function, particularly during free recall. However, previous attempts at modulating these rhythms to improve memory have yielded inconsistent findings. Although there are some suggestions of improvements in WM with modulation of parietal theta rhythms, changing theta rhythms in the frontal regions and gamma rhythms in the parietal and frontal regions have yielded contradictory results.

Their study design is very thorough. They first look at their hypothesis based on prior research, the use of low frequency stimulation in the parietal cortex and the use of high frequency stimulation in the pre-frontal cortex. They gave the subjects 10 minutes of stimulation per day for four days, and encoded verbal memory for words during stimulation. They studied healthy older adults from 65-88 and tested their immediate recall on the days of stimulation and then recall for the words one month later. They found a statistically significant improved in short term and long term recall for these types of stimulation, and further there seemed to be a dose-response with more successive days of stimulation having a greater effect, and improving in memory on day 4 predicting improving at one month. They used a double-blind sham-controlled protocol.

I like the fact that they then performed two internal controls. They did a second study where they reversed the high and low frequency stimulations, and showed no benefit. This is important to rule out nonspecific effects – for example, perhaps the stimulation (which they could feel) just made subjects overall more alert. This second experiment showed the results are frequency dependent. They then did a third experiment replicating the results of the first study in a fresh sample, again showing significant results. I have mentioned previously that internal replications should become standard, to minimize the publication of false positives.

So – this was a nice series of studies suggesting that stimulation using tACS at specific locations and frequencies may improve short and long term recall of words. But any reporting of this, especially in the context of an existing dubious industry of at-home brain stimulation, should carefully point out what this study does not show. First, the effect was only seen for memory during stimulation. The headline suggests a persistent effect over a month, as if brain function improved for a month, rather than just an immediate effect of improved memory for words during stimulation.

This, of course, significantly limits applications of this approach. You would need to be using the device while studying, and your memory outside the window of stimulation would not be affected. We don’t know how long this effect lasts for, and previous research does suggest a declining effect from continued stimulation. We also need to study what the long term effects are (both longer duration stimulation and greater number of sessions). It’s plausible there could be a negative long term effect. Might memory function decline between sessions? Does this effect extend beyond memory for words?

Also, it needs to be pointed out that this is not a disease treatment. While Alzheimer’s is mentioned both in the study and the reporting, Alzheimer’s is a biological disease of the brain. At best this would be a symptomatic treatment and would not slow or reverse progression.

We are still early in this kind of research. While I am hopefully for the potential of electrical interventions for brain function, the authors acknowledge that specific applications are likely far in the future. It is certainly too early for home brain hacking through portable devices.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, Robinson Meyer’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.All carrots, no sticks. That is the story of the Inflation Reduction Act. Since the law was unveiled last month, savvy commentators have noted that its policies consist almost entirely of “carrots,” incentives meant to encourage companies to decarbonize, with very few “sticks,” policies meant to punish them for using fossil fuels or emitting carbon. (Just so we’re clear: This analogy is meant to invoke a stubborn donkey that, Looney Tunes–style, is craning to reach a carrot hanging in front of its face while its driver whacks its behind with a stick.)Indeed, although the IRA includes dozens of new benefits, it creates only one new penalty for pollution: the methane-emissions fee, which will charge oil and gas companies at least $900 for every ton of methane that they leak into the atmosphere.However you feel about the IRA, it probably has something to do with this fact. While some climate activists have fretted that the law does not punish fossil-fuel companies enough, centrists have argued that its complicated industrial policy would have been better as a simple carbon tax. But just about everyone has recognized that this all-carrots, no-sticks aspect is why the law passed in the first place. It’s a big part of why Senator Joe Manchin, who has criticized and even directed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency during his political career, could champion the IRA.But this pat formulation overlooks something important. While it’s true that the IRA itself consists almost only of carrots, that is not true of the broader structure of American climate law. There is, in fact, a big “stick” for tackling carbon pollution already on the books in the United States, as well as an agency tasked with wielding that stick. I’m talking about the Clean Air Act and the EPA. And the IRA, by design, strengthens the government’s ability to wield that stick.It does this in at least two ways. The first is that the IRA confirms that carbon dioxide is a type of air pollution covered by the Clean Air Act, as initially reported by The New York Times earlier this week.This has broader consequences than it might seem. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide counted as an air pollutant, and that, if the EPA decided that CO2 harmed human health and the environment, it could regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act. That ruling—and the EPA’s official determination, a few years later, that CO2 is dangerous—has anchored the agency’s climate regulations on cars and trucks, and its proposed rules for the power grid.But then in June, the Court circumscribed some of the EPA’s authority over the power grid. Conservative justices have harped on the fact that Congress has never clearly delegated the power to regulate greenhouse gases to the EPA.Now it has. The IRA repeatedly defines greenhouse gas as a form of air pollution. It amends several sections of the Clean Air Act to define “greenhouse gas” as encompassing “the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.” In another section, it grants money under the Clean Air Act for any project that “reduces or avoids greenhouse gas emissions and other forms of air pollution.”Congress has now clearly spoken: Carbon dioxide is a form of air pollution. And though this will not undo this year’s ruling, it buttresses the EPA’s underlying legal authority to regulate climate pollution.But that change is not the only—or even the most important—way that the IRA strengthens the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. The law will also allow the EPA to pass much stricter rules than it could have previously.The reason has to do with a quirk of American law. Since the 1980s, every major proposed regulation has had to show that it passes a cost-benefit analysis demonstrating that its benefits to the economy as a whole exceed its costs. In the EPA’s case, that means that the cost of complying with a regulation can’t exceed the benefit to society of cleaner air or water. Over the years, this has turned out not to be much of an impediment to the EPA, because even small amounts of air pollution are massively damaging to public health, so preventing any air pollution has very high benefits.But the IRA’s many carrot-like policies, such as its clean-electricity subsidies and carbon-capture incentives, would functionally lower these limitations on the EPA even more by skewing the cost-benefit analysis in the agency’s favor.That will happen in two ways. First, the IRA’s economy-wide tax credits and subsidies will reduce the costs that companies face in complying with broad EPA rules that encourage wind, solar, or electric-vehicle adoption. Second, the IRA contains new grants that will allow the EPA to subsidize the cost of compliance directly by writing checks or issuing loans to oil and gas firms and other regulated companies so that they can meet the terms of the rules. This works in the EPA’s favor because the cost-benefit analysis looks only at the effect of the regulation itself; it does not include any funding from Congress that makes achieving that regulation more feasible. Both of these moves will lower the costs of regulation, allowing the EPA to pass much more expansive rules.This effect is important, but it was not accounted for in the law’s projected 40 percent reduction of U.S. carbon emissions. That was not a mistake—the modelers design their studies to look at what the new law alone will do, and so they assume zero further EPA action—but it means that the IRA’s emissions-cutting power could very well exceed what the models suggest today.The whole point of the IRA is that it brings down the cost of clean energy. It makes renewables cheaper, it makes nuclear power cheaper, and, as I wrote last week, it even makes the technologies that we’ll need to fight climate change in the 2030s cheaper. So far, most commentary on the law has focused on the immediate effects of that shift, and on how the law’s new incentives will reduce emissions simply by driving turnover in the energy system. But in the weeks and years to come, the secondary effects could become more important. Now that the IRA has passed, it will be easier for states and cities to pursue aggressive climate policy, and it will be simpler for companies to cut their emissions faster than would otherwise be economical.That’s why looking at the modeled emissions effects of the IRA—something that, to be clear, I did in this newsletter—is a little silly. The IRA isn’t like an EPA regulation that will modestly bend the curve of U.S. emissions. Instead, it catapults the country into a whole new landscape where the economics of every other climate action are different.We thought the IRA was doling out carrots. It was actually planting an entirely new garden.

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, has made a striking choice of which public fights to pick. Since 2019, he has been in charge of America’s most populous state—one that confronts severe water, energy, and housing shortages; growing homeless encampments in multiple cities; rising homicide counts; failing schools; perpetually gridlocked traffic; and infamously bad public transportation. In a poll earlier this year from UC Berkeley and the Los Angeles Times, a majority of voters said that California is headed in the wrong direction.Nevertheless, he has been devoting much of his attention to publicly heaping scorn on conservatives around the country. As a Californian, I struggle to imagine a bigger waste of time than the way Newsom has been spending his: “I just joined Trump’s Truth Social,” Newsom announced in June. “Going to be on there calling out Republican lies.” He’s the governor of a disaster-prone state with 39 million residents, and he’s bragging about trolling MAGA sycophants on an off-brand Twitter? This summer, he has bought ads attacking Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the Republican governors of Florida and Texas (where getting attacked by Californians helps you).Newsom’s behavior is the product of perverse incentives. Excelling in leadership at the state level means waging and winning risky, politically inconvenient fights that do little to raise a governor’s national profile. A far easier way to attract attention and ingratiate yourself to Democratic power brokers is by picking culture-war fights with enemies of convenience—that is to say, people whom most of your fellow partisans loathe—no matter how tenuously connected those fights might be to politics or policy in the place you’re supposed to govern. Many Democrats rightly scoff at Trump-era conservatives who care more about owning the libs than serving their constituents. But Newsom likewise seems to think that, in today’s political environment, the best way to improve his national prospects is to mock and irritate the other side. And for better or worse, he may be correct.[Read: The Democrats’ new spokesman in the culture wars]Despite California’s evident dysfunction, Newsom is expected to breeze to reelection this November. He has enjoyed all the advantages that a Democratic governor hoping to turn around or transform the Golden State could reasonably want. His party controls every statewide office, a supermajority of the legislature, and most cities. The state has a budget surplus. And the initiative process allows Newsom to appeal directly to the people if state lawmakers reject any changes that he might propose. Perhaps no elected Democrat in any state is less likely to see their agenda thwarted by Republicans.Spared a tough reelection fight by a California GOP too incompetent to nominate viable challengers, Newsom could have focused his reelection campaign on promoting any ambitious agenda of his choosing. Instead, Newsom shifted his attention to Texas and Florida, as if California has everything figured out and the nation need only follow its approach. Of course, no one looking at the state from the outside—and noting its high taxes, high cost of living, and poor infrastructure and state services—sees a model worth emulating.Yet many in the press view Newsom’s approach as politically prudent. His “attention-grabbing tactics” have “launched the leader of the most-populous state into the conversation about potential Democratic presidential nominees should Joe Biden not run again,” Bloomberg reports. Politico’s “California Playbook” argues that “whether Newsom is cracking the presidential door or promoting California progressivism is almost beside the point. The fundamentals are the same. Newsom has long sought to extol California’s agenda—and his—by contrasting it with that of populous red states … It elevates Newsom’s profile and helps him influence the national conversation.”Admittedly, Newsom’s behavior of late has arguably improved his chances of at least snagging the type of Cabinet appointment that new presidents give to partisan allies without any domain expertise, and in a Democratic presidential-primary contest, there’s always at least a lane for someone perceived as a happy warrior. Back in the aughts, when Rush Limbaugh’s bombastic bloviating dominated talk radio, a certain sort of Democrat thought, We on the left need one of him. Today, a similar sort of Democrat has the same thought when watching DeSantis, who has used his governorship to trigger as many liberal tears as possible. But the people who are most driven by negative partisanship are terrible judges of who will win general elections. Most Americans don’t want a hard-line left-winger or right-winger to be president, and many find the sadistic delight partisans take in political combat to be weird and off-putting. That’s why Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, is now president.Even if Newsom’s recent antics do persuade Democrats to nominate him for the White House in 2024—he insists he doesn’t want to run while acting as if he does—making him the party’s standard-bearer would be risky in a general election for two reasons. First, the “look at what the right wing is doing” diversions won’t be enough against a talented opponent who redirects attention to his record in California and forces him to answer for the state’s most jaw-droppingly dysfunctional features. Although Newsom can point to some small improvements here and there, none are on the scale of the state’s many challenges—or on the scale one might expect given his party’s supermajority control of the legislature. Second, Newsom’s approach to exploiting negative polarization is especially alienating, just as Hillary Clinton’s was in 2016, in that it essentially labels large swaths of America as deplorables.For example, earlier this month, Newsom—perhaps inspired by DeSantis’s efforts to punish Disney for speaking up in the culture wars—wrote an open letter insinuating that movie studios should avoid states that fail to protect abortion and LGBTQ rights. “Over the last several years, the legislatures of states like Georgia and Oklahoma have waged a cruel assault on essential rights,” Newsom declared in the letter, which he posted on Twitter and published as an ad in the movie-industry publication Variety. “Today more than ever, you have a responsibility to take stock of your values––and those of your employees––when doing business in those states … So to those in power to make decisions about where to film, where to hire, where to open new offices, we in California say: Walk the walk.”In this instance, Newsom’s stance is at least conceivably beneficial to his constituents. I personally would prefer that Hollywood spend its dollars in California, where I live, than in Georgia. But recall that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020. A Democratic presidential nominee on record arguing that corporations cannot ethically do business or hire people there will have a lot more trouble winning that state. In recent presidential elections, Democrats have been more and more competitive in Texas—which Newsom recently described on Twitter, alongside a dozen or so other states that still have sodomy laws on their books, as “hateful.”In the 2004 speech that catapulted Barack Obama to national prominence, the future president, who won Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio at least once, said this about the states he was gearing up to contest:
There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
[From the September 2004 issue: The natural]That’s how Democrats succeed—by trying to win over people in all states, not by suggesting that some states are properly shunned and boycotted by their moral betters in Hollywood. Bill Clinton, Obama, and Biden all understood that. So do Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and many others. Newsom’s current approach is perfect if MSNBC needs a voice to please its progressive base, but elevating him in politics would be fraught for Democrats. As for the ongoing partisan-warrior schtick, I have nothing in general against, say, Twitter spats with the governor of Alabama. I reject her values too. But as a Californian dismayed by my beloved state’s problems, it’s not how I want my governor, of all people, to spend his time.

The rhetoric of modern America is dominated by the paradigm of a biracial nation, but history is never black and white. Fissures between national and ethnic traditions have always been at the heart of its political conflict.
Their significance is highlighted in David Hacket Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America and Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America. Fischer shows how the factions and coalitions in colonial America played out in the early Republic, sowing the seeds of the the Civil War, while continuing to haunt American politics to this day. Phillips, meanwhile, flags up the differences between the English settlers of North America and the English of the metropole.
More from this author America's fake caste warBy Razib Khan 
Fischer’s early America is framed around four dominant folkways. There are the New England Yankees in the northeast; gentry planters in the lowland South along with their retainers; inhabitants of the upland South, originally from Ulster and the Scottish-English border; and the diverse business-oriented groups in the Mid-Atlantic, from Dutch burghers to Quakers. For both authors, the Yankees and the Southern planters have direct genealogical connections to the Roundhead Whigs and the Royalist Tories. The Borderers and the more mercantile folk of the Mid-Atlantic play a less prominent role in Phillip’s narrative, but  eventually amalgamated into the broader Northern and Southern cultural and political alliances.
These groupings would eventually struggle against each other in the American Civil War. When House member Preston Brooks nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate in 1856 — a foreshadowing of the conflict to come — it reflected the anxious, daggers-drawn national mood. But it was also the culmination of centuries of tumultuous history between those disparate strands in British culture which had put down deep roots into North America.
Brooks was a scion of the South Carolina upcountry and exemplar of a nascent fused Southern identity, a vociferous defender of slavery as a right and proper institution. In contrast, Sumner was a New England Yankee through and through. Brooks’s focus on family honour (he believed Sumner had insulted his cousin) reflects both the values of the English gentry and of the Scots-Irish Borderers. Sumner espoused the anti-slavery cause at a time when compromise between South and North was seen as prudent politics. This reflected a Yankee’s commitment to humanitarian justice, descended from the utopianism that gripped the Roundhead forebears of his New England ancestors.
More from this author How rational is Steven Pinker's world?By Razib Khan 
Where the ultimate basis of this American factionalism (Puritan New England Yankee against Southern planter Cavalier) can be found in England (Roundhead East Anglia against the Royalist glens of Devonshire), The Cousin’s Wars observes that the migration to North America of dissenters simultaneously enabled the creation of Britain as a cohesive 19th-century power. After the false dawn of the English Republic in the 1650s, Puritan-minded Protestantism only flourished as the dominant force in New England. The existence of North America as a release valve for radical Protestantism stabilised the middle path that the Anglican Church occupied. Meanwhile, the Irish potato famine and the mass migration to the US of Roman Catholic peasants meant that the Protestant proportion of the United Kingdom was far higher in 1900 than in 1800. There are victors in The Cousin’s Wars — just different ones in different places.
The Englishmen, Scots or Welshmen who migrated to America were not “normal” Britons. Perhaps they sought more freedom of worship outside the established Church or more economic opportunities outside of the class system, or perhaps they were fleeing debt and the hand of the law. The “cowboy” is a cliché, but these cowboys came from somewhere, many even genealogically descended from herders on the Scottish border that engaged in as much theft as productive labor. The inverse of the American cowboy were the English who were left behind: the aristocrats, peasants and gentry who came together to create a British Empire with a much more united cultural identity in the 19th century than it had in the 17th century.
Albion’s Seed and The Cousins’ Wars have as much to do with the present and future as the past. Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 saw the emergence of a belt of “Red” Republican counties dominated by Borderers, attracted to the aggressive pugilistic style of their candidate. Though Barack Obama was perceived by America and the world as the first black president, he was raised by a mother whose paternal grandfather was named Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, a nod to her ancestral Yankee lineage. Obama presented a moralistic, even utopian, vision for America in keeping with this ancestry.
More from this author Vikings need to be tamedBy Razib Khan 
In contrast, Trump, the German-Scottish son of New York’s outer boroughs, reflects a persona that is in tension with the dominant Yankee tradition of the North. It is not well remembered, but during the Civil War, New York City was a hotbed of pro-Southern sentiment, and the mayor, Fernando Wood, even proposed the city’s secession from the Union. To the west, much of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio were pro-Confederate during the conflict because the local population were “butternuts”, descended from settlers who had moved north in the first half of the 19th century, like Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln. The Great Emancipator was, though, a direct descendent of Samuel Lincoln of Norfolk, East Anglia, who was to settle in Massachusetts in 1638.
Suggested articleWould America survive a civil war?By Malcom Kyeyune 
Though the old ethnicities are in decline today, their shadow still haunts the present as the US fractures along cultural and regional lines again. The progressive cultural Left has rekindled the flame of enthusiastic abolitionism, attempting to attain cosmic justice in their utopia. “MAGA America”, in contrast, channels the irascible and pessimistic vision of the Borders, and their tribune is a fighter focused more on winning than policy. In the 19th century, the switch of the populace of the lower North, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana to an alliance with New England Yankees signalled the rise of a new Republican ascendancy that would persist down to FDR’s day. Now we are witnessing Americans of Latin American heritage frustrated with the moralism and cultural politics of the progressive Left, eyeing perhaps a realignment with the Borderers with whom they might share a cultural ethos, if not history.
Once you read Fischer and Phillips’s narrative, the past becomes illuminated. You can see shadows of the future already being cast.

On Monday, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill legalizing "safe consumption sites" in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland. Safe consumption sites, also known as "safe injection sites," are locations where individuals can use illegal drugs in a sanitary area with access to clean needles and staff who can administer drugs like naloxone, which can quickly treat an overdose. Proponents of the legislation argue that the sites are an important harm reduction tool, helping to prevent overdose deaths or the spread of certain diseases, like HIV, that can be spread through intravenous drug use.
"Safe injection sites aren't intended to be some sort of magic solution to a chronic drug addiction crisis; they are intended to reduce the likelihood of users dying," Reason's Scott Shackford wrote after the bill's passage in the state Legislature earlier this month.
Where safe consumption sites are legal, they have proved tremendously effective. As of 2019, one safe consumption site in Vancouver, Canada, has overseen more than 3.6 million instances of drug injection since its opening in 2003. At the site, staff responded to 6,440 overdoses with no deaths. A study examining the site's operations from 2004 to 2008 predicted that, during that period, the site prevented up to 51 deaths. According to NPR, researchers also found no increase in drug usage in the surrounding area.
"Safe consumption sites have been in operation around the world for approximately 30 years, with great success and literally zero overdose deaths," state Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), who originally introduced the bill, told CBS Bay Area. "These sites are a proven strategy to reduce overdose deaths, pressure on emergency rooms, and public drug use, while expanding access to drug treatment"
However, Newsom seems unconvinced that safe consumption sites will help the state's drug users. "I have long supported the cutting edge of harm reduction strategies," Newsom wrote in a statement explaining his veto of the bill. "However, I am acutely concerned about the operations of safe injection sites without strong, engaged local leadership, and well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and suitability plans." Newsom further expressed concerns that the bill could lead to "a world of unintended consequences… worsening drug consumption challenges in [Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland] is not a risk we can take."
"It's tremendously frustrating that safe injection sites have met continued resistance at the federal and state levels, including in supposedly liberal states like California," Geoffroy Lawrence, the managing director of drug policy at Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website), tells Reason. "While safe injection sites may sound counterintuitive to some people as an effective means to combat addiction, there's no arguing with the data. Results from other countries have shown that safe injection sites lead to a reduction in overdose deaths and transmission rates of infectious disease and an increase in the number of individuals seeking addiction recovery."
It is possible that Newsom's veto of the bill has little to do with the efficacy of safe injection sites and instead is the result of his preparation for a possible presidential run in 2024. On July 4, he placed political ads on several Florida television stations, criticizing Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a possible presidential contender. With cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles gaining attention in national media for their homelessness crisis (which is associated with drug use), Newsom could be eager to present a more anti-drug, even "tough on crime" image.
Newsom's presidential ambitions, or simply his desire to appear less soft on crime, might be getting in the way of a safe and effective public health strategy for preventing drug overdoses.
"The American approach to the drug war has historically been about restricting supply when changing demand was always the better approach," said Lawrence. "That's what so-called 'harm reduction' policies, including safe injection sites, are all about."
The post Gavin Newsom Vetoes Bill Legalizing 'Safe Consumption Sites' in 3 California Cities appeared first on Reason.com.

Americans earning well over six-figure incomes would be eligible for a student debt forgiveness plan that President Joe Biden is reportedly set to unveil later this week.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, that means most of the benefits of the roughly $300 billion proposal would flow to wealthier American households, according to a new analysis of the proposal.
Biden and top White House officials have been promising action on student debt for months, and CNN reported Monday that an announcement is likely coming on Wednesday. Reportedly, the White House will announce plans to forgive up to $10,000 in student debt for Americans earning up to $125,000 this year—though important specifics about the plan, like whether it would be a one-time event or an ongoing entitlement, remain unclear.
Because the poorest Americans generally don't have college degrees or the student debt that often accompanies them, the benefits of just about any student loan forgiveness program are likely to flow primarily to middle- and upper-income households. Placing income-based limits on who benefits is one way to prevent a student debt forgiveness effort from being a massive giveaway to the wealthiest Americans.
Nevertheless, according to a newly published analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a fiscal policy think tank based at the University of Pennsylvania, "about 70 percent of debt relief accrues to borrowers in the top 60 percent of the income distribution" even after limiting the benefits to individuals earning less than $125,000 this year.
As you can see from Penn Wharton's analysis, drawing different lines regarding eligibility or setting different amounts to be forgiven doesn't change the fact that wealthier-than-average households stand to benefit the most from student loan forgiveness plans.
Changing eligibility thresholds and debt forgiveness totals does little to change the fact that wealthier-than-average households accrue most of the benefits. Biden is reportedly considering granting up to $10,000 in loan forgiveness to Americans earning less than $125,000 this year.
If Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is a one-time arrangement, the Penn Wharton analysis pegs the cost at $297 billion. In other words, it would consume just about all of the supposed "deficit reduction" measures included in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, which is supposed to reduce the federal budget deficit by about $300 billion over the next decade. So much for that.
If the student loan forgiveness program becomes an ongoing part of the federal budget, it would cost an additional $3 billion to $4 billion annually. Costs will grow if the income-eligibility level rises or if larger amounts of debt are forgiven.
With America already on pace to run a $15 trillion deficit over the next 10 years, it's hard to justify a massive handout to middle- and upper-income households as a matter of fiscal policy.
And there are plenty of other reasons why student loan forgiveness makes little sense. As Reason's Emma Camp has detailed, student loan forgiveness programs manage to be unfair to graduates who paid back what they borrowed while also making it harder to solve the actual underlying problem of providing easy loans to students who are unprepared for college (and, therefore, unlikely to be able to pay off the burden they accrue at a young age).
In fact, it might cause the exact opposite to happen.
"If student loan debt forgiveness is ongoing, students might eventually reorganize their financing toward additional borrowing," the Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis concludes. "Moreover, more students might choose to attend qualifying education providers, including students who might otherwise have a harder time with repayment. The inclusion of these two effects could, to some extent, make the program a bit more progressive while increasing budgetary costs."
And there could be one additional foreseeable consequence: "Some of the benefit from debt forgiveness might be captured by colleges themselves in the form of higher prices (both tuition and net)."
The Biden administration has already taken steps to forgive huge amounts of student debt from some borrowers. As Reason's Mike Riggs reported last year, the Department of Education has erased about $9.5 billion owed by about 563,000 borrowers who attended for-profit schools or are disabled.
That's historic, but it's not good enough for the progressive activists who are demanding more from the White House on this front. Indeed, some of those activists are already claiming that Biden's plan to forgive only $10,000 in debt per borrower is not enough.

Canceling $10,000 in student debt when the average white borrower is $12,000 in debt, while Black women hold on average over $52,000 isn't just unacceptable, it's structural racism.
— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) August 23, 2022

The idea that taxpayers—including college grads who paid back what they borrowed—should have to finance a $10,000 giveaway to Americans earning more than six figures is absurd on its face. Well-paid professionals do not need welfare, and it makes little sense to blow another $300 billion hole in the federal budget to provide it to them.
The post Biden Reportedly Set To Forgive $10K Student Debt for Americans Earning Over Six Figures appeared first on Reason.com.

There has been an outbreak of sanity in, of all places, California.

On Monday, Golden State Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would have created so-called “safe sites” where users of illicit narcotics engage in supervised drug abuse. The governor’s decision has produced no small amount of consternation. Newsom’s veto has been tarred by its critics as little more than crass politics. In playing to the cheap seats, they say, the governor has displayed contempt for expert opinion and given up on the last, best alternative to the war on drugs.

The legislation would have created a five-year program in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles establishing sites where intravenous drug users could indulge with properly sterilized equipment under medical supervision. “It is possible that these sites would help improve the safety and health of our urban areas, but if done without a strong plan, they could work against this purpose,” Newsom wrote in a statement announcing his veto. “Worsening drug consumption challenges” in California’s already overrun metro areas, he added, “is not a risk we can take.”

Layer an epidemic of homelessness atop rising violent-crime rates, which have been exacerbated by a recruiting drought in California’s police departments, and it’s not hard to see what motivated the governor’s decision. In short, Newsom deferred to the safety concerns of his state’s taxpaying citizens over the faddish theories that excite technocratic reformers. That is basic political horse sense, but the press has reacted to Newsom’s decision as though it was an act of profound recklessness and a betrayal of his constituents.

Newsom has double-crossed his progressive supporters, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper observed, after all, that the governor had once said he was “very, very open” to an injection-site pilot program. That position stood in contrast to the one struck by his predecessor, Gov. Jerry Brown, who vetoed a similar program. But what Newsom said at the time was that he was “not wedded to the language of the existing bill” and he would have to “research” Brown’s rationale for vetoing what the Times described as “more narrow” legislation than what Newsom was asked to sign.

The governor left himself plenty of wiggle room in that 2018 comment, and the L.A. Times itself identified an exceedingly simple justification for his veto: The legislature went beyond even that which was already rejected by a Democratic governor. It went beyond even what most Democrats in the legislature were prepared to accept, in fact, as the so-called “safe consumption sites” bill passed narrowly despite Democratic supermajorities in both legislative chambers.

Newsom is also accused of having stabbed the expert class in the back. “A coalition of treatment specialists, healthcare groups, and civil-rights organizations argued that safe injection sites would save lives,” the L.A. Times continued. “They said it would lead to cleaner streets, reduce crime and prevent the spread of HIV and hepatitis while saving taxpayers money on ambulance calls and emergency room services.” Indeed, what can’t safe sites do?

By way of real-world evidence, this dispatch cites New York City’s experience with state-sponsored injection sites. The Big Apple established its own “safe site” program in November 2021. As of early August, the city believed these sites “have intervened in more than 390 potential overdoses to avert injury or death.” Preliminary statistics around overdose deaths in New York City since these sites became operational have not yet been made available, but city officials aren’t striking a triumphant tone. “As the city copes with a record number of fatal drug overdoses, we must do everything we can to give people a fighting chance to survive and thrive,” Sam Rivera, executive director of the nonprofit that manages the city’s safe sites, said this month.

While some metrics that would help us evaluate the efficacy of such facilities remain a mystery, we can render a verdict on whether supervised injection sites “reduce crime” and lead to “cleaner streets.” In July, shooting incidents increased in New York City relative to one year ago by 13.4 percent. There were 34.4 more murders in the city than there were in July 2021, and overall index crime was up by 30.5 percent (six of the seven major crimes that compromise that index saw rate increases). In literal terms, the streets in New York are as dirty as any city on earth save Rome, Italy, according to the Time Out Index poll of 27,000 urban residents around the globe. The city’s open-air drug markets remain open, and the waking death that opioid and opiate addicts must endure is still plainly visible on the city’s streets. And city residents are voting with their feet. While the exodus of New Yorkers that the city experienced during the pandemic has slowed, more people are still moving away from the city than to it.

The best that can be said of safe sites is that they provide illicit drug users with access to medical attention, sterilized works, and testing equipment that can detect the presence of deadly fentanyl. The second-best thing that can be said is that they could capture drug users for a time in an environment where they might be convinced to seek help. The former would save lives, though we do not know yet whether more lives are saved than lost amid the establishment of a new cultural norm that encourages the use of deadly narcotics. That encouragement most certainly is happening, and it wholly undermines the idea that these sites will inspire drug users to seek treatment.

“Don’t be ashamed you are using,” read one particularly outrageous, taxpayer-funded public service announcement advertising the city’s safe injection sites, “be empowered that you are using safely.” Applying the trite language of self-empowerment to one of the most disempowering activities imaginable—the recreational use of debilitating tranquilizers—is a natural corollary of the logic that advocates for safe sites use to justify them. Heroin addiction, they maintain, has a nasty “stigma” around it. We act as though the user has succumbed to a “moral failing,” which discourages users from getting help. Therefore, we must rehabilitate the practice, if only so the user will emerge from the shadows. Within this rationalization, the line between rehabilitation and encouragement is so fine as to be invisible.

Yes. Gavin Newsom is, of course, seeking political advantage by putting the brakes on the “safe-site” movement in his state. That’s because Americans have a habit of rewarding politicians who ensure that their streets remain safe, unblighted, and conducive to normal daily affairs. If those essential conditions are threatened by the existence of “safe sites,” as political professionals believe they are, the problem does not lie with the voters.

Last week my friend and colleague, Jacek Bartosiak, wrote a piece for GPF titled “The Scalable World War Ahead,” in which he warned that the world is descending into the abyss of near-global war. The most important argument he made was that there was a new dynamic in the world in which wars will grow as a cancer, with cells dividing until the world is fully consumed.

I disagree with what I will call the theory of war as metastasis generally, and particularly in our time. Wars occur between nation-states, rising from the particular interests of each nation-state. In general, wars originate from fear or greed. A nation calculates that the threat from another nation is best met by preemptive action. This occurs in the particular circumstance in which a nation fears what another nation will become, and risks war on the assumption that going to war will prevent the rise of another nation. The fear could be of the not-yet-harnessed power of the opponent or the possibility of the power of an ally. War can also arise from greed, or the desire to acquire something of strategic value from another nation – in which case the calculation of power assigns a probability of success on the nation initiating the war.

The decision to go to war is initiated by one party that tends to want to avoid an expansion of the war, or will at least wait until the first war is settled before expanding the war and increasing the chance of failure. The defending country tends to seek allies, if the attacker’s calculation of relative power is correct. The cost of alliance is normally high, and the desire to intervene exists only under particular circumstances. Cascading wars are thus possible but not likely. In this sense, most wars are self-limiting.

In retrospect, World War II appears to be a cascading war, but it was so only in a limited sense. There were two separate wars, one in the Pacific and one in Europe. The former did not cascade. The participants at the beginning defined the war until its end. In Europe, the war was really two wars, both involving Germany. One was Germany against the Anglo-French alliance, the other against the Soviet alliance. Neither the Pacific nor the European war metastasized far beyond the core powers.

The Cold War pitted NATO against the Warsaw Pact, and it had a distinctly nuclear flavor. The Cold War in Europe never turned into war because nuclear weapons increased the potential cost of war enormously. The war did spread to parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but these were non-critical conflicts for both sides.

One of the limiters of war involving major powers is the fact that most have nuclear weapons. A war between China and the United States would be possible only if one side were confident it could neutralize the other’s weapons. Absent that, the danger would be in winning the war. In extremis, where the nation’s fundamental interests were threatened by conventional forces, the nation might choose a nuclear option. The potential winner would have to assume that a nuclear response is possible, and would have to calculate whether the potential risks of victory would be worth the prize. Pre-nuclear limits on cascading wars would have a nuclear response added to the equation. Notably, the notion of tactical nuclear weapons creates the illusion of utility. The most widely available tactical nuclear weapons have a lethality of a large fraction of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima. There are smaller ones, but they are either so small as to not justify their use relative to conventional weapons or sufficiently devastating to make a large city uninhabitable.

War is possible between nuclear powers when at least one is acting through proxies able to carry the battle. Vietnam is a classic example. North Vietnam and the United States clashed with each other, with China and the Soviet Union providing logistical support. The U.S. never seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons in the confrontation. Nor did Israel in 1973 when it was attacked by Egypt. The Cuban missile crisis never really came close to nuclear exchange, as the release of papers and tapes by both sides shows. In Ukraine, Russia has threatened a nuclear strike. However, as in Vietnam, one side is conducting direct warfare, while the other is acting by proxy. Nothing is significant enough on either side to risk a nuclear exchange.

The situation between China and the United States is similarly limited. Neither nation has any interest worth a nuclear exchange, and neither side is certain what the other might do if facing an extreme risk of defeat. We have seen endless maneuvering and rhetoric from both sides, but at the moment the uncertainties involved in risking a conventional war are intact. Neither side is confident enough in its position in initiating combat, and neither is certain whether nuclear weapons might be used if it were winning a conventional war. Being almost certain is not the basis for rising national annihilation.

From my point of view, we see in Ukraine a classic uncertainty on both sides as the war progresses. In the Western Pacific, we have had many years of saber-rattling but little action. China is in the throes of a financial crisis that cannot be solved by engaging its largest customer and major investor in war. The U.S. has no desire to change the status quo.

There are, my mind, too many obstacles to a cascading war. The closest to a cascading war we have seen was World War II, but even then the participants were fairly stable after the war started. In the Cold War, the center never destabilized, the smaller skirmishes elsewhere notwithstanding. Cascading wars may happen over decades and with intervening political agreements. There will always be wars, and some will be terrible. But there are too many breakers to allow for cascades.

In the middle of July, three big blue billboards went up in and around Jackson, Mississippi. Pregnant? You still have a choice, they informed passing motorists, inviting them to visit Mayday.Health to learn more. Anybody who did landed on a website that provides information about at-home abortion pills and ways to get them delivered anywhere in the United States—including parts of the country, such as Mississippi, where abortions are now illegal under most circumstances.A few days ago, the founders of the nonprofit that paid for the billboard ads, Mayday Health, received a subpoena from the office of the attorney general of Mississippi. (The state has already been at the center of recent debates about abortion: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, upheld a Mississippi statute by allowing states to put strict limits on abortion.) The subpoena, which I have seen, demands a trove of documents about Mayday Health and its activities. It may be the first step in an effort to force Mayday Health to take down the billboards, or even to prosecute the organization’s leaders for aiding and abetting criminal conduct.Mayday Health is not backing down. This week, it is taking out a television ad on Mississippi channels and putting up 20 additional billboards. This makes the legal fight over the Jackson billboards a crucial test in two interrelated conflicts about abortion that are still coming into public view.[Read: The abortion-rights message that some activists hate]The first is that the availability of abortion pills, which are very safe and effective during the first three months of pregnancy, has transformed the stakes of the abortion fight. The pro-life movement has hoped that states’ new powers to shut down abortion providers will radically reduce the number of abortions around the country. The pro-choice movement has feared that the end of Roe will lead to a resurgence of back-alley abortions that seriously threaten women’s health.Yet the changes wrought by the recent Supreme Court ruling may turn out to be more contained than meets the eye: Legal restrictions on first-trimester abortions have become much harder to enforce because a simple pill can now be used to induce a miscarriage. Abortion by medication is widely available in large parts of the country; as Mayday Health points out on its website, even women who are residents in states where doctors cannot prescribe such pills can set up a temporary forwarding address and obtain them by mail.The second brewing conflict is about limits on free speech. So long as abortions required an in-person medical procedure, the pro-life movement could hope to reduce them by shutting down local clinics offering the service. Now that comparatively cheap and convenient workarounds exist for most cases, effective curbs on abortion require the extra step of preventing people from finding out about these alternatives. That is putting many members of the pro-life movement, be they Mississippi’s attorney general or Republican legislators in several states who are trying to pass draconian restrictions on information and advice about abortions, on a collision course with the First Amendment.Some limits on speech are reasonable. States do, for example, have a legitimate interest in banning advertisements for illegal drugs. If a cocaine dealer took out a billboard advertising his wares, the government should obviously be able to take it down. Especially when it comes to commercial speech, some common-sense restrictions on what people can say or claim have always existed and are well-justified.But the laws that Republicans are now introducing in state legislatures around the country go far beyond such narrow limits on objectionable commercial speech. In South Carolina, for example, Republican legislators have recently sponsored a bill that would criminalize “providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, internet, or any other mode of communication regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion, knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion.”[Read: The coming rise of abortion as a crime]This law—which is modeled on draft legislation that the National Right to Life Committee is trying to get passed in many states around the country—would seriously undermine the right to free speech. It could potentially make doctors in states where abortion is actually legal liable to prosecution for discussing their services with someone who calls them from a state where abortion is illegal. It could even outlaw basic forms of speech such as news stories containing information that might be used by someone seeking an abortion. Theoretically, even this article could fall under that proscription.The subpoena issued by the office of Mississippi’s attorney general is objectionable for similar reasons. Mayday Health is not advertising a commercial product or service. The organization does not handle or distribute abortion pills. All it does is provide information. Although one could reasonably believe that the information Mayday Health is providing may be used to commit acts that are now illegal in some parts of the United States, a ban on informational speech that can be used for the purposes of lawbreaking would be unacceptably broad and vague. After all, would-be lawbreakers might also consult the blog posts of lawyers who explain how to object to an improper search of a vehicle or study the pages of a novel to figure out how to make a Molotov cocktail. Should the attorney or the novelist also be considered to have aided or abetted a crime?Recent efforts to suppress speech about abortion would seriously undermine the nation’s ability to debate the topic openly and honestly. Anybody who believes in the importance of the First Amendment should oppose them. As Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has pointed out, “These proposals are a chilling attempt to stifle free speech … Whether you agree with abortion or not is irrelevant. You have the right to talk about it.”In recent years, the wider debate about free speech has undergone a strange transformation. Historically, the American left staunchly defended the First Amendment because it recognized the central part that free speech played in the struggles against slavery and segregation, and in the fight for the rights of women and sexual minorities. But as establishment institutions, including universities and corporations, became more progressive, and parts of the left came to feel that they had a significant share in institutional power, the absolute commitment to free speech waned.Progressives started to find the idea of restrictions on free speech appealing because they assumed that those making decisions about what to allow and what to ban would share their views and values. Today, some on the extremist left endorse restrictions on free speech, demanding campus speech codes and measures to force social-media sites to “deplatform” controversial commentators and censor what they claim is “misinformation.”[Mary Ziegler: Why exceptions for the life of the mother have disappeared]The transformation of the left’s position on freedom of speech has allowed both principled conservatives and the less-than-principled protagonists of the MAGA movement to cast themselves as defenders of the First Amendment. In the mind of many people, the cause of free speech has astoundingly quickly shifted from being associated with left-wing organizations such as the ACLU to becoming the property of right-leaning pundits and politicians.This makes the new front in the fight over abortion rights an important reminder of why the left should never abandon the cause of free speech. If the left gives up on the core commitment to free speech, what people can say is as likely to be determined by the attorney general of Mississippi as it is by college deans or tech workers. Curbs on free expression have always been a tool of governments that seek to control the lives of their citizens and punish those who defy them. The same remains true today.

To look on the bright side for a moment, one effect of the Republican assault on elections—which takes the form, naturally, of the very thing Republicans accuse Democrats of doing: rigging the system—might be to open our eyes to how undemocratic our democracy is. Strictly speaking, American government has never been a government “by the people.”

This is so despite the fact that more Americans are voting than ever before. In 2020, sixty-seven per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot for President. That was the highest turnout since 1900, a year when few, if any, women, people under twenty-one, Asian immigrants (who could not become citizens), Native Americans (who were treated as foreigners), or Black Americans living in the South (who were openly disenfranchised) could vote. Eighteen per cent of the total population voted in that election. In 2020, forty-eight per cent voted.

Some members of the loser’s party have concluded that a sixty-seven-per-cent turnout was too high. They apparently calculate that, if fewer people had voted, Donald Trump might have carried their states. Last year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, legislatures in nineteen states passed thirty-four laws imposing voting restrictions. (Trump and his allies had filed more than sixty lawsuits challenging the election results and lost all but one of them.)

In Florida, it is now illegal to offer water to someone standing in line to vote. Georgia is allowing counties to eliminate voting on Sundays. In 2020, Texas limited the number of ballot-drop-off locations to one per county, insuring that Loving County, the home of fifty-seven people, has the same number of drop-off locations as Harris County, which includes Houston and has 4.7 million people.

Virtually all of these “reforms” will likely make it harder for some people to vote, and thus will depress turnout—which is the not so subtle intention. This is a problem, but it is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that, as the law stands, even when the system is working the way it’s designed to work and everyone who is eligible to vote does vote, the government we get does not reflect the popular will. Michael Kinsley’s law of scandal applies. The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal.

It was not unreasonable for the Framers to be wary of direct democracy. You can’t govern a nation by plebiscite, and true representative democracy, in which everyone who might be affected by government policy has an equal say in choosing the people who make that policy, had never been tried. So they wrote a rule book, the Constitution, that places limits on what the government can do, regardless of what the majority wants. (They also countenanced slavery and the disenfranchisement of women, excluding from the electorate groups whose life chances certainly might be affected by government policy.) And they made it extremely difficult to tinker with those rules. In two hundred and thirty-three years, they have been changed by amendment only nine times. The last time was fifty-one years ago.

You might think that the further we get from 1789 the easier it would be to adjust the constitutional rule book, but the opposite appears to be true. We live in a country undergoing a severe case of ancestor worship (a symptom of insecurity and fear of the future), which is exacerbated by an absurdly unworkable and manipulable doctrine called originalism. Something that Alexander Hamilton wrote in a newspaper column—the Federalist Papers are basically a collection of op-eds—is treated like a passage in the Talmud. If we could unpack it correctly, it would show us the way.

The Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would probably not have been ratified, is essentially a deck of counter-majoritarian trump cards, a list, directed at the federal government, of thou-shalt-nots. Americans argue about how far those commandments reach. Is nude dancing covered under the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of expression? (It is.) Does the Second Amendment prohibit a ban on assault weapons? (Right now, it’s anyone’s guess.) But no one proposes doing away with the first ten amendments. They underwrite a deeply rooted feature of American life, the “I have a right” syndrome. They may also make many policies that a majority of Americans say they favor, such as a ban on assault weapons, virtually impossible to enact because of an ambiguous sentence written in an era in which pretty much the only assault weapon widely available was a musket.

Some checks on direct democracy in the United States are structural. They are built into the system of government the Framers devised. One, obviously, is the Electoral College, which in two of the past six elections has chosen a President who did not win the popular vote. Even in 2020, when Joe Biden got seven million more votes than his opponent, he carried three states that he needed in order to win the Electoral College—Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—by a total of about a hundred thousand votes. Flip those states and we would have elected a man who lost the popular vote by 6.9 million. Is that what James Madison had in mind?

Another check on democracy is the Senate, an almost comically malapportioned body that gives Wyoming’s five hundred and eighty thousand residents the same voting power as California’s thirty-nine million. The District of Columbia, which has ninety thousand more residents than Wyoming and twenty-five thousand more than Vermont, has no senators. Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, in 1913, senators were mostly not popularly elected. They were appointed by state legislatures. Republicans won a majority of votes statewide in Illinois in the 1858 midterms, but Abraham Lincoln did not become senator, because the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, and they reappointed Stephen A. Douglas.

Even though the Senate is split fifty-fifty, Democratic senators represent forty-two million more people than Republican senators do. As Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, points out in his book on the state of voting rights, “Our Unfinished March” (One World), the Senate is lopsided. Half the population today is represented by eighteen senators, the other half by eighty-two. The Senate also packs a parliamentary death ray, the filibuster, which would allow forty-one senators representing ten per cent of the public to block legislation supported by senators representing the other ninety per cent.

Many recent voting regulations, such as voter-I.D. laws, may require people to pay to obtain a credential needed to vote, like a driver’s license, and so Holder considers them a kind of poll tax—which is outlawed by the Twenty-fourth Amendment. (Lower courts so far have been hesitant to accept this argument.)

But the House of Representatives—that’s the people’s house, right? Not necessarily. In the 2012 Presidential election, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by five million votes, and Democrats running for the House got around a million more votes than Republicans, but the Republicans ended up with a thirty-three-seat advantage. Under current law, congressional districts within a state should be approximately equal in population. So how did the Republicans get fewer votes but more seats? It’s the same thing that let Stephen A. Douglas retain his Senate seat in 1858: partisan gerrymandering.

This is the subject of Nick Seabrook’s timely new book, “One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America” (Pantheon), an excellent, if gloomy, guide to the abuse (or maybe just the use) of an apparently mundane feature of our system of elections: districting.

We tend to think of a “gerrymander” as a grotesquely shaped legislative district, such as the salamander-like Massachusetts district that was drawn to help give one party, the Democratic-Republicans, a majority in the Massachusetts Senate in the election of 1812. The governor of the state, Elbridge Gerry, did not draw the district, but he lent his name to the practice when he signed off on it. (Seabrook tells us that Gerry’s name is pronounced with a hard “G,” but it’s apparently O.K. to pronounce gerrymander “jerry.”)

Gerry’s gerrymander was by no means the first, however. There was partisan gerrymandering even in the colonies. In fact, “the only traditional districting principle that has been ubiquitous in America since before the founding,” Seabrook writes, “is the gerrymander itself.” That’s the way the system was set up.

Partisan gerrymandering has produced many loopy districts through the years, but today, on a map, gerrymandered districts often look quite respectable. No funny stuff going on here! That’s because computer software can now carve out districts on a street-by-street and block-by-block level. A favorite trick is moving a district line so that a sitting member of Congress or a state legislator is suddenly residing in another district. It’s all supposed to be done sub rosa, but, Seabrook says, “those in the business of gerrymandering have a tendency to want to brag about their exploits.”

White House coronavirus adviser Anthony Fauci—the government health bureaucrat at the center of the federal response to COVID-19 for the last almost three years—announced Monday that he is retiring.
Fauci will step down from his position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in December, though he plans to remain an active and engaged public spokesperson. He will "devote himself to traveling, writing and encouraging young people to enter government service," according to Politico.
Even after he exits federal employment, Fauci will still earn a large salary, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He is currently the highest-paid federal official, making more money than the president, military generals, and even Cabinet officials. His salary in 2020 was $434,000, thought he likely made more in 2021 and 2022. According to Open the Books, an oversight and transparency organization, Fauci will be entitled to a pension that yields roughly 80 percent of his salary, so at least $350,000 per year.
Of course, Fauci will be able to make much more money than that. He will surely write books and give speeches. Indeed, the doctor is well-positioned to capitalize on his newfound fame as a hero to Team Blue. No public official, not even President Joe Biden himself, personifies the U.S. government's pandemic approach quite like Fauci, who quite deliberately positioned himself as the avatar of correct COVID-19 behavior. Fauci even said that critics who undermined him were attacking science itself.
These critics have grown more numerous over the course of the pandemic as Fauci's miscalculations became more evident. He has confessed to telling nobles lies—to giving the public information he thought was wrong in order to serve some other goal. He downplayed the effectiveness of masks, purportedly out of concern that there wouldn't be enough of them for hospitals. He also told the public that the herd immunity threshold was lower than his actual mental estimation; in the end, neither figure was accurate, since COVID-19 is able to evade both infection-acquired and immunity-acquired protection.
Fauci became a passionate advocate of mask-wearing, also pressing the public to engage in all kinds of social distancing measures. When criticized for supporting lockdowns, mask mandates, and other COVID-19 mitigation efforts, he has claimed that he only offered guidance, and did not personally authorize the relevant government orders. Many municipalities never felt like they had any choice to disregard missives from federal health officials; local authorities that did chart alternative courses were derided as science-deniers and practitioners of human sacrifice by Fauci sycophants in the media.
When I interviewed Fauci in July, he admitted to making just one mistake: He said that if he could repeat the COVID-19 pandemic, he would recommend lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing measures that were "much, much more stringent." Some people might take note of the dwindling evidence that government mandates led to vastly preferable pandemic outcomes and wonder whether investing a massive bureaucracy with the power to bully millions of people into social isolation, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency was worth it; not Fauci, though. If he could do it all again, the bullying would only increase.
Fauci is also notable for being the foremost public advocate of gain-of-function research, and has steadfastly defended the U.S. government's decision to fund scientific projects that seek to make viruses more deadly and more contagious within laboratory settings. While critics of such research are worried that unsafe lab conditions could result in a scenario where manipulated viruses escape into the world—some people suspect this is exactly what happened with COVID-19—Fauci has mostly responded by equivocating on the literal definition of gain-of-function.
"People use that terminology, gain-of-function, in a way that is not applicable in so many ways to what's being done," said Fauci in his interview with me. "We put guard rails up, and there have been very clear guard rails on what can and cannot be done."
One politician who is not satisfied with Fauci's comments on gain-of-function research is Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who has clashed with Fauci during congressional hearings throughout the pandemic. Paul said Monday that Fauci's retirement "will not prevent a full-throated investigation into the origins of the pandemic."
"He will be asked to testify under oath regarding any discussions he participated in concerning the lab leak," said Paul.
While Fauci was long associated with the view that public health policy should be left to the experts, he has increasingly begun to weigh in on all sorts of political issues. Once he is longer constrained by his role inside the U.S. health apparatus, it's likely that Fauci will become even more vocal. Don't expect him to stick to the science.
The post Anthony Fauci Will Still Get $350,000 a Year From the Government After He Retires appeared first on Reason.com.

Nearly six months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces are still holding their own against Russia. Foreign nations have funneled huge amounts of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine while imposing sanctions that affect Kremlin elites and ordinary Russians alike.
But some want those measures to go further. In an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Russians should "live in their own world until they change their philosophy." In practical terms, he suggested that countries should "close the borders" to Russian citizens. "Whichever kind of Russian," he said, "make them go to Russia."
A number of nations have taken steps to prevent Russians from entering. So far, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and Poland have decided to stop issuing certain visas to Russian citizens. Finland will be slashing its current level of Russian tourist visas by 90 percent. "It's not right that at the same time as Russia is waging an aggressive, brutal war of aggression in Europe," said Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin, "Russians can live a normal life, travel in Europe, be tourists."
But these measures won't just affect tourists. According to LETA, a Latvian news agency, the Latvian Ministry of the Interior has prepared amendments to the country's immigration law in order to "stop issuing…temporary residence permits (TUAs) to citizens of Russia and Belarus," which "will affect employers' opportunities to continue employment with migrant workers from both neighboring countries."
European Union foreign ministers are expected to discuss the issue of Russian visas on August 31. Ahead of that meeting, many major figures—including people within the Zelenskyy administration—have argued against a blanket ban on visas for Russians. They recognize the ethical and practical issues that come with punishing civilians for the actions of an authoritarian government they can't feasibly control.
Oleksiy Arestovych, a military adviser to Zelenskyy, told The Washington Post that he's "not a supporter of collective responsibility [but of] individual." While it might be reasonable to sanction those who overtly support Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said, he favored a "more selective" approach to visa denials for Russians.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz likewise has rejected the idea of an E.U.-wide ban on Russian tourists, arguing that such a measure "would undermine the purpose and effect of targeted sanctions that have been applied to those supporting the war," explains Politico. "This is not the war of the Russian people, but it is Putin's war," Scholz said at a press conference last week. "It is important to us to understand that there are a lot of people fleeing from Russia, because they are disagreeing with the Russian regime."
Enforcing visa restrictions on Russians may prove to be logistically difficult, especially if only certain visa categories are targeted. European officials aren't united on the issue of a visa ban, let alone who it should include. While Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has stressed that "those few Russians who may need an asylum or humanitarian entry" shouldn't be banned, Zelenskyy has previously argued that Russians studying abroad in Europe should be sent home. Limiting entry just to Russians who don't support Putin, meanwhile, would require visa-issuing authorities to make any number of subjective judgments (a complication that Arestovych suggests may have pushed Zelenskyy to favor a blanket ban).
Zelenskyy argues that limiting the movement of Russian travelers should be done "until they change their philosophy." But keeping Russians in Russia isn't the right approach to encourage them to change their views. For one, the Kremlin has censored all manner of information about the war. Back in March, it blocked access to Facebook. It's cracked down on journalists and foreign websites, censoring sites like BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Deutsche Welle. And in March, Putin signed a law that would dole out prison sentences of up to 15 years for those who circulate "false news" about the invasion. Russia arrested over 13,000 anti-war protesters in just the first two weeks after the war began.
Isolating Russians will be counterproductive. Allowing them to travel will surely bring them some measure of joy, but it will also give them access to views and insights on the invasion of Ukraine that they'd be hard-pressed to find at home. Fencing Russians off from freer nations will ensure that they're kept in a hostile information environment, deprived of experiences that may make them more amenable to freedom and more hostile to their current regime. What's more, it could keep certain vulnerable groups—like LGBT people or political dissidents—from leaving for safer places.
A sweeping visa ban would harm the Russian citizens that could very well benefit either from an escape route or exposure to ideas outside Russia's borders. Keeping them isolated will only trap them in a country rife with censorship and risk alienating them from the West, playing directly into Putin's hands.
The post Closing Borders to Russians Only Helps Putin appeared first on Reason.com.

Bret: Gail, do you remember the line from “Raising Arizona” when Nicolas Cage says to Holly Hunter, “There’s what’s right, and there’s what’s right, and never the twain shall meet”? That seems like a pretty good description of Merrick Garland’s predicament.

Gail: Love it when you do those quotes.

Bret: On the one hand, Trump continued to prevaricate and resist repeated requests to return the documents, in flagrant disregard for the rule of law. On the other, as a result of the search, he’s consolidated support among Republicans who seemed to be drifting away just a few weeks ago. He’s turned the media spotlight away from Biden and back to himself. He’s created a new field of theories and conspiracies about what the government was really after.

In short, Garland gave Trump precisely what he wanted. And if the Justice Department can’t show that Trump was hiding something truly sensitive or explosive — like proof that he was in direct personal contact with the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6 — I fear Garland’s going to emerge the loser from this encounter.

Gail: When in doubt, my all-purpose rule in understanding things Trump is to follow the stupendous Maggie Haberman, one of our great White House correspondents. Her analysis covers several possible explanations for the document-piling, all of them based on general stupidity. Maybe he wanted them as extremely high-end mementos. Maybe it’s his habit of hoarding papers. Or just his cosmic view of the world, that “everything he touches belongs to him,” as a lawyer Maggie talked to put it.

Bret: With Trump, the line between the shambolic and the sinister is often blurred. His entire being is like Inspector Clouseau doing an impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” or maybe vice versa.

Gail: But whatever the motive, we can’t allow him to set this kind of precedent for handling presidential documents.

Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro says that “Marxism can’t work in America” because we have too much income mobility. He has a basic misunderstanding of both income mobility and socialism.

Ben Shapiro speaks at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons)
 
Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro posted a video on his YouTube channel last Sunday entitled “Marxism Can’t Work In America.” He starts with a series of historical claims about race, class, Marxism, and American history.
When you have high levels of societal income mobility, when you can be born in America and become very, very wealthy, when you can be a middle-class person and you can get rich, it’s very difficult to make the case that the system is stacked against you — so the Left had to come up with another way to ram their cultural Marxism through, and what they came up with was race.
Because while the United States historically has not had massive class distinctions that are hard and fast, it has had race distinctions that were hard and fast for the vast majority of America’s lifetime, right, until the 1960s, so from 1776 to the 1960s you had hard and fast racial distinctions in law in many parts of the country and that was a serious problem.
So what the Marxists did is they glommed onto this, and they said, “Aha! What we need to do is make Americans understand that the systems are racist, and you need to tear down the systems so you can have, essentially, racial mobility. That is the only way to do this.
As he continues the story, the end of de jure segregation in the mid-1960s should have removed “any remaining excuse you have for some sort of revolution based on class.” Instead of giving up, though, Marxists invented Critical Race Theory, which claims that notionally racially neutral policies and institutions can be discriminatory in their effects.
Even if Shapiro’s factual premises weren’t completely erroneous — most importantly, the US does not have high levels of class mobility relative to comparable nations — his assumption that a high rate of upward mobility would be enough to blunt the socialist critique of economic inequality shows that he has no idea of what and why that critique is.

Ben Shapiro vs. American History
It’s tempting to imagine Ben Shapiro being transported to West Virginia a century ago so he could explain to striking coal miners dodging bullets from Pinkertons that no white people in America at that time were impacted by “massive class distinctions” — and that any class distinctions that might exist at least weren’t “hard and fast.” (Surely if they went back to work and focused on making sure their kids did their homework, it wouldn’t take more than a generation or two for any family of coal miners to become a family of coal barons.)
Putting that aside, though, Shapiro’s grasp of the relevant history really veers off into oblivion on the questions of a) Marxism and b) race.
It’s true enough that the Socialist Party of America and the Communist Party USA were among very few predominantly white organizations in the United States that put any kind of premium on the fight for racial equality in the 1930s and 40s. But does Shapiro really think fighting racism was something they had to focus on because their message about class injustice wasn’t resonating?
The opposite would be closer to the truth. For American socialists in the heyday of socialism, talking about class was the easy part, the path of least resistance. Race and racism were the difficult subjects, the issues that posed knotty strategic problems that socialists could sometimes be tempted to try to evade. Socialists spent most of their time on the economic issues that impacted working people of all races.
And those appeals resonated with plenty of workers. This was an era when even a tiny Trotskyist party, the Socialist Workers Party, led successful general strikes in a mid-sized American city.
More importantly, the idea that Marxists who were involved in the civil rights movement understood the goal as “essentially, racial mobility” is bizarre. And this gets to Shapiro’s core area of confusion about the point of socialist objections of economic inequality.

Is Critical Race Theory Just Warmed-Over Marxism?
It is true that many liberals equate social justice with equal levels of upward mobility for all demographic groups. And this is a view that seems to be reflected in at least some strands of the (quite broad) academic tradition known as Critical Race Theory. In Shapiro’s rant about CRT later in the video, he contemptuously references a 1992 story written by Critical Race Theorist Derrick Bell called “The Space Traders” in which space aliens visit Earth and offer a vast amount of wealth to the white population in exchange for re-enslaving the black population and selling them to the aliens.
Shapiro’s point in bringing this up is to dismiss “The Space Traders” as a ridiculous exercise in demonizing white America.  Writing at Current Affairs, though, Nathan Robinson has offered a thoughtful defense of what the parable gets right:
With each passing year, the country’s governing institutions allow Black people to die who could be saved, if whites were willing to expend a small amount of illegitimately-accumulated wealth. For instance: Black infant mortality is over twice that of white infant mortality. We could pay to address this problem, and relatively easily, through guaranteeing quality healthcare to all and addressing the social determinants of poor health outcomes. But we don’t. What is this but choosing money at the expense of Black lives? In other words: the despicable bargain of the “Space Traders” was not a hypothetical: it was just another way of looking at existing reality. Every dollar spent on luxury housing that is not spent on improving Black healthcare and Black schools is a deal made with the Space Traders.
There’s a straightforward sense in which all of this is correct. Although most of the “racial wealth gap” is at the top of the income distribution, it’s certainly true that the historical effect of Jim Crow has been to concentrate a disproportionate percentage of the black population at the bottom end of that distribution. This would be true even if there was literally no racially discriminatory behavior going on anywhere in American society for the obvious reason that people who are born in poverty are far more likely to end up in poverty than people who were born into the middle class.
But Marxist scholars like Adolph Reed or Pascal Robert would ask a simple question here: Is the objectionable part the poverty itself, or how it’s racially distributed?
In the sense that poor black people who go to substandard schools and have substandard healthcare are being metaphorically sold to the Space Traders, isn’t the same true of those equally poor white people who experience the same material conditions? Would a just society be one in which demographically proportionate percentages of each group went to schools where they had to pass through metal detectors every day and lost their babies because of substandard healthcare while a demographically proportionate percentage of each group was able to rise to the top?
Socialists have never thought so.

The Severe Limits of Ben Shapiro’s Imagination
The great American socialist rabble-rouser Eugene V. Debs famously said that he wanted to rise not “from the ranks” but “with the ranks.” The rate of upward mobility in the United States is much lower than Shapiro seems to think it is — in fact, it’s highest in social-democratic societies like Denmark and Norway. But whatever it was, it would be almost entirely beside socialists’ point.
We don’t object to “massive class distinctions” because they’re too “hard and fast.” We object to them in and of themselves. Our problem with the amount of inequality generated by capitalism isn’t that we think the wrong people are rising to the top. It’s that no human being deserves to live the way they have to if they end up on the bottom — and since it’s impossible for everyone to meritocratically advance, equating justice with unhindered advancement means ignoring the needs of the bulk of the population. And, even more importantly, inequalities in the distribution of material resources reflect a deep inequality in the distribution of power in capitalist economies.
It’s true that liberal meritocrats think that justice means letting the best and brightest of each group rise to the top. But it’s profoundly telling that Shapiro’s political imagination is so limited that he thinks even Marxists share this assumption. That’s the kind of belief that suggests you don’t so much exist within a conservative echo chamber as a whole series of echo chambers embedded within echo chambers like Russian nesting dolls.
Ben Shapiro should actually talk to a Marxist sometime. There’s no telling what he might learn.

This week's episode features one of Twitter's more controversial figures: Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. In true Wisdom of Crowds fashion, we wanted a more measured and wide-ranging exchange of views than Twitter could provide, so we invited Stanley onto the podcast to discuss his work on modern liberal democracy, and its struggles against a resurgent international fascist movement. Our desire for more open and honest dialogue was richly rewarded. Stanley believes that the modern alliance of right-wing and reactionary factions against democracy takes an American form in Donald Trump and the GOP. Does this mean that federal prosecutors should do all in their power to "lock him up" as a threat to the republic even if that imperils the legitimacy of our democracy? What to do about the party that supports Trump?

In Part 2 (available here for subscribers), we asked whether Stanley's definition of fascism included things that many would merely consider illiberal. How does diagnosing fascism work outside of the American context in Europe, where almost every country's notion of citizenship is at least partly based in ethnicity? Are modern notions of citizenship compatible with a non-fascist political philosophy?We also asked Stanley some more personal questions to finish out the episode. Does he see his combative Twitter activity as separate from his academic work and his writing? What is the role of philosophers in the public sphere, and what kind of legacy does he wish to leave? Required Reading:How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason Stanley (Amazon).How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley (Amazon).Jason’s 2015 article, “Democracy and the Demagogue,” where he describes the sources of Trump’s appeal (The New York Times).“American Fascism?” by Jason Stanley (El Pais).“America is now in fascism’s legal phase,” by Jason Stanley (The Guardian).The Newsweek story about Sam Harris’ controversial interview (Newsweek). Emile: On Education, by Jean-Jacques Rosseau (Amazon).

Many scientists are loath to involve themselves in policy debates for fear of losing credibility. They worry that if they participate in public debate on a contested issue, they will be viewed as biased and discounted as partisan. That perception then will lead to science itself being branded as partisan, further weakening public trust in research.

But lately some commentators and scientific leaders have argued that scientists should overcome this unease and contribute to urgent debates from climate change to gun control, alerting people to relevant scientific evidence and, in some cases, endorsing particular policies where their data provide support. One oft-cited example is the ozone hole, where scientists spoke up in support of banning the chemicals that were destroying Earth's ozone layer. Expert intervention helped to galvanize support for the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, an aggressive phase-out that has been an enormous success.

The public actually may be eager to hear from scientists who advocate policies that fall within their realm of expertise, according to a study published in 2021 by my colleagues and me at ETH Zurich. Led by graduate student (now postdoctoral fellow) Viktoria Cologna, we undertook a survey of about 900 people in the U.S. and Germany. We found that most respondents in both countries not only felt that climate scientists should be politically engaged but also felt that scientists should increase their current level of engagement. A large majority in both countries—70 percent of Germans and 74 percent of Americans—also felt that climate scientists should be advocates for specific climate policies. Scientists themselves, in contrast, were much more reticent. We surveyed about 1,100 researchers, and in the U.S., only 59 percent said they should advocate for particular courses of action. (The number was higher in Germany.)

What members of the public did not endorse, for the most part, were political protests by climate scientists. Perhaps this is because people make a distinction between scientists as experts—with a capacity to make well-informed recommendations—and scientists taking specific political stands, which might mark them as political, rather than intellectual, actors.

When specific policies are involved, however, things get stickier and even potentially confusing. Although in principle members of the public approve of scientists endorsing policies, their support for endorsement weakened when people considered an actual plan. Only 51 percent of Germans and 62 percent of Americans supported scientists advocating for carbon taxes, for instance. What people say about abstract principles and how they react to a particular example are not quite the same.

Where does this leave scientists? Our results clearly show their generic fear of engaging with the public is unfounded. People want to hear from scientists about relevant data. But they are less keen about advocacy for particular plans, so concerns that endorsing specific policies can weaken trust may not be entirely wrong.

Ours is of course just one study, and we looked only at the role of individual researchers. The roles of public health agencies appear to generate a different set of responses. A 2021 survey by researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found there is broad support for public health agencies and their activities in the U.S. Yet although public health experts say that dealing with the medical effects of climate change is a major responsibility of these health agencies, most survey respondents did not. Perhaps many people don't realize how seriously climate change threatens health.

Trusting in science is not an either-or proposition. It depends on many variables. Researchers do need to stay within their areas of authority: climate scientists should not be offering stock tips or medical advice. But our research suggests that they can feel comfortable offering policy advice in fields where they are acknowledged experts. The ozone story is a case in point: no one knew better than ozone scientists about the cause of the dangerous hole and therefore what needed to be done to fix it.

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Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it was buying the Roomba vacuum maker iRobot. On the surface, this move looks like a massive online retail marketplace acquiring a popular gadget to sell to its loyal shoppers. Roomba is a sparkling consumer product, and iRobot has sold 40 million of them over the past two decades. Shoppers today find them occupying end caps at big retailers such as Costco and Target. The device’s smooth, spinning design has given it a huge chunk of the $3 billion-a-year robot-vacuum market; three quarters of all smart vacuums sold in America bear the Roomba name. In that way, the deal makes sense.But my suspicion is that, for Amazon, the deal has nothing to do with cleaning your floors. What it seems to be about—expanding the company’s reach further into people’s lives—should trouble everyone.Amazon’s monopoly power looks like this: Sales on Amazon account for at least half of all online commerce in the U.S. Three out of every four product searches begin on the site. Amazon’s shipping and warehousing service delivers about a quarter of all e-commerce packages in America and is on pace to overtake UPS as the second-largest consumer package-delivery company after the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon Web Services is by far the largest cloud-computing company in the country. Amazon Echo accounts for two-thirds of all smart speakers. This is by no means a complete accounting.The iRobot deal follows a known Amazon strategy, one that Jeff Bezos has admitted to in the past: using mergers to buy its way to dominance. (I asked Amazon if this is what it’s doing with Roomba, but the company did not comment.) Several companies make and sell robotic vacuums, including brands like Shark and others. But Roomba is the household name, so ubiquitous that it’s shorthand for every other robot vacuum available. By simply taking over the company that makes the most popular product in the industry, Amazon can grow its monopoly without actually having to out-innovate and out-compete its rivals.[David Dayen: America’s monopoly problem goes way beyond the tech giants]Amazon can then use its gatekeeper power by pairing Roomba with its monopoly online marketplace and Prime subscription program, leaving other vacuum brands to wither and atrophy, unable to gain the attention and prominence held by Roomba on the country’s most popular shopping site.Amazon has used a range of anti-competitive tactics to secure a commanding position across a variety of home-tech products, all designed to further its dominance of the smart home. The company often sells its Echo smart speakers at a loss, mirroring the predatory pricing strategy it used to sell diapers, its Kindle, and even its Prime Video service in order to drive out rivals and expand its primacy. Amazon might very well employ the same strategy with Roomba. Combine its monopoly retail power with below-cost pricing, and the deal becomes a competition killer.This merger isn’t just about controlling the robot-vacuum industry, or even about smart-home devices. Owning Roomba would give the world’s most dominant spy-tech maker yet another portal into our homes and lives. It could map where we live, what we own, and what it should be selling to its hundreds of millions of captured customers.Amazon got its towering place in home tech the same way it is expanding it now—by buying other companies. It bought the voice-assistant start-up Evi Technologies in 2013 to help create what would eventually become Alexa, the voice of Echo and by far the leading smart-speaker voice assistant. Then, to extend its eyes and ears into people’s homes, Amazon bought two start-ups: the camera maker Blink in 2017 and a doorbell company called Ring in 2018. Today, Ring accounts for an estimated 40 percent of all video doorbells installed in America.These devices have given Amazon incredible access to people’s daily lives. The company has a documented history of leveraging the data its vast home-tech network captures in order to grow—and to expand its monopoly power. For example, Amazon has for years used Alexa’s algorithm to steer customers toward Amazon’s own products. Ring monitors and records every interaction with a customer's doorbell, including every doorbell buzz and every movement in proximity to the outside of the door, and congressional investigators found that “acquiring Ring and Blink was in part to expand and reinforce [Amazon’s] market power for its other business lines.”Amazon’s quest for consumer data comes with deep and real concerns about the way the company uses the images and sounds its home-tech products capture. It has partnered with police departments across America to get its Ring doorbell installed in neighborhoods, where it is used to surveil communities unknowingly and without consent. Amazon then shares the video footage its doorbells capture with police without a warrant or permission. Its Echo speakers have captured private conversations and shared those with Amazon without the permission of the eavesdropped. (On its website, Amazon says, “On some occasions Alexa may accidentally wake up when the wake word wasn’t spoken, but your Echo device thought it was” and that the company is “constantly improving our wake word detection technology.”)[Read: How to fight Amazon (before you turn 29)]The latest Roomba models capture information that Amazon, at the moment, doesn’t have access to. iRobot’s new operating system maps the floor plan and contents of the spaces in which it operates. The vacuums are now equipped with a camera so it can respond to commands like “Clean in front of the couch.” But that means it knows what kind of couch you have—and crib, and dog bed, and so on. If the deal goes through, Amazon will too, whether or not you wanted Amazon to know that stuff. (Amazon did not comment on how it would use data collected by Roombas.)If this deal feels bad and intrusive, that’s because it is. People buy a Roomba because they want something that will clean their floors. Most folks don’t want a spinning, camera-equipped data vacuum taking stock of their home and its contents, then beaming that information back to the most powerful retail monopoly on Earth.And Amazon’s data sweeps are more than creepy; they’re a roadblock to other companies that might want to jump into the smart-home market. Through its acquisition of Whole Foods, its attempted purchase of One Medical, and other deals, Amazon is positioned to crush new rivals. Every piece of information Amazon collects about people’s lives—what they most want to buy, what questions they most commonly ask, what they keep inside their homes—raises the barrier to fair competition even higher.Regulators will look at this deal closely, as they should. The direction of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is changing under the leadership of Lina Khan, a critic of monopoly power and Amazon specifically. If the agency sees this deal as I do, Amazon may have to leave the floor-cleaning to someone else.

Supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake pray at an election-night gathering on August 2, 2022. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.)Three things are true at once. First, the United States is the most Christian advanced democracy in the world. Even with declining rates of religious belief and declining rates of church attendance, a solid supermajority (65 percent) of Americans identify as Christian. America’s exceptional religiosity isn’t just measured by adherence but also by intensity. Look at the Pew Research Center chart below, which measures the percentage of people by country who say that religion is “very important in their lives.” While there are developing countries that are close to (or exceed) the United States, there is not one other true peer nation that is both mostly Christian and where most people say their faith is “very important”:Second, both the Republican and Democratic parties are utterly dependent upon their most devout members for their electoral success. As I’ve noted before, nonwhite Democrats (and especially black Democrats) are among the most God-fearing, churchgoing members of American society. At the same time, the Republican Party would be irrelevant without its own white Evangelical base. The bottom line is that Christians in both parties have absolute veto power over (at the very least) the party’s national candidates. In many states that veto power extends to statewide candidates, congressional candidates, and even candidates for the smallest local positions. Third, American political culture is a toxic, hyperpartisan, corrupt, and increasingly violent mess. Given the first two factors mentioned above, this should not be. After all, Jesus could not have been more clear. In John 13, he declared, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” That’s the dream. Here’s the reality: Again, remember that both of these coalitions are chock-full of Christians. It is not the case (at least not yet) that America has one religious party and one secular party. The mutual loathing you see comes from people who could recite every syllable of the Apostles’ Creed side-by-side and believe wholeheartedly in the divine inspiration of scripture. How does this happen? The longer I live the more convinced I am that our Christian political ethic is upside down. On a bipartisan basis, the church has formed its members to be adamant about policies that are difficult and contingent and flexible about virtues that are clear and mandatory. To understand what I mean, let’s refer back to one of my favorite passages in scripture—Micah 6:8. Like many biblical passages, it is simple to understand yet tough to execute: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”In many ways, each of those virtues is in tension with each other. Humility requires us to acknowledge our own limitations and inability to formulate political responses to complex human problems. For example, how do you close the racial achievement gap in American education? What are the just limits of individual liberty? How do you decrease violent crime? Is there a path to public safety that does not include mass incarceration?Yet while we can and should recognize the possibility that we can be wrong, we can’t be paralyzed into inaction. We might be wrong, but we have to try to do what’s right, as best as we can discern it.But then the instant we press on to “do justice” the demand to “love kindness” appears to block the way. How many times have we heard the claim that the “old rules” of civility and decency are simply inadequate for the times? That’s a core argument of the new right, for example. We tried decency, they say, and it didn’t work. Now is the time to punch back. Yet that mindset is utterly antithetical to the Christian moral ethic. You’re not kind until kindness doesn’t work. You’re to be kind even through the most brutal acts of repression and in the face of complete political defeat.In the face of the moral complexity and difficulty of the true Christian moral call, we’ve created a hierarchy of values. It’s not that we absolutely reject kindness or humility or decency. It’s not that we’re going to condemn the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—it’s just that they’re “secondary values.” When push comes to shove, it’s our vision of justice that matters. This is why, for example, a Republican like Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake (who leads her campaign bio with the words “faith courage truth”) can absolutely count on Republican Evangelicals to turn out for her en masse even though she has spread an avalanche of election lies and in spite of her proud crudeness in publicly praising Ron DeSantis’ and Donald Trump’s so-called “BDE” (which stands for “big dick energy”):Kari Lake @KariLakeUh-oh! Twitter is on fire because I said President Trump & Gov @RonDeSantisFL both have “BDE” I stand by what I said. 🤷‍♀️ August 15th 20222,961 Retweets14,473 LikesThe same analysis applies to Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano and a host of other MAGA Republicans—Christian politicians who act as if entire sections of clear biblical moral commands simply don’t exist so long as they take the “just” (in right-wing eyes) position on issues of social and cultural consequence. But here’s the paradox—forsake one virtue for another, and you increase the chances that gain nothing at all. To put it another way, when we transgress moral laws, we’re fools if we think we can control the consequences.It turns out that since justice is often hard to achieve, we often need humility to understand all the complexities, and kindness maintains the relationships that are indispensable to an exchange of ideas. Block out half of America, for example, and you’re going to lose access to the relationships and knowledge that enrich your understanding even of the issues that you care about the most. When I encounter the most partisan preachers and public Christian personalities, I’m often gobsmacked at the inverse relationship between their political certainty and their political knowledge. The less they know about an issue, the more confident they’re obviously right. (This is a confession, by the way. To take one example—the more I began to understand about the reality and legacy of racism in America, the less certain I became in my conventional, confident conservatism about law, liberty, and economic opportunity. I’m now far more open to contrary views.)Earlier this month I was in a conversation with friends, and one of them brought up how he’s combatting the pull toward animosity by revisiting the civil rights movement. In face of indescribably greater oppression than any American community faces today (including the American Evangelical community) its leaders and members demonstrated a degree of grace and forbearance that feels unimaginable today. In a 2004 interview, the late John Lewis described the approach:In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love — the message of love in action: don’t hate. If someone hits you, don’t strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive. That’s not anything any Constitution say anything about forgiveness. It is straight from the Scripture: reconciliation.No one can argue that the civil rights movement neglected the quest for justice. At the same time, no one can credibly argue that it sacrificed the fruit of the spirit in that urgent quest. It demonstrated that fruit, even in the face of beatings, lynchings, fire hoses, and dogs. And the argument now is, what? That these acts of love and grace were all well and good when dealing with Jim Crow, but now we’ve got wokeness to confront? In recent years I’ve taken to rereading scripture through a specific lens—understanding that all of scripture was written to a community of believers that enjoys a fraction of the wealth and power we take for granted today, and that the entire New Testament was written to a church that had no meaningful political voice and endured violent religious persecution. And here’s what we find—the description of biblical justice is less specific than the multiple descriptions of biblical virtue. That doesn’t mean we have no standard for justice at all. As Tim Keller has argued, biblical justice is characterized by radical generosity, universal equality, “life-changing advocacy for the poor,” and corporate and individual responsibility.  That conception of justice gives us a frame for discussing policy. It does not provide the specific answers. Biblical virtues, by contrast, are far more precise and far more detailed. This makes sense, especially for scripture that is intended to guide us in all nations, in all times. The “what” of politics (the specific policies we support) will evolve. They’ll often be debatable. We’ll have uncertain answers to complex questions.But the “how” of politics—the virtues we display as we engage—don’t evolve at all. The fruit of the spirit is timeless. There is no political emergency that justifies a departure from these core values. Scripture anticipates that Christians will face evil, yet the command is clear: “See to it that no one repays evil for evil to anyone, but always pursue what is good for one another and for all.”Christian young people are often taught that they should be countercultural. The youth group version of that admonition goes something like this: When the world is profane, your speech is clean. When the world is drunk, you are sober. When the world is promiscuous, you are chaste. How do you know we’re Christian? We don’t cuss, drink, or have premarital sex. But the call to counterculture is much more comprehensive. When the world is greedy, you are generous. When the world is cruel, you are kind. When the world is fearful, you are faithful. When the world is proud, you are humble. How do you know we’re Christian, by our love. Yes, we say. Yes to all of this. Right until the moment when we think that our kindness, our faithfulness, or our humility carries with it a concrete political cost. We think we know what’s just, and we can’t do justice without power. And so, in our arrogance, we think we know better than God. We can’t let kindness or humility stand in the way of justice. Yet we’re sowing the wind, and now we reap the whirlwind. The world’s most-Christian advanced nation is tearing itself apart, and its millions of believers bear much of the blame. One more thing …It’s not often that I’m going to recommend a Twitter thread, but this series of tweets by Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm is absolutely fascinating. It’s about how the nuances of the Hebrew language help us better understand the Tower of Babel. Take a couple minutes. Read it all:Ari Lamm @AriLammWhy Read The Bible In Hebrew?
Let's talk about one of the most influential stories *ever* for thinking about the nature of human progress—the Tower of Babel.
What exactly did Babel's builders do wrong?
A thread (for non-Hebrew readers too!) 🧵 1 August 19th 20221,460 Retweets8,375 LikesOne last thing …There is nothing quite like mass corporate worship. At its best it's a reminder that the church is a “great multitude” from “every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.” This song is simple and beautiful, sung before a great multitude. Enjoy. I hope it blesses you as much as it blessed me:

“In July, Britain’s National Health Service announced a major revamp of its gender identity services for young people. The famed Tavistock clinic — officially named the Gender Identity Development Service, operated by the Tavistock and Portman Trust and a flashpoint for the country’s debate about gender, trans issues and hormone treatments — would be shuttered. As the New York Times reported, it would be replaced by “a more distributed and comprehensive network of medical care for adolescents seeking hormones and other gender treatments.”
This outcome was strongly hinted at in the interim report of the Cass Review, an ongoing investigation into gender identity services for children, headed by the accomplished pediatrics expert Hilary Cass. “It has become increasingly clear that a single specialist provider model is not a safe or viable long-term option in view of concerns about lack of peer review and the ability to respond to the increasing demand,” she wrote in February.
Cass was tasked with evaluating Tavistock in the wake of years of complaints from internal whistleblowers and outside observers, as well as a lawsuit brought by Keira Bell, a woman who says her teenage decision to transition to male was not sufficiently challenged by medical professionals and who subsequently detransitioned. Critics allege that clinicians were pressured to fast-track kids with complex mental-health comorbidities toward physical transition — and that activists had undue influence on the operations of the clinic.
Tavistock’s critics have been vindicated by Cass’s work so far — her interim report notes straightforwardly that this is exactly what was happening: “Primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.” In addition, there’s the problem of “diagnostic overshadowing — many of the children and young people presenting have complex needs, but once they are identified as having gender-related distress, other important healthcare issues that would normally be managed by local services can sometimes be overlooked.”
One of the many disturbing things about this controversy has been how little data Tavistock apparently bothers collecting. During the Bell hearing, the clinic was initially unable to produce very basic court-requested information about its operations. When the data was finally produced, it appeared to show, contrary to many clinicians’ and activists’ claims, that kids who went on blockers there experienced no mental-health benefits (it also showed that nearly all kids who went on blockers at Tavistock proceed to hormone treatment).
Along the same lines, Cass’s work reveals that the clinic has apparently never had any sort of unifying set of standard practices, let alone a shared philosophy about clinical work with gender nonconforming youth. “At primary, secondary and specialist level, there is a lack of agreement, and in many instances a lack of open discussion, about the extent to which gender incongruence in childhood and adolescence can be an inherent and immutable phenomenon for which transition is the best option for the individual, or a more fluid and temporal response to a range of developmental, social, and psychological factors,” wrote Cass. As a result of this lack of professional agreement, “children and young people can experience… a ‘clinician lottery,’ and failure to have an open discussion about this issue is impeding the development of clear guidelines about their care.”
Given that Tavistock has been administering blockers and hormones to young people since 2011, this is completely unacceptable. Some critics of youth gender medicine refer to the administration of blockers and hormones as an ongoing “experiment” — a term trans activists often take issue with — but in a certain sense this is worse: an experiment at least has agreed-upon rules beforehand, plans for collecting and publishing data, and so on. Tavistock barely had any of this: it’s just been an absolute mess from the beginning, and the institution’s fundamental disorganization and dysfunction left a vacuum into which could step pressure groups that didn’t prioritize careful clinical practices.
Even a failed experiment, properly conducted, advances science a few steps and offers stepping-stones for the next generation. That’s not really the case here. While the ruins of Tavistock certainly will offer lessons to future clinicians, they will be almost entirely “how-not-to.”
One of the most frustrating things about this episode has been the abuse heaped on anyone who has questioned the trend toward carelessness in youth gender medicine exemplified by Tavistock. As the gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock, who left the University of Sussex after facing a wave of harassment there, put it: “Just here wondering whether any of the academics who have spent four years mocking, ridiculing, defaming and mischaracterizing my views feel any regret, now a scandal about puberty blockers and child transition is emerging in the mainstream.”
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Having encountered a version of this in my own world of journalism — albeit not a fraction of what Stock went through — I can answer that confidently: no. There will be few apologies, if any, and even less introspection. Already, online, many are distorting the news of Tavistock’s closing.
Next up, I think, is the United States. Our healthcare system is an order of magnitude bigger, less organized and less carefully regulated than the NHS. What possible reason would any thinking person have to believe that the same issues that plagued Tavistock aren’t going to pop up, again and again, in our own nationwide patchwork of youth gender clinics?
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 2022 World edition. 
The post The trouble with Tavistock appeared first on The Spectator World.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has been hampered by failings experienced by autocratic states during conflict, according to a far-reaching new study of command in war by one of the UK’s most prominent academics in the field.

Command, a wide-ranging analysis of post-second world war conflicts by the leading strategic studies expert Lawrence Freedman, examines a series of well-known conflicts, from the Cuban missile crisis to the French defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, through to the Falklands war and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, up to the present war in Ukraine.

“The big theme,” said Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, “is that autocracies are very bad at this. A lot of most catastrophic decisions come from autocratic decision-making. That is certainly the case with Vladimir Putin but also Saddam Hussein and even [the Argentine military dictator Leopoldo] Galtieri during the Falklands war.”

But he adds: “It’s not that democracies always make better decisions.”

As Freedman’s book sets out to show, in key interactions between military and political leaders – which even in the best circumstances can be characterised by tensions and personal conflicts – it is the lack of open and often critical feedback that leads to bad decision-making.

“Autocracies don’t have the feedback mechanism, and dig themselves in by believing that the advantage of autocracy is bold and decisive decision-making.

“While in certain circumstances you can tolerate quite a lot of bad decision-making and come out all right, because you have superior numbers, where it is very tight, one poor decision or bit of bad luck can put you out completely.”

And while Russian military operations for more than a century have often relied on using overwhelming numbers (often with little consideration for losses), in Ukraine, Russia appears to have been constrained by domestic political considerations from introducing a general mobilisation, which has limited the scale of forces it can deploy.

Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, has written a new study about command in military conflicts. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

One issue that has intrigued Freedman, as well as other analysts, is why Putin – whose use of force had been limited in scope before Ukraine – embarked on such a dangerous and badly prepared-for gamble in Ukraine.

“Military force had been quite good for Putin up until now. He used it effectively in Chechnya, Crimea, Georgia and Syria. He used it in quite a limited fashion in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014 where those doing his dirty work wanted him to take an even more aggressive approach.

“But his approach to the current Ukraine conflict has clearly been deluded. You have to assume he didn’t realise the gamble he was taking. He genuinely thought Ukraine would crumble quite quickly, and it’s hard to know why. “Even those [foreign] analysts who thought Ukraine’s military might not do well didn’t believe that the Ukrainian people would succumb. But he did.

He did see it as a special military operation [ the term the Kremlin has consistently used rather than “war”] that would last a few days. And once that plan had failed, they were on the back foot.”

A key failure, in Freedman’s view, was that while Russian intelligence had widely infiltrated Ukraine – as even Kyiv has acknowledged – the key figures around Putin either did not understand Ukraine or acted as an echo chamber for him.

“Experts on Ukraine in Russia don’t seem to have been consulted. It looks like Putin was talking to his mates in the FSB [the federal security service] and GRU [military intelligence ] who shared his prejudices. And the ranting speech he gave on 21 February [three days before Russia invaded] is still as good a guide as anything to believe what he thinks. It is clear from that that he finds it very hard to take Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, seriously. I think he thought Zelenskiy would make a deal. He didn’t.”

At the heart of the problem, Freedman believes, is the rigidly hierarchical nature of the Kremlin’s decision-making and how those at the very top are immune to responsibility for mistakes.

“There are no incentives to tell the truth on the ground to the higher command. The senior military – people such as defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov – are all part of the inner circle. They’ve sacked lots of generals now they know that there’s a problem. But it’s not them that’s the problem. It’s always someone else.”

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And since Russia’s first plan to topple Ukraine with a coup de main against Kyiv collapsed within the first few weeks amid fierce Ukrainian resistance and Russian logistical incompetence, Moscow has struggled to find a credible plan B.

“They tried for plan B – the famous convoy that gathered outside Kyiv – but they couldn’t find one. It was logistically beyond them. The lines were too exposed. So they reverted back to concentrating on the Donbas.

“Even then it took until May to focus on what they could do – artillery barrages on a narrow front, a tactic for which Ukraine had no easy response, except to take heavy casualties until western weapons systems began arriving.”

Even now, six months into the war, Freedman struggles to understand the logic of the Kremlin, not least its tactic of creating a wintertime energy crisis in Europe to undermine support for Kyiv.

There are no incentives to tell the truth on the ground to the higher command. They are all part of the inner circle Lawrence Freedman

“I think the only ‘theory of victory’ the Kremlin has at the present is that the west turns on Ukraine because of the energy crisis. But the surprise there is that Moscow has not asked for a ceasefire now. That would put Zelenskiy on the spot because he couldn’t agree to one.

“Instead, Putin is still acting as though he expects more from this war than he has already got. Why I think there are some signs of desperation on the Russian side is that some are beginning to recognise that an energy crunch is not going to lead to a betrayal of Ukraine. In the long term, that signals the risk of deep damage to Russia’s economy.”

While Freedman is cautious about predicting that Russian forces could face a second big setback – not least in the south of Ukraine, where Kyiv has been effectively pressing on Kherson – he sees the same lack of institutional imagination defining the future trajectory of the war.

“Is there going to be something big like Russian forces getting encircled and trapped [around Kherson]? Unless the system gets a shock like the one experienced in late February and early March [when Russia abandoned its effort to take Kyiv], I think Russia will doggedly carry on, if for no other reason than that it can’t think of anything better to do. The Kremlin is paralysed.”

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine by Lawrence Freedman is published by Allen Lane on 8 September

Like Billy Pilgrim, the unstuck-in-time protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade, it can sometimes feel like we're all witnessing the same censorship fights again and again.
Since it was published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five has been a repeated target for book burners—sometimes quite literally. In 1973, 32 copies of the book were thrown into the furnace at a high school in Drake, North Dakota, on orders from the local school board after parents complained about the book's sex and profanity. Sensibilities about those things have come a long way in the past few decades, but Vonnegut's novel is still a target. In 2011, a school board in Missouri barred the book from the curriculum and ordered it confined to a special section of the school's library.
The American Library Association says Slaughterhouse-Five was one of the most frequently challenged books of the 20th century.
It is also one of the most important books of that century for its unflinching portrayal of the brutality of war, its unconventional and deliberately meta structure, and its fatalist perspective that nonetheless eschews nihilism. Inspired by Vonnegut's experience as a prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five explores the absurdity of mass-scale murder. It asks, but leaves mostly unanswered, the questions about free will and responsibility that recur throughout many of Vonnegut's other works.
In short, it's about a lot more than sex and profanity.
Of course, it has those things too, in ample doses, as the would-be censors point out. But just as Slaughterhouse-Five catapulted Vonnegut to fame, the attempts to ban the book boosted his standing as a critic of all forms of censorship. Vonnegut died in 2007—so it goes—but that crusade lives on through the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in the author's hometown of Indianapolis. The museum includes a library of "banned books," and the foundation behind the operation funds First Amendment advocacy efforts.
The right to express violent and crude thoughts in art is essential. But Vonnegut, cynical and ornery as he could be, always strove to make a deeper point with his vulgarity. "If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind," he wrote to the Drake school board in 1973. "They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are."
The post How <em>Slaughterhouse-Five</em> Became a Repeated Target of Book Burners appeared first on Reason.com.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution.

The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law this past week, allocates more than $300bn to energy and climate reform, including $30bn in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and wind turbines.

Notice the difference?

The Inflation Reduction Act is an important step toward slowing or reversing climate the crisis. It also illustrates the nation’s shift away from regulating businesses to subsidizing businesses.

From 1932 through the late 1970s, the government mainly regulated businesses. This was the era of the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies begun under Franklin D Roosevelt (the SEC, ICC, FCC, CAB, and so on) culminating in the EPA of 1970.

The government still regulates businesses, of course, but the biggest thing the federal government now does with businesses is subsidize them.

Consider Joe Biden’s biggest first-term accomplishments:

the Chips and Science Act (with $52bn of subsidies to semiconductor firms, plus another $24bn in manufacturing tax credits);

the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550bn of new spending on railroads, broadband and the electric grid, among other things);

and now the Inflation Reduction Act (including the subsidies I noted).

This shift from regulation to subsidy has characterized every recent administration.

Trump’s Operation Warp Speed delivered $10bn of subsidies to Covid vaccine manufacturers.

Obama’s Affordable Care Act subsidized the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries (indirectly, through massive subsidies to the buyers of healthcare and pharmaceuticals).

And Obama spent about $489bn bailing out the financial industry (and, notably, never fully restored financial regulations that previous administrations had repealed), as well as GM and Chrysler.

Before the 1980s, the US would have done all this differently. Instead of subsidizing broadband, semiconductors, energy companies, vaccine manufacturers, health care and pharmaceutical businesses, and the financial sector, we would have regulated them – requiring them to act in various ways.

If this regulatory alternative seems far-fetched today, that’s because of how far we’ve come from the regulatory state of the 1930s to the 1970s, to the subsidy state beginning in the 1980s.

Why the big shift? Because of the change in the balance of power between large corporations and the government.

Today it’s politically difficult, if not impossible, for government to demand that corporations (and their shareholders) bear the costs of public goods. Government must bribe them instead.

I saw this first-hand. Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan was blocked by the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, which would have had to sacrifice some profits.

By contrast, Obama got the Affordable Care Act by paying off these industries – all but guaranteeing them larger profits from a massive inflow of newly subsidized customers.

Spending by corporations on lobbying increased from $1.44bn in 1999 to $3.77bn in 2021 and is on track to exceed $4bn this year.

This tidal wave of corporate money has occurred at the same time large American corporations have globalized, to the point where many are able to play off the United States against other nations – demanding government subsidies in return for creating jobs and doing their cutting-edge research in America.

The new Chips Act shows how powerful and highly profitable semiconductor manufacturers, such as US-based Intel, can extract billions of dollars in a global shakedown for where they’ll make semiconductor chips.

In the 1980s, yours truly was involved in a national debate over “industrial policy”. The question, put simply, was whether the government should subsidize certain industries that generate large social benefits in the form of new technologies.

I argued that the government was already engaged in a hidden industrial policy, disguised, for example, as grants to the aerospace and telecom industries by the Department of Defense and to the pharmaceutical industry by the National Institutes of Health. It would be far better to do industrial policy in the open, so that the public could assess what it was paying for and what it was getting in return.

Opponents, which included just about every Republican, were indignant at the very idea that government ought to be “intruding” on their blessed free market.

Today’s subsidies are far larger, and even supported by Republicans.

Republican senator John Cornyn, arguing for the Chips Act, said, “What we are doing is industrial policy unlike people of my free-market background have done before.”

In truth, the three decades-long shift in power to big corporations has transformed industrial policy into a system for bribing them to do the sorts of things government once demanded they do as the price for being part of the American system.

Author and neuroscientist Sam Harris raised eyebrows on Twitter on Thursday over comments he made about Hunter Biden, saying that his alleged laptop controversy was less significant than the potential damage Donald Trump could do to "democracy."

"Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement, I would not have cared," Harris told Trigger Pod hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster in a video clip that has been viewed online over 2.1 million times on Twitter.

President Joe Biden's son has been a repeated source of controversy, beginning with a New York Post story published just prior to the 2020 election that publicized emails allegedly showing Hunter Biden arranging a meeting between a Ukrainian business associate and his father in April 2015, and urging Biden's "influence" in May 2014.

The report garnered even more attention when both Facebook and Twitter restricted the reach of the post on their social media networks.

Harris argued in the 90-plus minute podcast episode, titled "Trump, Religion, Wokeness," that Hunter Biden's actions should not be compared with those of the former president who is currently involved in various legal battles, including accusations of hiding classified documents at his Florida home.

Kisin told Newsweek that Harris' comments were in response to the hosts asking him why he broke ranks with many former friends over Trump, as well as why he celebrated Twitter's ban of the former president.

"Whatever the scope of what Joe Biden's corruption is–we can just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, or China–it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It's like a firefly to the sun," Harris said during the interview.

"It doesn't even stack up against Trump University," he continued. "Trump University, as a story, is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop in my view."

Sam Harris: “Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement - I would not have cared” pic.twitter.com/FG3JI68MvO — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 18, 2022

After Harris said the social media channels limiting the reach of the New York Post story was "a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump" that was "warranted," Kisin followed up by asking if Harris was content with such a conspiracy.

"It doesn't matter what part's conspiracy, what part's out in the open," Harris replied. "If people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon...if there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a convo about what we could do to reflect its course, is that a conspiracy?"

Harris issued a response via Twitter on Thursday afternoon after saying he didn't speak "very clearly" in his comments, saying he "was essentially arguing for a principle of self-defense (where there's a continuum of proportionate force that is appropriate and necessary to use)."

"On the podcast, I was speaking narrowly about the wisdom and propriety of ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election," Harris wrote. "I've always thought that this was a very hard call, ethically and journalistically...Nothing I said on that podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or take other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency (nor do I think they did that)."

On the podcast, I was speaking narrowly about the wisdom and propriety of ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election. I’ve always thought that this was a very hard call, ethically and journalistically. 4/6 — Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) August 18, 2022

Attorney Alan Dershowitz told the conservative media outlet Newsmax in April that Hunter Biden simply mentioning his father in emails was not grounds for incriminating the current president.

Kisin, who describes himself politically as being in the center while Foster "is an old school leftie with some 'small C' conservative views, said "there was a respectful conversation about (Harris') views" as is customary on their podcast–which does not entertain "gotcha" questions and the like.

He admitted to finding Harris' comments regarding Hunter Biden "surprising."

"Neither of us share his views but it's really important that he had the space to express them," Kisin said. "We were on Joe Rogan's show a few weeks ago and I learned that from him: the most important thing is to let people express themselves. Then you can disagree and discuss.

"I thought we pushed back on him respectfully and also forcefully. It's now for the viewers to make up their mind about what they watched."

Asked about the reactions to the interview, noticeably on networks like Twitter, Kisin said he and Foster both thought it would garner plenty of attention for comments regarding the Trump Twitter ban.

"But also Sam made a lot of points we thought were important and agreed with, particularly about wokeness being a disaster," Kisin said, adding that a paywalled portion of the interview included questions about Harris' "controversial COVID stance" that led to a "robust debate" due to his being in favor of vaccine mandates.

Newsweek reached out to Harris for comment.

L ast year my employer, the University of Chicago, announced in its weekly newsletter that it was celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Office of LGBTQ Student Life mentorship program. The story focused on the program’s founder, Kathy Forde, tracing her biography from her self-discovery as a young lesbian in the 80s. As a gay staff member myself, it was difficult not to appreciate Forde’s courage in being “out” from the beginning of her career, or her efforts leading to the university’s extension of health benefits to same-sex partners in 1992. It seemed churlish to say (my boyfriend, in fact, told me it was churlish to say) that the news release made me uncomfortable, casting queer staff as potential agents of the transmission not of knowledge but of values, in a tone weirdly familiar from the evangelical subculture I had grown up in, and from which I had escaped, I thought, to academia. If words like “queer” were swapped out with “Christian,” it could have been an item from the bulletin of my childhood megachurch.

My point is not that the contemporary university is becoming, in the guise of a progressive secular morality organized around care for and affirmation of “identities,” its own sort of church. But the university’s occasionally churchy tone does reveal the common participation of ecclesiastical, pedagogical, and other American institutions in a new way of managing the self. “Mentorship,” following “leadership,” “values,” “mission,” and other such terms suggesting an affective, ethical supplement to institutions otherwise lacking human warmth, became an important concept in academic and corporate circles in the 1990s. Since then it has only increased in significance. It is now an object of considerable scholarly investigation, both from researchers who, imagining that “mentorship” is desirable and quantifiable, seek to refine techniques for increasing it, and from others of a more Foucauldian bent who wonder what kinds of “governmentality” are being exercised, and to what ends, through “mentoring.”

Queer mentees participating in the University of Chicago’s program are imagined, at least in its own discourse, as engaged in a process of supervised self-construction — a process at once utterly intimate and folded unproblematically into the university’s institutional workings and academic agendas. Chicago’s program, which matches queer university employees with students seeking “mentorship,” operates similarly to nearly 175 (counted in a recent report) other such LGBT+ mentorship programs at universities across the country — and countless more programs organized on the basis of sex, race, etc. At Chicago, “mentorship” is defined according to the program’s website as providing “support” to students as they learn how to articulate themselves publicly as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc. and “connecting” them to “community” sites and resources off-campus.

“Coming out” is presented here as a difficult self-questioning, which can be steered toward its correct conclusion by an authoritatively deputized adult imagined as a bridge both to the student’s queer future and to a community. The vision of gay life awaiting students beyond the university is a sanitized one; the website specifies that “LGBT establishments” consist of “coffee shops, LGBTQ centers … comedy nights, educational talks [and] LGBTQ media awards.” No bars, no clubs. One would never suspect from the program’s literature that the identities with which this sort of mentoring is concerned have anything to do with sex.

Wikipedia “Young Male Nude Seated beside the Sea,” by Hippolyte Flandrin (1863)

It may be that I lack what are described as the qualities of “Queer Mentors” (capital M), who are said to be “mature, caring, responsible, and altruistic.” Or it may be that, in an age when intimate relations between faculty members and students, and among students themselves, are increasingly policed by university administrators, the idea of identifying with students, in a manner formalized by and visible to my employer, on the basis of our shared sexual desire (however silenced in the university’s official narrative), seems like inviting trouble.

Beyond the academy, in all domains of white-collar employment, employees are at once warned against the dangers of unsanctioned intimacy with one another and solicited to blur the boundaries of the personal and professional by bringing their “whole selves to work.” In a cogent analysis of how universities and corporations use “mentorship” to shape employees, Catherine Manathunga has noted that mentoring allows institutions to frame as a “collegial and equal relationship” a “pedagogy” by which designated agents inculcate “desired subjectivities” in mentees. The latter are charged, on the one hand, to be self-directed and success-oriented, but also to demonstrate their receptivity to guidance that goes beyond the professional toward a form of “acculturation.”

In programs targeted to marginalized groups, mentors acculturate mentees to see themselves as able to reconcile their “identities” (female, gay, Black, etc.) with norms of academic and professional success — which assumes, of course, that taking up one’s Blackness, gayness, womanhood, etc., will not interfere with one’s ability to internalize and maintain expectations about oneself as a “professional,” “competent,” autonomous, and ambitious neoliberal subject. In the academic literature on LGBT mentoring programs, students from the targeted demographic groups are imagined, on the one hand, as exposed to “risk” that will interfere with their success unless remedied through special interventions, but also as bearers of higher degrees of traits associated with success such as “resiliency.” Potential mentees are both specially disadvantaged and specially capacitated by their experiences as minorities (a combination of traits that might suggest they are, all things considered, normal). After passing through such programs, students who see, and have learned to speak of themselves, as members of historically oppressed groups in the rhetoric appropriate for upper-class cultural contexts, will indeed likely have increased their value in the eyes of potential employers looking both to increase their companies’ “diversity” and to assure that “diverse” new employees can adhere to their corporate culture and performance standards.

In this respect, demographically-specific mentorship programs are an instance of a broader cultural pedagogy, one that solicits our future elites to see themselves both as bearers of group-based oppressions and as achievers who demonstrate their merit not least in their ability to narrate how they have overcome the identity-based injustice. I have described this newly hegemonic self-understanding elsewhere as the basis of “woke meritocracy,” in which students use the language of group identity not to resist the atomizing competitions of the contemporary academy and post-college professional life, but to demonstrate their good standing within it and to sharpen their edge against rivals.

We are encouraged to think, by the proliferation of such programs, that being a high-performing academic and economic subject and identifying strongly with one’s gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc., are not only perfectly compatible but mutually reinforcing. A line of anti-capitalist critique from the socialist left and heterodox right suggests that, in fact, such institutions encourage our thinking of ourselves primarily as bearers of these identities — as women, queer, racial minorities, etc. — in order to disrupt the possibility of our building solidarity with other people who share our material conditions but not our curated self-narratives. Insofar as an identity can be constructed and maintained only in opposition to others (a fact we tend to elide when celebrating the growing “visibility” and salience of increasingly numerous and complex identities), the proliferation of identities may offer evermore possibilities for conflict among smaller and smaller groups whose members find themselves unable to recognize common interests.

T here are, however, important tensions in this fusion of individualist, success-oriented ambition and identitarian discourse. For some students, thinking about what it means to belong to a historically oppressed group will mean challenging, breaking with, or simply failing to live up to the standards and pace of academic achievement.

My closest friend in college had never thought with any particular intensity about being a woman until, as a sophomore, she took a class in 20th-century feminist art. Toward the end of the semester, as she began to consider what she might write for a final paper, she began to think and — bodily, wrenchingly — to feel the enormity of women’s massive, historical, ongoing suffering — rape, abuse, murder, exclusion, poverty, silencing. In a few weeks, in 15 pages, how was she supposed to master even her initial terror and stupor faced with the chasm that had suddenly opened out from under what had seemed to be the clichés of a too-familiar feminism? How can a woman love a man, given everything men have done and still do to women? How can she make her way in a culture that, for thousands of years, reduced real women to chattel and made imagined women the symbols of a femininity defined as the inferior derivative of maleness? The paper was a disaster, earning her a C in the course and sending her to therapy.

One response to such failures is to valorize them as a kind of resistance to dominant norms. This is what, for example, Jack Halberstam does in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), figuring queerness as a “failure” to conform to heterosexuality that opens up radical possibilities for alternative lives. The problem is that this is almost indistinguishable from the TED-talk ethic that celebrates entrepreneurial risk-taking as a kind of “failure” that is, in fact, able to “succeed” better than conventional success. On the contrary, anyone who begins to think about what it means to belong to a group, to have unchosen ties to other people, to have been oneself constituted by histories of violence, to bear and to bear witness to the weight of past and present injustice, should be expected to be shaken, unsteadied, and less able either to compete with her peers or, at some future date, to transmute the trauma that such thinking reveals and inflicts into an eventual narrative of triumph and insight. Thinking about the irreparable may undo us, irreparably.

Thinking of my friend (who did, in the end, devote her life to feminist art), I have often felt in my classroom how perverse it is to confront students with the fraught questions posed by the “great books” while assigning work to be graded. I find myself hoping both that they will recognize the urgent, intimate relevance of these texts to their own lives and at the same time acquire the skills of verbal self-expression to write technically correct papers about them. Perhaps this double injunction really commands students to learn how to feign encounters with ideas that might wreck them, temporarily or permanently, and wrest them away from their status as high-achievers. They would not want, surely, what happened to my friend to befall them, and I can hardly say that I myself want to send them to therapy. But, if that risk — the risk of a real failure that will not be recuperable in some future tale of overcoming hardship — is not present, then why are we reading these books?

I t is precisely to resolve this dilemma that, along with other technologies of care such as “content warnings,” universities need mentorship programs to help vulnerable students learn how to lessen the risks of authentic thinking and keep their otherwise too-risky explorations of identities within the sure path of academic and professional ambition. Here mentorship would function as something similar to the therapy my friend sought — with the critical difference, as Manathunga notes, that it is an apparatus of power, not an independent relationship between two equal adults, and that it aims at a notion of flourishing not developed by the student herself but pre-figured on her behalf by an institution. Indeed, mentorship programs in higher education, particularly those aimed at groups such as sexual and racial minorities, provide an additional layer of surveillance by which universities can track students’ progress towards hegemonic standards of success.

In recent years, administrators I have talked with at the universities I am most familiar with (Northwestern University, where I received my Ph.D., and the University of Chicago, where I am a postdoctoral instructor) have told me that an assortment of stakeholders — including students, their parents, fellow administrators, and the media — are increasingly concerned about the university’s responsibility for student “wellness” and “mental health.” These are, they point out, to some extent euphemisms for fears about students dropping out, failing out — or even committing suicide. Mentors form an additional link in a chain of residence heads, academic advisers, instructors, and other mental-health monitors charged with reporting on students who seem “unwell.” Keeping students alive and succeeding in the classroom is, obviously, a basic function of the university. But the forms of surveillance, oriented towards “wellness” and organized through apparently “personal” relationships, can appear cruelly ironic in the context of actual lives.

Some years ago a male student emailed me one morning to say that he had been raped some time before and was feeling too sad to get to class. This was, at a minimum, a request to be excused for that day, and, probably, a plea for help. I do not think that he knew I was contractually obligated to report this information both to the Title IX office (regardless of whether the rape had involved another member of the university community) and the “wellness” office. Both of these apparatuses performed a “check-in” through which one of their agents contacted my student to ask if he was all right, which I imagine is understood by the university’s lawyers to constitute having done due diligence.

I waited until the end of the day to contact the administrators I had to contact. I thought, hard, about saying nothing. I thought about myself at his age — when my parents had cut off contact with me for being gay, when the only adults I felt I could trust were two history professors who, without ever saying a word to me about what I must be feeling, assured my financial and emotional “wellness” by getting me summer grants and into a Ph.D. program — and how humiliated and miserable I would feel to know my worst moments of vulnerability were the subject of a file passed among bureaucrats. I thought about how much I was letting him down, how little I lived up to the standard set by my own college professors.

Of course, he wasn’t me, or on the way to becoming me. I had no particularly close relationship with him before receiving his email, and I hadn’t attempted to build one. My usual intuition with gay male students is to be a bit more distant than I otherwise would, since rather than uniting us on the basis of our shared histories of marginalization, the sexuality I share with some of my students unfortunately makes me sometimes experience them as a source of danger from which I must protect myself, the way my straight male colleagues do, from any possibility of an ambiguous — and thus perhaps legally actionable — degree of closeness. While my employer periodically enjoins me to connect to students on the basis of our “identity,” it also insists that such connections are perilous.

I didn’t feel safe risking, as some of my female colleagues told me they had risked with female students who had been similarly victimized, an intimate conversation with my student about how he felt and what he wanted, much less of warning him that the university might not be the safest venue to seek help or justice. I worried, to what is now my shame but then seemed elementary prudence, that any specially personal expression of compassion might come off somehow inappropriate, prurient. But because, like me, he was gay — in the effeminate, involuntarily public, and vulnerable way that incites comment, derision, violence — passing his case off to university officials struck me as a despicable act of disloyalty.

Administrators hope that students and faculty will find in the university’s ostentatious celebration of their shared “identities” a means of connecting with each other that secures their mutual commitment to the institution itself and the set of values it serves. In that moment, though, it seemed I had to choose between doing the decent thing for another gay man — allowing him, in a furtive and humane suspension of the imperative to visibility to choose for himself how to make sense of his ordeal — and serving the university. The latter claims that my identity is a resource for relating to students, and thus for helping them to succeed on the university’s terms — terms increasingly shaped by the corporate world outside. But the university also charges me with monitoring my students, and my own relationships with them, as part of a system of surveillance to which genuine connections, based on common identities or otherwise, are disruptive, even dangerous.

In the end I did what I was, by the terms of my employment, supposed to do. But it felt, and still feels, like a betrayal. Instead of offering, as my teachers had, a sheltering opacity in which my student could get the material resources he needed to build his own gay life on his own terms, I exposed him to the surveillance network of “care” workers that has become increasingly central to universities’ functioning, and of which “mentorship” programs are another node. This may have been what my student would have preferred — and even what was, from the soberest vantage, the best thing for him. But, while universities celebrate their own tolerance of diversity and encourage their “diverse” students and staff to be visible members of the campus “community,” I remember with bitterness how our shared gayness made me feel that I had to keep my distance from this student.

In academia and throughout our society, elite institutions are interpellating their members as bearers of minoritized identities. They are eroding the distinctions between a private realm of intimacy and the public, visible, norm-bound realms of institutional life (work, school, etc.). And they ask us to see these hailings and conflations as liberatory. Such summons constrain and deny the way in which thinking about one’s identity is, at least always potentially, a call to begin a perilous intellectual adventure that may put one’s academic and professional “success,” and even one’s identity itself, at risk — and the way that our identities, by connecting us to other people, inspire forms of intimacy and sympathy that urge us to exceed, evade, or otherwise not conform to the responsibilities assigned to us in our professional roles. Real mentoring, perhaps, is what we offer students most in those necessarily unprofessional, unmanageable, almost unbearable moments when they see, in our agonizing uncertainty about what to do, what it means to care about ideas and about each other.

Last weekend, British novelist Salman Rushdie was almost killed for a novel he wrote. It’s a brutal reminder of why the Left’s long tradition of embracing free speech is so vital.

Salman Rushdie in Cologne, Germany on October 14, 2017. (Brill / ullstein bild via Getty Images)
 
It looks like Salman Rushdie is going to lose an eye. He also has stab wounds on his neck and chest. He’s finally off the ventilator that was used to keep him alive in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but his son has called the injuries “life-changing.”
The novelist was getting ready to deliver a lecture in New York last Friday when a man rushed the stage to stab him. It seems to be a belated attempt to carry out the clerical death sentence against Rushdie issued decades ago by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The fatwa was issued because Rushdie wrote a “blasphemous” novel, The Satanic Verses.
To say all of that a bit more succinctly, a writer just spent days on the brink of death because a religious leader found his novel offensive. It’s a brutal reminder of the importance of free speech.

Free Speech and the Left
I’ve talked to far too many radicals who’ve convinced themselves that freedom of speech is an unserious “liberal” concern, and too many progressives in general (whether radicals or liberals) who have become so accustomed to only hearing right-wingers talk about “free speech” that they find the whole concept suspect. Free speech “absolutists,” according to one depressingly common line of thought, must just be looking for excuses to condone bigotry.
But all of this reflects a collective memory that goes back about ten minutes. Historically, free speech was a core value of the socialist left. Karl Marx wrote scathing polemics against the very idea of “benevolent” press censorship in the 1840s — in fact, these battles were formative in the development of his politics. In the twentieth century, the radical socialists who built the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) waged what they called “free speech fights” in response to attempts to suppress their union. In the 1960s, the movement at UC-Berkeley that played a key role in the birth of the New Left called itself the Free Speech Movement. One of the most eloquent defenses of free speech ever written was the one penned by Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg just before she was murdered by the proto-Nazi “Freikorps” in 1918.
To be sure, the socialist movement has given rise to plenty of censorious bureaucrats. One particularly ugly mutation of our tradition produced Joseph Stalin. But those socialists going back to Marx who understood socialism not just as a set of economic arrangements but as a radical extension of democracy have always prized free speech for both pragmatic and principled reasons. As Jacobin contributor Leigh Phillips has put it, freedom of speech is the first freedom, without which there’s certainly no such thing as a right to dissent against the brutal inequalities that surround us or to organize for something better.
Any movement that wants to challenge existing power structures in a fundamental way needs to care about free speech as a matter of self-preservation. But there’s also a deeper reason to care about free speech. The telos of socialist politics — the defining point of our political project — is the empowerment of ordinary people. Without a deep commitment to freedom of expression, that commitment is incoherent.

Do Readers Need to Be Protected Against Books?
In one particularly funny scene in Zadie Smith’s multigenerational novel White Teeth, a group of young British Muslims go to a demonstration denouncing The Satanic Verses in Bradford in 1989 — the year that the fatwa was issued ordering the Ayatollah’s followers to murder Rushdie. On the train, the protesters ask each other if they’ve actually read the book. No one has. One of them references the price. “Twelve ninety-five, you know?”
Smith tells us that one of those young men, Millat Iqbal, “could not identify the book if it lay in a pile of other books and could not pick Rushdie himself out of a lineup. She then imagines that lineup of writers and thinkers deemed offensive by various authorities over the centuries, from Socrates to Nabokov, “all holding up their numbers for the mug shot, squinting in the flash bulb.”
What struck me thinking back to that scene after Rushdie’s stabbing is that, in Britain in 1989, the lack of thirteen pounds (or an interest in reading long novels) was the only thing keeping Millat and his friends from reading the book. For all the horrors inflicted on Rushdie and his murdered translators, the actual availability of the book has never been in doubt in countries like the United States and the UK. When I checked a few days after the stabbing, so many people had picked up copies that Amazon and Barnes & Noble were both out of stock.
But would The Satanic Verses be accepted by a major publisher if Rushdie had written it this year? The uncomfortable truth is that it’s hard to know. It isn’t difficult to imagine an editor interested in acquiring the book being unable to get a thumbs up from so-called sensitivity readers hired by the publishing house.
My concern about the Left and free speech isn’t that secular progressives are actually in favor of stabbing “blasphemous” novelists. It’s the fear that far too many progressives would respond to news of a publishing company canceling a contract for some Twitter-indicted, allegedly “Islamophobic” novel by rolling their eyes and making jokes about frozen peaches.
Those who accept a narrow libertarian definition of free speech wouldn’t see any problem in such news, since private publishing companies limiting the range of acceptable expression isn’t an issue of state censorship. But the idea that it’s important to protect the minds of readers from books whose content is deemed offensive, dangerous, or “harmful” strikes right at the heart of the value of free speech.
“Freedom,” Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1918, “is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” No matter “how numerous” the ranks of those who agree with opinions that won’t upset or challenge anyone, freedom just for them isn’t “freedom at all” in the sense that mattered to Luxemburg.
After all, she wanted working-class people to be able to make decisions about how society as a whole should be run. That goal simply can’t be reconciled with the idea that our minds are so fragile that benevolent bureaucrats need to decide which ideas are safe enough for the rest of us to handle.
There would seem to be no point in deepening democracy by extending it into the economy if we’re not willing to put our trust in the ability of ordinary people to be exposed to every perspective and make up their own minds. If you feel that trust in your bones, you’re going to be passionate about protecting readers’ right to access the kind of writing that might upset or infuriate them but also might help them to see the world in a different light.
There are a good many policies, positions, and strategies about which socialists can disagree in good faith without contradiction to the fundaments of socialism, but to support censorship by anyone — state, clergy, or crowd — is to contradict the edifice on which socialist politics are built. If you think everyone is capable of self-government, you should care deeply about free speech. And that means standing in solidarity with Salman Rushdie.

When President Joe Biden took office, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the federal government was on pace to run a $12.1 trillion deficit over the following 10 years.
But thanks to a boatload of new spending passed by Congress and signed by Biden during his first 16 months in the White House, that figure has climbed to about $14.5 trillion. In short, Biden has overseen a $2.4 trillion increase in America's longterm budget deficit.
One way or another, that shortfall has to be accounted for by cutting spending, raising taxes, or printing money. So what does the new Inflation Reduction Act do to address the problem?
It doesn't cut unnecessary spending or wasteful government programs. Instead, it raises taxes. And those tax increases will only reduce the deficit by about $300 billion. That's just 2 percent of what the government is forecasted to borrow over the decade after Biden took office.
In other words, even if you assume Congress won't further hike spending, we'd still need about 50 more bills just like the Inflation Reduction Act to avoid adding more debt in the next decade. And that doesn't even address the $30 trillion in debt the country has already accumulated. 
Even that small deficit reduction requires a massive corporate tax increase that will hurt the economy. There's also a plan to squeeze more money out of taxpayers by hiring 87,000 new IRS agents and beefing up the agency's audit powers.
This bill is indeed the first major piece of legislation to move through congress that would have even a slightly positive impact on future federal deficits since at least the middle of the Obama years. But it's not a serious attempt to grapple with our coming fiscal nightmare.
The actual drivers of future deficits are entitlement programs. President Biden and Congress are doing nothing to reform the programs that account for about half of the longterm budget deficit: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Thirty-six trillion of the 72 trillion dollars the federal government is expected to spend over the next 10 years goes to pay for these programs. Social Security and Medicare, in particular, are expected to ring up massive budget deficits over the next decade because they're structured like a Ponzi scheme in which current workers are paying the benefits of today's beneficiaries. A massive wave of older Americans are retiring and beginning to receive benefits, and there aren't enough working-age Americans to cover what they're owed. The system is starting to collapse.
Yes, $300 billion might sound like a lot of money, but in the context of government spending under Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—as well as the exploding costs of eldercare entitlements—it's not very much at all.
Music Credits: "Everytime," by Ben Fox via Artlist.
Photo Credits: Neon Tommy, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Newscom; Ron Sachs - CNP/Polaris/Newscom; Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom; N Giovannucci, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Tulane Public Relations, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Craig Michaud at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom.
Written and narrated by Eric Boehm. Edited by Regan Taylor.
The post The Inflation Reduction Act Barely Puts a Dent in the Deficit appeared first on Reason.com.

Labor Day presents a great opportunity for the Democratic Party to compare their election year story of being on the side of labor, as opposed to the GOP which is invariably backing the wealthy and giant corporations.

On Labor Day, Democrats should join with and showcase the working people whom the Democratic Party has been distancing itself from under the controlling dictates of their corporate-conflicted political and media consultants.

Unfortunately, the Democrats have not been taking advantage of the one national holiday dedicated to working people. It is not too late. Labor Day has been turned into a sales day by the big box chains, but the Democrats can revive the true purposes of this day. Imagine thousands of public events for the working classes to give voice to their rightful needs and protections.

Never mind the dwindling Labor Day parades. Instead, organize rallies and assemblies in neighborhoods around real reforms, redirections and respect that all workers (regardless of their political labels) want for themselves and their families.

Invite workers and their children to these festive gatherings--with refreshments, nutritious snacks and music (taking proper pandemic precautions). If necessary, do it virtually and distribute snacks via food trucks. Present a vibrant, coherent pro-worker mandate complete with what the Democrats have already enacted or proposed against the unanimous opposition of the Republicans in Congress.

The Democrats, against the filibustering opposition of the Wall Street Republicans, stand for a living wage (passing a $15 minimum in the House of Representatives which was blocked in the Senate), expanding Medicaid and Medicare, providing child care, and paid family leave--all blocked by the Republican Party of dread, anxiety and greed.

The Democrats push for more worker health and safety protections while the GOP Senators and Representatives want to continue to weaken OSHA and cut its tiny budget for workplace inspections and enforcement of protective standards.

The child tax credit of some $300 per month to about 60 million children was set for an extension this past January. In spite of cutting child poverty by over thirty percent, the Republicans blocked its extension, just as they blocked the Democrat's effort to restore some of Trump's giveaway tax escapes for corporations and the super-rich to pay for this crucial assistance to America's children and critical infrastructure jobs in the midst of a pandemic.

Cong. John Larson (D-CT) has proposed a comprehensive update for Social Security (benefits have not been upgraded for fifty years), but the Republicans are signaling a filibuster in the Senate. Worse, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, corporate felon Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) wants to sunset all federal legislation, including Social Security and Medicare, in five years. He actually put it in writing (See, An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America)

Then there is labor law reform to make it easier for workers to form unions. This is the 75th anniversary of the notorious Taft-Hartley Act--the worst anti-worker law in the western world. The Democrats passed a bill in the House that partially repeals this giant handcuffing of American workers, but again the Republicans are blocking it in the Senate.

The Pension Rights Center (See, Pension Rights Center) has a ready-made agenda to protect and expand worker retirement systems.

The Democrats should highlight the worker respect and dignity issue. Focus on companies like Amazon, which is perfecting "digital monitoring"of workers and tracking their every minute including limited bathroom breaks. Millions of Americans working remotely now have "Big Brother"electronically monitoring them, as Aldous Huxley predicted in his 1932 novel Brave New World. The GOP is not protecting minimal worker privacy.

The list of immediately perceived pro-worker contrasts between the Democrats and the Republicans goes on. Publicizing these deep livelihood improvements, where workers live, work and raise their children, is far superior to the failed billions of dollars spent on vacuous political television ads.

They should be landsliding the worst GOP in history instead of worrying about losing the House and Senate to the dictatorial Trumpsters bent on stealing elections through voter manipulation, suppression and purges.

On Labor Day, Democrats should join with and showcase the working people whom the Democratic Party has been distancing itself from under the controlling dictates of their corporate-conflicted political and media consultants. The latter gets 15% of the amount spent on all TV ads. Do you think they want to give us these big bucks for a superior, realistic ground campaign? How about organizing a campaign that speaks honestly about ending the corporate-managed, job-destroying foreign trade that has left our country defenseless--without, for example, domestic protection of key medicines (such as antibiotics), protective equipment and essential microchips?

Bring all these long overdue advances in just treatment of workers (many of them long available in western nations) to the voters in the form of a printed "voters'guide" handed out widely on a large card, on which one side asks voters to check "yes" or "no" on the issues, such as Full Medicare for All or a $15 minimum wage. The flip side of the card can show that Democrats side with workers and the Republicans back Wall Street over Main Street and big business domination of America.

There is still time to arrange for celebratory Labor Day events. Workers are eager to voice their claims to America's promise to their fellow workers and other Americans. It is also a good way to attract volunteers to get out the vote on Election Day this November.

Bear in mind that what works for Labor Day also can work in the two months leading up to Election Day. Activist voters, give your Party a push in this direction. They should be landsliding the worst GOP in history instead of worrying about losing the House and Senate to the dictatorial Trumpsters bent on stealing elections through voter manipulation, suppression and purges.

Among the millions of innocent people who have endured nearly one year of brutal Taliban rule in Afghanistan, those who worked with the United States face the greatest danger — and journalists top the Taliban’s target list. Many of these journalists are still stranded, mostly due to bureaucratic dysfunction, following the U.S. withdrawal last August. They are desperately waiting for the United States to save them before it’s too late.

More than a dozen Afghan employees of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-government-funded news organization, are still waiting for Washington to honor its promises to safely evacuate them and their families. The Taliban has killed four RFE/RL journalists since 2016, and in the months since the U.S. withdrawal, the regime has continued hunting, harassing and abusing those who remain. At grave risk, they continue to bravely report on the regression of their society under the Taliban’s cruel rule.

The very least the United States can do is to fulfill President Biden’s promise last August: “The United States stands by its commitment that we’ve made to these people, and it includes other vulnerable Afghans, such as women leaders and journalists.”

Many of the U.S.-sponsored journalists in Afghanistan who wanted to leave were successfully evacuated late last year, but recently, the pace has slowed to a trickle. Two journalists still working for RFE/RL in Afghanistan, whose names I am withholding for their safety, described to me the horrors they have faced over the past year.

The Taliban routinely detains and tortures journalists it deems insufficiently loyal or cooperative. Journalists who are women can no longer show their faces on TV or travel without a male chaperone. Journalists with ties to U.S. or Western media organizations are accused of being spies and could be arrested on false charges at any time.

One RFE/RL journalist in Kabul told me the State Department booked him on an evacuation flight last December, only to cancel his ticket at the last minute with no explanation. He had already sold his possessions and given up his home. Since then, he has been moving locations every month, repeatedly uprooting his wife and five children.

“If we don’t emigrate from the country, they will come after us. And even if they don’t arrest and torture us and force us to work for them, we will always be suspect in their eyes,” he told me. “I don’t see any future for us here if we are left behind.”

Another RFE/RL journalist who reported in the southern part of Afghanistan for years was forced to leave his village after the Taliban took over. He has since moved to another part of the country and moved his family into hiding. His father was arrested and tortured just for being related to him. Because he has been marked by the U.S. government for evacuation, but not actually evacuated, the Taliban is even more suspicious of him, he said.

“Our situation is getting worse and worse. Every second, I don’t feel safe,” he said. “I don’t know when they might jail or kill me. So I’m just waiting.”

Stubbornly and proudly, RFE/RL journalists in Afghanistan continue to do their jobs. Radio Azadi, the RFE/RL news service that broadcasts in local languages, continues to be a primary source of independent news for millions of Afghans. Its work also provides the world with a unique window into the hardships currently endured by Afghans.

At a news conference on Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Ned Price touted the administration’s evacuation efforts, called Operation Allies Welcome, which Price said had successfully evacuated, vetted and resettled more than 75,000 Afghans.

But in a private briefing Wednesday, State Department officials told congressional officials there are still over 90,000 applicants for special immigrant visas, earmarked for Afghans who worked with the U.S. government. More than 45,000 other Afghans have been referred for other visas that are meant for those who face threats from the Taliban.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has called on all governments to accept Afghan journalists and to increase pressure on the Taliban to stop persecuting them. But the U.S. government doesn’t actually need the Taliban’s permission — as it showed recently when it evacuated more than four dozen family members of 10 Afghan civilians killed in a U.S. drone strike last year, Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) told me.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Malinowski said.

Of course, the blame for the plight of these journalists falls mostly on the Taliban. But that doesn’t change the fact that they need the U.S. government to evacuate them now, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told me.

“It is unconscionable that so many remain stranded — especially journalists who worked for U.S.-supported media outlets and employees of the State Department,” Cardin said. “The Biden administration must elevate their efforts to bring these people to safety.”

These Afghans believed in the future that we promised for their country, and they took personal risks to help bring that future about. We can’t wash our hands of them. We have a moral obligation and a self-interest in preserving the hope of that future.

For almost seven years, two Pennsylvania judges sent hundreds of children—some of them as young as 8 years old—to privately run juvenile detention centers in exchange for financial kickbacks. On Tuesday, Judge Christopher Conner ordered former Judges Mark A. Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan to pay over $200 million in compensatory and punitive damages to their victims. 
Starting in 2000, the pair sent children into juvenile detention for offenses as innocuous as jaywalking, petty theft, or truancy. In what became known as the "kids for cash" scandal, the children were sent to two privately run detention centers whose builder and co-owner paid the men $2.8 million, according to the Associated Press, over the course of the scheme.
According to testimony from plaintiffs during the class-action suit, many of the sentences the children received were staggering. One plaintiff, who was 16 at the time, was sentenced to 11 months for driving the wrong way down a one-way street without a license. Another girl, then only 10, was sent to detention for a schoolyard fight with no serious injuries. One child was sent to detention for stealing a Hershey bar, another for writing on a school window with a marker. Several plaintiffs testified that their sentences were based on entirely arbitrary means, such as the number of birds in a tree outside the courtroom or the number of buttons on a girl's blouse. One plaintiff was sentenced to an additional eight months in detention after Ciavarella instructed him to pick a sports team, and he picked the wrong one.  
"The Luzerne County Court System failed us," said one unnamed plaintiff. "They [Ciavarella and Conahan] had abused their power and, in my opinion, should never see the daylight again. The scars of this scandal will continue to live with all of us. As a survivor, I can assure you the impact of this man's greed [will never] be over or forgotten."
According to CBS news, following the plot's discovery, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has thrown out 4,000 juvenile convictions between 2003 and 2008. However, many of the plaintiffs still suffer from mental health problems. Several children sent to detention by Ciavarella and Conahan have died by suicide or drug overdose in the years after their detention.
"Children and adolescents suffered unspeakable physical and emotional trauma at the hands of two judicial officers who swore by solemn oath to uphold the law," Judge Conner wrote in a memorandum on the ruling. "Ciavarella and Conahan abandoned their oath and breached the public trust. Their cruel and despicable actions victimized a vulnerable population of young people, many of whom were suffering from emotional issues and mental health concerns."
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that any of the plaintiffs will receive financial compensation for their unjust detentions as, according to the A.P., Ciavarella and Conahan are now serving lengthy prison sentences. Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in prison, and Conahan was sentenced to 17 years, though he was released to home confinement in 2020, citing COVID-19-related concerns.
Regardless, the ruling is considered "a huge victory" for the victims. Marsha Levick, a lawyer for the victims, told the A.P. that the ruling "recognizes the gravity of what the judges did to these children in the midst of some of the most critical years of their childhood and development."
The plaintiffs in this case "are the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions. The law is powerless to restore to plaintiffs the weeks, months, and years lost because of the actions of the defendants," wrote Conner. "But we hope that by listening to their experiences and acknowledging the depth of the damage done to their lives, we can provide them with a measure of closure and…ensure that their stories are never forgotten."
The post Judges Who Sent Kids to Detention Centers for Financial Kickbacks Ordered To Pay Over $200 Million appeared first on Reason.com.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.It’s rare to see a politician speak hard truths to surly—and even dangerous—fellow citizens, but that’s exactly what Liz Cheney did in her concession speech last night.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Paul Manafort is back.
Monkeypox doesn’t need to be renamed.
The Court’s liberals still have power.
‘I Love My Country More.’Representative Liz Cheney was blown out in her reelection bid last night. She lost the Wyoming Republican primary to Harriet Hageman, which in their deep-red state is tantamount to losing the general election. Hageman was once a Cheney ally and a critic of Donald Trump, but she is now a Trump booster and an election denier. Like so many Republicans, Hageman has decided that the humiliation of bending the knee to Trump is a price worth paying in order to live in Washington, D.C.Cheney’s defeat was no surprise, but it is an especially bitter pill to swallow for the Never Trump former Republicans (as Charlie Sykes and I discussed in a podcast today) who saw Cheney as the last outpost of the party they once knew. Cheney nodded to the GOP’s free fall in her concession speech. “I believe deeply in the principles and the ideals on which my party was founded,” she told her supporters. “I love its history, and I love what our party has stood for, but I love my country more.”Notice the use of the past tense there.The remarkable thing about Cheney’s speech is that it was aimed squarely at the voters. It was certainly not aimed at Trump; Cheney, as well as anyone, knows the pointlessness of addressing Trump in anything like an adult conversation. It wasn’t even really directed at the institutional Republican Party, which is beyond repair at this point. Instead, Cheney grabbed Republican voters by the lapels and told them to snap out of their Trump-induced trance.“To believe Donald Trump’s election lies,” she said, “you must believe that dozens of federal and state courts who ruled against him, including many judges he appointed, were all corrupted and biased; that all manner of crazy conspiracy theories stole our election from us; and that Donald Trump actually remains president today.”Nor did she shy away from accusing Trump of fomenting violence. The former president, Cheney charged, “knows that voicing these conspiracies will provoke violence and threats of violence. This happened on January 6, and it’s now happening again. It is entirely foreseeable that the violence will escalate further, yet he and others continue purposely to feed the danger … No patriotic American should excuse these threats or be intimidated by them.”All of this was said almost as a challenge: Are you really one of the people who can believe this madness? Are you the kind of person who is going to let Trump goad you into violence because of lies?Likewise, Cheney warned against electing even those in her own party who have already vowed to undermine the rule of law:
Today, as we meet here, there are Republican candidates for governor who deny the outcome of the 2020 election, and who may refuse to certify future elections if they oppose the results. We have candidates for secretary of state who may refuse to report the actual results of the popular vote in future elections. And we have candidates for Congress, including here in Wyoming, who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and suggest that states decertify their results.
“No American,” she continued, “should support election deniers for any position of genuine responsibility, where their refusal to follow the rule of law will corrupt our future.” She might as well have pointed to the voters and added: And by no one, I mean you.To make such a speech after a defeat in a populous state such as Ohio or Georgia would be difficult enough, but to do so in Wyoming is particularly courageous. In a bigger place with more cities, a defeated candidate could disappear into the crowd and live a busy life far from his or her critics—something, in a time of increasing political violence, that might seem particularly attractive after losing an election. But Wyoming’s natural grandeur is populated by a relatively tiny number of voters: The entire state has fewer residents than the city of Boston. Everyone knows the Cheney family, and a retreat into peaceful anonymity is not an option.Not that it matters: Cheney seems completely uninterested in leaving the public square. She is already putting together a political organization of some sort, according to a Politico report this morning, and she is likely to be an even more public warrior against Trumpism now—perhaps even in a GOP presidential primary?—than she could ever be in Congress.Whatever her future, her willingness to tell the voters that they have a duty, a positive obligation, to defend the American Constitution and the rule of law was a bracing moment in an era where too many politicians merely pander to extremists and coddle the very worst citizens among us. I want to hope that Cheney, for just a moment, broke through the fog that surrounds the mind of Republican voters, but I am pessimistic. Still, she vowed that the end of her congressional career is only the beginning of her fight against Trump, and so Liz Cheney’s story is far from over.Related:
Liz Cheney already has a 2024 strategy.
Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced a plan to reorganize the agency after criticizing its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Rudy Giuliani arrived at the Fulton County Courthouse in Georgia, where he was called to testify before a special grand jury as part of an investigation into 2020 election interference in the state.
Ukrainian officials warned that Russia is building missile systems north of Ukraine, in Belarus.
Galaxy Brain: For a few short hours last week, Charlie Warzel went viral—in the bad way.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explains that antiquated environmental laws are hindering clean energy.
(Jim Watson / AFP / Getty)
Does DNA Prove the Mythical Origins of These Wild Horses?By Sarah ZhangTo tell the story of how a purported cow tooth dug up in the Caribbean might corroborate the mythical origin of wild horses off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, let us begin, naturally, with a children’s book, Misty of Chincoteague.If you know, you know—horse girls, I’m looking at you. For everyone else: This beloved 1947 children’s novel tells the story of Misty the pony, born on the beaches of an uninhabited barrier island. The story is fictional, but the setting is real. A band of wild horses still roams that island today, eating seagrass and largely ignoring tourists who come for selfies with a real-life version of Misty.Read the full article. More From The Atlantic
Look at what happens when two galaxies collide. 
Free speech can’t survive as an abstraction.
Bernard-Henri Lévy on the immortal Salman Rushdie
Daniel “Desus Nice” Baker and Joel “The Kid Mero” Martinez (Jojo Whilden / Showtime)
Read. Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong, a novel that expertly balances the silly and the sublime.Watch. Hang out with Desus & Mero on Showtime. The late-night show will not be returning for a new season—and that’s a loss for TV as a whole.Listen. Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” taps into a wistful, online-inflected vibe.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I often marvel at the impenetrability of so many Trump voters when it comes to any news about the former president’s many misdeeds. But such stubbornness should not be surprising: Con artists have for decades understood that the marks would rather lose their money than admit that they were swindled and thus lose their pride as well. (Indeed, some marks have even been known to go so far as to appear in court to defend the people who took them to the cleaners.)You can read more about this in a delightful book first published in 1940 titled The Big Con, in which a professor named David Maurer recounts the exploits of some of the great con artists of early-20th-century America: Fred and Charley Gondorff, Limehouse Chappie, Hoosier Harry, and many others who ran scams such as “the shut out” and “the cackle-bladder.” The Big Con apparently served as some of the source material for the Oscar-winning 1973 film The Sting (Maurer sued the movie’s studio and writer and settled out of court), and it’s well worth reading both for pleasure and to understand the political moment in which we find ourselves.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Josh Marshall has a thoughtful response to my August 14 piece on the Mar-a-Lago raid. Below I try to engage with his points.

Where We Agree

Marshall says that I am right to insist that “it is dangerous for a President’s administration to pursue criminal charges against a predecessor.” But he adds that “[w]hat’s lacking in [my] discussion is any real grappling with the opposite side of the equation.” The opposite side of the equation is “the line past which a President’s lawlessness becomes so pervasive, persistent and dangerous that the risks of acting are outweighed by those of failing to do so.”

I agree that there is such a line. Indeed, I said so in the piece he responds to:

There obviously must be a point where information is so sensitive, and Trump’s disregard for law so extreme, to justify legal process against Trump, even in the current milieu. Otherwise the law is entirely hostage to a former president’s (and his supporters’) self-serving veto—something no legal system can tolerate.

I then explained how I think one should assess whether that point had been reached with the Mar-a-Lago documents episode, without taking a position.

As for my “grappling with the opposite side of the equation,” I have tried to acknowledge very clearly the consequences of giving Trump a pass for convictable crimes:

If Mr. Garland concludes that Mr. Trump has committed convictable crimes, he would face the third and hardest decision: whether the national interest would be served by prosecuting Mr. Trump. This is not a question that lawyerly analysis alone can resolve. It is a judgment call about the nature, and fate, of our democracy. A failure to indict Mr. Trump in these circumstances would imply that a president — who cannot be indicted while in office — is literally above the law, in defiance of the very notion of constitutional government. It would encourage lawlessness by future presidents, none more so than Mr. Trump should he win the next election. By contrast, the rule of law would be vindicated by a Trump conviction.

I agree with Marshall about the dangers of not prosecuting Trump for convictable crimes. They are extremely high.

I also agree with Marshall that Trump’s criminal activity after office warrants less prosecutorial caution than those committed in office. I made this point in “After Trump,” where I “argue[d] for extreme caution in a criminal investigation of a prior president for acts done in office” (emphasis added), and added that for non-official acts outside the presidency, the calculus is very different. I also made the point implicitly in this post, which emphasized that “[o]nce Trump leaves office, his criminal exposure for selling secrets broadens.”

Grappling With the Dangers of Not Prosecuting Trump

All that said, Marshall is right about my allocation of grappling: I have devoted more words to the dangers of the Biden administration using criminal process against Trump than to the dangers of it not doing so. In part that is because most of the commentary that I have read focuses on the dangers of not pursuing Trump. And in part it is because I still believe many people unduly discount the difficulties and possible costs of prosecuting Trump. I will not re-catalogue all of the difficulties and costs here. The narrow point I want to make is that the difficulties and costs should substantially inform the rule-of-law concerns that Marshall raises. I can make the point in two steps.

1. Convictable Offenses

The first step goes to whether, as Marshall says, “Trump’s violations of law are pervasive.” To the extent that Marshall is referring to criminal law, I am far from convinced, based on the public evidence to date, that Trump has committed convictable crimes. (Recall that the standard to bring a case against Trump is that his acts constitute a federal offense and “the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.”)

Marshall says: “Quite apart from potentially conspiring with a foreign power, the Mueller Report contains ample and convincing evidence of obstruction of justice.” I am not sure which of Trump’s many acts Marshall has in mind when he talks about “conspiring with a foreign power.” But absent a clearly venal quid pro quo, it will be practically impossible to nail a president—who has enormous constitutional discretion to direct foreign policy and define U.S. foreign policy interests and conduct diplomacy—for “conspiring with a foreign power” while in office. Which is why that issue does not now seem to be on the table.

And while Trump did seem in office to engage in “obstruction of justice as a way of life,” in John Bolton’s memorable words, that does not mean that there is “ample and convincing evidence” that he has committed convictable obstruction of justice crimes. (I know this seems inane to many people; more on this issue below.) I have explained why I am skeptical that Trump committed convictable obstruction of justice crimes at great length here and here and here, and will not repeat those arguments. Some of the episodes recounted in Volume II of the Mueller Report would face fewer Article II problems than others, but all would have been heavy lifts to convict Trump for obstruction of justice.

And then there is what Marshall describes as “the multifaceted and multi-jurisdictional plot to corrupt and then overturn the 2020 election all culminating in the violent assault on the seat of government.” This was all atrocious, unpatriotic, impeachable, and unforgivable. But I am still not convinced, based on current public evidence, that it meets the standard for federal prosecution.

The numerous criminal statutes that different people say Trump supposedly violated by his January 6 and related actions makes this claim hard to assess, and the breadth of the statutes invoked are some indication that none of them apply straightforwardly to Trump’s actions. The public hasn’t yet seen a smoking gun, and any prosecution here will face intent and Article II problems. I do not rule out that the Justice Department can make out a winnable case here—we do not know what Merrick Garland knows. I just have not yet seen a convincing analysis, based on the public evidence, that grapples with all of the difficulties.

(To get a flavor of how hard the legal issues will be, independent of the intent and Article II problems, read this opinion by Judge Contreras in a criminal case against Kyle Fitzsimons, who allegedly breached the Capitol on January 6 and “engaged in physical violence” that injured police officers. The case involves one of the statutes most frequently invoked by commentators against Trump—corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, 18 U.S. Code § 1512. Contreras denied Fitzsimons’ motion to dismiss the charges under Section 1512. But as the opinion makes clear, there are uncertainties about whether that statute applies even to someone who actually engaged in violence in the Capitol on January 6—all of which will be contested on appeal. The legal issues will be harder in a prosecution under this statute against a president who did not breach the Capitol or engage in violence.)

Next is what Marshall says “appears to be a concerted and deliberate effort to maintain possession not only of government property but significant state secrets for reasons unknown.” I agree that post-presidency criminal actions face a lower bar, and I have outlined (in the context of the warrant) what I see as the legal issues here. Not enough information has yet surfaced on this one, in my opinion.

As for the “evidence that Trump [after he left office] personally contacted potential witnesses against him and tried to ensure their silence with a mix of inducements and threats,” if the evidence ends up supporting that description, the Department of Justice should face none of the legal hurdles to prosecution identified above. We will see.

2. The Danger in a Failed Prosecution

The second factor builds on the first. The absence of an obvious convictable crime (based on public evidence thus far) underscores the dangers of a failed prosecution. ﻿

“A trial of a president following years of battle and ending in acquittal will cause the country tremendous pain for no good end and will likely create numerous unfortunate precedents along the way,” I once wrote. And in assessing the possibility of failure, one must consider “how any charges against Mr. Trump would fare in an adversarial criminal proceeding administered by an independent judge, where Mr. Trump’s lawyers will contest the government’s factual and legal contentions, tell his side of events, raise many defenses and appeal every important adverse legal decision to the Supreme Court.”

In calculating costs and benefits, in other words, one cannot assume that a prosecution will succeed. One must discount all of the dangers of not prosecuting (and the benefits of a prosecution) by the likelihood of the prosecution failing.

Would a failed prosecution be good on balance for the rule of law, broadly conceived—for the idea that no person, including a former president, is above the law; for the incentives it would create for Trump and others going forward; and for the devastating impact it would have on Justice Department legitimacy, beyond the legitimacy hit the department would suffer for going after the president’s political rival? I don’t think so. To be sure, some people believe, as I once put it, that the rule of law “might be enhanced by a full judicial airing of Mr. Trump’s possible crimes in office, even if it ultimately fails.” But I think that is very unlikely. Since I think that the likelihood of a conviction of Trump based on publicly available evidence is low, I do not think the rule of law would be advanced by prosecuting him.

***

This reasoning, ultimately, is why I continue to put myself in the caution category, and to emphasize dangers of prosecution. In my view, the appropriateness of prosecuting Trump goes up a lot if and when the Justice Department has clear evidence of a convictable crime. I have not seen it yet. Marshall thinks he has seen it, and that we have reached the point where the “risks of acting are outweighed by those of failing to do so.” That is the essence of our disagreement. I should note, in this regard, that both my argument and his rest on guesses about future consequences based on legal and practical reasoning grounded in very incomplete information. The right posture here is humility about how little we know, and prayer that Merrick Garland makes the right calls.

Gaps in Presidential Accountability

I want to close by addressing a theme that I think informs the pro-prosecution camp’s judgment. The theme is that Trump has done so many flagrant, awful, obviously bad things in and out of office that he must have committed a prosecutable crime. It seems unfathomable that any president or ex-president could act in such persistent defiance of law and legal process, in such blatant violation of the public trust, and not have committed crimes. As Marshall puts it, “the very brazenness of Trump’s indifference to the law has a way of rendering precious or quaint any serious and deliberate discussion of potential consequences.”

To frame the problem as Marshall does here is to neglect everything we have learned about the massive gaps in presidential and post-presidential accountability since January 2017. Time and time again, Trump has done outrageous things with indifference to law. And yet time and time again, what Trump did violated norms but not laws, or Trump operated with a mad-genius capacity to find and exploit legal loopholes, especially remedial loopholes, in legal constraints on the presidency.

Bob Bauer and I wrote a book on this theme. “Trump has shown that the current array of laws and norms governing the presidency is inadequate to protect institutions vital to American constitutional democracy and to ensure that the president is, and appears to be, constrained by law,” we said, in a non-original judgment. We detailed the main accountability gaps that became apparent during Trump’s candidacy and presidency—on foreign interference in elections, conflicts of interest, tax disclosure, pardon abuse, obstruction of justice, politicized investigations, and much more; and we proposed reforms. Trump has continued to illuminate and exploit accountability gaps since we wrote the book—in his abuse of the transition process, in his actions on and related to January 6, and in his handling of sensitive documents during and since he left the presidency.

For six years the Justice Department has struggled to use extant legal tools to redress Trump’s bad acts. In part its struggle is a result of Article II of the Constitution. The president is in charge of executing criminal law, and thus it has always been hard to execute criminal law against the president; the president is in charge of diplomacy, and in so many ways gets to decide what U.S. foreign policy is; and the president creates and controls the classified information system, and can do what he wants with it while in office. This massive constitutional allocation of authority to the president is why, ultimately, “our system of government depends on the People electing a President who is generally reasonable, prudent, and responsible.”

But Article II is not a bar to holding a president much more accountable while in office and afterwards. Laws, regulations, and norms could go much further to impose constraints on a president and ex-president like Donald Trump. A future Justice Department would have an easier time holding a bad-actor president to account if laws, regulations, and norms were clarified to address the acts that we now understand a president can commit. It would also be and appear more legitimate in doing so.

Yet Congress and the Biden administration have to date done nothing, really nothing, to move in this direction. The nation has since January 20, 2021 put its head in the sand about the very foreseeable repeats of everything Trump did. Except next time it will be worse, because the next norm- and law-defiant president—who could well be Donald Trump—will be much better prepared to circumvent legal and norms-based limits, and much defter at doing so.

Legal reform cannot by itself save us from this situation—only elections can. But legal reform can help, maybe a lot, by eliminating the legal ambiguity and loopholes that Trump has dined on. It can help constrain a future president’s worst inclinations, and, perhaps more consequentially, constrain the subordinates through whom he or she must act.

There is much to do, but the priorities now should include at least these three reforms. First, Congress should enact Electoral Count Act and presidential transition reform; an outstanding bill in the Senate is a great start. Second, Congress should do a much better job of specifying which criminal laws apply to the president and how—starting, as Bauer and I explained, with obstruction of justice. There has been no real movement in Congress on this issue, and reform here will be hard in the current political environment. Third, the Biden administration can and should take steps to clean up and clarify the presidential role related to classified information. I will have more to say on this issue, hopefully in the coming weeks.

Thirty-three years ago, when I was a teenager in Nairobi, I was a book burner. The year was 1989, the year of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and I was seduced by the rising tide of Islamism. I greeted the fatwa with glee.
I rarely burnt actual books: we were too poor to afford a copy of The Satanic Verses. Instead, we wrote the title of the offending novel and the name of its author on cardboard and paper and set them alight. It was comical and pathetic. But we were deadly serious. We thought Ayatollah Khomeini was standing up for Islam against the infidels, bringing down the righteous fury of Allah upon a vile apostate. Had Rushdie been attacked then, I would have celebrated.
In the decades since, I have been a refugee, an atheist and a convert to the highest ideals and values of the West: free speech, freedom of conscience, the emancipation of women, and a free press. When I fled from a forced marriage and made a life in Europe, I was bewitched by the culture of freedom. But I still remember with a shudder my time as a pious believer on the verge of fanaticism. I know all too well how righteousness in the name of Islam motivates those who inflict violence on supposed infidels.

I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.
And then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. Not for him the freely roaming imagination; his interest in literature was constrained by Islam.
Suggested readingHow we gave up on Salman RushdieBy Will Lloyd
While Salman sought to capture the entire world in his novels, Khomeini couldn’t escape religion. Almost prophetically, Salman included a Khomeini-like figure in The Satanic Verses. A character called only the Imam, he is also an exile seeking to return to his homeland to overthrow a despot and install his own tyranny. Like Khomeini, the Imam wants to turn back time:
“History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies — progress, science, rights — against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound [the Muhammad figure in the novel].”
And like Khomeini, the Imam succeeds in his quest and devours the very people who saw him as a messiah against the despot. In this, Salman understood so deeply the nature of the Iranian regime when so many then and now fail to grasp its fanatical, unbending nature. The Western response to the fatwa, as to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was to negotiate. Then, as now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the regime. The world of the West and the world of Islamism are totally irreconcilable. The sooner we realise that nothing will appease the fanatics of Tehran, the better able we will be to oppose them.
Just look at the wording of the fatwa itself: “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.” This is the language of honour and of sensitivity. Salman has blasphemed — he has insulted the honour of our precious beliefs — and so he, and many others, must die.
More from this authorThe new war on IslamismBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The fatwa is timeless. It won’t die with Khomeini. It is eternal. This is why, when it comes to fighting Islamism, the Western tools of diplomacy and reason are useless. We are faced with an enemy that never gives up, who thinks in terms of centuries rather than months or years, and who will wait patiently for an opportunity to strike. Only by understanding these different conceptions of civilisation can we begin to undo the damage wrought by the Iranian regime and other Islamists across the world.
It is unfashionable these days to defend Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis. But the attack on Salman shows the truth in it. Yes, there really are different ideas of civilisation — and yes, they are in conflict with each other. The sooner we realise this, the sooner we can recover our belief in Western civilisation, and stand up for it unflinchingly against its enemies, both foreign and domestic.
Salman would not, I imagine, phrase it in such a way, nor would he place such an emphasis on the Westernness of these values. But he is nevertheless an exemplar of them; a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end.
I have lived those long years; I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have 24-hour security. I still receive death threats. My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. His attacker used a knife to stab a letter into Theo’s chest: it said that I would be next.
When I heard the news about Salman last week, I couldn’t speak. I was horrified, but I was also scared. If they could get him on American soil, would I be next? Although I choose to live with security and Salman didn’t, the attack showed how patient and ruthless the enemy is. I am writing this four days after the attack, and have slept for as many hours. Will I ever be free? Will I ever feel safe? Will my children ever feel safe?
More from this authorThere is no "Biden Doctrine"By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
But this isn’t my story: it is the story of Salman Rushdie and everyone he stands for, of all the people in the Muslim world and the West who dare to challenge sacred dogmas and find themselves threatened and even murdered for doing so. For them, for us, giving into fear is never an option. As Salman wrote after 9/11: “How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorised. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”
And yet last Friday, I was scared. I felt terrorised. I was urged to go into hiding and stay silent for my own safety. For a few hours, I let fear rule my life. But still I knew deep down that freedom is a choice — and that I would keep choosing to be free, to speak and write as I please. In this way, in writing this very piece, I defy the Islamists and all others who would silence me.
Like Salman, I will continue to speak. Like Salman, I choose freedom.
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As a vague ideological lodestar, “environmentalism” has become a polarizing idea. Broadly, Democrats subscribe to it, and Republicans do not. That is the cause of today’s lament by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. What explains the GOP’s opposition to this nebulous idea? It isn’t the policy particulars, he writes, or any coherent political framework. It’s the culture war. In that conflict, environmental conservation has been recast as a “woke” practice. Since Republicans are trying to “limit the rights of Americans who aren’t straight white Christians,” the GOP’s hostility toward the bucolic is another pincer in their campaign against “racial and social justice.”

If that seems overly simplistic and irrationally uncharitable to you, you’re the perceptive sort. Krugman labors to dismiss or elide the right’s true objections to a dramatic expansion of state power that advances the prospects of favored Democratic constituencies. He ignores the GOP’s stated objections to the left’s environmental gambits, preferring instead to read their minds. In the process, he has misread his political opponents and misled his readers.

Take, for example, the mystery that opens Krugman’s column. Why is it that the congressional GOP, which supported the 1990 amendments to the 1970 Clean Air Act in overwhelming numbers, turned against environmental remediation? He cites as evidence the GOP’s unified opposition to the Inflation Reduction Act, “which, despite its name, is mainly a climate bill.” That brazen bait-and-switch does not factor into the columnist’s analysis of Republican motives.

Nor does Krugman dwell on the dramatic improvements to air quality that have occurred since 1990, some of which are attributable to the act’s targeted emissions standards, so neither should we. What deserves our attention is the Supreme Court’s June decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which the Court found that this bureaucracy had wildly overinterpreted its statutory authority. That agency set out to make it financially prohibitive to produce electricity by burning coal and cited Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act to justify this usurpation. The Court’s majority opinion asserted that the EPA sought to impose undue burdens on electricity consumers and the energy sector without congressional imprimatur. The agency even tried to implement programs, “namely, cap-and-trade for carbon,” that Congress explicitly rejected.

That is a perfectly legitimate expression of political propriety, which is perhaps why it doesn’t make an appearance in this column. What Krugman does rely on to make his point are what he believes are the wholly anodyne provisions within this Trojan Horse of a bill. “It doesn’t coerce Americans into going green,” he writes, “it relies on subsidies to promote low-emission technologies, probably creating many new jobs.”

We should only hope legislation that throws roughly $386 billion in the general direction of environmental issues, including tens of billions in grants and loans to related industries, creates jobs. That’s the least we should expect, though the economic value of conjuring up new skilled vacancies amid an acute labor shortage is debatable. The idea that the bill doesn’t “coerce” anyone is even more dubious. According to the link Krugman provides to justify the claim, the bill will “raise oil and gas royalties, rents, and minimum bids for operations on federal lands.” It will “increase Superfund taxes on crude oil and oil products.” It will set a “waste emissions charge” on methane emissions from oil and gas production and storage. And it will impose royalties on natural gas extraction. Outside of police powers, the imposition of fees and taxes are the foremost coercive powers the state wields.

Krugman has a point about the culture warring apparent in state-level Republican efforts to punish financial institutions that divest from the fossil-fuel sector. That is an exercise in point scoring, and it reflects the new GOP’s hostility toward firms that even appear to defer to progressive orthodoxies. But the columnist backs up the claim that the Republican coalition has, as a whole, turned against “free markets and opposition to government intervention” with his own misapprehension.

In the Trump years, Krugman writes, Republicans used “the power of the state” to override markets to “keep burning coal.” He notes that this followed a decade of revolutionary advancements in clean-energy technology and that the Trump administration’s intervention overruled the private sector, which “prefers alternatives” to fossil fuels. Again, the author links to items that refute his thesis.

According to the CNBC item he cites, the Trump administration did intervene to prevent the mothballing of coal-fire and nuclear-energy plants in 2018 on “national defense” grounds. As Europe’s experience following Russia’s land-grab attests, this insurance policy is entirely prudent. As for those alternatives, Krugman’s source does indicate that the cost of solar panels has collapsed in the past decade, but solar still only makes up roughly 5 percent of the U.S. energy mix. The cost of natural gas, however, declined as much in that same period following the advent of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technology. And because natural gas accounts for nearly one-third of the power generated in the U.S.—more even than crude oil—that, not renewables, was the “alternative” preferred by the power sector.

Krugman’s tidy thesis about Republican motives has little explanatory power. Its value is in its calumny and its reinforcement of a false binary. The state, in Krugman’s telling, is the author of all useful remedies to environmental degradation, and those who object to the state’s efforts, therefore, support environmental degradation. The right, by contrast, has tended to embrace the private sector and consumer choice—even the rare sort engineered into existence by taxpayer-funded incentives and regulatory standards—to advance environmental causes. That nuance is lost in Krugman’s narrative, which maintains that Republicans hate leftwing activists and initiatives so much that they’re willing to sacrifice the plant in the pursuit of vengeance.

“This may not make much sense intellectually,” Krugman concludes, “but you can see how it works emotionally.” You sure can.

From its very beginning, the course of the war in Ukraine has been charted in two ways. The first is by maps. Progress has been measured by territory acquired; prospects identified by territory in contention; challenges described in terms of territory still to be taken. We will know the war has ended when either Russia has made sufficient gains to satisfy Vladimir Putin or else Ukraine has taken back what Russia took. The second is by losses. Claims have been made about how many people have been killed and wounded, and how much equipment has been destroyed, damaged and abandoned. We will know the war has ended when either Russia or Ukraine has exhausted its capabilities and can no longer continue to fight. These two measures are related. The consequences of exhaustion are, it is assumed, to be most likely felt in the battle for territory. For now, neither measure appears to point to a clear victor. To see where this war is tending, therefore, it is necessary to look beyond both the maps and the lists of losses.
But let us start with the maps from the past four months of fighting. What is most striking is how little territory has changed hands. The Russians completed the capture of Mariupol and moved forward with an enormous effort in Luhansk, while Ukraine has been nibbling away at their positions in the Kharkiv and Kherson Oblasts, and pushed the Russians off Snake Island in the Black Sea. Other than that, not much. So far in this war defence has been dominant. This could be seen when Russia failed to take Kyiv and then withdrew from northern Ukraine.
But if defence remains dominant then how can the war end? The Russians remain frustrated that they have not even achieved their minimal objective – taking the whole of Donbas. While the Ukrainians still have some 20 per cent of their country under an increasingly brutal occupation. Even the much-vaunted Ukrainian offensive to retake Kherson appears to have been thwarted for the moment because the Russians have moved thousands of troops to boost the city’s defence – in the process making it less likely that their own anticipated offensive in Donetsk will make much headway.
The impression therefore is of stalemate. In the gloomiest commentary, the two sides are presented as punch-drunk boxers, trading jabs and uppercuts yet unable to land a knock-out blow. Unlike boxing, however, there is no referee to bring the fight to an end and let the judges call a winner; the two sides seem doomed to keep on punching until one drops from sheer exhaustion. Such commentaries often lead to proposals for the US to impose a conclusion. Washington might be sitting in Ukraine’s corner but, seeing the pain being inflicted, it could be urged to intervene and throw in the towel. Otherwise they are doomed to slug it out until one can fight no more or else, as the logic of the situation is recognised, an uneasy truce is agreed – perhaps a ceasefire that settles nothing but allows the two armies an opportunity to refresh and recuperate before picking up where they left off.
With defences dominant and not much territory changing hands, this is a war of attrition. Attrition is normally described as an alternative to a war of manoeuvre, which offers the more enticing prospect of a decisive battlefield victory. The only prospect of victory in an attritional war is through a series of encounters that have the cumulative effect of leaving the enemy depleted and exhausted. Generals prefer to think about winning through manoeuvre rather than attrition, through bold offensives rather than stubborn defences. Manoeuvre should be both quicker and less costly, concluding with a clear military victory that creates conditions for a clear political victory. Successful offensives lead to territory being seized and an outcome imposed; successful attrition requires the enemy to give up.
For understandable reasons, therefore, attrition is disparaged as an inferior and undesirable form of warfare, requiring patience and an ability to absorb pain – without necessarily offering a plausible route to victory. It is often the result, as in this case, of the aggressor failing to achieve an early victory through manoeuvre. It is chosen largely because it is the only alternative to acknowledging defeat.
But while wars of attrition may lack the dash and drama of “manoeuvre” ones, they can still lead to victory. This may be because they create the conditions for a return to manoeuvre warfare, or it may be because the losing side recognises that its position can only get worse and needs to find a way out. Moreover, there are different ways of fighting an attritional war, and some strategies can be more effective than others.
The word “attrition” derives from a Latin word meaning to rub away. Then it came to refer to repressing a vice and an imperfect form of contrition. This led to its original, theological English meaning: as a lesser form of repentance that had a worldly instead of a spiritual motive, lacking the sincerity of true contrition; from the start it connoted inferiority. And it came to refer to anything, from body parts to social conventions, that might be worn down over time. By the late 19th century “attrition” was used in a military context, though it only became prominent during the First World War. After the initial German offensive failed in 1914, the trenches were dug and thereafter combatants took heavy casualties whenever either side tried to mount offensives. After that war, military thinking was concentrated on how to prevent similar deadlocks in the future – through armoured warfare, air power or a combination of the two.
Attrition was, therefore, established as a form of warfare to avoid, as inferior to beating the opposition in a decisive battle. Exhausting an enemy through constant sniping, skirmishing and harassment took time, and increasingly made victory dependent less on the conduct of military operations and more on the underlying economic and social resilience of the belligerent, into a contest of endurance.
[See also: Volodymyr Zelensky is wrong to ask the West to ban Russian tourists]
This view of attrition as a lesser strategy has been a prominent feature of contemporary military thought. Part of the US army’s critique of its own performance in Vietnam revolved around its reliance on killing as many enemy soldiers as possible, in an attempt to make the campaign unsustainable to the communists. This led to a preoccupation with “body counts” as a measure of success, and the assumption that every Vietnamese killed was an enemy combatant – leading to the false observation that the communists had been eliminated many times over.
Those looking for a more intelligent way to fight wars soon identified “manoeuvre” as the superior form. The aim was to rely on speed, surprise and mobility to catch out, disorient and thus defeat the enemy. Generals were encouraged to relearn the art of operations, liberating themselves from dependence on firepower. The model was the German blitzkrieg of 1940, although the eventual outcome of the Second World War also offers clues about the problem of military breakthroughs with incomplete victories that do not end the fighting.
In practice the manoeuvre/attrition dichotomy can be too sharp. It may well be that commanders have to resort to more attritional methods after failing to secure an early victory, but that does not preclude a later return to a more dynamic approach. Indeed, inflicting an attritional approach on your opponent can be a sensible precursor to battle. Instead of rushing an attack, exploiting surprise, it might make more sense to opt for a more methodical approach, taking out enemy capabilities and undermining morale, before embarking on an offensive – what the Americans call “preparing the battlefield”.
There is thus a difference between attrition as a way of wearing down an enemy before embarking on an offensive, which might have the additional benefit of persuading the enemy that it is in a hopeless position, and attrition that reflects a situation of stalemate in which both sides can resist offensives. In these circumstances, wider economic and social resilience will matter, as both sides try to produce more equipment and ammunition and find more personnel to make up for losses. Once one side falters in this effort then they might lose as a result of unrest at home or a progressive inability to fight effectively. The First World War ended because German forces were weakened by the allied economic blockade, as well as the constant fighting. In 1918 the Germans mounted an offensive that they could not sustain, and then failed to cope with the counter from the allies.
Although the war in Ukraine is going through an attritional stage, this does not mean there is a stalemate. Both sides face the problem of defence dominance: it is hard to dislodge troops who are well dug in and prepared to fight. Large-scale counteroffensives risk exposing concentrated formations in the open to enemy fire. Russia’s recent offensives involved little manoeuvre. Attempts to encircle Ukrainian forces largely failed, except for Mariupol. Instead, intensive artillery barrages were used to force Ukrainian defenders to back away. These made possible some small gains at high cost for both sides. This stage of the war is coming to an end. Russia is now struggling to make any significant territorial progress, although it hasn’t stopped trying. Meanwhile Ukraine is aiming to seize the initiative so that the fighting occurs more on its terms. How well it can do so depends on whether it can develop a strategy to fight an attritional war.
Attritional warfare relies on assessments of its progress in terms of comparative losses to both equipment and personnel. With both sides, these assessments are often no more than guesses, especially when it comes to casualties. In practice, much of what we can glean about the extent of their losses comes from the efforts to replace what has been lost. Attrition is not just a question of which side is suffering most, but also who is best able to regenerate their combat capabilities. In this respect we can note some of the fundamental asymmetries that continue to shape this war’s conduct:
1. Ukraine is fighting for its sovereignty and territorial integrity and Russia is not. Russia has presented the war as a place to take a stand against both local and distant enemies, including Nato. But it has offered multiple versions of a desirable end-state for this war.
2. Russia is a far larger country that has been building up its armed forces. It is clear from current efforts at recruitment that it has suffered extensive losses. It is unlikely to run out of manpower but there are issues of quality, motivation and leadership. Because of its early mobilisation, Ukraine has the troops and motivation is high, but because many of its best units have been badly hit, it needs to train more.
3. Russia has vast stocks of weaponry but it is now having to dig deep into these stocks, having used up its more modern equipment. Ukraine lacks the numbers but is now fighting with more modern and effective equipment. In terms of crude firepower – artillery, aircraft and missiles – Russia has the advantage, though it isn’t as substantial as the one it started with. But its ability to wage manoeuvre warfare is now hindered by limitations with its armour and infantry. Ukraine’s capabilities may be improving but they appear to have some way to go. Thus, both sides are stuck with attritional strategies for the moment.
4. The war is being fought almost entirely over Ukrainian territory. With a few exceptions close to the border, Ukraine has not attacked targets inside Russia and has actively been discouraged by Washington from doing so.
5. Russia can therefore target vital infrastructure as well as civilian homes inside Ukraine on a regular basis. This has had devastating effects on the Ukrainian economy and everyday life. Ukraine is unable to respond in kind.
6. To cope with this core asymmetry favouring Russia, Ukraine depends on external assistance. Western support is vital both to keeping its economy afloat and also hurting Russia’s economy through sanctions.
7. While Ukraine can produce some of its own war materiel, it has also become increasingly dependent on external suppliers for its most effective systems. Russia has few external sources – it is acquiring some drones from Iran – yet its defence production is suffering as a result of sanctions. This is why it is increasingly having to make do with vintage equipment. But Ukraine has been denied systems that can strike Russian territory, notably modern aircraft as well as long-range rockets.
Two conclusions emerge from these asymmetries. Firstly, Russia has identified Ukraine’s dependence on external support as its greatest vulnerability and has been looking for ways to undermine this support, largely by aggravating the economic crises facing the West. The debates in the West on whether support for Ukraine will drain away as the economic pain intensifies and “war fatigue” steps in have acquired a routine quality, but all one can say is that so far this has not happened. The same is true of direct Russian attacks on the Ukrainian population. The effect has been to reinforce Kyiv’s conviction that it has little choice but to carry on and challenge those who might argue for a more conciliatory approach with Moscow to explain why this sort of barbarity should be rewarded.
[See also: In the grip of overlapping crises, Europe faces a leadership vacuum]
The second conclusion is that conditions on the ground should increasingly favour Ukraine because of the quality of the systems now entering service, and the effectiveness with which it is using them. The Russians are finding new recruits to send to their front (including press-ganging individuals in the occupied territories) but they can no longer be fussy when it comes to age, education, background or training. Life at the front for ill-prepared troops is becoming more desperate.
The most striking feature of the fighting since late June has been the vulnerability of ammunition dumps, command posts, air defence units and now airfields. The strike against the Saki air base in Crimea last week was a big blow not only to Russian capabilities – with at least nine and possibly as many as 27 aircraft and helicopters destroyed along with airport facilities and ammunition – but also to Russian self-confidence. The Ukrainians are being coy about how they mounted the attacks, preferring to leave the Russians guessing (and the guesswork continues on social media). They have said it was not a foreign-supplied system. Was this a one-off operation or a new long-range capability? If the latter then it warns of many ways in which Crimea, Vladimir Putin’s great gain from 2014, might now be in play. It also serves as a reminder of the curious ineptitude of Russian tactics: they are still underestimating their opponent. The Ukrainians dispersed their aircraft from the start so that they were not caught at their bases.
What we have not seen is Ukraine mounting comparable attacks to those mounted by the Russians in Donbas in May and June. In this respect defence remains dominant. Ukraine is having to follow a strategy that works around its weaknesses while exploiting those of Russia. This was dubbed back in May as “corrosion” by the retired Australian general Mick Ryan, now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ukraine, he noted, has sought to hollow out “the Russian physical, moral, and intellectual capacity to fight and win in Ukraine, both on the battlefield, and in the global information environment”. This is essentially a form of attrition, broadly framed. This strategy has recently been sharpened as Ukraine makes the position of the Russian defenders more parlous, threatening to cut them off completely from their supplies as well as their means of escape, leaving them more exposed to accurate artillery and air strikes. This is the potential risk Russian commanders have accepted by sending extra troops into Kherson. The increased partisan activity from within the occupied territories is tying down Russian troops and adding to their anxiety. Moreover, the spectacular nature of recent Ukrainian strikes has eased the need to impress external suppliers that their equipment is being used to good effect.
There are still opportunities for Ukraine to take land. Until territory changes hands and the maps are amended it is hard to convince doubters that the tide of war has turned in its favour. But while the secession referendums supposedly being prepared in Russian-occupied territories lack credibility and legitimacy, there are strong humanitarian reasons for seeking to liberate them as soon as possible.
The official Ukrainian line is that the counteroffensive is still underway. Nonetheless the importance of the damage being inflicted on Russian forces is also being emphasised. In an address on 10 August, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky used the classic language of attrition, arguing that it was Russian losses that would bring the war to an end:
“This is a question that worries absolutely everyone: when will the war end? Someone says – months; someone – a year; someone – even more. But the question of time actually directly depends on the question of the losses that Russia will suffer. The more losses the occupiers suffer, the sooner we will be able to liberate our land and guarantee Ukraine’s security. This is what everyone who defends our state and helps Ukraine should think about: how to inflict the greatest possible losses on the occupiers so that the time of the war gets shorter.”
The problem with attrition is that it doesn’t force the enemy to make decisions. It works by persuading enemy forces and their political leadership that their position is untenable and likely to get worse. So long as they believe they’re only facing temporary difficulties and can turn the situation around, or at least show that they have put up a decent fight before folding, then the war will continue. It is easy to understand why Ukraine feels that it has no choice but to carry on fighting, and why it is confident that it’s slowly taking the initiative.
Moscow appears to wish to incorporate seized territory into Russia, for which it is preparing some dubious procedures that will impress nobody but itself. For Moscow, the war may now be all about denying Nato the satisfaction of a Ukrainian victory and saving Putin’s blushes. There is nonetheless something increasingly desperate about Russian rhetoric and behaviour. The Russian military position is deteriorating and the West’s backing for Ukraine has yet to slacken. The trends favour Ukraine. At some point Putin and his cronies will have to work out how long they can continue to pretend that they have a credible path to victory.
Lawrence Freedman is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. This piece originally ran on his substack “Comment is Freed”.
[See also: Alexei Navalny’s chief of staff: “Putinism will now come to an end much sooner”]

According to NBC News, there are 4 million fewer students enrolled in college than there were 10 years ago, and there has been a 7 percent drop in college attendance from 2016 to 2020.
"With the exception of wartime, the United States has never been through a period of declining educational attainment like this," Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University's business school, told The Hechinger Report, an education nonprofit.
What caused this unprecedented drop? The COVID-19 pandemic played a clear role, and so does the robust labor market, which offers enticing jobs for recent high school graduates. While the dramatic national drop in enrollment began after the COVID-19 pandemic, several states have seen steady declines in enrollment prior to 2020. In Alabama, the college-going rate had declined 7 percent from 2014 to 2019, and in West Virginia, the 2019 college-going rate was 5 percent lower than in 2010.
However, while college-going rates were falling before 2020, college attendance numbers decelerated dramatically since the onset of the pandemic. In 2015, 65 percent of Indiana high school seniors went on to college. In 2019, the rate had declined by 6 percent. In 2020, the rate fell by another 6 percentage points, bringing the total of college-attending seniors to 53 percent. Tennessee's college-going rate decreased by almost 10 percent over a period of only three years, from 61.8 percent in 2019 to 52.8 percent in 2021.
While COVID-19 certainly played an outsized role in the drop in college attendance, with high school seniors wary of online school or unable to pay high tuition after their parents faced financial hardship, the pandemic doesn't tell the whole story. Despite a sharp drop-off in 2020, national college attendance didn't increase in 2021, which would have implied that students taking a COVID gap year had finally enrolled. In fact, attendance in 2021 dropped at nearly the same rate as the year before.
The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with a bustling labor market, seems to be the main thrust behind why more and more students are skipping out on college. "The change from in-person to online [college instruction] caused a reconsideration for some people of what it is that [they're] paying for when it comes to college, and then at the same time or shortly thereafter, we had the really rapid recovery in the labor market," Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells Reason. "My hope is that colleges are going to have to reconsider what it is that they're selling and try to be more sensitive to their students' needs and wants."
According to Akers, with many companies offering solid salaries and not requiring college degrees, many high school graduates are choosing to work rather than amass student debt for a degree they now seem to doubt will help them earn a better wage.
This dramatic decline in college enrollment could be the incentive needed for colleges to reduce their prices. Students are no longer buying the promises made in glossy brochures or by college counselors. Schools will either need to lower their prices or provide a product that is worth the hefty investment made by students and their families.
"I'm really hoping this fall in demand will wake colleges up to this fact and drive them to make some changes in what it is they're doing," says Akers, who added that this change "will be both good for individual students and good for our economy, creating a better pipeline for workers to fill the real jobs we have in place."
The post COVID-19 Gutted College Attendance. Now, a Solid Labor Market Is Convincing More High School Grads To Skip It. appeared first on Reason.com.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, which put an end to America's longest war.
Though 70 percent of Americans polled last year by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs supported President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw U.S. troops, they're now roughly split on the issue. When asked by YouGov and The Economist this month whether the U.S. made a mistake by withdrawing troops from Afghanistan last year, 40 percent of poll respondents said yes, while 39 percent said no and 21 percent said they weren't sure. Broken down by party, 61 percent of Democrats felt the withdrawal wasn't a mistake, while 68 percent of Republicans felt it was.
America's campaign in Afghanistan failed, but not for lack of trying. To date, the U.S. has spent over $2.3 trillion on the war—not including down-the-road interest payments on money borrowed or the lifetime care that veterans will require. It's estimated that over 46,300 Afghan civilians, 69,000 Afghan military and police officers, and 6,200 U.S. contractors and soldiers died during the conflict, according to Brown University's Costs of War Project.
Many aspects of the withdrawal could've been handled better. Since last August, critics have argued that leaving a residual troop presence would have ensured stability in Afghanistan at little cost to American lives and finances. But government reports released over the past year cast doubt on that approach, and on the idea of a sustainable nation-building presence in Afghanistan.
Last August, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released a report that named several key factors that doomed America's nation-building efforts. Among other failures, the U.S. government struggled to develop and carry out "a coherent strategy" and worked on unrealistic timelines that in turn encouraged quick spending and corruption. American personnel were often "unqualified and poorly trained." The government couldn't adequately tailor its work to the country it sought to transform.
America's strategy initially focused on Al Qaeda, but eventually became a much more nebulous reconstruction and anti-corruption mission. Officials felt that preserving stability would require building institutions and infrastructure, though the plans to do those things changed often. Douglas Lute, who coordinated Afghanistan strategy at the National Security Council for six years, said officials "didn't have the foggiest notion" of what they were undertaking. "With an ever-increasing list of enemies and priorities, it was tempting for U.S. officials to believe the solution was more troops and more aid," notes SIGAR. According to a senior U.S. Agency for International Development official, "The strategy was 'money expended equals success.'"
Officials misjudged how long reconstruction would take and often injected their own political preferences into what it should look like. The U.S. government "prioritized tangible projects on which money could be spent and success claimed more quickly" over less visible objectives that may have had more lasting effects. The Department of Defense's military organization that was tasked with training the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces didn't hold the body accountable, "simply performing tasks for them and providing funding regardless of actual progress." Money was often appropriated in Washington more quickly than it could be spent in Afghanistan.
American officials regularly failed to find enough qualified personnel for their ambitious projects. In 2009, the military reassigned chemical warfare response units to civil affairs projects, only giving them four-week-long PowerPoint crash courses to prepare. "With such a training deficiency" in policing, notes SIGAR, "some police advisors turned in desperation to television shows like 'Cops' and 'NCIS' to become more familiar with policing." Turnover was so bad that "every agency experienced annual lobotomies," with new staff doomed to make the same mistakes as their predecessors.
On a very basic level, U.S. officials didn't understand Afghanistan. That led to material issues, like U.S.-designed schools requiring the usage of cranes, which was impossible in much of the mountainous country. Planners selected obviously unusable construction sites for projects, like steep slopes and riverbeds. But more fundamentally, nation-building efforts neglected existing Afghan institutions and customs. That enabled certain "local allies" to exploit U.S. agencies "for financial gain and share a portion of the proceeds with insurgents." Officials attempted to instill American values and preferences into many Afghan systems without determining whether that was actually possible.
From the initial invasion to the withdrawal, the U.S. lacked the strategy and clarity needed to succeed in Afghanistan. Indeed, the definition of success changed dramatically between those two points, as the mission became much more complicated than just fighting terrorists.
Countless SIGAR reports over the years have exposed contract fraud and theft, deep-rooted corruption in the Afghan government, and policies that encouraged Afghan forces to over-rely on the American presence. Given the gravity of the failures outlined by SIGAR, there's little reason to believe they would've been magically resolved if only American troops had stayed a bit longer.
Unfortunately, American military engagement since the Afghanistan withdrawal proves that the U.S. government may—albeit on smaller scales—be doomed to repeat many of the mistakes it made in Afghanistan. America spent $300 million per day in Afghanistan with inadequate oversight; as of mid-June, it was spending $130 million per day in Ukraine with similarly shoddy monitoring. U.S. officials kept the American public in the dark on how poorly the war in Afghanistan was going; in July, The New York Times exposed the "stealthy network of commandos and spies," involving CIA personnel, who had covertly entered hostilities in Ukraine. Lessons learned are only as valuable as the U.S. government's ability to put them to good use.
Three presidents kept the U.S. entangled in Afghanistan in spite of the factors that spelled failure for the American campaign. After two decades of shifting goal posts, exorbitant spending, and futile reconstruction efforts, Biden was right to withdraw U.S. troops and put an end to the unwinnable war.
The post A Year After the U.S. Withdrawal, Getting Out of Afghanistan Was Still the Right Call appeared first on Reason.com.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Hey, this is Ezra. I am off this month, but today, we have Rogé Karma sitting in behind the mic. I don’t know if I’ve announced this yet, but Rogé is now our senior editor. He really runs the show and sits at the core of our collective mind. Sometimes, I worry he thinks more like me than I do, and when I leave, and he guest hosts, as he is today, sometimes people don’t even realize I’m gone. So I think you all will enjoy this. Today’s episode is on a pretty crucial topic right now — the future of remote work, the future of the office and really the meaning of both — the role they play or could play in our lives. So I hope you enjoy it.

rogé karma

Over the course of this year, a lot of our lives have returned to something resembling a prepandemic normal. Restaurants are full again. Airports and hotels are packed. Even movie theaters have made a comeback. But the one institution that hasn’t really been true for is the office. Only about a third of office workers are back in the office full time now, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change dramatically any time soon. If you look at surveys, the vast majority of knowledge workers prefer some form of hybrid or remote work, and executives are increasingly coming to accept that reality. But when you actually talk to people about their current work arrangements, many of them have mixed feelings, and I’m one of them. I work from home full time now, and don’t get me wrong — I don’t miss my commute. I love having a more flexible schedule. I’m an introvert who’s way more productive without all the distractions and interruptions of being around people all the time. But at the same time, I really do feel like the boundaries between my work and life have collapsed in ways that are hard to repair. I find myself not just working more often, but just thinking about work way more often. And again, I’m an introvert, but still, I felt way more loneliness in the past six months than maybe any time in my life since maybe high school. But what makes this moment so frustrating is also what I think makes it most hopeful. Yes, the office is dying, but a new, better way of working has yet to be born. So while it might feel terrible and messy now, I think there’s a real opportunity in this moment for not only rethinking where we work, but reimagining how we work. And that’s why I wanted to invite Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel on the show. Both of them have spent years covering the way we work from distinct angles. Warzel is a technology reporter who currently writes the newsletter “Galaxy Brain” for The Atlantic, and Petersen, as a longtime culture writer who writes the newsletter “Culture Study.” And late last year, Warzel and Petersen — who are a couple, I should add — published an excellent new book together called “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.” It builds off their experience leaving their life in New York behind in 2017 to move to Missoula, Montana, and work remotely years before the rest of us were forced into the same. And I actually think the book is even more relevant today than when it first came out almost a year ago. So this is a conversation about how companies and workers can navigate this wild, truly unprecedented moment in the history of work. It’s about what the office is for, about what the post-office future of work could look like, and it’s about what it would take for working from home to truly begin to live up to its utopian promise. One quick note before we begin: Not everyone has the ability to work from home in the first place, and the option to do so is, quite frankly, a massive privilege. But we couldn’t cover the entirety of work in this episode. So this conversation is only about the subset of workers, sometimes called knowledge workers or portable workers, who can, in fact, work remotely. As always, the show email is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Anne Helen Petersen, Charlie Warzel, welcome to the show.

anne helen petersen

Thank you.

charlie warzel

Thanks for having us.

rogé karma

So if you would have asked me a year ago, even six months ago, to make a prediction, I probably would have said that a lot more offices would have returned to fully in-person work by now, but that hasn’t really happened. The amount of time office workers report working from home has actually risen in the past year. A bunch of companies that were talking about much stricter return-to-office policies have either backtracked or aren’t really enforcing those policies. So I’m wondering why you think that is, and maybe we can start with Charlie here. Why haven’t we seen as strong of a push to return to the office as we might have expected?

I mean, I think one reason is pretty simple, and that’s, once you give somebody a perk, once you give somebody some kind of benefit, it’s really hard, just in life, to roll that back. And the benefit that so many knowledge workers gained over the past two and a half years — and to be clear, there were many downsides. But one of the benefits was genuine flexibility. People were able to work where they wanted. They were able to weave work in with the rest of their lives. They could be present with their kids, attend to them for a few moments inside the house, and then switch back into the mode of work. It was the flexibility that routinely was only granted to executives, who could take summer Fridays off and go to their beach house. And I think it’s really, really difficult to roll that back. It’s really hard to make a case, when your company functioned pretty well during the pandemic, when everyone was remote all the time, that the entire operation is going to fall apart if you’re not all together inside this nucleus building.

rogé karma

So I take your point, Charlie, that this is a perk that’s really hard to roll back. When you look at surveys of office workers, for example, the plurality of people clearly prefer some form of hybrid work. The vast majority either prefer remote or some form of hybrid. And yet when I talk to people about their hybrid setups, they aren’t exactly thriving. They’re commuting to these half empty offices, still worrying about Covid just to sit on Zoom calls all day. And so I’m interested in how you understand that disconnect. And you’ve specifically written about hybrid work as the worst of both worlds. Maybe you can start here. If hybrid work is generally what people want, why isn’t it working?

Well, I think it’s because the hybrid plans are bad, and no matter what you’re trying to do with your office, no matter what you’re trying to do with your workplace, you have to first really take stock of what the work is and what the work demands. And that requires a lot more kind of an eagle eye view of what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis as employees, than most companies are willing to actually put any effort into if they’re really — they’re like, oh, I thought we were just coming up with a hybrid work plan, not reconsidering the entire workflow of our office and what we do and why we do it and why we do it the way that we’ve done it for so long. But that look at the sort of work that you’re doing can be really, really helpful in thinking about what work demands or would benefit from presence, from co-presence, and what work can really be slotted into these times away from the office. And so I think that, sometimes, people look at hybrid and say, oh, it just means that we’re going to tell people they can come and go as much or as little as they want, and in practice that means that people are coming into ghost offices where no one’s there. They’re not getting any of that feeling of collaboration or presence that they’re seeking, and then when they’re back home, they’re just like, why am I not just here all of the time? And so I think that’s the fundamental problem, is people haven’t done that difficult but necessary work of figuring out what the office is going to be for.

I completely agree, and I think one thing we learned while writing the book and talking to people who spend a lot of time thinking about new ways to work is that, unfortunately, hybrid work is the hardest of all of the options. It is actually easier to drag everyone in and have everyone present and walk by and tap people on the shoulder and have that older way of working. It’s also easier to have everyone remote and just ping the people and have that decentralized office. The hard part with hybrid work is that it introduces all kinds of friction. It also introduces all kinds of potential inequities between the people who are present in person and the people who are opting not to be there. And so in order to make it work, it requires so much intentional design. It requires having people whose entire jobs are figuring out how every employee in the company operates best and designing systems of communication and organization to make collaboration as good as it can be across a variety of mediums, including in person. I think, as Anne said, this work — most companies, most executives, most people aren’t willing right now to do that. It’s so much easier to create some kind of half-assed, oh, you’re going to be in the office two and half days a week policy, and without that design, you get what we’re seeing. You get these ghost offices. You get people coming in to sit on Zoom all day and endure the commute without any of those spontaneous collaboration benefits.

rogé karma

One way that I think both of you are describing that I’ve come to think of the problem with the current hybrid models is that the problems with remote work seem to be bleeding into the office, and the problems of office work seem to be bleeding into remote. So when you’re in the office, you’re still dealing with the half empty office. The culture hasn’t fully come back. You’re on Zoom calls all day. You’re probably worried about Covid. And then when you’re remote, you still have to be working on the office 9:00 to 5:00 schedule. You still have to be constantly checking Slack or Teams. You still have to live close enough to the office to commute. And so I think when people imagine hybrid, they think, oh, it’s the best of both. I get to be flexible some days, but I also get to see my friends and colleagues. And then what you really get is these parts, especially if you’re not intentional about it, is these different parts bleeding into each other. But I think I do — for that reason, I want to give a voice of skepticism here, which is, if I’m a C.E.O. hearing this, and I’m hearing that hybrid is really hard, I’m hearing that it might require me to create entirely new positions to make it work, it is going to be difficult, why shouldn’t my response just be, look, this hybrid approach isn’t working? It’s too hard to implement. We had something great before in 2019. Let’s just make everyone come back into the office. Why isn’t that the right response here?

Well, I think some places have tried that, and I think that they’ve had a fair amount of attrition, especially amongst people for whom that flexibility has become nonnegotiable. A lot of the data that Charlie and I rely on, and that we frequently cite, comes from Slack’s Future Forum, and what they found is that mothers and fathers, in particular, not just want a flexible work schedule, but demand one. And if they can’t have it, if they’re threatened with it going away, they’re already looking for jobs if they haven’t left already. And so I think that if you hire a company that’s like, we only want a certain type of person, we don’t want any parents or any people with caretaking responsibilities, and we also don’t care about these feelings of inclusion within our workplace, because, again, we’re thinking about this data that shows that people of color in the workplace feel more inclusion, feel more comfortable, in hybrid and remote scenarios, you’re essentially setting yourself up to put yourself on a trajectory going backwards in time as a company instead of forwards. I think that there is this overwhelming feeling amongst white male executives that the office was a neutral space, and I think that leaders who are smart are coming to understand that just because it was a space that felt comfortable and productive for me did not mean that it felt that way to others.

I think one of the things that this whole control experiment has taught us is just to see how broken work was prior to the pandemic. I think it granted a lot of people some clarity, whether that was thinking about their commutes, thinking about the wasted time in the office, thinking about the centrality of the workday in their life, and just how much of the rest of their life got pushed further and further into the margins every consecutive day, week, month, year. And when I try to think about the case for the skeptical C.E.O., the thing that I keep going back to is this idea that we are obsessed in the working world. So many books get written about ways to innovate your business, ways to change, ways to adapt to a new information dominated, fast-paced society, what have you. And people are so ready to accept — executives are so ready to accept a new tactic or a new piece of communication software and then tout it as this form of cutting edge innovation, but there’s a way to innovate here as well with the way that you design your work practices, with the way that you grant people this flexibility. And I think, to what Anne was saying with inclusion and the way that different workers are actually thriving in this, what you’re doing with a true hybrid environment is you are giving new people a chance to contribute in different ways. You are actually playing to the skill set of all the people who didn’t actually thrive in the office, and that’s such an opportunity. I think where executives go wrong, they see this friction as just straight up downside. But this friction is actually, and we argue this in the book, it’s this ability for us to find better ways, to make work more human, to make work more focused on efficient communication between workers and executives, and I just see that as an amazing potential possibility. And what’s so frustrating right now is how few executives, especially the ones who think of themselves as innovators, don’t recognize this for the opportunity that I think it is.

rogé karma

Yeah, and I think that there’s some really good data to show that it’s actually just a bad business decision, to Charlie’s point. The Stanford economist Nick Bloom, who I think has done some of the best work generally on remote work, him and some co-authors just released what I really think of as the gold standard study on hybrid versus in-person work. They did this huge randomized control trial of something like 1,600 workers in a tech company. So these were computer engineers, folks in marketing, finance, et cetera. Some were in the office five days a week. Others had a hybrid schedule working from home two days a week, and the results were really striking. Among the hybrid employees, quit rates were 35 percent lower, which is really important when you consider just how much attrition costs a company in terms of rehiring and retraining. People’s self-reported happiness and work/life balance went way up, and productivity actually improved slightly. There was one measure they did where they looked at literally the most objective measure I think you can. Lines of code written went up around 7 percent. And what really struck me about that was, to the conversation we’ve been having, a lot of hybrid arrangements are kind of a mess right now, and yet hybrid work is still outperforming full time office work on all of these measures, which I think is just really telling.

I just think that it’s a great point that needs to be hammered home, which is just, so much of our working life prepandemic, and during the pandemic, to be clear, is people feeling like they’re toiling, people feeling like they’re giving so much of themselves to their jobs and have to fit their lives around that. I think it’s remarkable how people perform when they feel like their needs are being attended to a little bit better, or that they’re getting what they want, or that they have just a little bit more autonomy over their days. And I think that that’s really just the thing that we continue to be grappling with. Post vaccines, we’re all really trying to assess, both in our own lives, but also inside corporations and in, I think, capitalism at large, how important is this shared space? What does it do for collaboration? What does it do for culture, for morale? What does it do in making our lives more miserable, more hectic? I think this is all just a grand experiment that a pandemic forced upon us, and we’re trying to figure out the lessons of that and how we can apply them going forward.

Yeah, I think — I mean, Nick Bloom’s work is really interesting, too, because he was studying remote work before the pandemic and understood the ways in which productivity went up amongst fully distributed people before the pandemic. So also has an insight into the ways in which what we’ve studied or what we’ve conceived of as remote work over, especially, the first couple — year, year and a half of the pandemic was very different than these fully distributed models that existed before. And I think that’s just worth underlining again and again. If you, at home right now, are thinking about, oh, my gosh, I still can’t stand my work from home scenario, I just feel really lonely, I never work with anyone, I never see anyone, it’s not the future. There are so many different setups and co-working scenarios moving forward that are going to, I think, really define the future of work. But we’re just getting there now. We’re getting to some of those iterations now. [MUSIC PLAYING]

rogé karma

So I want to return to this question we’ve brought up a few times, which is what is the office for? Because if we’re going to make hybrid work better, this is really the first question that companies need to ask. And to a point you brought up earlier, Charlie, one way to think about these past two years is as a massive experiment in what the office actually does and the role it plays in our working lives. And so I guess what I’m interested in hearing from you both is, we have this great experiment. What have we learned? What is the office for, and what is it not for?

Well, there’s a great myth, that I’m sure you have heard, and that everyone listening is heard, which is that there is so much innovation and creativity that happens by happenstance in the hallways at an office. And there’s actually been some pretty great research, I’ve seen it published in Harvard Business Review and cited other places, that this is not the case, that this is absolutely a story that people tell themselves about the importance of the office. And maybe you have had a drive-by interaction that is useful, and that’s great, but it is not the primary function — utility of the office. I think that what people are realizing is that the office is very, very important for collaborative work. So a great example is, let’s say you have a document that you need to co-write, and in theory, Google Docs would be great for this right. You all sit down, and you do it. But it goes through so many iterations, it takes a week. Lots of people have to approve, and maybe that’s the sort of thing, if you sat down in a conference room for 30 minutes, you could just pound it out, get it done. So that sort of collaborative work, and also intense creative brainstorming work that builds on itself, I think, is also the sort of work that the office is extremely utile for. Everything else, there are things that maybe you might prefer about the office. You’re like, oh, I feel less lonely, or I like seeing other people, or I like doing teambuilding, happy hours. Some people really like that stuff, but they are — it is profoundly exclusionary in a lot of different ways. And while I can understand, especially why younger employees, employees newer to the office who are not yet ingrained in the company culture, feel desperate for that function of the office, there are other ways to integrate someone into the company culture that don’t demand a commute, getting ready, inflexibility in the way that your day works, all of those things.

One thing that I think about when trying to figure out what the office is for, I think the office is, to some degree, a place for people who work together to learn a bit about each other. I was reading a story about the new executive editor of The Washington Post and some of the struggles of the first year of her tenure, and one of the things that came up in there is a lot of people didn’t really have a sense of who she was as a person and vice versa because of the fact that most employees were out of the office. And so I think that there is some of that, simply having a familiar relationship. Observing somebody day in, day out in person gives you a lot of information about them that it’s difficult to pick up in other environments. So I think, to some degree, the office is this place to communicate and pick up a lot of ancillary data or intelligence about your workplace, and it’s the stuff that isn’t in the employee manual. Workplace gossip is really important, especially, again, for younger employees, this ability to learn the unwritten rules of your workplace and navigate it or the unwritten rules of your industry. And I think that stuff happens on chat apps. It happens remotely. Again, there’s is more friction there, and I think that will evolve. If we change the way that we work, a lot of that data will just naturally start to appear in those remote spaces, or will be exchanged in digital channels that aren’t part of the corporate infrastructure. But right now, I think so much of the difficulty of this moment is because a lot of what the office is for isn’t for work, but it’s for this kind of unofficial data. And we’re trying to figure out the ways to impart that on people and have that culture in a different medium.

rogé karma

So I think there’s a few points that, I think, all of us clearly agree on here about when it comes to the function of the office. But it seems like where there’s still a big question, and I sort of sensed it in some of the tension between your two answers, was this category of what The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has called soft work. When you leave the office, when you go remote, you’re still doing a lot of the hard work of making PowerPoint decks and sending email and writing papers. But for soft work, those moments where you’d run into a colleague on the way to the bathroom, and you’d catch up about your weekend, or you’d stop by someone’s desk to try out a new idea on them, that, I think, to some extent, could be over romanticized, but it’s definitely true that it’s plummeted. And I think that, Anne, you make a really good point. I don’t think there’s a lot of good evidence that kind of soft work is so important to creativity and innovation. But what worries me about the decline of that sort of softer work, those loose connections, is what it means for loneliness. Earlier this year, Microsoft released this big study of over 30,000 remote workers from something like 31 countries, and one of the findings that stood out most to me was that 55 percent of hybrid employees and 50 percent of remote employees feel lonelier at work than before going hybrid or remote. And don’t get me wrong, we had a serious loneliness problem well before the pandemic, but for many people, I think the office was one of the last institutions where we were around the same people consistently, where we could have these casual interactions and form friendships and meet potential romantic partners, and that kind of thing just doesn’t happen as much remotely, or at least, it’s harder to make happen. I mean, I — even the connections we do make, they don’t feel nearly as good as they do in person. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who genuinely enjoys Zoom coffee chats. And so don’t get me wrong, I love remote work in so many ways. I love the flexibility. I love not having to commute. And I’m pretty introverted, so honestly, I don’t miss what often felt like forced small talk. But at the same time, it’s possible I go days, even a week, without seeing anyone face to face except my partner. So on a day-to-day basis, I feel fine and productive, but then over time, there’s this gnawing feeling of loneliness, this craving for human connection. And I worry about that not just for me, but especially for people who don’t have the level of familial and social support that I have.

I’m so glad you asked about this because I think it’s a huge problem. And I think that the fundamental problem predates the pandemic, and that work had become the primary source of interaction, of comfort, of friendship, of relationships for so many people. It should not be our employer who is solving our loneliness problems. We should not be thinking, oh, I wish I saw more people at work. It should be, I wish I had more people in my life. I wish I had more of a social infrastructure outside of my job. Just generally, I think it’s a sad state of affairs when we are relying uniquely on our employers as our social hub in any capacity, and I think sometimes, people — this is a difficult thing to talk about because people are like, I like my work friends. Or me and Charlie’s case — we met at work. And there’s nothing wrong with having work friends, but I think the situations in which work becomes the primary source of all of your connection is more indicative of an unhealthy relationship with work just generally. And I say that personally, part of the reason Charlie and I met at work was because we had no life outside of work. When you spend all of your time working, you have no time to form those relationships outside of work that would be sustaining, and so it makes sense that, if you’re spending all your time working, and you no longer have those in-person interactions, and you also don’t have those sustaining relationships outside of work, that you’re going to feel very lonely. But how do you develop them? A lot of people, especially young people, and I think especially millennials, never built up that muscle. Do not know how to form those relationships. And so now, they’re sitting here with their jobs, reconsidering their jobs, is this who I want to be? Do I want to be defined by my job? Do I want all of my friendships and my source of companionship to come through my job? I don’t think so, and I think you’re also seeing a very different attitude emerging amongst the next generation of workers as they’re figuring out what place work is going to have in their lives.

rogé karma

I think that’s such an important point, Anne, and I agree. I don’t think we should need the office to be able to make these connections. There are lots of other ways to build community, to build relationships, but in addition to not knowing how to do this, I also think we’ve just set up our society in ways that make the office really easy and make these other institutions really hard. The office, for all of its faults, it was this central institution where you would come together and interact with the same people on a consistent basis. There was a structure to it. There were resources behind it. There’s all this physical and social infrastructure we invest to make it accessible, and the sad thing is, that’s just not as true for a lot of these other avenues of finding community. You’ve written a lot, Anne, about the bowling alone phenomenon, the way that churches and civic life and volunteer organizations have really declined in recent decades, and I’ve felt that when I tried to go get involved in my community and make connections outside of work. It’s really hard. The different organizations are scattered. They’re really understaffed and under-resourced. They’re hard to access if you don’t have a car. And so my big worry is that if we take away the office without building up some of these other institutions, then the result is just going to be more loneliness, more atomization, more time spent sitting in our apartments alone, doomscrolling on social media, and that seems like a really important social problem to address.

Yeah, I mean, the success of my newsletter, I feel like, is entirely rooted in people who feel this fundamental yearning for a community and struggle to make a space in their life for it, or even to know how to cultivate it, in part because their lives have been so subsumed by work for so long. And I just fundamentally think that we cannot rely on our corporations to provide this infrastructure of connection. They will always fail us. And so what you’re seeing instead, as people reconsider the placement of work in their lives, is a lot of people who are trying to figure out how can I forge this community? Since we have allowed these other forms of social connection to atrophy, how can I begin forming this in my neighborhood, through mutual aid organizations? On a more macro level, how can we rebuild not just a social safety net, but an infrastructure of care for one another?

We interviewed, for the book, some early career employees, people who graduated into the fully remote, mid-pandemic work force, and one of them was a young woman who basically detailed this nightmare scenario of coming in and feeling just totally adrift both in the organization, but also in the idea of what their career should be and feeling that they didn’t have any of that workplace data. They were struggling and feeling very alienated from everything, and their job was consuming so much of their time that they had what you describe as this kind of deep loneliness and floundering. And we published some of that as an excerpt, and that person reached out to us afterwards and actually said — this was about six or eight months after the initial reporting — and said, I actually have a completely different opinion on everything that I told you back then. And what they realized was that all that alienation that they had felt, while it was still really difficult in the moment, was actually potentially beneficial to them in the long run. As a result of graduating into the pandemic work force, they really understood their job as much more of a transactional relationship instead of that familial one. They were able to impose really firm boundaries between work and their personal life as a result of that alienating onboarding process, and I think that there’s something important there. I take all of the points of the loneliness, of the alienation, of feeling lost. I think that’s really important. I also think, too, that part of this great control experiment is slowly changing the norms and the expectations of what we want out of work, and one of those very well might be that certain people start viewing work as, honestly, what it is to some degree. It’s a transaction between employees and employers. It’s not a family, and that family rhetoric is often incredibly exploitative to the workers.

rogé karma

So there’s another angle of this I want to get at here because, if we’re talking about these problems of loneliness, of alienation, one response is we have to invest in community. Another response is we have to change our view of work. But another way to approach this is maybe what we need is better technology, and I’m really interested in your thoughts as a technology reporter here, Charlie, because if you go back 10 years, working from home was truly terrible. There’s no Zoom. Not many good applications for chatting. And even if you go back to the beginning of the pandemic, the April 2020 version of Zoom was really bad compared to what we have now, and that’s important because we’re actually seeing a lot of investment in work from home technology. The amount of new patents for work from home technology has more than doubled over the course of the pandemic, and as their technology gets better, there’s a real chance, I think, it could be used to address some of these limitations. So I’ll put this to you first, Charlie — if Zoom and Slack and Google Docs are generation one of remote work technology, what could generation two or three look like?

This is such a complicated question because I think all of us, for decades — and this is what we do with technology in general. We tend to think of it as almost a silver bullet. It’s going to solve this problem. It’s going to make this easier. And so when I think, when we look at it, what is the 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 versions of workplace technology, collaborative technology, I think what’s really important is not to have this overreliance on it because it’s really actually all about the implementation of that technology. Slack, let’s use for an example, is potentially a great tool. It allows you this instantaneous communication and this way to organize conversations and projects and for people to collaborate from anywhere in the world in this very low intensity, ambient way. It’s a wonderful thing for a lot of businesses if used correctly. But what we end up seeing is a very lazy implementation in so many offices of something like Slack, and what ends up happening is it becomes another channel overlaid on top of all the other communication channels where you have this long running performance of your job. You’re live action role playing your job, and that ends up being such a drain on productivity. It ends up being such a drain on the worker experience. It becomes this digital shackle when it’s implemented lazily, when there aren’t norms, when there aren’t cultural rules for how to use this technology efficiently and respectfully in your workplace. And so what’s the next generation of these technologies going to look like? I would imagine that there’s going to be a lot more visual or audio ambient presence, where you have something running in the background where someone can do a digital or virtual equivalent of knocking on your door or your cubicle and trying to pop in quickly to ask a short question. I think there will be all kinds of ways to take the ambience of the office and bring that into a digital setting, and those things very well might be transformative. They might lower some of that feeling of loneliness. They might make collaboration better and more efficient, but it’s really all about the implementation because if we just unleash the software on people without rules and norms about how to use it, it’s inevitably going to do what all this technology does, which is just become an additional layer into people’s lives, and it will undermine all of the efficiency that it promises.

rogé karma

So let’s talk about implementation. I think, if there’s one thing that really has come across from our conversation so far, it’s that our current model for thinking about the office is broken. But there are lots of new companies being created right now that have never had a conventional office and never will, and that means there’s a real opportunity to think about the kind of office, the kind of culture, the kind of technology that we could employ that can make some of these trade-offs we’ve been talking about less acute. So let’s think utopian here, and I’ll start with you, Anne. If we were designing the office from scratch, how would we design it? What should the office of the future look like?

Well, it depends on how big the company is, I think, because one thing that I found really interesting and provocative about the future of larger companies is this idea of the home office as almost like a museum, like a pilgrimage spot. So it’s a place that holds the keys to the company culture, for better or for worse, in terms of leadership. You get to be there and get to have that presence. And we have this to some extent with headquarters, but these spaces would not be a place where hundreds, thousands of other workers are as well. It’d be more a place where you go to onboard, a place where you go for large events, a place where you go for conferences, for times of celebration, for commemorating who you are as a company, for that manufacturer of culture broadly. And then you have all of these satellite places, and this, I think, really facilitates real flexible work that allows people to live in more places than just expensive coastal cities, where you can come into these spaces and use them collaboratively. The other thing that I think about, just like if you were a company that has people mostly in one area, and you want to facilitate an environment where people can and do come in two to three days a week, is to make it much more like a college library. So you have these spaces for quiet, dedicated work for people who want to be in co-presence with one another, but don’t want to be disturbed. They want to have their productivity that they get at home. And then you have breakout rooms, conference rooms, but that can be reserved and collaborative. And then you have places where you can post up and be next to one another, working all of the time. I mean, think back, if you went to college, when you went to the library, it was a very social space a lot of times. I had friends who would be like, I can’t go to the library tonight. I need to actually get work done. But you would also have that space available for people who wanted that, and I think that sort of iterative, flexible space is something that, if someone were designing an office right now, you would have much more of that. But instead, we’re getting a lot of retrofits that I don’t think are expansive in their thinking about what the office is actually for.

rogé karma

So I think a really important point that comes across in that answer is that I think the idea of the office as a single place, a single physical location, is just a very 20th-century way to think about work. I think something that’s really come across in this conversation is that work really isn’t one thing. We’ve talked about deep individual work. We’ve talked about brainstorming, meetings. There’s — that soft work. There’s onboarding. And if that’s the case, if work isn’t just one thing, then maybe we don’t just want one space to serve all of those roles. Maybe the, quote, unquote, office of the future is a series of spaces. The home is where you get a lot of your hard, deep work done, and then maybe there are co-working spaces where you work together with other members of your immediate team once or twice a week. And then maybe there are regional locations where, every couple of months, bigger teams can come together for team building and bonding. And to your point about the museum, Anne, maybe there’s a more central location where new employees are onboarded and trained and things like that. But I think something that’s really interesting in that answer is that, maybe, the way we should think about the office is much less of as a single location and more as this bundle or collection of different functions or tasks that different spaces can be employed to fulfill.

Yeah, I love that, in part because it really challenges what The Atlantic writer Ian Bogost calls the ideology of the office. He makes an argument that we’re not going to go to this distributed model or hybrid model because the ideology of the office still holds so strong, and what he means by that is it’s not the physical office per se. It’s more this understanding that work gets done under supervision, that I need to be able to see you to understand that you are doing work, and that also, for leaders in particular, for managers, for C.E.O.s, people in the c-suite, that my power, my authority, comes from that ability to supervise. And I think that’s a very old fashioned understanding of the way work gets done, but also a very prevalent one. And so if we do break up the physical spaces of the office into much more of what you were describing, in terms of a series, a suite, of understanding of what the office is, then I think it will also be effective in breaking up some of that ideology of the office.

I think that this speaks, as well, to this idea of, especially with hybrid work, but also just with fully distributed work, of friction being a good thing. One thing that we did in the book was we interviewed a number of management consultants about the way that management is very broken, and the way that so many managers — especially in industries like the technology industry, you have these workers who are really good at a certain part of their individual jobs. And they’re rewarded for that by getting management responsibility. You’re a fantastic programmer. Would you like to be responsible for a team of programmers? And what we found is, a lot of times, these people were promoted into management roles reluctantly often, and without any real training as how to do their job. And in an office, that proximity enabled them to paper over this lack of actual interpersonal management skill, and there were horrible consequences of that, everything from gender pay inequity to just great amounts of resentment between managers and rank and file employees. And one thing that these management consultants have really showed us, when we spoke to them, is the way that remote work is forcing them to learn a number of those skills because they don’t have that ease of presence. They don’t have that immediate authority of being nearby, and those who are succeeding as they’re relearning how to do their jobs as managers are learning how to communicate to their employees, but also, as Anne said, trust and build this trust. And one way that trust works is by modeling vulnerability. If you, as a manager, show that you are vulnerable, that you are imperfect, that you are struggling with trying to find this balance of work in your life amid a pandemic and all the uncertainty of 2022, your co-workers see that, and they’re inclined to model it back to you, that vulnerability. It’s building a different way to work. That seems, to me, like just a massive opportunity, and a lot of that comes from that removal of this authoritative centralized location of the office. [MUSIC PLAYING]

rogé karma

I want to use this as a place to pivot, to have a broader conversation about remote work. I think the central thesis of the book is that remote work, for all of its potential, could very easily just end up reproducing and even deepening the toxic dynamics of the office. It has all of this potential, like you said, to rethink how we think about management, about productivity, about communication. But in reality, it also has the possibility, especially if we port the model of the office onto it, it has the possibility of making work worse. And so I want to ground this in a quote. You write, quote, “this is the dark truth of remote work as we know it now. It promises to liberate workers from the chains of the office, but in practice, it capitalizes on the total collapse of work life balance,” end quote. Can you just unpack that for me?

Yeah, some of this is rooted in my own personal experience and in both of our personal experiences, but kind of hit hardest for me. In 2017, we moved from New York City to Montana and were doing our jobs remotely. And this is obviously before the pandemic, when there were no restrictions on where I could work, and I could go to a coffee shop without any fears of exposure or anything like that. And what happened was, I immediately was so insecure, being removed from the office, about my ability to produce and how I would be perceived as a worker, and so worried about protecting this privilege that I had of a flexible work, that all I did was work to protect it. My sense of work/life balance was pretty bad before, to be honest, but it was obliterated once I was a full remote worker to the point where I would roll out of bed, immediately begin to work, and throughout the day, neglect all the different responsibilities in my life as a partner in order to perform presence and also just get more done outside of an office than I would have inside it. And it got to the point where I was sitting on my couch one night, and I had cold sweats and this deep anxiety watching Netflix because the couch was the place where I did all my work. So it was like I was relaxing inside my office. I had so totally collapsed to the barriers between my work and my life that any relaxation, any kind of unplugging from the office actually felt bad. And so I had to go through this honestly relatively traumatic process of trying to figure out how to reclaim some kind of balance, and that began with a real series of evaluation questions about whether my life was going as planned, whether I was the person that I wanted to be, or whether I was just this working robot. And one of the impetuses for the book was that we saw a lot of people speedrunning my experience during the pandemic. I had this ability to take the time to work through this, and I watched a lot of people stuck inside hiding from a deadly virus trying to navigate this, and that was one of the original seeds of the book. And I think you can see this collapse happening in some of the workplace data. Microsoft, back in the spring, released some information. They were tracking the keystrokes in their workplace productivity software internally of employees, and what they noticed is, before the pandemic, there were kind of two peaks in the workday — one before lunch, and one after lunch — and that was the peak usage stats of company software. And what they noticed, a year or so into the pandemic, is this smaller but definitely noticeable third peak that was appearing late in the evenings around 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 at night, and this was this third hump of productivity. And there’s two ways you can look at that. One is that the workday is changing, that norms are changing, and that people are actually building their workdays around their lives in a potentially healthy or interesting way. But the other way to look at the data is that those two earlier peaks before and after lunch haven’t changed all that much. They’re still seeing the same amounts of keystrokes of, quote, unquote, work, and we’re just adding on the third one after the kids go to bed, after dinner. And there’s this idea that our workdays are actually just getting longer because we are porting that office mentality into the rest of our lives. And so I think that’s the danger here, which is that we fall into this situation where I was, say, in 2017, and that because of the fact that we’re running this controlled experiment in real time, to continue the metaphor, we don’t have the ability to take stock of what we’re doing to ourselves, and that we create this work culture that normalizes three productivity peaks in the day instead of two. I think that’s a really big worry that we’re going to lose sight of that.

rogé karma

I’m glad you mentioned the triple peak, and I think, to your point, I would feel better about the rise of the triple peak if it wasn’t for another Microsoft study, which found that the average workday has expanded by 13 percent, which is about 45 minutes, since March 2020, which means that, for a lot of people, even if this triple peak comes with the promise of flexibility, it’s actually, right now, the product of an expansion of work. And so I want to dig into some of the ways that not everyone, but many of us who are working from home, are working more than ever. One of the craziest statistics I’ve seen so far is that the average Microsoft Teams user saw an average of an over 250 percent increase in their weekly meeting time from March 2020 to February 2022. Now, obviously, some of that is just meetings that used to be offline happening online, but that’s clearly not all of it. And if you just talk to remote and hybrid workers, they’ll tell you that they’re in way more meetings now than before the pandemic, and it’s pushing their work later and later and later. And so I just want to understand why you think that’s happening because it’s not intuitive that’s simply switching from in-person to remote would create this explosion of meetings, but it really has. So why do you think it has?

I think the cause of over meeting culture is two things. The first is that, during the pandemic, especially in the early months, the way that people reacted to the anxiety of feeling like they weren’t effectively demonstrating how much they were working was by putting meetings on people’s calendars. And you can actually see there’s some interesting data that we got for the book where meetings would spike, actually, when there were periods of increased anxiety in the home, like when school started again. When parents were worried about the fact that, oh, my kids are Zoom schooling. I don’t want my boss to think that I’m not dedicated. I’ll put more meetings on other people’s calendars. And I think that once those meetings got on the books and were normalized, they’re still there, so that’s one thing. The other thing that I think is happening is that there is very little understanding of how to make incremental meetings, and some of this is technology. The automatic setup in many companies is to either put half an hour or an hour on someone’s calendar, and many meetings require five minutes, 10 minutes, 40 minutes. And we do not have a very good apparatus for those lengths of time. And then a corollary to this, too, is that I think there’s a lot of things that don’t need to be meetings that have become meetings, again, as a way to allow people an opportunity to be present with one another. So anything over six, seven people probably shoot be an email, but a lot of times, people now don’t read emails because people are sending emails that should be Slacks or Team messages, and people are sending Slack or Team messages that should be phone calls. And this is part of that larger overview that many people need to do for their companies, is looking at the types of communication they’re using and understanding and underlining what sorts of communications should be used for what sorts of problems.

rogé karma

So one thing I worry about happening here is that companies realize that there are too many meetings, so they start relying a lot more on asynchronous communication — Slack, Teams, email. But that isn’t always better. I would highly recommend people go listen to our show with Cal Newport on the way that this overreliance on these tools can, in some cases, be even more time consuming and distracting than meetings themselves. And so I want to talk about the source of a lot of this asynchronous communication. You all have mentioned the phrase “LARPing your job” a few times here, and I think that’s a really important concept for understanding the swell of communication, not only meetings but asynchronous communication, that is leading to overwork. So tell me about this idea of LARPing your job. What is it, why do we do it, and how has remote work changed it?

Yeah, my former colleague John Herrman coined this term a while back to speak about the performance attitude of a lot of these chat applications, especially Slack. And I think anyone who is engaged in this kind of portable work and uses these tools — I think this will be instantly familiar. You have a lot going on in your life, in your day. You’re busy, and you’re not really able to give as much attention to your job as you feel you should be in a given moment. And so what you do is you open up your phone, and you skim a conversation going on between a bunch of your colleagues and probably your boss in Slack, and you contribute something pretty meaningless, but nonetheless, it’s a contribution, and it’s visible. Your little dot is red. It means you’re logged on. Therefore, you must be engaged. But what it is, it’s kind of like work ephemera, work detritus. It’s not creating any kind of productivity. It’s just this performance of presence. And what that’s rooted in, obviously, is anxiety. All of our jobs feel so precarious, and the stakes are so high. We need our jobs because our health care is tied to our jobs in America, and I think this anxiety persists everywhere. And the workplace chat apps are a great way for it to bubble up because it’s just so easy to offer something up that makes you look like you’re really engaged when you’re not. And such a big problem with that is, often, those emails, those Slack messages, they’re not just sent out to nobody in particular. Oftentimes, they’re making work for other people. So your performing of your job is sometimes creating things for other people to attend to. And so I think there’s this way in which LARPing your job creates this vicious cycle where we’re very anxious about our status in an organization and how precarious it is, and it just ends up making more crap for people to deal with.

rogé karma

I think it’s important to point out, too, that this happens at the firms that consider themselves the most cutting edge and productive, and often isn’t just even about worker anxiety. It’s also about what the firm demands. So my first job out of college was at McKinsey, which is a management consulting firm that literally specializes in helping other companies be more productive. And I was told pretty early on that, if I wanted to be seen as a good worker, I needed to stay up at least past midnight every night working. And I told people, but I can get my work done faster than that. Why stay up arbitrarily? And I was literally told by one of my managers, if you want to advance at this company, you can’t stop working before midnight. And if you’re going to stop working before midnight, make sure to delay sending your emails to make it look like you were up past midnight. And I remember just being so mind blown, the fact that this was literally supposed to be the bastion of productivity, and yet so much of the way we were being evaluated was based on this kind of performance. And it gets at this point that you make, Anne, which is that the root problem of this LARPing phenomenon really comes down to the way that companies have historically measured and defined the productivity of knowledge work. So I was wondering if you could just talk about that piece of it a bit.

Yeah, this gets to this larger conversation about what good work looks like. And I think, in a lot of high powered places like McKinsey, places like financial firms, places like law firms where you’re billing by the hour, there really is this understanding that excellence is time spent even if that time spent is ultimately, oftentimes, quite wasteful. And I think this is a very American understanding, that more is always more, more time is always more, better work, that really flies in the face of so much research on what actually contributes to good work, especially good work over time, sustained good work that lasts longer than just a couple of years in your 20s when you feel like you could work forever and never sleep. And I think really smart companies are re-examining, or have long been re-examining, what excellence looks like and have decoupled it from any understanding of how many emails sent or how many meetings attended, and are looking more closely at what is the quality of the work, how creative is it? Is someone a good mentor? Because mentorship actually takes time, but it doesn’t necessarily take time in a way that is visible to others. And that’s something that I think remote work can actually really help with, is people being able to take that time between work and refresh and do things that give them a much more robust and three dimensional life that also make it possible for them to do much more excellent work. This is the case for me, I think. I’m producing more, writing more, having more success than I ever have before. I also work fewer collective hours over the course of the week, and one of the ways I’m able to do that is that I don’t have Slack anymore. I’m spending so much less time just trying to evidence that I am working to others, and then spending that time doing work or not doing work.

rogé karma

But I also think that there’s a way in which remote work can actually make this worse, especially if you’re at a company that requires you to have these kinds of communication tools. I think it’s pretty clear that the way most companies were measuring people’s productivity before the pandemic was time at your desk, was presenteeism. And I think it’s pretty obvious that the aesthetic of working hard at your desk was never a very good measure of actual productivity. But when you’re remote, even the parts of your job that used to be visible, the kind of work you got done sitting at your desk, typing away, making a slide deck or writing a piece, suddenly, all of that work is now invisible. There’s no way for your boss to just glance over and see what you’re doing or see that you’re working. And in the meantime, the only things that are visible to your boss, to your manager, are the emails you’re sending, your participation in certain group Slack channels, the little green or red dot by your name to show whether you’re online. And so I feel like remote, if you have the right setup, it could free you from having to LARP your job. But for a lot of people, I think there’s actually just way more pressure to use these channels to perform work because it becomes one of the few ways that you can actually show that you’re working.

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s something to acknowledge. But when I hear you explain that, while I’m incredibly sympathetic to all of it, from the pressures that a worker feels, and that’s so real, and the pressures that managers feel not being able to perform the authority of their jobs, I also just think that it’s a great example, especially on the management side, of not supporting your workers. I go back to that idea of building trust. So much of this is a trust issue on the part of managers. The version of them LARPing their job is calling the meeting or demanding more via Slack or even just creating that kind of anxiety so that their employees are constantly checking in and giving them something to do. And I just think that mentality is going to have to change if true flexible hybrid work is to succeed because we can’t manage the way that we did before. We can’t demand the same things, and we have to start to create systems of work where employees feel comfortable not always performing and feel like their job isn’t constantly in a state of precarity.

rogé karma

And I just want to step back for a moment because I think, also, what we’re saying here is a pretty radical claim, even if I believe it’s a largely true one. Basically, that in the name of productivity, in the name of efficiency, our workplaces, our managers, are pushing us into ways of working that actually rob us of our productivity, that we’ve created this entire culture that builds on itself around performing productivity instead of actually being productive to the point where I a lots of people who work that third peak, that night shift, simply because it’s the only time of day where they feel like they can get some peace and quiet from the constant barrage of communication that this LARPing dynamic requires. But that really raises the question of how we can begin to address some of these dynamics, which I think you started to get at, Charlie. And I think you all have a really helpful framework for this in the book. So, Anne, would you mind just talking about the distinction between boundaries and guardrails?

Yeah, so I came up with the concept of boundaries versus guardrails when I was trying to describe how we come up with something new to protect against the runaway train of working all the time that isn’t that phrase, boundaries, which has become so worn out as to effectively be meaningless. When someone says that they have boundaries at work, what they are often articulating is something that they’ve put up around themselves that they want to push past continuously to show just how dedicated they are to work. You could be like, oh, well, I need to take care of my kid, but I guess I can stay a little bit later. Someone else can help with that. Or I try to not work on the weekends, but look, here I am working on the weekends. I’m evidencing what a good worker I am. And guardrails, instead of being something that is the responsibility of the individual and also the responsibility of the individual to maintain, a guardrail is collective and structural, and it applies to people all the way at the top echelons of an organization all the way down to the bottom. And I use that metaphor of a guardrail instead of a boundary because guardrails, if you think about them on a highway pass, they are something that is put in place by the government to protect not just individuals, not just the people who have to travel that place every single day, they’re there to protect everyone. It doesn’t matter who you are. And an example of a guardrail would be something like, at this company, we do not work when we are on PTO. This might sound like a policy that most companies have, but in practice many, many companies, especially companies that are salaried knowledge work companies without union protections, they have practices of absolutely checking email and responding to email and taking a couple of hours to work while they’re on PTO, while they’re sick, anything like that. And so a guardrail would be something that is not just in the company handbook, but it is a communicated understanding between manager and managee, and it is practiced by everyone in the company.

And I think an important part of that, too, is that there’s consequences involved. So the person who works during their PTO actually gets called in when they come back by their manager and is issued a formal warning. You are actually working against the organization here. You are going against our values and our guidelines. You’re creating more work for other people in this sense, and there’s actual disciplinary procedures or something. And that may sound ridiculous to some people listening, but that’s how you create these norms. You get rid of something negative in the workplace by implementing consequences for it, but with work, what we have is, instead, this destruction of work/life balance is implicitly rewarded. There’s this, oh, you really shouldn’t have done that, but thanks, it was really helpful. I’m really glad you did get back to us. And what that does is just, as Anne was saying, it just reinforces that, and it creates that culture where there’s this unwritten or unspoken expectation of constant on-demand work.

rogé karma

So I have to say, I love this boundaries/guardrails framework. I think shifting this more to the responsibility of the collective of the company is really important, but I’m glad you brought up enforcement, Charlie, because that’s where I’ve really seen these kinds of guardrails often fail. And I think part of the reason that happens is the way that working hours themselves have become an elite status signal in our society, in our culture. I think people forget that, for a lot of the history of civilization, idleness was a key marker of elite status. The rich show that they were better than you by refusing to do anything that even looked like work. And so you have the situation where, up until 60 or 70 years ago, you can tell how rich someone was by how little they worked. And today, that relationship has just been completely reversed. Elites work much more than they used to. In terms of sheer hours, they work more on average than middle class, and there’s sprung up this whole status hierarchy built around work. I remember, when I was in college, the consultants and the investment bankers would argue with each other about who was working longer hours, who was pulling more all nighters, almost as a badge of honor, and that seems true at a societal level as well. Being busy, working long hours, has almost become seen as a signifier of your eliteness, of your self-worth. And so I’m wondering how you think about that layer of it because I think that culture layer of the extent to which status is bound up with overwork and working long hours is at the heart of why it’s so hard to enforce these guardrails or boundaries because we’ve all really internalized some of the signaling.

I mean, this is the blessing and the curse of the salaried job. Because companies are not paying you by the hour, you open yourself up to expectations of working far beyond whatever the unspoken or spoken norms are for how many hours you should be working in a week. And so I think there are two different types of this fetishization of overwork. Some of it is a real martyr syndrome, where it’s I care about this so much that I will put in every single hour that I possibly can to show everyone else in the world how dedicated I am, and that’s a burnout trap right there. And you see this in nonprofits, but then also in other care professions, things like health care and education, social work. And then you have the status, the fetishization of overwork, which as you point out, is really endemic to things like finance and consulting and other places where it becomes this badge of honor, how little time you have for anything else in your life, and that includes care work. That includes the cultivation of friendship. That includes taking care of yourself in any meaningful way, and I mean that in terms of sleep and nutrition and being outside, anything like that. And so how do we let go of that? I found, even amongst my friends who are ostensibly totally on board with the entire project of, yes, we all need to work less, when they talk about a friend or a sibling who lives in Germany and only works 37 hours a week, there’s this note of derision. Like, must be nice, instead of, oh, wow, isn’t that great that they have found a manageable work/life balance that also provides a living wage. And so I think that there’s something about a lot of our brains that is broken, and part of the problem is capitalism, and part of the problem is precarity, that the way that we grapple with the anxiety of feeling like the bottom could drop out at any moment is by working all the time. Part of the solution is guardrails at an organization, but a lot of companies are never going to do that. They thrive on burning people out. A company like McKinsey, part of their ethos is let’s burn people out to see who rises to the top over the course of their 20s, and the only way to institute healthy guardrails is unionization. And I don’t think that you’re necessarily going to see that at a place like McKinsey, but there are a lot of other places that are using unions as a way to create guardrails because leadership refuses to create them themselves.

rogé karma

So we’ve been talking a lot about how remote work can change work, but I also want to talk about something you get at towards the end of the book, which is how it can change society more broadly. And I want to start with one of the almost utopian possibilities you raise, which is that a shift to a better version of remote work wouldn’t just be better for us as individuals, that it can actually help revitalize our communities as well. We started getting into that earlier, but I was wondering if you could just talk through that idea for me.

Yeah, so this connects, I think, with some of what we’ve discussed before in terms of when your life stops rotating entirely around work, it opens it up to rotate around a lot of other things, and not just your immediate family either. So one thing that Charlie and I have been able to do with our flexible work schedules is we commit to helping provide care for our friends and their kids. This coming school year, every Tuesday and Thursday, they’re going to come over to our house from, I think, 3:00 to 4:30, and that’s a thing that you usually rely on a grandparent for or someone else that has kids. But we have the ability to arrange our schedules so that we can create that pocket of time twice a week to hang out with a 5 and 8-year-old. And it also makes it so that I can insert my hobby, which is gardening, into different points in my day instead of always feeling anxious, like oh, my gosh, I have to create a whole hour or five hours or carve out these times through the week that actually make the hobby seem so overdetermined that I don’t end up doing it at all. I can just sprinkle it throughout the week, and I think a lot of people really are desperate for that sort of thing. And it also makes it possible for me to sign up for things that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to. A lot of volunteer organizations ask for a steady commitment of maybe an hour a week, an hour every other week, two hours a week, and that’s the sort of thing that, when you can control the hours that you are working, you can block off two hours every Thursday that you work at the food bank. And yet if your employer trusts you, that you will be doing the work no matter what, that’s a real incredible way that you can be part of a community while also balancing your work responsibilities at the same time.

rogé karma

I have to say, I love those examples, and I really hope that you’re right about this. But I’m also worried because what I’ve often seen happen is the opposite. As we were talking about before, one of the major social trends of the past 70 years is that we’ve become far less rooted, far less bound to particular places. And I think, for a lot of people, the office was really the last thing, the last institution, binding them to a given place. So then when you could work from home, there’s really not a lot left to tether you to a given community, especially if you’ve been living in this world where work was the center of life. I mean, just look at what’s happening to cities right now. Over the past few years, there’s been this real exodus from a bunch of major cities that has a lot of policymakers worried, really worried, about the future of those places, and people are just traveling a lot more now. If your office is remote Friday and Monday, then the logic is why not just work from another city or country or cabin in the woods on those days and then be able to spend your weekend in a fun new exciting place? And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with those choices on an individual level. I know lots of people doing those things, lots of people leaving cities, lots of people traveling on the weekends more, and they seem really happy with those choices. But they certainly aren’t more engaged in their communities, and that really worries me when I think about the future of cities, the future of place, the future of community life, that we’ve sort of given people more time by allowing them to work flexibly, but we’ve also ripped away this institution that, for a lot of them, was the reason they were in this place at all. And so I’m just wondering how you think about that tension.

I think we’re so early to it all. I mean, if we’re looking at this experiment, we’re still inside a very active pandemic that we’re constantly failing to manage. So all of the flexibility is still inside that set of circumstances, and it’s treacherous to navigate. But I just think it’s going to be so complicated and it’s all going to happen over time in ways that are expected and unexpected for the people who opt to be really detached from a sense of place and use that flexibility to roam. I think you’re also seeing people who are moving back home to be closer to family, to be caregivers. I think that there is a sense that some of this can sound utopian, but I also think there’s a sense in which it actually makes sense and creates this interesting virtuous cycle, where the less you’re reliant on work to provide you that sense of belonging and meaning and community, the more you have time to participate in a community, the more you participate in a community of any kind. And again, some of these can be digital communities. It doesn’t have to necessarily be you are attending the City Council meeting, but that’s wonderful. And I think the more you rely on those communities, the more you realize that you don’t need work to fill that void, and I don’t think it’s a linear process. I don’t think it’s an easy process at all, and I think it’s really important to note that this is a seismic change in our lives. I mean, for a lot of, quote, unquote, knowledge workers, everything about the way that we did our jobs changed for a significant period of time. And to unwind those changes and to actually see the ways that they splinter off in positive and negative ways, I think, is going to take a while. We’re so interested in proclaiming this experiment as a success or a failure right now, but I think we’re just starting to figure out and to tease out some of these questions about what we need to demand from work and our communities and what we really want our lives to look like going forward.

rogé karma

I think that’s a really nice place to start coming to an end here. Before we get to our final question I just want to end where you end the book, which is your letter to workers, and here’s my particular question for you. We can set better office policies. We can create guardrails. We can even pass public policy that makes work less central. But at the end of the day, for a lot of us, for me, for I think a lot of people listening, we really have to grapple with that internalized workist within us. And so I’m just wondering, because I really appreciate your approach to this at the end of the book, like what advice do you have for people listening, for working with that part of yourself?

What I would say is that, I think, sometimes, people are really hard on themselves for their inability to let go of that inner workist or inner Protestant capitalist work ethic that tells them that the solution to problems, or the way that you work through that larger anxiety of precarity, is by working all the time, is that it takes a long time to unlearn, and that I am continually in the process of unlearning it and watching out for it. This has been a podcast that’s about the future of the office, but it’s no accident that this book followed on the coattails of my work on burnout and thinking about how to recover and return from burnout. And so much of it is just really spending some time thinking about, how did we get this way, how did I get this way, and how do I do that long work of unlearning that my value, my sole value as a human, is my capacity to work all the time? But I think Charlie probably has some insight into this, too.

As far as advice, I think what I’ve had success doing in my life is trying to do a personal inventory. I mentioned earlier that there was something traumatic about it, about going through that process of self-evaluation, and what was traumatic about it was that, fundamentally, I wasn’t the person that I wanted to be. I was a really great employee and really productive, and by all the metrics of my workplace or my career, I was excelling. I didn’t really have any hobbies. There came a point in that inventory where I legitimately didn’t know what it was that I liked. I just liked the fact that I was good at performing my job. That was a really difficult experience psychologically, and honestly, it’s one that has coincided personally with therapy. And so I think one way to approach this, for anyone who’s trying to do some inventories in their own life, would be to think of it through that lens of something like therapy or exercise. This is not a situation — work/life balance, or whatever you want to call it, is not something that you just immediately — just like your therapist will never stop you midsentence and say, well, I think you’re fixed, see you later, or you’ll never finish a workout and then say, well, I never have to exercise again, I’m fit, it’s an ongoing process. And it’s something that you’re going to succeed at some days and fail at on a multitude of days. This is part of the messy part of being human, and it requires constant vigilance and constant inventory and a constant reassessment of is the way that I’m living my life in line with what I want out of it? And that’s often really difficult work. But I think for everyone, it’s beneficial to take that time and really take that stock.

rogé karma

Well, I really appreciate you both taking the time to join me for the show, so I want to end where we always end the show, by asking you each to give a couple of book recommendations, books that have influenced you that you’d recommend to the audience.

I am going to choose two books that were really influential in the research process of this book, so they’re generally oriented around work. The first is “In the Age of the Smart Machine” by Shoshana Zuboff, who is also the author of the probably better known “Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” “The Age of the Smart Machine” is really about work and the modernization and technological advances of it. It was written in the ‘80s, so it doesn’t really concern the internet so much, but it does revolve around the early implementation of computers and this idea of the anxiety that workers felt, being alienated from the physical nature of their jobs with technology. And I think you can read that now, and even though it’s an analog description of what’s now fully digitized, all of the lessons are there, and it’s an extremely instructive historical perspective on labor and technology and the conflicts therein. The second book is “The Myth of the Paperless Office” by Abigail J Sellen. It’s about what, on the surface, should be a really boring topic, which is paperless offices, but it has this wonderful lesson at the heart of it, which is that the companies that succeeded in a transition to a paperless office were the ones that weren’t actually trying to go paperless. They’re actually the companies that were trying to do something else, were trying to be more efficient or trying to find new ways to work and actually did what all the other companies, who were trying to go paperless, couldn’t do. And so it’s a wonderful examination of the ways that really focused an intentional change and slow change to get the results that others can only dream of.

rogé karma

Awesome. And, Anne?

Yeah, the first set I would recommend is a book I returned to again and again, and it’s called “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street” by Karen Ho. And it’s an ethnography of people who work on Wall Street, mostly in the 2000s, and the way that Ho is able to elucidate some of that stuff that often goes unspoken about the way that Wall Street and finance banks understand what excellence looks —

rogé karma

Applies to a lot of consultants, too, I’ll tell you.

Yes, 100 percent. It is a fantastic and incredibly readable book, and I think that anyone who hates a culture of overwork and wants to understand exactly what they want to reject will find this really illuminating. And then the other book is more recent. It’s Angela Garbes’s “Essential Labor,” and her argument is, essentially, that taking care of children is the work of a society. This is straightforward, but I think we’ve forgotten it. We’ve lost sight of it, and that’s both in terms of structural changes, but also just what we are doing as individuals in a community to take care of children and also of one another. And it is an incredibly readable book as well, and I think that it has set a fire in a lot of different people that I know who have read it recently. So I strongly recommend.

rogé karma

And your book is “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.” Charlie Warzel, Anne Helen Petersen, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks for having us. [MUSIC PLAYING]

rogé karma

Salman Rushdie was stabbed ten times last Friday afternoon when a 24-year-old attacker rushed the stage of the Chautauqua Institution where the author was speaking. The attack was premeditated, and Rushdie’s injuries are severe. The interruption of this placid intellectual setting with an act of murderous violence—one that the Iranian regime has long encouraged—has shocked American consciences. At least, that’s what we can infer from the silence of those who attached themselves in recent years to the voguish notion that provocative speech is tantamount to violence.

It is reasonable to assume that Rushdie’s attacker was animated by the grievances that led Tehran to order devout Muslims to kill him on sight. That 1989 fatwa, issued shortly after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, is believed to have influenced his attacker. Indeed, this may have been a more “guided” attack than that, according to the NATO officials who spoke with Vice reporter Michael Prothero. “A Middle Eastern intelligence official said it was ‘clear’ that at some point prior to the attack,” Prothero wrote, the alleged assailant “had been in contact with ‘people either directly involved with or adjacent to the Quds Force.”

Perhaps the ambiguity over whether Rushdie’s attacker was acting on Iran’s orders, actively or tacitly, has led those who have argued for years that speech can produce trauma (and can, therefore, justify meting out trauma in equal measure) to hold their tongues. Maybe their silence is indicative of the fact that the target of this assassination attempt bears too much resemblance to themselves for comfort. If there was any intellectual consistency among those who subscribe to this proposition, though, they would be holding fast to their conviction that Rushdie had it coming.

“Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system,” Northwestern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. “Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.” The professor attempted to distinguish “abusive” speech from the “merely offensive,” the former of which can, she asserted, produce negative physical consequences. “We must also halt speech that bullies and torments,” she concluded.

This is the rationale that led college newspaper editorials in the last decade to argue that offensive speech constitutes “an act of violence” and to endorse “appropriate measures” to ensure controversial speech does not fall on fragile ears. It’s this logic that led a majority of college students who responded to a 2015 survey to agree with the idea that “choosing to use or not use certain words can constitute an act of violence.” It is this framing that convinced nearly one-fifth of college students to endorse the proposition that violence may be an “acceptable” way to prevent challenging ideas from ever being expressed.

This infantilizing notion has been trotted out to justify the violence committed by Islamist fundamentalists. “Charlie Hebdo has a long record of mocking, baiting, and needling French Muslims,” wrote Tony Barber in the Financial Times, after the bloody massacre of that French publication’s cartoonists and writers. After all, that’s “what happens when you get a culture that, rather than asking to what end we defend free speech, valorizes free speech for its own sake and thus perversely values speech the more pointlessly offensive it is.” Even then-Secretary of State John Kerry lent credence to this notion when he said of the murderers that they at least had “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’”

Four months after the bloodshed, American blogger Pamela Geller tried to repeat the behavior that supposedly led to this attack. Geller’s “cartoon drawing contest,” an act of solidarity with a famous stunt executed by the Danish publication Jyllands-Posten, had its intended effect. Two radicalized gunmen attacked the Dallas, Texas, venue hosting Geller, where they were killed by security. For successfully duplicating the conditions that inspire violence in the violent, Geller was pilloried. MSNBC host Chris Matthews accused her of “taunting,” “daring,” and “provoking” her would-be murderers. CNN’s Erin Burnett accused her of enjoying “being a target of these attacks,” and New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi said that it was Geller’s “wish” that there be “more dead Americans at the hands of radical Muslims.”

In 2015, following the bloodshed in Paris, the annual PEN American Center Literary Gala sought to award that year’s Freedom of Expression Courage award to Charlie Hebdo. In response, six well-known authors disassociated themselves from the organization. One of the boycotters, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Peter Carey, complained of PEN’s “blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation.” The slaughter of innocents over little more than having the temerity to offend the easily offended was not, he said, something the West should be “self-righteous” about.

Rushdie disagreed. “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” he wrote. “What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.” Of course, no one did. Why would they? Their actions were in line with the intellectual fad of the moment. Dissociating from an organization that celebrated speech for speech’s sake required no courage because it incurred no consequences. Rushdie, by marked contrast, has bled for his consistency.

In an ad for his daughter Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney denounced Trump as a “threat to our republic.” Dick seems to have forgotten that, unlike Trump, he and George W. Bush successfully stole an election.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney with her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, at his house in Virginia, May 12, 2021. (David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / University of Arizona via Getty Images)
 
“In our nation’s 246-year history,” Dick Cheney says at the beginning of a viral ad for his daughter Liz Cheney, the Wyoming congresswoman, “there has never been an individual who has been a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.”
That’s a remarkable claim, and not just because the United States once had to fight a war to suppress an actual insurrection led by antidemocratic ideologues. Compare the 360,000 Union soldiers who died suppressing the Southern rebellion to the zero Capitol police officers who were directly killed by pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021.
And we don’t need to go back to the Civil War to see the absurdity of Cheney’s claim. Just in the last few decades, you know who was a much more competent and dangerous enemy of democracy than Donald Trump? Dick Cheney.

A Tale of Two Elections: 2000 and 2020
Trump “tried to steal the last election,” Cheney reminds us as the ad goes on, “using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters rejected him. He’s a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election and he lost big.”
This focus on January 6, and more generally on Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, makes sense. As the vice chair of the House January 6 Committee, Liz Cheney has positioned herself as a leading member of the small and increasingly irrelevant faction of the GOP that continues to be openly critical of the former president. It looks quite likely that she’s about to lose to a Trump-endorsed primary challenger (Harriet Hagerman).
But it takes a pretty breathtaking amount of chutzpah for Dick Cheney of all people to attack anyone else for trying to steal an election. Cheney became vice president (and, at least in the early years of the Bush administration, something like the de facto copresident) when he and George. W. Bush successfully stole the 2000 election.
Set aside the fact that half a million more Americans voted for the Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman than for George Bush and Dick Cheney. In an actually democratic system, that would be the only number that mattered.
Given the strange and anachronistic Electoral College system used in our presidential elections, Bush and Cheney could steal the national election by stealing Florida’s electoral votes—which is exactly what they did.
Many tens of thousands of registered voters were purged from Florida’s voter rolls before the election in a deeply flawed process overseen by Republican secretary of state Katherine Harris. Florida’s deeply undemocratic laws barred felons from voting, and some of those purged really had committed felonies, but a great many had not. The low-end estimates about how many voters were illegally purged is about twice the number of votes by which Bush and Cheney allegedly won the state. High-end estimates put the number “11 or 20 times” higher than that.
Despite this, Florida’s remaining voters likely would have still handed Gore and Lieberman the state’s electoral votes, if not for a highly irregular vote-counting process in which Bush and Cheney were declared the winners by a Supreme Court decision, split on nakedly partisan lines, that stopped a recount.
Oh, and just like Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Bush and Cheney’s successful electoral manipulation twenty years ago involved riots designed to shut down key points in the process. The January 6 riot briefly delayed the certification vote in the Senate. By contrast, the 2000 “Brooks Brothers riot” in Florida actually shut down the recount with the goal of giving more time to the Bush-Cheney team’s legal machinations.
The two riots were different in important ways. On the one hand, the ways the culture war has changed in the last couple of decades led to the spectacle on January 6 being more luridly violent and strange than what happened in 2000. It would be hard to imagine any of the Republican congressional staffers who went to riot at the recount site in 2000 dressing up like “QAnon Shaman” Jake Angeli. On the other hand, the Brooks Brothers riot was one step in a carefully orchestrated and ultimately successful plan to overturn the will of the voters. On January 6, by contrast, there was no real plan—it was the last gasp of a flailing and incompetent attempt by a president increasingly shorn of allies to find someone, anyone, to overturn the result for him.
But the two riots had one striking detail in common: Roger Stone played key role in organizing both of them.

Threats to “Our Republic”
In the first few years of the Bush-Cheney administration, in which Dick Cheney seems to have exercised an unprecedented amount of power as vice president, core civil liberties like the right to privacy and the right to trial by jury were rolled back in disturbing ways. Vast numbers of people were detained as “enemy combatants” outside of the legal protections normally allowed to prisoners of war or criminal defendants. Surveillance was conducted on a massive scale, both inside and outside the new workarounds to standard constitutional protections created by the Orwellian Patriot Act the Bush-Cheney administration rammed through Congress in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Donald Trump was certainly no friend of democratic rights or civil liberties, but his big legislative accomplishment was a tax cut. He didn’t find any lasting new ways to undermine the standard freedoms associated with “our republic” remotely comparable to the handiwork of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
Trump is an enemy of democracy. He’s the current leader of a party that’s been actively trying to make it harder to vote for decades, and which has increasingly relied on the branch of government the most independent of democratic pressures (the judiciary) to enact its regressive agenda. However incompetent his attempt to steal the 2020 election may have been, there’s every reason to think that he (or perhaps Ron DeSantis) would try the same thing in 2024 or 2028 given half a chance. And as the example of 2000 shows, such attempts don’t always fail.
But if there’s one person we don’t need delivering pious little lectures about protecting our republic from the enemies of democracy, it’s one of the most competent and dangerous of those enemies in recent history. Or to put the point more succinctly: Shut up, Dick.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 90
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 20
This episode of the New Discourses Podcast continues a long miniseries exploring Paulo Freire’s landmark 1985 book The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, and it is embedded in the broader Critical Education Theory series here. In the previous part, James Lindsay presented the ideas in the ninth chapter of that book, where Freire outlines that the purpose of education is to humanize Man and the world, exactly as indicated by Karl Marx. The previous parts of this series, covering the earlier chapters of the book can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
In this episode, the last in the formal educational series covering this book, James takes up the first part of the very weird tenth chapter of The Politics of Education, wherein Freire discusses Liberation Theology and the Role of the Church as a parallel educational institution. In this first part of this shocking chapter, before turning to the role he envisions for churches, Freire explains the religious conversion educators must go through in order to be “true” educators. He describes it as a process of spiritual death and rebirth, literally an Easter educators and religious leaders must go through to be resurrected on the side of the oppressed. This is the religious heart of the so-called “pedagogy of the oppressed” at the center of Freire’s entire project and legacy. Join James to understand how Freire enabled the theft of education so that it could be transformed into religious education for the Theology of Marxism.

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This Fourth of July, in Brattleboro, Vermont, marching bands and fire departments and Vietnam veterans and baton twirlers and a motorcycle convoy paraded down Main Street, past Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters and Mocha Joe’s Coffeehouse, and up the hill toward Brown and Roberts Ace Hardware and the Brooks Memorial Library. You had to arrive early to get a spot on the sidewalk. Kids handed out tiny paper American flags glued to wooden toothpicks. A naked man covered in red paint decided to walk, silently, in the middle of the street, in the other direction. No one stopped him; later, he told the town paper that he had been protesting the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Love the country, hate the Court, Brattleborovians seemed to agree. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, the Supreme Court has got to go!” marchers chanted. Two people carried a sheet lashed between tree branches, painted with lines from Marge Piercy, “I am not your cornfield, not your uranium mine, not your cow for milking.”

Also in the parade: an eight-foot-tall woolly mammoth, on wheels, made out of plywood, chicken wire, PVC pipes, burlap, coconut husks, white birch bark, nails, box springs, buttons, rusty iron tools, and deer bones. For tusks, it had coiled metal tubing and, for a trunk, a chimney liner. “It’s a climate prophet,” Kevin O’Keefe, who built it, said. O’Keefe is a circus artist and a writer. From a gray plastic bucket, he handed out prophecies to paradegoers. One read “Humankind, animal kind, and earth are ALL one, all belong to the same home.” True, but one of us is a homewrecker.

Since 1970, wildlife populations have fallen by two-thirds, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The World Animal Foundation has predicted that a third to a half of all nonhuman animal species will have become extinct by 2050. A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—citing the latest projections from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and evidence of the accelerating mass extinction of nonhuman species—reports that “previous mass extinction events occurred due to threshold effects in the carbon cycle that we could cross this century.” What does the woolly mammoth have to do with all this?

If “Save the Whales” was the motto of the environmental movement in the nineteen-seventies, “Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth” is something of a slogan for the twenty-twenties. Woolly mammoths, which were as big as the African elephant but closer, genetically, to the Asian elephant, lived across Asia, Europe, and North America until about ten thousand years ago—although in some places they survived until about four thousand years ago. They are the first species whose extinction humans came to understand, and could prove. The reason was harder to know. Humans were first believed to have played a role, by hunting them, but climate change more likely caused the decline, by ending the last Ice Age. The mammoths left behind bones and giant tusks, which Western naturalists began collecting in the seventeenth century, before the discovery of dinosaurs.

The mammoth, often confused at the time with the American mastodon, was “the dinosaur of the early American republic,” as the historian Paul Semonin wrote in “American Monster”—evidence of antiquity, of greatness, and, apocalyptically, of possible doom. Two centuries before Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle, analysis of mammoth remains proved that Earth is much older than the account given in Genesis and that, contrary to a Christian doctrine of divine design, not every species that God created lasts forever. The unearthing of the mammoth proved the existence of a time before time. Its disappearance was taken as a warning of the possibility of an end of time; a way to imagine, for the first time, the extinction of humankind.

Woolly mammoths keep being unearthed. In June, in the Yukon, in the territory of the First Nation people the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, a gold miner hacking into the permafrost came across a baby mammoth, about a month old, exquisitely preserved, her legs tucked under, as if she’d just fallen asleep. Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in elders decided to name her Nun cho ga, big baby animal. “She is beautiful, one of the most incredible mummified Ice Age animals ever discovered,” Grant Zazula, the Yukon’s government paleontologist, said. “She has a trunk. She has a tail. She has tiny little ears.” She died alone, very likely, having wandered off and got stuck in the mud.

Creating a baby woolly mammoth today is the objective of Colossal, a bioscience and genetic-engineering company founded last year by the Harvard geneticist George Church and the serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, who had earlier launched the similarly named A.I. firm Hypergiant. “Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world,” the startup’s Web site announces. “And Colossal is the company that is going to solve it.” The plan is to reconstruct the DNA of the woolly mammoth, use CRISPR to combine it with the DNA of an (endangered) Asian elephant, make an embryo, implant it in an Asian elephant—or, perhaps, into a not yet invented artificial womb—and begin to “de-extinct” the species. Resurrected mammoths would populate the permafrost and avert its melting by turning wet tundra into dry grasslands, which better sequester carbon and reflect sunlight, keeping the permafrost cooler and helping, thereby, to save the planet.

After Colossal had raised its first fifteen million dollars from venture capitalists (among them the Winklevoss brothers), Lamm, who is the C.E.O., said that the company expects to have its first calves as soon as 2025. Last month, Colossal announced that, together with the Vertebrates Genomes Project, it had completed the reconstruction of the DNA of the Asian elephant. Aside from the countless ethical problems, technological hurdles, and scientific improbabilities of this venture, it makes almost no sense as climate-change mitigation; it’s too little, too late. And that’s not even considering the plight of the motherless baby mammoths, alone and wandering helplessly.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the dinosaur had dethroned the woolly mammoth as an American emblem—and become the favorite megafauna of Gilded Age oligarchs. Robber barons loved the idea of giant reptilian carnivores. In 1906, J. P. Morgan financed the installation of a T. rex in the American Museum of Natural History. Colossal is funded, in part, by Musky, tusky tech billionaires keen to “futureproof” the world. They’re hoping to build animals out of bitcoin and code. Meanwhile, back in Brattleboro, a homespun and better-beloved hope for humanity made out of chicken wire and birch bark and burlap rolls along, through pine-dark woods. ♦

Blake Masters, the GOP’s nominee for Senate in Arizona, claims to care about the working class. Don’t believe a word of it.

Bankrolled by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Blake Masters is running for Senate in Arizona against "Big Tech and Big Business." (Gage Skidmore / The Star News Network)
 
When Blake Masters clinched the Republican nomination for Senate in Arizona last week, the result was widely described as a triumph for the “populist” wing of the American right. A typical write-up in the Washington Post described Masters as a representative of a “New Right” that stands for “economic populism, nationalism, and conservative social values.”
The parts about conservative social values and nationalism are accurate. Masters loves to demonize immigrant workers, he wants to overturn same-sex marriage equality, and he all but froths at the mouth when anyone says the word “China.” But is he really an economic populist?
He’s certainly gone out of his way to give that impression. He tweeted that McDonald’s automating jobs once done by humans is a “giant step backwards for our society.” He put out a campaign ad about how “you ought to be able to raise a family on one single income.” (In the ad, he blamed “globalization” for the fact that workers are no longer paid enough for this to be possible.) On his campaign website, he rails against the damage perpetrated by an “unholy alliance” of “Big Government, Big Tech and Big Business.”
But what does he actually want to do to reign in the power of big business? Perhaps raise taxes on wealthy business owners or make it easier for workers to organize unions? Does he have a plan to force McDonalds to not only rehire human cashiers but pay them enough money to raise a family on “one single income”?
Of course not. His “economic populism” is phantasmic.

“Populism” Brought to You by Peter Thiel
Masters worked for Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel until this year. He was the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and the head of the Thiel Foundation. Masters and Thiel also cowrote a book of business advice called Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Not so many years ago, Masters and Thiel both called themselves libertarians. Thiel has a history of being openly contemptuous of the very idea of democracy, precisely because it gives poor people the option of voting for redistributive economic policies. If Masters is really a populist who hates the unholy alliance of big government, Big Tech, and big business now, his road-to-Damascus moment must have been very recent. Did Thiel and Masters perhaps have a giant falling-out when Masters decided to run for Senate as an anti–big business candidate?
Not so much. In fact, Thiel has donated at least $15 million to Masters’s campaign so far. And Masters advertises their relationship in the second and third paragraphs of the “About Blake” section of his campaign website. Quite apart from the fact that Thiel’s career — which included years of lobbying for government contracts for his surveillance firm, Palantir, and service on Donald Trump’s transition team — embodies the “unholy alliance” that Masters claims to oppose, you would think that if Masters’s “populism” was remotely serious, Thiel wouldn’t want to donate. Thiel is a guy who cares enough about protecting his hoarded wealth from taxation that he essentially bought himself dual citizenship in New Zealand. Would he really spend $15 million on a candidate he thought would stick up for the interests of working-class people unable to raise a family on a single income, perhaps by raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for generous financial support for working-class parents?
He would not. Though Masters occasionally makes economic populist noises, it’s window dressing for a rock-solid commitment to conventional right-wing economics, married to cruel social policies designed to appeal to the conservative side of the culture war. If anything was going to give Thiel pause about backing Masters, it would presumably be the second half of that equation, given that, at this point, Masters is officially committed to ending marriage equality and thus dissolving Thiel’s own marriage to Matt Danzeisen.
Masters isn’t wrong to say that a decent society would give people the option of having one parent stay home with the kids, if that’s what everyone involved genuinely wants. (I’d add that it would also provide free childcare for those couples where both partners want to work full-time.) But how exactly does he propose to accomplish this goal? Does he want to rebuild the labor movement or dramatically raise the minimum wage? Of course not. Talking about the problem is a cheap way of signaling concern for the welfare of the working class without having to attach it to a specific policy proposal.
When Masters does talk about specific economic policies, he sounds about as populist as Mitt Romney. He wants to privatize Social Security. He’s savvy enough, though, to get that dressing up bog-standard Republican policy preferences with a little bit of performative disdain for big business and a lot of culture-war pandering helps the medicine go down.
“We should be the party of low taxes,” Masters said in one particularly lucid moment at a campaign stop to talk to elderly Republicans at a library west of Phoenix. “But if that’s all we are, if that’s all that Republicans bring to the table, we’ll be crushed.”
As a strategy, it makes perfect sense. You can best advance an agenda of Reaganite economics, authoritarian nationalism, and conservative social values by putting the least emphasis on the first of those three points, and even by dressing it up as its opposite. But there’s no reason any of the rest of us need to play along.

I have long worried (here, and, more recently, here) about the adverse consequences of the Biden Justice Department using criminal process against former President Donald Trump. I have also long worried (spurred by Garrett Graff) about the mischief, and potential criminal liability, that Trump might stir up after his presidency with access to classified information. Here are some thoughts spurred by the collision of these worries.

Several sensible commentators—including George Will, Damon Linker, and David Brooks—think Attorney General Garland made a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one, in executing the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. (They made these claims before the federal magistrate unsealed the warrant and the inventory of seized materials.) They worry that the search will, in Will’s sedate words, harm “social comity” and “domestic tranquility.”

They are right in this sense: Trump supporters would have viewed any criminal legal process directed at Trump from the Biden Justice Department as, in Linker’s words, “an illegitimate act undertaken by an alien, tyrannical ‘Regime’ resembling a Third World dictatorship.” Justifiably or not, this reaction—and the further diminution in trust in the Justice Department and FBI by a large chunk of the country—was a directly foreseeable consequence of Garland’s decision.

Which is not to say that Garland made the wrong decision. On that question it is far too early to tell. Will is right to suggest that Garland’s decision, even if scrupulously non-political in intent, is “inherently political” and should be judged by how well he “adjust[s] tidy principles to untidy realities” and “balance[s] competing objectives.” And the bar should be very high before the Justice Department in an administration run by Trump’s former and probably future political opponent, uses unprecedented criminal process against Trump—especially given our cleaved politics, upcoming elections, and the well-documented mistakes and illegalities that the Justice Department and FBI committed in pursuing Trump in the past.

And yet Trump has for all his adult life, and especially during his presidency and post-presidency, shown contempt for law. The FBI’s belief that Trump acted illegally in bringing scores of sensitive documents to Florida, or in not returning them upon request, is very far from shocking. It also appears right now—and this too would not be surprising—that Trump and his advisors did not fully cooperate with the National Archives’ and the Justice Department’s efforts to secure and retrieve this information. There obviously must be a point where information is so sensitive, and Trump’s disregard for law so extreme, to justify legal process against Trump, even in the current milieu. Otherwise the law is entirely hostage to a former president’s (and his supporters’) self-serving veto—something no legal system can tolerate.

Garland will be judged over the coming days and months and years on whether that point had been reached—whether Trump’s indifference to law, and the failures of negotiations with Trump to right his wrongs, and the stakes of the information Trump possessed, justified the Mar-a-Lago search.

Lawfare posted a good account of the warrant, the documents seized (which included ones with classified markings), and this summary of what it all implies:

The FBI has clearly developed significant evidence of criminal activity at Mar-a-Lago related to the handling of classified material, and government property more generally. There is evidence of document tampering. And there is evidence, at a minimum, of willful retention of material that should not have been at the resort. Precisely who is the subject of these investigations and how strong the evidence is at this stage remains unclear. But we can infer from the granting of the warrant that a magistrate judge, at least, believes it meets the probable cause standard governing all federal searches and seizures. We can further infer from Garland’s apparent eagerness to have this material made public that the Justice Department is confident of its position, not just in court but in public opinion.

Whether Garland made the right call will depend on how much this description holds up, and how serious the wrongdoing appears to the public independent of legal technicalities.

The first factor is the nature of the classified information that Trump had at Mar-a-Lago. Not all of the legal predicates in the warrant turn on the documents at Mar-a-Lago being classified. But the prudence of Garland’s judgment will turn to a large degree on the true sensitivity of the information there.

Former President Obama once said, in the context of the Hillary Clinton email server investigation:

What I also know, because I handle a lot of classified information, is that … there’s classified, and then there’s classified. There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there's stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.

Obama was criticized for this remark because he commented publicly on the investigation, and because he revealed the skepticism with which top officials view (and often disregard) the U.S. government's overclassification of information.

And yet there is truth in what Obama says. The government massively overclassifies, and even many highly classified secrets are “stuff that you could get in open-source.” It will matter a lot, in assessing Garland’s decisions, whether the information Trump had was closer to “really top-secret, top-secret” or to information available in public.

There are many reports that “[c]lassified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought.” Trump’s unsurprising response: “Nuclear weapons is a hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax, two Impeachments were a hoax, the Mueller investigation was a hoax, and much more.” If indeed the FBI was searching for “documents related to nuclear weapons,” it will matter a lot whether the documents concerned, for example, Trump’s tweet-claim that his button was bigger than Kim Jong-un’s, or rather described nuclear weapons design or foreign nuclear capabilities—i.e. secrets that, if revealed, would truly harm national security.

The second factor will concern what Trump and his associates did with the information. The warrant referenced 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a criminal statute that prohibits the destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations, and 18 U.S.C. § 2071, a criminal statute barring the concealment, removal, or mutilation of government records. It will matter a lot whether Trump and his team, for example, merely removed classified markings on documents that Trump previously declassified (more on this below), or whether they did something more nefarious, such as altering or destroying documents to conceal illegal possession. (There are of course many possibilities in between.)

It will also matter, relatedly, what we learn about the process preceding the search. Had Trump and his team been cooperating with the government to return all inappropriately retained documents, to the point where the two sides had reached a good-faith disagreement? Or had they been prevaricating and stonewalling in bad faith?

Early reports suggest something closer to the latter, but many relevant details remain unclear. The ultimate answer to this question will (among other things) inform how to assess the invocation of the third statute referenced in the warrant, 18 U.S.C. § 793, which criminalizes the failure to deliver on demand documents and other materials “relating to the national defense” that “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” If Garland is invoking this famously vague criminal provision from the Espionage Act over a good faith dispute about compliance with the Presidential Records Act, that will be viewed as overkill. If he did so as a last-ditch effort to secure vital national security secrets, that is another matter altogether.

The third factor will turn on the legitimacy of the claim that Trump declassified all of the relevant documents. Trump says “[i]t was all declassified.” His aide Kash Patel stated in May that “Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government.” And John Solomon, Trump’s go-between with the National Archives, more recently stated that Trump had a “standing order” during his presidency that “documents removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them.”

The entire system of classified information rests on the president’s Article II power as chief executive and commander in chief. As I once explained:

Executive Order 13526, which constitutes, defines and governs the classified information system, is based on “the authority vested in [the] President by the Constitution and” some unspecified “laws of the United States.” As the Supreme Court stated in Department of the Navy v. Egan, “[the President’s] authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security ... flows primarily from this Constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.” This is why presidents don’t need security clearances, don’t sign prepublication review documents and can declassify classified information at will. It is a frighteningly broad and important power...

Charlie Savage has a good explainer on how Trump’s supposed declassification of documents relates to the criminal statutes referenced in the warrant. Savage notes that whether and how Trump followed standard procedures in declassifying the documents will matter for evidentiary purposes, but adds that “Trump’s lawyers could argue that he was not constitutionally bound to obey such rules.” The president’s power here is widely believed, inside and outside the executive branch, to be quite broad. But its actual breadth, including the steps a president must take to declassify, has barely been tested in court. We may soon learn a lot more about the scope of the president’s power over classification and declassification. (As I explained here, a former president has no authority to classify or declassify; the legitimacy of Trump’s declassification actions will be determined entirely by what he did while he was serving as president.)

Savage also notes that a successful Trump declassification “would not settle the matter” because the statutes referenced in the warrant criminalize concealment or unauthorized retention of certain nonclassified records. This judgment turns on what it means to “settle the matter.” Savage is right that the statutes do not necessarily turn on information being classified. But a president’s declassification decisions in office might inform predicates that the statutes do focus on—whether, for example, the documents were improperly retained or concealed, or whether retention was unauthorized and could harm national security. The classification status of the materials may also inform the prudence of the Department of Justice going after a former president with heavy criminal process. (This is a different point from whether any classified information was, in Obama’s phrase, “really top-secret, top-secret” or not.)

In this regard, it is worth noting the possibility that Trump successfully declassified the documents in question before he left office, but that the Biden administration, upon learning about the information in the documents, reclassified them before insisting that they be returned. If that is what happened, then it doesn’t matter that Trump declassified the documents. It is the current president and administration that possess the authority to determine which information should be classified. (But it might matter in evaluating the merits of the search, if this speculation pans out, how the current administration determined that the documents should be reclassified, and how convincing the need for classification was.)

Several other factors will inform how Garland’s actions here are judged. It obviously matters if Garland indicts anyone following this search. A prosecution—either of Trump or his associates—would raise the stakes significantly higher. Garland could have executed the warrant in good faith as a last-ditch effort to secure sensitive documents and yet decide, as a matter of prosecutorial discretion, that any discovered criminal activity should not be prosecuted for prudential reasons—including national harmony, worries about revealing classified information at trial, or doubts about a successful prosecution.

The final factor concerns where the Mar-a-Lago action fits into the larger picture of Justice Department actions against Trump, including, for example, any criminal action related to January 6. One (unlikely) possibility is that the Florida search was an isolated action against Trump that does not result in a prosecution, that is not followed by other department actions against him, and that quickly diminishes in significance. At the other extreme, and more likely, is that the Mar-a-Lago search will be followed by a multi-pronged criminal investigation of Trump, his associates, and perhaps some congressional republicans related to January 6 (or some other matter).

There are too many imponderables here to assess this issue at this point. But in general, and even assuming very bad acts by Team Trump, the more unprecedented investigatory and prosecutorial steps that one administration takes in response to the acts of a prior administration, the worse. If there is a lot more to come, and it seems that there is, that will put more pressure on the question whether Garland acted prudently out of practical necessity in executing the Mar-a-Lago warrant.

All of Garland’s decisions will be judged, as former FBI Director James Comey once wrote, not from the perspective of “urgency and exigency” under which he acted, but rather from the “perfect, and brutally unfair, vision of hindsight.” Hopefully Garland anticipated this hindsight judgment and acted with a scrupulous attention to process, and with a fair-minded, non-overreactive assessment of the facts, and of what needed to be done, all things considered.

"Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions," wrote Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm. "It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself."
Ever since he was a graduate student at Harvard, Henry Kissinger has been profoundly interested in the quivering balances and mist-veiled proportions that call for great leaders. His first book, A World Restored (originally his doctoral dissertation), ends with an essay on the difference between "the Statesman," on the one hand, and two kinds of revolutionary, on the other: "the Conqueror" and "the Prophet."
Kissinger preferred the statesman. "[T]he claims of the prophet," he wrote, "are a counsel of perfection, and perfection implies uniformity. [But] utopias are not achieved except by a process of leveling and dislocation … [while] to rely entirely on the moral purity of an individual is to abandon the possibility of restraint."
The statesman, by contrast, "must remain forever suspicious of these efforts, not because he enjoys the pettiness of manipulation, but because he must be prepared for the worst contingency." The statesman’s tragedy, the young Kissinger argued, is that he will always be in the minority, for "it is not balance which inspires men but universality, not security but immortality." People yearn for transcendence; that is what makes them susceptible to prophets.
A World Restored was published in 1957. Now, 65 years later, Kissinger returns to the subject of leadership. At 99, he is one of the last remaining representatives of a generation of leaders whose statesmanship was forged in the furnace of World War II, a furnace ignited by history’s most dreadful conqueror-prophet. It is not hard to see what made the young Kissinger—a refugee from Hitler who returned to a devastated Germany as a G.I.—so wary of both prophets and transcendence. Yet experience has taught him that the most successful leaders need to combine elements of both the statesman and the prophet.
In Leadership, Kissinger presents us with six beautifully crafted miniatures of leaders he came to know and admire, who in their different ways exemplified great leadership. His sextet—Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sādāt, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher—might seem a motley group, not least because Nixon’s career ended in disgrace and Sādāt’s in assassination. Yet Kissinger convinces the reader that they were "akin in their commitment to securing a new purpose for their respective societies and in each case seeking to relate that purpose to a meaningful tradition."
The gnarled Rhinelander; the aloof Frenchman; the devious Californian; the heroic Egyptian; the visionary Chinese; and the indomitable Englishwoman—all six, Kissinger points out, came from modest backgrounds. They had a faith in the values of their inherited culture, but also an idea of where their people could be led, and the courage to try to get them there. Less obviously, they were tellers of hard truths. At times they were divisive; at times isolated.
As Europe is once again battered by the storm of war, it is good to be reminded of what Adenauer and de Gaulle contributed to the reconstruction of the continent after 1945. Neither would be surprised, I suspect, by Russia’s reemergence as a threat to European peace. Adenauer would probably blame his successors for pursuing Ostpolitik—the policy of building closer economic and political ties between Germany and Russia—to the point of dependence and impotence. De Gaulle would doubtless see the war in Ukraine as partly the result of Anglo-American duplicity or naïveté or both.
It is also good to recall Thatcher’s extraordinary conviction and courage, qualities her admirer and probable successor as prime minister, Liz Truss, is going to need. Especially in time of war, when the Argentine junta invaded the Falklands, Thatcher was magnificent. The same could not be said of her cabinet, as Kissinger discovered when he visited London during the war.
"Over tea at 10 Downing Street," he recalls, "I asked Thatcher which of the new approaches [toward the Argentines] she favored. ‘I will have no compromise!’ she thundered, ‘How can you, my old friend? How can you say these things?’ She was so irate I did not have the heart to explain that the idea was not mine but her chief diplomat’s"—the foreign secretary Francis Pym. (As Kissinger points out, there was in fact a moment when Thatcher was willing to contemplate a compromise brokered by the United States and the U.N. Fortunately for her, the other side foolishly rejected it.)
Kissinger’s portrait of de Gaulle is the most striking of the chapters in this illuminating book. "De Gaulle defined his goals in the visionary mode of the prophet," he writes, "but his execution was in the mode of the statesman, steely and calculating." That steeliness was the result of years of self-discipline. Kissinger quotes de Gaulle’s diary from his time as a German prisoner of war in World War I: "Dominating oneself ought to become a sort of habit, a moral reflex acquired by a constant gymnastic of the will especially in the tiniest things: dress, conversation, the way one thinks."
Here is de Gaulle again in 1932: "Aloofness, character, and the personification of greatness, these qualities … surround … those who are prepared to carry a burden which is too heavy for lesser mortals. The price they have to pay for leadership is unceasing self-discipline, the constant taking of risks, and a perpetual inner struggle. The degree of suffering involved varies according to the temperament of the individual; but it is bound to be no less tormenting than the hair shirt of the penitent." It is hard to imagine any of today’s leaders writing such words. We know now that de Gaulle had a warm and tender heart: His devotion to his daughter Anne, who had Down syndrome, testifies to that. But he trained himself, like some medieval penitent, to conceal his private self altogether because he believed that only a man of iron could restore France.
What place, then, does Richard Nixon have in such a volume? Few people spent more time with Nixon during his presidency than Kissinger. Not for the first time, he makes the case that Nixon’s foreign policy achieved great things: ending war in Vietnam, limiting the arms race with the Soviet Union, opening to China, laying the foundations of peace between Egypt and Israel. Not for the first time, Kissinger portrays Watergate not as the high crime for which Nixon would have been impeached had he not resigned, but as a succession of lapses and blunders—echoing Bryce Harlow’s explanation for the debacle: "Some damn fool got into the Oval Office and did what he was told."
The scale of the challenge that Nixon faced when he entered the White House in January 1969 was certainly immense. And, while he could not salvage much, if anything, from the morass in Vietnam bequeathed to him by his predecessors, Nixon did a remarkable amount to lay the foundations of the world order we know today. He was also almost as big a self-disciplinarian as de Gaulle, working tirelessly with his yellow pads and telephones to try to stay ahead in what he liked to call "the game." Yet it all ended in ignominy. "All political careers end in failure," the British Conservative Enoch Powell famously observed. But few end in such abject failure as Nixon’s.
At Kissinger’s last meeting with Adenauer in Bonn in 1967, the ancient German chancellor asked: "Are any leaders still able to conduct a genuine long-range policy? Is true leadership still possible today?" It is strange to find that question being asked nearly 60 years ago, as we constantly ask it today. Kissinger concludes this volume with some speculative answers to the question of where all the Adenauers have gone. Is it that our societies have become less meritocratic? Can it be connected to the decline of deep literacy and the rise of the Internet? In contemporary politics, Kissinger notes, "Anger has replaced dialogue as a way to carry out disputes, and disagreement has become a clash of cultures."
Perhaps in such an environment there is little serious chance for someone who combines the tactical skill of the statesman with the strategic vision of the prophet. If that is so, then we are in trouble. As Churchill rightly said, it is "where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist" that we need inspired and inspiring leadership. Having seen such leadership more than once at close quarters, Kissinger can at least tell us—with a crystal clarity that belies his years—what we should be looking for.
Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
by Henry Kissinger
Penguin, 528 pp., $36
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (Penguin).
The post In Search of Statesmen appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Now that’s a Gen X boss.

“We Gen Xers don’t feel like we’re the boss,” Meagan Johnson, who speaks to companies like Merck and Cisco about generational differences, told me. “We’re just kind of forgotten about.”

Fittingly, by the time Gen Xers got a shot at the top job, being in charge was no longer as attractive as it used to be. Consider the two most culturally influential leadership styles for Gen X women as they ascended the ranks: Sheryl Sandberg’s demonic “leaning in” (until you topple over) and Sophia Amoruso’s odious #Girlboss approach, which had the additional drawback of coming with a hashtag. An unironic hashtag.

Naturally, both rubrics are now defunct.

The Great Resignation or Great Reshuffle or whatever we’re calling it this week may also be the worst time to be in charge. According to Microsoft’s work-trend index, 54 percent of managers say that leadership is out of touch with employee expectations, and 74 percent of managers say that they don’t have the influence or resources they need to drive change for their team. Their employees are either at home or wishing they were at home.

Or wishing they were gone. According to an October 2021 survey, 46 percent of millennials planned to leave their jobs within the year. Who can blame them? Employees say they are working harder and for longer hours than ever.

It gets worse. More than half of hybrid workers from Generation Z (born from 1997 to 2012) say they’re moving to a new location because they’re able to work remotely — possibly somewhere their bosses may never be able to reel them back from. A recent report in The Times makes clear that when it comes to recruitment and retention, Gen Z is calling the shots.

In short, Gen X bosses work for their employees, not the other way around.

It would be very Gen X to shrug at this seemingly inevitable outcome. We were probably never meant to be the boss. Baby boomers and millennials have always had a finely tuned sense of how important they are. Gen Xers are under no such illusion. Temperamentally prepared to be criticized and undermined at all times, we never entirely trusted the people in charge anyway.

Least of all ourselves.

Thirty-three years ago, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree suborning the murder of author Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, a work of magical realism partly inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad. A multi-million dollar bounty was offered by the 15 Khordad Foundation, a revolutionary organization supervised by the Supreme Leader, to whoever carried out the sentence of death. When attempts to appease the regime with an apology were spurned, Rushdie retreated into hiding and was forced to spend the second half of his adult life under threat of assassination. As part of an attempt to restore diplomatic relations with Britain in 1998, the Iranian government of Mohammad Khatami indicated that it would no longer support Rushdie’s murder. Three years later, Khatami declared the matter “closed.” Iran’s religious leaders, however, are a good deal less interested in the requirements of international diplomacy, and have been remarkably forthright in saying so to anyone who cared to listen. Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly stated that the fatwa will not—indeed, cannot—be lifted, even if Rushdie “repents and becomes the most pious Muslim on Earth.” Just three years ago, the Supreme Leader’s Twitter account was briefly locked after it posted the following tweet:Although important details are yet to emerge, pronouncements of this type almost certainly help explain why a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie at a literary festival in Chautauqua, NY, on Friday, August 12th. Matar rushed the stage upon which Rushdie was seated, and stabbed the writer repeatedly in the neck and abdomen until the attacker was physically restrained by attendees. A grim irony: Rushdie was reportedly waiting to deliver a lecture in which he would describe the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers and artists. Rushdie’s attacker has been taken into custody and charged with attempted murder, but his victim sustained serious injuries during the frenzied assault. Later that same evening, Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, delivered the distressing news that “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.” The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. The following year, it was banned in India, and copies were burned during street protests in Bradford, UK. An American Cultural Centre in Islamabad was attacked after the book’s publication in the United States. Khomeini’s fatwa was broadcast on Iranian radio on February 14th, 1989:We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur'an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah willing. Meanwhile, if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions.A wave of bloodshed ensued. Rushdie’s Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator was stabbed, and 37 people perished in a fire targeting the book’s Turkish translator. While the violence and threat level appeared to abate with the passage of time, allowing Rushdie to emerge from hiding and re-engage with public life, his growing sense of security proved to be illusory. Indeed, the intervening years taught the most alarming lesson of all—that no-one marked for death can ever afford to lower their guard or return to what Rushdie called “a normal life.”Rushdie is not the only person Iran has sought to terrorize. And the murderous fanaticism of its leaders remains in evidence, even as it seeks to renegotiate an agreement with the West regarding its nuclear program. American law enforcement officials have recently uncovered assassination plots by operatives associated with the Iranian regime against Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, dissident Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, and Iranian-American poet (and Quillette contributor) Roya Hakakian. Writing in The New York Review of Books a year ago, Hakakian relayed the story of her 13-year-old child opening the door to FBI agents, who then informed Hakakian that Iranian operatives were concocting a plan to kill her.In a timely essay for Quillette, published in May, Paul Berman observed:Roya Hakakian and Masih Alinejad happen to be friends, as Hakakian noted in the New York Review, and the combined threats against them suggest a broader policy of violence and intimidation on the part of the Islamic Republic and its operatives in the United States.This is a policy aimed not just at a couple of inconveniently articulate emigrés, but at the larger circles of the Iranian emigration in America and everywhere else, whose members are bound to pause an additional thoughtful moment before piping up in public about life and oppression back home in far-away Iran. The policy is a display of power. It terrorizes. It succeeds at doing this even if any given plot is foiled, or is suspended, or is merely intimated.Roya Hakakian and How to Speak About What No One Wants to HearI. Roya Hakakian is an American writer from Iran who commands a distinctive ability to speak about large and horrific events in a chipper tone that appears to underplay the horrific quality and, by apparently underplaying, ends up subtly underlining. It is an artful tone. It is cagey, charming, disa…QuillettePaul BermanWe do not yet know the nature of the relationship—if any—between the Iranian government and Rushdie’s attacker. Early news reports indicate that, “Matar has made social-media posts in support of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, and in support of Shi’a [Islamist] extremism more broadly,” which could point to Iranian inspiration rather than direction. Either way, the attempt on Rushdie’s life illustrates the dedication with which fanatics pursue the objects of their hatred, even those who produce merely imaginary works. Rushdie understands as well as anyone that this threat is by no means unique to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It characterizes adherents of all kinds of radical Islamic movements. In 2005, during the controversy that followed the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten’s publication of 12 editorial cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, Rushdie was one of 12 signatories to a defiant manifesto titled “Together Against a New Totalitarianism,” the full text of which appears below:Having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We writers, journalists, and intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all. Recent events, prompted by the publication of drawings of Muhammad in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values.This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological arena. It is not a clash of civilizations or an antagonism between West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats. Like all totalitarian ideologies, Islamism is nurtured by fear and frustration. Preachers of hatred play on these feelings to build the forces with which they can impose a world where liberty is crushed and inequality reigns.But we say this, loud and clear: nothing, not even despair, justifies choosing obscurantism, totalitarianism, and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom, and secularism wherever it is present. Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others. To counter this, we must ensure access to universal rights for the oppressed or those discriminated against.We reject the “cultural relativism” which implies an acceptance that men and women of Muslim culture are deprived of the right to equality, freedom, and secularism in the name of respect for certain cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatization of those who believe in it.We defend the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can be exercised in every continent, with regard to each and every abuse and dogma. We appeal to democrats and independent spirits in every country that our century may be one of enlightenment and not obscurantism.Signed by: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq.Salman Rushdie has risked everything for his art. Like Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, the slain cartoonists and satirists at Charlie Hebdo, and numerous other courageous writers, thinkers, artists, and intellectuals hunted across the globe for violating ancient taboos against blasphemy, he has stood up for free thought and expression, even as others have disgraced themselves by offering excuses on behalf of those who perpetrate lethal violence in the name of religion.Rushdie’s steady courage and reliable willingness to defend individual liberty have ensured his status as one of the great moral heroes of our time. “A poet’s work,” remarks one of his characters in The Satanic Verses, “is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” Rushdie has done all those things. And it is a tragedy that his dedication to these noble pursuits has cost him so much.

Let’s consider a few data points on America’s relationship with the smartphone. First, a recent survey published by SellCell, a cellphone price comparison company, found that 54 percent of Americans answered “yes” to the question “Would you rather spend time on your phone than in your partner’s company?” with 71 percent reporting that they do in fact spend more personal time with their phone than their partner. Another survey, conducted by independent reviewing site Reviews.org, found that 41 percent of Americans “say they’d rather give up sex for a year than give up their phone for a year.” Should one doubt the methodological rigor of SellCell, gold-standard research firm Pew found in 2021 that over half of Americans say their partner is often or sometimes distracted by their phone when they are trying to have a conversation with them, and that nearly one in three adults now says they are “almost constantly” online. It is not difficult to find plenty more troubling statistics: most people now sleep next to their phones, never turn their phones off, report a sense of panic when their battery is low, check their phones within minutes of waking up, are uneasy leaving their phones at home, touch their phones thousands of times a day, and use their phones while using the toilet. 
Most 18-year-olds admit to having texted while driving. Nearly half of people sometimes text others who are in the same house. A similar number consider their phones their most valuable possessions, and polls have found anywhere between half and three-fourths of Americans confessing to phone addiction. Nearly half of Americans reported spending 5-6 hours a day on their phones. Furthermore, the number of people who don’t have smartphones is growing smaller and smaller: 85 percent of Americans now report having a smartphone, while 97 percent own a cellphone of some kind.
The reports about the way smartphones have impacted romantic relationships are perhaps the most disquieting. Though, arguably, sexual desire and love for one’s partner aren’t drives quite as biologically basic as the will to stay alive, there is no disputing the fact that for the vast majority of people, love and sexual desire are—or, until relatively recently were—extraordinarily deeply entrenched aspects of their identities. (Indeed, even the small number of Americans who are asexual, and who thus experience little to no sexual attraction to others, are often still willing partners in romantic relationships.)
One might be tempted to attribute many of the extraordinary recent findings to the coronavirus pandemic, which temporarily made everyone much more online. But reports of the replacement of relationships with phones began streaming in years ago. (NBC News, 2011: “Survey: One third would rather give up sex than phone”; CNBC, 2013: “Sex or Smartphone? Women Prefer the Gadgets”; Bloomberg, 2015: “Give Up Sex or Your Mobile Phone? Third of Americans Forgo Sex.”) Furthermore, the decline in sexual frequency is well documented. A study in the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that “American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s.” That might not sound like too much of a difference, but the numbers are particularly extreme among younger people, as another study in the same journal showed: “Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women.” One of the study authors, Tsung-chieh (Jane) Fu of the Indiana University School of Public Health, explained that “for young people, computer games, increasing social media use, video games—something is replacing that time.”

What the existing data points seem to show is that vast swaths of the U.S. population would prefer to spend time with their personalized high-tech gadgets rather than attempt to foster meaningful human relationships and/or engage in one of life’s most biologically basic activities. Is this healthy? We might be tempted to dismiss the trends as benign, or the product of individual choices to maximize happiness. But as journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in a 2020 article called “The Social Fabric of the U.S. is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling, “there are “very troubling [new] data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population—not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological, and scientifically proven sickness.” Greenwald cited a 2020 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) survey, which assessed the mental health of American adults. Among other discoveries, the report found that 10.7 percent of American adults, equating to roughly 20 million Americans, had “seriously considered suicide” in the past 30 days—that is, “not fleetingly considered [suicide] as a momentary  nor thought about it ever in their lifetime,” as Greenwald elaborated, “but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past thirty days.” Among younger Americans, the figures were even more disturbing: more than a quarter (25.5 percent) of American adults between the ages of 18-24, and 16 percent of adults between the ages of 25-44, had thought seriously about taking their own lives during the previous month. Greenwald commented:

“In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.”

It is certainly possible to point to the pandemic to explain some of the increase in anxiety and depression. But as U.S. News & World Report documents, among children “anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems appear to be on the rise, while the amount of time kids spent being physically active or getting preventive care has been on the decline,” plus “parental emotional well-being and mental health … [were found] to be suffering in tandem.” The magazine notes that “that was all pre-pandemic,” with the pandemic making an already bad situation worse. A 2018 article in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) notes that “Sociologists have observed the decline in various measures of psychosocial well-being in the United States for some time” and “alarming declines in measures such as trust have been documented for decades.” Happiness, trust, sex frequency, and life expectancy have all been in decline, while despair has increased, which leads the AJPH researchers to conclude that “the United States has experienced what amounts to a social crisis that dates back to at least the 1980s.”

In the context of this social crisis, we should be cautious about what we attribute to technology alone. We must also disentangle cause from effect: has addiction to phones torn us apart, or has an already-suffering society turned to the narcotic of smartphones to relieve the pain? (The same caution applies when trying to analyze the opioid epidemic and understand the degree to which the drugs are a cause rather than a symptom of other problems in people’s lives.) We do know that material deprivation is clearly a major part of the story—the AJPH cites rising medical costs as a major culprit in declining mental health. But it’s also worth appreciating just how monumental a shift in our living patterns we have undergone as smartphones have become ubiquitous. It is a fact that most of us now spend a significant portion of our day that would once have been spent around physical human beings in an artificial world (there are those in Silicon Valley who even anticipate that we will soon live almost full-time in a dystopian place they call the Metaverse). Surely the switch of huge portions of daily activity from in-person to online has significant effects on us. Smartphone use appears to have a played a major role in reshaping the “internal environment” of the human individual: in particular, it appears to have radically restructured what we take to be most important in life—a restructuring which, at least prior to the smartphone era, many of us would have regarded as overwhelmingly negative.
In fact, many Americans seem to recognize the current state of affairs as inherently problematic. According to one survey, 73 percent of Americans said that they would be “happier if they spent less time” on their phones, with only slightly fewer (70 percent) admitting that smartphones are adversely impacting their relationships with those closest to them. Smartphone use has been credibly linked to a variety of mental and physical afflictions, including anxiety, depression, loneliness, short attention spans, reduction in reading ability, reduced in-person socializing, stunted childhood growth, general lower intelligence, obesity, poor eyesight, and even suicide. Indeed, there is little doubt that smartphone use has in many ways exacerbated and reinforced many of the pathologies confronting contemporary American society. In a country in which, for instance, more than three-fifths of the population report being lonely (with the figure rising to four-fifths for Gen Z), it is not difficult to understand how spending one’s time on one’s phone addictively scrolling through social media, as opposed to forming and sustaining meaningful human relationships, is unlikely to alleviate, and indeed is much more likely to exacerbate, such feelings of desperation. U.S. children now spend a lot of time online (the overwhelming majority of young children spend more time in front of a screen than experts recommend). Parents certainly don’t have terribly high opinions of smartphones. Technology is the number one factor parents cite as making parenting harder today than it used to be, and Pew research found that 71 percent of parents think “smartphones will hurt [their] children’s abilities to develop healthy friendships and learn social skills” and the “potential harm [of smartphones] outweighs the potential benefit.”
This does not mean that the parents are necessarily right, of course. We also have to acknowledge that even though Americans worry about their addiction to smartphones, they also like their phones. One Gallup study found that 70 percent of smartphone users say that smartphones have “made their lives better.” Many may well recognize they are addicted but feel it’s an addiction they’re happy to live with. On this interpretation, maybe people really do prefer to be on Instagram rather than spend time with loved ones. Given the choice between having or sustaining a meaningful human relationship and being on their phones, they would willingly choose the latter over the former, without regrets. 
Not all of the smartphone’s effects on human society have been negative. Indeed, according to a 2019 Pew poll, a significant majority of people in developing countries report that their lives have improved enormously as a result of acquiring cellphones (due to, for instance, online banking). These results, however, should be juxtaposed with the fact that the same poll found that significant majorities of people in emerging economies believe that mobile phones “have had a bad influence on children in their country,” as well as by the fact that the people in the developing world who actually manufacture smartphones typically work in abominable conditions. Moreover, even in the developed world, smartphones have certainly made life more convenient in various ways: they allow us to instantly look up an elusive fact at a moment’s notice, to almost instantly order food and transport, and yes, occasionally, to talk to loved ones on the other side of the globe. The question is: at what cost? 

Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again is a useful addition to the conversation around technology, addiction, and social crisis. Hari’s first book, Chasing the Scream, focused on the science of addiction and the War on Drugs. His second, Lost Connections, examined depression. Stolen Focus addresses our current “attention crisis”: according to data cited by Hari, a typical office worker today focuses on tasks for just three minutes at a time; college students fare even worse, switching tasks on average every sixty-five seconds.

Hari’s interest in the subject is personal as well as scientific. He describes his own experience:

“The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking. I could feel it happen to me—I would buy piles of books, and I would glimpse them guiltily from the corner of my eye as I sent, I told myself, just one more tweet. I still read a lot, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator.”

This mixture of scientific and personal curiosity—as in Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections—leads Hari on a journey all over the world, “from Miami to Moscow, from Montreal to Melbourne,” interviewing more than 250 experts on human attention. His conclusion is that there are twelve “deep forces” responsible for harming our attention. His goal in the book is to explain what they are, and what we need to do to “get our attention back.”
Hari does not attempt to dispel, or even downplay, the significance of the obvious candidate responsible for our attention crisis, namely modern technology: smartphones, email, social media, and, more specifically, Facebook, Google, and other tech platforms’ contemporary model of “surveillance capitalism,” the term used to describe the capturing and analysis of user data in the service of user manipulation and monetization. Indeed, Hari spends large portions of the book emphasizing just how debilitating much of modern technology has been both for individual consumers and for wider society: it has arguably made us (mentally) unhealthier, angrier, and more politically divided than at any point in modern human history.
But Hari draws a clear distinction between the technology itself and the incentive structures underlying them. It is the latter, he notes, which constitute the real, fundamental problem:
“The arrival of the smartphone would always have increased to some degree the number of distractions in life, to be sure, but a great deal of the damage to our attention spans is being caused by something more subtle. It’s not the smartphone in and of itself; it is the way the apps on the smartphone and the sites on our laptops are designed […] It’s not just the internet: it’s the way the internet is currently designed—and the incentives for the people designing it. You could keep your phone and your laptop, and you could keep your social media accounts—and have much better attention, if they were designed around a different set of incentives.” 
As is well known, the current incentive structures of platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok aim to optimize things like time spent on a given platform, number of clicks, and number of advertisements seen. Their skilful efforts to maximize our use of the platforms are clearly a large part of why we’re so often incapable of removing our dazed stare from our smartphones’ screens. At one point in Stolen Focus, Hari interviews Israeli American tech designer Nir Eyal, the author of a book called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. Eyal himself recommends individualist solutions to the attention problem, showing people tips for getting their tech addictions under control and encouraging a “personal responsibility” approach to smartphone use. But Hari points out that Eyal is also the author of a book called Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, which Eyal calls a “cookbook” containing a “recipe for human behavior.” Eyal describes the techniques of “mind manipulation” used to “create a craving” for a product, such as implanting an “internal trigger” in the user’s psychology, an uncomfortable emotional state that can only be relieved by the product and that will keep them coming back over and over. As Hari comments:

“In Hooked [Eyal] talks about using ferociously powerful machinery to get us ‘fiendishly hooked’ and in ‘pain’ until we get our next techno-fix. Yet in Indistractable he tells us that when we feel distracted by this machinery, we should try gentle personal changes. In the first book, he describes big and powerful forces used to hook us; in the second, he describes fragile little personal interventions that he says will get us out.”

As Hari indicates, the addiction-producing incentives built into tech are far from inevitable. As he puts it:

“[Y]ou could design [technology] … to maximally respect people’s need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them to achieve them.”

Thus, not only is Hari surely right to conclude that “banning surveillance capitalism” is an absolutely necessary step toward reclaiming our attention”—people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked [on tech platforms] can’t focus,” as he neatly puts it—but he is also similarly correct in his suggestion that we should want more: we should want technology to be aligned with our interests, rather than being merely not-misaligned with them. We should, as tech ethicist James Williams has put it, want technology not simply to get off our backs, but to be actively on our side
Hari also goes beyond technological causes. Indeed, much of Stolen Focus’s originality, and in fact one of its great strengths, is that it does not restrict itself to a discussion of the attention-sapping nature of modern technology, but rather emphasizes how other crucial factors like our chronic lack of sleep, worsening diets, and increasingly polluted cities have also harmed our ability to focus. He shows how these factors work together to create the attention problem. Take Hari’s beautifully succinct explanation for the measurable decrease in children’s attention spans:

“We don’t let [children] play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains druglike additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that, as a result, they are struggling to learn attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.”

The ultimate solutions Hari offers for “healing our attention” are, in my view, extremely reasonable. Some are proffered at the individual level, for instance, “pre-committing” to individual tasks, getting at least eight hours of sleep every night, and taking regular time off social media. Hari himself estimates that, as a result of these individual changes to his life, his own attention was boosted by about 15-20 percent. However, he is clear that such individual solutions can only take you so far; they will not—indeed, cannot—constitute a satisfactory long-term solution. On this point he quotes a telling remark from Williams, who notes that “digital detoxes” and other individual methods are “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep, at an individual level, certain effects at bay. But it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.”

Thus, Hari believes that it is at the societal level that substantive change must ultimately be made. In particular, other than banning surveillance capitalism, Hari also suggests introducing a four-day work week (to combat physical and especially mental exhaustion) and encouraging children to play freely from the very earliest stages of childhood. Moreover, he makes a persuasive point about how, in the absence of a resolution to our attention crisis, a host of our societal problems will likely remain, including (but not limited to) the climate crisis and the rise in authoritarianism around the world:

“Solving big problems requires the sustained focus of many people over many years. Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions, and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them. If we lose that, we lose our ability to have a fully functioning society. … People who can’t focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions—and less likely to see clearly when they fail.”

Or, to quote Williams: “In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter.” Indeed, I would be tempted to go further still: to the extent that we are unable to focus, we are, plausibly, unable to meaningfully exist.

One central, inescapable fact remains: for huge numbers of people, smartphones are having a seriously deleterious impact across many aspects of their lives. Not only are they causing mental or physical illness, but, by users’ own admission, they are addictive, and seem to have radically skewed how people spend their time and their conception of what they should consider important in life. But if we conclude—as I think we should—that the costs of smartphone use outweigh the benefits, an obvious question arises: what should we do?
We can answer that question at both the individual and the societal level. At the individual level, the simplest response—which I personally would recommend—would be to get rid of your smartphone. Simple “flip” phones are far less distracting and, typically, also far cheaper than your average smartphone—and, what’s more, they still allow you to call and text your loved ones. Other useful suggestions for minimizing your smartphone use include changing your screen to grayscale, downloading ad blocking software, and even—in the most extreme cases—buying a phone timer “lock box.”
Such individual solutions, however, will not—indeed, cannot—constitute a satisfactory long-term solution to the problem, because the devices in question are being designed specifically to overcome human willpower. As Williams remarked in his 2018 book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy:

“What we have … is, on one side, an entire industry spending billions of dollars trying to capture your attention using the most sophisticated computers in the world, and on the other side … your attention. This is … akin to a soldier seeing an army of thousands of tanks and guns advance upon him, and running in a bunker for refuge.”

Thus, it is at the societal level that we must respond. We can first imagine what the most draconian solutions would look like; for instance, regulation of smartphone use in a manner comparable to cigarette use. People could be restricted from using their smartphones except in certain designated areas (comparable to “smoking rooms” at airports). If we followed the cigarette model, warning labels and images would be placed on phones (featuring, perhaps, a helpless child desperately trying to get the attention of their smartphone-addicted parent?) just as some countries place images of dying or deceased smokers on cigarette packets.

Civil libertarians like myself are wary of measures that intrude on freedom, like trying to ban smartphones outright. A more sensible response is possible: we—that is, activists, concerned citizens, relevant NGOs, etc.—could pressure policymakers and businesses to radically overhaul the perverse incentive structures governing the design of these products’ software: those designs which are specifically designed to “hook” the user to the product through the use of features like randomized variable rewards (essentially the same process underlying slot machines) as a means of optimizing metrics like time spent on a given platform, number of clicks, number of advertisements seen, etc. A different set of incentives needn’t have such a deleterious effect on us. More specifically, these designs and underlying incentive structures could be redesigned so as to align more with users’ actual interests and concerns (which might include things like reading more, learning a new language, or fostering genuinely meaningful, i.e., mostly offline interactions with friends and family members). To quote Williams again: “No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘How much time could I possibly spend on social media today?’”
In the absence of any such societal response, however, the onus will be on each individual separately to determine for him or herself what they should do. It is not easy. Anyone uncomfortable with their phone addiction must fight a difficult fight to free themselves from it. But in addition to trying to bring our own personal habits in line with our true values and desires, those of us who believe the social effects are seriously damaging have a responsibility to try to convey our position effectively to those who disagree. We need to make the case persuasively that the increases in convenience, and our occasional use of smartphones to (meaningfully) connect with people, are absolutely not worth the cost of addiction, depression, and, perhaps most importantly, a fundamental rewiring of what makes us human.

       A truck driver moves containers in east China&#39;s Shandong province. The world&#39;s second-largest economy added tariffs to U.S. imports last week, in a tit-for-tat retaliation to moves by the White House. Associated Press   Is the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act actually working?   Weifeng Zhong  August 13, 08:00 AM August 13, 08:00 AM  Video Embed The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a new United States law to ban imports tainted with forced labor in China, went into effect in June. According to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), a co-author of the legislation, “we can finally ensure that American consumers and businesses can buy goods without inadvertent complicity in China’s horrific human rights abuses.” Horrific human rights abuses are exactly what they are. But early signs suggest that the law may not have its intended effects, and policymakers still have a long way to go before they can meaningfully push back against Beijing’s atrocities. The letter and spirit of the Uyghur law are sweeping, and Customs and Border Protection intends to implement it as such. But U.S. industries just don’t seem convinced. The law states that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or produced by certain entities in or outside of China that source material from the Uyghur region, would, by default, be barred from entering the U.S. unless importers can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that no forced labor was used. CBP seems to take it seriously, warning that an importer would need to trace its supply chains down to raw materials to prove that its merchandise isn’t made with forced labor and that it expects to grant very few exceptions. Yet, when the agency detained a shipment of quartzite — a key material for making polysilicon for solar panels and a major export of Xinjiang — it still caught the industry by surprise. Polysilicon importers reportedly believed that only a handful of suppliers would face enforcement action, and their vendors don’t have any quartzite documentation to show anyway. That’s by no means an isolated event. Nearly half of the world’s polysilicon supply comes from Xinjiang, but a solar industry group somehow believes that “most companies should be able to meet the requirements” of the Uyghur law. It’s amazing how optimists do their math. The solar industry is among the most closely watched sectors tainted with Uyghur forced labor, and it’s anyone’s guess how much more unrealistic similar optimism in other sectors will be. In fairness to importers, the confusion stems from a loophole since 1930 that allowed merchandise made with forced labor to enter the U.S. market as long as importers showed that the U.S. production of the good did not meet domestic demand — a bar Chinese products have often cleared with flying colors. While this loophole was closed in 2016, the reputational damage done to U.S. customs law has not yet subsided. Compared to 1930, today’s supply chains are orders of magnitude more complex. That means the private sector is best suited to clean up forced labor in its own supply chains, which requires policymakers to light an extra fire under companies. For this reason, my colleague Christine McDaniel and I have argued that the implementation of the Uyghur law needs to err on the side of being overly stringent to incentivize importers’ due diligence. Finally, while Americans should be proud that they’re the only Western power imposing an import ban on forced labor-tainted goods from China, that’s just a nicer way of saying that America’s allies are not yet on board. Reports suggest that this may be changing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, but unless the interest materializes in actions, U.S. allies may well become a stepping stone before forced labor-tainted goods make it to America’s shores. Talk is cheap, and the letter of the law won’t be much better without rigorous enforcement. Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda. He’s also the curator of the Wei To Think Again newsletter on U.S.-China competition.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, “This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.” I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.Though he lived in the apartment for several more months, I saw him only one other time, on the way to the bathroom. We didn’t make eye contact. Another time, I was on a Zoom call in the living room and heard, from behind his closed bedroom door, the Avril Lavigne song “Girlfriend,” the chorus of which is a peppy “Hey, hey, you, you, I don’t like your girlfriend,” playing at a pointed volume. Eventually, my boyfriend texted him to see if he would talk about the situation. He replied that there wasn’t much to say, except one thing: “Your girlfriend is toxic,” he warned, followed by an emoji of a monkey covering its face.This accusation was upsetting because I crave approval at all times from everyone around me. But it was also surprising because toxic is an internet word. I had seen all kinds of advice on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit about how to deal with “toxic” friends, generally by never speaking to them again. But I had rarely heard it used offline, and then only semi-ironically, or in regard to people who were objectively terrible. I had never had to consider whether it was a word that could be applied to me.The internet is wallpapered with advice, much of it delivered in a cut-and-dried, cut-’em-loose tone. Frankly worded listicles abound. For instance: “7 Tips for Eliminating Toxic People From Your Life,” or “7 Ways to Cut a Toxic Friend Out of Your Life.” On Instagram and Pinterest, the mantras are ruthless: “There is no better self-care than cutting off people who are toxic for you”; “If I cut you off, chances are, you handed me the scissors.” The signature smugness and sass of Twitter are particularly well suited to dispensing these tidbits of advice. I don’t know who needs to hear this, a tweet will begin, suggesting that almost anyone might need to hear it, but if someone hurts your feelings, you are allowed to get rid of them. There is even a WebMD page about how to identify a “toxic person,” defined aggressively unhelpfully as “anyone whose behavior adds negativity and upset to your life.” Well, by that measure … !I find this stuff tough to read because—like most people I know—I’ve surely hurt everybody I love at least once. Plus the roommate. I talked down to him—an obvious red flag—and he did what he was supposed to do, according to the prevailing online wisdom. He acted quickly to protect himself. A person has no obligation to forgive anyone for anything, he may have been reassured by some tinny internet voice. Or as one “Inspirational Quotes” account tweeted over the summer: “Cut them off silently, they know exactly what they did.”[Read: How the internet changed advice columns]I can’t say it was a huge loss—our relationship was based almost entirely on proximity. But the advice I’m sifting through isn’t just about sloughing off casual acquaintances; it’s meant to apply to close friends, siblings, partners, parents. The message—implied if not always stated outright—is that other people are simply not my problem.“These are some signs that you should cut somebody off,” Sahar Dahi, a 22-year-old TikTok creator, announced last year to her millions of followers. She has the air of a big sister—but a fun one, not a scold. The signs include: They can’t tell the truth, they can’t keep your secrets, and they cross your boundaries even though your boundaries are nonnegotiable. “These are definitely red flags,” she told me.Dahi posts a lot of videos tagged #toxic. When I interviewed her, I asked her if she practices what she preaches, and she told me that she’s actually very big on practicing what she preaches—she’s cut a wild number of toxic people out of her life. How many, exactly? She paused. “Like, just doing a quick count? Oh my God, I’d say, like, 10.” (In the past year.)I should stop here to note that I’m not looking to instigate some kind of moral panic. Maybe #toxic posts are popular because relationship drama is good entertainment, especially on TikTok—an app for teenagers whose literal role in society is to explore the full spectrum of irrational behavior. Maybe this advice is just what’s in style right now. But at a time when our most intimate relationships really do seem to be becoming more brittle, it’s hard to laugh off the possibility that some people are taking all of this to heart.Nobody tracks breakups between unmarried romantic partners, let alone friends or subletters. But we do know that all kinds of relationships seem to be snapping. Last year in The Atlantic, Joshua Coleman, a psychologist focused on family estrangement, described advising an influx of parents whose adult children had cut them out of their lives. Karl Pillemer, a professor at Cornell University, published a book on the topic in 2020 in which he estimated that about 67 million Americans were estranged from a family member.[Read: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement]Some blame self-absorbed young people. In a New York Times column last year, David Brooks employed the work of Pillemer and other experts to argue that the estrangement epidemic might be driven by “a generational shift in what constitutes abuse”—difficult or distant parents, redefined as dangerous. He wondered whether today’s young people view the family as a “launchpad for personal fulfillment,” rather than the site of lifelong obligation. Brooks then painted a lonely picture of the “psychological unraveling of America,” working in high rates of depression and suicide, as well as the sizable percentages of Americans who feel that they do not have even one close friend and that nobody truly knows them.Two decades ago, Robert D. Putnam lamented the breakdown of social ties in Bowling Alone. Americans, pressed for time and money, were abandoning their bridge clubs, bowling leagues, and broader community obligations. Putnam diagnosed a generational posture toward society, but what’s going on now is different: a generational mutation in the philosophy of interpersonal relationships. It’s more intimate, and maybe more distressing.Why is this happening? Maybe young people have been inspired by the impermanence and infinite choice baked into online dating and social media. Maybe our brains have been pickled in wellness culture and “self-care” rhetoric, which stress the need to privilege our own well-being above all else. Or maybe we’re just good American capitalists, encouraged by the cult of individualism to think of ourselves as compelling brands, the main characters of cinematic star vehicles, the centers of the universe.The line between internet advice and bona fide mental-health guidance can get a little blurry. A few TikTok personalities have branched out into something that looks more like therapy—charging for one-on-one consultations. And I spoke with professionals who told me that this school of online advice has made its way into their own consultation rooms.Lina Perl, a clinical psychologist in New York, said her patients sometimes talk about toxic friends and the internet’s advice for dealing with them. She gets the appeal. “People love rules,” she told me. They want to know what their responsibilities are. “When do I get to say, ‘That’s it. I cut you out’?”[Read: A diary of toxic love]Jack Worthy, a psychotherapist in New York, doesn’t care for the word toxic: “As far as I know, it’s not an actual psychological construct that has validity and reliability.” But lately, he told me, it’s been coming up “again and again” in his practice. Many patients “want to explore ideas or frameworks that they learned online.”Worthy noted that self-help is much older than social media, but that reading an entire Brené Brown book takes far more commitment than passively consuming what’s presented to you in an algorithmic feed. “I think previously it might not have been so easy to find content to validate what you already feel,” he said.The advice is not just easier to find; it’s easier to follow, too. Earlier iterations of self-help often stressed the hard work of building and maintaining relationships, of opening up and connecting with others. That’s more arduous than simply removing from your social network anyone who causes you discomfort.Social media, by its nature, can make people appear more extreme than they are. Consider a recent incident involving Lindy Ford, a 21-year-old influencer from Spokane, Washington, who posts videos on Twitch of herself playing fantasy games like The Elder Scrolls V. Though her modest audience follows her for gaming content, she has also been candid about her anxiety and panic disorders, as well as her relationships; sometimes, on Twitter, she’ll offer bits of advice. Last year, she posted:here’s your reminder that unless someone explicitly told you with their words they are upset with you, there is no need for you to worry yourself sick. you have no mental or emotional obligation to people who do not communicate with you. no matter how much you love them.Pretty intense! The tweet was shared more than 50,000 times—in many cases approvingly. But others saw Ford’s message as wrong or even dangerous, describing it as an “insane thing to say” and a “great entry in the short but rich history of sociopathic advice on social media.”When I spoke with Ford soon after, I was curious about whether she was surprised by that backlash. “That is just the way it is online,” she told me. Her followers knew she was alluding to her own tendencies to overthink things and be too self-critical. But she understood why other people thought “it was quote-unquote sociopathic … They were reading it as if I were saying, ‘If you hurt someone, then you have no obligation to fix it, because they didn’t tell you that you hurt them.’ ” That wasn’t what she meant. It’s only what she wrote.The beauty of a tweet is its simplicity: You can hear a gavel bang at the end of each sentence. But that just doesn’t correspond to the messiness of life. What mistakes can we make and still ask for forgiveness? What do we owe one another? What do we owe ourselves? You can discuss these questions forever. This is why I love reality TV—especially the Real Housewives universe, which, stripped of the glitz, is about nothing other than how and when to give an apology, and under what terms to accept one.In her 1987 memoir, Fierce Attachments, Vivian Gornick describes her relationship with her unhappy and demanding mother. The story doesn’t come to a dramatic end in which Gornick stops talking to her mother forever. Instead, Gornick painfully, slowly, gains a little freedom. “We are no longer nose to nose, she and I. A degree of distance has been permanently achieved … This little bit of space provides me with the intermittent but useful excitement that comes of believing I begin and end with myself.”Beginning and ending with yourself is not the same as suggesting that your self is your only obligation, which is plainly nonsense. Even the influencers with the most followers, putting out the toughest advice, must know that’s no way to live. Because if the people in our lives aren’t our responsibility, then what is?Catherine Hodes, a social worker in Massachusetts, doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet, but she has devoted her career to thinking about how people treat one another. In 2013, when she was the director of the Safe Homes Project, a domestic-violence program, she started a workshop called “Is It Conflict or Abuse?” An abusive dynamic, she argues, requires one person to have power over the other, whereas conflict involves two people struggling for power. The distinction can be confusing, and in some cases “both people feel like they’re being abused, because they’re not getting their needs met or they’re not getting their way.”The relationship advice I’ve been describing doesn’t necessarily encourage anyone to think of themselves as a victim of abuse, but it does imply that one person is always in the right, while the other is in the wrong—so much so that the person in the right should summarily dismiss the person in the wrong. To demonstrate the error of this thinking, Hodes told me a story.She once attended a conference where a group of people shared experiences of abuse. One young man was asked to tell his story of abusing someone else. He said that he’d been jealous when his girlfriend spoke to other guys, that he cursed at her and felt the need to exert control over her. He had thought this was a normal part of being in a couple, but he’d since been corrected.“He spoke very softly and he looked down, and he seemed shy and maybe ashamed,” Hodes recalled. As he spoke, she was thinking, “Wait a minute. Why is this being called abuse? It sounds like a 16- or 17-year-old kid with no experience with relationships who doesn’t know anything about intimacy … I saw his confusion and his pain and his humanity. And I had no desire to label him as being bad.”In 2016, the writer Sarah Schulman published a book called Conflict Is Not Abuse, elaborating on Hodes’s work. She argues that overstatement of harm can itself cause more harm. The person seen as good will be supported and the person seen as bad will be shunned. On social media, Hodes said, these binaries become even more entrenched, because people are encouraged to take sides. This was the case with Ford’s tweet, and thousands of other ephemeral dramas.One of the easiest explanations for the “toxic” trend is clearly false: Young people aren’t misanthropes. In the past few years, Millennials and Gen Zers have helped rejuvenate the concept of mutual aid, participated in some of the country’s largest-ever demonstrations in favor of racial justice, and expressed a renewed interest in organizing labor. Many of us are thinking hard about our interconnectedness and sometimes tying ourselves in knots trying to do the right thing.But too often this does not square with the way we discuss our personal lives. I never feel quite so worried that I could die alone and unloved as I do when scrolling through the relationship-sphere, hit by so many emphatic declarations of who should be dead to me and why I should be dead to others.And yet, I don’t feel hopeless. I have “no obligation,” I’m told, but we all feel obligation, or we wouldn’t be looking so desperately for some relief from that sensation. The very existence of the relationship-advice ecosystem implies an attitude of responsibility and generosity toward our fellow travelers (I don’t know who needs to hear this, but …). That attitude will remain, I think, long after the chilly tone of today’s advice-givers goes out of style.This article appears in the September 2022 print edition with the headline “That’s It. You’re Dead to Me.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

“Cut off the Disney Channel. Cancel your park trip or your cruise if one is planned. If you own Disney stock, sell it,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick advised his constituents in April. Though it pained him to let go of his nostalgic affection for the children’s entertainment behemoth, Disney’s efforts to “indoctrinate the children of America with their radical ‘woke’ views” forced his hand.

Patrick wasn’t alone. The Walt Disney Company’s decision to wade into the debate around Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual- and gender-identity issues through third grade, captured the American right’s attention and roused its fury. Disney CEO Bob Chapek confessed at the time that the firm’s employees and shareholders were “upset that we didn’t speak out against the bill.” So they committed to, as he said, “reassessing our approach to advocacy.” Conservative activists objected to the entertainment company’s intervention in a live culture war and set out to impose costs on the firm. “Boycott Disney!” protesters chanted outside the firm’s Burbank, California, headquarters. “Disney is demonic,” their signage read. “Disney, stop sexualizing our kids!” The right’s crusade culminated in victory when Florida’s legislature voted to strip the Walt Disney World Resort of its status as one of the state’s more than 1,800 special districts—effective next year.

Over the spring, the furor felt overwhelming. The “boycott Disney” movement was a potent force online, and the accompanying demonstrations in the streets suggested that a historic cultural moment was upon us. The company alienated the right, so right-leaning politicians exacted a toll from the firm. The “new Republican Party” showed it didn’t just talk a good game, and Disney took it on the chin. At least, it seemed that way at the time. But the company’s quarterly earnings tell another story.

On Wednesday, Disney reported a staggering 72 percent increase in revenue from its parks year over year. Attendance has neared or exceeded pre-pandemic levels despite soaring consumer costs. The company’s on-site hotels and cruises are up, running, and booking reservations. The streaming service Disney+ also outperformed expectations. The service has eclipsed Netflix’s total number of paying subscribers and is still on track to achieve profitability by 2024. Even as the streaming model itself teeters, and investors in that sector demand returns on their investments, Disney’s backers are satisfied with the company’s trajectory. “Revenue rose 26 percent year on year to $21.5 [billion] in the quarter, and net profit rose 53 percent to $1.4 [billion],” the Financial Times reported. “Disney’s earnings per share of $1.09 were ahead of Wall Street estimates of 96 cents.” Bob Chapek’s contract as Disney’s CEO has been renewed.

Florida’s shot across Disney’s bow did seem to shock the company and others like it into veering back into their lane—at least, for now. But the company has every reason to believe it will not lose the benefits it derives from providing municipal services in the 25,000-acre “improvement district” it operates in Orange and Osceola counties.

“The plan for Reedy Creek will be shared in the next few weeks,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, in late April. But by the end of July, no such plan had been released to the public. Some speculated that Tallahassee was unlikely to produce a plan that foisted the tax burden and municipal obligations formerly shouldered by Disney onto local residents, nor would it play a game of chicken with the district’s $1 billion in outstanding municipal bonds. That speculation was well-founded.

Late last month, Florida’s director of the state’s division of bond finance, Ben Watkins, revealed that state lawmakers are likely to establish a slightly more limited version of that special district in the next legislative session. Limited how? “The new district won’t have some of the powers previously granted that were never used,” Bloomberg News reported, “such as operating a nuclear power plant.”

It is safe to assume that the angry Americans on the right who set out on this crusade did not do so with the goal of preventing Walt Disney World Resort from achieving nuclear fission. They wanted to advance their cultural interests and impose pain on their opponents. They wanted Disney’s shareholders to suffer, its leadership discredited, and its products to stop promoting culturally progressive themes. The right’s cultural warriors certainly did advance their cultural objectives. They have not, however, seen their enemies driven before them; and the lamentations of their women are, so far, fairly muted. Disney’s shareholders and leadership have not suffered financial hardships, and the company’s commitment to supporting progressive causes seems as firm as ever.

Is this a loss for the right’s culture warriors? Not if they properly understand their own objectives and the limits of the tools at their disposal. By wielding the mechanisms of the state, DeSantis and Florida’s Republicans have established that there are consequences for firms that sacrifice their core competency to satisfy would-be activists in their ranks. The right demonstrated to actors in the private sector that acting like a left-wing pressure group will ensure that you’re treated like a left-wing pressure group. If, however, the right hoped to “Destroy Disney,” it’s failed miserably. Indeed, such an unrealistic objective was doomed from the outset.

In a major acknowledgment that most people have some form of protection from severe COVID-19 disease—either from vaccines or prior infection—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) no longer recommend social distancing as a general strategy to slow the spread of the virus.
New guidelines from the CDC also state that masks are only warranted in schools if the level of community spread is "high." When the spread is at a "medium" level, high-risk individuals should wear masks. When the spread is at a "low" level, masks are not recommended.
"At all COVID-19 Community Levels (low, medium, and high), recommendations emphasize staying up to date with vaccination, improving ventilation, testing persons who are symptomatic and those who have been exposed, and isolating infected persons," according to the CDC.
The new guidelines also remove the need for individuals merely exposed to COVID-19 to isolate until they can produce a negative test. Individuals who test positive for COVID-19 should continue to isolate for five days, however.
If anyone was still waiting for official permission from the nation's top health officials to resume life as normal, it is here. By signaling that the universal masking-and-social-distancing phase of the pandemic is now over, the CDC has conceded that the U.S.' COVID-19 prevention strategy should now revolve around protecting those who are at heightened risk.
And perhaps most importantly: Schools in areas of the country where community spread is low or medium do not need to require general mask wearing.
"This latest guidance from the CDC should give our students, parents, and educators the confidence they need to head back to school this year with a sense of joy and optimism," said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement.
Washington, D.C., school officials, take note: The level of community spread in the nation's capital is currently low.
The post CDC No Longer Recommends Social Distancing, Masks in Schools Unless Spread Is High appeared first on Reason.com.

In some sense, Alberta’s words are obviously true; Trumpists are already issuing death threats against the judge who signed off on the warrant, and a Shabbat service at his synagogue was reportedly canceled because of the security risk. On Thursday, an armed man tried to breach an F.B.I. field office in Ohio, and The New York Times reported that he appears to have attended a pro-Trump rally in Washington the night before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The former president relishes his ability to stir up a mob; it’s part of what makes him so dangerous.

We already know, however, that the failure to bring Trump to justice — for his company’s alleged financial chicanery and his alleged sexual assault, for obstructing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and turning the presidency into a squalid influence-peddling operation, for trying to steal an election and encouraging an insurrection — has been disastrous.

What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.

We do not know the scope of the investigation that led a judge to authorize the search of Mar-a-Lago, though it reportedly involves classified documents that Trump failed to turn over to the government even after being subpoenaed. More could be revealed soon: Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department had filed a motion in court to unseal the search warrant.

It should go without saying that Trump and his followers, who howled “Lock her up!” about Clinton, do not believe that it is wrong for the Justice Department to pursue a probe against a presidential contender over the improper handling of classified material. What they believe is that it is wrong to pursue a case against Trump, who bonds with his acolytes through a shared sense of aggrieved victimization.

The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, Trump’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.“It’s not just my opinion that things are weird,” Derek Thompson told me recently. It’s a fact of life, he explained, that the U.S. economy is behaving very strangely right now.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
What comes after the search warrant?
How California exported its worst problem to Texas
The other Ukrainian army
A Flopping HoseWe learned last week that unemployment in the U.S. is as low as it’s been at any time in the past 50 years, and a report released today shows that inflation slowed in July. Those are good things—and yet, economic output has also slowed in 2022, enough that economists are asking whether the country is in a recession.I caught up with Derek Thompson, a staff writer and the author of the Work in Progress newsletter, about this huge disconnect between job growth and economic growth, and asked why it’s so hard to understand what’s happening with the economy right now. “If economic growth is really declining, it’s one of the strangest downturns in American history,” he told me.Isabel Fattal: How should a regular, nonexpert person think about this moment in the U.S. economy?Derek Thompson: When you’re thinking about the economy, you should think about three categories: statistics, labels, and feelings. Statistics, like the inflation rate or the unemployment rate, come from government surveys, and you should trust them, because they are highly descriptive of what is happening to the broader economy.Feelings come from your personal experience in the economy. Is your local labor market good? How do you feel about whether your income is holding up against inflation?Labels come from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee. The label of “Are we in a recession or not?” is determined by eight economists. That has nothing to do with your feelings of the local economy at all.Isabel: You wrote recently that “Are we in a recession?” is the wrong question to ask. Why?Derek: There’s two reasons why it’s so hard to say whether we’re in a recession right now. Number one, the NBER is not going to render a judgment for several months, several quarters, or more than a year. So why debate now what we might not know for a year?Number two, the GDP estimate that we just got from the Bureau of Economic Analysis is just that—an estimate—and the estimate will be revised. There’s about a coin-flip chance that the economy actually grew in the first half of 2022. What we know about recent growth unfortunately isn’t solid.Isabel: What is one thing we do know for sure about the economy right now?Derek: We know three things for sure. Number one, we know that inflation is very high, historically speaking—one of the highest rates in the past 40 years. Number two, we know that unemployment is low, as low as it’s been in 50 years. The labor market is roaring.Number three, we know that growth is slowing down. We know that the GDP growth rate was really high in 2021, and we know that it’s slowing down in 2022. We don’t know if it’s what some economists would call a recession.Isabel: As you’ve written, we’re in an everything-is-weird economy because different factors are behaving in contradictory ways; for example, jobs are growing, but the economy is shrinking. How should people deal with these mixed messages? What should we be paying most attention to?Derek: Predicting the future of the economy is so hard that it’s useful to have a single metric to look for. The single metric I would watch is inflation, because if inflation starts to come down, as I believe it will in the next few months [it declined to 8.5 percent in July], the Federal Reserve doesn’t have to keep hacking up interest rates. If interest rates don’t keep going up, then the economy will probably get back to growth. So it all flows from inflation, and if I were interested in figuring out the direction of the economy, I’d be obsessed with watching energy prices, housing prices, and retail spending.Isabel: How are Americans feeling about the economy right now? There’s a possibility that people’s feelings can actually affect where the economy goes from here, right?Derek: It’s a really important point. Feelings aren’t imaginary. Feelings drive the economy, to a certain extent. When people are optimistic about the future, they spend more money.But if you ask consumers how they’re feeling about the economy, they increasingly bifurcate by ideology. Republicans say they’re sad about the economy when a Democrat is in the White House. And Democrats say they’re sad about the economy when a Republican is in the White House. So it’s not as useful as it used to be to ask people about their consumer sentiment, because increasingly, consumer sentiment is just political sentiment.On my podcast, Plain English, the economist Austan Goolsbee made the great point that in 1992, the entire presidential election was about an economic slowdown that had technically already ended. So statistically, the recession was over, but in vibes and feelings, the recession was deepening, and you had this electoral outcome—the defeat of the incumbent president—hinged on feelings of a recession that actually didn’t exist. That goes to show that even if feelings are disconnected from statistics, they still have real-world outcomes.Isabel: Is this an unprecedented moment for the economy?Derek: We’ve never had an economy like this, period. This is a cliché, but I’ve called this the pinched-hose economy. If you turn on the water in your backyard hose and you pinch the hose for a while, the water will build up, and then, when you release the hose, it’ll start sputtering wildly, and the hose will flop all over the place in a violent and strange manner. That’s what happened in the economy. We shut off the hose and said no one will fly, no one will go to restaurants, people won’t go to movie theaters. We purposefully shut down the economy because of the pandemic.But then demand, which is the water, surged beyond supply’s capacity to easily fulfill it. That’s why we’re seeing the economic hose flopping all over the place. It’s why things are weird with baby formula, with gas prices, with airlines. That’s the hose flopping around. The hose is still flopping.Related:
The three biggest mysteries about the U.S. economy
Why we hate rising prices more than we fear losing our jobs
Donald Trump took the Fifth Amendment and declined to answer questions from the New York State attorney general’s office in the investigation into his company’s business practices.
Russian forces killed at least 13 civilians and wounded others in a missile attack in southern Ukraine overnight. Ukrainian special forces also reportedly carried out a strike on a Russian air base in Crimea yesterday, a move that would mark a significant escalation in fighting.
The Justice Department charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard with allegedly plotting to assassinate John Bolton.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg explains how President Joe Biden keeps winning the internet by accident.
The Weekly Planet: Congress just passed a big climate bill—not the one you think, Robinson Meyer reports.
(Remus86 / Getty)
Hibernation: The Extreme Lifestyle That Can Stop AgingBy Katherine J. WuToday’s most elderly bats aren’t supposed to exist. Ounce for ounce and pound for pound, they are categorically teeny mammals; according to the evolutionary rules that hold across species, they should be short-lived, like other small-bodied creatures.Read the full article. More From The Atlantic
The “L.A. woman” reveals herself.
Lessons from a lonely, Trump-defiant Republican
“History is human”: Remembering David McCullough
(Apple TV+ / Getty / The Atlantic)
Read. The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom, a memoir set in New Orleans that has an incredible sense of place.Or try another pick from our list of eight books that grapple with a hard childhood.Watch. In the mood to solve a puzzle? Watch or rewatch Severance (Apple TV+) or Yellowjackets (Showtime)—but this time, try to follow along with fan theories on the internet, which play a bigger part in shaping modern TV than you might realize.Play our daily crossword.

Trump supporters gather near his residence at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on August 9, 2022. (Photo by Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images.)What an amazingly stupid time this is.Here’s an easy thought experiment. Imagine a Third World banana republic. A populist leader recently ousted in an allegedly “rigged” election is waiting in the wings, plotting a return to power. The current ruler sends armed agents of the state to search the ousted ruler’s home in the hope of discrediting his once and possibly future opponent, presumably to prevent him from ever threatening his rule.This, according to everyone from Donald Trump to large swaths of the GOP and its loyal commentariat, is what happened this week when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago. “Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World countries,” Trump declared. “Sadly, America has now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.” His son echoed the sentiment: “Biden’s out of control DOJ is ripping this country apart with how they're openly targeting their political enemies. This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics!!!”Similar declarations are all over the place.But let’s return to the thought experiment: What happens next? The ousted ruler and his representatives claim that this affront to his dignity is really an insult to all of his supporters. Like followers of Hugo Chavez or Daniel Ortega, they insist that only by returning their leader in internal exile to power can they avenge this travesty and purge the government of these enemies of the people.*That’s the argument raging like a religious awakening across much of the right this week. Once Trump announces he’s running for president, Mike Huckabee insists, “We need to rally around him and simply say, ‘He is the candidate.’ He will be re-elected. That’s because he’s the only candidate who’ll have the guts to take on this incredibly corrupt machine. We must put him back in and let him do this. I’m convinced at this point that this is the only hope for our nation, to get it back to the point where people can believe in it.”This isn’t an argument against banana republic politics, it is banana republic politics. Let’s put aside any consideration of primaries or policy debates and simply anoint a strong man to redeem our nation, purge corruption, and punish our enemies.I’ll put it plainly: If your “belief” in our country is so fragile and pathetic that you will lose “hope for our nation” unless Donald Trump is given free reign to cleanse the land of evildoers, then you don’t actually believe in this nation. If your love of country is contingent on your preferred faction being in power, you’ve confused partisanship for patriotism. Taken seriously, all of this banana republic talk is un-American.I don’t mean it’s a wrong or flawed argument or simply an argument I don’t like—though it is all those things. I mean it is literally an un-American argument because it fundamentally betrays the whole idea of this country. And I’d say this if the claims were made about any politician. Indeed, I did. When Barack Obama’s boosters claimed he would fix our “broken souls” (in Michelle Obama’s words), I spared no effort in denouncing them. When Joe Biden sermonized about how “unity”—under his banner—was the answer to all our problems, I trotted out all my arguments against the “cult of unity,” which constantly threatens our constitutional system of separated powers and divided government.Presidents are not redeemers, messiahs, incarnations of mystical aspirations, or righteous settlers of seething grievances. They’re not god-kings or the fathers of our American family. They’re politicians elected to do some specific things as the head of one branch of one level of government. They get that job for a limited and defined period of time, and afterward they’re simply citizens.It’s a source of constant consternation and amazement for me that so many people either don’t understand this or simply pretend not to.I don’t know for sure which politicians and pundits yammering about our “corrupt regime” are truly ignorant and which are merely duplicitous demagogues chumming the waters with bloody nonsense. But I do know it’s dangerous, because whether they believe it or not, they want millions of people to believe it.Our regime.But let’s talk about our “regime,” a term these people use with Vizzini-like confidence and error.In 2004, a lot of angry Democrats loved the phrase “regime change starts at home.” The idea was that voting George W. Bush out of office would constitute “regime change”—a term popularized by both Bill Clinton and Bush with regard to our policy on Iraq.The stupidity of this talking point—later picked up in the Obama years by conservatives—begins with the fact that elections are how our regime works. A regime, by definition, is a system of government, not an administration run by elected Democrats or Republicans. When serious people talk seriously about changing a regime, they’re talking about changing the system of government. Regime change in Iraq meant getting rid of a totalitarian, terroristic dictatorship, not simply replacing Saddam Hussein with a more pliable and cooperative tyrant.America’s regime isn’t on any ballot. Symbolically, it is the ballot. More properly, it is the constitutional system that requires our leaders to be elected. But unlike in an actual banana republic or the Third World Marxist dictatorships Marco Rubio compares us to, electing a leader doesn’t change the regime. There are roughly 520,000 elected officials in this country. At the federal level there are 537 of them. The president is just one of them.Like every other elected official, the president is subordinate to the Constitution, which is another way of saying he is not the regime, he’s a servant of the regime. None of those elected officials, including the president, is your boss (unless you’re on their payroll or serve in the military). Indeed, the president literally has no formal power to order any of those 536 other federal officeholders to do anything. He cannot make Congress—or even his vice president—do something they do not want to do because they, too, derive their authority from the Constitution and the people.Even the people in the executive branch who do have to follow the president’s orders may not follow orders that are unlawful or unconstitutional. Because again, the ultimate political authority in our system is not vested in a person, but in a piece of parchment.That’s our regime, and I love it regardless of who the president is.Which brings us to the search at Mar-a-Lago. Like all the people bleating about the “Biden regime,” I have no idea if searching the former president’s home was a wise decision. But from every account I’ve read, it was a lawful decision. Dictators do not typically seek warrants from judges when they send police to search the homes of their political opponents. Heck, if the reporting is to be believed, the White House didn’t even know what had happened until after the deed was done.Again, none of this means that the DOJ or the FBI didn’t make a terrible decision or otherwise screw up. We’ve seen plenty of evidence in recent years that they’re perfectly capable of both. But if J. Edgar Hoover’s stewardship of the FBI didn’t indict the legitimacy of the regime, I don’t see how this could, because government screws up all the time. That’s one of the reasons we have so many elections. James Madison’s whole vision was to use elections, at every level of government, as a regular and predictable cleansing tide to sweep away stagnant waters. In fact, if the DOJ actually had good reason to search Trump’s home, meeting all of the legal requirements of probable cause etc., we would have moved closer to a banana republic if they turned a blind eye. As Kevin Williamson writes:If we really believe, as we say we believe, that this is a republic, that nobody is above the law, that the presidency is just a temporary executive-branch office rather than a quasi-royal entitlement, then there is nothing all that remarkable about the FBI serving a warrant on a house in Florida. I myself do not find it especially difficult to believe that there exists reasonable cause for such a warrant. And if the feds have got it wrong, that wouldn’t be the first time. Those so-called conservatives who are publicly fantasizing about an FBI purge under the next Republican administration are engaged in a particularly stupid form of irresponsibility.By all means, vote Biden out of office. I don’t think he’s up to the job and I think most of his policies have been bad. Bring on the cleansing tide.But what I can’t get my head around is the idea that the solution to our allegedly bananifying regime is to put that browning, mealy, giant banana back into power. Let’s return—just one more time—to that thought experiment. What I left out is that the ousted ruler seeking to return to power whose home was searched had tried to steal the last election by spreading lies about its legitimacy and treating the Constitution like a dead letter. He declared victory despite being assured he lost by his own attorney general and campaign manager. He wanted the DOJ to simply declare the election corrupt so he could do the rest. He toyed with the idea of using the military to seize voting machines as some sort of pretextual theater. He railed at his Supreme Court appointees for their lack of personal loyalty when they failed to go along with his scheme. He wanted to appoint a deluded and pliable flunky as the head of the DOJ because he was willing to run wild with propaganda about the election being stolen. He invited a mob to the capitol to scare Congress into helping him steal the election and did nothing for hours when the rabble turned violent and even erected a gallows to hang his own vice president. He and his junta now talk about these criminals as if they are political prisoners unjustly persecuted by a corrupt regime.If you’re worried about America looking like a banana republic, please don’t tell me that the first president in American history to defecate on the peaceful transfer of power is the antidote to the rot of Third World corruption of our regime. He is the rot.Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people?*Correction, August 9: This piece originally misidentified Daniel Ortega as Manuel Ortega.

At a time when health care providers have gone all in on telemedicine, Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, surprised Wall Street in late July when it announced it would acquire 1Life Healthcare Inc., which runs the subscription-based One Medical primary-care service, for $3.9 billion. Investors and market watchers noted Amazon’s less-than-stellar forays into health care, while privacy advocates raised concerns about Amazon’s access to patient medical data. Still others have voiced hopes Amazon will bring much-needed efficiencies and improved customer experience to health care as it has to retail shopping.
Amitabh Chandra is the Henry and Allison McCance Professor of Business Administration and faculty chair of the M.S./M.B.A. program in life sciences at Harvard Business School. He is also Ethel Zimmerman Wiener Professor of Public Policy and Director of Health Policy Research at Harvard Kennedy School. Chandra spoke to the Gazette about Amazon’s latest gamble and what it may mean for consumers.
Q&A
Amitabh Chandra
GAZETTE:  Given the size of its investment, what could Amazon’s recent acquisition of One Medical mean for the health care industry?
CHANDRA: Amazon is an enormous company. I think we’re all excited because it’s Amazon, but the reality is that it’s a $4 billion expense for a company that has $160 billion dollars of current assets on its balance sheet that they can deploy to buy another company. So, this is actually a very small acquisition for Amazon — very, very small.
This aside, the idea behind the business model of One Medical is twofold: to make health care easier to access, and through prevention and better primary care management to avert downstream spending. These are laudable goals. But One Medical certainly has not figured out how to save money. They’ve been hemorrhaging money, and they have extremely low margins, in part because most of health care spending is on sick patients and can’t be easily reduced. Amazon has bought into One Medical’s aspiration, which again, is wonderful if they succeed. But from the perspective of an Amazon shareholder, or the hard-nosed evidence to date, it is probably going to cause that shareholder to lose the money that One Medical shareholders were losing.

“Shopping for health care is nothing like shopping for the other items that Amazon might be selling …”

GAZETTE: Why do you think Amazon decided to plunge further into health care, an area they haven’t had a lot of success in?
CHANDRA: When Amazon looks at health care, they probably see two opportunities where they could add a lot of value. First, the supply chain in health care is a mess. There are so many intermediaries selling to other people, and Amazon has done extremely well by streamlining the supply chain. So they must be thinking that the current insurers and other payers can’t improve the supply chain relative to what they can.
The second area where Amazon may think it can help is on price transparency: Prices are often opaque in health care. Nobody really knows the price of anything. But it’s a leap to think that by making the prices more transparent, we can save money in health care. There have been countless experiments around price transparency in health care, where patients have been given information on prices and there’s no evidence they use that information at the time they need their health care. Shopping for health care is nothing like shopping for the other items that Amazon might be selling and these kinds of ideas involving more consumerism in health care have not worked — and it’s not like other companies have not tried.
More generally, Amazon has been interested in health care for over 20 years, but their performance is somewhere between a C and C+. They’ve been trying to run Amazon Care, just before the pandemic, to offer health care to its employees. The take up of that has been poor. Before the pandemic, they bought PillPack for something like $800 million. It’s not clear that PillPack has been able to displace any of the large pharmacies. They had a disaster in 2018 when they launched Haven, along with JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway, which was a naive effort to reform health care. Haven folded in 2021. And in the late 1990s, they tried to buy drugstore.com. So, they’ve been interested in health care for a very long time, but unsuccessful. Health care is hard, and general lessons from outside health care don’t always apply to health care.
GAZETTE: What does Amazon’s entry into primary care mean potentially for consumer access to health care? Amazon is a trusted, well-known brand so the company could easily attract more customers. But it also has a reputation for crowding out competitors once they get a foothold in a marketplace, which could potentially lead to limited choice and less access for consumers.
CHANDRA: I’m not that worried about them crowding out competitors just yet. Maybe they’ll do that if they’re incredibly successful, but my point is they’re not going to be incredibly successful. But, if they are, then that’s a conversation that the regulators need to be aware of.
In the short run, my great worry is patient privacy. They’re going to get something like 10 or 15 years of patient data from One Medical. What are they going to use that for? How are they going to use it? What safeguards will patients in this new Amazon/One Medical health care have on how their data will be used? I would like regulators to think about and wrestle with that issue.
The other worry for regulators is that Amazon may bungle One Medical because it doesn’t know how to run a health care business — which is not only a logistics business. There isn’t much that one can do about this, but it would be sad if One Medical would have been more successful if owned by say, United or CVS or Walgreens or Humana, than if owned by Amazon.

“Amazon is good at selling other people’s products — but I don’t see it as a pharmaceutical company that might cure disease.”

GAZETTE: Amazon is highly customer-driven and known for finding ways to streamline its operations to provide greater efficiencies and save the company money. That can result in faster, more convenient service for customers. Getting medical care is anything but convenient or efficient. How might Amazon make the customer experience more important in the business of delivering services?
CHANDRA: I like the fact that Amazon might be able to improve the customer experience in health care, because people are clearly frustrated by that. But, despite the general frustration, improving the patient experience is not going to save money on health care. Improving the experience makes it easier to access health care and that increases spending. Second, most of the spending in health care happens at the end of life or on very sick patients. So, improving the efficiency of primary care scheduling or vaccine appointments or something like that — that’s not going to be a very big market. Other companies, like Teladoc Health, have captured much more of the “patient experience” market than One Medical has. There’s already a bunch of other well-established, public companies that have figured out that what you don’t want is a brick-and-mortar facility. What you want is more of a virtual relationship with your doctor. And so, if that’s really the future, then buying a bunch of brick-and-mortar facilities at a 77 percent premium was exactly the wrong answer.
GAZETTE: Has the public’s newfound acceptance of telehealth shifted the way providers view delivery of service?
CHANDRA: We’d already started to see a move toward telehealth before the pandemic. Two and a half years of COVID accelerated that movement, and it’s here to stay. But to be clear: These telehealth visits improve the patient experience. They don’t save money, in general. First, it’s easier for patients to schedule a visit, so more visits get scheduled. And second, almost all of the spending in health care is on very sick patients. That’s not where the One Medical model acts, and that’s not where the telehealth model is. So, telehealth doesn’t become a way to bend the cost curve as much as a way to make health care easier to access.
There’s this aspiration in health care that if we only got people more primary care, and took care of things earlier, we would be spending less on most of their conditions. That’s certainly possible, but we’ve never figured out how to deliver this aspiration in a systematic manner. The aspiration might even be possible — like putting a human on Mars — but that’s quite different than thinking that we know how to land a human on Mars. The sobering reality of health care is that terrible things — Alzheimer’s or cancer or an accident — can happen to anyone, including very healthy people. And that’s the bulk of health care spending. The reason that health insurance is expensive is not the lack of primary care. It’s all the other expensive stuff that we need when we’re really sick. And Amazon is no expert in managing any of that.
GAZETTE: It seems that Amazon has a shot at improving the business of health care, but is that the same as really fundamentally changing the field?
CHANDRA: If you ask me what the biggest challenges in American health care are today, I would say that U.S. health care is really expensive, and that we desperately need more meaningful innovation for a whole host of diseases — diabetes, cardiovascular disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS. We want cures, not chronic disease management.
How does Amazon’s foray into health care help with either? Simply because Amazon might be able to introduce supply-chain disruptions that increase its profit margin does not mean that patients will benefit from Amazon’s greater profitability. Amazon might continue to charge the high prices but pocket the savings.
It’s also not clear how Amazon will lower deductibles, co-payments, and co-insurance. But we need to do these [things] because we know patients respond to these financial barriers by cutting back on valuable care. Amazon’s not going to fix that problem.
Amazon is good at selling other people’s products — but I don’t see it as a pharmaceutical company that might cure disease.
Also, Amazon also paid 77 percent more than the market value of One Medical. CVS looked at One Medical and passed on acquiring it. CVS is a lot more knowledgeable about health care, including the supply chain, than Amazon is. So, what does Amazon see in One Medical that CVS does not?

Once again, the United States is messing up its approach to vaccines. Three months into its monkeypox outbreak, just 620,000 doses of the two-injection Jynneos shot—the nation’s current best immune defense against the virus—have been shipped to states, not nearly enough to immunize the 1.6 million to 1.7 million Americans that the CDC considers at highest risk. The next deliveries from the manufacturer aren’t slated until September at the earliest. For now, we’re stuck with the stocks we’ve got.Which is why the feds have turned to Inoculation Plan B: splitting Jynneos doses into five, and poking them into the skin, rather than into the layer of fat beneath. The FDA issued an emergency-use authorization for the strategy yesterday afternoon.This dose-sparing tactic will allow far more people to sign up for doses before summer’s end; if successful, it could help contain the outbreak in the U.S., which currently accounts for nearly a third of the world’s documented monkeypox cases. But this decision is based on scant data, and the degree of protection offered by in-skin shots is no guarantee. The FDA is now playing a high-stakes game with the health and trust of people most vulnerable to monkeypox—an already marginalized population. Call it a bold decision; call it a risky gamble: It may be the best option the country currently has, but one the U.S. could have avoided had it marshaled a stronger response earlier on.[Read: America should have been able to handle monkeypox]Little is known about how Jynneos performs against monkeypox even in its prescribed dosing regimen, the so-called subcutaneous route; the new method, intradermal injection, is a murkier proposition still. “We are in a very data-thin zone,” says Jeanne Marrazzo, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.The shot was approved for use against smallpox and monkeypox in 2019. But to date, researchers don’t have a strong sense of how well it guards against disease or infection or how long protection lasts. Although scientists know that two doses of Jynneos can elicit similar numbers of antibodies as older poxvirus vaccines, no estimates of the vaccine’s true efficacy, from large-scale clinical trials, exist; a human study in the Congo hasn’t yet reported results. And though firmer data have shown that the vaccine keeps lab monkeys from getting seriously sick, “I don’t necessarily trust making the clinical decisions” based just on that, says Mark Slifka, a vaccinologist at Oregon Health & Science University. It’s not even clear if Jynneos can stop someone from transmitting the virus, especially now that many cases seem to be arising via skin-to-skin contact during sex, an understudied form of spread.The emergency switch to lower-dose intradermal administration has been tested with other vaccines, among them the shots that guard against yellow fever and influenza. Skin is rife with specialized defensive cells that can snatch up bits of vaccines and ferry them to other immune fighters, “so you can use a smaller dose and get similar responses” to a full-size subcutaneous shot, says Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, a pharmacist at Loma Linda University, in California.One lone study from 2015 suggests that this logic should hold for Jynneos—at least among the trial’s participants, healthy adults who were mostly young and white. In that group, the subcutaneous and intradermal shots were “quite comparable” at rousing antibodies in the body, which is “very encouraging,” says Kathryn Edwards, a vaccinologist at Vanderbilt University who helped conduct the study. But that’s not the same as bona fide protection against the virus. And what happened in that single study won’t necessarily play out in the real world, especially in the context of the current outbreak, which differs from its predecessors in demographic and size. “I do think these data need to be confirmed,” Edwards told me. Most of the cases so far have been in men who have sex with men, many of them living with HIV—a community whose immune systems don’t look the same as the population at large, and in whom vaccines may not take as well, or for as long, Slifka told me. And yet the FDA has charged ahead “completely based on” that 2015 study, says Alexandra Yonts, a pediatric infectious-disease physician at Children’s National Hospital. In a statement, the agency explained that it had “determined that the known and potential benefits of Jynneos outweigh the known and potential risks” for green-lighting the intradermal route.Delivering vaccines into skin leaves little room for error. The tuberculosis skin test is also administered intradermally; Marrazzo has seen “dozens of those messed up.” People have bled or been bruised. Needles have gone too deep—a mistake that can slash effectiveness—or too shallow, letting liquid ooze back out. Intradermal injections are an uncommon and difficult procedure, requiring additional training and specialized needles. “There is going to be some degree of error,” says Kenneth Cruz, a community-health worker in New York. “People are going to wonder if they’re protected, and it’s going to be difficult to check.”Already, health-care providers are having “issues staffing vaccination clinics for subcutaneous injections,” says Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University; the switch to intradermal will exacerbate those shortages and could raise further vaccination barriers for people without reliable health-care access. Intradermal shots can also come with more irksome side effects, as the 2015 study suggested, including redness and swelling at the injection site that can be “pretty robust and severe,” Marrazzo told me. People who get their first doses might not come back for more, defeating the point.Dose-splitting is still “a much better way to go,” Yonts told me, than skipping or seriously delaying second doses—which has already happened in cities such as New York; Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco—in an effort to conserve supplies. Even elsewhere, second appointments are very hard to get. “I do not know anyone who’s gotten the second dose,” says Nick Diamond, one of the investigators behind RESPND-MI, an LGBTQ-led survey of monkeypox symptoms and networks. Which isn’t great: After just one shot, antibody levels “barely budge,” Yonts said, leaving people vulnerable until two weeks after the second injection is complete. (Another vaccine, ACAM2000, is available but can cause serious side effects, and isn’t recommended for people who are immunocompromised, including those with HIV.)With no other good choices on the table, dose-splitting is the only road to take. “I don’t really see another viable option,” Marrazzo told me. That doesn’t erase the fact that the nation squandered its chance with Inoculation Plan A: leveraging its considerable resources to deploy the tests, treatments, and vaccines to contain the outbreak early on, and keep subcutaneous shots in contention. Now, with about 9,500 recorded infections among Americans nationwide—a definite undercount—the door to that has slammed shut. Sticking with the strategy of two full subcutaneous doses for all was projected to leave us with “no vaccine by October,” Marrazzo said.Plan B, though, could have real costs, depressing vaccine demand and trust. Already, “we haven’t been able to answer questions about the level of protection,” Diamond told me, “which makes it really hard for people to make decisions around risk.” The best Abdul-Mutakabbir has been able to tell her patients is that “receiving this vaccine will likely protect you more than if you had not,” she said. Which doesn’t do much to “allay fears and worries,” Cruz told me, especially after more than a year of confusing and conflicting messages about COVID vaccination.[Read: What should worry most Americans about our monkeypox response]Joseph Osmundson, a microbiologist at NYU and a RESPND-MI investigator, told me that he thinks the Biden administration did not properly consult members of vulnerable communities before plowing ahead with dose-splitting. And he worries that disparities could arise if subcutaneous shots end up outperforming intradermal ones: People who had the socioeconomic privilege to find and access appointments early will have gotten the primo doses, while those already at higher risk skate by on a smaller serving of immunity, exacerbating the inequities the outbreak has already begun to exploit. The numbers alone could leave a bad taste: “If I were standing in line to get a fifth of a vaccine,” Diamond told me, “I would wonder why my health is valued less.”Dose-splitting is a stopgap—“not a solution” that’s sustainable, says Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the FDA. The monkeypox outbreak could stretch on for many months, or become endemic in animals. Eventually, boosts may be necessary; ACAM2000 may yet have a larger role to play. The U.S. will need clinical trials to understand which dosing strategies actually work best, and in whom—and the populations most affected, especially men who have sex with men, should be involved in those decisions along the way. Officials must be “transparent about the gaps that exist,” Abdul-Mutakabbir told me, “and be intentional about working to fill those gaps.”Still, as news of the dose-splitting decision continues to percolate out into the population, an inadvertent message may already be getting sent: “The government is placing the onus on community members to protect themselves,” Cruz said. “But we’re in this position because the government failed.” Should the administration’s big bet on dose-splitting not pay off, Osmundson said, for those who have so far borne the outbreak’s brunt, “that will be the nail in the coffin of any public trust.”

There was “zero inflation last month,” President Joe Biden triumphantly exclaimed on Wednesday. “It underscores the kind of economy we’ve been building.” A few economists shared Biden’s ebullience over the news. “Holy cow,” University of Michigan Professor Justin Wolfers marveled. “There was ZERO inflation last month.” Bloomberg analyst Joe Weisenthal agreed. “Inflation was 0% in July, and we added 500,000 jobs in the month,” he wrote, “and there are people who are insisting we call it a recession.” Because “our economy had 0% inflation in July” and gasoline prices are declining precipitously, White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre noted, “American families with two cars [save] $106 per month on average.”

In fact, inflation as measured by the rising cost of consumer goods grew at a marginally slower pace in July than it did in June. Last month, the consumer-price index (CPI), which measures the cost of consumer goods, rose by 8.5 percent. That’s down from June’s 9.1 percent, true enough. And if you exclude goods that are subject to fluctuating prices like food and energy—so-called “core CPI”—prices increased by 0.3 percent last month. While “core CPI” is nearly 6 percent higher than it was last year, it increased in July at the slowest pace since March. That’s a welcome relief, albeit a marginal one.

And yet, a decline in the rate of inflation from its sharpest increase in 40 years is the least we could hope for. Moreover, the conditions that precipitated this drop are inauspicious.

As Jean-Pierre correctly observed, much of the relief Americans are experiencing is attributable to the 7.7 percent decline in gasoline prices. That’s not the result of any new supplies coming online but of a marked drop in the demand for gas. Fuel deliveries have declined to a level unseen since the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, meaning the “summer driving season is a bust,” Bloomberg News reported. Gasoline consumption in the U.S. is about 9 percent lower than it was this time last year—a “pretty dramatic drop in demand,” NPR reported. And despite this decline, gas remains 44 percent more expensive today than it was in the summer of 2021. These new costs could only be absorbed for so long. Americans are likely opting out of that discretionary road trip to cover the cost of vital goods, the price of which is still on the rise.

What vital goods? Food, for example. The cost of groceries increased in July by another 1.3 percent from June. Basic foodstuffs are now over 13 percent more expensive than they were a year ago. The cost of electricity increased by 1.6 percent last month, rendering this crucial service over 15 percent more expensive than it was in the summer of 2021. Rents, too, rose by half a percentage point last month. The cost of shelter is now 5.5 percent more expensive than last July. The price of a used car or truck declined in July by a modest 0.4 percent, though one will still cost you over 6 percent more than it did in 2021. But insuring that vehicle will run you 1.3 percent more than it did a year ago. Transportation overall will run you 16 percent more than you were paying last year.

There’s reason to believe that prices will continue to decline into the fall, but that’s due to both seasonal and macroeconomic factors. Economists can argue over whether two consecutive quarters of economic contraction constitutes a recession or not, but Americans are making their feelings on the matter quite plain by putting off discretionary purchases. One study indicated that Americans have, on average, suffered a 15 percent decline in their personal savings over the last year as the basics eat further into their wallets.

The Biden administration may feel compelled to massage the data until it coughs up a positive spin it can promote. But by suggesting that Americans are enjoying any financial relief, the White House runs the risk of appearing out-of-touch, if not brazenly mendacious. The echo chamber that convinced the White House to run with the insulting proposition that inflation has declined to “zero percent” is doing this administration no favors.

On Monday, The Wall Street Journal published a report analyzing data from 1.7 million college graduates examining how the gender pay gap manifests itself in the first few years of college graduates' careers. They found that even for graduates with the same major, women often earned strikingly less than their male counterparts. For example, among Georgetown accounting majors, male graduates earned 55 percent more than female graduates just three years after graduation.
The data is "evidence that pay gaps between men and women often form earlier than is widely perceived," says the Journal, adding that "economists who have long examined pay gaps between men and women cite the so-called motherhood penalty—referring to the perception that mothers are less committed to their jobs—and say this affects hiring, promotions, and salaries. Determining why those gaps appear earlier isn't simple."
However, is this picture as dire as it seems? Among several explanations the Journal gives, including internalized sexism and outright discrimination, is worker preference. 
Take, for example, the University of Michigan School of Law, where the median male graduate out-earns the median female graduate by $45,000. "The school said that in the classes of 2015 and 2016, 237 men took jobs at law firms, while 158 women did. Fourteen men headed into public-interest jobs, whereas three times as many women did. The classes those years had slightly more men than women." Women appear more likely to prefer notoriously low-paying public-interest law over a grueling job at a law firm. As one woman law grad, now a public defender, told the Journal, "With corporate law, I could make all the money in the world, but I'd rather get some kind of fulfillment from my job."
While sexist discrimination is difficult to disprove, there is evidence that women earn less because they prefer personally fulfilling work over highly-paid work. Rather than viewing women's reticence to take on higher paying jobs that provide relatively low value to society as a symptom of rampant sexism, we should celebrate women's freedom to choose what career path they want. If women prefer work that contributes to society or gives ample work-life balance, then a "pay gap" should be little cause for alarm.
"Often this whole discussion starts from kind of a sexist premise: that we should focus on something where men seem to be outperforming women, so we focus on something that has high value among males," Hadley Heath Manning, the Vice President for Policy at the Independent Women's Forum, tells Reason. "Men seem to prioritize wages above almost anything in their job search or in their career preparation. And so we focus on that factor, and we compare women to men and we say 'You don't measure up.'"
There may be a "pay gap," but one could easily argue there is also a "social value gap," with women being more likely to gravitate towards non-profit and public service work.
"We should encourage workplace flexibility, we should encourage employers to offer telework and so forth, but they won't do that if the goal is to make men and women workers into widgets who all do exactly the same job for exactly the same number of hours," says Heath Manning.
It is fair to examine why many of the jobs women prefer are paid less than the jobs men prefer, though much of this difference is self-explanatory: Working 40 hours a week at a nonprofit will not and cannot pay as much as working 80 hours at a consulting firm. However, other phenomena, such as the decline in salaries as a field becomes female-dominated, are worth critically examining. However, treating any pay gap as evidence of discrimination ignores the desirability of tradeoffs and choice. Assuming all types of jobs are available to all types of equally qualified workers, it is good that the workers can choose between various combinations of labor hours, monetary compensation, flexibility, and personal enrichment. 
"We have to be careful the message that we're sending to women, particularly young women, about the expectations they should have in the workplace," says Heath Manning. "My fear, when we don't carefully handle the wage gap discussion and put it in the right context, is that women will perceive that this is normal, that discrimination is normal, and that being treated less than is something they should just accept."
The post Could the Gender Pay Gap Actually Be A Sign That Women Prioritize Socially Valuable Careers? appeared first on Reason.com.

“On the surface, this is good news for the Fed,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights. “This is the first baby step toward the moderation they want to see on a regular basis.”

Inflation F.A.Q. Card 1 of 5 Inflation F.A.Q. What is inflation? Inflation is a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys. Inflation F.A.Q. What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems. Inflation F.A.Q. Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth. Inflation F.A.Q. How does inflation affect the poor? Inflation can be especially hard to shoulder for poor households because they spend a bigger chunk of their budgets on necessities like food, housing and gas. Inflation F.A.Q. Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.

Fed officials remain committed to wrestling America’s rapid inflation lower, and they have raised interest rates at the quickest pace since the 1980s to try to slow the economy and bring supply and demand into balance — making supersize rate moves of three-quarters of a percentage point at each of their past two meetings. Another big adjustment will be up for debate at their next meeting in September, policymakers have said.

But investors interpreted July’s unexpectedly pronounced inflation slowdown as a sign that policymakers could take a gentler route, raising rates a half-point next month. Stocks soared more than 2 percent on Wednesday, as Wall Street bet that the Fed might become less aggressive, which would decrease the chances that it would plunge the economy into a recession.

“It was as good as the markets and the Fed could have hoped for from this report,” said Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist at Jefferies. “I do think it removes the urgency for the Fed.”

Still, officials who spoke on Wednesday remained cautious about inflation. Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, called the report the “first hint” of a move in the right direction, while Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said that it was “positive” but that price increases remained “unacceptably high.”

Policymakers have been hoping for more than a year that price increases will begin to cool, only to have those expectations repeatedly dashed. Supply chain issues have made goods more expensive, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent commodity prices soaring, a shortage of workers pushed wages and service prices higher and a dearth of housing has fueled rising rents.

The presumptive Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, Matthew DePerno, is under investigation for meddling with voting equipment after the 2020 election in search of evidence of election fraud. According to a petition for a special prosecutor filed on August 5 by current Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, DePerno and two other people, including state Rep. Daire Rendon (R–Lake City), allegedly "orchestrated a coordinated plan to gain access to voting tabulators" in several Michigan counties. Once they obtained the machines, the trio performed "tests" on them, including running fake ballots through the machines.
DePerno claims that there was anti-Trump voter fraud in Michigan during the 2020 election. He filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Michigan resident alleging sweeping voter fraud in the presidential election. In April, a Michigan appeals court dismissed DePerno's lawsuit. DePerno has said that "when I am elected, I will keep my word to prosecute the people who corrupted the 2020 election and allowed fraud to permeate the entire election system." 
According to Nessel's petition to the Prosecuting Attorneys Coordinating Council seeking the appointment of a special prosecutor for the case, DePerno and others took the machines they acquired to hotel rooms and Airbnb locations, where several people "broke into the tabulators and performed 'tests' on the equipment." Nessel's office claims that DePerno was present for at least one of these "testing" sessions.
Nessel has requested a special prosecutor in the case because she and DePerno will face each other in November's general election. Nessel insists that the investigation, which has been conducted by her office and the Michigan State Police, is not politically motivated. "When this investigation began there was not a conflict of interest," wrote Nessel's office in the petition. "However, during the course of the investigation, facts were developed that DePerno was one of the prime instigators of the conspiracy."
In response to the petition, DePerno's campaign tweeted a statement on August 7 claiming that "the petition itself is entirely an incoherent liberal fever dream of lies." 
Many Republican politicians seem committed to advancing the conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden won the 2020 general election only because of voter fraud. Whether deeply or opportunistically held, this idea allegedly led DePerno to engage in illegal activity despite the fact that American elections are very secure. 
 
The post Michigan GOP Attorney General Candidate Under Investigation by His Opponent for 2020 Voting Machine Scheme appeared first on Reason.com.

Former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. (Photo by GIORGIO VIERA/AFP via Getty Images.)I want to start with a warning. This is going to be a thoroughly unsatisfactory newsletter. I’m going to talk about the FBI search of Trump documents at Mar-a-Lago, and I’m not going to have any answers at all. I’m barely going to speculate. But I’ve seen enough sheer nonsense online that I think it’s necessary to weigh in with a few thoughts to make sense of what occurred and what happened next. Let’s do this in question-and-answer format.Why did the FBI search Mar-a-Lago? We don’t really know. As of the time of writing, neither the search warrant nor the application for the warrant have been released into the public domain. All we have is reporting from anonymous sources that the raid was apparently related to documents Trump removed from the White House as he left office. For example, here’s how the Washington Post began its coverage this morning:Former president Donald Trump’s residence at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., was searched Monday by the FBI in what appeared to be part of a long-running investigation of whether documents—some of them top-secret—were taken there instead of being sent to the National Archives when Trump left office.As Maggie Haberman reports in the New York Times, the search came after Trump had “delayed returning 15 boxes of materials” requested by the National Archives and after federal agents (including a counterintelligence official) visited him earlier this spring “to discuss materials that Mr. Trump had improperly taken with him when he left the White House.”But consider me skeptical that we have the full explanation for the search. I just finished recording an emergency Advisory Opinions podcast with Sarah Isgur—who just so happens to be a former senior Department of Justice official—and she rightly observed that there are a number of ways of securing classified information without executing a search warrant against a former president and seizing the documents. There is technically no problem with such an action, but practically, if you’re going to take law enforcement actions that get “civil war” trending on Twitter, then the alleged underlying offense should rise to a certain level of seriousness. Wait a minute—if this is about classified documents, don’t presidents have the final say? 

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Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last week ended up providing an unexpected jolt to me. It was different, however, than the jolt it seemed to give to the broader commentariat. Though I remain displeased that the trip provided an excuse for Chinese escalation, I’m finding myself increasingly resigned to a profoundly dangerous future. And if anything, the reactions to the trip underline for me just how unready we are for what is clearly coming.Last week, Tom Friedman wrote a good column representative of the conventional wisdom. He argued that Pelosi’s trip was reckless, not least because it threatened to upset the delicate balance the Biden Administration had managed to arrange with China after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The article made the implicit argument that by provoking the Chinese over Taiwan, we were not only hastening war with a dangerous peer competitor but we were also inviting Beijing to consider backing Moscow at a moment where its military assault may be stalling.It’s a sound argument as far as it goes, and from various indications in the article, it is reflective of a faction in the White House. It also echoes various concerns I’m hearing. The Biden team appears to be torn between a feeling of (somewhat deserved) accomplishment in having managed the Ukraine crisis competently, and a bevy of worries about how it could all go badly wrong. They see the West reasonably united in the face of Russian aggression, even as they fret about the coming winter and the likelihood of political turmoil in Europe ruining everything. (Read this article by the brilliant Nathalie Tocci on how that could all go pear-shaped.) They see the Ukrainians successfully grinding down the most recent Russian assault with Western weapons, to the broad satisfaction of American voters, but are losing sleep over what to do should Russian President Vladimir Putin choose to escalate unpredictably, worst of all with nuclear weapons. In Asia, the goal seems to be to execute a long-term reorientation towards a standoff with China that they believe will play out largely in the economic sphere, where they, not unreasonably, expect America’s long-term advantages will prove decisive. (The recently-passed CHIPS act is an attempt to secure economic resilience should that standoff become acute.) They are fretting about America’s ability to credibly deter an attack on Taiwan with military power, but the strategy remains resolutely a peacetime strategy, the default for a status quo power. In that context, Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is seen as a move that unnecessarily upsets a delicate balance.As I noted a few months before Biden’s victory in 2020, his team is focused on fixing the damage that they believe Trump did to the so-called liberal world order. Understanding how most American policymakers conceptualize this world order is important. To put it simply, they believe that the American experience is globally relevant, and that without malevolent peer competitors, the world would evolve to reflect it. The unnatural ideology of global communism was preventing the world from progressing naturally and automatically towards a system guided by liberal principles, anchored in an open, capitalist economy. In his new book The Arc of a Covenant, Walter Russell Mead argues that the “Great Miscalculation” was assuming this automaticity. Echoing George F. Kennan at the end of the Cold War, Mead points out that any attempt to meaningfully change a fallen and imperfect world would require exertions on the part of the United States that could well exceed its capacities. American optimism about human nature above all led it to stumble badly (and repeatedly) since 9/11, in large part by taking on ambitious projects it never bothered to budget for (both economically, and perhaps more importantly, in terms of resolve). The post-Cold War era was seen as a project of gentle shepherding rather than active, exhausting management—management that requires not just reserves of hard power, but the willingness to use it.The idea that America is a passive midwife to the inevitable birth of a better world continues to haunt American responses to the unraveling of the post-Cold War. In Asia, the liberal world order bias nudges us towards a kind of dangerous mirroring. In an otherwise sober column, Gideon Rachman gives voice to the kind of disbelief that is still dominant in Western capitals. A Chinese resort to force would be a tragedy not just for Taiwan, but for mainland China itself. It would lead to mass casualties on all sides, permanent alienation between Taiwanese and mainlanders, and a rupture in the global economy that would endanger decades of Chinese growth.In that frame, the provocative trip by Pelosi is bad because it empowers irrationalism among the Chinese, pushing them to act in such a way that is obviously bad for everyone.But as the FT reported a few days earlier, it appears as if the Chinese seized on Pelosi’s announcement to prepare military exercises they felt like they needed to do anyway in order to execute a successful takeover of the island nation. Ever since the trip was first announced in April, Taipei was receiving explicit threats from Beijing.“This gave them an opportunity to do things they consider necessary in their military training that might otherwise have been politically impossible,” says a senior Taiwanese government official. “Shooting a ballistic missile over Taipei could have triggered a global outcry or even sanctions if seen as ‘unprovoked’,” he says, comparing the move to North Korea’s launch of a missile that flew over Japanese territory in 2017. “Now they are getting away with it.”Obviously we shouldn’t give the Chinese an easy way to do things they feel that they have to do in any case. But the deeper point is that the Chinese seem hell-bent on achieving these goals, costs be damned. They may be more calculating and careful than Putin’s Russia, but they are determined and probably undeterrable through threats of economic privation.Despite the heightened tensions after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, we still couldn’t properly conceive of a reality where Putin would invade again, and indeed aim for a complete take-over of his neighbor—until he did. As a result, we have responded in a completely reactive, prophylactic way. We still can’t really admit that we are in a hot proxy war with Russia. The fact that the costs to us are measured in financial abstractions instead of the fresh body bags of our countrymen lets us comfortably describe it as an effort to shore up the existing order. (The fact that the figures are astronomical makes them even more of an abstraction.) Our military industrial complex remains resolutely on peacetime footing, even as the hard-fighting Ukrainians burn through our military “consumables”. President Biden has never even hinted that the stakes might require that the country steel itself for a very different world.Arguably, if Russia were the only challenge, such talk might not be necessary. The Ukraine War is far from won, but one can imagine how we might muddle through without disrupting Americans’ everyday lives. But the reality that China won’t easily be contained in Asia—and that’s what Pelosi’s trip underscored for me—means that this kind of pose is irresponsible. Time to start planning for a world that takes an invasion of Taiwan as a given. Since the end of the Cold War, we have had it easy. We have been coasting on glib assumptions about the world. It’s time to get serious.

 Artem Maltsev/unsplashIn a new series, we look at books that have become cultural touchstones.
If new books are lucky they enjoy a brief honeymoon of attention before ebbing away into oblivion. Not so The Body Keeps the Score, a publishing phenomenon that has kept selling long after it first hit the shelves in 2014. The book has spent more than 150 weeks on the New York Times best seller list for paperback nonfiction, including over half a year in the coveted #1 spot during 2021. It has reportedly sold almost 2 million copies.
Why a long, dense, and demanding book on the psychology and neurobiology of trauma should occupy so bright a spotlight for so long is not immediately obvious. Post-traumatic stress disorder is old news, a staple of psychological chatter for over four decades, and the book doesn’t offer any quick fix solutions for self-helpers.
Clues to what has driven The Body Keeps the Score’s success can be found in its sales trajectory. On bookriot.com, writer Gina Nicoll notes that sales began to liven up around 2018 and then grew in spurts, reaching a peak in 2021. The pandemic may have contributed to this surge by bringing collective trauma to our doorsteps, she speculates, but the pre-pandemic upswing suggests other factors are also at play. 

Reckonings with sexual and racial trauma in the wake of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have combined to raise the cultural profile of trauma, Nicoll suggests. 
But alongside this increase in cultural attention, there has been a broadening of what we take trauma to be.
People are seeing trauma everywhere and re-conceptualising their own experiences of misery and misadventure in its terms. They are doing so, at least in part, because the concept’s meaning has been stretched. More on that later.

Read more:
Six psychiatric concepts that have mutated: for better or worse

The book explained
So what is all the fuss about? Bessel van der Kolk, a Dutch-born psychiatrist who has been a successful researcher and clinician in the Boston area since the late 1970s, wrote The Body Keeps the Score as a guide to the understanding and treatment of trauma. 
The book adopts several standard features of the popular psychology genre: case studies from the author’s clinical practice, autobiographical reflections, and sharp critiques of mainstream views to assure readers the author is not merely doing good but slaying dragons in the process. 
However, its presentation of the science of trauma is unusually compelling, setting it above most works of popularisation. Van der Kolk has substantial legitimacy as a researcher, and his interleaving of the personal and the scientific makes for an engaging read.
Van der Kolk begins his blockbuster with a discussion of the neuroscience of trauma, complete with explorations of brain anatomy and function and how they underpin reactions to extreme threat. 
He presents traumatic reactions not simply as disturbances of fear and anxiety – how the amygdala becomes an over-sensitive “smoke detector” that triggers traumatised people into fight or flight reactions – but also as disruptors of interpersonal relationships and a stable sense of self.

Trauma’s somatic signature extends beyond the brain. Van der Kolk explains at length how hormonal influences and the vagus nerve, which runs from brain to abdomen and regulates several internal organ functions, reverberate its effects throughout the body. 
In trauma, he argues, people may lose a sense of body ownership to accompany their loss of self, felt connection to others, and even their sense of being fully alive. Recovering a sense of personal agency and of bodily ownership – what he refers to as befriending the body – is a key to recovery. 
Childhood trauma
Trauma in childhood becomes the second major focus of the book. Whereas early investigations of post-traumatic reactions focused on adult combatants in war, van de Kolk directs much of his attention to impacts of trauma and hardship earlier in life. Once again, his focus is expansive, extending beyond traumatised individuals in isolation to the disruptions trauma creates in their intimate attachments. 
Abusive family environments produce children who lack a secure sense of connection to others and suffer elevated risks of illness and re-traumatisation. They are more likely than their peers to experience and perpetrate violence as adults, to engage in self-damaging behaviour, and to experience cancer, heart disease, obesity and a range of psychiatric conditions.
Van der Kolk presents childhood trauma as a “hidden epidemic”, swept under the carpet by society at large and by psychiatry in particular. He advocates for policy responses that combat the economic and societal drivers of childhood adversity, and for better recognition by organised psychiatry of the mental health impacts of trauma. 
In this second quest he has had limited success. His proposal of new diagnoses that recognise the outcomes of repeated childhood trauma – “complex PTSD” and “developmental trauma disorder” – were rebuffed by the developers of American psychiatry’s classification of mental disorders, the DSM. 
The DSM’s third edition, published in 1980, recognised PTSD for the first time. But the fourth and fifth editions, DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-5 (2013), would have none of these new proposals. 
Van der Kolk’s outrage at this rejection, and his jaundiced, if sometimes straw-mannish view of the psychiatry profession, seasons his book with anti-establishment saltiness. The alternative view – that the DSM’s guardians were wary of adding new disorders that overlapped substantially with existing conditions, privileging trauma as the single, dominant cause of a diffuse and multi-determined set of symptoms – does not get a hearing. 
The Body Keeps the Score closes with an extended exploration of alternative forms of treatment. Despite his neuro-biological leanings, van der Kolk does not see medication as the best line of intervention. He contends that effective therapies must target meaning rather than chemistry and allow traumatic memories to be processed rather than blunted. 
Among his diverse collection of preferred treatments are neurofeedback, in which people learn to alter brain waves via real-time encephalographic feedback, somatic psychotherapies, yoga, theatre, and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR, in which people recall traumatic experiences while performing rhythmic, therapist-guided eye movements). 

Van der Kolk is enthusiastic about therapies including eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing.
Shutterstock

His enthusiasm for these interventions, some of which veer towards the fringe and the faddish, sometimes outstrips the evidence for their efficacy, but has contributed to their growing popularity.
Understanding the book’s appeal
The Body Keeps the Score has been remarkably popular for reasons beyond its alignment with our current cultural preoccupations. For one, it is a hopeful book. Although it underscores the sweeping extent of traumatic experiences and the severity and range of their impacts, it also argues that therapy works and post-traumatic distress need not be a life sentence. 
The same optimism shines through in the book’s dialectical account of the history of the mental health disciplines. A period of “brain-less” psychoanalytic interest in the meaning of psychological distress – carried out with no eye for biological processes – gave way to an era of “mind-less” psychopharmacology. We have now arrived at a stage in which neurobiology and a deep appreciation of human psychology can go hand in hand.
The book also contributes to an ongoing de-masculinising of trauma studies. Psychiatric thinking about trauma was long dominated by investigations of combat reactions in soldiers, described variously as shell shock or battle fatigue. The flood of psychological casualties among Vietnam veterans spurred the official recognition of PTSD in 1980. 
Van der Kolk pays much more attention to sexual abuse and violence as sources of trauma. These disproportionately affect women and girls and account at least partially for women’s higher rates of PTSD diagnoses.

Sexual violence disproportionately affects women.
Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona/Unsplash

Read more:
What is complex PTSD and how does it relate to past abuse and trauma?

The same feminising of trauma can be seen more symbolically in van der Kolk’s emphasis on the bodily and relational dimensions of trauma. Historically, the gender binary has been overlaid on the mind/body distinction, and on the distinction between stereotypically masculine independence and stereotypically feminine relatedness.
By paying heed to somatic impacts and treatments of trauma, and the ways in which it disrupts attachments and relationships, van der Kolk is making the psychology of trauma more inclusive of the experiences of female trauma survivors.
Inflating trauma
The Body Keeps the Score offers a vision of trauma that is inclusive in some respects. But is it over-inclusive in others? Van der Kolk’s understanding of trauma is expansionary, offering a broad view of its impacts and implications.
He recognises a wide range of manifestations of trauma, promotes new trauma-related diagnoses, affirms a broad definition of what counts as a traumatic event, and recommends diverse modes of treatment.
For example, conventional descriptions of PTSD point to a restricted set of symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares, and hyper-vigilance. Van der Kolk connects trauma to a much wider web of phenomena. It is examined as a primary source of relationship problems, emotional disturbances, and forms of acting out such as rebellious, defiant, impulsive, and inattentive behaviour. 
Most significantly of all, Van der Kolk sees trauma lurking beneath an array of somatic complaints. Trauma is embodied and manifested in such concerns as irritable bowel, auto-immune conditions, fibromyalgia, headaches, and a range of diffuse physical symptoms.

Van der Kolk sees trauma lurking beneath an array of somatic complaints.

Similarly, Van der Kolk’s work expands the range of events that are considered traumas. When PTSD was first defined in DSM-III, the condition could only be diagnosed if the event that precipitated it was life-threatening and outside the range of normal human experience. 
Later editions of the diagnostic manual loosened the definition to include unpleasant events witnessed indirectly, which are not physically endangering. 
Van der Kolk uses the term “trauma” more freely still, often employing it to refer to almost any form of life adversity, including enduring circumstances rather than only discrete incidents. Trauma can easily be stretched to encompass minor illnesses, normal romantic breakups and disappointing exam results.
On this broadened definition, all but the most cosseted among us have been traumatised and can view our struggles and sufferings through the potentially magnifying lens of trauma.
This expansion of the meaning of trauma has taken place in parallel with a steep rise in the cultural prominence of the concept. Research shows that the word “trauma” appears in everyday discourse much more frequently now than it did even two decades ago. 
That rise has been even more dizzying within the mental health professions, a recent study finding that “trauma” appeared at an almost 20 times higher rate in psychology journal articles in the 2010s as it did in the 1970s. 

Read more:
More than half of Australians will experience trauma, most before they turn 17. We need to talk about it

Backlash
It should not be surprising to learn that this sharply spiking interest in trauma has generated some push-back. In 2021, Eleanor Cummins observed in The Atlantic that the concept of trauma has become “uselessly vague – a swirl of psychiatric diagnoses, folk wisdom, and popular misconceptions”. In the same year, writer Will Self criticised “how everything became trauma” and Parul Sehgal decried how trauma-driven plots flatten fictional narratives and hollow out characters in The New Yorker.

Will Self: argues ‘everything has become trauma’.
Goodreads

In 2022, in the New York Times, Jessica Bennett asked “if everything is trauma, is anything?” and denounced “post-traumatic hyperbole”. Lexi Pandell, writing for Vox, argued this “word of the decade” has become close to meaningless.
Like Bennett and Pandell, several writers have queried whether trauma is now being used too promiscuously. Some have distinguished big “T” trauma from less severe little “t” trauma to resist this concept creep.
Others worry that the growing popularity of trauma narratives represents an encroachment of medical language into the realm of ordinary adversity, reducing unjust social arrangements to individual pathologies, or promoting personal fragility. Still others have voiced concerns that the concept of trauma has become politicised.
The argument that broad concepts of trauma produce fragility rests on the belief that defining moderate life challenges as mind-shattering traumas might undermine our resilience.
Understanding an adversity as a trauma implies that it overwhelms our capacity to cope and is likely to have lasting effects. In the popular mind, trauma still carries a connotation of indelibility. 
Of course, many adversities do take people beyond their breaking points and have enduring consequences. The question is whether perceiving less severe experiences as traumas makes them loom larger and longer than they need to. Emerging research evidence suggests that it might.
Van der Kolk can’t be held entirely responsible for the runaway success of his book or for the runaway semantic inflation and popularity of its central concept. The Body Keeps the Score has been successful because it resonates with its cultural moment, and it has helped to mould that moment for millions of readers.
The recent elevation of trauma attests to a time in which people are keenly attuned to their individual and collective suffering, increasingly attribute it to causes beyond their control, and look to a therapeutic mindset to resolve it. Van der Kolk’s book is a lucid guide to this new reality.
Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council. 

I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.That streak may soon be over. When it comes time to replace my current car, I probably won’t be able to get another like it. In 2000, more than 15 percent of new and used cars sold by the auto retailer CarMax came with stick shifts; by 2020, that figure had dropped to 2.4 percent. Among the hundreds of new car models for sale in the United States this year, only about 30 can be purchased with a manual transmission. Electric cars, which now account for more than 5 percent of car sales, don’t even have gearboxes. There are rumors that Mercedes-Benz plans to retire manuals entirely by the end of next year, all around the world, in a decision driven partly by electrification; Volkswagen is said to be dropping its own by 2030, and other brands are sure to follow. Stick shifts have long been a niche market in the U.S. Soon they’ll be extinct.We can’t say we weren’t warned. For years, the stick’s decline has been publicly lamented. Car and Driver ran a “Save the Manuals” campaign in 2010, insisting that drivers who “learned to operate the entire car” would enjoy driving more and do it better. A #SaveTheManual hashtag followed. Shifting gears yourself isn’t just a source of pleasure, its advocates have said, or a way to hone your driving. A manual car is also less likely to be stolen if fewer people know how to drive it. It’s cheaper to buy (or at least it used to be), and it once had lower operation and maintenance costs. You can push-start a manual if the battery dies, so you’re less likely to get stuck somewhere; and you can use the stick more easily for engine braking, which can reduce wear and make descending hills easier and safer.But the manual transmission’s chief appeal derives from the feeling it imparts to the driver: a sense, whether real or imagined, that he or she is in control. According to the business consultant turned motorcycle repairman turned best-selling author Matthew Crawford, attending to that sense is not just an affectation. Humans develop tools that assist in locomotion, such as domesticated horses and carriages and bicycles and cars—and then extend their awareness to those tools. The driver “becomes one” with the machine, as we say. In his 2020 book, Why We Drive, Crawford argues that a device becomes a prosthetic. The rider fuses with the horse. To move the tool is to move the self.Crawford argues that this cognitive enhancement is possible only when you can interpret the components of the tool you’re operating. As a rider must sense the horse’s gait, so must a driver grok the engine’s torque. But modern automotive technology tends to inhibit that sensation. Power steering, electronic fuel injection, anti-lock braking systems, and, yes, automatic transmissions obstruct the “natural bonds between action and perception,” Crawford writes. They inhibit the operator’s ability to interpret the car’s state and capacities through a healthy feedback loop of action and information. To illustrate the point, he tells a story about test-driving a 400-horsepower Audi RS3 with all the options, including a paddle-shifting automatic transmission. It was powerful and capable, he says, but “I could not connect with the car.” That description is a common one among gearheads, a way of expressing that the human operator and the machine are out of sync.The stick shift has become a proxy object for that loss. When manual transmissions were the norm, drivers had to touch and manipulate the shifter, in tandem with the clutch, constantly while operating a vehicle. Passengers saw this action taking place, and shifting gears became imbued with meaning. It represented the allure of the road, for all its good and ill, and stood in for the human control of a big, hot, dangerous machine screaming down the pavement. The manual transmission’s impending disappearance feels foreboding not (just) because shifting a car is fun and sensual, but also because the gearshift is—or was—a powerful cultural symbol of the human body working in unison with the engineered world.Crawford admits that he might connect with the Audi if he put in enough hours at the wheel. But even knowing this, “the car left me cold,” he writes. In part, that’s because the coarse feedback that one gets while driving an all-electronic vehicle might be—or feel—too subtle for a brute human mind. Cars have, in a way, become too good. Human understanding slips off their surface, like ice off a hot hood.The decoupling of humans from their driving machines will accelerate in years to come. If the automatic transmission made the stick shift a monument to lost control, the autonomous (self-driving) vehicle aims to do the same for steering wheels. At that point, the loss will be so complete that it may not feel so alienating. Any pretense that the automobile is a prosthetic will be eliminated, so car passengers can move on to other things. Like people on a train, they might settle into a book or take a nap or open up an Excel spreadsheet.But fully autonomous cars might never be in widespread use, and even mostly autonomous cars could be a long way off. In the meantime, the automotive industry will take away drivers’ control in slow, lumbering steps, just as other industries have for other appliances, apparatuses, and services. You can now flush a toilet or operate a sink not with the force of your hands, but by means of sensors. Web and product searches yield the results some third party wants you to see, rather than the best matches to your requests. Maps, now digital, show points of interest in place of raw information; travelers let the apps that host those maps tell them where to go and how to get there. Customer-service agents follow scripts to solve your problems, your doctors follow automatic diagnostic templates, and the streaming platforms on your television calculate which shows you should watch next.People rued the decline of the stick shift for years before the “Save the Manuals” campaign (and hashtag, and merch) spun up. But it may be no accident that the formal crusade arose just as computation overtook culture, steering human lives in the direction of technology companies’ and data aggregators’ needs. Around that time, all the apps and services just mentioned (and many more) became widespread.[Read: I’ll shift for myself]The manual transmission, however marginal it has become during the smartphone age, remains a vestige of direct, mechanical control. When a driver changes speeds, their intention can be fruitfully realized in gratifying action, meshing literal gears. Even when your hand slips and the gears grind, the device still speaks in a way you can understand.To lament the end of the manual transmission is to eulogize much more than shifting gears. When the manual dies, little about driving will fall away that hasn’t already been lost. But we’ll lose something bigger and more important: the comfort of knowing that there is one essential, everyday device still out there that you can actually feel operating. Even if you don’t own a stick, or if you don’t know how to drive one, its mere existence signals that a more embodied technology is possible—that it once was common, even—and that humans and machines really can commune. The stick shift is a form of hope, but it’s one we’ll soon have left behind.

“Falling gas prices blunt Republican campaign attacks,” a July 28 Politico headline confidently blared. With roughly 100 days left in the midterm campaign cycle, the price at the pump has begun to decline after peaking at over $5 per gallon, robbing the GOP of a “lethal campaign weapon.” Democrats, meanwhile, have not let gas prices speak for themselves. ​“​For American families looking for a little more breathing room, these savings matter,”​ Joe Biden crowed. Indeed, “falling gas prices” features high on the list of recent Democratic achievements—from neutralizing al-Qaeda’s leader in Kabul to the passage of climate-change legislation masquerading as an “inflation reduction” bill—that political handicappers believe has revived Democratic fortunes.

And yet, as NBC News reported last month, voters in competitive states and districts have not fallen to their knees in gratitude. The decline in gas prices “did not make up for how much money they were still spending on groceries, rent, and other basic goods.” That makes sense when you consider that the decline in the price of fuel isn’t a function of more supply coming online but a marked drop in demand for it. In that sense, the price at the pump is just another indication of how much America’s voters are hurting.

“The US summer driving season is a bust,” Bloomberg News reported on Sunday. According to their data, demand for gasoline is lower today than it was at this point in the summer of 2020, when Americans were either psychologically disinclined to venture out or simply had nowhere to go. That’s a departure from 2021, when summer driving season came roaring back, and it can’t be explained by rising rates of electric-vehicle ownership or new domestic capacity. After all, “a large proportion of US gasoline demand is discretionary,” Bloomberg noted. Potential drivers are simply choosing not to become active drivers.

The signs that wallets are tightening in response to undesirable macroeconomic conditions are especially evident in the energy markets. “Oil prices turned lower on Wednesday after the US Energy Information Administration said weekly oil inventories jumped by 4.5 million barrels last week, compared with expectations for a decline,” CNN reported last week. Also last week, the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude declined by nearly 10 percent, which is indicative of a “pullback” across the global oil market. As one energy trader told Bloomberg, “Buyers are content to sit on the sidelines until the broader narrative around demand improves.”

Democrats are certainly inclined to believe that the sentiments abroad that have led voters to tighten their belts is just a “narrative.” The White House has spent the last week arguing that the traditional metrics indicating that the U.S. is in a recession do not, in fact, indicate that the U.S. is in a recession. The blizzard of rhetoric with which the administration bombarded the public does not seem to have changed many minds. An ABC News survey released over the weekend found that two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. economy is bad and getting worse. The same percentage of Americans disapprove of Joe Biden’s handling of “inflation.” Approval of the president’s handling of “gas prices” has increased by seven points from June, but that yields only an anemic 34 percent approval on the issue.

As painful as things are today, Democrats might have something to hang their hats on if a decline in overall demand helps restore something resembling affordability. After all, cooling consumer demand is the objective the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes are designed to secure. Although preliminary analyses of the “Inflation Reduction Act” indicate that it will actually increase inflation in the short-run and have next to no effect on the phenomenon in the longer term, the act of passing something that at least acknowledges inflation could redound to the Democrats’ benefit if declining demand does put sustained downward pressure on consumer prices.

While declining demand is one way to restore stability to inflated markets, it’s a sign of widespread hardship only the gauche would celebrate. For the better part of a year, the party in power has shaken an impotent fist at pump prices, leveraging every gimmick in the book to reestablish affordability. From slashing sales taxes to providing taxpayer-backed gasoline refunds to tapping into America’s strategic petroleum reserves, Democrats have tried to combat the problems associated with low supply and high demand by subsidizing demand.

It’s no surprise that these strategies failed on their own terms, but what’s working to reduce demand—higher costs—is no treat either. Moreover, at just over $4.00 per gallon, the national average price of regular gas remains prohibitively costly. Daily commuters who cannot simply forego that summer road trip must eat these costs, and they’re unlikely to take well to those who call this an accomplishment and then demand gratitude in return.

Branko Milanovic's conversation with James Pethokoukis from the American Enterprise Institute.

1. James: Russia is a nation with vast natural resources, a well-educated population, and a deep scientific base. Yet on a per person basis, Russia is only the 67th richest nation in the world. Why?

The problem with Russia is what I called her “circular economic history”. To get rich, nations need internal and external peace, not chaos. One might remember Adam Smith’s famous statement that “peace, easy taxes and tolerable administration of justice” are sufficient for countries to transit from very low to very high income. Russia has not had that experience for a whole century. The period of fast economic growth after the elimination of serfdom in 1861 –that is, before the end of slavery in the United States—ended with the World War I and then with the Bolshevik revolution and the Civil War. Another acceleration of growth in the 1930s through Stalinist industrialization was stopped by World War II. The growth rebound of the 1950s-60s slowed down under Brezhnev—but at least there was no decline then. The decline came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism. Russian GDP decreased by more than 40% (more than the American GDP declined during the Great Depression). In the final episode of the “growth-to-war-and-back” dynamic, the relatively good performance of Putin’s Russia up to about 2012, has now definitely ended with the war.

One can discuss other, perhaps more fundamental, reasons for the lack of technological advance of Russia, but I wanted to highlight a very simple fact which is often overlooked: to become developed and rich, countries need stability and constant growth over long periods of time. For every reasonable person (but Russia’s president), this simply translated into the fact that Russia needed at least fifty years of peace, stability and tolerable administration of justice to reach advanced countries. It never got that chance.

2. How long will Western sanctions on Russia continue, and what will be the long-term effect on the political economy of Russia?

I think that the sanctions will continue for several decades because the problems opened up by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are exceptionally difficult to solve politically. They are as difficult, if not more so, as the Middle Eastern problem (Israel-Palestine), or the Cypriot problem (Northern Cyprus) or that between India and Pakistan (Kashmir). None of these problems has been solved in the past 50-70 years. So neither will the Russia-Ukraine problem be solved, which in turn means that Western sanctions, and especially American sanctions, will remain in force.

The sanctions will have a devastating impact on Russia’s economy. That impact is of the medium- to long-term nature. It is meaningless to focus on daily or weekly gyrations in the interest or exchange rate, as many people do.

Russia will need to proceed to import substitutions under the unique circumstances where import of foreign-made machinery that is normally needed to launch import substitution is impossible. Russia will thus have to proceed to what I called “regressive import substitution”, that is to replace today’s Western-produced goods, starting from combine-harvester and cars and airplanes to chips and Novocain (for dental surgeries) with inferior old-fashioned domestic substitutes. In other words, the policy will be, willy-nilly, to go backwards in terms of technological developments and/or to try to reinvent everything anew by own forces. Nobody in history has even been forced to do so.

It is in that respect that the “regressive” import substitution is fundamentally different from Stalin’s import substitution that was, in the technical part, based on Western, that is, on advanced technology of that time.

The idea that China will somehow help Russia in not having to go backward is partially true. But China will be very careful not to fall under the secondary US sanctions. In addition, China cannot replace the West in all technological fields. China herself depends in many areas on cooperation with the West.

Let me just mention that in 5-6 years, Russian civilian air transport will not be able to service far-flung areas: one may not be able to travel by plane directly from Moscow to (say) Vladivostok. In many respects, Russian way of life will regress, technologically, to the 1980s. Yes, one can say, but people did live, and many very well, in the 1980. That is true—but it is a very different thing to live with the technology of the 1980s in the 1980s from living with the technology of the 1980s today.

3. Is it still proper to call Russia an oligarchy, or is it now apparent that the oligarchs are benefactors of the state with no influence?

This is a very good question. Before the war, when the sanctions were just threatened, the assumption in the West was that oligarchs were sufficiently influential so that the fear of losing all (or almost all) of their assets will concentrate their minds and push them to dissuade Putin from the invasion. This did not happen. So the assumption on which this whole idea of threatening sanctions on the oligarchs was based was faulty. This is important to keep in mind for two reasons.

First, we have no idea why oligarchs are being punished today. I guess, for not being powerful enough. The West is saying to them, “now, we know that you are not powerful, and we shall punish you for that”. Isn’t that bizarre? I wrote about that here.

Second, the nature of Russian oligarchy had changed in a fundamental way between Yeltsin and Putin. I have written about that in 2019 here. To put it simply, under Yeltsin, oligarchs were calling the shots. Take for example the famous Winter of 1996 meeting of top Russian billionaires in Davos when, together with George Soros, they decided to fund Yeltsin’s presidential campaign, bring US advisors and consultants, and do everything to help Yeltsin win in June (1996). They succeeded and were richly rewarded through the infamous loan-for-shares deal.

With Putin things changed, albeit gradually. He was indeed brought to power by Berezovsky who believed that he, Berezovsky, would be the puppeteer and Putin the puppet. In truth, however, Berezovsky ended up hanging (probably) himself in his former house in England. Under Putin, top oligarchs (not necessarily all) could keep their assets only if they did not contradict the interests of the state, as defined by Putin and the ministries of power, and they could augment their wealth if they did what the state told them to do. The power relationship between the ultra-rich and the political rulers had reversed. It seems that in Washington and London they were unaware of that change until 24 February 2022; or perhaps they pretended not to be aware of it.

4. You've said that capitalism is "the sole socioeconomic system in the world." Is that likely to change in the long term?

To understand what I mean and to answer your question, let’s go back to the definition of capitalism that I use in “Capitalism, Alone”. It is not a very original definition. It was used by both Karl Marx and Max Weber. It is simple. It is powerful and it locates the “mode of production” in the way production is organized, not (as amateurish definitions of capitalism and socialism do) in the way distribution proceeds.

To call a country capitalist, the definition requires first, that most of production be carried on by companies whose assets are privately owned, second, that the owners of assets directly or indirectly manage the companies which in turn use hired labor to produce things or services. The fact that labor is hired is important: workers do not play an entrepreneurial role, they are just told what to do. The system of production is fully hierarchical. Finally, economic decision-making is decentralized.

Now, do we have serious proposals to change any of the three parts of that definition so that we move away from capitalism? I do not see them. To be clear, let’s see what it would imply, that is, let’s list the conditions under which capitalism would change in a substantial way. For example, if assets were nationalized. This is obvious. Second, if most of production is done by small-scale producers (worker-owners). In that case, there would be no hired labor. In effect. laborers (who are at the same time capitalists as well) exert the entrepreneurial role. And third, if economic coordination is centralized, say through an explicit plan or heavy government regulation of key activities.

As I said, I do not see any of these elements being much supported today. However, I can imagine some changes. For example, there may be in the future more companies that look like today’s start-ups. People with ideas canvass capital. In that case, the capitalist is no longer directly or indirectly the “decider”; he or she is just the lender, the investor. Capital is still private, it gets a return, but the fact of ownership does not give the right to manage production. That role belongs to labor, actually to the people with ideas. A system where owners of money are simply providers of that money with no managerial role and where that role falls to labor is no longer capitalism in the sense that I defined it. This is one change that I can imagine.

Another is the process that I documented in ”Capitalism, Alone” for the US and several advanced economies. I call it “homoploutia”. That means that an increasing proportion of people who are (say) in the top 10 percent of US total income distribution are both in the top 10 percent of income distribution by capital, and in the top 10 percent of income distribution by labor. In other words, they are not just rich people: they are amongst the richest workers, and amongst the richest capitalists. This is a very different, “new” capitalism: in the classical capitalism, the richest capitalists are not amongst the richest workers. They do not bother to work; they run their companies. But now, you can have a highly educated manager who has a very high labor income, saves from that income, invests, and realizes very high capital income that places him among the top 10% of capitalists,, while he/she is already among the top 10% of workers. This is, as I said, a big change compared to the past. It has some positive, and some negative features. But I will leave it to the readers of “Capitalism, Alone” to find out what they are.

5. What did Fukuyama get right and wrong in "The End of History?"

I deeply admire Fukuyama’s work in “The Origin of Political Order”. It is, I think, a first-class book. I have written two reviews, here is one.

But he got 1989 wrong. This is what we see clearly now. There were two mistakes. First, the revolutions of national independence and self-determination that were essentially nationalist revolts were proclaimed by Fukuyama and other maîtres à penser of the time to be the revolutions of democracy. This was a puzzle to me from the onset. If these were the revolutions of democracy, liberalism and multi-nationalism, why were all three communist federations broken up instead of just being democratized? Why, to use a contrast, was Spain democratized and kept as a democratic, ethnic-based federation, while all communist ethnic federations were broken-up? Clearly, there was something more than just democratization, and that more was ethnic self-determination. This was the key feature of East European revolutions; democracy was contingent.

The entire ideology of 1989 sidestepped that question. It is a fundamental question, because answering that question not only highlights the true nature of the revolutions, but answers the question of what motivated a number of wars, including the current one, that we have witnessed since 1989. There were 12 wars in the so-called transition countries. All of them were fought in the former communist federations, and 11 out of these 12 wars were the wars about borders. (The only war that was not about borders was the civil war in Tajikistan.) Thus the answer about what motivated these revolutions must be obvious to all—but to the most dogmatic minds.

But, even if Fukuyama were somehow right in his explanation of 1989, the broader point he made, following Hegel, regarding a terminus in the evolution of human institutions, namely, democracy in the political sphere and capitalism in the economic sphere, is simplistic and unlikely ever to be realized. As Fukuyama’s own “Origins…” shows, human experience, be it different peoples’ history, philosophy, economic background, institutions, “culture” etc., is so diverse that believing that one system will fit all such diverse needs and beliefs is nothing short of utopian. And the danger with Fukuyama’s utopia, like with all utopias, is that the desire to conjure them up into existence inevitably leads to conflict. If we believe that Russia and China, and Egypt and South Africa, and Nigeria and Brazil, and Iran and Algeria, and Burma and Saudi Arabia, and everybody in this wide world would be better off if they had one system, the Western political system, logically we have to convince them of that. And if they are stubborn in persisting in the “wrongness of their ways”, we have to wage wars on them. Thus Fukuyama’s utopia leads to an endless string of conflicts.

6. Why is economic growth important? Haven't we achieved enough and we can just redistribute what we have?

We will never achieve enough because the human desire for “betterment”, as Adam Smith called it, has no limits. If we had a limited appetite for all things, we could imagine a stationary society. But our needs are not physiological; they are socially-determined. Every development creates new needs. We did not have a need for mobile phones before they existed. But we have that need now. We do not have a need to fly to Mars for a weekend outing right now (even if Elon Musk might feel that way). It seems slightly bizarre to us today to have such a “need”. But in several generations, it will not be so bizarre. It will be like our “need” to go on vacation to Mexico or Italy. Thus economic growth and needs are, if you will, in a dialectical relationship: more growth creates new needs that require more growth to satisfy them. There is no end to that.

James Pethokoukis, a columnist and an economic policy analyst, is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” He is also a columnist for The Week and an official contributor to CNBC.

This first appeared on Branko's blog and was reposted with permission.

Image: Retis via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Ten years ago, Hanna Rosin’s book, “The End of Men,” argued that feminism had largely achieved its aims, and that it was time to start worrying about the coming obsolescence of men. American women were getting more undergraduate and graduate degrees than American men, and were better placed to flourish in a “feminized” job market that prized communication and flexibility. For the first time in American history, they were outnumbering men in the workplace. “The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards,” Rosin wrote.

The events of the past decade—the rise of Trump, the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—have had a sobering effect on this sort of triumphalism. The general tone of feminist rhetoric has grown distinctly tougher and more cynical. Cheerful slogans about the femaleness of the future have receded; the word “patriarchy,” formerly the preserve of women’s-studies professors, has entered the common culture. Last year, in an article about women’s exodus from their jobs during the pandemic, Rosin recanted her previous thesis and apologized for its “tragic naïveté.” “It’s now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning,” she wrote. “American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled.”

Men, especially conservative men, continue to wring their hands over the male condition, of course. (Tucker Carlson appropriated the title of Rosin’s book for a documentary, advertised this past spring, about plummeting sperm counts.) But feminist patience for “twilight of the penis” stories has run out. “All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of patriarchy,” Pauline Harmange wrote in her 2020 screed, “I Hate Men.” More recently, the British journalist Laurie Penny, in her “Sexual Revolution” (Bloomsbury), notes the systemic underpinnings of such snivels: “The assumption that oozes from every open pore of straight patriarchal culture is that women are expected to tolerate pain, fear and frustration—but male pain, by contrast, is intolerable.” Penny is careful to distinguish hatred of masculinity from hatred of men, but she nonetheless defines the fundamental political struggle of our time as a contest between feminism and white heterosexual male supremacy. In “Daddy Issues” (Verso), Katherine Angel calls for #MeToo-era feminists to turn their attention to long-overlooked paternal delinquencies. If the patriarchy is to be defeated, she argues, women’s reluctance to criticize their male parents must be interrogated and overcome. Even the “modern, civilized father” must be “kept on the hook,” she recommends, and daughters must reckon with their “desire for retribution, revenge and punishment.”

The combative tone taken by these writers is hardly a surprise. One might argue that a movement currently scrambling to defend some vestige of women’s reproductive rights can be forgiven for not being especially solicitous of men’s sperm counts. One might argue that it isn’t feminism’s job to worry about how men are doing—any more than it’s the job of hens to fret about the condition of foxes. But two recent books claim otherwise. “A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice” (Allen Lane), by the French historian Ivan Jablonka, and “What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents” (Allen Lane), by Nina Power, a British columnist with a background in philosophy, both contend that the drift toward zero-sum war-of-the-sexes language is a bad thing for feminism. Although their diagnoses of the problem are almost diametrically opposed, both authors make the case for a more generous and humane feminist discourse, capable of recognizing the suffering of men as well as of women. Hens, they acknowledge, have legitimate cause for resentment, but foxes have feelings, too.

Jablonka’s dense, copiously researched book, which became a surprise best-seller in France when it was published there, in 2019, takes an ambitious, key-to-all-mythologies approach to its subject. Jablonka, who is a professor at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, begins in the Upper Paleolithic, examining its mysterious, corpulent “Venus” figurines, and moves suavely across the millennia all the way to the successive waves of modern feminism. He has an eye for striking, often grim, details—under the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, a daughter might be killed as punishment for a murder committed by her father—and relishes drawing parallels across eras. From ancient times to the present day, it seems, the central totems of masculinity—weapons, locomotive vehicles, and meat (particularly rare meat)—have remained remarkably consistent. Likewise, from the fall of Rome to the Weimar Republic, men have consistently attributed political disaster and cultural decline to the corrupting influence of feminine values.

Jablonka’s thesis about how patriarchy arose is a fairly standard one. Paleolithic societies already had a sexual division of labor—Spanish cave paintings from as early as 10,000 B.C. show male archers hunting and women gathering honey—but it was relatively benign. In the Neolithic era, with the advent of agriculture and the move away from nomadic existence, birth rates increased and women became confined to the domestic sphere, while men started to own land. From then on, each new development, be it metal weapons, the rise of the state, or even the birth of writing, further entrenched the power of men and the subjugation of women.

Until now, that is. “Patriarchy has declined,” according to Jablonka, but men remain caught in “pathologies of the masculine,” trying to live up to a symbolic role that doesn’t reflect their reduced dominance. The result is an “almost tragic” level of alienation, he writes, and feminists, instead of mocking or dismissing male anguish—thereby leaving men vulnerable to the revanchist fantasies of Tucker Carlson and his ilk—should recognize this moment as a crucial recruitment opportunity. Now is the time to convince men that their “obligatory model of virility” has immiserated them far more than it has empowered them. “The masculinity of domination pays, but it comes at a high cost: an insecure ego, puerile vanity, disinterest in reading and the life of the mind, atrophied inner life, the narrowing of social opportunities . . . and to top it all, a diminished life expectancy.”

Feminism has been slow to empathize and collaborate with men, Jablonka claims, because too many in the movement remain wedded to a “Manichean world view” of male oppressors and female victims. Some feminists are unreconstructed leftist types, who reject any evidence of women’s progress as “mystification designed to hide the persistence of male domination.” Others are duped by a “pro-women romanticism” into believing that women are innately nicer and more progressive than men. Jablonka rejects this sort of essentialist thinking, which he says provides a spurious biological rationale for traditional gender roles. If women are naturally kinder and more nurturing than men, and if men are “intrinsically imbued with a culture of rape,” why bother trying to change the status quo? Testosterone and other androgens may “have something to do with” a male propensity for aggression, he concedes, but “human beings are hostage neither to their biology nor their gender.” Men’s history of brutish behavior is the product of patriarchal culture, and only by insisting on “the fundamental identity” between men and women can feminism realize its proper aim—a “redistribution of gender,” in which “new masculinities” abound and the selection of any given way of being a man becomes “a lifestyle choice.”

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To claim that masculinity is a patriarchal “construct,” however, is not so much an explanation as the postponement of an explanation. Who or what created the patriarchy? Evolutionary biologists maintain that our earliest male ancestors had an evolutionary incentive to maximize the spread of their genes by violently competing for, and monopolizing access to, women. Jablonka is eager to avoid such biological imperatives, but in doing so he reaches for a kind of just-so story that renders much of the history he has laid out beside the point. Patriarchy, he speculates, was motivated by simple resentment of women’s wombs. “Deprived of the power that women have, men reserved all the others for themselves,” he writes. “This was the revenge of the males: their biological inferiority led to their social hegemony.”

Thus it is that successive patriarchal élites have spent the past several millennia shoring up their illegitimate rule, by defining manliness as a set of superior qualities denied to women. Not that Jablonka thinks there is only one, eternal masculine style; rather, all models of masculinity since antiquity have been mechanisms for asserting and imposing patriarchal power. The extroversion and swagger of the toreador look very different from the gallantry of the Victorian gentleman, which is, in turn, quite distinct from the laconic glamour of the cowboy, but they are all equally culpable expressions of the masculine-superiority complex.

There’s nothing like migration to reveal how things that seem natural may be artifacts of culture. When I left India for college in England, I was surprised to find that pinching my Adam’s apple didn’t mean, as I had thought it meant everywhere, “on my honor.” I learned to expect only mockery at the side-to-side tilts of the head with which I expressed degrees of agreement or disagreement, and trained myself to keep to the Aristotelian binary of nod and shake.

Around that time, I also learned—from watching the British version of “The Office”—that the word “cringe” could be an adjective, as in the phrase “so cringe.” It turned out that there was a German word for the feeling inspired by David Brent, the cringe-making boss played by Ricky Gervais in the show: Fremdschämen—the embarrassment one feels when other people have, perhaps obliviously, embarrassed themselves. Maybe possessing those words—“cringe,” Fremdschämen—only gave me labels for a feeling I already knew well. Or maybe learning the words and learning to identify the feelings were part of the same process. Maybe it wasn’t merely my vocabulary but also my emotional range that was being stretched in those early months in England.

Many migrants have such a story. In “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” (Norton), the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita describes her puzzlement, before arriving in the United States, at the use of the English word “distress.” Was it “closer to the Dutch angst (‘anxious/afraid’),” she wondered, “or closer to the Dutch verdriet/wanhoop (‘sadness/despair’)?” It took her time to feel at home with the word: “I now no longer draw a blank when the word is used. I know both when distress is felt, and what the experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an ‘emotion’ to me.”

For Mesquita, this is an instance of a larger, overlooked reality: emotions aren’t simply natural upwellings from our psyche—they’re constructions we inherit from our communities. She urges us to move beyond the work of earlier researchers who sought to identify a small set of “hard-wired” emotions, which were universal and presumably evolutionarily adaptive. (The usual candidates: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.) Mesquita herself once accepted that, as she writes, “people’s emotional lives are different, but emotions themselves are the same.” Her research initially looked for the differences elsewhere: in the language of emotion, in the forms and the intensity of its expression, in its social meaning.

Over time, though, her conviction began to weaken. “What would it mean that emotions are the same?” she asks. Working with Turkish and Surinamese immigrants to the Netherlands, and later being an immigrant herself, in the United States, she came to believe that the idea of a culturally invariant core of basic emotions was more of an ideology than a scientific truth. For one thing, Mesquita notes, “not all languages have a word for ‘emotion’ itself.”

What about words for particular feelings? “If we were to find words for anger, fear, sadness, and happiness everywhere,” she writes, “this could be a sign that language ‘cuts nature at its joints.’ ” That last phrase, much beloved of philosophers, echoes a line in Plato’s Phaedrus. It captures the hope that our human concepts correspond to something “out there,” natural kinds that exist independently of whatever we happen to think or say about them. The biologist Ernst Mayr thought that species concepts in biology were joint-carving in this way. He was impressed by the fact that “the Stone Age natives in the mountains of New Guinea recognize as species exactly the same entities of nature as a western scientist.” Are “anger” and “fear” like Mayr’s examples of chickadees and robins?

Here, Mesquita—joining her sometime co-author Lisa Feldman Barrett and other contemporary constructionists—enlists linguistic data to undermine the universalist view of emotions. Japanese, Mesquita points out, has one word, haji, to mean both “shame” and “embarrassment”; in fact, many languages (including my own first language, Tamil) make no such distinction. The Bedouins’ word hasham covers not only shame and embarrassment but also shyness and respectability. The Ilongot of the Philippines have a word, bētang, that touches on all those, plus on awe and obedience.

It gets worse. According to Mesquita, “There is no good translation for self-esteem in Chinese.” Native speakers of Luganda, in East Africa, she tells us, “use the same word, okusunguwala, for ‘anger’ and ‘sadness.’ ” Japanese people, she says, are shocked to learn that English has no word that’s equivalent to amae: “a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver.” When the Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi told a colleague about this inexplicable lacuna, the colleague exclaimed, “Why, even a puppy does it.” Mesquita concludes that “languages organize the domain very differently, and make both different kinds as well as different numbers of distinctions.”

In Mesquita’s book, Westerners have succumbed to a mode of thinking sufficiently widespread to be the subject of a Pixar film. In “Inside Out,” a little girl, Riley, is shown as having a mind populated by five emotions—Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger—each assigned an avatar. Anger is, of course, red. A heated conversation between Riley and her parents is represented as similar red figures being activated in each of them. “Inside Out” captures, with some visual flair, what Mesquita calls the MINE model of emotion, a model in which emotions are “Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist”—that is, always having the same properties.

In a passage where she sets out her working methods, she tells us about some empirical results that had puzzled her. Asked to list “emotion words,” her respondents from Turkish and Surinamese families were especially inclined to list words that referred to behaviors. And so words for “laughing” appeared more often than “joy,” and “crying” more often than “sadness.” Some thought terms for “yelling” and “helping” were emotion words. What all this established, for Mesquita, is that “cultural differences go beyond semantics”; that emotions lived “ ‘between’ people rather than ‘within.’ ”

Mesquita wants us to consider this alternative model. Instead of treating emotions as mental and “inner,” perhaps we should conceive of them “as acts happening between people: acts that are being adjusted to the situation at hand,” rather than “as mental states within an individual.” Instead of seeing emotions as bequeathed by biology, we might see them as learned: “instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents,” or “conditioned by recurrent experiences within our cultures.” In this model of emotions, they are “OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated”—OURS.

For Mesquita, the MINE model of emotion goes naturally with the individualist orientation of the West, while the “globally more common” OURS model belongs to the collectivist approach of non-Western, non-industrialized societies. As you might expect, the contrast is very much to the West’s disfavor. Japanese athletes interviewed after competing “reported many more emotions in the context of relationships,” compared with American athletes. Western societies, by placing emotions on the inside rather than on the outside, have made it difficult to understand, let alone sympathize with, other ways of having, or “doing,” emotion.

One reason people resist the notion that emotions might be different in different cultures, Mesquita acknowledges, is a desire for inclusivity: the worry is that “to say that people from other groups or cultures have different emotions is equivalent to denying their humanity.” On the contrary, she argues: it’s the insistence on cultural invariance that has the tendency to exclude. The MINE model, by obscuring non-Western ways of talking about and conceiving of emotions, ends up implying that what non-Western people have must really be something other than emotion. And so the inclusivists, she contends, end up treating those who are different as effectively nonhuman. Only by accepting that emotions are culturally specific, she thinks, can we truly understand the people with whom we share this planet. Accordingly, she offers a prescription: “Do not assume that a person who does not behave the way you expect is suppressing their authentic, real emotion. Ask.”

The critical tendency that Mesquita’s book represents has cast a long shadow over the intellectual culture of the West in the past century. Where we naïvely supposed there to be human universals, the critics—anthropologists, philosophers, and now, it seems, psychologists—urge us to see diversity, relativity, “incommensurable paradigms,” and “radical alterity.” Translation between the emotional lexicons of different languages, which we’d thought was an everyday activity, comes to seem an impossible endeavor. Not even our deepest feelings turn out to be free of the shaping hand of language and convention.

Mesquita’s psychological research, like the earlier work in anthropology and sociolinguistics she draws on, is clearly intended to overturn orthodox theories of emotion, both academic theories and the “folk theory” that’s implicit in the way we talk about our emotions. And there is something confused in those theories. It’s just that constructionists like Mesquita, captive to their own theory, may be offering the wrong diagnosis—and the wrong course of treatment.

Start with her parade of sociolinguistic examples. Mesquita’s interpretation of them courts what in similar connections has been termed the “lexical fallacy.” What are we supposed to take away from the fact that another language doesn’t have different words for shame and embarrassment? That its speakers have no way of knowing which situations call for which emotions? Does my embarrassment at an undone zipper turn into shame when I am around other Tamil speakers? Is my shame at forgetting my mother’s birthday modulated into embarrassment? Do all my English friends, for that matter, have a firm grasp on the distinction? (Try to make it yourself.)

English has a single word for homesickness. So does German (Heimweh). But French doesn’t. Does that make the pain a French emigrant feels at an underbaked croissant any less acute than the pain of an Englishman in New York faced with a lukewarm cup of tea?

Mesquita makes much of the claim that Luganda has a single word that refers to anger and sadness. Doesn’t the English term “upset” have the same range? (Luganda speakers dispute her account, and note that the language readily marks the distinction between the two.) The English word “modesty” covers much the same range as the Bedouins’ hasham, and a clever translator can find ways of getting us to see the range of the Ilongot’s bētang, which can be used to connote an “I’m not worthy!” sense of bashfulness or submission. The practice of translation—undertaken daily by millions of migrants talking about their experiences—should leave us with more hope for what we can say with the words we have.

What justice, then, can a war-crimes trial offer if it’s neither a suitable penalty for the criminal nor compensation for the victim? Matviichuk, of the Center for Civil Liberties, suggested that war-crime trials might facilitate a more just end to the war itself. “The Russian regime is trying to win this war by causing intolerable suffering to civilians,” Matviichuk said. “Our duty is to keep reminding the world of the brutality and the scale of these crimes.”

This is an argument for war-crime trials as media, as theatre—and it is an argument for why these trials should be organized right now. “Western politicians keep saying that we should cede part of our territory to Putin,” Matviichuk said. “We have to remind them that they are talking about dooming people to the horrors that we have been documenting.”

After Oleg was killed, Iryna Abramova went with her father and her cat to a friend’s house, in a part of town that hadn’t seen much fighting. For the next three weeks, she kept imagining Oleg’s body being crushed by tanks or ripped apart by dogs. She promised herself that she would try to salvage something, if only a single bone. And then a woman came by and said that the Russians were gone.

Iryna ran to where her house had been. She felt like she was flying, even as she found herself stepping over bodies on Yablunska Street—at least three on the sidewalk, a woman beside a bicycle, plus several in a car that had been shot full of holes. Her house was now a pile of pale rubble, with the burned-out shell of a washing machine on top. Oleg was where the soldiers had left him. The month of March had been cold, so his body was intact. Iryna wrote his name and age and the location of his death on a piece of paper for the body collectors.

Iryna Havryliuk made her way back to Forest Bucha the day after her son’s call. The bodies of her husband, her brother, and the rabbit guy were in the yard. Then she found a charred pile of what she realized were the remains of six more people: her cousin, his wife, their child—Iryna’s godchild—and three members of the family who had been cooking for the others. The bodies were burned and mutilated: the lower half of Iryna’s godson had been sawed off, and her cousin’s legs were chopped off below the knee. The neighbors were also missing limbs. Altogether, in their little corner of Bucha, eleven people from four houses were killed.

Havryliuk stayed with a friend for two days, until the police came and took the bodies. Then she moved back into her house and, with some apprehension, went down to the cellar where she had spent the first days of the invasion. The light of her cell-phone flashlight caught two eyes in the darkness. She was terrified for a moment, then realized that the eyes belonged to the pet rabbit, which had survived.

After authorities collected the dead, families were once again forced to search for them. When Abramova eventually found Oleg—weeks later, in a morgue fifty miles from her home—his body was marked as “unidentified.” Svitlana and a neighbor called every morgue in the area, asking for the location of Konstantin’s and Oleksandr’s bodies. Eventually, they found a morgue that had Konstantin on its list of victims. When her son, Serhii, got there, he was invited to climb into a refrigerated wagon and to look inside body bags until he found his father.

The women now had to think about how they would live. They had lost their breadwinners. Their houses had been looted and damaged. Ludmila’s was destroyed by fire, apparently as Ukrainian soldiers fought to retake the city; she has furnished a sleeping space in what had been the summer kitchen—she scavenged a door, but she has struggled to scrape together enough money to buy a latch. Abramova is staying with her father. Havryliuk’s home was struck by shelling and is missing all of its windows. There may not be a single intact roof remaining in Bucha—the shelling and shooting went on for a month.

One day in late May, I followed Kateryna Ukraintseva, a member of the Bucha city council, to a five-story apartment building on Yablunska Street. In early March, two dozen residents there had crowded in the building’s basement. Many of them found ways to get out of Bucha, and eventually only six men and two women remained. Russian soldiers shot and killed three of the men, in three separate incidents—one in his apartment and two in the building’s stairwell. Now most of the other residents were back. Ukraintseva was delivering a heavy roll of canvas donated by the Red Cross, to spread across the roof of the building—for the moment, this was the best remedy they could find.

During my visits to Bucha, I was surprised at how little construction there was. I saw a single crew, putting up a store where one had burned down, and I heard a bit of hammering here and there. A shipment of modular homes had arrived from Poland, neat-looking metal containers with electrical and water hookups, but there was talk that the hookups wouldn’t work with the local system, and that the houses would be unbearably hot in summer and cold in winter. Most of them appeared to be parked at the train station.

Nataliya Verbova was finally able to return home on May 10th—more than a month after she saw the photograph of her husband’s body. She and other mourners had been visiting the site of the execution every day and laying flowers where the bodies of their loved ones had been. Nataliya usually cried softly when she came. If anyone addressed her, she told the story of her loss in a rushed monotone. Some days, journalists were at the scene, their television cameras set up on an out-of-sight patch of pavement, ready to roll when a mourner showed up.

During the first week of June, an investigator from the S.B.U. came to interview Nataliya and the other women whose husbands and sons had been killed beside the office building. He met them at the scene of the crime. The investigator, who asked me not to use his name, was pudgy and looked to be in his mid-twenties, with a still-sparse beard. He set up a makeshift office on a bench, using an old chair as a desk. He spoke to Nataliya for about an hour, then called out, “Next!” Kateryna Rudenko sat down with him and started dictating her personal details.

Nataliya finally had a case number. She walked toward the low granite steps in front of the office building and sat down next to Olga Prykhidko, whose husband, Anatoliy, was also executed there. He had been a furniture-maker. Olga was the deputy director of a food store that Russian troops had looted and then destroyed. She has two daughters, ages five and eleven. Olga and the girls had left when the Russians came, and Anatoliy stayed back to join Territorial Defense. Olga had checked with the conscription office; Anatoliy was not on the rolls. She worried that this meant she would not receive compensation.

Both women cried as they exchanged stories. “Next!” the investigator called. He was done talking to Kateryna Rudenko. Olga walked toward the bench. Kateryna handed out candies. ♦

If the House of Representatives follows the Senate's lead and passes the Inflation Reduction Act, it would become the first major piece of legislation to have even a small positive impact on the federal budget deficit since President Barack Obama was in office.
But don't go popping those champagne corks just yet, deficit hawks.
The Inflation Reduction Act—which, notably, won't reduce inflation, but that's another story—cleared the Senate on Sunday with a 51–50 vote (Vice President Kamala Harris provided the tie-breaker). The bill includes an estimated $650 billion corporate tax hike and directs about $300 billion of that new revenue toward deficit reduction over the next decade, a key priority for Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), who negotiated the package with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.).
Within the context of the federal government's wildly out-of-whack budget, however, the promised savings from the Inflation Reduction Act are tiny at best—and that's only if those savings actually materialize, which they might not.
Start by comparing the bill's promised deficit-reduction efforts with how other recent efforts by Congress and the Biden administration have inflated the budget deficit.
When looking at the impact of legislation on the federal deficit, projections always take into account the next 10 years of federal spending and expected revenue—in other words, that $300 billion reduction created by the bill is the expected total amount over the next decade. That sounds like a lot of money—and it is!—but it looks a lot smaller when you stack it up against other bills Congress has passed in recent years. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the 10-year deficit has increased by about $2.4 trillion since President Joe Biden took office, thanks to items like the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package, and this year's budget omnibus bill.
So, rather than looking at the Inflation Reduction Act as a $300 billion reduction of future budget deficits, it's probably more accurate to describe it as a plan to actually pay for about $300 billion of the estimated $2.4 trillion that Congress has agreed to borrow in the past 18 months.
In short, we'd still need seven more bills like the Inflation Reduction Act just to cover the rest of Biden's spending binge—and that's before we start trying to pay for the rest of the $6 trillion in borrowing that Congress did during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The actual math is likely to be even bleaker since a good bit of that $300 billion in deficit reduction is tenuous at best. Much of it won't arrive for several years, according to an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. By then, it's likely that future run-of-the-mill spending increases or new initiatives like a student loan forgiveness program will have swamped whatever small relief results from this bill. If Congress decides to permanently extend the expanded Obamacare subsidies created during the pandemic, for example, it will end up costing about half of the supposed savings created by the Inflation Reduction Act.
If you want to see the really big picture, stack up the bill's supposed savings against the real drivers of the federal budget deficit in the next few decades: America's creaky entitlement programs. Social Security is set to run a $2.4 trillion deficit over the next decade years. Medicare will be $578 billion in the red over the same period.
Yes, $300 billion is a lot of money, but in the context of America's fiscal problems, it's actually not very much money at all.
"With or without this bill, deficits are going to be a trillion [dollars] per year," points out Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Even under the best circumstances, this would reduce the deficit by $50 billion per year, starting five years from now, but we'd still be running trillion-dollar deficits from all the regular stuff the government does."
The bill's narrow Senate passage almost certainly doesn't foreshadow an oncoming rush of fiscal sanity in Washington. Instead, it's probably better understood as an indication of how a year-plus of runaway inflation has spooked lawmakers and slightly changed the political calculus around budgeting in Congress.
"We may soon look back on the 2009–2021 period as the era of 'free-lunch economics,' when hubristic politicians and economists declared that traditional fiscal and monetary trade-offs no longer existed in any meaningful form," wrote Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a former Senate budget committee staffer, in City Journal two months ago. With annual budget deficits well over $1 trillion for the foreseeable future and inflation spiking as a result of government stimulus, Riedl writes, "The 'free-lunch' experiment has collapsed."
In that sense, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act probably matters more as a political signal than a fiscal one. Democrats read the polls, realized that Americans now say inflation is their top political concern, and rebranded their latest major piece of legislation as a response to that problem. It doesn't mean the incentives for higher spending and more borrowing are gone, but the political barriers to "free-lunch" fiscal policy have been raised ever so slightly.
On one hand, the Inflation Reduction Act signals a significant break with the recent, bipartisan trend of higher spending funded by more borrowing and higher deficits.
But in the context of America's $30 trillion national debt and the expectation of swelling budget deficits in the next few years, it is barely even a single step on the road to fiscal responsibility—and there's a long way to go.
The post The Inflation Reduction Act Won't Meaningfully Address the Budget Deficit appeared first on Reason.com.

Jordan Peterson keeps running his mouth on Marx and Marxism, but a new conversation with Kyle Kulinski shows that the Canadian neo-reactionary has forgotten what little he ever knew about the subject.

Given Jordan Peterson's interest in critiquing Marx's analysis, it would be nice if he knew what it was. (Hollie Adams / Newspix / Getty Images)
 
Jordan Peterson loves to talk about Karl Marx. Even his book of self-help advice, 12 Rules for Life, includes surprisingly extensive rants about Marx, Marxism, communism, and something called “postmodern neo-Marxism.” He blames Karl Marx and his ideas for everything from the alleged corrupting influence of postmodernism on Western society to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. It’s one of his favorite subjects.
Oddly enough, then, he never seems to have bothered to read much Marx. Three years ago, Peterson debated the Slovenian Marxist thinker Slavoj Žižek in Toronto. In his opening statement, before Žižek had said a word, Peterson made an astonishing admission. He said he’d just now, in preparation for the debate, read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since he was eighteen years old.
Let that sink in. The Communist Manifesto is a very short pamphlet. You can read it in one afternoon with time to burn. And Peterson hadn’t read even that at any point in the last forty years. It’s a safe bet that he wasn’t poring through Marx’s discussion of the falling rate of profit in Capital, Volume III at any point during those decades either.
Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, when Peterson once again decided to talk to a leftist — Kyle Kulinski. And this time Peterson seems to have forgotten even what Marx said in the Manifesto.

Peterson vs. Kulinski
It was, at least in parts, a friendly conversation. Kulinski seems to be far more sympathetic than I am to Peterson’s ideas about psychology, spirituality, and related subjects. Naturally, they argued quite a bit about politics. Peterson’s positions on some issues seem to have hardened and become even more stridently reactionary over the course of the last three years.
He first rose to prominence, even before 12 Rules for Life, by speaking out against Bill C-16, which added gender identity to the prohibitions against discrimination in Canada’s preexisting Human Rights Act. His concern was that Canadians would now be liable to legal punishment for refusing to use trans people’s preferred pronouns.
This was always a dubious claim. The Canadian Bar Association denied at the time that C-16 would somehow “force individuals to embrace concepts, even use pronouns, which they find objectionable.” And if pronouns had really been his main concern about the bill — whose primary purpose was to prevent discrimination against trans people in domains like housing and employment — he could have advocated that the bill merely be amended. But at least back then, he could claim that his position arose from some principled commitment to free speech rather than any sort of hostility to trans people. In 2022, in his discussion with Kulinski, Peterson said that he wasn’t sure whether even adults should be allowed to medically transition.
He also strongly denied that there could be such a thing as a “right” to health care, and expressed ambivalence about whether Canada’s universal Medicare program delivers better results. Oh, and he defended Donald Trump, who he claims never “betrayed the working class.”
All of this makes sense given Peterson’s trajectory. In 2019, there was at least some ambiguity to Peterson’s political posture. He was clearly a defender of traditionalist social values, but he still seemed to be at least somewhat detached from day-to-day partisan politics. In 2022, he’s working for Ben Shapiro’s media organization, the Daily Wire.

Peterson vs. Marx
One thread that’s run through all stages in Peterson’s evolution is his obsessive dislike of Marx and Marxism. Early in the interview, he mentions Marxism as an example of a dangerous idea. Kulinski asks him if he thinks that any of Marx’s ideas had any merit. Peterson’s response makes it overwhelmingly clear that he has no idea what Marx thought.
Well, the idea that capitalism produces inequality is clearly true. But Marx didn’t think that up. I mean, that’s been known forever. I mean, it says in the Gospels that the poor will always be with us. I mean, inequality is an unbelievably pervasive economic problem. . . . Capital — wealth — tends to accumulate in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people. Now Marx was right in that diagnosis, although he was not the originator of that idea by any stretch of the imagination. But laying [that] at the feet of capitalism is preposterous . . . because every economic system ever devised by human beings has produced inequality, but only capitalism has produced an increase in material prosperity.
If The Communist Manifesto had been fresh in Peterson’s mind at the time of this conversation, he might have remembered that Marx is very aware of the existence of economic inequality in precapitalist societies. The first sentence of the first chapter tells us that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle,” and the second sentence reminds us what class divisions looked like under previous forms of social organization. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serfs, guild-master and journeyman,” Marx writes, “stood in constant opposition to one another.”
Marx’s primary objection to capitalism is not that it distributes resources in an unequal way. In fact, if Peterson had read a second, similarly short pamphlet — Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program — he would have seen Marx argue that any distribution of the “means of consumption” is only a consequence of who holds a more basic form of economic power — ownership of the “means of production.” Crudely put, questions about how much bread everyone gets to take home are downstream from questions about who owns the bakery. The kind of equality socialists have always cared most about is equality of power.
But Marx certainly knew that capitalist property relations led to the means of consumption being distributed in a brutally unequal way. He also knew that the (very different) property relations that existed at the time the Gospels were written had that effect. And he certainly knew that capitalism developed the productive capacity of society to a previously undreamt-of level. After the part about precapitalist societies, Marx spends the opening pages of The Communist Manifesto going on about that exact point. Capitalism, Marx writes, “has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”
That’s the whole point. The reason Marx didn’t agree that “the poor will always be with us” is precisely that he understood that capitalism is unique not in generating class inequality but in creating the kind of material abundance that lays the basis for a qualitatively more egalitarian and democratic form of economic organization (socialism). For the first time in human history, we can bring about a society where everyone’s needs are met and no one is forced to work for anyone else — either through the kind of direct coercion characteristic of precapitalist class societies or through the soft coercion of economic necessity that induces workers to submit to the rule of capitalists for eight out of every sixteen waking hours.
That, at any rate, is Marx’s analysis. It’s fine if Peterson wants to disagree with it or critique it. But given his interest in doing so, it would be awfully nice if he knew what it was.

This article is outdated. Ms Zsuzsa Hegedüs has already "unresigned".

https://hungarytoday.hu/viktor-orbans-advisor-zsuzsa-hegedus-unresigns/

By the way the "antiracist" viewpoint of the article is nonsensical. All ruling powers in history always seized and maintained power by being able to protect their people against the existential menace of alien immigration. This was the case of the Russian dynasties who raised to power by demonstrating their ability to free Russians from the Mongols. The Pippinides, ancestors of the Carolingians supplanted the Merovingians, when Pippin the Short defeated the Arabs in Poitiers. The succeeding Carolingians lost power, because they were unable to roll back the Normandic and Sarasene invasions, and they were replaced by the minuscule lineage of the Capetians who fixed the problem. Otto the Great of Saxony became Emperor and created the German nation and the Holy Roman Germanic Empire, a recontitution of the Carolingian Empire, because he defeated the Hungarians at the battle of Lechfeld. The House of Habsburg drew its legitimacy and survival as a ruling gynasty in Austria during centuries by being able to keep the Turks out of Vienne and rolling them back from Hungary. In Spain the Kingdoms of Castille and Aragon became hegemonic in the Peninsula by conducting a re-conquest against the Arabs which lasted many centuries. And so on and on.

What you call "racism" is simply the necessity of ethnic identity. It is the driving force of history, even before class struggle and the economic factors. Thus, if you state that the "populists" are "racist ", you are actually announcing their inevitable victory.

Most of us don’t want self-driving cars, yet governments are kowtowing to firms like Tesla rather than planning for sustainable means of transport. It’s just one example of how Silicon Valley has hijacked public infrastructure to sell us stuff we don’t need.

The Tesla Motors dealership in Pleasanton, California, March 12, 2018. (Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)
 
Review of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx (Verso, July 2022) and Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff (Verso, June 2022)
Often, we no longer feel we have a say over our futures. Instead, tech companies offer us glittery images of luxury and convenience — and prophesize about our fully optimized and automated destiny. Through their product launches, think pieces, and PR departments, tech companies exercise a powerful influence over our sense of what we can do as a society. But for all their talk of innovation and change, these companies present a very limited and static vision of how we could change our world.
We can have a new generation of tech products, but with all the current fundamental structures of power firmly in place. So long as you are still buying merch, you can be in whichever web, metaverse, or cinematic universe you like. Politics is, in part, a struggle over what can appear as possible, and tech companies have been very successful in defining the limits of our political imagination.
This control over the future is particularly important at key turning points in history. In certain moments of crisis and transition, radically different pathways are open to us and there is a struggle over which direction to take. We are arguably at just such a moment of a great realignment in global politics, with dramatic shifts occurring even in the tech sector. Legacy tech companies are rebranding, acquiring competitors, and attempting to fend off challenges from a new generation of companies and products.
It is against this backdrop that two new books seek to address how we might reorient our sense of what is possible by returning to previous transition periods and discerning where things went wrong in order to provide new possibilities for technology and transport today.

The Rise of the Automobile
In Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Paris Marx eviscerates a century of propaganda from the automobile industry and shows why we can’t trust Big Tech with the future of transport. He tells a tragic story of how our world was built around the demands of the automobile and how corporations effectively sold a car-centered vision of modern life through mobilizing resources, building alliances, and exercising control over public debate.
We don’t often think about just how transformative the rise of the automobile has been over almost every aspect of urban life. Roads were extended, cities were redesigned, and the idea of public space was reimagined for an automobile era. Cars also provided the means for middle-class nuclear families to move out to the suburbs, further solidifying class and race divisions.
As the industry grew in the 1920s, pedestrians and other road users were literally driven off streets as these killer machines took over, with catastrophic consequences for our safety and the environment. The dominance of cars over cities has been a disaster for everyone aside from powerful corporate interests. In 2020, 38,680 people were killed by automobiles on US roads, with more young people dying from road deaths than guns. This figure adds to the 3.7 million people that have been killed by motor vehicles in the United States alone since 1899. These deaths fall disproportionately on the old, the poor, and people of color, not to mention the horrendous environmental damage caused by car emissions.
One of the most surprising features of this story is the complicity of public authorities in facilitating this move desired by the oil and automobile industries. City planners of the early twentieth century saw their role as managing public space and city streets for multiple types of road users. Roads were places that pedestrians, cyclists, horses, carts, and streetcars needed to use safely and effectively. Before their current dominance, there were campaigns to radically limit the use of cars to make space for more traditional forms of transport. The automobile industry conducted a concerted campaign to overcome public opposition to cars until planners ensured cars were given priority on the roads.
Silicon Valley’s future of transportation just involves different ways for people to continue driving cars. They could run on electricity, be ordered through a ride-hail app, or eventually be self-driving. But none of these possibilities ever questions the centrality of the car itself. Paris Marx shows that developing a sustainable and egalitarian future of transport is ultimately a political rather than a technological question. We should question whether the resource extraction, exploitative labor practices, and dominance of powerful interests accompanying new visions of transport should be part of a desirable future.

Privatizing the Internet
The guiding thread of each book is about the influence that corporations exercise over government policy-making and social relations. Special interests can completely reshape urban landscapes, remake infrastructure, and direct public resources toward private ends, ensuring that governments are ultimately building things that are valuable to powerful corporations.
The privatization of public services and community spaces has led to the erosion of public goods and an impoverishment of the alternatives to corporate-controlled services. As private wealth and power expands, public wealth diminishes. The rise of a billionaire class — with its selective and self-serving philanthropy, tax havens, and government subsidies — reduces the capacity of governments to provide well-funded public services and amenities. One of the reasons public and not-for profit alternatives can have difficulty competing with corporate giants is not because they are less dynamic or innovative, but because they have been deliberatively defunded and neglected as part of campaigns to destroy alternative futures.
Ben Tarnoff’s Internet for the People: The Fight for our Digital Future shows how the growth of the Internet was driven by the corporate pursuit of profit and by forging new relationships of control. One of its key insights is the centrality of infrastructure in the development of new technology. We should remember the embodied and material nature of seemingly ephemeral digital technology. “The Internet has a body,” Tarnoff implores, “a body of glass, copper, silicon, and a thousand other things — things that have to be dug out of the earth and hammered into useful shapes, with significant inputs of labor and energy.”
This material reality also has a political life. The submarine cables of the Internet follow similar routes of previous telegraph and telephone networks, meaning these fiber-optic cables often replicate colonial patterns mapped out during the high period of European imperialism. The influence of political forces on the development of the Internet is present in every chapter of Tarnoff’s history, revealing at each step how connectivity served powerful interests and was driven by corporate actors.
The book explains how the Internet became privatized and the effect this has on our conception of what it could become today. The central turning point was not the rise of global platforms in the 2000s but allowing private companies to own much of the infrastructure of the Internet in the 1990s. While this occurred over an extended period, by the time of the dotcom bubble, all the pieces were already in place for the commercialization of online spaces and the creation of corporate empires in this new domain.
This process began with the government allowing industry to take over control of the hardware of the network and create a fully privatized infrastructure at a time when other options were still on the table. It’s important to remember that most of the money used to assemble this intricate network came from public funding, which led to the creation of the backbone of the Internet and the first networks between research universities. But during the free-market triumphalism of the 1990s, privatization seemed like both an inevitability and a necessary step to more widespread adoption.
From this perspective, the problem with the current generation of platform companies is not their type of business model, but the fact that the Internet has become a business. Challenging the orthodoxy of progressive criticisms of surveillance capitalism, Tarnoff argues that an Internet filled with smaller, more competitive and regulated firms would still be an Internet run in the interests of making profit rather than delivering effective services to users.
When an essential service is marketized it inevitably leads to forms of rent-seeking and extractive practices that benefit powerful corporate interests but leave the vast majority of people shortchanged. Understanding how the Internet was transformed from a collaboration between the government and the university sector into the privatized monster it is today is an important step in knowing what we can do to change it.

The Road Not Taken
What these two books show brilliantly is how historical research can reveal the contingencies of the present. Particular choices led us to where we are today which means we have the ability to choose differently. Paris Marx reminds us that for brief moments there were movements away from an oil-centered society. Jimmy Carter, for example, installed solar panels on the White House and invested large amounts of federal funds into the development of renewable energy. But for a variety of complex reasons, these paths were prematurely closed as corporations reasserted their control.
When it comes to what should be done right now, both books are in agreement: citizens need to mobilize to demand public authorities make bold new investments in infrastructure and use democratically accountable power to counter the influence of corporate interests. The end goal is to reduce the role of the market in the provision of important services and to support higher levels of community and public ownership.
Public alternatives do not all have to be state-owned. For example, Tarnoff advocates for more “people’s pipes” — cooperatively owned community networks that offer low-cost Internet access. He points to the example of North Dakota telephone cooperatives who teamed up with smaller telephone companies for the purchase of sixty rural exchanges as an example of what community networks might offer in terms of reorganizing the Internet to serve human needs rather than corporate profits.
Municipal authorities can also build their own networks to serve government-run and community services, such as the example of Washington, DC. These proposals can be tied to a broader municipal program of “community wealth building,” as advocated by Martin O’Neill and Joe Guinan. This could also include publicly owned cloud services, which could be “carved out of a corporate provider like Amazon Web Services” as a means for ensuring greater equality in access to hosting services.
When it comes to digital platforms and services that occur higher up the stack, Tarnoff argues for more decentralized alternatives that break with the underlying logic of the platform economy. Rather than supporting a single state-owned option, he calls for experimentation with multiple self-governing organizations. One anchor point for these new experiments could be public libraries. These public institutions could run their own social media servers or provide users with a range of digital services as a starting point for non-commodified alternatives. It is currently difficult to imagine how these alternatives might operate, which is why we need to invest in collective processes of experimentation with a variety of new forms.
What unites these examples of community-run web services and local broadband with Paris Marx’s urban experiments in bicycle promotion and sustainable public transport from Oslo to Paris is a commitment to the basic principles of social democracy. While both books name capitalism as the fundamental problem, their suggested alternatives draw from the toolbox of social democratic political parties from the pre-neoliberal era.
Solutions are sought from policies since abandoned by many center-left parties: increased government spending and investment in infrastructure, and exercising greater control over the economy. Some might dismiss this as hopeless nostalgia, a longing for a vanished era that was only temporarily possible due to a specific constellation of factors unique to the mid-twentieth century.
However, in a post-COVID era, certain aspects of this program might find a new role as people demand protection from multiple crises and a larger role for social welfare provisions and protections for workers. The common sense on these issues has shifted greatly since the 1970s, but many of the sensible demands offered in these books were at one point not seen as radical or unrealistic. The dial may still shift such that they are seen as policy options once again.
As anger at the profits taken in by Big Tech increases and people search for alternatives, these two books offer a clear picture of how we ended up in this position — and what we must now do to change it.

Nancy Pelosi is in Taiwan. The trip will accomplish nothing except ratcheting up tensions with one nuclear-armed superpower while the United States is already in a proxy war with another.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi leaves the Legislative Yuan during her visit to Taiwan, August 3, 2022. (Annabelle Chih / Getty Images)
 
Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan — a pointless trip that ratchets up tensions with one nuclear-armed superpower just as the United States finds itself knee-deep in a potentially catastrophic proxy war with another.
President Joe Biden is hardly a pacifist. But even he discouraged her from going, noting that the military thought it was a stupid risk. Hell, Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist who can generally be counted on to be recklessly enthusiastic about American military power, has described Pelosi’s visit as “dangerous and irresponsible” — arguing that “Taiwan will not be more secure or more prosperous as a result of this purely symbolic visit, and a lot of bad things could happen.”

Bringing the US and China Closer to the Brink
The United States has poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine’s war effort as well as being more directly involved in semi-covert operations to assassinate Russian generals and sink Russian ships. (I don’t know how “covert” an operation is if “intelligence sources” turn right around and brag about it to the New York Times.) Crucially, China so far has not provided similar assistance to its ally Russia — or at least not yet.
According to a “senior U.S. official” quoted by Friedman, President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan have held a “series of very tough meetings with China’s leadership” — including Biden personally threatening Chinese president Xi Jinping about the economic consequences of military assistance to Russia. So far, it’s worked.
But a calculated diplomatic provocation, like the Speaker of the House paying what looks suspiciously like a state visit to an island claimed by China as part of its territory, could provide fodder to anyone within the Chinese government arguing for a more hawkish posture toward the United States.
Really take a beat to let that part sink in. We’re already closer to the brink of World War III than we’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The prospect of a third major power being added to a hot war is disturbing. And that’s not even close to the worst-case scenario from increased US-China tensions.
In response to Pelosi’s visit, China has announced live-fire drills that include coordinates within ten miles of Taiwan’s coast — a direct challenge to Taiwanese sovereignty. (China conducted similar drills during another standoff twenty-six years ago, but these are aimed much closer to Taiwan’s coast.) While the probability of an all-out war between China and Taiwan is still low, there’s no doubt that Pelosi has raised that probability — a few months after Joe Biden recklessly abandoned the long-term American posture of “strategic ambiguity” about what the United States would do in such a war.
“You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons,” a reporter asked Biden in late May. “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”
Biden’s terrifying monosyllabic answer was, “Yes.”

“They Didn’t Say Anything When the Men Came”
In Taiwan, Pelosi suggested that China’s reaction to her deliberate diplomatic provocation reflects a sexist double standard. Referring to a visit in April from Lindsey Graham and several other senators, Pelosi said that China “didn’t say anything when the men came.”
This is a nonsensical defense for at least two reasons. First, Pelosi seems to have forgotten that the Speaker of the House, being constitutionally in the line of succession to the presidency, has always been regarded by foreign governments as an official representative of the United States in a way that rank-and-file senators are not. Second, China did say something about these senatorial visits, officially warning the United States that it was “going down a dangerous path.”
This is the first time an American of Pelosi’s rank has visited the country since then speaker Newt Gingrich went there in 1997. And as Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft explained on Democracy Now, even citing that apparent precedent for Pelosi’s trip is misleading.
She flew over to Taiwan on an official US military jet that looked like Air Force One. She described her visit in Taiwan as an official visit. She publicized it in a very major way. Unlike Newt Gingrich, who went as Speaker of the House twenty-five years ago to Taiwan — Newt Gingrich went to Beijing first, he stopped in Taiwan very briefly and then moved on, the Chinese didn’t like it then, but now what Pelosi has done is much larger scale than this, much higher publicity, much more of the trappings of an official visit, and that really is a basic violation of the understanding that the United States and China reached at the time of normalization.
That understanding was that, on the Chinese side, Beijing wouldn’t surrender its territorial claim to Taiwan or disclaim its right to use force within what it considers to be its sovereign territory, but, implicitly, it would focus on a long-term pursuit of peaceful unification. On the US side, Washington would accept Beijing’s claim that there was only “One China” but refrain from adjudicating which government — Beijing’s or Taipei’s — had the valid claim to sovereignty over it. Meanwhile, it would reserve the right to arm Taiwan for the purpose of self-defense. That awkward compromise has sometimes felt very shaky. But it’s kept the peace for decades.

Making Basic Distinctions
Taiwan was a right-wing, one-party state until the 1990s. The process of democratization went along with the rise of the Taiwanese labor movement and the development of a relatively generous welfare state, and the country is now a real multiparty democracy. While a handful of eccentrics on the margins of the western Left may believe there should be no objection to China reintegrating Taiwan by force, against the will of the overwhelming majority of people who live there, most of those raising concerns about the potentially catastrophic consequences of increased US-China tensions take it as a given that that, too, would be a disastrous outcome.
As with Russia’s war in Ukraine, we should be able to distinguish between two very different questions. The first is whether the actions of a rival power are morally justifiable. The second is what role US policy might play in making those actions more or less likely to happen. I’m old enough to remember a time when Chomskyite critics of American foreign policy were accused of being apologists for al-Qaeda when they suggested that American actions in the Middle East helped to fuel terrorism. Anyone who can understand the flaw in that reasoning should be able to understand what’s wrong with accusing contemporary advocates of de-escalation of being apologists for Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.
The Taiwanese people deserve to be left in peace. This is one of many excellent reasons to dial down great-power tensions. A good start would be for the Biden administration to say no the next time Nancy Pelosi asks to use a military jet.

This week, the United States proved it could handle China and Russia at the same time, without starting any new wars or losing any ongoing battles. This should put to rest two trendy but wrong ideas: the notion on the right that we must back off Russia to confront China, and the notion on the left that we must back off China to confront Russia. It’s a false choice — because it’s all one confrontation.

Congress came together this week to assert U.S. leadership and push back against the aggression of two autocratic regimes. The Senate voted 95-1 on Wednesday to ratify the addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO, a strong rebuke of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked war against Ukraine. Both parties (and eventually the Biden administration) also affirmed their support for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, despite the Chinese government’s attempts to bully her into abandoning the trip.

Despite deep skepticism of U.S. intervention abroad among the American people, leaders in both parties seem to understand that the United States has a duty and an interest in exerting active leadership and pushing back against America’s adversaries in both Europe and Asia.

“We don’t beat China by retreating from the rest of the world. We beat China by standing with our allies against our enemies,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) before voting to expand NATO.

Cruz was responding to arguments made by fellow Republican Josh Hawley (Mo.), the only senator to vote no on NATO’s expansion. In an op-ed in the National Interest, Hawley wrote, “We must do less in Europe (and elsewhere) in order to prioritize China and Asia.” He said the United States must make “tough choices” because we “cannot defeat China and Russia in two major wars at the same time.”

Hawley is playing into a growing foreign policy trend on the right that seeks to justify taking the pressure off Moscow. The Conservative Political Action Conference welcomed Russia-friendly Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to its event this week. The Heritage Foundation, once a bastion of traditionally hawkish GOP foreign policy, opposed U.S. funding for Ukraine in May, ostensibly over accountability concerns.

But the NATO vote shows that most GOP leaders understand a softer position on Russia is neither good policy nor good politics. Six in 10 Americans support providing weapons and aid to Ukraine, and 7 in 10 Republicans support NATO.

Contrary to what Hawley argues, strengthening NATO actually lessens America’s burdens in Europe. More importantly, the idea that increasing deterrence against Russia will lead to war is a straw man. NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to prevent a larger war.

Meanwhile, on the left, several prominent voices warned this week that Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan could spark a major war with China at the worst possible time, another straw-man argument. Thomas L. Friedman argued in the New York Times that Pelosi’s visit was “reckless” because Ukraine demands our full attention.

“It is Geopolitics 101 that you don’t court a two-front war with the other two superpowers at the same time,” Friedman wrote.

First of all, Friedman misapplies the “reckless” label. It belongs squarely on the Chinese Communist Party, which decided to threaten Pelosi’s safety. China is shooting missiles in Taiwan’s direction and conducting military drills all around the island. That’s reckless. Visiting Taiwan for meetings is not.

More importantly, this analysis completely misreads the situation in China — President Xi Jinping’s impending coronation for a third term means he can’t afford to look weak, but he also can’t afford a major conflict right now. To the limited extent China is withholding assistance to Russia, it is because of China’s desire to avoid U.S. sanctions, and that hasn’t changed.

After significant hand-wringing, the Biden administration supported Pelosi’s visit, using reasonable steps and diplomacy to manage the fallout with Beijing. The sky did not fall. World War III did not commence. Pelosi’s trip did not change the fact that China, not the United States, is the aggressive party disrupting the status quo across the Taiwan Strait.

The idea that the United States can choose between confronting Russian aggression or Chinese aggression is attractive, until it meets reality. In truth, these two expansionist dictatorships are working together to undermine our security, prosperity and freedom. Moscow and Beijing view their struggles against the West as intertwined, so we must acknowledge that connection as well.

The good news is that the United States has many strong partners that also understand this is a dual threat, not a choice between two separate challenges. Leaders on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum should stop deluding the American people into the false comfort that we have the luxury to choose to confront one evil and not the other.

In order to spread, viruses exploit the connections between humans. The more connections there are, the more likely a virus is to find a new host to infect. Monkeypox is not terribly efficient at transmitting from human to human. The virus has been causing illness and deaths in some African countries, where animals carry the virus, for decades, but has gone largely ignored in the West. When the virus made it to places like Singapore, Israel and Britain in the past, it rarely led to any further cases. Most people do not have enough close skin-to-skin contacts for the virus to transmit. But those men who do have a lot of male sexual partners are more vulnerable. We have seen this with some other pathogens, like MRSA and drug-resistant shigella. Now we are seeing it with monkeypox.

The world needs to take the threat of monkeypox seriously. Around 7 percent of cases so far have resulted in hospitalization, usually for pain treatment, and several countries have reported deaths from the disease. Even in many patients who are never hospitalized, the virus causes immense suffering. On top of this, poxviruses have adapted to numerous species over time, and as the monkeypox virus continues to circulate it may evolve in unpredictable ways. Researchers have already reported signs of the virus’s genome changing. In the worst-case scenario, monkeypox could become more transmissible and more deadly. And even without any changes, the virus may yet make its way into other densely connected networks where it can spread.

To control the outbreak, those most vulnerable to infection need to have information that allows them to make decisions to stay healthy until there are enough vaccine doses available. That includes talking about reducing the number of sexual partners, creating “pods” of sex partners (where people keep sexual activity within a group) and other strategies to reduce the risk. It means communicating that scientists do not yet know how well one dose of the vaccine — or indeed two — will protect people, a crucial knowledge gap that needs to be addressed quickly. And it also means combating misinformation about the virus that is circulating widely on social media.

Public health responders need to make sure that the production of vaccines and drugs is ramped up, and that they are distributed quickly to those who need them most — especially in the countries that have long been affected by this disease. And we need to talk clearly and honestly about all this.

Keeping the focus on gay men and our sexual networks carries a risk, especially in those countries and communities where gay men are discriminated against and persecuted. Part of the public health response needs to be watching out for attempts to use this health crisis as a pretext for stigmatization and discrimination.

Today, in countries not previously affected, this virus is spreading predominantly in my community, and we need to focus efforts there. Talking about thousands of children being infected or millions of cases is not where the disease is right now. But, however unlikely, it is one possible future. The way to prevent it is by fighting this disease, not one another.

OnlySubs Episode 102: Race Marxism Goes to Congress is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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We now know and are rapidly spreading the news that Critical Race Theory is, in fact, Race Marxism. Well, now that knowledge has made its way to the United States Congress, specifically the House of Representatives. At the end of July of this year, Representative Dan Bishop (R-NC-9), with several co-sponsors, issued House Resolution 1303, “establishing the Marxist roots of critical race theory and detail[ing] the threat this divisive ideology poses to the American republic.” In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I read through the text of this resolution in full and give verification and discussion on its various claims. Most importantly among its claims, besides identifying Critical Race Theory accurately as a Marxist ideology that “poses a significant threat to the United States Republic, its citizens, and the free people of the world rising to the degree of a clear and present danger to the Republic, its citizens, and the States, its allies, and the good and happiness of mankind,” it also identifies that CRT violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and, very likely, the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution when implemented by any government apparatus, which would include public schools and the military. Join me as I read through the text of this new, important resolution, which deserves all your support and robust debate. And, PS, the next step, as always, is for the many states to copy this resolution and declare this recognition throughout our nation on every level.

Additional episodes of the OnlySubs Podcast can be found here.
The post OnlySubs: Race Marxism Goes to Congress appeared first on New Discourses.

If Democrats avoid the worst outcome in November’s midterm elections, the principal reason will likely be the GOP’s failure to reverse its decline in white-collar suburbs during the Donald Trump era.That’s a clear message from yesterday’s crowded primary calendar, which showed the GOP mostly continuing to nominate Trump-style culture-war candidates around the country. And yet, the resounding defeat of an anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas showed how many voters in larger population centers are recoiling from that Trumpist vision.Democrats still face enormous headwinds in November, including sweeping voter dissatisfaction over inflation, low approval ratings for President Joe Biden, and the near unbroken history since the Civil War of the party that holds the White House losing seats in the House of Representatives during a president’s first two years.Polls indicate that many college-educated center-right voters have soured on the performance of Biden and the Democrats controlling both congressional chambers. Yet in Tudor Dixon, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, and Blake Masters, the party’s Senate selection in Arizona, Republicans have chosen nominees suited less to recapturing socially moderate white-collar voters than to energizing Trump’s working-class and nonurban base through culture-war appeals like support of near-total abortion bans. With Trump-backed Kari Lake moving into the lead as counting continues in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, the top GOP nominees both there and in Michigan will likely be composed entirely of candidates who embrace Trump’s lie that he won their state in 2020.In the intermediate term, most Democratic strategists believe that the party must find ways to combat the GOP’s strong performance during the Trump era with working-class voters, particularly its improvement since 2016 among blue-collar Hispanic voters. But with inflation so badly squeezing the finances of many working- and middle-class families, recovering much ground with such voters before November may be tough for most Democratic candidates. Those working-class voters “know the shoe is pinching,” says Tom Davis, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, quoting the late political scientist V. O. Key Jr.The more realistic route for Democrats in key races may be to defend, as much as possible, the inroads they made into the white-collar suburbs of virtually every major metropolitan area during the past three elections. Although, compared with 2020, the party will likely lose ground with all groups, Democrats are positioned to hold much more of their previous support among college-educated than noncollege voters, according to Ethan Winter, a Democratic pollster.An array of recent public polls suggest he’s right. A Monmouth University poll released today showed that white voters without a college degree preferred Republicans for Congress by a 25-percentage-point margin, but white voters with at least a four-year degree backed Democrats by 18 points.A recent Fox News Poll in Pennsylvania showed the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman crushing Republican Mehmet Oz among college-educated white voters, while the two closely split those without degrees. Another recent Fox News poll in Georgia found Senator Raphael Warnock trailing his opponent Herschel Walker among noncollege white voters by more than 40 percentage points but running essentially even among those with degrees (which would likely be enough to win, given his preponderant support in the Black community). The most recent public surveys in New Hampshire and Wisconsin likewise found Republicans leading comfortably among voters without advanced education, but Democrats holding solid advantages among those with four-year or graduate degrees. A poll this week by Siena College, in New York, found Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul splitting noncollege voters evenly with Republican Lee Zeldin, but beating him by more than two-to-one among those with a degree.This strength among college-educated voters may be worth slightly more for Democrats in the midterms than in a general election. Voters without a degree cast a majority of ballots in both types of contests. But calculations by Catalist, a Democratic-voter-targeting firm, and Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout, have found that voters with a college degree consistently make up about three to four percentage points more of the electorate in a midterm than in a presidential election. “When we see lower turnout elections,” like a midterm, “the gap between high-education and low-education voters increases,” McDonald told me. In close races, that gap could place a thumb on the scale for Democrats, partially offsetting the tendency of decreased turnout from younger and nonwhite voters in midterm elections.Republicans have mostly counted on voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation and Biden’s overall performance to recover lost ground in white-collar communities. But as the polls noted above suggest, many voters in those places are, at least for now, decoupling their disenchantment with Biden from their choices in House, Senate, and governor’s races. “Voters have concerns about the direction of the country,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me, “but they’re terrified of the direction it would take if these MAGA Republicans took power.”[Geraldo L. Cadava]: The battle for latino voters in the rust bell.One reason for this decoupling may be that, although all families are feeling the effects of inflation, for white-collar professionals, it generally represents something more like an inconvenience than the agonizing vise it constitutes for working-class families.That doesn’t mean white-collar voters are unconcerned about the economy, but with less worry about week-to-week financial survival, they are more likely to be influenced by the trifecta of issues that have exploded in visibility over the past several months: abortion rights,  gun control, and the threats to American democracy revealed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.As last night’s Kansas result showed, abortion rights may be an especially powerful weapon for Democrats in white-collar areas. Polls, such as a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, have generally found that about two-thirds or more of voters with at least a four-year college degree believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. That support is evident even in states that generally lean toward the GOP: Recent public surveys found that strong majorities of voters with college degrees supported legal abortion in Georgia and Texas, and another survey showed majority backing among more affluent voters in Arizona.In deep-red Kansas, two-thirds or more of voters have just supported abortion rights in four of the state’s five largest counties. Particularly noteworthy was the huge turnout and massive margin (68 percent to 32 percent at latest count) for the pro-choice position in Johnson County, a well-educated suburb of Kansas City that demographically resembles many of the suburban areas that have moved toward Democrats around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix.Republican candidates this year have ceded virtually no ground to the pro-abortion-rights or pro-gun-control sentiments in those suburban areas. With the national protection for abortion revoked by the Supreme Court, almost all Republican-controlled states are on track to ban or restrict the practice. In swing states that have not yet done so, GOP gubernatorial candidates are promising to pursue tight limits. Dixon, the GOP’s Michigan nominee, said recently that she would push for an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother (while she would allow them only in cases that threaten the mother’s life). Asked during a recent interview about a hypothetical case of a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by an uncle, Dixon explicitly said the teenager should carry the baby to term because “a life is a life for me.”Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, told me that the magnitude of the pro-abortion-rights vote in Kansas was “unexpected,” but it does not guarantee Democratic candidates’ suburban domination in November. “This was a rare up or down vote on this issue,” he told me in an email. “November will be different, as voters will have lots of reasons to vote and lots of issues to consider … Polls consistently show the economy trumping this issue in the minds of the voters.”But Democrats believe that the contrast on abortion will be highly consequential, especially in governor’s races, where Democrats such as the incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and the nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are presenting themselves as a last line of defense against Republicans intent on banning the procedure. Suburban “voters might have been thinking about voting Republican because they are unhappy with the direction of country and inflation, and they might decide to back Whitmer because of abortion,” Winter, the Democratic pollster, told me.The choice may not carry such immediate implications in House and Senate races, but leading Democrats are running on promises to pass legislation restoring the national right to abortion, while Republicans are either opposing such a bill or signaling openness to imposing a national ban. The two top Democratic challengers for Republican-held Senate seats (John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin) have both called for ending the filibuster to pass legislation codifying national abortion rights.Davis, the former NRCC chair who represented a suburban Northern Virginia district, believes that even in white-collar communities supportive of abortion rights and gun control, Democrats won’t escape discontent over inflation. If Republicans could frame the election simply as a referendum on Biden’s performance, Davis told me, “that’s their path to victory and a path to an electoral landslide.” But, he added, the choice by GOP voters in so many states to nominate “exotic candidates” mostly linked to Trump has provided Democrats with an opportunity, particularly in higher-profile Senate and governor contests, to make this “a choice election.” And that, he said, gives Democrats a shot at winning enough “white ticket-splitters” to at least hold down their losses.Given the headwinds, Democrats would take a November outcome in which they narrowly lose the House but hold their Senate majority and preserve control of the governorships in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while perhaps adding some others, such as Arizona. With Biden’s approval rating still scuffling, that outcome is hardly guaranteed. But it remains a possibility largely because, as yesterday’s primaries showed, Republicans have responded to their suburban erosion by betting even more heavily on the policies and rhetoric that triggered their decline in the first place. In November, white-collar suburbs may be the deciding factor between a Republican rout and a split decision that leaves Democrats still standing to fight another day.

The Masters campaign and the Lake campaign seem to represent different answers to that question — Masters leveraging Trump’s support to try to push the party in a more nationalist or populist direction on trade, foreign policy, family policy, other issues, and Lake just promising to stop the next (alleged) steal. Or do we think that it’s all the same phenomenon underneath?

Bovard: A very significant part of Trump’s appeal, what he perhaps taught the G.O.P., was that he spoke for voters who stood outside of party orthodoxy on a number of issues. And that’s where Masters tried to distinguish himself. He had a provocative campaign message early in his campaign: American families should be able to survive on a single income. That presents all kinds of challenges to standard Republican economic policy, how we think about family policy and how the two fit together. He also seems to be fearless in the culture wars, something else that Republicans are anxious to see.

So this constant distilling into the “Big Lie” overlooks something key: A sea change is slowly happening on the right as it relates to policy expectations.

Miller: But you know who distilled the Masters campaign into the “Big Lie”? Blake Masters. One of his ads begins, “I think Trump won in 2020.” This is an insane view, and I assume none of us think Masters really believes it. So fealty to Trump’s delusions is the opening ante here. Had Masters run a campaign about his niche, Peter Thiel-influenced issue obsessions but said Trump lost and he was harming Republican voters by continuing to delude them about our democracy, he would’ve lost like Rusty Bowers did.

Opinion Debate Will the Democrats face a midterm wipeout? Elizabeth Warren explains her priorities and writes, “if we fail to use the months remaining before the elections to deliver on more of our agenda, Democrats are headed toward big losses.”

explains her priorities and writes, “if we fail to use the months remaining before the elections to deliver on more of our agenda, Democrats are headed toward big losses.” Mark Penn writes that “without a U-turn by the Biden administration,” voters increasingly motivated by fear over a variety of issues “will generate a wave election like those in 1994 and 2010.”

writes that “without a U-turn by the Biden administration,” voters increasingly motivated by fear over a variety of issues “will generate a wave election like those in 1994 and 2010.” Thomas B. Edsall asks, as the midterms approach, “to what degree are Democratic difficulties inevitable,” and which challenges stem from the party’s strategic choices?

asks, as the midterms approach, “to what degree are Democratic difficulties inevitable,” and which challenges stem from the party’s strategic choices? Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging.

I do think Masters has some differentiated policy ideas that are probably, not certainly, reflective of where the G.O.P. is headed, but that wasn’t the main thing here.

Douthat: So Tim, speaking for the “it’s Trump fealty all the way down” camp, what separates the Arizona results from the very different recent results in Georgia, where Trump fealty was insufficient to defeat either Brian Kemp or even Brad Raffensperger?

Image Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany, center, on Wednesday with the Siemens gas turbine intended for the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline in Russia Credit... Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Standing before a hulking metal turbine that normally propels natural gas from Russia to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany rejected Russia’s contention that technical problems were behind the sharp curtailment in gas flows to Germany.

He said the only reason the machine had not yet been returned to Russia after undergoing maintenance work was that Gazprom, Russia’s state energy giant, did not want it back.

The turbine, which is at the heart of a dispute between Germany and Gazprom, was on display Wednesday at a news event in the western German city of Mülheim an der Ruhr, where its has been stored since it was returned from refurbishment in Canada.

Gazprom and Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, have blamed Siemens Energy, the turbine’s manufacturer, for delays in returning it to Russia. They have repeatedly cited the need for “required documents and clarifications,” and said the turbine’s absence was the reason it had slashed gas flows to 20 percent of capacity.

Gazprom issued a statement later on Wednesday saying the sanctions enacted by Canada, Germany and Britain prevented it from taking the turbine back. But Mr. Scholz had said earlier that nothing was standing in the way of its return.

After weeks of releasing only terse responses, the German side seemed intent on calling the bluff of Gazprom and Mr. Putin.

“It is obvious that nothing, nothing at all, stands in the way of the further transport of this turbine and its installation in Russia. It can be transported and used at any time,” Mr. Scholz told reporters. “There is no technical reason whatsoever for the reduction of gas supplies.”

European officials say Russia is cutting back its gas deliveries to punish Europe for its opposition to the war in Ukraine. In mid-June, Gazprom cut back the amount of gas it was delivering to Germany through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to only 40 percent of possible capacity. Last week, it reduced the amount again by half.

Russia has been restricting gas supplies to Germany Daily flow of natural gas via Nord Stream 1 pipeline

Germany still relies on Russia to meet about a third of its natural gas needs, down from more than half before the start of the war but still enough to leave the country reeling from the cuts. It is scrambling to store up enough of the fuel before demand rises in winter, in hopes of staving off rationing and shutdowns of key industries if Russia cut off supplies entirely.

Gas storage facilities in Germany were 69 percent full on Wednesday, but officials told companies and citizens to begin reducing their energy usage as much as possible while the weather was still warm. Nearly half of all homes in Germany are heated with gas, and households, along with essential infrastructure such as hospitals and rescue services, will be given priority in the event of shortages.

Mr. Putin has suggested that Germany could solve its gas problem by opening the second pipeline that was mothballed days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Nord Stream 2.

That proposal was echoed by Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, who remains close to Mr. Putin despite being outcast by his own political party, the Social Democrats, and many Germans. In an interview with the German newsweekly Stern, Mr. Schröder, who met with the Russian president in Moscow last week, also said the Kremlin was open to talks to end the war, on condition that Ukraine surrender its claim to Crimea — which Russia annexed in 2014 — as well as its aspirations to join NATO.

Asked about the prospect of restarting Nord Stream 2, Mr. Scholz stifled a laugh, pointing out that its twin pipeline running under the Baltic Sea, Nord Stream 1, was already being underused, as were other overland links through Ukraine, as well as one through Belarus and Poland — that Russia had put under sanctions.

“There’s enough capacity with Nord Stream 1,” he said. “All the contracts that Russia has concluded for the whole of Europe can be fulfilled with the help of this pipeline.”

The reduced flows of natural gas have caused prices in Europe to jump to record highs. On Wednesday they remained about double what they were in mid-June, when Russia began restricting flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

Christian Bruch, the head of Siemens Energy, who appeared with Mr. Scholz, said that his company was in regular talks with Gazprom over the issue of the turbine and that it was eager to return it so other Siemens turbines used in the pipeline could also be taken for maintenance.

But the Russian company has a “different view” of the situation, he said, without elaborating.

“This turbine is ready to go immediately,” Mr. Scholz said. “If Russia does not take up this turbine now, it shows the whole world that not taking it is just an excuse to reduce gas supplies to Germany.”

Shortly after voting to impeach former President Donald Trump for his role in instigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Peter Meijer (R–Mich.) issued one of the more reflective statements you're likely to find in a congressional press release.
"This vote is not a victory. It isn't a victory for my party, and it isn't the victory the Democrats might think it is. I'm not sure it is a victory for our country," Meijer, who was one of just 10 Republicans to vote for impeachment, and the only first-term GOP member to do so, said. "But it is a call to action for us to reflect on these events and seek ways to correct them."
Later, he told The Atlantic's Tim Alberta that the Republican Party needed an intervention over its addiction to Trump—he wanted to provide "hope for some who wanted to [see] the Republican Party get past the darkness and the violence and that sense of foreboding and doom," even if it cost him a long career in politics.
On Tuesday night, it did.
Meijer narrowly lost a primary contest in Michigan's 3rd district to a Trump-backed challenger, John Gibbs, who has echoed Trump's conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. In a narrow sense, the result is yet another illustration of the current state of the GOP, where the former president's grievances continue to carry serious weight, particularly with the types of voters who turn out for primaries.
In that group of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, Meijer is now the second to lose a primary this year, following Rep. Tom Rice (R–S.C.). Four others retired rather than choosing to run again, and three are facing primary challenges later this year. Rep. David Valadao (R–Calif.) is the only member of the group to survive a primary so far.
But while Republican primary voters are ultimately responsible for the choices they make, the Democratic Party's cynical campaign strategies helped bring about last night's result.
As Reason's Robby Soave noted earlier this week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spent $435,000 on an ad claiming that Gibbs was "too conservative" for western Michigan—effectively boosting the election-denying Trump-endorsed candidate. The spending was not trivial: it was 100 times more than what Trump had actually donated to Gibbs' campaign.
"Politics is a dirty game, and both parties routinely engage in this sort of brinkmanship, doing whatever it takes to win more seats," Soave wrote. "But Democrats boosting Gibbs are squandering considerable moral high ground they might have otherwise possessed on the issue of the so-called existential threat to democracy."
Given how close the race turned out to be—Gibbs won by fewer than 4,000 votes out of more than 104,000 votes cast—it's certainly possible that the DCCC ad made a difference.
Democrats have turned to this same playbook elsewhere. In the Republican gubernatorial primary in Pennsylvania, for example, an ad funded by the presumptive Democratic nominee helped elevate state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R–Fayetteville) above a crowded field of GOP contenders. Mastriano participated in the January 6 protest in D.C. His refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania has stoked worries that he would refuse to certify a prospective Democratic win in 2024 if he wins this year's election. (In Pennsylvania, elections are overseen by the secretary of state, a position appointed by the governor).
In a post for Common Sense, Meijer wrote that Democrats are making similar efforts to boost Trumpy candidates in Colorado, Maryland, and Illinois.
The January 6 riot should have been a warning to both parties about the potentially dangerous mixture of rage and conspiratorial thinking that increasingly dominates right-wing politics. Instead, it has become just another opportunity for playing politics, as Democrats have cynically elevated the right-wing fringe they condemn as a threat to the future of American democracy.
But there is an added irony to what happened last night in Michigan. For now, Meijer represents the same district that was previously the domain of Justin Amash, the Republican-turned-Libertarian congressman who was ejected from the GOP for frequently criticizing Trump and, ultimately, for supporting Trump's first impeachment. Michigan's 3rd district has produced two consecutive independent-thinking, freedom-oriented Republican lawmakers. Tuesday's results ensure that there won't be a third, thanks to both halves of the two-party system.
Like Meijer observed about the impeachment vote, Tuesday's election result isn't the victory Democrats might think it is.
The post The Democratic Establishment Teamed Up With Trump To Oust Peter Meijer appeared first on Reason.com.

While this newsletter is about China, I’m not forgetting that the United States won a great victory this weekend. We finally tracked down and killed Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda and one of the masterminds of 9/11. Steve Hayes, Klon Kitchen, and I will be on Dispatch Live tonight to talk about Zawahiri, China, and Russia. Dispatch Live is for Dispatch members only, so if you haven’t joined yet, now’s your chance. Subscribe here before 8:00 p.m. ET, and you can watch us live and ask questions. See you soon!The plane carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi touches down in Taipei, Taiwan.(Photo by Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)There is an admirable consistency to Nancy’s Pelosi’s long opposition to the communist Chinese regime. Thirty-one years ago Pelosi stood alongside representatives Ben Jones and John Miller in the heart of Tiananmen Square and unfurled a banner that read, “To those who died for Democracy in China.” Police responded immediately, “roughing up” journalists who covered the moment and chasing Pelosi and her colleagues out of the square.She has confronted Chinese leaders directly about the plight of political prisoners. She has opposed Chinese efforts to host the Olympic Games. She has taken House members to Tibet. And today she became the highest-ranking U.S. politician to visit Taiwan since then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich visited in 1997. And she did it in spite of explicit Chinese threats against her flight, in spite of explicit Chinese warnings of military escalation, and in spite of administration misgivings. We are witnessing an important moment, for important reasons that go beyond Pelosi’s visit. While the eyes of the world were (rightly) focused on Pelosi, how many people were also tracking this report about the U.S. Pacific Fleet:

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I want to follow up on the topic of language evolution that I took up in my previous newsletter about how the word “satisfying” has taken on a new meaning among many of today’s kids. The bigger theme is that we all know language inevitably changes; it’s the way we got from Latin to French or from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe. But while that change is happening, we tend to see it as decay, sloth, maybe even a scourge.

A great example of this is what is happening with English’s past tense forms — I hear from someone appalled about it roughly once a month. Namely, in standard English, many verbs come in different forms for present, past and past participle: “sing,” “sang,” “sung”; “take,” “took,” “taken.” But in colloquial English, there’s a tendency to use the past form as the participle form as well. Someone gets “beat up” rather than “beaten up.” If you are cheated, sometimes you get “took” rather than “taken.” As Cleo sings in Frank Loesser’s opera-esque Broadway musical, “The Most Happy Fella,” “But when you’re just 27 in his book, gettin’ took out is much more like gettin’ took.” Cole Porter had it in the song “Friendship” from the musical “Du Barry Was a Lady,” with the line “When other friendships have been forgot, ours will still be hot.” And this wasn’t just showbiz goofiness; one of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous lines was “That years of love have been forgot.”

Many of us process this as distinctly nonstandard — infra dig, as it were. Or in a case like Poe’s, maybe just quirky. Surely, the cultivated person doesn’t go in for such “errors.” But in real life, many, if you will, “supra dig” English speakers routinely use the past form instead of the participle form. I know this partly from being a linguist and partly from hearing it in the wild, week in and week out. Just recently, I’ve quietly jotted a bunch of examples from casual conversations with urbane, college-educated people of the sort who read this newspaper daily.

(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)Within weeks, Texas death row inmate Ramiro Gonzales may face execution for a murder he committed in 2001. What makes his case notable is that someone else’s life hangs in the balance as well: the desperate person to whom he is hoping to give his kidney.For many months, Gonzales, 39, had been exchanging letters with Cantor Michael Zoosman, an ordained Jewish clergyman living in Maryland. As co-founder of an anti-death penalty advocacy group, Zoosman first wrote to Gonzales last year as part of outreach to inmates with scheduled execution dates.After a month of correspondence, Zoosman told Gonzales that a member of his congregation needed a kidney. Gonzales offered his, but eventually found that his blood type wasn’t a match. Rather than give up, Gonzales still wanted to be a “Good Samaritan” donor, giving to someone with whom he did not have a connection.But Gonzales’ initial request for a stay of execution so he could make the donation was denied. He did eventually receive a stay on different grounds—because of a concern about an expert witness over a decade ago at Gonzales’ murder trial, who has since admitted that his testimony was flawed. The resulting stay gave extra time for another potential recipient, Judy Frith, who matches Gonzales’ rare blood type, to send a letter to Governor Greg Abbott on July 10. “I cannot emphasize enough what a precious gift you would be giving someone if you allowed Mr. Gonzales the opportunity to donate his kidney,” she wrote. Were Frith to receive a new kidney, she would be freed from her own prison of dialysis. But even so, according to Gonzales’ lawyers, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice won’t permit him to go through with the donation, citing concerns that the surgery could “possibly [interfere] with the court-ordered execution date” and that the prison system might be unable to cover the costs of the procedure.The nation has a crying need for organs. About a dozen people die each day for want of a kidney, not to mention those removed from the list because they fell too ill to tolerate transplant surgery even if an organ would finally come along. With the crisis this acute, why are we depriving recipients of a chance at life—and donors a chance to do good?     In 2006, and again in 2016, I received a kidney transplant—both times from dear friends. After the first transplant, I became a vocal proponent of compensating kidney donors to help solve the dire organ shortage. (Currently, federal law prohibits compensation for donations, due to fears of both abuse and third-party profit-seeking.) For prisoners, becoming a donor can be additionally difficult. The federal prison system, for example, does not permit posthumous donations, and, like some states, limits living donations to immediate family members. While ethical and medical concerns may understandably motivate such policies, the continued barriers disregard pragmatic ways to make donation feasible—and, most importantly, often ignore the desires of inmates themselves. In 2011, shortly after writing an article on ways to facilitate donations by prisoners, I received a letter from the high-profile killer Christian Longo, who still awaits execution at Oregon State Penitentiary. For years, Longo had petitioned Oregon to let him donate. “There is no way to atone for my crimes, but I believe that a profound benefit to society can come from my circumstances,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. Even though Longo wished for his organs to be donated after his execution, Oregon authorities denied his request. That same year, I also heard from Shannon Ross, then 29, at the Stanley Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. He was eight years into a 17-year sentence for reckless homicide. “I am hoping you can give me some advice about my desire to get the state [of Wisconsin] to allow inmates to donate their organs—without compensation,” Ross wrote. “I am not simply looking to be humored as I try to make my time pass faster. I have been pursuing this objective for five years now.”Ross wanted to donate one of his kidneys to a stranger. The penal system proved to be a barrier. “As a rule, we are banned from live organ donation,” he told me. “After how much we have taken from society, it’s unacceptable that society is denied the opportunity to receive something so valuable from us in return.”Refusing Gonzales the opportunity to donate may make sense to those who believe that a person responsible for a monstrous crime should, on principle, be denied anything he desires.But if the Governor of Texas is committed to doing what is morally righteous, then he should allow Gonzales to save a precious human life.  Sally Satel is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

On most evenings this past spring, the man who lives across the street sat at his small desk, turned on the lamp, and began to write as the light faded. The white curtains in his room were seldom drawn. From where I sat, I had a clear view of him, and he, were he to look up from his writing, would have had a clear view of a house across the street, where a woman with dark hair and a faintly olive complexion was seated by a window, watching him write. At the moment he glanced up from his page, the woman supposed him to be contemplating the look, or perhaps the sound, of the sentence he had just written. The sentence was this: “Since then I have tried to avoid those rooms that grow steadily more crowded with works to explain away Time.”

On certain evenings, the watching woman speculated that the writing man might be the author of the sentence, the reclusive Australian writer Gerald Murnane. She thought this even though Murnane lived thousands of miles away, in Goroke, a town of some three hundred people, in eastern Victoria, and even though the man, with his bunched silver hair and his wasting English face, looked nothing like the black-and-white photograph in front of her, on the cover of one of his books. The photograph showed an older man wearing a clean white shirt and seated in a dark chair, with one hand holding the other in his lap. He was scowling at a point just beyond the lower border of the photograph. The woman speculated that he might have been scowling at the photographer’s shoes, or at a misshapen stain on the floor. Or perhaps he was not scowling at a shoe or a stain but, rather, concentrating on an image he had caught sight of in his mind’s eye. For him, that image would not have been here—the room in which the photograph was taken at the precise moment the photographer released the camera’s shutter. It would have been there—the foreground of his mind, a fictional place, set at a fictional distance from where the author writes and the reader reads and the photographer takes a picture.

During the years the woman was studying literature in school, she had taken a class on fiction and the mind. Almost all the assigned readings were by the renowned Russian scholar of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin. When trying to explain when and where a novel took place, Bakhtin spoke of the “chronotope,” the peculiar fusion of time and space which created and saturated the invisible landscape of fiction, shaping the thoughts of all who dwelled in it. In the classical epoch, man’s speech and his thoughts were directed outward, to people who gathered to listen in the squares and the agoras. Yet the centuries that followed had warped man’s public essence, making him aware of the possibilities of a private life of the mind. He had grown secretive and shameful, split between his inner and his outer existences, a core and a shell. The landscape inside his mind had broken loose from the landscape outside it. Man, Bakhtin wrote, in a formulation that seemed to distill all the pathos and the possibility of our silences and concealments, had become “drenched in muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness.”

The idea of the chronotope had returned to the woman while she read Gerald Murnane’s third book, “The Plains.” The word “Time” was capitalized throughout the novel, evidence of the same reverence that led other men to capitalize the word “God.” The narrator of “The Plains” was a filmmaker. He had arrived on the plains hoping to capture the way of life of the plainsmen and, through it, the meaning of the landscape. But he had discovered that neither their speech nor their thought could be assimilated to the visible and audible impressions of his medium; that each plainsman had his own understanding of the shape and the significance of the landscape; and that the true substance of each plainsman’s life was nothing anyone could hear or see but the distance he felt between his younger self and the man he was now. The narrator, his film abandoned, spent his days in the library, surrounded by great works on Time about the distance between the memory of an anticipated happiness and the perceived disappointments of the present. These were lonely books which some readers would have called novels, but which the plainsmen called moral philosophy.

As for Bakhtin, so for Murnane: a passage of fiction is a series of utterances that promise access to a time and a space that could never be realized outside of prose—a place whose autonomy grants it a pleasure and a mystery entirely its own. Recalling the plains one evening, I called my husband into the room where I was sitting, so that he might look at the writing man. In a concerned voice, my husband informed me that the man was not, in fact, writing. He was watching television. It was likely that he had been watching television this whole time.

Gerald Murnane was born in 1939 in Coburg, a northern suburb of Melbourne, the son of a devoted, if unsuccessful, gambler on horse races. He was raised Catholic, which, as he has reflected, meant for a long time believing in the reality of men and women he could not see. When he turned eighteen, he entered a seminary. It took him fourteen weeks to leave and a few years more to lose his faith completely. During the next two decades, he taught primary school, edited technical publications, and married a woman called Catherine. They had three sons, and Murnane became, in his words, a househusband, who wrote in the hours he was not cleaning or caring for the children. His first two novels, “Tamarisk Row” (1974) and “A Lifetime on Clouds” (1976), were published to moderate acclaim. After six years of struggle and rejection, he published “The Plains,” his best-known book, whose dazzling merger of mirage and reality marked a turning point in his career. Four times, he has claimed to have written the last book he would ever write: in 1991, a year after he published “Velvet Waters”; in 2005, the year he published “Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs”; in 2017, the year he published “Border Districts”; and in 2022, with the publication of “Last Letter to a Reader” (And Other Stories).

The world is fortunate that he has not yet made good on this claim. His inability to stop writing has resulted in a voice that has spoken in an almost unbroken tenor across some fifteen strange and brilliant books; a voice in which one hears a different notion of life’s time than what can be measured by counting the years that elapse from the day of one’s birth to the day of one’s death. In part, his work is marked by its recurring subject matter, the details that Murnane has claimed “wink” at him, demanding his attention. In his youth, there were the glass marbles he lined up on a rug and pushed around an improvised course, envisioning their swirl of colors as the racing liveries of horses. In his adolescence, there was an idea of America created by listening to music on the radio and reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” In his adulthood, there were dreams of colored glass, the vulnerability of his young sons, and the novels of Emily Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust, whose “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” he has read regularly, and which the narrator of one of his books goes so far as to copy passages from in longhand. And, throughout, there are the several hundred women with whom he falls in love, to whom he never speaks, and for whom he seems to write, as if to insist that the relationship between reader and writer is one of benevolent voyeurism.

By design, Murnane’s books do not reward discussion of plot, characterization, or historical setting. Beginning with “The Plains,” most of them concern the twinned acts of reading and of writing about the act of reading. This means that they are, in essence, a record of the thinking that takes place when one mind must struggle, in a sometimes pleasant, sometimes maddening, sometimes revelatory way, to discern the pattern of meaning that has been laid out by another. Murnane has referred to what he writes as true fiction. True fiction, he has claimed, is “an account of certain of the contents of the mind of the narrator.” It is a report of the narrator’s “contemplation of what did happen or what did not happen or what might have happened or what can never happen.”

The act of contemplation is rendered in a compact and highly finished style that distinguishes Murnane both from his predecessor Proust and from his contemporaries W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Jon Fosse, and Rachel Cusk. Murnane has described himself as a technical writer, and his outspoken and fastidious devotion to grammar steers a great deal of the thinking his narrators perform. This thinking is usually about the nature or the essence of fiction’s relation to life, and it often begins with verbs of supposition. “I, who dislike the word imagine, would prefer to use such an expression as speculate about,” reports the narrator of “A Million Windows.” “Speculate,” “suppose,” “presume,” and “seem”—as in “I seem to recall”—all shift narrative into the subjunctive mood, in which ambitions, conjectures, and longings reign.

The mood is enhanced by the sudden appearance of the perfect continuous conditional tense, which considers not what was, or what had been, but what would have been, or might have been, in certain secluded corners of the narrator’s mind. And, in these corners, one also finds a series of smaller, but no less essential, repetitions that hint at how far fiction may range from fact: the avoidance of proper names when referring to historical figures or locations, or the application of adjectives like “certain” or “so-called,” or adverbs like “probably” or “surely.” The effect is a paradoxical sense of both particularity and indeterminacy, exposure and concealment.

Consider the opening paragraph of “A History of Books,” in which the narrator reads what sounds like a work of magical realism:

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb penned an op-ed in the New York Times published on Saturday arguing that the United States lacks a federal infrastructure capable of dealing with public health emergencies like monkeypox and COVID-19.
“Our country’s response to monkeypox ‌‌has been plagued by the same shortcomings we had with Covid-19,” Gottlieb wrote in the op-ed. 
“Now if monkeypox ‌gains a permanent foothold in the U‌nited States and becomes an endemic virus that joins our circulating repertoire of pathogens, it will be one of the worst public health failures in modern times not only because of the pain and peril of the disease but also because it was so avoidable,” he said. “Our lapses extend beyond political decision making to the agencies tasked with protecting us from these threats.”
Gottlieb said the country did not test enough people for monkeypox in the early days of the outbreak, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not expand testing to large commercial labs until late June.
“Its cultural instinct is to take a deliberative approach, debating each decision,” he said of CDC. “With Covid, the virus ‌‌gained ground quickly. With ‌‌monkeypox, which spreads more slowly, typically through very close contact, the shortcomings of CDC’s cultural approach haven’t been as acute yet. But the shortfalls are the same.”
CDC has reported nearly 5,200 cases as of Sunday, and the outbreak has reached all but three states: Montana, Vermont and Wyoming.
Monkeypox spreads through close contact with an infected animal or person, generally through lesions, body fluids, contaminated materials and respiratory droplets. Those droplets can only travel up to a few feet and usually require prolonged contact for transmission.The virus has largely been detected in men who have sex with men, leading some jurisdictions to prioritize those groups to receive the currently limited number of available monkeypox vaccine doses.
Gottlieb called for CDC to continue leading the nation’s pandemic response, but he argued that it should transfer some of its disease prevention work to other agencies.
He called for the FDA to manage smoking and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to handle cancer and heart disease.
“Focus the CDC more on its core mission of outbreak response,” Gottlieb wrote. “And imbue the agency with the national security mind-set that it had at its origins. If the CDC mission were more tightly focused on the elements required for handling contagion, Congress might be more willing to invest it with the robust authority to do that targeted mission well.”
But Gottlieb cast doubt on the feasibility of reform to equip CDC and other public health agencies with new tools and authority, citing his conversations with lawmakers and their staffs that showed what he called a “scant appetite” for such a move.
“After Covid, there’s a view among some that public health agencies used flawed analysis and miscalculated their advice,” Gottlieb wrote. “Securing a political consensus that the CDC needs to be further empowered to complete its mission ‌‌ — for example, invested with the authority to compel reporting from states ‌‌ — is politically unobtainable.”

Kissinger’s Vision of Society By: Pierre Lemieux

The Economist of last week reviews the latest book of Henry Kissinger who, at 99, does not seem to have changed intellectually (“The Vision Thing: Henry Kissinger Explains What He Thinks Makes Great Leadership,” July 21, 2022):

In his latest book, Mr Kissinger, an unofficial adviser and friend to many presidents and prime ministers, considers how six leaders from the second half of the 20th century reoriented their countries and made a lasting impact on the world.

These leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon (of whom Kissinger was Secretary of state), Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. I would say it is not clear what most of of them, if any, did besides “reorienting their countries” or “their societies,” as the Economist writes, which means bossing people around. It is not clear how these leaders have contributed to advancing the liberty and dignity of individuals. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher is the exception, but we may have doubts that the world would be much different or worse if she had never existed. One can argue that these statocrats at least prevented worse people for getting in power, but that does appear to be Kissinger’s argument.

It seems that, for Kissinger, history is and should be the product of the actions of good and bad leaders. We can hope that God will give us good ones. Since I haven’t read the book, I am open to surprises, but this impression, as conveyed by the Economist’s reviewer, looks consistent with what a casual observer of Kissinger’s career and occasional reader of his newspaper articles can gather.

The reviewer ends by quoting what he says is the book’s warning:

No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception.

What does that mean? How can society lose faith in itself? How could it first obtain faith in itself? How can society impugn anything? Where does one find society’s self-perception? Does she reveals it through our collective mouth? Whom does she speak to? I suspect that Kissinger’s answer to the last bit is: to the great leader (flectamus genua), who, he writes on (thanks to Amazon’s “Look Inside”!), represents “the generosity of public spirit which inspires sacrifice and service.” Like, say, Nixon ordering a break-in into the Watergate building? Many of Kissinger’s half-dozen idols, if not Nixon himself, have likely done even worse.

I suspect that Dr. Kissinger has no knowledge of the welfare-economics and social-choice literature that have thrown substantial doubts on the usefulness and even the mathematical possibility of viewing society as something like a big individual of which we are the cells and the leader is the brain.

This line of reflection, I think, points out to the fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the socialist and the conservative, who both favor collective choices over individual choices; and, on the other hand, the classical liberal and the libertarian, who (1) understands that we can only analyze society through methodological individualism, and (2) accepts that, from a normative viewpoint, only human individuals ultimately count and that they count equally.

In early February, Bernie Sanders advocated US involvement in peace talks to head off an “enormously destructive war” in Ukraine. We should have listened.

Senator Bernie Sanders speaking with attendees at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, California, on June 2, 2019. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
 
What would the last two years have been like if Bernie Sanders had beaten Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination and won the general election? How, for example, would he have handled Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — or would the outcome of other races around the country have changed enough with Bernie at the top of the ticket for the Senate to look substantially different?
We can only guess at the answers to most such questions. We can, however, be confident about at least one aspect of this alternate timeline. Foreign policy is the area where the executive branch has the most power, and we know how a President Sanders would have addressed the crisis in Ukraine — because Senator Sanders spelled out his approach weeks before the Russian invasion.
In a February 8 op-ed for the Guardian, Bernie correctly predicted many of the grim consequences that have played out in the last five months and urged the United States to get involved in negotiations to head off the catastrophe. We should have listened.

Unintended Consequences
“Wars,” Sanders wrote in February, “have unintended consequences.” In the case of the impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, he predicted massive civilian casualties, the large-scale movement of refugees into nearby countries, and economic ripple effects “with impacts on energy, banking, food and the day-to-day needs of ordinary people throughout the entire world.”
All of the above has filled headlines for months. Some of the other possible consequences laid out in Sanders’s op-ed are less obvious — but they should be keeping everyone up at night. The kind of global cooperation we’ll need to “address the existential threat of global climate crisis and future pandemics” is badly undermined by skyrocketing tensions between major powers. And the most “horrifying” possibility, he wrote, is that those tensions could escalate into a wider war.
Since Bernie wrote the op-ed, that danger of escalation has only increased. Seth Moulton of the House Armed Services Committee has said, “We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia, and it’s important that we win.”
The congressman was choosing his words carefully. It’s not just that US military aid to Ukraine has amounted to many times that country’s total military budget. US intelligence sources have bragged to the New York Times about helping the Ukrainian military assassinate Russian generals and sink Russian ships. That takes us into territory where it’s disturbingly accurate of Moulton to say that the war between the world’s two major nuclear powers is only being conducted “somewhat” through a proxy on the American side.

What Bernie Would Have Done — and Biden Should Still Do
Sanders condemned the impending invasion without equivocation, clearly identifying Russian president Vladimir Putin as the man “most responsible for this looming crisis” and calling for targeted sanctions on “Putin and his associates” if they went through with their plans. But he was also clear that, however morally and legally indefensible, Russian policy was grounded in ordinary geopolitical motivations. It’s worth remembering that concerns about increased American influence on Ukraine and about the possibility that Ukraine might one day join NATO were expressed by Putin’s predecessors long before he came to power.
To put it simply, even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin, Russia, like the United States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its neighbors. Does anyone really believe that the United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico was to form a military alliance with a US adversary?
This is exactly the kind of reasoning now widely denounced as whataboutism. And anyone who suggests that Russia has any motivations deeper than the personal megalomania of its president is widely portrayed as a Putin apologist — see, for example, the widespread condemnation of Noam Chomsky.
But both impulses are dangerously misguided. Just as, in the aftermath of 9/11, anyone who thought al-Qaeda had motivations more complicated or explicable than “hating us for our freedom” was, according to a ubiquitous line of argument, on the side of the terrorists — a claim that was used to shut down dissent at a time when the United States was initiating catastrophic wars in the Middle East — parallel accusations of Putin apologism are used to enforce ideological conformity at a time when escalation of an increasingly less indirect conflict between nuclear powers endangers the entire planet. Trying to understand what causes a geopolitical actor to do something is just not the same as claiming that what they did was morally justified.
And the prohibition on “whataboutism” is, in practice, an excuse not to apply consistent standards to the actions of rival powers. The invasion of Iraq, for example, was grotesquely unjustifiable. But I wouldn’t have wanted Russia or China to start by arming the Republican Guard to the teeth and then to openly signal a willingness to be more and more directly involved in the conflict — for example, by Chinese intelligence sources bragging to the People’s Daily that they’d been involved in operations to assassinate American generals. What I would have welcomed, though, would have been any last-minute attempt by one of those powers to broker peace talks to head off the disaster.
At the end of the op-ed, Bernie urged his readers to remember “the horrors that a war in the region would cause” and urged the United States to “work hard to achieve a realistic and mutually agreeable solution — one that is acceptable to Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and our European allies — and that prevents what could be the worst European war in 75 years.”
If Sanders had been president and tried to carry out this approach, would he have succeeded? We can’t know that for sure. But we know what happened when Biden didn’t even try.
We’re often told that because it’s “their fight,” it would be arrogant and imperialistic of the United States to take a proactive stance in negotiations. This is hard to take seriously — and it would be even if Volodymyr Zelensky himself hadn’t repeatedly urged the United States and other Western powers to join negotiations with Putin.
Flooding the country with heavy weaponry, sinking Russian ships, and assassinating Russian generals doesn’t constitute arrogant interference in someone else’s conflict but brokering peace negotiations does? The logic is hard to follow.
There is a popular argument that says none of this matters because Putin would never agree to an acceptable negotiated settlement anyway. Sometimes French president Emmanuel Macron’s failure in his prewar attempt to achieve a diplomatic settlement is cited as proof. But the United States, unlike France, is the primary country arming and funding Ukraine’s military and the primary source of sanctions on Russia. Biden would have vastly more leverage than Macron. And it’s absurd to start with the premise that negotiations might not work and conclude that we shouldn’t even try.
If Sanders had been president back in February, he would have tried. Maybe the effort wouldn’t have succeeded. But it’s infuriating that Biden didn’t even attempt such an approach before pouring tens of billions of dollars into a proxy war whose ruinous effects have been felt all around the world.
The thousands who have died in the last five months can’t be brought back to life. Ukrainians who have lost limbs to Russian bombs can’t grow them back. But for the sake of alleviating the global food crisis, foreclosing the slim but terrifying possibility that the war in Ukraine will escalate into a wider conflict, and saving all the Ukrainian civilians and Ukrainian and Russian soldiers who are going to lose their lives if the war “just” keeps grinding on the way it has for another five months or five years, the world very badly needs Biden to take Bernie’s advice from February and give peace a chance.

Attorney General Merrick Garland. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images.)Hey,Here’s a general rule of thumb (it’s not an iron law or anything, just a good practice when it comes to media consumption): If a headline counts as a bombshell, ask yourself whether it would still be a bombshell if the opposite were true.For instance, “Scientists Invent Faster Than Light Travel,” or “NASA Discovers Intelligent Life on Mars” would be big news. But “Scientists Still Can’t Crack Faster Than Light Travel” or “NASA Mission Reports Lifeless Rocks Found on Mars” wouldn’t be that big a deal.Now consider this headline that popped up pretty much everywhere:Axios: “Merrick Garland: DOJ won't rule out prosecuting Trump”National Review: “Merrick Garland Won’t Rule Out Prosecuting Trump over January 6”Fox News: “AG Garland refuses to rule out prosecuting Trump for Jan. 6”CNN: “Merrick Garland does not rule out charging Trump and others in January 6 probe”(Full disclosure: The Morning Dispatch didn’t use the “doesn’t rule out” formulation in a headline, but it does appear in a small item.)Ask yourself: What if it was the opposite headline? “Garland Rules Out Criminal Charges of Trump,” or, “AG Refuses to Consider Criminal Prosecution of Trump.”I would argue—heck, not only would I argue it, I’m literally arguing it right now—that this would be a much bigger story. In other words, if Garland said that he would not even consider pressing charges against Trump regardless of what his investigators found in a still-ongoing inquiry, that would be a huge deal. “Yes, yes, we found a video of him bludgeoning a nun with a frozen Trump steak and eating her pancreas, but we already ruled out pressing charges regardless of what evidence we turned up.”   In other words, Garland said exactly what he was supposed to say. In fact, he had no choice but to say it.

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Keir Starmer is the Goldilocks of radicalism. He’s tried throughout his leadership to get it just right, to distance himself from the Corbyn era while maintaining some of the policy commitments of that time.
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, stumbled on the problem with that strategy in an interview with the BBC this morning. In answer to a question about nationalising rail, energy and water companies she said that “spending billions of pounds on nationalising things… just doesn’t stack up against our fiscal rules”. However, Louise Haigh, the shadow transport secretary, had told the journal of the train drivers’ union Aslef four months ago that Labour was “totally committed to public ownership” of the railways, as it was in 2019 and 2017.
A Labour spokesperson said later that Reeves was saying Labour would be “pragmatic” about rail ownership. No one seems to have told Haigh: she soon restated Labour’s commitment to nationalisation on Twitter. When asked about the issue this morning after a speech setting out his economic vision, Starmer sided with Reeves, saying he wanted to be “pragmatic about [nationalisation] rather than ideological”. 
Where does this leave the party? Starmer’s comment will cement the perception among the left of the party that he has abandoned the pledges he made during his leadership bid. No surprise there. But it’s interesting why many want public ownership in the next Labour manifesto. Part of the reason is because it’s so popular. According to a recent YouGov poll, 60 per cent of people are in favour of the public ownership of railways.
So why won’t Labour promise it? In the face of the cost-of-living crisis and rising inflation, Starmer wants to fight the next election on creating a sustainably growing economy. “Growth, growth, growth,” was the mantra of his speech this morning. A debate with the government about nationalisation does not fit easily into that strategy, nor will it help shed what Starmer sees as the baggage of the 2019 general election defeat. 
But if Labour isn’t going to brandish this popular policy, then it will need something else that polls equally well among voters. Starmer wanted today to be about his vision for the economy, but because of poor communication and disunity, the focus is yet again on whether the Labour leader has just the right amount of radicalism.
[See also: Why Keir Starmer has borrowed the Tories’ “magic money tree” attack line]

A week ago, the Republican Party’s nominee for the United States Senate from Georgia explained his opposition to the Green New Deal. Given the decades of Republican denials, obfuscations, and outright falsehoods on the subject of climate change, it would be difficult for nearly any G.O.P. candidate’s erroneous comments to stand out. It was a challenge Herschel Walker, a former N.F.L. star, was ready to meet. He explained, “Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air, so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. Then, now, we got to clean that back up.”

Fighting climate change, in Walker’s telling, is as productive as trying to sweep sand off the beach. Amid the tide of criticism that his remarks generated, his campaign resorted to a dodge that Donald Trump’s team had often used in response to his most indefensible campaign comments: they were just a joke. If there is a joke being told, though, Walker almost certainly is not in on it. Yet in some polls he currently trails his opponent, the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, by just a few points, and it seems that, no matter the final outcome, Walker will receive the votes of millions of Georgians this fall.

The tale of how Walker came to be the Republican nominee is a clear example of the warping effect that Trump has had on the Party nationally. Having lost Georgia in the 2020 election, he launched a crusade to invalidate the results there, famously pressing the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” him more than eleven thousand votes—an act that is now the subject of a criminal probe—while he insisted to supporters that the state’s election had been rigged. He did so irrespective of the impact that such claims could have on other Republican candidates, including Georgia’s two incumbent senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who faced runoff elections against their respective Democratic opponents, Warnock and Jon Ossoff. A Trump supporter in Marietta asked Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, “Why should we vote in this election when we know it’s already decided?” After Warnock and Ossoff won, Trump, in a fit of internecine score-settling, pushed Perdue, a viable contender to take on Warnock this November (Warnock’s victory was in a special election), to run as a primary challenger to Brian Kemp, the Republican Governor, who had also rejected Trump’s entreaty to throw out the 2020 results. Kemp easily beat Perdue, and Trump’s grievance left an open lane for Walker to pursue the Senate seat.

During three seasons with the University of Georgia Bulldogs, Walker, who is now sixty, recorded more than five thousand rushing yards. In 1982, he won the Heisman Trophy. These are his primary qualifications for representing Georgia in the Senate. He has also cited his work in law enforcement, his graduation from U.G.A. in the top percentile of his class, and his success in running businesses, including one of the largest minority-owned food-service companies in the country. These claims would be impressive, if they were accurate. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that he had never worked in law enforcement, that he did not graduate from college, and that he has exaggerated the size of his various business ventures.) The state G.O.P. had a long list of potential candidates to challenge Warnock. Walker, however, had effusively praised and diligently defended Trump during the 2020 election and after it. Trump looked at the unqualified newcomer, who was prone to rambling disquisitions on subjects he knew little about, and saw in him a winner. Game recognizes game.

Trump’s endorsement helped Walker become the nominee despite a devastating ad from a primary opponent pointing to Walker’s alleged history of domestic violence, including an incident years ago in which he is said to have pointed a firearm at his now ex-wife. (He has said that he does not remember that episode, citing a struggle with dissociative-identity disorder, and has denied accusations from other women.) His personal life has continued to prove complicated. A frequent commentator on the perils of “fatherless” households in Black communities, he has highlighted the role he has played in the life of his twenty-two-year-old son, Christian. In June, though, the Daily Beast reported that Walker was also the father of a ten-year-old son, whom he had not publicly acknowledged, and that the boy’s mother had sued him for child support. Walker then admitted that he had fathered a daughter during his college years, and also that he had another child, a thirteen-year-old son. Hypocrisy has seldom been less of a political liability than it is now, so it’s not particularly shocking that a candidate for high office would rail against men shirking their paternal responsibilities while evidently evading his own. Yet Walker also appears not to have told his campaign staff the truth when he was asked directly how many children he has; an unnamed adviser told the Daily Beast that Walker lies “like he’s breathing.”

Walker has not spoken much on matters of policy, but his statement about air quality was not an outlier. (At the same event, he said that China had created the coronavirus, which he had previously said could be killed by a “dry mist.”) Asked how he would prevent needless gun tragedies such as the Uvalde massacre, he said, “What I like to do is see it and everything and stuff.” In response to a similar query from Fox News, he replied, “What about getting a department that can look at young men, that’s looking at women, that’s looking at social media?”

We have learned the hard way that, in American politics, integrity is optional. We’ve seen the wreckage that unqualified leadership yields. Yet Walker’s deficits are not the only cause for concern here. Warnock and Ossoff were elected on January 5, 2021. The next day, a Trumpist mob laid siege to the United States Capitol. We are not yet beyond that moment. Trump will reportedly announce a 2024 run for the Presidency ahead of this year’s election, when a Walker victory could return control of the Senate to the Republicans. A number of state legislatures have made their systems less amenable to fair elections, and next year the Supreme Court may assist those efforts. No one in the G.O.P. leadership can possibly believe that Walker is fit to hold a Senate seat, but the hope—as dangerous as it is cynical—is that he may be able to win one. And that joke would most certainly be on us. ♦

Friends,

On June 30, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case called Moore v. Harper. With all the controversial decisions handed down by the Court this term, its decision to take up this case slid under most radar detectors. But it could be the most dangerous case on the Court's upcoming docket. You need to know about it.

As this Supreme Court shows, the future of our democracy is not guaranteed.

Here's the background: Last February, the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked the state's Republican controlled general assembly from instituting a newly drawn congressional district map, holding that the map violated the state constitutional ban on partisan gerrymandering. The Republican Speaker of the North Carolina Houseappealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, advancing what's called the "independent state legislature" theory. It's a theory that's been circulating for years in right-wing circles. It holds that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures alone the power to regulate federal elections in their states.

We've already had a preview of what this theory could mean. It underpins a major legal strategy in Trump's attempted coup: the argument that state legislatures can substitute their own judgment of who should be president in place of the person chosen by a majority of voters. This was the core of the so-called "Eastman memo" that Trump relied on (and continues to rely on) in seeking to decertify Biden's election.

The U.S. Constitution does grant state legislatures the authority to prescribe "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections." But it does not give state legislatures total power over our democracy. In fact, for the last century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the independent state legislature theory.

Yet if we know anything about the conservative majority now controlling the Supreme Court, it's that they will rule on just about anything that suits the far-right's agenda.

Conservatives on the Court have already paved the way for this bonkers idea. Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist was an early proponent. In his concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that halted the recount in Florida in the presidential election, Rehnquist (in an opinion joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) asserted that because the state court's recount conflicted with deadlines set by the state legislature for the election, the court's recount could not stand.

The issue returned to the Supreme Court in 2020, when the justices turned down a request by Pennsylvania Republicans to fast-track their challenge to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that required state election officials to count mail-in ballots received within three days of Election Day. In an opinion that accompanied the court's order, Justice Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) suggested that the state supreme court's decision to extend the deadline for counting ballots likely violated the U.S. Constitution because it intruded on the state legislature's decision making.

Make no mistake. The independent state legislature theory would make it easier for state legislatures to pull all sorts of additional election chicanery, without any oversight from state courts: ever more voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and laws eliminating the power of election commissions and secretaries of state to protect elections.

If the Supreme Court adopts the independent state legislature theory, it wouldn't just be throwing out a century of its own precedent. It would be rejecting the lessons that inspired the Framers to write the Constitution in the first place: that it's dangerous to give state legislatures unchecked power, as they had under the Articles of Confederation.

The Republican Party and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court call themselves "originalists" who find the meaning of the Constitution in the intent of the Farmers. But they really don't give a damn what the Framers thought. They care only about imposing their own retrograde and anti-democracy ideology on the United States.

But we can fight back.

First, Congress must expand the Supreme Court to add balance to a branch of government that has been stolen by radicalized Republicans. This is not a far-fetched idea. The Constitution doesn't specify how many justices there should be - and we've already changed the size of the Court seven times in American history.

Second, Congress must impose term limits on Supreme Court justices, and have them rotate with judges on the U.S. courts of appeals.

Third, Congress must restore federal voting rights protections and expand access to the ballot box. We need national minimum standards for voting in our democracy.

Obviously, these reforms can happen only if Democrats retain control of the House in the midterm elections and add at least two more Democratic senators--willing to reform or abolish the filibuster.

So your vote is critical, and not just in federal elections. Make sure you also vote for state legislators who understand what's at stake to preserve our democracy. Because, as this Supreme Court shows, the future of our democracy is not guaranteed.

Still, there are some reasons to think that the path the Fed set forward in its projections could play out. While inflation has been running at the fastest pace in more than 40 years, it is likely to slow when July data is released because gasoline prices have come down notably this month.

And, although inflation expectations had shown signs of jumping higher, one key measure eased in early data out this month. Keeping inflation expectations in check is paramount because consumers and companies might change their behavior if they expect quick inflation to last. Workers could ask for higher pay to cover rising costs, companies might continually lift prices to cover climbing wage bills and the problem of rising prices would be perpetuated.

A variety of other metrics of the economy’s strength, from jobless claims to manufacturing measures, point to a slowing business environment. If that cooling continues, it should keep the Fed on track to slow down, said Subadra Rajappa, the head of U.S. rates strategy at Société Générale. While Fed officials want the economy to moderate, they are trying to avoid tipping it into an outright recession.

“When you start to see cracks appear in the unemployment measures, they’re going to have to take a much more cautious approach,” Ms. Rajappa said.

Markets have been quivering in recent days, concerned that central banks around the world will push their war on inflation too far and tank economies in the process. Investors are increasingly betting that the Fed might lower interest rates next year, presumably because they expect the central bank to set off a downturn.

“It is very likely that central banks will hike so quickly that they will overdo it and put their economies into a recession,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, a rates strategist at TD Securities. “That’s what markets are afraid of.”

When asked what he would do differently if he could go back in time to the beginning of the pandemic, White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci said that he would recommend "much, much more stringent restrictions" from the get-go.
"If I knew in 2020 what I know now, we would do a lot differently," said Fauci in an interview on Monday. "The insidious nature of spread in the community would have been much more of an alarm, and there would have been much, much more stringent restrictions in the sense of very, very heavy encouragement of people to wear masks, physical distancing, what have you."

Fauci made these remarks during an interview on Rising, the news show I co-host for The Hill. When asked about the return of mask mandates in various parts of the country, Fauci conceded that the cloth masks that most people were required to wear indoors throughout the pandemic do not substantially prevent the transmission of COVID-19.
"Right now, we are very, very clear that masks do work in prevention of acquisition and transmission," said Fauci. "But you've got to get a well-fitted mask that is of a high quality. And the two we know are high quality are N95 and KN95."
Fauci also disputed the term "gain of function" in a conversation about whether it is necessary for the U.S. government to fund the kind of research that many experts worry might have produced—or might one day produce—a pandemic on the level of COVID-19. Watch the full interview here.
The post Anthony Fauci Says If We Could Do It Again, COVID-19 Restrictions Would Be 'Much, Much More Stringent' appeared first on Reason.com.

Gail: We semi-disagree about bail reform. I don’t think you decide who should be able to walk on the basis of the amount of money their families can put up. Anybody who’s charged with a dangerous crime should stay locked up, and the rest should go home and be ready for their day in court.

Bret: There’s theory, and there’s practice.

Gail: The Lee Zeldin thing is, though, pretty shocking. Republican nominee for governor attacked during a public speaking appearance. The judge undoubtedly found a low level of serious danger — I think the assailant used a sharpened keychain, and Zeldin fought him off. Still, it was an assault on a major political candidate on the campaign trail, and you’d think it’d be treated like a damn serious charge.

Bret: This particular case sorta makes my point. His assailant was released because New York judges are barred by law from setting bail for “attempted assault,” which in this case was only nonviolent because Zeldin managed to thwart the attack. That is not a law Democrats should want to have to defend in the midterms.

Gail: Hey, we haven’t talked about Congress yet — stumbling to the wire! Any thoughts?

Bret: Well, if this Congress is remembered for nothing else, it will be for the work of the Jan. 6 special committee. The sight of Senator Josh “Fredo” Hawley running for safety is a picture that should dog the rest of his career. And there will be many former Trump voters who may have a hard time shaking the fact that Donald Trump called Mike Pence a wimp and then stood by for hours while his vice president was in mortal danger.

Gail: Very unnerving how all Pence’s parts in the story are sympathetic to heroic. Have to keep reminding myself that this is a guy whose idea of a public enemy is Planned Parenthood.

Bret: The other positive development is that a bipartisan group of senators has come up with a plan to overhaul the Electoral Count Act of 1887 so that it can never again be used as a flimsy excuse in an attempt to overturn the election. My only question is why rewrite the law instead of repealing it entirely? This is history you know much better than I do.

Review of Liberalism and Its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama (Macmillan, 2022)

In a CNN interview, after another round of the US government’s sanctions on Russia, the following exchange took place between the show’s host and President Joe Biden’s economic adviser Brian Deese: CNN: What do you say to those families that say, “Listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months if not years, this is just not sustainable”? Deese: Well, what you heard from the president today was a clear articulation of the stakes. . . . This is about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm. The events of the past two years, from the start of the global pandemic to the war in Ukraine, and now the global food shortage, are clear signs that liberalism, as a global economic and political system, is in crisis. For now, following the latest bout of ill-health, no plausible challengers have been able to put liberal capitalism out of its misery. No one has done more to support the idea of liberalism’s resilience and universality than Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama gained a level of international fame in the 1990s as a policy planner at the State Department when he wrote, first, in 1989, a journal article for The National Interest titled “The End of History?” and then, in 1992, an extended treatise, The End of History and the Last Man. His most recent offering, Liberalism and Its Discontents, released in May of this year, reprises the themes of his previous works.

Intellectual Origins The publication of The End of History and the Last Man coincided with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, and the independence of various Soviet satellite states like Poland and Lithuania. Initially, all these post-Soviet states adopted liberal, democratic, and capitalist models of governance. Accordingly, Fukuyama became a both famous and somewhat misunderstood figure in academia — a prophet of the triumph of liberal democracy and the material inevitability of capitalism. In the press, he was written about as a reverse Karl Marx. For those who had not read his book, the lesson to be taken from it was that history was over because American capitalism had won against the Soviet Union. Indeed, in the aftermath of 9/11, journalists, who had misunderstood the book, attempted to contact Fukuyama to ask if history had started again. However, Fukuyama is distinct from the political-economic partisans of free trade and laissez-faire capitalism like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman — men who defended the price mechanism as a more rational means of distributing and allocating resources. Instead, Fukuyama is a writer and political scientist deeply concerned with how humans, and their supposed transcendent psyches, operate within specific historical political, economic, and cultural systems. Although he no longer identifies as a neoconservative, like many of that coterie, Fukuyama is deeply concerned with transhistorical and universal ideals. The failure of the Iraq War, a major neoconservative project that Fukuyama initially supported, seems to have pushed him away from the view that liberalism, democracy, and capitalism occur naturally if the ground is cleared by “well-intentioned” interventions. Yet his political idealism still runs deep. Born in Chicago in 1952, Fukuyama’s family moved east to Manhattan. His family background contains academic, religious, and mercantile strains. Fukuyama’s paternal first-generation Japanese immigrant grandfather ran a hardware store on the West Coast, while his maternal grandfather was a prominent academic economist and university administrator at Kyoto University. His father was an academic sociologist and minister in the Congregational Church — a bastion of bourgeois liberal and puritan religious idealism. The emphasis Fukuyama places on democratic self-management, political-moral predestination, and individual autonomy within a liberal “priesthood of all believers” seems to be a secularized holdover of his Calvinism. In 1970, Fukuyama started his undergraduate career at Cornell in classics: he is in many ways a classical political thinker. One can see the influence of ancient Greek political theory everywhere. For instance, Fukuyama takes an interest in the basic Aristotelian units of politics (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) and their relation to liberal modernity, and continues to use the Platonic theory of the soul (divided between reason (logos), spirit (thymos), and appetite (eros) to describe eternal human nature and its need for recognition. During his time at Cornell, Fukuyama fell in with the philosopher and classicist professor Allan Bloom, best known for his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, which criticized the practice of moral relativism and historical contextualism at American universities. Bloom, who was taught by the philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève, introduced Fukuyama to an idealist intellectual tradition stretching back to Hegel. Strauss influenced the conservative academy with his Natural Right and History (1953), which argued for a transcendent and transhistorical set of naturally occurring rights that might provide politics with a moral compass. Strauss’s followers in America developed an approach to interpreting political texts that emphasized perennial problems and the power of the authored text to independently generate meaning. Kojève was an unorthodox Marxist thinker, French economic administrator in the European Common Market, and neo-Hegelian who reintegrated the German philosopher’s thinking on history into contemporary politics. His 1946 Introduction to the Reading of Hegel proposed an earlier theory of the “end of history” that influenced Fukuyama’s own thesis. Kojève suggested that the rational Napoleonic Empire’s victory over the absolutist Prussian state at Jena in 1806 represented the apex of human political possibility: the parameters of all future political action were drawn by Napoleon at Jena. After Cornell, Fukuyama spent time in a comparative literature program at Yale and studied under the post-structuralists Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida in Paris, before switching to political science at Harvard. While Fukuyama would become engaged with the empirical quantitative and qualitative study of hard-nosed foreign policy and international relations, he retained a deep interest in the text and human ideals, which he carried to the RAND Corporation, the State Department, and advisory roles under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The success of his 1989 National Interest Article “The End of History?” resulted in a $600,000 advance to write a follow-up — The End of History and the Last Man. This pushed Fukuyama back into writing and academia, where he popularized the idealism of his intellectual precursors.

The End of History — From Nietzsche to Freud In The End of History, Fukuyama argued that, over the long term, the whole world will converge on variations of the liberal democratic capitalist model. This was because there were, in his mind, no other existing models that could rationally organize modern societies. Rivals, such as Islamic and Christian theocracy, were culturally and geographically restricted — only liberalism, after the end of socialism, could bestride the world as a global system. In his first book, Fukuyama was keen to stress the fact that history’s ending would not occur synchronously across geographical regions; instead, active outliers in the Global South would eventually catch up after a century or so. The enclaves of non-liberalism that existed in the developing world were not models for an alternative world order. Writing in The End of History, he could proclaim that “it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso.” For Fukuyama, liberalism would win out, not because it was historically inevitable but because it represented an ideal form of rational social organization that, when compared to its competitors, had the fewest internal contradictions. Yet the little-remembered last chapter of Fukuyama’s The End of History — “The Last Man” — takes its name from Nietzsche’s letztermensch, the passive, secure, and materialistic opposite of the übermensch (superman). Fukuyama uses the image of the Last Man to acknowledge the contradictions inherent in the liberal democratic system and the frustration felt by affluent liberal democratic subjects. As he wrote in 1992, “The passion for equal recognition — isothymia — does not necessarily diminish with the achievement of greater de facto equality and material abundance, but may actually be stimulated by it.” Fukuyama understood, in 1992, that liberal democracy would be in the most danger not from competing outside forces but from boredom and its effects on a restless population willing to experiment and reach for Platonic thymos, or spirited recognition. In The End of History, Fukuyama, influenced by Kojève’s readings of Hegel and Leo Strauss’s close analysis of Platonic conceptions of the human psyche in The Republic, argued that perennial aspects of human nature like thymos would endanger the coldly rational and technocratic world of advanced liberal democracy. Yet, at the same time, liberal democracy in The End of History is understood to be the only system with the potential to provide adequate recognition to humanity’s thymos. While the clashes between human nature and the liberal democratic system were an important postscript to The End of History, they have moved center stage in Liberalism and Its Discontents. What remains constant is Fukuyama’s reliance on transhistorical psychological models of immutable human nature, rather than an analysis of material and economic relations, to explain the current fragility of liberal democracy. His latest publication moves from the metaphysical frameworks of Plato and Nietzsche to the psychological perspective of Sigmund Freud — Liberalism and Its Discontents echoes the title of the Austrian psychoanalyst’s 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents. A deep-seated pessimism about modernity runs through much of Freud’s work. But Civilization and Its Discontents is not simply a rejection of rational society. Freud ironically points out that civilization is the cause of, and balm for, human misery. Our civilization is largely responsible for our misery . . . we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. . . . In whatever way we may define the concept of civilization, it is a certain fact, that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilization. Freud’s theories about the relationship of humans to civilization — that discontent with civilization is generated within the system and used against it — are, to Fukuyama, equally applicable to liberal democracy.

Liberalism in Peril Indeed, Liberalism and Its Discontents, much like its Freudian forebear, argues that liberal democracy’s two adversaries, “populist conservatism” and “progressivism,” are not outside threats but outgrowths of the liberal tradition itself. As Fukuyama states in his first chapter, “What is Classical Liberalism” — the threat comes from internal economic and social corruptions within liberalism rather than from outside competing models or inherent material contradictions. On the right, autonomy meant primarily the right to buy and sell freely, without interference from the state. Pushing this notion to extremes, economic liberalism turned into “neoliberalism” and led to grotesque inequalities. On the left, autonomy meant personal autonomy with regard to lifestyle choices, and resistance to the social norms imposed by the society. Pushed down this road, liberalism began to erode its own premise of tolerance as it evolved into modern identity politics. These extreme versions of liberalism then generated a backlash, which is the source of the right-wing populist and left-wing progressive movements that threaten liberalism today. His solution to these threats is to return to an imagined status quo ante — an uncorrupted, renewed, reformed, and robust historical liberalism that recognizes itself as such. Liberalism and Its Discontents uses the term “classical liberalism” to describe this program, whose capaciousness Fukuyama welcomes. “Classical liberalism is a big tent that encompasses a range of political views that nonetheless agree on the foundational importance of equal individual rights, law, and freedom.” In his last chapter, “Principles for a Liberal Society,” Fukuyama claims that classical liberalism “may be understood as a means of governing over diversity.” But this diverse political pluralism requires a strong and trusted state. The failing of liberalism since the start of the neoliberal era, he argues, is that it failed to recognize the central role the state must play in managing this diversity. Throughout the remaining chapters of Liberalism and Its Discontents, Fukuyama identifies the forces that have damaged public trust in liberal democratic governments and the solutions that classical liberalism can supposedly employ. First, in “From Liberalism to Neoliberalism,” he sees neoliberalism as a dangerous outgrowth of economic liberalism that promotes extreme inequality and threatens the body politic. Fukuyama’s admirable desire for universalistic and humanistic politics frustratingly leads him back to an exhausted nineteenth-century ideology. While Fukuyama does not abandon a commitment to the capitalist market, he avers that, under neoliberalism, the “valid insight into the superior efficiency of markets evolved into something of a religion, in which state intervention was opposed as a matter of principle.” His second chapter, “The Selfish Individual,” contends with the personal and social effects of neoliberalism. There Fukuyama argues that the economic model of individual rational actors looking to maximize utility has been corrosive to a balanced market that respects competing values like the dignity of labor, family, tradition, and collective altruism. “The individualistic premise on which liberal theory is based is therefore not wrong, but rather incomplete.” Cautiously, Liberalism and Its Discontents suggests that a society that focused on production rather than consumption might help to redress the pathologies of contemporary capitalism. Long gone is the triumphalism of thirty years prior, in its place is a Freudian analysis of the troubled liberal consciousness, which leads Fukuyama to ask, “Would people be willing to sacrifice a bit of consumer welfare in order to maintain the dignity of labor and livelihoods at home?” In other chapters that seek to address noneconomic issues of identity — and their innate exclusiveness, which clashes with liberalism’s supposed universalism — Fukuyama argues for a move back to a capacious set of civic nationalisms and identities. Following the sociologist Max Weber, he insists that liberal rights are meaningless without the enforcement of the state. Indeed, Fukuyama correctly identifies a strong set of problems with liberal democracy, but his solution — a return to the problem’s root cause: historical classical liberalism — is ultimately at odds with his commitment to a group of values that transcend the particular liberal capitalist system in which they operate. Indeed, the threats to liberal democracy Fukuyama finds in neoliberalism (massive inequality, consumerism, lack of state capacity) were initially the values of early nineteenth-century free-trade classical liberals — ideas neoliberal thinkers like Milton Friedman wanted to resuscitate for the late twentieth century.

“The discovery of unmarked graves at a former Residential School in [the province of British Columbia] and the countrywide awakening it set off have been chosen as Canada’s news story of the year by editors in newsrooms across the country,” reported the CBC last December. It was an apt choice—though not necessarily for the reasons described by the author.  Canada’s unmarked-graves story broke on May 27th, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the existence of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data that indicated regularly spaced subterranean soil disturbances on the grounds of a former Indigenous Residential School that had operated in Kamloops, BC between 1893 and 1978. In addition, the First Nation’s leaders asserted their belief that these soil disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of Indigenous children who’d died while attending the school.The story became an immediate sensation in the Canadian media; and remained so for months, even after the GPR expert on whom the First Nation relied, Sarah Beaulieu, carefully noted that the radar survey results didn’t necessarily indicate the presence of graves—let alone graves that had been unmarked, graves of Indigenous people, or graves of children. Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.An explanatory image posted by GeoScan, a Canadian Ground-Penetrating-Radar service provider, showing how mapped GPR data can indicate the possible presence of graves.But those details were swept aside during what, in retrospect, appears to have been a true nation-wide social panic. As other Indigenous groups announced that they’d be conducting their own GPR surveys, media figures confidently asserted that the original Canadian Residential-School student death-toll estimate of 3,201 would soon double or even triple. One op-ed writer went so far as to declare that “the discovery of the graves of the children in Kamloops may be Canada’s Holocaust moment.” Dramatic, tear-drenched acts of public atonement unfolded everywhere, with many July 1st Canada Day celebrations being either cancelled or transformed into opportunities for morose self-laceration.I was one of many Canadians who initially got swept up with all of this—in large part because it seemed as if everyone in the media was speaking with one voice, including journalists I’d known and respected for many years. Looking back on the coverage, I note that headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves.” And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive.The whole mission of Canada’s church-run Residential School system was to assimilate Indigenous people into white Canadian society, usually against their will, while forcing children to leave their families and communities for months or even years at a time. No one disputes that many students were subject to cruel (and sometimes even predatory) treatment and substandard medical care. Certainly, the death rate for Indigenous children attending these schools was much higher than that for children in the general population. No, I never bought into the idea that there was any kind of mass-murder plot going on at these schools. But it hardly seemed far-fetched that some victims of mistreatment and neglect had been buried in unmarked graves—“off the books,” so to speak—by malevolent white teachers, school administrators, and priests seeking to evade responsibility for their actions.The other important aspect to mention is that—like most other Canadians, I’m guessing—I believed we were only a few days or weeks from seeing real physical evidence plucked from the earth. So it didn’t much matter to me that early commentators were temporarily playing fast and loose with the distinction between GPR data and actual corpses.  Canadians were being told that the old orchard in Kamloops where the GPR data had been collected was a crime scene—a site of mass murder, and the final resting place of 215 child homicide victims. As I’ve reasoned elsewhere: If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried somewhere in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police crawling all over the place, looking for remains that could be tested and identified. And so I naturally assumed the same thing soon would be happening in Kamloops.  Many of the abuses identified at the Kamloops Residential School and others like it date to the early decades of the Cold War. This means that some of the perpetrators of these claimed child homicides—that is, the staff who worked at these schools—could still be alive. Perhaps their crimes might even be studied and solved by inspecting the bones of children buried alongside one another. Surely, no effort would be spared to pull evidence from the ground immediately, so that criminal cases could be prosecuted before the passage of time allowed the killers to escape accountability for their racist bloodbath.But then the weeks and months passed in 2021. Spring turned to summer, then summer to fall, and fall to winter, and … nothing happened. It’s now been 14 months since the original announcement was made about presumed graves in Kamloops, and no physical evidence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains. In fact, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t even seem to be any systematic effort by police or First Nations leaders to commence such investigations. Eventually, it began to strike the general public that this was a very odd way to treat a mass murder scene, even as pundits and politicians refused to change their early, apocalyptic tone.  Which brings us back to that CBC announcement in December, which informed us that “the discovery of unmarked graves” had been Canada’s biggest news story of 2021. That very statement encoded the polite lie, which most Canadian journalists have been encouraged to repeat in one form or another, that some known number of “unmarked graves” had well and truly been “discovered.” The truth was (and remains) that the number of confirmed graves remains at zero. No one, to my knowledge, has found any human remains—i.e., body parts or tissue from decaying corpses—either at Kamloops or any of the other former Residential Schools, through the use of GPR.So yes, the story did arguably qualify as “Canada’s news story of the year”—but not insofar as it was a story about graves. Rather, it turned out to be a story about the herd behaviour of Canada’s intellectual class. Thousands of politicians, writers, broadcasters, and activists spent months crowd-sourcing the creation of a completely unsupported national narrative, and then failed to correct the record once their rush to judgment had run headlong into reality. I’ve been in journalism for a quarter century, and have witnessed plenty of bizarre controversies within my trade. But I’ve never witnessed anything similar to this phenomenon. It’s like one of those case-studies in mass hysteria and popular delusion that you read about in history books. Some dissenting voices did begin popping up in 2022, however. In February, Frances Widdowson, then a liberal arts professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, wrote an article for a conservative US publication explaining how far-fetched rumours and urban legends dating to the 1980s seem to have informed the most lurid claims concerning the Kamloops Residential School. A small publication called the Dorchester Review published a scathing article by Quebec academic Jacques Rouillard, entitled “In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found.” And in May, most significantly, a large newspaper called National Post published a blockbuster exposé by a well-known columnist, Terry Glavin, going blow by blow through the scandalously botched media treatment that’s fuelled the unmarked-graves story since it first broke in the spring of 2021. As Glavin took pains to emphasize, the main reason the story was bungled was that journalists got it wrong, not that Indigenous leaders lied about what they believed. Glavin’s piece was a watershed, as it represented the first explicit acknowledgement from a mainstream Canadian news outlet that the original narrative we’d all been asked to parrot in 2021 was unsustainable. And predictably, Glavin paid a price for speaking up. When it was announced that he’d be interviewed about his story for a well-known Toronto-based podcast, the chair of Canada’s national arts funding agency, Jesse Wente, publicly intervened in an apparent bid to prevent the interview from going forward. (The host responded to this extraordinary development by sheepishly assuring Wente that he’d assign the segment to another interviewer.) I wish you'd reconsider. I'm not sure you're equipped to have this discussion, not am I convinced your guest can have a good faith conversation on the matter. I wish you'd consider what harm reduction might look like in these situations from a media perspective. Is it this?— Jesse Wente (@jessewente) May 30, 2022
As for Widdowson, her university fired her after she spoke out about unmarked-graves misinformation circulating in Canadian university circles. And Prof. Rouillard’s article in the Dorchester Review attracted condemnation from no less an official than the federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, who denounced any expressed skepticism of the pre-set graves narrative as “ghoulish” and “retraumatizing for survivors.” Shockingly, Miller also called the article “part of a pattern of denialism”—as if the author were on moral par with a Holocaust denier. (Miller didn’t refer to the article by name, but the target of his rhetoric was abundantly clear.) Given all this, it should not be surprising that at least one expert in this kind of site inspection (whose identity is known to Glavin, though not to me) has chosen to publish his comprehensive critique anonymously. These articles are part of a pattern of denialism and distortion that has coloured the discourse on Residential Schools in Canada. They are harmful because they attempt to deny survivors and their families the truth, and they distort Canadians' understanding of our history.— Marc Miller (@MarcMillerVM) January 27, 2022
It bears emphasizing that no respectable academic or journalist is denying the fact that thousands of children died while attending Canada’s Residential Schools (the last of which closed in the 1990s). The critiques summarized in the paragraphs above, rather, are limited to the specific claim that the final resting places of hundreds, or even thousands, of dead Indigenous children have been identified over the last 14 months using GPR. Even the most reputable media outlets sometimes get stories wrong, of course, Quillette included. And for the most part, they will publish corrections and clarifications if a fact-checking critic presents evidence of a journalistic error. In particularly egregious cases, they might even retract an article entirely. But the unmarked-graves story is unusual—perhaps even unique—because the faulty coverage has been a systematic feature across the entire Canadian journalistic landscape since the day the story broke. It isn’t limited to one publication, or even to one type of publication. This herd-driven aspect of the social panic has yielded a perverse incentive structure among journalists, whereby no single media outlet had any interest in walking back its previously published misinformation, because each could evade criticism simply by pointing to the (equally erroneous) work of everyone else. Why take the gratuitous reputational hit that goes along with admitting one’s own mistakes when all your competitors are staying mum? That incentive structure explains why the treatment of dissidents such as Glavin has been so harsh: If even a few columnists break ranks, it makes it harder for everyone else (including politicians such as Justin Trudeau, who went all in on the unmarked-graves story from the get go) to evade criticism and accountability. This, I believe, is why institutional players such as Miller and Wente have attempted to smear Rouillard and Glavin, moves that seem aimed at intimidating other journalists into silence. After all, money could be at stake. It’s worth noting that Wente leads a federal funding body that annually doles out $500 million to Canada’s creative class. For his part, Miller serves a government that subsidizes Canadian journalists to the tune of about $700 million every year. Being branded as a “denier” by a government official might put your share of that money at risk.  All of what I’m discussing here, I realize, will seem very much tied up with Canada’s parochial media scene, which is known to operate in an amateurish, herd-like manner even in the best of times. But when it comes to the unmarked-graves story, the most influential (and, I would argue, irresponsible) media player hasn’t been a Canadian outlet at all, but rather the New York Times. The newspaper’s articles on this subject have been riddled with completely obvious errors since the day after the story first broke. None of these errors have been corrected, despite the passage of over a year since their original publication.And to be clear: I am not talking here about errors of tone, emphasis, shades of meaning, or omission. I am speaking of flat-out Trump-Won-The-2020-Election-style false information—what some call “fake news.” Most spectacularly, on May 28th, 2021, it was the Times that told the world that the discovery of a “mass grave” had been “reported in Canada.” It’s a claim that exists—again, to this day—in the headline sitting above an article written by veteran correspondent Ian Austen, in which the reporter relates that “an Indigenous community in British Columbia says it has found evidence of … a mass grave.” The truth is that no Indigenous community said any such thing. In fact, the leader of the First Nations community that Austen was referencing, Rosanne Casimir of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, explicitly told the media that there was no mass grave, and disavowed usage of the term. The small handful of other outlets that printed some version of the Times’s incorrect mass-graves news included the Toronto Star, which, to its credit, quickly corrected the mistake; and the Washington Post, which not only corrected the mistake, but included an editor’s note at the top of the article, fully detailing the newspaper’s original lapse. Meanwhile, the Times still parades the original mass-graves error in its headline.This Times purported bombshell—and the horrifying image it elicited, of corpses piled like timber as in some horrific scene out of Bosnia or Rwanda—predictably made international news, giving the world’s dictators a chance to excoriate Canada while deflecting from their own human-rights atrocities. This was The New York Times, after all, not some local rag. Shortly after the Times set the tone in this manner, Trudeau ordered Canada’s flags to half mast (where they would remain, incredibly, for more than five months), and dramatically went down on one knee to place a teddy bear on the site of a former Residential School in Saskatchewan as cameras clicked.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apologized to Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir after travelling to Tofino rather than attending public events during Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliationhttps://t.co/HLbv2KzYmb— Andrea Woo | 鄔瑞楓 (@AndreaWoo) October 3, 2021
Journalism is history's first draft, produced on deadline. And one might easily understand how errors got into that first Times article, especially given that initial reports of the Kamloops GPR findings were being published alongside claims that the data accorded with the lore of (unidentified) Indigenous “knowledge keepers.” It would have been a brave journalist who, amid such furious national garment-rending, pointed out that locally circulated memories about unmarked child graves do not amount to evidence on par with actual human bones and tissue unearthed from the ground, no matter the ethnicity of the knowledge-keeping community.But the May 28th article wasn’t an isolated mistake. Ten days later, the same Times reporter penned a follow-up report that, to this day, bears a sub-headline referring to “the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children.” Like Austen’s first story, this one is flat out wrong. No “remains” have been discovered.The article text indicates that “the remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May,” a statement that is also absolutely untrue; and that “the remains of 200 people, mostly children, were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of [a] former boarding school in British Columbia,” which, again, is totally false. At one point, we are informed by Austen that, “In July, the Penelakut Tribe in British Columbia said it had uncovered about 160 undocumented and unmarked graves.” As Glavin reports, that’s not what the Penelakut Tribe said.Two weeks after that, Austen and a second Canadian-situated Times reporter, Dan Bilefsky, co-wrote a third article, this one published under the (again, absolutely false) headline, “Hundreds More Unmarked Graves Found at Former Residential School in Canada.” That article informs us that “the recent unearthing of remains in Canada has reverberated globally,” a whopper that juxtaposes the entirely false claim that there’d been any kind of “unearthing” of human remains, alongside the completely accurate observation that the story has garnered international attention—largely thanks to the Times’s own erroneous reporting. With the Tk’emlúps community itself now agitating for clarity on what actually lies below the ground’s surface, it will be interesting to see how Austen and Bilefsky proceed with further articles—as the two journalists are now tasked with lecturing their Tk’emlúps interviewees about all those remains of deceased relatives that, according to these same reporters, were unearthed at least a year ago and are presumably now sitting in some mysteriously undisclosed location.The sub-headline on that Times article informs us that “An Indigenous group said the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school in Saskatchewan.” Unlike the other examples I’ve listed, this one at least has the Times journalists attributing their information to a third party. But even on this score, the article neglects to note that Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation identifies only nine children from the institution in question—Marieval Indian Residential School—who died during its entire century-long period of operation. It’s a fact that casts rather a lot of doubt on the claim offered in the sensationalistic Times headline. And yes, I realize that reporters typically don’t write their own headlines. But these Times mistakes can’t be blamed on any editor, because the errors go well beyond the display copy. The text of the co-authored June 24th article, for instance, (falsely) informs us that “the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of [a] former church-run school for Indigenous students in British Columbia.” It’s a sentence that contains both the unambiguously false statement that the “remains of 215 children” have been found, alongside the piggyback fiction that these remains were found in “unmarked graves.”The nature of the mistakes vary from one Times story to the next. But all of the stories are alike to such extent that they grossly misrepresent the nature of the information that was announced in May 2021 and thereafter. As noted above, the novel findings presented by Indigenous groups didn’t identify graves, bodies, or human remains, but rather soil dislocations that may or may not be associated with a human burial. And as GPR experts have been cautioning since the technology first began being used by police officers and archaeologists many years ago, such dislocations can be traced to everything from old irrigation ditches to backhoe trenches. The area where the Kamloops GPR data was recorded has been put to multiple agricultural uses over the decades, which means that anyone looking for graves in the area is at risk of encountering all manner of false positives. And even if any of these dislocations do turn out to indicate the presence of graves, classifying them as “unmarked” may not be straightforward. As has been widely noted, an old grave that bears no markings in 2022 wasn’t necessarily “unmarked” at the time it was used for burial, since rapidly degrading wooden crosses were commonly employed as markers until well into the 20th century. A further complication is that many of the cemeteries located on or near Residential School properties were used by religiously observant Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike. Cadmus Delorme, Chief of the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, where Trudeau staged his maudlin teddy-bear photo-op, for instance, told the media flatly, “This is a Roman Catholic grave site. It’s not a Residential School grave site.”It’s entirely possible that unmarked, previously unknown graves may one day be definitively identified at Kamloops and other former Residential School campuses; and that such graves will then be found to contain the remains of Residential-School students. But neither Austen nor Bilefsky nor anyone else has yet produced information to support the claim that this evidence has already been collected. And when I asked the Times to explain how their reporters had arrived at such plainly speculative conclusions, all I got by way of answer was a statement from a corporate staffer that read: “We are confident in the accuracy of our reporting. All of our articles have made it clear that the gravesite findings are based on the analysis of ground penetrating radar and these findings are supported by expert corroboration.”Ian Austen isn’t a stranger to me. I’ve met him, and we’ve occasionally conversed over social media and email about stories of mutual interest. He’s a skilled and dedicated journalist whose work I’ve read appreciatively for many years. That’s one reason I’m singling him out when there are so many other journalistic offenders I could name: It says a lot about the depth of the social panic surrounding the unmarked-graves story that even a reporter of Austen’s high stature was impelled to abandon the high standards he brings to his other work.I refuse to believe that anyone at the Times set out to tell lies. It seems more likely that they instinctively believed, on some gut level, that the GPR data signalled the existence of child murder victims. They treated it as a revealed moral truth, and so imagined themselves duty bound to use their Times platform to spread the story globally, advocate for Indigenous rights, and educate Canadians about a dark historical legacy. Numerous other journalists did exactly the same thing, and, in so doing, got swept up by the collective fervour. But now that the story hasn’t gone the way their guts told them it would, they (very understandably) are embarrassed at the prospect of admitting their mistakes.  In truth, it probably doesn’t matter much if the Times ever gets around to correcting its mistakes, because it’s not as if Canadians haven’t noticed the glaring absence of physical evidence to back up the breathless claims they first heard in mid-2021. Many feel duped by the unmarked-graves story, especially given the way it was held up, both inside and outside Canada, as a pretext to trash their country. Over the last 14 months, it hasn’t just been the Times, but the journalistic trade as a whole, that’s squandered a good deal of the trust and affection held by readers and viewers. However, it may prove to be Indigenous people themselves who lose the most from this whole sad episode. Given how much terrible treatment was meted out to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities over the course of Canadian history, there is surely no shortage of real evidence of past atrocities waiting to be found by researchers. It seems inevitable that some day in the future, actual bodies will be brought to the surface—genuine, uncontestable evidence of a real historical atrocity that formerly had been unknown or obscure. If, in that authentic moment of discovery, journalists and politicians suddenly find that it’s become impossible to arouse the interest and sympathies of a jaded, untrusting Canadian public, let’s not pretend that we won’t know the reason why.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government's network of consulates around the world shut their doors. They were extraordinarily slow to reopen, with 60 percent of consulates still fully or partially closed as of last October.
The scheduling of interviews for nonimmigrant visas—used by business travelers, tourists, and foreigners traveling to the U.S. for other short-term reasons—ground to a halt. Now that consulates are reopening, they're dealing with massive backlogs and forcing foreigners to endure egregious wait times before they can sit for visa interviews.
Tourists and business travelers are now waiting an average of 247 days for their visa interviews, up from the pre-pandemic wait of 17 days. That's according to data compiled by Cato Institute immigration researcher David J. Bier, who notes that the "astounding 8-month wait" applies to foreigners who want "to visit the United States for a period of at most just 90 days and usually much less than that." According to Bier, "52 percent of consulates were scheduling tourist and business traveler interviews 6 months or more out," while 27 percent were scheduling a year out or longer.
These delays have led to inefficiencies in issuing visas. Though the rate varies by consulate, nonimmigrant visa issuance has dropped significantly at many sites compared to pre-pandemic levels. The issuance rate fell by roughly 50 percent between 2018 and 2022 in Kuala Lumpur, Panama City, Bucharest, Ho Chi Minh City, and many other cities.
Currently, the State Department's Visa Waiver Program "enables most citizens or nationals of participating countries" to come to the U.S. for tourism or business stays of up to 90 days, no visa necessary. But the program applies to just 40 countries, leaving countless would-be travelers in need of visas.
South Africans who want to visit the U.S. are traveling to Namibia, Botswana, and even more distant countries in the hopes of applying for visas at consulates with shorter wait times, according to the Daily Maverick. Hundreds of athletes and officials attending the 2022 track and field world championships in Oregon this month ran into visa snafus and processing delays. Two athletes applied for visas with the U.S. Embassy in Paris on June 8 but were scheduled for interviews on November 9, 2023—16 months after the championships.
New data from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and ForwardKeys show that while international travel to the U.S. is recovering, it's lagging behind other major destinations and likely won't reach pre-pandemic levels until 2025. "The spike in inbound bookings validates the U.S. government's decision to ease travel restrictions by scrapping testing for visitors and returning U.S. citizens—something other economies did long ago," said WTTC President and CEO Julia Simpson. Still, inbound bookings might not translate into much if international travelers aren't able to secure the necessary visas.
Government barriers are keeping travelers out of the country and preventing their money from reaching the American economy. The uncertainty brought by long wait times for visa interviews will simply drive tourists and business travelers elsewhere. Some COVID-era restrictions on inbound international travel may have been scrapped, but the government is still keeping travel out of reach for many.
The post Why Do Travelers to the U.S. Have To Wait an Average of 247 Days for Their Visa Interviews? appeared first on Reason.com.

In its zealous effort to contain the coronavirus, the Chinese government has trampled on the rights of U.S. diplomats to an extent previously unknown, compelling the State Department to take drastic measures to protect them. Beijing’s heavy-handed pandemic practices have forced the United States’ representatives there to live in constant fear.

Plenty has been written about China’s draconian “zero covid” policy, which is marked by harsh, rolling lockdowns in Chinese cities and the forced quarantine of thousands of Chinese citizens in makeshift medical facilities known as “fever clinics.” In these facilities, which can resemble prisons, anonymous authorities determine whether and when patients can leave. U.S. diplomats and their family members living in China are supposed to be immune from being arbitrarily detained. But until recently, that was simply not the case.

For the past two years, U.S. diplomatic personnel in China have been forced to confront the risk of being detained or separated from their family members for either testing positive for the coronavirus or being deemed a “close contact” of someone who has. In fact, 16 U.S. diplomatic personnel or their family members have been sent, against their will, to Chinese government medical quarantine centers since the pandemic began, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing confirmed to me.

The State Department concluded this was a clear violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Since he arrived in Beijing in late March, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns has been working nonstop to fix this ongoing problem, making significant progress.

“What has dominated my first few months at post is the essential mission of any American embassy since the 1780s, to take care of American citizens,” Burns told me in an interview. “We have legal rights here, and reclaiming those legal rights under the Vienna Convention was very important to us. And so, we’ve held the line.”

The Chinese government boasts about its handling of the pandemic, claiming suspiciously low numbers of deaths and infections since the virus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019. But whatever success the authorities have achieved in containing the spread has come at a steep cost for Chinese citizens, who have no right to object when the government orders them into quarantine centers.

What’s known about these secretive facilities inside China is troubling. Entire residential communities can be isolated because of one positive case. Once there, people are often packed into dormitories with zero privacy, for weeks, and can be separated from their children. Once inside these facilities, patients have no rights to appeal their detention or resist invasive testing procedures, including anal swabs.

U.S. diplomats in China were so afraid that they petitioned the State Department earlier this year to allow them to leave the country if the U.S. government couldn’t protect Americans from forced covid-related detention. After several meetings with senior Chinese foreign ministry officials, Burns secured a promise that U.S. diplomats and their family members would not be forced into fever clinics, but rather allowed to quarantine in their homes or at the embassy.

Because of the lack of confidence that Beijing could fully implement that promise nationwide, the State Department issued formal letters in Chinese to each U.S. diplomat and family member in China. The documents can be presented to any local official who might try to force them into a medical facility or separate children from their parents. Also, an embassy team was set up to engage the Chinese foreign ministry on this issue.

In another policy change, if any U.S. diplomat in China now tests positive and the Chinese government can’t be persuaded to exempt them from going to a fever clinic, the State Department will immediately evacuate them to another country. These measures seem to be working. Since Burns arrived March 28, no American diplomats have been forcibly quarantined, although several had to be evacuated already this year, he said.

Even while trying to protect their own families from China’s zero-covid measures, U.S. diplomats in China have been working overtime to help Americans cope with the restrictions. The State Department evacuated most of its diplomatic personnel from Shanghai during the city’s two-month lockdown this year but simultaneously stood up an 80-person consular team to help Americans leave or at least to provide them some support.

This was not the mission Burns anticipated when he got the job to represent the United States in Beijing. China’s zero-covid policy has made it excruciatingly difficult for U.S. diplomats to do the core work of diplomacy, Burns told me, which is to travel around the country and engage with regular Chinese citizens.

“It has brought me back to the realization that there are many aspects of diplomacy, from war and peace negotiations to commercial diplomacy, but the most essential is protecting people,” he said.

From Beijing’s perspective, stifling U.S. diplomacy in China might be a welcome if unexpected byproduct of its draconian health measures. But this worrying trend in China — where the government uses health concerns to exert control over everyone, including Americans — will likely outlast the current crisis.

In March, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and GB News channel both reported that the National Museum of Wales would be relabelling a replica of the first steam-powered locomotive, unveiled by its Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick had no links to slavery, but the amendment has apparently been included anyway as part of the museum’s commitment to “decolonizing” its collection. In a statement defending what it described as the addition of “historical context,” the museum said: “Although there might not be direct links between the Trevithick locomotive and the slave trade, we acknowledge the reality that links to slavery are woven into the warp and weft of Welsh society.” The statement continued:Trade and colonial exploitation were embedded in Wales’ economy and society and were fundamental to Wales’ development as an industrialised nation. As we continue to audit the collection, we will explore how the slave trade linked and fed into the development of the steam and railway infrastructure in Wales.In a similar vein, back in 2014, MSNBC broadcaster Chris Hayes wrote an article for the Nation in which he drew a rather tenuous connection between human slavery—specifically, the kind practiced in the US prior to 1865—and the use of fossil fuels. Hayes argued that the reluctance of energy companies and their investors to forfeit the financial value of their fossil-fuel assets is analogous to the reluctance of pre-Civil-War southern slaveholders to surrender the financial value of their human “property.” He went on to assert that environmentalists attacking the use of fossil fuels are in a moral and tactical position similar to that of the pre-war Abolitionists.This whole line of thinking reminds me of a few things:1) Shortly after obtaining his freedom, former slave Frederick Douglass visited a shipyard in New Bedford, where he observed the cargo being unloaded. In his memoir, My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass wrote:In a southern port, twenty or thirty hands would have been employed to do what five or six did here, with the aid of a single ox attached to the end of a fall. Main strength, unassisted by skill, is slavery’s method of labor. An old ox, worth eighty dollars, was doing, in New Bedford, what would have required fifteen thousand dollars worth of human bones and muscles to have performed in a southern port.2) Sometime around 1900, a young PR man recently hired by General Electric in Schenectady realized he had a problem. He had obtained his job with glowing promises of all the great press coverage he would generate for the company. But now his boss wanted him to place “a terrific front-page story” about a 60,000-kilowatt turbine generator that the company had just sold to Commonwealth Edison. The PR man knew that such a story would only merit a paragraph on the financial pages, so he went to see GE’s legendary research genius Charles Steinmetz for advice. Headlines, he explained, need drama, and “there’s nothing dramatic about a generator.” Following a quick calculation, Steinmetz determined that this particular machine could perform the physical work of 5.4 million men. The slave population in the US on the eve of the Civil War had been 4.7 million. “I suggest,” Steinmetz told the young PR man, “you send out a story that says we are building a single machine that, through the miracle of electricity, will each day do more work than the combined slave population of the nation at the time of the Civil War.”3)  Owen Young was a farm boy who grew up to become the Chairman of General Electric. Young’s biographer Ida Tarbell offers this description of what life had been like for a farm wife on “wash day” back then:[Young] drew from his memory a vivid picture of its miseries: the milk coming into the house from the barn; the skimming to be done; the pans and buckets to be washed; the churn waiting attention; the wash boiler on the stove while the wash tub and its back-breaking device, the washboard, stood by; the kitchen full of steam; hungry men at the door anxious to get at the day’s work and one pale, tired, and discouraged woman in the midst of this confusion.Hayes does not seem to understand—or at least, he was reluctant to recognize—that the benefits of an energy source accrue not only to the companies and individuals who develop and own that energy source, but also to the people of the society at large. The benefits of the coal and oil (and later natural gas) burned to power the turbines made by Owen Young’s company did not go only to the resource owners and to GE and the utility companies, but also to the farm housewives with whom he had grown up.4) Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) was a famous British actress who was also an avid diarist and a brilliant social observer. In 1830, she became one of the first people to ride on the newly constructed London-to-Manchester railway line. Her escort on the trip was none other than George Stephenson, the self-taught engineer who had been the driving force behind the line’s construction. She noted that the British government had rejected Stephenson’s railroad plans on grounds of unfeasibility, but added: The Liverpool merchants, whose far-sighted self-interest prompted them to wise liberality, had accepted the risk of George Stephenson’s magnificent experiment, which the committee of inquiry of the House of Commons had rejected for the government. These men, of less intellectual culture than the Parliament members, had the adventurous imagination proper to great speculators, which is the poetry of the counting-house and wharf, and were better able to receive the enthusiastic infection of the great projector’s sanguine hope than the Westminster committee.She contrasted the character of men such as Stephenson with that of the aristocracy, as represented by Lord Alvanley in particular: “I would rather pass a day with Stephenson than with Lord Alvanley, though the one is a coal-digger by birth, who occasionally murders the King’s English, and the other is the keenest wit and one of the finest gentlemen about town.”Kemble had a bit of a crush on Stephenson, to whom she referred as “the master of all these marvels, with whom I am most horribly in love.” Nevertheless, industrialization—Trevithick’s locomotive, Stephenson’s railway, and the steam engine itself (which Boris Johnson once called a “doomsday machine”)—enabled self-made men like Stephenson to gain influence they never could have had in a pre-industrial society, and that this reduced the relative power of the Lord Alvanleys. Aristocrats and would-be aristocrats have tended to disapprove of technologies which enable physical and social mobility. The railroads, Lord Wellington fretted, would “encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” Sequence of illustrations showing slaves pulling stone, Trevithick's locomotive, Stephenson's Rocket. (Getty Images)If I had to guess, I’d say the people who run institutions like the National Museum of Wales are generally more like the Alvanelys of the world than the Stephensons (although perhaps without the wit for which Alvanley was renowned). In any event, the historical timeline suggests that the sailing ship, the cannon, and the instruments and mathematics of celestial navigation were more obviously enablers of the slavery and colonial expansion than Trevithick’s locomotive. But such a link fails to combine the anti-racist lesson with an environmentalist one. In fact, the human use of the horse likely did more to aid colonial conquest, since it enabled the use of chariots and mounted cavalry. Not to mention all forms of metalworking, from bronze to steel.When a society compulsively disrespects its historical accomplishments—when it obsessively seeks to turn every good thing into a bad thing—the outlook for that society is bleak. It destroys social cohesion, and sends the wrong kind of message to actual and potential opponents. The matter of the steam locomotive display in Wales may seem minor, and certainly trivial when compared with the appalling events in Ukraine or the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. But it is not. The behavior of the museum administrators in Wales is of a piece with other contemporary symptoms, such as the eagerness within influential circles in the US to embrace the conclusions of the New York Times’s revisionist 1619 project. It is part of the politicization of everything. Science, technology, and art cannot—indeed, must not—be appreciated simply on the grounds of beauty, utility, or truth; everything must be reduced to race, gender, and other academically and media-approved categories of analysis.Trends such as these have real-world implications, including the growth and decline of nations and their relative power. Writing in 1940, C.S. Lewis, warned about the dangers of what he called the National Repentance Movement, which focused on the need to apologize for Britain’s sins (thought to include the Treaty of Versailles) and to forgive Britain’s enemies. Certainly, the British State had done many bad things during its long and eventful history—as well as many good things. But the excessive focus on its sins was part of a phenomenon manifested in a 1933 motion debated at the Oxford Union: “This House will under no circumstances fight for King and country.” To the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, attitudes like these indicated that aggression would not meet much resistance. They also informed a policy of appeasement. Liberals and progressives (as they call themselves) claim to be greatly concerned with physical sustainability of resources and ecosystems. But they are too eager to undercut the social sustainability of their own societies and the physical infrastructures on which those societies depend, however fond they may be of repeating the word “infrastructure.” 

The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has called for a windfall profits tax, arguing the idea is a “no-brainer” that has been taken off the table due to the influence of big companies.

Stiglitz made the comments to reporters during a tour of Australia after personally lobbying the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to introduce the tax and warning that excessive interest rate rises could push Europe, the US, and then Australia into recession.

At a press conference on Monday the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, again ruled out a windfall profits tax despite a new report from the progressive thinktank Australia Institute finding rising profits are helping to drive inflation.

Stiglitz said a windfall profits tax was a “no-brainer” as companies made “huge windfall profits” during the Covid pandemic, and as the Russian invasion of Ukraine had increased energy prices.

“It makes a great deal of sense at this current juncture – it’s not as if the energy companies did anything to deserve it.”

“It was [Vladimir] Putin who engaged in that reckless action. Why should the energy companies be rewarded?”

The tax would discourage companies from exercising “monopoly power” and induce them not to increase prices, he argued, and prevent largely foreign-owned resource companies from extracting money from Australia .

Stiglitz told reporters the windfall profits tax “seems to be politically difficult for this government”, suggesting companies “have a lot of influence”.

In comments to employees of the Australia Institute, Stiglitz also praised environmental taxes such as a carbon tax, which he acknowledged may not be feasible in Australia, an apparent reference to the bipartisan consensus not to drive emissions reduction with taxes since the Coalition’s repeal of the interim carbon price.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, headed by former finance minister Mathias Cormann, has also called on Australia to adopt a carbon price despite Cormann spending years in government fighting against the idea.

Later on Monday, Chalmers told reporters he accepted “wages aren’t driving the inflation problem that we have in our economy” but did not anticipate further revenue-raising beyond responsible changes to multinational tax and tax compliance.

“We’ve made it clear that a windfall tax is not something that we are considering,” he said.

“I had a long conversation with Joe Stiglitz about this this morning in my office. We’ve made our view clear on that for some time.”

Australia is currently enjoying unemployment of just 3.5% after a decade of wage stagnation, but with inflation set to reach 7% and interest rates on the rise, employers and the Reserve Bank don’t want wage growth to add to inflation.

Stiglitz warned it would be a “mistake” to allow workers’ wages to fall behind the increase in prices because “wages are not really the source of the inflation” in Australia, and falling real wages would “exacerbate” inequality.

Given inflation is “focused in a few sectors”, central banks should be careful using monetary policy – a “very blunt instrument” – to deal with the problem, he told reporters in Canberra.

Stiglitz said “a primary risk” is unemployment, warning: “If you raise interest rates too much and too fast, there will be, almost surely, an economic downturn.”

Australia was “not as likely to tilt into recession” as the US, he said, as it is in a “much more robust” position.

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Stiglitz argued the US is “probably already” in a recession, with growth negative in the first quarter of 2022, preliminary data suggesting it will be again in the second quarter, and the fourth quarter of 2021 only positive due to an increase in inventories.

“What Australia has to be sensitive to is that there is a significant risk that Europe and the United States will go too far, and there will be a global downturn.”

Stiglitz said the lower bound of Australia’s inflation target, 2%, had been “pulled out of thin air” and there was “no theory or evidence that 2% was the right number”.

Stiglitz said there is a “strong theory” that during a high period of transformation, “it makes a lot more sense” to accept “a slightly higher rate of inflation if it facilitates that kind of transition”.

He warned that high interest rates made it harder for businesses to invest.

“We want to do everything we can to ensure that transformation happens rapidly and without a loss of jobs.”

Last Friday, I spoke to a group of visiting students from various Arab countries. The topic was U.S. policy toward the Middle East. I told them an abridged version of my own story, starting from September 11—the day that changed my life’s trajectory, but also a day that none of them had any recollection of. They ended up being quite curious about think tanks, what they did, and why I had chosen to work in one. These were good questions.   It was only after I spent time living abroad that I realized that the concept of “think tanks” was somewhat odd. In the Middle East, the idea itself was more or less self-negating. If the goal of a think tank is to influence government policy as well as the broader public debate, then this would seem to require some level of democratic openness. For those who live under dictatorships, governments aren’t something you influence. Rather, they are omnipresent sources of worry—the very entities against which you hope to escape unscathed. As it happened, I would have been skeptical of think tanks too. I came of age not just after 9/11 but also during the Iraq War. I saw myself as opposing the system, because, apparently, the system had given us this absurd war, the Patriot Act, and any number of other post-9/11 abuses (To the extent that people today reflect on the Bush years with nostalgia, it is a nostalgia that is largely unwarranted). I remember how the Iraq War forced me to rethink my assumptions about the nature of change. It was almost as if something clicked, suddenly, after the first phase of the war ended with Bush’s infamous declaration of “mission accomplished.” Anyone who was involved in the anti-war movement would have believed in “people power.” The organizing principle—at least among those who wanted to do more than merely virtue signal—was that each and every one of us had a duty to do what we could to stop the war. Like anything that actually happens, recorded in history with permanence, it now seems as if it couldn’t been otherwise. But the war didn’t seem inevitable at the time. Across the globe, millions were mobilizing and protesting in dozens of countries, something that their own leaders couldn’t quite ignore But of course, “we” couldn’t stop the war. Instead, a group of ideologically committed individuals—many of whom had known each other for decades, including as early as graduate school—were able to influence government from within, with much smaller numbers. And so they managed to do something that is generally not so easy to do: they made the absurd seem real and the indefensible defensible. After everything, I was disillusioned. We had given our hearts and our time and our energy to organizing sit-ins, tent-ins, die-in, and God knows what else, but it was an exercise in futility. I didn’t want to feel what I felt, which was resignation but also a sense that these were “systems” that were so much more powerful than us, and that we, in turn, were powerless when confronted with the reality of the world as it was. Even if this had been an accurate description, this was no way to think, live, or act. It was better to act under the impression of individual agency and free will, regardless of whether or not it was true. This is part of what I hoped to convey to the students, as we discussed whether those outside of government (or even inside) would ever really change U.S. policy toward the Middle East. Of course, we can tinker around the margins and make things less bad or slightly better on specific policies or initiatives, but that wasn’t what they were asking. They were asking about the entire edifice of U.S. policy and strategy in the region as it has been for the better part of seven decades—one that is built around a distinctly authoritarian structure, supported, funded, and sustained by successive American administrations. If there was any doubt about the longevity and durability of this structure, it was helpfully put to rest by President Biden’s cringe-inducing visit to Saudi Arabia last week. What could I tell them? When a policy becomes entrenched over decades, it is extremely difficult to undo. There were moments when it seemed like it could change, during the short-lived (first) Arab Spring of 2004-5 when George W. Bush was advancing his Freedom Agenda. And it seemed like it was changing during the (second) Arab Spring of 2011-2013. That these moments invited us to imagine a genuine alternative to the old ways of relying on dictators makes what actually happened all the more tragic. Was all of this inevitable? Did it actually have to be this way, as opposed to all the others? Of course, nothing is inevitable until after it has already happened. Systems may be stubborn and seem immovable, but they do not have a will of their own. They are the accumulated result of individual actions, and individuals make choices. Those choices, at least in theory, can change. That doesn’t mean they will, only that they can. But my message to the students was, in a way, simpler than that. We, as mere mortals, are only responsible for what we do. That is our range of freedom, and maneuver. To be individuals endowed with free will is to believe, at some level, that this is enough.

France’s June parliamentary elections dealt a heavy blow to President Emmanuel Macron and his place in France’s political arena. Holding an outright legislative majority in 2017, with 345 of 577 seats, his parliamentary group shrunk to 245 – a drop of 100 seats. That left him 34 short of the 289 required to have an absolute majority.
The results in 2022 contrast with the praise heaped on the French president by the English-speaking media since his rise to power in 2017. Macron has variously been depicted as “young, clever and eminently reasonable” (The Economist), “solid” and “urbane” (MSNBC) and a “striver” (Politico). In the United States, he was seen by some Democrats as a model to emulate. A year into his mandate, the Financial Times marvelled how he had turned France “into a refuge for entrepreneurs”.
Such views are anything but universally held in France, however, a point brought home by the drubbing that Macron and his party took in the June elections. Simply the difficulty of pigeonholing the him can inspire suspicion. Ever since entering the public eye, Macron has revelled in paradoxes. In a 2018 speech, he said: 

“One must be very free to dare to be paradoxical and one must be paradoxical to be truly free.”

He is France’s youngest president, having entered the Élysee Palace at age 39 without any previous electoral mandate, but also the preferred candidate of older voters. He’s a champion of Europe, but a polished product of France’s grandes écoles (elite universities). When he was re-elected in April, he was the first to do so outside of a “cohabitation” (power-sharing with an opposing party), yet did so with a historically low percentage of the vote.
So, who is Emmanual Macron? To crack that riddle, let’s take a close look at the concepts that have defined his paradoxical politics.
Disruption and revolution
In 2016, Macron published a political essay, “Revolution”, and there was a lot of talk about “disruption”. The term is often used in the digital world – it’s about thinking differently (to borrow a page from Steve Jobs and Apple), and it is also a way of thinking about business and marketing.
Revolution is to politics what “disruption” is to the economic world. But as was observed by Thomas Schauder in Le Monde, “the facts quickly point to a return to the same”. In other words, there was neither revolution nor disruption, but a massive shake-up especially concerning the left-right political divide. At the same time, the state returned to its classical form, vertical and relatively conservative.
Few terms embody Macron’s chameleonic ideology more than his much-parodied adverbial phrase “En même temps…” (“at the same time”). On the one hand, it can point to a similarity between two entities (in English: “at once”, “simultaneously”). On the other, it can also designate an opposition (“however”, “and yet”). Here is an example from the Journal du Dimanche:

“I have always accepted the dimension of verticality of transcendence, but at the same time, it must be anchored in complete immanence, of materiality.”

During an April 2017 campaign meeting, he even said:

“You must have noticed, I said ‘at the same time’. It appears to be a verbal tic. I will continue to use it.”

Yet in 2018, the president fully owned up to its underlying function: 

“I will continue to use it in my sentences and thought, as it means one takes into account seemingly opposed principles.”

Macron has never believed in being a “normal president”, as his predecessor Francois Hollande once described himself. On the contrary, he wants to embody the presidency in word and deed. He wants emotion and “fiery” politics, as exemplified by a speech he made on July 14, France’s national holiday: “Perharps I’m Vulcan, the one who forges” – in a way, “the one who works”. Macron seeks stature, in the truest French monarchical tradition.
In 2022, however, the reality of France’s electoral landscape brought Emmanuel Macron back down to earth. “Jupiter no more” observed the Financial Times. Indeed, it is rather as if Icarus had burned his wings: the disruptive president of the left and the right, the one who was going to defeat the extreme right, fell short.
New public management, the “third way” and triangulation
New public management (NPM) is a way of introducing private sector methods into public organisations, the pretext being efficiency. It was born in the 1970s and contributed to putting pressure on public service, the idea being that they should be efficient in the same way as the private sector. For France, however, this quickly led to the public-service mission of administrations being overshadowed by the demand for efficiency.
The “third way” is a kind of political transposition of the NPM. Tony Blair, former leader of the UK’s Labour Party (1994–2007) and prime minister (1994-2007) was its most visible face. He was neither left nor right, and yet both – at the same time.
Macron has also been considered France’s champion of triangulation. A way to weaken one’s enemies and gain power, the theory of triangulation was developed by Dick Morris for Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s.

“I felt that what you should do is really take the best from each party’s agenda, and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party. So, from the left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the right, take the idea that they have to work for a living, and that there are time limits. But discard the nonsense of the left, which is that there shouldn’t be work requirements; and the nonsense of the right, which is you should punish single mothers. Get rid of the garbage of each position… and move up to a third way. And that became a triangle, which was triangulation.”

Following in Blair’s and Clinton’s footsteps, Emmanuel Macron is champion of NPM, the third way, and triangulation. It is about being beyond the parties, rallying voters beyond the left and the right. It is also – more prosaically – appropriating the ideas of others. In so doing, he has succeeded in breaking the left-right divide, a divide that structured the French political landscape for more than 50 years.
“Pantouflage” and progressivism
In France, the term pantouflage refers to the practice of leaving the civil service to work in the private sector. Macron’s career has followed the opposite direction – closer to the US practice of “the revolving door”: having attended France’s elite Ecole Normale d’Administration in the early 2000s, he left the public sector to work as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co. His return to politics has been shaped by the corporate spirit and, in particular, the banking world. His resumé reveals both everything and its opposite: major companies and public service.
In 2019, two of Macron’s former advisors, Ismaël Emelien et David Amiel, attempted to define the president’s ideology. Their take was “progressivism”: 

“The first principle of progressivism is to maximise the possibilities of present and future individuals.”

To them, Macron believes that it is the individual that is important and that categories such as religions, social classes, and the left-right divide are outdated. The concept promotes the individual without individualism, globalisation without submission and diversity without division.
By affirming that the world has changed and that it is necessary to govern beyond the parties, Macron thought – in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – that he was going to defeat the extremes. However, the opposite occurred: while Macron succeeded in occupying the centre and centre right, in the process he favoured the rise of the extreme right: the Rassemblement national (RN) party has 89 deputies in the new assembly, a total never before seen.
As for the political left, they recoiled from Macron and in opposition built a new alliance, the Nouvelle union populaire écologiste et sociale (Nupes). In June’s legislative elections, they won 131 seats, second only to Macron’s party, and deprived him of his political majority. If Macronism changed from 2017 to 2021, in 2022, it failed.
Macron: an outline
Ultimately, Macron evades labels. However, his essay “Revolution” does provide us with some clues on his few but enduring political values that still hold today.
Macron’s statements are often vague and can be easily adapted, but Individualism is arguably one of his founding principles:

“I deeply believe in a society of choice, that is to say, freed from its barriers, from an obsolete organisation, and within which, each individual will be able to decide upon his/her life.”

Even if Macron was part of a Socialist government under François Hollande, he is pro-market: “Competition is essential for innovation”, he has said.
He has little sympathy for those who have difficulty finding work, as exemplified by a 2018 remark to a job seeker: “I’ll cross the street and I’ll find you a job” Macron replied, an off-the-cuff phrase that shocked many in France.

In 2018, Emmanual Macron told a job-seeker that all he needed to do to find work was “cross the road”, implicitly putting the responsibility on him.

Macron is pro-European and champions France as an influential country in a European Union that is dear to him: “To regain control of our destiny, we need Europe.” France’s presidency of the Council of the EU from January 1 to May 31 was a highlight for Macron, especially concerning the Ukrainian crisis.
Beyond these themes, the question of the environment appears to be more of an intention than a major ambition. While Macron began his first mandate by the naming Nicolas Hulot as environmental minister, Hulot noisily resigned in 2018. And with Macron’s second mandate, the minister of ecological transition has moved from fifth place in the protocol to tenth place – the implications are clear.
Fractured France
Rather than bringing together everyone to a new centre, freed from political parties, Macron’s strategy has fractured France’s political life into three entities, centre right, left and far right.
Defining Macron is ultimately tied to his character, his electorate and the consequences for the French political landscape. In the end, he may just be a “partyless” catch-all man. As the sociologist Max Weber would say, he has a “charismatic legitimacy”, drawing his authority from his person rather than his moral strength, or even his connection to those who voted for him. After all, many in France did so only because they refused to support either of the two alternatives. That’s a Pyrrhic victory at best for Macron and the “Revolution” of which he dreamed in 2016.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 85
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 17

Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) is a key battleground topic in education today. Parents across the country are rightly very upset that what sounds like and could be a very useful program for kids who struggle in certain ways at school has far less wholesome purposes. On the one hand, they’re noticing that SEL tends to be misapplied in classrooms and through other subjects, not in controlled therapeutic settings with kids who have been identified to need it. On the other hand, they’ve noticed far more nefarious uses like data mining of children and a diversion of educational resources into overtly grooming and Marxist programs they don’t support or want for their kids. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay goes through a paper on Social-Emotional Learning in the context of the pandemic to reveal that there’s an intentional bait-and-switch being sold to school districts (unless they realize what they’re doing, which is unconscionable). What sounds good in SEL is being sold to promote “Transformative SEL” (CASEL model) or, in this paper, “Social-Emotional Learning for Social-Emotional Justice (SEL-SEJ),” which is just a different description of essentially the same thing. What’s obvious here is how flimsy SEL programs of this type are and also how overwhelmingly Marxist in the Paulo Freirean mold Lindsay is exposing in tremendous depth here on the New Discourses Podcast. Join him to learn about how SEL is definitely not what it might seem to be.

The post The Social-Emotional Learning Bait-and-Switch appeared first on New Discourses.

Tariffs aren't merely making summer fun more expensive—they are also making it potentially more dangerous too.
"Life Saver is not a misnomer," writes Neil Mooney, an attorney representing Life Saver Pool Fence Systems, Inc., in testimony submitted earlier this month to the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), which later this week will hold a hearing on the economic impact of the multitude of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in 2018.
For a company like Life Saver, which manufactures fencing meant to keep children away from unsupervised pools where they might accidentally drown, the tariffs have hiked the cost of raw materials imported from China. In his written testimony, Mooney estimates that the company has paid about $1.2 million in tariffs over the past four years—and has twice had to raise prices "specifically because of the tariffs."
"The imposition of the Section 301 tariffs has forced Life Saver to raise its prices which inevitably has led to lower sales volume and therefore fewer protected pools," writes Mooney. "The economic impact of the Section 301 tariffs is not only felt by Life Saver and other similar businesses and their employees, but also by the end consumers—American families."
Are higher taxes on Chinese-made imports worth leaving American children marginally less safe?
Apparently so, at least for the past two presidential administrations. Former President Donald Trump used Section 301 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1974 to impose tariffs on a wide range of goods imported from China in several phases during 2018 and 2019. As a result, the average tariff rate applied to goods from China effectively doubled. Cumulatively, Americans have paid about $136 billion in higher costs as a result of those import taxes—that's about $1,000 per household, according to research by the National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit that opposes the tariffs.
Tariffs are adding to inflation, too. A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade-focused think tank, found that repealing tariffs could reduce overall inflation by about 1 percentage point. Despite that, the Biden administration has so far been unwilling to do more than talk about repealing the tariffs imposed by Trump.
Perhaps this week's hearing in front of the USITC will make the case for a new trade strategy. On Thursday, business owners and industry lobbyists will have a chance to spell out how the tariffs have resulted in slower growth and higher consumer prices. Later this year, the commission is expected to publish a report that could help guide American trade policy in the future (though it's worth noting that a similar series of hearings in 2018 did nothing to stop the onslaught of tariffs, despite dozens of business owners testifying against them).
Pool fencing is, of course, just one example of a niche product that's been affected by four years of an ineffective trade war. Among other businesses and trade associations set to testify on Thursday are makers of outdoor equipment, sporting goods, and brewers.
Fred Ferguson, a vice president at Vista Outdoor, a Minnesota-based company that manufactures a line of bicycling accessories, including helmets, will tell the commission that the U.S. should "rescind tariffs altogether on protective headwear utilized for safety purposes cyclists and other action sports participants," according to a written statement submitted earlier this month.
Tariffs on pool fencing and bike helmets make about as much sense as the tariffs on personal protective equipment that left American hospitals less prepared, in winter 2020, to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. They're also a useful illustration of how both Trump and Biden trade policies could actively harm Americans in ways that go beyond higher prices.
The post How Tariffs Are Making Summer Fun More Expensive, Less Safe appeared first on Reason.com.

A bill working its way through the California Senate would prohibit large social media platforms from using "a design, feature, or affordance that the platform knew, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should have known, causes child users to become addicted to the platform." The Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act has cleared the California Assembly, been amended in the Senate, and referred to the Appropriations Committee.
While the bill seems to address many of the concerns raised about teenagers and social media use, the bill erases the role of parents in determining what their kids can see and do online. 
The bill also establishes unclear rules and definitions seemingly meant to turn social media platforms into cash cows for prosecutors. If found to be violating the law, social media companies can face a civil penalty of up to $250,000 for each violation of a ban on "addicting" features. Companies can be prosecuted directly by the "Attorney General or by a district attorney, county counsel, or city attorney."
It is now conventional wisdom that spending too much time on social media can be bad for kids. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued in a 2021 Atlantic article that social media use is to blame for the increase in depression among adolescent girls. Haidt wrote that "From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14." 
However, whether social media is a symptom or a root cause of mood disorders for some teenagers is not settled science, writes Grayce Burns, a technology policy analyst with the Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website). In June, she observed that conflicting studies about whether social media addiction is an actual addiction suggest that our collective anxiety about social media echoes past social panics about new technology. 
"When the printing press made reading accessible to the public, some individuals, the most prominent being famous British writer Vicesimus Knox, began to identify and condemn 'reading mania' in the late 1700s," Burns wrote. "Like social media addiction today, 'telephone addiction' also had a formal definition and criteria that included being unable to be away from a phone for more than three hours without suffering 'anxiety tremors.'"
California's law has problems that extend from its shaky premise. It prohibits companies from including so-called addicting features but fails to list specific features and to state whether they must be addicting in isolation or in combination with other features or specific kinds of content. Rather than do the hard (if not impossible) work of writing specific regulations for what legislators claim is a real and specific problem, they want to hold social media platforms liable for any feature these companies "knew, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should have known" would cause child addiction.
What would happen if prosecutors decide that mere use of a social media platform leads to addiction in some percentage of children? Or if the content, and not app features, are the addicting draw? The way the bill is written currently, the answers to these questions are unclear. 
"It doesn't make sense to identify the feature when it's the content underlying it that may cause the problem," Dylan Hoffman, a TechNet executive, told the Associated Press. He added that there "is a lot of innovation in this space to make sure that parents and kids are able to better control their social media usage." 
With this bill, California is treating a parenting problem with a government regulation solution.
The post A California Bill Wants To Punish Social Media Companies for 'Addicting' Children appeared first on Reason.com.

Why a wealth tax was abandoned in Britain. By: John Phelan

Wealth taxes have become an increasingly popular policy in recent years, though there is some confusion among their advocates.

On the one hand are those, like the economist Thomas Piketty, who propose wealth taxes with the goal of eliminating concentrations of wealth. He has argued for a graduated wealth tax of 5% on those worth 2 million euros or more and up to 90% on those worth more than 2 billion euros so that “there won’t be billionaires anymore.” To Piketty, the wealth tax will have succeeded if nobody is rich enough to be liable to pay it and revenue is $0.

On the other hand are those, like Senator Elizabeth Warren, who believe a wealth tax could fund vastly increased government spending. Her proposed ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax’ would levy:

…an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 6% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion…this small tax on roughly 75,000 households will bring in $3.75 trillion in revenue over a ten-year period.

Yet despite this increased prominence, wealth taxes have become less common. In 1996, twelve OECD members collected revenue from net wealth taxes: by 2020, just five did. Even Piketty’s native France ditched its wealth tax in 2017. Britain’s failed attempt to impose a wealth tax indicates why.

In February 1974, the Labour party was elected promising to “fundamentally redistribute income and wealth”. They proposed increased pensions, a new child benefit, and reductions in public housing rents. Their manifesto pledged “an annual Wealth Tax on the rich” to help pay for this.

The Inland Revenue was initially positive, reporting that:

“…although there will of course be many problems to be resolved we see no reason why a wealth tax should not be introduced reasonably quickly”

But they did not believe it would raise much revenue. This had been the experience of Britain’s inheritance tax, raised to 75% in 1949 but generating revenues of just 0.6% of total personal wealth by the mid-1960s as people quite legally avoided paying it, mostly by giving it away. While this might reduce wealth inequality – Piketty’s goal – it would not raise the revenues Labour needed to fund its new spending plans – Warren’s goal.

The Select Committee which examined the proposal was much more skeptical of the practicalities than the Inland Revenue. Countries with wealth taxes had imposed them at low rates when most wealth was held in the form of land; neither was the case with Labour’s proposal for mid-1970s Britain. As Howard Glennerster notes:

“The several thousand civil servants needed, depending on the valuation level at which the tax began, the numerous regional offices required and the process of regular valuation that might fall on individuals came as a surprise to the politicians and, indeed, to the Treasury when it got to think about the question properly.”

But if Labour’s wealth tax wouldn’t have achieved the Warren revenue goal, it would have helped achieve the Piketty goal of equalized wealth.

The Treasury concluded that the wealth tax:

“1. Will lead people to seek non resident status, result in a considerable outflow of funds in the form of dividends and interest. Since it will apply to all wealth held world wide foreign employees in foreign companies resident here would be subject to tax. This would result in a big movement of banks, insurance and shipping business moving out of the UK. Assets held here would be affected. This would reduce the level of business in UK.”

They had good reason to think this. Britain imposed a top income tax rate of 83% and 98% on investment income. This was the era of the Tax Exile, which The Rolling Stones acknowledged with their LP Exile on Main Street, partly recorded in the south of France in 1971-1972. Their guitarist, Keith Richards, explained:

“The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws…It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all.”

Britain’s punitive tax rates did help reduce wealth inequality just as Piketty would hope, but they did so by pushing the wealthy – and their wealth – out of the country.

In November 1976, Labour abandoned their plans for a wealth tax. Denis Healy, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote:

“We had committed ourselves to a Wealth Tax: but in five years I found it impossible to draft one which would yield enough revenue to be worth the administrative cost and political hassle.”

So has everybody else.

Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource.

Not so long ago, America’s next COVID fall looked almost tidy. Sure, cases might rise as the weather chills and dries, and people flock indoors. But Pfizer and Moderna were already cooking up America’s very first retooled COVID vaccines, better matched to Omicron and its offshoots, and a new inoculation campaign was brewing. Instead of needing to dose up three, four, even five times within short order, perhaps Americans could get just one COVID shot each year, matched roughly to the season’s circulating strains. Fall 2022 seemed “the first opportunity to routinize COVID vaccines,” says Nirav Shah, the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and simultaneously recharge the country’s waning enthusiasm for shots.[Read: This fall will be a vaccination reboot]Now that fall is [checks notes] officially 10 weeks away, that once-sunny forecast is looking cloudier. The Biden administration could soon offer second booster shots to all adults—an amuse-bouche, apparently, for fall’s Omicron-focused vaccines, which may not debut until October at the earliest, by which time BA.5 may be long gone, and potentially too late to forestall a cold-weather surge. In April, the FDA’s leaders seemed ready to rally around a fall reboot; in a statement last month, Peter Marks, the director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, struck a more dispirited tone. The coming autumn would be just a “transitional period,” he said. Which checks out, given the nation’s current timetable. “I see this fall shaping up to be more incremental,” says Jason Schwartz, a vaccine-policy expert at Yale, “rather than that fresh start of let’s begin again.”This, perhaps, is not where experts thought we’d be a year and a half ago, when the vaccines were fresh and in absurdly high demand. Since then, the tale of the U.S.’s COVID immunity has taken on a tragicomic twist: First we needed a vaccine; then we needed more people to take it. Now the problem is both.Yes, fall’s vaccine recipe seems set. But much more needs to happen before the nation can be served a full immunization entrée. “It’s July, and we just heard that the FDA would like to see a bivalent vaccine,” with the spike of BA.4 and BA.5 mixed with that of the OG SARS-CoV-2, Schwartz told me. When, exactly, will the updated shots be ready? How effective will they be? How many doses will be available? We just started prepping for this new inoculation course, and are somehow already behind.Then, once shots are nigh, what will be the plan? Who will be allowed to get one, and how many people actually will? Right now, America’s appetite for more shots is low, which could herald yet another round of lackluster uptake.There’s little time to address these issues. Fall “is, like, tomorrow,” says Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, an infectious-disease pharmacist at Loma Linda University, in California. Autumn, the season of viral illnesses and packed hospitals, already puts infectious-disease experts on edge. “We dread fall and winter season here,” says Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Stanford University. The system has little slack for more logistical mayhem. The world’s third COVID autumn, far from a stable picture of viral control, is starting to resemble a barely better sequel to the uncoordinated messes of 2020 and 2021. The coming rollout may be one of America’s most difficult yet—because instead of dealing with this country’s vaccination problems, we’re playing our failures on loop.In an ideal version of this fall, revamped COVID vaccines might have been doled out alongside flu shots, starting as early as August or September, to prelude a probable end-of-year surge. But that notion may have always been doomed. At an FDA advisory meeting in early April, Marks told experts that the fall vaccine’s composition should be decided no later than June. The agency didn’t announce the new ingredients until the final day of last month. And it chose to include BA.4 and BA.5, the reigning Omicron subvariant—rather than the long-gone BA.1, which Pfizer and Moderna had been working with. That decision may further delay the shots’ premiere, punting the delivery of some doses into November, December, or even later, depending on how the coming months go. If the goal is preventing a spate of seasonal sickness, that’s “cutting it quite close,” says Wilbur Chen, an infectious-disease physician and vaccine expert at the University of Maryland.Whenever the shots do appear, they could once again be hard to keep in stock. Coronavirus funds are still (still!) stalled in congressional purgatory, and may never make it out. Although the Biden administration has agreed to purchase more than 100 million doses of Pfizer’s revamped Omicron vaccine for the months ahead, federal officials remain worried that, as Ashish Jha, the nation’s top COVID-response coordinator, has said, “we’re not going to have enough vaccines for every adult who wants one” this fall.  Meanwhile, state and local leaders are awaiting marching orders on how much vaccine they’ll be getting, and who will be eligible for boosters—intel they may not receive until after the updated shots are authorized. With a year and a half of experience under their belts, health workers know how to roll out COVID shots, says Chrissie Juliano, the executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition. But distribution could still get tangled if “we’re back to a situation of scarcity,” she told me. The government may allocate shots based on states’ populations. Or it could opt to dole out more doses to the regions with the highest vaccination rates, wasting fewer shots, perhaps, but widening gaps in protection.More than two years into the pandemic, with the health-care system under constant strain and staff exhausted or frequently out sick, local communities across the nation may not have enough capacity to deploy fall shots en masse. In particular, pharmacies, a vaccination mainstay, will need to handle a simultaneous surge in demand for flu and COVID shots amid “a serious nationwide staffing shortage,” Michael Hogue, the dean of Loma Linda University’s pharmacy school, told me. A lack of funding only compounds these problems, by making it harder, for instance, to get doses to people who aren’t insured. For that reason alone, “some of the contractors we’ve used in the past have not been able to keep up the same services,” including vaccination drive-throughs, Phil Huang, the director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, told me. In Douglas County, Nebraska, pop-up vaccination sites are closing because not enough nurses can staff them. How do you get people vaccinated, Lindsay Huse, the county’s health director, asked me, “when nobody wants to work for what you’re paying, or they’re just burned out?”Even if more resources free up, greater shot availability may not translate to greater protection: Less than half of eligible vaccinated Americans, and less than a third of all Americans, have received a first booster dose, a pattern of attrition that experts don’t expect to massively improve. And just how much of an immunity boost the updated shot will offer is still unclear. When the FDA recommended including BA.4/5’s spike, it had limited data on the proposed recipe, collected in mice by Pfizer’s scientists. And Pfizer and Moderna won’t have time to generate rock-solid efficacy data in humans before the shots are authorized, then roll out in the fall. “So when we get these vaccines cranking off the assembly line, the case public-health officials may be able to make will be tempered,” Schwartz told me. That these doses will offer big improvements on their predecessors is a decent bet. But believing that will, for the public, require a small leap of faith—at a time when Americans’ trust in public health is already low.America has had its share of COVID-vaccination victories. Hundreds of millions of people have gotten at least one dose. Distribution and administration have been streamlined. Communities have come together to bring shots to people in all sorts of venues. The local experts I spoke with felt confident that they’d rise to the challenge of this autumn, too. But if the shots themselves are not in demand, an infusion of supply-side resources alone won’t be enough.[Read: America created its own booster problems]With two years of data on COVID vaccines’ safety and efficacy, the case for dosing up has only strengthened, scientifically. But the public’s interest and trust in the shots has fallen off as recommendations have shifted, often chaotically, and the number of necessary shots has ballooned. Even Americans who lined up for their first doses are now over the idea of rolling up their sleeves again. Abdul-Mutakabbir hears often: “I got the two doses; that’s what you told me I needed to do. I’m not doing anything else.” In Camden County, New Jersey, a team led by Paschal Nwako, the region’s health officer, has “knocked on doors, given out freebies and gift cards, visited people in all areas: grocery stores, shops, restaurants, schools, churches, shows,” he told me. “We have exhausted all the playbooks.” Still, people have refused.The shifting culture around COVID in the U.S. has undoubtedly played a role. “We don’t have the same sense of desperation that we did in December of 2020,” Maldonado, of Stanford, told me. Americans are eager to put the pandemic behind them. And boosters are a tough sell in a nation that has dispensed with nearly all other COVID-prevention measures, and where political leaders are triumphantly declaring victory. “We start talking about COVID, and people’s eyes glaze over,” says Nathan Chomilo, a pediatrician and health-equity advocate in Minnesota. “The messaging will have to be fundamentally different, even, than last year’s conversation about boosters.”[Read: Don’t wait to get your kid vaccinated]When the vaccines were fresh, the popular narratives were tantalizing: The shots could permanently stop transmission in its tracks. But that was probably never going to pan out, says Luciana Borio, the FDA’s former acting chief scientist. “Everybody that worked in the vaccine space,” she told me, knew that the safeguards against infection “were not going to last. Their voices did not get listened to.” Instead, the more appealing story took root, setting “expectations that could not be sustained.” Disappointment ensued, fracturing public faith; mis- and disinformation seeped into the cracks. And no one, including the nation’s leaders, was able to offer a compelling enough counternarrative to put the matter to rest.An upgraded shot could be enticing to some pandemic-weary folks. “I know a lot of people, including my family members, who say, ‘If it’s the same vaccine, why would I have to get it?’” Nwako told me. “They want something different.” Chomilo suggested that it may also be wise to stop counting how many shots people have gotten: “I hope no one 15 years from now is saying, I’m on my 15th booster.” But nothing about these new vaccines promises to unify Americans around the why of COVID vaccines. At April’s advisory meeting, Marks said the FDA knew that the U.S.’s current vaccination strategy couldn’t go on forever. “We simply can’t be boosting people as frequently as we are,” he said. And yet, the nation’s leaders now seem keen on okaying another round of original-recipe shots for adults under 50—without emphasizing other tactics to lower transmission rates.Getting COVID shots, too, can be a chore. With so many brands, doses, schedules, and eligibility requirements in the matrix, it’s “the most complex vaccine we have,” says Erik Hernandez, the system director of clinical-pharmacy services at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The fall will introduce even more snarls: Boosters are switching to an Omicron blend, but, contrary to what the FDA had initially planned, primary-series shots will be sticking with the original recipe. “That has massive operational implications,” Maine CDC’s Shah said, and could “increase the risk of errors.” Nor have federal officials offered clarity on how long people getting shots now will have to wait before they’re eligible for yet another this autumn. And Loma Linda University’s Hogue thinks that it’s very unlikely that children, especially the youngest ones, will be greenlit for bespoke Omicron doses this fall—another caveat to juggle. Some experts also worry that different states will once again select different rules on who can sign up for shots first. “You almost have to have a computer algorithm” to figure out what shots you need, Chen, of the University of Maryland, told me. Recommending an updated dose for everyone at once could be less confusing, but if shots are truly scarce, broad eligibility could simply put the privileged at the front of the queue.[Read: Vaccines are still mostly blocking severe disease]Less funding already means less community outreach, and less support for the people most vulnerable to COVID’s worst. The country could easily default back to many of the failures of equity it’s rehearsed before. Abdul-Mutakabbir, who’s the lead clinician and pharmacist for the COVID-19 Equitable Mobile Vaccination Clinics, serving Black and Latino communities in San Bernardino County, says she’s “very nervous” that large swaths of the country will once again “end up in this place where people of minority groups are going to be those that suffer, and people of lower socioeconomic status are going to be those that suffer.”An infusion of dollars would allow the government to purchase more vaccines; it would furnish states with the funds to hire more workers, expand their community clinics, and reach people who might otherwise never get their shots. But the underlying issue remains: The U.S. does not have a strong, coordinated vaccination plan. Experts still can’t agree on how many shots people need, how often we’ll need to update them, even what the purpose of a COVID vaccination should be: stopping just severe disease and death? Blocking as much infection as possible? “We don’t really have a grand unified theory of what we’re doing when we vaccinate,” Shah told me, at least not one that’s been properly messaged—a deficit that will keep hamstringing the country’s immunization efforts.
Without a clear plan, this fall, contra Marks’s prediction, may actually be a definitive one for COVID vaccines—just not in the way that the nation’s leaders once hoped. A bad precedent, too, could be set, and make Americans’ trust in these shots, and the people who offer them, even tougher to recoup.

(Stock photo via Getty Images.)There’s talk of realignment in the air. If you think all the way back to 2012, you might remember a certain phrase—the coalition of the ascendant. This was the Obama coalition, the collection of all of America’s growing demographics, from nonwhite voters to single women. The Romney voters, by contrast, were fading. White, Christian, and married, they were the demographic losers in a population that was becoming both more diverse and more secular. Democratic dominance was inevitable.That analysis should have caused us to feel a certain looming dread. Nations that use race or ethnicity as the organizing principle of politics are often quite unstable, and quite violent. This is true across the world, and it’s true in our own land. Systematic racial division and oppression fractured the country once. It’s foolish to think it couldn’t fracture again—especially when the political class intentionally mobilizes voters to vote as a racial bloc. Optimistic Democrats didn’t see Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 so much as a refutation of the coalition of the ascendant theory as a quirk of the electoral college and a reminder that Hillary Clinton wasn’t Barack Obama. The nation wasn’t quite majority-minority yet, and thus that the white majority could still win races when identity politics reign supreme. But 2020 told a different tale. The Democrats got whiter, the Republicans got more diverse, and now all the assumptions are scrambled. Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a far wider margin than he did in 2016, but he did materially better with Hispanic, Asian, and black voters. In fact, Trump did better than Romney with nonwhite voters in 2016 (an improvement then mainly attributed to Hillary Clinton’s weaknesses), and he improved on that showing in 2020. What was once seen as an aberration now looks like a trend.The trend continues. Last week Axios’s Josh Kraushaar described an ongoing “seismic shift” in the two parties’ coalitions. As outlined in a New York Times/Siena College poll, “Democrats now have a bigger advantage with white college graduates than they do with nonwhite voters.” The Democratic Party’s losses with Hispanics are remarkable. Whereas Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, and Biden won 65 percent in 2020, now the Hispanic vote is “statistically tied.”Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that Hispanic voters will continue to migrate to the GOP. As Ruy Teixeira described this week on his Substack, comprehensive issue polling from Echelon Insights demonstrates that strong progressives have substantially different political and cultural views from Hispanics. Hispanic voters are far more likely to believe that America is “the greatest country in the world,” far less likely to support defunding the police, far less likely to believe “racism is built into our society,” and far less likely to believe that transgender athletes should play on sports teams that match their current gender identity. In most cases, the polling gap is just immense. What accounts for such monumental differences in beliefs in values? As my colleague Jonah Goldberg often (and rightly) says, we should reject monocausal explanations for complex social phenomena, but here’s a factor that simply isn’t discussed enough. The Democratic Party has a huge “God gap,” and that God gap is driving a wedge between its white and nonwhite voters. Let’s look at the data. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey on American religious beliefs provides us with a picture that’s worth a thousand words:We would be foolish to believe that religious differences this immense would not eventually manifest themselves in different political values. Ever since I first set foot on Harvard Law Schools’ campus more than 30 years ago, I’ve seen with my own eyes how utterly scornful many powerful white progressives are towards traditional Christianity. Yet in scorning traditional or orthodox religious beliefs, secular progressives are often scorning indispensable members of their own coalition. Writing in response to flare-ups over Chick-fil-A, Yale law professor Stephen Carter sounded the alarm more than four years ago:Overall, people of color are more likely than whites to be Christians — and pretty devout Christians at that. Some 83 percent of all black Americans are absolutely certain that God exists. No other group comes close to this figure. Black Christians are far more likely than white Christians (84 percent to 64 percent) to describe religion as very important in their lives. Of all ethnic groups, black Christians are the most likely to attend services, pray frequently and read the Bible regularly. They are also — here’s the kicker — most likely to believe that their faith is the place to look for answers to questions about right and wrong. And they are, by large margins, the most likely to believe that the Bible is the literally inerrant word of God. In short, if you find Christian traditionalism creepy, it’s black people you’re talking about. Hispanic Americans also tend to possess strong religious values. In October 2020 the New York Times’s Jennifer Medina published a prescient report highlighting Trump-supporting Hispanic Evangelicals. Called “Latino, Evangelical, and Politically Homeless,” it featured this insightful sentence: “Hispanic evangelicals identify as religious first and foremost.”Yes. Absolutely. That’s exactly why a politics focused on mobilizing by race/ethnicity will not reach them, especially when identity politics is paired with hard-left cultural positions and hostility for traditional religion. Hispanic voters will find a religious connection with many, many white Republicans, and that religious connection can prove far more culturally and politically consequential than any effort to create a politics based on ethnic or racial identity. The disproportionate secularization of white Democrats represents a danger for the Democratic Party, for the country, and for American religion. The danger for the Democrats is clear. America may be more secular than it’s been in generations, but it is still a quite religious country. It’s far more religious than any European nation. It’s far more religious than Canada or the rest of the anglosphere nations. And it’s going to remain extraordinarily religious for the foreseeable future. A party that’s culturally disconnected from (or perhaps even scornful of) traditional religious faith is going to alienate itself from tens of millions of voters it could otherwise reach.The danger to the nation is a version of the same danger represented by ethnic identity politics. If there’s one thing that can fracture a nation as thoroughly as ethnic division, it’s religious strife. The historical examples—from Catholic/Protestant to Hindu/Muslim to Sunni/Shiite—are too numerous to count. Indeed, we’re watching a great power war unfold in eastern Europe that’s motivated at least in part by profound religious animus. Our nation will be far, far healthier if we don’t divide on sharp religious lines. Religious conflict and political religious separation is also dangerous to religion itself. Turning one party into the “faith party” not only risks repeating many of the compromises of the Trump era (many Christians saw supporting the GOP as their only real choice), it also risks melding together faith and power and faith and ideology in deeply destructive ways. Countless political and cultural issues don’t have a clear “Christian” policy solution, yet when a party’s members perceive it to be the party of American Christianity, then the platform is wrongly infused with religious fervor, even on issues (like tax rates, gun policy, environmental policy, foreign policy, and countless others) where the correct religious answer is far from clear. Moreover, the tight union of Christian faith and political power has a terrible track record for the Christianity. Note, for example, that Christianity is withering away in Europe, the very continent that for centuries unified church and state to an extent never seen in the United States of America. When Christian power is seen as indispensable for the flourishing of the Christian faith, history demonstrates that power, not faith, will become the priority of a Christian people. The future is not yet written. Both parties are at a crossroads. There is time for secular progressives to understand that Christians (including especially the black church) are an indispensable element of the progressive coalition. At the very least secular Americans should demonstrate respect and real tolerance for traditional religious beliefs. Indeed, there is a long history of Christian leftist political engagement in the United States. America would be a less just place without their Christian witness, and many politically progressive Christians are traditional and orthodox, including on matters of sex and gender. Can they retain their political home? Conservative Evangelicals—who come disproportionately from the South—have a real opportunity to turn the page on generations of terrible sin. Why are black Christians still so politically separated from the white church? Because for centuries all too many white Christians viewed their black brothers and sisters less through the lens of a common faith and more through the bigoted lens of a different race. It was white identity politics that separated the church, and its lingering legacy is a roadblock to unity today.While Hispanic Americans don’t share the same history as black Christians, the hateful and fearful language around immigration (including, for example, “replacement theory” discourse) causes too many Republican Christians to view Hispanic immigrants more as a political threat and less as brothers and sisters who likely share the same faith.In December 2016, the executive editor of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, famously told NPR’s Terry Gross, “We don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives.” His comment rang true to me. During my time in deep blue America, it was plain to me that many of my secular friends were mystified by my faith, at least at first. But if we don’t “get religion” we won’t fully get the seismic shift in American politics. America is a multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and deeply religious republic. If one or both parties can embrace each element of that reality, then we have a chance to make sure that seismic shift moves our politics towards the respectful pluralism that America requires. One more thing …In May I wrote at length about the police failures in Uvalde, Texas, and since then the story has gotten much worse. I don’t want to link to the newly-released video footage of police waiting in the hallway while gunshots rang out in a classroom a few feet away, but it’s exactly as bad as you can imagine. Instead, I want to link to something else, something much better.There is still great courage in this country. Last week I ran across the story of Nick Bostic thanks to this tweet: Joe Paul @joesampaulSTUNNING: LPD body cam video shared with @WLFI shows local hero Nick Bostic carrying a 6-year-old child from a burning Lafayette home. July 14th 20222,721 Retweets12,592 LikesThis remarkably courageous man was driving past a burning building, stopped his car, and saved a family. WLFI News has the details, in Bostic’s own words: "I slammed on the brakes, I turned the steering wheel, I did a 180, I ran into the back of the house and I was yelling for anybody 4 faces, 3 or 4 faces came out the top."Four children accompanied by their 18-year-old sister were inside.The eldest sister was able to get three of her siblings out but one was still missing, Nick Ran back in."I heard a faint whine, a faint crying noise and I went down there till I found that baby," said Nick.Due to smoke, Nick's only option was to exit from upstairs."I remembered seeing a window in the first room I checked for the child and I knew that would be the side to go on, that would probably be my best bet."The child was safe but Nick suffered multiple severe injuries."It was all worth it. I kept reminding myself what a small sacrifice. This temporary pain, oh ya it's so worth it.”Hero.And another thing …My Good Faith podcast co-host Curtis Chang is on a “sabbatical” for most of this month (must be nice Curtis!) but that doesn’t stop me from podcasting. This week I hosted Scott Sauls, pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville. We talked about his new book, Beautiful People Don’t Just Happen, whether winsomeness “works,” and about his prescient warnings about the culture wars. It was a great conversation. I hope you give it a try, even if my theological wingman has decided to take the month off.  One last thing …I know quite a few hillbillies. I know very few Thomists. And I know precisely zero Hillbilly Thomists. But lots of readers know and love these guys, and they keep sending me some truly delightful songs. They’ve released some new music, and it’s great. Enjoy:

Last week, Boris Johnson announced that he would resign from his role as leader of the Conservative Party, which will now choose his successor as Prime Minister. Johnson, the former mayor of London, led the Tories to a sweeping election victory in 2019 and guided his country’s withdrawal from the European Union. Since then, he has been beset by a constant string of scandals, often stemming from his own lies, and the violation of his own government’s COVID rules. His resignation only came after numerous Cabinet ministers called for his departure, finally rendering his attempts to remain in charge untenable.

I recently spoke by phone with David Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University, about Johnson’s legacy and what comes next for the Tory Party. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Johnson may have permanently altered British politics, what distinguished his style of populism, and the Labour Party’s continuing difficulties.

No one in America would dispute that Trump changed American politics. Do you think Boris Johnson has changed British politics?

He has changed it in two obvious ways. The first is that all of this is still Brexit playing itself out, and there almost certainly would’ve been no Brexit without Boris Johnson. People who look back on it now tend to think that the key moment in the Brexit campaign was when Johnson came out for Leave, and that British politics has not been the same since.

The other thing, which is closer, I suppose, to some of what Trump has done, is that Johnson has pushed the limits of what people think is permissible further than anyone has in modern British politics. There were a lot of conventions he tested, and most of them held. But the unanswered question is the extent to which that’s created a precedent, and his successors will continue to test them. Compared even to Theresa May before him, the Johnson premiership felt like it was much more willing to see how far it was possible to go before the rules kicked in, and it turned out it was further than anyone thought.

What, specifically?

In a way, the norm he pushed hardest on—and it is worth adding here that some of this was foreshadowed by Jeremy Corbyn during his time as the head of the Labour Party—was the idea that Parliament and parliamentary government is the be all and end all of British politics. And Johnson right till the end was trying to make a case that a popular mandate, Brexit, and then a general election which he won by saying he would get Brexit done, somehow, for want of a better word, trumped some of the claims of Parliament.

He would fall back on the idea that a Prime Minister has an obligation and a kind of set of rights that derived from the number of people who voted for him in a general election. And that simply pushes against most of the ways that British politics work. He tried to bypass his parliamentary party. He tried to claim that he could govern without many of them, in the name of the people. It is a form of populism. In the end, it wasn’t enough to sustain him, but he pushed it further than anyone else had.

When you said that his undoing was about Brexit, or the consequence of Brexit, what did you mean?

I don’t think his undoing was a consequence of Brexit. His premiership happened because of Brexit, and the consequences of Brexit will long outlast him. I think his undoing was him. In the end, he couldn’t put together a government. He lost the ability to persuade enough people in his party and in Parliament to support him.

A year ago, he was fine. A year ago, he was doing that kind of politics, and he still had the support of his party, and there was no reason to think he wouldn’t potentially be Prime Minister for ten years. It’s not that in the last year the consequences of Brexit have finished him off. What destroyed him was his inability to get people in his government willing to go out and lie on his behalf day after day. I mean, in the end, what destroyed him over the last week is the fact that too many people in his Cabinet had simply got sick of saying things which turned out the next day not to be true.

When you talk about this new type of politics that he was practicing, shaped by Brexit, I assume you mean some sort of version of a Conservative Party that is perhaps more appealing to working-class voters in formerly Labour-held constituencies, and perhaps a Conservative Party more willing to spend money. Where does that type of politics stand now within the party?

I meant two things. I meant that—but I also meant the politics that sets a kind of national popular majority against Parliament. The brute fact of British politics, even now, is that if members of the Parliament were polled on the basis of their personal opinion, the majority of them would say Brexit was a very bad idea. The Parliament that existed between 2016 and 2019 was, on the whole, massively against Brexit, trying to represent a population that voted for it. And Johnson was the one who broke the deadlock by essentially saying, “I’m going to be on the side of the people and Parliament can go to hell if it needs to.” So there’s that kind of politics, and I think that kind of politics appeals a lot to some members of the Conservative Party, who see it as a way of cutting through what they feel is the liberal establishment and so on.

It is quite Trumpish—the people against the establishment. And then there’s the other thing that goes with it, which is that the price of that kind of politics is appealing to non-traditional conservatives, and to not traditionally conservative voters, with a bigger state agenda with possibly more public spending. Many people in the Conservative Party are uncomfortable with that. They’re probably more uncomfortable with that than with more majoritarian populist politics, and the leadership election to succeed Johnson is partly going to be played out on that territory.

Maybe all of the people vying to replace Johnson, apart from Rishi Sunak, are talking about a more traditional tax-cutting agenda. They think he went too far pandering to this new base of support. But most of them, at the same time, are still speaking about the people against the élites. So, that part of Johnson’s legacy will remain. The big-state stuff is hard to sustain, but what matters is how they’re going to square that circle. How are you going to be the spokesperson for a majoritarian Brexit politics at the same time as running a small-state government? No one’s got an answer for that.

Just to go back to the Trump comparison you made—it strikes me that there’s one huge difference, which is that Trump’s project was always a minority one. He never won a plurality. He never had good approval ratings. Johnson did win a huge majority in Parliament. He was on the winning side of the Brexit referendum, which won fifty-two per cent of the vote, and for a while he was legitimately popular. We probably think the same thing about Brexit and about Johnson, but it does seem to be a type of populism where you’re wielding majorities against democratic institutions.

By James Pethokoukis and Michael Strain
For the past two
years, the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated discussions of the US economy. But
now, with inflation and the possibility of a recession on everyone’s
minds, are we in the post-pandemic economy? To get a sense of the current
economic moment, as well as what’s next for the US economy, I’m joined by
Michael Strain, whose macroeconomic forecasting during the pandemic has been on
point.
Mike is the director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also the author of the 2020 book, The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.
Pethokoukis: Inflation is really high. How did we get
here?
Strain: On the supply
side, we had supply chain bottlenecks that restricted the ability of businesses
to produce goods and services. We had a situation where it was hard for businesses
to find workers, where the workforce participation rate wasn’t recovering from
the pandemic as rapidly as people had thought. It was due in part to
pandemic-era programs that expanded the generosity of unemployment benefits or
that just expanded household savings generally.
Shopping in a supermarket in New York on Friday, July 1, 2022. Prices for goods rose 6.3% in May from the previous year. Photo by Richard B. Levine via REUTERS
Those supply-side
restrictions collided with a huge burst of demand for goods and services on the
part of consumers. This extremely strong demand was similarly fueled by several
factors: the pandemic was coming to an end, vaccines were more widely
available, people could go back out and lead more normal lives. Business
activity restrictions were lifted or relaxed. This led to a recovery of
consumer demand. The Fed kept interest rates very low, which helped consumers
to spend money. The Fed was attempting to juice the housing sector by
purchasing mortgage-backed securities. That not only led to strong demand for
houses, but it also had spillover effects in other sectors of the economy. And
Congress, through the $900 billion stimulus that was passed in December of 2020
and through the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan that was passed in
March of 2021, also strongly juiced consumer demand. And so you had this big
burst of demand.
Are the things causing high inflation right now the
same as they were six months ago?
No, they’re not. Some of them are similar, but a lot of the inflation we’re experiencing now is coming from higher energy prices due to the war in Ukraine, coming from higher food prices due to the war in Ukraine. If you look at measures of inflation that try to remove outliers, or if you look at measures of inflation that try to remove food prices and energy prices, you see that inflation looks different. Inflation is still very, very high, but it’s not accelerating. For example, when you look at the consumer price index but you kick out food and you kick out energy, you see really fast inflation. You see the price level for those goods and services increasing much faster than it normally does. But over the past six or seven months, the problem is not getting worse. It’s not getting better, either. You’re not seeing the consumer price index minus food minus energy inflation fall, but you’re not seeing it rise. You are seeing the headline CPI rise.
Are we heading into a recession?
I think it is unlikely
that the Fed will be able to engineer a soft landing. I think the odds of a
recession at some point in the next 18 months are two-thirds, maybe higher. I
think the severity of that recession is TBD. The arguments in favor of a mild
recession are that there is no real underlying structural problem in the
economy right now. We don’t have a situation, for example, where people own
more houses than they should.
Housing prices have gone up. Housing prices are primarily driven by market fundamentals. Equity prices had also gone up quite a bit. Equity prices are now down 20 percent, which is probably the more reasonable valuation. Household debt service ratios are low. Household balance sheets are strong. Businesses are profitable. So we are in a situation where we can have a kind of textbook recession: The Fed raises interest rates, that reduces demand, demand goes down, economic output goes down, we’re in a recession, unemployment rises, prices moderate.
What would the recovery from such a recession look like?
My expectation would
be that employment would recover more slowly than it has from other Fed-induced
recessions in the past. I think that we won’t be in a situation with the kinds
of systematic economic problems that take years to unwind. I think we would
have a recession where demand would drop because of the Fed. And then when the
Fed put its foot on the gas pedal, demand would come back. And the recession
under that scenario would be much more mild.
The concern that I
have that is growing is that the Fed is so far behind the curve right now and
the war in Ukraine doesn’t seem to be ending. If high oil prices are spooking households
and businesses into thinking that we’re going to have inflation for a long time
and are affecting the decisions that businesses are making today about prices as
a consequence of those expectations, then the Fed may have to slam on the
brakes a lot harder than it otherwise would.
If we have a recession, what happens to the “Great Resignation”
narrative?
I think the Great Resignation
is largely a myth. Instead of a Great Resignation, what I see is a big increase
in upward mobility. If you look at wage growth for workers who change jobs,
it’s much higher than wage growth for workers who stay in jobs. And so people
are quitting their jobs, they’re getting new jobs, and those new jobs pay
higher wages. This is a story of upward mobility.
I think we are in a period
right now where even though employment has nearly fully recovered, even though
workforce participation is finally getting close to recovering or closer than
it has been, there is a real change in the labor market in terms of the kind of
relative bargaining power of workers. Workers are in the driver’s seat, right
now, in a way that’s unusual. I think if we have a recession, and when we come
out the other end, we will see workers in a relatively weaker bargaining
position than they currently are in.
Learn more: 5 Questions for Glenn Hubbard on Adam Smith's Answer to Economic Populism | 5 Questions for Ryan Streeter on the Benefits of Dynamism | 5 Questions for Michael Strain on the Labor Market
The post 5 Questions for Michael Strain on Inflation, Recession, and the Labor Market appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

During his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden claimed that "by the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office—the only president ever to cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year.
Since then, he's claimed responsibility for "the largest reduction" in the federal deficit in history.
That claim, in short, is bullshit.
In fact, in the roughly 18 months since he took office, Biden's policies have only added to America's long-term budget deficit, which is getting worse and worse as government spending outpaces tax revenue.
What Biden is trying to do is take credit for expiring emergency spending measures. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government ran an unprecedented $3.1 trillion deficit in 2020, which fell to a still-stratospheric $2.7 trillion deficit in 2021.
This year, with COVID spending largely off the books, the deficit is expected to fall to about $1.4 trillion—though we won't have a final figure until after the fiscal year ends on September 30.
If you eliminate outlier years like 1943, when the U.S. was embroiled in a global war, this year's budget deficit is likely to end up as one of the largest in American history even after adjusting for inflation.
So Biden doesn't really have anything to be bragging about.
As expiring COVID spending made our fiscal situation look better on the surface, Biden was busy adding $2.4 trillion to the long-term deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office's most recent estimates.
That's due to Biden's American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package, and the $1.5 trillion federal budget that was passed in March. If the president's multi-trillion-dollar Build Back Better plan had become law, we'd been in even worse shape. 
On the chart below, the grey columns represent the projected deficits for the next 10 years when Biden took office. The red columns are the projected deficits a year and a half into his presidency. Biden can talk about reducing the deficit all he wants, but the truth is that he's added to it.

"The federal government's budget is on the road to hell," warned former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin back in 2011. That was before Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden each went on a spending binge that has made our fiscal future even less stable.
Biden wants you to focus on just a small part of the overall picture. But the deficits for the past two years and this year are a misleading indicator of America's overall fiscal health.
And to claim that he has reduced the deficit is worse than misleading. It's an outright lie.
Photo Credits: CNP / Polaris/Newscom; Mykhaylo Palinchak / SOPA Images/Newscom; MEGA / Newscom; Abaca Press/Gripas Yuri/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; Ron Sachs/CNP; SplashNews/Newscom; Bob Daemmrich/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom.
Music Credits: "Threat (Good Remix) Instrumental Version," by Wearethegood via Artlist. 
Graphics by Adani Samat and Isaac Reese. Edited by Regan Taylor. Written by Eric Boehm.
The post Biden's Policies Have Increased, Not Reduced, Future Budget Deficits appeared first on Reason.com.

When I first visited Kyiv in March of 2014, a few weeks after the “Revolution of Dignity,” there was a certain dreariness in the air. The Maidan, with its encampments and smell of burnt tires, felt febrile; the downtown looked overwhelmingly grey and dilapidated after decades of communism and 20 years of missed opportunities following the collapse of the Soviet Union.On my most recent trip in June this year, together with American Purpose editor-in-chief Jeff Gedmin and our friend and fellow-contributor Iulia Joja, Kyiv looked like a different city. Some of it was just midsummer pleasantness: While the city remained half-empty and fortified because of the war, the restaurants and cafés housed by the Stalinist architecture would not look out of place in Islington or Brooklyn. And, notwithstanding the hardship and tragedy of recent months, Ukrainians came across as serene, without any of the gloom associated in Western popular imagination with post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Ignore the Cyrillic and you can easily imagine yourself in Warsaw or Prague. Not Bucharest though: Iulia noted that Kyiv is much cleaner, war or no war.My read is simple: Ukraine has become a part of the West.Is that a surprise? In the winter of 2014, Ukrainians spent weeks in the freezing cold to ensure that their government would follow through on their association agreement with the European Union. For years, Ukrainians bled in the trenches to keep Russian expansion in the Donbas at bay. This year, against the odds, they have in important respects defeated what some consider the second largest military in the world.After a decade in which, more often than not, countries have been peeling off Western alliances, including in pursuit of deeper relations with China, Ukraine’s embrace of the West should be treated as a gift from heaven. Turkey and Hungary, while formally in NATO, have become fifth columns rather than constructive stakeholders. A plethora of other countries, from Brazil to Indonesia, are hedging their bets in global confrontations between the West and our adversaries.

Despite its successive enlargements, the relative weight of the European Union in the global economy has fallen from its peak of around 25 percent of the world’s real economic output in the early 1990s to less than 15 percent now. The U.S. share of real global output has followed a downward path from its peak in the late 1990s. By 2050, some forecasts suggest, China will command roughly the same share of world output as the EU and the U.S. combined.Insert a nation of 40 million, in a critically important region of Europe, which has been doing almost everything right­­–while also fighting off and practically crippling the military of one of our key adversaries. Why is Ukraine’s accession to the EU, and its place in Western alliances, treated as a matter for further discussion and not as the clear-cut, uncontroversial blessing that it is?The argument is not simply that Ukraine can, under the right conditions, materially strengthen our alliances–militarily, politically, economically. Perhaps more important, Ukrainians are more unapologetically Western in their embrace of Western-style economic and political institutions than we are.Most Westerners pay lip service to localism, federalism, and the devolution of power. For Ukrainians, these ideas are alive. Several interlocutors explained to our group in Kyiv that the kind of bottom-up resistance to Russian occupation in places like Kherson is linked to reforms devolving powers to mayors and municipalities. Unthinkable in the Russian context, Ukrainian mayors actually run cities and control economic resources–while being democratically accountable–and Ukrainians love it. The idea that their local mayor would be removed and replaced by a Russian-sponsored satrap was simply outrageous to ordinary Ukrainians who took to the streets at great personal risk.Not only would it be hard to imagine similar levels of enthusiasm about, say, Muriel Bowser (not to speak of Bill de Blasio!), but the United States, and to a lesser extent some European countries, have embarked on a vicious cycle of delegitimizing their political institutions.To some on the left, such institutions are tainted by the painful legacies of slavery, racism, colonialism, or misogyny, with liberal democratic ‘norms’ only masking the ruthless relationships of power that keep women, minorities, and other vulnerable groups down. On the right, the mantra seems to be one of the “failure of liberalism,” regurgitated by figures from Patrick Deneen to Yoram Hazony. Meanwhile, that once-venerable institution of American conservatism, the Philadelphia Society, will hold a session later this year on the “fate of conservatism in an age of Illegitimacy,” featuring speakers including Michael Anton of Flight 93 fame.On both of the extremes that currently muddy the waters of public life in the Western world, there is little appreciation of the counterfactuals. True, liberal democracy, religious and social toleration, and market relations are in many ways unsatisfying. In some cases, they may be overdue for reform. Our fundamental moral intuition rarely resonates with the messiness and unwieldy nature of a pluralistic society based on incompletely shared rules.Yet, liberal democracy’s arrangements are greatly superior to any alternative that has been tried. As for the ideas of social order that have not been tried, at least not in recent past, as the post-liberals like to insist, not many rise above the level of the puerile. The United States is a nation with a small and not terribly energized Catholic minority. Yet Catholic integralists somehow expect that giving the state the power to re-order society “toward the highest good,” to use their favorite turn of phrase, will place them–and not the woke, or the atheists, or the “RINOs”–in the driver’s seat.Ukraine, for one, has seen the alternatives to liberal democracy. From Soviet communism, through the kleptocracy of the Yanukovych years, to the brutality of Putin’s regime and of the mafia-run “people’s republics” in Ukraine’s East, none of them looks particularly appealing.And therein lies the main promise of Ukraine’s accession to the EU and Western geopolitical structures: a forceful reminder of the value of the institutions and informal norms that we take for granted and even dismiss as trivial. Ukrainians understand well that freedom, national self-determination, and democratic, constitutional government are worth fighting and even dying for. Quite a few Americans and Europeans are in dire need of being reminded of that lesson.Dalibor Roháč is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of American Purpose. Twitter: @DaliborRohacPhoto: Office of the President of Ukraine (source)

The “Torso of Adèle” is among the smallest and most sensual of Auguste Rodin’s partial figures. She has neither head nor legs; her body reclines with its elbows raised and one arm flung across her neck, her back arching into the air. The eye seeks the point that balances her movement. Skimming her breasts, her ribs, her navel, it comes to rest on her iliac crest, the bone that wings its way across the hip. “From there, from Ilion, from her crest, Odysseus departed on his return to Ithaca after the war,” thinks the narrator of “The Iliac Crest” (2002), the second novel by the Mexican-born writer Cristina Rivera Garza. To his wandering mind, “Iliac” summons Ilion, Homer’s Troy—a city destroyed because one selfish man desired one beautiful woman. In Rivera Garza’s fiction, quests for desirable bodies do not destroy cities. They destroy the identities—man, woman—worshipped by rulers.

No one clings to his manhood more ardently than the narrator of “The Iliac Crest,” a physician at a state-run sanatorium. He lives alone in a forbidding house, on a wild spit of land somewhere near the ocean, on the border of two nations. One storm-thrashed night, a woman arrives at his door, trembling and disconcertingly lovely. “What really captured my attention was her right hip bone, which, because of the way she was leaning against the doorframe and the weight of the water over her skirt’s faded flowers, could be glimpsed just below the unfinished hem of her T-shirt and just above the elastic of her waistband,” he observes. His clinical gaze is clouded by the allure of his visitor’s body. The learned language of anatomy eludes him: “It took me a long time to remember the specific name for that bone, but, without a doubt, the search began at that moment. I wanted her.”

This woman, whom he takes as the object of his quest, tells him that her name is Amparo Dávila. The name is the first obstacle he must confront. It is the name of an actual Mexican writer of fantastical short stories in the nineteen-seventies. Characters—sadistic house guests, elusive demons—and passages from Dávila’s fiction creep into “The Iliac Crest” as the Amparo Dávila of the novel usurps the narrator’s home, laying more obstacles in his path. She invites his ailing ex-lover to live with them, and the women begin to whisper conspiratorially in a private language. “Glu-glu,” they repeat, like rainfall. Engulfed by their dialect, the narrator starts to lose his grasp on his masculinity, the source of his power. “I know your secret. You are a woman,” Amparo Dávila tells him. Unsure of his identity, unable to differentiate between reality and fiction (or insanity), he—and we—start to lose the thread of the plot.

Desperate, the narrator embarks on a journey, crossing the border to track down the real Amparo Dávila. He finds an old woman who bears her name and claims to have disappeared into her writing. Addressing him with feminine parts of speech, she tells him he has been not only a woman but also a tree. “My half-buried, half-liberated body,” he thinks, seeing flashes from his vegetal past. “My own ruins.” The journey ends with no consummation of his desire, no reclaiming of his home. Instead, he must surrender to his undone, unsexed, antiheroic nature; he must plunge into “an infernal abyss” of desire that shatters his preconceptions about the body, identity, and language. “I felt as if I were inside a parenthesis in a sentence written in an unknown language,” the narrator thinks.

The mystery and obscurity that envelop Rivera Garza’s fiction caress both gender and genre, words with a shared etymology. In “The Iliac Crest,” gothic shades into noir, noir into fable, with fable climaxing in the metafiction cherished by Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges. Trapped in the undertow of this procession, it is easy to forget what prompted the narrator’s quest in the first place: the name of the hip bone. It appears only on the novel’s final page, when such cruel, inexplicable things have passed between him and his various Amparo Dávilas that the word “iliac” clarifies nothing. It hangs before us, flush with the deferred promise of some ruinous or transcendent revelation. “I smiled upon remembering, too, that the pelvis is the most definitive area to determine the sex of an individual,” the narrator thinks, with irony. Nothing is definitive anymore, least of all the relationship between anatomy and gender.

This unsettling of boundaries conjures up various terms to describe Rivera Garza’s body of work as a writer and as a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston: feminist, queer, trans, posthuman, and—the term stressed by the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her its “genius” grant in 2020—transnational. At times, the will to place her fiction seems to betray the very evasions on which it depends. But these terms help to excavate the political imagination of her sensuous border crossings, and the national history behind her aesthetic of disappearance. “Only a disappeared person could have materialized on the coast as she had,” the narrator thinks of Amparo Dávila, wondering if she has been a victim of the government, organized crime, or a medical institution like the one where he works. “Disappearance is contagious,” he thinks. “With scientific and technological advances, we now know that to become a disappeared person, previous contact with another such person is necessary.”

The disappearance of women here holds a cracked mirror up to the disappearance of women in the world beyond the novel. In Mexico, women do not fade into texts with mysterious grace. They are snatched from the streets and thrown into unmarked cars. Their bodies—raped, tortured, decapitated—are found days or months later, or never found at all. The rate of femicide has doubled in the past five years; ten women and girls are killed every day on average, and Mexico is the second most dangerous country for transgender people. The increase has been spurred by the rise in cartel violence since President Felipe Calderón launched his war on drugs, in 2006. “But we know other, more truthful names: the war against the Mexican people, the war against women,” Rivera Garza writes in her essay collection “Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country.” The word “femicide” never surfaces in Sarah Booker’s exquisite translation of “The Iliac Crest.” But it is the missing word that hurls the reader down to earth.

The primary tension in Rivera Garza’s fiction—between the unruly intensities of sexual desire and the political disciplining of the body—is at its most concentrated in the latest translation of her work, “New and Selected Stories” (Dorothy). The book assembles pieces from three collections first published in Spanish—“La Guerra No Importa” (1991), “Ningún Reloj Cuenta Esto” (2002), and “La Frontera Más Distante” (2008)—variously translated by Booker, Francisca González Arias, Lisa Dillman, and Alex Ross. And it adds a new collection of flash fiction, “Diminitus,” parts of which Rivera Garza translated herself, while founding the first Spanish-language creative-writing doctoral program in the United States.

In Rivera Garza’s refusal to elevate one language above the other, we glimpse her family’s bilingual history. In her essay “Writing in Migration,” she traces it to the turn of the past century, when the regime of Porfirio Díaz pursued a program of economic growth at the expense of the country’s peasantry and its Indigenous peoples. All four of her grandparents were exiled from their lands. Her father’s parents fled to ranches and mines on the Texas-Coahuila border; her mother’s parents, to the burgeoning cities of southern Texas, where they picked cotton, worked construction, and learned English, until one day, some thirty years after their arrival, they were deported to Mexico, casualties of Herbert Hoover’s Depression-era crackdown on immigration. Exiles again, they found themselves in the port city of Matamoros, whose northern limits follow the Rio Grande. On the other side of the river lies Brownsville, Texas.

Rivera Garza was born in Matamoros in 1964. She knew nothing of her family’s American past—only the fears and anxieties of her home town, the base of the Gulf Cartel, one of the oldest criminal syndicates in the country. Her childhood coincided with its expansion into the U.S. and across Latin America. Her adolescence saw the successful introduction of cocaine trafficking to the cartel’s operations, aided by the political ties of the narcos, “the fierce businessmen” of globalization. By the time she enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the state, like many others in the eighties, had ratcheted up its economic liberalization, seizing lands, privatizing social services, and watching as violence, especially violence against women, exploded. “For a unam graduate with a degree in sociology, the prospects for life in a country clearly turning toward neoliberalism were few,” she recalled.

In 1990, she arrived at the University of Houston to start a doctorate. Her dissertation examined the criminalization of prostitutes and insane people during the Díaz era and the “mad narratives” produced by doctors and inmates at La Castañeda General Insane Asylum. Inmates were often poor mestizo women, whose allegedly aberrant sexual desires informed much of the state’s discourse on mental illness. In the asylum’s archives, Rivera Garza found traces of their voices, raised in opposition and sometimes in supplication, when they confessed their sexual suffering and pleasure. “Asylum inmates pressed doctors, often successfully, to listen to their stories closely,” she wrote. “Suspicion and seduction must have played equal roles as their multiple encounters unfolded.” Reading the case files of inmates, she discovered acts of expressive freedom smuggled in through the diagnostic protocols of psychiatry and its production of knowledge designed to control women.

Illustration by João Fazenda

The lasting depredations of the Trump Presidency were brought into sharp focus by last week’s testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6th, which left an indelible portrait of Donald Trump as a food-throwing despot willing to encourage an armed mob to march to the Capitol. And, in addition to an attempted coup, we have him to thank for 2022’s becoming the turning point of the Supreme Court’s conservative revolution.

In a single week in late June, the conservative Justices asserted their recently consolidated power by expanding gun rights, demolishing the right to abortion, blowing a hole in the wall between church and state, and curtailing the ability to combat climate change. The Court is not behaving as an institution invested in social stability, let alone in the importance of its own role in safeguarding that stability. But what if its big and fast moves, eviscerating some constitutional rights and inflating others, are bound for collision? As people harmed by one aspect of its agenda look to other aspects of it to protect them, the Court may not be altogether pleased with where that process leads.

Shortly before the Court, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overruled Roe v. Wade, a synagogue filed suit in a Florida court, challenging, under the Florida constitution, the state’s new law criminalizing pre-viability abortions. Among the plaintiff’s claims is that the abortion ban violates the right of Jews “to freedom of religion in the most intimate decisions of their lives.” The suit states that Jewish law stipulates that life begins at birth, not before, and “requires the mother to abort the pregnancy” if there is a risk to her “health or emotional well being.” Thus, the plaintiff argues, the abortion ban infringes on Jewish free exercise of religion.

Many post-Dobbs lawsuits can also now be expected to assert that abortion bans violate state constitutions, which may be more protective of individual rights than the federal Constitution is. Marriage equality, for example, was protected in Massachusetts by a state constitutional ruling twelve years before the Supreme Court declared a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Republican-dominated state courts, no less than G.O.P.-led state legislatures, though, may well stymie such efforts to preserve abortion access. Last month, the Iowa Supreme Court simply overruled its own 2019 decision affirming a state constitutional right to abortion, leaving Iowa free to ban the procedure.

But the Jewish group’s claim is a bellwether, because the Supreme Court has lately been exceedingly accommodating of people’s religious views. This term, two cases resulted in historic expansions of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The Court held that Maine, which provides tuition funds for students who reside in districts lacking public secondary schools to attend secular schools elsewhere, must also provide funds for such students who choose to attend religious schools. The Court also held, in the case of a football coach at a public high school in Washington State, who knelt and prayed on the field after games, that the school district could not stop him, even if it wanted only to avoid the appearance of endorsing religion. The upshot, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, in a dissenting opinion, is that the Court “elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise . . . over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state.” And, in a free-speech case this term, the Court held that Boston must allow a group to fly a Christian flag on the flagpole outside city hall if it allows other groups to hoist non-religious flags, such as the pride flag.

The Supreme Court’s expansion of religious liberty is long-running, but it has rapidly accelerated in the two years since the Court gained a conservative supermajority. At the start of the pandemic, in 2020, the Court repeatedly rejected claims of churches that objected to states’ stay-at-home orders. But, after Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed, in the fall of 2020, a majority—the same five conservative Justices who eventually voted to overrule Roe v. Wade—held in favor of Catholic and Orthodox Jewish organizations that objected to a state’s stricter capacity limit for houses of worship than for essential businesses. Similarly, the courts have historically and routinely rejected religious free-exercise challenges to compulsory vaccinations, such as for admittance to schools. But, since last year, a number of courts have required religious exemptions to COVID-vaccine mandates. According to a recent Yale Law Journal study conducted by Zalman Rothschild, a fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, “while every federal court in the country faced with the issue has rejected vaccine-mandate challenges brought under free-speech or substantive-due-process theories, free exercise challenges have succeeded in securing wins for vaccine objectors.” He has since noted that “free exercise has exploded out of proportion.” Indeed, that expansion threatens to allow people to claim a religious free-exercise right to discriminate against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals. But it may also arm those who seek religious exemptions from abortion bans with powerful arguments that courts will have to grapple with. And some groups that make such arguments may be beyond the embrace of the general public—much less that of Republican-dominated courts.

The Satanic Temple, for example, headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, claims seven hundred thousand registered members in congregations around the world. Courts and the I.R.S. have recognized the organization as a religion (which doesn’t actually worship Satan as a deity but, instead, views him as a symbol of dissent against tyrannical authority). In keeping with one of its core tenets—that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone”—TST has filed several lawsuits pressing a free-exercise claim that objects to abortion bans. Its position is that a state’s imposition of a waiting period or counselling prior to an abortion is as much a violation of religious freedom as it would be prior to a baptism or a Communion.

We are accustomed to hearing religious objections to abortion. Religious objections to abortion bans also reflect the fact that, for many people, questions of when human life begins and whether to have a child are centrally informed by their religious beliefs. It is possible that these free-exercise claims won’t succeed, because avoidance of hypocrisy is not a value that we expect from this Supreme Court, any more than we expect it from the man responsible for its composition. The Select Committee and the Department of Justice may yet force Trump to answer for some of his actions, but, notwithstanding the historic swearing-in of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson last week, we are stuck with his Court, and the damage it will do, for the next generation. ♦

“A lot of folks are seeing now as they go to re-sign their lease that it’s hundreds more dollars than last month, thousands more dollars than last month,” said Nicole Bachaud, an economist at the housing website Zillow, whose own rent tracker is running fast. “We’re going to continue to see pressure in rent prices; to what extent is to be seen.”

Gail Linsenbard lectures on philosophy at a college in Boulder, Colo., but housing in the area has gotten so pricey that she has been teaching remotely — recently from a friend’s house in Cincinnati, now from a friend’s place in New York — to make ends meet.

“The rents in Boulder have just skyrocketed, so I could no longer afford to live there,” said Dr. Linsenbard, a 62-year-old ethicist, who said that the $36,000 she earns lecturing four classes per semester had always been tight, but was increasingly failing to keep up with inflation. While she can rely on a national network of friends, the situation has disrupted her life.

“I’d so prefer my own place,” she said.

Besides burdening millions of families across America, rising rents have emerged as a particularly thorny issue for the Fed. While coronavirus-related supply disruptions have fueled price increases in products like cars and couches, the recent surge in rents relates to longer-running fundamentals. America has for years failed to build enough housing, and as members of the massive millennial generation grow older and move away from their parents and roommates, the need for apartments and leased homes has grown.

A few years ago, author and demographer Joel Kotkin declared that “California is a great state in which to be rich.”Of course, it’s good to be rich anywhere. But California—the province that for decades has led the United States in cultural issues like fashion, gay rights, and entertainment—has devolved into a state where the American dream is being strangled by a phalanx of energy and climate regulations that are imposing huge regressive taxes on the poor and middle class. And worse yet, the state’s vast bureaucracy is imposing yet more regulations that will further tighten the financial noose on Californians. Before going further, it’s essential to put California into context. While the state is known for posh spots like Beverly Hills, Marin County, and Silicon Valley, the Golden State has the highest poverty rate in America. Indeed, the poverty figures in the state can only be described as shocking. A 2021 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that “More than a third of Californians are living in or near poverty. Nearly one in six (16.4 percent) Californians were not in poverty but lived fairly close to the poverty line … All told, more than a third (34.0 percent) of state residents were poor or near-poor in 2019.” Los Angeles, the state’s biggest city, and a magnet for generations of immigrants has one of the highest poverty rates among America’s biggest cities.California also has the largest Latino population in America. About 15 million Latinos live in the Golden State and they account for about 40 percent of its population. But the PPIC report also found that more than Latinos account for nearly 52 percent “of poor Californians but only 39.7 percent of the state population.”Despite these numbers, California policymakers continue to implement policies on energy, housing, and transportation that are driving up the cost of living and deepening the state’s poverty problem. In April, the state’s Air Resources Board released a plan that will ban the sale of automobiles with internal combustion engines by 2035. The plan was cheered by a lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity who said it was essential to “free our streets from tailpipe pollution as fast as possible.” Sierra Club demonstration in California, 2004, AlamyIn May, the Los Angeles City Council banned the use of natural gas appliances and heaters in new homes and businesses. By doing so, according to the Sierra Club, the city became the 57th municipality in the state to ban the fuel. The vote, said council member Nithya Raman, puts the city “in line with climate leaders across the country.” That climate leadership comes at a high cost to consumers. Why? On an energy-equivalent basis, electricity costs four times as much as natural gas. L.A. is banning most gas appliances in new homes. Get ready for electric stovesClimate change spurred Friday’s unanimous vote by the Los Angeles City Council.Los Angeles TimesSammy RothOn July 1st, motorists in the state began paying an additional three-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline, a move that will make California’s motor fuel even more expensive. In late June, motorists in the state were paying an average of $6.30 per gallon for gasoline, which is roughly 29 percent more than motorists in the rest of the US. Perhaps the most obvious casualty of California’s climate policies is the state’s tattered electric grid. Blackouts in the state have become so common, particularly in the Bay Area, that media outlets have largely quit reporting on them. Nearly every day, maps of Pacific Gas & Electric’s service territory show outages across wide swaths of central California. The state’s increased blackouts are coinciding with skyrocketing electricity prices. And those skyrocketing electricity prices are coinciding with the implementation of some of America’s most-aggressive renewable-energy mandates. In 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed an executive order that required the state’s utilities to obtain a third of the electricity they sell from renewables by 2020. In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that boosted the mandate to 5o percent by 2030. In 2018, California lawmakers imposed yet another mandate that requires the state’s electric utilities to procure at least 60 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030 and to be producing 100 percent “zero-carbon” electricity by 2045.California Sets Goal Of 100 Percent Clean Electric Power By 2045Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill mandating that ambitious goal on Monday. He also issued an executive order calling for statewide carbon neutrality by the same year.NPRCamila DomonoskeWhat has happened since The Terminator signed that executive order? Between 2008 and 2021, the all-sector price of electricity in California increased five times faster than rates in the rest of the continental United States. Last year alone, the all-sector price of electricity in California jumped by 9.8 percent to 19.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. Residential prices increased even more, jumping by 11.7 percent to an average of 22.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. California residential users are now paying about 66 percent more for electricity than homeowners in the rest of the US. The state also faces a chronic shortage of affordable housing. Despite the shortage, home prices are being driven up by a myriad of mandates including the requirement that new homes have solar panels on their roofs. Since 2020, single-family homes and multi-family buildings up to three stories high in California must be topped with solar panels. In January 2023, that mandate will expand to include commercial buildings, including hotels, offices, retail and grocery stores, restaurants, and schools. It will also require panels to be put atop civic buildings, including theaters, auditoriums, and convention facilities.California Energy Commission mandates solar for new buildings from 2023The California Energy Commission yesterday voted to require solar panels and battery storage in new commercial and multifamily buildings.ElectrekNordVPN Because I don’t want to wait for the best of British TV.All of these mandates amount to what land-use and civil-rights lawyer Jennifer Hernandez calls “Green Jim Crow.” In an essay published last year by the Breakthrough Institute, Hernandez wrote that her home state: leads the world in renewable energy and electric vehicle ownership. But its industrial and manufacturing sectors have been decimated … Its climate accomplishments are illusory, a product of deindustrialization, high energy costs, and, more recently and improbably, depopulation. Inequality has hit record levels, and housing segregation has returned to a degree not seen since the early 1960s.Hernandez is the lead lawyer for The Two Hundred, a group of Latino leaders who have sued the state of California over its climate, housing, and transportation policies. In 2019, she and The Two Hundred filed a 250-page civil rights lawsuit that claims “Entrenched special interest groups, including environmentalists, block meaningful housing policy reforms” and that the state’s housing crisis is “deepening an already severe civil rights crisis.” Hernandez also points out that many of the regulations The Two Hundred is fighting were never directly authorized by the state legislature. There is no shortage of irony here. California is one of the most liberal states in America. In the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden thrashed Donald Trump in California by a margin of nearly two to one, taking 63 percent of the vote. Although Trump lost California to Biden, the state is key for presidential hopefuls. That helps explain why Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has already begun positioning himself for a White House bid in 2024. The California Senate has been controlled by the Democratic party since 1970. The lower house, the Assembly, has also been controlled by Democrats since the 1970s, except for two years in the mid-1990s. The Democratic Party has long considered itself the party of the working class and minorities. Nearly half of Latinos consider themselves Democrats while only about 23 percent identify as Republicans. But Latinos in California are not prospering under Democratic control. Quite the opposite. According to the report issued by the PPIC last year: More than one in five (21.4%) Latinos lived in poverty, compared to 17.4% of African Americans, 14.5% of Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, and 12.1% of whites. Though the Latino poverty rate has fallen from 30.9% in 2011, Latinos remain disproportionately poor—comprising 51.6% of poor Californians but only 39.7% of the state population. There are also big disparities in homeownership. In 2018, the homeownership rate among California Latinos was about 44 percent. Among whites, that rate is about 63 percent. Robert Apodaca, the executive director for The Two Hundred, and a long-time activist, told me that a myriad of pending regulations will exacerbate the state’s affordability crisis. He pointed to the state’s decarbonization efforts, which include a ban on the sale of cars powered by internal combustion engines that begins in 2035. The push for the electrification of transportation will require the installation of about 1.2 million new EV charging stations by 2030, according to the California Energy Commission. The cost of those stations will, of course, be borne by ratepayers. Furthermore, running all cars and trucks in the state on electricity will increase electricity demand by 25 percent, in a state that is already experiencing regular blackouts. Apodaca said the 100 percent zero-carbon electricity mandate and an economy-wide goal of carbon neutrality by 2045, will also increase costs. In February, the California Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved a scheme that aims to add more than 25 gigawatts of renewables and 15 gigawatts of batteries to the state's electric grid by 2032 at an estimated cost of $49.3 billion. Also in February, the California Independent System Operator released a draft plan to upgrade the state's transmission grid at a cost of some $30.5 billion.The combined cost of those two schemes is about $80 billion. Dividing that sum among 39 million residents works out to about $2,050 for every Californian. But the final price will almost certainly be far higher than $80 billion. Big public works projects routinely exceed initial estimates; California's beleaguered high-speed rail project was expected to cost $42 billion when it was launched in 2008. The latest cost estimate is $105 billion. Any effort to overhaul the state’s electric grid will require huge amounts of complex machinery, including generators, solar panels, transformers, and switch gear. It will also require vast amounts of land, steel, concrete, and tanker loads of industrial commodities at the same time that prices for everything from zinc and lithium to nickel and aluminum are soaring.The renewable-electricity push will force prices upward at a time when California is in the midst of an energy-affordability crisis. In January, electricity rates for customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, the biggest utility in the state, went up by eight percent. In March, PG&E customers were hit by another nine percent rate hike. Consumers served by San Diego Gas & Electric are also seeing big increases, with electricity price increases of nearly eight percent this year. Furthermore, PG&E is seeking rate big rate increases from 2023 to 2026 to pay for a variety of programs including burying thousands of miles of power lines. Electricity prices are soaring at a time when many consumers simply can't afford to pay. In March, more than a quarter of residential customers in San Diego County were behind on their utility payments.These soaring costs shouldn’t be surprising. Like what has occurred in Australia and Germany, the imposition of renewable-energy mandates in California has corresponded with dramatic increases in electricity prices. Of course, that’s not what we are told by climate activists like Bill McKibben who never tire of claiming that wind and solar are cheaper than traditional forms of electricity production. But a 2019 study done by academics at the University of Chicago found that renewable-energy mandates cause prices to go up, not down. Photo by Venti Views on UnsplashThe report, by Michael Greenstone and Ishan Nath, said renewables “raise electricity prices more than previously thought” due to “hidden costs that have typically been ignored.” They also found that the mandates “come at a high cost to consumers and are inefficient in reducing carbon emissions.” Greenstone and Nath said “the intermittent nature of renewables means that back-up capacity must be added” and that “by mandating an increase in renewable power, baseload generation is prematurely displaced, and some of the cost is passed to consumers.” It continued, saying that renewable-energy mandates lead to lead to “substantial increases in electricity prices that mirror the program’s increasing stringency over time.”Of course, none of this fits the convenient narrative that California is leading the way on climate change. Nevertheless, the hard reality is that California’s climate policies and renewable-energy mandates are immiserating vast segments of the state’s population. In a July 1st telephone interview, Apodaca said the state’s climate policies are hard to fight because California is “being governed by the administrative state, the regulators.” He continued, saying “The legislature hasn’t mandated most of these climate rules. There is no legislative mandate for the majority of the regulations that the Air Resources Board and other agencies are creating. The agencies have gone too far. But they aren’t held accountable.”What has happened in California is a warning for the rest of the United States and the rest of the world. Kotkin, who I quoted at the top of this piece, has become one of the loudest and most-frequent critics of California’s decline. In April, citing a report he co-wrote (with Marshall Toplansky and three others) for Chapman University, Kotkin declared that California is in the midst of an “existential crisis, losing both its middle-aged and middle class, while its poor population faces dimming prospects. Despite the state’s myriad advantages, research shows it [is] plagued by economic immobility and inequality, crushing housing and energy costs, and a failing education system. Worse than just a case of progressive policies creating regressive outcomes, it appears California is descending into something resembling modern-day feudalism, with the poor and weak trapped by policies subsidized by taxes paid by the rich and powerful.”Given the state’s many problems, residents are reacting with what has been dubbed the “California Exodus.” Last year, for the first time in its 171-year history, California lost a seat in the US House of Representatives. Meanwhile, Texas gained two seats and Florida gained one. A few months ago, U-Haul, the company that rents moving trucks, issued a press release that said its California locations experienced the biggest loss of one-way truck rentals in 2021. The top destination for those soon-to-be-ex Californians? Texas. (I can verify this, as it seems everyone from California is moving to Austin.) Furthermore, since 2018, about 300 companies have moved their headquarters out of California. Among the more notable corporate departures: Tesla and Oracle, both of which moved their headquarters to Austin. The punchline here is obvious: For decades, regulators and politicians in California—a state that is a pillar of the Democratic Party as well as the home of US vice president Kamala Harris and the home of America’s biggest climate-activist group, the Sierra Club—have been implementing a skein of policies, nearly all of them tied to energy and climate, that are blatantly anti-poor and anti-working class. Yes, California is a fine place to be rich. But Californians who aren’t rich have seen enough. And now they are voting with their feet and with whatever U-Haul truck they can find.   

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This is my last day writing The Atlantic Daily (for now!), and I’d like to thank you all for reading. I know it’s something of an ask to allow the same fellow into your inbox every evening to opine about the day’s news, and I appreciate it.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Shinzo Abe made the world better.
The mystery of Michael Flynn
The glaring contradiction of Republicans’ rhetoric of freedom
Plus: Scroll down for an update from Katherine J. Wu on the spread of Omicron’s latest subvariants.Keep the FaithIt’s been a tough month. The mounting toll of the war in Ukraine, the murders in Highland Park, the Supreme Court’s disturbing decisions—there hasn’t been a lot of great news. Boris Johnson finally packing his bags, I suppose, counts; so does today’s jobs report. But even before I began to write this, we learned that former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is dead, assassinated during a political rally. If you feel like the world is spinning out of control, you’re not alone.I have been trying to think about what connects many of these stories. It’s easy to say—and I know, because I’ve said it—that America and other democracies are falling prey to a kind of mass psychosis. Many Americans are becoming unhinged, unmoored from reality, unable to process even the tiniest bit of information if it conflicts with their biases. A few days ago, Mitt Romney wrote in The Atlantic that the problem of denial affects us all. He’s right. I feel it too; I sometimes do not check myself fast enough when shuffling new information into the pigeonholes of my priors.Confirmation bias is normal human behavior. What’s not normal is the emergence of a populist madness on the American right that counts on the intimidation of the sensible many by the delusional few. This development threatens to turn a great republic into little more than a collection of unthinking and dangerous reflexes, its citizens like a school of fish aimlessly darting back and forth as they are lured by bait or chased by predators.This, I think, is the link that binds so many recent events, including the January 6 insurrection, the callous and even reckless decisions of the Supreme Court, the Illinois massacre, even the Ukraine war. At almost every turn, democracy and basic human decency are under siege because a paranoid and rage-blinded mob will shout down and sometimes go as far as threatening the rest of us. Ordinary citizens, overwhelmed and exhausted, soon turn away from public spaces.In a different time in America, almost every story this month would have been an immense scandal or upheaval in and of itself. The Russian army invading a nation in Central Europe while brandishing its nuclear weapons at NATO would have been an ongoing national crisis that once would have unified America and its two parties. A mass shooting at a July 4 parade would have shocked our national conscience and moved us to look closely not only at our ridiculous gun laws but at a society that seems to produce an endless stream of violent young losers. Talk of stopping women from crossing state borders by turning the United States into a giant version of East Berlin with a pregnancy-testing Checkpoint Charlie on every highway would have provoked outrage on both the right and the left.Most important, an attack on the U.S. Capitol aimed at the overthrow of an American election, instigated and cheered on by a sitting president, would have been a national trauma that would have made Watergate look like a comic opera. And yet, a violent insurrection seems to barely register with some Americans—while others actively continue to support it, and still others believe it was a “false flag” operation by the left or by operatives of the U.S. government.I started by asking you to forgive me if I’ve cast a pall over your optimism about America, and here I am, doing it again.So let me try to leave you with some of the good news. Rational and decent citizens are still a significant majority in the United States of America. Cynical Republican officials might cower in fear of the small clutch of their own extremist primary voters, but on many issues—including Ukraine, abortion, and gun control—a durable majority across both parties is in favor of doing what’s right, what’s humane, and what’s sensible.And that means America endures. Yes, American democracy is on the ropes, and the destruction of our constitutional system is still possible if enough of the unhinged minority votes and enough of the rational majority does not. The Constitution was not designed to withstand a frontal assault from its own citizens and elected officials; it relies on shared norms and values about essential things like basic human and legal rights.That means it’s up to us to assert those norms and values in everything we do in our daily life. It means that citizens of good will must hold their ground, calmly and without reacting to the many bad-faith provocations thrown at them. It means linking arms with people with whom we disagree about almost everything, so long as we agree on the Constitution and our rights as citizens. And that means, more than anything else, voting in great numbers together as a coalition. We must, as John Adams encouraged us in 1765, “dare to read, think, speak and write.”After his presidency, Mr. Adams retired to his farm in Massachusetts, a place south of Boston called Peacefield. That is also the name of my newsletter, and if you’ve enjoyed my writing for the Daily, please join me there.Related:
Democrats try to build back (a bit) better.
The most pathetic men in America
President Joe Biden issued an executive order intending to preserve access to abortion in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, but it’s not yet clear exactly how it will do so.
The economy added 372,000 jobs in June, many more than expected.
The U.S. women’s national soccer team beat Jamaica to qualify for the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
The Books Briefing: Nicole Acheampong celebrates great critical takedowns of books.
The Third Rail: The former Republican strategist Tim Miller’s new book asks the question every conservative must answer, David French writes: Who are you, really?
Update: Omicron
(Spencer Platt / Getty)
After two and a half years of pandemic life, people in the Northern Hemisphere are now neck-deep in a summer of travel—and so, too, are the coronaviruses they’re carrying.Really, the summer sojourns have long since begun. BA.4 and BA.5—offshoots of the Omicron variant that were first detected in South Africa in January—are now dominant in many parts of the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, with BA.5 in particular taking a decisive lead. The subvariants are speedy and stealthy, some of the most antibody-evasive morphs of SARS-CoV-2 identified to date. That means they’re having little trouble infecting and reinfecting people around the world who have already encountered the virus before, or been vaccinated against it, or both, making transmission a bit of a nightmare to contain. Cases are rising in more than 100 countries. And in places like the U.S. and the U.K., hospitalizations are continuing the troubling upward creep spurred by prior Omicron morphs. To make matters all the messier, yet another immunity-dodging member of the ever-growing Omicron clan, BA.2.75, is starting to pop in a few countries, with more cases being discovered by the day, including in the U.S.This is not the warm-weather news most people want to hear. The start of this summer won’t be like the last, when Delta was still at a gentle simmer and the pandemic’s American toll was at some of its record lows. But the news isn’t necessarily all bad—just complicated.Importantly, the world has yet to meet a SARS-CoV-2 variant that can completely circumvent people’s immunity to the virus, which is multifaceted and sturdy. Our defenses against severe disease, hospitaliation, and death are still holding up quite strongly—evidenced, for instance, by the sizable disparity in mortality and infections that played out in South Africa’s BA.5-driven fifth wave. Even infections and transmission remain less common among people with immunity, especially those who are up-to-date on their shots. Vaccines also seem to offer at least some protection against long COVID. And revamped shots, better tailored to fend off BA.4 and BA.5, are slated to debut this fall. The average coronavirus infection is still, over time, becoming a bit more bearable.But more bearable isn’t totally benign—and large swaths of the population remain much more vulnerable than experts would like. If infections and reinfections keep happening, they’ll continue imperiling people’s health. And the virus will take every opportunity it can to shape-shift again.— Katherine J. WuMore From The Atlantic
Why Illinois’ red-flag laws didn’t stop the Highland Park shooting
Dobbs is no Brown v. Board of Education
Admit it, squirrels are just tree rats.
(Courtesy of Leonard Cohen Family Trust)
Read. Where the Wild Ladies Are, by Aoko Matsuda, is an electrifying story collection based on classic ghost stories. “Read this one slowly, to get a tangy whiff of the afterworld as it tangles with daily life,” our editor Jane Yong Kim suggests.Check out our full summer reading guide for more recommendations.Watch. Set It Up, on Netflix, is the perfect weekend rom-com. Or try another pick from our critic’s list of 25 of the most rewatch-friendly movies.If you’re headed to the theater, just remember that the Minions are good—really. And a new film about Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” playing in select theaters, explores how the song came to belong to everyone.Listen. The series finale of our podcast How to Start Over explores ways to forgive ourselves for what we can’t change. Find the full series here.Play our daily crossword.P.S.For many of us, movies and TV are our comfort food, but many people still keep a book on the nightstand, perhaps by a beloved author who calms them after a tough day. Mine is The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. Many of you might know Lewis from his Narnia books, or the widely read classic The Screwtape Letters. The Great Divorce, however, is a strange little fantasy about a man who finds himself in a rainy, dingy town that might be hell. And then a bus arrives, and … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. I love The Screwtape Letters so much that I tried my hand at emulating it, but The Great Divorce is a work of such rich description, redemptive hope, and sincere human emotion that I find it restorative every time I read it. Maybe you will as well.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

By James Pethokoukis and Neil
Thompson
In living memory, computers filled entire rooms and delivered only a fraction of the processing power of today’s pocket-sized devices. But over the decades, computers began to shrink while becoming more powerful thanks to Moore’s Law. Those computing improvements have been central to productivity growth, but Moore’s Law seems to be slowing. So what does this mean for the future of computers and, more importantly, for the future of productivity and economic growth? To answer those questions, Neil Thompson joined a recent episode of Political Economy.
Neil
is an innovation scholar in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, a research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy,
and an associate member of the Broad Institute.
Pethokoukis: What is Moore’s Law, and what does the world look like today if it
didn’t exist?
Thompson: So Moore’s Law is an incredibly important trend, which is sort of used to talk about broadly all of the improvement in computing we’ve had in the last five or six decades. The actual origins of it, though, come from basically the miniaturization of computer chips and the elements that are on computer chips. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, gave this speech back in 1959. And in this talk, he says, “I think we could just keep miniaturizing stuff all the way down to the point where it’s just a few atoms.” And he said that about computers, right? He said, “We can make them and these parts will be really small, like 10 or a 100 atoms big.” And this was a pretty remarkable thing that he said.
View of an electronic data processing system IBM 7070 at the Chemical Factory Hüls in Marl in 1962. Via REUTERS
And
it turned out as we did that, we were able to put more transistors on our chip,
which meant we could do more and we could run our chips faster. And a huge
amount of the revolution we’ve had in IT all really comes from this. If we were
still using the computers back in those early days, we really could not be
doing almost anything that we’re doing today. So it has had an enormous effect
on society. And yeah, it has really been very transformational.
There have been many stories over the
years about the end of Moore’s Law. Have all those reports of its death been
greatly exaggerated, or are we finally there?
Yes, you’re absolutely right. You can go back decades and find people saying, “Well, this is going to be a problem.” And actually, it’s a real credit to the technologists and engineers that they were able to push through that and get past it. But since 2004, what is clear is we’ve lost many of the benefits of Moore’s Law. When Gordon Moore actually made up this law, it was really about the number of transistors you could fit on a chip. But what it translated to, generally, was this incredible speed up in the capacity of our chips and how fast we could run them. And so we sort have taken to calling all of those things Moore’s Law. But in practice, actually in 2004–2005, we lost, I think, one of the most important parts of that, which is the speed up on our chips.
So
chips at that point were about 3 gigahertz. The chips in your computer today
are about 3 gigahertz. And so we’ve really plateaued, whereas before that we
were improving it exponentially. So it’s no longer just lone voices in the cold
saying it’s going to end. Now, it’s a lot of the community.
How concerned should I be about
productivity growth with Moore’s Law at an end?
I
am worried about this. If you look across society and you think of general
productivity improvements, you’re talking 1 or 2 percent per year kind of as
how we make things better over time. And at its peak, the improvement that we were
making in our chips was 52 percent per year. So it was vastly faster. And that
really had sort of spillover effects on everybody else. And then as we get to
the end, the question is, where do we go from here if this engine has been
slowing down? And of course, there are some candidates. People talk about
artificial intelligence: Are we going to be able to use that? Quantum
computing: Are we going to be able to use that? And I think it’s not at all
clear that any of them will be able to sort of take up that mantle in the way
that Moore’s Law has done, particularly over so many decades.
If we’re at the end of Moore’s Law,
is there a new technology that would return us to these massive gains?
None
that we know yet. There are candidates. People have proposed architectural
changes in the way we do our switches that might make things more efficient. I
think there’s some possibility there. Although, again, probably not the decades
and decades of Moore’s Law. People have talked about things like optical
computing. That seems like that might be interesting, particularly for some
kinds of calculations. Then there are other things like quantum computing,
which I think many people have the sense of quantum computing is just the next
generation of computing. I actually don’t think that’s right. I think it’s more
like a different kind of specializer. So I think that’s what the landscape
looks like right now. But as I say, I don’t think there are any of these that
really look like they’re going to be the next general-purpose technology, for
the moment.
How difficult would it be to start
manufacturing these chips in the US instead of overseas?
It
really depends on how cutting edge you want your chips to be. The smaller you get,
the harder it gets, the closer you’re getting to moving around individual atoms
and things like that. And so if you want to be away from the cutting edge,
actually, there are lots of places that can build that. And so that is more
broadly available technology.
The
problem with [cutting-edge chips] that is building one of those factories these
days costs $20 billion or $22 billion. So it’s a big deal. It’s really hard.
You need very cutting-edge equipment to do it. The challenge there is that we
probably did not worry about this as much in the past because there used to be
25 different companies, all of whom were on the frontier of building chips. And
as these factories have become more and more expensive over time, what we’re
down to is now basically three different companies that produce these cutting-edge
chips. So it is very hard. There are not very many folks that do it at the
cutting edge, but it certainly is important that we have good production
facilities and that we know that they can be secure.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a
weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Neil Thompson is an innovation scholar in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, a research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the
Digital Economy, and an associate member of the Broad Institute.
Learn more: 5 Questions for Mark Jamison on the Metaverse | 5 Questions for Melanie Mitchell on the Challenges of Artificial Intelligence | 5 Questions for Mark Mills on the Cloud Revolution
The post 5 Questions for Neil Thompson on the Death of Moore’s Law appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Popularism and freedom By: Scott Sumner

Is there a pro-freedom progressivism? I’m not certain, but Matthew Yglesias sure seems to think so. In the past hour, he has tweeted the following:

1. Criticism of a “Really outrageous attack on free speech” by law enforcement in Arizona.

2. Argued “Let’s make it easier to get permits to build houses” An hour earlier he made the pitch more overtly political, “Own Ron DeSantis by making it easier to build houses in California.“

3. Argued “Let’s make clean energy deployment easier“

4. Argued “Let’s increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals” by weakening the AMA cartel.

5. Five hours ago he suggested that “freedom” was the best way to sell the pro-choice argument:

As I’ve said many times, there’s no such thing as public opinion. It depends how you frame the question. I.e., the question creates the opinion.

6. Six hours ago, he tweeted, “YIMBY is about freedom, not apartment buildings.”

7. Twenty hours ago he tweeted on vaccines and nuclear power. In both areas he has written more extensive essays, sometimes advocating the removal of regulatory barriers that slow the development of vaccines and prevent the construction of (low carbon) nuclear power plants.

Matt Yglesias is certainly not a libertarian. But he’s also not a typical progressive. Rather he advocates something called “popularism”, which is roughly the achievement of progressive goals via popular means (and in some cases compromises.) This differs from “populism”, which often aims at non-progressive policy goals such as trade barriers, immigration barriers, and the weakening of criminal justice protections. In Yglesias’s view, unpopular “woke” excesses actually end up hurting the progressive cause.

I find it interesting that Yglesias often sees the “freedom” message as a way of making public policies more palatable. He spends part of the year in Texas, and seems to have a pretty good grasp of how middle Americans think, especially when compared to the typical coastal progressive.

PS. If I were pro-life, I’d be infuriated by this misleading and manipulative video. But as Yglesias correctly suggests, it is probably quite effective.

PPS. Warning: If progressives keep using the freedom message because it works, they might eventually find themselves beginning to believe in freedom. Handle with care! 🙂

Metaphorical Crouching Tigers By Alice Temnick

Have we made our lives too comfortable? Can we imagine living without the many services we pay for, the apps that assist us, or the algorithms that reduce our physical efforts while saving us precious time? Journalist Michael Easter argues in his book, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, that moving out of our physical and mental comfort zones is not only good for us but might improve our health and mental well-being.

In this episode, he and EconTalk host Russ Roberts discuss the merits of boredom, listening to our surroundings, death, and “this thing called misogi”. Dive in, and tell us about your past and anticipated novel experiences; we’d love to hear from you.

1- The theme of rites of passage is rich in ancient and modern literature and film. What do you think of the practicality of choosing a physically challenging, psychologically tough misogi (禊) experience that has only 50% odds for success?

2- If too little or too much mental and physical stimulation can have lasting negative effects, how much risk should we choose to take? What stimulating event or activity would cross you to the other side of the U-shaped curve Easter describes and that Roberts believes he is now scaling?

3- To what extent does Easter sufficiently explain why he contends that monumental intellectual accomplishments don’t achieve the same or similar life-changing outcomes as tremendous physical wins?

4- Door Dash, Amazon Next-Day Delivery, Venmo, Lyft, Google Maps, (name your favorites). How do these innovations assist our propensity toward routine and lack of focus on the present? What does your cost/benefit analysis reveal about your value for increasing daily conveniences?

5- Humans used to run down prey in the heat for miles, and then carry heavy weight over long distances. Is it a good or a bad thing that the majority of us have let these skills stultify? Do you agree or disagree with Easter that we should also seek to learn where else we might be “falling short” in our lives? Explain.

The US employment report for June continues to show a strong labor market that is consistent with a strong economy with moderating inflationary pressures. Employment is growing robustly, unemployment is low and stable, and nominal wage growth continues to slow, which should ease inflationary pressure. The one discordant note in the June data was a decline in labor force participation.

But if one looks outside of the labor market, other economic data are telling a worrisome story of an economy that could be entering into recession even while the underlying inflation rate remains very high.

There is some possibility that one set of data is being mismeasured now and future revisions will show a more coherent story. But another scenario is more likely. Just like the pandemic recession did not follow any of the usual rules, the recovery is also not following the usual rules either. Without past experience to guide us, the economic outlook is very uncertain.

The employment report strongly suggests that the economy was not in recession in the first half of 2022. At the same time, however, it provides only limited reassurance about the future because previous recessions were not always evident in the employment data several months prior to the peak. The report does, however, provide some reassurance about inflation. Nominal wages appear to be growing at about a 4.5 percent annual rate. Based on historical trends in productivity and the relationship between nominal wages and inflation, this appears consistent with about a 3.5 percent underlying inflation rate. This is below the roughly 6 percent pace of recent CPI growth, excluding the volatile contributors to price growth, and well below the 10 percent annualized pace for the headline CPI so far this year.

The pace of employment growth remains strong while employment is rising

The economy added 372,000 jobs in June (figure 1). While this is a substantial slowdown from the pace earlier this year, job growth remains very strong compared with more normal periods and especially compared to the roughly 50,000 jobs per month needed to maintain constant age-adjusted employment.

Unemployment remained low and stable at 3.6 percent in June (figure 2a), just above its pre-pandemic level. Labor force participation, which has remained low since the beginning of the pandemic, has been roughly flat the last several months, but ticked down in June, and the employment rate to fall (figure 2b). Most of the remaining employment gap represents a decline in part-time work as the full-time employment rate is nearly back to its pre-pandemic level.

The pace of nominal wage growth is slowing

Overall, labor markets appear to be very tight. The unemployment rate is relatively low, there are about 1.9 job openings for every unemployed worker, and quits remain near record levels—and are much higher than any value recorded before the pandemic.

Nevertheless, nominal wage growth continues to moderate. In the second half of 2021, nominal average hourly earnings adjusted for industry-level composition effects grew at a 6.0 percent annual rate. In the last three months, they grew at an 4.1 percent annual rate, reflecting a gradual but mostly steady slowdown in average hourly earnings growth.

There are a few possibilities for why wage growth has slowed. The most likely is that some of the nominal wage growth in 2021 was a one-time phenomenon reflecting resorting of jobs as the economy was emerging from the pandemic, increased compensating differentials, and the one-time effect of public supports on the bargaining power of labor. As the economy normalizes, nominal wage growth remains relatively high because of the tight labor markets (the 4.1 percent annual rate in the last three months is above the 3.1 percent annual rate in the two years before the pandemic) but not nearly as high as in 2021.

It is also possible that the slowdown in average hourly earnings reflects noise in the data (including the effects of slowing in certain industries like retail trade and transportation and warehousing), a residual compositional issue, or a transitory slowing of wage growth. Some other measures of nominal wage growth have not shown as large a slowdown as average hourly earnings. Average hourly earnings are the only data currently available for the entire second quarter. As more data, including the Employment Cost Index, becomes available later this month and next month it will be possible to better assess this possibility. Wage growth could also pick up again.

This does not look like an economy in recession

The National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee, the organization which officially determines the dates of US recessions, defines a recession as "…a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months." The committee looks at several different indicators when identifying the start of recessions including "real personal income less transfers (PILT), nonfarm payroll employment, real personal consumption expenditures, wholesale-retail sales adjusted for price changes, employment as measured by the household survey, and industrial production" and does not follow any fixed rules, so it can take several months or longer before a recession is declared.

Most recessions are characterized by strong co-movements between different aspects of economic performance. One of the most important indicators of a recession is the labor market. It is so important because it is measured in a timely and accurate manner and is directly related to how much an economy can produce, and because of its inherent importance for people that rely on the labor market for their income.

While it takes time for the NBER to officially identify the beginning of a recession, certain labor market measures have made it possible to identify recessions in close to real-time, at least historically. One very reliable indicator about whether the economy is currently in recession is the Sahm Rule. The rule indicates recession when the three-month average of the unemployment rate exceeds its minimum value over the prior 12 months by at least 0.50 percentage point. Right now, with the unemployment rate tied for its lowest point over the past year, the economy is nowhere near the Sahm Rule triggering as shown in figure 4. Historically, this has corresponded to only an 8 percent risk of recession within the next 6 months and a 20 percent risk in the next 12 months—although a range of other data suggests that recession risks are currently much higher than just this one indicator would suggest.

Jobs are also continuing to grow strongly. Over the last six months jobs have grown 1.8 percent (3.7 percent at an annual rate), for an average of 457,000 per month. This is about double or more the pace of job growth in the six months before the last six recessions.

One concern with using job growth to "nowcast" a current or imminent recession is that these estimates will be revised (revisions to the unemployment rate, which is solely survey-based, only reflect updated seasonal factors and are typically minor). Specifically, to estimate job growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) supplements the information reported by employers with a model-based estimate of the number of new businesses that were created and destroyed. Since BLS's model does not know when the economy is at a turning point, it will tend to overestimate jobs when the economy is turning down and underestimate jobs when it is turning up. That means that subsequent revisions, which incorporate administrative data like tax reports, will tend to be negative. For example, it was originally estimated that the economy lost 159,000 jobs in September 2008, but the most recent estimate is that the economy actually lost 460,000 jobs that month.

In the five recessions prior to the pandemic recession, the average revision to total job growth in the six months leading up to the recession was -0.2 percentage points, or the equivalent of about 50,000 jobs per month now. As shown in figure 6, even if the recent jobs numbers are eventually revised down, they are still very likely to be much higher than is typical before a recession.

Employment data can, however, change very quickly

The fact that a "nowcast" provides little support for the view that the economy is currently in a recession does not mean it will not go into a recession soon. The Sahm Rule, for example, while very good at identifying recessions that have already started, is not highly predictive of recessions that start in the near future. In five of the last six recessions, the unemployment rate was very stable, or even falling, in the 5 months prior to the business cycle peak. Moreover, job growth can turn very rapidly, as shown in figure 7. In each of the past six recessions, the economy shed more jobs in the first six months of the recession than it gained in the six months leading up to the business cycle peak.

Output-per-hour is falling at a historic pace in 2022, although this could partially reflect measurement error

Even as employment continues to rise, GDP shrank in the first quarter of this year and is expected to shrink again in the second quarter. The disconnect between falling GDP and rising employment is largely reconciled by the dramatic fall in output-per-hour, also known as productivity. Based on the latest tracking, it is very plausible that productivity growth has fallen at about a 6 percent annual rate over the last two quarters, which would be about twice as fast as the largest previous decline in productivity growth. This follows very rapid productivity growth as the economy emerged from the pandemic.

Productivity growth is volatile and poorly measured because it is affected by errors in both the numerator (output) and the denominator (hours). In addition, it is not a pure measure of technology because it is affected by changes in work intensity, rising when work intensity is increasing (e.g., if demand increases a lot before employment increases), and falling when work intensity decreases. It is too soon to use these aggregate data to assess questions like whether work-from-home is increasing or reducing the productivity of employees.

What it does show, however, is that employers are still hiring. One possibility is that they need additional workers because it was only possible to sustain the increased work intensity temporarily. Another possibility is that employers are unsure about their ability to fill job openings going forward, so they are hoarding labor now. Either way, it is a very unusual disconnect between the trajectory of output and the trajectory of employment.

The final possibility, however, is that output is stronger than the official data suggest—and thus productivity growth has been less negative than those data indicate. Gross Domestic Income (GDI), an alternative measure of the size of the economy that should be identical to the more widely reported Gross Domestic Product (GDP) except for measurement error, has grown much more quickly than GDP. Some evidence suggests that GDP has been undermeasured, particularly in the area of business investment.

Everything about the economy over the last two and a half years has been extremely unusual and it continues to be. The disconnect between falling output and rising employment in the data for the first half of 2022 is larger than anything that has been recorded in the post-World War II period. It is possible that data revisions will ultimately reconcile these disparate phenomena. It is also possible that the discrepancy is merely one of timing. In this case, either output will start picking up as the economy averts recession or employment will start falling as the economy slips into recession.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I wonder if the remaining sensible Republicans have accepted the irretrievable loss of the GOP they once knew.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Let’s use Chicago rules to beat Russia.
Hybrid work is doomed.
Uber Pool is a zombie.
Harsher TruthsIn 1991, the last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was briefly deposed in a coup by hard-line members of the Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev, upon his return to Moscow, tried to differentiate between the plotters and the Party itself. One of his closest advisers, Aleksandr Yakovlev, told him that this effort was pointless, akin to “serving tea to a corpse.”Republicans such as Senator Mitt Romney—an honorable man for whom I voted in 2012—and a handful of others in the GOP, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, should take note of Yakovlev’s phrase. Over the weekend, The Atlantic published a plea from Senator Romney for Americans “across the political spectrum” to stop ignoring “potentially cataclysmic threats.” The senator from Utah is right to be worried about the detachment of so many Americans. But Romney, Cheney, and Kinzinger cannot rescue their party, either—at least not in its current form.In fact, I wonder if the Republicans can ever return to being the kind of party that once nominated someone like Mitt Romney for the American presidency. I say this not because of Donald Trump, nor as the apostate Republican I am. (The last straw for me was not Trump’s election, which I regarded as a fluke, but when Susan Collins lectured America on the jurisprudence of Brett Kavanaugh.) Likewise, I say this not because I disagree with the Republicans on many policy issues; I do, but as a New England Republican who identified with (and worked for) moderates of a bygone era, I have always had differences with the hard-right social conservatives.Rather, I say this because millions of Republicans seem to have irreversibly lost touch with reality itself.Senator Romney, for his part, seems to share this concern, but he softens this criticism of his own side with some examples from around the political landscape:
I have witnessed time and again—in myself and in others—a powerful impulse to believe what we hope to be the case. We don’t need to cut back on watering, because the drought is just part of a cycle that will reverse. With economic growth, the debt will take care of itself. January 6 was a false-flag operation.
But as the old song from Sesame Street goes: One of these things is not like the other. Unfounded optimism about droughts or recessions is one thing; it’s another thing entirely to embrace the idea that an insurrection and an attack on the Capitol was conducted by agents of the United States government itself.At least the false-flag assertions fall within what we might call an ordinary—normal, even?—range of conspiracy theories. Other Republicans have blown past such pedestrian crackpottery and now have escaped the last tendrils of Earth’s gravity.The Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, for example, believes that people can transmit demonic possession through “intimate relations,” according to CNN. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republicans have nominated a candidate for governor, Doug Mastriano, who has implied that he might invalidate any election result he doesn’t like in 2024—and that’s probably the least disturbing thing about him. As Jonathan Last put it recently, the Democratic nominee, Josh Shapiro, is an ordinary politician, while Mastriano “is an insane person. A seditionist. A Christian nationalist. A conspiracy nut.”Almost every other national Republican is either silent or on board with the dark fantasies and deepening paranoia that now rule the GOP. For example, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the relentlessly ambitious third-ranking House Republican, endorsed the developer Carl Paladino for a newly redistricted House seat in the state; in 2021 Paladino said that Adolf Hitler was “the kind of leader we need.” Some House Republicans are frustrated that Stefanik went rogue by endorsing Paladino, meaning only that they are embarrassed but not ashamed.But this internal GOP griping raises a question. When Senator Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, is paddling about in the anti-vaccine fever swamps, and Senate candidate J.D. Vance is cozying up to people like the congressional conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene and the execrable Matt Gaetz, what exactly counts as “going rogue” and how can anyone distinguish it from just another day in the Republican Party?In the end, despite the efforts of Senator Romney and other reasonable Republicans, the fringe is now the base. The last rational members of the GOP—both elected and among the rank and file—need to speak even harsher truths to their own people, as Liz Cheney did last week at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Otherwise, the madness will spread, and our institutions will continue an accelerating slide into a nightmare that will engulf all Americans, regardless of party.Related:
Mitt Romney: America is in denial
The reason Liz Cheney is narrating the January 6 story
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel to Donald Trump who was with the president on the day of the Capitol riot, will testify in a transcribed interview with the January 6 committee this week.
The suspect who was detained in Monday’s shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, admitted to investigators that he fired at the parade crowd, and will be held without bond.
About a third of Ukraine’s population has been displaced since Russia invaded in February, the United Nations estimates.
DispatchesGalaxy Brain: Charlie Warzel got COVID—and became obsessed with those thin red lines.Wait, What?: In post-Roe America, the misogyny is the point, Molly Jong-Fast argues.The Weekly Planet: Robinson Meyer reports that the world is turning back to coal.Up for Debate: From vaccines to sunscreen, America’s public-health efforts have slowed to a crawl, Conor Friedersdorf writes.Evening Read
(Keith Birmingham / Pasadena Star-News / Getty)
College Football Is Cannibalizing ItselfBy Jemele HillCollege-sports traditionalists were appalled last week when the Big Ten athletic conference announced that it will add UCLA and the University of Southern California to its membership in 2024—creating a seismic shift in the college-sports landscape that will generate millions of dollars in revenue for the two California powerhouse programs.This reorganization is the strongest indicator yet that college sports is cannibalizing itself.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
The game is (probably) up for Boris Johnson.
The future of mud
We’ve never seen Mars quite like this.
Read. Imogen Binnie’s 2013 novel, Nevada, is a cult classic that captures the grind of dead-end jobs.Watch. Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film directed by an African American woman to be theatrically distributed in the United States, in 1991, is an astonishing portrait of a multigenerational family.Or try another pick from our critic’s list of movies unlike anything you’ve seen before. (One movie that probably won’t amaze you? Marvel’s latest.)Play our daily crossword.P.S.I teach a course at Harvard Extension School every year on the pop culture of the Cold War, in part because I think younger students no longer understand how much the threat of war—including nuclear devastation—permeated almost everything we watched and read and heard, including pop music. But I have a special place in my heart for the apocalypse-themed videos of my youth that aired on MTV in the early 1980s. (This was back when MTV played music.) If you’re looking to jump into a rabbit hole of diversions, I wrote this for The Atlantic with links to some of these videos.— TomIsabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Thompson
Moore’s
law, which states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every
two years, has fueled rapid computing gains since the mid-20th century. But
will this law last forever? Today’s guest, Neil Thompson, thinks its end is
near. I’ve invited Neil on the podcast to explain why Moore’s Law may be coming
to an end and what that means for productivity growth and continued innovation.
Neil

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, including brief portions that were cut from the original podcast. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.
Pethokoukis: Let’s start with a basic question, and then maybe a somewhat harder
question: What is Moore’s Law, and what does the world look like today if it
Thompson: So Moore’s Law is an incredibly important trend, which is sort of used to talk about broadly all of the improvement in computing we’ve had in the last five or six decades. The actual origins of it, though, come from basically the miniaturization of computer chips and the elements that are on computer chips. And it was kind of a neat moment where Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, gave this speech back in 1959. By the way, this was an after-dinner speech, if you believe it. This was like, you’re at a conference and someone was just saying, “Hey, by the way, why don’t you say a few remarks?”
That’s great.
And
in this talk, he says, “Okay, let me tell you about nanotechnology.
Because we’re doing all these things in this sort of regular world, and I think
we could just keep miniaturizing stuff all the way down to the point where it’s
just a few atoms.” And he said that about computers, right?
He
said, “We can make them and these parts will be really small, like 10 or a 100
atoms big.” And this was a pretty remarkable thing that he said. It’s a little
hard, I think, to get the sense of how big the difference is between our everyday
lives and that many atoms. But it’s roughly proportional to, if you were building
things the size of the Earth, and you’re like, “You know what? I think we
could build that the size of a tennis ball.” And that really laid out a
roadmap for us as we improved our technology to say, “We could keep
miniaturizing.” And it turned out as we did that, we were able to put more
transistors on our chip, which meant we could do more and we could run our
chips faster.
And
a huge amount of the revolution we’ve had in IT all really comes from this. If
we were still using the computers back in those early days, we really could not
be doing almost anything that we’re doing today. So it has had an enormous effect

I’m old enough that I’m pretty
sure I may have watched some sort of film strip or something in school about
computers, and they were still pretty big. So this is probably like the ‘70s. It
may have been in black and white, so maybe it wasn’t state of the art. But it
was classic: giant, monolithic computers with punch cards and things like that.
So maybe we’d still be in that world. I don’t know.
I
remember those moments too. My mother used to do some of her research with a
computer and she’d come back with extra punch cards when they were getting rid
of the computer, and we had these things as our notepads.
That’s great. If I did a news
search on Moore’s Law and I searched with a phrase like “coming to an end,”
I would find many stories over many years about the end of Moore’s Law. Have
all those reports of its death been greatly exaggerated, or are we finally
there?
Yes,
you’re absolutely right. You can go back decades and find people saying,
“Well, this is going to be a problem,” or “This is going to be a
problem.” And actually, it’s a real credit to the technologists and
engineers that they were able to push through that and get past it. But since 2004,
what is clear is we’ve lost many of the benefits of Moore’s Law.
Let me make the distinction here, because when Gordon Moore actually made up this law, it was really about the number of transistors you could fit on a chip, which is a very specific, technical thing about what you can do. But what it translated to, generally, was this incredible speed up in the capacity of our chips and how fast we could run them. And so we sort have taken to calling all of those things Moore’s Law. But in practice, actually in 2004–2005, we lost, I think, one of the most important parts of that, which is the speed up on our chips.
U.S. President George W. Bush presents Gordon Moore with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House, July 9, 2002. REUTERS/Hyungwon Kang HK
So
were improving it exponentially. So we really have lost a lot of it already.
It’s also very clear that we are pretty close to the end, even being able to
get more transistors on. And that’s not just me saying that. The people who
designed the roadmaps to figure out, “What are the technologies that we need to
put together in order to make the next generation of Moore’s Law happen?—those
folks have already said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that can’t be the path
anymore.” So it’s no longer just lone voices in the cold saying it’s going
to end. Now, it’s a lot of the community.
Speed and the number of transistors
on a chip: I think those are two different things. How are they different?
I
think a useful way to think about this is to think about that miniaturization that
Feynman had proposed. Every time you shrink those transistors, you can fit more
on a chip. And that’s just geometry, right? We know that if we’ve sort of taken
up less space, you can fit more on. So that’s really good. And that allows you
to have things like more memory, for example, on your chip. And so if you think
about cache—that may be something people see when they’re buying their
computers—the size of cache has been going up a lot over time. So that’s really
good.
But
the speed of your computer is also based on how many operations you can do in
one second. So you do one thing, and then you do the next thing, and you do the
next thing. And one of the things that modern computers are really good at is
doing things way, way faster than we can. So if you think about our clock being
one second, they can do three billion things in that one second. Three billions
sets of operations. It’s enormously fast, but it turns out that also came from
the miniaturization that was happening with Moore’s Law.
The
limit to running chips faster is always that as you run them faster, they
produce more heat. And the problem is if you produce a lot of heat, you’ll eventually
melt the chip. So there’s a limit to how fast you can sort of toggle it up to
be able to run it faster. And you hit that limit and then you stop. And the
nice thing is, as we miniaturized, it turns out we were able to run them
faster, right? They produced less heat because they were smaller. And so you
could turn up the speed a little bit and you just kept being able to do that
over and over again until we hit this limit in 2004 and 2005.
I write a lot about the down shift
in productivity growth in the United States and in other countries starting in
the ‘70s. And then we had this kind of blip up in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
I think this down shift—and people can debate if productivity is being properly
measured—happened at the same time as this amazing improvement in chip performance
and the capabilities of computers. So first, do we know to what extent Moore’s
Law contributed to productivity growth over the past half century? Do you
happen to know if there’s a rough estimate? I’m kind of asking you to do this
off the top of your head, so I apologize.
I
think that there are sort of two ways to answer that question. There’s the sort
of overall IT—what macroeconomists say the effect that IT is having on
productivity—and by one estimate, since the 1970s, about a third of all labor
productivity improvements have come from improvements in IT. That sort of gives
you sort of one version of this.
Right.
But
it’s very hard in a lot of ways to measure it, because Moore’s Law has been a
pretty stable thing over time, and that tends to be a hard thing for economists
to measure. But in some of the work that I did as part of my dissertation work,
I can actually show, for example, that in this 2004–2005 era where we lose the
speed up, it turns out a whole bunch of firms are hurt by that. Their
productivities do not rise as fast as a result of this. And so we definitely
can see these effects coming in. And myself and my group, the stuff that we
work on, a lot of this is trying to get a much better estimate of this because
we think this is actually a pretty crucial question. Because we may have
actually been systematically underestimating the effect that IT has had and
Moore’s Law has had on the economy.
Given the fact that we may have
underestimated it, how concerned should I be going forward? If we’ve had this
struggle of measured productivity growth, at least as currently measured, with Moore’s Law, how concerned should I
be about productivity growth—which is pretty important for raising living standards
going forward—with Moore’s Law at an end?
I am worried about this. I am absolutely worried about this. And the way I think of this is: If you look across society and you think of general productivity improvements, you’re talking 1 or 2 percent per year kind of as how we make things better over time. And at its peak, the improvement that we were making in our chips was 52 percent per year. So it was vastly faster. And that really had sort of spillover effects on everybody else. Everyone else could say, “Let me use computers to do this additional thing and make my part of the economy more productive as well.” And Dale Jorgenson at Harvard has done some nice work splitting that out and seeing how important it is.
Quantum computer startup QuEra Computing’s 256-qubit machine is pictured in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., on February 18, 2021. Alexei Bylinskii – QuEra/Handout via REUTERS
And
then as we get to the end, the question is, where do we go from here if this
engine has been slowing down? And of course, there are some candidates. People
talk about artificial intelligence: Are we going to be able to use that?
Quantum computing: are we going to be able to use that? And some of these other
things. And the question is, do these things have the legs in the same way that
Moore’s Law has had. And I think it’s not at all clear that any of them will be
able to sort of take up that mantle in the way that Moore’s Law has done,
particularly over so many decades.
Computers start out at the very
beginning as a very specific technology developed for use in war—I’m sure you
know a lot more about this than I did—whether it’s calculating artillery range
or something. Then it became what economists call a general-purpose
technology. You’ve written that it’s now transitioning back into a more
specific technology where computers and chips become more special purpose. Do I
have that right?
Yeah,
that’s right. That’s right. So maybe a way to think about this is a Swiss Army
knife versus having a whole toolkit full of hammers and screwdrivers and all
those kind of things. So you could say, “I’m trying to make this decision,
should I invest in a Swiss Army knife or should I buy a screwdriver and all
those kind of things?”
I
think in my toolbox and I’m sure in yours, we have the full set of things,
right? We don’t just have this Swiss Army knife. And the reason that’s true is
because, obviously if you specialize, your tool for one particular thing does
that thing better. But the remarkable thing about what we got with these sort
of general-purpose chips, which is the CPUs, over time was they got better so
fast that the choice was more, “Well, do I want to buy a screwdriver today
or do I want to buy a new Swiss Army knife four years from now that’s going to
be vastly, vastly better?” And so we sort of kept on that path.
But
it only works, that trade-off is only worth doing, as long as the Swiss Army
knife is getting better fast enough: as long as the CPU is getting better fast
enough. And what we’ve seen is a real breakdown in that. That is, as this slows
down, we’ve gone from that 52 percent that I had told you before as the rate of
growth. By one measure, we’re now down to 3.5 percent per year improvement. And
so at that level, you’re much better off saying, “I want to get the screwdriver
myself.” And we already see lots and lots of firms doing this. So Google is
building their own chips. Amazon is building their own chips. Tesla is building
their own chips. Lots of people are going down this road to build a specialized
chip that is right for exactly what they want to do, not the one that we’re all
on the same platform for.
You mentioned AI earlier. When you
talk about AI, what are we talking about? Machine learning, deep learning? And is
this world of more specialized chips just fine? If your specialty is deep
learning, you have a deep learning chip. I’m probably wildly oversimplifying
this. So does that have a negative impact? What do you mean by AI? And then
what is the impact of a more specialized chip?
I
think you’re so right to point us out. Let’s talk about what we mean by AI, because
people mean everything from artificial general intelligence—which obviously has
a whole bunch of particular implications—to I would say sort of a catch-all
phrase where almost everything from data science these days gets wrapped in
this blanket of artificial intelligence. Certainly within the last 10 years,
the thing that has really changed remarkably is deep learning in particular.
And
for those in your audience who haven’t seen this, this used to be called neural
networks. This has existed back since the ‘50s, and it was just that when we
didn’t have much computing power, they were kind of small and they didn’t have
very many layers, which is sort of one of the ways that people think about
them. And as we got more computing power, they got deeper, which is why we call
them deep neural networks now. So that’s sort of how we get there. That’s
really where the revolution has been in the last 10 years. And at the cutting
edge, all of the models that are beating records and stuff are almost all deep
learning models.
And does the slowing of Moore’s Law
and the moving to more specialized chips have any impact on the progress of
deep learning AI?
Yeah.
So I mean, what you can see is that when you have something like deep learning
where it’s clear that there’s potential here, people have invested in building
these specialized chips. And so people may have heard of GPUs, graphics
processing units. But people have built even more specialized [chips]. So
Google has their own tensor processing unit, TPU.
So
these sort of ever-more-specialized things are sort of taking us down this road
of becoming more and more efficient at that particular thing. And so the good
news about that is that, indeed, you get a big performance gain. So one of the
results that Nvidia pointed out not too long ago was that they could get about
a 100x improvement from the specialization that they were doing. So that’s on
one hand, pretty great.
 NVIDIA computer graphic cards are shown for sale at a retail store in San Marcos, California, U.S. August 14, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake
On
the other hand, that’s not at all big compared to the sweep of Moore’s Law, right?
And so you were asking, should I not be worried? And I think the answer is you
should be worried because specialization gives you that one-time gain—and maybe
incremental. Maybe you can build a screwdriver ever a little bit better, but
you run out of steam pretty quickly. Whereas Moore’s Law had much, much more
legs and many more decades of improvement that it could offer.
Do people think there’s a lot more
progress to be made in deep learning? Or do they think it’s being
exhausted already, and they’re trying to think of the next thing?
Where are we in that revolution?
I
think there are people in both camps on that. I think that there are lots of
folks that are still excited by all the progress we’re making here, and I think
they have some real things they can point to. The one that I’m particularly
excited about recently is AlphaFold, which is this ability to model protein
folding with deep learning. And that’s a remarkable achievement, right? It’s a
problem that we struggled with for a long time. And it has a lot of benefits
for how we do medicine in the future. So I think there’s a real promise there.
And so they can say that’s great, lots to be done there.
At
the same time, we do see us starting to run into limits on how we implement
these things. We can run into times where the inherent inefficiency of deep
learning—which we can talk about if you’re interested—that inherent inefficiency
that comes with using deep learning comes with a very high computational price.
And so you see people starting to say, “Well, do I really want to pay that
price?” So one example that we saw very closely: we did an MBA case on
this where a supermarket had said, “I’m really interested in using deep
learning to predict the demand for my products.” And of course, that
matters a lot for a supermarket because they’d want to know how much to stock
on the shelves and the like.
And
it turns out that they did it; they got a real improvement in performance. But
for many of the products that they put on their shelves, it was not
economically worth it to run that model. The computational cost of just running
it overshadowed that. I think we’re seeing both of them and we’re seeing the
second group of folks saying, “Well, maybe I’ll use deep learning in some
places, but in other places I won’t, or maybe in some places I’ll try to adapt
it so that it can become more efficient.”
If we’re at the end of Moore’s Law
as we’ve thought about it and now we’re moving to specialized chips, is there a
new sort of chip technology that would return us to these massive gains and return
us to a general-purpose technology?
None
that we know yet. There are candidates.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Yeah,
me too. Me too. There are candidates, right? People have proposed architectural
computing. So right now we have wires and electrons doing our calculations.
Maybe we could use light and photons to do it. That seems like that might be
interesting, particularly for some kinds of calculations. Then there are other
things like quantum computing, which I think many people have the sense of
quantum computing is just the next generation of computing.
I
actually don’t think that’s right. I think it’s more like a different kind of
specializer. So it’s like, we’re going to have our main computers and we’re
still going to have them in the future. But then on the side, we’ll say, “Well,
for a certain subset of problems, quantum computers can do really well, so we
use the quantum computers for those.” So I think that’s what the landscape
I can’t remember a time when computer
chips have been in the news and as much on the national news pages. There are
concerns that not enough chips are made in the United States or not the best
kind; they’re made in Taiwan, but what if China invades Taiwan? How hard is it
to say, “Oh, now we want to make these things in the United States”?
Workers manufacture LED chips at the plant of Tsinghua Tongfang in Nantong city, east China’s Jiangsu province, 26 December 2011. China is propping up its local chip manufacturing industry with new policies and financial support intended to turn the country into a semiconductor-making powerhouse by 2030. Via REUTERS
I think some people think you take
apart a factory in one place, you move it to the United States. Would that be a
very significant change, if companies tried to make more of their chips here?
And does that take a number of years? It sounds like it would be hard, harder
than I think many politicians think.
It
really depends on how cutting edge you want your chips to be. So I was talking
before about that miniaturization that’s going on. And so the smaller you get,
Neil, I want America to be on the
cutting edge. I want us to be on the cutting edge.
Well,
yes. I don’t blame you.
I don’t want a chip that runs a
toy. I want the best.
The
problem with that is building one of those factories these days costs $20
billion or $22 billion. So it’s a big deal. It’s really hard. You need very
cutting-edge equipment to do it. The challenge there is that we probably did
not worry about this as much in the past because there used to be 25 different
companies, all of whom were on the frontier of building chips. And as these
factories have become more and more expensive over time, what we’re down to is
now basically three different companies that produce these cutting-edge chips.
So it is very hard. There are not very many folks that do it at the cutting
edge, but it certainly is important that we have good production facilities and
that we know that they can be secure. Absolutely.
Neil, thanks for coming on the
podcast.
My
pleasure. Thanks for having me.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Neil Thompson is an innovation scholar in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a research scientist at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and an associate member of the Broad Institute.
Learn more: Metascience, R&D, and Federal Research Spending: My Long-Read Q&A with Tony Mills | How to Identify and Allocate Talent: My Long-Read Q&A with Tyler Cowen | Engineering Economic Growth: My Long-Read Q&A with Walker Hanlon
The post The End of Moore’s Law and the Future of Computers: My Long-Read Q&A with Neil Thompson appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.At the start of a different week, I might have written about many things, including politics. But not today. Instead, I am watching a group of my fellow citizens deal with a slaughter of defenseless people on a summer day at a parade.First, here’s more from The Atlantic.
America is in denial, Mitt Romney writes.
The origin of vibes
A crisis historian has some bad news for us.
Losing FaithWe do not yet know why a shooter opened fire on a crowd in Illinois yesterday. Given what we know about the suspected killer, I think it is unlikely that the massacre in Highland Park was part of an organized terror plot, but rather yet another case of a young male loser attacking his own community. Nonetheless, the effect of these mass shootings is the same as terrorism: They rob us of a general sense of safety and turn us into a nation of hostages.In the first few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, I traveled to London and New York. That’s when I realized that the terrorists had succeeded in making an ordinary citizen—me—think about terrorism constantly. I wondered, on my first trips back to those cities and during almost every visit to any metropolis for a few more years: Am I here on the wrong day? Is this the site of the next attack? The terrorists had, for a time, taken away my complacency and my ability to enjoy a simple stroll in a big city. Americans now have to feel this way all the time, in their own country, at almost any mass gathering, in even the quiet towns and suburbs that people once thought of as relatively immune to such terrifying events.Such feelings are corrosive and depressing. They undermine our faith in our system of government. (This is often the goal of terrorist violence.) Worse, mass shootings undermine our faith in one another. And that loss of faith leads me to a thought I cannot escape: There is nothing we can do about such events. They will keep happening.This is not because I am a pessimist. Despite my sometimes-grumpy views on any number of things, I think most people are good and that engaged citizens can find workable solutions to most things. But when it comes to this particular kind of violence—a lone shooter attacking a community with a powerful weapon—all of the foundations for another disaster are already in place. A bizarre gun culture created the demand for millions of guns; an extremist lobby has attacked almost every measure to place any restrictions on those guns. (And the Supreme Court seems determined to roll back any limits on the ability of states to control access to these weapons.)Add to this the final and necessary element: a group of young males who are determined to take their frustrations or delusions or fantasies out on others. New state and national laws, such as the recent gun bill, will make it harder, perhaps, for future shooters to get the weapons they want. I support such laws, but I am not convinced they will matter much, at least not for some time.So what can we do?We can choose not to despair. We can, as an act of will, keep faith in our society and our institutions. Just as we do not give up on living when we are ill, we cannot give up on ourselves because of these monstrous acts. We can do this concretely by demanding more changes to our laws, but we can also exert social pressure on an irresponsible gun culture. After all, we managed as a nation to make smoking a legal but socially unacceptable habit in everything from movies to public spaces. Do we really think we can’t collectively start pushing back against gun culture the same way?This sounds anodyne, almost ridiculous, on a day like this. The guns will not disappear and another such attack is a near certainty. But we can and must try to mitigate the danger—and the damage to our democracy—by refusing to surrender to the anguish, by insisting that our fellow citizens come to their senses, and by affirming our faith that a great democracy can heal itself from even the most grievous wounds.Related:
The Constitution is whatever the right wing says it is.
The problem is gun culture, not SCOTUS.
Norwegian oil and gas workers went on strike, shutting down three gas fields and causing a jump in Europe’s natural-gas prices.
New federal estimates show that the Omicron subvariant BA.5 has become dominant among new coronavirus cases in the U.S., but reductions in public testing and state reporting make it difficult to see the full pandemic picture.
Russia has turned its focus to the eastern Donetsk region in Ukraine, a sign that the country is preparing for its next major offensive.
DispatchesHumans Being: All men should watch this one movie scene about abortion, Jordan Calhoun argues.Peacefield: Tom Nichols offers a guide to the vintage TV shows that he stays up watching at night.I Have Notes: Nicole Chung talks with a negotiation expert about how writers and creatives can better advocate for themselves.Up for Debate: Should Americans have a right to absolute privacy and bodily autonomy? Conor Friedersdorf rounds up reader perspectives.Evening Read
(Getty; Everett Collection; The Atlantic)
Hell Yeah, Tom Cruise By Caitlin Flanagan Top Gun came out in the spring of 1986, a movie so big, so wall-to-wall, so resistance-is-futile that you just had to coexist with the damn thing until it finally went away. Now—like one of those flowers that comes into bloom only once every 40 years—it’s back.Read the full article.More From The Atlantic
Let the rich have their supertalls.
Actually good news about voting for a change
If it can happen in San Francisco, it can happen anywhere.
(Adam Maida / The Atlantic; Getty)
Read. On Not Knowing is a collection of short, blazing essays by Emily Ogden.Or try another recommendation from our list of books in which ignorance is the point.Plus: The Atlantic’s design director reimagines the covers and titles of popular books for summer.Watch. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, a comedy starring Emma Thompson and streaming on Hulu, positions sex as a path to freedom.Listen. On the finale of our podcast How to Start Over, the hosts discuss simple steps to forgive ourselves for what we can’t change.Play our daily crossword.P.S.I am a fan of the jazz musician Pat Metheny, and I am also a movie buff who loves soundtracks. So I am recommending a 1985 movie that flopped when it came out but became a cult favorite in later years (and is now widely available to stream): Fandango. It’s a coming-of-age movie set in 1971, the first effort by the director Kevin Reynolds, and the first major movie starring Kevin Costner. Steven Spielberg produced it, but he reportedly didn’t much like the final product. You might not love it either, at least not in the first clunky half hour or so—but wait for the third act, and the tracks by Metheny and Lyle Mays. (They weren’t written for the movie, but they are reflective and moving, and they capture the film’s gentle melancholy at the end.) You’ll be glad you did.— TomCorrection: The July 1 edition of this newsletter misidentified Steve Hackett as a former member of the band Asia.Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time for Dispatch Live. Join Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and me tonight to discuss whether Trump is losing his grip on the GOP and to answer your questions. All the relevant details can be found here.Dispatch Live is one of my favorite parts of The Dispatch, and it’s open to members only. If you’re not on board yet, what are you waiting for? Subscribe today and join us live, tonight, at 8:00 p.m. ET.(Photo by YOUNGRAE KIM/AFP via Getty Images.)If you’re a politically minded person (and if you’re reading this newsletter, you probably are), the instant a tragedy happens, your mind likely races to the “big” solution. What are the policies that can solve this problem? I’m not here to condemn this impulse. We should be thinking hard and creatively about policy—especially when we face persistent and deadly challenges, like mass shootings. We also have to understand that there are some cultural diseases that policy can’t fully fix. There are wounds that politics can’t heal. And I’m convinced that our spreading epidemic of mass shootings falls into that category. Better policy can ameliorate the crisis, but fix it? I don’t see how. My own thinking about this topic has been deeply influenced by two people—Robert Putnam and Malcolm Gladwell. Putnam is most famous for his book, Bowling Alone, which identified the increased loneliness and isolation of American civil society long before we knew it was a crisis. But in 2015 he wrote a book called Our Kids that transformed the way I see childhood in this country. I don’t want to summarize the entire book (read it!), but one of the most impactful insights was the way in which kids in crisis often grow up in relative isolation from children in healthy families. It’s not that we see kids in crisis and ignore them. If we live in the right neighborhoods and integrate into the healthy civic associations, we don’t see kids in crisis at all. 

Read more

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg proposing that the federal government take "immediate action" to reduce flight cancellations and delays that have been inconveniencing American travelers this summer.
According to Sanders, the U.S. government ought to fine airlines $55,000 per passenger for each flight the airline must cancel due to staffing shortages. Airlines also ought to be fined by the government $27,500 per passenger for each domestic flight delayed over two hours where passengers must sit on the tarmac, and $15,000 per passenger for each domestic flight delayed by more than two hours if tarmac loitering is not a factor. (Neither fine would be doled out if weather forces a delay.) For flights delayed by merely one hour, Sanders wants the federal government to force airlines to give passengers refunds.
Though none of this is likely to become law, Sanders' frequent cries for heavy-handed federal government intervention should be opposed whenever they crop up. This one is no exception.

Senate Budget Committee Chair @BernieSanders writes a letter asking Transportation @SecretaryPete to take action against the airline industry over flight cancellations, proposing passenger refunds and fines. pic.twitter.com/PoYsoOdMK8
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 29, 2022

Sanders, ever a man of the people, is reacting to the fact that summer air travel has been a hot mess. Prices have surged, reflecting pent-up demand that has rebounded from peak COVID era, while some airlines (like JetBlue) have cut routes and most have struggled with staffing shortages. In Atlanta, 400 Delta pilots spent this past holiday weekend picketing, protesting what they say are subpar working conditions. Per data collected Saturday afternoon, 20 percent of Southwest flights within the U.S. had been delayed for the start of Fourth of July weekend. American Airlines logged similar numbers, while Delta came in a little better, at 13 percent.
"Nine of the ten busiest days for air travel passenger volume since March 2020 have come in the last month," wrote Sean Cudahy last week for The Points Guy, "and the majority of those days fell in the last week or two." Transportation Security Administration pass-through numbers for this holiday weekend surpassed last year's, with more than 9 million total travelers hitting U.S. airports between Thursday and Sunday. The Los Angeles Times reports that "the rate of cancellations over the last two weeks is up 59% from the same period in 2019, before the pandemic."
The reasons for this dysfunction are complex, though, and Sanders' proposed fixes—which read more like punishments—would not solve domestic flyers' problems.
Mostly, the summer of flight delays and cancellations is a demand issue. Travel demand is extraordinarily high, which is a positive indicator that most Americans are going back to the normal patterns of life following pandemic interruptions, overly cautious guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 40-year-high inflation be damned. When you order people to stay at home for many months and tell them to skip a bunch of holidays and life events, at a certain point they decide to get back in the game of existing as social creatures. We're seeing that happen now.
But it's also an understaffing problem. Over the course of the pandemic, many airline employees were unable to do their jobs as they'd traditionally been done due to depressed travel; a chunk of them participated in the much-ballyhooed "Great Resignation," switching industries or retiring a bit early. Some airlines took advantage of service interruptions to retire some of their aircraft, which resulted in pilots needing to be retrained to fly different plane models. Some airlines also retrained pilots who had been furloughed or laid off during that period of record-low travel demand. Airlines like Delta, faced with financial trouble during the pandemic, adopted controversial "juniority benefits" (a.k.a. buyouts) for the most senior and highly-paid employees, as a cost-cutting measure. Airlines did what they could to hunker down, cut costs, and make the best of a dismal time for the industry.
Meanwhile, air traffic control—run by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)—also deserves some of the blame. FAA representatives deny that there's a staffing shortage while simultaneously admitting that air traffic controller training has been reduced due to COVID…which sure looks like a staffing shortage.
Sanders is right to bemoan the fact that airlines received $74 billion in pandemic-related aid from the federal government, which was ostensibly doled out to ensure airlines would be able to be resilient during low-travel times and get back to regularly planned service once conditions stabilized, though it didn't quite work out that way. It's almost like infusions of federal cash change airlines' incentives, and don't even fully prevent bad outcomes!
It's hard to see how the federal government intervention proposed by Sanders would create the endgame he desires, at a time when airlines are struggling to adapt to quickly changing conditions, and still face many unknowns—like whether business travel will ever fully rebound—that are tough to plan for.
Many sectors of the economy are experiencing strain right now. There's a palpable sense among American consumers that everything is getting simultaneously worse and more expensive. But this will not always be the case, since markets have a way of sorting these things out over time and readjusting to consumers' ever-changing needs. Eventually, supply chains will restabilize. Ports will no longer cyclically close down or be short-staffed due to COVID lockdowns. The real estate market will cool down a bit, with homes no longer going for 20 percent above asking. Inflation will someday be below today's staggering 8.6 percent. And, yes, airlines will once again compete for the mantle of best and most reliable, taking discerning flyers with them (and letting those who don't care as much about service interruptions gravitate toward more affordable airlines).
But it's not Sanders who will pull all this off—it's market forces, quietly at work, that should be trusted, not messed with.
The post Bernie Sanders Wants To Force Airlines To Refund Passengers for Flights Delayed Over 1 Hour appeared first on Reason.com.

The salvage yard at M. Maselli & Sons, in Petaluma, California, is made up of six acres of angle irons, block pulleys, doorplates, digging tools, motors, fencing, tubing, reels, spools, and rusted machinery. To the untrained eye, the place is a testament to the enduring power of American detritus, but to Foley artists—craftspeople who create custom sound effects for film, television, and video games—it’s a trove of potential props. On a recent morning, Shelley Roden and John Roesch, Foley artists who work at Skywalker Sound, the postproduction audio division of Lucasfilm, stood in the parking lot, considering the sonic properties of an enormous industrial hopper. “I’m looking for a resonator, and I need more ka-chunkers,” Roden, who is blond and in her late forties, said. A lazy Susan was also on the checklist—something to produce a smooth, swivelling sound. Roesch, a puffer-clad sexagenarian with white hair, had brought his truck, in the event of a large haul. The pair was joined by Scott Curtis, their Foley mixer, a bearded fiftysomething. Curtis was in the market for a squeaky hinge. “There was a door at the Paramount stage that had the best creak,” he said. “The funny thing was, the cleaning crew discovered this hinge squeak, and they lubricated the squeak—the hinge. It was never the same.”

Petaluma is a historically agricultural town, and that afternoon was the thirty-ninth annual Butter and Egg Days Parade; the air smelled of lavender and barbecued meat. Inside the yard, Curtis immediately gravitated toward a pile of what looked like millstones, or sanding wheels. He began rotating one against another, producing a gritty, high-pitched ring, like an elementary-school fire alarm. “The texture is great,” Roden said. She suggested that one of the wheels could be used as a sweetener—a sound that is subtly layered over another sound, to add dimension—for a high-tech roll-up door, or perhaps one made of stone. “It’s kinda chimey,” she said, wavering. “It has potential.” A few yards away, Curtis had moved on to a shelf of metal filing-cabinet drawers, freckled with rust. “We have so many metal boxes,” Roden said, and walked away.

“It’s kinda the squeak I was looking for,” Curtis said softly.

“Hey, guys, remember the ‘Black Panther’ area?” Roden called out. “Wanna explore?” She led the group past a rack of hanging chains, also rusted; Curtis lightly palmed a few in sequence, producing the pleasant rings of a tintinnabulum. Roden pointed to the spot where she had found a curved crowbar to create the sound of Vibranium—a fictional rare metal unique to the Marvel universe—before zeroing in on a rack of thimbles, clamps, nuts, bolts, and washers. The trio began knocking and tapping hardware together, producing a series of chimes, tinks, and clunks. Roesch, who calls himself an “audile”—someone who processes information in a primarily auditory manner, rather than in a visual or a material one—had unearthed a sceptre-like industrial tool with a moving part, and was rapidly sliding it back and forth. “Robot,” he said.

The bulk of the sound in film is typically added in postproduction. “I always say there’s sound effects, like footsteps, and then there’s music,” the director David Lynch, whose films are famous for their inventive, evocative sound design, said. “And then there’s sound effects that are like music. . . . They conjure a feeling.” Traditionally, “hard effects” cover ambient noises such as traffic or rain, or the more mechanical, combustive sounds of explosions and gunfire; they are usually pulled from libraries, or electronically produced. Foley effects are custom to a film, and are synchronized to characters’ movements. They might include the sound of someone walking across a room, rolling over in bed, stirring a pot, typing, fighting, dancing, eating, falling, or kissing. The line between the two kinds of effect is thin: Foley artists record the sound of a hand twisting a doorknob, but not the sound of the mechanism turning within. Foley is subtle but suggestive, capturing offstage bedsprings, or the shuffle of a clumsy intruder. In the past hundred years, technology has changed the process of recording, editing, and engineering sounds, but the techniques of Foley have remained stubbornly analog. Behind any given Foley effect, no matter how complex, are one or two people contorting their bodies in a soundproof room.

Foley artists have historically worked in pairs. (Certain sounds are so complex that they require the labor of four hands.) Roden and Roesch are two of the masters in their field. David Fincher, the director of movies including “The Social Network,” “Gone Girl,” and “Mank,” told me that Foley is “a very strange calling,” and “a dark art” foundational to filmmaking. “You’re trying to make beautiful sounds that make their point once and get the hell out of Dodge,” Fincher said. “The people who do it really, really well are few and far between.”

The group continued walking through the salvage yard, clanking poles together, pushing buttons, tapping metal surfaces, flapping doors, turning cranks. Roesch pulled a handle on the front of an electrical cabinet, and it made a satisfying fnnp. “Those are sha-shonkers, for sure,” Roden said approvingly. She flipped a large metal clasp back and forth. “It’s lovely.” The group headed to a rack of hinges. Roden tested one; it made a seesawing squeal. She retrieved another and flapped it back and forth. “Screaming puppy,” she said, shaking her head. She looked up at me. “Did you lose a filling?”

For an audile, the yard seemed like a potentially overstimulating environment. I imagined the old mattress springs and racks of hardware bursting to life, “Fantasia”-like, jangling and clunking in a private cacophony. I relayed this to Roden, who shook her head. “No, no, no, not at all—it’s potential creativity,” she said. “You know what’s overstimulating? Sitting in a movie theatre.”

Sound effects emerged in the late nineteenth century, as the motion-picture industry experimented with accompaniment to silent films. Theatres brought in live bands, orchestras, lecturers, and hidden actors who stomped and clattered in conjunction with movies; they tested strategically placed phonographs and the Kinetophone, a contraption introduced by Thomas Edison, which attempted to synch sound to movement. Enterprising inventors created effects “traps,” small machines meant to imitate everyday sounds such as a baby crying or a nose being blown. In a recent paper for the academic journal Film History, Stephen Bottomore, a historian of early cinema, cited a 1911 article that griped about the maximalism such devices facilitated: “It is often the case that a youth with no imagination, and with very limited brain power, combined with a spirit of mischief, ‘lets himself go,’ when presiding over the sound machine.”

In 1926, Warner Bros., then a small outfit best known for a movie about a German shepherd named Rin Tin Tin, débuted the Vitaphone, which allowed for synchronized recorded sound. That year, the studio released “Don Juan,” a silent film with a recorded musical score and a handful of sound effects: tepid clicks to accompany swords in combat; clangs and chimes to add weight to wedding bells. Initially, it was impractical for production teams to edit recordings, and dialogue, music, and sound effects had to be recorded in real time, on set. “In a lot of cases, those recordings were still the sounds that musicians used to perform in the theatres,” Emily Thompson, a historian of technology at Princeton, told me. “You’ll hear drummers instead of machine guns, or saxophones when ducks go by onscreen.”

Foley takes its name from Jack Foley, a stuntman, prop handler, and assistant director at Universal Pictures in the late twenties. His breakout was “Show Boat,” which was initially intended to be a silent film; facing competition from Warner Bros., Universal added a soundtrack, which included dialogue, during postproduction. Jack Foley provided sound effects: handclaps, footsteps. He built a small crew, and their workspace became known as “Foley’s room”; other studios eventually developed their own “Foley stages.” Later, a technique known as sound-on-film—in which recorded sound is converted to light waves printed directly onto film strips—made it possible to work with effects separately, something that allowed for more artistic freedom. In the thirties, sound technicians sought “wild” recordings—a literalism that prioritized the grinding rush of an actual train over the smoother, more controllable sound of roller skates cruising over a wood floor. But some directors used sound effects for their suggestive qualities, such as the growing thunder of encroaching shells in “A Farewell to Arms,” or the sinister whistling of the serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s “M.”

In the decades that followed, sound work continued to evolve, both technologically and aesthetically. Studios assembled robust catalogues of sound effects. (Certain stock sound effects became famous, such as the “Wilhelm scream,” which was reproduced in dozens of movies.) Multitrack recording enabled effects artists to create more complex soundscapes. But it wasn’t until the mid-seventies, with the innovation of Dolby Stereo—a sound system with four channels, rather than the usual two—that filmmakers began to truly embrace the possibilities of stereo sound.

Roesch studied film at N.Y.U. and at the American Film Institute, and entered the industry in 1978. Soon after he moved to Los Angeles, Joan Rowe, who collected rent for Roesch’s landlord, and who was freelancing as a Foley artist, brought Roesch into the studio where she worked. “He was absolutely amazing,” she told me. “There was a character that came running across the stage, and jumped up, and spun around, and flipped over—I just can’t tell you the number of intricate steps that this character had—and John just went loobaloobaloobaloo.” She made a kind of cartoonish spiral sound to imitate his movements.

Roesch and Rowe became Foley partners. One of their first projects together was “The Black Stallion,” from 1979. (To simulate the clatter of horses’ hooves, they stuffed toilet plungers with fabric, among other techniques.) Roesch worked on the footsteps for Michael Jackson’s dance moves in “Thriller.” He and Rowe were hired by Steven Spielberg to do the Foley for “E.T.” That film, Rowe told me, was “the Foley artist’s dream, the Foley artist’s joy.” Spielberg had a distinct idea of how he wanted E.T. to sound: liquidy and alien, but funny, and not scary. Most crucially, it was important that the wide-eyed, wrinkled, freaky extraterrestrial be lovable. To make the sounds of E.T.’s movements, Rowe and Roesch landed on raw liver, which slid about in its package, and jello wrapped in a damp T-shirt. For the character’s body falls, Rowe recalls using a novelty-sized bag of popcorn; Roesch remembers using a pillowcase filled with rice and cereal.

There are certain well-worn tricks of the trade. Vegetables are old standbys: snapped celery for broken bones, hammered cabbage for a punch. (According to the Web site Atlas Obscura, during the climax of “Titanic,” in which Kate Winslet floats, shivering, on a piece of debris, Foley artists peeled back layers of frozen lettuce to add texture to the sound of her crisping hair.) Paper clips or nails, taped to the tips of a glove, are useful for the clicking footsteps of a house pet. Wet pieces of chamois leather, the sort that is used for cleaning cars, are highly versatile. “They sound just like mud,” Rowe said. “Also, they’re excellent for blood. If you want to stab somebody in the chest, and you want to hear the sound of the knife going in”—here she made a gushing, kuschhy sound—“get that chamois out and just squish it. I found this big plastic cup, and when you put a chamois in it, when it’s wet, when you rub it up and down”—she emitted another guttural gush—“it makes this incredible sound.”

Hugh Eakin’s new book, “Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America” (Crown), isn’t really about Picasso, or about war, or about art. Its subject is the creation of a market for a certain product, modern art.

One (mostly) good thing about the digital revolution, which is otherwise sucking us all into a plutocratic dystopia, is that the Internet has reduced the barriers to cultural production enormously. Many types of cultural goods are now much easier to make and much cheaper to distribute. You don’t need an investor to capitalize your production costs or a distributor to get your stuff before the public. You just need a laptop and a camera (and maybe an inspiration). And, no matter how small you are, you always open worldwide.

It’s true that when your product goes online it will be competing with a zillion similar products—and products that do have investors and distributors, such as streaming services, are much more likely to attract audiences and become profitable. But the Internet makes your work accessible to anyone who wants to see it or read it or listen to it or buy a copy of it, because barriers to cultural consumption are also much lower. Goods are far easier to access and to acquire.

Back when all of life was offline, back when to buy a record you had to go to a record store, back when there were record stores, the infrastructure required for cultural goods to get from creation to consumption had many more moving parts. These parts are the principals of Eakin’s story. His focus isn’t on the big-name modern artists, like Picasso and Matisse, who are offstage for much of the book. It’s on figures most people have never heard of: dealers, gallery owners, collectors, curators, and critics—the components of what sociologists call the art world.

The art world isn’t a fixed entity. It’s continually being reconstituted as new artistic styles emerge. Twentieth-century fine art, in Europe and the United States, passed through a series of formally innovative stages, from Cubism and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, and each time art entered a new stage and acquired a new look the art world had to adjust.

At the most basic level, the art world exists to answer the question Is it art? When Cubist paintings were first produced, around 1907, they did not look like art to many people, even people who were interested in and appreciated fine-art painting. The same thing was true of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings (around 1950) and Andy Warhol’s soup cans (1962).

But you don’t know it’s art by looking at it. You know it’s art because galleries want to show it, dealers want to sell it, collectors want to buy it, museums want to exhibit it, and critics can explain it. When the parts are in synch, you have a market. The artist produces, and the various audiences—from billionaire collectors to casual museumgoers and college students buying van Gogh posters—consume. The art world is what gets the image from the studio to the dorm room.

The general American public, in the period when modern art emerged, around the time of the First World War, had no interest in it. Wealthy Americans, the sort of people who could afford to buy art for their homes, had no taste for it. Even the art establishment was hostile. In 1913, a Matisse show at the Art Institute of Chicago instigated a near-riot. Copies of three Matisse paintings were burned and there was a mock trial, in which Matisse was convicted of, among other things, artistic murder. The demonstrators were art students.

In Eakin’s account, the creation of a Picasso market in the United States—“Picasso” standing for modern art generally—took almost thirty years, from the first American Picasso show, at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291, in 1911 (eighty-three works, one sale), to “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in 1939 (more than three hundred and sixty works). The MoMA show, as Eakin puts it, “electrified the city.”

High-end department stores like Bonwit Teller and Bergdorf Goodman began selling Picasso-themed clothing. A national tour followed, and from then on, Eakin concludes, “the story of modern art—the collectors who acquired it, the scholars who studied it, the museums that showed it, and the ordinary people who waited in long lines to see it—would be written in America.”

Modern art had many middlemen and women in the United States—Albert C. Barnes, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Katherine S. Dreier, Galka Scheyer, Solomon R. Guggenheim, Hilla von Rebay, Hans Hofmann, Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg. Eakin has chosen to center his story on just two of these people: John Quinn, a collector and an all-around cultural impresario, who died, of liver cancer, in 1924; and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of MoMA, which opened in 1929. Using these figures gives his book a certain symmetry: Quinn tried and failed to do what Barr finally succeeded in doing, which was to get Americans to accept and appreciate modern art.

Quinn was a successful Wall Street lawyer who spent much of his money in support of contemporary art and literature. He was not only an art collector. He was the principal American adviser and promoter of modern writers like William Butler Yeats, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. He bought their manuscripts as a way of supporting them, and he helped make their work known in the United States. He negotiated Eliot’s American book contracts at a time when Eliot was barely a coterie writer. He brought Yeats to the United States for a national tour. He arranged for the first American production of J. M. Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World.” He acted as a talent scout for the publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

Culture industries need to adapt continually to changes in the legal, financial, and political environment—tax laws, depreciation rules, government regulations, quotas and tariffs, the availability of capital, and geopolitical developments, like wars. In what was possibly his most significant achievement as a supporter of modern art, Quinn single-handedly got Congress to rewrite a 1909 tax law that imposed a tariff on imported art less than fifty years old while exempting “historic art.”

From the moment the attack on the Capitol began, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s moral culpability was clear. That mob would never have assembled on the National Mall but for Trump’s decision to relentlessly lie about the results of the 2020 election.His legal culpability, however, was more ambiguous. We did not possess any evidence that he directly coordinated with the rioters prior to the invasion of the Capitol, and although his speech to the mob on January 6 itself admonished his followers to “fight like hell” and warned them that “you will never take back our country with weakness,” it also contained an explicit statement that they should march to the Capitol to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard.Also hovering over the legal analysis was a prudential calculation. Former presidents shouldn’t be prosecuted under novel legal theories. If the government is going to prosecute, it should bring a case that’s easy to justify under existing precedent. Otherwise, the prosecution itself could be dangerous, further fracturing and destabilizing an already fragile American political culture.Those considerations are precisely why Trump’s conduct in the case of Georgia had seemed more obviously to involve potential criminal liability than his actions on January 6. In Georgia’s case, Trump was recorded telling Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” and then explicitly threatening Raffensperger with criminal sanctions if he didn’t accede to the president’s demand.Georgia criminal law appears on point. Its relevant criminal-solicitation statute states:
A person commits the offense of criminal solicitation to commit election fraud in the first degree when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony under this article, he or she solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.
And which felony was Trump soliciting Raffensperger to commit? Among the most applicable is Georgia Code Section 21-2-566, which prohibits willfully tampering “with any electors list, voter’s certificate, numbered list of voters, ballot box, voting machine, direct recording electronic (DRE) equipment, electronic ballot marker, or tabulating machine.”[Peter Wehner: A withering indictment of the entire GOP]Indeed, at the request of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a special grand jury has been empaneled in Atlanta, and it is actively pursuing an investigation of Trump’s actions. On June 2, it questioned Raffensperger, and it has issued subpoenas to a number of other local officials.Even as the Fulton County district attorney looks into possible violations of state criminal law, Trump’s conduct regarding Georgia also implicated federal law. Most notable is his apparent violation of 18 U.S. Code Section 241, a law that prohibits a “conspiracy against rights,” which can include voting rights. As I’ve noted before, prior courts have found unlawful any effort to prevent the counting of ballots, failure to count votes, alteration of votes already counted, or changing of votes cast at voting machines.Given the legal ambiguity about Trump’s misconduct on January 6 and the clarity of both the evidence and the law regarding his efforts in Georgia, I’ve always thought that he faced greater legal jeopardy in the less spectacular case. Until yesterday, that is. Until Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, delivered riveting testimony to the January 6 select committee.The claim of most direct legal significance came when she described hearing Trump demand that the Secret Service remove magnetometers (or “mags”) that were screening the crowd for weapons. The area directly in front of his podium was not entirely full and, Hutchinson said, he wanted it filled for the sake of “the shot,” or photograph of the speech.Even though Trump was warned that the crowd possessed weapons, Hutchinson testified that he said, “I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the f-ing mags away.”Why is this so important? Since a 1969 case called Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court has sharply limited prosecutions for speech that allegedly incites violence. In Brandenburg, the Court tossed out the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had called for a march on Washington, D.C.; Florida; and Mississippi and threatened “revengeance” if the president continued to “suppress the white, Caucasian race.” The Court held that speeches threatening violence or disorder were protected by the First Amendment unless “such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”In a later case called Hess v. Indiana, the Court threw out a disorderly-conduct conviction for an anti-war demonstrator who was arrested after stating, “We’ll take the fucking street later (or again).” It reasoned that Hess’s words were not “intended to produce, and likely to produce, imminent disorder.”[Graeme Wood: The dumbest coup attempt]Let’s apply this test to Trump and January 6. We know that he directly summoned the mob with his tweet on December 19, 2020: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.” We know that he directed his supporters to march on the Capitol, but we now also have evidence that he knew they were armed and that he did not believe they were a threat—to him. Then, once the attack on the Capitol was under way, he further inflamed the crowd by tweeting, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary.”In a series of messages on his social-media site yesterday, Truth Social, Trump denied Hutchinson’s claims. But his denials were on an app. Her allegations were under oath.The available evidence now tilts strongly toward the claim that Trump’s words were indeed “intended to produce” and did in fact produce “imminent disorder.” Yes, his speech still contained the admonition to march “peacefully and patriotically,” but that is thin gruel for the defense in the face of the other language in his speech and the totality of the circumstances.Remember, earlier on January 6, the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had told the crowd, “Let’s have trial by combat,” and he described the supposed stakes in vivid terms:
It’s bigger than you and me. It’s about these monuments and what they stand for. This has been a year in which they have invaded our freedom of speech, our freedom of religion, our freedom to move, our freedom to live. I’ll be darned if they’re going to take away our free and fair vote. And we’re going to fight to the very end to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Republican Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama also stood before the crowd on January 6 and said:
Our ancestors sacrificed their blood, their sweat, their tears, their fortunes and sometimes their lives to give us, their descendants, an America that is the greatest nation in world history. So I have a question for you—are you willing to do the same?
The crowd was known to be armed, had been deliberately worked into a frenzy, and was then knowingly sent straight to the Capitol. As I wrote last night, in this context Trump’s request that the crowd march on the Capitol peacefully “looks more like pro forma ass-covering than a genuine plea.”[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]There is much more to investigate, including whether Trump worked directly or through proxies with the Proud Boys and others who led the invasion of the Capitol and have been charged with seditious conspiracy. In addition, in her questioning of Hutchinson, Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming raised the possibility that Trump’s allies were attempting to influence witnesses by contacting them and reminding them that Trump read transcripts and that, in the words of one witness, being a “team player” would help them “stay in good graces in Trump World.”As the investigation continues, the possibilities for prosecuting Trump are expanding. In addition to the Georgia investigation, the January 6 committee has produced evidence bolstering the case that Trump incited the violent attack on the Capitol. He was already in direct legal jeopardy in Georgia. Now we can add federal court in Washington, D.C., to the list of places where Trump faces the possibility of a serious and credible criminal case.

In 1875, the future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis met his classmate Samuel Warren at Harvard Law School. The two became close friends and soon formed a law firm together. Warren was from one of Boston’s wealthiest families, whose doings were fodder for gossip columns; when Warren married a senator’s daughter, details of wedding décor, guests, and dresses were extensively covered in national newspapers. This irritated Warren, who, even in his undergraduate days, had castigated Boston papers for divulging private facts about Harvard’s secret societies.

Brandeis later pointed to Warren’s “deepseated abhorrence of the invasions of social privacy” in explaining why the two men published their famous law-review essay “The Right to Privacy,” in 1890. It decried invasions of “the sacred precincts of private and domestic life.” It deplored “the details of sexual relations” being “broadcast in the columns of the daily papers” and the publication of “idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle.” People should have legal recourse, it suggested, against those who publish private facts about them.

For decades afterward, courts debated whether the right to privacy existed. But, by the nineteen-sixties, many courts and legislatures had recognized such a right, in various forms, entitling people “to be let alone” and protected from incursions into their private affairs. The tort-law scholar William Prosser, an architect of modern privacy jurisprudence, noted in a classic 1960 study that the right to privacy had, confusingly, come to encompass rights against not only publishing private facts but also several other kinds of harm: portraying a person in a false light; appropriating a person’s name or likeness; and intruding on a person’s “seclusion.”

As privacy widened in scope, it seemed to grow in power. In the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court constitutionalized a right to privacy, ruling that prohibiting the use of contraceptives was unlawful because of “a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights.” As Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the Court, put it, “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.” Douglas, who married four times, explained that marriage is “intimate to the degree of being sacred” and promotes “harmony in living.” And so the constitutional right to privacy—which soon became the basis for the right to abortion and, later, the right to same-sex intimacy—was derived from the common law of marriage, in which an established doctrine of “marital privacy” had traditionally shielded the life of a married couple from interference.

Douglas’s repulsed imaginings drew on at least two distinct senses of privacy. First, privacy as secrecy: the idea that some personal matters, especially those of a sexual nature, should be sequestered from others’ view. And, second, privacy as autonomy: the idea that some personal decisions should be unimpeded by government interference. With marital sex serving as the paradigmatic private act—private in both senses—the rhetorical logic of Griswold suggested that the obvious importance of the first kind of privacy meant that the state must respect the second.

In Roe v. Wade (1973), the valence of constitutional privacy, helped along by the sexual revolution of the late sixties, broadened from sacred marital beds and domestic enclosures to personal autonomy and bodily integrity. People having control over decisions about their own bodies, free from the state, was the core liberty value that privacy represented. In Lawrence v. Texas, three decades later, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy statute as an unjustified “intrusion into the personal and private life of the individual.” In effect, “Don’t look” had become “Hands off.”

The shifting terrain here invites the question of whether, when we talk about “the right to privacy,” we’ve been treating as interchangeable two terms that are merely homonyms: roughly, privacy as nondisclosure and privacy as noninterference. Justice Samuel Alito, in his leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, asserted that the Court, in holding that privacy covered abortion, had previously “conflated two very different meanings of the term: the right to shield information from disclosure and the right to make and implement important personal decisions without governmental interference.” Alito’s purpose, of course, was to deny the constitutional basis for the right to abortion. And yet disaggregating the two concepts of privacy—the right to hide and the right to decide—may do the opposite, revealing both their interdependence and the contribution each makes to personal liberty.

Contemplating the overruling of Roe v. Wade, scholars have often speculated that abortion access might have been less vulnerable if it hadn’t been grounded in a right to privacy at all. (Some have seen a sturdier foundation in the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.) In the decades after Roe, many feminists argued that privacy had long offered a cover for the subordination and abuse of women in the home and in marriage; as one unit in the eyes of the law, husband and wife were alone in their privacy—including in instances when a wife sought protection against her husband. The feminist legal theorist Catharine A. MacKinnon, along these lines, sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s reliance on privacy to protect rights to abortion and same-sex intimacy. “Privacy works to protect systematic inequality,” she argued. The claim is particularly resonant at a time when Roe’s fragility is apparent.

Today, the right to privacy may implicate “everything from sexual intimacies and private scandals to police eavesdropping and computer data,” Amy Gajda writes in “Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy” (Viking). Although she notes the disparate interests that demand legal protection under privacy’s tent, her focus is on privacy as secrecy, on the right to prevent information about oneself from becoming public. Commentators these days regularly warn that Big Tech is getting rich by preying on our privacy for commercial purposes; they also point out that eliminating the right to abortion will disproportionately harm the poor and the marginalized. Yet Gajda, a journalist turned law professor, has a different story to tell. She contends that the right to privacy has, from the start, served the interests of rich men and élite society. “When we laud ‘The Right to Privacy,’ ” she writes, “we laud language influenced at least indirectly by a man—men, really—with much to hide.” Consonant with the feminist critique, Gajda’s theme is that privacy sounds “pretty darned great” until it’s used “to protect the most powerful, thereby shrinking public knowledge about the nation and its key players.”

Like Samuel Warren, early American proponents of privacy were powerful men with secrets to keep. Thomas Jefferson was bothered by innuendo circulating about his hidden life, which included his relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings, who was a teen-ager when she first bore his children. Jefferson attacked the very press whose freedoms he had previously championed, and he encouraged the prosecution of a newspaper editor. But, as Gajda recounts, he also gave money to an editor who reported on Alexander Hamilton’s adulterous affair with the married Maria Reynolds. Hamilton, another champion of a free press, responded by complaining about the loss of his privacy. In letters exchanged in 1789, John Adams and William Cushing, soon to become a Supreme Court Justice, agreed that malicious press revelations of politicians’ “male conduct” should be punishable, even if true.

When President Grover Cleveland, in his forties, started dating the young daughter of a friend of his who had died (they eventually married) and newspapers began making insinuations about the relationship, he complained of the “outrage upon all the privacies and decencies of life” and demanded that reporters respect the “rights of privacy.” Gossip about a child born out of wedlock, domestic abuse, bacchanalian orgies, and his wife’s preference for the company of older men drove Cleveland to deliver an address at Harvard in which he emotionally condemned newspapers that “violate every instinct of American manliness, and in ghoulish glee desecrate every sacred relation in private life.” President Warren G. Harding, who had a secret child with one of his mistresses, persuaded journalists to adopt a national ethical code, which stipulated that “a newspaper should not invade private rights or feelings without sure warrant of public right as distinguished from public curiosity.”

Gajda’s point is that, throughout American history, enthusiasm for privacy has been linked to a truth that the #MeToo movement made familiar: privacy shields men’s conduct concerning women. The “sacred precincts” that Warren and Brandeis so wanted protected are often the unholy environs of privileged misbehavior. A person’s right to privacy can be at odds with the public’s “right to know,” which has been critical to the functioning of our democracy. Cue President Bill Clinton’s statement, with respect to his affair with a White House intern, that “even Presidents have private lives,” and President Donald Trump’s insistence on keeping private his financial dealings, which included hush-money payments to a porn star.

Look more closely at the jurisprudence of privacy in the postwar era and you see that the two kinds of privacy had very different trajectories. The cause of noninterference bounded from Griswold to Roe to Lawrence. The cause of nondisclosure, meanwhile, was largely in retreat, as the Supreme Court increasingly gave priority to press freedom. The vicissitudes of privacy were exemplified by the saga of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary “Titicut Follies,” which portrayed inmates in a state hospital for the criminally insane. A court limited access to the film in 1967, citing the right to privacy; in 1991, a court allowed the film to be shown to the public without restriction. Later in that decade, a woman who objected to a television show that aired closeup footage of her rescue from a car wreck that left her a paraplegic lost parts of her privacy case because, the California Supreme Court pronounced, “the desire for privacy must at many points give way before our right to know.”

Only recently has privacy as secrecy made something of a comeback. Nearly a decade ago, after Gawker published a video of Hulk Hogan having sex with a friend’s wife in that friend’s canopy bed, Hogan sought damages for invasion of privacy, in a suit funded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. The result was the biggest modern-day showdown between press freedom and privacy. Gawker’s brazen stance at trial—in a deposition, a former Gawker editor said that the site was entitled to post any celebrity sex tape it wanted, unless the video depicted a child under the age of four—didn’t bode well for its prospects. (Gawker said that he had answered “in a flip way.”) A 2016 verdict awarding Hogan a hundred and forty million dollars and the resulting demise of Gawker Media showed, Gajda says, the right to privacy “rallying back with full-nelson force.”

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Gajda worries that “in our zeal for privacy” we will err in a direction that limits the public’s right to know. Still, her emphasis on privacy as a weapon wielded by the powerful means giving less attention to the protections that privacy might afford the vulnerable. In cases involving charges of rape, intrusive questions about an accuser’s sexual history used to be routine; efforts to limit them have been informed by privacy interests. Instances in which press freedom has trumped privacy, on the other hand, have included the right to publish a rape victim’s name, and sometimes video of the crime. Even when it comes to sexual assault, privacy cuts both ways.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.“The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked.” The sentiment is old—it comes from Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City—but it’s hard to think of a better epitaph for the economic vibes of 2022. From the oil markets to the baby-formula markets to the general sense of safety and disorder, the U.S. seems to suffer from chronic Nothing Works Syndrome.The latest victim of acute NWS is air travel. Around the world, security lines are getting brutally long and cancellations and delays are spiking. The major carriers JetBlue, American Airlines, and Delta canceled nearly 10 percent of their flights last weekend, creating mayhem at major airports.In an interview for my podcast Plain English, I spoke with Scott Keyes, the founder of the Scott’s Cheap Flights newsletter, about why air travel has been such a mess this summer. This transcript has been edited and condensed.Derek Thompson: Scott, what’s happening and why?Scott Keyes: The amount of turmoil in the airline industry over the past two years is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in travel. The 9/11 attacks caused a 7 percent drop in overall travel. But 2020 travel was down 70 percent. Airlines were worried about surviving. That meant laying off staff, shedding pilots, selling airplanes, and retiring aircraft. Now, as travel rebounds, we are paying the price.Delta shed 30 percent of their employees—almost 30,000 people cut from their staff. American Airlines laid off 30 percent of their staff, through buyouts, early retirements, or otherwise. Airlines were trying to become as lean as possible to reduce those operating expenses with the anticipation that they were not going to be making much money. They also retired older planes.Those decisions certainly helped improve the balance sheet throughout 2020. But would they have made the same call if they had known how quickly travel demand would rebound? Almost certainly not. They assumed that this was going to be a six-year recovery period, not an 18-month recovery period. So when travel demand started rebounding much quicker than they anticipated, the airlines were caught flat-footed.Thompson: Why is it taking so long to adjust? Why is it so hard to hire pilots or bring back more airplanes?Keyes: Being a pilot is not an entry-level job. It takes years of training. There are many regulatory requirements, like a mandatory retirement age for pilots: 65 years old. There are mandatory training requirements for U.S.-based pilots. They have to fly 1,500 hours before they’re allowed to pilot those commercial planes.Similarly, Boeing doesn’t have tons of 787s or 737s sitting in a warehouse waiting for airlines to come pick them up. There’s a years-long delay in a manufacturing process plagued with supply-chain disruptions, just like so many other parts of the economy.Thompson: The industry is so woefully understaffed that whenever there’s a storm, or a pilot who calls in sick, there’s no redundancy or resiliency in the system, and you get these cascading cancellations. But wasn’t it obvious 18 months ago that we’d have vaccines? Wasn’t it obvious six months ago that Americans wanted to get out of the house? Why is all this mayhem happening now?Keyes: There’s a labor-supply issue, not just for airlines but also the TSA. If you live in Milwaukee and you’re looking for an entry-level job, you could become a transportation security officer for $19.41 an hour, or you could go on Amazon’s website and see that there’s a job in the area for $19.50. Would you rather help load and unload bags outside in the dead of winter in Milwaukee, or work in a climate-controlled environment in a warehouse for Amazon? That’s the trade-off a lot of folks are making. Labor shortages cause delays and cancellations. In normal times, airlines might have a reserve crew of pilots or flight attendants that they can call in. But now there is not the reserve in place to bridge the gap. The result is a huge swath of delays and cancellations.Thompson: Laurie Garrow, a professor at Georgia Tech, directed me to FlightAware, a website that tracks airline-industry statistics. On any given day, it seems normal to have a cancellation rate of about 1 percent—or one cancellation for every 100 scheduled flights. Last Thursday, JetBlue canceled 14 percent of its flights. Last Thursday and Friday, American canceled 10 percent of its flights. On Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Delta canceled 8 percent of its flights. Meanwhile, Frontier and Spirit canceled just 1 percent of their flights in that time. Why are the major carriers having these major problems right now?Keyes: Today’s airline that gloats about not having cancellations is tomorrow’s airline that’s experiencing a meltdown. I don’t want to pretend that Spirit and Frontier don’t experience meltdowns. They absolutely do. That said, a few factors can explain why we’re seeing higher rates of cancellations among legacy full-service airlines. First, many of the budget airlines like Spirit already trimmed their summer schedules when they realized they didn’t have enough pilots and crew to operate the schedule they had planned. The legacy full-service airlines can suffer sometimes from hubris.Second, many of the legacy airlines have hubs in crowded corridors like New York, Chicago, and Boston, which can suffer from compounding cancellations when there’s a thunderstorm [which are more common in the summer]. Those cancellations beget more cancellations. A flight from JFK to Miami that gets canceled results in a further cancellation for that flight out of Miami.Thompson: Has anything changed about air travelers? Are we doing something different in 2022 that is contributing to these delays?Keyes: Leisure travel has fully rebounded, whereas business travel is still down 30 percent. Now, why does that matter? Because leisure travelers tend to be more inexperienced when it comes to travel. They need more support from the airlines handling their itinerary ahead of time. They might need more time going through security. They don’t remember to take their shoes off or to take their laptop out. When each person takes an extra 20 seconds, you multiply by 3,000 passengers, and these little micro events matter at scale.Relatedly, the two airports with the biggest growth since the summer of 2019 are Miami, up 17 percent, and Las Vegas, up 10 percent. San Francisco is down 26 percent. Detroit is down 25 percent. Chicago O’Hare is down 18 percent. The business-heavy destinations are down, and the leisure destinations are up.These changes have bigger knock-on effects for some airlines than others. Historically, the budget airlines have had the leisure traveler as their bread and butter. Spirit Airlines does not have a significant amount of business travel within its portfolio. Conversely, American Airlines and Delta make the most money from business travelers, who are up to seven times more profitable on a per-person basis. And they orient their entire operation around serving those business travelers and fly more to Chicago, San Francisco, and New York.Because a pandemic came along that crushed business travel, Delta and American and United are now playing away games. The budget airlines have home-field advantage. And budget airlines have basically eaten all the growth over the past three years. Allegiant [flights] are up 17 percent since 2019. Spirit is 7 percent. Frontier is up 6 percent. Whereas Delta, United, American are down.Thompson: To what extent do you think regulatory policy is making America’s airlines particularly fragile to the sort of problems we’re currently experiencing?Keyes: One of the front-and-center issues discussed in the airline industry right now is this question of pilot training. Is 1,500 hours the proper amount of air time we should be expecting from pilots before we certify them to fly commercial jets? On the one hand, it’s easy to say, “You can’t be too careful.” Just imagine the attack ads if somebody votes to decrease the training requirement, and then all of a sudden there’s a crash. The optics are horrendous. On the other hand, the U.S. is a bit of an outlier. Most other countries do not require anything near this level of training ahead of being certified. The U.S. historically has not required that level of training. And we let foreign pilots fly to JFK and SFO and LAX without this requirement. All that said, there’s still no quick overnight fix that will immediately get you more flights, more pilots, and a greater supply of air travel. Certainly not for this summer.Thompson: So when does this end? When can we expect traveling to feel more normal?Keyes: Cheap flights aren’t gone forever. They’re just gone for this summer. The rolling delays and cancellations you’re seeing are predominantly a side effect of the demand for travel right now. So many folks are making up for trips they haven’t been able to take over the past couple of years, and summer’s always the most popular time of year to travel. By mid-September and beyond, you have less people traveling. We’ll have more pilots and planes in reserve to be able to come in when there is a thunderstorm, or an IT meltdown. We’ll have more reserves to help prevent a catastrophic wave of cancellations and delays. So, bad news for the short term. Good news for the fall and beyond.

Everything seems to be falling apart. The Russians are occupying a neighboring state. A foreign crisis is causing spikes in the price of oil. Inflation is the worst it’s been in some 40 years. A Democratic president is facing the lowest approval ratings of his term and has openly admitted that he knows the public is in a foul mood. A virus is on the loose and making a lot of people sick.Even the music charts are a mess, a horrid stew of disco and wimp-rock hits.Wait. Disco?

I’m sorry, did you think I was talking about 2022? I was actually reminiscing about 1979, the year I turned 19, when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution led to another round of oil shocks, inflation reached its worst levels since World War II, President Jimmy Carter was at 30 percent approval, and, yes, an influenza epidemic broke out.Whether music is better now than at the end of the 1970s, I will leave to you. (I was not a fan of the charts in those days, but I will still take the Bee Gees over Harry Styles.)The parallels with 1979 and 1980 are conspicuous as we head into the homestretch before midterms and the election sprint to 2024. President Joe Biden’s supporters worry that he is no longer up to the job, and that his admission of the country’s mood could be his “malaise” moment, echoing Jimmy Carter’s infamous July 1979 speech. (Carter never actually said the word malaise but might as well have when he blamed America’s sour mood on … Americans.) Republicans are delighted at the comparisons; the Republican National Committee is even blasting out a clever Back to the Future parody image with Carter and Biden as Marty McFly and Doc Brown.[Derek Thompson: America’s most important economic storyteller is confused]But the comparisons to 1979 can only go so far, and anyone who is indulging in this nostalgic gloom—but especially the Democrats—needs to snap out of it before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.First, Biden is dealing with the wreckage of a horrific pandemic. In 1979, we were trying to recover from an oil embargo, not a global disaster and the shutdown of entire societies. (Biden, of course, also must contend with his predecessor’s utterly incompetent policies. One million Americans are dead, and too many of them died needlessly because of the ways in which Donald Trump and the Republican Party politicized the pandemic response.)And yet, even with the challenge of pandemic recovery, we are not facing “stagflation,” a word that ruled our economic lives 40 years ago and now is a term that I have to explain to my younger students. Stagflation was something that once seemed impossible: high inflation, low growth, and high unemployment all at the same time. This happened in the 1970s, but it isn’t happening now—or at least, it isn’t happening yet—and it’s one reason treating 2022 as if it’s 1979 doesn’t make much sense.Let’s also admit an obvious political reality about the expectations of the American voter: Many of the people who are fed up with inflation in 2022 are angry mostly because until about a year ago, they’d never actually experienced it. Yes, it’s been a rough year, but in 1979 Americans were despairing because high inflation had already been around for several years. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Carter all tussled with it. We tried everything from wage and price controls to “Whip inflation now” sloganeering—as if consumers could join the fight by wearing buttons.The same is true of interest rates. Today’s younger consumers may be shocked that mortgages are breaking 6 percent—but again, this is because they have become accustomed to ridiculously low rates. Even 50 years ago, the average rates were about 7 percent; they’ve been lower than that for two decades now. By 1979, however, mortgages were already past 11 percent and heading for almost 14 percent a year later. (Student loans were not immune from inflation, either: I took out my first college loans in the summer of 1979, at 13.9 percent.)Another difference from the 1970s is that America in 2022 is dealing with a labor shortage, with unemployment at 3.6 percent. In the summer of 1979, unemployment was at 6 percent and climbing. Many Americans think of the 1990s and 2000s as the end of the great manufacturing boom, but this, as I have written about at length, is the nostalgia of selective memory. Deindustrialization was well under way in the 1970s, and jobs—as every Bruce Springsteen song of the time reminded you—were leaving us in despair outside the factory gates, trying to survive the darkness on the edge of town.Growth in 2022 is slow (and will get slower as the Federal Reserve tries to cool inflation). Worrisome? Very. But have we reached “back to the 1970s” levels of bad? Not even close.Ironically, the one area in which 2022 is worse than the end of the 1970s is foreign policy.Biden faces a far greater foreign-policy challenge in 2022 than Carter faced in his last two years in office. The December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was a huge Soviet mistake, and one that would help bring about the end of the U.S.S.R., but it did not directly threaten the United States. In fact, the Soviet war in Afghanistan helped unite NATO and destabilize the Soviet Union while absorbing huge amounts of a Soviet defense effort that would otherwise have been aimed at the West. And even when Iranian militants seized American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in the fall of 1979, it was more of a national humiliation than an existential danger, despite the tragedy of those who were killed in a botched rescue attempt.Biden, by contrast, is trying to keep NATO united in the face of the nightmare scenario dreaded by every post–World War II American president: a major Russian invasion of Europe. Russia is engaging in savagery and actual war crimes just miles from NATO borders, all while Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear saber at the West. I never thought I would wish for the days of gray and dull Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev, yet here we are.[Neil Hauer: Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya.]Americans largely support Ukraine, and that’s all to the good. Many of them, however, seem to have forgotten that had the Soviet Union in 1979 unleashed more than 100,000 soldiers to its west, menaced NATO’s borders, and raised its nuclear-alert levels, we would have considered it a national crisis of the first order, and it would have dominated almost everything in our national political life. Today, the war in Ukraine has faded back to being just another news story—even among those who understand the grave stakes—and Americans are focused instead on criticizing Joe Biden for not doing enough or for doing too much.This political dynamic, perhaps, is the greatest difference between the 1970s and the 2020s. The Cold War was terrifying, and while I am glad it is over, the existence of the Soviet Union and the existential conflict between East and West required the United States to be a serious country capable of making serious decisions. We might have worn some silly clothes in 1979 (don’t ask me about the velour-trimmed tux I wore to a prom), but we were still, in the main, voting like sensible adults.Depending on your tribal affiliations, you may not think much of Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, but their electoral contest in 1980 included a substantive discussion of national defense between two men who’d spent a long time thinking seriously about the subject. In fact, Reagan continued Carter nuclear-weapons programs such as the MX missile; in those days, the distance between a Republican and a Democrat on national defense was measured in inches and feet instead of miles.(The Soviets, for their part, saw almost no difference between Reagan and Carter. As their former ambassador to the United States wrote in his memoirs, they actively hated Carter, and assumed that Reagan, for all his tough talk, would be a Republican dealmaker in the Nixon mold. They were soon to be surprised, to say the least.)Awareness of the Cold War kept American political discourse within some sensible boundaries. We had to be able to envision presidents not only as politicians but as the people who might have to open a briefcase in the middle of the night and issue codes that would open the gates of hell. This induced a certain amount of sobriety even in the most partisan voters.All of that is gone. In foreign policy, the party of Reagan now fears Democrats more than it fears the Kremlin. At home, millions of people talk about things such as secession and sedition with utter unseriousness. Grown men and women, actual citizens of the United States, fly Confederate battle flags (in those traditional rebel strongholds such as New York and Michigan) like defiant toddlers scrawling obscenities on a wall. They yell “Let’s go, Brandon” (a convoluted euphemism that means “Fuck Joe Biden”) like snotty teenagers in the detention hall trying to see if they can make the teachers mad. People old enough to collect Social Security drive around in expensive cars and trucks covered in flags and obscenities as if it’s their first junker and they’ve just had their first beers.But other Americans are failing to do their part as well. We are all watching, on live television, the uncovering of a conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. constitutional order, and yet we will be lucky if voters turn out in large numbers for the elections that could prevent a replay of the coup attempt. People who should be linking arms to save democracy are grousing about their student loans and the price of gas. These complaints are, of course, understandable. A recession would change many Americans’ lives for the worse. But the end of democracy in America is not just an abstract threat—it is a real danger.[David Frum: The one witness at the January 6 hearing who matters most]We are better off by almost any measure in 2022 than we were in 1979 and 1980. (And, yes, I realize that many of you are thinking about the end of Roe as a counterpoint. So am I.) But charlatans like Donald Trump and the Republican political remoras clinging to his belly are trying to convince us that we are reliving a nightmare. This is the same hallucination they sold, successfully, to millions of Americans in 2016. If they manage to get us to believe it one more time, then we will be complicit in the destruction of our own system of government.It is our responsibility as citizens to take better stock of our priorities, and to ask if expensive gasoline and pricier milk are grounds to overthrow democracy—or reasons to stay home while others vote to trash the Constitution. Trump’s Republicans will try to promise Americans that the only way out of this bad-news déjà vu is by voting them into office. They are wrong. We can solve all of these problems—just as we did after the 1970s—but only if we still exist as a constitutional republic.

We have known for some time that this Supreme Court’s manifest destiny was to overrule Roe v. Wade. Now it has fulfilled it. In the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a five-Justice majority, eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and handed the states the power to restrict the procedure as they wish. There was little suspense, owing to a leak of the draft opinion last month, from which the Court’s final opinion is not substantially different, but the decision still came down as a surreal shock. The three liberal Justices dissented “with sorrow—for this Court, but more importantly, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection.”

As expected, Chief Justice John Roberts declined to join his conservative colleagues’ opinion, and concurred only in the judgment to uphold the challenged Mississippi law, which bans most abortions after fifteen weeks. Calling the Court’s overruling of Roe “unnecessary to decide the case,” Roberts would instead have allowed states to ban abortion sometime before fetal viability, but would also have reaffirmed a right to abortion that would “ensure a reasonable opportunity to choose.” That more moderate position might have been the Court’s ruling had Ruth Bader Ginsburg not died during the Trump Presidency and been replaced with Amy Coney Barrett, or had the Senate acted on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, instead of waiting to install Trump’s eventual nominee, Neil Gorsuch. And, had neither of those events occurred, we would still have a constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

The difference between preserving and eliminating a long-held constitutional right involves a crude reality of political machinations and contingency in filling these seats—which makes it galling to read the Court’s righteous condemnation of Roe v. Wade as an exercise of “raw judicial power,” and its self-portrayal as a picture of proper judicial restraint. It is hard to imagine something more like an exercise of raw judicial power than the Court’s removal of the right to abortion, which is precisely what these Justices were put on the Court to achieve. As the dissent put it, the Court is “rescinding an individual right in its entirety and conferring it on the State, an action the Court takes for the first time in history.”

Some have speculated that last month’s draft-opinion leak was intended to make it difficult for Justice Brett Kavanaugh to defect from the majority and join the Chief Justice’s compromise position. Kavanaugh didn’t defect, but he did write a notable concurrence that seemed to take some distance from the possible perceived extremity of the majority. It confirmed that he is the Justice whom the majority will need to worry about keeping on board if they wish to go further than Dobbs in the future.

Kavanaugh flexed this muscle by addressing questions about decisions that may come after Dobbs. “The Constitution neither outlaws abortion nor legalizes abortion,” he wrote. As a result, “this Court does not possess the authority either to declare a constitutional right to abortion or to declare a constitutional prohibition of abortion,” he proclaimed, and in so doing seemed to indicate that a possible future development—the eventual enshrining of a constitutional right of the fetus—is not something for which he would provide a fifth vote. Similarly, regarding the constitutional rights to contraception and same-sex marriage, Kavanaugh made a point of emphasizing, with italics, that “overruling Roe does not mean the overruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents.” Additionally, he expressed his view that a state may not bar its residents from travelling to another state for an abortion, because of the constitutional right to interstate travel. To the extent that anyone is grasping for a silver lining, Kavanaugh appears to want us to know that he personally intends to—and can—stand in the way of a post-Dobbs parade of horribles, even if his colleagues might want to go there.

And at least one of his brethren plainly does want the Court to go there. Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate concurrence made crystal clear that he would indeed do away with the entire substantive due-process doctrine on which the right to abortion rested, and that would mean eventually sweeping away the rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage. He referred to the fact that the Court used substantive due process in Dred Scott v. Sandford to affirm the right of enslavers to enslave people, and he concluded that “the harm caused by this Court’s forays into substantive due process remains immeasurable.”

Thomas’s comments contradict the majority opinion he signed, in which the Court claimed that other rights protected by the Court’s substantive due-process precedents are safe, the reason being that only abortion involves an interest in the life of a fetus. The Dobbs ruling’s insistence that the Court should not impede states from making policies in which they weigh the interest in life for themselves, through their democratic processes, is tragicomic, even gruesome, coming the very day after the Court did just that in striking down a New York State gun-licensing law, based on the Court’s expansion of an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the plurality that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade wrote that “liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt”—meaning that, if the public is in doubt about whether constitutional rights are in danger of disappearing, that is not liberty. Dobbs leaves no doubt that the federal constitutional right to abortion is gone. And it ushers in an era of grave doubt about the status of liberty in the United States. ♦

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I remember the days when my fellow conservatives hated activist judges and fulminated against attempts to gain in the courts what could not be won at the ballot box; today, a new kind of “conservative” is cheering a radical unraveling of women’s rights.But first, here’s more from The Atlantic.
If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything.
America is growing apart, possibly for good.
The United States is underreacting to monkeypox.
Grim DeterminationWe all saw it coming—even me. I was long convinced that no Supreme Court would be stupid or vicious enough to end the right to legal abortion, but after Amy Coney Barrett was fastballed onto the Court, I knew I had been wrong. And in the weeks after Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked, anyone could see—well, anyone except the hapless Susan Collins—not only that the Court’s conservatives were going to overturn Roe v. Wade, but that they didn’t care what kind of jumbled reasoning it would take to get there.This is the revenge of the Court’s right wing, who in their confirmation hearings had to dodge and dissemble with furrowed brows and deep concern (have I mentioned Susan Collins?) about things like stare decisis and their personal religious beliefs. They hated these questions because they knew that as soon as they got the chance, they would ignore stare decisis and impose their personal religious beliefs. The Court’s five hard-line conservatives, with a hand-wringing John Roberts trotting behind them, did what their critics warned they would do: They trashed 50 years of settled law.Even that wasn’t enough for Clarence Thomas, a man who has seemed grimly determined to get even with America since his brutal confirmation hearings more than 30 years ago. Thomas now wants the Court to revisit the decisions that rely on its substantive due-process precedents, including rulings on issues such as contraception and gay marriage.Republicans used to hate activist judges; I was once a Republican and I remember the high-minded speeches from a party that despised using courts to circumvent the legislature. Today, those same Republicans have no hope of persuading a majority of their fellow Americans to accept their views, and so they are more than happy to abuse the rules of the Senate and prop up the now-obvious lies of Supreme Court nominees to get what they want.I have already written about my belief that abortion must stay legal (and how I learned, late in life, that an illegal abortion nearly killed my mother). Other writers are weighing in today in The Atlantic, and you can find all recent articles on the abortion divide here, including a powerful warning from Mary Ziegler that if the Court can overturn Roe, it can overturn anything, and Xochitl Gonzalez noting that the same Republicans who are always quick to wrap themselves in the flag and bloviate about the American dream have no compunction about taking hopes of a better life from women.Abortion now goes to the states. The federal and state elections that Democrats too often ignored because of their obsession with the White House will now decide the future health of millions of women. Will the voters finally act?Related:
The future of abortion in a post-Roe America
Legislators could not have cared less whether my mother lived or died.
America’s abortion divide: A guide to all our coverageToday’s News
Congress passed the most significant legislation on gun control in nearly 30 years. The bill now awaits President Joe Biden’s signature.
The United Nations Human Rights Office concluded that Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist, was killed by Israeli forces—not from indiscriminate firing by Palestinians.
Ukraine is withdrawing from the key eastern city of Severodonetsk, moving Russia closer to its goal of fully controlling the Donbas region.
Brooklyn, Everywhere: “My mother was a devout Catholic, and I was a devout believer in Planned Parenthood,” Xochitl Gonzalez writes. “Neither of us wanted me to get pregnant too young.”
The Books Briefing: Maya Chung examines the perils and limits of writing with a moral message.
Anika Molnar / Sister Pictures / BBC / AMC
What This Is Going to Hurt Leaves OutBy Sophie Gilbert
Up until rather recently, the history of gynecological health was written and recorded by men who seemed to have an inordinate degree of suspicion regarding vaginas. Aristotle, considered by some to be the founder of biology, believed that being born female was an innate sign of deficiency and a “departure” from nature.
Read the full article.Culture Break
Warner Bros.
Read. Mrs. Dalloway reminds us that aging has its benefits.Looking for something new? Try a recommendation from our summer reading guide.Watch. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, in theaters today, is utterly disorienting—and that’s the point.Halftime, a new Netflix documentary about J. Lo, posits that rebirth is essential for the modern celebrity, but it takes a hidden toll.Catch up on the first season of Reservation Dogs, which returns to Hulu on August 3. It’s the rare show where atypical families are portrayed as “all-American” ones.Listen. On our podcast The Experiment, Jessica Bruder talked about her May cover story on the activists prepared to take abortion into their own hands.If you missed it, the latest episode of our new podcast, How to Start Over, is about when it’s time to end a marriage.Play our daily crossword.I got the news about Dobbs as I was heading to Harvard to teach a class on the theory of “just war” and how it developed over the past thousand years. (It seemed almost a less depressing problem than the social conflict the Supreme Court has now unleashed on the United States.) But an unjust war is raging in Ukraine, and I have to recommend this heartbreaking documentary by a Russian filmmaker on how Russia’s savagery has divided friends and families in Russia and Ukraine.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

The entire legal and cultural ethos of the pro-life movement can be summed up in two sentences: A just society protects all life. A moral society values all life.Justice is thus necessary but not sufficient for a culture of life. The pro-life movement should greet the reversal of Roe v. Wade with a spirit of gratitude. The people of this country have, for the first time in almost 50 years, an opportunity to enact laws that truly protect the lives of unborn children. But the movement should also show a profound humility and absence of malice toward their political opponents.After all, the simple truth is that if the pro-life movement wants to end abortion, it has to do much more work than merely banning abortion. Indeed, if it reacts with too heavy a hand in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the movement can ultimately defeat its very purpose.[From the December 2019 issue: The dishonesty of the abortion debate]The history of abortion in the United States is contentious and complicated, but a single fact should shape much of the debate in the months and years to come: Abortion was more common when it was mostly illegal. According to data from the pro-abortion-rights Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate was at about 16 abortions per 1,000 women when Roe was decided in 1973, soared to 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women by the end of the Carter administration in 1981, and then began a long, slow, and steady decline to an all-time low of 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women in 2017.This decrease doesn’t mean that pro-life Americans should cease working to provide legal protections for unborn life. As a matter of deep principle, we cannot leave any human being unprotected by law—and the life and health of the mother are as paramount as those of the child. But the historical record does tell us that ending abortion is a different matter from banning abortion, and we cannot end abortion until we learn why women seek abortions and how our nation can address the concerns that lead them to make that choice.In 2020 the Notre Dame sociologist Tricia Bruce released a fascinating and highly original study of American attitudes about abortion. Rather than merely asking a set of conventional poll questions, she and her team engaged in a series of in-depth interviews with a representative sample of the American population.As I read the study, two things stood out to me. First, not one of the individuals they interviewed talked about abortion as a “desirable good.” Even those respondents who were strongly supportive of abortion rights did “not uphold abortion as a happy event, or something they want more of.” Attitudes ranged from “restrictive to ambivalent to permissive,” and yet Bruce’s team heard about “the desire to prevent, reduce, and eliminate potentially difficult or unexpected circumstances that predicate abortion decisions.”This initial finding alone helps explain the decades-long decline in abortion rates. If women don’t perceive abortion as a positive good, then millions will either take steps to avoid unplanned pregnancies (through contraception, for example) or choose to carry pregnancies to term rather than abort their child.At the same time, abortion is still common in spite of the widespread distaste for the practice. This brings us to the second important finding: Americans of all stripes are intensely interested in the circumstances of pregnancies. Respondents raised concerns about the nature of the relationship between mother and father (whether it was consensual, for example), about efforts at “pregnancy prevention,” and—crucially—about the financial stability and physical health of the mother.[David French: What Alito got right]Taken together, these two realities provide a guide for pro-life America’s next moves. If banning abortion doesn’t end abortion, then what will? The answer is deceptively simple in concept, yet extraordinarily difficult in practice. Our nation must ease the fears and concerns—which are legitimate—of women who are already predisposed to view abortion as a last resort, not a first choice.Doing so is a matter of both better policy and personal conduct. Better policy is embodied by Mitt Romney’s proposed Family Security Act, which would provide most American families with monthly financial assistance even when a child is still in the womb. Parents of young children would receive $350 a month per child, and parents of older children would receive $250 a month per child. Pregnant women could receive up to four $700 monthly payments, one for each of the last four months of pregnancy. The Romney plan isn’t the answer to child poverty and family financial insecurity, but it is an answer, and its concrete financial support for mothers and children would be a tangible statement of our nation’s moral commitment to young families.No set of policies relieves pro-life Americans of personal responsibilities. That means fostering and adopting children. That means loving mothers in distress. That means sustaining and creating private institutions that provide shelter and assistance to women in need.And this is where the animosity that dominates American political discourse can be so destructive. The last thing pro-life Americans should want is to create the perception that they do not love pro-choice women and will not seek to help them and their children flourish. No virtue can be had in “owning the libs” when a hostile posture will close hearts and minds.I’ve been a pro-life attorney and activist for more than 30 years. On this long-awaited day I feel both joy in my heart and disquiet in my spirit. The reason for the joy is obvious. Our nation’s elected representatives now have the ability to enact laws that better protect innocent life.The disquiet comes from a different source. Earlier this month, we learned that the abortion rate increased during Trump’s presidency. He was the first American president since Jimmy Carter to end his term with a higher abortion rate than when he began.This suggests that, for the first time in three decades, the cultural momentum is not on the pro-life side, that women are facing an increased sense of instability and uncertainty, and that the best way for pro-life Americans to view the reversal of Roe is not as the beginning of the end of abortion in the United States, but rather as the end of the beginning of a long struggle to remake our nation into a culture that is far more hospitable to mother and child.

This week, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court struck down a more-than-century-old state law that restricts the right to carry a concealed handgun in public, ruling that it violated both the Second and the Fourteenth Amendments. Meanwhile, Congress passed a bipartisan agreement on a new federal gun-safety law; the Court’s decision in Bruen seems likely to render much of that law unconstitutional. As is true of the Court’s opinion in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade on the grounds that a right to abortion is not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” the majority argument in Bruen was strictly originalist and, in that sense, nonsense.

In Bruen, lawyers for the State of New York presented a rich, centuries-long tradition of restrictions that balance two interests: gun ownership and public safety. Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, dismissed all of it. “The Second Amendment was adopted in 1791; the Fourteenth in 1868,” Thomas wrote. “Historical evidence that long predates either date may not illuminate the scope of the right.” That chronological rule didn’t stop him from dismissing, as well, evidence between those two dates, or after them, that supported New York’s case. For Thomas, the rule of evidence appears to be: if I agree with it, it’s evidence—if I don’t, it’s not.

Originalists are always narrowing the pool of available historical corroboration. What counts? Five sources: The Constitution, James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention, the records of the ratifying conventions, the Federalist Papers, and Samuel Johnson’s 1755 “Dictionary of the English Language.” That’s basically it. How about a volume titled, “Laws enacted in the third sitting of the eleventh General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which commenced at Philadelphia, on the fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven”? That is, a book of laws passed at the very time and place the constitutional convention was meeting, Philadelphia, in September 1787, a book that includes this law: “whereas it hath been usual for merchants and traders . . . to keep large quantities of gun-powder in their dwelling houses and shops, to the manifest danger of the inhabitants; Be it therefore enacted . . . that that no person or persons whatsoever . . . shall . . . keep in any house, shop, cellar, store or other place . . . any more or greater quantity than twenty five pounds weight of gun-powder, which shall be kept in the highest story of the house, at any one time; unless it be at least fifty yards from any dwelling house.” That, of course, is a gun-safety law. If the government can limit how much gunpowder you keep in your house or shop, shouldn’t it be able to limit how many guns you keep there, too, or where you carry them? “When confronting such present-day firearm regulations, this historical inquiry that courts must conduct will often involve reasoning by analogy,” Thomas recommended. This one seems pretty straightforward.

The court’s opinion in Bruen suggests that you can’t beat originalism by following its growing number of strictures on what counts as historical evidence. There is no method to it, nothing but inconsistency and caprice. Robert Bork, one of the early architects of originalism, itself an invention of the nineteen-seventies, strenuously argued, in 1989, that the original intention of the Second Amendment was “to guarantee the right of states to form militia, not for individuals to bear arms.” Only later did originalists come to disagree with this position. And, as Bork also made clear, originalists don’t really care about chronology. “If someone found a letter from George Washington to Martha telling her what he meant by the power to lay taxes was not what other people meant,” Bork wrote in 1990, “that would not change our reading of the Constitution in the slightest.” If Washington didn’t say it at the constitutional convention, or if he said it but Madison didn’t write it down, it doesn’t count.

Originalists have another evidentiary rule, one that seems, at first glance, like a good one. What counts as evidence, if it’s not in that set of five historical sources, has to have been written and enacted by an elected body. But the problem with this rule is that during the eras of American history that originalists say they care about—roughly, 1787 to 1791 and 1865 to 1870—the majority of people living in the United States could neither run for office nor cast a ballot. They could not elect, and they could not enact; the historical analysis employed by the Court to make decisions about the constitutionality of laws concerning everything from guns to abortion relies on a fundamentally anti-democratic historical record. It deliberately excludes, as inadmissible, all constitutional and legal thought authored by women and people of color—a form of distortion that the Yale legal scholar Reva Siegel calls “the politics of constitutional memory.” Everyone living in the United States today has to abide by decisions made by Supreme Court justices, even though most of us, if we’d been alive during the times that originalists look to, would have had no vote and no voice in what laws were passed. The most democratic jurisprudence, then, would go searching for historical evidence that can tell the court what people disenfranchised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and well into the twentieth—would have wanted, if they’d been able to influence the writing and rewriting of the Constitution.

As far as historical analysis is concerned, there’s no good reason for discounting that kind of evidence. And, as far as democracy is concerned, there’s a very good argument to be made for including in the constitutional record the voices of people who, for centuries, have been left out of it. “When it comes to interpreting the Constitution, not all history is created equal,” Clarence Thomas wrote in Bruen. True. What the disenfranchised would have wanted should matter more, not less.

Tellingly, Bork, in his hypothetical, spoke only of the absurdity of reading a letter from George to Martha Washington. He apparently couldn’t fathom that the courts might consider, as evidence, a letter to George from Martha, or from Harry Washington, a man born in Gambia and later enslaved by the Washingtons at Mount Vernon. What would gun or abortion laws look like if the courts did consider that kind of evidence? In May, 1787, Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane wrote to him from Boston. He was about to be sequestered for the constitutional convention, and she wanted to wish him luck in advancing a “grate design for the Benifitt of mankind, and your own Nation in Perticular.” Jane Franklin Mecom, born in 1712, had lived through not only the Revolutionary War and the chaotic evacuation of Boston but also the British Army’s occupation of that city, which, in addition to the Boston Massacre, when troops fired on a crowd of townspeople, had involved a lot of soldiers raping women. She had one concern or, really, two. She was worried about guns, and she was worried about capital punishment (or halters, meaning nooses used at the gallows). She hoped that, “with the Asistance of Such a Number of wise men as you are conected with in the Convention,” he could put a stop to such violence. “I had Rather hear of the Sword being beat into Plow-Shares, and the Halters used for Cart Roops, if by that means we may be brought to live Peaceably with won a nother.”

Use evidence from 1787 to 1791. Reason by analogy. Fine. Beat your swords into plowshares. Advice sent by a woman to a delegate to the constitutional convention: Americans, lay down your arms. ♦

“Abortion presents a profound moral question,” reads the Supreme Court’s momentous decision overruling the precedents that prevented states from passing restrictive abortion laws. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority.”

That is inarguable. It was, in fact, one of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s primary sources of frustration with the precedents established by the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. By invalidating anti-abortion laws in dozens of states, the decision arrested the process of establishing a durable legal equilibrium that experimentation among the states produces. This is also one of the reasons that Roe proved so durable over the last 50 years despite its indefensibly dubious legal rationale.

That process of experimentation begins again today, and it will be messy. It’s going to be downright icky, in fact. The legal bulwark that took the question of abortion out of the hands of lawmakers also freed the voting public from consequences associated with their views. For a half-century, voters and their representatives could enjoy the courage of their convictions on abortion without the associated repercussions. No longer. Americans will once again be compelled to think about, talk about, and legislate on the issue of abortion.

“The Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated,” the Court’s decision continues, adding, “the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” We can expect the states to do precisely that. There will be a burst of enthusiasm both for and against abortion rights at the state level. Their respective legislatures will test the parameters of this new legal environment. Maximalists on both sides of the issue are likely to push their representatives, many of whom are most responsive to maximalists on every issue, to say and do things that will make most everyone else squeamish.

Quite unlike engaged partisans, most Americans are conflicted when it comes to abortion. Polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of American adults did not want to see Roe overturned. Even if you’re inclined to parse that language, it’s a finding that suggests between six- and seven-in-ten Americans do not want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases. That doesn’t mean they’re comfortable with the practice.

Those same polls find that majorities prefer to see restrictions on elective abortions roughly after the 14th week of pregnancy. These views are informed as much by the public’s understanding of law as their religious and moral views, and they tend to be reinforced by personal experience with the practice. These views may not sound well-reasoned to partisans who spend a lot of time thinking about abortion, but that’s the problem. Most Americans do not spend a lot of time thinking about abortion.

“Americans’ convictions on abortion, we learned, encounter inconvenient exceptions and questions with neither clear answers nor venues to sort through them,” read a recent TIME magazine spread featuring the voices of “hundreds” of Americans on the issue. “Attitudinal complexity leaves many Americans feeling sidelined and displaced for their abortion views: ill-fitting in the Democrat and Republican parties, imperfectly aligned within religious traditions, unwilling to join activist movements that don’t readily invite equivocation or gradation.” Because they perceive themselves to be so out of step with the loudest voices in the room, these Americans keep their views to themselves. And while Roe was the law of the land, they didn’t have to think—much less talk—much about abortion.

That’s all over now. American politicians who cater to the minority of voters who are utterly unconflicted when it comes to abortion rights will have to act on their preferences. Some states will enact restrictions on the practice that functionally ban it. Others will loosen their abortion laws, perhaps allowing mothers to electively terminate a pregnancy in its final stages. These extremes will profoundly discomfit the majority of Americans who previously enjoyed the luxury of not having to think about any of this.

Of course, that is what the justices who crafted and joined this decision explicitly intended. Pro-abortion activists who insist that their voices have been silenced by this decision have it precisely backward. They have been liberated to pursue their visions for social organization, as have their opponents. What Americans do with this new liberty matters more now than it has for decades. The Court has compelled the millions of Americans who sat on the sidelines over the last 50 years to get in the game, whether they want to or not.

The voting public may bitterly resent being drafted into the process of self-determination, especially since the subject matter at issue is unsettling. The process will produce winners and losers. Competition among the states to satisfy their constituents on this matter will be fraught and will contribute to social tensions. But it will also contribute to the establishment of the sort of national equilibrium on the issue Justice Ginsburg envisioned. That is how our system functions and why it endures.

The miracle of American self-governance is a blessing and a curse. On this aspect of the social contract, the nation’s voters outsourced their sovereignty to the courts for too long. That’s over now. And maybe, in the end, it will be for the best.

1. The Ukraine Crisis and Dollar Supremacy

Since the collapse of communism in the early 1990s and the subsequent rise of the world economy as a single market-based operational totality, its monetary counterpart has been a unipolar currency system centered on the US dollar as the premier vehicle currency in the private sector, as well as the premier reserve currency in the official sector. The hegemony of the dollar has survived several global economic shocks, including that of the financial crisis of 2007-9. Whether the system can survive the seismic shocks stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is now under active debate.

Many prominent commentators argue that it will not, noting the ongoing attempts by Russia and her trading allies to circumvent the US-led imposed financial sanctions. Barry Eichengreen, for instance, observed that because of the Russian and other central banks’ increased diversification of their reserve holdings away from the dollar “we are seeing movement towards a more multipolar international monetary system.”[1] James Galbraith sees a dual currency system in the making, as Russia and her trading allies “carve out… a significant non-dollar, non-euro” rival financial system.[2] In a wider context of innovations in technology and finance, the IMF also noted the possibility of a scenario where “the greenback could be felled not by the dollar’s main rivals but by a group of alternative currencies,” including crypto and digital currencies.[3]

This is not the first time that a geopolitical crisis has prompted musings, at various levels of the academia and the commentariat, about the coming end of dollar hegemony. Invariably, they turned out to be wrong. Given the rather long history of failed forecasts, current predictions about the dollar’s future tend to be given with more caution and hedged with various caveats and qualifications. Indeed, to be fair to Barry Eichengreen, he is careful to emphasize that dollar dominance will not end soon, even while the Ukraine crisis may have accelerated the ‘stealth erosion’ of that dominance. A more general qualifying refrain is that a multipolar currency system, while not yet here, is nevertheless in the cards.

Is it, though? Can the ongoing attempts to establish a non-dollar alternative amount to a serious challenge to the hegemony of the dollar? The contrasting answers to this question reflect two alternative visions of capitalism. The declinist school of thought on the dollar supremacy stems, as Susan Strange noted some 30 years ago, from academic traditions that have historically overlooked the importance of the financial system in shaping the balance of power. It was a result of a methodological choice: at best, they have proxied it with currency regimes that serve international trade relations. As such, the declinist school of US power (and hence the dollar) originates in the productionist vision of capitalism, where trade reflects the structure of production, and where monetary regimes of individual states reflect the position of a country in international trade flows.

An alternative approach, known as the money view of capitalism,[4] or capitalism of futurity, places the tradability of debt[5] as the core institutional setting that defines political economy generally, and, more specifically, the force that anchors major decisions and developments in production, trade, and investment. From the latter perspective, we see no end to dollar supremacy, whether rapid or gradual. As Susan Strange wrote in her seminal critique of a realist school of international relations:

“the error of the declinist school of American scholars lies in assuming that if the US has lost power, some other state must have gained it… The facts suggest that this zero-sum idea is far too simple. The US government has lost power mainly to the market.”[6]

Today, we can add, the financial market. Focusing on the trade flows and currency reserve tactics of the central banks, the declinist perspective on the global role of the dollar overlooks the central force that underpins not only the hegemony of the dollar but lies behind global financialized capitalism in general. That force is the gravitational pull of the dollar-denominated securities markets.

2. The Gravitational Pull of the Dollar

“As recent crises make clear, up to now the dollar-based order has been supported mainly by instability elsewhere and the lack of a credible alternative or compelling reason to create one, or where such reasons are felt, the ability to do so… The system has been held up, in short, by confidence in itself, and not, so far as one can see, by much of anything else.”[7]

Galbraith is correct about the importance of the lack of alternatives to the dollar, yet the problem with his argument is his reading of the cause. He sees the confidence in the dollar as something highly fragile because it apparently lacks any material substance to back it. A lack that, presumably, comes down to the gap between the US share of world production on the one hand, and its share of world securities supplies, on the other.

Between 1986 and 2019, daily forex turnover had risen from about $0.4 trillion to $6.6 trillion.[8] During this period, the dollar’s share of this turnover has averaged about 44%.[9] In today’s terms, this percentage is roughly on a par with the US’s respective percentage contributions to the world’s equity stocks (40% of the $95 trillion outstanding in 2019) and to the world’s bond stocks (39% of the $106 trillion outstanding in 2019).[10] However, it is also far above the US’s percentage share of nominal world output (23% of the 2019 world GDP figure of $88 trillion). These numbers, taken in combination with the trend increase in the US trade deficits, underpin the widely held view, shared by Galbraith, that there will soon come a time when foreign investors will lose confidence in the dollar and thus abandon it due to mounting concerns about the US ability to meet its financial obligations in the face of its deteriorating macroeconomic fundamentals.

This scenario is realistic only if one assumes that there has been no structural change in the relationship between the financial sector and the macroeconomy. Yet, citing Strange again, the addition of credit has altered the balance of power in the world economy. But not in the way that Galbraith and others envisage it.

The expansion of financial markets, the explosion of debt and asset values, are typically associated with the phenomenon of financialization. Over the past few decades, financialization has evolved at an accelerated pace; the financial sector now completely dominates the real productive economic sector on which it rests. In 1980 the combined nominal value of the world’s equity and bond stocks stood at about $11 trillion, a figure on a par with that of nominal world GDP in that year. By 2020 the combined value of those securities stocks had grown over twenty-fold to $234 trillion, while world GDP had only registered an eight-fold increase to $84 trillion in that same period.[11] The growing scale disparity between the financial sector and the underlying real sector is what ultimately fuels narratives of an impending collapse, and the declinist school on the power of the dollar forms one of those narratives.

But financializaton is not a one-dimensional force. Its depth is just as important as an indicator of its historical significance, as is its speed of development because it reflects the structural role of finance in economic transformation. To be specific, the recent scale growth of the world’s equity and debt securities markets is an outcome of fundamental changes in both their supply and demand sides.

From a supply-side standpoint, this growth manifests the radical change in corporate and government dependence on financial security issuance. Previously that dependence may have been small, or, if large, always temporary (e.g., bond issuance to finance a large-scale project or to meet the costs of an emergency). Today, it has become both large and permanent, because of the new financial pressures on corporations and governments that are rising in tandem with the increasing size and complexity of modern economies. For increasing volumes of security issuance to be possible, there obviously must be investors with a correspondingly large enough demand capacity. Chief amongst those investors are the institutional asset managers, the pension and mutual funds, and insurance companies.

Once a small cottage industry catering to the wealthy, over the past four decades asset management has in many countries become a mass industry catering to the retirement and other welfare arrangements of large sections of the population. Along with this growth in asset management scale has come a corresponding growth in the need for investable assets - most notably, for equities and bonds. Although there are other types of assets that serve as stores of value for asset managers, the exigencies of their role as financial intermediaries mean that it is financial securities that necessarily comprise the majority proportion of their asset holdings. What sets these securities apart from other asset classes is their ability to combine a value storage capacity with a relatively high degree of liquidity. “In most countries, bonds and equities are the two main asset classes in which pension assets were invested at the end of 2018, accounting for more than half of all investments in 32 out of 36 OECD countries, and 39 out of 46 other reporting jurisdictions.”[12]

The new structural presence of the asset management sector has important implications for the financial system as a whole. The large absorption capacities of asset managers represent ample opportunities for corporate and government borrowers in having these investors on the buy side of the securities markets. However, at the same time, the industry is operating under new tight constraints regarding the disbursements of cash. As securities have no intrinsic value, their ability to serve as investables with a determinate value storage capacity depends entirely on the degree to which their prices are held firm and thus made tangible, a condition which, in turn, depends on the rate and regularity with which cash is returned.

Here lies the crucial significance of the transformation of asset management from a subsector of finance serving individuals, into an industry of wealth management populated by large institutional players. When households were the representative type of investor in the securities markets, borrowers had far more room for maneuver over cash disbursements. This was partly because households, as small investors, were less able to constrain security issuing organizations, but also because they had less motivation to do so, given that they themselves were under no obligation to invest any part of their savings in financial securities.

By contrast, institutional asset managers are always obliged to keep a substantial proportion of the portfolios that are marketed to the public in the form of liquid securities. It is this obligation that explains why these investors have been instrumental in the establishment of a whole new type of transparency and governance infrastructure in the financial markets that can help guarantee the regularity with which borrowers return cash.

In the final analysis, all understanding of what sustains the dollar’s supremacy in the contemporary era comes down to an insight into the remarkable transformation that securities have undergone in line with the new governance rules and constraints that are now binding on security issuers. Without these constraints, promises of returning cash are always in danger of remaining fictitious: promises filled with empty air. With the new regulatory and governance constraints, securities have been transformed from mere promissory notes into genuinely solid stores of value; from being particles without matter, they become particles filled with matter. What this means is that when all the securities of a country’s organizations are aggregated together, this aggregation endows that country’s financial markets with mass and a corresponding power of attraction for asset managers and other institutional investors: the greater the mass, the greater the power of attraction.

No facet of this power is greater than that exerted by the US securities markets.

Foreign investors currently have trust in the US and in its legal and governance infrastructure of tradability debt, or futurity. Far from there not being “much of anything else” underpinning this trust, there is, on the contrary, much of everything underpinning it. What the US offers, and what no other region can do at present, is a huge and varied abundance of securities (not only equities but also bonds, including corporate, financial, Treasury, agency, and municipal bonds) in which foreign investors can store large amounts of funds and across which they can also move these large amounts relatively easily according to any change in circumstances.

Given the need for dollars as a means of accessing the US securities markets, it follows that just as it is the sheer depth and liquidity of these markets that attracts foreign institutional investors in droves, this attraction serves, in turn, to further amplify the depth and liquidity of the market for dollars itself. This development helps to explain why the dollar remains the most widely used currency in the execution of various cross-currency transactions. For example, the dollar is the funding currency of choice in foreign exchange swap transactions that currently account for nearly a half of the $6.6 trillion daily forex turnover and that are mostly used by banks to hedge exchange rate risks and meet short-term liquidity needs. Similarly, the sheer depth and liquidity of the dollar market means that even when those institutional investors holding globally diversified portfolios transfer funds from one set of non-dollar securities to another non-dollar set of securities, they usually do so indirectly, via the dollar, to contain the costs of these fund transfers.

How will the financial sanctions currently imposed on Russia impact this situation? The answer is, hardly at all. Of course, these measures will see an increase in the amount of pairwise emerging market economy (EME) currency transactions. Yet to put this increase into perspective, there needs to be an estimate of the percentage share of the $6.6 trillion daily forex turnover that these transactions had prior to the Ukraine crisis. Even a cursory look at the figures makes it clear that this share was negligible.

In the first place, EME cross-currency transactions relate primarily to trades in goods and services, and these trades, taken in conjunction with all other real-sector-related currency transactions, account for no more than 8% of total daily forex turnover.[13] Once one strips out the real-sector-related transactions conducted between the advanced market economies (AMEs) themselves and those between the latter and the EMEs, it turns out that the remaining inter-EME currency transactions barely register as a meaningful percentage ratio.

The combined share of all EME currencies in daily forex turnover is just 13%. Even then, in most cases the counter currency was not another EME currency but an AME currency such as the euro, the yen, the Australian dollar but most notably the US dollar. China’s yuan, although the highest-ranked EME currency in 2019 at 8th place in daily forex transactions, accounted for just 2% of these transactions and no less than 45% of these in turn had the dollar as the counter currency.

In sum, the Ukraine crisis will certainly lead to an increase in “non-dollar, non-euro” currency transactions, just as James Galbraith has argued. But the pre-crisis volume of these transactions was so vanishingly small as to invalidate any suggestion that this increase portends a multipolar currency system in the making.

3. An emergent multi-polar reserve currency system?

The same conclusion holds regarding predictions about the dollar’s primacy as a reserve currency. When Barry Eichengreen recently argued[14] that the Ukraine crisis will accelerate the movement towards a more multipolar international monetary system, his line of reasoning was as follows:

the share of dollars in globally identified foreign exchange reserves has been trending down so that they now account for 59% of these reserves as opposed to the 70% figure of 20 years ago; the principal cause of this downward trend has been central banks’ diversification away from dollars towards the currencies of smaller economies such as Australia, Canada, Sweden, South Korea, and Singapore; this diversification into smaller currencies has been facilitated by the liquidity of these markets and hence the low costs of transacting in them, developments that have been made possible by the advent of electronic trading platforms and other financial innovations; and the principal motivation for this reserve diversification has been the central banks’ attraction to the higher yields that the smaller currencies offer in contrast to those offered by the large currencies.

There is nothing wrong with this explanation as to why central banks are diversifying their reserve portfolios to include more smaller currencies. Nor is there anything wrong with the IMF’s observation that these reserve portfolios may now include alternative currencies such as cryptocurrencies and digital currencies. What is wrong is that these narratives are presented in entirely self-enclosed terms rather than in the broader context of what any increased diversification signifies for the overall composition of central bank reserve portfolios.

As with all institutionally managed asset portfolios, foreign exchange reserve portfolios are organized according to a core-satellite structure, where the core segment in this case typically comprises US treasuries and the satellite segments comprise the higher-yielding securities of other governments.

A key question, therefore, is whether dollar reserves in central bank allocations will fall far enough below 59% to warrant the claim about an emergent multipolar reserve system? The answer to this question, in turn, boils down to the question of whether the dollar core segment in reserve portfolios will shrink to a size comparable with the non-dollar satellite segments. The expectations are that it will not.

Recall that the reason why institutional asset managers must hold a significant, if not majority, proportion of their portfolios in the form of financial securities, is that these best combine liquidity with a value storage capacity. Now, while the huge growth of the stock of securities in recent years has provided these institutional investors with abundant supplies of safe and portable value containers, the flip side of this growth in financial value storage capacity is that it has also provided hedge funds and other speculative vehicles with massive financial firepower when targeting national currencies that are perceived to be vulnerable. As was pointed out in a Group of Ten report back in 1993:

“the growth in the size, integration and agility of international financial markets has greatly increased the scale of pressure that can be exerted against an exchange rate when market sentiment shifts.”[15]

The European currencies felt the scale of that pressure in the EMS crisis of the summer of 1992, while all the Asian currencies (bar the yen) felt the scale of that pressure in the summer of 1997. Indeed, it was largely because of the unnerving experiences of these crises that there was a subsequent sharp increase in central bank foreign exchange reserves. From barely $0.5 trillion in 1995, the total amount of allocated reserves held by central banks had risen to $5.4 trillion by 2010, an amount that was more than doubled again to $11.8 trillion by 2020.[16]

In 2020, the dollar’s share of allocated reserves was indeed 59% as compared with its share of 70% in 2000. However, to say that there was a “trend decline” in the dollar’s share over this twenty-year period is misleading because it gives the impression of a continuous, year-on-year decline. Rather, while there was an initial downward adjustment of the dollar’s share to about 60% that occurred in the first few years following the introduction of the euro, from 2005 to 2020 that 60% share then remained stable, as did the euro’s share of 20%, and as did the remaining 20% collective share of several other smaller currencies.[17] The fundamental reason why the dollar has continued to maintain this 60% share of foreign exchange reserves even as these continue to grow exponentially in absolute terms comes down to the large mass of US Treasuries.

In today’s era, when the world’s capital markets are deep and highly integrated and when cross-currency capital movements accordingly combine huge scale with high mobility, central banks that are concerned to minimize the impact of these movements on their domestic currencies need to have in reserve financial securities that: (i) have a large and safe value storage capacity, (ii) are available in abundance, and thus (iii) are highly liquid. No other financial securities, and no other financial instruments including crypto and digital currencies, can match US Treasuries as regards these criteria.

If any EME-based central banks needed any reminder of this crucial fact, the events of early March 2020, provided it. By that time, the covid-19 pandemic’s negative impact on the global economy became clear to the world’s institutional investors, and they quickly withdrew funds amounting to over $100 billion from the EMEs in the space of days. That withdrawal was catastrophic for many of these countries, but its impact would have been even more devastating had their central banks not quickly intervened in their domestic currency markets with huge sales of the US Treasuries kept in their reserves.

Central banks around the world may well add the higher-yielding securities of other smaller currencies to their reserve portfolios. But can we seriously believe that, at a time when the world’s financial markets continue to grow in scale and become ever more closely integrated, and the threats posed by sudden surges of cross-border portfolio investments grow accordingly, that these central banks will risk substantially shrinking their core holdings of US Treasuries in the search for higher returns? Of course not.

4. The Primacy of the Dollar as an International Currency

On April 1st, 2022, the Bank of International Settlements launched its 13th Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange Transactions and OTC Derivatives Markets, the full results of which are due to be published in November. In the two full years between the 2019 survey and the current one, the world economy suffered its biggest shock since the great depression of the 1930s with the outbreak of the covid pandemic. In 2020, nominal world GDP fell from its 2019 figure of $87.4 trillion to $84.9 trillion, while the world’s combined bond and equity stocks increased by more than 15% from $200.9 trillion in 2019 to $234.3 trillion, an increase principally driven by the steep increase in government bond issuance on the one hand, and the increase in security prices fueled by monetary policy easing, on the other.

The story in 2021 appeared somewhat better, as nominal world GDP rose above its pre-pandemic level to $94.9 trillion, but the world’s combined equity and bond stocks again rose substantially, to reach over $241 trillion.[18] In both these Covid-impacted years, the US share of the world’s supplies of equities and bonds remained stable at around 40%. Thus, going by the observation that forex turnover volume is overwhelmingly driven by financial sector interests as distinct from those of the real sector, we can safely predict that the dollar’s share of the new 2022 figure for daily forex turnover will remain around 44%, while, at the other end of the spectrum, the combined percentage shares of all the EME currencies will stay around 13%, with China’s yuan share at 2%. In other words, our prediction is that the Ukraine crisis that broke out just after the commencement of the latest BIS triennial survey of forex turnover will have had no discernible impact on the currency breakdown of that turnover.

As to the longer term, we also predict that there will be no serious challenge to dollar supremacy in the foreseeable future because there will be no other regional or national currency that will have a sufficient backing mass of equity and debt securities to enable it to mount such a challenge over that time span. To support this prediction, we need only invoke the experience of the euro.

When this currency was launched in 1999, it was widely assumed that, as the currency of the world’s largest single market and trading bloc, it would soon overtake the dollar as the world’s premier international vehicle currency. Chinn and Frankel, for example, argued that the dollar would relinquish that position by 2015 not only because ‘the euro now exists as a more serious potential rival than the mark or yen were’ but also because ‘the United States by now has a 25-year history of chronic current account deficits and the dollar has a 35-year history of trend depreciation.’[19]

This argument could not have been more wrong, because while the euro’s share of daily forex turnover hovered around an average of 19% between 2001 and 2010, it subsequently fell to an average of 16% between that year and 2019, the principal reason for this reverse movement being the eurozone’s failure to supply the world’s large institutional investors with sufficient amounts of euro-denominated securities in which to park their funds.

This insufficiency is even starker in the case of the world’s EMEs that today collectively account for about 20% of world equity stocks and about 15% of world bonds stocks.[20] Many EMEs have too small a domestic real economic base to support securities markets of any appreciable size. Those EMEs that do have large production bases nevertheless continue to have relatively small financial markets principally, if not exclusively, because of continuing weaknesses in their domestic legal and governance infrastructures.

China’s situation illustrates the point. Although China’s equity and bond markets are by far the largest of any EME, these are still small by comparison with those of the US, largely because its governance standards are currently of uneven quality, high in some sub-categories (e.g. law and order, crime prevention) and low in others (e.g. protection of minority shareholders). As for the period ahead, China, which is still a middle-income developing country, will find it difficult to move all its legal and governance institutions rapidly in the required direction.

5. Conclusion

Nothing that has been said above should be taken to mean that we favor a dollar-centered international monetary system. Far from it, for we believe that there are many sound reasons, ranging from the political to the economic, why a multipolar system is desirable.

Desire, however, is not enough. Nor is it enough to hope that the foundations of dollar supremacy are so fragile that it is only a question of time and of another shock or two to the world political and economic order for those foundations to come tumbling down. On the contrary, those foundations are strong, which means that any attempts to elevate rival currencies to a position where they can challenge dollar supremacy must start by recognizing the reason why its foundations do remain strong. That reason comes down to the hard stuff of the financial securities markets, their constituent solid matter. The chief purpose of this short contribution has been to explain the nature of that matter.

References

Arslanalp, Serkan, Eichengreen, Barry and Simpson-Bell, Chima, 2022, “Dollar Dominance and the Rise of Nontraditional Reserve Currencies”, IMF Blog, 1 June 2022, https://blogs.imf.org/2022/06/01/dollar-dominance-and-the-rise-of-nontraditional-reserve-currencies/

BIS, 2019a, “12th Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange Transactions and OTC Derivatives Markets”, November.

BIS, 2019b, Quarterly Review, December.

Chinn, M. & Frankel, J. 2008, “Why the euro will rival the dollar”, International Finance, 11(1), 49–73.

Commons, John, 2017, Institutional Economics. Its Place in Political Economy, London, New York: Routledge.

Eichengreen, Barry, 2022, “Ukraine war accelerates the stealth erosion of dollar dominance”, Financial Times, 28 March 2022.

Galbraith, James, 2022, “A multipolar financial world is here”, INET, May 5th 2022; https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-dollar-system-in-a-multi-polar-world

Georgieva, Katarina, 2022, “The Future of Central Bank Money”, 2 February 2022, https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/02/09/sp020922-the-future-of-money-gearing-up-for-central-bank-digital-currency

Group of Ten. (1993). International capital movements and foreign exchange markets: Report to the Ministers and Governors by the Group of Deputies. Basel, Switzerland: Bank for International Settlements.

IMF, 2017, Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves, March.

IMF, 2021, Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves, March.

Mehrling, Perry, 2010, The New Lombard Street, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

OECD, 2019, Pension Markets in Focus, p.29.

SIFMA, 2020, US Capital Markets Fact Book.

SIFMA, 2021, US Capital Markets Fact Book.

SIFMA, 2022, US Capital Markets Fact Book.

Strange, Susan, 1994, “Wake Up, Krasner! The World Has Changed”, Review of International Political Economy, 1:1.

UNCTAD, 2019, “Financing a Global Green New Deal”, Trade and Development Report.

https://unctad.org/webflyer/tr…

UNCTAD, 2022, “Tapering in a Time of Conflict”, TDR Update, March. https://unctad.org/webflyer/ta…

Notes

[1] Eichengreen, Barry, 2022, “Ukraine war accelerates the stealth erosion of dollar dominance”, Financial Times, 28 March 2022.

[2] Galbraith, James, 2022, “A multipolar financial world is here”, INET, 5 May; https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-dollar-system-in-a-multi-polar-world

[3] Arslanalp, Serkan, Eichengreen, Barry and Simpson-Bell, Chima, 2022, “Dollar Dominance and the Rise of Nontraditional Reserve Currencies”, IMF Blog, 1 June 2022, https://blogs.imf.org/2022/06/01/dollar-dominance-and-the-rise-of-nontraditional-reserve-currencies/

[4] Mehrling, Perry, 2010, The New Lombard Street, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[5] Commons, John, 2017, Institutional Economics. Its Place in Political Economy, London, New York: Routledge.

[6] Strange, Susan, 1994, “Wake Up, Krasner! The World Has Changed”, Review of International Political Economy, 1:1.

[7] Galbraith, James, 2022, “A multipolar financial world is here”, INET, May 5th 2022.

[8] BIS, 2019a, 12th Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange Transactions and OTC Derivatives Markets, November.

[9] BIS calculates currency percentage shares out of 200%, to allow for the double counting of each currency pair. For simplicity, in what follows we halved the shares to give figures out of 100%.

[10] SIFMA, 2020, US Capital Markets Fact Book.

[11] SIFMA, 2021, US Capital Markets Fact Book.

[12] OECD, 2019, Pension Markets in Focus, p.29.

[13] BIS, 2019b, Quarterly Review, December.

[14] Eichengreen, Barry, 2022, “Ukraine war accelerates the stealth erosion of dollar dominance,” Financial Times, 28 March 2022.

[15] Group of Ten, 1993, p.33.

[16] IMF, 2017, Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves, March. IMF, 2021, Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves, March.

[17] UNCTAD, 2019, “Financing a Global Green New Deal”, Trade and Development Report.

[18] SIFMA, 2022, US Capital Markets Fact Book.

[19] Chinn, M. & Frankel, J. 2008, “Why the euro will rival the dollar”, International Finance, 11(1), p.51.

[20] UNCTAD, 2022, “Tapering in a Time of Conflict”, March. https://unctad.org/webflyer/ta…

What makes a nation wealthy? Getty ImagesWhy are some nations rich and others poor? Can the governments of poor nations do something to ensure that their nations become rich? These sorts of questions have long fascinated public officials and economists, at least since Adam Smith, the prominent Scottish economist whose famous 1776 book was titled “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
Economic growth matters to a country because it can raise living standards and provide fiscal stability to its people. But getting the recipe consistently right has eluded both nations and economists for hundreds of years. 
As an economist who studies regional, national and international economics, I believe that understanding an economic term called total factor productivity can provide insight into how nations become wealthy.
Growth theory
It is important to understand what helps a country grow its wealth. In 1956, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Robert Solow wrote a paper analyzing how labor – otherwise known as workers – and capital – otherwise known as physical items such as tools, machinery and equipment – can be combined to produce goods and services that ultimately determine people’s standard of living. Solow later went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work.
One way to increase a nation’s overall quantity of goods or services is to increase labor, capital or both. But that doesn’t continue growth indefinitely. At some point, adding more labor only means that the goods and services these workers produce is divided between more workers. Hence, the output per worker – which is one way of looking at a nation’s wealth – will tend to go down. 
Similarly, adding more capital such as machinery or other equipment endlessly is also unhelpful, because those physical items tend to wear out or depreciate. A company would need frequent financial investment to counteract the negative effect of this wear and tear. 
In a later paper in 1957, Solow used U.S. data to show that ingredients in addition to labor and capital were needed to make a nation wealthier.
He found that only 12.5% of the observed increase in American output per worker – the quantity of what each worker produced – from 1909 to 1949 could be attributed to workers becoming more productive during this time period. This implies that 87.5% of the observed increase in output per worker was explained by something else.
Total factor productivity
Solow called this something else “technical change,” and today it is best known as total factor productivity.
Total factor productivity is the portion of goods and services produced that is not explained by the capital and labor used in production. For example, it could be technological advancements that make it easier to produce goods. 

Another way to understand total factor productivity.

It’s best to think of total factor productivity as a recipe that shows how to combine capital and labor to obtain output. Specifically, growing it is akin to creating a cookie recipe to ensure that the largest number of cookies – that also taste great – are produced. Sometimes this recipe gets better over time because, for example, the cookies can bake faster in a new type of oven or workers become more knowledgeable about how to mix ingredients more efficiently. 
Will total factor productivity continue to grow in the future?
Given how important total factor productivity is to economic growth, asking about the future of economic growth is basically the same as asking whether total factor productivity will continue to grow – whether the recipes will always get better – over time.
Solow assumed that TFP would grow exponentially over time, a dynamic explained by the economist Paul Romer, who also won a Nobel Prize for his research in this field. 
Romer argued in a prominent 1986 paper that investments in research and development that result in the creation of new knowledge can be a key driver of economic growth. 
This means that each earlier bit of knowledge makes the next bit of knowledge more useful. Put differently, knowledge has a spillover effect that creates more knowledge as it spills out.
Despite Romer’s efforts to provide a basis for the assumed exponential growth of TFP, research shows that productivity growth in the world’s advanced economies has been declining since the late 1990s and is now at historically low levels. There are concerns that the COVID-19 crisis may exacerbate this negative trend and further reduce total factor productivity growth.
Recent research shows that if TFP growth falls, then this can negatively affect living standards in the U.S. and in other rich countries.
A very recent paper by the economist Thomas Philippon analyzes a large amount of data for 23 countries over 129 years, finding that TFP does not actually grow exponentially, as Solow and Romer had thought. 
Instead, it grows in a linear, and slower, progression. Philippon’s analysis suggests that new ideas and new recipes do add to the existing stock of knowledge, but they don’t have the multiplier effect previous scholars had thought.
Ultimately, this finding means that economic growth used to be quite fast and is now slowing down – but it’s still occurring. The U.S. and other nations can expect to get wealthier over time but just not as quickly as economists once expected.
Amitrajeet A. Batabyal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Yesterday, a CDC panel discussed whether smallpox vaccines should be offered more widely as a preventive measure against monkeypox. The panel made no decision. But getting those shots into patients’ arms—and particularly gay and bisexual men’s arms—is an urgent matter. Since May 13, more than 3,300 cases of monkeypox have been reported in 58 countries where the disease was not previously thought to be endemic, including the United States. The CDC is reporting at least 172 cases. Before this outbreak, monkeypox had usually been reported from West and Central Africa, or in travelers from those regions. The new cases are occurring on all inhabited continents, mainly among men who have sex with men (MSM).The U.S. is underreacting to the monkeypox outbreak. Given that a vaccine is available for the infection—and can be targeted toward the people most at risk—public-health authorities and health-care providers need to move more quickly and forcefully to change the outbreak’s trajectory.Monkeypox is related to smallpox, the only human virus that has been eradicated worldwide. A highly effective smallpox vaccine, called Jynneos, has been licensed in the United States for use against monkeypox as well. Data from Africa suggest that it is at least 85 percent effective in preventing the latter condition.[Read: Monkeypox vaccines are too gnarly for the masses]On June 1, the CDC updated its recommendations to say that Jynneos is the preferred post-exposure prophylaxis for health-care workers and others who have had close contact with monkeypox patients. The U.S. has about 36,000 doses in its stockpile and expects 300,000 additional doses in coming weeks. It needs to purchase many more—and should offer the vaccine to all MSM at risk of exposure in the next month. Canada just signed a $56 million deal with the manufacturer of the Jynneos vaccine, and Quebec has started offering the vaccine to all MSM. The U.K. is expanding its vaccination campaign as of this week to offer shots to the gay and bisexual men at highest risk of exposure. The New York City Health Department announced the opening yesterday of a clinic in Chelsea that will offer the vaccine to MSM who have had multiple partners in the past 14 days.When the coronavirus spread worldwide in early 2020, we lacked an effective vaccine, so governments required masks, distancing, ventilation, testing, and contact tracing to try to minimize transmission until the COVID-19 shots arrived. The world is not at the same disadvantage with monkeypox; we have a vaccine, and our current attempts to test and contact trace our way out of this epidemic are failing. A swift, targeted vaccination campaign—one that identifies Americans at risk and persuades them to get a shot—is far more likely to stop the monkeypox outbreak.[Jim Downs: Gay men need a specific warning about monkeypox]Different diseases require different responses. The coronavirus is becoming endemic because it spreads quickly and easily, and even high-quality vaccines that protect against severe disease do not prevent initial infection or reinfection. Smallpox, among the most deadly pathogens in history, could be eliminated because of four distinguishing features that most human pathogens do not have: Its symptoms—most notably, the skin rash it causes—are very characteristic, so doctors could easily identify patients who had it; its infectious period was short; new infections were preventable by a highly effective vaccine; and the virus had no animal reservoirs from which it could infect unvaccinated humans. As such, routine smallpox vaccinations for U.S. populations were stopped in 1972. Yet because of the cessation of mass vaccination programs for smallpox, humans have waning protection from monkeypox.The name monkeypox comes from the first documented cases of the illness in animals in 1958, when two outbreaks occurred in monkeys being used for research. However, the infection until recently was usually spread by rodents such as rats, mice, and squirrels, and transmitted to humans by a bite from an infected animal, or by touching an infected animal’s blood, body fluids, or fur. A 2003 outbreak among humans in the U.S. was traced to pet prairie dogs infected by a shipment of mammals from Ghana.Many of the current cases are in MSM ages 30 to 55, at first linked to two large raves held in Spain and Belgium. Of note, sexual transmission of monkeypox has never previously been described. Although monkeypox has been reported in semen, the most likely route of spread during the current outbreak is the close skin-to-skin and respiratory contact during sexual activity. Moreover, transmission from prolonged face-to-face contact can put household members and other close contacts of active cases at greater risk.That monkeypox is spreading among gay men has led to calls to postpone this month’s Pride celebrations, and the CDC has faced some criticism for recent messaging that offers tips on how to avoid the pathogen during sex. Yet the agencies are following the well-grounded concept of harm reduction—which calls for both minimizing the impact of a health threat while also recognizing the other needs of the individuals and society involved. People crave companionship and intimacy, and messages that ignore those needs and recommend complete abstinence are unlikely to succeed. Harm reduction is the basis of most current public-health messaging about reducing HIV risk, and is profoundly important in the field of addiction and substance use.Health agencies deserve credit for trying to minimize stigma in their communication, even as they recognize that relevant communities need to be alerted to how this particular outbreak is being spread. (The WHO is also considering a change in the very name monkeypox to prevent stigma against the geographic areas originally connected with the disease and to banish associations with animals that appear to play little role in its spread.)[Read: Squirrels could make monkeypox a forever problem]Stopping the monkeypox outbreak in the U.S. isn’t enough. The WHO is scheduled to meet today to decide whether to declare monkeypox a global health emergency—a move that clinicians from Africa argue is long overdue. Although the virus is not a significant threat to the general population, as COVID-19 was, declaring a global health emergency will raise awareness of both this outbreak and endemic infections. As the World Health Organization has previously pointed out, rich countries have ignored endemic monkeypox in West and Central Africa for far too long, despite having effective vaccines, which should be equitably distributed to the populations at risk worldwide. The crucial point is that all these efforts should be happening right now. We have to stop underreacting to the world’s latest infectious-disease threat.

It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’”Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party—what he terms the “MAGA movement”—as the U.S. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country—with or without majority support. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”[Read: Beware prophecies of civil war]All of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. What’s becoming clearer over time is that the Trump-era GOP is hoping to use its electoral dominance of the red states, the small-state bias in the Electoral College and the Senate, and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to impose its economic and social model on the entire nation—with or without majority public support. As measured on fronts including the January 6 insurrection, the procession of Republican 2020 election deniers running for offices that would provide them with control over the 2024 electoral machinery, and the systematic advance of a Republican agenda by the Supreme Court, the underlying political question of the 2020s remains whether majority rule—and democracy as we’ve known it—can survive this offensive.Podhorzer defines modern red and blue America as the states in which each party has usually held unified control of the governorship and state legislature in recent years. By that yardstick, there are 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states, where state-government control has typically been divided.Measured that way, the red nation houses slightly more of the country’s eligible voting population (45 percent versus 39 percent), but the blue nation contributes more of the total U.S. gross national product: 46 percent versus 40 percent. On its own, the blue nation would be the world’s second-largest economy, trailing only China. The red nation would rank third. (Podhorzer also offers a slightly different grouping of the states that reflects the more recent trend in which Virginia has voted like a blue state at the presidential level, and Arizona and Georgia have moved from red to purple. With these three states shifted into those categories, the two “nations” are almost equal in eligible voting-age population, and the blue advantage in GDP roughly doubles, with the blue section contributing 48 percent and the red just 35 percent.)[From the July/August 2021 issue: How America fractured into four parts]The hardening difference between red and blue, Podhorzer maintains, “empowers” the 10 purple states (if you include Arizona and Georgia) to “decide which of the two superpower nations’ values, Blue or Red, will prevail” in presidential and congressional elections. And that leaves the country perpetually teetering on a knife’s edge: The combined vote margin for either party across those purple states has been no greater than two percentage points in any of the past three presidential elections, he calculates.The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)Simultaneously, the regional differences were moderated by waves of national investment, including the New Deal spending on rural electrification, the Tennessee Valley Authority, agricultural price supports, and Social Security during the 1930s, and the Great Society programs that provided federal aid for K–12 schools and higher education, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.The impact of these investments (as well as massive defense spending across both periods) on states that had historically spent little on public services and economic development helped steadily narrow the gap in per capita income between the states of the old Confederacy and the rest of the country from the 1930s until about 1980. That progress, though, stopped after 1980, and the gap remained roughly unchanged for the next three decades. Since about 2008, Podhorzer calculates, the southern states at the heart of the red nation have again fallen further behind the blue nation in per capita income.Jake Grumbach, a University of Washington political scientist who studies the differences among states, told me that red states, as a group, are falling behind blue states on a broad range of economic and social outcomes—including economic productivity, family income, life expectancy, and “deaths of despair” from the opioid crisis and alcoholism.[Read: America’s red-blue divide is about to get starker]Defenders of the red-state model can point to other measures that show those places in a more favorable light. Housing is often more affordable in red states; partly for that reason, homelessness has become endemic in many big blue cities. Red-state taxes are generally lower than their blue counterparts. Many red states have experienced robust job growth (though that’s been heavily concentrated in their blue-leaning metro areas). And red states across the Sun Belt rank among the nation’s fastest growing in population.But the big story remains that blue states are benefiting more as the nation transitions into a high-productivity, 21st-century information economy, and red states (apart from their major metropolitan centers participating in that economy) are suffering as the powerhouse industries of the 20th century—agriculture, manufacturing, and fossil-fuel extraction—decline.The gross domestic product per person and the median household income are now both more than 25 percent greater in the blue section than in the red, according to Podhorzer’s calculations. The share of kids in poverty is more than 20 percent lower in the blue section than red, and the share of working households with incomes below the poverty line is nearly 40 percent lower. Health outcomes are diverging too. Gun deaths are almost twice as high per capita in the red places as in the blue, as is the maternal mortality rate. The COVID vaccination rate is about 20 percent higher in the blue section, and the per capita COVID death rate is about 20 percent higher in the red. Life expectancy is nearly three years greater in the blue (80.1 years) than the red (77.4) states. (On most of these measures, the purple states, fittingly, fall somewhere in between.)Per capita spending on elementary and secondary education is almost 50 percent higher in the blue states compared with red. All of the blue states have expanded access to Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, while about 60 percent of the total red-nation population lives in states that have refused to do so. All of the blue states have set a minimum wage higher than the federal level of $7.25, while only about one-third of the red-state residents live in places that have done so. Right-to-work laws are common in the red states and nonexistent in the blue, with the result that the latter have a much higher share of unionized workers than the former. No state in the blue section has a law on the books banning abortion before fetal viability, while almost all of the red states are poised to restrict abortion rights if the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority, as expected, overturns Roe v. Wade. Almost all of the red states have also passed “stand your ground” laws backed by the National Rifle Association, which provide a legal defense for those who use weapons against a perceived threat, while none of the blue states have done so.The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures.Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, told me that the experience of Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties—not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid. As the distance widens between the two sections, she said, “there are all kinds of potential for really deep disruptions, social disruptions, that aren’t just about our feelings and our opinions.”To Podhorzer, the growing separation means that after the period of fading distinctions, bedrock differences dating back to the country’s founding are resurfacing. And one crucial element of that, he argues, is the return of what he calls “one-party rule in the red nation.”With some complex but telling statistical calculations, he documents a return to historical patterns from the Jim Crow era in which the dominant party (segregationist Democrats then, conservative Republicans now) has skewed the playing field to achieve a level of political dominance in the red nation far beyond its level of popular support. Undergirding that advantage, he argues, are laws that make registering or voting in many of the red states more difficult, and severe gerrymanders that have allowed Republicans to virtually lock in indefinite control of many state legislatures. Grumbach reached a similar conclusion in a recent paper analyzing trends in small-d democracy across the states. “It’s a really stacked deck in these states because of this democratic backsliding,” Grumbach said.The core question that Podhorzer’s analysis raises is how the United States will function with two sections that are moving so far apart. History, in my view, offers two models.During the seven decades of legal Jim Crow segregation from the 1890s through the 1960s, the principal goal of the southern states at the core of red America was defensive: They worked tirelessly to prevent federal interference with state-sponsored segregation but did not seek to impose it on states outside the region.By contrast, in the last years before the Civil War, the South’s political orientation was offensive: Through the courts (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) and in Congress (the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854), its principal aim was to authorize the expansion of slavery into more territories and states. Rather than just protecting slavery within their borders, the Southern states sought to control federal policy to impose their vision across more of the nation, including, potentially, to the point of overriding the prohibitions against slavery in the free states.It seems unlikely that the Trump-era Republicans installing the policy priorities of their preponderantly white and Christian coalition across the red states will be satisfied just setting the rules in the places now under their control. Podhorzer, like Mason and Grumbach, believes that the MAGA movement’s long-term goal is to tilt the electoral rules in enough states to make winning Congress or the White House almost impossible for Democrats. Then, with support from the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans could impose red-state values and programs nationwide, even if most Americans oppose them. The “MAGA movement is not stopping at the borders of the states it already controls,” Podhorzer writes. “It seeks to conquer as much territory as possible by any means possible.”The Trump model, in other words, is more the South in 1850 than the South in 1950, more John Calhoun than Richard Russell. (Some red-state Republicans are even distantly echoing Calhoun in promising to nullify—that is, defy—federal laws with which they disagree.) That doesn’t mean that Americans are condemned to fight one another again as they did after the 1850s. But it does mean that the 2020s may bring the greatest threats to the country’s basic stability since those dark and tumultuous years.

Bans on abortion, birth control, and same-sex marriage are at stake in November's elections.

Republican lawmakers want the government to make decisions about your marriage, your bedroom, and your body.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is extreme, but what's just as alarming is the logic Justice Samuel Alito used to justify it, which puts a whole range of other rights on the chopping block, too.

We enjoy many rights that are protected by the Constitution but not explicitly mentioned in it. One of these is the right to privacy. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the 14th Amendment's due process clause protects individuals' privacy against government interference.

In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court used privacy to make it illegal for states to ban birth control. In 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Court used privacy to decide that women have broad rights to determine whether to end their pregnancies. In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Court protected LGBTQ Americans from arrest and prosecution for engaging in consensual sex in the privacy of their own bedrooms. In 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court legalized gay marriage.

These landmark court cases all rest on the principle that the Constitution protects the liberty of an individual to make decisions about certain private matters without government interference.

But in his leaked opinion, Justice Samuel Alito argues that since the Constitution contains neither an explicit right to an abortion nor an explicit right to privacy, Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and must be overturned.

Alito's logic threatens all the other court cases that were decided based on the inferred right to privacy. That could give government a say over the most intimate decisions someone ever makes. Alito explicitly writes that his opinion overturning Roe v Wade "concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right." Should we believe him?

Well, he and the other justices who have tentatively joined him all reassured the senators in their confirmation hearings that they accepted Roe v Wade as settled precedent. They all lied. So there's no reason to believe their assurance now.

Make no mistake: this is what's on the ballot in November.

Republican lawmakers want the government to make decisions about your marriage, your bedroom, and your body. They've already started at the state level by restricting abortion and criminalizing gender-affirming health care for trans people. The Republican majority on the Supreme Court is giving states the green light to invade everyone's privacy in ever more egregious ways.

This is why we must work to elect Democrats who will protect these rights at both the state and federal level. Know the stakes, and vote accordingly.

Watch:

There has always been a certain amount of artifice in what Supreme Court justices do. Whether they are conservatives or liberals, they pretend that their personal moral and political values are irrelevant to their votes, and that they are just Following The Law. They delude themselves into thinking they are mere “umpires” who might have differing legal theories but are certainly not partisan. They try to get the public to accept this myth, because if we did think of the justices as mere “robed legislators,” there would be little reason to treat their decisions with deference and respect. It is necessary for the court’s legitimacy that the public not see its rulings as the mere imposition of certain partisan policy preferences by an unelected council who are only in their positions for arbitrary reasons (e.g., because of the timing of another justice’s death). 
The desire to preserve the myth of a legitimate court was one reason Ruth Bader Ginsburg refused to retire. She felt it “belittles and diminishes the court to have retirements so obviously timed for political reasons.” It also explains why some liberal legal professionals praised the nominations of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Their politics and personal beliefs were seen as irrelevant. Instead, their qualifications and intelligence were what mattered. Yale Law School’s Akhil Amar predicted that Kavanaugh “will be a pro-intellectual and anti-polarizing force on the Court.” The Washington Post ran a law professor’s op-ed called “I’ve known Amy Coney Barrett for 15 years. Liberals have nothing to fear.” The author argued that as a justice, “Barrett would not draw on any extralegal source of authority—be it religious, moral or political.”
These predictions were obviously lies or unbelievably naive delusions. As I documented at great length at the time, both Kavanaugh and Barrett both had long track records of making conservative decisions that obviously incorporated their value judgments. The justices themselves, during their confirmations, pretended they weren’t going to be partisan (Kavanaugh was said to have called Roe v. Wade “settled law” in an August 2018 conversation with Sen. Susan Collins; yet the New York Times, reporting on his confirmation hearings a month later, mentioned documents revealing that Kavanaugh had, in the past, questioned whether Roe was indeed “settled law.” In any case, he clearly didn’t actually think the “important precedent” was worth upholding—although that somewhat paled next to the many other egregious instances of outright perjury in his testimony defending himself against allegations of past sexual assault). The pretense of neutrality was obviously untrue. Donald Trump had publicly promised that the justices he appointed would overturn Roe. It’s reasonable to doubt that any statement uttered by Donald Trump could ever be accurate, but this was one pledge he followed through on. Lindsey Graham, in his recent debate with Bernie Sanders (in which Sanders cleaned Graham’s clock), boasted openly about having a “conservative” Supreme Court. So much for objective “umpires” merely applying the law. 

It should surprise nobody, then, that when right-wing justices dominate the Court, they do what the Supreme Court did this week, when it declared even modest gun control measures unconstitutional and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion.
But even if it’s not shocking, it’s important to take stock of what this means: because the Court has the ultimate authority to decide whether democratically decided-upon laws are upheld or struck down (a power it arrogated for itself in Marbury v. Madison, but which appears nowhere in the Constitution), the Court as an institution has almost unrestricted power, despite having no democratic accountability. When the Court is full of mushy moderates who worry about not doing anything too rash, this near-absolute power doesn’t cause too much public concern. But now that the Court is stuffed with hardcore reactionaries, we see plainly what an extremely dysfunctional and unjustifiable institution it is. 
Conservatives justify the Court’s decision by saying that there is nothing political here. Liberal lawyer Neal Katyal suggested there was something contradictory about the conservative Court granting the right to the concealed carry of firearms while revoking the right to an abortion. But for conservatives there is no mystery: the Constitution has an amendment protecting the right to bear arms, but no amendment mentioning the right to terminate a pregnancy. Conservatives argue that this settles the issue. The justices are just applying the Constitution. Politics? What politics? 
As I have pointed out before, however, there is a serious problem with imposing the Constitution of 1787 on the public of 2022, namely the fact that all of the Constitution’s provisions were imposed on the public by force rather than consent. The Founding Fathers treated women, Black people, and Native Americans as subhumans ineligible to participate in self-governance. As a result, the Constitution’s provisions do not reflect the “consent of the governed” and are owed little respect. (When Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband to “remember the ladies” in drafting the laws, he laughed at her and replied “we know better than to repeal our masculine systems,” saying this would be “the despotism of the petticoat.”) Because the Constitution was made deliberately difficult to alter, the result of applying an “originalist” framework is that the public is forever trapped under undemocratic and illegitimate laws. 
Both the abortion opinion and the gun rights opinion, for instance, dwell heavily on what the historic regulations in both these areas was. Clarence Thomas argues that gun regulations of today must comport with historical American practice, and Samuel Alito argued that abortion bans are consistent with history, pointing out that it was only in the mid-20th century that the idea of a right to abortion arose. But looking to “tradition” is a problem, because traditional laws were made without adequate public consent. The reason the “mid 20th century” was when the idea of a right to abortion arose is that in the mid-20th century, we had a women’s liberation movement that rose up against a centuries-old patriarchy. It is no more legitimate to determine women’s rights today by looking at women’s rights in the 19th century than it would be to decide which rights Black people should have by asking which rights Thomas Jefferson thought they should have. 
The belief that judges shouldn’t act as dictators does not mean that every judicial opinion should merely defer to public opinion polls. The job of a court will always involve a willingness to thwart “majority opinion” in certain cases; a responsible judge upholds the rights of a defendant even if there is an angry lynch mob at the courthouse door. But this doesn’t mean that a court has the right to wilfully trample on the democratic process and force the public to be subjected to a set of laws that it did not vote on, that were imposed by a small group of propertied white men, and that were deliberately designed to be difficult to alter. A judge that simply defers to polls is not doing their job, but neither is a judge that totally disregards the question of whether the public actually, for example, would prefer not to have their constitutional rights taken away. 
Clarence Thomas has suggested that, having struck down Roe, he would next like to see the right to contraception, same-sex marriage, and even same-sex relationships eliminated. That shouldn’t be surprising: Thomas believes that the Court should only uphold the rights people had in 1787, plus those explicitly added to the Constitution through the amendment process. No right to same-sex relationships or contraception has been added through the amendment process, so even if it would be extremely unpopular to take these rights away, Thomas believes the Supreme Court should do it. And he won’t believe that there’s anything in the least “political” about doing it, even though the decisions squarely align with conservative policy preferences.
But in trying to force women and LGBT people to live under 1787’s legal framework, the Court risks running into a serious objection: there is no reason for the people subjected to this regime to obey it. The Supreme Court has the legal power to take away women’s right to an abortion. But in doing so, it has no legitimacy. That is, there is no reason why a woman should assent to the Court’s assertion that it is entitled to let the state criminalize her abortion. 
The Supreme Court is playing a dangerous game here, because the more it seems like a group of arbitrarily-empowered reactionaries with absolute authority to make 2022 look like 1787, the less the public is going to be inclined to accept its rulings. Even leaving aside the fact that the Court’s decisions fail as originalism (how on earth could a document written centuries ago resolve whether an AR-15 should be allowed?), the insistence on imposing an undemocratic order will be met with discontent and resistance. Already, we see that approval of the Court has slipped to historic lows: 

By being nakedly reactionary, the Court is risking its reputation, and thereby its power. You can sometimes convince people that wearing a robe gives you authority and credibility, but if you get too outlandish in your pronouncements, they will wonder whether the robe actually means much. As the Court continues to defy the popular will and produce extreme and harmful outcomes (more mass shootings, women thrown in jail for miscarriages), some people may begin to ask why we owe deference to Supreme Court opinions at all. Some states may flirt with the idea of simply defying the Court, which has no army and cannot enforce the laws itself. The idea of simply ignoring the Court is frightening—leftist writer Carl Beijer has warned that it is “dangerous—because it inches us closer to a situation in which the rule of law breaks down altogether. But nobody is morally bound to obey the Supreme Court absolutely. If the Supreme Court ordered us to commit an atrocity, we would be obligated to practice civil disobedience. The correct response to atrocious racist decisions like Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson would have been for state governments to simply ignore them. Dred Scott, remember, ruled that legislators could not free people from enslavement and had to recognize the rights of slave-holders. Any moral person in government would simply ignore such a ruling, because of the criminal wrong there would be in handing a person over to an enslaver. This would be so even if the Supreme Court had been correct on an originalist reading of the Constitution. Nobody is justified in doing atrocious things just because the (illegitimate) laws of a prior generation of property-owners required said atrocities.
Of course, in practice outright defiance of Supreme Court rulings by state governments is somewhat unlikely, though on guns they should keep passing new laws and challenging the court to strike them down. We ultimately need to put more justices on the Supreme Court and readjust the partisan balance, because the Supreme Court simply cannot survive if it has no democratic legitimacy, which it doesn’t if it is just a conservative think tank with absolute power. Because the Court has such extraordinary power, and because Democrats are generally cowardly and ineffectual and far too devoted to procedural norms, it will be difficult to tame the Court’s power. But we must begin by recognizing that it is an entirely illegitimate institution in dire need of reform, and that its decisions are nakedly partisan and do not deserve a shred of respect. 

In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a New York law restricting the ability to carry a gun in public violated the Second Amendment. The majority opinion, from which the three liberal Justices dissented, raises questions about how cities and states can regulate firearms going forward. It also casts doubt on the constitutional viability of the bipartisan gun bill that passed a procedural vote in the Senate a few hours after the decision was announced. (That bill, which came about largely in response to recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, would, if enacted, become the most substantial federal gun-safety law in more than two decades.) To talk about the decision, and what it may mean for future gun-control efforts, I spoke by phone with Adam Winkler, a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and the author of “Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion cherry-picks history, how states might try to comply with the decision while still regulating firearms, and the meaning of a concurring opinion from Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.

What’s your biggest takeaway from this decision?

This decision calls into question a wide variety of gun laws, including several key provisions of the Senate gun bill.

What was New York’s law, and what types of gun laws do you think are most at risk?

New York’s gun law restricted concealed-carry permits to those who could show a special need to have a firearm in public, which the Court said is too onerous a restriction given the Second Amendment. And, in terms of what this will call into question, I think the Court’s ruling will lead to laws in a number of other states being struck down, including California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Hawaii, which also have so-called may-issue permitting. Any state that has may-issue permitting will have to rewrite its laws and allow people to carry guns on the street.

Can you describe the differences between may-issue permitting and another kind, which is still allowed, called shall-issue permitting?

May-issue permitting limits concealed-carry permits to people who can show a special individualized need to have a firearm. A general fear of being a victim of crime is not good enough. But if you have had your life threatened, are maybe being stalked, or carry a large amount of cash or jewelry around as part of your job, then you might be eligible for a concealed-carry permit. So a may-issue regime gives the state a lot of discretion over who gets the permit.

A shall-issue-permitting rule is one in which, as the name suggests, the state shall issue a permit to any law-abiding citizen who meets the basic training or educational requirements, and you do not have to show an individualized need.

In terms of the decision itself, what was notable about how the Court presented the history of the Second Amendment and guns?

Most notable is that the Court says it is going to look to history and tradition, but then ignores history and tradition. The Court says that only gun laws which have historical precedent are constitutionally permissible, and then the Court dismisses all of the historical precedents for heavy restrictions on concealed-carry laws as outliers. The Court says that it is going to look to history, but dismisses early English common law as too old. The Court says that it is going to look to history, but dismisses any laws that were adopted after the mid-eighteen-hundreds as too young. The Court says that it is looking to history, but also says that shall-issue permitting is constitutional, even though shall-issue permitting is a twentieth-century invention. So the Court says that it is doing history and tradition analysis, but conveniently ignores any history it doesn’t like.

In terms of picking and choosing historical precedents, is that out of the norm or a common feature of Court decisions?

This is singular. The Court says that history and tradition analysis is the way that constitutional rights should be analyzed. But all you have to do is go back to Tuesday’s decision on the funding of religious schools. The Court didn’t do any history and tradition analysis to show that there is a First Amendment requirement that states finance religious schools. [In the gun case,] the Court rejects the kind of interest-balancing that is commonplace in constitutional law more generally.

How important is the concurrence from John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, which seems to suggest that there are at least five votes for certain kinds of regulations, even if it is not the official majority holding? Does this send a signal to lower courts about what regulations may be allowed going forward?

I don’t think so. I think the Kavanaugh-Roberts concurrence suggests that there are at least two Justices in the conservative majority who may vote to uphold future gun laws, but the concurrence does not really back down from the majority opinion. The concurrence makes two points. One is that you can have shall-issue permitting. But the majority opinion says the same thing. And the concurrence says that long-standing gun laws are constitutionally permissible, but that’s what the majority says as well. I don’t think it does much of substance. Maybe it is a signal that there are some Justices who are a little uncomfortable with how broad the Court’s ruling is. But, importantly, they do not pull back on the broadest parts of the ruling, notably the idea that only those laws with historical precedents—only those gun laws consistent with historical patterns of gun regulations—are constitutionally permissible.

If it doesn’t go further than the majority opinion, what is the purpose of the concurrence? What is the force of it?

I’ll be honest with you—I don’t see it having a lot of force or impact.

What is the bill that just passed the Senate, and how might it be at risk now?

This decision calls into question several key provisions of the Senate gun bill. For instance, the Senate bill provides funding for states to roll out red-flag laws. Red-flag laws are not grounded in history and tradition. In the seventeen- and eighteen-hundreds, there were no laws similar to red-flag laws that allow the temporary confiscation of firearms when someone is in crisis. The Senate gun bill closes the boyfriend loophole on domestic abusers. In the seventeen- and eighteen-hundreds, there were no laws that prevented domestic abusers from possessing firearms.

These provisions don’t actually have a historical precedent or backing, and so you are saying that the Court may strike them down. But it seems like you were previously saying that the Court just picks and chooses what it wants from history anyway, so are we giving them too much credit by analyzing these provisions historically?

I think that is fair. The Court does seem to pick and choose the history that it likes. But, if we take the law seriously, we have to take the test that the Court articulates as a serious test. And certainly lower courts will look to the Court’s test and use that test and apply it to many gun laws. Lower courts aren’t going to say, “Well, the Supreme Court picks and chooses what it wants, so we will just pick and choose what we want.” The lower courts are going to say that they have to look to historical tradition, and if there is no historical tradition then they have to strike the law down.

How confident are you that states—mostly blue states—can still find ways to regulate guns? You can do taxes on guns or ammunition—

Can you? Were there taxes on guns and ammunition in the seventeen- and eighteen-hundreds?

I meant one can at least try it.

Look, this ruling is going to have its biggest impact on blue states, such as California and New York, that have relatively restrictive gun regulations. Those states will still try to regulate guns. The political movement in those states is still very strong. I think this ruling will not only lead to a lot of litigation but lead to a lot of litigation on the concealed-carry issue in particular. This is not the final word but the beginning of a long battle over it. States such as New York are going to pass laws that broadly define “sensitive places,” to make it very hard to carry a gun in New York City. Those laws will be subject to constitutional challenge. States might impose burdens on licensing requirements.

In California, if you want to get a cosmetology license that gives you the ability to put chemicals in someone’s hair, you have to go through a thousand hours of training. You could imagine California saying that, if you want to carry a gun, you have to do extensive training and go to a certain kind of class before you have the ability to carry firearms. So I think we are going to see states continue to try to regulate firearms, but this opinion will make it much easier for Second Amendment advocates to go to court and strike these laws down.

Is there some specific case you are thinking about next?

There are cases already working their way up to the Supreme Court on restrictions of high-capacity magazines and military-style rifles. I think those could be the next ones that the Supreme Court takes. I also think that once New York adopts a new set of restrictions on concealed carry, those laws will be challenged immediately. They will take a few more years to get up to the Supreme Court, but I do think we are likely to see the restrictions on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons come before the Court before too long. ♦

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I used to think of myself as a gun-control conservative—I supported both the right to own firearms and the interest of the state to limit that right—but America’s gun culture isn’t about rights. It’s about performative insecurity.But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.
This comment reveals the depths of the Republican Party’s moral collapse.
Fashion has abandoned human taste.
What a 1904 war can teach Vladimir Putin.
Big IronBack in 1959, the country singer Marty Robbins wrote a ballad about a murderous outlaw who met his well-deserved end at the hands of a handsome young Arizona Ranger who was carrying the “Big Iron on his hip.” (The song was supposedly inspired by a weapon Robbins saw in a shop, but there is some question about whether the Big Iron was a real gun.)It’s a great song. But it wasn’t supposed to be a guide to life in modern America.I don’t have the energy or expertise to debate whether the Supreme Court should have taken on the case of a New York State law that limited the ability to carry weapons around in public. Honestly, I just assume that many declines in the quality of American life for the foreseeable future will be announced with “In a 6–3 decision …” Elections have consequences, and with the current composition of the Court, this decision was inevitable.The problem is not the Court’s decision. The problem is an adolescent, drama-laden gun culture, a romance with weapons that became extreme only in the past quarter century.It didn’t used to be this way. I grew up around guns; my father had been a police officer, and we had two of them. My older half-brother, who lived a few streets away, was a police officer. Our next-door neighbor was a police officer. My hometown was a military town, and almost all of the men I knew were veterans who owned weapons and knew how to handle them. (There were some female veterans too. My mother, for one.)What I remember about guns is that I remember almost nothing about guns. People owned them; they didn’t talk about them. They didn’t cover their cars in bumper stickers about them, they didn’t fly flags about them, they didn’t pose for dumb pictures with them. (I’ll plead one personal exemption: When I was a little boy, relatives in Greece once posed me in a Greek Evzone-soldier costume with my uncle’s hunting shotgun. I could barely lift it.)Today, there is a neediness in the gun culture that speaks to deep insecurities among a certain kind of American citizen. The gun owners I knew—cops, veterans, hunters, sportsmen—owned guns as part of their life, sometimes as tools, sometimes for recreation. Gun ownership was not the central and defining feature of their life.Don’t take my word for it that things have changed. Here’s Ryan Busse, a former gun-company executive who has now taken on his former industry, talking about the day someone showed up to a hunting party with an AR-15:
The unwritten rules of decency were enforced by firearm-industry leaders … I witnessed how this worked many times, including one occasion when a young writer brought his own AR-15 to a hunting event I was hosting in 2004. The senior figures there responded immediately. “That’s not the kind of thing we want to be promoting,” they said. The newcomer was shamed into locking the gun up for the rest of the event.
This kind of affirmation of cultural norms can be a lot more powerful than any law, and I suspect that the gun-culture extremists know it. They head off expressions of this kind of social disapproval by being aggressive and performative, daring anyone to criticize them for feeling the need to be armed while getting milk and eggs at the supermarket.I have always trusted my fellow citizens with weapons. Now the most vocal advocates for unfettered gun ownership are men sitting in their cars in sunglasses and baseball caps, recording themselves as they dump unhinged rants into their phones about their rights and conspiracies and socialism.The Supreme Court has now affirmed that all these guys can be the handsome ranger with the Big Iron on their hip. You can be angry with the Court for furthering and enabling this weirdness, but it’s not the Court’s fault. It is, as usual, our fault, as voters and citizens, for tolerating a culture that is endangering our fellow Americans instead of insisting that all of us exercise our constitutional rights like responsible adults.Related:
The next fight over guns in America
The Supreme Court just made New York less safe.
The Supreme Court handed down four decisions today, including one on a North Carolina voter-ID law, a ruling in favor of a death-row inmate seeking to die by firing squad, and the widest expansion of gun rights in a decade.
Germany activated the second phase of its three-stage gas-emergency program as a result of Russia slashing supply through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.
European leaders granted Ukraine candidate status for European Union membership today, a process that typically takes years.
Work in Progress: Derek Thompson explains how a recession could weaken the work-from-home revolution.
Wait, What?: The January 6 hearings are working—and even the staunchest Donald Trump allies know it, Molly Jong-Fast argues.
Netflix
How Reality Dating Shows Stoke Racial TensionsStory by Hannah Giorgis
In the first season of Netflix’s hit reality show Love Is Blind, Lauren Speed visits the Atlanta home of her new fiancé, Cameron Hamilton. The house is airy and bright, and Lauren and Cameron, fingers laced, wander the rooms imagining the life they might have there together. But behind the scenes, that day was less dreamy than it looked.

Here’s how to stop dating people who are wrong for you.
These five COVID numbers don’t make sense anymore.
The pandemic caused the biggest disruption in the history of American education.
Disney / Pixar
Read. The World as We Knew It shows how Greek mythology can help us make sense of the climate crisis.Or try another recommendation from our reading list of books that reveal our anxieties about a warming planet.Watch. You could catch Lightyear, the “perfectly functional sci-fi tale” and Toy Story origin story, in theaters. But maybe you should rewatch Minority Report instead—Steven Spielberg’s prescient 2002 thriller is as chilling as ever (and widely available on streaming services).Listen. The sensual new album Ugly Season marks a career watershed for the ambitious singer Perfume Genius.Play our daily crossword.The past is the future: The song “Big Iron” was a hit in early 1960, but it became an internet meme thanks to Fallout New Vegas, the 2010 entry in one of the greatest science-fiction-video-game franchises of all time, the Fallout series. If you’re inclined to play video games, New Vegas is a kitschy, retro-sci-fi experience featuring some great old music and—I am not kidding—a cast that includes Wayne Newton. Apparently, a TV series is in the works—so get started!— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

“I will do such things – What they are yet, I know not; but they shall beThe terrors of the earth!” – King Lear, Act 2, Scene 4
Vladimir Putin seeks to convey an indomitable will. Here is a man who has set his course and will stick to it, whatever the obstacles in his way and the costs of overcoming them. It is an image that serves him well. It is now widely assumed in the West that he will not back down in the war with Ukraine and, if things go badly, he will lash out. Such a man must not be provoked. Yet the image is starting to fray at the edges. Behind all the braggadocio his power is slowly eroding. The symptoms of this are to be found not in a readiness to compromise on the war, which remains absent, but instead in a policy paralysis; he is pressing on with his established strategy because he can think of nothing better to do.   
Putin’s St Petersburg speech
A good place to start is with the speech he delivered last week, coming in at over 70 minutes, at the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum. This is intended as an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Putin’s audience was not as substantial as in previous years, with representatives of the Taliban helping to make up the numbers. The theme of his address was that, despite facing an American-led “economic blitzkrieg”, Russia would emerge even stronger as the rest of the world suffers from inflation and recession. He described in great detail the measures being taken to protect the economy against this onslaught which would ensure self-sufficiency. “We are strong people,” he insisted, “and can cope with any challenge. Like our ancestors, we will solve any problem. The entire thousand-year history of our country speaks of this.” He presented the current conflict as being essentially about Russia standing up to American arrogance; they “think of themselves as exceptional. And if they think they’re exceptional, that means everyone else is second-class.” This is a theme which provides common ground with China. President Xi Jinping sent his own video message along similar lines.
Putin’s assertions of invincible Russian strength were undermined by his speech being delayed for an hour by a cyberattack, demonstrating that this supposedly favoured Russian instrument of modern conflict can be used against it in an embarrassing way. Although he boasted about how well the Russian economy will weather the storm, even official forecasts predict a contraction this year by some 8 per cent, and unofficial estimates go as high as 15 per cent. One reason why Russia’s economic position is not worse is the boost to revenues resulting from the huge rise in oil and gas prices, yet Putin is currently seeking to add to the pressure on the West by cutting gas supplies to EU countries. He will fight the economic war by demonstrating to Europeans that siding with the US will mean that they are committing “economic suicide”. At the moment, if there is a punitive option available, he is anxious to take it.
With regards to the huge issue of the effects on world food supplies of the blockade of the Black Sea, and the real prospect of famine in many countries, Putin again deflected the blame to US and EU sanctions against Russian fertiliser and grain exports, and the obstacles put in the way of Russian efforts to send exports to those in direst need. Another perspective was provided in one of the more telling interventions in the forum. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-controlled RT media organisation, who specialises in blood-curdling threats and in making Russians feel cheerful about their prospects by warning how bad it is going to be for everybody else, presented famine as a Russian weapon in the economic war: “The famine will start now and they will lift the sanctions and be friends with us, because they will realise that it’s impossible not to be friends with us.”
On the war itself, Putin promised that Russia would fully meet its goal of consolidating the territory of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine: “Freedom for the Donbas.” As if ignorant of the cruel realities of the war, and the devastation being inflicted on Ukrainian towns and cities, he urged: “We must not turn those cities and towns that we liberate into a semblance of Stalingrad. This is a natural thing that our military thinks about when organising hostilities.” Those who urge a peace deal got little comfort from Putin. The Kremlin line is now firmly that Ukraine will have to live with new borders: those areas under Russian occupation are being prepared for annexation.
The only possible concession came when Putin stated that he had no objection to Ukraine joining the EU, because the EU “isn’t a military organisation”. This admission is one of those moments equivalent to an alternative ending to Hamlet, when the old King returns from an overseas trip to reveal that the tragedy that has just unfolded was based on an unfortunate misunderstanding. This whole sorry business began in the summer of 2013 when Putin put the Russophile president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, under intense economic pressure, including cuts in energy supplies, to prevent him signing an association agreement with the EU. This pressure succeeded and the agreement was not signed, but the effect was to trigger the Euromaidan movement which eventually led to Yanukovych fleeing the country, Putin annexing Crimea and encouraging the separatist movement in the Donbas.
The admission shows that Putin realises that he must pick his fights carefully. He can’t do much for now about the EU opening negotiations with Ukraine, so best not to try. For a similar reason, the Kremlin dismissed the moves by Finland and Sweden to join Nato as being irrelevant, despite previous lurid warnings of the terrible fate awaiting those countries should they take such a step (and the assumption by some Western geopoliticians that Nato enlargement is all Putin really cares about). This is another development he can’t do much about and so is inclined to let pass.
Which may be just as well because the challenges keep on coming. One of the most intriguing moments at the forum came when Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the only head of state to join Putin on stage, made it clear that his country would not recognise the “quasi-governments” in the Donbas, as well as those in South Ossetia or Abkhazia (in Georgia) or, for that matter, Taiwan. “If the right to self-determination is to be realised everywhere on the planet, then instead of 193 governments on Earth, there will be 500 or 600… Of course, it will be chaos.” This was not what the audience – or Putin – expected to hear.
This led to the normal warnings that because Kazakhstan has a large Russian-speaking population Russia was bound to take an interest, and if it started to be unfriendly, Russia could get very interested indeed. Simonyan’s husband and fellow propagandist, Tigran Keosayan, had, even before the forum, complained about Kazakhstan’s “ingratitude” after it cancelled a Victory Day parade on 9 May, and suggested that Tokayev “look carefully at what is happening in Ukraine”. (The reference to ingratitude was to the brief Russian-led intervention last January to help put down civil unrest.) Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Moldova and Georgia are exploring their own links with the EU (with Georgia’s population apparently more enthusiastic than its government), while Belarus, which is now stuck in an unequal alliance with Russia, has avoided committing forces to the war.
[See also: History’s long shadow falls over Russia and Ukraine]
As Tom McTague noted in an essay reflecting on his recent travels in Kyrgyzstan, it is only in Russia that there is any nostalgia for the old Soviet Union, and Putin has not found a way to develop a positive appeal. ”The question for Russia,” he asked, “is, right now, what does it have to attract its former colonies beyond history? It is not rich enough, advanced enough, or ideologically compelling enough. Nor does it show the kind of love that suggests it would preside over a happy family.” Who looks at Belarus or Crimea, let alone the Donbas, and thinks there is something there to emulate? Hence the Kremlin’s dependence upon coercion and control. Putin only knows the way of the bully. When an individual, or a state, or any other entity, starts on a path that he doesn’t like, all he can do is threaten. If his threats lack credibility, then he has to let it pass.
Lithuania and Kaliningrad
This can be seen with the latest flashpoint in Russia’s conflict with the West. The Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, home to 430,000 people, is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. This was formerly the German city of Königsberg, captured by Soviet forces right at the end of the Second World War and valued by Moscow for its Baltic port. Because it is home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet, it is territory of strategic importance. Its position became exposed when Poland and Lithuania joined Nato. This vulnerability has now been underlined as the Lithuanian government has blocked deliveries of coal, metals, construction materials and advanced technology through its territory by means of both rail and road. This move is in line with, and does not go beyond, EU sanctions, does not stop the movement of passengers and unsanctioned goods, and does not preclude Russia supplying Kaliningrad by sea.
Dmitry Peskov – the Kremlin spokesman who has spent a lot of his recent career warning other states about one thing or another – has reported that Russia is preparing “retaliatory measures”. Putin’s close buddy and security council secretary Nikolai Patrushev has vowed that these measures, yet to be determined, “will have a serious negative impact on the Lithuanian population”. It’s not clear what options are available. Not a lot of Lithuanian goods travel through Russia these days, while the option to cut off gas supplies is negated by the fact that Lithuania stopped taking Russian gas in April, having had the foresight after 2015, when nearly all of its gas supplies were imported from Russia, to have built an off-shore liquefied natural gas import terminal in the port city of Klaipeda. So Moscow is short of available economic forms of coercion. The move has been described on Russian TV as tantamount to a declaration of war, but retaliatory military action against a Nato country would be a bold and dangerous step to take simply because of the implementation of sanctions which Moscow insists in general are really no big deal.
Paralysis in Moscow
All this fits in with the gradual erosion of Putin’s authority in Russia along the lines recently outlined by Tatiana Stanovaya, analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Russian elites are struggling to come to terms with a war that Putin began without consultation and which he does not know how to end on favourable terms. He is unwilling to take the even greater risks required to secure a military victory (assuming that these could succeed), yet unable to accept anything that would look like a defeat. Because no one among the elite has a clue how to escape this conundrum or, even if they did, has the political courage and opportunity to move against Putin, the odds of him being overthrown in a coup are low. Instead, there is paralysis as internal divisions grow along with the consequential problems caused by the war. Putin, Stanovaya notes, “has created a situation for which he was not prepared and which he doesn’t know how to deal with, while the Russian power system that he himself built is constructed in such a way as to prevent effective decisions from being made collectively and in a balanced way”.
This paralysis is reflected in the conduct of the war. Russian tactics and strategy remain inflexible and predictable. Having identified Severodonetsk as a vital objective, just as Mariupol was before, failure cannot be contemplated, and so all available firepower and manpower has been hurled at it to break the Ukrainian resistance and then prevent the defenders retreating. This has come at a heavy cost for Ukraine and questions have been asked in Kyiv about the wisdom of committing so much of its own military capability to the defence of a city that has acquired strategic relevance only because it seems to matter so much to Moscow. Yet, the Ukrainian military insists, the effort has been worthwhile: Russian forces have suffered the greater attrition; this defence has delayed advances elsewhere, as Ukraine waits for – and now starts to receive – much-needed Western weaponry; and it has diverted Russian capabilities from places where Ukraine is now able to start moving on to the offensive. Evidence of this offensive is seen in Ukrainian advances in the Kherson area.
[See also: Is Vladimir Putin dead?]
A test of endurance
From the start of this crisis Russia has acted to demonstrate its strength and show why it deserves to be treated at all times like a great power, but its power is limited and it is now facing the possibility that it really has bitten off more than it can chew. None of this means an early end to the war. Nor does it mean that things will get easier for Ukraine. Putin’s default strategy is always to inflict pain even if he can achieve little else. The risk of more reckless action cannot be precluded. Nonetheless, we should not assume that Russia is inexhaustible or, just because we cannot pick a winner in the battle at the moment, that the war is destined for a prolonged stalemate.
The political paralysis affects Russia’s military strategy. Putin is unwilling to accept defeat and see what he can extract by way of concessions for an offer to withdraw. Nor does he want to mobilise all of Russian society for the war effort, so the limits on troop numbers will remain, and will affect operations more as those that are lost cannot be replaced and Russian advantages in firepower begin to be eroded. He can propose a ceasefire to allow him to hold the territory already taken but he knows that will be rejected by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, unless it is accompanied by a promise of withdrawal.
Putin’s best hope, in pressing on with his current strategy, is that at some point, preferably quite soon, Ukraine’s Western supporters will tire of the war and its economic costs and urge Kyiv to accept some territorial compromise. Here his problem is that there is also paralysis of a different sort on the Western side. The economic costs are high, but they have already been incurred. The commitment to Ukraine, and to ensuring that Russia does not win its war of conquest, has been made. So long as Ukraine continues to fight, and suffer the costs, then even leaders who think a compromise might at some point be necessary are holding their tongues. The West is settling in for the long haul, looking for ways to keep Ukraine supplied with the weapons and ammunition it needs, while adjusting foreign policies to be able to concentrate on the war. The fight can be presented as a conflict between democracy and autocracy, but at its core it is also now about the future of the European security order, and if that means improving relations with autocracies, whether in urging the Saudis to pump more oil or keeping relations with China calm, then so be it.
Which means that the most salient test of endurance is still on the field of battle. When Russia began to suffer setbacks, after the initial offensive in February, the Ministry of Defence moved smartly to recast the operation as being solely about the Donbas. The problems the Russian military has faced over the last couple of months have not so much resulted from Ukrainian counter-offensives as the meagre territorial gains it has achieved for such an enormous effort. If it is the case that the Ukrainian armed forces are beginning to increase the tempo of their offensive operations, then Russian commanders will face a new set of challenges. It may be that their troops will be as tenacious in defence as their Ukrainian counterparts, even as they take heavy blows, but it is as likely that they will not do so with the same conviction. Problems of morale and disaffection may begin to tell. From the start of this war, its most important feature has been the asymmetry of motivation. In the end the Ukrainians are fighting because they have no other choice. Russians have the option of going home.
[See also: Nato must keep faith with Ukraine]

The past two and a half years have been a global crash course in infection prevention. They've also been a crash course in basic math: Since the arrival of this coronavirus, people have been asked to count the meters and feet that separate one nose from the next; they’ve tabulated the days that distance them from their most recent vaccine dose, calculated the minutes they can spend unmasked, and added up the hours that have passed since their last negative test.What unites many of these numbers is the tendency, especially in the United States, to pick thresholds and view them as binaries: above this, mask; below this, don’t; after this, exposed, before this, safe. But some of the COVID numbers that have stuck most stubbornly in our brains these past 20-odd months are now disastrously out of date. The virus has changed; we, its hosts, have as well. So, too, then, must the playbook that governs our pandemic strategies. With black-and-white, yes-or-no thinking, “we do ourselves a disservice,” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University, told me. Binary communication “has been one of the biggest failures of how we’ve managed the pandemic,” Mónica Feliú-Mójer, of the nonprofit Ciencia Puerto Rico, told me.Here, then, are five of the most memorable numerical shorthands we’ve cooked up for COVID, most of them old, some a bit newer. It’s long past time that we forget them all.2 doses = fully vaccinatedAt the start of the vaccination campaign, getting dosed up was relatively straightforward. In the United States, a pair of Pfizer or Moderna shots (or just one Johnson & Johnson), then a quick two-week wait, and boom: full vaccination, and that was that. The phrase became a fixture on the CDC website and national data trackers; it spurred vaccine mandates and, for a time in the spring and summer of 2021, green-lit the immunized to doff their masks indoors.Then came the boosters. Experts now know that these additional shots are essential to warding off antibody-dodging variants such as the many members of the Omicron clan. Some Americans are months past their fifth COVID shot, and the nation’s leaders are weighing whether vaccinated people will need to dose up again in the fall. To accommodate those additions, the CDC has, in recent public communications, tried to shift its terminology toward “up to date.” Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, prefers that phrase, because it “allows for flexibility” as recommendations evolve. It also more effectively nods at the range of protection that vaccination affords, depending on how many doses someone’s gotten and when their most recent dose was.But fully vaccinated has been hard to shake, even for the CDC. The agency, which did not respond to requests for comment, maintains that the original definition “has not changed,” and the term still features heavily on CDC websites.  Maybe part of the stubbornness is sheerly linguistic: Up to date means something different to everyone, depending on age, eligibility, health status, and vaccine brand. Fully vaccinated is also grabby in a way that up to date is not. It carries the alluring air of completion, suggesting that “you’re actually done with the vaccine series,” maybe even the pandemic overall, Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and adviser at the Pandemic Prevention Institute, told me. All of this may be partly why that uptake of boosters—which sound optional, even trivial, compared with the first two shots—remains miserably low in the U.S.< 6 feet + > 15 minutes = close contactSince the pandemic’s early days, Americans have been taught to benchmark our risk of exposure to the virus by two metrics: proximity and duration. Get within six feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes over a 24-hour period, and congratulations—you’ve had a “close contact.” Even now, the CDC advises that this kind of encounter should trigger 10 full days of masking and, depending on your vaccination status and recent infection history, a test and/or a five-day quarantine.Thresholds such as these made some sense when researchers weren’t yet savvy to the virus’s main modes of transmission, and at least some efforts were made to contact trace, Jetelina told me. “You needed some metric so you could call people.” Nearly all contact-tracing attempts, though, have long since fizzled out. And scientists have known for years that SARS-CoV-2 can hitch a ride in bubbles of spittle and snot small enough to drift across rooms and remain aloft for hours, especially in poorly ventilated indoor spaces. Pathogens don’t slam up against a magic wall “at the six-foot mark,” Malaty Rivera said. Nor will viruses bide their time for 14 minutes and 59 seconds before launching themselves noseward at 15 minutes on the dot. Exposure is a spectrum of high to low risk” that factors in, yes, proximity and duration, but also venue, ventilation, mask quality, and more, Popescu said. “It’s not just ‘exposed’ or ‘not exposed.’”The CDC acknowledges that SARS-CoV-2 can move beyond six feet—but the scientific justification behind its guidelines on preventing transmission was last updated in May 2021, just before the Delta variant bamboozled the nation. Since then, the coronavirus has gotten even more contagious and crafty—better at transmitting, better at dodging the antibodies that people raise. “Even passing interactions and encounters have led to people becoming exposed and infected,” Malaty Rivera said, especially if people are indoors and a ton of virus is being volleyed about. And yet, the mantra of “six feet, 15 minutes” has stayed. Schools have even cut the guidance in half, counting close contact only when children are less than three feet apart.5 days = end of isolationIn the beginning, isolation numbers loomed large: Infected people had to wait at least 10 days after their symptoms began, or after their first positive test result, before they could reenter the world. Then, at the start of 2022, the CDC slashed the duration of isolation to just five days for people with mild or asymptomatic cases (regardless of vaccination status), as long as they kept masking and avoided travel through Day 10. You didn’t even need a negative test to go about your life.This guideline has been perpetually behind the times. For much of 2021, truncating isolation might have made sense for vaccinated people, who clear the coronavirus faster than folks who haven’t gotten their shots, especially if negative tests confirmed the safety of exit. But only after the rise of Omicron did the guidance change—and it was based mostly on pre-Omicron data. The shift in guidance arrived just in time for the coronavirus to bust it wide open. After nearly two years of COVID symptoms starting around the time people first began to test positive, test positivity with Omicron and various iterations is now quite frequently lagging the onset of illness. Many people now report strings of negative results early in their symptom course, then positives that persist into their sixth, seventh, or eighth day of sickness or later, raising the possibility that they remain quite contagious past when formal isolation may end. “I find it impossible to believe you can end isolation without testing,” Malaty Rivera said.[Read: A negative COVID test has never been so meaningless]And yet, many workplaces have already embraced the five-day rule with no exit test, using that timeline as the basis for when employees should return. With masks largely gone, and paid sick leave so uncommon, defaulting to five days could drive more transmission—in some cases, likely inviting people back into public when they’re at their infectious peak.Infection + 90 days = no retestAccording to CDC guidelines, people who have caught SARS-CoV-2 don’t need to test or quarantine if they’re exposed again within 90 days of their initial infection. This recommendation, which appeared in the pandemic’s first year, was designed in part to address the positives that can crop up on PCR tests in the weeks after people stop feeling sick. But the CDC also touts the “low risk of subsequent infection for at least 6 months” on one of its pages, last updated in October 2021. Reinfections “can occur” within 90 days, but that’s “early.”That framing might have once been pretty solid, before the era of widespread at-home antigen testing—and before the rise of antibody-dodging variants, Popescu said. However, reinfections have gotten more common, and far closer together. They were happening even in the era of Delta; now, with so many immunity-evading Omicron offshoots at the helm, and masks and other mitigation matters mostly vanished, they’ve become a quite-frequent fixture. The number of people who have caught the virus twice within just a matter of weeks “has grown so much that we should forget these windows,” Malaty Rivera said. Even the Department of Health and Human Services secretary recently tested positive twice in the same month.[Read: You are going to get COVID again … and again … and again]And yet, with these guidelines in place, many people have been lulled by the promise of rock-solid post-infection immunity, assuming that a new crop of symptoms are “anything but COVID,” Malaty Rivera said. That thinking is not only allowing a growing share of contagious coronavirus cases to go undetected—it’s also stymieing the study of reinfection dynamics writ large. Many studies, including those cited by the CDC in its guidance, won’t even count reinfections earlier than 90 days. But the 90-day number, Malaty Rivera said, is no longer relevant. “It has to be deleted from people’s minds.”200 cases + 10 hospital admissions per 100,000 = mask?As obsolete as some of America’s COVID calculations may be, updates aren’t a universal win, either. Take the most recent iteration of mask recommendations from the CDC. The agency would like everyone to mask indoors if their county hits a “high” COVID community level, a threshold that is met only when the region logs 200 or more infections per 100,000 people in one week, and if local hospitals see more than 10 COVID-related admissions per 100,000 people in a week, or fill at least 15 percent of their inpatient beds. Currently, roughly 10 percent of U.S. counties are in the “high” category.[Read: The Biden administration killed America’s collective pandemic approach]But waiting to just suggest masks at those levels of transmission and hospitalization—not even require them—leaves far too much time for widespread disease, disability, even death, experts told me. A bar that high still lets long COVID slip through; it continues to imperil the vulnerable, immunocompromised, and elderly, who may not get the full benefit of vaccines. Case rates, Malaty Rivera pointed out, are also a terrible yardstick right now because so many people have been testing at home and not reporting the results to public-health agencies.In Puerto Rico, Feliú-Mójer and her colleagues have been struggling to reignite enthusiasm for mask wearing as their community battles its second-largest case wave since the start of the pandemic. A better system would flip on protections earlier—taking a preventive approach, rather than scrambling to react. But that’s a difficult stance for jurisdictions to assume “when the official map looks so green and a little yellow,” Feliú-Mójer said. It’s the problem of thresholds striking once again: No one cares to take up arms anew against the virus until the damage is already done. That’s made the pandemic that much easier to tune out—it’s either here in full force, the thinking goes, or it’s totally gone. If only the calculus were that simple.

The Biden administration faces a crucial test of its willingness to confront the genocide in China. This week, a new U.S. law meant to cripple China’s ability to profit from the forced labor of Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities went into effect. The question is whether President Biden will fully implement it — or squander America’s best and perhaps last chance to end our complicity in these atrocities.

Congress passed and Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act last December. It bans imports of any products connected to forced-labor practices in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, part of what the Biden administration has determined to be an ongoing genocide. Several officials, congressional staffers and experts have told me that some administration figures and business interests are fighting against strict implementation of the law. Those opposed are the same interests that fought long and hard to thwart its passage, as detailed in a new seven-part investigation released by the Dispatch. They are not about to stop now.

“The implementation will be contested, just as everything Xinjiang-related was contested last year,” said Michael Sobolik, a fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. “The mechanics are different, but the battle remains the same: climate interests pitted against human rights concerns.”

Some Biden officials, including State Department climate envoy John F. Kerry, have argued internally since last year that human rights concerns should not stand in the way of working with China on climate change. (Asked about this trade-off last year, Kerry said that “life is always full of tough choices.”) Beijing itself promotes this linkage, demanding the United States back off human rights criticism before it will cooperate on climate change.

What’s different this year is that Biden faces an economic crisis that threatens Democratic control of Congress and his own reelection. This seems to be causing the White House to ease off its promise to combat Uyghur forced labor to the full extent of its ability. This month, the White House issued an emergency declaration that granted a 24-month tariffs waiver for solar panels containing components from Xinjiang, even though that action undermined an ongoing Commerce Department investigation.

The new law requires that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detain any shipment that comes from Xinjiang or has components connected to Xinjiang, which are now presumed to be tainted with forced labor unless the importers can prove otherwise. Some U.S. corporations are already complaining that the requirement is too onerous, because proving that the products are unconnected to abuses is near impossible.

China doesn’t allow independent auditing of Xinjiang factories and denies all accusations of abusing Uyghurs. This is contradicted by mountains of evidence showing that the Chinese government has systematically imprisoned millions of Uyghurs and other minorities, compelled tens of thousands of them into forced labor, separated families, quashed their religious and cultural freedom, and used forced sterilization, all in service of their genocidal aims.

To be sure, if the law were enforced as written, there would be short-term disruptions to several industries, involving everything from cotton to electric vehicles. But that’s the whole point. Unless businesses are compelled to scrub their supply chains of products made with forced labor, they won’t act. That’s why Congress stepped in.

These corporations can’t say they didn’t have fair warning. Since the law was passed, CBP and the Department of Homeland Security’s task force on forced labor have engaged with industry extensively on the new rules. Homeland Security released a list of Chinese companies that use forced labor in Xinjiang or transport forced workers to other parts of China. Many of these Chinese entities were already banned in previous government actions.

“Without full and effective implementation, businesses will continue to profit from slave labor, and American consumers will continue to be complicit in the genocide,” said Uyghur American Nury Turkel, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “We cannot carry on with business as usual, empowering the Chinese Communist Party to commit human rights abuses with impunity.”

Human rights considerations aside, China’s rampant use of cheap forced labor hinders the competitiveness of U.S. solar firms, who must pay workers market rates. Moreover, U.S. dependence on these Chinese supply chains is an increasingly obvious national security vulnerability.

Importing solar panels from China is of minimal value to solving climate change anyway, given that China’s solar industry factories run largely on dirty coal. It’s also naive to think that if the United States tones down its criticism on human rights that Beijing will cooperate on climate change in any meaningful way.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised this week to implement the new law and rally “allies and partners” to the cause. Congress will be watching closely to hold the administration to that commitment. If the White House provides enough wiggle room for China’s forced-labor industry to continue with business as usual, the entire effort will be rendered useless — and the prospects for the Uyghurs and other victims will further darken.

I continue to be puzzled by President Biden’s poor approval ratings. He is an affable man, clearly decent, and many of his policies and proposed policies are popular. So what explains his astonishingly low approval ratings, which are adding to the sense of doom felt by Democrats as they approach the midterm elections?

Of course inflation is the dominant explanation. But Biden’s fall preceded it. One answer might be found by unpacking the numbers. The most significant factor in Biden’s decline is a falloff in approval by Democrats and independents. Since the start of his presidency, Biden has gone from a 98 percent approval rating to 85 percent among Democrats, according to Gallup’s numbers. As of early this year, he has dropped significantly among groups often thought of as very left-wing — most notably among the youngest voters (Gen Z and millennials). He also lost a lot of ground with African Americans, Hispanics and the poorest Americans. By contrast, at this point in his presidency, Donald Trump had dropped a mere two points in his approval rating among Republicans, from 89 percent to 87 percent.

Biden does not seem in charge of the Democratic Party in the way that Trump and even George W. Bush dominated their own parties. This is a modern version of an old story. “I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat,” quipped humorist Will Rogers in the 1930s. The left wing of the party has been perennially dissatisfied by its own incumbent and often rebelled against him. It broke with Lyndon B. Johnson on the Vietnam War and doomed his chances for reelection, as well as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s shot at the presidency. It revolted against Jimmy Carter, with Edward M. Kennedy running for the nomination against a sitting president. It attacked Bill Clinton for his strategy of accommodation toward conservatives and “triangulation.”

During Barack Obama’s presidency, there was less of an open rebellion. Even so, the consensus view of that presidency among liberal Democrats these days is that Obama was too much of a cautious centrist. You have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt to find a time when a Democratic president truly dominated his party — and even then, there was liberal discontent with FDR.

The second problem that Biden faces is that whatever he might say about his economic policies, which do in fact help the poor and working class, people don’t tend to vote on detailed policy analyses. To me, one of the most striking things about the rise of populism in our times is that it is driven by cultural issues. It is strange at some level, but in uncertain times — even in economically uncertain times — instead of moving left on economics, people tend to move right on culture. They feel unmoored and worry that they are losing the world in which they grew up.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair has often explained that if you cannot give people some sense of security on these issues, then they will simply not listen to the left on economics — even when they might well agree with the policies being proposed. But the left has to first establish that it is not culturally revolutionary. That’s why Clinton in 1996 declared in his State of the Union address that public schools in America should be allowed to require uniforms. Now, the federal government has little authority over public education, which is mostly handled by states. And this might seem a trivial topic. But Clinton was signaling to the country — “I’m not a radical hippie from the 1960s; I’m even in favor of school uniforms.” He won reelection that year by 220 electoral votes and an 8.5 percentage point popular-vote margin, a bigger victory than any candidate has received since 1984.

If you watch how Republicans are running, you can see where they think their opponents are weak. Yes, they rail about inflation, but beyond that they offer a litany of attacks on woke schools and companies, cancel culture, radical changes in education and so on. As James Carville has explained, when members of the Democratic left talk about social issues, they leave much of the country alienated by their very language — see “Latinx” or “communities of color.” A 2021 poll found that just 4 percent of Hispanic Americans prefer the term “Latinx.” If the left wants to be the party of the working class and minorities, surely it should pay attention to what those people are saying?

Cultural and social issues are fraught with challenges. Unlike economics, where you can always split the difference, it’s hard to do that on abortion, gay rights, etc. So symbolism, language and messaging become very important. And in all of this, the Democrats often seem to cater to their most extreme supporters and lose the average person on the street.

Biden’s supporters will say he has never endorsed any radical social or cultural policies. Perhaps that’s true, but he also hasn’t confronted people in his party about them, either, the way Clinton and Blair did. Nor has he tried to consciously signal where he stands on some of these issues. Perhaps he needs to make a speech endorsing school uniforms.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.I am appalled, as so many Americans are, that Donald Trump and his team assaulted our elections, but today I’m thinking about how the assault on election officials across the nation is an even deeper wound that will take years to heal.But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.
Hong Kong’s big lie is that it is still free.
What my mom told me about America before Roe.
An experimental gene therapy had a surprising side effect—a new hair color.
I hadn’t planned on writing about the January 6 investigation today. But that was before I watched the testimony of Rusty Bowers, Brad Raffensperger, Gabriel Sterling, Shaye Moss, and Ruby Freeman.Their stories of being targeted with threats, harassment, and vile accusations are a reminder of how much Trump and his team of malignant election fabulists have taken from the civic life of the United States. I’ve spent most of my career studying authoritarian governments, and I’ve spent a lot of time in some repressive places, from Greece under a military junta as a boy to the Soviet Union as an adult. I always felt, on returning to the United States, that I had returned to a fortress of democratic stability and civic cooperation.I no longer feel that way.American elections have never been perfect. Any member of a visible minority knows this; anyone who’s seen a political machine in action knows it too. (I worked in politics in Massachusetts. Gerrymandering is literally named for one of our governors.) But American elections are fair and free, even if it is fashionable among cynics at home and observers abroad to dismiss such sentiments.Our elections work because they are run by ordinary citizens at the state and local level who either were elected or volunteered to help administer the vote as a matter of civic duty. This is a wondrous thing: community volunteers overseeing the vote and counting the results. I love voting in person for just this reason; having seen people in other nations too terrified even to talk about politics, it always filled me with quiet joy to have my fellow townspeople hand me a ballot and protect my privacy while I voted.Trump and his people, however, have made it clear that democracy is a meaningless word. They want what they want and they will hurt anyone who gets in their way. Their goal is to make public service a hazardous undertaking, to create an environment in which people working on elections—their fellow American citizens—fear for their lives if they don’t cough up the results they want.These unhinged bullies are telling other Americans that it is not safe to defy them at the ballot box, whether you’re a top elected official or a rank-and-file volunteer—or even if you’re the vice president of the United States, as Mike Pence learned while hiding from the mob on January 6.This is obscene. Americans, I think, have always understood that running for a high-profile or national office like the presidency entails some danger from unstable people; that’s why we think so highly of the men and women of the Secret Service who will put themselves in harm’s way even for candidates. But it is a long-standing tradition in American politics that serving as an election worker or a school-committee member or a local alderman is not a life-threatening proposition.Trump and people like him want to destroy that sense of safety, and their efforts are having an effect: I was talking with a close friend recently who admitted to me that she might vote by mail for the next few elections because it could be risky to visit actual polling places. This is the future that Trump and his supporters want, in which only the loyalists show up either to work the polls or to cast a vote, while the rest of us put a stamp on an envelope, avoid public engagement, and retreat to the safety of our homes.The fight for democracy in America might soon look yet again like the fight for racial and political equality in the 1950s and 1960s, when racist state and local governments denied the franchise to Black Americans. Those battles were won not only in legislatures and courts but in public by people showing up together and demanding to exercise their rights as citizens. In the coming elections, Trump and a claque of liars and opportunists will continue their efforts to hollow out American democracy.Will the voters stop them?Related:
Trump’s next coup has already begun.
Rusty Bowers and the Republican conundrum in 2024
President Joe Biden called on Congress to suspend the federal gas tax for three months.
Afghanistan experienced its deadliest earthquake in 20 years. At least 1,000 people have died.
Senators have reached a bipartisan compromise on a gun-violence-prevention bill.
Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf reflects on Dave Chapelle, Matthew Yglesias, and when the punishment doesn’t fit the joke.
Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg revisits his profile of the man likely to become Israel's next leader.
Brooklyn, Everywhere: Xochitl Gonzalez explains what not to say to women achieving their dreams.
Photograph by Chase Castor for The Atlantic
Does the Jason Kander Story Have a Third Act?Story by John Hendrickson
There’s a saying, though it’s more of a whisper, that politicians are damaged people. That those who run for office have a pathological need for validation, that they’re willing to go to obscene lengths to get attention, even if it means putting themselves or their family at risk. Jason Kander is ready to admit that all of this is true.
How to be a good person without annoying everyone.
Malls aren’t actually dying.
Refusing to acknowledge the crime problem won’t help it go away.
Culture BreakRead. “Black Flamingo,” a poem about how we all deserve a vibrant life.Watch. Half of the appeal of Hulu’s Luther? Idris Elba in a gray tweed jacket.Or try something else from our critic’s 2020 list of undersung crime shows.Listen. Beyoncé and Drake usher in a summer of dancing—and darkness.Play our daily crossword.Today is the 81st anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a war of extermination that took tens of millions of Soviet lives. (The Russians, of course, are now attacking the very same cities and towns once occupied by Nazis and soaking the ground with the blood of other Soviet descendants.) If you’d like an eight-minute musical history of the Eastern Front, Al Stewart wrote one in 1973, complete with Russian-inspired musical themes. Stewart is still performing—I saw him in April—and he prides himself on telling accurate historical stories through his music. Give his “Roads to Moscow” a listen.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

(Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,I was never a very eager student in law school but did absorb a few enduring lessons in between all the video games and beer pong. One of them came during a corporate law class, in which the professor emphasized repeatedly that, while companies and investors surely care about a law’s substance (e.g., tax rates or whatever), they care more that the policies are crafted and applied in a consistent and predictable manner over time. In short, market actors—especially the big boys—can adjust to and plan for almost anything (and respond accordingly), as long as said thing is relatively sure to happen. High levels of economic and policy uncertainty, on the other hand, are simply a killer—invoking paralysis in a company and, by extension, the economy. I force you to endure this long windup because I’ve been thinking a lot about that law school lesson—and policy uncertainty more broadly—the recent political drama about U.S. gas prices, which in case you haven’t noticed are pretty high right now (though still off inflation-adjusted highs):Given gas prices’ political importance in the United States (for better or worse)—amplified today by broader inflationary pressures—the Biden administration has reportedly been scrambling to find a few policy levers it can pull to lower prices over the high-demand summer driving months. Just today, the president called on Congress and states to suspend gas taxes. He also just sent a sternly worded letter to major U.S. oil refiners, accusing them of profiteering during a global energy crisis and calling on the companies to produce more gasoline and diesel… or else. From the Associated Press:

Read more

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.As more truths about Donald Trump and his attempted coup come out, I fear there will be more irrational anger and threats from people who cannot bear the truth.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Beware the luxury beach resort.
Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya.
This president did everything right and still got no thanks.
Secret DoubtAs the January 6 hearings restarted today after the long weekend, I was thinking about the weird, psychotic fear that has overtaken millions of Americans. I include in those millions people who are near and dear to me, friends I have known for years who now seem to speak a different language, a kind of Fox-infused, Gish Galloping, “what-about” patois that makes no sense even if you slow it down or add punctuation.Such conversations are just part of life in divided America now. We live in a democracy, and there’s no law (nor should there be) against the willing suffocation of one’s own brain cells with television and the internet. But living in an alternate reality is unhealthy—and dangerous, as I realized yet again while watching the January 6 committee hearings and listening to the stories of Republicans, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describing the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution.And the threats don’t stop with political figures; families are now in the crosshairs. Representative Adam Kinzinger, for example, tweeted Monday about a letter he received in which the writer threatened not only to kill him, but to kill his wife and infant son.There have always been unstable people in America, and they have always done frightening things. But there seem to be a lot more of them now. Some of them are genuinely dangerous, but many more are just rage-drunk nihilists who will threaten any public figures targeted by their preferred television hosts or websites, regardless of party or policy.The more I think about it—and I spent years researching such problems while writing a book about democracy—the more I think that such people are less angry than they are terrified.Many of you will respond: Of course they’re terrified. They’re scared of demographic change, of cultural shifts, of being looked down upon for being older and uneducated in an increasingly young and educated world.All true. But I think there’s more to it.I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice.This therapy works for as long as the patient is glued to the television or computer screen. The moment someone like Bowers or Kinzinger or Liz Cheney appears and attacks the lie, the anxiety and embarrassment rise like reflux in the throat, and it must be stopped, even if it means threatening to kill the messenger.No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach.In the film adaptation of the Cold War epic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré’s fictional British intelligence officer George Smiley describes his opposite number, the Soviet spymaster Karla. Smiley knows Karla can be beaten, he says, because Karla “is a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”What this means, I regret to say, is that there will be more threats, and more violence, because there will be more truth. It’s going to be a long summer.Related:
The January 6 insurrectionist in the flower shop
Trump’s savviest aides are already headed for the exits.
The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called law enforcement’s response in Uvalde “an abject failure.”
The Supreme Court ruled against Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from a state tuition program.
This past weekend, a historic European heat wave broke daily, monthly, and all-time highs. Heavy rain also left at least 84 dead in India and Bangladesh this past week.
Galaxy Brain: Google has quietly crushed cherished parts of the internet, Charlie Warzel argues.
I Have Notes: Nicole Chung reflects on writing in the midst of emotional and physical pain.
Up for Debate: Eight readers pick their poison—high inflation or a recession.
The Atlantic; Antoine Antoniol / Getty
Sheryl Sandberg and the Crackling Hellfire of Corporate AmericaStory by Caitlin Flanagan
In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers—in the halcyon days when we thought it was just for sharing pictures of the grandkids and ruining marriages.
Rising interest rates are ending an era in which the rich got much, much richer.
Dave Chappelle’s not kidding.
Squirrels could make monkeypox a forever problem.
Culture BreakRead. “A Substitution,” a short story about a play, middle age, and a Manhattan storage unit. Then check out this interview with the author.Watch. Chris Hemsworth transforms from hero to villain in Spiderhead, a new star-studded Netflix thriller.Listen. On this week’s episode of How to Start Over, our hosts ask when it’s time to end a marriage.Play our daily crossword.That’s it for today. If you’re a fan of John le Carré (who died in 2020) or are new to his canon, I have a recommendation for you: Do not start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Instead, read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold from 1963, and then read his 1990 The Secret Pilgrim, which was a kind of valedictory farewell from Smiley as he recounts his entire career to a group of young spies in training. Perfect summer books, both of them.P.S.: If you’ve seen an Atlantic headline about “the heroism of Biden’s bike fall” circulating on social media, it’s not real. It seems to be a parody of this edition of The Atlantic Daily—and if so, it’s a pretty good one—but The Atlantic did not actually publish this.— TomKatherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

With gas prices averaging near $5 a gallon and inflation holding steady at 8 percent, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percent last week in an aggressive bid to reduce consumer demand and bring inflation back down to 2 percent. The central bank said it anticipated more rate hikes in the coming months would be needed to achieve that goal. Economist Betsey Stevenson, A.M. ’99, Ph.D. ’01, is a professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. She served on the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration from 2013 to 2015 and was chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor from 2010 to 2011. Stevenson discusses the effects the new rate increase could have on consumers and the economy and whether a recession is inevitable, as some economists now warn.
Q&A
Betsey Stevenson
GAZETTE: Will the Federal Reserve’s latest interest rate hike have a meaningful effect on slowing inflation?
STEVENSON: Interest rates are still below where they were in 2018 and 2019 and yet the economy has recovered so quickly from the pandemic recession. I think what we need is a pretty quick move toward normalization, bringing us back to what you might think of as neutral monetary policy, the kind of monetary policy we had prior to the pandemic and then an assessment as to how much further the Fed will need to tighten. The problem is that it can be very jarring to raise rates all at once. And so, the Fed is trying to move quickly enough to bring inflation down, but slow enough to not accidentally push the economy so hard that it goes into recession or people lose jobs or businesses unnecessarily suffer.
And I think this task is made extra hard right now because supply, what businesses produce, is not responding to prices in quite the same way that it has in previous periods. Supply has been less responsive to the surge in demand, which also means that it might be less responsive to the increasing interest rates. The Fed’s tools only influence demand. They want to keep demand and supply in balance, but supply has been harder for them to predict over the last year.
We saw a very rapid rate rise, 75 basis points, which they hadn’t done in a very long time. At the same time, it’s not a big difference in their policy stance. What they’ve been saying all along is they’re trying to move toward neutral monetary policy over the next three to six months to a year and that they are committed to bringing long-run inflation back down to their target of 2 percent. They have also said clearly that they are monitoring and reacting to data as it becomes available. What happened was they moved a bit faster in response to recent data, but where they are in six months might not be any different than if they had done a 50-basis point rate rise.

“What the Fed needs to do is make sure that people continue to believe that we can get inflation back to 2 percent, that high inflation is not here for good,” says University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson.
Courtesy of University of Michigan

GAZETTE: How high could rates go and over what timeframe before we see inflation significantly slow down?
STEVENSON: The Fed is projecting something between 3 and 4 percent [in its benchmark rate] and that range is where most economists think they are headed. Now, that’s a lot higher than what people were expecting even three months ago, and certainly more than we thought a year ago. So, we do expect rates to get up toward 3 or 4 percent [about twice what they are now] and probably to stay there into 2023. But if inflation doesn’t begin to slow down as predicted, then rates could go higher.
If you look at the projections coming out of the Federal Open Market Committee meeting, you see a wider range of projections for 2024 than 2022. That wider range of projections reflects the fact that some people are worried it is going to take longer to get inflation under control.
I have no reason to be outside the range of projections that the FOMC has already put out there. But I do think it is reasonable to ask whether the range of projections should be even wider, given the massive amount of uncertainty that we’re facing in the global economy right now. The reason I didn’t expect inflation to get as high as it did is that I didn’t expect Putin to invade Ukraine and for global energy prices to soar. And I also expected that supply chain issues like the chip shortage would resolve a lot faster. Because I was expecting a faster resolution to our supply chain problems, I expected that we’d see more of the kind of glut of goods we’re starting to see retailers telling us that they’re having.  I expected that kind of buildup of excess inventories could be more widespread and in that situation there would downward pressure on prices. I think it’s still possible that we see some unclogging of supply chains happen quite rapidly, putting downward pressure on prices. In that case, inflation will resolve faster. However, it’s also possible that we continue to see lockdowns such as what we have recently seen in China over the next year or two and we could continue to see war in oil producing countries. These global challenges limit supply and make it harder to bring prices under control.
GAZETTE: In explaining this latest rate hike, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said the Fed “understands the hardship that inflation is causing.” But rising interest rates also cause hardships for consumers in the form of higher interest rates for credit cards, auto and student loans, and indirectly, mortgages, which are close to 6 percent now, double where they were last year. Does the effort to slow inflation have the potential to cause more harm than good?
STEVENSON: I had a lot more patience for higher inflation in 2021 and even in early 2022 precisely because the effort to slow inflation — higher interest rates and slower economic growth — hurts people too. The price rises we were seeing early on were mostly driven by durable goods. The Fed raising interest rates wasn’t going to be able to directly impact the challenges with the supply of durable goods, and so, we just needed to be patient. The supply chain problems would resolve themselves, and inflation would start to get under control.
What has happened is a series of shocks have allowed inflation to not only continue, but to spill across the economy into the service sector, really into every sector. I think the most worrying thing for the Fed is people are starting to expect inflation will stay high for some time. And as you form expectations around higher inflation it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you’re expecting higher inflation, you behave as if there’s going to be higher inflation and that means trying to negotiate wage increases that reflect rising prices. If you’re a manager, just expecting that you’re going to be raising prices every quarter or every year, but you’re going to expect big price increases on a regular basis, and you start to plan for that and build it in and that becomes very hard to undo.
What the Fed needs to do is make sure that people continue to believe that we can get inflation back to 2 percent, that high inflation is not here for good, and that we don’t set up a wage-price spiral, meaning that people look at the rising price of goods, and then go into negotiations with their boss and say, “If I don’t get at least an 8.3 percent raise, I’m not even keeping up with the price of the things I buy.” So, they negotiate very high raises that reflect inflation, but in order to pay all workers that higher amount, employers end up needing to raise their prices.
If you are someone who’s trying to borrow, those higher rates can be very, very costly. And in fact, what the Fed wants you to do is think twice before you borrow. You’re tightening your belt; you’re buying fewer things. That’s exactly how we bring demand and supply back into alignment. But the only way it works is if somebody feels the pinch, and then they reduce their demand as a result. What’s frustrating is everybody wants to see prices come down, but nobody wants to be the one that feels the pinch.
GAZETTE: Many people now believe a recession is more probable than not over the next 12-18 months. Is a recession inevitable?
STEVENSON: I am by nature an optimist, but I’m not a fool, so I do understand the risks of a recession. But it’s not inevitable. The question is: How difficult will it be to achieve? We need to slow growth in demand so we’re bringing demand down toward what we can sustainably produce, and we’re increasing supply and then eventually policy helps them to meet in a nice, happy place with stable prices and full employment. We don’t need to bring demand crashing down to meet supply exactly where it is today — and that’s the recession fear.
Can the Fed navigate that? Maybe. The challenge is it’s not all about them. What’s going to happen to oil prices? If we can bring oil prices down, that’s going to help them out a lot in achieving this Goldilocks soft landing where there’s no recession. If we can figure out how to expand labor supply in a way that employers don’t feel like they are competing so hard over workers that they’re pushing wages way up. If there can be enough concern on the employer side that they can hold firm when their workers come in and say, “I’m going to quit if you don’t give me this 10 percent raise right now,” then we can slow down the inflationary pressures on the labor market side. One of the fastest ways to do that would be if we were able to bring back some of the flow of immigrants that really dried up over the last four to five years. I think there are things we can do. There are a lot of tools left.
My optimistic outtake is many businesses are still in pretty good financial shape. These rate increases are not going to wallop them. We saw the savings rate come down recently, but household and business balance sheets are still pretty flush. We’ve got really low unemployment, lots of people are working, so they’ve got cash coming in. So, as these rate increases are coming in, they’re not coming in to weakened households, in to weakened businesses. They’re coming into pretty strong households and pretty strong businesses. That’s where I think the opportunity for success lies.

A massive federal bailout of state and local governments during the pandemic had a negligible effect on overall employment levels despite costing taxpayers an estimated $855,000 per job saved.
That's the bottom line of a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published this week. In the paper, a trio of researchers attempted to determine the effectiveness of nearly $1 trillion in pandemic-era aid distributed to state and local governments—the majority of which was delivered as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March 2021.
Despite the eye-watering price tag, however, the stimulus spending had only "a modest impact on government employment and has not translated into detectable gains for private businesses or for states' overall economic recoveries," conclude University of California, San Diego economists Jeffrey Clemens and Philip Hoxie and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Stan Veuger, the paper's three authors.
The aid to states and local governments did not meaningfully affect the broader economy either, the paper argues, in part because of other government responses to the pandemic. "Both voluntary and mandated limits on economic activity inhibit standard transmission mechanisms that can make fiscal stimulus effective under other circumstances," Clemens wrote on Twitter.
The case for bailing out state and local governments was always paper-thin. Despite fears of massive budget shortfalls due to a combination of government-imposed lockdowns and changing consumer behavior during the pandemic, those deficits mostly did not materialize. Before the American Rescue Plan passed, there was widespread skepticism about the proposed bailout, in part because three other pandemic-era spending bills had already sent about $360 billion in aid to states and localities.
But instead of stimulating the economy or filling budget holes that mostly didn't exist, the aid to states and local governments just left them flush with cash. As Reason has reported, some of that money was spent on unrelated things like money-losing, government-owned golf courses.
And while saving jobs or preventing layoffs was not the sole purpose of the American Rescue Plan's spending on state and local governments, that was and remains a centrally stated goal of the bailout. "These funds ensure that governments across the country have the flexibility they need to vaccinate their communities, keep schools open, support small businesses, prevent layoffs, and ensure a long-term recovery," Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in January of this year, as the Biden administration loosened some of the restrictions on how those funds could be used.
Even within the context of other federal emergency spending plans, the state and local bailout looks massively wasteful. Clemens, Hoxie, and Veuger point out that the $855,000 per-job figure dwarfs estimates of other emergency government bailouts.
Estimates suggest that the $770 billion Paycheck Protection Program, for example, ended up costing between $169,000 and $258,000 per job saved—though other researchers have claimed the cost was only about $50,000 per job. The Obama-era American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) ended up spending between $50,000 and $112,000 per job created or saved.
The federal bailout of state and local governments during the COVID-19 pandemic has already gone down as one of the most unnecessary responses to that crisis. Now, it might also be remembered as the most wasteful.
The post Federal COVID Aid to States and Localities Cost $855,000 Per Job Saved appeared first on Reason.com.

In the summer of 2003, just weeks after an outbreak of monkeypox sickened about 70 people across the Midwest, Mark Slifka visited “the super-spreader,” he told me, “who infected half of Wisconsin’s cases.”Chewy, a prairie dog, had by that point succumbed to the disease, which he’d almost certainly caught in an exotic-animal facility that he’d shared with infected pouched rats from Ghana. But his owners’ other prairie dog, Monkey—named for the way he clambered about his cage—had contracted the pathogen and survived. “I was a little worried,” said Slifka, an immunologist at Oregon Health & Science University. All the traits that made Monkey a charismatic pet also made him an infectious threat. He cuddled and nibbled his owners; when they left the house, he’d swaddle himself in their clothing until they returned. “It was sweet,” Slifka told me. “But I was like, ‘Can Monkey be in his cage when we come over?’”Slifka made it home pox-free, and the 2003 outbreak fizzled out. But that rash of cases was a close call: an opportunity for the virus to set up shop in a new animal host. One lasting interspecies hop, akin to the one that SARS-CoV-2 has made into white-tailed deer, and monkeypox will be “with us forever” in the U.S., says Barbara Han, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute, in New York. In Central and West Africa, where the virus is endemic, scientists suspect that at least a couple of rodent species intermittently slosh it into humans. And as the largest-ever epidemic of monkeypox outside of Africa in history continues to unfurl—more than 2,700 confirmed and suspected cases have been reported across roughly three dozen countries—the virus is now getting plenty more shots on goal. This time, we may not get so lucky; the geography of monkeypox might soon change.Any new leaps could reshape the future for this virus, and for us. Experts consider the possibility unlikely—“low risk, but it is a risk,” says Jeffrey Doty, a disease ecologist at the CDC. Existing animal reservoirs make some diseases near impossible to snuff out; the emergence of new ones could seed future outbreaks in places where they’re not currently common. If researchers can ID some of those animals, and keep them from mingling with us, we could head off a few of those issues. But that’s a big if. With so many susceptible animals out there, figuring out which ones harbor the virus could send researchers on a yearslong race, without a clear finish line.Scientists first discovered monkeypox in the 1950s, in two species of monkeys housed at a Danish animal facility; hence the name, which will likely change soon. But in the decades since, the best evidence of the virus lingering in animals has been tugged from rodents in Central and West Africa, including rope squirrels, sun squirrels, Gambian pouched rats, and dormice. All signs point to rodents being “responsible for maintaining this virus in the wild,” Doty told me, and so he and his colleagues worry most about those mammals when they ponder what animals in non-endemic regions may pose the most future risk.But a lot of rodents scurry the planet—about 2,500 species, which together make up roughly 40 percent of known mammals. Though not all species are capable of carrying monkeypox—for example, guinea pigs, golden hamsters, and common mice and rats usually don’t—many of them can.Building the case for an animal reservoir tends to require years of fieldwork, rigorous safety protocols, and a good deal of luck. For a few viruses, the reservoir narrative is relatively neat: Hendra virus, an often-fatal respiratory infection, typically moves from bats to horses to people; most hantaviruses, which can cause lethal fevers, set up shop in one rodent species each. Monkeypox, however, is far less picky than that. Experts suspect that multiple animals keep the virus percolating in the wild. Just how many, though, is anyone’s guess.[Read: Monkeypox could be nothing—or it could be the next syphilis]The gold standard for establishing a reservoir requires isolating active virus—proof that the pathogen was xeroxing itself inside of a viable host. But in the wilds of nature, “you can break your back and end up getting only five animals from a species,” Han, who’s been using machine learning to try to predict potential monkeypox reservoirs, told me. “And what’s five animals?” They may lack the virus in question, even if other members of their population harbor it; they may have been caught at an age, or during a season, when the pathogen’s not present. And among the animals that host the virus, a reservoir might not always be the most obvious species: Rodents might be among the most commonly detected carriers of monkeypox, but zoo outbreaks and laboratory experiments have shown the virus to be capable of infiltrating anteaters, rabbits, and a hefty handful of primates, along with other un-mousy mammals. In several of these species and others, scientists have found antibodies that recognize poxviruses, hinting at past exposures; they’ve even uncovered the virus’s DNA. Only twice, though, has anyone found active virus in wild animals: a rope squirrel from the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1980s, and a sooty mangabey, found in Côte d’Ivoire about a decade ago.Even those cases weren’t slam dunks. It takes more to “figure out which one is a reservoir, versus which ones get infected, but aren’t actually responsible for maintaining circulation of the virus in people,” Jamie Lloyd-Smith, a disease ecologist at UCLA, told me. Just because an animal could bop the virus into us doesn’t mean that it will.For that to happen, humans need to have enough contact with the animals to make exposure likely—on routine hunts for bushmeat, for instance, or in fractured landscapes where animals forage for food in and around people’s homes. Lloyd-Smith, who has been surveying residents of the Congo, said parsing what’s risky and what’s not is tougher than it sounds: Most everyone he speaks with interacts with forest creatures all the time. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, it was the people who ate the salmon mousse at the church breakfast,’” he told me. To complicate matters further, wild and domesticated animals can act as intermediaries between humans and a true reservoir, says Stephanie Seifert, a disease ecologist at Washington State University. Researchers sometimes have to traverse webs of interaction, moving through Kevin Bacon–esque degrees of separation, to pinpoint the original source.Unveiling those natural origins is key to blocking the virus from moving onto new real estate—and, perhaps, breaking existing tenancies. In Central and West Africa, for instance, where some people’s livelihoods depend on hunting and eating wild game, “You can’t just say, ‘Don’t interact with rodents,’” Seifert told me. But with more investigation, says Clement Meseko, a veterinarian and virologist studying the human-wildlife interface at Nigeria’s National Veterinary Research Institute, perhaps experts could eventually pinpoint just a couple of species, then recommend sustainable alternatives in their place. Improved sanitation to keep rodent pests away from humans could also help. So could doling out vaccines to people who live in the high-risk regions of endemic countries—or perhaps to worrisome wild animals themselves. (Immunizing animals is a pretty lofty goal, but may still be a better alternative to culling animals, which “often doesn’t work,” Lloyd-Smith said.)[Read: Monkeypox vaccines are too gnarly for the masses]In the U.S., amid the current rash of monkeypox cases, the CDC has recommended that infected people avoid interacting with pets, livestock, and other animals altogether. Though no cat or dog has ever been known to contract the infection, “we basically know nothing about monkeypox in common companion animals,” Doty said. For now, it’s best to play it safe.And the most meaningful way to keep the virus from surging into a new animal species, Han said, “is to control the human outbreak.” Already, monkeypox’s species range is formidable, and in today’s world, humans and animals are colliding more frequently. Amid the ongoing outbreak, Meseko, who is spending the year completing a fellowship in St. Paul, Minnesota, has been taking note of “how squirrels are just free all over the place.” Whatever threat they might pose to us, “animals are also in danger from humans,” he told me.Human activity, after all, brought monkeypox to the U.S. in 2003, and into a coterie of prairie dogs that included Chewy and Monkey. “They would not have been exposed geographically without us moving around this virus,” Seifert said. And the human desire for pets brought those prairie dogs into dozens of midwestern homes. People mobilize disease; our species, too, poses an immense infectious threat to the planet. The current monkeypox outbreak, for instance, is more sprawling and human-centric than those documented in the past. And the more opportunity the virus has to infiltrate new hosts, the more opportunity it has to expand its species range. Any trickle into animals might not be detected until too late; perhaps, some experts pointed out, it already occurred long ago, seeding a reservoir that helped the ongoing epidemic erupt. “We have no evidence of that right now,” says Grant McFadden, a poxvirus expert at Arizona State University. “But that could change on a dime.”

The evolution of military power is one of the most important if underrated geopolitical changes happening in the world today. Throughout the 20th century, military power was the province of large nations. Machines dominated the battlefield, and the production of these machines, the materials that fueled them and the ordnance they used required access to complex factories and massive amounts of raw materials. This, in turn, required vast numbers of workers – and the housing and food the workers needed to function. An economy of this scale needed to produce large numbers of ships, planes, tanks and all other manners of wartime materiel, even as they required functioning economies outside the wartime economy, providing the basic necessities of life and, ideally, maintaining national morale.

Battlefields are black holes of consumption. Any nation can build a plane or tank or send a man to his death, but wars were won by nations that could build enormous numbers of planes and tanks and replace the ones that had been destroyed by the enemy – not to mention replenish the steady stream of dead soldiers.

Small nations could not engage in high-intensity war because they lacked the resources to do so. The definition of a great power, then, was a country with a large population, the agricultural system that fed it and the mineral base that could arm it. Given the deaths and damage the enemy could inflict, the key to military power was the size of the population and its resources. It also ideally had to be vast, with resources dispersed such that an enemy victory in one region would not mean a victory in all regions.

As important, successful wartime nations needed technical expertise. Aircraft, warships and tanks needed to be planned and built, and the designs needed constant upgrading in response to the technical evolutions of the enemy. This meant that great powers had large numbers of inherently scarce technicians.

After World War II, only the United States and the Soviet Union had the potential to wage war as great powers. (They were later joined by China.) Before the war, smaller powers, like Germany, the United Kingdom, France or Japan could be considered great powers too, but in the end, they either lost or participated in an alliance.

In the intervening years, there has been a vast evolution of martial technology. It was once necessary to bring a 40-ton tank 2,000 miles away to deliver 40 or 50 pounds of explosives on an enemy position. The first British bomber attack was so inaccurate that the Germans couldn’t figure out what the British target was. Ships could not see farther than the horizon, where an enemy fleet could be lurking. Special aircraft had to be launched simply to see deep. Paradoxically, the more primitive the system, the more resources were required to sustain it. The more aware of its environment and the more accurate the guidance, the lower the drain. For example, a satellite can provide an enemy’s location, and automated internal guidance systems on munitions can strike precisely. There are new satellites that belong in a new class. As a result of accuracy, a force requires fewer munitions. The concentration of manpower shifts from the active battlefield to managing intelligence and rapidly innovating technologies. War no longer required a massive population, nor does it require massive consumption of raw material.

This has significant geopolitical consequences. Small and even very small countries can wage war, particularly against older model militaries that lack the precision and range of the new class of countries. These small countries shift from a dependence on depth to time. The more room a country had, the more room it had to disperse. In the emerging model of war, the more time they have in which to react to dangers, the more effective they are. It is not a single evolution so much as a set of evolutions, from space-based intelligence to long-range autotargeted weapons to automated anti-missile systems.

We can see this evolution most clearly in Israel. Founded first on French and then American weapons, the Israeli military now has homegrown capabilities that it (ironically) can sell to others. They are designed around the principle that putting troops at risk is a possible but rare event, while using unmanned force as the dominant element of strategy. Israel has come the furthest with this strategy, but it can be seen also in places such as the United Arab Emirates and Singapore. As a result, each wields international political power far beyond what might have been expected from it during the prior era. New technologies enable small powers to engage much larger powers. The core of the force is the technologists who maintain and upgrade systems – a fraction of the manpower needed by the old definition of great powers.

Of course, manned militaries remain indispensable. But the conversion to a new mode of thought is well underway. Israel has a striking amount of regional influence, but its technology cannot fully defend against a massive force from the last era’s great power. Maintaining one culture while creating new ones sparks crises between cultures – and within budgets. The new technology is ready for operation, but by itself it is not yet proven.

Still, the evolution is underway, and that means that the definition of great power will have to change. Russia expected to defeat Ukraine with older weapons. That has not happened, at least not yet. Russia has to evolve its military. So will other large great powers if they wish to have effective forces. There is no inherent reason they can’t evolve, but their size is no longer decisive. Smaller nations can become great powers, decisive and dangerous.

For me, John Lennon’s mega-hit Imagine was always a song popular for the wrong reasons. Imagine that “the world will live as one” is the best way to end in hell.

Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of “imagine”. Imagine a world in which tensions are no longer resolved through armed conflicts … Europe persisted in this world of “imagine”, ignoring the brutal reality outside its borders. Now it’s the time to awaken.

The dream of a quick Ukrainian victory, the repetition of the initial dream of a quick Russian victory, is over. In what looks more and more as a protracted stalemate, Russia is slowly progressing, and its ultimate goal is clearly stated. There is no longer any need to read between the lines when Putin compares himself with Peter the Great: “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it … He was not taking away anything, he was returning … He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing … Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well.”

More than focus on particular issues (is Russia really just “returning”, and to what?) we should read carefully Putin’s general justification of his claim: “In order to claim some kind of leadership – I am not even talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area – any country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.”

The implication of these lines, as one commentator put it, is clear: there are two categories of state: “The sovereign and the conquered. In Putin’s imperial view, Ukraine should fall into the latter category.”

And, as it is no less clear from Russian official statements in the last months, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Finland, the Baltic states … and ultimately Europe itself “fall into the latter category”.

We now know what the call to allow Putin to “save his face” means. It means accepting not a minor territorial compromise in Donbas but Putin’s imperial ambition. The reason this ambition should be unconditionally rejected is that in today’s global world in which we are all haunted by the same catastrophes we are all in-between, in an intermediate state, neither a sovereign country nor a conquered one: to insist on full sovereignty in the face of global warming is sheer madness since our very survival hinges on tight global cooperation.

But Russia doesn’t simply ignore global warming – why was it so mad at the Scandinavian countries when they expressed their intention to join Nato? With global warming, what is at stake is the control of the Arctic passage. (That’s why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.) Due to the explosive development of China, Japan and South Korea, the main transport route will run north of Russia and Scandinavia. Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin’s imperial dream.

Those who advocate less support for Ukraine and more pressure on it to negotiate, inclusive of accepting painful territorial renunciations, like to repeat that Ukraine simply cannot win the war against Russia. True, but I see exactly in this the greatness of Ukrainian resistance: they risked the impossible, defying pragmatic calculations, and the least we owe them is full support, and to do this, we need a stronger Nato – but not as a prolongation of the US politics.

The US strategy to counteract through Europe is far from self-evident: not just Ukraine, Europe itself is becoming the place of the proxy war between US and Russia, which may well end up by a compromise between the two at Europe’s expense. There are only two ways for Europe to step out of this place: to play the game of neutrality – a short-cut to catastrophe – or to become an autonomous agent. (Just think how the situation may change if Trump wins the next US elections.)

While some leftists claim that the ongoing war is in the interest of the Nato industrial-military complex, which uses the need for new arms to avoid crisis and gain new profits, their true message to Ukraine is: OK, you are victims of a brutal aggression, but do not rely on our arms because in this way you play in the hands of the industrial-military complex …

The disorientation caused by the Ukrainian war is producing strange bedfellows like Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky who “come from opposing ends of the political spectrum – Kissinger serving as secretary of state under Republican presidents and Chomsky one of the leading leftwing intellectuals in the United States – and have frequently clashed. But when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both recently advocated for Ukraine to consider a settlement that could see it dropping claim to some land to achieve a quicker peace deal.”

In short, the two stand for the same version of “pacifism” which only works if we neglect the key fact that the war is not about Ukraine but a moment of the brutal attempt to change our entire geopolitical situation. The true target of the war is the dismantlement of the European unity advocated not only by the US conservatives and Russia but also by the European extreme right and left – at this point, in France, Melenchon meets Le Pen.

The craziest notion floating around these days is that, to counter the new polarity between the US and China (which stand for the excesses of western liberalism and oriental authoritarianism), Europe and Russia should rejoin forces and form a third “Eurasian” block based on the Christian legacy purified of its liberal excess. The very idea of an “Eurasian” third way is a form of today’s fascism.

So what will happen “when voters in Europe and America, faced with soaring energy costs and broader inflation driven by sanctions against Russia, might lose their appetite for a war that seems to have no end, with needs that are only expanding as both sides head for a protracted stalemate”? The answer is clear: at that point, the European legacy will be lost, and Europe will be de facto divided between an American and a Russian sphere of influence. In short, Europe itself will become the place of a war that seems to have no end …

What is absolutely unacceptable for a true leftist today is not only to support Russia but also to make a more “modest” neutral claim that the left is divided between pacifists and supporters of Ukraine, and that one should treat this division as a minor fact which shouldn’t affect the left’s global struggle against global capitalism.

When a country is occupied, it is the ruling class which is usually bribed to collaborate with the occupiers to maintain its privileged position, so that the struggle against the occupiers becomes a priority. The same can go for the struggle against racism; in a state of racial tension and exploitation, the only way to effectively struggle for the working class is to focus on fighting racism (this is why any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-right populism, betrays class struggle).

Today, one cannot be a leftist if one does not unequivocally stand behind Ukraine. To be a leftist who “shows understanding” for Russia is like to be one of those leftists who, before Germany attacked the Soviet Union, took seriously German “anti-imperialist” rhetoric directed at the UK and advocated neutrality in the war of Germany against France and the UK.

If the left will fail here, the game is over for it. But does this mean that the Left should simply take the side of the west, inclusive of the rightist fundamentalists who also support Ukraine?

In a speech in Dallas on 18 May 2022, while criticizing Russia’s political system, the ex-president Bush said: “The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” He quickly corrected himself: “I mean, of Ukraine,” then said “Iraq, anyway” to laughter from the crowd, and added “75”, referring to his age.

As many commentators noted, two things cannot but strike the eye in this rather obvious Freudian slip: the fact that the public received Bush’s implicit confession that the US attack on Iraq (ordered by him) was “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” with laughter, instead of treating it as an admission of a crime comparable to the Russian invasion of Ukraine; plus Bush’s enigmatic continuation of his self-correction “Iraq, anyway” – what did he mean by it? That the difference between Ukraine and Iraq doesn’t really matter? The final reference to his advanced age doesn’t affect in any way this enigma.

But the enigma is dispelled the moment we take Bush’s statement seriously and literally: yes, with all differences taken into account (Zelenskiy is not a dictator like Saddam), Bush did the same thing as Putin is now doing to Ukraine, so they should be both judged by the same standard.

On the day I am writing this, we learned from the media that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US has been approved by the UK home secretary, Priti Patel. His crime? Nothing other than to render public the crimes confessed by Bush’s slip of tongue: the documents revealed by WikiLeaks revealed how, under Bush’s presidency, “the US military had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan, while leaked Iraq war files showed 66,000 civilians had been killed, and prisoners tortured.” Crimes fully comparable with what Putin is doing in Ukraine. From today’s hindsight, we can say that WikiLeaks disclosed dozens of American Buchas and Mariupols.

So while putting Bush on trial is no less illusory than bringing Putin to the Hague tribunal, the minimum to be done by those who oppose Russian invasion of Ukraine is to demand Assange’s immediate release. Ukraine claims it fights for Europe, and Russia claims it fights for the rest of the world against western unipolar hegemony. Both claims should be rejected, and here the difference between right and left enters the stage.

From the rightist standpoint, Ukraine fights for European values against the non-European authoritarians; from the leftist standpoint, Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. That’s why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.

The most important component of not fighting cancellation is not recruiting friends to my cause. The expectation that one’s friends exhibit the “courage” to speak up on one’s behalf, the inclination to see the cancellation as a test of the friendship, which suddenly requires proofs of loyalty — these are the first step on the road to the friend purge. Here is how it goes: a few of the cancelee’s friends meet the expectation to speak up in support, but those who remain silent — which is most of them — become suspect. New, publicly aligned friends are acquired to take their place. The beleaguered cancelee now feels she sees who her “real friends” are, but in fact she has no friends anymore. All she has are allies. First she turned her friends, and perhaps even her family members, into allies; and then she acquired more allies to fill the ranks of the purged friends. The end result is a united front, but what I would call real friendship has gone missing in the bargain.

I do not want any of that. I want friends who feel free to disagree with me both publicly and privately; friends who will admonish me, gently but firmly, with whatever grain of truth there is in any accusations against me. I want friends whose minds are not tethered to my own in bonds of allegiance, but spin freely of their own accord. I love my contrarian friends, and the way their thinking traces wonderful and mysterious paths, following a logic all their own; and I cherish my conformist friends, who keep me in touch with the wisdom of most people. I want friends who ask the right questions, friends who bring me cookies, friends who help me up when I stumble, friends who expend so much attention on the inner me that they have little to spare for how I am perceived by others. I want friends, not allies. I value my public persona, but not enough to sacrifice the liberty of my friendships at its altar.

But what if, when the moment arrives, I come to see all this differently? Isn’t there a chance that when I’m in the thick of it, I’ll want “my” people to rally round me, to stand up for me, to call out my accusers, to be willing to risk their own reputations on my behalf, to show the world that I stand equipped with a team of supporters ready to fight at my side? Yes, of course.

My brief tangle with the mob taught me that it is not when I am most embattled that I see most clearly. Hence I, like Odysseus, am tying myself to the mast in advance. I commit now, publicly, in print: please don’t fight on my behalf. Don’t stand up for me. Don’t rescue my good name. Let it be tarnished. Let my reputation die.

Agnes Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

New York Times reporter Coral Davenport has uncovered the existence of the Constitution’s first article, and she appears to be scandalized by it.

In her latest dispatch, which highlights the “Republican drive to tilt courts against climate action,” Davenport chronicles the efforts of conservative lawyers and right-leaning elected officials to test the legality of climate-related regulations. Their intention is to rein in the bureaucracy—“what they call the administrative state,” the reporter writes of the plaintiffs in one such case—where the bureaucracy is acting in ways that are not authorized by Congress.

“But Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change,” Davenport remarked. For decades, Congress has “delegated authority” to the executive branch and its “specialists,” who can “respond quickly to changing science, particularly when Capitol Hill is gridlocked.” In one case that receives particular attention in Davenport’s article, the Courts have been asked to decide whether the Environmental Protection Agency can assume for itself the authority to shut down an entire sector of the power-generation industry. Conservatives think the answer is no.

Indeed, conservative legal activists could not have made a plainer case against the administrative state’s overreach than this. The legislature’s lethargy on climate change or any other exigency does not give the executive branch license to usurp its authority. Davenport’s use of “delegate” in this context also ballasts the right’s argument against bureaucratic bloat because Congress is obliged to be a jealous steward of its authority—whether the institution’s members like it or not.

The “nondelegation doctrine” and the havoc it could produce if it were applied to environmental regulations is what keeps Supreme Court experts “up at night,” according to UC Berkley Law Professor Dan Farber. Though it is rarely applied, this doctrine recently made an appearance in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s January concurrence to a ruling striking down the administration’s vaccination and testing mandates for large businesses.

Nor is the right’s campaign particularly new. Environmental regulations that do not enjoy congressional authorization and that impose an unfair cost burden on private industry have been on thin ice for years. In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down an EPA rule that would have compelled power-generating firms to absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs. In 2014, the courts took a dim view of regulatory efforts to ban the use of lead in bullets and fishing tackle, which would have made both far more expensive (some have speculated that this, not environmental preservation, was the point of that particular regulation). In 2015, the EPA lost again after it sought to expand its jurisdiction over “navigable waterways” to include minor tributaries to those waterways, effectively making the agency the final arbiter over what can and cannot be built on ground that is or may one day become wet.

Davenport’s attempt to demonize the right’s effort to drag Congress back into the process of legislating isn’t especially subtle. The conservative legal movement challenging climate-related rules is characterized by its “aggressive nature.” One progressive activist called the banality of right-wing lawyers arguing before Republican-appointed judges a “pincer move.” And worst of all, these conservatives probably voted for Donald Trump. After all, the “plaintiffs are supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges.” Much of the remainder of the article is devoted to informing readers of the nexus between conservative legal organizations, such as the Federalist Society, and the judges they quite openly promote.

There is nothing remarkable about any of this, save the breathlessness with which it has been reported in the Times. The flimsiness of the case for these sweeping and burdensome regulations is made plain by Davenport’s failure to include arguments in favor of their constitutionality as much as their necessity. The reporter closes her piece by warning that the courts have their sites set on two critical powers assumed by the administrative state. The judiciary is set to rule on the legality of the way the federal government calculates the “real-life cost” of climate change and a regulation that limits tailpipe emissions, which is “designed to cut auto pollution by compelling automakers to sell more electric vehicles.” The legality of these regulations and the burdens they impose on private interests is assumed.

If the courts block the administration’s climate cost metrics, Davenport concludes, “they could strip the federal government of its legal defense for almost any future climate policy.” Not if those regulations were authorized by Congress, of course. But Congress cannot be trusted to act with the alacrity and objectives this reporter prefers. The law’s general indifference to Times’ readers’ emotional states might be the cruelest injustice of them all.

Which would you prefer? An elderly TikTok star who compares himself to Donald Trump? Or a former Marxist guerrilla who attended the funeral of Hugo Chávez? A candidate notorious for his radical flip-flops on public policy? Or a candidate notorious for his intolerance of any kind of disagreement or dissent? One who explained his praise for the Hitler dictatorship by claiming he had confused Adolf Hitler with Albert Einstein? Or one whose attempt to renationalize garbage collection in his city left mountains of trash piled in the streets?Welcome to the Colombian presidential election of 2022. The second round of voting last night yielded a victory for candidate No. 2, the former guerrilla Gustavo Petro, over No. 1, Rodolfo Hernández. Obviously, either choice would have inscribed huge question marks over the future of one of the more successful democracies in Latin America.But there’s another question mark, a retrospective one: How in the world did Colombia arrive at such a bizarre dilemma?Colombia’s outgoing president, the moderate conservative Iván Duque Márquez, was barred from running again by the country’s strict single-term limit. In that four years, he oversaw a record of policy success unmatched in recent South American history. In return, he is leaving office with an approval rating in the low 20s, the worst any president has had in Colombian polling history. The party he belonged to has been wrecked and discredited.I interviewed Duque on June 2, during a visit he made to Washington, D.C., and found him as baffled as anybody else by Colombia’s turn to extremism.When Duque took office in 2018, he was only 42. Yet he seems as vexed by the impact of social media as politicians decades his elder. “The world has become very polarized,” he said. “Sound debates about policy issues don’t seem to be applauded today. It makes more applause if you decide to take a strong stand, even based on not-sound facts or on lies—but you get a lot of likes. That sometimes seems the temptation we have in modern politics.”[Read: This country is setting the bar for handling migrants]President Duque faced two big challenges in his four years in office: the COVID-19 crisis and the social collapse of neighboring Venezuela. He met both challenges in a careful, balanced, well-informed way.On COVID, he rejected the dismissal and denial espoused by populists like Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Duque did not pursue dubious Chinese vaccines to win points from anti-American voters, as Peru’s leftist president, Pedro Castillo, did. Instead, Duque used the strong relationship with the United States built by Colombia’s moderate conservative leadership. Colombia qualified for the first exports of the Pfizer vaccine from the United States and began a national vaccination program early in 2021. As of mid-June, at least 70 percent of Colombia’s population has been fully vaccinated with safe and effective vaccines developed by Western democracies.On Venezuela, Duque agreed with his country’s right that the Chávez-Maduro dictatorship was repugnant, no model for anyone to follow. He took a hard line against Venezuelan subversion and threats to export revolution to Colombia. At the same time, Duque extended refuge to Venezuelans fleeing the disaster in their country. He granted some 1.7 million Venezuelans the right to remain and work in Colombia for 10 years, the largest such temporary-protected-status program in the history of the Western hemisphere.As he coped with these emergencies, Duque upheld Colombia’s trading relationship with the United States, ratified by the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement that entered into force in 2012. Thanks to this agreement, Colombia has enhanced its traditional exports of oil and coffee. The country now supplies three-quarters of all the cut flowers sold in the United States. Colombia has also emerged as the world’s No. 3 avocado producer.Colombia is surging out of the pandemic with one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. In the first quarter of 2022, Colombia’s output expanded at an annual rate of 7.5 percent. Duque used some of this wealth to bolster the nation’s shaky social-insurance system. He abolished tuition for virtually all students in Colombia’s public colleges and universities.At every turn, he faced attacks either for doing dangerously too much, according to the hard right, or for doing offensively too little, according to the radical left.[Read: The slow death of Colombia’s peace movement]Colombian society remains cleaved by the aftermath of the left-wing insurgency of the 1970s and ’80s, as well as by the opportunistic alliance those guerrillas formed with drug-trafficking cartels like the one once run by the notorious Pablo Escobar. A lengthy peace process produced an agreement signed in 2016 that provided amnesty for former guerrillas. But the settlement was intensely resented by the many Colombians whose family and friends had been kidnapped or murdered by the insurgents. That resentment became the basis for a more militant Colombian far right—a resentment then reinforced by anti-immigrant sentiment, with the influx of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans asylum seekers into Colombia.

Colombia’s new president will inherit all of these challenges, plus soaring inflation and a possible recession in the United States, by far Colombia’s most important trading partner. That record made it no wonder that President Duque received such a fond goodbye from President Joe Biden on Duque’s farewell tour of the United States. In sharp contrast, President-elect Petro has made his career by exploiting his country’s social divisions, not healing them.Americans may have come to take for granted Colombia’s very recent, hard-won, and fragile achievement of social peace. The democratic world will sadly miss President Duque, perhaps more than it yet knows.

President Donald Trump was never one with high regard for the limits of his executive authority. Yet when people first floated the idea of using the 1950 Defense Production Act (DPA) to force private sector businesses to prioritize orders from the federal government for masks, ventilators, and other gear, the idea gave Trump a moment's pause.
"We're a country not based on nationalizing our business," Trump said at a March 2020 press conference. "Call a person over in Venezuela; ask them how did nationalization of their businesses work out. Not too well."
It didn't last, and Trump did eventually sign a declaration invoking the DPA. But if you think it was a stretch to respond to a pandemic with a law designed to ensure the military can access supplies during wartime, wait 'til you find out the ways Trump's successor has been using it.
The production of vaccines? Check.
Rare minerals needed for electric car batteries? Check.
Baby formula? Check—despite the role that his own government played in creating that shortage in the first place.
Solar panels, heat pumps, and…home insulation? Check, check, and check.
How, exactly, is insulation related at all to national security? According to the White House, it's because "insulation is an industrial resource, material, or critical technology item essential to the national defense." By that standard, what product isn't essential to national defense?
The Defense Production Act has become President Joe Biden's go-to "solution" to any market that isn't operating quite how he'd like. It's the back door to central planning: just declare any product to be of a vital national security interest. Who's going to stop you? Certainly not Congress, and so far not the courts either.
The justifications for invoking the DPA are "just getting thinner and thinner the more it gets used," argues Philip Rossetti, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. Rossetti tells Reason that the DPA isn't being used to increase production overall, but rather to reorganize the market under the White House's direction.
"And that's going to come at a cost to wherever you're taking those resources from," he says, because "government doesn't produce; government simply takes from one area and puts it towards another."
Trump was not the first president to call up on the DPA for something other than a wartime emergency. President Bill Clinton invoked the law in 2000 to force providers to keep selling natural gas to California's largest electricity provider despite the utility's bankruptcy. In 2011, President Barack Obama used the law to compel telecommunications companies to disclose foreign-made components within their networks—an early battle in an ongoing conflict between the U.S. government and Huawei, the major Chinese manufacturer of high-end telecom gear.
Like other examples of executive excess, the Defense Production Act has evolved over time as presidents from both parties stretch the boundaries of their authority. While Trump was reluctant to use the DPA, he eagerly stretched the definition of "national security" in order to unilaterally impose tariffs under a different Cold War-era law. And now, just as Obama built on President George W. Bush's war powers when he bombed Libya, Biden has inherited both Trump's use of the DPA and his willingness to make every economic issue a national security one—and he's put the two together.
While the DPA was passed in 1950, its roots go back to World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson created the National War Labor Board and War Industries Board to oversee the production of wartime supplies. When the U.S. entered World War II, Congress passed the War Powers Act of 1941 to codify many of those same economic powers. But in both cases, the powers expired when the wars ended.
Not so with the DPA, which was passed in the early days of the Korean War at the request of President Harry Truman. To this day, the law allows the federal government to prioritize contracts of goods deemed to be vital to national security, to expand productive capacity with loans and grants, and to make special financing agreements with the private sector.
It could be worse. Four other parts of the law have gone extinct because Congress has not seen fit to reauthorize them, including provisions that allowed presidents to seize private property, set wages and prices, forcibly settle labor disputes, and exercise control over consumer credit access. Imagine a president invoking the DPA to set the price of gasoline or to impose the labor order he prefers on Amazon warehouses.
Even without those elements, the expansive use of the DPA during Biden's term raise questions about the law's economic efficacy and legal limits. "Clarity about what the law does and does not allow is yet another thing in short supply," The Economist notes.
A few politicians have complained about the way the law is being used, as when Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Pa.) tweeted that "After gas, solar panels, and baby food, Congress should rename the Defense Production Act the Domestic Politics Act."
But the overwhelming bulk of the pressure is coming from the other direction. Dozens of members of Congress and hundreds of mayors urged Trump to invoke the DPA in response to COVID-19. When the president waivered, publications like Vox waved away Trump's concerns (after years of objecting to Trump's many other expansive uses of executive power). The clamor for Biden to declare the production of heat pumps and solar panels matters of national security hasn't been as strong, but it's clear that industry lobbies have added the DPA to their bag of cronyist tricks.
The underappreciated risk is a potential moral hazard, says Rossetti. The DPA makes political connections more valuable than success in the marketplace, making the economy less stable economy and, thus, paving the way for more calls for emergency actions.
"The way you grow the economy is by productivity improvements and letting the market identify what consumers actually view as valuable activities," Rossetti says. "This is exactly an opposite approach of that philosophy. It's a central-planning mindset."
The post The Defense Production Act Has Become a License for Central Planning appeared first on Reason.com.

Mario Rajib Flores Molina put a great deal on the line to protest government corruption and the illiberal regime in his native Nicaragua, facing vandalism, beatings, and death threats. He eventually tried to reach safety in the United States, only for a federal immigration board to say his mistreatment didn't "rise to the level of past persecution" since the death threats weren't "especially menacing." It ordered his removal to Nicaragua. But last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said the board was wrong to deny him asylum.
In 2018, an opposition movement mobilized to protest President Daniel Ortega's regime and pension reforms that saw taxes go up and benefits go down. The Nicaraguan parliament passed a law in response that allowed the government to prosecute protestors as terrorists. In the crackdown that followed, state officials killed hundreds.
Flores Molina took to the streets of Estelí, Nicaragua, to join the demonstrations, where the police and paramilitary officers regularly shot and killed protesters. His repeated participation eventually put him in the crosshairs of government officials. They singled him out on social media and threatened him with imprisonment in a facility known for brutal torture of political dissidents.
He fled twice to what he thought were safer locations within Nicaragua, but government loyalists found him both times. During the second encounter, six members of the pro-Ortega Sandinista Youth beat him, warning, "This is what happens to the ones that want to be part of the coup. And at the next encounter, we're going to kill you." He knew he had to leave Nicaragua for good. Flores Molina journeyed to the U.S.-Mexico border, presented himself at a port of entry, and requested asylum.
Those eligible for asylum in the U.S. may qualify if "they have suffered persecution or fear that they will suffer persecution due to" political opinion, as Flores Molina did. An immigration judge found his testimony "consistent with the declaration he submitted in support of his application for relief" but held that he hadn't demonstrated past persecution or a well-founded fear of future persecution. This wasn't to say that Flores Molina hadn't been threatened or abused—simply that those experiences didn't qualify as persecution "for the purposes of asylum and withholding of removal."
He appealed, and in November 2019, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) dealt his asylum case another blow, saying the threats he faced were "not the sort of 'extreme' or 'especially menacing' threats necessary to establish past persecution." It also pointed to the relatively small number of detained political activists in Nicaragua and the fact that "he was physically assaulted only once" to strike down Flores Molina's persecution claims.
After reviewing the BIA's decision, the 9th Circuit concluded last week that Flores Molina's past experiences did, in fact, constitute persecution. He was forced to flee home three times after being targeted for his political views, had credible experiences of death threats and violent confrontations with government-affiliated individuals, and was threatened in an escalating fashion "against the well-documented backdrop of the Ortega regime's violent crackdown on members of the political opposition," the 9th Circuit wrote.
"Any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to hold that the repeated and specific death threats that Flores Molina experienced, amid the violence and menacing confrontations to which he was subjected, amount to persecution," the opinion reads. The BIA's denials of asylum and withholding of removal are now remanded for further consideration, and Flores Molina may ask the BIA to remand his case to an immigration judge in order to apply for legal status in the United States.
The 9th Circuit opinion pointed out several failures and oversights on the part of the BIA. "The Board cited the record selectively, relying on two news reports of the Ortega regime's release of 100 prisoners and its intention to release more, to support its assertion that Flores Molina's fear of future persecution was speculative," it explains. It also ignored documentation of poor detention conditions and abuse of political dissidents. "Moreover, the Board failed to discuss whether the repeated death threats and threats of violence Flores Molina faced were sufficient to inspire a well-founded fear of future persecution."
Flores Molina's initial hearing and appeal took place during the Trump administration. Former President Donald Trump expanded the BIA from 17 to 23 seats, with his administration selecting judges aligned with his immigration priorities. "Data from 2019 reveal that six immigration judges whom Attorney General William Barr elevated to serve as Board members had abysmal asylum grant rates," averaging just 2.4 percent, according to Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
Biden administration officials are now working to undo some of the harmful legal policies put in place by Trump-era attorneys general—less visible than controversial measures like the border wall and family separation, but nonetheless damaging to due process and punitive toward the people who seek asylum on American soil. Last June, Attorney General Merrick Garland scrapped rules that made it difficult for victims of domestic violence or gang violence, as well as family members of threatened individuals, to qualify for asylum.
Flores Molina's pursuit of asylum is receiving new life after a yearslong legal debate about the persecution he faced in Nicaragua. Despite that win, last week's opinion is a reminder that immigration courts are deeply shaped by the broader political climate and the discretion of the individuals who staff them.
The post This Political Dissident Faces Death Threats if He Goes Back to Nicaragua. Why Was His Asylum Claim Denied? appeared first on Reason.com.

If you are new to socialist theory, you might assume that socialists think capitalists are greedy—that owners and bosses are selfish and immoral and trying to get as rich as possible because of their personal acquisitiveness. But, especially among Marxist socialists, a lot of thinkers on the left actually reject this way of talking. For instance, in Vivek Chibber’s forthcoming book Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How To Change It, a useful plain-language primer on socialist economic theory, Chibber writes that “capitalists aren’t motivated by greed but by market pressures.” He elaborates:

Capitalists don’t cause harm to their employees out of malice or greed. Their motivation comes from the brute reality of market competition. If a capitalist doesn’t produce at the lowest price, he knows that he will lose customers, and if that continues, his firm will start bleeding money. So he has to keep his selling price as low as possible. But if he’s going to lower his selling price, he also has to lower his costs, or he won’t make any money. Hence, he tries to pay out as little as possible for his inputs—the machines and raw material that he buys, and the wages he’s paying to his workers. So every capitalist constantly tries to get the most out of every dollar he spends, including from his workers. This is how firms survive in the market. It has nothing to do with greed.  

Ben Burgis, in Jacobin, says along the same lines:

Crucially, the capitalist drive to accumulate money isn’t primarily about individual capitalists being bad, greedy people, but rather the relentless pressures of the system itself. A capitalist who doesn’t ruthlessly pursue profits will be outcompeted by those who do.

This fits with the story that many capitalists tell themselves, which is that they are not in it for themselves. If your boss cuts your pay, you will be given an explanation to do with market forces. No capitalist ever confessed that they just want to earn as much money as possible because they like money. 
Now, the story told about market forces putting pressure on capitalists to cut costs is true, and it explains why exploitation may not be purely the result of employers’ selfishness. But the Marxist argument is wrong, because it concludes from this that capitalists are not motivated by greed and selfishness, even though this is precisely why capitalists they go beyond “surviving” in the marketplace and actually become rich. 
One reason I can tell there is no necessity beyond selfishness to pursue gain is that I have started and run a “business” myself that does not pursue gain, and I know that it was a choice for me not to try to maximize my gains. Current Affairs is subject to certain market pressures (we have to keep our magazine priced low enough to where people will buy it), and the lack of money in media means that salaries at Current Affairs aren’t very high. But nothing compels us to pursue profit, that is to make money above what it takes to cover our costs. If we want to expand the business, we will need to make money. If we were incorporated as a for-profit enterprise that needed to “maximize shareholder value,” we would need to make as much money as possible. But these are choices, not imperatives imposed upon us by the economic system. I know that it is not necessary to maximize profit in order for a “firm to survive in the market” because I have spent six years helping a firm survive in the market without pursuing any such imperative. 
Chibber and Burgis explain why a capitalist who does seek to maximize profits will need to exploit people, and why even a business that is not operated for profit may find itself having to cut costs ruthlessly in order to survive in a competitive market. But market forces do not constitute an explanation for why a capitalist would ever need to maximize their own profits in the first place. The desire to maximize one’s return is a function of greed. 
Capitalists are greedy, and very obviously so. In fact, elsewhere in the book, Chibber gives us evidence that capitalists are greedy. Explaining how a capitalist who invests money is seeking to make more money, Chibber writes that “while it is important for him to recoup his original investment, of course this isn’t all he needs. For one thing, he wouldn’t have made any money for himself.” If not for the additional increment the capitalist makes over and above what is put in originally, “his entire effort becomes a kind of philanthropic endeavor, in which he pays out to others, but takes nothing home for himself. … [A]s everyone knows, it is the pursuit of profit that shapes the entire organization of production in capitalism.”
But what prevents the capitalist from operating philanthropically, and taking nothing for themselves? Or taking home only the same amount as the lowest-paid worker? Why does the capitalist need to “take something home” over and above the amount needed to subsist? It’s perfectly possible to start a business and operate it in the interests of the community without using it to make a fortune. The capitalist chooses to try to make money, and it’s that choice that is accurately described as acquisitiveness, or greed, because nothing in the economic system mandates it. Jeff Bezos does not need to be a billionaire. He didn’t need to take any ownership of Amazon himself. He exploits people for his own benefit because he has an insatiable greed and lust for power, not because facts about the economy compel him to own the company.

When we are asking whether capitalists act as they do out of greed or if they are compelled by some kind of systemic force, one way to test the proposition is to think about what would happen if we substituted an altruist in the capitalist’s role. We can see that certain things would not change. If you made the CEO of a company an altruist, but the CEO was under a legal mandate to maximize shareholder value, then if they exploited their workers less the board of directors might replace them. The altruistic CEO alone may have few options to improve the company. But the owner of a company, the person who puts up the capital, can make a huge difference depending on whether they are pursuing gain or the public good. Pursuing gain means that workers have to be more exploited than market pressures alone require so that a sum of profit can go to the owner. If public good is the goal, no such sum need be generated. Nor does the owner need to relentlessly expand the business in order to pursue larger profits. The business can stay the same size, if doing so serves the public good.
Since it is obviously wrong to say that capitalists aren’t greedy, why would socialists make this argument? One reason is that Marxism, often presented as a kind of “scientific socialism,” developed as a way of trying to understand the economy as a machine that operated according to certain principles. Engels, in discussing the utopian socialists, said that socialists prior to Marx had seen socialism as a grand moral idea, an expression of “absolute truth, reason, and justice” that “has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power.” Indeed, Robert Owen, the wealthy textile manufacturer who founded early socialist communities, said on his deathbed that he “gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded.” Marx and Engels realized that simply exposing that capitalism was immoral and that socialism would be better was not enough. One needed to understand the mechanisms of capitalism in order to figure out how to replace it. “Moralism” became a dirty word among many socialists, because morality was perceived to be mostly irrelevant. The Marxist socialist is not a religious teacher but an engineer who takes apart the machine, sees how it works, and tries to rebuild it to work along different lines. 
To this day, many socialists also do not see capitalists as being particularly human, and so they are inclined to explain them as rational-maximizing robots. To treat the capitalist as selfish is to treat them as a person who could do better, rather than a faceless money-maximizing automaton, which is what they often appear as from the worker’s perspective.
It makes quite a bit of sense, then, that socialists wouldn’t want to humanize capitalists by making them seem as if they are people just like ourselves. But ironically, in developing a theory that capitalists cannot do otherwise, they let capitalists off the hook. They gave up the argument that being rich is immoral, even though it obviously is. This socialist argument allows people like Elon Musk to say that they aren’t greedy even as they violate every norm of human ethics to accrue as much for themselves as possible, without anything in the economy forcing them to do so.
Importantly, the fact that capitalists are selfish, and that their selfishness drives a great deal of their exploitative behavior, does not mean that we simply need to persuade the world’s owners to be nicer or to voluntarily shed their possessions and turn their companies over to the community or the workers. It could simultaneously be true that personal greed plays a major role in the pursuit of profit and that attempts to talk greedy people out of being greedy are doomed to fail. One of the fears that some Marxists have, I suspect, is that when we begin to talk in moral terms, we start to think of political action in terms of making people better, rather than seizing power. But the moral and the militant need not be considered mutually exclusive. We can be cynical about the likelihood of capitalists’ becoming better through moral exhortation alone and also recognize that, for the most part, it is not the “market” but their own pathological and sociopathic pursuit of their self-interest that compels them to act as they do.
Sometimes something that is very obviously untrue is believed because everyone has an interest in believing it, even if those interests vary or are opposed. So, for instance, both the government and an anti-government terrorist group might have an interest in exaggerating the strength of the terrorist group. Similarly, both socialists and capitalists have good reasons to say that capitalists aren’t “selfish” but it is “the system” that compels them to act as they do. So an argument that makes little sense and is obviously at odds with reality (where rich people could easily choose not to be rich, and capitalists make profits by choice) persists because it is convenient for both the system’s proponents and its critics to believe it. But the fact that a falsehood is useful does not justify believing it.
Some of capitalism’s defenders do not make the argument that capitalists aren’t greedy (though usually they prefer the term “self-interest,” which sounds much less objectionable). Milton Friedman replied to the question of whether capitalism was built on greed by insisting that Russia and China run on greed as well. But this is not a justification, either. We must reject the idea coming from many wealthy people that, as Jag Bhalla puts it, “unbridled greed is just simple human nature.” (Bhalla says we have accepted a “greedocracy.”) We ought to acknowledge the simple fact that those who try to get more than they need to live a life of basic comfort, with luxuries of the kind that everyone deserves, have accumulated their luxuries because they have deprived others along the way. This has been done by choice. Everyone could have had plenty, because there is plenty to go around, but decisions are made every day that prevent this outcome. Nobody makes the capitalist maximize profits, or pay their workers less than they pay themselves, and “the market made me do it” is an excuse that should make socialists highly dubious. And while it is the case that persuading capitalists to shed their wealth and join the proletariat is not an intelligent revolutionary strategy, it is crucial for socialists to understand that human beings are not mere billiard balls whose moral choices are dictated by the systems we are in. We have agency, and that agency confers responsibility. There are no excuses for enriching one’s self and exploiting others.

The two most frequently mentioned crimes Mr. Trump may have committed are the corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding (the Jan. 6 vote count) and conspiracy to defraud the United States (in working to overturn election results). Many have noted that Mr. Trump can plausibly defend these charges by arguing that he lacked criminal intent because he truly believed that massive voter fraud had taken place.

Mr. Trump would also claim that key elements of his supposedly criminal actions — his interpretations of the law, his pressure on Mr. Pence, his delay in responding to the Capitol breach and more — were exercises of his constitutional prerogatives as chief executive. Mr. Garland would need to assess how these legally powerful claims inform the applicability of criminal laws to Mr. Trump’s actions in what would be the first criminal trial of a president. He would also consider the adverse implications of a Trump prosecution for more virtuous future presidents.

If Mr. Garland concludes that Mr. Trump has committed convictable crimes, he would face the third and hardest decision: whether the national interest would be served by prosecuting Mr. Trump. This is not a question that lawyerly analysis alone can resolve. It is a judgment call about the nature, and fate, of our democracy.

A failure to indict Mr. Trump in these circumstances would imply that a president — who cannot be indicted while in office — is literally above the law, in defiance of the very notion of constitutional government. It would encourage lawlessness by future presidents, none more so than Mr. Trump should he win the next election. By contrast, the rule of law would be vindicated by a Trump conviction. And it might be enhanced by a full judicial airing of Mr. Trump’s possible crimes in office, even if it ultimately fails.

It’s a quirk of history that the foundations of modern biology – and as a consequence, some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century – should rely so heavily on peas. Cast your mind back to school biology, and Gregor Mendel, whose 200th birthday we mark next month. Though Mendel is invariably described as a friar, his formidable legacy is not in Augustinian theology, but in the mainstream science of genetics.

In the middle of the 19th century, Mendel (whose real name was Johann – Gregor was his Augustinian appellation) bred more than 28,000 pea plants, crossing tall with short, wrinkly seeds with smooth, and purple flowers with white. What he found in that forest of pea plants was that these traits segregated in the offspring, and did not blend, but re-emerged in predictable ratios. What Mendel had discovered were the rules of inheritance. Characteristics were inherited in discrete units – what we now call genes – and the way these units flowed through pedigrees followed neat mathematical patterns.

These rules are taught in every secondary school as a core part of how we understand fundamental biology – genes, DNA and evolution. We also teach this history, for it is a good story. Mendel’s work, published in 1866, was being done at the same time as Darwin was carving out his greatest idea. But this genius Moravian friar was ignored until both men were dead, only to be rediscovered at the beginning of the new century, which resolved Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, midwifing the modern era of biology.

But there’s a lesser-known story that shaped the course of the 20th century in a different way. The origins of genetics are inextricably wedded to eugenics. Since Plato suggested the pairing of “high-quality” parents, and Plutarch described Spartan infanticide, the principles of population control have been in place, probably in all cultures. But in the time of Victorian industrialisation, with an ever-expanding working class, and in the wake of Darwinian evolution, Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, added a scientific and statistical sheen to the deliberate sculpting of society, and he named it eugenics. It was a political ideology that co-opted the very new and immature science of evolution, and came to be one of the defining and most deadly ideas of the 20th century.

All new scientific discoveries exist within the culture into which they are born, and are always susceptible to abuse

The UK came within a whisker of having involuntary sterilisation of “undesirables” as legislation, something that Churchill robustly campaigned for in his years in the Asquith government, but which the MP Josiah Wedgwood successfully resisted. In the US though, eugenics policies were enacted from 1907 and over most of the next century in 31 states, an estimated 80,000 people were sterilised by the state in the name of purification.

American eugenics was faithfully married to Mendel’s laws – though Mendel himself had nothing to do with these policies. Led by Charles Davenport – a biologist and Galton devotee – the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, set out in 1910 to promote a racist, ableist ideology, and to harvest the pedigrees of Americans. With this data, Davenport figured, they could establish the inheritance of traits both desirable and defective, and thus purify the American people. Thus they could fight the imagined threat of great replacement theory facing white America: undesirable people, with their unruly fecundity, will spread inferior genes, and the ruling classes will be erased.

Pedigrees were a major part of the US eugenics movement, and Davenport had feverishly latched on to Mendelian inheritance to explain all manner of human foibles: alcoholism, criminality, feeblemindedness (and, weirdly, a tendency to seafaring). Heredity, he wrote in 1910, “stands as the one great hope of the human race; its saviour from imbecility, poverty, disease, immorality”, and like all of the enthusiastic eugenicists, he attributed the inheritance of these complex traits to genes – nature over nurture. It is from Davenport that we have the first genetic studies of Huntington’s disease, which strictly obeys a Mendelian inheritance, and of eye colour, which, despite what we still teach in schools, does not.

Deborah Kallikak, the young woman whose family history Henry Goddard fabricated to back up his theories. Photograph: Macmillan & Co. Publishing 1912

One particular tale from this era stands out. The psychologist Henry Goddard had been studying a girl with the pseudonym Deborah Kallikak in his New Jersey clinic since she was eight. He described her as a “high-grade feeble-minded person, the moron, the delinquent, the kind of girl or woman that fills our reformatories”. In order to trace the origin of her troubles, Goddard produced a detailed pedigree of the Kallikaks. He identified as the founder of this bloodline Martin Kallikak, who stopped off en route home from the war of independence to his genteel Quaker wife to impregnate a “feeble-minded but attractive barmaid”, with whom he had no further contact.

In Goddard’s influential 1912 book, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, he traced a perfect pattern of Mendelian inheritance for traits good and bad. The legitimate family was eminently successful, whereas his bastard progeny produced a clan of criminals and disabled “defectives”, eventually concluding with Deborah. With this, Goddard concluded that the feeble-mindedness of the Kallikaks was encoded in a gene, a single unit of defective inheritance passed down from generation to generation, just like in Mendel’s peas.

A contemporary geneticist will frown at this, for multiple reasons. The first is the terminology “feeble-minded”, which was a vague, pseudopsychiatric bucket diagnosis that we presume included a wide range of today’s clinical conditions. We might also reject his Mendelian conclusion on the grounds that complex psychiatric disorders rarely have a single genetic root, and are always profoundly influenced by the environment. The presence of a particular gene will not determine the outcome of a trait, though it may well contribute to the probability of it.

This is a modern understanding of the extreme complexity of the human genome, probably the richest dataset in the known universe. But a meticulous contemporary analysis is not even required in the case of the Kallikaks, because the barmaid never existed.

The Kallikak family tree, from a 1955 textbook. Photograph: Macmillan & Co Publishing 1912

Martin Kallikak’s legitimate family was indeed packed with celebrated achievers – men of medicine, the law and the clergy. But Goddard had invented the illegitimate branch, by misidentifying an unrelated man called John Wolverton as Kallikak’s bastard son, and dreaming up his barmaid mother. There were people with disabilities among Wolverton’s descendants, but the photos in Goddard’s book show some of the children with facial characteristics that are associated with foetal alcohol syndrome, a condition that is entirely determined not by genetic inheritance, but by exposure to high levels of alcohol in utero. Despite the family tree being completely false, this case study remained in psychology textbooks until the 1950s as a model of human inheritance, and a justification for enforced sterilisation. The Kallikaks had become the founding myth of American eugenics.

The German eugenics movement had also begun at the beginning of the 20th century, and grown steadily through the years of the Weimar Republic. By the time of the rise of the Third Reich, principles such as Lebensunwertes Leben – life unworthy of life – were a core part of the national eugenics ideology for purifying the Nordic stock of German people. One of the first pieces of legislation to be passed after Hitler seized power in 1933 was the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, which required sterilisation of people with schizophrenia, deafness, blindness, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease, and other conditions that were deemed clearly genetic. As with the American’s tenacious but fallacious grip on heredity, most of these conditions are not straightforwardly Mendelian, and in one case where it is – Huntington’s – the disease takes effect after reproductive age. Sterilisation had no effect on its inheritance.

The development of the Nazis’ eugenics programmes was supported intellectually and financially by the American eugenicists, erroneously obsessed as they were with finding single Mendelian genes for complex traits, and plotting them on pedigrees. In 1935, a short propaganda film called Das Erbe (The Inheritance) was released in Germany. In it, a young scientist observes a couple of stag beetles rutting. Confused, she consults her professor, who sits her down to explain the Darwinian struggles for life – and shows her a film of a cat hunting a bird, cocks sparring. Suddenly she gets it, and exclaims, to roars of laughter: “Animals pursue their own racial policies!”

The muddled propaganda is clear: nature purges the weak, and so must we.

A still from the 1935 Nazi propaganda film Das Erbe, which conflates natural selection and eugenics. Photograph: YouTube/ORF2

The film then shows a pedigree of a hunting dog, just the type that you might get from the Kennel Club today. And then, up comes an animation of the family tree of the Kallikaks, on one side Erbgesunde Frau and on the other, Erbkranke Frau – genetically healthy and hereditarily defective women. On the diseased side, the positions of all of the miscreants and deviants pulse to show the flow of undesirable people through the generations, as the voiceover explains. Das Erbe was a film to promote public acceptance of the Nazi eugenics laws, and what follows the entirely fictional Kallikak family tree is its asserted legacy: shock images of seriously disabled people in sanatoriums, followed by healthy marching Nazis, and a message from Hitler: “He who is physically and mentally not healthy and worthy, may not perpetuate his suffering in the body of his child.” Approximately 400,000 people were sterilised under this policy. A scientific lie had become a pillar of genocide in just 20 years.

Science has and will always be politicised. People turn to the authority of science to justify their ideologies. Today, we see the same pattern, but with new genetics. After the supermarket shootings in Buffalo in May, there was heated discussion in genetics communities, as the murderer had cited specific academic work in his deranged manifesto, legitimate papers on the genetics of intelligence and the genetic basis of Jewish ancestry, coupled with the persistent pseudoscience of the great replacement.

Science strives to be apolitical, to rise above the grubby worlds of politics and the psychological biases that we are encumbered with. But all new scientific discoveries exist within the culture into which they are born, and are always susceptible to abuse. This does not mean we should shrug and accept that our scientific endeavours are imperfect and can be bastardised with nefarious purpose, nor does it mean we should censor academic research.

But we should know our own history. We teach a version of genetics that is easily simplified to the point of being wrong. The ‘“laws” in biology have a somewhat tricksy tendency to be beset by qualifications, complexities and caveats. Biology is inherently messy, and evolution preserves what works, not what is simple. In the simplicity of Mendel’s peas is a science which is easily co-opted, and marshalled into a racist, fascist ideology, as it was in the US, in Nazi Germany and in dozens of other countries. To know our history is to inoculate ourselves against it being repeated.

This article was amended on 20 June 2022. The mass shooting in Buffalo, US, in May 2022 was at a supermarket, not a school as an earlier version said.

In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year. She was the chief operating officer of Facebook, back when most of us had no understanding of the platform’s fearsome powers—in the halcyon days when we thought it was just for sharing pictures of the grandkids and ruining marriages. The book was about how women can make it to the top. It was a sort of “work-life balance” category buster, because she was telling women to pretty much forget about the “life” part.In the weeks before the big rollout, I was contacted by editors at several publications asking if I would write something about it. I knew exactly what they wanted—not the main article, which would be a rapturous announcement of this bold American visionary. They wanted some crank to pump out a “What About the Children?” sidebar, pointing out that to lean into work you have to lean away from your family, to lend a spirit of objectivity to their 21-gun salutes to author and book. Trust me, around 2013 I was the top crank for that kind of thing.  But when I looked through the galley, the whole thing was so manufactured and B-school-ish that I just wanted to put my head on the keyboard and have a little nap. Still, I myself had been leaning in to the lucrative book-reviewing space for a long time, and I could tell there was money on the table because these Sheryl Sandberg packages were obviously going to be lavish. If I played my cards right, I could be looking at one large. Where to get it?[Read: How Sheryl Sandberg lost her feminist street cred]Time Inc., as it turned out. It was a purely meretricious transaction, but I didn’t phone it in. I did the honorable thing and read the book closely. Almost immediately I saw that its main problem wasn’t the children. This was a book about how women in corporate America could—and should—strive to get the most money and the most power. But where should they seek such power? In the crackling hellfire of C-suite America.Sandberg invoked the name Goldman Sachs multiple times—in a good way. Mind you, this book was published five years after that despicable outfit played a major role in almost bankrupting the country. She tells us it was a “seismic event” when, in the late ’90s, Goldman Sachs made a woman named Amy Goodfriend head of its U.S. derivatives team; she stayed at the company until 2001. “Amy’s a bitch, but an honest bitch,” one man said about her. If I ever write one of these books, I’ll call it A Few Honest Bitches, and explain that if we can get the right kind of women inside these places, we might be able to burn them down.Why were the progressive worlds of publishing and journalism embracing this junk as some kind of giant step toward equality? It will surely go down in history as one of white feminism’s greatest achievements.I didn’t send Time a book review so much as a red-flag warning. Time had published a cover story in the midst of the financial crisis called “The Price of Greed”; Lean In was a return to Greed is Good. But the editors didn’t care about Cassandra in the sidebar. The copy was clean, and they slapped on a title they liked (the title was “What About the Children?”), and I decided to act very Goldman Sachs about the situation. I cashed the check the day it arrived.Sheryl Sandberg announced this month that she’s resigning from Facebook—now called Meta—to focus on her philanthropy. Her work there is done.During her 14 years at the company, she’s done so much damage to our society that we may never recover. The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good. Facebook—supposedly a wondrous, no-charge gift to the world—was made of you and me. It needed our baby pictures, our religious and political affiliations; it needed the names of our high schools and employers and favorite movies and hometowns. It let us set up shop as the very particular and special individuals we are—and it was all free. In fact, it was ruinously expensive. As the saying goes, “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.” There we were: suckers, lambs to the slaughter. It didn’t even occur to us that all of that information wasn’t “safe.” We didn’t want it to be safe! We wanted our long-lost friends from Brownie Troop 347 to be able to find us! When we realized what we’d done, it was already too late.During the Trump campaign, we got a taste of what a giant, mysterious corporation can do with all of that information. A political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica had gotten hold of the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users. That data was used in service of the “psychological warfare” that Steve Bannon wanted to wage against the American public. It sent voters down just the right rabbit holes; it whispered in their ears. It was a fooling-some-of-the-people-all-of-the-time operation.  “We made mistakes and I own them,” Sandberg eventually said about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “They are on me.” The impression was of radical transparency, a Harry Truman of the C-suite: The buck stops here.[Read: The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in three paragraphs]But according to The New York Times, the buck was about to embark on an Oh, the Places You’ll Go! journey to the bottom of the Earth. Sandberg oversaw the company’s bizarre damage-control efforts. It was an old-school, dirty-tricks campaign, combined with the unimaginable power of Facebook. That campaign included hiring “a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros,” and lobbying “a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.”Excuse me—Facebook did what?But more interesting is the way that Sandberg deployed some of her personal power. In Lean In, we were power-posing, assuming male levels of self-confidence, asking for the big money and knowing we deserved it. But when The Daily Mail attempted to publish something unflattering about Sandberg’s then-boyfriend, the Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, she seemed more like the head cheerleader standing up for the captain of the football team. On two separate occasions she is said to have contacted The Daily Mail and successfully kept the information out of the paper. (The source of the critical story recanted some of it, and Sandberg denied pressuring the paper, The Wall Street Journal reported.)(Look, I fully understand that as the result of this article, I’m going to wake up next to a horse’s head, and all I ask is that it not be one of the weeks when I’m using the paisley sheets.)Now we learn that Meta has been investigating Sandberg for possible misuse of company resources. The Wall Street Journal reported that some of her colleagues think she may have broken Securities and Exchange Commission rules by having Facebook employees work on her pet projects. These include her Lean In foundation; her second book, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy; and even her upcoming wedding, to a consultant named Tom Bernthal. (The Journal reported that a Meta spokesperson declined to comment and that a spokesperson for Sandberg denied that she had inappropriately used company resources in connection with her wedding.)I should have left well enough alone, but I couldn’t help myself, and I Googled the fiancé’s company’s website, which reads, “From Manila to London we help Facebook with their most pressing Communications and global Brand Strategy challenges.” So this is a match made in heaven.(It’s going to be my own head bleeding out on the sheets, I realize now. Will have to pin a note to my pillow reminding the night caller of what Michael Clayton said: “I’m not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy!”)One lesson I learned in the Berkeley of my 1960s and ’70s youth has never failed me: Huge corporations are never, ever on the side of the people. You can’t take your eyes off of them for a second, because any time you look away, they’ll do terrible things, like make napalm (Dow Chemical) or Agent Orange (Monsanto), or get desperately impoverished women in developing countries to use expensive baby formula instead of breastfeeding (Nestlé).Today’s young people have been forced to learn that old lesson, because they are the inheritors of 40 years of corporate greed, private equity’s smash and grab, bank deregulation, and the collusion of the very rich and the U.S. government to squeeze every penny it can from the middle class and move it into the counting houses of billionaires. They know the game isn’t rigged against them; they know the game was lost long before they were born.Corporations are now faced with labor shortages, and there are rumblings from the owner class about the demise of the great American work ethic. But corporations are the ones who killed it. Young people today know that work is not your life; it’s how you pay for your life. It’s an exchange of money for labor, and they are not interested in devoting a jot of extra energy to jobs that pay minimum wage and offer no health insurance or savings plan, for employers who show no loyalty to their workers.[Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen: How to care less about work]These are signs that a real labor movement may be growing in this country. Here’s another old lesson from my misspent youth: If workers organize, they become more powerful than the men—or, lean in!, women—who own the companies.So farewell to Sheryl Sandberg. But maybe her departure is finally the moment to answer the question Time magazine asked me so long ago: What about the children?I’ve heard a number of young people lately say they won’t have children because of the climate crisis. That’s a tremendous sacrifice and a principled position. A Pew Research Center survey from November found that 44 percent of adults without kids say that they probably won’t have any, up from 37 percent in 2018, the last time Pew asked the question. But often when you talk with these young people, after the climate comes a whole lot of reasons the choice isn’t a sacrifice at all. Children seem like a hassle, and an impediment to a fun life.To them I say, Hold on. That’s the corporation speaking, which seeks to cleave you from human experience and sees you only as a worker, a unit of production. That’s the corporate demand that you lean in to work and lean away from your family. “For some women, a career is their baby,” said Business Insider, in its article on the Pew results.Staying home with very small children—Jesus Christ! There’s no way to explain the amount of labor, tedium, and occasional desperation it includes. Especially if you also work from home. Nothing is going right, the kids are running around, and you really can be brought to tears by mud tracked across a clean kitchen floor. Nothing to recommend it on that front.But here’s the thing. Ask any older person when the happiest time in their life was, and they will always, always say it was when their children were young.A few weeks ago I came up with the absurd project of digitizing all of the photographs of my children taken from the pre-iPhone half of their lives. I bought the scanner, and the cord to attach it to my computer. I hauled up the cardboard boxes and opened one—and the whole endeavor stalled out.My children, thank God, are healthy young men living their adult lives—they are twins, 24 years old. But when I opened the box, I saw the faces of those little boys who aren’t here anymore, the ones who lived with me in the dreamtime of early childhood. My husband worked, I stayed home, and five long days a week we did things I knew they would never remember. Like the first time they heard the music of an ice-cream truck. I bought them each a Pokémon popsicle, and here’s the mind-blowing thing: They had no idea what was inside those wrappers until I took them off. When I gave them those astonishing, perplexing, never-before-seen popsicles (“My popsicle is raining,” one of them said in confusion when it started dripping), they looked at me the way they often did in the dreamtime: as though I was the most wonderful, and kind, and important person in the whole world. In the corporation of their love, I was at the top of the power structure.There is no greater joy in this life than having a baby. Here is a person who has been uniquely designed to love you. And here is Goldman Sachs.  

What she said she really worries about is the prospect of losing her overtime hours.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do if anything gets any worse than it is now,” she said. “Am I going to have to cut my meals back? Am I going to have to eat once a day as opposed to three? I don’t know. It’s just tough.”

Low-income households, at least on average, emerged from the first two years of the pandemic in remarkably strong financial shape. Trillions of dollars in government aid ensured that poverty fell in 2020, despite the loss of tens of millions of jobs. New rounds of assistance in 2021, including monthly payments through an expanded Child Tax Credit, led to a sharp drop in measures of childhood poverty and hunger.

Those programs came from a very different economic moment, however. In 2020, and to a lesser degree in 2021, the needs of individual households and the needs of the broader economy were aligned: Stimulus checks and other forms of government aid helped jobless workers and their families avoid eviction, while at the same time helping businesses avoid bankruptcy, landlords avoid foreclosure, and cities and states avoid a collapse in their tax revenue.

Today, that alignment has broken down. Giving people money now might help them pay their bills, but it could also make inflation worse by adding to demand as businesses are already failing to produce enough goods and hire enough workers.

The Federal Reserve is instead trying to cool off the economy by raising interest rates, making it more expensive to borrow money to buy a house or expand a company. Weaker business activity will slow hiring, leading to slower wage growth and, most likely, more layoffs. It could also allow America’s goods and services — limited for more than a year by supply chain snarls and labor shortages — to catch up to demand, putting a damper on rising prices.

Fed policymakers argue that this strategy is necessary to put the economy on a more sustainable path. But even as conditions take a turn for the worse, inflation will probably take a while to slow, and Fed officials themselves think it will still be elevated at the end of the year.

On the question of economic justice, political debate tends to swing between two poles. The Left wants to reduce economic differences based on the notion of distributive justice, while the Right emphasizes social mobility based on equality of opportunity. A plumber today might not be just an ordinary employee, but actually, with the right career moves, the boss of a plumbing company. Does the plumber, however—or for that matter the builder, elderly care worker, or shelf-stacker—need to move into a higher social class for their job to be seen as worthwhile? Theirs is work that needs to be done and that is valuable to us all.We should move our focus from today’s one-sided emphasis on redistributive justice versus social mobility. Instead, we should talk about contributive justice—that is, the individual’s right to contribute to the common good based on their skills and abilities. For this to happen, our perception of what constitutes a contribution must change. Any salaried job that adheres to national workplace norms should be regarded as valuable and worthwhile.To grasp the reasoning behind this statement, a shift is required. Let me illustrate what I mean by taking a closer look at the challenges facing my own native country Sweden.In the spring of 2022, 8.2 percent of the labor force were unemployed in Sweden. Among foreign-born people from the Middle East and Africa, unemployment is about 30 percent. After 13 years in Sweden, only half of those born abroad achieve a very modest level of economic self-sufficiency. For foreign-born people from Africa and the Middle East, the proportion is under 40 percent. This is demonstrated in a 2020 report by the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum, where the most recent data are from 2016. Since then, net immigration to Sweden has been close to half a million, and most of those who came here during those years are from countries whose citizens are proving particularly difficult to integrate.Despite high unemployment and rapid population growth among people of working age, in many localities it is hard to find suitable labor in many sectors. The main solution proposed for this problem is always the same: education. This is often made with reference to the lack of programmers, doctors, systems analysts, and other highly educated professionals, which has long created political pressure to expand the higher education sector. In the autumn of 2021, 273,000 people—two full cohorts—were admitted to universities and colleges in Sweden. In total, 450,000 people, or four full-time cohorts, are currently enrolled in university-level education.Education and statusOf course, continued prosperity demands high-quality tertiary education. But this is not what our education looks like today. Bloated university admissions, for which a large proportion of the courses are of low quality, are hardly the solution. In addition, most jobs do not require extensive education or training. The 20 most common occupations among women cover almost half of all female employees; in less than one-in-five of these jobs is higher education required. For the equivalent occupations among men, only one-in-four requires tertiary study.Nor is it obvious that things will be different in the future. Tasks that must be performed on site, such as social care, healthcare, and maintaining the physical environment, are difficult to automate and cannot be moved to low-cost countries. The integration of IT into more and more jobs and a general knowledge of IT—which virtually all Swedish young people have already—means that many future jobs will not require extensive education. Often you will be able to learn these jobs quickly, so long as you have the right character traits, such as self-discipline, social skills, motivation, a good work ethic, perseverance, reliability, and emotional stability.The challenges and contradictions that arise from extensive social exclusion, and the demands for change that follow from rapid technological development, are politically very difficult to handle.Sweden’s former prime minister Stefan Löfven (October 2014–November 2021) often justified political decisions by referring to “the equal value of all people.” Indirectly, he was referring to the Biblical idea of man created in the image of God, who thereby becomes the ultimate guarantor of each person’s unique and inviolable value. At the same time, human beings are reputation-seeking or status-oriented, and our societies are hierarchically organized. Our complex society needs to function. This inevitably creates differences in income and living conditions, and these differences are growing. In many countries and industries, this is mainly because globalization leads to outsourcing and downward pressure on wages. In Sweden, extensive immigration from poorer countries is the most important factor behind growing income differentials.How, then, should politicians deal with the tension between sweeping declarations about the equal value of all human beings and the growing differences in income, status, wealth, and standards of living?It is common for politicians on the Left to point to differences in outcomes and label them as “unfair”—something that needs to be fixed. This has an undesirable side-effect: an emphasis on economic outcomes as the basis for equality actually undermines the notion that everyone has equal value. Politicians on the Right, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of mobility between the classes—even if you start out further down the status hierarchy, you should be able to raise your status through hard work and self-improvement. Sweden’s Moderates, for example, talk about creating a society where people are “on the move.”While the public debate goes on, reality creeps in in the form of growing social exclusion. Most jobs do not require credentials in the form of demanding university diplomas, but there is still a shortage of labor.Social change also takes place when higher education is raised in debate as an ideal and a necessity. The status of jobs that do not require extensive education falls even further. This can be seen not least in the fact that young people would rather incur large debts to get a university degree and then work as a bank clerk or in customer support for SEK 27,000 a month, than train as an electrician or plumber with a salary of as much as SEK 45,000. This illustrates that a job’s reputation weighs very heavily, and that significant wage premiums are required in a welfare state such as Sweden to persuade young people to choose occupations with a low status, even when the educational requirements are low.During the past quarter-century, the rich countries of Western Europe have managed this equation by becoming heavily dependent on people from the former Eastern Europe and guest workers from East Asia for jobs in maintenance, forestry, agriculture, and home food deliveries. It is hard to see how this can go on indefinitely. On one hand there is popular opposition, and on the other, developments at home are making it less attractive to become a guest worker in one of today’s richer EU countries.Both left- and right-wing governments naturally use their powers to impose their own solutions to social exclusion and outcome differences. For left-wing governments, it is common to use taxes and subsidies to force a more equal distribution of disposable income and housing. This inevitably leads to weakened incentives for gainful employment and self-improvement, which in turn, albeit with some delay, leads to increased exclusion.Right-wing governments tend to apologize for the fact that there are jobs with lower status, but they hold out the prospect of class mobility and promise to increase these opportunities. But the truth is that most people are not mobile between the classes; they have a job further down the status ladder throughout their working lives. When there is no class mobility and you describe jobs further down the status hierarchy as something to “move away” from, it creates dissatisfaction among those who do not move on. Sympathy with those who have remained “further down” also falls; they have not moved on, they have not made the required effort, they have chosen to stay there, and they deserve their fate. They had the opportunity, but they did not take it. The rhetoric weakens the sense of unity and cohesion between the bottom and the top.Both the left- and right-wing strategies are affected by the fact that status weighs heavier than money, which means that increasingly higher wage premiums are required for low-reputation jobs, or that more and more guest workers are required to perform them at a reasonable cost. Both strategies involve focusing on the citizen’s relative position. But for someone to improve their relative position, it must deteriorate for someone else. Research has shown that the negative experience of having one’s position deteriorate is much stronger than the positive experience of it improving. The net outcome therefore does not necessarily lead to increased political support, something that the Conservative government in Britain has become aware of since the Brexit vote.What is justice?The simplest measure of justice is distributive justice, that is, outcomes should be as equal as possible, regardless of how they are achieved. Here, however, the problem is that resources obtained through redistribution do not confer the same status and self-respect as those earned through work. And as we have already noted, status and self-esteem outweigh financial reward (especially in a wealthy society).This finding brings us to the concept of contributive justice, introduced by the American philosopher Michael J. Sandel in his book The Tyranny of Merit. This entails all people having the opportunity to contribute to society through productive work, which in turn confers social recognition and respect by producing what other people need and value.Ronald Reagan understood the value of contributive justice. In his inaugural speech in January 1981, he highlighted everyday “heroes”: Our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we are sick—professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the people,” this breed called Americans. Robert Kennedy understood it too. In a speech a few months before he was murdered, he put it this way: “We need jobs, dignified employment at decent pay; the kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important to himself—‘I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its greatest public venture. I am a human being.’”People’s pursuit of dignity, status, and self-respect means that the main task of politics is to ensure that all citizens can contribute to managing and developing their society. This means not least that any job with terms of employment and a working environment that comply with Swedish norms is a good job that provides a route to dignity and out of social exclusion. Instead, many important jobs are labelled low status and carried out by economic migrants. Workers who already live in Sweden must be trained and supervised to do these jobs. If, for example, it is not possible to persuade those with citizenship or permanent residency to deliver ready-made food for a salary, then it means simply that there is no market for such services.Dignity and self-respectA key issue for the centre-right governments of 2006–14 was the so-called work line (arbetslinjen). The objective of these measures was that “it should pay to work, and more people should be given the opportunity to support themselves through their own work. … Through the proposals that the government has included in this Budget, it will become more beneficial for people to work. It will be more beneficial than today to go from handouts to work and self-sufficiency.” The weakness of the work line was that it was essentially justified by economic arguments: everyone must work, pay taxes, and contribute to welfare. But perhaps the most important aspect of the work line was the moral one—that it brings about contributive justice: all people should have the right to contribute to building society, to become an “agent of society,” and thereby gain status and respect. But then it is necessary that the perception of what constitutes a worthwhile and valuable contribution must also change.The political discussion is often about how differences in outcomes are said to be caused by differences in environmental factors that must be corrected. It is of course important to create the best possible conditions for everyone, but the public sector is failing in this respect more and more often. The discussion is less often about how we should deal with differences that cannot be corrected through political measures, precisely because people have different talents and preferences.This emphasis contributes to undermining the notion of the equal value of all. The implicit message is that those with higher intellectual abilities are more valuable, and that it is the task of the political elite to eradicate the environmental factors that give rise to differences so that everyone again becomes equally valued.Perhaps the problem lies partly in how Article 1 of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was translated into Swedish. The English original—“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”—has become in Swedish: “All people are born free and equal in worth and rights.” The Swedish translation becomes problematic because worth is something relative that allows comparison, while dignity is absolute, incomparable, unconditional, inviolable, and belongs to everyone. All human beings thus have human dignity, and in this respect, we are all equal. It is therefore a moral duty to respect human dignity. As the organizational researcher Ingemund Hägg has shown, Sweden seems to be unique in talking about worth instead of dignity.The Swedish translation of the rest of Article 1, on the other hand, is unproblematic. It reads: “They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of community.” I understand this to mean that people should work together for the public good rather than prioritize their narrow self-interest. If this can be achieved, the foundation has been laid for a high-trust society that enables effective cooperation at low cost to solve complex tasks within the framework of well-functioning companies, authorities, and civil society organizations.Effective cooperation requires structure. Power and authority must be distributed in some way, and the benefit will be greatest if they are distributed meritocratically—that is, to those who have the greatest ability to contribute to the group’s success.In a 2021 essay for Quillette, I argued that people have an inherent ability, naturally and voluntarily, to bestow influence and authority on the person or people who have the greatest ability to contribute to the group’s success. Those who receive power and authority from the group concerned also receive a large part of their compensation in the form of status, i.e., in non-pecuniary form, which reduces the income gap. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his 2021 book The Aristocracy of Talent, maintaining such a system requires “a wise meritocracy,” that those entrusted with positions of power must remain humble and feel responsible for the common good. It is important to avoid meritocracy developing into an entrenched aristocracy that lives a life far removed from those they rule over—the very system that Michael Sandel critiques.Nor can such a wise meritocracy survive unless those without the ability or motivation to advance to higher levels in the hierarchy are offered paths to dignity and self-realization. This is about upgrading our view of vocational education and practical skills, while at the same time toning down the current focus on academic studies as the path to success, status, and self-respect. Moreover, most people have a completely different path to dignity and what they perceive as a worthwhile life: forming and taking good care of a family, spending time with friends, and being able to say that you support yourself and those you are responsible for by holding down a respectable and socially valuable job. That is precisely the value of work.

My eldest daughter is in elementary school, and I recently started noticing that she was regularly enunciating “going to” and “want to,” no longer saying “gonna” or “wanna,” as many people do in casual speech. I’d say that most of us, on the fly, are more likely to ask, “What time is it gonna be?” than “What time is it going to be?” So, I decided to gently ask her about this, and she said her teachers had told her that “gonna” and “wanna” are not in the dictionary and one should instead say “going to” and “want to.”

I’m gonna diverge from this guidance.

First, though, I should note that her teachers are excellent. A week barely goes by that I don’t see, on the school’s website, or hear, directly from my daughter, about something they’ve done that shows them to be sterling instructors. They’ve also very recently gone through having to manage teaching small people under pandemic conditions, and I heartily salute them for grappling with that at a level I’m sure I would never have reached if put in their shoes. From my vantage point as a college teacher, their job seems harder than mine. Yet I still think the “gonna”/“wanna” issue merits unpacking.

To start, “gonna” and “wanna” are in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, with the part of speech for both given as a “pronunciation spelling.” Another way to describe these words is as contractions. They’re not the kind where an apostrophe welds two words together, such as “needn’t” and “shan’t,” but the general notion of combining two words into one is the same.

The issue is not that “hardening” is being used beyond its most elementary dictionary definition, referring to something leaving the state of softness. It is normal in language for words to have multiple meanings, and ordinarily I think people tend to be too strict when language evolves: No one thinks of slavery when referring to a master bedroom. Multiple meanings are a key source of what later becomes so much part of the warp and woof of a language that we no longer even perceive the source. “Hard,” in its meaning of hearty or brave, is what became the “-ard” in the names Leonard (lion hard), Bernard (bear hard) and Richard (hard ruler).

“Hardening” schools isn’t a metaphorical extension of target hardening but a direct usage of it, where we contemplate a strategy for repelling violence at schools, as opposed to city halls or train stations, as if this were an ordinary development in a mature society. I find this awful, in both our contemporary sense of the word — abhorrent — and its original one, as what we now express as awesome (a remnant of the original meaning is in the adverbial usage, which can be positive, as in “awfully good”). I am in awe at what we are accepting as everyday.

And what especially gets under my skin is the coyness at the heart of it, when the topic is the killing of children. Why this use of a term most of us find so unfamiliar when associated with schools? It’s because “hardening,” when applied to schools, is a kind of euphemism, a way of avoiding openly proposing that we prepare buildings full of children to be shielded against gunfire and even meet that gunfire with more gunfire. Calls to harden schools have the air of a nervous press secretary looking dutifully into the camera, wishing to be anywhere but there.

Now, we can be too hard on euphemization. It is so common — in fact, euphemizing is as inevitable as language change in terms of how entrenched it is in language and languages — because strategies of politeness, deference, avoidance and even wordplay are a part of being human. A part of us wants to tell people to just “say what you mean.” The thing is that quite often, euphemism is part of what people mean. We can, and generally do, mean more than faceless, straightforward statements like “the boy kicked a ball” and “I like apple pie,” despite how central these are in language arts textbooks, the teaching of foreign languages and our sense of what language is for. Mere descriptions and declarations are only a slice of what it is to express oneself as a person.

To the Editors:

Marcus Feldman and Jessica Riskin did not like my book. Or rather, they did not like a book called The Genetic Lottery by an author named “Kathryn Paige Harden,” but their review [NYR, April 21] so badly distorts my arguments that I have the curious impression that Feldman and Riskin somehow got their hands on another book entirely, an evil doppelgänger to mine. Therapists, parents, and the unhappily married would recognize the feeling I had upon reading their review the first time: it’s both vexing and bewildering when someone is spoiling for a fight about something you never said.

As a longtime reader of The New York Review of Books, I am surprised and disappointed that this review was published in such an esteemed outlet. Yes, “we all enjoy an intemperate paragraph of syntactically inspired bile,” to quote Zadie Smith, and Feldman and Riskin do deliver the bile. But I assume that, besides wanting to be entertained by vitriol, readers of book reviews are also interested in learning what a book is about. Here, Feldman and Riskin’s review fails entirely. That quote of Smith’s is from her review of My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, about which she wrote: “The gap between what actually happened and how Bernhard writes of it can be interpreted variously as postmodern playfulness or deceitful paranoia.” The gap between what The Genetic Lottery says and how Feldman and Riskin write of it is very large indeed, and no tone of playfulness is to be found.

Feldman and Riskin set out to slay three dragons: genetic determinism (“why biology is not destiny”), genetic essentialism (“you are not your genes”), and genetic reductionism (“all phenomena” are not “reducible to nucleotides”). They argue that these three “isms” are not supported by the scientific evidence—and I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, The Genetic Lottery devotes considerable space to describing why these three “isms” are wrong. As I summarize in the last chapter:

Much of this book has been taken up with these arguments. We should not interpret genetic influences as deterministic. We should not give up on the possibility of social policy to bring about social change. We should not confuse an outcome being socially valued with a person being valuable.

Passages like this one, which directly contradict their characterization of the book’s alleged determinism, reductionism, and essentialism, are easy to find! But Feldman and Riskin are not here to engage with what The Genetic Lottery says. Their aim, instead, is to expose what they see as the sinister, repressed meanings of my book, which are cloaked, in their view, by my cluelessness and my duplicitousness. Throughout the review, I am portrayed as the unwitting dupe of false consciousness (“beneath Harden’s protestations…”) or worse, as a liar (“with an admirable poker face, Harden writes…”). The possibility that I might mean what I say does not enter the picture. The hermeneutics of suspicion has its place, I suppose, but as Paul Ricoeur said, hermeneutics is animated by a “double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen.” They forgot the listening part.

In addition to grossly distorting the arguments of my book, Feldman and Riskin also turn their suspicious gaze to a variety of ordinary scientific concepts. In their telling, the “normal” distribution, which was first described, decades before Galton, by a mathematician studying errors in astronomical observations, is a “founding axiom of eugenics.” They write about the measurement of personality differences in a conspiratorial tone more commonly associated with Reddit discussions about the Deep State. They dismiss the importance of random assignment for causal inference as “blowing smoke.” There would be little left of the behavioral and social sciences if everything that Feldman and Riskin considered dubious were removed.

But perhaps they would like to be rid of all of the behavioral and social sciences? We could return to that more innocent time, when scientists didn’t go about confusing cabbages with kings, when behavior was understood solely in terms of “social practices” and free from any reference to biology. You know, the good old days, when autism was blamed on “refrigerator mothers” and being gay was blamed on domineering ones, when schizophrenia was the result of familial “double binds,” when patients with psychosis from late-stage syphilis suffered without any treatment options.

There is no arguing with someone committed to a paranoid reading, and doubtless Feldman and Riskin will respond to this letter with further distortions about how my book should “really” be interpreted. Fortunately, I trust readers. Based on the hundreds of e-mails and comments I have received about The Genetic Lottery, people are more than able to appreciate and engage with the book’s arguments. To quote one (anonymous) reader comment:

As someone with a chronic illness influenced by genes (T1D), and the mother of a child with a genetic syndrome and its attendant disabilities, I have wished for someone to wade into the fraught waters between eugenics on the right and the refusal to consider genes as important to life outcomes on the left. It is impossible to live lives where genes have such obvious and significant impact without feeling abandoned by both sides, frankly; that, on the one hand, we should accept our lesser status and try not to further contaminate the human race with our dirty genes, or on the other, we have certain accessibility rights defined by physical limitations but are never to link them to genetic causes in polite company, or mention the gaps that such a refusal creates in our ability to live good lives. The Genetic Lottery…elegantly discuss[es] how to address genetic causes for social outcomes within a framework of equity and human rights.

Near the end of their review, Feldman and Riskin acknowledge that, “True, genes shape people, and people make up social and cultural situations.” They don’t take that idea any further, leaving unanswered questions such as: How do we know that genes shape people? What aspects of people do genes shape? And what should we do with any new scientific insights about how genes shape people, especially if we want to avoid the evils of eugenics? These are exactly the questions that The Genetic Lottery addresses. Read it for yourself and decide.

Kathryn Paige Harden

Professor Department of Psychology

University of Texas at Austin

In the April 21, 2022, issue of The New York Review, M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin publish a hostile review of Kathryn Paige Harden’s recent book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality. The review makes some arguments that make no sense to me and deserve rebuttal.

Let us discuss the genetics of Educational Attainment (EA), defined as the number of years of schooling and measured in adults over thirty years old. EA takes up a good part of both the book and the review. Using genetic data from more than 300,000 individuals of European ancestry, it was possible to develop a “score” using the genomes of the people in the study. The details of the score are of lesser importance, but it’s important to realize that the score is a single number calculated from a genomic sample, by a fixed recipe. The score is correlated with EA at an enormously significant statistical level. This result was then replicated in an Icelandic study, using entirely different individuals from the first study. Again enormously significant results were obtained.

How do Feldman and Riskin explain these results? After a somewhat rambling diatribe complaining that choices were made in the details of the score, and how exactly the EA phenotype was chosen to study, they conclude that “researchers are [not] counting anything but their own projections.” How is this reasonable? A recipe is given, checked in a different study, and the results replicated. (Incidentally, a much larger study with more than 3 million (!) individuals was completed just this month and the results were again replicated.) Are we somehow to believe that experimental error in Iceland is correlated with EA of a sample? This is truly absurd.

The score has other interesting features. The average has been decreasing in Iceland since at least 1910, and the score strongly correlates between mating couples, an effect much stronger than correlation of EA. This argues that the score is meaningful without making the meaning clear. The work on EA is technically little different from studies of the genetics of height, and if we took the criticisms of Feldman and Riskin seriously that would invalidate an enormous amount of modern genetics, in which it is routine to find that complex traits are associated weakly with multiple genetic loci.

Feldman and Riskin also attack Harden for stating that the score will be normally distributed. Claiming that a trait follows a bell-shaped curve is “a founding axiom of eugenics.” This is an argument of guilt by association. The score is a sum of small values mostly independent and any geneticist, or statistician, will expect the distribution to be approximately normal. In a given study it is trivial to check normality of the computed scores.

This review is baffling. Feldman is a leading mathematical biologist at Stanford who I would have assumed understands statistical genetics, yet if I didn’t know who the reviewers were I would have thought that they were incompetent or ignorant. Perhaps Feldman and Riskin think that any argument is acceptable if it goes against results that they dislike?

Nick Patterson

Associate

Department of Human Evolutionary Biology

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin rightfully point out the many fallacies and misinterpretations in Kathryn Paige Harden’s new book, but appear dismissive of all efforts to identify genetic contributions to complex behaviors, going so far as to suggest that investigating genetic contributions to social life is somehow equivalent to comparing a copy of the Krebs cycle to Shakespeare’s King Lear.

How then to understand such experiments of nature as Williams-Beuren syndrome, a rare congenital genetic disorder caused by a deletion of twenty-six to twenty-eight genes on chromosome 7, and characterized by distinctive facial features, cognitive and cardiovascular dysfunction, and, most interestingly, extreme social affability and an engaging extroverted personality? Structural variants of the genes identified in the syndrome furthermore have been found to be associated with stereotypical hypersociability in dogs and implicated in the behavioral divergence of dogs and wolves.

It is clear that unraveling complex behavioral phenotypes into component parts that relate best to genetic risk is a difficult undertaking, but it is not a folly, and a more sophisticated analysis of the literature would accord greater respect for the field.

Victor I. Reus, M.D.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine

UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences

M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin, in their excellent, well-written, and very entertaining review of The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Harden, allude to but do not specify how one’s environment can be defined functionally and scientifically. Such a definition is the crux of the debate about nature and nurture and any discussion of genetic influences on behavior.

I believe that Feldman and Riskin, not to mention everyone else who talks about environment, would benefit from a behavioral view of environment as “all stimuli that affect behavior at any given moment” rather than the more widely accepted and general one which is “the surrounding conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.”

The behavioral view of environment has three important implications: 1) the environment is not just our surroundings but is inside of us as well because there are stimuli (pain, proprioceptive, etc.) that are located inside our bodies that affect our behavior; 2) the environment is constantly in flux as it comprises “all stimuli that affect an individual’s behavior at any given moment,” which means that one’s environment changes moment to moment; and 3) no two individuals can ever have the same environment, not even monozygotic twins.

To the last point, my mother used to ask me how my two siblings and I could be so different even though we were raised in the same environment. Now I know that she meant the same parents, house, etc. But according to a behavioral view of environment, we weren’t raised in the same environment because one’s environment consists of all stimuli that affect behavior moment to moment. And even though that environment begins negligibly in the last trimester before birth, the number of responses and stimuli explode and expand exponentially at birth. When one considers the staggeringly high number of possible behavioral responses and stimuli those responses can interact with, any genetic explanation of human behavior takes a back seat to environmental ones. As Feldman and Riskin wrote, “living things are in continual interaction with their environments in ways that transform both at every level.”

To the behavioral view of environment we can add the discovery of how stimuli affect behavior as antecedent events (e.g., discriminative stimuli) and, more importantly, as (reinforcing) consequences, which themselves determine whether and how antecedent stimuli evoke (or abate) behavior. This conception of environment and a selectionist view of how consequences cause behavior have proven to be a much more productive avenue for research and, perhaps more importantly, interventions to change behavior in sometimes dramatic ways.

Of course, genetics cannot be completely discounted because the capacity of an organism’s behavior to be affected by the environment is a function of the species’ evolutionary history and genetic endowment. Nonetheless, a functional and scientific conception of environment can counteract to a large degree any biological or genetic claims of behavioral causation.

Henry D. Schlinger Jr..

Professor.

Department of Psychology.

California State University, Los Angeles

M. W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin reply:

Kathryn Paige Harden accuses us of selective reading, but she herself is an uncareful reader. To begin with, she writes that we’ve charged her with “genetic determinism.” But we haven’t done this anywhere in our review. We were as careful to acknowledge her disavowals of genetic determinism as she was to place them at regular intervals throughout her book. Although we didn’t quote the one she excerpts in her letter, we did quote an equivalent one, which occurs on page 46: “One’s genetics might not determine your life outcomes, but they are still associated, among other things, with being hundreds of thousands of dollars wealthier at the end of one’s working life.” As we said in connection with this passage and others like it, Harden’s reductionism is of an “I’m no reductionist but” variety; or we might just as well have said that her essentialism is of an “I’m no essentialist but” variety. Another example: “genetic luck is braided together with other differences” (page 43), but “Can we really say that genes cause you to be wealthier? (Short answer: yes)” (page 44).

When she says we described the “normal” distribution as “a founding axiom of eugenics,” Harden misreads us. In fact, we wrote that the assumption “that there are intrinsic cognitive and personality traits whose distribution in a population follows a bell-shaped curve” was a founding axiom of eugenics—not, of course, the normal distribution itself, which isn’t an axiom of any kind, eugenic or otherwise.

Harden also misquotes us when she writes that we “acknowledge that, ‘True, genes shape people, and people make up social and cultural situations.’” She leaves out a crucial word. What we wrote was that “genes help shape people,” hardly a momentous “acknowledgment”; neither we nor anyone else would be likely to deny it.

Oddly, Harden says we seem nostalgic for a “more innocent time” in the “good old days.” This is surprising: we wouldn’t have guessed our historical sketch of eugenics and scientific racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could seem nostalgic. At the same time, it’s interesting to note that the very conditions and characteristics she lists as having received much worse treatment in those old days—autism, homosexuality, schizophrenia, psychosis, and syphilis—all seem like good examples of a principle we advanced in our review: genes don’t cause everything. We agree that many today regard these human phenomena in a better light than previously, but this is not due to behavioral genetics or sociogenomics.

Finally, Harden asks whether we reject the psychological and behavioral sciences altogether. We don’t: we reject those areas of the psychological and behavioral sciences that claim a spurious reduction of complex social phenomena to genes. Happily, we know that some researchers in the area are pursuing better, less reductionist lines of research. The intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of people in social situations aren’t fixed and distinct but are continually shaping and transforming one another, so that there’s no fact of the matter about which causes what. It’s not that these situations are too complex for us to figure out how much is intrinsic and how much extrinsic, but that the question itself is meaningless. How much is the California coastline due to the Pacific Ocean and how much to the North American continent?

Overall, Harden’s letter confirms what we said in our review: while disavowing essentialist, racist, and eugenic notions she affirms a new version of the old illogic that has long supported them.

Nick Patterson’s arguments are beside the point. First, regarding polygenic scores for “educational attainment,” he writes that these are calculated “by a fixed recipe.” OK, but assuming this recipe didn’t come from a burning bush, someone must have written it, making many interpretive choices along the way, as we said in our review, such as which single-nucleotide polymorphisms to consider, how to weight and aggregate these, and what definition of “educational attainment” to adopt. Patterson mentions “years of schooling.” Dissatisfaction with this parameter led various institutions, including the US Census Bureau, to replace it with “highest level of school completed or highest degree achieved.”

These parameters too (like all parameters) carry ambiguities and interpretive assumptions. For instance, what kinds of school? The Census Bureau generally includes “professional” but not “vocational” training, allowing training in chiropractic but not automotive mechanics or airline maintenance. The main study that Patterson cites (Okbay et al. 2016) draws on many surveys conducted in different countries, all with different educational systems and definitions of “educational attainment,” and uses a UN framework to normalize the results to “years of education.” In short, Patterson’s “fixed recipe” hides many layers of implicit social theory.

Next, Patterson emphasizes that polygenic risk scores correlate with “educational attainment” to a statistically significant degree; he in fact says these correlations are “enormously significant.” Since “enormous” is not a technical term it’s hard to guess what he might understand by it. “Significant” does have a technical meaning in statistics. Just as correlation is not causation, “significant” does not mean “important” or even “relevant.” A “significant” effect is one whose p-value—or probability of resulting from pure chance—is less than a certain specified value. Accordingly, it can still be tiny and/or causally irrelevant.

In fact, data mining can even extract highly “significant” correlations that “explain” a set of randomly generated dependent variables using a set of randomly generated independent variables. The three studies Patterson mentions do indeed use data-mining techniques to, as he says, develop polygenic indices for “educational attainment” and to make various weak correlations of the latter with the former. Of course, we never disputed that such studies do this; as we said in our review, the field of sociogenomics is devoted to creating statistical correlations between social outcomes according to various interpretive definitions and aggregates of up to many thousands of single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Our point is that there’s no reason to think these statistical correlations have any causal meaning.

Patterson writes that our criticisms “would invalidate an enormous amount of modern genetics.” Again, we won’t interrogate what he means by “enormous,” but will just assure readers that our review of The Genetic Lottery is not meant to invalidate modern genetics. For some physical traits, such as height or body mass index, polygenic scores are associated with a sizeable fraction of the variation. Even in these cases, the traits are clearly environmentally malleable, and there is no fact of the matter about how much of the variation is due to genetics versus environmental factors, as Richard Lewontin showed, because of the interaction between the two. Therefore, we would indeed question any claim to show specifically genetic causes of such traits on the basis of polygenic scores. Happily, such claims constitute what we would judge to be a less than enormous portion of the field.

Finally, Patterson is incredulous that we would question the idea of a polygenic score following a bell-shaped curve, writing that “the score is a sum of small values mostly independent and any geneticist, or statistician, will expect the distribution to be approximately normal.” He says that only someone incompetent or ignorant of statistics could deny this. But our point is ontological, not statistical. The question is not whether a sum of small, independent values would be likely to follow a normal distribution. The question is whether there’s any reason to think such a sum can bear a meaningful relation to cognitive, psychological, social, or behavioral aspects of people.

Here’s an example to illustrate what we mean: we find some letter-writers to The New York Review to be cogent while others are tendentious. No doubt, given the right genetic database and using our definitions of cogent and tendentious letter-writing, we could produce polygenic scores for each, made up of many independent variables. On that basis, a competent statistician might expect the distributions of cogent and tendentious letter-writers to the The New York Review of Books to be bell-shaped. But such a score would be a fabrication with no causal meaning and would not help to explain the occurrence of tendentious letters to the editor.

Victor Reus invokes the rare disease Williams-Beuren syndrome, which has a known and relatively simple genetic cause. There is no doubt that even simple genetic abnormalities may cause many phenotypic consequences; this is called pleiotropy. But this is a very different situation, even something like the opposite situation, from what the authors of polygenic scores are claiming. In Williams-Beuren and other such syndromes, differences or deletions in one area in the genome cause many effects throughout the body. Conversely, the authors of polygenic scores claim that aggregates of tiny differences throughout the genome have specific effects on complex phenotypes.

Polygenic risk scores therefore do not “[unravel] complex behavioral phenotypes into component parts.” Rather, they associate complex behavioral phenotypes with aggregates of thousands of single-nucleotide differences. Moreover, genome-wide association studies of social-behavioral phenomena such as “educational attainment” associate only a tiny fraction of the variation among individuals with single-nucleotide differences, and there is no reason to think these differences are causal.

Henry Schlinger raises an important point, not only for human behavioral traits but for evolution in general. Richard Lewontin challenged the neo-Darwinian assumption of a fixed environment, pointing out that organisms are continually constructing and transforming their environments through their own behaviors and social interactions. This idea was formalized in a series of articles and a 2003 book, Niche Construction, by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, and taken further in articles in Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The “extended evolutionary synthesis” framework incorporates this continual, mutual transformation of organism and environment into the evolutionary picture.

A few friends and I were having dinner in downtown Washington, DC last night. While we were walking out, I saw a man—he appeared to be mentally ill or perhaps under the influence—come out of nowhere and aggressively lunge toward my friend, making contact. It was over in a second, and I couldn't really make out what happened. Fortunately, it didn't get worse than it was, but it was unsettling. Shaken, my friend, who is white, told us that the man had made a racist comment while lunging at him.When we thought about what to do next, my friend wondered if he should call the police. The man appeared to be trailing us from a block or two away and was shouting at people on the street. It wasn't about getting the man in trouble, my friend reasoned, but rather about making sure he couldn't potentially assault anyone else.On the other hand, we more or less assumed that the police couldn't do anything—or, perhaps more precisely, that they wouldn't. It wasn't so much that the police were incompetent or that they were participating in some sort of deliberate work slowdown, as has been the case in other American cities. It stemmed rather from a more general sense of lawlessness and that vaguely unsettling feeling one experiences in certain parts of the city at certain times of night.Before 2019, I don't really remember local crime being a regular topic of discussion among friends in DC. It is now. Most of my friends can relay a recent experience with petty crime and the sense of fatalism that comes from realizing that authorities and institutions probably won't do much, for whatever reason. Anecdata, of course, is not the same as data. In cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, progressive district attorneys repeatedly insist that their critics have gotten the facts wrong. As the New York Times recently reported, San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin routinely "confront[s] voters with data that shows overall crime has not increased meaningfully while he has been in office, even as some categories have risen during the pandemic." Perhaps more irritating, Larry Krasner, Philadelphia's cantankerous district attorney, has developed a habit of browbeating critics in town hall meetings with appeals to "the science" and how his in-house criminologist can give people the real numbers if they really want them. Ordinary residents are being told that what they perceive to be true is not, in fact, true. They are, in effect, being gaslit.The problem, here, is that we understand and interact with the world around us based on perception and feeling. Politics is about policy, but it is also about human nature and realizing that human nature, however one wishes to characterize it, is a constant to contend with. You can try to transcend it by appealing to people's better angels or through education and enlightenment—but only up to a point. Information, facts, and education don't necessarily serve the purpose liberals assume it will. Very few of us will read a detailed academic journal article about trends in crime reporting before deciding how to feel about crime.It also depends on which facts one actually pays attention to. Any self-respecting political scientist will be well aware of how the data can be manipulated to confirm one's priors. A criminologist—considering how politicized debates over crime are—will presumably have ideological biases that inform his or her research. Are you looking at "overall crime" or certain sub-categories—and who's to say which sub-categories matter more than others? No one, in the end, is a disinterested observer.But the debate over facts and (mis)information obscures a more fundamental objection. The data miners and the otherwise well-intentioned people who believe, as one might believe in a religion, that the facts will save you seem unable to grasp that crime isn't just crime (is anything ever really only what it seems to be?). Crime is also a proxy for a deeper malaise, that inchoate sense of almost-but-not-quite social collapse that's in the air we breathe, impossible to measure with precision but unmistakably there all the same. Part of it draws on our own confusion, driven by the intuition that things shouldn't be the way they are. When we see the tent encampments that have spread throughout Washington, DC in the past two years, it suggests that something has gone wrong. This is the most powerful city in the world, and yet people are living in makeshift tents in the richest parts of the city, a stone's throw from the White House and the U.S. Congress. And no one seems to know what to do about it. Or they do know what to do about it but can't be bothered to act. Either that, or they've found a way to quickly resign themselves to a new reality—the so-called "new normal."'Things aren't worse; they just seem worse' makes for an odd battle cry, and I, for one, don't find it particularly reassuring. This—whatever this is—is obviously not the end of the world, but that's only reassuring insofar as most things aren't the end of the world.

It is easy, and not entirely incorrect, to dismiss French President Emmanuel Macron’s idea of a broader “European political community” as a cynical ploy to deny Ukraine full EU membership. Simultaneously, the vague proposal gives Europeans an opportunity to grapple seriously with their continent’s diversity. There is, after all, a real tension between efforts to extend EU membership to a growing number of countries and the imperative of the union’s further deepening, which appears to be an important motivating force for Macron and his ilk.First, however, let there be no mistake about the cynicism behind France’s reticence. While some East European leaders—Poland’s Andrzej Duda comes to mind—have made several trips to Kyiv since the beginning of the war, both Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz appear more eager to call Vladimir Putin regularly than to pay a visit to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Neither of the two European powers have covered themselves in glory with their low-key military assistance to Ukraine, either. For all the talk of a “Zeitenwende,” Germany’s military aid, including the delivery of Gepard air defense tanks, is subject to constant delays—as if the German government were carefully hedging its bets.Similarly, the Franco-German tandem is dragging its feet over Ukraine’s eventual membership in the EU. While the European Parliament is sanguine about Ukraine’s accession, the EU summit in Versailles offered carefully calibrated, noncommittal language about “strengthen[ing] our bonds and deepen[ing] our partnership to support Ukraine in pursuing its European path,” with no mention of actionable steps or deadlines. That approach, reminiscent of the lukewarm compromise adopted at NATO’s Bucharest Summit in 2008, sets up both the Ukrainian citizenry and political elites for a sharp disappointment once the war is over, as Damir Marusic warns over at Wisdom of Crowds.The notion that this reluctance is driven by fear of a looming axis between Kyiv and Warsaw that will displace, or will compete with, the Franco-German tandem for power in the EU is farfetched. The leverage of the latter two is related to their economic size and their role as the largest contributors to the EU budget—both of which are unlikely to be matched by a putative Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 2.0.Perhaps most charitably, the resistance toward enlargement can be explained by the real trade-off between a widening and a deepening of the EU. For a large segment of West European elites, including Macron, the latter unambiguously trumps the former. To this, add the casual condescension in Berlin and Paris, which both see Eastern Europe as a hopelessly backward place, a source of sand in the EU’s decision-making gearbox, and as a drain on the bloc’s finances.How should Eastern Europeans—and Americans, Brits, and Nordics—respond? One option is to hope that the Germans and the French eventually change their minds under pressure from the currently unfolding events and in the face of reasoned arguments from their East European partners.Yet, if the basic parameters of strategic thinking in Berlin and Paris have not been fundamentally altered by the ongoing war in Ukraine, we should not be organizing our lives on the assumption of a just-around-the-corner fundamentally transformed Germany or France. Rhetoric aside, much of the evidence suggests that no deep change has taken place to date: the EU’s two central powers are likely to push Ukraine to a Minsk-like “compromise” sacrificing its sovereignty, in order to block the EU’s future enlargements to the east, and to seek eventual normalization of relations with Russia.By doing so, however, both governments are unwittingly putting to rest any prospects of Europe’s “strategic autonomy.” To be sure, we will likely see more defense spending across the bloc, with the EU’s structures such as PESCO and the European Defence Fund playing a helpful role at the margins. Yet, given that Eastern Europeans are more likely to see eye-to-eye on the issue of Russia with the United States or the United Kingdom than with their EU partners, they are unlikely to enthusiastically embrace a common EU defense and security policy, the terms of which would be shaped primarily by Germany and France.Given the asymmetry between extraordinarily generous military assistance to Ukraine by East European countries—amounting to a third of Estonia’s defense budget, for example—not to mention that coming from the United States, and the far more muted West European response, the argument for pooling defense resources and subjecting them to collective decision-making at EU-27 does not pass the laugh test.

Resurgence of the Russian threat, after all, has not led Sweden and Finland (both EU members in good standing) to bring up questions of the EU’s common security policy. Instead, it has prompted both to seek membership in NATO. For all the concerns about America’s reliability, especially if isolationist forces continue to gain strength in its domestic political life, there is no alternative to U.S. security guarantees.It is worth dwelling on the reasons why, other than the might of the United States. The EU’s main problem is not simply the extremism of outlier countries such as Hungary, which could theoretically be overridden, as some imagine, by a move to qualified majority voting. The problem is, rather, the persistence of broader fissures on which the EU’s east and north, roughly speaking, clash with its west and south.Such fissures cannot be wished away or eliminated by one side prevailing over the other. Countries that stand with Ukraine and want to see Russia unambiguously defeated have no choice but to work around Germany and France, joining forces with the United States and other non-members, such as Norway and the United Kingdom. Doing so will necessarily de-emphasize the role of the EU.Because EU enlargements require unanimity, Ukraine (or Moldova or Georgia) will not be joining the EU unless the German and French governments expressly want it—which may well mean no membership, ever. That would be a sad outcome, one that should put on notice those who want Ukraine to succeed. International institutions are neither God-given nor made of stone. They are, just like commercial contracts, words on paper that can be renegotiated or superseded by other contracts.Just as the United States can (and should) unilaterally extend treaty-based security guarantees to Ukraine that would be just as good as NATO membership, Nordics and Eastern Europeans do not have to await Brussels’ pleasure. They can open their labor markets to Ukrainians. They can introduce mutual recognition arrangements facilitating cross-border economic exchange. They can bring Ukraine into already existent energy infrastructure projects under the Three Seas Initiative. Simultaneously, they should push Brussels to extend to Ukraine membership in the single market and the Schengen Area, much like Switzerland or Norway, either through a bilateral super-deal or membership in the European Economic Area.With enough political imagination and leadership, the ultimate outcome may not be disastrous. For one, Ukraine’s needs today are very different from those of the post-communist countries of the 1990s. While the country will have to fight corruption and strengthen its democratic institutions, it is far from obvious that the only way to do so is by sheepishly embracing the acquis communautaire. If anything, the Russian threat has concentrated minds in Kyiv on building a viable, strong, and prosperous state, in a way that European integration in the 1990s was never able to do, given the benign international conditions of the time.Moreover, for far too long, the EU has operated under the assumption that European integration is a state-building exercise, a one-way street toward a future European federation. Such efforts, however, have led European elites to make risky bets that too often have clashed against the reality of Europe’s diversity, disagreements, and the continent’s rambling, unruly nature. If Macron and his ilk want to continue in those efforts within, say the eurozone, they can. Yet, coalitions of other European countries both inside and outside of the EU should be equally free to pursue (or not) partial integration in projects that fit their own preferences, including by forging deeper ties with Ukraine. If one wants to call the bundle of those project the “European political community,” so be it. Given Macron’s love of Ricoeurian contradiction and synthesis, creating a simultaneously tighter and looser union in Europe would be a fitting—and ultimately beneficial—institutional legacy of his presidency.Dalibor Roháč is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of American Purpose. He is author of Governing the EU in an Age of Division, due out this fall. Twitter: @DaliborRohac

When dating apps started becoming popular in the early 2010s, many people feared that seeking romance on the internet might be dangerous. Since then, online dating has become a normal part of how adults find new relationships. Still, one uncomfortable aspect of these apps remains mostly unaddressed: the ease with which underage users can create profiles and risk being preyed on by adults. I would know; I was one of them. I found my way to Grindr at 16, chatted with older men, and later met my first boyfriend, who was in his early 20s, when I was just 17. In my reporting, I’ve come to realize not only how common this type of experience is but also how ineffective apps have been at preventing minors from joining.Most popular dating apps (including Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, Scruff, Jack’d, and Her) mandate that users be at least 18 to join. ​​When signing up, users must provide their birthday or link a social-media profile that includes their date of birth. But they are not required to provide any proof of their age; Facebook and Instagram, which they may connect to their online-dating account, also don’t ask for evidence of a user’s age. Stopping someone from lying about their birthday is virtually impossible, and other safeguards appear to be minimal at best. Anyone who says that they’re 18 or older is free to start adding photos, customizing a profile, and connecting with other users—mostly adults—in their area.[Read: The five years that changed dating]The exact number of minors who secretly make profiles is hard to quantify, but estimations exist. According to a Northwestern University study published in 2018, more than 50 percent of sexually active gay and bisexual underage boys have had sex with people they met on apps such as Grindr.  “Use of our app by anyone under the age of consent in their country is a violation of our terms of service and we block/shut down accounts for anyone who violates those terms,” Patrick Lenihan, Grindr’s vice president of communications, told me via email. “We would love partnership, specifically from Apple and Google, to develop better age gate technology that respects the privacy of users while also enhancing safety.” A representative for Bumble shared that the company uses “automated and live verification procedures” to block users under 18 and prevent them from rejoining, but apart from saying that the app employs a team of content moderators, the representative did not specify what those procedures were. A spokesperson for Match Group, which owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, said that the company uses “technology including AI” to search for suspicious language “that indicates a user may be underage,” though the spokesperson did not share how the search process worked or what type of language that might encompass. Her, Scruff, and Jack’d failed to respond to multiple requests for comment. (Scruff and Jack’d are owned by Perry Street Software, which also did not respond to a request for comment.)To some, having minors on dating apps might seem harmless. Many young people start accounts hoping to find other people around their age. Queer teens in particular sometimes come searching for a sense of community that they can’t find at home. But these apps are made for adults, some of whom are too eager to meet someone so young. I spoke with three young people who said they online-dated while under 18, easily lying about their age to create profiles. Though their experiences differed, our conversations painted a concerning picture of a process in which they sought romantic validation and exploration but instead wound up feeling used.For example, an 18-year-old living in Anaheim, California, who requested anonymity to protect his privacy, told me that he joined Grindr when he was 16 to explore his sexuality and connect with other queer teens. He specified in his profile that he was in high school, but he says he still found himself sorting through messages from older men wanting to meet. When he first hooked up with someone from an app at 16 or 17, he didn’t ask their age but guessed that the man was in his mid-20s. Similarly, Ellie, a 19-year-old based in California who requested to be referred to by her first name only to protect her privacy, was just 15 years old when she made her first profiles on Tinder and Bumble. She quickly found that “a lot of guys” were into how young she was. She said she met up with a number of college-age men and ultimately felt taken advantage of.Tristien Nguyen, a 19-year-old gay man, who started a Grindr account at age 15, summed up the situation bluntly: “I only met up with creeps, I only talked to creeps, and it changed my viewpoint on older people in my community.” He felt deeply unsettled that so many men were willing to meet up after learning his true age. “Some of them were old enough to be my grandpa,” he told me about the people who messaged him. Nguyen’s profile was flagged and taken down several times, but each time he found that making a new one was easy.Although dating apps say they are doing what they can to keep minors off, they aren’t succeeding. And when these platforms fail to prevent minors from joining, they also fail to protect them from potential predators. Data on the possible harms these apps can pose to minors are sparse because many cases of sexual assault and statutory rape never reach the police, but the existing investigations are troubling. The GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting found that from 2015 to 2021, more than 100 men—including police officers, teachers, and priests—were charged in the United States with crimes related to sexually assaulting minors or attempting to engage in a sexual act with a minor through Grindr. (In a statement to GBH, a spokesperson for Grindr said that the app is “susceptible to misuse and bad actors” and that Grindr “strictly prohibits any interactions with or use of its platform by minors, exploitation or solicitation of any kind, impersonation, and other forms of illicit or inappropriate conduct.”) Similarly, the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times has reported that, from 2015 to 2019, there were at least 30 cases of child rape and 60 cases of children being otherwise sexually exploited on dating apps in the U.K. (Both Tinder and Grindr emphasized their efforts to keep minors off their platform in statements to The Sunday Times.)Governments have started to take notice of reports like these. After the Sunday Times investigation, then–Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright said that he would be writing to Tinder and Grindr to investigate their age-verification processes. Meanwhile, the United States House Oversight and Reform subcommittee on economic and consumer policy initiated an investigation in 2020 into Bumble, Match Group, Grindr, and the Meet Group (which operates several dating apps), focused on the companies’ processes for verifying ages, protecting minors, and responding to reports of assault, among other issues. But results from both inquiries have yet to be made public.The question of how a more rigorous age-verification process would ideally work on the apps is a surprisingly tricky one. Currently they rely on teams of content moderators and artificial intelligence to detect suspicious profiles, as well as reports of underage accounts from their own users. Augustin Chaintreau, a computer-science professor at Columbia University and the director of the university’s Mobile Social Lab, describes this system as cheap and ineffective; it may make signing up easy, but it does not do enough to protect children. Requiring users to provide an ID when they register is one obvious solution. But, according to Jonathan Mayer, a computer-science and public-affairs professor at Princeton and a former technology adviser to then-Senator Kamala Harris, a process like this would be expensive for the companies and a hassle for users. Not everyone has a form of identification, and giving a private company access to millions of users’ IDs poses potential privacy and security problems. Another option would be verifying users’ identity through their credit card—though such a proposal might not succeed; Congress has unsuccessfully attempted to mandate credit-card-based age verification for websites with sexually explicit content twice.[Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls]Preventing all teens from meeting people they find on the internet would be impossible, says Lorin LaFave, who founded an organization to educate young people about online safety after her son Breck was murdered by an 18-year-old man he met on the internet. But individuals and companies can do better. When we spoke, LaFave recommended education and open discussion about healthy online relationships from parents. Chaintreau advocated for government-ID-based verification to keep minors off adult dating apps, despite the privacy trade-offs of such a system.Looking back on my experience as a minor on Grindr, I have mixed feelings about being so young on an app meant for adults. Part of me is happy that I met so many people during a time when I felt alone. I had recently come out and, beyond Grindr, I didn’t have any queer people to process my feelings with. However, another part of me regrets that I was so eager to grow up. My life before these apps was filled with a lot less self-loathing, which was induced by the harsh comments Grindr users made about my appearance. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about how I communicate, how I should be treated, and how to navigate online spaces. I wish I’d started that journey when I was less impressionable, though, and I hope that teens in the future will be better protected than I was. Dating apps need more in-depth screenings to ensure that vulnerable minors don’t find their way onto the platforms—even if such processes come at the expense of growing the number of users. Kids deserve better protection than this.

Boris Johnson has survived the attempt by some in Britain’s Conservative party to remove him as prime minister. The margin not quite close. But by being so publicly called into question, both the prime minister and his party have been weakened. Dogged by real and performative public disapproval, Johnson will have difficulty remaining in power for the rest of the parliamentary term, and more performing to do in the next election to remain in office after it.
In the fabled axioms of British politics, two things are meant to be clear. One is that the Conservative party is the natural party of government. The country is slightly right-of-center, the logic goes, and it is a rare Labour challenge which can defeat this innate advantage. A second axiom is that the Conservative party wins because it is ruthless and efficient: willing and eager to remove a leader if the aura of defeat starts to hang about them.
Adherents of this theory point to the vicious deposition of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, in which the prime minister — a three-time landslide election winner — actually won her leadership challenge, but did so insufficiently. One by one, her trusted ministers slunk into meetings in Downing Street to tell her the game was up. She was soon gone, in tears.
But the belief that this is the norm is wrong. The premiership of Theresa May was an unparalleled disaster, a long and drawn-out embarrassment. She stumbled through speeches and announcements, failing to win over foreign powers and the House of Commons over Brexit. None of this endeared her to the public. But rather than intuiting this fact, the Conservatives let her fight an election and lose their majority in 2017.
The Tories failed to oust the shambling wreck of John Major in 1995, after which he led them into one of their worst defeats two years later. They allowed Edward Heath to fight, and lose, three elections between 1965 and 1975, winning only one of the four he contested, before selecting Thatcher in his place.
Johnson has been chronically unpopular for six months, and was barely trusted for much of the last two years. Britain’s entirely uncharismatic opposition seems likely to defeat him in the next election. If his party were an efficient butcher, Johnson would have been long gone by now.
I labor this point because in British politics, and especially now, the character of the party leader is inescapable. They give flavor and direction to the government. When in favor, they run their cabinets like dictators. If they are weak or passionless, their governments desiccate before our eyes. They look vainly for something to do and, anemically, pursue vague policies of little import.
That is the situation we have faced since 2019. Boris Johnson’s government was derailed by Covid, as the world was. But now the worst of the pandemic is behind us, and as we approach the midpoint of the parliamentary term, the tabulations are beginning. What has the government achieved of its manifesto? Has it built any of its proposed programs? Does it have any vision at all? Are you better or worse off than you were in December 2019?
Ideological confederates of the Conservatives are increasingly saying publicly what they have long whispered: that Johnson and his government are entirely empty and without substance, that they have accomplished nothing.
Johnson has always been ideologically loose: his colleagues have often accused him, not without reason, of believing in nothing at all. Much of his party appears similar. They were elected to a hefty majority in 2019 on such platitudes as “leveling up” the country — a term still without a definition. When asked now why Johnson should stay, Conservatives loyal to him largely resile themselves to saying that, of all his parliamentary colleagues, only Johnson could win another election, and win big. It is a depressing indictment. Out of their own mouths condemned.
Unlike distant ages past, the House of Commons is full of mediocrities. MPs are not, typically, bright or interesting. They generally had unremarkable careers in business, media, or the law; many were activists from obsessive childhood. Few of them have achieved anything in life besides being elected. Even when putting their heads together, they have few decent ideas. The age of 24-hour TV news and campaigning via Twitter has made them seem even more robotic or, conversely, deranged. The only time — aside from if they say something impolitic online — that any individual MP is likely to make news is if they are murdered or convicted of sexual crimes.
Britain’s Conservatives are run by someone many consider a character, a real personality, and they are already weak and ineffectual. Can you imagine, the party must think, how little chance they might have with someone else?
One of the most iconoclastic figures in British public life is Dominic Cummings. He was Johnson’s Svengali before political differences, and Cummings’ becoming the story tore them apart. Cummings has many faults: instinctual contrarianism, a tendency towards hysteria, a badly concealed sense of his own innate superiority, an inability to work with others. But his analysis of the British administrative state is sound. As he diagnoses, it is run — both bureaucratically and politically — by hollow men: people who have nothing to give yet insist on ruling the nation. Because Britain’s legislature and executive are fused, they head every government department.
The Tories are hollow men. Internally, they have few alternatives to Johnson. So few of them have any skills, let alone any deep knowledge accumulated over a lifetime. The party is exhausted; it has vivisected itself over twelve years of largely pointless office-holding, with what little talent it took government with a decade ago largely gone.
With his shaky survival tonight, Johnson’s party has shown itself still dependent on the continuing popularity of one deeply flawed man, a man with little acumen and nothing to do besides dig his nails into doorframes and attempt to cling longer to power.
All men and all politicians fail. Johnson himself will do so soon. It is careless for any natural party of government, as the Conservatives believe themselves to be, to leave itself with so little road left before collapse.
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A Book Review of Time For Socialism, by Thomas Piketty.

T ime For Socialism author Thomas Piketty boasts a doctorate in economics, publishes papers regularly in top economics journals, teaches economics at the Paris School of Economics, and was once on the economics faculty at M.I.T. Yet not only are the 333 pages of his 2021 book utterly empty of economic reasoning, the reasoning that does infuse those pages is painful for an economist to encounter. Reading this book—which is a collection mostly of Piketty’s columns for Le Monde—literally hurt my head.

The aching caused by reading this book isn’t a result of my immense ideological distance from Piketty. Having read and reviewed his 2014 Capital In the Twenty-First Century, I—a Hayekian liberal—have long known that Piketty is a man of the far left, and I have no trouble dealing with even gaping ideological differences. What hurt my economist’s head was trying to make sense of a worldview that would approach plausibility only in an alternate universe in which the most basic principles of economics, as I understand them, don’t apply.

In Piketty’s universe, the tools, enterprises, and economic processes that are necessary for modern prosperity just materialize, as if out of thin air. About the formation and operation of capital goods and services the reader gets no information beyond the alleged fact that, above a certain level, wealth—that is, the value of capital—”tends to grow mechanically.” An implication of this mysterious reality is that, because the value of capital depends upon the value of what it produces, the total output generated by capital also tends to grow mechanically. In Piketty’s universe, then, capital goods and services are neither caused by—nor affected by—entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and individuals’ private investment choices. Economic and social institutions thus have almost no impact on wealth creation. Ditto for economic and fiscal policies. Adam Smith’s 1776 inquiry into how institutions and norms cause the wealth of nations —Smith’s investigation into how different institutions and norms cause differences in the wealth of nations—must be for Piketty a project wholly sterile and inexplicable.

My best guess is that Piketty is enough of a Marxist to assume that that which “mechanically” generates businesses, factories, tools, and all other productive assets are the historical forces that form society. The toil of physically extracting from capital the outputs with which capital is pregnant is left to laborers, but Piketty’s belief that the value of capital “tends to grows mechanically” allows for only very minor variation over time in the total amount of final output that labor helps capital to birth.

It follows that in Piketty’s universe, any unusually great wealth and income possessed by entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate managers is unearned and, hence, unjustified. Having done nothing to produce their outsized bounties, capitalists will not be incited by near-confiscatory taxation to change their economic behavior in ways that will injure society. How could they be so incited, given that the value of capital under their control “tends to grow mechanically”? Transferring the proceeds derived from this heavy taxation to workers and the poor will simply ensure that everyone in society obtains his and her fair share of what is overwhelmingly the result of inexorable social forces—forces that are in no way explained by bourgeois economic ‘reasoning’ of the sort popularized by the likes of Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, and calamitously put into public-policy practice by political rogues, most notably Margaret Thatcher, Emmanuel Macron, and Ronald Reagan.

It’s no surprise, then, that not once in this book does Piketty bother to argue substantively against economists’ familiar prediction that taxing incomes at exorbitant rates discourages income-earning activity. On the few occasions when he acknowledges the existence of such concerns, he breezily dismisses them by asserting that they are unsupported by evidence. For Piketty, bothering to explain why taxing incomes or wealth will not diminish society’s flow of income or its stock of wealth is as pointless as would be bothering to explain why taxing the performance of rain dances will not diminish the amount of rain that falls from the heavens. Just as it’s foolish beyond comment to suppose that rain dancers create rain, it’s equally foolish, Piketty seems to think, to suppose that entrepreneurs and investors create wealth.

You might suspect that I exaggerate or miss important nuances in Piketty’s strange vision of economic reality. I don’t think that I do. Throughout Time for Socialism, Piketty describes cuts in taxes owed by wealthy people as “gifts to the rich” or as “tax gifts to the most wealthy.” For Piketty, this language isn’t hyperbole; it’s evidence of his sincere belief that human agency plays no role in creating capital and in ensuring that capital is employed productively. Doing nothing to earn their disproportionately large shares of society’s “mechanically” produced wealth, the rich are given “gifts” if and whenever the state reduces their tax burdens.

Any person who believes that the value of capital “tends to grow mechanically” is a person who is either ignorant of economics or who rejects it wholesale. For such a person (and Piketty is indeed one) an ultimate reality of economics—scarcity—applies only to consumption and not to production.

Because wealth isn’t superabundant, Piketty correctly recognizes that, when it comes to consumption, trade-offs are inescapable. Goods and services consumed by Liliane and Alcide are unavailable to be consumed by Adrienne and Jacques. But in Piketty’s universe, because production is largely automatic and mechanical, it occurs independently of human choices and effort and, hence, imposes on humanity no need to make sacrifices or trade-offs. Taxing wealth away from Liliane and Alcide reduces only Liliane’s and Alcide’s ability to consume as it increases consumption opportunities for Adrienne and Jacques. Such taxation, however, has no impact on the amount of wealth that is produced.

Therefore, all effort poured by economists into understanding how incentives and constraints inspire, direct, or discourage entrepreneurship and investment are pointless. Also apparently wasted are the research by the Nobel-laureate economists Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon, George Stigler, and Oliver Williamson into the determinants of the size and scope of firms and the organization of industries. Because the value of capital—and, hence, output—grow mechanically, any suspicion that changes in taxes, legal rules, or regulatory constraints affect the economy’s capital structure or its flow of output is a mere illusion, one that undoubtedly is produced by the distorted lenses worn by bourgeois economists. As far as production is concerned, its mechanical occurrence means that no trade-offs are necessary or even possible.

The above describes the economic universe as understood by Piketty. Only in such a universe would the confiscatory taxation and radical wealth redistribution for which he yearns be ethically justified and economically harmless.

“Given the bizarreness of Piketty’s economic vision, the reader is not surprised to find in his work fatal inconsistencies.”

Given the bizarreness of Piketty’s economic vision, the reader is not surprised to find in his work fatal inconsistencies.

One such inconsistency arrives when Piketty asserts that “long-term economic performance is primarily determined by investment in training.” Well. Now that we’re told that improving the training of workers improves the performance of capital, it’s impossible to believe that the value of capital “tends to grow mechanically.” What’s left of the asserted non-role of capitalists in affecting the value of capital once we learn that economic growth is affected “primarily” by the choices humans make regarding how much, and presumably which sorts of, human training to demand and supply? After all, prominent among those who surely have incentives to provide at least some worker training are workers’ capitalist employers.

And so might the amount of worker training currently supplied by real-world employers be optimal? A strong case can be made that it is, especially given that when Piketty measures the growth over time of the value of non-human capital he finds that this growth appears to happen “mechanically.” But if, instead, privately provided worker training is suboptimal, what’s the best way to provide more and better training? Is the answer to entrust government, as Piketty predictably wishes, with more money to supply training? Or might a better way to improve training be through changes in labor law, or increases in the amount of training expenses that employers are allowed to deduct from their taxes? And how about, contrary to Piketty’s demand for a higher minimum wage, lowering or eliminating minimum wages, thus enabling more low-skilled workers to find employment—employment that gives workers valuable on-the-job experience and training?

Questions such as these are naturally asked by economists. Questions such as these are never asked by Piketty.

A second inconsistency is highlighted by Piketty’s insistence that worker training doesn’t merely positively affect economic performance, but that such training is the primary determinant of performance. This insistence, though, is at odds with Piketty’s exclusion of human capital from his measures of capital.

Central to Piketty’s case for confiscatory taxes on the rich is his alleged empirical demonstration that, over the past 40 or so years, the rich have accumulated a steadily growing share of ownership of capital. With the increasing concentration of capital ownership comes, alleges Piketty, increasing economic power exercised by the superrich. But if worker training is really as important as Piketty asserts it to be—and, of course, it truly is important—then the non-human capital owned by the superrich is of little value without the human capital owned by workers.

Because, as it now turns out, non-human capital delivers most of its rewards to its owners, not mechanically, but only by combining with human capital—and because, by Piketty’s admission, human capital is the primary determinant of economic performance—capitalists will compete as fiercely for workers as they do for any other valuable assets. Indeed, if Piketty is correct that there is now a dearth of worker training, today’s competition among capitalists for the relatively few workers who are well-trained must be especially intense, causing wages for such workers to be inordinately high and, in turn, giving heightened incentives to other workers to get more training. You’ll not be surprised to learn that Piketty is oblivious to these implications of his assertions.

Whether or not the amount of human capital that exists is suboptimal, today’s high living standards imply that a great deal of such capital nevertheless does exist. This implication holds even if, contrary to fact, Piketty is correct to assert that nearly all of the fruits of economic growth over the past 40 years have been captured by the undertaxed superrich. Yet Piketty’s measure of capital ownership—and, hence, his asserted demonstration that ownership of capital is becoming dangerously more concentrated—loses most of its meaning as a result of its exclusion of human capital, the “primary” determinant of economic performance. As Deirdre McCloskey explained in her review of Capital In the Twenty-First Century,

The only reason in the book to exclude human capital from capital appears to be to force the conclusion Piketty wants to achieve. One of the headings in Chapter 7 declares that “capital [is] always more unequally distributed than labor.” No it isn’t. If human capital is included—the ordinary factory worker’s literacy, the nurse’s educated skill, the professional manager’s command of complex systems, the economist’s understanding of supply responses—the workers themselves, in the correct accounting, own most of the nation’s capital—and Piketty’s drama falls to the ground.

Piketty’s obliviousness to this major flaw and inconsistency in his work is stunning.

Even to list, let alone to substantively expose, all of the other inconsistencies that Piketty stuffed into this volume would fill a thick monograph. A not-insubstantial book would be necessary to fully document, in addition to the inconsistencies, Piketty’s historical inaccuracies, non sequiturs, and head-scratching pronouncements, including this gem of a conclusion—presented as a regrettable discovery—to a discussion of the trend of “concentration of ownership” over the past century: “The poorest 50% of the world’s population is still the poorest 50% of the world’s population.”

This book isn’t the work of a serious economist. Instead, it’s a tract composed by someone who is blindingly obsessed with differences in monetary incomes and wealth yet has no earthly idea what really causes these differences or what would be the consequences that would curse humanity if his confiscatory piracy were put into practice.

A couple of years ago, a hacker known as “BuggiCorp” put an incredibly powerful zero-day exploit up for sale on the Russian underground forum called exploit.in. Zero-days are exploits that expose a software vulnerability previously unknown and, thus, can be especially powerful for groups or individuals seeking to gain or escalate access to computer systems. According to BuggiCorp, the exploited vulnerability on sale “could affect almost all Windows machines on the planet.” BuggiCorp was, in other words, offering the keys to the hacker kingdom.

This is not the first time that these powerful exploits have been publicly advertised. The market for zero-days is said to be flourishing, global and ever-present. They are “the blood diamonds of the security trade,” Nicole Perlroth writes, “pursued by nation-states, defense contractors, and cybercriminals on one side, and security defenders on the other.” According to David Sanger, “many firms from the outskirts of Fort Meade to Silicon Valley … hunt for—or surreptitiously purchase—‘zero-day’ flaws.”

In 2013, the National Security Agency had a budget of more than $25 million to purchase zero-days, in an internal budget document referred to as “covert purchases of software vulnerabilities.” The allegedly stolen documents purported to originate from the CIA in the Vault 7 leaks revealed that of the 14 exploits for Apple’s iOS owned by the agency at the time, four were purchased.

But the burgeoning market is far from efficient. To put it bluntly, the zero-day market is extremely prone to market failure. There are great information asymmetries between the sellers and buyers on the market, and it is often hard to reveal the quality of the exploit before sale. This frequently impedes sales. Also, to have as much information and control as possible over the sold exploit, buyers are much more likely to buy local and go to only a select group of sellers than is often realized.

Market for Lemons

George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize for his research showing how information asymmetries can lead to adverse selection in markets. When car buyers have imperfect information—not knowing as much about a car’s quirks and problems as the seller who has owned the car for a while—sellers of low-quality cars (“lemons”) can crowd out everyone else from their side of the market, stifling mutually advantageous transactions. If the buyer is unable to tell the difference between a good car and a lemon, she is unwilling to pay top-tier prices. This means the price is bound to be lower than what sellers of high-quality cars would be willing to sell for, driving them out of the market.

The zero-day exploit market is a market with extreme information asymmetries. The seller has much more information about whether the exploit is actually working. The market is also flooded with lemons. Many of the exploits offered are a lot less reliable than sellers initially report. Also, the buyer of an exploit is not always able to test the exploit before purchasing it, as the economic value would be lost once given to the buyer for “testing.” This structural setup makes even beneficial zero-day transactions difficult.

Costly Signals

Michael Spence shared the Nobel Prize with Akerlof for his explanation that agents can use signaling to counteract the effects of the “lemon market” situation, otherwise known as “adverse selection.” In this asymmetric information context, signaling refers to observable actions taken by actors to convince the other party of the value of their products or services. A key insight developed by Spence is that signaling can succeed only if the signaling cost differs across “senders.”

As an example, Spence supposes there are two types of workers, both looking for a job. One worker has a higher productivity than the other. The problem is that the employer cannot distinguish between two workers and will thus offer the average wage (like the market for used cars). The more productive worker, however, can do something to stand out. She can, for example, get an academic degree to signal her competence. But what would stop the less productive candidate from also acquiring the same education? Spence notes that the cost of getting a degree must be higher for the less productive worker for the signal to be believable. This might be the case, for instance, if the less productive worker takes much longer to finish his education. He would then find it unprofitable to get a degree just to convince the hiring firm that he is more capable than he really is.

This is a behavior that occurs on the exploit sale market.

For example, BuggiCorp included two videos to prove that the exploit it was selling worked. In an attempt to sell the supposedly powerful exploit, BuggiCorp also asked for the deal to go through the administrator of the website as the escrow. This means the website administrator acts as a third party and transfers the money to BuggiCorp only if the buyer is satisfied with the product.

Yet the fact that the seller lowered the price from $95,000 to $90,000 after the exploit had been advertised for an extended period of time suggests that signaling was insufficient to convince other parties to buy the exploit. In fact, the price tag of $95,000 is already low for a reliable exploit that could affect all versions of Microsoft Windows.

Under the principle of Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD), researchers often have the option to disclose newly discovered vulnerabilities to the vendors or other coordinator (instead of selling it to an entity that wants to use the exploit for hacking purposes). Through the CVD, Microsoft has paid out $13.6 million in bounty rewards between July 2020 and June 2021 to 341 researchers. As Krebs on Security also points out, Microsoft heavily restricts which vulnerabilities qualify for a bug bounty, “but the reward for a vulnerability which can fully bypass EMET is $100,000. That’s $10,000 more than BuggiCorp is asking for his zero-day.” In other words, if BuggiCorp’s exploit was truly working, why try to sell it on this website and not go directly to Microsoft?

More Select, Local Sellers

The information asymmetry in the market for zero-day exploits makes trust a crucial dimension of exploit sales and regionalizes the market.

First, governments will tend to buy, if they do at all, from a highly select group of preferred sellers. The U.S. government, for example, tends to buy its exploits from major U.S.-based defense contractors.

The other option is to work with a reliable exploit broker or platform. An exploit broker first acquires original and previously unreported zero-day research from developers, also known as bug hunters. They then sell it to their customers. Buying exploits through a broker reduces the number of parties a government organization has to engage with, allowing them to more easily vet the selling party and develop a long-term business relationship.

Second, these sellers are normally based within a government’s legal jurisdiction. Buying from sellers in the same legal jurisdiction also makes it easier to screen sellers (especially if they have a government background) and thus helps to overcome some of the information asymmetries. It also allows the buyer and the seller to communicate in their native language and provides opportunities to potentially sanction the seller in case of a fraudulent deal. There is little a government can do if it buys an unreliable exploit of an unknown entity in a faraway country.

Sandro Gaycken, founder of the German startup Go Root, which once tried to sell offensive capabilities but failed, made a similar remark recently:

The [offensive cyber capabilities] marketplace is largely oriented along the broad geopolitical lines we see anyhow. Some groups deliver into China and Russia, some deliver into Middle Eastern and North African autocratic systems, some deliver only to NATO or NATO-friendly countries. However, the marketplace is unstable and unreliable. Contrary to common belief, nations are not hoarding vulnerabilities. On the contrary. Selling exploits is still difficult and frustrating, which in turn leads to violations and fluctuation of talent and loyalties.

Indeed, the market is more regional than often appreciated.

Timely Delivery

The zero-day market suffers from other complications. Not least, delivery time and availability often impede sales. The exploit market is largely a buyer’s market. A buyer’s market happens when the purchaser has advantage over sellers in price negotiations. In this market, the primary advantage stems less from the relatively small number of buyers on the market (unlike, for example, the housing market) and more from the superior knowledge buyers have over the requirements.

To understand why this is the case, one needs to consider the timing of exploit sales. If an exploit is relevant to a current need, the exploit is worth more money. Yet that knowledge is almost completely internal to the buyer. Only the buyer knows its own mission needs, who it is seeking to target and when.

But buyers cannot easily advertise those needs. A buyer is going to reveal little information to an exploit broker about its planned cyber endeavors. For example, the U.S. Cyber Command is not going to announce, “We have an operation coming up that will need a certain Safari browser capability, partially with Farsi language support.” This is sensitive information that a government, or other buyer, is not keen to share.

As a consequence, this makes it a lot harder for developers outside the government to supply to current needs. Yet current needs are the main reason for sales. A buyer is not going to buy an exploit just to add it to its collection of exploits. One buys only if there is a need for use.

An Efficient Market?

Pretending that the zero-day market is efficient is part of sellers’ strategy. Yet the reality is that the market is more regional and less efficient than is often realized. States may hack global, but they prefer to buy local.

Editor's Note: This post is adopted from "No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force."

He said that given his experience, he had no current plan to return to academia. “Academia has become an intolerant place for anyone, not just conservatives but anyone who seeks the truth,” Mr. Shapiro said. (He calls himself a “classical liberal” but says others describe him as a libertarian conservative.)

The intolerance, he said, was enforced by nondiscrimination and antiharassment offices such as Georgetown’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action, which investigated him. “It is one of the most pernicious parts of recent developments in academia where it’s kind of an Orwellian situation, where in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion, bureaucrats enforce an orthodoxy that stifles intellectual diversity,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Georgetown, Meghan M. Dubyak, said: “While we protect speech and expression, we work to promote civil and respectful discourse. In reviewing Mr. Shapiro’s conduct, the university followed the regular processes for members of the law center staff.”

Mr. Shapiro’s troubles began with a tweet in late January, a few days before he was to begin working at Georgetown Law, and just as Mr. Biden was selecting a Supreme Court nominee — who he had promised would be a Black woman.

“Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart,” he wrote. “Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?”

Image Mr. Shapiro tweeted about Sri Srinivasan in January before he began working at Georgetown. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Shapiro quickly apologized for the tweet, calling it “inartful” and deleted it. Trying to fit his message into Twitter’s short format had not helped, he said on Monday.

Ms. Calvo is hoping to work her way up to the assistant store-manager level, which would put her in a salaried position, and thinks she has made the prudent choice in leaving school, even if her parents disagree.

“They think it’s a bad idea — they think I should have quit working, gone to college,” she said. But she has made enough money to put her name on a lease, which she recently signed along with her boyfriend, who is 19 and works at the restaurant in a local Nordstrom.

“I feel like I have a lot of experience, and I have a lot more to gain,” Ms. Calvo said.

The question, then, is how people like Ms. Calvo will fare in a weaker labor market, because today’s remarkable economic strength is unlikely to continue.

The Fed is raising rates in a bid to slow down consumer demand, which would in turn cool down job and wage growth. Monetary policy is a blunt instrument: There is a risk that the central bank will end up pushing unemployment higher, and even touch off a recession, as it tries to bring today’s rapid inflation under control.

That could be bad news for people without credentials or degrees. Historically, workers with less education and those who have been hired more recently are the ones to lose their jobs when unemployment rises and the economy weakens. At the onset of the pandemic, to consider an extreme example, unemployment for adults with a high school education jumped to 17.6 percent, while that for the college educated peaked at 8.4 percent.

The same people benefiting from unusual opportunities and rapid pay gains today could be the ones to suffer in a downturn. That is one reason economists and educators like Ms. Jackson often urge people to continue their training.

“We worry about their long-term futures, if this derails them from ever going to college, for a $17 to $19 Target job. That’s a loss,” said Alicia Sasser Modestino, an associate professor at Northeastern University who researches labor economics and youth development.

Ideas have consequences. From the early 2000s Matt Continetti, the author of the fascinating new book The Right, has worked at some of the leading institutions of American conservatism. He has seen firsthand how many of them fallen or lost their way. But where conservatism's critics see a movement that has become unrecognizable and even dangerous, Continetti sees instead a rich, vibrant, and messy war of ideas, institutions, and personalities. This week, Continetti—the co-founder of the Washington Free Beacon and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute—offered us a panoramic look at the past and future of the American right and its sometimes odd intellectual evolution. How much do ideas really matter? How might the Republican Party have been different had 9/11 not happened? And would the conservative movement have even been possible without the pervasive threat of communism?

In Part 2, available here for subscribers, the conversation zeroes in on the extent to which conservatism and the right have diverged. Conservatism is meant to conserve, where the New Right is defined by populism and radicalism. Shadi pushes Matt by asking a question that is top of mind for many on the left: To what extent is the Republican Party still democratic? What is it drawing young men to such a revolutionary view of American politics? Is there a limit to anti-American ideas in American politics? Required ReadingThe Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, by Matthew Continetti (Amazon)Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World (Irving Kristol Lecture), by Charles Krauthammer"The Unipolar Moment" by Charles Krauthammer (Foreign Affairs)Trump's American Carnage Innaugural Address (CSPAN)

Armed demonstrators protest outside of the Michigan state capital building on January 17, 2021 in Lansing, Michigan. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)I remember the first essay I ever wrote for The Atlantic. Four years ago, they reached out to me and asked me to write about American gun culture from a conservative perspective. I took the responsibility seriously. I knew most readers disagreed with me vehemently, and while I didn’t expect them to necessarily change their minds, I did want them to understand why my family owns guns and what “gun culture” meant to us.The story began with the first time we faced a threat at our own house. A man blocked our driveway with his car and walked up to Nancy and our kids while they were playing outside. He demanded to see me. I was away, at work. It was a terrifying moment. Nancy didn’t have her phone. We owned guns, but they were inside. Even if she could dial 911, the police were likely 15 or 20 minutes away. As I told Atlantic readers, Nancy was cleverly able to defuse the situation, but just when we thought we might be overreacting to the incident, we learned the same man was seen, earlier in the day, slowly driving through the parking lot of our kids’ school. That incident motivated Nancy to get more serious about her personal defense. She’s an abuse survivor. An ex-boyfriend almost choked her to death in college. And the combination of past attacks and present threats made her not just walk into a gun store to find the right handgun to carry, it motivated her to get serious training. She spent day after day at the range taking classes from an expert in self-defense. Her view was simple: With gun rights come grave gun responsibilities. One ought not casually own or carry a firearm.My piece described a gun culture marked by kindness, empathy, and sobriety. Nancy met people who understood her concern, patiently helped her learn how to defend herself, and at every turn taught her safety, safety, and more safety. That was the “gun culture” I wanted Atlantic readers to understand. But that culture is under threat, and I’m not talking about the threat of gun control. Few cultural and political movements are more successful and politically dominant than America’s gun rights movement. Go to the Rand Corporation’s state firearms law navigator, and you can track the extraordinary expansion of gun rights in the United States year-by-year. Combine state laws with Supreme Court precedent, and it’s hard to think of a time when Americans enjoyed a greater degree of personal liberty to own or carry firearms. No, the threat to America’s gun culture comes from the gun rights movement itself. The threat is gun idolatry, a form of gun fetish that’s fundamentally aggressive, grotesquely irresponsible, and potentially destabilizing to American democracy. And it’s become so prevalent that I would not—I could not—write the same piece for The Atlantic again. What is a gun fetish? It’s a concept that’s tough to define, but easy to observe. When a leading candidate for Senate runs on a platform that’s “pro-God, pro-Gun, and pro-Trump,” then guns (and Trump) are elevated far above their proper place in American life. The same goes for popular t-shirts and signs that declare a person “pro-life, pro-God, and pro-gun.” We see the gun fetish when a member of Congress appears on television with crossed AR-15s behind her head. Or when another member of Congress raffles off a .50 caliber sniper rifle. You definitely see it when a third member of Congress posts a Christmas message that looks like this:Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassieMerry Christmas! 🎄 ps. Santa, please bring ammo. 🎁 December 4th 202112,513 Retweets81,968 LikesThe gun fetish rears its head when politicians pose with AR-15s in their campaign posters, or when a powerful senator makes “machine-gun bacon” to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment. It’s certainly not the case every time a politician publicly shoots a gun that they’re exhibiting a gun fetish, but the sheer prevalence of the open display of firearms (and not just any firearm, but the AR-15 specifically) illustrates that something has changed.There is nothing wrong with building and marketing high-quality firearms, but this mixture of scripture and weapons from Daniel Defense, the company that made the rifles used by the Uvalde shooter, is disturbing:Spend much time at gun shows or at gun shops, and you’ll quickly become familiar with something called the “tactical” or “black gun” lifestyle, where civilians intentionally equip themselves in gear designed for the “daily gunfight.” It’s often a form of elaborate special forces cosplay, except the weapons (and sometimes the body armor) are very real. Something has changed in the streets as well. It’s now common to see men and women armed to the teeth, open-carrying during anti-lockdown protests and even outside public officials’ homes. This is when the gun is used to menace and intimidate. It’s displayed not as a matter of defense but rather as an open act of defiance. It’s meant to make people uncomfortable. It’s meant to make them feel unsafe. This transition from defense to defiance can destabilize our democracy. The concept of self-defense is rooted in a high view of human life. In his Second Treatise of Civil Government, John Locke described a “fundamental law of nature” (his description of the “will of God”) that man be “preserved as much as possible” yet “when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred.”Indeed, scripture makes multiple allowances for self-defense, in both the Old and New Testaments. While I respect Christian pacifism, I simply don’t see it required by the biblical text. My own view is that the refusal to protect innocent life can constitute a grave moral wrong. If a violent man came after my family, and I did not do everything in my power to stop his attack—even if it meant killing him to save my wife and kids—then I would have failed a profound obligation as a husband and father.  Defiance is different. It’s rooted in the will to power. It is designed to implant fear, not to save lives but to exert control. It contradicts a core value of a classically-liberal society, that change comes through courts and the ballot box, not through intimidation and fear. It’s even more disturbing to see that spirit of armed defiance so closely correlated with the religious right. The decision of Christians to provoke their fellow citizens into feeling palpable, physical fear of armed violence is deliberately malicious and cruel. If you’ve read me at all, you know that I’m constantly talking about the relationship between rights and responsibilities. If, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, governments are “instituted among men” to secure our unalienable rights, then it is our responsibility to exercise those rights for a virtuous purpose. Otherwise, our constitutional experiment may fail. In his famous letter to the Massachusetts Militia, John Adams issued a timeless warning. Liberty is inseparable from virtue, and our vices can break the Constitution itself:Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.The gun culture I grew up with placed its responsibilities on par with its liberty. It understood the true purpose of owning a gun—that it was designed to secure and protect your family, not to frighten and intimidate your neighbors. I defended it because I believed I was defending something good. Here’s how I closed my Atlantic essay four short years ago:Because of the threats against my family—and because I don’t want to be dependent on a sometimes shockingly incompetent government for my family’s security—I carry a weapon. My wife does as well. We’re not scared. We’re prepared, and that sense of preparation is contagious. Confidence is contagious. People want to be empowered. That’s how gun culture is built. Not by the NRA and not by Congress, but by gun owners, one free citizen at a time.I don’t feel nearly so confident about those words today. That culture is being consumed from the inside-out. Yes, there are still millions of deeply-responsible gun-owners who focus on their responsibilities even more than their rights, but the idolatrous fringe is fringe no longer. They bear arms with religious intensity, and in their zeal for their weapons, they send the message that their identity and their power are defined by the guns they love. One more thing …In this week’s Good Faith podcast, Curtis and I dive even deeper into the topic of Christians and guns. He’s more progressive on gun control. I’m more conservative. We hash out our differences, and we also discuss the challenge of embracing humility and complexity in a topic that is so profoundly emotional and contentious. The comments section is already getting interesting. Give the podcast a listen, and please share your thoughts. One last thing …I’m going to end with another Kristene DiMarco song from her incredible new album. This one is particularly appropriate for a time when we’re all prone to serve our political idols. It’s a beautiful, meaningful song. Enjoy:

Francis Fukuyama calls his brief new book a defense of classical liberalism, which he defines as "the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions." Had Liberalism and Its Discontents been written by anyone else it could have been called Fukuyama for Dummies, jumping as it does between the various themes that have preoccupied the Stanford political scientist over four decades.
Fukuyama introduced himself to the reading public with a 1989 journal article called "The End of History?" in which he suggested that, with the withering of the Soviet Union, American-style liberal democracy constituted a final answer to 200 years of ideological questioning. Liberal democracy has been his subject, frontally or obliquely, ever since. In Trust (1995) he focused on the cultural/psychological underpinnings of political order. In The Great Disruption (1999) he was probably the first to examine how the transition from an industrial to an information economy was changing not just our politics but the conditions of our politics, in matters ranging from family formation to crime. He wrote a two-volume history of political order. He became a prominent advocate of spreading American liberal democracy by force, calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in a 1998 letter, but repented in 2004, a year into the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Lately he has been especially active in public debate. He considers Donald Trump a menace to the country's political institutions. Even some of the former president's supporters will probably share Fukuyama's verdict that, "of Donald Trump's many assaults on American institutions, the most serious by far was his unwillingness to concede his loss of the 2020 presidential election and to peacefully transfer power to his successor." But Fukuyama has come to believe that Republicans more generally aim at "restricting voter access" and "are toying with the idea of overtly authoritarian government." In recent weeks, Ukraine's resistance to Russia has reconciled him with the project of armed democracy-promotion. He even hopes the war will bring to our exhausted liberal democracies what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom."
It might sound like a boring thing to have been, since 1989, Senior Ideologue of the global hegemon, Explicator-in-Chief for those who rule the world. But there has always been a disruptive "edge" to Fukuyama. Utopian Marxists and fellow travelers, who had thought their own ideology would bring an end to history, got the trolling of their lives from him. More neutral readers were struck by a peculiarity: Most intellectuals sounding off about "liberal democracy" treated liberalism and democracy as if they were two names for the same thing. Not Fukuyama! And it was not hard to tell which of the two goods he cared about more. "There is an inherent tension between democracy and what we now call ‘good governance,'" he wrote in Political Order and Political Decay (2014). Fukuyama did not despise democracy. But he considered it a means. Liberalism was the end.
Fukuyama's familiar strengths and weaknesses are on display here. The strengths include a keen eye for the paradoxes of liberal freedom. Late-20th-century free-market sloganeering is a favorite target of Fukuyama: "Ideas about the centrality of property rights, consumer welfare and spontaneous order," he writes, "are far more ambiguous in their economic, political, and moral consequences than neoliberal doctrine would suggest." For instance, he notes that government's handover of the Internet to the private sector set in motion the process whereby its retail users would lose control over it.
Fukuyama's weaknesses include a prose style that often fogs up, as abstractions do abstract things to other abstractions. "Following the French Revolution, liberals were shunted aside by other doctrines on the right and on the left," he writes, as if doctrines shunt. It is hard to pin Fukuyama down. He has a style of argument, useful literarily but slippery philosophically, of ventriloquizing arguments. "Intersectionality is an acknowledgment of the fact that different forms of marginalization exist, and that their intersection creates new forms of prejudice and injustice." Does he buy that? Or is he just laying it out? He covers a great deal, but in a hurry, and so superficially that one wonders whether to trust him. He calls Richard Nixon's victory in 1968, in which he nosed Hubert Humphrey by 0.7 percent, a "landslide." He thinks the 16th Amendment, which enabled progressives to introduce the income tax in the 20th century, was one of the post–Civil War amendments.
The book's punchiest chapters concern how "certain sound liberal ideas have been interpreted and pushed to extremes." On the one hand, Republicans pushed too much of one kind of liberalism (capitalism); on the other hand Democrats pushed too much of another (identity politics). That is a reasonable construction as far as it goes. But lately events have shifted out from under Fukuyama, in ways that his book struggles to take into account. At the close of the 20th century both parties were, in their different ways, liberal-democratic. Nowadays, Democrats are overwhelmingly the party of the liberal Ordnung that Fukuyama prizes—of stare decisis, of human rights, of the "rules-based international order." Republicans are the party of the democratic sentiment that Fukuyama mistrusts—of the credential-distrusting common man, of the gun-carrying yeomanry, of Daniel O'Connell–style "monster meetings."
As a result, certain of Fukuyama's observations that might have challenged preconceptions during the Clinton administration now come off as complacent: "Communist societies pretended that they had solved problems related to race and gender," he writes, "but in Western liberal democracies the social transformation was driven by grass-roots mobilization rather than top-down decree and hence proved more thoroughgoing." Sorry, but that is not where race-and-gender matters stand now: Where is the "grass-roots mobilization" behind critical race theory? Behind swimmer Lia Thomas's testosterone-fueled long march through women's college swimming records?
Fukuyama criticizes for its treatment of civil rights this reviewer's most recent book, The Age of Entitlement, a history of the United States since the Kennedy assassination. Since Fukuyama neither lists the book in his bibliography nor manages to accurately reproduce any of its arguments, it would be unseemly self-flattery on my part to assume he had read it.
All the same, it is worth addressing Fukuyama's treatment of civil rights, which he uses occasionally as a synonym for liberalism. His embrace of "diversity" is more categorical than it was just a few years ago. Comparing Asian countries' late 20th-century success to various postcolonial failures on other continents, he noted in Political Order and Political Decay that China, Japan, and Korea "constituted some of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world," and that their "state building efforts were enhanced by great ethnic homogeneity." That is the "edge" to Fukuyama mentioned above. He was once more willing than other political scientists to admit that, under certain circumstances, diversity is not a strength but a weakness.
Today he is more categorical. He opens the book by noting that the circle of rights-bearers "was initially limited, in the United States and other ‘liberal' regimes, to white men who owned property, and only later was broadened to other social groups."
But this has nothing to do with "whiteness," which has never had standing as any kind of category within liberalism. Liberalism was a civilizational invention, an advance if you like. All such advances initially benefit people in the place where they happen, and sometimes they are defended against outsiders. For a long time only "yellow men who owned property" benefited from Confucianism as only "black men who owned property" benefited from Benin ivories. No matter where liberalism was invented, it would not have extended to women. That American liberalism has for most of its history borne the imprint of a particular culture does not make pre-multicultural liberalism a pretense or a sham.
In fact, we are discovering today that liberalism—or the ideology that bears that name—is just as susceptible as other ideologies to turn illiberal. In theory, liberalism is a set of neutral, rational, scientific principles for making sense of a society, the raw human material of which may well be non-neutral, ir-rational, and un-scientific. Liberals have generally reformed institutions by judging them against standards of utility and fairness. But what happens in what we might call "late-stage" liberalism, when all such institutions have been reformed according to liberalism's wishes? Liberalism's defenders turn the argument around, demanding, on behalf of institutions, that the public demonstrate its utility and fairness—that it make itself "legible" to government, to use the anthropologist James Scott's term.
Fukuyama has always believed, and repeats here, that "liberal societies cannot survive if they are unable to establish a hierarchy of factual truths." He does not call for censorship but would like to see speech governed by norms. "There are well-established techniques for determining factual information," Fukuyama writes, "techniques that have been used for years in court proceedings, professional journalism, and in the scientific community."
Is that realistic? The verb "establish" makes it sounds as if liberalism is merely defending truth against error, and indeed this is what most liberals believe they are doing. Just as often of late, liberalism has meant defending official truth against free inquiry: defending race-based college admissions against aptitude testing, defending abortion against ultrasound technology, defending transgenderism against medical studies. That is leaving aside the related problem of how, in a society where all institutions are liberal and value-free, it becomes profitable to suppress scientific truths like "opioids are dangerous" or social ones like "betting is dangerous." So profitable, in fact, that interested parties can raise immense sums of money to turn an untruth into a public watchword. "Disinformation" is not always a problem of populist epistemology that liberalism must hold accountable. It is sometimes a problem of liberal political power that populism must hold accountable.
This book hangs in front of Fukuyama's collected works like a rainbow flag in front of a church, reassuring readers that the Old Faith that used to be preached inside is no threat to theirs. You're good the way you are! Pay no attention to that cross on the roof! Returning early in this book to the origins of liberalism in the aftermath of the English civil war, he calls it "an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity, or, to put it in slightly different terms, of peacefully managing diversity in pluralistic societies." As if the electrifying 17th- and 18th-century vision of liberalism had anything to do with today's corporate-consulting phrase "managing diversity." As if the freedoms at the core of that early liberalism—speech, association, religion—were not the ones that "diversity," as we understand it today, is least inclined to honor.
Liberalism and Its Discontents
by Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 192 pp., $26
Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.
The post One Cheer for Liberal Democracy? appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Congress issued its last official declaration of war 80 years ago today, marking the last time the president deferred to the war-making process outlined by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution before entering a conflict. Since 1942, when it authorized the use of military force against Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania in World War II, Congress has abdicated its proper role in American war making. Blank-check authorizations now shield the president from domestic accountability for his use of military force.
The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to declare war. Since the presidency of George Washington, it's invoked that power 11 times to fight nations in five distinct conflicts—the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. In each case, the president had to first request congressional authorization either in writing or in person. He would explain his justification for why the U.S. should enter the conflict at hand. Congress would then put it to a vote—majority support was required, but most declarations were passed unanimously or near-unanimously—and pass a declaration of war in the form of a bill or joint resolution.
The Founding Fathers were rightly skeptical of an executive with an unbridled capacity to wage war. "Nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it," John Jay wrote in Federalist No. 4. "Absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans." Such factors could motivate the executive "to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people."
Presidents once treated congressional approval as a necessary condition—a legal requirement—for the U.S. to enter hostilities. But this constitutionally ordained process has given way to more recent executives relying on a hodgepodge mix of authorizations and external validation to justify the use of military force without consulting Congress.
Some presidents have claimed justification through international organizations in order to enter conflicts. President Bill Clinton looked to the United Nations Security Council for approval to use military force in Haiti and didn't seek the support of Congress. President Barack Obama didn't secure authorization from Congress before U.S forces began to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, which involved the use of military force over the course of seven months. According to the National Constitution Center, modern conflicts that lacked congressional approval include President Harry Truman's entry into Korea; President Ronald Reagan's military operations in Libya, Grenada, and Lebanon; and President George H.W. Bush's invasion of Panama.
But far from being unjustly overridden, Congress has helped weaken its own role in war making. It's passed several Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMFs) designed to give the president broad discretion in specific conflicts or against clearly defined threats. However, these authorizations have permitted the president to use U.S. military force in dubious ways. The 2001 AUMF may have been drafted to let the president "use all necessary and appropriate force" against the parties behind the September 11 attacks, but presidents have capitalized on the authorization's overly broad phrasing to justify 41 operations in 19 countries. While the president once had to convince members of Congress to support American entry into conflicts, lawmakers themselves have diluted their say by signing away so much power.
Debate abounds over presidential discretion in many realms of conflict. Scholars and commentators question what falls under the president's purview and what is only permissible after a congressional declaration of war: defensive strikes, actions against nonstate actors, engagement in low-level hostilities, deployment of peacekeepers, enforcement of no-fly zones, and on and on. Regardless of the nuances, it's undeniable that the mechanisms behind American war making have changed enormously in the past century.
With that, it's worth remembering that the president's current war powers come not just at the expense of Congress but the American people as well. Bringing lawmakers into the fold of war authorization ensures that their constituents' approval or disapproval of a conflict is voiced, at least in theory. It's now effectively optional for a president to make his case for force and face the political costs that follow. Modern American engagement in hostilities is not representative of a popular mandate but rather presidential lawyering and decision making carried out beyond public view.
The post Today Marks 80 Years Since Congress Last Bothered To Declare a War appeared first on Reason.com.

Yet when I read the broader theories of hawkish commentators, their ideas about America’s strategic vision and what kind of endgame we should be seeking in the war, I still find myself baffled by their confidence and absolutism.

For instance, for all their defensive successes, we have not yet established that Ukraine’s military can regain significant amounts of territory in the country’s south and east. Yet we have Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic insisting that only Putin’s defeat and indeed “humiliation” can restore European stability, while elsewhere in the same magazine Casey Michel calls for dismantling the Russian Federation, framed as the “decolonization” of Russia’s remaining empire, as the only policy for lasting peace.

Or again, the United States has currently committed an extraordinary sum to back Ukraine — far more than we spent in foreign aid to Afghanistan in any recent year, for instance — and our support roughly trebles the support offered by the European Union. Yet when this newspaper’s editorial board raised questions about the sustainability of such support, the response from many Ukraine hawks was a furious how dare you — with an emphasis, to quote Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, on Ukraine’s absolute right to fight “until every inch of their territory is free”; America’s strictly “modest” and “advisory” role in Ukrainian decision-making; and the importance of offering Kyiv, if not a blank check, at least a “very very big check with more checks to follow.”

These theories all seem to confuse what is desirable with what is likely, and what is morally ideal with what is strategically achievable. I have written previously about the risks of nuclear escalation in the event of a Russian military collapse, risks that hawkish theories understate. But given the state of the war right now, the more likely near-future scenario is one where Russian collapse remains a pleasant fancy, the conflict becomes stalemated and frozen, and we have to put our Ukrainian policy on a sustainable footing without removing Putin’s regime or dismantling the Russian empire.

In that scenario, our plan cannot be to keep writing countless checks while tiptoeing modestly around the Ukrainians and letting them dictate the ends to which our guns and weaponry are used. The United States is an embattled global hegemon facing threats more significant than Russia. We are also an internally divided country led by an unpopular president whose majorities may be poised for political collapse. So if Kyiv and Moscow are headed for a multiyear or even multi-decade frozen conflict, we will need to push Ukraine toward its most realistic rather than its most ambitious military strategy. And just as urgently, we will need to shift some of the burden of supporting Kyiv from our own budget to our European allies.

Dear Nick,

Since our meeting at your office in the Fall of 2014, I have tried several times to reach you about a number of civic projects that seem to be right up your alley. As others have noted, it is near impossible to get you to return a telephone call for the necessary two-way conversation.

While you have become an overachiever in wealth and publicly declared concerns for people's well-being coming from your previous status, you are an underachiever given your present super-successful status.

During our meeting, I suggested a small roundtable of enlightened billionaires, such as yourself, in Washington, D.C., to achieve a much higher level of impact favoring the interest of the people. You replied, "If I could pull them together, you would attend?" Unfortunately, this didn't happen. Billionaires prefer to return calls from billionaires.

Let me explain. While you have become an overachiever in wealth and publicly declared concerns for people's well-being coming from your previous status, you are an underachiever given your present super-successful status.

Many people know you not from your "managing, funding or financing of over 30 companies, with market values of tens of billions of dollars" (quoting from your website), but from your articles in major publications calling for higher minimum wages and blasting trillions of dollars in stock buybacks. You argued years ago that corporations like Walmart should use such monies to elevate their workers to at least $15 per hour, not just because these laborers need the money, but also because such a policy would obviously increase consumer demand and stimulate the economy. You once warned major capitalists that if they keep their heads in the sand, "the Pitchforks Are Coming." That phrase rang around the country for a while, but the impasse in Congress is blocking an increase in the federal minimum wage and other labor protections. (Fortunately, some states and cities have raised their minimum wage.)

In 2015, you started Civic Ventures, which you called "a group of political troublemakers that "rejects trickle-down economics in all of its forms" and moves to "improve the lives of the typical family in our community and country," "including all consumers, workers, innovators and citizens," by creating "systemic disruptive change that improves the lives of our fellow citizens and community." "Said another way, we seek to prevent poverty, rather than treat the symptoms of poverty."

I especially applaud your crisp declaration:

"The tenets of trickle-down economics--tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for the powerful, and wage suppression for you--have turned economic inequality into the defining issue of our time."

You have an exceptionally well-articulated mission statement. (For more see Civic Ventures). Civic Ventures invites what I have asked you to consider repeatedly. I have recently requested to speak with you for your non-monetary participation for one hour during a one-day event to help thwart the fall of our Republic into authoritarian grips after the November election. To date, I have been unable to make direct contact with you. This initiative meets uncannily your five criteria for engaging in "local and national civic actions." You know well that our democracy and political system rest on the quality and timing of our civic actions.

However, there is something even more basic than civic actions. That is initiating communications about civic actions. Without communication between two or more people, nothing happens. Everybody knows this, but far too many people, in this cluttered Internet age, do not practice what they know. (Starting with members of Congress, I might add, regarding serious matters of policy and action.)

All the above is a way of elaborating why I think you are such an underachiever relative to what you can now accomplish with the resources, experience and intellect you have thus far aggregated. From your present perch, you could galvanize a small number of enlightened billionaires to accomplish significant needed changes quickly and sustainably, especially in this momentous year of 2022.

You can get your calls returned and for serious purposes, including revoking the Reagan-SEC repeal in 1982 of stock buybacks as illegal stock manipulation. Add ending the "carried interest" loophole, which is draining an estimated $18 billion a year from the public treasury because not one full-time advocate is working Congress on this low-hanging fruit.

With President Biden and about half of the Congress already supportive of these three reforms, along with way over half the public, hire a dozen strong citizen advocates to work Capitol Hill and weave this tapestry for successful results. The time is ripe for action, not just great talk.

If you wish to recommunicate after eight years, you have my telephone number. Do it now, for tempus fugit.

Best wishes,

Ralph

It’s a little-known fact that Shakespeare hated Americans. At least, when in Twelfth Night Sir Andrew Aguecheek said “I had as lief be a Brownist as a politician”, he meant the same impertinent little cult that would later set out on the Mayflower.
So it seems especially impertinent — hence especially appropriate — for an American to criticise your monarchy. Especially an American monarchist like me. I am not even a costume monarchist — I am not in it for the castles, weddings, and funny hats. I actually think of monarchy as a legitimate form of government. And by monarchy I mean actual monarchy: absolute monarchy.

There are only three forms of government: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of few), and democracy (rule of many). Monarchy is good because it is better than oligarchy. Democracy is neither good nor bad — it is just impossible. With today’s voters, at least. It is not just that voters are not wise enough to control the government. It’s worse: the voters are not powerful enough to control the government. They — or at least the politicians they elect — have not had significant power for decades.
Monarchy is both the most common form of public-sector governance in history, and the universal form of private-sector governance (all corporations have CEOs). Any private-sector firm could operate as a republic or other oligarchical form. None do. There are no senates, assemblies or supreme courts in the private sector — let alone anything like the administrative state. Monarchy —ideally accountable monarchy, with a board of directors or some other safety mechanism — just works better.
So either the whole public sector today is mad, or the rest of human history was mad, and so is the entire private sector. As an American monarchist, I choose the former. But in Britain, how should you feel about it? You already have a monarchy. Not monarchy as a form of government — but as a theatre of government. It’s a sort of official soap opera, one that has been on-air a long time — about 300 years, by some counts.
Suggested readingThe Royal Family always winsBy Will Lloyd
As even its defenders would surely admit, the British monarchy is not a functional organ of governance. It is a living monument of history. The German for “monument” is evocative — Denkmal, meaning “an occasion to think”. To ask questions, perhaps. Simple questions. Dangerous questions.
Yet in this year of Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, few Englishmen will stop to ask the simplest, most dangerous form of question that history can ask: to ask the past for a judgment of the present. One insanely dangerous way for you to ask is: what would Elizabeth I think of Elizabeth II?
Leopold von Ranke, not a Nazi Panzer commander but actually the inventor of modern history, wrote: “Every age stands equal before God.” Ranke’s law does not deny any era the right to judge any other. But it must allow itself to be judged in return.
At the birth of Elizabeth I, England was a minor power. At the death of Elizabeth II, the UK will be a minor power. In between, Britons ruled the world for a century and a half. In Elizabeth I’s time, England was a rising power. In Elizabeth II’s time, England is a fading power.
How would Elizabeth Tudor feel about all this? Petrified? Blimpish? If she had to characterise Elizabeth Windsor’s perspective of monarchy and government, what adjectives would she use? The term roi fainéant (a do-nothing monarch) is a millennium older than the Tudors — invented for the hopeless Merovingians.

How would the Tudors not find the comparison of the Windsors to the Merovingians obvious? Especially when they heard that the Windsors, unlike the Merovingians in France in the 5th century, had reigned over a palpable national decline? At least the Merovingians had the good grace to give way to the frankly much more badass Carolingians. The Windsors have given way not even to Parliament, but to a bunch of bureaucrats; to a gang of foundations, quangos, media conglomerates and university administrators. At least the early Merovingians won and held their crowns by the sword. Perhaps: once a costume dynasty, always a costume dynasty.
It is easy for Elizabeth II to judge Elizabeth I. For example, diversity and inclusion are among Elizabeth Windsor’s core principles whereas Elizabeth Tudor was a racist. But we need not accept Elizabeth I’s prehistoric racial theories to find her political insights relevant. The past, without being perfect, can usefully criticise the present.
It was Bagehot, the 19th-century theorist of the English Constitution, who best described the difference between Elizabeth I and II. Bagehot divided sovereigns into the effective (actually in control of the state) and the dignified (a crowned Kardashian, a long-haired Merovingian man-doll). A more modern version of these labels might be operating and ceremonial. Elizabeth I was the operating Elizabeth. Elizabeth II is the ceremonial Elizabeth. A costume Queen.
It is true that the binary is not absolute. In Bagehot’s day, Parliament was effective and Victoria was ceremonial. But Victoria certainly mattered much more than Elizabeth II, if much less than Elizabeth I. In our day we might say that both Parliament and Queen are dignified —the operating power lies in Whitehall (if it is in England at all).
Moreover, a really critical Tudor historian might question whether the decline of working absolutism in the English monarchy did not precede Elizabeth II. The Stuarts, alien in nation and suspect in religion, were never secure on the throne. James I ranted about divine right and absolute power, because he knew he doesn’t have it. Charles I seriously tried to be a limited monarch — resulting in the judicial murder of Strafford; Charles II was restored only as a limited monarch; don’t even start me on the “Glorious Revolution”. But surely Elizabeth I was peak England?
Suggested readingOnly a monarch can control the elitesBy Helen Thompson
But was Elizabethan England really Elizabeth’s? To what extent was this woman actually the CEO of the government? Was she in charge — or was it “Leicester’s Commonwealth”? Was it really the Cecils who invented the Deep State? And Walsingham the intelligence community?
We do get a sense of the increasing importance of an early “deep state” as the Tudor dynasty boots up. Henry VIII was a kingly king, but his attention did seem to wander, and his policies did often seem driven by his advisers. I know of no indication that his father, Henry VII, meant anything but business — as anyone would expect of a chad rebel who seized the throne on horseback with his sword. For there were true kings on Earth in those days. But let us treat the Tudors as a homogeneous monolith and history as binary. Tudors both reign and rule; Windsors only reign, but do not rule. (Cromwell, also a monarch, ruled, but did not reign.)
One way to identify a ceremonial or dignified institution is to detect a situation in which a seeming organ of power is vestigial. An organ or organisation in a larger regime is vestigial if the regime could continue operating as usual without it. When Elizabeth I kicked it, that was the end of Elizabethan England. What followed was still very cool, but it was not Elizabethan England.
An objective political change can change the lives of everyone in the country — think of everyone who used to be an East German — and always somehow disrupts or replaces the governing elite. If Elizabeth II passes away tomorrow, the trash in London will still be picked up. If the monarchy did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual. If Parliament, the Cabinet, and the voters did not exist, Whitehall would function as usual.
What this “Elizabeth test” teaches us is that it is obvious to even the dogs in the street that democracy has gone the way of monarchy, becoming ceremonial or dignified. The 20th-century removal of politics and politicians, and hence voters and elections, from actual authority over the government, was the century’s great changing of the guard.
The Trump administration did not disrupt the elite. Disruption can be measured by number of jobs destroyed. How many elite jobs did Trump destroy? He annoyed and energised the elite. He was the best thing that ever happened to the New York Times. Thousands of public-spirited Ivy graduates must owe Trump their jobs to this day.
Brexit did not disrupt the elite. If anything, Brexit gave power back to some purely British institution — such as Whitehall (for Yanks, the British deep state). But Whitehall would much rather implement directives from Brussels — freeing the native mandarins from responsibility, the bane of all bureaucrats. The only possible recipients of power in Brexit did not even want it. The voters? They voted for Brexit, accepted a few weird bureaucratic complications, and went back to their fish and chips.
Suggested readingThe death of the conservative eliteBy Park MacDougald
As Bagehot explains, putting a fake power in front of the real power has tremendous benefits. It is even better to have two layers of fake — both monarchy and democracy. This double panel acts as a perfect bullet-absorber for the civil-service oligarchy, which, though young, was already building its strength in Bagehot’s time.
The working Queen, Elizabeth I, must feel that her fancy-dress successor was in some way tricked out of her rightful power. Elizabeth I will judge Elizabeth II for investing in this trick — rather than exposing it, rising up and restoring the monarchy. For the people, too, were tricked — out of their right to a real monarch.
How did monarchies even become ceremonial? Usually not in one step. Rather, their first step was to become constitutional. It turns out that as soon as a monarchy loses any power, it very soon loses all power — and often its head as well.
Ultimately, the purpose of a ceremonial monarchy is to prevent the existence of a functional monarchy. Where a puppet reigns, no one else can reign; so no one reigns at all. So a murky, distributed oligarchy can rule — unchallenged by the clear, clean sunlight of irresistible central power.
The Whig oligarchs of the early 18th century installed the Hanoverians, a dynasty with no inherent support base in England, in place of the dangerous Stuarts. Any Stuart revolt — and there were two — would have to go through the Hanoverians first. But it is a long time since the early 18th century.
We can look at the UK today and ask: what would Elizabeth Tudor do? When we imagine Elizabeth Tudor waking up in the rejuvenated body of Elizabeth Windsor, it makes little difference that their actual roles in government have changed. Nothing at all has changed about the English constitution. The Queen reserves all her royal prerogative.
It is customary for the British monarch to use prerogative power only under her ministers’ advice — except in an emergency. While monarchy is nothing without a deep respect for custom, unfortunately it is an emergency. And has been, Elizabeth Tudor will tell you, for at least the last half-century.
The new old Elizabeth declares martial law and puts the police under her direct orders. She never considers the possibility that she has anything less than absolute power. Bobbies everywhere are shutting down the oligarchy — padlocking the buildings, imaging the servers, freezing the accounts. All state, media, quango and university employees are retired. Even primary schools are closed for the reset. Only essential productive workers still work — for now, everyone else can chill, and still get paid. As we learned under Covid, the paycheck is the essence of the bullshit job.
Of course, this day is only the start of the renewal of Britain. “The revolution was first in the mind of the king.” The truth about the revolution is that, in nations with a surviving monarchy — even a purely ceremonial monarchy, like Britain’s today — the revolution remains in the mind of the monarch.
A modern monarch who chose to be not a costume-king in the school of the Windsors, but at the very least a Patriot King in the school of Bolingbroke, would not have to work hard at all to regain monarchical control of the state. At least, regaining full control is much easier than regaining a tiny bit of control.
Suggested readingOnly a monarch can control the elitesBy Dominic Sandbrook
The essence of the modern coup d’etat is the use of popular enthusiasm to gain stable, unified, direct control over the security forces. Everything about this transition must feel completely natural, inevitable and irreversible — in retrospect. This is exactly how it could feel — it won’t, of course — when Charles III finally takes the throne.
All agencies other than the army and police can be retired. This cannot be done with the security forces. No one wants anarchy in the UK. But also, no one actually needs the Ministry of Defence — what is it defending? Just bring everyone home already. At least temporarily.
Under direct royal command, military and police leadership must undergo a rapid purge and reshuffle. Staff who can show their (prior) commitment to the new regime are rapidly advanced; those known to be sympathetic to the old are sidelined. It may not be fair. What is? What ever was?
And power is a shark. It has to keep moving. Power for power’s sake is a dead fish. What does Charles III want to make of his Britain? What does he have the power to change? After executing this manoeuvre — anything. The Patriot King is the nation’s gardener; his goal is to make its lovely human flora burgeon and blossom. Obviously, his first job is building a new government — but the problem goes far beyond this. He has to build a new society and a new economy. Everything is a ruin.
If there is any set of people who need to be challenged the most, it is the highest elites. An aspect of the Elizabethan court which is almost impossible to explain to the modern world is that it is the centre of excellence in everything. In the early Elizabethan era at least, the best plays and poems in England were by courtiers. In the modern era, a royal court in the Elizabethan style would be surrounded by the country’s best scientists, filmmakers, mountain climbers. Not only would royal sponsorship select and fund the best people; it would even lead them stylistically. The style of the king would become the fashion of the country.
As opposed to — where does style come from, nowadays? Centres of excellence are hidden to those not in the know; they are widely spread across fields; sometimes they are taken over by bad people, and become centres of badness. But elites benefit from concentration; concentrating the elite of an elite around one centre is the way to create the most awesome elite. Such is the job of a royal court.
Of course, it all depends on the right king. In the history of kings, which is most of human history, there are awesome kings and not-so-awesome kings. But if we accept Elizabeth II’s responsibility for the condition of England, and try to hypothesise Elizabeth I’s reaction to that same condition, “not so awesome” doesn’t cover it. Imagine her inspecting some of what you chaps call “council housing”.
Suggested readingIs Elizabeth II a bad mother?By Tanya Gold
Yet as an American I must face the fact that London is the last city outside America which still has the right to call itself the capital of the world. “Though much is taken, much abides.” It will probably keep falling. It could rise again.
A proud, renewed and independent royal Britain, a based Britain, could easily create elite institutions and cohorts that challenged and surpassed the aging titans of the American world. Because of London’s legacy of world domination, anti-American nationalists everywhere would naturally become Anglophiles.
And even we Americans could easily throw off the vast carcass of our 20th-century regime by appealing to a higher power to restore order — were there any such power. One day we may elect a President with a mandate to peacefully cede sovereignty to our rightful king, Charles III.
The King is right there, on the inauguration podium. The President hands him the Bible and the nuclear football. He takes command and the President calls an Uber. From the river, a deep roar — a corps of Royal Marines, on enormous transatlantic Hovercraft, is cruising in formation up the Potomac…
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Columbia University’s renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs talks about the lessons he has learned from consulting with governments around the world, about how global problems, such as the war in Ukraine, will only be solved via efforts to understand the other side, never through force.

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Rob Johnson:

Welcome to Economics & Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I’m here with Jeffrey Sachs. How would I say? I always smile, when every time we talk, I’m paying homage to the Rommel family, George a nephew of Rommel, where we both grew up in Detroit and our parents were good friends with the respective Rommel’s, and perhaps that inspired my curiosity, even as an undergraduate at MIT, to learn more about Jeffrey Sachs. And it’s been like a north star beacon for me in thinking about what’s important through my entire career.

So, Jeff, thanks for being here. I’ll describe just briefly, you’ve done a tremendous amount of work here at Columbia University. The highest ranking professor, you ran The Earth Institute for many years. Currently the president of the US Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And I would say just as a signature, I see you always have… There’s a gift that I perceive and that I admire and I try to turn people onto about your career. You always seem to choose important questions. People can do all kinds of dances with technique, but how do they say they might be fiddling with [inaudible 00:01:49], and you seem to zoom in over and over on things that matter, not just to your country or not just to prestige, but to humankind. And I greatly admire that.

Jeffrey Sachs:

Thanks for that. Very nice.

Well, I feel it way inside me. And I just want to refer, you’ve written many books. We’ve talked about The Age of Globalization, in one of our previous episodes together, but Sustainable Development, the two I underscored today, because the question is related to the Ukraine that I’ve seen you writing about in Project Syndicate and other places were you recently… To Move the World JFK’s Quest for Peace in 2013 and A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. What I see there, first book, 2013, second book, 2018 is a prescience. You’re seeing ahead of the challenges that we’re going to have to address. So I’m very excited today that you’re with me and we can talk about what you see, what scares you and what’s the way up.

Well, thanks so much. It’s great to be with you. And thank you for focusing on those two books. The book about JFK, which I wrote in 2013 was to commemorate an incredible speech and initiative of President Kennedy in 1963, which was just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, here we are Rob, the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis with another showdown between the United States and Russia. And so I’m going back to that speech, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the lessons that I drew in that book just about every day in my thinking about what events are telling us right now. The 2019 book, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, is also directly core to my thinking right now. I do think the United States doesn’t get or accept it’s a realistic constructive place in the world right now.

And that this is at least a part of our problem in a world that is increasingly destabilized. I think that both books focus on one fundamental idea, which is that, peace is better than war and peace comes through a constructive engagement with the other side. President Kennedy said in his remarkable speech, given at American University commencement on June 10th, 1963, that pieces into some magic solution. It’s not an event. Peace is a process, a way of solving problems. It is a constructive engagement with the other side. It is what I’ve learned in 21 years of advising the UN leadership. It is diplomacy at its finest. It’s not guessing what the other side will do. It’s not playing a game theory where you take as given the other parties move, which can have disastrous consequences, but rather you engage. And I think that this has been by central theme, partly from my own life experience of working in cultures all over the world, very different communities, different religions, races, ethnicities, nationalities, geographies.

It taught me something about the common fate of humanity, I think. And it also taught me about the wonders of dialogue, communication and diplomacy. Well, here we are with war, with incredible tensions, with China, with the inability to solve major global problems like the increasing the arrangement of the Earth’s climate system. And I believe that in all of these, what we’re seeing is a failure of state craft, a failure of concepts of cooperation, a really an application of crude ideas that are like the game theoretical ideas that assume the worst of the other side, for example, and assume you know what’s in Putin’s mind assume you know what is in president Xi’s mind. And when we behave that way, we get very bad outcomes. So I thank you for focusing on those works. And for me, they do reflect my underlying feeling that there’s a different way for us to approach global problems, different from what we’re doing right now. And it would be much safer, more prudent and more constructive to follow a different approach.

Well, I find it fascinating, just putting what I’ll call pattern recognition. You’re talking about what John Kennedy did. I remember the old, what I’ll call the Bismarck playbook. I took a bunch of courses in arms control and disarmament, and they said the one of the big dangers is when you’re failing at home, there’s discord, the Bismarck playbook is a metaphor. Find an external enemy so everybody can agree and focus on that. But sitting behind the Bismarck playbook in the first appendix to that playbook, is the need to cooperate on climate change. So we’re not in a place where… Forget mutual assured destruction for a moment, we got to cooperate. There’s another way we can exterminate earth if we don’t collaborate. And then the last thing I’ll throw into this mix is a wonderful book by the scholar Orville Schell and his colleague, John Delury called Wealth and Power.

And what Orville, who was a good friend of mine said, this was years ago. He said, “Rob, we’ve got a situation where the Chinese went through centuries of humiliation, opium war, Japanese invasion, et cetera. America thinks it runs the world and wants everybody to fall in line behind it.” To use the big Brzeziński’s metaphor, we have tectonic plates crashing between two philosophical systems at the head table of the G20, that used to be the G7. We are in a situation where you can’t even play game theory with different philosophical systems, because you’re projecting things onto your counterpart that may never have been in their imagination or in their training.

So you’ve got this instability, what I’ll call the Bismarck playbook, you’ve got the end game of climate and then you have this tension that centers on US, China, but we could bring… Why didn’t Russia, after the deescalation, the end of the Soviet union, and I know you’ve worked a lot there, so I don’t know the answer to this at all, but why didn’t Russia get the equivalent of a aid program to integrate them into the EU, regain prosperity, dignity through that? And I’ll ask you question, is the political economy of the military industrial complex, a little bit of the evil that hides inside this dilemma of danger?

So there’s a lot of intertwined issues there. And let me start with the very specific issue of climate change and the energy transformation that we know we need. We need to move to a zero carbon energy system. And that requires actually a lot of long term thinking and a lot of international cooperation. So every day in the context of the Ukraine war, I’m asked by somebody and it happened again this morning, what’s the implication of the war for climate change? In other words, you see Russia cutting off or threatening to cut off natural gas to Europe or Europe putting on sanctions on oil and gas imports from Russia. Will this accelerate the energy transition? And the answer is basically, no, because it may change the calculus in the very short term, it’s actually opening up more coal mines again or pumping more gas and oil to make up for what has been lost from Russian supplies.

Maybe by raising the price of oil and gas on world markets, it’s making some new solar projects more economical and financial, but all of that misses the main point, which is that the real changes we need are long term strategic changes in the energy system. And that requires a stable, peaceful, cooperative environment. Even renewable energy to be efficient and effective needs to cross borders. It needs to be regional, even globally connected in some ways, maybe in the new hydrogen economy, we can’t do this if we’re in conflict. We won’t do this if we’re in conflict. So this is the first point that almost everything of real value for development and what we now call and should call sustainable development, meaning economic development that is also socially, just and environmentally sustainable, requires a long perspective. If you have a short perspective because of huge uncertainties, because of war, because of conflict, then you can’t accomplish anything real of the transformations that we need.

You can improvise. You can maybe keep your footing in the short term, perhaps, but the truth of the matter is, real development of any kind requires years, even decades of hard, continuous work. Educating children, building infrastructure, cooperating across river sheds, building power transmission grids that are again, transnational. And that is a long term cooperative effort that depends on peace. And we’re not getting there right now, partly because our mindsets really are wrong. And unfortunately, what I have invade against in the US context is the idea which is very popular. It’s in every speech of us leaders, that the world is safe when the United States leads the world. So primacy or what the political scientists call hegemony is really built into the American thinking. I think Henry Luce did an unfortunate thing to America when he, in 1941, christened this as the American century, is a great turn of phrase, by the way. So inspiring.

And so ennobling, but it actually basically went to the heads of the permanent state that they took it literally. This is our century. In the past it was Britain’s century, in the industrial age of the 19th century, or it was the Mongol century, or it was the Roman centuries. Now it’s our century. What a dangerous way to think about things because you get way overstretched, you act provocatively without even attempting to understand the other side. And that unfortunately, is so much of what happened in Europe after the 1990 remarkable transformation. And as you know, I was there. I was physically present in de Kremlin in December 1991. You couldn’t even believe. I could not believe that. And especially you’d appreciated a kid from Detroit sitting in the Kremlin in this huge office and who works in the far door, Boris Yeltsin.

And he walks across the room, and he sat down right in front of me because I was leading the delegation. And he said, gentlemen, because it was all men. He said, “Gentlemen, in the next room is the leaders of the Soviet military. And I have just agreed with them to the disillusion of the Soviet union.” I heard literally those words. Yeah. Wow. Is exactly right. It was weird. No. So I thought… And I had been working in the Soviet Union before that. I was told, I don’t know if it’s true, that I was the first person to brief the ghost plan leadership in its entirety, on the top floor of ghost plan, just outside of Red Square in 1990 to the politburo leader who headed ghost plan on the transformation to a market economy.

And they were taking notes of 50 Soviet leaders on the other side, all with notebooks open, taking copious notes about market economics. But the fact of the matter is Gorbachev and Yeltsin, wanted a common home. Gorbachev, who I regard as the greatest statesman of our age. And who’s reviled in Russia for having lost the Soviet Union and for inflation and everything else, he’s the greatest statesman of our age, because he understood that what we needed was peace rather than a cold or hot wars. And he was ready to even let the system fall rather than shoot people to “save the old system.” But his idea, which I know was a common home from Rotterdam to Vladivostok, that we have a common European home. I believed it. I went to work for his team in 1991, promoting what we called the Grand Bargain working with Graham Allison, who was then head of the Kennedy School at Harvard and Stanley Fisher and others.

And we recommended a significant financial assistance program to the Soviet Union to support its economic and political reforms. What was the White House response? Complete and yet nothing. [inaudible 00:18:18] not anything we’re not doing this. Okay. That was a disaster for… The failure of Western support definitely undermined Gorbachev. Yeltsin emerged after the attempted push against Gorbachev which was in the summer of August 1991. And then I was contacted by Yeltsin’s economic leader, Yegor Gaidar and I came to Moscow, and Yeltsin said to me and said to others, “I wanted normal country. I want a democratic country with the market economy. And I want normal relations with the world.” I said, absolutely wonderful. This is exactly what we want. And Gaidar, who was then the acting premier of Russia, which was about to become the sovereign country, was meeting with the G7 finance deputies in November 1991.

And Russia was running out of foreign exchange reserves. This was a fulminant financial crisis. So I knew a lot about financial crises and their history and their resolution, and worked with Poland a couple of years before. And I suggested to Gaidar, well look, tell the US and the other six deputy finance ministers, you need a stand still on the debt payments because you’re running out of reserves and Russia is about to become an independent country and we can’t have a financial collapse. And he came out of the meeting, just absolutely action faced. He said, they wouldn’t even consider it. They said, you have to pay to the penny. We will not allow anything right now. We’re not authorized to allow anything, we will not allow anything, you continue to pay. Russia ran out of reserves at the beginning of 1992, as Yeltsin came to power.

In other words, a fulminant financial crisis. I couldn’t believe it. I spent two unbelievably frustrating years trying to get the US and the IMF to do something and they wouldn’t do anything. And Larry Eagleburger who was acting secretary of state explained to me at one point said, Mr. Sachs, it’s not even about what you’re advising, even if I agreed with it, it’s not going to happen. And he said, this is an election year, it’s not going to happen. And the truth is, this didn’t determine all the future, but God, did it show an attitude of obtuseness in the United States. And I didn’t appreciate then that Cheney and Wolfowitz were working on their great NeoCon illusions that now were the sole superpower. Now we get to do what we want, and they really were working on the next wars because they were going to take away every Soviet ally or Russian ally in the middle east, knock out Libya, Syria, Iraq.

This was a plan already from the early 1990s, according to Wesley Smith. And I didn’t know it at the time. I just couldn’t believe, here we are this historic moment, a chance to cooperate and no, we’re not going to cooperate. We’re going to be the sole superpower. And I just found that obtuseness year after year from the US, and by the end of the 1990s, I basically had, had it because I had seen the US now from all sides, I had seen it from the Latin American perspective. I had seen it from the central European perspective. I had seen it from the Russian perspective. I had seen it from the Indonesian perspective in 1997. We just were not a cooperative country that aimed to work with other countries to solve problems. We were the unipolar, great power of the world. We were arrogant and we were not paying attention to what other countries said.

And this manifested itself in a number of financial debacles of these countries that had big effects on the world. It also manifested in what brings us to the war in Ukraine today, though, this is a very unpopular view. It’s right. And that is NATO enlargement. What John Mearsheimer has said is right. Kissinger said it. And so many other wise people, George Kennan said it in 1997, don’t do this NATO enlargement, it’ll lead to a new cold war. Now we have a hot war. The secretary of defense under Clinton was deciding whether to resign or not. When he learned that Clinton indeed would go ahead with NATO enlargement because, Bill Perry, who was the secretary of defense said, look, we’re starting to improve relations with Russia. Do we really need to risk that right now by peremptory moves of NATO enlargement, especially since unequivocally, both the Germans and the Americans had promised Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, no enlargement in return for German reunification.

Then we lied about it. Well, it’s not in writing. We brought out all our lawyers, but good historians know that those commitments were made. And we just want to deny that. And given the predominance of US government in our media, you can tell any story you want. This is absolutely true, but the long and the short of it, Rob, is that NATO enlargement started. We weren’t giving any financial help. We were plotting wars against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Assad, all the allies of the former Soviet Union. And then of Russia. Russia has military naval base in Syria. So Assad would be our target and so forth. No cooperation other than superficial. And in the 1990s, the NATO enlargement started. And then during George W. Bush… Well, actually Clinton did something that in retrospect, we didn’t even see the significance of, but it was hugely significant and misguided.

And that was the war against Serbia in 1999, to force Serbia to give up Kosovo. So there was a rebellion of Kosovar Albanians or Albanian Kosovars, I should say, in Serbia. And the US took sides and said, let them break away. And when Serbia said, no, they’re part of Serbia, which is the normal way that diplomacy works, the US bombed Belgrade for several weeks. And we set up the precedent that if you want a breakaway state or you want to weaken the other side, just go bomb them. And then when Russia says, well, when we do this, we’re called the crime of humanity, but when NATO does it, that passes as defending freedom fighters. So isn’t there no standard or a double standard, but just to carry on to the current day, in the early 2000s after the Belgrade bombing, and then after 9/11, of course, Bush pushed the enlargement of NATO to I think, seven countries under his watch. An extraordinary increase of the number of countries, the Baltic States to begin with the Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, if I remember correctly, all during Bush’s watch.

And then to the shock of the Europeans in NATO in 2008, he said, Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. And just take a look at a map. And I encourage everybody to take a look at the map of the Black Sea. What was NATO’s idea? What was the US strategic idea? The US strategic idea was basically to own the black sea for NATO, because you’d have Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and where’s Georgia all the way over on the Eastern side of the Black Sea, suddenly is going to be a NATO country, whereas NATO was originally to defend against an invasion by a now defunct non-existent country in Western Europe.

So suddenly, it is an expansionary force moving straight across the Black Sea. It reminds me a lot of the Crimean War of the 19th century. Who controls the Black Sea? And well, one thing has led to another and we have the war in Ukraine. And if in our media you say, the United States played a provocative war. You’re immediately targeted. Oh, you’re just purveying Putin’s propaganda. Well, this is really nonsense. We need a serious discussion, some context, some history, and we should not have pushed NATO right up against Russia’s edge and right around the encirclement of the Black Sea. But we did so, and now we’re also paying consequences for this, but especially Ukraine is paying consequences for this.

Yeah. I remember some of my teachers at MIT in that arms control disarmament. Once, this was years after I was a student, but I ran into Bill Kauffman and I said, this doesn’t feel like game theory to me, it feels like the chain store paradox. Which is, you never should engage in each of these things, but you act like you got to do it to show your tough to the next three episodes, but with consequences being so dangerous, first with regard to nuclear war, and now with regard to climate, this is madness, and this is not leadership. Why are leaders so afraid of our population at this juncture that they have to put on this ritual of toughness, as opposed to doing what needs to be done?

Did you play the game of risk as the board game risk? Okay. So the board game risk really is a marvelous model of how Washington thinking is, you have the map of the world and the aim of the game is to have your piece on every space of the world. And as you move forward, if you’re successful and your armies are advancing into new territory, every new territory you have has borders with the enemy. And suddenly, every new border becomes the conflict zone. Every new border becomes vital for your national security. And so you have to have every space on the board, or suddenly you’re at risk. Now, American strategists behave this way. I think it’s mind boggling because we shouldn’t be playing a game of risk where you’re trying to conquer the world, but this is the American strategist approach.

And a good example of it is the Solomon Islands, tiny islands, 3,200 kilometers off the coast of Australia that had the audacity to sign a security pact with China. And suddenly, the United States and Australia are in a tizzy. How dare they? This is a threat to security. And you hear the voices in the US Congress completely unacceptable that there’s a security pact because you give China one inch, they’ll take the world. But when the United States says, well, NATO should enlarge to Georgia and Ukraine and Russia says, no, that’s a security concern. We laugh. We say, why is it a security concern? We’re peace loving, we’re wonderful. And that’s their choice. That’s not our choice. We didn’t say, well, that’s the Solomon Islands choice. We dispatched the deputy of the national security council to Asia on an urgent mission to express the US displeasure at the Solomon Islands decision to enter this pact with China.

So much, Rob, comes from the unwillingness to really have rules that apply to yourself as well as to others or to think empathetically, what is the other side thinking? And it comes back by the way to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I think we should talk about that because it’s absolutely relevant. When Khrushchev put the nuclear or the atomic weapons in Cuba, all of Kennedy’s advisors, except one, except Adlai Stevenson, said from the start, you must attack and take them out. We need a military operation. Many things can be said about that. But I think the bottom line is it would’ve started world war III, because the CIA had every fact wrong. It thought that the missiles were not yet operational. It completely underestimated roughly by a factor of seven, how many Soviet troops were actually in Cuba? How many would be killed in a military operation? And so forth.

Kennedy did a remarkable thing. He kept asking one question, what is in Khrushchev’s mind? What is he thinking? In other words, Kennedy behaved empathetically. It didn’t mean he sympathized with Khrushchev he was thinking, what is Khrushchev thinking? What is his point of view? Does he want war? What is he trying to prove? Kennedy had to learn actually the details that there were US missiles in Turkey. What are they? Why are they there? Who put them there? And so on. But by the second week of the crisis, Kennedy realized Khrushchev didn’t want war, but he did want to put America’s face in it because the US had its Turkish missiles. Its missiles in Turkey pointed right on the border of the Soviet Union. The US had invaded Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation and so forth. Kennedy realized, you know what? We got to get out of this by a compromise. You remove your missiles. We remove our missiles. We commit never to invade Cuba again.

And that’s how the crisis was resolved. It wasn’t, we demand victory because Khrushchev has done the most dastardly deed. So we must defeat that man, which is the rhetoric that we have today. Must defeat Putin with his 1,600 active nuclear warheads. We must defeat Putin. This is mind boggling that even on an anniversary like this 60 years anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we’re not taking care to learn the real lessons of how you diffuse a crisis. And you start with empathy. You say, if we care about the Solomon Islands, maybe Russia cares about Ukraine and Georgia in the same way. Maybe we shouldn’t be quite so provocative. Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about humiliating, defeat and so forth. Or maybe we shouldn’t be saying, this is the worst crime in modern history when the United States has engaged in so many wars of choice. And maybe we should find a way for both sides to stand down.

Yeah. Well, I see, I remember reading Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine, about that there were many nuclear weapons inside of submarines off the coast of Cuba. And we started dropping depth charges on them, but for… I can’t remember the gentleman’s name, who overruled firing the missiles. They were terrified. They were underwater and the death charges were going off trying to essentially killed them all and drown them all.

And absolutely right.

And this guy wouldn’t allow the missiles to be shut, but it’s that close. It’s that close to extermination.

So reading list for everybody listening, Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine and Martin Sherwin, Gambling With Armageddon, which is the finest book ever written about the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Martin Sherwin, tells this story that you’re so importantly referring to Rob, and I think it has many lessons, but what happened is even after Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed on the way out, a disabled Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that was out of radio contact. So it had no news, was disabled, it was overheating. It needed to surface just to breathe. Sailors were fainting and it started to surface and a jackass in the US Air Force, instead of dropping depth charges, dropped live hand grenades on the submarine as a joke. And he’s, we’ll scare the hell out of them. So the commander of the vessel ordered a nuclear tipped submarine to be put into the… Nuclear tip torpedo to be put into the Torpedo Bay.

And called for its launch. And it happened by coincidence that a Soviet party official, a communist party official, was on that vessel named Antipoff. And he had the ability to override the order of the skipper of the submarine. And he said, no, we’re going to surface. We’re not going to fire this. And under US military doctrine, described by Ellsburg and by Sherwin, if the US was attacked by a nuclear weapon, even a nuclear tipped submarine, our military doctrine said we would unleash the full scale response of a complete attack on the Soviet Union, China and all of the other countries of the Soviet system.

And the estimate was 700 million dead. But what they didn’t know was about nuclear winter, because the such an impact could have ended human life on the planet. We came within seconds of this. We’re stupid. If we think that things can’t get out of hand. Today, I read about a US general saying, well, we may need to break the Soviet blockade of the port of Odessa to let Ukrainian grain supplies. I’m sick of these generals telling us about things that are so unbelievably risky without a proper public debate and understanding because we could end up in nuclear war. And this is mind-boggling that we are having general opine on these kinds of military operations, which would be tantamount to direct US war with Russia in this kind of way.

And you’re talking about the extermination of life on earth. These are not rumors. I’ve seen in nature and science magazine studies of what happens to the upper atmosphere, if there’s a nuclear exchange. And I encourage many people now, I’ve been doing a little bit of work with a group called the Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich and hard tongue in this group and exploring some of the ramifications for how our military decisions are being made. And it’s really quite haunting to try to understand this dynamic as having anything to do with representing the wellbeing of America or mankind.

I learned in thinking about American history and politics, which I’ve been doing pretty much nonstop for 50 years now, it turns out the president’s main job in the world is to keep a foot on the brake of the US military machine, because it’s like those old cars that are poorly tuned, that though they’re a neutral, they’re always revving forward and they’re always jumping. You take your foot off the brake, the car jumps forward and good presidents, great presidents have been the ones to have the foot on the brake. Like Kennedy, had the foot on the brake in October 1962. Johnson, did not have the foot on the brake and we escalated in Vietnam. We know that Bush, I don’t even know if he was in the driver’s seat, much less having a foot on the brake, but we went to so many wars. Obama, was no good at this either. So this is a real question…

It’s a systemic process. Yeah.

It is like the game risk. You’re always looking, oh, we’re in Romanian and Bulgaria, we’re at risk unless we’re also in Ukraine. So we better expand. Well, then there could be losses in the Eastern Black Sea and the Caucasus. So we better expand to Georgia, et cetera. Or the Solomon Islands or what we’re doing in East Asia and just so much chit chat about war with Taiwan and US war with China and Biden piping off and so forth. All of it is provocative. All of it requires actually, our good luck that a president says, no, we’re not going farther. Korean war again, had MacArthur had his way, he would’ve invaded China. We would’ve used nuclear weapons at the time, Truman, his right decision, no, stop. He had to fire his top general. This is really the job of the American president because the underlying revving machine doesn’t have a natural stopping point.

I remember, the late Chalmers Johnson was a good friend of mine, and I was doing a lot of work in Japan at the time, but he was working on the books like Blowback. He wrote that trilogy about the dangers that foreshadowed the attack of 9/11. Saying if you’re aggressive, you are going to have these consequences putting the American people at risk. But let me shift Jeff, as we’re coming down the home stretch to the relation of all of this to budget and the wellbeing of America.

What concerns me is at the level of medical care, the OECD data shows that America per capita spends more than twice the average in the OECD to have some healthcare system that is ranked 38th in the world by the WHO. The second dimension is, we have a baby boom creating a demographic bulge where elder care is going to be a priority. We are going through technological transformation that requires transforming the education system towards knowledge intensive things. What was his name, Sir Ken Robinson, the most famous TED talker of all time, how schools kill creativity. We got to change that. That involves investment. Now, we’ve got this military urge and climate transformation.

I guess I worked on the Senate Budget Committee under Pete Domenici, and I’m thinking, how are we going to get all this stuff done if we keep playing these aggressive military games? And how are we going to harness the political economy? I always laughed, Domenici said to me one time, well, you’re an economist, you know that thing called Say’s law? I said, yeah. He said, how supply creates its own demand? I said, yes, Senator. He says, well, you watch every year when we put up the budget about the time that the military budgets come up, you’re going to see all kinds of news about how dangerous the world is.

They’re using fear to create their own demand. And Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary, he created a series, a three part series that you can watch for free on thoughtmaybe.com. And it’s called The Power of Nightmares. And so Jeff, I’m loading you all up, but you can’t sit there and be… How would I say, self righteous budget hawk, tolerate a military industrial complex and spending 22 times what any other country is. Neglecting older people, neglecting young people and letting our healthcare system cost twice what it should. And with all the discord of not reconciling those things, the Bismarck playbook comes back into center stage.

Well, one of the expressions of Joe Biden that I really like though, I haven’t heard it from him recently, for an obvious reason. He said, don’t talk to me about your values. Show me your budget. And I’ll tell you your values. And what he means by that is where you put your money, that’s what counts in the system. And the United States has really messed up the budget. It spends far too little on many areas like education, like wellbeing of children, it spends far too much on other areas like the so-called modernization of our nuclear fleet arsenal, when we should be negotiating long term nuclear disarmament. And in general, our budget is a mess. As you say, also, the way we organize key parts of the economy like healthcare, is to give private monopolies to a crucial sector, ending up overpaying roughly by a factor two for our healthcare, we spent almost 20% of GDP on healthcare compared to roughly 10% of GDP in our pure countries.

So I’ve written a number of books, The Price of Civilization being one of my favorites, about what a budget would look like for a civilized country and interestingly, and one of the better parts of a speech that secretary of state Antony Blinken just gave about US approaches to China. He said, the real approach is we need to invest in ourselves. We need to strengthen our capacities in science, education, our wellbeing at home, because that’s what makes us the competitive model vis-a-vis, the rest of the world, including vis-a-vis, China. And that’s true, but we’re not doing it. And we have lost the budget debate and the budget narrative in the last two years. Biden came in with the idea of a package to build back better. It did not appear. What happens in the United States is essentially, key sectors are in the hands of powerful lobbies and Military Industrial Complex is one of them. Big Oil is another or Fossil Fuel Industry is another.

The healthcare sector is a third. Those are favored by the budget. They are favored by regulation and areas that don’t have such powerful lobbies. Don’t see the light of day. And in general, the United States under taxes even though we’re told all the time that were being crushed by taxes, the total government revenues in the United States for federal state and local are about 30% of GDP of national income, but in Northern Europe, which ranks much better in healthcare and longevity in many quality of life indicators, about 45% of GDP. So the fact of the matter is the budget’s a mess and what founded for Biden in the end, why didn’t his package go through because nobody wanted to pay for it with taxation. And it all unraveled when Senator Sinema said, I don’t want to have a rise of the corporate tax rate.

And Manchin said, I don’t like that billionaire tax. And we ended up with nothing. Biden, ended up empty handed, ineffective politics, by the way. So I think a president ought to be able to keep a couple senators in the fold and he failed to do so. And that’s part of his job also is to know how to twist arms or cajole or give whatever side payments for new projects in West Virginia, you get something done, you make a deal, but he could not make a deal. He failed on that. So we have nothing. So we have a budget mess.

And by the way, a budget mess also with a mountain of debt, now 100% of GDP, of public debt, that’s actually consequential with interest rates going up, the burden of that debt is also going to be quite significant. We need to raise some taxes and we need to restructure what we spend, but we’re a blocked political system. So we are not showing a way forward on this and I, not holding my breath. Nothing’s going to happen. Probably, the Democrats are going to lose one or both houses of Congress in the fall. If that happens, I would guess there would be no significant budgetary reform or action until 2025.

Yeah. Well, Jeff, I mentioned at the outset that you and I grew up in Detroit, and I remember one of my father’s friends said to me, Detroit is the place that America divorced because they wanted to believe in the American dream. And when we had our stresses in the 60s and 70s, things like Tom Sugrue book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis in Detroit, he said, they’d had the voting rights act and the civil rights act and all the Democrats in the south were afraid to vote, to support the transformation of a black majority, black government, meaning Coleman Young as mayor.

So we got divorced from… We were no longer America. We were a bad example and you and I have done work together in Detroit and been at numerous meetings. And I often think of the pressures that I remember in 1990, there was this headline in CNN, Detroit is the shadow that looms over the future of America. In other words, it’s an indicator, it’s an early warning, like the Canary in the coal mine of toxic political economy. And so when I thought about talking with you today, I often go back to my musical origins. There was a guy that actually played my senior prom named Bob Seger.

Oh, my God. Hold on.

I followed you for many years as a younger person from Detroit, but with family, mutual friends who were guiding me to look at your example, Bob Seger wrote a song that made me think of you. It’s called Travelin’ Man, and at the end of the song, as he’s reflected on all of this, he says, sometimes at night, I see their faces, I feel the traces they’ve left on my soul. Those are the memories that make me a wealthy soul. Jeff, you give me that kind of inspiration, curiosity. I follow your work. I have, since I was, I guess, a senior in high school. And I think it’s amazing how you, after what might call the woundedness of Detroit, all the things you’ve described today in all your international involvement, remains so constructive. And I’m very grateful for that. Thank you.

Well, Rob, I’m grateful that we do it together and thank you for those lovely words, but we’ve been on a journey together. And your leadership of INET and constructive new approaches to these issues is essential. So I really thank you and how great to be together with you today.

Yeah. Thank you. And well, how would I say, pause now and wait for the next turn of events in the next chapter, but I look forward to working with you in the days ahead. And once again, I’m very grateful for the example you set for our young scholars and for our country.

Thank you so much.

Bye. And check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, at ineteconomics.org.

The war in Ukraine is now in its fourth month, but there is no sign of a ceasefire or resolution anywhere in sight. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out a ceasefire or concessions, yet he maintains that only diplomacy can end the war. In the meantime, Russian forces are trying to capture eastern Ukraine, while the policy of the United States is to provide military support to Zelenskyy’s government for as long as it might take to weaken Russia in hope that regime change will come to Moscow.
These developments do not bode well either for Ukraine or for the world at large, argues Noam Chomsky, a public intellectual regarded by millions of people as a national and international treasure. In this new and exclusive interview for Truthout, Chomsky urges the forces capable of ending the war to devote their energy to finding constructive ways to put a halt to the unfolding tragedies. In addition, he analyzes the new and highly dangerous global order that is taking shape. Perhaps to the surprise of many, especially considering the ongoing war in Ukraine, he does not describe the U.S.-Russia confrontation as the central element of the new global order in the making. Chomsky is institute professor and professor of linguistics at MIT and currently laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and has published some 150 books in linguistics, political and social thought, political economy, media studies, U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.
C.J. Polychroniou: After months of fighting, there is still very little hope of peace in Ukraine. Russia is now refocusing its efforts on taking control of the east and south of the country with the likely intent of incorporating them into the Russian Federation, while the West has signaled that it will step up military support for Ukraine. In the light of these developments, Ukrainian officials have ruled out a ceasefire or concessions to Moscow, although President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also went on record saying that only diplomacy can end the war. Don’t these two positions cancel each other out? Doesn’t a mutually acceptable agreement for a war to end always contain concessions? Indeed, back in March, the Ukrainian government had signaled its intention that it was willing to make big concessions for the war to end. So, what’s going on? Could it be that neither side is fully invested in peace?
Noam Chomsky: I’ll come back to the questions, but we should carefully consider the stakes. They are very high. They go far beyond Ukraine, desperate and tragic as the situation is there. Anyone with a moral bone in their body will want to think through the issues carefully, without heroic posturing.
Let’s consider what is at stake.
First, of course, is Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a crime (to repeat once again) that can be compared to the U.S. invasion of Iraq or the Hitler-Stalin invasion of Poland, the kind of crimes against peace for which Nazi war criminals were hanged — though only the defeated are subject to punishment in what we call “civilization.” In Ukraine itself, there will be a terrible toll as long as the war persists.
There are broader consequences, which are truly colossal. That’s no exaggeration.
One is that tens of millions of people in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are literally facing starvation as the war proceeds, cutting off desperately needed agricultural supplies from the Black Sea region, the primary supplier for many countries, including some already facing utter disaster, like Yemen. Will return to how that is being handled.
A second is the growing threat of terminal nuclear war. It is all too easy to construct plausible scenarios that lead to a rapid climb up the escalation ladder. To take one, right now the U.S. is sending advanced anti-ship missiles to Ukraine. The flagship of the Russian fleet has already been sunk. Suppose more of the fleet is attacked. How does Russia then react? And what follows?
To mention another scenario, so far Russia has refrained from attacking the supply lines used to ship heavy armaments to Ukraine. Suppose it does so, placing it in direct confrontation with NATO — meaning the U.S. We can leave the rest to the imagination.
Other proposals are circulating that would very likely lead to nuclear war — which means the end, for all of us, facts that do not seem to be properly understood. One is the widely voiced call for a no-fly zone, which means attacking anti-aircraft installations inside Russia. The extreme danger of such proposals is understood by some, notably the Pentagon, which so far has been able to veto the most dangerous proposals. For how long in the prevailing mood?
These are horrendous prospects. Prospects: what might happen. When we look at what actually is happening, it gets worse. The Ukraine invasion has reversed the much-too-limited efforts to address global warming — which will soon become global frying. Prior to the invasion, some steps were being taken to avert catastrophe. Now that has all been thrown into reverse. If that continues, we’re done.
One day the IPCC issues another severe warning that if we are to survive, we must start right now to reduce use of fossil fuels. Right now, no delay. The next day President Biden announces vast new expansion of fossil fuel production.
Tens of millions of people in Asia, Africa and the Middle East are literally facing starvation as the war proceeds, cutting off desperately needed agricultural supplies from the Black Sea region.
Biden’s call to increase fossil fuel production is sheer political theater. It has nothing to do with today’s fuel prices and inflation, as claimed. It will be years before the poisons reach the market — years that could be spent on moving the world rapidly to renewable energy. That’s perfectly feasible, but barely discussed in the mainstream. There’s no need to comment here. The topic has recently been expertly analyzed by economist Robert Pollin in another of his essential contributions to understanding this critical issue of survival and acting on that understanding.
It is crystal clear that settling the Ukraine crisis is of extraordinary significance, not just for Ukraine itself but because of the calamitous consequences beyond if the war persists.
What then can we do to facilitate ending the tragedy? Let’s begin with virtual truism. The war can end in one of two ways: Either there will be a diplomatic settlement, or one side will capitulate. The horror will go on unless it ends with a diplomatic settlement or capitulation.
That at least should be beyond discussion.
A diplomatic settlement differs from capitulation in one crucial respect: Each side accepts it as tolerable. That’s true by definition, so it is beyond discussion.
Proceeding, a diplomatic settlement must offer Putin some kind of escape hatch — what is now disdainfully called an “off-ramp” or “appeasement” by those who prefer to prolong the war.
That much is understood even by the most dedicated Russia-haters, at least those who can entertain some thought in their minds beyond punishing the reviled enemy. One prominent example is the distinguished foreign policy scholar Graham Allison of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, who also has long direct experience in military affairs. Five years ago, he instructed us that it was then clear that Russia as a whole is a “demonic” society and “deserves to be strangled.” Today he adds that few can doubt that Putin is a “demon,” radically unlike any U.S. leader, who at worst only make mistakes, in his view.
Yet even Allison argues that we must contain our righteous anger and bring the war to a quick end by diplomatic means. The reason is that if the mad demon “is forced to choose between losing and escalating the level of violence and destruction, then, if he’s a rational actor, he’s going to choose the latter” — and we may all be dead, not just Ukrainians.
Putin is a rational actor, Allison argues. And if he is not, all discussion is useless because he can destroy Ukraine and maybe even blow up the world at any moment — an eventuality we cannot prevent by any means that won’t destroy us all.
Proceeding with truism, to oppose or even act to delay a diplomatic settlement is to call for prolonging the war with its grim consequences for Ukraine and beyond. This stand constitutes a ghastly experiment: Let’s see whether Putin will slink away quietly in total defeat, or whether he will prolong the war with all its horrors, or even use the weapons that he indisputably has to devastate Ukraine and to set the stage for terminal war.
All of this seems obvious enough. Or it should, but not in the current climate of hysteria, where such near truisms elicit a great flood of utterly irrational reactions: The monster Putin won’t agree, it’s appeasement, what about Munich, we have to establish our own red lines and keep to them whatever the monster says, etc. 
There is no need to dignify such outpourings with a response. They all amount to saying: Let’s not try, and instead undertake the ghastly experiment.
The ghastly experiment is operative U.S. policy, and is supported by a wide range of opinion, always with noble rhetoric about how we must stand up for principle and not permit crime to go unpunished. When we hear this from strong supporters of U.S. crimes, as we commonly do, we can dismiss it as sheer cynicism, the Western counterpart to the most vulgar apparatchiks of the Soviet years, eager to eloquently denounce Western crimes, fully supportive of their own. We also hear it from opponents of U.S. crimes, from people who surely do not want to carry out the ghastly experiment that they are advocating. Here other issues arise: the rising tide of irrationality that is undermining any hope for serious discourse — a necessity if Ukraine is to be spared indescribable tragedy, and even if the human experiment is to persist much longer.
If we can escape cynicism and irrationality, the humane choice for the U.S. and the West is straightforward: seek to facilitate a diplomatic settlement, or at least don’t undermine the option.
On this matter, official Western opinion is split. France, Germany and Italy have been calling for negotiations to establish a ceasefire and move toward a diplomatic settlement. The U.S. and Britain, the West’s two warrior states, object. Their position is that the war must proceed: the ghastly experiment.
The longstanding U.S. policy of undermining diplomacy, which we have reviewed in detail in earlier discussions, was presented in sharper form a few weeks ago at a meeting of NATO powers and others organized by Washington at the U.S. airbase in Ramstein, Germany. The U.S. issued the marching orders: The war must be continued so as to harm Russia. That is the widely advocated “Afghan model” that we have discussed: In the words of the definitive scholarly study of the topic, it is the policy of “fighting Russia to the last Afghan” while seeking to delay Russian withdrawal and to undermine the UN diplomatic efforts that finally brought the tragedy to an end.
Explaining U.S.-NATO goals at Ramstein, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Let’s think about it. How do we ensure that Russia can never again invade another country? We put aside here the unthinkable question of whether reshaping U.S. policy might contribute to this end, for example, examining Washington’s openly declared refusal to consider any Russian security concerns and many other actions that we have discussed.
To achieve the announced goal, it seems that we must at least reenact something like the Versailles Treaty, which sought to ensure that Germany would not be able to go to war again.
But Versailles did not go far enough, as was soon made clear. It follows that the new version being planned must “strangle the demon” in ways that go beyond the Versailles effort to control the Huns. Perhaps something like the Morgenthau Plan.
That is the logic of the pronouncements. Even if we don’t take the words seriously and give them a limited interpretation, the policy entails prolonging the war, whatever the consequences are for Ukrainians and the “collateral damage” beyond: mass starvation, possible terminal war, continued destruction of the environment that sustains life.
Narrower questions of a similar sort arise with regard to the blockade, with its lethal effects in the Global South. Right now, Ukrainian ports are blockaded by the Russian Navy, preventing desperately needed exports. What can be done about it?
As always, there are two directions to explore: military or diplomatic. “War/War or Jaw/Jaw” in the phrase attributed to Churchill, who assigned priority to the latter.
War/War is official U.S. policy: Send advanced anti-ship missiles to force Russia to stop blockade of ports. Beyond the Russian flagship, more can be sunk. Will the Russians observe quietly? Maybe. How would the U.S. react in similar circumstances? We can put that aside.
Another possibility, proposed by the Wall Street Journal editors, is “to use warships to escort merchant ships out of the Black Sea.” The editors assure us that it would conform to international law, and that Russians will stop at nothing. So, if they react, we can proclaim proudly that we upheld international law as all goes up in flames.
The editors observe that there are precedents: “The U.S. has marshalled allies for such a mission twice in recent decades. In the late 1980s the U.S. reflagged and protected Kuwaiti oil tankers as they sailed out of the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq tanker war.”
That is correct, though there is a small oversight. The U.S. did indeed intervene directly to provide crucial support for Reagan’s good friend Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran. That was after supporting Saddam’s chemical warfare that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and even charging Iran for Saddam’s massacre of Kurds with chemical warfare. Iran was the demon of the day. A fine precedent.
Those are options for ending the blockade, keeping to convention by restricting attention to force rather than possible peaceful steps.
Are there any? One cannot know without thinking about them, looking at what is transpiring, and trying. It may be of relevance that Russia did propose something of the sort, though in our increasingly totalitarian culture, it can be reported only at the extreme margins. Quoting from a libertarian website:

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko … [argued] his country is not solely responsible for the burgeoning food emergency while pointing to Western sanctions blocking the export of grain and fertilizers.
“You have to not only appeal to the Russian Federation but also look deeply at the whole complex of reasons that caused the current food crisis. [Sanctions] interfere with normal free trade, encompassing food products including wheat, fertilizers and others,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said.

Is it worth considering? Not in our culture, which automatically reaches for the revolver.
The reflexive preference for violence, and its grim consequences, have not been overlooked abroad. That’s common in the Global South, which has ample experience with Western practice, but even among allies. The editor of the Australian international affairs journal Arena deplores the rigid censorship and intolerance of even mild dissent in U.S. media, concluding that “This means it is almost impossible within mainstream opinion to simultaneously acknowledge Putin’s insupportable actions and forge a path out of the war that does not involve escalation, and the further destruction of Ukraine.”
Quite correct. And unless we can escape this self-imposed trap, we are likely to march on to annihilation. It is all reminiscent of the early days of World War I when the Great Powers enthusiastically undertook a self-destructive war, but this time with incomparably more severe consequences lurking not far in the distance.
I’ve said nothing about what Ukrainians should do, for the simple and sufficient reason that it’s not our business. If they opt for the ghastly experiment, that’s their right. It’s also their right to request weapons to defend themselves from murderous aggression.
Here we return to what is our business: ourselves. How should we respond to these requests? I’ll repeat in a moment my personal belief, but here too a little honesty wouldn’t hurt. There are many ringing declarations upholding the sacred principle that victims of criminal assault must be supported in their just demand for weapons to defend themselves. It is easy to show that those who issue them don’t believe a word of what they are saying, and in fact, almost always, strongly support providing weapons and crucial diplomatic support to the aggressor. To take just the most obvious case, where are the calls to provide Palestinians with weapons to defend themselves from half a century of brutal criminal occupation in violation of Security Council orders and international law — or even to withdraw the decisive U.S. support for these crimes?
One can, of course, read the reports of U.S.-backed settler-IDF atrocities in the Israeli press, in the daily columns of the great journalist Gideon Levy. And we can read the withering reports by another honorable Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, reviewing the bitter condemnations of the ecological damage caused by the “demonic” Russians in Ukraine, which somehow miss the Israeli attack on Gaza last May, when “Israeli shells ignited hundreds of tons of pesticides, seeds, fertilizers, other chemicals, nylon and plastic sheeting, and plastic piping in a warehouse in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia.” The shelling ignited 50 tons of hazardous substances, with lethal effects on the shattered population, which is living in conditions of bare survival, international agencies report, after decades of U.S.-backed Israeli sadism. It is “chemical warfare by indirect means,” the highly reputable Palestinian legal research and activism agency al-Haq reports, after extensive investigation.
None of this, and vastly more, inspires any word in the mainstream about ending huge U.S. support for the murderous occupier, or of course for any means of defense.
My own view … is that the Ukrainian request for weapons should be honored, with caution to bar shipments that will escalate the criminal assault, punishing Ukrainians even more, with potential cataclysmic effects beyond.
But enough of such outrageous “whataboutism,” otherwise known as elementary honesty, and a common theme outside of our tightly controlled doctrinal system. How should the principle apply in the unique case of Ukraine, where the U.S. for once opposes aggression? My own view, to repeat, is that the Ukrainian request for weapons should be honored, with caution to bar shipments that will escalate the criminal assault, punishing Ukrainians even more, with potential cataclysmic effects beyond.
If the war in Ukraine can be ended through diplomacy, a peace deal could take many forms. The diplomatic solution advanced by many experts is the one based on a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality while Russia drops its objections to Ukraine’s membership in the EU, although the road to membership will inevitably be very long. However, there is one scenario which is rarely discussed, yet this is where things could be headed. This is Graham Allison’s “Korean scenario,” where Ukraine is divided into two parts without a formal treaty. Do you regard this as a likely or possible scenario?
It is one of a number of possible very ugly outcomes. Speculation seems to me rather idle. Better, I think, to devote our energy to thinking of constructive ways to overcome the developing tragedies — which, again, go far beyond Ukraine.
We might even envision a broader framework, something like the “common European home” with no military alliances proposed by Mikhail Gorbachev as an appropriate framework of world order after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Or we might pick up some of the early wording of the Partnership for Peace, initiated by Washington in the same years, as when President Clinton in 1994 assured Boris Yeltsin that “the broader, higher goal [is] European security, unity and integration – a goal I know you share.”
These promising prospects for peaceful integration were soon undercut, however, by Clinton’s plans for NATO expansion, over strong Russian objections, long preceding Putin.
Such hopes can be revived, to the great benefit of Europe, Russia and world peace generally. They might have been revived by Putin had he pursued Macron’s tentative initiatives towards accommodation instead of foolishly choosing criminal aggression. But they are not necessarily dead.
It’s useful to recall some history. For centuries, Europe was the most vicious place on earth. For French and Germans, the highest goal in life was to slaughter one another. As recently as my childhood, it seemed unimaginable that it could ever end. A few years later, it did end, and they have since been close allies, pursuing common goals in a radical reversal of a long history of brutal conflict. Diplomatic successes need not be impossible to achieve.
 It is now a commonplace that the world has entered a new Cold War. In fact, even the once-unthinkable scenario of using nuclear weapons in warfare is no longer taboo talk. Have we entered an era of confrontation between Russia and the West, a geostrategic and political rivalry reminiscent of the Cold War? 
Nuclear warfare had better become taboo talk, and unthinkable policy. We should be working hard to restore the arms control regime that was virtually dismantled by Bush II and Trump, who didn’t have quite enough time to complete the job but came close. Biden was able to rescue the last major relic, New Start, just days before its expiration.
The arms control regime should then be extended, looking forward to the day when the nuclear powers will join the UN Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now in force.
Other measures can be taken to alleviate the threat, among them implementing Nuclear Weapons-Free Zones (NWFZ). They exist in much the world, but are blocked by U.S. insistence on maintaining nuclear weapons facilities within them. The most important would be a NWFZ in the Middle East. That would end the alleged Iranian nuclear threat and eliminate any thin pretext for the criminal U.S.-Israeli bombings, assassinations and sabotage in Iran. That crucial advance in world peace is, however, blocked by the U.S. alone.
The reason is not obscure: It would interfere with Washington’s protection of Israel’s huge nuclear arsenal. That has to be kept in the dark. If exposed, U.S. law would come into play, threatening Washington’s extraordinary support for Israel’s illegal occupation and constant crimes — another topic that is unmentionable in polite society.
All steps should be taken to remove the scourge of nuclear weapons from the earth, before they destroy all of us.
In the world system that is taking shape, the confrontation with Russia is something of a sideshow. Putin has handed Washington a marvelous gift by turning Europe into a virtual U.S. vassal, cutting off the prospects that Europe might become an independent “third force” in international affairs. A consequence is that the fading Russian kleptocracy, with its huge stock of natural resources, is being incorporated into the Chinese-dominated zone. This growing system of development and loans stretches over Central Asia and reaches to the Middle East through the UAE and Maritime Silk Road, with tentacles stretching to Africa and even to Washington’s “little region over here,” as FDR’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson described Latin America while calling for dismantling of all regional associations except for our own.
It is the “China threat” that is the centerpiece of U.S. strategy. The threat is enhanced if resource-rich Russia is incorporated as a junior partner.
The U.S. is now vigorously reacting to what it calls “Chinese aggression,” such as devoting state resources to developing advanced technology and internal repression. The reaction, initiated by Trump, has been carried forward by Biden’s policy of “encirclement” based on a ring of “sentinel states” off the coast of China. These are armed with advanced weapons, recently upgraded to high-precision weapons, aimed at China. The “defense” is backed by a fleet of invulnerable nuclear submarines that can destroy not just China but the world many times over. Since that is not good enough, they are now being replaced as part of the enormous Trump-Biden military expansion.
The stern U.S. reaction is understandable. “China, unlike Russia, is the only country powerful enough to challenge U.S. dominance on the world stage,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced in describing this intolerable threat to world order (aka U.S. dominance).
While we talk of “isolating Russia,” if not “strangling” this “demonic” society, most of the world is keeping its ties open to Russia and to the China-dominated global system. It is also watching, bemused, as the U.S. destroys itself from within.
Meanwhile the U.S. is developing new alliances, which will presumably strengthen in November if the GOP takes over Congress and manages to gain long-term control of the political system through its quite open efforts to undermine political democracy.
One such alliance is being firmed up right now with the racist self-declared “illiberal democracy” of Hungary, which has crushed free speech and independent cultural and political institutions and is worshipped by leading figures of the GOP from Trump to media star Tucker Carlson. Steps toward that goal were taken a few days ago at the conference of far right elements in Europe that met in Budapest, where the star attraction was the Conservative Political Action Conference, a core element of the Republican Party.
The alliance between the U.S. and the European extreme right has a natural ally in the Abraham alliance forged by Trump and Jared Kushner. This widely hailed alliance formalized the tacit relations between Israel and the most reactionary states of the MENA (Middle East-North Africa) region. Israel and Hungary already have close relations, based on shared racist values and a sense of grievance for being shunned by more liberal elements in Europe. Another natural partner is today’s India, where Prime Minister Modi is shattering Indian secular democracy and establishing a Hindu ethnocracy, bitterly repressing the Muslim population, and extending India’s domains with his brutal occupation of Kashmir.
The U.S. is already virtually alone in recognizing the two existing illegal MENA occupations in violation of Security Council orders: Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and of vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem, and Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara to extend its near monopoly of irreplaceable phosphate reserves. With the GOP in power, the U.S. might complete the picture by recognizing Hindu India’s violent takeover of Kashmir.
A new global order is taking shape, but the U.S.-Russia confrontation is not its central element.
Speaking of a new Cold War, I must say I am in utter disbelief by the delirious reaction on the part of so many in the U.S. to analyses seeking to provide background to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the same is true in connection with voices calling for diplomacy to end the war. They conflate explanation and justification and willfully ignore historical facts, such as the decision of the U.S. to expand NATO eastward without consideration to Russia’s security concerns. And it isn’t as if this decision was greeted at the time with approval by leading diplomats and foreign affairs experts. Former U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock Jr. and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned against NATO expansion and Ukraine’s inclusion. George Kennan’s reaction to the Senate’s 1998 ratification of NATO eastward expansion up to the borders of Russia was even more blunt: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war…. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely…. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the Nato expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.” 
Were these top U.S. diplomats Russian pawns, as is often said today of anyone offering background information why Russia has invaded Ukraine? I like to have your thoughts on this matter.
You can add others who delivered stern warnings to Washington that it was reckless and needlessly provocative to ignore Russia’s announced security concerns, including current CIA Director William Burns and his predecessor Stansfield Turner, even hawks like Paul Nitze, in fact almost the whole of the diplomatic corps who had any deep knowledge of Russia. Those warnings were particularly strong with regard to Russia’s concerns, well before Putin and including every Russian leader, over incorporation into NATO of Georgia and Ukraine. These are Russia’s geostrategic heartland as is evident by a look at a topographic map and recent history, Operation Barbarossa.
Are they all Russian pawns? I suppose that can be claimed in today’s climate of frenzied irrationality, a danger to ourselves and the world.
It’s useful to have a look at chapters of history that are far enough back so that we can consider them with some degree of detachment. An obvious choice, as mentioned earlier, is the First World War. It is now recognized that it was a terrible war of futility and stupidity in which none of the agents had a tenable stand.
That’s now. Not at the time. As the great powers of the day stumbled into war, the educated classes in each proclaimed the nobility of the cause of their own state. A famous manifesto of prominent German intellectuals appealed to the West to support the land of Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and other leading figures of civilization. Their counterparts in France and Britain did the same, as did the most distinguished American intellectuals when Woodrow Wilson joined the war shortly after having won the 1916 election on a platform of Peace without Victory.
Not everyone took part in the celebration of the grandeur of their own state. In England, Bertrand Russell dared to question the party line; in Germany, he was joined by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; in the U.S., by Eugene Debs. All were imprisoned. Some, like Randolph Bourne in the U.S., escaped that fate. Bourne was only barred from all liberal journals.
This pattern is not a departure from the historical norm. It pretty much is the norm, regrettably.
The World War I experience did provide important lessons. That was recognized very quickly. Two highly influential examples are Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. Lippmann went on to become a most prominent U.S. 20th century public intellectual. Bernays became one of the founders and intellectual leaders of the huge public relations industry, the world’s major propaganda agency, devoted to undermining markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices and to fostering the unbridled consumerism that ranks alongside the fossil fuel industries as a threat to survival.
Lippmann and Bernays were Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy liberals. They were also members of the propaganda agency established by President Wilson to convert a pacifist population to raging anti-German fanatics, the Creel Committee on Public Information, a properly Orwellian title. Both were highly impressed by its success in “manufacture of consent” (Lippmann), “engineering of consent” (Bernays). They recognized this to be a “new art in the practice of democracy,” a means to ensure that the “bewildered herd” — the general population — can be “put in their place” as mere “spectators,” and will not intrude into domains where they do not belong: policy decisions. These must be reserved for the “intelligent minority,” “the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals” in the Camelot version.
That is pretty much reigning liberal democratic theory, which Lippmann and Bernays helped forge. The conceptions are by no means new. They trace back to the early democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in England and then its U.S. colony. They were invigorated by the World War I experience.
But while the masses may be controlled with “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” (in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, venerated as the “theologian of the liberal establishment”), there is another problem: the “value-oriented intellectuals” who dare to raise questions about U.S. policy that go beyond tactical decisions. They can no longer be jailed, as during World War I, so those in power now seek to expel them from the public domain in other ways.

Yet that same jury ruled that Heard had defamed Depp when she described herself, in a Washington Post opinion essay, as a “public figure representing domestic abuse,” and awarded Depp more than $10 million.

As a First Amendment issue, the verdict is a travesty. By the time Heard wrote the essay, the restraining order she’d received had been all over the news, and a photo of her with a bruised face and bloody lip had appeared on the cover of People Magazine. Even if Heard lied about everything during the trial — even if she’d never suffered domestic abuse — she still would have represented it. But if the police call wasn’t part of a hoax, then it’s hard to see how Heard hadn’t suffered as well.

Perhaps this contradictory verdict was a result of jury-room horse-trading; the finding for Heard could have been a sop to convince a few holdouts to get on board with a unanimous decision. But its meaning is clear: It might be impossible to dismiss all the evidence against Depp, but he’s still the more sympathetic figure.

This finding echoes the conventional wisdom of the internet, where Depp is widely viewed as the sensitive prey of a vicious and conniving gold-digger, and of much of the conservative movement, which has cheered Depp, a man who once joked about assassinating Trump, for slaying the #MeToo gorgon. After the verdict was announced, the official Twitter account of Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee tweeted out a GIF of Depp as the pirate Jack Sparrow, looking dashing and determined. If there’s one thing they hate more than decadent Hollywood elites, it’s mouthy women.

During the trial, the jurors heard a recording in which Depp sneered at Heard, using an obscenity, “I head butted you in the forehead. That doesn’t break a nose.” (He claimed it was an accident.) They heard from a makeup artist who testified about covering up Heard’s bruises. They heard a text Depp wrote in which he said, using an obscenity, that he hoped Heard’s “rotting corpse was decomposing in the trunk of a Honda Civic,” and another one in which he fantasized about having sex with her burnt corpse. They saw video of him rampaging around their kitchen, smashing cabinets while she tried to calm him down. They heard a recording of him screaming at her for daring to speak to him in an “authoritative” way, and another in which he threatened to cut himself while she begged him to put the knife down.

James Oakes’s review of my book The Broken Constitution [NYR, May 12] is a case study in whitewashing the central role of race and slavery in the history of the US Constitution. Like other work by Oakes and his fellow hagiographers, the review systematically distorts or suppresses incontrovertible facts of law and history. Theirs is an exercise in denying the explicit and express protection of slavery in the original Constitution and bowdlerizing Lincoln’s consistent record of supporting and upholding the constitutional guarantee of slavery throughout his public career, even after he became president. Their twin dogmas are that the framers cannot have supported race slavery and that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation therefore cannot have broken the Constitution. The trouble with these reassuring-sounding dogmas is that they are legally and historically false. And falsehood, particularly falsehood that denies the realities of historical racism, cannot serve as the basis for a usable past, whatever may be believed by an aging generation of would-be guardians of the American myth.

The Constitution of 1787 enshrined slavery in the three-fifths clause, in the unamendable guarantee that the slave trade would be allowed for at least twenty years more, and most brutally in the fugitive slave clause, which bound even free states to obey the laws of slave states by using their own legal systems to return to bondage enslaved persons who managed to escape their shackles. The document, obviously, thus contained no guarantee of equal protection anywhere, including the Bill of Rights. As Alexander Hamilton told the New York ratifying convention with regard to the three-fifths deal, all this was a necessary “accommodation” struck in Philadelphia: “Without this indulgence, no union could possibly have been formed.”

It may seem astounding that, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, anyone would still be trying to deny that these constitutional provisions enshrining slavery made it the law of the land under the supremacy clause of the Constitution. But that is just what the review does, citing Sean Wilentz’s apologia No Property in Man (2018) for the claim that some slaveholders sought a still more explicit guarantee than the fugitive slave clause at the Philadelphia convention. Oakes writes, “Years later…southerners claimed that the fugitive slave clause vested owners with the very right they had been denied in 1787.” This reasoning is either legally ignorant, Orwellian doubletalk, or maybe both. The fugitive slave clause explicitly and inherently guaranteed slaveholders’ legal right to the return of their enslaved human property. It did not deny that right.

As a matter of his own political faith, Lincoln embraced the Constitution of 1787, and with it the slavery compromise. In 1838, as a young politician, he inveighed against would-be dictators who would seek fame “at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” In his first inaugural address (the one that isn’t on the Lincoln Memorial), he stated bluntly, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

In perhaps the most stunning passage in a review studded with misrepresentations and outright falsehoods,* Oakes simply pretends that Lincoln’s explicit promise was never made. He mentions the inaugural speech, points to Lincoln’s repeated warning to seceding states that without the Union their fugitive slaves would not be returned, and concludes, “None of this suggests that Lincoln came into office promising to ‘protect slavery.’” In fact, the passage I quoted literally does say that. Lincoln was also literally saying that if the slave states remained in the Union, the northern states would return their fugitive slaves. Stronger evidence of bad-faith, bad-history apologetics could hardly be imagined.

There is more—much more, all of it apparently intended to discredit by distortion. Contra Oakes’s first sentence, I do not “believe” the Confederate states had a constitutional right to secede, nor does my book say so. Far from “barely mention[ing]” antislavery constitutionalism, I discuss the subject at great length, explicating the views of Federick Douglass, Angelina Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison, Lysander Spooner, and adding to the literature the voices of less well-known Black abolitionists like Charles Lenox Remond, William Howard Day, and Hezekiah Ford Douglas.

Oakes says I endorse “the views of proslavery Confederates,” but he knows this is a lie. I extensively discuss (over four full pages!) the opinion of Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis, a Boston man who had dissented in Plessy v. Ferguson and wrote a long pamphlet explaining the unconstitutionality of the Emancipation Proclamation. Oakes also accuses me of calling Lincoln a dictator, as though this were a sacrilegious insult rather than the subject of pages of close analysis. But it was Lincoln himself who, six months into his presidency and a year before issuing his draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, stated that military emancipation was “simply ‘dictatorship.’”

One assertion in the review is (almost) true: “Feldman…ignores the long-standing American consensus in support of military emancipation.” My book precisely challenges the old, now-crumbling consensus that “supports” the suppression of the truth that the Constitution enshrined slavery and that the Emancipation Proclamation had to break the Constitution to end it. Lincoln’s greatness is that, in the crucible of war, he changed his mind about the constitutional compromise broken by secession, broke the Constitution by emancipation, and opened the door to the moral Constitution of the Reconstruction amendments. Denying the constitutional legacy of race slavery disserves our own capacity to imagine the necessity of constitutional change when it is required by circumstance and moral judgment.

Noah Feldman

Harvard University

James Oakes replies:

Noah Feldman takes the title of his book as well as its opening epigraph from an 1850 speech by Jefferson Davis bewailing the flood of antislavery “fanaticism and ignorance” that had “broken” the Constitution. What follows is a book that reaffirms Davis’s belief that, contrary to those antislavery fanatics, the Constitution was a thoroughly proslavery document. Like Davis, Feldman goes on to claim that Lincoln was a dictator, that secession was constitutional, and that the Emancipation Proclamation was illegal. Feldman may protest, but by invoking the president of the Confederate States of America and parroting his views Feldman leaves himself open to the charge that he has revived long-discredited Confederate interpretations of the Civil War era.

As for me and my fellow apologists and “hagiographers”: neither I nor any historian I know of “suppresses” the compromises with slavery made at the Constitutional Convention. In a book I published only a year ago, I described the three-fifths and fugitive slave clauses as the bone and sinew of the proslavery reading of the Constitution, a reading that proved disastrously influential on both domestic and foreign policy. What I have also not suppressed, however, is the conflict between proslavery and antislavery delegates that resulted in crucial victories and defeats for both sides.

From their victories the opponents of slavery fashioned a robust antislavery interpretation of the Constitution—its reference to slaves as persons; its authorization of Congress to ban slavery from the territories, to halt the importation of enslaved Africans, to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and to secure due process rights for accused fugitives—an interpretation widely embraced by the northern majority leading into the Civil War. In his book, and again in his letter, Feldman erases this antislavery interpretation of the Constitution. In the process, decades of conflict over slavery are rendered invisible, indeed incomprehensible.

I noted in my review that Feldman says nothing about the central importance of federalism in the debates over slavery, with the result that he misunderstands both the significance and the conventionality of Lincoln’s promise not to “interfere” with slavery in the states where it existed. Feldman claims that I ignore Lincoln’s promise, despite my explicit reference to it in the review and my extended accounts of it in my last three books. It is more than a little ironic that in a letter fulminating against the proslavery Constitution Feldman continues to disregard the fact that federalism restricted the scope of antislavery politics far more powerfully than did the fugitive slave and three-fifths clauses.

In his letter Feldman invokes the supremacy clause in a way that once again presupposes a Constitution devoid of antislavery elements. This raises questions. Could an individual state reject federal supremacy by reopening the slave trade once Congress had shut it down? If the Constitution nationalized slavery, did the supremacy clause preclude New York from passing an abolition statute in 1797? In a Constitution that deliberately refers to slaves as persons rather than property—one of those incontrovertible facts Feldman cannot controvert—did the supremacy clause not thereby dictate that accused fugitives be afforded the rights of due process guaranteed to all “persons” by the Fifth Amendment?

No less ironic is Feldman’s refusal to recognize the fact that in wartime the federal government claimed constitutional powers to interfere with slavery that it did not have in peacetime. Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Randolph, John Jay—indeed, just about every one of the Founders who went on record—affirmed that under the law of nations belligerents could emancipate enemy slaves in an effort to win a war or suppress a rebellion.

Feldman boasts of the four pages he devotes to a pamphlet questioning the legality of the Emancipation Proclamation, but he continues to ignore the sustained defenses of emancipation put forward by distinguished legal scholars during the war. Once again, the constitutional conflict is erased. Likewise, he disregards the implications of the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the president’s war powers in the Prize Cases in a decision handed down in the midst of the war itself.

By steadfastly averting his gaze from the tension between what the government could do in peacetime and what it could do in wartime, Feldman allows himself to claim that with the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln changed his mind about the Constitution. The result is another set of blunders. He garbles Lincoln’s denunciation of a Union general for making his own policy by fiat, which Lincoln denounced as “military despotism” but which Feldman misquotes as “military emancipation.” He claims that with the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln abandoned the federal consensus, yet Lincoln openly invoked it in 1864 and warned his fellow Republicans not to abandon the principle that Congress could not abolish slavery in a state.

Once we acknowledge the conflicts over slavery dating back to the earliest years of the republic, the fates of slavery and racial injustice can be seen more clearly as a matter of the shifting balance of political power. The question was which interpretation of the Constitution would prevail. From the 1780s to the Civil War, northern majorities in the House of Representatives voted against slavery 95 percent of the time, often to no avail because the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the executive branch were dominated by supporters of the proslavery interpretation of the Constitution. But in 1860, with the election of Lincoln and the subsequent secession of eleven slave states, the balance of power shifted decisively in favor of the antislavery tradition that, according to Jefferson Davis, had already broken the Constitution a decade earlier.

In refusing to acknowledge that tradition, Noah Feldman registers the conceit, all too common these days, that his is the first generation of white Americans to denounce racism and slavery. A bit less arrogance and a bit more modesty would seem to be in order. It would make for better history and, quite possibly, the more usable past he’s looking for.

I’ve drifted away from Twitter. I’d like to tell you that it was a principled decision—that the format of the site did it, that it’s the vitriol, the shallowness. But it’s not that at all. I’d also like to tell you how I feel a lot better now that I spend less time on the site, but I can’t do that either. (If anything, I feel more out of step with the world now that I’m not getting less of my news through the Twitter firehose.)No, what’s caused me to drift away from Twitter is a sense of the futility of the place.Shadi and I talked about it a little on the most recent episode of the podcast, but I’d like to drill down into it some more. As I said on the episode, logging onto Twitter after the Uvalde massacre was off-putting not because the tone of the discussion was hostile and partisan. It’s that the experience of reading the discussion on Twitter in the tragedy’s aftermath crystallized for me the way in which the dominant mode of discussion on the site—a kind of affirmation-seeking piety—is a waste of time.Matt Yglesias tweeted what arguably was an ill-timed sentiment just as news of the tragedy was spreading:For all its very real problems, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the contemporary United States of America is one of the best places to live in all of human history and there’s a reason tons of people of all kinds from all around the world clamor to move here.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 24, 2022
Matt got ratioed quite quickly. And while one can make the argument that the censure Matt received was well-deserved on politeness grounds, I suspect the reason Matt initially doubled down (before apologizing), and indeed the reason he has not taken down the initial tweet, is that a lot of the blowback was grounded on sensitivity grounds. It’s a subtle distinction, but I think it's an important one. It’s the difference between being rude and being unsentimental. The sentimental approach to politics that Twitter has helped sew into our national discourse is, I think, what’s started to push me away from the platform.My distaste for sentimentality, especially when wrestling with weighty issues, is a personal preference. And when one is unsparing about things (as I sometimes tend to be) I fully expect to get pushback and criticism. If you’re getting a beat-down on Twitter, don’t whine. If you’re wrong, learn from your mistake. Engage with your earnest detractors. If you’re not wrong, either fight back or let the storm pass—whatever your pleasure. In other words, I’m not complaining about how unsentimental perspectives unfairly get shut down on social media. If you’re unsentimental in your analysis, don’t be overly sensitive about the pushback when it comes.As I said, I’m drifting away from Twitter, I’m not fleeing it. And the reason for my drifting away is that participation in an ostensibly political space increasingly shaped by sentimentality feels largely futile. Not simply because sentimentality doesn’t easily yield to argument. Rather, it’s that sentimentality leads to a feckless, symbolic politics—a politics of signaling but not a politics of action.I remember first being struck by a version of this phenomenon in 2009 when, overnight, almost all of the avatars on Twitter turned green in support of Iran’s “Green Revolution”. Very few of the people I follow on Twitter are Iranian, or Iran experts, or even Middle East hands. And yet everyone was moved to show solidarity with a movement in a faraway land that they understood to feature the forces of decency fighting against the forces of barbarism. A similar phenomenon can be observed today with an overwhelming number of people sticking Ukrainian flags in their profiles.I don’t know enough about Iran to have anything smart to say about the virtues (and shortcomings) of the Green Revolution, but I stand on the side of Ukraine in most of the arguments we’re dealing with today. And while I have no yellow and blue in my profile, I’m not against people finding ways to show solidarity with things occurring in the world that happen to move them.But there’s something different about how solidarity is done on the internet as opposed to the real world. You might say that changing your avatar or putting a national flag into your handle is no different from how Americans started tying yellow ribbons onto trees outside their houses both in solidarity with troops deployed in Iraq, and as a general anti-war sentiment. But the sense of degree, and the sense of personal investment, matters. Tying a ribbon to a tree was certainly a political statement, but everyone understood it to be quite low on the scale of investment in a cause. It was a passive demonstration of sentiment, not a real sign of commitment. On the internet, such demonstrations of solidarity take on a different valence. Instead of tying a ribbon to a tree, one is all of a sudden wearing the colors everywhere one goes. What may have started as a desire to show solidarity quickly becomes a tribal marker, and becomes invested in a sense of deeper belonging, often becoming a kind of virtue signaling that extends beyond whatever virtue the initial cause itself may have entailed.And the problem is not that virtue signaling is inherently bad, but rather that it paradoxically cheapens politics. Signaling a personal commitment to a cause is easier than ever on the internet, but doing so is no more (or less) effective than the passive act of tying a ribbon to a tree. Both are merely symbolic, sentimental acts. But on the internet, it often feels like the symbolic, sentimental act is more meaningful than it actually is. As a result, all too often people feel more politically engaged than they actually are.On the Uvalde massacre, Shadi rightly pointed out that the outpourings of grief and rage on the internet could be used to motivate meaningful political action to ultimately effect change on the gun question. Maybe. Let’s see. But color me skeptical. The challenges to reforming gun legislation are formidable, and success may well be out of reach to even a well-organized political movement. But my prediction is that no such political movement will materialize, in no small part due to the anesthetizing tendencies of social media activism. On Twitter, you’re free to be political and speak your mind. Having done so, you can go about your day, satisfied that you’ve done your part, untroubled by the fact that what you have done has very little significance or impact.That’s why I’m drifting away. Because the stakes are so damned low.

Before U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet made her long-awaited trip to China last week, the Biden administration and the human rights community urged her not to let Beijing turn the visit into a propaganda win for the Chinese Communist Party. But Bachelet ignored those warnings. Her trip ended up helping China deny its genocide against Uyghur Muslims and other repressive policies, harming the cause of human rights accountability in the process.

On Saturday, Bachelet completed her six-day trip to China, the first in 17 years by someone with her title, with a statement to the media that summed up a visit many observers view as a tragic failure. As Human Rights Watch U.N. director Louis Charbonneau rightly observed, she grotesquely praised China’s “tremendous achievements” in human rights by pointing to poverty alleviation — which is exactly how Beijing defines human rights these days. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Bachelet is supposed to be following, calls for a higher standard.

After a two-day visit to the Xinjiang region, Bachelet failed to clearly condemn the government’s campaign of repression there, which the Uyghur community and two successive U.S. administrations have said amounts to genocide. She acquiesced to Beijing’s framing of the issue there as “counterterrorism and radicalization.” She also reported without skepticism that Chinese officials in Xinjiang claim to have closed the “reeducation centers” where an estimated 2 million innocent people have been imprisoned.

“She has failed her mandate,” Dolkun Isa, the president of World Uyghur Congress, said Saturday. “The Uyghur community deserves accountability more than ever.”

Perhaps Bachelet was too busy hobnobbing with Chinese officials to notice that a huge cache of leaked documents from the Xinjiang police files were released last week. They show the faces of thousands of prisoners thrown into the camps for such “crimes” as traveling abroad, studying Islam or growing a beard. Critics say that Bachelet allowed the Chinese authorities to stage-manage her trip so thoroughly that Beijing will be able to use it to deflect responsibility for its atrocities.

“Nothing that we’ve seen from the high commissioner’s trip to China dispels our worry that this will be used as a massive propaganda victory for the Chinese government,” Charbonneau told me in an interview. “Bachelet needs to work to put an end to, and not enable, the perception that the U.N. is letting China get away with massive abuses at no cost.”

There were public and private efforts to warn Bachelet this would happen. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield went so far as to raise formal concerns about Bachelet’s trip with U.N. Secretary General António Guterres himself, administration sources told me.

Blinken, Thomas-Greenfield and several other U.S. officials also raised concerns directly with Bachelet and her staff, urging them not to back down from their initial demand for access to Xinjiang and the prison facilities there. The Biden team coordinated these messages with other Western governments. The result of those diplomatic conversations was a strong statement in the May 14 Group of Seven foreign ministers’ communique, which called on Chinese authorities to allow “immediate, meaningful and unfettered access to Xinjiang and Tibet for independent observers, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.”

On Saturday, Blinken released a statement criticizing Beijing for restricting Bachelet’s movements so thoroughly that it was impossible for her to conduct a complete and independent assessment of human rights in China, “including in Xinjiang, where genocide and crimes against humanity are ongoing.”

There were plenty of other signs Bachelet was heading into a debacle. Chinese authorities compelled her advance team to quarantine for 21 days upon arriving in Beijing, relegating their meetings during that time to video calls. Bachelet was not allowed to travel with any media, just her Chinese government handlers. She later claimed that her meetings in Xinjiang were “unsupervised,” without acknowledging that even her nongovernment interlocutors were handpicked by the authorities and were likely heavily pressured and surveilled.

After Bachelet held a virtual meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, the Chinese government claimed that she had expressed “admiration” for China’s progress on human rights. China’s propaganda machine blasted this claim around the world before Bachelet’s office finally issued a statement saying she was misquoted.

Meanwhile, Bachelet’s long-awaited report on China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang is still missing in action. Charbonneau said she should release it now and speak the truth about the Chinese government’s crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and its other massive human rights abuses. “Anything less would be an insult to the victims,” he said.

Bachelet’s trip was not just a missed opportunity to speak truth about China’s atrocities. She has undermined her credibility and the overall credibility of the U.N. system on human rights. Beijing has compromised yet another part of the U.N. system, said Christopher Walker, vice president at the National Endowment for Democracy.

“The dynamics surrounding the U.N. human rights commissioner’s visit are part of the larger pattern in which Beijing, through manipulation and intimidation, seeks to shape behaviors and norms in line with authoritarian preferences,” he said in an interview.

Leaders in Beijing are now surely more confident than ever they can commit mass atrocities without fearing significant costs imposed by the international community. When the history books are written about the world’s failure to stop the Uyghur genocide, Bachelet’s trip will go down as one of many shameful episodes.

Even so, the United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.

The problem isn’t government. It’s our government. Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?

One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper titled “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back.” Lindsey’s definition is admirably terse. “State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively,” he told me. When a government can’t collect the taxes it’s owed or build the sign-up portal to its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail it’s already spent billions of dollars on, that’s a failure of state capacity.

But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindsey’s argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice, and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isn’t intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient. And not just by the right:

What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s, reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts, and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.

The Biden administration can’t do much about the right’s hostility to government. But it can confront the mistakes and divisions on the left.

A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In “The Procedure Fetish,” Bagley argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that that’s because American politics in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, is dominated by lawyers. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. “Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States,” Bagley writes. “And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”

This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism,” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule-making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”

The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate, and in my view, wisest, point. “Legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.

Crimes without criminals was not a subject for study when I was in law school. The two were seen as part of the same illegal package. That was before notorious corporate lawyers and a cash register Congress combined to separate economic, health and safety crimes from corporate accountability, incarceration and deterrence.

Lawlessness is now so rampant that a group of realistic law professors, led by Professor Mihailis E. Diamantis of the University of Iowa Law School, claim there is no corporate criminal law. I say "realistic" because their assertion that corporate criminal law, does not in fact, exist is not widely acknowledged by their peers.

What are Congress and the White House saying and doing about this growing corporate crime wave? Saying little and doing almost nothing.

Most Americans know that none of the executives on Wall Street who are responsible for the lies, deception, and phony investments they sold to millions of trusting investors were prosecuted and sent to jail. "They got away with it," was the common refrain during the 2008-2009 meltdown of Wall Street that took our economy down and into a deep recession that resulted in massive job loss and the looting of savings of tens of millions of Americans.

Not only did the Wall Street Barons escape the Sheriff but they got an obedient Congress, White House and Federal Reserve to guarantee trillions of dollars to bail them out, implicitly warning that the big banks, brokerage firms and other giant financial corporations were simply "too big to fail." They had the economy by the throat and taxpayer dollars in their pockets. Moreover, Wall Streeters made out like bandits while people on Main Street suffered.

All this and much more made up a rare symposium organized by Professor Diamantis last year at Georgetown Law School. (See: https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/imagining-a-world-without-corporate-criminal-law-symposium/). He wrote that the "economic impact of corporate crime is at least twenty times greater than all other criminal offenses combined," quoting conservative estimates by the FBI. It's not just economic, he continued: "Scholars, prosecutors and courts increasingly recognize that brand name corporations also commit a broad range of 'street crimes': homicide, arson, drug trafficking, dumping and sex offenses."

The litany of corporate wrongdoing ranges from polluting the air and drinking water, dumping microplastics that end up inside human beings, promoting lethal opioids that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, providing millions of accounts or products to customers under false pretenses or without consent, often by creating false records or misusing customers' identities, (Wells Fargo), manufacturing defective motor vehicles, producing contaminated food, allowing software failures resulting in crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX's with 346 deaths. (See, Why Not Jail? By Rena Steinzor).

People don't need law professors to see what's happening to them and their children. People laugh when they hear politicians solemnly declare that "no one is above the law," extol "the rule of law" and "equal justice under the law."

By far the greatest toll in preventable fatalities and serious injuries in the U.S. flows from either deliberate, negligent or corner-cutting corporate crime under the direct control and management of CEOs and company presidents, many of whom make over $10,000 an hour over a 40-hour week.

Five thousand people a week die in hospitals due to "preventable problems," documents a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine study. The EPA estimates some 65,000 deaths a year from air pollution; OSHA has estimated about 60,000 work-related fatalities from diseases and traumas in the workplace. This carnage does not include the far greater numbers of people suffering from illnesses and injuries.

This range of corporate destruction was pointed out thirty-four years ago by Russell Mokhiber in his classic book, Corporate Crime and Violence: Big Business Power and the Abuse of the Public Trust (Sierra Club, 1988).

What are Congress and the White House saying and doing about this growing corporate crime wave? Saying little and doing almost nothing. Corporate criminal law enforcement budgets are ridiculously paltry. The Department of Health and Human Services recovers less than three percent of the estimated $100 billion a year stolen from Medicare and Medicaid. There are too few cops on the corporate crime beat and the White House and Congress are unwilling to remedy this problem.

Congress doesn't hold broad hearings on corporate crime, except when a dustup gets headlines like the recent contaminated baby formula from the unsanitary Abbott factory in Sturgis, Michigan.

This is remarkable because since January 2021, two of the rare outspoken lawmakers against corporate criminality, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), both are chairs of subcommittees in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

There are large gaps to be filled and updated in the inadequate federal corporate criminal law. Some regulatory agencies, such as the FAA (aviation) and NHTSA (auto safety) have no criminal penalty whatsoever for willful and knowing violations that directly result in fatalities.

Then there is the patsy Department of Justice (DOJ). For years we've asked DOJ officials to ask Congress to fund a corporate crime database (like the street crime database). Attorney General Merrick Garland won't even respond to letters about this issue. For years, specialists like Columbia Law professor John Coffee have been urging the DOJ to stop settling the few cases they bring against corporate crooks with weak "deferred prosecution agreements" or "non-prosecution agreements." These deals involve modest fines, no jail time for the corporate bosses and a kind of temporary probation for the corporation.

Corporate attorneys play the DOJ like a harp knowing that the Department has a small budget for prosecuting corporate crime and that many DOJ attorneys are looking for lucrative jobs in these corporate law firms, after a few years of government service. Any one of many giant corporate law firms has more attorneys than all the lawyers working on corporate crime in the Department of Justice.

Professor Diamantis, W. Robert Thomas and their colleagues are prolific writers of law review articles. They argue for a range of effective penalties that will deter recidivism, which is rampant. They probe restructuring the corporate hierarchies of privileges and immunities from the law. They argue for updating the antiquated federal criminal code to match new technological/Internet/artificial intelligence (AI) violations.

Until, however, these scholars can make it into the mainstream media to reach enough citizens and get this "law and order" agenda adopted by candidates campaigning for elective office, the ideas they advance will circulate mostly among themselves indefinitely.

It potentially places biology and gender identity on the same footing in sport. Dr. Doriane Lambelet Coleman, a Duke University law professor and former top track runner, supports legal protections for transgender people but foresees havoc in the arena of sports. The legal rationale for keeping women’s sports sex-segregated would fall away. “We are bringing a male body into a female sport,” Dr. Coleman said. “Once you cross that line, there’s no more rationale for women’s sport.”

Some trans activists and academics welcome that. Nathan Palmer, a lecturer at Georgia Southern University, wrote in Sociology in Focus: “Nature loves diversity, but humans love simplicity. Separating males from females may be socially useful, but when the dividing lines limit and oppress, we have to acknowledge they are social constructions.”

Anna Posbergh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, is a former pole-vaulter who studies the mechanics of human movement and gender and athletes. She sees notions of gender disadvantage in sports as rooted in culture and an outdated view of what women can achieve.

“I’m beginning to question the idea of sex segregation in sport,” she said. “We need to learn to sit with discomfort.”

This strikes some feminists and scientists as a walk into strange territory. Kathleen Stock, a British philosopher whose work is often grounded in her feminist and lesbian identity, has carved out positions on transgender rights that have made her a lightning rod. She has written “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism,” and argues against the insistence that one’s gender identity is all. That is to miss, she said, the profound importance of the lived experience of being born a biological female.

“We are caught up in this fever dream,” she said in an interview. “How could it be that a social construct and not the material reality of being a woman is guiding our thoughts and our physical performance?

“I find it incredible that we have to point this out.”

May, a month we traditionally associate with spring, Mother’s Day, and graduations, was defined this year by a far different rite: funerals. In a single ten-day stretch, forty-four people were murdered in mass shootings throughout the country—a carnival of violence that confirmed, among other things, the political cowardice of a large portion of our elected leadership, the thin pretense of our moral credibility, and the sham of public displays of sympathy that translate into no actual changes in our laws, our culture, or our murderous propensities. In the two deadliest of these incidents, the oldest victim was an eighty-six-year-old grandmother, who was shot in a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York; the youngest were nine-year-old fourth-grade students, who died in connected classrooms at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas.

In the interim, there were other mass shootings, in Indiana, Washington State, Florida, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere. Less than one per cent of gun deaths in the United States are the result of mass shootings. But the data are less salient than another element of the month’s tragedies: the images posted of the children who died, many of them smiling, blithely unaware of the flawed world they were born into. The knowledge that they are no longer alive—that any future iterations of those smiles have been permanently forestalled—is an indictment that we all have to live with.

Some of the victims of the shootings were killed evidently because they were Black; others were killed for reasons that are as yet indiscernible. The shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, though, bore notable similarities. Both were carried out by eighteen-year-olds who had legally purchased semi-automatic rifles shortly before their killing sprees. Both shooters began their attacks before entering the respective buildings. (The assailant in Uvalde shot and critically wounded his grandmother before going to the school.) And both shooters were confronted by armed defenders who failed to stop them. In Buffalo, Aaron Wallace Salter, Jr., a fifty-five-year-old retired police officer who worked security at the supermarket, was killed after firing multiple rounds and striking the shooter’s body armor. The Buffalo police commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, noting that Salter’s engagement with the gunman gave people time to hide, said, “He undoubtedly saved lives.” Reports that an officer had confronted the Uvalde gunman outside the school were subsequently refuted, though the shooter apparently exchanged gunfire with multiple officers early on in his rampage. (There was initial confusion and a delay, during which a large number of law-enforcement agents arrived at the school; some of them restrained parents who wanted to storm the building themselves. On Friday, a Texas state official said that a “wrong decision” had caused the delay.)

These facts are significant. Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the horror in Newtown, Connecticut—where a twenty-year-old with a semi-automatic rifle entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and fatally shot twenty children and six adults—Wayne LaPierre, the C.E.O. of the National Rifle Association, said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The idea of vigilant protectors subduing armed antagonists spoke to a vision of a society in which firearms are as commonplace as cell phones, and where more guns mean more safety. If the idea seemed absurd then, the passage of time has only made it empirically so.

Two years ago, a study published in the journal Justice Quarterly examined the effects of gun laws in every state. Emma Fridel, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University, looked at gun-ownership rates and the proliferation of concealed-carry laws between 1991 and 2016. State lawmakers pushing for laxer laws have tended to argue that a more broadly armed public would serve as a deterrent to violence. Fridel found the opposite: gun-homicide rates in states with more permissive carry policies were eleven per cent higher than in states with stricter laws, and the probability of mass shootings increased by roughly fifty-three per cent in states with more gun ownership.

The most obvious indicator of the absurdist thinking on this subject can be seen in the fact that the latest massacre happened in Texas, a state that has more than eight thousand gun dealers, and where an estimated thirty-seven per cent of the population owns firearms. Last year, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that allowed most Texans to carry handguns without a license or mandatory training. This legislation did not prevent the Uvalde carnage any more than previous legislation allowing easier access to guns prevented the 2019 shooting that killed twenty-three people at an El Paso Walmart, or the 2017 attack in the town of Sutherland Springs, which took the lives of twenty-six worshippers in a rural church.

All this was the context when Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbott during a press conference in Uvalde last Wednesday. “The time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing,” he said, adding, “This is on you.” O’Rourke, the former Democratic congressman and Presidential candidate, whose angry pledge to take away guns after the killings in El Paso was widely thought to have damaged his political prospects, is running for governor against Abbott this year. That likely explains, in part, why Don McLaughlin, the Republican mayor of Uvalde, who has appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, called O’Rourke a “sick son of a bitch” and accused him of making the shooting “a political issue.” Senator Ted Cruz, who was also at the press conference, later said, “I get tired of all the politicking. It happens every time there is a mass shooting.” That Cruz used the phrase “every time there is a mass shooting” spoke volumes about how commonplace these abominations have become. Two days later, Cruz addressed the annual N.R.A. convention, in Houston.

O’Rourke did not politicize the shooting. The circumstances that make a mass murder of fourth graders possible are inherently political. The legal access to the weaponry involved is political. The most visible people refusing to see these things as political happen to be elected to political office. But O’Rourke was only partially right. Some of this is on Second Amendment fundamentalists and the politicians who translate their zealotry into law—the rest is on every one of us who has yet to find the courage, the creativity, or the resolve to stop it. ♦

Early this year one of the world’s most prominent scientists, Eric Lander, had to resign his position as President Joe Biden’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was forced to quit because of evidence that he had bullied staff members and created a hostile work environment. Lander, a leader in the successful effort to sequence the human genome, had headed the prestigious Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. before being tapped for the White House job. He now joins the ranks of other top scientists who have been sanctioned over behavior ranging from disrespect and bullying to illegal sexual harassment.

The most publicized cases have involved Title IX violations. (This is the federal civil rights statute that bars sexual harassment in educational programs that receive federal funds.) In 2015 astronomer Geoffrey Marcy resigned from the University of California, Berkeley, after a Title IX investigation found him guilty of sexual harassment, including kissing and groping students. In 2018 evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, a one-time president and chair of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, resigned from U.C. Irvine after an investigation found that he had violated the university’s policies on sexual harassment and sex discrimination, even after repeated warnings. In 2019 geologist David Marchant—who had a glacier named for him—was fired from Boston University after an investigation concluded that he had repeatedly made sexual comments and used derogatory sex-based slurs against a former graduate student. (The student also alleged Marchant pushed her down a rocky slope, although the investigation did not confirm this.) In a historic first, in 2021 the National Academy of Sciences expelled both Marcy and Ayala from its ranks. Marchant’s glacier was renamed.

But not all cases fall under Title IX. As Lander’s case shows, there are many forms of bad behavior in science that don’t rise to the level of illegality, and perhaps for that reason colleagues often look the other way.

Why? The reasons are complex and likely include some outright sexism and a whole lot of implicit bias. But there’s another problem in scientific culture that is rarely addressed: the acceptance of personal misconduct in light of high professional accomplishment.

Many academics seem to believe that brilliant people should be excused a degree of bad behavior. This can veer into an intellectual superiority complex. Arthur T. Hadley, president of Yale University from 1899 to 1921, offered this view in an influential 1925 text that argued intelligence should be “a determining factor” in deciding on allowable personal conduct. The greater your brainpower, the greater your right to do as you please.

Hadley is mostly forgotten, but his attitude persists. It helps to explain why academics often rally around bullies with arguments about how accomplished they are as geologists, biologists, anthropologists or even literary theorists. This is a logical error: it conflates intellectual greatness with human decency, which are, clearly, two different things. It also may help explain a pattern common in these cases: that some people close to the culprit insist they never witnessed anything like the alleged behavior. In the Marchant case, a fellow geologist who had worked with him for 11 years insisted the accusations were “inconsistent” with his experiences. But Marchant may have behaved well around those he respected, while acting badly toward people of lesser professional stature.

Call it the Raskolnikov effect after the law student in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, who justified theft and murder because he believed the crimes would let him overcome his poverty and fulfill his exceptional intellectual potential. Bullying is not murder, but the mindset that motivated Raskolnikov often undergirds other forms of antisocial behavior, and surveys show this kind of personal abuse in science is widespread.

It is an important step forward when the research community holds its most prominent members accountable for their actions. It’s not unfair, inappropriate or an overreaction. It’s about time.

Historian, philosopher and author Yuval Noah Harari was born in Israel in 1976 and completed his PhD at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2002. In 2014 he published Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which went on to become an international bestseller. It was followed by Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). He lives in Israel with his husband and works as a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On 2 June Harari will be attending HowTheLightGetsIn Hay, where you can catch him in conversation with Slavoj Žižek.

1. Fiction

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker

I really liked this book, which retells part of the story of the Trojan war and the Iliad from the viewpoint of the captive women. It was interesting to see how you can tell one of the most repeated stories, certainly in the western tradition, in a completely new way, just by adopting a new perspective. Pat Barker writes wonderfully – I’ve read most of her books. When she describes something, it feels sensory and concrete. You can imagine clearly what she’s talking about. I couldn’t put it down.

2. Musical

The Book of Mormon

‘About the power of stories to shape the world’: The Book of Mormon. Photograph: Joan Marcus

This was the last musical I saw before the coronavirus pandemic made it problematic to come to London and see them. I actually saw it four times on different occasions – it’s an amazing performance. I really connected with it: the whole musical is about the power of stories to shape the world and how a completely fictional story can impose itself on reality, for better or worse, and people’s entire lives and the social and political systems all get reshaped.

3. Nonfiction

Different: What Apes Can Teach Us About Gender by Frans de Waal

I’m reading this now. This was a safe bet for me, because every time Frans de Waal publishes a book I immediately read it, ever since Chimpanzee Politics, which came out 40 years ago and blew my mind. The new book is very timely and courageous in how he tackles some of the hottest topics of today – it goes right to the issue of sex and gender in biology and culture. I also really like his writing style: he is able to popularise scientific ideas in such a clear and engaging way.

4. TV

Young Royals (Netflix)

‘When the crown prince of Sweden turns out to be gay’: Young Royals. Photograph: Netflix

This series is about what happens when the crown prince of Sweden turns out to be gay. Fiction is at its best when it’s like a social experiment. Royal houses are built on the most traditional views of family, heredity, sexuality and gender. The first season didn’t take the experiment far – the royal family just shut the prince in the closet. I hope the second season breaks new ground and explores how a liberal royal institution might publicly embrace a gay crown prince: “Yeah, the prince is gay – get over it. So let’s think what it means in terms of royal marriages, succession and all that.”

5. Place

Alpe Adria Trail, Slovenia

Kranjska Gora, Slovenia. Photograph: Janos Gaspar/Alamy

Last year I did this trail from Kranjska Gora to Tolmin, and it was one of the most beautiful treks I’ve ever done. It was also interesting from a historical perspective because it runs roughly along the frontline of the first world war, between Italy and the Habsburg empire. It’s mind boggling to realise that hundreds of thousands of people died and were wounded there. When we think about the first world war, we usually think about northern France and the mud of Flanders. Walking between these peaceful forests and the Soča river and trying to think how it looked a century ago was quite surreal.

6. Sport

2022 Fifa World Cup

The Jules Rimet trophy. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

I’m really looking forward to this. It’s a shame that it’s in November and December because I’m planning to go to my yearly meditation retreat in December, so I’ll miss the final and semi-final. I enjoy the football World Cup both because I like the game and also because I think it’s an amazing example, for humanity, of how you can reconcile nationalism with global cooperation. People have fierce loyalty to their national team, but you can’t have a cup unless everybody agrees on the same rules. As a blueprint for the world, I think that’s a good example.

The coronavirus is nothing if not scrappy. In the two and a half years since the microbe hurtled into our midst, it has infected most Americans—probably most of the world’s population—and researchers have cooked up several lifesaving vaccines. And yet, the virus keeps finding new ways to spread quickly among us, sometimes infiltrating the same hosts again and again and again.Scientists think SARS-CoV-2 will continue to be a recurring visitor. It will reinfect each of us, on average, maybe once every three or so years, Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me. What that means for our health remains unclear. There’s every indication that second infections aren’t as severe as first ones, that third and fourth ones should be more tolerable still. These trends should hold especially true for people who stay up-to-date on their vaccines.But hospitalization and death aren’t the only coronavirus-related outcomes people are looking to avoid. Infections of all severities can still unfurl into long COVID, or transmit to someone vulnerable, or keep someone away from work or school. And researchers aren’t sure whether a repetitive run of “mild” infections could eventually take a cumulative toll. That means trying to avoid reinfection still seems wise, especially while researchers continue to develop more effective vaccines and treatments.Which brings us to another COVID mystery: Paxlovid, the antiviral that is shrouded in a cloud of questions that my colleague Rachel Gutman deftly tackled this week. The pills, which were designed to keep newly infected people out of the hospital, do seem to be blocking severe disease. But as of late, the drug’s been linked to a lot of rebounds, in which people dose up for five days, feel better, then experience a symptom relapse—and test positive anew.Rebounds didn’t seem common in Paxlovid’s clinical trials; experts still haven’t even confirmed that the drug is causing these relapses, which can happen with untreated infections as well. Right now, though, doctors are operating in a vacuum of evidence. Pfizer has published data documenting how the drug works only in high-risk, unvaccinated people in the pre-Omicron era. Now, out in the real world, all sorts of patients are getting prescriptions to fight off a slew of new variants.So far, Paxlovid doesn’t seem to be causing more severe disease. And health-care providers are still erring on the side of prescribing it—the pills remain one of the best treatment options we have. But as Rachel writes, “If the drug doesn’t really do that much for vaccinated people—if it fails to have meaningful effects on their risk of severe disease, and doesn’t help resolve their symptoms—then giving it out widely could be a waste of the dwindling resources the United States has committed to fight the pandemic.”More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas:
Local police in Uvalde on Tuesday prevented federal immigration agents from entering Robb Elementary School, where the gunman was left unapprehended for more than an hour. Their sluggish, bungled response has prompted a wave of criticism.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Uvalde this weekend to “grieve with the community.” Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association has convened its annual meeting in Houston, hosting a slate of speakers that includes former President Donald Trump.
Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, talks to my colleague Elaine Godfrey about how she’s coped with grief in the decade since.
Latest dispatches: Elizabeth Williamson, the author of a book about the Sandy Hook mass shooting, talks with Charlie Warzel about what has, and has not, changed in the United States since that tragedy [Galaxy Brain]. Tom Nichols counters Henry Kissinger and others calling for a cease-fire in Ukraine, arguing that only Ukrainians will decide when the war is over [Peacefield]. Black American artists inherit a literary past that is prickly at best, Imani Perry writes [Unsettled Territory].Read. Joanne Greenberg’s best-selling but now-obscure 1964 novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, helped the writer Lauren LeBlanc find her voice as a teenager.Watch. Binge the first seven episodes of Stranger Things’ fourth season, whose new villain embodies the menace of conspiratorial thinking, our critic Shirley Li writes.Revisit Top Gun, then dive into its long-awaited sequel, which my colleague David Sims described as straight-up “Tom Cruise propaganda.”Listen. In season two of The Atlantic’s How To podcast series, launching Monday, Olga Khazan will help you overcome the forces of inertia. Listen to the trailer, and subscribe.The Atlantic Crossword: 5-across, four letters: Genesis member with Peter, among othersPlay our daily crossword.Explore all of our newsletters, including our special offerings for subscribers.

Yet so much of our national dialogue these days urges a laser-focus on notions of privilege, bias, inequity and vocabulary, and while most Americans want some kind of gun reform, most are less on board with the idea that we must revolutionize our attitudes on these other issues. A 2020 Pew Research survey found that in the U.S., only 40 percent say “people should be careful what they say to avoid offending others” vs. 57 percent who say “people today are too easily offended by what others say.”

As I read that, more of us feel that guns are a pressing issue and political correctness is not. And yet our discourse frequently centers on that issue, only briefly focusing on guns in the immediate wake of tragedies. For those who think racism is still our main problem, we might even think of a reckoning on guns as a component of antiracist efforts, given the repeated instances of violence motivated by racism.

Knowing this and knowing that legislative efforts at the national level went nowhere after shootings at Sandy Hook, Parkland, a Walmart in El Paso and outside a bar in Dayton, the reckoning now would not only have to be a renewed attempt to change gun laws, but also about confronting the fact that doing so appears impossible, and what this suggests about the very trajectory of the American experiment.

My pessimism may seem unwarranted. After all, there was a time when it was reasonable to think little would ever really change on the civil rights front in America. Black citizens and others of good will had been demonstrating, making speeches and were thoroughly fed up long before the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s, only to encounter resistance from a united cadre of nakedly racist members of Congress hostile to calls for integration.

Senator Richard Russell Jr. — a Georgia Democrat for whom the Russell Senate Office Building is named — filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and had, earlier in his career, responded to a challenger by stating: “As one who was born and reared in the atmosphere of the old South, with six generations of my forebears now resting beneath Southern soil, I am willing to go as far and make as great a sacrifice to preserve and insure white supremacy in the social, economic and political life of our state as any man who lives within her borders.”

Part of what turned the tide in the fight for civil rights was a combination of technology and shame. Television offered visual evidence of the barbarity of segregationist racism with a vividness hitherto unknown to many Americans.

But that won’t work this time. The instantly accessible moving image long ago lost its novelty, and most Republicans in Congress give no indication so far of being moved by the images from Uvalde or by the facts. As long as they maintain this posture, they have no more shame than the Dixiecrats of yore — and our system has come to a point where those of us who do have shame, and want to vote for people who will do something about it, are thwarted.

Americans woke up on Wednesday morning feeling some combination of deep sadness and intense anger. The feeling was shared throughout the country. Americans are grieving. This is not a hunch from watching the interviews in Uvalde, Tex., or talking with friends, family and colleagues about the horror of an 18-year-old’s bursting into an elementary school there and killing 19 children and two teachers. I have seen it in the data.

As overwhelming as the feeling is now, the available evidence suggests that it will fade into the background within about four days. This means we have four days in which to act on it. Four days to take steps that might help prevent the next Uvalde or Sandy Hook or Parkland or Columbine massacre before we move on, before we return to the immediate concerns of our own lives — and before the urge to take on an intractable problem loses the emotion that can fuel momentum.

I came to this conclusion after working with a unique daily survey conducted by Gallup. Nearly every single day from 2008 through 2017, Gallup interviewed a national sample of Americans, asking them their opinions and perceptions about a variety of issues. Gallup also asked about their emotions on a given day: Had they felt happy or sad the day before? Were they angry or smiling? Trends in the data show a remarkably consistent pattern. Almost every day, between 10 percent and 25 percent of Americans reported feeling sadness the previous day. What immediately stands out when these feelings are plotted onto a graph is the tall, anomalous spike in the middle — on Dec. 15, 2012, to be precise. That day, nearly 40 percent of respondents reported feeling sadness the previous day, more than double the percentage on a typical day. The number of respondents who said they felt angry was less dramatic but still significant: 20 percent, vs. 12 percent on a typical day. One day earlier, on Dec. 14, a young man had entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and killed 20 children and six adults before killing himself.

The poll respondents were not primed to think about the massacre that had taken place in Newtown and give their opinion of the incident. They were simply asked whether they felt angry or sad or happy the day before the interview.

The survey’s value is the window it opens into the way this kind of event weighs on our minds, the collective process of grieving that we all went through then — and are going through again, right now.

Crucially, the survey also reveals when these events fade in importance from our minds. The troubling reality is that it doesn’t take long. Days after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, Americans’ reports of sadness and anger returned to their normal levels. This doesn’t mean we forgot about the shooting or no longer cared. It just means that we returned to our lives, that the horror of what had happened had moved away from the forefront of our consciousness even as the sadness and anger lingered in the background.

In a study published last year, Yinzhi Shen and I gathered data on all mass shootings from 2008 through 2016 to test whether Sandy Hook was an anomaly. We found that it was, in the sense that it affected the emotions of the entire country. But other than Sandy Hook’s reach, the pattern I noticed afterward was replicated when we used more refined methods to identify the causal impact of all mass shootings on the emotions of Americans. We found that the most horrific mass shootings with the most victims generate the largest impact on Americans’ emotions, and that the effect of mass shootings is felt most acutely in the cities and towns in which they occur, then fades quickly as the geographic distance between the incident and the survey respondent widens. We found that respondents who identify as Democrats have a larger emotional response to mass shootings than those who identify as Republicans — but, critically, Republicans also report higher levels of sadness and anger in the aftermath of mass shootings, even if their response is more muted than that of Democrats.

But the impact of mass shootings on the emotions of respondents lasts for only a few days, and then it is gone, indistinguishable from the longer time trend. This isn’t true for everyone, of course — the groups that have mobilized against gun violence in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, Parkland and other tragedies have done heroic work, facing off against the full force of the gun lobby. But the survey finding may provide a hint about why these episodes of uniquely American horror have not translated into widespread changes in legislation designed to prevent the next mass shooting or the thousands of “routine” shootings that destroy American lives, families and communities every year. Research has shown that mass shootings lead to an increase in the number of gun-related bills introduced at the state level, but with few exceptions, they tend not to lead to the passage of legislation designed to confront gun violence. In fact, the sick reality of our gun politics has led to the opposite: In Republican-controlled state legislatures, mass shootings are associated with a large increase in legislation designed to loosen gun restrictions.

To be clear, there is no evidence of a causal connection between Americans’ emotional response to this kind of incident and the behavior of state or federal legislators. But the pattern of policy responses to mass shootings suggests a link. In the days after the latest mass shooting, politicians express their outrage, their thoughts and prayers, and some put forth new proposals to finally confront the problem with meaningful legislation. A few days pass, and the raw emotions we are all feeling dissipate, even if we’re reluctant to admit it. As the attention of the nation shifts, that legislation stalls, and the organized, well-funded forces that favor guns over children’s lives flex their muscles.

For those who would turn the painful emotions of this moment into action, they have four days. There are models for ways that states can create basic requirements to make it harder for violent people to acquire guns. And, yes, formidable forces have mobilized to make sure these models don’t spread beyond states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut. But the anger and sadness most of America is feeling right now can be a driving force behind political and social movements for change. The right tells us that now is not the time to politicize the latest mass shooting. If policymakers want to harness these emotions and turn them into policy, however, they have only a couple more days to act.

My sister is a teacher in America, which means she has had to teach her fourth-grade students about how to defend themselves against people who might walk into her public school with guns. Once, during a false alarm, her class followed the “safety protocol” they had learned. What did these children do to protect themselves from the shooter they thought was in the building? One boy wielded a peanut butter jar. Another: a bottle of hand sanitiser. A student with a broken leg held up his crutch. My sister crouched behind her desk and told them they were doing great.
I wonder if the elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, had similar drills. I wonder if the teachers there, like my sister, worried about what they would do if they had to barricade the door. I wonder if the fourth graders in Texas had time to pick up their staplers and notebooks and lunch boxes to defend themselves from an 18-year-old armed to the teeth before he slaughtered them in their classroom.
The elementary school shooting in Texas is the 212th mass shooting this year. It is the 27th school shooting. It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the US so far in 2022, which says something because it happened just ten days after ten people were killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. So far, at least 19 children and two adults are dead in Uvalde. Others are injured.

I read these headlines and I think about how people grow accustomed to horrific things. How, not so long ago, people watched other people get hanged, drawn and quartered in the public square. They watched beheadings. They participated in honour killings. I think about things that, in other times, in other places, perhaps seemed perfectly normal to the people who witnessed them — and that still remain normal in parts of the world today.
We look at such practices from our civilised perch and wonder how human beings ever did this to one another. How did they witness such barbarism and still have the appetite for dinner? How do we?
How have we normalised the fact that innocent people in America can step onto a subway car or go to a grocery store or a synagogue or a church or a concert or a baseball game or a party or a car show or to work and maybe they will just be gunned down? How have we become accustomed to — let’s call it what it is — child sacrifice?
Suggested readingBuffalo and the myth of racist AmericaBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
There is a deep sickness in this country. It goes beyond our addiction to guns. It’s an anti-social, anti-human disease that has gripped our society and our politics. A big part of that disease is how numb we have become to violence. The country has been experiencing the largest crime surge in decades. Armed robberies are up. Shoplifting is up. Road deaths are up. Car break-ins are so common in some cities that people leave notes on their windows to the thieves that nothing is inside.
But the most devastating rise has been in murders. Since the FBI started tracking the data, 2020 marked the highest single-year increase in homicides. In 2021, it went up again. As of 2020, the leading cause of death among children in America is guns. Not cars. Not drugs. Guns. It was also the year that we had the highest rate of gun sales in American history.
The profiles of America’s mass shooters don’t fit into a straightforward political box. The 18-year-old who massacred elderly black New Yorkers at the grocery store in Buffalo earlier this month was driven by white supremacy and evil conspiracies such as the Great Replacement. The shooter the next day, who targeted a Taiwanese Church in Laguna Woods, California, was Chinese. The recent shooting in Dallas, at a Korean spa, was carried out by a young black man. The mass murderer in Uvalde, another 18-year-old, is Hispanic.
And the victims of the new crime wave fit no single profile. They include a young Eagle Scout in Philadelphia. A 24-year-old UCLA graduate student stabbed to death while working at a furniture store. An Afghan refugee who had worked as an interpreter for the US army who was shot to death while resting in his car between Uber shifts. It’s the 70-year-old nurse murdered at the bus stop on the way to work. The 19-year-old Burger King cashier robbed at gunpoint — and then killed after handing over the money. It’s the eight-year-old boy shot outside of Chicago. A pregnant woman who was shot to death just after arriving home from her baby shower.
Sixteen cities, including Philadelphia, Austin, Jackson, Columbus, Baton Rouge, New Haven and Portland, saw record high homicide rates in 2021. In the nation’s capital, more people under the age of 50 were gunned down than died from Covid.
Suggested readingThe fall of SeattleBy T.A. Frank
You don’t need to be told what you already know: that mentally ill people getting their hands on guns to commit mass murder this easily is deranged and wrong. Accepting this as normal has nothing to do with respecting the Second Amendment. You don’t need another writer pointing out that this doesn’t really happen in other places and maybe the fact that America has more guns than any other nation on Earth has something to do with it. There’s nothing well-regulated about Salvador Ramos, though it appears he bought those assault rifles legally on his 18th birthday. There’s simply no world in which our founders would look at inner-city gun violence and these sick teenagers in suburban schools and say this was their intention.
Gun rights activists will argue that other countries have guns and that murderers don’t need guns to kill and that some of the cities and states with the strictest gun laws in the country have the highest rates of violent crime and that people kill people guns don’t kill people and that anyway good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. (Uvalde police officers and a school resource officer reportedly fired at the shooter. They couldn’t stop him.)
Here’s where I think they are right, if inadvertently: the social rot that’s come over America, the nihilism and hatred of each other, is part of the cause here. The dissolution of our social ties — and with them the accountability and responsibility that an actual community demands — has allowed insanity to fester unnoticed. Lockdowns accelerated the isolation, the purposelessness, the lack of meaning that was already overcoming us.
If we insist on viewing this shooting as part of some isolated issue or species of violence, then we miss the point. The point is the country is being consumed by what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”. It stretches back many decades, or longer, and for ages it was possible to ignore or compartmentalise. Now the brokenness is everywhere we look — and it is impossible to unsee it.
A version of this article first appeared on Bari’s Substack.

The left these days gets a bad rap for policing language. It can be irritating to feel like you have to watch how you say things or keep up with the latest lingo when the old lingo still seems perfectly fine. This is especially the case with counterintuitive ideas such as referring not to “pregnant women” but to “people who are pregnant” — a phrase now used on Planned Parenthood’s website — or the even less intuitive “birthing people,” which we’re asked to embrace as inclusive, and therefore progressive, despite that both reduce women to being biological vessels.

I’m certainly not arguing for intolerance toward those who can become pregnant but don’t identify as women. I’m saying that even if we’re not being forced to use the new terms, the way they’re introduced, almost as if by fiat, can make it seem as if sticking with the old ones is a kind of thought crime. But it isn’t that those on the left have some weird, childish yen for control. Rather, they seem to be operating under an attractive but shaky idea that language channels thought: Change how people say things and you change how they think about things and then the world changes.

That’s not how it works, though. Good intentions frequently don’t translate into efficacy. So, the question is, how much does changing terminology really accomplish?

In the late 1980s, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the term “African American” had more “cultural integrity,” and “Black” was, therefore, out of date. But I’d be hard-pressed to say that the Black community today has a greater measure of cultural integrity or is any prouder than it was then. And though a recent poll showed that a majority of Black Americans see being Black as central to their identity, the younger they are, the less central it is — suggesting less significance, as time goes on, about what we call ourselves.

But there is also a subset of conservatives who are, for lack of a better term, more ambitious. They want to reverse not only Roe and Casey but all the parallel rulings that shield Americans’ sexual lives from state interference. They see no reason why Alito’s logic—that Roe isn’t “deeply rooted” in Anglo-American legal history and therefore must fall—couldn’t also be used to dismantle the legal scaffolding of the sexual revolution. And with five reliable conservative votes on the high court, they see no real downside to trying. To them, the worst that this Supreme Court could say is no.

Let’s start with the basics. “Will the court overturn X?” is really two separate questions: Will someone try to overturn X, and will the court actually agree with them that X should be overturned? There are precedents that the court would happily overturn if it got the chance to do so, but is unlikely to get that chance. Unlike Congress, which can take up an issue whenever it likes, the Supreme Court has to wait for someone to bring a relevant case to it. Korematsu v. United States, which infamously upheld Japanese-American internment during World War II, wasn’t overturned for decades because the federal government didn’t try to intern an entire ethnic group again. The justices finally abrogated it in 2018 only after it came up during the litigation over Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.

Loving v. Virginia, which struck down bans on interracial marriages in 1967, should be safe because it falls under the Equal Protection Clause instead of a general right to privacy. But it is also safe for two more practical reasons. First, it is almost impossible to imagine that any state legislature today would try to pass a new law banning interracial marriages or enforce one that might technically remain on the books. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is not a single sitting Supreme Court justice—let alone five of them—who would vote to uphold such a law. So not only would no one actually be able to challenge Loving, but it would never succeed anyway.

In recent weeks, the western public has been obsessed with the question “What goes on in Putin’s mind?” Western pundits wonder: do the people around him tell him the whole truth? Is he ill or going insane? Are we pushing him into a corner where he will see no other way out to save face than to accelerate the conflict into a total war?

We should stop this obsession with the red line, this endless search for the right balance between support for Ukraine and avoiding total war. The “red line” is not an objective fact: Putin himself is redrawing it all the time, and we contribute to his redrawing with our reactions to Russia’s activities. A question like “Did US intelligence-sharing with Ukraine cross a line?” makes us obliterate the basic fact: it was Russia itself which crossed the line, by attacking Ukraine. So instead of perceiving ourselves as a group which just reacts to Putin as an impenetrable evil genius, we should turn the gaze back at ourselves: what do we – the “free west” – want in this affair?

We must analyze the ambiguity of our support of Ukraine with the same cruelty we analyze Russia’s stance. We should reach beyond double standards applied today to the very foundations of European liberalism. Remember how, in the western liberal tradition, colonization was often justified in the terms of the rights of working people. John Locke, the great Enlightenment philosopher and advocate of human rights, justified white settlers grabbing land from Native Americans with a strange left-sounding argument against excessive private property. His premise was that an individual should be allowed to own only as much land as he is able to use productively, not large tracts of land that he is not able to use (and then eventually rents to others). In North America, as he saw it, Natives were using vast tracts of land mostly just for hunting, and the white settlers who wanted to use it for intense agriculture had the right to seize it for the benefit of humanity.

In the ongoing Ukraine crisis, both sides present their acts as something they simply had to do: the west had to help Ukraine remain free and independent; Russia was compelled to intervene militarily to protect its safety. The latest example: the Russian foreign ministry claiming Russia will be “forced to take retaliatory steps” if Finland joins Nato. No, it will not be “forced”, in the same way that Russia was not “forced” to attack Ukraine. This decision appears “forced” only if one accepts the whole set of ideological and geopolitical assumptions that sustain Russian politics.

These assumptions have to be analyzed closely, without any taboos. One often hears that we should draw a strict line of separation between Putin’s politics and the great Russian culture, but this line of separation is much more porous than it may appear. We should resolutely reject the idea that, after years of patiently trying to resolve the Ukrainian crisis through negotiations, Russia was finally forced/compelled to attack Ukraine – one is never forced to attack and annihilate a whole country. The roots are much deeper; I am ready to call them properly metaphysical.

One is never forced to attack and annihilate a whole country

Anatoly Chubais, the father of Russian oligarchs (he orchestrated Russia’s rapid privatization in 1992), said in 2004: “I’ve reread all of Dostoevsky over the past three months. And I feel nothing but almost physical hatred for the man. He is certainly a genius, but his idea of Russians as special, holy people, his cult of suffering and the false choices he presents make me want to tear him to pieces.” As much as I dislike Chubais for his politics, I think he is right about Dostoevsky, who provided the “deepest” expression of the opposition between Europe and Russia: individualism versus collective spirit, materialist hedonism versus the spirit of sacrifice.

Russia now presents its invasion as a new step in the fight for decolonization, against western globalization. In a text published earlier this month, Dmitry Medvedev, the ex-president of Russia and now the deputy secretary of the security council of the Russian Federation, wrote that “the world is waiting for the collapse of the idea of an American-centric world and the emergence of new international alliances based on pragmatic criteria.” (“Pragmatic criteria” means disregard for universal human rights, of course.)

So we should also draw red lines, but in a way which makes clear our solidarity with the third world. Medvedev predicts that, because of the war in Ukraine, “in some states, hunger may occur due to the food crisis” – a statement of breathtaking cynicism. As of May 2022, about 25m metric tons of grain are slowly rotting in Odesa, on ships or in silos, since the port is blocked by the Russian navy. “The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that millions of people are ‘marching towards starvation’ unless ports in southern Ukraine which have been closed because of the war, are reopened,” Newsweek reports. Europe now promises to help Ukraine transport the grain by railway and truck – but this is clearly not enough. A step more is needed: a clear demand to open the port for the export of grain, inclusive of sending protective military ships there. It’s not about Ukraine, it’s about the hunger of hundreds of millions in Africa and Asia. Here should the red line be drawn.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, recently said: “Imagine [the Ukraine war] is happening in Africa, or the Middle East. Imagine Ukraine is Palestine. Imagine Russia is the United States.” As expected, comparing the conflict in Ukraine with the plight of the Palestinians “offended many Israelis, who believe there are no similarities”, Newsweek noted. “For example, many point out that Ukraine is a sovereign, democratic country, but don’t consider Palestine as a state.” Of course Palestine is not a state because Israel denies its right to be a state – in the same way Russia denies the right of Ukraine to be a sovereign state. As much as I find Lavrov’s remarks repulsive, he sometimes deftly manipulates the truth.

Yes, the liberal west is hypocritical, applying its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way you open yourself up to inherent criticism – when we criticize the liberal west, we use its own standards. What Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy – because it is without global ethical standards, practicing just pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China. China accepts the new Afghanistan while the Taliban will ignore what China is doing to Uyghurs – this is, in nuce, the new globalization advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality. The moment we apply double standards, we are no less “pragmatic” than Russia.

My first bicycle was not, in fact, a bicycle. I rode it in 1968, when I was two years old and as tubby as a bear cub. It had four wheels, not two, and no pedals: strictly speaking, it was a scooter. But Playskool called it a Tyke Bike, so I say it qualifies, and aside from the matte-black, aluminum-alloy number that I’ve got now, which is called (by the manufacturer dead seriously, and by me aspirationally) the Bad Boy, the Tyke Bike may be the swankiest bicycle I’ve ever ridden. According to the box, Playskool’s scooter—red and blue and white, with a yellow, leopard-spotted wooden seat, chrome handlebars, and black, white-walled wheels—offered “smart high style” for the “preschool jet set,” as if a little girl in a diaper and a romper were about to scoot along the jetway to board a T.W.A. flight bound for Zurich.

Before being handed down to me, my Tyke Bike, like most of the bicycles in my life, had belonged to my brother, Jack, and to both of my sisters, and, earlier still, to cousins or neighbors or some other family from Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose annual parish sale was where we always got our best stuff, bless the Virgin Mary. By the time I got the Tyke Bike, the paint was scuffed, the leopard spots had worn off, and the white plastic handlebar grips had been yanked off and lost, most likely buried in the back yard by the slobber-jawed neighborhood St. Bernard, a Christmas-present puppy whose name was Jingles and who was eventually run over by a car, like so many dogs on our street, which is another reason more people should ride bikes. I didn’t mind about the missing handlebar grips. I tucked a stuffed bear into my red wagon, tied its rope to my seat post, and scooted down the sidewalk, dragging the wagon behind me, my first bike hack. Far from being a jet-setter, I have always been an unhurried bicyclist, something between deliberate and fretful. Jack, a speed demon and a danger mouse, but above all a gentleman, would wait for me at every telephone pole. Jack and Jill went up the hill, everyone would call out, as we wheeled past. Pbfftttttt, we’d raspberry back.

My current bicycle, the Cannondale Bad Boy, is said to be cloaked in “urban armor,” looks as though it could fight in a regime-changing war, and is built for “traffic-slaying performance.” I like the idea of being redoubtable on a roundabout, Mad Max on a mews, but, in truth, I have never slain any traffic. I have never slain anything. I once knew an old Polish man who called all drivers one of three things—“Cowboy!” “Old Woman!” “Teen-ager!”—which he’d shout out, raging, behind the steering wheel of his station wagon, in a heavily accented growl. I am, and have always been, Old Woman.

The Bad Boy is the only bike I’ve ever bought new. I paid an embarrassing amount of money for it in 2001, to celebrate getting tenure and maybe with the idea that I was finally going to be a badass, that all I needed was this James Dean mean-streets city bike. But, the minute I got it home, I started hacking it, girling it out. I bolted a radio to the handlebars and listened to the news on my ride to work every day—I heard the war on terror unfold on that bicycle—until my friend Bruce told me I’d be exactly seventy-four per cent happier if I listened to music instead. WERS. College radio. Indigo Girls. Dixie Chicks. He was right. For a long time, I had a baby seat strapped onto a rack in the back, molded gray plastic with a blue foam cushion seat and a nylon seat belt. Babies, not to say bad boys, would fall asleep back there, their nodding heads tipped over by the great weight of baby helmets covered in the spikes of a stegosaurus, poking into my back. I steered around potholes, ever so slowly, so as not to jolt them awake. Old Woman.

Bicycles are the workhorses of the world’s transportation system. More people get places by bicycle than by any other means, unless you count walking, which is also good for you, and for the planet, but you can travel four times faster on a bicycle than on foot, using only a fifth the exertion. People all over the world, and especially outside Western Europe and North America, get to school and work, transport goods, cart passengers, and even plow fields with bicycles. In many places, there isn’t any other choice. Bikes are cheap, and easy to fix when they break, especially if you can keep track of your Allen keys and your tire levers. Mine are on the breakfast table, because, at the moment, I have a bike stand in the kitchen. For every car on earth, there are two bikes, one for every four people. (I refuse to count stationary bikes, including Pelotons, since they go nowhere.) “We live on a bicycle planet,” Jody Rosen writes in “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle” (Crown), a set of quirky and kaleidoscopic stories. But roads and parking lots and entire cities are still being built for cars, even though they’re wrecking the world. Or, as bicycle advocates would have it, riffing on Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” two wheels good, four wheels bad. Two wheels are better than two wings. In a contest of humans against all other animals in the efficiency of locomotion, humans on foot are about as ungainly, or gainly, as sheep. Condors come in first. But humans on bicycles beat even birds.

A few years back, the bicentennial of the bicycle wheeled past at breakneck, bike-messenger speed. In 1817, Baron Karl von Drais, the Master of the Woods and Forests to the Duke of Baden, invented a contraption called the Laufmaschine, or running machine. A climate crisis had led to a great dying off of livestock, including horses, especially in Germany. Drais meant for the Laufmaschine to be a substitute for the horse. It had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you sort of scooted around on it, and a full-grown man could pick up pretty good speed. (“On descent it equals a horse at full speed,” Drais wrote.) In England, Laufmaschinen were called “swiftwalkers.” My Tyke Bike was a kind of Laufmaschine. I added the wagon, though.

In the history of the bicycle, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Lately, posh toddlers, the newest preschool jet set, roll around on modern swiftwalkers, marketed as “wooden balance bikes.” If you bike all your life, there’s a fair chance you’ll bike the whole history of bicycles. When I was three, I started riding a red metal tricycle, another hand-me-down from my brother. It had a chrome fender in the front, a red running board in the back, and, most crucial, pedals. The cranking of pedals converts downward motion into forward motion, with multiplying force. No one’s quite sure who came up with this idea—most historians place their bets on a French carriage-maker, in 1855—but putting a crank on the axle of the front wheel, with pedals on either side of the hub, changed everything about bicycles, including their name: most people called the ones with pedals “velocipedes,” which is, roughly, Latin for “fast feet.” People expected velocipedes to replace horses. “We think the bicycle an animal, which will, in a great measure, supersede the horse,” one American wrote in 1869. “It does not cost as much; it will not eat, kick, bite, get sick, or die.”

My next bike, the red-and-yellow Big Wheel, had a lot in common with a velocipede known as the penny-farthing, which was invented in the eighteen-seventies. The penny-farthing, like the Big Wheel, had a much bigger wheel in front because, so long as the pedals cranked the front wheel, the bigger the wheel, the faster you could ride. “An ever saddled horse which eats nothing,” a Boston penny-farthing manufacturer promised, boasting speeds of a mile in under three minutes. “The Big Wheels are rolling,” the television ads of my childhood announced, “with the speed you need to win!” Big Wheels came, and they went; they were made of plastic, and mine fell apart during a figure-eight race around a parking lot against the kids next door, when I skidded off course and crashed into a telephone pole. Penny-farthings were dangerous, too: riders pitched right over the top. (The Big Wheel débuted in 1969, and a fiftieth-anniversary edition came out in 2019. “It’s just a really cheap piece of crap,” a reviewer at Walmart.com reported.)

My first two-wheeled bicycle was a Schwinn, hyacinth-purple. My father, who seems to have spent most spring weekends raising and lowering bicycle seats, retrofitted it for me by bolting back on the rickety pair of training wheels that we kept on a shelf in the garage. Aside from the training wheels, everything on that purple Schwinn had been invented by the end of the eighteen-eighties: two wheels of about the same size, pneumatic tires, and pedals that drive the rear wheel by way of a chain and sprockets. This type of bike, in the eighteen-eighties, was marketed as a “safety.” Unlike earlier models, it was surprisingly risk-free, mainly because, even without foot brakes, you could stop the bike by taking your feet off the pedals and skidding to a halt. That, as my mother liked to point out, was how I ruined all my sneakers.

The safety was the prototype of every modern bicycle. Most everything added to the bicycle since is just tinkering around the edges. During the bike craze of the eighteen-nineties, bicycles became an emblem of modernity; they were the epitome, as Paul Smethurst argued in “The Bicycle: Towards a Global History” (2015), of “the cult of speed, a lightness of being, a desire for existential freedom and a celebration of the future.” That’s how it felt to me, too, when I first pedalled away from home, without my training wheels, all on my own. My favorite bike ever, though, was my next bike, my sister’s Sears knockoff of the Schwinn Sting-Ray. It had a green banana seat with glitter in the vinyl, monkey handlebars, and a sissy bar, which I had always understood to be the place where little sisters were supposed to sit. I added rainbow-colored covers to the spokes and rode to school, the library, the candy store, hitching my bike to posts with a combination lock attached to a cable as thin as yarn. No one ever stole it.

To ride a bike, Rosen points out, is to come as close to flying by your own power as humans ever will. No part of you touches the ground. You ride on air. Not for nothing were Orville and Wilbur Wright bicycle manufacturers when they first achieved flight, in Kitty Hawk, in 1903. Historically, that kind of freedom has been especially meaningful to girls and women. Bicycling, Susan B. Anthony said in 1896, “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” I’ve always had a sneaking feeling that, somehow, I owe it to feminism to pedal hard, weave through traffic, crave speed, curse at cars. A guy in my neighborhood wears a T-shirt that reads “Cyclopath.” In my mind’s eye, I’m that guy. Instead, I stop at yellow lights and smile at strangers, gushing with good will, giddy just to be out there.

Bicycles and bicyclists veer to the political left. Environmentalists ride bicycles. American suffragists rode bicycles. So did English socialists, who called the bicycle “the people’s nag.” Animal-welfare activists, who opposed the whipping of horses, favored bicycles. In 1896, the American preacher who coined the expression “What Would Jesus Do?” had this to say about bicycles: “I think Jesus might ride a wheel if He were in our place, in order to save His own strength and the beast of burden.” But bicycles have also been used in warfare on six continents, and were favored by colonial officials during the age of empire. After the League of American Wheelmen started the Good Roads Movement, in 1880, the asphalt that paved the roads for bicyclists was mined in Trinidad, and the rubber for tires came from the Belgian Congo and the Amazon basin.

For a while, starting in the eighteen-nineties, the bicycle seemed likely to finally beat out the horse. Aside from not needing to be fed and not dying, bicycles are also quieter and cleaner than horses, something I thought a lot about as a kid, because I had a job mucking out stables. But then along came the automobile. “There are some who claim the automobile will replace the bicycle, but this is rank nonsense,” a Maine magazine reported in 1899. “Those who have become attached to their bicycles—there are several millions of bicycle riders—will not easily give up the pleasure of skimming along the country like a bird . . . for the more doubtful delight of riding in the cumbersome, ill-smelling automobile.”

In 1899, 1.2 million bicycles were sold in the United States. Henry Ford’s Model T made its début in 1908. The next year, only a hundred and sixty thousand bicycles were sold in the U.S. In the absence of bike lanes, cyclists in all states but one have to follow the rules of something known as the Uniform Vehicle Code, first adopted in 1926. Like jaywalking, a crime invented by the automobile industry to criminalize being a pedestrian, the U.V.C. treats bicycles as cars that go too slow. “It shall be unlawful for any person unnecessarily to drive at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic,” the U.V.C. decreed in 1930. E. B. White was among those who protested, calling for “a network of permanent bicycle paths.” (Many paths were built under the direction of Robert Moses.) “A great many people have now reached forty years of age in this country, despite all the handicaps,” White wrote in this magazine in 1933, when he was thirty-four, “and they are the ones who specially enjoy bicycling, the men being somewhat elated on discovering that they can still ride no hands.” In 1944, in what became known as the Far to the Right law, the U.V.C. stated that “any person operating a bicycle upon a roadway shall ride as near to the right side of the roadway as practicable,” which could mean being driven off the road.

By the nineteen-fifties, when the League of American Wheelmen disbanded and bicycles were excluded from many roads (including all of the new federal highway system), bikes had been reinvented as toys, child’s play. Grownups drove cars; kids rode bikes. Girls were supposed to ride girls’ bikes, although when, at age twelve, I inherited a girl’s three-speed Raleigh, I decided I hated girls’ bikes. Twelve was when I first started to see clearly the price you had to pay for being a girl, the vulnerability, and right about then I got more scared of cars, too. A boy in my sixth-grade class was killed riding his bike home from school. I covered the frame of that feckless three-speed Raleigh with black duct tape, to make it meaner. It’s bad enough being powerless, because of being a kid and, on top of it all, a girl; it’s worse when the adults are riding around in cages made of three tons of metal. It felt then, and still feels now, like being a bird flying in a sky filled with airplanes: the deafening roar of their engines, their impossible speed, the cruelty of steel, the inescapable menace, the looming sense of catastrophe, your own little wings flapping in silence while theirs slice thunderously. Black duct tape is no defense, and no disguise, but it was all I could find in the kitchen drawer.

After reading it, I’m reasonably sure it’s the best fiction I’ll read in 2022, despite that we aren’t even halfway through the year. I can’t stop thinking about it, for more than one reason.

Socrates Fortlow is a Black ex-con in Los Angeles who spent much of his adulthood in prison for murder and rape, is rounding 60 and is ever haunted by a sense that his real place is still between those prison walls. The key to Fortlow is how his past has left him ambivalent about freedom, despite his titanic physical strength. In this, he is an embodiment of his local Black community, which in turn reflects Black America as a whole. It can be hard to know what to do with the very real Black Power that we have.

“The Right Mistake” explores this racial self-conception within an almost mystical mise-en-scène that centers the novel. Fortlow’s project is convening a weekly colloquy, a wide-ranging conversation over dinner among a growing number of everyday people, many of whom are Black, from around his neighborhood, in a modest but comfortable spot he calls The Big Nickel: A gangbanger, a singer, an inveterate gambler, a deacon, a lawyer, an old-school church lady, a Latino workman, an elderly Jewish sage, a white-Black gay couple, a Black cop who starts as a snitch and comes to see differently. All (or almost all) keep coming, week after week, to eat and talk into the wee hours, limning a philosophy one part woke and one part hard-core conservative, hoping for a constructive consensus but unsure if one quite exists. In other words, the way real Black people in America tend to think. Try to classify one of Socrates’ explorations as left- or right-wing:

“We spend way too much time thinkin’ ’bout hair and color and what we look like to who. But you know and I know that the Black man, the man they want us to be, is just a cage dreamed up by the white man. He the one made up the countries of Africa. He the one brought us here and called us ugly. He the one taught us in school that there was no history for us. He the one put us in chains and then threw us out in the street callin’ it freedom.”

All very “conscious rap,” as it used to be called — revolution and realism taking turns. In “The Right Mistake,” truth is elusive, and making everyone see it is Socrates’ grail. He wants “the look on people’s faces when they tryin’ to say sumpin’ an’ they don’t know what it is.”

I was deliberate in calling what Socrates said an exploration rather than an oration — maybe “expl-oration” is it. But at any rate, there’s little preaching and certainty to be found. On practically every page, Mosley gets across layers of attitude, feeling and question of the kind theater directors dig into line by line with their actors, examining the inner motivations of their characters’ lines, when going over the script early in rehearsals at what is often called “table work.”

The septuagenarian church lady at one point calls out a young man, Ron Zeal, who served time and is on trial for murder, referring to him with the N-word (soft “-ah,” not hard “-er”). He takes exception, but is reminded by the gambler, Billy Psalms, that he refers to himself with the same word:

“Ain’t the same word,” Zeal said. “Maybe it is, man. Maybe she mean exactly what you do.”

That is, as angry as she is, she retains a degree of fellowship with Zeal because they are members of the same beleaguered community, and Billy knows that you can hear it if you listen properly to what she says.

In November 2019, from the salon doré of the Élysée Palace, where Charles de Gaulle once held court, Emmanuel Macron warned his fellow Europeans that Nato, the transatlantic alliance that had secured Europe since 1949, was on the point of “brain death”. President Donald Trump’s administration, to the horror of America’s own soldiers, had just unilaterally withdrawn support from the Kurdish forces in northern Syria, sacrificing them to Bashar al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Within a year, the US would impose sanctions on Turkey, a member of Nato since 1952, for its purchase of Russian anti-aircraft missiles. Disunity reigned.
In 2017 Angela Merkel had returned from a chaotic meeting with Trump to declare that Europe could clearly no longer count on America as an ally and must look to its own resources for its security. Macron’s concern over two years later was that little had happened to make good on that realisation.
The antics of leaders such as Trump and Erdoğan would be hard to contain in any formal alliance. But Nato’s problems went deeper than populism. What was still a compact, anti-Soviet alliance in the 1980s had, thanks to expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, grown into a sprawling and aimless organisation. As west European defence spending dwindled, the alliance relied ever more on America’s huge military budgets and eager new east European recruits. The failures of Nato intervention in Afghanistan from 2001 and Libya in 2011 were demoralising, something that in 2021 would be underlined by another unilateral American withdrawal – this time from Afghanistan on the orders of Joe Biden.
[See also: Does Ukraine need a Marshall Plan?]
For Macron, Nato’s old rationale of keeping the Soviets out and the Germans down no longer seemed relevant. Despite Vladimir Putin’s moves against Ukraine in 2014, Berlin was buying more Russian gas and Macron wanted to reopen diplomatic channels to Moscow, reviving one of de Gaulle’s great hopes of Europe as a balancer between Washington and Moscow. Meanwhile, from the American point of view, insofar as there has been a clean line of strategy in the last decade it has largely bypassed the Europeans and been directed against China and the battle for influence in the so-called Indo-Pacific – a geopolitical construct that gained widespread currency after 2010.
Now, in the spring of 2022, and thanks to Putin’s ill-judged assault on Ukraine, the picture is transformed. All eyes are on Europe and Nato. Sweden and Finland are applying for membership. For the first time in its history, the Nato Response Force has been deployed as part of a collective-defence mission. Even Germany’s government has agreed to increase its military spending. From Berlin the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has publicly affirmed the “deep cooperation and coordination that is at the heart” of the alliance.
It is hardly surprising that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has helped to revive Nato. But is this a sign of true mental reactivation? Does Nato have a new vision? Or is the reaction to the war in Ukraine more in the manner of a knee-jerk, an involuntary spasm induced by Putin’s hammer blow?
The Atlanticist jubilation is so loud that people seem to have forgotten that if Nato’s aim was to deter Russian aggression and keep the peace in Europe, it has failed. Whether or not the talk of Ukraine joining the alliance can really be said to have triggered Putin’s invasion, it certainly encouraged nationalist opinion in Kyiv to take a hard line against Moscow, and also fuelled Russian propaganda. And for all the assistance and training that Ukrainian forces had received up to that point from the US, UK and Canada, Moscow clearly assumed that it had military superiority. Western threats of economic sanctions were brushed aside.
If things had gone as most Western intelligence agencies appear to have expected, Russia would have rolled over Ukraine. That would have terrified its neighbours to the West and given existing Nato members every reason to reinforce their defences. But whether Sweden and Finland would then have rushed to join Nato is far from obvious. Would they have risked provoking Moscow if the Russian army was rampant? Moldova, for one, has no intention of applying. Even now, it would be far too risky.
What has created Nato’s moment – it cannot be emphasised too often – is what was least expected: Ukraine’s effective and sustained armed resistance. Despite Nato forces’ long interaction with Ukraine’s military – Ukraine deployed troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan – that resistance has been a total surprise, which is hardly a testament to the closeness of those operations. In terms of military intelligence about Ukraine, Macron’s assessment of Nato “brain death” seems not too inaccurate. Ahead of the war we had no real understanding of the true military balance between Russia and Ukraine.
 
It is the fact that Russia’s offensive has been both blatant and, thanks to Ukraine’s heroics, unsuccessful that makes Nato membership for Sweden and Finland so obvious. Whether their applications will be straightforward is unclear. The issue of Kurdistan, which in 2019 first prompted Macron’s provocative diagnosis, has resurfaced. Ankara has raised objections over Sweden’s alleged sponsorship of the Kurdish independence movement.
Once war began and Ukraine endured, Nato members rallied. But talk of a Nato response to Putin’s war is the kind of smoke-and-mirrors operation that is the organisation’s forte. In fact, while Nato has issued declarations in support of Ukraine, the aid is being supplied by the individual member states. And that aid follows an all too familiar pattern.
Proportionally, the Baltic states are providing huge amounts – around 0.8 per cent of GDP from Estonia and Latvia. Poland is contributing almost 0.5 per cent. But above all it is the US that is arming Ukraine and doing so on a gigantic scale – well over $4bn in defence since the war started, with tens of billions more in the pipeline. If anything, the crisis has confirmed the imbalances that have increasingly discredited Nato. Nor is Washington embarrassed to advertise that reality. From the American side the rhetoric is redolent not of the collective commitments of the Cold War, but the hub-and-spokes model of Lend-Lease, under which between 1941 and 1945 the US supplied allied nations with food, fuel and materiel, and cemented its role as the arsenal of democracy. But, if the US is leading the way, does Washington have a real plan?
On strategy, Washington has not one but several brains. Biden himself sounds bullish. His rhetoric towards Putin smacks of regime change. The defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, speaks openly of exhausting Russia. The CIA is more cautious, warning of the risks of further escalation. Using Ukraine to humiliate Russia is one thing that America’s warring parties in Congress seem to be able to agree on. The Ukraine Lend-Lease Act, which gives Biden the powers to accelerate further deliveries, passed easily through both chambers. Agreeing the additional aid packages proposed by the Democrats – an extra $40bn in additional military, humanitarian and economic support – will require horse-trading. Assuming they do pass, the question remains: is the US developing a new grand strategy for Europe and Nato or is grinding down Russia an end in itself – a project that plays well with the American electorate, while freeing the Pentagon to focus on China?
Beyond the immediate need to back Ukraine, what is America’s vision of a workable security order in Europe? Does it even need one? Barring a nuclear escalation, Russia is far away and irrelevant to America’s economy – the same cannot be said of its relation to Europe.
It suits governments in eastern Europe, the Nordic countries and the UK to talk tough on Russia. If anyone is truly invested in the idea of a Nato revival, they are. Better equipped, with steady American leadership, larger European contingents, squarely focused on the East. But everything has to work out just right. To imagine that this is going to be the outcome of our current situation entails hoping for the best on three fronts.
[See also: The new Iron Curtain]
The first and most important is the war in Ukraine itself. If Ukraine prevails and manages not only to stop but to roll back Russia’s offensives, do we really believe that Moscow can tolerate that outcome? If not, shouldn’t we expect Russia to escalate asymmetrically? The US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has recently warned of the risk that Putin may be “moving along an unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory”. If Putin reaches for his nuclear arsenal then what we have experienced so far is merely a prelude, a phoney war. The real test for Nato lies ahead.
If the war drags on, with America providing substantial aid, but Russia proving able to stop Ukraine’s counteroffensives, does Europe want the equivalent of another Afghanistan on its doorstep – a decades-long conflict with a devastating humanitarian fallout? That might suit Washington, but can Europe live with it? The dialogues between Olaf Scholz, Macron and Moscow in recent weeks suggest that Paris and Berlin are still looking to offer Putin a way out. If the Ukraine crisis extends into the distant future, what will be the impact on the front-line states, above all Poland? If Afghanistan is the analogy, we should be concerned that eastern Europe does not suffer the fate of Pakistan, where America’s anti-Soviet campaign helped to strengthen the deep state and stoke popular radicalisation.
Then there is the US itself. If Nato was facing an existential crisis in 2019, it was largely due to Trump’s erratic attacks on America’s European partners. The competent leadership from the Biden team during the Ukraine crisis – unlike over Afghanistan – has been reassuring. But here too we may be experiencing the calm before the storm. By November 2022 the Republican Party will most likely be back in control of Congress. The presidential race in 2024 will probably be closer than the midterms, but on their present showing, the Democrats will be lucky to hold on to the White House. The return to power of Trump, or one of his ideological protégés, would be a disaster for transatlantic relations. But we should not be under any illusions about the Republicans even without Trump. The political-cultural gap between the norms of European politics and those of the GOP is wide and growing. Already in 2014-15, the late senator John McCain and hawkish voices in Washington DC made life very difficult for European diplomacy over Ukraine. America’s eager new allies would be well-advised to bear that in mind.
Finally, there is the larger question of what lies beyond the Ukraine crisis. If America succeeds in its more or less open strategy of bleeding Russia dry, why should that betoken a reorientation towards European security, rather than the opposite? If the US is willing to take risks to weaken Russia as a strategic competitor, that is presumably to be better able to focus on China. And that poses the greater strategic question: on China, are Europe’s interests aligned with those of the US and what has Nato got to do with it?
So long as the current crisis keeps the focus on values and principles – democracy vs dictatorship – one can construct a master narrative of the free world vs the authoritarianism of Xi Jinping and Putin. But in other respects it takes a pretty fervid imagination to see France’s sprinkling of colonial possessions in the Indo-Pacific as equivalent to America’s stake in the glacis that consists of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Germany, for its part, continues to maintain close economic relations with China. As Herbert Diess, the CEO of Volkswagen, has frankly remarked: “If we would constrain our business to only established democracies, which account for about 7 to 9 per cent of world population, and this is shrinking, then clearly there would not be any viable business model for an auto manufacturer… If you are not in China, you have a problem. If you are in China, you have a chance.”
For Berlin, a pivot from an energy war with Russia to a trade war with China would be an economic worst case.
It would be vain to imagine that the Western powers will dictate the course of future relations with China – we ought to have learned the limits of our agency in Ukraine. In December 2020 Brussels, Paris and Berlin, to the horror of the Biden team, offered an economic olive branch with the Comprehensive Agreement on Investments, which Beijing spurned. That made it easier for Europe and the US to align on China during Biden’s first year in office than many expected. In the summer of 2021 Nato for the first time issued a statement on the security challenge posed by China. But then in January 2022 came the storm over Lithuania upgrading Taiwan’s diplomatic recognition. Faced with Beijing’s threats, the Baltics lined up with the US, presumably with a view to anchoring American support against Russia. Meanwhile, Berlin and much of the rest of the EU distanced themselves, refusing to get drawn into a clash with Beijing. For all the talk of partnership it is far from clear how Europe and the US align on China in the long term.
[See also: “Russia cannot afford to lose, so we need a kind of a victory”: Sergey Karaganov on what Putin wants]
That a Russian invasion of Ukraine should revive the energies of Nato is hardly surprising. But does this refute or rather confirm Macron’s diagnosis in 2019? With hindsight Macron’s advocacy for a rapprochement with Putin was wildly over-optimistic, but that optimism did at least have the effect of freeing him to call for Europe to face new strategic challenges. Those challenges might include China; conflicts with Turkey and in North Africa; migration; climate; or America’s own democratic crisis. By contrast, the new mobilisation against Russia has elicited a compulsive return to old antagonisms and Cold War ideological tropes. We are reheating images of “the West”, both in the élan of Ukraine’s national self-assertion and in the more technocratic, cold-eyed excitement over Nato’s “Vorsprung durch Technik” – “lead by technology” – exemplified in Javelin “top attack” anti-tank missiles or imagined scenarios of Finnish snipers hunting down hapless Russian invaders.
As incongruous as it may seem, in the 1950s and 1960s this cocktail of existential ideas of individual freedom, liberal constitutionalism and advanced military technology was the stock in trade of Natopolitan ideology. Through the 1980s, freedom, initiative and intelligent training combined with the right hardware was touted as the formula that would enable Nato to prevail despite being outnumbered against the invading hordes of the Warsaw Pact.
It is no doubt comforting to have that formula revived in the 21st century, and it seems to be working on the battlefield in Ukraine. But it should not be confused with an adequate answer to Europe’s security problems. What Macron was asking for in 2019 was greater European strategic sovereignty and greater imagination. Given the three great imponderables hanging over Europe – future relations with an even more resentful nuclear-armed Russia, the state of US politics, and the confrontation between the US and China – that call is more pressing than ever.
What Europe’s strategy should consist of remains undefined. Macron was asking for fresh thinking not patented answers. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has suggested recently, Europe must surely recognise its historical and politico-cultural distance from the patriotic enthusiasm so spectacularly on display in Ukraine. Europe must own its own post-heroic state. It should also, however, stand at a distance from America’s technology-obsessed, militarised strategic culture, which has a track record in recent decades that no one would wish to emulate. If Europe’s bitter history of violence helps to inoculate against any great enthusiasm for militarism, that should be regarded as an asset, not a liability.
But Europe should not, on the other hand, fall into the self-deceiving vanity of imagining that its “values-based” politics places it beyond the hard choices and dirty-hands problems of power. The EU as it stands is far from harmless and the development of a real conversation about strategic autonomy will begin when it recognises that reality.
Not only do certain member states continue to have live military capacity with plenty of contemporary experience – most notably France – but we should also remember that the first people to wear EU uniforms are the officers of the Frontex border guard, who among other things are involved in pushing back migrants in the Mediterranean. A debate about strategic autonomy should start there. Is this what strategic autonomy looks like faced with the demographic and economic trends of Africa and west Asia? A primitive fortress Europe? If not, what is the alternative?
Or take the energy transition. How much are Europeans willing to pay to avoid dependence on Putin’s gas? That is a strategic question, and so too is the question of the commercial and ethical trade-offs in importing Chinese solar panels. It is not at all obvious what that has to do with the long-range anxieties about Taiwan, which preoccupy America. Slave labour in Xinjiang and European industrial policy, on the other hand, are immediately relevant.
Though air power has played a subordinated role in Ukraine, it may be relevant to debate how many hundreds of billions of euros should be devoted to developing an independent European Future Combat Air System to rival America’s gargantuan F-35 project. But if Europe is to have that discussion, it should not be as a shamefaced return to “proper” strategic debate with a ring-fenced budget allocation, but alongside and in light of other commitments that will also be vital to Europe’s security – the Green Deal, for instance, or digital investment programmes.
All of this may involve cooperation with the US and others, inside and outside Nato. Faced with Putin’s assault, Nato is an essential first line of defence. But as far as the future is concerned it is at most a partial solution, quite possibly a distraction, and at worst a historic dead end.
[See also: Europe’s new Iron Lady: Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas]

Since Saturday, the mass shooting in Buffalo has rarely left my mind. Ten innocent people killed at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Out of 13 people shot, 11 were Black. According to law enforcement, the man accused of shooting them, Payton Gendron, was motivated by racist hate. Erie County Sheriff John Garcia didn’t equivocate when he said, within hours, that it was a “straight up racially motivated hate crime.” Nor did Mayor Byron Brown when he said on Sunday that “this individual came here with the expressed purpose of taking as many Black lives as he possibly could.” It’s impossible not to be reminded of the 2015 massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., and, sorrowfully, we have no reason to think something like that won’t happen again.

Clearly, racism is not over in the United States.

I have reason to suppose, however, that there are more than a few who think that I am not aware of this. A heterodox thinker on race, as I and others are sometimes called, is often accused of thinking, “There’s no racism.” Or as more temperately inclined folks sometimes say to me, we underplay racism and seem not to understand that it’s still out there. As such, I as well as similarly minded Black thinkers such as Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Wilfred Reilly, Orlando Patterson and Thomas Chatterton Williams are dealing in an alternate reality.

Much of this kind of impression is due to our questioning of how sweeping the use of the word “racism” has become, and I’d like to clarify, at a juncture like this, why I take issue with most strains of what is today called antiracism, despite the reality of racist violence.

The key difference is between outright bigotry and the more abstract operations of what we call “systemic racism.” Yes, there is a synergy between the two. But as the difficulty in our conversations about racism attests, there is a wide gulf between personal prejudice (Racism 1.0) and the societal and sociohistorical operations that render Black physicists, for example, rare relative to Black people’s proportion of the population — Racism 2.0, sometimes even termed “white supremacy.” In an alternate universe, those two things might not go under the same name.

On Saturday, a gunman murdered ten people and wounded three others at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The suspect, who is eighteen, used a weapon painted with a white-supremacist slogan and live-streamed his attack. Prior to the shooting, he also allegedly posted a manifesto, which relies heavily on the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy that has become increasingly mainstream in a number of Western countries, from France to the United States. To help understand that theory, and the dangers of white-supremacist violence more broadly, I spoke by phone with Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the alleged shooter’s influences, why the notion of a “great replacement” has gained a foothold in the United States and elsewhere, and how the media and political actors have used the theory to their benefit.

This theory seems to be useful for people in many different countries, and to target many different groups. Can you describe what it is, how it has changed over time, and how it’s become so useful to people such as this alleged shooter?

We can get into the textual background of the term if you want to, but it’s basically a new language for the same set of ideas that have worked to connect many different kinds of social threats into one broadly motivating, violent, and frightening world view for people in the white-power movement and on the militant right. The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of élites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation. It connects things such as abortion, immigration, gay rights, feminism, residential integration—all of these are seen as part of a series of threats to the white birth rate. One thing you’ll notice in the manifestos and in the talking points, really going back through the twentieth century, is this focus on the reproductive capacity of white women in maintaining the white race as a nation.

You mean the manifestos generally, or the manifesto last night?

Generally, and also the manifesto last night. The manifesto last night is also, broadly, copied from the Christchurch manifesto. [In March, 2019, a white gunman killed fifty-one people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.] We’re dealing with a genre of writing in which these threats are brought up to paint a picture of a race under siege. It changes the logic for some of the issues that we think of as capital-“C” conservative. So opposition to immigration is not simply about national security. It’s about the reproductive capacity of immigrants and the fear that the white race will be overwhelmed and eradicated by intermixing. It is seen as an apocalyptic threat to their race.

The “great replacement” comes about relatively recently from “The Camp of the Saints,” a novel that depicts a surge of migrants that usurps European culture. But it’s really the same ideology as the New World Order conspiracy, the idea of the Zionist occupational government—which is how people talked about this in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. We see versions of this going all the way back to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, the writings of Madison Grant, and things such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” All of these are the same set of beliefs packaged with the cultural context at the time.

The French origins interest me, because it seems like you can plug in these different “enemy” groups in different places, right?

It can be Muslims in France, and it can be Mexican Americans in the United States, or African Americans. Can you talk a little bit about that?

It allows an opportunism in selecting enemies so that you can tack to the scapegoat of a particular time and place, but it also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside, regardless of the enemy on the outside. It’s about the fundamental importance of the preservation and birth rate of the white race. So the elements that are consistent across time are the idea that the white race can be threatened by intermixing and the idea that there is some kind of evil, élite force interested in eradicating it.

It’s not just about passive demographic change, and the news stories we see pretty often about when a county or a city or the nation will no longer be majority white. It’s about an apocalyptic threat perpetrated by what these conspiracists think of as a cabal. They see, for instance, abortion as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see residential integration as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see feminism as a scheme to keep white women out of the home and lower the white birth rate.

Who do they think is running this cabal? Is there any intellectual interest to that, or is it irrelevant?

The evil élites are typically rendered as Jewish, and I use that word “cabal” knowing that it tends to invoke an idea of Jewish élites. But this movement is also generally distrustful of all kinds of élites. Sometimes it’s about the United Nations as the élites trying to wage this war on the white birth rate. Sometimes it’s about global outsiders. But there is a heavy current of anti-Semitism that links the idea of the manipulative élite with Jewish conspirators.

When people such as Tucker Carlson try to do the “respectable” version of this, they often say, Oh, we’re worried about illegal immigration, and they pretend that they’re not saying something quite as bad as what they mean. It’s almost always about immigrants, not African Americans. I assumed that was because it would be hard to pretend that African Americans haven’t been here for a long time. Is this shooter’s focus on African Americans notable in any way?

The “great replacement” comes from that novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” which is specifically about the threat of immigration. So it comes up a lot in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, who was focussed on immigrants as his victims. This document that has been circulated that we believe to be the manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo is largely drawn from the Christchurch manifesto. The anti-immigration rhetoric is sort of being used as the frame for an act on African Americans.

In the past few years, we’ve had a series of mass attacks employing this ideology on different kinds of victim groups: the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the El Paso shooting of Latino folks at a Walmart. The Christchurch shooting targeted Muslim congregations in New Zealand. The Charleston shooting by Dylann Roof targeted African Americans in a church. All of those gunmen share an ideology. They are using the same framing language in their manifestos. They’re all identifiable as white-power gunmen. This is a movement with a long history.

When you say “movement,” does that imply a structure or something with leadership?

When I say “movement,” what I’m talking about is a set of groups and actors who are working with a common ideology and with interpersonal connections toward the same end. As a historian, I don’t think we’ll be able to see the interconnections for at least another ten years. But there’s good reason to think that they are there because this movement works the same way now as it has since the late nineteen-seventies, and there’s been no decisive change in how we’ve prosecuted or surveilled the movement. There’s no reason for it to change its method of organizing.

What we’ve seen in the earlier period is broad-based interconnection of money; weapons; exchange of ideas; travel between groups; people with multiple memberships; people changing memberships; and social connections such as marriages, churches, counselling services, picking each other up from the airport, staying with each other when they come through town. It’s a deeply networked social movement. It’s been using the Internet in one way or another since the nineteen-eighties. It’s the same movement that has perpetrated a long string of racially motivated attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing. And we’ve never had a moment of coming to terms with it or of dedicating sufficient resources to stopping its activity.

A self-respecting people must be a self-critical people, open to introspection and ready to repent of real sin. But self-criticism is not the same as self-loathing. Reckless and willful distortion of the historical record betokens not integrity, but ingratitude toward those who have left the American people a noble civic and moral inheritance. The “1619 Project” represents everything to be avoided in this regard. It is an effort to identify the American story unilaterally with irredeemable racism, systematic oppression, unprecedented violence, and Hitlerian malignity.
The Project first appeared in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine dated August 18, 2019. At that time it comprised a series of articles on a theme outlined by the black journalist and activist Nikole Hannah-Jones in her flagship essay, “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One.” In 1619, a ship arrived at Point Comfort, Virginia, “bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans.” Hannah-Jones sought to make that landing into America’s founding moment, eclipsing the Pilgrim settlements and the Mayflower Compact (1620), the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention (1776 and 1787), and “the new birth of freedom” heralded by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address (1863). To the 1619 Project, slavery is more than America’s “original sin”: it is a moral stain that the nation can never escape or overcome. No subsequent developments truly matter. America is a nation with the soul of a “forced-labor camp,” as Hannah-Jones repeatedly calls plantations like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Whites are ontologically guilty, and blacks seemingly can do no wrong.
This effort to valorize recrimination and prohibit civic reconciliation was lauded by journalists, racial activists, “progressive” educators, “woke” capitalists, and one of our two major political parties. Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, and the 1619 Project was quickly adopted as the basis of history and civic curriculums in school systems across the country. Charles R. Kesler pointed out in a New York Post op-ed that the mayhem which overtook many American cities after George Floyd’s death was inspired by the inconsolable hatred Hannah-Jones preaches. The riots of summer 2020 are thus best understood as “the 1619 riots.” In a tweet that quickly followed (and was just as quickly removed), Hannah-Jones enthusiastically agreed. Strikingly, however, she denied that the willful destruction of property, broken windows, and arson had anything to do with violence. “Violence,” in her view, is the unique prerogative of whites. Other contributors, especially Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander, go out of their way to minimize the violence that accompanied the mass demonstrations in summer 2020. They paint a picture of “brutal” police attacking “peaceful protesters,” an account of events that strains credulity.
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The project’s willful distortions of fact have received criticism from many corners. Distinguished scholars such as James M. McPherson (perhaps the greatest living historian of the Civil War), Sean Wilentz (a liberal patriot of the first order), CUNY History Professor James Oakes, and award-winning historian Gordon S. Wood challenged Hannah-Jones’s lies and distortions, her tendentious ideology, and her absurd claim that Americans asserted their independence from Great Britain in order to preserve chattel slavery against abolitionists in the mother country. The community activist Robert Woodson founded 1776 Unites, a broad coalition of black thinkers, activists, and ministers (as well as independent-minded liberals and secularists) who, as their name suggests, reiterated their commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. 1776 Unites emphasizes civic pride, moral agency, and the self-respect of black Americans who will not stoop to partake in a debilitating cult of racial resentment and victimization.
The black political scientist Wilfred Reilly is an active participant in 1776 Unites. In a special January 2022 issue of National Review, Reilly firmly refuted the misrepresentations, half-truths, and startling omissions that define the 1619 Project. As he argued, contributors to the Project ignored the nuanced but deeply felt patriotism of most thinkers and activists, black and white, who fought to end slavery. These abolitionists did not reject or mock the principles of ’76. To the contrary: they abhorred slavery because they affirmed the liberty and equality of all human beings under “Nature’s God.” Reilly helpfully highlights a long lineage of black American patriots from Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to Robert Woodson and Thomas Sowell. The implication is clear: America cannot be healed by men and women who hate their country, loathe its principles, and see nothing but racism in its most noble truths and affirmations.
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But these many eloquent objections have not stopped Hannah-Jones and her collaborators from distributing their message all over America, with the help of lavish funding and public honors. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story is now available in a beautifully printed and produced volume that expands the original contributions, adds some new essays and themes, and includes a large admixture of poetry and fiction to accompany the prose essays, some of which first appeared in the New York Times Magazine. No doubt in response to the criticism described above, the essays are occasionally more nuanced than the originals. But the broad emphases remain the same, and the ideological Manichaeism remains dominant as ever. There is a marginally greater willingness to acknowledge that Abraham Lincoln was anti-slavery (although incorrigibly racist), and the contributors ever-so-slightly qualify the claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve race-based slavery. Mostly, though, Hannah-Jones responds to her critics not with good arguments but with predictable indignation and ad hominems. In an introductory preface, she confesses herself shocked that “a small group of historians attempted to discredit” the 1619 Project, as if she expected that her anti-American slander would receive nothing but praise. And in response to Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo’s observation that she launched her crusade from a position of “ultimate cultural privilege,” Hannah-Jones calls Guelzo—of course—a racist.
The packaging is undoubtedly prettier, but the assault on America—and on the excellence and dignity of our political principles—is as sustained and unqualified as ever. The immense sacrifices of the Union soldiers, in lives or limbs, count for nothing in this volume: the boys in blue, too, were incorrigible racists, and anyway the slaves basically freed themselves. Similarly, banning the slave trade in 1808—as allowed or even encouraged by the federal Constitution of 1787—was no great achievement. In fact, it may have been motivated by a racist desire to keep the black population from overwhelming the white population in key states of the Deep South.
A foundational conceit of this book is that Americans are denied access to the most fundamental truths about American history and the racial oppression that animates it. Hannah-Jones wants us to believe that unless her work is in every elementary school and coffee shop, Americans will never learn about the horrors of slavery, which endure to this day. But her account of what American students learn in school is unrecognizable to me. Non-stop attention to slavery, Jim Crow, and the secular religion of race- and gender-based “diversity” has been the norm in American schools for a very long time now. On the whole, students come away with little sense that there are elements of the American experience not tainted by racism.
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In her preface, Hannah-Jones expresses her dismay that graduating high school students cannot, when polled, name many essential facts about slavery and the causes of the Civil War. But as any experienced teacher these days will attest, students can tell you little or nothing about almost any major historical or political phenomenon. My students do not know that Communist regimes killed nearly 100 million human beings in the 20th century and unleashed a persecution of religion unprecedented in human history. The humorist Ben Stein once wrote amusingly about an intern of his from UCLA, a major university and not the worst of the lot, who was outraged when she discovered that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Stein had to reassure her that we had fought and won a war in response to the attack.
Another of Hannah-Jones’s major objectives is to recharacterize Abraham Lincoln, “the Great Emancipator,” as an irredeemable racist. She lifts select quotations almost wholly out of context to portray him as a fraud who had nothing but contempt for black people. Her preface focuses on just one meeting with black leaders in 1862, during which the president entertained the question of sending freed blacks to colonies outside the United States. The reader would not know that Lincoln talked about anything else but colonization, or that he quickly abandoned the idea and fought instead for “a new birth of freedom” on the American continent.
This kind of lazy polemic is nothing new. Contemporary ideologues also labor to “cancel” Lincoln for his supposed racism, as, for example, when he told Illinois farmers that though it was grievously wrong to enslave a black woman, they did not have to marry one. A more measured student of politics and history, attentive to the arts of civic and moral prudence, might discern the underlying anti-racist intent at work here. With his distinction between enslavement and marriage, Lincoln was pressing his countrymen to recognize the true nature of equality: again and again he stressed that black men and women, however any Southerner might feel about them personally, were children of God. They were thus endowed with the natural right to keep what they earned “by the sweat of their brow.” Hannah-Jones dismisses all this, as well as anything else that might do credit to Lincoln’s name. The Emancipation Proclamation, the arming of free blacks to fight courageously for Union and liberty, and Lincoln’s last major address in 1865 calling for the gradual extension of suffrage for freed blacks in Louisiana are either brushed over in passing or ignored completely.
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This character assassination is expertly refuted in Mary Grabar’s Debunking the 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America. Dr. Grabar is a former English instructor at Emory University who previously exposed the falsehood of another anti-American historian in Debunking Howard Zinn (2019). Her newest book provides the most comprehensive critique of the 1619 Project to date. The best chapter, “Taking Down Abraham Lincoln,” lays out Lincoln’s true positions regarding Union and liberty, racism and slavery. For Lincoln, slavery was loathsome because it said to the slave: “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” This, the rail-splitter could never abide. Grabar appreciates that as a statesman Lincoln had to negotiate with “free soil” Northerners who really were racist and anti-slavery. Through the art of prudence, he needed to renew the American people’s fidelity to their highest moral and civic principles.
Hannah-Jones also remakes Frederick Douglass in her own image, characterizing him as an unremittingly bitter critic of Lincoln. But Grabar shows that this, too, is false. Douglass called Lincoln his friend, recognizing that the president had treated him with great respect. He acknowledged that Lincoln “loathed slavery,” though prudence held him back from eradicating it as swiftly and unilaterally as Douglass would have liked. Douglass shared Lincoln’s conviction that the Constitution of 1787 was a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT, one that in its core principles and its refusal to mention or validate ‘the hateful thing’ that was slavery, sustained the cause of freedom.” As Grabar points out, Douglass was “filled with grief” upon learning of Lincoln’s assassination.
But one would learn nothing about these truly decisive facts if one depended upon either the first or the more recent iteration of the 1619 Project. The contributors to the Project quote extremely selectively from Douglass’s famous speech on July 5, 1852 (“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”). That speech contains stern and justified condemnation of slavery’s moral evil, but also admiration for the courage and genius of America’s founders. To omit the second part of the speech from any account of Douglass’s views is dishonesty of the first order. As Grabar suggests, students need to study all parts of Douglass’s speech, as well as the deep thought underlying Lincoln’s principled and passionate opposition to chattel slavery. There is more to Lincoln than a single meeting with black leaders in 1862. But Hannah-Jones prefers to denounce rather than to understand.
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The rest of the essays in the collection (18 in all) are no better. Penn Law Professor Dorothy Roberts simply takes for granted that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, ignoring persistent reasons for doubt. She describes abortion on demand, which has ravaged black communities, as a requirement of anti-racism (along with a whole slew of counterproductive statist policies). Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, for his part, identifies slavery with capitalism. He tells us that a truly anti-racist America must also be a socialist one. But are there no similarities between the paternalism of the slave plantation and the despotism of many state-socialist systems? Our neo-Marxist ideologues refuse to differentiate free labor and free economic initiatives from the system of cruel racial domination that informed economic arrangements under slavery. In doing so, they willfully ignore the incompatibility of slavery with the sustained economic development that is the hallmark of a genuine market economy.
Capitalism helped end slavery, not create it. As Milton Friedman demonstrated in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), a businessman who refuses to do business with a black family is letting racial prejudice impede him from conducting profitable trade in a humane and civilized way. The Baron de Montesquieu had already made this point in Book XX of The Spirit of the Laws, the first of two books dedicated to discussing the humanizing and liberating effects of free commerce. Such commerce cures destructive prejudices every day. In a famous passage near the end of Democracy in America, volume 1, Alexis de Tocqueville contrasted the hustle and bustle of men at work in the free state of Ohio with the “half-deserted fields” and sluggish lethargy in the slave state of Kentucky. A political order that actively promotes free commercial arrangements is in principle antithetical to race-based chattel slavery. We have known this truth for nearly four centuries, although our academic Marxists will deny it in spite of the abundant evidence. Today, Nigerians, Ghanaians, many Caribbean blacks, Indians from the Indian subcontinent, Asians, and Jews economically outperform white Americans—making it hard to sustain the argument that we live in a neo-apartheid state.
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New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, contributing a chapter on “Politics,” gives a reasonably accurate account of Senator John C. Calhoun’s despicable views on slavery as a “positive good” and blacks as “ignorant, degraded, and vicious.” Yet he cannot see that both Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant adamantly opposed such un-American and un-Christian views. That is why they fought a long, bloody Civil War to its successful conclusion: to ensure that the Confederate States of America, committed to some version of Calhoun’s position, could not indefinitely perpetuate itself. Bouie is keen to show that Calhoun’s view somehow survives in the person of Donald Trump, whom he associates with the most vicious and demagogic racism. He does not seem to think he needs evidence for this claim, or for his assertion that commonsense voter regulations are part of a broader scheme to oppress and disenfranchise black Americans.
Evidence, in general, is in short supply in these essays—one contributor simply assumes that Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan only fretted over the state of fatherless black families as a backhanded means of blaming black mothers for the problems in the black community. Over and over again, ideologically charged accusations substitute for reasoned discussion. University of Pennsylvania Professor Anthea Butler writes under the heading of “Church,” but the only Gospel she can esteem is that of Marxism and “Black Liberation theology.” Celebrity demagogue Ibram X. Kendi (né Henry Rogers) refuses to acknowledge that any real “progress” has been made in American society regarding race and racism since 1865. But is anything more racist than to suggest that white people have oppression built into their civic DNA? Indeed, the entire volume suggests that blacks, too, are essentially powerless to overcome a racism that is coextensive with America itself.
Another important new book provides a much-needed corrective to this bleak, falsified picture. In 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, former Boston University anthropology professor Peter W. Wood shows that the regime of chattel slavery took many decades or more to solidify after 1619 in Virginia and the rest of the South. Thus 1619 was not even the true founding of American slavery, let alone of America. Moreover, Wood shows the historical ubiquity of slavery itself: millions of Europeans were captured by Muslims in North Africa over several centuries; the Islamic slave trade was even more extensive and brutal than the Atlantic one; and conditions for slaves in Brazil were far deadlier than those in North America.
Using this context and perspective, Wood puts paid to one of the 1619 Project’s most woefully irresponsible rhetorical tropes: its repeated comparisons between slavery in America and death camps in Nazi Germany. In the summer months, Wood points out, most slaves worked five and a half days a week. Some slaves became skilled artisans, a few even won their freedom, and a small number became wealthy. Some freed blacks owned slaves themselves. Wood stresses that chattel slavery was always a moral and civic abomination. But to point out that slave plantations in the United States did not resemble Nazi extermination camps is not to make an apology for slavery. It is simply to insist on historical honesty.
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Such honesty is at a disadvantage in our current climate. Near the end of his book, Wood wisely notes that teenagers “are by nature inclined to see hypocrisy everywhere in the adult world.” The 1619 Project feeds this propensity by “giving full scope to a cynical reading of the American past,” and, I might add, the American present. Such cynicism ignores the countless exemplars of “self-restraint, self-sacrifice, and commitment to the common good,” in Wood’s words, that have made the United States a morally estimable country, if an imperfect one. No study of 1619 is complete without 1620, the Puritan efforts to establish liberty under God, and—even more importantly—1776, 1787, 1863, and all they represent. If, concludes Wood, the young are taught the terrible falsehood that “racism is and always was the dominant ideology,” then the American experiment will hang by the thinnest thread, and we will have no Lincolns to save it. Let us return to the “better angels of our nature,” who teach salutary self-criticism and civic renewal, not self-loathing and despair.

Shadi has been curious about whether he has diverged from the left since Bernie Sanders' campaign, so he invited the socialist thinker Daniel Bessner onto the podcast this week for a spirited discussion of first principles. Bessner is one of the most influential and important leftist intellectuals writing on foreign policy today. He is the Joff Hanauer Honors Professor in Western Civilization at the University of Washington and the author of Democracy in Exile. What followed was perhaps the most contentious episode in Wisdom of Crowds history. Of course, here at the podcast, we see deep difference as a feature and not a bug, so we hope you'll see this as an example of what spirited but civil disagreement might look like in practice. The fundamental question we wanted to ask was whether American hegemony has, on balance, been "good" or "bad" for the world. This is a question about a world that seems to have been lost. The unipolar moment is quickly coming to an end—that is, if it isn't already gone. Daniel argues that the decline in American power is both an inescapable reality and a net positive for the world. Shadi and Damir both disagree, but for quite different reasons. 

In Part 2 of our conversation, available here for subscribers, the guys dive even deeper into their disagreements over America's role in the world. If the status quo is anything but ideal, what exactly are the alternatives—and are those alternatives plausible? Damir, looking to press Daniel, suggests that the socialist vision for how the world will improve with an inward-facing Socialist America leaves too many questions unanswered. Shadi bristled at the suggestion of decreasing America's military footprint at the exact time when Russia and China are becoming increasingly aggressive. All the while, Daniel rejects the premise that it's in our interest to militarily aid Ukraine and would prefer that the U.S. take care of its own people and address its own moral disasters instead of pushing its pretend values on the world.Required ReadingDaniel Bessner's podcast, "American Prestige"Daniel's recent appearance on Glenn Loury's podcastDemocracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual, by Daniel Bessner (Amazon)"The American Empire and Existential Enemies" by Daniel Bessner (Foreign Exchanges)"There Are Many Things Worse Than American Power" by Shadi Hamid (Atlantic)"Are We The Good Guys? A Debate with Glenn Greenwald" (Wisdom of Crowds)The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Amazon)

Wolves are not a particularly special species. They are not as menacing nor as powerful as mountain lions. They are not as big as many other predators, nor as strong, nor terribly wise, nor do they have sophisticated tools or genetic dispositions that make them individually dangerous in the animal kingdom. Their ability to capture prey worthier than themselves results from collaboration—from the pack.Once prey is targeted, the pack first disperses, then surrounds the victim—some wolves from the front, others from the back. The wolf pack’s defining feared feature is that it does not work alone. The lone wolf, in the animal kingdom, is not powerful; it is weak. The wolf, acting alone, is not something to fear. Lone wolves do not massacre because they can’t.Eighteen-year-old Payton S. Gendron allegedly went hunting yesterday at a supermarket after traveling more than 200 miles from his home. Police say he was heavily armed, wearing protective military-style gear, and proceeded to shoot and kill at least 10 people, injuring three more. Almost all of the victims were Black; the supermarket is in a predominantly Black area of Buffalo, New York. The event was, according to a manifesto apparently written by Gendron himself, a racist massacre. Almost immediately, it was described as a “straight-up racially motivated hate crime” by New York officials.  When we write about, think about, and prosecute such hate crimes in this nation, we tend to focus on whether the assailant acted alone. In this case, Gendron appears to have had no accomplices. He is an alleged solo shooter, or, in the parlance of our time, a lone wolf—a term used to differentiate the slaughter from more sophisticated acts of terrorism staged by groups like ISIS that typically involve multiple people and nuanced planning.  But that lone wolf language fails us in an era when hate and radicalization now serve as a proxy for the collaborative herd, for the co-conspirators and colluders. Gendron wasn’t alone. His mission was effective because he was supported by an apparatus that provided the ideology and means for the hunt. Based on evidence from a manifesto that he reportedly posted Thursday night, Gendron did not perceive himself as being alone: He had his people; they were there for him.As if to make that clear, he livestreamed some of his actions yesterday, a performative gesture for an audience that already existed. To emphasize that his victims were targeted and not at all random, Gendron wrote that he chose the specific Tops supermarket because it was in a demographic area that, according to public data, is only 1 percent white. And lest there be any doubt, he wrote the N-word on the tip of his gun, a word perfectly visible from his videotape of the rampage.Language alone cannot change the violent extremism that is a part of American society today, which President Joe Biden called out last night as “hate-fueled domestic terrorism” that leads to such tragedy. Social-media platforms should be held accountable and gun laws should be more restrictive, but the wrong language has a tendency to excuse the herd. Biden gets this; with only a brief nod to the perpetrator—“We need to learn more”—the thrust of his statement was a form of public shaming of the racist network that is culpable, even if not legally responsible. While lawyers get tied up over specific charges around hate crimes and the meaning of terrorism, Biden rightfully uses terrorism in its less legal sense: Black people were hunted by a white racist. Terror.[David Frum: America’s gun plague]The manifesto is an ode to a particular variant of hate—espoused by political and conservative media leaders—called “Great Replacement” theory. Pulled from European extremists’ fear of Muslim immigrants, the American variant has grown out of undeniable demographic shifts. The year Donald Trump was elected president, 2016, was also the first year that the U.S. Census Bureau reported more nonwhite babies born in America than white babies. The country is not going back to a white majority.At its core, the idea of a “great replacement” is about violence, because the notion of displacement justifies the elimination of the parties responsible for taking your place. Their very presence—not their ideas, or politics, or voting patterns—is the threat. Political and media leaders who spread these ideas can play coy, a notion I’ve described as stochastic terrorism, by having plausible deniability about what in fact they are promoting. Their language may be vague as to place and time of the kill, but it isn’t misleading. It is terror, executed by the herd.The manifesto itself will be scoured for evidence of what motivated Gendron. I myself appear in the manifesto, in an image of CNN hosts and analysts labeled as Jews. But Gendron’s hatred isn’t specific to me, just as we are unlikely to find that there is anything particularly interesting about him. We are likely to find that he, actually, isn’t that special. He’s just part of a pack.

Editor’s Note: The gap between the risk of dying from terrorism and the fear of it is large. This misperception can help the terrorists, making their violence more consequential and giving their hateful ideas more attention than they deserve. Scholars Peter Krause, Daniel Gustafson, Jordan Theriault and Liane Young offer a way out. They find that education about terrorism can reshape perceptions, leading to a more accurate view of the danger.

Daniel Byman

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Counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 have limited the average number of Americans killed on U.S. soil from all types of terrorism to 23 people per year, but those efforts have been unable to quell Americans’ unrelenting fear of terrorist attacks. About two-thirds of Americans have consistently reported worrying “a fair amount” or more about a terrorist attack on the United States in polls over the past two decades, and at least one-third have worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism. This outsized fear represents the terrorists’ greatest tool, making millions scared of a few and leading to tremendous attention to terrorists’ words and actions. This fear helped spur the United States to fight numerous costly, largely ineffective wars across the Middle East and North Africa, restrict civil liberties and immigration, massively increase government defense spending amid ballooning deficits, and cause widespread stress and anxiety among the public—sometimes leading to chronic posttraumatic stress disorder .

Unfortunately, even those experts like John Mueller who argue that Americans significantly overestimate the threat of terrorism conclude that “[t]here seems to be little, if anything, policymakers can do to reduce the fear of terrorism—whether it is through shouting from the bully pulpit or through spending trillions of dollars to protect people from the feared hazard. If people want to be afraid, it seems, nothing will stop them.” Expert William McCants agrees: “As for how governments can calm their citizens, I’m at a loss .... Every attack is discussed endlessly on television and social media, which heightens fear of future attacks [and] makes citizens scared of one another.” If anything, existing research suggests that exposure to more information about terrorism, via either the media or exposure to others in the “Threat-Industrial Complex” who hype the threat for their own ends, increases the public’s fear.

In a new article published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, we report on our surprising research findings that something can significantly decrease individuals’ fear of terrorism: education on the topic by the very professors who are sometimes labeled as part of the “terrorism industry.” We gathered evidence from an extensive series of experimental and observational surveys involving students in 31 terrorism- and non-terrorism-related courses at 12 universities. The “treatment” courses covered the definition, causes, strategies, and effects of terrorism and counterterrorism; the “control group” courses focused on other topics in political science and history. These courses varied from semester-long classes at elite American universities, to massive open online courses (MOOCs) with older students from across the globe, to online survey experiments with subjects watching a 10-minute video about terrorism or financial crises. Across all types of educational approaches, we found that the more individuals learn about terrorism, the smaller they perceive the threat to be to themselves and to the United States by a significant margin.

One fascinating implication of these findings is that they occurred even though the treatments—largely introductory classes on terrorism—were not designed to generate them. Most studies of attitude change (for example, for diversity training or environmental sustainability) are set up specifically to alter subjects’ attitudes in a certain way, yet they tend to show far less substantively significant attitude changes than our study. The vast majority of subjects in this study were in classes in which the professors did not even know the hypotheses being tested, and none were given any instructions on how to teach or what to teach. Professors simply administered the surveys to their students at the beginning and end of the semester.

By learning extensively about terrorism’s causes, strategies and effects in a dispassionate environment that separates fear from knowledge—rather than from emotional media accounts—people find that the unknown and scary become known and categorized. Individuals transition from seeing terrorists as crazed and irrational to more human and comprehensible, if still immoral. If terrorists’ central strategy is to inspire fear, then education is the antidote to inspire calm and resilience.

U.S. efforts should continue to focus on preventing attacks, but greater emphasis should be placed on educating and assuaging the American public. Our research shows that institutions of higher education are effectively informing Americans about terrorism—we found strong evidence of increased student knowledge—and tempering their fears of it in the process. At a time when state governments have significantly cut funding for universities and seek to exert greater control over curricula, our study reveals the value of academic freedom and analytic classrooms that engage deeply with important topics. Increasing funding for higher education in general, and about terrorism in particular, is a great long-term counterterrorism strategy to build an informed, resilient public. Otherwise, citizens’ understanding of political violence will come from conventional and social media accounts that are misleading, polarized and overhyped. Education about political violence fits well within a renewed civics education, which is severely lacking in the United States. The federal government funds a great deal of counterterrorism-related research through the Department of Homeland Security and its Centers of Excellence, but it is important to recognize the significant benefits that emerge from teaching, not just research.

Not everyone can take a semester-long course on terrorism, which is why we also tested the effect of watching a 10-minute informative video. This also led to a reduction in fear, albeit a smaller one. Public education campaigns that clearly and effectively define what terrorism is and explain its causes and effects, and how the government and citizens can work to lessen its impact, should also be part of this effort. Our study reveals how balanced, dispassionate and rigorous analysis of the phenomenon can make the public less susceptible to terrorism’s harmful psychological effects and, therefore, the terrorists’ designs.

A less fearful public would decrease the political demand for inflated threat assessments and excessive government spending, while also directly benefiting mental health and societal harmony. Politicians can be tempted to use fear to get the public to take an issue seriously. Our study shows that, with educational training, one can understand the capabilities of terrorists without fearing them—much like a military does with an enemy force.

U.S. policymakers today want to pivot from conflicts with extremist non-state groups to focus on powerful state rivals like China and Russia. Nonetheless, the struggle against terrorism remains—as does the U.S. public’s fear of it. The best way to gain greater freedom of action is to ensure the public has an accurate understanding of terrorism as a phenomenon. As the threat and associated fears of domestic terrorism in the United States begin to outpace those of international terrorism, the need for clear-eyed education and fear reduction has never been greater. Public education campaigns administered in partnership with experts on terrorism can help lead to a more informed, less fearful and more resilient public. This would represent a significant counterterrorism success in and of itself, while also providing the basis for improved domestic and foreign policy in the future.

Was it one of ours? Or one of theirs?That’s the question that flashes through American minds after a mass shooting. Was the alleged killer a jihadi, like the shooter at the Pulse night club in Orlando in 2016? A left-wing extremist, like the shooter who attacked a congressional baseball practice in 2017? A vegan animal-rights zealot? Or, as apparently was the case yesterday in Buffalo, New York, a white supremacist who believed in the “great replacement” theory?In a politically polarized and heavily armed society, each new massacre rapidly becomes another occasion for mutual accusation.After Buffalo, the accusations of lethal white supremacy feel especially apt and especially deserved. Some of the country’s loudest media voices have, night after night, expressed ideas very similar to those that allegedly animated the alleged killer, and those ideas are loathsome. Their words will be quoted back at them, joined to demands that they disavow white-supremacist ideology. Perhaps some of them will even do that. Will doing so make a difference?[Adam Serwer: White Nationalism’s deep American roots]The crucial variable in mass shootings is not ideas but weapons. We cannot control ideas or speech and should not attempt to do so even if we could. But we could reduce access to the weaponry that converts ideology into atrocity. At least, other advanced countries find themselves able to do so. Almost every country on Earth has citizens filled with vitriol, but no comparably advanced country has a gun-violence epidemic quite like America’s.Yesterday’s alleged shooter appears to be a white supremacist. If the next killer is Muslim or vegan, many of those now most eager to assign blame to the Buffalo suspect’s co-partisans will be anxious to do the opposite—and of course, those now most anxious to restrict blame to the alleged killer alone will next time be eager to spread the blame as widely as possible.Racist ideology is an evil in itself. But the American exception that bathes this country in blood and grief again and again and again is not that we are uniquely susceptible to racism or jihadism or veganism. The American exception is the unique ease of access to weapons.Condemn the words if you will, but understand what those words do and what those words do not do. To save lives, focus on what is taking lives. Americans die by the gun in such terrible numbers because Americans live by the gun with such reckless disregard.

Between 1998 and 2021 prices for “Medical Care Services” in the US (as measured by the BLS’s CPI for Medical Care Services) more than doubled (+132.2% increase) while the CPI for “Hospital and Related Services” (data here) more than tripled (+230.4% increase), see the bottom two rows of the table above. Those increases in the costs of medical-related services compared to only a 66.2% increase in overall consumer prices over that period (BLS data here). On an annual basis, the costs of medical care services in the US have increased 3.6% per year since 1998 and the cost of hospital services increased annually by 5.1%. In contrast, overall inflation averaged only 2.1% annually over that period. The only consumer product or service that has increased more than medical care services and just slightly less than hospital costs over the last several decades is college tuition and fees, which have increased nearly 5.0% annually since 1998 for four-year public universities. 

One of the reasons that the costs of medical care services in the US have increased more than twice as much as general consumer prices since 1998 is that a large and increasing share of medical costs are paid by third parties (private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Veterans Affairs, etc.) and only a small and shrinking percentage of health care costs are paid out-of-pocket by consumers. According to government data, almost half (47.1%) of health care expenditures in 1960 were paid by consumers out-of-pocket, and by 2020 (most recent year available) that share of expenditures has fallen to only 9.4% (see chart above). It’s no big surprise that overall health care costs have continued to rise over time as the share of third-party payments has risen to more than 90% and the out-of-pocket share has fallen below 10%. Consumers of health care have significantly reduced incentives to monitor prices and be cost-conscious buyers of medical and hospital services when they pay less than $1 themselves out of every $10 spent, and the incentives of medical care providers to hold costs down are greatly reduced knowing that their customers aren’t paying out-of-pocket and aren’t price sensitive.
How would the market for medical services operate differently if prices were transparent and consumers were paying out-of-pocket for medical procedures in a competitive market? Well, we can look to the $14.6 billion US market for elective cosmetic surgery for some answers. Every year since 1997, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery has issued an annual report on aesthetic procedures in the US (both surgical and nonsurgical) that includes the number of procedures, the average cost per procedure (starting in 1998), the total spending per procedure, and the age and gender distribution for each procedure. The 2021 report was released in April and is available here.
The table above (click to enlarge) displays the 16 cosmetic procedures that were available and reported in both 1998 and 2021, the average prices for those procedures in each year (in current dollars), the number of each of those procedures performed in those two years, and the percent increase in the average price for each procedure between 1998 and 2021. The procedures are ranked by the number of cosmetic procedures last year. Here are some interesting findings from this year’s report and the table above:
Only four of the 16 most popular cosmetic procedures (tummy tuck, eyelid surgery, facelift, and male breast reduction ) increased more than the overall 66% increase in the CPI between 1998 and 2021, while the other 12 procedures increased less than overall consumer prices. That means that four of the procedures increased in real inflation-adjusted dollars and the other 12 decreased in real, inflation-adjusted constant dollars.For four of the most popular nonsurgical procedures in 2021 – botox injections, laser hair removal, laser skin resurfacing, and chemical peel — the nominal prices in current dollars have actually fallen over the last 22 years, by 3.5% for botox injections (from $424 to $409), by 24.7% for chemical peel (from $821 to $618), by 63% for laser hair removal (from $452 to $167) and by 47% for laser skin resurfacing (from $2,276 to $1,199). When a price in nominal, current dollars is lower in 2021 than in 1998, that means that the real prices of those procedures have decreased significantly. For example, the cost of laser hair removal in 1998 ($452) expressed in 2021 dollars ($753) means that the price last year of only $166 was 78% lower adjusted for inflation. Likewise, the real price of botox injections fell by 42.1% in inflation-adjusted dollars, laser skin resurfacing fell by 68.4%, and the price of chemical peel fell by 54.8%. The unweighted average price increase between 1998 and 2021 for the 16 aesthetic procedures displayed above was 31.3%, which is less than half of the 66.2% increase in consumer prices in general over the last 23 years. When the average procedure prices are weighted by the spending on each procedure last year, the average price increase since 1998 was 38.2%. And most importantly, none of the 16 aesthetic procedures in the table above have increased in price by anywhere close to the 132% increase in the price of medical care services or the 230% increase in hospital services since 1998. The largest aesthetic procedure price increases since 1998 is the 86.5% increase for facelifts, which is still way below the more than doubling of prices for medical services overall and the more than three-fold increase in the CPI for hospital services.The Aesthetic Society doesn’t provide a detailed breakdown of aesthetic procedures by gender, but it did provide the number of procedures for the top six most popular procedures for women (liposuction, breast augmentation, tummy tuck, breast lifts, breast implant removals, and eyelid surgery) that totaled just under 1.5 million and the top six procedures for men (liposuction, breast reduction, eyelid surgery, nose surgery, tummy tuck, and face lift) totaling 94,844. Based on those figures, women accounted for about 94% of aesthetic procedures and men only 6%, which is consistent with the gender breakdown in past years based on more comprehensive data (and also consistent with the gender shares highlighted in the report). 
MP: The competitive market for aesthetic plastic surgery operates differently than the traditional market for health care in important and significant ways. Cosmetic procedures, unlike most medical services, are not usually covered by insurance. Patients typically paying 100% out-of-pocket for elective aesthetic procedures are cost-conscious and have strong incentives to shop around and compare prices at the dozens of competing providers in any large city. Providers operate in a very competitive market with transparent pricing and therefore have incentives to provide cosmetic procedures at competitive prices. Those providers are also less burdened and encumbered by the bureaucratic paperwork that is typically involved with the provision of most standard medical care with third-party payments. Because of the price transparency and market competition that characterizes the market for cosmetic procedures, the prices of most cosmetic procedures have fallen in real terms since 1998, and some non-surgical procedures have even fallen in nominal dollars before adjusting for inflation. In all cases, cosmetic procedures have increased in price by far less than the 132% increase in the price of medical care services between 1998 and 2021 and the 230% increase in prices for hospital services. In summary, the market for cosmetic surgery operates very much like other competitive markets with the same expected results: falling prices over time for most aesthetic plastic surgery procedures.
Question: If aesthetic plastic surgery procedures were covered by third-party payers like insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid, what would have happened to their prices over time? Basic economics tells us that those real prices would have risen over time, possibly somewhere close to the same 132% increase in the prices of medical services in general between 1998 and 2021. The main economic lesson here is that the greater the degree of market competition, price transparency, and out-of-pocket payments, the more constrained prices are, in health care or any other sector of the economy. Another important economic lesson is that the greater the degrees of government intervention, opaque prices, and third-party payments, the less constrained prices are, in health care or any other sector of the economy. Some important economic lessons to keep in mind as we consider various reforms for national health care, including proposals by Bolshevik Bernie Sanders for single-payer “Medicare for All” because “health care is a human right, not a privilege.”
The post What economic lessons about health care costs can we learn from the competitive market for aesthetic plastic surgery? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

I T TOOK FOUR horsemen to mete out God’s apocalyptic punishment. The biblical wrath conveyed by two of them will sound familiar to Europeans worn down by disease and now war in Ukraine. But a mere quartet of steeds would not have sufficed to deliver the calamities the EU has had to contend with in the past decade or so. No fewer than five crises have befallen the continent in that time: in addition to covid-19 and fighting on its doorstep, Europe has been visited by the protracted euro-zone slump, soon followed by a migration emergency and then Brexit. Any normal polity would be worn down by living in near-perpetual crisis mode for so long—not least since the episodes rarely showed the EU at its best. It is only the war in Ukraine that the bloc has handled remotely deftly. Is it possible that the EU has learned how to avoid turning problems into existential dramas?

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Crisis holds a special place in the hearts of believers in the European project. Jean Monnet, one of the EU ’s founding fathers and the nearest thing Brussels has to a patron saint, thought the continent’s political arrangements would be “forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises”. Like most religious parables, this is not wholly true. The bloc’s most notable shunts towards ever-closer union, from the euro to the single market by way of open borders, were agreed on without the spectre of impending meltdown. But crises help to disrupt the status quo. The temporary chaos they bring about allows new ideas to emerge. Apply enough pressure—and in Europe that can mean the prospect of the entire edifice of the EU collapsing—and what was politically unthinkable yesterday becomes inevitable tomorrow.

Thus it was that the euro-zone crisis resulted in once- verboten sovereign bail-outs and a souped-up central bank. In 2015 a surge of migrants crossing the Mediterranean prompted the EU to recruit its own gun-toting officers to patrol its external borders. The economic rout brought by covid-19 saw the creation of a jointly guaranteed recovery fund of the sort even the protracted euro-zone mess had not made possible. In each instance the lurch to “more Europe” came after new circumstances made business-as-usual unpalatable. In the corridors of Brussels Eurocrats bemoaned the crisis of the day, all the while knowing it represented an opportunity to deepen integration. In what other circumstances than an all-night summit could leaders breach their own red lines and agree some federalising leap in the hope of being released to their hotel rooms?

If a trend can be spotted, it is of Europe dealing with crises rather better over time. Nobody these days boasts about how the euro was saved, ruing instead the many missed opportunities to avert a meltdown in the first place. The migrant surge in 2015 was no better: squabbles over how to treat refugees from war-torn countries showed Europe at its most divided and unkind. Brexit was, relatively speaking, a triumph of EU co-ordination. No doubt preserving a unified Brit-bashing front reduced the risk of other countries leaving—but at the expense of a still noxious relationship with an important neighbour. Europe’s covid-19 response is touted as a success in Brussels, yet many citizens will not forget the delays in the arrival of vaccines the EU was asked to buy for them.

For the current batch of EU leaders and bureaucrats who are handling Ukraine, in other words, the bar is low. On the whole they have done a creditable job. Wave upon wave of sanctions have hurt Russia enough for it to squeal. Weapons, some of them paid for with EU money, have found their way east, along with cash to keep the government in Kyiv going. Refugees were welcomed with open arms. Ukraine’s electricity grid was hurriedly plugged in to Europe’s to free it from Russia’s—a fiddly operation that would normally have taken a year but was pulled off in a fortnight. America has pitched in lots, too, as has Britain. But Europe has little to blush about thus far.

Why the improvement? The nature of the situation is part of it. War is the very thing the European project was designed to make impossible. Its resurgence nearby has helped to forge unity. Nor does armed conflict lend itself to kicking the can down the road, a habitual European sin. By all accounts the EU ’s institutions have done a good job of paving the road for national capitals to approve sanctions. That every package has been a slog—a sixth one, focused on Russian oil, was being hammered out as The Economist went to press—shows that Brussels is pushing as hard as the EU ’s various member-states are willing to go. Could Europe have done more? Certainly, but it could also have done less.

Apocalypse later

A striking feature of this crisis is the lack of a grand federalising scheme of the sort predicted by Monnet, which helped stem previous calamities. A plan to repeat the joint borrowing of the post-covid stimulus was floated by France’s President Emmanuel Macron in March, but has gone nowhere. His call on May 9th to revise the EU ’s founding treaties, for example to get rid of national vetoes that have slowed down sanctions, has been greeted coolly. Mr Macron thinks the EU should strive for “strategic autonomy”, but if any institution gets a refresh as a result of this crisis it is likelier to be NATO , which Sweden and Finland are now set to join.

All that may change as the war unfolds. Grand, crisis-defying schemes are usually concocted by the EU ’s dominant duo, Germany and France. Both have been on the back foot over Ukraine. Neither is trusted in eastern European capitals when it comes to dealing with Russia. Both Olaf Scholz in Berlin and Mr Macron in Paris have had plenty on their plates domestically. Maybe as they regain their European footing a bold new apocalypse-defying plan of the sort Monnet would have cheered will be on the cards. Some would see that as a sign of further progress in the crafting of the union. The real breakthrough, in fact, would be if the EU could handle crises without needing to rewire itself every time. ■

Read more from Charlemagne, our columnist on European politics:

France’s re-elected President Emmanuel Macron wants to govern differently (May 7th)

Emmanuel Macron is now Europe’s standard-bearer (Apr 30th)

Tariffs on Russian energy are a smart way to hobble Vladimir Putin (Apr 23rd)

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis

The Price of Immortality. By Peter Ward. Melville House; 288 pages; $28.99 and £20

E TERNAL LIFE , in heaven or through reincarnation on Earth, is promised by many faiths. For a simple reason: it eases the fear of death. The idea of living for ever has other devotees, too. It is now pursued by a motley crew of fringe scientists, cultish groups and tech billionaires, united by a conviction that a way to make humans immortal will eventually be found. Meanwhile they pin their hopes on experimental, often fraudulent therapies that promise rejuvenation.

In “The Price of Immortality”, Peter Ward, a journalist who has written for The Economist, delves into the origins of these beliefs and the science of purported cures for ageing. He spends time with groups such as the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, where congregants discuss food supplements and cryonics (the freezing of bodies at death in the hope that they can be revived later).

America’s “immortalists”, he discovers, are inspired by the dreams of futurists such as the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Another influence is Nikolai Fedorov, a 19th-century Russian philosopher who thought all living beings could, one day, be resurrected using traces of them floating around in the cosmos—a vision that brings to mind modern DNA cloning.

“Longevity escape velocity” is one of the immortalists’ central tenets. This notion holds that if science manages to extend the human lifespan by 20 or 30 years—to around 110 or 120—it will then rise exponentially as new techniques are developed in time to keep the wizened going longer and longer. The hypothesis was floated in 2004 by Aubrey de Grey, a British scientist prominent in the field of age-reversal, whose work caught the attention of Silicon Valley moguls.

This is not all pure fantasy. Gene and stem-cell therapies and other types of regenerative medicine can tackle some of the ways in which ageing causes natural deterioration—though these methods are yet to be turned into proven and safe treatments. That may not take long, though. Tech magnates such as Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon have been pouring money into longevity research. Some of the startups conducting it have billions of dollars at their disposal and are poaching leading scientists. As an investor tells Mr Ward, the goal is extending healthy life spans, not freezing decrepit bodies that might “wake up in 200 years from now and commit suicide if they can”.

Some immortalists back an even more radical aim: doing away with the body and resurrecting a dead person’s mind in a robot or through some form of digital alternative reality. The theory is that this could be accomplished using scans of brain tissue, or by applying artificial intelligence to reconstruct a personality from “mindfiles”—vast amounts of digital data accrued during the subject’s life. Tech titans are bankrolling this moonshot, too. Digital immortalists, like adherents of cryonics, accept that the chances of success are slim; but they are willing to put in the work and money anyway.

Mr Ward combines thorough reporting and lucid scientific explanations in a fluent and balanced account of a diverse movement. From the tragicomedies of cryonics’ early years, to tales of scam artists and reckless zealots, he is a vivid storyteller. And he ponders a world in which people do indeed live a lot longer. Even if old age is made healthier, drastic new kinds of inequality—and political strife—could result. If scientists succeed in making death optional, concludes Mr Ward, resolving such issues will be a prerequisite for a “world worthy of a longer stay”. ■

T O WALK AROUND Lititz on a perfect spring day is to see small-town America at its picture-postcard best. Pensioners stroll along the main street, looking in the windows of gift shops, stopping at the tea shops. With around 10,000 residents, the town in Pennsylvania’s Amish country is so pristine that if you saw it in a film you might assume it was a set. You almost certainly wouldn’t guess it was the rock’n’roll capital of the world.

Yet about a mile north of the town centre is an unremarkable industrial park in which the world’s biggest pop and rock shows are made. The boxy buildings on the Rock Lititz campus house around 40 companies, which between them supply everything a touring artist requires. The firms that founded Rock Lititz, Clair Global and Tait Towers, take care of the two staples, amplification and set-building. Others fill in the gaps. One makes only the motors to drive the hoists that pull PA systems into the rafters of arenas; another makes only stage pyrotechnics. There are two huge rehearsal spaces in which the shows can be assembled and road-tested.

Rock Lititz takes artists from the first glimmerings of an idea to the final production rehearsal. There is nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world. And it happened by accident.

In the 1960s two brothers from the town, Gene and Roy Clair, had a hobby supplying PA systems for local shows. In 1966 Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons played Franklin & Marshall College in nearby Lancaster, and the Clairs lent a hand. According to Clair Global’s creation myth, the band members’ wives noticed subsequent shows didn’t sound as good, and the brothers were brought on the road with their own bespoke system. “There you go,” says Troy Clair, son of Gene and now the firm’s CEO . “That was the beginning of a sound company travelling with the band.”

A dozen years later an Australian called Michael Tait—who had been designing lighting and staging for Yes, a prog-rock band—came to Lititz following immigration difficulties in Britain, and set up Tait Towers. The town’s reputation began to spread. But it was not until 2014, when the two companies established Rock Lititz, that it turned from a small hub into the fulcrum of rock.

Put another dime in the jukebox, baby

It is an extraordinary place: part manufacturing centre (Clair Global, for example, still makes its own PA systems, and sends teams on tour with artists), part R & D paradise and part logistics operation (a visit to Rock Lititz reveals just how many moving parts are required to put a show on the road). The attention to detail is staggering. Clair Global monitors all its tours so closely that on its screens you could see that in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the yellow ink in the singer Dua Lipa’s printer was down to 17%.

Two decades ago Rock Lititz might not have thrived in the same way. When artists could make money from recorded music, there was less need to sell tickets to live events at premium prices. After the internet caused a crash in revenue from recordings, that changed. Then came the rise of social media, which had two effects, according to Adam Davis, boss of Tait Towers. It showed there was a global demand for these big shows—and provided the ideal tool to market them.

“We’re making these moments that people will remember for ever,” Mr Davis says. He notes that promotion of these events happens largely through pictures on social media, so a dazzling production is “almost a marketing expense”, which allows for higher ticket prices. Tait Towers’ shows are designed to look as spectacular to the Instagrammer in the back row as to the punters at the front. Simple human vanity takes care of the rest. “I’ve spent $1,000 to come to a sold-out event. Next thing I do is brag about the fact I was there, right? And so I’m going to send you this incredible picture of me being amazing.” Even if the music disappoints, Mr Davis says, the photos will look wonderful.

Amish country turned out to be the ideal location for businesses that are dependent on bespoke parts and custom manufacturing, in which the local Amish and Mennonite communities specialise. When other commercial outfits have struggled to make the items that big shows needed, say both Mr Clair and Mr Davis, adaptable Amish craftsmen have done so with ease. One of Tait Towers’ regular suppliers has been a Mennonite-run company that makes cattle grids: the precision in cutting metal is a transferable skill.

The Pennsylvania countryside has another unanticipated advantage: because it is more conducive to getting things done than distracting big cities, bands themselves have descended on it, too. When The Economist visited, a stadium act was in secret session in a giant rehearsal studio (originally built to test shows before the artists got involved). Musicians and crews stay at the on-site hotel. Lititz may be the only small town where you might see Justin Bieber or Ariana Grande popping out to buy a toothbrush—and bumping into an Amish craftsman on the way.

Covid-19 brought the live-music industry to a halt. Now business is back, and Rock Lititz is busier than ever. But rising demand—up 30% on pre-pandemic levels, estimate Mr Clair and Mr Davis—and varying coronavirus protocols have brought their own difficulties. Getting missing parts from one side of the world to the other overnight is harder than it was. There are shortages of all the things tours need, from trucks to screws. “Things as simple as a stock three-quarter-inch nut: the world is running out,” Mr Davis says.

But Rock Lititz rolls on. By the loading docks of Clair Global’s factory, the flight cases were piling up. When everything had been tested, they were shipped out to the annual Coachella festival in California. Rock just doesn’t happen without Lititz. ■

T HE IMMUNE system has many weapons with which to counter hostile incomers. But what works against one may not be effective against another. An interloper can take advantage of this by misdirecting the system into thinking it is fighting an enemy that it is not. This buys time for that interloper to become entrenched. That is sneaky. Sneakier still, though, is the approach just discovered by Ruslan Medzhitov of Yale University. As he and his colleagues report in Immunity, they have found a bacterium that induces its host’s immune system to release compounds on which it can then feed.

Mammalian immune systems have two modes of attack. Type-1 is used against bacteria and viruses; type-2 against multicellular parasites such as worms. Some invading bacteria, however, provoke a type-2 response when type-1 would be appropriate. Dr Medzhitov decided to take a closer look.

He and his colleagues studied the behaviour of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium which causes stubborn infections in people with cystic fibrosis. They suspected it was leading the body to mount an ineffective type-2 response against it and wanted to know how it was doing this.

To explore the matter, they grew laboratory cultures of the sorts of epithelial cells that line human airways and monitored their gene-expression profiles when exposed to LasB, a toxic enzyme produced by the bacterium. They found that LasB activated signalling pathways which drove the epithelial cells to make a protein called amphiregulin. This forms the basis of a thick mucus that excels at ensnaring parasitic worms. It also recruits immune cells called eosinophils, which are adept at attacking multicellular parasites.

A type-2 error

That finding alone is interesting, because it helps explain why cystic-fibrosis patients with bacterial infections often develop copious mucus in their lungs, even though this does nothing to counter the bacteria. More intriguing, though, was what happened when the researchers tried growing P. aeruginosa on samples of this mucus. So long as LasB was present, the bacteria did not merely thrive, but actually consumed the mucus. Not only is P. aeruginosa tricking the immune system into an inappropriate response, it is also feeding on the result. And to make things worse still, Dr Medzhitov also discovered that all this immune manipulation makes the surrounding tissues prone to allergy.

Allergic reactions are, essentially, exaggerated and inappropriate type-2 immune responses. The researchers therefore wondered whether the reactions being created by LasB could cause lasting allergies to develop. To find out, they sprayed mice infected with P. aeruginosa with egg-white protein (often used as an experimental allergen) on the first and seventh days of a four-week experiment. As a control, they did the same with some mice genetically engineered to lack the ability to produce amphiregulin when exposed to LasB.

They theorised that, in the absence of worms, the inflamed epithelial tissues in normal mice might instead identify the egg-white protein as an intruder. This is exactly what happened. When injected with a small amount of egg-white protein two and three weeks after the start of the experiment, the normal mice showed a strong allergic response to it. In contrast, the amphiregulin-free mice showed little.

These discoveries, fascinating in and of themselves, also pave the way for new approaches to treating infections in those with cystic fibrosis. Moreover, if one bug has thus evolved a way to milk the immune system, the chances are good that others have done so too. Thus alerted, researchers will be on the lookout for similar cases. ■

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A HEAD OF THE mid-terms in 2018, the New York Times published a sensational piece from a “senior official” in Donald Trump’s administration who claimed to be “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [the president’s] agenda and his worst inclinations”. After it emerged that the author was Miles Taylor, a little-known staffer in the Department of Homeland Security, the Times was accused of mis-selling. Yet it turns out Mr Taylor’s words were before long equally true of the secretary of defence.

In his much more lurid confessional, “A Sacred Oath”, Mark Esper describes his tenure at the Department of Defence as an 18-month white-knuckle effort to prevent Mr Trump starting “unnecessary wars”, launching “strategic retreats” and causing “politicisation of the DOD ” and “misuse of the military”. And to do so while avoiding getting sacked, because that would probably lead to Mr Trump replacing him with one of the sycophants and crazies the president was increasingly surrounding himself with.

On the plus side, Mr Esper, a former defence-industry lobbyist, claims to have helped persuade Mr Trump not to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters (“Can’t you just shoot them. Just shoot them in the legs or something?” the president asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff); or to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan and Germany; or launch “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”. Yet Mr Esper, by his admission, could at best mitigate the damage Mr Trump did. He was fired in November 2020, after which the president carried out the feared purge of senior Pentagon staff and their replacement with some of the most malign or inept individuals in his coterie.

Hair-raising accounts of the Trump presidency are now so familiar it is easy to become complacent about them. Mr Trump’s authoritarian instincts and lack of principle are a matter of record. Even so, Mr Esper’s memoir stands out for a few reasons.

One is the credibility of his revelations. A stolidly partisan establishment conservative, plucked from relative obscurity by Mr Trump, he owed him everything, resented his left-wing critics, got along with many of his henchmen and took a fairly relaxed view of the president’s foul-mouthed eccentricities. He appears to have taken such little note of Mr Trump’s behaviour in the first three years of his presidency that Mr Esper was surprised the first time he heard Mr Trump announce a sudden withdrawal from South Korea and call Vice-President Mike Pence and other members of his top team “fucking losers”. (The Pence incident “really caught my attention”, Mr Esper writes in wonder.) Having risen higher than he could have expected to, he is also eager to see the upside in whatever he did. He claims to have run an unusually harmonious Pentagon leadership team, to have overseen a golden age of co-operation between the Defence and State Departments, to have moulded Mr Trump’s wild orders into all manner of policy successes. “Judgments should be made…on the lemonade that was made, rather than the lemons that were handed to us.”

That, importantly, chimes with a common defence of Mr Trump which Republican politicians are already starting to dust off, as the prospects of his running again in 2024 increase. He was unconventional, but had great and successful policies, it is said. Yet, as Mr Esper makes clear, unwittingly at times, that was not true. The Trump administration did a lot of solid work, as all governments do (and, who knows, perhaps the changes Mr Esper made to defence recruitment and spending programmes were as groundbreaking as he claims). But such progress was generally made despite Mr Trump, often surreptitiously. And much of what the president touched directly was a disaster.

He was the biggest leaker in the leakiest of administrations. He was unable to make decisions, unable to maintain a consistent policy, was forever wasting his cabinet members’ time with meetings that would turn, no matter the subject under discussion, into extended presidential rants on “his greatest hits of the decade: NATO spending, Merkel…closing our embassies in Africa”. He badgered Mr Esper obsessively about the ugliness, in Mr Trump’s view, of American battleships (“He wanted to see ships that looked more like yachts”). He claimed to be tough on China but, according to Mr Esper, was inconsistent, weak and pandering until, seeking a distraction from his mismanagement of covid-19, he started talking tough ahead of the 2020 election.

Describing the changes that Mr Trump and his White House team underwent in the late stages of his term is Mr Esper’s other big contribution. The president’s demands—motivated entirely by personal political calculation, the former defence chief says—grew more outlandish and brutal. Mr Trump, for all his thuggishness, had had a long-standing distaste for violence. But over the final 18 months of his term, Mr Esper writes, “the president or some of his top White House aides proposed to take some type of military action in or against other nations on multiple occasions…Other recommendations were so careless that they easily could have provoked a conflict.” Including at home, given Mr Trump’s frenzied demand for violence against racial-justice protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. His late-stage cast of sycophants, led by Mark Meadows and Robert O’Brien (both of whom Mr Esper despised), encouraged his worst instincts.

Esper-sensory perception

It is a chilling account, which has elicited not a breath of concern from Mr Trump’s party. The large majority of Republicans who did not break with him over the deadly Capitol riot will not leave him now. Whether Mr Trump will be the next Republican presidential nominee appears to be largely for him to decide. Yet it is already clear, from Mr Esper’s and other accounts, that if he does return to the White House Mr Trump and his cabinet will be very different from their earlier versions. Trump II would be more reckless and aggrieved, and probably much less restrained. ■

Read more from Lexington, our columnist on American politics:

Evan McMullin’s run against extremism in Utah is working, so far (May 5th)

Kevin McCarthy’s accidental truthfulness (Apr 30th)

James Madison and his slaves (Apr 23rd)

For exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter.

Letters are welcome via email to [email protected]

Zero tolerance on inflation

You correctly noted that there is “nothing special” about the Federal Reserve’s 2% average target for inflation, except that it “has promised it in the past” (“The Fed that failed”, April 23rd). Indeed, when Anthony Diercks, an economist on the central bank’s board, reviewed every optimal monetary-policy paper made available to the public since the mid-1990s, he was unable to identify a single one citing 2% as the ideal. Most papers—and the most highly cited ones—recommend an inflation rate of around 0%.

WILLIAM LUTHER

Associate professor of economics

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

The stern warning in your special report on central banking (April 23rd) against overburdening central banks is appropriate. Taking on too many tasks, such as focusing on inequality and other social ills, risks undermining their independence by drawing them into politics. After his retirement from the Bank of England, Mervyn King wrote that, “the biggest threat to the future and independence of central banks comes from… promising too much.” The Fed and others have already gone a fair way in informally taking into account income distribution and other matters of an essentially political nature into consideration.

An early example of inserting politics into the Fed’s remit, and a root cause of many of its later problems, is the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978, which introduced a dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment. The Fed has the unenviable task of trying to balance these two macroeconomic outcomes. Like others it seems that the Fed has over time favoured low unemployment (running the economy red hot) rather than having been sufficiently alert to early signs of inflation.

ONNO WIJNHOLDS

Washington, DC

Tell it how it is

A letter from the Chinese embassy’s spokesperson referred to the war in Ukraine as “an international dispute between two sovereign nations” (April 30th), as if it were some sort of mundane trade spat, rather than unprovoked and brutal military aggression by Russia. She wouldn’t have had to hunt far to find a precedent. Xi Jinping has described China’s response to invasion in the 1930s as a “war of resistance…where China resisted the invasion of a foreign enemy”. This is cited in “China’s Good War” by Rana Mitter, who notes that the Chinese government “has promoted the new collective memory” of the second world war “as a way to create a morally weighted narrative about China’s role in the global order”.

That moral narrative would be more consistent, and that role in the global order greatly more effective, if Mr Xi, his embassy spokesperson and their colleagues were to call out the situation in Ukraine for what it truly is.

ANDREW KORNER

Port William, Galloway

Cambridge’s cancel culture

As an alumnus of Gonville & Caius college in Cambridge I have watched its contortions about Ronald Fisher with dismay (“Window pains”, April 23rd). If the fellowship truly wanted to take a principled stand about its predecessors, it could do no better than start with John Caius himself, a man who wanted to bar scholars who were "deformed, dumb, blind, lame, maimed, mutilated (or) a Welshman" from entry to the college. For more contemporary relevance it could turn to Jimmy Carr, a graduate of Caius, who thinks that the Nazi genocide of the Roma is amusing.

To pick on Fisher, who held views fairly unremarkable for his time, is simply giving in to those wishing to indulge in some virtue-signalling. Raking through the historical record for dead people who held views we now find unacceptable is a fool’s game. Both Churchill and Gandhi would fall foul of such a process. It consumes energy that would be best directed towards ongoing injustices.

PAUL WATSON

Cambridge

Drug lows

The use of ketamine to treat depression is being promoted in certain quarters (“Special K ”, April 23rd). In Canada, several medical specialists have touted its effectiveness. Some are almost delirious in their enthusiasm. I received ketamine as an anaesthetic for surgery, after being assured of its safety. They said I would experience a nice little "trip". I have never used recreational psychedelic drugs. What a trip it was. I awoke in a severe and prolonged tearful state, with profoundly suicidal thoughts. Two years later the images and sounds remain vivid and can trigger those same thoughts.

This cavalier use of ketamine is a modern iteration of the psychiatric experiments carried out in the 1950s at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.

ASTRID AHLGREN

Ottawa

Housing attachments

“Cottage industry” (April 23rd) pointed out that granny flats, or Accessory Dwelling Units as they are known, “have taken off in California…as house prices have soared”. We have a long tradition of these dwellings here. Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley”, described the one on Milvia Street where he and Jack Kerouac lived in the mid-1950s. Unfortunately, it is long gone.

Cottages used to be available for short-term rentals to students and artists, but landlords are now unwilling to take the risk of expropriation by tenants who won’t pay, won’t leave, and who are supported by an autocratic rent board.

TOM BURNS

Berkeley, California

Kind regards

I would have enjoyed Bartleby’s advice on “How to sign off an email” more had I not been conscious of having committed pretty much every epistolary sin listed (April 16th). One sin omitted was the sad line that often precedes a sign-off. “No worries if not” negates everything that has gone before, and always make me cringe for the writer’s lack of self-worth. Anyway, thank you in advance for planning to print my letter. Although no worries if not.

LUCY BERESFORD

London

Automated corporate sign-offs can be a bore, especially when they include legal shields, equivalent to “by reading this message you implicitly agree not to use it as a reason to sue us”. More interesting is the signature that all employees at the International Institute for Management Development ( IMD ) are encouraged to use: “I am sending this email at a time that suits me. Please feel free to respond at a time that suits you.” It is a clear expression of respect for the notion of work-life balance that our hyper connected lives tend to disregard much too often.

BRUNO LANVIN

President, Smart City Observatory

IMD

Lausanne, Switzerland

Bartleby’s sign-off is oh-so 2010s. Today it is also necessary to state your preferred pronoun (she/her) and that the message was sent from the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the (fill in the blank) people.

B OMBS AND bullets could not remove cracolândia, the largest open-air drug market in South America, from the heart of São Paulo. When violence failed, the police took away the black tents in which women weighed packages of powder. They raided the surrounding hotels, where customers ordered food on delivery apps while waiting for their illicit orders. Still, the business flowed. The dealers merely put up umbrellas and sold drugs from backpacks.

But in March cracolândia emptied. Hundreds of dealers and addicts dispersed without any sign of violence. The police initially claimed credit, but whispers said that the move had instead been orchestrated by First Capital Command ( PCC ), South America’s largest gang, on the orders of its imprisoned leadership. The drug-sellers, in cahoots with the PCC , are pitching up elsewhere in smaller groups.

That a gang could do what the Brazilian police could not is perhaps not terribly surprising. In some ways the PCC has set itself up as an alternative form of government, according to Gabriel Feltran, a sociologist who has studied the group for decades. Many poorer Brazilians “feel they can trust the PCC more than the state”, he says.

Last year the US Treasury named the PCC as one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world. The group is now involved in everything from petty crime to international drug-smuggling. It first formed in São Paulo’s overcrowded prisons in the 1990s, and still counts many thousands of inmates as its members. In 2017 the PCC was behind the beheading and killing of dozens of inmates in various prisons. The group is thought to control the trade in stolen phones that plagues São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, where a mobile phone is reported stolen every 3.5 minutes—and, with it, access to the owner’s banking app. On April 25th a young man was shot for his phone by a fake delivery driver. After the phones have been hacked to gain access to the banking app Pix, they are sold.

But the group has pretensions to be greater. It loftily claims to be motivated by a desire to help the “oppressed of the system”, rather than just to make a juicy profit. The gang’s rules are designed to benefit a “fraternity of crime”: it provides loans, weapons and a network of contacts to help illicit enterprises flourish. It acts like a “government of the crime world”, says Bruno Paes Manso, who co-wrote a book on it.

Indeed some think the group is behind the dramatic fall in crime in the state of São Paulo. Since 1999 its homicide rate has plunged by 80%. It has gone from being one of the most dangerous places in Brazil to one of the safest. Although police take credit for the decline, academics point out that the biggest falls occurred in the most violent suburbs, at around the time that the PCC began to make its presence felt in such places. To end the gang wars of the 1990s, the group created its own parallel court system in which to settle disputes, says Mr Feltran. It mediated among gang members’ families, churches and other members of civil society.

Today order is maintained by members known as disciplinas who hand out punishments, such as beatings, to those who break their rules. Many residents find them less threatening than the police, who killed 6,000 Brazilians in 2020. (Police in the United States, by contrast, killed 1,000 people that year.) One of the group’s maxims is, “Crime strengthens crime.” It pays to be strong where the state is weak. ■

In the Shadow of the Gods. By Dominic Lieven. Viking; 528 pages; $40.Allen Lane; £35.

F ROM THE decorative sovereigns of Europe to the more potent ones of the Gulf, monarchs still abound in the 21st century. But none of them is a real emperor. That is to say, there is no modern ruler who wields personal authority over a huge, diverse range of polities, thanks to a distinctive, mysterious swirl of dynastic and spiritual credentials.

That is the observation, delivered with a near-audible sigh of regret, of a historian who has devoted a professional lifetime to one empire in particular, that of Russia under the Romanovs, and to imperial regimes in general. Dominic Lieven brings to his latest work a striking, informed empathy for the dilemmas of mighty sovereigns, from Britain’s Queen-Empress Victoria to galloping lords of the steppes.

As his narrative whirls through the realms of Rome, India, the various Islamic caliphates (including the Ottoman one), the tsarist autocracy and colonial systems commanded from western Europe, he demonstrates an unmistakable soft spot not only for most of the empires of the past, but for their masters and mistresses too. Few readers will share that sentiment, but most will enjoy the journey.

Mr Lieven offers especially vivid portraits of some great empresses, from China’s Wu Zetian (who ruled from 690 to 705 AD ) to Russia’s Catherine the Great (1762-96), both of whom made shrewd use of their status as outsiders in male-dominated worlds. With verve, he describes the good-cop/bad-cop games played by imperial strategists: that mixture of light-touch suzerainty through local proxies, and occasional ruthlessness, which often let a handful of individuals hold sway over vast and scattered populations.

He presents empires as systems in which disparate cultures and technologies could co-exist creatively. He sees ethno-nationalism—the emergence of small and sharply defined states that slip the imperial bonds—as a destructive force. He is disarmingly frank about the personal history that colours this approach. His academic home is in Britain but he descends from Baltic-German nobles who served Russia; he grew up among Anglo-Irish folk in the twilight of British domination, and spends many months with his in-laws in Japan.

The title promises a focus on imperial claims to divinely ordained legitimacy, or to the plain divinity asserted by the rulers of ancient Rome and nearly modern Japan. And Mr Lieven does say a lot about the unifying and legitimising role played by religion in various empires, from Buddhism and Confucianism in China to Russian Orthodoxy. He writes well about the stark, compelling simplicity of Islam, which galvanised a previously unremarkable group of middle Arabians to overwhelm more sophisticated places.

But religion is only one of his themes. He is no less fascinated by the disproportionate role in history played by the fighting horsemen who, as he recounts, held sway over the north Eurasian grasslands for about 2,500 years—until well into the second Christian millennium. As Mr Lieven notes, the dynastic realms that once extended from modern China can be divided into those dominated by the Han Chinese (the Song and Ming), and the much larger territories governed by the Mongol, Qing and Tang dynasties, whose origins can be traced to “the nomadic warrior world of the Eurasian steppe”.

Both the Ottomans and (less obviously) the Russians, especially those of Moscow, could claim similar roots. Russians are taught at school that in 1480 their forebears threw off the yoke of their so-called Tatar-Mongol masters. This falsely conflates two peoples; it also understates the deep symbiotic link between the Slavic rulers of the Muscovy region and their overlords.

Having said that real empires are a thing of the past, Mr Lieven rather shyly makes the case that understanding them is still important. As he puts it, “most large countries in Asia remain more like empires than the European model of the ethno-national polity.” If the continent “catches the disease of European ethno-nationalism the planet might well not survive the resulting chaos.”

Modern India, he writes provocatively, is the product of the Mughal and British empires, which used divide-and-rule tactics, along with pomp and ceremony, to knit the subcontinent together. Having lost its anti-colonial legitimacy, Mr Lieven says, the Indian state is now succumbing to the plague of ethno-nationalism, and seems to be locked in an ever-more dangerous stand-off with Pakistan.

That analysis will be controversial in India. In any case, the argument for studying empires can be made more simply. Recall that since 2017 American strategy has avowedly been based on great-power competition, which means vying with Russia and China. Officially, neither is now an empire in the sense of being ruled by a sovereign. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are depicted as emperors in cartoons, but both emerged from an ideology that in theory abhorred inherited privilege.

What matters most, though, is not what they are, but what they think they are. Regardless of their differences from the old imperial despots, both men see themselves as heirs, in important ways, to the monarchic realms of yesteryear. Mr Putin has drawn on tsarist history to make his case for subordinating Ukraine. He has encouraged his bureaucrats to study the work of Ivan Ilyin, who saw royal imperialism, not liberal democracy, as the way to hold Russia and its dominions together. For his part, Mr Xi has led an energetic effort to rehabilitate the Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1912, and has persecuted historians who take a different line.

In a sense, Russia and China have followed similar paths: first a communist revolution, which led to a rejection of almost all the religious and ideological trappings of the regimes that went before; eventually, a gradual reclaiming of the imperial heritage. The era of crowned despots who personify the divine will may be over, but the age of self-conscious imperial calculus is not. ■

I MAGINE FOR a moment that your unborn child has a rare genetic disorder. Not something at least vaguely familiar, such as sickle-cell anaemia or cystic fibrosis, but rather a condition buried deep within the medical dictionary. Adrenoleukodys trophy, maybe. Or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.

Would you, when your child is born, want to know about it? If effective treatments were available, you probably would. But if not? If the outcome were fatal, would your interest in knowing about it depend on whether your newborn had five years of life to look forward to, or ten? Or 30?

Today these questions are mostly hypothetical. Precisely because they are rare, such disorders are seldom noticed at birth. They manifest themselves only gradually, and often with unpredictable severity. But that may soon change. Twenty years after the first human genome was mapped, the price of whole-genome sequencing has fallen to a point where it could, in rich countries at least, be offered routinely to newborns. Parents will then have to decide exactly how much they want to know.

Early diagnosis brings with it the possibility of early treatment. Moreover, sequencing the genomes of newborns could offer a lifetime of returns. A patient’s genome may reveal which drugs will work best in his or her particular case for conditions such as ADHD , depression and cancer. Combined with information about someone’s way of life, it could highlight easily discounted health risks such as cancers and cardiovascular disease, leading to better preventive measures. A database of genomes, matched to living people, would be a boon for medical research. The fruits of that research, in turn, would make those genomes more useful to their owners as time goes on.

Sequencing children’s genomes at birth would also create opportunities to develop treatments for rare conditions that are typically discovered too late and in small numbers. There are reckoned to be about 7,000 rare diseases in the world, affecting 400m people, and most are genetic. At the moment they are so unusual as to be unattractive targets for big pharmaceutical firms. With more and earlier diagnoses, that might change.

Such a powerful new technology creates new dangers. Widespread screening for thousands of potentially harmful genes may be counterproductive: some results may worry parents unnecessarily, because some genetic variations, though occasionally indicative of disease, are not strongly so. Parents may not want to unlock all the secrets that their newborn’s genome might reveal. Some may indeed prefer not to know about conditions that cannot be treated. Adult-onset illnesses pose a different dilemma—a reasonable position is that it should be up to the children themselves, once grown, to decide whether they want to look at their genomic information. A further concern is that data will not be kept secure, and may be leaked or otherwise misused at some point in the future.

In Britain, where a large project to sequence the genomes of newborn babies is planned to start next year, a consultation process is already grappling with these questions. Some of the broad principles emerging may be applied to similar projects in a number of other European countries, and in America, Australia, China and Qatar. One lesson is to start conservatively. The British project is likely to begin with a small number of extremely reliable tests that will improve the way children are treated. This ensures the testing is for the benefit of the child. Tests that are not firmly diagnostic, or which involve much follow-up work, are not a priority. Control of the data should be passed on to children at adulthood. Finding the time to educate parents, so they can make good decisions, is essential.

It remains to be seen whether the economics of this sort of testing make it feasible on a national scale. These days the cost has less to do with the technical expense of sequencing than with the salaries of those providing the services. But countries that can make this work will be able to start to harness the full potential of the genomic revolution. It began 20 years ago. Soon, it will become part of everyday health care. ■

I N THE AUTUMN of 2006, two teenage girls were sexually assaulted in Detroit. Within weeks, the police had their man. Terance Calhoun, a local 19-year-old, was spotted in a liquor store nearby and appeared to match the composite sketch the police had produced. He pleaded no-contest in February 2007 and was dispatched to prison.

There was just one problem: he didn’t do it. A follow-up investigation in 2019 found a litany of red flags in how the case was handled, including an unrecorded police interrogation and the fact that Mr Calhoun, who was found to be cognitively deficient, had been questioned without a lawyer present. On April 27th, after 15 years behind bars, he was exonerated.

He was not alone. The government does not record figures, but in 2012 a pair of professors founded the National Registry of Exonerations ( NRE ) to keep track. It counted 161 exonerations last year, up more than sixfold compared with 1989, when there were just 24 (see chart). These shed light on weak spots in America’s justice system.

An exoneration “doesn’t just happen on its own”, says Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State University, who runs the NRE . A crucial development has been the rise of “professional exonerators”. These were spurred by improvements in DNA testing, which spread public awareness of mistakes, and can take two forms. First, advocacy groups such as the Innocence Project play a role in lobbying for individual cases. The WMU -Cooley Innocence Project, a part of Western Michigan University’s law school, was a critical component in Mr Calhoun’s case. Second, and perhaps more important, are Conviction Integrity Units ( CIU s), branches of prosecutors’ offices tasked with investigating possible miscarriages of justice. Together, these professional exonerators were responsible for 60% of overturned convictions last year.

Some CIU s require cases to be DNA -based; a few consider only cases which have been tried (as opposed to ones with guilty pleas); others look at every application. Once it takes on a case, a CIU combs through police files, court transcripts and lab results, in search of flaws. The CIU in Wayne County, Michigan, pieced together the alarming story of Mr Calhoun’s conviction. It found that the DNA analysis of a condom at the second crime scene, completed just three months after his conviction, had excluded him as its potential donor. This result was apparently never shown to Mr Calhoun’s lawyers. Other discoveries included the fact that one of the victims had clearly described a perpetrator with “braids” and a distinctive “puzzle tattoo”, neither of which Mr Calhoun had.

Since the first CIU s were established in the early 2000s, 93 other jurisdictions have followed. Last year 16 were formed, from Bessemer, Alabama, to Monterey, California. Minnesota set up a statewide CIU last August. Yet many are understaffed and under funded, and they remain few in number relative to the more than 2,400 elected prosecutors across the country.

Official misconduct is the main reason behind most exonerations: it played a role in 102 of the 161 cases last year. In 2012, for example, Ronald Watts, a Chicago police sergeant, was arrested for stealing federal funds from an undercover FBI informant. It gradually emerged that he had been planting drugs and extorting victims over the course of a decade, stitching them up on bogus charges if they refused to pay. Starting in 2016, the CIU in Illinois’s Cook County began identifying and tossing out all convictions linked to him. So far over 100 have been overturned.

Mistaken eyewitness identification accounts for about a third of exonerations. Misleading forensic evidence is relatively rare, responsible for roughly 20% of wrongful convictions. Other factors include perjury and, as in Mr Calhoun’s case, false or coerced confessions. Nearly three-quarters of the exonerated who falsely confess have been found to be mentally ill or intellectually disabled.

Since 1989 the NRE has recorded more than 3,000 exonerations in America, amounting to 27,080 years of lost freedom. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Samuel Gross, one of the project’s co-founders, estimates that the wrongful-conviction rate may be as high as 2%, or some 20,000 false felony convictions a year. Finding and overturning those injustices is essential work—for Mr Calhoun, now in his mid-30s, and the many others like him. ■

Trust. By Hernan Diaz. Riverhead Books; 416 pages; $28. Picador; £16.99

W HO WAS Mildred Bevel? According to Andrew Bevel, a “legendary” Wall Street tycoon, his late wife was gentle, frail and kind, with a taste for pretty music and the “innocent wisdom” of a child. But in a thinly veiled novel about her life, published soon after her death in the mid-1930s, she shimmers as a brilliant loner and astute philanthropist who dies of madness in a Swiss sanatorium.

Who gets to tell Mildred’s story now that she is not around to tell it for herself? How accurate are any of the stories people tell about themselves and others anyway? These questions animate “Trust”, Hernan Diaz’s clever puzzle of a new novel.

As he demonstrated in 2017 with “In the Distance”, a debut which chronicled the rough and tumble of 19th-century America through the eyes of a young Swede with no English, Mr Diaz is not afraid to disorientate readers. In “Trust” he creates a kind of narrative matryoshka doll, nesting what may be the truth about Mildred within obfuscating layers of story.

He begins with a novel within the novel about a childless couple who live contentedly amid obscene wealth—“the obvious Dutch oil paintings, the constellations of French chandeliers, the Chinese vases mushrooming in every corner”—until the wife’s grip on reality starts to slip, “the mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth”. This detached, third-person yarn, reminiscent of the work of Henry James, is followed by a somewhat bombastic autobiography-in-progress by Bevel. He touts the patriotism of his enormous success, maintaining that “self-interest, if properly directed, need not be divorced from the common good”. Then there is a memoir from a writer called Ida Partenza who helped Bevel sculpt his legacy in print. Finally come some unpublished pages, seemingly by Mildred herself.

The title is a nod to Bevel’s wealth. But it also evokes the fragile feeling that is frequently missing from relationships, including between storytellers and audiences. As Bevel gamely admits, self- interest nudges people to “bend and align reality” to accord with needs or desires.

“Trust” dramatises the way such truth-bending often accompanies tales of wealth. “What I’ve made, I’ve made on my own,” says Bevel, who inherited a fortune. The novel also highlights the way history’s dominant storytellers—mostly white and male—have tended to sideline the narratives of others, such as women. As Partenza writes of her affinity with Mildred: “We both were young women trying to grow in narrow crevices, hoping to break and expand them in the process.”

Mr Diaz shifts elegantly between styles, but saves the most engaging voices for the novel’s second half. Partenza’s memories of being cowed by Bevel’s money and authority, and her nostalgia for her “overbearing and dysfunctional” father, inject depth, momentum and clarity. The only shame is Mr Diaz’s pat ending, which gives too much of the game away. ■

L AST MONTH a slim volume rose to the top of British bestseller lists. It outsold Kazuo Ishiguro, trounced Julian Barnes and outstripped Richard Osman. It deserved its place: its illustrations are iconic; its prose as familiar and powerful as poetry. Few who have read it could forget the lapidary simplicity of its most famous line: “Remember: Mirrors-Signal-Manoeuvre.” It is “The Official Highway Code”.

Few cultural critics spend much time thinking about the Highway Code. They should. It is arguably one of the most influential British books of the 20th century—and certainly one of the most read. Some 24m copies of the 1959 edition were printed, and 14m of them were distributed free. It has topped the bestseller lists repeatedly, and over the past 20 years has outsold Jo Nesbo, John le Carré and William Shakespeare. The latest edition, published in April, sold 19,000 copies in a single week. As the Bible was in another era, it is a staple of British bookshelves.

The Bible and the Code share other qualities. Both issue large numbers of commandments. Both are obsessed by mortality, albeit in rather different ways. Where the Bible observes that we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, the Highway Code notes that the shadows are darker and death more probable when cars speed, since “At 40mph your vehicle will probably kill any pedestrians that it hits.”

The frail flesh of man was the genesis of the Code. Britain’s first victim was killed on the roads in 1896. The coroner hoped that “such a thing would never happen again”. It did. By the time the first edition of the Code was printed in 1931, Britain’s fleet of motorised vehicles had risen to 2.3m and the annual total of those killed on the road had risen to over 7,000. (Today Britain has over ten times as many vehicles but around a quarter as many deaths.) A code of conduct was needed.

Whether or not it instantly improved safety is not clear, for the instructions contained within early editions could be eccentric. The 1931 edition told drivers that to indicate a “ TURN to my RIGHT ” they should extend their right arm out of the car and hold it “ rigid in a horizontal position straight”. To indicate a “ TURN to my LEFT ” they had to repeat the procedure, but flap their arm up and down while “keeping the wrist loose”. To overtake, a driver should first sound his horn; perhaps to allow other drivers to retract their arms first.

The Code was a product of its time. Its pages accept that other users of the road might include sheep, herds of cattle and even “a pack of hounds”, but absolutely nowhere does it indicate that any of those other users might be women. All the drivers are, without exception, “he”. Children appear, to be told to stay out of the way: they are to be warned “of the dangers of the road” and how to avoid them. And though the Code lacks women, it does contain instructions on how to drive a horse-drawn carriage on the road (for right turns, first, “Rotate the whip above the head…”).

Its editions chronicle a changing world. In the first, its drivers wear cravats, panama hats and an imperious air. Like “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Wind in the Willows”, it evokes an era when cars were roofless, driving was glamorous and roads largely lawless. In an opening scene in Brideshead, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte set off with “a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chateau-Peyraguey”, drive to the country and drink till “the golden wine seemed to…hold us suspended” above the turf. By later editions, the Code included other kinds of suspension for drinking. The 2022 edition warns, bluntly: “Do not drink and drive”.

Later editions of the Code show a country metamorphosing as driving became more popular. From the 1950s motorways unspooled and old road signs were redesigned. In Hyde Park graphic designers drove repeatedly past boards of different colours to see which were most readable at speed. They chose bright blue for motorways and green for A -roads. A new, sans-serif font—”Transport”—was created. The designer Margaret Calvert came up with the “Men at Work” sign (people told her it looked more like “Man having difficulty with a large umbrella”). Her “School Children Crossing” sign, based on her as a child, may be the best-known self-portrait in the country.

Cultural indicator

The Code kept on changing. The 1968 edition was welcomed by a speech in Parliament noting the tightening of laws on seat belts and speed limits, breathalysers and road markings. “Semaphore signals,” one politician observed with pleasure, “are almost a thing of the past.”

Progressive editions hint at the democratisation of driving, and of Britain. The 1968 edition was rewritten in part because the previous one had “used too many long words”. The most recent Code involved a consultation of almost 21,000 people, who were asked whether its wording was clear. It offers absolutely no guidance on what do when you meet “a pack of hounds”—but does include large numbers of images of women using the roads.

Above all, the Code chronicles the demise of the golden age of motoring. In its pages, driving changes from glamorous, to dangerous, to a chore that many would rather avoid. Plans are already being made for a new version that will allow for driverless cars and watching films at the wheel. And it chronicles a world that is ceasing to capitulate to the car. No longer must children avoid cars: cars must avoid them. The latest Code has a hierarchy of road users: pedestrians are at the very top; motorised vehicles are at the bottom. And no one is wearing a cravat. ■

P OLITICAL HOPEFULS always cast doubt on the abilities of their competitors. But when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva finally confirmed on May 7th that he would be running in Brazil’s presidential election in October, his campaign speech included attacks which were more moralistic than most. Lula, as he likes to be known, was scathing about Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent, arguing that a president who does not cry for those rummaging for food in rubbish or for the 660,000 Brazilians dead from covid-19 is not worthy of the title. “He may call himself a Christian, but he has no love for his neighbour,” he said.

Lula, who was president from 2003 to 2010, has much to gain by doing down his rival’s godliness. Evangelical or born again Christians make up around a third of Brazil’s electorate. In 2018 seven out of ten of them chose Mr Bolsonaro over Fernando Haddad, the candidate from Lula’s Workers’ Party, according to one poll. (Lula was not on the ballot.) In April another pollster found 52% of evangelicals would vote for Mr Bolsonaro in the first round, compared with 30% for Lula. “[Evangelicals] are going to decide the elections,” says Victor Araújo, who writes about the politics of Brazilian Christians.

That the presidency of Brazil, which has more Roman Catholics than any other country, would be determined by evangelicals would have been hard to believe half a century ago. Then they made up just 5% of the population; Catholics, by contrast, accounted for 92%. Evangelicals look set to become the biggest religious group in Brazil within a decade. In São Paulo, the biggest city, the number of evangelical churches increased by a third between 2011 and 2020, to over 2,000.

This shift is already transforming society. Brazilians listen to gospel music more than samba. Members of the Seleção, Brazil’s revered football team, frequently praise God on the field. Bigger churches, which often operate as multinational companies, report profits touched by the divine. Church revenues almost doubled between 2005 and 2013, to over $11bn.

Evangelicals are also changing Brazilian politics. Since the 1990s they have sought to elect local representatives who can protect their churches’ interests. Today, these interest groups are national. In Congress, 195 of the lower house’s 513 deputies belong to the evangelical caucus.

Mr Bolsonaro is Catholic but his wife, Michelle, is evangelical. The family enjoys the support of the country’s most powerful pastors, such as André Valadão, who once shared a pulpit with one of Mr Bolsonaro’s sons. On Instagram, a social-media app, Mr Valadão puts up posts explaining to his 5m followers why it was acceptable for Cain to marry his sister and why Christians should not vote for the left. Edir Macedo, a billionaire bishop who owns Brazil’s second-largest TV station, backed Lula in 2002 but Mr Bolsonaro in 2018. Lula does have the support of Paulo Marcelo, a left-leaner in the Assembly of God, Brazil’s biggest church. But that is one person against “an army” of pastors, says Juliano Spyer, an academic.

The megachurches do not represent all believers. Brazil has thousands of smaller churches, and many different versions of evangelicalism. More middle-class types are less likely to vote for Mr Bolsonaro. Pentecostals, who make up around two-thirds of evangelicals, are more so. But while their highest-profile leaders often resemble the white, affluent men who form Mr Bolsonaro’s core support, most rank-and-file members are poor and black. It is their votes that the candidates will be battling for in October.

Some will plump for Mr Bolsonaro because they believe he is upright and pious. In Belo Horizonte, a city in the bellwether state of Minas Gerais, Carlos, a Pentecostal pastor, sports straightened Afro hair and a grey pinstripe suit. Standing in front of a golden pulpit with “JESUS” written in large black letters down the front, he explains that church is “a hospital for the soul”, which he claims saved him from a life of crime. Mr Bolsonaro, as “a man of God”, is the person to defend it.

Others simply like the ideas that Mr Bolsonaro champions. “Evangelicals are not voting for him as a person, they are voting for principles,” says Isnard Araújo, a councilman and pastor, of the thrice-married president. These include protecting “family values” such as marriage, “manly” behaviour and opposition to abortion. Evangelicals are not the only voters who find these ideas appealing, says Fábio Baldaia of the Federal Institute of Bahia, but they respond to them more than most.

Evangelicals may also be more exposed to fake news on social media, which in turn could influence how they vote. The WhatsApp messaging service is used by 145m people in Brazil, the second-largest number of users in the world. A recent poll found that 92% of evangelicals belong to religious WhatsApp groups, compared with 71% of Catholics. In the same survey, half of evangelicals said they had received fake news from such chats. Others are told more explicitly by their pastors how to cast their vote. “This is the person who marries you, buries your father, baptises your kids, and visits you when you are sick,” says Fillipe Gibran, a pastor in Belo Horizonte.

But not all churchgoers embrace the politics of their pastors, warns Vinicius do Valle of the University of São Paulo. Many are tired of the politicisation of their faith. Evangelicals “have a thousand other identities”, he says. In Salvador in north-eastern Brazil, Mr Bolsonaro got less than a third of votes cast in 2018, despite the city’s fast-growing Pentecostal population. This may be because Salvador is 80% brown and black. Mr Bolsonaro has made derogatory remarks about black people; he once said that members of a quilombo (a community descended from runaway slaves) “don’t do anything” and were fat. Many in Salvador consider the president racist, says Cláudio Almeida, a researcher from the city.

Poverty also plays its part. Almost a third of Pentecostals have a monthly income of half the minimum wage or less (ie, less than $118 at current exchange rates). While some will be swayed by otherworldly promises of rewards in heaven, others will vote based on their rising bills.

Possibly the most decisive votes will come from women, who make up 58% of evangelicals. A recent survey showed that while men clearly prefer Mr Bolsonaro, among evangelical women, Lula leads by nine percentage points. This is in keeping with broader surveys which show Mr Bolsonaro trailing Lula with women of all religions. “In some ways, gender is more important than faith,” says Cláudio Couto, a political scientist. (In 2018 poor women helped elect Mr Bolsonaro.)

Many evangelicals will never vote for Lula. He was convicted of corruption after leaving office, although the conviction was later overturned. His recent comments that abortion should be treated as a public-health issue worry many religious types. But his critiques of Mr Bolsonaro’s presidency may resonate with enough of them to swing the vote in his favour.

“What do you want me to do?” Mr Bolsonaro asked critics of his slow response to the virus and anti-vaxxer statements at one point during the pandemic. “I’m Messiah [his middle name] but I can’t do miracles.” For Alex, an evangelical bus driver who spent two weeks hospitalised with covid, such an attitude was inexcusable. “God saved me, but if the government had secured vaccines, thousands of people would not have died,” he says. He voted for Mr Bolsonaro in 2018. This time, he says, he will not do so again. ■

I N THE ANIMAL kingdom, mimics are a dime a dozen. Stick insects pretend to be twigs. Hawk-moth caterpillars resemble venomous snakes. Edible heliconid butterflies disguise themselves with the wing patterns of noxious ones, and noxious ones copy each other to make it easier for predators to learn what not to eat.

All these examples, though, are visual. Auditory mimicry is rarer. But, as he describes in Current Biology, Danilo Russo of the University of Naples Federico II thinks he has found a novel case of it. Some bats, he believes, mimic angry bees, wasps and hornets in order to scare away owls that might otherwise eat them.

Dr Russo first noticed the propensity of greater mouse-eared bats to buzz a few years ago, when he was collecting them in mist nets to study their ecology. The noise struck him as similar to the sound of hornets that inhabited the area of southern Italy he was working in. That led him to wonder whether bat buzzing was a form of mimicry which helped its practitioners to scare off would-be predators.

To test this idea, he and Leonardo Ancillotto, a colleague at Federico II, first recorded the buzzing that captured bats made when handled. Then, having donned suitable protective clothing, they embarked on the more dangerous task of recording the buzzing made, en masse, by four different species of hymenoptera: European paper wasps; buff-tailed bumblebees; European hornets; and domestic honeybees. Computer analysis revealed that chiropteran and hymenopteran buzzes were, indeed, similar.

For the next part of their experiment Dr Russo and Dr Ancillotto recruited the services of 16 captive owls—eight barn and eight tawny. Both of these species are known to hunt bats.

The researchers put the owls, one at a time, in an enclosure equipped with branches for them to perch on, and also two boxes with holes in them. The boxes resembled the sorts of cavities in trees that owls would explore in the wild for food. They placed a loudspeaker alongside one of the boxes and, after the birds had settled in, broadcast through it five seconds of uninterrupted bat buzzing and a similar amount of insect buzzing three times in a row for each noise. As a control, they broadcast in like manner several non-buzzing sounds made by bats.

During the broadcasts (which occurred in random order) and for five minutes thereafter, they videoed the owls. The videos were then analysed, by an independent observer, without benefit of their soundtracks. The results were unequivocal. When they heard both the bat buzzings and the hornet buzzings the owls moved as far from the speakers as they could manage. In contrast, when the non-buzzing bat sounds were played, they crept closer.

Dr Russo and Dr Ancillotto believe this is the first reported case of a mammal using acoustic mimicry to scare away a predator. They strongly suspect, however, that it is not unique. Anecdotes suggest several birds and also small mammals, such as dormice—particularly species that dwell in trees and, like dormice, in rock cavities—make buzzing noises when their hidey-holes are disturbed. This has not yet been documented formally as acoustic mimicry. But, given the propensity for venomous buzzing insects to dwell in those sorts of places too, and also the fear that these insects generate in other species, human beings included, Dr Russo thinks this may well be what is going on. He therefore predicts that when these other buzzes are recorded and analysed the results will show that acoustic mimicry by vertebrates of stinging insects is far more widespread than currently realised. ■

K AREN AND TOM HESSLER moved to their remote corner of Humboldt County, California, in 1971. Distrust of the government during the Vietnam war and a desire to live off the land drove them to settle in Ettersburg, some 225 miles (360km) north of San Francisco. “We thought we’d come out into the wilderness, and we could just do our thing,” Mrs Hessler says. The only way to get to the Hesslers’ farm is to navigate miles of serpentine dirt roads through northern California’s towering redwoods. The isolation that so intrigued “back to the land” hippies like the Hesslers also turned Humboldt County into the cannabis capital of California—and, therefore, America.

Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties make up the “Emerald Triangle”, an area roughly the size of Massachusetts famous for growing weed. Locals say the dense forests act as a “redwood curtain”, affording farmers seclusion when cannabis was still illegal. For decades cannabis farmers were seeing green. Johnny Casali, a small farmer in Humboldt County, says he remembers selling some of his crop for $5,800 a pound ($2,600 a kg) in 1990.

California legalised medical marijuana in 1996 and recreational cannabis in 2016. The state is now the largest legal weed market in the world, raking in $5.2bn in sales in 2021. Proposition 64, the ballot measure that allowed recreational weed, was heralded as a way to shrink the illicit market, and give those harmed by the war on drugs a chance to join the legal economy. Some of that has happened. Mr Casali was released in 2004 after serving eight years in prison. He now runs a legal cannabis farm.

However, many cannabis businesses in California are floundering. Supply surged as more growers entered the legal market. In 2017 ERA Economics, a consultancy, estimated that California consumes 2.5m pounds of the 13.5m-15.6m pounds of weed produced there each year. Farmers and shop owners complain that onerous taxes and rules make running a profitable legal weed business nearly impossible. Last autumn was “a perfect storm of everything that could have gone wrong”, says Nicole Elliott, California’s top pot regulator. Prices fell to $400 a pound; the cultivation tax, of $161 a pound for buds, was raised because of inflation; and labour was scarce.

The price has recovered somewhat; in April it was about $800 a pound. But the legal framework set up by Proposition 64 spells long-term trouble. It gave local municipalities the power to decide whether they would allow cannabis to be grown and sold. In their forthcoming book “Can Legal Weed Win?” two economists, Robin Goldstein and Daniel Sumner, argue that local control ensured that the illegal market would continue to flourish in places where legal weed was banned. Local control also helps explain why California lags behind nine states in weed shops per person. By comparing sales figures with drug-use surveys, Messrs Goldstein and Sumner estimate that only about 25% of the weed sold and consumed within California is legal. Many pot farmers in Humboldt say that some of their fellow growers have gone back underground to make a profit.

One way to try to stamp out the illegal market, including the organised-crime groups which have set up shop in the Emerald Triangle, is to ramp up enforcement. But that is not popular among officials who want to make up for the trauma inflicted during the war on drugs. In the 1980s, “it was like the military coming in,” says William Honsal, Humboldt County’s sheriff. “A lot of the old farmers still have PTSD based upon the helicopters flying low.” He says his department doesn’t have the resources anymore to go after illegal farmers even if it wanted to. Of the 120 deputies that roam Humboldt, only four are devoted to smoking out illegal cannabis.

Programmes to help former offenders have fallen short. An investigation by the Los Angeles Times, published in January, found that at least 34,000 old drug charges for marijuana had yet to be cleared.

Wake up and smell the weed

Chipping away at local control by incentivising—or compelling—cities to join the legal market might help the industry. But the change farmers want most is tax reform. Some cities and counties have suspended local taxes on cannabis. Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, has promised to “look at tax policy to stabilise the market”. Meanwhile, Humboldt farmers are getting crafty to keep their businesses afloat. Some take part in cannabis tours, where Bay Area potheads are whisked to different farms to see what happens behind the redwood curtain.

Humboldt farmers hope federal legalisation will save them by creating a national market. “When California cannabis becomes legal”, says Mr Casali, “the Emerald Triangle will be the Napa Valley of weed.” They might be disappointed. Because interstate commerce is banned, states that might have bought California pot have instead built their own industries. If and when weed is legalised, these states may strive to prop up their local businesses.

California may also have trouble competing with lower-cost states. Industrial, indoor farms have proliferated as the cannabis industry has begun to resemble Big Ag. But the state’s high energy costs make growing pot indoors expensive. In future farmers may choose to grow in somewhere like Oklahoma—a medical-only state that licenses new businesses quickly—rather than California, where they must also contend with high taxes and burdensome regulations. “People gotta wake up in California, man,” warns Mr Hessler, “before it’s way too late.” ■

Read a transcript of our interview with the prime minister

“T HE INVASION of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin was a massive punctuation point in post-war history,” says Boris Johnson, the British prime minister. “We are now in a new era.” One sign of this new age came on May 11th, when Mr Johnson travelled first to Sweden and then to Finland to sign “solemn declarations” with the leaders of both countries; in each case the signatories affirmed that should either one be attacked, the other would be ready to respond with military aid. Another sign came the next day, when Finland’s leaders announced they favoured joining NATO .

The events of this week underscore the dramatic changes in Europe’s security landscape since Mr Putin’s decision to invade on February 24th. They also shed light on Britain’s place in Europe and illustrate Mr Johnson’s frustrating duality—bold abroad and timid at home.

Start with the pacts. Finland was neutral in the cold war, and Sweden hasn’t fought a big conventional war in 200 years. With both countries now moving swiftly towards NATO membership, the agreements with Britain offer particular reassurance against Russian attack during the “grey-zone period” between applying to join and ratification of their membership. If they do join the alliance, “it would be a complete repudiation of Putin’s assumptions,” says Mr Johnson, speaking to The Economist on the plane back to London.

Sceptics might say that making commitments is easy when the risk of a conventional assault is low, at least in the immediate future. Russia’s army is bogged down in Ukraine and barely has the manpower to advance in the Donbas region, let alone turn its attention to Finland and Sweden. “Looking at Russian military forces right now, they are rather occupied in Ukraine,” noted Magdalena Andersson, the Swedish prime minister.

Finnish and Swedish officials think that a far bigger risk is a prolonged and intense campaign of “hybrid” warfare—meaning cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure, incursions by Russian warplanes, disinformation campaigns and the like. The agreements cover closer co-operation in areas such as intelligence-sharing and cyber-security, and are meant to stand in perpetuity. “Are we safer with this agreement? Yes, we are. Of course this means something,” Ms Andersson concluded.

The deals fit with Britain’s evolution over the past decade into one of the most active defenders of NATO ’s northern flank and eastern front. It is central to a network of bilateral pacts and groupings, including the Joint Expeditionary Force, a cluster of ten states around the Baltic and the North Sea. Britain shunned a treaty on foreign policy and security when it left the EU . As a result, says Richard Whitman of the University of Kent, its policy in Europe resembles a “Polo mint”: it has a hard outer rim, and a hole in the middle.

Hard-edged is a good way of describing Mr Johnson’s view of the war in Ukraine. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, has raised the country’s goals to nothing less than the liberation of the territories invaded by Russia in 2014. Ukraine’s war aims are a matter for them, but that aspiration is “entirely logical”, Mr Johnson says. Ukrainians feel they cannot “negotiate sensibly with someone who is in the process of trying to devour their country. And I have to say I agree with them. So everyone is then forced into the same logical position, which is the only answer is to keep going until Putin is back to the status quo ante of February 24th—at least.”

In the long run, he says, the West must help Ukraine through a “doctrine of deterrence by denial. So that even without invoking the question of NATO membership, Ukraine is being given NATO -compatible weaponry, training and intelligence sharing of such quality and quantity that no one will ever invade Ukraine again.”

Mr Johnson’s hawkish tone is not shared by other European leaders. In a speech on May 9th President Emmanuel Macron of France suggested a means must be found to spare Russia “humiliation”. Mr Johnson discounts this concern. “It is one of the paradoxical advantages of the situation that the strength of Putin’s popular support gives him the opportunity actually to be completely flexible. And to say, for instance, that certain objectives have been achieved, ‘denazification’, whatever, and that’s why the operation is over.”

Mr Macron’s idea of a community of EU and non- EU states that co-operate on security, migration and more is also likely to fall on stony ground. “I think most fair-minded observers would say that after some sort of initial anxieties and hesitations, an independent UK foreign policy has really been important,” says Mr Johnson. “I think that our ability to take decisions at speed, to be out in front, to campaign for outcomes that we want, that we think are right has been very valuable…we are able to give a lead in a different way.”

Fair-minded observers might also point out that Britain has been far from the biggest donor to Ukraine, in cash terms or as a share of GDP , and not particularly generous in taking refugees. But its policy has had a nimbleness which has won Mr Johnson a genuine and widespread gratitude in Ukraine itself. Britain was dispatching anti- tank weapons before the invasion began; Mr Johnson was the first western European leader to walk the streets of Kyiv after the repulse of the Russian assault, and the first to address its parliament.

Mr Johnson is hardly the architect of Britain’s policy in Ukraine, notes Robin Niblett of Chatham House, a think-tank. Rather, he has been following a trajectory, largely shaped by the Ministry of Defence, of preparing Ukraine against Russian aggression that has been in place since 2015. But the prime minister deserves credit for not recoiling as the crisis emerged, says Mr Niblett. “He’s been looking for a bigger purpose for British policy. Sometimes history throws you a card, and your positioning could be just right.”

The contrast with Mr Johnson’s timidity at home is striking. A fear of aggravating his backbench MP s and core voters was on full display on May 10th in a safety-first Queen’s Speech, which laid out the government’s legislative programme for the coming parliamentary session. His bombast often seems clownish, his character questionable, and his judgment weak: threats to rip up Britain’s deal with the EU over trade arrangements in Northern Ireland are deeply wrong-headed.

But on Ukraine at least, and in his commitments to Sweden and Finland, flourish and boldness have served Mr Johnson well. His predecessor, Theresa May, flew on a plane decked in dull air-force grey. These days it is liveried in red, white and blue, with gold lettering down the fuselage. ■

T HE TRIALS and transformation of India’s economy have an epic quality, reminiscent of 19th-century America. A vast national market is being created, allowing firms to grow from economies of scale. Internal migration is shifting tens of millions of desperately poor people; a brash new consumer class is proliferating and empires are being built on new technologies. Tycoons unleashing vast investments are happy to debate if they are India’s Rockefeller or its Carnegie.

In 2014, when Narendra Modi began his first term as prime minister, India was the world’s tenth-largest economy. In the following seven years it grew by 40% (see chart 1); of big economies only China did better, with 53% over the same period. Growth this year of 8% will be the highest among big countries, according to the IMF . It predicts that by 2027 India will be the world’s fifth-largest economy, with a GDP of roughly $5trn at market prices. In terms of the size of its stockmarket it has already reached the number-four spot, behind only America, China and Japan (see chart 2). And with a herd of about 100 unicorns (unlisted startups worth over $1bn), India is third only to America and China.

Behind those figures lie ups and downs and bitter controversy. Mr Modi’s decision to void high-denomination banknotes in 2016 saw growth drop from 10% to 5% over the following nine months. A crisis at shadow banks led to a financial scare in 2018, slowing growth again. The lockdowns in the first half of 2020 saw GDP temporarily drop by a quarter.

Yet, as the pandemic recedes, four pillars are clearly visible that will support growth in the next decade: the forging of a single national market; an expansion of industry owing to the renewable-energy shift and a move in supply chains away from China; continued pre-eminence in IT ; and a high-tech welfare safety-net for the hundreds of millions left behind by all this.

Mr Modi was elected on a platform of “minimum government, maximum governance”. That is not really what he has served up. There is still a lot of government in India, and the threat that Mr Modi poses to its democratic nature worries observers inside and outside the country. Indeed, one of the reasons India’s performance is less admired than it might be is that people are reluctant to highlight it lest they be seen as endorsing Mr Modi.

But a realistic approach to things which government can and cannot do has paid dividends—despite being based on truths which Mr Modi would never publicly affirm. His government sees that second-best policies forcefully implemented are better than immaculate plans that never happen. It acts on the basis that the country can industrialise, but not as fast as East Asia did. Though it sees the potential in the rise of tech platforms, the shift to clean energy and the redesign of the world’s supply chains, it appreciates that the age of open globalisation that China exploited in the 1990s and 2000s is over. And it knows that if it is to win a continual cycle of elections (the next national poll is in 2024), economic disruption must be combined with instant gratification for the mass of voters.

The first and most important pillar of India’s new growth pattern is the emergence of a single national market in which more firms and consumers use the modern financial system. This is fast superseding regional markets and informal businesses using mainly cash, which accounted for two-fifths of output and 87% of jobs five years ago. Much of the reform and investment underpinning this change predate Mr Modi, but he has expedited them.

Infrastructure is crucial. The national highway network is over 50% longer than it was in 2014 (it also uses a digital tolling system to avoid queues). The number of domestic air passengers has doubled; air-freight volumes are up by 44%. There are more than three times as many mobile-phone base stations, supporting 783m broadband subscribers. Wall Street private-equity firms are competing to create networks of warehouses across India.

In addition to all this tarmac and concrete is the “India stack”, a unitary national digital infrastructure created by the state and championed by Mr Modi. This includes Aadhaar, a biometric identity system for all Indians; a push to make sure everyone has a bank account; and a national payments system known as UPI . A huge obstacle to trade between states has been removed by the adoption of a nationwide goods-and-services tax ( GST ) in place of umpteen local levies. As a result, more businesses are being dragged into the daylight, using modern banking and perhaps paying taxes. Payments via UPI have risen from the equivalent of 13% of monthly GDP in January 2020 to 50% in April 2022. Receipts from GST reached the equivalent of 8% of monthly GDP in April (see chart 3). Tax evasion is getting harder. Competition in a national marketplace has been bad news for smaller firms that were reliant on tax-dodging and captive markets. The covid-19 slump hit them badly, too: by some estimates, 10-20% have failed during the past few years. Investment by households, which operate lots of tiny informal businesses, has dropped from 16% of GDP a decade ago to 10%. Bigger firms that have brands, scale and technological perspicacity have grown. For example, Titan, the leading firm in the jewellery trade, boosted sales by a third and floor space by a fifth during the pandemic. A new bankruptcy code that makes it harder for zombie firms to stagger on is also spurring consolidation. Formalisation and consolidation, in turn, presage a leap in productivity. McKinsey, a consultancy, reckons India’s top 600 firms are 11 times more productive than the average. The second pillar of India’s new growth concerns industry. India has long dreamed of becoming a factory for the world. But manufacturing’s share of output has remained stuck at 17-18% over the past decade as corporate investment by all firms has idled at the equivalent of 9-12% of GDP . The country accounts for a paltry 1.9% of global exports of goods.

Bigger and bigger business

Big companies with large cashflows are looking to change this. Saurabh Mukherjea of Marcellus, an asset manager, calculates that India’s top 20 firms earn 50% of corporate India’s cashflows. They are making money fast enough to take risks with their earnings instead of having to borrow to excess. The ambitious giants include conglomerates—Adani (energy, transport), Reliance Industries (telecoms, chemicals, energy, retail), Tata ( IT , retail, energy, cars)—and more focused giants such as JSW (mainly steel).

Those four firms alone plan to invest more than $250bn over the next five to eight years in infrastructure and emerging industries; in doing so they intend to develop local supply chains, which fits with government goals. Mukesh Ambani of Reliance says he will cut the price of green hydrogen to $1 per kilogram by 2030, for instance, from about $5 today. Tata is rolling out battery plants, electric vehicles and semiconductors. These are huge, risky bets that few other firms would dare take.

There are worries about excessive corporate power, monopolies and, in some cases, cronyism. If the firms accrue yet more economic power through their investments, such concerns will surely grow. At the moment, though, the ratio of those four firms’ profits to national GDP is 0.7%, half the equivalent ratio for the four tech giants which are currently America’s biggest companies. The government seems happy with big business, given its high reinvestment rates.

Hoping to benefit from multinationals’ efforts to diversify away from China, Mr Modi’s lieutenants are also handing out $26bn in subsidies over the next five years for investment in 14 industries. These “production-linked incentives” ( PLI s) pay out as firms’ revenues expand in such fields as solar panels, batteries and pharmaceuticals. Samsung from South Korea and Foxconn from Taiwan are using PLI s to make more mobile phones in India. Local companies, such as Ola Electric, an affiliate of a big ride-hailing firm, are also taking advantage of them. Ola has built a large e-scooter factory 90km from Bangalore with the goal of becoming a global force.

The government wants to catalyse manufacturing. The danger is that benign intentions degenerate into cronyism and protectionism. Still, although $26bn amounts to only roughly 1% of all expected corporate investment over the next five years, in the short run the policy is having the intended effect.

The new edifice’s third pillar is founded on a long-standing strength: technology. India’s IT -services and outsourcing industry has doubled in size over the past decade. Its annual revenues are now $230bn. That has made India the world’s fifth-biggest exporter of services, despite being only 16th in goods. A global shortage of software engineers, and the fact that software is increasingly supplied as a service from the cloud, mean that the trend is likely to continue. India’s biggest difficulty is now finding talent. Some 5m people already work in tech and there is a red-hot market for new workers.

The combination of engineering skills, mobile data and a national tech stack has created lots of startups. They have gone from providing e-commerce, delivery and ride-sharing services for the 10m-20m richest Indians to seeking opportunities further down the economic pyramid. And Bangalore’s low-key tech culture is fostering a new generation of firms that are closer to the global frontier of innovation, for example in space, drones and batteries. Four such “deep-tech” firms that spoke to The Economist all use domestic research and development and are targeting exports for over half of their sales. A rich venture-capital system can finance firms throughout their life-cycle, from angel funding to public offerings (which financial reforms have made easier). A local venture capitalist reckons there is a pipeline of 10,000 plausible startups created each year.

The single market, industrial policy and technology seem likely to bring about a pick-up in growth from the 5.4% year-on-year rate reported in the final quarter of 2021. A mortgage banker says, “I have never seen this kind of demand for loan applications in 40 years.” Demand for electric vehicles is booming, a manufacturer exults. Capital spending is starting to revive, according to an index compiled by CMIE , an analysis firm. Exports are rising.

What, though, of jobs? Formal employment is rising: enrolment in the national social-security scheme for formal blue-collar workers has risen by 19m, to 56m, since early 2020. But that reflects the formalisation of the economy. The share of Indians aged over 15 in work of any sort was 55% in 2012 but only 51% in 2020. Sluggish jobs growth, with a paucity of women in work, are long-standing problems. The jobs that exist are often miserable.

Hence the fourth pillar, digital welfare, with payments for some 300 schemes for needy Indians, from job support to fertiliser subsidies, sent straight to people’s bank accounts. This cuts out bureaucrats and allows spending on a staggering scale. In the year to March, payments reached $81bn, or 3% of GDP , up from 1% four years earlier. Payments have totalled $270bn since 2017. Roughly 950m people have benefited, at an average of $86 per person per year. That makes a difference to struggling households: India’s extreme poverty line is about $250 per person per year at market exchange rates. Mr Modi has not managed to initiate a national jobs boom, but he has created a national safety-net of sorts.

Money for the masses

These four pillars could sustain a transformation of India’s economy over the next decade. It would have a core of highly productive firms. Digital services would mean most people’s consumption took place efficiently in the formal economy (even if their jobs remained informal), raising productivity and channelling funds into the banking system. All this would be taxed, allowing the government to pay for redistribution, using the direct welfare system to placate a great mass of underskilled and under employed people.

One risk to this vision is economic instability. India is dependent on inflows of capital to finance its current-account deficit. Though it uses almost a fifth less oil per unit of GDP than it did a decade ago, almost all of that oil is imported. When interest rates and commodity prices rise, it tends to suffer. Welfare spending has helped push the budget deficit to 10% of GDP and public debt to 87% of GDP . On May 4th India’s central bank raised interest rates from 4% to 4.4% in response to inflation and the global tightening of monetary policy.

That said, the financial system is more resilient than it was. Banks’ bad debts have at last been cleaned up. A growing pool of domestic investors offer resilience should foreigners feel forced to flee. And formalisation of the economy gives the government more tax-raising clout.

Another danger is Mr Modi’s style of rule. Businesspeople know he is not the progenitor of all that is working well; he did not invent the tech stack, road-building or unicorns. But they see a government that is more consistent and less corrupt than its predecessor. What is more, his political dominance provides continuity. “They are not ideas guys, but they are open,” says one company founder. “Modi puts the full weight of the system behind it. They are able to kick butt, to get it done.”

A penchant for quick, second-best decisions has costs, though. Intractable problems fester. Despite surging private investment in renewable energy, the state-owned firms that distribute electricity are bankrupt and supply is unreliable. Education remains terrible. Although school enrolment has risen to over 90% for children under 16, many leave barely literate. More efficient welfare is not a substitute for a system in which people are more fully able to realise their potential, rather than be left on tiny farms as automated factories pass them by. Too little is being done to prepare such farms, or the country as a whole, for the ravages of climate change.

There are other disturbing aspects to the mindset of Mr Modi’s BJP . The ideology of self-reliance and habit of tinkering with tariffs could yet morph into full-blown protectionism. The culture of intimidation it fosters in the political world could become a bigger feature of the business world, too. It has already bullied the press and eroded judicial independence.

So far the economy seems to be insulated from the religious tensions that the BJP continuously heightens to sustain itself in power. This is not new. In 2002, in the last big bout of religious violence, over 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed in riots in the state of Gujarat. But the economy shrugged off the horror: the national stockmarket dipped by 4% for a day and then recovered. Gujarat’s GDP grew by 8% the following year, twice as fast as the national economy—growth which helped Mr Modi, then the state’s chief minister, rise to his current office.

Unlike, say, ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, India’s persecuted Muslim minority does not have a disproportionate role in business. Their exclusion reflects discrimination. It also limits the potential scale of any capital flight should things deteriorate further. But there is a chance that sectarian violence could return on a large scale. And Mr Modi’s chauvinism could also damage the economy by destabilising the federal system. Promoting Hindi as a national language goes down badly in the south and Maharashtra, which have disproportionate economic weight. A potential redrawing of India’s parliamentary seats could heighten regional tensions. The government’s sinister tendency to undermine rival sources of power could obfuscate problems and promote cronyism.

Mr Modi wants to restore Indian greatness. For him, that seems to involve not only bolstering Hindu pride at the expense of minorities, but also building a large, integrated, high-tech economy. So far the two ambitions have gone together, but that may not always be so. India’s Rockefellers and tech stars are hoping that the country’s economic modernisation and unification will survive his divisive politics. ■

O VER THE past three years India has endured more than its share of bad news and suffering. The pandemic has killed between 2.2m and 9.7m people. Lockdowns caused the economy to shrink temporarily by a quarter and triggered the largest internal migrations since partition in 1947, as city workers fled to their villages. Religious tensions have been simmering, stoked by the anti-Muslim chauvinism of the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ), in power since 2014 under the strongman prime minister, Narendra Modi. Now a heatwave is baking the north of the country and the global oil- and food-price shock is battering the poor.

Yet as our Briefing explains, if you take a step back, a novel confluence of forces stands to transform India’s economy over the next decade, improving the lives of 1.4bn people and changing the balance of power in Asia. Technological leaps, the energy transition and geopolitical shifts are creating new opportunities—and new tools to fix intractable problems. The biggest threat to all this is India’s incendiary politics.

Since India opened up in 1991, its economy has prompted both euphoria and despair. One minute it is the next China: a rising superpower bursting with enterprising geniuses. The next it is a demographic time-bomb unable to generate hope for its young people; or a Wild West where Vodafone and other naive multinationals are fleeced. Over the past decade India has outgrown most other big countries, yet this has been overshadowed by a sense of disappointment. It has not engineered the manufacturing surge that enriched East Asia nor built enough big companies to marshal capital for development. Its fragmented markets and informal firms create few good jobs.

As the country emerges from the pandemic, however, a new pattern of growth is visible. It is unlike anything you have seen before. An indigenous tech effort is key. As the cost of technology has dropped, India has rolled out a national “tech stack”: a set of state-sponsored digital services that link ordinary Indians with an electronic identity, payments and tax systems, and bank accounts. The rapid adoption of these platforms is forcing a vast, inefficient, informal cash economy into the 21st century. It has turbocharged the world’s third-largest startup scene after America’s and China’s.

Alongside that, global trends are creating bigger business clusters. The IT -services industry has doubled in size in a decade, helped by the cloud and a worldwide shortage of software workers. Where else can Western firms find half a million new engineers a year? There is a renewable-energy investment spree: India ranks third for solar installations and is pioneering green hydrogen. As firms everywhere reconfigure supply chains to lessen their reliance on China, India’s attractions as a manufacturing location have risen, helped by a $26bn subsidy scheme. Western governments are keen to forge defence and technology links. India has also found a workaround to redistribute more to ordinary folk who vote but rarely see immediate gains from economic reforms: a direct, real-time, digital welfare system that in 36 months has paid $200bn to about 950m people.

These changes will not lead to a manufacturing boom as big as those in South Korea or China, which created enough jobs to empty the fields of farmers. They do not solve deep problems such as extreme weather or clogged courts. But they do help explain why India is forecast to be the world’s fastest-growing big economy in 2022 and why it has a chance of holding on to that title for years. Growth generates more wealth to invest in the country’s human capital, particularly hospitals and schools.

Who deserves the credit? Chance has played a big role: India did not create the Sino-American split or the cloud, but benefits from both. So has the steady accumulation of piecemeal reform over many governments. The digital-identity scheme and new national tax system were dreamed up a decade or more ago.

Mr Modi’s government has also got a lot right. It has backed the tech stack and direct welfare, and persevered with the painful task of shrinking the informal economy. It has found pragmatic fixes. Central-government purchases of solar power have kick-started renewables. Financial reforms have made it easier to float young firms and bankrupt bad ones. Mr Modi’s electoral prowess provides economic continuity. Even the opposition expects him to be in power well after the election in 2024.

The danger is that over the next decade this dominance hardens into autocracy. One risk is the BJP ’s abhorrent hostility towards Muslims, which it uses to rally its political base. Companies tend to shrug this off, judging that Mr Modi can keep tensions under control and that capital flight will be limited. Yet violence and deteriorating human rights could lead to stigma that impairs India’s access to Western markets. The BJP ’s desire for religious and linguistic conformity in a huge, diverse country could be destabilising. Were the party to impose Hindi as the national language, secessionist pressures would grow in some wealthy states that pay much of the taxes.

The quality of decision-making could also deteriorate. Prickly and vindictive, the government has co-opted the bureaucracy to bully the press and the courts. A botched decision to abolish bank notes in 2016 showed Mr Modi’s impulsive side. A strongman lacking checks and balances can eventually endanger not just demo cracy, but also the economy: think of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, whose bizarre views on inflation have caused a currency crisis. And, given the BJP ’s ambivalence towards foreign capital, the campaign for national renewal risks regressing into protectionism. The party loves blank cheques from Silicon Valley but is wary of foreign firms competing in India. Today’s targeted subsidies could degenerate into autarky and cronyism—the tendencies that have long held India back.

Seizing the moment

For India to grow at 7% or 8% for years to come would be momentous. It would lift huge numbers of people out of poverty. It would generate a vast new market and manufacturing base for global business, and it would change the global balance of power by creating a bigger counterweight to China in Asia. Fate, inheritance and pragmatic decisions have created a new opportunity in the next decade. It is India’s and Mr Modi’s to squander. ■

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A COMMAND CENTRE to scan the digital realm for global disinformation campaigns. Standardised plugs for electric cars that will work both in America and in the European Union ( EU ) and so lower the cost of building the infrastructure needed to decarbonise. A transatlantic team to scout for attempts by China and others to manipulate global technical standards in their favour. These sorts of initiatives sound like common sense, but they are difficult in a world where even allies have competing regulators, vying for technological dominion. Happily, a transatlantic diplomatic undertaking that most people have never heard of is trying to change all that.

The group in question, called the “Trade and Technology Council” ( TTC ), will convene in Saclay, a suburb of Paris, on May 15th and 16th. A constellation of grand officials from either side of the Atlantic—including America’s secretary of state, commerce secretary and top trade negotiator, and the EU ’s commissioners for trade and competition—will be meeting for the second time. Whereas their first meeting in September in Pittsburgh was mainly meant for participants to get to know each other, the gathering in France will assess progress on their work so far and set goals for the next two years.

It is a momentous task. The TTC is the West’s response to efforts by China and others (notably Russia after its invasion of Ukraine) to build an autocratic digital world and bring the physical supply-chains that underpin it under their control. “The big question is whether democratic governments can develop a meaningful alternative,” explains Marietje Schaake of the Cyber Policy Centre at Stanford University. If America and the EU resolve their differences in tech, other countries are bound to follow their lead: the pair account for 55% of the global market for information technology, whose value is expected to reach a staggering $4.4trn this year, according to Gartner, a consultancy.

The TTC was set up last year as a “transatlantic inter-agency”, in the words of Paul Triolo of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a foreign-policy consultancy. It is supposed to be the main venue in which America and the EU co-ordinate policy for the digital realm. The two sides have created ten working groups, ranging from “technology standards” and “secure supply chains” to “investment screening” and “climate and clean tech”.

The structure of the TTC allows the relevant agencies and experts in Brussels and Washington to develop working relationships that go beyond ad hoc encounters that have long dominated transatlantic policymaking. It is a practical forum in which they can resolve their digital differences. Officials once barely knew who was in charge of a given topic on the other side of the Atlantic. Now they can just jump on a video call. “The TTC has become the conduit for much of the US - EU co-operation,” explains the chair of one of the council’s working groups.

The TTC has already helped move negotiations along in several areas, particularly with regard to a new version of “Privacy Shield”, an agreement to create a clear legal basis for flows of personal data across the Atlantic. The original was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2020. It ruled that the agreement did not sufficiently limit American law-enforcement agencies’ access to the personal data of European citizens.

Although talks to reform “Privacy Shield” are not officially on the TTC ’s agenda, they involve many of the same officials. Their familiarity with each other was one big reason why President Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, were able to announce in March that both sides had finally agreed on a deal “in principle”. This will provide the basis for more progress in the TTC . If America and the EU had not even been able to agree on data flows, says another official, other attempts at transatlantic co-operation in tech policy would have been futile.

Another project that has benefited from the TTC is the “Declaration for the Future of the Internet”, which was announced on April 28th and signed by more than 60 countries. Complementing the TTC , this document lays out the priorities for an “open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure” internet—describing in effect an alternative to China’s and Russia’s increasingly autocratic technosphere. Yet it is not aimed mainly at those two powers, both of which are certain to ignore it. It serves instead as a warning to other countries tempted to copy some of the pair’s authoritarian ways.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has both spurred the council’s efforts and proved their usefulness. Officials had, among other things, to decide which technology exports to block, how to strengthen cyber-security defences and what to do about Russia’s online disinformation campaigns. “That has given us something to co-operate on,” says another TTC participant.

Unsurprisingly, in light of the war, the beefiest proposals in a leaked draft of the “joint statement” to be published at the end of the meeting in Saclay relate to security. Both sides wish to share more information and harmonise regulations, a step which could one day lead to a common list of sensitive technologies to be kept out of the hands of autocratic regimes. As for supply chains, the idea is to develop, among other things, an early-warning system to avoid the sort of bottlenecks that have led to the current shortage of microchips. The two sides will also vow to refrain from further “subsidy races”, a clear danger in the semiconductor industry.

But in most areas, the council’s woolly pledges hint at the difficulty of the task ahead. In AI, the EU and America aim to “develop a shared hub/repository of metrics and methodologies for measuring AI trustworthiness and AI risks”. In climate and clean tech, both “work towards a common methodology for joint EU-US recommendations on selected carbon-intensive products”. In tech investment, the pair are thinking about holding a “tabletop exercise” to learn how the other side reacts when a Russian or Chinese firm comes knocking to acquire a local company. In other words, officials still are trying to find a common language.

If concrete “deliverables” are few and far between, it is because America and the EU still live on different digital planets when it comes to regulating big online platforms like Facebook and Google. The EU is putting the finishing touches on a series of sweeping laws, including the Digital Markets Act, meant to increase competition, and the Digital Services Act, to control harmful content. No equivalent bills are likely to make it through America’s Congress. Optimists note that ordinary Americans, if not their elected representatives, seem open to the idea of such rules: they trust tech companies even less than Europeans do (see chart). That is partly a function of America’s political gridlock, but partly also economic nationalism, in that far more of the firms to be regulated are American than European. The EU is guilty of similar protectionism: America’s negotiators want the TTC to speed up the deployment of two new ways of building mobile networks called Open RAN (short for Open Radio Access Network) and “virtualisation”. These should make it easier for new providers of telecommunications gear to emerge, which would provide more competition for Huawei, a Chinese information-technology giant which is accused of working closely with spooks in Beijing. But Open RAN and virtualisation also weaken two big European firms, Ericsson and Nokia, which are in the same business as Huawei. And they create opportunities for America’s big cloud providers, in particular Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, to get involved in telecoms.

More such squabbles are likely to emerge once the TTC focuses more narrowly on its original purpose: challenging China. “It’s one thing to negotiate export controls for Russia, where the economic impact is quite small, but things become much more difficult to do this for a giant like China,” says Martijn Rasser of the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank. China is central to most tech supply chains. Many firms from both America and the EU have big investments there. Another problem is that neither side can really be trusted to keep its promises. If Donald Trump is re-elected in 2024, or another Trump-like president enters the White House, the TTC may soon be forgotten. As for the EU , the European Court of Justice may yet strike down the new version of “Privacy Shield”, too. Similar lawsuits are possible in America as well. “It’s a legal Rubik’s Cube,” says Peter Swire of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who helped develop the new agreement, which has not yet been made public.

Counting your chips

The TTC ’s admirers argue that the logical response is for the council to be more ambitious while it still can. They applaud its bolder aims, such as creating common rules for AI and increasing transatlantic co-operation on cyber-security. Another way to strengthen the group would be to invite other like-minded countries, such as Japan and South Korea, or even large companies and other organisations, to join its deliberations. (Big tech firms and other entities will attend the pow-wow in Saclay on an informal basis.)

Some would even like the TTC to evolve into a “tech alliance” of democracies, the digital NATO called for when Mr Biden was elected in late 2020. Recent developments suggest a more probable outcome will be a network of bilateral undertakings. In April the EU agreed such a deal with India and has embarked on a similar process with Japan. Tech is also being discussed in the Quad, the security dialogue between America, Australia, India and Japan. “Just as regulation tends to mirror the industries that it’s regulating, the international system is starting to mirror the industries that they’re trying to address,” says Tyson Barker of the German Council on Foreign Relations, another think-tank. “Expect an ecosystem of alliances.” ■

S OPHIA TETOFF was 12 years old in 1901 when she was sent 4,000 miles from her island home in the Bering Sea to Carlisle, an Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania. Sophia was a member of Alaska’s Unangax people. Five years later, she died from tuberculosis. She was buried in the school’s cemetery and largely forgotten. Her name on her headstone was misspelt. Her tribe’s name was incorrect. Sophia was one of thousands of children separated from their communities, often forcibly, and sent to Indian boarding schools.

Last summer Deb Haaland, the secretary of the interior, whose department manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of such policies. On May 11th Ms Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, released the first volume of the review. The investigation found that from 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding-school system had 408 schools across 37 states or territories. Burial sites were identified at 53 schools (as the investigation continues that number is expected to rise). The Indian children who died at schools far from their families could number in the tens of thousands.

“The consequences of federal Indian boarding-school policies…inflicted upon generations of children as young as four years old are heartbreaking and undeniable,” said Ms Haaland. Forced-assimilation practices included cutting off the children’s long hair, and stripping them of their traditional clothing, language and culture. The government mixed children from different tribes to disrupt connections and force the use of English. There was rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse as well as malnourishment, disease and overcrowding. Many children were sent out to farms and businesses for months of manual labour. The schools often pocketed their wages.

Ms Haaland was moved to shed light on these traumas by the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves connected to Indian residential schools in Canada. The review found much evidence of intergenerational trauma caused by family separation and cultural eradication. Ms Haaland’s own grandparents were stolen from their families and sent away to school. Her great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle.

Carlisle was used as a model for other schools. Its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, infamously said in 1892, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” His outlook was not novel. As far back as George Washington it was part of federal policy. Indian territorial dispossession and assimilation through education was considered a cheap and safe way of subduing Native Americans. By 1926, 83% of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools.

The initiative will continue its search for burial sites. It also intends to identify surviving boarding-school pupils to document their experiences. And it will explore the potential repatriation or disinterment of children’s remains. Sophia’s remains, along with those of nine Rosebud Sioux children, returned to Alaska and South Dakota last summer, where they were welcomed home by their communities. At the review’s unveiling Deborah Parker, head of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, said: “Our children deserve to be brought home.” ■

F IRE-FIGHTING FOAM starves the flames of oxygen. A handful of overused words have the same deadening effect on people’s ability to think. These are words like “innovation”, “collaboration”, “flexibility”, “purpose” and “sustainability”. They coat consultants’ websites, blanket candidates’ CV s and spray from managers’ mouths. They are anodyne to the point of being useless.

These words are ubiquitous in part because they are so hard to argue against. Who really wants to be the person making the case for silos? Which executive secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation officer? Is it even possible to have purposelessness as a goal? Just as Karl Popper, a philosopher, made falsifiability a test of whether a theory could be described as scientific, antonymy is a good way to work out whether an idea has any value. Unless its opposite could possibly have something to recommend it, a word is too woolly to be truly helpful.

Woolliness is the enemy of accuracy as well as utility. A word like “sustainability” is so fuzzy that it is used to encompass everything from a business that thinks sensibly about the long term to the end of capitalism. This column may well count as sustainable because it keeps recycling the same ideas. The lack of precision opens the door to grandstanding and greenwashing. Earlier this year Morningstar, a data provider, culled 1,200 funds from its European sustainable-investment list after a closer review of their prospectuses and annual reports. Regulators in America and Europe have been scrambling to define standards of sustainability disclosure.

Woolliness also smothers debate about whether you can have too much of a good thing. Take “innovation”, for example. Too much innovation can be a turn-off for customers. A recent paper from Yingyue Luan and Yeun Joon Kim of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge looks at the effect of perceived novelty on the response of audiences to films. The researchers find that there is a sweet spot in experimentation, where films are distinctive enough to pique curiosity but not so radical that they up-end expectations. In that space between “Home Alone 4” and “Tenet” lie the real moneymaking opportunities.

Innovation can also be trying for employees. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) recently looked at factors that predicted high levels of attrition among companies’ workforces. To their surprise, they found that employees were more likely to leave firms—like Tesla and Nvidia—with high levels of innovation. The authors hypothesise that the long hours and high pressure that typify innovative cultures can lead to higher staff turnover.

“Collaboration” is another word that repays closer scrutiny. It can be marvellous: boundaries dissolved, expertise and ideas flowing. But collaboration can also run wild. It often means having more and more people on every email thread and in every meeting. It can paralyse decision-making, as everyone and their dog gets to weigh in with their view. (To be fair, the dog often makes the most useful points.)

And the rewards that flow from collaborativeness are uneven. “The No Club”, a new book by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart, examines the disproportionate amount of “non-promotable work” done by women—tasks like covering absences, organising logistics and mentoring. Collaboration is a much less attractive proposition if helping others means spending less time on the sort of work that gets recognised when it is time to hand out actual promotions.

A host of other woolly words also mask genuine trade-offs. The supremely fluffy notion of “purpose” disguises hard-edged questions of how managers should balance the interests of multiple stakeholders. “Flexibility” sounds like a boon to workers, but the reality for employees of coping with last-minute changes to schedules is often very different. The MIT study found that having a regular schedule was six times more powerful as a predictor of blue-collar-employee retention than having a flexible schedule.

Traits like innovativeness or collaborativeness are still qualities for firms to aspire to. And this is not an argument for constant qualification of what is meant: the one way to make “purpose” more annoying is to put the word “smart” in front of it. But it is a plea for managers to use woolly words thoughtfully. They are not going away, but they do not have to suffocate mental activity.

Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work

Why working from anywhere isn’t realistic (May 7th)

The case for Easter eggs and other treats

(Apr 30th)

Startups for the modern workplace (Apr 23rd)

T HE SANDWICH goes by several names, including “canteen”, “tavern” and, most descriptively, “loose meat”. First sold in Muscatine, Iowa, nearly a century ago, it is now popular across the state. Like a hamburger, a Maid-Rite—as the dish is known at Dan’s Sandwich Shop in Newton, Iowa—is made from ground beef. But instead of a patty flipped off a grill, diners get a scoop of loose, pebbly, well-done meat dug out of a cooking trough and dumped onto a bun, typically topped with mustard, ketchup and pickles.

Mike Brown, the restaurant’s proprietor since last year, proudly notes that he cuts the beef fresh every day, adding nothing, not even salt. (Before him Dan Holtcamp ran the place for half a century with his wife, Pam, and bequeathed it his name.) To non-Iowans, the sandwich can seem a perplexingly austere creation. It offers neither the compact, car-friendly convenience of a burger—the meat in a Maid-Rite, being loose, tends to spill out—nor the saucy comfort of a Sloppy Joe. But it says much about the charm and persistence of regional cuisine.

If a Maid-Rite were merely a disintegrating, suboptimal burger, Iowans would have long stopped eating them. They do not lack for choice; like most small American towns, Newton abounds in familiar burger-slinging franchises. Yet Mr Brown estimates that on most days, he cuts and cooks up to 150 pounds (68kg) of beef, enough for a few hundred sandwiches: not bad for a town of 15,000 people.

Asked why the Maid-Rite has not found a wider market, Mr Brown says “the right person” hasn’t come along to champion it. That may not be the whole story; the sandwich is probably too bland and beefy for an increasingly multicultural America. But as a general comment on regional foods that are handed down through generations of locals, his rationale stands.

They are as much the product of savvy marketing, an affable restaurateur or chance—“the right person” in the right place and time—as of recipes or terroir. Meat, bread and cheese are not unique to Philadelphia, but the cheesesteak is. Someone experimented, people liked it, and a regional food was born. Other, less serendipitous dishes perish with their creators, not always because they are inferior.

If they endure, regional foods become artefacts of habit and memory. When out-of-towners sit down at Dan’s lunch counter and eat a Maid-Rite, as Barack Obama once did (pictured), they indulge in something new and exotic. They may find it delicious or unremarkable, but unless they return to rural Iowa, they may not eat another.

But a local who eats a Maid-Rite is not just eating beef on bread. He is ordering what he ate with his father after Little League games, what his mother brought home from work when she was too tired to cook, or what he longed for in the army. She is eating what she ate with her friends after school or on prom night. Regional food does not have to be superior or even comprehensible to outsiders to help devotees, wherever they are, deepen their connections to the past, and to themselves. ■

K NEE-DEEP in the rushing waters of a creek in the valley of the Pasvik river, Paul Aspholm of the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research is trying to prevent a lifetime’s work from being washed away by politics. Wading into the frozen stream, he peers through a water visor and tots up how many mussels he can spot in an area recently exposed by thawing ice. He would normally compare these numbers with similar data gathered by Russian counterparts splashing likewise in rivers a few kilometres farther east. But all contact with them has stopped.

Dr Aspholm has spent 30 years studying the wildlife that inhabits the Arctic lands where Norway and Russia march. He has needed Russian scientists’ assistance for almost everything he has done. Together, they have kept track of species ranging from the area’s native brown bears to the invasive pink salmon that are driving out local trout and salmon, and which die in such numbers when they spawn that bacteria feeding on their corpses turn the rivers toxic and so kill other animals which live in or drink those waters. They had planned this autumn to start tracking the migration of elk along a narrow “superhighway” through the tundra, but the war has put paid to that.

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February, ties between Russian and Western scientists have frozen. Hundreds of long-standing partnerships like Dr Aspholm’s have been put on indefinite hold and projects involving Russian researchers have either suspended their participation or been put on ice entirely.

This has thrown Arctic science into chaos. More than half the Arctic’s coastline is Russian. Information from stations in Siberia and buoys in the Arctic Ocean provide irreplaceable data on climate change. Fieldwork in the Russian Arctic gives snapshots of how animals, plants and soils are responding to this change. The Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum which promotes research in the area, has been on pause since early March.

In northern Norway, Dr Aspholm is making a leap of faith. Later this month he will take his team back to the Pasvik, which forms part of Norway’s border with Russia, for a bird-counting expedition that has happened every year since 1995. “We will try and do it just like last time,” he says, “and hope that the Russians show up at the same time and do it the same way on their side.” If the Russians do not appear, he worries, there is a good chance any data his team gather will be incomplete nonsense.

On its own, a gap in knowledge of the peregrinations of waders might not matter much. But such lacunae add up. And for data that feed into research on climate change, which the timings of bird migrations do, such losses are important.

Sanctions, says Dag Rune, rector of the Arctic University, in Tromso, “will have devastating consequences for Arctic research, and the consequences for climate change are obvious. Projects in the Arctic”, he observes, “are major operations that involve money, equipment, travel, and this is exactly the kind of research that is being most affected by sanctions.”

Sander Veraverbeke, a climate scientist at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, is another whose work is threatened. He studies fires in the Arctic, and had been planning to resume fieldwork in northern Siberia after two years lost because of covid-19. Since he was last in Russia, Siberia has been ablaze. The past three years have seen record numbers of fires in the east of that vast expanse of land: not a good time, then, for there to be gaps in the data.

Some work can be done using satellites, or by studying comparable sites in Canada and Alaska. But this gets you only so far. Permafrost research, crucial for understanding where climate projections will end up, is likely to suffer in particular. Two-thirds of Russia is covered by permafrost, and this frozen ground locks up huge amounts of organic material. As it melts and that organic material decays, greenhouse gases in the form of methane and carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. Without good data on these emissions, understanding about their contribution to climate change will decline.

Something even more destructive than a further year of lost fieldwork, however, is the damage to networks that have been knitted painstakingly together since the cold war. Levels of formal communication between Western and Russian scientists have declined to a point far worse, even, than during the late 1970s and 1980s. Russian researchers have, for example, been “disinvited” from academic conferences, such as the Arctic science summit week held at the end of March, where scientists gather to present research, compile and assess data, and discuss research priorities.

Climates of opinion

Isolating Russia this way creates a dilemma. Losing Russian contributions to climate science in order to punish the place for invading Ukraine might be seen as cutting off noses to spite faces. “We are missing out on almost two-thirds of the Arctic now,” explains Dr Veraverbeke. “We have a lot of good colleagues that we need to be in touch with and collaborate with to have an understanding of what is going on in Siberia. It is really impacting our understanding of one of the most dramatically changing areas on Earth.”

Russian science will suffer too. Russian researchers rely on the West not just for collaboration, but also for the money that comes with it. Of Russia’s top ten scientific collaborators, according to publication statistics from Nature Index, a database that tracks scientific output, only China has failed to impose post-invasion academic sanctions on Russia. There is thus a looming funding crisis for dozens of Russian research and data stations that were maintained by Western support.

Even if things start to normalise soon, it might be difficult to snap back to how it was. “It will not be easy,” says Dag Olsen, at the Arctic University. “There is absolutely no trust.” In March 200 of his Russian counterparts, including the rector of the Northern Arctic Federal University in Arkhangelsk, signed a letter supporting the invasion of Ukraine. In Pasvik valley, meanwhile, the only contact Dr Aspholm has had with the Russian scientists on the other side since the academic curtain fell was an email from a colleague in Karelia. “It was an opinion about mussel distribution,” he laughs. “I am not able to reply.” ■

F OR MONTHS opinion polls have made Gustavo Petro, a leftist populist, the front-runner in Colombia’s presidential election, which is due to take place on May 29th. But Mr Petro’s challenge is not just to defeat his rivals, chief among them Federico Gutiérrez, a centre-right former mayor of Medellín. It is also to stay alive. Earlier this month Mr Petro cancelled a two-day campaign trip, for reasons of security. His team said it had information that La Cordillera, a paramilitary group, was planning to kill him.

This threat conjures up ghosts from Colombia’s past. In 1989 Bello spent a day in the southern city of Palmira watching César Gaviria campaign. He was followed by three ambulances, one equipped with an intensive-care bed. He spoke from behind a bullet-proof rostrum, surrounded by a huddle of six policemen clutching Uzi submachineguns. Mr Gaviria had replaced Luis Carlos Galán, a Liberal reformer who was gunned down at a rally three months before. By the time Mr Gaviria was elected president in 1990, two more candidates, both left-wingers, had been shot dead.

Those were the days when Pablo Escobar, the boss of the Medellín drug mob, had declared war on Colombia’s political establishment. The country is much improved since then, thanks first to a security build-up, though one not free of abuses, by Álvaro Uribe, president from 2002 to 2010, and then a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas in 2016 by his successor, Juan Manuel Santos. The murder rate fell by almost two-thirds between 2002 and 2017.

But security has deteriorated since then. Iván Duque, the current president, has failed to make the most of the peace agreement. In November he claimed to have dismantled the Gulf Clan, the largest paramilitary drug-trafficking organisation, when troops arrested its boss, Dairo Antonio Úsaga. But this month, hours after Mr Úsaga was extradited to the United States, the Clan shut down a large swathe of north-western Colombia with a four-day “armed strike”.

Mr Duque has politicised the security forces, naming as commanders people close to Mr Uribe. According to prosecutors, several retired officers have links to the Gulf Clan. When Mr Petro alluded to that in a tweet after six soldiers were killed by drug-traffickers in April, General Eduardo Zapateiro, the army commander, attacked him for using their deaths for “campaign narratives” and offered other criticisms of the candidate. Many opposition figures saw this unusual political intervention as unconstitutional, and called for General Zapateiro to be sacked. But Mr Duque defended him.

If Mr Petro wins, he would be Colombia’s first avowedly left-wing president. He was once a member of M -19, a nationalist guerrilla group. But that is not the reason he alarms many Colombians. Rather it is because until recently he was an enthusiastic supporter of the late Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s elected autocrat. He now presents himself as a moderate and has pledged not to expropriate any businesses. But some of his proposals still seem quite extreme. He promises, for example, to guarantee public employment to all the jobless (unemployment stands at 12%) and to persuade the central bank to print money to finance the government. He wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Venezuela. Other proposals are opposed by reactionary landowners and cattle-farmers, such as a plan to tax idle land.

Colombia is a country of checks and balances. The powerful constitutional court thwarted Mr Uribe’s attempt to turn himself into president for life. The central bank is independent. Mr Petro would lack a majority in the Congress, although he might secure one eventually.

Mr Petro wears a bulletproof vest and does not announce his venues until the last minute. If he were to be killed it would be a moral indictment of Colombian democracy that would risk a downward spiral into violence. In 1948 Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a demagogic populist who like Mr Petro was a crowd-puller, was shot dead in Bogotá, the capital. He had said, paraphrasing the Gospel of St Luke, “If they kill me, there will not be left one stone upon another”. And so it came to pass: the centre of Bogotá was almost destroyed in days of rioting. Colombia was plunged into ten years of violence in which perhaps 180,000 people died.

That should be a warning to any would-be assassins and their sponsors. If he is elected Mr Petro may prove to be a bad president. But it is up to Colombia’s institutions to restrain him and only they can do so peacefully.

Read more from Bello, our columnist on Latin America:

Brazil’s presidential election in October will be about the economy (Apr 2nd)

Cuba’s dictatorship has a cultural opposition that it can’t tolerate (Mar 26th)

Chile’s new president won from the left. Can he govern like that? (Mar 19th)

A HIERARCHY OF hate exists on the progressive wing of British politics. True, Labour wallahs may not like their Conservative colleagues. But they save their real contempt for the Liberal Democrats, whom they deride as spineless cynics and dirty campaigners. In a feat of projection, the Lib Dems detest the Greens because it is annoying to have a small party with no chance of power snatch precious votes. Meanwhile, everyone loathes the Scottish National Party ( SNP ) to the point that, when its Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, rises to speak in the House of Commons, an audible groan often echoes around the chamber.

Progressive parties in Britain struggle to work together, which keeps them out of power. That is not because of a lack of voters. Surprisingly, for a country that usually elects Conservative governments, the bulk of British voters support progressive parties. In every post-war election bar 2015, more voters supported progressive parties (Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP and the Greens) than conservative ones (the Conservative Party and its cousins on the radical right). Yet, owing to the iniquities of Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the government usually has a conservative bent.

In effect, Britain’s progressive parties are stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma. Co-operation would be better for all, yet they never quite manage it. Signs are emerging, however, that the dilemma has been solved. Changing electoral geography, a shift in Labour’s politics and canny voting behaviour suggest that Britain’s progressive parties could, for once, be more than the sum of their parts. Although Labour are only slightly ahead of, or level with, the Conservatives in most polls, progressive parties have a 20-point lead over their conservative rivals. A happy equilibrium has been reached. The prisoners could soon escape.

For starters, there is less incentive to fight each other. Progressive parties no longer tread on the turf of their peers. Sheffield Hallam, a leafy suburb of the Yorkshire city, is the only marginal constituency where Labour faces off against the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems predominantly battle the Conservatives in tighter races: around 70 of their 90 winnable target seats are Tory-held. As a result, peace has broken out in recent by-elections. Labour barely put up a fight in North Shropshire, when the previously safe Conservative seat fell to the Lib Dems. A similar strategy will be employed in forthcoming by-elections. A new era of non-aggression between the two parties, similar to one in the 1990s, is under way.

There is also less to scrap over in terms of ideology. Politics has settled down after a frenzied period, when both Labour and Conservatives dabbled in populism on the left and right. Brexit is no longer the be-all-and-end-all of British politics. Jeremy Corbyn, the fomer, hard-left Labour leader, made those wavering between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives nervous about not plumping for the Tories. Now, Labour is a more centrist option. Sir Keir Starmer was elected to lead the party on a soft-left ticket, and has since dragged Labour even more to the right. A mushy consensus blurs the lines between Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP .

That means progressive parties can focus on their target voters. If there is no challenge from rival parties for their metropolitan base, Labour can focus on winning seats that turned Tory at the last election. Likewise, the Liberal Democrats have previously been an incoherent mixture of low-tax liberals and disaffected social democrats. Now the party can focus on well-off, liberal Conservative voters in southern England. Call them Tesla Tories: those voters who were happy under David Cameron but chafe at the populist diet of illiberalism and tax rises served up by Boris Johnson.

Across southern England, Conservative MP s are nervous. Councils such as Somerset fell to the Lib Dems in local elections on May 5th. Talk of “levelling up” northern England sounds a lot like taking tax revenues raised in the south and spending them in the north. If Conservative voters in the Home Counties wanted that, they would have voted Labour in the first place. To placate them the Conservatives could admit that levelling up involves little money actually being spent. But that would upset their new supporters. Clinging on to both sets of voters, without the centripetal force of Brexit, is a tricky task.

It is one made harder by the efficiency of the Conservative vote. British politics follows the same principles as Wilkins Micawber’s finances. Theresa May managed 42.4% of the vote in 2017. Result: misery, and a hung parliament. In 2019 Mr Johnson won an extra 300,000 votes, hitting 43.6%. Result: happiness, and an 80-seat majority. A small swing has a big effect. British politics obsesses over the newest marginal voter—the extra shilling in Mr Micawber’s formula. It was new voters across the Midlands and northern England that won Mr Johnson his majority. It is forgotten Conservative voters in the south of England who stand to take it away.

Knight, knight Boris

A formal deal between progressive parties would either be pointless or harmful. Scottish independence would become a live issue if the SNP were involved in a pact. Oliver Dowden, part Conservative Party chairman and part political Rottweiler, accused Labour and the Liberal Democrats of a secret stitch-up ahead of the local elections. By causing a fuss, the hope is that a Tesla Tory in Winchester may still blanch at voting Lib Dem because of the thought of a Labour-led government. The truth is that there is no need for a formal pact when a tacit one is already in place.

Breaking out of jail will be the easy bit. Even pollsters optimistic about Labour’s chances think that a governing coalition of opposition parties is likely to be a total mess. Any such coalition would probably consist of three parties, or a complicated confidence-and-supply deal, in which junior parties support a Labour government on specific votes. The progressive parties do still hate each other, after all. But being in power beats being in prison. ■

Read more from Bagehot, our columnist on British politics:

British politics is stuck in a 1990s time-warp (May 7th)

Sir Keir Starmer, the cynical leader (Apr 30th)

Why Boris bashes the archbishop (Apr 23rd)

“L ET’S MAKE a thriller,” Alexei Navalny tells Daniel Roher, and the Canadian film-maker tries to oblige. “Navalny” has many of the genre’s key elements—a hero, villains, skulduggery—but runs into an obstacle. “Tango with Putin”, a documentary by Vera Krichevskaya about Dozhd (also known as TV Rain), a gutsy Russian news channel, faces the same problem. It lies not in the directors’ craft, still less in the merits of their subjects, but something deeper: the throttling of narrative in a dictatorship.

His eyes are a reproach. Piercingly blue, they peer from the screen as Mr Navalny exhorts his compatriots not to give up. Mr Roher filmed the Russian opposition leader as he recovered from a poisoning in Siberia in 2020 (old footage shows Yulia, his indomitable wife, struggling to get into his hospital room, lest his assailants finish the job). Recuperating in Germany, the patient links up with Christo Grozev, whom he describes as a “very kind Bulgarian nerd”; the investigator uses data from the dark web to track down the failed assassins.

Mr Navalny is a social-media maestro—barred from campaigning in other ways, he has had to be—and some viewers may already know of the phone calls he made to the goons who allegedly tried to kill him. The sequence is still gripping. One falls for his impersonation of a Kremlin official and spills the details of the botched hit, including the smearing of Novichok in Mr Navalny’s underwear. “He’s a dead man,” the team pityingly conclude of the unwitting informant.

If “Navalny” elucidates the workings, and incompetence, of Vladimir Putin’s death squad, the source of its subject’s amazing courage remains something of a mystery. By contrast, “Tango with Putin” (also called “[email protected] This Job”) shows how bravery can be nurtured by circumstance.

When Natalia Sindeeva launched Dozhd in 2010, she envisaged an upbeat lifestyle channel, not a crusading news outlet. By her own account, she previously had more interest in partying than in politics: the news imbued her with principles, rather than the other way round, beginning with a bombing at a Moscow airport in 2011. A four-way split screen—a repeated device in Ms Krichevskaya’s film—contrasts Dozhd’s coverage of the aftermath with the tranquillising pap being aired by state-controlled channels.

Another motif is Dozhd’s journalists calling in from the back of police vans. As the repression worsens, reporting becomes riskier, from the rigged Russian elections and protests of 2011-12, to the crisis in Ukraine and eruption of war in the Donbas region in 2013-14. The channel becomes a beacon of integrity less by design than by observing elementary journalistic principles. To be good, in this telling, is simply to obey your conscience. (Mr Navalny turns up in this film, too, giving advice on lighting for an interview.)

These documentaries chart different genealogies of heroism, seemingly innate in Mr Navalny’s case, accidental in Ms Sindeeva’s. Yet their outlines overlap. Both dramas are powered by exceptional, against-the-odds defiance of a crushing system. Ultimately, in both, that system bends and flattens the story arc.

Totalitarianism, noted George Orwell, forces storytellers to falsify facts and feelings. In a tyranny, he concluded, literature is doomed. In Mr Putin’s Russia, censorship is tightening anew. The squeeze is not just on the stories Russians can watch and read. It extends to the stories they can live—and thus, the tyrant hopes, even imagine.

In these films, the authoritarian ratchet is inexorable. Dozhd endures harrumphs from the Kremlin, then cyber-attacks, boycotts by cable providers, eviction from its studio, harassment and police raids. For his part, Mr Navalny is assaulted and imprisoned before being poisoned. “I’m not scared of anything,” he says when, in a classic act of Russian valour, he flies back from Germany to Moscow. “And I ask you not to be scared either.” This is the climax of “Navalny”.

Russia’s rulers have other ideas. Like most despots, they are philistines as well as brutes. But they understand the rudiments of narrative. They know a drama needs a denouement—in which the hero vanquishes the villain, or goes down in a blaze of glory—and see to it that there won’t be one. In the film, Mr Roher speculates that Mr Navalny may now be murdered; instead he is detained on arrival at the airport, then dispatched to a penal colony. Dozhd, meanwhile, is driven off the air. Their stories flatline in the bureaucratic vice of the police state. It is hard to make a thriller when someone else is writing the ending.

Read more from Back Story, our column on culture:

Philip Guston’s paintings are controversial. But here they are (Apr 30th)

“Atlanta” matches method with message to sensational effect (Apr 16th)

Ukraine’s most famous rock star is singing for victory (Apr 2nd)

F OR FOUR decades China has defied received wisdom about the institutions that countries must build to become rich and strong. After the Communist Party’s bosses embraced market forces in 1979, many foreign observers predicted that political reforms had to follow, such as the emergence of more independent courts to sustain the rule of law and uphold property rights. In time, the optimistic foreigners ventured, most advanced economies realise that they need democratic—or at least accountable—political systems. Societies with such “inclusive institutions” enjoy both stability and broad-based prosperity, Chinese officials were told.

China’s leaders heeded something less than half this advice. Over 40 years successive leaders have tolerated only as much economic and social openness as is compatible with unchallenged party authority. President Xi Jinping, the party chief since 2012, has broken even more decisively with norms that hold sway in much of the rich world. He has explicitly condemned the separation of powers and an independent judiciary as unwelcome Western notions. His China is proud to offer not the rule of law but “law-based governance” via party-controlled courts.

There have been changes at the grassroots, too. In Mr Xi’s China, ever more power, including coercive power, is wielded by party members and volunteers with fuzzy legal mandates. During the covid-19 pandemic many residents of locked-down cities have been forced into squalid quarantine sites or sealed inside housing compounds by pandemic workers, swaddled in the anonymous full-body suits that explain their nickname, “Big Whites”. A few are police officers or local officials. But others are zealous volunteers, imposing house arrest without a warrant. Even before covid emerged, Chinese leaders had called for citizens to take more disputes to mediation by unpaid local worthies, rather than to law courts. In recent years private companies, including joint ventures with foreign firms, have been pressed to form or revive party cells made up of employees with party membership, enjoying ill-defined authority.

Scholars of authoritarian politics have taken note of this trend. Two recent books take complementary looks at how the party embraces ambiguity as it controls the masses—or rather, encourages citizens to control one another. By way of case study, both books examine the same area of public policy, namely urbanisation schemes that have displaced many tens of millions of Chinese. Often the land that they farmed was requisitioned and sold to developers or their homes were demolished, by force and with paltry or no compensation. At the root of such schemes is an institutional void: in China property rights are anything but secure. As Daniel Mattingly of Yale University estimates in “The Art of Political Control in China”, published in 2019, land requisitions have in effect redistributed property worth trillions of dollars from rural collectives to the state. Yet as Lynette Ong of the University of Toronto describes in her new book, “Outsourcing Repression, Everyday State Power in Contemporary China”, resistance to violent land-grabs in China has been fragmented and easily squelched.

One reason, both books suggest, is a tradition of delegating dirty work to non-official agents. These include hired thugs lacking uniforms or badges, sent to wreck homes, cut power and water supplies, or beat up those who try to petition higher authorities. Their links to local officialdom are unprovable but blatant. One gambit involves thugs bulldozing communal lavatories, allowing bureaucrats to declare a village unsanitary and so fit only for demolition, records Ms Ong. Even a threadbare cover for official brutality is useful, though. Drawing on a data set of over 2,000 cases of forced land-taking or demolition recorded by news outlets and rights groups, as well as on hundreds of her own field interviews conducted from 2011 to 2019, Ms Ong finds that citizens were more likely to resist when police acted brutally or officials led thugs into battle in person. Citizens were more fatalistic when attacked by anonymous toughs. The public expects nothing better from them, but is indignant when the state breaks laws, she suggests.

The tyranny of the majority, plus bulldozers

Recorded incidents of violence declined but did not end after 2013, as national leaders urged campaigns of “harmonious demolition”, moved in part by nationwide outrage over citizens killed or driven to suicide during violent land-grabs. In the Xi era anti-corruption campaigns have ensnared some local tyrants who razed scores of villages for profit. Harmonious demolitions may be achieved by recruiting village elders or volunteers with deep community ties to press their own neighbours to sign demolition papers. Some involve the setting-up of zigaiwei, or “Autonomous Redevelopment Committees”. Guided by unseen officials, these are not as benign as they sound. Ms Ong describes local power-brokers spying on households that refuse to comply, setting family members against each other, or hunting for individuals vulnerable to pressure, such as public employees who can be threatened with the sack. Hold-outs are publicly shamed for resisting the majority’s will. Talk of the majority reveals the Maoist roots of outsourced repression. Mr Xi’s China is reviving the “mass line”: a strategy of using rewards and punishments, but also ideological “thought work”, to mobilise the many and ostracise the dissenting few.

Conventional wisdom holds that a strong civil society gives citizens leverage over governments. In fact, co-opted clan leaders and village elders can serve autocrats well, writes Mr Mattingly. Indeed, official biographies of Mr Xi record how, as a young village party secretary in rural Shaanxi, he recruited a local clan leader to help him confiscate land for a dam, including a clan cemetery.

Party bosses grow impatient when foreigners question China’s autocratic politics, pointing to years of growth. But economies can also slow. When they do, inclusive institutions offer legitimacy that arm-twisting and opaque power-structures cannot match. ■

Read more from Chaguan, our columnist on China:

China unveils its vision of a global security order (May 5th)

Why some Chinese are angry about covid (Apr 30th)

China’s harsh and elitist covid rules (Apr 23rd)

       Former Rancho Seco nuclear plant in California, USA Getty Images/iStockphoto   Polls, politicians, and emerging technology   James Pethokoukis  May 13, 01:33 PM May 13, 01:33 PM  [This article has been published in Restoring America to consider how politicians might lead the public towards an embrace of nuclear energy, which would allow the U.S. to become more energy independent]. Nuclear energy may prove to be a case study for the notion that public opinion is often less a driver of public policy than policymaker leadership. A look at public opinion polls shows no great desire for the U.S. to generate more of its electricity from nuclear fission, though favorability has increased. As reporter Harry Stevens recently noted in The Washington Post:  In the United States, nuclear energy’s advocates for decades have been awaiting a renaissance that seems to never come. Public opinion remains mixed, but younger adults are less favorable to nuclear power plants than older people, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.  And a similar, but more recent poll from Gallup:    Yet I think it’s fair to say that the odds of nuclear becoming a greater share of US power production might be on the rise. For example: Los Angeles Times recently reported that California Gov. Gavin Newsom is open to the possibility of delaying the closure of the state’s last operational nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. Newsom’s thinking is related to a Biden administration effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing, “citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change,” according to NBC News. And to the extent that what happens in Europe may influence politics here, there have been numerous stories about how meeting climate change goals and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are leading to politicians pushing a nuclear renaissance over there. I think emerging technologies, in particular, is an area where public attitudes — likely influenced by dystopian science fiction — may be a particularly poor guide for policymakers. Another Pew poll, this one from last March, suggests public caution, though also openness, across a range of emerging tech. “Cautious openness” seems like a public attitude politicians can work with as they consider how to both promote and regulate new tech. This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

       Voters line up to vote behind rolls of "I Voted Early" stickers in the final hours of early voting in the primary election in Noblesville, Ind., Monday, May 2, 2022. Indiana's primary election is Tuesday. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy) Michael Conroy/AP   The trouble with ballot harvesting   Walter Olson  May 13, 01:27 PM May 13, 01:28 PM  [This article has been published in Restoring America to highlight how ballot harvesting and tampering undermines the integrity of our elections.] The topic of ballot harvesting is likely to be the topic of much shouting in coming weeks, so for now I’d just like to get one point on the table: even for those of us who reject former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous stolen‐election claims, there are genuine reasons to be skeptical about this practice. For those coming in late, ballot harvesting or ballot collection happens when one person gathers absentee/mail ballots from many voters — bundling, you might say — for submission at a mail or drop box. This obviously happens on an innocuous micro scale when someone offers to post the completed ballot of a spouse or disabled friend, so it’s usual to define the threshold by reference to quantity (you’re not a collector unless you accept more than, say, three or six ballots) or relationship (it’s okay to do it for family members or persons with a specified incapacity). Restrictions on ballot collection are common around the states. The best known exception is California, which legalized ballot collecting in 2016, upon which Democrats are said to have employed the method quite effectively to increase their vote. Even California, as the Washington Post notes, “has since made it illegal to get paid per ballot collected and for employers to ask employees to bring their ballots into their workplace.” That last point highlights one of the first problems with the practice: the person standing there asking you to hand over your ballot may be someone you have a hard time saying no to, owing to dependence, economic or otherwise. What if it’s a union steward at your workplace, or the political boss of your community, or a patriarchal family member? What if they’re pressing you for a faster decision than you’d prefer to make? There’s a requirement that the envelope be sealed before you hand it over, but that might work mostly as an honor system. If you yield to improper pressure, who’s going to complain to the authorities, or verify a complaint? Contrast all this with the idea behind the secret ballot, the idea of leaving you free to vote your conscience or maybe not vote at all, no matter what powerful people in your life or community may expect of you. As they used to say, it’s just you alone in the voting booth. Next consider the dangers of ballot tampering. Contrary to some imaginings, the abuse that is probably likeliest is not that the collector will switch the choice of party at the top of the ticket. Far harder to police is the practice of “helping” unsophisticated voters by filling in choices for down‐ballot races that they might have left blank on their own. Gaudier abuses, such as the collection of pseudo‐ballots from voters who are dead, never intended to vote, or never existed at all, are not unthinkable — politicos are capable of thinking of anything — but leave a trail that is in principle checkable, differing in this from some of the subtler abuses. All of which will not prevent conniptions in various quarters over a new movie by conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, entitled 2000 Mules, sensationally alleging widespread fraudulent use of ballot harvesting in the 2020 election. I’ll leave the critique of that movie to others — the Associated Press and the Bulwark’s Charles Sykes have already started the job, among others, and more is to come. AP quotes an academic I much respect: “There’s no evidence a massive ballot harvesting scheme dumped a large amount of votes for one candidate into drop boxes, and if there were, it would likely be caught quickly, according to [Iowa law professor] Derek Muller.” Underneath it all, election integrity is a genuine issue with many complications and trade‐offs that should not be written off or dismissed. What a shame it would be were it understood merely with reference to the personal interests of one losing presidential candidate. [This article originally appeared in the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the Cato Institute.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Among the Kremlin’s many regrets about the conduct of its war in Ukraine one might be that expectations were allowed to build up around the annual parade to mark the end of the Great Patriotic War on 9 May. The link first emerged in March when there were reports that this had been set as a deadline for victory, or at least some notable military achievements, that could be celebrated by Vladimir Putin. But in the absence of any significant achievements, the date began instead to be approached with a different sense of foreboding – as a moment when Putin would be obliged to escalate. This might involve turning the “special military operation” into a full-scale war, with the accompanying mobilisation of reservists and conscripts, or announcing an intent to annex Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson, or, especially alarming, raising again the prospect of nuclear war.
When 9 May came Russian forces still had little to show for all their exertions, not even the complete capture of Mariupol. Nor, however, were there obvious forms of escalation available that would actually improve Russia’s strategic position. The territory that might be annexed was not yet securely in Russian hands, and there was not a lot that Putin could do in the short-term to resolve the deep predicament he faced.
His speech, and the accompanying parade, were lacklustre affairs. Nuclear missiles made their customary appearance, but there were fewer troops marching than usual, with most of the army currently engaged elsewhere. Instead of an exhibition of strength it was confirmation of Russia’s lack of spare capacity. Instead of presenting an army on the verge of a military triumph this one appeared depleted. There was not even a flypast, excused on the grounds of the weather although the skies were clear above Moscow. Aircraft had been practicing in a “Z” formation, picking up what has become Moscow’s favoured symbol of this war. The Z was taken from the markings on Russian vehicles assigned to duties in Ukraine. It is now mostly seen on burned out wrecks or abandoned vehicles, so perhaps it has lost some of its shine. It was generally far less in evidence than expected. Perhaps the lack of victories under the banner of “Z” has turned the symbol into something of an embarrassment.
Putin’s speech acknowledged casualties and praised those caring for the wounded. He did not explain his war aims. The war was presented in defensive terms. This was his account of its origins:
“Another punitive operation in Donbas, an invasion of our historic lands, including Crimea, was openly in the making. Kiev declared that it could attain nuclear weapons. The Nato bloc launched an active military build-up on the territories adjacent to us. Thus, an absolutely unacceptable threat to us was steadily being created right on our borders. There was every indication that a clash with neo-Nazis and Banderites backed by the US and their minions was unavoidable. Let me repeat, we saw the military infrastructure being built up, hundreds of foreign advisers starting work, and regular supplies of cutting-edge weaponry being delivered from Nato countries. The threat grew every day. Russia launched a pre-emptive strike at the aggression. It was a forced, timely and the only correct decision. A decision by a sovereign, strong and independent country.”
It is not hard to take this apart, not least because it fails to mention the impact of the build-up of some 190,000 troops in the months leading up to the war, which would have made it an odd time for Ukraine to embark on a military adventure of its own. There is no evidence of this imminent threat that required urgent pre-emptive action.
It does, however, provide a definition of victory that might be in reach. So long as the Donbas is spared punitive action, Crimea is defended and Ukraine abandons thoughts of nuclear weapons then Russia will have succeeded. Putin described an imaginary threat for which he therefore might accept an imaginary solution. As it happens these are all matters that Volodymyr Zelensky would be prepared to discuss with Putin, although it would be difficult for the Russian President to meet as an equal a man he has dismissed and derided as a Nazi presiding over an artificial state.

Another reason why the Kremlin might regret the focus on 9 May was the effect of contrasting the heroic performance of 1941-45 with the rather the dismal performance of 2022. Putin has deliberately created a cult around the Great Patriotic War and has used the annual parade in the past to show off his military power and to forge a sense of common pride and purpose. It is also a reminder of a time when Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were not separate states but together members of the Soviet Union (the hammer and sickle of the Soviet flag has become almost as prominent as “Z” in the symbolism of this war).
By appropriating the history for his own political purposes, claiming that the war against Ukraine is somehow an extension of the one that ended 77 years ago, Putin has subverted and demeaned the memory. This is especially the case when attacks on infrastructure and residential buildings, tolerance of war crimes, along with the original crime of aggression, are justified as if true Nazis are being fought and punished. As Zelensky recalled in his own message, Ukraine lost eight million people to the Nazis and has as much right to the memory of this war as does Russia. By using the term “Nazi” as a generalised category for all people who the Kremlin doesn’t like the term loses its specific meaning. When the hapless Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, tried to explain how the Jewish Zelensky could be a Nazi he got himself mired in anti-Semitic tropes about the holocaust.
The desperation to sustain the connection between the two wars reflects the singular character of the victory of 1945, not only because of the resilience and intense sacrifice that lay behind it, but because Russia’s history offers few comparable military achievements. Russia does not commemorate 11 November as the end of the First World War, as we do for our annual service of remembrance, because by the time of the armistice in 1918 popular discontent with the losses and economic pain had led to the 1917 revolution and the Bolsheviks seizing power. The new Soviet Union signed its own separate peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk the previous March which, if it had not been opportunistically annulled at the time of the later German surrender, would have meant that nearly all of Ukraine would have become part of Germany.
The 20th century had begun with a humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan. In 1939-40 as Germany (helped by its pact with Moscow) occupied European countries, the Soviet Union struggled to defeat Finland, taking heavy losses for little gain. It did not lose the Cold War through battle, although the inability of Soviet forces to cope with the insurgency in Afghanistan did not help. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia was humiliated by the secessionist Chechnya in one war and then only won the second by adopting brutal tactics. They made heavy weather of a limited war with Georgia in 2008. More recently they had success against Ukraine in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014-5 and then in Syria, but these were on a modest scale. Russian military history is therefore at best patchy. The war of 1941-45 stands out because it was huge in all its dimensions, from forces committed to casualties, and the extent of both the initial setbacks and the eventual victory.
[See also: Putin and Zelensky offer contrasting visions of the future]
The victory left an abiding image of a military steamroller, a mass army crushing all before it through its sheer weight. This image shaped the early strategies of the Cold War. For Germans who had been pushed back to Berlin inexorably by this steamroller, it was impossible to imagine being able to fight the Soviet military on its own terms. For this reason, when they joined Nato in the mid-1950s, the West Germans stressed the importance of nuclear deterrence. A conventional battle on their territory would most likely leave it ruined before it was lost. The ability of Moscow to overwhelm its opponents was confirmed by the suppression of the Hungarian rebellion in 1956 and Czechoslovakia’s Prague Spring of 1968. Even after the Cold War the image of the steamroller did not go away. When, as in Chechnya, the military performance left something to be desired, Russian tactics were remorseless, flattening enemies when they could not be outfought.
The strength of this image was evident on the first days of this war, and it has not quite gone away even though Ukraine has not been rolled over. Its influence on the Russian generals helps explain the arrogance behind their initial plans, as if Ukrainian forces would crumble once confronted with a Russian offensive. Even when on 25 March the Russian Ministry of Defence announced that it was going to abandon the assault on Kyiv and other northern cities and focus on the Donbas, the natural response was to assume that the steamroller would at last be activated. The spies of the FSB took the blame for the early failures to catch President Zelensky and the poor intelligence on Ukraine’s willingness and ability to fight. They were pushed aside to allow the military to take charge, with more realistic objectives, a more coherent command system, and a chance to rectify some of their earlier tactical and logistical errors.
It is now apparent that there is no steamroller. The second phase of the war has been underway for a month now and the Russians have made few gains. The encircling movement to eliminate the substantial Ukrainian force in the Donbas has yet to take place. The achievements that have been made have been minimal while Ukraine is starting to see some successful counter-offensives pushing up from Kharkiv and eating away at Russian positions in Kherson. The Russian have amassed whatever forces they can muster for this latest push, with little left in reserve, and it does not appear to be sufficient. Equipment is still being lost at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, advanced artillery pieces from Western countries are being employed by Ukraine, which is likely to add to the attrition of Russian forces. It is not surprising that there are reports of Russian commanders refusing to put their troops into exposed positions.
It is possible that this second phase of the war around the Donbas will follow the same pattern as the first phase. The first step is for it to become apparent that the Russians cannot win. Then the implications of a draw for a negotiated solution are discussed, before the position of Russian forces becomes unsustainable and they have to withdraw. Except that this time withdrawal means accepting defeat. If that is an intolerable prospect for Moscow then the rational next step is not to escalate in some way but to offer a ceasefire as soon as possible, with the hope of then securing the minimum defensive objectives or at least causing tension between Zelensky and his international supporters if the offer is refused.
The current consensus is that this war will go on for some time because Ukraine cannot agree to the loss of any territory to Russia while Putin has invested so much in this war that he cannot back off. It is possible that a stalemate will develop in the Donbas and the fighting will subside to a lower level that both sides can sustain over time, but it is as possible that Russian forces will at some point face a calamitous and humiliating defeat. It may be that the bombast and confidence is already draining away from the Kremlin’s appreciation of how this war might develop over the coming weeks. It can still do immense harm to Ukrainian people and property through artillery and missile strikes, and it is still mounting a blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and cutting off its trade. But Ukraine has already absorbed immense pain without giving up and may soon have the upper hand in the battle for the Donbas. Warfare can impose its own political logic.
Putin was under no obligation to make a major strategic announcement on 9 May. The date acquired significance because of the importance of the war against Germany in the ideology of Putin’s Russia and the need for decisions about what next to do in the war against Ukraine. But now that the 9 May has passed, and with it the burden of living up to the triumphs of 1945, Putin might find that instead of contemplating how to make this war a whole lot worse for everyone his time would be more usefully spent working out how to cut his losses.
Lawrence Freedman is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. This piece originally appeared on his Substack “Comment is Freed”.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner, 592 pp., $32)
The world has paid too little attention to cancer over the last two years. Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, many cancer screening centers closed for a period of months, and routine procedures were put off to prioritize Covid patients and reduce risk. Screenings in April 2020 at the Center for Disease Control’s National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program declined by over 80 percent compared to that same month in previous years. In light of the anticipation of another wave of Covid cases this coming fall and winter and the realization that the virus has yet to recede in the rearview mirror, a look back at Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2011 book on cancer is not only worthwhile, but timely.The Emperor of All Maladies, an extraordinary book aptly subtitled “A Biography of Cancer,” is as deep a dive into a family of diseases and the millennia-old effort to understand, treat, and cure them as we are ever likely to see. Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is both a cancer clinician and a scholar of the disease. Fortunately, he is also a gifted storyteller with a poetic eye and ear for metaphor and analogy. Even so, the abundant detail and sheer bulk of his narrative are daunting.More than four thousand years ago, an Egyptian physician named Imhotep identified a tumor; and, around 400 B.C., Hippocrates named the disease, noting its resemblance to Cancer, the astrological crab. But other than the Roman physician Galen’s mention of some bizarre medicines for “black bile,” Mukherjee finds little mention of the malady for almost two millennia, until Andreas Vesalius’ 16th-century anatomical drawings. Since then, cancer’s signature sequence—invasion of a site, repulsion of putative cures, metastasis to other sites—has drawn the attention, even obsession, of generations of investigators from many different fields. Until very recently, they had precious little to show for their efforts.In Mukherjee’s adroit hands, this centuries-old story of dogged trial-and-error efforts to treat this dimly perceived scourge—invariably followed by failure, spawning newer efforts based on fresh theories of causation and control—is inspiring. We glimpse the harsh discipline of science in the stories of these pioneers, whose lonely trails almost invariably led to dead ends.Treatment efforts intensified in the 1860s with the development of antiseptics and anesthesia, which made more complex and radical surgery possible. William Stewart Halsted, a leading figure in this advance, described a cheap, accessible, foolproof, and easy-to-dose substance—cocaine—that became the “fast food of surgical anesthesia.” So alluring was it that Halsted himself became addicted to it while he expanded its use in attempting ever more radical mastectomies. The radical surgery, though it lacked proof of effectiveness, nevertheless “drew the blinds of circular logic around itself for nearly a century.”Some putative advances, like radium, turned out to cause cancer, not cure it. Other innovations, like the development of chemical dyes, enabled better tracking of cancerous cells.Genuine progress against cancer had to await a serious commitment to large-scale scientific research after World War II. Mukherjee, invoking Tocqueville’s paean to private civic energy, details the crusading organizational efforts of Mary Lasker and Dr. Sidney Farber, who together created remarkable momentum for a scientific war against cancer—first by orchestrating the anti-leukemia “Jimmy Fund,” showcased by Ted Williams and other baseball stars and modeled on the anti-polio March of Dimes. Mukherjee shows how they mobilized political entrepreneurship and quasi-religious zeal to produce the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and, in 1971, the National Cancer Act, likened to a “moon shot.” (While noting that many scientists opposed the act, he inexplicably fails to explain why.)Pure happenstance also played a key role in the war on cancer, as exemplified in the work of Min Chiu Li, a fugitive researcher from wartime China, fired by NCI for using a chemical on a woman whose symptoms then disappeared. In other words, he effected the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults—and established a basic principle of oncology: cancer must be treated even after every visible sign of it has vanished. In the mid-1970s, Dr. Larry Einhorn stunned the cancer world by curing a solid organ tumor with chemotherapy.But these victories, despite overhyping, were very limited; the individual battlefields were small. Genuine progress would require researchers to appreciate the “colossal diversity” of what was a “shape-shifting disease.” Such a comprehensive view, however, was impeded by practitioners’ commitment to radical surgery and their resistance to rigorously designed and controlled trials on appropriately selected groups of patients. Patients’ recruitment, unfortunately, had to come through their doctors, who were often “precisely those who have the least interest in having a theory rejected or disproved.”For breast cancer, a condition embedded in a legacy of radical surgery, these conflicts were “particularly charged.” But maverick researchers increasingly believed that the traditional “mastectomy or lumpectomy-plus-radiation” approach had no scientific basis. Decisively, they were joined by a growing “medical feminism,” in which women increasingly resisted their surgeons’ preferences. But another major problem arose: Patients worried that in a rigorous blind trial, they might unknowingly receive the placebo (or no surgery) and thus lose the possibility of a cure. Accordingly, recruiting adequate numbers for a trial took years. But radical surgery had been discredited; and, when it was abandoned, an “entire culture of surgery … collapsed with it.” The radical mastectomy, Mukherjee notes, is “rarely, if ever, performed by surgeons today.”

Another unfulfilled hope that detection would lead to cure involved the screening technique of mammography—for which there was great initial enthusiasm, especially in Europe. Between 1976 and 1992, enormous parallel trials of mammography were launched there and in Canada. Mukherjee explains the design and procedural obstacles that confronted and ultimately undermined the scientific value of these trials. Sometimes rigorous controls were embedded into the trials, sometimes not. Even when controls were present by design, execution of the trials was scattershot or biased in ways that defeated the random assignment of patients.One trial, for example, selectively removed high-risk patients from the mammography group; another trial did just the opposite. The Malmo study in Sweden was exceptionally well run and accurately detected early cancers; but it turned out to benefit only older women and then only modestly, a pattern that plagued later studies as well. The problems, Mukherjee concludes, were the complexity of early detection trials, the conundrum of over- and underdiagnosis, and the sensitivity of the results to the ages of the women involved. The limits on scientists’ knowledge about how carcinogenicity actually works were—and, to an extent, remain today—the root problems.The scientific and political struggles over smoking occupy, appropriately, a substantial chunk of the book. It describes tobacco’s vast human toll even today: the massive legal and political struggles required to regulate the products, the relative roles of public health and legal reformers in exposing the peril, the industry’s political power, its many deceptions and evasions, and the long tail of the distribution of lethal risk. Mukherjee begins this knotted, tragic story with an 18th-century surgeon, Percivall Pott, who inferred, epidemiologically, that cancer could be caused by environmental agents and thus was preventable. In a cruel irony, the ubiquitous use of tobacco made the causal relationship much harder to discern: Indeed, a leading epidemiologist, Richard Doll, first attributed it to road tar exposure.The rest of the tobacco story is well known: a public health establishment of the 1950s that was “largely unperturbed” by the epidemiological evidence; the industry’s cynical deployment of geneticists and other “experts” as dupes; the conversion of Surgeon General Luther Terry; the regulation of cigarette advertising by a rejuvenated Federal Trade Commission; the warning label fiasco; the tireless, innovative legal campaigner John Banzhaf; the dramatic announcement by the dying actor William Talman that smoking was killing him; the consumer class actions and state litigation that culminated in the Master Settlement Agreement; the evasions of the agreement by the industry; the export of the tobacco scourge abroad; and the continuing toll among American smokers today, sixty years after the surgeon general’s report, a “devastation” that Mukherjee personally witnessed in the cancer wards he visited.The rest of the book presents the evolution of our post-1970s scientific knowledge about the nature, detection, prevention, and treatment of various cancers, including the inspiring crusade against AIDS by the gay community. The passage of time has only revealed the extraordinary variety of causes of the many discrete types of cancers. The most important of these new discoveries concerns the plagues caused by viruses and bacteria. These exceedingly complex agents, Mukherjee explains, have vastly expanded our knowledge not only of cancer’s etiology but, crucially, of the fundamental nature of carcinogenicity itself. The most important windows into this world have been opened by advances in research on genes, DNA, RNA, proteins, enzymes, and their complex interactions. Mutagenicity—chemical changes in a cell’s DNA—plays a particularly critical role, as Berkeley bacteriologist Bruce Ames has established over the past fifty years.This extraordinary book concludes on a characteristic note of cautious optimism. Mukherjee is taken with the figure of what he calls “the Red Queen syndrome” from Alice in Wonderland; she “moved incessantly,” he puts it, “just to keep in place.” This, he maintains, applies to screening, prevention, and every other aspect of the battle against cancer. Even smoking behavior exhibits this dynamic complexity: In the “smoking-network effect,” people smoke or refrain based on signals from their cohesive social groups. This helps explain why “even the most successful cancer-prevention strategies can lapse so swiftly.” As he illustrates with a final account of a beloved patient for whom he pulled out all the stops to no avail, we are never likely to find a definitive cure.Peter H. Schuck, Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale Law School, is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU Law School and author of many articles and books on law, public policy, diversity, immigration, and other subjects.

O VER THE years, doctors have described more than 7,000 rare diseases, generally defined as those affecting fewer than one in 2,000 people. So, though individually unusual, such illnesses are collectively a serious problem—a long-tail of need which is hard to treat because patients are few in number and their symptoms often picked up too late. Three-quarters of rare diseases are genetic, and Global Genes, an American advocacy group, reckons 400m people around the world are affected by them. For medicine to do better, people with them need to be noticed earlier, preferably in the first days of their lives.

To that end, doctors in many places want to sequence and screen babies’ entire genomes at birth. In America there are projects to do just that at Boston Children’s Hospital, Columbia University and Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. A pioneering group at Harvard, known as BabySeq, has recently received money to expand its small-scale work to include 1,000 babies. In Europe, a five-year project called Screen4Care is starting. And efforts are also under way in Australia, China and Qatar. But the project to watch is in Britain. There, a government-owned company called Genomics England, originally set up to run a study called the 100,000 Genomes Project, which investigated genetic diseases and cancer in adults, will soon start a pilot project intended to sequence the genomes of 200,000 babies. That could presage a national programme.

Screen saver

Screening babies for genetic diseases is not a novel idea. Across North America, Europe and the Middle East, in particular, newborns are often checked at birth for a handful of common heritable illnesses, such as sickle-cell anaemia, thalassaemia and cystic fibrosis. But a whole-genome sequence offers the prospect of spotting thousands of disorders rather than the few which are currently searched for.

Early diagnosis means earlier treatment. This, in turn, means that children’s lives will be improved and even saved. But the power of the technology also means it is possible, in theory, to screen for conditions that would occur later in life, or even to help parents avoid having other children with the same genetic mutation.

Just how many risk-associated variants it is appropriate to screen for is an open question. BabySeq, which was the first project of its kind, tested for about 1,000. It found that 11% of the 159 infants it looked at harboured at least one variant associated with a child-onset disorder.

While techno-utopians might think it a good idea to test for everything, parents of newborns are more cautious. On May 4th, at a meeting held in London by Genomics England, Rick Scott, the organisation’s chief medical officer, said discussions with parents and doctors had led his team to conclude that people want any genomic-screening programme for newborns to look for a far narrower set of conditions than BabySeq sought. The most appealing tests were for variants associated with a high probability of childhood illness, and which would benefit from early treatment.

The set of variants Genomics England will seek is therefore being decided “cautiously”, says Dr Scott. At the moment, the proposed list has several hundred items on it. If implemented in toto, this would result in about one baby in 200 receiving a diagnosis of a rare genetic disorder. That list would be likely to grow as understanding improves and new treatments arrive.

This public consultation has shown that some parents want to know everything possible about their child while others very definitely do not. One particular finding, according to David Bick, a clinical geneticist who advises Genomics England, is that parents want certainty. They feel it is no use being told that a child is “fairly likely” to have a condition. Rather, they want a pretty clear “yes” or “no”.

Many also do not want to know of adult-onset illnesses that their children may one day suffer. This means rejecting tests which might indicate a newborn’s risk, later in life, of contracting cancer, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease. That information would bring with it the burden of deciding what to tell their child, and when. Rather, these parents feel, it should be up to the children themselves, if they so wish, to seek that information when they are older—which would be easy if their genomes were already on file.

There are, however, still some conundrums. For example, Pompe’s disease is a disorder in which a carbohydrate called glycogen builds up in the body's cells. The infant-onset form of this illness must be treated straight away. The adult-onset form can be left until those with it are in their 30s. The current genetic test cannot distinguish between these forms. The cost of prompt treatment for youngsters is therefore that some parents must carry the knowledge that their offspring will suffer eventually, though not immediately.

Tay-Sachs disease, an illness fatal in childhood, causes another dilemma. Some parents absolutely do not want to know about it, because that would spoil their experience of the early years they have with their child. Others feel knowledge is power, and so do wish to know.

One of the trickiest questions of all concerns Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative illness that starts in childhood. Screening for this would find it in six of every 100,000 children tested. But only a small number of these have forms of the disease that can currently be treated, and the drugs needed are not widely available. However, learning that one’s child has this disease could also allow children to join trials of new drugs.

Over the coming year Genomics England, along with doctors, patients and the wider public, will wrangle with such questions, armed with a set of principles (which are themselves up for discussion) about what tests should be done. These principles include the idea that screening should lead to improved outcomes in those it is applied to; that this should not involve many invasive follow-up tests; and that there is strong evidence the genetic variant being tested for does indeed cause the condition in question.

And there is one other thing. This is the tricky question of how to ensure that the data are kept safe for a lifetime. Properly informed consent for all the various uses such data might be put to is central to the British plan. Other places may not be so scrupulous. Moreover, things change. The temptation to crack open genetic databases for police investigations might prove irresistible. Insurance firms would surely be delighted to snoop as well, if they were allowed to.

Most important, such data are a veritable Aladdin’s cave for medical researchers—a cave to which only some parents will be prepared to add their children’s sequences. (Informed consent means data should not be used in this way unless parents have explicitly agreed to it.)

Combining the fruits of future scientific advances with people’s full DNA sequences, collected at birth, could bring huge medical benefits. But it might also be a double-edged sword. Current knowledge of how genomes work is primitive. There is also a lot of so-called dark genetic matter in them, which does things currently unknown. Genomes may conceal secrets of, say, potential mental illness, or of behavioural predispositions that a genome’s owner would rather stayed private. Current rules say that they should. But for those who have opened the door to doctors and scientists to look at their data, the question of whether those data will remain secure for a lifetime may be a gamble. ■

Political philosopher Noam Chomsky said Ukraine's request for heavy weaponry is a narrative concocted by the "Western propaganda system," despite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's previous requests for other nations to arm his country in its efforts to fend off Russia's invasion.

"What if we were to argue to the Ukrainian people that if we provide the huge arms demanded by Zelensky, by the president, that this will be an act of destruction for the Ukrainian people, but the position of the Ukrainian people in response to that is, 'We want those arms,'" U.K. journalist Owen Jones asked Chomsky in an interview shared Wednesday.

He continued: "Because then in a sense, it's this danger that we're arguing something against the expressed will of the Ukrainian people, we're saying that 'This will lead to your violent destruction,' but their argument is 'We need this in order to end a war of aggression, which is a war of subjugation,' how do we square that?"

Chomsky responded: "Well in the Western propaganda system, what we hear is Ukrainian people want more and more arms. That's the U.S. and British propaganda system."

He stated that Zelensky—whom he said is "as much of a voice to the Ukrainian people as we have any idea about"—has "repeatedly" called for a "pretty sensible" political settlement in which Ukraine would "commit itself to neutralization," give up NATO membership prospects, postpone the Crimea issue, and "move towards some kind of accommodation on Donbas."

"That's what you don't hear in the U.S.-British propaganda system," he added.

Zelensky has, in fact, made pleas for weapons on several occasions. Beyond requests during meetings with foreign officials, the Ukrainian president tweeted a video with the hashtag #ArmUkraineNow in April.

"We've been defending ourselves against Russia much longer than the invaders planned," Zelensky said in the video. "We have destroyed more Russian weapons and military equipment than some armies in Europe currently possess. But this is not enough."

Noam Chomsky claims Ukrainians aren’t actually demanding heavy weapons, that’s just western propaganda.

Owen Jones just nods along.

Suspect 44 million Ukrainians might have something to say about it. pic.twitter.com/BY3foLfDFg — Chris York (@ChrisDYork) May 12, 2022

Zelensky said images out of Bucha and Mariupol have "demonstrated real Russian intentions to the whole world," which can "only be stopped by force of arms."

"It must be done now. Ukraine needs weapon supplies," he said. "We need heavy artillery, armed vehicles, air defense systems and combat aircraft. Anything to repel Russian forces and stop their war crimes."

The president then went on to list specific weapons needed by Ukraine, which included artillery, multiple launch rocket systems, armored vehicles, tanks, air defense systems, and military aircraft.

"Freedom must be armed better than tyranny," he concluded. "Western countries have everything to make it happen. The final victory over the tyranny and the number of people saved depends on them. Arm Ukraine now to defend freedom."

Без додаткової зброї ця війна перетвориться на нескінченну криваву лазню, що поширюватиме нещастя, страждання та руйнування. Маріуполь, Буча, Краматорськ – список буде продовжено. Ніхто не зупинить Росію, крім України з важкою зброєю. #ArmUkraineNow pic.twitter.com/b1LlRmjOYk — Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) April 13, 2022

Zelensky had previously expressed some willingness to compromise with Russia in an effort to end the war. In a recent interview with Italian broadcaster RAI, the Ukrainian leader said he was ready to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin, barring any "ultimatums."

Zelensky said "there is nothing left" in the Donbas and that Ukraine will "never recognize autonomy."

"I have never talked about recognizing the independence of Crimea, we will never recognize it as part of Russia," he added.

In March, Zelensky acknowledged his country's accession to NATO would not take place—chalking it up to the alliance not being "prepared to accept Ukraine"—though he welcomed news of Finland's bid to join NATO on Thursday.

"Had a phone conversation with President of Finland [Sauli Niinistö]," Zelensky tweeted. "Commended the readiness of [Finland] to apply for NATO membership. We also discussed Ukraine's European integration. And [Ukraine] - [Finland] defense interaction."

Joseph Raz, a commanding figure in modern legal philosophy, died in London on 2 May aged 83. He was one of three or four philosophers who made towering contributions to our theoretical understanding of law. The others were Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), HLA Hart (1907-92) and Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013). They are all gone now. Analytic jurisprudence – and, in Raz’s case, the philosophy of law washing over into the study of practical reason generally – is their legacy.
Raz, born in Haifa in 1939, was a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After getting his law degree, he went to Oxford to do graduate work under Hart’s supervision. Then, having returned for a few years to Jerusalem following the completion of his doctorate, he came back to Oxford in 1972 to take up a fellowship at Balliol College. There he remained, in one capacity or another – tutorial fellow, professor of the philosophy of law, research professor – until his retirement from Oxford in 2009. But his work continued. He taught at Columbia Law School in New York City from 2002 until 2019 and at King’s College, London until his death. Over the years he also held visiting positions at places such as Berkeley Law, the Australian National University, the University of Toronto, and Yale Law School.
At each institution, Raz was a loving colleague and mentor to students, lecturers, and younger professors – intimidating them no doubt with the rigour of his analysis, but at the same time keeping them close, inspiring them with his example of how much could be achieved by trusting one’s own disciplined pathways of thought. Raz had an immense influence on the two or three generations of analytic legal philosophers who followed him. There is hardly a man or woman in the field who does not owe a debt to his friendship. He took on more than his share of graduate students and (as this writer knows) he took pains, too, to reach out to those for whom he was not formally responsible as a supervisor. Softly spoken, Raz was unpretentious, generous and sociable. He introduced scores of us to each other. I think he made us all better people.
Intellectually, what sort of influence did he have? As a student of HLA Hart, in 1994 he edited with his partner Penny Bulloch the second edition of Hart’s 1961 masterpiece The Concept of Law. That edition included a “Postscript” in which Hart defended his approach to jurisprudence against Ronald Dworkin; the “Postscript” was not complete at Hart’s death, but the editors helped piece it together from notes that Hart had left. Hart was a legal positivist. He didn’t believe that lawyers or judges needed to engage in moral thinking to find out what the law was or how to apply it. Raz believed this too, but he refined the position in a number of ways. Though he maintained that law was a matter of social facts about the exercise of power, Raz thought it was perfectly consistent to say that the question of what the law is, is a morally significant question. He explored some of that significance in his writing on the rule of law, for which he received the Tang Prize for the Rule of Law in 2018.
In analytic legal philosophy, we argue endlessly about what law is and whether positivism is true. Raz held his own in such conversations, but he was also interested in what all this conceptual analysis amounted to and why we engage in it. It’s an effort at self-understanding, he thought, since law is such a presence in our social environment.
His substantive contribution to these debates was striking and counter-intuitive. For Raz, positivism did not arise – as it did for Kelsen, and as it sometimes seemed to do for Hart – out of a difference in status between law and morality, with morality being the more subjective of the two. On the contrary, Raz thought morality ought to pervade all human decision-making. Everyone is subject to moral reasons, and it is incumbent on them – on judges as well as others – to figure those reasons out the best way they can. We have laws, however, when – for some reason – we want to displace that background role for morality and subject our decision-making to some particular control. (We may do this, for example, when moral disagreement is likely to lead to chaos or failures of coordination.) So moral reasoning is the default position; law operates in a minority of cases to block it, which is why finding out what the law is must be possible without engaging in the very reasoning that it is the law’s function to supersede. This is a typical Raz line of argument. It is hard to follow because its trajectory is unexpected. But it turns the table on the anti-positivist, assigning morality an initially greater role rather than a lesser one.
Another way of putting all this is to say that law claims authority, and the point of authority is that it is sometimes better for me to pay attention to someone else’s reasoning – better for the reasons that apply to me, including moral reasons – than to try to work things out on my own. Now, if law claims authority, it must be the sort of thing that can have authority of that kind, which, again, would not be possible if accessing law required one to make the very moral judgements that authority is supposed to supersede. Raz’s position remains controversial. Dworkin, for example, argued that Raz’s exclusive positivism was far too demanding: he said there is scarcely a legal provision in US constitutional law that can be applied without any trace of moral reasoning.
These points about authority illustrate the way in which, in Raz’s hands, technical arguments in jurisprudence overlapped with and illuminated issues in political philosophy. Authority had never received a convincing analysis in political philosophy – “deserves to be obeyed” is about as close as we got – until Raz turned his attention to it. And once he produced his analysis, drawing on deeper arguments about the reasons I might sometimes have for not acting on the balance of reasons as it appears to me, it was never the same again.
Sometimes the connections between Raz’s jurisprudence and his work in political philosophy were incidental, as in his theory of rights; his critique of the idea of equality, in which he basically argued that what was at stake was not numerical equality as such but uniform application of the same rules; and his 1990 essay on nationhood and cultural community with Avishai Margalit.
In other cases, however, the connections were deep and systematic. Raz’s greatest accomplishment was his book The Morality of Freedom (1986). The first section was devoted to his analysis of authority which, as we have seen, was important for his jurisprudence. But mostly the book was about personal autonomy and about autonomy’s role in people’s lives. It’s a lovely juxtaposition because authority is usually seen as a problem for autonomy and vice versa. Raz, however, offered a new account that did justice to both concepts and explain how they might work together in practical reasoning.
Still, his account of autonomy was disconcerting. Raz was a critic of Dworkin-style liberal neutrality about values and about the definition of the good life. He thought autonomy – the self-authorship of a person’s life – was worth nurturing only in the service of genuine values and worth respecting only in a life dedicated to the pursuit of what really mattered. In the 1980s we called this “liberal perfectionism”, and Neil MacCormick (another name to reckon with in jurisprudence) didn’t seem to be exaggerating when he wrote in a TLS review that Raz’s bookwas “as significant a new statement of liberal principles as anything since John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty”.
For philosophers working in areas other than jurisprudence, Practical Reason and Norms (1975) was the most influential of Raz’s early writings, partly because it introduced a sophisticated conceptual scheme for understanding how reasons work in a person’s practical deliberations. The idea of second-order reasons was particularly important, most notably exclusionary reasons – that is, reasons for not paying attention to other reasons. Raz’s work on the different levels at which reasons operate, and the way their operation reflected and helped to constitute values, enabled him to make decisive contributions in moral philosophy, and those contributions continued throughout his life, culminating in a last collection of essays, The Roots of Normativity, published in February this year. His work in these fields of often quite technical philosophy was relentlessly challenging and is highly respected by his peers.
It is hard to convey this in a short compass, but Raz’s legacy is a body of work united by dense and detailed tissues of understanding, spun between jurisprudence, political philosophy, ethics, and practical reasoning. Thumbing through The Roots of Normativity, where Raz is figuring out what matters in life – “Well-being consists in a wholehearted and successful pursuit of valuable relationships and goals” – I hear echoes of the later chapters of the English analytic philosopher GE Moore’s Principia Ethica, written more than a hundred years earlier in 1903. I mean that as praise. We look on Moore these days as fussy and unworldly – shocked, for example, to find that others didn’t have the intellectual interests he had. “Do you know, my dear,” said Moore to Mrs Moore in 1951 when he returned from his investment with the Order of Merit at Buckingham Palace: “The King had never heard of Wittgenstein?” Raz was a bit like that, a gentle giant, otherworldly. But he was grounded in an array of friendships, and grounded too by his family and by his camera (Joseph was a very talented photographer). We miss him. He is survived by his son Noam, by his long-time partner Penelope Bulloch, and by the intellectual community, now in mourning, that he nourished and sustained.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The American economy isn’t looking great right now. U.S. GDP shrank last quarter, despite a hearty showing from American consumers. Inflation is high; markets are down; both wages and personal-savings rates show some troubling statistical signals. Is the U.S. destined to have a recession in 2022? I don’t know for sure. But here are nine signs that worry me.1. Everybody’s stock portfolio is disgusting right now. The Nasdaq is down 30 percent. Growth stocks and pandemic darlings such as Peloton and Zoom have crashed more than twice that amount. Hedge funds that backed these growth stocks, including Ark and Tiger Global, have been crushed. If you look at your 401(k), you’ll see that … no, scratch that, you should under no circumstances look at your 401(k).“The stock market is not the economy” is a thing that some people like to say. But it’s not a very useful mode of analysis. Health care isn’t the economy either, and neither is the gross metropolitan product of Los Angeles. But if either of those things crashed by 30 percent in a quarter, we would all agree that was important. Sharp declines in equity values can trickle down through the economy in all sorts of ways, discouraging investment and spending, or leading to a contagion of layoffs.2. The crypto bubble has popped. Crypto fans had a fun ride, powered by exuberant risk taking in an era of low interest rates. But now the car is coming down the other side of the roller coaster. As fear and interest rates spike, investors are selling off their positions and billions of dollars of value are being erased from the industry. By one estimate, more than $200 billion of stock-market wealth has been destroyed within crypto alone, in just a matter of days. The bursting of the crypto bubble seems quite reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when the Nasdaq crashed and the effects reverberated throughout the economy, wiping out retail investors and pulling down business investment until we ended up in a brief recession. If the crypto bubble popping were the only thing happening right now, I don’t think a recession would be likely. Except it’s not even close to the only (or even the most important) thing happening right now.3. Inflation is very high and broad-based, and that’s bad. This week’s inflation headlines were a bit confusing. The Wall Street Journal reported that inflation had “eased.” The New York Times reported that prices are “rising rapidly,” at a pace close to a 40-year record. Who’s right? They both are. The rate of price increases is declining, but the level of price increases is still extremely high and frustratingly broad-based. Several months ago, some economists offered succor to worried consumers by pointing out that inflation was overwhelmingly about a handful of weird categories, such as used cars. Well, that’s no longer true. Today used-car prices are actually declining as inflation has moved on to service industries, such as restaurants and tourism. This week, gas prices hit their highest average nominal price ever. Inflation is bad for all sorts of reasons. People really hate it: The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment is near its 60-year low.4. A lot of people feel poorer than they did one year ago. Unemployment is very low, and the labor market is tight, which means workers can easily quit jobs and take new positions to make more money. (This trend is sometimes confusingly referred to as the “Great Resignation.”) That’s a nice situation. But inflation is rising every month, and raises rarely come more than once a year. That means “real,” or inflation-adjusted, wages are actually declining. Worse, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve, wage growth is starting to level off, even as inflation continues to march on. This isn’t a tenable situation.5. Savings are falling, and debt is rising. From 2020 to 2021, the U.S. government sent most American households several thousand dollars in checks to get them through the pandemic. With much of the economy shut down, many Americans held on to that stimulus cash, and the personal-savings rate soared to a 60-year record. But now Americans have spent just about all that cash, and the personal-savings rate has fallen to below its 2010s average. During an unstable moment for the economy—with markets collapsing, and inflation rising, and the Federal Reserve slamming the brakes on the economy—the typical household doesn’t have much in the way of protection. Instead consumer debt is breaking new record highs.6. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes are already causing mayhem. One of the Federal Reserve’s mandates is to keep inflation around 2 percent. Well, so much for that one. Inflation has skyrocketed past 8 percent, leading the Fed to announce a spree of rate hikes designed to slow down economic activity. In theory, the plan works like this: The Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which makes it more expensive to borrow money for mortgages, cars, and business investments. As a result, investment in all those categories and more declines, and the economy cools off. But here’s the problem. Modern history has very few examples of unemployment this low and inflation this high where rate increases haven’t caused a recession. On the path to crushing inflation, the Fed may destroy trillions of dollars of wealth and economic activity.7. China is a mess. The world’s second-largest economy has had a strange 2022. China’s zero-COVID policies have led to shocking lockdowns in major cities such as Shanghai, freezing economic activity. China is also dealing with a real-estate-investment implosion, falling business confidence, and startling declines in economic activity. Why is this troubling for the U.S.? Because China was projected to account for about one-quarter of global economic growth in the next few years. When China sneezes—or, more apt, when Chinese officials forcibly quarantine anybody who sneezes—the world could catch a cold. The U.S. might have been in a strong position to deal with a Chinese slowdown if its other trading partners were all doing well. But they’re not.8. A recession is coming for Europe. The U.K. economy is shrinking, and the central bank says inflation will exceed 10 percent this year. War in Ukraine has sent energy prices skyrocketing throughout Europe, and most economists believe that the continent’s economy will contract this year. Europe seems very likely headed toward both stagnation and inflation—the dreaded combination that, 50 years ago, gave birth to the awful term stagflation. If Europe shrinks while Chinese growth decelerates, American exporters will have a hard time contributing to growing GDP.9. Oh yeah, it’s still a pandemic. Restaurant activity and airline travel are nearly back to their pre-pandemic highs as most Americans return to something like “normal.” But we don’t know what else the virus and its variants are going to throw at us. Could the next variant be more transmissible and more deadly, and also get around our immunity? I hope not. But these are the 2020s. Anything is possible.

In October 2021, environmentalist activist and author Michael Shellenberger published his bestselling book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He is now campaigning to be the next governor of California on an independent ticket and a platform that promises to address the crises he identified in that book—a homeless crisis afflicting the major cities, a rising cost of living, spiking crime rates, and a failing education system. He says he is proposing aggressive action and common-sense solutions that are not beholden to party politics. Threading that needle is notoriously difficult, but Shellenberger’s unusual candidacy may resonate with a liberal voting base perennially disappointed by the conventional candidates on offer. In a Skype interview for Quillette, I asked Shellenberger about his plan for fixing California’s homeless crisis and his strategy for appealing to voters across the political spectrum. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.Quillette Magazine: You are running for governor not because you’re a politician who’s a natural fit, but because California has a lot of problems and you believe you have the right solutions. Tell me about the problems California is experiencing.Michael Shellenberger: I’m running for governor because I’m heartbroken by the tragedy—the human tragedy—on the streets. I’m also angry at the politicians who keep making the problem worse. But I’m also inspired by California. I’m in love with California—I’ve been in love with it ever since I was a boy—and I think it has huge potential.So, I’m running because I want to overcome the problems. But more than that, I want to help California to achieve its potential as a state, which is to lead the country in creating a new social contract—a new understanding around questions like: What is our obligation to our fellow citizens when it comes to mental illness, drug addiction, and homelessness? What is the arrangement with each other in terms of creating abundant energy, water, and housing? And what is the new social contract around education? Because we should have world-class schools, but they’re absolutely failing our students.QM: Recently, urban planner Nolan Gray tweeted, “Florida is what California was supposed to be: a place where normal people can just kind of show up and claim their little slice of paradise and be weird.” That’s how I thought of California before I moved here. Do you think that’s the correct way to think about it?MS: I think that maybe it’s sort of how it was supposed to be, but I don’t think that’s a particularly compelling vision of what California should be. California is in many ways the most American of all American states. It’s a state that’s obsessed with the frontier, it’s obsessed with freedom. The crisis facing California is part of a broader crisis facing America, and that is a crisis of freedom unbalanced by responsibility. So, one of the things I’m proposing to do as governor is to build a statue of responsibility that’s as tall and magnificent as the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. But rather than ask a foreign nation to build it, I believe Californians should pay for it and build it ourselves. That would represent a completion of the American project.We’re suffering a Peter Pan syndrome in California—we refuse to grow up, and that looks like a refusal to accept responsibility. We see it at all levels of government. We see our current governor refuse to accept responsibly for the various crises—the homeless crisis, which is really an untreated mental illness crisis and a drug addiction crisis. He’s refusing to accept responsibly for the educational crisis, where only half of our students are proficient at reading and only one-third are proficient at math—black students are 10 percent proficient at math and Latino students 15 percent proficient at math. In response, they’re now seeking to lower the standards for all students. That’s a way of eschewing rather than accepting responsibility. Accepting responsibility means raising standards for all students and giving parents more involvement and choice to personalize the education of their children.This also means taking responsibility for the management of our environments—of our forests and cities. We’re not going to allow large areas of our cities to turn into open drug scenes. That deprives other people of their freedom and does nothing to care for sick people in need of medical care, who are instead enabled to live in their own filth and to maintain their addictions. Similarly, on energy, Californians need to take responsibility for producing our own energy rather than being dependent on energy imports.So, I’m proposing a new era of responsibility. With that, California has a chance to lead the whole country, which is also struggling to figure out what kind of country we are going to be. We see both Left and Right slipping into nostalgia for a past that never existed. So, while I agree that California has not become what Florida is, I don’t think “live and let live” is good enough anymore.QM: Last week, I was coming home from work at San Francisco’s Civic Center. I was at a BART station going down an escalator, and right in front of me was a guy smoking something off a piece of tinfoil. I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t appreciate the fact that I had to breathe it in. This situation wasn’t shocking at all; it’s something you see all the time. In Michael Shellenberger’s California, what happens to this guy? Is he arrested? Does he go to jail? Does he go to rehab? Is it forced rehab?MS: He was probably smoking fentanyl, an opioid that’s 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin. It’s put on top of the tinfoil and then they light the foil underneath and then they inhale the smoke through a straw. We’re going to get people like that the medical care and shelter they need, which is our moral duty. If there were an earthquake and 200,000 people were suddenly living in tents on the streets suffering from drug addiction and mental illness, we would not hesitate to take care of them.So, our response will be to create sufficient temporary shelter for everybody and triage tents to provide medical care, including detox from drugs. We will then work with law enforcement and social services to create a centralized addiction and mental-health care system that we’re going to call Cal-Psych. Initially, this will be created through executive order and executive action, but we will also go to the legislature and ask that they pass legislation to create Cal-Psych as a legislative body. We’ll take action because it’s our moral and legal obligation to do so. And we’ll draw on the extraordinary powers that we have as governor to do that. We’ll use those powers judiciously, but we’ll use them to address the humanitarian disaster. If we get into early 2024 and the legislature has failed to act on our proposals, then we’ll put them on a ballot initiative and voters will vote on them in November 2024.Once those two years have gone by, voters will have seen a significant improvement and a significant reduction of open-air drug use and dealing. To the extent that we can, we’re going to deport the drug dealers working here illegally for the Sinaloa Cartel. And we’ll work with federal law enforcement and immigration services to make sure that those drug dealers who are killing our citizens are deported or prosecuted to the full extent of the law.We may also need to modify some of the laws that have decriminalized drugs and shoplifting. We’re going to need to pass legislation. But the vision here is that after eight years—really after four years—we don’t have open-air drug scenes. Instead, we will have shelter for all—universal shelter—and a significantly larger police force. We will have our centralized psychiatric and addiction care system—a CEO who reports to me, six regional directors who will report to the CEO, and case managers and social workers who will report to the regional directors. They will also oversee a network of private contractors who will provide shelter, residential care, rehab facilities, psychiatric hospitals, and hospital beds, all with a single payment reimbursement system so we get reimbursed by Medicaid, particularly if we’re going to be taking care of sick people from around the United States.QM: How are you planning to sell the idea that some measure of force is required to get people off the street? Every time the government tries to close a homeless camp (for example, in Echo Park last year), there’s a huge public outcry. Right now, Gavin Newsom is trying to roll out his CARE Courts plan, and you have the ACLU saying it’s going to exacerbate racial disparities. How are you going to deal with the level of pushback you get from the public and organizations like the ACLU?MS: After the Echo Park open drug scene was closed, we saw a small number of very loud activists complain, but they are a political minority. They hold radically different values than the majority of people in California who think that parks belong to all of us, and that they shouldn’t be privatized by a small number of radical anarchist organizations using drug addicts and the mentally ill as cannon fodder for their war on civilization. The vast majority of the public wants to shut down the open-air drug scenes. They’re tired of what’s going on.The governor is basically engaging in a public relations exercise to show that he is trying to take action on this issue. But it transparently can’t work, because without the care system in place, you can arrest mentally ill people but where are you going to put them? We don’t have the psychiatric beds in our hospitals and we don’t have the residential care facilities, like the one that took care of my aunt with schizophrenia. They don’t exist because Gavin has refused to create that system, despite the advice of his top mental-health advisor.So, the care system has to come first. This is where mainstream liberals and progressives, at least rhetorically, have been accurate. So, once we create that care system, we have to enforce laws so that the people who are crying out for help through their behaviors—like breaking laws against public camping, public defecation, public drug use—can get the help they need. But if you don’t create the care system first, then you’re just going to be putting mentally ill people in jail. So, I think progressives are actually right to be concerned about Governor Newsom’s agenda.QM: A poll of the top issues for voters in California was recently taken by the Berkeley Institute of Government Studies. For Democrats, these are housing affordability, homelessness, climate change. For Republications: crime, gas prices, immigration, taxes. For no-party [unaffiliated] voters, it was a mix of both: housing affordability, homelessness, crime, gas prices. So, it looks like Democrats and Republicans, even in California, are on wildly different pages in terms of what they care about. Republicans don’t seem to rank homelessness as a top priority. So who are you actually speaking to? It seems your message is more for Democrats. How are you going to bring Republicans in?MS: Our early polling shows that we draw equal support from independents, Republicans, and Democrats because our agenda is not partisan. It’s just a common-sense, practical agenda.The majority of Californians have the same concerns but they express them slightly differently. What the Republicans call crime, progressives call homelessness. But we’re all talking about the same thing, which is that the open drug scenes are driving the increase of property crimes around the state. And so, we’re going to deal with that the same way that all civilized countries have dealt with it. We’re going to enforce the law, provide universal shelter with housing earned, and provide universal psychiatric care.There’s been this conventional wisdom in politics that somehow you’re supposed to change your message in the primary versus the general election. I don’t think that’s a particularly honest way of campaigning. I’d rather just tell people what I want to do from the beginning. And the fortunate thing is that California’s no-party-preference electoral system has created an opportunity to just be able to explain what we need to do to both sides—all sides.QM: I’ve heard a lot of politicians in the last few years say that they’re going down the middle and appealing to both parties. That was Andrew Yang’s thing: “It’s not Left or Right, it’s forward.” If you look at his policies, he’s basically a leftist but he reframes the messaging so it’s palatable to the Right. Is there a politician that you think has done this correctly? Is there someone who you’re modeling your campaign after?MS: No [laughs]. If there were, I’d be working for them. And that’s why I’m running. I’m the only person who has this vision. And the vision comes out of having done the research and gone to places that have done this successfully. If you were to ask, “Has anybody had the vision?” the answer is “Yes, but they’re all in foreign countries.” I’m a huge fan of the Netherlands. It’s a country that has tough love as a core value. The party that’s in power is the party that came to power shutting down the open drug scenes. It also is the same power that supports nuclear energy and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.Whether you’re dealing with drug addicts or with energy, you have to be a grownup. The childlike view of these things is that there’s some quick and easy solution that has no consequences and anybody who denies it is a bad person. A more mature version says there are always going to be advantages and disadvantages to particular solutions. But there needs to be some kind of balance and some kind of moderation between strictness and love—between just helping people but also demanding change.Similarly, we get higher performance by doing hard things. Hard things actually bring out our best. And so, difficult obstacles are also the way forward. You don’t solve problems by going around them or avoiding them but by confronting them head-on and seeing them as opportunities to make yourself better.And that’s how I view California’s crisis: it’s not just a chance to get back to how things were. It’s a chance for the state—for us—to become better and really to become more mature. And to realize that there are ways to enforce laws without being cruel. You can demand accountability from people without punishing them. Certainly, some people are just sociopathic—violent criminals who should be in prison. But the vast majority of homeless people are just drug addicts or mentally ill people who need care with accountability.You can follow Michael Shellenberger on Twitter @ShellenbergerMD.

Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, believes that the eleven slave states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy in 1861 had a constitutional right to do so. That, he says, is what James Madison, sometimes referred to as “the Father of the Constitution,” would have believed. By contrast, Abraham Lincoln’s decision to coerce the seceded states back into the Union was a clear violation of the Constitution, and the first of his three brazenly unconstitutional actions as president. The second was his suspension of habeas corpus and use of military tribunals to silence his political opposition. In doing these things, Feldman says, Lincoln effectively made himself into a “constitutional dictator.”

Such violations interest Feldman chiefly because Lincoln had always claimed to be a strict adherent of the Constitution, even if that meant he had to preserve slavery despite his moral objection to it. Indeed, his respect for the proslavery compromises made by the Founders was so deep that only after two flagrant repudiations of constitutional restraint was Lincoln willing to undertake his third and most extraordinary violation of the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation. As Feldman sees it, Lincoln broke an already broken Constitution, thereby paving the way for the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery everywhere in the United States.

Most historians, when they seek the origins of the Emancipation Proclamation, trace the radicalizing effect of the Civil War on federal antislavery policy. Only weeks after the war began, the Lincoln administration decided not to return to their owners three slaves who had escaped to Fortress Monroe in Virginia. Over the course of the next year Congress passed two statutes mandating the permanent “confiscation” of the rapidly growing number of slaves who were coming into Union lines from disloyal states and disloyal owners. In August 1861 the Lincoln administration began instructing Union generals that such slaves were emancipated. Although tens of thousands were thereby liberated in the first eighteen months of the war, some Union soldiers violated the policy and returned escaping slaves.

In early 1862 Congress made it a crime for anyone in the Union Army or Navy to participate in the capture or return of fugitives. Shortly thereafter it abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., banned slavery from the western territories, and required West Virginia to abolish slavery as a condition for admission to the Union. Lincoln meanwhile refused to stay the first execution of an American slave trader sentenced to death. His secretary of state, William Seward, also negotiated a treaty, ratified by Congress, that would lead in a few years to the final suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. Viewed in light of these policies adopted early in the war, the Emancipation Proclamation appears as the climax in a series of increasingly radical attacks on slavery.

For some historians, it was the escaping slaves whose swelling numbers forced the radicalization of federal antislavery policy. Others cite the indispensable involvement of the Union Army. And still others, myself included, trace changes in policy back to their origins in the antislavery movement. These interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and there is widespread agreement that the ever more aggressive attacks on slavery led to Lincoln’s proclamation of January 1, 1863. At that point, the historian Allan Nevins wrote years ago, war became revolution.

This is the familiar narrative arc that Feldman seeks to replace by relocating the much-needed Thirteenth Amendment to the end of a succession of constitutional violations. He does not doubt that the war became an antislavery revolution, but he doubts that this had much to do with escaping slaves, the behavior of the Union Army, or the longer history of antislavery politics. The progression from the earliest decision not to return fugitives to the Emancipation Proclamation was hardly inevitable, he notes, nor was it even legally or logically necessary. In a sense, of course, he’s correct. History doesn’t proceed according to legal or logical necessity. But neither was there any legal or logical necessity, much less inevitability, in the progression Feldman describes, from coercing seceded states back into the Union to issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

Yet Feldman does appear to believe that once Lincoln made the fateful decision to abandon constitutional restraint by issuing his illegal proclamation, the path was cleared for the amendment that would replace the proslavery provisions of the Founders’ Constitution. To make his case, however, he must discount much more than the history of accelerating antislavery policy during the Civil War. He must expunge the entire record of antislavery constitutionalism stretching back to the founding era.

Feldman begins with a chapter on what he calls “the compromise Constitution,” that is, the Constitution that he believes protected slavery and made it a permanent feature of American society. It is worth noting that when Feldman uses the word “compromise,” what he actually means is “capitulation.” Most historians who describe the Constitution as a compromise accept that proslavery and antislavery delegates at the constitutional convention actually compromised with one another. In return for Congress’s right to ban slavery from the western territories, for example, the slaveholders secured the right to recapture fugitives who escaped into free states. Opponents of slavery at the convention did not want any slaves counted for purposes of representation and taxation, whereas the proslavery delegates wanted all the slaves counted.

The result was the notorious “three-fifths” clause, in which neither side got all it wanted. Delegates from the lower South threatened to walk out if Congress were given any power to regulate the slave trade. After objections from antislavery delegates, however, Congress secured the power to ban the slave trade—the first such provision in history—but not until 1808. These are the major compromises between proslavery and antislavery delegates that nearly all historians agree were embedded in the original Constitution of 1787.

But Feldman describes no such give-and-take and disregards all evidence that the antislavery delegates had any influence at the convention. He claims, for example, that the slave trade clause was “included in the Constitution at the insistence of South Carolinians,” when it was quite clearly included at the insistence of antislavery delegates. One would scarcely notice, reading Feldman’s book, that the Constitution gave Congress the power to ban slavery from the western territories—a power that, more than any other, prompted decades of escalating tension between the North and the South. Nor does Feldman even hint that proslavery and antislavery forces developed very different understandings of what the fugitive slave clause actually meant. This last dispute matters because it raised the single most important legal issue in the decades-long debate over slavery—whether the Constitution recognized slaves as property or as persons.

Sean Wilentz has demonstrated that the slaveholders at the constitutional convention tried and failed to get slaves recognized as property in the Constitution.1 Years later, however, southerners claimed that the fugitive slave clause vested owners with the very right they had been denied in 1787. Antislavery northerners flatly rejected this and insisted, as Lincoln put it, that “no such right” to slave property existed in the Constitution, even by implication. It is impossible to understand the origins of the Civil War, or of wartime emancipation policy, without grasping the significance of the debate over “property in man.” Among slavery’s opponents, the fact that slaves were referred to in the Constitution as persons and never as property—even in the fugitive slave clause—had profound implications, which Feldman simply ignores.

He likewise ignores two of the most important constitutional principles regarding slavery, neither of which is explicitly stated anywhere in the document. The first was federalism, which left the regulation of slavery entirely to the states. None of the well-known constitutional clauses dealing with slavery restricted the scope of antislavery politics as effectively as the assumption that slavery was a state institution, beyond the power of the federal government. The second principle was the war powers, ascribed to the Constitution despite the fact that there is no actual war powers “clause.” The war powers removed federalism’s restraints on Congress and the president. By this reading of the Constitution, the federal government could emancipate slaves in an effort to defeat an invading army or suppress a rebellion.

Proslavery and antislavery readings of the Constitution were already evident during the debates over ratification and persisted through the Civil War. Southerners eventually claimed that the constitutional right to slave property was so absolute that Congress could neither abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., nor ban it from the territories—indeed that it was obliged to protect slavery in the territories. But those arguments were stillborn if the Constitution recognized slaves as persons rather than property. If they were persons, they were entitled to due process rights when they escaped to the free states, for example. Legal personhood also meant that slaves taken into the free states by their owners could be automatically emancipated, and that slavery was unconstitutional on the high seas and in the territories.

None of this appears in Feldman’s account of slavery and the Constitution. He claims that “Northerners could not quote the Constitution to oppose slavery, because the Constitution said nothing against the practice.” Instead they were forced to rely on the airy platitudes about fundamental human equality in the Declaration of Independence, “the best—really the only—text they could invoke to claim an official pedigree for their moral stance.”

Actually, opponents of slavery not only cited the Constitution’s repeated references to slaves as “persons”; they invoked numerous other clauses as well. They quoted the Constitution, chapter and verse, when they claimed that Congress had the power to ban slavery from the territories or abolish slavery in Washington. They endlessly cited the Fifth Amendment’s declaration that no “person” could be deprived of liberty without due process of law. They invoked the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable seizure and regularly quoted the Preamble, with its claim that the purpose of the Constitution was to “secure the blessings of liberty” to everyone. It is certainly true that opponents of slavery—not least of them Lincoln—always recited the words of the Declaration of Independence, but they argued that the principle of fundamental human equality was “embedded” in the Constitution. There are several references to the Constitution in the Republican Party platform on which Lincoln ran for president.

It would be one thing if Feldman argued, on originalist grounds, that the defenders of slavery had the better case. Perhaps Chief Justice Roger Taney was right when he claimed that the Constitution “expressly” protected slaves as property and that as such they were not entitled to the due process rights of legal persons in the free states or territories. There are reputable scholars who make this sort of argument. By this reasoning Lincoln and his fellow antislavery constitutionalists might have been on the right side of history, but the “original” Constitution was the proslavery atrocity that the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced.

One problem with Garrison’s sort of originalism is that the original meaning of the Constitution, certainly with regard to slavery, was contested from the earliest years of the republic. During the debates over its ratification, the Constitution’s proslavery opponents often denounced it as an existential threat to slavery, and its antislavery supporters sometimes hailed it as a harbinger of slavery’s abolition. Still others defended or denounced it because it protected slavery. Yet Feldman barely mentions these conflicting interpretations in The Broken Constitution. Antislavery constitutionalism was the majority view among northerners, but Feldman restricts it to a tiny group of misguided radicals and quickly hurries them offstage to make room for those who believed the Constitution was thoroughly compromised by its protections for slavery—among them Lincoln, whose proslavery reading of the document was in Feldman’s view more historically accurate.

By disregarding the substantial conflict over the Constitution, Feldman frees himself to discount the origins of wartime antislavery policy. He begins with Lincoln’s promise not to “interfere” with slavery in the states where it existed, a promise known to scholars as the “federal consensus” because nearly everyone—from Garrison to the fiercely proslavery John C. Calhoun—agreed that the federal government could not interfere with (that is, abolish) slavery in a state, any more than it could interfere with emancipation in a state. Like marriage and indentured servitude, slavery was a state institution. But the federal consensus did not prevent Congress from attacking slavery indirectly in a variety of ways. Republican Party platforms across the northern states were replete with endorsements of a host of federal policies designed, in Lincoln’s words, to put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Rather than explore the implications of Lincoln’s utterly conventional avowal of federalism, however, Feldman misleadingly paraphrases it as a promise “to protect slavery.”

But promising not to abolish slavery in a state was not the same thing as promising to protect it. By the time Lincoln became president, he had endorsed the complete ban on slavery in the territories, drafted legislation to abolish slavery in Washington, called for aggressive suppression of the illegal slave trade, and suggested revising the fugitive slave law to protect the due process rights of accused fugitives. In 1859 he warned that if slave states seceded from the Union, they would forfeit their constitutional right to recover their fugitive slaves, and he repeated this warning in his first inaugural address. Secede from the Union, Lincoln declared, and your fugitive slaves, “now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all.” None of this suggests that Lincoln came into office promising to “protect slavery.”

Most significantly, Lincoln forcefully rejected the claim that the Constitution recognized slave ownership as a right of property. This was one of the central themes of his famous speech at the Cooper Institute in early 1860, which helped him secure the Republican Party’s nomination as president later that year. Southerners asserted a right to bring their slave property into the territories, but the Constitution “is literally silent about any such right,” Lincoln declared. “We, on the contrary, deny that such a right has any existence in the Constitution.” Nowhere does the Constitution refer to slaves as property, Lincoln went on. Instead, “wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a ‘person.’”

It’s hard to imagine how Lincoln could have been clearer. Yet Feldman completely ignores his emphatic repudiation of “property in man” and instead dismisses the speech as “strange,” “fairly bland,” based on “mildly tendentious legal reasoning,” and an “odd performance.” Feldman goes on to imply that the Constitution recognized slaves as property and, inexplicably, attributes that view to Lincoln. This is at best misleading. Everyone knew that to be a slave was to be defined in southern state law as property—as chattel personal. What Lincoln and nearly all opponents of slavery insistently denied was that slaves were recognized as property in constitutional law.

Southern secessionists had a clear understanding of who they were up against. They scorned Lincoln’s promise not to “interfere” with slavery directly because he and his fellow Republicans were simultaneously promising to interfere with slavery indirectly. Feldman dismisses such indirect attacks as trivial on the grounds that they could not possibly have led to the destruction of slavery. Yet the claim that indirect assaults on slavery might not have worked is largely beside the point, because it was the antislavery constitutionalists’ promise to attack slavery indirectly that led, directly, to secession and civil war. The historical significance of antislavery constitutionalism cannot be dismissed by means of a counterfactual hypothesis that erases the Civil War.

The slave states began leaving the Union shortly after Lincoln’s victory, claiming that the northern voters had elected a president who denied that the slaveholders had a constitutional right of “property in man.” He represented a party committed to slavery’s ultimate extinction, a party that would readily do indirectly what it could not do directly. Feldman, however, believes that secession should not have led to the Civil War because Lincoln had no constitutional right to employ coercion against the seceded states. This is where he begins building an alternative account of the origins of the Emancipation Proclamation. By obliterating the entire history of antislavery politics and the effect it might have had on wartime antislavery policy, Feldman has, as it were, cleared the decks for his alternative interpretation—Lincoln’s successive violations of the Constitution.

Lincoln’s immediate predecessor, James Buchanan, argued that although a state had no legal right to secede, the federal government had no power to force a state back into the Union. According to Feldman, Buchanan’s interpretation more accurately reflected the views of the Founders, in particular Madison. By contrast, Lincoln’s justification of coercion was a “novelty,” Feldman writes, that contradicted “the basic idea of American constitutionalism”: the consent of the governed. The secession conventions of the southern states “had made it as clear as humanly possible” that they had withdrawn their consent to be governed by the United States. Yet Lincoln insisted that the Constitution “did not allow the withdrawal of consent by the people of the states.”

This glosses over a number of complications. The Constitution says nothing about secession, so Buchanan’s claim was as much a novelty as Lincoln’s. Unable to cite the Constitution, Feldman instead cites Madison. But Madison said different things at different times. During the ratification debates he insisted, as did his fellow Federalists, that a state could not ratify the Constitution conditionally. On the contrary, he wrote in a letter to Alexander Hamilton, “the Constitution requires an adoption in toto and for ever.” Madison’s remarks were read aloud at New York’s ratification convention and subsequently published throughout the country. Opponents of the Constitution repeatedly warned that once a state entered the Union it would be unable to withdraw, and supporters of the Constitution never denied it. If there was an original understanding about secession, there is at least some evidence suggesting that Lincoln got it right: the Union was perpetual.

Nor did Lincoln clearly reject the will of the people, unless one assumes that “the people” did not include northerners or that secessionists, in repudiating the valid results of a legitimate presidential election, were not repudiating the will of the people. Feldman writes as if there were no such thing as the nation and restricts popular will to the secession conventions in the southern states. Even leaving aside the will of the enslaved population of those states, the issue is not nearly as straightforward as he would have it. Lincoln believed, for example, that, with the possible exception of South Carolina, the majority of southern whites did not support secession.

It was a standard theme of antislavery politics that 400,000 slaveholders held undemocratic sway over 30 million Americans, and still more undemocratic sway over 12 million southerners. A recent study suggests that the electoral systems devised for the secession conventions were systematically rigged to suppress the votes of nonslaveholders.2 The extent of popular support for secession among white southerners is still hotly debated among historians, but no one doubts that Lincoln believed—whether rightly or naively—that the secessionists did not represent the will of the southern people.

Feldman is on firmer ground in his discussion of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and the imposition of martial law in large parts of the North, but he undermines his argument by his repeated assertion that Lincoln set himself up as a dictator. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for the first time in the earliest weeks of the war, and his subsequent suspensions eventually covered the entire country. He allowed military trials in parts of the Union where the courts were functioning, a clear violation of the Constitution. His subordinates went so far as to arrest opposition politicians and close opposition newspapers. Few would dispute David Herbert Donald’s observation that the Civil War years brought “greater infringements on individual liberties than in any other period in American history.”3

The Constitution does, however, allow for the suspension of habeas corpus in the event of rebellion, and it would be foolish to pretend that Lincoln did not confront the largest rebellion in the nation’s history. The suspension clause is in Article I of the Constitution, which specifies the powers of Congress, and on that basis Feldman endorses Chief Justice Taney’s claim that Lincoln had no constitutional right to suspend habeas corpus. Taney’s reasoning, Feldman declares, “was so powerful that it was almost irrefutable.” But more sober legal scholars—G. Edward White, for example—point out that the suspension clause was placed in Article I almost incidentally, with no real thought given to limiting executive authority. Feldman is surely correct that Lincoln trivialized habeas corpus by referring to it as merely “one single law” among many, rather than the bulwark of civil liberty it has always been. But it was not entirely unreasonable for the president to conclude that the Founders could not have meant to paralyze the government by requiring the country to suffer rebellion and invasion for the six months of the year that Congress was out of session.

Feldman cites the familiar estimate that during the Civil War as many as 38,000 Americans were arrested without recourse to the courts. But he does not point out that the overwhelming majority of them were Confederates, spies, blockade runners, or smugglers—traitors actively engaged in the rebellion. Feldman instead highlights the relatively few arrests of opposition politicians and newspaper editors and dismisses Lincoln’s justifications as “paranoid—even unhinged.” Lincoln, he says, used “terms that would sound familiar in any dictatorial regime.” Eric Foner, hardly a Lincoln apologist, offers a more reasoned assessment: “Lincoln was no dictator,” he writes.

Elections took place as scheduled throughout the war, and the Democratic press continued to criticize the administration in the harshest terms. But neither did he possess a modern sensitivity to the importance of civil liberties.4

Having offered his readers a misleading account of secession and an indictment of Lincoln’s record on civil liberties, Feldman turns to the the most controversial thesis of his book, the alleged illegality of the Emancipation Proclamation. To appreciate the uniqueness of his analysis, some historical background is required, not least because it is entirely missing from The Broken Constitution.

Beginning with the Treaty of Paris of 1784, which ended the Revolutionary War, the United States repeatedly acknowledged the right of belligerents to emancipate the slaves of enemies during wartime. In debates over British reparations in the 1790s, every member of Congress who addressed the issue, along with every member of President George Washington’s cabinet who spoke up, acknowledged the legitimacy of military emancipation in wartime. In the 1830s former president John Quincy Adams, who had returned to the House of Representatives, stoutly affirmed that the constitutional war powers would allow the federal government to emancipate southern slaves should the US military be called upon to repel an invasion or suppress an insurrection. During the secession crisis antislavery congressmen quoted Adams, to the horror of their southern colleagues, and shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration Senator Charles Sumner—who was well versed on the legal status of slavery in wartime—visited the White House to instruct the new president that the war powers of the Constitution authorized him to emancipate the slaves of rebels.

As the war progressed, reputable legal scholars, notably William Whiting, weighed in with substantial tracts spelling out the president’s constitutional power to emancipate slaves. But the most important legal defense of emancipation was contained in the Lieber Code. In December 1862, weeks before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, two of the highest-ranking officials in his administration—General-in-Chief Henry Halleck and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton—asked Francis Lieber, a renowned professor of law at Columbia College, to revise the American military’s Articles of War. The result was General Orders No. 100, known as the Lieber Code.

Because state and local laws were suspended when armies occupied enemy territory, Lieber argued, fugitives escaping from the disloyal slave states to “the military forces of the United States” were “made free by the law of war” and, once freed, could never be re-enslaved. Halleck, himself an expert on the laws of war, edited the code to ensure that it was consistent with Lincoln’s emancipation policy, and it was released in April 1863. With that, the well-established legal justification for military emancipation was formalized in American law.

But readers of The Broken Constitution will find no reference to any of this. William Whiting appears nowhere and the Lieber Code’s defense of emancipation is not even mentioned. Instead, Feldman claims that Lincoln never offered a plausible legal justification for the Emancipation Proclamation other than “military necessity.” He says that Lincoln’s critics never accused him of acting in bad faith, when in fact they repeatedly claimed that the president’s defense was fraudulent because emancipation was never militarily necessary. Feldman simply ignores the long-standing American consensus in support of military emancipation and instead endorses the views of proslavery Confederates who denied its constitutionality.

Ignoring most of the legal arguments and nearly all the precedents for wartime emancipation, and garbling Lincoln’s fairly consistent references to them, Feldman instead declares that emancipating slaves was a patent violation of property rights, that everyone understood this, that the Emancipation Proclamation was Lincoln’s most outrageous abuse of the Constitution, and that Lincoln knew all along that it was illegal.

Most reputable scholars agree that Lincoln expanded the war powers of the presidency far beyond their previous limits. No chief executive had ever called up an army of 75,000 to suppress a rebellion without prior congressional authorization. None of Lincoln’s predecessors, or for that matter successors, dared suspend civil liberties so broadly. No one had ever come close to expanding the reach of military emancipation to more than three million enslaved people. But it does not follow that the Constitution required Lincoln to passively accept the dismemberment of the Union. He was no dictator. And his Emancipation Proclamation was an extension of well-established legal and historical precedents.

Feldman is surely right that the Constitution was radically transformed by the addition of the Thirteenth Amendment, effectively undoing the compromises the supporters and opponents of slavery made in 1787. But he could have made that point without ignoring the voluminous historical evidence that would have added some much-needed nuance to his thoroughly unpersuasive analysis.

O N FRIDAY APRIL 30TH 2021, at around 10pm, a £200 ($248) order of takeaway curry arrived at a Labour Party constituency office in Durham. A year on, the circumstances surrounding the delivery are subject to a police investigation that will decide the future of Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader.

Last year’s local elections took place during a partial lockdown. After a day of campaigning in north-east England, Sir Keir was recorded through a window drinking a beer while waiting for the fateful curry. The Labour leader insisted that since this was a work event, it was legal. After finishing his bottle of beer, he returned to the political coalface, firing off missives about the following day.

But one witness claims no work was done and that it was, in effect, an end-of-week bash. After complaints from a local Conservative MP , Durham police decided to examine the case. And on May 9th Sir Keir pledged to step down if fined by the police for breaking lockdown rules.

Sir Keir’s curry is the latest twist in a long-running scandal. For the past six months, British politics has largely been shaped by who drank what, where and when during a series of lockdown-busting parties in 2020 and 2021. Anger rose after it emerged that Downing Street and parts of Whitehall had hosted a series of soirées throughout the peak of lockdown. Juicy details, such as civil servants smuggling a suitcase full of wine into Downing Street, triggered apoplexy among voters and a slump in Boris Johnson’s poll ratings.

In April the prime minister became the first holder of that office to be fined for breaking the law. However, his £50 penalty was related to the least egregious event, in June 2020, when officials gathered to sing Mr Johnson “Happy Birthday” in the middle of the working day. Rishi Sunak, the teetotal chancellor, who was there because he had arrived early for a meeting, was also fined. Far worse allegations, including an ABBA -inspired party in Mr Johnson’s private Downing Street flat, still hang over the prime minister. But because Sir Keir called on both to resign over the birthday-party fines, the Labour leader has pledged to do the same if he gets one.

Sir Keir’s decision to stake his political career on a decision by a regional police force is risky. But he would have faced pressure to quit in the event of a fine, or look a hypocrite. Sir Keir, a former director of public prosecutions, has pitched himself as a man who follows rules, unlike Mr Johnson, who revels in breaking them.

This is not a new strategy. Sir Tony Blair employed a similar tactic in the middle of the cash-for-peerages scandal, when Labour donors were pledged seats in the House of Lords, in the final years of his tenure. Advisers let it be known that the then prime minister would resign if interviewed under caution. The upshot was that police skipped over Sir Tony in their inquiries. Sir Keir has some wriggle-room, too: if police say he broke the rules but choose not to fine him, he will stay in office.

After President Biden finished his speech at last week’s White House reception for Eid al-Fitr, he stepped down from the podium to greet the guests. He probably did not expect to meet two Uyghur Americans whose family members in China are being targeted by the Chinese government as part of Beijing’s efforts to silence its critics in the United States.

This was Biden’s first meeting with Uyghur American community representatives since becoming president, and it was not planned as anything more than quick handshakes. But when Ziba Murat started talking, Biden stopped his rounds and listened, Murat told me in an interview. Biden appeared visibly saddened when she told him about how Chinese authorities had arrested and disappeared her mother four years ago on spurious “terrorism” charges, five days after her mother’s sister had publicly criticized the Chinese government in Washington.

“I said, ‘I’m an American citizen, and my mother is in a concentration camp,' ” Murat said." And he stopped. And he looked at me, and I could see him getting emotional. And then he said, ‘Can I give you a hug?’ ”

Uyghur American lawyer Nury Turkel told me that Biden then patiently listened to his own story. Turkel was born in a Xinjiang reeducation camp during Mao’s cultural revolution and went on to become an American citizen and a U.S. government official serving on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a journey chronicled in his memoir, “No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs.”

Beijing has been retaliating against Turkel’s family because of his human rights advocacy in the United States. China won’t let his mother leave the country; he hasn’t seen her since 2004. His father died last month, before they could be reunited. Adding insult to injury, Beijing sanctioned Turkel and other members of the commission last year.

“I was moved and impressed by his empathy. ... I sensed the humanity of the man,” Turkel said of Biden. “Much like Putin’s Russia, regimes like the one in Beijing like to silence vocal critics through intimidation and abuse of their loved ones.”

Biden’s empathy and sensitivity are a welcome contrast to the demeanor of his predecessor, who reportedly told Chinese President Xi Jinping that his mass internment of Uyghur Muslims was “exactly the right thing to do.” But empathy goes only so far. The Biden administration must do more to address the problem of Americans targeted by Beijing’s long arm of transnational repression.

Dozens of family members of Uyghur or Uyghur American reporters at Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-funded journalism organization, have been thrown into the camps.

In March, the Justice Department arrested five men it alleges were working on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security to stalk, harass and even attack Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Kong, Taiwanese and other Chinese dissidents across the United States. That’s a good start, but policymakers have been slow to respond to the rising tide of authoritarian states repressing people outside their borders.

China is not the only dictatorship engaging in these illegal practices. Last year, Freedom House released a report that compiled 608 cases of transnational repression since 2014, carried out by 31 governments against the citizens of 79 other nations. But China, the report states, “conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” Beijing has transformed its influence over Chinese-language media, social media apps, local diaspora groups, local crime organizations, economic leverage and diplomatic pressure into “a multi-faceted transnational repression bureaucracy.”

The U.S. government regularly issues statements condemning this or that abuse. Some cases are occasionally raised by U.S. officials with their Chinese counterparts. But our failure to focus on this problem largely allows Beijing to go on acting with impunity. Meanwhile, these U.S. citizens and their families continue to suffer.

“We are living in this unending nightmare,” Murat told me. “We are the human face of this. We are the living, breathing examples of this horror.”

The fight against authoritarian regimes repressing Americans begins at home. U.S. tech companies must stop letting their platforms be used by dictatorships to harass and attack innocent people in the United States. Congress should make it illegal for U.S. companies to sell their spyware and spying services to regimes that use it to persecute their critics abroad. Foreign tech platforms such as WeChat and TikTok that operate inside the United States should not be allowed to import Beijing’s repression via their software.

Autocrats will keep expanding their malign influence inside Western societies until our governments wake up to the threat and make confronting it a real priority. That means more law enforcement, more diplomatic pressure and more protection for those brave enough to speak out against dictatorship in the belief that the United States is a safe place in which to do so.

The Biden administration gets all of this, but it isn’t doing nearly enough. Maybe now that the president has heard stories directly from two American victims, he will spur the machine of government into action. One thing he can no longer say is that he has never been told.

S IMON BOYD of REID steel, an engineering firm, is haunted by rising taxes, high energy prices and expensive raw materials. He complains of “scary spikes” in the firm’s costs. Over the past two years he has seen steel almost quadruple in price, and in October he expects energy bills to double—at least. (There is no energy-price cap for companies, unlike households.)

Mr Boyd is not suffering alone. In March manufacturers’ input prices were 19% higher than a year earlier, the sharpest increase since records began in 1997. Service providers are reporting record-breaking rises in costs, too. After dipping during 2020, the rate of corporate insolvencies is now higher than in 2019. The British Chambers of Commerce, a business association, wants an emergency budget to provide tax relief. On March 12th it emerged that the economy had contracted in March.

Yet for all the bad news, business confidence in Britain is a puzzle. Though falling (see chart), it has not plummeted in the way it has for consumers, among whom confidence is at its lowest since the financial crisis. In March the OECD , a club of mostly rich countries, recorded the largest gap between business and consumer confidence since records began in 1977. Why? Anna Leach of the Confederation of British Industry, a business association, thinks that the relatively gradual creep of businesses’ costs has normalised their pain. Paul Dales of Capital Economics, a consultancy, also suggests that the energy-price increases could be concentrated in a few industries. According to calculations by The Economist, businesses accounting for around a quarter of private-sector output consume as much as half of its gas and electricity (excluding firms that produce and distribute energy themselves). Businesses are still feeling relatively optimistic about their ability to pass on price rises to their customers. A survey run by the Bank of England suggested that in April managers expected prices to grow by a little over 6% over the next year, and for revenue to grow by over 9%. All the attention on inflation may be making it easier for businesses to push climbing costs onto their customers. Whereas companies may be in a position to negotiate inflation ratchets into their contracts, households are less able to protect themselves. For now firms are still hoping to hire more people than average, and redundancy notifications remain low. But there is a strong chance that the corporate mood will become as dark as that of consumers. The Bank of England is trying to curb inflation by raising interest rates: that means higher corporate borrowing costs. Soggy consumer spending will dampen revenue projections. A row with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol would add uncertainty.

On May 5th the Bank of England predicted that growth would slow sharply, partly because of the decline in households’ real incomes but also because of squeezed profit margins. Those with an eye on Britain’s longer-term growth will be studying both investment intentions and investment itself. Uncertainty over the macroeconomic environment could weigh on both, in which case productivity will suffer. If so, an acute problem would compound a chronic one. ■

Protesters outside of Justice Samuel Alito’s house. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images.)For the last seven years or so, I’ve often said that I’ve never felt more ideologically grounded but more politically homeless. What I mean by that is I don’t have an obvious political team anymore. A lot of people often ask whether this makes me feel lonely. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it did, a bit, in the early days. It’s more fun to be part of a team, never mind a valued member of one.  But I count myself rich in terms of the real teams that matter—friends, family, colleagues, and, of course, the quadrupeds.Besides, I’ve long believed and, more recently, fully taken to heart, that this is a flawed way of thinking about such things. If your political convictions lead you to feeling lonely, you are probably invested in politics for the wrong reasons. To put it crudely, if you take the position that taxes should be low or defense spending robust so you can fit in with a group of people, you don’t really hold that position. If you were pro-life or pro-choice out of loyalty to a team, you weren’t really pro-life or pro-choice in the first place. When the desire to maintain your good standing in a group determines what you profess to believe, you don’t really believe it—or at least you can’t be counted upon to believe it when it might come at a cost.That’s what I mean by being ideologically grounded but politically homeless. In recent years, huge numbers of people zigged because zigging was the order of the day. And since the crowd determines its bearings by the position of the ship, not the fixity of the sun or the North Star, those who stay put look like they’re zagging when in reality everyone else is zigging. This is partly what I have in mind when I talk about the “Remnant”—those people who hold to their views even when they are out of fashion.

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Since 2015, Jonathan Greenblatt has served as the director of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization devoted to chronicling and fighting anti-Semitism in American society. Amid a rise in anti-Semitic incidents documented by his group, and with hate crimes in general on the upswing, Greenblatt, a former special assistant to Barack Obama, has been speaking harshly about the tendencies he believes exacerbate anti-Semitism. One of those tendencies is anti-Zionism, which, in a recent speech, he referred to as “an ideology rooted in rage,” comparing it to white supremacy, and adding, “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.” This comes at a time when a vocal minority of young American Jews has called for one secular, democratic state across Israel and the Palestinian territories.

I recently spoke by phone with Greenblatt. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why hate crimes are increasing, the historical roots of anti-Zionism, and whether it’s bigoted to oppose a Jewish state.

What is the mission of the A.D.L. and how do you see it specifically since you took over?

The A.D.L. is interesting. It’s one of the oldest civil-rights organizations in the country. Its mission has not changed since our original charter was written in 1913: to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment to all.” It always had this mission, which is both particular and universal. The founders believed in this idea that you might call intersectional, that the Jewish people could only be safe when all people were safe, and only when all minorities were free would the Jewish people truly be free. So the organization has had this integrated approach—particularist and universalist at the same time—for more than a century.

What is the challenge for an organization whose mission is both particularist and universalist? Is there tension there?

I think it is a creative tension or a healthy tension, but there certainly does exist the necessity of finding how those things interoperate. So, for example, in 1952, the A.D.L. wrote an amicus brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case and did so because our leadership in the nineteen-fifties, long before it was fashionable to fight for civil-rights issues, had come out strongly in favor of them, in favor of integration, in favor of desegregation. There were some among our volunteer base who said, Why is the A.D.L. getting involved? That’s not a Jewish issue. But our management in the nineteen-fifties said, Actually, this is our issue. It’s essential to who we are. Then later that same decade the A.D.L. came out in favor of immigration reform and did a lot of work in civil society in support of what became known as the 1965 Immigration Act. There were some among A.D.L. who said, Why is this our issue? The A.D.L. leadership said, No, it actually is our issue.

When I stood up against the proposed Muslim registry, in 2016, or when I went to the border and I was a very loud opponent of the way they were detaining undocumented children and separating them from their parents, some people have said, These things aren’t Jewish issues. Again, I think the way we treat people of different faiths, the way we treat people who immigrate to this country or come as refugees, speaks entirely to who we are. So I think this is exactly what the A.D.L. is all about and always has been.

Your group has released statistics indicating that anti-Semitism is on the rise in America. Why do you think that is?

The F.B.I. tracks hate crimes, meaning felonies and misdemeanors, reported through local law-enforcement agencies, that are crimes against an individual or an institution because of an immutable characteristic like faith, gender, sexual orientation, or national origin. The A.D.L. also tracks anti-Semitic incidents. So let’s say acts of harassment, or bullying—that might not rise to the level of a hate crime. Law enforcement doesn’t care if a kid gets bullied at school, but we do. We collect this information through our twenty-five offices across the country, as well as through lots of individuals and organizations. The F.B.I. 2020 stats—we don’t have 2021 yet—suggested hate crimes are up six per cent over all. We calculated in our most recent audit a thirty-four-per-cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents. That is consistent with an unfortunate pattern that’s emerged since 2016, where instances have been on the rise pretty much every year.

So what’s the cause of that? Political polarization and the coarsening of the public conversation has taken a lid off of politeness and people are now saying things in public spaces they just never did before. People are more vituperative with one another and going after each other. So I think that’s No. 1. I think No. 2 is the penetration of conspiracy theories: making wild claims about individuals such as George Soros or Sheldon Adelson or the Zionists or whatever. Now conspiracy theories are everywhere, and Jews are often at the center of them. No. 3, I think extremists are emboldened in this environment and you see them literally running for school boards, running for Congress. The last thing is that almost seventy-five years since the Holocaust, the collective shame that was there fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago has somewhat receded.

Recently, you a gave a speech where you said, “Against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitic incidents, we will thank the G.O.P. leadership for their statements of support—and demand that they call out the bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracies of their candidates and elected officials. Against this same backdrop, we will applaud Democratic leadership for their statements of support—and demand that they call out the statements of those in their party who knowingly traffic in anti-Zionist tropes and make malicious claims against the Jewish state.” You tagged this rise to 2016, and most of the examples you listed were things I would associate with Republicans and especially Donald Trump. Is the major issue here Donald Trump and the course the G.O.P. is on? And is that course broadly not conducive to Jews thriving?

America has been not only the most vibrant democracy in memory but the open, liberal-minded society that we have here has been the best for the Jews. And historically you can see that the Jews tend to thrive in these open, democratic environments, where people are judged on the content of their character. We tend not to do very well in authoritarian societies. We tend not to do very well in the places where civil rights are diminished or squelched. All these freedoms have a lot to do with Jews prospering.

I worry a great deal about the diminishment of civil rights and the diminishment of these values and privileges that we really cherish. We have politicians or public figures who liken COVID precautions to Nuremberg laws. I think that’s frightening. Holocaust distortionism, which is what I would describe that as, is a slippery slope that tends not to end very well for Jewish people. So, to answer your question, that does worry me a great deal because I do think it’s a slippery slope toward more illiberal policies.

I was asking whether partisanship and extremism more broadly were the problem, or whether it was the G.O.P. becoming a party that goes whole hog for many of these things.

I think when either party starts adopting conspiracies as if they were facts, that worries me. You’ve got people like Marjorie Taylor Greene in the Republican Party who say things that can’t be believed.

President Joe Biden arrived in office with a throwback theory of how to expand his party’s support. He sought to focus his presidency on delivering kitchen-table benefits to low- and middle-income families—for example, with stimulus checks and an expansive child tax credit—while downplaying his involvement in high-profile cultural disputes and emphasizing bipartisanship. Harry Truman or Hubert Humphrey would have recognized this approach: It was an updated version of the economics-first political formula that allowed the New Deal–era Democrats of Biden’s youth to dominate blue-collar communities, like his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, from the Depression through the 1960s.But nearly 16 months into his presidency, Biden’s plan has been battered on both ends. Republicans in Washington, D.C., have dashed his hopes of cooperation (apart from a deal on a bipartisan infrastructure package), and his desire to de-emphasize the culture wars has been undermined by a red-state blitzkrieg on social issues and the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that exploded into public view last week. Simultaneously, opposition from Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—combined with moments of intransigence from the party’s left—have blocked Biden from delivering the full suite of material benefits he hoped would move more working-class families, of all races, back toward the Democrats.[From the April 2022 issue: What Joe Biden can learn from Harry Truman]It’s not unusual for presidents and their political strategists to find that events confound their initial theory of how to expand and solidify their coalition. Bill Clinton wanted to win back working-class white people and independents with his “third way” centrism, but he ultimately revived his presidency by staring down the Newt Gingrich–era Republican Congress over the federal budget (before shifting course again to make some high-profile deals). George W. Bush initially hoped to woo moderate voters and Hispanics as a “compassionate conservative” before becoming a wartime leader focused on maximizing turnout among the Republican base. Barack Obama aspired to be a unifying figure of generational change and racial reconciliation, but he found himself struggling to lead the nation out of its worst economic downturn since the Depression, against fierce Republican resistance that culminated in the emergence of the racially resentful Tea Party.Events forced each of these presidents to make significant course corrections that in turn helped each win a second term. The challenge for Biden is that he is still searching for the course correction that will enable him to recover—with six months to go until the midterm elections and at a time when his approval rating is stuck at about 40 percent.The resulting vacuum has plunged Democrats into a cacophonous argument. Centrist party strategists are insisting, more loudly than at any point since Clinton’s presidency, that the president must explicitly renounce the Democrats’ liberal vanguard, especially on cultural flashpoints such as crime and immigration. Progressives, meanwhile, believe that Biden must do more to fulfill his 2020 campaign promises through unilateral executive action, such as canceling more student debt. They also want him to call out Republicans more forcefully, for their hard-right turn on social issues as well as their embrace of state-level voting restrictions and candidates backing former President Donald Trump’s discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.Condemning Republicans might be one area of consensus for Democrats. In recent weeks, Biden has appeared more willing to describe the GOP—or at least its MAGA faction—as “the most extreme political organization that’s existed … in recent American history,” as he put it in a May 4 speech. Democrats across the party’s ideological spectrum also believe that the threat to abortion rights from the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority and state-level Republicans will help them energize their base voters in the midterms and narrow the enthusiasm advantage that polls have documented for the GOP.A unifying message about Republicans is a relatively easy puzzle for Democrats, though. Their bigger challenge is defining their own priorities and direction—for this year and beyond. The party right now “is a little stuck, and it’s a little mired,” says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategist for Way to Win, which helps fund organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color. “But we don’t have time to keep fighting about it.”Both parties generally agree on the two main reasons for Biden’s low approval ratings. First, with the country facing its highest inflation levels in four decades, Americans are expressing in polls towering levels of economic dissatisfaction and assigning a big share of the blame to Biden’s policies. Second, the persistence of COVID disruptions with the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants, as well as the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, severely dented Biden’s attempt to project competence, one of his core campaign promises.[Annie Lowrey: Why everyone is so mad about the economy]“People voted for competency and normalcy,” says Doug Sosnik, who served as a senior political adviser in the Clinton White House. “Well, we don’t have normalcy—a lot of that’s not his fault. And there have certainly been some areas where you could accuse the Biden administration of being less than competent.”Less agreement exists over how much Biden’s own legislative strategy and broader positioning have contributed to his distress. To Republicans, and some centrist Democrats, the main reason for the president’s decline in approval is that he “ran as a center-left politician, and he has governed as a politician from the left,” as the longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres puts it. Ayres cites an observation from Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who said of Biden, “Nobody elected him to be FDR.” She “had it right,” Ayres told me. On issues including immigration, crime, taxes, and government spending, he said, Biden “has persisted in making liberal choices over moderate choices.”Ruy Teixeira, a veteran Democratic electoral and demographic analyst who has become one of the most ardent critics of the party’s left wing, largely agrees. Teixeira says that Biden’s initial strategy for expanding the Democrats’ base, by emphasizing economic issues and bipartisanship, remains “a perfectly good theory about how to build a broad majority coalition.” But he complains that Biden allowed progressives in the House of Representatives to demand a much more sweeping economic agenda in the Build Back Better legislation than could realistically pass a closely divided Senate. “He may have wanted to be ‘Scranton Joe,’” Teixeira says. “But he got elected as a president in a party and a political context that won’t let him do that.”To those on the Democratic left, that analysis might as well have originated in the Upside Down. The problem, they argue, is not that the left is foisting unpopular policies on Biden; it’s that Manchin and Sinema, from the party’s center-right, are preventing Biden from passing popular ideas. “The evidence is much more credible about this being driven by economic perceptions”—primarily about inflation—“rather than the idea that Biden is too left-wing,” says Sean McElwee, a progressive pollster.If anything, McElwee argues, the failure to pass the BBB legislation’s major climate provisions has contributed to the fact that Biden’s approval rating, compared with his 2020 vote share, has fallen most sharply among young people. Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a progressive organization, points out that a survey conducted by the group’s Navigator poll recently found that two-thirds of adults said they support a package that would lower drug prices, confront climate change, and expand Medicare benefits to services such as hearing aids, all of which essentially describes the pared-back version of Build Back Better that has received the most discussion on Capitol Hill.Sosnik sees some merit in both arguments. He agrees that Biden and Democrats would improve their position for 2024 if they could pass some of the tangible economic assistance in the BBB plan, though he doubts that those programs would be felt in time to boost the party’s prospects this coming fall. But he also believes that Biden mismatched the scale of his ambitions and the size of his legislative majority, and misread the signals swing voters sent when they reduced the Democratic House majority even while electing him to replace Trump in 2020. “Biden got elected mostly as an anti-Trump vote,” Sosnik says, adding, “The signs were there in the 2020 election about the limits of the activism” his voting coalition would accept.The coalition that elected Biden—primarily people of color, young adults, and college-educated, socially liberal white Americans—very much reflected the Democratic Party’s evolution over his lifetime. But Biden has always seemed eager to reconstruct the Democratic coalition of his youth, which relied on more support from working-class white voters. One White House official, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told me that Biden is intent on framing his economic agenda “in a very blue-collar-oriented way.” The president often stresses his plans’ benefits for workers without four-year college degrees—a clear departure from both Clinton and Obama, who emphasized the importance of moving workers up the education ladder. Biden also has rejected calls from even some Democrats to roll back international tariffs or his tougher “Buy American” procurement provisions in order to combat inflation. He’s much more likely than either Clinton or Obama to praise labor unions and less inhibited about criticizing China. Biden rarely seems happier than when appearing at a manufacturing plant.Yet in the 2020 election, according to most data sources, he improved only slightly on Hillary Clinton’s anemic 2016 showing among white voters without college degrees. As president, Biden’s approval rating among those white blue-collar workers has fallen into the mid-20s in some polls.[Bill de Blasio: Joe Biden can learn from my mistakes]Biden still clearly sees his economic plan as his best chance to reverse those numbers: In his State of the Union address and again in his May 4 speech, he reframed key elements of the stalled BBB package—including bigger child-care and health-care subsidies and measures to reduce drug prices and utility bills—as a means to help financially strapped families. But calling attention to any provisions in the plan always risks reminding voters that Democrats so far have failed to pass it—and that Manchin might not accept any remnant of the economic package Biden once hoped would restore the Democrats’ New Deal–era identity as the party delivering for average families.If anything, the gap between the competing Democratic factions is even greater on cultural issues. And the dispute is as fundamental as where Biden should aim his fire.Some centrists—including Teixeira and Will Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute—have told me they believe that Biden should focus more on what they see as cultural extremism from the left. They want the president to forcefully and consistently condemn the progressive voices who have backed defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings.Biden has edged in this direction by underscoring his support for reforming but “funding”—not defunding—the police, most visibly in his State of the Union address. But Teixeira said “it defies logic” to think that will be enough to persuade voters drawn to Republicans’ claim that Democrats are soft on crime. “It would take a sustained campaign in and outside the party to really convince voters that Democrats are tough on criminals,” he said. “To simply say that to defund the police is not a good idea—I don’t think works.”Teixeira also is skeptical that Democrats should push back harder against the GOP’s cultural agenda. He argues that in many instances—such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law or the restrictions on classroom discussion of race—Republican politicians are responding to justifiable parental concerns and that Democrats can’t condemn the initiatives “as sheer bigotry.” “I know people who say the Republicans are so far out of their skis on this that all we have to do is oppose them, and people will come to their senses,” Teixeira said. “And I believe that is not the case.”For progressives, this counsel once again springs from the Upside Down. “There is an old tendency” among party centrists “to call out the left and do the Sister Souljah thing,” says Ancona, of Way to Win, referring to Clinton’s denunciation of a young hip-hop star who called for violence against white Americans during the 1992 campaign. “That’s an old playbook that needs to be thrown out.”Ancona argues that Biden should target what she and other progressives see as cultural extremism from the right: the potential overturn of Roe and the wave of red-state laws to restrict abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; ban books; and censor how teachers can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation. The advice that Biden should reassure swing voters by picking a fight with the left, she says, ignores the reality of a Democratic coalition that now relies on people of color for about two-fifths of its votes, and also depends on the white voters who “want to be part of a multiracial society [and] in coalition with Black people who are fighting for justice.”Instead of targeting the cultural left, progressives I spoke with said Democrats should employ the “race-class narrative”—which argues that Republicans are emphasizing cultural and racial issues to distract voters from their real priority of tilting economic policy toward the rich. Ancona says candidates should take their cues from the way Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock integrated economic and racial equity in their messaging during their stunning victories in Georgia. “If I were going to look at who to emulate,” she argues, “I would not look back to Clinton in the 1990s; it would be to look to Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia in 2021.”The Justice Department has filed federal lawsuits in almost all the policy areas Republicans are targeting. And Biden has criticized elements of that cultural agenda, particularly Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But he has not mounted any sustained effort to call attention to these policies or paint them as extremist. Multiple outlets last week reported that Biden’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe was the first time he had uttered the word abortion as president.A 79-year-old practicing Catholic who once criticized Roe before shifting his view, Biden has always been an unlikely figure to rally the forces of cultural change. But his choice not to engage more forcefully has dispirited some Democrats—particularly as Republican-led Senate filibusters have blocked House-passed legislation attempting to counteract red-state moves. The enormous show of support for Michigan Democratic State Senator Mallory McMorrow’s impassioned response to a Republican who accused her of wanting to “groom and sexualize” young children shows how hungry Democrats are for a stronger rebuttal to the right’s escalating cultural offensive, Ancona argues. At a fiery press conference last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom also articulated that impatience, describing the Republican cultural agenda as “extremism at a scale I’ve never experienced in my lifetime” and then pointedly asking: “Where the hell’s my party? … Why aren’t we standing up more firmly, more resolutely?”[Read: America’s blue-red divide is about to get starker]The draft opinion overturning Roe seems certain, at least for a while, to sublimate this intraparty dispute: Democrats of every stripe were quick to condemn it, Biden included. Teixeira told me in an email that “this issue is different since Democrats fairly unambiguously are on the center ground and don’t (yet) have any crazy they really need to disassociate themselves from.” But party divisions over cultural issues are bound to resurface as Biden confronts questions such as how to balance criminal-justice reform and public safety and whether to revoke Trump’s Title 42 restrictions turning away migrants at the southern border on public-health grounds.If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, a big backlash against it could reconfigure the midterm landscape. But it remains more likely that whatever message Democrats choose, the combination of high inflation, Biden’s sagging approval rating, and the historical pattern of first-term midterm losses for the president’s party will generate significant Republican gains in November.The 2022 elections, like all midterms, might turn mostly on voters’ assessments of immediate conditions in the country. But that probably won’t stop both sides in the Democrats’ internal debate from arguing that the results show why Biden should move in their direction. After November, the struggle over the party’s identity is guaranteed to grow even more urgent and intense—especially because so many Democrats are afraid that if they don’t get it right, the consequence will be a Trump restoration. “That’s one thing for certain,” Sosnik says. “If Democrats have a bad election, we will have a full-throated, public, six-month debate about why we lost.”

Last week, Politico reported on a strange leak from the J. D. Vance campaign. A super PAC supporting the Ohio Republican—who won the party’s nomination for Senate on May 3—had commissioned opposition research to help Vance defend against his vulnerabilities. The super PAC discovered that a decade ago, the now staunchly pro-Trump Vance had written a half dozen articles for a website run by a future anti-Trumper: me. Politico found the super PAC’s report and posted a link to it.The site was called FrumForum.com. From 2009 to 2012, it tried to imagine a reformed Republican Party: more economically inclusive, more culturally modern, more environmentally aware. The project proved unsuccessful, to put it mildly. Yet it attracted dozens of young writers who subsequently advanced to important careers and high reputations. One of them was J. D. Vance.Vance wrote for FrumForum under a pseudonym. So, even as my former contributor’s career has lurched in disturbing directions, I’ve felt honor-bound to maintain confidentiality about the pieces. I also felt that the substance of what he wrote, while revealing, didn’t at the time rise to the level of urgent public interest. Now the record is out there, not by my doing.In some ways, there are continuities between the FrumForum Vance and candidate Vance. Both are deeply concerned about the deteriorating prospects for working-class white America; both are immigration skeptics. But the differences are more profound. FrumForum Vance scorned culture-warring, valued expertise, endorsed social inclusion, rejected partisan rancor, and supported America’s important role in world security. All that has been left behind by Senate candidate Vance.[Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of J. D. Vance]One Vance essay for FrumForum praised former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman as a truer conservative than Texas Governor Rick Perry. Another attacked ethanol subsidies. A third endorsed cuts to the future growth of Medicare and Social Security. (Vance wrote: “Of all the things I can’t stand about politics, the tendency to emotionalize a difficult topic is probably the worst.”) In the course of writing about the Supreme Court, he conceded his support for race-conscious affirmative action.A fifth essay defended the U.S. war in Iraq against a video released by WikiLeaks showing an Apache helicopter firing upon and killing at least 10 Iraqis. “War will always be a grisly business,” Vance wrote. “I’m not a peacenik, and I supported the Iraq invasion on the merits, but it’s folly to send troops to do the toughest job and then be shocked by the attitude that some show while doing it.” A sixth expressed Vance’s disdain for the rhetorical populism of the Tea Party era. It defended ultraselective elite universities, and championed government by “the best and the brightest.” He wrote: “I was raised primarily by my grandparents in a dying steel town. They taught me that if I worked hard and believed in myself, I could do anything. They were right. This fall I’m headed to Yale Law School, and I’ll join 200 other students—of every color—virtually all of whom scored above the 95th percentile on the LSAT. Our best institutions of higher learning—warts and all—demand excellence from their students.”I admired this outspoken young writer. More than that, I liked him. I welcomed his rise as a future leader of reformist conservatism—and him as a guest in my home for dinner parties.Vance has obviously traveled a long way since those days, and I was a spectator to some of that journey.In the early 2010s, Vance and I talked about a book he might write, outlining how government policy could address poverty and addiction in rural America. When Vance did write a proposal for that book, he opened with a personal introduction. His publisher advised him to discard the policy chapters and expand the introduction into a book-length memoir. The result was the mega–best seller Hillbilly Elegy.[Cassie Chambers Armstrong: Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t reflect the Appalachia I know]Vance’s superpower in those days was his biographical credibility as he spoke about Trump America to non-Trump America. In talks at forums like the Aspen Institute, in an essay for The Atlantic, across elite tables at venues like the investment bank Allen & Company’s Sun Valley media conference, Vance urged understanding of the people who had voted for Trump, even as he excoriated Trump himself as unfit, bigoted, authoritarian, fraudulent—a deceiver and exploiter of the people Vance spoke for.Vance’s message was tough, but his tone was measured. In those days, the figure he most modeled himself upon was Barack Obama. Vance made the comparison explicit in an early-January 2017 opinion article for The New York Times, titled “Barack Obama and Me.” Vance pointed out the similarities between their lives: absent father, raised by grandparents, prestigious law degree, literary fame. He described President Obama as “a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted … I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth.”Before the 2016 election, Vance’s future political path looked straightforward. He would await the expected Trump defeat, then emerge as a next-generation Republican savior: a candidate who could speak from his origins in Appalachia to the suburbs of Columbus, all while preserving his connections to his donors in Silicon Valley.Trump’s Electoral College victory complicated the calculation. Some Democrats wooed Vance to change parties. Obama’s campaign guru David Axelrod had Vance as a guest on his popular podcast the month after Vance’s Times article was published.More plausible was a path for Vance as leader of the internal Republican opposition to Trump. About a week after the inauguration, in 2017, Vance invited me and a dozen other anti-Trump conservatives to a quiet meeting in a downtown Washington, D.C., conference room to discuss ways forward from the Trump predicament. That meeting was off the record, but Vance subsequently emailed participants to alert us that he himself had spoken to a reporter about it.[Read: Opioid of the masses]Among the topics we considered: Could any good come from the Trump administration? How outspoken should we be in opposition? The meeting did not reach conclusions, but it did not need to. The unspoken but widely understood agenda looked further into the future: We were present at the creation of a “Vance for President” campaign that might go into operation sometime in the late 2020s or early 2030s.
J. D. Vance speaks at a campaign rally in April. (Joe Maiorana / AP)
I imagine that many of the participants in that meeting still hold such hopes. Vance’s subsequent choices, however, have ensnared his plans. In a reversal of the usual political trajectory, Vance’s writing and speaking have edged angrier and uglier as he has gained success and prominence.In July 2021, Vance inveighed against the “childless left” who have made no “physical commitment to the future of this country.” In November, he attacked fellow Ohioan LeBron James for criticizing Kyle Rittenhouse’s demeanor at his homicide trial: “Lebron is one of the most vile public figures in our country. Total coward.”In a September podcast, he urged that Trump, upon his hypothetical restoration to office in 2024, purge the government of federal employees who aren’t loyal to him and defy the courts if the purge was held illegal.When he got the endorsement recently of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who notoriously floated a conspiracy theory about California’s wildfires being started by space lasers associated with “Rothschild Inc.,” he tweeted: “Honored to have Marjorie’s endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the scumbags.”The former supporter of the Iraq War has turned into one of the nation’s preeminent scorners of Ukraine’s fight for independence, declaring: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” At the end of last month, Vance even suggested that President Joe Biden was plotting intentionally to flood the U.S. with deadly fentanyl: “It does look intentional. It’s like Biden wants to punish people who didn’t vote for him.”[David A. Graham: The art of the dealer]In April of this year, Vance tweeted: “Barack Obama is articulate but has never made a memorable speech. The reason is that his views are utterly conventional. He’s unable of saying anything outside of the elite consensus. He’s a walking, talking Atlantic magazine subscription.” What prompted that highly personal outburst against Vance’s former role model and the magazine to which he himself had contributed his sharpest anti-Trump criticisms? A video clip of Obama speaking negatively of Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin.Many who knew the early Vance ponder the question: What happened to him?I don’t overthink that question; the answer seems obvious enough. I ponder something else.The anti-populist conservative Vance persona of 2010–17 was well designed to please the individuals and constituencies that held power over his future at that juncture in his career. The angry-white-male persona of 2017–22 was as perfectly aimed at the Thiel-Trump-Tucker nexus as the earlier iteration had been to the Allen-Aspen-Atlantic one.With a Senate nomination secured, Vance now has new constituencies to please. Ohio today is not the swing state it used to be, yet it’s still home to many non-Trumpy constituencies, including tens of thousands of voters of Ukrainian descent. If elected to the Senate, Vance may rekindle still-higher ambitions, ambitions that cannot be realized by the narrowly based support that got him not quite a third of the vote in last week’s Ohio Republican primary. I very much doubt that the “Vance for President” dream has died—not in him, and not in his backers.So the question I ponder is not: What happened to the J.D. I knew? It is: Who will J.D. become next?

Four decades after the publication of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s famous essay Dictatorships and Double Standards, everything old is new again. Only the particulars of America’s predicament are different. Today, we face Russia’s hot war on NATO’s doorstep and a long-term struggle with a China that is both totalitarian and woven into the fabric of the global economy. Much like in the past, the United States and its allies need to do a better job in broadening coalitions against our two main adversaries.Kirkpatrick wrote at the time about the need for a “morally and strategically acceptable, and politically realistic, program for dealing with non-democratic governments.” What might this look like in today’s world, where the faultlines are sharpening between the democratic and authoritarian worlds?Kirkpatrick’s essay took a shot at the period’s naive attempts to democratize autocracies that were friendly to the United States. Such efforts ended up making way, as in Iran and Nicaragua, for much worse forms of totalitarianism and authoritarianism that aligned with the Soviet Union instead of America—all while dictators unfriendly to the United States were left alone or appeased. The relevant distinction, she observed, was between authoritarian regimes that were open to U.S. suasion and that could democratize one day, and the totalitarian communist states, incapable of domestic change and in lockstep with Moscow.In our efforts today to build wide coalitions to push back against Chinese and Russian influence, we have to relearn how to make similar distinctions—though perhaps along slightly different lines.Of course, many of the “traditional autocracies” of Kirkpatrick’s time have since been swept away by the third wave of democracy. While that is, on balance, good news, such democracies can also be fragile, flawed, and sometimes move in an authoritarian direction—as Turkey or Hungary have done. It would be splendid news if we could prevent such democratic declines. A world populated by consolidated liberal democracies would be far more amenable to U.S. interests. In this vein, if executed well, the Biden administration’s new European Democratic Resilience Initiative, for example, might make a meaningful difference in keeping other allies from following Hungary’s example.Yet, much like in Kirkpatrick’s time, “architects of contemporary American foreign policy have little idea of how to go about encouraging the liberalization of an autocracy.” Take Poland and Hungary, both under populist, right-wing governments. For years, the two countries were treated by the popular media and Western policymakers as manifestations of essentially the same problem—and in many ways they were. After all, the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party famously promised in 2012 to build a “Budapest in Warsaw.”While both countries have de-democratized, albeit to a very different extent, the deep-seated differences between the two are far more important than the similarities. Regardless of who is in power in Warsaw, Poland is bound to be a thoroughly reliable ally of the United States, arguably more reliable than many of its traditional West European partners. Conversely, there are historic factors that account for Hungary serving as Russia and China’s fifth column in Europe.Not only have Americans and Europeans long failed to make that and similar distinctions, they have also conflated issues that are critical to our interests—Hungary’s participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative or Poland’s attacks on U.S.-owned media outlets—with a broader agenda of promoting liberal social and cultural values, fueling a predictable anti-Western backlash in Central Europe. Together, such policies harken back to Kirkpatrick’s warning against “hurried efforts to force complex and unfamiliar political practices on societies lacking the requisite political culture.”Perhaps the least auspicious parallel between the present and Kirkpatrick’s time is the extent to which countries around the world—whether democracies or not—are seeking to stay out of the current conflicts between the West and China or Russia. That Indonesia, for example, appears extremely reluctant to disinvite Russia from the upcoming G20 summit in November is a testament to the limits of America’s ability to shape the foreign policy of countries of the Global South in ways that are conducive to its interests.To take another example, there is no denying that Turkey has been helpful in boosting Ukraine’s defenses. Yet, apart from its problematic regional role, the government in Ankara was itself, until recently, a keen buyer of Russian weapons systems. Likewise, Saudi Arabia is a repellent, oppressive theocracy. But it is also a bulwark against an equally theocratic, and revanchist and aggressive, Iran. While we may want to wish plague on both houses, that does little to keep the region and its oil supply safe. Critically to the current war in Ukraine, an increased Saudi oil output could play a very helpful role in bringing down the Russian foreign exchange revenue funding Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine.Yet, the Biden administration’s record in building incentives for countries such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia to act as constructive players is decidedly mixed. Turkey, like other nominally pro-Western countries of the Middle East, is steering away from Western sanctions against the Kremlin. Riyad seems unwilling to dramatically boost oil production. It now accepts renminbi for its oil sales to China. “Who do these Gulf monarchs consider their true ally,” Josh Rogin asks in a recent article on Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, “the United States or Russia?”

While Rogin makes a compelling case for playing hardball with the Gulf autocrats, he does not address questions of why such regimes seem to have peeled off from Western alliances and what combination of sticks and carrots, if any, could have been deployed to prevent that. Here is one tentative answer: Appeals to democratic values are no substitute for a clear understanding of America’s first-order goals—containing and weakening China and Russia—accompanied by a strategy built ruthlessly around those priorities. As long as Washington itself is unsteady and erratic in the pursuit of those aims, it is hard to expect others to follow it.The administration should be commended whenever it decides to do the unambiguously right thing—as in Ukraine, where, after weeks of self-deterrence, a more muscular approach appears to be emerging. Yet, much of the administration’s efforts are marked by lethargy and a lack of forward-looking strategic aims. In the abstract, a Summit for Democracy was an appealing idea. But can anyone remember what goals it was meant to achieve geopolitically, in what countries, and with what U.S. resources?To deal with the current geopolitical landscape, what is needed today is not an abstract commitment to values of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. U.S. foreign policy must have a clear, reality-based view about what success looks like in different parts of the world. Thus, while we may have disagreements with Poland, Warsaw is a qualitatively different partner than Budapest. We might recoil at Mohammed bin Salman but there are solid reasons to stand with Saudi Arabia against Iranian proxies. In the Indo-Pacific, we have no choice but to engage constructively with the likes of Singapore, Malaysia, or the Philippines in containing China’s influence—however much those countries fall short of democratic standards.To build broad-based alliances against Chinese and Russian influence around the world, the United States needs to roll out more effective sticks and carrots across different areas of policy—from defense through diplomacy, to trade and regulation. That is precisely where the lethargy and the inward focus of the Biden administration, epitomized by the slogan of a “foreign policy for the middle class,” become major problems.Biden’s trade policy, to cite just one example, is simply a continuation of the boneheaded protectionism of the Trump years—keeping the World Trade Organization paralyzed, shying away from trade deals with our closest allies, and even continuing with some of the counterproductive tariff measures. Without aggressive liberalization efforts that could offer real market access and new opportunities to emerging economies, there is very little in the administration’s toolkit that could generate goodwill among the vast majority of countries around the world that are currently carefully sitting on the fence and watching the West confront its two major autocratic adversaries.The administration’s gradual stepping up in Ukraine notwithstanding, Joe Biden risks falling, just like Jimmy Carter, into the trap of empty moralizing accompanied by haphazard action not matched by adequate resources. “Usually … governments behave hypocritically when their principles conflict with the national interest,” Kirkpatrick writes.What makes the inconsistencies of the Carter administration noteworthy are, first, the administration’s moralism, which renders it especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy; and, second, the administration’s predilection for policies that violate the strategic and economic interests of the United States.It would be good if the same did not ring true of our present moment.Dalibor Roháč is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of American Purpose. Twitter: @DaliborRohac

Today marks the publication of my new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, which you will be hearing more about in the coming days.  It is published in North America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and available on Amazon; it was published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books in late March and has been available since then on the Amazon UK website.  Over the coming weeks and months it will be published in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, and many other countries.This book is an expansion of an article of the same title that I wrote to launch American Purpose, an online journal dedicated to the defense of classical liberalism.  My UK publisher Andrew Franklin read the article and encouraged me to turn it into a short book, whose results you’re seeing now.I want to begin by defining the sense in which I am using the term “liberalism.”  There are many different uses of this word, several of which are different from my usage of it.I am not using liberalism in the American sense of left-of-center progressive politics.  In the hands progressives, classical liberalism has evolved into something that is often anti-liberal.I am not using liberalism in the European sense of a center-right politics that is pro-free market and socially progressive, exemplified by the Free Democratic Party in Germany.I am not using liberalism, or the term “classical liberalism,” as a synonym for libertarianism, that is, a peculiarly American viewpoint that is hostile to government as such, both in the economic realm and in social policy.  I believe that a true liberal society needs a capable state to enforce laws and deliver necessary services.My use of the term “classical liberalism” is best summed up by the political theorist John Gray, who describes it in the following terms:"Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and society … . It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements."I would further define classical liberalism in terms of the institutions with which it is closely associated, and without which it has no real effect.  The most important is a rule of law that imposes constraints on the exercise of state power and protects a sphere of individual autonomy.  Most successful liberal societies have constitutions that create checks on executive authority like separation of powers, federalism, and press freedoms.Classical liberalism is further associated with a certain mode of cognition, the scientific method, which postulates an objective world independent of subjective human consciousness, that can nonetheless be perceived and manipulated through the experimental method.  This cognitive mode makes possible the technological world that is the enabler of modern economic growth.Classical liberalism as I have defined it is different from democracy, yet closely related to it.  It is possible to have liberal autocracy, like Germany in the late 19th century or perhaps Singapore today.  These are or were countries with a strong rule of law, but that do not hold regular free and fair elections.It is also possible to have illiberal democracies that do hold regular elections, but do not observe liberal constraints on state power. This characterizes Viktor Orban's Hungary, and is the aspiration of populist politicians from Recep Tayyip Erodoĝan in Turkey to Narendra Modi in India to Donald Trump in the United States.That being said, liberalism and democracy are closely associated with one another historically in something we properly label “liberal democracy” that combines a strong rule of law with free and fair elections. Liberalism by itself often produces a high degree of economic inequality, and if unconstrained by a democratic state through regulation and effective social policy liberalism becomes hard to sustain.  I consider social democratic countries like Sweden and Denmark to be fundamentally liberal societies despite the fact that they have expansive welfare states, because they also have a strong rule of law and protect individual rights.Similarly, democracy without liberal rule-of-law constraints often becomes undemocratic, as legitimately elected leaders scheme over time to keep themselves in power regardless of popular will.  This has been going on in Hungary, where Orban’s Fidesz Party has been gerrymandering the electoral system to make it hard for the opposition to win power. Something similar is happening in the US as Republican state legislatures seek to manipulate the way that votes will be counted in future elections.Liberalism and Its Discontents is a defense of liberalism rather than democracy in the first instance because it is liberalism that has been most immediately challenged in the present-day world. Vladimir Putin in a well-publicized 2019 interview with the Financial Times asserted that liberalism had become an obsolete doctrine.  Democracy by contrast continues to be almost universally legitimated principle, even if not put into practice; both Russia and China claim that they are in fact more genuine democracies than countries that hold regular elections.If you want to read more about why liberalism has been attacked from both the right and left in recent years, please purchase and read Liberalism and Its Discontents.

       Transgender symbol and pencils with the color of Lgbt flag on the blackboard. Eoneren/Getty Images   We already know the truth about detransitioning   Debra Soh  May 10, 11:56 AM May 10, 11:56 AM  A new study in the journal Pediatrics is being propelled by the media as evidence that few children change their minds after socially transitioning.  The study followed roughly 300 children who had socially transitioned to live as the opposite sex. (Nonbinary and third genders were not as popular five years ago, when study data were first being collected, so these children had transitioned to live as either female or male.) At enrollment, they were between the ages of 3 and 12 years old, and approximately 12% had begun puberty blockade prior to beginning the study.   About 7% of the children changed their gender identity at five years post-social transition. An example of a change would be returning to living as his or her birth sex or deciding to live as nonbinary. In some cases, children changed their minds more than once.  For example, after the initial social transition to live as the opposite sex, some children decided they were nonbinary, then decided they were, again, the opposite sex. Another child decided, after the initial social transition, that they wanted to live as their birth sex before changing their mind and identifying as nonbinary.  Of note, these children displayed significant cross-sex preferences and identification, but the study didn’t assess whether they met the criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria because many parents in the study didn’t believe such a diagnosis was "ethical or useful." Parents of these children also had "disproportionately higher income and went to college at higher rates than the general population." Take from that what you will about their politics.  The most pressing question in my mind is, why would a parent support a child’s gender transition if it hasn’t been deemed medically necessary?  Allowing children to partake in cross-sex interests doesn’t require them to live as the opposite sex. Young children also don’t have an accurate understanding of what it means to "become" the opposite sex. A nonbinary self-identification can stem from this confusion.  As a result, we can’t extrapolate these findings to children who are gender dysphoric, who are statistically likely to desist. We also can’t ascertain much about children presenting with rapid-onset gender dysphoria, as this is an epidemic primarily occurring among girls and young women, and most of the children in the current study were born male. State legislation pertaining to childhood transition should consider this when making determinations about policy.  Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Updated at 2:55 p.m. on May 10, 2022In the two years since she caught the coronavirus, 38-year-old Jessica McGovern has cycled through “well over 100 drugs, supplements, and therapies” to try to keep her long-COVID symptoms at bay. In almost all cases, she told me, the interventions were to no avail: Exhaustion, weakness, and aches still lashed her to the couch; she still felt suffocating chest pain that worsened when she inhaled; her upper body was still haunted by a sharp, staticky sensation that reminded her of running hot water over frozen hands. McGovern would fall asleep in agony, then dream of more agony.Then, around the start of April, she began a five-day course of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral pill. By her second day on the drug, McGovern “could feel the messaging in my body shifting.” Four weeks later, her fatigue, aches, and labored breathing remain. But the screaming, nerves-on-fire pain that gripped her body for two dozen months “is basically gone,” she told me. She’s recovered some mobility. She’s spending more time with her three young kids. A flutist for nearly three decades, she’s playing her instrument again after a two-year hiatus, “which feels incredible,” like reclaiming a shade of her former self.To date, no established treatments exist for long COVID. But in recent weeks, a smattering of long-haulers—McGovern among them—have been surprised to feel their sicknesses subside after taking Pfizer’s new drug. The case for treating long COVID with antivirals is far from open-and-shut. But should these anecdotal reports augur a flood of similar data, Paxlovid might offer a surprisingly straightforward fix to one of the pandemic’s biggest puzzles. Long COVID is so ranging, so diverse, so capable of wreaking havoc on a multitude of tissues that treatment, for many, will undoubtedly require the rehabilitation of many bodily systems at once. Maybe, though, for a subset of long-haulers, a few days of antiviral pills could be all it takes to rev the healing process into gear.[Read: The pandemic after the pandemic]That Paxlovid may quench anyone’s long-COVID symptoms is itself a bit mysterious: The drug works best when delivered fast and early, futzing with the virus’s ability to xerox itself inside human cells and making it easier for the immune system to jettison the bug. But long COVID can take weeks or months to manifest, and hasn’t been proven to have a persistent viral source. Experts still don’t know how common, or lasting, post-pill reprieves might be; they can’t say with confidence why the drug could have palliative effects, or—if said effects are substantiated—which long-haulers stand to benefit most.Even in the rosiest scenario, Paxlovid won’t be a panacea. But if it has a chance of doing something, even for just a fraction of long-haulers, “we have to at least try,” says Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, “because we have nothing else.” Millions of people in the United States alone are estimated to have developed long COVID’s harrowing symptoms since the pandemic’s start; their numbers grow with each additional wave. “This is an intervention that should [have been] under clinical trial yesterday,” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation specialist at Mount Sinai. And yet there are, to date, no well-designed studies investigating Paxlovid’s potential as a long-COVID drug, and none publicly poised to begin.The search for long-COVID therapies has been stymied, in part, by the nature of long COVID. The condition, like cancer, appears to be not a single disease but a category of related-but-distinct syndromes, each of which could manifest with its own set of symptoms, require its own treatments, and stem from a slightly different cause. In some proportion of long-haulers, maybe the majority, the virus is believed to have come and gone, leaving behind physiological devastation—battered tissues, raging inflammation, self-attacking antibodies, discombobulated nerves, a freckling of blood clots. In these cases, experts told me, Paxlovid probably won’t do diddly-squat. But perhaps the drug could help another group of long-haulers, who are thought to harbor hard-to-reach reservoirs of virus that regularly rile the body up.The snarl is that no one has yet provided slam-dunk evidence of these hidden viral caches. Many scientists, including Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki, one of the world’s top long-COVID researchers, argue that strong hints are there: SARS-CoV-2 certainly can stick around in certain people’s bodies for months, and can also mosey out of the airway to colonize other tissues, including ones that certain immune fighters can’t easily access. Researchers have seen traces of the virus’s genetic material and proteins in a mélange of organs, sometimes months after infections begin. But while those fragments could represent active virus, they could also be bits of stray microbial trash. To help clinch the case, researchers would have to recruit tons of long-haulers, guess where the virus might be lurking, and see if they could extract enough of the microbe from that tissue to infect new cells in the lab—studies that are invasive, “long and slow and painful” to get just right, and couldn’t even prove that the virus was causing the symptoms at hand, says Catherine Blish, an immunologist at Stanford.Still, Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch, believes long-term infection is probably “more common than we think,” he told me. People’s lived experiences support that too. Some long-haulers have reported feeling a massive, unexpected upswing in well-being after receiving COVID vaccines—a trend several experts attribute to the shots galvanizing immune cells into finally, finally kicking out remnant virus.The handful of post-Paxlovid improvement stories now emerging echo what other long-haulers felt with the vaccines. A group of Stanford researchers, led by the physician Linda Geng, recently reported that a 47-year-old woman’s long-COVID symptoms—among them, fatigue, insomnia, body aches, cognitive issues, and a racing heartbeat—evaporated after she took Paxlovid for a possible reinfection. “She was able to go back to work, and started exercising again,” Geng told me. A couple of long-haulers being treated at a clinic at UCSF may be on a similar trajectory. Lavanya Visvabharathy, a 37-year-old immunologist at Northwestern University, experienced a bounceback as well. After months of headaches, fatigue, and disturbed sleep, she nabbed Paxlovid at the end of March, and “all my symptoms went away,” she told me. Visvabharathy, who takes immunosuppressive drugs to manage her rheumatoid arthritis, had been repeatedly testing antigen-positive. But after she finished Pfizer’s pills, she saw a negative for the first time since she was infected, in December.Anecdotes and case studies alone won’t be enough. So far, the reports of post-Paxlovid improvements have been too inconsistent, too scant “to gauge what’s really happening,” Angela Meriquez Vázquez, who runs Body Politic, an advocacy group that offers support to people with long COVID, told me. Many long-haulers do not qualify to take Paxlovid, because they haven’t recently tested positive and are not considered at “high risk” of developing severe COVID. Long COVID’s symptoms can also naturally wax and wane, making it difficult to tie relief to a definitive cause. To show with any real clarity whether Paxlovid’s doing what many long-haulers hope, someone needs to test the theory with rigorous clinical trials, ideally with the help of the company that’s manufacturing the drug.Pfizer doesn’t seem actively opposed. The company is “considering how we would potentially study it,” Kit Longley, a spokesperson for Pfizer, wrote in an email, but declined to clarify why the company has no study under way. That frustrates Putrino, of Mount Sinai, who thinks Pfizer will need to spearhead many of these efforts; it’s Pfizer’s drug, after all, and the company has the best data on it, and the means to move it forward. The NIH, whose RECOVER initiative has a budget of more than $1 billion to study long COVID, recently sought proposals for clinical trials of new long-COVID therapies, including, potentially, antivirals—a promising step, Stanford’s Geng told me. But the agency has been sharply criticized for dillydallying in the year-plus since the program launched, and for de-emphasizing treatment-focused trials. And there’s no guarantee that Paxlovid will be among the treatments tested. When asked to elaborate on Paxlovid’s experimental status, the NIH said only that the agency “is very interested in long term viral activity as a potential cause of PASC (long COVID), and antivirals such as Paxlovid are in the class of treatments being considered for the clinical trials.”In all fairness, a Paxlovid–long-COVID trial would be tough. Researchers still haven’t reached a consensus on how to define or diagnose long COVID, or what it means for patients to markedly improve. Drugs against severe disease have an ultra-clear readout: “You count the number of people who end up in the hospital,” says Steven Deeks, a long-COVID researcher at UCSF. Long COVID’s sprawling scope, however, means no single ruler can measure the drug’s potential impact. Many of the experts I spoke with felt a bit daunted by the idea of trying to quantify the disease’s qualitative symptoms pre- and post-Paxlovid. That challenge, they said, could be a stumbling block for any research effort. But JD Davids, the co-founder of the Strategies for High Impact and its National Network for Long COVID Justice, who has long COVID, told me scientists don’t have to look far for inspiration. Researchers have already developed metrics for another chronic illness, ME/CFS (which Davids also has) to rate, for instance, the severity of fatigue, mobility limitations, and pain. “You just have to believe that people can tell you how they are feeling,” Davids said.[Read: Long-haulers are fighting for their future]Then there’s the question of whom to enroll, and how many of them. If only a small fraction of long-haulers are duking it out with persistent virus, “you might not see the benefit” in trials, unless they’re gargantuan in size, says Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease physician at Columbia. Researchers could hedge their bets by selectively recruiting long-haulers who continually shed bits of virus genetic material in their feces, say, or who only recently developed long-COVID symptoms and might be more likely to have SARS-CoV-2 still inside them. But select the wrong subset, and a trial could tank. Iwasaki, of Yale, wants to explicitly study the drug’s effects in a wide range of people. “The goal is not to cure everyone but understand who benefits,” she told me—and when. In some people, long COVID could evolve from a viral problem into an autoimmune one, making early intervention essential.Paxlovid has baggage too. In recent weeks, some people taking the five-day pill course for new infections have reported a rebound in symptoms and test positivity—a likely indication, UTMB’s Menachery told me, that the pills aren’t sweeping all the SARS-CoV-2 out. It’s still unclear how common the relapses are, and the problem may be cropping up with long COVID too. Alisa Valdes, a 53-year-old writer who has battled more than 220 long-COVID symptoms, “felt normal for the first time in 25 months” after taking Paxlovid in April. “I was skipping, I was jumping,” she told me. “I thought, This is a miracle.” But within a day of the drugs running out, her body was once again aching, feverish, and inflamed; angry red rashes that had disappeared came roaring right back.Visvabharathy, the Northwestern immunologist, told me that a few weeks after taking Paxlovid, she felt some symptoms creeping back as well. A test she took at the end of April also came up positive. Perhaps Paxlovid’s five-day regimen for acute COVID will need to be lengthened in some newly infected patients; long-haulers may require something more extended still. Such a tweak could prompt a slew of safety questions. The original clinical trials turned up side effects—occasional bouts of diarrhea, a nasty sour tang in the mouth—that did not raise huge concerns, but after months of unabating illness, long-haulers’ bodies may not react in the same way to the drugs, especially when dosed on an extra-long course. Paxlovid also interferes with a hefty list of other medications, some of which can’t be paused for extended periods.[Read: Paxlovid mouth is real—and gross]Right now, long-haulers are gambling with all of those question marks as they seek the drug out—some of them through loopholes in the health-care system, with the help of providers sympathetic to their cause. With so few options on the table, people are “itching for any type of treatment,” Body Politic’s Vázquez told me, and some are willing to stomach a bit of risk. But in the absence of real data and rigorous research, and with so many unable to access the drug at all, others are hesitant and confused—and afraid of being once again let down.From the start of the pandemic, skepticism has dogged long COVID and the people who live with it. McGovern, the flutist, spent much of 2020 being repeatedly told that her symptoms were just anxiety, or that she was feeling off because she was allergic to her pet parrots. (She is not.) Attitudes have improved in the years since—but some doctors, once unsure of long COVID’s existence, now struggle to wrap their head around the prospect of out-of-the-box treatments. At one point, I asked McGovern which of the many therapies she’s tried actually helped. “Aside from my family and close friends, you’re the first person to ask me that,” she told me. “I’ve never had a physician ask me ‘What has worked for you?’”This skepticism can extend to research too. Benjamin tenOever, a virologist at NYU, told me that he recently had NIH funding pulled from a project that would have investigated whether antivirals could combat long-COVID symptoms in a hamster model. His contact at the agency said the study had “no merit,” tenOever told me. “They were like, This doesn’t make sense, because why would Paxlovid ever help long COVID? The virus is long gone.” (When I reached out to NIH, Clint Wright, the director of the Division of Clinical Research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, responded that “we can’t comment on research that is not funded.”) Others posited that the possible benefit of antivirals for long-haulers might not feel worth the effort required to prove it: Even if viral persistence plays a role, it may be quite uncommon. Yale’s Iwasaki dismisses this. “Say it’s only 10 percent of patients that respond positively,” she told me. That’s still potentially millions of people in the U.S. alone.America’s neglectful posture on long COVID is choreographed into just about every aspect of what’s left of the country’s pandemic response. Vaccines can’t totally block long COVID, but are being billed, via boosters, as one of the only interventions people need; the CDC’s newest guidelines on masks almost entirely elide the condition’s existence, as it’s not classically considered to be clinically “severe.” Researchers aren’t even sure if early-acting treatments such as antivirals slash people’s chances of getting long COVID, though Iwasaki is hopeful that they do. With so few protections against long COVID available or in use, its burden only stands to grow. Therapies, at least, could finally construct an exit ramp.
Paxlovid could still be a bust. But the process of figuring that out could shift the landscape for long COVID. Carefully testing this drug in long-haulers could help researchers build templates for even more clinical trials, Davids, of the National Network for Long COVID Justice, told me. And perhaps other, more powerful therapies would follow: antivirals specifically tailored for long-haulers’ needs, or immune-modulating drugs to combat the cases of long COVID that are less about the virus and more about the body attacking itself. Long COVID’s problem has always been a self-reinforcing one. It is difficult to address, so it goes unaddressed; countries do not know how to deal with it, so they don’t, and simply never learn. Reversing that trend, Davids and other long-haulers told me, means not just describing the condition but tackling it; not just counting the people who live with it but working to reduce their ranks. The world has to start that process now, or risk falling further behind.

Photographs by Jonno Rattman“Before I turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.”“Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me.Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his “diatribe.” The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News.”Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair. His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans. “On the vaccines …” he begins.For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines. “A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin pauses dramatically. “They have 103 vaccine-complication patients.” The crowd gasps.“How about this one?” Bolin says. He tells of a doctor who claims to know that “between 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months … with …” Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear. A chorus of people responds: “Ivermectin.” Bolin pretends not to hear. “What was that?” he says, leaning over the lectern. This time, they shout: “Ivermectin!” Bolin nods.This isn’t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me. Yet I’m still struggling to make sense of the place.
Bolin in February. After he held indoor Easter services at FloodGate in 2020, in defiance of Michigan’s emergency shutdown orders, attendance at his church soared. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)
Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”Brighton is a small town, and I knew the local evangelical scene like it was a second reporting beat. I knew which pastors were feuding; whose congregations were mired in scandal; which church softball teams had a deacon playing shortstop, and which ones stacked their lineups with non-tithing ringers. But FloodGate? I had never heard of FloodGate. And neither had most of the people sitting around me, until recently.For a decade, Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter 2020, when Bolin announced that he would hold indoor worship services in defiance of Michigan’s emergency shutdown orders. As word got around the conservative suburbs of Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit to promote right-wing interests. FloodGate’s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.On this particular fall Sunday, Bolin riffs on everything from California forcing vaccines on schoolchildren to the IRS proposing more oversight of personal banking accounts. He promotes a new book that tells of “how the left has done a power grab to systematically dismantle religion and banish God from the lips, minds, and hearts of believers,” prompting the couple in front of me to make a one-click Amazon purchase. He suggests there is mounting evidence of a stolen election, concluding, “With the information that’s coming out in Arizona and Georgia and other places, I think it’s time for there to be a full audit of all 50 states to find out the level of cheating and the level of manipulation that actually took place.” The people around me cheer.At one point, Bolin looks up from his notes.“We had a visitor this morning who said, ‘You know, it’s really refreshing to hear a pastor talk about issues like this.’ ” Basking in the ovation he’s just invited, Bolin adds: “I’m okay talking about these things.”He asks if he can keep going. The crowd answers with more applause.Listening to Bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one who approached his job very differently: Ken Brown.Brown leads his own ministry, Community Bible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton. I got to know him during the 2020 presidential campaign, when I was writing dispatches from around the country and asking readers about the stories and trends they thought weren’t receiving enough attention. Brown wrote to me explaining the combustible dynamics within the evangelical Church and describing his own efforts—as the conservative pastor of a conservative congregation—to keep his members from being radicalized by the lies of right-wing politicians and media figures.[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson’s cover story on Trump and the evangelical temptation]When we finally met, in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. “The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” he said over lunch. “Discernment”—one’s basic ability to separate truth from untruth—“is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.” A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brown struck me as thoroughly disheartened. The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.He made a compelling case. So I began checking out his sermons, podcasts, and blog posts.
Brown (right) in February. When COVID arrived, he launched a podcast to combat misinformation among his congregants. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)
Every time I heard Bolin preach, I could also hear Brown, the pastors’ voices dueling inside my brain. Brown is polished and buttoned-down; Bolin is ostentatious and loud. Brown pastors a traditional church where people wear sweaters and sing softly; Bolin leads a charismatic church where people dress for a barbecue and speak in tongues. Brown is a pastor’s kid and lifelong conservative who’s never had a sip of alcohol; Bolin is an erstwhile “radical liberal” who once got “so high on LSD” that he jumped onstage and grabbed a guitar at a Tom Petty concert.But in leading their predominantly white, Republican congregations, Brown and Bolin have come to agree on one important thing: Both pastors believe there is a war for the soul of the American Church—and both have decided they cannot stand on the sidelines. They aren’t alone. To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement—the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.“Hands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,” Brown said.Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized—and pastors who don’t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem. He understands their reluctance. They would rather keep the peace than risk alienating anyone. The irony, Brown said, is that by pretending that a clash of Christian worldviews isn’t happening, these pastors risk losing credibility with members who can see it unfolding inside their own church.There is one person Pastor Brown doesn’t have to convince of this: Pastor Bolin.“The battle lines have been drawn,” Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. “If you’re not taking a side, you’re on the wrong side.”If this is a tale of two churches, it is also the tale of churches everywhere. It’s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.The first piece of scripture I memorized as a child—the verse that continues to guide my own imperfect walk—is from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece. As with most of his letters, the apostle was addressing dysfunction and breakage in the community of believers. “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,” Paul wrote. “Since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”Paul’s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of humanity.For much of my lifetime, however, American Christians have done the opposite. Beginning in the 1980s, white evangelicals imposed themselves to an unprecedented degree on the government and the country’s core institutions. Once left to cry jeremiads about civilizational decline—having lost fights over sex and sexuality, drugs, abortion, pornography, standards in media and education, prayer in public schools—conservative Christians organized their churches, marshaled their resources, and leveraged their numbers, regaining the high ground, for a time, in some of these culture wars.Short-lived victories, however, came at a long-term cost. Evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that pastors today can no longer control. Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as one against flesh and blood, fixated on earthly concerns, a fight for a kingdom of this world—all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture—they were indoctrinated with a belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means was justified.Which brings us to Donald Trump.When Trump was elected thanks to a historic showing among white evangelicals—81 percent voted for him over Hillary Clinton—the victory was rightly viewed as the apex of the movement’s power. But this was, in many ways, also the beginning of its unraveling. The “battle lines” Bolin described as having emerged over the past five years—cultural reckonings over racism and sexual misconduct; a lethal pandemic and fierce disputes over vaccines and government mandates; allegations of election theft that led to a siege of the U.S. Capitol; and, underlying all of this, the presidency, prosecution, and martyring of Trump himself—have carved up every institution of American society. The evangelical Church is no exception.[Peter Wehner: Evangelicals made a bad bargain with Trump]The nation’s largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, is bleeding members because of ferocious infighting over race relations, women serving in leadership, accountability for sexual misconduct, and other issues. The United Methodist Church, America’s second-largest denomination, is headed toward imminent divorce over irreconcilable social and ideological divisions. Smaller denominations are losing affiliate churches as pastors and congregations break from their leadership over many of the same cultural flash points, choosing independence over associating with those who do not hold their views.Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Christians, like Americans from every walk of life, are self-selecting into cliques of shared habits and thinking. But what’s notable about the realignment inside the white evangelical Church is its asymmetry. Pastors report losing an occasional liberal member because of their refusal to speak on Sunday mornings about bigotry or poverty or social injustice. But these same pastors report having lost—in the past few years alone—a significant portion of their congregation because of complaints that they and their staff did not advance right-wing political doctrines. Hard data are difficult to come by; churches are not required to disclose attendance figures. But a year’s worth of conversations with pastors, denominational leaders, evangelical scholars, and everyday Christians tells a clear story: Substantial numbers of evangelicals are fleeing their churches, and most of them are moving to ones further to the right.Christianity has traditionally been seen as a stabilizing, even moderating, influence on American life. In 1975, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the church,” according to Gallup, and as of 1985, “organized religion was the most revered institution” in American life. Today, Gallup reports, just 37 percent of Americans have confidence in the Church. This downward spiral owes principally to two phenomena: the constant stench of scandal, with megachurches and prominent leaders imploding on what seems like a weekly basis; and the growing perception that Christians are embracing extremist views. One rarely needs to read to the bottom of a poll to learn that the religious group most opposed to vaccines, most convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, most inclined to subscribe to QAnon conspiracy theories is white evangelicals.[From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how QAnon is more important than you think]Many right-wing pastors have formed alliances—with campaign consultants, education activists, grassroots groups, even MAGA-in-miniature road shows promoting claims of an assault on American sovereignty—that bring a steady flow of fresh faces into their buildings. From there, the fusion of new Republican orthodoxy with old conservative theology is seamless. This explains why, even during a period of slumping church attendance, the number of white evangelicals has grown: The Pew Research Center reports that more and more white Trump supporters began self-identifying as evangelicals during his presidency, whether or not they attended church.Meanwhile, other pastors feel trapped. One stray remark could split their congregation, or even cost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.” His command of scripture is less relevant than suspicions about how he voted in the last election.“A pastor asked me the other day, ‘What percentage of churches would you say are grappling with these issues?’ And I said, ‘One hundred percent. All of them,’ ” Russell Moore, the public theologian at Christianity Today, told me. “I don’t know of a single church that’s not affected by this.”Once the president of the Southern Baptist policy arm, Moore quit the denomination in 2021 after enduring years of “psychological warfare” for his opposition to Trumpism and advocacy for racial reconciliation. In the time since, as he’s traveled the country and counseled pastors on the intensifying divisions within their congregations, Moore has become convinced that the problem of political fanaticism inside the Church poses real threats outside it.[Peter Wehner: The scandal rocking the evangelical world]“Honestly, I’m more concerned than I was a year ago—and that’s saying something,” Moore said. “It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”Moore is not exaggerating. More than a few times, I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace. And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice.The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.“I was a card-carrying member—literally, a card-carrying member—of the Moral Majority,” Brown told me.It was 1981. Brown was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and for the first time, the Christian kid who’d graduated from a Christian high school was outside his bubble. He felt threatened by what he saw all around him: moral relativism, shameless sexuality, far-left professors who openly disparaged his faith. Brown found an identity in the nascent evangelical movement that aimed to restore the religious values of America’s founding. He read the books, watched the videos, listened to the radio programs. Brown committed himself not just to the dogma of the religious right, but to the precepts of political conservatism. For many years—while getting married, starting a career in technology, having children—he remained rooted in both.When Brown felt called to join the clergy, he enrolled at Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. It was there that he began to question the union of his politics and his faith. The more he studied scripture, the less confident he felt in the people he’d listened to for so long. Some of the Christian right’s leading voices—people like Paul Weyrich, of the Heritage Foundation, and James Dobson, of Focus on the Family—promoted visions of “postmillennialism,” a controversial interpretation of scripture that encourages amassing political power as a means of building a kingdom in this life parallel to that in heaven.“I started to realize that a lot of these religious-right guys weren’t actually trained theologians. A lot of them didn’t know what they were talking about, biblically,” Brown said. “I worried that could come back to haunt us.”[Alan Jacobs: The word evangelical has lost its meaning]Just when Brown’s passion for politics was beginning to abate, Bill Clinton was elected president. “The apocalypse,” Brown recalled, laughing. Like so many evangelicals, the pastor viewed Clinton as the manifestation of America’s moral decline. He obsessed over the president’s every scandal and deception.But Brown was growing equally disillusioned with Christian conservatives and their tactics. Some of the same people who tormented Clinton and lectured on morality were just as ethically compromised as he was—but because they played for what was ostensibly God’s chosen political team, they faced little scrutiny. “Back when I believed there was an honorable alliance between Republicans and evangelicals, it was because I believed that our values would ultimately prevail, come what may on this Earth, whether we win or lose some election,” Brown said. “But over time, there was a shift. Losing was no longer an option. It became all about winning.”Late in Clinton’s tenure, Brown, who was serving as an associate pastor in Flat Rock, Michigan, was commissioned to plant a new church down the road in Trenton. He would have his own flock to look after. He didn’t have time to worry about politics. Aside from preaching against abortion—an issue Brown sees as inherently biblical—he kept politics out of his sermons. George W. Bush, whom evangelicals claimed as one of their own, was popular with Brown’s congregants. It was a period of harmony inside the church.“And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”It felt silly at first—jokes about Obama’s birth certificate, comments about his faith. But over time, the discourse inside the church became more worrisome. One day, a longtime member told Brown something that at the time sounded shocking: The president wore a secret Islamic ring. Brown demanded to know the woman’s source. “And she sent me this fake, Photoshopped thing. It didn’t take long to debunk,” Brown told me. “So I wrote her back and said, ‘Hey, here’s the deal: If you have forwarded this to anyone, you have an obligation to go back to them and correct it. Because Christians cannot foment falsehood. We are people of truth.’ ”[Adam Serwer: Birtherism of a nation]The woman never replied. She still attends Community Bible; the two have not spoken about the incident since. But it was a watershed moment for Brown. “That was the beginning of a new ministry for me,” he said.Brown wasn’t faced with just Obama-centric conspiracy theories. People were beginning to confront him with questions and concerns he couldn’t comprehend. Once, when he visited Washington, D.C., for a pastors’ conference, he returned home to learn that people in the church had been entertaining a rumor started by one of its members. Having read blog posts about a FEMA program that recruited clergy to help calm communities after natural disasters, this man believed that Brown had gone to D.C. for covert training—and that he and other pastors were preparing to help the government enforce martial law.“Good people were taken in by this stuff,” Brown said. “They really wondered whether I was a part of this secret government plot.”Even as Brown became more vocal, he knew he was being drowned out. Fear, the pastor says, was taking root inside Community Bible. Some of it was explainable: The cultural climate was getting chilly for evangelicals; the Great Recession was squeezing his blue-collar congregation. But much of the anxiety felt amorphous, cryptic—and manufactured. However effective Brown might be at soothing his congregants for 45 minutes on a Sunday morning, “Rush [Limbaugh] had them for three hours a day, five days a week, and Fox News had them every single night.” Brown kept reminding his people that scripture’s most cited command is “Fear not.” But he couldn’t break through. Looking back, he understands why.“Biblically, fear is primarily reverence and awe. We revere God; we hold him in awe,” Brown told me. “You can also have reverence and awe for other things—really, anything you put great value on. I think, in conservative-Christian circles, we place a lot of value on the life we’ve known. The earthly life we have known. The American life we’ve known … If we see threats to something we value, we fear—that is, we revere, we hold in inappropriate awe—those who can take it away. That’s Barack Obama. That’s the left.”An urgency—bordering on panic—could be felt inside the Church. For white evangelicals, the only thing more galvanizing than perceptions of their idealized nation slipping away was the conviction that their favored political party was unwilling to fight for the country’s survival.“There was this sense that America is under siege, that the barbarians were at the gates,” Brown said. “Then along comes Donald Trump, who says he can make America great again. And for evangelicals, it was time to play for keeps.”When I first walked into the sanctuary at FloodGate, I didn’t see a cross. But I did see American flags—lots of them. There were flags on the screens behind the stage, flags on the literature being handed out. There was even a flag on the face mask of the single person I spotted wearing one. It was May 2021, and the church was hosting an event for Stand Up Michigan, a group that had formed to protest pandemic shutdowns, masking, and, most recently, vaccine mandates. This was the launch of the group’s Livingston County chapter.While covering presidential campaigns, I had attended political rallies at churches across Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere. But I’d never seen anything quite like this. The parking lot swarmed with vehicles covered in partisan slogans. The narthex was jammed with people scribbling on clipboards. (I thought they were doing preemptive COVID contact tracing; they were actually enlisting volunteers for political activities.) Inside the sanctuary, attendees wore MAGA caps and Second Amendment–related shirts. I didn’t see a single person carrying a Bible.For the next three hours, the church became a coliseum. The executive director of Stand Up Michigan decried the “evil” Democrats in charge of the state; said there was “probably some truth” to QAnon, which holds that satanic liberal elites are cannibalizing children for sustenance; and warned that Christians are too “nice.” The chair of the county board of commissioners railed against diversity training and critical race theory. A state senator tried to play to the base—joking that she’d asked God why he’d allowed Gretchen Whitmer to become governor—but then cowered when the base turned on her, with people standing to demand that she answer the question of whether Trump had won Michigan in 2020. Visibly shaken, she refused to answer.The table had been set by Bill Bolin himself. Introduced at the beginning of the program as the “rock star” who disobeyed the government, Bolin took the stage and wasted no time before showing his visitors just how uncouth one could be in the pulpit. He began by suggesting that COVID-19 was “possibly being manipulated with the funding and blessing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who put us in masks.” When he heard scattered boos, Bolin said: “That’s right, go ahead!” The sanctuary filled with jeers. A minute later, the pastor was boasting about how far he’d taken his insults of Whitmer. “Probably the most egregious thing I ever did,” Bolin said, chuckling, “was I did do a Nazi salute and called her ‘Whitler.’ ”
Bolin praying with FloodGate congregants in February. The pastor initially opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy, but he says he came to “love” the former president. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)
In my ensuing visits to FloodGate, and in long conversations with Bolin, it became clear that this type of extreme political expression is central to his church’s identity, and to his own.Bolin told me that after a troubled childhood in Southern California—he said he began drinking and doing drugs at age 9—he discovered an interest in political activism. He became infatuated with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., committing himself to the art of protesting: marches, sit-ins, hunger strikes. He was a “proud hippie” more interested in the occult than in any organized religion.Then, when he was 20 years old, he was packing for a cross-country hitchhiking trip and discovered a Bible that had been given to him years earlier. “I lifted it up—and remember, I’m a supernaturalist—and felt like my arm was on fire,” Bolin told me. “And I heard a voice: ‘Return to me, or you will die.’ ”Bolin got a ride to Reno, Nevada, where he had a Christian cousin. They went to church together. “There was an altar call, and I went down and got baptized that same afternoon,” Bolin said. “I’ve never been the same. It changed who I am.”That change included his politics. Setting out on his Christian journey—working as a substance-abuse counselor, attending Bible college, pastoring in churches from California to Pennsylvania—Bolin found that many of his old stances were incompatible with his new faith. In particular, his views of abortion and religious freedom were turned upside down. One thing didn’t change. “I have always been prone to protesting,” Bolin told me. “Then and now.”Much like Pastor Brown, Bolin married conservative theology to conservative ideology. But whereas Brown became disillusioned by the religious right’s hypocrisy and political ruthlessness, Bolin believes that evangelicals didn’t go far enough. “Christians have languished with their participation in politics,” he said, “which is one of the reasons we’re in this dire position as a nation.”When Bolin arrived at FloodGate in 2010, the church—founded in 1972 and formerly called the Father’s House—was mostly apolitical. Bolin changed that. “Pastors used to be the primary influencers in their communities in determining who we elected,” Bolin said. He aimed to restore that tradition in his own ministry.Some people left the church; others joined. All the while, his congregation hovered right around 100 people. He leaned into plenty of political controversies—including Trump’s candidacy—but his membership stayed flat. Looking back, it’s fair to wonder whether that’s because he was on the wrong side of that particular issue. “Donald Trump was the last person I wanted elected president,” Bolin said, letting go of a belly laugh. He thought Trump was a charlatan, a lifelong Democrat who was defrauding conservative voters.“He proved me wrong,” Bolin said. “He turned out to be the most pro-life president we’ve ever had. His influence on the courts will change the country for the next 50 years.” Bolin sounded ashamed of having ever doubted Trump. He rattled off the former president’s accomplishments. He rolled his eyes at the “condescending” Christians who criticized Trump’s ethics. He defended the January 6 insurrection, which “was not a big deal.” In fact, Bolin himself nearly traveled to Washington that day “because a lot of people from our church were going, and because I love Donald Trump.”The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation. And yet, it reflects a phenomenon greater than Trump himself. Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to act with desperation and embrace what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.In the fall of 2016, Ken Brown informed his congregants that he planned to vote for Trump. His choice came down to abortion, he explained, and the Supreme Court appointments in the balance. Still, the pastor emphasized Trump’s personal failings and warned against political idolatry. He reminded his people that Christians aspire to a higher standard than “the lesser of two evils.” Brown felt confident they understood him.His confidence was misplaced. Over the next four years, the pastor watched as many of his people became MAGA disciples. They were glued to Fox News. Some posted ugly, combative messages on social media. A few were devotees of Alex Jones, the internet-radio host famous for his hateful conspiracy theories.When COVID arrived—bringing with it “a new flood of misinformation”—Brown and his leadership team wrote a letter to the congregation laying out their reasons for closing the church and specifying the sources they were relying on. Brown also launched a blog and a podcast, vying for his members’ attention at a moment when so many were suddenly stuck at home and swimming in hearsay and innuendo.[From the October 2018 issue; The tiny blond bible teacher taking on the evangelical political machine]Jen Furkas, who began attending Community Bible in 2003, wondered if Brown’s efforts were coming too late.“There are people at the church, people who I’d consider friends, who would have said very hurtful, very unbiblical things,” Furkas, the assistant principal of a local public school, told me. “And it didn’t just start during COVID.”Furkas describes herself as a moderate Democrat—which, she joked, “makes me the most liberal person at our church.” When Trump became the Republican nominee and Pastor Brown shared his intention to vote for him, Furkas was so disappointed that she left the church.She spent a year shopping around. But none of the other congregations felt right. One Sunday, Furkas came back to Community Bible and noticed something different about the place. “It was Ken,” she said. “He had changed. This wasn’t the same guy who was sold out to this mindset of Well, it all comes back to abortion and the courts. It was clear that he’d seen how this fanaticism had infected the church.”Furkas recalled how, a few years ago, Brown delivered a sermon reminding everyone whom Jesus had come to save. Clicking through a PowerPoint on the sanctuary’s projector screens, Brown showed pictures of well-known faces. It was good for some laughs and lighthearted commentary. Then he put up a photograph of Ilhan Omar, the Democratic representative from Minnesota and a Muslim, wearing her hijab. “What about her?” Brown asked. “Did Jesus come for her?” The room was silent.“I love the evolution from Ken,” Furkas said. “But I know it’s come at a cost.”Every person I spoke with from Community Bible brought up the fact that some longtime members had quit the church. Brown acknowledged that his tactics had pushed some people away, but he shrugged off the number, saying “four or five families” and “a few individuals” had left. “Sometimes, when someone leaves,” he said, “that means you’ve been successful in protecting the rest of your flock.”But not everyone who’s dissatisfied with a church leaves—at least, not right away. At a place like Community Bible, with a core of members who have been together for years, the concern isn’t necessarily a mass exodus. It’s a mass estrangement, in which people stop listening to the pastor or stop trusting one another—or both—and the church slowly loses its cohesiveness.“What I worry about is people tuning Ken out—people who don’t like his politics, and because of that, they stop letting him be their pastor,” Bob Fite, a high-school history teacher who has attended Community Bible for more than a decade, told me. “And honestly, he’s making me nervous. I have tried to tell him, ‘Stay in your lane.’ ”Fite said that Brown is “losing people” with his political agenda. One of those people is B.J. Fite—Bob’s son. B.J. was raised evangelical, graduated from Bob Jones University, and believes it’s his responsibility to be active in the Church. He’s just not sure anymore that Community Bible is a good fit for someone like him—deeply conservative, a Trump voter, a consumer of right-wing media.When I met B.J. it was apparent that he was wrestling with whether to leave Community Bible. In fact, he said he’d been engaged in a weeks-long text exchange with Pastor Brown. B.J. was upset that Brown had released multiple podcast episodes vilifying the people responsible for the January 6 insurrection. He also resented the fact that Brown had written blog posts endorsing COVID vaccines and, B.J. felt, had minimized the concerns of people—like himself—who worried they would lose their jobs for refusing the shot.[From the January/February 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on Peter Meijer and what the GOP does to its own dissenters]“There are different truths in politics—Trump’s truth, Biden’s truth, whatever,” B.J. told me. “But in church, there’s supposed to be one truth. Why aren’t we just sticking to that truth?”Bob Fite said he addressed these concerns in a letter to Pastor Brown and the leadership team. But nothing changed. Bob can’t imagine leaving the place he loves, the place where he and his wife, Valerie, teach Sunday school. But he also can’t imagine standing by while Brown pushes B.J. out the door.“I’ve been going to church with a lot of apprehension,” Bob said. “I told Valerie, ‘One day, if Ken says the wrong thing, I might have to stand up and leave.’ ”Bill Bolin knows something about people leaving. About 90 percent of his Sunday crowd at FloodGate has migrated from other congregations over the past two years. Almost all of them, he says, came bearing grievances against their former pastors. Yet most had never considered looking elsewhere. It took a pandemic, and the temporary closing of their churches, for them to sever ties.As of the spring of 2020, Jeff and Deidre Myers belonged to Oak Pointe Milford, a suburban-Detroit church. Though they were frustrated that the preaching wasn’t more overtly political, they were highly engaged: leading a marriage ministry, active with other homeschoolers. They were even friends with the pastor, Paul Jenkinson, and his wife.And then COVID hit. When the church closed, rumors flew about the board of elders holding contentious late-night meetings to debate pandemic protocols. The longer the church remained locked, the more people speculated on who was casting the deciding votes. Around that time, George Floyd was murdered. Oak Pointe Novi, the parent church, introduced a video series called “Conversations,” which featured interviews with Black pastors and social-justice activists.“I thought I was going to vomit,” Deidre told me, recalling her reaction to one episode. Jeff added: “It was the pastor’s son”—who, he claimed, is said to be a member of antifa in Canada—“lecturing on white privilege and critical race theory.” (I could not confirm that the pastor’s son is, in fact, a member of antifa in Canada; several people who know the family laughed when I asked the question.)After an outcry, the pastor apologized for “the ruptures that have occurred,” while the elders issued a separate statement denouncing critical race theory. According to Jeff and Deidre, they were just two members in a stampede out of Oak Pointe.Deidre saw friends from other congregations, also displaced by shutdowns, posting on Facebook about FloodGate. The first service she attended—in which Pastor Bolin unapologetically advocated for people, like Jeff and Deidre, who felt cheated by their old churches—brought her to tears. Jeff was equally moved. They had found a new home.When Jeff and Deidre met with Jenkinson to inform him that they were leaving the Milford church, tensions ran high. Their worst fears had already been confirmed: A friend on the elder board had told them that Jenkinson—their pastor, their friend—had argued to keep the church closed. Jeff and Deidre pressed Jenkinson on the church’s refusal to engage with politics. When they asked the pastor why, despite being personally pro-life, he had never preached on abortion, they got the response they’d dreaded. “He said, ‘I’d lose half my congregation,’ ” Jeff recalled.Jenkinson remembers the conversation somewhat differently. Jeff and Deidre, he tells me, weren’t just pushing him on abortion; they were challenging the pastor’s policy of political neutrality from the pulpit, and accusing him of taking the easy way out of the debates fracturing his church.“And I remember telling them, ‘The harder thing to do is what I’m doing,’ ” the pastor says. “This is how you lose people. How you gain people is, you pick a tribe, raise the flag, and be really loud about it. That’s how you gain a bunch of numbers. That is so easy to do. And it cheapens the Gospel.”Whatever the specifics of their exchange, to Jeff and Deidre, Jenkinson’s stance amounted to cowardice. “I realize these are hard conversations, but the reason we left Milford is they were never willing to have the conversation,” Jeff said. “They were just trying to keep everybody happy. Paul is a conservative, but his conservatism has no teeth.”Tony DeFelice is another new arrival at FloodGate—and another Christian who got tired of his pastor lacking teeth. At his previous church, in the Democratic-leaning Detroit suburb of Plymouth, “they did not speak a single word about politics. Not on a single issue,” he told me. “When we got to FloodGate, it confirmed for us what we’d been missing.”DeFelice, a building inspector, had been attending the Plymouth church for 14 years when the pandemic began. He and his wife, Linda, had friends and family there; one of their daughters still works on the church staff. Tony and Linda had their share of complaints—the church was too moderate and “too seeker-friendly,” catering more to newcomers than longtime Christians—but they had no plans to leave.And then, in March 2020, everything fell apart.“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”Tony and Linda say FloodGate’s style—and Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud—has changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, Tony no longer distinguishes between the political and the spiritual. An attack on Donald Trump is an attack on Christians. He believes the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he’s confident that righteousness will prevail: States are going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he says, and Trump will be returned to office.“The truth is coming out,” Tony told me.When I pressed him on these beliefs—offering evidence that Joe Biden won legitimately, and probing for the source of his conviction—Tony did not budge. He is just as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he said, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead 2,000 years ago.Nestled in a wooded stretch of exurban Wilson County, Tennessee, the campus of Greg Locke’s Global Vision Bible Church feels more like a compound. Heaps of felled oak trees border the property, evidence of hurried expansion. A rutted gravel parking lot climbs high away from the main road. At the summit stands an enormous white tent. A sign reads This Is A MASK FREE Church Campus.
The old Global Vision building (right) held about 250 people. Now the congregation gathers in a tent that fits 3,000 (left). (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)
Inside, men wearing earpieces and camouflage pants guard the entrance. Behind them, many hundreds of people jump up and down on a floor of cedar chips. Locke salutes them as “soldiers rising up in God’s army.” Some hear this more literally than others: I spot a few folks carrying guns.Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. The pastor has suggested that autistic children are oppressed by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He has called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”If this all sounds a bit strange—ominous, or even “dangerous,” as one local pastor warned me the night before I visited—well, sure. But strange compared to what? Having spent my entire life in and around the evangelical Church, I had in recent years become desensitized to all the rhetoric of militarism and imminent Armageddon. The churches that host election-fraud profiteers and weeknight speakers denouncing the pseudo-satanic agenda of Black Lives Matter—churches that consider themselves mainstream—were starting to feel like old hat. It was time to visit the furthest fringes. It was time to go see Greg Locke.Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video has collected 18 million views, and it launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. He cast himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom. He aligned himself with figures like Dinesh D’Souza and Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the Christian right’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds 3,000 people and would be the envy of Barnum & Bailey.Which is fitting—because what’s happening at Global Vision can feel less like a revival than a circus.One Sunday morning in November, Locke, prowling the stage in a bright-orange tie, asks how many people have traveled to his tent from outside Tennessee. Scores of people stand up. “And this is every weekend!” Locke cries in his hickory drawl. Eager to put on a show for the visitors, Locke announces that his special guest—he tries to book one every Sunday—is the actor John Schneider, who played Bo Duke on The Dukes of Hazzard. The crowd erupts and everyone hoists their phone in the air, heralding Schneider’s arrival like Catholics awaiting the pope.Schneider has come to speak and sing. There’s such energy that even some very serious-looking men—dressed in paramilitary gear, firearms strapped to their sides—bounce on their toes and clap along. Between songs, Schneider offers a different catalog of greatest hits. He talks about the flu shot making someone sick. He decries the Christian elites who look down on people like him. He hints at a potential violent uprising.“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider says. “We have a country to get back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”Locke’s sermon is about the Philistines of the Old Testament stealing the Ark of the Covenant from the Israelites, because they sensed that the only way to defeat God’s chosen people was to separate them from God. The same thing is happening in America today, Locke warns. Liberals have devised a plot to separate Christians from God. And all too many Christians—under the guise of a “plandemic”—are allowing it to happen.
Worshippers at Global Vision Bible Church, in Tennessee, in April (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)
“Let me tell you something,” Locke says, his voice rising. “I ain’t never had a prostitute mad at me for keeping this church open! I ain’t never had a wino or a drunkard [come] in here and say, ‘I can’t believe you!’ I ain’t never had a crackhead mad for keeping this church open! But I get letters from preachers all the time: ‘Oh, Brother Locke, you just need to take a chill pill. We feel like you’ve shamed us.’ ”Locke starts nodding. “I have! Every last one of them cowards, I’ve shamed all of them!” The audience leaps to its feet again. “Shame, shame, shame!” he shouts, wagging a finger.Listening to Locke that morning, I felt a peculiar sort of disappointment. There was nothing sui generis about the man or this Sunday service. Locke said nothing I hadn’t heard from other pastors. Atmospherics aside—it’s not every day you worship inside a tent next to an armed man wearing an Alex Jones shirt—the substance was familiar and predictable to the point of tedium.Let’s be clear: Locke belongs to a category of his own. He recently accused multiple women at his church of being witches (his source: a demon he encountered during an exorcism). That makes it easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own church and ponder its logical end point. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been dismissed as a blip on Christianity’s radar. These days, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and has posed for photos with Franklin Graham at the White House.Walking out of Global Vision, I asked myself: How many pastors at smaller right-wing churches—pastors like Bolin—would have felt uneasy sitting inside this tent? The answer, I suspect, is very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind.This mission creep inside evangelicalism is why some churches have taken an absolutist approach: no preaching on elections, no sermons about current events.“The second you get into any of the political stuff, you start losing focus,” Michael Bingham, the lead pastor at Aldersgate United Methodist Church, in Greenville, South Carolina, told me during a visit last fall. “Some people say, ‘Well, you have to preach on abortion.’ Okay. But then something else happens in the culture—and if you preached on abortion, well, you better preach on voting rights. Or gun rights. Or immigrants. I’ve just decided I’m not touching any of it.”Bingham has been a pastor in the UMC for nearly 25 years. Over that time, he says, he’s watched as political disputes have traveled from the periphery of church life to the heart of it. Despite being personally conservative on most issues—and estimating that two-thirds of the church agrees with him—Bingham has maintained a posture of unflinching neutrality from the pulpit.He has two reasons. First, Bingham simply does not believe that pastors should contaminate the Gospel with political talk. Second, and of more immediate relevance when we spoke, the United Methodist Church was finalizing plans for a denominational divorce over core social divisions, including whether to ordain gay ministers. Under the tentative plans, individual churches will vote on whether to break away and join the new conservative denomination or side with the liberals and remain under the existing UMC umbrella.With rumors of this imminent split roiling Aldersgate, Bingham told me, the last thing he wanted was to exacerbate tensions within his church. Plenty of people there know that he’s a conservative. They also know that his deputy, Johannah Myers, is a committed progressive. But the pair were working diligently to keep any trace of those political disagreements out of church life. “We are doing everything we can to hold this place together,” Myers told me.But what is left to hold together? When I visited, the church—an elegant structure with room for 500 in the sanctuary—was hosting maybe 150 people total across two Sunday services. Bingham is proud to say that he hasn’t driven anyone away with his political views. Still, membership has been in decline for years, in part because so many Christians today gravitate toward the places that are outspokenly aligned with their extra-biblical beliefs.For all their talk of keeping Aldersgate unified, Bingham and Myers acknowledged that in a few years’ time, they would belong to different churches. The same went for their members. When I met with some of the longest-tenured laypeople of the church, almost everyone indicated that when the UMC divorce was finalized, they would follow the church that reflected their political views. It didn’t matter that doing so meant, in some cases, walking away from the church they’d attended for decades.“What’s coming is going to be brutal. There’s no way around that,” Bingham told me. “Churches are breaking apart everywhere. My only hope is that, when the time comes, our people can separate without shattering.”Ken Brown knows plenty of pastors like Bingham, who refuse to talk about the very things tearing their churches apart. He knows they have their reasons. Some don’t know what to say. Others fear that speaking up would only make matters worse. Almost everyone is concerned about job security. Pastors are not immune from anxiety over their mortgage or kids’ college tuitions; many younger clergy members, in particular, worry that they haven’t amassed enough goodwill to get argumentative with their congregation.Brown is grateful that, after 20 years leading Community Bible, he gets lots of latitude from his congregation. He hears the grousing that his political commentary takes the focus off Jesus, but his entire rationale rests on the belief that Jesus long ago became a secondary focus for some in the church. “I need to do better explaining why I’m dropping these comments in such a volatile cultural environment. Some people feel like I’m just dropping random anti-Trump bombs,” Brown said. “But if I didn’t see Trump—and Trumpism—as a danger to our mission, they would never hear me say anything about Trump.”Brown has informed the church that he’s headed toward retirement. He’s searching for a successor and hopes in a few years to transition into a support role. He says the new lead pastor doesn’t necessarily need to share his approach to the crises of discernment and disinformation. But this only adds to the urgency of fortifying Community Bible.The pastor is pushing harder than ever, and he feels, for the first time, that momentum is on his side. Many of his members, Brown said, have told him over the past year that they swore off cable news or deleted their social-media accounts; not coincidentally, some of them seem more engaged with scripture than ever before. There are still holdouts, Brown said, people who’d prefer the church to go in another direction. But that only validates his approach: Without this intervention, how much worse off might Community Bible be? “I can’t prove what would have happened,” Brown said, “but my guess is that our church would have descended into the sort of war zone that other churches have become.”There are days when Brown envies his colleagues from other churches who haven’t waded into this fight. It would be simpler to spend his final years as a lead pastor sticking to scripture. But whenever he considers that temptation, Brown says he is reminded of a favorite passage. In the Book of John, Chapter 10, Jesus warns of the “hired hand” who puts his own safety ahead of the flock’s: “So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.”Brown believes he’s been called to be a shepherd. The hired hand, he says, is no better than the wolf.Sitting inside a cramped office at the back of FloodGate, Bill Bolin is second-guessing himself.We’ve talked at length about extremism in his church—the people who were certain that Trump would never leave office, the people who swear by QAnon—and Bolin seems, at some level, to genuinely be reckoning with his role in it. He says he’s worried about Christians getting their priorities mixed up. He tells me he doesn’t want his rants about Biden or the 2020 election—which are “nonessentials”—to be taken with the seriousness of his statements about Jesus, which are the “essentials” people should come to church for.“I do make a separation between our religious perspective and our political perspective,” Bolin tells me. “I don’t view political statements as being infallible.”That’s putting it generously. In the time I spent listening to Bolin preach, sitting with him for interviews, and following his Facebook page, I recorded dozens of political statements that were either recklessly misleading or flat-out wrong. When I would challenge him, asking for a source, Bolin would either cite “multiple articles” he had read or send me a link to a website like Headline USA or Conservative Fighters. Then he would concede that the claims were in dispute, and insist that he didn’t necessarily believe everything he said or posted.It seemed a dangerous practice for anyone, let alone someone trusted as a teacher of truth. Many of the backwater websites and podcasts Bolin relies on for political information were the same ones cited to me by people from his church. In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this is something new—and something decidedly nonessential.At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.[The Atlantic Interview: Why this evangelical got fired for promoting vaccines]“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)Doesn’t he worry that if people see him getting the easy things wrong, they might suspect he’s also getting the hard things wrong? Things like sanctity and salvation?“I really don’t. No. Not too much. I don’t,” Bolin says, shaking his head. “Firebrand statements have been part of the pulpit, and part of politics, for as long as we’ve been a nation. And there is a long history of both sides exaggerating—like in a post like that.”Still, Bolin seems rattled. He begins telling me about a couple of Democrats who attend FloodGate and have rebuked him for his political rhetoric—but who reassure him, Bolin says, “When it comes to the Word, you’re rock-solid.” Then he tells me something surprising: He’s thinking of scaling back “Headline News” on Sunday mornings. Maybe he’ll just read news clips verbatim, he says, without adding commentary. Or maybe he’ll cut the political headlines in half, adding some “feel good” news to balance the mood. The more he thinks about it, Bolin says, he might just cut the segment altogether, posting those political musings on Facebook but keeping them out of worship.“We’re now going from pandemic to endemic. Our culture will change. There will no longer be this massive division over COVID,” Bolin says. “The fervency is going to die down.”Except there will always be something new. Literally moments before he talked about the fervency dying down, Bolin previewed a shtick he was going to deliver on Sunday morning about Apple adding a “pregnant-man emoji” to the iPhone.Bolin had diagnosed in some detail “the sorting” within evangelicalism—the scramble of Christians switching congregations, churches rising and falling, pastors adapting or heading for the exits. It occurs to me, while he discusses these potential changes, that no church is guaranteed anything. The moment Bolin stops lighting fires from the pulpit at FloodGate, how many of its members—who are now accustomed to that sort of inferno, who came to FloodGate precisely because they wanted the heat—will go looking for them elsewhere?That’s not a risk he seems willing to take. Bolin tells me the church has sold the building we’re sitting in—where the congregation has met since the 1970s—and purchased a sprawling complex down the road. The pastor says FloodGate’s revenue has multiplied sixfold since 2020. It is charging ahead into an era of expansion, with ambitions of becoming southeast Michigan’s next megachurch.Bolin says FloodGate and churches like it have grown in direct proportion to how many Christians “felt betrayed by their pastors.” That trend looks to be holding steady. More people will leave churches that refuse to identify with a tribe and will find pastors who confirm their own partisan views. The erosion of confidence in the institution of American Christianity will accelerate. The caricature of evangelicals will get uglier. And the actual work of evangelizing will get much, much harder.God isn’t biting his fingernails. But I sure am.This article appears in the June 2022 print edition with the headline “How Politics Poisoned the Church.”

In English, we don’t express evidentiality with a special set of suffixes used only for that purpose but instead use words that otherwise can mean other things. “Apparently, they sell them in the summer, too,” you say about something you’ve heard around. If you believe you hear the pizza delivery person arriving, you say “That must be the pizza.” When you couch something as an opinion, you say “I think it’s a matter of sincerity” or, these days, “I feel like it’s a matter of sincerity.”

On the old radio and TV show “Fibber McGee and Molly,” Fibber was regularly bedeviled by a little girl, Teeny, who would come by and engage him in rambling conversations. Her catchphrase was “I betcha,” an evidential expression signaling awareness that something might be untrue but that one is nonetheless confident it is true — enough to be willing to place a bet on it. In one 1939 episode Fibber says, “Teeny? Well … that’s a cute name,” and she answers, “Sure it is, I betcha” — even if someone out there thinks her name isn’t cute, she’s pretty sure it is.

The expression “I reckon” serves a similar purpose. Chaucer used the phrase “I gesse,” or “I guess,” in his work, with the same basic meaning as for us today. If “I reckon” is warm and quaint and Chaucer’s “I guess” is literary and noble, then we ought to wonder why “I feel like” is taken as a marker of rhetorical weakness.

When people preface their thoughts with “I feel like,” they’re indicating that the source of what they’re about to say is reasoned but not categorical. Tacitly, they’re leaving an opening for others to disagree, but this is less cowering than gracious. The heart of human linguistic communication is pointing out something all are familiar with and then indicating something novel or useful or unexpected about it. This is what language evolved for, not private rumination or exploratory dialogues, which came later and piggybacked on the basic function of enlightening others — something Thom Scott-Phillips gets to the heart of in “Speaking Our Minds” and Charles Taylor also explores in “The Language Animal.”

But languages go further than this. Because all of them are vehicles of nuance, all of them allow speakers to indicate how sure they are of what they are communicating in various ways. “That must be the pizza,” one surmises, because it was ordered a half-hour ago. “I feel like the pizza won’t get here in time,” you say, although you can’t know for sure and are open to someone else’s assessment.

Of course, there are gradations of confidence: “I think” indicates a touch more certainty than “I feel like,” while “I believe” indicates more certainty than “I think.” This indicates in us attention to degree and detail; an anthropologist might document these phrases as neatly allowing speakers to register three degrees of qualified certainty. So if Tuyuca speakers have a suffix to indicate that they suppose, perfectly confident people say “I reckon” and no one would accuse Middle English speakers of self-doubt for saying “I guess,” then I feel like we can say English speakers are doing just fine today.

Have feedback? Send me a note at McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

Trump regularly disparaged South Korea, a key U.S. ally in Asia, and repeatedly threatened to order the U.S. military to pull out all 28,500 U.S. troops stationed there, former defense secretary Mark T. Esper writes in a new book. Esper and other top officials worked to dissuade and delay Trump from ordering this withdrawal. And although Trump never gave the order, he never gave up the idea.

Trump said that the South Koreans were “horrible to deal with” and were “ripping us off,” Esper writes. The troop withdrawal issue was wrapped up in Trump’s demand that South Korea increase its financial contribution for the hosting of U.S. troops by 400 percent.

“They sell us Samsung TVs and we protect them. It makes no sense,” Esper quoted Trump as saying.

Trump brought up the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea several times during Esper’s 15-month stint as defense secretary, Esper told me in an interview. The consequences of such a move, Esper argued to Trump, would be disastrous, including losing the ability to deter North Korea. The move would also surely be welcomed by China, which has long sought to push the U.S. military out of Asia.

“This comes up repeatedly throughout my tenure. Each time, I have to push back on that,” Esper told me. “I didn’t want that to happen, and I knew it wouldn’t happen on my watch.”

At one point, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tried to stall Trump by telling him, “Mr. President, you should make that [withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea] a second-term priority,” Esper writes. Trump grinned and responded, “Yeah, yeah, second term.”

Esper took Trump’s desire to withdraw all U.S. troops from South Korea seriously, but it was only one of many threats that he worried about. Trump also often said he wanted to remove all U.S. troops from Africa, and in June 2020, he ordered Esper to remove 9,500 troops from Germany, giving the military an implausible three-month deadline to carry out the move.

Esper worked with military officials to mitigate the downsides of the Germany decision, he writes in his book. The fear that Trump might order a withdrawal from South Korea was one reason Esper says he stayed on the job, because he couldn’t be sure whether his successor would follow Trump’s order and begin removing troops, Esper told me.

Some might see Esper’s justification as self-serving. But Esper’s fear of Trump’s recklessness was not unfounded. Just a couple of months after Esper became secretary of the army in late 2017, Trump began publicly taunting Kim Jong Un by bragging on Twitter about the size of his “nuclear button.” A few weeks later, Esper received a call from the Pentagon telling him Trump was about to publicly announce that all U.S. military family members were ordered to leave South Korea immediately.

Esper was shocked, knowing that this could be interpreted by the North Koreans (wrongly) as a prelude to an attack, which could prompt North Korea to strike first. Even if that didn’t happen, the news would likely cause panic in the region and tank South Korean markets. But while Esper was waiting for more guidance from the White House, Trump changed his mind.

“I never received a clear explanation,” Esper writes, “but somebody talked the president out of sending the tweet announcing the evacuation of Americans from South Korea. Crisis averted. War avoided. I was dumbfounded at the time as to what was happening.”

Overall, Esper has praise for some of Trump’s actions, including his decision to engage diplomatically with Kim as a means of avoiding conflict. He agrees with Trump’s desire to press allies to contribute more to common defense.

But he is scathing about Trump’s deal with the Taliban, which was championed by Pompeo. And Esper is critical of the “war hawks” in the White House he saw as itching for conflict with Iran, specifically national security adviser Robert O’Brien and Vice President Mike Pence.

In our interview, Esper said that Trump is not fit to be commander in chief. Any elected leader, especially the president of the United States, must embody the basic attribute of being able to put the country over himself. He must have principles and integrity, Esper told me, saying, “President Trump doesn’t meet the mark for me on those things.”

The sensational details in Esper’s book confirm much of what we already knew about Trump. He doesn’t understand or even much care about the strategic implications of his decisions. He sees alliances as transactional at best and at worst, a needless burden. He cares about dollars and cents more than democracy or human rights.

The clear implication of Esper’s warning is that a second-term Trump would have no restraints and nobody around to temper his reckless or thoughtless instincts. That means that ideas Trump has long held — like withdrawing all troops from South Korea — are not just a matter for history.

In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic administration passed a piece of legislation it hoped would accelerate the end of the First World War. The new law didn’t directly concern the military — nor was it a revolutionary act of foreign policy. Rather, its target was ordinary American citizens.
Passed shortly after the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act made it a crime to “wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the Government of the United States”. In other words, it was intended to stifle dissent. And by all accounts, it was immensely effective: it was used to convict 877 people between 1919 and 1920.
In the century since it was passed (and swiftly revoked), the Sedition Act has largely been viewed as a legislative artefact, an embarrassing quirk that’s best forgotten. In recent weeks, however, its spirit appears to have been rekindled by another Democrat President — one who may not be at war, but nonetheless finds himself under siege. Late last month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the creation of a sinister-sounding new unit called the Disinformation Governance Board. When asked to justify its formation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained: “It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities, and I am not sure who opposes that effort.”

And so the mask slips. As became clear in the following days, the Board has been established to legislate fake news and mistruths out of existence, as if they were draughts of toxic air, wafting out of laptops and cell phones into the eyes and ears of unsuspecting citizens. It’s hardly surprising that the Board was swiftly condemned as the ill-disguised attempt at state censorship it is.
The main clue to its true mission was the person chosen to lead the unit: Nina Jankowicz, a government specialist in “disinformation” who has an unhealthy record of disseminating disinformation for the Left and then singing about it, Mary Poppins-style, on TikTok. In 2020, for instance, she dismissed the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation and a “Trump campaign product”. In October last year, she claimed that parental concerns about the teaching of critical race theory in schools were merely “one of those hot-button issues that the Republicans and other disinformers, who are engaged in disinformation for profit… have seized on”.
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Given her past comments, it’s hard not to view her appointment by Joe Biden — indeed, the creation of the Board itself — as anything other than a cry of desperation. The midterm elections, when congressional seats are contested, are fast-approaching. For weeks now, most commentators have been predicting calamity for the Democrats. And it’s not hard to see why: America’s post-pandemic economic recovery has stalled; gas prices have soared; inflation is above 8%; violent crime, especially homicide, remains at a disturbingly elevated level; and America’s Southern border is seeing record illegal crossings.
Faced with such a crisis, the rational thing for Democrat leaders to do would be to review their policies on these kitchen-table issues and change course. They could, for instance, invite their former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers back to advise the President on the economy. They could reassess ill-considered climate policies, such as the closure of the Keystone Pipeline and the regulatory war on fracking. They could even re-examine their naive programmes on crime and punishment, from defunding the police to putting felons back onto the streets. As for who could lead this course-correcting effort, there are ready-made centrist Democrats, such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, waiting in the wings.
But this is not where the party is today. The most influential voices are still on the far-Left, in the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez corner of the tent. And the Democratic Socialists want to double down on their madcap agenda — party and voters alike be damned. How they achieve this is where Jankowicz comes in. The Democrat’s progressive wing knows it will never win over the American public by relying on the mundane methods of political campaigning. Its only hope is to frighten, censor and indoctrinate voters into accepting their agenda.
This explains the ill-judged idea of a Disinformation Governance Board. It also explains the hysterical Left-wing response to Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter. Having established such a stranglehold on social media in recent years, to the point that the last Republican President was effectively cancelled from the Internet while still in office, the Democrats are appalled by the thought that free speech might be restored to one of the major platforms.
Suggested readingThis isn't a war between good and evilBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Yet the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board marks a clear turning point, signalling the consolidation of state-sanctioned censorship. Once “disinformation” has been identified, we are told, “DHS then shares factual information related to its mission to potentially impacted people and organisations”. DHS has insisted that the Board does “not have any operational authority or capability”, while Psaki stated that “the mandate is not to adjudicate what is true or false online or otherwise”. But how else is it to identify disinformation and combat it with “factual information”?
This is, of course, a facsimile of the playbook adopted by media companies during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Remember when Twitter started warning us not to pay attention to such “disinformation” as the hypothesis that the Covid coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan? Or when highly qualified medical scientists were threatened with cancellation for arguing that lockdowns were doing more harm than good? With every passing day, these arguments look more convincing. Yet for more than a year they were regularly denounced as “disinformation”. And for more than a year, they were effectively silenced. Given the option of deploying such an effective political weapon, is it any wonder that the Democrats are now drawn to its use?
Of course, not everyone in the Democratic Party supports what is being attempted here. As Jim Himes, the Democratic Congressman for Connecticut’s 4th District, has observed, “the government has no business saying that this is disinformation and this is information”. Even President Wilson himself quickly recognised that for all its practical, short-term benefits, the Sedition Act was having a poisonous impact on American democracy. It was swiftly repealed in 1920; a year later, Wilson offered clemency to the vast majority of those convicted under the act.
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Of those who were prosecuted under the Sedition Act, most belonged to the pacifist Left. Yet the Democrat advocates of the Disinformation Governance Board appear to have forgotten this, along with the age-old problem of censorship’s use as a political tool: it’s incredibly helpful at crushing dissent — until you find yourself on the receiving end.
Could the Democrats be about to learn this the hard way? It’s looking increasingly likely that, come 2024, a Republican will be returned to the White House — with that Republican likely to be Donald Trump. Forget angry parents tweeting about Critical Race Theory. If Trump wins a second term and takes control of the Disinformation Government Board, then the Democrats really will have something to worry about. And if that does happen, they will only have themselves to blame.
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Slowing US wage growth could ease inflation

The big news in the US Labor Department's April jobs report was that average hourly earnings only increased by 0.3 percent, bringing the annualized rate of growth—once adjusted for compositional changes in the labor force—to 3.8 percent over the past three months. This pace is considerably slower than in 2021 and may indicate that the US labor market is cooling down, which could ease some inflation.

The annualized three-month change in private sector earnings has fallen below 4 percent for the first time since March 2021. To the extent that wage increases would pass through to inflation, slower wage growth should ease some of the upward pressure on prices. Slower wage growth will do nothing, however, to end the supply-side drivers of inflation like the ongoing trade bottlenecks caused by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The downside of slower wage growth is that prices are currently rising faster than wages. Once adjusted for inflation, wages are falling faster than at any time in at least 40 years and are now near or below their pre-pandemic levels according to multiple measures.

The question going forward is whether continued reductions in unemployment can be sustained if wage and price increases do not slow dramatically. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates to more normal levels, but what happens next depends on whether the labor market starts to cool on its own.

This PIIE Chart is adapted from Jason Furman and Wilson Powell III's blog, The US labor market could be cooling down.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 75
Critical Education Theory Series, Part 11
This episode of the New Discourses Podcast continues into a second part a long miniseries exploring Paulo Freire’s landmark 1985 book The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation, and it is embedded in the broader Critical Education Theory series here. In the previous part, James Lindsay presented the ideas of the fifth chapter, wherein the seeds of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) are laid as Freire describes how education and social work are closely related. The previous parts of this series, covering the earlier chapters of the book can be found here, here, and here.
In this episode, James dives into the first half of the sixth chapter, which goes deeply into Freire’s model for education. In fact, what we see in this episode makes sense of the ones before it while setting the stage for all the ones that follow. Paulo Freire Marxified education itself. That is, Freire redefined literacy, education, and even knowledge according to the usual bourgeois/proletarian dichotomy and thus was able to redefine literacy to mean gaining critical consciousness. Join James to hear about the Marxification of education itself, bearing in mind yet again that almost all of our kids now go to Paulo Freire’s schools.

The post Paulo Freire’s Marxification of Education appeared first on New Discourses.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and the author of “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.” Sharan Grewal is an assistant professor of government at William & Mary and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Nine long months have passed since the start of the slow-motion coup in Tunisia, a country that, until recently, offered one of the best hopes for democratization in the Middle East. After shuttering the parliament with tanks in July, President Kais Saied has suspended the constitution and dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council. In perhaps the most disturbing move yet, Saied has also now seized control of the independent electoral commission, allowing him to consolidate his rule. How long can a slow-motion power grab persist before it is plainly irreversible?

The world is watching developments in Ukraine with horror, as it should. President Biden has framed the struggle with Russia as an ideological struggle, as a “battle between democracy and autocracy.” Lately, the Middle East has been an almost entirely neglected front in that struggle. Yet the current crisis in Tunisia offers an opportunity to send a powerful signal in defense of democratic values.

Until now, U.S. officials have been reluctant to put much pressure on Saied. They perceived his July putsch as broadly popular. Many Tunisians were fed up with infighting political parties and a parliament that couldn’t seem to get anything done in the face of a crumbling economy. Saied, a constitutional law professor, pledged to bypass political elites and (somehow) deliver results directly to the people. He alone could fix it.

But he hasn’t. If there were ever a time to rethink and reassess, it would be now — before Saied succeeds in consolidating power and ending Tunisian democracy entirely. As we have seen elsewhere in the Middle East, including most tragically with Egypt’s 2013 coup, once a new regime entrenches itself, the international community’s options and room to maneuver narrow drastically.

The United States has spent too much time hoping that private entreaties for Saied to do the right thing might be persuasive. But urging autocrats to do the right thing for their countries — or for democracy — is nearly always guaranteed to fail. Saied, like other autocrats, does not believe in representative democracy, claiming in 2019 that it “has gone bankrupt and its era is over.” Dialogue and persuasion were never going to be enough to change his mind.

Belatedly, the Biden administration is slowly realizing that rhetorical pressure without any teeth is not working. In late March, the State Department proposed to slash both military and economic assistance to Tunisia roughly in half. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also made clear that the aid would not be restored unless Saied pursues a “transparent, inclusive — to include political parties, labor and civil society — reform process.”

This is a good start but still limited. A partial suspension of aid dilutes the United States’ leverage by splitting the middle — alienating Saied without fundamentally changing his calculus. Instead, the United States should make clear that if Saied refuses to reverse course, a full suspension will be the result.

Leveraging U.S. aid alone, however, is unlikely to be enough. The United States — in coordination with European partners — must consider something it has rarely done. One might call this the “maximalist” option.

Over the past year, Saied has been negotiating with the International Monetary Fund over a multibillion-dollar bailout that would save Tunisia from a looming default. Such a loan would likely require Tunisia to first develop “a plan for reforms to tackle subsidies, the high public sector wage bill and loss-making state companies,” Reuters reported. The time has come to supplement (if not replace) these conditions with explicitly political ones: that Saied initiate a national dialogue with all major political parties, find consensus on a road map back to democracy and implement that road map.

To be sure, this is not how the IMF usually operates. Its Articles of Agreement do not specify political conditions; autocrats and democrats alike are eligible for support. However, the United States and European countries, as the IMF’s largest shareholders, can use their voting rights to compel fund officials to push pause on talks.

This might be the best — and last — chance at pressuring Saied to change course. With the economy in free fall, Tunisia needs its Western partners more than ever. As a former senior Tunisian official recently told us, “Saied cannot live without the IMF.” The IMF loan is important to Tunisia not only as a stopgap to fund the state budget,but also as a signal to improve its credit to obtain other loans. (Tunisia was recently downgraded to “CCC,” its lowest-ever credit rating.)

Of course, using U.S. leverage in this way is as risky as it is bold. But, as we have seen over the past year, not using U.S. leverage is also risky. In fact, it risks condemning Tunisians to a full return to the old days of dictatorship. If Americans believe democracy is good, then they should believe that it is good for Tunisians, too. Otherwise Biden’s commendable rhetoric will remain just that — an ideal that we speak about but ignore even in the very cases where it matters most.

Pastor Tim Keller. (Photo by Frank Licorice via Wikimedia Commons.)If I had to put a name on this era of right-wing Christian politics, it would be “The Great Rationalization.” As the right has become more cruel, malicious, and dismissive of character, some Christian thinkers have been willing not just to excuse this transformation but to affirm it as deeply virtuous.Drill down into any of these rationalizations, and you’ll find the same theme repeated time and again: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Those who don’t understand the present crisis or the necessity of changed tactics are simply not men for the moment.A good example of the genre was published this week in First Things. The piece is called “How I Evolved on Tim Keller,” and its author, First Things associate editor James Wood, makes all the familiar arguments, though more civilly than most. Wood takes pains to compliment and note Keller’s immense and positive influence on him personally and on the church collectively (he calls him a “C.S. Lewis for the postmodern world”), but he goes on to inform us that he has “turned elsewhere for guidance in our contemporary political moment.” In short, it’s because my friend Tim shuns political tribalism (emphasizing a “third way” between red and blue) and strives, in Wood’s words, to be “‘winsome,’ missional, and ‘gospel-centered’” in his approach. Wood says that Tim recognizes “though the gospel is unavoidably offensive, we must work hard to make sure people are offended by the gospel itself rather than our personal, cultural, and political derivations.”Why is this a problem? You guessed it. Times have changed. And after 2016 Wood evolved:At that point, I began to observe that our politics and culture had changed. I began to feel differently about our surrounding secular culture, and noticed that its attitude toward Christianity was not what it once had been. Aaron Renn’s account represents well my thinking and the thinking of many: There was a “neutral world” roughly between 1994–2014 in which traditional Christianity was neither broadly supported nor opposed by the surrounding culture, but rather was viewed as an eccentric lifestyle option among many. However, that time is over. Now we live in the “negative world,” in which, according to Renn, Christian morality is expressly repudiated and traditional Christian views are perceived as undermining the social good. As I observed the attitude of our surrounding culture change, I was no longer so confident that the evangelistic framework I had gleaned from Keller would provide sufficient guidance for the cultural and political moment. A lot of former fanboys like me are coming to similar conclusions. The evangelistic desire to minimize offense to gain a hearing for the gospel can obscure what our political moment requires.Wood claims Keller’s approach was “perfectly suited” for the so-called “neutral world,” but the “‘negative world’ is a different place.” Wood says, “Tough choices are increasingly before us, offense is unavoidable, and sides will need to be taken on very important issues.”There are so many things to say in response to this argument, but let’s begin with the premise that we’ve transitioned from a “neutral world” to a “negative world.” As someone who attended law school in the early 1990s and lived in deep blue America for most of this alleged “neutral” period, the premise seems flawed. The world didn’t feel “neutral” to me when I was shouted down in class, or when I was told by classmates to “die” for my pro-life views. Nor was the world “neutral” for Tim. Last night he tweeted about his experience launching Redeemer church in New York: Timothy Keller @timkellernycRespectfully, when we began Redeemer in 1989 we experienced great hostility. We were thrown out of facilities for our faith. We were mocked in the press. Anyone who thinks Manhattan culture was then "neutral" toward evangelical Christianity is mistaken.May 7th 202269 Retweets1,476 LikesAnd if you want empirical evidence that New York City wasn’t “neutral” before 2014, there was almost 20 years of litigation over the city’s discriminatory policy denying the use of empty public school facilities for worship services. The policy existed until it was finally reversed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.Even growing up in the rural south, I wasn’t surrounded by devout Christianity, but instead by drugs, alcohol, and a level of sexual promiscuity far beyond what we see among young people today. Where was this idealized past? There may have been less “woke capital,” but there was more crime, more divorce, and much, much more abortion. Moreover, this was happening at a time when Christians’ free speech and religious liberty rights were far less well-established. Speech codes reigned, and in the first 15 years of my legal practice hundreds of Christian student groups faced expulsion from campus. In response, Christians “took sides” on the very important issues of life and religious liberty and not only dramatically transformed First Amendment jurisprudence, the pro-life movement helped dramatically reduce abortion rates until the point where abortion is less common than before Roe.That’s not to say that the world was worse and is now getting better. It’s to say that the narrative of cultural decline is not nearly so simple. The First Amendment is more potent than it’s ever been, yet cancel culture on the right and left are evidence of a cultural retreat from free speech. Declines in divorce, abortion, teen sex, and single-parenting indicate a turn towards more traditional lifestyle choices (including in elite cultural spaces), yet the controversy over transgender athletes indicates that the definition of “man” and “woman” is now subject to furious debate.This complexity applies even to the documented, increasing hostility between America’s competing political tribes. After all, increasing partisan animosity is unquestionably mutual. “They” hate “us”? Well, “we” hate “them” just as much. When it comes to negative partisanship, neither side has clean hands. If we truly live in a “negative world,” then Christians helped make it negative. And because of the partisan press and social media, we’re much more cognizant of each and every outrage and offense than we ever were before. We’re constantly (and intentionally) “revved up” by voices who are invested in teaching us that the end is near and America is on the precipice of extinction. How do we know we’re being artificially “revved up”? The data indicates Americans are simply wrong about their political opponents. We tend to believe they’re more extreme than they really are.It’s important to be clear-eyed about the past because false narratives can present Christians with powerful temptations. The doom narrative is a poor fit for an Evangelical church that is among the most wealthy and powerful Christian communities (and among the most wealthy and powerful political movements) in the entire history of the world.Yet even if the desperate times narrative were true, the desperate measures rationalization suffers from profound moral defects. The biblical call to Christians to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhibit the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—does not represent a set of tactics to be abandoned when times are tough but rather a set of eternal moral principles to be applied even in the face of extreme adversity.Moreover, Christ and the apostles issued their commands to Christians at a time when Christians faced the very definition of a “negative world.” We face tweetings. They faced beatings. As a notable piece of evidence of our “negative world,” Wood points to Princeton Theological Seminary rescinding its decision to award Tim its “Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness.” (The seminary rescinded the award, but Tim still delivered a lecture.)Imagine trying to even explain this to an apostle. “There’s this famous and influential Christian pastor, and . . .” Paul would stop you right there. That very idea would be novel to him, as would the idea that revoking a prize but delivering a lecture would be evidence of any kind of crisis requiring one to change a “winsome, missional, and gospel-centered” approach to the public square. Paul called Christians to exhibit the fruit of the spirit even when they were being nailed to crosses and clawed by lions. Peter called on Christians to give a defense of their faith with “gentleness and reverence” even when they “suffer for righteousness.”Sadly, this moral analysis is alien to all too many politically engaged Christians. They approach political contests differently from the way they approach their families or even their businesses. They apply an instrumentalist lens that they don’t apply to other areas of life. Is honesty an imperative in business only so long as it “works” to generate a profit or to maintain your employment? Is fidelity an imperative in marriage only so long as it “works” to provide the sense of happiness and sexual fulfillment you believe your entitled to?No, any decently discipled Christian knows that in these vital areas of life, the means are the ends. Even under financial duress or in struggling marriages, Christians maintain honesty and fidelity not because they “work,” but because they’re obeying and glorifying God.But in politics? If we reject lies and liars we might lose, and we believe we cannot lose. If we maintain basic commitments to Christian character we might lose, and we believe we cannot lose. Yet in all of life the command to act justly is inseparable from commands to love kindness or to walk humbly. And the spirit of fear that grips so much of the modern American church might be a reason why so many Christians have scorned civility and decency in the public square, but it is not a justification. It is also clear that Wood (and many others) simply misunderstand Keller’s “third way” approach to politics. Wood says that “it encourages in its adherents a pietistic impulse to keep one’s hands clean, stay above the fray, and at a distance from imperfect options for addressing complex social and political issues.” But this is wrong. Keller isn’t arguing for disengagement. He’s arguing for a commitment to biblical justice, and that both red and blue suffer from profound flaws:Another reason Christians these days cannot allow the church to be fully identified with any particular party is the problem of what the British ethicist James Mumford calls “package-deal ethics.” Increasingly, political parties insist that you cannot work on one issue with them if you don’t embrace all of their approved positions.This emphasis on package deals puts pressure on Christians in politics. For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.I have found this to be true. In the past week I’ve written strongly against Roe and in support of Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion in the pages of The Atlantic, and you should read my inbox. In the past month, I’ve urged Christians to reject the idea that the fight over critical race theory is a religious war—in part because it closes our minds to thoughtful Christian critiques of the church—and you should read my inbox. “Above the fray”? No, not even close. To be committed to biblical justice while also rejecting political partisanship doesn’t put you out of the fight. It instead subjects you to periodic gang-tackling, from both sides of the field. Finally, it’s important to recognize that the “third way” approach represents the humble recognition that Christians can in good conscience (and consistent with orthodox Christian theology) reach different positions on the political spectrum—in part because the answers to America’s social problems are not only hard, they’re extremely complicated. I’m going to show you three charts which demonstrate where members of different American faith groups place themselves relative to the political parties. They were asked to “place yourself, Democrats, and Republicans in ideological space.” As you can see, Black Protestants see themselves as slightly to the right of Democrats, nonwhite Evangelicals see themselves in the middle, and white Evangelicals see themselves as identical to Republicans:The fact that so many millions of believers—people who diligently study the scripture and have deep, orthodox Christian faith themselves—come to competing answers about hard questions isn’t a reason to refuse to take a position. The command to “act justly” remains. But it should reaffirm the necessity of “walking humbly.” Tim has been ministering in New York City for decades. That means he has much more up-close interaction with diverse Christian communities than, say, your typical suburban or rural Evangelical pastor. Prolonged exposure to differing Christian views on contentious issues is and should be a profoundly humbling experience. It constantly reminds you that we “see through a glass darkly” and that our confidence in our own reasoning and ideas is often misplaced. We live in an age of negative polarization, when the cardinal characteristic of partisanship is personal animosity. In these circumstances, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit should be a burst of cultural light, a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times. Instead, Christian voices ask that we yield to that fury, and that a “negative world” is now no place for the “winsome, missional, and gospel-centered approach.” But this isn’t an evolution from Tim Keller, it’s a devolution, and it’s one that’s enabling an enormous amount of Christian cruelty and Christian malice. Wood says “Keller was the right man for a moment,” but he also says, “it appears that moment has passed.” That’s fundamentally wrong. When fear and hatred dominates discourse, a commitment to justice and kindness and humility is precisely what the moment requires.One more thing …It strikes me that a number of readers may have hoped for an analysis of the draft Dobbs opinion today. Quite frankly, I talked about it so much this week, I have nothing left to say. But if you want analysis, I’ve got analysis:Here’s my initial FAQ French Press in response to the leak. Here’s a longer analysis of the Alito draft opinion in The Atlantic.Here I am again in The Atlantic explaining why I don’t think Dobbs threatens gay marriage.Here’s the emergency Advisory Opinions podcast the day after the leak.Here’s another Advisory Opinions podcast answering common questions about the opinion.Here’s this week’s Good Faith podcast focusing on abortion and integrity.That’s not all. There’s a Dispatch Live, a Dispatch Podcast, an Atlantic podcast, and an Economist podcast. I’m tired just linking all that work!One last thing …We’re continuing our walk through Kristene DiMarco’s outstanding new album (I promise we’ll move on soon), but this song is perfect for this week. Enjoy:

Imagine a world in which the United States has a contested presidential election, as it did in 2020 (to say nothing of 2000). If one candidate was friendlier to Chinese interests, might the Chinese Communist Party insist that ByteDance give a nudge to content favoring that candidate? Or if they wanted to weaken America rather than shape the outcome, maybe TikTok begins serving up more and more videos with election conspiracies, sowing chaos at a moment when the country is near fracture.

None of this is far-fetched. We know that TikTok’s content moderation guidelines clamped down on videos and topics at the Chinese government’s behest, though it says its rules have changed since then. We know that other foreign countries — Russia comes to mind — have used American social networks to drive division and doubt.

It is telling that China sees such dangers as obvious enough to have built a firewall against them internally: They’ve banned Facebook and Google and Twitter and, yes, TikTok. ByteDance has had to manage a different version of the app, known as Douyin, for Chinese audiences, one that abides by the rules of Chinese censors. China has long seen these platforms as potential weapons. As China’s authoritarian turn continues, and as relations between our countries worsen, it is not far-fetched to suspect they might do unto us what they have always feared we would do unto them.

“No analogies are perfect, but the closest analogy I can think of is to imagine if the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union had decided to plow some of its oil export profits into buying up broadcast television stations across the U.S.,” my former colleague Matthew Yglesias wrote in his newsletter, Slow Boring. “The F.C.C. wouldn’t have let them. And if the F.C.C. for some reason did let them, the Commerce Department would have blocked it. And if a judge said the Commerce Department was wrong and control over the information ecosystem didn’t meet the relevant national security standard, Congress would have passed a new law.”

As analogies go, I think that’s a good starting point. But if the Soviet Union had bought up local television stations across the nation, we’d know they had done it, and there’d be an understanding of what those stations were, and what they were attempting, just as was true with Russia Today. The propaganda would be known as propaganda.

TikTok’s billion users don’t think they’re looking at a Chinese government propaganda operation because, for the most part, they’re not. They’re watching makeup tutorials and recipes and lip sync videos and funny dances. But that would make it all the more powerful a propaganda outlet, if deployed. And because each TikTok feed is different, we have no real way of knowing what people are seeing. It would be trivially easy to use it to shape or distort public opinion, and to do so quietly, perhaps untraceably.

In all of this, I’m suggesting a simple principle, albeit one that will not be simple to apply: Our collective attention is important. Whoever (or whatever) controls our attention controls, to a large degree, our future. The social media platforms that hold and shape our attention need to be governed in the public interest. That means knowing who’s truly running them and how they’re running them.

I’m not sure which of the social network owners currently clear that bar. But I’m certain ByteDance doesn’t. On this, Donald Trump was right, and the Biden administration should finish what he started.

O N THE OUTSIDE , the Oura ring looks rather ordinary, indistinguishable from a chunky wedding band. But a faint green light that intermittently leaks out from the gap between finger and ring suggests that it is not just jewellery.

The inside of the ring is packed with electronics. The green light comes from a pair of rectangular metallic specks that are light-emitting diodes, or LED s. Three dome-shaped bumps the size of water drops contain red and infrared LED s and a pair of photodetectors. They are surrounded by seven temperature sensors, a wafer-thin battery and a miniature 3 D accelerometer that detects any kind of motion.

The LED s illuminate the blood vessels inside the finger. As the heart pumps blood through the body, the vessels expand and contract and the light reflected changes accordingly. The number of these changes per minute is the heart rate or pulse. It is calculated by an algorithm that takes the data given out by the sensors and makes adjustments for the noise in their signal brought on by motion, ambient light and numerous other external factors.

The green LED s do their work by day; the infrared ones, by night. Their advantage is that they reach deeper blood vessels, in which the pulse is more easily detected. But their signal is even more sensitive to disturbance, so needs more algorithmic adjustment. The red LED will, eventually, be used to monitor blood-oxygen levels. The software which will turn its data into such measurements, though, will be available only in a later update.

What a wearable device can measure depends on its sensors and its software. Lower level algorithms turn the noisy output of photodetectors and the like into heartbeats. Higher level programs combine, say, heart rate, temperature and movement into measures of the duration, and quality, of sleep.

Sensors and algorithms combine to help wearable devices measure step counts, calories burned, oxygen levels and more. Artificial intelligence ( AI —as machine learning is popularly known) gives extra oomph to the algorithms. Technology advancements in the past five years have made it possible to pack wearable devices with more sophisticated sensors and more computing power. Oura’s third-generation ring, released three years after the second, has 32 times more memory with the same battery life.

All that has enabled wearables to produce more accurate measures and a greater number of them. In a recent review IQVIA , a research firm, found 384 wearable devices marketed to consumers. They include wrist-worn fitness trackers, sports watches, smartwatches, smart jewellery like the Oura ring and sensor-bearing headsets, patches, straps, clip-ons and even clothes (such as smart socks that measure the vitals of babies). Just over half of the devices analysed by IQVIA monitor activity. The rest are devices that measure a wide array of health variables, including sleep, temperature, breathing, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood sugar and electrical activity of the heart.

Many of these variables are starting to appear on popular activity-tracking wristbands, such as Fitbit and Apple Watch. Lots of devices added blood-oxygen measurements to their repertoire in response to the pandemic because low levels are a sign of severe covid. Rockley Photonics, which provides sensor technology to big consumer and medical-device manufacturers, claims its newest sensor can measure hydration, sugar, alcohol, lactate (reflecting muscle inflammation from exercise) and much more in the blood, as well as core body temperature and blood pressure, which have been hard to crack in wearables. Rockley plans to seek approval of its new sensors by the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ), America’s medical regulator, later this year. For health applications, it helps to turn measurements into the sort of insight required for diagnosis.

In medicine, diagnoses often depend on biomarkers—specific molecules in blood and other fluids linked to a particular health condition. High blood-sugar concentration, for example, is a biomarker for diabetes. Neurological diseases are usually diagnosed with standardised assessments of how people behave, and how well they perform certain tasks. Some of the algorithmic measurements made by wearable devices can be thought of as digital equivalents of established biomarkers and diagnostic tests. Others are novel metrics that can predict or diagnose a disease, such as movement or coughing patterns that cannot be measured with conventional diagnostics. Collectively, these are called “digital biomarkers”.

Tracking digital biomarkers allows wearables and their associated software to identify changes that are early signs of disease or age-related deterioration that may otherwise go unnoticed. Take atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heartbeat that increases the risk of stroke. About 9% of Americans over 65 and 2% under 65 have the condition, often with no symptoms to alert them to it. In 2018 the FDA approved the Apple Watch as a device that can identify atrial fibrillation. It issues an alert when it spots a string of irregular heartbeats. The user can put a finger against a sensor on the side of the watch, which sets up a circuit sensitive to the heart’s electrical activity, allowing the watch to produce an electrocardiogram ( ECG ). On April 11th Fitbit got FDA approval for its own atrial-fibrillation function.

Movement, an irksome source of noise for individual sensors, is a valuable ingredient in many digital biomarkers. Gait changes, for example, can show whether a person’s balance is deteriorating. A recent study found that people who have early-stage Parkinson’s disease have subtle differences in gait, arm swing and how they type compared with those who do not. All were measured by their phones and wrist-worn devices. The digital measures also reliably tracked how far the disease had advanced.

Currently, depression is diagnosed using a standard set of questions. Algorithmic measures of the sentiment in daily voice diaries can do the job just as well. Some virtual providers of therapy and psychiatric care are already using interaction patterns between people and their smartphones (without capturing the actual content of what is typed or viewed) to track the mood and cognitive state of patients.

Wearables can also spot healthy changes that people want to know about. Upticks in temperature, for example, are markers for ovulation and pregnancy. Oura is testing a feature predicting weeks in advance the date of a woman’s next period. A small study found that measurements from the ring could detect pregnancy on average nine days before at-home pregnancy tests.

Measure for measure

There is almost no part of human biology that has remained untouched by digital measurement. HumanFirst, an organisation in San Francisco that maintains a catalogue of connected devices for remote patient monitoring, has identified 1,200 digital sensors that are tied to 8,000 physiological and behavioural measures.

Quantity does not mean quality. Some devices are much better than others at measuring certain variables; a product may be good at measuring one thing but not another. A recent round-up of studies on the accuracy of various measures produced by 72 wrist-worn trackers found that many devices did a poor job. Some of the leading brands, however, bucked the trend. Fitbit’s devices had consistently good accuracy on step counts; the Apple Watch had the highest accuracy for heart rate. None of the devices was good at calorie counts, with estimates off by more than 30% for all brands. But most of the devices in these studies have since been updated and probably use more sophisticated algorithms.

The situation is similar with sleep tracking, an increasingly popular feature. Many devices report measures such as the amount of time in various sleep stages, including deep and rapid-eye-movement ( REM ) sleep, which are important for brain functioning and recharging the body. Researchers comparing wearable devices against a clinical-grade method that tracks electrical brain activity with a special headset, have been unimpressed. As one study of nine popular wearables published in 2020 put it, “All the commercial devices tested struggled with accuracy.” But some, notably Fitbit’s and Oura’s products, have been reasonably accurate for several years. Oura’s chief scientist, Shyamal Patel, says that in studies of more than 1,000 nights of sleep its algorithm agreed with polysomnography, the gold standard for grading sleep, 78% of the time. Polysomnography involves an expert analysing data on brain activity from an entire night of slumber. Two experts doing this agree with each other’s assessment 83% of the time.

One area where independent studies find consistently good performance across many devices is heart-rate measurement. Euan Ashley, a cardiologist at Stanford University whose team has done independent studies on the accuracy of wearable devices, says that leading brands, notably Apple and Fitbit, have been good at measuring heart rate for years, “to the point that I would have been willing to trust it in a clinical situation”.

When measurements are informing formal diagnostic tests for medical conditions, such as that for atrial fibrillation, they need not just accuracy, but also selectivity. Making an algorithm more sensitive means it will catch more cases, but also means it will call more false positives.

The Apple Heart Study and the Fitbit Heart Study each enrolled more than 400,000 people, who were followed for several months. About 0.5%-1% of participants in each study got an alert about irregular heartbeat. They were asked to wear an ECG patch (the best method for measuring heartbeat) for a week or two. In both studies, a third of people monitored that way went on to have atrial fibrillation. Fitbit’s devices identified cases correctly 98% of the time. Apple’s did so 84% of the time. Comparing them is tricky because the studies differed on average age of participants and other things. In a study of people mostly older than 55 an updated version of Apple’s algorithm caught 89% of atrial-fibrillation cases, and 0.7% of those without the condition got a false alert.

Heather Ross, a cardiologist at the University of Toronto is particularly worried about false negatives from devices that claim to diagnose heart problems but have not had these claims validated. People may ignore warning signs like heart palpitations, she says, if they are wearing something which suggests there is no problem. Dr Ross points to a round-up of studies on 40 wearable devices on the market in 2020, only 15 of which had been vetted by the FDA . Although there were nearly 1,300 studies published about these devices, most were about feasibility or proof of concept matters; only 128 of the studies were from some stage of a cardiovascular clinical trial, the sort of data that doctors want to see in order to trust the results from a device.

Wearables can recognise important deviations in lifestyle earlier, before a disease develops

Andy Coravos, the chief executive of HumanFirst, has a worry about unregulated devices. Some collect information that is not currently protected as health data, she says—which means it could be used to target advertisements or possibly discriminate when it comes to health insurance or employment. A neurological symptom such as a tremor, for example, could be collected as “wellness” data and reveal a high likelihood for a disorder such as Parkinson’s disease, says Ms Coravos. Insurers can get hold of this information via online data brokers and charge that person a higher premium.

The growing array of health variables tracked by wearable devices can lead to big changes in the prevention of chronic ailments like diabetes and heart disease. Continuous measurement makes it possible to establish what patterns are normal for an individual for vital measures like heart rate or respiration. This, in turn, will help users and their doctors to recognise important deviations in lifestyle earlier, before a disease develops. Spotting unhealthy lifestyles, however, is not much use unless it leads to change. And that is something that the devices can now help with, too. ■

“I T LOOKS LIKE your back is a bit tight today. Let’s modify your workout.” The voice is gentle yet commanding, the instructions rolled out in the signature cadence of a physiotherapist. It is also unmistakably robotic. The AI physio issues her commands straight from a smartphone’s speakers. A phone with a camera is all she needs to do her job: select the exercises to suit the patient’s injury, guide him through each session and order corrections when he is not doing something right (bending a knee at the wrong angle, for example). An AI algorithm marks up his body as he moves, which is how it knows when a joint is hurting or the back is stiffer than the day before.

This digital therapist, developed by Kaia Health, a German startup, is, by many measures, as good as a human therapist. One trial, which involved 552 exercises by osteoarthritis patients, found that human therapists agreed with the corrections to exercise suggested by Kaia’s app as often as they agreed with the corrections suggested by other human therapists. In clinical trials patients with back pain using the app improved more than those who got in-person physiotherapy. Making people with injuries bend and twist carries some risks. On that, too, Kaia’s app is no worse than human experts. Less than 0.1% of nearly 140,000 users of the app in studies reported adverse events.

The app is registered as a medical device by America’s Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) and also in the European Union. Since 2017 the FDA has approved more than 40 other health apps for problems as varied as diabetes, back pain, opioid addiction, anxiety, ADHD and asthma. They are reviewed under the rules for medical devices, usually in the moderate-risk category (which covers things such as pregnancy tests and electric wheelchairs).

Some European countries are designing special approval pathways that also stipulate how health apps are paid for through their health systems. In Germany health apps can get provisional approval for a year based on preliminary evidence of benefits, which obliges health insurers to pay for them. Apps that provide solid evidence from clinical trials get permanent approval. Twelve have already done so and another 19 are on the provisional list. France and Belgium are copying the German model.

Such apps, known as “digital therapeutics”, hold great promise for common and rare diseases alike. Some are stand-alone products, for which you need nothing more than a smartphone. Others are paired up with wearables and other devices that feed them data from users’ bodies, like continuous glucose monitors. Some of them are available only on prescription or through referral from a health professional.

Brent Vaughan, a veteran entrepreneur in digital health who is currently the chief executive of Cognito Therapeutics, a Boston-based startup, says there have been three waves in the evolution of digital therapeutics. The first was mostly what he calls “nagware”—apps that help patients with diabetes and other chronic diseases manage mundane tasks, such as taking their medication, moving around more, eating suitable food or measuring their blood sugar. The second wave digitised existing therapeutic interventions that had almost no safety risk, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy for insomnia and various mental-health problems (“Repackaging things that we’ve done before face-to-face, and moving them to face-to-screen,” as Mr Vaughan puts it). It is the latest wave of digital therapeutics that he says are genuine medical breakthroughs. These therapies may change the progression of a disease by altering the underlying biological mechanisms, such as rebuilding neural connections within the brain.

Within a year most heart attack survivors prescribed cholesterol drugs are not even picking up their drugs

The nagware apps for chronic conditions may sound boring but can have a big impact on health at population level. “If you want to change behaviour, that’s what it’s going to take,” says Steven Driver, a cardiologist and medical director of digital therapeutics at Advocate Aurora Health, a big hospital group in America. “It’s not going to be me in the office 30 days later, reminding them to eat less and exercise more. It’s going to be someone on Tuesday saying, ‘It’s 5pm, you’re probably home from work and you only have 3,500 steps. If you get up and walk for a half hour you’ll meet your goal.’ That’s what we need and that’s what a digital therapeutic allows us to do.”

Poor adherence to medication regimens is a huge problem, too. “Nobody is more eager to take their medicines than someone who just survived a heart attack,” says Dr Driver. But in just three weeks, adherence to most treatment regimens begins to wane. Within a year most heart-attack survivors prescribed cholesterol drugs are not even picking up their drugs. And because chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease often come with other health problems mixed in, even conscientious patients struggle to keep track of everything they must do.

AI -coaches help with all that, some with the level of personal detail typical of an organised, doting or even despotic spouse. Blue Star, an app for diabetes, combines data on a patient’s diet, activity, sleep, social interactions and state of mind, as well as medications and tests, automatically bringing in data from the laboratories and pharmacies the patient uses. People can connect it to all sorts of devices such as smart weight scales, continuous glucose monitors, fitness trackers and blood-pressure cuffs. They are told daily what a particular meal, bedtime schedule or exercise does to their blood sugar, with advice on what they should change. Clinical trials have found that BlueStar, when added to patients’ usual care, reduces the amount of haemoglobin A 1 C (a biomarker of long-term blood-sugar level) by two to four times more than it is reduced by the most widely used diabetes drugs alone.

Such apps could also make a difference for chronic conditions for which existing treatments do not always work. Perfood, a German startup, is testing an AI -based app for migraine that has a personalised-nutrition component. Some studies suggest that for some sufferers a low-glycemic diet may provide as much relief as some of the commonly used migraine medications.

And breathe

Though chronic-care apps are likely to become the blockbuster category of digital therapeutics, some of the most exciting innovation is directed at less common health problems, including some debilitating conditions for which existing therapies are of limited benefit. One example is Freespira, a digital therapy for panic attacks and post-traumatic stress disorder. It consists of a breathing sensor placed in the nose and connected to a tablet that patients use twice a day for four weeks. People with panic disorders breathe in a particular way that leads to a build-up of carbon dioxide, thought to set off the physiological chain that causes panic.

Freespira trains them to normalise their breathing. Acacia Parks, a user whose panic attacks began when her husband was hospitalised after a car accident, is a trained psychologist. She says current treatments available for panic are awful. “You’re essentially pushing yourself towards the thing that’s causing your panic, so that you could purposely induce a panic attack and then learn to cope with it. Nobody wants to do that.” Several clinical trials, though small, suggest that most users have decreased symptoms or are in remission after six months or longer. Ms Parks says the app has helped her a lot.

Even the most ground-breaking therapeutics, digital or otherwise, will not help many patients if they are not a good business proposition for health-care payers, such as insurers, national health-care systems and employers who provide health benefits to their employees. That message is not lost on some of the more established digital-therapeutics companies. They are starting to invest in studies that show their products deliver good value.

In profit-oriented health systems like America’s, some doctors see prescribing digital therapeutics as a way to be more efficient. Such apps provide them with data at a glance on what their chronic-disease patients have been up to, so a consultation can be shorter and focus on pressing concerns.

The smartness of such apps means that, effectively, they set their own dose. That means they can be prescribed to a large population without worrying too much about an individualised response. Some American health-care systems are integrating these therapeutic apps into the system-specific apps that patients already use to book appointments and see test results.

This allows them to “push” new digital therapeutics that may be relevant to patients with certain conditions straight onto their smartphones. Dr Driver’s team at Advocate Aurora Health, for example, recently batch-prescribed an app for pre-diabetes to thousands of patients who had received worrying test results. The team had thought it might need up to five weeks to enrol 250 people, but so many people signed up that enrolment had to be closed after just 36 hours.

Connectivity needed

The two biggest problems that have emerged for health-care providers exploring these possibilities are finding the most suitable apps and making various computer systems—from the patient’s watch to the records system in his doctor’s office—talk to each other. In recent years a cottage industry of specialised firms has emerged to help with that. Orcha and AppScript are just two of the companies that review and rank apps for effectiveness, user experience and privacy, and prepare bespoke digital formularies for specific conditions or patient groups. Companies like Xealth specialise in integrating a range of health-software systems and devices for clients like Welldoc and Advocate Aurora Health to make the flow of data seamless.

Marc Sluijs, a consultant, estimates that about $11bn has been invested so far in the 349 digital-therapeutics companies that he has identified. Most of them are small. The top 20 of them have raised $7bn of that between them. But some of the pioneers in this nascent industry are already going public. Pear Therapeutics, developer of the first FDA- approved health app, a cognitive-behaviour therapy for addiction called reSet, went public in December 2021 in a deal that increased its valuation to $1.6bn. Akili Interactive, which makes video-game based therapies for ADHD , plans to go public in the summer.

The regulator-approved digital therapeutics behind such valuations are being positioned as high-margin products. Some of their features have been patented and their algorithms are proprietary, which protects the firms from having their products copied. In America, Pear Therapeutics sells a three-month course of its insomnia app Somryst for $899. Akili’s EndeavourRx therapy for ADHD is $450 for a three-month course. In Germany most of the digital therapeutics that have been vetted by regulators are priced at €400-500 ($450-560) per course.

For all their promise, digital therapeutics are still a novelty among doctors. Matteo Berlucchi, a “serial digital entrepreneur” who founded Healthily, an AI self-care app and website, reckons that it may take as much as 15 years for digital therapies to be used as much as pills are today. It often takes a decade or two for innovative drugs to become widely used because clinicians and insurers are very conservative groups, says Murray Aitken from IQVIA , a research firm.

That is why the makers of some digital therapeutics are partnering with pharmaceutical companies, which have the sales teams to market their products to doctors. Financially this is small beer for big pharma. Analysts put the digital-therapeutics market at $3.3bn in 2020, when pharmaceutical sales reached $1.1trn. But the market is expected to grow by about 20% a year for the next five to ten years. And such deals offer other benefits. Some pharma companies think digital therapeutics could increase their drug sales by boosting the efficacy of their drugs and the brand loyalty of their customers. If patients exercise, sleep and adhere to their drug regimen, they feel better and may have fewer side-effects. In these medication-centred models the app often has the company’s branding. For some drug makers, the biggest draw may be the fact that the apps generate vast amounts of real-time intelligence on their customers.

Even in a supporting role to conventional health care, though, digital therapeutics could eventually transform medicine. Those that target the workings of the brain are some of the most exciting. MedRhythms, based in Boston, has produced a therapy that uses music to restore movement-related brain connections in people undergoing rehabilitation after a stroke. Sensors attached to patients’ shoes measure gait and feed the results into an AI -based algorithm that mixes a customised beat into a playlist chosen by the patient—like a personalised DJ of sorts. The therapy is in clinical trials for strokes and there are plans to test it for Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Chrissy Bellows, a 74-year-old stroke survivor in Maine, is one of the early-trial participants. She had been told that improvement in her condition was highly unlikely more than two years after her stroke. That meant being dependent on her husband to walk, a few steps at a time. After the Med Rhythms treatment, however, she can walk up to 100 metres without support. Her husband recalls a therapy session in which she was walking towards a set target but suddenly stood still, as if her leg couldn’t move. It turned out the music had stopped. Such is the power it has over the brain’s control of the body.

Cognito’s Mr Vaughan thinks that digital therapeutics will play a big role in conditions that are now hard to treat, such as brain disorders. “I think that 15-20 years from now the idea that you give someone a systemic drug, either a pill or an injection, hoping that some small amount of it gets into the brain and then it actually changes electrical activity in the brain before the rest of it piles up in your liver or kidneys and causes a problem…I think we’re going to look back on that as going after flies with hammers.” ■

I T IS A TRENDLINE that gives you pause: a spike nearing the top of the blue band that marks your normal blood-sugar range, followed by a sharp dip. The culprit is obvious: the sourdough toast for breakfast half an hour before. A generous piece of banana bread the following morning leaves a completely different trace. The blood-sugar line runs nicely unperturbed right down the middle of the normal zone all the way through to lunchtime.

These are the sort of revelations that a continuous glucose monitor, a coin-sized device attached to the skin, beams to your smartphone’s screen. The device lasts for two weeks and has a tiny needle that gets just under the skin. Every few minutes it measures the concentration of sugar in the fluid between the cells there—a good proxy for what is going on in the bloodstream.

Almost as soon as the first such continuous glucose monitors started replacing finger-prick blood tests for diabetics in 2014, they began to show up on the arms of non-diabetic geeks in Silicon Valley. They were looking for ways to “hack” their metabolism into delivering, for instance, more energy or brain clarity. Their ad-hoc experiments were soon replicated by formal researchers doing broader studies of metabolism. Those, in turn, have led to the possibility of personalised nutrition.

Such metabolic studies have changed the scientific thinking on what a healthy diet looks like. It has turned out that many seemingly healthy people often have large post-meal spikes in blood sugar, which have been linked to the development of pre-diabetes. Without any intervention pre-diabetes turns into diabetes in 37-70% of cases within four years. The sugar dips that often follow the spikes were recently found to be problematic, too, because they make people feel hungry. People who are “big dippers” consume about 300 more calories a day than those who are not.

In 2015 researchers in Israel showed that an AI -based algorithm they had developed could predict someone’s blood-sugar reaction to various foods. The algorithm’s inputs included blood tests, sleep, exercise, height and weight, which all affect daily metabolic variations. They also included the composition of the gut microbiome, the trillions of bacteria residing in the gut whose collective job is to process what we eat. Microbiome analysis is done by shotgun genomic sequencing of everything found in a stool sample.

In the past five years startups in America, Europe and Asia have launched AI -based personalised-nutrition apps that build on these discoveries. One of them, Zoe, sends customers a set of specially formulated muffins. By knowing exactly what is in the food being eaten, and measuring the changes in blood sugar and fat that come about in response, the company can create a predictive model of its customers’ metabolism. Its algorithm then whips up a bespoke catalogue of foods and meals, with predicted blood-sugar reactions to each. Tushar Vashisht, co-founder of HealthifyMe, an Indian startup that provides digital coaching for weight loss, says the trove of data from customers who can afford various connected devices and blood tests as inputs for their bespoke plans is useful far beyond those customers. It can help to build apps for people who do not have such devices, which would rely on AI -derived proxies of weight, blood sugar and so on.

For such systems to keep metabolisms in balance, they have to be adhered to. Knowing what is happening inside your body is no help if you do nothing to change the pattern of behaviour involved. Just being told that it is in your interests is not, typically, enough. So apps sold as ways of achieving health gains on the basis of measurements made by wearables typically incorporate a variety of behavioural nudges to keep the user focused.

The AI innovation in such personalised diets makes them easier to maintain in the long term because it gives people options on how to make the foods that the algorithm says are particularly bad for them a little less bad. The algorithms may suggest small tweaks, such as sprinkling some nuts on that ice cream or going for a long walk after eating it. January AI , another personalised-nutrition startup, says it has derived the nutrition contents of 16m grocery-store items, recipes and menus of local restaurants, which makes it easier for users to plan and track meals.

It is still early days, but results reported by users of such precision-nutrition programmes look encouraging. Users say they are losing weight, have higher energy levels and are sleeping better. Some diabetic users no longer need medication. Studies of several apps are under way to confirm and quantify these benefits.

However, thoughtful suggestions that make compliance easier are the exception. As too often with the design of new tech products, behavioural science is an afterthought. When she began researching her book, Natasha Schüll, the cultural anthropologist from NYU , found trying to decode the logic behind many health-tech products very frustrating. Then she realised that there was no logic. It was “a pinch or two of positive psychology thrown in with the infrastructure of a punitive Skinner box, thrown in with some other notion of the brain” ending up as “a hotch-potch of ad-hoc things that was not that studied or scientific”. The typical design strategy, she concluded, “was just throwing things at the wall”.

This may be why many of the apps fail to establish themselves in people’s lives (see chart). There are more than 400,000 health and wellness apps on the Apple and Google app stores with 250 new ones added daily. Appetite for them is healthy, with around 5m app downloads per day. But 95% of those downloads will be deleted within 24 hours. The problem is that people do not just need a product that is well designed. They need a product that is well designed for them, says Liz Ashall-Payne from Orcha, a British organisation that evaluates the quality of health apps for clients like the National Health Service. As she points out, buying a pair of trousers online is made easy by filters for size, colour and style, but no such system exists on the app stores. A teenager seeking help for anxiety will need a different type of app to his grandparent wanting the same thing.

A lot of dead wood

Orcha has rated 7,000 health apps on three criteria: privacy, user experience and evidence that they work. Only about a quarter of them meet its quality threshold on all three. Mental-health apps are particularly weak. But quality is improving, says Ms Ashall-Payne. She attributes that to the guidelines for health apps that were set recently by British health authorities, which gave developers clarity on what “good” looks like. As the market matures the bad products will die out, “but it’s going to take time”.

Making people stick to healthy behaviours is probably the biggest challenge in public health. That makes innovations which boost compliance particularly exciting. Technology developed by Sweetch, an Israeli startup, is making the advice dispensed by health apps more practical and personalised. Sweetch’s AI -based algorithm is a hybrid of a personal secretary and a motivational coach. It keeps track of whatever it is the user must do, such as walking a certain number of steps or checking their weight weekly, and finds the best time to suggest they do it.

The vigilant bot may spot, for example, that you have a 20-minute gap between meetings and suggest you pop out for a walk to the coffee shop a few blocks away to do your steps. It changes your activity goals up and down depending on how you are doing, to prevent you from becoming demotivated and ditching the whole thing. The prompts are available in 33 different tones of voice: combinations of words that can be friendly, begging, commanding and so on. Yoni Nevo, Sweetch’s chief executive, says that the algorithm evaluates about 700m possible combinations of things to say to an individual on any given day. It takes about four to five weeks for the algorithm to learn what makes you tick by trying different combinations of all these things.

Device manufacturers, for their part, are starting to realise that when it comes to giving people health data, less is sometimes more. Many people are happier when they are simply told whether things are fine or not, rather than being flooded with all sorts of data to make sense of before breakfast. Some smart scales now just buzz approvingly when you step on them to confirm that your weight and body-fat composition are in your target range, rather than giving you the metrics. Wearables like the Oura ring are now able to tell you not just what your heart rate, sleep or temperature trends are, but also what that means—and what changes might improve things. And when the data show that things have gone off kilter, novel digital treatments may come to the rescue. ■

A S SOON AS the covid-19 pandemic began, several research institutes around the world set up studies asking people to share data from their wearable fitness trackers. On most devices, signing up involved just a few clicks, and people did so enthusiastically. The biggest study, the Corona Data Donation project set up by the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, enrolled more than 500,000 people. Over 30,000 signed up for DETECT , a study by the Scripps Research Institute in California.

When it comes to disease surveillance, the most useful biomarker is fever, a direct sign of infection. But most wearables do not measure temperature, because accurate readings are hard to do. So a proxy had to be created using the standard things they do measure, such as heart rate, sleep and activity level. Resting heart rate, measured when people are sitting still, varies a lot from person to person—anything between 50 and 100 beats per minute counts as normal—but each person’s rate is generally stable. When the body fights an infection, however, the rate goes up, often dramatically. With covid-19, data from wearable devices showed that this uptick happened four days before people felt any symptoms. By one estimate 63% of covid cases could be detected from changes in resting heart rate before the onset of symptoms.

Before covid came along, a team from Scripps led by Jennifer Radin had shown that, in America, weekly changes in the proportion of people with abnormal results in heart rate, sleep and activity—all measured from wearables—align neatly with the prevalence of flu-like symptoms as measured by established surveillance systems. These track flu outbreaks by canvassing doctors’ offices to find out if more people with such symptoms are starting to show up. Because people usually seek care 3-8 days after symptoms appear, by the time these data are collated, an epidemic is usually at a different stage, possibly requiring different public-health measures. More timely insights are sorely needed.

That said, data from wearables have quirks of their own. One day the Koch Institute team saw a sudden peak in the measurement derived from step count and heart rate they were developing as a proxy for fever. It turned out that Apple had changed the algorithm that calculates resting heart rate on its devices. Such software updates have been a headache for the team because their data come from about a dozen different devices. They also have to sort out various gaps. Apple Watches are usually charged at night, which means that they give no sleep data. Once through its teething problems, though, the project proved a success. “It is not 100% accurate but it does a pretty good job,” says Dirk Brockmann, who leads the team.

Other research teams have taken a different approach to population-based surveillance with wearable devices. They have developed algorithms that examine deviations in each individual’s metrics, based on whatever data their particular device collects. They establish the person’s baseline levels of various biomarkers and then look for changes that suggest he may be experiencing some sort of anomaly in physiology. When lots of such changes occur all of a sudden, different as they may be from person to person, it is reasonable to suspect that lots of people are falling ill, and probably from the same thing.

One thing researchers now need to work out is whether the disease-surveillance algorithms based on wearable devices might systematically miss what is happening with some types of people, says Leo Wolansky from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. For example, algorithms might unwittingly be optimised for spotting outbreaks in wealthy areas where people are more likely to have been using high-end wearables for longer. In poorer areas, where people may have different underlying health conditions (which often affect digital-biomarker measurements), the algorithm for wearables might be a lot more likely to miss an outbreak. “As they often say in this field, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’, and we still have to better understand whether the data we’ve captured has some garbage in it,” says Mr Wolansky.

Medical scans that look for a particular problem routinely turn up other things, known as incidental findings. Something similar has occurred with the mass scan of human bodies that has taken place thanks to all these data from wearables. The German team found that resting heart rate was higher in areas that had been in East Germany than those in former West Germany. “We still don’t know why this is,” says Mr Brockmann. “Is it because women work more in East Germany? Or is it because people eat differently?”

Another mysterious finding is that Germans in all parts of the country are sleeping less in 2022 than in 2020 and the resting heart rate of the nation has gone up. One guess is that this may have to do with the extra weight that people put on during lockdowns, but nobody really knows for sure. The data from wearables has been “a question generator”, says Mr Brockmann, raising queries about health that would not have been asked otherwise.

The ability to examine lots of human bodies as they go about their daily lives is also changing how clinical studies of new drugs are done. According to IQVIA , a research firm, 10% of late-stage clinical trials in 2020 used connected devices to monitor people, up from 3% in 2016. A catalogue by the Digital Medicine Society, an American organisation, lists more than 300 examples of digital biomarkers that are used in trials.

Activity measures, such as step count, for example, are a formal outcome in drug trials for asthma, arthritis, heart failure, Parkinson’s disease and cystic fibrosis. Measuring how much a person walks can provide a more objective, or at least complementary, picture of a drug’s effect on pain or mood than the standard practice of asking people to give a rating on a scale.

Most important, devices that unobtrusively monitor patients as they go about their lives have allowed medical researchers to see, for the first time, how patients experience a given disease and treatment in their natural habitat. Nobody sleeps well in a pharmaceutical company’s sleep lab. The most widely used test of cardiovascular and physical fitness is the “six-minute-walk test”, which is the distance that someone can walk in the span of six minutes. It involves a patient pacing up and down a hospital corridor while a nurse with a clipboard records the result.

This has been simplified by fitness trackers, some of which have added the six-minute test to their repertoire of movement metrics. An Apple Watch, for example, makes its estimates using multiple metrics from its sensors that are passively observed over long periods of a user’s normal behaviour (rather than a single six-minute walk). Validation studies in people over 65 show that this algorithmic estimate is highly accurate.

The inclusion in drug trials of measures that reflect patients’ quality of life might help people choose treatments that best suit their priorities. At the moment, new cancer drugs are considered a success even if they prolong patients’ lives by just a few months. Many cancer patients, however, care much more about what they can do in the months that they survive the disease than about stretching their lives a little longer.

They would choose a treatment that might promise fewer extra days but a greater chance that they would be able to do what matters to them, such as being able to lift up their grandchildren. Pharmaceutical companies are starting to include such metrics among the goalposts they set for new drugs.

Wearable sensors have also opened clinical trials to patients who would otherwise be excluded from them, says Andy Coravos from HumanFirst, an organisation which helps drug companies deploy connected devices for monitoring trial participants at home. She raises the example of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a muscle-wasting disease. The typical primary outcomes for medicines developed for the disease are a six-minute-walk test and a four-stair climb test. But 60% of sufferers are in wheelchairs, which means that they cannot participate. So it is unclear what the treatments can do for them. An armband tracking upper-body motion makes it possible to include them in trials.

Academic studies of non-drug interventions, such as behavioural nudges to increase physical activity, are also using more data from fitness trackers rather than asking participants to keep a diary or fill in a questionnaire. One analysis of clinical trials registered in America found that the number using connected devices grew from 88 in 2007 to more than 1,100 in 2017. The majority of those trials have not been by pharmaceutical companies, but by research organisations such as the group led by Euan Ashley at Stanford University which focuses on precision medicine.

Dr Ashley’s group was among the first to run, in 2019, a fully digital trial in which participants never met a researcher face-to-face. Not long ago, he says, recruiting trial participants involved putting up posters with tear-off bits of paper listing a number for them to call. They would then need to go to the hospital and sit down with a nurse to go over 17 pages of consent forms to sign up. “If you could get 200 people in a few months, you’d be pretty happy,” he says.

This model of care can make a big difference in poor countries, where there are not enough specialists

Now, people can download the app for a study and sign up while waiting in line for their coffee. The first time Dr Ashley’s team used this method for a study on physical activity 40,000 people enrolled in just two weeks and results were ready in a matter of months. That was not an unalloyed benefit. Though the study was very easy to join, it was also very easy to leave and about 80% of participants had dropped out before the end, which was just two weeks in. Even so, the final group was about ten times the usual size for this line of research.

The quantified life

This report has argued that wearable health and fitness trackers can change the way people try to stay healthy and alleviate illness, the way their doctors care for them, and the way population-level health interventions are deployed. The digital health care that wearables enable could make treatment more efficient, personalised and effective. In America digital therapies are used by lots of people who might otherwise not receive care at all. Mental-health care from an AI -therapist may not always be as good as from a human being. But it can be accessed a lot more easily by people who cannot afford the payment or time off to see a doctor, or where there is a shortage of mental-health specialists.

Automated, round-the-clock monitoring of patients with chronic conditions (the biggest users of health care) can greatly improve their treatment and outcomes. Done right, it can also help doctors treat more of them without being overstretched. This model of care can make a big difference in poor countries, where there are not enough specialists.

About a third of deaths globally are from cardiovascular disease and more than three-quarters of those deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. It may seem hard to imagine that wearable devices with heart-monitoring functions will become widespread in developing countries like India. But look at smartphones. In 2021, 54% of Indians already owned one. Deloitte, a consulting firm, reckons that by 2026, the country will have 1bn smartphone users, and will be the world’s second-biggest manufacturer of the devices. Many African countries have skipped developing a personal-banking sector by establishing mobile-phone payment systems that are now used for almost everything.

But even in a developed country like America, a digital divide exists whereby many people cannot afford internet access or lack the digital literacy needed to make use of new health technology. The new sensors and wearables technology are all very exciting, says Yuri Maricich of Pear Therapeutics, but “how can we reduce that to something that [works for] a single mom in the state of Kentucky who is in a very difficult life situation, or a trucker who is always on the road and trying to make ends meet?”

This sort of question is, all too often, an afterthought when new consumer technologies are being developed. To ignore it with digital-health products would be squandering a big opportunity to improve health care for all. ■

E LECTRICITY HAS been getting increasingly scarce in India. In a recent survey two-thirds of households said they had been facing regular power cuts. Residents of some rural areas in the northern states report receiving only a few hours of electricity a day. The shortage has even reached posh parts of Delhi, the capital, whose pampered residents are usually insulated from many of the discomforts suffered by their compatriots.

The most immediate reason for the crisis is scorching heat. The past couple of months have been even hotter than usual in South Asia. In north-west and central India average temperatures in March and April were the highest since records began 122 years ago (see map). As a result, air-conditioners in homes and offices have been whirring away at levels not usually seen until mid-May. That has come on top of already rising demand after the easing of covid-19 restrictions and an uptick in economic activity.

India no longer lacks capacity. Over the past two decades it has built more coal plants, which generate about 70% of the country’s power, and speeded up the expansion of renewables. It has also connected all but a tiny percentage of households to the grid (though not to 24-hour supply). But in recent weeks coal plants have not been receiving enough coal to operate at capacity. At the start of this month more than 100 of India’s 173 thermal plants had critically low stocks. At the end of April, officials in Delhi said the capital could run out of coal in a matter of days, threatening electricity supply to hospitals and the metro system. Power plants have been scrambling for fuel from Coal India, a state-owned company, and paying steep prices for coal at auctions. One reason for the shortage is that coal is cumbersome to move around. Demand for train travel recovered quickly after covid measures eased in March, causing busy tracks. The government has cancelled hundreds of passenger trains over the coming weeks to make way for cargo ones. But there is a deeper, more long-running reason: electricity producers have no incentive to keep large stocks of coal because they cannot be sure that they will be paid regularly. Billing and payment for electricity is patchy, leaving many distribution companies in the red and unable to pay the power plants, which in turn have a hard time paying the miners. “They have known for two months that coal stocks were declining, but instead of building them up then, we now have a bunch of broke entities scrambling to buy coal and electricity at a premium,” says Karthik Ganesan of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a think-tank in Delhi.

In the short term, power plants and distributors have little choice but to muddle through. Longer-term, several fixes are possible. One is to ensure existing coal stocks are used by the most efficient plants, which are disadvantaged by long-standing distribution contracts that favour older, more fuel-hungry plants. Doing that could reduce coal consumption by around 6% a year, reckons Mr Ganesan, freeing up stocks for emergencies. And as the government continues to expand renewables the pressure should ease.

Another solution is to convince more users of electricity actually to pay for it. Farmers in many states are entitled to free power. Around 10% of households connected to the grid do not receive regular bills. Theft is rampant. A study in 2019 by P w C , an accountancy firm, estimated that distribution companies lose about a fifth of their revenue to theft, meter-tampering and leaks from faulty power lines.

Fixing the dysfunctional electricity distribution system will become more urgent as India gets richer. Climate change will make extreme temperatures more common. More Indians will install air-conditioning: currently only one in ten households has it. The International Energy Agency, a forecaster, estimates that to meet electricity demand over the next 20 years, India will have to increase its installed capacity of 400 gigawatts more than threefold, adding another 950 GW , or roughly the size of the EU ’s power market. Muddling through will no longer be an option. ■

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W HEN TELEVISION viewers tuned in last month to “Al-Ikhtiyar” (“The Choice”), they knew exactly how it would end. In the penultimate episode Yasser Galal, who plays Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, then the defence minister, enters a room full of religious and political leaders. “We must make a fateful decision,” he says. “The country needs one.” The date was July 3rd, 2013. Within hours the assembled grandees would appear on television alongside Mr Sisi, as he declared Egypt’s brief experiment with democracy to be over.

Television viewers in the Arab world are spoilt for choice during the month of Ramadan, which ended on May 1st. Studios roll out dozens of big-budget serials, with a new episode each night. “Al-Ikhtiyar”, now in its third season, was one of this year’s most heavily promoted shows.

The latest one dramatises what the producers call “the most dangerous 96 hours in modern Egyptian history”: the mass protests and subsequent coup in the summer of 2013 that overthrew Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood apparatchik who had become the first and only man to win a fair election in Egypt.

Mr Galal (pictured) plays his role with uncanny precision, capturing the general’s penchant for half-smiles and clasped hands. Close your eyes and his whispery, singsong voice is almost indistinguishable from the real Mr Sisi, who has been president since 2014. There is never a doubt about whom viewers should root for. Mr Sisi is portrayed as humble and pious; en route to announcing a coup, he stops for a heartfelt chat with his mother. Mr Morsi and his henchmen come off as shifty sorts, their appearances set to ominous music.

The producers describe the show grandiosely, not just as entertainment but as a “history book” for future generations. This would be laudable—if they were serious about it. Even for those who lived through them, that summer’s events were a blur. What seemed as if it could be a one-day protest against Mr Morsi, a chance for the opposition to blow off steam, progressed with bewildering speed to a bloody coup.

The show purports to take viewers inside the inner sanctum of Egypt’s security state. The credits thank the army and the interior ministry before the crew. It incorporates real-life recordings of Brotherhood officials that must have been taken in secret and had never been aired before.

The clips paint the Brotherhood as obstinate and inept, a truth many of Mr Morsi’s one-time supporters concede. But the show sheds little new light on how the deep state conspired to junk democracy. This is history written by the victors.

Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat, the second and third post-revolution presidents, both had their careers immortalised in film. But their appearances came long after their deaths. (Their successor, Hosni Mubarak, a man perhaps best remembered for being overthrown, may not merit a biopic.) Mr Sisi’s turn on the small screen comes at the height of his powers: he forced through constitutional amendments in 2019 that all but guarantee he will rule until 2030. This was a lavish propaganda effort, meant to rally Egyptians just when many have grown disenchanted.

Six years after it struck a $12bn deal with the IMF , Egypt has gone back for another loan, worried about how soaring food and energy prices will hurt its budget. Poverty has risen since Mr Sisi took office. Endemic problems—shoddy education and health care, urban chaos, rampant inequality and corruption—are unfixed. The president’s boosters say he saved Egypt from a “dark tunnel” of Islamist rule. But the country has not quite emerged into sunlit uplands.

M UHAMMAD ADMITS he was not an eager student. The young Emirati says he slept through school, if he turned up at all. When he was 17, desperate teachers arranged for him to spend one day a week in classes put on just for disaffected males. These aimed to raise ambition and to grab him with more practical kinds of schoolwork. Now 20 and completing military service, Muhammad says this last-ditch intervention saved him from flunking. A career as an army officer looks possible. Even training to be a doctor. Perhaps.

Muhammad is a graduate of Hands-on-Learning, a modest project aiming to drive down drop-out rates in Ras al Khaimah, one of the scruffier of the seven statelets that make up the United Arab Emirates ( UAE ). It is but one local effort to solve a sweeping regional problem. Across the Arab world, girls are less likely than boys to be at school. But in the classroom girls vastly outperform their male peers—to a degree unmatched anywhere else in the world. Boys’ shockingly bad school marks are a big drag on Arab economies, as is the continuing oppression of females. Shoddy boys’ schools are turning out insecure young men who are more likely to feel that their livelihoods depend on keeping better-educated women out of work.

The region’s boys and girls both perform badly in international tests. This makes Arab boys’ failings all the starker. The World Bank says two-thirds of ten-year-old boys in the Middle East and north Africa cannot read a simple story, compared with more than half of girls (see chart). Eight Arab school systems have the world’s widest gender gaps in science, according to international tests of 12-year-olds in 40-odd countries in 2019: in all of them boys score worse. Arab girls almost always outperform boys in high-profile tests of 15-year-olds carried out every three years by the OECD , a club mostly of rich countries. In Jordan, Qatar and the UAE the gap in 2015 was equivalent to girls having had an extra year of schooling in science and two extra years in reading.

Segregated schooling is part of the problem. Single-sex schools are common in Arab countries, especially in the Gulf, where boys’ failures relative to girls’ are worst. Boys’ schools tend to be crummier than girls’, in part because hiring male teachers is difficult. Whereas a job in girls’ schools can easily attract ten applicants, an opening in a boys’ school might get three or four, says an official in Saudi Arabia. An academic study of six men who were training to be teachers in the UAE found that four did not particularly want a job in a school and only three liked working with children. Men in Gulf countries can generally earn more money and status working in the army or the police. Thus many schools rely on immigrant teachers from poorer Arab neighbours, who struggle to win local pupils’ respect. Bullying also drags down school marks and increases drop-out rates. Polling analysed by UNESCO found that more than 40% of the teenagers in the Middle East and north Africa are bullied at least once a month, compared with 32% in North America and 25% in Europe. The region’s boys were more likely to be bullied than girls, whereas globally boys and girls are bullied at about the same rate. Moreover, the bullying was much more likely to involve violence. Around 60% of boys also report getting into fights at school. Many boys see little point in working hard, says Natasha Ridge of the Al Qasimi Foundation, an Emirati think-tank. Hidebound economies do not reward strivers. In the richest countries young men can expect a share of oil money, however badly they flunk. In other places, boys with poor scores can still hope for jobs in bloated civil services: a quarter of jobs in Egypt are in the public sector; in Saudi Arabia in 2014 the share was over twice as high. For girls the benefits of swotting are much clearer. Education is one of the few ways to gain independence from husbands and fathers. Parents contribute to this disparity, too. Muhammad in Ras al Khaimah says he often stayed out gallivanting with friends on school nights, while his sisters, kept indoors by their parents, spent more time studying. Arab parents are less likely than those elsewhere to say they “often” read to their children, and less likely to read with sons than with daughters—even though research suggests that boys’ literacy tends to suffer more than girls’ when parents don’t nudge them towards books.

In theory preschools can help iron out these differences. But less than a third of children in the Middle East and north Africa go to one, which is about half the global rate. Prejudice complicates matters. “Boys are smarter than girls, but they can’t settle down,” says Andjy, an Egyptian teacher and mother in Alexandria.

Women are still largely locked out of workforces, despite having better school grades. Across the Middle East and north Africa only around a fifth of women have jobs. Poorly educated men are in no hurry to change that. Research outside the region confirms that less-educated males are more likely to hold sexist views, and that men who do not complete a secondary education are more likely than others to abuse a wife or partner.

Reforms under way in some countries could drive up standards and benefit left-behind boys. More Arab countries are choosing to take part in the big international tests that have helped make the region’s woeful schooling so plain. In 2019 Saudi Arabia’s government let women teach boys in the first three grades of state primary schools, though in single-sex classes. Today 45% of those boys have female teachers. In 2018 the UAE began creating mixed-sex classes in state primary schools. It is also well on its way to making pre-primary education universal.

Yet very few countries have conjured up policies or projects, such as Hands-on-Learning, that expressly aim to help boys close the gap. More must be done for girls, too, to ensure that they go to school: since 2012 progress towards equal enrolment has stalled. But tackling the boy problem is unfashionable, says Ms Ridge. Reform-minded leaders in the Arab world prefer to talk up their efforts, however meagre, to improve the lot of women. They fear that spending more on lads will make governments look like dinosaurs—even when the data show that boys are in sore need. ■

I N BURUNDI, DRIVERS are so desperate for fuel that they sleep on forecourts of petrol stations. Senegal has so little jet fuel that Air France’s flight from the capital, Dakar, to Paris has been stopping in the Canary Islands to fill up. Johannesburg has the same problem, which has caused United Airlines to cancel some flights from New York. From Kenya, which recently suffered its worst petrol shortage in a decade, to Lagos, where queues outside petrol stations backed onto motorways, and Cameroon, where thousands of lorries have been stranded without diesel, Africa has been short of the lifeblood of modern economies. “Everywhere, everyone is scrambling for diesel,” laments Anibor Kragha of the African Refiners and Distributors Association, an industry group.

The economic costs of shortages are huge. They bring commerce to a grinding halt, shut the millions of businesses that have to generate their own electricity and force holidaymakers to cancel trips for lack of flights. This is a blow to tourism, a large contributor to GDP in many African countries. The social impact is large, too. Hospitals cannot get drugs and ambulances are immobilised. All this makes politicians jumpy. Anger at shortages can quickly erupt in the streets.

Demand for fuel surged across the world last year as economies recovered from covid-19. Yet for the first time in 30 years global refining capacity fell, causing fuel prices to rise. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed them higher still. In most places fuel has remained available, if expensive. But not in Africa, which is going through its worst supply crisis in 40 years, according to Pierre Barbe, who runs the Africa business at Vitol, the world’s biggest independent oil trader.

The shortages are not simply the result of higher prices that have made fuel unaffordable to poorer buyers in many parts of Africa. They have also been caused by several other market changes that particularly affect the continent, says Kristine Petrosyan of the International Energy Agency ( IEA ), an intergovernmental think-tank.

Fuel traders generally use financial markets to lessen the risk of price fluctuations. But they have to spend much more (and tie up more working capital) hedging when prices are high and volatile. Importers to Africa are often smaller than those in richer regions, and have tighter balance sheets. To conserve capital many simply import less fuel.

The problem is being aggravated by a turn in the futures market: the price for deliveries of oil at a future date has fallen far below that for immediate delivery. In more usual times traders would park dozens of full oil tankers (known as “floaters”) off the west African coast, where they would wait for higher prices. Now traders want to unload them as quickly as possible and send them to Asia through the Suez canal, avoiding Africa altogether.

Many sub-Saharan countries are particularly vulnerable because they generally buy in small amounts from floaters or tankers sailing by. Whereas many rich countries hold a 90-day supply in reserve, few sub-Saharan countries have any such backup. It is clear that there is little storage capacity in the region, although data on this are scant.

A second vulnerability is that sub-Saharan countries refine little oil domestically. Many of their refineries are badly run and operate far below capacity or are too small to compete. Refinery output in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen by half over the past decade, even as oil demand in the region has risen by 19%, according to the IEA . Sub-Saharan Africa now imports about three-quarters of its refined products on average, a greater share than any other region. That leaves it deeply exposed to external shocks. West Africa is especially vulnerable. Senegal, for example, is short on fuel in part because the country’s sole refinery has been shut for maintenance.

Having little refining capacity and barely anything in reserve is risky at the best of times. In many African countries poor logistics, bad management and distorting subsidies regularly cause supply shocks. Many African ports can only receive ships with a shallow draft, forcing big tankers to offload into little ones. They are also heavily congested, exacerbating delays. Nigeria’s recent shortages emerged after the authorities blocked the sale of 350,000 tonnes of petrol: it contained too much methanol. Exactly who messed up is hotly contested but, with tiny reserves, motorists were soon running dry. In Kenya the government subsidises petrol but does so clumsily, worsening fuel shortages. It was recently late paying the equivalent of $112m in subsidies to retailers who were already struggling with a shortage of working capital because of high prices.

Things may soon get even worse. Big oil traders are reducing purchases of Russian oil to comply with European sanctions that take effect on May 15th. This will further cut the flow to Africa of fuel refined in Europe from Russian oil.

I T WAS JUST after lunchtime when a group of ageing men and women, dressed in red, and flashing V-for-victory signs, drifted past a Uniqlo store in one of the many malls that pass for public spaces in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. The call had gone out on Facebook for supporters of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos to come out for their presidential candidate. “I hope he will vindicate the family name,” says Carmen, 74, as she rides the escalator down towards the Zara outlet. “They are so hated.”

On the floor below, another group, this one mostly in pink, had come to prove her point. Supporters of Leni Robredo, Mr Marcos’s closest rival for the presidency, were there to show their disdain for Bongbong. “We want a clean and honest government,” says Gina Ramos, 52. She has had enough of corruption, she adds.

She is in for disappointment. Barring an earth-shattering surprise or an unprecedented polling error, Mr Marcos, the son of the Philippines’ former dictator of the same name (minus the bongs), will win by a landslide in an election on May 9th. His vice-president, who is elected on a separate ticket, will be Sara Duterte, the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte, the outgoing president. In a system dominated by dynasties, both members of the all-star team have for months polled at above 50% in their respective races. Ms Robredo’s numbers have remained stuck in the low 20s.

That is a remarkable comeback for the Marcos family, who were run out of the country on February 25th 1986 as massive street protests and the loss of support from the police and army forced Ferdinand senior to reconsider his position. The Marcoses fled to Hawaii—along with at least 24 bars of gold and 22 boxes of cash—where the deposed dictator died three years later.

The family returned to the Philippines, ostensibly to face corruption charges, in 1991. Marcos’s wife, Imelda, ran for president the following year, and lost. But Bongbong won a seat in the House of Representatives. Various members of the family have played musical chairs in provincial and national positions ever since (see chart). In 2016, Bongbong ran for vice-president and lost narrowly to Ms Robredo. Now he is about to move his family back into Malacañang, as the presidential palace is known.

Yet it is unclear what Mr Marcos intends to do with power. He has made few promises on the campaign trail, published no policy agenda and appeared in no debates. The slogan of his and Ms Duterte’s campaign is an airy-fairy “Unity”. (The pair call themselves “Uniteam”.) Despite 30 years in public life—as congressman, senator and provincial governor—he has little to show for it. Descriptions of him by supporters, critics and foreign observers are variations on a theme: “easy-going”, “laid-back”, “not very energetic”, “lazy”. That is because the presidency, for Mr Marcos and his family, is not a means to transforming society, fixing deep-rooted problems or even plundering the treasury. It is instead an end in itself, the culmination of a decades-long effort to rehabilitate the family name, long associated with the late dictator’s brutality and corruption, and the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by Imelda, whose shoe collection now fills a museum in Manila. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands jailed or tortured during the period of martial law imposed by Marcos senior. Some $5bn-10bn of public money is alleged to have been looted. “This campaign did not start six years ago”, when Mr Marcos lost his bid for the vice-presidency, says Julio Teehankee of De La Salle University in Manila, but in 1986. Over time, and more recently helped along by skilful propaganda, the idea took hold that the Marcos dictatorship was a “golden era”, when the Philippines enjoyed stability, high growth and massive investment in infrastructure. On social media and on YouTube, sophisticated campaigns push this revisionist version of history. The lack of an agenda beyond winning is bad for the Philippines. Its population of some 110m is the second-biggest in South-East Asia. Around a quarter of its people cannot afford enough food and other essentials. Its economy, before the pandemic among the best-performing in the region, was battered by an unduly long and harsh lockdown. It is an American treaty ally with a niggling territorial dispute with China, lying within cellphone-signal distance of Taiwan. It will be on the front line in any conflict between those powers.

Mr Marcos has little to say on any of these subjects. What he has said has alarmed economists. For example, he promises to cap the price of rice at about half the current rate. That may be campaign bluster, however. Analysts expect him to forget unaffordable campaign vows and follow Mr Duterte’s example in appointing technocrats to run the economy.

On foreign policy, Mr Marcos’s family has a long association with China. One of only two Chinese consulates outside the capital is in Ilocos Norte, a province notable only for being the family’s stronghold. He is said to be China’s preferred candidate. Yet Bongbong is a cosmopolitan sort with a fondness for England, where he studied, and for American culture. There are suggestions that he might appoint Jose Manuel Romualdez, the Philippine ambassador to America (and his second cousin), as foreign secretary. But his lack of any strong beliefs of his own, combined with a susceptibility to external influence, is a potential liability. He listens to the last person he spoke to, says an interlocutor.

The greater risks are at home. Mr Marcos’s campaign may have been milquetoast but his candidacy, and probable victory, have been deeply divisive. Ms Robredo has fired up a passionate base. Her rallies draw huge crowds. Lots of Filipinos remain wedded to the ideals of the 1986 revolution that kicked out his father. It is possible they will not accept the result. Attempts to disqualify Mr Marcos are making their way through the elections commission, and will probably get sent to the Supreme Court. Whatever it decides, there will be uproar.

Mr Marcos’s administration is likely to be marked by protests and instability. That will be bad for governance, and for the economy. It will also be a headache for America—and an opportunity for China—as they compete in the Pacific. The Marcos name is rising again. But for how long? ■

T HE SUN is shining, the fountains are playing and Odessans are enjoying simple pleasures—most of all that of seeing their city come back to life. Primorsky (“Seaside”) Boulevard is still cordoned off, and the statue of the Duc de Richelieu, the city’s early-19th-century governor, is covered in sandbags. But the tank traps have been moved to the outskirts, where the lines of defence now lie.

The actual fighting has moved to Mykolaiv, some 130km away. Russian shelling left that city’s residents without water, so Odessans are sending them bottled water and food. In Odessa the main threat now comes from the occasional Russian missile. Even when air-raid sirens wail, people carry on with their lives.

In the morning they flock to Privoz, Odessa’s biggest market and the source of much folklore. The fish rows are emptier than usual, as mines have barred fishing in the Black Sea, and tomatoes are twice as expensive as before the war, but nobody is complaining. In the evening, in the city gardens, a local crooner sings romantic songs in Ukrainian to people on benches and in cafés. As 10pm approaches, the streets empty and men with guns come out to enforce the curfew.

Odessa, a cosmopolitan port city of traders, adventurers, writers, gangsters and romantics, of multiple ethnicities, languages and cultures, is known for storytelling. And the story it tells today is of life winning over war. Odessans are proud that the most popular meme of this war was coined off their coast, on Snake Island, where Ukrainian border guards told a Russian warship “Go fuck yourself.” They are even prouder that on April 14th their army sank the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship. Four days later they queued to buy new postage stamps marking the meme. Since then there have been no Russian ships on the horizon. At Arcadia beach, people are jogging and cafés are reopening. But the beaches are still mined, and only the bravest venture into the water. More important, Odessa’s economic heart, the port which carries Ukraine’s grain to the world, is blockaded. Russia still yearns to conquer Odessa, once a jewel of the Russian empire. But according to Gennadiy Trukhanov, the city’s mayor, they want it “intact and beautiful”, so they are unlikely to bomb its historic centre. Their plan is to cut it off from the rest of Ukraine by advancing from Mykolaiv to Transnistria, a pro-Russian separatist region of Moldova. Russia once hoped Odessa would greet its soldiers with flowers, counting perhaps on Mr Trukhanov’s many ties to Russia. A former Soviet officer, he was one of the first to warn that Russia might invade, and prepared by revamping bomb shelters. Russian is the lingua franca in this city of 130 nationalities, but that does not make it pro-Russian, Mr Trukhanov says. He is disgusted by the Russian army’s behaviour: “These are not military warriors, they are murderers, driven only by fear of what will happen to them if they don’t follow orders—and by money.”

Mr Trukhanov’s anger is all the greater because he considers the war a personal betrayal. So do most Odessans, for whom Russia’s language, history and culture are a part of their city. “Russian soldiers and officers must see that this is not a military operation, but a cynical, murderous, occupational war of punishment, with all the signs of fascism and Nazism.”

Where Russia hoped Odessa might be a weak link in Ukraine’s defence, it has proved a bastion, an emblem of a nation that draws its strength from diversity, free enterprise and freedom. While soldiers dig trenches and fortify defences, the city is stockpiling enough food, water and medicine for two months. Mr Trukhanov is asking the army to de-mine some of the beaches so that people can swim in the summer.

It is not just his Soviet military background that equips him for the job. In the 1990s Italian police named Mr Trukhanov as a major player in the Odessan mafia, responsible for training gang members in “hand-to-hand combat and sniper shooting with high-precision weapons”. In 2021 he was charged with organised crime in Ukraine, but avoided arrest with a $1.1m bail payment. He makes little distinction between his own businesses and those of the city. (Mr Trukhanov denies all such allegations.) But what seemed an obvious conflict of interest before the war became one of the city’s strengths in defending it against the invasion. Old vendettas have been set aside, at least for the moment.

Nika Vikhniansky, a furniture businessman who opposed Mr Trukhanov in elections, is now working side by side with him managing volunteers and co-ordinating humanitarian aid. “The city council told us we were far more efficient than they are,” he explains. Mr Vikhniansky’s grandfather was a tank driver who fought the Nazis during the second world war. “Then they were killing us as Jews,” he says. “Now they are killing us as Ukrainians.” ■

I N THE VILLAGE of Anbang in Yunnan, a south-western province, people of social stature are heaving a sigh of relief. In the past, what a delicate matter it was to point out bad behaviour among residents. There was etiquette to consider, and the risk of causing offence. Recently, however, Anbang has set up a “moral review council” to praise the worthy and criticise the errant. The local government says the mood has changed. Now the village elite can use these meetings to exercise their “right to speak”.

In some parts of China, such councils have been a feature of rural life since the 1980s. Their members—mainly drawn from the ranks of village powerholders—have met regularly to praise those who are well-behaved and denounce others’ misdeeds, face to face. By 2018 more than half of China’s provinces had them, according to Shaoying Zhang of Shanghai University of Political Science and Law. In a paper last July, he said the councillors were “like the village priest or the Protestant pastor in rural European contexts centuries ago”.

In the past couple of years, the central government (ever keen to tighten social controls) has been stressing their importance. Like other places, Anbang has been using its council to enforce covid controls—summoning selected villagers to point out their failings, such as resisting vaccination. The humiliation does not stop in the meeting room. Offenders may be subjected to public shaming by having their names displayed on a morality notice board for all to see.

As Mr Zhang points out, councillors are usually male. Their values reflect patriarchal traditions. Those chosen for praise are often women deemed to have shown exemplary behaviour in their roles as mothers-in-law or daughters-in-law (a relationship that is often tense in Chinese villages, where married women usually live with their husband’s family). Respect for the elderly is also prized. Bad behaviour can cover a wide range of sins: littering, gambling, urinating in public or “superstition”, such as burning paper money for the dead.

It can also include behaviour that the Communist Party regards as threatening to stability. Officials in the countryside are hypervigilant about people who travel to cities to complain to governments there about injustices they have suffered in their villages. Such petitioning is legal as long as the person involved does not bypass their nearest city authority. But, to protect their own backs, village officials are quick to dismiss any petitioning as “unreasonable”, and thus a matter for the morality police.

Baoshan, the municipality to which Anbang belongs, claims the councils are a success. By the end of last year it had 128 of them. “The seeds of morality and civilisation have spread to everyone’s hearts,” the city’s government boasts.

S ELIM BORA has had quite a run. In March his company, Summa, won a contract to rebuild and run Guinea Bissau’s new international airport. Months earlier it had completed a 50,000-seat national stadium in Senegal, after less than 18 months of work—a sprint-like pace for such projects. The company’s résumé also includes convention centres in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea, a sports arena in Rwanda, and airports in Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone. “Ten years ago we had no projects in Africa outside of Libya,” recalls Mr Bora, taking in the view from his office in Istanbul. “Today 99% of our work is in Africa.”

Turkey’s construction industry is an international heavyweight. Of the world’s 250 biggest contractors, 40 are Turkish, behind only China and America. Many have long had a big footprint in north Africa. Of late they have begun making inroads in the continent’s south. Last year alone the value of projects undertaken by Turkish builders in sub-Saharan Africa was $5bn, or 17% of all Turkish building projects abroad, up from a paltry 0.3% before 2008. The region has overtaken Europe (10%) and the Middle East (13%), and is second only to countries of the former Soviet Union. In parts of Africa Turks are even giving Chinese builders, which continue to dominate construction in Africa, a run for their money.

Many of the Turkish construction firms got their African start in Libya in the 2000s, where they locked up billions of dollars in contracts. The toppling of the country’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011 and the ensuing civil war forced them to flee. They found new opportunities south of the Sahara, where their reputation regularly preceded them: many African leaders who had visited Libya and admired Turkish projects there were eager to work with the companies responsible for them.

Some assistance for Turkish projects comes from Turkey’s export-credit bank and public lenders from Japan. Both countries are, for their own strategic reasons, keen to check Chinese interests in Africa. Still, the Turks concede that they can rarely compete with Chinese rivals on price. “We cannot match the Chinese, because they come in with their own financing and we have to go to the markets,” says Basar Arioglu, chairman of Yapi Merkezi, another big construction firm.

The Turkish firms are therefore stressing other selling points instead. They tend to work faster than Chinese rivals and to offer superior quality. Having completed a big railway project in Ethiopia a few years ago, Yapi Merkezi more recently beat Chinese rivals to build the first section of a Tanzanian railway connecting Dar es Salaam and Lake Victoria. In December it signed a $1.9bn deal to build the third section.

The Turks are also happy to comply with African governments’ demands to hire local subcontractors and workers, which the Chinese have been more reluctant to do. This is in large part making a virtue out of necessity: whereas Chinese firms can afford to bring their own skilled workers, including engineers, to Africa, Turkish ones often cannot. Since Turkey lacks China’s resources to be in all places at once, Mr Arioglu observes, “the only way we can survive in the long run is to become local in all the countries we work in.” When Summa began working in Senegal in the 2010s, its workforce was 70% Turkish, remembers Mr Bora. That figure is now down to 30%.

Some Africans still grouse about the Turkish presence in their countries. Like the Chinese, “they come and go,” grumbles one official, creating only fleeting jobs. Another complains that the Turks (and other newcomers) invest in construction, mining and ports rather than higher up the value chain, which would do more for Africa’s broader economic development. And they could launch more joint ventures with African companies.

Such gripes are, however, outweighed by one last consideration increasingly prized by African governments. “We came at a lucky time,” recalls Mr Arioglu, “when both Ethiopia and Tanzania were looking for alternatives to Chinese companies.” As more sub-Saharan countries follow suit, being non-Chinese is a Turkish trait that China’s builders cannot match. ■

H IPPOCRATES CONDEMNED abortion; Aristotle thought it less cruel than exposing unwanted infants to the elements. The West has been arguing about this hard moral problem for over 2,000 years. Most Western democracies have found a compromise between the liberal position, held by this newspaper, that the state should not control women’s bodies; and the most conservative position, that any abortion is murder. In Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan, legislatures have allowed abortion early in pregnancy and made it illegal later. Most Americans agree with that, but their country stands apart.

A leaked draft of a majority opinion from America’s Supreme Court obtained by Politico, a news organisation, suggests that the court will overturn Roe v Wade, the 50-year-old decision that makes abortion legal until the fetus becomes viable. If so, state law would take precedence. Most abortions look set to become illegal in half of states; some bans would include cases of rape or incest. Better-off women can take time off work and travel to legal clinics, so the burden would fall mainly on poorer women. Banning abortion would increase the number of pregnancy-related deaths, by over 20%, according to one study.

Perhaps the judges will change their mind or temper their arguments before the final opinion is issued. Even so, with a 6-3 conservative majority, not the 5-4 split that has held for the past half-century, the court is poised to reopen some of the most contentious questions in American public life. In this, it risks damaging itself and accelerating the division of the country into two mutually hostile blocs.

The outsize power wielded by the court in 2022 derives from a political system that struggles to strike compromises. Lining up a majority in the House, 60 votes in the Senate (to override a filibuster) and a presidential signature is too hard. It is easier for politicians to fundraise off controversy rather than solve problems. Time and again on the thorniest questions—carbon-dioxide emissions, gay marriage, guns, abortion—Congress has failed to reflect public opinion.

By their dereliction, legislators dump big decisions on the justices. As a result Supreme Court confirmations have become trials of strength where the Senate majority holds sway. Donald Trump, who ran on a promise to pick judges explicitly to overturn Roe, further dissolved the idea of judicial independence. All this politicking heaps intolerable pressure on the court.

Conservative Americans, who may not have liked Mr Trump but admire his judges, may retort: so what? Liberals, they argue, broke the court in the 1950s and 1960s, pursuing a programme they could not get past Congress. Roe was shoddily argued and a correction is long overdue. Even if most Americans favour a compromise between a libertarian view and the belief that life begins at conception, judges are supposed to rule on the law, they say, not bend to public opinion.

That is surely right. However, the solution to one activist court 70 years ago is not another activist court today. When the legislature cannot pass laws on the big questions of the age, the courts bear a special responsibility, lest justice itself is poisoned. The court must indeed feel that it can go against public opinion. But in whatever it does it should weigh tradition and precedent and exercise restraint. If the justices take it upon themselves to cut through legislative knots, using their power maximally, they will transform themselves into the lifelong members of an all-powerful unelected third chamber.

Three bad outcomes may follow. The justices might find their judgments ignored. An America where the rule of law was weakened would be less free and more dysfunctional. If the court loses its ability to be the decider of last resort, the role asked of it in the presidential election in 2000—and again in 2020—it could lose its ability to settle disputes peacefully.

Second, if in the name of conservatism the justices start tearing up precedents that have stood for half a century, there will be growing political pressure to remake the court. Packing it is a terrible idea, and currently a fringe position in the Democratic Party. But if the court swings hard to the right, every Democratic presidential candidate in 2024 will be asked what they would do to tame a body in which a third of the justices were nominated and confirmed by a president and senators who represented a minority of Americans. Such proposals could be at issue even while the court had to rule on the outcome of the vote.

Third, America’s divisions into red and blue camps would deepen. The United States is a federal system where states enjoy discretion to write many of their own laws. But unlike the European Union it is also a nation. If state laws became so divergent that nobody in California could own a gun and gay people in Texas could not marry, that would lead to a trampling of the rights of minorities in those states. The only solution would be to move. But an America where almost everyone in one state was Republican and almost everyone in a neighbouring state was Democratic could hardly be expected to come together in any national endeavour. States bound in such an arrangement would hardly be united at all.

The ideal way to avoid this would be for the legislature to rediscover the art of compromise, so that the court could act as the arbiter it was meant to be. Political questions are best solved by politicians, not judges. That possibility looks awfully distant today, but Ireland managed to find a compromise on abortion by creating a citizens’ assembly which issued recommendations to the government. If only America could rediscover the spirit of institutional innovation and participatory democracy, some of the questions that now seem untouchable could be opened.

Until then the court should save itself by acting with restraint. It should also seek to bolster its own legitimacy. Congress is debating an ethics code, prompted in part by the discovery that Clarence Thomas’s wife, a Republican activist, was angling to overturn the election result. Rather than wait, the justices should impose a code on themselves. And, while they are at it, they should announce term limits. Some new members of the court could still be around in 2050. That is asking a lot of them, but unless justices act wisely now, the court will be a different place by then—and America a different country. ■

O F THE BARRAGE of sanctions the West has inflicted on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the most symbolically powerful, if not the most economically consequential, have been those targeting the cronies of Vladimir Putin. Britain’s government trumpets the fact that it has announced measures against more Putin-linked plutocrats than any other country. It is less keen to talk about why that might be. London has long been a destination for dirty money. Corrupt capital flows to Britain from all over the world, but no one doubts that Russian loot is a major contributor to a money-laundering problem that the National Crime Agency puts conservatively at £100bn ($125bn) a year.

Dodgy money has been lured to London by some of the same things as the clean variety, including a long-standing openness to foreign investment and strong property rights. Another attraction, however, is the financial secrecy offered by both Britain and its network of offshore satellites, from Jersey to the Cayman Islands. That has helped make Britain murkier than classic havens such as Panama and Liechtenstein, according to a respected global financial-secrecy index. Political obsequiousness has also played a part. Successive governments looked to woo oligarchs and their billions—for instance, by hawking “investor visas” that gave them residency.

The politicians overplayed the benefits and underestimated the costs of unfurling the welcome mat. In the macroeconomic scheme of things the gains were small and concentrated, mostly filling the pockets of a select group of bankers and lawyers. The costs were more pervasive. London’s growing reputation as a repository for tainted money has undermined its financial centre and tarnished its legal system.

The government has pledged to clean things up. But if it is serious, it will have to go beyond the half-baked measures of the past. In 2016 Britain became the first G 20 country to set up a public register of company owners. But it did not finish the job. The register is thinly policed: of the half-dozen convictions so far for knowingly submitting false data, the most high-profile was of an activist who posed as an ex-minister to expose its flaws. Similarly, government attempts to rein in Britain’s offshore territories have been half-hearted—witness the scandal engulfing the British Virgin Islands, whose leader has been arrested on allegations of drug-smuggling and money-laundering.

Ministers do seem more determined this time. They have scrapped the visas-for-cash scheme; proposed reforms to a libel law that lets oligarchs scare off critics; and sped up an economic-crime bill that, among other things, will force more transparency on foreign owners of British property. What Britain really needs, however, is not more laws but better enforcement.

One priority is the oversight of lawyers, who play a central role in putting together crooked offshore structures and fending off scrutiny of those who engage in financial chicanery. Ethical standards have slipped as more lawyers have been tempted by plutocrats’ fat cheques. This has put cracks in the industry’s “good chap” system of regulation, which relies heavily on self-policing. It is time for the statutory regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, to show some teeth, and punish those falling short. The largest fine it has announced to date was £232,500, little more than a top-tier firm might charge a deep-pocketed Russian client for a week’s work.

A second priority is to make government investigators and prosecutors more effective. Corruption cases are hard; money trails are complex and cross borders. In Britain the task of building such cases is spread across over 100 agencies and police forces. Their combined budget for fighting cross-border corruption is just £40m-50m, around the same as the annual wage bill of the three best-paid players at Chelsea, a football club that Roman Abramovich, an oligarch under sanctions, is looking to sell.

As a result, corruption-fighting agencies suffer from a chronic lack of forensic investigators, and prosecutors lack the budgets to bring more than the occasional case. That needs to change. Cleaning up Britain’s dirty-money problem is not rocket science, but it will cost money. ■

W HEN RUSSIA invaded Ukraine, many eastern European countries responded with hawkish resolve, fearing they could be next. Their governments pushed for the EU to cripple Russia’s economy and dug deep into their own pockets (some deeper than western counterparts) to send Ukraine weapons and aid. Countries in the EU ’s east have taken in most of the 5.6m refugees who have fled the war. But doing the right thing does not come cheap, and the economic fallout of being frontline states is starting to show.

Trade was the first victim. Russia has been a big export market for some economies in the region. Trade with Russia accounted for 6% of GDP in Latvia and Lithuania in 2021 and 1.5% in Poland and Slovakia. In 2021 Russia received roughly a tenth of non- EU exports from Poland and the Baltic states. Most such links are probably severed for good, but they see that as a price worth paying. “It is Poland’s key political interest that the West does not return to doing business with Russia,” said Piotr Arak, head of the Polish Economic Institute, a government think-tank in Warsaw.

Direct trade is only part of the story. Eastern EU states have become integrated into western supply chains. Their economies, especially those of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, are heavily oriented towards exports to Germany. So a hit to German industry, such as a cut-off of Russian gas, would badly hurt its suppliers in the east.

Energy imports are especially thorny. Slovakia and Hungary, which got 96% and 58% of their oil from Russia last year, say any EU oil embargo should be phased in gradually. Other countries are better prepared. The Baltic states ended Russian gas imports in April and now rely on liquefied natural gas ( LNG ) imported via ships. Poland has embargoed Russian coal and, like most countries, rejected Russia’s demand to pay for gas in roubles. In response Gazprom, which supplies 40% of the country’s gas, halted deliveries to Poland (and Bulgaria) last week. But Poland, too, has an alternative gas-import plan through its own LNG terminal and new pipelines to the gas grids of Norway and Lithuania.

Shunning Russian energy means higher prices. That will be especially painful in Europe’s poorer east. Inflation was already higher in eastern Europe before the war; in April it reached double digits in many countries. In some, consumer energy bills are fixed by regulation, delaying the pain. In Slovakia, for instance, prices will only be updated in January. But “the prospect of a 100% increase in household gas prices has not sunk in yet,” says Michal Horvath, the central bank’s chief economist.

In Poland inflation hit 12.3% in April, a headache for the ruling party, which faces elections next year. Government largesse is partly at fault for cost-of-living increases, and Mr Arak thinks voters will blame it: “In communist times the government would introduce higher prices, often sparking mass protests. For the majority of Poles it remains clear that the state is responsible for maintaining price levels.” To soften the blow, the government has cut value-added tax on food, gas, fuel and fertiliser. It dubs an upcoming economic package an “anti-Putin shield”.

Central banks will have to act, too, notably by raising interest rates. But that will have unpleasant consequences. In Poland, where about 90% of loans to households and businesses have variable rates, mortgage-holders are heavily exposed. Banks have already tightened credit standards considerably. Along with inflation, rocketing house prices and sagging business confidence, that could spell a “perfect storm”, says Adam Czerniak, head of research at Polityka Insight, a think-tank in Warsaw. Higher interest rates and weakening economies mean that rising government debt will become more expensive to service, especially in countries such as Hungary where debt is already high.

Spending on refugees will further spur inflation. Take housing. In Warsaw rents have jumped by more than 30% since the end of February. Strains on public services are similar. Refugees have swelled Poland’s population by almost 8% since the war in Ukraine started in late February. That puts pressure on health care and education, which were already in poor shape. This will be partially offset, however, by the newcomers joining the local labour forces. In Slovakia and Hungary, the dedication of NGO s and private citizens has compensated for a lack of public services for refugees. The war’s economic costs to eastern Europe look formidable. But that seems not to have softened countries’ resolve. The economic hit is seen as manageable. Poland’s economy, which remains strong, had not seen a recession in almost three decades until the covid-19 pandemic, notes Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University. The Baltic countries suffered much worse during the financial crisis, adds Morten Hansen of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. Citizens absorbed that suffering because it was needed to join the euro, part of the countries’ strategic drive to integrate into the West. As in the current crisis, they were willing to undergo economic pain to safeguard their independence.

I N 1956, AS part of its experiment with embracing socialism, India created the Life Insurance Company of India ( LIC ) by nationalising and lumping together 245 firms. The experiment took a while to conclude. In 2000 India allowed private firms to sell life insurance again. Two decades later it is selling a 3.5% sliver of LIC on the public market, a first step in what is intended to be a full privatisation. Orders will be taken from investors between May 4th and May 9th. Trading is due to commence on May 17th.

The scale of LIC is such that the sale of even this trivial stake will bring in $2.7bn, making it the fifth-largest public offering of the year globally and the largest in India’s history. One of the reasons stated by the company for such a small percentage being sold is that selling more might crowd out investment in other private and public firms in the country’s capital-constrained market. Out of similar concerns, market regulators are already considering waiving a provision that currently requires the dominant shareholder of a listed firm to reduce its ownership stake below 75% within five years.

Once listed, LIC will have a market valuation of around $80bn, making it the fifth-most-valuable life insurer in the world. Yet more striking is how thoroughly LIC dominates the Indian market. Its utter supremacy has no equivalent in any other major country: LIC has a staggering 286m policies in force and collects 64% of all of India’s written premiums (the share of the largest insurer in Britain is 23%; in China it is 21%). The firm has $507bn in assets under management, triple the amount of its 23 private competitors combined.

Although such dominance gives the firm and its products unmatched scale—a big advantage in an industry that runs on trust—the 659-page listing prospectus makes it clear that there are cracks in LIC ’s armour. Premiums have been growing by 9% annually over the past five years, a good performance but one that pales in comparison to its Indian competitors, many of which have been growing at twice that rate.

And government ties may come with costs. Investors have long suspected that LIC is often required to invest at least some of its river of premiums in the interests of the state rather than in the pursuit of profits, quietly seeding problems. Included in the prospectus’s 47 pages of risk factors are LIC ’s large investment in IL & FS , a government-supported infrastructure-investment fund that went spectacularly bust in 2018, and its majority stake in another formerly government-controlled entity, IDBI Bank, which it bought as its contribution to a 2019 bail-out. Also featured are equity investments purchased over the years for 8.8bn rupees ($115m), currently valued at 2bn, and debt investments of 113bn rupees, 54bn of which are classified as non-performing assets.

A public listing, and the transparency that must accompany it, may alter this approach. But concerns about hidden problems and continued interference by the government are worrying investors, which helps to explain why the offering is being priced so low. Until recently there had been expectations that LIC would be valued at three times its “Indian Embedded Value”, an approach based on the present value of future profits derived from expected premiums, like most other Indian private insurance firms. Instead LIC shares are likely to be sold at only 1.1 times, suggesting buyers have serious reservations.

Still, in time, the most salient detail about the listing may have nothing to do with price and size and everything to do with the fact that it happened at all. When the newly reelected administration of Narendra Modi first proposed a public sale of a stake in LIC , in early 2020, it was derided as an empty political promise. Highly publicised efforts to flog other state-controlled assets, most notably Air India, had flopped multiple times. In October of that year, however, Air India was finally sold—to Tata Group, from which it had been seized in 1953. LIC ’s return to the markets after almost as long a gap is not without snags. But it suggests a cycle may have genuinely, if not entirely, come to an end. ■

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O N MAY 3RD investors in Chinese stocks woke up to the news that Jack Ma, the co-founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, had been arrested on national-security charges. Or so many of them thought. State media were reporting that a tech worker with the surname Ma had been detained in the city of Hangzhou. The description seemed to fit that of the billionaire tech magnate, whose companies are based in Hangzhou and have been subject to a regulatory onslaught over the past year. The speculation, it rapidly turned out, was wrong (Ma is a common family name in China). But not before Alibaba shares dipped 9%, temporarily wiping out more than $25bn in the firm’s market value.

The incident shows how fragile market sentiment has become in China. Beijing’s unpredictable, often-shocking policy swerves in recent years have made it all the more conceivable that the country’s most prominent entrepreneur could suddenly be accused of attempting to “split the country and subvert the state”. President Xi Jinping’s increasingly ideological campaign to rid China of the Omicron variant of covid-19 is threatening to throttle economic growth this year. His unwavering support for Russia, even as Vladimir Putin commits war crimes in Ukraine, has further fuelled the perception that the country’s leaders, once known for their pragmatism, are faltering.

The shift has been punctuated by gloomy comments from prominent experts who until very recently remained upbeat on China. Stephen Roach, the former Asia chairman of Morgan Stanley, a bank, has long defended Chinese policy. But in a recent article in Project Syndicate, an online publication, he said “the China cushion”, the economic might that helped power the world through the global financial crisis in 2008, had “deflated”. Shan Weijian, the chief executive of PAG , a Hong Kong-based private-equity firm, recently told investors the Chinese economy “at this moment is in the worst shape in the past 30 years”, the Financial Times reported.

Some use harsher language—and are getting punished for it. Joerg Wuttke, the head of the European chamber of commerce in China, last week suggested in an interview with a Swiss website that China’s zero-covid strategy has put many decision-makers in “self-destruction mode”. Hong Hao, an outspoken analyst at Bank of Communications, a state lender, recently had a Chinese social media account frozen after he published a negative outlook on the economy. He has now left the bank.

Much of the darkening sentiment has been focused on Mr Xi’s covid strategy. Closing down Shanghai, China’s business and financial hub, seemed unimaginable only a few months ago. But the city of 25m has undergone a strict lockdown since April 1st. Flare-ups of covid in Beijing and other cities have prompted targeted lockdowns. A regime of testing for the virus is quickly becoming part of everyday life.

The costs of controlling the spread of Omicron are becoming apparent. Factory activity has suffered dearly and strains on shipping and logistics are rippling through global supply chains. The central government has mandated that it must hit its GDP growth target of 5.5% but many analysts have downgraded their outlook for economic activity in the country this year. Some economists believe real growth in China in 2022 will only reach 2% (even if official statistics say otherwise).

“D ESPITE BEING a neutral country, Austria positioned itself very clearly,” says Karl Nehammer, Austria’s chancellor. Sitting in his offices at Vienna’s baroque Ballhausplatz, he says that Austria’s immediate backing of EU sanctions against Russia surprised many. Austria gave €60m ($64m) to NGO s to help Ukraine and donated helmets, protective vests and fuel. The small country has taken in 66,000 Ukrainian refugees. Mr Nehammer sees his visit to Vladimir Putin on April 11th to appeal for a ceasefire as part of that support.

Others thought the visit showed ambivalence. Indeed, Mr Nehammer’s backing of Ukraine was not assured. Austria, which became neutral during the cold war at Soviet insistence, has been notably friendly to the Kremlin in recent decades. Eastern Europeans refer to it as Russia’s Trojan horse in western Europe. After Mr Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, Austria was the first Western country to welcome him for a visit. The far-right Austrian Freedom Party ( FPö ) frequently criticised the EU ’s sanctions against Russia and praised the country as a bastion of cultural conservatism.

The Austro-Russian love affair peaked during the first government of Sebastian Kurz, a coalition between his öVP and the FPö from 2017 to 2019. Karin Kneissl, then Mr Kurz’s foreign minister, had Mr Putin to her wedding; images of her curtsying to him after they danced went viral. In 2018 Mr Putin and Mr Kurz met four times.

Mr Kurz’s government fell in 2019, after a secretly filmed video showed Heinz-Christian Strache, then vice chancellor and leader of the FPö, seeming to accept an offer of financing from a woman pretending to be the niece of a Russian oligarch. (The meeting took place at a louche drinking party in Ibiza; the woman offered to invest €250m in Austria and buy newspapers to support the FPö.) Mr Kurz returned to power in 2020 with a coalition government that included the Greens and a foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, who is a committed Atlanticist. The flirtation with Mr Putin started to cool. “Austria vastly overestimated the geopolitical role it could play as a bridge-builder between Russia and the West,” says Gerhard Mangott of Innsbruck University.

Still, economic relations are substantial. Austria gets 80% of its natural gas from Russia. One-quarter of all gas deliveries from Russia to the EU flow through a hub in Baumgarten, in lower Austria. Russia is the country’s number-two foreign investor after Germany, with investments of €21.4bn in 2020. Raiffeisenbank International, Austria’s second-biggest bank, made 35% of its profits in 2021 in Russia, where it employs 9,300 workers.

Cultural ties are close, too. Russians play key roles in Austrian cultural institutions. Ekaterina Degot runs Steirischer Herbst, a contemporary-art festival in Styria; Anna Netrebko, an opera singer, received Austrian citizenship in 2006. She is still scheduled to sing at Vienna’s state opera, whereas other houses, such as New York’s Metropolitan, cancelled her performances. Austrian interest in Russian high and popular culture is tremendous. “We are fascinated by a culture that seems so familiar and still remains so foreign,” says Simon Mraz, a diplomat who for 12 years ran Austria’s cultural centre in Moscow.

Mr Nehammer’s visit to Moscow left him deeply pessimistic. Mr Putin, he says, has completely adopted the logic of war. The conflict will permanently alter relations with Russia. Austria has embargoed Russian oil and is working to diversify its gas supplies. Raiffeisenbank is considering the possibility of pulling out of Russia. Strabag, Austria’s biggest construction company, forced Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who owns 28% of its shares, to leave its board. But opera and ballet fans hope the artistic relationship will survive—or be revived, after the war. ■

T HE FIRST rule of investment, according to Warren Buffett, is not to lose money. The second rule is not to forget the first. That is true for no one more than bond-fund managers, whose job is to shelter their clients’ money from volatility while eking out what returns they can. The bloodbath in bond markets so far this year—America’s have had their worst quarter since 2008, and Europe’s their biggest-ever peak-to-trough plunge—ought to be the ultimate nightmare for such timorous investors. Instead many are sighing in relief.

After a brutal but brief crash when the world shut down in March 2020, and until the end of last year, rule number one was pretty easy to follow. Central banks were pumping $11trn of new funds into the markets via quantitative easing and keeping interest rates at rock bottom. Governments offered unprecedented fiscal support for businesses to stop them going bust.

The corollary was that the best thing for bond investors to do was to close their eyes and lend. Quibbling about trivia like the state of the borrower’s balance-sheet or capital discipline seemed like a quaint tradition. In general, high-risk, high-yield debt performed best. Yet the market’s foremost trait was “low dispersion”: a tendency for returns across sectors, issuers and credit-rating bands to be unusually similar.

There is plenty of money to be made in such a market, which a credit strategist at a Wall Street bank describes as “a rising tide lifting all boats”. But it is awkward for active fund managers, whose craft is to use financial nous to select particular bonds hoping they will beat the broader market. Measured by monthly returns between January and October 2021, for instance, around 95% of America’s corporate bonds performed better than Treasuries, with the lion’s share clustered together. That made it hard for prudent bondpickers to stand out.

Yet this state of affairs has started to reverse—and dispersion is back with a vengeance, the strategist says. The successful roll-out of covid-19 vaccinations last year had already “squeezed the excess juice” out of those few sectors, like travel and leisure, whose debt was not already at a high valuation, reducing its potential to appreciate further. Now headwinds, from inflation and snarled-up supply chains to recession risk and the withdrawal of easy money, are blowing against borrowers, clouding the outlook further.

These hindrances are so broad that few companies are able to avoid them. But firms differ widely in their ability to cope. Take inflation. Businesses with rock-solid brands and unassailable market shares, like Coca-Cola or Nestlé, have had little trouble increasing their prices to mitigate rising costs. Other companies—Netflix, for example—have suffered.

Such variation in pricing power spreads well beyond consumer-facing sectors: commodity producers in general are much better positioned to face down ballooning energy and metals prices than commodity purchasers. Those commodity producers that are less exposed to Chinese lockdowns—energy firms as opposed to miners, for instance—are better placed still. At the other end lie industries such as carmaking, vulnerable to both supply-chain snags and recession-induced damage to consumer sentiment.

This adds up to a minefield for investors, whatever their asset class. For bondpickers, divergence will be further fuelled by a withdrawal of liquidity from the market. On June 1st the Federal Reserve will begin winding down its $5.8trn portfolio of Treasuries; by September, it intends to be shrinking it by $60bn a month. That amounts to the disappearance of an annual buyer of 3% of publicly held Treasuries, whose yields are thus likely to rise. As a result corporate borrowers will have to work harder to convince investors to buy their debt rather than seek the safety of government paper. Such a buyers’ market means more scrutiny of debt issuers, and more variance in the yields they have to offer.

Active bond investors—or, at least, those who are any good—will benefit from this renewed emphasis on fundamentals. But they will not be the only ones. Financial markets derive their value to society from their ability to allocate capital to those best placed to make a return on it. A rising tide may lift all boats, but by diluting the incentive to discriminate between borrowers it reduces the efficiency of that allocation. A credit market that makes more of a distinction between winners and losers is one step towards restoring it.

Read more from Buttonwood, our columnist on financial markets:

Slow pain or fast pain? The implications of low investment yields (Apr 30th)

A requiem for negative government-bond yields (Apr 23rd)

The complicated politics of crypto and web3 (Apr 16th)

B IG NEWS from America’s Supreme Court usually arrives in late June, when the most contentious rulings of the year are released. But on May 2nd a legal bombshell was delivered two months early, and in unprecedented fashion. Politico, a news website, published a leaked draft of an opinion overruling Roe v Wade, the precedent that has enshrined a constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years. The draft, which the chief justice, John Roberts, later confirmed was genuine, appeared to have the support of five of the nine justices, enough to make it the law of the land. If that majority holds when the ruling is officially released, states would be free to ban abortion altogether. Thirteen have already done so, pending just such a ruling.

It is not clear who leaked the draft or why. Justices can change their votes up until the moment a ruling is made public, so Roe is not necessarily doomed. What is certain is that a reversal of Roe would invite howling from the left and exultation from the right. Although many jurists consider Roe’s reasoning flawed, voiding it would still be a shocking step, in that it would run counter to public opinion and lead to the prohibition in many states of a procedure that almost a quarter of American women seek at some point in their lives—all for no more pressing reason than because the composition of the court has changed.

And abortion is by no means the only controversial topic the justices have taken up. They are also about to release decisions on gun rights, the federal government’s regulatory powers and the separation of church and state. Next year affirmative action will be under review. If they shift American law to the right in all these areas, growing numbers of Democrats are bound to denounce them as unelected, unrepresentative and illegitimate cat’s paws of the right. The court risks being seen as just another manifestation of America’s extreme partisanship, and treated accordingly. Should its authority be undermined in this way, it is not much of a stretch to imagine a Democratic governor, say, refusing to enforce an order of the court—or a Democratic candidate refusing to accept its judgment in an election dispute.

Nine berobed judges striking down laws approved by elected politicians poses a “countermajoritarian difficulty”, wrote Alexander Bickel, a legal theorist, in 1971, after the court under Chief Justice Earl Warren had expanded judicial power in the 1950s and 1960s. But Robert Dahl, a political scientist, believed any gulf between popular opinion and the positions of the Supreme Court was bound to be bridged relatively quickly. “The policy views dominant on the court,” Dahl wrote in 1957, “are never for long out of line with the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities of the United States” as presidents “can expect to appoint about two new justices during one term of office”. This might not be enough to rebalance a listing court in four years, but presidents are “almost certain to succeed in two terms”.

Terms of entrenchment

Recent decades suggest this confidence was misplaced. For 25 years the pace of appointments was half of what Mr Dahl thought normal. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all averaged only one per term. When Antonin Scalia, a conservative, died in 2016, it briefly looked as though Mr Obama would be able to move the court to the left. But within hours of Scalia’s death, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, placed a blockade on the seat and refused to allow a vote on Merrick Garland, Mr Obama’s pick. Donald Trump went on to fill the seat when he became president almost a year later, and then to appoint two more justices, making him the first president since Ronald Reagan to name three in one term.

Mr Trump’s third pick upended a 50-year balancing act. Since the 1970s a series of swing justices had kept the Supreme Court from tilting too far from the political centre. Although all of them had been appointed by Republican presidents, each one acted as a pivot, with four liberal justices to the left and four conservatives to the right. In 2020, however, with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her swift replacement by Amy Coney Barrett, the court’s equilibrium vanished.

There are now six solidly conservative justices, all appointed by Republican presidents, and only three liberals, all seated by Democrats. Chief Justice Roberts, the last median jurist of the five-decade balancing act, can no longer curb the conservative majority. The threatened reversal of Roe, in other words, may portend a string of highly charged, polarising rulings.

There is no quick way for Democrats to remedy this, since the constitution allows justices to serve “during good behaviour”, meaning as long as they like, provided they are not impeached. Nearly half die in office. The oldest of the justices appointed by Mr Trump is just 57; all three could easily remain in robes for another 30 years.

But that tight grip may come at the cost of the Supreme Court’s reputation. The Roberts court has moved the law steadily to the right on race, voting rights, campaign finance, religious liberty, labour unions and the right to bear arms. When he dissented from a ruling in 2007 that halted efforts to ensure public schools were racially mixed, Justice Stephen Breyer lamented the ground shifting beneath his feet: “It’s not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.”

When Justice Breyer delivered those words, the Supreme Court enjoyed the approval of 60% of Americans. Fifteen years on, that figure has fallen to about 40%. The explosive cases currently before the court are likely to drag it down further. The justices are weighing a challenge to laws in New York that make it difficult to carry guns outside the home. A case regarding the regulation of power plants under the Clean Air Act gives them an opportunity to hamstring federal agencies. And two cases could begin to demolish the wall between church and state: a public-school football coach’s plea to lead student athletes in prayer and a challenge from parents in Maine who say their state’s tuition-assistance programme must include money for religious schooling.

The most contentious of all is Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the case that could see Roe v Wade overturned. The government of the state of Mississippi had at first asked the justices to uphold a ban on abortions more than 15 weeks into a pregnancy, even though prior rulings had stated that abortion should be legal at least until the fetus is able to survive outside the womb (about 24 weeks). But once Justice Barrett joined the court, the state was emboldened to sharpen its request. The constitution does not protect a right to abortion at all, Mississippi’s lawyers told the justices: Roe was “egregiously wrong” and should be overruled.

That is not what most Americans think. By roughly 2-to-1, they oppose letting states ban abortion outright, according to pollsters. Last year fully 80% told Gallup, a polling firm, that abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances; only 19% wanted it to be completely banned. These views have changed little since the 1970s.

A gavelling storm

Overturning Roe would also involve departing from a well-trodden precedent—something the court does relatively seldom. In its hearings on Dobbs, Justice Sonia Sotomayor predicted that scrapping Roe would bring it into disrepute. “Will this institution”, she asked, “survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?”

In April Justice Elena Kagan posed similar questions in a case concerning the requirement that police inform those they arrest of their rights. She noted that years ago Chief Justice William Rehnquist, while no fan of the ruling that gave rise to the requirement, nonetheless saw it as deeply ingrained in the justice system and “central to people’s understanding of the law”. For him, she continued, if the court “overturned it or undermined it or denigrated it”, the result would be “a kind of unsettling effect not only on people’s understanding of the criminal justice system” but of the “court itself” and its “legitimacy”. Chief Justice Roberts is an institutionalist who tends to honour stare decisis, the idea that the court should normally “let stand the decision” made in previous rulings. In 2020 he joined the court’s liberal wing in striking down onerous regulations on abortion clinics. Although he disagreed with the precedent the case was based on, he wrote, without “special circumstances”, stare decisis requires the justices to abide by their precedents. Justice Clarence Thomas, by contrast, has argued that, when a previous ruling is “demonstrably erroneous”, the court “should correct the error”. The leaked opinion pooh-poohs factors that might typically weigh in a precedent’s favour, including its age, how practical a standard it sets and the extent to which Americans have come to rely on it. Reversing Roe would also amplify charges of partisanship, which the justices dislike, whatever their devotion to precedent. Last year, at a centre named for Mr McConnell, Justice Barrett insisted that she and her fellow justices were not “a bunch of partisan hacks”. In April, at the Reagan Library, she argued that people would not see justices as politicians in robes if they would only “read the opinions”. Yet the court is taking more decisions without laying out its reasoning, another habit that has elicited complaints from the left. Two days after Justice Barrett’s appearance, for instance, it revived a Trump-administration rule that had limited states’ power to protect rivers from pollution under the Clean Water Act, in a 5-4 decision released without any written opinion. What is more, Louisiana v American Rivers had arrived at the court on its emergency or “shadow” docket—a shortcut supposedly reserved for urgent matters.

The shadow docket has become a back door through which growing numbers of important decisions are slipped with limited airing and little or no explanation. Its expansion reflects in part the Trump administration’s filing of 41 emergency applications in four years, compared with a total of just eight during the previous four presidential terms. But the justices have also been more indulgent of petitions of dubious urgency, if inconsistently so. Since their current annual session began in October, the justices have taken up 13 emergency cases on subjects as fraught as electoral redistricting and vaccine mandates.

Since Justice Barrett joined the bench, Chief Justice Roberts has publicly joined the court’s three liberals in dissent seven times in shadow-docket orders. But American Rivers was notable: it marked the first time he signed one of the liberal justices’ dissenting opinions and joined in criticism of the court’s tendency to step into legal disputes prematurely. In her dissent, Justice Kagan noted that the applicants had not shown “exceptional need for immediate relief”. To grant their wish anyway “renders the court’s emergency docket not for emergencies at all”.

In September a shadow-docket request to block a law in Texas that banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy met a different fate. Over dissenting votes from the three liberal justices and the chief, the conservative majority allowed the ban to take effect, all but erasing access to abortion for Texas’s 7m women despite the precedent set by Roe. Justice Kagan argued the move was “unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend”. Steve Vladeck of the University of Texas argues that by accepting some emergency applications and refusing others with little rhyme or reason, the justices “open themselves up to charges that they are engaged in political, rather than judicial, behaviour”.

The court’s decision to let the Texan law stand also raised eyebrows because it was designed expressly to thwart Roe, and thus the court’s own authority. The law barred Texan officials from enforcing the ban on abortions, thus shielding them from legal challenges. But it empowered private individuals to sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. Those found guilty of doing so are to be fined $10,000, which would be passed as a bounty to the plaintiff. The court saw nothing wrong with this mechanism, even though it could be used to undermine all manner of its rulings.

Deal with it

This is not the first time the Supreme Court has been accused of ideological bias. The biggest crisis came during the 1930s, when policy after policy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal hit a judicial roadblock. In 1937 the exasperated president pledged to “take action to save the constitution from the court and the court from itself”. He announced a plan to add six seats to the court to create a new, more pliable majority. But he did not go through with it, after one of the justices changed his mind and upheld a contested law on minimum wages.

The “switch in time that saved nine” ended the feud with the president and Congress and heralded greater openness to Roosevelt’s economic reforms, which he cemented with seven appointments to the court between 1937 and 1943. That, in turn, paved the way for the most liberal period in the court’s history, in the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted Republican complaints of “judicial activism” and calls for the impeachment of the chief justice.

Forty years later came another crisis, when the court voted along partisan lines to end vote-counting in Florida and install George W. Bush as president. But Al Gore accepted the result with paeans to the rule of law and peaceful transitions of power. The court’s standing in opinion polls fell sharply, but recovered within about a year.

The court’s reputation does not seem so resilient these days. Three recent studies by two political scientists, Logan Strother and Shana Gadarian, suggest that decisions people do not like “substantially, significantly and durably affect [their] assessment of the court’s nature and its legitimacy”. When liberals were asked about conservative rulings in prominent cases, and vice versa, they tended to view disagreeable decisions as “political”. The more political the court seemed to them, in turn, the less legitimate they considered it.

Yet for all the misgivings about the court on the left, few Democratic politicians have any appetite to do anything about it. President Joe Biden appointed a commission last year to study reforms to the court. But its report is gathering dust. Congress seems uninterested in such ideas as limiting the court’s jurisdiction or trimming justices’ life terms, much less expanding the number of seats on the court.

One measure with better prospects is an ethics bill. Unlike their colleagues in lower courts, Supreme Court justices are not subject to any formal code of conduct. It had simply been assumed that the justices’ professionalism was unquestionable. Yet many Democrats have found reason to question Justice Thomas for failing to step back from cases regarding the efforts by Mr Trump to overturn the results of the election of 2020, which culminated in a rally-turned-riot that overran the Capitol on January 6th 2021. Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, a conservative activist, had not only attended the rally but had also implored Mark Meadows, Mr Trump’s chief of staff, to keep looking for ways to undo Mr Trump’s defeat. In February Justice Thomas was the only member of the court to support Mr Trump’s bid to prevent a committee investigating the events of January 6th from obtaining presidential records.

The Supreme Court lacks an army; it relies on others to give life to its decisions. So far, whenever the court’s legitimacy has been questioned, its authority has held. Yet the justices would surely like their judgments to inspire more than acquiescence. And it does not seem implausible that grudging acceptance might at some point devolve into defiance.

What, for instance, if a liberal state such as California or Massachusetts followed Texas’s example and enacted a law intended to get around the Supreme Court’s permissive view of gun rights? If the conservative justices were inconsistent and voided such a law, an outraged Democratic governor might ignore them, spurring a constitutional crisis. Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, for one, believes the prospect of government officials “thumbing their noses at the court’s formal judgments” is not “an altogether far-fetched scenario”.

An even more worrisome possibility is another contested presidential election. A near-majority of the court has shown interest in the idea that state legislators are the ultimate arbiters of election results in their states. In 2020 Mr Trump urged officials in states that had voted for Mr Biden but had legislatures controlled by Republicans to find fault with the count in some way. Although none did so, and the courts knocked back the many flimsy lawsuits filed on Mr Trump’s behalf, four justices have given the impression that they would not necessarily overrule a legislature that took it on itself to decide an election.

Justice Robert Jackson saw the court’s powers as bound up in the public’s perception of its legitimacy. “We are not final because we are infallible,” he said; “we are infallible only because we are final.” If politicians and voters begin to reject the Supreme Court’s authority as the final arbiter of the law, chaos beckons. ■

F ORTO SEEMS an unlikely tech darling. It does not make gadgets, build the metaverse, forge cryptocurrencies or launch rockets. The six-year-old startup from Berlin, whose main business is arranging the transport of cargo from one place to an other, has nevertheless managed to raise nearly $600m from venture capitalists. Its backers reckon the firm can shake up the archaic freight-forwarding industry. It has tripled its business in each of the past four years, boasts Michael Wax, its boss, and is now one of the top ten forwarders in the busy trade lane between China and Germany. In March it announced $250m in new funding at a valuation of $2.1bn.

Forto is not the only freight tech startup attracting investors’ attention. With the world’s supply chains gummed up by bottlenecks, lockdowns and other disruptions, venture-capital ( VC ) firms are pouring billions into companies offering ways to make freight transport more efficient. In 2021 supply-chain-technology firms raised more than $62bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider, more than twice the figure in pre-pandemic 2019 (see chart). Of that, nearly $9bn went to freight-tech startups. PitchBook counts more than a dozen private freight-tech “unicorns”, valued at more than $1bn. Viki Keckarovska of Transport Intelligence, a firm of consultants, expects more funding rounds this year.

Part of the appeal lies in the industry’s size and potential for disruption. The freight-forwarding business alone is worth $475bn in annual revenues, reckons Armstrong & Associates, a supply-chain research and consulting firm. The broader “third-party logistics” market, which includes transport management and warehousing, generates sales of $1.4trn. At the same time, freight remains technologically backward, especially the cross-border sort. “This industry is completely offline,” marvels Zvi Schreiber, boss of Freightos, a digital-freight marketplace. “You would expect that shipping a container would be just as digital as booking a flight,” he says, “but it is not at all.” Just getting a quote can be a headache. “For 90% of the freight-forwarders today it still takes one or two days to come back with a price,” says Mr Wax. This is starting to change thanks in part to whizzy new software platforms designed to streamline the process of shipping freight overseas. Flexport, a digital freight-forwarder based in San Francisco, automates many of the supply-chain processes that were traditionally done manually, including getting quotes, filling out documents and co-ordinating with shippers and carriers along the supply chain. The nine-year-old startup, which earned $3.2bn in revenues in 2021, was recently valued at more than $8bn. Project44, a supply-chain visibility platform from Chicago, lets retailers and brands monitor milestones in their cargo’s journey, such as when it is loaded onto a ship, leaves the port or arrives at its final destination—all in real time. They can also make adjustments or reroute shipments if needed. One common feature of such platforms is the ability to glean insights from data. Big shippers and logistics providers typically manage their shipments in software known as a transport-management system ( TMS ), which tracks shipments as they make their way along logistics networks, from the factory to the port and finally to the customer. Such systems, which have been around since the late 1980s, are useful databases of information, says Evan Armstrong, president of Armstrong & Associates. But they are not clever. “The first step was getting everything onto a TMS . Now the next step is taking those TMS s and making them intelligent.” Although recent supply-chain snarl-ups have played a part in boosting demand for logistics software, they are not the main force behind the boom. That, industry-watchers agree, would be Amazon. The e-emporium “is the absolute number-one catalyst for supply-chain transformation, no question”, says Julian Counihan of Schematic Ventures, a VC firm. Whereas the supply chain has historically been seen as a cost centre, Amazon has turned it into a money-maker. With the rise of next-day and same-day delivery, consumers’ expectations have changed dramatically. As shipping times plummet, logistics requires “way, way more supply-chain technology”, says Mr Counihan.

Some scepticism is in order. Many of the startups look little different from the incumbents they are seeking to disrupt. Kuehne + Nagel, a big Swiss freight-forwarder, has invested heavily in digitisation even if it doesn’t “sing and dance that they are a ‘digital’ freight forwarder”, as Mr Schreiber of Freightos freely admits. C.H. Robinson, a big American logistics firm, is “really a digital freight broker”, says Mr Armstrong. And although some of the big incumbents rely on antiquated technology, he adds, they have much more scale than any of the newcomers. That lets them secure lower prices from ocean liners, air freighters and other carriers.

Still, as Ms Keckarovska points out, the upstarts have a shot. The freight-forwarding market remains highly fragmented, so they need not take on a huge incumbent. DHL and Kuehne + Nagel, the two biggest brokers, have a combined global market share of just 6%. And despite their digital aspirations, the incumbents’ tech nous leaves plenty of room for improvement. Of the 20 biggest established freight-forwarders, 15 apparently use the same off-the-shelf TMS to manage their shipments. ■

F ROM THE point of view of the 1950s, America’s economic progress over the 70 years that followed has been a huge disappointment. Futurists foresaw a world of super-pills, space farms and cities encased in glass. Science and technology would engineer unending riches and everything consumers could ever want. Yet the speed of gains achieved during the Space Age, it turned out, soon ebbed: between 2000 and 2019 America’s real income per head grew by 1.2% a year on average, down from 2% between 1980 and 1999 and 2.5% in the 1950s. And instead of flying cars, Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, once jibed, “we got 140 characters”.

A new paper suggests such disappointment is not warranted—because it stems from an equally huge misunderstanding of how economic progress happens. Thomas Philippon, a professor of finance at New York University, argues the post-war experience was unusual. Looking at American data going back to 1890 and British data from 1600 to 1914 he finds that, when technological progress is properly understood, the world has been on broadly the same path for centuries. In the grand scheme of things, in other words, there has been no slowdown at all.

Most economists’ starting point for thinking about growth is Robert Solow’s 1956 paper, “A contribution to the theory of growth”. Mr Solow’s model for predicting a country’s long-term wealth relies on what he dubs the “production function”. It is a mathematical black box: on one side labour and capital go in; out the other come all the consumer goods and services that contribute to people’s standard of living. One way of growing is obvious: shove more labour and capital into the box. But that cannot deliver improvements for ever. Adding more labour means the output is divided between more workers. And capital wears out, so more investment is needed over time just to stay put.

Instead long-term growth can only come from improving the black box—the way in which labour and capital are combined. The fancy name economists give to this is total factor productivity ( TFP ), though they sometimes refer to it with more intuitive labels, such as technology or knowledge. You might think of it as a recipe. On one side lie labour and capital, the ingredients. On the other is the finished dish: economic output. TFP is an attempt to measure how effective the recipe is at combining the ingredients, which in turn depends on factors including the level of education on offer to the population, the quality of business management and the depth of scientific know-how.

Mr Solow assumed that the annual contribution of TFP to GDP would grow exponentially. This may have been for purely mathematical reasons: he wanted his model economy to grow at a fixed rate, of say 2% a year, which required ever larger gains as GDP got bigger to keep the pace of growth constant. Later economists, including Paul Romer (like Mr Solow, a Nobel prizewinner), have tried to work out the chemistry underpinning TFP ’s presumed exponential growth. Their theories usually contend that some investment goes not into capital, but into research and development. And because knowledge can be freely copied, they observe, this investment has an increasing marginal product, meaning that each prior bit of research makes the next bit of research more effective. Knowledge thus cascades out, creating more knowledge as it does, akin to how a virus spreads in the early stage of an epidemic.

The problem, according to Mr Philippon, is that TFP does not actually grow exponentially. Using the most popular data sources for long-term growth, he compares predictions from two different models to observed trends in TFP . A linear pattern—which he calls “additive growth”—consistently fits better with how progress has actually unfolded. Contrary to existing theories, that suggests previous research does not make the next idea any easier to find. It also explains why, as Mr Philippon puts it, some economists keep predicting some future wave of innovation that just never comes.

This is not a counsel of despair. While the rate of growth in percentage terms may be slowing, Mr Philippon’s model predicts that the size of any increment is roughly constant. Societies do get richer—but just not as fast as generally thought.

Encouragingly, Mr Philippon also finds evidence of moments when the rate of TFP growth does temporarily accelerate and the annual increment gets higher. His paper plots one such moment in Britain between 1650 and 1700, and another around 1830, consistent with when historians date the first and second Industrial Revolutions. He also finds one in America around 1930, which he credits to the adoption of electrification. Such moments only seem to take place about every century or so. But they do help to explain Mr Solow’s mistake: it would have been easy for him, as he was living through one of these periods of acceleration, to fall for the illusion of exponential progress.

The ways of growth are inscrutable

Mr Philippon’s statistical analysis does not speak to TFP ’s deeper conceptual problems. One is that capital is hard to value. There is usually a difference between its historical cost, suitably depreciated, and the discounted value of the profits it will eventually produce. Unlike labour, which can be quantified in hours, there is no non-monetary unit with which to value oil rigs and pharmaceutical patents alike. After Mr Solow’s 1956 paper came out, a group of economists at the University of Cambridge showed that its method for valuing capital was circular, a point Mr Solow’s followers conceded. But the model is still widely used regardless.

Similar problems bedevil TFP itself. Statistical techniques that try to measure the concept of “knowledge” typically bundle all the variation in growth that cannot be explained by changes in the workforce or investment into the black box. Hence TFP ’s other, less flattering name—the “Solow residual”. Rather than a reliable metric of society’s level of knowledge, TFP so far seems to remain, in the words of a Solow critic, a “measure of our ignorance”. ■

Read more from Free Exchange, our column on economics:

How would an energy embargo affect Germany’s economy? (Apr 30th)

Does high inflation matter? (Apr 23rd)

What bigger military budgets mean for the economy (Apr 16th)

T HIS WAS not how Rebecca Ego planned to use her law degree. In 2020 she was accepted into a master’s programme in America. It would cost $20,000 after scholarships, a sum she had in the bank. In Lebanon, though, getting money out of the bank is almost impossible: lenders have imposed harsh, arbitrary capital controls amid a financial crisis. Ms Ego was told she could not withdraw her funds.

Like hundreds of Lebanese, she sued her bank for breach of contract. The case has languished for two years. One of her banks subsequently shut her account, cashing out her savings in a cheque no other bank will accept. “There’s no legal basis for any of this,” she says. “But there’s no judge who will say that.”

For almost three years, Lebanon’s banks have been zombies. The crisis dates to 1997, when the central bank, the Banque du Liban, pegged the pound at 1,500 to the dollar. It sustained the peg by borrowing dollars from commercial banks at double-digit interest rates, a state-run Ponzi scheme that unravelled in 2019.

Lebanon defaulted the following year. Losses in the financial sector are estimated at $68bn (130% of pre-crisis GDP ). Earlier this year the pound sank as low as 34,000 on the parallel market, a 96% depreciation.

On April 7th the IMF reached a deal with Lebanon, which could include a $3bn loan. Before the fund’s board votes on the package, though, it wants the Lebanese government to take steps to restructure the financial sector, such as by passing a law strengthening capital controls. Parliament has dithered on the matter for two years. A vote planned for April 20th was postponed. With parliamentary elections set for May 15th, it is unclear when it might happen.

The vacuum has left banks to impose their own rules. Most depositors can access only small sums in pounds. Withdrawals from dollar accounts use unfavourable rates.

Local courts offer little relief. The Depositors Union, which represents thousands of savers, reckons there have been more than 300 lawsuits against banks to date. Only a handful have been resolved.

Foreign judges have been more expeditious. In December a French court ordered Saradar Bank to pay $2.8m to a customer in Paris. In February a court in London handed down a similar judgment in favour of a Lebanese-British businessman. Bank Audi, one of the lenders ordered to transfer him money, warned that the ruling would lead to “unequal treatment” of depositors.

To show its commitment to fairness, Bank Audi has shut dozens of accounts held by British citizens or residents. So has at least one other lender. Depositors say they were offered a chance to reopen their accounts if they signed a contract that waived their right to sue and stipulated they could not make transfers abroad. Otherwise, their balances would be paid out in a cheque, all but useless in a country with a defunct banking system.

A few have tried more desperate measures. In January the owner of a café in the eastern Bekaa valley doused his bank’s lobby in petrol and demanded $50,000 from his account. He got his money (his sister says he signed a receipt). Some Lebanese cheered his boldness. Others saw a symptom of everything that ails their country, where force trumps the rule of law.

The lawsuits may soon have little effect: the capital-controls law would void them. “It’s like an amnesty for bankers,” says Fouad Debs of the Depositors Union.

The government has proposed guaranteeing accounts under $100,000, though depositors may have to wait up to eight years to withdraw their full savings. Larger balances would receive a haircut.

Even if Lebanon’s banks escape a legal reckoning, their industry seems wrecked for a generation. Lebanon has become a cash economy. Many businesses no longer accept card payments. The sprawling diaspora, which once poured billions into Lebanese lenders, will probably keep its money abroad. “If we don’t see banks pay the price for what happened,” says Ms Ego, “we can never trust them again.” ■

F OR MOST white-collar workers, it used to be very simple. Home was the place you left in order to go to work. The office was almost certainly the place you were heading to. Co-working spaces were for entrepreneurial people in T -shirts who wanted to hang out with other entrepreneurial people in T -shirts. You could stay at a hotel on a work trip but it was not a place to get actual work done, which is why a hotel’s “business centre” defined all of business as using a printer.

The pandemic has thrown these neat categories up into the air. Most obviously, home is now also a place of work. According to a recent Gallup survey, three-quarters of American workers whose jobs can be performed remotely expect to spend time doing just that in the future. And offices are increasingly where you go to put the company into company—through collaborative work as well as through social activities.

But the boldest version of remote working extends well beyond these two locations. “Working from anywhere” envisages a completely untethered existence, in which people can do their jobs in Alaska or Zanzibar. Plenty of destinations are keen to blur the lines between business and leisure (“bleisure”, the world’s ugliest chunk of word-vomit). Hotels are revamping some of their rooms as offices and rolling out work-from-hotel offers. Entire countries are reinventing themselves as places to mix play and work (“plork”?): the Bahamas, Costa Rica and Malta are among those that offer visas for digital nomads.

The work-from-anywhere world edged a little closer on April 28th, when Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s boss, outlined new policies for employees of the property-renting platform. As well as being able to move wherever they want in their country of employment without any cost-of-living adjustment, Airbnb staff can also spend up to 90 days each year living and working abroad. Mr Chesky has been living out of Airbnb properties himself for the past few months, and thinks this is the future.

The idea of a globe-trotting existence sounds wonderful. Nevertheless, plenty of barriers remain. Some are practical. The legal, payroll and tax ramifications of working from different locations in the course of a year are an administrative headache (Mr Chesky admits as much, and says that he will open-source Airbnb’s solution to this problem).

Mundane issues like IT support become more complicated when you are abroad. Working from anywhere is only feasible if your equipment functions reliably. If the Wi-Fi at your Airbnb reminds you of what life was like with modems, your options may be limited. If you spill suntan lotion on your laptop, the people on the hotel’s reception desk are more likely to offer you sympathy than a replacement computer.

Another set of obstacles is more personal. The carefree promise of working from anywhere is far easier to realise if you don’t have actual cares. Children of a certain age need to go to school; partners may not be able to work remotely and have careers of their own to manage.

The option to work from anywhere will be most attractive to people who have well-paid jobs and fewer obligations: childless tech workers, say. For many other people, the “anywhere” in working from anywhere will still boil down to a simple choice between their home and their office. That might be a recipe for resentment within teams. Imagine dialling into a Zoom call covered in baby drool, and hearing Greg from product wax lyrical about how amazing Chamonix is at this time of year.

Resentment may even run the other way. Hybrid work has already smudged the boundary between professional and personal lives. Making everywhere a place of work smears them further. Countries that used to be places to get away from it all will become places to bring it all with you. Turning down meetings when you are on a proper vacation is wholly reasonable; it is not an option when you are plorking on a jobliday. Antigua and Barbuda’s tourism slogan, “The beach is just the beginning”, sounds a lot more idyllic if the punchline in your head isn’t, “There’s also the weekly sales review”.

Adding to the menu of working options for sought-after employees makes sense. Mr Chesky’s new policies will probably help him attract better people to Airbnb. They are certainly aligned with the service he is selling. But for the foreseeable future, working from anywhere will be a perk for a lucky few rather than a blueprint for things to come.

Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:

The case for Easter eggs and other treats (Apr 30th)

How to sign off an email (Apr 16th)

Dead in the Water. By Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel. Portfolio; 288 pages; $27. Atlantic Books; £18.99

T HE GLOBAL shipping network is one of capitalism’s most impressive achievements. Commercial vessels carry over four-fifths of world trade in physical merchandise, much of it lugged around in the more than 16,000 container ships and oil tankers in service. Yet as ever-more ports have been moved away from cities, shipping has become one of the least visible engines of the modern economy.

It can also be among the shadiest, argue Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, two journalists from Bloomberg. Based on more than four years of reporting, their tale of the fate of the Brillante Virtuoso exposes the dark, barnacle-encrusted goings-on beneath the industry’s waterline. They tell a remarkable story about an unremarkable ship, “fought over, picked apart in court, and investigated by police, naval forces, private detectives and experts who make their living boarding ships to look for nearly invisible clues”. Books about merchant shipping are rarely so gripping.

The central event is the boarding of the Brillante, an ageing oil tanker, by pirates claiming to represent “the authorities”, as the ship crosses the Gulf of Aden in July 2011. The interlopers set off an explosion that causes a devastating fire, then flee.

David Mockett, a Yemen-based maritime surveyor working for the Lloyd’s of London insurance market, is sent to inspect the badly damaged vessel, but is left with more questions than answers. Why was the crew so quick to let the pirates on board? And why did the marauders start a fire and disappear rather than seize the ship and demand a ransom?

Suspecting an insurance scam, Mockett begins to dig deeper. But within weeks he is killed by a car bomb. Two British ex- detectives hired by the insurers to take up the investigation encounter several obstacles. One is a thicket of corporate layers, common in shipping, which makes it hard to identify the Brillante’s owner. Shell companies and flags of convenience allow shipowners to take “all of the profits, little of the accountability”, say the authors.

Another problem is the investigators’ own employers. Lloyd’s, the main market for insuring large commercial risks, has a history of paying out (at least partially) on claims by shipowners suspected of scuttling their own vessels, rather than enduring long, expensive inquiries and litigation. Another reason very few “accidents” are fully investigated is that insurers worry this will lead big shipowners to take their business elsewhere. Better to cough up, say, half the ship’s value and move on.

So egregious is this case, however, that after much toing and froing, the investigators are allowed to keep digging. They identify Marios “Super Mario” Iliopoulos, a car-racing enthusiast and owner of a Greek ferry service, as the Brillante’s ultimate owner. Whistleblowers confirm that the attack was an insurance fraud; one needs rescuing when he discovers that a group of bulky-looking men are searching for his house. A Greek lawyer representing the insurers receives death threats and is beaten up near his office in Piraeus.

In October 2019, more than eight years after the Brillante was set ablaze, the High Court in London eventually ruled that the attack had been faked and that the “orchestrator” of the audacious fraud was Mr Iliopoulos (who has always denied it). But it was an odd sort of victory for the underwriters. Mr Iliopoulos was found to have made a false insurance claim for $77m, but that did not cost him a penny since he was not party to the case—which was between the insurers and one of his lenders, Piraeus Bank. The bank, which had financed the purchase of the Brillante, had long since written off the loan. Two months after Justice Nigel Teare handed down his 136-page judgment, one of Mr Iliopoulos’s ferries won “Ship of the Year” at the Lloyd’s List Greek Shipping Awards. He accepted the prize in person, at a ceremony attended by industry bigwigs and Greek politicians.

The private investigators who helped uncover the scam arguably came off worse than its alleged perpetrator. One was even forced to defend a criminal complaint after an associate of Mr Iliopoulos alleged the sleuth had illegally tried to access his private information. The insurers withdrew an offer to pay the investigator’s legal bill, leaving him heavily out of pocket. Mockett’s widow got a rum deal, too. She asked for compensation from the insurers, who, she had been told, had spent $28m on their own legal fees, but received nothing, according to the authors.

The sobering lesson of the Brillante saga, they conclude, is that maritime fraud is profitable—and even if those behind it are unlucky enough to get caught, their chances of ending up in prison, or even out of pocket, are slim. The story illustrates how the shipping industry “has the unique attribute of being utterly integrated with the world economy while existing apart from it, benefiting from its infrastructure while ignoring many of its rules.” ■

B RYAN JOHNSON has just spent another weekend being examined. “On Saturday the sonographer was measuring…my ankles and knees and hips and shoulders and elbows, assessing what is the age of my tendons and ligaments,” he says. It is part of a mission to have all 70-plus organs of his body measured in exhaustive detail so he can see whether, and to what extent, his healthy lifestyle is rejuvenating them.

Mr Johnson, a tech entrepreneur in California, says he has undergone more than 300 tests of various sorts to that end. At one point he had one to check for damage to his arteries from all the blood drawn for other tests. His diet is also entirely determined by tests which have looked at how his body reacts to some 150 foods. “My conscious mind never decides what to eat,” he says. The main meal every day is the same green veggie mush, with a side of strictly regimented sleep, exercise and meditation.

By some measures, Mr Johnson reckons, eight months of living like this has left his body five years younger. Be that as it may, he is certainly pushing at the boundaries of what, in 2007, Wired magazine dubbed the “quantified self” movement: the meticulous collection and analysis of data about bodies and lifestyle that people do to hack their way to better health.

Systematic measurements of people’s physical attributes and records of their behaviour came into their own with the Enlightenment and the development of statistics. For the most part, they were used to understand and control populations, organising them into classes and seeking out the sick, the different and the “inferior” in order to segregate, encourage or punish them. What is striking about the current quantification of the self is the inward-looking individualism of its standardised scrutiny.

As it becomes more mainstream, the technology in smart wristbands, watches, rings and patches—collectively called “wearables”—is measuring ever more aspects of wearers’ lives more accurately and subtly. An Apple Watch collects millions of data points per day. People are seeing into themselves in ways not possible before and are finding new ways to act on what they learn. The effect on health and lifestyle is likely to be profound.

Natasha Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University who is writing a book, “Keeping Track”, about the quantified-self movement, began lurking in meetings of its devotees around 2011. The attendees back then were “geeky techno enthusiasts”, mostly men, who brought data they had collected about themselves and shared what they had learned from it. Soon, though, Dr Schüll says, other types began to show up: people who just sat at the back taking notes. They were the entrepreneurs who would turn what they learned from these meetings into consumer products: apps and gadgets that put such data to use in various ways.

By 2015, when Apple launched its first Watch, Fitbit’s fitness trackers had already been on sale for six years, and there were more than 500 health-related wearables on the market. Sales of smartwatches and fitness trackers amounted to $8bn, according to CCS Insight, a market-research firm. By 2021, $29bn was spent globally—more than half the amount spent on sporting goods.

In America smartwatches are catching on as fast as did early mobile phones (see chart 1). In 2021 about one in four Americans was estimated to own a smartwatch or fitness tracker. The rate is similar in leading European adopters such as Britain and Finland. The number shipped in North America more than doubled from 2015 to 2021. In western Europe and China it more than tripled (see chart 2). In 2019, Apple sold more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry. Some 400m devices a year (of all brands) are expected to be sold globally by 2026, up from 200m in 2020.

There has long been a gap between the parts of Western societies and economies that look after people when they are sick and the parts that help them stay healthy. Wearable devices—and the technologies that they enable—are starting to bridge that divide in two ways. On the one hand, they are making life more medicalised, with people, for the first time, keeping an eye on things like their nocturnal heart rate. On the other hand, they are ushering in a shift in the balance of responsibility between medical treatment provided by clinicians and what patients do to improve their health. The covid-19 pandemic accelerated the process. Wearables entered the lives of more people and took on new roles. With gyms closed, exercise shifted outdoors and many people bought them for the first time, to keep track of how much they walked, ran and pedalled. A parallel trend was that lots of consumers began to see these devices as tracking specific areas of their health, not merely their activity level. Before covid, wearables were often “what we might call disposable”, says Ranjit Atwal from Gartner, a research firm. People would buy them for no particular reason, wear them for a short time and put them into a drawer. It was unclear how, or indeed whether, the market for such devices would mature. The pandemic changed that because many people had to be monitored at home for health reasons. Doctors in America and Europe started seeing more elderly patients with smartwatches that relatives have bought for them in order to track their health and send alerts of any problems. All this is assisted by the fact that people are more used to having technology help monitor and manage their lives. AI -assistants like Siri and Alexa are no longer a novelty used by a brave techie minority. Things that reflect how intimately a device knows you, like personalised playlists, are starting to feel less creepy. The benefits are noticeable. A round-up by researchers in Denmark of more than 120 studies of personal-activity trackers, which included healthy people and those with various health conditions, concluded that wearing the devices makes people move more. The improvements are modest: about 1,200 more steps (around 800 metres, or half a mile) daily, 49 more minutes of vigorous exercise per week and 10 minutes less sedentary time per day. But physical activity is so important that even small changes can matter a lot. Studies that have followed people for 4-10 years have found that increasing steps by an extra 1,000 per day reduces mortality by between 6% and 36%, with the biggest impact among those who are most sedentary.

Such results have convinced some American health insurers to give away fitness trackers and smartwatches to their customers. UnitedHealthcare, one of the biggest, says that 59% of takers log exercise for at least six months. For comparison, gym-membership retention rates drop off a cliff after two or three months.

Doctors in America and Europe are starting to warm up to the idea that wearables can help them take better care of their patients. Profit-oriented health-care systems, like America’s, smell greater efficiency. Instead of asking patients if they are sleeping better, for example, doctors can simply look up a chart from a wearable device. Several hospital groups in America that care for millions of patients are setting up systems that make wearables a seamless part of clinical care. Finland’s citizens can link their wearables and other personal health devices (such as smart scales) with their national health records.

Market analysts expect that, in the next five years, the wearables market will split into two categories: medical-grade devices approved by regulators for people with chronic conditions who need tracking with greater care and accuracy, and devices with less sophisticated features for healthy people who want to keep an eye on their metrics and be able to spot problems early. Leading manufacturers are expected to offer increasingly specific devices for groups such as children and the elderly.

Qualitative, too

This report will examine the technologies that are paving the way for this transformation of health care. The sensors and algorithms that unobtrusively measure things as people go about their daily lives are becoming more sophisticated, turning wearables into diagnostic devices. AI -based apps built on the data streaming from people’s wrists are dispensing personalised advice on what to eat for lunch or when to go for a walk. Interactive apps backed up by clinical evidence are being prescribed as treatment for all sorts of ailments, just as medicines are. Some of them work better than conventional therapies aimed at the same problem.

Wearables are also transforming disease surveillance and clinical trials for new drugs, by showing how people experience a disease or a treatment in their daily lives. They make it possible, for the first time, to take the temperature, or measure the pulse, of a population rather than an individual.

There are plenty of problems to be resolved. Chief among them are concerns about privacy and discrimination based on the health data from wearables. Digital-health products built on the data are still variable in quality, though it is getting easier to sort the good from the bad. Regulators are trying to strike a balance between protecting consumers and not suppressing innovation, while also learning how to regulate a digital-health ecosystem.

But few doubt that the benefits from wearables will be huge, even if the digital care that they make possible will remain supplementary to conventional medical treatments. About 80% of the burden of disease in America is caused by lifestyle factors, and many poorer countries are not far behind. Drugs work as intended in only 30-50% of people. For many diseases there are no therapies at all. Digital health care can deal with many of these problems. To appreciate what it can achieve, the best place to start is the technology behind wearable sensors. ■

But so often, the real issue in these situations is less ignorance or ill will than differing priorities. Take the common idea that to be a Donald Trump supporter is to be, if not a racist, someone who tolerates racism. Yes, some polls reveal that Trump voters were more likely than others to harbor unfavorable views about nonwhites — a 2016 Reuters-Ipsos poll found that Trump supporters were more likely than supporters of Hillary Clinton to view Black people negatively. But the idea that anyone who’s ever pulled the lever for Trump carries the odor of bigotry is facile.

I have known too many Trump voters, of various levels of education, to whom the “racist” tag could be applied only in a hopelessly hasty fashion. Too many of them have worked for civil rights causes in the past or are married to or seriously involved with people of color or are of color themselves, for the racist label to make any real sense. They, rather, do not rank Trump’s casual bigotry as being as important as others do. To them, this trait is unfortunate and perhaps even off-putting, but not a dealbreaker in comparison to other things about him. I see nothing evil in that. It puts me off a bit. It often seems a little crude — I sense some people being swayed, purely, by Trump’s podium charisma. But that is not the same as malevolence.

I feel the same way about those who are opposed to abortion. I am disgusted that the Supreme Court seems poised to make it more difficult in many cases, and practically impossible in others, for American women to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I am aware of how opposition to abortion has been entangled in the nation’s history of racism, classism and sexism. I understand the fear that the reversal of Roe could be a prelude to future decisions threatening other rights involving private life.

However, I am also aware that opposition to abortion is often founded on a basic idea that it constitutes the taking of a human life, with many seeing a fetus at even its earliest stages as a person-to-be that morality forbids us to kill. I know people of this view of all races, classes and levels of education. For them, all the negative effects of doing away with Roe may fade in importance. To them, those things are a lesser priority than preserving life.

I find the scientific aspect of this position a bit unreflective. I also sense, in many who take this view, less interest in how humans fare in their lives as children and adults than in the fate of humans as fetuses. I have to work to imagine prioritizing a fetus as a person in the way that they do.

But I think I manage it, and with a deep breath, even though it’s not where I stand, I cannot view the equation of abortion and the taking of a life — or even, as some suggest, a murder — as an immoral position. For many, including me, the priority is what a woman does with her own body. As such, many suppose that to be against abortion is to be anti-feminist. But for pro-lifers, a woman’s right even to controlling her own body stops at what they see as killing an unborn child. To many of them, being anti-abortion is quite compatible with feminism.

I deeply wish that we were not on the verge of Roe being overturned — a decision that, if it came to pass, would be opposed by a majority of Americans and would disrupt or even ruin lives. It would represent further and grievous evidence of our broken political system, with the Electoral College a keystone anachronism, having put Trump into a position to recast the Supreme Court according to priorities unshared by most of the population. However, I cannot see opposition to abortion, in itself, as either naïve or evil. As much as I wish it were not, it is a position one can hold as a knowledgeable and moral individual.

Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.

What does “queer” mean to you? For many older gays and transsexuals, it’s an unpleasant reminder of past homophobic encounters, some of them physically threatening. Yet thanks to its positive recuperation over the last 30 years, today queerness means something completely different. It’s now an umbrella “identity”, covering everything that’s non-standard and non-vanilla in the sexual world, from boring old lesbians to more brilliant non-binaries, demisexuals, kink-lovers, and beyond.
In recent years, queerness has also become a fascinatingly multifunctional symbolic object in the psyche of the nation, simultaneously representing both sexily avant-garde transgression and fully paid-up membership of the British establishment. Compelling new evidence of the latter is provided by the opening this week of a museum celebrating “LGBTQ+” history in central London. Entitled “Queer Britain”, the venture is financially supported by M&C Saatchi, Allen and Overy, Levis, and Coutts, and lists partnership with the V&A, the National Trust, the Tate, the British Library, and English Heritage on its website.
In stentorian tones more reminiscent of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee than Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, we are told that the museum “will be an essential place for all regardless of sexuality or gender identity, to find out about the culture they have been born into, have chosen or seek to understand. It will help complete the Nation’s family tree.” Online events in the run-up to its opening included partnering with a wine company to run a competition asking what “queer creativity” means, and a celebration of the launch by the Bank of England of what’s surely the least visible banknote in its history to date — a £50 note featuring Alan Turing, unlucky in his timing once again.

A project on the history of the gerrymandered categories of “LGBTQ+” and “queer” is, of course, a fantastic idea; were it done properly, it would be genuinely exciting. Ideally such a museum would interrogate the sociological and historical conditions of its own movement. It might ask, for instance: what economic forces have shaped its transition from the gay rights movement of 20th Century to the present rainbow soup, in which many lesbians and gays feel they are not waving but drowning? Who gains and who loses from this radical reorientation?
Relatedly, a serious historical inquiry might ask: how did Stonewall move from defending the rights of homosexuals in the Nineties to arguing in 2022 that lesbian women should date members of the opposite sex — that is, males who identify as women — or else be judged as motivated by “social prejudice” and even “sexual racism”? And while historians were at it, they might also consider how our society has moved from the laudable aim of depathologising homosexuality, to a now fairly widespread acceptance of the chemical castration of confused gay youth, under the guise of “transitioning” them — a fate horribly reminiscent of the one meted out so vindictively to Turing. All fascinating historical questions, none of which are remotely likely to be asked within the glossy corporate-friendly walls of Queer Britain, I predict.
More from this authorHow philosophy sacrificed the truthBy Kathleen Stock
In truth, queerness as framed by its most culturally powerful representatives has absolutely nothing to do with the average gay man, lesbian, bisexual, or adult transsexual in the UK. For most of these, their sexual orientation or feelings of gender identity are not the chief source of meaning or motivation in life, and hence they are not particularly politically engaged in activism nor in posturing online about queerness. This leaves the field clear for rather more self-interested people to take both the mic and the money. The fantasy conjured up by the overused phrase “LGBTQ+ community” might suggest a cohesive group with genuinely shared interests, if not some sort of glittery high-camp version of the Bruderhof, but in fact the term is a shiny carapace shielding the eyes of straight people from big underlying divisions.
Though you’re unlikely to see an exhibit about it at Queer Britain, at the top of the pile sits an uneasy coalition of two radically different factions, each indifferent to the interests of many for whom they jointly claim to speak. The first of these factions is the sexual libertarians, mostly accounting for what remains of the avant-garde reputation of queerness in the public mind. Broadly speaking, this group wishes to erode most prohibitive sexual norms in society, considering them as pernicious curbs on individual freedom. Some are gay men, some are transwomen, and some are — as the lingo goes — “cis-het” but overcompensate for it by means of elaborate tattoos, the sort of facial hirsuteness last seen on a Victorian parson, and an ostentatious interest in pornography. All have a strong theoretical interest in sex (perhaps not so much in practice, given the amount of time spent talking about it, but who knows?).
What unites this group is the conviction that there’s no sexual act between adults that cannot be redeemed through the magic of “consent”. A significant number of them are to be found in universities, opining scholastically about chemsex, BDSM, furries, sexual choking, or whatever the latest and hottest transgression is supposed to be. Another notable presence is in the creative arts. In terms of concrete political projects, they mostly nick ideas from the instinctively libertarian youth culture currently going haywire on the internet. Indeed, a lot of unthinking public support for sexual libertarian projects comes from the merging of those projects with those of more idealistic and naive teenagers, doing their best to piss off their mothers by talking loudly on the internet about sexual deviancy.
Meanwhile, to situations where consent is obviously absent — as in the large number of sexual offences against women — the response from sexual libertarians is mostly studied indifference. These people are not in the business of public sexual disapproval, after all. Yet despite being norm-averse in sexual matters, they are often happy to enforce social sanctions against those who they consider political enemies, tending to be highly censorious about speech they perceive to threaten their own interests. They like to call themselves feminists, though only on the understanding that Judith Butler has definitively shown that women don’t really exist. Though a few pay surrogate “birthing bodies” to produce Insta-friendly babies, most don’t have children; but this doesn’t stop them having very confident opinions on the rearing of “trans kids” or on sex education in schools.
More from this authorFive rules for fighting transactivismBy Kathleen Stock
The second significant influence on contemporary queer culture could not be more different. These are the rainbow bureaucrats: the charity workers and trustees, managers, PR specialists, lobbyists, and equality advisers who keep the whole corporate-friendly show on the road. In contrast to the sexualised norm-busting swagger of the libertarians, the dominant idiom here is completely asexual and intensely moralised. The self-appointed role of the rainbow bureaucrat is to educate, to sooth, to care, to “manage difficult conversations”, to protect, and to inspire. The tone is comforting, homely, and eminently responsible. It’s time for tea and biscuits, not for chemsex. And as with bureaucrats everywhere, there is also a positive relish for rules and norms: what words to say and not to say, what badges and lanyards to wear, what Stonewall holy days to mark, what petitions to sign, what bake sales to have, what mantras to chant, what merchandise to buy. There is also a strong legislative instinct — as soon as there is a norm they approve of, there probably ought to be a law or a policy to help it along.
An illustrative example of this side of the queer coin is the Mermaids website, where a basic aim of the charity — lobbying to make medical and social transition easier for minors — is placed within a miasma of cooing, caring, supporting, “affirming”, and consoling. Colluding against potentially protesting parents, the site even tells kids that “if you are nervous about visiting our site then you can click on the arrow over on the right-hand-side of the screen and it’ll take you to another page”. (The arrow takes you to Wikipedia.) So much for out and proud.
These, then, are the two signatories to the exceptionally weird pact underpinning queerness as a contemporary cultural phenomenon in the UK — between one side who believes nothing and one who believes everything; between the icily cold and the warmly caring; between those who say fuck the police, and those who want to call the police (in Mermaids’ case, quite literally, as was revealed last week). The sexual libertarians steal their ideas from youth cultures online, while the rainbow bureaucrats operationalise those ideas, earnestly selling them back as identities to the next generation of young consumers, as well as selling on the victimhood tropes that will keep the cash flowing from corporates keen to have a socially responsible-looking brand.
Perhaps it won’t have escaped the reader thus far that there’s a biological element to all this too. The sexual libertarians are mostly men; the staff and trustees of Mermaids are nearly all female — no matter how they identify — and, in my experience, so are most other rainbow bureaucrats. Despite foundational intellectual myths, it turns out biological sex matters in the queer world too. And though they won’t like it, it’s tempting to see these two factions as part of a tediously conventional nuclear family, with rebellious jack-the-lad Dad and solicitous stay-at-home Mum, and with many confused children shunting between the two.
Suggested readingThe week the trans spell was brokenBy Hadley Freeman
Between them, these two symbolic parental figures allow queerness to be all things to all (non-)men, depending on what the interest is at the time: sexily threatening or passively threatened; thrillingly disruptive or reassuringly conventional; cynically nihilistic or earnestly idealistic. Their joint influence explains why the adjective “queer” might as easily be added to a Brighton nightclub flyer as to an NHS pamphlet or an article in the Women’s Institute magazine. It also explains why the whole “LGBTQ+ movement” remains so impervious to criticism. Should a sexual libertarian ever go rogue and overdo the transgression (say, by claiming that “children have sexual desires at an early age”), or should a rainbow bureaucrat ever get sloppy with procedure (say, by committing a massive data breach), other bureaucrats will instantly appear in reassuring mummy-mode to steady the horses, talking soothingly about best international practice and strong safeguarding policies.
If a back-up is needed, a pre-digested narrative stands ready for employment at any time, which says that any criticism must be motivated by phobia. And since victimhood sells these days, both to troubled kids looking for a spiritual home and to corporates looking for a progressive brand image, a crisis is thereby neatly turned into an opportunity for growth. Truly, when they called this whole racket queer, they weren’t wrong.

In their new book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future,” the New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns offer an account of the last couple of years in U.S. politics, from the 2020 Presidential election to the insurrection on January 6th to the first legislative push of the Biden Administration. The book has already made news for a number of its scoops, especially those surrounding the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, who was caught on tape blaming President Trump for his role in fomenting the attack on the Capitol and saying that he intended to tell him to resign. (McCarthy later said that he was walking through “different scenarios” and “never thought” Trump should step down.)

I recently spoke by phone with Martin and Burns, with the intent of talking less about the book’s scoops and more about how journalism has functioned in the Trump era, during which they have both covered national politics for the Times. In our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the ethics of saving important reporting for a book’s publication, how Republicans have tried to launder their reputations through the media, and what really drives Mitch McConnell.

How do you conceive of the type of journalism that you guys do, or tried to do, in the book, and how do you think it functioned, especially during the Trump era?

ALEXANDER BURNS: I do think that we tried to do something different with this book. Look, Jonathan and I are best known as campaign journalists, which is often what it means to be a political journalist in the way the term is broadly used. What we tried to do with this book is broaden the definition of what we would consider political journalism and tell a broader story that takes in, yes, an election, but it takes in the wider condition of the country, it takes in the inner workings of government—not just in Washington but at the state and even at the local level—and tells a more integrated story about the country during a period of time.

In addition to the overwhelming bias toward treating political journalism as campaign journalism, there’s also an overwhelming tendency to treat our coverage of politics and government as coverage of the President. We have two Presidents as major, major characters in the book, but this isn’t a book about Donald Trump. It isn’t a book about Joe Biden. It’s not even a book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It’s a book about the political system as a whole.

JONATHAN MARTIN: There are three branches of the federal government. We think that, when it comes to the political story of this time, the legislative branch plays an enormously important role. And we relish the fact that we are introducing a set of really pivotal actors in this period that perhaps even a fairly informed reader wouldn’t know that much about. And we think that, by doing so, we present a more comprehensive account of this tumultuous time in American history.

There was some great journalism that came about in the Trump era, but I think there were also, especially in many of the books written about the Trump Administration, problems in terms of who was telling the story and how they were telling it.

A.B.: I’m not trying to do some sort of dodge about that. When you say that you see obvious problems with—

I would say as someone who read the books by Bob Woodward, Michael Wolff, and others, I can often tell who the sources were by the way they’re described, or when people say things that I don’t believe, or when long conversations are recounted verbatim in a way that seems unlikely to have occurred. This is always a challenge for reporters who rely on sources, but I think that it was a particularly acute problem during the Trump Administration.

A.B.: I’m not going to go negative on other books or other reporters here. I do think that what you said about recounting lengthy verbatim conversations, many months after the fact, was something that we felt going into this project that we didn’t want to do unless we had a very, very, very, very high degree of confidence that we really were working with exact words. We would never put something in the newspaper that we thought was roughly what somebody said in quotation marks. So what we did in the book was we drew on a ton of primary source material: audio tapes, documents, contemporaneous notes.

We spoke to a lot of people, not necessarily literally in real time but very close to near time—with the understanding that the information they were sharing would not come out until much later—to try to get much closer to the kind of exactitude in language and in scene and in fact that we demand of ourselves in the newspaper. And that’s something we disclose to readers at the front of the book—that if you see something in quote marks, we have a very high degree of confidence that is exactly what was said. And if you don’t see something in quote marks, we’re paraphrasing because we feel we have to paraphrase.

J.M.: I would just say that we were conscious about the nature of this period as we were living it and then covering it. And we wanted to do justice to what we feel like is an extremely consequential part of American history, and we wanted it to be accurate and what we hope will be one of the building blocks for future historians who are writing about this time. And, of course, if you want to start building the historical record, it’s best to have primary source documentation.

A.B.: And one thing I would add—and, again, this is not a criticism about other books specifically—I do think that going into this Jonathan and I had a sense that, look, people have read a lot of books about the Trump Administration, they’ve read a lot of news coverage of the Trump Administration, and we wanted to say something new. And so it’s not that we looked at those other books and said, “We don’t like them, we think they’re bad, and so we’re going to do something different.” But we didn’t want to come to the reader with stories that they had heard eighty times before, but presented slightly differently. The story that Trump has a volcanically bad temper and is abusive to staff and doesn’t understand or care about policy is something that has been very, very well fleshed out over the years, to put it mildly. And so, where we’re going to dip into that, we try to do it in places and on subjects and in ways that would get us to a different place.

One critique of books such as these is that they have material that’s urgent to get out to the public and the public must know about, and that holding them for a book is somehow unethical as a journalist. I don’t actually agree with that critique, but I at least think it’s worth thinking about, and I’m curious if you guys have thought about it and how you wrestle with it.

J.M.: I would just say up front, Isaac, that we’re not going to discuss sourcing as a rule here. I would make two general points on your question, without engaging on the nature of our reporting. And that is just, one, people are always more willing to speak for history than they are for a story that’s going to be in the paper the next day. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the reporting or what the topic is. I think that’s generally a sort of safe bet. A lot of authors will understand this. And I think when people know that they’re talking for history it prompts a measure of candor that perhaps political actors wouldn’t be willing to offer in real time.

Remote learning had an even worse effect on U.S. students' education than was previously known, new research shows.
K-12 students who attended school from home in the 2020-2021 school year lost 50 percent of their typical math curriculum learning, according to a Harvard study first reported by the New York Times. Even students who went back to school in fall 2020 lost 20 percent of their typical math curriculum learning due to pandemic disruptions in the spring. The learning disparities were the worst for poor, black, and Latino students, a gap that one of the study's authors called "the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation."
"It's pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning," Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the coauthor of a similar study, told the Times. Oster was one of the first to sound the alarm about the danger of school closures. In October 2020, she wrote a piece for the Atlantic, "Schools Aren't Superspreaders," which argued the risk of COVID spread in schools was overblown.
Children are at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. In-school transmission is also "extremely rare," according to a 2021 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of COVID was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed," the Times‘s David Leonhardt wrote on Thursday. "Schools also reopened in parts of Europe without seeming to spark outbreaks."
Students who suffered the greatest learning losses were often in districts that succumbed to powerful teachers' unions and Democratic officials who fought to keep schools closed. Schools in the poorest areas on average stayed remote five weeks longer than affluent areas.
As late as March this year, Chicago Public Schools, in coordination with its teachers' union, was implementing at-home learning periods for classes after COVID exposures. Additionally, any school could flip to remote learning provided at least 30 percent of teachers were absent for at least two days or at least 40 percent of students were told to quarantine by the city's health department.
The post Remote Learning Was Even More Harmful Than Previously Thought, Research Shows appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

W HEN BRITISH colonists first came to Australia they brought with them, among other delights, a bouquet of venereal diseases. They introduced Aboriginals to syphilis and gonorrhoea. Not even Australia’s wildlife was spared. The Europeans shipped in sheep and cattle infected with chlamydia. Scientists suspect that it jumped between species: koalas are now riddled with the disease. In some colonies, every animal tests positive. Only a couple of wild populations are free of it.

This is more than just a matter of embarrassment in polite marsupial society. Chlamydia causes conjunctivitis, which can blind a koala. Worse is a brown bottom. That implies that the disease has led to a bad urinary infection and incontinence. Those animals are hard to save, says Michael Pyne, a vet at Currumbin Wildlife Hospital in Queensland. Often the infection spreads to the kidneys, leading to renal failure. Many survivors are left infertile.

Australia’s iconic “bear” has plenty of other problems, too. Koala numbers in Queensland and New South Wales have fallen by at least half this century. The decline is so steep the federal government recently listed them as endangered. Their habitats have been ripped up for development and burnt down in bushfires. They are regularly hit by cars and attacked by dogs. Yet chlamydia is one of their biggest killers, and growing.

It is not just that randy koalas are spreading disease the old-fashioned way. Females feed their joeys a kind of faeces called “pap” to pass on nutrients from eucalyptus leaves. That transmits the infection, too. Koalas do not respond well to antibiotics, which disrupt the bacteria they need to break down food.

Help may be coming in the form of vaccines. Competing teams at two Queensland universities have spent years developing jabs for koala chlamydia. Both are now testing them in wild populations. A single-shot vaccine, created by the University of the Sunshine Coast, is being administered to some 1,000 animals in Queensland and New South Wales. Early results suggested that it is about 70% effective at preventing the disease, says Samuel Phillips, one of the researchers. Hundreds more koalas are being given a double-shot vaccine by the Queensland University of Technology and Currumbin Wildlife Hospital.

Mass vaccination is still a long way off. Inoculating every wild koala would in any case be impossible. The creatures would first have to be found (they are not exactly conspicuous) before being coaxed out of trees. Yet chlamydia does not spread as virulently as, for example, covid-19. Vaccinating just 10% of a breeding population annually might be enough to stem infections.

F OR ONCE , the braised shark fin is not the most controversial thing about Yeong Bin Gwan. The grand banquet hall in Seoul, famed for the dubious delicacy, is where Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s incoming president, will have his inauguration on May 10th. The opposition Minjoo party complained that the event’s 3.3bn-won ($2.6m) budget makes it the most expensive inauguration ever. Mr Yoon’s people explained that the venue adds only a meagre 500,000 won to the bill. Still, a Minjoo spokesman said it was tantamount to declaring South Korea a country where “the president comes first”.

Petty point-scoring is not new to South Korean politics. High office attracts forensic scrutiny. It will soon become routine for Mr Yoon. Shark fin or not, he will have a lot on his plate after inauguration day. He must tackle many problems, including astronomical housing costs and the frustrations of young people who are well-educated but underemployed. Mr Yoon has also promised structural reforms in several areas, including welfare, corporate regulation and criminal justice. Even the executive branch is to be transformed: it will become an institution, his office has said, that “has autonomy, communicates and takes responsibility”.

And that is just at home. Mr Yoon must also deal with a dangerous world. He hopes to draw closer to America, but also wants to avoid antagonising China, his country’s largest trading partner. He has promised a harder line on North Korea, which has been increasingly bellicose in recent months, launching yet another missile on May 4th, just days before the inauguration.

Such Herculean ambitions would be challenging for the most experienced and popular of leaders. Mr Yoon is neither. In 2016 his role in the impeachment of Park Geun-hye, a disgraced former president, on corruption charges earned him a promotion to chief prosecutor under Moon Jae-in, her successor. In that job Mr Yoon zealously pursued figures in Mr Moon’s government, bolstering his own anti-corruption credentials. But he entered politics only when he announced his candidacy for president in June last year.

Mr Yoon has promised a “fair administration that does not allow privileges or foul play”. The public is sceptical about this claim, given the various allegations that tainted him and his family during the unedifying campaign, not to mention those flung at his opponent. Despite his frequent claims to embody the will of the people, he won the election on March 9th with a margin of only 0.7%, the narrowest in the history of modern Korean democracy. He enters office with the highest disapproval rating of any new president.

As if his historic unpopularity and long to-do list did not pose enough of a challenge, Mr Yoon also faces a third impediment: his party does not have a majority in the National Assembly. Barring a mass defection, the Minjoo party, which holds 168 of 300 seats, will control the legislature at least until elections in 2024. It can block Mr Yoon’s bills and try to force through its own. But the presidential veto is a trump card—the opposition lacks the numbers to overturn it. The most likely result will be paralysis. Mr Yoon has said he hopes his administration will be able to “overcome the division of ideologies”. But he will be encircled by sharks. ■

M AHN TUN LYNN says he has thought of little but food since Myanmar’s armed forces mounted their brutal coup in February last year. First, from Yangon, the commercial capital, he used his skills from years running an import-export business to get staples to the resistance groups springing up around the country. When, late last year, hunger began to gnaw even at him, he fled the country. He now shelters in Thailand, by the banks of a river that marks the two countries’ border. Everyone in his makeshift camp knows how conflict disrupts the cycle of sowing seed and harvesting crops. When bullets fly, ricebowls grow emptier.

And now, says Mr Mahn Tun Lynn, another war, on the other side of the Eurasian land mass, has made things even worse. Since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the prices of food staples available to Burmese refugees have risen sharply. The World Food Programme and other charities that provide aid find their dollars do not go so far. And the refugees are among the lucky ones. Before the coup, some 1m Burmese were in need of humanitarian aid. Today, according to the UN , the number is over 14m, among them 5m children.

Even before Mr Putin’s needless war supply-chain disruptions caused by the pandemic, along with climate-change-related vagaries in the weather, had forced many Asian and Pacific countries to think harder about food. Now the risk is that governments will respond in ways that will make supplies even scarcer and prices even higher in the long run.

The direct effects of the war are bad enough. Ukraine and Russia are both agricultural powerhouses. Before the war they generated 12% of the world’s farm exports, measured by calories. That included nearly a third of all wheat exports and three-quarters of exports of sunflower oil. Fighting has kept many Ukrainian farmers from their fields. Combined with sanctions, it has disrupted trade flows, too. Both countries have restricted food exports to conserve stocks. Russia’s fertiliser exports have been hit. All this adds up to a huge shock to global food markets.

Central Asians are feeling the pain. Russia’s ban in March on exports of grain to fellow members of the Eurasian Economic Union, a club of some former Soviet states, has hit Kazakhstan hard. Though a big wheat producer itself, it normally imports Russian grain for domestic consumption while exporting its own (dearer) wheat to neighbours. The Russian ban led Kazakhstan’s flour-millers to warn that, running out of supplies, they were going bust. Last month the government urged the millers to switch to domestic grain, banning most exports for three months.

Central Asian neighbours, which get 90% of their grain imports from Kazakhstan, are appalled. Uzbekistan, the region’s most populous country, was planning to import 100,000 tonnes of Kazakhstani wheat between April and July. Turkmenistan has long suffered from chronic food shortages, which only last October Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev, promised to help end. Now he risks exacerbating them.

The war is pushing up the prices of all kinds of foodstuffs, not just grain. In Indonesia, households have been grumbling about the cost of cooking oil. Late last month the government suddenly halted exports of crude and refined palm oil, of which Indonesia is the world’s biggest producer. The stuff is used not just for frying but also in cakes, cosmetics and much more. India, the world’s biggest importer, is scrambling to find replacements.

In Sri Lanka, food inflation—and staples such as lentils disappearing from shop shelves—are a major factor in popular calls for the president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to go. As for nearby Bangladesh, with a population of 164m, its food-security predicament is among the most severe, says the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute ( IFPRI ): paying more for food and fertiliser imports will deplete foreign-currency reserves, while leaving less room for social-safety-net support.

Both Kazakhstan and Indonesia claim their moves are temporary. But as IFPRI argues, even short-term measures can be contagious, generating higher prices and further volatility. Hoarding and panic-buying are similarly counterproductive. And seeking food self-sufficiency, which some Asian governments are promoting, is a costly fool’s errand for most food-importing countries. Open markets, and help for the neediest: these are the best ways to tackle the hunger that Mr Putin is inflicting on the world.

Read more from Banyan, our columnist on Asia:

Sri Lanka’s ruling family is running out of road (Apr 30)

Lawrence Wong is Singapore’s presumptive next prime minister (April 23rd)

Australian politicians need to think harder about defence (Apr 16th)

I N AUGUST 1942 an American-led task force landed on Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, for an offensive that would turn the tide in the Pacific war. The campaign dislodged Japanese troops, thwarted their plans to sever American supply lines to Australia and New Zealand, and gave the Allies a vital platform for later battles that helped vanquish Japan.

Small wonder, then, that American and allied nerves were rattled when it emerged in late March that China, their new Pacific rival, was signing a security deal with the Solomons that could give it a military foothold there. Over the past month, hurried visits from American and Australian officials prompted denials from China and the Solomons that a Chinese base was in the offing. Still, on April 27th an Australian minister predicted that China was “very likely” to send troops to the Solomons.

The exact contents of the deal have yet to be made public. America and its regional allies have promised fresh diplomatic engagement and threatened unspecified consequences if the agreement leads to any substantial Chinese military presence. So far, though, the saga represents a win for China—with important qualifications.

China still has just one military base abroad, a naval facility opened in 2017 in Djibouti. But it is accelerating and broadening its quest for more. American and allied officials believe it has approached at least five countries since 2018 and considered a dozen others as potential hosts (see map). Whether the Solomons deal translates into a Chinese base remains unclear. And if it does, the strategic value of such an isolated outpost is debatable.

Nonetheless, some who track China’s efforts predict more such deals in the coming years and say that America and its allies should focus on limiting their utility rather than trying to outbid China on each. The alternative is “a game of global whack-a-mole”, says Isaac Kardon of the US Naval War College. “I think part of it is just adjusting to the reality that the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) is going to be more global, and thinking about ways to make their assets vulnerable.”

The skirmishing over the Solomons began in March when a draft of the deal was leaked online. It said the Solomons could ask China to send police and soldiers to help maintain social order, provide humanitarian relief and conduct “other tasks” agreed on by the two sides. China could, “according to its own needs” and with local approval, send its ships to stop over, according to the draft. It also said that neither side could make the contents public without the other agreeing.

Soon after the leak, Australia, which has a similar, though transparent, agreement with the Solomons, rushed two intelligence chiefs to the country and made a public appeal for the government there not to sign the Chinese deal. Manasseh Sogavare, the prime minister of the Solomons, signed it anyway, saying he needed to diversify his country’s security partnerships.

America then dispatched Kurt Campbell, who oversees Indo-Pacific affairs in the White House, and other senior officials on an island-hopping tour of the region culminating in the Solomons. Mr Campbell made several commitments, including a promise to expedite the reopening of the American embassy in the Solomons, which closed in 1993, and to start a strategic dialogue with the government there.

Mr Campbell issued a warning, too. If any steps were made to establish a Chinese military installation or permanent presence in the Solomons, America would “respond accordingly”, the White House said after his meetings, without explaining what that might entail. Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, added a similarly vague threat, saying a Chinese base in the Solomons would cross “a red line”.

Ports in a storm

As China seeks to protect its worldwide interests and challenge American military dominance in Asia, it can already rely to some extent on a global network of over 90 ports that are partly or wholly owned or operated by Chinese firms. Those are fine for refuelling, replenishing supplies and repairing ships in peacetime. But it also needs facilities in which to station uniformed personnel and store weapons and equipment. In the past three years alone, it has signed a secret deal to use a Cambodian navy base, tried to negotiate its own naval outpost in Equatorial Guinea and secretly begun building a military facility inside a Chinese-run port in the United Arab Emirates ( UAE ), say American officials.

China also appears to have adjusted its tactics, abandoning attempts to convince America and its allies that such deals don’t threaten their interests, and targeting countries of more strategic importance to America. Before opening its base in Djibouti, China insisted that it would only be a “logistics hub” to support Chinese forces involved in UN peacekeeping, anti-piracy and humanitarian operations. It made no such effort to sell the Solomons deal.

One likely explanation is Chinese pique at the recently unveiled AUKUS pact, under which America and Britain will help Australia to acquire nuclear submarines. It is part of a broader joint effort to counter China’s military ambitions. In April one of China’s deputy foreign ministers, Xie Feng, contrasted the Solomons agreement with the “covert operations of certain countries, which have put together military blocs, stimulated an arms race and exacerbated the risk of nuclear proliferation”.

Another difference about the Solomons deal is the reference to Chinese forces quelling local unrest. Chinese proponents of overseas bases often argue that they are needed to help protect Chinese citizens abroad, citing evacuations from Libya in 2011 and Yemen in 2015. Still, they rarely, if ever, suggest intervening in the host’s domestic affairs, which would violate what China says is a pillar of its foreign policy.

That change no doubt reflects Chinese authorities’ concern about the roughly 3,000 Chinese citizens in the Solomons, who were targeted in rioting in November. But it also paves the way for Chinese security forces—which have already trained local police in the Solomons—to intervene in support of Mr Sogavare if violence erupts again after an election due next year. Such a direct Chinese intervention in a democracy would be unprecedented and deeply troubling. The world has plenty of unpopular leaders who would welcome Chinese help to stay in power.

For all China’s efforts to expand abroad, the results so far have been mixed. That is partly the result of history. America, Britain and a handful of other military powers have a global network of bases that have existed for decades and are mostly legacies of empire, the second world war and the cold war. China has started from scratch, and establishing even a small new base abroad is costly and time-consuming.

China’s challenge in some ways resembles that of the Soviet Union, which from the mid-1960s began a push to find overseas bases to give its navy global reach. Over the next couple of decades it negotiated access to facilities in some 15 countries, including Mauritius, Syria and Vietnam. But those agreements took many forms, with some allowing full-blown bases and others only ship repairs. Some fell through.

As with the Soviets, China’s progress is largely dependent on local strongmen and vulnerable to sudden shifts in the political landscape. The Solomons deal was driven by Mr Sogavare’s concerns about his own political future—and by his antipathy towards Australia. Any Chinese military presence would be fiercely opposed by many islanders. In a poll last year 91% said they would prefer their country to be diplomatically aligned more with liberal democracies than with China.

Further constraining China is a recent push by America and its allies to draw more public attention to Chinese base-hunting and to co-ordinate their diplomatic responses. Although unlikely to reverse any agreements, those efforts may have slowed China down by forcing local leaders to deny plans for a Chinese base, and by mobilising domestic or regional opposition. Observers say Chinese forces have not yet been spotted using the Cambodian naval base and that the UAE has halted construction of the alleged Chinese military facility in its port.

China’s deal with the Solomons marks a step towards extending its global military presence. For the moment, though, a second overseas base of its own remains elusive, let alone a global network. ■

L ATE LAST month China’s central propaganda department announced a new campaign: “The Strong Nation’s Rejuvenation Has Me”. The goal of this odd-sounding effort is to rally red spirit before the Communist Party’s 20th congress later this year, when Xi Jinping hopes to secure a third term as party chief. But a different kind of rejuvenation is trending online, that of “run philosophy”, a coded way of talking about emigration. Instead of using a character that suggests running away from China, which would antagonise state censors, netizens have been using one that sounds like the English word “run”, but means something different: run (moist).

Most of Shanghai’s 25m residents have been locked in their homes for more than a month in order to stem an outbreak of covid-19 in the city. Case numbers are dropping there, but rising in Beijing, the capital, which is doing mass testing and imposing targeted lockdowns. Business leaders worry about the economic impact of China’s covid controls. Many foreigners are leaving—and, according to online search trends, China’s young and educated elite are thinking about doing the same.

On WeChat, a popular messaging app, searches for “immigration” increased more than fourfold between early and mid-April. Users of Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, published more than 78,000 posts with the run character in March and April (see chart). Spikes in their frequency coincided with traumatic events in Shanghai, such as when an asthma patient was refused medical treatment and died, or when videos of infected children separated from their parents spread online.

“It’s like an alarm bell has gone off,” says Miranda Wang, a young Chinese video-producer who moved to Shanghai after studying in Britain. The Chinese metropolis used to feel like a global city, similar to London, she says. But after more than 50 days of lockdown, Ms Wang has begun researching ways to leave. “Now we realise, Shanghai is still China’s Shanghai,” she says. “No matter how much money, education or international access you have, you cannot escape the authorities.” Chinese internet users have crowdsourced a repository of run-philosophy readings on GitHub, a platform for open-source coding and rare refuge from censorship in China. There they discuss why to run, where to run and how to run, archiving stories of successful emigration to various countries. To run is not to seek pleasure or profit, one essay states, but to escape a country that is speeding in the wrong direction. “Surely a sheep that has been hurt by beating can try to flee?” it asks. “Therein lies the truth of run.” But to run is easier said than done. Flights out of China are few and expensive. America has tightened visa restrictions on Chinese students over exaggerated fears of spying. In the name of pandemic prevention, China is also making it harder for citizens to move around. Since 2020 the National Immigration Administration has stopped issuing travel documents for “non-essential reasons”. The agency handed out 335,000 passports in the first half of 2021, only 2% of the number issued over the same period in 2019. The authorities in one city, Leiyang, have been confiscating citizens’ passports to prevent travel. “We’ll return them after the pandemic is over,” says a public-security official. Would-be emigrants know that they are in the minority. A young finance worker in Beijing says her peers “see no future” in China. But most Chinese, especially older generations, are “numb”, she says. Ms Wang fears that leaving would mean losing touch with her parents. “Calm your heart,” her mother scolds her on WeChat. “Fill it with home, parents and motherland, find a steady job and you’ll be fine.”

A white-collar worker in Shanghai used to take his freedom for granted. It was “something to chat about over a pint”, he says. Now, stuck at home and lacking food, he fears being taken to an isolation centre if he tests positive for covid. Yet in China, he laments, memories are short. People will forget about the chaos in Shanghai; the government will maintain its strict covid controls. Such despair is why some Chinese are looking to run. ■

W ITH EACH day that fresh blood is shed in Ukraine, it becomes more painfully clear that China and the West have clashing notions of how to preserve world peace. Since President Vladimir Putin first invaded his neighbour, hopeful voices in some Western capitals have called China an ideal mediator between Russia and Ukraine. Such optimists cite the supposed pragmatism of the modern Chinese Communist Party. They note the ties of trade and investment that bind the Chinese economy to Russia, Ukraine and wider Europe, and conclude that brokering peace is in China’s self-interest. Alas, their elegant arguments cannot overcome a stark and ugly point of difference. Most Western governments and citizens want Mr Putin to lose in Ukraine, and to pay an instructively high price for his aggression. China’s rulers want the opposite.

In part, Chinese sympathy for Russia—ill concealed behind protestations of neutrality—is explained by domestic politics. In February President Xi Jinping and Mr Putin declared a partnership with “no limits” between their countries. Mr Xi calls Russia’s boss his closest friend, seeing a kindred spirit in a fellow autocrat obsessed with traditional values and national revival. This is a sensitive year, during which Mr Xi is expected to secure a third term as party chief: an awkward time for him to be linked to a loser.

Nor does it suit China’s ruling party to concede that Russia is committing war crimes. Chinese officials insist that America caused Ukraine’s invasion by enlarging NATO up to Russia’s borders. The Chinese public is assured that the West is now prolonging the conflict to enrich American arms dealers, while Russian troops are praised for their restraint. Despite these efforts to turn reality on its head, the Chinese foreign-policy establishment does not deeply respect Russia, a country seen as admirably tough but in sad decline. As Chinese scholars tell it, America and the West may be trying to contain Russia now, but their main target is surely China, a far more important country. As a result, China has selfish reasons to root for Mr Putin to avoid paying a high price for aggression. Such an outcome may be the result of a Ukrainian surrender, the crumbling of Western unity or the flopping of international sanctions. China is strikingly indifferent to Ukraine’s suffering, but really wants to see the containment of Russia fail.

More disruptively for the world at large, China is growing more willing to adopt Russian arguments about how to organise a global security order. On April 21st Mr Xi presented a new “Global Security Initiative” to the Boao Forum for Asia, a Chinese gathering of bigwigs. Mr Xi’s initiative is dense, brow-furrowing stuff. He calls for a security order that is “common, comprehensive, co-operative and sustainable” and declares humanity “an indivisible security community”. This slab of party-speak is sprinkled with bromides about respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity that sound rich coming from a friend of Mr Putin’s.

Mr Xi’s speech is a code. Governments from Europe to Japan and Australia should take it seriously, for it is China’s latest bid to delegitimise the American-led defence alliances and treaties that have guaranteed their security for decades. Much of Mr Xi’s new initiative builds on “Asia for the Asians” arguments that China has promoted in its home region for years. In a commentary on his boss’s Global Security Initiative, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, traced the lineage of common, comprehensive, co-operative and sustainable security back to a “New Asian Security Concept” offered by Mr Xi in 2014 to the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia ( CICA ), a multinational forum.

Eight years ago Mr Xi called for Asian countries to shun defence alliances that include some countries but exclude others (the meaning of calls for common and co-operative security) and to handle disputes by dialogue (ie, prodding them to bargain one-on-one with China, their giant neighbour). Mr Xi’s CICA speech included the declaration: “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia”—an unusually bald hint for America to leave the region.

In contrast, Mr Xi’s talk of indivisible security is a more recent addition to China’s lexicon, and echoes Russian talking points about Europe. Europeans have debated indivisible security, the idea that countries should not ignore other nations’ legitimate security interests, ever since cold-war efforts to set ground rules for Soviet co-existence with the West. Russia’s definition of indivisible security is self-serving: a demand for a say over any European defence arrangements that offset Russia’s offensive capabilities. A Western diplomat summarises the argument as: “You can never be secure, as long as we do not feel secure.”

Building a world with impunity for great powers

Since the Ukraine crisis began Chinese diplomats have called for a “balanced, effective and sustainable European security architecture”. The same phrase then turned up in Mr Xi’s Global Security Initiative, shorn of European references. China has been studying Europe, says Wang Yiwei of Renmin University, and thinks that security deals there must involve Russia, as one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council, or the UN will lose its meaning. Indeed, for global agreements outside Europe to endure, China thinks that all five of those powers should be consulted, alongside such bodies as the African Union, Professor Wang suggests.

There is an obvious objection to a world order that grants veto rights to America, Britain, China, France and Russia, the five permanent Security Council members. Because the five agree about little, an international community that needs UN permission to act will often struggle to intervene. That would not break China’s heart, or Russia’s: both loathe Western powers acting as global policemen. China suspects that many developing countries agree, and will applaud its Global Security Initiative. America and its allies call their united actions over Ukraine proof that the West is not finished just yet. China sees a chance to prove them wrong. ■

China goes on the offensive over human rights (Apr 16th)

T HE ARRIVAL of a new sheriff is not always a joyous occasion—at least in the films of John Ford or Clint Eastwood. Usually, it means something has gone terribly wrong. But in New Orleans it is another chance for a parade.

On May 2nd a crowd lined Canal Street as marching bands, sheriff’s deputies on motorcycles and costumed revellers reminiscent of Mardi Gras headed towards the Mississippi. They were escorting the city’s new sheriff, Susan Hutson, to her inauguration. After defeating a 17-year incumbent, Marlin Gusman, in last year’s election, Ms Hutson is the first female sheriff in New Orleans’s 304-year history, and the first African-American female sheriff in the state of Louisiana.

Her reward is to oversee the Orleans Justice Centre, a jail with a history of violence and mismanagement. Ms Hutson promises a more humane approach to the incarcerated. Though she is not the first such progressive sheriff, Ms Hutson’s new jurisdiction is among the largest. Her experience will be closely watched.

Faced with overcrowding in the 1970s, Louisiana shifted many inmates from state prisons to city jails. The New Orleans jail population swelled, peaking at more than 6,000 in 2005. Hurricane Katrina that year brought nightmarish reports of inmates waist-deep in flood water. Violence, organised crime and poor sanitation plagued the jail for years. Following a class-action lawsuit brought by ten prisoners, Mr Gusman agreed to a consent decree with the Department of Justice in 2012, under which the sheriff’s office promised to improve conditions. The presiding federal district-court judge, Lance Africk, described the jail as “an indelible stain on the community”.

A decade later, the consent decree has still not been lifted. The jail, though it now has just under 1,000 inmates, remains dangerous. Force is often used to break up fights. An average of three inmates a year have died in custody since 2014, nearly all from drug overdoses, suicide or preventable medical emergencies. Short staffing and high turnover lead to lapses in security. A surge in crime may put the jail under even greater pressure. More than 90 murders have been recorded in New Orleans this year, the worst four-month stretch to start a year since 2005.

Unlike most sheriffs, Ms Hutson has never served in law enforcement. From 2010 she worked as the independent monitor for the New Orleans Police Department, itself under a consent decree since 2012. “I don’t look at everything through a blue lens, but I’ve worked around law enforcement long enough to know the standards,” she says. Inspired by the protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, she decided to challenge Mr Gusman.

Her campaign stressed improving medical services for prisoners, including mental health. She pledged to give them full visitation rights, minimise the use of force by deputies and provide housing that accords with an inmate’s self-identified gender. She also vowed to bring the office into compliance with the consent decree. But she opposes a $50m expansion of the jail that would add 89 beds for mental-health services, the construction of which was ordered by Judge Africk and supported by Mr Gusman. Ms Hutson argues that the money would be better spent on upgrading the city’s dilapidated structures and she will seek to appeal against the move.

So after the festivities, she will have her hands full. “Jails are like big freighter ships moving down the Mississippi, they need continuous attention to shift course,” says Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. If the city’s crime surge continues, residents may become more receptive to Ms Hutson’s critics, who believe a gentler approach to inmates will only embolden criminals. In the films, it is not long before a new sheriff faces a showdown. ■

G HANA HAS a curious problem: it produces too much electricity. Under the terms of opaque contracts with generating companies, the government has been paying over $500m a year for power that is never used. That is odd, because the country is hardly awash with energy. The average Ghanaian uses as much electricity in a year as an American does in a fortnight. Although access has expanded rapidly, more than a quarter of rural households are not connected to the grid.

The biggest obstacle to economic development is often inadequate resources. But not always. In Ghana, generating power has proved much easier than distributing it. So, too, in several east African countries, including Uganda, where installed capacity is nearly double peak demand—and your correspondent sits writing this in a blackout. Electricity is not the only industry where resources are sometimes plentiful, and needs are obvious, but demand does not join up with supply. Call it the paradox of untapped riches: surplus and shortage, existing side by side.

Seeking hide

This riddle is most apparent in parts of the economy where the market ought to link up supply and demand. Yet in many cases lorries sit idle on roadsides, even as traders cannot find vehicles to carry their goods. Or factories run short of supplies even though the resources they need seem plentiful. Ethiopia has more livestock than anywhere else in Africa and the tanneries to turn hides into leather. Yet some of its shoe and glove makers import leather from as far afield as China. “Most of the raw hides and skins are supplied from household backyard slaughter,” explains Tesfaye Birhanu of the Leather Industry Development Institute in Addis Ababa, the capital. These can be ruined by bacteria within six hours of slaughter if not treated properly.

Even Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, cannot escape the paradox. In 2016 his conglomerate opened a tomato-processing plant in northern Nigeria to turn the country’s vast crop of fresh fruit—half of which rots each year because of poor handling and storage—into the tinned paste that is currently imported. But a shortage of tomatoes forced the factory to shut down within months because of a crop failure caused by a voracious moth. Several years later the factory was still operating at a fraction of its capacity because of problems in getting enough tomatoes of the right quality.

A different variation of this paradox also arises in state-managed markets, like electricity, where governments have struggled to forecast supply and demand, and to build the infrastructure linking the two. It also appears within government institutions themselves. Because of poor management, health ministries in Africa fail to use about a fifth of the budget they are allocated, despite hospitals running short of medicines. The underspend is similar in agriculture ministries, sometimes for the simple reason that money for farm inputs such as subsidised fertiliser is released after crops have been planted.

Another mismatch is in infrastructure. Governments and investors often have money to spend. And demand for roads, ports and the like continues to grow. But bankable projects—the link between the two—are in short supply. “There is funding, a large pipeline, and a need for spending, but not enough money is being spent,” argue analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy. They reckon 80% of African infrastructure projects fail at the feasibility and business-plan stage; fewer than 10% reach the point of funding. Even high-profile schemes can stutter. By 2020, at the end of the first eight-year phase of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa, an initiative led by the African Development Bank, construction had started on fewer than half the planned projects.

In a survey by the European Investment Bank, more than 60% of African banks say that a lack of “bankable” projects significantly constrains their lending to small businesses; a similar proportion of entrepreneurs tell World Bank researchers that they cannot get a loan when they need one.

What do these diverse examples have in common? One obvious theme is broken connections—quite literally, in the case of power grids. A quarter of the electricity that is sold in Ghana is lost due to derelict distribution infrastructure and theft, estimates Theo Acheampong, an energy economist at Aberdeen University. Bad roads and grasping middlemen stand between farmers and buyers.

Sometimes the missing link is information, such as the credit histories that would help banks assess the riskiness of would-be borrowers. A second lesson is that quality trumps quantity. Yes, Ethiopia has a lot of cows, but they need to be kept healthy and slaughtered skilfully if their hides are to be turned into brogues.

A few rotten tomatoes

None of these obstacles is insurmountable. Farmerline, a Ghanaian firm, uses technology to connect farmers, their suppliers, lorry drivers, warehouses and buyers. “We know how much food people are growing ahead of time, we know the location,” says Alloysius Attah, its co-founder. “It gives us an edge on how we plan our supply chain.” Tomato Jos, a startup in central Nigeria, is trying to crack the tomato-paste conundrum. It spent years talking to and then training farmers before its first tin rolled off the production line. “It’s not as simple as just setting up a factory and mopping up supply,” says Mira Mehta, its American founder. “Roads are horrible, market information is bad, tomatoes are perishable. You have to actually control your supply chain.”

Unclogging bottlenecks is often unglamorous, costly work that businesses are loth to do on their own because it will benefit free-riding competitors. “There has to be an intentional effort from government to support the market,” says Ed Brown of the African Centre for Economic Transformation, a think-tank in Accra, Ghana’s capital. In farming that may mean enforcing standards, or providing support and credit to help build up a whole supply chain. Mr Brown notes the success of Ethiopia and Kenya in developing cool storage at airports, which allows farmers to export flowers and fresh vegetables to Europe.

Economists have long known that resources alone do not make a country rich. African economies already have many of the pieces of the growth jigsaw. What matters is how they slot together. ■

A MID THE horrors of the 2016 presidential election, Evan McMullin offered a moment of relief. The former CIA officer and Republican congressional staffer had watched in horror as his party traded its principles for Donald Trump. When it became clear that no Republican leader would resist him, Mr McMullin launched an independent run of his own. He entered the race just three months before the election, with little name-recognition or money, yet won half a million votes in the 11 states where his name was on the ballot (and over 200,000 write-in votes where it wasn’t), including a fifth of the total in his native Utah. The state’s senior Republican senator, Mike Lee, voted for him.

Now Mr McMullin has Mr Lee in his sights. His protest vote long forgotten, the senator has become an arch Trump toady and conspirator. A Mormon, like most Utah Republicans, Mr Lee has compared the former president to a mythical Mormon hero, Captain Moroni. Text messages leaked last month suggested that the senator was up to his neck in Mr Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. Few Republican politicians have fallen further into the Trumpist mire. So Mr McMullin is standing against him at the mid-term elections in November. “Utah is a state founded by my ancestors in the mid-1800s and many others who fled persecution,” he told Lexington. “We know the value of our system of self-government better than many. We cannot be represented by someone who is trying to destroy it.”

He is again running as an independent, but with a couple of differences. In 2016 he sought to rally his fellow conservatives against Mr Trump for the sake of conservatism and the country. He was for gun rights and against federal efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet, having apparently concluded that conservatism is beyond saving, he is now trying to woo moderates of all parties and none. “A majority of Utahns want to replace Mike Lee but they are divided between political factions,” he says. “Our strategy is to unite them into a single voting bloc.”

So far, it is working. Though Utah’s conservatives are less resistant to Mr Trump than they were, a minority still back Mr McMullin. They might include the state’s other senator, Mitt Romney, who has suggested he will not endorse either his Republican Senate colleague or Mr McMullin, because both are “friends”. Even better for Mr McMullin, Utah’s Democrats voted on April 23rd not to field a candidate against him.

A two-horse race could be tight. Mr Lee’s approval ratings are poor and the senator could be further bruised by next month’s Republican primary, at which his secretive role in Mr Trump’s post-electoral machinations will receive fresh scrutiny. This is a remarkable development in a state that has not had a competitive Senate race since 1976.

Mr Lee’s campaign is naturally trying to define Mr McMullin as a shifty opportunist. In response, the challenger presents his change of tack as a recognition that politics is now less a struggle between right and left than between extremism and moderation. He makes a compelling point. Mr Trump is unrestrained, has no ideology and his party is in thrall to him. By contrast, the Democrats are a broad ideological coalition, including conservatives such as Joe Manchin and democratic socialists, which accepts compromise and restraint, however grumblingly, as its only means to stick together. The rise of Joe Biden, an ageing moderate whom few Democrats love but most can live with, is emblematic of the party’s pragmatism.

So is the decision of Utah’s Democrats to tacitly embrace Mr McMullin (at the urging of the state’s most recent Democratic congressman, Ben McAdams). All the more so, it might seem, because Mr McMullin has not significantly revised his conservative views. Three of his five priorities—cutting government waste, keeping America safe, and protecting air and water—are standard Republican talking points. And the other two, strengthening democracy and reducing health-care costs, are hardly left-wing. It is a reminder that Democrats and moderate Republicans, a dwindling but extant species, could govern together perfectly well if their fanatical colleagues would only allow it. Indeed, in Utah, which has a strong tradition of bipartisanship despite its conservatism, they quite often do.

The arrangement looks particularly significant given how hard the Democrats are finding it to win a governing majority on their own. In the Senate, the fact that most states lean to the right, though most Americans vote on the left, gives the Republicans a huge advantage. Senate Democrats have therefore spent much of the past two years debating possible structural reforms to correct such anomalies, for example by scrapping the filibuster in order to grant statehood to staunchly Democratic Washington, DC . Yet to make any reform they need unanimity, given their paper-thin Senate majority, and their most conservative member, Mr Manchin, is not on board. Lending Democratic votes to a pragmatic independent such as Mr McMullin in places where Democratic candidates cannot win looks like a useful second-best option. It could give the Democrats a serious governing partner, as Mr McMullin promises to be, or at least fewer hard-right opponents like Mr Lee.

Reform by stealth

It is also hard to see what the Democrats could lose from the arrangement. Their 35% share of the vote in Utah—and 40% in Louisiana and in Missouri and so on—is currently wasted. Many Democratic voters therefore do not bother to turn out in such places, making it difficult for the party to win the down-ballot contests that it otherwise might. Providing its supporters with a novel winning option, albeit in the form of an independent candidate, should help the party correct this. “I do believe that this is a model for defending our democratic republic from the anti-democracy far-right,” says Mr McMullin. He may just be right. ■

Ken Paxton’s bid for re-election is a test of Texas Republicans’ values (Apr 16th)

I T IS A stealthy killer. When the heart’s chambers beat out of sync, blood pools and clots may form. Atrial fibrillation causes a quarter of more than 100,000 strokes in Britain each year. Most of those would never happen if the heart arrhythmia were treated, but first it has to be found. Tests are costly and inaccurate, but Apple Watches, and soon Fitbits, can detect it, are far cheaper and can save those whose lives are in danger.

This is just one example of the revolution about to transform medicine. Smartwatches and -rings, fitness trackers and a rapidly growing array of electronically enhanced straps, patches and other “wearables” can record over 7,500 physiological and behavioural variables. Some of them are more useful than others, obviously, but, as our Technology Quarterly in this issue explains, machine learning can filter a torrent of data to reveal a continuous, quantified picture of you and your health.

These are early days for the quantified self, and for investors in digital health it is still a wild ride. Witness the recent collapse in the share price of Teladoc, which provides online consultations, a worrying sign for other would-be disrupters. But for patients the innovation in wearable devices has just begun. Individual firms may come and go, but wearables and artificial intelligence look set to reshape health care in three big ways: early diagnosis, personalised treatment and the management of chronic disease. Each promises to lower costs and save lives.

Start with early diagnosis. Wearables can detect subtle changes that otherwise go unnoticed, leading to less severe disease and cheaper treatment. Sensors will reveal if an older person’s balance is starting to weaken. People’s gait and arm-swing change in early-stage Parkinson’s. Strength exercise can help prevent falls and broken limbs. Psychiatric diagnosis may be enhanced by tracking patterns of smartphone use—without monitoring what people see or type. A smart ring can help a woman conceive, by predicting her menstrual cycle. It can also detect pregnancy less than a week after conception (many women continue to drink or smoke for weeks before they realise they are pregnant).

Then there is the promise of seeing people as individuals, not clones of the theoretical, average human. Most drugs work in just 30-50% of patients. In one person, regularly eating bananas moderates blood sugar; in another, it raises blood sugar to levels that, over time, can cause harm. Algorithms can turn reams of data from wearables into bespoke prescriptions and diets for losing weight, controlling diabetes and so on. These regimes are more effective, less limiting and hence easier to follow than the one-size-fits-all kind. When doctors can see into a patient’s body in real time all the time, they can provide better care. In a German trial this sort of monitoring of heart-failure patients reduced mortality and the days spent in hospital by a third.

And wearables can transform chronic diseases, such as diabetes. Some 80% of disease can be prevented by changes in how people lead their lives. Apps use small devices and clever tactics of the sort employed by a personal trainer or a shrewd spouse to get people to move more, eat better and sleep more soundly. Inducing even small increases in exercise is good: adding 1,000 steps (0.7km) a day reduces mortality by 6-36% depending on how sedentary you are. Continuous monitoring also shifts the balance of care from what doctors can do in the brief occasional office consultation to what patients can do for themselves day in, day out. America spends $10,000-20,000 a year per patient with diabetes and about $280bn a year nationally, half the entire public-school budget. A diabetes-control app has been shown to reduce the cost per patient by $1,400-5,000.

The scale of all these benefits promises to be vast. Just how vast will become clearer as wearables create data, leading to innovation. The reason for optimism is that the technology is ripe. Some 200m devices were sold in 2020 and twice as many are expected to sell in 2026. One in four Americans has a wearable device. Smartphones serve as a platform for innovators. Within a year or two the device on your wrist may be measuring non-invasively your blood sugar, alcohol and hydration, as well as various markers of inflammation, kidney and liver function—all of which currently require blood to be drawn. As wearables acquire more features, users are less likely to lose interest in them and shove them into the back of a drawer.

As with any technology, wearables bring worries. Health data are valuable; they could be abused by device-makers, insurers or governments interested in social control. The techno logy may not reach the poor and those who lead chaotic lives—the people who need it most. But the greatest worry is that the bureaucracy of health care gets in the way.

The first responsibility for powering forward lies with the market. And developers are indeed starting to pay for rigorous studies that demonstrate the safety, efficacy and value of their technology. A cottage industry that ranks devices and apps on, say, clinical efficacy and privacy is helping doctors, insurers and governments sort good from bad.

But health-care professionals also have a vital role. Health care is a conservative industry—and rightly so, given the stakes. Yet it risks slowing the uptake of digital medicine not for legitimate concerns about safety, but because of the inertia of regulators, standards bodies, insurers and medical schools.

An app a day

Rules are needed to make data ownership and use more transparent, so that people understand and control what happens with their information. Standards can help guide developers to produce usable devices. Patients’ data need to be tied into medical-record systems, which are often clunky. Practitioners need treatment protocols on how to use the new tech. Doctors must be trained and reimbursed for offering digital treatments and reviewing data. Governments and insurers must work out how to build the technology into subsidised health-care systems so busy fighting fires that they struggle to invest in prevention.

It is a long and daunting list. But the pay-off, in money and well-being, is likely to be huge. Time to roll up sleeves and prepare health care for the era of the quantified self. ■

Sign up for David’s newsletter, The Third Rail, here.We do not know if Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health represents the current consensus of a majority of the Supreme Court. We certainly don’t know yet if it’s a preview of the Court’s actual ruling. Decisions are not final until opinions are issued, and dramatic history exists of a Supreme Court justice changing his mind on abortion during deliberations. In 1992, The Washington Post reported that Justice Anthony Kennedy initially voted to reverse Roe v. Wade when deciding Planned Parenthood v. Casey but later switched his vote to affirm Roe, “a flip attributed in court circles to liberal constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe’s pulling strings backstage.”Even so, Alito’s draft is consequential. It not only represents a potential preview of one of the most significant Court decisions in a generation, but also articulates a compelling understanding of the nature of liberty and the role of the judiciary in American constitutional law.[Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century]First, it’s important to understand the question before the Supreme Court. It is not “Should American women possess a right to abortion?” but “Does the American Constitution protect abortion rights?” The distinction is of paramount importance. The Court’s job is not to determine which rights we should possess but rather the rights we do possess.A surface reading of the Constitution would indicate an easy answer to the question. Because the Constitution doesn’t even mention abortion, how can one argue that it protects a right to an abortion? Don’t we have to locate the right in the text itself?But the matter is not so simple, and the reason relates to the basic theory of American liberty. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex debate, the quick explanation is that many of the Founders viewed the Constitution as reserving “all rights and powers that were not positively granted to the federal government” to the people or the states. In plain English, this means that the Constitution did not need to spell out our individual rights. They existed unless a constitutional provision declared otherwise.Anti-federalists, however, insisted on the Bill of Rights as a belt-and-suspenders safeguard against federal encroachment. By spelling out (some) of our fundamental liberties, the citizens of the new republic could be assured that the federal government would be restrained. And how do we know that the Bill of Rights didn’t outline all of our liberties? Because the Ninth Amendment specifically states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”In Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court located the right to an abortion in the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment prohibits any state from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Prior courts have used this provision of the Constitution as the textual hook to protect not just procedural rights but unenumerated substantive rights, including rights to interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and contraceptives.In his draft opinion, Alito calls this approach “controversial” (after all, the due-process clause says nothing about substantive rights) but accepts the conceptual approach anyway. He notes that Court precedent has protected “two categories” of substantive rights.The first category is the list of liberties guaranteed by the first eight amendments in the Bill of Rights. That category doesn’t apply to abortion, which isn’t mentioned in the Bill of Rights. The second category refers to those rights “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and “essential to our Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered liberty.’”Alito’s opinion represents a thorough dismantling of the idea that—prior to Roe—abortion rights were rooted at all in American history and tradition, much less “deeply rooted.” In fact, the deep roots that exist are of state regulation and prohibition of abortion. The draft opinion concludes with a 31-page appendix listing statutes that criminalized abortion in “all states of pregnancy” when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868.[Rachel Rebouché and Mary Ziegler: There’s no knowing what will happen when Roe falls]The draft opinion also rejects the idea that the right to an abortion is an “integral part of a broader, entrenched right.” Alito distinguishes the long line of cases recognizing the rights to interracial marriage; to obtaining contraceptives; to engaging in private, consensual sexual acts; and to same-sex marriage by noting that abortion “destroys” what Roe and Casey call “potential life” and what the Mississippi law at issue in the current case “regards as the life of ‘an unborn human being.’”It’s the impact on the unborn child that sets apart Dobbs, the case on which Alito wrote his draft opinion, from, say, Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court’s ruling on same-sex unions. Gay marriage involves consenting adults. No unborn child consents to his or her own destruction.The inherent weaknesses of Roe’s approach have long been recognized even by the strongest defenders of abortion rights. In 1992, for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized Roe as a “breathtaking” precedent during a speech at New York University.Her lecture addressed “measured third-branch decision making,” and she spoke words that have proved remarkably prescient. “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable,” she said. And what was a prime example of a too-swiftly shaped doctrinal limb? Roe v. Wade. “A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day … might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.”If Alito’s draft opinion answers whether the Constitution does protect abortion, it does not answer whether states should protect abortion. Voices on the right argue that the Constitution should be read to prohibit abortion entirely—and at least one amicus brief made that very argument—but Alito does not go that far. His opinion would leave the ultimate legality of abortion to the democratic process, to state legislatures and to Congress.And that brings us to the final key element of Alito’s opinion. He calls abortion “a profound moral question,” but it’s one that he does not settle. He does not believe that it is the role of the judiciary to settle such questions.Here is where the differences between conservative and progressive jurists are perhaps starkest. Going back to Justice Ginsburg’s 1992 remarks, she argued (quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes) that “judges do and must legislate.” Even though Justice Ginsburg argued for a change slower and more interstitial than Roe, conservative justices such as Alito would still strenuously disagree.Instead, enacting legal change is precisely the role of the people’s elected representatives. Legislation is for the legislature, and if the people of the United States want to create a right to abortion, they have that power. They had that power before Roe, and if Alito’s opinion holds, they will still have that power.

“Information laundering is really quite ferocious/It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious/By saying them in Congress or a mainstream outlet so disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious.”
These are the lyrics to a ditty composed by Nina Jankowicz, the executive director of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, a new body that was introduced to the public on 27 April. In a video released on her TikTok channel, Jankowicz sings with gusto, setting her disinformation anthem to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from Disney’s Mary Poppins. 
The choice of a song from children’s fiction is apt. In the world-view that Jankowicz is promoting, disinformation is a matter of goodies and baddies – the former tell the truth, while the latter tell lies. Her Disinformation Governance Board is on a mission to vanquish these “hucksters”. It is Disney all the way down. 
What’s notable about the examples presented by Jankowicz – both in her song, and in her writings and public statements – is that only one side of the political aisle seems to be responsible for spreading disinformation. “Most of the disinformation that we’ve seen, this highly emotionally manipulative content, is coming from the right,” she said in November 2020. So while Jankowicz is quick to describe scepticism about the coronavirus vaccine or the security of mail-in balloting as disinformation, I have not been able to find any instances of her condemning disinformation spread by left-leaning media outlets or politicians. 
Examples of the latter do exist. It was comically misleading, for example, for CNN to broadcast its reporter standing in front of burning cars during the Black Lives Matter protests in August 2020, which the news ticker on the screen was simultaneously describing as “fiery but mostly peaceful”. Then there was that long period of time during which the Covid-19 lab leak hypothesis was considered to be a “debunked conspiracy theory”, until all of a sudden it wasn’t. Early in the pandemic, Jankowicz herself suggested on Twitter that promoting the utility of masks constituted “disinfo” before the rapid U-turn in public health advice that led to the introduction of mask mandates. It is straightforwardly wrong to suggest that the clash between left and right maps neatly on to the clash between truth-tellers and liars.
Which is not to say that disinformation isn’t a real thing. The term was once used primarily to describe efforts by government intelligence agencies to undermine enemy states through deliberate deception. In the early 2000s, the word entered mainstream US politics and began to be used as a synonym for propaganda. Jankowicz is now among those speaking in sometimes apocalyptic terms about the threat that disinformation poses to the American nation (“Facebook Groups are Destroying America” is the headline of a piece she wrote for Wired in 2020).
The problem with swapping out the word “propaganda” and replacing it with “disinformation” is that doing so obscures the role of political power. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has triggered panic among many of the people most concerned about disinformation – the former head of global news at Twitter, Vivian Schiller, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the prospect filled her with “existential dread”.
Musk’s critics are terrified of the possibility that his apparent commitment to free speech is actually a cover for the promotion of harmful speech, including disinformation. Both sides of this conflict are representing themselves as defenders of fundamental virtues, with one side (Musk’s) concerned with protecting free speech, while the other side (Jankowicz’s) concerned with protecting the public from hostile actors. This framing suggests a politically neutral contest.
But there is nothing politically neutral about it. The Disinformation Governance Board is actually tasked not with defending the American people from lies, but rather with defending the American people from statements that Jankowicz and her political allies believe to be lies, which is not at all the same thing.
This does not mean that Jankowicz is insincere – far from it. I’m quite sure that she genuinely understands herself to be in battle with the “ferocious” and “atrocious” creatures of the night. There is no conspiracy to suppress the speech of the Joe Biden administration’s domestic enemies – at least, not a conscious one. There is a system at work here, but it is a system that works in peculiar ways. 
There is a concept that can help us understand what is going on – a concept developed by an American software engineer called Curtis Yarvin. He doesn’t have an academic position and he hasn’t published any books, at least not in analogue form. Instead, he has written hundreds of thousands of words online, some of which have been synthesised into ebooks that are available to download for free.
Despite his outsider status, Yarvin is perhaps one of the most influential political philosophers of this century, and a highly controversial figure. A recent Vanity Fair feature on what has been dubbed the “New Right” details Yarvin’s impact, not only on powerful figures such as the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, but also on a cool and youthful crowd who have turned against progressivism and are now forming something of a counter-elite. 
One of Yarvin’s most influential ideas is concerned with what he calls “the cathedral”. Our pre-Reformation forebears had the Catholic Church, and the Soviets had the Politburo, and we too have a nexus of powerful institutions that govern us: the media and the academy. But our cathedral has no central administrator. There is no conspiracy.
Instead, there is a group of clever and ambitious people all competing for status within elite institutions, and this process of competition tends to produce ideological conformity across those institutions. The cathedral “has a Party line without a Party”, writes Yarvin, and “if you’ve ever met any of the officially authorized bearers, you know that the last thing they think of themselves as being is ‘officially authorized bearers’.”
You don’t have to agree with the rest of Yarvin’s writings to see that the cathedral metaphor has explanatory power. It explains, for instance, how Jankowicz – an officially authorised bearer if ever there was one – can be put in charge of a propaganda department and not realise it. Because ideological conformity makes the ideology invisible, turning political conflict into a simple matter of truth and lies.
[See also: How social media influencers are trying to combat the myths and misinformation around sex]

(Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,As readers here surely know (and as we’ve covered here repeatedly), inflation is unquestionably the top economic issue in the country right now, and it has been for quite a while. In fact, we’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the first time I dug into the risk of the U.S. economy “overheating” in the months ahead (a piece that, in retrospect, holds up pretty well!). And it seems that not a day goes by that there isn’t some sort of breaking news about inflation in the U.S., whether it’s on new data, Federal Reserve stuff, legislative or executive branch actions, or the political ramifications. On the last two items, in particular, it’s become increasingly clear that rising prices are issue No. 1 for American voters and, therefore, Washington politicians—including the president—already eyeing the November midterms. So why, then, does the Biden administration keep doing things to boost, not mute, inflationary pressures?Inflation Update: Still Frothy Out ThereBefore we get to that, however, let’s briefly recap where things now stand. After several months of uncomfortably high inflation in 2021 deflated summertime hopes that price gains would be “transitory”, the Federal Reserve earlier this year began raising interest rates and just recently signaled that it will not only increase the magnitude of future rate increases (from a quarter point to half a point) but will also begin reducing its “mammoth” $9 trillion portfolio of Treasury and mortgage securities (acquired to implement “quantitative easing”). They’re meeting today to confirm these plans, the goal of which is to temper domestic demand while avoiding a “hard landing” that pushes the U.S. economy into a recession. The balancing act will not be easy.

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Complaints about the intensity of political debate are widespread in the United States—and in that vast portion of global media that mirrors and magnifies American culture. The diagnoses are familiar. We split into rival partisan teams, between which there can be no rational exchange of ideas that might lead to compromise or conversion. New problems, as soon as they appear, get subsumed into this rivalry. Even a crisis like the war in Ukraine does not silence culture warriors and political activists.

Yet, this pitch of polemical intensity, far from offering citizens alternatives to the status quo, distracts us from taking real action. Excessively informed about contemporary crises, we are, to an unprecedented degree, disconnected from the structures and institutions through which mass political power has historically been built. We are both intensely “politicized” and incapable of what once was considered the stuff of real politics: the organization of grievances and desires into a rational strategy for reorienting government policy and reshaping our common life.

A tempting solution to this dilemma would be to retreat into private life. Voltaire told us to “cultivate our gardens,” and today we hear that we should “log off,” “touch grass,” and “take the grill pill.” That we often encounter this advice online from people who are themselves deep in the partisan slough might give us pause. More importantly, such quietism presupposes that hyper-partisanship is a personal moral failing rather than an understandable response to our material circumstances.

But the truth is the opposite: those material conditions create the warped political subjectivities characteristic of our age. Understanding this is crucial to avoiding moralizing injunctions and, perhaps, to discovering a means of restoring both the sanctity of private life and the efficacy of politics.

One feature of our intensive politicization is that it disconnects the expression of attitudes, preferences, and identities, on the one hand, from collective projects to influence policy and reshape society on the other. Being “political” means airing one’s views and publicly taking sides. Whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her “Tax the Rich” Met Gala dress or Madison Cawthorn punching a tree, political action means producing attention-getting images. Our elected officials’ distorted sense of politics reflects that of ordinary people, who seem increasingly to imagine politics as a mode of self-expression rather than as coordination toward shared goals. Coordination, of course, would require individuals to discipline themselves, to moderate their insistence on their own uniqueness, and to subordinate their own desires to a greater good.

Such restraint is the essence of politics as traditionally understood. In his 1919 lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” the sociologist Max Weber insisted that politics has nothing to do with self-expression. Political activity, he argued, is a domain of human life with its own rules. In the ethical or aesthetic domains, we try to express our relationship to values like goodness or beauty, cultivating ourselves as spiritually pure or creative individuals. In politics, however, we are responsible for articulating and achieving common goals, which requires us to appeal to—and coerce—others. Effective political action requires, according to Weber, setting aside our individual standards of right and wrong when necessary. Though we might personally abhor violence, for example, governing means using an implicit threat of force to compel citizens to act in certain ways. And while we may think that lying is a sin, politicians can never be entirely honest.

Anyone who wants to get involved in politics, for Weber, must know that they will not be able to maintain entirely a personal ethical code. They will have to accept the rules of the political domain in order to acquire power to fulfill their goals. The fundamental error of political actors, he warns, is “vanity,” or an investment in their own image, which “begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication.” The vain politician is “constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions. . . . His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power.”

Our leaders today seem stricken with vanity, combining attention-seeking with practical impotence. One has only to compare the zest with which figures such as Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi seek the spotlight to their inability to steer the American ship of state effectively. But ordinary people, too, are caught up in this desire for the “glamorous semblance” of power disconnected from any common goals and responsibilities. Indeed, many of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers have described this condition as “narcissism” and have diagnosed it as the characteristic pathology of our age.

In his Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud defined narcissism as a perverse over-investment in one’s own image. He associated it with depression, arguing that as individuals withdraw their interest from the external world, often in the aftermath of some disappointing experience, they frequently reorient their attention to themselves. Unable to create a satisfying reality, they try to maintain a pristine self-image.

Such efforts are doomed to fail, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out in her account of narcissism in The Second Sex. Arguing that women are particularly vulnerable to narcissism in a sexist society that limits their ambition, Beauvoir noted that narcissists only seem to turn inward. In fact, they desperately need external validation to maintain their precarious sense of themselves. People who cannot find satisfaction and a sense of identity through their activity in the real world, she warned, will not be able to find them in the cultivation of a positive self-image. Women who seek validation from men, for instance, however fascinating they may be to men in the short-term, will inevitably spoil their own efforts with their unsatisfiable demands, making their partners and themselves miserable.

Beauvoir hoped that, as opportunities for women in the workforce grew, narcissism would cease to be a problem. Instead, as Christopher Lasch observed in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, narcissism became the general condition of late-twentieth-century life. Lasch argued that in the face of growing economic and cultural precarity (evidenced by the stagnation of wages, decline of unions, and more general erosion of institutions for civic association such as clubs and churches), individuals could no longer count on their professional roles or identities within their families and communities to sustain their sense of self. What looked to some optimistic observers as a blossoming of self-expression and alternative lifestyles—gay liberation, feminism, and the more general vogue for therapeutic self-exploration—was, from Lasch’s perspective, a desperate attempt by lonely, vulnerable people to replace material and psychic security with the illusory security of a self that, amid the uncertainties of a world in flux, could at least be known and declared to others.

The “vanity” denounced by Weber, in other words, is not an individual shortcoming but an understandable psychological response to a disordered society. Mass hyper-politicization, in this sense, would appear as only one manifestation of a more general obsession with self-image, through which unhappy individuals try to differentiate themselves from one another while competing for attention.

The collapse of politics as a distinct domain and its replacement by attention-seeking hyper-politicization is, from this perspective, a consequence of the spread of a neurotic personality type that is itself the product of economic precarity, social isolation, and cultural dislocation. Some argue that just as the cultural transformations of the 1960s seemed to arise out of that era’s material abundance for the growing middle class, today’s culture-war partisanship is a “post-material” politics reflecting Americans’ relative well-being. But in fact, the economic precarity and social isolation that Lasch saw in the 1970s has worsened. Extreme demands from the Right and Left are not expressions of the decadence of a society that has solved its fundamental economic problems, but a kind of escapism in which individuals who feel powerless to control their own economic destinies vicariously participate in shared fantasies that confer meaning on their lives.

The only way that narcissists—and today we are all, to some degree, narcissists—can be rescued from our obsession with pseudo-politics is by chipping away at the material conditions that have warped our psychologies. This means that we must work to transform our conditions and thus ourselves. It will be, as Weber says politics always is, “a slow boring of hard boards,” but only such an effort can restore the ground on which it might, at last, be possible to cultivate our gardens.

Photo: Sergey Dolgikh/iStock

In 2015, the American technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that humanity wasn’t ready for a pandemic. Seven years on, as the world emerges (hopefully) from a pandemic for which it wasn’t ready, he thinks we have it within our power to make sure this one was the last. There will be more disease outbreaks, but we now possess the tools and the knowledge to prevent them from becoming global catastrophes.
Gates’s optimism is refreshing after the gloom of the last two years. Since we all learned a new word, Covid-19, we’ve heard a lot about what we can’t do. We can’t contain infection and remain democratic; we can’t vaccinate everybody in time to prevent new variants emerging; we can’t develop effective treatments before the pandemic is over. Gates thinks we can do all these things, as long as we take the right lessons from Covid (he also thinks we can eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the subject of his last book). He wants us to act now, while the fear lingers and before we return to our habitual complacency.
The roadmap he lays out sounds feasible. It involves strengthening disease surveillance by exploiting the full potential of existing genomic sequencing and informatics tools; supporting ongoing research into universal vaccines, which protect not only against single pathogens but against whole families of pathogens; building manufacturing and distribution capacity for vital diagnostics, vaccines and treatments; and further streamlining procedures for obtaining regulatory approval for these tools.
It also involves strengthening primary healthcare systems around the world, because general practitioners and community nurses will double as an early-warning system and the main vehicle of prevention when the next outbreak occurs. And it involves creating a team whose full-time job is to coordinate pandemic preparedness efforts worldwide. He calls this team “Germ”, for “Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation”, and estimates its running costs at $1bn a year – less than a thousandth of annual global defence spending, and a negligible amount compared to the trillions Covid has already cost us.
[See also: The global race to contain Omicron]
Gates’s proposals are wise, and his goals should be our goals. But how do we achieve them? Unsurprisingly, given how the Microsoft co-founder made his fortune, he puts his faith in private-sector innovation supported by governments and philanthropy – the status quo, in other words. But another thing this pandemic has taught us is that, while markets and technology can solve a lot, they can’t solve everything. And, as things stand, the private sector is as much a part of the problem as of the solution.
Credit where credit’s due: the technological developments that have been driven by this pandemic are breathtaking. The messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines that have already saved so many lives will save many more as they are adapted to fight other major killers. And there have been less visible technological advances in recent years that stand to revolutionise our response to infectious disease. One Gates is particularly excited about is the cheap, sensitive mass-testing technology being developed by the British company LumiraDx. He also notes that innovation doesn’t have to be high-tech. “It’s mind-blowing how cheap and effective masks are,” he writes, adding that they by themselves could prevent an outbreak of respiratory disease developing into a pandemic.
Philanthropy deserves some credit too, including his own. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic body that he set up with his now ex-wife in 2000, has made significant inroads into some major global health problems, and contributed more than $2bn to the fight against Covid. It helped create the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which played a critical role in the development of Covid vaccines, and anticipated the problem of vaccine inequity by backing the Covax vaccine-distribution mechanism.
Unfortunately, Covax failed to meet its objectives. Gates says this happened for reasons beyond its control, which is true: wealthy countries bypassed it to negotiate their own deals with vaccine-makers. But the real problem was that the vaccine-makers were calling the shots. They were able to because they own all the intellectual property (IP) rights in their products, even though the governments they were selling to bore much of the risk of the research that generated that IP.
Gates explains this himself, without seeing any contradiction. He writes that the US government not only supported the academic work on mRNA and its translation into marketable products, but it also helped the vaccine companies to continue the work once the pandemic struck. He also points out how reliant those companies were on the publicly funded infrastructure behind clinical trials in various parts of the world, including Africa.
He claims, and he’s not alone, that IP issues didn’t impede the vaccine roll-out; limited manufacturing capacity and know-how did. He may be right. Making vaccines is far more challenging than making many other drugs, partly because they’re given to healthy people, so quality-control standards are higher. But a South African company’s successful effort to copy Moderna’s Covid mRNA vaccine, after the American firm promised not to enforce its patents during the pandemic, has severely tested that claim.
And if intellectual property isn’t the obstacle, why did a consultancy hired by BioNTech, another mRNA vaccine-maker, lobby against the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s efforts to boost manufacturing capacity in Africa?
The ongoing campaign to persuade the World Trade Organisation to temporarily waive IP rights on all medical products needed to control the Covid pandemic – the efficacy of which Gates is personally sceptical about, though it’s a move his foundation now supports – came too late to have an impact on this pandemic, even if it forces partial change. But it may be possible to negotiate a new deal ahead of the next outbreak – one in which the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t set global health priorities and its products don’t automatically go to the highest bidder.
It won’t be easy, and governments may have to stump up more cash themselves to persuade the companies to relinquish some control. But the firms have to compromise too: they can still make huge profits, just slightly less huge, and without impeding public health goals in a time of crisis.
[See also: The scars of Long Covid]
Gates allows little of this. He concedes that firms should commit to more tiered pricing – where richer countries pay higher prices than poorer ones – and second-source deals, where they agree to share tools and expertise with other companies, but he would leave the world reliant on their largesse. As philosophies go, it’s at best paternalistic, at worst imperialistic. And he has other blind spots.
He writes, for example, that the United States couldn’t have envisaged data-sharing in the way that, say, South Korea did, to track the spread of the virus. That’s all he has to say about this complex subject. But while South Korea’s entirely legal data-collection efforts were considered by some to infringe privacy – and it did go further than other countries in the intimacy and precision of the details it released – others highlighted how effective those efforts were in containing the virus. American contact-tracing efforts were poor by contrast, yet US social media users haemorrhage personal data, and it is often used against them. So there is surely a debate to be had about balancing privacy and public health, and an important distinction to be made between curtailing liberalism and curtailing democracy.
Gates is right that the private sector isn’t solely to blame for our woes. We all have a part to play in solving the collective-action problem posed by pandemics – by, for example, mandating our governments to confer more powers and resources on the WHO, which coordinates the global response.
He is also right that technology alone could eliminate some problems. If scientists devised a highly effective single-dose vaccine that could be stored at room temperature, whose production could be scaled up far more quickly than is possible now – something that is, alas, not yet on the horizon – vaccine inequity might simply ebb away.
If history is anything to go by, however, new technologies will create new problems – ones the market is, again, poorly equipped to solve. The need to strike the right balance between public and private sectors is one we will have to tackle sooner or later. And, given the new disease threats we are already facing – notably avian flu, new strains of which have recently been detected in humans – sooner would be better. 
How to Prevent the Next PandemicBill GatesAllen Lane, 304pp, £25
Laura Spinney is a writer and science journalist based in Paris. Her books include “Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World” (Vintage)

The Fed does not deserve all the inflation cure either.

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One-size-fits-all (or "killing-almost-everyone") contractionary monetary policies, in the form of the Fed's coming consecutive and non-trivial interest rate hikes and accelerating quantitative tightening, can and will continue to be easily implemented by the Fed, without much interference from the Congress, but doing so may also

(i) precariously pierce the country's steaming stock-bond-housing bubbles all at the same time, pushing the country once again into a prolonged balance-sheet economic recession, and so lengthening the specter-like secular stagnation symphony always lurking in the shadows of the global economic environment,

(ii) massively crop up US DXY, aggravating the perennial lack-of-Euro-Dollar problem in the global financial system,

(iii) fail to ameliorate the worsening domestic inflation problems in America.

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The Biden administration can consider using differential fiscal policies to mitigate the country's inflation problems caused mainly by the global pandemic and aggravated by the Ukraine War :

(a) to help arrest the trend of falling GDP growth rate just reported this quarter, avoid distributing free-money en masse to the American public and corporations this time, so that demand-pull inflation won't rear its ugly head once again in the country,

(b) instead, (electronic) consumption coupons that have to be used within a certain period should be given to the public, and the coupons can cater to the needs of the specified merchandise and service sectors of the domestic economy (the citizens can no longer use the free money to reduce their debts and so fail to increase consumption of their own),

(c) non-trivial government subsidies (or no-interest loans) can be given to the affected American supply sectors, like the energy and food sectors, to help reduce both their costs of production and hence the pressure of cost-push inflation in the domestic economy,

(iv) the (central) government's much increased deficit spending to finance the above increased government expenditures can be financed by MMT, say in the form of a smaller size of quantitative tightening than planned (ie, the Fed's renewing much more matured treasuries than planned), or even in the form of new QEs.

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The increased deficit spending by the central government requires the Treasury Department to issue more bills and bonds.

The increased supply of US treasuries this time can also help resolve the lack-of-good-collateral and hence lack-of-Euro-dollar problem in the global Eurodollar (repo) markets, thereby mitigating the current global recessionary trend.

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As the old Chinese saying goes, governing a big country is like carefully frying a small fish, an intricate feminine act much finer and delicate than the Fed's traditional one-size-fits-all manlike strive.

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Centrist pundit Andrew Sullivan thinks Karl Marx was “one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century.” That’s nonsense — Marx’s political project was all about expanding human freedom and fighting oppression in every form.

Karl Marx’s deepest commitment was to human freedom. It’s a commitment that led him to produce a body of work that continues to reward the attention of readers who are serious about remaking society in accordance with “Enlightenment values.” (Robert Diedrichs / Wikimedia Commons)
 
Andrew Sullivan really, really hates Karl Marx. He writes in his recent essay “When Will They Cancel Karl Marx?” that “the woke” are hypocritical because they’ve “canceled” Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant for their racist beliefs — whereas Marx remains uncanceled.
Marx, Sullivan says, was “one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century.” Oh, and Marxism has had a “uniquely murderous role in human history.”
Every one of these claims is nonsense.

Marxism, “Wokeness,” and the Enlightenment
To begin with, it’s far from clear what Sullivan means when he says some historical figures have been “canceled.” Immanuel Kant, for example, did say many disturbingly racist things, although historians of philosophy debate how much his views changed at the end of his life. Is noting these facts or grappling with what they say about the man tantamount to “canceling” him if his writings are still assigned and his ideas about other subjects continue to be taken seriously?
Certainly, no one has ever suggested that I stop put Kant’s writings on my syllabus — as I have, semester after semester, since I started teaching philosophy classes.
Sullivan accuses “the left” of wanting to “root out the Enlightenment principles that make America a free country” and quotes black studies professor Kehinde Andrews blaming “Enlightenment values” for “cement[ing] racial prejudice.” Yet Sullivan seems unaware that Marx’s ideas had deep roots in Enlightenment thought — and that intellectuals who do hate the Enlightenment aren’t on Marx’s side. If Sullivan had bothered to check what Kehinde Andrews thought about Marx, for instance, he would have found an article called “M is for Marxism” where Andrews pours contempt on Marx and Marxists for their belief that black and white workers should unite on the basis of shared material interests. “If we are looking for the White worker to join the struggle,” Andrews writes, “we will be waiting forever after.”
Sullivan seems unaware that Marx’s ideas had deep roots in Enlightenment thought.
Sounding more than a little like Jordan Peterson, Sullivan insists that Marx remains a “core source for the woke worldview, after being strained through the nihilism of postmodern thought and repackaged for American undergrads.” I have no idea what that part about straining and repackaging means. Frankly, I doubt that even Sullivan knows what it means.
But let’s put that aside and focus on the “core source” claim.
Sullivan’s only evidence is an op-ed published by the New York Times in 2018 on Marx’s bicentennial. The author, philosophy professor Jason Barker, claims that “[s]ocial justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo” owe “something of an unspoken debt” to Marx because, like Marx’s critique of capitalism, these social justice movements seek to question things that might otherwise be seen as “eternal truths.”
Since (a) I’m a Marxist and (b) my hot take on racism and sexism is that both are very bad, I’m not averse in principle to giving Marx credit for attempts to counter them. But is it really true that Marx is a “core source” for these movements in their current form?
This would certainly surprise someone like Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, who has criticized the common focus on racial disparities to the exclusion of deeper economic inequalities. Making sure a demographically appropriate mix of people occupies each rung of the economic ladder, Reed argues, wouldn’t create a just society but a “differently unjust” one. Whether you agree or disagree with Reed’s critique, its mere existence is a good reminder of the distinctions that are lost by casually equating Marxism with “the woke worldview.”
It’s also worth noting just how brazenly Sullivan is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the popularity of an anti-racist movement is evidence of the insidious influence of Marxism. On the other hand, Marx was “one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century.”

Ranking the Antisemites and Racists of the Nineteenth Century
Sullivan backs up this last claim with three pieces of evidence. First, Marx allegedly supported British imperialism in India and US imperialism in Mexico. Second, in a letter to his close collaborator Friedrich Engels complaining about his sometimes-friend and sometimes-enemy Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx resorted to crude racist stereotypes. Third, Marx said antisemitic things about Jews and Judaism in his 1844 pamphlet On the Jewish Question.
In two of the three cases, Sullivan’s characterizations are at best extremely misleading. The exception is the letter about Lassalle. Marx’s racist descriptions of his then-friend are hard to stomach and a stain on his personal character. But even if the picture Sullivan paints was accurate on all three points, the notion that this would make Marx “one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century” would still be utterly absurd.
This was a century when the question of whether Jewish people should have citizenship rights in Christian countries was very much a live issue. So was the belief in the “blood libel” — the charge that Jewish people murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. Pope Pius IX, “the most influential pope of the century,” directly endorsed this claim — making him perhaps a slightly more repellent antisemite than Karl Marx. As to antiblack racism, it’s worth remembering that this was the century when 620,000 Americans died in a war started by Southern rebels with the explicit goal of preserving slavery — an institution that the rebels constantly claimed was right and good because of the allegedly natural differences between the races.
A photographic portrait of Karl Marx from 1861. (Richard Beard / Wikimedia commons)
In 1844, when Marx’s On the Jewish Question came out, the question of granting legal rights for Jews was controversial even within freethinking and democratic-revolutionary circles. His pamphlet was a polemic against Bruno Bauer, a Young Hegelian who argued that Jews had no right to demand that a Christian state give them equal rights as long as they practiced a non-Christian religion. Bauer advocated a secular state but argued that Jews should give up their religious peculiarities in order to integrate into such a state.
Marx disagreed, writing that the freedom of everyone to privately practice the religion of their choice was a natural and desirable result of the progress from premodern forms of society to modern capitalist democracies. While he hadn’t completed his own evolution from Left Hegelianism to Marxism by the time he wrote On the Jewish Question, Marx did conclude the pamphlet by insisting on the need to push past capitalism to create a deeper kind of freedom.
In the last section of the pamphlet, Marx did engage in some casually antisemitic language and metaphors, using what’s essentially an extended pun on the word “Judentum” with its colloquial double meanings as “Judaism” and “commerce.” His overall point, though, was to argue against Bauer and for equal rights for German Jews.
As to India and Mexico, Sullivan is only telling half the story. In his initial writings on British rule in India, Marx said that England was “actuated by the vilest interests, and stupid in her manner of enforcing them” but nevertheless celebrated the idea that by modernizing the Indian economy the colonizers were laying the basis for future progress — progress that would presumably come in the form of democratic and then socialist revolutions. Engels initially said similar things about Mexican territory being gobbled up by the United States.
But four years after his commentary on India was published, when a rebellion had indeed broke out against British colonial rule, Marx wrote in staunch support of the rebels, saying that India’s struggle for independence made it the “best ally” of the British working class as it struggled for its own rights against the same establishment. Similarly, as Lance Selfa notes, Marx changed his tune on Yankee imperialism in Mexico during the 1860s when he was writing about the US Civil War:
Marx welcomed the North’s tentative steps toward emancipation and urged the arming of ex-slaves to fight for their own liberation: “[T]hese emancipated Negroes may be militarily organized and sent into the field against the South,” he wrote. Marx also wrote of the psychological effect of Black regiments in breaking the South’s morale. And . . . in his writings on the Civil War, Marx also rejected Engels’s earlier position on Mexico. Instead of seeing the 1830s war for Texas as an advance for capitalist progress, he recognized it as part of the expansionist policy of the Southern slaveholders.
Sullivan’s final charge is that Marxism has a “uniquely murderous role in history,” presumably because of the crimes of dictators who lived long after Marx died. But the fact is that the only head of state that Marx ever liked enough to send a friendly telegram was the democratically elected Abraham Lincoln. “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election,” Marx enthused to Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association, “the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”
If Sullivan thinks these are the words of one of “the most repellent” racists of the nineteenth century, I wonder what terms he’d use to describe, say, Jefferson Davis. Or even Thomas Jefferson. Recall that Jefferson is one of the allegedly canceled Enlightenment figures mentioned in Sullivan’s essay. Not only was he personally a slaveholder but as president of the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jefferson tried to isolate Haiti out of fear the country’s antislavery revolution “would spread to the United States.”
Karl Marx’s deepest commitment was to human freedom. He wanted everyone to be able to flourish to their fullest potential and hated any system that inhibited that flourishing by forcing some people to do backbreaking labor to support the luxury of others. It’s a commitment that led him to produce a body of work that continues to reward the attention of readers who are serious about remaking society in accordance with “Enlightenment values” — in a way that Andrew Sullivan very much is not.

On Monday evening, Politico published a draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion in certain circumstances, and limited the ability of states to ban abortion procedures. In the draft, Alito writes that the Constitution makes “no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision. . . . The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett have reportedly sided with Alito. (The Justices are able to alter their initial votes, but there is no evidence that any of them are likely to do so.)

To talk about what this means, and how the draft itself came to be written and leaked, I spoke by phone with Neal Katyal, the former Acting Solicitor General of the United States and a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Alito’s judicial philosophy, why the Justices are unlikely to change their votes in a case like this, and whether liberals erred in supporting the confirmations of Trump-appointed Justices.

Can you walk us through the process of how this document came to be and what exactly it is?

What happened is that the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case last year on Mississippi, which has a fifteen-week abortion ban, with no rape or incest exception. Then there was a briefing and oral argument, and at that oral argument the Justices asked everyone tough questions, and sometimes you can see where things are heading. It is never a perfect predictor. But you can generally see. And there was a lot of skepticism for Roe and support for the Mississippi law from at least five and maybe six Justices at the oral argument. So after the oral argument the Justices go and meet in a conference. Only the nine of them. No law clerks or anyone allowed. And they take a tentative vote of who is going to win and why they should win, going around one by one and explaining their views.

The Justice who is the senior-most Justice in the majority can decide to keep the opinion for himself or herself or can assign the opinion to another Justice. The typical rule of thumb is that if it is a really exciting opinion you want to keep it for yourself, and if it is a less exciting one, you assign it to someone else. But that doesn’t always happen, and sometimes there are reasons—even strategic reasons—why you would want someone specific to write it. And here, the Chief Justice [John Roberts], as the senior-most Justice presiding over the conference of nine—it’s almost inconceivable to think that if he was in the majority he would have assigned the opinion to anyone but himself. He loves the Court as an institution. He would want to speak with the authority of the Chief Justice. The most senior Justice in the majority would be Clarence Thomas, so my sense is that he assigned it to Justice Alito.

Why might that be?

One can only speculate, but, in a hot-button case like this, Justice Thomas might have felt like he shouldn’t be the person who was out front. The author of this opinion is going to be singled out, just like the author of Roe. v. Wade, Harry Blackmun, got singled out. And Justice Thomas, his style—

His leadership on women’s rights?

His style is generally to write opinions for himself that try to move the law in a certain direction, but he is not as much a writer of big opinions for the Court and his colleagues. So it’s not surprising.

How does the draft come to be?

They have been in conference, and gone around and given their views for some period of time, anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, and then the draft opinion is assigned, and then the author would take the comments from the conference of nine Justices, and start writing an opinion that tries to reflect where a majority of five of them are. And then he would do that for as long as that takes—here, it looks like for a couple of months—and then he circulates that draft not just to the five that voted with him but to all nine. And that’s what it looks like we have: the first draft of the opinion after the conference vote.

So then that draft gets circulated and the senior-most Justice in dissent assigns the dissent to himself or someone else. Here the senior-most Justice would be either [Stephen] Breyer or the Chief Justice, if he is dissenting. And they would start writing their opinion. Sometimes you would have a give-and-take, between the dissent and the majority, where the dissent says something really powerful and the majority thinks, That makes a good point. Maybe I should take out that point or maybe I should have modified my opinion. Every so often, it is at least theoretically possible that someone who voted with the majority could think, I voted wrongly in conference and changed my mind.

Is this—or something similar—what happened with Roberts and Obamacare?

That’s what the reporting indicates. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but there is certainly a lot of reporting saying that that happened with Roberts, and some people are clinging to hope that that will happen here. It is theoretically possible, but there is a big difference between this and Obamacare. There, the Chief Justice was the fifth vote to uphold President [Barack] Obama’s signature initiative, the Affordable Care Act. Here, the Chief Justice is potentially irrelevant. And so, for the bottom-line decision to change, one of the four of Thomas, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, or Coney Barrett would have to change their vote, which for any number of reasons is not that likely.

So even if this is a first draft, it would be fairly rare for a serious shift on a case like this?

Yeah, and particularly because this isn’t some random obscure area of law that the Justices haven’t thought about. Every one of these Justices has thought about this since law school.

You are forgetting Clarence Thomas saying in his confirmation hearings that he had never given Roe v. Wade much thought.

Exactly. [Laughs.] That’s a very good point. You got me there.

What did you make of the document itself—and its arguments? Did it reflect Alito’s style and values generally?

It a hundred per cent reflected Alito’s comments at oral argument, right down to the test that he uses to determine whether there is a constitutional right. The question he says the Court should ask is whether the right is firmly rooted in the traditions of the people. And that has always been a controversial way of understanding things, because rights exist in our society at a broader level of abstraction. You don’t say, “Was there a right to abortion in 1787? Was there a right to contraception in 1787?” You ask it at a more general level about the degree of personal autonomy and freedom. But Alito turns the clock back on all of that and says that is not the test. And that is what this opinion says, page after page. It reads like an opinion from Robert Bork, the failed Reagan nominee for the Court, in 1987, who didn’t get confirmed because of exactly this issue. Robert Bork thought there was no general right to privacy, and rights had to be firmly rooted in the traditions of the people, and the right to use contraception, even if you are a married couple, was not something that existed in 1787. And that, to put it mildly, is not just an outdated but also wrong account of what our Founders gave us.

Few familiar with today’s academic world will find Inoue’s opinions especially surprising. The idea in education circles that standard English functions as an unjust “gatekeeper,” holding back students of color, has been around for a long time. Related has been the idea that at the grade-school level, Black students whose home dialect is Black English should be taught as bilinguals of a sort. Adherents of this philosophy don’t say standard English should be withheld but suggest that standard English and Black English should be presented as different languages, as it were. Recall the “Ebonics” debate that gained national attention in the 1990s.

In 1993, English Leadership Quarterly, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English, published a piece by two Indiana University of Pennsylvania English professors, Donald A. McAndrew and C. Mark Hurlbert, arguing that:

Writers should be encouraged to make intentional errors in standard form and usage. Attacking the demand for standard English is the only way to end its oppression of linguistic minorities and learning writers. We believe this frontal assault is necessary for two reasons: (1) it affords experienced writers, who can choose or not choose to write standard English, a chance to publicly demonstrate against its tyranny and (2) if enough writers do it regularly, our culture’s view of what is standard and acceptable may widen just enough to include a more diverse surface representation of language, creating a more equitable distribution not only of the power in language and literacy but also, ultimately, of the power in economics and politics that language and literacy allow.

Later, as The Washington Times reported in 1995, the N.C.T.E. discussed eliminating “English” from its name. That year, a delegate to its annual convention said, “If we are to offer diversity, there can be a conversation about language arts, but not about English.”

But in the same way that the idea of eliminating references to “English” strikes most as overboard, the idea that for Black people standard English is something wholly apart is simply inaccurate. For most Black Americans, both Black and standard English are part of who we are; our English is, in this sense, larger than many white people’s. In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not … I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.” On a less exalted level, a great many Black people toggle endlessly between standard and Black English, day in and day out — we code-switch. I always liked how Gloria Naylor was able to get this across, as in this scene from her novel “Mama Day”:

“We ain’t staying long,” Ruby says, pulling up a chair. “But I thought it would be nice for us to meet Cocoa’s new husband.” “It’s a pleasure,” George says. “Doubly mine,” says Ruby. “And this here is my new husband, Junior Lee.” “Pleasssurre.” Junior Lee manages a nod. “Hear you a big railroad man.” “No, I’m an engineer.”

In that exchange, the characters aren’t dipping in and out of what they think of as a cold, alien dialect. They are sounding subtly different notes according to which dialect they render each thought or gesture in. Standard English forms are as much theirs as Black English ones.

Communicating in this way, Black Americans are doing what other people do worldwide, living between two varieties of a language. Swiss people’s formal Hoch Deutsch is almost a different language from the Swiss German they speak informally. The Arabic speaker typically controls both the Modern Standard Arabic derived from the language of the Qur’an and used in formal settings and a local dialect used for real life, like Egyptian or Moroccan.

People in these countries and beyond would find familiar Maya Angelou’s observation in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” couched as completely unremarkable:

In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s’s from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That’s not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, “It be’s like that sometimes.”

To give some credence to those freshman-comp panelists, we might say that Angelou could have turned away from the “That’s not unusual” and that Du Bois could have considered that in real life Shakespeare, Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius might have looked down on him as some kind of “Aethiope.”

In a world of growing dependence on technology, consumers of information and communications technology (ICT) goods face increasingly important questions: How, and to what extent (if any), can users be confident that the systems on which they rely are worthy of trust?

That question is one that bedevils everyone—from end users to major enterprises. Each must decide which products, and vendors, to trust. Many make those decisions without a great deal of consideration, but the stakes in those decisions are often significant. And even those who choose to think about the questions carefully lack a system of thought for addressing questions of trustworthiness. The ongoing discussion regarding the use of Chinese information technology products as components of Western systems is one example of a broader and deeper problem: How should we assess the degree of trustworthiness in ICT products?

To answer that question, the Lawfare Institute convened a working group of experts to articulate and justify a set of trustworthiness principles—concepts that, ex ante, would justify accepting a digital artifact as worthy of being trusted. Today, the group publishes its report on the subject, and we offer this short-form summary. The task force members included: Paul Rosenzweig, who served as the group’s chief rapporteur; Justin Sherman, who served as assistant rapporteur; Benjamin Wittes, who chaired the task force; Trey Herr, David Hoffman, Herb Lin, Bart Preneel, Samm Sacks, Fred B. Schneider and Daniel Weitzner.

This project began in the fall of 2019, when the Intel Corporation asked the Lawfare Institute to convene an expert panel to study the question of trustworthiness in hardware and software, to try to establish and describe the constituent elements of trustworthiness, and to identify a set of principles by which one might determine how trustworthy a product is. Intel provided funding for this working group. But this report represents the work product and thinking of the working group as a whole and was not subject to editorial control or oversight of Intel or any other outside body or organization.

Our inquiry began at the most basic level by defining what we mean when we say that a digital artifact is trustworthy. We settled on the following definition: an artifact that does what is expected of it and nothing more is trustworthy.

The challenge however, was not so much in defining the desired end-state of trustworthiness but, rather, in defining how it is that one may demonstrate trustworthiness to a skeptical world. In modern systems, all artifacts are the sum of multiple parts—so the inquiry of trustworthiness is an inquiry into creation, into assembly out of diversely produced components, into distribution, and into use. In effect, it is to ask about the entire supply chain of ICT goods from conception to consumption.

Thus, the principal question addressed in the report is: What indicia of trustworthiness ought we to be looking for and why are those particular indicia of trustworthiness ones on which users should rely? As the report lays out in detail, our answer to this problem resonates in three different dimensions.

First, the inquiry implicates questions of technical capacity and security: How are we to know that the manufacturers of a hardware or software system have designed and built it in a way that is trustworthy and, therefore, secure against deliberate internal or external attack? In other words, has the manufacturer performed competently in constructing the digital artifact? Has the enterprise performed transparently? And has it used only those suppliers that have, in turn, also performed competently and transparently?

Second, the inquiry implicates the question of organizational intent as reflected in a corporate governance structure: How are users to be assured that manufacturers have not constructed and marketed a system that affords either themselves or some other party privileged access and control, without the users’ knowledge? In other words, does the manufacturer see a value to be gained for itself from the design, to the disadvantage of the consumer?

On yet a third axis of inquiry, the problem of trust can be seen as a question of policy and law: What protections exist against inappropriate intervention into the manufacture or operation of an ICT system? And, relatedly, what are the mechanisms for determining the appropriateness of such interventions to the extent they may exist? Are there flaws in the system that some third party, for whatever reason, can benefit from exploiting?

Of course, the report recognized that a dispositive assessment of trustworthiness will never be feasible. However, we concluded that evaluating relative trustworthiness is possible. Thus, even though it is the nature of ICT systems that risks of compromise can never be fully eliminated, we concluded that risks can be mitigated to a degree that often depends strongly on the effort devoted to the task and that intercomparisons of trustworthiness (the flip side of risk) were possible.

To that end, we developed a comparative checklist of steps an organization can take that significant stakeholders might agree demonstrates its products to be trustworthy—what one might call a functional definition of trustworthiness. Even without the prospect of precisely assessable levels of trustworthiness, the report concludes that a framework for assessments can be made with a relatively high degree of confidence.

The value of a framework based on agreed-upon principles should be evident. Using these principles—as well as acceptable evidence—as a guideline, ICT manufacturers and users, including organizations and consumers, can analyze comparative risks and make reasoned risk-benefit and resource-allocation decisions.

In the end, the report articulated a set of principles that, in our view, form a suitable structured framework for analysis to guide the assessment of ICT trustworthiness. Our framework distinguishes between trustworthiness criteria that are analytic in nature (that is, capable of definitive measurement) and those that are axiomatic (that is, procedures or rules that are indicative, but not dispositive, of trustworthiness). Though the framework we suggest is detailed at some length in the report, at the top level, the report summarizes this framework as follows:

Maximize transparency —The single greatest engine of trust is transparency. Visibility into the production and the operation of any system (whether technical or not) increases the ability to test a system and verify its operation.

Ensure accountability —Transparency can help users make better decisions, but from a trustworthiness standpoint, it must be paired with accountability. Those who put ICT artifacts into the stream of commerce must be accountable for their trustworthiness. Mechanisms for accountability may vary depending on the artifact, regulatory environment, and context of use, but their absence is a sign of systemic untrustworthiness.

Allow for independence of evaluation —Often the transparency and accountability of a system are self-assessed by the manufacturer and/or designer of the digital artifact, both of whom have a conflict of interest in engaging in this analysis on their own. In general, independent (often outside) evaluation is superior.

Prefer provable analytic means of trust verification over axiomatic, nonverifiable means —As a general matter, trustworthiness assessments that are analytic in nature are superior to those that are axiomatic. We recognize that analytic means of establishing trust are significantly more costly and difficult to implement, but where feasible, they are preferable.

People or organizations making trustworthiness judgments regarding given acquisitions or implementation decisions will undoubtedly find that the various factors we have outlined point often in different directions. Thus they will have to draw conclusions about how different trustworthiness measures trade off against one another. Trade-offs in identifying acceptable risks may be driven by a variety of factors, including the risk tolerance of the user or organization, the use case for the product, and the environment in which the product can be used.

There are those hoping for a one-and-done, universally applicable algorithm to evaluate trustworthiness. Alas, there are no silver bullets for trustworthiness, and no substitute for careful, considered judgments made on a case-by-case basis. By distinguishing between products that bear many of the indicia of trust as outlined in our report and those that do not, we believe that the principles described in the report can help to frame trustworthiness assessments of the supply chain and provide a way forward for decision-makers.

Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. By David de Jong. Mariner Books; 400 pages; $28.99. William Collins; £25

A T THE APPEALS hearing in April 1949 of Günther Quandt, one of Nazi Germany’s top industrialists, Julius Herf, the prosecutor, read from “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in his closing argument. He felt the passage in Max Weber’s magnum opus elucidated Quandt’s single-minded personality:

It’s the intoxication of the pursuit of power, the intoxication of building a huge corporation, the obsession with self-affirmation that is at the root of all this, and it’s the belief in the value of one’s own work, not only because work is something moral, but because building the corporation is the ultimate good, and because anything that resists building it out is bad.

He did not manage to persuade the Munich court of Quandt’s guilt, nor the Bavarian court of cassation where he again appealed the verdict. Judges argued there was no “clear proof” that Quandt had procured “excessive advantages” for himself under the Nazis. As David de Jong describes in “Nazi Billionaires”, other German magnates, including Rudolf-August Oetker and August von Finck, got “little more than a slap on the wrist”.

After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, German companies benefited from lucrative contracts related to rearmament. They took over Jewish-owned businesses. Facing a shortage of workers during the war, German firms staffed their factories with concentration-camp inmates and forced labourers from occupied territories in Europe. Many of these 13.5m people died from starvation, abuse or poor living and working conditions.

Yet businessmen were often deemed by regional denazification courts to be mere followers of the regime rather than active supporters. Executives went back to work in the newly founded federal republic to become even richer. Friedrich Flick (pictured on next page) was an exception: Mr de Jong describes him as “one of the Third Reich’s largest arms producers, Aryanisers, and exploiters of forced and slave labour through his steel, coal and machinery conglomerate”. In December 1947, during the Nuremberg trials, Flick was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to seven years in prison.

The shameful role of Germany’s business dynasties during the Nazi regime has been known for decades, but Mr de Jong’s investigative work adds detail. “Initially, most business tycoons viewed Hitler and his Nazis as loud, violent, boorish, brutish uniformed curiosities from the uneducated and impoverished hinterlands,” he writes. That changed after the global stockmarket crash in 1929, which took a devastating toll on the German economy. In September 1930 the Nazi party became the second-largest in the Reichstag. For Hitler, economic malaise opened the door to Germany’s richest businessmen: they hoped a Faustian pact with the upstart from Austria would help to shield their business empires from a rebellion on the left.

Von Finck, a financier who joined the Nazi party after Hitler came to power in 1933, “believed that Hitler was sent by God to become Führer of the German people”; a friend observed that the dictator exercised “a hypnotic influence” on him. Flick, Oetker, Albert Reimann and Ferdinand Porsche also subscribed to Hitler’s imagined future for the country.

Quandt disliked the Nazis, yet he had no scruples about facilitating their rise. When Quandt met Hitler in 1931 he described him as “perfectly average”. A widower with two sons, Quandt married Magda Friedländer, the stepdaughter of a German-Jewish businessman, with whom he had another son, Harald. After divorcing Quandt, Magda married Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. Quandt and Goebbels deeply resented each other and fought over the custody of Harald, who had caught Hitler’s eye as he looked like the perfect Aryan child.

The second half of “Nazi Billionaires” is devoted to the decades after the end of the war, through West Germany’s economic miracle to the present day. After his premature release from prison in 1950, Flick managed to rebuild his business empire; he became one of the largest shareholders of Daimler-Benz and, for a period of time, West Germany’s richest person. Every one of the titans, and their heirs, examined their Nazi past only belatedly, very reluctantly and under pressure.

J ULIA CHILD died almost 18 years ago, at the enviable age of 91, having done more to enrich American culinary life than anyone before or since. She wrote many books, including her two-volume landmark “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”; presented numerous television series; and won a cabinet full of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her life in food was public—so is her private life, thanks to several biographies and films. There seems to be little left to say about her.

And yet HBO Max and Sky Atlantic are airing a new series, “Julia”, dramatising the start of her TV career. On the Food Network, contestants on “The Julia Child Challenge” make Child’s recipes in a replica of her kitchen. And Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a historian at Smith College, recently published “Warming Up Julia Child”, about the friends and colleagues who nurtured her career. Why the sudden burst of interest?

One answer is that contemporary popular culture loves familiar successes—witness the current fad for remakes, reboots and the ever-expanding superhero “universes”. Child was wildly popular, with a literary and television career spanning the 20th century’s last four decades. Studios and publishers imagine that she has legions of fans who will eagerly watch and read anything about her.

But that is too cynical by half. The real answer is that Child lived a bold and eventful life, capacious enough to offer nostalgia to those who remember her and inspiration to those who do not. In effect, she was a populariser of French cuisine—but that carries the implication that she somehow diluted it for the masses. In fact, her recipes are not simple or dumbed down: they are clear.

At heart she was a demystifier and a pragmatist. She ensured that all her recipes could be recreated in the average mid-century American home kitchen. She took food seriously, but unlike generations of men in white toques who cultivated imperious, remote demeanours, she had no patience for cant or pomp. Cooking French food does not require that the chef be touched by God, or begin an apprenticeship in childhood; it merely requires that they follow a series of easily explicable steps. In a letter to a friend written while she was living in Paris, before she was famous, she referred to France’s most esteemed food writer as “a dogmatic meatball”. His insistence on rigid culinary rules was “so damned typical, making a damned mystery out of perfectly simple things”.

That line is quintessential Child: straightforward, funny and confident in the best sense. To earlier generations, she was an emissary from the refined world of French gastronomy. Today’s viewers may see her, rightly, as a feminist icon who broke into the then-overwhelmingly male worlds of haute cuisine and television despite having no professional experience in either, on the strength of unfussy charm, wit and hard work (producing “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” took years, partly because she rigorously tested and refined the recipes to ensure they were foolproof). Those qualities are timeless. ■

M OUNT OF REMEMBRANCE on the western edge of Jerusalem is encircled by thousands of trees, many with a sign naming a person and a country. The Avenue of the Righteous among the Nations, a project begun in 1962 by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national authority for Holocaust remembrance, links to the museum and monuments commemorating the extermination of Europe’s Jews, many of them in Ukraine.

Recognition as a Righteous Gentile, a great honour, granted mainly posthumously, to non-Jews who risked their lives to try to save Jews from deportation and murder during the Holocaust, is a laborious procedure. Each case is carefully vetted by a committee of historians chaired by a judge on Israel’s Supreme Court. But in recent years the process has become more controversial and political, as various governments seek to build self-serving national narratives. Some highlight their citizens who saved Jews, but ignore or even deny the many cases of those who collaborated with the Nazis.

“Holocaust denial is less common today, yet Holocaust distortion with its various faces is alarming,” says Havi Dreifuss, a historian at Yad Vashem. “One of its expressions is the attempt by some countries to artificially increase their number of Righteous among the Nations and claim that these noble exceptions reflect their entire national story during the Holocaust.” Yad Vashem stresses that the number of Righteous Gentiles from any country does not necessarily reflect an entire society’s conduct during the Holocaust.

“P ROBABLY THE only thing one can really learn”, Philip Guston eventually concluded, “is the capacity to be able to change.” The modern artist’s fate, he said, was “constant change”. As a painter he embraced that fate—and in posterity his work has proved both an index of change and a challenge to it. A new show in Boston charts his restless genius; it is also the canvas for a struggle over art’s freedom and obligations, and the contested balance between them.

Twice Guston, who died in 1980, made a reputation and gave it up—first as a figurative artist and muralist in the 1930s and 1940s, next by plunging into abstraction with his friend Jackson Pollock and other mid-century American pioneers. Boldly he returned to figuration in the late 1960s, dwelling on banal yet somehow uncanny objects: light bulbs, bricks, boots. He painted heads, distorted or half-submerged. And he made a series of paintings of triangular hooded figures that recall the Ku Klux Klan.

When first exhibited in 1970, these caused an art-world scandal—not because of the imagery, or Guston’s right to use it, but over the brashly cartoonish technique. A retrospective staged in 2003-04 passed without uproar. But in 2020, in the ferment after the murder of George Floyd, the organisers of the then-upcoming new show quailed at Guston’s motifs and themes. The director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it was due to open first, said he had “appropriated images of black trauma”. The problem, implicitly, was both what Guston painted and who he was.

Well, who was he? The son of Jewish refugees from Odessa, he changed his name from Goldstein to evade anti-Semitism. The Klan was active in the Los Angeles of his youth and his early work also evoked its crimes, alongside other fascistic atrocities. He turned away from abstraction in part out of an enduring sense of political duty. “What kind of man am I”, he felt in the 1960s, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.”

As for the later hoods themselves: Guston delighted in telling stories with them, and in the expressions he could conjure in their almost blank visages. At bottom, though, they were—and are—a reproach. They are terrible in their ordinariness, surrounded with everyday bric-a-brac, glimpsed smoking or riding in a boxy car. In “The Studio” one sketches a self-portrait, blood on his hand and costume. The stitching in the hoods matches and merges with the window slits in the buildings Guston painted. His hoods are knitted into society. They are everywhere.

These works are an indictment of racism, glaring or insidious, not a case of it. But it appeared today’s viewers might not get a chance to see that for themselves. In 2020 the exhibition (already hit by the pandemic) was postponed by the four museums involved in it, initially until 2024. Opponents of censorship protested, as did many artists. Some thought the delay smelled like a cancellation, and that “Philip Guston Now”, the show’s title, might become Philip Guston Never.

They were wrong. Ahead of the mooted schedule, it opens on May 1st at the Museum of Fine Arts ( MFA ) in Boston, and will be adapted in Houston, Washington and London. It is a magnificent exhibition and—at a febrile, polarised time—an important one. The MFA brought in African-American curators and has carefully laid out the political context of Guston’s life and work. Visitors can avoid the hoods if they choose to: they can make up their own minds.

But with a few forgivable exceptions, the intended artworks are there; Guston’s vision is honoured and explained. The format gives consideration to those who might be offended, but not a veto. It affirms and accommodates art’s power to provoke, and its right to. Lots of cultural skirmishes end in shouty hostility or shabby retreat. Here is a wiser sort of resolution, relying on a mix of principle, reflection and what you might call tact, or good manners.

Besides the hoods, other themes and motifs recur. Red was the main colour in Guston’s palette, bleeding into pink. He was always influenced by the Italian Renaissance masters, especially their gorgeous visions of the apocalypse and the damned. Heaven was dull, he noted, but “when they’re going to hell the painter really goes to town”. The same is true of him, and of the new show: they draw art from anguish and force you to think.

IMAGE CREDITS:

"The Deluge", 1969. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Musa Guston. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

"The Studio", 1969. Private Collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Disavow some Russian artists. Don’t cancel Russian art (Mar 19th)

I N POLITICS, AS on the catwalk, fashions come and go. In Europe in the 1980s it was Britain that dazzled with its daring ideas, as Margaret Thatcher’s state-shrinking, red-tape-slashing policies inspired numerous imitators and even more furious protest songs. In the noughties came Germany’s turn. Sensible economic reforms helped firms there seize the new opportunities of globalisation, the better to sell unstructured Hugo Boss suits to upwardly mobile Russians and Chinese. Ideologically the 2020s belong to France. Its big idées—a scepticism of free markets, an acceptance of the state’s role in shaping everything from farming to culture, haughty declarations of independence from America—are vintage stuff. But like a Louis Vuitton clutch re-released to adoring fashionistas, this line of thinking is once again back in vogue.

Emmanuel Macron, France’s youthful and newly re-elected president, is the EU ’s man of the moment. He triumphed in part by thumping rivals intent on derailing the European project. Marching to his victory rally on April 24th to the tune of the European anthem was a clear signal that Mr Macron sees his realm as extending beyond France. And well he might. For who else could serve as a standard-bearer for the EU today? Britain has left. Olaf Scholz, the newish chancellor in Berlin, is mired in an overhaul of German foreign policy (it turns out that trading suits and cars for Russian gas had geopolitical consequences). Mario Draghi, Italy’s prime minister, is respected but on his way out by next spring. Mr Macron, by contrast, will now be around for five more years.

But it is not merely by default that Mr Macron is now Europe’s most consequential figure. French thinking on how the club ought to be run has steadily gained ground in recent years. Mr Macron has long fretted that Europe might “no longer be in control of [its] destiny” as he put it to The Economist in 2019. The EU, he argued, had become dependent on others for too much—from its ability to innovate to military heft and even food. In a world led by unreliable folk like Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, that set his nerves jangling. Europe, in Mr Macron’s jargon, needs “strategic autonomy”. That pitch for greater sovereignty encompasses everything from more defence spending to Europe coming up with its own tech giants and much else besides.

Those (such as the British) who saw the EU as merely a single market were wrong, in Mr Macron’s view. Being a community involves deeper integration, long a French priority. Critics dismiss his idea of strategic autonomy as vague. It has gained ground nonetheless. The European Commission in Brussels used to block member states from funnelling public money to “national champions”. Now it is busy co-ordinating subsidies to battery firms and other favoured sectors. The EU is far from having its own army, but national capitals have co-ordinated spending better of late, and were doing more of it even before Mr Putin invaded Ukraine.

Two crises since the start of the decade have brought home Mr Macron’s point. Covid-19 highlighted the fragility of globalisation and its complex supply chains for everything from paracetamol to microchips. France pushed for pandemic recovery funds to be raised in part by joint EU borrowing—the kind of pooling of debt that Germany had resisted for decades. The second crisis, in Ukraine, has shown that trade can indeed create ugly dependencies. Take energy. France, with its nuclear-power plants devised in an earlier spurt of strategic autonomy, is far less reliant on Mr Putin than is Germany, which built pipelines to Russia instead. And fewer people now rail against vast dollops of EU money going to farmers at a time of uncertain food supplies.

“We live in a French EU at the moment,” says Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank based in London. The top of the Eurocracy, including Charles Michel at the European Council and Ursula von der Leyen at the commission, owe their jobs in no small part to backing from Mr Macron. His brand of political centrism is gaining ground, too: despite Viktor Orban’s recent victory in Hungary, other populists are getting thumped, most recently Janez Jansa, Slovenia’s prime minister, whose party lost an election on the same day that Mr Macron triumphed.

La République en vogue

Mr Macron has plenty of ideas for reshaping Europe left over from his first term. All French presidents have demanded that France act like, and be recognised as, a great power ; Mr Macron wants the same for Europe. Yet he has only a national mandate, not a continental one. He knows that no individual country, even France, can call the shots in the EU . Leaders must build and nurture alliances; Mr Macron visited all 26 of his EU neighbours during his first term. Still today none matters more than the Franco-German axis, Europe’s traditional motor, and even a powerful France cannot railroad the continent’s biggest country into changes that don’t suit it. Mr Macron repeating “I told you so” will probably not be enough to sway Mr Scholz. A confident Germany, brave enough to take the risks inherent in chasing France’s ambitions, would help Mr Macron a lot. That is still a work in progress.

Plenty within the EU will resist French grandstanding. Small countries suspect that airy talk of co-ordinating spending on defence or technology simply means funnelling cash to big French and German firms. Much of eastern Europe is wary of efforts to boost European military strength independent of NATO , since they see America as the indispensable guarantor of their security. French public finances border on the precarious. EU rules designed to constrain deficits were rightly suspended during covid-19. At some point they must come back—and Germany will once again take the lead.

All that will be for another season. The political influence needed to guide the EU comes and goes, as Mr Macron well knows. One day, his brand of thinking will again be considered passé. For now he is the king of Europe’s political catwalk. ■

Thank the elderly for keeping Europe’s extremists out of power (Apr 16th)

Europe is learning to cope with Viktor Orban (Apr 9th)

For more coverage of the French election, visit our dedicated hub

E VEN IN A city as congested as Chicago, traffic jams rarely form at seven o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. At that time on April 23rd, however, there were already over 300 cars queuing outside a branch of BP in East Garfield Park. They stretched from the petrol-station forecourt around an entire city block. Drivers sat in their cars, which ranged from battered Toyotas to new Range Rovers, waiting to pull in for $50 worth of free petrol courtesy of Willie Wilson, a Chicago millionaire who is standing for mayor again next year. Those at the front of the queue had arrived at 4am.

The giveaway, which also took place at 15 other places in the city and 11 in the suburbs, was Mr Wilson’s third in two months. He has spent some $2.2m, mostly in majority-black neighbourhoods, buying people petrol. “It’s a good use of the dollar to help a lot of families,” he told the Chicago Sun Times.

That seems questionable. Over a quarter of Chicago households, and higher shares of the poorest, do not own cars. And the city is already choked with traffic too much of the time. Still, Mr Wilson’s largesse is popular. “It’s a good look for Chicago,” said David Jones, queuing in a Chevrolet Impala, its wing mirror hanging off. The rising cost of petrol is of particular concern in the neighbourhoods Mr Wilson targeted, where public transport is often poor.

Will it help him become mayor? Mr Wilson, a 73-year-old who came to Chicago from Louisiana as a child and made his money with a McDonald’s franchise and then a medical-supplies company, is unlikely to win the election next February. But his support among black voters could hurt Lori Lightfoot, the incumbent. In 2015, when Mr Wilson last ran, he won just 11% of the vote, but far more in the black wards which Ms Lightfoot will need if she is to win again.

She is clearly rattled. On April 27th she persuaded the city council to approve a plan to distribute 50,000 pre-paid cards for petrol and public transport, at a cost of $12.5m. Voters may not be impressed. “She’s using the city’s money, he’s using his own money,” notes Derrick Orr, a school principal waiting in his Range Rover and full of praise for Mr Wilson. The city needs other stuff more urgently than free petrol, he argues. But it is hard for a cash-strapped politician to fight a man handing out freebies.

S OMETIME IN THE early autumn of 1944 Mimi Weitmann, as she then was, added her name to a list. She thought she would take the risk. Unfortunately she had to use the horrible first name, Carmen, which her opera-loving father had given her; “Mimi”, from “La Bohème”, was the much nicer nickname they settled on later. Sadly, too, she had to add the surname of her dead husband, Yozsi Weitmann, her love since university, who had been shot by the Germans at the gate of the Krakow ghetto as he had tried to escape.

That had happened in 1942. She had been widowed in her 20s, left with a baby son, Sasha, whom she and Yozsi had managed to smuggle to Hungary with her grandmother. She was very uncertain when, or even whether, she would see either of them again. As she typed “Carmen Weitmann”, there seemed to be nothing left of herself. Her old life as carefree Mimi, in a Vienna where Jews were integrated and the word “Aryan” unnecessary, was too long ago and far away. She was now in a blank place, among the dead.

At least she was no longer in the ghetto, which had been liquidated anyway, with those too ill or old to work simply shot in the street. She was in the Plaszow labour camp, to which most of Krakow’s Jews had now been moved. There were horrors in Plaszow, too: a small child killed for refusing to take off his clothes, the digging of a mass-grave which was also meant to be hers. But she was given a relatively sheltered desk-job because, being Austrian, her German was perfect, and because she had learned shorthand from a stenography course. Not that these were much use for taking down and typing up—as she was tasked to—a list that eventually ran to 1,200 names.

The list had been growing for a while. At first it had around 1,000 names, those of the Jews who worked in Oskar Schindler’s German Enamel Factory in Krakow. Then it got longer. It was added to by Mietek Pemper, secretary to Amon Goeth, the vicious camp commandant, and by Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant. Then Schindler himself (and his wife) contributed yet more, the relatives and friends of his employees and, it seemed, anyone he could think of. She typed them up as he asked her. In the end there were at least seven versions, possibly even nine, and her job was to make each one presentable.

Every name was Jewish (with “Ju.” typed before it), even though Schindler was not. These were meant to be essential workers in his factory, which he was going to move from Plaszow (where it had moved from Krakow) westward to Brünnlitz, in his native Sudetenland, and repurpose to make arms. But as Mimi typed the date-of-birth column she could see there were children on it, and as she typed the “skills” column she could spot photographers and rabbis among the metalworkers, so something else was clearly going on. Even her own qualification, Schreibkraft, “typist”, looked odd, especially as she added it with two slow fingers. Typing was something she had never learned.

She did not have much direct contact with Schindler, but liked him as a boss. He was charming and outgoing, and treated his Jewish workers kindly, not like scum. Perhaps even too kindly, for he was a great womaniser, with several pretty secretaries besides her, and got into trouble once for kissing a Jewish girl on the cheek at his birthday party. Maybe she was there because he liked her cool blonde elegance, rather than her mind. She knew, too, that he was very rich, and struck deals with the Nazi high-ups all the time by bribing them with black-market luxuries to get better conditions and more food for “his” Jews, as he called them. But that sounded patronising as well as protective, as if they were just cogs in his factory, since Jewish slave-labour was cheap. She also could not forget that he was a thoroughgoing Nazi, an SS man, who sometimes spent whole nights carousing with the officers.

In short, her boss was no angel. And there was something chilling about the list, with its constant repetition of number, race, name, skill. Perhaps he did not mean to save “his” Jews after all, but simply move them to another camp, a fatal one. His closeness to Goeth, though it was tactical, was worrying. Some people, she knew, had refused to let their names be put on the list for those reasons. She decided, though, that she would trust him. She added her name partly to be useful to him, by swelling the numbers. Then she added three friends as well.

That was a gamble, and for one terrifying moment she seemed to have bet the wrong way. Three hundred of the women and girls on the list, including her, were transferred by mistake to Auschwitz, where they endured two weeks that reminded her (from her language-and-literature studies) of Dante’s “Inferno”. With even more bribery, and threats too, Schindler got them out. In the end the list and the transfers worked, and everyone was saved.

She restarted her life then, moving to Morocco, marrying Albert Reinhard, reclaiming her son and settling first in New York, which she loved, and then in her 90s in Israel. Of the time with Schindler, and the list, she said little or nothing over those years. When Steven Spielberg’s film appeared in 1993 she was invited, with the other Schindlerjuden, to the premiere, but left before the screening. The memory was still too fresh. When at last she felt able to see it, she approved of the casting but not of the prisoners. They were too well-dressed, not demeaned in rags.

Schindler, she heard, had died in 1974 without a penny to his soul. He had spent all his money on saving and feeding his workers, and was never reimbursed as he hoped. His reward was posthumous, to be recognised at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as righteous among the nations, and by Mimi Reinhard as a Mensch.

They had met one last time, on a sunny day in Vienna around 1960, when she was visiting an aunt. As they passed a café a voice called out “Carmen Weitmann!” and it was Schindler, drinking with other Schindlerjuden. They all dined together and in the taxi he hugged her, proclaiming everyone “my Jews” again. But she could forgive him that, as well as the painful “Carmen Weitmann”. This was the name that had saved her, the one on his list. ■

B EFORE VLADIMIR PUTIN invaded Ukraine on February 24th, many Europeans fretted that their region was getting older and that more people were dying than being born. Europe’s median age of 43 is nearly four years older than that of North America, the next-greyest region. The population of the European Union is expected to peak at just shy of 450m within the next few years, then dip below 424m by 2070. The prospect of dwindling numbers frightens many. It has been especially scary for the formerly communist countries of eastern Europe, where outmigration has compounded the effects of below-replacement birth rates. Andrej Plenkovic, Croatia’s prime minister, called declining population “an almost existential problem for some nations”. Demographic change is Europe’s “third key transition”, alongside the green and digital ones, says Dubravka Suica, the vice-president of the European Commission for demography and democracy, a post created in 2019.

Among its many shocks, Mr Putin’s war has delivered one of a particular kind to demographers, who tend to see the phenomenon they study as slow-moving. Some 5.3m people—the bulk of them women and children—have fled Ukraine since the war began, the vast majority to countries bordering Ukraine on the west. Poland, which until recently exported more people than it received, has taken in more than half of these. The population of Warsaw, the capital, expanded by 17% in weeks. Hungary, whose population had shrunk from 10.7m in the mid-1980s to 9.8m in 2020, has received more than 500,000 Ukrainians.

Numbers that big can change demographic destinies. For countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and possibly the Baltic states “this crisis is a watershed moment, shifting them quickly to becoming immigration countries rather than outmigration countries,” says Tomas Sobotka of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna. The EU has extended a uniquely generous offer to Ukrainians, giving them the right to live, work and study in a host country for three years, privileges that refugees often struggle for years to attain. That suggests Ukrainians will have the chance to root themselves quickly in new communities. If the refugees choose to remain, they will lower the average age of their host countries, provide a needed infusion of relatively skilled labour and tilt the sex ratio towards women.

That may look like a silver lining to a terrible tragedy, but the future of this demographic disruption is unpredictable. If the war is short women and children will probably return quickly to Ukraine to reunite with husbands and fathers, who, like all Ukrainian men, are compelled by the government to remain in the country if they are between 18 and 60. Any demographic dividend, if there is one, will be distributed unevenly among European countries. And it will probably be diminished by a decline in baby-making as a result of the economic uncertainty caused by the war. With just 1.6 babies per woman on average, Europeans, before the war began, were already among the world’s most reluctant breeders.

For Ukraine itself the war is a demographic disaster. Its population had shrunk sharply because of emigration and few births, though before the invasion people had begun to return because the economy had improved. Since February more than a quarter of the population has been forced to move, including 7.7m people displaced within the country. The birth rate is bound to plunge still further. Life expectancy will probably fall “massively”, says Mr Sobotka. He points out that the brief war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in 2020 was largely responsible for a decline in life expectancy among males of three to four years.

Russia, too, is certain to suffer. Thousands of well-educated Russians have left a country which they now believe offers them no future. Fewer migrants may choose to come to Russia from former members of the Soviet Union to take up jobs requiring few skills. For the first time in decades, Russia’s migration balance may turn negative. To Mr Putin’s dismay births will probably fall. Like his friend Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Mr Putin has been splashing out cash to encourage women to have babies. In 2020 he extended a one-time “maternity capital” payment worth $7,600 to families when they have their first baby; before, it was available only to those who already had a child. Mr Putin hoped to boost the fertility rate from 1.5 to 1.7. The tumult caused by his war will probably push it in the opposite direction.

The Pole position

Countries to the west of Ukraine look like demographic gainers, although the influx is putting a strain on some, especially tiny Moldova, which has received more than 400,000 refugees—equivalent to 15% of its population. For Poland, where some 1.4m Ukrainians lived and worked in 2020, the arrival of millions more turns the demographic clock back to before the second world war, when the country had a large Ukrainian minority. Inter-ethnic animosity, which culminated in a post-war forced population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union, has diminished.

In theory, the newcomers should give Poland a boost. The ruling Law and Justice Party has been keen to increase the number of Poles. In 2016 it sought to raise the birth rate by giving families 500 zlotys ($115) a month for every child after the first. The effect was mainly to encourage women already planning to have children to have them earlier lest the benefit be withdrawn. The number of births rose in the scheme’s first two years, but dropped in 2020 to the lowest level since 2003. The Ukraine war has added more than a million children to Poland’s population, at least temporarily.

Other European countries, especially those with large Ukrainian diasporas, stand to gain. Perhaps 1.5m refugees have moved on to countries farther west, including Germany, Italy and France, according to an estimate by Gillian Triggs of the United Nations refugee agency. Before the war, about 250,000 Ukrainians lived and worked in Italy, where the median age is four years higher than in Europe overall and the fertility rate is among the lowest. In the first three months of this year Austria’s population increased by half a percentage point to more than 9m; 83% of that growth was from Ukrainian immigration. For a region worried about demographic decline, the youthful infusion from Ukraine can look like a blessing, although it is the consequence of horror. Businesses are reporting labour shortages. In January a lack of workers constrained output at a quarter of manufacturing and service enterprises in the euro zone, according to a survey by the European Commission. Governments lament that a shrinking workforce will have to support an ever greater number of pensioners. The ratio of working-age Europeans (aged 20-64) to those older than 65 is expected to drop from three to one to less than two to one by 2070. That is the sort of problem that can be relieved at least for a while by the arrival of able-brained and -bodied Ukrainians. But how long will they stay? And will they be joined by their male family members? That depends on how long the war lasts, and on how much damage is inflicted on their home country. In the Kosovo war of 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia to prevent the brutalisation of ethnic Albanians who make up Kosovo’s majority, hundreds of thousands fled, or were forcibly moved, to neighbouring Albania and Macedonia. But this period of the war lasted 78 days, after which the Kosovars quickly returned. By contrast the Bosnian war, which lasted from 1992 to 1995, sent some 700,000 refugees fleeing to western Europe and beyond, and far fewer returned. That is one reason why today there are thought to be 3.2m people or fewer in Bosnia. Before the war there were 4m.

Italy could do with some newcomers

For now, Ukrainians remain eager to return home. Indeed, on some recent days the number returning across the Polish border, presumably to relatively secure places such as Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, has exceeded the number going the other way. And some industries have lost workers as young Ukrainian men return home to fight the Russian invaders. The growth of Slovakia’s construction sector, for example, has been weakened by an exodus of workers.

But if the war drags on, and children grow accustomed to their new schools, mothers may become more reluctant to head back to their former homes. That will be all the truer if Ukraine’s economy does not recover, encouraging men to head west, some to rejoin their wives. In that case, the unsought addition to Europe’s population west of Ukraine may become long-lasting. And, if governments are successful in encouraging newcomers to find jobs that suit their skills, they will contribute to the prosperity of their hosts.

Plenty of countries will miss out. Croatia, whose population has dropped by 600,000 since 1991 to 3.9m, according to its latest census, is unlikely to attract many Ukrainians. Roughly 11,000 had arrived by early April. Russophile Serbia, whose population has slumped by a tenth since the mid-1990s to 6.9m, is also unlikely to appeal to Ukrainians in large numbers.

The gains from the influx, where they happen, may not be long-lasting. The biggest influence on families’ willingness to have children is their confidence in the economy. Births in Europe plummeted after the onset of the pandemic but recovered as governments lifted lockdowns and pumped money into their economies. Mr Putin’s aggression, and the rise in inflation to which it has contributed, has delivered a fresh blow to people’s confidence.

In March economic uncertainty among consumers reached its highest level on record, according to the European Commission. Few people may be inclined for their families to grow. None may be more reluctant than Ukrainian women, among whom birth rates were already low, who have been separated from their husbands and driven from their homes. The Balkan wars robbed the region of some of the best and brightest of a generation, and their descendants. Ukraine may face a similar fate. ■

B REXIT WAS always going to be a bother. The question was how much of one it would be. Although industries like financial services have not suffered the disaster some predicted, it is not hard to find aggravated business-owners complaining that leaving the EU has brought baffling bureaucracy, higher costs and frustrating delays. A flurry of new studies quantifies the pain.

One paper by the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics finds that Britain’s departure from the single market at the end of 2020 led to only a temporary dip in its exports to the EU relative to its sales elsewhere. But when they look at “trade ties”, or the range of products traded with different member states, they find a plunge of 30% (see left-hand chart). The drop is concentrated in lighter trade flows to dinkier countries. That looks suspiciously like smaller exporters giving up.

Another study, published by the UK in a Changing Europe, a think-tank, explores the effects of new barriers on the trade that did continue. Faced with higher costs when crossing Britain’s borders with the EU , businesses raised their prices. The authors compare products like fresh pork or tomatoes, which are mostly imported from the EU, with products like pineapples, which come from more exotic climes. They find that by September 2021 Brexit had lifted food prices by 6% relative to the years before December 2019. (A mooted government proposal to cut food tariffs might help, though removing non-tariff barriers matters more for imports from the EU .)

Comparing Britain’s economic performance with that of similar countries suggests a broader problem. Catherine Mann of the Bank of England has pointed out that by the end of 2021 consumer prices were around 4% higher than in otherwise comparable economies that did not experience Brexit (see right-hand chart). As the cost of living soars, a difference of this magnitude really matters.

For more coverage of matters relating to Brexit, visit our Brexit hub

A S TECHNOLOGICAL FEATS go, recovering and relaunching the first stage of a space rocket ranks pretty high on the scale of difficulty. So far, only SpaceX, an American giant, has pulled it off. But another outfit now seems close to doing so—albeit on a rather smaller scale. Shortly after the local weather calms (and thus after this story was published), a firm called Rocket Lab plans to dispatch a mission dubbed “There and Back Again”.

There and Back Again will start with the lift-off of one of the company’s two-stage Electron launchers from its spaceport on New Zealand’s North Island. (The mission’s name is a sly allusion to New Zealand’s role as a set for Peter Jackson’s filmed version of “The Hobbit”, the original book of which bore the phrase as part of its subtitle.) Minutes later, the attempt to recover the Electron’s spent first stage will begin. SpaceX, which first did this sort of thing in 2015, uses thrusters to set the descending first stages of its Falcon 9 launch vehicles gently upright on a landing pad. Rocket Lab, by contrast, will employ a helicopter to try to catch its parachuting first stage in flight.

It promises to be quite an operation, even if, at 12.4 metres, an Electron’s first stage is less than a third of the height of a Falcon 9’s. Rocket Lab has designed a grappling mechanism attached to a long line which will dangle from a twin-engined Sikorsky helicopter. The trick will be to manoeuvre the chopper so that this cord first makes contact with, and then slides smoothly along, the incoming stage’s taut parachute line. When that line reaches the grappler, it will snap shut like a gin trap, seizing the line in its jaws.

This sounds both hard and risky. But, in a number of tests, the capture team has successfully grabbed the parachute line of a dummy rocket stage dropped from a second helicopter (see picture). As for keeping the whole shebang out of the helicopter’s rotors, a radio in the stage helps to do this by transmitting its position continuously to the flight crew.

The trickiest technical challenge, therefore, is not the actual process of capture, but rather the manoeuvring of the stage that takes place minutes earlier, while the helicopter is still hovering on standby near the catch zone, some 280km from shore. If all goes well, about 150 seconds after launch the first stage’s nine kerosene-powered engines will switch off. The stage will then separate. As the second stage continues upward to loft 34 small satellites into orbit around Earth, the first, by now about 80km up, will arc back downward. This is when things get really dicey. With the first stage hurtling along at 2.35km a second, atmospheric friction will soon—and quite suddenly—generate tremendous heat. “It just goes whack, like that,” says Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s boss. His engineers refer to this first stretch of progressively thickening air as the Wall.

To survive the Wall intact, the first stage will use thrusters to flip itself over, so that it is travelling tail first. The bottom part of the stage is already designed to handle the intense heat of the engine’s exhaust, so it makes sense to take advantage of its heat-resistance to slice a pathway through the air. The friction of re-entry will nevertheless create a bow wave of superheated air molecules surrounding the stage, which Mr Beck describes as “a hot knife of plasma”. This renders the margin for error slim. Were the stage to tip slightly, and touch this plasma knife, he says, it would be cut through almost as if it were butter.

Friction from passing through the Wall will slow the stage, but not enough for it to deploy its main parachute immediately. Instead, at an altitude of about 13km, a pneumatic mortar will shoot out a smaller drogue chute. Only when the descending stage has reached an altitude of 6km will the big parachute be released. Even then, a circular “reefing” cord will restrict its opening to a quarter of its maximum surface area. Roughly a minute later, that cord will be severed, to permit the parachute to inflate fully. This will slow the stage’s descent to just ten metres a second. As the earlier trials have shown, at that speed the helicopter’s pilot is able to snag the spent stage with neither great difficulty nor a dangerous downward yank on the aircraft.

Rocket Lab is not the only company which hopes to emulate SpaceX’s feat of recycling. Quilty Analytics, a firm that advises the space industry, is aware of at least five others—though none is as far advanced as Rocket Lab. As to how much money the firm might save if all this proves successful, Mr Beck remains coy. However, Chris Quilty, Quilty Analytics’ founder, reckons the Electron’s first stage may well account for more than two-thirds of the launcher’s cost, so reusing it will cheapen things considerably. It is a fair bet, then, that Rocket Lab’s competitors will be almost as keen as the firm itself to see just how well the operation succeeds. ■

W ITH ALMOST 4,000 seats, the Metropolitan Opera House in New York is the largest indoor venue of its kind in the world. A solo singer can struggle to be heard over a full-sized orchestra playing forte, but Lise Davidsen, a 35-year-old Norwegian soprano, makes it seem effortless. The thrilling power of her luminous voice is even more remarkable considering she initially aspired to be a singer-songwriter in the style of Eva Cassidy or Joni Mitchell.

It is fortunate, says Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, that Ms Davidsen “discovered opera is her destiny”. He describes her as “one of the greatest singing talents to emerge in decades”, able to fill the cavernous space “in a way that is extraordinary”. Her voice is unique in its magnitude and distinguished by its timbre, technique and expressivity. Her skill was evident at the Met this spring when she sang the title role in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” and performed as Chrysothemis in a brilliant staging of his “Elektra”. Next season she will star as the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier”, another piece by the German composer.

In May she will sing the part of Sieglinde in “Die Walküre”, part of Wagner’s gargantuan “Ring of the Nibelung”, at the Vienna State Opera. This summer Ms Davidsen will also appear at the Bayreuth Festival, an annual celebration of Wagner’s oeuvre in Germany, and headline the Last Night of the Proms in London.

The opera world is primed for another star: Ms Davidsen’s rapid ascent coincides with the sudden descent of Anna Netrebko, the diva currently in operatic exile from most houses because of her association with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Ms Davidsen is a statuesque six foot two inches (1.88 metres) tall. On stage, she has a regal and magnetic presence.

Her stardom is unlikely. Born in Stokke, a small town in south-eastern Norway, she is the youngest of three siblings in a family that prized athletic talent more than the musical kind. Her parents were not of an artistic bent—her mother worked in health care and her father is an electrician—but she played the guitar as a teenager and sang pop, jazz and folk songs.

It was while completing a bachelor’s degree at the Grieg Academy in Norway that she saw her first opera, “Der Rosenkavalier”. “I remember thinking it was absolutely beautiful. It was so overwhelming,” she says. “It sounds weird because it was just 15 years ago and I was studying music, but to stand on the stage like that seemed as impossible as if I would speak Chinese tomorrow.” During a master’s degree at the Royal Opera Academy in Copenhagen, she finally decided to try her luck as a professional opera singer.

After she won Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2015 she made debuts at Bayreuth, the Royal Opera, Glyndebourne and La Scala. The Queen of Norway flew to New York to see her first Met performance in Tchaikovsky’s “Queen of Spades” in 2019 and she won rave reviews for her turn as Leonore in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” at the Royal Opera in early 2020. At the time, she was suffering from such extreme exhaustion and brain fog that she thought she was having a mental breakdown; in fact, she had covid-19. With opera houses closed, she returned to Oslo and focused on projects including a recording of songs by Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian composer and pianist, with Leif Ove Andsnes. The duo recently took the album on tour and will perform on May 27th in Bergen.

Ms Davidsen says she enjoys the direct communication with audiences that is possible with the recital format. Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”, which she sang poignantly at the Met’s Ukraine fund-raiser on March 14th, are among her signature pieces. She dismisses critics who say younger musicians shouldn’t perform late Beethoven string quartets or autumnal works such as the Strauss songs. The ability to feel and convey deep emotions, she points out, is not restricted to those over a certain age: “We all have different stories.”

She is adamant, however, that she is not ready for the emotional and physical challenge of singing Brunnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, the pinnacle of the dramatic soprano repertory and a role that administrators are eager to hire her for. (It lasts 15 hours and is performed over four evenings.) Ms Davidsen compares preparing for such roles to training for a marathon: when developing delicate vocal muscles, she says, it’s important to build stamina.

Seasoned opera lovers say that younger listeners not lucky enough to have heard the marvellous Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson will experience similar thrills when they hear Ms Davidsen perform. As Mr Gelb points out, the opera world struggles to stay artistically relevant and to connect with a broader public, a problem even more acute after the pandemic. Ms Davidsen has the voice to lure a new generation of fans to fill those seats. ■

Letters are welcome via e-mail to [email protected]

The plurality of Silicon Valleys

It is a long overdue develop ment that Silicon Valley is now a global state of mind (“A new atlas”, April 16th). As your article correctly noted, we are seeing an abundance of innovation around the world, resulting in many clusters from São Paulo to Bengaluru to Estonia. Having been closely involved in the growth of the Estonian and London ecosystems I can’t wait to see many more come about. Often their development is accelerated by having early big successes that act as an inspiration for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

However, when ranking the clusters we should take care not to forget that the smallest can often be the mightiest examples. Estonia has a population of 1.3m, but has given birth to ten unicorns, firms with a value of at least $1bn. Or zooming out from Estonia, the region known as the New Nordics (the Nordic and Baltic countries) has a combined population of more than 30m people and has created a similar number of unicorns. As the same population to unicorn ratio spreads over Europe we will soon take the lead over America.

TAAVET HINRIKUS

Technology founder and investor

Tallinn, Estonia

China and Taiwan

You once again made a comparison between the Taiwan issue and Ukraine (“How to become a porcupine”, April 23rd). You incited Taiwan to increase its military budget and strengthen its defence capability in order to resist a so-called invasion from China, and even advocated that America upgrade its political and military links with Taiwan and provide it with more weapons. Those statements are seriously wrong and we strongly condemn them.

The issue of Ukraine is an international dispute between two sovereign nations. The issue of Taiwan is purely an internal affair of China and is completely different in nature. There is only one China. Taiwan is an inseparable part of China’s territory, and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government representing the whole of China. The one-China principle is the extensive consensus of the international community.

The Taiwan issue bears on China’s core interests and we will brook no external interference. Resolving the Taiwan issue and achieving the complete reunification of China is the common wish and firm will of all Chinese people and is a historical trend that no one can stop. China will do its utmost to promote the peaceful reunification of the motherland but will never allow anyone to split Taiwan from China in any way. No one should underestimate the strong resolve and capability of the Chinese people in safeguarding the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

ZENG RONG

Spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy

London

Big majorities are a problem

Presumably many Conservative voters now recognise that the good-chap approach to governance has ceased to be effective, if it ever were (“Waiting for Boris”, April 16th). As long as a government can obtain a majority of 80 seats on 44% of the vote, any prime minister can change any governance rule they like. After Boris Johnson’s historic lawbreaking, will defenders of the status quo still argue that the first-past-the-post voting system brings stability and strong government? Or will One Nation Tories realise that the democratic values and the rule of law they claim to value would benefit from a more representative voting system with better accountability?

KATHRINE SANTOS

Executive member

Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform

London

Viktor Orban won an election with roughly half the vote, you say, but, “thanks to gerrymandering”, two-thirds of the parliamentary seats (“Imaginary hobgoblins”, April 9th). In the British election of 2019 the Tories won 44% of the vote and 56% of the seats, and in 1983 42% of the vote and 61% of the seats. Clearly Britain’s electoral system is more unfit for purpose than Hungary’s, even without gerrymandering.

MICHAEL SHIPMAN

London

Help yourselves

The transition to self-service in retailing, of all kinds, not just for petrol, was one of the great wealth-creating engines of the 20th century. Walmart and IKEA owe their fortunes to the phenomenon of replacing paid shopworkers with customers whose labour (selecting and picking goods) in their stores is free. This enhances their economies of scale.

For those who study or obsess about fuel retailing (and there are thankfully, just a few of us), New Jersey’s ban on motorists pumping their own gas has always been a charming fossil (“To pump or not to pump?”, April 16th). Smaller stations persist because, with smaller economies of scale, it makes sense for retailers to maintain more numerous smaller outlets rather than fewer, larger ones. Think of hairdressers. The same logic explains why there is no such thing as a vast “Hair Cuts R Us” outlet on the edge of town.

The move to self-service petrol has been accompanied by a drastic reduction in the number of fuel courts in America. In the 1960s there were around 450,000 gas stations, nearly all full-serve. Today there are around 125,000 despite the bigger fuel market.

NICHOLAS HODSON

Partner, P W C (retired, mostly)

Salt Lake City

Your correspondent really had to go there and mention pork rolls. Just to be clear, nothing can start a fight in New Jersey sooner than the mention of my state’s pork-product naming convention. It is called pork roll in south Jersey and Taylor ham in north Jersey. Our delicious ham, egg and cheese on a roll or bagel can’t be found anywhere else in America.

TIM O’KEEFE

Long Branch, New Jersey

Manifold prefixes

Johnson’s column on prefixes, such as tera- and nano-, mentioned that some people object to words that combine elements from different languages (April 9th). We could tackle this objection by matching Old English prefixes with units that have English roots.

For mega- and micro- there are the nicely matched words for large and small, mycel- and lytel-, as in mycelwatt and lytelfoot.

As for giga- and tera-, the Anglo-Saxons seem to have been fascinated by giants and monsters. I recommend ent- and aglac-, as in entapound and aglacyard. Ents were said to be giants, credited with building impressive Roman ruins. And Grendel’s mother in “Beowulf” is described, rather gallantly, as “ides aglacwif”, lady monster-woman.

ROY WHITE

St Paul, Minnesota

Time is an illusion

The gulf between Henri Bergson’s and Albert Einstein’s theories of time can be reconciled by the thinking of yet another 20th-century genius (“Time v the machine”, April 9th). Douglas Adams concocted the hitch-hiking “wave harmonic theory of historical perception”. It states that “history is an illusion caused by the passage of time, and that time is an illusion caused by the passage of history.”

T HE POLITICAL carnival of the Senate primary season in Pennsylvania—featuring a bald, tattooed giant with a billy-goat beard, a celebrity talk-show host and a hedge-fund executive who recently decamped from Connecticut—is settling into an intriguing pattern. The Republican candidates are doing what Republicans do now: panicking about the woke left and rhapsodising about Donald Trump. But the Democrats, rather than trying to excite their own base by espousing progressive causes, are edging towards the centre.

“I wouldn’t categorise myself as progressive,” John Fetterman, the Democratic front-runner and, at just over two metres, the giant, told CNN on April 21st, even as the Philadelphia Inquirer described him on its website as “an unabashed progressive”. The Democrats are competing instead over who will prove most electable statewide this autumn. It is a sign of the focus with which the candidates are approaching the race, one of few across the country where Democrats have a chance to gain a Senate seat. And, in a large swing state that will be crucial to the presidential contest in 2024, it may also reflect a broader return to pragmatism by the party, which has found itself to the left of most voters nationally on issues from crime to spending to immigration.

When the three Democratic candidates faced one another in debate for the first time, on April 21st, they seemed easy to tell apart. To Mr Fetterman’s right (physically and, at least until recently, politically) was Conor Lamb, a congressman from Pittsburgh who might have been assembled from a make-a-centrist kit: white and mild, a former marine and prosecutor without a hair or word out of place. To Mr Fetterman’s left was Malcolm Kenyatta, a state representative who is from Pennsylvania’s other Democratic stronghold, Philadelphia, and seemingly unpacked from the progressive box: black, gay and 31 years old, with warm charisma and a compelling autobiography of working-class struggle.

Yet on policy the three could be hard to distinguish as they spoke of raising the minimum wage, reducing gun violence and combating inflation. Both Mr Fetterman and Mr Lamb said they opposed President Joe Biden’s decision to revoke Title 42, a sweeping immigration restriction imposed by Donald Trump and hated by progressives. Yet even Mr Kenyatta was quick to say Mr Biden’s move should be part of “comprehensive immigration reform”, suggesting he also felt Mr Biden should have a better plan to deal with an influx of migrants, a prospect alarming Democrats in competitive races around the country.

The more raucous Republican race has been dominated by Dr Mehmet Oz, the talk-show host, and David McCormick, the former hedge-fund boss, who has startled ex-colleagues at Bridgewater Associates by embracing Mr Trump’s anti-immigration, anti-China politics. A respecter of television celebrity, Mr Trump has endorsed Dr Oz, who is pounding Mr McCormick in advertisements as “a finance bro” who invested in China “even after they gave us covid”. Ads supporting Mr McCormick have mined Dr Oz’s TV archive for clips of him appearing with Michelle Obama, interviewing a transgender child and kissing his own star on Hollywood Boulevard.

When the five Republican candidates debated in Harrisburg on April 25th, only one, Jeff Bartos, a businessman, committed the heresy of implying the party should move on from contesting the legitimacy of the 2020 election. They bickered over who had authentic ties to Pennsylvania (Dr Oz is a longtime New Jersey resident) and to Mr Trump. “I’m not going to be out-Pennsyvlanian’ed or out-America-first by anybody on this stage,” Mr McCormick said.

With the primary election less than three weeks away, on May 17th, the Republican race is a toss-up between Dr Oz and Mr McCormick. But Mr Fetterman is far ahead of his competitors in the polls and in fundraising. The Harvard-educated son of an insurance executive, he served for 13 years as mayor of Braddock, a tiny Pittsburgh suburb impoverished by the collapse of the steel industry. As mayor he tattooed one arm with the dates of nine murders during his tenure and built a national profile as an apostle of urban revival.

After a first unsuccessful bid for the Senate in 2016, Mr Fetterman won the largely ceremonial post of lieutenant governor in 2018 and in 2020 further enhanced his statewide and national image among Democrats by defending the integrity of the state’s vote; even his dogs, Levi and Artie, have more than 25,000 Twitter followers. Profiles of Mr Fetterman in the national press inevitably emphasise his preference for shorts and Carhartt outerwear instead of suits. GQ , a fashion magazine, declared him “nothing less than an American taste god”.

To some Pennsylvania insiders, Mr Fetterman’s style smacks of gimmick and even privilege, a disrespect to voters that only a white man could get away with. But there is no doubting his appeal to Democrats, particularly in the white enclaves of western and central Pennsylvania where he has mostly campaigned. He manages to appear at once unconventional and safe.

During the debate, Mr Fetterman looked ill at ease in a suit that was baggy even on his frame. His opponents confirmed his front-runner status by attacking him, and Mr Fetterman, frowning and furrowing his brow, seemed poorly prepared to explain himself or his policies. “You know it when you see it,” he replied, when asked to define what level of wealth merited higher taxation. His wardrobe may be ready for the general-election campaign, but his policies might yet benefit from some refinement. In this and other important ways, America’s political future is playing out in Pennsylvania. ■

A MERICA’S CONSTITUTION promises the “free exercise” of religion; it also prohibits religious “establishment”. Recently the Supreme Court has been strengthening the first guarantee—a right to live one’s faith free from government meddling—while chipping away at the wall separating church from state. The divergent trend lines of these First Amendment guarantees are unlikely to converge in the case of Joseph Kennedy, a devout Christian American-football coach who was suspended for praying after games in Washington state.

Kennedy v Bremerton School District, the first case involving prayer and public schools to reach the high court since 2000, is messy. The Supreme Court typically decides on the law, not the facts; ascertaining facts is the district court’s job. But on April 25th factual disputes about what exactly Mr Kennedy did and why he was suspended took centre stage in the oral argument.

Paul Clement, the lawyer for Mr Kennedy, claimed his client lost his job for private, “fleeting” prayers conducted by himself on the 50-yard line after two games in October 2015. Richard Katskee, representing the school board, told a different story: Mr Kennedy had been praying with students since he started coaching in 2008. Teachers and coaches can of course have “quiet prayers by themselves at work even if students can see”, Mr Katskee said, but Mr Kennedy made himself “the centre of attention” during many midfield supplications and “pressured” students to pray.

Justice Stephen Breyer laid out what he took to be six facts. These included an unanswered letter the district sent Mr Kennedy proposing accommodations for him to pray less demonstratively. Mr Clement assented to those, but said there were “lots of other facts that are in the record that I think are highly relevant”.

Justice Samuel Alito urged Mr Katskee to “forget about all of the complicated facts in this case” and ponder whether a football coach praying, without inviting or excluding anyone, risked establishing religion. Chief Justice John Roberts asked whether, if Mr Kennedy’s politicisation of the issue by inviting legislators to pray with him was taken “off the table”, his actions would be kosher in the school board’s eyes.

In building its case against Mr Kennedy, the school board had relied on the “endorsement test”, a standard first used by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 1984 whereby a constitutional violation occurs when a “reasonable observer” finds the government’s imprimatur on religious expression. It has fallen out of favour among the justices. As a lower-court judge in 2010, Neil Gorsuch said it was “far from clear” the test remained an appropriate measure.

Recognising this, Mr Katskee sought to characterise the prayers as “coercive”—a test the conservative justices are less suspicious of. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh presented the concerns in Kennedy as a departure from precedent. In contrast to the religious invocations at public-school graduations that the court found coercive in Lee v Weisman in 1992, he said, Kennedy involves only “subtle” or “implicit” pressure.

The links between Lee and Kennedy are stronger than Justice Kavanaugh lets on: both ask whether youngsters will feel pushed to take part in religious rituals they don’t believe in. And there’s an extra incentive for athletes, as one former Bremerton student attests. Staying on the coach’s good side is crucial for those who want playing time. Participation in the prayer circles, the student said, is “expected”.

Four justices signalled support for Mr Kennedy when the case first came to the Supreme Court in 2019. This week one or two more—Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts—sounded inclined to join that quartet in pooh-poohing religion-state separation in favour of free religious exercise. Mr Kennedy’s chances of redemption seem high. ■

I T WAS A somewhat trying night for fans of understatement. On his first prime-time show on Talk TV , a broadcast and streaming channel that launched on April 25th, Piers Morgan declared: “As Nelson Mandela might have said, it’s been a long walk to freedom of speech!” His opening-night interviewee, Donald Trump, may be the only person in the world who can make Mr Morgan look bashful. But the presenter has not been hired for his command of euphemisms. His job is to sock it to Britain’s existing news broadcasters.

Talk TV is the latest addition to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. In 2018 his bid to take full control of Sky, a European pay- TV giant, failed, leaving the tycoon with no stake in a British broadcaster for the first time in decades. He considered investing in GB News, a right-wing news channel which began broadcasting in June 2021. GB News has avoided clashes with Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator which enforces rules on impartiality, but it has largely flopped in the ratings.

The lukewarm reception for GB News might seem like a bad signal for another talking-heads channel. But Talk TV has some important advantages. The first is the sheer volume of journalism that News UK , the British arm of News Corp, already produces. As well as TalkRadio (a phone-in station whose shows are being simulcast on the new channel), its athletic sibling TalkSport and the higher-brow Times Radio, the firm publishes newspapers including the Times and the Sun. “The journalistic talent that is already inside the building in News UK can be deployed in ever more ways,” says Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis, a research firm.

Second, Talk TV is focusing heavily on online platforms. Presenters sound off to camera, creating viral content alongside which the channel hopes to sell advertising. A shift to social platforms has helped LBC , TalkRadio’s biggest commercial rival. Videos of its presenters and guests travel much further on social media than audio clips do, helping to make it Britain’s fastest-growing talk-radio station.

Operation Car Wash. By Jorge Pontes and Márcio Anselmo. Translated by Anthony Doyle. Bloomsbury; 208 pages; $27 and £20

A T SIX O’CLOCK one morning in June 2015 nine agents of Brazil’s Federal Police raided a mansion in Morumbi, a swanky neighbourhood in São Paulo, and arrested its owner. Marcelo Odebrecht was the boss of a family business—Latin America’s largest multinational construction conglomerate—and his detention was a watershed in a police investigation into the promiscuous relationship between money and political power in Brazil.

Originally focused on Petrobras, the country’s state-controlled oil and gas giant, the investigation was dubbed Lava Jato (Car Wash) because one of the money-launderers used an exchange house at a petrol station in Brasília. Odebrecht’s managers would eventually confess to operating a “bribes department” which handed out nearly $800m to politicians and officials in a dozen countries; in return, they secured more than 100 overpriced public-works contracts across Latin America and Africa. Brazilian prosecutors charged dozens of politicians. In 2017 they secured the jailing of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country’s president from 2003 to 2011 and a hero of the Latin American left.

Led by a new generation of young, often foreign-educated, detectives, prosecutors and judges, Lava Jato seemed to be a decisive offensive against ingrained corruption in Brazil. Yet the sentencing of Lula by Sergio Moro, a crusading judge in the southern city of Curitiba, to 12 years for allegedly receiving a penthouse from a construction magnate, both marked its apogee and signalled its overreach.

The wrongdoing uncovered by Lava Jato and the political controversy surrounding it have spawned a large literature in Brazil. “The Mechanism”, an early journalistic report by Vladimir Netto in which Mr Moro is the hero, became a Netflix series. Deltan Dallagnol, the lead prosecutor in Curitiba, published a personal account. The most notable contribution is “A Organização” (“The Organisation”), a thorough and readable chronicle of the rise and fall of Odebrecht by Malu Gaspar, another journalist.

Now comes “Operation Car Wash” by Jorge Pontes and Márcio Anselmo, first published in Brazil in early 2019 and translated into English by Anthony Doyle. The authors are federal policemen. When Lava Jato began, Mr Pontes had recently retired after a distinguished career which included campaigning to set up an environmental-crimes division of the force. Mr Anselmo led the team which arrested Mr Odebrecht. Their thesis is that Brazil suffers from “institutionalised crime”, by which they mean “a fraudulent system that operates with the blessing of the nation’s power structures and the support of a network that pervades all three powers of the state”.

This system involved all the main political parties, who shared out state procurement jobs. Construction companies received padded contracts in return for bribes, many of which went to finance political campaigns. Although it dates back at least to Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964-85, the authors claim that the system was perfected under the governments of Lula’s Workers’ Party, when an oil boom offered bounteous revenues and party officials centralised corruption.

There is much truth in this. Systematic corruption has contributed to an expensive state in Brazil that offers poor public services. Lava Jato turned up cases of grotesque greed. Sérgio Cabral, a former governor of Rio de Janeiro now in prison, pocketed around $100m, levying 5% on construction contracts and embezzling budgets from health care to prison meals.

Yet the authors push their thesis too far. They never discuss in detail how much of the bribery involved personal enrichment and how much campaign finance. They attribute adverse judicial decisions and budget cuts to conspiracy. Brazil’s Supreme Court has shown greater independence than they give it credit for. But their pleas for the independence of the Federal Police, and for more resources for the force, are well made. They are particularly scathing about the distorted priorities imposed by the war on drugs: tens of thousands of poor Brazilians have been locked up while the crimes of the rich and powerful have often gone unpunished.

Some Brazilians believed that Mr Moro was simply out to get Lula. There was no evidence the former president had occupied the penthouse (there was stronger proof in another case involving a country retreat). Lula’s conviction, upheld on appeal, prevented him from running in an election in 2018 and paved the way for Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, to win the presidency. Suspicion of Mr Moro’s motives was aroused when he released damaging plea-bargaining testimony implicating Lula days before the vote. It was reinforced when the judge agreed to become Mr Bolsonaro’s justice minister.

Since 2019 the tables have turned against Lava Jato. Leaked messages showed that Mr Moro broke the rules of judicial impartiality by coaching Mr Dallagnol. By a narrow majority the Supreme Court reversed its previous ruling that the guilty should be imprisoned after a first appeal and thus freed Lula. The court also ruled that Mr Moro had exceeded his jurisdiction in pursuing the former president for matters not directly related to Petrobras.

Although he campaigned against corruption, Mr Bolsonaro has shown little interest in fighting it. He appointed a public prosecutor and a federal police chief who do his bidding. The pandemic and economic troubles have displaced corruption in the public mind. Many of those jailed for Lava Jato are agitating for their release.

One lasting benefit of the scandal is a reform that bars corporate political donations. In other respects, the struggle against institutionalised crime has not yielded the fruits that Mr Pontes, Mr Anselmo and many others hoped for. ■

R USSIA’S DECISION to halt the supply of gas to Bulgaria and Poland has added fuel to an already heated debate in Germany, which is heavily reliant on the commodity. For weeks the country’s economists and officials have argued over just how much a ban on Russian hydrocarbons would harm the economy. Now it seems imaginable that Russia itself could turn off the taps. What toll would an embargo take? A wide body of research, which examines a range of past disruptions, sheds light on the question.

The relationships between modern firms are not simple links connecting one producer with another, but a tangle of complex interactions. The breakdown of a seemingly insignificant link in the chain can disrupt firms that are either upstream or downstream of it, causing wider damage. In a paper published in 2019 David Baqaee of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Emmanuel Farhi of Harvard University used a model of complex supply networks to study the oil shocks of the 1970s. Linkages between firms and sectors meant that the overall economic effect was quite a bit larger than the direct impact on sectors that used oil. Recent research on the effect of social distancing on America by Jean-Noël Barrot, then of HEC Paris, and his co-authors finds that ripple effects through production networks accounted for more than half of the total economic impact.

Another much-studied instance of disruption is the earthquake that struck north-eastern Japan in 2011. As the worst-hit areas only accounted for less than a twentieth of GDP , local disruption should not have had a noticeable nationwide effect. But it did. In a review Vasco Carvalho of the University of Cambridge and colleagues disentangle the impact on the affected areas from the ripple effects along supply chains, and find that the latter accounted for more than half the hit to Japanese growth.

Researchers have also uncovered the types of links and mechanisms that enable shocks to propagate widely. The shutdown of a company altogether is one way in which a jolt can create a much bigger economic hit, according to a paper by Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi of Northwestern University (as well as another study by Mr Baqaee). That explains why Alan Mulally, then the chief executive of Ford, a carmaker, urged American lawmakers to bail out his competitors during the global financial crisis. Ford feared the collapse of the auto sector’s suppliers, which would cause severe disruptions at its own plants, too.

Intimate commercial relationships, such as those within firms, tend to be especially affected, because they are harder to replace. Another study of Japan’s 2011 earthquake by Christoph Boehm of the University of Texas, Austin, and others finds that the American subsidiaries of Japanese firms also suffered, as did their suppliers. Other research also concludes that the more customised the relationship between firms and their suppliers, the bigger the ripple effects. Mr Barrot and Julien Sauvagnat of Bocconi University examine 30 years of American natural disasters and find that disruption to just one supplier leads to a loss in sales for a downstream firm of two to three percentage points, which, considering that most suppliers provide a small portion of a firm’s production inputs, is a sizeable fall.

Such findings provide fodder for opponents of an energy embargo in Germany. And some estimates of the impact of an embargo also suggest that the short-term disruptions could be large. Six leading German research institutes conclude that an embargo could lead to a GDP loss for the country of around 1% this year and 5% in 2023. The Bundesbank estimates a hit of 5% in 2022.

Yet there are two reasons why things need not be so bad. For a start, just as past experience shows that supply disruptions can have sizeable near-term effects, it also shows that the economy in aggregate has a great ability to adjust. In 2010 China banned the export of rare-earth metals to Japan, one of the world’s biggest users of the minerals. Japanese firms were able to quickly substitute away from previously cheap rare earths and find alternative supplies, according to research by Eugene Gholz of the University of Notre Dame and Llewelyn Hughes of the Australian National University. In a study of the potential effects of a Russian energy embargo on Europe, Rüdiger Bachmann of the University of Notre Dame and his co-authors find that while the hit could be large, it would be partly offset by the economy’s ability to adapt. The overall impact, they reckon, could be in the region of 0.5-3% of GDP .

Production, interrupted

Moreover, it is within the gift of governments to mitigate the short-term pain of supply disruptions. EU officials, for instance, are mulling stricter sanctions on energy imports from Russia. The more notice firms receive about the measures, which could include a tax on Russian energy, the easier adjusting to them is likely to become. Past episodes suggest that if policymakers do want to change regulations or trade relationships, they should do so consistently and carefully. A liberalisation of Indian trade in the 1990s led to little wider disruption because it was gradual, helping firms adjust. A recent study by Alessandra Peter of New York University and Cian Ruane of the IMF points out that Indian firms were able to find substitutes for inputs.

Governments could also take into account the fact that businesses may not do enough to ensure that networks are solid in the near term. Matthew Elliott of the University of Cambridge and others find that firms might invest in the robustness of their supply chains if they have a business case to do so. But they might not seek to ensure the resilience of the wider network, because they do not stand to reap the rewards from such investment. Encouraging firms and households to shift away from using fossil fuels, as a tariff would do, could enhance that resilience. Managed well, Germany’s supply disruptions need not be quite so disruptive. ■

China has a celebrated history of policy experiments (Apr 9th)

I N 1988 STEVE GUTTENBERG, a comic actor, appeared on a British talk show. At one point he was asked why he had not appeared in “Police Academy 5”, having starred in the earlier films. He replied that, in his view, all the important philosophical questions had been addressed in the first four movies.

This brings us to the more serious business of investing, and a sequel of a very different kind. Ten years ago Antti Ilmanen, a finance whizz, published “Expected Returns”, a brilliant distillation of investment theory, practice and wisdom. His latest book, “Investing Amid Low Expected Returns”, is an update, taking in a decade’s worth of additional research and data. Mr Ilmanen has read all the books and papers, sorting the good stuff from the junk. He has a gift for explaining clearly and concisely the lessons of this research for investors. The new book is as invaluable a resource as the old one. If it has a fault, it is that it does not quite address all the important philosophical questions. A sequel may be necessary.

Start, though, with a recap of the expected-returns framework. There are two sources of return on an investment: income and capital gain. The income on, for instance, a government bond is the interest (or “coupon”) paid once or twice a year. Bond prices and yields move inversely. So when interest rates fall, as they did for much of the past four decades, bond investors enjoy a capital gain. In essence a capital gain of this kind brings forward future returns. You get the income now you were going to get later. But as yields fall ever lower the scope for further capital gains becomes more limited. So low yields imply low expected returns. This bond-like logic holds for other assets—equities, property, private equity and so on. Dividend and rental yields have fallen in response to the secular fall in interest rates. Owners of all kinds of assets have experienced windfall gains. But today’s low yields imply low expected returns in the future.

What now? As Mr Ilmanen sees it, low expected returns can materialise through either “slow” or “fast” pain. In the slow-pain scenario, assets remain expensive and investors receive desultory bond coupons, equity dividends and rental receipts for years on end. In the fast-pain scenario yields revert to their higher historical averages. This implies a spell of brutal capital losses followed by fairer returns thereafter. The choice is between well-heeled stagnation and a crash.

Mr Ilmanen is too much of an epistemological sceptic to put all his chips on one scenario. He is also too careful an analyst to miss that low inflation made the high-asset-price, low-yield 2010s what they were. Many of the factors that kept a lid on inflation in that decade—globalisation, efficient supply-chain management, tight fiscal policy, an expanding global workforce—are now attenuating or unwinding. Mr Ilmanen’s hunch is that the 2020s will see something of a reversal of the investment trends of the preceding decade. But he generally eschews investing on hunches.

Faced with lower expected returns, investors have three courses of action: they can take more risk to reach for higher returns; they can save more; or they can accept reality and play the hand they have been dealt as well as they can. The first approach may increase returns but also makes them more uncertain. Saving more means sacrificing today for the sake of tomorrow, a highly personal choice. Understandably, Mr Ilmanen’s focus is on the third approach. He sets out a chapter-by-chapter analysis of various investment assets and styles. He advises how to put them together in a truly diversified portfolio. Along the way, he explains why market timing is a snare (you end up taking too little risk); what the true appeal of private equity is (not superior returns); and why portfolio insurance will not save you (it is too expensive in the long run).

There are shortcomings. A quarter of the 500+ references are from authors affiliated with AQR Capital Management, Mr Ilmanen’s employer. This weighting gives the book a less independent air than “Expected Returns”. Readers would have benefited greatly from a chapter on the implications of low expected returns for different sorts of savers. The fast-pain scenario, for instance, is surely preferable for young savers, to whom the book is dedicated. Perhaps this and other gaps will be filled in “Expected Returns III”. Even Mr Guttenberg has been teasing fans with the prospect of “Police Academy 8”. The big philosophical questions are never truly settled.

Bonds signal recession. Stocks have been buoyant. What gives? (Apr 9th)

Z OOLOGISTS ROUTINELY track animals, from albatross to zebra, using global-positioning-system ( GPS ) tags which then return their data via satellite. Marine biologists have a harder time of it, though, because seawater is infuriatingly opaque to radio signals. This makes it impossible either to receive GPS signals or to transmit any data collected back to base.

That does not stop people tagging sea creatures. Data collected and stored in a tag can either be sent to a satellite in bursts if the species in question is one that comes to the surface from time to time, or the tag can be dispatched on a one-way trip to the surface after a set period. A tag may also be recovered if the animal carrying it is caught by a fishing boat. (Fisherfolk are typically paid a few hundred dollars per tag returned to its home laboratory.)

None of these methods, though, keeps accurate track of where the animal carrying the tag has been. For these and other reasons, it would therefore be useful to have a marine equivalent of GPS . And one is now being deployed. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, hopes to fill the seas with sonic beacons that will ape the role of GPS satellites by broadcasting signals which can be used to triangulate a receiver’s location when it is underwater.

Ping pong

The sea is divided into distinct layers that have different temperatures and salinities. During the second world war American naval scientists showed that some of these layers act as sonic waveguides. They dubbed them “sound fixing and ranging” ( SOFAR ) channels. Sound emitted in one of these channels echoes between the layers above and below, thus staying in the channel—an effect comparable to the way light is carried within an optical fibre. Thus constrained, a sound wave can travel hundreds of kilometres before it becomes too attenuated to detect.

The SOFAR transmitters deployed by Woods Hole, as the institution is known colloquially, are one-tonne buoys moored at an appropriate depth for the channel concerned. Every 12 hours they broadcast a 32-second-long location signal known as a pong. Pongs are so called because they are similar to sonar “pings”, but of lower frequency (300 H z rather than 18k H z). In typical conditions a pong can be picked up 1,000km away. By listening to the pongs from several beacons a receiver can calculate its location.

Existing receivers for the two SOFAR transmitters currently deployed are carried on free-floating instrument packs that measure temperature, salinity and other physical variables. But the plan is to deploy two more transmitters this year, and more in future years, with the aim of “ensonifying” the entire east coast of America, out as far as the Sargasso Sea. At the same time, people are working on shrinking the receivers to the point where they can be attached easily to fish.

Godi Fischer of the University of Rhode Island is one of those attempting this receiver-shrinking. His latest offering, now being tested on submersible drones called gliders, is 24mm long, 11mm in diameter and weighs just nine grams. That makes it tiny enough to be attached to a range of marine creatures. Even if the recipient is not in a SOFAR channel, Dr Fischer says there is enough leakage from such channels for it to pick up a signal at a distance of perhaps 100km. Each tag costs just $200.

Simon Thorrold, an ocean ecologist at Woods Hole, will be an eager adopter of these tags. He plans to attach them to tuna and swordfish later this year. Both species are commercially important, and their behaviour is not properly understood. Swordfish follow a daily pattern, diving at dawn and spending the day at depths of up to 800 metres before rising near the surface again at night. But nobody knows what drives them to do this.

Dr Thorrold suspects it may be related to the way the fish interact with so-called mesoscale features. These are gyres tens of kilometres across which last for a month or so. In particular, a type of feature called a warm-core eddy may be crucial for populations of prey species. Plotting the way swordfish move in relation to eddies could reveal much about the workings of the marine ecosystem. Dr Thorrold says the findings could help both fisherfolk and the environment, by helping ensure that only fish of the desired type are caught, therefore minimising so-called by-catch of forbidden or non-commercial species.

Further down the line, he hopes to track Atlantic salmon. This could shed light on “ocean phase mortality”—the number of fish that go out into the deep ocean from their freshwater spawning grounds but fail to return to them later in life, to spawn themselves. He also hopes, once and for all, to solve the mystery of where Atlantic eels spawn.

Eels have life cycles that are the opposite of salmon. They spawn at sea and the young then swim back to freshwater to live out most of their lives. That Atlantic eels spawn somewhere in the vicinity of the Sargasso Sea is known from work carried out a century ago. But exactly where this happens remains obscure.

SOFAR transmitters will have applications beyond zoology, as well. Melissa Omand, a colleague of Dr Fischer at Rhode Island, specialises in underwater robotics. She has developed small underwater floats she calls Minions. Their purpose is to follow the movement of carbon in the oceans.

Toiling Minions

Each Minion is equipped with a camera of the sort found in a smartphone, and also a Raspberry Pi microprocessor. It uses these to monitor small particles of organic matter (mainly fish faeces) that are known collectively as marine snow. This snow falls from the surface to the ocean depths, where it decays so slowly that it may persist for thousands of years. That makes it an important carbon “sink”, which stores that element in a form in which it cannot contribute to global warming. A fleet of cheap Minions carrying Dr Fischer’s tags could give a better picture of ocean currents and carbon transport in the ocean. Dr Omand says this might guide projects seeking to sequester carbon out of harm’s way in the ocean depths.

A SOFAR beacon of the sort Woods Hole makes clocks in at around $100,000, plus the price of deployment. Thousands could thus be put in place for the cost of a single GPS satellite. Surprisingly, there is no military equivalent (though DARPA , a research arm of America’s defence department, is working on one called POSYDON ). And, since Woods Hole is a scientific institution, it is makes sense that the initial applications are scientific. As with GPS , though, once the infrastructure is there, people will probably find commercial employment for it, too. Exactly how humans will use the oceans over coming decades remains to be seen. But having decent navigation beacons in place will surely help. ■

I T WAS A criminal’s paradise. In June 2020 a firm in Milan secured a €60,000 ($63,300) government loan to cope with the pandemic-induced downturn. But the business did not exist. The Italian government had in fact sent cash to the ’Ndrangheta Mafia of Calabria. The same month six French citizens swindled €12m in unemployment benefits by claiming funds for employees at 3,600 shell companies. A Texan man filed loan applications for 15 made-up firms and pocketed $24.8m in government support.

As countries scale back unparalleled emergency-relief programmes there is growing interest in where the funds went. The IMF estimates that since January 2020 governments have doled out $15.5trn in non-health-care spending and loans in response to the covid-19 pandemic. The rush to support households and firms led to poor procurement, messy programmes and inadequate oversight. The best estimates of fraud, so far, are from Britain and America; other countries, where wrong doing may well have been more prevalent, lack audits tracing where the money went. In America at least 4.5% of funding under the CARES Act, the largest pandemic-stimulus bill, went to cheats. Applying that figure globally suggests that nearly $700bn could have ended up in the wrong hands.

In Britain fraud and error—losses due to crime and mistaken payments—across five economic-relief schemes exceed £16bn ($21bn), roughly a tenth of the £166bn spent, according to official reports. That tally could well rise: the National Audit Office calculates that fraud from just one of the programmes, the Bounce Back Loan Scheme—whose reported losses account for a quarter of the sum—could reach £26bn, 55% of its total spending, when investigations come to a close.

Spending in America was larger—and so was the waste. The Secret Service reckons $100bn has been stolen from the $2.2trn CARES Act. If pre-pandemic fraud levels were sustained, at least $87bn in unemployment insurance—which got a budgetary bump during the pandemic—would have been captured by crooks. Auditors reckon the true fraud rate is much higher.

Scams and mismanagement are inevitable in programmes of such a scale. But past stimulus efforts were cleaner. In the decade since the financial crisis, investigators recovered only $57m in fraudulent funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an $840bn stimulus package. Cheats continue to be exposed over time, but even if all cases still being audited are confirmed as criminal, the programme’s fraud rate will reach only 0.6%. Other government schemes lose less, too. The rate of total health-care fraud in America hovers at around 3%. Britain mistakenly overpaid around 1.5% of work and pension benefits a year in the decade to 2019.

The covid-19 stimulus waste estimates, by contrast, are alarming—especially as the true extent of fraud could take years to uncover. But some misspending may have been unavoidable. When crisis struck economists urged governments to do whatever it took to avoid colossal damage. Speedy action did just that. America distributed stimulus cheques to 90m people in less than a month. In rich countries real disposable income per person rose by 3% in 2020. That kind of offset might not have been possible with slower, more carefully crafted policies.

More scrutiny is coming. In March three dozen Republican senators demanded more transparency about how funds were spent before signing up to more pandemic-related funding. Joe Biden has appointed a chief prosecutor to take down criminals who tried to profit from the pandemic. And some justice is already being served. The French fraudsters were arrested and the Texan creator of fictional firms pleaded guilty to money-laundering. As for the Mafia in Milan? The Italian government caught on and froze their assets. ■

T HE JOB of organising NATO ’s biggest military exercise since the cold war kept Admiral James Foggo, then the commander of American naval forces in Europe and Africa, busy in the summer of 2018. Trident Juncture was to gather 50,000 personnel, 250 aircraft and 65 warships in the European Arctic in October. As logistically taxing as that sounds, it was small fry compared with what Russia was planning in Siberia in September. The Vostok exercises would be the biggest since the Soviet Union’s mammoth Zapad drills of 1981, boasted Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister: they would involve 300,000 troops, 1,000 aircraft and 80 warships.

This was a huge feat. “It was a big lift for us to get 50,000 people in the field,” recalled Admiral Foggo recently. “How did they do that?” The answer, he eventually realised, was that they did not do it. A company of troops (150 at most) at Vostok was counted as a battalion or even a regiment (closer to 1,000). Single warships were passed off as whole squadrons. This chicanery might have been a warning sign that not everything was as it seemed in the Russian armed forces, even before they got bogged down in the suburbs of Kyiv.

“It’s not a professional army out there,” said Admiral Foggo. “It looks like a bunch of undisciplined rabble.” Since they invaded Ukraine on February 24th, Russian forces have succeeded in capturing just one big city, Kherson, along with the ruins of Mariupol and chunks of Donbas, the eastern industrial region that they partially occupied in 2014 and now hope to conquer in its entirety. That meagre haul has come at the cost of 15,000 dead Russian soldiers, according to a recent British estimate, exceeding in two months the Soviet losses in a decade of war in Afghanistan. The invasion has clearly been a fiasco, but how accurate a reflection of Russia’s military capabilities is it, astonished Western generals wonder?

On the eve of war, Russia’s invasion force was considered formidable. American intelligence agencies reckoned that Kyiv would fall in days. Some European officials thought it might just hold out for a few weeks. No one thought that the city would be welcoming such dignitaries as Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, America’s secretaries of state and defence respectively, two months after the fighting started. The belief was that Russia would do to Ukraine what America had done to Iraq in 1991: shock and awe it into submission in a swift, decisive campaign.

This belief was based on the assumption that Russia had undertaken the same sort of root-and-branch military reform that America underwent in the 18-year period between its defeat in Vietnam and its victory in the first Gulf war. In 2008 a war with Georgia, a country of fewer than 4m people, though successful in the end, had exposed the Russian army’s shortcomings. Russia fielded obsolete equipment, struggled to find Georgian artillery and botched its command and control. At one stage, Russia’s general staff allegedly could not reach the defence minister for ten hours. “It is impossible to not notice a certain gap between theory and practice,” acknowledged Russia’s army chief at the time. To close that gap, the armed forces were slashed in size and spruced up.

Ambition in spades

Russian military expenditure, when measured properly—that is, in exchange rates adjusted for purchasing power—almost doubled between 2008 and 2021, rising to over $250bn, about triple the level of Britain or France (see charts). Around 600 new planes, 840 helicopters and 2,300 drones were added to the arsenal between 2010 and 2020. New tanks and missiles were flaunted at parades in Moscow. Russia tested new tactics and equipment in Donbas, after its first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and in its campaign to prop up Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator, the following year.

A retired European general says that watching this new model army fail reminds him of visiting East Germany and Poland after the end of the cold war, and seeing the enemy up close. “We realised how shite the 3rd Shock Army was,” he says, referring to a much-vaunted Soviet formation based in Magdeburg. “We’ve again allowed ourselves to be taken in by some of the propaganda that they put our way.” Russia’s army was known to have problems, says Petr Pavel, a retired Czech general who chaired NATO ’s military committee in 2015-18, “but the scope of these came as a surprise to many, including myself—I believed that the Russians had learnt their lessons.”

The charitable interpretation is that the Russian army has been hobbled in Ukraine less by its own deficiencies than by Mr Putin’s delusions. His insistence on plotting the war in secrecy complicated military planning. The FSB , a successor to the KGB , told him that Ukraine was riddled with Russian agents and would quickly fold. That probably spurred the foolish decision to start the war by sending lightly armed paratroopers to seize an airport on the outskirts of Kyiv and lone columns of armour to advance into the city of Kharkiv, causing heavy casualties to elite units.

Yet, this coup de main having fizzled, the army then chose to plough into the second largest country in Europe from several directions, splitting 120 or so battalion tactical groups ( BTG s) into lots of ineffective and isolated forces. Bad tactics then compounded bad strategy: armour, infantry and artillery fought their own disconnected campaigns. Tanks that should have been protected by infantry on foot instead roamed alone, only to be picked off in Ukrainian ambushes. Artillery, the mainstay of the Russian army since tsarist times, though directed with ferocity at cities such as Kharkiv and Mariupol, could not break through Ukrainian lines around Kyiv.

Problems in profusion

In recent weeks officials and experts have debated the causes of Russian failure. Some have drawn comparisons to the collapse of the French army in 1940. But the analogy is not apt, says Christopher Dougherty, a former planner for the Pentagon. “France failed because it followed bad doctrine,” he says. “Russia’s failing in part because it’s not following its doctrine, or basic principles of war.”

Inexperience is part of the problem. As the historian Michael Howard once noted, the expertise a military officer hones “is almost unique in that he may only have to exercise it once in a lifetime, if indeed that often. It is as if a surgeon had to practise throughout his life on dummies for one real operation.” America has been wielding the scalpel nearly continuously since the end of the cold war, in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and so on. Russia has not fought a war of this magnitude against an organised army since seizing Manchuria from Japan in 1945.

Things it could do in smaller wars, in Donbas and Syria—such as using electronic sensors on drones to feed back targets for artillery—have proved harder on a larger scale. And things that appeared easy in America’s wars, such as wiping out an enemy’s air defences, are actually quite hard. Russia’s air force is flying several hundred sorties a day, but it is still struggling to track and hit moving targets, and remains heavily reliant on unguided or “dumb” bombs that can be dropped accurately only at low altitudes, exposing its planes to anti-aircraft fire.

All armies make mistakes. Some make more than others. The distinguishing feature of good armies is that they learn from their mistakes rapidly. In abandoning Kyiv, focusing on Donbas and putting a single general, Alexander Dvornikov, in charge of a cacophonous campaign, Russia is belatedly showing signs of adaptation. In early April a Western official, when asked whether Russia was improving tactically, observed that armoured columns were still being sent unsupported and in single file into Ukrainian-held territory—a suicidal manoeuvre. On April 27th another official said that Russian forces in Donbas appeared unwilling, or unable, to advance in heavy rain.

In part, Russia’s woes are down to Ukraine’s heroic resistance, buoyed by a torrent of Western weaponry and intelligence. “But just as much credit for the shattering of Russian illusions lies in a phenomenon long known to military sociologists,” writes Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University, “that armies, by and large, reflect the qualities of the societies from which they emerge.” Russia’s state, says Mr Cohen, “rests on corruption, lies, lawlessness and coercion”. Each one has been laid bare by Russia’s army in this war.

“They put a lot of money into modernisation,” says General Pavel. “But a lot of this money was lost in the process.” Corruption surely helps explain why Russian vehicles were equipped with cheap Chinese tyres, and thus found themselves stuck in the Ukrainian mud. It may also explain why so many Russian units found themselves without encrypted radios and were forced to rely on insecure civilian substitutes or even Ukrainian mobile phone networks. That, in turn, may well have contributed to the war’s toll on Russian generals (Ukraine claims to have killed ten of them), since their communications at the front line would have been easier to intercept.

Yet corruption cannot be the whole story. Ukraine is also corrupt, and not much less so than Russia: they sit respectively in 122nd and 136th position on the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International, a pressure group. What really distinguishes the two is fighting spirit. Ukrainian soldiers are battling for the survival of their country. Many Russian ones did not even know they were going to war until they were ordered over the border. A European intelligence official says that conscripts—whom Mr Putin has repeatedly and publicly promised not to send to war—have resisted pressure to sign contracts that would turn them into professional soldiers; others have refused to serve outright. The official says that units affected include the 106th Guards Airborne Division and its 51st Guards Parachute Regiment, which are part of the notionally elite VDV airborne forces, and the 423rd Motorised Rifle Regiment, part of an important tank division.

Difficulties in droves

Ill-trained and poorly motivated soldiers are a liability in any conflict; they are especially unsuited to the complexities of modern combined-arms warfare, which requires tanks, infantry, artillery and air power to work in synchrony. To attempt such daunting co-ordination in Ukraine with sullen teenagers, press-ganged into service, fed expired rations and equipped with badly maintained vehicles was the height of optimism.

Such a task requires, at the very least, sound leadership. And that too is in short supply. Non-commissioned officers—senior enlisted men who train and supervise soldiers—are the backbone of NATO ’s armed forces. Russia does not have a comparable cadre. There are “too many colonels and not enough corporals”, says a European defence official. Staff training is rigid and outdated, he says, obsessed with the second world war and with little attention paid to newer conflicts. That may explain why doctrine was thrown out of the window. Manoeuvres that seemed easy at Vostok and other stage-managed exercises proved harder to reproduce under fire and far from home.

To the extent that Russian officers have studied their military history, they appear to have imbibed the worst lessons of the Afghan, Chechen and Syrian wars. During their occupation of northern Ukraine, Russian soldiers not only drank heavily and looted homes and shops, but murdered large numbers of civilians. Some have been rewarded for it. On April 18th the 64th Motorised Infantry Brigade, accused of massacring civilians in Bucha, was decorated by Mr Putin for its “mass heroism and courage” and accorded the honour of becoming a “Guards” unit.

War crimes are not always irrational. They can serve a political purpose, such as terrorising the population into submission. Nor are they incompatible with military prowess: Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht was good at both fighting and murdering. But brutality can also be counterproductive, inspiring the enemy to fight tenaciously rather than surrender and risk being killed anyway.

The savagery and confusion of Russia’s forces in Ukraine is consistent with their recent conduct in Syria. Their bombing of Ukrainian hospitals echoes their bombardment of Syrian health facilities. By the same token, Israeli military officers who watched the Russian air force in Syria closely came away surprised by its struggles with air defence, target acquisition and high-tempo sorties. At one stage they thought Syrian involvement in air operations was the only plausible explanation for such a low level of professionalism.

In the end they concluded that Russia lacked the training, doctrine and experience to make the most of its advanced warplanes. Israeli military pilots were struck, both on combat tours and during their day jobs as airline pilots, by Russia’s crude approach to electronic warfare, which involved blocking GPS signals over vast swathes of the eastern Mediterranean, sometimes for weeks at a time. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became bogged down, Israeli analysts realised that Russian ground forces were afflicted by many of the same problems.

Some of Russia’s friends appear to be drawing the same lesson. Syed Ata Hasnain, a retired Indian general who once commanded India’s forces in Kashmir, notes “Russian incompetence in the field”, rooted in “hubris and reluctance to follow time-tested military basics”. A group of retired Indian diplomats and generals affiliated with the Vivekananda International Foundation, a nationalist think-tank close to the Indian government, recently discussed Russia’s “visible and abject lack of preparation” and “severe logistical incompetence”. The fact that India is the biggest buyer of Russian arms lent their conclusion particular weight: “the quality of Russian technology previously thought to be superlative is increasingly being questioned”—though Ukraine, of course, uses much of the same equipment.

A similar process of reassessment is now under way in Western armed forces. One camp argues that the Russian threat to NATO is not as great as was feared. “The reputation of the Russian military has been battered and will take a generation to recover,” reads a recent assessment by a NATO government. “It has proven to be worth less than the sum of its parts in a modern, complex battlespace.” But another school of thought cautions against hasty judgments. It is too early to draw sweeping lessons, a senior NATO official warns, with the war still raging and both sides adapting.

If one of Russia’s errors was to draw false confidence from its success in seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and averting the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in 2015, the argument runs, there is a similar risk that Russia’s foes might infer too much from the current shambles in Ukraine. Michael Kofman of CNA , a think-tank, acknowledges that he and other experts “overestimated the impact of reforms…and underestimated the rot under Shoigu”. But context is everything, he notes. In recent years the scenarios that have preoccupied NATO planners have not been wars on the scale of the current one, but more modest and realistic, “bite and hold” operations, such as a Russian invasion of parts of the Baltic states or the seizure of islands such as Norway’s Svalbard.

Wars like this could play out very differently from the debacle in Ukraine. They would start with a narrower front, involve fewer forces and place less strain on logistics, says Mr Kofman. Neither the Kremlin nor the Russian general staff would necessarily underestimate NATO in the way that they mistakenly dismissed the Ukrainian army. And if the Russian government was not trying to play down a future conflict as nothing more than a “special military operation”, as it has in Ukraine, it could mobilise reserves and conscripts in far greater numbers. Many crucial Russian capabilities, such as anti-satellite weapons and advanced submarines, are not known to have been tested in Ukraine at all.

Geography is important, too. While Russian logistics are “eerily reminiscent” of the old Soviet army, says Ronald Ti, a military logistician who lectures at the Baltic Defence College in Estonia, their dependence on railways would be less of a problem in an attack on the Baltic states. “A fait accompli operation where they bite off a chunk of Estonian territory is well within their capabilities,” says Dr Ti, “because they can quite easily supply that from railheads.” (Whether the Russian air force, its inexperience and frailties now exposed, could protect those railheads from NATO air strikes is another matter.)

Lessons in abundance

Mr Kofman believes the question of “how much of this war is a bad army, which in important ways it clearly is, and how much is a truly terrible plan” has not yet been answered. And yet answering it is essential. In a seminal paper in 1995, James Fearon, a political scientist at Stanford University in California, argued that costly and destructive wars that rational governments would prefer to avert through negotiation can nonetheless still occur owing to miscalculations about the other side’s capabilities. In theory, a war-averting peace deal would reflect the relative power of the two potential belligerents. But the two sides can fail to reach such a bargain because that relative power is not always obvious.

“Leaders know things about their military capabilities and willingness to fight that other states do not know,” wrote Mr Fearon, “and in bargaining situations they can have incentives to misrepresent such private information in order to gain a better deal.” That helps explain why Russia so wildly inflated its supposed prowess in the Vostok exercises. And it can work. “I suspect many of us were taken in by Victory Day parades that showed us all of the smart bits of kit,” says the European general.

The battle for Donbas will not entirely settle this debate. A Russian army that prevails in a war of attrition through sheer firepower and mass would still be a far cry from the nimble, high-tech force advertised over the past decade. More likely is that Russia’s plodding forces will exhaust themselves long before they achieve their objectives in southern and eastern Ukraine, let alone before mounting another attempt on Kyiv. The world’s military planners will be watching not just how far Russia gets in the weeks ahead, but also what that says about its forces’ resilience, adaptability and leadership. Like a knife pushed into old wood, the progress of the campaign will reveal how deep the rot runs. ■

I T BEGINS WITH a bite near the cow’s ear. In the next few days, the animal’s lymphocytes multiply. Its lymph nodes swell. It stops feeding and starts coughing as fluid fills its lungs. It develops a fever as high as 41°C. A few weeks after the bite, it dies.

Such a story is common in African countries where East Coast Fever ( ECF ) is rampant. ECF , which is caused by protozoan parasites spread by ticks, kills around 1m cattle a year. It also prevents the introduction of faster-growing, higher-yielding European breeds, which are much more susceptible to the illness than their African kin. Though a vaccine is available, and the ticks can be attacked with sprayed pesticides (see picture), both of these approaches are costly. Most farmers thus continue to use less-productive local varieties—curtailing their incomes and reducing agricultural output. The difference is stark: a Kenyan cow produces around a tenth as much milk as one in Britain.

New research may offer a solution. Veterinary scientists led by Phil Toye of the International Livestock Research Institute’s campus in Nairobi and James Prendergast of the Roslin Institute, in Edinburgh, have found a gene variant associated with resistance to ECF . This result, published in PLOS Genetics, opens up the possibility of breeding—or even gene-editing into existence—cattle that can beat it.

The variant’s discovery came about serendipitously. While observing a small ECF vaccination trial in 2013, researchers at the International Livestock Research Institute noticed that of the 12 unvaccinated animals involved, all three survivors had been sired by the same bull. Further investigation suggested the specific genetic element responsible was a version of a gene called FAF1 , which they dubbed FAF1B . FAF1 is part of a process of programmed cellular suicide called apoptosis, which helps regulate cell numbers.

The current study examined 20 animals carrying two copies of the variant version. Just one of these succumbed to ECF . In contrast, 44 of 97 cows without the variant succumbed. The results, says Dr Prendergast, suggest that FAF1B has a “disproportionately large effect” on cattle’s ECF tolerance. He and his colleagues, though not sure exactly why that might be, think this variant may stop cattle lymphocytes from multiplying as quickly.

Their discovery could soon lead to better selective breeding. Once researchers are sure the variant does not have adverse side-effects, African cattle breeders can test their animals’ DNA for it and breed from those carrying it, thus producing ECF -resistant offspring. In the longer term, gene-editing techniques such as CRISPR -Cas9 may permit the protective version to be spliced into productive European breeds, which can then be raised far more successfully in Africa.

Such gene-editing programmes are increasingly common, and are achieving official acceptance. In March, regulators in America approved the first sales to consumers of meat from gene-edited cattle. (The modification in question gives the animals short, slick hair, to help them cope with a warming climate.) The International Livestock Research Institute and Roslin, meanwhile, are designing livestock resistant to other diseases, including trypanosomiasis, a protozoan illness spread by tsetse flies.

By reducing mortality and increasing productivity, gene-edited European livestock could have a useful effect in Africa—though some worry the benefits are overstated. Dr Prendergast points to the many other animal diseases prevalent on the continent, to which such cattle would still be susceptible. He suggests farmers might be better off breeding local varieties for resistance (and also higher productivity). But no matter whether disease resistance is brought about by conventional breeding or gene editing, it should lead to healthier cattle—and happier farmers. ■

E LON MUSK , the world’s richest man, has described Twitter as the “de facto public town square”. On April 25th he struck a deal to take it private. Mr Musk, the boss of companies including Tesla, a carmaker, and SpaceX, a rocket firm, put together an all-cash offer worth about $44bn, stumping up the bulk of the financing himself in the form of $21bn in equity and a $12.5bn loan against his shares in Tesla. It amounts to one of the largest buy-outs in history. If it is a big deal in business terms, it could be bigger still in what it means for the future of online speech.

Twitter isn’t an obviously attractive business. With 217m daily users it is an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook, the world’s largest social network, and has slipped well behind the likes of Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Its share price has bumped along for years. It is like a modern-day Craigslist, writes Benedict Evans, a tech analyst: “Coasting on network effects, building nothing much, and getting unbundled piece by piece.”

But Mr Musk isn’t interested in Twitter as a business. “I don’t care about the economics at all,” he told a TED conference earlier this month. “This is just my strong, intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation.”

His willingness to spend a chunk of his fortune on making Twitter more “inclusive” follows a period in which it has tightened its content moderation. A decade ago Twitter executives dubbed the company “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party”. But the presidency of Donald Trump and the covid-19 pandemic persuaded Twitter (and most other social networks) that free speech had drawbacks. Mr Trump was eventually banned from Twitter, as well as Facebook, YouTube and others, after the Capitol riot of January 2021. Twitter began to label and block what it judged to be misinformation about covid and other subjects. In the first half of 2021 it removed 5.9m pieces of content, up from 1.9m two years earlier. In the same period 1.2m accounts were suspended, an increase from 700,000.

Mr Musk has said that in the name of transparency he will publish Twitter’s code, including its recommendation algorithm. He proposes to authenticate all users, which might help to reduce anonymous trolling, and vows to “defeat the spam bots”. He has mooted the idea of relying less on advertising, which provides 90% of Twitter’s revenue, and more on subscriptions, which would mean the firm could worry less about advertisers taking flight from contentious content.

Most controversially among users, he has said he will be “very cautious with permanent bans”, preferring “time-outs”. This suggests a reprieve for blocked politicians such as Mr Trump, as advocated by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, which counts Mr Musk as one of its largest donors. Mr Trump said this week that he would never return to Twitter, but many doubt he could resist; he has posted only one message to his own little-used Twitter rival, Truth Social, since its glitch-beset launch in February.

There is lots of scepticism, not least among Twitter users, about Mr Musk’s professed desire to safeguard the “future of civilisation”. But wide-eyed idealism runs through his businesses. SpaceX, founded 20 years ago with money made from his early involvement in PayPal, a cash-transfer service, has the goal of “enabling people to live on other planets”. He insists that making electric cars is not just a $1trn business but an act of “philanthropy” to counter climate change. Even the Boring Company, a tunnelling venture, is on a mission to “solve traffic” and “transform cities”.

The way Mr Musk runs his other businesses suggests that he may try to answer the content-moderation problem with automation. Tesla’s manufacturing processes are more automated than any other big carmaker. Social networks have found that artificial intelligence ( AI ) is good at spotting some banned content, particularly images. But it is bad at understanding context and irony, particularly in foreign languages (over 80% of Twitter’s users are outside America). Facebook’s bots once removed a post referring to “Indian Savages”, not realising it was a direct quote from the Declaration of Independence; it now employs 15,000 human reviewers to set the robots straight. If Mr Musk leans too hard on AI he will encounter similar problems.

An impish streak has helped Mr Musk to sell fast cars and spaceships, and to stir up interest in “meme” stocks and cryptocurrencies, such as GameStop and Dogecoin. It might cause more problems when he is entrusted with the public square. Mr Musk’s talk of reinstating banned tweeters appals many on the left, as does his impatience with what he calls “woke” culture (“The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable,” he tweeted earlier this month). A recent poll in America by YouGov found that whereas 54% of Republicans thought that Mr Musk buying Twitter would be good for society, only 7% of Democrats agreed.

Twitter’s employees may be among the doubters. Mr Musk’s libertarian worldview was forged in the Silicon Valley of the late 1990s, but today’s Valley is a different place. Twitter leans left even by tech standards: it was the first social network to censor Mr Trump, adding labels to his inaccurate tweets before other networks followed suit. If Twitter swings libertarian under Mr Musk, some employees might leave. He seems to be encouraging a clear-out, tweeting criticism of senior executives. He is likely to trim headcount: its 7,500 employees generated average revenues of $677,000 last year, whereas those at Facebook generated $1.6m, points out Ben Thompson of Stratechery, a newsletter.

More important is what users will make of the more relaxed approach to moderation that Mr Musk promises. The political mix already seems to be shifting: since the buy-out was announced, Republican politicians have gained followers while Democrats have lost them (see chart). Ordinary users may not like the results of looser moderation. “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law,” Mr Musk tweeted the day after the deal was done. That would imply giving the green light to racist abuse, for instance, which is legal in some countries but not most users’ idea of fun. Other social networks that began with the aim of allowing anything legal, such as Parler and Gettr, eventually tightened censorship after being deluged with abusive language and porn. If Twitter were to take a purist line on free speech, the immediate winners might therefore be its more censorious rivals, suggests Evelyn Douek, an expert on online speech at Harvard Law School. Until now, the main social networks have set roughly similar content-moderation policies, each reluctant to be an outlier. “You can imagine a Twitter with Trump back on its platform just being in the headlines all day, every day, while the other platforms sat back and ate their popcorn,” she says. Mr Musk has never seemed to mind being in the headlines. Even so, he may find it harder than he expects to do away with moderation. Twitter relies on the co-operation of other companies within the tech “stack”, which could be withdrawn. Its mobile app is distributed by Apple’s and Google’s app stores; both suspended Parler after the Capitol riot. Even its presence on the web is conditional. Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting platform after discovering posts encouraging violence, which broke its terms of service. Governments are also tightening laws on online speech. Twitter fielded 43,000 content-removal requests based on local laws in first half of 2021, over double the number two years earlier. Stricter laws are being drafted in Europe. The easy passing of Twitter into the grip of one rich man may prompt harder thought about regulation in America.

Much will depend on whether Mr Musk can stick to his own principles. Social networks face a conflict of interest when the people setting moderation policies are also in charge of growth, notes Ms Douek. Would Mr Musk’s approach to free speech be swayed by his other interests? Tesla hopes to expand in China, whose state media are given prominent warning labels by Twitter. “Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” tweeted Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post. Mr Bezos later said he expected “complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter”. Investors seemed to agree: Tesla’s share price has fallen by over a tenth since news of the Twitter deal broke.

Mr Musk insists that as the platform’s owner he will be even-handed. “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” he tweeted on April 25th, shortly before the company’s board accepted his offer. Some users had other ideas: on the same day, one trending topic was “Trump’s Twitter”. ■

S WEEPING STATEMENTS about the future of humanity do not usually feature in discussions about leveraged buy-outs. But Elon Musk has never felt bound by convention. Asked about his plans to buy Twitter, a social network, and take it private—which were approved by the firm's board on April 25th—he went straight for the big idea. “My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilisation. I don’t care about the economics at all.”

Compared with its rivals—Facebook, Instagram and TikTok—Twitter is a minnow. But the deal matters. One reason is that Twitter’s size belies its importance. As a haunt of politicians, pundits and wonks, it does much to set the political weather—a digital “public square”, as Mr Musk put it.

Another is that Mr Musk made his name and his fortune by upending industries. This time, he will be grappling with a knotty problem of keen interest to governments around the world—how to regulate speech online. Most prescribe ever more rules. But Mr Musk wants to go the other way, removing restrictions instead of imposing new ones. The operators of other big social networks will be watching the experiment with interest.

At first blush, Mr Musk—best known for electric cars and reusable rockets—seems an unlikely social-media mogul. But a closer look suggests his acquisition of Twitter fits his approach to business. Mr Musk, a passionate engineer, likes to take poorly performing technologies and improve them. Tesla tore up the car industry’s rule book by replacing petrol with electricity, ditching dealerships and treating cars as computers. SpaceX proved that a hungry, move-fast-and-break-things startup run on a relative shoestring could outperform aerospace giants grown cautious and fat on the back of generous government contracts. Both firms were dismissed by bigger incumbents—until one day they weren’t.

All that engineering and disruption is animated by Mr Musk’s own, sometimes idiosyncratic conception of the social good. Tesla’s purpose is to prod the world more quickly towards a carbon-free economy (a goal vindicated by the speed at which other carmakers are now pivoting to electric vehicles). SpaceX’s ambition is so grandiose some commentators struggle to believe that Mr Musk is sincere: to establish a human presence on Mars, something that, were a catastrophe to befall Earth, might one day prove to have been an insurance policy for civilisation.

Assume that Mr Musk really is ready to spend billions of dollars of his own money to secure the “future of civilisation” (though he has a break clause should he get cold feet). The question is whether his vision of free speech on Twitter is sensible.

Twitter fits the pattern of Tesla and SpaceX, offering Mr Musk another complex engineering system to tinker with, and a grand reason for doing so. Social media deploy algorithms to highlight “engaging” content, using a thicket of rules that try to mitigate the worst side-effects, the better to sell users to advertisers. It is a business model full of inconsistencies and unexamined trade-offs that looks ripe for disruption. That Mr Musk wants to be its agent is perhaps no surprise, for he cut his entrepreneurial teeth in the 1990s, when techno-libertarianism and anti-censorship were the internet’s animating ideas.

The fact that Mr Musk is a billionaire should not disqualify him from owning an important media firm. He has already set out some ideas for Twitter, many of them cautious and sensible. The resulting fuss shows how illiberal much online opinion has become. He wants fewer outright bans and more temporary suspensions. Users should prove they are not bots. When in doubt, err on the side of leaving tweets up, not taking them down.

More significant, he thinks the cogs and ratchets of Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, which decides which tweets a user sees, should be public. Researchers could examine it; other programmers could tweak it. A version less prone to pushing “engaging” content—which, in practice, often means tweets that are enraging, controversial or plain daft—could lower the temperature of the entire platform, making the job of moderation easier and possibly leading to debate that is more thoughtful. Or perhaps Twitter could become an open platform, where different users may choose one of many different third-party algorithms—or none at all—according to their taste. Content moderation is the messy product of political and social pressures. It will be fascinating to see how easily it succumbs to engineering.

Mr Musk will not have an entirely free hand. Australia, Britain, the EU and India, have all been working on tech-regulation. Thierry Breton, a senior EU official, noted that “It’s not [Mr Musk’s] rules that will apply here.” Mr Musk’s other investors are nervous. The more time he devotes to Twitter, the less he will have for his other ventures. Shares in Tesla fell by 12% after news of the Twitter deal.

Mr Musk’s personality poses a big risk. He is clever, driven and ferociously hard-working. He can also be puerile and vindictive, traits on display in 2018 when he accused a British cave-rescue expert, with no evidence, of being a “pedo guy”. Such outbursts are one thing coming from a Twitter user with a big following. But when he is the owner, they will raise questions about whether he will be able to resist the temptation to exploit his new position to pursue his own obsessions and vendettas.

The bird and the oak tree

This newspaper shares Mr Musk’s free-speech convictions. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom. Experts are sometimes wrong and blowhards sometimes right. Even in the internet age, the best response to a bad argument is a better one. Moderation on many platforms has become heavy-handed and arbitrarily enforced. If Mr Musk’s talent for shaking up industries can help cut the Gordian knot of online speech, everyone will benefit.

But we are also keen on another liberal principle, that institutions should be bigger than the person running them. Mr Musk can set new rules, but he should be seen to play no role in enforcing them. If he really wants to convince users that he will be an impartial guardian of his “digital public square”, he could implement his reforms—and then freeze his own account. ■

A MERICA’S TECH giants make ungodly amounts of money. In 2021 the combined revenue of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft reached $1.4trn. These riches come from a wide and constantly expanding set of sources, from phones and pharmaceuticals to video-streaming and virtual assistants. Analysts expect the tech quintet’s combined sales to surpass $340bn in the first three months of 2022, around 7% more than in the same period last year.

In a quarterly ritual that kicked off on April 26th, when the big five started reporting their latest earnings, the staggering headline numbers again hit headlines. Alphabet unveiled revenues of $68bn, up by 23% compared with a year ago, though slowing advertising growth saw net profit dip to $16.4bn. On the same day Microsoft announced revenues of $49.4bn, up by 18%, and net profits of $16.7bn. A day later Meta revealed sales of $27.9bn with net profits of $7.5bn. Amazon and Apple reported after The Economist was published.

Big tech firms are understandably eager to trumpet these impressive figures, as well as their diverse offerings. They are considerably more coy about how much many of their products and services actually make. Annual reports and other public disclosures tend to lump large revenue streams together and describe them in the vaguest terms. Last year, for example, the five giants’ sales were split out into 32 business segments in total. That compares with 56 segments for America’s five highest-earning non-tech firms.

Apple breaks its sales into five slices; Meta into only three (see chart 1). The category that Alphabet labels as “Google Other’‘ made $28bn in revenue last year. It includes Google’s app store, sales of its smartphones and other devices, and subscriptions from YouTube, a subsidiary. Last year YouTube’s advertising revenue, which Alphabet first revealed only in 2020, reached $29bn. That means that in 2021 Google Other and YouTube’s ad business each generated more money than four-fifths of the companies in the S & P 500 index of the biggest American firms. The opacity makes business sense. Keeping rivals in the dark helps ensure that they will not try to replicate a prized business unit and eat into its margins. Andy Jassy, Amazon’s boss, has lamented the prospect of breaking out his firm’s financials because they contain “useful competitive information”. Annoyingly for the tech barons, the veil of secrecy is getting thinner. Regulators, lawmakers and investors see it as a problem, and are calling for more transparency about everything from how big tech’s payments platforms work to the amount of carbon the companies belch out. And new sources of information are emerging, from brokers’ reports, hedge-fund analyses and, most revealing, antitrust court cases brought by would-be competitors and competition regulators around the world. All these are bringing to light details about the inner workings of big tech. To understand it all, The Economist has rifled through court documents, internal emails, analyst notes and leaked files about Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta (Microsoft has managed to avoid antitrust scrutiny this time around, so secret information about its finances is scarcer). What emerges is a picture of big tech in which the titans appear more vulnerable than their ostensible omnipotence suggests. Their secretive profit pools are indeed deep. But the firms’ finance secrets betray weaknesses, too. Three stand out: a high concentration of profits, waning customer loyalty and the sheer sums at risk from assorted antitrust actions.

Start with the profit pools. The biggest of these tend to be transparent. The iPhone remains Apple’s profit engine, Amazon rakes in most of its money from cloud computing, and Alphabet and Meta couldn’t survive without online advertising. The firms are less forthcoming when it comes to disclosing details about their smaller but fast-growing units.

Perhaps the biggest untrumpeted sources of profits for Alphabet and Apple are their app stores. The firms take a commission on all in-app spending on these platforms, usually of up to 30% (though in a bid to appease regulators, they are increasingly offering lower rates for small developers and those whose apps rely on subscriptions). The revenue streams are middling. In 2019 they were around $11bn for Google, according to one case brought against it in America by a group of state attorneys-general. Analysts estimate that for Apple’s store they were $25bn last year.

Because the costs of maintaining the app stores are low, however, the profit margins are vast. The operating margin for Apple’s app store has been estimated at 78%, according to one case brought against the firm by Epic Games, a video-games maker. For Google the figure is 62%. That compares with an operating margin of 35% for Apple’s overall business and of 31% for Alphabet’s business as a whole (which continues to rely on advertising for revenues).

The app stores are booming. Revenues from related commissions for Google and Apple roughly doubled between 2017 and 2020, according to the Competition and Markets Authority ( CMA ), Britain’s trustbusting agency. In 2020 Google’s store had 800,000-900,000 developers offering 2.5m-3m apps. That made it slightly bigger than Apple’s, which was home to 500,000-600,000 developers and 1.8m apps. There is no sign of the growth slowing down or margins shrinking, according to Apple’s Epic case and the CMA probe. The gross margin on Google’s app store has ticked up by a few percentage points in recent years.

In Apple’s annual report its app-store revenues are in a category called “services”, which made $68bn in sales last year, or 19% of Apple’s total. But the app store is not the most profitable subset of Apple’s services. Though the exact figure is unknown, the gross margin on Apple’s search-advertising segment is even larger than on its app emporium, the CMA reckons. That, according to the regulator, is down to a deal struck between Apple and Google. The terms mean that Google search is the default option on most Apple devices. In exchange, Google gives Apple somewhere between $8bn and $12bn a year (2-3% of Apple’s total revenue). This arrangement costs Apple close to nothing, so it is nearly all profit.

Amazon and Meta are (a bit) less secretive about the sources of revenues and profits. Despite its rebranding and pivot to the virtual-reality “metaverse”, Meta isn’t shy about admitting that it continues to make 97% of revenues from online advertising. Amazon is happy to disclose revenues of its controversial Marketplace, where third-party vendors sell their wares, paying the equivalent of 19% of those sales for the privilege (up from 11% in 2017) and competing with Amazon’s own retail business. Marketplace contributed $103bn to Amazon’s top line in 2021, a six-fold increase from 2015 and 22% of the firm’s total.

But it took digging by analysts to estimate that Instagram accounted for $42bn of Meta’s revenues last year, nearly two-fifths of the total and up from a reported $20bn, or a quarter of the total, in 2019. The photo-sharing app’s role in the social-media empire’s prospects has risen dramatically, in other words. And a lawsuit brought by the attorney-general of the District of Columbia that revealed Marketplace’s profit margins to be 20%, four times higher than those of Amazon’s own retail business (the case does not specify whether the margins in question were gross, net or operating).

Fair game

All this makes for plenty of deep profit pools. Look closer, though, and they are surprisingly narrow. In Apple’s app store, for example, games account for 70% of all revenues, according to documents uncovered during the Epic court battle. Most of this comes from in-app purchases, such as wacky accessories for avatars or virtual currencies. In 2017, 6% of app-store game customers accounted for 88% of the store’s game sales. Those heavy users spent, on average, more than $750 each year.

The Epic trial also revealed that the top 1% of Apple gamers in terms of spending generated 64% of sales and splurged an average of $2,694 annually. Internally these super-spenders are known as “whales”, like their casino equivalents. An investigation by the CMA found a similar pattern at Google’s app store. In 2020 around 90% of the store’s British sales came from less than 5% of its apps. Once again spending on in-app features in games made up the vast majority of revenue.

Spending is concentrated in the online ad industry, too. Another CMA probe looked at data on British advertisers who spent a combined £7bn ($8.9bn) in 2019 on Google Ads, an ad-buying tool aimed at small businesses. The top 5-10% of advertisers by spending made up more than 85% of revenue for Google Ads. The highest-spending sectors were retail, finance and travel. A similar exercise showed even greater concentration at Facebook. The top 5-10% of the social network’s advertisers made up more than 90% of revenue (see chart 2). Retail, entertainment and consumer-goods firms splurged most. Concentration is also present at the level of “impressions”, as each incident of an advert appearing on a user’s screen is known in the business. That was one finding of internal research by Google, which was unearthed as part of a case bought against the tech giant by another group of American state attorneys-general. The study found that in America 20% of all impressions produce 80% of web publishers’ ad revenue. High-value impressions are ones aimed at users likely to make a purchase. Google referred to this phenomenon internally as “cookie concentration”. Besides a heavy reliance on a few big profit generators, another undisclosed weakness is customer churn. Tech giants’ customers are often assumed to be devoted to their products and services—or even hooked. The companies do not challenge this assumption in public, because it conveys the sense of captive markets, which are beloved of investors. In fact, their markets may not be quite so captive. The Epic case revealed that roughly 20% of iPhone users who bought a new phone in 2019 and 2020 switched to another smartphone. Leaked documents from Meta show that fewer teenagers are signing up to Facebook and those that do are spending less time on it. Even Instagram, Meta’s youth-friendlier platform, is losing out to rivals. A leaked internal report from March last year found that teenagers were spending more than twice as much time on TikTok, a hipper short-video app.

Young people are not the only customers beginning to retreat from the platforms. So are young companies. Last year was a bonanza for startups. Global venture-capital funding reached $621bn, more than double the previous year’s total. According to a report by Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, of all the money invested in early-stage companies about a fifth is spent on cloud services, a market dominated by Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft. Another two-fifths goes on marketing, which in the digital realm is dominated by Alphabet, Meta and, increasingly, Amazon. Bridgewater estimates that, all told, around 10% of the total revenue of Alphabet, Amazon and Meta is derived from the startup ecosystem. That is the equivalent of $84bn each year.

That flow of money may be ebbing. Fears about rising inflation, Russia’s war in Ukraine and the chance of a recession has sent the share prices of tech firms tumbling. The NASDAQ , a tech-heavy index, has fallen by 20% from its peak in November. Falls in public markets are filtering down to the startup world. On March 24th Instacart, a grocery-delivery firm, cut its own valuation by 38%. Lower valuations will in turn make it harder for firms to raise capital. Investors say they expect to see startups tightening their belts in the coming months. That means less spending on the cloud and ads.

What do all these vulnerabilities add up to? In the worst-case scenario, where the toughest-talking regulators in America, Britain and the EU get their way, the answer is an awful lot. Europe poses the biggest threat. The Digital Markets Act ( DMA ) is a sweeping new set of EU rules designed to rein in big tech that was finalised last month. It will only affect some business units and is targeted at tech’s European operations. Bernstein, a broker, finds that Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Meta make $267bn of revenue, about a fifth of their combined total, in Europe. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by The Economist suggests the DMA puts perhaps 40% of the four firms’ European sales at risk.

Globally, Alphabet is the most exposed, with nearly 90% of European revenues (equivalent to 27% of its global revenues) in danger. In America Google’s search monopoly is being targeted in a case brought by a team of state attorneys-general. The Department of Justice is thinking about following suit. That puts American search revenue of $70bn, a quarter of Alphabet’s total, at risk of antitrust action. If Alphabet reduced its commission on in-app payments from 30% to 11%—the share agreed in a deal between Google and Spotify on March 23rd—American app-store revenues would plummet from $11bn to $4bn. Together these actions could imperil perhaps $150bn of Alphabet’s revenue, or about 60% of its global total.

Many appy returns

Apple’s worst-case exposure is smaller but still significant. If trustbusters put a stop to its sweetheart search deal with Google, that would imperil $8bn-12bn a year. Should Apple follow Alphabet’s lead and slash app-store commissions, or be forced to do so by new laws, its app-related earnings would also drop, from about $25bn to $9bn. Apple’s total exposure would be roughly $35bn, or a tenth of global revenue. Amazon stands to lose up to $77bn per year, or 16% of global revenue, if it is barred from mixing its own retail operations with those of third parties on Marketplace.

Some lawmakers and regulators have been murmuring about breaking up Amazon altogether, into a retailer and a cloud-computing provider, for example. The rump Amazon would either be deprived of its e-commerce sales (about 70% of current revenues) or its cloud profits (about three-quarters of its profits). The same voices are calling to split Meta. If America’s Federal Trade Commission got its way and forced the social-media conglomerate to hive off Instagram and WhatsApp, the company could lose $42bn in revenues from Instagram and another $2bn from WhatsApp—or two-fifths of its total.

All told, if everything went against big tech, perhaps $330bn in revenues would be at risk, or about a quarter of the total for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Meta. That is before including the two antitrust bills making their way through America’s Congress. Among other things, these aim to stop platform owners, such as app stores and search engines, giving preferential treatment to their own products. The financial impact of such rules is hazy but could, as in Europe, be substantial.

This catastrophic case for big tech is unlikely to materialise. Many attempts to check the power of the platforms have gone nowhere. The current crop is likely to be watered down and could take years to take effect. But a few successful tech-bashing efforts could make a meaningful dent in the firms’ prospects. And by lifting the veil on tech titans’ secret finances, they are already alerting challengers to where exactly margins are ripest for eating into. ■

H AVE YOU ever actually read a terms-and-conditions document? WordPress, a service for building websites whose clients include the White House and Disney, thinks anyone who has deserves congratulations. Its terms of service are the usual endless scroll of legalese, until you reach section 14, on disclaimers. Buried in the verbiage about warranties and non-infringement is a short, odd sentence: “If you’re reading this, here’s a treat.” Click on the link, and you see a picture of some appetising Texas brisket. Suitably revived, you can then move on to the stuff about jurisdictions and applicable law.

Coming across an Easter egg, the name given to unexpected messages or features hidden somewhere in a product, is not like seeing funny advertising or following a humorous corporate social-media account. Easter eggs are winks, not gags; asides rather than stand-up. A new paper on their use in software, by Matthew Lakier and Daniel Vogel of the University of Waterloo in Canada, describes various motivations for them, from rewarding users’ curiosity and acknowledging the work of developers to building hype and recruiting employees. But their defining characteristic is that they are playful.

On Google’s search engine, treats famously abound: if you search for the word “askew”, for example, the results page is somewhat off-kilter. Tesla cars are jampacked with references to pop culture: entering 007 into a text box on the car’s console, for example, will change the image of the car to one used by James Bond in “The Spy Who Loved Me”. Tapping repeatedly on the software version number in the settings menu of an Android phone will usually open up a game (on version 11, the game is unlocked by repeatedly turning a dial that goes all the way up to that number, an in-joke nestled within an in-joke).

Not everyone likes playfulness in their products. Microsoft got rid of Easter eggs from its software in 2002, when it launched an initiative called Trustworthy Computing. It worried that they might introduce vulnerabilities, prompt questions among users about what else might be lurking in its code, or simply get people asking why its engineers did not have anything better to do. “It’s about trust. It’s about being professional,” explained a blog by one of its developers in 2005.

Obviously, playfulness has limits, particularly when applied to products that must not go wrong or to services whose reputation rests on sobriety. You probably don’t want engineers at Airbus or Boeing to spend too much time on giggles. The idea of a frisky auditor sounds more like a fetish than a recipe for commercial success. Giving rein to employees’ creativity has risks: jokes can easily backfire. But Easter eggs do not have to be embedded in code to have an impact: playfulness is a mindset which can show up in design choices or tweaks to wording. And in many contexts, irreverence can foster loyalty rather than weaken it.

Making references that rely on users’ knowledge of a product is a way of adding to a sense of community. Hit a broken page on the Marvel website and you’ll be taken to one of a series of quirky 404 pages; one shows Captain America grimacing and the tagline “ HYDRA is currently attacking this page!” Elon Musk routinely uses playfulness to signal his anti-establishment credentials to his army of fans: by including the number “420” in his recent offer price for Twitter, he appeared to be making a reference to marijuana. (If you find this funny, you’ll be thrilled to know that Tesla vehicles can also make fart noises.)

In-jokes can be used to reinforce brands. While readers of the New Yorker wait for their app to load, messages like “Captioning cartoons” and “Checking facts” appear at the bottom of the screen. On an iPhone’s web browser, Apple uses circular-rimmed glasses as the icon for its reading-list feature, in an apparent tribute to Steve Jobs.

Showing playfulness is above all a way of bestowing humanity on companies and their products. Slack, a messaging platform, offers users a chance to pick various notification sounds. The explanation for the one marked “hummus” is that a British employee said this word in a way that tickled colleagues: it is her voice you can hear.

There is no utility at all to this feature, or to knowing the story behind it. But far from eroding trust, the decision to include this sound in the product creates a sense that a group of actual humans is behind it. Playfulness may sound unprofessional. It can be seriously useful.

How to make hybrid work a success (Apr 9th)

B ARELY VISIBLE a mile off the south-western tip of Oahu, an oil tanker floats lazily in the gentle surf. Squinting from shore, an eagle-eyed observer can spot a small yellow metal platform in its shadow, hooked like an intravenous bag to the vessel by a series of tubes. It is here that the tanker’s contents are piped undersea and onto shore, and into the sprawling Kapolei complex. Operated by Par Hawaii, it is the only oil refinery in Hawaii, converting crude oil into refined products dispatched to the other islands to power cars, homes and planes. It is the beating heart of the state’s oil-dependent economy.

With oil prices pushed up by the war in Ukraine, and an American ban on imports from Russia, Hawaii’s reliance on oil is putting pressure on its economy. Despite improving energy efficiency and progress with renewables, big obstacles remain. In the meantime, Hawaiians are not finding much relief from the energy crunch.

Among the 50 states, Hawaii is the most reliant on oil, which accounts for over 85% of its energy needs (see chart), compared with 56% for the second-most dependent, Vermont. As in the rest of the country, petrol powers ground transport. But most states use almost no oil to produce electricity, whereas it supplies more than 66% of Hawaii’s. It is also critical for the jet fuel that Hawaiians rely on to travel from island to island, and to the American mainland. When oil prices climbed above $100 a barrel in the 2000s, Hawaii was among the hardest-hit states. The same is true today.

Most of Hawaii’s oil is imported—usually about a third of it from Russia. Par Hawaii announced on March 4th (four days before President Joe Biden declared a national ban) that it would cease importing the stuff from Russia, and would find alternative sources from North and South America. “We do not anticipate this decision will have a meaningful impact on the prices paid by Hawaii consumers,” says Eric Wright, the firm’s president.

Target practice

It may still be painful. The state has the second-highest petrol prices in America, behind only California, and the highest electricity prices. Hawaiian Electric, its major utility, warned customers in March that electricity bills could rise by 10% on Oahu, 20% on Maui and Hawaii Island, and 25% on the poorer island of Molokai.

This reliance on oil has long motivated efforts at diversification. A state law passed in 2015 mandates 100% clean energy in electricity by 2045, the first such goal set by an American state, building on targets established in 2007. “Because of the actions we have taken since 2007, things are not nearly as bad as they might have been,” says Scott Glenn, the state’s chief energy officer. Hawaii is blessed with regular sunshine and winds, as well as the potential for geothermal energy on Maui and Hawaii Island. The Aloha State now has the second-highest number of electric vehicles per head in America, and it has by far the greatest penetration of rooftop solar in the country.

Weaning itself off oil, however, is not simple. Each of Hawaii’s inhabited islands has its own electric grid, in effect giving the state six different energy systems. Kauai sources almost 70% of its electricity from renewable energy, the highest share of any island, thanks to its ample land for large projects. Hawaii Island can tap geothermal for 30% of its electricity, thanks to its volcanic activity. The populous Oahu, on the other hand, draws just one-third of its electricity from renewable energy, much of it through rooftop solar. An integrated grid would make the state’s whole system more efficient and resilient. But Hawaii is also handicapped by political constraints. Its constitution requires that any nuclear project be subject to a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the legislature, an obstacle many liken to an effective ban. Rules written to protect Hawaii’s natural environment hinder renewable-energy projects, lest wind turbines interfere with migratory birds or hydro power displace a rare species. Fights over land use, meanwhile, pit environmentalists and local communities against one another. The planet is in “a moment of extreme trade-offs, and the discussion over land use is no exception,” says Melissa Miyashiro, the executive director of the Blue Planet Foundation, a local advocacy organisation. In some ways, Hawaii is well placed to weather the storm in global oil markets. Hawaiians are used to paying a premium. The state has a bipartisan tradition of environmentalism—in the mid-2000s it was a Republican governor, Linda Lingle, who helped put Hawaii on the path to renewable energy. Hawaii was the first state to set a net-negative emissions target.

But achieving these ambitions will require hard choices and heavy investment. The current governor, David Ige, has rejected calls for a state of emergency to accelerate the construction of renewable-energy projects, claiming that it would not add capacity soon enough to make a difference. The Kapolei refinery, and high energy prices, may not be going away soon. ■

W HEN INDIANS think of how the law works, speed is not what comes to mind. An average case in the lower courts takes five years to settle. Three-quarters of prison inmates are not sentenced offenders, but awaiting trial. Yet repeatedly in recent weeks Indian justice has moved with remarkable swiftness.

Ask Jignesh Mevani, a member of the Gujarat state assembly. On April 18th Mr Mevani posted a tweet hinting that Narendra Modi, the prime minister, approves of Hindu-nationalist violence. This annoyed a reader in Assam, a state as far from Gujarat as Ukraine is from England, so much that he complained at his local police station. Within 48 hours a team from Assam’s police had flown to Gujarat, nabbed Mr Mevani and hustled him across India. When a judge then granted the prisoner bail, the Assam police instantly rearrested Mr Mevani for allegedly assaulting one of the officers who had helped transport him across the country.

Or ask residents of Jahangirpuri, a working-class part of Delhi, India’s capital. In mid-April a riot broke out in its narrow lanes after Hindu youths carrying swords, guns and clubs on what they called a religious procession stopped outside a mosque to insult the fasting worshippers inside. No one was badly hurt in the ensuing stone-throwing, but three days later authorities, citing building violations, sent in diggers to smash property belonging to suspected troublemakers (affected residents are pictured).

Such “bulldozer justice” is becoming increasingly common. In recent months religious processions strikingly similar to the one in Jahangirpuri have sparked mini-riots in towns and villages across eight north Indian states. All too often, instant punishment has fallen in the form of property demolitions. In numerous instances owners say they had no time to gather possessions, or to present perfectly valid legal documents, or to explain that their house stood miles from where the riot happened.

There is a subtext to this legal impatience. The governments of Gujarat and Assam, as well as local authorities opting for summary demolitions, are all controlled by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party ( BJP ). Its hard-core fans, many of whom belong to Hindu-supremacist groups, chorus outrage against critics of Mr Modi. They loudly decry any infringement of what they see as the right of majority Hindus to practise their faith. It is just this mix of Modi-mania and pumped-up Hindu pride that has won the BJP election after election.

Exalting one thing seems to entail demonising its opposite. Mr Mevani does not just represent an opposition party in a state that is Mr Modi’s own home turf and which is headed for elections in December. He is also a Dalit. By drawing attention to the continued repression of these former “untouchables”, Mr Mevani challenges the BJP ’s narrative of Hindu unity.

As for those at the wrong end of government bulldozers, the stark fact is that nearly all are Muslims. Although India’s 15% Muslim minority suffers most from communal violence, it is Muslims who are targeted for collective punishment. On April 10th rioters in the town of Khargone in the state of Madhya Pradesh vandalised Muslim-owned property and burned down houses. Yet a day later government bulldozers wrecked 29 Muslim-owned houses and 16 shops. Narottam Mishra, the state’s home minister, made the objective clear: “The house from whence stones came we will make into a pile of stones.”

The intent behind the sudden acceleration of justice for some cases is exposed by the plodding slowness of others. Hindu agitators, including one who recently called over a loudspeaker for the rape of Muslim women, are getting soft treatment. But numerous Muslims remain in jail, often charged under anti-terror statutes, for far milder statements. Indian justice is not always so partial. Granting bail to three Muslim students who had been jailed for sedition, a judge declared, “The unity of India is not made of bamboo reeds which will bend to passing winds.” But he made no mention of what had cost the youths five months of freedom: tweeting cheers to Pakistan for winning a cricket match. ■

H IS HOURS-LONG speeches lack the pizzazz of yesteryear. He is said to tire more easily on his early-morning treadmill. Though still a stripling of an autocrat at 69 years of age, the shadows are lengthening on the rule of Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister. He has run the country, in one form or another and increasingly ruthlessly, since 1985. That is longer than most Cambodians have been alive. Now Mr Hun Sen is starting to think of his legacy—and how to reshape it. He would love to acquire the respect that accrues to elder statesmen.

The dictator is aware of his dim standing in the world. Mr Hun Sen’s repression of the political opposition and other civic groups has earned Cambodia pariah status in much of the West. China’s outsized economic, military and political influence has made Cambodia resemble a vassal state. This year neighbours in South-East Asia were appalled when Mr Hun Sen became the first foreign leader to visit General Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of Myanmar’s outrageous coup. It made the prime minister look like a fan of the general.

Even Mr Hun Sen has admitted to foreign diplomats that his trip to Myanmar went badly. Not only was he (predictably) prevented from meeting Aung San Suu Kyi or any other ousted civilian leader. He also claimed he had secured the release of an Australian adviser to Ms Suu Kyi, whom the general has in fact kept locked up. Mr Hun Sen grumbles that his trip was not an endorsement of the junta. He says he would have been damned if he did not attempt to mediate, and damned if he did. He decided to try.

Yet in other regards Mr Hun Sen has not behaved as an autocrat in hock to China might. The red carpet rolled out in March for Kishida Fumio, making a rare visit for a Japanese prime minister to Phnom Penh, suggested that Mr Hun Sen wants other Asian powers to balance China’s presence. Japanese vessels even called by a naval base on which China has designs.

More striking, the autocrat has heeded the urgings of Japan and others to condemn Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He even insisted that Cambodia co-sponsor a UN resolution calling on Russia to withdraw. That move stunned observers—including, presumably, China, which has forged close ties with Russia. Cambodia’s own relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union goes back to the Indochina wars of the second half of the 20th century. Yet conscious, perhaps, that international law protects the smallest states above all, Mr Hun Sen has told foreign visitors that gross violations need to be called out. The wannabe elder statesman was writing himself into the history books.

Matters of legacy loom large at home, too. In December Mr Hun Sen named a successor: his eldest son, Hun Manet. Not that Mr Hun Sen intends an imminent exit; he has mentioned some time around 2028, when the next (rigged) election but one is due, as a good time to step aside—not down. Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, wielded influence for two decades after retiring as prime minister, including serving as “minister mentor”. He is often cited by Mr Hun Sen’s people as a model.

The irony hardly needs stressing. If Lee ruled with an iron hand, he also fostered institutions, competence, probity and widespread prosperity. Mr Hun Sen, to his credit, helped bring peace to a country racked by three decades of violence that included civil war, American carpet bombing and the grotesque bloodletting of the Khmers Rouges. Yet he has centralised power not by building institutions but by personalising them.

In Mr Hun Sen’s Cambodia, government positions are handed out as sinecures to the offspring of ageing comrades in the ruling Cambodian People’s Party ( CPP ). Favoured tycoons get the right to import and distribute tobacco, booze and more. They chop down forests or grab land from subsistence farmers. Alliances among the elite are cemented with spectacular weddings. The economy has grown fairly briskly. But Hunsenomics has brought environmental destruction, money-laundering, capital flight and gross inequality. Cambodia comes 157th out of 180 countries ranked by Transparency International for perceived corruption.

Even as the old fox demands almost unquestioned obedience within the CPP , he has attempted to demolish the opposition. The Cambodia National Rescue Party came close to winning a general election in 2013. In late 2017 the courts agreed that the party was part of a foreign plot to overthrow the CPP and ordered it disbanded. Of its two former leaders, one, Kem Sokha, faces a drawn-out trial for treason while the other, Sam Rainsy, leads an upholstered life in exile in Paris.

Given Mr Hun Sen’s tight grip on power, the endorsement of Mr Hun Manet is as good as a coronation for the 44-year-old. A top-scoring graduate of America’s West Point military academy with a doctorate in economics from a British university, Mr Hun Manet has risen fast through Cambodia’s security services. He currently serves as army chief, head of counterterrorism and number two in his father’s all-important presidential guard. Modest and personable, he does not appear to have very many enemies.

Yet if his elevation is almost guaranteed, a smooth transition is not. The secretive CPP is more factionalised and diverse than it appears from the outside. Differences might only grow under Mr Hun Manet, especially between the party’s modernisers and those who think of the CPP as a vehicle for patronage and personal networks of power. A related challenge for the next ruler is the generational change his elevation implies. For Mr Hun Sen has made it clear that when he steps back so must the other old-timers.

This breeds two potential problems. One is that some of the old guard will resent the whippersnapper’s unearned promotion, which has dashed their own dreams of higher power. A bigger problem is the sense of entitlement among their progeny. Mr Hun Manet has been meeting some of his contemporaries for tea at the capital’s Hyatt Regency hotel, presumably to thrash out quite how power will be doled out in future. But with so much honour and profit at stake there are surely not enough plum posts to go around. Genteel machinations at afternoon tea could yet descend into nastier struggles.

A last challenge to Mr Hun Sen’s notions of a smooth transition might come from outside the ruling party. For all his political repression, and his cosying up to authoritarian China, the prime minister seems to care too much about what the West thinks of him to snuff out all opposition for good. NGO s and other action groups cling on, and occasionally bounce back—a sharp contrast to neighbouring Vietnam or Laos.

T HE PUNDITS and the psephologists are all gearing up. On May 5th voters in England, Scotland and Wales will go to the polls in local elections: a bad result for the Conservatives could stoke unease among Tory MP s about Boris Johnson’s leadership after his breach of covid-era lockdown rules. But another election taking place that day is likely to prove more significant. For voters in Northern Ireland could choose as the biggest party one that does not want Northern Ireland to exist.

For the past 101 years, a pro-British (or unionist) party has won every election to Stormont, the province’s governing assembly. And for the past 19 years the Democratic Unionist Party ( DUP ) has always been the victor. If the polls are accurate, that is about to change.

Sinn Féin, for decades the political wing of the Irish Republican Army ( IRA ), is projected to achieve a historic victory. That does not mean Irish reunification is on the immediate agenda. But it will add to the strains on the Good Friday Agreement, and may provoke a fresh crisis in Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Sinn Féin is not a shoo-in for first place. Fear of defeat is the DUP ’s greatest hope of victory: the party’s campaign centres on the atavistic message that if unionist voters do not endorse it, then they will get a Sinn Féin First Minister of Northern Ireland. Although the posts of first and deputy first minister are joint and equal in law—one cannot so much as order a pizza in their ministerial role without the other’s permission—the prospect of victory for a party that still lauds IRA terrorists appals many unionists.

Michelle O’Neill, Sinn Féin’s Stormont leader, has played down talk of a victory presaging a referendum on Irish reunification. Instead the party has focused its campaigning on issues such as the cost of living, in order to avoid incentivising unionist voters to turn out. And the same polls which have Sinn Féin on course for victory show that is only because it is losing support at a slower rate than the DUP . Sinn Féin could become the biggest party at the same time as its share of the vote shrinks.

In those circumstances, there would be little pressure on the British government to call a referendum on Irish unity. Under the Good Friday Agreement, which in 1998 ended 30 years of bloody sectarian strife, a plebiscite must be held if it appears likely that the Northern Irish electorate would vote to leave the United Kingdom.

Yet the past six years have shown how far off unity may be. An unpopular Brexit, years of unionist incompetence, a prime minister who manages to unite voters of all stripes in their dislike of him, and a growing Catholic population amount to the most propitious circumstances possible for nationalism. But advocates of unity have only marginally shifted the dial in their favour: the longest-running poll on the question showed that 27% supported immediate unity in 2002, and 30% supported it in 2020. Enthusiasm for reunification south of the border is hard to detect.

Nonetheless, a Sinn Féin victory would have practical as well as symbolic implications. Under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, either of the two main parties can veto an administration being formed. The DUP has refused to say whether it would participate in government if Sinn Féin wins. Jim Wells, a former DUP minister, has said publicly that the party should refuse to share power with Sinn Féin if it were to get the post of first minister. Such a decision would not just be undemocratic but idiotic: it would almost certainly boost republican support.

Even if the DUP pulls off an improbable victory, however, the province may not get a government. That is because Northern Ireland now has two disputed borders, not one. A crucial part of Mr Johnson’s Brexit divorce deal was the Northern Ireland Protocol, an agreement that the province would stay in the EU ’s single market for goods and in its customs union. The protocol avoided checks at the Irish land border but created a new Irish Sea border, which makes trade with Britain more difficult and has left many unionists believing that ties to “the mainland” are being severed.

In February the DUP brought down the devolved government in protest at the protocol. It says it will not return to the executive until the sea border is removed. The British government, which dislikes the protocol for many reasons, has been making noises about unilateral legislation to dismantle bits of it. That would not only precipitate a bitter clash with the EU but could see Sinn Féin, which strongly supports the protocol, itself refuse to enter government in protest.

The province has been in this position before: for three of the past five years, it has had no government. But according to Ann Watt of Pivotal, a think-tank, a period without an executive “will inevitably make life harder for individuals and families here in Northern Ireland—with the most vulnerable people disproportionately affected”.

Moreover, the underlying strains in Northern Irish politics are intensifying. The least confrontational path to getting rid of the Irish Sea border seems likely to disappear as a result of the elections. The Brexit deal explicitly provides for a Stormont vote in 2024 on whether to keep the Irish Sea border; that vote will be decided by assembly members who are elected on May 5th. Whether the DUP clings on as the largest party or not, it is very unlikely that unionists will win a majority in Stormont.

If unionists think they have lost their chance to vote down the protocol, a more militant approach may prevail. A year ago serious rioting erupted in several parts of Northern Ireland; paramilitaries in balaclavas openly taught children born long after the Good Friday Agreement how to make petrol bombs. The violence subsided as unionist leaders said politics could remove the sea border, but its threat lingers.

F OR A MAN who could be prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer enjoys a peculiar reputation as a political naïf. The Labour leader was elected as an MP only in 2015, after a decorated career as a human-rights barrister and a stint as the director of public prosecutions. By 2020 he was party leader. To his critics, he has the air of a hobbyist who had reached the top of one profession and fancied a go at another, and who ended up as a potential prime minister due to circumstance rather than skill. An enjoyably hostile new biography of Sir Keir by Oliver Eagleton, an editor at the New Left Review, a socialist journal, offers an alternative view.

In “The Starmer Project”, the political naïf turns into a bequiffed Machiavelli. On this telling, Sir Keir undermined Jeremy Corbyn, his hard-left predecessor, as part of a long-term plan to install himself as Labour leader. He campaigned for that job on a platform of carrying on with Mr Corbyn’s policies. Then, once in power, Sir Keir organised a ruthless purge of the left-wingers who had taken control of the party machinery. In Mr Eagleton’s version of events, Sir Keir is politically rapacious and rather cynical. He could well be offended. But he should take it as a compliment.

For starters, allegations of plotting protect against Boris Johnson’s charge that the Labour leader is cut from the same cloth as his predecessor. Displaying a weak grasp of Britain’s tailoring heritage, the prime minister has labelled Sir Keir as a “Corbynista in a smart Islington suit”. Sir Keir did, after all, spend three years in Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, overseeing Labour’s Brexit policy. To his defenders, Sir Keir had no choice but to serve. Brexit was an existential question at the time; duty called. In Mr Eagleton’s telling, however, Sir Keir was a wrecker. Agent Starmer tried to undermine Mr Corbyn’s team from within, pushing the party towards supporting a second referendum primarily to position himself as a potential leader of the party.

Convenience rather than conviction is the better explanation, and the better alibi, for Sir Keir’s stint under Mr Corbyn. The next leader of Labour was always likely to be someone who had ostensibly been loyal to the leftie leader. Although a tranche of Labour members were hard-core believers, the bulk were moderate social democrats who liked Mr Corbyn’s proposals of higher public spending and more public ownership. Anyone who had spent the previous five years attacking Mr Corbyn would have had no chance of succeeding him. Standing on a Corbynite platform of higher taxes on the very rich and public ownership of utilities, Sir Keir sauntered to victory.

Upon winning power, however, Sir Keir ditched the bulk of this programme. More than that, he set about ridding the party of the left-wingers who had taken over its apparatus. He even removed the whip from Mr Corbyn, his old boss, after the former leader played down the rise of anti-Semitism on his watch. Chasing lefties out of the party is performative as well as practical. Others on the Labour benches avoided serving Mr Corbyn; an element of overcompensation from Sir Keir was required. Mr Eagleton’s portrayal of Sir Keir as a blood-soaked Trot-slayer is rather useful.

Cynicism is not the only possible explanation for Sir Keir’s political volte-face. One unflattering theory for his flexible political positions is that he has been “cuckooed”. Cuckooing happens when wrong ’uns take over the flat of a vulnerable person, turning it into a drug den or a brothel. In this telling, something similar has happened to Sir Keir, whose shadow cabinet and advisers are now drawn from the right of the party. He is reduced to the role of a hapless pensioner trying to sleep while holdovers from the New Labour era blast “Things Can Only Get Better” at 3am.

The cynical explanation puts Sir Keir in a much less feeble light. Grumblings about his leadership emerged during 2021. Labour had a lousy set of local-election results last year; were hammered in a by-election in Hartlepool, a poor coastal town in northern England; and clung onto Batley and Spen in west Yorkshire by only a slim margin. Opponents, particularly on the right of the party, were circling. Sir Keir changed tack in a bid to stay alive. He brought in people from the party’s right, such as Yvette Cooper, and turfed out long-standing advisers. Survival sometimes requires a dose of cynicism.

An appreciation of the Labour leader’s ruthless side may also win over his remaining doubters. Critics of his are found across the whole party. Although the left see him as a malevolent wrecker, the right sees Sir Keir as someone who lacks the right political instincts. But politics is a results business. “If you’re so smart, why are you so poor?” runs one Russian proverb. “If you’re so good at politics, why are you not in power?” applies in Westminster. Sir Keir’s path of reluctant support of Mr Corbyn, to be ditched once in power, was an option open to all Labour’s pretenders from the right. But others did not have the nous to seize it.

A backhanded compliment

By doing down Sir Keir, therefore, Mr Eagleton has done him a favour. This is not the first time Corbynites have found themselves bigging up their enemies. When Theresa May was at her lowest ebb, Corbynites were among her few defenders. It must have taken a political genius to defeat Mr Corbyn in the 2017 election, ran their logic then. There was some truth to this. Mrs May’s strategy of targeting Leave-voting seats across the Midlands and the North was broadly right; Mr Johnson followed it closely in the next election and won a stonking majority.

Likewise, the idea that Sir Keir is a cynical mastermind is a more comforting one for Corbynites than the possibility that the former Labour leader was manifestly unsuited to the role. But it is also a more reassuring tale for Sir Keir’s supporters. A cynical Labour leader is one who owes his position to his own cunning rather than circumstance. He is also one that stands a better chance of becoming prime minister. ■

Martin Lewis faces up to a world he can no longer fix (Apr 16th)

The cruelty of the British state (Apr 7th)

O NE WAY to predict the future in Lebanon is to look at election billboards and imagine the opposite. The last time voters chose a parliament, in 2018, roads across the country were lined with cheery messages. “Our port will come”, read one, referring to a tourist harbour that would woo cruise ships and boost the economy. Another hailed Lebanon’s financial stability: “Currencies around us are collapsing, but our lira is firm.” In the years that followed, Lebanon’s main port was wrecked by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever seen (pictured above), and the lira lost more than 94% of its value.

The same pattern may apply this year. Lebanon will hold legislative elections on May 15th. Nattily dressed candidates grin from ubiquitous billboards. The most common word on them seems to be “change”. Everyone promises reform. Yet the most likely result is more of the same.

If ever there was a moment for a throw-out-the-bums vote, this should be it. Lebanon is in one of the worst economic crises in modern history. GDP has shrunk by 58% since 2019 (see chart). Annual inflation is above 200%. The minimum wage is worth about $1 a day. The UN counts three in four Lebanese as poor. In a once-vibrant bit of the capital, young men dive into skips at dawn, looking for something to sell. At dusk pensioners come out to beg for spare change. Nightfall brings an eerie darkness: most streetlights and traffic signals no longer work. The faces on the billboards seem to be the only ones smiling. The rough cause of all this was the unravelling in 2019 of a state-run Ponzi scheme to support a currency peg and pay for yawning fiscal and trade deficits. But the crisis’s origins go back much further. The political class that carved up power after Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990 built a corrupt, inept order. They stole billions through dodgy contracts and bribes, spending $40bn subsidising a state-run power utility that never provided 24-hour electricity. “The government, the MP s, the ministries, they are a single entity, jointly liable,” says Roy Badaro, an economist. “The system is totally locked by these people, even if they’re enemies politically.”

A record 1,043 candidates registered to run for 128 seats in the May election (42 later withdrew). Sawti (“My Voice”), an activist group, describes 212 as “alternative” candidates with no links to the ruling elite. In the Metn district outside Beirut, for example, campaigners hope to sink Ibrahim Kanaan, an MP who has worked closely with banks to obstruct a financial-recovery plan. His main challenger is Jad Ghosn, an independent journalist known for reporting on political and economic woes.

Beirut Madinati (“Beirut, My City”), a technocratic group, is fielding 11 candidates in the capital, hoping to capitalise on anger over the port explosion of 2020. Caused by thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored improperly for years, the blast killed at least 218 people, gutting much of the city centre. No one in power was punished. Politicians have worked to obstruct the official investigation.

But translating anger into votes will be hard. Campaign-finance laws are weak and favour deep-pocketed incumbents. Billboards alone cost as much as $8,500—beyond the reach of a grassroots campaign. Independents have tried to spread their messages on social media instead. Vote-buying is legal. With so much of the population in desperate circumstances, it may be easier for party bosses to buy support.

Some 244,000 expats have registered to vote, three times as many as in 2018. Some activists hope the diaspora will be less likely to back sectarian parties. But many expats have still not got instructions on how to vote. Embassy budgets have shrunk amid the crisis (diplomats have been told to watch their toilet-roll consumption).

With widespread blackouts due to fuel shortages, ballots may literally be counted in the dark. Bassam Mawlawi, the interior minister, says the electricity firm asked for $16m to power polling places, more than the entire election budget. In the past votes have been counted fairly; some fear that will not be the case this time.

The opposition has also made missteps, chiefly its failure to run a unified slate. Charbel Nahas, a leftist former minister, has backed scores of candidates. In most areas, though, they are competing against one or two other “alternative” lists, as well as the old established parties.

Lebanon’s complex electoral law, which even many voters do not understand, mixes sectarian quotas with a proportional-list system. But parties that fail to meet a minimum threshold win no seats. The competing lists will split the opposition vote.

Some reformers want to make the election a referendum on Hizbullah, the Shia militia-cum-political party that is a powerful defender of the sectarian system. That has led to dalliances with figures from the old guard, such as Samy Gemayel, the boss of Kataeb, a Christian party with paramilitary links. Others refuse to co-operate with parties of the old era.

Expectations are low. Some campaigners say four or five independent MP s would count as a victory. Hizbullah retains deep support among its co-religionists and remains the strongest armed force in Lebanon; it will not be voted into irrelevance.

Election night is an anticlimax, as the work of forming a government invariably drags on long after. The last election was followed by nine months of horse-trading.

Under Lebanon’s sectarian power-sharing system, the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim. Yet it is unclear who will lead that community after the election. Najib Mikati, the prime minister since September, is not on the ballot. Nor is Saad Hariri, who spent two terms in the post: his Future Movement is not fielding any candidates. By October parliament must also pick a president to replace Michel Aoun, whose six-year term is ending. With so much uncertainty around two of the top three jobs, it may take months to reach consensus on a new government.

Lebanon has no time to waste. On April 7th the IMF signed a tentative agreement which could include a $3bn loan. To unlock that money, however, Lebanon will have to start restructuring the banks. Parliament has yet to pass a capital-controls law or overhaul bank-secrecy regulations, among many other unfinished tasks.

It is hard to be optimistic about the vote. Many Lebanese with money or foreign passports have left. Many less fortunate are trying to follow. On April 23rd a boat carrying migrants illegally towards Cyprus capsized. At least seven people died and dozens more are missing. A survey by Arab Barometer, a pollster, found that 48% of Lebanese (and 63% of young ones) want to emigrate. Whatever happens at polling stations in May, many Lebanese will continue to vote with their feet. ■

A review of A Brief History of Equality by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press, 288 pages (April 2022)As I write this, the city of Rotterdam is considering a request to dismantle one of its historic bridges to grant Jeff Bezos’s super-yacht (too monstrous for normal ports) safe passage to the Atlantic. At the same time, Amazon workers around the world continue to fight to secure the living wages and safe working conditions they are currently denied. Such juxtapositions are fraught with appalling symbolism—the vulgar display of wealth, the mutilation of national monuments, the outsized influence the rich have over public policy, the gulf that exists between CEOs and their employees. Moreover, Bezos’s wealth doubled to $170 billion during the pandemic, when over 160 million people worldwide were threatened with poverty. This merely reaffirms what we already know: staggering inequality continues to thrive in advanced capitalist societies.This kind of inequality is not news, of course, but we need to be regularly reminded of it. The great chronicler of inequality in our time is the French economist, Thomas Piketty. The author of several tomes, Piketty’s works are not for the weak of wrist: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) clocks in at 816 pages, while its follow up, Capital & Ideology (2020), breaches 1,000. Heavily graphed and annotated, reading them from front to back is a labor in itself. Volume aside, Piketty’s books are massively popular and widely praised, though one suspects, as with all big and difficult books, that most people have not read them in full, and much of their praise comes in under the pressure of consensus. Fortunately, Piketty’s new book is mercifully brief. Indeed, A Brief History of Equality (at less than 300 pages) is a nice distillation of the “rockstar” economist’s ideas and a good entry point for the uninitiated.Piketty’s research sits at the intersection of history and social science, and his great contribution has been to show that tax records are as important to understanding and learning from history as anything else. In tracking the distribution of wealth since the beginning of the modern era, Piketty’s thesis is elegantly intelligible and empirically obvious: if return on capital consistently outpaces growth, it will invariably lead to a concentration of wealth, thereby producing inequality. The stress here is on inequality of opportunity, as Piketty’s argument for a more robust welfare state is more a matter of degree. He is careful to remind us that a measure of inequality between social groups can be productive, and that there is no universal formula for eliminating it. But he also points out that an unequal concentration of wealth is bad for growth and corrosive to democracy, precisely because it limits social mobility and prevents people from accessing key institutions.This argument is not new. Aristotle made the same case in his Politics, positing that since all systems bend towards the concentration of power, and power tends to concentrate in the hands of those that have wealth, the interests of the governing will naturally diverge from those of the governed unless some correction takes place. The point at which this divergence becomes unmanageable, a decision has to be made—either reduce democracy, or increase people’s access to institutions. In defense of the latter, Aristotle proposed that property be distributed more widely among the middle class, allowing it to participate more fully in the democratic process and aligning its interests with that of the ruling class. Thus we see, in fourth century Athens, the conception of the first welfare state, and the reasoning behind it remains at the heart of progressivist politics to this day: a large and prosperous middle class encourages mobility, strengthens democracy, restrains oligarchy, and stabilizes society.Piketty points out that “Property is a historically situated notion,” largely dependent on “the way each society defines legitimate forms of ownership,” which has shifted over time. Rousseau, who argued that people are truly equal only in the state of nature, identified the hoarding of property as one of the origins of inequality: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Marx could only imagine the abolition of property as the way to social equality, but Piketty falls within the tradition of Thomas Paine and Henry George who called for the taxation of property as a means of redistributing wealth. Piketty echoes Paine specifically in the concept of “inheritance for all,” an idea that Paine advanced during the French Revolution in the form of a land tax. This could be used to finance social security not just for those at the end of their life, but for those at the beginning as well. This universal inheritance, which Piketty argues could be financed by a global wealth tax, would be accessible to everyone upon reaching the age of maturity. The goal is not simply to punish the rich for the comfort of the poor (a common mischaracterization of Piketty’s ideas), but to enhance the social mobility of young people by increasing their buying and bargaining power (impossible in a condition of insecurity), instead of saddling them with student debt equivalent to a mortgage before they reach the age of 25.The tradition into which Piketty-economics fits goes by various names, but Piketty calls it “Participatory Socialism”—participatory precisely because it eschews the movement towards the bureaucracy and centralization that characterized Soviet-style socialism. It focuses on giving people greater access to institutions, with the goal of “allow[ing] all citizens to participate more fully in social and economic life.”One participatory reform would be adopting a co-determinate structure for businesses, like the so-called Mitbestimmung model in Germany, where as many as one-third to half of the seats on boards of directors are given to worker representatives. This approach, Piketty reminds us, has certainly not weakened the productivity of the German economy since it was introduced nearly a century ago. In addition to being a more democratic compromise between management and workers, it would constitute a legitimate investment in the company by employees (who are already investors by virtue of their employment), and would give them a greater stake in its prosperity, while also increasing the transparency of bookkeeping.The central pillar of the Piketty model is a global system of progressive taxation, with high corporate and income tax rates aimed at the wealthiest one percent. Exactly how high these rates should be, Piketty (a mild prescriptivist) leaves open, though he makes it clear that it should be much higher than it is now in most countries. In the United States, one might propose a top marginal tax rate of 81 percent. If that sounds like communism, it is worth remembering that this was in fact the American tax code between 1932 and 1980. So, the popular objection that progressive taxation of this kind might work in Europe, but that it would never be acceptable in the United States (because it would be “un-American”) is simply ahistorical.A good deal of A Brief History of Equality consists of reminding readers that these policies, far from being unrealistic or utopian, either exist currently or have existed at some point in the past. In many ways, Piketty is asking us to return to the economic models that were put in place in Europe and North America between 1914–1980. Piketty calls this era “The Great Redistribution,” when income inequality decreased dramatically. To be sure, this redistribution would not have been possible without a series of catastrophes—disaster being the great leveler. Within the space of four decades, revolutions, two world wars, and an economic depression destroyed much of the inherited wealth of the European aristocracy (the gap was closed as much by the self-immolation of the rich as it was by raising up the poor). The Great Redistribution, however, was also (and in large part) due to the rise of the welfare state, which could not have happened without changing people’s view of the role that governments play in markets. And here it is important to recognize that many of these initiatives, like the New Deal, were not merely acts of noblesse oblige, but compromises aimed at alleviating pressure from socialist and labor movements, and implemented partly to quell radicalism and avert the threat of revolution.The movement towards greater equality among the classes accelerated tremendously during this period, and it is along this line that Piketty recommends we continue. He shows—with data readily accessible to all—that developing more progressive taxation and furthering the potential of the welfare state does not come at the expense of productive efficiency and growth. The US economy, which is perhaps the best example of this, grew at an unprecedented rate between 1945–1980, a time of high tax rates and generous social spending. This legacy, however, has largely been gutted in the last 40 years, with the rise of neoliberalism (inaugurated by the Powell Memo), the wave of conservatism that overtook the West in the 1980s, and the abandonment of class politics by labor and social-democratic parties after the end of the Cold War. Since then, we have seen growth rates slow, contrary to the predictions of Reaganites and Thatcherites who insisted that deregulation and low corporate tax would spur innovation, create jobs, and “trickle down” more wealth to the rest of society.The march toward equality, like the rest of history, is fraught with ironies. It is also not fixed and safe from reversal. The United States, for example, had a far more even distribution of wealth than most European societies in the 19th century. Today it has flipped. The French Revolution succeeded in establishing the principle of égalité, but failed to alter the distribution of wealth in France (Piketty shows that, in 1900, the wealthiest controlled roughly the same amount of property as they had a century before). These are good reasons not to be whiggish. There is a temptation to imagine our progress towards equality as a straight line, along which we will continue to travel, as the high tide of capital markets raises all boats. But there is no reason for us to believe that this will continue. The 21st century may well be one in which a surfeit of techno-billionaires reach new heights of obscene wealth, while a third of the population in post-industrial societies fall into poverty as their jobs are automated out of existence. That is, unless corrections are made.The cause of creating a more equal society depends heavily on the strength of its social democracy and its willingness to renew the question of inequality. It was largely due to the efforts of social movements that we have things like free public education, universal health care, maternity leave, social security, unemployment insurance, worker’s rights, fixed salaries, the eight-hour work day, etc. We have no right to take these things for granted, as many of them were fiercely opposed at the time they were advocated, and had to be fought for, sometimes violently.It is also important to remember that our sensibilities—and the institutions on which they are based—are not hardcoded. Regimes change, as does the prevailing sense of what is just and fair. The acceptability of these regimes largely depends on the ideas that hold them in place, and to that extent all economic policies are matters of “Ideology”—a word that Piketty doesn’t use as a pejorative. Indeed, there is little historical evidence to support the notion that a particular set of policies cannot be adopted on the basis that they are incompatible with some vague sense of “national character.” The French Revolution showed, albeit with much blood, that a country’s political organization and attitudes regarding equality can change radically in a very short time. Sweden, which is often held up in the West as a model of democratic socialism, did not begin moving towards egalitarian policies until socialist parties took power after WWI. Until 1911, Sweden had censitary suffrage, according to which only the richest 20 percent could vote in elections, and the number of votes given to each citizen was proportionate to their wealth (we can see echoes of this today in campaign finance laws and rulings like Citizens United in the United States). We’ve also seen astonishing transformations in countries like Japan and Germany between 1910–1960, which transitioned from military aristocracies to fascist dictatorships to democratized welfare states in just a few decades.The rapidity of these changes was sometimes a response to catastrophic events that demanded a radical restructuring of intuitions. But therein lies the lesson: societies that ignore inequality do so at their peril. Indeed, it was the abandonment of social democracy in Germany in the 1920s that weakened European socialism and created the vacuum that allowed parties like the Nazis to rise to power (a development predicted by Trotsky and confirmed by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism). More still, it was the abandonment of a truly internationalist movement that made people susceptible to nationalist and statist politics that more readily adapted themselves to the demands of the interwar years.If the politics of Europe and America during the last decade have taught us anything, it is that the failure to address inequality is highly corrosive to the social contract. It fosters distrust and resentment, and makes people vulnerable to demagogy, populism, xenophobia, and reactionary politics of all kinds. Politicians who refuse to address the real source of inequality naturally have to search for other reasons to explain it, which usually involves finding scapegoats for people’s grievances—immigrants, foreign labor, foreign countries, etc. And if the problem of inequality is not addressed, the only way for the ruling class to protect its interests is to gradually erode democratic institutions.This last point should be brought into sharper focus. Near the close of his argument, Piketty writes:...if no democratic post-national project is formulated, then authoritarian constructions will take its place in order to propose more or less convincing solutions to the feelings of injustice engendered by the unrestrained economic and state forces operating on a world-wide scale.One of the more honorable legacies of socialist movements in the 20th century was the recognition that the struggle for equality transcended all other identities (national, ethnic, religious) and that the project to improve the conditions of working people was essentially an international one. This, among other things, demanded an expansion of human solidarity. Sadly, we fail to see this same internationalism today, as societies across the West founder in nativist discourse, and tribalist thinking on the Left has displaced a debate once centered on a global critique of capital.Perhaps rekindling a bit of this old internationalism is in order if we wish to crawl out of this rather ugly phase in our politics, and avoid the irony and humiliation of an authoritarian populism spearheaded by elites posing as saviors of “the forgotten.” This will require a return to certain principles, and a hardier debate within the Left. To that end, the march towards greater equality in the coming century may result from a debate between competing visions of socialism rather than a war between socialism and capitalism.

Hi,I’m sorry to report that I’ve been felled by a nasty malady (of the non-COVID variety). I didn’t want to bail on today’s newsletter, but I also don’t feel well enough to churn out something that would be worth your valuable time. So instead I’m publishing an excerpt from my underrated second book, The Tyranny of Cliches. While it came out a few years ago, much of it is relevant today, including my chapter on the middle class and the cognitive dissonance of the American left. This is a trimmed down version. I hope to be recovered enough for the Friday G-File. If I’m not, I’ve got bigger problems.So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. —Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning” What do all of these folks say? I’m not too sure. But you can figure that out for yourself if you want to by reading Maya Angelou’s “Inaugural Poem,” delivered at Bill Clinton’s swearing-in as the 42nd president of the United States. This passage serves as a less than ideal example of the left’s obsession with identity politics—the idea that we are all locked into our status as gay, straight, black, white, etc. But there are three reasons why I’ve chosen it. First, it’s notable that at the inauguration of a president of the United States, the poem listed just about every flavor of humanity ever captured in a Benetton ad, but never once mentioned Americans. Second, it highlights the intense cognitive dissonance of the American lleft. And third: It rhymes, which is nice. Let’s circle back to number two. Bill Clinton won the Oval Office in large part because he refused to fall into the same trap as so many Democrats before him. Namely, the Democratic Party had become (and largely remains) the tail on the dog of special interests, particularly labor unions, racial grievance peddlers, feminists, limousine liberals, and the rest of the usual suspects. He cast himself as a different kind of Democrat, who wanted to “end welfare as we know it” and offer a “hand up not a hand out.” He attacked the brilliantly self-parodying rapper Sister Souljah, distanced himself from Jesse Jackson Jr., and, most importantly, talked relentlessly about the “middle class.”

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Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion. They also often cite Charles Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to support the claim that universal expressions evolved by natural selection.

Other scientists point to a mountain of counterevidence showing that facial movements during emotions vary too widely to be universal beacons of emotional meaning. People may smile in hatred when plotting their enemy’s downfall and scowl in delight when they hear a bad pun. In Melanesian culture, a wide-eyed gasping face is a symbol of aggression, not fear. These experts say the alleged universal expressions just represent cultural stereotypes. To be clear, both sides in the debate acknowledge that facial movements vary for a given emotion; the disagreement is about whether there is enough uniformity to detect what someone is feeling.

This debate is not just academic; the outcome has serious consequences. Today you can be turned down for a job because a so-called emotion-reading system watching you on camera applied artificial intelligence to evaluate your facial movements unfavorably during an interview. In a U.S. court of law, a judge or jury may sometimes hand down a harsher sentence, even death, if they think a defendant’s face showed a lack of remorse. Children in preschools across the country are taught to recognize smiles as happiness, scowls as anger and other expressive stereotypes from books, games and posters of disembodied faces. And for children on the autism spectrum, some of whom have difficulty perceiving emotion in others, these teachings do not translate to better communication.

So who is right? The answer involves an unwitting physician, a scientific error and a century-long misinterpretation of Darwin’s writing. Ironically, his own observations offer a powerful resolution that is transforming the modern understanding of emotion.

The assumption of universal facial expressions can be traced back to several sources, most notably a set of photographs by 19th-century French physician Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne. In the early days of photography, Duchenne electrically stimulated people’s facial muscles and photographed the contractions.

His photographs inspired Darwin to propose in Expression that certain facial movements were universal signs of emotion. In happiness, Darwin wrote, people smile. In sadness, they frown. The way the story is usually told, Darwin discovered that emotions have innate, biologically based expressions that are made and recognized universally and shared with other animals. That story presents facial movements as a sort of signaling system in which you can look at a person’s face, detect their emotional state and receive important information to keep you—and them—alive and healthy.

Or so it would seem. A preponderance of evidence shows that Darwin was wrong, and his mistake was a doozy. In real life, people express a given emotion with tremendous variability. In anger, for example, people in urban cultures scowl (or make some of the facial movements for a scowl) only about 35 percent of the time, according to meta-analyses of studies measuring facial movement during emotion. Scowls are also not specific to anger because people scowl for other reasons, such as when they are concentrating or when they have gas. The same tremendous variation occurs for every emotion studied—and for every other measure that purportedly tells us about someone’s emotional state, whether it’s their physiology, voice or brain activity.

Emotion AI systems, therefore, do not detect emotions. They detect physical signals, such as facial muscle movements, not the psychological meaning of those signals. The conflation of movement and meaning is deeply embedded in Western culture and in science. An example is a recent high-profile study that applied machine learning to more than six million internet videos of faces. The human raters, who trained the AI system, were asked to label facial movements in the videos, but the only labels they were given to use were emotion words, such as “angry,” rather than physical descriptions, such as “scowling.” Moreover there was no objective way to confirm what, if anything, the anonymous people in the videos were feeling in those moments.

There’s also considerable evidence that facial movements are just one signal of many in a much larger array of contextual information that our brain takes in. Show people a grimacing face in isolation, and they may perceive pain or frustration. But show the identical face on a runner crossing the finish line of a race, and the same grimace conveys triumph. The face is often a weaker signal of a person’s internal state than other signals in the array.

Darwin’s Expression suggests that instances of a particular emotion, such as anger, share a distinct, immutable, physical cause or state—an essence—that makes the instances similar even if they have superficial differences. Scientists have proposed a variety of essences, some of which are easily seen, such as facial movements, and others, such as complex, intertwined patterns of heart rate, breathing and body temperature, that are observed only with specialized instruments. This belief in essences, called essentialism, is compellingly intuitive. It’s also pernicious because it is virtually impossible to prove that an essence doesn’t exist. People who believe in essences but fail to observe them despite repeated attempts often continue to believe in them anyway. Researchers, in particular, tend to justify their belief by suggesting that tools and methods are not yet sufficient to locate the essences they seek.

A solution to this conundrum can be found in Darwin’s more famous book On the Origin of Species, written 13 years before Expression. Ironically, it is celebrated for helping biology “escape the paralyzing grip of essentialism,” according to heralded biologist Ernst Mayr. Before Origin was published, scholars believed that each biological species had an ideal form, created by God, with defining properties—essences—that distinguished it from all other species. Think of this as the “dog show” version of biology. In a dog show, each competitor is judged against a hypothetical ideal dog. Deviation from the ideal is considered error. Darwin’s Origin proposed, radically, that a species is a vast population of varied individuals with no essence at its core. The ideal dog doesn’t exist—it is a statistical summary of many diverse dogs. Variation is not error; it is a necessary ingredient for natural selection by the environment. When it came to emotions, however, Darwin fell prey to essentialism, ignoring his most important discovery.

The power of essentialism led Darwin to some beautifully ridiculous ideas about emotion, including that emotional imbalance can cause frizzy hair and that insects express fear and anger by frantically rubbing their body parts together.

Essentialism likewise appears to lure designers of emotion AI systems to follow Darwin down this comfortable path, with its assumption that emotions evolved via natural selection to serve important functions. But if you actually read Expression, you’ll find that Darwin barely mentioned natural selection. He also did not write that facial expressions are functional products of evolution. In fact, he wrote the opposite: that smiles, frowns, eye widening and other physical expressions were “purposeless”—vestigial movements that no longer serve a function. He made this statement more than 10 times in Expression. For Darwin, emotional expressions were compelling evidence that humans are animals and that we’ve evolved. By his logic, if we share expressions with other animals, but the expressions are functionally useless for us, they must have come from a long-gone, common ancestor for whom the expressions were useful.

Expression has been cited incorrectly for more than 100 years. How did this happen? I discovered the answer lurking in the work of an early-20th-century psychologist, Floyd Allport. In his 1924 book Social Psychology, Allport made a sweeping inference from Darwin’s writing to say that expressions begin as vestigial in newborns but quickly assume useful social functions. He wrote, “Instead of the biologically useful reaction being present in the ancestor and the expressive vestige in the descendant, we regard both these functions as present in the descendant, the former serving as a basis from which the latter develops.”

Allport’s idea, though incorrect, was attributed back to Darwin and eagerly adopted by like-minded scientists. They could now write about facial expressions as universal and claim to be the heirs of the unassailable Charles Darwin. With a single sentence, Allport misdirected the Western understanding of emotions, not only in science but in law, medicine, the eyes of the public and now emotion AI systems.

Nevertheless, this scientific tale has a happy ending because there is a name for the kind of variation we observe in real-life instances of emotion. It’s the same variation that Darwin himself observed in animal species. In Origin, Darwin described an animal species as a collection of varied individuals with no biological essence at its core. This key observation became known more generally as population thinking, and it’s supported by the modern study of genetics.

Population thinking has been revolutionizing biology for the past century, and it is now revolutionizing the science of emotion. Like a species, a given emotion such as fear, grief or elation is a vast population of varied instances. People may indeed widen their eyes and gasp in fear, but they may also scowl in fear, cry in fear, laugh in the face of fear and, in some cultures, even fall asleep in fear. There is no essence. Variation is the norm, and it is intimately linked to a person’s physiology and situation, just as variation in a species is linked to the environment its members live in.

An increasing number of emotion researchers are taking population thinking more seriously and moving beyond the essentialist ideas of the past. It is time for emotion AI proponents and the companies that make and market these products to cut the hype and acknowledge that facial muscle movements do not map universally to specific emotions. The evidence is clear that the same emotion can accompany different facial movements and that the same facial movements can have different (or no) emotional meaning. Variety, not uniformity, is the rule.

Darwin’s Expression is best viewed as a historical text, not a definitive scientific guide. That leads to a deeper lesson here: Science is not truth by authority. Science is the quantification of doubt by repeated observation in varied contexts. Even the most exceptional scientists can be wrong. Fortunately, mistakes are part of the scientific process. They are opportunities for discovery.

Americans on both Left and Right seem increasingly convinced that the other side’s viewpoint is so entirely wrong and pernicious that it is simply past bearing. So we end relationships, deplatform views, and try to cancel those who hold them. In short, we display growing intolerance.So, maybe it is time to ask, what is tolerance? What is its value? On what grounds can it be criticized? Here are ten theses:1. Tolerance is conditionally putting up with things you don’t like.Botanists ask how much loss of moisture a plant can tolerate and still survive. In the 18th century, Hungary disfavored Jews, but would tolerate them if they paid a “toleration” tax. In these examples, perceived threats are deemed bearable for certain purposes within certain limits.Thus, tolerance is contingent, practiced not for its own sake but because it is a means of obtaining other things we want. The core question therefore becomes, tolerance for what?2. Tolerance is more a concession than a right.In The Rise of Toleration, historian Henry Kamen defines tolerance as “the concession of liberty to those who dissent in religion.” Western tolerance is rooted in Europe’s 16th- and 17th-century religious wars. Exhausted, Europeans accepted religious tolerance as the necessary price of peace and the growth of trade.Kamen’s definition also suggests that tolerance is granted by one party to another rather than held as a right. Rights are strong things. As the Declaration of Independence puts it, rights accrue to individuals from their “Creator” and are “unalienable.” They inhere in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” People don’t need the state’s or their neighbors’ permission to exercise them.In contrast, tolerance is more conditional and inextricably social. Thus religious “liberty” ordinarily refers to a right, religious “tolerance” to a concession.3. Tolerance conflicts with other values.Tolerance exists only in relation to other values, some of which—such as solidarity, democracy, and honesty—can conflict with tolerance. Theorists such as Isaiah Berlin and William Galston call this phenomenon “goods in conflict”—think of mercy conflicting with justice, or freedom with cooperation. Such conflicts can never be fully resolved. The best we can do is to try to balance them wisely.4. Tolerance can endanger itself.In what Karl Popper calls the “paradox of tolerance,” unbounded tolerance can lead to the victory of intolerance by tolerating those who themselves are intolerant. Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, delivers this warning:[I]f we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.… I do not imply … that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; But we should claim … in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.The citizens’ group Braver Angels, which I lead and whose mission is to pursue less societal polarization, wrestles with these issues. In some respects, we dissent from Popper’s argument. For example, in our podcasts, debates, and national meetings in early 2021, we included strong voices arguing that the 2020 election was likely stolen and that patriotic concerns motivated most people at the January 6 protests at the U.S. Capitol, even though some of our members disagreed with this decision.Earlier this year, YouTube took down a January, 2022 Braver Angels podcast on the grounds that our featured guest—Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the recent book Wrath: America Enraged—violated YouTube policy by spreading false information about the 2020 presidential election. (A week later, after a review, YouTube changed its mind and put the podcast back up.)Did we tolerate what we shouldn’t have tolerated? Since the 2020 election, most groups in what is often called the “bridge-building” field have drawn lines in the sand for reasons like Popper’s: Some voices are welcome, but others are too dangerous. Braver Angels’ approach is increasingly unusual, but I believe that leaving all Americans free to express all views is the only approach consistent with our mission. We choose our topics carefully, on the basis of how much and how dangerously they divide the country. We require participants to abide by our rules of engagement, which include civility toward others and a willingness to listen as well as speak. But within that framework, there is no list of disallowed beliefs.5. Democracy does not require tolerance.I spent most of my life assuming that self-government and tolerance thrived together, like two flowers in one garden; but I was wrong.More than two decades ago, Fareed Zakaria proposed the term “illiberal democracy” to describe regimes in which leaders are duly elected by the people but civil liberties related to tolerance are curtailed or denied. Zakaria and others suggest that the number of the world’s illiberal democracies is growing, and it is hard to dispute them.One such regime today is Hungary. When Viktor Orbán was re-elected as Hungary’s Prime Minister in 2010, he famously said, “A democracy is not necessarily liberal. Just because something is not liberal, it can still be a democracy.” When it comes to tolerating political dissent and minority political views, liberal educational institutions, immigrants, homosexual conduct, and other previously protected people and actions, Hungary is now what Orbán describes as an “illiberal democracy” that actively seeks to “abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society as well as the liberal way to look at the world.”Orbán and others who believe as he does now clearly favor group rights over individual rights. They say plainly that what “we”—the “real people” who constitute what Orbán calls the “soul” of Hungary—want matters more than the claims of unpopular minorities. In the name of democracy, or with its tacit blessing, the sphere of authority expands while the sphere of tolerance shrinks.6. Situation guides tolerance.In their study of American political extremism, The Politics of Unreason, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab urge us to resist the temptation to interpret the intolerance of some extremist movements as the fruits of “diabolism:” “Extremist movements are not primarily the products of extremists. The critical ranks … are not composed of evil-structured types called ‘extremists,’ but rather of ordinary people caught up in certain kinds of stress.”Lipset and Raab identify “status deprivation”—that is, the “displacement of some population groups from former positions”—as the type of stress most conducive to the rise of extremist movements. What drives extreme political anger is less a particular economic or political trend than the way people feel about their place in society. Situation is prior to attitude. Put people of different races in certain situations, and racism will likely dominate. Put exactly the same people in different situations, and racism is unlikely to dominate. Clearly, the main problem isn’t defective people, but decent people under “certain kinds of stress.”It’s easy to believe that intolerant people contribute to our social problems, and sometimes they do. But what if the deeper truth is that some circumstances and occasions are particularly likely to generate intolerance, even if the people involved are virtuous?Intense dislike of others is usually a reaction. Outrage is usually an expression of pain.7. Certain habits of mind are unfriendly to tolerance.Binary thinking is the presumption that for every question there are two possible answers and that these answers are opposites. Binary thinking almost by definition leads us to either/or choices between true and false, good and bad, right and wrong. Perhaps some choices are genuinely binary. But most aren’t, or at least that’s how we see it at Braver Angels. A. J. Muste expresses our argument beautifully: “You always assume there is some element of truth in the position of the other person [and] you must try very hard to see what truth actually does exist in their idea, and seize on it to make them realize what you consider to be a larger truth.”Similarly, if your thinking tends toward monism, you tend to believe that one guiding principle or master cause essentially explains everything. You also believe that all good or bad things have one correct place in the scheme of things, so that, when well understood, they fit together like properly arranged pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.In contrast, if your epistemology tends toward values pluralism, you tend to think that life’s goods don’t revolve around one controlling conception. You further believe that freely choosing people will never succeed, even if aided by reason or revelation, in arranging their values so that they all hold together as a unity without clashing with one another.I don’t want to argue the merits here. I do want to argue that, for better or worse, values pluralism is friendlier to tolerance than monism. Why? Because pluralism—no one main answer, no fixed hierarchy of goods—contains built-in room for doubt and uncertainty, which can increase one’s capacity or even appetite for tolerance.Do we all know intolerant pluralists? Yes. Do we know tolerant monists? Of course. Should tolerance always trump intolerance? No. But, begging your tolerance, I make this claim.8. Publicly engaging dangerous arguments shouldn’t depend on the arguments.People who disapprove of Braver Angels’ approach often ask challengingly: “Would you debate (something horrible)?” Is nothing off limits?” The short answer is that nothing is off limits.It’s not that Braver Angels has no guidelines. Some topics don’t merit discussion because they aren’t important enough. Some people believe Elvis is alive, but that question isn’t tearing us apart, so we don’t engage it. Likewise, we wouldn’t engage “Pizzagate”—allegations that Hillary Clinton engaged in human trafficking and child sexual abuse—because very few Americans believe that the allegations are credible.But what if large and growing numbers of American citizens did begin asserting something horrible as part of their political agenda?If that happened, I hope we’d find good ways to engage the topic, which would include letting people who believe the horrible thing say so and defend their view. What would be the alternative? Ignoring them? Deplatforming them? Attacking them personally? Making their views illegal? Some people favor such alternatives, but we don’t. Our choices about which subjects to debate depend on what is polarizing America, not on how we feel about the subjects themselves.The reasons why we make this choice involve our final two theses.9. Tolerance is the condition of freedom.In free societies, people regularly test the limits of our tolerance. Moreover, all societies have moral and cultural boundaries; in no society is everything tolerated. The question is never “boundary” versus “no boundary,” but the wisest balance.A major intellectual attack on tolerance occurs in Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay, “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse is a monist. His unifying theory is anti-capitalism. He’s a binary thinker, viewing the human drama as zero-sum struggles between the oppressed and their oppressors.Marcuse also rejects tolerance. For him, a proper anti-capitalist society “cannot protect false words and wrong deeds” that “contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation.” He favors denying politically retrograde groups the rights of free speech and assembly and advocates “rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in … educational institutions.” As against traditional tolerance, Marcuse recommends what he calls “liberating tolerance,” meaning “intolerance against movements from the Right, and tolerance of movements from the Left.” His argument confirms a sociological rule: On both Left and Right, the more authoritarian the politics, the less room for tolerance.

Why worry about growing intolerance? To the degree that we lose faith in tolerance, some version of Marcuse is the only alternative. We cherish tolerance because unfreedom denies it and freedom requires it.10. Tolerance is truth’s partner.Why do so many of us believe that so many others no longer accept facts? The answer isn’t intellectually weak people as much as the weakening of our truth-adjudicating institutions—a weakening that both feeds on and contributes to the loss of social trust. Growing numbers of people on both sides getting their facts wrong is a consequence of this trend, but not the cause.We are in a degenerative cycle harming many of our institutions, from Congress to courts to universities. Consider the media. Polarization means that we no longer rely on the same sources of information. Which encourages more of those sources to develop business models based on fostering partisanship and offering click-bait to the angry. Which produces more factual distortion. Which produces more rancor and mistrust. Which produces more polarization.If I wanted to accelerate this cycle, I know what I would do: I would refuse to engage people who in my view aren’t in good faith about facts. I would brand them as dangerous, refuse to talk to them, and try to deplatform them. I would publicly question their motives and their hold on reality. I would call them names featuring words like “disinformation” and “conspiracy theory.”But if I wanted to stop the cycle, I would seek more engagement, not less. I would do all I could to keep the conversation going, even and perhaps especially when the conversation seemed pointless or even dangerous. To get more truth, I would tolerate more error, not less.Why? Because the best way for free people to determine what is true is to tolerate false statements and odious ideas so that they can be publicly contested and corrected.Jonathan Rauch, a founding Braver Angels board member, in his book The Constitution of Knowledge, calls this notion the “single most counterintuitive social principle in all of human history.” But Rauch strongly defends it, as do thinkers dating back at least to John Locke, because it usually works, especially with the right cultural supports, while the alternatives nearly always fail.At the beginning of this essay, I said that the core question is, “Tolerance for what?” The core answer is, “Truth.”David Blankenhorn is president of Braver Angels, a citizens’ group working for less rancor and more good will in U.S. politics and society. Twitter: @blankenhorn3

On Monday, Elon Musk bought Twitter for forty-four billion dollars. Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and the richest man on earth, plans to take the social-media company private, and has said that he wants Twitter to adhere more closely to the principles of free speech, which, in a statement, Musk called “the bedrock of a functioning democracy.” (In the same statement, he described Twitter as the “digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”) Musk himself is a frequent tweeter, and it is assumed that he will continue to use the platform, and potentially reinstate the account of former President Donald Trump. He is also thought to be less likely to ban people for violations of the platform’s policies, which themselves may change.

To talk about Musk and what the future holds for his newest acquisition, I spoke by phone with Matt Levine, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who has been comprehensively reporting on and analyzing this story over the past month in his newsletter. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Musk has used Twitter to further his business interests, how he views freedom of speech, and why Twitter’s influence has long surpassed its financial value.

Why do you think Elon Musk is buying Twitter?

I assume it’s because he has some genuine set of political and social beliefs about how Twitter should be run, and he feels like it isn’t being run that way. I also think that he gets a lot of pleasure and utility out of tweeting and wants it to be optimized for his use. The value of his company is enhanced by his being a very strange public figure on Twitter, and so he clearly sees a lot of value in tweeting, and probably wants to own that for himself.

It’s not immediately obvious why Tesla is valued as highly as it is. So how much do you connect Tesla’s worth to Elon Musk as a person and the way he orients himself toward the world, especially on Twitter?

Tesla is a company, a relatively small car company, that makes good high-end electric cars, right? And the stock-market value of Tesla, which makes Elon Musk the richest person in the world, comes from a lot of extreme optimism about Tesla’s future ability to make more cars and become the dominant player in car-making as cars become more electric. Also, he’s just, like, a sort of futurist visionary—he’s building tunnels that he seems to think will be the future of transportation. He’s sending rockets into space. And so the value of these companies in the market is largely derived from expectations around how much money they’ll make in the future, as opposed to how much money they’ve made in the past. And those expectations are probably helped by having a charismatic, noisy founder who makes a lot of jokes online and is sort of a science-fiction character himself, and portrays himself as a science-fiction character, and who appeals to people who like that by making jokes.

Tesla’s an expensive company to run. It’s not like a social-media company, where you rent some space from some servers and type some code. You have to build big factories to build cars. And, historically, Tesla has needed a lot of money to run itself, and Tesla has been able to sell millions of dollars of stock to new shareholders, to some extent bypassing the way Wall Street usually works, and not finding big institutions to sell stock through banks but, rather, going out to the market and selling stock to individual shareholders who are big fans of Elon Musk. So his public persona has helped him raise money to build a big company that does real things, and has also kept the valuation of that company really high because people like it and like him, and trust in his vision for the future because he is an accessible character to them in a way that a lot of other C.E.O.s are not.

None of that translates in any direct way to the idea that owning Twitter will make that more valuable. At least it doesn’t to me. It’s not obvious to me how, if he bought Twitter, he would then be better able to get his message out, or better able to tell a story in a way that is good for Tesla and good for his economic interests. But it’s not obvious that it wouldn’t be. And he’s a really smart guy. One possible way to tell this story is that Twitter doesn’t make that much money compared to Facebook and other social-media companies. It’s not that big a company in terms of market cap. He might say, “Look, I get so much value out of this direct access to the public.” Owning that direct access to the public—owning that thing that creates so much value for Elon Musk and Tesla—it has to be valuable somehow, whether it’s by increasing the value that it creates for Tesla, or whether it’s by finding a way to monetize the value that it creates for sports stars and celebrities and Donald Trump and lots of other people. You know, Donald Trump’s tweets back when he was on Twitter could create billions or trillions of dollars’ worth of market moves, right? And Twitter never made a lot of money off of that. It’s not obvious how the company would, but if you’re sitting on top of a thing that can create that much value, surely, if you’re really smart then you can extract some value out of it.

In terms of the way that you described him using Twitter for his business image and business interests, is he sui generis, or do you see this more widely now?

I think it’s hard to imitate him, but I think people are, and I think that the classic example in the last five years or so has been the rise of meme stocks: companies like AMC and GameStop got very high market valuations and raised a lot of money through social media, popularity, and game memes. Adam Aron is the C.E.O. of AMC, and he’s this Harvard Business School graduate, a guy who’s worked at traditional corporate jobs. And he’s really embraced the meme-stock stuff, and does a lot of weird stuff on social media because his fans on Reddit and Twitter really like that and it seems to be good for the stock. And he’s pretty self-conscious about saying he works for retail meme investors now, and he’s going to do things that appeal to them.

I think there was this longtime perception that, if you were a high-powered corporate person, you could only get in trouble on Twitter and you should write bland things that are vetted by lawyers. And I think people are recognizing that Elon Musk has created a lot of value for his companies by being unhinged on Twitter. And I think there are imitators, and I think we’re kind of early in the game. There will be more imitators. And that applies to politics. It’s the obvious counterpart, where people have realized that you can make a lot of hay politically by being a poster.

In a column earlier this month, you wrote, “Look, this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and sense of identity from that game, maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game.” At one level, this is a more personal account of his desire to buy Twitter. And then there is the more financial, or business, account, which you have just explained. But, at the same time, it almost seems like it’s impossible to disaggregate those two things, unless you think that all of his behavior is some elaborate performance or something, which I don’t think anyone really believes.

Instead of counting on an allegedly benevolent billionaire like Elon Musk to guard free speech online by buying companies like Twitter, we should just take our digital public square out of rich people’s hands and into public ownership.

Billionaire Elon Musk reached a deal on Monday to buy Twitter for $44 billion. (Patrick Pleul / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)
 
What’s the state of online free speech after Twitter’s decision to sell itself to billionaire Elon Musk, who has promised to restore stronger free speech norms on the platform? Many centrist commentators seem alarmed at the thought that ordinary, working-class people will be too free to express themselves as they please and access a broad range of points of view so they can make up their own minds about what’s right and what’s wrong.
I have the opposite concerns. I worry that we won’t be able to count on Musk to stick to his stated principles when they come into conflict with his profits. More importantly, it’s absurd that we live in the kind of capitalist hellscape where the only hope for reasonable norms protecting free speech online is that we get lucky and the right kind of billionaire purchases our digital public square. It’s as if we lived in a kind of libertarian dystopia where every inch of every city was private property, and we could only hold protest marches on sidewalks that happened to have been bought by billionaires who were personally friendly to free speech.

Should Trump Be Allowed to Tweet?
Let’s start with the concerns of those who think there’s going to be too much free speech rather than too little on a Musk-run Twitter. One particular case that seems to worry some liberals and leftists is that Musk might restore Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account and that this will help him win the 2024 election.
This concern is misguided on both pragmatic and principled levels. As a matter of immediate practicality, my Jacobin colleague Branko Marcetic has convincingly argued that cable television was a vastly larger factor in Trump’s 2016 victory than social media. Nor has his Twitter ban paid off in terms of declining popularity for the demagogue. Most recent polls show that, well over a year after Trump lost his account, he’s on track to either beat Joe Biden in the 2024 election or at best lose by a smaller margin than he lost by in 2020, when he was tweeting every day.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that this analysis is wrong and Trump’s Twitter account really would be a major short-term advantage for him. Even on pragmatic grounds, this shouldn’t be enough for us to line up behind the corporate censors. Strategically, left-wing support for the Trump ban — and for a stricter regime of “content moderation” in general — is shortsighted.
Like other social media platforms, Twitter has every profit incentive to oppose the Left’s agenda. Whichever billionaire happens to be running the show at any given time won’t want any of their wealth to be redistributed or any of their power to be taken away. And they have every reason to want to stay on the good side of the federal government.
To tweak a question I’ve asked elsewhere, if Twitter had existed in 2002, who do you think would have been more likely to be banned for spreading “disinformation”: users who agreed with the president and the New York Times that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or users who suspected that Bush administration officials were conspiring to lie to the public?
If the Left ever captured the American presidency, the new president would be immediately facing a prolonged and vicious battle against the entirety of the media, corporate America in general, the defense and intelligence “communities,” and the establishments of both major parties. Democratic socialists should be extremely uncomfortable with the idea that a sitting president can have lines of communication with the general public cut over vague charges of incitement.
Here’s the scenario I posed at the time: Imagine a general strike encouraged by a future president Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She speaks to a massive rally of strikers and gives a speech as rabble-rousing (and as vague) as the one Trump gave on January 6. Cops fight with strikers — a regular occurrence throughout the history of organized labor — and AOC is accused of incitement. Wouldn’t you hope that whatever the rules were for adjudicating this complaint were transparent, included plenty of due process, and erred on the side of protecting free speech?

Why Free Speech Is an Important Socialist Value
As a question of principle, the case for socialists supporting broad free speech protections is even more straightforward than the tactical and strategic case. Unlike libertarians, who believe that only the kind of “coercion” that emanates from government can limit freedom, and any content moderation decision made by a private company falls into the category Robert Nozick called “capitalistic acts between consenting adults,” we understand that private property can itself be an important source of unfreedom. That’s why, for example, we fight for broader free speech protections at the workplace, where most adults have to spend half their waking hours most days of the week.
And unlike centrist liberals, who think that “social justice” is a matter of the best and brightest members of every group rising to the top and coming up with technocratic solutions to social problems, the heart and soul of our politics is about empowering ordinary, working-class people to govern themselves. That means trusting them to hear every point of view and make up their own minds.
That doesn’t mean Twitter has to be a free-for-all of doxing, harassment, and child porn. But there’s a massive space in between that and its current level of censoriousness, and we should support speech norms on Twitter and every other platform that tends to err of the side of free speech. The question we’re confronted with now is whether we trust Elon Musk to navigate to that space — and whether we should have to count on an allegedly benevolent oligarch to make such decisions.

Can Elon Be Counted on to Keep His Word?
It’s very easy to support the free speech of people you basically agree with, or whose views you at least think aren’t all that bad. I’m not worried about the free speech of market-loving, libertarian Bitcoin enthusiasts, for example, under Elon’s stewardship of Twitter. I’m not even worried about the free speech of deranged right-wing conspiracy theorists with whom Elon might personally disagree. Letting back banned QAnon accounts, or former president Trump himself, would be very on-brand.
I’ll be a lot more interested to see if, for example, he restores several “Antifa” accounts, with a combined total of seventy-one thousand followers, that were banned early last year. Were they really inciting violence in a more direct and unambiguous way than Donald Trump? I’ll similarly be interested to see if he’ll hold strong on free speech if he realizes that his economic interests will be served by making it harder for Tesla union organizers, or whistleblowers calling attention to allegations of shockingly racist practices at the company, to get their message out.
Of course, all this is speculative. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that I’m wrong to suspect that Musk might not act on his stated principles. The deeper question is whether we should have to pin our hopes on a single wealthy individual doing the right thing.
It would be far better if we simply took our digital public square into public ownership so that, like literal public squares, broadly applicable free speech laws apply there.
That doesn’t mean there would be no rules. Just as you might be kicked out of a city council meeting for trying to use the public comments section to scream racial slurs at other members of the public or read off their phone numbers and home addresses, a publicly owned Twitter could probably fend off any First Amendment challenges to reasonable rules against harassment, doxing, unambiguous incitement of violence, and so on.
I don’t deny that there would continue to be room for reasonable people to disagree over exactly how strict such rules should be. Nor is there any guarantee that the right balance would always be struck. I would be infinitely more comfortable with such decisions being made in the public sector, where they can be subject to democratic debate and deliberation, than I am with just placing our faith in the whims of one deeply unimpressive oligarch. Free speech matters far too much to be entrusted to such people.

The Czech Republic is calling on China to stop supporting Russia while claiming neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war — a claim that is designed to let Beijing take advantage of the crisis, a senior Czech official told me this week. The West, he argued, must realize that China and Russia represent a joint threat to the world order that urgently needs to be addressed.

Even if Beijing isn’t militarily supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky told me, China is not neutral in the conflict. Lipavsky, whom I interviewed in Washington on Monday, said China has supported Russia in international organizations and is parroting Putin’s propaganda about Ukraine both externally and internally. Czech officials have warned their Chinese interlocutors against boosting support for Russia, saying this would result in “severe consequences” for Beijing’s relationships with the entire European Union, Lipavsky told me.

“We in the Czech Republic are very closely following China’s position on the Russian aggression in Ukraine, and we are signaling to them in a very clear way, if China supports Russia more, it will seriously damage [European Union]-China relations,” said Lipavsky, a 36-year-old member of the Czech Pirate Party. “China is trying to play both sides, but what concerns me is that the Chinese propaganda uses only Russia’s narrative about the war for its own population, which creates a pretext for possible future action in helping Russia more.”

The Czech Republic is neck-deep in the Ukraine crisis. Since Putin attacked, 300,000 or so Ukrainian refugees have poured into the Czech Republic, adding about 3 percent to the country’s population. The country is also dealing with Ukraine-related economic, energy and agricultural crises — problems it has in common with many other countries in Europe and beyond.

But when he meets with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday, rather than focus on Putin, Lipavsky wants to discuss improving U.S.-Czech cooperation on China. While in Washington, he will also meet with the National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, just back from an important trip to islands in the Pacific, as well as the visiting president of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Penpa Tsering.

The new Czech government, led by Prime Minister Petr Fiala, has been promoting a values-based foreign policy in the tradition of former Czech president Vaclav Havel. This platform includes relatively strong support for Taiwan’s democracy, which Prague views as under severe pressure. Several Czech senators visited Taiwan in 2020, ignoring Beijing’s objections.

“We need to be in continuing discussion about how to provide Taiwan with necessary help and what we can do for them to protect their democracy,” Lipavsky told me. “As a small democracy, we were bullied by Soviet and Russian imperialism. The case of Taiwan is very similar in that aspect.”

Views of China had already been deteriorating throughout Europe before the Ukraine invasion. This was due in part to Beijing’s disastrous handling of the covid-19 pandemic, which included China using supplies of masks and medicine to bully and blackmail several European countries. More European governments are now responding to the concerns of their citizens by moving to reduce their economic dependence on China.

China’s actions during the Ukraine crisis could be the last straw, Lipavsky said, because Europeans are suffering greatly from the war, and Beijing’s unhelpfulness is exacerbating that suffering. In a globalized world, no country can escape the fallout of unnecessary wars of aggression.

More broadly, the Ukraine war has shattered the long-held notion among Europeans that engaging and trading with authoritarian regimes will prevent those regimes from waging wars against democracies. And while no one knows whether China will attack Taiwan, Lipavsky argues that China has the same ambitions as Russia, and that both are challenging the international order in ways the West cannot ignore.

“The lesson is that we in Western society need to build up our defenses, and we have to find a way to explain it to our societies, because there is a cost connected to all of this,” Lipavsky said. “We are fighting for the very survival of the nature of the international order and the values that order is built on.”

A decade ago, I interviewed a Czech foreign minister named Karel Schwarzenberg, who warned that Putin intended to restore imperial Russia by any means necessary and that the West was being too complacent about it. Now, the new Czech government, led by a new generation, is sounding a similar alarm — this time about China. The United States and the rest of Europe would be wise to heed it.

[MUSIC]

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein. This is “The Ezra Klein Show.” So before we begin, one last time, we are getting ready to do the Ask Me Anything episode. So if you’ve got anything you’d like to ask me about any issue, about the show, about me, send it your question to ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com with the subject line AMA. Rewind a few years, and the idea of Europe seems exhausted. It’s buried in these labyrinthine regulatory projects of the E.U. It’s fractured by debt crises and Brexit. It’s dependent on Russian oil and gas. There’s very little idealism left in that Union. What was Europe at that point even for? To the extent that question had an answer, it was this — Europe was for an end to war in Europe. That was the European idea. As Tony Judt put it, Europe was postwar. But now, we are watching a land war in Europe, one that has trashed the assumptions of many European leaders. Building pipelines with Putin didn’t stop him from invading Ukraine. It gave him the money he needed to do it. Opening a door for countries such as Ukraine to join NATO and the E.U. without truly deciding whether Europe wanted responsibility for their security, whether it would take responsibility for their security — doing that provoked Russia without giving thought to what would happen then, what Europe would do if Russia lashed out. And in outsourcing so much defense spending to the U.S. — well, that looked like a pretty bad idea after Trump and a pretty bad idea now that Putin has actually started a war. So Europe is changing. It is having to rebuild itself in the wreckage of so many treasured beliefs. But what is it changing into? Ivan Krastev chairs the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. He’s a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the book “After Europe.” And he’s just among the most interesting and erudite people you can talk to on the subject of Europe, of liberalism, of democracy, and all the tensions therein. As always, my email — ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC] Ivan Krastev, welcome to the show.

ivan krastev

Thank you very much for inviting.

ezra klein

So I had a first question. But when we were just talking beforehand, you told me one you’ve been thinking about, which is you feel that we are so obsessed with the question of what will happen that we miss what has happened. So tell me what has happened.

Listen, one of the things that strikes me is that the change is happening so quickly that people really are missing seeing some very obvious things. For example, for the last 10 years, Europe was very much shattered by at least three crises. One was first the financial crisis, which was a big economic issue, the fear of impoverishment of the population and what is going to happen. And then you have the Russia — first, kind of annexation of Crimea, war in Donbas. And then basically you have the refugee crisis of 2015. The first thing that we are not seeing is that all these crises came back. If you’re going to see what is happening on the economic story, we are talking about inflation. We are probably going to talk about the decline of the G.D.P. That is, compared to what happened in 2008, 2009. If you see the refugee crisis, basically, you are going to see more refugees coming out of the Russia Ukrainian war than of the war in the Middle East. And by the way, this is going to be the biggest movement of people in Europe since the World War II. And then, basically if you’re going to talk about the first Russia Ukrainian war, when it started, now we’re going to see a totally different scale. So suddenly, all these three came back, but they came in a very different way. They came in a so different way that we didn’t see that this is the same crisis coming back. And for me, this is one of the things. Secondly, I was surprised how quickly certain things that we have been taken for granted have been totally shattered. For example, just a year ago, Europeans have been convinced that a major war is not possible in Europe. If you basically go with the famous Tony Judt’s history of Europe after 1945 called “Postwar,” postwar was the very definition of what Europe was. Europe was a project — European Union born out of the World War II — but also a project that is based on the idea that a major war is not possible anymore. And now it changed totally. Even before the Russian invasion, European Council on Foreign Relations did studies in several of the E.U. member states, and majority of people claim that there’s going to be a war to the end of the year. Or the very story of neutrality — there was talk and talk and talk. And then, over two months now, we expect that Sweden and Finland, two countries for which neutrality was their identity, probably are going to change it. Or Germany, a country that didn’t have a single drone for now — they believe it’s unethical. They never bought a drone. And now this same country is talking about investing a hundred billion euros in the rearmament. This is such a big changes, but because everything happens so fast, we are not understanding how dramatic all this is. And we’re just taking what is going to come next.

ezra klein

Let me take those three crises from the beginning and, practically, number one and number two, the economic and refugee crises, because I’ve been thinking a bit along the same lines, particularly around refugees. And one thing that is striking is how differently populations respond to stress when there is a story behind it. So a financial crisis caused by bankers or, to some in Europe, caused by the Greeks, that’s one thing, that you’re mad at your leaders, you’re mad at your fellow E.U. members. But it causes a lot of internal discohesion. Refugees coming from Syria, which is a place that many in Europe feel very little connection to, is another kind of crisis — an invasion, right? It becomes a huge political problem. But the stories we’re hearing about the way Ukrainian refugees are being taken in are very different. The way people I assume are understanding some of the economic tumult right now is different. How much does it matter that there is a unifying external enemy in the person of Vladimir Putin, compared to when these crises felt, to many people, more like the fruits of poor liberal governance?

Totally. The narrative is critically important, because when people don’t see who is responsible for what is happening, the conspiracy theories come up. And the story was, of course, there was a major war in Syria. But people cannot identify because they don’t understand it. There was all this kind of a quite wicked talk about how the economic migrants — are they refugees? And now, you see a war that you understand, particularly countries like Poland, that is receiving now three million people. This is the paradox. During the first refugee crisis, Poland was one of the countries that closed themselves totally for refugees. And suddenly, you see this same Poland — three million people volunteers, private persons volunteers going to the borders, driving their cars. Why? Because they understand this war. They can identify it. And I do believe also the pandemic has a role in this. Before people in Europe, particularly, felt protected against any major disaster. We have been complaining. Of course, we have been unhappy with this and that. But you had the feeling that you’re living in a world where nothing dramatic can happen to you. And then came the pandemic. And then came this war, and you identify with these people. And the third thing which I found really important was that it’s not that the Ukrainians suffer. They suffer, but they fought back. This level of heroism, particularly in societies like Europeans where heroism was kind of perceived as something coming from the past, is critically important. Bertolt Brecht has said once upon a time that he feels sorry for nations that need heroes. But at some point, basically, we also should feel sorry for nations that do not need heroes. And from this point of view, the Ukrainians — the very fact that they did something that nobody expected from them created this respect. So you’re not simply going to meet suffering people, refugees, but you’re meeting also and trying to welcome respectful people, people who are victorious in their resistance. I do believe this also has a huge importance to understanding. It’s not simply a narrative, but it’s a narrative of a heroic resistance.

ezra klein

How unifying is this story, in truth? Because another way of looking at it is that this is what is being reported. Germany is making this huge defense expenditure. People are taking in refugees in Poland. But then you look at the country that is currently undergoing a moment of small-d democratic accountability, France, where there’s an election going on. And Le Pen is making a very strong challenge to Macron. In Hungary, Orbán was reelected easily. Now he has created a system where it’d be very hard for anything to happen but for him to be reelected easily. But still, in the two data points we have, Hungary and the race in France, the more pro-Putin politicians don’t seem to be suffering a complete exile from politics in the way that some might have expected.

You’re right, and it’s even going deeper. The problem is not simply how strong is this unity but how long it can last, because meeting people, hosting people living in your house for three months, for four months, for six months, for how more long — so this comes the problem of what is going to happen next for the governments. So I do believe it is a momentum, and this momentum is also dividing. In the case of France, as you know, on the first round Macron prevailed. Now the second round is going to come on Sunday. If we trust opinion polls, he is going to win. But of course, this victory is not going to be the glorious victory that he expected. But part of the story is that what happened in France is that, while Macron was focusing on the war, the major message of Le Pen was, everybody cares now about Ukrainians. Who cares about you, French people? So you start in Europe a kind of Olympics of suffering. Who is suffering most, is basically, the forgotten French farmer is doing worse than the Ukrainians, because his suffering is invisible. And this is a moment in which there is a unity, but there is a very strong nationalist sentiment. And of course, both Le Pen and Orbán did it very clear that they don’t stand behind the invasion, so they’re against the war. But the major message was, we don’t like what Putin is doing. But the most important for us is that we care about our own people. And here is something that they find is a major change compared with, for, example with the late 1990s. People now talk a lot about the impact of the Kosovo war and NATO basically bombing of Belgrade and what is happening in Russia and how the Russians were perceiving themselves. But one of the interesting story about the Kosovo war was that, from the Western point of view, the message of the war was, we care about people who are not like us, who are Muslims, and we are ready to die or at least to kill for a place in which there is no oil. So in a certain way, it was perceived as a classical humanitarian war. So the idea was that, when we talk about rights, we normally talk about the rights of the minorities, of the most vulnerable group, and not only about people like us. I remember in 1999, during the war campaign, Tony Blair came to Sofia, and he gave a speech. And he said, what Gladstone did for Bulgarians in 1876 during the liberation from the Ottoman Empire, we are doing for the Kosovars. And he was wrong, because Gladstone interfered because Bulgarians were Christians, like him. And here, the major message was, these people were different than us. What, in my view, is changing is that you see that people again start very much to focus on people like them. In a certain way, you identifying — for example, Poles identified with the Ukrainians because they do believe that they have an enemy, which is the same enemy. And this was not the same in Syria, regardless of the fact that it was Russians bombing Aleppo. But this was not a type of identification. It’s not simply that you have a common enemy, but you are seeing that you can be the next. And this kind of a moment in which people have a solidarity but it’s a solidarity of their own groups.

ezra klein

Yes, there’s a way of understanding the refugee story right now with the Ukrainians as very inspiring. But the more difficult and, I think, also true way to understand it is that what makes it inspiring is how different it is from previous refugee stories. And that question of who we care about and why, when do we care, when does it become front page news day after day after day after day — correctly, because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a big deal, but in terms of lives, in terms of geopolitics, it’s not like the starvation in Afghanistan isn’t a big deal or the war in Yemen isn’t a big deal or any number of other conflicts or catastrophes we can name. So on the one hand, the solidarity with Ukrainians is a genuinely wonderful moment, I think, in the West. But it’s thrown into sharp relief by all the times we have not offered that solidarity or have even gone in the other direction.

No, I totally agree with you. But here, there is a basic problem, and in its most radical form it looks like this. Can you love all kids in the world as strong as you love your own kids? To what extent there are certain preferences that are so strongly embedded in all of us that, when it comes to solidarity, a certain type of a community suddenly ends up to be more important? And I’m saying this because, on one level, what you’re seeing is very true. On the other, the fact that this is happening in Europe and this is Russia attacking Ukraine and not Syria also explained the fact why many countries outside of Europe and the United States do not care much about the war. For example, the majority of the countries that have been invited by President Biden on the Summit of Democracy do not sanction Russia. And some of these countries are important countries. You have countries like India, but also you have a kind of a symbolic places like South Africa. They obviously don’t approve what Russians are doing. But for them, this is not so important, because it’s not so much about them and because they fear other things, because they have other calculations. So in my view, this is one of the interesting stories that we can see in a moment in which the globalization is in crisis. The moment the world globalized, suddenly, universalism ended up in crisis. In a way, we had a much more kind of readiness to identify with different people and people not like us when these people were much more part of our imagination than part of our personal experience. So it’s not by accident that Immanuel Kant, the guy who basically come up with this universalist ethics and ideas, was famous for never leaving his town. So this is what I found kind of quite interesting.

ezra klein

Yes, there’s very much something to that. And to the point you made about those countries, another thing you hear in the reporting from them is that, when they look out and they see America and Europe rallying global opinion against Russia, as you say, they may not support what Russia did, but they see less difference than we do between what Russia did and what we do. And I, as a member of my own, we here don’t want to draw what I consider to be a false equivalence. At the same time, I think we are seeing here that it has built a deeper reservoir of weakness than we always admit for America, I will say, to have violated international law so often, to have been an expansionist power many times over the past 20 or 30 years, to appoint itself the global policeman. There are real ways here where the case we make to ourselves is not believed, it seems to me, by other countries who say, well, I hear what you say. But look what you do.

No, listen, you’re absolutely right. And the major accusation to the West in all these countries is hypocrisy. And the major thing that, basically, Putin believes that he is doing is teaching the West a lesson. I’m just doing what you’re doing. Just see yourself. I’m the mirror of yours. He’s obsessed with the hypocrisy of the West. On the other side, there is one major difference, which is at least important for me when I’m trying to basically decide for myself how right or wrong we are saying this or that. Listen, the tortures, atrocities — this is not the only thing. It’s not only the Russians that are doing this. We remember [INAUDIBLE] what happened during the 2003 and 2004 in Iraq. But there is a major difference. When this happened, there was a moral outrage. There was a Senate investigation saying, what was the chain of command? Who knew what is going on? This is totally absent in the Russian-Ukrainian case. The Russian president decided to make heroes of the people that have been accused of committing crimes against civilians, and this is a major difference. So the major difference is not what the military do. The major difference is basically, to what extent societies are ready to face the evils that they’re doing? And from this point of view, there is a famous Italian historian who said something that I found particularly convincing. He said, in order to understand which is the nation to which you belong, this is not the nation that you love most, but this is the nation that you are ashamed of. So the fact that you feel kind of a much more certain kind of uneasy about the things that America is doing in the world is simply proof that you are American. And the thing that basically makes the Russians losing a lot of the moral respect that they have gained because of what their parents and grandparents did during the World War II is exactly this. Do not apologize. Do not confess any type of wrongdoing. Try basically to dismiss any type of suffering that you have injected on others. And in my view, this is becoming an issue, because this is demoralizing nations.

ezra klein

I want to use this as a bit of a bridge to a different question of projection here, which is projection from Europe, as to what Europe is internally, and from Europe, as to what other countries are externally. And let’s begin with the latter. You wrote that Europeans made a mistake by universalizing using their post-World War Ii experience to countries like Russia. Tell me about that.

Listen, this is a very interesting story. If you go back to the 1990s, not immediately — 1991, 1992, when there was a lot of kind of uncertainty, and by the way, the fear of chaos and disorder, so there was no triumphalism immediately after the end of the Cold War. But in the last part of the 1990s, the beginning of 2000, suddenly, because something that we did not expect happened — I mean Soviet Union collapsed — we decided that we know what is going to happen in the future. Our failure basically — this is, a German colleague of mine who made this great observation. The failure to basically predict the Soviet Union collapse made the West confident that we know what is going to happen next. And here the story was, Russia is going to follow the development of Germany after World War II. But then, three things happened. One is, you’re a victor, but your economy collapsed. I’m always giving this example. But if you’re coming from an alien planet and you don’t know anything that happened after 1990, 1991, you’re just going to see the G.D.P. of the countries and what happened to them in this first five or six years. You look at Soviet Union, and this is a country that lost a major war. There lost one third of their G.D.P. So you have this. Secondly, while Russians were quite happy that communism ended, and I do believe a majority of them were, for them, the end of the communism does not meant the end of Soviet Union. It was true for many people in the republics. It was quite natural for the West. But for them, this was a surprise. And thirdly, this was the mystery of defeat. Can you imagine? Even now, I do believe if we’re going to repeat what happened, we’re going to understand how strong the shock was. You have a nuclear power that basically cannot be defeated militarily, because the moment you’re going to defeat them, they’re going to destroy the world. That has survived gulag, World War II, major misery. And suddenly, they collapsed overnight. And nobody decided to defend the Communist system. Nobody decided to die for the Soviet Union, even the intelligence officer who was in G.D.R. at this moment, Putin. None of these people basically did it. I’m saying this because this sense of guilt and misunderstanding — you don’t understand what happened — this pushed a very strong conspiracy thinking about politics. One of the things that is absolutely amazing not about Putin but about Russian political debate is that they really adopted a very conspiratorial view of how the world functions. When you see 5,000 people on the street, you’re not asking questions why they’re there. You’re asking questions who sent them, who paid them. So this created a situation in which, in my view, our expectations that Russia is simply going to be the repetition of what happened to Germany after World War II was wrong. Or in a way, it was right, but it was not a repetition of what had happened to Germany after World War II, but what happened to Germany after World War I. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

I really like the point that the West took the collapse of Soviet Union, an unexpected event, as proof of the predictability of human events, right, of the end of history, at least as a relevant hypothesis. And one thing that’s interesting about that I think gets into some of the assumptions that have been wrongly applied in recent decades is that the story that is applied to the Soviet Union’s collapse, I think correctly, is that it is economic, that economics are destiny, that communism was a bad economic system. And eventually, its own internal contradictions around an inability to provide a better life for its citizens, to keep economies growing, to produce efficiently in comparison to democracies and more capitalist systems, that that is what makes their collapse predictable. And then, applied broadly, those are the forces that allow you to predict anything. And this, I think, is something that ends up informing the way the United States and Europe treat China, of course, but also Russia. And you have this nice line that falls in the same piece where you write, “Capitalism is not enough to temper authoritarianism. Trade with dictators does not make your country more secure. And keeping the money of corrupt leaders in your banks does not civilize them. It corrupts you.” Do you mind talking a bit about the assumptions behind that, the assumptions that I think were particularly dominant in Europe, that you can civilize other countries through trade?

This was very much the European experience. As Thomas Bagger, a German diplomat, said, “The end of history was an American book but a German reality.” And what was so appealing to the Europeans was that, basically, all the rationality is economic. The only thing that you’re really interested in is your G.D.P., the welfare of your people. Anything which is based on identity, pride, resentment, humiliation should not be important. So from this point of view, have you seen to what extent any time that we cannot explain, we are trying to explain by corruption? For example, all these years when we’re trying to understand what is going wrong with countries like — be it Russia, be it China, be it Hungary, we’re going to focus on corruption. And corruption is there. It’s part of the system. But the most important thing that people, for example, missed is that, through corruption, you’re not going to understand what President Putin is going to do, because there is something very naive and, to be honest, ridiculous, to believe that the president of a nuclear power who is preoccupied with history and who is writing an essay himself why the Russians and Ukrainians are the same people is going to have this-or-that policies simply based on his economic interests, particularly private economic interests. The idea that the Russian oligarchs can prevent the war simply because they want to keep their bank accounts shows the fact that we totally eliminated the non-economic motivations of states, of politicians, but also basically of human nature. So as a result of it, we reduce human nature to the economic activities. And by the way, we reduced economics to the G.D.P. and to the standard of living, while in front of our eyes, we’re seeing that people were motivated by totally different things. Most of the big protests that we have seen in the last decade in the world cannot be simply explained in economic terms. We like to talk dignity, but dignity cannot be explained simply by economic factors. It’s something different. And here, to be honest, Fukuyama was more interesting than some of his critics because, following Hegel, he really made a strong point that recognition and struggle for recognition is critical to understand what is happening to the world. By the way, his article, not so much the book, is interesting because it was totally misread, because people read Fukuyama’s article as if it was written in 1990.

ezra klein

This being “The End of History” article?

“The End of History?” — always a question mark.

ezra klein

Yes.

And listen, it was written in the spring of 1989. Fukuyama did not expect Soviet Union to collapse. For him, the end of history was that it was communist leaders that stopped believing in communism. Suddenly, basically, they accepted the fact that the major utopia that justified their political order is dead. And suddenly, what happened after the end of communism, in fact, was the disintegration of the last European empire. Suddenly, in Europe after the end of communism, almost 20 and more new states have been born. So from this point of view, Europe in 1990s was like Africa in the 1960s. It was the major site for newly born nations. This was kind of an absence. And one of the things that I do believe we went totally wrong is, we very much marginalized the experience of the Yugoslav wars of 1990s. Suddenly, it appeared that many of the problems that we saw in the period of the disintegration of Yugoslavia were not problems coming from the past. They were problems coming from the future. We, in my view, misrecognized the sovereignty moment for democracy moment.

ezra klein

Say more about that.

Listen, we continued to talk about the post-Cold War period in terms of the Cold War. But in a big way, it can turn out the decolonization that started with, basically, the end of the First and then Second World War, is a much more important narrative for the other part of the world. Simply, the Cold War has arrested this narrative. And with the end of the Cold War, what happened was the emergence of a new states, that they’re looking for identities. And from this point of view, Europe is a great story, because the European Union was created by former empires. But for East Europeans, and this was quite interesting, they were sharing very much the sentiment of this same African nations, because they were seeing themselves as being the product of the disintegration of Hapsburg Empire, Ottoman Empire or Russian Empire. So this kind of change of narratives, in which we continue to describe what we have been seeing in terms of the Cold War, namely democracy versus authoritarianism — and it was true to a great extent. But the much more important was, what was the meaning of sovereignty in the interdependent world? And then this is going to explain us the rise of people like Orbán, the rise of people like Le Pen, who are basically obsessed with what it means to be sovereign in an interdependent world. And of course, in European Union this has a much more important meaning because of the nature of the European project.

ezra klein

Is the way to think about this. — and I’m just thinking about this on the fly — democracy versus sovereignty, or is it liberalism versus sovereignty? Because we often collapse liberalism and democracy into liberal democracy. But as many people pointed out, Yascha Mounnk among them, those can be quite intention. And often what the demos wants is not to be as rule-bound, as cosmopolitan, as respectful of rights, as neutral in its treatment, as what the rules and ideals of liberalism would want. And when I think of a Le Pen, when I think of an Orbán, I think something they have understood is that democracy is relatively easy to co-opt. It can be altered, right? It can be shaped, corrupted the way Orbán has. But it’s also possible for you to just win, right? And I hope Le Pen won’t. We will know that by the time this comes out, but it could happen. And Donald Trump, who’s not a very small-d democratic figure just won in America. And so one of the weaknesses in this period, it has often seemed to me, has been believing liberalism is something that has simply won, that you can take for granted, while others understood it as something — an, in fact, a weakening target that you could fight against.

You’re very right. And there were two things that, in my view, are critical for understanding this. The first is, when the Cold War ended, the assumption in the West was that this is going to change, but the West is going to remain the same. To a certain extent, the Western democracies were quite blind to what extent their existence, their political and social system, was very much preconditioned on the Cold War and the existence of the Soviet Union.

ezra klein

I think this is a very, very underdone point.

Yeah. Because listen, this is extremely important. When you have Soviet on the other side claiming that they represent the proletariat, you should very carefully think how your workers are perceiving what is going on. It’s so important for you, your workers to be on your side. So the welfare state was not simply an economic project. The welfare state was a security project. But the second thing. — and here, of course, the West is to be blamed but also can be excused — because in 1990, and what you saw for this first decade, is that our East European societies ourselves, if you’re going to ask us, what do you want, we’re going to say, we want to be like the West. So imitating the West became our understanding of what it means to have a good society, to be a liberal democracy. And then you’re imitating. First of all, we’re writing constitutions. We’re doing this. We’re inviting advisors. But the problem with imitation is that, if I imitate you, I basically claim that you’re better than me. And what about my identity? And here comes the idea of the sovereignty. I also want to be different. I like to be like you, but also I want you to recognize my difference. And from this point of view, if you’re going to see, particularly, through some of these European populist regimes, be it Hungary, be it Poland, they have the same psychological kind of a trajectory that we know from the second generation of migrants. The first generation comes in being very kind of willing to accept and to integrate in the host society, because it was their choice. But the second generation, which is born there, and in a certain way much more internalized some of the things, they start to see basically the glass ceilings. They see basically the walls of their own authenticity and identity. And this is very difficult, because you have the cultural environment in which the message is, be unique. Be yourself. And on the other side, the political imperative is, be like us. Fulfill all the obligations and all the criteria of the European Union if you want to join. And in my view, this created this clash between, yes, liberalism and the idea of sovereignty, liberalism and the idea of the will of the people, which was very skillfully used. And one of the major message that came also in the first years of transition was, we have been asking for justice, and we have been given the rule of law. And then came people like Kaczynski who said, do you really need an independent court? Do you really need an independent central bank? How I can make a revolution if somebody is constraining my power all the time?

ezra klein

Let me then ask about a hypothesis that I can’t decide if it is the same or different than the one you’re offering here, which is that one of the continuous difficulties of liberal democracy, even when it is a term intention, is that you’re promised an idea and what you get is governance, and that, over time, this is a continuously difficult problem for any system, to be fair. It’s a problem for communism. It’s a problem for Vladimir Putin moving from the idea of invading Ukraine to the reality of invading Ukraine. But I’ll take the European Union as the example here. The European Union is such a remarkable idea when it emerges that its forerunner, which is a pact to trade coal around, is understood historically as this great, inspiring moment of postwar turning. But then eventually what you get is bureaucrats and the harmonizing of regulations and trade. I cover elections, obviously, in America quite often, and you see this in miniature constantly. Elections are exciting. You’re promised the idea of a candidate, the idea of their platform, and then you get the disappointments of their governance. And it does seem to me that one of the difficulties is that, as liberalism went from being an idea to being a reality, one problem is that it simply lost ideologists. People stopped making really the argument for it, particularly after the Cold War. But the other problem is that it actually is disappointing. It’s disappointing to live under these rules. Rule of law is frustrating, constantly frustrating. And it’s more frustrating the bigger the area that law needs to rule is.

You are absolutely right. Albert Hirschman, one of the social scientists for whom I have the highest regard, was claiming that, nevertheless of what you were doing in life, we get disappointed. For example, you get involved in politics, and in 10 years, you get disappointed. You go in your private life, and you say that you are not interested in politics. You get disappointed. So normally, the major strength of democracy was that democracy, better than other societies, was dealing with disappointment. You are disappointed, and you are going to change a government. You are going to change this and that, and you are getting a kind of a new license for being re-engaged. What is changing? And in a certain way, I saw this in Eastern Europe in one way and in America in different. In 1990s, you are changing the government, but you have the feeling that you cannot change the policies. And this creates this kind of angry position in which you are ready to vote for anybody who is ready to challenge the system, even when you don’t agree particularly with the ideas that he comes from, because this is just to try to assert your agency. I can make it. Because if the change of government does not mean much, if there is too much consensus — and this is the crisis in places like France and others. You see the crisis of consensual politics. So the politics of citizens was very much replaced by the politics of fans. Political leaders really started to treat their voters as their fan clubs. And by the way, this is true also for non-democratic regimes like Russia. If you see the annexation of Crimea, annexation of Crimea was like a sport performance. Everything is changing when, basically, it’s not sport anymore, when you have all these people, including Russian soldiers, being killed in Ukraine. So this story that you have a leader, that you should deliver gifts to the public, and on the other side, you have fans who are not citizens anymore, because they are totally uncritical to their own, and the loyalty is only unconditional loyalty. From this point of view, I do believe President Trump basically has the best understanding of loyalty in this type of a world. The loyal is somebody who defends you and he knows that you are totally wrong, and also wrong in moral terms. If you’re supporting somebody when he’s right, that’s not loyalty. This is just common sense. So this is where the problem with dissatisfaction goes, because dissatisfaction assumes a meaningful change, a change that you can achieve. If you don’t believe that you can achieve this change, your goal is this kind of hysterical reactions in one direction or the other, where everything is about expressing how you feel. And this is what I find kind of dramatically changing, and also this is slightly generational. Talking about the first round of the French elections — if people older than 65 were not allowed to vote on the French elections, President Macron was not going to reach the second round. The second round is going to be between the candidate of the far Right and the far Left. And this type of a centrist politics, which is very much based on compromise, on achieving, on governing, is very much, in my view, replaced by politics of self-expression, where, for me, the most important is how I feel, because this is the only thing that I really believe I can do to express how I feel. I don’t believe any more in a collective project that can be realized.

ezra klein

And to express who you are.

Exactly.

ezra klein

Like the — one thing a vote is, is an expression of self-identity.

Totally. And from this point of view, this is the biggest story of identity politics that is going. And this is also very much in the way we got wrong what Putin will do, because people believe that he’s going to be very much guided by economic considerations. This is true also in our societies about how people vote.

ezra klein

This is a big theme of my book, “Why We’re Polarized.”

Yes, I know, very much. That’s why I like the book.

ezra klein

If you want to try to predict the way people vote, people always want to go to material incentives. They always want to go to who’s going to give them the most money. Pundits do. And that does not describe it. That does not describe the way people vote. They vote based on who they are and who they want to be seen as in the world. And they vote based on who they think is going to raise up people like them. And we’ve tested this 100 different ways in many, many countries, and it is always true. Identity trumps policy.

But this is true also on the level of the states, because basically what you see in Ukraine is identity trumps interests, economic interests. Listen, Russia is going to be economically devastated, regardless of how the war is going to end up. But basically, the idea to keep your status of a great power, of an imperial nation — the fear of being irrelevant in global politics is the one not simply that is moving what the government is doing. In my view, it also explains why people are ready to support policy that is going to hurt them. So from this point of view, we have a global spread of identity politics. Identity politics stopped to be kind of characteristics of a certain groups, normally minority groups. It stopped to be the characteristic of small nations, because small nations were used to be much more tended, for very obvious reasons, to identity politics. Suddenly, everybody is in identity politics. But the interesting story is that the powerful want also to be perceived as the most vulnerable. So when Russia is trying to position itself as the victim of Ukraine —

ezra klein

When Russia is positioning itself as a victim of cancellation.

Yeah, exactly.

ezra klein

I mean, the metaphor is being drawn very, very directly.

And this is quite interesting because, at the same time — and this is also quite important — is that, when everything is identity politics, the majority cannot be taken for granted. Normally, in a classical liberal democracy of the 1990s, the idea was that democracy works very well for the majority groups, and this is why all the rights discourse was focused on minority groups. In a certain way, majorities has power, minority has rights. And suddenly, majorities have the feeling that they don’t have power anymore. And when majorities has the feeling that they don’t have power anymore, minorities don’t have rights anymore, because then suddenly everybody starts feeling as a kind of a persecuted group. And I do believe, particularly in European politics, which I know better, the threatened majority, the majorities which also, for demographic reasons, believes that they are the minorities of tomorrow, is becoming the major driving force in politics. And by the way, Ms. Le Pen — Zemmour during the first round much stronger than her is the classical example of this, and by the way, also Russia, because many of the things that you see in the politics of President Putin are driven by demographic fears. In the last months, because I have been following all his statements, he’s repeating that, if it was not for the revolution, if it was not for the World War II, if it was not for the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there were going to be 500 million Russians in the world. This idea of the fear of a demographic decline, which in the eyes, particularly of these much more traditional politicians, mean also decline of power, decline of prestige. It’s pushing you to do many things that — better that you have not done.

ezra klein

Yeah. One of my deep beliefs about the way politics works is that you see identity politics when the dominance of single identities begins to wane, that identity politics is much stronger 50 years ago. It’s just that a small number of identities had so much control. A small number of groups had so much control, such unquestioned majority, such unquestioned power, that you don’t see the politics of it. They’re able to make the politics of it invisible. That’s just the boundaries of debate. An example I always like to use on this in America is religion. There was not an open atheist in the House of Representatives until 2007. Until 2007. There have been atheists around for a lot longer than that. And I assure you, there were some non-believing members, non-theist members of the House of Representatives, but it was something you could not say. And so now, we have what feels to me like more and more fierce religious conflict in American politics than we did when I was younger and a lot of religious radicalization, this rising Catholic radical integralist group and a lot of collision. But it’s coming because secularization has made Protestant dominance far less total. And as such, now more identities are able to assert a politics. When that happens, then we say, oh, there’s all this identity politics. But what it really is like a breakdown of the dominance of certain identity groups.

You’re absolutely right, because this also — the moment when you see the breakdown of your dominance, two things are happening. All the elections are basically perceived as the most important, as the last elections. And all the war is perceived as the most important, as the last war. I’m absolutely sure that if somebody is going to have an interview and ask President Putin why he decided to invade Ukraine and to do what he did, one of the arguments that probably he’s going to tell this kind of invisible interviewer is that he realized that time does not work for him, that in 10 years there are going to be less Ukrainians who speak Russian. In 10 years, there are going to be better Ukrainian armed forces. In 10 years, there are going to be stronger Ukrainian identity. So suddenly, you have the feeling that either you’re going to do it now, or you’re going to do it never. And I do believe also President Trump was very powerful in 2016 when he was telling the Republicans, this is the last elections. Either you’re going to elect me or, if you’re not going to elect me, the demography is going to change in such a way that you are never going to win. And in my view, this explains also very much your favorite topic of polarization, because out of the title of the Fukuyama’s book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” probably we parted with the idea of the end of history. But now, strangely, the world is populated by the last man. Everybody believes that they’re kind of a last of a kind, that if they’re not going to defend their position, their power, then everything is going to collapse. And this is also explains the fact why future disappeared as a kind of a mobilizing project, and societies become very nostalgic. It was three years ago that Bertelsmann Foundation was asking Europeans, do you believe that the past was better than the future? Majority in every single European country, including among the young people, believe that past was better than the future. And of course, if you’re going to ask which past, then you’re going to have a huge differences. But suddenly, people who are dreaming for the past — this is a classical understanding a crisis of this basic dominances that you are talking about, because what was better about the past? That I knew, basically, that I was more powerful. That is, I was younger. I was —

ezra klein

But identities change. People tend to think of them as groups and religions and races, but nationality is an identity. European is an identity. And so one of the things that I’m interested in is how the identity of European is changing under this kind of pressure. You made this very, very good point, I thought, at the top of our conversation, that there’s a period when the identity of Europe, the reality of Europe, is war. Then there’s the postwar period, as Tony Judt put it. The identity is that this is a place that is no longer at war, that is united through trade. And they are trying to extend the assumptions of that identity, the assumptions of that philosophy, over to Russia. But then, what is the next Europe? If it’s no longer postwar, what do you think the European identity is changing into?

Listen, this is a great question. I’m not sure that I’m going to give you a great answer. But if you go historically, in 1914, Europe was the world, at least in its own imagination, because basically the World War I was also called the European War, because it was the war of European empires. So all the power was concentrated in Europe. And then comes World War II and the Cold War. And in the Cold War, the two non-European powers, the United States and Soviet Union, have been totally dominating. But Europe was the prize. It was the major stage. It was central. Basically, what it means to win the Cold War, it was basically to win Germany, to try to dominate Europe. And then comes the end of the Cold War. And I do believe here it was interesting about the European project that Europe was not as important as it was, but Europe tried to build its identity of being the laboratory of the world to come. Europe suddenly said, we are the one which are kind of a post-modern state. We are about economy and soft power. We’re not going to fight each other. Everybody’s going to be like us. It simply takes time. So suddenly, Europe’s made itself central, based on the fact that we have this unique experience which is exceptional but also universalist. So from this point of view, Europe slightly took from the American playbook. You’re exceptional, but it’s your exceptionalism that makes universal because, in 50 years, 100 years, everybody is going to be like you, because everybody wants to imitate you. What happened now is that Europe lost. Suddenly, Europe is becoming simply one of the regions of the world, probably the most prosperous, culturally quite interesting, but we lost our centrality. And from this point of view, the war in Ukraine can have very different outcomes when it comes to European identity, because at this moment — by the way, based on a very legitimate moral outrage, most of the Europeans look at Russia in the way they have been looking at the Chernobyl reactor after the disaster. You simply want to isolate it. We don’t want to have anything to do with you. We don’t want your oil. We don’t want your gas. We don’t believe that we can change you anymore. This is who you are. Simply, we want to imagine the world without you. So as a result of it, either we should start to be interested in other parts of the world, also for the reasons that you should buy from somewhere oil and gas and natural resources — and this could be quite interesting — or Europe is basically going to see itself as the appendix to the United States, which is also very much what is happening now in military terms but under the assumption that the United States is interested in this, because this is the problem when you’re not at the center. You cannot even take the American interest for granted. So as a result of it, this war basically challenged dramatically the identity of all the three players that are around it — Russia, because Russia cannot take its historical empire in the way Putin has been assuming it for granted, just the opposite. And then, of course, Europe — who we are going to be? I mean, how economically sustainable, how politically sustainable? What is going to come out of our own project? Do we still believe in shared sovereignty? Do we still believe that economic interdependence is the major source of security? So all these questions are coming. And I don’t believe that we know exactly what the answers are going to be, because the answers are not going to be theoretical. They’re not going to be ideological. They’re going to be the result of certain decisions taken by certain people and certain governments, which are going to end up in a constellation. And going back to your idea about the European narrative, now we tend to tell the story of Europe as a history of a project. But if you go back in closer to what happened, this was a compromise — certain type of a decision as a response to a certain crisis. Europe is a project when you look back or when you look very far ahead. But in the midterm, it’s not a project. It’s something different. It is a mechanism for surviving. And I have a very high opinion of the capacity to political projects to survive, because what gives you legitimacy is the capacity to survive. If certain project manages to survive after different crisis, it is worth existing.

ezra klein

But that mechanism is interesting because, I think in that way, there will not be the capacity to forget about Russia. I do not know how any of this will end. I do not pretend to have any capacity to make relevant predictions. But I think a plausible path we might be on is Russia controlling much of Ukraine’s East and Zelensky and his government maintaining Kyiv and the other parts of Ukraine. So now you have a carved up Ukraine. You have Russian expansion. You have a recognition that the dependence on Russian oil and gas weakened the ability to sanction Russia and strengthened Putin. And you have fear that Putin will go further, that he’ll do more, that he’s waiting to strike again. And so Europe, to say nothing of Ukraine, of course, but Europe is going to be living with an external unifying threat. They might be trying to make Russia isolated, but that is an active practice, right? It is a practice of sanctions, a practice of getting yourself off of Russian gas, a practice, as you say, of trying to respond to crisis. And so it seems to me that one thing that is changing about Europe now is that it has something to fight, something to define itself against. You know, you go back six years, and it seemed like the fundamental fight was about the European Union. You have Brexit. You have this question of whether or not the idea has become exhausted. And now you have this new unity, but it’s aimed at an external enemy. I wonder, is that ground not just for responses but for ideas?

Listen, this is a great question. And in a certain way, it can develop very differently. One of the things that strikes me in the modern world, particularly in the modern democratic world, is the fading power of the external enemy to create domestic cohesion. When you see at the United States and if you compare, basically, America in the beginning of the Cold War with the America, what we see now was that Soviet Union created a lot of cohesion in the American society. You remember this famous quote from Updike, “What is the meaning to be American if there is not Cold War?” So in a certain way, Cold War was the identity — this one of his characters is basically saying. And now what you see is that, yes, on artificial level, everybody, of course, is against Putin. But I’m sure that, for many Republicans, Biden is the real enemy, not Putin. And probably for many Democrats, Trump is the real enemy, not Putin. So this kind of external enemy that is producing an incredible political cohesion at home, this is not in the way it worked in a classical period either of the Cold War or even before in a classical nation state. I always remember this famous poster which I have seen from 1848, the poster of a worker who has a ballot in one hand and rifle in the other. And the message was, ballot for the class enemy and bullet for the national enemy. So now you cannot understand which of the two are more important. And this is why Europe is going to either be unified because of the external threat or fragmented because of the external threat, because this is the problem of identity politics. They have different logics. I very much agree with you that — and by the way, I found wrong our discourse talking about Russia in the way we have been talking before about democracy, as if we know how Russia is going to look like in the next 50, 100 years, this civilizational discourse. The moment when you know, you have the illusion that you know what a country is doing, you’re not interested. By the way, we really are not curious about what is happening in all of these places. Instead of saying, we don’t understand why they’re doing this — for example, why Russians are not appalled killing other Slav Christians. What about all this religious discourse that was so popular with this government? How it happens that the Russian patriarch is blessing these people to be killed? So this is an interesting questions, and they have an answers, but they does not need to be obvious answers. The moment when we defined Russia as a civilization different than others that never can be then what they are now, we don’t need to be interested. The moment we define Russia like the last Chernobyl’s reactor, then we’re in isolation, because the other parts of the world does not see it like this. Europeans can imagine the world without Russia, but the Indians, for their own reasons, the Chinese, for their own reasons, they are going to find a place for Russia in this world, for Putin’s Russia or post-Putin’s Russia. So as a result of it, in my view, this is the story. Can this war unify Europe to the extent that Europe should build a new identity that did not exist before? And this identity can be based on many things. It can be also based on rediscovering what is European sovereignty, the famous topic of Macron, what it means for European Union to be sovereign. Sovereign with respect to whom? Until recently, it was from the United States. But now? Russia? China? Where we do stay on this? [MUSIC]

ezra klein

Let me end by ask you a couple of questions then about America. And I was going back to a piece you wrote shortly after Joe Biden was elected, building around a big poll across many countries in Europe. And you wrote that, while most Europeans rejoiced at Joe Biden’s victory in the November U.S. presidential election, they do not think he can help America make a comeback as a preeminent global leader. So tell me what you found in that survey, and then tell me if you think it has changed at all over this period.

Really, the majority of Europeans were very happy for Biden to come back, and this was true even on the European Right. There was a very small segment that had been devoted to Trump. Trump was a strange figure for the European politics. But what people start to fear, and I do believe that this fear has not disappeared, was that suddenly we see America so divided that every election in America looks like a regime change. And President Biden did a great work of consulting Europeans. I do believe this was one of the amazing success of his foreign policy. And compared to his many other administrations, basically, this administration is very sensitive to things that are important to the Europeans, also to the asymmetrical, for example, nature of the sanctions, United States compared to Europe. But several things are going to happen — first of all, midterm elections. If we trust what experts like you are telling, most probably you’re going to have a different Congress, a different Senate. And then the story is, is America, as a result of the war in Ukraine, restored certain type of a foreign policy consensus when it comes to Europe, or to what extent this is an elite consensus that is not endorsed, neither by the Trump Republicans nor by the kind of a more left wing of the Democratic Party, which are not particularly excited of American being over engaged and talking arms and so on. So for Europeans, this is a major issue, because Europeans before have been taking the American foreign policy consensus for granted, and not anymore. So from this point of view, Trump effect is still much more in the back of the mind of European leaders. Secondly — and here, of course, President Putin is touching on something that I can also see in Eastern Europe — many of the things that you see as an identity politics and, too, we’re talking about happening into American universities are differently interpreted in Eastern Europe for many reasons. But the most important is communism was very sensitive on words. Communism very much was a linguistic regime. When Sinyavsky basically was put on camp and when he was asked why he was arrested, he said, I have some grammar disagreements with the Soviet government. So basically, this kind of a major focus on language make the East Europeans nervous. And this could be right or wrong. This is — again, it’s about sensitivities. This is about identities. You cannot say that East Europeans are right or wrong. And of course, we don’t know much about what is happening in America, but you hear this. And then one other question is how easily American progressive revolution can travel to some of these places where the composition of society is different, where the historical experience is different. China is a great example of this, too, coming from a communist period, too. So all these goals and the third, of course, the American economy. During the pandemic where all of us has more time, you see the American stock market overperforming. And then you start asking yourself how it is related to the real economy, to what extent basically the stock market does not play in the modern system the same role that communist ideology plays in the Communist regime. Basically, this was life in the future and talk about the future. but it’s not very clear how the future is related to the present.

ezra klein

That’s a very, very interesting way of putting it. The other question, though, is there’s the uncertainty around the steadiness of American foreign policy. It’s also the question of simply American power. Something you found in that poll I referenced is that six out of 10 of the respondents felt China would be more powerful than the U.S. within 10 years. Now, that might be economic. That also might be something else that the poll found, a sense that the American political system was breaking down, was returning crazy results. There’s a lack of ability to govern. So it doesn’t just have to be China rising in power. It can also be America losing power, losing the capacity to act. But I wonder if, whether broadly or just to you, watching America in this period has made you think America is stronger or weaker in its ability to act abroad than you believed — you know, let’s call it a year ago.

It’s a great question. Of course, part of the Chinese advantage is that, when people talk about power, they always see the change of power. Even if America basically is stronger than China, what we’re seeing is that China basically became less weaker, with respect to America than it was. So people always impressed by change. Secondly, unlike the United States, that everything is visible to everybody, everybody has the feeling that he knows how America works, China for most of us is a kind of a black box. You know certain things, but you don’t know how it worked. My colleague, Stephen Holmes, who made this argument, which I found extremely important — he said, America discovered that its major advantages are turning against it — for example, the spread of English language. Because of the spread of English language, any kind of a terrorist can go and basically rent a plane somewhere in the United States and attack the Twin Towers, because American society was transparent for the foreigners, because they know the language but also the culture. The American culture is so much dominant. At the same time, also because of the spread of the English language, when an American goes to a society, you are always going to have an English speaker. So speaking to the English speakers, you have the feeling that what is happening in this society. But quite often, the English speakers are not the most representative parts of the societies. So suddenly, because of the American power, America became transparent to the world. But the world became totally non-transparent to America. And when you’re asking the question, do I see America strong or not, I do believe that Biden did a very good foreign policy. I do believe also what Bill Burns and the American intelligence community did with this declassified intelligence as the way to prevent the war was amazingly interesting. But the strength of the American power very much depends to what extent American society is ready to allow the American government to use this power, particularly military power. I don’t believe that, nevertheless, how well you’re armed, if your society has decided not to be involved, any government can achieve anything. Don’t forget the Soviet Union was very well armed. But in the late 1980s, after Afghanistan, after many disappointments which they had, Soviet power had disappeared, because society was not ready to support any involvement. And this is the biggest problem, and in my view, this is a problem both on the Republican Right and on the Democratic Left. For different reasons, both of them don’t trust American power.

ezra klein

That’s where we’ll end. Always our final question. — what are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

One is a book which I found really, really very important. And I see that this is now well read. This is a Lea Ypi’s book, “Free.” This is a young Albanian political philosopher teaching in the London School of Economics who is reflecting on the idea of freedom, just telling the story of Albania of the 1990s and the idea of freedom of her father, her mother, her grandparents, and her home, and the relations between political freedoms and economic freedoms — beautifully written book, really worth. I’m a great fan of Fiona Hill’s book, but I know that Fiona was with you very soon, so I’m not going to give her as example. But I’m going to recommend Mark Leonard’s in my view very good book on international relations called “The Age of Unpeace.” All this story of economic interdependence and the weaponization of interdependence, in my view, is very well captured there. And the third is going to be a fiction book by Bulgarian and a friend of mine Georgi Gospodinov who is called “Time Shelter.” And this is an interesting book, and part of the book is also when Europe was very much kind of haunted by referendums. He comes with the idea asking different European nations to have a referendum where back in history they want to go and trying to understand basically the new identity politics of Europe through the sentimental nostalgia of European societies. It’s also a very, very good book which makes, in my view, the most beautiful assertion that the only time machine that exists is a man, human imagination.

ezra klein

I love that. Ivan Krastev, thank you very much.

Thank you. [MUSIC]

ezra klein

T HINK OF A central bank in dire straits, and Turkey’s might come to mind. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president, has sacked three of its bosses in three years in pursuit of his wacky economic ideas, one result of which is inflation of 60%. Or Lebanon, where the central bank orchestrated a scheme to funnel bank deposits to the government. Riad Salameh, its long-standing governor, faces charges of corruption and money-laundering, and is reportedly in hiding.

The latest to hit trouble is the Central Bank of Russia ( CBR ). When Russia faced economic sanctions from the West for invading Crimea in 2014, Elvira Nabiullina, its governor, let the rouble float and introduced an inflation target. But now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to sanctions aimed directly at the central bank, blocking access to foreign-exchange reserves. Unable to use about half of the $630bn in its war-chest, the CBR had to raise interest rates briefly to 20% and impose capital controls.

Speculative attacks against other currencies have long been part of the arsenal of economic statecraft, says Harold James of Princeton University, in the belief that a financial crisis would force the enemy to spend less on its army. During the second world war America froze Japan’s foreign assets, and banned traders from buying gold from Japan. More recently, it took aim at Iran’s central-bank assets in 2011-12, as it tried to stop the Iranian nuclear-weapons programme. The American government estimates that Iran can still access only a tenth of its $100bn in reserves. After the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, America also froze $7bn in assets held by the Afghan central bank at the Federal Reserve. In an executive order, President Biden said that the administration would eventually seek to spend some of the money on aid for Afghanistan.

The CBR has tried to reduce its reliance on American financial plumbing: the share of its reserves in dollars fell from nearly half in 2017 to less than a quarter in 2022. But it increased its holdings of euros, suggesting it may not have expected sanctions from Europe. It is now subject to sanctions from America, Britain, Canada, the EU , Japan and Switzerland. Most of the reserves that it can still access are in either gold or the yuan.

Geopolitics has always influenced foreign-exchange reserves, along with trade, convenience and safety. The obliteration of Russia’s financial war-chest will have been noted especially in countries like China, which has around $3.5trn in reserves, and India and Saudi Arabia, with $590bn and $472bn, respectively. The result may be a continued reduction in the dollar’s dominance. According to the IMF , it accounted for 60% of global reserve holdings in 2021, down from 70% in 2000.

Where to go instead? Gold could regain lustre. But although it is a good store of value, it must be sold to be useful, and financial sanctions will deter potential buyers. It is also a hassle to move. The CBR ’s holdings amount to more than 180,000 bars, much of it kept in Russia, estimates Steve Cecchetti of Brandeis University. Safely transporting any of these to China or India, say, would be a costly affair.

What seems most likely is that “each reserve manager lives in their sphere of influence”, predicts Mr Cecchetti, buying currencies only of friendly countries. China’s yuan stands to gain: it makes up only about 3% of global currency reserves now. But the gains may be modest. Only a quarter of the diversification away from the dollar over the past 20 years has been to the yuan, according to Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley. China’s closed financial system makes buying many yuan-denominated bonds and securities far from easy. And if America can freeze a central bank’s foreign assets, it is not hard to imagine China one day doing the same.

T HE HISTORY of money is littered with swindles. In 17th-century England William Chaloner counterfeited coins, banknotes and lottery tickets before being sent to the gallows by Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint. During America’s free-banking era in the mid-1800s Andrew Dexter bought five banks in New England and began circulating banknotes with very little to back them. One bank was found to have issued $760,000 in notes, backed by only $86 in gold and silver.

Things became less lively after central banks gained legal monopolies over banknotes. Yet there were anxieties about this. At the turn of the 20th century, shortly before the Riksbank was given its banknote monopoly, Pontus Fahlbeck, a Swedish politician, wrote of “fears of severe disruptions in the business world”, and concerns that the central bank would become “much more powerful and influential than before for the country’s entire economy”.

Today physical cash has fallen out of favour. The bulk of money is digital and created by commercial banks, albeit regulated ones. A cast of digital-money wannabes are vying for customers’ e-wallets. And central banks want to stay in the money business by issuing digital currencies of their own, making the questions Fahlbeck raised more relevant than ever.

A banknote, as a claim on a central bank, is the safest form of money. But only commercial banks have access to a central bank’s reserves. A central-bank digital currency ( CBDC ) would extend that to everybody. The public could either hold accounts with the central bank, or hold central-bank money in privately issued wallets. According to the Atlantic Council, a think-tank in Washington, DC , 89 countries making up 90% of world GDP are exploring a CBDC . The Bahamian sand dollar, the East Caribbean D Cash and Nigeria’s e-naira are already circulating. China’s trial of its digital currency, e- CNY , has expanded to more than 260m wallets. The ECB is looking into the design and scope of a digital euro. “My preference is to see something in place by 2025,” says Christine Lagarde, its president. In Sweden a parliamentary inquiry will opine on the desirability of an e-krona soon. President Biden has issued an executive order asking the government and the Fed to explore the idea of a CBDC . In February researchers at the Boston Fed and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they had built a system to handle up to 1.7m transactions a second, far exceeding the throughput of Visa.

Central banks want to stay in the money business by issuing digital currencies

The consequences of CBDC s in their most radical form would be serious. They might make central banks responsible for how credit is intermediated. Because public money is safer than commercial-bank money, deposits could trickle out of banks towards the central bank. In bad times that could become a flood, made easier because money can be transferred between wallets at the mere click of a mouse. One study in Canada suggests that, depending on the features of a CBDC , households could hold between 4% and 55% of their liquid assets in one. Deposits are a source of cheap funding for banks. If they drained away, lenders would either have to raise money on pricier wholesale markets or scale back their lending. And central banks’ liabilities would expand, says Rickard Eriksson of the Swedish Bankers Association, raising the question of how they should be matched on the asset side. Direct lending to companies and households would be unlikely, but they might have to lend more to banks.

The danger, says Princeton’s Markus Brunnermeier, is that lenders’ dependence on central banks would alter the balance of relations by giving central banks power to determine who gets credit. Randal Quarles, the former Fed vice-chairman, points out that America’s Troubled Asset Relief Programme was meant to have no strings attached, but after it went through the political wringer, all sorts of conditions were added. Somebody would have to monitor payments data, if only because of anti-money-laundering rules. That would turn the central bank into a mighty credit machine and an all-seeing tool of the surveillance state. Eswar Prasad of Cornell University, author of a book on the future of money, reckons the biggest threat from a digital currency is ultimately to the independence of central banks.

Yet most central bankers are confident that a well-designed CBDC can minimise their intrusiveness, but still be attractive. Many are converging on a set of principles to avoid destabilising banks. None of the digital coins so far introduced or tested pay interest, so as not to compete with bank deposits. To avoid the risk of bank runs, most existing CBDC s limit the amount of virtual cash that customers can hold. A report by the BIS and seven big central banks suggests that a system of escalating fees could make CBDC s less attractive than commercial-bank accounts. The solution to the problem of privacy, they say, is to use a two-tier system without letting dodgy dealings off the hook. The users of the Bahamian sand dollar can hold up to $500 without providing any information to set up an account, but those wishing to hold up to $8,000 must pass identity checks. In an attempt to keep central banks at arm’s length from the public, most countries use private providers to offer CBDC wallets, so wallet providers do the anti-money-laundering checks.

These changes would, by design, make CBDC s an inferior form of money. Physical cash typically satisfies three functions of money: it is a unit of account, a means of exchange and a store of value. Caps on virtual cash would, however, mean that it would no longer be a store of value. The optimistic view is that this could open the door to innovation and competition. But the pessimistic view is that it might doom the attractiveness of a CBDC .

The result is something of a paradox. Central banks must ensure that the currencies are successful, but not too successful. In a report to the European Parliament Mr Brunnermeier and Jean-Pierre Landau of Sciences Po in Paris suggest that a central bank “will have to ensure that the CBDC is present everywhere but important nowhere”.

O N A SPRING day in 2021 some visitors to the ECB made an unusual entrance. Just before its governing council was due to meet, two paragliders landed on one of its buildings in Frankfurt, unfurling a banner reading: “Stop funding climate killers!” Another banner urged the bank to “Act on climate now!” Implicit in the stunt, timed to mark the release of a Greenpeace report on the bank’s bond-buying, was praise. Politicians might dither but central banks have the power to get things done.

Most central bankers wish to do their bit for the green cause. Christine Lagarde called embedding climate into the ECB ’s framework “mission critical”. Andrew Bailey of the Bank of England talked of “tackling climate for real”. Over 100 central banks and financial regulators have joined the “Network for Greening the Financial System”. The Fed is cautious, given the political backdrop in America, its mandate and its tools. But other central banks are considering how to favour green firms over polluters. Even the Fed is working out how climate change may affect the soundness of the banks, the overall financial system and inflation.

The impact on lenders and the financial system may come from two sources: physical damage to property or businesses, which could mean losses for insurers and banks; and transition risks as climate policy pulls capital away from dirty sectors towards cleaner ones, creating “stranded” assets. Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, talks of a potential “Minsky moment”: an abrupt reassessment that leads to a collapse in asset prices. To help understand how bad things could get, at least 30 regulators worldwide are conducting stress tests of the impact of a range of transition paths towards net-zero emissions.

Physical risks already mean losses for insurers and lenders in places like northern Australia. More will be affected. In a stress test in 2020, the Banque de France concluded that insurers in some regions, such as the Mediterranean, would face heavy losses by 2050. But the conclusion of most stress tests is that the impact of climate risk is likely to be moderate. Last year staff at the Reserve Bank of Australia reckoned that 1.5% of houses in the country would lose a tenth of their value by 2050 because of climate risk. (By comparison, the median sale price fell by around 20% during the financial crisis in America.) And research by the New York Fed finds that banks usually make new loans as local economies recover from natural disasters, offsetting initial losses.

What about transition risks? The Australian researchers look at lenders’ exposure to dirty industries, such as energy and agriculture. These are deemed “manageable”: they make up about a fifth of banks’ business loans, but most have a duration of less than five years, allowing banks to adapt lending practices to avoid being stuck with stranded assets. In its stress test last year the ECB found that big banks would make 8% more credit losses in 30 years’ time in an extreme case, compared with an orderly transition to net zero. That seems modest, the more so since data limitations mean that it assumes banks do not adjust their loan books over time.

Even in a worst case modelled by the Dutch central bank, where climate policy becomes stricter overnight, and GDP falls by 7%, lenders make losses equivalent to about four percentage points of core capital ratios. Stress tests by the European Banking Authority find banks sufficiently well-capitalised to survive. Insurers’ solvency ratios could decline by up to 16 percentage points in the worst case, but that is “relatively small”, said the Dutch, considering that they are currently way above the regulatory minimum.

Money to net zero

Climate change may also impinge on monetary-policy decisions. The prices of petrol and air travel will rise. Economists see such changes as reflecting shifts in relative prices within a basket of goods, rather than a sustained rise in inflation that requires monetary-policy action. But in a situation where shocks feed through only slowly, say as a carbon price is raised, inflation expectations may change, forcing central banks to move. Climate change could affect the policy room that central banks have. The surge of investment needed to reach net zero could reduce the imbalance between global saving and investment, giving central banks more scope to raise interest rates. A badly managed transition could also lead to more uncertainty and higher saving.

Put all this together and climate risks seem more “mission vigilant” than “mission critical”: worth studying and keeping on banks’ radar screens, but not requiring drastic action today. To that end, the ECB is urging lenders to improve disclosure to supervisors, and demanding more information from them.

Should central banks penalise polluters and subsidise green firms? The Fed’s answer is no. It is caught in a political row over climate change. Last autumn some Democrats argued against the reappointment of Jerome Powell as chairman for failing to recognise climate change as an “urgent and systemic” risk (he was still reappointed). Senate Republicans objected to Joe Biden’s nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin as a board candidate partly because she had called for bail-outs in the pandemic to exclude polluting firms. “That’s not a decision to be made by unelected vice-governors who never faced the voters…the Fed has already been wandering outside of its lane,” declared Pat Toomey, a Senate Republican. Ms Bloom Raskin has since withdrawn from the nomination.

Even if it wanted to act, the Fed would be limited by its mandate, which requires it to focus on price stability and employment. It does not have the tools to target clean firms over dirty ones. It is banned from buying private-sector assets except in “unusual and exigent circumstances”, and with permission from the Treasury secretary. And it can hardly do much with interest rates that affect wind farms and coalmines alike.

By contrast, central banks in Asia have been more active. They have often played a role in developing markets and guiding credit before. The PB o C launched its own green lending operation in November and has developed the market for green bonds and pressed forward an environmental labelling scheme. In December Japan extended more than ¥2trn ($18bn) in interest-free loans for climate-linked loans. And the Reserve Bank of India has added green projects to its quota for “priority lending”, which banks must hit when they make loans.

It is in the European Union that the dilemma of greener monetary policy is most acute. The ECB ’s mandates offer more leeway than the Fed’s. Both the Bank of England and the ECB are tasked first with price stability and only then with supporting the government’s wider economic strategy. In the EU , that includes everything from protecting the environment to promoting scientific advances, combating social exclusion and ensuring gender equality. Last March the Bank of England’s remit was amended to state that government policy now included a transition to net zero.

Both banks have tools that can be tweaked for green ends. The Bank of England and the ECB have bought corporate bonds as part of their QE schemes. The ECB ’s collateral framework classifies 25,000 securities against which it is willing to lend through refinancing operations. The terms of both programmes could be used to make climate disclosures a condition of eligibility, exclude fossil-fuel companies, or value polluters at a discount. A plan to study such tweaks featured in the ECB ’s strategy last summer. “Climate change is a key issue that should be considered. It has an impact on the transmission of monetary policy, economic indicators and financial stability,” says Ms Lagarde.

Central banks follow the principle of “market neutrality” when buying assets: they buy in line with issuance in the market, so as not to distort the relative prices of bonds. But because dirty firms are more capital-intensive, they are more likely to issue bonds. Yannis Dafermos and co-authors from the New Economics Foundation, a think-tank, find that more than half the ECB ’s holdings of corporate bonds are concentrated in the dirty manufacturing and electricity industries, even though they account for only 14% of euro-area employment. The authors urge the bank to dump holdings of fossil-fuel firms to remove this “carbon bias”.

It is in Europe that the dilemma of greener monetary policy is most acute

The Bank of England’s experience of tweaking its purchases serves to illustrate the difficulties that are involved. In November it announced a framework to make its corporate-bond purchases climate-friendly. It would exclude thermal coal assets, but excluding anything else would shrink the universe of bonds it could buy too much. It would rank firms based on their recent emissions record, and their plans for reducing emissions further. The greener the firm, the higher the price the bank would be willing to pay for its bonds.

What followed was a triple let-down for activists. Because the Bank of England still bought some dirty firms, the carbon footprint of the portfolio, according to Mr Dafermos and colleagues in another paper, fell by only 7%. And the purchases ran the risk of subsidising prospective investors in dirty bonds: research by economists at the Sustainable Finance Lab at Utrecht University compares yields of bonds eligible for a purchase programme with those that are ineligible, and finds that the gap between them has tended eventually to narrow, or even disappear, as investors who sell the eligible bonds to the central bank then buy cheaper non-eligible ones. The kicker came in February. With the recovery on track and inflation rising, the Bank of England decided to run down its stock of corporate bonds. Having applied its green framework just once, there would be no more purchases to tweak.

The bank’s hope is that it offers a useful example. “We did it to show it could be done,” says Mr Bailey. But this fevered activity still raises some concerns. Even if their mandates give political cover, central banks are in effect designing their own climate policy. The EU ’s economic policy is wide-ranging enough that the “ ECB ’s secondary objective could be hundreds of things,” says Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton University. If it were to pick and choose which to support, its lack of accountability might be problematic. Although it has to provide reports to the European Parliament, it is not accountable to national governments. Changes to its powers require votes by each of the euro area’s 19 members.

Tackling climate change may be less divisive in Europe than in America, but it is hardly a settled question, says Mr Brunnermeier, recalling the gilets jaunes protests in France in 2018. If public sentiment on the green transition were to sour because energy prices stayed high, central banks could quickly look as if they were picking sides, rather than staying above politics. That would ensnare them in debate and cast doubt on their neutrality, damaging the public credibility that is so vital to their taming inflation. ■

A CENTRAL BANK’S reputation is determined as much by its relationship with the government as by its handling of financial crises and economic downturns. Over the past 300 years, as governments have sought to enhance or sometimes restrict central banks’ powers, the mood has varied from collaborative and harmonious to antagonistic and fractious. By the end of the 20th century the tone had shifted to a grudging respect. Politicians came to learn that they interfered with central banks at their peril. The technocrats were told to aim for some combination of low inflation, high employment, a stable financial system and a reliable currency, and were mostly left alone to get on with the job.

As this special report has laid out, the line between intrusive politics and independent central banking is now blurring again. This is not just because central banks have bought vast quantities of public debt in an attempt to shore up economies. They have also come closer to disbursing implicit subsidies on their own account. During the pandemic they did this to keep firms alive. Now they are mulling schemes to deal with such issues as climate change. They are being pressed to solve various social problems. And they are toying with digital currencies that, in their most radical form, could expand their role in allocating credit further still.

This expansion in powers echoes across the emerging world. Central banking in the rich world has inched towards the approach in China, with its greater emphasis on its balance-sheet and credit guidance, and its multiplicity of aims. The PB o C tends to be called in to solve economic problems, says one observer, because it is regarded as more competent than other ministries. The existence of targeted-lending schemes has made it easier for the PB o C to nudge credit towards green borrowers. And among large economies, China was the first to put a digital currency to the test.

In the rich world, central banks’ greater use of their balance-sheets was to a large degree unavoidable as they sought to deliver their mandated goals. Unable to pull the lever of interest rates, they were forced to experiment with new tools. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic justified a wide, indiscriminate safety-net. It would equally be foolish for central banks to ignore emerging risks and technologies. Geopolitics will become a more important influence on their decisions. Governments may instruct central banks to issue digital currencies. And understanding how climate change could affect the economy and the financial system is a vital task.

Laser focus

What should be fiercely resisted, however, is the endless addition of new policy goals. For one thing, as the examples of climate change and inequality show, not all problems can be fixed by monetary policy. Even in China economists have concluded that it is too blunt a tool to wield against long-standing structural woes. And in democracies the question of how best to subsidise the worthy or tax the unworthy is surely better left to elected and accountable politicians, rather than to technocrats.

Central banks were given independence so as to focus on a narrow remit. That explains why they retain legitimacy in the eyes of the public. But to heap more tasks on central banks risks pulling them into the political sphere, opening them up to ever increasing demands. That would undermine their position as neutral technocrats and could, ultimately, raise doubts about their independence. A survey by Ms Binder and Ms Skinner, the two academics, found that college-educated Americans were much more amenable to the Fed playing an active role in tackling climate change and inequality than those without a college education.

More important today, considering that inflation in the rich world is running at around 8%, is that a proliferation of aims would interfere with the tasks that only central banks can do. For as long as inflation was low, central banks may have seen little harm in venturing into new areas. Its resurgence should serve as a timely reminder of why they were given independence in the first place, and why their mission matters. Pressing social problems may continue to make them seem like convenient dogsbodies to governments. The real question for them now is whether they can control inflation, and at what price. Focus on their core job will remain crucial. ■

A LL AROUND the world politicians are exercised by the yawning gap between haves and have-nots. For every $1 the average white American household earned in 2019, the average black one made only 51 cents. For every $1 in wealth held by a white household, a black one owned just 15 cents. Joe Biden came into the presidency promising to tackle such disparities, vowing that “The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.” In New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, promised to “make homeownership possible again”. House prices went up by more than 25% in 2021, making property among the least affordable in the OECD club of mostly rich countries. “Anyone else want to leave New Zealand purely because of the housing crisis?” asked one buyer on an online forum. “This housing market sucks.” In China, the conspicuous gap between rich and poor and slowing social mobility spurred President Xi Jinping to launch a campaign of “common prosperity” last year, which took aim at everything from tech firms to celebrities.

Central banks seem almost as preoccupied with income distribution. According to a database maintained by the Bank for International Settlements ( BIS ), words relating to inequality cropped up in a tenth of speeches made by central bankers last year, compared with about 2% before the financial crisis. (By contrast, mentions of inflation drifted down.) In America about 15% of research papers published by the Federal Reserve studied inequality in 2021, up from about 5% in 2005, according to research by Carola Conces Binder of Haverford College and Christina Parajon Skinner of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

This greater attention in part reflects a response to arguments that central banks have worsened inequality by keeping interest rates low and boosting asset prices. But they also face calls to do more to remedy inequality and other social ills directly. And they sometimes embrace a social role themselves. Recent experiences in America, China and New Zealand provide illustrations.

In America progressive Democrats have called on the Fed to tackle racial gaps in employment, income and wealth. In April 2021 the House financial services committee passed a bill proposing to amend its mandate, which requires it to aim for price stability and maximum employment, to add demands that it tries to eliminate racial gaps. “Systemic racism and inequality is not something that happens on its own—it is a result of specific policy choices and the Fed must take deliberate action to fix it,” said Elizabeth Warren, a senator for Massachusetts.

Research shows that black workers benefit most from long expansions. Black unemployment is not only always higher than white unemployment (the current gap is about three percentage points) but also tends to rise faster in bad times. As the labour market tightens, excluded workers are drawn in, and the gap starts to close. This suggests that if monetary policy stays loose for longer, it will enhance equality. As the Fed reviewed its strategy in 2020, when inflation looked low, it leapt on the idea, redefining its goal of maximum employment as “broad-based and inclusive”. “This change reflects our appreciation for the benefits of a strong labour market, particularly for many low- and moderate-income communities,” said Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman.

Betting the house

In 2021 the Reserve Bank of New Zealand became the first central bank to have house prices included in its remit, 31 years after it became the first to be given an inflation target. As in other rich countries, the central bank is seen as a big contributor to the housing boom. At the finance minister’s instruction, and subject to its primary inflation and employment goals, the RBNZ must now “have regard to house prices” and the government’s objective of making property affordable for first-time buyers.

By contrast, the PB o C has long had a multiplicity of goals. Chief among them is currency and economic stability. But the government has also asked it to improve the economic structure, implement reforms and enhance household welfare. Since 2014 the PB o C has conducted “structural monetary policy”, which targets credit to different sectors through subsidised lending facilities, to boost specific parts of the economy without worsening debt problems for overextended state-owned firms. As of June 2021, according to its Monetary Policy Report, it had lent nearly 1.5trn yuan ($234bn) to support rural development, small and midsize firms and poverty alleviation. The push to lend to small firms also supports the wider common-prosperity campaign, by lifting employment and therefore household income, says Helge Berger, the IMF ’s mission chief for China.

Many economists doubt these attempts can succeed. One problem is that interest rates are a blunt tool. To have a big effect, the macro hammer must be used with great force, but that risks breaking other things. A study by Stephanie Aaronson of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, and others suggests closing the gap between black and white men’s unemployment rate requires headline unemployment in America to fall to 1%. Another paper by economists at the New York Fed suggests that a percentage-point interest-rate cut reduces the gap in unemployment rates for black and white workers by less than 0.2 percentage points. Closing the wedge would require interest rates to fall by more than ten percentage points. Even if that were possible, it would overheat the economy and stoke serious inflation.

The economics linking monetary policy and inequality is “confused”, says Larry Summers of Harvard University (and a former Treasury secretary). He has spoken before of the danger that “woke” central bankers neglect rising inflation. Easy money buoys asset prices by design—and white people own an outsize share of those assets. The New York Fed researchers find that interest-rate cuts lead to large gains in white households’ wealth, far outweighing the impact of lower unemployment and higher incomes for black families. High inflation tends to affect the poorest in society most. Another study by Fed economists suggests that black households suffer more from inflation spikes, because they consume more goods with volatile prices. Both suggest that interest-rate increases, rather than decreases, would be a way to narrow disparities. The question of whether to raise or lower interest rates is a conundrum which the RBNZ would also face. It could raise interest rates to bring down house prices, but that would slow the economy, thereby denting the incomes of prospective homebuyers.

There is also debate over whether low rates cause inequality. Adrian Orr, the RBNZ ’s governor, has pointed to the global savings glut, which holds down interest rates globally, and the low availability of housing, as reasons for the boom: the central bank plays only “a bit part”. Agustin Carstens, head of the BIS , says there is little central banks can do to counter the side-effects of low interest rates. Their best course, he counsels, is to ensure macroeconomic and financial stability. Just as inflation hurts the poorest most, so do recessions and crises.

The PB o C has more targeted tools at its disposal. Yet even in China many economists see structural monetary policy as a mistake. In an essay on the monetary-policy framework, Yiping Huang, Tingting Ge and Chu Wang, three academics, say there is no convincing evidence that it works. More credit is not always a solution, they say: if farmers do not receive enough, it may be because they are deemed too risky relative to the interest rates on loans. Stimulating competition among lenders, or liberalising interest rates, would be better. More broadly, argues Yu Yongding, a former member of the PB o C ’s monetary-policy committee, the solution to social ills is not more lending, but a system of better-targeted taxes and subsidies, something only governments can do. This is an argument that applies as much to the case of racial inequality in America, and to housing disparities in New Zealand.

A CENTRAL BANK’S power stems from its ability to create reserves from thin air so as to buy assets or lend to borrowers. The use of the balance-sheet involves choices: which assets to buy, and how much. Central banks are guided by their legal mandates, using their clout to defuse risks to the financial system and meet their inflation targets. But their actions create winners and losers. After the financial crisis the Federal Reserve was castigated for bailing out Wall Street over Main Street. The ECB was attacked for being slow to act as a lender of last resort to the euro area’s heavily indebted southern members.

The power of central banks was on its fullest display during the pandemic. As countries began locking down in spring 2020, an enormous shock reverberated across the financial system. Desperate for cash, investors dumped even safe Treasuries. Corporate-credit markets dried up. Central banks reacted strongly. Between March and June 2020, writes Athanasios Orphanides of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Fed created as many reserves as it had in its first 100 years.

As unparalleled as the scale of this intervention was its scope. The Fed introduced nine emergency-lending schemes, backstopping financial markets worth about $24trn and supporting bank lending to firms. It bought Treasuries, first to stabilise the bond market, then to lower borrowing costs (a policy known as quantitative easing, or QE ). The assets of central banks in America, Britain, the euro area and Japan rose during the pandemic by more than $10trn. More than a dozen emerging markets, including India, Indonesia and South Africa, bought government bonds.

The mere announcement of these policies stemmed market chaos. “As of March 2020 there was a clear and rapid reaction that we could visibly point to,” said Christine Lagarde, president of the ECB, speaking in mid-February. Yet the take-up of some schemes remained modest: the Fed’s corporate-credit facilities lent only $14bn, a fraction of the $750bn available. A rapid economic bounceback led many lending schemes to wind down. And, as inflation surges, net purchases under QE are ending. Yet the consequences of these interventions will endure, not least by creating expectations that central banks will always come to the rescue if trouble hits. Vast stockpiles of government bonds have left monetary policy uncomfortably enmeshed with the public finances. Both considerations could make central banks less willing, or less able, to act forcefully to fight inflation.

The support for markets reflected the need to preserve financial stability. Following a doctrine laid out by Walter Bagehot, a former editor of The Economist, in the 19th century, central banks now act as lenders of last resort, standing ready to lend to sound financial institutions, against good collateral and at a penal rate, in order to prevent financial panics. Bagehot clearly had banks in mind. “The great wish on the part of the English people as to currency and banking is to be safe,” he wrote in 1844.

According to the Financial Stability Board, a group of regulators, non-banks conducted half of all financing activity worldwide in 2019. And it was these, not banks, that caused most panic in the pandemic. As mutual funds and money-market funds faced redemptions, they rushed to sell Treasuries and corporate bonds, disrupting credit markets and exposing weaknesses in government-bond markets. The Fed dusted off lending facilities for money-market funds set up during the financial crisis. Central banks also became buyers of last resort, both of government bonds and of commercial paper.

As Raghuram Rajan of the Chicago Booth School (and a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India) puts it, central banks became “corporate safety-nets”. The Fed bought commercial paper from companies, backed bank loans across the economy and even backstopped municipal debt. The ECB extended loans to banks. The Bank of England lent directly to firms. For some central bankers this was uncomfortable. The ECB , having run out of monetary firepower even before the pandemic, had already resorted to subsidised loans. And the PB o C is “a lending machine”, says Alicia Garcia Herrero of Natixis, an investment bank. In the middle of a trade war, it told banks how much to lend to the private sector. The Fed’s actions were its deepest involvement in the corporate-credit market since the 1930s. “We would always prefer not to be there,” says Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England.

Independence days

These measures were justified by the extraordinary covid shock, says Randal Quarles, a former vice-chairman for supervision on the Fed’s Board of Governors. But his testimony to Congress in May 2020, after the Fed announced its schemes, serves as a reminder of how politically fraught they are. “Every question was along the lines of ‘where’s mine?’” he says. The Fed cannot buy private assets without permission from the Treasury secretary. Yet now that the “emergency glass has been broken”, he worries that credit support might be seen as just part of the regular toolkit. That makes norms around independence crucial.

The safety-net for investors may also feed the belief that central banks will always step in at the merest hint of trouble. Such moral hazard may just encourage investors to take greater risks. “The whole point of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 was to keep the Fed from intervening again,” says Mr Rajan. “But in 2020 it did everything and more. How do you get markets not to believe that you’ll do it again and again?”

Such moral hazard may just encourage investors to take greater risks

One answer is to ensure non-banks do not need rescuing again. In December the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed rules to lessen the likelihood of money-market funds fire-selling assets when in trouble. A group of academics and former regulators suggests making the insurance the central bank offers non-banks explicit, by setting up a repo facility so they can borrow against Treasuries when they need cash, rather than sell them. This would be open to all market participants and charge unregulated non-banks a fee rather like an insurance premium. But the events of 2020 also make a case for more targeted ways of dealing with financial instability, says Mr Bailey. Last time it was fortuitous that a single tool of large-scale bond purchases served both to stabilise the financial system and to ease monetary conditions. If market dysfunction were to coincide with monetary tightening, central banks would face a tricky choice between stabilising markets and quelling inflation.

Large-scale bond purchases pose another set of headaches. Where programmes to provide liquidity can be quickly wound down, QE involves holding on to assets for some time. Central banks are now a huge presence in bond markets. The Bank of Japan owns 44% of Japanese government bonds. The ECB , which first began QE in 2015, holds more than 40% of Dutch, Finnish and German sovereign debt. The Fed and the Bank of England hold about 40% of Treasuries and 30% of gilts, respectively, much of it bought since 2020.

The pandemic required closer co-ordination between monetary and fiscal policies. In May 2020 the Bank of Japan and the finance ministry said they would do “whatever it takes” to stabilise the economy. The ECB played a key role in backstopping heavily indebted euro-area countries after Mario Draghi, its president, promised in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency. In the spring of 2020 it even began disproportionately buying bonds of the zone’s southern member states. Overall, its purchases more than exceeded governments’ net bond issuance in 2020 and 2021. A survey of big investors by the Financial Times found that the “overwhelming majority” thought the Bank of England’s bond-buying was meant to fund the government’s emergency spending, rather than support the economy. Mr Bailey rebuffs the charge: “To think that we knew precisely what Treasury issuance was going to be ahead of time is absurd,” he says. The nightmare scenario is that central banks end up financing fiscal deficits, and governments press them to keep monetary policy loose, leading to spiralling inflation. But the pandemic seems to have been different. In Ghana, the Philippines and Indonesia, for example, central banks began buying bonds directly from debt-management offices, rather than secondary markets, with barely a backlash from investors—a sign of how much credibility they had built up. Markets have been unfazed as Indonesia extended its direct financing of the government into 2022. In a study in January, economists at the IMF found that large monetary expansions tend to lead to “considerable” price increases when fiscal deficits are wide and central-bank independence is weak. But during the pandemic, the researchers say, direct-financing programmes had little effect on inflation expectations. The real test lies ahead. QE did not lower the government’s borrowing costs but rather changed when the bill falls due. In effect, central banks became managers of the public debt. With many starting to raise interest rates to tackle inflation, governments, weighed down by debt burdens swollen during the pandemic, will not be happy. QE works by swapping long-term bonds for the shortest-duration liabilities possible: central-bank reserves. These reserves, which are remunerated at a floating rate, form part of consolidated government finances. The effect of central banks’ vast holdings of bonds has therefore been significantly to shorten the maturity structure of public debt. In Britain, the median maturity of gilts falls from 11 years to four years once the effects of the Bank of England’s QE are included, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, an official fiscal watchdog. The OBR estimates that, should interest rates rise by an extra percentage point, the government would have to spend an extra £20.8bn ($27.1bn, or 0.8% of GDP ) in interest in 2025-26.

Taken together, this looks like “a big debt-management mistake”, says Sir Paul Tucker, a former central banker now at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of the book “Unelected Power”. Rather than locking in very low long-term interest rates, governments have exposed the public finances to rising short-term rates as monetary policy normalises. The worry is that, particularly if their independence looks frail, central banks will be leant on to raise rates more slowly, or not at all.

Although interest rates are now rising, central banks may find them uncomfortably close to zero when recession next hits. Longer-term factors, such as population ageing, that have borne down on interest rates are unlikely to go away. In the face of such forces, it is the job of structural and fiscal policy to act, says Shirakawa Masaaki, a former governor of the Bank of Japan. Monetary policy aims to pull forward demand from tomorrow. But that is unlikely to do much if there isn’t the demand to bring forward, he says. The “hubris” of central bankers, says Mr Rajan, lies in thinking they can solve all problems.

That suggests a different co-ordination is needed: for fiscal policy to step in as monetary policy reaches its natural limits. But public spending faces “political transaction costs”, says Sir Paul. “A finance minister might agree that the best response to a deep recession is a mix of fiscal and monetary stimulus, but the difficulty of getting it past the party and parliament means that he leaves the central bank to do more alone.”

The close links between monetary policy, on the one hand, and financial stability and the public finances, on the other, could together make central banks think twice about how tough to be in response to rising inflation. So could their new-found emphasis on social responsibilities. ■

P EDRO MORALES , a 73-year-old retired farmer, sits at the table of his sparsely furnished house in Santa Rosa and flicks through faded pictures of José, one of his sons. In 1990 José, then just 19, left this small village two hours outside of Guadalajara, in the central Mexican state of Jalisco, where chickens still roam the streets. He crossed the border to the United States illegally, and has lived there ever since.

Some 3,000km (1,800 miles) away, José explains over breakfast in Los Angeles that he migrated north for “a better life and to help my parents”. It has been hard work, but he achieved both aims. With the money he earned through a series of construction jobs, he bought a house in California. He married Claudia, also an undocumented Mexican. Their 26-year-old daughter, Evelyn, is an American citizen.

José was not the only person from his family to make the journey. His brother Roberto lived in the United States for nine years until he was deported. One of Pedro’s grandsons, named after him, worked for four years legally in America before returning to Mexico at the start of the pandemic. Juan Carlos, another grandson, migrated north last year for six months on a visa for agricultural labourers.

One family, two countries—and a tangled web of legal statuses and experiences. The Morales family illustrates the vast and varied panorama of migration from Mexico to the United States, one of the largest movements of people from one country to another in the past 50 years. Since 1965 over 16m people have left Mexico to go north of the border.

Partly because so many Mexicans (and Central Americans) have moved illegally to the United States, immigration is an issue that haunts every American administration. President Joe Biden, for example, is under pressure to extend a policy known as Title 42, introduced under his predecessor Donald Trump. This policy, ostensibly adopted because of the pandemic, allows officials to turn away migrants at the border, including asylum-seekers, and is due to expire in May. But such squabbles over Mexican migration fail to capture its nuances. And they ignore how these migrants are shaping both their countries, mostly for the better. The border between the two countries has always been porous. But the period of mass movement north dates to 1964, when the closure of the bracero seasonal work programme in the United States spurred many Mexicans to make the journey illegally. The number of migrants gathered pace in the 1980s and rocketed in the 1990s and early 2000s (see chart).

Las fronteras

Mexican migration is primarily driven by a demand for manual labour in the United States, says Jorge Durand of the University of Guadalajara. By one estimate 68% of California’s agricultural workers are Mexicans. “I knew there was work in the United States,” says José.

The first wave of migrants fitted squarely into this pattern. They were single young men from rural areas, according to Filiz Garip of Princeton University. They did not have documents and worked in agriculture. Later, however, they were joined by migrants from cities, who were richer and better educated than the average Mexican. Women started to make the journey. Migrants fanned out from California, Texas and Illinois to other parts of America. They stayed for longer, too.

The patterns of Mexican migration shifted again over the time that José was beginning to settle down in the United States. For a start, after a peak in 2007, fewer Mexicans have been making it over the border each year, not least as border security has been tightened by successive administrations. In the 2000s there were several years of negative net migration, because of a large number of deportations and a less buoyant jobs market caused by the Great Recession. The second trend is that since around 2017, there have been more legal than illegal Mexicans in the United States, estimates suggest.

The overall fall in the number of migrants also correlates with Mexico’s shifting demography. An average Mexican woman had 6.6 children in her lifetime in 1970 but only 2.1 in 2020; the country’s median age rose from 15 to 28 over the same period. Mexican migrants, in turn, have changed the United States. The country is home to around 11m migrants born in Mexico. They constitute around a quarter of the foreign-born population, and are increasingly a political and an economic force. Hispanic migrants are younger and, until recently, tended to have more children. According to the Pew Research Centre, some 17% of American women who gave birth in 2018 were of Hispanic origin, up from 10% in 2000. But Mexican migrants to the United States are having far fewer children than they used to: in 2000 they accounted for 42% of all births to women born abroad. By 2018 their share was half that.

Hope accompanies them

The newcomers changed where they lived, too. Almost half of the population of Los Angeles is Hispanic. Most are of Mexican heritage. In the neighbourhood where the Morales live, there are “lavanderias” (laundries), “tiendas” (shops) and “taquerias” (taco shops), not unlike back in Mexico. Claudia says when Evelyn was small she would panic about not being able to speak English in a medical emergency. Now Spanish-speaking doctors are plentiful. Mexican-Americans are creating new traditions, too. “On the one hand I have a sense of lost identity, but on the other we are creating our own culture,” says Evelyn.

The presence of Mexican labourers willing to work for less pay than Americans can push down wages. Research by economists such as Gordon Hanson of Harvard University and Giovanni Peri of the University of California suggests this affects only a small proportion of Americans. Mexican migrants boost the purchasing power of far more people by providing cheap childcare and the like. “Anyone who has bought a house or eats fruit and vegetables” has benefited, says Mr Hanson. However, other economists, such as George Borjas at Harvard University, think the number of poorly paid American workers affected may be higher.

Either way, most economists agree that immigration is good for the receiving economy over the long run. A model built by Mr Hanson and colleagues found that reducing immigration from Latin America by half led to a small decline in average real income. The decline was larger in places with many Hispanic immigrants, such as Los Angeles.

Moving north also improves the lives of Mexican migrants. Mr Hanson calculates that the income of those who move goes up between two-and-a-half and five times, even after adjusting for the higher cost of living in America. Pepe Zárate, a 41-year-old undocumented Mexican, could have earned a decent living at home as a doctor but still left for the United States two decades ago. He now makes around $4,000 a month as a construction worker. In Mexico he would struggle to earn an equivalent wage even as a doctor.

An essential worker

Evaluating migration’s impact the other way, on Mexico’s economy, is trickier. Economists reckon remittances have helped keep the economy relatively stable. They boost spending and are a big source of foreign exchange. Pedro’s house in Santa Rosa is modest compared to his son’s in Los Angeles, but far more luxurious than others in the area. With the money José sent him, he installed a toilet which flushes, for instance.

During the pandemic remittances have been particularly important. They rose by 27% between 2020 and 2021, reaching a high of $52bn, equivalent to 4% of Mexico’s GDP . In contrast, the government under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the fiscally conservative president, has spent only 0.7% of GDP on direct aid.

But Mexico has failed to make the most of its migrants, says Tonatiuh Guillén, a former head of Mexico’s National Institute for Migration. Those with fluent English could work in call centres, so boosting the country’s nascent service industry. Migrants could also be tapped for investment. Mr López Obrador ended a programme in which municipal, state and federal governments could match gifts or contributions from hometown clubs of migrants in the United States to pay for roads and the like.

Today is all they have

Lately the number of Mexicans making the journey north has been climbing again. Last year US border patrol agents caught 655,594 Mexicans trying to enter America illegally. Numbers this year are already up by 44%. That includes some double-counting, but it still seems likely that the number of people crossing is rising sharply.

Mexico’s economy is 3.8% smaller than in 2019, and is not expected to reach its former size again until next year. Gang violence has not previously spurred migration, but that appears to be changing, too, reckons Stephanie Leutert of the University of Texas at Austin.

The political backlash to this will make the lives of those Mexicans who are already settled in the United States harder. According to Doug Massey at Princeton University, most studies suggest that Mexican migrants are becoming more like Americans, both financially and socially. But as so many are undocumented, they do not have access to services that could help them integrate further. Many live in fear of being booted out; few dare leave as a result. American immigration policy “has never really recognised that historically Mexicans didn’t want to settle [in the United States],” argues Mr Massey, but to “circulate and keep their home in Mexico”.

José, for example, has only visited his father once in the two decades since moving away. He and Claudia would return to Mexico permanently if they knew they could go back to see Evelyn in the United States. “This country has given us so many opportunities,” he says. “But I would like to be able to hug my brother on his birthday or share a family meal.” ■

T HE RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN hospital in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, is named after Turkey’s president. It has 47 intensive-care beds, more than any other in the country, but it does not treat covid-19 patients. “If we did, we would have to isolate them,” explains Asir Eraslan, the manager, “and we would not have enough room to treat the bomb victims.” These keep on coming because of an insurgency by al-Shabab, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, and clashes between rival clans.

Along one of Mogadishu’s main roads, packed with armoured vehicles and red tuk-tuks (motorised rickshaws), locals point out where bombs have ripped through crowds. During your correspondent’s visit, security forces were on the lookout for two suicide-bombers.

Given the violence and risk of kidnapping, Mogadishu attracts few foreigners. Few aside from Turks, that is. One Turkish company has renovated and operates the port. Another runs a hotel and the international airport, from which Turkish Airlines flies daily to Istanbul. Turkish firms have repaired the city’s main roads and the parliament building, with funding from Turkey’s development agency. At its biggest foreign military base, Turkish officers have trained and equipped more than 5,000 Somali soldiers and police commandos.

Perhaps more distinctive even than the size of Turkey’s presence in Somalia is its boots-on-the-ground approach, helped by a common religion. “In Somalia one of the advantages of being a Turk is that you pray at the same mosques as everyone else,” says Kadir Mohamud, a Somali businessman. Non-Turkish companies and embassies tend to operate from the guarded “green zone” around the airport. “We are the only ones in the field,” says Mehmet Yilmaz, the Turkish ambassador. With its own herd of dwarf antelope and a sweeping view of the Indian Ocean, his embassy is Turkey’s biggest anywhere, too.

Somalia is a striking example of Mr Erdogan’s broader push into Africa in search of markets, resources and diplomatic influence. Only two decades ago Turkey had very little interest in Africa below the Sahara. Instead it looked west and dreamed of joining the European Union. But as relations with the West have cooled, Turkey has pivoted south. The turning point was in 2011 when Mr Erdogan, flanked by Turkish businessmen, aid officials and Muslim charities, visited Somalia, then in the grip of a drought and civil war. His visit, the first by a non-African leader in about two decades, marked the start not just of Turkey’s involvement in the Horn of Africa but of deeper ties across the continent.

In 2009 Turkey had just a dozen diplomatic missions in Africa. Now it has 43. Ambassadorial glad-handing has helped businesses expand. Turkish Airlines, which flew to only four African cities in 2004, now flies to more than 40. Trade with the continent has expanded greatly, to $29bn last year, of which $11bn was with sub-Saharan Africa, an almost eight-fold increase since 2003. So has construction, where Turkish firms are chipping away at the dominance of Chinese ones, helped no doubt by a drop in lending by China. Turkish officials reckon that Turkish firms have completed some $78bn worth of African projects, including airports, stadiums and mosques. Last year Tanzania awarded a Turkish firm a $1.9bn contract to build a modern railway line.

Turkey is also gaining clout through aid. Previously it gave money mainly through international agencies such as the UN. In 2003 some 60% of Turkish aid was channelled this way. By 2019 that share had plummeted to 2%. These days Turkish flags adorn packages of food, schools and wells. “Turkey is known for giving a blank cheque, particularly when you’re in desperate need of economic or military aid,” says Abel Abate Demissie, who works for Chatham House, a British think-tank, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Yet there is a harder edge, too. Mr Erdogan, who has readily sent his army into the many-sided civil war in Syria, has also started flexing his muscles in Africa. He has, for instance, dispatched Turkish soldiers and Syrian mercenaries to Libya to fight against Khalifa al-Haftar, a warlord then backed by Egypt, France, Russia and the United Arab Emirates ( UAE ). Turkey and France, after sparring in Libya, have also locked horns in west Africa, the Sahel and the Maghreb, where Mr Erdogan has challenged French influence by playing on France’s image as a colonial oppressor. In Somalia Mr Erdogan faced off against Saudi Arabia and the UAE when their spat with Qatar, which is friendly with Turkey’s government, spilled over into a proxy struggle in the Horn of Africa.

Arms are the plan

Turkey has also signed military pacts with several African countries, most recently Nigeria, Senegal and Togo. Many are keen to take advantage of Turkey’s experience in counterinsurgency. Tellingly, an increasing share of African ambassadors appointed to Turkey are active or retired generals.

Turkey’s aim is not to get involved in wars, but rather to sell weapons. It is not in the same league as countries such as Russia, which provided 30% of all arms sold to sub-Saharan Africa in 2016-20, or China (20%), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But last year Turkey’s sales surged seven-fold to $328m. In the first two months of this year they approached $140m.

Turkey’s top products are drones of the sort currently bombing Russian tanks in Ukraine. They have been seen in Ethiopia, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. Other countries, including Angola, Nigeria and Rwanda, are thinking of buying them. “Wherever we went, they asked us for unarmed and armed drones,” said Mr Erdogan after a visit to Africa last year. Somalia would also like more arms, but cannot get them because of a UN embargo. “Turkey is giving us everything they can give,” says Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, Somalia’s defence minister. “But right now they can only give us small weapons.”

Unlike America, Africa’s fourth-largest arms supplier, which stops sales to African countries that use them to commit war crimes, Turkey seems unconcerned about how its kit is used. Its drones, which helped turn the tide in Ethiopia’s civil war, have reportedly killed dozens of civilians. Because of Turkey’s silence about this, Ethiopia sees it as one of its very few trusted allies. Somalia’s president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known to his people as Farmaajo, has used Turkish-trained soldiers against his rivals, to cling to power after his term expired more than a year ago, says Matt Bryden of Sahan Research, a Nairobi-based think-tank. “We do not dictate, and we do not tell anyone what to do,” says an official in Ankara, Turkey’s capital.

Like China and Russia, which have expanded their reach in Africa in recent years, Turkey touts its policy of non-interference as a selling point. Mr Erdogan presents Turkey as a rising power and the champion of a fairer world order. “Turkey is coming in with no colonial baggage whatsoever,” says Wamkele Mene, the secretary-general of the African Continental Free Trade Area ( A f CFTA ). “That’s an advantage.” Mr Erdogan takes this a step further, arguing baselessly that colonialism persists. “The British, the French and the Western colonisers,” he said earlier this year, “continue to loot Africa’s diamonds, its gold and its mines.” In truth, Turkey is not above strong-arming African governments. Last year its security agents in Kenya abducted the nephew of Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accuses of spearheading a failed coup in 2016. He was snatched right outside the police headquarters with the connivance of Kenyan officials and flown to Turkey, flouting a court order barring his deportation. Turkey has also pressed African countries to close schools set up by Mr Gulen’s Islamist movement. Turkey’s interest in Africa is reciprocated. The number of African embassies in Turkey has tripled in two decades, to 37. At least 14,000 students from Africa have received scholarships to study in Turkey over the past decade. Africans are also buying property in Turkey, not least since spending $250,000 on a house brings a Turkish passport. Ankara has emerged as a hub of the Somali diaspora. Turkish soap operas, which are winning audiences across the continent, are spreading soft power.

Still catching up

Though Turkey’s involvement in Africa has grown fast, occasionally bringing confrontation with other outside powers, its economic, military and diplomatic reach is still nowhere near as extensive as those of America, China and the continent’s former colonial powers. China’s government reckons its two-way trade with Africa was worth $254bn last year, dwarfing Turkey’s $29bn. Turkey’s military aid carries nothing like the punch of Western powers. America has about 6,000 troops and supporting civilians deployed in Africa, where they battle al-Shabab in Somalia and jihadists in the Sahel, and train African counter-terrorist forces across the continent. France, too, deploys roughly 5,000 troops, many of them in the Sahel. This is reflected in popular opinion. In a survey conducted for The Economist in March by Premise, a data firm, 72% of Kenyans and 58% of Nigerians named America as the most reliable security partner.

I F ANYONE FEELS Ukrainians’ pain, it is Georgians. In 2008 Russia invaded Georgia and garrisoned the self-declared statelets of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, leaving a fifth of Georgia’s territory under de facto Russian occupation. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February thousands of Georgians marched in solidarity. Many worry that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, may target them again to compensate for his failed invasion—or “to continue the expansion started in Ukraine, depending on the outcome of the war”, warns Salome Zourabichvili, Georgia’s president.

Polls show more than 60% of Georgians believe the government should do more to help Ukraine. Georgians have welcomed thousands of Ukrainian refugees, and bristle at the larger influx of Russians fleeing Mr Putin’s regime. The national bank requires Russians wishing to open accounts to sign statements condemning “Russia’s aggression in Georgia and in Ukraine”.

Yet the government’s response has been more muted. It has not joined Western sanctions; Irakli Garibashvili, the prime minister, said doing so would harm the country’s interests. Georgia has refused entry to some prominent Russian opposition figures and stopped some of its own citizens from flying to Ukraine to join the fight. The deference to Russia has not gone unnoticed on either side: Ukraine recalled its ambassador, while Russia left Georgia off its list of “unfriendly countries”.

The ruling party, Georgian Dream ( GD ), explains its stance as strategic caution. Since coming to power in 2012, GD has sought to normalise relations with Russia. Travel restrictions eased and trade grew; Russia is now Georgia’s second-largest trading partner. Sanctions, GD argues, would do little damage to Russia’s economy while devastating Georgia’s, and could provoke further aggression. Yet that is only a partial explanation. Bidzina Ivanishvili, the shadowy oligarch who backed GD and once served as prime minister, made his fortune in Russia. He no longer has a formal role in GD , which denies any Russian influence, but speculation is rife. “He is a Russian oligarch, he came from there,” says Kornely Kakachia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, a think-tank in Tbilisi, the capital. GD ’s feud with Mikheil Saakashvili, a former Georgian president who relaunched his political career in Ukraine after being forced out of Georgia, complicates things further. “They are taking this personal relationship, the Saakashvili factor, into state relations between Ukraine and Georgia,” Mr Kakachia argues. Mr Saakashvili was arrested on returning to Georgia last year. Ms Zourabichvili, who was born in France and served as a French diplomat, strongly backs Ukraine. That puts her at odds with GD , which supported her candidacy. She has travelled to Europe to reassure leaders of Georgia’s Western orientation. GD accused her of violating limits on presidential powers by conducting her own diplomacy. But her trips helped facilitate Georgia’s application for EU membership, filed together with Moldova’s in March. “We see a new window of opportunity,” says Ms Zourabichvili. The government’s caution on Ukraine may make things trickier. Western governments are scratching their heads over Georgia’s response, Mr Kakachia says. It also carries security risks. If Russia threatened military action on its border, Georgia would “need weapons and support” from the West, says Olesya Vartanyan of the International Crisis Group. “Let’s hope that by then there [is] no question about which side Georgia is on.” ■

H AVING FOUND itself at a crossroads, Indonesia is attempting to go in every direction at once. On March 2nd it joined much of the world in deploring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. A few days later its president, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, said Russia and Ukraine were both friends of Indonesia. By the middle of April, against a domestic backdrop of protests against rising costs, a fierce debate had broken out within government about whether to take advantage of the crisis by buying discounted Russian oil, with payments perhaps routed through India.

Indonesia is in a tricky position. This year it holds the rotating presidency of the G 20, a club of the world’s biggest economies. Jokowi does not want to humiliate Russia. Nor does he want to preside over a high-profile flop: Western leaders have indicated they could ditch the main meeting in Bali in November if President Vladimir Putin turns up. “Our strategy is Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’,” says Evan Laksmana, an Indonesia expert at the National University of Singapore, meaning, “just hope that something gets resolved in the next month or so”.

Governments across Asia are performing feats of acrobatics to avoid antagonising America, Russia, China or their own citizens. Some leaders elsewhere, such as President Joe Biden, consider the swift condemnation of Russia’s actions by Asia’s West-leaning economic heavyweights—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—proof that “democracies are rising to the moment and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.”

Yet many Asian countries, including big democracies like India and Indonesia, are reluctant to criticise Russia openly. The number of Asian states siding with America and Europe at the UN on Ukraine-related issues has been declining. Commentators in Washington see this as a failure of the West to win the moral argument. They think Asians see America and its allies as hypocrites, who have themselves invaded countries and given refugees from war-torn places outside Europe a hard time.

But few Asians share the European and American perception of the war as a grand battle between democracies and autocracies. For many of them, including most of America’s allies in Asia, responses to Russia’s invasion have been dictated first by cold calculations of interests, with values coming a distant second.

Many Asian governments look to America for security even though China is their chief economic partner. Their backyard—the “Indo-Pacific”, as America now likes to call it—is where the tussle between the two powers is playing out. “The future of global order will be decided not by wars in Europe but by the contest in Asia,” Shivshankar Menon, a former Indian foreign secretary, wrote recently. For Asia, the war in Ukraine has added an unhelpful extra dimension to what was already a tricky balancing act.

In Asia this year, planned gatherings of world leaders will highlight the problem. These include the G 20 as well as APEC meetings in Thailand and the annual East Asia Summit in Cambodia, also in the autumn. In normal times, Mr Putin might attend all of them. “Those countries haven’t made a strategic choice over the Russia-Ukraine conflict: they are still sending invitations to Putin,” says Jimbo Ken of Keio University in Tokyo.

At the end of May Japan is set to host a summit of the Quad, a security grouping whose other members are America, Australia and India. Its discussions—which usually focus on China—may be complicated by India’s neutral stance towards Russia. “How can we pursue Quad co-operation without sharing principles?” Mr Jimbo asks. For Japan’s government, India’s position is worrisome mainly because of the message it sends: it may be harder to rally European support for Asian countries facing Chinese pressure if they remain neutral on Ukraine. “It is important to share with other Asian nations a view that we mustn’t allow any change to the status quo by force,” Kishida Fumio, Japan’s prime minister, has said.

From America’s point of view, Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korea’s president-elect, talks the right talk. He says he wants to make his country a “global pivotal state” that spreads “freedom, peace and prosperity through liberal democratic values”. Mr Yoon has called for more help for Ukraine and pressure on Russia.

But South Korea also frets. China is by far its largest trading partner and the source of many inputs for its giant manufacturing sector. Antagonising Russia and China would create security risks—both have sway in North Korea. Though it is a big exporter of arms, South Korea has repeatedly refused to supply Ukraine with weapons. It has imposed sanctions on Russia, albeit more slowly than its Western allies. But since the war began it has boosted its imports of cheap Russian energy. (So, too, has Taiwan.)

Take my hand, we’ll make it I swear

Mr Yoon has hard choices to make. During his campaign, he promised to ask America to redeploy nuclear weapons to South Korea (they were removed three decades ago) and said he would install more American-made anti-missile defences, known as THAAD. China would be enraged by either move. It may retaliate with economic and other punishments.

In South-East Asia, Singapore has been the most vocal critic of the invasion. Concerned that it might embolden big countries to bully small ones, the city-state has placed sanctions on Russia. But among others in the region, including American allies such as Thailand and the Philippines, pragmatism has won the day. Although most countries voted at the UN in early March to condemn the invasion, many in their follow-up statements refrained from naming and shaming Russia, and later abstained from the vote suspending it from the UN ’s human-rights body.

Russia is South-East Asia’s largest supplier of weapons. Most of the kit goes to Vietnam, which imports 80% of its arms from Russia, but hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of guns also flow to Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. “It would be extremely costly for Vietnam if it lost access to Russian arms and military technology,” says Carl Thayer of the University of New South Wales. Yet Vietnam disapproves of Russia’s invasion and views America as a more important partner, says Le Hong Hiep of the ISEAS -Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank in Singapore.

That both Vietnam and India are reacting to the Russian invasion with similarly calculated ambivalence shows how countries’ political systems do not necessarily determine their responses to the war. India is a noisy democracy. Vietnam is a secretive Communist dictatorship. Both are on increasingly good terms with America and wary of China, but are also big buyers of Russian arms. For their own security, they see a need to preserve good relationships in Moscow.

Or consider the case of Cambodia, an autocratic country which has close ties to both China and Russia. To the surprise of both, Hun Sen, its prime minister, took a stand against Russia’s aggression by co-sponsoring one of the UN resolutions. In recent months he has been making it clear he wants better relations with the West.

That countries in South-East Asia are responding to the Ukraine crisis on the basis of perceived self-interest rather than ideology should be of no surprise to America. Even before the war, Mr Biden’s administration had been fostering a spirit of diplomatic pragmatism. It was being careful not to overemphasise human rights in its dealings with countries in the region. When touring South-East Asia, senior White House officials mainly focused on finding ways of meeting countries’ economic and security needs, rather than lecturing to them about politics. But across Asia, government policies towards the war are often out of sync with public sentiment. In Singapore, where officials have been gung-ho about joining in with America, citizens are more circumspect. Many ethnic-Chinese Singaporeans consume China’s state media, which tout a pro-Russian line. They think that Singapore should cosy up to China, and believe that America provoked the Russian invasion, says Ian Chong of the National University of Singapore. In South Korea, official backing for Ukraine has failed to match the enthusiasm of ordinary people’s support. Many citizens have made donations to Ukraine. There have been frequent public protests against Russia. Yet when Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, addressed South Korea’s parliament he found himself speaking to a near-empty hall where the few lawmakers fiddled with their phones. There was no standing ovation.

Whoa, we’re half-way there

It is in non-aligned countries such as India and Indonesia where the attitudes of government and the public seem most at odds. On Indian television popular commentators who usually devote their energies to praising the government and attacking its enemies have taken a strongly anti-American line. They blame the war on American provocation of Russia, including NATO ’s expansion. They push this angle much harder than the government itself, which has avoided saying who is at fault. Their views are echoed in India’s living rooms. According to a YouGov poll in late March, 54% of Indians approved of Mr Putin’s leadership in the first month of the war (and, confusingly, 63% of Mr Zelensky’s). Fully 40% supported Russia’s invasion.

Indonesians feel similarly. “This is about the sovereignty of Russia,” says Riza Ghautama, a 42-year-old exporter of crude palm oil. He says he does not support Russia’s invasion but understands why it felt compelled to act. Russia, he says, was just trying “to defend itself”. Connie Bakrie, an Indonesian defence expert who has the ear of the armed forces, accuses the West of hypocrisy. How can it condemn Russia for securing a sphere of interest, when Western powers have done the same with Guam, the Falkland Islands and New Caledonia—territories belonging to America, Britain and France, respectively? “What is the difference?” she asks.

Such talk stems from a widely held perception in Indonesia that America is at heart an imperialist power that does not play by its own rules, says Radityo Dharmaputra of the University of Tartu in Estonia. “If you are pro-Ukraine, then you are pro-America, and thereby supporting the idea of American imperialism in the region,” says Mr Radityo, summing up a common belief among Indonesians. Social-media posts in many Asian countries propagate such narratives. Though many of these online fulminations against the West may be the product of disinformation campaigns, they find receptive audiences.

Indonesia’s rulers have so far managed to avoid alienating America, Russia, China and their own citizens. Their reluctance to make hard choices has yet to cause major embarrassment. But cracks are showing: on April 20th Janet Yellen, America’s treasury secretary, and others walked out of a meeting of G 20 finance ministers when the Russian delegate started speaking.

Relative to the other great powers, Russia is a bit player in Asia. For countries in the region the really difficult decisions lie ahead. They relate to the rivalry between America and China, which has been fuelled by Russia’s invasion. American talk of an intensifying “battle between democracy and autocracy” has ratcheted up the tension. Time and again South-East Asian countries have said they do not want to have to choose between America and China. But there will be “a point where many in the region will be hard pressed not to choose”, says Mr Evan of the National University of Singapore. “You are going to be made to choose, or at least you will be pulled one way or another.” ■

“W OULD THE US really dare to freeze or confiscate China’s reserve assets?” asked Wang Yongli, a former director of Bank of China, in an article last month. Good question. After Russia invaded Ukraine, America and its allies imposed crippling sanctions on Russia’s central bank, removing from its reach about half of its foreign-exchange reserves. They also cut off some of Russia’s biggest banks from the Western financial system and banned many high-tech exports to the country. If China were to do something geopolitically rash, such as invading Taiwan, could the West do to China what it has done to Russia?

America and its allies certainly have the means. “The locus of financial power still sits firmly in the West,” says Eswar Prasad of Cornell University. China probably keeps about two-thirds of its $3.2trn of foreign-exchange reserves in Western government bonds and the like. Because of the size of its holdings, it has few viable alternative stores of wealth. If America and Europe instruct their financial institutions not to deal with Chinese banks, they would lose access to the dollar, euro and pound.

But would the West really dare? “Freezing” China’s reserves might not be too destabilising. Even if China wanted to dump its holdings to spite the West, the sanctions would prevent it from doing so. China would be unable to buy more of these securities. But the bond markets would not miss it much. China has not been a big buyer of late. And by invading Taiwan it would create panic, triggering a stampede into highly rated bonds from private investors.

China could find other ways to punch back, though. In particular, it could seize the sizeable assets that Westerners hold in China. At the end of last year, foreigners owned $3.6trn in direct investments, including immovable factories, and $2.2trn in shares, bonds and other “portfolio” investments, notes Gerard DiPippo of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington. The combined total is over six times the size of the equivalent foreign holdings in Russia.

What if the West also imposed sanctions on other Chinese financial institutions, beyond the central bank? That could expose Western institutions to financial “blowback”. Four of the world’s 30 “systemically important” banks are Chinese, according to the Financial Stability Board, a group of regulators. Crippling these banks could also damage Western institutions that have lent to them or hold accounts with them. Could Western countries be confident that cutting off Chinese banks would leave their own financial stability undisturbed? “No,” says Clay Lowery of the Institute of International Finance, a bankers’ group. “I’m not confident of that.”

Such measures would also wreak havoc with trade. Less than a fifth of China’s trade last year was settled in its own currency. Much of the rest was conducted in dollars. “If you can’t get insurance and trade credit, a lot of economic activity dries up,” says Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research organisation. Since China is the leading trade partner of over 120 countries, the disruption might turn the rest of the world against America and its allies.

Western countries would suffer, too, which could erode their unity and resolve. China accounts for about 18% of America’s imports and over 22% of the EU ’s, including many parts and components used in domestic manufacturing (see chart). For this reason, obstructing trade with China can damage a country’s own production, including its exports. If America and its allies were to cut Chinese imports by over 90%, their own exports would fall by almost 10%, according to simulations by Gabriel Felbermayr of the Vienna University of Economics and Business and his co-authors. China’s biggest source of leverage is its own vast market. America might, for example, wish to deprive it of certain high-tech inputs, such as semiconductors. But a complete ban would cost American semiconductor firms 37% of their revenues, according to Boston Consulting Group, and jeopardise over 120,000 jobs. China, for its part, might curb exports of the “rare earths” used in many electronic goods. It could disrupt the supply chain for electric-vehicle batteries and other manufacturing niches. And it could squeeze adversaries out of markets they might not want to forfeit. European sanctions, for example, initially spared Russia’s $2.4bn market for luxury goods: the so-called “Gucci exemption”. The same market in China is worth over $50bn a year, according to Statista, a data provider. The West can hit Russia with a harder economic punch any time it tries to hit back. The same is not necessarily true with China, says Eddie Fishman of the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank. That in turn makes it more likely that China would indeed hit back. America and its allies could, then, suffer considerable pain if they imposed on China the same sanctions they have inflicted on Russia. For that reason, they would probably not dare go that far. But they must hope that China does not dare to find out. ■

S AT NEXT to a nursery on an industrial estate in Naperville, a suburban city on the outskirts of Chicago, the Ketamine Wellness Centres ( KWC ) clinic does not look like anything revolutionary. Inside, a television plays videos of landscapes with calming music; tubs of sweets sit on a coffee table. The clinic is one of several in the region, and of over 100 across America, where patients are injected with ketamine to treat persistent pain or depression.

Interest is rising in the idea that ketamine, typically used as an anaesthetic (or as an illegal party drug), can help provide a lasting cure where traditional treatments, such as antidepressant drugs, have failed. PSYCH Global, a provider of information on psychedelic health care, estimates that the revenue for American clinics could be over $3bn between 2023 and 2029. Critics, though, worry that the drug can lead to dependency and that not enough is known about its long-term safety.

It is more than 20 years since studies first suggested that ketamine was an effective, rapidly acting antidepressant—albeit one whose impact lasts for only days and weeks. Its take-up has been limited because it has not been approved for use specifically as an antidepressant. That deters doctors, patients and those who pay for medicines. It is also unlikely to gain such regulatory approval, which would require a pharmaceutical firm to invest in a drug that is now a cheap generic that anyone can make. Still, off-label prescriptions are possible—and they are on the rise.

In KWC ’s treatment rooms, people spend between two and four hours experiencing what Kevin Nicholson, the founder and chief executive of the firm, calls a mildly “floaty” and “dreamlike” high, under the close watch of a nurse or paramedic. Although there may be less clinical evidence for ketamine than for traditional antidepressants, its ability to act quickly to relieve depression is an enormous advantage. It stands in stark contrast to antidepressants that can take weeks or months to have an effect—if they work at all. For patients who have failed to respond to antidepressants, and for those who may be suicidal, ketamine is an attractive option.

Quicker but potentially quackier

Some of KWC’ s patients struggled for a decade, though a growing number are coming a year or two after their first diagnosis. At the Naperville clinic, to get treatment for depression patients must first go through a psychological evaluation, usually over a video call. They must also have been experiencing symptoms that have not lifted after the use of antidepressant medications and lifestyle changes.

Once accepted, patients have four to six injections over two weeks, then more as needed with widening spaces between. Each one costs $449. Most medical insurance does not cover the actual injections yet, says Mr Nicholson, though it may cover the related assessment and therapy. And a few insurers, including the federal VA , which provides health insurance to former soldiers, now pay for the injections too.

In addition to depression, there is growing evidence that ketamine may be effective in treating several other mental-health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic pain and alcoholism. But it can also cause adverse reactions, ranging from dizziness, nausea and poor co-ordination to hallucinations and paranoia. Delivery of the drug, therefore, needs to be supervised in a safe environment such as that provided by KWC . There is also the thorny, unanswered question of whether it has a long-term downside.

Providing ketamine to those who may have previously struggled with addiction to opioids, alcohol or other drugs may seem risky. But the treatment does not seem likely to appeal to people who just want to get high. The dose given is much lower than recreational users of ketamine typically take, and far costlier. (A gram of street ketamine costs around $100 in the United States; the dose used by KWC is rarely more than 100th of that.) A suburban office in which users are hooked up to cardiac and blood-pressure monitors is also not exactly a party space. After the session is over, patients have to be driven home by a friend or relative.

Plenty of other firms use the drug as an adjunct to psychiatry. While the exact mechanism by which ketamine works is not entirely clear, it is known to increase neuroplasticity and stimulate the growth of new synapses. By combining the ketamine experience with psychiatric support, the idea is it helps the patient learn new ways of thinking during a window of neuroplasticity opened by the drug.

Many of these new clinics also have a weather eye to rapid shifts in the science, and cultural acceptability, of using psilocybin and MDMA , two psychedelic drugs, for many of the same mental-health conditions. The path to such treatments is trickier: both these drugs are illegal in most of the country. But ketamine clinics provide the ideal setting for delivering future substances, if and when their time arrives.

Without approval from a regulator, however, ketamine will remain in a medical no-man’s-land. In 2016 the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners advised doctors against its use in mental-health conditions, warning that doing so might be deemed “unprofessional conduct”. Many doctors who deal with addiction are still reluctant to recommend it, admits Mr Nicholson: “It’s new and different, so it scares them.”

Others are too keen. As interest grows, without better oversight of new clinics there is a risk that vulnerable people may be exploited by unscrupulous actors. And a boom in at-home use through telemedicine, spurred by the pandemic, is taking ketamine into uncharted territory. ■

O N FEBRUARY 27 th, three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Olaf Scholz delivered a speech to Germany’s parliament that astonished even his close political allies. Calling the moment a Zeitenwende (“turning point”), the German chancellor outlined the biggest strategic shift in German security, foreign and energy policy in the federal republic’s history. Earlier he had refused operating permission for Nord Stream 2, an $11bn pipeline to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany which has taken many years to build, but which allies had long warned would reinforce Germany’s dependence on the Kremlin. Now the understated chancellor, who during his first two months in office seemed to have gone into hiding, announced a startling plan. It included an increase in Germany’s defence spending from 1.5% of GDP to the NATO target of 2%, the establishment of a €100bn ($110bn) special fund for the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces), and the construction of two liquefied natural gas ( LNG ) terminals to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian energy.

Mr Scholz’s new strategy raised high hopes in the western world. Yet eight weeks into the war in Ukraine these hopes are being dashed, bit by bit. Mr Scholz refuses to support calls for a German or European embargo or tariff on Russian oil and gas. Every day Germany pays Russia tens of millions of euros for fossil fuels, even as the war grinds on.

Still more damaging has been his refusal to give Ukraine heavy weapons such as tanks. Ukraine needs them more than ever thanks to the new Russian offensive in the east. Other Europeans are exasperated by German dithering. “This is costing Germany lots of political capital in the European Union and NATO ,” says Rafael Loss of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Germany’s allies fear that the country is wavering in its commitment to the Zeitenwende. Such fears are exaggerated; Mr Scholz is following through on important parts of his new policies with impressive speed. His government has already said it will buy 35 American-made F -35 fighter jets to replace its ageing Tornados. It is buying 140 armed drones from Israel, and is mulling the acquisition of an Israeli anti-missile system. A draft law is in the works that will anchor the €100bn special fund in Germany’s constitution.

“I would have never expected an SPD politician to do this against [the will of] his own party,” says Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The Social Democratic Party ( SPD ) has typically preferred engagement with Russia to confrontation. That attitude harks back to Ostpolitik, the policy of rapprochement with Germany’s eastern neighbours (including Russia), which was launched in 1969 by Willy Brandt, a celebrated SPD chancellor.

Mr Scholz is also honouring his promise to reduce Germany’s dependence on Russian energy as fast as possible. In March Robert Habeck, his economy minister, swallowed his distaste for autocracies and travelled to the United Arab Emirates and to Qatar, one of the biggest exporters of LNG , to forge new gas-supply partnerships. Besides the two new permanent LNG terminals in Wilhelmshaven and Brunsbüttel, the government will spend €3bn to lease four floating ones.

Yet while Mr Scholz is charging ahead with implementing his Zeitenwende, he is neglecting to win hearts and minds. Rather than tirelessly communicating the need to break with old policies on Russia, the soft-spoken Mr Scholz seems to have retreated into his shell. In a televised speech on April 18th, he failed utterly to explain why he is not authorising the delivery of heavy weaponry to Ukraine. (Germany has sent other military kit, such as anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles and ammunition.) Mr Scholz said the country should not “go it alone”. But other NATO allies are sending armoured vehicles, helicopters, heavy artillery and even fighter jets; Germany now stands out for its reticence.

The Greens and the Liberals, the junior partners in Mr Scholz’s governing coalition, want to do more. Anton Hofreiter, a Green MP who was part of a German delegation to Kyiv last week, insists Germany must “finally deliver what Ukraine needs, and that is heavy weapons”. He called Mr Scholz “too hesitant”. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, an outspoken Liberal MP who also travelled to Kyiv, echoed his call.

Opponents argue that supplying heavy weapons would make Germany a party to the war. Experts in international law say this claim is simply wrong. Russia has threatened to strike NATO countries that give Ukraine heavy weapons—but that would probably draw all of NATO into the war, and seems to have been a bluff. It would take many weeks of training, argues Erich Vad, a retired Bundeswehr general, to teach Ukraine’s army to operate German-made Leopard and Marder tanks and to develop a supply chain for spare parts. Yet as the months go by, such caveats begin to look like excuses.

Christian Lindner, the finance minister, announced on Twitter on April 15th that Germany will increase its Ertüchtigungs hilfe, a fund to help allies buy weapons, by about €1bn, with the boost largely going to Ukraine. The money will surely be welcome in Kyiv. But there is an air of unreality to many Germans’ attitudes: they want to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia, but they shrink from the warlike things this implies. The concrete implementation of the Zeitenwende is proceeding, but the change in Germans’ thinking has barely begun. To convince them, the reticent Mr Scholz, too, will have to change. ■

N O NATIONAL PAVILION in the latest Venice Biennale, which opens on April 23rd, will make such a brave and unambiguous statement as Russia’s. Its airy spaces will be empty, the curator and two artists chosen to represent Russia having withdrawn on February 28th in protest at the invasion of Ukraine.

Politics is seldom distant from the world’s most prominent showcase for contemporary art. But this year it was not intended to be central. The Italian curator of the main show, Cecilia Alemani, had chosen to build it around shifting concepts of what it means to be human, and called it The Milk of Dreams after the title of a children’s book by a late Surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington. Yet there is every chance the Biennale, including 80 smaller, national exhibitions, will be dominated by the war.

Demonstrations are expected outside the shuttered Russian pavilion. And the exhibition authorities have agreed to the creation nearby of an open-air space around a monument covered by sandbags in which to display work created by Ukrainian artists since the invasion in February. Ukraine was initially going to pull out of the event, but that changed after one of the co-curators of its show, Maria Lanko, drove the main elements of its central exhibit more than 2,000 kilometres from Kyiv to Venice. The journey, which in normal circumstances would have taken her a matter of days, lasted three harrowing weeks.

“In times of brutal wars,” said Ms Alemani, “it seems almost impossible to think about art.” But in a statement, the Ukrainian curators of the open-air show argued their wartime art might even chime with her chosen themes. “For months,” they wrote, “human bodies have been shaking along with the walls of their homes and cities. Every day, technologies kill and protect also. Every day, human relationships with plants, animals, earth and non-humans change or strengthen, and this is not a dream.”

For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no literary form was ever sufficiently capacious. Three gargantuan works dominated his creative life. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, on which his reputation mainly rests, chronicles in three volumes the history of Soviet forced labor camps. It earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and forced exile from the Soviet Union in 1974, the first official expulsion since Leon Trotsky had been deported to Turkey in 1929. Solzhenitsyn himself regarded The Red Wheel, a series of novels about the Russian Revolution, as his major contribution to literature. These novels posed a question: Why and how did the unprecedented horror described in The Gulag Archipelago occur? The answers Solzhenitsyn arrived at shaped his third great project, four volumes of memoirs.

The Red Wheel is divided into four “nodes,”1 some of which contain more than one volume; each node focuses on a specific short period encapsulating important events that led to the catastrophe of Bolshevik rule. The first two nodes, August 1914 and November 1916, superb works that overflow the conventional form of historical novels, are followed by four long volumes devoted to the third node, March 1917, which recounts events from March 8 to March 31, 1917. The final node, April 1917, still untranslated, encompasses two more volumes. The third volume of March 1917, now available in an exceptionally fine rendition by Marian Schwartz, is especially riveting. It makes a splendid companion to the last volume of Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, the recently translated second part of Between Two Millstones, which casts the Gorbachev years as an eerie repeat of 1917.

Taken together, the two volumes of Between Two Millstones describe Solzhenitsyn’s life from the time he was expelled from the USSR until his return in 1994. (After considering several places in Europe and North America, he eventually settled in Cavendish, Vermont, which reminded him of Russia and which afforded the isolation needed to work on The Red Wheel.) The title Between Two Millstones refers primarily to the surprising hostility to, and absurd mischaracterization of, his views that the author faced in the West. The same intellectual and press circles that had celebrated his courage when he was in the USSR now often became relentless critics because, Solzhenitsyn explains, he did not share conventional American left-leaning ideas but instead held positions that did not fit existing Western categories. He therefore found himself caught between Soviet and Western “millstones,” both vilifying him and attributing to him intolerant opinions he did not hold.

Solzhenitsyn identified in Western intellectual circles the same smug narrow-mindedness that he had discovered in liberal Russian intellectuals before the revolution. The core moment in these volumes occurs when, as Solzhenitsyn writes,

a leading [Canadian] television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my own limited Soviet and prison-camp experience. Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited that is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!

Solzhenitsyn had himself once celebrated the Russian liberals and socialists who ran the Provisional Government overthrown by the Bolsheviks, but Western archives—and perhaps his encounters with Westerners—led him to an entirely different view. The members of the Provisional Government and their supporters were so incompetent, self-satisfied, and willing to suppress any insufficiently progressive opinion that tyranny was bound to triumph. Solzhenitsyn detected the same mindset among liberal Russian reformers in the 1990s and feared another descent into authoritarian rule.

There were two Russian revolutions in 1917. In February (March by present reckoning) Tsar Nicholas II, one of the most foolish people ever to occupy a throne, abdicated. Mob violence, greeted by the educated with the naive ecstasy of “February fever,” unleashed the chaos that allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power in October (now November). Unlike the tsar or the Provisional Government that succeeded him, Lenin’s party did not hesitate to use extreme violence. The infamous Cheka (secret police, ancestor of the NKVD , OGPU , and KGB ) was in operation before 1917 was over. The weaklings of the Duma proved as strategically inept as Lenin was brilliant.

Not all intellectuals allowed the excitement of revolution to blind them. In the recently translated volume of the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s interviews with the critic Victor Duvakin in 1973, Bakhtin recalled his reaction to the February revolution. Since it was still dangerous to express such views, he asked Duvakin not to record them, but Duvakin published Bakhtin’s comments anyway:

BAKHTIN : I’ll tell you this, but there’s no need to record it…

DUVAKIN : We can erase it later…. Or we don’t have to transcribe it, if you prefer.

BAKHTIN : I did not welcome the February Revolution. I thought, or I should say in my circle we believed that it’ll all certainly end very badly. We knew well, by the way, the leaders…of the February Revolution…. We were of the opinion that all those intellectuals were utterly incompetent to govern, they were incompetent to defend the February Revolution…. So, inevitably, the extreme left, the Bolsheviks would take over.2

The wisest fictional characters of March 1917 appreciate what is really going on: during a world war, with German armies advancing rapidly into Russian territory, revolutionaries were calling on soldiers to murder their officers. Mobs looted and killed as work came to a standstill. Such a power vacuum invited the most ruthless organized group to seize power. Solzhenitsyn imagines Lenin thinking, “There was a void in Petersburg…that was suckingly waiting, calling for—his force.”

Anarchy, starvation, and invasion loom, but the word “revolution” blinds most intellectuals. “Revolution! There was, after all, something attractive and inviting in that sound,” they think. “Revolution! The music of the moment!” “Universal brotherhood was now coming!” Instead of seeing reality, these intellectuals imagine themselves strutting on the stage of History. “How could you not light up at the thought that you were taking part in Russia’s moments of greatness!” the third volume of March 1917 begins. “This moment—dreamed of, longed for, by so many generations of the Russian intelligentsia…here it had come.” Almost everyone views events through a haze of romanticized parallels with the French Revolution. We must seize our Bastille, they feel, but what is it? Play “The Marseillaise”! Ludicrously, Mikhail Rodzyanko, the president of the Duma, decides that the revolution has gone far enough, and now must stop. But what is to stop it?

The novel’s fictional heroine, the historian Olda Andozerskaya, recognizes the radical difference between reality and newspaper accounts:

Every Petersburger had seen the revolution with his own eyes. But with the first newspaper page they were told about something quite different. There were vague mentions of “excesses” and “anarchy.”… Everyone knew that soldiers were going from apartment to apartment and stealing, but the newspapers wrote: “thieves and hooligans dressed as soldiers”—as if hooligans were some known social class, or it was so easy for lots of people to dress as soldiers.

Having proclaimed “the Revolution” bloodless, newspaper accounts even referred to the thousands of executed people “as ‘deceased’ rather than killed.”

“The lie became the principle of newspapers starting from the very first day of this unchecked freedom,” Andozerskaya reflects. When they reported that arrested officers—recently regarded as war heroes—had been magnanimously allowed to receive a bed in prison and food from home, it really meant that they weren’t being fed or given a place to sleep. Journalists and intellectuals had long demanded freedom of the press but now suppressed any publication deemed insufficiently radical.

In each Red Wheel novel, Solzhenitsyn explores the mentality leading educated people to conform to prevailing opinion even when it contradicts their most cherished principles. Before the revolution, Andozerskaya shocked her students by saying that a historian writes the truth even when it does not support progressive opinion. Now she reflects:

The newspapers were disgusting, yes, but that was because they spewed society’s vile epidemic: the fear of standing out from everyone else…. Now that the “police inspector was gone” and “we can breathe,” people’s greatest fear was standing out from everyone else…. The dictatorship of the current.

Lenin supposedly remarked that “when we are ready to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope,” but in Solzhenitsyn’s (generally accurate) account, capitalists were even more self-destructive. Wealthy businessmen and other well-placed people destined to be shot implored bloodthirsty revolutionaries to accept sizable cash contributions. Liberal generals and admirals, who immediately proclaimed their allegiance to the revolution and the new Provisional Government, were lynched anyway. Solzhenitsyn describes their pathetic confusion. Meanwhile Nicholas II, whom Solzhenitsyn portrays as a softhearted idiot, reasons that “in [good] weather like this, no evil deed could take place. God would not allow it.” Only Bolsheviks grasp “the unusual nature of revolutionary situations” and the dynamics of power.

Almost without exception, the members of the Provisional Government could do no more than assume revolutionary poses and make speeches inspiring to intellectuals but beyond the comprehension of workers and soldiers. The “paramount principle” to which Prince Lvov, the first head of the Provisional Government, adheres “was belief and trust. Belief in people, all people, our holy people.” To the suggestion that police should put a limit to anarchy and murder, he replies, “Why does a free state need police at all?” Lvov recoils at the very idea of resolute action. “Ah, ‘decisive measures,’ that’s not our language,” he thinks, “it is unworthy of a free alliance of free people. My dear fellows, why so ominous?”

The radical Aleksandr Kerensky, intoxicated by his own voice, supposes he can defeat anarchy and Bolshevism by sheer charisma. Only Vladimir Nabokov, the progressive politician (and father of the novelist) who was murdered by monarchists in 1922 in Berlin, acts competently. He wonders that his colleagues “had no idea how to operate, how to translate thoughts and votes into legislation…. A decision was approved before it had any text, unaccompanied by any figures or budget,” and orders were given that made no sense or could not be implemented. Politicians neglected “the most fundamental act,” establishing their authority in the provinces.

Solzhenitsyn writes so harshly about the liberal Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) and non-Bolshevik socialists of the Provisional Government because he himself had adhered to the common assumption—still predominant in the West—that the February revolution represented Russia’s great hope instead of a stage leading directly to Bolshevism. He began writing The Red Wheel, he explains in Between Two Millstones, under the spell of such ideas, “and they were scattered throughout [his novel] First Circle, for example, and the first edition of Archipelago.” It was only in the mid-1970s, when he consulted archives preserved in the West, that he recognized his mistake. The slide from February to October was a continuous process and Bolshevism its natural outcome. The Red Wheel, he decided, would narrate “the inglorious, six-month-long story of how the ‘victorious’ democracy (fabricated, in Russia, by the educated types) foundered, helpless, of its own accord.”

Solzhenitsyn wanted to leave readers with little alternative to accepting his conclusions. He wanted “to provide proof, rather than impressionistic daubs, which convince no one. A historical epic is not some diversion for the pen—it only has substance if it is truthful all the way through.” He therefore included revealing documents in the text. Several chapters consist entirely of actual newspaper extracts. The result was a work of immense length and formal idiosyncrasy unprecedented even in the Russian tradition of formally idiosyncratic works. Solzhenitsyn employed structural anomaly not as an end in itself, as the Russian Formalists had advocated, but to convey the direct sense of what was really happening.

Most historians trace a coherent narrative of past events, but Solzhenitsyn renders the confusing impressions of participants who had no idea where events were leading and pieced together scraps of shifting evidence and unreliable information. To portray the historical process, Solzhenitsyn explains in Between Two Millstones, one must render “the color of the successive, changeable, momentary opinions” and perceptions. Hundreds of short chapters, shifting between historical and fictional figures, convey the throb of events almost hour by hour.

The section in the third volume of March 1917 devoted to Friday, March 16, for instance, includes chapters 354 to 407. Scenes shift quickly between the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and other generals and telegraph and railway employees, fictional characters representing types of people common at the time, and the novel’s main fictional heroes, all interspersed with newspaper extracts, a chapter of “Fragments from the day,” and the attempt of Tolstoy’s former secretary to intervene on behalf of imprisoned sectarians. One brief chapter depicts what the table of contents describes as “a new daily life for the Executive Committee [of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies].—The Romanov dynasty’s fate.—Start the Streetcars.” If this is difficult for the reader to follow, it was even harder for actual participants in the events.

One newspaper instructed:

Naïve people fear that with the elimination of the monarchy, Russia’s state unity might falter. But it is free political institutions that will strengthen Russian state unity. The new government arose not through self-appointment: on it rests the will of the people.

Every one of these statements proved false. Another newspaper reported:

More than 800 prisoners were released from the local prison (two of them politicals, the rest criminals). Immediately upon release…the courthouse was burned to the ground…. Pogroms, robberies, and murders rained down on the entire city.

A newspaper in the city of Tver described how the governor, seeing a mob heading for his house, phoned the bishop to make confession. One socialist newspaper published a curious “appeal”:

Comrade thieves, wheeler-dealers, robbers, picklocks, swindlers, blackmailers, double-dealers, sots, marauders, pickpockets, cat burglars, vagrants, and other brethren…we have to meet in order to choose representatives to the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies…Unite, comrades, for in unity is strength!… [Signed] Group of conscientious businessmen.

Solzhenitsyn also includes what he calls “screens”: directions for how a scene might be filmed. Frame by frame, chapter 418 depicts how a mob murders the surprised liberal admiral Adrian Nepenin (“He hadn’t expected this treatment!”). The equal sign, Solzhenitsyn explains, means “cut to”:

The whole time we see up ahead—

we see large and up close the admiral’s face,

not yet disenchanted even now,

how he trusted and hoped.

But there, behind, sailor hands are pushing officers aside, dragging them off….

= Trampled snow on the street down which they are leading

= the admiral with the lively, open face, who so believed in these heroes in black.

Yet another perspective appears in the brief proverbs and sayings Solzhenitsyn places in large print between chapters to evoke folk wisdom that’s beyond the reach of the participants: “FOR THE TSAR’S SIN GOD WILL PUNISH THE ENTIRE LAND”; “SOMEONE ELSE’S FOOL IS A JOKE, YOUR OWN FOOL A CALAMITY.” Solzhenitsyn grasped that this piling on of evidence taxes readers’ patience: “And yes, I do understand that I am overloading the Wheel with detailed historical material—but it is that very material that’s needed for categorical proof; and I’d never taken a vow of fidelity to the novel form.” This comment recalls Tolstoy’s explanation about the formal oddities of War and Peace, which contains documents, a map, and nonfictional essays. Like March 1917, it depicts events not according to an overall narrative but in all the confusing immediacy with which they were experienced. “What is War and Peace?” Tolstoy famously asked in his essay “Some Words About the Book War and Peace”:

It is not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wished to express and was able to express in that form in which it is expressed. Such an announcement of disregard of conventional form in an artistic production might seem presumptuous…. But the history of Russian literature since the time of Pushkin not only affords many examples of such deviation from European forms but does not offer a single example of the contrary. From Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House…there is not a single artistic prose work rising at all above mediocrity, which quite fits into the form of a novel, epic, or story.

Such unconventionality itself became a conventional mark of Russianness, a sort of literary patriotism. Russians wrote what Henry James called “large, loose, baggy monsters” because of their conviction that “truth” was more important than harmonious form.

All the same, Solzhenitsyn considered his differences from Tolstoy more important than any similarities. August 1914, the first novel of The Red Wheel, begins with the fictional Sanya questioning Tolstoy about his uncompromising pacifism and his insistence that love is the only proper response to evil. “But are you sure…that you don’t exaggerate the power of human love?” Sanya asks.

You say…that evil does not come from an evil nature…but out of ignorance…. But…it isn’t at all like that, Lev Nikolaevich, it just isn’t so! Evil refuses to know the truth…. Evil people usually know better than anybody else just what they are doing. And go on doing it.

The novels to follow, especially when depicting Lenin and the Bolsheviks, illustrate how right Sanya is. Nicholas II, the Provisional Government, and even the generals refuse to use force, “just so there is no bloodshed,” they think. The main reason the Bolsheviks won was precisely that they took advantage of this tenderheartedness.

The essays concluding War and Peace outline a determinist theory of history at odds with the book’s preceding narrative. Both the essays and the narrative itself reject the view that “great men” affect historical events, whose outcomes actually depend on the hundred million imperceptible decisions of ordinary people. Solzhenitsyn, for his part, rejects both deterministic and “great man” views of history. Time and again, he shows us characters who recognize that if only generals had deployed military units early enough, the slide toward Bolshevism could have been arrested. Far from inevitable, the outcome of the revolution resulted from the cowardice and indecisiveness of crucial leaders. That is why so much of March 1917 is devoted to tracing how people in authority think and react (or fail to react) to events.

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn argues, the tsar’s most able minister, Pyotr Stolypin, had almost reversed the trend to revolution with a series of far-reaching reforms, which included making peasants into proprietors who could own land individually, not just as members of a traditional peasant commune (obshchina). His assassination in 1911 by the terrorist (and possible double agent) Dmitri Bogrov diverted Russia from peace, prosperity, and the gradual extension of individual rights and respect for the rule of law. So important is Stolypin’s career, which took place before the beginning of The Red Wheel, that August 1914 includes a two-hundred-page flashback (in a section labeled “From Previous Knots”) about his career and death. The prudent but decisive Stolypin represented the Russia that might have been.

A patriot opposed to Russian imperialism and glorification of war, Solzhenitsyn eluded the usual categories of Russian or Western thought. His enemies therefore found it easy to assign him to one or another disreputable outlook that was more familiar. Those enemies included the KGB , liberal Russian émigrés like the writer Andrei Sinyavsky and the scholar Efim Etkind, extreme Russian nationalists, liberal Western journalists and intellectuals, and most members of my own profession, whom Solzhenitsyn disparages as “Slavists.”

In his foreword to the second volume of Between Two Millstones, which focuses on the book’s most controversial arguments, Daniel J. Mahoney—generally regarded as the world’s greatest Solzhenitsyn scholar—observes that absurd and contradictory charges were leveled at Solzhenitsyn. On the one hand, a Russian émigré journal accused him of “selling out to the Jews,” and a Russian publisher based in London insinuated he was really the Jew “Solzhenitsker.” On the other, the Jewish magazine Midstream called August 1914 a new Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Despite his exposure of Soviet forced labor camps in Gulag Archipelago, he was pronounced “an ally of the Kremlin,” perhaps even a secret agent. Solzhenitsyn recalled that the émigré Lev Kopelev called him “the leader of a ruthless party” devoted to

extreme Russian nationalism…more terrifying than Bolshevism. Kopelev went on to conflate me even with Stalin and the Ayatollah Khomeini, while “member of the [ultranationalist and violently anti-Semitic] Black Hundreds, monarchist, theocrat” were some of his mildest monikers.

Few Westerners regarded Solzhenitsyn as a Bolshevik agent, but many believed that his nationalism entailed imperialist and anti-Semitic views. After all, Solzhenitsyn considered himself a patriot. He objected that Westerners used the terms “Russian” and “Soviet” as synonymous when, in fact, “Russia and Communism had the same relationship as a sick man and his disease.” Solzhenitsyn’s thinking eluded received categories. Unlike others who wanted to see Bolshevism end, he rejected revolutionary violence and insisted on gradual change. And what sort of nationalist or imperialist insists that his country should give up its empire?

In Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (1991), for instance, he implored Mikhail Gorbachev to grant the non-Slavic Soviet republics their independence. Indeed, if they didn’t want it, he insisted, Russia should secede from them. While Russia should try to persuade other Slavic republics to remain with Russia, he argued, they, too, should be allowed to leave without hindrance. Foreseeing the conflicts likely to arise eventually if Ukraine, with its large Russian-speaking population and its close cultural ties to Russia, chose to secede, Solzhenitsyn, who considered himself both Russian and Ukrainian, hoped to preclude the devastating conflict we see today. Far from wanting Russia to hold on to territory, this patriot—uniquely, so far as I know—even recommended returning the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan.

Nationalism, as we usually envisage it, appalled him. “I note with alarm that the awakening Russian self-awareness has to a large extent been unable to free itself of great-power thinking and of imperial delusions,” he warned his countrymen. “What a pernicious perversion of consciousness it is to argue that we are a huge country ‘for all that, and we are taken seriously everywhere.’” As Japan renounced imperial ambitions and flourished, so should Russia: “We must strive not for the expansion of the state, but for a clarity of what remains of our spirit. By separating off twelve republics…Russia will in fact free itself for a precious inner development.”

Solzhenitsyn believed that during the preceding hundred years the Russian national character had been corrupted, and therefore the country’s most important task must be spiritual restoration. To Westerners unfamiliar with the language of spirituality so important in Russian culture, all this talk of renewing the soul seemed at best woolly, at worst mere cover for theocracy. The charge of anti-Semitism particularly offended Solzhenitsyn, who, as some critics conceded, defended Jewish dissidents and the right of Jews to emigrate in order to avoid religious and other persecution in the USSR. Accusers relied primarily on passages in August 1914 devoted to the assassination of Stolypin by Bogrov, who was Jewish. Since Stolypin had been Russia’s best hope, some thought, Solzhenitsyn must be blaming the Jews for its terrible fate.

Having written about the scourge of Russian anti-Semitism, I was puzzled to hear that the Bogrov passages were taken as proof by some Western critics of Solzhenitsyn’s hatred of Jews. I knew this novel well and had discerned no anti-Semitism. After these accusations were first made following the 1983 publication in Russian of the expanded version of August 1914, Solzhenitsyn demanded:

And what kind of reasoning is this?—if Bogrov was a Jew, and the death of Stolypin was a disaster for Russia and made it easier to start a revolution, then that means Solzhenitsyn blames the Jews for the 1917 revolution? In effect, they are demanding the censorship of history.

As Solzhenitsyn also observed, most Westerners making this charge had not even read the offending passages, since the novel had not yet been translated. When The Washington Post, which had published these accusations, commissioned John Glad to translate the passages suspected of being anti-Semitic, it “was obliged to mention that he had ‘found no grounds for accusing [Solzhenitsyn] of anti-Semitism.’” Still more telling, when a translation of the expanded August 1914 finally appeared, the accusers fell silent: “All those critics seemed, in an instant, to have lost their memory.”

Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life’s fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that, as he stated in Rebuilding Russia,

political activity is by no means the principal mode of human life…. The more energetic the political activity in a country, the greater is the loss to spiritual life. Politics must not swallow up all of a people’s spiritual and creative energies. Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul.

In Between Two Millstones he repeated: “Political life is not life’s most important aspect…a pure atmosphere in society cannot be created by any juridical legislation, but by moral cleansing.” Commenting on The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn explains that “no matter what depths of evil the narrative has plumbed, this must not be allowed to warp the soul of either author or reader—you must arrive at a harmonious contemplation.”

The central passage of March 1917 concerns not a historical figure’s political ruminations but the fictional Varsonofiev’s assessment of his life, with all its irretrievable mistakes and erroneous judgments that seemed so right at the time. Remembering his fervent hopes for revolution and the republic that would make life sublime, Varsonofiev now asks rhetorically:

A S INFLATION SURGES and central banks start to reverse the ultra-easy monetary policies that defined the past 14 years in financial markets, one of the starkest signs of the period of cheap money is fading away. The pool of negative-yielding bonds is evaporating.

Less than three years ago, as much as 40% of global government debt offered negative yields. Today that share has fallen below 10%. Much of it is concentrated in very short-term European and Japanese debt, the first of which is not long for this world, if market expectations for interest-rate rises in the euro area are to be believed. The volume of negative-yielding corporate bonds, an especially eye-popping element of recent financial history, is close to zero.

It might seem strange, given this backdrop, to say that the coming years will still be defined by investors reaching for yield. But if the past decade was characterised by a desperate search for nominal returns, an equally frantic scramble for real income seems likely to follow.

Negative yields brought fewer shifts to investors’ habits than was feared in 2016, when oil prices tumbled and German and Japanese ten-year bond yields first dipped below zero. Conservative investors—reserve managers and pension funds, say, with tens of trillions of dollars to deploy—still bought bonds. Mass hoarding of physical cash, which offers a nominal interest rate of zero, did not come to pass. That is in large part because stubbornly low inflation left real yields relatively little changed. And to most investors, real yields—the ability to protect and enhance the value of a pot of capital—are what matter.

The road ahead looks at least as bumpy for investors seeking real yields as the one that lies behind, if not rockier. As expectations of interest-rate rises have ratcheted up, the ten-year Treasury yield, at 2.8%, is higher than it was for nine-tenths of the time in the past decade. The yield on inflation-protected Treasuries is still around zero. That is higher than it was during most of the pandemic, but barely above its level during the deflationary wobble in 2016. In the period since 2012, real yields have been higher about two-thirds of the time.

The situation in the euro zone is even more extreme. The real yields on long-dated government bonds are far lower than they were during the height of the deflationary panic. A German inflation-linked bond maturing in 2046 now offers a yield of -1.6%, compared with -0.8% in mid-2016. A modest increase in expectations for interest rates has been swamped by the bigger jump in expected inflation.

What does this change in regime mean for conventional portfolios, which are balanced between equities and bonds? When nominal yields on newly purchased bonds were tumbling and inflation was low, investors at least saw the benefit of capital gains on their existing holdings (bond prices move inversely to yields). Now bond investors must suffer both negative real returns on newly bought bonds, and a decline in the value of their stock of holdings.

Some assets, such as American high-yield corporate bonds and some emerging-market corporate debt, benefited when investors first searched for yield. The recent change in financial conditions complicates the outlook for them. High-yield bonds, for example, are more likely to offer positive real yields. But rising interest rates and the higher possibility of recession make those assets riskier, too. Some emerging-market bonds may gain favour: China is one of the few countries where short-term real interest rates are positive; Brazil, Mexico and South Korea issue inflation-linked debt with yields in positive territory. But hedging against currency risk could eat up the entire return.

Equity in both public and private markets, and underlying assets where returns have some sort of link to nominal economic growth, rather than to interest rates alone, may be more attractive. Assets that carry some pricing power—such as rental property, and commodity and infrastructure investments—are also likely to be favoured.

Even as nominal bond yields undergo their most dramatic rises in a generation, the picture for real yields will remain familiar to investors acquainted with the pressures of the past decade. Unless the world’s big central banks become drastically more hawkish about inflation, and engineer an economic recession—much as Paul Volcker, then the Federal Reserve’s chairman, did in the 1980s—the scramble for real income could prove to be a decisive force in markets.

Can the Fed pull off an “immaculate disinflation”? (Apr 2nd)

G REAT UPHEAVALS always spark innovation. The covid-19 pandemic is no different. The share of new patent applications in America connected to remote-working technologies more than doubled between January and September 2020. Opportunities abound to invest in a host of transformative early-stage ideas. The pitches below are from startups that aim to improve the modern workplace and are inexplicably struggling to raise capital. Are you in?

Offices are being rejigged to allow more room for collaborative working. More desks are being shared and space is scarcer. Workers often need to make reservations to secure a spot. Towels on Deckchairs is a German startup that uses algorithms and manual workers to claim and hold the best desks. Our high-frequency bots can book slots as soon as reservation systems open; in offices that operate a finders-keepers system, our gig workers will physically occupy space for our customers.

Bottled Boss produces a line of fragrances designed to help harder-hearted managers display their more human side. “Empathy”, with its notes of cedar, has a sedating effect, rendering the wearer unable to do much else except look understanding. “Vulnerability” does not smell of anything but if you squirt it in your eyes, it does make you cry.

Class Pet takes the same contact-tracing technology used to monitor whether people have been exposed to covid-sufferers and applies it to the problem of proximity bias in the office. By tracking how often people are physically close to each other, Class Pet can alert firms to whether bosses are giving too much face time to specific people in the office. It’s also excellent for gossip.

Employees are under scrutiny as never before, both in the office and at home (see Class Pet). The degree of surveillance is becoming more transparent: a law goes into force in New York state next month requiring employers to tell workers how they monitor their activities. Chaff is a new startup that gives employees a range of options to fight back. Chaff’s customers can alter web-camera feeds to show pre-recorded looped footage of them working furiously. Proprietary software will move cursors at random intervals in order to show that employees have not fallen asleep. (Not available in China.)

Video Vici improves the experience that people have on video calls. We have developed a set of features that work on all the main conferencing platforms, and include the following: time-on-mic countdown clocks, to limit the amount of time that any one person spends blathering; a ticker showing how many people are not paying any attention to you at any one time; and nostril filters to help with unfortunate camera angles.

From Serene and Focusmate to Todoist and Evernote, a bewildering array of productivity apps promises to make workers more efficient. Cull takes a new approach to this problem, by ruthlessly prioritising the things you need to do. We use artificial intelligence to work out which colleagues are above you in the organisation, or soon might be. Messages from these people are pulled into your inboxes and notifications, and ranked in order of seniority. Communication from other people is automatically deleted before you even see it.

The commute into the office wastes time that could be spent a) more productively or b) snoring. The same logic applies to the time people spend getting ready to work from home. That is why we founded Bedesk, maker of a revolutionary piece of furniture that allows you to sleep and work in one location. Modelled on hospital beds, Bedesks can automatically adjust their angle of recline and feature a foldable work surface with multiple charger points. Headboards can be stamped with your corporate logo, and our first 1,000 customers will receive a free bedpan.

Pretty soon it won’t be enough to spout off about the metaverse; you will actually have to go there. Metamorph is like a personal shopper for your avatar, offering customised advice on what your digital twin should look like. Higher-end avatar designers such as Ready Player Me already allow you to reshape eyebrows, thicken hair, choose to wear virtual combat fatigues and generally have a digital mid-life crisis. Millions of middle-aged workers are about to make some seriously embarrassing choices. Don’t be one of them.

If any of these investment opportunities appeals to you, please just send a blank cheque to The Economist and we will make sure it gets to the right people.

The case for managerial decency (Apr 2nd)

B EFORE THE pandemic, there were a few accepted facts about the euro zone. Heavily indebted southern member states would try to persuade northerners to agree to jointly issue bonds, and fail. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, would talk of a big common budget, only to be met by opposition in Berlin. And everyone agreed—some would say pretended—that Italy’s government debt was manageable. That helped give the European Central Bank ( ECB ) political cover to buy Italian bonds during downturns.

Covid-19 has laid many of those truisms to rest. In 2020 the bloc set up a €750bn ($813bn) common recovery fund, financed by European bonds, to counter the economic fallout from the virus. The ECB ‘s pandemic bond-buying scheme, through which it has bought €1.6trn in government debt, also helped contain borrowing costs for the zone’s more indebted members. But Italy’s big debt burden remains: in fact, it has grown, from 134% of GDP on the eve of the pandemic to 151% by the end of 2021. As inflation surges, the ECB has begun to signal that it will stop net bond purchases after the summer. What does that shift hold for Italian debt?

Italy’s bond yields depend in part on the country’s economic health. And it has been in better shape than its huge debt ratio might suggest. Recovery from the pandemic has been faster than expected, and the European Commission estimates that spending from the recovery fund could boost GDP by 1.5-2.5% over the next four years. The war in Ukraine, and the attendant rise in energy prices, is likely to dampen activity: on April 19th the IMF revised its forecasts for Italian GDP growth in 2022 down to 2.3%, from 3.8% in January. The hope, though, is that the reforms that are tied to receiving the EU ’s recovery funds—such as an overhaul of public administration and the justice system—will bolster the economy over the long term.

With growth supported and inflation high, Italy’s nominal debt burden should eventually start to decline. Carlo Cottarelli, a former director of Italy’s fiscal watchdog, reckons that the country’s debt ratio could fall by three percentage points a year, provided that its growth spurt continues. Yields will also be affected by what the ECB does next. It has indicated that it will stop making new purchases that add to its stock of holdings. But it is unlikely to reduce those holdings, whether by letting maturing bonds run off, or by making active sales (a policy known as quantitative tightening). Speaking on April 14th Christine Lagarde, the bank’s president, said that such balance-sheet shrinkage was much farther ahead along the path of monetary tightening. The central bank will therefore continue to maintain its stock of assets by re-investing the proceeds of maturing bonds, and so will continue to be a source of demand for Italian debt. Furthermore, the central bank’s view of its role as a lender of last resort has matured. Ms Lagarde emphasised the bank’s philosophy of “flexibility”, in the name of ensuring that borrowing costs in weaker (ie, southern) parts of the euro area do not deviate too much from those for the rest of the bloc. That approach could extend to future quantitative tightening, which would be good news for Italy. The ECB could, for example, decide to reduce its holdings of German bonds first, to allow Italy more time to bring down its debt. Perhaps the biggest change as the ECB scales back its asset purchases, though, is that investors will return to following Italian politics keenly. Parliamentary elections are due next spring, and there is a possibility that a populist government emerges victorious. It would probably be less enthusiastic about implementing the reforms that the recovery fund has so far encouraged. That would cloud the growth outlook and worsen the debt problem.

If the government were also hellbent on picking fights with the rest of Europe, the ECB may be forced to be a lot less flexible. Investors could begin to fear that the central bank might be unwilling to backstop a government that blatantly violates “macroeconomic reasonability”, worries Francesco Papadia, a former ECB official. In 2018 the formation of a populist coalition led the spread between Italian and German bond yields to double within days to nearly three percentage points. The fate of Italian bonds, in other words, ultimately rests with Rome. ■

C ENTRAL BANKS are supposed to inspire confidence in the economy by keeping inflation low and stable. America’s Federal Reserve has suffered a hair-raising loss of control. In March consumer prices were 8.5% higher than a year earlier, the fastest annual rise since 1981. In Washington inflation-watching is usually the preserve of wonks in shabby offices. Now nearly a fifth of Americans say inflation is the country’s most important problem; President Joe Biden has released oil from strategic reserves to try to curb petrol prices; and Democrats are searching for villains to blame, from greedy bosses to Vladimir Putin.

It is the Fed, however, that had the tools to stop inflation and failed to use them in time. The result is the worst overheating in a big and rich economy in the 30-year era of inflation-targeting central banks. The good news is that inflation may have peaked at last. But the Fed’s 2% target will remain a long way off—forcing agonising choices on the central bank. Apologists for America’s policymakers point to annual price rises of 7.5% in the euro area and 7% in Britain as evidence of a global problem, driven by the soaring price of commodities, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nearly three-quarters of the euro zone’s inflation is attributable to rocketing energy and food prices.

America, though, benefits from abundant shale gas, and its higher incomes mean that staples have a smaller effect on average prices. Strip out energy and food and the euro zone’s inflation is 3%—but America’s is 6.5%. Also, America’s labour market, unlike Europe’s, is clearly overheating, with wages growing at an average pace of nearly 6%. Recent falls in the prices of oil, used cars and shipping probably mean that inflation will fall in the coming months. But it will stay far too high, given the underlying upward pressure on prices.

Uncle Sam has been on a unique path because of Mr Biden’s excessive $1.9trn fiscal stimulus, which passed in March 2021. It added extra oomph to an economy that was already recovering fast after multiple rounds of spending, and brought the total pandemic stimulus to 25% of GDP —the highest in the rich world. As the White House hit the accelerator, the Fed should have applied the brakes. It did not. Its hesitancy stemmed partly from the difficulty of forecasting the path of the economy during the pandemic, and also from the tendency of policymakers to fight the last war. For most of the decade after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 the economy was hung over and monetary policy was too tight. Predicting inflation’s return was for those who wore tinfoil hats.

Yet the Fed’s failure also reflects an insidious change among central bankers globally. As our special report in this issue explains, around the world many are dissatisfied with the staid work of managing the business cycle and wish to take on more glamorous tasks, from fighting climate change to minting digital currencies. At the Fed the shift was apparent in promises that it would pursue a “broad-based and inclusive” recovery. The rhetorical shift ignored the fact, taught to every undergraduate economist, that the rate of unemployment at which inflation takes off is not something central banks can control.

In September 2020 the Fed codified its new views by promising not to raise interest rates at all until employment had already reached its maximum sustainable level. Its pledge guaranteed that it would fall far behind the curve. It was cheered on by left-wing activists who wanted to imbue one of Washington’s few functional institutions with an egalitarian ethos.

The result was a mess which the Fed is only now trying to clear up. In December it projected a measly 0.75 percentage points of interest-rate rises this year. Today an increase of 2.5 points is expected. Both policymakers and financial markets think this will be enough to bring inflation to heel. They are probably being too optimistic again. The usual way to rein in inflation is to raise rates above their neutral level—thought to be about 2-3%—by more than the rise in underlying inflation. That points to a federal-funds rate of 5-6%, unseen since 2007.

Rates that high would tame rising prices—but by engineering a recession. In the past 60 years the Fed has on only three occasions managed significantly to slow America’s economy without causing a downturn. It has never done so having let inflation rise as high as it is today.

An American contraction therefore hangs over the global economy as part of a trio of risks, along with Europe’s energy security and China’s struggle to suppress covid-19. Poor and middle-income countries in particular have a lot to lose from sharply higher rates at the Fed, which will tempt away capital and weaken their exchange rates, especially if a global downturn saps demand for their exports at the same time.

Does the Fed have the stomach to inflict such economic pain? Many economists advocate higher inflation, because in the long run interest rates would go up in tandem, lifting them further away from zero, below which they are hard to cut in a crisis. Inflation is already helping the federal government by shrinking the real value of its debts. Around 2025, when the Fed reviews its policymaking framework, it will have the chance to raise the target. There is nothing special about 2%, except the fact that the Fed has promised it in the past.

My word is my bond

Inflation that is stable and modestly above 2% might be tolerable for the real economy, but there is no guarantee the Fed’s stance today can deliver even that. And breaking promises has consequences. It hurts long-term bondholders, including foreign central banks and governments which own $4trn-worth of Treasury bonds. (A decade of 4% inflation instead of 2% would cut the purchasing power of money repaid at the end of that period by 18%.) It might add an inflation risk premium to America’s cost of borrowing. And if even America broke its inflation promises in tough times, investors might worry that other central banks—many of which are looking over their shoulders at indebted governments—would do the same. In the 1980s the recessions brought about by Paul Volcker’s Fed laid the foundations for inflation-targeting regimes worldwide. Every month inflation runs too hot, part of that hard-won credibility ebbs away. ■

Editor’s note (April 21st 2022): After this article was published, Elon Musk said he has received funding to finance a takeover of Twitter, and that he is exploring whether to launch a tender offer to all Twitter shareholders.

I DA TARBELL , author of an exposé of the Standard Oil Company in 1904, described its founder, John D. Rockefeller, as “the most successful man in the world”. By that she meant “the man who has got the most of what men most want”. These days Elon Musk fits that description to a tee. Not only is he worth more than God. He invents things that are changing the world, from electric cars to space rockets. A word from him—on anything from crypto to meme stocks—turns retail investors into slobbering Pavlovians. With millions of adoring fans, he is an idol of modern capitalism.

He is also a shaper of capitalist trends, and that is where the problem lies. His fetish for Twitter—first as a megaphone to promote himself and his companies and now as a plaything that he has offered $43bn to buy—is taking the world of business in a reckless new direction. Call it GameStop for gazillionaires. Like last year’s craze for the American games retailer (“Gamestonk!!” as Mr Musk called it), he promotes the idea that the normal rules of investment do not apply. He paints stewards of fair play—regulators and boards—as pettifogging enemies of progress. And he idealises surreal narratives over economic facts. Such mischief-making has hitherto mostly been confined to the fringes of finance. In his pursuit of Twitter, Mr Musk is taking it into the mainstream.

He has brought the whiff of the meme stock to Twitter, not your usual microcap candidate for meme-ification. Before Mr Musk revealed a stake in excess of 9% on April 4th, the social-media platform was the sort of business attractive only to true believers or contrarians. Its advertising revenue has never come close to its potential. Despite its name recognition, it has been a lacklustre investment. Now Mr Musk has cast his bid to take it private as a move to protect free speech, rather than to make money. Presumably, that appeals to his fan base. Day-traders are already piling in on his coat-tails; their share of Twitter’s float has risen from 8% to 13.3%, according to Vanda Research, an investment adviser. Option trading has spiked, as has discussion of Twitter on forums like Reddit’s WallStreetBets. It could just be harmless fun. However, it could also play into Mr Musk’s hands. Individual investors are likelier to support his tactics than the institutional old guard.

Such tactics reek of populism. In effect, they seek to diminish institutions while elevating Mr Musk’s own stature as Twitter’s saviour. That includes bating those tasked with ensuring that such takeovers are done fairly and transparently, chiefly the Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ), America’s market regulator, and Twitter’s board. Mr Musk still publicly berates the SEC over a $40m settlement that he and Tesla agreed to pay in 2018 regarding a tweet he sent saying he could take the electric-car company private. In his recent Twitter investment, a class-action lawsuit alleges that he violated an SEC rule by not revealing the stake within ten days of it exceeding 5%. As for the board, since it introduced a “poison pill” on April 15th, setting penalties if he lifts his stake above 15%, he has hit back. He has tweeted a poll that purports to show his followers are heavily in favour of shareholders deciding whether Twitter should be taken private, not the board. He has also noted how few Twitter shares board members own.

For all this impishness, his tactics also trample on the principle that markets need reliable information to function correctly. Fuelling the ongoing guessing game about his intentions, he has tweeted a reference to Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender”, implying—at least to those blessed with meme-stock intuition—that he may try to sidestep the board by launching a tender offer to all shareholders. Then again, he may not be serious about buying Twitter. ”I’m not sure if I will actually be able to acquire it,” he said in a TED interview recorded shortly after he had made his bid on April 14th. For any other suitors circling Twitter, reportedly including two private-equity groups, Thoma Bravo and Apollo Global, this could be a stumbling block. While Mr Musk remains a shareholder, his unpredictability makes him a poison pill of his own.

The impression that if you are the world’s richest man you can have fun with the rules of the game is one thing. As problematic is the idea that Mr Musk might end up controlling one of the world’s most powerful means of communication at a time when fortunes are won and lost on “story stocks”—those driven by narratives discussed on forums like Twitter. Mr Musk knows all about the power of the platform. No CEO has the Twitter presence that he does. He has an army of 82.6m followers, many of whom have helped amplify his tweets promoting Tesla, making the site in effect the main marketing department for the $1trn company. Tesla, which on April 20th reported record sales in the first quarter, goes from strength to strength. Twitter helped fuel its rise.

It may not be just his Twitter “fanboys” who have bolstered the Tesla narrative. According to David Kirsch of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, tweets generated by “fanbots”, or what he claims are pro-Tesla algorithms, accounted for 23% of all messages on Twitter containing the hashtag # TSLA between 2010 and 2020, or 36,000 tweets. The findings are still under review, and do not include comparisons with other firms’ fanbots over the same period. But widespread use of fanbots could suggest that Twitter has even greater power to blare out corporate propaganda than previously assumed.

Citizen Musk

Propaganda is not a word widely associated with business. The world has plenty of reasons to worry about politicians buying media assets to peddle ideologies. Less so tech titans. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for instance, is thought to be an arm’s-length owner of the Washington Post. Mr Musk is more complicated. What he builds is the work of genius. But when it comes to Twitter, he is often childish and capricious. Imagine if Rockefeller had bought himself the Twitter of his era. He, too, would have had fanboys. And Tarbell’s exposé might have been trolled out of existence. ■

Read more from Schumpeter, our columnist on global business:

How much of a risk is opacity for China's Shein? (Apr 16th)

Save globalisation! Buy a Chinese EV (Apr 9th)

Is cancel culture coming to free trade? (Apr 2nd)

K EEPING SHAREHOLDERS satisfied used to be straightforward. If a firm could announce juicy profits, healthy cashflow and a perky dividend at the annual general meeting ( AGM ), applause was assured and few hard questions would be asked. But in recent years these meetings have shifted from routine talk of balance-sheets to loud battles over companies’ broader purpose. Where once it was enough for bosses to nod to some vague notion of “stakeholder capitalism”, now some investors demand that they present detailed strategies on everything from the environment to racial justice and even abortion. More, too, are highlighting the dissonance between companies’ stated values and their political donations. Shareholders at American firms face a record volume of proposals on environmental and social issues: 576 resolutions as of April 12th, up from 499 last year. In the coming weeks an unprecedented number will be put to a vote.

This reflects investors’ growing and understandable interest in mitigating risks that could threaten a wide variety of firms, such as climate change. It is also a side-effect of gridlock in Washington. Frustrated at the near-impossibility of getting bills through Congress, many activists are seeking change by passing motions at AGM s instead. This year the number of climate-related proposals faced by American firms has jumped by more than 40%. This is not the only lever that environmentalists can pull. In Europe they are increasingly using the courts to sway fossil-fuel firms and other big emitters. In California the state government is seeking to re-establish its credentials as a green pioneer. Nonetheless, shareholder activism is potent, and likely to intensify.

This is partly because it has become simpler. The past decade has seen a concentration of voting power among managers of large index funds. Three asset managers—BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard—together own over a fifth of the average company in the S&P 500, but wield even greater clout, because only 30% of retail investors bother to vote their shares. So the decision to approve a shareholder resolution often rests with just a few managers and pension trustees overseeing assets owned by millions. That means activists can concentrate their lobbying on a few big decision-makers, rather than having to track down and cajole lots of small ones.

A GROUP OF rich do-gooders tried a bold experiment 15 years ago. The Gates Foundation, a charity, and five countries put $1.5bn into a pilot project aimed at encouraging research and development in a previously neglected area. The “advanced market commitment” ( AMC ) they created promised rewards to drugmakers that came up with an effective vaccine against pneumococcus, a disease which killed many children in poor countries. Defying sceptics, three vaccines have since been developed. More than 150m children have been immunised, saving 700,000 lives.

Now several initiatives aim to apply the same approach to a different scourge. This month four big tech companies—Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and Stripe—and the sustainability practice of McKinsey, a management consultancy, pledged $925m over nine years to bootstrap technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an effort to arrest global warming. A similar AMC -esque project is expected to be unveiled in May at the annual plutocrat retreat in Davos hosted by the World Economic Forum ( WEF ). That project’s instigators in the First Movers Coalition, which was forged last November and unites the WEF , America’s State Department and dozens of big global firms, have already made purchasing commitments aimed at helping to decarbonise the aviation, shipping, trucking and steel industries.

Experts reckon the world must remove about 6bn tonnes of CO 2 a year from the atmosphere by 2050 to avert the worst impacts of climate change. Less than 10,000 tonnes have so far been permanently extracted in this way. Closing the gap thus requires heavy-duty bootstraps.

To be eligible for the tech companies’ scheme, known as the Frontier Fund, carbon-removal technologies have to pass several tests (besides obvious ones like being safe and legal). One is permanence: the technologies must be able to store the stuff sucked from the air for at least 1,000 years. Another is scalability: they must not have land-use requirements that are in conflict with food security. A third is cost: they must have a path towards a price tag of less than $100 per tonne of carbon dioxide removed (down from hundreds of dollars or more per tonne for existing techniques). These are “absolutely foundational to getting anything close to net-zero”, says Mark Patel of McKinsey.

The goal is not to invest in carbon-tech startups, explains Nan Ransohoff of Stripe, which controls the Frontier Fund and will chip in more than a quarter of the kitty. Rather, the idea is to be early customers for the nascent carbon-removal techniques, which can help meet the buyers’ own decarbonisation targets. For early-stage carbon-suckers, the fund will offer low-volume pre-purchase agreements. For bigger firms scaling up proven methods, it will offer larger contracts that pay providers for tonnes of carbon once these are delivered to the agreed specifications. Suppliers can then use these commitments to secure financing and expand capacity.

“A billion dollars is a big number but not even close to big enough,” concedes Peter Freed, who leads the project at Meta. But, he hopes, it may “start a snowball rolling down the hill”. And, if all goes well, it will keep some snow from melting, too. ■

For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. And for more coverage of climate change, register for The Climate Issue, our fortnightly newsletter, or visit our climate-change hub

C HINA MERCHANTS BANK has always stood out from the pack. It was founded by a former communist guerrilla in 1987 as China’s first commercial lender with a corporate-shareholding structure. It is part of a group with ties to a Qing dynasty project that sought in the 19th century to build an indigenous steam-powered shipping industry in order to compete with the West. The English name “merchants’‘ is a poor rendition of the Chinese, which is better translated as “investor recruitment”.

The bank has been at the forefront of China’s economic transformation. The southern manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, where it is based, virtually sprang up around it from the late 1980s onwards. Its revolutionary founder, Yuan Geng, also launched some of China’s earliest economic reforms. It lent to private entrepreneurs, while clunky state banks preferred mainly to lend to other state entities. Although its shareholders are largely government-controlled, China Merchants Bank has operated more like a privately run group. This helped it attract better managers than the country’s four largest state lenders—Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China ( ICBC ), China Construction Bank ( CCB ) and Agricultural Bank of China.

Such advantages were not lost on investors. China Merchants Bank’s market capitalisation soared, reaching about $230bn in May last year. At that time it was one of the largest banks in the world, behind only JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America in the West. Most big Chinese state lenders are considered inefficient allocators of capital and, as a result, trade at much lower price-to-book-value ratios. By mid-2021 China Merchants Bank had also surpassed all but one of its state rivals, ICBC , in market capitalisation. Some analysts expected it to become China’s most valuable bank.

That target now looks out of reach. China’s financial sector is in the throes of yet another corruption purge. On April 18th the bank’s board removed its president and chief executive, Tian Huiyu, without explanation. Mr Tian has not been accused of wrongdoing but local media have linked his removal to a corruption probe that has shaken the Shenzhen branch of CCB , his previous employer. Several of Mr Tian’s former colleagues have been investigated for serious breaches of the law.

The incident has rocked China Merchants Bank’s share price, which is now 29% below its peak last year. By April 21st its market capitalisation had fallen to $162bn, placing it behind three of its state-owned rivals. More worrying are the long-term implications for the bank’s operations. Mr Tian had run China Merchants Bank since 2013. Its ability to keep managers for long periods set it apart from state lenders, which often shuffle their executive teams and make appointments based on political merit. That stability had been key to the bank’s industry-beating corporate governance, Chen Shujin of Jefferies, a broker, has noted. Now it is in doubt.

China Merchants Bank had so far avoided a high-level scandal. If a graft investigation spreads through the bank, it may end up looking more like other troubled, inefficient lenders in China. Recruiting investors will be that much harder. ■

I T STARTED IN America, but the surge in inflation has spread to the rest of the rich world. Consumer prices across the OECD club of mostly rich countries are rising by 7.7%, year on year, the fastest pace of increase in at least three decades. In the Netherlands, inflation is nearing 10%, even higher than in America, while in Estonia it is over 15%. How forcefully should central banks respond to the inflationary surge? The answer depends on how much damage inflation is causing. And that depends on whom you ask.

Inflation is regarded as costly because it erodes people’s savings and distorts price signals. And there are unquestionably instances when it has brought an economy to its knees. During Weimar Germany’s period of hyperinflation in the 1920s people’s savings evaporated, eliminating the middle class and paving the way for the rise of fascism. Inflation also spiralled out of control in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. As price signals broke down, millions went without food.

But in more moderate inflationary episodes, such as the current one, the evidence for economic carnage is weaker. One common worry is that increases in prices outpace rises in wages, causing people’s real incomes to decline. This has almost certainly been happening across rich countries in recent months. American real hourly earnings fell by nearly 3% in the year to March.

On the whole, though, economists see a tenuous connection between inflation and workers’ real living standards. Sometimes prices rise faster than wages; sometimes they do not. British real wages grew strongly during the inflationary era of the 1970s. According to a study published in 1975, American workers, whether unionised or not, had seen inflation-busting pay rises in the preceding decade. The Economist has looked at data for 35 OECD countries going as far back as 1990. In years when inflation exceeded 5%, we find, real wages rose on average. Inflation can also help the unemployed find jobs, even as it hurts people already in work. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09 sterling depreciated, lifting inflation in Britain and reducing real wages. Companies could then afford to hire more workers.

The notion that inflation messes with price signals, another putative economic cost, is also exaggerated at moderate levels. Capitalism allocates resources via movements in relative prices: if the price of cars rises compared with that for bicycles, more cars should eventually be produced. The worry is that inflation disrupts this process, making it harder to discern the “true” relative prices of cars and bicycles.

In a paper published in 2018, however, Emi Nakamura of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues examine price dispersion for the same sorts of products over time. Looking at the period of high inflation in the 1970s, they find “no evidence that prices deviated more from their optimal level” than just before the pandemic, when inflation was far lower. The “strong conclusions about [the] optimality of low inflation rates [in this regard] need to be reassessed”, they conclude.

Sophisticated papers such as these back up a broader body of work, going back decades, that questions the link between inflation and growth. A paper published by the IMF in 2014 noted that “few empirical studies have even tried to find costs of single-digit inflation.” In 1996 Michael Bruno and William Easterly, then both of the World Bank, found “no evidence of any relationship between inflation and growth at annual inflation rates less than 40%”. The next year Paul Krugman wrote that “even though inflation is universally regarded as a terrible scourge, efforts to measure its costs come up with embarrassingly small numbers.”

So does the rich world’s current bout of inflation have minimal costs, or even none at all? The trouble for economists is that there is a world outside their research. Few people know or care about their results. But they know what they think about inflation: they utterly, implacably loathe it.

Inflation seems to hold a special place in the public consciousness. Our analysis of English-language newspapers and blog posts suggests that during the 2010s media organisations mentioned inflation 50% more frequently than they mentioned unemployment, even though joblessness during that decade was a far bigger economic problem. In the 1990s Robert Shiller of Yale University asked people in a number of countries about their opinions on inflation, and compared them with the views of economists. He found that ordinary people held much more extreme views on the subject than the academics who study it for a living.

People believe that inflation makes them poorer. They worry it makes it harder to plan. And they believe that inflation is a sign that unscrupulous companies are taking advantage of them (two-thirds of Americans ascribe the recent rise in inflation to corporate greed). Economists, by contrast, are more equivocal in their answers. More than half of Americans “fully agreed” that preventing high inflation was as important as stopping drug abuse or maintaining educational standards, compared with just 18% of economists. In the same survey Mr Shiller found that 46% of people wanted the government to lower the price level after an inflation spike (ie, to engineer deflation), something few economists would recommend.

Get real

Perhaps policymakers should just ignore the views of ordinary people. If experts find that inflation has surprisingly low costs, then what more information is needed to guide policy? Another way of looking at it, however, is that the psychological costs of high inflation are real, and that central bankers and governments should take them into account. Fighting inflation by forcefully tightening fiscal or monetary policy is often seen as a hard-nosed choice because it cools the economy and risks provoking a recession. In fact it is one of the most populist policies out there. ■

Will dollar dominance give way to a multipolar system of currencies? (Apr 2nd)

T HE LASTING effects of the covid-19 pandemic on the economy are starting to become clear. Surveys suggest that Americans who can work from home are likely to do so for two or three days a week in the post-covid world, compared with hardly at all in 2019. Companies have regained their appetite for capital spending. And the pandemic appears to be provoking a shift towards higher levels of entrepreneurship around the rich world.

Economists are mainly focusing on the surge of new firms in America. But the trends are wider. Using data for a range of rich countries we estimate that in the fourth quarter of 2021 the number of “enterprise entries”—ie, newly formed companies—was 15% higher than the average before the pandemic (see chart). An extra 1m or so firms have sprung to life across the OECD group of mostly rich countries since the first lockdowns, compared with the pace of business creation before 2020.

Not everywhere is booming. In the 2000s Italians founded about 400,000 firms a year. They probably formed half that number in 2021. But most places are more vibrant. In America during the 2010s the share of people who worked for large companies (ie, those with more than 1,000 employees) was rising. In 2021 it fell, with the proportion of people working for small firms moving up. Britain is experiencing similar trends. In Germany new business creation is slightly higher than it was in 2019. And in France the number of startups is about 70% higher than was usual before the pandemic. Who said the French didn’t have a word for “entrepreneur”?

Some of these new firms are in glamorous industries. Caroline Girvan incorporated her fitness business in Northern Ireland in October 2020. (Her at-home videos, which your correspondent has discovered are impossibly difficult to keep up with, have racked up more than 250m views.) With global venture capital booming, startups from Triple Whale (e-commerce) in Columbus, Ohio, to Payrails (fintech) in Berlin are receiving lots of investment. Yet most of the companies set up during the pandemic have nothing to do with Silicon Valley or its pretenders. They are construction firms, consultancies and the like. More entrepreneurship is likely to be good for the economy. New businesses try out fresh ideas and ways of doing things, while drawing capital and people away from firms that are stuck in their ways. Many economists draw links between the low rate of entrepreneurship after the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the weak productivity growth of the 2010s. In addition, a recovery with lots of startups tends to create more jobs, since young firms typically seek to expand and thus hire new staff. Three explanations for the startup boom stand out. The first relates to family finances. From about 2017 onwards labour markets in the rich world noticeably strengthened, putting money in workers’ pockets. With a financial cushion in place, people may have felt comfortable trying something new—which might explain why business creation picked up shortly before the pandemic. Then governments plumped the cushion considerably, as they handed out vast amounts of cash via stimulus cheques or furlough schemes in 2020 and 2021. At the same time, people cut back on spending. The result was a huge rise in saving, and an acceleration in startups. The second factor relates to economic reallocation. The pandemic has prompted profound changes in consumption habits, meaning that demand has shifted across both geographies and industries. City centres are less busy than suburbs, while industries favoured by social distancing—online retail, for instance—remain more popular than activities that require in-person attendance. Entrepreneurs are responding. In France the number of hospitality startups is 22% below its pre-pandemic level, but those in the information and communication sector are up by 26%.

The third explanation is hard to measure, but could have the longest-lasting effects. The pandemic, by reminding people that life is short, may have encouraged them to take more risks. It would not be the first time. In America from 1918, after the first world war had ended and the Spanish flu epidemic had faded, an even bigger startup boom began, as more people plucked up the courage to set out alone. ■

O VER THE quarter-century before the pandemic, global manufacturing was transformed by the emergence of complex supply chains, through which firms could efficiently produce all sorts of goods at low cost and enormous scale. The pandemic put these supply chains through the wringer, causing wild swings in demand while forcing repeated lockdowns that frustrated both production and distribution. The result has been a surge in shipping delays, shortages of critical components and soaring prices.

Governments have become keener to boost domestic production, the better to reduce their vulnerability to disruptions in foreign supplies. But new work by the IMF suggests that this would be misguided. Supply chains held up better during the pandemic than is often assumed, it argues, and greater self-sufficiency is likely to leave countries more vulnerable to future shocks, not less.

The covid recession was unusual. Trade in goods fell sharply at its onset—by 12% in the second quarter of 2020, relative to late 2019—but then bounced back faster than has been common in recent downturns. To better understand these gyrations, the fund’s economists built a model that predicts trade patterns based on levels of spending within economies. They found large differences between the amount and type of trade predicted by the model and what actually happened during the pandemic—a sign of covid-related weirdness.

The virus distorted trade in part through its effects on domestic economies. Places that experienced higher caseloads and more restrictive lockdowns imported more goods than expected, given the blow to overall GDP , for instance. That in part reflects a shift in demand away from services and towards goods such as home electronics and protective equipment. Covid also interfered with the production of some goods at home, which then needed to be imported instead. But lockdowns in some places also had spillover effects elsewhere. During the first half of 2020, the researchers note, about 60% of the decline in a country’s imports could be explained by lockdowns in its trading partners. These ripple effects hit goods that were reliant on long supply chains the hardest. But the drag was smaller when the places that were locked down had greater capacity to telework. And crucially, the effect of restrictions declined over time, as working patterns and supply chains adapted. Exporters in places that ended strict lockdowns earlier saw big gains in market share, with bigger increases occurring in the production of supply-chain-intensive goods. A lack of data means that the fund’s analysis stops in mid-2021, after which a series of unfortunate events, from stranded ships to war, led to port backlogs and rising costs. Nonetheless, the fund reckons the model might suggest how best to protect an economy against disruptions. The answer is not by reshoring production, but by diversification: sourcing inputs from a wider variety of countries, and using components that can easily be substituted for if supply problems arise. In most countries, the vast majority of components used to make goods tend to be sourced domestically. About 69% of parts in Europe and more than 80% in the western hemisphere are produced at home, for example. If a firm were to choose to import a critical component instead, it would face a more diverse choice: the market share of the average exporting country in the average industry is a little under a third. Re shoring would therefore tend to reduce the diversification of a supply chain rather than increase it, by making production even more dependent on a single country: the home economy. That could prove costly. The fund estimates that in the face of a big disruption (one that causes a 25% drop in labour supply in a single large producer of critical inputs), the average economy could be expected to suffer a fall in GDP of about 1%. Greater diversification stands to reduce the damage by about half.

Encouraging diversification is a tricky matter. The fund suggests that lowering barriers to trade and investing in infrastructure could help. Geopolitical tensions, sadly, mean that openness to deeper integration is in short supply. But the gains to be made, at least, are now clearer. ■

T HEY MAY be on the other side of the world, but few are watching the war in Ukraine more intently than the Taiwanese. The battle for survival of a young democracy against a bullying, autocratic neighbour that scorns its right to self-determination could one day be their own. When Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, the despotic presidents of China and Russia respectively, say their friendship has “no limits”, Taiwan shudders.

Two obstacles prevent the mainland from forcing “reunification” with Taiwan, which it deems part of Chinese territory, even though the island has had a separate government since 1949. One is the 180km-wide strait of Taiwan. The other is America’s military might. But China is fast building the wherewithal to overcome both. Some American commanders think China might attack before the end of the decade.

An invasion of Taiwan would be a disaster in several ways. It could snuff out one of Asia’s most admirable democracies. Because Taiwan produces the world’s most advanced computer chips, it would wreak havoc in the global economy. Breaching the “first island chain” that girds the mainland from Japan to Malaysia would also grant China’s armed forces unfettered access to the open ocean. That would endanger Japan and overturn the American-made order in the Indo-Pacific.

To prevent such a calamity, Taiwan, America and its allies must act on the (evolving) lessons of Russia’s invasion. The most important lesson is that the threat is real, and it is better to prepare now than to have to improvise in the heat of battle. Ukraine has shown how a stout fighting spirit, brave leadership, a resilient population—and Western arms—can keep at bay a bigger enemy. The better Taiwan prepares, the less likely China is to risk an invasion.

So Taiwan should think harder about defence. Its decision to rely less on conscripts and build a more professional force is a good one. But it should continue to provide military training to all men (and why not women, too?) and create a territorial defence force. It should also increase its military budget, which stands at about 2% of GDP —low for a country in such danger (Israel spends 5.6%). Just as Germany recently has, it should give spending a big boost as a signal of intent. It cannot hope to outspend China, whose defence budget is 20 times larger, or field more soldiers. Instead it will have to concentrate on becoming indigestible.

Luckily Taiwan already has a sound military doctrine to build on, the “Overall Defence Concept”, issued in 2017 but not fully embraced by the top brass. It is a “porcupine” strategy, based on ubiquitous mobile and concealable defensive weapons, especially missiles for use against ships and planes. This would mean giving up at least some of the expensive jets, ships and submarines Taiwan is currently seeking—but many of those are likely to be blown up when the shooting begins anyway.

Such a shift would be a huge gamble. In today’s “grey zone” conflict Taiwan faces constant harassment, such as incursions near its airspace that must be met by a stretched air force. Although Taiwan, as an island, is harder to invade than Ukraine, it is also harder to resupply. It may have to fight alone for weeks or months. And it cannot be certain whether or how soon America would come to its aid. The priority must be to hold out. Look at Ukraine: the longer it has fought, the more help it has received.

America can ease the transition. In return for military reform, it should provide more support. This should include upgrading political and military contacts, selling or giving more weapons, providing overt training and hosting joint exercises. Taiwan has pitifully little experience of operating with friendly forces. America should draw up and rehearse detailed plans—not least with Japan and other allies—to respond to a range of crises, from a naval blockade of Taiwan to an invasion.

All this will infuriate China. That is why President Joe Biden should be careful to maintain “strategic ambiguity”, whereby America helps Taiwan defend itself but does not state clearly that it would go to war with China if it invaded. In the case of Ukraine, in contrast, he has said explicitly that America will not join the fighting for fear of starting “World War III”.

Promising to fight for Taiwan, as some advocate, would do little to deter China, which already assumes America will do so. And such a promise would, at the very least, cause a diplomatic crisis. Better, therefore, to focus on practical steps to sharpen Taiwan’s quills. A year ago this newspaper called Taiwan “the most dangerous place on Earth”. America and Taiwan must encourage China to see it that way, too. ■

Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, by Jacob Mchangama, Basic Books, 528 pages, $32
Many languages have in-built speech codes: There are levels of formality and informality in address, words that are not to be used in certain contexts, even forms of speech specific to men and women. European languages tend not to carry the levels of baroque distinction found elsewhere, but they still maintain formal and informal registers. English is distinctive in having essentially abandoned them; our you was once the formal/plural form of address (thee being the familiar).
But when we talk about freedom of speech, we usually mean legal restrictions backed up by the state. These too date back thousands of years. Ancient edicts offered strict instructions in who was allowed to say what and to whom. Around 2500 B.C., the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu declared that "if a slave woman curses someone acting with the authority of her mistress, they shall scour her mouth with one sila [0.85 liter] of salt." I'm guessing that she wasn't allowed to say that slavery sucked either.
With Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media, Jacob Mchangama races through those thousands of years of intellectual and political history to show how distinctive—and how essential—the concept of free speech is. Mchangama, a Danish lawyer, has been an important voice for liberty over the last decade, particularly in the context of Islamic blasphemy claims in Europe. His book is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to know why free speech matters.
For much of European history, the speech being widely policed was heretical or treasonous. (Or both: The divine right of kings meant a fair amount of potential crossover.) As Mchangama shows, early universities were sites of information exchange as well as crackdowns on those people thought to be spreading dangerous views.
These were by necessity elite debates: Most people had no opportunity to read the controversial texts that scholar-monks were troubled over. That started to change with the arrival of the printing press, although that didn't mean your average reader suddenly got sucked into Thomas Aquinas. As Mchangama points out, the same printing presses that disseminated philosophical tracts "churned out a steady stream of virulent political and religious propaganda, hate speech, obscene cartoons, and treatises on witchcraft and alchemy."
We see this with every new form of communication. Barely five minutes after the invention of the photograph, someone was taking nudie pics. But the printing press opened doors far beyond smutty woodcuts to new ways of thinking. Martin Luther was not the first to speak out against the church, but he was first to fall on the latter side of the Gutenberg divide. So his ideas spread further, including to those who weren't readers.
It helped that Luther understood his audience. "The layout and design of his writings became increasingly slick," Mchangama writes, "and the punchy text was accompanied by illustrations for the benefit of the illiterate who eagerly shared his anti-Catholic memes."
Not everyone was thrilled with Luther's takedowns of the pope, and the conflicts of the Reformation brought rapid-fire publications on all sides. As today, legislation raced to keep up with new speech challenging the old order. The result of the print revolution was not just books but newspapers, which spread ideas, fostered commerce, and linked communities. Technology and trade brought ever-more-affordable paper and ink, and also postal systems. Pretty soon you could insult someone from hundreds of miles away.
The political debates that filled pamphlets and newspapers during the Enlightenment could be high-minded and important. But a lot of them weren't. Pamphlet wars, Mchangama recounts, "quickly descended into an eighteenth-century version of flaming, trolling, name-calling, motivated reasoning, and butchering of straw men."
In the context of this text culture, the French Revolution sent shockwaves across Europe, as panicked monarchs suddenly wanted to crack down on republican ideas spreading among their subjects—the kind of reactive legislation that marks the history of free speech. Over the 19th century, a more laissez faire attitude toward speech slowly evolved in Europe (with some hiccups), though some of the more traditional clerical perspectives would hang on longer in the Catholic countries. But nowhere in Europe went as far with the concept of free speech as America did.
Here too there were still limits, as high-minded liberalism brushed up against political reality. The kind of speech that the Founders wanted to keep under control was often libel and slander, and the British tradition of a relatively highly developed civil-suit culture was a way of dealing with that. A more heavy-handed approach appeared not long into the federal experiment, with the short-lived Sedition Act of 1798. It allowed the deportation or imprisonment of people who produced "false, scandalous, or malicious writing" against the government of the United States. The act expired three years later, but it influenced the debate over what speech should be allowed.
Another major stumbling block came with the conflict over slavery. Southern states sought to ban and punish abolitionist literature, passing laws casting it as incendiary. "Ironically," Mchangama notes, "this included the idea of group libel—a progenitor of modern 'hate speech' laws, which protected specific groups from defamatory statements. Senator Calhoun complained that the abolitionist petitions 'contained reflections injurious to the feelings' of Southerners who were being 'deeply, basely and maliciously slandered.'" It would be hurtful for the poor slaveholders to hear that people thought they were bad.
Despite the promises of the First Amendment, America's uneven approach to free expression continued over the decades. In 1918, the Sedition Act cracked down on speech seen as defaming the government, or the military, or the flag, or speech that was otherwise deemed disloyal. (The American Civil Liberties Union was established in 1920 in response.) It wasn't only political speech that was regulated. The Comstock Act of 1873 banned "obscene" publications, which to the authorities meant not only pornography but also family-planning pamphlets. The birth control rules were not struck down until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.
On a global level, the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century brought new challenges. Despots, naturally, are not big fans of free discourse. But how should democracies respond to despots? Some countries, like Germany, have passed laws against sharing Nazi propaganda, restricting free speech in the name of preserving freedom. But is making something off-limits really the best way to address it?
Mchangama details the post-war wrangling over the U.N.'s Declaration of Human Rights and its clause proclaiming the right to free expression. This was always going to rub painfully against people whose religious beliefs demand punishment for blasphemers, especially as globalized mass communications transmitted unwelcome ideas from one region to another. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was the first major case exposing this tension. The challenge persists as governments try to balance their stated commitments to free speech with laws against spreading hate.
Meanwhile, the secular world has its own forms of blasphemy. As our politicians and tech gods talk about cracking down on "disinformation," I get the sneaking suspicion that they don't just mean Sandy Hook truthers—they mean political ideas they don't like, the stuff they called "sedition" in 1798. Once the government is allowed to silence speech, the net of justification always broadens.
The post Speaking Freely Through the Ages appeared first on Reason.com.

Sailors work next to F-18 Hornet fighter jets on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson on February 14, 2018, as the carrier strike group takes part in a routine deployment mission in the South China Sea, one hour away from Manila. With a deafening roar and earth-shaking vibrations, the fighter jets zoomed off US carrier USS Carl Vinson as it navigated the waters of the South China Sea in what its admiral said February 14 was a tangible sign of American presence in the region. (Photo by AYEE MACARAIG / AFP)

If we don’t, Putin will escalate without limit

Robert Zubrin

The time has come for the US to intervene directly in Ukraine with air power. There are four reasons why we should do this:

To secure Ukrainian victory. To minimize loss of life To prevent further escalation by Putin To deter China from engaging in military adventures of its own.

In what follows, I am going to discuss each of the above four points in detail. But before I do, I want to make clear exactly the form of US intervention that I am recommending.

The US does not need to send ground troops. Ukraine has an extremely brave army of its own. What we need to do, in addition to supplying Ukraine with all the arms it has requested, is to provide the Ukrainian army with air cover and close air support so it can drive the Russian invaders out of the country. We should accomplish this by striking Russian ground and air forces inside of Ukraine, and Russian naval forces inside of Ukrainian territorial waters. We should not strike Russian targets outside of Ukraine. While from a strictly military point of view such strikes might be desirable, they are not necessary. Russian anti-missile batteries in Belorussia and Russia have not been able to stop Ukraine from flying its planes inside of country. They would certainly not be able to stop ours, which have much better technology for spoofing such systems. In this way the option of striking such installations or other Russian assets outside of Ukraine can be held in reserve as a retaliatory threat to ward off Russia from responding by striking NATO airbases outside of Ukraine. Our air intervention should aim to be conducted along the lines it was in Korea, where US aircraft based in Japan struck at communist air and ground forces in Korea, but neither side struck the others’ home bases outside of that country.

Furthermore, I am not proposing that we try, at this point, to set up a No Fly Zone to protect all of Ukrainian airspace from Russian intrusion. Ukraine is currently no place for peacekeepers. It is a place for warfighters. We don’t need to patrol the entire Ukrainian sky. We just need to fly to locations where Russian ground forces are to be found and destroy them. While we might choose to provide combat air patrol to protect selected cities or other strategic locations as resources permit, the overriding purpose of our initial air intervention should be to provide the Ukrainian army with the air cover and firepower it needs to repel the invasion. Once the invading forces are ejected, a broader program of long-term air protection for the nation may be considered, probably carried out by Ukrainian pilots trained to fly F-16s, which should be transferred to Ukraine in large numbers as soon as qualified pilots are available. But the immediate task before us is to help the Ukrainian army achieve victory on the ground.

That said, let us proceed to examine why such an intervention is needed to accomplish the four vital goals identified at the start of this article.

It is needed to secure Ukrainian victory.

It is in the vital interests of the United States and its NATO allies that Ukraine prevail against Putin’s invasion. It can be seen by taking a glance at the map that Russian conquest of Ukraine would position Putin to directly threaten NATO allies Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. Furthermore, conquest of Ukraine would eliminate a strategic weakness that Russia currently has on its exposed southern flank, thereby greatly improving Russia’s position should it decide to attack NATO allies Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as other pro-Western countries such as Finland. In addition, conquering Ukraine would not only add its resources to

those currently under Kremlin control, it would eliminate the large battle-hardened Ukrainian army, which if properly armed and backed by NATO air power would represent an enormous asset to the Western alliance in the event of any conflict with Russia.

Those who say that concerns over such consequences can only be justified if it can be proven that Russia has expansionist intent have the matter backwards. Aside from the fact that Putin has openly proclaimed his commitment to restoring the Russian and Soviet empires, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians

in such a matter of national security, the burden of proof must rest on those who would so radically enhance our vulnerability, rather than on those who would guard against it. Before we could even consider allowing Putin to conquer Ukraine, we would need positive proof of his good intentions to behave peacefully afterwards. Claiming that we can be confident of any such assurance is manifest nonsense.

Given these stakes, our policy needs to be to ensure a Ukrainian victory. The West’s current policy of providing a trickle of arms to support Ukrainian resistance is not sufficient to achieve this objective. We could do much better in this regard. It may be observed that it was not until 50 days into the conflict that the Biden administration finally decided to send Ukraine any artillery, with 18 howitzers included in the most recent package. By contrast, within 7 days of the Dunkirk evacuation, FDR had assembled on the New Jersey docks a shipment of 500,000 rifles, 8,000 machine guns, 900 field artillery guns, and over 100 million rounds of ammunition to rearm the BEF, and these supplies then reached Britain within a month traveling on cargo ships with an average speed of 12 knots.

Yet, even if the Biden administration was to considerably upgrade its performance to match that of FDR’s arsenal of democracy, the fact remains that Ukraine is heavily outnumbered by Russia, and as the war drags on is running a deficit of $5 billion per month – equivalent, relative to national GDP, of the US running a deficit of $670 billion per month, or $8 trillion per year. Combined with a projected 45% drop in GDP due to the war, this threatens national bankruptcy.

Under these circumstances, demanding that Ukrainians do all the fighting, with airpower limited to such old Soviet-made aircraft that former Warsaw Pact NATO countries might still have lying around is hardly a prescription for assuring victory. The Ukrainians have been fighting very well, and the Russian have been underperforming, so it’s possible that with greatly increased arms aid the Ukrainians might win. But our vital interests are at stake, so we should do everything in our power to make sure that they do. Deployed in tactical support of the Ukrainian army, US airpower could do exactly that. US aircraft could easily destroy the trains and truck convoys Russia is using to move and supply its ground forces. We could wipe out their tanks deployed in open country is Ukraine’s east and south, flatten the artillery assembled to bombard Mariupol, sink every ship threatening Odessa, and deliver smashing bombardments to Russian forces while they are trying to resist Ukrainian counteroffensives. In short, with the help of our air forces, Ukraine could, and would, readily triumph.

It would minimize loss of life.

This is pretty straightforward. The way to minimize bloodshed is repel the invasion and end Russia’s murderous occupations as quickly as possible. The longer the war goes on, the more people will die – and not only in Ukraine, but all around the globe as the elimination of the Ukrainian harvest drives food prices beyond the reach of the world’s poorest.

It is necessary to prevent further escalation by Putin.

Many people would agree that US airpower would certainly improve the odds of Ukrainian victory, and that achieving that goal as quickly as possible is key to minimizing loss of life. They argue, however, that such intervention runs the risk of provoking escalation of the war by Putin.

It must be admitted that it is possible that US armed intervention might cause Putin to escalate. However it is not only possible, but virtually certain that failure to intervene will result in expanded aggression as well. The proof of this latter statement can be found in both experience and logic.

In the first place, it is exactly what we have seen so far. Starting with his devastation of Chechnya in 1999, then proceeding to Georgia in 2008, Syria in 2012, Ukraine in 2014 and then 2022, Putin, facing no constraints from the West, has escalated from one aggression to another. All attempts to dissuade him from expanding his warpath by offering Russia friendship, favorable trade deals, or bluffs – such as Obama’s unenforced red line against his use of chemical weapons in Syria – have completely failed.

The reason why they failed, and must continue to fail was made completely clear by Putinite hard liner Igor Korotchenko, the editor of Russia’s flagship military policy journal National Defense on February 23, immediately following a press conference held by Biden spokesperson Jen Psaki during which she reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to stay out of Putin’s way in Ukraine. In response to this guarantee, Korotchenko joyfully tweeted: “America has abandoned Ukraine. Jen Psaki says US will not send forces under any scenario to fight with Russia. So, let’s go!” So they went, with the invasion commencing just 24 hours later.

The situation is as plain as day. The Putin regime has no moral compass. It will only be prevented from wreaking havoc upon the world through deterrence – that is, the convincing threat of serious consequences for its actions.

This is not a novel idea. The US employed deterrence to prevent a general war for seven decades following WWII. We made that deterrent credible not only by spending an enormous amount of treasure to support vast armed forces and deploying them worldwide, but by showing our willingness to fight in Berlin, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, among other places. But when Biden chose to have our forces run away from the Taliban last August, he discredited our deterrent posture, making the current invasion totally predictable.

As I wrote in January https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/biden-slouches-towards-catastrophe-in-ukraine/ “Good fences make good neighbors; deterrence is much better than war. By showing the enemy our back in Afghanistan, the Biden administration took down the fences that have secured general peace in Europe and Asia for the past seven decades.

It needs to put them back up again, and immediately.”

In January that could have been accomplished by taking advantage of the two months advance notice we had of the pending invasion to arm Ukraine to the teeth. Unfortunately, the Biden administration elected not to do that, sending only a token 600 tons of weapons of limited types. (For comparison, in 1973, when Israel, a much smaller country than Ukraine, was in trouble, the US sent 23,000 tons of arms. In 1940, when the BEF, which was about the same size as the current Ukrainian army, evacuated Dunkirk, it left behind 400,000 tons of equipment.) Then, as noted above, the Biden administration went further to virtually obliterate deterrence, by overtly guaranteeing Putin that we would not intervene in Ukraine “under any scenario.”

So, with that as our posture, why wouldn’t Putin use chemical, or for that matter, nuclear weapons in Ukraine? Answer: There is no reason whatsoever.

Putin will escalate without limit unless we draw the line. By vowing non-interference, we greenlighted the invasion. By continuing to shine the green light through the smoke of all the devastation that has followed, we are inviting nuclear war.

Furthermore, if America’s real red line is that we won’t fight, then the only constraint on Putin’s appetite for conquest is that offered by local armed forces. Ukraine has little ability to cope with such attacks on its own, and the Baltic States have even less.

If America won’t fight, then the fact that the Baltic States are members of NATO need not deter Putin. If we won’t fight, then we won’t fight. This is especially true since the cost of trying to defend the Baltic States would be far higher than on trying to defend Ukraine, and the odds favoring military success much lower. Ukraine has a strong army. We just need to provide it with weapons and back it up with air power in order to win. The Baltic States have no significant armed forces. To defend them, we would have send hundreds of thousands of American troops, and be willing to accept the massive casualties associated with large scale conventional ground warfare. Should Putin believe we have the stomach for such a desperate effort? He certainly won’t if we show we are not even willing to engage a few dozen fighter pilots to secure victory in Ukraine.

So if we stand by and let Ukraine be conquered, the Baltic States will fall too, and NATO and all other US alliances will be completely discredited. This brings us to the subject of Asia.

It is needed to deter China

If we abandon deterrence, then, instead of relying on our protection, large nations like Japan will rearm, while small countries everywhere will seek to cut the best deals they can with Russia or China. It will be the end of the Pax Americana and the start of an age of global chaos.

What would be the fate of Taiwan? We currently claim that, despite the 1994 Budapest memorandum in which we guaranteed Ukraine sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for that country’s surrender of its nuclear arsenal, we have no obligation to defend Ukraine because it is not a member of NATO. But, in contrast to Ukraine, Taiwan is not even a member of the United Nations, and we do not recognize its government. Furthermore, Taiwan lacks any semblance of the size of armed forces required to repel a Chinese invasion. In order to defend it we would have to risk our Pacific fleet to destruction by land based Chinese antiship missiles, and probably have to send the marines into battle as well. If we allow Ukraine to fall, would there be any reason for China to believe that we would take such a stand for Taiwan?

If you run from a mountain lion, it will give chase and attack. This is so because predators understand that those who run are prey.

Do we wish to be prey? If not, then we must start acting otherwise.

Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer. His latest book The Case for Space, was recently published by Prometheus books.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.

We have some exciting news. The political philosopher Samuel Kimbriel, author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation, is joining the Wisdom of Crowds team as a contributing writer. (You'll recognize him from his recent essay "Death and Morality in the War on Ukraine" and his appearance on the podcast.) Samuel is a brilliant mind and we are lucky to have him write for us. —Shadi Hamid and Damir MarusicIn Adam Curtis's 2015 documentary Bitter Lake there is a scene in which a young British NGO worker gives a lecture to a darkened room of Afghan women. "Does anyone know what it is? I don't expect the ladies to know" she says, looking over to a projection screen. "An artist called Marcel Duchamp…put this toilet," she emphasizes the word "in an art gallery about a hundred years ago. It was a huge revolution" she says. The scene is strangely disconcerting. The looks that fall across the Afghan women's faces seem very different from the fashionable shock Duchamp was aiming to prompt in his overly-satiated New York audience. The effect seems more personal, invasive. Whatever else one may make of Curtis's film-making, it is remarkable to see so many threads of our political problems drawn together into a single 45 second clip.That moment is haunting because it feels familiar. In one frame, lecturer and students seem at ease, embodying what looks like a kind of universal commonality. In the next, and without any warning, they stare at one another across a chasm without any idea of how it opened or how to span it. What seems delicate—and perhaps even dangerous—about our current moment is that we can't quite figure out why "the common" is collapsing, or whether it even existed in the first place. *** I've found myself thinking a lot recently about how western societies handle difference. It's the question at the center of the political theorist Liam Bright's excellent essay Why I'm Not a Liberal (which Shadi also wrote about). What came through clearly in that essay as well as subsequent debate is that liberalism—in the old 18th century sense of "a free society"—seems to have arranged a unique kind of trap for itself.The embrace of diversity is central to liberalism's sense of its own worth. Francis Fukuyama, for example, opens his recent essay on Ukraine stating: "Liberalism is in peril. The fundamentals of liberal societies are tolerance of difference, respect for individual rights, and the rule of law." This strand was there from the beginning. The French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man emphasizes not only that rights are to be held equally by all citizens, but also that the exercise of those rights should have "no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights."In making lofty claims for its capacity to facilitate all types of diversity, liberalism has likewise been emphatic in its universalism. John Locke founds his system on the recognition that "being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions"; in The Declaration of Independence, Jefferson takes up the point with the famous "all men are created…"; the Declaration of the Rights of Man asserts "the natural, unalienable, and sacred rights of man."There is something very delicate about the position liberalism has developed for itself. Its theory involves powerful assertions regarding the universal embrace of diversity. Its practice, in contrast, has always involved specific states guarding their interests. Fukuyama has been fully in keeping with the tradition, for example, to argue in the context of the Ukraine crisis that particular national states must serve as the guarantors of liberal rights. In the words of the French Declaration "The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces."The tension between the universality of the ideal and the specificity of the practice also shows up in one of the foundational texts of our international system, Immanuel Kant's Toward Perpetual Peace. Kant sets out numerous principles, now familiar for the way they seem to echo in entities like the United Nations and European Union: "No state shall violently interfere with the constitution and administration of another" and "the law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states."Even as he asserts the warmth of Republican government internally which "accords with the principles of the freedom of the members of a society," Kant expresses significant hostility to anyone who would refuse to accept these conditions: "a man (or a people) who is merely in a state of nature denies me this security and injures me merely by being in this state. For although he does not actively (facto) injure me, he does so by virtue of the lawlessness of his state…I can require him either to enter with me into a state of civil law or to remove himself from my surroundings."The magnanimous embrace of diversity, in other words, must be built and maintained by hard and often overwhelming power.*** Despite the mainstream intensity of the liberalism debates, I've tended to swerve clear of taking a strong stand, not because I think the debates are insignificant, but because I can't help but have the sense that liberalism is not in fact the central question. Political life has always been lived on the edge of an abyss. For all the friendship and community and solidarity one can build, one can still turn to realize that the person sitting across the table remains elusive, alien. It is this foundational sense of difference that seems to be the basic political question. From small-scale, human community to supra-national treaty structures, the challenge has always been to calibrate to what was classically called the problem "of the one and the many." Swerve too far toward the many, and you get fragmentation and instability. Swerve toward oneness and you get enforced conformity (usually followed by instability again).The core question in any case is how much can human beings actually build with one another, and how can it be done? To face the full reality of difference need not imply a reduction of politics to perpetual hostility. In fact, it is astonishing just how much sacrifice and loyalty and communal vitality there has been throughout political history, even in contexts where those actions are entirely against the principle of "interest." The point, in other words, is not that "the common" is impossible, but that it is hard.Nor is a desire for universality necessarily crippling. Other political forms—Islam, Christianity, Marxism—have shared an aspiration toward a future universality, but in all of those cases, the path to it has always seemed remote and arduous (hence the emphasis on conversion). What is haunting about politics—all politics—is just how fragile our structures end up being. This was the point of the old "Fortuna" tradition—it's no bad thing to remind princes or clerics of how quickly they can be thrown off into the dust.Assertions of universal dignity or commonality are all well and good if they then prompt a wrestling with the realities of deep difference, giving impetus to mediate them. Such language, however, can also act to paper over difference, asserting a kind of commonality that allows us to evade the effort to cultivate it. It's time for us to shed the abstraction of the debates about liberalism—but also the abstraction of liberalism itself. Abstractions and generalizations that pretend to resolve difference by repairing to a higher vantage point often cause us to lose sight of the fleshly challenge posed by the person, or persons, standing in front of us. Not surprisingly, abstraction also distracts us from more practical tasks. What are the resources available that can actually help us to build deep and lasting political community? Overly general assertions of universality don't seem to have been able to do it. Overwhelming violence alone can't either. Nor, apparently, can an elephantine infusion of cash. After these distractions are put aside, the question that remains is a much more human one—what does it take to build a common?

1.

It is unfair to begin an essay on Elizabeth Hardwick with an instance of her cruelty; she was one of the fairest literary critics of her time, as well as the most elegant and humane. Yet the faintest hint of certain themes, overheard in a novel or play or the chatter of a cocktail party, could provoke her to astonishing acts of savagery. These themes included academics, politicians, youth cults playing at revolution, biographers, diarists, and, above all, marriage, with its unremitting and awful capacity to turn a woman into a wife. Consider the letter she sent to her friend Mary McCarthy in 1973, describing the husbands and wives at a writers’ residency in Italy:

Strangely torpid, aging academics from at home and [the] UK; sly, dead eyes, darting away from an idea; envious sighs, and as much intellectual vivacity as a woodchuck. And the wives, of all sizes, yet somehow one size in their heads! They mutter about typing His manuscripts, and they have not made one single demand upon themselves, whether of mind or body, and go forth without any effort or artifice as if they were dogs adopted by their professore. They are mostly kindly, but there is this thorough acceptance of their nature and they seem to have lived in a world without mirrors.

“It is a perturbation—the laziness of wives,” Hardwick pronounces, and her judgment, however unjust, makes visible, audible, and dramatic the figure of the wife. Like Frankenstein’s monster, she is a composite creature, “of all sizes, yet somehow one size.” Unlike him, she is sluggish, weak-willed; destined to travel from one side of the earth to the other and learn no more, live no more, than had she stayed at home. Her resignation, her obtuseness, her simple, secretarial concern for her husband’s manuscript—they represent the essence of all that is undesirable in intellectual and erotic life. But she is not without her powers. She wields the force appropriate to her tyrannized circumstances, the manipulations of “the dominant-dependent woman ruling by disguises and distortions, always on the alert to restrain the freedom of others, to create guilt,” Hardwick wrote. She called it “the revenge of wives.”

The letter to McCarthy is spiteful, petty, and vain. It is so shocking that it prompts a question that tends to arise when reading novels, not letters. Who is speaking here? No one would dispute that the letter was written by Elizabeth Hardwick, born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916; fifty-seven years old; a recent and embittered divorcée; the author of two novels and dozens of reviews and essays in The New York Review of Books, which she had cofounded with Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, among others, in 1963. Yet the voice that narrates it is the voice of another, tuned to some notion of “the ideal self,” as Hardwick described the distant and fantastic apparition who speaks from within a letter. Here the ideal self is everything the wife is not, all the qualities summoned, via negation, by her brutal dismissal. She is independent, disciplined, self-assertive, and mirthful; attentive to the pleasures of artifice yet penetrating in thought and feeling; passionate about collective life and its moral responsibilities; suspicious of power and those who covet it; persuasive in speech, and, when the occasion demands it, merciless in judgment. She is—as Hardwick was, until her death in 2007—the consummate critic.

It is the critic whose outrage courses through the letter, sneering and jeering from behind the wives’ backs, whistling at the professors’ scruffy, stubby-legged dogs to step lively now, to pick up the pace of their own lives. It is the critic who holds the mirror up, not just to the unseeing wives—may the scales fall from their eyes one day—but to the larger and more luminous world of literature. The mirror was the metaphor Hardwick reached for most often, though she never imagined the reflective quality of criticism, or any other genre of writing, as symmetrical or strictly mimetic. It was subversive. The critic made up her objects anew, drew lines and cast shadows over brightened surfaces, revealed the great patterns submerged below the petty details. Her eyes and ears, her mind, her heart, were pledged to the written word, more interesting in its variety and complexity than any single person could hope to be. Here, at last, was a union capable of withstanding boredom, triviality, fear, and constraint, in life as in the making of art.

Push the conceit a little further, and the responsibilities of the critic are clear. Her obligation is to her materials—to apprehend them faithfully, to represent them honestly, and to coax from fiction’s acting, speaking, and thinking beings those half-glimpsed truths of the human condition. Her resolve is strengthened by a stubborn, if short-lived, fidelity. Hardwick’s best essays attend with considerable energy to a single author, sensing that other critics paid for breadth, and for the grand pronouncements about the state of fiction that often accompanied it, with a certain shabbiness of thought. The “we”—invoked by couples and critics alike, and never more pointedly than in moments of insecurity—troubled her with its falseness, its unscrupulous and overbearing insistence on a single, shared vision. “I am not a law-giver,” she liked to assure people. She knew that the last thing anyone needed was more laws or people eager to enforce them.

Whether through intuition or experience or the acuteness of her sympathetic imagination, Hardwick understood that the expression of judgment was an act of persuasion, not coercion. The art of criticism turned on convincing readers that one’s judgment was not merely a permissible opinion but a universal truth. The best critics do not order or whine or throw long, baffling tantrums. They reason and qualify and defend. Occasionally, they do it with such a thoroughly integrated array of tactics—a splendid particularity of description, metaphor, and paraphrase; a casual fluency in the language of genre and form; a knowledge of literary theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, and history; an ear for irony; a gift for compassion—and with such unusual refinement that the reader may confuse the brisk and polished exercise of critical reason for the eccentricities of style or the operations of sensibility. This has been Hardwick’s fate so far, to be worshiped as a stylist. It is an unfortunate fate, in its way, but a fate she tempted for four decades in The New York Review, where she glided between her comically impertinent judgments—“Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway is bad news,” “Almost every idea or opinion in this book is a banality”—and her very precise justifications of them.

And her justifications, it must be stressed, were always historical, grounding the singular shape of a novel in the actualities and possibilities that gave rise to it. Hardwick wrote about history on various scales—the life of an author; the decades of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; the pre-war and postwar periods; the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—“as if history were a concert program, some long and some short selections, a few modern and the steady traditional,” she wrote. Whatever the length of the selection, she traced the same Yeatsian arc. A bourgeois social world that had once seemed so pleasantly and progressively arranged, with a logic and a purpose and a center that could hold, had dissipated into something “formless”: “A fearful gap, not only in generations, but in common sense, in ordinary understanding of the world about us, has opened up. And how can we face this, except with dread?” Unpredictability ruled the day. Suffering could no longer be treated as an obstacle to be overcome—the painful but well-proportioned middle of a story—but the yearly cost of living in a world without accountability. The injured and the insulted waited, first at the windows of their dirty lodgings, then in the streets, for a redemption that refused to come.

This is registered in her criticism by a split in the history of the novel. The nineteenth-century realist novel clutched at the moral and aesthetic powers of destiny, “the orderly sequence whereby the seed brings forth a crop of its kind,” as Hardwick liked to quote Silas Marner. Certain acts—auctioning off your wife and daughter, sheltering an escaped convict, sleeping with the local pastor, marrying a mole-speckled pedant with a sexually magnetic nephew, or, really, marrying anyone at all—were fateful, marking a character as profoundly and irrevocably as Odysseus’s scar. These acts transformed people into the protagonists of novels and set the wheels of plot turning. Mysteries were solved; misdeeds were punished; honesty and generosity were rewarded. As she explained in “Reflections on Fiction”:

Through a natural determinism, character and action came together, the intermingling of stories and destinies, of cause and effect, of crime and punishment, gave us most of the great novels of the English and European tradition. Environment, moral choice, defects of character, defaults of luck; these could be depended upon to lead to some plausible resolution.

Modern fiction did not simply break this promise; it flaunted its betrayal of the pact between history and narrative. Its protagonists—exiles, refugees, paranoiacs, picaros, queers, “divorcées, models, whores”—violated the pledge to be faithful to their former selves. The unsettling dramas of Henrik Ibsen and the “clear, chilly” monuments of Henry James, her two perpetually difficult, perpetually interesting loves, laid bare what the realist novel had repressed: the fractured nature of the self and its capacity for reinvention; the anxiety, fatigue, and loneliness compelled by the absence of origins and endings; the irony that made the fragility and the emptiness of the world bearable; and the realization, expressed with beautiful melancholy by Georg Lukács, that the soul was “wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it.” Or as Hardwick summed it up in one of her essays, “The self is insatiable.”

The novelist could valorize this insatiability as freedom or lament it as homelessness. Whichever way she chose to take it, it was how life was lived today, beyond the reach of a strange or unique destiny. The modern novel had to display “the mirror-image of a world gone out of joint,” Lukács wrote. Its art was an art of bewildering and irredeemable loss; an art of incongruity, pieced together from the innumerable shards and fragments of consciousness. In the novel’s once-silvered and now blistering glass, the act of thinking—merely thinking—about the past and its shattered relation to the present was both its event and its mystery. “It was June,” announces the narrator of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, before showing us Clarissa Dalloway in her room, searching the mirror for “her self” and finding a false, glittering idol, a reflection whose life belongs only to the present, to this fleeting moment, “pointed; dart-like; definite.” The lines chime through the opening sentences of Hardwick’s final novel, her masterpiece, Sleepless Nights (1979): “It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.”

2.

What about her past? Her revisions and reinventions? Cathy Curtis’s new biography, A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick, begins with an eyebrow-raising author’s note. “This biography of Elizabeth Hardwick includes only as much information about her famous husband,” Curtis writes, “as is necessary to tell the story of her life.” This is an exhilarating promise, carrying with it a whiff of naughtiness, of feminist insubordination. Perhaps he will be glimpsed aslant, in cutting asides and parentheticals, or better yet, in the footnotes. “The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage—the footnotes of their lives,” begins Hardwick’s essay “Wives and Mistresses.” Imagine a biographer wily enough to insist on misreading this statement, treating the famous one as the wife, and her husband as her weighty patriarchal baggage!

Yet Curtis disappoints immediately, with the appearance on the next page of a kind of thesis statement, blunt, earnest, and dutiful:

In this first biography of Elizabeth Hardwick, I seek to go beyond the glimpses that a famously private person revealed in her published writing to present a portrait of an exceptional woman who emerged from a long, troubled marriage with the clarity and wisdom that illuminate her brilliant novel Sleepless Nights.

The book that follows arranges the names, dates, and places of Hardwick’s life with a listless and clumsy workmanship; quotes her writing only to measure its likeness to her life; and is overwhelmingly, even slavishly, devoted to the vexatious, humiliating, and pitiable behavior of her famous husband. One wonders why Curtis chose a subject whose favorite topic was the myriad failures of biography. Why show such indifference to an essayist who hands reviewers the most lacerating sentences with which to flog biographers for their sins? For instance: “Biographies inevitably record the demeaning moments of malice and decline and have the effect of imprinting them upon the ninety years.” Or: “There is no doubt that this is ‘the material.’ But it is not an existence.”

The life, the existence, is best gleaned by reading her work and listening to the six extraordinary interviews Hardwick gave to David Farrell at the University of Kentucky from 1977 to 1980.1 Here is the ghost of the woman herself: the rich and disarming drawl, the frank bursts of laughter, the reverence with which she speaks of Eliot, Hardy, James, and Mann. Her voice is arresting, in part because the style of speech does not and could not match the style of her writing. Yet this is what Farrell wants from her—a performance whose poetry and romance rival those of the page, with plots and subplots and characters splashed with local color—and she amuses herself at his expense, with irony and forbearance. Confronting his questions, at times intelligent, at times obtuse, she creates and withholds herself. Could she describe what her parents looked like? “They looked just like other people.” What kind of clothes did they wear? “They wore ordinary clothes.” She thinks a moment and adds that her father “wore those kind of shoes that lace up.”

He retreats, chastened. Now it will cost her nothing to be courteous and to describe her childhood in Lexington with a little flair. She tells him that her father, Eugene, was a spirited man, handsome, gregarious, and exceptionally musical, a fine baritone-tenor who sang parlor songs when he walked to the fire station to play pinochle. Her weary, industrious mother, Mary, preferred the simple beauty of hymns, and on Sundays, if there weren’t floors that needed sweeping or windows that needed washing or children who needed tending, she would take all eleven of them to sing in the Presbyterian choir.

“Lizzie,” as they called her, was the eighth. She was raised to be thrifty and self-sufficient, it being her mother’s opinion that the two worst things a woman could do were go into debt and get married. The Hardwick girls were supposed to wear patched dresses and wait for the July sales on Main Street to buy new things. They were supposed to go to college and become schoolteachers. A poor, pragmatic upbringing is not ideal for the biographer who wants to put her young subject in touch with “glamour, fantasy, and illicit pleasure”—Curtis’s inflated description of downtown Lexington—but in the case of Hardwick, the drama seemed to emanate from within, from an elemental restlessness, a vigor, and a desire for sovereignty over her intellect and emotion, over money and everything it determined.

She was still living at home when she enrolled at the University of Kentucky in 1934. There was something as pure as water and utterly unabashed in her love of literature; she recalls, over forty years later, “the thrill of freshman English.” And it was, indeed, a thrilling moment in literary studies in America. New Criticism had diffused a strange, excitable air into Kentucky’s English Department. “T.S. Eliot had just made the seventeenth century sort of the thing,” she twangs. John Crowe Ransom, “a very elegant, refined, very complex man,” had come to Lexington to teach summer classes to high school English teachers. The writers she adored, the left-wing, anti-Stalinist critics of the Partisan Review, were leading the revival of interest in James and introducing readers to Kafka, rescuing American literary culture from the clutches of a feeble and decaying regionalism. The first play she remembered seeing, the “first knockout blow” delivered by art, was Ibsen’s Ghosts on a trip to Cincinnati during college. In this southern landscape, a seed was planted whose shoots would be “flowering to their fate,” she wrote of her adolescence. Looking back, she could see the beginnings of her disdain for provinciality, her fascination with “the history of now,” and her sense that literature was, in some oblique way, part of that history, but also a liberation from it.

In her essays on Kentucky these years have a sort of lost and squalid beauty to them, the sadness that comes from measuring the distance between now and then. What does it mean to be from Kentucky? What part of her has endured? “What can I answer except to say that I have been, according to my limits, always skeptical,” she writes, in a piece included in Uncollected Essays, a new volume of her criticism. Kentucky was horse races and tobacco farms and unblended whiskey:

It was Gratz Park and the Public Library, Morrison Chapel at Transylvania College, the John Hunt Morgan House, Dr. Buckner’s house, called Rose Hill, and surviving amidst the rusty oilcans of a filling station, backed by the peeling frames of poor people, a fine old garden facing an adjoining rectangle of old pipes, broken clothesline, Coke bottles, and the debris of hope—those unchurning washing machines, discarded toilet bowls, rusting tire rims.

The avarice with which the sentence hoards these details is heightened by their uselessness; they are worth nothing to anyone, now. This salvage yard of dreams—above all, the dream of a comfortable life for the poor people of the South—holds the clutter of her past, the autobiography of her people. But she is no longer the teenage girl who stopped at the filling station on her walk home. That girl can only be seen across a great distance, in the lovely decrepitude of her people’s old things. “The possessor must at last come to an end,” she wrote, “while the things live on in the mute, appealing obduracy of the inanimate. The decline of one and the endurance of the other is plot.”

The plot of her life would shift the story from the deprivations of many—this, after all, is only backdrop—to the fortunes of one. In college, she prided herself on the distance she kept from group life and its clannish sentiments. She hated sororities, loathed student journalism, found the very idea of athletics ludicrous. “What did you do?” Farrell pleads, sounding irritated and demoralized by her contempt for extracurricular activities. “I talked. I drank,” she cackles. “I drank a lot of whiskey.” When the war began, she rode the Greyhound to New York to start a graduate degree in English literature at Columbia. She found the professors appallingly “conventional”—dried little sticks of men who wouldn’t lift a finger to help place a woman in a tolerable professorship in a tolerable city. “There wasn’t much point in getting a Ph.D.,” she says, “because women did not get very good jobs.” Twice she left the city to go back to Lexington for the summer, and on her second visit she was so determined to avoid studying for her general exams that she wrote a novel instead. She threw it away—“It wasn’t very good,” she says—then wrote another, The Ghostly Lover, which was published in 1945.

The Ghostly Lover is artful and unpleasant, claustrophobic, and more gratifying to think about than pleasurable to read. It marks the beginning of Hardwick’s talent as an intimate, nearly metaphysical portraitist. Here, for instance, is sixteen-year-old Marian Coleman by her porch in Kentucky—“Of course that’s me,” Hardwick tells Farrell—looking at the older man who will seduce her:

She looked squarely at his face. It was relaxed and had fallen into its purest shape. The face was like that of a baby who had grown into full manhood with a beard and lines, but still retained the child’s lack of pain and indecision. It was a face of the present, a startling face that seemed to have reached some ultimate static stage. It was remotely arrogant and cruel.

It is a curiously incorporeal description—no eye or hair color, only metaphor and atmosphere—worthless for the sketch artist but ideal for the judge of character. Already, the man’s sins have risen to the surface of his flesh. The beginning and the end of his relationship with Marian—her vulnerability, his betrayal of her, his callousness—flash like “white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed,” as James would have it.

The chilly, abstracted nature of the description raises the same question as the letter to McCarthy did. Who is speaking here? For while Marian is the one looking, her perception is filtered through layer after layer of reflection by the narrator, whose foreknowledge seals Marian’s fate as tightly as the tomb of some unfortunate fairy-tale princess. So effaced, the narrator lingers everywhere, passing judgment: behind the “alert, trigger-set, dry and scorched eyes” of Hattie, Marian’s maid, for whom “the people of the world were perpetually in a state of indecent exposure”; behind the mask-like face of Marian’s brother Albert, “sharp, lithe, and curious as a glistening dagger” among the “slow-eyed people” at a cockfight; beneath the harsh glare of Marian’s mother, Lucy, who belonged to that “special category: a wife.”

The compression of story through point of view is useful for a certain kind of critic, who, short on space and patience, must assess a writer’s life and work in three or four piercing sentences. But this tactic lends The Ghostly Lover the same airless, frozen, and cruel quality as the man’s face. It is as if the characters, modeled to perfection and glazed by the narrator’s moral judgments, have nowhere to go and nothing left to do. Here is a novel that is not only bereft of plot but fatal to its characters’ vitality. There is no life in it; no voice, save the all-knowing voice of the critic, straining to free herself from the constraints of fiction.

3.

Was it this voice that compelled Philip Rahv, the editor of Partisan Review, to believe that Hardwick would make a good reviewer? The letter he wrote to her after reading The Ghostly Lover most likely reached her at the Hotel Schuyler on West 45th Street, where she and a friend had rented an apartment after she left Columbia. They worked odd jobs, scraping together enough money to live in sleazy glamour, surrounded by

a nettling thicket of drunks, actors, gamblers, waiters, people who slept all day in their graying underwear and gave off a far from fresh odor when they dressed in their brown suits and brown snap-brim hats for the evening’s inchoate activities.

She wrote short stories for little magazines and copy for a “crummy publishing company,” whose books left not a single mark on her memory. She taught literature to cloistered debutantes at a “horrible Southern academy” in a “gray stone house” on Riverside Drive, its stately beauty diminished by its dull, frivolous inhabitants. “But it was history, wasn’t it?” she wondered, recalling how she “worried a great deal about ‘disgrace’: about pregnancy, promiscuity, gossip, mistakes.”

“The Family”—the name that Rahv and his fellow New York intellectuals gave themselves—took her in. They assigned her Partisan Review’s monthly Fiction Chronicle and published her famous and scathing review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. They saved her from the tepid ooze of middlebrow publishing and the indignities of teaching high school, waved away her quaint notions of disgrace and downfall and fate. From the beginning, her role in the Family was defined by what they believed she was destined never to be: a wife. “There weren’t many women in it,” she tells Farrell, who points out that wives did not seem to be considered part of the Family. In a voice edged with pride and uncommon prejudice, she recalls the lordly parties that Rahv threw for the critics to discuss art and politics. “You didn’t do anything,” she qualifies. “You just talked all the time. It was all ideas. But nobody ever addressed a word to a wife. They just sat there like stuffed dummies.”

Farrell wonders why they bothered coming at all. “Well, you can’t leave your wife at home,” Hardwick replies, shocked. “Unless you just get so fed up she must stay.” And the literary critic Diana Trilling? “Did you consider her a wife?” “I still do,” she laughs, a malicious laugh.

There is a deep, almost punitive irony in the fact that she met her famous husband in the Rahvs’ living room in 1947. Later, he wrote a poem titled “Man and Wife,” which seemed at once to commemorate and to mourn the occasion. Farrell recites part of it to her:

You were in your twenties, and I,

once hand on glass

and heart in mouth,

outdrank the Rahvs in the heat

of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—

too boiled and shy

and poker-faced to make a pass,

while the shrill verve

of your invective scorched the traditional South.

“He wasn’t fainting at my feet. That was hyperbole,” she remarks, very dry and a little wistful. She encountered him casually here and there, then more fatefully at Yaddo in early 1949, where he, “handsome, magnetic, rich, wild with excitement about his powers,” had deigned to consort with lesser beings. “What were you doing there?” Farrell asks, rather stupidly. “Just what we were all doing up there—just writing!” she exclaims. But the man was not doing what they were all doing. He was helping to whip up an FBI investigation into Yaddo’s subversive director instead of writing poems. Later, he drove across the country to harangue friends and assault policemen outside movie theaters. She kept him company during what she calls his “flights”—a word she utters with muffled tenderness—and what his psychiatrists would diagnose as “his struggle with bipolarity.” They were married that summer, after he was released from Baldpate Hospital, a name so absurd even Dickens could not have dreamed it up.

“My husband,” she calls him. “My own husband.” It comes as a shock to realize that, at the time of the first interview, her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, had been dead for only a month, and that at the time of his death, he had not been her husband for five years. Meekly, Farrell tells her he thinks she was very brave to “take on Lowell” after he had been released from the hospital. Her words are perfectly deflating. “Well, he got over it,” she says. Farrell does not seem to have the courage to contradict her. “A lot of other people have been willing to forbear also,” she laughs, trying to rescue herself from the humiliation of his compliment by crushing it with the humiliation of her husband’s affairs.

Had Hardwick derailed the plot of her life by becoming a wife? Well, not exactly; she merely had diverted it onto another track, a rickety and unfinished one. She and Lowell spent the first three years of their marriage wheeling around Europe, seeking a reason for their self-imposed exile. The essays in Partisan Review that bear the marks of these years preserve the fears and the possibilities of tearing away from one’s place of origin—the freedom of solitude, the guilt of indolence, the intense, irreconcilable pull of both the new and the familiar. “The expatriate sometimes suffers painfully from the dread of losing touch with the world he has left but towards which he looks back…with all the tart ambivalence of the injured lover,” she wrote in “Living in Italy.” “It is, after all, the fickle, abandoned country for which the exile writes his books.” And the sense of history in Europe was deeper, more sobering, than what America had to offer. In Vienna, the opera house rose like a jewel box amid the rubble of the war. In Amsterdam, the air was cold and sorrowful, but the life they lived, with little money and endless conversation about the Old Masters, was “marvelous.” (In the background—his flights.)

When they returned to America in 1953, it was without settling into it. Boston, where they lived on and off until 1960, “isn’t particularly good for women,” she informs Farrell, who suggests that her description of the city (in her 1959 essay “Boston”) as “wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming” may have offended Bostonians. “Only fools identify themselves with a place,” she laughs. “Who cares?” They spent a year in Iowa City, where her husband taught at the esteemed writing workshop. Of the essays she started drafting there, it is “George Eliot’s Husband” that contains the most optimistic hints of the connubial life she imagined. Eliot and her husband were

inconceivable as anything except what they were, two writers, brilliant and utterly literary. They led the literary life from morning to midnight, working, reading, correcting proofs, traveling, entertaining, receiving and writing letters, planning literary projects, worrying, doubting their powers, experiencing a delicious hypochondria. The Brownings, the Webbs, the Garnetts, the Carlyles, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Middleton Murray and Katherine Mansfield—the literary couple is a peculiar English domestic manufacture, useful no doubt in a country with difficult winters. Before the bright fire at tea-time, we can see these high-strung men and women clinging together, their inky fingers touching.

Might the list of couples end one day with “the Lowells”? The university made this fantasy hard to sustain, despite its difficult winters and her bad nerves. “I was present as the wife of a teacher,” she recalled in the bitter afterword to her second novel, The Simple Truth (1955), which she wrote when she could not get a job teaching because the university refused to hire wives, she claimed. (In the background—his flights. A return to Boston. A move to New York.)

The Simple Truth prolonged the Jamesian spell that had gripped her since her college years, but in a popular genre: the true-crime novel, a useful vessel for a twentieth-century writer thirsting for the eventfulness of nineteenth-century sensational fiction. “There is beauty to be torn out of the event, the suicide, the murder case, the prize fight,” she later wrote in “Grub Street: New York.” “Real life is presented as if it were fiction. The concreteness of fact is made suggestive, shadowy, symbolical.” While the writers attracted to true crime—Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, William Styron—planted themselves at the center of the excitement, as an obstinate and “vividly experiencing ‘I,’” she stayed in the shadows of the third person in The Simple Truth.

The book’s murder trial was based on one she followed closely during her time in Iowa. It comes into focus through the affable eyes of Joseph Parks, a writer who haunts the courthouse while his wife, Doris, bleaches the kitchen, puzzling “over the way to be both a housewife and a ‘free person.’” With the impressionability and the heartlessness of youth, they create a fiction out of the unrequited love the murderer, Rudy Peck, nursed for his victim, Betty Jane Henderson. But when Joseph meets Anita, a shy, middle-aged, professor’s wife, spouting a “loose and generalized Freudianism” in the visitor’s gallery, she becomes his confidante and the analyst of his fictions.

Fiction and its interpretation tempt Joe away from the uncertainty, the poverty, and the banality of his life into snobbish speculations about intention and consciousness, about psychological and sociological explanations for why human beings hurt one another. Doris, hearing her husband on the phone to Anita, chooses simply to ignore it all: she “put another cigarette in her black-and-white holder. A single cool tear clung pleasantly to her eyelashes.” This single cool tear is a sphere of beautiful unfeeling. In its reflection lurks the danger of transforming real people into fictional characters and putting them through the paces of scandal. It makes them easy to weep over and easy to forget.

In her essays, Hardwick reproved and indulged the temptation to fictionalize. How could she help it? Between the person and the page lies the prism of fiction, always. No genre can avoid it. Even criticism, if it is to speak of the lives and works of the dead, must bring the dead to life—the words of the past distilled in the words of the present. The only reprieve comes from retreating into generalities, speaking of archetypes and myths rather than individuals. Through the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote of “the American woman as snow-queen” and “the Turks, with their scarecrows in colored rags doing all the work in the fields.” Dylan Thomas was not a person but “the charming young man of great gifts, wilfully going down to ruin. He was Hart Crane, Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the stuff of which history is made.” Robert Frost “was his own stereotype.”

The current ran in the opposite direction too; writing about fiction presented her with a repository of characters and tropes to help make sense of reality, to yoke the past to the present. Her pieces on the obliterated hopes of the civil rights movement, dispatches from Selma and Memphis, from Chicago and Los Angeles, remain in thrall to novels. This gives them a distant, unreal quality, a sense that they have been observed by a presence hovering high above the action rather than a reporter with her feet on the ground. Martin Luther King Jr.’s solitary evangelism recalls Adam Bede, when “Dinah preaches that Jesus came down from Heaven to tell the good news about God to the poor.” The scorched southern countryside

inevitably brings to mind flamboyant adjectives and images from Faulkner. Immemorial, doomed streets, policed by the Snopeses and Peter Grimms, alleys worn thin in the sleepless pursuit of a thousand Joe Christmases.

Neither “the Southern Negroes” nor “the white people” are made of flesh and blood, but ideas and symbols; it is startling to realize that not a single proper name, except for those of the heroes and the villains, appears in these essays.

(In the background—a daughter, Harriet, born in 1957, whose “smiles were, in Sylvia Plath’s phrase, ‘found money,’” and whose privacy Hardwick guarded with ferocious love. A summer home in Castine, Maine, “where man and nature are one, or seem to be,” she wrote, perplexed by the state’s immunity to change. And his flights, leaving her to raise the child by herself for long stretches of time.)

4.

How does marriage matter for criticism? This is an embarrassing question.

It is, however, the correct one to ask of Hardwick’s writing in the 1970s. What does it mean to be married for a long time, for twenty or thirty or forty years? Nothing, perhaps. “You’re never really a married person,” she informs Farrell. Anyone who claims to be one is pretending, for if marriage teaches you anything, it is how “alone one always is,” she says. “This is just common experience.” A person, a wife, does not need to suffer what Hardwick suffered to know it.

But betrayal added injury to injury. She is reticent when Farrell brings up the end of her marriage. The record of it is already public, in the poems her husband wrote about leaving her for a woman he met while on a fellowship at Oxford, altering and embedding snippets from the letters she sent him while he was having the affair.2 The letters trace a too-familiar plot: the deception and devastation of the wife. He praises the loveliness of the countryside, pretending that he is tucked away among the dreaming spires, when he plays house with his mistress in some charming London square. Hardwick is his housekeeper, his bookkeeper, his child-minder, his archivist, his frantic and destitute secretary. “I have been absolutely overwhelmed with all this,” she writes, “the taxes, insurances, houses, studies, papers, schools organized, mail answered, things turned down.” Over her side of the correspondence, which, in her husband’s words, “veers from frantic affection to frantic abuse,” there hangs a blackened cloud of dramatic irony. The reader of the letters is forced into the wrenching position of the friend who knows before the wife does.

But the plot has a twist, or maybe another change of track: the appearance of the critic, the possessor of an achieved, enjoyed, and triumphant life. Until that point, “I wasn’t very conscious of Elizabeth Hardwick,” she tells Farrell. “It’s been a kind of an accumulation of a little bit of reputation”; “I didn’t write so terribly much.” Everyone is vulnerable to projection, and I cannot help thinking that, in her letter to McCarthy, she unleashed the voice of the critic in all its severity on the wife she had been. In doing so, she revealed the strange structural correspondence between the critic and the mistress; to their great relief, they are both not the wife. They gain their dazzle from her blindness, their verve from her complacency.

Most of all, the freedom they represent—the freedom to create anew, to judge without obligation—is sweetened by the debt the wife extracts. “This is the unspoken contract of a wife and her works,” Hardwick wrote. “In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin—consideration for their feelings.” Yet the true tragedy of the wife was not her betrayal by her husband but her failure to create for herself an enduring structure, a form, that assisted and protected her. “In the end what strikes one as the greatest personal loss,” she observed of the life of Jane Carlyle, among others, “is that the work could not truly build for the women a bulwark against the sufferings of neglect and the humiliations of lovelessness.”

If, in marriage, there is a triangle that matters for criticism, it is the shifting allegiances among the wife, the critic, and the mistress. This is the immanent logic (and sometimes the theme) of much of the criticism Hardwick wrote in the 1970s: “Sue and Arabella,” “Sense of the Present,” “Domestic Manners,” “Wives and Mistresses,” the essays gathered in Seduction and Betrayal, the occasional pieces on women for Mademoiselle and Vogue. They are not personal essays. She never strayed from her anti-confessional ethic, never abandoned her belief in reticence or her contempt for writers who made art by betraying the secrets of those they had loved.

Yet the mist of impersonality occasionally parts, and never more dramatically than when she passes judgment on characters. There is a hint of her in Jude the Obscure’s Sue, who is as original in her “intellectual alienation”—“Sue thinks,” she insists—as Arabella, “the hard, needy, shackling” wife, is conventional. She reveals herself more openly in her discussion of The Kreutzer Sonata. Her description of Countess Sonya Tolstoy, destroyed by her husband’s portrait of her in his novella, lurches into free-floating generalities: “An adjutant, wracked by drama, brilliant in her arias; and then awakening to uncertainty, shame.”

But Hardwick must have tired of hiding behind the third person, hitching her love and her anger to remote figures and veiled judgments. Sleepless Nights is often described as an autobiographical novel, a memoir, or only “half fiction,” a mongrel breed. It is easy to dwell on the signs of real life—Kentucky, the Hotel Schuyler, the letters to friends the narrator signs “Elizabeth,” the intimation of a recent divorce. “I was then a ‘we,’” the narrator recalls. “Husband-wife: not a new move to be discovered in that strong classical tradition.” “Can it be that I am the subject?” she asks, contemplating the pose of a then-typical female protagonist: the middle-aged divorcée, the newly single woman in New York City. Or could it be that the subject is not a singular person, a self whose interior life broadens and deepens over the course of a predestined plot? What if the subject is a pattern, a structure? The pattern is easy to recognize in Sleepless Nights—this is a novel of the unwived, seeking and receiving acknowledgment, assistance, and a sense of dignity. To tell the story of the unwived is a new move in the tradition that also moved Hardwick away from it.

The unwived are not only women. They are bachelors and queers and utterly unmarriageable Marxists. They are widowers, unwived in a sadder sense of the term. They are the poor, the immolated, the estranged; characters who belong to no one, who have no families and no novels to call home. Yet those who have read Sleepless Nights recognize the women as afflicted old friends, visitors from the narrator’s childhood and adolescence, showing up unexpectedly at her doorstep. Here are Judith, Marie, Juanita, Simone, and Billie Holiday, “because never was any woman less a wife.” Without protest, they submit to the narrator’s gaze, to the cool tenderness of her style. Age and care do not fall away. They are exalted. Here is Miss Cramer, her old neighbor, roaming the street on a bitter December morning:

Miss Cramer in winter in a dress of printed silk, soiled here and there with a new pattern of damage. She is wearing torn canvas shoes and no stockings to cover her bruised, discolored legs, nothing to help the poor naked ankles caked with barnacles of dirt.

She meets another solitary traveler:

She approaches an appalling wreck of great individuality, a black woman who wanders in and out of the neighborhood, covers the streets with purposeful speed. No one has ever seen the black woman’s mouth, since the whole lower part of her face is always bound tight with a sort of turban of woolen cloth. Fear of germs, disfigurement, or symbol of silence?

From these wrecks of individuality rises a collective subject, grotesque almost to grandeur. “They are gladiators, creatures of the trenches,” Hardwick writes. They do not speak to one another, do not disclose anything of themselves. Their mouths remain shut and bound. But the novel recognizes and reflects them both, as it does all the unwived. It honors their terrible, decadent freedom. “Beauty formed out of negatives,” the narrator thinks. A whole formed out of the scattered and shattered selves of history.

Gathering and arranging and scrutinizing the unwived with a “prying sympathy,” the narrator reveals herself obliquely in the pattern she creates. “I love to be known by those I care for,” she thinks in the novel’s final sentences. “Public assistance, beautiful phrase.” The phrase appeared around twenty years earlier, in Hardwick’s essay “The Insulted and Injured: Books About Poverty”: “I think I read recently that before many years have passed it is expected that nearly half the residents of Manhattan will be living on public assistance.” But by the time Hardwick started writing Sleepless Nights, social welfare was as much a thing of the past as the promise of happily ever after. The ruins of marriage smolder in the ruins of the welfare state. In the middle stands the critic turned novelist, though it should be clear that the distance between these identities has, by now, dwindled. She does not patronize. She does not prophesy. She does not look down at her subjects from her perch of omniscience. She shares in their defacement. In her hands, the novel emerges as a form of public assistance, dispersed without expectation of recompense, without judgment of “sloth and recurrent mistakes.”

When Sleepless Nights was published, McCarthy sent a letter to Hardwick praising her achievement. She went on to explain that she had not anticipated how Hardwick would deal with the huge fact of her famous husband:

It didn’t occur to me that you could do it simply by leaving him out. That’s a brilliant technical stroke but proves to be much more than that: he becomes a sort of black hole in outer space, to be filled in ad lib, which is poetic justice; he’s condemned by the form to non-existence—you couldn’t do that in a conventional autobiography.

The poor, unwived beauties of Sleepless Nights are ringed around this black hole—call it the husband, call it the state—like mirrors placed on opposite walls. In their reflections flash the eyes of the critic, who has retrieved from the darkness the miracle of pure style and the model of communal history. McCarthy was right to conclude that the husband had been condemned to nonexistence. But she had failed to grasp the full force of her observation. Where he went, the wife was sure to follow, nipping at the heel.

W HEN PRINCE ALBERT purchased the 20,000-hectare (50,000-acre) Balmoral estate in 1852, he did so for his family and for the views, the grouse and the deer. Owners of estates in the Scottish Highlands have conventionally had similar motives. But a new breed of landowner is drawn to something else entirely: the estates’ ability to suck in carbon from the atmosphere.

Individuals, companies and trusts have been buying up properties for their environmental potential for about two years, says Robert McCulloch of Strutt and Parker, an estate agent. Estates in the Highlands are often not fertile enough for profitable farming and the properties are large, making it easier to do tree-planting or peatland restoration that sequesters carbon at scale.

In 2021 46% of estate transactions in Scotland involved companies, investment funds or charitable trusts; Mr McCulloch estimates the proportion was less than 20% in previous years. Their interest has driven prices up. In 2021 the sale price of an average Scottish estate was £8.8m ($11.5m), almost double the amount of a year before. Between 2020 and 2021 the total spent on buying estates increased by 119%.

In Britain the amount of carbon dioxide a landowner is sequestering counts as credits that can be used to offset emissions. Firms and funds mostly set their land holdings against emissions from their own businesses. In 2020 BrewDog, a beermaker, bought 3,800 hectares in the Highlands; it now claims that its carbon offsets are double its emissions. Aviva Investors snapped up 6,300 hectares in Aberdeenshire for similar reasons.

Individual buyers tend to have their sights on making money. Jeremy Leggett, an environmentalist who founded and sold a solar company, bought a 511-hectare estate along the shores of Loch Ness in 2020. He is gambling that its woodlands, peatlands and plants will yield carbon credits that can be sold to firms looking to offset their emissions. (If a market forms, he hopes to sell biodiversity credits, too.)

The influx of green buyers is positive in many ways. Scotland has ambitious climate goals, including to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2045. Most of those cuts in emissions will come from phasing out fossil fuels, but native woodland and healthier peatlands help. The Scottish government has a target of planting 18,000 hectares of woodland every year, beginning in 2024, and restoring 250,000 hectares of peatland by 2030. The government will not meet those targets without changes on the country’s private estates, which make up more than half the countryside.

But the new landowners bring controversy, too. The tenant farmers and gamekeepers who rely on traditional use of the estates could find work harder to come by. And land ownership is a touchy subject in Scotland: 400-odd people own half of the country’s area. Lawmakers have taken note of the possibility that rising prices risk making land even less accessible to local communities. On March 31st the government published a set of non-binding principles which, among other things, encourages would-be buyers to consider leasing land to generate carbon offsets. Legislation may follow. Green landowners may be good for the planet, but they don’t do much for equality. ■

T HE ANNIVERSARY of Kim Il Sung’s birth, on April 15th, is often an exuberant affair in North Korea. This year’s tribute to the country’s founder was no exception. Civilians, many dressed in traditional costume, danced in choreographed crowds in the centre of Pyongyang, the capital. Fireworks lit up the night sky. Sculptures of tanks and missiles, made of multicoloured lights, decorated the streets. And all the while spectators cheered, swelling with patriotism and pride.

North Koreans could do with something to celebrate. Mr Kim’s decision to seal the border at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic has taken a harsh toll on the economy. Trade with China is slowly returning but remains far below the level of 2019. Many imports are stuck in quarantine. A shortage of food—bad enough for the state to acknowledge its existence—is getting worse. The price of corn, a staple, has risen almost a quarter since the start of the year. A winter drought threatens a poor harvest of wheat and barley. Remittances from people who have escaped to South Korea have plummeted as it becomes harder to contact relatives.

Little wonder then that Kim Jong Un, the country’s dictator and Kim Il Sung’s grandson, is keen to focus instead on his regime’s successes. In the week before the anniversary he inaugurated two housing projects in Pyongyang. The day after the celebrations, he watched the successful launch of what state media called a “guided weapon” that would improve the efficacy of North Korea’s “tactical nukes”.

There is less to these achievements than meets the eye. The smaller of the housing complexes, along the capital’s Pothong river, has been dubbed a “socialist fairyland”. But its 800 flats will go only to those the regime deems “patriots and persons of merit”, such as Ri Chun Hi, an octogenarian newsreader known for her vitriolic tone and pink attire. On April 13th Mr Kim personally showed her to her new luxury apartment as she beamed with joy.

The larger block is an 80-story tower in the centre of Pyongyang. It contains 20% of the 50,000 flats Mr Kim promised by 2025 to solve Pyongyang’s housing shortage. These too will go to those favoured by the party. But the lucky few allotted flats in the new complex may turn out to be less fortunate than they appear. DailyNK, a Seoul-based news outlet, reported that only the homes of the party elite and donju, a class of quasi-capitalists, are actually complete. Other residents will have to finish their homes at their own expense.

For everyone else, there are displays of military might. The weapons tests like the one seen on April 16th are designed not only to assess equipment but also to elicit pride. A dozen such tests have been conducted this year, including at least one of an intercontinental ballistic missile. A snazzy video of the launch was released for domestic consumption. Many also expected a parade of the armed forces on April 15th. One may still be in the offing, perhaps on April 25th, when the army celebrates its own anniversary. Soldiers were seen rehearsing on April 17th.

Mr Kim is also redoubling efforts to root out the “evil spirits of anti-socialism and non-socialism infesting the heads of the people”. He has waged a long campaign against the distribution of USB drives packed with South Korean dramas and other nefarious foreign media, promoting more ideologically sound fare in their stead. A flurry of cultural events was held around the anniversary of his grandfather’s birth, including an art festival postponed since 2020. This month North Korea released its first new feature film in five years, telling the tale of Ra Myong Hui, a plucky nurse and war veteran who exposed an anti-party plot in 1958.

Despite his brutality and his vice-like grip on the population, Mr Kim must still command the continuing support of both the elites and ordinary citizens. Red-letter days offer him a chance to show both that their faith in him has borne fruit. Unfortunately for most North Koreans, fruit of this sort will not fill hungry bellies. ■

C HRISTINE LEE once mingled easily with members of Britain’s elite. The Hong Kong-born British solicitor frequently visited Parliament, where legislators supported her work helping ethnic Chinese get more involved in politics. She even received an award for her efforts from Theresa May, who was then prime minister. The two were photographed together at Downing Street in 2019.

In January that award was rescinded—because, according to MI 5, a British spy agency, Ms Lee has been covertly working for China. In a security notice issued to parliamentarians that month, the agency warned them about her “political interference activities”. It was the first of its kind naming China, though not a complete surprise. “You might think in terms of the Russian intelligence services providing bursts of bad weather,” said Ken McCallum in 2020, shortly after becoming MI 5’s chief. “China is changing the climate.”

Britain is not the only Western country sensing a change in atmosphere. American officials also warn of covert attempts by China to bend local politicians to its will. The alarms grew louder during the presidency of Donald Trump. “China is expanding its influence efforts to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China’s interests, and counter criticism of China,” noted William Evanina, then the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Centre, in 2020.

In a report last year the Canadian Security Intelligence Service ( CSIS ) said it had observed “persistent and sophisticated state-sponsored threat activity targeting elections for many years now” with “a rise in its frequency and sophistication”. It did not name the countries involved, but earlier in the year David Vigneault, the chief of CSIS , said his agency was most concerned about actions by “countries like Russia and China”. In January the Globe and Mail, a newspaper, said Canada’s spies had been briefing selected parliamentarians about influence operations by China, as well as other countries.

“Espionage and foreign interference has supplanted terrorism as our principal security concern,” said Mike Burgess, the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ( ASIO ), in February. He says his agency recently thwarted an attempt by a person nicknamed “the puppeteer”, working on behalf of a foreign government, to interfere in an Australian election. Using an offshore account, the puppeteer planned to support candidates who either backed the interests of the foreign government or who were deemed vulnerable to inducements and cultivation. “It was like a foreign-interference startup,” said Mr Burgess.

The spy chief did not identify the government or the puppeteer. An Australian senator (who died last month of a suspected heart attack) said she had been “reliably informed” who the person was: she named a prominent ethnic-Chinese Australian businessman. ASIO has not confirmed this, and the person has denied the allegations. But the country referred to by Mr Burgess was undoubtedly China.

It is believed that a common factor in these allegations of political interference is a branch of the Chinese Communist Party called the United Front Work Department ( UFWD ). MI 5’s notice about Ms Lee says the organisation “identifies and cultivates individuals” with the goal of promoting the party’s agenda and “challenging those that do not subscribe to its policies”.

Ms Lee’s connections with the UFWD are hardly a secret. She has acknowledged her work as a “legal adviser” to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, a division of the UFWD . She has served as a director of the China Overseas Friendship Association, a body under the UFWD ’s control. Her website in China, now closed, described a meeting in Beijing of the association’s directors in 2019. “I should do a good job as a communicator of China’s voice,” she told the gathering. “I should also keep firmly in mind General Secretary Xi Jinping’s instructions,” she said, referring to China’s leader. “I should turn them into guidance for my own actions and firmly implement them.” State television showed a grinning Ms Lee shaking Mr Xi’s hand at the gathering (the UFWD ’s chief was also there).

It had also long been known that Ms Lee had been providing money for staff in the office of a prominent opposition politician in Britain, Barry Gardiner of the Labour Party: a total of more than £500,000 ($650,000) over several years. Mr Gardiner says that this funding ended in 2020, that Ms Lee had no role in the appointment or management of his team members, that he did not profit personally and that Ms Lee’s son, who was working as his diary manager, resigned after MI 5 issued its warning.

From China with love

MI 5, it appears, is now more certain that Ms Lee obtained funds from China to hand out to a wide range of recipients, from political parties and legislators to aspiring politicians. Mr Gardiner says security officials told him they had no evidence that the money his office received came from China, and no evidence of any complicity in Ms Lee’s alleged activities by her son.

Little has come to light publicly that shows China has gained much from its overseas influence operations. Only one case has been reported so far of a senior Western politician receiving money from a source linked to the Chinese campaign and then siding with China in a way clearly at odds with mainstream opinion. It involved Sam Dastyari, an opposition legislator in Australia who, in 2017, urged his government to “respect” China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. Amid a furore over this, he resigned from parliament.

What worries the spooks, however, is something subtler than securing support for China’s building of bases on contested reefs. The UFWD , they believe, often wants politicians to help China just by keeping silent: avoiding criticism of Chinese policy and refraining from supporting action, such as sanctions, that might cause difficulties for China’s government. The UFWD is not a spy service, but its targets are sometimes of interest to China’s espionage outfits, too. It facilitates their work.

Much of the UFWD ’s effort is directed at people inside China: influential citizens such as businessmen, academics, religious leaders, ethnic minorities and people from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Abroad, it mainly focuses on winning over ethnic Chinese, and through them, creating bonds between the party and Western elites, including politicians. Like his predecessors, Mr Xi calls political-influence efforts one of the party’s fabao (talismans). In 2015 he set up a “leading small group” to supervise them, bringing such operations closer to the heart of the party’s decision-making.

China’s official media have highlighted Ms Lee’s work as leader of the British Chinese Project (in February she applied for its dissolution). The aim of this organisation was to encourage ethnic Chinese to play a bigger role in British politics. On the face of it, this was a noble cause. Historically, voter-turnout rates have been low within this community; it was not until 2015 that Britain elected its first ethnic-Chinese MP . But the promotion of huaren canzheng (ethnic-Chinese participation in politics) is also one of the stated missions of the UFWD in the West. Ms Lee took ethnic-Chinese candidates on trips to China, where UFWD officials preached to them about the virtues of China’s political system.

Again, there is no evidence that such tactics work. China’s prestige in the West has taken a battering from the horrors Mr Xi has unleashed in Xinjiang, his gutting of freedoms in Hong Kong and, most recently, from his tacit backing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It would take a brave politician to stand up in any Western legislature and defend such a record. Support for Chinese investment in the West’s critical infrastructure has all but evaporated in recent years because of security concerns. Western spies warn of the danger of overreaction. ASIO ’s Mr Burgess said it was critical not to let fear of foreign interference “stoke community division”. In February America’s Department of Justice ended a Trump-era campaign against Chinese theft of intellectual property amid claims that the effort, called the “China Initiative”, was encouraging ethnic profiling.

There is a clear danger, however, when China’s real spooks get involved. Their work abroad—apart from gathering secrets—includes intimidating political enemies such as exiles from Xinjiang and other dissidents. A recent case involves Yan Xiong, a student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 who became an American citizen and served as a chaplain in the US Army. Mr Xiong is now making a bid for Congress as a Democratic candidate in New York. A primary election is due to be held in June. His Tiananmen background makes him the kind of ethnic Chinese whom the party definitely does not want elected.

In March the FBI alleged that an operative of China’s spy service, the Ministry of State Security, had asked a private investigator in America to try to thwart Mr Xiong’s campaign by finding something that might discredit him, such as a tax violation or contact with a prostitute. Failing that, the FBI quoted the spy as saying in a voice message, “violence would be fine, too”, including a “car accident”.

Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them. History has oscillated between periods of greater dispersion of ownership, and those that favored greater concentration.Today, we live in an era of ever-greater consolidation, not from knights in armor, or Communist cadres, but from the forces of big capital and an ever-more intrusive regulatory state. The result has been record-high housing prices, well above the increase in incomes resulting in a systematic decline in the ability of people, particularly the young, to buy their own house as prices rise even in less expensive areas. Supply also faces great constraints, due in part to labor and supply-chain woes and the demand shock of the pandemic and remote work. Unless reversed, young people will be forced into a lifetime of rental serfdom. The assets that drove middle-class stability, wider social benefit, and subsidized comfortable retirements, will likely not be available to them. Property remains key to financial security: Homeowners have a median net worth more than 40 times that of renters, according to the Census Bureau. Shoving prospective homeowners into the rental market not only depresses their ambitions, but it also forces up rents, which hurts poorer households and even solid minority neighborhoods.But this impacts far more than just finances. Low affordability and high rents tend to depress the fertility rate, contributing to what is rapidly becoming a demographic implosion in many countries. More important still, dispersed property ownership has long been intimately tied to democracy while concentration tends to characterize autocracies, whether of the state-dominated variety or that of big capital.How we reverted to a feudalistic state is a complex and infuriating story. Critical to this change has been a planning theology that holds density itself as intrinsically good and that purposely seeks to block housing on the periphery for societal, and environmental reasons. Where implemented, this approach has driven up prices, as evident in places like Sydney, Vancouver, San Francisco, London, and Paris. This has been a boon to speculators and well-heeled developers, but makes middle-class housing unaffordable to the middle class and intensifies the poverty of poorer residents.The “pack and stack” planning “vision” has been widely adopted, even in land-rich countries like Australia. This ad from the New South Wales government promises an urban paradise of sorts:This, as many Sydney-siders will tell you, is not exactly what happened. Instead of flocking to the city, research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Queens University (Canada) estimates that nearly 80 percent of Australia’s metropolitan population lives in automobile-oriented suburbs or exurbs. Further, more than 75 percent of employment growth in Sydney and Melbourne occurred outside the central business districts between the 2011 and 2016 censuses. But due to planning restrictions, taxes, and fees, in the decades since these regulations have been imposed, Sydney has become one of the Anglosphere’s most expensive cities, with prices that have placed most prospective homeowners on the sides. Indeed, under these regulations, house prices have tripled relative to incomes creating conditions where two-thirds of Australians now believe that the next generation will never be able to afford a home.These trends are distressingly common across the higher income countries. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported in Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle-Class that the future of the middle-class is threatened by house prices that have been growing “three times faster than household median income over the last two decades.”This shift reflects, at least in part, the movement of big capital into housing, including foreign investors. In 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty produced a widely referenced analysis of world inequality. Soon after, Matthew Rognlie of Northwestern University found that virtually all of Piketty’s increased inequality was attributable to increased house values. In the United States over the past decade, the proportion of real-estate wealth held by middle-class and working owners fell substantially while that controlled by the wealthy grew from under 20 percent to over 28 percent.This trend will be worsened by moves on Wall Street to buy up single family homes, further raising their price, and then rent them out, particularly to priced-out millennials, has reached record proportions. Rather than help middle-class families this supports the rentier class—which Piketty calls the “enemy of democracy”—assuring them of steady profits by collecting rents while the middle class loses its independence.Some densifiers suggest that forced densification will lower prices. In reality, virtually all the regions of the world with the highest house prices have regulations designed to encourage development in the inner urban rings and discourage or even ban construction on the more affordable peripheries. Former World Bank principal urban planner Alain Bertaud describes the associated consequences, noting that urban growth boundaries and greenbelts put “arbitrary limits on city expansion” and that “the result is predictably higher prices.”Research in Vancouver, Canada and other locations has shown an association between densification, on one hand, and higher land prices and diminished housing affordability on the other. Research on two decades of densification projects in Brisbane—Australia’s fastest growing city—found that housing costs rose even with little private development interest. In the US, meanwhile, higher density urban areas have substantially higher housing costs. Around the world, more severe housing and land-use regulation has been associated with losses. Both the OECD and Rognlie urged a review of such regulations which has been associated with severe losses in housing affordability.Planners may not have lowered prices or lured people to cities, but they have managed to stomp on the aspirations of homeowners. Even before the pandemic, this hit the young in particular including in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Perhaps nowhere is this hostility to market demands more intense than in California, where oligarchic finance has allied itself with progressive planning. The general thrust of the state’s regulatory regime seeks to limit “sprawl” to reduce greenhouse gasses from cars and make our communities environmentally more sustainable.The result? Coastal California’s housing prices relative to incomes have risen nearly three times the national average, and now the state suffers from the second lowest homeownership rate in the US after New York. Most impacted have been California millennials suffering homeownership rates that are diminishing more quickly than elsewhere in the country.Nor does densification have any of the purported environmental benefits now being pushed by the permanent DC urban-centric establishment, such as the Brookings Institution and the Biden administration. The pro-density Terner Center projects that if California’s cities followed the density guidelines, the impact on emissions would be at best one percent. This at a time when we have better, less disruptive ways to address emissions. For example, promoting at-home and hybrid work reduces greenhouse gas emissions without embracing a density mantra which is widely unpopular in most communities.Rather than impose a density agenda, it is now imperative to embrace the growing pace of suburbanization. Despite all the talk of “back to the city,” suburbs and exurbs account for more than 90 percent of all US major metropolitan growth since 2010. Between 2010 and 2021, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained two million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. Overall, according to a recent MIT study, roughly 80 percent of the nation’s metropolitan population lives in auto-oriented suburbs and exurbs, while barely eight percent live in the urban core, and another 13 percent live in traditional transit-oriented suburbs.The increased move to the suburbs and smaller cities was evident even before the pandemic, and now it has accelerated. According to Census Bureau data, cited by Brookings’ Bill Frey, most large metros are shrinking. Redfin reports that roughly one-in-three moves by their readers was to another region, the highest level ever, and mostly to less expensive, and usually less dense, locales. This clearly makes the current planning religion particularly misplaced.These trends can only be amplified by the shift to online work and the continued decline in the historic appeal of dense central business districts, which across the West account for roughly 13 percent of all jobs. Early in the pandemic, perhaps 42 percent of the 155 million-strong US labor force was working from home full-time, up from 5.7 percent in 2019, and had exceeded the share of workers commuting by transit. New research from Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis suggests that, when the pandemic ends, a “residual fear of proximity” and a preference for shorter commutes (or none at all) will mean that roughly 20 percent or more of all work will be done from home, almost four times the already-growing rate before the pandemic.This is not an extravagant claim. Studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research and from the University of Chicago suggest this could grow to as much as one-third of the workforce, and as high as 50 percent in Silicon Valley, something reflected in the openness with which most tech firms accept new workstyles. Roughly 40 percent of all California jobs, including 70 percent of higher-paying ones, could be done at home, according to research by the Center of Jobs and the Economy. Moreover, advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality are likely to improve the popularity and feasibility of remote working.In the process, central business districts like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington have all suffered far more than surrounding suburban or sunbelt business districts, losing both residents and businesses. New York has been disappointing, largely due to a rise in crime, employee reluctance to give up a more home-centered lifestyle, and growing acceptance of at-home or hybrid work among employers.Even San Francisco, with one of the nation’s strongest central business districts, has suffered rising office vacancies, now three times the pre-pandemic levels. This is enough to fill the Salesforce Tower, the city’s tallest building, 12 times. Things should improve, but most companies there, according to a Bay Area Council survey, expect employees to come to the office three days a week or fewer, with barely one-in-five seeing a return to a “normal” five-day work week.This shift is likely to be resisted by many managers who want to frogmarch people back to the office. Yet, some 60 percent of US teleworkers, according to Gallup, wish to keep working remotely. Attempts to reverse this situation may prove difficult, due to deep-seated labor shortages. “You see tons of bold statements. Companies saying, ‘No remote work.’ Some companies are saying, ‘We’re getting rid of all of our offices,’” says Bret Taylor, president and chief operating officer of Salesforce. “There’s like a free market of the future of work, and employees are choosing which path that they want to go on.”These workplace trends suggest the suburbs and exurbs are the future. Nearly two-thirds of US millennials prefer this kind of location, which is historically tied to single family ownership. Where millennials go has implications for birthrates, which have fallen as housing prices have risen. Families overwhelmingly favor less dense housing and frequently decide to have children once they buy a house. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study draws this conclusion, seeing a 10 percent increase in home prices leads to a one percent decrease in births among non-homeowners in an average metropolitan area. In China’s Yangtze River Delta (Hangzhou-Shanghai-Nanjing), research shows that fertility rates decline materially as house prices increase, with a similar finding regarding rents.The prevalence of singledom and the culture of childlessness are often portrayed as matters of choice or even superior environmental enlightenment. But in America, at least, attitudes about family are not significantly different from prior generations, albeit with a greater emphasis on gender equality and later births. Among childless American women aged 40–44, barely six percent are “voluntarily childless.” The vast majority of millennials want to get married and have children.High prices and density are poison to fecundity. Cities with the most expensive housing and the most density are becoming childless demographic graveyards. Rich Asian cities like Hong Kong, Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul suffer fertility rates often barely half of replacement. This also applies in the West in high-cost cities such as New York, Paris, London, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In Manhattan, the ultimate high-cost elite urban core, the majority of households are not only childless, but nearly half are single, according to the latest American Community Survey (US Census Bureau) data.Ultimately, as housing challenges reduce birthrates, we will likely face economic stagnation. In the United States, workforce growth has slowed to about one-third of the level in 1970 and seems destined to fall even more. These figures are even more catastrophic in very low-fertility countries like Japan, Germany, and most importantly, China. China’s working-age population (those between 15 and 64 years old) peaked in 2011 and is now projected to drop 23 percent by 2050, with 60 million fewer people under the age of 15—a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The ratio of retirees to working people is expected to have more than tripled by then, which would be one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. By 2100, reports the South China Morning Post, the country’s population could be halved.Perhaps even more critical may be the political and social impacts of unaffordable housing. From its earliest days, democracy depended on a class of small property owners, whether in Greece or Rome, or modern Britain, America, Canada, and Australia. The earliest democracies in Athens and Rome rested on an assertive property-owning middle class. Aristotle warned about the dangers of an oligarchy that would control both the economy and the state; in fact, an ever-greater consolidation of wealth played a role in undermining Greek democracy and the citizen-led Roman Republic. By the end of the Republic, over 75 percent of all property was owned by roughly three percent of the population, while over four-fifths owned no property at all.Self-government resurfaced largely where a property-owning middle class emerged to challenge the feudal order—first in Italy and the Low Countries, and later across western and northern Europe, and then in the “new worlds” of North America and Oceania. The idea of dispersed ownership was sharply opposed by aristocracies and later by communist planners who saw the appeal of owning for the masses but preferred to impose “a concrete spatial agenda for Marxism” in small apartments densely built near public transit, with close proximity to the workplace.These objections to suburbs and homeownership have been picked up by density advocates from the tech-funded YIMBY movement in California. Home ownership, according to progressive mouthpiece Vox, “could be turning you into a bad person,” by making you concerned about living near slums and drug dealers. According to a Minnesota City Council Member, those who talk of “neighborhood character” and “historic preservation” may be “participating in structural white supremacy.”Until recently, such collectivist views were unpopular across the political spectrum. The ideal of broadly dispersed property ownership was promoted by politicians on both the Right and Left in most high-income countries. “A nation of homeowners, of people who own a real share in their land, is unconquerable,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He saw homeownership as critical not only to the economy but to democracy and the very idea of self-government.Today, this faith in self-determination and the democratization of land ownership is being reversed, despite the wishes of the great majority in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada. We can either work to expand our communities, preferably in more sustainable ways, or we can accept that future generations will be ever-more dependent on subsidies or affordable unit set-asides.An economy where most people, blocked from ownership, rely upon wealth transfers from the lucky few cannot easily coexist with a tradition of individual initiative and self-governance. Addressing the housing crisis is not only about homes and hearth but may determine the nature of our society for decades to come.

L AST JUNE the foundation that runs Montpelier, the former Virginian slave plantation of James Madison, made a dramatic announcement. It had resolved, by a two-thirds vote of its board, to share management of the property with a group representing the descendants of slaves. The Montpelier Descendants Committee ( MDC ), a local charity, would be “co-equals in sharing governing power and responsibility for the very site that enslaved their ancestors”, said the foundation’s chairman, Gene Hickok.

The decision brought acclaim to Montpelier, one of the least visited yet perhaps the loveliest of Virginia’s Founding Father abodes. Set in rolling horse-country north of Charlottesville, the historic site had already come a long way towards confronting the slaver past of America’s fourth president. Its domestic slave cabins had been located and reconstructed—within shouting distance of the room where Madison drafted the American constitution. Yet the Montpelier Foundation’s promise of “structural parity” for the slave descendants implied a far greater commitment.

Sadly, the foundation has broken its word. Even as slave-descendant groups trumpeted the arrangement as a new template for historic places, its board, dominated by local worthies, began questioning the MDC ’s right to represent Montpelier’s slave descendants. It removed MDC representatives from its governance committee and promoted members of a rival descendant group—which claims kinship with Montpelier’s best-known slave, Paul Jennings, author of a memoir of enslavement in the White House. Last month the board voted to reduce the MDC’S role in nominating descendant board members, a move slammed by the trust that owns Montpelier and by most of its senior staff. As a result, the site’s chief curator and chief archaeologist—veterans of three decades at Montpelier between them—were sacked this week.

Their opposition to the board’s move was understandable. Advances in genealogy have seen a proliferation of slave-descent groups in recent years, and many have contributed to America’s ongoing reckoning with slavery. The Monroes of Monroetown, a settlement formed by former slaves of James Monroe, are as revealing of the fifth president’s legacy as his rebuilt house, Highland, a short drive from Montpelier. It helps that America has a long tradition of lineage societies—some of which, in a compelling irony, long pushed a lily-white version of American history. The Madison family cemetery at Montpelier was renovated by Daughters of the American Revolution, an educational society that openly refused to accept black members until the 1980s. This makes it especially logical that the MDC claims an oversight role at Montpelier’s slave burial ground. Similarly, in Monticello, the nearby residence of Thomas Jefferson, the long-standing role of his descendants in pushing a sanitised version of his biography provided an opening for descendants of the third president and his slave-concubine, Sally Hemings, to offer an accurate version.

Such interventions can be especially powerful because of how thin the record of individual slaves is—especially set against the magnificent details of the slaver presidents. The names of slaves were noted patchily, if at all, in estate accounts. Amid the clutter of Jefferson’s inventions, books and collections at Monticello, there is no image of Hemings, with whom he had six children. Most of what is known of her comes from her descendants’ family histories. Jennings, who was sold by Madison’s widow but later bought his freedom, is the only one of Madison’s 100 or so slaves of whom an image and much biography remain. To hear James French, a banker who chairs the MDC , recount his family tree is therefore to be guided back to a time and place from which little evidence of human life or interaction survives. His ancestors were enslaved offspring of two of Madison’s white neighbours, including James Barbour, a governor of Virginia.

Yet, impressive as its achievements are, slave-descendant activism may not be as straightforwardly positive as some claim. The MDC argues for a lead role at Montpelier not on the basis of its impressive academic and business capacity, but solely by moral right. Its blueprint for slave-descendant activism, known as “the rubric”, suggests any institution that omits slave descendants is by definition “perpetuat[ing] the exploitative practices of the past by privileging the perspectives of slave owners”. Slave descendants are not merely defending the interests of dead slaves, in other words; they consider themselves almost synonymous with them. This may help explain why the slavery exhibits at Montpelier use photographs of slave descendants to represent slaves. For Lexington, at least, these portraits of middle-class Americans with sombre expressions do not bring history alive; they push it away.

By extension, Monticello, whose excellent slavery exhibits your columnist also visited last week, is nonetheless failing as far the rubric is concerned because it does not reserve seats on its board for slave descendants. Or rather, according to the blueprint’s loose definition of descendance, because it does not reserve seats for people who consider themselves as slave descendants, “whether or not they know of a genealogical connection”. It can be hard to prove slave lineage; yet that seems like a contestable basis on which to claim a right to manage Monticello or Montpelier.

The meaning of Madison

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place,” wrote Madison of the constitutional system he designed. The same seems to be true of the management of his former house. The Montpelier Foundation has behaved shamefully in abrogating its agreement with Mr French’s organisation. But you do not need to be racist to suspect that the overreaching descendant movement could be a difficult partner. Both parties will have to compromise to co-exist. That, despite his terrible moral flaw, remains Madison’s great insight. ■

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What Joe Biden’s gaffe says about his end-game in Ukraine (Apr 2nd)

I N MANY RESPECTS Lawrence Wong resembles the scholar-statesmen both epitomised and prized by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father. Like Lee, the country’s first prime minister, and his son Lee Hsien Loong, the third and current one, Mr Wong did a stint at Harvard, earning a masters in public administration. He then climbed the ranks of the civil service, ending up as principal private secretary to Lee the younger. As a politician, his ministerial portfolios have included education and national development. He is currently the finance minister and co-chair of the government’s covid-19 task force. Although Singapore is a multiracial country, Mr Wong is an ethnic-Chinese man, like all previous heads of government.

Yet he is also the kind of bloke you could drink a beer with. That, at least, is the impression one gets from Singapore’s state-owned media, which have been full of glowing reports ever since it was announced, on April 14th, that Mr Wong will take over as leader of the People’s Action Party ( PAP ) when its current boss, Lee junior, eventually steps down. (Mr Lee had planned to retire by February, but deferred that during the pandemic. He has yet to declare a new departure date.) Barring a historic upset at the next election, Mr Wong is on course to become the country’s fourth prime minister.

Mr Wong grew up, he has said, in an “ordinary family”. His father was a salesman and his mother a schoolteacher. Like most Singaporeans, they lived in public housing. And unlike many leading politicians, he attended his local high school rather than an elite institution. He then went to the University of Michigan—not quite Cambridge, where the two Lees studied. His private life is not picture perfect. In a socially conservative country, he is a divorcé, since remarried, and has no children. He has hobbies—he likes to play the guitar—and a softer side. When his golden retriever died in 2020, he mourned publicly on Instagram: “baby Summer has crossed the rainbow bridge… We will miss u :(“.

All this cuts against the image of the typical PAP politician. The man with whom the party is most closely associated is Lee senior. Unabashedly elitist, he possessed immense intellect, ruthlessness and a penchant for telling Singaporeans what was best for them. A colossus who transformed the city, he saw no need to be liked. Over the course of his long career—he retired from politics only in 2011—he moulded the party in his image.

The man first selected to succeed Lee Jr, Heng Swee Keat, resigned from the post last year citing his age—he is 61—rather than his many gaffes. But he was widely perceived as dull and distant. By the same token, the two other main candidates for the job are considered arrogant (Chan Chun Sing, the education minister) and stern (Ong Ye Kung, the health minister).

The 49-year-old Mr Wong is a bit more personable. Perhaps the first time the public took notice of him was in 2020 when, while giving a speech in Parliament about the sacrifices made by front-line workers at the height of the pandemic, he broke down in tears. His sniffles endeared him to the public, who think of the party’s elite as cold and calculating.

Mr Wong is not considered a charismatic visionary, says Linda Lim, a professor at the University of Michigan who has known him since his student days. But he is “a decent guy” who is comfortable showing emotion. If the men in white, as PAP stalwarts are known, are supermen, Mr Wong is everyman.

Mr Wong’s more human bearing may have won him the job, but he is unlikely to take the country in a different direction, reckons Michael Barr of Flinders University in Australia. Instead, his elevation, in an opaque process involving the PAP ’s so-called “fourth generation”, or “4 G” , is a sign of the party’s adaptability. Even though the PAP commanded 61.2% of the vote in the most recent election, in 2020—a landslide anywhere else—it won the smallest share of seats in its history.

The opposition remains small and structurally disadvantaged. Yet the PAP ’s election post-mortem revealed that many Singaporeans found their rivals more empathetic and wanted them to act as a check on the ruling party’s power. The PAP is therefore preparing for a future in which politics will be more contested. As Mr Wong said recently, echoing the prime minister, “We do not assume that the PAP will win the next general election.” Its leaders seem to hope that they can hold on to power by climbing down from their pedestals and showing that they, too, are only human.

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The invasion of Ukraine has turned Japan definitively against Russia (Apr 2nd)

I T STARTED WITH Norwegian salmon. Chinese officials blamed the frozen fish for a surge of covid-19 cases in Beijing in 2020. Later they claimed to have found the virus on crabs from Chile and shrimp from Ecuador. A smorgasbord of other delicacies, from pork knuckles to bananas, have also been labelled as hosts by China. So have South Korean clothing and packages arriving from abroad.

Most experts—even some Chinese ones—think this is hogwash. The World Health Organisation says there is no evidence that people can catch covid from food or food packaging. The virus rarely spreads through surfaces. Most transmissions occur when an infected person breathes out tiny droplets that are inhaled by someone close by. When China claims to find covid on an imported banana, say, it is probably just finding harmless fragments of the virus.

But imported products make for good scapegoats. Under China’s “zero-covid” policy local officials are punished when an outbreak occurs on their watch. It probably helps if they can blame foreigners. Indeed, Chinese officials and media have pushed an unfounded conspiracy theory that the virus originated in America and was brought to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the pandemic started, by American soldiers.

This leads to paranoia. A video shows health officials in a Shanghai market swabbing the lips of a live carp. Last year the National Health Commission published advice on imported cherries. “Since the virus is running rampant in foreign countries, cherries cannot come out of the mud unsullied,” said an expert on its website. Some goods come with a QR code that a Chinese buyer can scan in order to check its covid test results.

The testing and quarantining of imports adds costs for businesses. When a good tests positive, trade in it may be halted. “China has never shared any scientific justification for having adopted such restrictive and unjustified measures,” says the European Union’s delegation to China. Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, blames “voodoo science” for the way imports are treated. According to him, “The hysteria is still sky-high.”

Dig deeper

All our stories relating to the pandemic can be found on our coronavirus hub. You can also find trackers showing the global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by country and the virus’s spread across Europe.

L AST DECEMBER York City Council considered a proposal to demolish a Mecca bingo hall and replace it with student housing. The building was acknowledged to be architecturally undistinguished. It was also unused—it had closed during the covid-19 pandemic and never reopened. Still, some councillors objected. One argued that the bingo hall was “clearly a cultural facility, if not institution” and called on the chairman to resign.

The council eventually approved the plans. But the eruption of controversy over the redevelopment of an ugly, defunct building is pure York. “It’s quite a backward-looking city—it’s very nostalgic,” says Helen Heraty, co-owner of the Grays Court Hotel, which unlike the bingo hall is both old and beautiful. And nostalgia is a problem, for York and for Britain.

When politicians talk about “levelling up” Britain, they tend to imply that northern England, the Midlands and Wales are hungry for development and growth. This is certainly true of prominent northern politicians such as Andy Burnham and Ben Houchen, respectively the mayors of Greater Manchester and the Tees Valley. But the north also contains places that are as NIMBY as any other in the country.

York is a small city of 211,000 inhabitants with a lovely, largely medieval centre. Over the past few decades it has fared well economically, although like many places it has slipped a little since the financial crisis (see chart). York University churns out more graduates every year. Taking an average of the past five years, 50% of residents are estimated to have a post-secondary qualification, compared with 41% in Britain as a whole. The city could be a powerful engine of the northern English economy. But it does not want to be.

British cities are supposed to have local plans, agreed with the government, which explain where they will build new homes and offices. The last time York managed to do this was in 1956. That is not an oversight. York has simply not wanted to turn into a bigger city like Leeds or Manchester, says Neil Ferris, the corporate director of place at York City Council: “Do you need all those big sheds, do you need all those factories to have a good quality of life?” York has surrounded itself with an enormous green belt, eight times as large as the built-up area of the city, which prevents suburban sprawl. It cannot grow upwards, partly because planners do not want to block views of the cathedral. And apart from some railway yards, which will be redeveloped in a plan known as York Central, it lacks the large blocks of post-industrial wasteland that have allowed cities such as London and Manchester to build rapidly in their centres. As a result it adds homes and people only slowly. Between 2015 and 2020 York’s population grew by 2.5%, or an average of just over 1,000 people a year. That is slower growth than the United Kingdom as a whole. Students seem to account for nearly all of the increase: full-time enrolments in the University of York alone have risen by 4,785 over the past five years. York is hardly better at creating commercial buildings. A new office development known as Hudson Quarter claims to be the first of its kind in the city for at least ten years. The amount of office space in the centre of York fell after the national government made it easier to convert offices into homes. “We have a lot of people looking at York and then going elsewhere,” says Laurence Beardmore, president of the chamber of commerce.

York might well be a richer city if it allowed itself to grow faster. The council does worry that York loses too many graduates, who push off because they cannot find entry-level homes or highly skilled work. It is generally the case that bigger cities are more productive than smaller ones, although this is less true in Britain than elsewhere. And as Mr Beardmore points out, even sprawling cities can have beautiful centres. Just look at Paris.

But the truth is that the established residents of York are doing fine. Desirability and limited construction help explain a ratio of median home prices to earnings of 8.8, above the 6.4 average for the Yorkshire and Humber region. “Your average person in York who owns a house is quids in,” says Philip McCann of the University of Sheffield. York’s refusal to grow harms its residents less than the people who cannot afford to move there. ■

O NE ROOM is named “Rolihlahla”, his forename at birth. Another is “46664”, his prison number on Robben Island. A third is “Madiba”, his clan name. And the most luxurious suite? That is simply “Mr President”.

Sanctuary Mandela, a boutique hotel that opened in September, is evidence of the power of the brand built around Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president. The hotel is owned by the Nelson Mandela Foundation ( NMF ), a charity established by Mandela when he stepped down.

Before his death in 2013, Mandela charmed money out of rich Americans, who accounted for 80% of donations to the NMF and included the likes of Bill Clinton and the Gates Foundation. But recently American funders have “turned inwards” to domestic causes, laments Sello Hatang, the NMF ’s CEO . Others have been scared off by the corruption that has spread in South Africa since Mandela left office in 1999.

Fortunately his foundation owns about a dozen valuable trademarks, including “46664”. It sometimes uses them to boost its coffers, for instance with a hotel or branded clothing. It also approves a few of the many licensing requests it gets. But it tries not to cheapen the former president’s legacy. A Nelson Mandela burger, Mr Hatang suggests, would be a no-no. “We are trying to maintain the stature of the man.”

But the foundation does not have a monopoly on making money from Mandela. Last month the Liliesleaf Farm and Museum sold an NFT , or non-fungible token (an electronic chit to a digital artwork) of Mandela’s arrest warrant from 1961. The money may help reopen the museum, which was once a safe house for anti-apartheid groups. It shut last year, partly because of covid-19.

And last month Makaziwe Mandela, Madiba’s surviving daughter from his first marriage, auctioned NFT s of his paintings (pictured). Mrs Mandela and two of her children run House of Mandela, a retailer. Among other things it sells a range of $5 wines inspired by the family clan— “noble, respected, trusted”. In December the government halted an auction, also involving Mrs Mandela, of the key used to lock her father’s cell at Robben Island, on the grounds that the item is state property. (Mrs Mandela did not respond to requests for comment but has reportedly said that the earnings would have funded a memorial garden.)

“You can’t stop the family,” says Mr Hatang, since they have the name, too. Though critics accuse Madiba’s descendants of exploiting his legacy, there is perhaps a broader lesson from all of the ventures. Economics is about scarcity. So long as South Africa lacks leaders in the mould of Mandela, his value will endure.

A FTER 23 YEARS on the throne, King Abdullah looks tired, aloof and despairing of his kingdom. While his counterparts in the Gulf unveil grand visions, he sounds short of ideas: his favourite way to tackle a problem is to create a committee. As more Arab states normalise ties with Israel, Jordan’s strategic importance as a front-line state has dwindled. So has aid from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, which used to be a primary source of revenue given Jordan’s lack of natural resources. Meanwhile prices for ordinary folk have soared; nearly half the young are jobless, and the economy—in the words of a disgruntled former prime minister—is bankrupt. In sum, Jordan and its king are unhappy.

Mockery of the monarch has become more frequent. Leaks about his plethora of properties in America and Britain have forced Abdullah and his family to deny that they have squirrelled national wealth abroad. His recent sojourn in Frankfurt for back surgery has been prompting catty comments about the state of Jordan’s health service. The decision to level a poor neighbourhood near the palace, supposedly for aesthetic reasons, has enraged some of the Bedouin who were living there.

To cap it all, Abdullah faces a lingering leadership crisis. Last year he put his half-brother, Hamzah, under house arrest for plotting what palace officials said was a coup. Efforts to patch up the row have failed. Hamzah has asked for the king’s forgiveness but has not been freed. The more the king tries to sideline him, the more he becomes a focus for popular grievances. Hamzah’s likeness to their father, King Hussein, who reigned from 1952 until his death in 1999, and his mastery of Bedouin Arabic evoke nostalgia for better times. “The efforts to silence Hamzah are increasing his popularity and turning him into a threat,” says a former official. A Western military expert calls him “trouble”.

By contrast King Abdullah looks and sounds more British. His mother, née Toni Gardiner, a British colonel’s daughter, was the only one of King Hussein’s four wives not to be formally crowned queen. Hamzah was said by some to have been his father’s favourite. His mother, Queen Noor, an American partly of Levantine heritage who lives mainly abroad, wrote in an autobiography that King Hussein intended Abdullah to be a placeholder for a decade until Hamzah was ready to reign. This may be conjecture. In any event, Hamzah was displaced as crown prince in 2004, and in 2009 Abdullah promoted his own son, Hussein, to the role. A fraternal feud has festered ever since.

Hamzah is now sending mixed signals. On April 3rd he declared that he was discarding his royal title. “From the matter of honesty to God and conscience, I see nothing but to transcend and abandon the title of prince,” he tweeted. Some say he is tired of the military cars at his gates and the headlights that shine at his windows at night, so wants to drop out of the race. But the word “transcend” makes others surmise he still aspires to higher things. His mother has dubbed him “sharif”, a title his forebears used before they established monarchies (in Iraq as well as Jordan), claiming leadership of all Arabs.

A succession struggle between Hamzah, with his Bedouin accent, and Crown Prince Hussein, whose mother is Palestinian, could dangerously widen the kingdom’s old cleavage between the indigenous Bedouin and Jordanians of Palestinian descent who are now more numerous.

For all their economic woes, Jordanians still prize their country’s enviably longstanding stability above all. Whatever his faults, their king is something of a rarity in the region for having no blood on his hands. But cracks in the monarchy are causing jitters. Jordanians want their kingdom to serve as a regional crossroads, not as a cockpit of royal intrigue. ■

I N TIMES OF disease, revolution or famine, Beijing’s city gates offered China’s imperial rulers more than mere security. These hulking towers of grey brick and stone were symbols of a system that strove to keep death itself far from the seat of supreme power. When smallpox swept the arid plains and mountains of north-east China, the sick were quarantined miles outside Beijing and even imperial family members banished, if they lacked immunity from a previous infection. During some bubonic plagues, burials were banned in Beijing and detailed records kept of each coffin exiting its gates. In the heyday of China’s final, revolution-haunted dynasty, the Qing, the city maintained a garrison of 33,000 paramilitary police—or about one guard for every 20 Beijingers—with orders to track and register every stranger who entered its walls, whether domestic or foreign. When famines stalked the countryside, a gruel of millet and rice was served at temples just outside the city gates, to keep refugees from storming Beijing.

Under the Communist Party most of Beijing’s walls and gates have been torn down, but its privileges endure. Until the late 1970s all outsiders, especially from the countryside, had to register on arrival in the capital. To migrate to the city required something few newcomers could obtain: a Beijing hukou, the household registration papers needed to access housing, jobs, schooling and other public services. When famines killed millions in the era of Mao Zedong, Beijing was kept supplied with food to preserve political stability. Even today, provincial Chinese cannot easily buy property or raise school-age children in the capital without a Beijing hukou. Yet for some years outsiders, notably well-educated youngsters, could work and live in Beijing and feel almost equal to natives. The covid-19 pandemic shows that they are wrong to.

The Baimiaobei police checkpoint, straddling a four-lane road linking Beijing to the next-door province of Hebei, lacks the battlemented grandeur of an imperial gate. This open-sided, blue and white shed, one of over 160 checkpoints around Beijing, resembles a motorway toll station. Before covid it barely slowed buses and cars bringing commuters from Sanhe, a dormitory town separated by a river from Beijing. In normal times, Sanhe offers cheaper housing and shorter commuting times than many outlying districts of Beijing, with the added lure of easy-to-obtain Hebei hukou. Then in early March three covid cases were found in Langfang, a sprawling city of 5.5m people of which Sanhe is a part. Within hours authorities in Langfang banned non-essential travel to Beijing, pledging to make their region of Hebei a “political moat” for the capital. As more cases were confirmed, the city locked down for more than 30 days. Now that it has reopened, residents who work in Beijing need “commuter passes” issued by local officials. Obtaining a pass requires a declaration stamped by employers in the capital. That is impossible for some day labourers, self-employed cleaners and the like, leaving them out of work. Even students studying in Beijing have struggled to obtain the “Langfang exit certificates” needed for one-off trips.

Chaguan headed to the Baimiaobei checkpoint just after dawn on a recent weekday. With cross-border buses suspended, a stream of inbound commuters crossed from Langfang on foot. The smoggy air rang with the cries of touts promoting express coaches to central Beijing, and hawkers selling hot soybean milk and fried dough-sticks for breakfast. A smartphone salesman from Sanhe reported missing weeks of work in the capital, taking some of it as unpaid leave. He is sure that Langfang residents will find it harder to land jobs in Beijing in the future. Asked if he fears another border closure, he sighed: “There is nothing you can do.”

A defence of Beijing’s strict border controls might stress the importance of shielding the central government from outbreaks. But that does not explain why pandemic rules inside the capital have been strikingly lenient, compared with those imposed on humbler places like Langfang. For instance, more than half a dozen covid cases were found in April in Jiuxianqiao, a district of Beijing near modern-art galleries and posh apartment blocks. A compact “high-risk zone” was drawn around that outbreak as if with a scalpel. Nearby schools, shops and restaurants stayed open.

Some lives are more equal than others

To be sure, Shanghai, the only Chinese city to rival Beijing in importance, has suffered ferocious pandemic controls since the end of March. Residents of several districts went without food for days and hundreds of thousands of Shanghainese have been sent to grim mass-quarantine sites. Even so, Shanghai is receiving special treatment. On April 20th the city was home to 18,495 new cases, or over 95% of China’s total. But officials are imposing lockdowns as precisely as possible while opening individual neighbourhoods. It is even possible to leave Shanghai and travel to Beijing—at least for those who can afford at-home covid tests, covid-exempt taxis to the airport and 14 days of home quarantine in Beijing.

In contrast, tens of millions of people in dozens of little-known cities are currently under sweeping lockdowns and “static management” orders banning travel, some triggered by a single case. Some border cities in China’s far north and south have repeatedly quarantined residents and closed schools and businesses over the past two years, plunging locals into debt and despair. Beijing bans arrivals from all such places. Controls are especially tough on migrant workers, lorry drivers and others who move for a living. Their suffering attracts a fraction of the attention paid to Shanghainese, whose woes have made headlines for weeks.

Party bosses call strict covid rules proof that China cares about the lives and interests of the majority, unlike the decadent, freedom-obsessed West. Harsh controls have prevented many deaths, for China has lots of unvaccinated old people and a weak health system. But fast-spreading Omicron is testing that strategy. It is also exposing inequalities with ancient roots. ■

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S IX COWS munch on dry grass in a barn in Vajeghar, a village some five hours from Mumbai. Ajay Shilimkar, a dairy farmer, beams as he introduces them to your correspondent. One, named Laali, is his most recent acquisition. “She listens to what I say. I don’t need a stick,” he says. Laali moos triumphantly.

Until recently, Mr Shilimkar would have gone to one of India’s many livestock fairs in search of a new beast. But he found Laali on Animall, a cattle-trading platform. The seller, who listed her for 45,000 rupees ($590), lived just 20km away. Mr Shilimkar reckons he saved at least 10,000 rupees that would otherwise have gone to a middleman.

Mr Shilimkar is among 75m dairy farmers in India, and Laali one of 200m cows (there are another 100m buffaloes). The dairy industry is worth $174bn and produces a fifth of the world’s milk. Enticed by the prospect of juicy margins from formalising a highly fragmented market, many startups have emerged in the past few years. The companies make money by charging fees or providing extra services, such as online vet appointments. Animall claims to have made 1m sales since it was set up in 2019, and has received $23m in investment. Gaurav Choudhary of Pashushala, the first such startup to be founded, in 2018, says his aim is “democratising cattle”.

Livestock fairs, where most animals are still bought and sold, can be expensive and chaotic. Farmers shell out entry fees to register their beasts. They must pay for labourers to load and unload the animals, as well as for transport to and from the fair. They worry about cattle thieves. Making a sales pitch to every prospective customer takes a toll in the heat. And if your cows find no buyers, you must go through the whole rigmarole again, complains Anil Renusay, another cattle farmer in Vajeghar.

Then there is fraud, says Satish Birnale, who rears buffaloes in Sangli, a small western city. Some traders inject their animals with steroids. Horns are often polished “as if the cows have just been to a beauty parlour,” he says. “It’s like searching for a bride in an arranged marriage. We have to be careful and not go just by the looks.”

Firms like Pashushala and Animall claim to have solved such problems with a system of checks, including a nod from a local veterinarian. Animall requires sellers to upload videos and pictures of their cattle, and provide details not just of breed or age, but also past pregnancies, how much milk they provide and so on. A team calls every user to verify the information. Ads with blurry photos or listings with pictures taken from the internet are swiftly removed. A close-up of the cow’s udders is important. So are comments by the farmer about the animal’s temperament. In one video a seller croons, “Beautiful! Oh, look at those singhs (horns)“. It is not a new pitch. But it is now easier and cheaper to make.

E GYPTIANS OFTEN complain that their country produces little of value. Juhayna, the country’s largest dairy and juice maker, has been a notable exception. Its red and blue cartons are a staple in Egyptian homes. Its milk and yogurt are sold across the Middle East and Africa. It is one of the most valuable companies on Cairo’s stock exchange and a darling of foreign investors. In most countries it would be considered a national champion. But under Egypt’s military rulers it has faced a Mafia-style shakedown. Its fate illustrates the flaws of the Egyptian economy.

Juhayna’s troubles began when the Egyptian state decided to take it over. After its founder, Safwan Thabet, refused to hand over a controlling stake, he was thrown into a prison notorious for torture. When his son, Seif, refused the same deal, he joined his father in jail.

The state accuses the Thabets of funding terrorism. Safwan’s grandfather and uncle had been leading lights in the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious and political movement. In 2013, after a government dominated by the Brothers was overthrown in a coup led by General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the group was labelled as terrorist and outlawed. The Thabets insist they have nothing to do with it. Though father and son have been in jail for more than a year, the courts have not heard their case.

The Thabets were once part of the establishment. Safwan was chummy with Egypt’s previous autocrat, Hosni Mubarak. He flew abroad with state delegations to woo investors and advised ministers. After Mr Sisi became president in 2014, the older Thabet donated 50m Egyptian pounds ($7m) to the Long Live Egypt fund for development projects. Mr Sisi happily took cash from members of the Thabet family, despite their supposed links to terrorism.

Egypt has borrowed $20bn (about 5% of its GDP ) from the IMF since 2016, making it the fund’s second-largest recipient after Argentina in that period. It is negotiating a fresh loan after the war in Ukraine prompted nervy investors to flee, which caused a hard-currency crunch. The IMF has praised Egypt for swiftly taking painful (and unpopular) austerity measures.

But it has also complained that Egypt’s government is stifling the private sector. One survey shows that it has shrunk in all but nine months since 2016. Mr Sisi makes pro-business noises in public. But his generals, who dominate chunks of the economy, make a mockery of the free market.

Take another case. Ramy Shaath is a successful businessman whose company produces electronic devices that track the usage of electricity, water and gas for state utility companies. When he refused to let a military firm share his technology, the utility firms began cancelling contracts. “We started going bankrupt. And not because we were underperforming, but because the army was pressuring us,” says Mr Shaath. A critic of Mr Sisi’s politics, he was sent to jail for more than two years on unspecified terrorist charges but, like the Thabets, was never tried.

Last December Mr Sisi was shown on television browbeating three owners of construction firms into accepting delays for payments from the state for building roads and bridges. The businessmen grinned sheepishly and yielded. What would have happened if they had refused? Though the army gets special tax breaks and customs exemptions, the government lauds it for saving the public from greedy merchants and speculators. During the current holy month of Ramadan, soldiers hand out meat at subsidised prices. But when in 2019 a new state firm entered the lucrative market for certifying meat as halal (compliant with Islam), the agriculture ministry banned private competitors. Up shot the price of the certificates.

Last year Egypt launched Silo Foods Industrial City, a complex of food factories overseen by the army. The firm’s slogan, “The World has a New Taste”, echoes Juhayna’s, “The World has a Beautiful Taste.” The company wants to open a milk factory of its own. After Seif Thabet was arrested, he offered to run its operations for a token salary if the state laid off Juhayna and freed him and his father. The offer was rebuffed.

Few businessmen dare stand up to the army. The Thabets’ treatment shows what might happen if they do. “If they took [Juhayna], they would destroy it. I’m not handing over what my father built,” Seif has lamented from prison. In a video posted on Facebook last year his mother begged Mr Sisi to free her son and husband. When it went viral she was summoned for questioning and told to shut up, or suffer the same fate. Last month she died of cancer. The regime prevented hundreds of mourners from attending her funeral.

A protest against American interventionism in World War II from 1940. (Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.)Hi,Yesterday, Matt Continetti’s invaluable history of the American conservative movement finally went on sale. For those interested in this topic, I highly recommend it.I wanted to open with that statement for two reasons. First, because I mean it. Second, because I want to pick up where I left off in my friendly disagreement with Matt at the end of our conversation on The Remnant.I’m reluctant to call what follows a criticism, because one of the most annoying gripes for any author is to get grief about the book you didn’t write. On its own terms, The Right is very, very good and Matt accomplishes what he set out to do. He wanted to provide a richer political context for the history of the conservative movement. George Nash’s essential The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America Since 1945 is a very academic book (though it’s very well-written for an academic book). According to Matt, what was missing in Nash’s landmark book was a broader consideration of the interplay between the GOP and the conservative movement and he set out to provide it. And whatever my quibbles may be, he succeeds at doing that.But here’s my problem. By focusing so exclusively on the right, many of the problems, dysfunctions, challenges, and moral failures of the conservative movement are (unintentionally) cast as uniquely right-wing phenomena. The ironic and, again, unintended upshot of this approach is that it actually tends to reinforce rather than rebut the liberal version of conservative history. It’s like being honest about your own shortcomings and misdeeds at an intervention: It’s worth doing, but it doesn’t—or shouldn’t—imply that everybody attending the intervention is without their own baggage.

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 ShutterstockIn his 1989 book Wonderful Life, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that, if we could “replay the tape”, life on Earth would evolve to be fundamentally different each time. 

Wings and flight evolved differently, and independently, in (1) pterosaurs, (2) bats, and (3) birds.
George Romanes

Was he right? Convergent evolution, in which similar features evolve to perform similar functions in distantly related organisms, offers an excellent model in which to run Gould’s thought experiment. 
One classic example of convergent evolution is the independent evolution of wings and flight in insects, birds, pterosaurs, and bats. Another is live birth (or “viviparity”), which has evolved independently from egg-laying more than 150 times in vertebrates (animals with backbones).
To understand how this happened, we studied the genes involved in pregnancy and live birth in six different live-bearing species. We discovered that, despite broad similarities in the anatomy and physiology involved, each species used a completely different set of genetic tools to give birth to live young. 
Is live birth controlled by a universal set of genes?
In nearly all live-bearing vertebrates examined so far, changes to the gestational tissues and biophysical processes during pregnancy appear remarkably similar. 
Some common elements of the process are:

tissues in the bodies of the mother and fetus which grow more blood vessels to exchange gases and water with each other
protection of the fetus from the mother’s immune system
allocation of nutrients to the fetus.

Live birth is driven by a complex suite of morphological, physiological, and genetic changes.
Modified from an image by Basile Morin, CC BY

The changes that occur during pregnancy and birthing must be mainly controlled by genetics, and we know that the expression of genes changes during pregnancy in different live-bearing animals. 
However, the generality of these changes is less clear. For example, are the same genes used during pregnancy in mammals and fish? Or are similar outcomes driven by entirely different genes? 
That’s what we set out to discover in our study, newly published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Queensland and James Cook University.
Measuring gene activity during pregnancy
An animal’s development is controlled by its genes, its environment, and an interaction between the two. 
Not every gene within an animal is always active. Genes are switched on (or “expressed”) when needed, and then switched off again when no longer needed. 
Gene expression levels naturally vary over time as an animal interacts with the environment and undergoes physiological changes, such as those associated with pregnancy. Using a technique called “transcriptomics”, we can take snapshots of these changes in gene expression as they occur.
To investigate the genetic changes occurring in the uterus during pregnancy in different species, we collected samples or used existing data from six live-bearing animals: the Australian sharpnose shark, three species of Australian lizards, the gray short-tailed opossum, and the brown lab rat.

The spotted skink Niveoscincus ocellatus, sampled in our study, gives birth to live young.
Charles Foster, Author provided

Sampling this wide range of animals allowed us to determine whether the same gene expression changes occur during pregnancy across species in which live birth evolved independently. 
Our work is the first quantitative study into the genetic basis of live birth at such a broad evolutionary scale.
There are many different ways to grow a baby
We expected to find many of the same genes used during pregnancy to support the growth and survival of embryos in each of the live-bearing species we sampled. 
This hypothesis seemed logical, given the many similarities in anatomical changes during pregnancy across live-bearing vertebrates, along with qualitative findings from previous research.

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This lizard lays eggs and gives live birth. We think it's undergoing a major evolutionary transition

Instead, we found there was no one set of “live-bearing genes” utilised during pregnancy across our sampled range of animals. In other words, evolution has converged on similar functions for successful pregnancy but those functions have been achieved by recruiting different groups of genes. 
Despite not being what we expected, this finding also makes sense. Different animal lineages may have different “toolboxes” of genes to draw from, due to their unique evolutionary histories.
A genetic “toolbox” can be thought of as a broad class of genes that perform similar basic functions. Over the long timescales of evolution, different genes from this ancestral toolbox can be recruited to carry out the same physiological functions in different animals. 

Like humans, the Australian sharpnose shark transports nutrients to developing embryos via a placenta.
Camilla Whittington, Author provided

For example, developing babies require access to a supply of amino acids for successful development. In many species these amino acids are transported from the mother to the fetus across the placenta via “solute carrier” genes. 
We identified more than 75 different solute carrier genes in the combined genetic toolbox of our study species. However, each species recruited different genes from the toolbox to transport amino acids during pregnancy.
Rethinking live birth
Our findings force us to rethink the idea that the cross-species similarities in live birth are controlled by the same genetic changes.
We can also consider our results in the context of Gould’s thought experiment about “replaying the tape of life”. 
Was the evolution of live birth predictable? It depends on how you look at it.
Large-scale similarities, such as the anatomy and functions of the uterus, seem predictable. They appear to have evolved repeatedly to solve the biophysical challenges of successful pregnancy. 
However, our results show this predictability does not extend to the underlying genes.
Charles Foster has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council, and is currently employed via funding from the Medical Research Future Fund (Australian Government Department of Health) and the University of New South Wales. Camilla Whittington receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the University of Sydney.James Van Dyke receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Government Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.

The democratic world has always had a double standard when it comes to dictators. Some we oppose vociferously, while others we quietly allow to get on with it.
Money and big business usually play a role in this hypocrisy. Our governments say little about human rights abuses in countries such as Saudi Arabia because we need their oil. The Chinese government is given a free pass because we want them to build our nuclear power stations. And while politicians may today wrap themselves in the blue and yellow of Ukraine, only yesterday they were happy to allow money stolen from the Ukrainian and Russian people to be safely stashed in London’s corrupted property market.
Another factor that leads some in the West to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses is guilt. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s dictator since 2000, has cunningly weaponised this guilt to remain in good odour with the West during more than two decades in power.
Kagame has long been championed by Western elites. Bill Clinton, the former US president, has called him “one of the greatest leaders of our time”. Tony Blair has praised his “visionary leadership”. The UK gives Kagame’s regime £54m a year and well-meaning Conservative MPs hold Rwanda up as an example of responsible African governance to sell the 0.7 per cent UK aid target to sceptical backbenchers.
One might even call this aid “guilt money”. This guilt is one legacy of the West’s inaction during the 1994 genocide, in which 800,000 Tutsis were massacred by tribesmen from Rwanda’s Hutu majority. The 100-day orgy of violence took place at a time when, much like today, isolationism was back in vogue in the West, whose leaders had little appetite for humanitarian intervention. Elsewhere at that time, as Bosnian Serb forces massacred Bosnian Muslims during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, adapted Margaret Thatcher’s amoral domestic mantra and declared that there was “no such thing as the international community”. The bodies began to pile up, and today the political class feels guilty about it.
And so we return to Kagame. A Tutsi who came to power following the genocide and a former intelligence officer, the Rwandan president was in his younger days nicknamed “Pilato” after Pontius Pilate, due to his relish for executing suspected informers (Pilate ordered Jesus’s execution).
Since coming to power in 2000, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) movement has ruled over the country’s 12 million inhabitants with an iron fist. Human Rights Watch cited a climate of “intimidation, harassment and other abuse” during a 2010 plebiscite organised to celebrate Kagame’s decade in office. Opposition parties were forbidden from fielding candidates due to spurious legal and administrative rulings. Kagame was subsequently elected for a second seven-year term with 93 percent of the vote. He was elected again in 2017 with 98.63 per cent of the vote, a mandate that would make the leaders of North Korea blush.
Yet Western leaders hardly batted an eyelid. Guilt for their inaction during the genocide played its part. But so did a racism of low expectations. Listening to Western politicians talk about Africa, one gets the perception that Africans are held to a lower standard because they are assumed to be both less capable and more easily corruptible. When asked in 2013 about Kagame’s questionable human rights record, Bill Clinton said that he made “more allowances for a government that produces as much progress as this one”.
What Kagame apparently had going for him was economic growth. And to be sure, Kagame’s government has overseen dramatic improvements in the fields of healthcare and education. Economic growth frequently stands at 7 percent. “The numbers do not lie,” Kagame told the pan-African magazine Jeune Afrique in 2017.
Yet while the numbers themselves may not lie, there is evidence that those in charge of the economic data have fiddled them. According to a comprehensive 2017 Financial Times investigation, far from being an economic miracle, poverty actually increased in Rwanda during the “boom” years of Kagame’s rule. Indeed, the FT’s investigation referred to “a consistent attempt since 2015 to misrepresent the results” regarding poverty.
The report was described as “Western propaganda” by the Rwandan government and rejected by the World Bank, which had been credulously singing Kagame’s praises as a “moderniser” ever since he first came to power.
The Rwandan government’s retort to the FT’s investigation was wide of the mark because Kagame remains the West’s favourite dictator. Indeed, Kagame is still treated with kid gloves by the West after 23 years unopposed in power: he can regularly be seen hobnobbing with the global elite at Davos.
Now, Kagame is set to play a role in Britain’s immigration policy. Boris Johnson’s government announced last week that Rwanda would soon begin processing asylum seekers attempting to come to the United Kingdom. The controversial scheme will see migrants who arrive in the UK via the English Channel, or other irregular routes, deported to Rwanda. As part of a “migration and economic development partnership” between Britain and Rwanda, Kagame’s government is set to receive £120 million from Britain towards an economic development program. The Home Office has said that those who receive refugee status “will be given full rights in Rwanda”.
If Western elites had a less blinkered view of Rwanda and Kagame they would probably not use such hollow phrases. Rwanda today is a country where elections are rigged, independent journalists are imprisoned, and former allies and critics of the president are hunted down abroad or forcibly disappeared at home. Three Rwandan exiles living in London were warned in 2011 by Scotland Yard that they were potential targets of Kagame’s assassins. Patrick Karegeya, a former Rwandan intelligence chief, was found suffocated in a hotel room in South Africa on New Year’s Day in 2014.
As for poverty reduction, I suppose you could call it that. While the IMF and World Bank wax enthusiastically about Rwanda’s openness to foreign capital, the homeless of the country’s capital Kigali are herded into “re-education” camps, where they can be held for months without charge and subjected to vicious beatings.
Rwanda is not the model of economic development and political stability that some in the West wish to see. Evidence of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Kagame regime is abundant. After 23 years of Kagame’s rule, Rwanda is clearly not the “Singapore of Africa”, as it is often called.
Educated Africa-watchers can see what Rwanda is becoming. The question for us Britons is: what are we becoming as a country if we think it’s OK to send some of the world’s most vulnerable refugees to Rwanda?

Starting in 1976, Andy Warhol kept a daily diary—meaning, since Warhol was dyslexic, and since he preferred having assistants perform the labor for his works, that he dictated it over the phone to a writer named Pat Hackett. Hackett had showed up at Warhol’s studio in 1968, a few months after Warhol was shot and nearly died, and got a job transcribing Warhol’s phone conversations. She would become his principal co-author, ghostwriter, or some combination of both.

In the beginning, the reason for keeping a diary was to make a record of Warhol’s daily cash payments. Warhol tried to deduct pretty much everything—takeout food, cab fares, all his shopping purchases and entertainment expenses—on his income-tax returns. This got him into trouble with the I.R.S., which seems just, unless we believe, as many people believe, that Andy Warhol’s greatest work of art was Andy Warhol. In that case, every dollar he spent on himself was properly a business expense.

Eventually, Warhol got into the habit of telling Hackett what he had done the previous day—usually a lot, since most evenings he socialized non-stop. According to Hackett, their conversations began around 9 A.M. and could last an hour or more. Then Warhol went to work. “The Andy Warhol Diaries” was published in 1989, two years after Warhol died in the hospital following an operation to remove his gallbladder. The book is being reissued this spring, and a six-part Netflix series based on it (and bearing the same name) arrived in March.

“Self-Portrait with Skull,” part of a series from 1977. Photograph by Andy Warhol / Courtesy Andy Warhol Foundation / Netflix Warhol photographed, filmed, and taped most things that he did. Photograph by Andy Warhol / Courtesy Andy Warhol Foundation / Netflix

Warhol’s work is notoriously indeterminate. What did he think about Campbell’s soup, car crashes and electric chairs, Marilyn Monroe, Mao? He never said. Some people (mostly professional art critics) read social criticism into the work, even though Warhol does not appear to have ever expressed a political view. He was certainly not a political radical. He seems to have been a liberal Democrat. Other people think that the work can be read autobiographically. Netflix’s “Diaries” does an honorable job of raising these interpretative questions without closing them.

Like “The Beatles: Get Back,” and like pretty much anything you can stream these days, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” is too long. Unlike “Get Back,” it’s also very montage-y—that is, rapid-fire images are used to illustrate virtually everything that’s said. But these formal choices don’t detract from the impressively thick and sensitively handled record of a life that the filmmakers, led by Andrew Rossi, who wrote and directed, have carefully reassembled.

The thickness is made possible by Warhol himself. From early on, he made a practice of photographing, filming, and taping almost everything that he did, and he encouraged members of his entourage to do the same. Consequently—and, although you get used to it, kind of miraculously—there seems to be a photographic record of almost every dinner party Warhol attended, every trip he made, every club he visited. The Netflix show makes a big deal of how mysterious and unknowable a human being Warhol was, but we must know more about him than we do about any artist who ever lived. He recorded everything and he rarely threw anything away. Warhol is the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Warhol dining with Diane von Furstenberg, one of many figures in his unrelenting social life. Photograph courtesy Andy Warhol Foundation / Netflix

The voice-over in the series is the published diaries read in Warhol’s voice, which, as far as I can tell, was produced by having the actor Bill Irwin read from the book and then using an A.I. program to transform his voice into Warhol’s. It works. The narration is supplemented by interviews with, mostly, former associates. The passage of time has enabled these people to be relatively disinterested. Particularly engaging are Bob Colacello, the former editor of Warhol’s magazine, Interview, who usually gets rough treatment from Warhol scholars; Jay Johnson, the brother of Warhol’s romantic partner Jed Johnson; and the artist and filmmaker Fab Five Freddy. The artists Glenn Ligon, Christopher Makos, and Kenny Scharf are insightful, and there are appearances by Tama Janowitz, Debbie Harry, Rob Lowe, Jerry Hall, John Waters, and Mariel Hemingway. One survivor who did not participate is Paul Morrissey, who directed many of Warhol’s feature films, including “Chelsea Girls,” “Trash,” and “Heat.”

The Netflix series follows the diaries. This means that it begins in the seventies, after the Pop period and the Silver Factory, after Warhol had finished putting his footprint on the history of modern art. His shooting, in 1968, marked the end of something both for Warhol, who grew understandably fretful as a person, and for the culture, including the artistic avant-garde in which Warhol worked. Suddenly, artists, and seemingly everyone else, became infatuated with money. A close reader of the Zeitgeist, Warhol remade himself as a practitioner of what he called “Business Art”—churning out celebrity portraits and producing silk screens on commissioned subjects (such as pets) in order to score large fees. Which he did.

Warhol could be quite cynical about all of this, and, in a way, he was once again deliberately scandalizing the purists by exposing the commercial bones of art-making. But he must have felt that his creative powers were diminishing, and that he was in danger of repeating himself. He was in danger; he did repeat himself. There were flashes of conceptual genius: the “Sunset” series, in which the sun looks like both a mushroom cloud and a Rothko, a neat Cold War image; the “Oxidation Paintings,” faux Pollocks created by pissing on the canvas; the “Camouflage” series. But a lot of the work was easy and empty. Warhol had a great eye; the art generally looks terrific on the wall, composition-wise and color-wise. But you can often feel that he didn’t really know what he was trying to do.

C ENTRAL BANKS are the guardians of money, the lifeblood of capitalism. Their actions influence people’s wages and savings, whether they can borrow and at what price, and steer the broader direction of the economy. Whether you are a worker or a pensioner, a saver or a borrower, their decisions affect you.

Thirty years ago, after inflation in the rich world had spiked in the double digits, these powers were harnessed for a single goal: to keep prices stable. Most central banks were given strict mandates and made independent of meddlesome, vote-seeking politicians. For a time it seemed that this ingenious policy fix had banished the spectre of inflation altogether. Central banks’ targets moulded expectations of price rises everywhere. Inflation in America, Britain, Germany and Japan averaged 2.1% a year between 1990 and 2007, down from 8% in the 1970s. Before covid-19 hit the big worry was too-low, not too-high, inflation.

Today, however, the inflation-fighting regime faces its most spectacular failure yet. Inflation has come roaring back, spurred by surging energy prices, rising wages and supply-chain disruptions. In America and the euro area consumer prices rose at an annual rate exceeding 7% in March, the fastest pace in decades. Labour markets in many places have become uncomfortably tight as jobs chase too few workers. Even the Bank for International Settlements ( BIS ), the central bank for central banks, is warning that the world may be on the cusp of a new inflationary era. Monetary policymakers across the rich world are scrambling to react.

This special report notes that this threat to central banks’ credibility comes as they have extended themselves far beyond just fighting inflation. After the financial crisis of 2007-09 their regulatory authority was beefed up. During the pandemic they intervened in a wide range of asset markets, hoovering up government bonds and even lending directly to companies and governments. Lulled by quiescent inflation before the pandemic, they became all-purpose policymakers, venturing into fixing structural problems such as inequality and climate change. As inflation makes a comeback, the danger is that these new aims will hinder, or distract from, the central mission of taming it.

An expansive phase

The powers of central banks have waxed and waned over time, especially after crises. The Swedish Riksbank, the first central bank, was set up in 1668 “to maintain the domestic coinage at its fair and right value”. The Bank of England was established in 1694 to fund war against France. Other central banks followed, although the Federal Reserve was created only as late as 1913. A series of financial panics in the 19th century led to central banks becoming lenders of last resort, ready to support the banking system during a crisis. To ensure trust in money, most linked their currencies to gold.

In the depression of the 1930s the gold standard collapsed, central banks were disgraced and a period of subservience to governments ensued. During the second world war they kept public borrowing costs low. Many veered into industrial policy. In emerging markets they came to resemble national development banks. (An arm of Mexico’s central bank financed the construction of tourist resorts in Cancún.) But as inflation picked up in the 1960s and 1970s, the tide shifted in favour of giving them independence.

In America the Fed and the Treasury agreed that the central bank would no longer cap government-bond yields. The Fed forcefully displayed its independence in the early 1980s, when Paul Volcker provoked a recession to tame inflation. Central banks were given independence and inflation targets, first in the rich world and then in many emerging economies. Today most are independent (the People’s Bank of China, or PB o C , is an exception).

Why is the role of central banks ballooning again? One reason is the steady decline in interest rates as desired global saving rose, which made reviving inflation after the financial crisis harder. In 2000 the Fed’s benchmark rate was around 6%. Today it is 0.25-0.5%. Although the central bank has begun raising interest rates, investors expect them to peak only at 3.1% in two years’ time. As they tried to revive inflation central banks have reached for all manner of tools. Many in the rich world began buying government bonds to lower long-term interest rates. The European Central Bank ( ECB ) bought corporate paper and subsidised bank lending to households and businesses. The Bank of Japan went further, buying equity exchange-traded funds, and promising to keep ten-year government-bond yields at 0.25%.

Another reason for the growing role of central banks is the new attention paid to financial stability, after a period of neglect. Stricter regulation of banks has led to a rise in non-bank intermediaries in a range of credit markets. When the crisis came, central banks had to stabilise these markets. The extraordinary cash crunch brought on by the lockdowns of 2020 pushed central banks back to the sphere of credit allocation. Technological change has accelerated the decline of physical cash, which once embedded trust in central banks. That has led central banks to consider if the banknotes they supply to the public should go virtual.

Politics is another reason for central banks’ bigger footprints. One sign is that appointing Fed governors has become more fraught since the financial crisis. Confronted with big intractable problems such as climate change and inequality, ministers and activists also eye central banks’ huge balance-sheets, hoping to use them to achieve socially worthy or green goals. Central bankers talk about such issues a lot more. Rising global tensions have also forced some to go beyond technical risk management when managing their foreign-exchange reserves, into geopolitics.

Many emerging markets have adopted inflation targeting, casting off their development roles and enjoying lower, less-volatile inflation as a result. But they keep a firmer hand on markets, given their vulnerability to exchange-rate movements and capital outflows. Some vestiges of the old industrial policy remain, such as bank-lending quotas for farmers or rural borrowers in India. The PB o C chases several objectives, often at the behest of the government. Although it has liberalised interest rates a bit, it relies heavily on managing the quantity of credit, rather than its price, nudging banks to lend to certain preferred borrowers.

This special report considers five areas where central banks are being pressed to do more: intervening in financial markets; tackling inequality; combating climate change; introducing digital currencies; and reacting to geopolitics. Each represents an important shift in markets and the economy. But each also risks pulling central banks deeper into political terrain, the price of which would be a loss of focus. When inflation was low, a broader role may have seemed harmless. Now, however, it has slammed into the reality of high inflation. The danger is that, with too many objectives, central banks will fail in their most important mission. ■

In the past several decades, Michael Kazin has written a series of books on the history of the American left—which have touched on labor and antiwar movements—as well as long studies of populism and a biography of William Jennings Bryan. The former co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown, Kazin has now combined many of his interests into his latest book, “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.” Kazin’s comprehensive narrative spans the Party’s nearly two-hundred-year existence, but he pays particular attention to internal battles over race and workers’ rights, and how this infighting has posed challenges to, alternately, the Party’s unity and conscience. The book arrives at a notable time for Democrats, too. Although the Party currently controls the executive and legislative branches in Washington, it must contend with a possible November wipeout in the midterm elections, and a President with declining approval ratings—now at around forty per cent—as well as a contentious debate between its moderate and progressive wings.

I recently spoke by phone with Kazin. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the New Deal era permanently changed the Party, the battles over the Democrats’ relationship to organized labor, and why the modern progressive movement decided to embed itself almost entirely within the Party.

People tend to snicker when Republicans call themselves members of the party of Lincoln because the current Republican Party is so different from the party that Abraham Lincoln led. But you could say the same thing about the Democratic Party, so I’m curious why you decided to write the history of the Democratic Party as one coherent entity.

First of all, I think institutions really matter and historians don’t write enough about them. Here you have a political party that has been in existence for two hundred years—some would argue even longer, going back to Thomas Jefferson—but I think it really begins as a mass party under Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, in the eighteen-twenties. And, for a long time, Democrats traced their origins back there, with the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners, and it was under F.D.R. that the Jefferson Memorial was put up in Washington.

I think there’s a reason why Democrats, historically, have seen continuity between the founding years and today. Also, it’s probably controversial for some people, but there is a common strand of rhetoric that Democrats have used, really, since Jefferson, but especially since Jackson—that they’re the party of the ordinary man, or the ordinary person. At first, it was only white people, of course, but, in some cases, by the middle of the twentieth century, it included people of all races.

There’s also, I think, a strand of what I call “moral capitalism” that was true for Jackson, and was true for F.D.R., and, for all of his problems, for Joe Biden as well. The form it took for each of them was quite different, but in each case moral capitalism meant standing for the interests and needs of ordinary people—small-business people, small farmers, wage earners—and against the big interests: against Wall Street, the big investor, and now, of course, big corporations like Walmart and Amazon. I think there’s continuity there in rhetoric and ideology, even though the meaning of all that rhetoric has changed in major ways.

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Yes, it seems like today the rhetoric has changed, even if some of the underlying policies have not. When you talk about speaking for the common man or railing against corporations, that rhetoric seems more likely to come from Republicans now, even if the policies do not.

Yeah, and I think it’s a problem for Democrats. As the Party became more diverse racially and ethnically, welcoming immigrants, it did become more difficult to find who “the people” were, and what their interests were. It was a moral necessity for Democrats to shed their racist past and struggle to become the party of all ordinary people, but in so doing they ran into the importance of race in American history and had to confront the fact that a lot of white working people were maybe happy to join unions with Black people, but didn’t want the government to push back Jim Crow regulations, and didn’t want their party to be seen as the party of racial equality, as opposed to the party of economic self-interest for all working people.

Democrats were always diverse, but, in the nineteenth century, they were a diverse party among whites, including lots of immigrants back then—especially Irish immigrants. They also became the party of people like me: college professors, who were often seen as the leaders of the Democratic Party ideologically. I think that the Democrats began to pick up an élitist tinge because of this in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when so many liberal intellectuals began to be Democrats, and that has also made it more difficult for the Democrats to appear as if they’re the party of the working person.

How much do you think that the modern Democratic Party as we think of it today is still defined by that period of F.D.R., both in terms of its successes and compromises?

The key pieces of legislation that made up the New Deal and are still very popular really encoded within them discriminatory provisions. Neither Social Security nor the Wagner Act covered agricultural workers or domestic workers; these were jobs that a majority of African Americans had in the South and also a majority of Mexican Americans had in the Southwest.

The New Deal is still very popular, even among most Republicans. That is, the programs that were passed and the ones that are still in existence—not the job-creation ones, certainly, but the welfare ones, like Social Security, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. But, at the same time, the Democrats, as they brought in liberal intellectuals, as they brought in these unions, which included a lot of radicals—communists and socialists helped organize those unions—they began to head down a perilous road that was going to, inevitably, end up in a kind of fragmentation. When you have a party that is so broad, that includes some of the most vicious racists in America—people such as Strom Thurmond, people who are openly anti-Semitic such as this guy John Rankin, from Mississippi, who is the architect of both the T.V.A. and the G.I. Bill—together with congresspeople who were very close to the Communist Party, well, the Party became so broad in that sense, and so popular, at least, for a while, during the Great Depression, that, inevitably, the different groups in it were going to make demands on the Party, which the leaders could not grant. They couldn’t grant a civil-rights bill and support for more power for the white South in Congress. Those two were at cross-purposes.

And, people don’t realize this, but already by the late nineteen-thirties the solid South stopped being so solid. It was really in the late nineteen-thirties that a lot of Southerners began to think about voting for Republicans. They begin to think about forming their own party. It didn’t happen until 1948, when Strom Thurmond led the States’ Rights Party, but already there was a lot of unhappiness with the liberal leadership of the Democratic Party in the North.

Yes, and, if not for the role of the Republican Party in the Civil War, the process would probably have happened more quickly, right?

Yes, and because the Democrats in the South made sure that very few Black people could vote. At the same time, these Southern congressmen and senators were delivering for their white constituents. I’ve got this moment in the book with Fritz Hollings, the last Democratic senator from South Carolina, from the nineteen-eighties, and he quotes this constituent of his who is grousing about all of the things the government is doing for other people, and then Hollings lists all the programs that this guy is getting the benefits from: the Small Business Administration, Social Security, the G.I. Bill, and the Army Corps of Engineers dredging the harbor where he has his boat, as well as the Smithsonian Museum that he goes to visit for free when he comes to Washington. And yet the perception was that the Party was standing for people who did not deserve this help, and did not deserve these programs.

You referred to moral capitalism earlier, and you have a line in the book, during this time after the First World War when the major left-of-center parties in the world were trying to define their relationship to business and labor, where you write, “The social movements that compelled Democrats to define the right to a union as a linchpin of moral capitalism thus had an ironic consequence. Without intending to, labor helped make corporate capitalism seem as imperishable as the two-party system itself.” Can you talk about what you mean here?

As the United States nears its numbing, millionth COVID death and shrugs its shoulders at a rise in cases, some Americans are feeling left behind. Immunocompromised people have suffered disproportionately throughout the pandemic, and even those who have been fully vaccinated wonder if they’re really safe. News stories highlight their struggles to adapt to a society that “doesn’t seem to care whether they survive.” “I could just go outside and within two weeks, I could be dead,” a fibromyalgia sufferer told ABC News last month. She went on to say, “It kind of feels like immunocompromised people are getting sacrificed.”This dramatic coverage underscores the continuing risks of the pandemic, especially for those who are most vulnerable: Immunocompromised people who get vaccinated aren’t quite as safe as the general vaccinated population. (The degree of added risk depends on the underlying condition.) But well-intentioned stories on this issue sometimes overstate the case, claiming that COVID shots for the immunocompromised are “ineffective” or “cannot work on everyone.” That is incorrect, and it hinders uptake of vaccines. The shots do provide these patients with very meaningful protection as a rule, Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told me. To suggest otherwise “is just a complete distortion … It’s just scaring people, and it’s not saving lives.”When the mRNA vaccines finally arrived, at the end of 2020, their value for immunocompromised people remained unclear. Members of this high-risk group were specifically excluded from the first trials performed by Pfizer and Moderna. Patients and their doctors had only scientific scraps to guide them in the months that followed: small, preliminary studies that recorded antibody levels after shots. The initial results weren’t promising at all. One study found that just 54 percent of organ-transplant patients, who require the most powerful immune-dampening drugs, had detectable antibodies after two vaccine doses; and when present, these protective proteins accumulated in much lower quantities than were observed in the general population. Some astute patients had their own antibody levels measured and declared themselves “vaccinated but not protected” when the results came up short.Sure enough, when Omicron arrived last fall, immunocompromised people were hit the hardest. A study conducted by Kaiser Permanente in California showed that immunocompromised patients who had received three Moderna doses were just 29 percent protected from Omicron infection—as compared with the 71 percent protection afforded others. Some patients’ antibody levels can still be low after three, four, or even five vaccine doses. (Three primary doses and two boosters are now recommended for this population.)Yet there’s a silver lining. Antibodies matter, but they matter most for preventing illness, at any level of severity. Regarding the most dangerous outcomes from disease, recent research from the CDC indicates that—shot for shot—the immunocompromised achieve most of the same benefits as healthy people. One study, published in March, looked at the pandemic’s Delta wave and found that three doses of an mRNA vaccine gave immunocompromised people 87 percent protection against hospitalization, compared with 97 percent for others. Another CDC report, also out last month, suggested that on the very worst outcomes—the need for a breathing tube, or death—mRNA vaccines were 74 percent effective for immunocompromised patients (including many who hadn’t gotten all their shots), and 92 percent effective for the immunocompetent. A 10-to-20-percentage-point gap in safety from the most dire outcomes is consequential, especially for those who are most susceptible to the disease. Still, these results should reassure us that the immunocompromised are not fighting this battle unarmed.That reassurance means all the more when so many members of the chronic-disease community feel left for dead by the casual reversals of pandemic funding and restrictions. But in place of measured consolation from the experts, they find offhanded comments saying that the vaccines “don’t work” for them (as one public-health-school dean tweeted earlier this month). This despairing rhetoric can’t be helping to encourage vaccination. The CDC hasn’t published data on what proportion of the immunocompromised remain unvaccinated or undervaccinated, but one survey of 21,000 autoimmune patients taking immunosuppressive medications, conducted by a network of rheumatology clinics, found that, as of last September, one in four hadn’t received any shots. Several clinicians involved with this population told me that, even now, many patients are unvaccinated.[Read: America is zooming through the pandemic panic-neglect cycle]When Anne Mills, a physician in Virginia with rheumatoid arthritis, went public with her inoculation experience last year, she hoped to reassure her friends in the autoimmune community that the shots are safe and effective. “We’re still looking at very high response rates and very robust protection against severe disease,” she told me. Now that her entire family is vaccinated, Mills feels better able to mentally compartmentalize her condition, and she is working and traveling again while maintaining some precautions. But she worries that many immunocompromised people have gotten the message that vaccination isn’t worth it.Michael Putman, a rheumatologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin who cares for many patients receiving immunosuppressive medications for autoimmune diseases, confirms that it’s a battle to get his patients inoculated. “The idea that the vaccines don’t work for immunocompromised people has definitely contributed to hesitancy,” he told me. Many autoimmune sufferers worry that the shots might lead to a flare-up of their disease symptoms. Some of Putman’s patients have decided not to take that risk after reading news stories suggesting that the injections wouldn’t help them much anyway. Ironically, patients with rheumatologic conditions, like Putman’s, are generally among the most protected within the immunocompromised cohort, as measured both by antibody production and clinical outcomes.A large CDC analysis of two-dose vaccine regimens within the immunocompromised population found that rheumatologic patients saw an 81 percent decrease in their risk of COVID hospitalization. Next came solid-cancer patients (79 percent protection), blood-cancer patients (74 percent), and those born with immune deficiencies (73 percent). Organ-transplant recipients were the least safe from COVID after vaccination, with just 59 percent of their hospitalizations prevented after two doses. Robert Rakita, a transplant-infectious-disease specialist at the University of Washington, told me that some of his patients have died from COVID despite having had three or four mRNA injections. He recommends that all vaccinated organ recipients continue to wear a mask and avoid crowded indoor activities. But such patients make up just 8 percent of the 7 million Americans estimated to be taking medications that weaken their immune system. When COVID reporting casually lumps together all “immunocompromised” patients, it papers over these differences. Readers are left to think that a fibromyalgia patient and a kidney recipient face similar risks.For chronically ill people, political power derives in part from group solidarity; the larger the contingent, the louder the voice. Yet in pursuit of visibility and justice, the “vaccinated but vulnerable” category may be expanded well beyond what the science suggests, to include not only organ-transplant patients, but also people with diabetes, asthma, obesity, or high blood pressure. According to this paradoxical arithmetic, half of the country can end up in the “high risk” category by some definition. In truth, we all remain vulnerable to COVID; inoculation isn’t 100 percent effective in any demographic. The threat of long COVID also lingers. But the peril is far more concentrated than generic references to “chronic conditions” or “comorbidities” would suggest. Age continues to be, far and away, the most powerful risk factor for becoming seriously ill from the coronavirus. Putman, the rheumatologist, uses an example of a 64-year-old doctor counseling a 24-year-old autoimmune patient to take precautions. The patient should probably be admonishing the doctor instead, he told me.When the vaccine campaign began, with shots for the oldest Americans in nursing homes and elsewhere, news coverage emphasized seniors’ feelings of joy and relief. But the immunocompromised have been described in very different terms, even as vaccines are saving their lives too. Stories focus on their uncertainty and fear—and may end up adding to the same.

American statistician and author Nate Silver has tweeted his support of ending the mask mandate, after federal judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down mask requirements on public transport including airplanes, trains and buses, aimed at reducing the spread of COVID.

This ends the mandate extended through to May 3 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), meaning that wearing masks on such transportation will now be optional rather than mandatory.

While the move to void the mandate by Trump-appointed Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle has been actioned by many airlines, like United Airlines and Delta, as well as being celebrated by some who deemed masks unnecessary on public transport, many experts, including virologists and epidemiologists, are less positive.

In response to the news, Silver tweeted: "The average American spends something like 5 hours per year on a plane.

"The mask mandate might be good or bad at the margin, but it is very unlikely to make a major difference in the overall course of the coronavirus."

The average American spends something like 5 hours per year on a plane. The mask mandate might be good or bad at the margin, but it is very unlikely to make a major difference in the overall course of the coronavirus. — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 19, 2022

Andrew Sparling, a Ph.D. in history, specializing in the history of science and medicine, responded to Silver's tweet by calling it a "jaw-droppingly specious argument."

Sparling continued: "The chief way to restrict the spread of SARS-CoV2 is to reduce the number of superspreader events. Airplanes can be sites of such events, and when they are, they seed the virus far and wide.

"N95s or better curtail such transmission chains."

A jaw-droppingling specious argument. The chief way to restrict the spread of SARS-CoV2 is to reduce the number of superspreader events. Airplanes can be sites of such events, & when they are, they seed the virus far & wide. N95s or better curtail such transmission chains. — Andrew Sparling (@awsparling) April 19, 2022

Infectious disease epidemiologist and Senior Infection Preventionist at the University of Arizona and George Mason University Saskia Popescu addressed the wider issue of the lifting of mask mandates and the fact mandates would no longer be enforced by the Transportation Security Administration.

She wrote: "Cases are rising in the U.S. and with so many public health measures relaxing, we'll likely see increasing case counts. This data also reflects an underreported number because home antigen tests aren't reported.

"Public transportation is hard to enforce infection prevention measures in - from masking to ensuring adequate ventilation."

Popescu added that this is even the case on airplanes that have great ventilation and filtration, saying masks are critical wherever there are lots of people in an enclosed space for a prolonged period of time.

She continued: "Protecting the safety of those who use public transportation is critical and frankly, deciding it's not worth it is a really privileged stance to take.

"For air travel - removing masking requirements is a great way to ensure you're spreading COVID."

You’re likely seeing a lot of “ffs” from public health folks at the news that TSA is dropping mask mandates on airplanes, trains, and public transportation. Here are some thoughts (while screaming into the void):

(1/n) — Dr. Saskia Popescu (@SaskiaPopescu) April 19, 2022

Popescu continued: "We may want to be done with COVID, but forcing our way through it is myopic and frankly ridiculous. People are still getting sick, going to hospitals, and dying. We need primary prevention, like masks and vaccines."

The epidemiologist added that she will continue to wear a mask on airplanes and other public transport.

Mark Jit, professor of vaccine epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told Newsweek: "For an individual, mask-wearing does reduce the chance of getting COVID, particularly if both the infected person and the potential infectee are wearing good N95 masks.

"However, on a population level, mask-wearing on public transport on its own won't be enough to prevent large and continuing COVID utbreaks in the era of the fast-spreading Omicron variant."

Jit added that the measure with the largest impact on COVID deaths is high coverage of the most effective vaccines, particularly among vulnerable groups. He concluded: "A mask mandate could help too, but it may not be sustainable or acceptable in all countries – it may depend on people's attitudes to long-term mask-wearing."

Virologist and professor at Cornell University's Weill Cornell Medicine college, John P. Moore, also responded to Silver's tweet. Moore told Newsweek: "I think he is missing the point. It's a terrible ruling from the public health perspective in the long term, which is why it will surely be appealed and overturned."

Moore added that he believes Mizelle's argument is contrived: "It has more holes in it than a mask does, and they are FAR, FAR larger. To use the word she obsesses over, masks 'sanitize' the air that passes through them, cleansing the air of virus.

"That's the point. If her argument was valid, air filters, in general, would be disallowed on the same grounds, including ones that are badly needed to improve the indoor environment in, say, schools. And air filters are routinely used in hospital settings, again to 'sanitize' the air that passes through them."

Moore continued by adding that most infections are not occurring on planes so, on narrow technical grounds, Silver is correct. He continued: "But is air travel a significant risk factor for virus transmission? Yes, it is.

"There have been multiple reports going back to 2020 of infection transmissions to nearby or even more distant from an infected index case on planes. Wearing a mask is a basic, common-sense safety precaution that is extremely easy to do and only minimally inconveniences people."

Article Updated 04/19/22 at 10:29 am EST to add comments from John P. Moore

As stories of bravery and sacrifice continue to pour out of Ukraine, the Hong Kong freedom and democracy movement has lost the world’s attention. Many of the movement’s leaders are languishing in prison. The West must remember that Hong Kongers are still fighting — and that their struggle is a crucial part of the international struggle for freedom, democracy and human rights.

With that goal in mind, 15 prominent academics from 10 different countries have joined together to nominate five imprisoned Hong Kong pro-democracy leaders for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize (to be awarded this autumn). These five are representative of the hundreds, if not thousands, of Hong Kongers who are bearing the brunt of the city’s new national security law, which authorities have abused to crush the city’s once-vibrant civil society and silence any criticism of the authorities in Hong Kong or Beijing.

“The nominees have chosen to be prisoners of conscience rather than to accept the crushing of human rights and the affront to human dignity that a new National Security Law has visited upon Hong Kong,” the professors wrote in their nomination.

Under the rules set up by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, university professors are among those able to submit nominations for the prize. In 2021, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers nominated the entire Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. This year, there are 343 nominees, including 251 individuals and 92 organizations.

Those are long odds in a world full of people suffering and struggling for peace, admitted China scholar and University of California Riverside professor Perry Link, who organized the nomination letter. But these Hong Kongers are worthy, he says, noting that they persisted even though each of them had the means to flee or just stay silent.

“It’s a pure example in my mind, of acting on principle,” said Link. “They willingly chose jail. And that’s a pretty remarkable sacrifice.”

The nomination, which was sent to the committee before the Jan. 31 deadline, has not been made public until now. In a letter accompanying the nomination, the professors compared the Hong Kong activists to other prominent dissidents and persecuted freedom fighters who have received the prize, such as Hitler critic Carl von Ossietzky (1935), Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov (1975), Polish politician Lech Walesa (1983) and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (2010), who died while in Chinese custody.

"A Peace Prize to Hong Kong prisoners of conscience in 2022 would underscore the highest moral aspirations of humanity,” the letter states.

One of the 15 professors who signed the letter is a dissident herself. Cai Xia taught at the Central Party School in Beijing for 15 years, until she left China and denounced the Chinese Communist Party as “a political zombie” and called for the entire system to be jettisoned.

The five nominees were selected to represent the various communities that have been active in resisting the crackdown on freedom and civil society in Hong Kong: students, journalists, lawyers, politicians, labor rights activists and even business leaders.

Hong Kong student pro-democracy leader Joshua Wong, 25, was already serving a 13-month sentence inside Hong Kong’s maximum-security Shek Pik Prison for “unlawful assembly,” when, in January 2021, he was rearrested and charged with “subversion” under the new national security law, which could carry a life sentence.

Gwyneth Ho is a 31-year-old journalist who documented government-organized criminal gangs beating protesters during protests in 2019. She came under attack herself but kept filming. In January 2020, she was also arrested for “subversion” under the national security law, and now potentially faces life in prison. She is awaiting trial.

Chow Hang-Tung is a 37-year-old lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was arrested for “unlawful assembly” in June 2020, when she attended a candlelight vigil to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, as Hong Kongers had done each year before that. At her court hearing, she read aloud memoirs of family members of those killed in Tiananmen Square. She is serving a 22-month sentence.

Lee Cheuk-Yan is a 65-year-old Hong Kong politician and former legislator known as a fierce advocate for human rights and labor rights. He also helped lead the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which was eventually forced to disband. He is serving a 14-month sentence for his role in organizing the Tiananmen Square candlelight vigil.

Jimmy Lai is a 74-year-old Hong Kong media mogul who founded and led the newspaper Apple Daily, which was forced to close its doors in Hong Kong last year. Lai is currently serving 20 months for “unlawful assembly” at the candlelight vigil. But he faces additional charges of “colluding with foreign forces,” which could bring him a much longer sentence.

The nomination effort was organized in conjunction with the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting freedom, democracy and the rule of law inside Hong Kong and around the region. The organization’s president, Mark Clifford, told me that freedom in Hong Kong is down but not dead.

“China wants the world to believe that it has succeeded, that resistance is futile. But the Nobel Prize nominees show that it is possible to stand up to a totalitarian regime,” he said. “China’s crackdown in Hong Kong is a warning for free places everywhere.”

Growing up in the 1970s, one got a good snootful of what today might be wrongly described as critical race theory: The film “Sounder,” in the wake of a prominent novel, offered a searing depiction of sharecropping. The made-for-TV epic “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” also based on a novel, took us through a sweep of history from slavery to segregation. The “Roots” mini-series, watched by millions (all at the same time, in a way that’s probably hard to imagine for those too young to remember life before D.V.R.s), portrayed the trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation barbarity in a way American audiences hadn’t seen. As Charlayne Hunter-Gault reported for The Times in 1977, a Black economist in Philadelphia said, “It has made the brutality of slavery more vivid for me than anything I’ve seen or read.” To refresh a sense of what an event “Roots” was at the time, recall that the cast included some of the biggest names of the day, including John Amos, Lloyd Bridges and Sandy Duncan. Cicely Tyson, who passed away last year, starred in “Sounder,” “Miss Jane Pittman” and “Roots.”

Meanwhile, the novelist Judy Blume pushed the envelope with coming-of-age stories — what we might now call “Y.A.” fiction — including 1970’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” and an even more envelope-pushing one, 1975’s “Forever …” that depicted teenagers embarking on a sexual relationship. I recall “Forever …,” especially, getting around as a kind of contraband among curious adolescents, with its unblushingly frank descriptions. And it was part of a general trope of the time: For example, in 1978, the network TV series “James at 16” (previously titled “James at 15”) depicted a young man losing his virginity.

No doubt, these offerings gave a broader audience a different awareness of racism and sexuality. It was a new American popular culture, and one felt enlightened to be a part of it. Did “Roots” cause some Black people (and maybe some white people) to doubt or even denounce the American experiment? Maybe. At the time, reportedly, Ronald Reagan said, “I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.” Towering figure though he was, that seems like the wrong takeaway from the mini-series. And I doubt anyone today traces any kind of woke oppositional sentiment to that show or others of the time. Did “Forever …” encourage some teenagers to try what its characters did? Maybe. And clearly some take issue with that — it’s on one of the American Library Association’s lists of “most frequently challenged books.” But surely it was more that “Forever …” reflected what people were already doing (The Pill, anyone?) than that the book suddenly transformed the culture.

So we should consider whether “Roots” and “Forever …” were really dangerous when assessing today’s penchant for book-banning on the political right. “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story,” a children’s book recounting the author’s experiences as a 6-year-old desegregating a school in New Orleans, was characterized as anti-white by a Tennessee Moms for Liberty chapter trying to prevent it from being taught in schools. But consider that “Roots” negatively portrayed white people who were either enslavers or who tolerated slavery, and I’m not aware of any effort now to ban it. There was even a 2016 “Roots” reboot on the History channel.

A Florida judge has vacated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) mask mandate for transportation, calling it an "unlawful" expansion of federal authority.
"Our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends," wrote U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who was appointed during the Trump administration.
Mizelle's ruling brings an immediate halt to the mandate, though the government could ask the court to stay the judgment while an appeal is made. Under that scenario, the travel mandate—which applies to airplanes, trains, buses, and subway systems—could return.
In either case, it's not clear how much longer the CDC planned to keep the mandate. It was initially set to expire today, but the agency extended it for two additional weeks. Given that the air quality on airplanes is highly filtered, the CEOs of major airlines have testified that the mask requirement is unnecessary for their industry.
"It makes no sense that people are still required to wear masks on airplanes, yet are allowed to congregate in crowded restaurants, schools and at sporting events without masks, despite none of these venues having the protective air filtration system that aircraft do," wrote the CEOs of all major airlines in a letter to the Biden administration.
They certainly have a point. It's difficult to imagine that unmasked travelers and commuters are at significantly greater risk of catching COVID-19 than unmasked restaurant and gym customers: There's much less talking and heavy breathing on an airplane than there is at a bar—but the latter has practically no masking requirements at this point in the pandemic. In most respects, people are now free to decide for themselves what their personal risk tolerance is with respect to COVID-19 and behave accordingly.
In her decision, Judge Mizelle chided the CDC for taking shortcuts and exceeding its own statutory authority. Under the law—specifically, a federal law known as the Administrative Procedures Act—the agency is required to submit new policies for outside review and comment. The CDC declined to do this, arguing that any delay in implementing the mandate would cost lives. The agency also maintained that the mandate was not a new rule but, rather, a clarification of previous guidance relating to "sanitation."
Mizelle was unpersuaded, however, that the Public Health Service Act of 1944—the law the CDC cited as giving the agency the power to take such actions—considered disease prevention to be a form of sanitation.
"Wearing a mask cleans nothing," wrote Mizelle. "At most, it traps virus droplets. But it neither 'sanitizes' the person wearing the mask nor 'sanitizes' the conveyance. Because the CDC required mask wearing as a measure to keep something clean—explaining that it limits the spread of COVID-19 through prevention, but never contending that it actively destroys or removes it—the Mask Mandate falls outside of [applicable law]."
The mask mandate is "best understood not as sanitation, but as an exercise of the CDC's power to conditionally release individuals to travel despite concerns that they may spread a communicable disease (and to detain or partially quarantine those who refuse)," wrote Mizelle. But she is not convinced that Congress has actually delegated this power to the CDC in the case of individuals traveling within the U.S.
"The power to conditionally release and detain is ordinarily limited to individuals entering the United States from a foreign country," she wrote.
The lawsuit was brought by two Florida residents who argued that being required to wear masks on airplanes aggravated their anxiety—a condition that is not exempted from forced masking under the mandate. They are represented by the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a conservative legal group.
The post Florida Judge Declares CDC's Federal Travel Mask Mandate 'Unlawful' and Vacates It appeared first on Reason.com.

“It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Those are the words of Edward Gibbon, and the book he imagined was, of course, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

The passage is from Gibbon’s autobiography, and it has been quoted many times, because it seems to distill the six volumes of Gibbon’s famous book into an image: friars singing in the ruins of the civilization that their religion destroyed. And maybe we can picture, as in a Piranesi etching, the young Englishman (Gibbon was twenty-seven) perched on the steps of the ancient temple, contemplating the story of how Christianity plunged a continent into a thousand years of superstition and fanaticism, and determining to make that story the basis for a work that would become one of the literary monuments of the Enlightenment.

Does it undermine the gravitas of the moment to know that, as Richard Cohen tells us in his supremely entertaining “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past” (Simon & Schuster), Gibbon was obese, stood about four feet eight inches tall, and had ginger hair that he wore curled on the side of his head and tied at the back—that he was, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun round with astonishing alacrity”? Does it matter that Gibbon’s contemporaries called him Monsieur Pomme de Terre, that James Boswell described him as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” and that he suffered from, in addition to gout, a distended scrotum caused by a painful swelling in his left testicle, which had to be regularly drained of fluid, sometimes as much as three or four quarts? And that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet?

Cohen thinks that it should matter, that we cannot read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” properly unless we know the person who wrote it, scrotal affliction and all. Gibbon would not, in theory, at any rate, have disagreed. “Every man of genius who writes history,” he maintained, “infuses into it, perhaps unconsciously, the character of his own spirit. His characters . . . seem to have only one manner of thinking and feeling, and that is the manner of the author.” When we listen to a tale, we need to take into account the teller.

“Making History” is a survey—a monster survey—of historians from Herodotus (the father of lies, in Plutarch’s description) to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sketching their backgrounds and personalities, summarizing their output, and identifying their agendas. Cohen’s coverage is epic. He writes about ancient historians, Islamic historians, Black historians, and women historians, from the first-century Chinese historian Ban Zhao to the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard. He discusses Japanese and Soviet revisionists who erased purged officials and wartime atrocities from their nations’ authorized histories, and analyzes visual works like the Bayeux Tapestry, which he calls “the best record of its time, pictorial or otherwise,” and Mathew Brady’s photographs of Civil War battlefields. (“In effect,” he concludes, “they were frauds.”)

He covers academic historians, including Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-century founder of scientific history; the Annales school, in France; and the British rivals Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. P. Taylor. He considers authors of historical fiction, including Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Dickens, Tolstoy, Toni Morrison, and Hilary Mantel. He writes about journalists; television documentarians (he thinks Ken Burns’s “most effective documentaries rank with many of the best works of written history from the last fifty years”); and popular historians, like Winston Churchill, whose history of the Second World War made him millions, even though it was researched and partially written by persons other than Winston Churchill.

Cohen is English, and was the director of two London publishing houses, biographical facts that, to apply his own test, might account for (a) his willingness to treat journalism, historical fiction, and television documentaries on a par with the work of professional scholars, since, as a publisher, he is interested in work that has an audience and an influence, and (b) the Anglocentrism of his choices. American readers may feel that writers from the United Kingdom are overrepresented, although that list does include historians whose careers were spent largely in American universities, such as Simon Schama, Tony Judt, and Niall Ferguson. But “Making History” is a book, not an encyclopedia, and whatever Cohen writes about he writes about with brio. As the song goes, “If you want any more, you can sing it yourself.”

A very good thing about “Making History” is that, despite the book’s premise, it is not reductive or debunking. Except when Cohen is discussing writers like the nationalist revisionists, whose bias is blatant and who aim to deceive, and some Islamic historians, who he thinks are dogmatic and intolerant, he tries to present a balanced case and allow readers to make their own judgments. The message is not “They’re all untrustworthy.” It’s that bias in history-making is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it.

One area where Cohen may not have achieved an ideal degree of detachment is Marxism, which he handles with bristly animosity and whose principles he misrepresents by confusing Marxism with Stalinism. He accuses Marx of failing to foresee the rise of fascism and the welfare state, which is ridiculous. Who did foresee those things in 1848?

There is a cost to this animus, since Marxist thought played a big role in the work of twentieth-century historians, particularly in the United Kingdom. Still, even here, Cohen tries to be catholic. He plainly feels affection for the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who joined the Communist Party in 1936 (bad enough) and remained a member for fifty-five years (surreal).

“Making History” is a loaf with plenty of raisins. We learn (or I learned, anyway) that Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Lenin’s and Stalin’s cook, that Napoleon was about average in height, that Ken Burns is a descendant of the poet Robert Burns, and that when the Marxist critic György Lukács was arrested following the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution and was asked if he was carrying a weapon, he handed over his pen. (That anecdote is a little neat. I had to take it with a grain of salt—but I took it.)

He is not sloppy, exactly, but he can be a bit breezy. Cornel West was not the director of the African and African American Studies program at Harvard, and Jill Lepore does not come from “a privileged family.” And there are (inevitably) assertions one could quarrel with. Cohen thinks, for example, that “oral history is no more prone to making things up or changing the past to suit the present than is written history.” This has not been my experience. You always have to fact-check what people say, not because they lie deliberately (although Andy Warhol lied in pretty much every interview he ever gave) but simply because we don’t remember things accurately. It’s like when you’re searching for a picture in your photo library: “I was sure it was in 2008 that we visited the Grand Canyon!” But it was in 2009. Mistaken recollections of this sort are common in oral histories and interviews because people generally have no stake in getting dates right. Historians do, though.

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Shopping Cartoon by Jonathan Rosen

Cohen likes journalistic histories, books written by reporters who were witnesses to some of the events they describe. (One omission here is William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” which, with its Gibbonesque title, won a National Book Award and sold a million hardcover copies.) He thinks that journalists, if they aspire to be objective, can get “pretty close to the truth.” But, he adds, “what one needs is time to judge that truth in the cold cast of thought.”

This is the traditional “first draft of history” definition of journalism, and part of the belief that our understanding of the past improves with time. I wonder if this is really true, though. Maybe we’re just smoothing the rough edges, losing some bits of what actually happened in order to get the story the way we want it. As history’s first responders, journalists may be more reliable because they are not usually working under the spell of a theory (though Shirer had one). They are describing what happened. Like any other historian, they are trying to produce a coherent narrative, but they don’t need to subsume every fact under a thesis. They also have a better sense of something that no subsequent student of the past can really know and that gets harder and harder to reconstruct: what it felt like.

It’s striking how often this concept—“what it felt like”—turns up in “Making History” as the true goal of historical reconstruction. “The historian will tell you what happened,” E. L. Doctorow said. “The novelist will tell you what it felt like.” Cohen quotes Hilary Mantel: “If we want added value—to imagine not just how the past was, but what it felt like, from the inside—we pick up a novel.”

We expect novelists to make this claim. They can describe what is going on in characters’ heads and what characters are feeling, which historians mostly cannot, or should not, do. But historians want to capture what it felt like, too. For what they are doing is not all that different from what novelists are doing: they are trying to bring a vanished world to life on the page. Novelists are allowed to invent, and historians have to work with verifiable facts. They can’t make stuff up; that’s the one rule of the game. But they want to give readers a sense of what it was like to be alive at a certain time and place. That sense is not a fact, but it is what gives the facts meaning.

In 2003, when the Supreme Court held, in Lawrence v. Texas, that criminalizing gay sex was unconstitutional, it insisted that the decision had nothing to do with marriage equality. In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “Do not believe it.” Then, in 2013, when the Court struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, emphasizing the tradition of letting the states define marriage, Scalia issued another warning, saying that “no one should be fooled” into thinking that the Court would leave states free to exclude gay couples from that definition. He was finally proved right two years later, when the reasoning on dignity and equality developed in those earlier rulings led to the Court’s holding that the Constitution requires all states to recognize same-sex marriage.

Just as rights can unfold and expand, however, they can also retract and constrict in breathtaking ways, pursuing a particular strain of logic one case at a time. In the forthcoming decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court is widely expected to overturn or severely undermine its abortion-rights cases, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In fact, following the comments of the six conservative Justices at the oral arguments in December, the strength of this expectation has spurred state legislative efforts to proceed as if Roe were already gone. A handful of states have passed laws, like the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs, that ban abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, in violation of precedents establishing that abortion cannot be banned before “viability,” at around twenty-four weeks. (On Thursday, Florida became the most recent.) Some of the laws have been blocked by the courts, but, if Mississippi prevails, the states expect to be free to enforce these bans.

Among the more restrictive bills currently under consideration across the country, more than a dozen emulate the Texas “heartbeat” law, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and allows only private citizens, not state officials, to enforce the ban. That provision insulates the law from being challenged as unconstitutional in federal court. The Supreme Court repeatedly declined to block the Texas ban, but did leave open a possible avenue to challenge it. In March, the Texas Supreme Court closed that avenue.

Idaho became the first state to enact a Texas-inspired law. Idaho’s law bans abortion after about six weeks, and allows family members (including a rapist’s relatives) of the “preborn child” to sue a provider who performs an abortion. The law was passed last month, but Idaho’s Supreme Court has temporarily blocked it from taking effect. Missouri has introduced a bill that allows private citizens to sue an out-of-state abortion provider, or even someone who helps transport a person across state lines for an abortion. Wyoming has passed a law that bans most abortions, which will be triggered if the Supreme Court overturns Roe. The boldest effort thus far, though, has been in Oklahoma, a destination for Texans seeking abortions. Two weeks ago, Oklahoma’s legislature made it a felony punishable by ten years in prison to perform an abortion except to save a woman’s life in a medical emergency. The governor signed the bill last Tuesday; the law is set to go into effect in August.

Overturning Roe would be the culmination of a half-century-long legal campaign singularly focussed on that outcome. And there are signs that, far from being an end in itself, it would launch even more ambitious agendas. In the Dobbs litigation, Mississippi denied that doing away with Roe would cast doubt on other precedents, set between 1965 and 2015, on which Roe rested or which relied on Roe. This series of decisions held that states cannot ban contraceptives, criminalize gay sex, or refuse to recognize same-sex marriage. The state told the Court that those cases are not like Dobbs, because “none of them involve the purposeful termination of a human life.” But all of them involve the question of whether states should be able to make laws that affect some of the most intimate aspects of people’s lives. In recent weeks, in anticipation of the Dobbs decision, various Republican senators have questioned Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down a state ban on contraceptives; Obergefell v. Hodges, which required states to recognize same-sex marriage; and even Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated a state anti-miscegenation law. Overturning Roe would almost certainly fuel the broader fight to get fundamental moral issues out of the realm of federal constitutional rights and under the control of the states.

A Supreme Court decision overturning Roe would seek to justify itself on the ground that it allows states to resolve the issue of abortion for themselves, through democratic processes, rather than by having a resolution imposed on them. At that point, it will be tempting to echo Justice Scalia’s “Do not believe it” warning. Although the legal arguments against Roe have focussed on returning the issue to the states, for five decades the core moral belief against the ruling has been that abortion is the termination of a human life. Last week, a twenty-six-year-old Texas woman was arrested on murder charges, for “intentionally and knowingly causing the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.” The prosecutor dismissed the case, saying that the Texas law did not apply to it. But the incident suggested a possible post-Dobbs future, in which states pursue criminal charges against people who have abortions as well as against those who provide them.

It may also be only a matter of time, if Mississippi prevails, before pro-life legal efforts turn toward getting the Supreme Court to recognize the constitutional rights of the fetus. These efforts would focus on the same part of the Constitution that was previously held to provide the right to abortion, the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Fetuses are currently not considered to be persons. But Mississippi’s brief repeatedly notes the human attributes of the fetus, in utero, and it may be a precursor to future constitutional arguments to the effect that fetal personhood prohibits abortion.

In the face of such a push, liberals may one day find themselves advocating for leaving the matter to the states, and perhaps even seeking novel methods—like the one Texas concocted—to circumvent federal-court review of state laws protecting abortion access. Whether or not it would take another fifty years or more for a fetal right to unfold, the pro-life legal movement has demonstrated its ability to fight the long fight. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the day that Florida passed a fifteen-week abortion ban.

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EVEN AS RUSSIAN troops were massing on Ukraine’s borders in January, Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister, insisted that it was “very unlikely” her country would join NATO during her time in office. Less than three months and one invasion later, Finland is hurtling towards membership. On April 2nd Ms Marin told Finns that the country would have to reach a decision “this spring”. As she explained, “Russia is not the neighbour we thought it was.”

Finland, after two grinding wars with the Soviet Union, and unlike most of eastern Europe, kept its independence and democracy through the cold war. The price of doing so was neutrality. Finland bought arms from both East and West, but stayed out of alliances. That arrangement, and the way in which Soviet pressure distorted Finland’s domestic politics, became known by the pejorative term Finlandisation. When the USSR was dissolved, Finland, along with Sweden, took the leap of joining the European Union, binding it closer to other European countries. And after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, both countries intensified joint exercises and other forms of co-operation with NATO.

Russia’s attack on Ukraine has now tipped the scales. When your correspondent visited Helsinki in February, a week before the invasion, official after official emphasised the conservatism of Finnish policy. “We’re still far from a national consensus,” said one, adding that it was unclear whether support for a NATO bid would gather steam. “Do we just have a national awakening?” he mused. In fact, that is largely what has happened.

In 2019 just over half of Finns were opposed to NATO membership. On February 28th, four days after the invasion, the polls showed majority support for the first time. The latest, on March 30th, revealed 61% in favour, 16% against and 23% undecided. That includes majorities among supporters of all parties, except the Left Alliance. And it is widely accepted that if Sauli Niinisto, Finland’s popular president, were to give his formal endorsement, support would grow further.

Both Ms Marin and Mr Niinisto are keeping silent for now, to allow a political process to play out. “April, May and June are important—and in many ways historic—months in Finland,” says Henri Vanhanen, a foreign-policy expert and adviser to the centre-right Kokoomus party. A government report setting out the changes in Finland’s security position since the Russian invasion is due to be published on April 14th.

Parliament will then debate the issue. After that, a second government report could make a formal recommendation on NATO membership. A special parliamentary monitoring group, made up of party leaders and committee chairs, will play a key role in signalling the political consensus. A committee of government ministers and Mr Niinisto will take their cue from that. The final call remains with parliament, though whether it will need a two-thirds majority depends on its constitutional committee.

A decision is widely expected to come before a NATO summit in Madrid on June 29th, and perhaps as soon as early May. The two main governing parties, Ms Marin’s Social Democrats and the Centre party, have previously been split on NATO. But a consensus is forming rapidly: of 200 lawmakers, 96 are now in favour of membership and just 14 against, according to Helsingin Sanomat, a newspaper. “It's been the Finnish people in the lead,” says Elina Valtonen, an MP and vice-chair of Kokoomus, whose pro-NATO position has driven it to unprecedented popularity in the polls (elections are due by next April). “I'm pretty confident that we will be filing the membership agreement…in a few weeks’ time,” adds Ms Valtonen.

For Finland, which shuns dramatic change, that is lightning-fast. One reason for that is concern about the country’s vulnerability during a membership bid. On March 12th Russia’s foreign ministry said that Finnish membership would have “serious military and political consequences”, including “retaliatory measures”. Hints of those may already be appearing. On April 8th a Russian plane reportedly violated Finnish airspace, and the websites of the country’s foreign and defence ministries were hit by crude cyber-attacks (which may have been related to a speech by Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, to Finland’s parliament on the same day). To limit opportunities for Russian meddling, Mr Niinisto has said that a national referendum on NATO will not be necessary.

Once a bid goes in, Finland would be especially vulnerable: subject to Russia’s ire, but not yet covered by NATO’s Article Five mutual-defence clause. One answer to that is to move fast. On April 3rd Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, said that Finnish or Swedish accession could be done “in a relatively quick way”. No one, not even Viktor Orban’s pro-Putin government in Hungary, is expected to veto it. Mr Stoltenberg has also hinted at interim security guarantees. He was “certain”, he said on April 6th, that “we will find ways to address concerns…regarding the period between the potential application, and the final ratification.”

In practice integrating either country would not be hard. Both are as close to NATO as it is possible for a non-member to be. Mr Vanhanen says that NATO officials have told him that Finland is in fact more “NATO interoperable”—capable of conducting joint operations alongside other allies—than some actual members. A special procedure designed in 2014 and activated for the first time after Russia’s invasion means that Finnish and Swedish envoys now sit at the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s decision-making body, for every meeting relating to the crisis. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Mr Stoltenberg’s predecessor, has said that an application “could be approved more or less overnight”, though some officials say that is a slight exaggeration.

Yet in Sweden, the debate is moving more slowly. Sweden’s main governing party, the Social Democrats, is opposed to NATO membership. As recently as March 8th Magdalena Andersson, the prime minister, said that a membership bid would “destabilise the current security situation in Europe”. However, the country has had a parliamentary majority in favour of NATO since December 2020. The latest poll, on April 1st, also showed a majority of the public (51%) in favour for the first time, up from 42% in January; opposition fell from 37% to 27%. General elections are due in September.

In the past, Swedes worried that a solo NATO bid would leave Finland dangerously exposed. Now it is Finns who wonder whether Sweden will keep pace. The two countries’ armed forces have become intertwined in recent years. They sent a joint brigade to a NATO exercise in March (an earlier joint Finnish-Swedish air exercise is pictured above). It is natural that Finland is ahead, says Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, given its tangles with Russia: “They have a tradition of thinking more deeply about security issues than we do, for fairly obvious reasons.” But Mr Bildt is confident that, just as Finland caught up with Sweden when both countries joined the EU in parallel in 1995, Sweden will make up the ground. “For me, it is inconceivable that we would end up in a situation where the two countries come to different conclusions.”

Editor’s note: On June 24th a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court voted to overrule the constitutional right to an abortion, which had been guaranteed since 1973 in Roe v Wade.

A WOMAN IN Missouri who decides to end her pregnancy has a choice, of sorts. She can go to the state’s last remaining abortion clinic, in St Louis, where state law dictates she must be told that “the life of each human being begins at conception” and warned of the psychological damage the termination could cause. She must then wait 72 hours before returning. Or she can travel 15 miles (24km) east, across the Mississippi River, to a larger clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, where the doctor (it may even be the same one) can speak to her patient as she thinks best. The abortion can be done that day.

This gulf between two neighbouring states illustrates the mess that surrounds abortion in America. Since 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v Wade that abortion was a constitutional right, lawmakers in conservative states have introduced hundreds of regulations designed to make it hard for abortion clinics to function. Missouri is one of six states with only one clinic left.

The mess may be about to get much worse. This spring or summer the justices will rule on a law in Mississippi, blocked by a lower court, which bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. If they use the case to overturn Roe (thus sending decisions on abortion back to the states), the repercussions will be momentous. More than half the states are likely to make most abortions illegal (see map). In November, Americans will vote in mid-term elections. Republicans currently look likely to win back Congress, but if Roe is overturned Democrats will hope it will energise a broad range of voters.

How likely is the Supreme Court to ditch Roe? At first, it seemed its conservative majority might use the case to lower the gestational limit on abortion on demand. The court had done this before: in 1992 it lowered that set by Roe (26 weeks) to fetal viability (around 23 weeks). Though abortion-rights activists rail against lowering the limit, it would change little: the vast majority of abortions happen in the first 12 weeks. It would also reflect popular opinion. Though many states impose stringent restrictions, America has one of the most liberal frameworks in the world: of 59 countries that allow abortion on demand, it is one of only seven that allow it after 20 weeks. Polls suggest most Americans’ support for abortion drops dramatically after the first trimester.

But abortion-rights groups are increasingly concerned that the court will scrap Roe altogether. In September Texas banned all abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and the court failed to stop it. That seemed to express five justices’ belief that Roe is not worth upholding.

Then in December the conservative justices made this plain. During oral arguments in the Mississippi case, Brett Kavanaugh, one of Donald Trump’s three nominees, cited many occasions when the court had overturned earlier decisions and suggested it should be “neutral” on an issue about which the constitution says nothing. Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at Florida State University, says that because introducing a new gestational limit would make it harder for the court to overturn Roe later, the likeliest alternative, “would be to do something more modest, such as saying viability is the wrong line and the right line could be decided in future cases”. The question, she says, is whether Roe will be reversed “gradually or immediately”.

A gradual reversal could come about if the court undermined the viability standard. Anti-abortion states could pass all sorts of bans and expect that the courts would be more likely to uphold them. In the event of an outright reversal, the impact would be immediate. Twelve states already have “trigger laws” that would click into effect the moment Roe was undone; a further 12 are expected to dust off pre-Roe bans or make new ones. Congress is unlikely to provide a remedy. Though House Democrats have passed a bill that would guarantee abortion rights, it has little chance in the Senate.

Texas offers a glimpse of how this would play out. On September 1st, the first day clinics in America’s second-most-populous state were forced to turn away patients, those in nearby states saw a sudden influx. Kristina Tocce, medical director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in Denver, Colorado, says she saw a 1,650% increase in the number of patients from Texas in the 45 days to mid-January compared with the same period last year. “If Roe is overturned I fear Texas is a prologue to absolute chaos and confusion,” she says.

When Sara (not her real name) drove from Texas into Oklahoma, having distributed her seven children among several sitters, and stayed in a hotel, it cost her half her monthly income. Groups which help women with such costs say they have been flooded with requests for support. Anna Rupani, the director of Fund Texas Choice, says donors have been quick to step up, but she worries about what will happen if a lot more cash is suddenly needed.

Getting ready for the rush

Even before the Texan law, clinics in states with decent abortion provision had become used to serving women far from home. This has helped them prepare for the demise of Roe. In Illinois, Planned Parenthood, the biggest supplier of abortions in America, has been readying itself for years. The clinic in Fairview Heights was built in 2019 to handle growing numbers of abortion refugees from nearby states. Planned Parenthood has also built clinics on the Illinois borders of Indiana and Wisconsin, two of five neighbouring states that are likely to ban abortion if Roe goes.

In January the Fairview Heights clinic and an operation nearby, the Hope Clinic, opened a regional logistics centre to deal with the expected surge in non-clinical workload: arranging transport, hotels and funding for the many more women who were expected to arrive. Colleen McNicholas, Planned Parenthood’s chief medical officer in the region, says staff are preparing to put in longer days and work seven days a week instead of six.

Where pregnant women go, anti-abortionists follow. Local armies have moved their campaigns from states like Missouri, where the battle has been largely won, into Illinois. As patients drive into the Fairview Heights clinic they pass a large gallows from which the image of a fetus is hanging. Parked trucks, operated by an anti-abortion group, try to entice pregnant women into conversation by offering “free on board” ultrasounds and pregnancy testing; posters advertise “abortion pill reversal”. At Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Missouri, by contrast, it is quiet: a couple of softly spoken protesters wait with leaflets encouraging women to have their babies; the only ones they saw, one recent morning, were there for contraception.

Only in America

Elsewhere, smaller abortion providers are weighing their options. Tammi Kromenaker, director of the Red River abortion clinic in Fargo, North Dakota, the only one in that state, says she is often asked why she doesn’t move a few miles east into Minnesota, where abortion will remain legal if Roe is overturned. She is torn, she says, between practicality and principle (“our community needs us to be here”), adding that in no other field of health care would providers face such uncertainty.

This points to another example of American exceptionalism. In other countries abortion tends to be embedded in broader health-care systems. In the United States it is practised almost exclusively in stand-alone clinics, largely so that providers can avoid the costly billing systems found in hospitals. Yet this has made the job of anti-abortion campaigners easier, allowing them to find the right women to shout at and enabling them to portray abortion as being separate and different.

Partly as a result, clinics have become powerful defenders of abortion rights, including in the courts. When these places close, says Carole Joffe, a professor at the Bixby Centre for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco ( USCF ), “huge political clout and grassroots support for the rights of women is lost”. Several clinics in Texas, she says, are close to shuttering.

As great as the post-Roe upheaval is likely to be, it would be greater still but for three mitigating factors. First, it is not just the likes of Planned Parenthood that have been making preparations. A handful of states have scrapped all regulations on when or for what reason a woman may terminate a pregnancy. In California, lawmakers are expected to consider a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for anyone seeking an abortion.

Second, the abortion rate today is half what it was in 1980. That is mostly down to improved access to more effective methods of contraception. It may also be linked to better sex education, especially in states that used to teach only abstinence (although in Jackson, Mississippi, Shannon Brewer, the director of the state’s last abortion clinic, which is at the heart of the case the Supreme Court will soon rule on, raises her eyebrows exaggeratedly when asked whether many young patients lack basic knowledge about reproduction).

A third element is the increasing use of abortion medication, which has transformed abortion care globally (because tracking it is hard it may also make America’s abortion rate look lower than it really is). By taking two drugs several hours apart, women are able to abort at home without a clinic appointment. The pills can be posted after an online consultation. Several telemedicine startups now offer the pills more cheaply than clinics do. The drugs are also available illegally from Aid Access, a charity in Europe, and from online pharmacies overseas. Their efficacy and safety up until 11 weeks of pregnancy mean America should not return to an era of backstreet abortions.

Anti-abortion lawmakers are onto that. Last year, 15 states introduced bills restricting medication abortion. If Roe is overturned, more will surely follow. Even if women can get hold of the pills, they could still be in trouble. The cramping and heavy bleeding that these pills cause prompt some women to seek medical help. A number of abortion providers suggest they tell doctors they are having a miscarriage if necessary. They worry that such women—or doctors who have helped them—may be charged with a crime. Such fears have intensified since several states have said they plan to copy Texas’s law. It enables private citizens to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an illegal abortion, and for every case that is successful it authorises “damages” (in effect a bounty) of $10,000.

How much will voters care?

Some women—those who wish to keep their abortion secret from their parents or partner, say, or those whose pregnancy has passed 11 weeks—will continue to need care in an abortion clinic. And the number of those needing abortions later in pregnancy will grow if women have to travel farther, with the time-consuming burdens that entails. Thus the number who fail to have an abortion altogether will also increase, with woeful consequences.

Using data from a nationwide longitudinal study that investigated the effects of either having an abortion or being turned away, researchers found that women who were denied abortions experienced a sharp spike in financial hardship. Their children suffered. Some obstetricians worry that overturning Roe could push up America’s maternal and infant mortality rates.

Democrats are ready to use such fears to try to boost turnout in the mid-terms in November. This may work among some educated women in suburbs where many of the competitive Senate races will be decided. But whether it would prevent Republicans from taking the House and Senate is far from clear. In Virginia’s gubernatorial race last year, Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, repeatedly castigated Texas’s new law. But he lost to Glenn Youngkin, his Republican rival, who has supported abortion restrictions. Exit polls revealed, as they have done before, that abortion is a bigger voting issue for Republicans than it is for Democrats.

Overall, however, abortion is some way behind a lot of other issues in voters’ minds. The end of Roe may not necessarily prompt huge protests. After Texas banned most abortions some businesses in the state offered to relocate employees; otherwise their response was subdued. Terminating Roe would undoubtedly cause a bigger stir, but it is unclear how the effects would really be felt beyond the lives of women and the abortion providers who serve them. And on that, “The only thing we know for sure is that it will be a mess,” says Dr Joffe of the USCF Bixby Centre, “and that rich women will do better than poor women. What else is new in America?” ■

T HE NAKAGIN CAPSULE TOWER stands out from its unremarkable neighbours in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district. Made up of 144 identical cuboids, stacked upon and jutting out from each other, the modular tower is both unabashedly futurist and subtly respectful of tradition. Each cuboid has a round window that evokes both space travel and the ancient architecture of Kyoto. They contain built-in living spaces composed of bath units, beds, desks and household electronics. Kurokawa Kisho, the building’s architect, envisioned his cramped “capsules” as dwellings for what he called Homo movens, or highly mobile modern humans, such as the businessmen who lived in distant suburbs and worked late in Tokyo offices.

When the tower first went up in 1972, it became a prime example of Metabolism, an influential architectural movement in post-war Japan. Metabolism’s chief exponents had studied under Tange Kenzo, an architect whose works included the park and memorial built in Hiroshima to commemorate the nuclear attack of 1945. The Metabolists designed buildings to be adaptable and replaceable, and resilient to threats such as wars and earthquakes. But not, alas, to neglect. On April 12th work started on demolishing the tower, following a long but ultimately futile battle to preserve it.

Given that, it is ironic that Metabolists sought to shift thinking about architecture from the mechanical to the biological, conceiving of cities as organisms that grew and changed rather than as static constructions to be planned and maintained. “We regard human society as a vital process, a continuous development from atom to nebula,” they declared in their first manifesto, written ahead of the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960.

Their ideas were informed both by Western modernism and Eastern philosophy, drawing particular inspiration from Japan’s Ise shrine, which has been entirely reconstructed almost every 20 years since the 7th century. Metabolism also embodied the energy of Japan’s rapid-growth era. The Metabolists did more than just design buildings: in their hands, architecture became a field for reimagining Japanese identity after the ravages of the war.

In their texts, the architects pondered the relationship between technology and humanity. They considered the demands of designing cities for a growing urban population and a humming economy. They envisioned structures that floated over the seas and reached for the skies. Kurokawa called his capsules “cyborg architecture”, where “man, machine and space build a new organic body”.

The ideas were characteristic of an era of change and possibility. “There was great momentum in society,” says Maeda Tatsuyuki of Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project. “It was a period when society was bolder and could afford to do such things.”

By the end, the structure was decaying and riddled with asbestos. Many of the capsules were no longer habitable. The tower’s destruction serves as a reminder of the relative caution of contemporary Japan. “These days, nobody would dare to build anything like that,” Mr Maeda sighs. Yet it is also reflective of the same culture of impermanence that once inspired the Metabolists. In Japan, buildings are traditionally made of wood and paper, not intended to last centuries. There is not much of a preservationist movement. “Japan seems to demolish things before there’s even debate,” says Mr Maeda.

Still, fans and residents of the Nakagin tower had hoped to raise funds to replace the capsules, in line with Kurokawa’s initial concept. They had been in negotiations about buying the building. But the pandemic halted any momentum they had. Mr Maeda’s group now hopes to rescue some 40 individual capsules, remove the asbestos, recreate the interiors and give them new lives at museums around the world. Mr Maeda compares the process to a “withered dandelion” spreading its seeds. “The capsules will take on a life of their own, scattered across different locations.” It is in keeping with the spirit of Metabolism. ■

T AKE AN EVENING walk on 17th Cross Road in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout district, and you bump into tech types stepping out of their startup’s office and into one of the local microbreweries. They might work for Udaan (e-commerce), Vedantu (education technology) or another of the growing herd of private startups valued at $1bn, whose proliferation in the area has prompted locals to dub it “Unicorn Street”. That name might be outdated, says Mohit Yadav, co-founder Bolt.Earth, a unicorn wannabe housed in the MyGate building. “Unicorn neighbourhood” would be more apt, he chuckles.

HSR Layout was not always the startup hub of Bengaluru, itself the startup capital of India. Five years ago Koramangala, a few kilometres to the north, was the place to be—until rising office prices pushed out new startups. The fact that young firms are beginning to eye an ever-wider region to set up shop hints that Bengaluru is maturing as a venue for ambitious technologists. The city is home to 26 unicorns, and last year attracted $13bn in venture capital ( VC ).

For decades Silicon Valley’s position as the birthplace of high-growth technology companies was unassailable. The small patch of land has given the world, among others, Hewlett-Packard (founded in Palo Alto in 1939), Intel (Mountain View, 1968), Apple (Los Altos, 1976), Google (Menlo Park, 1998) and Uber (San Francisco, 2009). Mark Zuckerberg moved in only four months after founding Facebook in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2004. As recently as 1999 the valley attracted a third of global VC investment. In 2011, 20 of the world’s 27 unicorns had their headquarters in America, according to CB Insights, a data provider. Only four other countries boasted even one.

San Francisco is home to 136 unicorns, with 220 in the Valley as a whole, more than any other place in the world. But as Bengaluru shows, such clustering is no longer confined to a strip of land in California. Unicorns can be found in 45 countries. Over 1,000 trot the globe; nearly half are outside America. The share of all VC flowing into American startups has declined from 84% two decades ago to less than half.

The diffusion of capital reflects huge growth in tech in recent years that lifted many boats. But it will endure beyond the ups and downs of the investment cycle. Even as tech valuations slid during the fourth quarter of 2021 and first quarter of 2022, the share of funds flowing to firms outside Silicon Valley and America has remained high at 82% and 51%, respectively.

Of the places that have burst onto the startup scene, some are mature, such as Beijing, London or Tel Aviv, and often global in their ambition. Others, including Bengaluru, Singapore or São Paulo, are in earlier stages of hub-dom. All enjoy a broad pool of technical talent, deep links to other parts of the world and local risk capital. Together, they are redrawing the map of global innovation—creating one that is more dispersed, diverse and competitive.

Many of the new clusters look different from Silicon Valley—although some share its pleasant climate. They also differ from each other. The more mature hubs tend to spawn more “deep tech” firms working in complex areas like artificial intelligence and other sophisticated software aimed chiefly at corporate customers rather than consumers. But whereas Israeli and British startups often look across their borders, Beijing’s are focused almost entirely on the domestic market.

Younger innovation hubs, including Bengaluru, São Paulo and Singapore, look a bit more alike in that their focus is regional rather than global. Instead of breaking new ground they often adapt existing business models to local market conditions. As disposable incomes rise in new regions, consumers become willing to pay for similar “technification of services”, says Peng Ong of Monk’s Hill Ventures, a Singaporean VC firm. Anand Daniel of Accel, a Silicon Valley VC firm, calls this the “ X of Y ” playbook. And so Flipkart (e-commerce) is the Amazon of India; Nubank (fintech) is the Revolut of Brazil; Grab (ride-hailing) is the Uber of South-East Asia. This helps explain why 70% of South-East Asian unicorns and 80% of Latin American ones are either in fintech or consumer internet (see chart). Still, hyper-localisation means each hub is distinct. The boom in tech clusters has been fuelled by several structural developments. The worldwide spread of high-speed internet and smartphones has allowed startups to serve customers just about everywhere from just about anywhere. “Rapid technology adoption has made the market so much deeper,” says Abheek Anand of Sequoia India, the Indian arm of a Silicon Valley VC stalwart. Cloud computing and freely available developer tools have made starting a firm much easier. At the same time, as growth rates in mature markets have slowed and competition for investments has risen, venture capitalists are looking elsewhere for their next big bet. The pandemic appetite for all things digital has fuelled these trends. Some 60m South-East Asians, nearly a tenth of the region’s population, became new netizens in the past two years alone, according to Bain, a consultancy. The number of companies in India and South-East Asia generating $100m of annual revenue has jumped by an order of magnitude in recent years, observes Mr Anand. If the democratisation of technology and global VC were the whole story, however, startups would be springing up everywhere. They aren’t. The Economist has looked at startup funding and valuation data for the ten countries with the most billion-dollar startups. We have found that nearly 40% of these unicorns herded in the country’s top startup city. Between 2011 and 2021 the top city’s share of national VC funding rose from less than 50% to nearly 70% for London, from 24% to 60% for Berlin and from 15% to 34% for Bengaluru.

Where to startup?

That suggests that clustering remains no less powerful a force than when Alfred Marshall coined the notion of “agglomeration economies” in the late 19th century. Once a city gains a foothold, additional activity is pulled in because of increasing returns to scale. It is easier to do business and recruit when suppliers and talent pools are nearby. Ideas flow more easily when employees from rival firms frequent the same pubs (or microbreweries). Even wide adoption of hybrid work is unlikely to change that; people will still want to meet in person and it is easier to do this when the persons are nearby.

A deep talent pool is the most obvious ingredient of a successful cluster. Famously, Silicon Valley benefits from proximity to brain trusts such as Stanford or the University of California, Berkeley. Tel Aviv has both universities and recruiters from the Israeli Intelligence Corps, which like elite universities enlists the best and brightest. Participation in such elite units is an immediate signal for a venture capitalist looking for a startup founder to back, or a startup seeking to hire young technologists. Bengaluru has nearly 70 engineering colleges. More than 55% of Indians on LinkedIn, a professional social network, boast technical skills, such as those needed for programming. Only Germans are technically savvier; for Americans and Britons the share is around 42%. “Where else can you quickly hire a few thousand engineers?” marvels Shailesh Lakhani, a colleague of Mr Anand’s at Sequoia India.

Talent alone is not enough, however. Tokyo had the brains to produce global tech giants such as Sony (in electronics) and, more recently, Rakuten (in e-commerce). Yet the Japanese capital has struggled to nurture a vibrant startup scene. One possible reason is the continued dominance of Japan Inc by keiretsu (conglomerates). Another is the country’s insularity. In one survey from 2019 the country ranked 53rd in the world in English proficiency; less than 8% of Japanese speak it fluently. Foreigners tend to have a hard time gaining status in Tokyo’s business circles. Outside venture capitalists have been shunned.

That hints at the second critical factor: openness to people and ideas. Migrants are a disproportionately enterprising bunch. Around 60% of America’s most valuable tech companies were started by immigrants or their children. European hubs such as Berlin, London and Paris, each of which is home to ten or more unicorns, have large immigrant populations. China lacks foreign founders but its startup hubs like Shanghai and Shenzhen draw plenty of “sea turtles”, returnees who have studied or worked abroad.

It is hard to determine to what extent connectedness spurs startup activity, as opposed to the other way around. But the two go hand in hand, and almost certainly feed off each other. René Belderbos of Maastricht University has examined how often inventors in a city co-author patents with inventors abroad, and how this changes over time. Unicorn-rich Bengaluru, San Francisco, Singapore and Tel Aviv all feature in the top ten of Mr Belderbos’s ranking of cities based on the growth in such linkages. Unicorn-poor Tokyo has seen a decline in connections.

Bengaluru illustrates how talent and openness combine to create startup magic. The city’s fondness for newfangled technology dates back to at least 1905, when the local maharajah diverted a nearby supply of hydropower to make it the first city in Asia with electric streetlamps. Four years later it built the Indian Institute of Science, a prestigious university that remains a magnet for clever Indians. Migrants make up more than half its population—a statistic India’s tech grandees invariably cite when explaining the city’s success.

It has also long been connected to the world. Texas Instruments, an American electronics-maker, chose Bengaluru for its first regional office in 1985. Infosys and Wipro, Indian information-technology ( IT ) giants based in Bengaluru since the 1980s, have served global software customers, making the city “the world’s back office”. When India’s closed economy opened up in 1991, the city was the natural place for foreign companies and capital eyeing the country’s vast market, says Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys. That in turn drew ambitious domestic upstarts seeking connections and cash.

Yet Bengaluru might not be where it is were it not for a third ingredient: the presence of local risk capital. For an enterprise to thrive, it needs backers who understand the ecosystem and are willing to feed it. This can be founders and employees of earlier startups, who become angel investors for the next generation, notes Rana Yared of Balderton Capital, a VC firm. Former employees of Flipkart, which Walmart bought in 2018, have gone on to found 225 startups, including five unicorns, according to Tracxn, a data provider. Those from Grab, Lazada and Sea Group, a trio of Singaporean tech darlings, have founded or run more than 1,000 firms.

A local capital base also encourages another important type of risk-taking. Employees must be able to leave existing firms and join or start competitors. AnnaLee Saxenian of Berkeley has argued that Boston’s Route 128, also near to top-notch universities, was outcompeted by Silicon Valley in the 1980s because it lacked this free flow of people between firms, perhaps in part because of stricter enforcement of non-compete agreements than in California.

In some cases, the state can provide early backing. Besides having a long bench of angels that stretches back at least to Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Silicon Valley enjoyed its share of government contracts in its formative post-war years, particularly from the Defence Department. Fairchild Semiconductor, whose employees included the future founders of Intel, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, depended on government procurement for much of its early growth. Bengaluru, home to military-research outfits, and Tel Aviv also have strong links to their countries’ armed forces, which can act as buyers of first resort.

Some governments support startups with capital rather than contracts. Take Singapore, which has more unicorns per person than anywhere bar Israel. Edwin Chow of Enterprise Singapore, a government agency in charge of the city-state’s startup policy, puts this down to schemes aimed at attracting investors and founders. For instance, a big programme from 2009, modelled after a similar one in Israel, matched every $1 from investors with nearly $6 from the public purse. At least 15 funds qualified for the scheme, which allowed the investors to buy out the government’s stake at its original face value, adds Mr Ong of Monk’s Hill.

How much credit such top-down policies deserve is hotly debated. Attempts to will clusters into existence have mostly foundered. In 1999 Germany poured €1.5bn ($1.6bn) into a Bavarian cluster initiative. France funnelled a similar amount to its pôles de compétitivité in 2005. Malaysia’s BioValley complex, launched the same year at a cost of $150m, was soon derided as “Valley of the BioGhosts”. A Canadian experiment in supporting startups failed because it was so well-funded that private investors stayed on the sidelines. In 2009 Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School concluded that “for each effective government intervention, there have been dozens, even hundreds, of failures, where substantial public expenditures bore no fruit”.

There be unicorns

Most investors and even some policymakers agree that Singapore’s success has more to do with its entrepot status, pro-business laws and political stability. That said, Justin Hall of Golden Gate Ventures, a Singaporean VC firm, reckons that the leg-up from the state may have accelerated Singapore’s ascent by a few years.

The importance of talent, openness and risk capital will persist. But the clusters that thrive thanks to a combination of the three will continue to evolve. As the younger clusters mature, the “ X of Y ” playbook will gradually give way to more advanced tech, as is happening in China. They will also become more globally minded. Already about 30% of India’s current herd of 60-odd unicorns primarily target international markets, says Dev Khare of Lightspeed India Partners, one more VC firm.

And new cities may join the ranks of tech hubs. Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, already looks poised to become the dominant player in the African fintech scene. In March Nigerian startups were better represented than those of any other country except two at Y Combinator, a famed Silicon Valley startup accelerator. Hot technologies such as the decentralised world of cryptocurrencies and so-called Web3 may seek out places with favourable regulations (or lack thereof). FTX , a cryptocurrency exchange valued at $32bn, has just moved to Nassau, in the Bahamas. The weather is nice there, too. ■

A SKINNY LITTLE fish of indeterminate colour, the Garra barreimiae lives in the freshwater lakes of the Al-Hajar mountain range in Oman. When it is young it can see, but as it ages a layer of skin grows over its eyes and it gradually becomes blind. Every year the blind fish of Oman draw thousands of tourists to the Al Hoota cave, a five-kilometre cavern of rocky grottoes and watery depths. Under strings of electric lights, men in white robes and women with covered heads inch along walkways and peer into the dark water. For Radhika Khimji, a 42-year-old Omani artist now living between London and Muscat, the challenge in the cave was less to spot the Garra than to imagine its world.

The result will feature in Oman’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which opens on April 23rd, alongside work by four other artists. For “Under inner under”, Ms Khimji took impressionistic black-and-white photographs of the cavernous rock face, blowing them up and printing them on thick fabric to make a wall curtain. The visual effect is crepuscular, volcanic and reminiscent of Dante’s underworld. On that backdrop she painted strings of pale-pink oval lozenges: globules of light in a gloomy world (the most a half-blind fish could see), or perhaps a new dawn spied through a dark window. The piece defies easy interpretation, but urges the viewer to keep looking. “In scale and imagination, I think this represents a big leap forward for Radhika,” says Aisha Stoby, curator of the Omani pavilion in Venice.

Oman has taken to contemporary art more slowly than its Gulf neighbours. Over the past two decades, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Qatar have projected themselves as art hubs, midway between Europe and Asia. Even Sharjah has held a contemporary-art biennale since 1993. Art in Oman, however, has mostly meant tourist souvenirs—views of long beaches, rocky landscapes and ancient forts hidden in the hills.

Ms Khimji’s work is different. A member of a Gujarati family that moved to Oman many generations ago, she is not trying to picture or even describe the world around her. Instead she reimagines it using an ever-shifting array of styles, materials, techniques and dimensions.

At school she found writing hard, she says, but drawing was a respite. As a young child she spent her holidays sketching for an aunt, a fashion designer—often images of buxom figures with heavy breasts and large thighs. A teacher from England suggested she apply to Slade School of Fine Art in London. At 20 she returned to Oman and entered an arranged marriage. Within six months she had fled, determined to make a life alone as an artist.

Admitted to a postgraduate course at the Royal Academy of Art, she steered away from ideas about decolonisation and diasporas—themes that are now almost automatically associated with up-and-coming artists from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. She took up voice-movement therapy, yoga and weightlifting. These helped her get over her failed marriage, she explains, and also to engage in a far more emotional way with making art. She experimented with sculpture, cut-outs and collages. In a return to the large-thighed subjects of her childhood, she painted a huge triptych of prancing figures which were decorated with the same lozenge shapes that she would use in her work on the blind fish.

The triptych was eventually bought by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the only Omani work in its collection. “I’m not really a very good painter,” Ms Khimji says now. But painting dancing figures in acrylic, on paper backed by MDF , led to a breakthrough when she began cutting the figures out and arranging them in conceptual pieces. Placed upright, they might be running or climbing; laid flat on the ground, they seem sunk in post-coital oblivion. At times they look bent or disfigured, at others, whimsical and lithe. On one occasion she tied a group of them to a collapsed parachute at the Barka Fort in Oman. As so often with her work, the effect was ambivalent: it was hard to tell if they had crashed or landed safely, whether they were tethered or free to walk away.

Her figures have been shown in Austria, India and America. Since 2015, meanwhile, she has filled seven volumes of notebooks with ink portraits and drawings, sketches and dreams. Some of the colours are inked so thickly as to bleed through the pages. The notebooks are private and not for sale, but they chart the journey of an artist who refuses to be tied down.

For the Marrakech Biennale of 2016, where Ms Khimji’s installations first reached a big international audience, she omitted the figures and arranged the parachute on a crumbling wall. “I think of her most of all”, says Reem Fadda, that exhibition’s curator, “as an artist of freedom.” ■

The Impossible City. By Karen Cheung. Random House; 319 pages; $28 and £23

Indelible City. By Louisa Lim. Riverhead Books; 293 pages; $28

I N RETROSPECT, SOME calamities quickly assume the inevitability of tragedy. Of course Vladimir Putin could never accept an independent, Western-aligned Ukraine. Of course the Taliban would triumph in Afghanistan; just glance at the history of foreign involvement there. And, more certain still, of course China’s Communist rulers would never tolerate a free, open, democratising city in a southern corner of their country. “One country, two systems”—the simple Sino-British formula under which Hong Kong would remain politically distinct from the rest of China for 50 years from 1997, when Beijing resumed the exercise of sovereignty—was always doomed.

But nobody told Hong Kong. After all, it was supposed not to care. Many outsiders swallowed China’s habitual line that Hong Kong was an “economic” city, a place of business that was not concerned with politics. Yet the generation that has grown up since 1997 has always posed and faced an awkward question that Karen Cheung formulates at the beginning of “The Impossible City”, her fine new book: “Why are we not the ambivalent, apolitical generation that our leaders want us to be?” Every few years since 2003, the territory has seen huge protests, building up to the occupation of parts of the city centre in the “umbrella” movement of 2014, and what amounted to an abortive insurrection in 2019. Whether to take part was a decision that Hong Kong’s people could not dodge.

Ms Cheung and Louisa Lim, author of the equally good (and similarly titled) “Indelible City”, both grew up in Hong Kong. Both occupy what Ms Cheung calls the “liminal space of being local enough to write stories that white writers can’t and ‘international’ enough to write about Hong Kong for overseas readers”. And both offer illuminating accounts of how the city descended into the mass street unrest of 2019, as demonstrators agitated for a more representative political system, and of the pandemic-abetted repression that has crushed protest since. Tear-gas, water cannons and police batons eventually cleared the streets. Covid-19 kept them empty.

Their perspectives are very different. Ms Lim is a journalist-turned-academic, who long covered China and Hong Kong for the BBC and National Public Radio; her previous book told of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to erase the memory of the protest movement that roiled China in 1989 and its bloody suppression. She writes mostly as a coolly objective observer, but opens with an account of crossing the line into activism, on September 30th 2019, the eve of a big protest to mark China’s National Day. On the roof of a skyscraper, she finds herself “painting expletive-laden Chinese characters onto a protest banner eight storeys high, and wondering if I had just killed my career in journalism”.

Though dominated by events since 1997, “Indelible City” also attempts a revisionist telling of Hong Kong’s history. This challenges both the traditional Western view that it was nothing but a “barren rock” until British opium traders found a use for it, and the Chinese version: that it has been an integral part of the Chinese polity since time immemorial. Rather, in the past Hong Kong was “a sanctuary for rebels and fugitives from central power” and a haven for free-thinking.

The mermen’s song

Ms Lim describes Hong Kong people’s efforts to rebuild a link with this past, including through the resurrection of an indigenous creation myth about the Lo Ting, fish-headed mermen who had come to Hong Kong’s Lantau island in the fifth century, after a failed rebellion against the imperial dynasty. The character who gives her book its name is Tsang Tsou Choi, who died in 2007 and left behind a vast body of graffiti over public spaces in Hong Kong—much of it supporting his eccentric claim to be the king of Kowloon, the peninsula opposite Hong Kong island.

For those brought up in Hong Kong, questions of identity were unavoidable and virtually impossible to answer. Almost uniquely among colonised peoples, they were never offered independence. In 1972, shortly after it joined the United Nations, China asked the decolonisation committee to remove Hong Kong from its list of colonial territories, and Britain, as became customary in its treatment of its colony, connived in this implicit condemnation of Hong Kong to eventual Chinese rule. Ms Lim quotes an early British governor, from 1858, who pithily summed up the ethos of British sovereignty: “We rule them in ignorance, and they submit in blindness.”

So Hong Kongers, a term that, for her part, Ms Cheung says she has never heard anyone apply to themselves, “defined themselves in negatives—not Communist, no longer colonial subjects”. Her book, like Ms Lim’s, shows how they did acquire a sense of identity. Sadly, it was still couched in the negative: in the thwarted struggle against the gradual erosion of their civil liberties under Chinese sovereignty—and the repeated frustration of their demands for a representative political system.

Like Ms Lim, Ms Cheung is a leading character in her book as well as its narrator. Hers is more personal, building up a sense of a unique Hong Kong identity through an account of her own life and interests and immersion in the local indie-music scene. A journalist for various outlets, still in her 20s, she complains of some foreign editors: “It’s best if our family stories are somehow representative of the rest of the Hong Kong population…They want your life stories, not your opinions.”

Indeed. But her story is also Hong Kong’s. The painful struggle with depression that she recounts becomes emblematic of a stunted generation living on the edge of desperation. She notes that between 2012 and 2016 the suicide rate among students jumped by 76%.

Both these books were largely written before the pandemic further cut off Hong Kong from the rest of the world—a shared isolation that has seemed more acute this year, as first Hong Kong and then parts of the mainland suffered widespread outbreaks of the Omicron variant. The joint pursuit with China of a zero-covid policy has been among the most powerful symbols of where Hong Kong’s future lies. That future may indeed have been inevitable, but it has rarely looked so grim. ■

I MAGINE A PLATE holding two strawberries, identical in appearance. One came out of a clamshell supermarket box, meaning it was probably harvested when it was still unripe, immediately placed in a forced-air cooling unit, loaded onto a refrigerated truck and driven hundreds of miles. By the time it reached the plate it may have been off the vine for two weeks. The other strawberry was picked from a garden minutes before being eaten.

The first one will probably taste like a slightly mushy cucumber, with a vague hint of berry tang and strong sour undertones. The second is likely to be sweet and floral; the flavour will linger in the mouth, as the scent will on the hands. Supermarket strawberries are not entirely without advantages: they are convenient and available in the northern hemisphere in February. But the two berries differ from each other in the same way that hearing Bach’s Mass in B Minor in a concert hall differs from listening to it on a threadbare cassette. The home-grown fruit is an edible case for cultivating a home garden.

Your columnist, who long deemed gardening a twee waste of time, advances this argument with a convert’s zeal. Planting cool-weather greens, as gardeners across the north-east of America are now doing, can seem nonsensical. Convenient, perpetually well-stocked supermarket shelves are available all week, in many places supplemented on weekends by farmers’ markets, which offer a jolt of virtuous seasonality. But the same could be said of cooking: cheap and decent restaurants abound, so why bother to make your own meals?

That attitude misconstrues the ultimate appeal of gardening: it mistakes the product for the purpose. It is true that a garden can yield peas that taste like the vibrant, green essence of spring; tomatoes and carrots of incomparable sweetness; lettuces and herbs that taste like themselves rather than the plastic they are usually packaged in; and potatoes with the biscuity richness of earth itself. Finding, say, fenugreek leaves or celtuce in the shops can take some time, effort and expense; growing your own vegetables, exotic or routine, ensures a reliable supply.

On the other hand a garden, especially in the early years, can also yield little but frustration. Novice gardeners may plant the wrong crops for their soil. Squirrels have an infuriating habit of taking single bites of cucumbers, beans and tomatoes, then leaving the rest on the vine to rot. And even expert gardeners can lose a season’s harvest to unco-operative weather.

No matter. The real joy of gardening is the time spent doing it. The deepest pleasure—as with cooking, writing, bringing up children or almost anything worthwhile—is in the work itself. A gardener’s memories revolve not around the food produced, but around long summer afternoons with hands in the dirt, surrounded by family, if the garden is at home, or deepening acquaintances with friends and neighbours in an allotment or community garden. To garden is to patiently, lovingly and diligently help life flourish, in the ground and above it. ■

T HE STANDARD MODEL of particle physics—completed in 1973—is the jewel in the crown of modern physics. It predicts the properties of elementary particles and forces with mind-boggling accuracy. Take the magnetic moment of the electron, for example, a measure of how strongly a particle wobbles in a magnetic field. The Standard Model gives the correct answer to 14 decimal places, the most accurate prediction in science.

But the Standard Model is not perfect. It cannot explain gravity, dark matter (mysterious stuff detectable only by its gravitational pull), or where all the antimatter in the early universe went. Physicists have spent much time, effort and money performing ever-more elaborate experiments in an effort to see where the Standard Model fails, in the hopes of finding a clue to the theory that will replace it. But the Standard Model has fought back, stubbornly predicting the results of every experiment physicists have thrown its way.

But that may perhaps be changing. In a paper published last week in Science, a team of researchers from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in America announced that the mass of an elementary particle called the W boson appears to be greater than the Standard Model predicts. The difference is small—only a hundredth of a percent—but the measurement’s precision exceeds that of all previous experiments combined. It places the odds that the result is spurious at only one in a trillion (“seven sigma”, in the statistical lingo), well above the one in 3.5m (five sigma) that physicists require to consider a finding robust.

The scientists at Fermilab analysed historical data from the Tevatron, a circular particle collider which was the most powerful in the world until the Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ) came online in 2009. Between 2002 and 2011 (when it ran for the last time), the Tevatron produced approximately 4m W bosons in collisions between particles called quarks and their antimatter counterparts, antiquarks. Using detailed recordings of the scattering trajectories of the menagerie of particles present in such collisions, the scientists could calculate the mass of the W boson with unprecedented accuracy.

The finding has big implications. The W boson is a force-carrying particle. Together with its sibling the Z boson, it mediates the weak nuclear force that governs radioactive decay. Unlike other force-carrying particles, however, the W and Z bosons have mass—and a lot of it. The W boson is 90 times heavier than a hydrogen atom. The Z boson is even more massive. What really distinguishes the W boson, however, is its ability to change the type—or “flavour”—of other elementary particles it comes across. For example, it can transform the electron (and two of its cousins, the muon and tau) into neutrinos. It can also flip quarks from one type to another—up to down, top to bottom, and the whimsically named “strange” quark to a “charm” one.

These protean powers mean that the mass of the W boson is linked to the mass of several other elementary particles. That allows scientists to use the W boson to calculate the mass of those other particles. That is how they predicted the mass of the top quark (discovered in 1995) and the mass of the Higgs boson (discovered in 2012), before either particle had been detected. If the W boson is more massive than the Standard Model predicts, it implies that something else is tugging on it too—an as-yet-undiscovered particle or force. For particle physicists, that is an exciting prospect.

It is not the only one. In March 2021 scientists from CERN —Europe’s particle-physics laboratory—reported evidence that the bottom quark decays into electrons and muons in uneven numbers, contradicting the Standard Model. Only three weeks later, Fermilab announced that the magnetic moment of the muon appears to be greater than predicted by the Standard Model too. Like the mass of the W boson, the magnetic moment of the muon is partly determined by the properties of other particles. If it is greater than the Standard Model predicts, that hints at an as-yet-undiscovered particle or force too.

Assuming, that is, the results are real. Exciting as they were, neither result from 2021 crossed the 5-sigma threshold (they hit 3.1 and 4.2 sigma, respectively). That means further confirmation is necessary. The more recent Tevatron result, though, contradicts the previous best measurement of the W boson mass, made in 2017 at the LHC . That was in close agreement with the Standard Model, presenting a puzzle.

On the other hand, the latest Tevatron result aligns well with previous estimates from the Large Electron-Positron Collider, the LHC ’s predecessor. It is consequently the strongest evidence yet of the physics that must lie beyond the Standard Model. Anyone who prefers interesting errors over yet more dull confirmation will be hoping it holds up. ■

N EVER BEFORE have the activities of ocean-going vessels been under so much scrutiny. So says Oleg Ustenko, the economics adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, and a leader of a government initiative called the Russian Tanker Tracking Group ( RTTG ). Working with tips from a network of experts and spies, including foreign officials who contribute on the sly, the RTTG , Dr Ustenko says, tracks the energy shipments with which “Russia is desperately trying to finance its military machine”.

Despite the sanctions imposed by America and Europe, most of Russia’s energy shipments have remained legal. Outrage over its war on Ukraine, however, has left many firms keen to avoid the reputational risks of dealing with entities or goods of Russian origin. Beyond that, as the pandemic and war have tightened commodity markets, the value of detailed data on shipments has risen. As Reid I’Anson of the Houston office of Kpler, a firm of commodities analysts, notes, even traders who won’t buy illicit oil can make better decisions if they can gauge how much sanctioned countries such as Iran are managing to smuggle out.

Technology hopes to provide such information. The RTTG , for example, uses “network analysis” software to find revealing relationships among disparate bits of information. The group is already notching up successes. These include identifying shipments of Kazakh oil believed to contain portions of clandestinely loaded Russian crude, says Dr Ustenko. Alerts are sent to relevant governments and firms, as well as several Ukrainian ministries.

Data from ship transponders inform much of the analysis. Big commercial vessels must transmit their location and an identifying code to networks of terrestrial and satellite receivers known as the Automatic Identification System ( AIS ). Something as simple as an unusual acceleration may be a clue that a crew is buying time for an illicit deal. But the key to flagging potential mischief, says Ivan Ladan, the boss of Marine Digital, an analytics firm in Lübeck, Germany, is to use software that analyses the behaviour of ships in light of many different bits of information.

Marine Digital’s software, for instance, examines a ship’s declared cargo, route, and insurance details, as well as historical navigation patterns in various weather and market conditions. Crime and corruption in different places are also taken into account. The software is even fed port records on how low a vessel sits in the water, revealing the tonnage of cargo aboard. When it smells something fishy, the firm alerts authorities and its clients, mostly shipowners unhappy to hear that one of their leased vessels may be up to no good.

Sanctions-busting often involves transfers of cargo between ships, far from the eyes of port authorities. Vortexa, a London-based firm, runs software that looks for these “trans-shipments”. One clue is when a full and an empty vessel built to carry the same type of cargo meet away from crowded shipping lanes. Vortexa’s software also looks for encounters between a vessel that has a dodgy reputation and one that does not (or does not yet). The latter are preferred for passing off sanctioned cargo as a legitimate delivery. A ship’s age also matters. The riskier the voyage, the older the vessel is likely to be.

It is too soon to see how efforts to dodge sanctions on Russia will shape up. But Ioannis Papadimitriou, a Vortexa freight analyst, reckons illicit ship-to-ship transfers will be concentrated in the Baltic Sea and eastern Mediterranean. He also expects ships to meet in those areas and swap transponders, a trick sometimes done near Malaysia to deliver Iranian oil to China.

But AIS has its shortcomings. Satellites struggle to distinguish signals from crowded ports and littoral waters. To improve resolution, AIS receivers are being built along some coasts, but more are needed. A company based in Athens called Marine Traffic is posting AIS antennae to seaside building owners around the world, who volunteer to install the kit on rooftops. Marine Traffic’s network of roughly 3,600 antennae collects data that it fuses with information from other terrestrial networks and satellites. The resulting analytics are sold to trading firms, financial outfits and government bodies. Spokesman Georgios Hatzimanolis notes rising demand for information on vessels linked to Russia, be they tankers or superyachts.

Rubs remain. One is that a vessel’s AIS transponder can be switched off. Ami Daniel, the boss of Windward, a shipping-analytics firm based in Tel Aviv, sees “a huge spike” in the number of ships that have recently cut AIS transmissions. Many are in waters near Russia, including the Black Sea. Some have no doubt “gone dark” to reduce their visibility to Russian warships, which have fired upon merchant vessels. Even so, Mr Daniel, a former officer in Israel’s navy, reckons that the drop in transmissions heralds an increase in “deceptive shipping practices”.

Eyes in the sky

But there are other ways to keep tabs on ships. These include satellites with cameras and synthetic-aperture radar, which sees objects at night and through clouds. A more recently developed approach uses satellites in low orbits to hoover up signals from shipborne radars. These are used for navigation and to avoid collisions, so mariners are disinclined to switch them off. Fancy software for signal processing geolocates the signals’ sources, at times within just several hundred metres.

A handful of firms track ships in this way. Their clients include coast guards, navies and America’s National Geo spatial-Intelligence Agency. This autumn a British firm, Horizon Technologies, aims to begin providing radio-frequency intelligence to Britain’s Royal Navy and governments in Greece, Italy and Singapore. It will also compile, in partnership with the International Maritime Organisation, a library of radar-pulse “fingerprints” of ships worldwide, made possible by minute idiosyncrasies in componentry in radar units of even the same make and model.

It adds up to a heap of data. Making sense of it, however, can be quite tricky. For one thing, a growing number of ships “spoof” AIS by transmitting bogus data that changes the vessel’s apparent identity or location. TankerTrackers, a firm with analysts in London and Stockholm, monitors more than 40 vessels, some with links to Russia, that visit Iranian and Venezuelan ports. Nearly half, the company says, transmit counterfeit AIS data. Such spoofing used to require hard-won expertise with fiddly software. These days, one manufacturer in Istanbul advertises a model smaller than a shoebox that transmits bogus data for up to ten vessels—“position offset, false identity, fake type, fake echo”, and so forth.

Beyond that, ships themselves are only one part of the game. Analysts must also figure out who is behind ships and their cargo. This is hard, for the shipping industry is a notorious mess of shell companies, flags of convenience and opaque accounting. To complicate matters further, many outfits are attempting to disassociate from Russia. Recent weeks, Windward reports, have seen an unprecedented number of vessels “flag out” of Russia and register with other countries.

Which comes back to the role of network-analysis software. Like Ukraine’s RTTG , Kharon, a Los Angeles firm, feeds its software with corporate records, shipping documents, court filings, news articles, police reports and regulatory paperwork. The software, says Benjamin Schmidt, head of product, even sucks up obscure databases “hosted by some random country where we’re able to identify one thread of information”—an address, perhaps, that connects a shady entity to a certain businessman. Social media helps. If a snapshot of that businessman at a trade show reveals another logo in the background, Kharon’s analysts begin poking around that company, too.

Kpler, for its part, is eyeing a different type of software upgrade. Mr I’Anson sees future iterations of Kpler’s software taking into account the political developments likely to shape appetites for busting sanctions, whether on Russia or other countries. He notes that when Joe Biden became president, China, presumably expecting “a little more leeway”, began to smuggle in greater amounts of discounted Iranian oil.

For technologists and technocrats, all this is heady stuff. But not all recent developments have worked in their favour. Western sanctions on Russia have shut off access to Russian registries of corporate filings. Jessica Abell of Sayari, an American business-intelligence firm that makes extensive use of such data, says that will make it much harder to work out who is doing what on the high seas. There is plenty, in other words, to play for. ■

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A lesson from history

One historical case that has been overlooked as a parallel for the situation in Ukraine is the Spanish civil war (“Why Ukraine must win”, April 2nd). From 1936 until 1939 European democracies gave moral support to the republicans in that conflict, but failed to provide them with sufficient military support to defeat Franco, the dictator. They hesitated because of internal domestic divisions and for fear that they would be stepping across a line that would make them belligerents in the war. As a result, a few months after the fall of Barcelona and Madrid, these same European democracies found themselves in a much nastier war. They had Franco on their consciences until he died, in bed, in 1975.

We are at risk of repeating that error today in Ukraine. As you argue, no solution short of a decisive military victory by the Ukrainians will preserve Western credibility and the rule of law. Consequently, three measures need to be taken immediately: the establishment of clearly defined "red lines" concerning the use of chemical and nuclear weapons; blocking SWIFT transfers to all Russian banks and the termination of Russian oil and gas purchases that this would imply; and providing the Ukrainians with immediate access to the entire Western arsenal of defensive weapons. But, like the Spanish civil war, I fear Western democracies lack the courage to implement these measures.

MATTHEW LEITNER

Former director of the executive masters in international negotiation and policymaking

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies ( IHEID )

Geneva

If victory in Ukraine is so important to the West, then why the hypocrisy of sending weapons and other support and letting the Ukrainians do all the dying? If victory is so important, why are we not putting NATO boots on the ground and giving Ukraine back to the Ukrainians? To quote Primo Levi regarding another period of horrific atrocities, "If not now, when?"

MICHAEL SLATER

San Luis Obispo, California

I applaud most of your position on helping Ukraine win, but I take exception to your recommendation to “bring Ukraine’s governance in line with the EU ”. In “The Light That Failed”, a book that seeks to understand the crisis in liberalism, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes put forward a theory that holding up one system of government as ideal has led to a nationalist reaction and support for autocracy in some eastern European countries. Hectoring others to fall in line does not work everywhere.

NORMA ELLIOTT

Seal Rock, Oregon

Missiles and drones have rendered armour-plated tanks as obsolete as cavalry for military purposes (“Loitering with intent”, March 26th). Perhaps future versions of stealthy nocturnal drones could be developed to carry food and medical supplies, making it pointless to besiege a city.

GILES CAMPLIN

London

Delivering reform for Africa

You are right to point out that non-tariff barriers are a key obstacle preventing the growth of African trade (“Long walk to free trade”, March 26th). Logistics are a big part of that. Our members ( DHL , FedEx and UPS ) are increasingly subjected to draconian postal-licensing regimes in Africa. These licences are designed to stifle competition and extract revenue. They extend national postal monopolies to logistics and impose prohibitive fees that increase the cost of doing business. They fly in the face of regulation standards that a large group of WTO members have recently adopted.

An open and competitive market for delivery services would be an essential building block for the African Continental Free Trade Agreement to yield its full potential. It would allow African traders of all sizes to reach foreign markets efficiently, both within Africa and worldwide. This can be achieved while maintaining a universal postal service, which is distinct from express delivery. Sadly, many African governments are choosing to go in the opposite direction.

CARLOS GRAU TANNER

Director general

Global Express Association

Geneva

A sign of our times

There has, for good and ill, been a recent cross-pollination of anti-poverty policy between the United States and Britain (“The social experiment”, April 2nd). A year ago the queues outside British food banks were shortening and hundreds of thousands of children were being lifted out of poverty. This was largely because of the government’s decision to raise benefit payments.

However, as in America, the increase in benefit payments proved to be temporary and has now been withdrawn. With those payments now lagging far behind inflation, some food banks within our network are reporting their busiest weeks ever and families are arriving, in the words of one volunteer, with desperation written over their faces.

ANDREW FORSEY

National director

Feeding Britain

London

What is a taco?

As a Mexican living in America who has accidentally ordered (and then proceeded to eat) hard-shell tacos, I think your article in praise of their mass marketing did not convey the main objection to them (“The unreal McCoy”, April 2nd). It is not about the food content, but about the name. A taco is anything that is wrapped in a tortilla that has been warmed up. That’s it. There are no canons on Mexican food, but we do need to get the names on the menu right.

Something similar to hard-shell tacos already exists in our Mexican menu: the tostada, a deep-fried tortilla that has an assortment of stuff on top of it, such as ceviche or pig's trotter in vinegar. One of the classic versions has meat, lettuce, tomato, cheese and cream. Kudos to the American engineering innovation that fried these things in a wedge shape.

As far as taste goes, if you like hard-shell so called tacos, go for it. Leave the good stuff for the rest of us.

JAVIER MADRID

Chicago

I enjoyed your article and description of foodie culture. But I contest your claim that hard-shell tacos bear “little relation to the real thing”. That would have been a surprise to my immigrant grandmother (born in Irapuato, Mexico) as she served us only hard-shell tacos her entire life. I can assure you she never went to a Taco Bell nor succumbed to “hard-shell” propaganda.

TONY ACOSTA

Redondo Beach, California

Also known as

There may be something to the “name-letter effect”, the subconscious bias that people have for the letters in their own name, and for their own initials in particular (Bartleby, March 19th). During my career I was known as a major S.O.B .

MAJOR STEPHEN BORKOWSKI

United States Air Force, (Ret)

Pittsburg, Texas

Energarchy in the UK

I read your leader on the new age of energy insecurity (“Power play”, March 26th). Is it too soon (or late) to coin the term “Energarchy”?

A LEJANDRA LEMONNIER joined the convent of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus when she was 20. She came from a religious family, attended a Roman Catholic school and lived in a conservative part of Buenos Aires. Her four younger siblings were all, to varying degrees, Catholic—at least officially. Today Sister Lemonnier, who is now 31, is the only devout member of her family. Her oldest brother became a New Age spiritualist. One of her sisters came out as a lesbian and became an apostate, formally renouncing her Catholic faith. Another sister is “indifferent”. For the youngest brother, who is 18, religion is “just not part of his universe”.

The diversity of belief in Sister Lemonnier’s family reflects a growing trend. Latin America holds more than a third of the world’s Catholics, but their numbers are shrinking. In 1995 80% of people in the region identified as Catholic. Today just 56% do. Many have become evangelical Christians instead. Since 1995 evangelicals’ share of the regional population rose from 3.5% to 19%, according to Latinobarómetro, a pollster (see chart).

Yet an even more striking trend is the rise of those who do not profess adherence to any religion, known as ningunas (or “nones”). Their share of Latin America’s population has quadrupled to 16%, and is particularly high among young people. That may help explain the region’s growing liberalism on matters like abortion and same-sex marriage.

The data on religion is not always consistent. In Latinobarómetro’s survey, only 5% of Mexicans identified as evangelicals, whereas 11% did so in the 2020 census. There is also wide variation across the region. In Uruguay a whopping 40% are “nones”, while another 10% are agnostic or atheist. In some countries, such as Guatemala and Honduras, there are now as many evangelicals as Catholics. Bolivia, Mexico, Paraguay and Bolivia appear more immune to religious competition, with Catholicism remaining dominant. Yet even here, change is afoot. The share of Mexican “nones” in the census has almost doubled in a decade, to 10m people in 2020 (or 7% of the population).

Evangelicalism is particularly widespread among poorer people and prisoners. In Argentina evangelical pastors negotiated with prison authorities in the 1990s and early 2000s to set up separate wards for their adherents, says Verónica Giménez Béliveau, a researcher. Such wards tend to be less violent and cleaner, attracting further converts. Over time, however, evangelicals have joined the mainstream. In 2015 Guatemala elected the region’s first evangelical president.

A secret chord

Those with no religious affiliation are more homogenous, in that they tend to be more educated. Having a university degree appears to reduce religiosity. Nowhere is this more evident than in Chile, which has experienced one of the biggest increases in its share of “nones”. Access to higher education has quintupled since 1990, and GDP per capita has grown sixfold. At the same time, the share of “nones” has tripled, to around a third of the population.

The secular trend is far from absolute. Many “nones” continue to have spiritual beliefs. In Chile almost 70% of people continue to believe in life after death, including more than half of those with no religious affiliation. In Colombia 80% of people believe in miracles, including 14% of agnostics and a whopping 65% of the unaffiliated. There are also new beliefs. In Argentina 72% of the unaffiliated, whose ranks have almost doubled in the past decade, say they believe in spiritual “energy” and a third believe in astrology. And despite the increase in “nones”, very few people describe themselves as atheists.

This reflects the strength of cultural Catholicism, says Andrés Casas of Pontifical Xavierian University in Bogotá, Colombia. He notes that even members of former communist guerrilla groups in Colombia say things like, “Thanks be to God”. When a Swedish satanist heavy-metal band tried to host a concert in Bogotá in 2018, officials quickly had the venue shut down. Dr Giménez Béliveau notes that there are crucifixes in police stations and courts in Argentina. “Religion is inscribed culturally,” she says.

But religious identities are becoming more fluid. A Brazilian Catholic may attend an evangelical service every now and again because they like the style of worship. They might also dabble in candomblé, a belief system with African roots first imported to the country by slaves, says Arlene Sánchez-Walsh of Azusa Pacific University in California. Charismatic Catholicism, which mimics some aspects of evangelicalism, has grown, too.

The political implications of these changes are already being felt. The evangelical lobby in Brazil’s Congress includes 195 of 513 federal deputies. Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s right-wing president, courted the evangelical vote. Although he is a Catholic, he was re-baptised in the River Jordan shortly before his election in 2018 by an evangelical pastor.

Evangelicals are a political force elsewhere, too. In Costa Rica an evangelical singer reached the presidential run-off in 2018 after the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, which is based in the country, ruled that same-sex marriage should be legal. Mexico’s president won office partly because of evangelical support. “Con mis hijos no te metas” (Don’t mess with my kids), an educational pressure group founded by the son of a Pentecostal pastor, successfully agitated for the dismissal of an education minister in Peru. In Colombia an alliance of religious groups caused an openly gay education minister to resign after her ministry tried to reduce discrimination against LGBT youths in schools.

As Latin Americans’ spiritual choices become more varied, their politics could become more polarised. Although the trends are not uniform across the region, believers tend to vote for right-wing parties, whereas “nones” lean far more to the left. In Chile’s recent presidential election, José Antonio Kast, a hard-right Catholic candidate with nine children, courted religious voters. Gabriel Boric, the leftist who won, was supported by young graduates.

Father Fabián Báez, a Catholic priest in Argentina, hopes that the church can win back adherents. He loosely quotes Pope Francis, an Argentinian and the first Latin American pontiff, when he insists, “The priest and the church need to be where the people are, on social media, in the villages, in the barrios.” But even if the priests do go to those places, it is unclear that people will follow them again. ■

A S HE DRIVES away from a coffee shop, Marshall Johnson (played by Justin Bartha) is trailed by a mysterious turquoise car. It pulls up at his house, he answers the door—and is served with a reparations claim. His ancestors were slave-owners and, amid a rippling restitution push, Marshall’s life unravels. Colleagues frantically take DNA tests to prove they are of blameless stock. “I’m Peruvian,” his estranged wife declares. “You were white yesterday,” he replies.

Unsettling, funny and deadly serious, episode four in the third and latest season of “Atlanta” is—at least for white viewers—a kind of satirical anxiety dream. Neither Donald Glover, the show’s creator and lead actor, nor its other regular stars appear. These surprises are to be expected. Since it first aired in 2016, “Atlanta” has conducted an escalating experiment in form, even as it crafts an offbeat exposé of poverty and racial injustice. The perfect fit between method and message makes it a powerful and original work of art.

At first, the show felt like a sitcom—if Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin had written one together. Mr Glover is Earn, a Princeton drop-out whose cousin Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry) raps under the name Paper Boi. Earn wants to be his manager and has a child with Van (Zazie Beetz). Alfred has a trippy, philosophical housemate called Darius (LaKeith Stanfield). From the start, “Atlanta” dispensed with the niceties of exposition and tired machinery of plot. Banality bled into surrealism and hallucination: an invisible car, a bow-tied shaman on a bus.

Things spiralled from there. An entire episode consisted of a mock talk show on which Paper Boi argued with a white activist about trans rights in a dizzying, multifaceted satire; a spoof news report featured a black teenager who identified as a 35-year-old white man. In the second season Darius was trapped in a Gothic mansion by a psychopathic music legend who resembled Michael Jackson. The gun Earn acquired in the season premiere went off in the finale, but not as Chekhov might have predicted.

The guiding principle of “Atlanta” seems to be never to compromise with the executives at FX , the network that commissioned it, nor with the audience (in Britain the latest series will be available on Disney+). After a four-year hiatus, the new run opens with two unknown men fishing on a haunted lake; most of the first episode tells the tale of a black child adopted by a pair of sinister white women.

The content is as discomforting as the form. Mostly the villains are not frothing bigots but presumptuous white liberals, like the condescending host of a Juneteenth party in season one. The microaggressions add up, though. Gatekeepers in “Atlanta” will admit its black characters only on soul-crushing, pigeonholing terms. Charm and talent are not enough, and nor, for Earn and Van, is love. Their mistakes count triple; small gains are liable to be snatched back. The humour is less laugh or cry than both at once.

Even success isn’t enough, it turns out. Like the actors—above all Mr Glover, not only a “Star Wars” hero but, as Childish Gambino, an internet-breaking musician—in season three the characters have made it and are touring Europe. But good fortune is less an escape than a new kind of trap. In Amsterdam they stumble into a blackface winter festival. At a party in London, an off-key remark is a chance for white onlookers to perform their piety. Racism, the show insists, transcends borders and bank accounts.

The drama’s elastic shape, and a mood both urgent and woozily dreamlike, work because they reflect the unstable conditions that “Atlanta” depicts. If you stop to think about it, the story’s surreal moments are no crazier than its everyday indignities, not least the violence that throbs at its margins, often perpetrated by police. The narrative digressions mirror the involuntary detours in lives that are short on autonomy. When mundane errands can lead to disaster, as they do for Alfred and Earn, or a day can begin as screwball comedy and lurch into horror, established genres won’t do.

Except perhaps one. The basic template in “Atlanta”—in which fantasy and reality blur, anything can happen yet the ending seems predetermined—is the fairy tale. As with the consoling repetitions of the sitcom, fairy tales run on a loop, but sometimes the effect is nightmarish. Like Hansel and Gretel, Mr Glover’s characters keep getting stuck—in a spooky forest, mazy nightclub or depraved frat house. They search for a way out, but sense that there isn’t one. They are caught in a story written long ago.

In a resonant staging of “Henry V”, war is murder in uniform (Mar 5th)

Ways and Means. By Roger Lowenstein. Penguin Press; 448 pages; $30

W AR CAN expose a society’s weaknesses, or give expression to its latent potential. This lesson, apt today, applied in spades to the American civil war, as a new financial history of the conflict explains. Though Roger Lowenstein, a journalist, surely had no idea that when “Ways and Means” was published, Russia would invade Ukraine, his engaging history nonetheless makes for timely reading.

In hindsight, it is hard to imagine that the triumph of Union forces could ever have been in doubt, given the North’s advantages in population and industry. But the Confederacy did not need to win the war outright; it had only to struggle on until the people of the North grew tired enough of fighting to seek a peace. President Abraham Lincoln, whose victory in the election of 1860 precipitated secession, was determined to preserve the Union. But the patience of his people in the face of hardship could not be taken for granted, and the tools available to him were limited.

At the outset of the struggle, the federal government was still a bare-bones affair, which in most respects deferred to the authority of “these United States”. It lacked a central bank to help manage the government’s credit. Neither did the federal government control its own currency; in the antebellum economy, the role of money was played by private notes, issued by banks. And the main source of federal revenue—tariffs on traded goods—was hard hit by the crisis. A third of the ports at which customs duties were collected were in the Confederacy.

Chief responsibility for addressing these problems fell to Salmon Chase (pictured), a prickly figure and aspirant to the presidency who served as Lincoln’s Treasury secretary. At first neither North nor South expected a long war, and Chase’s initial financial requests were a mere drop in the bucket of money that would be needed to subdue the rebellion. After he secured a loan of $50m from a bank syndicate (around $1.5bn today), a banker said he hoped the sum would be sufficient to win the war. The government would ultimately spend some 60 times that amount. Both sides sought to borrow from Europeans, with minimal success. This newspaper declared it “utterly out of the question” that the Americans could obtain “anything like the extravagant sums they are asking”.

Yet while the Union’s finances seemed in danger of collapsing early in the war, Lincoln’s administration soon began constructing the machinery to effectively tap the strength of the American economy. From 1862 the federal government started issuing a fiat currency—called “greenbacks”, for the colour of the ink used in printing on the reverse side. In 1863 Congress enacted Chase’s plan for a national banking system, in which federally chartered and supervised banks issued Treasury notes and held federal bonds. The inflationary potential of such measures was kept in check by a big expansion of federal taxation—including the central government’s first-ever income tax.

The government’s measures did not just make the financing of the war possible; they also knitted together an ever more powerful national economy. The new currency facilitated commerce, spurring economic growth in the North which benefited the war effort. As the fighting broke down the age-old bias against government intervention in the economy, a wave of transformational legislation was passed—boosting investment in continent-spanning railways, providing free land to Americans willing to move to the country’s Western fringes, and laying the groundwork for a network of public universities that would provide practical higher education to the masses.

None of this was possible in the South, where slaveholders’ deep suspicion of government, and indeed of the trappings of modernity, was essential to the rebellion. Unable to produce its own goods—or to sell its cotton, thanks to the Union blockade—the Confederate economy ground to a halt. Without the capacity to tax, the South struggled to borrow and relied heavily on money-printing, which fuelled runaway inflation. Illusions of a glorious victory gave way to ruin and humiliating defeat.

The rebels seethed at the economic power wielded by their enemy. “The Yankees did not whip us in the field,” noted one Confederate soldier. “We were whipped in the Treasury Department.” But the fight was a clash of values and outlooks as much as a contest of arms or bond issues. Through it, a more cohesive and capable United States was forged. ■

T HE WEEKLY email from Money Saving Expert is a superb guide to Britain’s collective mood. Usually, the missive from the consumer-finance website brings an incoherent mix of bargains into the inbox of its 7.5m subscribers. “£12 broadband, free wills...£4.50 dresses”, ran one perky subject line.

But in recent weeks the messages have become darker. “Heat the human, not the home” was the headline above one section of advice on how to avoid freezing as energy prices soar. Martin Lewis, who has become one of Britain’s most recognisable figures since starting the site in 2003, is now calling for government intervention to cope with annual energy bills that could soon hit £3,000 ($3,900) per household. Without help, warns Mr Lewis, civil unrest is likely.

As the cost-of-living crisis intensifies, the usually apolitical Mr Lewis has a good claim to be the most influential man in British politics. The readership of Money Saving Expert rivals the collective reach of Britain’s newspapers. “The Martin Lewis Money Show” on ITV is watched by up to 4m people per week. Mr Lewis estimates he is stopped on the street 30 or 40 times per day. Polls put him among the country’s most popular figures. He is part national treasure, part firm parent: think David Attenborough, but with mortgage advice rather than gorillas.

Mr Lewis’s fame might seem odd to people outside Britain. But then, British capitalism is odd. The country has gone further than others in opening services to the market. Elsewhere, state suppliers dominate the energy market. By contrast, Britons could until recently choose between dozens of firms. Switching mortgage providers every year or two would strike people in France or Belgium on 20-year fixed deals as insane. In Britain it is normal; those too lazy to do it end up paying higher prices.

It is a hassle, though. As the saying goes, the trouble with socialism was that it took too many evenings. The trouble with neoliberalism is that it involves too many evenings comparing prices. Mr Lewis emerged as a fair guide through the maze. It is a valuable service: he sold the business to Money Supermarket, a price-comparison website, for £87m in 2012 although he is still involved. Arms folded, his picture glares from the top of the homepage.

Money Saving Expert has played a subtle but significant role in British politics. While austerity immiserated poorer Britons after the financial crisis, those in the middle were able to dodge the worst with a bit of financial wiliness. Mr Lewis’s company helped Britons claim back £38bn in mis-sold payment protection insurance, keeping their bank balances positive. At the peak in 2012, compensation payments amounted to 0.3% of GDP . For years, Labour called on voters to be angrier than they were. But for most of them, things were all right. Why smash the system when one can work it instead?

That world is quickly vanishing. Many of the energy firms that Mr Lewis encouraged people to jump between have gone bust, taken down by a sharp rise in wholesale gas prices. With inflation forecast to hit double digits, changing broadband suppliers will not touch the sides. Bluntly, there is little Mr Lewis can do to help, as he admits. There are no more micro solutions to what is ultimately a macro problem.

Mr Lewis finds himself in an increasingly political position. He built his fame via a technocratic approach to the British economy—a kind of policy without politics. (Despite his popularity, Mr Lewis has ruled out an entry into politics proper, but he is keen on becoming a crossbench peer in the House of Lords.) It is easy to tell people which car insurance is cheapest. It is harder to say exactly how much the government should spend on ensuring people can heat their homes. But, now, Mr Lewis is clear: more.

Usually, celebrity interventions in politics can be dismissed as the wailing of well-paid luvvies. But they work well when the celebrity in question has experience of what they are talking about, says Luke Tryl from More In Common, a think-tank. Marcus Rashford, a Manchester United footballer, had success campaigning for wider access to free school meals because he grew up in poverty. Having spent two decades berating people for failing to pay off their credit-card balances, Mr Lewis has earned his chops.

His chivvying puts the Conservative government in an awkward spot. It has cut fuel duty and tried to help in other ways, but its measures are poorly targeted. A cap on household energy bills delayed rather than avoided pain for consumers. It acts more like a price beret—a little hat to put on top of a huge price rise, rather than an upper limit. Consumers face an extra £38bn in energy bills. Covering a significant chunk of that cost, as Mr Lewis suggests, would be an intervention to rival the furlough scheme during the pandemic.

Penny wise, pound foolish

How the government responds to Mr Lewis’s call will determine its fate at the next election. Living costs are the main problem facing Britain’s politicians, although they do not always recognise it. Westminster suffers from collective attention-deficit disorder: there is always a non-dom wife or a sex-pest MP to snatch attention from long-term but more important crises. But Britons are anxious, and the full horror of rising prices is yet to be felt. Most of the old homeowners who so reliably vote Conservative are yet to receive a giant heating bill.

Mr Lewis personified a particular era of British capitalism. It featured a fight between consumers and capital, with the state playing little role. Homo economicus had to fend for himself, with Mr Lewis whispering tactics in his ear. Now things look so grim, only the government is big enough to help. Mr Lewis has changed his tune accordingly. Rather than chide the British public as usual, He is shouting at the British government. The Conservatives would do well to listen. ■

To appreciate the SNP’s dominance, look at what it has done to the Tories (Mar 26th)

Does Rishi Sunak have the stomach for what he must swallow? (Mar 19th)

“N OW YOU may only see a pile of receipts. But I see a story. I can see where this story is going. It does not look good.” These lines, spoken by an Internal Revenue Service agent in “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, a dark sci-fi comedy now showing in cinemas, is perfectly calibrated to strike fear into the hearts of Americans ahead of their tax-filing deadline on April 18th. The agent has a paper trail neatly arrayed on her desk as she conducts an audit. Reality is more frightening, for the exact opposite reason. “Paper is the IRS ’s kryptonite,” Erin Collins, a watchdog within the IRS , recently told Congress. “The agency is buried in it.”

The IRS entered this tax season with a backlog of 24m returns, 20 times worse than normal, as it struggled to recover from pandemic disruptions. Good luck to anyone wanting help by phone: just one in nine callers reached an agent last year, according to Ms Collins. Now in the midst of a hiring drive, the IRS thinks it can clear the backlog by the end of 2022. But it will be up to two years late in processing many returns. “It’s a crisis,” says Mark Everson, former head of the IRS . “Millions of people and businesses who were due tax refunds don’t have that money yet. This is very detrimental for compliance.”

Even without the pandemic, the IRS was struggling, the victim of chronic underfunding. Spending on the agency has declined by nearly 20% since 2010. At the same time, the number of tax returns has increased by 20%. The backbone of the system, a nationwide taxpayer database, is built on top of a 1960s computer language rarely taught in schools. One major element of President Joe Biden’s legislative programme is a funding boost for the IRS . Yet that is stalled, along with much of the rest of his agenda.

It is hard for lawmakers to summon enthusiasm for the IRS . Who enjoys paying taxes? Even for those who recognise the social value, the act of filing tax returns is a hassle. The 1040 form, the basic document for personal-income-tax reporting, came with just one page of instructions when introduced in 1913. This year’s version has 230 pages of instructions when counting all the branches added to it, reckons Demian Brady of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, an advocacy organisation.

Like any good story, though, there is also a plot twist. Despite its awful backlog, the IRS has, from another perspective, had a very good pandemic. It has played a critical role in delivering support to Americans. And it has been surprisingly efficient at it. For each of the three rounds of stimulus payments, the IRS was the conduit. Within two weeks of Mr Biden’s signing of the stimulus bill in March 2021, for instance, it sent out $325bn via 127m separate payments, mainly by direct bank deposit. Some people fell through the cracks and cheques took longer. But most got the money quickly. The IRS operated at even greater frequency in making child-tax-credit payments every month.

Along with doling out vast sums of cash, the IRS also took less in. The government gave the unemployed tax breaks on their benefits and gave businesses tax breaks for retaining workers. It also expanded the earned-income tax credit, a subsidy given to low earners, one of America’s biggest anti-poverty programmes. Putting it together, a poor family with two young children could expect $20,000 from the IRS last year, double what they would normally receive. In all, the agency paid out more than $600bn in pandemic-related support in 2021, equivalent to about two-thirds of Social Security spending in the federal government’s budget. “We have seen a substantial share of what used to be the social safety-net migrate from the public-expenditure side of the federal ledger to being run through the tax code,” points out Gordon Gray of the American Action Forum, a think-tank.

By the agency’s own count, Americans spend about 13 hours doing their taxes on average—mostly condensed into one frantic spring weekend. In fact this is an improvement: in 2010 the estimate was 18 hours. Increased use of software such as TurboTax, made by Intuit, has sped up the filing process. More could be done: the IRS provides a free-software option for poorer Americans but does a bad job advertising it (the Federal Trade Commission is suing Intuit for allegedly attracting customers in the belief that filing would be free, only to charge them). There are also perennial calls for the IRS to collect tax via withheld pay, allowing many to avoid filing returns altogether, as is common elsewhere, including Britain.

That, however, misses the point about the IRS as a welfare provider. It needs a range of information from taxpayers in order to assess their eligibility. “We don’t look at stores like Walmart and say, oh, it’s so complicated. We say, hey, that’s convenient. A similar thing should apply to some extent to the income-tax system,” says William Gale of the Brookings Institution, another think-tank. Using the 1040 form as the gateway to multiple social programmes and tax credits means that people do not have to go to a series of different agencies for each payout.

Eventually, the IRS will hack its way through the pandemic backlog. That, however, will do nothing to fix another serious problem: the degradation of its auditing abilities. About a fifth of agency staff are eligible for retirement, and many have taken covid as the moment to leave. “We’re losing exactly the kind of people we need to be able to maintain enforcement scrutiny,” says a senior Treasury official. The IRS audited 0.3% of corporate tax returns filed in 2018, down from 1.6% in 2010. The number this year may well be lower. Charles Rettig, who leads the agency as its commissioner, has estimated that the government loses about $1trn in tax revenues annually because of cheating. The agency is “outgunned” against big companies, he says.

The answer to so many of the IRS ’s woes—antiquated tech systems, congested phone lines, threadbare enforcement—is more funding. It stands as one of the few federal agencies that would generate a large and nearly immediate return on investment were the government to spend more on it. The hope for the harried tax agents is that the highs and lows of IRS performance during the pandemic will have earned it grudging support in Washington, demonstrating that it is both overstretched and indispensable. ■

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P ETER LEY , a retired civil servant who lives in London, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2017. An operation to remove the tumour was successful. But the chemotherapy that followed caused a severe reaction that required a two-week hospital stay and a pause in his cancer treatment.

All that could have been avoided had a simple test been done. The test examines a gene that encodes a liver enzyme called dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (or DPD for short). The enzyme breaks down several common cancer drugs. Without it, toxic levels of the drugs build up in the body, sometimes with fatal results. A complete inability to make DPD is rare, but there are four mutations in the DPD -regulating gene that are known to reduce its production. As it turned out, Mr Ley had one of them.

Screening for such “pharmacogenes” is an idea that is catching on among doctors. Several big hospitals in America are testing their patients for a dozen or more of them. Separate pilot projects are under way in at least seven of the European Union’s member states. Britain’s National Health Service ( NHS ) is doing screening tests for some patients being prescribed cancer and HIV drugs. A report on March 29th by the British Pharmacological Society ( BPS ) and the Royal College of Physicians ( RCP ) proposed widening that testing to cover the 40 drugs among the 100 most-prescribed that are known to be affected by pharmacogenes. The report’s authors reckon testing could feasibly be rolled out across the NHS as soon as 2023.

Genetic screening promises big benefits. Mutations can affect drugs in all sorts of ways, determining a pill’s efficacy, toxicity, how well it is absorbed, and how well it is broken down. Some genetic variants affect several drugs at once, because they alter common enzymes in widely used metabolic pathways. Britain’s 100,000 Genomes project has shown that almost 99% of people carry at least one pharmacogene; 25% have four. About 9% of Caucasian people have, like Mr Ley, DPD deficiency; one in 200 lack the enzyme completely. Roughly 8% of Britain’s population get little pain relief from codeine, because they lack an enzyme responsible for metabolising the drug into morphine (they instead metabolise it into other substances that have little influence on pain).

All told, scientists have identified about 120 such drug-gene pairs so far. Roughly half of them are “actionable”, says Henk-Jan Guchelaar, a pharmacologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands—meaning that changing the dose or replacing the drug can lead to a better clinical outcome. And most people will be prescribed at least one of those drugs at some point in their lives. In Britain people over the age of 70 have around 70% chance of taking at least one drug whose safety or efficacy is compromised by their genes, says Munir Pirmohamed, a pharmacologist and geneticist at the University of Liverpool.

Currently, clashes between a patient’s genome and his drug regimen are dealt with by trial-and-error prescribing. But that is time-consuming, and may be harmful. If a drug is being prescribed for high blood pressure or artery-clogging levels of cholesterol, time spent trying different drugs means time in which a stroke, heart attack or organ damage may occur. And cleverer prescribing would have benefits for the health-care system overall, as well as for individual patients. Adverse drug reactions account for 6.5% of hospital admissions in Britain.

The chief issue, as ever, is cost. In the Netherlands a test for 50 pharmacogenes costs about €200 ($217). In Britain a panel test for 40 such genes costs £100-150 ($130-195). Carrying out testing on an entire population would, therefore, be extremely expensive. Some light on whether it is worth the cost will be shone later this year when PREPARE , a study that began in 2017, publishes its results. The project, which is led by Dr Guchelaar, recruited 7,000 people across seven European countries for a study of mutations affecting 42 different drugs. Half the participants were screened, and given cards listing the drugs flagged up. That information, in turn, was made available to doctors, pharmacists and the like. Dr Guchelaar and his colleagues are analysing how much this reduces adverse drug reactions compared with the unscreened participants—and, crucially, the health-care costs averted as a result.

Such cost-benefit analyses will be vital in making the argument that governments or insurance firms should pay for widespread genetic testing. In the meantime, though, doctors are already pondering ways to get the most bang for their buck. The BPS and RCP study suggests several ways to expand pharmacogene screening. One is to test for the genes the first time a drug known to be susceptible is prescribed. Another option is to offer that test to everyone over a certain age, perhaps 50—though the NHS is also pondering the idea of comprehensive genetic screening for all newborn babies. That could pay off handsomely later in their lives. ■

I SRAEL PRIDES itself on having some of the world’s finest counter-terrorism units. But when a lone Palestinian gunman roamed the streets of Tel Aviv on April 7th, it seemed to have too many of them. After a shoot-up outside a popular night spot, which left three Israelis dead or dying, hundreds of special forces, airborne commandos and police rushed to the scene, then milled around chaotically without co-ordination. Some ran with guns cocked into restaurants and residential buildings, hoping to flush out the killer, who had fled to Jaffa, a few miles south. He was tracked down and shot dead eight hours later.

The attack was the fourth in an Israeli city in 16 days. Fourteen victims and five perpetrators have been killed, ending ten months of relative calm in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The attacks were not jointly planned nor attributed to a single group. The attackers came from different communities and backgrounds. Three were Arab citizens of Israel (one was a Bedou from the Negev desert) who had tried to join Islamic State; two were Palestinians from the West Bank.

Israelis and Palestinians were bracing themselves for another round of violence in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which this year coincides with the Jewish festival of Passover. A year ago there was a month of constant clashes on the eastern, Arab side of Jerusalem. Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Gaza strip, then joined in, firing rockets at Israel for 12 days, provoking a devastating wave of Israeli air raids on Gaza and widespread riots in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel proper.

So far none of last year’s flashpoints has erupted again. Bar a few scuffles, east Jerusalem has been tense but calm. Prayers have taken place undisturbed at the al-Aqsa mosque. Crowds of young Palestinians have been quietly enjoying themselves after breaking their Ramadan fast near the city’s Damascus Gate, the scene of several of last year’s violent confrontations.

“There’s a general feeling in Jerusalem that this Ramadan has got to be different,” says a Palestinian stall-owner. “The Israeli police are behaving better, not firing skunk all over the place.” Last year Israeli anti-riot police sprayed the area with a putrid liquid that lingered in the air for days. Now the strongest smell is from shisha pipes.

Gaza, still under a state of semi-siege imposed by Israel and Egypt, has been calm this year, too. Hamas has not fired any of its arsenal of rockets since a ceasefire, in May 2021. While congratulating the recent attackers, it has prevented smaller Palestinian factions such as Islamic Jihad from launching rockets.

All the same, the outbreak of violence has come at a bad time for Israel’s government. Not yet ten months into its term, the unwieldy coalition of eight disparate parties lost its majority in the 120-member Knesset when a member of the party of Naftali Bennett, the prime minister, defected. The government can persevere without a majority, at least for a while, but if it were to lose another right-wing waverer, an election could be called.

This political pressure could prod Mr Bennett to act tougher on security. So far Palestinian workers are still allowed to travel from the West Bank to jobs in Israel. A limited number may enter for prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque. But the government has closed the West Bank town of Jenin to Arab visitors from Israel, since two of the attackers were from there. Israel has also doubled the number of troops in the West Bank. On April 10th a Palestinian woman, who turned out to be unarmed, was shot dead at an Israeli roadblock because she was “moving suspiciously”. “If the politicians try to show they’re tough and more people get killed, things can kick off very fast,” warns an Israeli security official. ■

I F YOU CUT yourself, your options are to reach for a plaster or, if the cut is nasty, to go to a doctor to have it stitched or glued. That seems a rather limited choice. Medical researchers have been trying to develop another way to join the edges of a wound, inspired by something routinely done to gas pipes and electronics: soldering. And an innovation developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ( ETH ) in Zurich, in co-operation with the Swiss materials-science institute Empa, suggests this might soon become a practical reality.

In soldering, an intermediate material is heated until it melts and bonds with the two surfaces that are to be joined. The material of these edges has a higher melting point and remains solid (otherwise it would count as welding).

For tissue, the intermediate material is not a metal alloy, but a paste of biocompatible material, such as albumin, a protein that is an important constituent of blood. When heated, the paste develops chemical bonds with living tissue on both sides. As healing progresses, the two sides reconnect and the paste is removed by the body's natural cleaning procedures.

Closing wounds by soldering has several important advantages, says Oscar Cipolato, a P h D candidate at ETH , who presented preliminary results on April 5th at the Photonics Europe conference in Strasburg, France. The bond it produces is strong and watertight, something that cannot be guaranteed with stitches. If a wound is internal—after surgery, for instance—a leak could cause an infection.

But soldering tissue has turned out to be difficult in practice, which means it is not commonly done. Heating the soldering paste is done by shining a laser onto it, from which the paste absorbs energy. But controlling the heating precisely is tricky. The paste needs to reach about 80° C to work. If the temperature is too low, the soldering material will not fully melt and the bond will be weak. But if it is too high, it risks burning the surrounding tissue. Existing attempts at wound-soldering rely on thermal imaging to measure temperature. But that only measures the temperature at the surface of the solder, rather than throughout the material.

Mr Cipolato and Inge Herrmann, a chemical engineer at ETH , hope their improved paste can get around such problems. It is made up of two kinds of nanoparticles, specks of material of only about 20-billionths of a metre across. Between them, these help direct the energy of the laser to the places it should be, and help doctors gauge the conditions in the paste.

The first set of particles are made of titanium nitrate. They eagerly absorb photons of red or near infrared light, precisely the colours that most easily penetrate living tissue, and release the energy as heat to their surroundings. That efficient absorption means the paste can be heated by a relatively weak laser beam, which helps protect the surrounding tissues.

Using such tiny particles is in itself not new. But until recently most researchers used tiny rods of gold, which are expensive. Nanoparticles of titanium nitrate, on the other hand, are easily and cheaply produced by spraying the right mix of precursor chemicals into a flame.

The second set of particles are a new development in the soldering world. They are specks of a material which fluoresces. In other words, it absorbs the laser light, but immediately re-emits the energy as light again, at a few very specific wavelengths.

Two of these wavelengths are also in the infrared and red colour range. That allows some of the re-emitted light to emerge from the paste to where it can be analysed by an external instrument called a spectrometer. By precisely measuring the difference between the two wavelengths, the temperature of particles that are emitting it—and thus of the paste as a whole—can be worked out.

Thus far, the researchers have tested the technique only on pieces of pig intestine that they obtained from a slaughterhouse. Soldering a cut is done in a matter of minutes. Similar “ex vivo” tests of the strength and permeability of the bond will also be needed for human tissue, followed by clinical tests on actual pigs and, eventually, humans. But the researchers are optimistic. At the conference, they were cagey about exactly what the fluorescing particles are made of. They are applying for a patent, which could be quite valuable if the tools at the ready in a doctor’s office one day include a laser soldering gun. ■

O VER THE next four decades Canada’s growth per person is expected to be the lowest in the OECD , a club mostly of rich countries. On April 7th Chrystia Freeland, the finance minister, sought to correct that. In presenting the federal budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year, which began on April 1st, she vowed to tackle the “insidious” problem of low productivity growth. She coupled that with a promise to reduce debt, which soared during the pandemic, as a share of GDP .

The budget looks like an attempt by the Liberals, in office since 2015, to reclaim their reputation for centrism after years of rising federal spending. Critics say it falls short. It comes as the fortunes of Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, are improving after a rough patch. Police removed anti-government protesters from the streets of Ottawa, the capital, in February. The recent jump in the prices of commodities Canada exports should help protect its economy from an expected decline in global growth. In March Mr Trudeau, who leads a minority government, struck a “confidence-and-supply” agreement with the left-leaning New Democrats ( NDP ), which will probably keep him in power until elections in 2025. The opposition Conservatives are preoccupied with choosing a new leader in a vote due to take place in September.

Ms Freeland also has some money to spend, partly because of a post-pandemic economic recovery. She plans to fork out C$9.5bn ($7.5bn) over five years, 0.4% of total spending, on measures to spur home-building. A 50% rise in house prices over the past two years is among voters’ biggest concerns. Construction is supposed to double over the next decade. Foreigners, who are implausibly blamed for pushing up prices, will be barred from buying houses for two years.

Despite the deal with the NDP , Ms Freeland “did show some restraint” on spending, says Rebekah Young, an economist at Scotiabank. The budget sets almost nothing aside for a proposal, backed by both parties, to provide universal coverage of the cost of prescription drugs. Debt is projected to fall from 46.5% of GDP last year to 41.5% in 2026-27. But the government should do more to restrain deficits “when times are good”, says Ms Young. She argues that the government’s plans to sustain growth lack “a coherent vision”.

Ms Freeland’s most notable idea is to establish an “arm’s-length” Canada Growth Fund. Initially capitalised at C$15bn, it is supposed to attract at least three times that from the private sector to boost green businesses and exports. Missing from the budget are measures that would have a bigger payoff, such as giving incentives to provinces to remove barriers to trade. Ms Freeland’s quest for growth could have been bolder.

H E LIKED TO dress in bright colours. Acidic yellow, fluorescent red and purple were his favourites for a jacket. His top shirt button was always undone, his tie loose, his suit crumpled and covered in his last dinner. On occasions he wore a bow tie; sometimes a Soviet military uniform, replete with medals. The leader of the right-wing and misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky was first and foremost a showman. He was after fame, money and sex—not political office. But he played an important role in Russian politics, stripping it of meaning, faking opposition, turning it into buffoonery and providing an outlet for nationalism and xenophobia.

Zhirinovsky was a prized guest at Moscow’s political beau-monde parties. Actors loved to do imitations of him in variety shows. His eccentricity, his direct slightly twitchy manner was easy to mimic; his every utterance a caricature of the scandalised, embittered, vodka-swilling dolt of Moscow’s back streets—disgruntled in equal measure by personal misery, sexual frustration and the humiliation of his once-mighty nation.

His fans called him “Zhirik”, a nickname better suited to a circus clown. Stage characters don’t talk about the biography of the actors who play them. He was born in 1946 in Almaty, then the capital of Soviet Kazakhstan, to an ethnic Russian mother and a Ukrainian Jewish father, Volf Edelstein, who had been deported from western Ukraine and who later emigrated to Israel. “My mother was Russian, my father was a lawyer,” he said of his background.

He burst onto the stage in late 1993. Russia had just stepped back from the edge of a civil war. Street battles between a Stalinist-fascist coalition and President Boris Yeltsin ended in the president’s favour after he shelled the parliament building where the hardliners were holed up. It seemed, at last, that Russia could forge ahead with creating a market-oriented democratic system and living in peace with the world. At a televised party held on the night of the parliamentary elections in 1993, liberals were sipping champagne and congratulating each other on their victory.

Zhirinovsky gate-crashed their celebrations when his ultra-nationalist party topped the poll with 23% of the national vote, compared with the 15.5% attained by pro-Western liberals. “Russia, come to your senses, you have gone bonkers,” said Yury Karyakin, a liberal deputy and literary academic. A scholar of Dostoyevsky, Karyakin took Zhirinovsky for a real threat. He did not recognise in him one of the novelist’s favourite types—those who revel in scandals, make mockery of any value, and break taboos.

In Zhirinovsky’s 1995 electoral campaign a nearly naked dancer in an erotic floor-show gyrated to the song: “I’m looking for a man who will spank me, spank me…” In the same campaign he threw a glass of orange juice at Boris Nemtsov, the liberal opposition leader who was murdered in 2015. “We must always exploit the worst in the people. Such is the fate of the opposition,” he once said.

He was not, of course, opposition in any real sense. His party was brought into being by the Soviet KGB , which in the spring of 1990 reluctantly concluded that the communist monopoly on power was over and some version of multi-party democracy had to be accepted. But Russia’s security services—going right back to tsarist times—had vast experience of manipulating and fostering tame “opposition” groups. After the authorities had announced that non-communist political parties could be legally registered, a mysterious group called the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia sprang into existence.

His party was meant to split the democratic electorate. But as a showman in search of an audience, Zhirinovsky sensed that popular demand was in the field of imperial nostalgia and ressentiment—a mixture of frustration, jealousy and resentment. His electorate was the disenchanted and the lumpenised. He had a knack for articulating their basic instincts, forbidden desires and dark thoughts. He told them he dreamt of a day “when Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean”.

While he was entertaining the public with his antics, those with real political power looted their own country. As Kirill Rogov, a chronicler of post-Soviet politics, noted, Zhirinovsky’s confident dominance on that stage kept real right-wing nationalists with their permanent hangover and stern gloominess at bay, thus shielding the Russian centrist kleptocratic bureaucracy from a nationalist revanche.

Perhaps it was partly his success that made the Kremlin realise just how fertile that nationalism and xenophobia were. As it came to adopt his slogans of imperial resurgence, Zhirinovsky spotted another fertile ground—the resentment of Moscow by the regions. His Liberal Democratic Party became a refuge for populists across the country who rivalled and rattled Kremlin nominees. The Kremlin responded with its usual thuggery and repressions.

He, in turn, warned them of the growing rage. “Do you want a Maidan, like in Ukraine? Then you will get one! Just one match will be lit somewhere, a fire will erupt everywhere, the people will not stand for it…Don’t try to bring people to the boil; don’t provoke conflict out of the blue. You have no shame and no conscience.” The Kremlin took his warning of rising anger in Russia seriously and doubled-down on nationalism, xenophobia and aggression.

Zhirinovsky understood the Kremlin’s intentions because he taught them the language in which they spoke. Last December he made an eerie prediction. “At 4am on February 22nd, you will feel [our new policy]. I would like 2022 to be a peaceful year. But I love the truth. For 70 years I have been telling the truth. It will not be peaceful. It will be a year when Russia becomes great again.” He was out by two days: Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in the small hours of February 24th. By then he was already in hospital and did not join in the fascistic frenzy. It is not known exactly when he died, but his act was over and he took his exit just in time. He was a cynical jester, not a war criminal. As Russia descended into darkness, there was no room for his bright colours. ■

T HINGS ARE looking bright for Zhuzhou. The city of 4m people in landlocked Hunan province has often caught the runoff of industrial business from the more populous provincial capital, Changsha, to its north. In the 1990s it became a regional hub for chemicals and metals production. But that caused horrible environmental destruction; more than 1,000 polluters were eventually shut down, with dire economic consequences. Zhuzhou’s inland economy has remained behind that of coastal cities. Over the past decade its moderate growth has been typical of the mid-tier cities that dot China’s interior.

Now, however, its officials talk as if it were a tech hub. Hundreds of artificial-intelligence ( AI ), robotics and data companies have sprung up in the past year. Local planning documents reflect the exuberance of a boomtown in the making, something Zhuzhou could only watch from afar in the 1990s as eastern ports became rich.

The documents refer to “great changes not seen in 100 years”, a phrase that has been used by Xi Jinping, China’s president, to signify the start of a new era. He believes China is on the verge of a revolution in which dozens of cities will begin producing breakthroughs in robotics, cloud computing and automation. Zhuzhou’s officials also believe they are poised to reap the rewards of Mr Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign—a plan to redistribute wealth from richer regions to poorer ones, and from the dominant internet platforms to consumers and workers.

Mr Xi’s strategy is best understood as a weighty bet that China is on track to become the world’s centre of innovation over the next decade. A shift towards homegrown tech is altering the geographical layout of China’s manufacturing machine. New investment and migration are being rerouted from rich coastal hubs to inland cities such as Zhuzhou. A second feature is an unprecedented rise in the number of new tech companies. The government is nurturing thousands of groups, big and small, in the fields of data science, network security and robotics. Mr Xi and his advisers are also taking firmer control over markets. Their ability to direct capital flows is already evident in how private-equity groups invest in China.

This shift comes at a definitive moment. The narrative that America and the West are in decline, and that China is rising, appears frequently in state media. And yet China has not been more inward-looking since it was condemned internationally after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. The business hub of Shanghai, a city of 25m people, has been locked down as Mr Xi seeks to eradicate covid-19. His support for Russia during the war in Ukraine has raised the potential for more sanctions on Chinese firms. These conditions seem only to strengthen his desire for self-reliance.

Mr Xi is building an incubator state: an economy that relies heavily on government nourishment to create productivity gains with domestic research and technology. In doing so he is also signalling a premature break with the technological convergence that has served China well since the 1980s, when foreign companies began setting up factories using advanced technologies. This tech was eventually transferred to local firms or reverse-engineered at little cost.

The payoff, argues Raymond Yeung of ANZ , a bank, was the realisation of productive efficiencies. One crucial feature of the convergence model was that it presented few risks. China needed only to continue liberalising, and foreign companies only to continue to bring in capital and high-tech gear, to reap the reward.

But the era of convergence is drawing to a close. China’s total-factor productivity growth languished at just above 1% per year between 2010 and 2019. Tech transfers are now far more restricted by America. Mr Xi can surely imagine the sanctions devastating Russia being aimed at China. The response has been to end reliance on foreign tech and to refocus the growth model on what can be created at home.

High-stakes gamble

Rather like a venture-capital investor taking high-risk, high-reward bets, Mr Xi will shoulder more risk in this era. His plan requires the creation of big, globally competitive groups akin to Huawei, a telecommunications giant. “But they will have to develop lots of Huaweis,” says Mr Yeung. If the investments do not produce returns, the plan will have saddled the economy with yet more debt, and too little growth.

Past Chinese leaders have focused their reforms in coastal cities, where manufactured goods could easily reach ports. Shenzhen, 700km south of Zhuzhou, became emblematic of China’s rise as the factory of the world in the 1990s. Some of that business crept westwards to cities such as Chengdu and Chongqing. Mr Xi’s time in power at first focused on boosting consumption, which also favoured the largest coastal cities. On his watch, Alibaba and Tencent, based in the eastern and southern entrepôts of Hangzhou and Shenzhen, respectively, rose to prominence as engines for consumption and were often hailed as such by Party officials.

This has changed rapidly over the past two years. Mr Xi is reorienting the economy back towards manufacturing. The move away from consumer-internet tech, or soft tech, was made clear in the 14th five-year plan published in 2021. It emphasised instead rapid development in hard tech, or areas such as AI , semiconductors, industrial software and big-data processing. The new industrial policy does not require easy access to ports.

The efforts could redraw China’s economic map. An emphasis on manufacturing had pushed migrant workers not just to coastal towns but also to inland cities where new factories could be built cheaply, says Chi Lo of BNP Paribas, a bank. The last great pulse of inland migration began in 2001, when China joined the WTO , and lasted until 2013, when Mr Xi came to power and consumption became the focus for growth. The past eight years witnessed a shift, with migration out of inland centres to cities in the east. Mr Lo believes China is near the start of another wave of inland migration that will power Mr Xi’s new industrial revolution.

Migration is essential if the new tech firms are to be staffed. A review of company-registration data by The Economist shows that firms dealing in big data, AI , the internet of things, robotics, cloud computing and clean energy are setting up at an unprecedented pace in China’s interior. Many of the new hubs are capitals of poor provinces. But many smaller cities, too, such as Zhuzhou, are also experiencing explosive growth in tech firms (see chart). Hefei in Anhui province, one of China’s poorer regions, is a city of about 9m. It has reinvented itself in recent years as a tech hub, with thousands of firms opening in a short period. In 2021 alone more than 2,500 companies claiming to develop basic AI software set up in the city, up from just 370 in 2020. Thousands more say they offer related services. The far northern rustbelt city of Shenyang welcomed more than 860 companies that say they are doing robotics research over the past two years, up from a combined 170 in the four years before that. Some 4,400 groups claiming to be involved in the internet of things set up shop in the south-western city of Chengdu in 2021, four times the number in 2020. The rapid growth in these cities is closely connected to local-government planning and the offer of generous tax and land incentives. Indeed the figures should also come as a warning to planners that the tech boom they have induced is leading to potentially wasteful investments. Take data-centre and cloud-computing businesses. The pandemic created great demand for consumer-internet firms and, in turn, data services. Local policies encouraged companies of all types to set them up, or at least try. Property developers needed only to convince local officials to sell them land and power cheaply in order to tap into the lucrative data-centre industry, says Edison Lee of Jefferies, an investment bank. Guiyang, a large city in the poor southwestern province of Guizhou, witnessed an explosion in data-centre-company registrations in 2020, many with no experience in the area. Some have even tried to move into cloud computing, which requires more technological input than data centres. The wave of innovation in AI , robotics and climate tech is carrying with it many wannabes that will drain government funds, not add to GDP .

Several investors have questioned where the talent needed to power this boom will come from. The government has announced academic programmes to train people up. But a shortfall seems clear. The rerouting of migrants does not take into account that their skills have not kept up with Mr Xi’s industrial shift. Almost 70% of the labour force has not had one day of high-school instruction, notes Scott Rozelle of Stanford University.

The government needs more than a startup scene to make its plan work. And so it is nurturing a new cohort of champions. These are not the consumer-internet groups that dominated China’s digital economy. Instead they are companies engaged in enterprise software, industrial digitisation, data security and state-owned cloud computing. Few investors in Silicon Valley will have heard of Baosight, Maxscend, Sangfor, Supcon or YoueData. Many are listed in Shanghai or Shenzhen, not New York and Hong Kong. They are a mix of state and private firms, but almost all are close to the government. And they are working to upgrade China’s industrial infrastructure in order to usher in Mr Xi’s new revolution.

Baosight is a state-owned industrial-software firm. It builds the enterprise-resource-planning software and manufacturing-execution systems that are integrating and digitising industrial plants across China. These systems aim to drive efficiency within the steel, pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries. Baosight recently completed work for a state steel group in what was considered the largest, most complex integration project of its kind. Its market capitalisation has risen three times over since 2018, to 62bn yuan ($9.7bn).

Sangfor Technologies, a private network-security and data group based in Shenzhen, is helping the government build advanced big-data platforms. Supcon, also privately controlled, builds network ecosystems for state-owned firms.

A small but growing number of international investors has cottoned on to these companies. Their thinking could not be more different from the past generation of tech-watchers. Companies such as Alibaba attracted funding as investors bet that only the private sector could provide the dizzying array of online shopping and financial services that would in turn support hefty valuations for a few big platforms.

Soft tech, hard line

That thesis has been dealt a heavy blow. The government believes the consumer-internet craze widened inequality. Companies’ market dominance allowed them to manipulate pricing while hoovering up unregulated personal data. Their clout also dwarfed the influence the Party had over the digital economy. These imbalances have been “rectified”, as officials say, by sweeping regulatory crackdowns.

The state not only succeeded in knocking tech-market valuations by more than $2trn in the span of about a year. It has pushed the giants into submission and decline. Many executives, such as Richard Liu of JD .com, have stepped down. Companies are laying off workers; few are pursuing capital-intensive acquisitions.

For the new champions to achieve scale, they will need to be globally competitive and gain market share in developed economies. Huawei was on this road before it was knocked back by America. Mr Xi wants China to produce its own hard-tech companies in order to become more self-sufficient from the hostile West. But even if this new phalanx of state-backed tech companies is less reliant on foreign inputs than Huawei, it can still be barred from foreign markets, denying it the business needed to grow to sufficient size.

How China’s new boom is funded has become a vexing question for venture capitalists eager to find the next Alibaba but wary of running afoul of government policy. Mr Xi is now six years into a reordering of capital and financial markets. China’s 58trn-yuan shadow-banking market was first targeted in earnest in 2017. A three-year, $450bn wave of speculative outbound investment, driven by flamboyant tycoons, was subdued the same year. Meanwhile property developers were cut off from the supply of credit that financed a 20-year frenzy.

In 2021 senior officials began referring to the enemy by name: a “disorderly expansion of capital” that has recklessly pursued high returns at the expense of the common good. Hundreds of officials and businessmen have been taken down in recent years on corruption charges but only recently have some been accused of being “influenced by capital”. Zhou Jiangyong, a former Party secretary of Hangzhou, the prosperous eastern city that is home to Alibaba, is being investigated for such crimes. He has also been linked by local media to companies affiliated with Alibaba.

Mr Xi is already offering up a plan for an “orderly development of capital”. He personally oversaw the launch of a new stock exchange in Beijing in 2021 that is focused on channelling investments to small tech groups. State funds are raising ever more cash and investing in private tech firms. The “little giants’‘ programme, launched by the Ministry of Industry and Internet Technology, is hand-picking thousands of firms that will be granted tax incentives and public funding. According to Bloomberg, China plans to spend some $2.3trn this year on new projects, many of which will be focused on high-tech manufacturing and technology development.

Han Wenxiu, a leading economic adviser, recently said the crackdown on disorderly capital is not about turning it away. Instead it is about capital following the Party’s lead. This is already starting to happen. Private-equity ( PE ) investments in consumer tech collapsed last year, for instance, while investments in microchips and software soared to new highs.

Today the tech investors eyeing companies such as Sangfor and Supcon rely on policy and the amount of state-linked business to assess whether they have promise. Analysts at investment banks often cite a company’s inclusion in a large government project as a strong “buy” signal, and avoid anything that runs counter to the state’s message. “Every time we look at a sector, investors are asking us if this area is going to be seen as promoting inequality,” says Kiki Yang of Bain, a consultancy.

Many venture-capital ( VC ) firms in China are finding fewer constraints on their investments as long as they focus on the areas in the party’s good graces—the hard-tech and clean-energy companies that are cropping up at rapid pace. VC investments in clean energy surged in 2021 to about $8.7bn, up from $5.6bn in 2020, according to PitchBook, a research firm. A growing number of private investors hopes to invest alongside state funds, or to find startups that have already taken state money, says one investor. A green light from the state is now a powerful market signal.

Many of the imbalances in the Chinese economy—the targets of Mr Xi’s attacks—arose or worsened on his watch. The tech tycoons largely made their billions over the past decade. Mr Xi oversaw one of the largest accumulations of property-sector debt in the world. His administration relaxed controls that allowed for a wave of speculative overseas buying. Mr Xi’s regulatory crackdown was in many ways an attempt to correct market distortions caused by his own policy failures.

Some experienced global investors worry the cycle of errors and corrections will repeat. Few have been able to swallow the talk of a “disorderly expansion of capital”. Only through the introduction of market forces and foreign capital did China build an advanced, modern state. Its world-class tech scene has been nurtured by global VC and PE funds. For Mr Xi and his team of technocrats to turn their back on this, says one big investor, shows they have not learned from the past 40 years. That they believe they are ready to do the job of the market sends all the wrong signals. ■

I F EMMANUEL MACRON , the youngest-ever president of France’s Fifth Republic, gets to keep his job he will have its oldest voters to thank. Had only the ballots of those under 60 been counted in the first round on April 10th, Mr Macron would have come third—leaving France to pick between extremists of the left and right in the run-off a fortnight later. Across Europe, many mainstream leaders owe their jobs to a grey-haired (and no-haired-at-all) electoral bulwark loyally trudging to the polls. They will not be around for ever. Either today’s youngsters will have to mellow into the middle ground as they age, or Europe will drift away from the predictable centrism it has comfortably espoused for decades.

In Europe as elsewhere, voters’ preferences were supposed to follow a predictable pattern as they aged. Brimming with idealism and compassion their parents apparently lacked, younger citizens tended to lean left. As they got older, took out a mortgage and discovered the pleasures of income taxation, the right’s appeal became more obvious. But this ideological drift often took place within the same political party. “Big tent” affairs like Germany’s centre-right CDU, or PSOE on Spain’s centre-left, contained factions that could accommodate just about everyone from bleeding hearts to the fiscally righteous. (Americans and Brits will also be familiar with, in essence, two-party systems spiced up by the occasional and usually marginal interloper.)

Many European countries today consist of two superimposed polities. Voters in their 70s are hanging on to the big tents, American-style. German pensioners are turning out for the CDU and its rival SPD , parties their own parents might have recognised. Doddering Irish stick with Fine Gael or Fianna Fail, near-centenarian political stalwarts. Their Italian counterparts are more likely to cast a ballot for the Democratic Party or Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia; the Spanish for their rough equivalents and so on.

For the young, in contrast, centrist big tents are merely one option among many. Ties that might have bound their parents to a party—belonging to a church, say, or to a trade union—often no longer apply. Their resulting political adventurism has helped launch new movements across Europe: a slew of Green parties, the odd (sometimes very odd) nationalist one, a few liberal splinter groups. Some outfits that have emerged as a result are quirky, like the Five Star Movement in Italy, a shape-shifting party that got a higher share of votes from younger voters than older ones in Italy’s most recent elections. A few have nasty histories, like Sinn Fein in Ireland: once a terrorist-adjacent group, among the young it is now polling at well over the combined tally of the erstwhile Fine/Fianna duopoly. In Spain both liberal parties and demagogues have sprung up on the far right and left. Outright xenophobes like Jobbik in Hungary and the Sweden Democrats, now both somewhat reformed, got their breakthroughs from young voters before establishing wider bases. In Germany A f D, another migrant-bashing party, has been held back by voters over 70, who are only half as likely as the wider electorate to support it.

The most successful of these political insurgencies can morph into their own big tents. The En Marche! movement that propelled Mr Macron to power in 2017 did so with roughly as many young as old voters. Five years later, having become part of l’establishment (and having pillaged the most recognisable talents from the Socialists and Republicans, France’s old mainstream parties), Mr Macron has baby-boomers to thank for his success. Around 36% of French voters aged 60 or above backed him, nearly twice the rate of the under-25s. Given that turnout increases with age, it was this ballot bonanza which won him a clear first-round victory.

Why the generational divide? Young and old people think of politics differently. Pensioners are loth to ditch parties that helped secure the peace after a war they might remember, or decades of subsequent economic growth. But all that millennials and those in generation Z, from first-time voters to 30-somethings, have lived through are two economic crises since 2008, with covid-19 curfews to boot. The extreme left doesn’t seem so threatening to those who do not remember the cold war. To older French voters Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a lefty firebrand, is alarmingly reminiscent of crusty French communists who showed fealty to all things Soviet. Younger ones merely like his plan to soak the rich.

Plenty of youngsters rightly feel that mainstream politicians mollycoddle senior citizens, who bought their homes before prices boomed, enjoy inflation-proof pensions and leave behind high public debts and an environmental mess. The class warfare of old has been replaced by a generational divide. The boomers have their political parties; later generations have theirs now too—radical new ones, increasingly. Conventional wisdom once held that youngsters, having sown their electoral seeds, would mature into big-tent voters as they aged. That seems ever more doubtful. The slide of the centrist electoral mastodons has continued for well over two decades now.

Oldies but goodies

Sticking to a dominant duo of entrenched parties is no guarantee of moderation: look at America’s Republicans. Nor is fragmentation a sure path to extremism. France ditched its two big tents in favour of more centrism, not less. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a dozen or so parties now sit in parliament. Elections are a mere starting gun for the building of arcane coalitions that can take months or even years. Parties on the fringes sometimes shore up governing coalitions, but thus far have not controlled them.

The fragmentation of politics prompted by the young has injected competition into the public sphere. Good. But the old parties that dominated European politics at least did a decent job of forcing extremists to fit their centrist mould or struggle for relevance. A new model is gaining ground. It will include a place for those whom older voters are currently keeping on the sidelines. ■

It will take years for Ukraine to become an EU member (Apr 2nd)

Weaning Europe off Russian energy will mean making changes (Mar 26th)

I N ITS HEYDAY in the 1950s, the spacious five-storey redbrick building on North Calvert Street housed the hundreds of employees of the Baltimore Sun, the city’s pre-eminent newspaper. Like other local papers across America, the Sun has since fallen on hard times. In 2018, after years of lay-offs, it moved out of downtown.

Back at the city’s Inner Harbour, construction crews hurry in and out of a former power plant. They are converting the building into office space for a new occupant aspiring to fill the gap left by the Sun’s shrinking presence. When it launches online this spring, the Baltimore Banner, a non-profit news organisation backed by a local businessman and philanthropist, Stewart Bainum junior, aims to boast more writers than its crosstown rival. “Our goal is to make sure Baltimore doesn’t become a news desert,” says Imtiaz Patel, the CEO .

The slow death of local news in America is a well-documented phenomenon. The internet has ended the monopolies on news and advertising once enjoyed by local media. But a wave of startups is betting that a digital-first strategy, with its reach and low costs, can reverse the decline. The initiatives are experimenting with a variety of business models.

The scale of the collapse of local news has been stunning. In a report published in 2020 Penelope Abernathy, a professor now at the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, found that 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet 16 years earlier now had none. Two-thirds of counties lack a daily newspaper.

Political scientists believe the consequences have been severe. The demise of local news has been linked to greater political polarisation, declining participation in local elections and reduced accountability for local elected officials, leading to more corruption. It has also contributed to the growing nationalisation of politics, with a voter’s choice for president increasingly predictive of their choice for school-board representative. Some people are now prepared to throw money at the problem.

One way is through philanthropy. Rich benefactors propping up local news is nothing new—the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post all rely to varying degrees on patrons with money to spare. New ventures like the Baltimore Banner reckon it is an advantage not to be weighed down by the legacy infrastructure of print. The American Journalism Project gives grants to non-profit local news organisations across the country, with an eye to cultivating sustainable businesses. But what if the philanthropists lose interest? “What Stewart provides is seed capital,” says Mr Patel. “Longer term, we are aiming for a diversity of revenue sources.”

Other startups are leveraging one of the internet’s oldest innovations: the email newsletter. In the vanguard is Substack, a technology company that provides the tools and infrastructure for writers to establish their own paid email subscriptions. Although many of the platform’s best-known publications cater to a national audience, some are focusing locally.

After the national magazine he worked on closed in 2018, Tony Mecia pondered a return to life as a freelancer in Charlotte, North Carolina. But after seeing how many local stories went unreported even by the city’s main paper, Mr Mecia decided to start his own newsletter on Substack, the Charlotte Ledger. “It’s a turnkey solution, I probably never would have started the Ledger without something like Substack,” says Mr Mecia. With no need for external financing, the business can grow with subscribers, and Mr Mecia can focus on reporting.

Some national digital-news organisations believe their formula can work locally. Axios, mostly known for its daily email newsletters on national politics, started Axios Local last year to deliver regular email newsletters tailored to 14 cities, with 11 more soon to come. With its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, handling operations, and leveraging a well known brand, Axios is betting that its ad-supported newsletters will allow it to invest in local journalists. “From a business perspective, we go where there’s population, audience and money first, and then work our way out to the harder-to-reach areas,” explains Jim VandeHei, the CEO of Axios.

The range of experiments is encouraging, and all are eager, like the Baltimore Banner, to stress the conservatism of their strategies, prioritising long-run sustainability ahead of growth at all costs. But success in local news, whatever the model, will not be easy. And Ms Abernathy worries that these new digital initiatives will leave much of the country untouched outside America’s major cities. “In these places”, she says, “there’s no one left to hold the powerful accountable.” ■

T HE WAR is first of all about the fate of 44m Ukrainians. But in the shattered ruins of Mariupol and Kharkiv a worldview is also at stake. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine to force it to renounce the West and to submit to the Kremlin. He believes that big countries should be free to dominate smaller ones. Ukraine counters that it will choose its own allies. With Western backing, it is affirming the universal principle that all countries are sovereign. Whoever prevails on the battlefield will win a fundamental argument about how the world should work.

It matters, therefore, that off the battlefield this is an argument the West is losing. Most of the emerging world either backs Russia over its invasion or is neutral. Some countries depend on Russian arms, others feel a misplaced nostalgia for Soviet largesse, but many see the West as decadent, self-serving and hypocritical. And many more, even if they do not welcome the invasion, see it as somebody else’s problem. As America and the rest of NATO rally support for action against Russia, that is a stunning rebuke. It is also taking the world down a dangerous path.

On March 2nd, 141 countries voted in the UN to deplore Russia’s invasion. Just five voted against and 35 abstained. But the real pattern is more complex. Our sister organisation, the Economist Intelligence Unit, has noted that only a third of the world’s people live in countries that have not only condemned Russia but also imposed sanctions on it. Most of them are Western. Another third are in neutral countries. This group includes giants like India and tricky American allies, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The final third are in countries that are echoing Russia’s rationale for the invasion. The biggest, China, has repeated propaganda claiming that Ukraine has hosted American-backed bioweapons laboratories.

In Mr Putin’s world, where might makes right, today’s lack of support is proof of Western decline. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, when America became the sole superpower, countries aligned themselves with it not so much out of ideological conviction but to win its backing. On this reading, America’s sway over smaller countries has diminished as China has risen.

There is something to this, even if declinism is exaggerated. The West has also hastened its own loss of influence. Until Mr Putin jolted it by invading Ukraine, the West had seemed to have lost faith in the universal principles it espoused. Following the Russian attack on Georgia in 2008, America’s president, Barack Obama, rushed to “reset” relations and focus on nation-building at home. When Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in 2013, Mr Obama backed off. After annexing Crimea in 2014, Russia got a slap on the wrist.

China and Russia argue that this lack of self-belief is a sign of Western decadence. If so, it spread under Donald Trump, who held America’s allies in contempt and was wholly transactional. Democracy in America sank further into outrage and conspiracy. The European Union often seemed hopelessly self-absorbed. Brexit, whether you were for or against it, was a fiasco.

Poorer countries also see America and its allies as self-serving, because they demand solidarity when it suits them and turn their backs when it does not. While Russia and China released covid-19 vaccines abroad, the West hoarded huge stocks. Countries that grew rich by burning oil and coal have urged a global effort to limit climate change, but failed to keep their (limited) promises to help finance poorer countries’ plans to abandon fossil fuels and adapt to a warmer world.

And poorer countries see the West as hypocritical. Europe talks about universal rights, but its laudable welcome for millions of refugees from the war in Ukraine has been undercut by its rejection of refugees from the war in Syria. America and its closest allies invaded Iraq in 2003 without UN backing. In Western eyes, and The Economist’s, Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator who had used nerve gas on his own people and attacked his neighbours. He could not be more different from Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s elected president. Yet the rulers of other countries worry that if the West is free to act as judge, jury and executioner, they will get summary justice.

This is a poisonous cocktail of legitimate grievances and exaggeration, all laced with a lingering resentment of colonialism. The pity is that emerging countries are making a grave error. As sovereign powers, they too have a stake in the war. All the West’s faults do not outweigh the fact that, in the system Mr Putin is offering, their people would suffer terribly.

The reason is that the world Mr Putin desires would be far more decadent, self-serving and amoral than the one that exists today. Ukraine shows how. His extravagant lies about Nazis in Kyiv and his denial that Russia is even fighting a war are decadent. His brazen claim that NATO provoked the war, posing an intolerable threat to Russia by expanding into central and eastern Europe is self-serving. Those countries were not swallowed up: they chose to join NATO for their own protection after decades of Soviet tyranny. And witness the drowning of all morality in his armies’ unconscionable use of torture, rape and mass murder as the routine tools of war.

What is more, Mr Putin’s belief in the dominance of great powers will not be limited to the battlefield. For he is right that, ultimately, the successful use of force underpins the structure of geopolitics. If Russia is allowed to prevail in Ukraine, bullying, lying and manipulation will further permeate trade, treaties and international law—the whole panoply of arrangements that are so easily taken for granted, but which keep the world turning.

That vision may suit China, which is impatient to shape the world in its own interests and which feels strong enough to dominate its sphere of influence. It would certainly suit tyrants, who want free rein to abuse their countries and terrorise their neighbours. But it cannot be welcome to leaders who want the best for their people.

Contrast Mr Putin’s brutish vision with Ukraine’s. Partly in answer to Russian aggression, the country has emerged as a beacon of democracy. Like the West, it is imperfect. But it stands for freedom and hope. Developing countries should not abandon today’s flawed system. They should defend it from Mr Putin and use their growing influence to help it flourish. ■

On Sunday, French voters chose the incumbent President, Emmanuel Macron, and his far-right challenger, Marine Le Pen, as the two candidates who will compete in a runoff on April 24th. Macron captured nearly twenty-eight per cent of the vote; Le Pen managed to win twenty-three per cent. They were followed by the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who won a surprising twenty-two per cent, and the television personality and writer Éric Zemmour, who ran to Le Pen’s right and briefly rose in the polls before finishing at seven per cent. Perhaps the most shocking results were the drubbings given to the mainstream center-right and center-left parties, which won 4.8 per cent and 1.8 per cent of the vote, respectively. The race was marked by increasingly dire rhetoric about crime, Islam, and immigration. Multiple candidates or their advisers warned of a “great replacement,” referring to a racist conspiracy theory that France is being strategically overrun by nonwhite immigrants. Polls show Macron with a small lead in the runoff, but the race appears much closer than it was in 2017, when he defeated Le Pen by more than thirty percentage points.

I discussed the election and the state of French politics with Arthur Goldhammer, an affiliate at Harvard’s Center for European Studies and the translator of more than a hundred books from French into English. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Le Pen’s current campaign has been more successful than her last, the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in France, and Macron’s political legacy.

This election is being talked about as a nail in the coffin of the center-right and center-left in France, and its replacement by candidates on the extreme ends and what has been dubbed the “radical centrism” of Macron. Do you think that this has essentially been Macron’s plan all along—to become the alternative to the extremes in France? Or is this where he’s ended up after five years?

I think he’s exploited a situation that even preëxisted him. It was always convenient, going back to the time of François Mitterrand, who was President from 1981 to 1995—he arranged for the candidate of the far right to take votes from his opponents in the mainstream center-right party. Now the mainstream center-right party has vanished, but that doesn’t mean that the center has vanished—Macron now thoroughly occupies the center. And it doesn’t mean that the left has vanished. The unexpectedly strong vote for Mélenchon shows that there is a hunger for a left alternative, but it can’t really find a candidate to coalesce around.

And the vote for Mélenchon was largely a strategic vote. His real solid base, I think, is only about eight or nine per cent, but in the end he got over twenty per cent because you had a lot of disgruntled Socialists who thought if they wanted to have any kind of left-wing alternative, or the possibility of reaching the second round, they had to vote for Mélenchon. That would’ve given them, if he had made it, at least a debate between someone on the left and Macron. So, while the parties are certainly in disarray, the strength of the historically mainstream parties—the Socialists and Les Républicains—does continue to exist at the subnational level, and they remain concentrated in the center. And that’s the way it’s been for a long time.

Do you have a sense of why Le Pen took off in a way Zemmour did not? Her appeal seems to be to a more working-class right-wing electorate than his. But for a long time it seemed like they would maybe steal each other’s votes, or he would rise and she would fall. And instead she beat him by more than three to one.

Well, I think two things account for her strength. The first is something not of her own doing but of Vladimir Putin’s doing. The invasion of Ukraine discredited Zemmour, who was an outspoken supporter of Putin—and who refused to back off of that position even when it became clear that Russia was going to go through with its threat to invade and then commit atrocities. Le Pen has also been associated with Putin in the past, and was photographed with him in Moscow, and made favorable statements about him, and said that her preferred foreign policy is to be equidistant between Russia and the United States. But she also was quick to condemn the invasion and to welcome Ukrainian refugees to France, in spite of her general opposition to immigrants and refugees from other countries. Zemmour did not do that. And when he did not do that he began to fall back in the polls.

The other thing is that Le Pen has worked hard to soften her image, and Zemmour provided a convenient contrast: someone even more xenophobic and racist and hostile to Islam than she is. And someone harping on the three “I”s: immigration, insecurity, and identity, all of which had been signature issues of the Le Pen family. He was so radical that he made her seem more moderate, and therefore abetted her long-term strategy to de-demonize herself, as the French like to say.

My sense is also that it wasn’t just that he was going further on things like immigration and Islam but that she was more willing to talk about economic issues in this campaign than she had been in 2017. Is that accurate?

I would correct you on one point. In 2017, she did talk about economic issues, but essentially in terms of withdrawing from the E.U., reëstablishing protectionism, and dumping the euro. Those were not popular issues. This year, she talked about purchasing power, and the cost of living. And that did strike a vein—particularly, again, in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, when France suffered a spike in energy prices even more extreme than we’ve seen in America, which hit ordinary automobilists in the pocketbook. That issue began to gain even more traction.

So her discussion of economics this year was much more down to earth and relatable than the threat of Frexit that she raised in 2017, which was, first of all, abstract, and, second of all, not really her own issue. In my assessment, it was something that was sold to her by her then top adviser, Florian Philippot, who has since left the Party to form his own. And she didn’t really understand the complexities of the position as he had developed it. So, in particular, she couldn’t defend it effectively in the debate with Macron, and that’s what made her look so bad in that debate, leading to her humiliation and sound defeat in 2017.

And my sense is Zemmour never really caught on with working-class conservative voters. Is that accurate?

He had the bourgeois conservative voters and the more affluent and more religious conservative voters. So, for example, that’s why Marion Maréchal, the niece of Marine Le Pen and granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, supported Zemmour rather than her aunt, even though her aunt had helped raise her in her childhood.

Tragic betrayal. I want to take a step back here. From a distance, France seems like a country with a pretty high standard of living. It’s weathered the pandemic fairly well. France is generally considered a nice place to live. And yet every time I checked in on this campaign the tone of it seemed to be near-apocalyptic—about immigration, about crime, about Islam, about issues of secularism and how much they were under threat. I don’t want to underplay the real problems France has, but I don’t totally understand why in 2022 the tone of this campaign took this turn. Do you have some sense of why?

It’s a very good question. I think the French have a tendency to hate all of their leaders more than is warranted. Macron, in particular, comes in for more hatred than he deserves. But I think a lot of voters on the left felt betrayed. Many were willing to accept his proposition in 2017 that he was neither the right nor the left, and were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. And then when he came into power he brought many right-wingers into his government. The measures he enacted, such as abolition of the wealth tax and also labor-market reform, were generally seen as measures that could have been enacted by, say, Alain Juppé, a center-right leader who lost the primary in 2017. So there was this sense of betrayal. But it goes far beyond, to my mind, anything that can be justified by what Macron actually did. He was vilified by Zemmour, by Le Pen, by Mélenchon, all of whom painted him in the blackest of terms. Still, it’s hard to understand why people accept these characterizations of someone who, for all his neoliberalism, remains fairly moderate—a radical centrist, as you put it earlier.

The Russian aggression in Ukraine has triggered a revival of Cold War liberalism. After decades of self-doubt and introspection, old ideas about “the free world” and the “empire of evil” have been resurrected. But to revive the Cold War would be a serious error.

German-made Leopard 2 tanks of the Polish army are seen lined up after a joint exercise with the US Army at the Twenty-First Rifle Regiment training groun in Nowa Deba, Poland, on April 8, 2022. (STR / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
 
This year, the prestigious Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford were given by Samuel Moyn, and his subject was Cold War liberalism. It was a case of intellectual history being ahead of its time. Moyn’s lectures are only a few weeks old, but his characters have since left the lectern to run amok in opinion pieces, like wax figures escaped from Madame Tussauds. Isaiah Berlin teaches us to see the pattern in the Russian carpet; Hannah Arendt had warned us against Russian expansionism and the revisionist uses of history; Judith Shklar had cautioned us against liberalism’s lack of self-confidence. We were warned, and yet we didn’t listen.
The Russian aggression in Ukraine has triggered a revival of Cold War liberalism the way a reflex hammer triggers a patellar reaction. One loses count of the op-eds arguing that we are back to the post–World War II years. Notions such as the “free world,” the “West,” and the “empire of evil” have been retrieved from their formaldehyde jars. The Cold War is the new intellectual compass that will help us navigate a world that is once again pitting democracies against totalitarianism.
The knee-jerk response comes complete with all the Cold War paraphernalia, starting with an enemy bent on world domination. Vladimir Putin’s intention to reconstitute the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire is taken for granted. Ukraine has been reduced to a piece from a vintage 1960s domino set: if it falls, Russian tanks will inexorably steamroll through Poland and show up at the Brandenburg Gate. It does not matter if they have been stuck for two weeks in a traffic jam in the outskirts of Kiev before turning back. Nothing short of a global alliance of democracies will ward off the totalitarian threat.
Needless to say, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is indefensible, and Kiev deserves all possible assistance short of military engagement in its effort to repel the invasion and reach a diplomatic settlement. Nor should the risk of escalation be underestimated. And it may well be that the Russian leadership is intent on rebuilding an imperial periphery. Yet none of these facts warrants a return to Cold War liberalism.
The period between 1945 and 1989 had little in common with today’s situation. The world is less ideologically cohesive than it was then. It is not divided into clear-cut blocs. The triumph of liberal internationalism has turned it into a tumefied assemblage held together by the glue of potted history. It is now less a coherent project than a bloated mail-order catalog from which one can pick discrete items. The result, as Robert Kaplan recently suggested, is that it has become “unclear whether parliamentary democracy is an absolute necessity for the general spirit of liberalism to develop.” From the leadership in Beijing to Silicon Valley neoreactionaries and an increasing number of Republicans, a lot of people would agree. Such versatility is why liberalism has no real challengers but also why it no longer has a clear sense of purpose either. At best, it is a fig leaf for hegemony.
It is this lack of definition that makes the clarity of the Cold War so appealing today. Until a few weeks ago, poring over the demise of liberal internationalism was something of a cottage industry. Even its staunchest advocates, like John Ikenberry or Francis Fukuyama, had started acknowledging that there were many things wrong with it — neoliberalism in primis. For many others, an open search for an alternative international order was well underway.
All this soul-searching was put to rest the moment the first Russian tank crossed into Ukraine. Self-doubt and introspection are no longer in order. The reservists have reported back to duty. Like pilots flying repurposed Soviet-era Sukhois, liberal internationalists have propped up the West’s defenses with antiquated propaganda material. From an advanced outpost in Skopje, Francis Fukuyama recently announced the revival of the “spirit of 1989” and a “new birth of freedom” that would follow a Russian “defeat.” Finally, history can end all over again.
This Cold War nostalgia is selective. From the original, it retains rollback over containment and Dr Strangelove over Henry Kissinger. The mood is distinctly neoconservative, while realism is getting bad press. William Kristol recently tweeted that his ideal candidate would be a “Zelensky Democrat.” This sort of moral intransigence is a winning formula in times of war — but unfortunately, it tends to trigger them as well. Eliot Cohen, a former adviser at the State Department, recently suggested that “the Russians do not have . . . escalation dominance” and that the United States should therefore “not fear fighting Russians” in Ukraine — a wild gamble about a country that has more nuclear warheads than the United States. In comparison, past interventions against ragtag armies in the Middle East and insurgents holed up in the Hindu Kush would look like an exercise in tantric self-restraint.
It’s not just that liberal self-doubt and introspection were unwarranted: it is now assumed that they were part of the problem all along. After 1989, liberalism had become effete: the “satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” had replaced the “willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal,” as Fukuyama observed back then. You cannot expect the “last man” to leave his couch and join an international brigade.
We are now paying the price for this indulgence, liberal pundits tell us. Liberalism has become “complacent.” Michael Ignatieff recently suggested that an obsession with soft power has emolliated liberal internationalists. It’s time to man up and don combat fatigues. Forget le doux commerce: what is needed are Master Classes in no-fly zones and Javelin missiles. Fukuyama, who seems to be flying drones during his spare time, is in awe of the larger Turkish models. Wouldn’t it be great to fly a Bayraktar TB2? Bonus point: the acronym for medium-altitude long-endurance drones is MALE. To defeat a strongman, you’ve got to become one.
The contention that liberal internationalists have softened up is ludicrous. If anything, the opposite is true: the liberal project has been bruised by too many catastrophic engagements in America’s forever wars and too many domestic failures. Rather than acknowledging these failures, today’s drone enthusiasts and armchair Spartans would rather blame them on identity politics, Black Lives Matter, or movements for greater social justice. If only for strategic reasons, the original Cold War liberalism was capable of accommodating important steps in favor of social and racial justice. The newer version has made clear it will not.
For liberal internationalists of all stripes, the war in Ukraine has been a serendipitous opportunity to reinvigorate a moribund project. Why it could solve the problems it created in the first place is unclear. How it could compound them is obvious.
As to the Cold War, it was a tragedy for millions of people. Nothing guarantees that it will repeat itself only as farce.

But there are intermediate cases between basic meaning and bona fide idiom. When we say that someone threw up, is that an idiom? Part of the essence of an idiom is that you wouldn’t immediately know its meaning out of context — “chewing the fat,” “being stood up,” “throw that up to me,” etc. In contrast, the relationship of “throw up” to throwing is, upon a bit of reflection, rather obvious; it’s why people also say “hurl” or “upchuck” to mean the same thing. If people are learning English, do we consider their recognition that this is how we routinely refer to that action as having grasped one of our idioms? Not really. “Throw up,” in this sense, is a word that happens to have two parts that we write separately.

What we think of as one word with one meaning can in use actually be many, many more words, and not just in the sense of stark and obvious homonyms such as “spring” as a season and “spring” as a coil. This is beautifully illustrated with my favorite example: “pick up.” Its basic meaning is to lift something. But we also pick up our kids from school. Someone might pick someone up at a bar. You pick up a disease, or someone says you’ve picked up the habit of overusing certain salty words. In all those cases, we see a relationship with the “lift” meaning. Few would say that when we talk of picking up our kids, we are tossing in an idiom. Rather, these uses of “pick up” are something more mundane than idioms; they are words of their own.

That these are separate words is especially clear when the relationship with lifting gets more abstract: A car picks up speed; a cocktail picks up your spirits; we pick up a sound from far off; we pick up where we left off. Yes, “pick” and “up” are words in their own right, but in this case a combination of the two is the source of what are actually many more words, and this is the case with countless others. Think a bit about the different things “make up” can mean, for example. Yet no one would be accused of overusing the words “pick” or “make,” much less the word “up.” The key is how we use them.

And this brings us back to the profanity issue. When we perceive a word as used a lot or too much, it’s often being used to mean multiple things. The casual usage of “like” divides into about four different usages, some having drifted pretty dramatically from its stock definition. The N-word that ends with “er” and the N-word that ends with “a” are, for all intents and purposes (idiom alert!), different words now, and the latter is also developing into, of all things, new pronouns. What we might hear as a mere matter of yet another F-bomb is actually a vocabular sapling sprouting apace, with branches growing in different directions. As I put it in “Nine Nasty Words” (with wording a notch too zesty to print here), the F-word can convey destruction, deception, dismissal, dauntingness and down-to-earthness.

Russian speakers seem to get this more readily about profanity than English speakers. There is a tradition among Russians of cherishing its richness; for example, a Russian I am especially fond of has given me dense, sober volumes chronicling and exploring their profanity. Hence, what some bemoan as too much profanity is, to me, the equivalent of the glories of what Russians call mat, or dirty language. As the writer Edward Topol wrote in “Dermo!: The Real Russian Tolstoy Never Used,” a nonnative speaker who learns “even one-third of this lexicon can be sure of being the most popular and honored foreigner at any Russian gathering.”

A former top advisor to Donald Trump has described how the former president began to "resemble" Russia's Vladimir Putin during his time in the White House, speaking frequently about how he wanted to remain in power beyond the congressional two-term legal limit.

Fiona Hill, the former senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council, gave a damning indictment of how Trump handled foreign policy issues during his time as president in a lengthy profile for The New York Times.

In the article, Hill described how Trump started to mimic his Russian adversary during his four years in power, especially with regards to how he treated Ukraine—a country she said Trump used as a "plaything for his own purposes" after viewing it as a political enemy.

"In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors," Hill said.

Hill also accused Trump of "pulling a Putin" with his alleged attempts to stop the certification of the 2020 Election results in favor of Joe Biden on January 6, 2021.

She said that while watching the violence unfold on January 6 she was able to "thread" together a chain of events that began with Trump allegedly pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden's business dealings to Trump's supporters storming the Capitol.

"I saw the thread," Hill said. "The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to January 6. And I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia's constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin."

Elsewhere, Hill, who testified in Trump's first impeachment trial over the Zelensky phone call, described how Trump would tell other world leaders that he should get a "redo" of his first two years as president seeing as they were overshadowed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference at the 2016 Election.

"He'd say that his first two years had been taken away from him because of the 'Russia hoax.' And he'd say that he wanted more than two terms," Hill said.

Hill also cited comments from David Cornstein, Trump's ambassador to Hungary, who claimed that the former president wanted to copy Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban's arrangement where he could "push the margins and stay in power without any checks and balances."

When suggested by The Times that Trump meant these remarks as a joke, Hill replied that "he clearly meant it."

In a statement to Newsweek, Trump described Hill—who was born in England—as a "radical left RINO" [Republican in name only] and that "if she didn't have the accent she would be nothing."

Trump added: "During the Impeachment Hoax #1, she had no credibility, obviously, because we won unanimously. Never listened to her, I hardly knew her at all. She knew nothing about me, I knew nothing about her, and I liked it that way."

Trump's relationship with Putin was put in the spotlight again in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Prior to the start of the conflict, Trump was criticized for describing Putin as a "genius" and "savvy" for his tactics prior to the invasion in late February.

Trump was also condemned after he asked Putin to "release" information on Hunter Biden's financial links to Russian oligarch Elena Baturina—a claim that President Biden's son has denied.

Those who are convinced that a free market economy is what brings prosperity to all should also acknowledge that competition is the essence of the enterprise culture and that it alone fosters innovation, wealth creation and the winning mindset.

For an economic system that relies on voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers and seeks to deliver goods and services to everyone at a price they are willing to pay, vigorous competition among vendors on the basis of a level playing field is absolutely essential.

This philosophy is as true for the market in defence equipment as it is for the market in consumer goods and services.

To this end, the government has made it absolutely clear, time and again, that it would like to see the competitiveness of the defence industry improved significantly, both in the domestic market and globally, so that the UK can pay its way in the world post-Brexit.

But the reason why this constant badgering is not yielding any results is because defence contractors, on whom the government has become totally reliant for all its military equipment needs, are competition-averse – not least, because they are staffed (from the very top to the bottom) by people who were previously in the pay of the State where they never had to face any competition and consequently, have no experience whatsoever of what it is like to “feel the heat” of competitive market forces.

This total dominance of the payroll has come about because the last several decades has seen the transfer of tens of thousands of people in the pay of the State to the private sector via the “revolving door”, largely due to the resounding success of the policy instituted by Defence Secretaries of all political persuasions – to encourage for-profit organisations in receipt of government defence contracts to take-on people who are just about to come off the public payroll.

This mass migration would explain why the workforce, at every level of the hierarchy within defence contractors’ organisations (right across the full spectrum of defence engineering businesses, government outsourcing contractors and foreign-owned entities, large and small) is now made-up entirely of people who were previously in the pay of the State.

To add to this blunder, the government is inviting precisely these sorts of people into its policy-making forums in Whitehall to try to get a handle on what has gone wrong with defence procurement, because its own civil servants are not up to the job. So, it will come as no surprise that these unpaid advisers, seconded from the defence industry and treated as “one of us” will never bring themselves to prescribe more competition as the medicine to the ills suffered by defence equipment manufacturers.

And yet, it is the government’s policy to procure equipment for the Armed Forces through fair and open competition. It confirms this stance in its most recent policy statement on defence procurement expressed in the Defence Industrial Policy published in December 2017, where it says (on page 23):

“We strive to provide our Armed Forces with the capabilities they need at the best value for money, obtaining this through open competition in the global market, wherever possible. Competitive tension is the greatest driver for innovation, productivity and earning power in any economy.”

However, those lower-down the hierarchy underneath the governing elite, including the administrative elite and military top brass, who are hostile towards competitive markets have fought tooth and nail to prevent this policy from being fully implemented, which would explain why only 42% of new MoD contracts by value were placed via open competition in 2016/17, down from 64% in 2010/11. Reinforced by fierce opposition from vested interests outside Whitehall, there seems little chance of it being applied anytime soon.

So long as defence contractors carry on with the practice of recruiting only people who were previously in the pay of the State, they will continue to be allergic to competition.

Sign up for Derek’s newsletter here.The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.The government survey of almost 8,000 high-school students, which was conducted in the first six months of 2021, found a great deal of variation in mental health among different groups. More than one in four girls reported that they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, which was twice the rate of boys. Nearly half of LGBTQ teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14 percent of their heterosexual peers. Sadness among white teens seems to be rising faster than among other groups.
Credit: Derek Thompson, The Atlantic; data from the CDC.
But the big picture is the same across all categories: Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it’s happening all across the country. Since 2009, sadness and hopelessness have increased for every race; for straight teens and gay teens; for teens who say they’ve never had sex and for those who say they’ve had sex with males and/or females; for students in each year of high school; and for teens in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.So why is this happening?I want to propose several answers to that question, along with one meta-explanation that ties them together. But before I start with that, I want to squash a few tempting fallacies.The first fallacy is that we can chalk this all up to teens behaving badly. In fact, lots of self-reported teen behaviors are moving in a positive direction. Since the 1990s, drinking-and-driving is down almost 50 percent. School fights are down 50 percent. Sex before 13 is down more than 70 percent. School bullying is down. And LGBTQ acceptance is up.The second fallacy is that teens have always been moody, and sadness looks like it is rising only because people are more willing to talk about it. Objective measures of anxiety and depression—such as eating disorders, self-harming behavior, and teen suicides—are sharply up over the past decade. “Across the country we have witnessed dramatic increases in Emergency Department visits for all mental health emergencies including suspected suicide attempts,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in October. Today’s teenagers are more comfortable talking about mental health, but rising youth sadness is no illusion.The third fallacy is that today’s mental-health crisis was principally caused by the pandemic and an overreaction to COVID. “Rising teenage sadness isn’t a new trend, but rather the acceleration and broadening of a trend that clearly started before the pandemic,” Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, told me. But he added: “We shouldn’t ignore the pandemic, either. The fact that COVID seems to have made teen mental health worse offers clues about what’s really driving the rise in sadness.”Here are four forces propelling that increase.1. Social-media use Five years ago, the psychologist Jean Twenge wrote an influential and controversial feature in The Atlantic titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” based on her book iGen. Around 2012, Twenge wrote, she had noticed that teen sadness and anxiety began to steadily rise in the U.S. and other rich developed countries. She looked for explanations and realized that 2012 was precisely when the share of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent and mobile social-media use spiked.In the past few years, scientists have disputed the idea that social-media use itself makes teenagers miserable. “There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects,” Jeff Hancock, a behavioral psychologist at Stanford University who has conducted a meta-analysis of 226 such studies, told The New York Times recently.But I think Twenge’s strongest point is misunderstood. Social media isn’t like rat poison, which is toxic to almost everyone. It’s more like alcohol: a mildly addictive substance that can enhance social situations but can also lead to dependency and depression among a minority of users.This is very close to the conclusion reached by none other than Instagram. The company’s internal research from 2020 found that, while most users had a positive relationship with the app, one-third of teen girls said “Instagram made them feel worse,” even though these girls “feel unable to stop themselves” from logging on. And if you don’t believe a company owned by Facebook, believe a big new study from Cambridge University, in which researchers looked at 84,000 people of all ages and found that social media was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13.Why would social media affect teenage mental health in this way? One explanation is that teenagers (and teenage girls in particular) are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd. As I’ve written, social media seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity. The problem isn’t just that social media fuels anxiety but also that—as we’ll see—it makes it harder for today’s young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.2. Sociality is downBoth Steinberg and Twenge stress that the biggest problem with social media might be not social media itself, but rather the activities that it replaces.“I tell parents all the time that if Instagram is merely displacing TV, I’m not concerned about it,” Steinberg told me. But today’s teens spend more than five hours daily on social media, and that habit seems to be displacing quite a lot of beneficial activity. The share of high-school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30 percent from 2007 to 2019. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today’s teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver’s license, or play youth sports.The pandemic and the closure of schools likely exacerbated teen loneliness and sadness. A 2020 survey from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education found that loneliness spiked in the first year of the pandemic for everyone, but it rose most significantly for young people. “It’s well established that what protects teens from stress is close social relationships,” Steinberg said. “When kids can’t go to school to see their friends and peers and mentors, that social isolation could lead to sadness and depression, particularly for those predisposed to feeling sad or depressed.”This is important to say clearly: Aloneness isn’t the same as loneliness, and loneliness isn’t the same as depression. But more aloneness (including from heavy smartphone use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might have combined to push up sadness among teenagers who need sociality to protect them from the pressures of a stressful world.3. The world is stressful—and there is more news about the world’s stressorsLisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and author, told me that no single factor can account for the rise of teenage sadness. But she believes a part of the answer is that the world has become more stressful. Or, at least, teenagers’ perception of the world seems to be causing them more stress.“In the last decade teenagers have become increasingly stressed by concerns about gun violence, climate change, and the political environment,” she wrote in an email. “Increased stress among young people is linked to increasing levels of sadness. Girls, more than boys, are socialized to internalize distress, meaning that they tend to collapse in on themselves by becoming depressed or anxious.”Fears about finances, climate change, and viral pandemics are smashing into local concerns about social approval and setting oneself up for success. “I think of it as a pile-on effect,” Steinberg said. “We’re coming out of the pandemic, and then suddenly Russia goes to war. Every day, it feels like there’s something else. It creates a very gloomy narrative about the world.”This sense of doom doesn’t just come from teenagers. It comes from us, the news media, and from the social-media channels through which our work is distributed. News sources have never been more abundant, or more accessible. But journalism also has a famous bad-news bias, which flows from an unfortunate but accurate understanding that negativity generally gets more attention. When we plug our brain into a news feed, we are usually choosing to deluge ourselves with negative representations of reality. A well-known 2019 experiment randomly forced people to stop using Facebook for four weeks before a midterm election. The study found that those who logged off spent more time hanging out with family and friends, consistent with the idea that social-media use displaces pro-social behaviors. It also found that deactivating Facebook “reduced factual news knowledge” while “increasing subjective well-being.” We cannot rule out the possibility that teens are sad about the world, not only because the world contains sadness, but also because young people have 24/7 access to sites that are constantly telling them they should be depressed about it.4. Modern parenting strategiesIn the past 40 years, American parents—especially those with a college degree—have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend coaching, chauffeuring, tutoring, and otherwise helping their teenage children. The economist Valerie Ramey has labeled this the “rug rat race.” High-income parents in particular are spending much more time preparing their kids for a competitive college admissions process. When I interviewed Ramey about her work in 2019, she told me that she “couldn’t believe the amount of pressure our friends were putting on their kids to get ready for college.”The “rug rat race” is an upper-class phenomenon that can’t explain a generalized increase in teenage sadness. But it could well explain part of what’s going on. And in the 2020 Atlantic feature “What Happened to American Childhood?,” Kate Julian described a related phenomenon that affects families a bit more broadly: Anxious parents, in seeking to insulate their children from risk and danger, are unintentionally transferring their anxiety to their kids.I want to pull out two points from Julian’s complex essay. First, children are growing up slower than they used to. Today’s children are less likely to drive, get a summer job, or be asked to do chores. The problem isn’t that kids are lazy (homework time has risen), or that scrubbing dishes magically dispels anxiety disorders. Rather, Julian wrote, these activities “provide children with two very important things”: tolerating discomfort and having a sense of personal competence.Second, researchers have noted a broad increase in an “accommodative” parenting style. If a girl is afraid of dogs, an “accommodation” would be keeping her away from every friend’s house with a dog, or if a boy won’t eat vegetables, feeding him nothing but turkey loaf for four years (an actual story from the article). These behaviors come from love. But part of growing up is learning how to release negative emotions in the face of inevitable stress. If kids never figure out how to do that, they’re more likely to experience severe anxiety as teenagers.Julian highlighted a new treatment out of Yale University’s Child Study Center called SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. Put simply, SPACE forces parents to be less accommodating. If the girl is afraid of dogs, encourage her to play with young puppies. If the boy hates vegetables, caramelize the hell out of some broccoli. This sort of advice is infinitely easier to type than to put into practice. But folding a bit of exposure therapy into modern parenting and childhood might help teenagers grapple with a complex and stressful world.Other explanations don’t fit neatly into the above categories. Maybe drugs are a big factor: One study found that a sixth of the increase in teen suicides was associated with parental opioid addiction. Maybe the authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt are right that college campuses and internet culture have come to celebrate fragility. Maybe political polarization is fueling anxiety, not only by creating mutual hatred but also by encouraging people to reject opposing views, which over time reduces their capacity to handle cognitive dissonance in a confusing world.The truth is I’m not satisfied by any of the above explanations, on their own. But I see no reason to keep them alone. They interact, amplify, and compound. And together they paint a powerful picture.The world is overwhelming, and an inescapably negative news cycle creates an atmosphere of existential gloom, not just for teens but also for their moms and dads. The more overwhelming the world feels to parents, the more they may try to bubble-wrap their kids with accommodations. Over time, this protective parenting style deprives children of the emotional resilience they need to handle the world’s stresses. Childhood becomes more insular: Time spent with friends, driving, dating, and working summer jobs all decline. College pressures skyrocket. Outwardly, teens are growing up slower; but online, they’re growing up faster. The Internet exposes teenagers not only to supportive friendships but also to bullying, threats, despairing conversations about mental health, and a slurry of unsolvable global problems—a carnival of negativity. Social media places in every teen’s pocket a quantified battle royal for scarce popularity that can displace hours of sleep and makes many teens, especially girls, feel worse about their body and life. Amplify these existing trends with a global pandemic and an unprecedented period of social isolation, and suddenly, the remarkable rise of teenage sadness doesn’t feel all that mysterious, does it?

The federal mandate requiring passengers and personnel to wear masks on airplanes, trains, and buses is set to expire on April 18, but federal health officials are giving every indication that they are willing to extend it once again.
"This is a decision that CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is going to make," Ashish K. Jha, the White House's COVID-19 response director, told the Today show on Monday. "I know the CDC is working to develop a scientific framework."
When host Savannah Guthrie pressed Jha to clarify whether extending the mask mandate was a real possibility, he said "it's absolutely on the table."

.@SavannahGuthrie spoke with White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. @ashishkjha about the rising COVID cases and mask mandates. pic.twitter.com/OZX62EaN3o
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 11, 2022

Technically, the policy falls under the jurisdiction of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rather than the CDC or the White House. But the TSA, like most other COVID-19 compliant authorities, defers almost entirely to CDC guidance. In practice, the power to compel masking belongs to Walensky, who has taken an extremely cautious approach to easing mandates in a variety of circumstances.
But the policy of forced masking on airplanes actually runs counter to what many industry experts say is appropriate: The CEOs of several major airlines have testified before Congress that the air quality on planes is better than the air quality in the ICU. They think it would be extremely safe to let passengers make their own decisions about whether to wear a mask; it is not likely that COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths would surge as a result.
Unfortunately, the responsibility for making this determination does not rest with the individual traveler or even the individual airline: It largely rests with Walensky. This means that even though hospitalizations and deaths remain steady as cases rise, extreme risk-aversion will likely continue to be the law of the land.
For many families with young children, the practical implication is that they cannot travel by airplane at all, since it is difficult to force small kids to wear their masks for entire flights. Masks are not a cost-free intervention for parents in this circumstance, and whatever benefits the CDC thinks this policy yields must be weighed against the very real downsides.
At a time when occasional upticks in cases following new waves and more infectious strains of COVID-19 do not produce appreciably more hospitalizations and deaths, one might be forgiven for thinking that it would be acceptable to let onerous restrictions expire.
The post Extending the Mask Mandate for Air Travel 'Absolutely on the Table' Says White House COVID-19 Czar appeared first on Reason.com.

The fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine has reminded us of the unforeseeable disruptions constantly confronting the global economy. We have been taught this lesson many times. No one could have predicted the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and few anticipated the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, or Donald Trump's election, which resulted in the United States turning toward protectionism and nationalism. Even those who did anticipate these crises could not have said with any precision when they would occur.

Each of these events has had enormous macroeconomic consequences. The pandemic called our attention to our seemingly robust economies' lack of resilience. America, the superpower, could not even produce simple products like masks and other protective gear, let alone more sophisticated items like tests and ventilators. The crisis reinforced our understanding of economic fragility, reprising one of the lessons of the global financial crisis, when the bankruptcy of just one firm, Lehman Brothers, triggered the near-collapse of the entire global financial system.

Similarly, Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine is aggravating an already-worrisome increase in food and energy prices, with potentially severe ramifications for many developing countries and emerging markets, especially those whose debts have soared during the pandemic. Europe, too, is acutely vulnerable, owing to its reliance on Russian gas--a resource from which major economies like Germany cannot quickly or inexpensively wean themselves. Many are rightly worried that such dependence is tempering the response to Russia's egregious actions.

This particular development was foreseeable. More than 15 years ago, in Making Globalization Work, I asked, "Does each country simply accept [security] risks as part of the price we face for a more efficient global economy? Does Europe simply say that if Russia is the cheapest provider of gas, then we should buy from Russia regardless of the implications for its security...?" Unfortunately, Europe's answer was to ignore obvious dangers in the pursuit of short-run profits.

Underlying the current lack of resilience is the fundamental failure of neoliberalism and the policy framework it underpins. Markets on their own are short-sighted, and the financialization of the economy has made them even more so. They do not fully account for key risks--especially those that seem distant--even when the consequences can be enormous. Moreover, market participants know that when risks are systemic--as was the case in all the crises listed above--policymakers cannot idly stand by and watch.

Precisely because markets do not account fully for such risks, there will be too little investment in resilience, and the costs to society end up being even higher. The commonly proposed solution is to "price" risk, by forcing firms to bear more of the consequences of their actions. The same logic also dictates that we price negative externalities like greenhouse-gas emissions. Without a price on carbon, there will be too much pollution, too much fossil-fuel use, and too little green investment and innovation.

But pricing risk is far more difficult than pricing carbon. And while other options--industrial policies and regulations--can move an economy in the right direction, the neoliberal "rules of the game" have made interventions to enhance resilience more difficult. Neoliberalism is predicated on a fanciful vision of rational firms seeking to maximize their long-run profits in a context of perfectly efficient markets. Under the neoliberal globalization regime, firms are supposed to buy from the cheapest source, and if individual firms fail to account appropriately for the risk of being dependent on Russian gas, governments are not supposed to intervene.

True, the World Trade Organization framework includes a national-security exemption that European authorities could have invoked to justify interventions to limit their dependence on Russian gas. But for many years, the German government seemed to be an active promoter of economic interdependence. The charitable interpretation of Germany's position is that it hoped commerce would tame Russia. But there has long been a whiff of corruption, personified by Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor who presided over critical stages of his country's deepening entanglement with Russia and then went to work for Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas giant.

The challenge now is to establish appropriate global norms by which to distinguish rank protectionism from legitimate responses to dependency and security concerns, and to develop corresponding systemic domestic policies. This will require multilateral deliberation and careful policy design to prevent bad-faith moves like Trump's use of "national security" concerns to justify tariffs on Canadian automobiles and steel.

But the point is not merely to tweak the neoliberal trade framework. During the pandemic, thousands died unnecessarily because WTO intellectual-property rules inhibited the production of vaccines in many parts of the world. As the virus continued to spread, it acquired new mutations, making it more contagious and resistant to the first generation of vaccines.

Clearly, there has been too much focus on the security of IP, and too little on the security of our economy. We need to start rethinking globalization and its rules. We have paid a high price for the current orthodoxy. Hope now lies in heeding the lessons of this century's big shocks.

Socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen was a brilliant thinker who subjected Marxism to the same scrutiny he would any other ideology. If you want to see Marxism at its most nondogmatic and precise, you should read G. A. Cohen.

The late philosopher G. A. Cohen was became one of the most important pioneers of a tendency called “Analytic Marxism.” (Philosophy Overdose / YouTube)
 
The late G. A. Cohen was many things, not all of which usually go together. He was the son of a working-class Canadian Communist family who outgrew his early attachment to the Soviet Union but never let go of his socialist convictions. He was an Oxford-educated philosophy professor who became one of the most important pioneers of a tendency called “Analytic Marxism.”
He was also very, very funny. Here’s Cohen doing an impression of his mentor, philosopher Gilbert Ryle, that I showed to the late Michael Brooks a couple years ago; Michael told me he was angry that Cohen wasn’t still with us because he wanted Cohen to come on his show:

In the introduction to the 2000 edition of his brilliant book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (first released in 1979), Cohen tells a self-deprecating story to explain what distinguishes “analytical” Marxism from other forms. When he wrote a paper on the early Karl Marx in the late 1960s — commenting on a passage about the power of money in Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — Cohen claimed that Marx’s view would be that “a rich capitalist’s mistress does not love him because of his money” because what she loves is the money itself. Cohen was taken to task by the American philosopher Isaac Levi, who wanted to know “exactly what that meant and/or how one was supposed to go about telling whether or not it was true” and “what, precisely, was the difference between loving someone just because of their money and loving that money itself?”
At the time, Cohen considered the interrogation to be “hostile and unhelpful.” On his way out of the room, though, Levi told Cohen something that stuck with him — that he didn’t mind thinking about things in a different way as long as he understood which “ground rules” were being assumed:
That remark hit me hard and sunk in deep. In the aftermath of Levi’s admonition, I stopped writing (at least partly) in the fashion of a poet who puts down what sounds good to him and who needn’t defend his lines (either they resonate with the reader or they don’t). Instead, I tried to ask myself, when writing: precisely what does this sentence contribute to the developing exposition or argument, and is it true? You become analytical when you practice that sort of (frequently painful) self-criticism.
The results of this lesson are all over Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Instead of treating Marx as a prophet, Cohen treats him like he would any other philosopher, accepting the ideas that are persuasive and rejecting the rest. If Cohen writes as a Marxist, it’s because he believes that Marx’s core ideas about history are true — and to establish that, he holds those ideas up to the light, scrutinizing them from different angles, making distinctions that Marx didn’t, clearing up misinterpretations, and fielding (and sometimes conceding) a variety of objections.

The Basic Materialist Picture
Marx’s theory is “materialist” in a very specific sense. Marx didn’t just reject the notion that the ideas in people’s heads are the primary driver of history. He didn’t even simply emphasize that humans are driven by material needs. He thought the capacity of any given society to meet those needs (its “forces of production”) and the way it organized itself to do so (its “relations of production”) were the primary factors that explained why and how different forms of society rose, fell, and replaced each other in different historical epochs.
In early human societies, the productive forces were so undeveloped that the population couldn’t be divided between a ruling class and a class of subordinate laborers. There just wasn’t enough to go around. This changed somewhat under feudalism and early slave societies: a sufficient social surplus could be created to support a nonproductive ruling class if the peasants or slaves or other “immediate producers” were coerced into handing over some of what they produced.
The late philosopher G. A. Cohen. (Nicholas Vrousalis / YouTube)
At a certain point, though, feudalism and slave systems became an impediment to further growth. As modern industrial capitalism emerged within the shell of feudalism, it needed a labor force that was, in Marx’s phrase, “doubly free” — free in the sense that instead of being bound to some aristocrat’s estate, workers could labor for any boss who offered them a job, and free also in the sense that they were “free” from any way of making a living except selling their working hours to a boss.
Capitalism worked exceptionally well at generating wealth and pushing forward the productive forces. So exceptional, in fact, that Marx argued the productive forces were advanced enough that the working-class majority could meet its material needs far better by taking over the economy and running it in its own interests. In a word, socialism.
Marx didn’t underestimate the importance of ideas or human activity in this process. As Cohen points out, Marx’s historical materialism isn’t a “deterministic” theory incompatible with human free will or a theory that, by assigning primacy to purely material factors, understates the importance of “man’s mind” in driving forward historical progress. When Marx talks about the “forces of production,” he means two things — first, the nonhuman “means of production” and second, the “labor power” of human beings. The fish in the lake and the pole the fisherman uses to extract them from the lake are both part of the fisherman’s “means of production.”
How about labor power? This just means the capacity of humans to use the “means of production” to produce goods or services. When Marx talks about “the forces of production” expanding over time, he’s primarily talking about mental labor power — the increase in scientific knowledge of how to use what we’re given by nature to meet human wants and needs. “Man’s mind” is the whole thing.
Marx argued the productive forces were advanced enough that the working class could meet its material needs better by taking over the economy and running it in its own interests.
The charge of free-will-denying “determinism” is also confused on several levels. First, the question of whether any sort of “determinism” about causes and effects is incompatible with human free will is a deeply philosophically controversial question. It isn’t just a “Marxism problem.” Second, claims like “the relations of production cause the legal and political institutions of some society to be the way that they are” don’t have to be interpreted in a deterministic way. Often, claims like “X causes Y” are about probability rather than necessity.
Finally, as Cohen notes in a footnote later in the book, even “in so far as the course of future history and, more particularly, the future socialist revolution, are inevitable, they are inevitable not in spite of what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound to do.”
Of course, not everyone is equally rational. But that is as much an objection to the claim that the supply and demand curves in Econ 101 textbooks are predictive as is to the suggestion that Marxist claims about people acting on their class interests are predictive.

How Do Societies Change?
By the time the second edition of Karl Marx’s Theory of History came out in 2000, the Soviet Union’s collapse had become the ready example for Marxism’s critics. As Cohen points out, though, this turn of events was actually a dramatic confirmation of a key tenet of historical materialism. After all, historical materialism holds that the form of society possible at any stage of history is a function of the level of development of its productive forces.
While Marxists would certainly have been happier to see an economically viable and politically attractive form of socialism arise in the USSR rather than to see our theory confirmed, the fact is that the theory would have been falsified if Joseph Stalin had been right and it really was possible to bring into being a flourishing postcapitalist order in a society that was still half-feudal in 1917. Vladimir Lenin was enough of an orthodox Marxist to know this — he said many times that the experiment could only flourish if revolution spread to the developed West.
Where does that leave us today?
Marx and Friedrich Engels famously say in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle,” but that by itself doesn’t tell us when and why there are breakthroughs in struggle or why an old system is overturned and a new one is born.
Marx’s answer is that when an old system “fetters” the further development of the productive forces the old system is defeated and the new one is born. But this is confusing. If the idea is that later technological progress explains earlier shifts in social systems, that sounds suspiciously like effects are being used to explain causes instead of the other way around.
In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen tells what he calls a “somewhat naive story” to illustrate one way this can work. It’s worth quoting at length:
Imagine a productively weak society whose members live in equality at subsistence level, and who wish they were better off. One of them suspects that the introduction of treadmills on the bank of the river on which they rely for irrigation would increase the flow of water onto the land, raise its yield, and thus enhance their welfare. He puts his idea to the community, who are impressed, and a group is forthwith commissioned to design and construct the devices. These are then installed at suitable points on the river bank, and tested, all members of the community participating in the test. They correctly perceive the benefits regular use of the treadmills would bring, and there is a request for volunteers to man them. But none come forward: it is a task relished by no one in the society. Nor is it feasible, for reasons we allow the reader to conjecture, for everyone to contribute just some of his time to treadmilling. Many full-time treaders are needed. It is agreed to select them by lot, and this is done. So rebarbative is the job, however, that it becomes apparent it will not be efficiently performed without severe supervision. For that role there is no dearth of applicants, and a number are, by some means, selected for it. Gradually a class structure (supervisors, farmers, treaders) rises in what was an egalitarian community. One may now say that the relations have changed because otherwise the forces would not have progressed, and that the forces do progress because the relations have changed. But it is clear, despite the second part of the last sentence, that the change in the forces is more basic than the change in relations: the relations change because the new relations facilitate productive progress.
Cohen also draws on real-world examples like the consolidation of small workshops into modern factories that precapitalist guild rules prohibited. The fact that these larger factories were more productively efficient can explain the consolidation — and thus the overthrow of guild rules that stood in their way.
Is this some “shell-game” explanation of causes by reference to effects? Not really. There are, Cohen writes, multiple ways that the productive advantages of larger factories can explain the consolidation. One is that employers often recognize the productive advantages themselves and consolidate because of that recognition. A second “Darwinian” explanation is that, whatever initially motivates consolidations, larger factories are better able to survive in the long term than their smaller competitors. Either way, the feature that brings about the functional advantage is “selected” because it has that functional advantage; the order of cause and effect is the “right way” around.

Cohen’s Critics
So far, so good. But many of Cohen’s critics have pointed out in the decades since the book’s release that the idea of “fettering” seems more than a little imprecise. Does a new social system have to be more conducive to further development of the productive forces than any alternative possible at that stage of history or just more conducive to further development than the system it replaces? If the former, what does “further development” even mean here? Technological innovation? The more widespread implementation of new technology? And is the case for socialism over capitalism really that it’s going to be better for rapid development than capitalism — the most absurdly development-happy system that’s ever existed — or just that a socialist system could guide that development in ways more amenable to human flourishing?
Whatever the answer to these questions, there’s surely some sense in which it’s unrealistic to think one system can replace another as the globally dominant economic order unless a sufficiently large number of people know that they’ll have better lives under the new system than they had under the new ones. And the “exchanges with nature” by which people meet their material needs have to have improved in some way for that to be true — whether we’re talking about improvements in productive technology per se or “just” their redeployment to serve more people’s needs. But Cohen’s treatment of Marxist concepts is so intricately precise that the publication of his book inspired a new generation of critics to criticize him with equal precision, and the new chapters in his 2000 edition grappling with problems like the imprecision of the “fettering” analogy show there’s plenty of work left to be done.
Cohen’s treatment of Marxist concepts is so intricately precise that his book inspired a new generation of critics to criticize him with equal precision.
To his credit, Cohen subjected at least one aspect of the classical Marxist understanding of history to a searching critique in his book If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?
Cohen noted that one reason the problem of how to make sense of “fettering” — and in particular whether a new society would have to be not only more “unfettered” than the one it replaced but more “unfettered” than any of the other possible alternatives — didn’t preoccupy Marx and Engels is that they tended not to think of a number of different possible new societies potentially replacing the old one but of a single new society “gestating in the womb” of the old. This metaphor, while it has its roots in G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy, led many Marxists to neglect the hard business of thinking about what a socialist society should look like — a theoretical defect that arguably had terrible consequences during the state socialist experiments of the twentieth century. Taking that task seriously will involve both solving complicated problems about economic engineering and institution building and grappling with contentious normative questions — as radicals explore which values should guide the construction of the new institutions.
The second of those tasks is the one that took up most of Cohen’s energy in the final decades of his life. He spent his time arguing on the one hand with libertarians, who opposed any redistribution of wealth on principle, and on the other hand with Rawlsian liberals, whose conception of distributive justice Cohen believed to be insufficiently egalitarian. This is the only part of his body of work that many philosophers are familiar with — and to be clear I find much of that work brilliant.
But I sometimes find myself wishing that Karl Marx’s Theory of History would get more love from contemporary socialist writers and thinkers, given its refreshing combination of analytical rigor and engagement with questions of historical change that lie at the heart of the socialist project.

Why Socialists Should Read G. A. Cohen
At one point in Karl Marx’s Theory of History, Cohen differentiates three historical classes of “subordinate producers” according to their relationship to their labor power and the means of production. Slaves own neither. Serfs who hold some ownership rights over their plots of land but are legally obliged to labor for their lord own some but not all their labor power and their means of production. Proletarians own all their labor power but none of their means of production. Cohen says we should say, roughly, that proletarians are subordinated to capitalists because to make a living they must combine the labor power they own with the means of production owned by the capitalists.
But wait. Cohen considers two examples, both involving garment factories, that are recognizably capitalist employment relations but depart from this description. The first involves a worker at a dress factory named Schwartz who cuts cloth into patterns. He does some of this using a machine owned by his boss, a machine that Schwartz couldn’t afford to supply for himself. The rest of it he does by using a pair of scissors he brings to the factory from home.
The second and more serious counterexample involves Schwartz’s brother-in-law, Weiss, whose work at a coat factory could be completed entirely on a machine that belongs to him. His employer demands, as a condition of employment, that Weiss buy his own machine and bring it into the factory. Perhaps the only reason Weiss labors for the boss at all rather than striking out on his own as a small businessman is that he lacks his boss’s business connections.
He could easily have been writing about an Uber driver’s responsibility to buy a car that would’ve been provided to her if she’d been a unionized cab driver instead.
Considering these examples leads Cohen to clarify that what makes the proletarian a proletarian is not the lack of ownership of means of production but the lack of ownership of means of production that he’s able to make a living from without working for a capitalist.
What always strikes me most about this passage is the way Cohen describes Weiss’s situation. If it’s true, Cohen writes, that workers have nothing to lose but their chains, then the sewing machine Weiss is forced to buy and maintain for himself “is one of those chains.”
Cohen wrote that line in a time and place where strong unions and a strong welfare state felt like permanent features of advanced capitalist societies. Cohen himself made several comments in different places that indicate he badly underestimated capitalists’ ability to roll back this progress. Nevertheless, his description perfectly encapsulates a familiar feature of the hellscape of neoliberal precarity that’s emerged in the decades since. He could easily have been writing about an Uber driver’s financial responsibility to buy and maintain a car that would have been provided to her if she’d been a unionized cab driver instead.
This kind of insight, both moral and descriptive, is exactly what makes Karl Marx’s Theory of History a useful book for anyone who wants to think carefully about how history progresses — a subject of enduring relevance to anyone who wants to lose their chains.

As America slouches toward the midterm elections, you need an economic message that celebrates your accomplishments to date – job creation and higher wages – yet also takes aim at the major abuses of economic power that remain in the system, fueling inflation and widening inequality.

You should put these 10 indisputable facts center stage:

1. Corporate profits are at a 70-year high. Yet corporations are raising their prices.

2. They are not raising prices because of the increasing costs of supplies and components and of labor – which are real but expected when an economy goes suddenly from a pandemically induced deep freeze due to meeting the soaring demands of consumers who are emerging from the pandemic. Corporations enjoying record profits in a healthy competitive economy would absorb these costs.

3. Instead, they’re passing these costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices. In many cases they’re raising prices higher than those cost increases, using the cover of inflation to increase their profit margins even more.

4. They’re doing so because they face little or no competition. If markets were competitive, companies would keep their prices down to prevent competitors from grabbing away customers. As the White House National Economic Council put it in a December report: “Businesses that face meaningful competition can’t [maintain high profit margins and pass on higher costs to consumers], because they would lose business to a competitor that did not hike its margins.”

5. Since the 1980s, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated. This concentration gives corporations the power to raise prices because it makes it easy for them to informally coordinate price increases with the handful of other companies in their same industry – without risking the possibility of losing customers, who have no other choice.

6. Corporations are using these near-record profits to boost share prices by buying back a record amount of their own shares of stock. (Buybacks reduce a company’s shares outstanding, pushing its profit-per-share figure higher.) Stock buybacks hit a new record last year. So far this year they’re on track to exceed that record. In the first two months of 2022, S&P 500 companies have disclosed authorizations to buy back $238bn in stock – a record pace, according to Goldman Sachs, which expects $1tn of buybacks this year – an all-time high.

Chevron engaged in $1.4bn in stock buybacks and spent $500m more on shareholder dividends than it did in 2020. This year, the oil giants are planning to buy back at least $22bn more.

7. Most American workers have barely had a wage increase in 40 years (adjusted for inflation). Although corporations have recently given out wage increases in response to the post-pandemic surge in demand, these wage increases have been almost completely eroded by price increases.

Corporations are handing out wage increases to attract or keep workers with one hand, and then eliminating those wage increases by raising prices with the other. When corporations are enjoying near-record profits, we would expect corporations to pay the higher wages out of their profits rather than to pass them on to consumers in higher prices. But they are not. The labor market is not “unhealthily” tight, as Jerome Powell asserts; corporations are unhealthily fat. Workers do not have too much power; corporations do.

8. As a result of all this, income and wealth are being redistributed upward from average working people (many of whom live from paycheck to paycheck) to CEOs and shareholders, including the wealthiest people in America. Billionaires have become $1.7tn richer during the pandemic. CEO pay (based largely on stock values) is now at a record 350 to 1 ratio relative to median pay.

9. Wealthy Americas are now paying a lower tax rate than the working class. Some are paying no taxes at all.

10. Big corporations have accumulated a substantial amount of political power, with which they’ve beaten back lower drug prices, prevented higher corporate taxes, and amassed unprecedented corporate welfare.

In short, although the American economy is rebounding nicely from recession, the growing imbalance of economic power is bad for most Americans and for the economy as a whole. It must be addressed through (a) tougher antitrust enforcement, (b) a temporary windfall profits tax, (c) higher taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, (d) a ban on corporate buybacks, (e) stronger unions, and (f) campaign finance reform to get big money out of politics.

You have a critical opportunity to reframe the national conversation as it should be framed – around these worsening abuses of economic power by large corporations and the super-rich. Republicans have left themselves vulnerable because they have no response to this. They believe their “culture wars” will distract the public from what’s going on.

This is not and should not be a partisan issue. Average working Americans – many of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 – are being shafted.

W ATCHING THE votes come in, Madeline Wesley, treasurer of the Amazon Labour Union ( ALU ), becomes emotional. “We really had nothing,” she says between sobs. By a margin of ten percentage points, staff at JFK 8, an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York, opted to form the firm’s first American union. The ALU hopes it will not be the last. “I expect Amazon unions will be popping up all over now,” Ms Wesley adds, now smiling.

Plenty look set to try. Organisers say that since the result on April 1st, workers in more than 50 Amazon buildings have been in touch. The ALU is optimistic about a vote at another Staten Island warehouse later this month and the Teamsters union, one of America’s largest, has promised to try to organise other Amazon staff. Success can be contagious. A first Starbucks café in America unionised in December; now almost 200 have filed for votes. National conditions seem favourable: a pro-union president is in the White House, the labour market is tight and some 60% of Americans say that the reduction in union representation has been bad for workers.

Not so fast. The ALU gained traction as a local, worker-led movement, (unlike the less successful big-labour-led drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama). Asked why he backed the union despite being happy with his pay and breaks, one Amazon worker replied: “I know the guy.” That may be hard to replicate. It was not “a traditional union campaign where an outside organisation came in and told the workers what was best for them”, says Julian Mitchell-Israel, an ALU activist.

Amazon itself opposes unionisation, arguing that “having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees”. At Staten Island, it made that case in mandatory meetings and in posters across the warehouse. Nationally, it spent over $4m last year on anti-union consultants.

“Amazon is going to keep fighting as hard as they possibly can,” says Adam Seth Litwin of Cornell University’s labour-relations school. One option is to draw out negotiations at JFK 8: “delays around the first contract have become “ de rigueur strategy for businesses in the situation that Amazon is in now,” Mr Litwin explains. Less than half of union certifications result in a contract. Without one, firms can push for decertification, and copycat campaigns can lose their lustre.

Private-sector union membership has decreased in America for decades. Defying that trend will be hard: those nearly 200 unionisation elections at Starbucks are just a sliver of the 9,000 company-owned cafés. In his final message to shareholders Amazon’s ex-boss, Jeff Bezos, pledged to make it “Earth’s Best Employer”. It is unlikely to become its most unionised. ■

I N 2013 A Lebanese businessman sent an email to Ndambi Guebuza, the son of Armando Guebuza, who was then president of Mozambique. It promised that a chartered flight would soon leave France for Maputo, the Mozambican capital, carrying an unusual cargo: 7,427 bottles of wine. What did the email mean? When the public prosecutor asked about it at an ongoing trial, the younger Mr Guebuza shot back. “Do you, madam, want some wine?” he fumed, before alleging that the whole process is a political stitch-up.

Ndambi Guebuza is one of 19 high-profile defendants on trial in Maputo on charges including bribery, embezzlement and money-laundering (which they deny). The accusations relate to a series of deals in 2013 and 2014 which saw state-backed firms borrow more than $2bn, mostly in secret. Although the money was earmarked for fishing boats (pictured) and maritime security, American regulators say that at least $200m was pocketed by Mozambican officials and bankers from Credit Suisse, which helped arrange the deals. The revelation of the hidden debts in 2016 pushed the country into default and sparked court cases on three continents.

One of those cases is the trial in Maputo, held in a marquee at a maximum-security prison and broadcast on national television. The hearing wrapped up last month, with a verdict expected in August. Between legal minutiae, it offered a lurid glimpse into the lives of Mozambique’s super-rich, and allegations of how they splurged ill-gotten gains on posh flats and fleets of sports cars.

In February the former president, Mr Guebuza, took the stand—as a witness, not a defendant—and used the opportunity to make a subtle dig at his successor, Filipe Nyusi. It was “strange”, he said, that Mr Nyusi claimed to know nothing about how the corrupt deals were made, despite having been defence minister at the time. That is a sign of how politicised the issue has become, as rival factions jostle for influence within Frelimo, the ruling party. “Those groups are fighting to control the party to be able to control the state and take advantage of it,” says Edson Cortez, the director of the Centre for Public Integrity ( CIP ), a Mozambican NGO .

Despite its internal ructions, Frelimo retains a strong grip on power and does not want its dirty laundry aired in public. Mozambique and America are still tussling over who can extradite Manuel Chang, the former finance minister who signed off the deals and currently sits in a South African jail. Activists say he would be more likely to spill the beans in an American courtroom than in his home country.

It would not be the first American intervention. Three former Credit Suisse bankers who cooked up the loans have pleaded guilty to related charges in a New York courtroom. Last October the bank itself agreed to pay $475m to regulators in America and Britain for misleading investors and violating anti-corruption laws. The ruling said that the bank had ignored warning signs, including a due-diligence report which described the contractor who received the money as “an expert in kickbacks, bribery and corruption”. VTB , a Russian bank which was also involved in the deals, agreed to pay $6m to regulators.

None of that money has gone to the people of Mozambique, although Credit Suisse has said it will waive $200m of the unpaid debt that it is trying to recover. That would be scant compensation for the crisis that the scandal caused. When the debts were revealed in 2016, donors halted aid to the government, the IMF packed its bags, the currency collapsed and growth slowed. A study by CIP and Chr. Michelsen Institute, a Norwegian research outfit, estimated that if these indirect effects are included, then the cumulative costs of the loans add up to nearly $11bn, almost as much as Mozambique’s GDP in 2016.

The debt itself is still outstanding. Some of it is now in the hands of investors who were not involved in corruption. Fiona Huntriss of Pallas Partners, a lawyer for some of them, says that “innocent lenders” should be paid “what is long overdue to them”. The government of Mozambique counters that it should not have to pay because the state guarantees for the debts were issued illegally. That question will be settled in yet another court case, due to start in London next year, in which virtually every party to the matter is suing everyone else. The legal proceedings may rumble on, but justice remains elusive. ■

T HE GOLD-LEAF lanterns on the railings around the tomb are modelled on those that embellish Buckingham Palace. The crenellated walls glimmer with Italy’s finest marble. A huge chandelier within hails from Egypt. The shrine to Omar al-Mukh tar, Libya’s anti-colonial scholar-cum-warrior hero, has been handsomely restored, two decades after a jealous Muammar Qaddafi dumped it in the desert.

But peer out through its arched windows and all you see is the surrounding ruin of Benghazi, Libya’s second city. Much of what was once a charming Italian city, with cafés, art-deco cinema and royal palace, is a smashed ghost town. The courthouse where Libyans rose up against Qaddafi in 2011 is awash with sewage. “Lost homeland”, reads a graffito on a chipped colonnade adorning the old Bank of Rome. Services have collapsed. Rubbish is piled up in the streets. Waste flows into the sea. Schools recently had to close after they were flooded in a storm. War profiteers and smugglers have moved in.

Like those other fine cities of the Middle East—Aleppo, Mosul and Raqqa—Benghazi was sacked in order to wrest it from Islamist rule. For three years Khalifa al-Haftar, a former general turned warlord who commands the self-styled Libyan National Army ( LNA ), shelled this capital of Libya’s eastern region (once called Cyrenaica) from land, sea and air, until it fell to him in late 2017. Egypt, France, Russia and the United Arab Emirates all lent him a hand, then left him to run it as his base.

The UN has proposed no recovery plan for Benghazi. On March 21st the Italian government hosted an architectural jamboree, which many participants attended by video, calling for the city’s regeneration. However, Libya’s power brokers in Tripoli, the country’s capital in the west, are preoccupied with arguing over oil revenues and who should be prime minister. “There’s no real will to rebuild our city,” laments Atif al-Hasiya, a Benghazi engineer.

Mr Haftar nonetheless promotes himself as its protector. “With one hand we build, with the other fight terror,” reads a slogan on a sheet flapping in the wind along the corniche. Locals speak only of the terror, inflicted mainly by Mr Haftar’s men, and say he squanders funds on military ventures and salaries for his fighters, who claim to number 127,000. In 2018 the UN reported that a brigade led by one of his sons had raided the city’s central bank, stealing $300m in local and foreign currency. “His sons are worse than Qaddafi’s,” says a Benghazi businessman in exile.

Journalists in the city are monitored and muzzled. Mr Haftar’s critics are liable to disappear. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2020 that he hoards a stash of gold, originally from Venezuela. Since he reopened Benghazi’s port in 2018, it has become an entrepot for captagon, an amphetamine manufactured in Syria. “Drugs is Benghazi’s main growth business,” says a local academic. Dealers are said to launder money in fancy clothes shops and restaurants along Venice Street. Jewellers catering to gangsters are thriving.

Benghazi’s people had hoped that Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, Libya’s beleaguered prime minister based in Tripoli, would set about rebuilding Benghazi. Last May he unveiled a reconstruction package that included the city. He was likened by optimists to Rafiq al-Hariri, the Lebanese tycoon who used his own company to rebuild Beirut after its civil war (before he was assassinated). Various unfinished projects, such as an Olympic stadium that Mr Dbeibeh had overseen under Qaddafi, might possibly be completed. But Mr Haftar’s gunmen barred Mr Dbeibeh from visiting their stronghold, and the funds never materialised. A general election scheduled for December raised hopes of breaking the deadlock but has been repeatedly put off. Meanwhile Benghazi moulders away. ■

L IFE IN EGYPT gets more expensive by the month. Sitting in a café on a shady street, Mahmoud, a software developer, runs through the new taxes and fees. A value-added tax ( VAT ) was introduced at 13% in 2016, then hiked to 14%. A few years ago the government added a tax of ten Egyptian pounds ($0.55) to Mahmoud’s monthly phone bill. His cigarettes go up a pound or two whenever the treasury needs a puff of extra cash. Last time he got a new driving licence, it cost 15 times more than before.

The one tax that has not soared is the one on his most valuable investment, a rental property he bought in 2016. He says it has appreciated by $100,000 or so, a 25% increase. But his annual property-tax bill has remained almost flat, at less than 1% of the apartment’s value.

Arab countries have long lagged in collecting taxes. In 2015 the IMF estimated they raised the equivalent of 13% of non-oil GDP , compared with 17% in other emerging markets. Christine Lagarde, then the fund’s director, told an audience in Abu Dhabi in 2016 that Arab states should “re-engineer their tax systems” and boost revenue.

They got the message—up to a point. Since 2016 five Arab countries have brought in VAT . Governments have imposed a spate of other levies on everything from mobile phones to cinema tickets and sought non-tax revenue by raising fees.

If they are getting better at taxing their citizens, though, they are often taxing the wrong ones, imposing a big burden on those who can least afford it. Consumption (or indirect) taxes, such as VAT , are highly efficient but generally regressive. They tax what you spend; the poor spend more of their income than the rich. In the OECD , a club of mostly rich countries, indirect taxes raise about one-third of tax revenue. In recent decades the proportion has fallen.

Arab states are going the opposite way (see chart). Egypt collected 46% of tax revenue from goods and services in the fiscal year 2020-21, up from 40% six years before. Indirect taxes are more than half the take in Tunisia, and three-quarters of it in Jordan, where they add up to 12-13% of GDP . The appeal is simple. Value-added taxes raise a lot of cash without distorting economies much (which is why European welfare states love them). And outside the Gulf, most Arab countries have only a patchy picture of what their citizens do and how much they earn, which makes it hard to levy direct taxes. Some two-thirds of Egyptians work off the books in informal jobs. Less than half of Tunisians have bank accounts. The last time Lebanon conducted a census was in the 1930s. Tax inspectors are often overworked and reliant on pen and paper rather than databases. Evasion is widespread. A report in 2018 by Bank Audi, a Lebanese lender, estimated that it cost the exchequer $5bn a year (10% of GDP at the time). Authorities often blame this, wrongly, on the informal sector. Most Egyptians labouring in the black market should pay no income tax or a top marginal rate of just 2.5%. Even if the taxman found them all, the extra revenue would be meagre. The bigger problem is a tax system skewed towards the rich. Egypt’s corporate-tax rate of 22.5% is five points below the African average, while its top income-tax bracket of 25% ranks as one of the continent’s lowest. It also has no inheritance tax. Many rich and middle-class Arabs prefer buying property to shares, seeing it as safer and more lucrative. Yet governments collect little property tax. Jordan’s finance ministry estimates that it brought in just 115m dinars ($162m) from property last year, just 1% of tax revenue.

Some countries assess property tax on rental rates rather than the value of the building, which leads to puny bills. Egypt calculates these only once every five years, with increases capped at 30% per assessment, even though property values in some parts of Cairo rise by as much as 25% a year. Rich Egyptians who play the stockmarket are subject to a 10% capital-gains tax. But if they invest that money in property, the tax rate can drop below 1%.

Oil-exporting Gulf states do not levy income tax, fearing it would upset citizens and make their countries less attractive to migrants. Corporate-tax rates are low, ranging from zero to 15%. Instead they, too, lean on consumption taxes. Saudi Arabia introduced a 5% VAT in 2018, then tripled it in 2020 (a move the IMF advised against). It will account for 79% of tax revenue this year. Poorer Saudis will be hit hardest. Rich ones tend to do their big-ticket spending outside the kingdom.

Instead of making tax systems more progressive, Arab states are seeking ever more desperate ways to raise revenue. Last year a parliamentary committee in Egypt approved a 3% tax on purchases in duty-free stores (which may need a new name). Tunisia now charges people 100 millimes (3 cents) for paper receipts in shops. This is the fiscal equivalent of looking under the sofa cushions for spare change.

Such measures will not make much of a dent in deficits, but may anger citizens. In 2019 the Lebanese government tried to put a 20-cents-a-day tax on WhatsApp calls. It became a trigger for mass protests that brought the government down. ■

I VY ZELMAN knows a thing or two about the American housing market. She was rare among mainstream analysts in warning of trouble in 2005, a year before the bubble started to burst. In 2012, when many investors were reluctant to get back into property, she declared the sector had hit rock-bottom; prices have more than doubled since then. So it is worth paying attention to her latest pronouncements. “It’s euphoric right now,” she says. “There are definite signs of excess.”

But Ms Zelman, who has gone from investment banks to running an analysis firm, also knows the current rally is different from past ones, which suggests the downside may be less severe. Start with the evidence of potential danger. Prices have surged in America since early in the pandemic, much as they have throughout the rich world. In recent months they have risen by nearly 20% year on year, eclipsing their heady pace before the global financial crisis of 2007-09.

Far from deterring buyers, the rally has only fuelled FOMO —a fear of missing out. The typical home sold in March was on the market for just 38 days, down from a pre-pandemic norm of 67 for that time of year, according to Realtor.com, a listings website (see chart). And supply seems constrained. At the end of 2021 America had 726,000 vacant homes for sale; in the two decades before the pandemic that had never fallen below 1m.

One critical variable is now changing, and rapidly at that, owing to the monetary-policy decisions of the Federal Reserve. Although the Fed has raised short-term interest rates by only a quarter of a percentage point so far this year, mortgage rates have soared by more than 1.5 points as investors price in more tightening to come. Normally, such a steep increase would cool the housing market, making monthly payments increasingly unaffordable. Yet thus far the red-hot market has remained resistant to rising mortgage rates. Partly that is because so many Americans took advantage of the extremely low rates available during the pandemic to take out new financing. About 70% of homeowners now have mortgages with rates of less than 4%, according to Ms Zelman. In 2018 just about 40% enjoyed such low borrowing costs. Another explanation is the wealth, at least on paper, that Americans have accumulated thanks to rising asset prices over the past two years. About a quarter of existing-home sales are all-cash transactions now, compared with a fifth before the pandemic, according to the National Association of Realtors. Resistant to rising rates, though, does not mean impervious. At some point high borrowing costs will crimp demand. Moreover, the fundamentals underpinning the property rally—the limited supply of new homes—may prove to be, in part, an artefact of the pandemic. Nearly 1.6m homes are under construction nationwide, the most since the early 1970s. The problem is that the housing sector is, like other parts of the economy, suffering from labour shortages and gummed-up supply chains. It is taking longer than normal to complete construction. A resolution of these constraints could move America from a property shortage to a glut. Ms Zelman is far from alone this time in her warnings. On March 29th a group of researchers with the Dallas Fed noted that their “exuberance indicator”, a gauge to detect housing bubbles, was flashing red. “Our evidence points to abnormal US housing-market behaviour for the first time since the boom of the early 2000s,” they wrote. Few expect a repeat of the collapse that followed that boom. Homeowners have healthier balance-sheets than they did 15 years ago, and borrowing standards are stricter. Nevertheless, the housing market today provides just another illustration of the rocky path that the Fed must navigate, with rampant inflation on one side and a bust on the other. ■

I N THE EARLY evening of March 9th a supersonic cruise missile blasted skyward from a site in northern India. Within 200 seconds it had streaked across the Pakistani border. When it smacked to the ground just minutes later, it was 124km inside the territory of India’s nuclear-armed enemy. Luckily no one was harmed. Lucky, too, that Pakistan did not respond to the intrusion, except to ask an embarrassed India what had gone wrong.

The answer is still not clear, though India did say that there had been a regrettable mishap. What is known is that the wayward projectile was a BrahMos missile. Estimated to cost some $2m each and fired from land, sea or air, the nuclear-capable weapon is one of the most potent India possesses. It is also among the most visible products of a deep, decades-long partnership between state-run Indian and Russian arms-makers. Even its name, combining the Brahmaputra and Moskva rivers, suggests a sangam, or confluence, of interests.

This entanglement is one of the reasons why, seven weeks into Russia’s war on Ukraine, India finds itself in an uncomfortable position. The trouble is not just the sight of so much Russian armour, of exactly the sort that still makes up most of India’s own arsenal, getting smoked on the plains around the Dnieper. It is also the attachment of the Indian state to a historic partner that could do something so capricious, destructive and stupid as to try to devour Ukraine.

That has forced Indian diplomats into a marathon of fast talking and fancy footwork. The question they have struggled to answer is one that Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina and self-declared “friend of India”, pressed on Lloyd Austin, America’s defence secretary: how, he asked in a congressional hearing on April 5th, could a fellow democracy like India be persuaded to join its “natural allies” in the West?

Some Indian officials are blunt about the dilemma. “We know Putin is a shit,” says one lawmaker from the ruling party, before explaining that reliance on critical Russian spare parts and technology limits room for manoeuvre in Delhi. Defending India’s 11 successive abstentions in UN forums since the invasion—except for a strongly worded statement that “unequivocally condemned” the massacre of civilians in the suburbs of Kyiv—others speak of a long tradition of non-alignment. They note that just as leaders in Delhi declined to condemn Russia, they similarly abstained from blasting America when it stomped into Iraq. Some more boldly say that Ukraine is Europe’s problem, that India is simply asserting its own freedom to choose, and who says India belongs to the West anyway?

India’s Western suitors, keen not to alienate a country that is key to their own plans for managing China, have now muted their criticism of its position. Within India, the government’s prickly resistance to what is portrayed as Western high-handedness and hypocrisy has been popular. For the time being, then, it looks like India may pay little price for breaking with the democratic pack over Ukraine. Indeed, it may profit from buying discounted Russian oil.

Yet the self-congratulatory patter now echoing in Delhi’s corridors of power, about having told bossy Westerners where to get off, may be premature. The Ukraine crisis has sent fawning envoys scurrying to India’s capital. But it also reveals the country’s underlying weaknesses. Dependence on imported arms is one of these. The BrahMos project, for example, is 24 years old. Most of its inputs are now Indian-made, but Russian parts remain crucial.

Economic vulnerabilities, such as a near-total reliance on imported fossil fuels, have also come into sharp relief. Facing crucial state elections in February, India’s government held down petrol prices from mid-December to mid-March. Now soaring back up to Ukraine-boosted global levels, they are causing a painful shock. No wonder those Russian oil discounts look so tempting.

Josh Felman and Arvind Subramanian, a pair of economists, argue in a recent article that India’s rulers may be fooling themselves into believing that the country’s apparent military and economic heft translates to major-power status. In fact, an undersized domestic market for consumption and a small tax base with which to pay for defence upgrades mean that India remains a middling power in need of rapid, sustained economic growth. Their advice: India “must look past the illusion of size and reconcile itself with strategic realities”.

Joko Widodo is considering extending his term in office (Mar 26th)

A debate about nuclear weapons resurfaces in East Asia (Mar 19th)

E VIDENCE OF RUSSIAN war crimes litters Ukraine, but however much Ukrainians and some Russians wish differently, no one—least of all Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president—is likely to spend a single day in prison for them. Nonetheless, it is important that the atrocities are investigated. This is partly to commemorate those who were tortured, raped and murdered. It is also to expose the Kremlin’s lies to a world too inclined to let them pass. And public indictments of Russian troops would serve as a warning that may help deter the next round of killing.

Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said on April 3rd that 410 civilians had been killed around Kyiv. Many more bodies will be found. The Economist saw the corpse of the mayor of Motyzhyn, a suburb, blindfolded and shot, apparently by Russian forces, along with her family. We heard details of the murder of Ukrainian men in Bucha, ordered by a Russian commander. Human Rights Watch, a charity, reports that Russian soldiers threw a smoke grenade into a basement in Vorzel, near Irpin, then shot a woman and her child as they emerged.

Evidence like this has rightly caused a worldwide outcry. Ukraine’s president and Poland’s prime minister have accused Russia of genocide. Joe Biden, America’s president, has called the enormities in Bucha a war crime. And the UN secretary general asked for an investigation into the killings, alongside the several already under way.

Investigators are likely to find that Russian forces should be indicted, even if they have not killed on such a systematic scale as to have committed genocide. The Geneva Conventions, which Russia has signed, outlaw war crimes, including wilful killing, causing great suffering and targeting civilians. The murders in Bucha would count. So would the bombing of the Mariupol theatre on which the Russian word for children was written large enough for targeters to see from the sky. Russia’s invasion was itself a crime of aggression, as defined by the International Criminal Court ( ICC ), which tries individuals for actions under international law. And Russia’s vast and indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities is a crime against humanity, defined by the ICC as participation in and knowledge of “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”.

Unfortunately, indictments are unlikely to bring Russian war criminals to justice. Having been thrown out of the Council of Europe on March 16th after the invasion, Russia has started ignoring the European Court of Human Rights. Neither since 2016 has it recognised the ICC . That does not stop the ICC bringing a case or issuing arrest warrants against Russians, but enforcement needs the UN Security Council ( UNSC ) to refer Russia to the court—and, as a permanent member of the council, Russia could veto any such move. Russia does recognise the International Court of Justice, which hears disputes between governments, but that court also enforces its rulings in the UNSC .

One response is to send Ukraine more arms and impose more sanctions on Russia. America will ban new investment there. The European Union has proposed blocking its ships and lorries and banning imports of coal. The EU should do more, and limit purchases of oil and gas, too.

The other response is for the courts to press on with their investigations. Russian forces have a duty to protect Ukrainians, but they are treating them as if they are tools of war. Because the West, like Ukraine, rejects the Russian view that people are a means to an end, it should back the courts’ efforts to show that every life matters. The legal process will also shed light on Russia’s lies, to the shame of Mr Putin’s international backers. Even now the Kremlin has said the atrocities were faked, then used the UN to blame the Ukrainians and accuse them of being Nazis. And should those who wish Mr Putin’s regime to fall be satisfied, indictments may help ensure that war criminals lose power with him. Who knows, they may even end up in a jail cell. ■

W AR! FAMINE! Death! AIDS ! This is how Bill Hicks, a revered comedian who died in 1994, aged 32, riffed on the disorienting effect of watching cable news. Homelessness! Recession! Depression! The shocking headlines come at you relentlessly. But look out of the window and everything seems calm. The only sound is the chirping of crickets. You start to wonder, said Hicks: where is all this bad stuff happening?

A lot of bad stuff is happening just now, most notably a war in Europe. There is also inflation and growing fears of recession. Government bonds have just had their worst quarter for returns in ages. The Treasury yield-curve has inverted: the gap between yields on ten- and two-year bonds recently turned negative, an early warning of a downturn. The Federal Reserve is growing more hawkish. Yet stocks are surprisingly buoyant. Even after a few days fairly deep in red ink this week, the S & P 500 index of stocks is only 7% below its all-time high. This might look like a foolish stockmarket failing to take its cue from a more realistic bond market. But the truth is more complicated.

There are lots of plausible explanations for the resilience of stocks. An evergreen one is that there is no good alternative to owning them. Investors need to put money to work and American stocks are the least-worst option. Bonds are a snare. As long as inflation is expected to exceed interest rates, they are a sure-fire way to lose purchasing power. The yield on ten-year inflation-protected bonds is still negative even after the big repricing in bond markets. The earnings yield on equities is comfortably higher than this real bond yield. And stocks offer some protection against inflation in as much as corporate revenues are indexed to rising consumer prices.

In any event, the risk of recession in America is not immediate. The Fed has barely started to tighten monetary policy. Even a rapid series of interest-rate increases will take time to slow the economy. The negative spread between ten- and two-year yields is an early-warning signal, not a blaring alarm. On average, recession hits more than a year after this part of the yield curve inverts. In the meantime, the equity market typically goes up. Looked at in this light, the message to take is to hold stocks for now.

Underlying all these rationalisations is a sense that equity investors do not quite believe the Fed will follow through on all the interest-rate increases the bond market is pricing in. (Perhaps that is why the Fed’s rate-setters are sounding more and more hawkish in public.) One strain of this belief gives the Fed too much credit: it says it can easily conquer inflation without crashing the economy. Another strain gives it too little credit: this school doubts the Fed’s stomach to engineer a recession for the sake of price stability. If the result of such qualms is that inflation lingers above the Fed’s 2% target for longer, then so be it. That would be a bigger problem for bond returns than for equities.

It is possible to pick holes in all these arguments. But it is not quite right to conclude that the stockmarket has failed to adjust to new and harsher realities. The best-performing industries in the S & P 500 in the first quarter were those likely to be resilient to stagflation: energy, utilities and consumer staples. Meanwhile, technology stocks—flag-bearers of the “secular stagnation” era of low inflation and low interest rates—have had a brutal few months. The violence of this sector rotation away from tech has caused remarkably few ripples in the overall stockmarket. Nevertheless, equity investors were mindful of the world outside their window. The Bank of America’s global fund-manager survey suggests that investors reduced the weighting of technology stocks in their portfolios as far back as November, notes Kevin Russell of UBS O’Connor, the hedge-fund unit of the Swiss asset manager. The stockmarket has been ahead of the bond market on the risks of inflation, not behind it, he argues.

A big question is how far all financial markets are running behind the reality of inflation. The phase during which asset prices adjust to the prospects of tighter Fed policy does not seem to have quite run its course. And the pattern of the past two years is for one market phase to give way quickly to another. Everything is moving faster these days. But the relentlessness of scary financial headlines is not a confection of the 24-hour news cycle. Instead it is a reflection of a super-charged business cycle, which looks set—much like Bill Hicks—to burn brightly and die young.

The parallels between the nickel-trading fiasco and the LIBOR scandal (Mar 26th)

Can foreign-currency reserves be sanction-proofed? (Mar 19th)

E ACH NEW Russian atrocity in Ukraine prompts a question about China. Surely, foreign governments wonder, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, must distance himself from Vladimir Putin soon—if only to avoid harming his own national interests?

Alas, the history of outsiders telling leaders in Beijing how to judge China’s interests is long, and littered with disappointment. The Ukraine conflict is no exception. One reason for this involves geopolitics, and an argument made by Chinese officials and state media, as well as in special classes being organised by universities to give academics and students a “correct understanding” of the war. This says that Mr Putin attacked Ukraine in self-defence, after America encroached on Russia by pushing European nations into the NATO military alliance. No matter that this turns history on its head, and ignores the pleas of ex-Soviet satellite states to join NATO as a defence against Russian aggression. To China, NATO enlargement is a hostile act which calls to mind American alliance-building in Asia. That makes Russia an invaluable partner in a global contest against American bullying, which China can ill afford to abandon. By this cold logic, Ukraine’s agonies are a distraction.

A second explanation for China’s embrace of Russia is harder to see and hear, for it involves an indoctrination campaign within the Communist Party. This draws lessons from the “tragedy” of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. It takes its lead from Mr Xi, who casts the Soviet collapse as a crisis of lost communist faith. Several times during his first decade as leader, Mr Xi has condemned Soviet party leaders and officials for becoming a self-serving caste and for losing political control of the army. Above all, Mr Xi blames the Soviet collapse on “historical nihilism”, jargon for allowing ideological foes to dwell on dark episodes in history.

A new, 101-minute Chinese documentary made for internal party use, “Historical Nihilism and the Soviet Collapse, Reflections on 30 years since the Disintegration of the Soviet Party and Nation”, takes up that charge. Though not widely publicised, the film has been studied since late last year. There are brief reports of screenings all around China, in central and provincial government bodies but also at universities and law courts, municipal party committees and at least one local forestry bureau: evidence of a campaign ordered from the top. The film has not been released in cinemas or on television, but may be found online.

The film lionises Stalin. It blames famines that followed his collectivisation of agriculture on rich peasants hoarding grain. It denies that his political purges killed millions, though it admits to some excesses. The documentary calls it slander to accuse Adolf Hitler and Stalin of jointly launching the second world war (Poland, which the two tyrants invaded from the west and the east, might disagree). It expresses outrage at those who question whether some Soviet-era heroes and martyrs are inventions. And it accuses the West of scheming to undermine the Soviet Union for decades by handing Nobel prizes to dissenting writers, inviting reform-minded officials on academic exchanges and, by the late 1980s, supporting civil society and a free press. The film’s villains include Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, whose denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult is called “90% lies”. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is blamed for capitalist policies that—the film asserts—destroyed a planned economy that had outperformed America’s. There follow scenes of post-Soviet chaos crafted to appal watching officials, involving toppled communist memorials and mobs attacking former oppressors. Then comes the Putin era, with proud war veterans and goose-stepping troops in a sunlit Red Square, over the strains of Russia’s national anthem. Mr Putin is hailed for commissioning new, patriotic history books.

The film is revealingly odd. It reflects some obsessions of Putin-era Russia, from celebrating wartime victories to paranoia about Western infiltration. But its defence of collectivisation and of the planned economy would strike even Putin loyalists as bizarre: they believe in crony capitalism, not Marxism. Nor does the Kremlin propaganda machine expend energy downplaying Stalin’s cult of personality, or insisting that long-ago heroes literally existed. These choices are more Chinese than Russian. Time and again the film defends aspects of the Stalin era that bring to mind Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong. Mao set in motion rural famines and political purges that killed millions. His planned economy left the country bankrupt. He ordered the masses to learn from the faked or invented achievements of model communes and model heroes, often to disastrous effect. Meanwhile the film praises aspects of Mr Putin’s record that also apply to Mr Xi. China’s leader has had history textbooks rewritten and passed laws against disrespecting martyrs and heroes. Under Mr Xi, such values as freedom of speech are called tools of Western subversion, designed to topple the party through “peaceful evolution”.

Backing Russia’s war is good domestic politics

Above all, the film helps Mr Xi by suggesting that intensely personalised rule is no bad thing, at one point showing young Russians kissing images of Mr Putin. Later this year Mr Xi is expected to seek a third term as party chief, upending norms put in place after the horrors of Mao’s decades-long reign. Reports about screenings of the documentary end in strikingly similar ways: officials stress the importance of “correct” history, then conclude that what matters most is loyalty to the Communist Party of China and to Mr Xi.

There is a warning here for foreign governments wondering why Mr Xi will not repudiate Mr Putin’s crimes. China’s support for Russia is in part geopolitical, with Mr Putin seen as an irreplaceable comrade in a fight with America. But it involves domestic political calculations, too. Chinese ideologues see benefits in identifying Mr Xi’s brand of nationalism with Mr Putin’s. As long as that holds true, asking Mr Xi to disown Russia and side with the West is like asking him to break with himself. ■

China has honed its justifications for taking Russia’s side (Mar 26th)

Omicron is changing China’s covid strategy (Mar 19th)

W HEN LAYLA (not her real name), an Egyptian woman, got divorced in her mid-30s, her parents assumed she would move back home. But she wanted to share with female flatmates. “What are we, Americans?” her mother wailed. No woman in her family had ever lived on her own, widows included, or with independent female friends. For an unmarried woman in Egypt, fleeing the nest can be tricky. It helps if she is wily, or rich, or lives in a neighbourhood that caters to foreigners.

Persuading the family is usually the first hurdle. Arguing simply for freedom would be valiant but often unwise. Better to cite the bad traffic as your reason. That helped convince Layla’s mother, because they both tend to be car sick. Having her own flat would shorten her commute.

Finding an amenable landlord can be awkward, too. Few let to single women, since that may damage the building’s reputation or ruffle its other residents’ moral feathers. Some let on condition that a lone woman must have no visitors.

Once an unmarried woman clinches a rental deal, she must often fend off nosy neighbours and doormen, says Basmalah, another singleton, who also spoke under a false name. Boyfriends sometimes have to sneak in when the doorman is on a coffee break. Hers took the stairs, since the lift would give away the floor he was stopping at. Luckily one of her doormen mistook her for a foreigner: she did not disabuse him. They tend to wink at those loose-living Westerners.

Some women simply fork out for freedom. Landlords in affluent neighbourhoods are often more liberal. Bribing the doorman may be the way to keep him out of your hair. Paying for your own furniture can help, too. Egyptian police routinely question people living in rented flats in big cities. They keep a closer eye on furnished ones, says Layla, since journalists, political activists, foreigners and people selling sex are too transient to have their own furniture. Layla lugs around a futon: it buys a bit of privacy.

Single Egyptian women often help each other navigate their country’s mores. They have been known to have money sent to a stranger through social-media groups if she gets kicked out of her place and needs a hotel room. When a woman leaves a flat that permits singles, she may make sure that a friend is next in line. Basmalah knows the names of all the women who lived in her flat for the previous ten years. She and her best friend made a pact always to live in separate flats. If one gets chucked out, she will have a place to go to.

Editor’s note: On April 7th Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed as America’s 116th Supreme Court justice.

T HE CONSTITUTION directs the Senate to offer presidents “advice and consent” on their Supreme Court nominees. Alexander Hamilton imagined that inter-branch co-operation would be a “source of stability”. The Senate would put “an excellent check” on presidents and thwart the appointment of “unfit characters”.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Joe Biden’s pick to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer, who is retiring this summer, is on the brink of narrowly winning Senate confirmation. She will be the fourth person of colour and the first black woman to serve on the court. But Hamilton might have been puzzled had he witnessed the three-week process leading to this moment.

Few of the 47 Republicans vowing to oppose Ms Jackson’s nomination professed concerns about her character or her fitness. She won near-universal praise for her intellect and qualifications: two Harvard degrees and three judicial clerkships, including to Justice Breyer; two federal judgeships; and service as a federal public defender. Senators of both parties complimented her on her poise and charm.

For Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, Republicans who supported Ms Jackson’s ascent last June to the court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March was strong enough to win their votes again. Senator Mitt Romney, who opposed Ms Jackson last year but switched his vote, called her a “well-qualified jurist and a person of honour”. Ms Murkowski lamented “the corrosive politicisation of the review process”.

Republican criticism of Ms Jackson ranged from routine to caustic. Senator Thom Tillis said he worried the nominee would “legislate from the bench”, a sentiment repeated by many Republicans despite Ms Jackson’s vow to “stay in my lane” and avoid intruding on the duties of the legislative branch. Other charges included her refusal to answer questions about whether more seats should be added to the Supreme Court (a matter that rests in the hands of Congress, not the justices).

A few Republicans aimed to paint Ms Jackson as soft on crime by focusing on sentences she gave to people convicted of child-pornography offences as a district-court judge. Several conservative commentators dismissed these claims; one called them “meritless to the point of demagoguery”. That did not stop Senator Tom Cotton contrasting Ms Jackson with her namesake, Justice Robert Jackson, who went to Nuremberg to prosecute Nazi war criminals after the second world war. “This Judge Jackson”, Mr Cotton said, “may have gone there to defend them.”

Ms Jackson deflected questions about critical race theory, how to define a woman and where, on a ten-point scale, she rates her religiosity. She recounted that when she was a freshman walking through Harvard Yard another black woman, seeing self-doubt on her face, admonished her to “persevere”. Senator Cory Booker recited a poem by Maya Angelou where “bitter, twisted lies” could not keep a woman down. Ms Jackson showed patience and command—traits she may need to draw upon as one of three liberal justices on a court with six conservatives.

The hearings, however historic, cast a pall over Hamilton’s vision of fruitful cross-branch collaboration. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who voted for Ms Jackson last year, not only flipped his vote but gave a dose of realpolitik during the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on April 4th. If Republicans controlled the Senate (a distinct possibility after this year’s mid-terms), he said, Ms Jackson “would not have been before this committee”. ■

W HEN THE man who had paid Melissa Cook to bear three embryos, created from his sperm and the egg of an anonymous donor, informed her that he had run out of money and she would have to abort at least one, she refused. Her worry that he would not be able to look after the children grew when she learned that the surrogacy broker she had used in California had not properly checked the man’s ability to be a parent. She sued, arguing that the state law authorising surrogacy contracts was unconstitutional because it treats babies “as a commodity or as chattel”. This and successive attempts to retain her parental rights failed. When the triplets were born Ms Cook was not allowed to see them.

Six years later, having exhausted all legal avenues, including an attempt to get the case before the Supreme Court, Ms Cook remains consumed by anxiety about the children, all boys, according to Harold Cassidy, her lawyer. “The last we heard he had lost his house and they were moving from motel to motel,” he says. Robert Walmsley, the man’s lawyer, says that is not true and that arguments made in court filings that the man was unfit to be a parent because he was deaf and mute are “grossly offensive and discriminatory”.

The case illustrates the legal and ethical messes that can arise in a surrogacy market that is largely unregulated. America has no federal law governing such arrangements. Most states allow paid surrogacy; some regulate it loosely. National data are scarce. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says 18,400 babies were born to gestational surrogates (that is, using a donor egg) between 1999 and 2013. The fee paid to a surrogate can range from $30,000 to $60,000 out of a total cost—including in vitro fertilisation and fees for brokers and lawyers—of $110,000-180,000.

Three of the six states that once prohibited the business have legalised it: New Jersey in 2018, Washington in 2019 and New York in 2021. Poorer places have shut it down: Cambodia, India, Thailand and Nepal have outlawed cross-border surrogacy. Most European countries prohibit commercial surrogacy. Ukraine, where it is legal and a lot cheaper than in America, had become a big market, before Russia’s invasion. But those who can afford it have long favoured America, with its advanced medical technology, healthy supply of egg donors and aggressive lawyering.

Demand is rising across the rich world. Surrogacy brokers say they have observed the practice becoming more socially acceptable as celebrities have talked about using surrogates. Many agencies say gay couples constitute a growing proportion of their clients (lesbian couples who want children can mostly use sperm donors). That has influenced the lobbying of fertility-rights groups, which increasingly portray access to paid surrogacy as a gay-rights issue. On the other side of the argument, a belief that no one has a right to pay a woman to carry a baby has unified some conservatives and some feminists.

Mother and child reunion

Proponents of paid surrogacy point out that the market self-regulates in important ways. Unlike the business of buying sperm, it depends on the use of assisted reproductive technology, which is regulated federally. Brokers prefer surrogates with health insurance. Risa Levine, a lawyer who campaigns for better access to fertility treatments, says that if health insurance covered the cost of surrogacy it would bring new layers of protection and transparency. Some businesses now include some costs associated with surrogacy in benefits packages. Research suggests 15-20% of surrogates are army wives.

To help avoid situations in which a surrogate, overwhelmed by maternal feeling, decides she wants to keep a baby, many agencies stipulate she must already be a mother. Opponents say that neither this, nor the use of donor eggs, which is now what most surrogacy involves, circumvents a bond between mother and child.

Parental disputes about what should happen to an unborn baby, generally amid divorce, are more common than conflicts between parent and surrogate. New York’s law allows one parent to use embryos that both once wanted, without forcing the other to pay child support. If a baby is born with a physical defect that might have prompted an abortion had it been known about earlier, the state’s law forces parents to accept custody.

Yet laws and contracts cannot fix everything. A contract may stipulate that abortion decisions are up to the paying parents, but no court would force a woman to go through with one. Health is also a concern. More than half the babies born in America to gestational surrogates are twins or triplets, which can take a dangerous toll. “My body, my choice”, a refrain used by abortion-rights activists, is often cited by proponents of surrogacy to counter that worry. “Why do we fight so hard to allow women to choose not to have a baby but assume some aren’t equipped to decide to become a surrogate?” asks Ms Levine.

The greatest fears concern children. In some states with little regulation, lawyers turn to procedures used in adoption, including background checks on prospective parents. Britain, where unpaid surrogacy is allowed but contracts cannot be enforced, is considering mandatory checks on both surrogates and parents. That is unlikely to happen in America. It could be “discriminatory”, says Mr Walmsley, the lawyer. “Do we do background checks on everyone who has a child?” ■

D RIVE ANYWHERE in New Jersey and you will almost certainly see a bumper sticker or a car magnet bragging that “Jersey girls don’t pump gas”. For 73 years, New Jerseyans have relied on petrol-station attendants to fill their cars and lorries, rather than do it themselves. It is a point of pride for many to say they do not know how to pump petrol, as much a part of local identity as pork rolls or salt water taffy at the Jersey shore.

Might the Garden State join the other 49 and allow drivers to serve themselves? A combination of record fuel prices and a shortage of pump attendants means that changing the 1949 law is gaining support—including from the owners of the state’s petrol stations, who have historically opposed any reform. In the past high-school and college students were happy to take on attendant jobs, which require a day’s apprenticeship. But now Ebbie Ashabi, who owns two stations and delivers petrol to more than 50 others, says, “We cannot find people.”

Some station operators are paying $17 an hour, $4 more than the state’s minimum wage, and still are short-staffed. They have no choice but to shut down pumps for hours at a time, causing long queues at the ones that remain open.

Yet most New Jerseyans like the status quo. A recent Rutgers University poll showed that 73% do not want to pump petrol themselves. Some have antiquated notions about pumping being dangerous. Declan O’Scanlon, a state lawmaker who supports the reform, points out that: “It is absolutely true, Jersey girls are hotter than girls anywhere else. It is not true that they are more flammable.”

This reform would still leave the state with the most stringent full-service requirements in America. “We are proposing giving the consumer a choice,” says Sal Risalvato, head of an association representing New Jersey petrol stations. It would save 15 cents a gallon, he notes.

Phil Murphy, the governor, has called full-service “part of our fabric” and changing it “a political third rail in New Jersey”. Nicholas Scutari, president of the state Senate, is currently blocking the measure, but has said that if public sentiment changed, or if data showed that it would dramatically reduce costs, he would reconsider. Most New Jerseyans, pragmatic and sceptical by nature, would agree, says Micah Rasmussen of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, at Rider University. “We’re not giving away something for nothing.”

H UNGARY’S WAY of life is under attack, if you believe the ruling party. A Jewish billionaire plots to flood the country with a million Muslims. Perverts want to teach its children sexual deviance. The opposition are spoiling for war with Russia. The only way to stay safe is to back Viktor Orban, the prime minister. On April 3rd his party, Fidesz, won roughly half the vote and, thanks to gerrymandering, two-thirds of seats in parliament. Mr Orban called it a triumph for “our brand of Christian democratic, conservative, patriotic politics”. It was actually a victory for the paranoid style.

The threats the regime describes are largely imaginary. Hungarians are free to follow their traditions if they choose. George Soros has no power over their borders. There is no global conspiracy to corrupt Hungarian children. And the fact that the opposition do not share Mr Orban’s admiration for Vladimir Putin does not mean they are warmongers. No matter. Since Mr Orban took office in 2010 he has won control of nearly every significant media outlet. The opposition leader, Peter Marki-Zay, had only five minutes on public television during the campaign—barely enough to introduce himself, let alone dam a river of lies.

Mr Orban’s victory entrenches a corrupt and semi-authoritarian regime in the heart of the European Union, the world’s premier club of liberal democracies. Every year he is in office, he erodes more democratic checks and balances. Most of the opposition united against him during this election, worrying that if they did not stop him now, it would be too late. They failed.

Hungary has shown once again how well fearmongering works. Voters are never more attentive than when hearing about threats, even phoney ones. Because of social media, unscrupulous politicians can easily spread vivid, viral footage that appears to support their scare stories. If such types win power, they are likely to abuse it. Even in a liberal democracy, as Hungary once was, a determined would-be strongman can chip away at independent institutions, such as the media or the courts, until his voice drowns out every other.

Mr Putin’s regime is very different from Mr Orban’s, which does not kill people. Yet their styles overlap. The Kremlin also lies to scare voters into seeking the big man’s protection. Its mouthpieces tell Russians that they are about to be attacked by the West, which has been developing bioweapons in Ukraine, a country run by Nazis. None of this is true, but viewers of Russian TV hear little else. Many therefore rally around their president. Many believe the fresh lies with which their ruler reinforces his old ones, for example that the photos of Ukrainian civilians tied up and murdered in Bucha are a “staged provocation by the Kiev regime”. The Economist sent a reporter to check; he came back with his clothes stinking of death.

Thousands of kilometres away, in another very different country, a third leader is inventing threats as a way to cling to power. A no-confidence vote against Imran Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, was scheduled for April 3rd. The deputy speaker of parliament, an ally of the former cricket star, declared it a plot by the United States and cancelled it. Political chaos ensued. Mr Khan is said to have lost the support of Pakistan’s army, which often meddles in politics. He no doubt calculates that in a fresh election, which he has called, it will do him no harm if voters believe he stood up to a wicked American conspiracy. There is no evidence of one.

Starting on April 10th, under a political system unlike Hungary’s, Russia’s or Pakistan’s, French voters also face a choice between hope and fear. Marine Le Pen relies on exaggeration rather than lies, and tries to put a respectable face on fearmongering. She frets about France’s “submersion” by a flood of immigrants. She proposes to ban public wearing of the hijab and give French people priority over foreigners, even EU citizens, in jobs, housing and welfare. That would violate the principles of the EU . If she were a marginal figure it would not matter, but she may conceivably be the next president of France.

Mass-killing dictators like Mr Putin are rarer today than during the cold war. More common are leaders who win power by sowing fear and division. For all their many differences, such leaders all pose a threat to tolerance and decency. To defeat them, liberals must neither underestimate them, as they did Donald Trump in 2016, nor copy their tactics. In the long run, lies must be fought with truth, painstakingly researched and patiently expressed. It will be a long struggle. ■

T HE COMMUNIST PARTY has a way with words. Take the prosaic topic of food security. The pandemic, geopolitical tensions and heavy rainfall last year (which may lead to a wretched wheat crop) threaten China’s grain supply. Lately officials have been echoing the exhortation of President Xi Jinping that “the people’s rice bowl must be firmly held in their own hands at all times.” In non-party-speak, the government is thinking hard about how to keep the world’s most populous country fed.

Past leaders have at times struggled with this task. Tens of millions of Chinese perished in the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s ruinous policies in the late 1950s. Such a catastrophe is inconceivable today. But rows with Australia and Canada have made Chinese officials worry that the copious amounts of grain the two countries supply might one day be cut off. They note that soyabean imports from America plunged when Donald Trump launched his trade war. The conflict in Ukraine adds another layer of concern. Though China has tacitly backed Russia’s invasion (and abruptly lifted its ban on Russian wheat), the turmoil could mean less, or pricier, food in Chinese bowls. Last year Ukraine supplied China with 29% of its imported corn and 26% of its imported barley.

Global food prices were rising even before the war started to affect the supply of grains and fertiliser ingredients. The conflict scares China for another reason, too. The harsh sanctions imposed on Russia by Western countries make China nervous that it would face similar punishment were it to invade Taiwan. How, officials in Beijing ask, can China rely on such fickle foreigners for its basic needs?

The regime has dealt with these concerns in two important ways. It has stockpiled food—or, as critics say, hoarded it. Over the past five years China’s purchases of everything from soyabeans to pork have soared. America’s Department of Agriculture predicts that by the middle of this year China will hold 69% of the world’s maize (corn) reserves, 60% of its rice and 51% of its wheat. All this to feed 18% of the world’s population. Last year a Chinese official said that the country’s grain stocks were “historically high” and that it had enough wheat to meet demand for 18 months. China’s big purchases have pushed up global prices, say analysts.

In the longer term China may hope to diversify its suppliers. This will be difficult, says Zhang Hongzhou of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. So it is also trying to become self-sufficient. One benchmark calls for Chinese producers to meet 95% of the country’s demand for basic grains. On rice they pass. On sorghum and barley they fail. On maize and wheat they come close. Genetically modified crops would help. The government favours the technology, but it has been slow to introduce it because of public concern.

“Even if China decides it wants to be self-sufficient, it is now pretty much impossible,” says Dr Zhang. That may not stop it from trying, though. Mr Xi, a fervent nationalist, wants more of what China consumes to be made at home. Or, as he put it last year: “The rice bowl must mainly contain Chinese grain.” ■

O UTSIDE INDIA, the union of two entities that share a banal acronym in their name might seem an exercise in bureaucracy. But in the case of the acquisition of Housing Development Finance Corporation ( HDFC ) by HDFC Bank, announced on April 4th, that appearance would be deceptive. The size of the deal, at $60bn, is by far the biggest in India—triple the value of the next largest acquisition (Walmart’s purchase of Flipkart for $17bn in 2018). It is also the fourth-biggest banking transaction in the world ever, according to Refinitiv, a data provider. The resulting entity is estimated to have a market capitalisation of as much as $185bn, which would make it one of the world’s largest banks, after JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and three Chinese lenders—and well above Citigroup, HSBC and Standard Chartered, the three global banks that once stood at the pinnacle of Indian private-sector finance.

As important as the scale of the deal is what it says about the evolution of finance in India. Both institutions are among the most successful private-sector financial firms in a country where state-owned banks still loom large (local lenders were nationalised by Indira Gandhi, then India’s prime minister, in 1969). HDFC was founded in 1977 to provide basic housing finance. In the ensuing 45 years it has financed the purchase of 9m homes.

As restrictions on private-sector enterprise were gradually eased, HDFC ’s chairman, Deepak Parekh, adeptly launched other financial institutions. Insurance came in 2000, and asset management in 1999. But none was as important as HDFC Bank, which was created in 1994 when private banking licences began to be granted. HDFC kept a 26% stake in the new entity and required the bank to work through it when providing mortgages.

For years there were advantages in maintaining separate institutions. Banks had access to cheap funding through deposits, but paid for the privilege through onerous capital requirements and rules that made them devote 40% of credit to “priority” areas, such as farming. Non-bank finance firms were easier to create—thousands sprang up—and faced less-stringent lending or capital requirements, but lacked cheap overnight deposits.

It proved a messy, even dangerous development, as many went on a lending and borrowing binge. In 2018-19 several prominent non-banks, including IL & FS and two housing-finance firms, collapsed. There were fears of more failures to come, and funding dried up for many finance companies. That in turn led to a credit crunch.

Since then, regulatory changes have been quietly instituted, making life harder for the non-banks. The complex capital requirements imposed on them have been raised, for instance, to bring them largely in line with banks. That has made the operating restraints on finance companies somewhat bank-like, but without the benefits of cheap deposits. Jefferies, an investment bank, estimates HDFC pays 6% for its funding, compared with 3.7% for HDFC Bank. The spread for other finance companies is probably wider.

With the merger, that distinction will disappear, providing a meaningful cost saving and competitive advantage. Meanwhile, HDFC Bank, which has a sprawling network of 6,500 branches, ten times as many as its housing-finance cousin, will be able to offer mortgages to its customers directly—something that might have doubled its size had it been able to do so all along, said Sashidhar Jagdishan, the bank’s chief executive, on April 4th. Investors were unsurprisingly giddy at the prospect, with the share prices of both firms rising sharply. The mood in Mumbai’s stately Taj Hotel, where the merger was announced, was equally ebullient, as the city’s leading dealmakers speculated about what other changes might, once again, follow in HDFC ’s wake. ■

W HEN HE WAS first elected president of France in 2017, Emmanuel Macron immediately became a standard-bearer for radical centrism. He was young, clever and eminently reasonable. Also, it was a time of panic for liberals.

Britain had voted the previous year to leave the European Union. America had just elected Donald Trump. Across Europe populists were climbing in the polls, even in sober places like Sweden, Denmark and Germany. The far left were in power in Greece. Italy’s Northern League would soon enter government as half of an all-populist coalition that flirted with leaving the euro and rebuffed migrants rescued in the Mediterranean. All around the rich world politicians who promised to raise walls, ignore experts and turn back the clock to an imaginary golden age were in the ascendant. No wonder Mr Macron’s triumph in one of Europe’s most pivotal countries brought sighs of relief.

On April 10th Mr Macron will face voters once again. This time he is running not so much on his aspirations for the radical centre, but on his record as a nuts-and-bolts reformer, on his vision for world affairs, and as a leader who has reinvigorated French politics. In one sense, Mr Macron looks as if he will soon be able to say his record has been vindicated. Our election model gives him a 98% chance of making the second round on April 24th and a 78% chance of winning re-election (albeit a number that has recently been shrinking). Victory would be a remarkable achievement. Not since Charles de Gaulle in 1965 have the French re-elected a president who has a majority in the assembly. However, the closer you look, the more liberals around the world should see Mr Macron as a cautionary tale.

It is in economic policy that his centrism has been most successful. Before taking office in 2017, he argued that France should be open to globalisation, but try harder to equip its citizens with the skills they needed to adapt to change. His pro-market labour and regulatory reforms embodied this philosophy and they have led to an impressive rebound in employment and new-business creation. Rather than trying to preserve redundant jobs, he has boosted training and early education. At the European level, he was a driving force behind the establishment of the NGEU , a €750bn ($818bn) jointly guaranteed fund to help Europe’s weaker economies dig themselves out of the hole into which covid-19 had cast them.

He has, however, left plenty to do in a second term. Mr Macron has been too eager to reach for the levers of state control, whether capping electricity prices or meddling in the management of hypermarkets. For all his ENA -honed competence, he has failed to restore hope to France’s left-behind. Though his supporters would be quick to point out that covid got in the way, he has failed to overhaul the labyrinthine pensions system.

As an international statesman, Mr Macron correctly identified the threat to the Western order from a rising China and an irascible Russia. His solution was to attempt to boost the European Union—a forum where France’s voice counts—even if that undercut the institutions that bind the West together. Rather than confront Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, he argued for building bridges. He wanted to downplay NATO , which he accused of suffering “brain death”, by building up a European counterpart. Yet, as the war in Ukraine has shown, America’s role in defending Europe is indispensable. Although his efforts to defeat jihadists in the Sahel were courageous and laudable, they have yielded few results and are now unravelling. His dealings with a puerile post-Brexit Britain were petulant—and just what Britain’s unserious prime minister wanted.

It is in reinvigorating French politics that Mr Macron has most fallen short. In the election in 2017 he trounced Marine Le Pen, a nostalgic nationalist, by 66% to 34%. If she makes it to the second round, which is likely, the polls today say Mr Macron would win only narrowly, by 53% to 47%. The proportion of French who tell pollsters that they will vote for a candidate of the nationalist right or the anti-capitalist left in the first round is 51%, slightly more than voted that way in 2017.

In other words, five years of government by the world’s centrist standard-bearer has eroded support for the centre. There are many reasons for this. War and the pandemic have polarised politics, and not only in France. Mr Macron also sometimes repels voters with his aloof Jupiterian manner. Critics dub him “le président des riches”. The label sticks, partly because he cut France’s unworkable wealth tax, but mostly because his manner is that of the high-flying banker he once was. Mr Macron also faces a problem that responsible politicians always face when running against populists. He offers policies boringly grounded in reality. They say whatever will stir up voters, whether or not it is true.

The last reason is that Mr Macron has shown an illiberal neglect of institutions. Although the old politics had too many time-serving deputies, the parties of the centre-left and centre-right have become sideshows in presidential politics. True, responsibility for renewal lay with them, but he made their job harder by poaching their best talent. What is left is a contest between Mr Macron and a cacophony of extremists on the left and the right. As a result, the nearest thing France has to an opposition leader is Ms Le Pen—a historic admirer of Mr Putin who would flout EU rules by favouring French citizens for everything from housing to jobs. Her 21% chance of becoming president is alarmingly high.

In 2016 Mr Macron wrote: “If we don’t pull ourselves together in five years or ten years, [Ms Le Pen] will be in power.” What should centrists make of the worrying fact that, despite all he has done, his words are as true today as they were then?

One lesson is that complex trade-offs struggle to defeat slogans. Politics is so much about tribes and identity that material gains in terms of jobs and economic growth are necessary but not sufficient for re-election. Another is that one person cannot sustain the radical centre. That is not only because too much is riding on each re-election and on a successor turning up, but also because, as centrists know, individuals are flawed. French centrism and its Anglo-American liberal cousins are systems. They require constant renewal, through argument and competition. Mr Macron still has our vote, but he needs company. ■

For more coverage of the French election, visit our dedicated French election hub

S TERLING WAS once the world’s dominant currency. As the American dollar took its crown, it became second-tier but remained elite, and for decades was content with its lot. Yet lately the pound’s shine seems to have dulled again—so much so, says Kamal Sharma of Bank of America, that it has been “acting [like] emerging-market ( EM ) currencies”.

It is not that the pound has suddenly turned into the Turkish lira or the Argentine peso. It remains part of the G 5 group of heavily traded currencies, alongside the dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc. Yet it has proved more vulnerable to crises than the others.

A “flash crash” in October 2016 took its value from $1.26 to $1.14 in less than a minute. As covid-induced panic gripped markets in March 2020, it dropped by 12% against the dollar in the space of a fortnight (the euro fell by just 6%). When British petrol pumps ran dry last September, it plunged again and traders’ expectations of its future volatility soared. The Bank of England’s decision to raise interest rates earlier than most has since held it steadier, but some commentators remain adamant that the pound has not just decoupled from the currencies of other developed economies, but also joined the ranks of EM ones.

Such claims are usually made with the speaker’s tongue planted firmly in their cheek. EM currencies’ delightful attributes include capital controls (the Chinese yuan), hyperinflation (the Argentine peso) and “unorthodox” monetary policies (the Turkish lira). Liquidity crunches during market routs can subject sterling to harsh devaluations, explaining why it is not a haven like the dollar or the Swiss franc. But in normal times, call up a bank’s foreign-exchange ( FX ) trading desk asking to sell half a billion pounds and they won’t struggle to do so. That they might for an EM currency is the category’s distinguishing feature. In fact, sterling is notable for the opposite: it plays an oddly outsize role in FX markets. Britain accounts for 3% of the world’s GDP . Yet over the past 20 years its currency has consistently been involved in over a tenth of FX trades. So why do traders like sterling, if it is so brittle? You might trade a foreign currency if you want to buy goods or services from the country that issues it. Or you might sell something in exchange for it and want to convert the proceeds back to your currency. Neither explains sterling’s popularity: in 2019 Britain accounted for 3.8% of global goods imports and 2.6% of exports. Nor is it prominent in central-bank holdings (it makes up less than 5% of global reserves). The dollar dominates global payments, many governments borrow in it and some markets—commodities—are priced in it. The pound does none of these jobs. In fact it is a means to less grand aims: speculation and cross-border investment. People trade sterling to take a punt on its value, or because they are buying or selling British assets. In this it has more in common with another rich-world currency. Like sterling, the Australian dollar is issued by an open, developed economy that relies heavily on trade. Punters use both to bet on trends that are bigger than their issuers’ economic footprint: sterling is a proxy for risk appetite; the Aussie dollar for commodity prices. And they loom larger in FX markets than either their economies’ heft or trade volumes warrant. Australia makes up less than 2% of world GDP , yet its dollar is present in 6.8% of FX trades.

Five years after the Brexit vote, there is little sign of the Global Britain that voters were promised, and declaring sterling an EM currency suits the country’s fondness for declinism. But to understand the role of the pound today, look Down Under. ■

E ARLY LAST year Jordan’s security service uncovered a plot against the kingdom’s ruler, Abdullah, involving his half-brother, Saudi Arabia and some Bedouin tribes. William Burns, the CIA director and a former ambassador to Jordan, recognised the threat this represented to a crucial American ally. He hotfooted it to the White House to brief Joe Biden—“the first customer”, in CIA parlance—who immediately called King Abdullah to express his strong support. Once the crisis had passed, the Jordanian became the first Arab leader to visit Mr Biden.

The incident, little noticed at the time, was a foretaste of the attributes Mr Burns has brought to Langley. Decisive, discreet and experienced, the 66-year-old former career diplomat—often described as the most accomplished envoy of his generation—combines expertise with influence. Fluent in Russian and Arabic, he has served five presidents and had two postings in Moscow: the first amid the chaos of Boris Yeltsin’s leadership, the second, as ambassador, during Vladimir Putin’s early tenure, as America’s relations with Russia darkened. He knows the Russian leader well. And few advisers are as trusted by Mr Biden, whom the spy chief has briefed for almost three decades, including on the Iran nuclear deal, which he negotiated for Barack Obama in 2015.

America’s Putin-whisperer

He has duly taken a lead role in the Ukraine crisis. After American and British spies uncovered Russia’s war-planning last October, Mr Burns was dispatched to Moscow to warn Mr Putin that his intentions were clear and of the consequences they would invite. Perhaps Mr Putin, stewing in his dacha over covid-19 and his many grievances, would have spoken to no other emissary. Doubly convinced that war was likely, Mr Burns then helped lead a successful effort to convince sceptical European allies of Mr Putin’s plans by making the Anglo-American intelligence on them public. Rarely has America’s intelligence community, a scapegoat, rightly or wrongly, for many foreign-policy blunders over the decades, achieved such a clear win. It has been hailed as one of the most creative and successful uses of intelligence in many years.

Ukraine remains a disaster, of course. Yet at a time when American foreign policy is increasingly viewed through a distorting political lens—as either a great triumph or humiliating defeat—the administration’s response to the crisis is a reminder that clever diplomacy usually produces something in between. Diplomacy is an exercise, in Henry Kissinger’s careful phrase, which Mr Burns quotes admiringly, in “the patient accumulation of partial successes”. In the spy chief’s own contribution to that painstaking task, three qualities stand out.

One is the indispensability of deep subject knowledge. Most recent foreign-policy blunders—from the abrogation of the Iran deal by Donald Trump to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq—were made in profound ignorance of the world that America was presuming to shape. Mr Burns’s views on Russia, by contrast, are informed by a deep appreciation of it as well as understanding. As ambassador, he discussed Russian spirituality with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was grilled by the Duma foreign-affairs committee, spoke at the funeral of a journalist murdered on Mr Putin’s birthday and travelled the Russian land mass relentlessly. A one-man repository of America’s institutional knowledge of Russia, Mr Burns represents a tradition of serious American diplomacy that has been under appreciated by American policymakers. “There is simply no one who knows Russia better,” says Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser. It is no coincidence that one of Mr Burns’s first actions at the CIA was to launch a drive to recruit more Mandarin-speakers. He recognises that America, no longer the world’s policeman, cannot hope to shape a world it does not understand.

Another Burns attribute is his institutionalism. On Mr Trump’s first day in office the president delivered an unhinged speech to America’s spies while standing by the Memorial Wall in Langley that lists the CIA members who have died in service. He also ignored the intelligence briefings the agency prepared for him. Even if his spy chiefs, Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel, had been more competent and likeable they could not have prevented the demoralisation and attrition this caused. Mr Burns’s effort to fix the damage has involved repurposing as well as reassuring the CIA .

He has launched two new mission-centres, one covering China and the other technology and transnational threats such as climate change. The second, which is dedicated in part to keeping abreast of technological developments in the private sector, illustrates how rapid socioeconomic change is forcing intelligence agencies to expand into areas beyond espionage. The administration’s creative use of the intelligence on Ukraine is another example of that: it was informed by a desire to cut through the chaos of open-source intelligence reports as well as by fear of Russian disinformation. Agency sources point to internal contentment with that policy, notwithstanding the CIA ’s customary obsession with secrecy, as proof of its confidence in Mr Burns.

The third quality is collegiality, which is a common feature of Mr Biden’s foreign-policy team. Mr Sullivan and Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, seem similarly unencumbered by the petty jealousies that usually plague the cabinet. Mr Burns’s current prominence, including in roles that Mr Blinken might have been expected to perform, appears to have ruffled no feathers among his peers. It helps that he and they have worked together for years.

They also all appear to enjoy Mr Biden’s trust. Perhaps not since William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s spy chief, has a CIA director enjoyed such easy access to the president as the current one enjoys. The only significant criticism Mr Burns faces (which his memoir suggests he shares) is that it is in his careerist nature to be too accommodating to power. No one accuses Mr Burns of being egocentric. At a bleak time, Mr Biden is lucky to have him to hand. ■

American energy innovation’s big moment (Mar 26th)

The embarrassing Mrs Thomas (Mar 19th)

F IFTEEN YEARS ago Steve Jobs announced three new products: a music player, a mobile phone and an internet communicator. As Apple’s then-boss gave his presentation, his audience slowly realised that the three products were in fact a single gadget: the iPhone. Cue applause, cue Apple’s renaissance, and cue a new era in technology as the smartphone overtook the desktop PC as the centre of personal computing.

Today even Mr Jobs might be surprised by how many uses have been found for his versatile device. The small screen has come to handle banking, networking, map-reading, gaming and much more. Apple and other phonemakers have been enriched not only by hardware sales (worth $530bn last year) but by controlling what happens on the platform, from app stores (which raked in $135bn) to mobile ads (worth nearly $300bn).

Yet there is mounting evidence that the smartphone era is fading. Phone sales have been in gentle decline since 2016, as slower technological improvement has led to people upgrading less often. In rich countries, already saturated, the decline is especially marked. So tech innovators and investors are on the hunt for the next big thing, in hopes of winning not just a juicy hardware market but the potential to control the platform on which everything takes place.

The current big idea is virtual-reality ( VR ) headsets, spurred on in part by pandemic lockdowns. More promising, but further off, are glasses for experiencing augmented reality ( AR ), in which computer graphics are overlaid on the real world. Most of America’s big tech firms—among them Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft—as well as Asian giants like ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese owner) and Sony, are developing or already selling VR or AR headsets. What has so far been a niche market is about to become very crowded.

Any claim to have discovered the next big platform deserves caution. There have been plenty of false starts. Tablets were proclaimed as a rival to the smartphone, yet Apple still makes six times as much money selling iPhones as it does from iPads. Smart homes were seen as another possible mega-platform, but so far Alexa and her like serve mostly as jukeboxes and egg-timers. In-car tech is another platform that has proved useful and valuable, but hardly threatens to become the centre of anyone’s digital life. It is easy to imagine headsets, which are now used mostly for gaming, getting stuck in a similar niche.

What does seem to be under way, however, is a gradual movement by consumers towards a constellation of new wearable devices. These include voice-activated smart headphones, which can make calls, read messages and more, and smart watches, which handle scheduling, navigation and fitness. A growing array of health-tech gadgets measure everything from blood sugar to sleep patterns. In America unit sales of these “wearables” are already close to sales of smartphones.

These gadgets are more like accessories for the phone than replacements. But as computing shifts away from the pocket and towards wrists and ears, a growing share of consumers’ attention and spending is seeping away from the phone, too. As VR and AR glasses become lighter and cheaper, they could form the most powerful part of the wearable cluster.

People are not about to ditch their phones, any more than they threw out their laptops a decade ago. But as they interact more often with earphones or, soon, glasses, more of them will come to use their phone as a kind of back office, primarily there to provide processing muscle for other gadgets. As chips get even smaller, phones may not be needed even for that.

B REAKING FAST at sundown during Ramadan, which started on April 2nd, will not be the usual joyful family occasion for many Sudanese this year. The communal iftar will be blighted by the shortage, and spiralling cost, of wheat and other basics. Some expect this year’s Ramadan to explode into a confrontation between a frustrated, immiserated people and the country’s brutal military regime.

Few Sudanese can remember a time when their country was in such a bleak state. The currency is in free fall, having plunged by more than a quarter since October. Inflation is officially 260%, but probably even higher. Some 9m people (out of a population of about 44m) face “acute hunger”, says the UN ’s World Food Programme, and this number could double by September. Khartoum, the capital, is rocked by daily anti-regime protests and the often-violent response of the security forces, who have killed about 90 people over the past five months (see chart).

Blame this mess on a military coup led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in October, which reversed Sudan’s fragile transition to democracy. This had started three years ago after protesters took to the streets to eject Omar al-Bashir, a ruthless Islamist despot who had ruled the country for 30 years. As he was about to fall in April 2019, the army seized power, hoping to keep its grip on politics and the economy. But demonstrations and international pressure pushed the generals into a pact with the leaders of the protests, whereby they promised to hand control to civilians by 2021 ahead of elections that were due to take place this year.

Western donors and multilateral banks pledged tens of billions of dollars in assistance and debt relief to support the democratic transition. But the second coup in October has stopped much of that help from reaching Sudan, or delayed it. America, the World Bank and the IMF have halted the flow of at least $1.4bn in aid and assistance. The junta, running short of funds, has cut the once generous subsidies it lavished on wheat and fuel. But it is doing so without the Western aid-funded safety nets that were meant to cushion the blow to the country’s poor. They are furious; more protests are likely. All these woes have been compounded by Vladimir Putin’s war. More than 80% of Sudan’s wheat imports come from Russia and Ukraine, and the conflict has already interrupted supplies. Last month the local price of wheat rose above $550 a tonne, an increase of 180% compared with a year ago. The generals running the country, meanwhile, are desperate for cash to keep the government functioning. To plug holes in the budget they are increasing taxes on businesses. This looks like wishful thinking, since few businesses pay much tax at all, says Kholood Khair, an analyst in Khartoum; many are struggling to survive. More notably and more opaquely, the generals have gone begging for funds from countries that used to back the old regime. They may be hawking Sudan’s few remaining assets in exchange. General Burhan recently visited the United Arab Emirates ( UAE ) to get pledges of support for Sudan’s banks and currency, as well as investment in unspecified “development projects”. One of these may involve DP World, the UAE ’s port operator, which for years has had its eye on Sudan’s main container terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. But workers at the port bitterly oppose privatisation, fearing it may lead to job losses. An earlier attempt to bring in a Philippine port operator was scuppered after workers went on strike and paralysed the port, which handles 90% of Sudan’s inter national trade.

The generals are also cosying up to Russia. It has long coveted a naval base on the Red Sea and is also a keen buyer of Sudan’s gold. Both topics were probably on the agenda when the deputy head of Sudan’s junta, Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (better known as Hemedti), visited Russia on the eve of its invasion of Ukraine. Mr Dagalo heads the Rapid Support Forces ( RSF ), a vicious paramilitary outfit that controls many of Sudan’s illicit gold mines. He is thought to be the regime’s link to Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary outfit that Western diplomats accuse of involvement in the illicit gold mines. Sudan’s government denies it.

The timing of Mr Dagalo’s visit to Moscow cannot have been a coincidence. Russia needs more of Sudan’s gold to buttress its economy against Western sanctions. Gold accounts for about 40% of Sudan’s exports and is thought to be smuggled out of the country via the UAE and then on to Russia. This may help explain why both the UAE and Sudan abstained on the UN vote condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On his return from Moscow, Mr Dagalo said he had “no problem” with Russia opening a naval base in Sudan and that the country presents a “great opportunity for Russian investments”.

Yet such desperate dealmaking may not buy the regime stability. Mr Dagalo’s deepening ties to Russia are exacerbating tensions between him and General Burhan. And they are fuelling anger among the protesters, who believe Russia supported the coup last year.

The generals need to worry not only about protests in the capital but also about rising violence in the western region of Darfur, where government forces and the Janjaweed, a militia that is now part of the RSF , committed genocide in 2003. This week a suspected leader of the Janjaweed appeared at the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the court’s first case relating to conflict in Darfur. Yet the prospect of justice is not bringing peace. Last month at least 48 people were killed in clashes in the area.

O N APRIL 6TH 2016 a 38-year-old former investment banker who, two years before, had been appointed as a minister in France’s Socialist government announced that he wanted to change French politics. Standing in front of an audience in his home town of Amiens he declared that the old divisions between left and right were not relevant to 21st-century challenges. Matters such as climate change, or Europe, split the established mainstream parties as much as they held them together. It was time for a “political movement” that would be “neither on the left nor the right”.

The event was the talk of France’s political classes. But maybe only the man on the stage believed that the movement he was starting would go as far as it has. “At the time we didn’t even know if Emmanuel Macron would run for the presidency,” recalls Brigitte Fouré, the mayor of Amiens.

In May 2017 Mr Macron won his first ever elected office, leaving the established Gaullist and Socialist parties in his wake and squarely defeating Marine Le Pen of the National Front to become president of the republic. That June his movement, “La République en Marche”, took 53% of the seats in the National Assembly. Mr Macron had a legislature at his command.

By occupying a broad centrist space, and borrowing talent from both the Socialist Party and the Republicans, Mr Macron has accomplished much in the five years since then. As he returns to the polls—the first round of the presidential election is on April 10th, with the two candidates who get the most votes then pitted against each other in a run-off two weeks later—he has a lead that most other heads of large democracies could only dream of. He looks likely to be the first French president to win re-election while enjoying a majority in parliament since Charles de Gaulle in 1965. But the elections also show the troubling side of the bouleversement in which Mr Macron upended the party system: the resilience of the extremes.

One of the remarkable things about 2017 was that the two mainstream parties managed just 26% of the first-round vote between them, with neither making it into the second round. They will fare even worse this time. As of April 6th, The Economist’s poll of polls suggested that Valérie Pécresse, from the centre-right Republicans, and the Socialists’ Anne Hidalgo would together secure a mere 11% of the vote. The three leading radical populists—Ms Le Pen and Eric Zemmour on the right, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left—will dwarf this figure with a combined 46%. Add in small fry on the fringes and those telling pollsters they will vote for candidates beyond the historic mainstream make up 54% of the electorate.

Mr Macron’s victory in 2017 was in part due to the extremists' success keeping the mainstream out of the second round. In a head-to-head race he trounced the hard-right Ms Le Pen. With Britain having chosen Brexit the year before, and America having put Donald Trump in the White House, this triumph by a charismatic if untested standard-bearer for broadly liberal, internationalist centrism was heralded as a setback for populism of global import.

With the Gaullists and Socialists still nowhere, there is a 90% chance that this election’s second round will be a re-run of 2017’s. Its result, though, looks like being a great deal closer: the number of people willing to shift their allegiance to Ms Le Pen from other candidates is much higher than it was. No poll of second-round voting intentions has as yet shown Ms Le Pen as the winner. But our poll of polls puts the likely result at 53% to 47%. In many systems that would be a landslide. Compared with 66% to 34% last time it looks worryingly close. At this stage in 2017 our statistical model of the election gave Ms Le Pen a 1% chance of overall victory. On April 6th this year the equivalent number was 21% (see chart 1). By the standards of his recent predecessors, Mr Macron’s first mandate must be seen as something of a success (see chart 2). A form of pragmatic, post-partisan policymaking has pushed through a range of reforms—lower taxes, a more flexible labour market, better training and early education, IVF for gay women, and more. Parliamentary politics has become more consensual. There has been scarcely a whiff of rebellion in parliament. It feels quite normal to see Bruno Le Maire, France’s long-serving finance minister and once a presidential primary candidate for the Republicans, working closely alongside Olivier Dussopt, the budget minister, previously a Socialist deputy. Such harmony has made possible, among other things, a post-covid recovery plan that saw France’s economy recover to pre-pandemic levels faster than any other G7 country apart from America.

Some of the fruits of his tenure are easily seen in Mr Macron’s native Amiens, a modest northern city of red-brick houses nestled in what were once the battlefields of the Somme, their soil and memories the strongest of all cases for European unity. Unemployment has fallen. Nursery education is now compulsory (and free) for all from the age of three, as it is across the country. In poorer neighbourhoods, early-primary class sizes have been halved and free breakfasts brought in as part of Mr Macron’s promise to tackle inequality with better education. New businesses have opened their doors, and some existing ones have expanded. Amazon has built a distribution centre on the city’s outskirts, employing over 1,000 people. A tyre plant has expanded; so has one making laundry products. “Over the past five years, economic activity has really developed in Amiens,” enthuses Ms Fouré, the mayor, despite being a supporter of Mr Macron’s presidential rival, Mrs Pécresse. A startup called Ynsect, which breeds and processes insects for animal feed and fertiliser, is building the world’s biggest vertical mealworm farm. “This government has been particularly pro-business,” says Antoine Hubert, Ynsect’s boss. “The number and size of startups in recent years has exploded.” But there have been close-downs, too. One of the iconic moments of the 2017 campaign was when Mr Macron faced enraged trade unionists burning tyres outside a Whirlpool factory in Amiens; the firm was shipping work out to lower-cost economies elsewhere in the EU and the factory faced closure. The presidential hopeful spent nearly an hour urging them not to believe the “empty promises” offered by the likes of Ms Le Pen, who vowed to stop the factory from closing. “I can’t tell you I’m going to save your jobs,” Mr Macron declared candidly. But he would try. Today weeds are growing in the car park of the Whirlpool factory; a sculpture made from 18 steel tumble-dryer drums dominates its deserted entrance hall. Twice new owners promised to keep the plant going. Twice they failed. “It’s a disgrace,” says Frédéric Chantrelle, a former union representative. Less than half of the 280 former employees have found another permanent job. Other industrial workplaces have suffered similar fates. Work in distribution warehouses has not replaced the muscular camaraderie of the factory floor. “Socially, the closure has destroyed a lot of people,” says Mr Chantrelle angrily: “We can’t say that Macron as a guy from Amiens has exactly been a lucky charm.”

Disillusion among blue-collar and low-paid workers is one of the reasons the populist vote has not gone away. The single most popular choice for blue-collar voters is Ms Le Pen: 36% say they will back her in the first round, next to 20% for Mr Macron and 19% for Mr Mélenchon, according to Ifop, a polling group. She attracts 28% of the vote of those with incomes below €970 ($1,055) a month, next to 25% for Mr Macron and 21% for Mr Mélenchon.

Let them eat crickets

Discontented working-class voters are hardly a novelty; for the first eleven years of Mr Macron’s life the Communist Party ran Amiens town hall. Part of Ms Le Pen’s success has been attracting more of them to a party which, when her father founded it in the 1970s, was based on xenophobia, anti-Semitism and nationalist nostalgia linked to the loss of French Algeria.

Ms Le Pen has distanced herself from some of that heritage, not least when she changed the party’s name from the National Front to the National Rally in 2018. Mr Zemmour, a former TV pundit, has embraced its most reactionary and xenophobic elements. He promises to “save France” from the “great replacement” of its population by foreigners and Islam; he has been convicted of incitement to racial hatred. At one point he edged ahead of Ms Le Pen in the polls, but as a devotee of Vladimir Putin he was knocked back badly by the invasion of Ukraine. (Ms Le Pen and Mr Mélenchon have also had nice things to say about Mr Putin, but voters have so far minded less, if at all). A large majority of his supporters will probably transfer their allegiance to Ms Le Pen in the second round.

That is hardly surprising. More untoward is the evidence that she will pick up votes from the left and the centre in unprecedented numbers. According to Ipsos, in 2017, 7% of those who had supported Mr Mélenchon and 20% of those who supported the centre-right candidate in the first round transferred their allegiance to Ms Le Pen in the second. This time polls put the numbers saying they will do so at 17% and 34% respectively. Many left-wingers, including 48% of the Green vote and 49% of Mr Mélenchon’s, will abstain or spoil their ballot papers rather than support Mr Macron against her.

No longer seeming beyond the pale is Ms Le Pen’s great success. Some of it is cosmetic; changing the name of a party hardly changes its essence (though there have been some expulsions). As Gilles Finchelstein and Raphaël Llorca note in a study for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, a think-tank, Ms Le Pen’s written programme is still focused on immigration, “Islamism”, and “national preference” for the French. The fact that Mr Zemmour makes the running on such matters, though, allows her to speak about them less, and to seem more moderate in the process.

She has, on the face of it, moderated her stance on the EU . She no longer talks of abandoning the euro. But her vision of Europe is a long way from Mr Macron’s. She looks for inspiration not to its centre, but to its edge, in the form of Hungary’s “illiberal democrat” Viktor Orban, a thorn in Brussels’ side (see Europe section). After Mr Orban was re-elected on April 3rd Ms Le Pen tweeted a photo of herself beaming alongside him and the message: “When the people vote, the people win!” She calls Mr Macron “the president of chaos”.

By concentrating on the cost of living, pictures with her many cats on social media and a nationalist promise to restore order as a “president of French unity”, Ms Le Pen is offering an improbably calming appeal. She has positioned herself as a leader close to the people and their concerns—something Mr Macron has never managed.

Rural voters respond to this positioning well, with 32% saying they will back her in the first round, compared with 12% in the Paris region. Fine-grained analysis of last time’s results in south-west France by Jérôme Fourquet, a political analyst, shows that her vote was particularly strong in former agricultural communes, places where vineyards have given way to new housing estates and out-of-town shopping centres. They are places where concerns about identity, globalisation and change are easily played to, and Ms Le Pen is campaigning there accordingly.

In “Révolution”, a book he published as a candidate in 2016, Mr Macron himself warned about the danger of neglecting this “peripheral France”. “If we don’t pull ourselves together”, he wrote, “in five years or in ten years the National Front will be in power.” But on taking power he ignored his own warning.

In 2018 it was in this car-dependent semi-rural France, where McDonald’s drive-throughs sit next to newly built roundabouts decked out with kitsch sculpture, that people first put on high-visibility jackets— gilets jaunes—to complain about the way in which an increase in carbon taxation had pushed up the price of motor fuel. Their protests spread throughout the country. As French uprisings always do, they evoked echoes of 1968, 1848 and 1789. The government backed down.

It was the low-point of Mr Macron’s presidency and a wake-up call. He has since tried to put aside his imperious governing style and show that he can connect with ordinary people. But nothing he has done has provided a lasting bridge for the gap between him and them. He has never really shaken off his image as the “president of the rich” and embodiment of the Parisian elite.

Between the tramlines and the oxen

His policies, though, belie that image. By introducing a flat tax of 30% on investment income and ending the wealth tax in favour of a lighter “mansion tax”, he has indeed helped the rich. But France is no outlier when it comes to poverty or inequality of the sort that might explain an unusually high protest vote. Jobs are not just more plentiful; an expansion of apprenticeships and training schemes is helping more young people into work. During the pandemic Mr Macron vowed to spend “whatever it costs” to keep businesses going and people in jobs, and he did, pushing the level of public spending up from 55% to 59% of GDP in 2021. To some extent, though, the reward for success is to have it taken for granted. Unemployment was the voters’ third biggest worry in 2017. Now it does not make the top ten.

Instead, they worry about the cost of living, where Ms Le Pen is focusing her efforts. Mr Macron, who since 2018 has known better than most the political risk of rising fuel costs, has subsidised petrol prices and capped energy-price hikes. Ms Le Pen goes further, promising to cut VAT on petrol and energy bills to 5.5%, to lower motorway tolls and, for good measure, to bring back the wealth tax. Some former supporters are aghast at how left-wing her programme is.

Picture this

A centre-right or centre-left party might easily do much the same. But such has been Mr Macron’s success at building a broad centrist church, and so poor have been the legacy parties' efforts to re-establish themselves, that there is no strong, credible moderate opposition available. Mr Macron’s vision of a realignment to bring together progressive pro-European centrists from the old left and right in order to beat conservatives and nationalists of all sorts has ended up legitimising the populist politics he promised to fight as the only opposition left.

On April 2nd the Macron campaign held a glitzy rally in a packed indoor sports arena in La Défense, west of Paris. In front of a crowd waving EU flags as well as French ones, Mr Macron warned that “the extremist danger today is even greater than it was a few months ago, a few years ago” and that his victory was not guaranteed. Playing to fear, rather than hope, is not his strong suit. But as Roland Lescure, a deputy in Mr Macron’s campaign team, points out, “Pandemics and war don’t lend themselves easily to optimistic politics.”

For all his faults, Mr Macron remains an energetic, serious, ideas-driven leader with a knack of defying expectations. “The way he managed the pandemic was better than we could have expected,” says Cindy, an amateur marathon runner from Montpellier who did not vote for him in 2017 but went to his rally in La Défense. Rasmane Sawadogo, an accountant from Lille who also travelled to Paris for the rally, points approvingly to Mr Macron’s “energy, clairvoyance and pragmatism” over matters such as Europe and nuclear power.

The lines on his face and grey in his hair speak of the crises Mr Macron has faced in the presidency. The less haughty tone he has begun to adopt hints at lessons learned from past mistakes. His campaign’s slogans are “Avec vous” (“With you”) and “Nous tous” (“All of us”).

But the campaign—a toxic one, tinged with genuine worries, half-truths, and outright lies—is not helping him. Among other things, a lack of serious policy debate means that the specific policies on which he is campaigning are unexamined, which may make them harder to implement even if his party and its smaller allies maintain their majority in the legislative elections set for June, especially if his victory over Ms Le Pen is narrow. The change he promised in 2016 is at best only half delivered, and the strangely unifying insurgency that brought him to power is ill-suited to winning over the voters who remain unconvinced. Governing France could turn out to be even harder next time around. ■

S IX MONTHS ago America and Britain said they would help Australia acquire the crown jewels of the defence world: nuclear-powered submarines. The AUKUS pact, announced on September 15th, reflected Australia’s fear of China’s growing power; America’s willingness to break old taboos to counter it; and Britain’s eagerness to bolster its role in Asia. The three countries also promised to co-operate in areas from cyber capabilities to quantum technologies. Now these allies are turning their attention to hypersonic missiles.

Such projectiles travel at sustained speeds of Mach 5 while manoeuvring. There are two sorts. Hypersonic cruise missiles, like Russia’s anti-ship Zircon, are powered by air-breathing engines. Hypersonic glide vehicles, like Russia’s Avangard and China’s DF -17, go up on rockets, but glide down over long distances.

China has “outpaced the United States in graduating hypersonic-specialised engineers, publishing open scientific papers, and constructing hypersonic wind tunnels”, noted a report by CSIS , an American think-tank, in February. The Pentagon carried out a successful hypersonic test in mid-March (it was kept quiet to avoid raising tensions with Russia) but several previous ones failed. So it is not hard to see why America wants to collaborate with allies.

America and Australia have been working on an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile under the cheesy rubric of SCIF i RE for 15 years, taking advantage of the Woomera test range in southern Australia, one of the world’s largest, and Australia’s seven hypersonic wind tunnels. Britain is further behind, but gave a $12m contract to Rolls-Royce, an aerospace company, to work on suitable engines in 2019. The trio plan to swap notes “to accelerate our programmes”, says a British official.

This evolution of AUKUS shows that Western allies see a pressing need to pool their resources and talents to keep pace with China. It might also future-proof the pact. America and Britain have been sharing information on nuclear propulsion technology with Australia since February; that sort of thing is so sensitive that it will stay within the club of three. But collaboration in other areas—which will now also include electronic warfare—might allow other Sino-sceptic partners, like India or Japan, to plug into AUKUS in the future. ■

Correction (April 11th 2022): A previous version of this story called Russia’s Kinzhal a hypersonic cruise missile. In fact, it is the Zircon. This has been amended.

S CHUMPETER IS NOT a car owner. He bought his last one, a diesel-fuelled Volkswagen, in 2015, days before the emissions-cheating scandal erupted. He was so appalled that when the car’s engine caught fire he vowed never to buy another and took to a bike instead. He has lived in emissions-free smugness ever since. At least he did—until increasing numbers of electric vehicles ( EV s) started to swish past, signalling even more virtue. Now his car envy has returned—but with a dilemma. Some of the most appealing EV s in Europe are either made in China (Tesla) or by Chinese-owned firms ( MG ). Given concerns about the decoupling of trade into ideological blocs, should that be a dieselgate-sized worry?

To answer that question, first examine what is known in China as “the catfish effect”, the idea that a predator makes weaker rivals swim faster. For years China led the world in production and purchase of EV s. However, the cars were heavily subsidised and shoddy. They were a response to the government’s desire to scrub the air and leapfrog the internal-combustion engine, a technology in which China was a laggard. Delighting customers was an afterthought. No Chinese EV -maker was as world-beating as Huawei became in smartphones—before America blackballed it in 2019.

That same year Tesla set up shop in Shanghai and began rolling Model 3s off the production line. It became, says Gregor Sebastian of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, the epitome of a catfish. The effect was similar to the benefit that production of Apple’s iPhone in China brought to the country’s smartphone market, where local suppliers had to raise their game to meet international standards. Chinese carmakers’ ambitions likewise rose. The result has been an accelerated shift towards electrification. BYD , a battery manufacturer turned China’s biggest seller of EV s and hybrids, said on April 4th that it had ceased making full combustion-engine vehicles. As with Tesla, its sales are booming.

As yet, no Chinese EV -maker is an export powerhouse. Stockmarket analysts are playing up the potential, hoping this will bring Tesla-like valuations, says Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights, a consultancy. But most of China’s EV exports are by wholly foreign brands, such as Tesla, or those with Chinese partners, such as BMW . Foreign marques account for most of the 296,000 Chinese-made EV s and plug-in hybrids sold abroad last year—more than quadruple the number in 2020. Because of high American tariffs, the favourite destinations are Europe and South-East Asia.

China’s biggest EV firms are adopting a variety of export strategies to catch up. SAIC , a state-owned car company, is making inroads in Europe under the cover of MG , a classic British sports-car brand that it bought in 2007. It keeps its Chinese identity hidden behind the alluring octagonal nameplate, which may be why sales hit more than 52,000 in Europe last year, double the year before, many of which were EVS . BYD , as well as Nio, which hopes to take on luxury marques like Mercedes, have made EV -friendly Norway the springboard for their forays into Europe. In South-East Asia the strategy is to “attack the villages to surround the cities”, says Scott Kennedy of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington. That means selling low-cost EV s where Western companies do not venture, in order to strengthen supply chains. Taxi fleets are a popular target for firms like BYD .

Until recently it was considered a long shot that such low-cost brands could penetrate developed markets as well as developing ones. The EV market in China includes scores of also-rans and it begs for consolidation. The firms lack the overseas sales networks of global rivals. Yet they have their own built-in advantages, including access to the best battery supply in the world and in some cases more sophisticated software than European rivals. China is also taking international safety standards more seriously.

If its EV -makers thrive, it would be good for more than just the car market. The more high-quality Chinese products appeal to international consumers, the more of a stake China has in preserving global trade. EV s encompass many of the strategic tensions that burden the trading system. They are heavily reliant on semiconductors, which has become a sore point in China, and on batteries, Chinese dominance of which is a bugbear for the West. They are hugely subsidised. The harvesting of personal information to improve traffic routes, charging and self-driving technology raises thorny questions about privacy, data storage and cyber-security. The EV industry is also exposed to trade wars: since 2018 America has levied 25% tariffs on Chinese battery cells, electric motors and other EV components. The European Union, with its green agenda, is less overtly protectionist for once.

Most Western carmakers have enough of a stake in keeping supply chains open, and in maintaining access to China’s own market, that they would prefer not to erect more trade barriers. They know, however, that China is using them as catfish to improve its own industry. At any point it could decide that they have done their job. That could throw the entire global market, including China’s, into turmoil.

Completing the circuit

Yet the catfish effect can work in both directions. Last month Bloomberg reported that CATL , China’s battery behemoth, was considering building a $5bn factory in North America. In response Jim Greenberger of NAAT Batt International, a battery trade body, said he would welcome this as long as CATL brought battery-manufacturing tech and know-how in order to foster technology transfer to American firms.

That, of course, is the magic of globalisation. Over time, competition and co-operation lead to the exchange of ideas, benefiting all. It will not last if geopolitical tensions, heightened by Russia’s pounding of Ukraine, splinter the world economy into competing blocs. If buying a Chinese car feels unfamiliar, remember that you are supporting globalisation. Not bad as fringe benefits go. ■

Why Saudi Aramco could be eclipsed by its Qatari nemesis (Mar 26th)

Has Silicon Valley lost its monopoly over global tech? (Mar 19th)

W HITE-COLLAR WORKERS tend to like hybrid working. Research by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University suggests that, on average, employees reckon the blend of in-person and remote work is a perk equivalent to an 8% pay increase. The biggest attraction of days spent working from home is the absence of a commute. Other benefits include not having to get ready for the office: the proportion of people wearing a fresh set of clothes drops by 20 percentage points when they are not commuting.

Executives have been keener to get people back into the office full-time, so that employees can bond with peers, absorb the corporate culture and appreciate the awesome power of laundry. But even sceptics have accepted that hybrid working will be part of the post-pandemic future: in his annual letter to shareholders this week, Jamie Dimon, the boss of JPMorgan Chase, said he thought that about 40% of the bank’s staff would be hybrid. The job now is to make sure that hybridisation works as well as it can for both employees and employers. That depends on one ingredient above all: clarity. Things function best when everyone knows what is expected.

Start with the shape of the hybrid week. One of the great theoretical attractions of hybrid working to employees is that they get to choose what days they come in. But the point of in-person working is to spend time collaborating and bonding with their colleagues: that is much more likely to happen if companies are clear about who they want in the office on which days of the week.

Clarity also maximises the benefits of work-from-home days. If office time is best spent in a whirlwind of collaborative brainstorming and socialising, home days are logically the time when solo and focused work should get done. That requires bosses to do what comes unnaturally to them, by resisting the temptation to interrupt at will.

It is easier to do that if expectations are clear. Anne Raimondi of Asana, a work-management platform, says the firm expects people to come in on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and has a “no meetings” day on Wednesday. If a manager wants to have a meeting that day, they have to “recontract” with their team and explain why it is needed.

By the same token, being explicit when a reply is needed on an email saves everyone scurrying around in a desperate bid to answer the boss first. Defining what kinds of work can be done asynchronously and what requires everyone to get together is a recipe for fewer, better meetings. Encouraging a set of do-not-disturb protocols makes it less likely that employees will be bothered unnecessarily.

Clear protocols also make hybrid meetings go better. Harry’s, a shaving firm that has published its guidelines for hybrid working, expects each attendee to have their own screen and promises not to keep discussing the matter at hand once remote colleagues have left the meeting (though commenting on who is wearing the same clothes as they did yesterday is presumably fine).

Some of this will be deeply alarming to managers who worry about slippery slopes. First you give people space to focus at home, and soon enough you cannot contact anyone because they have changed their settings on Slack and are binge-watching “Bridgerton”.

There are three answers to such worries. First, expectations are firmly in the gift of managers. Asana’s no-meetings day does not extend to meetings with customers, for example.

Second, burnout is as much of a risk as slacking. New research from Microsoft finds evidence for what it calls a “triple-peak day”. As well as the usual large crests in activity in the early morning and after lunch, around 30% of employees at the tech giant also experience a smaller, third bump in work in the late evening. That may be a sign of people getting work done when it suits them—or of the workday extending relentlessly into every waking hour. Setting expectations, over things like how quickly notifications need to get a response, can help determine which one it is.

Last, good performance is not defined by employees’ locations at specific times of the day but by what they achieve—what Mr Bloom calls “managing outputs, not inputs”. If bosses can articulate what counts as productive activity, and evaluate it regularly, it matters less whether employees are at headquarters or stinking out the spare bedroom. Managers may have concerns about hybrid working, but it is pretty clear what will make it successful.

What an honest leaving-do speech would sound like (Mar 26th)

Why loafing can be work (Mar 19th)

H ARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL is all about its graduates’ “lifelong impact” on society. INSEAD exhorts its alumni to “drive business as a force for good”. Believe these and other MBA prospectuses, and a student arriving as an ordinary human being will leave as a virtuous do-gooder. Such claims have always strained credulity. A new working paper by Daron Acemoglu, Alex He and Daniel le Maire, a trio of economists, puts numbers on the disbelief.

The authors look at newly appointed CEO s in America and Denmark. They find those with MBA s increase returns on assets in the five years after their appointment—by a total of three percentage points on average in America and 1.5 points in Denmark. But that is not because they boost sales, ratchet up investments or raise productivity. Rather, the higher returns are the result of suppressing workers’ wages, which fall by 6% in America and 3% in Denmark over the five years after an MBA takes charge. In short, ushering MBA s into corner offices seems to boost shareholder value by slicing the pie in certain ways, not by making the pie bigger.

The researchers put this phenomenon down to change in business-school syllabuses. MBA programmes, says Mr He, have over the years grown less focused on technical aspects of finance and management, and more obsessed with maximising shareholder value and corporate leanness. The result, he and his colleagues contend, is that workers have increasingly been seen as “costs to be reduced” rather than an investment in human capital.

People drawn to MBA courses in the first place may, of course, simply be more ruthless than holders of other degrees. But there may be something to the syllabus hypothesis. Chief executives who earned their MBA s after 1980 were likelier to stint on employees than graduates from earlier MBA classes. If the general shareholder-friendly zeitgeist which took hold around that time were the whole explanation for this intergenerational difference, then MBA s and non- MBA s ought to be equally affected. The study shows this was not the case. Further work will be needed to see whether feeding MBA s modules such as “Reimagining Capitalism” (Harvard) and “Business and Society” ( INSEAD ) does anything to reverse the trend.

I N MAY 1919 John Dewey, an American philosopher, embarked on a lecture tour of China. “We are going to see more of the dangerous daring side of life here,” he predicted. His celebration of learning by doing and social experimentation was enthusiastically received by the country’s daring reformers and dangerous revolutionaries. At least one of his lectures was attended by a young schoolteacher called Mao Zedong. “Everything through experimentation,” Dewey declared on his tour. Chairman Mao would later repeat the line as China’s ruler.

In the scattered bases occupied by China’s communists before 1949, experimentation was unavoidable, points out Sebastian Heilmann in his book, “Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policymaking Facilitated China's Rise”. The communists lacked the manpower or administrative reach to impose uniform policies. Instead they introduced new measures, such as land reform, in model villages or “experimental points”, before spreading them across the “surface” of their territory. The aim was to learn by doing, without doing anything uncontainably calamitous. These “model experiences”, Mao wrote, were “much closer to reality and richer than the decisions and directives issued by our leadership organs”.

A similar “point-to-surface” approach was embraced by China’s leaders after Mao. Indeed, the central government has initiated over 630 such experiments since 1980, according to a recent paper by Shaoda Wang of the University of Chicago and David Yang of Harvard University. It has experimented with carbon trading, fisheries insurance, business licensing and fiscal devolution. A report last month by China’s planning agency referred to pilot schemes covering everything from cross-border e-commerce and housing provident funds to green electricity and recyclable packaging.

These trials are not mere formalities. The results can go either way. About 46% of experimental policies are never rolled out nationwide, according to Messrs Wang and Yang. An unsuccessful trial can nonetheless yield useful lessons for future reforms. Failure, as Mao once put it, is the mother of success: “a fall into the pit” can yield “a gain in your wit”. China has indeed gained a lot from using this method. It is a “huge improvement” on a “counterfactual world” in which all central policies are implemented without any experimentation, Mr Wang argues. The point-to-surface technique is one reason why communist China has survived and advanced even as other socialist regimes have stagnated or collapsed, according to Mr Heilmann. Such unexpected outcomes are sometimes described as “black swans”. In China’s case, he argues, red seems the more appropriate colour. This long and celebrated history notwithstanding, China is surprisingly bad at policy experiments. Its trials are not as clean as they could be, skewing the conclusions its leaders draw. One problem is their location. According to China’s planning agency, “sites should be fairly representative.” But contrary to this sound advice, 80% of experiments since the 1980s have taken place in localities that are richer than average, according to Messrs Wang and Yang. Another bias is fiscal. When local authorities experiment with an area of policy, such as education or agriculture, they tend to spend 5% more money on that area than otherwise similar counties that are not taking part in the experiment. Experiments can also be skewed by less measurable factors. Some local officials, for example, simply put more effort into these pilot exercises than others. This is particularly true of ambitious young cadres who have more scope for promotion, because they are still far from retirement age. To measure this extra effort, Messrs Wang and Yang devise an ingenious proxy. They compare the language employed by local governments in describing the experiment. Leaders with more room for promotion differentiate their language from the boilerplate used by their upwardly immobile counterparts elsewhere.

Extra effort, more spending and atypical prosperity can all skew the results of a policy experiment. Some of these biases may be well known to seasoned policymakers in Beijing. But if so, national leaders do not act as if they are aware of them. They tend to favour successful trials regardless of the true source of that success. The more prosperous an experimental site, the better the chance the policy will be adopted nationwide. Such backing is also more likely if the host county just happens to enjoy a fiscal windfall during the trial period, say because a fortuitous cut in interest rates raises land values. The central government does not seem to disentangle the merits of an innovative policy from the idiosyncrasies of the places that pilot it.

A duck dressed up as a swan

This has national consequences. When new policies are spread across the surface of the country, the localities that most closely resemble the experimental “points” benefit the most, judged by their subsequent economic growth. Since experimental sites tend to be richer than average, the policies that emerge from experimentation may “systematically favour” the richer parts of China, Messrs Wang and Yang argue. That is not an outcome that Mao or Dewey would have welcomed: inequity through experimentation.

How can China reform this engine of reform, moving its experiments closer to reality? Another striking calculation by the researchers suggests one useful place to start. They point out that local officials are 22% more likely to be promoted if they take part in a successful experiment. To improve this technique, therefore, China’s leaders will have to fix the politics that attend it. In recent years, under Xi Jinping, experimentation has become “forced and feigned”, according to Mr Heilmann. Local administrators enjoy little “leeway and they are fearful of making policy and ideological mistakes along the way”. There will be no gain in wit if local policymakers fear a fall into the pit. ■

Have economists led the world’s environmental policies astray? (Mar 26th

The disturbing new relevance of theories of nuclear deterrence (Mar 19th)

I N MOST COUNTRIES the state has no business in most commercial secrets. The Chinese authorities have long taken a different view, considering the review by foreign regulators of accounting documents drawn up in China for Chinese companies listed outside the mainland as an infringement on sovereignty, potentially punishable by death. The government softened its stance in 2020, when some such documents were shared with a Hong Kong accounting body. Now it seems ready to open the books to American regulators, who have been keen for a peek for more than a decade, in order to ensure the soundness of Chinese securities listed in New York.

On April 2nd the China Securities Regulatory Commission ( CSRC ) indicated that it will allow American inspections of Chinese accounting papers. The concession from the Chinese government is a breakthrough in one of the costliest regulatory spats in capital-markets history.

Without the reviews, an American law from 2020 could eventually force nearly $1trn-worth of Chinese stocks off New York’s exchanges. Although this would not happen until 2023 at the earliest, the mere prospect has exacerbated a sharp sell-off in Chinese technology stocks abroad, already battered by a broad clampdown on the tech industry at home. The NASDAQ Golden Dragon China Index, which tracks Chinese firms listed in New York, is down by two-thirds from its peak in February 2021. The publication last month of a list of 11 candidates for delisting by America’s Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ) shaved another $260bn from the collective value of American-listed Chinese stocks.

T OSHIBA WAS once synonymous with Japan’s industrial might. Of late the conglomerate, which has made everything from memory cards to nuclear reactors, has become a byword for drama. Japan’s business press writes of “Toshiba Theatre”, which began with accounting fraud a decade ago and has continued to the present day in a series of “slapstick” struggles between management and shareholders. Toshiba’s share price has underperformed domestic and foreign rivals, as well as the broader Japanese stockmarket (see chart).

The latest plot twist comes amid talk of a buy-out led by Bain Capital, an American private-equity group. This raised hopes among investors for some sort of resolution to the saga. Toshiba’s market value has risen by a quarter in the past month.

The opening act in the Toshiba spectacle was tragic. The firm cooked its books to inflate profits by $1.2bn between 2007 and 2014. Implicated executives bowed deeply in apology. A new crop of leaders had to apologise again two years later when a big bet on Westinghouse, an American nuclear-power company, went sour. To remain solvent, Toshiba sold its prized memory-chip unit to a Bain-led consortium and issued a block of new shares. Foreign activist investors spied opportunity. Effissimo Capital Management ( ECM ), a Singaporean asset manager, amassed a stake of nearly 10%, making it the single largest shareholder in the company.

That set the stage for a protracted second act of tragicomedy. As shareholders pushed for better returns and more transparency, Toshiba executives squirmed. Some colluded with the Japanese government to stop the activists from getting seats on the board in 2020, according to an independent inquiry. A year ago a surprise bid to take the company private collapsed, bringing the CEO, Kurumatani Nobuaki, down with it. Tsunakawa Satoshi, a former boss who returned to the job after Mr Kurumatani’s ousting, argued instead that the group should be split up. This plan, too, faltered, and on March 1st Mr Tsunakawa fell on his sword. At an extraordinary general meeting three weeks later, shareholders killed the management’s proposal for a split into two businesses, one focused on electronics, the other on infrastructure. At the same time, they also rebuffed calls from Toshiba’s second-largest investor for the group to court buy-out offers. The impasse set the stage for act three. On March 31st ECM announced it had signed an agreement to sell its stake to Bain if regulators gave the nod to the American firm’s bid. A deal would be hefty. Toshiba’s market value is $17.5bn; a premium could add a few billion, putting it in striking distance of the top ten leveraged buy-outs in history. Given Toshiba’s history (which stretches back to 1875) and prominence (it employs nearly 120,000 people), the transaction would also mark a big advance for both foreign investors and private equity in Japan, which has not historically been welcoming to either. Hurdles remain. Japanese laws regulating foreign investment were amended in 2020 to increase oversight of industries important to national security. Toshiba has interests in several, including nuclear power, defence, chips and quantum computing. Regulators helped scuttle earlier buy-out bids. Bain appears to have learned from those experiences, and is said to be in discussions with Japanese funds and companies to form a consortium that would be palatable to the government. But “many issues” must still be resolved, Bain acknowledged. The curtain is far from closed. ■

Editor's note:Quillette asked four scholars to reflect and comment on the costs and benefits of tribalism. They each have a background in academic psychology and include Chris Ferguson, Professor of Psychology at Stetson University, Cory Clark, behavioural scientist, Bo Winegard, essayist and PhD in social psychology, and Allen Buchanan, Professor at University of Arizona and author of The Evolution of Moral Progress: a Biocultural Theory (co-authored with Russell Powell) and Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape From Tribalism.What follows is a discussion of the human tendency to form groups, and how this tendency produces both great achievements, as well as extreme danger. If you would like to continue this discussion, please email your submission to pitch@quillette.com. I. Tribalism is ineradicableChris Ferguson is a Professor of Psychology at Stetson University and author of How Madness Shaped History, Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong, and Suicide Kings. You can follow him on Twitter @CJFerguson1111.Looking at contemporary politics and culture in the West, it seems evident that tribalism is bad. It turns neighbor against neighbor, it results in discourse that is shrill and sanctimonious, it reduces bipartisan problem-solving, and it thwarts free speech and due process. But if we’re to understand how tribalism is hurting us in the modern era, we must understand the advantages it conferred in our evolutionary past.Human tribalism dates back to when small groups of hominids were the norm, ending with the advent of complex societies a few thousand years ago. What evidence we have suggests that violence among early humans was high. Indeed, the reductions in violence we have experienced in modern industrialized societies are likely the result of efficient policing, so long as it is not corrupt and procedurally fair. Chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative, experience high rates of both intra- and intergroup violence, suggesting that these behavioral traits can be traced back to a common ancestor millions of years ago. As with humans, chimpanzee violence appears to be related to status-seeking, particularly among males, and to competition for resources and territory between groups.In such an environment, adherence to one’s own group norms and beliefs, and suspicion of those adhered to by other tribes, was an evolutionary advantage. With the development of static agricultural societies, these tribes became larger, and this state of affairs persisted until the latter half of the 20th century when an emphasis on globalization emerged after the Cold War. Nonetheless, suspicion of strangers and a preference for familiarity (the tribe) was a behavioral advantage for most of human evolution.The disadvantages of tribalism in the modern industrial world are not difficult to identify. Tribalism can lead to brutal wars of conquest; unnecessary wars caused by mutual suspicion; racism and ethnocentrism; as well as disregard for different social classes. At our moral best, we strive to rise above the tribalism of our evolutionary past and embrace universalism—an understanding that we are one big tribe and that, by working together in the interests of humankind, we can achieve far more than working against one another.Unfortunately, the dominant threads of recent politics are inherently tribal. On the far-Right, politicians too often lean into racism and xenophobia, nationalism, and violence. They characterize their political rivals as quasi-communists or out-of-touch elitist globalists. This can stoke the kind of intranational paranoia that led to events such as the January 6th, 2021, riot at the US Capitol. We even see some pundits on the far-Right express admiration for dictatorial autocrats such as Vladimir Putin because he is a nationalist who shares their hostility to globalism.Yet the far-Left indulges the same tribal instincts. Rather than embrace universalism, they embrace the particularism and identitarianism of fashionable ideologies like intersectionality to create a hierarchy of good and evil based on perceptions of victimhood. The far-Left has adopted a myopic (and privileged) obsession with the alleged wickedness of the West that admits no acknowledgement of its achievements or progress. And, like the far-Right, they have turned away from free speech and due process.The problem with both of these dominant ideologies is similar: both promote rather than discourage tribalism by dividing citizens into warring camps. Though often couched in moralizing language popular with their core audience, both worldviews are aggressively discriminatory, racist, classist, and ethnocentric. Neither side is especially interested in core values unless they are expedient, and each is often guilty of precisely the sins of which they accuse the other. Both ideologies foster tribalism among groups rather than encouraging them to see themselves as members of the same tribe, albeit with differing ideas on policy or politics. Tribalism, when calibrated toward actual inclusivity (not the false kind sloganeered by the far-Left) can be positive and produce worthwhile outcomes tackling real challenges facing the group. But pitting citizens against each other on the basis of race, class, gender, or political affiliation creates internecine conflict, the only victors of which are those who profit from fear and hatred.Nevertheless, the prevalence of Manichean narratives in literature, the arts, role-playing-games, and so on, indicates that tribalism is here to stay. So, how are we to harness tribalism toward the good?We can each take small steps to disengage from ruinous and fruitless political fights, and shun pundits and politicians who portray their opponents as evil. We should clarify that all citizens (of our nation and, perhaps one day, the human species) are on the same team and must work together to combat common threats such as climate change, poverty, or mental health crises. We also need to recalibrate our teaching of history so that we recognize the failings of our past while also recognizing the remarkable progress which has brought historically unprecedented levels of democracy, humanism, and social progress to the world. The jingoism of the past has been overcorrected with nihilism in the present, and neither view provides an honest assessment of our history. We can understand past failings while taking pride in our exceptional successes.  Tribalism is here to stay. But, harnessed cleverly, it can be directed toward prosocial goals rather than turned inward against ourselves.II. Tribalism is a double-edged swordCory Clark is Director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project and a behavioral scientist at University of Pennsylvania. You can follow her on Twitter @ImHardcory.Tribalism—or the natural human tendency to distinguish ingroup from outgroup and give preferential treatment to the former—contributes to some of our most destructive and regressive human behaviors. Many of the worst atrocities in human history can be attributed in part to tribalism. Violent conflicts between groups can lead to both sides feeling victimized, and therefore justified in escalating mutually ruinous violence.Those of us who have never directly experienced violent intergroup conflict still display a variety of group-based biases and double standards. People support rights and freedoms more for ingroup members than outgroup members; we are less trusting and cooperative toward outgroup than ingroup members; we hold our ingroups and outgroups to different moral standards; we aim to conceal the bad behavior of ingroup members; we overestimate how homogeneous and extreme outgroups members are, and denigrate them. Because people desire reliable signals of group loyalty, they often gravitate toward extremists at the expense of their more moderate (and often more level-headed) peers, increasing polarization and giving more social power to the most rigid and intolerant among us.Tribalism can also undermine sound reasoning as people skillfully avoid information that could challenge their ingroup beliefs and axioms, and hold epistemic double standards in their evaluations of new information. Identity interests among scientists contribute to the proliferation of contradictory conclusions. These disagreements often devolve into uncivil and unproductive debates in the scientific literature, in which our most educated intellectuals make moral accusations rather than working to understand why disagreements persist and to resolve disputes. Policymakers then struggle to navigate the complex evidence, wasting valuable time and resources on failed interventions. And contradictions fuel disagreements among journalists and politicians, further dividing society as different groups arrive at divergent views of empirical reality.This all sounds bad. But tribalism (and tribalistic tendencies such as loyalty and conformity) may be essential for facilitating cooperation and coordination in large and complex social groups comprising unrelated strangers. Groups which share languages, norms, values, goals, and beliefs can more effectively coordinate to the benefit of all group members. And signaling these characteristics to others helps individuals sort into cooperative and productive groups. Identification with an ingroup can facilitate cooperation within that group and creating a common ingroup identity between groups may reduce intergroup conflict.Many collective activities of shared identity inspire awe and elation—the holiday seasons when community members decorate their homes and sing familiar songs, collective chanting in religious groups or cheering at sporting events, flash mobs, the time 65,000 Green Day fans sang Bohemian Rhapsody in unison or Canadian hockey fans sang the US national anthem in a charming display of outgroup cooperation. Such experiences can create a profound sense of meaning and transcendence that inspires prosociality and self-sacrifice. Tribalism thus creates some of the most elevated and significant feelings people can experience, and these positive feelings can result in altruistic acts that further benefit fellow group members.Tribalism brings out the best and worst in humans. We may want to discourage it in contexts where there are risks of intergroup conflict and encourage it in contexts where it facilitates ingroup or intergroup cooperation. The challenges are to accurately distinguish these contexts and to discover effective interventions for channeling tribalism for collective benefit rather than mutual destruction.III. Tribalism is a net goodBo Winegard is an essayist and holds a PhD in Social Psychology. You can follow him on Twitter @Epoe187.Many intellectuals worry about the potential mismatch between a brain designed for interaction among a few hundred relatively homogenous people and modern societies, which are full of cultural and racial diversity. They therefore condemn tribalism for contributing to many contemporary ailments, from bigotry and racism to dogmatism and ideological biases. These concerns are not unreasonable, for tribalism can be a force for great evil. But so can love. So can hope. So can optimism. And we do not condemn these things simply because they can in certain contexts lead to harm or even catastrophe. Just as the terrible crimes of wounded or jealous lovers should not lead to a blanket condemnation of love, nor should the crimes of bigoted or rapacious tribes lead to a wholesale rejection of tribalism. On balance, we should applaud tribalism not condemn it. It is the solution to a fundamental dilemma faced by any social animal: How to distinguish cooperators from exploiters. At bottom, tribalism is simply a division of the social world into ingroup and outgroup with a concomitant preference for the ingroup. We tend, when we discuss tribalism, to think of potentially pernicious instances: countries battling for prestige, gangs fighting for territory, political ideologues promoting hatred of opponents. But there are many wholesome and even inspiring instances of tribalism: Church communities working together to feed the poor, husbands and wives doting on each other, cousins helping each other through financial hardships. And without the tendency to make this distinction between ingroup and outgroup, human sociality could not arise. Cooperation is perilous because others can always cheat, steal, and manipulate. Imagine, for example, that three people start a business together. Each has full access to all the company’s resources. Even though all three want the company to succeed, it is also in everyone’s interest to skim a little. Although this is a constant threat, tribalism is a partial solution. Those who cheat and exploit are chastised (or worse) and become part of an untrustworthy outgroup—we no longer preferentially cooperate with them—while those who cooperate become part of the trustworthy ingroup.Humans without tribal propensities would be endlessly exploited. They would have no preferences (or loyalty) for family or community or political coalition and would therefore not distinguish between allies and potential rivals. A kind of universal love may sound appealing, but like communism or other utopian ideas, it is either empty rhetoric or a dangerous delusion. And though a person who practiced it might, in the abstract, appear admirable, he would be a terrible social partner, since good social partners (good husbands, good brothers, good parents, good friends, good political allies) are reliable precisely because they are not impartial with their love, affection, time, and energy. Social partners are dependable because they are tribal. Therefore, our social lives are part of an expanding set of tribes: nuclear family, extended family, local community, country, religious group, et cetera. These not only facilitate cooperation and protection from exploitation, but they also create meaning and identity. They shape our characters; they guide our behaviors, and they generate a web of obligations and expectations. An opponent of tribalism might concede most of the above but note that although tribalism was once important for human sociality, it is unnecessary and unhelpful today, like a vestigial organ that causes more problems than it is worth. We solve the problem posed by the business example I offered above with the criminal justice system. We therefore do not need to rely on parochial preferences or nepotism; instead, we can cooperate with complete strangers because we have impartial rules and procedures. According to some scholars, the West’s unique power and prosperity are largely a result of transcending tribalism, of eschewing the localism of blood and soil, and expanding sociality by relying upon more abstract principles of reciprocity and fairness. This is largely correct, but it’s important to draw the correct lesson. Tribalism, as noted earlier, can be harmful, and not all forms of tribalism are healthy. Social groups that are highly nepotistic, clannish, and skeptical of strangers, are limited. They struggle to build and maintain impartial institutions. Some of the great achievements of the West did in fact require transcending certain kinds of tribalism and relaxing other kinds. But they did not require the eradication of tribalism altogether. One important feature, for example, of Western tribalism is that much of it is voluntary. People are free to choose their tribal affiliations (for example, their spouse, community, religious group, political party). But once they choose, they are still tribal. They still prefer their spouse’s company to that of a stranger (or they had better!). Perhaps, instead of comparing tribalism to a wasteful vestigial organ, we should compare it to jealousy. Jealousy, like tribalism, is often assailed on the basis that it is pointless and dangerous—a sign of insecurity and immaturity. But, in fact, jealousy is an important emotion. It points the mind to potential threats to a relationship. A person without jealousy would also be vulnerable to exploitation, and romantic partners might stray. We may lament the deleterious effects of jealousy, but a fair hearing must also consider its positives. In the real world—a world that is dangerous and full of potential exploiters—we need to be vigilant about our relationships. We need to be jealous. This comparison is slightly unfair to tribalism because jealousy has fewer obvious positive effects than tribalism does. However, it does illustrate an important point: When we assess something we must consider its costs and benefits in the real world, not in a hypothetical world. In a different world, I might support the abolition of the police since the costs of police corruption are obvious. But in this world—a world in which some humans are violent and impulsive, and most are largely self-interested—I not only oppose the abolition of the police, but also consider professionalized policing one of the great achievements of civilization. Reality matters. And in the real world, there are simply no viable alternatives to tribalism. Tribalism can be vexing and even deadly. It can bias and blind and promote destructive competition that ends in violence. But it also creates meaning and identity and helps to solve one of the fundamental challenges of cooperation. The opposite of tribalism is not universal love, it is perpetual solitude. IV. Tribalism could cause the end of democracyAllen Buchanan is a Professor at University of Arizona and author of 15 books, including, most recently The Evolution of Moral Progress: a Biocultural Theory (co-authored with Russell Powell) and Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape From Tribalism.The term “tribalism” is used by different people to mean quite different things. Sometimes it simply refers to the human tendency to divide the social world into ingroup/outgroup categories. In what follows, I am using the term in a more specific fashion, to refer to a particularly destructive form that the division into Us and Them can take. Tribalism flourishes when there is a pervasive perception that democracy is not working; and, by undermining democracy, it makes that perception valid. The terms “tribalism” and “polarization” are often used as if they were synonyms. They are not. Tribalism is not only distinct from polarization, it is also much more dangerous. “Polarization” refers to a situation in which there are serious disagreements on social and political issues and the distance between positions is growing. “Tribalism” refers to the way in which those who disagree regard one another.You and I might have serious differences on some issue, but we might still respect each other, listen to one another, and be willing to bargain and compromise. Despite our disagreement, I might take what you say at face value, give you the benefit of the assumption that you are sincere, and even entertain the possibility that I might learn something by taking what you say seriously.Tribalism isn’t like that. When you are in the tribalistic mode, you not only disagree—you denigrate, despise, and even demonize those with whom you disagree. Further, you do not see someone who disagrees with you as an individual, you see them as an enemy unworthy of respect and even of the presumption of rationality.If you are tribalistic, you lump all opponents together, regarding them as alike, and you believe they are either incorrigibly stupid and misinformed or irredeemably corrupt and perhaps even evil. In this way, tribalism de-humanizes the outgroup, insofar as it regards them as the sorts of beings with whom one cannot reason. After all, the ability to reason is usually thought to be a hallmark of humanity, something that distinguishes us from other creatures. When one is in the tribalistic mode, one focuses on the supposed character of the speaker, not on what he or she is saying. In that sense, every tribalistic “argument” is an ad hominem argument.The term “libtard,” for example, popular in American conservative discourse, implies that liberals are so mentally deficient that there is no point in listening to or reasoning with them. The late Rush Limbaugh repeatedly claimed that liberals—all liberals—didn’t really want “open borders” because they were concerned about the welfare of immigrants. Instead, he said, they wanted “open borders” because they believe that most immigrants would vote Democratic. Dismissing the message by discrediting the messenger is a convenient means of avoiding engagement with the arguments for and against modifying border policy.On the Left, meanwhile, student activists sometimes prevent certain individuals from speaking on campus. They either threaten violence or disruption that could result in violence, prompting the administration to cancel the event. If the event proceeds, they may try to shout down the speaker. They might justify their infringement of freedom of speech on the grounds that the speaker is racist or sexist, with the implication that if one allows a racist or sexist to speak in a public forum, they will contribute to perpetuating the harms of racism and sexism.Typically, such actions are not preceded by anything resembling a serious discussion of whether the speaker is indeed a racist or a sexist or whether the fact that someone is a racist or a sexist is a sufficient reason for preventing him from speaking in public. Instead, once the label “racist” or “sexist” is attached, the individual in question is excluded from public discourse, assumed to be unfit to participate in the processes by which people come to form beliefs. This is simply another way of avoiding engagement with a person’s views by attacking the person, not as an individual, but as a completely interchangeable member of a group.The first fundamental feature of tribalism, then, is sorting: dividing the word into Us and Them, in which They are unworthy of rational engagement because They are either so mentally deficient or insincere or ideologically malign as to make rational engagement impossible.A second, intimately related, feature of tribalism is signalling. This works in two ways. On one hand, it is a matter of taking what someone says or how they behave as a reliable signal or indicator that they are not one of Us but rather one of Them, thus sorting that person into the category of those with whom one cannot engage rationally. On the other, one’s assertions are shaped chiefly by the deeply felt need to signal that one is a member of the good group, Us, not one of Them.For example, on the eve of the 2020 election, I heard several conservative acquaintances say that “if Biden wins, he will make America a communist country.” When a person makes such an absurd claim, it is prudent to regard that statement as a signal that the speaker is a conservative (and most likely a Trump supporter). But it is more than that: it is a signal that serves to test the hearer in such a way as to enable the speaker to sort the hearer, to determine, by reference to her response to the statement, whether the hearer is one of Us or one of Them. By making the statement, the speaker is in effect hoisting a flag, an emblem of allegiance to his group; if the hearer salutes the flag (agrees with the statement), then he is one of Us; if he does not, he is most likely one of Them.A third essential feature of tribalism is the tendency to view every conflict as a supreme emergency—a contest in which the stakes are as high as possible. Hence the title of Sean Hannity’s latest book: America on the Brink: Live Free or Die. Further, because all significant political issues are held to be interconnected, every issue is treated as the locus of a life-or-death struggle. In that sense, tribalism is totalizing: every bit of behavior and every utterance is likely to be treated as political, from the car you drive to whether or not you wear a mask during a pandemic. The life-or-death struggle is not contained—it is everywhere. If you think you are trapped in a zero-sum existential battle, there is no room for compromise, no possibility of bargaining, because Our interest and values and Theirs are unreconcilable. Further, if one assumes that the situation is a supreme emergency, one will be inclined to think that the ordinary moral rules do not apply. The result is a race to the bottom.A final feature of tribalism bears emphasis: it is the archenemy of individuality, in two senses. First, given the assumption of a supreme emergency, a zero-sum, life-or-death contest in which all issues are connected, there is tremendous pressure for conformity to what one perceives as the ingroup’s views. Any deviation may be taken as a signal of disloyalty and put one at risk of expulsion. Second, tribalistic sorting is indiscriminate: all liberals (or all conservatives) are perceived as alike. Hence, there is no point in engaging with any of them in hope that they might share some common ground with Us.Taken together, these features of tribalism make it the enemy of democracy. Democracy requires bargaining and compromise, both of which require listening to those with whom one disagrees, proceeding on the presumption that they mean what they say, and that they are beings with whom one can reason. Tribalism is about sorting and signalling, not about rational engagement.

In Shanghai, which is three times the size of New York City, residents have been under strict pandemic lockdown since March 27 in some parts, and since March 31 in others, with no end in sight.
Having detected a huge surge in cases, with more than 20,000 new cases being found daily, Chinese authorities locked the city of 25 million down, forcing residents into situations of extraordinary deprivation and subjecting them to brutal containment and control measures. With residents unable to leave their houses, food supplies are dwindling, and government workers attempting to deliver supplies to homes and apartments, frequently failing to do so in a timely or consistent manner. People are running out of the medicines they need to stay healthy or alive. Some people experiencing medical emergencies, CNN reports, have died after being turned away; they were unable to access care without negative COVID tests. "We are not killed by Covid, but by the Covid control measures," read a viral post on social media site Weibo.
Due to strict containment and isolation measures in place for COVID-positive people, some mothers report being forcibly separated from their COVID-infected children by authorities. Health authorities allege parents will be able to appeal this and seek permission (!) to accompany their COVID-positive children to hospitals and isolation wards. It is unclear how this will actually apply in practice and whether this will end the brutal measure of separating parents from their young, sick children.
"In this country it's not the virus that scares us, but the chaotic anti-Covid measures that have caused risks to the well-being of the elderly, the children and companion animals," Shanghai resident Lily Chen told Bloomberg. "I now realize we can only rely on ourselves—not the government—to protect our own families."
A video that has gone viral in China shows one family in Shanghai being taken off to COVID quarantine as their pet corgi chased the van in pursuit of its people. They had ostensibly released the dog into the city, assuming possible survival, instead of letting it stay in the family home during the quarantine period (where it would die without care). The dog was promptly killed by a COVID prevention worker wielding a spade. (This is not the first time Chinese authorities have come under fire for brutal treatment of pets in pursuit of COVID containment.)

The great leap forward, from the discomfort of your own home. Hunger drives people crazy, how can this continue? https://t.co/i1wnRiwcg2
— Alex Turnbull (@alexbhturnbull) April 5, 2022

Those who do violate or attempt to violate state-mandated quarantine or lockdown are subjected to punishment, though it is difficult to know the full extent due to the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) aggressive censorship. In other cities like Shandong, which was also recently forced under lockdown, videos of harsh punishments have circulated:

Disturbing video of COVID volunteers forcibly shaving someone who stepped outside of the house in Heze, Shandong (山东省菏泽市鄄城县凤凰镇) pic.twitter.com/TI49QzRnqa
— Alexander Boyd (@alexludoboyd) April 5, 2022

(Some on social media site Weibo suggest that the above could be a parody, while others elsewhere note that "forcibly shaving only the left side" is a callback to "an insulting practice widely used during the Cultural Revolution.")
All such measures are part of the CCP's "COVID Zero" strategy, which aims to entirely eliminate COVID spread within China's borders, often through imposition of aggressive regional lockdowns like the one seen in Shanghai, as well as strict border control and frequent testing. Only about half of China's above-80 population is fully vaccinated, with Chinese vaccines proving less effective than their Western counterparts. It's unclear what the death toll looks like as this COVID outbreak takes it course, and CCP-sourced numbers are notoriously unreliable.
What is clear is the degree to which residents of Shanghai are disturbed by the state of deprivation they've been forced to endure; an unusually high amount of government criticism has emanated from Weibo and other platforms, which are typically heavily censored. "We don't want to starve to death," chanted residents of one suburb.
"Control your soul's desire for freedom," one drone told them as it aerially broadcasted COVID control policies throughout the city, emblematic of how seriously CCP authorities take citizens' concerns.
The post Under COVID Lockdown, Shanghai's People Are Running Out of Food and Meds While Pets Get Killed in the Streets appeared first on Reason.com.

I fully get that it can be harder to have a sense of African languages as distinct in this way. Partly, this is because some of them are largely spoken; we don’t experience them static on the page. Also, colonialism has left it that some African nations use European languages in an official capacity — in Equatorial Guinea, for instance, Spanish, French and Portuguese are official languages — making it even less likely that we know any but a few of Africa’s indigenous languages even by name.

Just as most European languages belong to the Indo-European language family, the Niger-Congo family of languages — spoken over an area that extends from Senegal across the southern part of Africa — is the family of indigenous languages most spoken by people across the continent. However, this family has many more languages than does Indo-European, and overall, the languages in it differ more from one another. Many Indo-European languages have a general pattern about them; in terms of grammar, they are like variations on Latin or Russian, varying in how much of the bells and whistles of the grandfather language they hold on to. It is harder to characterize Niger-Congo languages in any single way. They have been developing apart from one another for so long, in such a broad and varied set of contexts, that sometimes you just want to leave it that Niger-Congo contains multitudes.

Lately, it has become clear that part of the reason Niger-Congo seems so especially varied is that linguists who first formally sorted African languages into families had a way of lumping languages together as similar when they were actually different. One big subgroup of languages traditionally grouped within Niger-Congo, Mande, is quite distinct, and it is increasingly thought of as its own separate family.

It’s been pretty obvious to linguists for some time now that Mande (which includes the Mandinka language that Alex Haley had the character Kunta Kinte speaking in “Roots”) was its own thing. But earlier scholars had to start somewhere, and sometimes the lumper is better able to see patterns, and the historical conclusions they can point to, than the splitter. In the case of Mande, this approach didn’t work. Most likely also contributing was a certain essentialization, a Westerner’s ill-conceived notion that indigenous African languages must all be related somehow.

This sort of attitude was reflected in the linguistic grouping of other African languages within the family that covers much of northern Africa, which also stretches a bit across the Red Sea. As a language-nerd kid, I remember seeing this family described in then-aging books as “Hamito-Semitic” — “Hamito” meaning Black languages (of the biblical Ham and his purported curse, get it?) plus the Semitic ones, such as Arabic and Hebrew. To some pipe-smoking white linguists of a certain era, it probably felt right to call this family what may as well have been “Blackity-Semitic,” as if being spoken by Black people inherently made these languages a unit in contrast to the Middle Eastern ones.

Since the Ferguson, Missouri protests of 2014, the issue of how race and police violence interact has consistently been a front-page news item in the United States. Recent weeks have seen the criminal conviction of three Minneapolis police officers who failed to stop the murder of George Floyd in May 2020; the acquittal of an ex-police officer connected to the Louisville, KY drug raid that ended with Breonna Taylor’s death two months earlier; and the decision to not file charges in the case of Amir Locke, a black man who was fatally shot by a Minneapolis SWAT team officer in February. The former decision has been applauded by those who see it as a step toward rolling back racist police abuses, while the latter two have been condemned as a perpetuation of the status quo. Meanwhile, two economists have just published the latest in a series of academic analyses of the issue, this one appearing in the American Economic Review under the title, ‘Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence from 911 Calls.’The new study, by Mark Hoekstra and CarlyWill Sloan, gets at a question that many of us ask when these tragedies happen: All other factors being equal, are black suspects more likely than white suspects to be harmed during encounters with the police (white officers, in particular)? Or is this impression created, at least in part, by the fact that killings of African-Americans by police officers now are likely to get media attention, while similar killings of white victims sometimes fly under the radar? The new study casts light on the issue by reporting findings from a city in which, as the researchers detail, white officers are indeed far more likely than their black colleagues to discharge their guns when sent on 911 calls in black neighborhoods—even when white and black officers work the same beats and shifts.But the authors admit that they don’t know for certain why this is the case. Perhaps trigger-happy, racist white officer are killing people without justification in black neighborhoods. Or perhaps black officers are better at handling tense situations in such areas. Or perhaps suspects in these neighborhoods react differently to officers of different races. Or perhaps some combination of these factors (and various others, besides). Unfortunately, the city under study remains anonymous in the report, so there’s no way for third parties to investigate the individual cases further. Nor is there any way to determine how well the results would generalize to other places.As I detail in a new report for the Manhattan Institute, “Fatal Police Shootings and Race: A Review of the Evidence and Suggestions for Future Research,” this field of research has witnessed immense strides in the past half-decade or so. But researchers still have not definitively answered the core question about officers’ mindset. And thus far, every existing fact-finding approach has come with significant limitations.In the past few years, the narrative that police use lethal force disproportionately and without justification against African-Americans has been rampant. But is it true?@RAVerbruggen takes up the question in a new report: https://t.co/tncTIqzyr2— Manhattan Institute (@ManhattanInst) March 31, 2022
The Hoekstra-Sloan study is one of the methodologically strongest to date. And critics of the police will point to it as evidence that race matters, at least in some places and in some ways. But the academic literature has produced a wide range of findings. And proof of rampant, extreme forms of police racism hasn’t readily leapt from the data in any kind of unambiguous way, as many observers understandably expected would be the case. Instead, the debate has come down to complicated issues of analysis and interpretation.One lesson that emerged from Ferguson and subsequent events is that the government has done a terrible of job of tracking police killings. As a stopgap measure, private actors have stepped in to help fill this knowledge void, including the Washington Post and a collaboration called Fatal Encounters, though each uses somewhat different criteria for inclusion in their databases.By themselves, these raw numbers tell us a lot we didn’t know before. On-duty police officers shoot and kill about 1,000 people every year. And the total number and racial composition have been fairly steady since 2015, with black Americans accounting for a little more than a quarter of those shot by police—and about a third of the unarmed individuals killed (though it is worth stressing that someone without a weapon can still pose a serious threat to an officer, a bystander, or himself).The question is how to turn such data into a useful analysis of police behavior. Blacks’ share of the general population is only about 13 percent. But this doesn’t tell us all we need to know, since crime (and crime victimization) isn’t evenly distributed across racial groups. And so even if this disparity is itself connected to underlying patterns of racism in American society in multiple ways, it still must be corrected for in any analysis that’s aimed at statistically isolating officers’ actual behavior. If crime isn’t evenly distributed across racial groups, then the deadly encounters associated with even the most fastidiously non-racist police corps will exhibit the same statistical pattern. Some studies try to “benchmark” racial groups’ police-shooting rates to the crime rates associated with each group. However, racial disparities are different for different crimes, and there’s no consensus as to which crimes should be examined for purposes of this kind of analysis. Moreover, crime rates are difficult to measure accurately in and of themselves; and not everyone shot by the police is a criminal, or even a suspected criminal. Yes, the black share of known murderers (and cop-killers in particular) is higher than the black share of those shot and killed by police. But in light of all the other uncertainties at play, that fact alone is hardly enough to settle the debate.Other studies focus on defined types of encounters, in which police officers either used lethal force or did not—for example, cases in which officers used a taser instead of a gun, or pointed a gun but didn’t fire it. The researchers who’ve produced these statistical models have tried to account for a wide range of important variables, such as the suspect’s weapon (if any), the reason the officer had been called to the scene, and so on; with the goal being to allow them to study what happened to white versus black suspects in reasonably similar situations. The most famous study in this vein is Roland G. Fryer, Jr.’s 2019 paper, ‘An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.’ He found no anti-black bias in lethal force across numerous models (with the most rigorous analysis being limited to data from Houston). However, the information that informs such studies often comes, at least in part, from police departments themselves, which naturally raises all kinds of questions about bias. Moreover, no model can account for everything that’s important about every situation. This includes the question of whether racial bias presented itself as a significant factor before the decision to use lethal force was made.Consider, as a thought experiment, data showing that a white police officer was less likely to shoot a black person once the officer had unholstered his or her gun. On the surface, this would look like evidence against racist intent. But this inference becomes much weaker—and perhaps even unsustainable—if one considers the possibility that officers are significantly more likely to unholster and aim their weapons at blacks to begin with. This field is full of puzzles such as this. Still other studies aim to examine the races of the police officers themselves. And these have often found that white officers aren’t disproportionately involved in shootings of blacks. The most well-known of these studies was the subject of a bizarre 2020 academic fiasco in which, after a protracted pressure campaign, the authors retracted their work, even while maintaining that their statistical methods were “appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police.” Going forward, this example suggests that we must not only be mindful of technical forms of statistical bias that may compromise any given data set or scholarly analysis; but also more general manifestations of political bias, which now may affect a scholar’s decision to report (or even investigate) certain facts in the first place. The (not unreasonable) presumption in this area of inquiry is that black officers harbor less anti-black bias than their white colleagues. But this approach raises thorny issues as well. Information about the race of the involved officers isn’t always publicly available. Some locales have higher black populations than others, and these areas will tend to have more black suspects and more black officers. So studies of this type need to be run in a way that carefully accounts for local demographics. Complicating matters is the fact that even within some cities, black officers are disproportionately assigned to police black neighborhoods. (That’s why the Hoekstra-Sloan study was such a breakthrough: Their data are so detailed that they can account for the individual beats and shifts that police officers work, not just overall demographics.)The question of geography presents other complications as well. A police officer who uses deadly force may be responding to fears (race-related or otherwise) that originate not only with the person being shot, but with the neighbourhood in which the encounter takes place. So there’s been work done on determining whether heavily minority neighborhoods have more police shootings, even after controlling for crime rates. Others have asked if locations in which white residents score poorly on controversial “implicit bias” tests also exhibit wider racial gaps in regard to police shootings. Reported measures of these correlations can be interesting; but as yet, it would be hard to use them to prove any kind of concrete thesis concerning officers’ motivations (even if all such studies pointed us in the same direction—which they don’t). As I discuss in my new Manhattan Institute report, there are a number of useful ways in which this research literature can be developed. One would be for researchers to move past simplistic designs that merely “benchmark” police shootings to crime rates; I’d argue that there’s simply not much more to be learned on that front. Another would be to mine data from “natural experiments” that already offer pre-supplied control groups—as with the Hoekstra-Sloan study, whereby researchers were able to see how black and white officers responded to otherwise similar sets of 911 calls. Still another is for the government to finally collect these data in a comprehensive manner, several efforts at which are already underway; and to expand the information collected to include, for example, officer race and incidents that didn’t result in fatalities.Given the widespread outrage that has followed in the wake of police killings of black victims, many Americans have understandably come to expect that clear proof of flagrant and widespread racism among officers would be provided by researchers. As explained above, however, we are still waiting for clear answers to emerge. Until then, our main consolation will be that Americans from all points on the political spectrum have at least been alerted to the need for better data, and for a deeper understanding of why police encounters too often end in tragedy.

THE AUGURIES were poor. For several days before the British government released its energy-security strategy, cabinet ministers blew hot and cold on the subject of onshore wind turbines. The Treasury was reported to have turned down ministerial requests for more money to pay for home insulation. It looked alarmingly as though the government did not actually have an energy strategy.

When the document appeared, on April 7th, all doubt was dispelled. It is now plain that the government does not have a proper energy strategy. Instead it has a collection of preferences and hopes, which reveal more about how Boris Johnson’s government goes about its business than about the future of energy in Britain.

To be charitable, Britain is trying to do something enormously difficult. The spur to the new energy strategy is the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has reminded politicians of the undesirability of relying on autocratic fuel exporters. But as well as becoming more self-sufficient, Britain must reach zero net greenhouse-gas emissions by the year 2050. That entails decarbonising electricity generation while producing far more of it. Most homes will have to be heated by electric heat pumps rather than gas; and cars must be powered by batteries rather than oil. At the same time Britain must try to make energy cheaper. A sharp rise in wholesale gas prices is now feeding through into household fuel bills, causing terrifying increases in the cost of living.

In short, as Mr Johnson puts it, “we need a flow of energy that is affordable, clean and above all secure…a power supply that’s made in Britain, for Britain.” That confident, we-can-do-it tone suffuses the entire document. Britain, it boasts, will become “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”. The government will “reverse decades of myopia” and make “the big call” on nuclear power. And did you know that Britain’s power distribution lines, if laid end-to-end, would stretch 20 times around the world?

The document is Johnsonian not only in its bombast, but also in its reliance on targets and vaguer “ambitions”, many of them reassuringly far in the future. The government’s ambition is that Britain will have 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030—almost five times as much as today. Its aim is to have up to eight more nuclear reactors, and up to 24GW of deployed nuclear power by 2050. It expects that some of the new ones will be small modular reactors, a new technology being developed by Rolls-Royce. Its ambition for low-carbon hydrogen production by 2030 is twice as high as it was before.

In contrast to its excitement about these three technologies, the strategy downplays energy efficiency. Instead of a bold plan to improve Britain’s leaky homes, the government envisages “a gradual transition following the grain of behaviour” involving little state spending. When it comes to onshore wind, the bombast abruptly vanishes. “The government recognises the range of views on onshore wind,” it says. Rather than alter planning rules to make it easier to build turbines, it will hold a consultation about entering into partnerships with “a limited number of supportive communities” that might be interested in hosting wind farms in exchange for something, such as lower bills.

These choices have puzzled and disappointed greens, who argue that suppressing demand through energy-efficiency measures and building wind turbines on land are among the cheapest, quickest ways of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. But the big problem is not that Britain will end up spending more money and cutting emissions more slowly than it needs to. Rather, by favouring expensive and sometimes untried technologies it is setting itself up to do not much at all. Nuclear power stations are expensive and slow to build, and under the “regulated asset base” model that the government favours, many of the costs will be loaded onto customers’ bills years before they begin operating. It would take a brave prime minister to approve many of them, when the time comes. Michael Grubb, an energy expert at University College London, thinks the government might sign off on one new project, probably the 3.2GW Sizewell C in Suffolk, but not 24GW worth.

IT IS EASIER to forecast French foreign policy than it is for many other Western countries. That is because there has been significant continuity in French diplomacy in recent decades. It has been built around broad consensus, albeit with nuances, since 1958. This is helped by the wide margins for manoeuvre awarded to the President of the Republic by law and tradition: he is less bound by changes in parliamentary majorities that can happen in other Western democracies.

France’s foreign-policy fundamentals include a firm, yet guarded alliance with America, a genuine desire to build an autonomous Europe, a willingness to engage with Russia and a commitment to the stability of Africa, and, to a lesser extent, of the Middle East. But innovations in French policy have emerged in recent years. One was a willingness to play a critical role in Iranian nuclear negotiations. Another was demonstrating leadership on combating climate change in the wake of the COP21 environmental conference held in Paris in 2015. And a third has been France’s effort to build a stronger military presence and greater political influence in the Indo-Pacific region. That effort was halted last year, though not reversed, by the creation of the AUKUS trilateral defence pact between Australia, Britain and America. (It led to the cancellation of a major French contract to build submarines for Canberra.)

Debates on French foreign and security policy have traditionally concerned two broad dilemmas. Should France primarily focus on its global role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear power, or on its commitment to build and reinforce the European Union as a political identity? In other words, should France’s diplomacy be primarily national, or European? Should Paris align itself with Washington and NATO, or should it seek a fully independent, “balanced” form of diplomacy and continue dialogue with Russia?

Foreign issues usually get even less time and attention in France’s major political campaigns than they do in Britain and America. EU policy, however, is treated separately and generates much policy discussion, for instance on borders and asylum policies, but also more generally on whether or not Brussels holds too much influence on domestic policies. This latter question is a key theme, of course, for nationalist forces.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, observers expected only two questions to be discussed in campaign debates. One was whether Paris should remain militarily engaged in the Sahel. The other was whether France should withdraw from the NATO integrated military structure it rejoined in 2009. The war in Ukraine has changed perspectives and seems to have benefited, for a while at least, the president. Candidates such as Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are now moderating their anti-NATO stances.

Emmanuel Macron looks most likely to win the presidential contest again. Already he has pushed the personalisation of French diplomacy to the extremes. He attaches exceptional importance to direct relations with his counterparts, even when they have little in common with him, such as Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. And he relies much more on his personal team at the Elysée palace than on his foreign ministry or on his ministry of the armed forces.

It would be surprising if his methods were to change radically during a second term. The substance of his policies, however, is a different matter. Although overall continuity in foreign policy is the French norm, the question of how he will respond to the situation in Ukraine looms large. Will he give up on his apparent neo-Gaullist dream of revamping the European security architecture with the benign and constructive participation of Russia?

Although Mr Macron has retreated from his scepticism about the Atlantic alliance—recall that he declared NATO brain-dead in an interview with The Economist in October 2019—do not expect him to abandon his goal of advancing EU “sovereignty”, for three reasons. First, he sincerely believes that NATO and the EU are not competitors, rather that they complement each other. NATO should take the lead for collective defence, and the EU should be the key player to manage other, less important security- and defence-related European problems. Second, he will point out that the risk of a Trump victory in 2024 is non-trivial and that Europe should get ready for it.

Third, he believes that concepts of strategic “autonomy” and “sovereignty” have not lost their validity. These words are more or less interchangeable in French discourse and suggest that the EU should be less dependent on major powers. They refer not only to defence but also to energy, technology and data. Coming after covid-19, which had revealed European dependencies on foreign sources for assets such as masks, respirators and vaccines, the aftershocks of the Ukraine war will almost certainly lead Mr Macron to see his approach vindicated. The war has shown the deleterious effects of excessive dependence on non-allied sources for critical resources, such as gas.

What about a surprise win for Ms Le Pen? French foreign policy would then enter the unknown. To begin with, it is not certain at all that she would get a majority in the ensuing parliamentary elections. And even though this is her third presidential candidacy, she does not have a strong cadre of experienced politicians and experts around her. For these reasons her hypothetical policies are hard to predict.

Ms Le Pen would embrace like-minded European leaders, such as Viktor Orban, but would be less tempted to do so with Mr Putin than would have been the case before the Ukrainian war. As a nationalist, she was previously an admirer of the Russian president. Opponents also recall that her National Rally is in debt to a Russian bank. In March she even declared that Moscow could “once again be an ally” if Mr Putin put an end to the war. She would, however, almost certainly lay her mark on a few critical areas of EU policy, and would want to reform or even leave the Schengen arrangements. She would be likely to withdraw French forces from the Sahel, abandon any plans for new free-trade agreements and reduce the French commitment to fight against climate change.

If re-elected, Mr Macron would be the most experienced leader of an important European country. You should expect him to double down on his desire to ensure that France contributes to building a stronger Europe—probably the only area where he truly wants to have a foreign-policy legacy. If elected, Ms Le Pen would be by far the least experienced leader among her counterparts. Nobody knows where this would lead France nor, for that matter, the European Union.

_______________

Bruno Tertrais is a political scientist and the deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.

For more coverage like this, visit our dedicated French election hub

WE KNEW THE war was coming. But we did not expect it to become a full-scale conflict, displacing millions of people, in just a month. We did not anticipate so much tragedy and destruction. In our worst nightmares we did not expect to witness atrocities not seen in this part of Europe since the second world war.

Millions of people have fled Ukraine and 2.5m have arrived in Poland alone. We estimate that more than half a million refugees have passed through Warsaw, Poland’s capital. Another 300,000 have chosen to stay in the city and its suburbs. In just a month the population of Warsaw has increased by 17%. Poland has suddenly become the country with the second-largest refugee population in the world.

Our neighbours from Ukraine were welcomed with open hearts. The whole country has helped in the effort. Volunteers and charities streamed to the border to help people in need and the government opened reception centres. It announced that it would welcome every Ukrainian citizen in distress. After years of anti-refugee sentiment fuelled by the populist ruling party, Law and Justice–which I have countered as a member of the opposition coalition Civic Platform–we have all proved that we do indeed have solidarity in our national DNA even so.

The city of Warsaw opened information points and reception centres on the first day of the Russian invasion on February 24th. The central government has also opened its own reception centres in the city. We decided to organise the initial assistance at railway stations, providing our guests with information, food and medical help. Initially the vast majority of Ukrainian arrivals were taken care of by their families and friends. But ordinary people also opened their apartments to complete strangers. That is one reason why there are no visible groups of refugees on our streets, no pitched tents in the parks and no people living like nomads in camps.

The city also provides accommodation in our reception centres, municipal buildings, hotels and sport and youth centres. With the help of private companies we have retrofitted numerous office buildings so that they can serve as refugee centres. The Norwegian Refugee Council and WOSP, which collects money for medical equipment for kids and is one of the biggest charities in Poland, have built a state-of-the-art temporary transit shelter at the Warsaw East Railway Station.

As the war continues ever larger numbers of people are fleeing its bombs. They are increasingly traumatised, and need immediate psychological and medical assistance. They also need accommodation. Through the EU the Ukrainians have been granted temporary status akin to that of citizens in Poland and so enjoy free access to health care and education. Our hospitals and clinics are caring for thousands of patients. And there is a little hope amid the tragedy: 40 Ukrainian children have already been born in them.

Most of the administrative burdens associated with this care are being dealt with by local authorities. We are responsible for registering refugees, which includes assigning them identity and social security numbers, and for distributing government stipends to those hosting them. Warsaw is slowly becoming overwhelmed. Most of my social workers now focus on refugees, and most of my psychologists, who normally work with Polish kids, are helping traumatised youths coming from Ukraine. And of course I, as a mayor, have a duty to make sure that the city functions normally. No one wants the generosity of the people to be sapped by the inadequate quality of the city’s services.

It has to be clearly stated that most of what you see in Poland is improvisation. It is a bottom-up process driven mostly by a dense network of co-operation between volunteers, charities and local governments who shoulder most of the relief effort. We cannot go on in this way. Two weeks ago, at the peak of the crisis to date, 30,000 people a day were coming to Warsaw. I had to call mayors of other Polish and European cities to beg for assistance. My friends sent buses in the middle of the night to relocate people.

It’s high time we phased out improvisation and instead created a strategy for coping and appropriate systems for helping refugees. The latter will allow us not only to continue delivering assistance, but also will allow us to prepare for the coming months. To give you one example: in Warsaw we have already accepted more than 15,000 Ukrainian kids into our kindergartens and schools. But we know that there are 80,000 more of them waiting to enrol in the Polish education system. If they do so we will have to hire several thousand new teachers and build numerous kindergartens and schools. These are enormous costs that cities cannot bear alone. That is why it is best to create a two-tier system, whereby only certain kids, who understand a bit of Polish, immediately enter our system. The rest should start with remote learning on an Ukrainian educational platform. In addition they should be taught Polish after hours, so that they can be gradually introduced into our school system more successfully if they so choose.

What we need most is for the European and international relief agencies to create a permanent system of co-ordination for the refugee crisis. The Polish central government should make a prompt decision to sign a memorandum of understanding with the relevant UN agencies and it should ask the EU to show its solidarity through a voluntary refugee relocation scheme.

Finally, we need financial assistance that does not only go to the central government. The fact that Poland and Germany have just asked for a new system to be created through which the EU can grant €1,000 per refugee is a positive thing. But we also need funds to go directly to refugees, charities and local governments as they are at the forefront of the crisis. I have been fighting in the EU for such direct financial support for cities for years. We confront the greatest challenges of our time every day: fighting climate change, battling the pandemic or tackling the consequences of the most vicious military aggression in Europe in decades. The international community and the EU need to step up and help us out.

The Ukrainians are fighting not only for their freedom. They are fighting for our freedom, our values and the stability of transatlantic institutions as well. That is why we need to do our bit to help refugees. During the second world war, Hitler tried to wipe Warsaw from the European map. It was turned to rubble by the Nazis. Yet it rose to glory like a phoenix from the ashes. Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kherson and other Ukrainian cities have been sentenced to death by Vladimir Putin. Not many people in the world understand what that means better than us, what it means to fight, persevere and rebuild for the future. We need to help the Ukrainians fight and then rebuild their future. They cannot do it alone.

Rafal Trzaskowski is the mayor of Warsaw and a member of the opposition coalition, Civic Platform.

THE INCREASING brutality of Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine has prompted alarm in the West. That is understandable. But keep a sobering historical lesson in mind: brutality can be militarily effective. As such, it is premature, if not a mistake outright, to dismiss Russian savagery as indicative of operational desperation—however upsetting such an idea might be. It is a savagery consistent with Russia’s successful military operations in Chechnya and Syria.

I have little doubt that memories of these campaigns influenced Russia’s decision to employ brutal tactics in Ukraine. Viewed strictly through the lens of military usefulness, the tactics support Vladimir Putin’s stated goals for his “special military operation”: to demilitarise Ukraine and to protect Russian speakers in the Donbas region. The tactics are a form of terrorism which, in its simplest definition, is the application of violence against civilians to pursue political aims. In this case, Russia’s tactics may eventually present Ukraine’s political leadership with an impossible choice between concession and genocide.

Just because a tactic works, though, does not mean that a military commander should use it. Assuming there are alternatives, tactics should also strike the right balance between risk, cost and anticipated outcome. In other words, balancing these three considerations should distinguish tactics that are feasible—such as deliberately killing civilians—from those that are acceptable.

As a colonel in the US Army, I imagine that most professional military commanders would deem Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine to be unacceptable, tactically, because of their costs. But what are the costs of brutality, militarily speaking?

First and foremost, such tactics are a gross violation of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). These violations are more commonly called “war crimes”. Although unscrupulous commanders can attempt to justify anything under the guise of military necessity—one of the LOAC’s basic tenets—principles concerning distinction and proportionality limit options on what targets can be struck, how and when. Adherence to the LOAC is a sacred covenant within professional military ethics and is drummed into us officers throughout our careers. Collateral damage sometimes occurs, unfortunately, but the LOAC could never justify Russia’s armed forces indiscriminately targeting civilian areas with air strikes and artillery fire, as well as taking reprisals on the Ukrainian population through extra-judicial killings and sexual violence.

One of the challenges in the norms-based international order is that adherence to the LOAC and its constitutive principles results from agreement in good faith rather than strict enforcement. Other than through direct intervention by another country, there is no way to compel the Russians not to commit atrocities in Ukraine. However, just because there are no enforcement mechanisms does not mean that there are no costs.

Russia risks becoming a pariah state. The political and economic limitations that result from this will almost certainly translate into military problems. Pariah states are dysfunctional, and dysfunctional states tend to not do anything well. Russia will retain its status as a nuclear power come what may in Ukraine, and will continue to employ nuclear brinkmanship in pursuit of political ends. But a revanchist country cannot realise its aggressive political ambitions without credible land-based armed forces. I am hard pressed to see how Russia can renew its armed forces—for example, by making capital investments in new weapons systems—after what has happened in Ukraine. The fact that Russian conventional military capability is apparently not as good as observers had assessed before the war makes the recovery gap even greater.

Once atrocities have been committed, it is very difficult to walk back from them. A “sunk-cost” mindset can take hold. Russia’s particular method of brutalisation is self-limiting. Its armed forces appear primarily to be reducing areas to rubble with long-range firing to either kill Ukrainian civilians or force them to flee. (The refugees could have the ancillary effect of destabilising proximate NATO countries.) Once you have decimated an area and displaced the population, what more benign tactic can you then revert to? Alternatively, what other means are at your disposal to achieve the same military effect?

Terrorising civilians would seem to be at odds with occupation and pacification. But recall that these are not stated Russian operational goals. It seems that the Russians are not interested in “clear, hold, and build” (ie, the American counterinsurgency method) to consolidate gains in Ukraine, but rather just “clear”—as in Grozny and Aleppo, cities destroyed by Russian bombardment. Regardless of operational goals and the supporting tactics, it is the individual Russian soldier who brings the tactics to bear. He is thus very much complicit in any brutalisation. Every war crime in history has been abetted by the rank and file, after all, and Nuremberg proved that “just following orders” is no excuse. But there are opportunity costs that come with complicity, too.

Military effectiveness results from the compliance or commitment of soldiers, backed up by sound military discipline. A prudent commander wants commitment but can minimally force compliance; this is the essence of control. An army that is capable of the cruelty we are witnessing in Ukraine cannot be understood within this taxonomy. It would be more akin to a gang or a criminal mob, not an army. Sure, they may be “controlled” towards the commission of atrocities and undertake those atrocities with discipline. But it is not a form of discipline that the commander can apply to other military purposes. The tactic may have military utility, but its agents will not.

How, then, should we assess Russia’s adoption of brutalisation tactics in Ukraine? There are only two answers: either Mr Putin has no alternatives, or his cost calculations fundamentally differ from those presented here. Sobering, indeed.

Colonel Patrick J. Sullivan is the director of the Modern War Institute at West Point, a military college in America. This piece reflects his personal views and not those of either the US Army or of West Point.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

ONLY A FEW weeks ago Rishi Sunak, Britain’s chancellor, was seen as the most likely successor to Boris Johnson. Dapper where the prime minister is dishevelled, Mr Sunak was popular for his handling of the pandemic; his personal wealth was seen as a story of can-do competence. His star is now fading fast. A cost-of-living crisis is battering both household finances and his approval ratings: they have plummeted from a peak of +49 during the pandemic to -29 now. And his affluence has abruptly become a source of weakness.

On April 6th, the very same day that the Treasury increased payroll taxes, it emerged that his wife, Akshata Murty, has non-domiciled (“non-dom”) tax status. As a non-dom, and in exchange for an annual fee of £30,000 ($39,100), she does not have to pay tax in Britain on income generated abroad. That matters because her foreign assets include a stake in Infosys, a giant Indian IT-services company founded by her father, which generated dividends worth a reported £11.6m for her last year. If Ms Murty had been registered as a UK resident, 38.1% of those earnings would have been due to the government department her husband runs. As it is, zilch.

Mr Sunak is aggrieved by the focus on Ms Murty’s finances. Wrongly so. He alleges a smear campaign, but it is an odd sort of smear when the principal facts are not in dispute. Mr Sunak’s argument that his wife’s income is her business would make more sense if the government did not treat marriage as a financial merger, in which assets can be transferred between spouses tax-free. To imply that it is sexist to think differently would hold up better if non-dom status were not so archaic: the exemption itself is a legacy of empire and even now a person’s “domicile of origin” is still largely determined by paternal lineage. To say that Ms Murty has done all that Britain asks of her in terms of her tax affairs is deeply disingenuous when he is the person in charge of what is being asked.

On April 8th Ms Murty volunteered to pay British income tax on her global income, without giving up her non-dom status. But the right thing for the chancellor to do is to scrap non-dom status altogether. There is no natural law of taxation which requires it. The non-dom category layers further complexity onto an already-intricate system. The government’s guidance note on how to determine where someone is domiciled features four baffling flow charts and lots of advice to get advice.

The fear that getting rid of non-dom status would discourage talented foreigners from coming to or staying in Britain is not to be dismissed: at the margins, it will deter some people. But the country’s attractions (or more specifically the south-east’s, where the country’s 76,000 non-doms tend to cluster) are not restricted to tax breaks: schools, culture and property rights are all in the mix. And once put down, roots persist. New analysis by academics at the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics suggests that people who have ceased to claim non-dom status do not scarper afterwards.

Above all—and especially at a time when living standards in Britain are about to record their steepest drop since records began in the 1950s—it is essential that taxpayers regard taxes as fair. In truth, the tax system is progressive: average tax rates rise with income. But non-dom status is an anomaly; it is overwhelmingly used by the mobile rich. In 2018, 0.3% of those earning less than £100,000 had claimed the exemption; that figure jumps to 41% for those earning £5m and above (among migrants, it zooms to 84%). And since non-doms do not have to tell British authorities where they pay tax on their foreign assets, overseas income can be channelled to tax havens instead. There is no suggestion or evidence that Ms Murty has done anything illegal. But her husband should stop complaining and get rid of the exemption.

Editor’s note (April 8th 2022): This story was updated after Ms Murty said that she would pay British income tax on her global income.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is producing an earthquake in international affairs. The war has raised new questions about national security across Europe and is shaking up energy geopolitics. In addition, the war seems to be creating new divisions between the Global North and the Global South while Russia and China strengthen their strategic relationship.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky addresses some of the new developments taking place in the world system on account of Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Chomsky also ponders the question of whether Vladimir Putin can be prosecuted for war crimes in light of the mounting evidence that brings to mind the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II. Recent evidence also indicates that Ukrainian forces have also engaged in war crimes by killing captured Russian soldiers.
Chomsky, who is internationally recognized as one of the most important intellectuals alive, is the author of some 150 books and the recipient of scores of highly prestigious awards, including the Sydney Peace Prize and the Kyoto Prize (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize), and of dozens of honorary doctorate degrees from the world’s most renowned universities. Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona.
C. J. Polychroniou: The war in Ukraine has turned Russia into a pariah state throughout Europe and North America, but Moscow continues to receive support from many countries in the Global South. The strategic relationship between Russia and China seems to be getting stronger, although both countries had identified each other as major factors for maintaining order and stability in an “emerging polycentric world” long before Putin and Xi Jinping. In fact, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following a recent meeting with his Chinese counterpart that the two countries are working together to advance a vision of a new world order, a new “democratic world order.” Is the new world order one that pits Global North and Global South countries against each other? And what do you make of the statement of Russia and China working together to promote a new “democratic world order?” To me, the idea of two autocratic states working together to promote democracy across the world sounds like a crude joke.
Noam Chomsky: The idea that Russia and China will be working together to promote a “democratic world order” is, of course, ludicrous. They will be doing so in much the way that the U.S. was laboring to “promote democracy” in Iraq, the goal of the invasion as President Bush announced when it became clear that the “single question” — will Saddam abandon his nuclear weapons program? — had been answered the wrong way. With rare exceptions, the intellectual class and even most scholarship leaped to attention and vigorously proclaimed the new doctrine, as I suppose is also the case today in Russia and China.
As U.S.-run polls showed, Americans enthralled by the “noble” goals belatedly proclaimed were even joined by some Iraqis: 1 percent of those polled. Four percent thought the U.S. invaded in order to help Iraqis. The rest concluded that if Iraq’s exports had been asparagus and pickles, and the center of global petroleum production was in the South Pacific, the U.S. wouldn’t have invaded.
I don’t pretend to have any expert knowledge, but from my own experience in past weeks with the Global South — press, many interviews and meetings, much personal discussion — it doesn’t seem to me quite accurate to say that it is supporting Moscow, except in the sense that Moscow is getting support from the Western powers that keep paying it for petroleum products and food (probably by now the source of Russia’s main export earnings). 
My impression is that the Global South has sharply condemned the Russian invasion, but has asked: “What’s new?” The general reaction to President Biden’s harsh condemnation of Putin as a war criminal seems to be something like this: It takes one to know one. We agree that he is a war criminal, and as creatures of the Enlightenment, we adopt the Kantian principle of universality that is dismissed with contempt by the West, sometimes with angry charges of whataboutism.
Westerners consumed with moral outrage over the crimes of enemies are still able to maintain their usual silence while their own leaders carry out terrible crimes right now.
It is, after all, not easy for people in the civilized world — increasingly, the Global South — to be impressed by the “moral outrage” of Western intellectuals who just a few years ago, when all the horrific facts were in, were enthusiastically applauding the success of the invasion of Iraq, spouting pieties about noble intentions that would have embarrassed the most abject apparatchik. And we can just imagine the reaction when they read the pious invocation of the Nuremberg judgment by the editors of The New York Times, who are just now coming to recognize that, “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime: it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The accumulated evil includes the instigation of ethnic conflict that has torn apart not only Iraq but the whole region, the horrors of ISIS, and much more.
Not, of course, what the editors have in mind. The supreme international crimes that they have supported for 60 years somehow escaped the Nuremberg judgment.
While there is appreciation in the Global South for the fact that at long last Western intellectuals and the political class are coming to perceive that aggressors can commit hideous crimes, they seem to feel that it is perhaps a little late, and curiously skewed, as they know from ample experience. They are also able to perceive that Westerners consumed with moral outrage over the crimes of enemies are still able to maintain their usual silence while their own leaders carry out terrible crimes right now — in Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, Western Sahara, and all too many other places where they could act at once, and expeditiously, to mitigate or end these crimes.
Let’s turn to the “strategic relationship between Russia and China.” It does indeed seem to be strengthening, though it is not much of a partnership. The corrupt Russian kleptocracy can provide raw materials and advanced weapons to the economic system that Beijing is systematically establishing through mainland Asia, reaching also to Africa and the Middle East, and by now even to U.S. domains in Latin America. But not much more. Russia’s role in this highly unequal relationship is, I think, likely to diminish further, much as Europe’s international role is likely to diminish after Putin has handed Europe on a golden platter to the U.S.-run “Atlanticist” system, a gift of substantial significance, as we’ve discussed before.
Can China help end the war in Ukraine? If yes, what’s stopping Beijing from using its influence over Moscow for a peace agreement to be reached in Ukraine?
China could act to advance the prospects for a peaceful negotiated settlement in Ukraine. It seems that the Chinese leadership sees no advantage in doing so.
China’s “information system” appears to be pretty much conforming to the Russian propaganda line. But more generally, it doesn’t seem to diverge much from a fairly common stance in the Global South, illustrated graphically by the sanctions map. The states joining in sanctions against Russia are in the Anglosphere and Europe, as well as Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The rest of the world condemns the invasion, but is mostly standing aloof.
This should not surprise us. It is nothing new. We recall well that the Iraq invasion had virtually no global support. Less familiar is the fact that the same was true of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. A few weeks after the invasion, an international Gallup poll asked the question: “Once the identity of the [9/11] terrorists is known, should the American government launch a military attack on the country or countries where the terrorists are based or should the American government seek to extradite the terrorists to stand trial?”
The wording reflects the fact that their identity was not known. Even eight months later, in his first major press conference, FBI Director Robert Mueller could only affirm that al-Qaeda was suspected of the crime. If the poll had asked about actual U.S. policy, the very limited support would doubtless have been even lower.
World opinion overwhelmingly favored diplomatic-judicial measures over military action. Opposition to invasion was particularly strong in Latin America, which has a little experience with U.S. intervention.
The free press spared Americans knowledge of international opinion. It was therefore able to proclaim that “the opposition [to the U.S. invasion] was mostly limited to the people who are reflexively against the American use of power.”
Quite a few suffer from this malady, apparently. Global opinion today should come as no great surprise.
China’s unwillingness to devote its efforts to a negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict deserves criticism, but it is hard to see how such criticism can properly come from Americans. After all, China is adhering to official U.S. policy. Simply put, the policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence” while offering no way to save Ukraine from further tragedy. Even worse, current policy undermines such hopes by informing Putin that he has no way out: It’s The Hague or proceed to destroy Ukraine.
The quote and the opinions just paraphrased are those of one of the most astute and widely respected U.S. diplomats, Ambassador Chas Freeman, who goes on to spell out the options, and to remind us of the history.
Like anyone who cares in the least about the fate of Ukrainians, Ambassador Freeman recognizes that the only alternative to Russian destruction of Ukraine — which, with their backs to the wall, Putin and his narrow circle of siloviki can implement — is a negotiated settlement that will be ugly, offering the aggressors an escape. He also carries the history back further than we have done in our earlier discussions, back to the Congress of Vienna of 1814, which followed the Napoleonic Wars. Metternich and other European leaders, he observes, “had the good sense to reincorporate [defeated] France into the governing councils of Europe,” overlooking its virtual conquest of Europe. That led to a century of substantial peace in Europe, which had long been the most violent part of the world. There were some wars, but nothing like what preceded. The century of peace ended with World War I.
Freeman goes on to remind us that the victors in the war did not have the good sense of their predecessors: “The victors — the United States and Britain and France — insisted on excluding Germany from a role in the affairs of Europe, as well as this newly formed Soviet Union, the result was World War II and the Cold War.”
As we’ve discussed earlier, a leading theme throughout the Cold War was the status of Europe: Should it subordinate itself to the U.S. within the Atlanticist-NATO framework, the U.S. preference? Or should it become an independent “third force” along Gaullist lines, accommodating Russia within a Europe without military alliances from the Atlantic to the Urals?
The question arose starkly when the USSR collapsed, and Mikhail Gorbachev outlined the vision of a “common European home” with no military alliances from Lisbon to Vladivostok. In a limited form, the concept was revived by French President Emmanuel Macron in his recent abortive interchanges with Putin.
If there had been anyone in the Kremlin who resembled a statesman, they would have leaped at the opportunity to explore something like the Gorbachev vision. Europe has strong reasons to establish close relations with Russia, ranging from commerce to security. Whether such efforts might have succeeded, avoiding the Ukraine tragedy, we can only guess. The answer could only have been found out by trying. Instead, the hard men in Moscow turned to violence, compounding their criminal aggression with self-defeating foolishness.
The Gorbachev conception had some partial U.S. support within the framework of the Partnership for Peace, a U.S. initiative intended to provide a cooperative security system with a limited relation to NATO. Ambassador Freeman, who had a significant role in establishing it, describes its fate in words that are worth heeding:

What happened in 1994, which was a midterm election year, and 1996, which was a presidential election year, was interesting. In 1994, Mr. Clinton was talking out of both sides of his mouth. He was telling the Russians that we were in no rush to add members to NATO, and that our preferred path was the Partnership for Peace. The same time he was hinting to the ethnic diasporas of Russophobic countries in Eastern Europe — and, by the way, it’s easy to understand their Russophobia given their history — that, no, no, we were going to get these countries into NATO as fast as possible. And in 1996 he made that pledge explicit. [In] 1994 he got an outburst from [Boris] Yeltsin, who was then the president of the Russian Federation. [In] 1996 he got another one, and as time went on, when Mr. Putin came in, he regularly protested the enlargement of NATO in ways that disregarded Russia’s self-defense interests. So, there should have been no surprise about this. For 28 years Russia has been warning that at some point it would snap, and it has, and it has done it in a very destructive way, both in terms of its own interests and in terms of the broader prospects for peace in Europe.

None of this provides any excuse for Putin’s invasion, Freeman emphasizes. But it is important to understand that, “There were those people in the United States who were triumphalist about the end of the Cold War…. This allowed the United States to incorporate all the countries right up to Russia’s borders and beyond them, beyond those borders in the Baltics, into an American sphere of influence. And, essentially, they posited a global sphere of influence for the United States modeled on the Monroe Doctrine. And that’s pretty much what we have.”
Russian leadership tolerated Clinton’s violation of the firm U.S. commitment to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond East Germany. They even tolerated George W. Bush’s further provocations, and U.S. military actions that struck directly at Russian interests, undertaken in such a way as to humiliate Russia. But Ukraine and Georgia were red lines. That was clearly understood in Washington. As Freeman continues, no Russian leader was likely to tolerate the NATO expansion into Ukraine that began after the 2014 “coup, [carried out] to prevent neutrality or a pro-Russian government in Kiev, and to replace it with a pro-American government that would bring Ukraine into our sphere…. So, since about 2015 the United States has been arming, training Ukrainians against Russia,” effectively treating Ukraine “as an extension of NATO.”
As we’ve discussed, that stance became explicit policy in Biden’s September 2021 official statement, possibly a factor in Russia’s decision to escalate to direct aggression a few months later.
Crucially, to repeat, current U.S. policy is to “fight to the last Ukrainian” while offering no way to save Ukraine from further tragedy and in fact undermining such hopes by informing Putin that he has no way out: It’s The Hague or proceed to destroy Ukraine.
China is probably relatively satisfied with the course of events. Very likely the same is true in Washington. Both have gained from the tragedy. And the euphoria among weapons and fossil fuel producers is unconcealed as they lead the way toward indescribable catastrophe, underscored in vivid terms by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of April 4.
Turkey’s position over the war in Ukraine is to maintain neutrality while acting as a mediator in the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. Can Turkey continue to maintain such a balancing act since we know that it has been supplying military assistance to Ukraine since 2019 and that it is aligned with the geo-strategic vision of Washington over Ukraine?
Turkey has had an ambiguous position in global affairs for many years. It is a member of NATO, but the EU has rejected its appeals for membership on human rights grounds. In the 1990s, Turkey was indeed responsible for hideous crimes: its massive state terror against its Kurdish population, leaving tens of thousands dead, 3,500 towns and villages destroyed, a flood of hundreds of thousands of people from the devastated Kurdish regions to miserable slums in Istanbul. The crimes were mostly concealed by the “free press,” perhaps because Clinton was pouring arms into Turkey, the flow escalating as atrocities mounted. Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. military aid (apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category), extending a very close correlation between human rights abuses and U.S. aid that goes far back, but somehow does not detract from its much-lauded nobility.
By 2000, Turkish state crimes were abating, and in the following years the situation greatly improved — something I was able to witness personally, with much appreciation. By 2005, under President Recep Erdoğan’s increasingly harsh rule, the progress ended and reversed. That might have been in part a reaction to the continued refusal of the European Union to accept Turkish membership, ignoring the great steps forward in recent years and fortifying the sense that Europeans simply won’t accept Turks into their club.
Since then, Erdoğan’s rule has become far more brutal, again targeting Kurds but also attacking civil and human rights on a broad front. And he has been trying to turn Turkey into a major actor in regional affairs, with hints of a renewed Ottoman caliphate. He accepts Russian weapons over strong U.S. objections but remains a central part of the NATO system of regional — by now global — dominance. The “balancing act” with regard to Ukraine is a case in point.
If Turkey can facilitate negotiations that will bring the Ukraine horrors to an end, that will be a most welcome development, to be applauded. We can only speculate about what the chances are while the U.S. insists on perpetuating the conflict “to the last Ukrainian” while blocking an ugly negotiated settlement that is the alternative to destruction of Ukraine and perhaps even nuclear war.
Russian gas continues to flow to Europe although Putin had demanded that European governments pay for it in rubles. What would be the impact in the geo-strategic relations between Europe and Russia if the former became independent from Russian gas? 
It doesn’t look likely in the near future. Europe could manage to end the use of Russian coal and oil, but gas is a different matter. That requires pipelines, which it would take years to build, or transport facilities for liquified natural gas that barely exist. But the question we should be asking I think is different. Can we ascend to the wisdom of the reactionary tyrants who provided Europe with a century of peace in Vienna in 1814? Can we move towards the Gorbachev vision of a European common home with no military alliances, a conception not too far from the U.S.-initiated Partnership for Peace that was undermined by President Clinton? Can some resemblance to statesmanship appear in today’s Russia? Such questions as these should, I think, be in the forefront of our thinking, and our active engagement in trying to influence discussion and debate, and policy choices.
Evidence of Russian war crimes is mounting. Can Putin be prosecuted for war crimes in Ukraine?
Prosecution for war crimes, in the real world, is “victor’s justice.” That was clear from the Nuremberg Tribunal and was not even concealed in the accompanying Tokyo Tribunal. At Nuremberg, saturation bombing of densely settled urban areas was excluded because it was a specialty of the Allies. German war criminals were exculpated if they could show that the Allies carried out the same crimes. In subsequent years, the Nuremberg principles were thrown out the window. They have only recently been discovered as a cudgel to beat official enemies.
There can be no thought of trying the U.S. for its many horrendous crimes. An effort was once made to bring the U.S. to justice for its war against Nicaragua. The U.S. responded to the International Court of Justice orders to end the crimes by sharply escalating them while the press dismissed the court as a “hostile forum” as shown by its daring to convict the U.S. (per The New York Times’s editors), following ample precedent.
Putin might be tried for crimes if he is overthrown within Russia and Russia can be treated as a defeated country. That is what the record indicates.
Imaginably, the world might rise to a level of civilization in which international law can be honored instead of righteously wielded against selected targets. We should never cease efforts to bring that about. In doing so, we should not succumb to the illusions fostered by the global doctrinal systems.

When I first became president, I said that I would support Russian President Boris Yeltsin in his efforts to build a good economy and a functioning democracy after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—but I would also support an expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact members and post-Soviet states. My policy was to work for the best while preparing for the worst. I was worried not about a Russian return to communism, but about a return to ultranationalism, replacing democracy and cooperation with aspirations to empire, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. I didn’t believe Yeltsin would do that, but who knew what would come after him?If Russia stayed on a path toward democracy and cooperation, we would all be together in meeting the security challenges of our time: terrorism; ethnic, religious, and other tribal conflicts; and the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. If Russia chose to revert to ultranationalist imperialism, an enlarged NATO and a growing European Union would bolster the continent’s security. Near the end of my second term, in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO despite Russian opposition. The alliance gained 11 more members under subsequent administrations, again over Russian objections.[Read: Putin’s strategic error]Lately, NATO expansion has been criticized in some quarters for provoking Russia and even laying the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The expansion certainly was a consequential decision, one that I continue to believe was correct.As United Nations ambassador and later secretary of state, my friend Madeleine Albright, who recently passed away, was an outspoken supporter of NATO expansion. So were Secretary of State Warren Christopher; National Security Adviser Tony Lake; his successor, Sandy Berger; and two others with firsthand experience in the area: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili, who was born in Poland to Georgian parents and came to the U.S. as a teenager, and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who translated and edited Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs while we were housemates at Oxford in 1969 and 1970.At the time I proposed NATO expansion, however, there was a lot of respected opinion on the other side. The legendary diplomat George Kennan, famous for advocating for the policy of containment during the Cold War, argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, NATO had outlived its usefulness. The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said Russia would feel humiliated and cornered by an enlarged NATO, and when it recovered from the economic weakness of the last years of Communist rule, we would see a terrible reaction. Mike Mandelbaum, a respected authority on Russia, thought it was a mistake too, arguing that it wouldn’t promote democracy or capitalism.I understood that renewed conflict was a possibility. But in my view, whether it happened depended less on NATO and more on whether Russia remained a democracy and how it defined its greatness in the 21st century. Would it build a modern economy based on its human talent in science, technology, and the arts, or seek to re-create a version of its 18th-century empire fueled by natural resources and characterized by a strong authoritarian government with a powerful military?  I did everything I could to help Russia make the right choice and become a great 21st-century democracy. My first trip outside the United States as president was to Vancouver to meet with Yeltsin and guarantee $1.6 billion for Russia so it could afford to bring its soldiers home from the Baltic states and provide for their housing. In 1994, Russia became the first country to join the Partnership for Peace, a program for practical bilateral cooperation, including joint training exercises between NATO and non-NATO European countries. That same year, the U.S. signed the Budapest Memorandum, along with Russia and the United Kingdom, which guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in return for Ukraine’s agreement to give up what was then the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Beginning in 1995, after the Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War, we made an agreement to add Russian troops to the peacekeeping forces that NATO had on the ground in Bosnia. In 1997, we supported the NATO-Russia Founding Act, which gave Russia a voice but not a veto in NATO affairs, and supported Russia’s entry to the G7, making it the G8. In 1999, at the end of the Kosovo conflict, Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen reached an agreement with the Russian defense minister under which Russian troops could join UN-sanctioned NATO peacekeeping forces. Throughout it all, we left the door open for Russia’s eventual membership in NATO, something I made clear to Yeltsin and later confirmed to his successor, Vladimir Putin.[Tom Nichols: Only NATO can save Putin]In addition to all these efforts to involve Russia in NATO’s post–Cold War missions, Albright and our entire national-security team worked hard to promote positive bilateral relations. Vice President Al Gore co-chaired a commission with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin to address issues of mutual interest. We agreed to destroy 34 tons of weapons-grade plutonium each. We also agreed to pull Russian, European, and NATO conventional forces back from borders, though Putin declined to go ahead with the plan when he assumed the Russian presidency in 2000.All told, I met with Yeltsin 18 times and Putin five times—twice when he was Yeltsin’s prime minister and three times in the 10-plus months that our terms as president overlapped. That’s just three short of all the U.S.-U.S.S.R. leaders’ meetings from 1943 through 1991. The idea that we ignored, disrespected, or tried to isolate Russia is false. Yes, NATO expanded despite Russia’s objections, but expansion was about more than the U.S. relationship with Russia.When my administration started, in 1993, no one felt certain that a post–Cold War Europe would remain peaceful, stable, and democratic. Big questions remained about East Germany’s integration with West Germany, whether old conflicts would explode across the continent as they did in the Balkans, and how former Warsaw Pact nations and newly independent Soviet republics would seek security, not just against the threat of Russian invasion, but from one another and from conflicts within their borders. The possibility of EU and NATO membership provided the greatest incentives for Central and Eastern European states to invest in political and economic reforms and abandon a go-it-alone strategy of militarization.Neither the EU nor NATO could stay within the borders Stalin had imposed in 1945. Many countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain were seeking greater freedom, prosperity, and security with the EU and NATO, under inspiring leaders such as Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, Lech Wałęsa in Poland, and, yes, a young pro-democracy Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Thousands of everyday citizens crowded the squares of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, and beyond whenever I spoke there.As Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December 2021, “It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites and republics wishing to go West.”Or as Havel said in 2008: “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.” To reject Central and Eastern European countries’ membership into NATO simply because of Russian objections would have been doing just that.Enlarging NATO required unanimous consent of the alliance’s then-16 members; two-thirds consent of a sometimes skeptical U.S. Senate; close consultation with prospective members to ensure that their military, economic, and political reforms met NATO’s high standards; and near-constant reassurance to Russia.Madeleine Albright excelled at every step. Indeed, few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine. As a child in war-torn Europe, Madeleine and her family were twice forced to flee their home—first by Hitler, then by Stalin. She understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent. As UN ambassador and secretary of state, she worked to realize that vision and to beat back the religious, ethnic, and other tribal divisions that threatened it. She used every item in her famed diplomat’s toolkit and her domestic political savvy to help clear the way for the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join NATO in 1999.[Anne Applebaum: Ukraine must win]The result has been more than two decades of peace and prosperity for an ever-larger portion of Europe and a strengthening of our collective security. Per capita GDPs have more than tripled in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. All three countries have participated in a variety of NATO missions since joining, including the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. To date, no member state of our defensive alliance has been invaded. Indeed, even in the early years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the mere prospect of NATO membership helped cool long-simmering disputes between Poland and Lithuania, Hungary and Romania, and others.Now Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was necessary. Russia under Putin clearly would not have been a content status quo power in the absence of expansion. It wasn’t an immediate likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO that led Putin to invade Ukraine twice—in 2014 and in February—but rather the country’s shift toward democracy that threatened his autocratic power at home, and a desire to control the valuable assets beneath the Ukrainian soil. And it is the strength of the NATO alliance, and its credible threat of defensive force, that has prevented Putin from menacing members from the Baltics to Eastern Europe. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum said recently, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years … We would be having this fight in East Germany right now if we hadn’t done it.”The failure of Russian democracy, and its turn to revanchism, was not catalyzed in Brussels at NATO headquarters. It was decided in Moscow by Putin. He could have used Russia’s prodigious skills in information technology to create a competitor for Silicon Valley and build a strong, diversified economy. Instead he decided to monopolize and weaponize those abilities to promote authoritarianism at home and wreak havoc abroad, including by interfering in the politics of Europe and the U.S. Only a strong NATO stands between Putin and even further aggression. We should therefore support President Joe Biden and our NATO allies in giving as much assistance to Ukraine, both military and humanitarian, as possible.My last conversation with Madeleine Albright was just two weeks before she died. She was vintage Madeleine, sharp and direct. It was clear she wanted to go out with her boots on, supporting the Ukrainians in their fight for freedom and independence. On her declining health, she said, “I’ve got good care. I’m doing what I can. Let’s not waste time on that. The important thing is what kind of world we’re going to leave our grandchildren.” Madeleine saw her lifelong fight for democracy and security as both an obligation and an opportunity. She was proud of her Czech heritage and certain that her people and their neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe would defend their freedom, “because they know the price of losing freedom.” She was right about NATO when I was president and right about Ukraine now. I miss her so much, but I can still hear her voice. So should we all.

In his review of Woody Holton’s Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution [NYR, January 13], Sean Wilentz presents an array of statistics about the slave trade that require correction. Professor Wilentz questions Holton’s claim that nearly a million Africans were transported to the Americas between 1783 and 1792. A closer look suggests that Holton is a little cavalier on the numbers—the slavevoyages.org estimates for this period are 873,000. But Holton is mistaken in assuming that the War of Independence had any effect on the overall slave trade. The massive Portuguese, British, French, and Spanish slave trades were growing before the War of Independence, and they resumed their growth to peak levels after 1783. The peak year for the transatlantic slave trade was 1829.

One problem with Wilentz’s estimates is that he excludes arrivals to the US from the Caribbean. He states that “between 1786 and 1795…an estimated 10,006 enslaved Africans disembarked in what had been British mainland North America.” That figure is correct for the number who arrived here directly from Africa. However, it fails to include those who arrived in the same period via the intra-American slave trade. When we add in the 6,916 Africans arriving indirectly, the total for that decade dramatically increases by a whopping 70 percent.

Suppose we widen our lens somewhat and look at the number of arrivals between 1780 and 1808, the year the legal slave trade ended. In that case, the total number of enslaved Africans who arrived in the United States is estimated to have been 116,277—101,048 directly from Africa and 15,229 from other ports in the Americas, which amounts to 25.4 percent of the total of 457,348 enslaved Africans who arrived in mainland North America over the entire course of the legal slave trade.

The growth in the trade is apparent if we look at the numbers of imports in the early nineteenth century. Professor Wilentz says that the Constitution permitted “South Carolina to reopen its slave trade in December 1803, which led to the arrival of an estimated 63,862 enslaved Africans…to the Carolinas and Georgia” before 1808. (The slavevoyages.org estimate for this period and region is slightly higher, 66,795: 64,512 directly from Africa and another 2,238 through the intra-American trade.) 1807 saw the historical peak of the slave trade to North America when Charleston received more enslaved people (28,892) than the British Caribbean combined (26,855). As this suggests, despite state and federal legislation, American merchants dramatically reconstituted their transatlantic slave trade in the 1790s, with an epicenter, first, in Rhode Island and then Charleston.

Even with these important adjustments, Professor Wilentz’s numbers also fail to account for American participation on US-flagged vessels from Africa to foreign ports, an issue that has received insufficient attention. Adding those numbers, we can see that American involvement in the slave trade progressively increased to an astonishing degree. For example, we can add another 70,646 Africans caught up in this traffic to the 116,277 who arrived in the United States between 1780 and 1808. Overall, Americans were responsible for nearly 5 percent of the total transatlantic slave trade between 1783 and 1808, not the 2.4 percent that Wilentz claims. In the last decade of the legal traffic, the US was the third-largest slave trader in the Atlantic world after the Portuguese and the British.

The central issue of the review is whether the Constitution “facilitated a postwar boom in the forced transportation of Africans to the Americas.” Holton says it did; Wilentz says it ultimately enabled abolition. The Constitution upheld the institution of slavery by protecting the rights of slaveholders. But it also opened a venue for Congress to end the transatlantic slave trade. In Holton’s support, we have shown that, indeed, there was an exponential growth in enslaved Africans carried to the postrevolutionary US. But that increase also confirms Wilentz’s point on the importance of the decision to abolish the trade at a time when ever more Africans were arriving. Without such legislation, prices for the enslaved would have remained low and American merchants would have continued importing captives to the US, and indeed to the rest of the Americas.

David Eltis

Professor Emeritus

Emory University

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, British Columbia

Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez

Assistant Professor

Department of History

University of Texas at San Antonio

Alphonse Fletcher University Professor

Sean Wilentz replies:

My thanks to Professors Eltis, Felipe-Gonzalez, and Gates for clarifying the statistics on the intra-American slave trade. A total of 16,922 enslaved Africans arrived in the US between 1786 and 1795, not 10,006. The letter writers’ figures and sources also affirm my conclusions about the Constitution and the slave trade. This is the crucial point, underscoring the scholarly refutation of the doctrinaire nonsense about the supposedly pro-slavery Revolution.

The letter writers reinforce my review in concluding that Woody Holton on the slave trade is “a little cavalier on the numbers.” Holton’s effort to tie the Constitution to the entire transatlantic slave trade for the decade after 1783 is “highly deceptive,” as I wrote, starting with the fact that the Constitution only came into effect in 1788.

Unfortunately, some of the letter writers’ other observations are mistaken. For instance, they have me holding Americans responsible for just 2.4 percent of the entire transatlantic slave trade from 1783 to 1808. My review, though, states something entirely different, that US-flagged vessels accounted for “about 2.4 percent” of the trade in slaves from Africa, but only “to the rest of the Americas,” and only between 1783 and 1792.

This muddle probably explains, in turn, their assertion that I fail to include the enslaved people carried by “US-flagged vessels from Africa to foreign ports.” But the sentence they garble does exactly what they charge I don’t do.

That error regrettably misrepresents my view of the US Atlantic slave trade. Between 1780 and 1808, their figures show, the number of enslaved people sent directly from Africa to the US and those sent to foreign ports under the US flag—which my review includes—was 171,694. Add the intra-American trade that I overlooked and the total is 186,923, a difference of 8.9 percent—noteworthy, even significant, but hardly vast. The suggestion that my review, in seeking accurate statistics, gravely minimizes both the barbaric US slave trade and the immensely larger overall trade is false.

It’s true that the US was the third-largest slave trader in the Atlantic world from 1798 through 1807, but the statement can mislead. By then, the letter writers should have mentioned, three countries alone commanded more than 90 percent of the trade, and the US trailed the leaders, Portugal and Great Britain, by a factor of roughly three.

Finally, the letter writers should reconsider seriously their claims about an “exponential growth” in enslaved arrivals to the US after the Revolution, with a dramatic reconstitution of the trade in the 1790s. Their sources actually reveal the opposite, contravening Holton. The Continental Congress’s ban on importing enslaved Africans during the Revolution can make marginal increases after the Revolution look “exponential.”

More important, the sources indicate a drastic decline in arrivals during the postrevolutionary decades compared to prerevolutionary America. The total for the twenty years ending in 1776, as calculated by slavevoyages.org, was 113,142. Over the twenty years starting in 1783, the figure was 41,549—an astonishing drop by nearly two thirds. The undramatic growth after the Revolution was erratic, not “exponential,” briefly peaking in 1784–1785 and 1795–1797. The sharp spike to which my review alludes—two thirds of the total since 1783—only came between 1803 and 1807, nearly a generation after the Constitution was ratified, anticipating abolition in 1808.

There was a steadier rise in the numbers carried by US-flagged ships between 1783 and 1808, chiefly to foreign ports, with another spike in 1803–1807. But numbers alone can deceive. As too few note, the Constitution permitted Congress to restrict the US slave trade short of abolition before 1808. This included banning US involvement in the foreign slave trade, which Congress, pushed by black and white abolitionists, enacted in 1794 and 1800. Enforcement proved difficult, but still: How much can anyone say the Constitution “facilitated” the larger slave trade when it empowered Congress to outlaw the US part of that trade, which Congress did?

Quibbling about statistics aside, the larger point is that, contrary to Holton, the Constitution’s authorization to abolish the American transatlantic slave trade in 1808, although a hard-fought compromise, was fundamentally an antislavery accomplishment in 1787–1788, the first serious blow ever against the Atlantic trade in the name of a national government. We are left, without illusions, as the letter writers conclude, to reflect on the importance of the Constitution in opening “a venue for Congress to end the transatlantic slave trade.”

W EEKS AFTER Russia invaded Ukraine, a couple of superyachts belonging to Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch sanctioned by Britain, docked in Turkish ports. Boats linked to two other oligarchs, Andrey Molchanov and Maxim Shubarev, and to Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president, have also been sighted. On March 29th Mr Abramovich himself surfaced in Turkey, joining Russian and Ukrainian negotiators at peace talks in Istanbul.

Turkey is playing more than one role in the war. A NATO member, it backs Ukraine and continues to sell it armed drones, which have turned scores of Russian tanks into scrap. Yet President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s criticism of Russian atrocities has been mild. And, more worrying, there are signs that Turkey may be circumventing sanctions against Russia.

On March 26th Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, said Russian oligarchs’ business was welcome in Turkey as long as they respected inter national law. Mr Erdogan said he would “keep the doors open”. In a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin, he suggested Turkey and Russia conduct their trade using roubles, the Chinese yuan or gold. Turkey, which already faced American sanctions for buying a Russian air-defence system, has refused to rule out new arms deals with Russia.

Most Turks sympathise with Ukraine. But Mr Erdogan’s habit of provoking the West and placating Russia has taken a toll. A recent poll found 73% of Turks want their country to stay neutral over Ukraine. Only 34% say Russia is responsible for the war: 48% blame America and NATO . Mr Erdogan seems determined to allow nothing, including war crimes, to upset his relationship with Mr Putin. “Our relations with Turkey are excellent,” Dmitry Peskov, the Russian dictator’s spokesman, crowed on April 2nd.

Mr Erdogan’s offer to mediate between Russia and Ukraine has earned him praise. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has dinged other leaders for going soft on Russia, has had only kind words for the Turkish leader. The role of Turkish drones may be tempering Ukrainian criticism, says Yevgeniya Gaber of Carleton University’s Centre of Modern Turkish Studies.

That Turkey refuses to join sanctions against Russia is no surprise. The country has traditionally opposed sanctions as a foreign-policy tool. But frustration with Mr Erdogan’s opportunism is mounting in Western capitals. Many feel Turkey is using the fruitless peace talks as an excuse. “Nobody here believes in the success of the negotiations,” says a European official. “Russia is determined to destroy Ukraine, and it should be in Turkey’s interest to prevent this.”

F RANCIS BACON declared it “the painfullest task in the realm”. Patrick Hastings QC , who would serve three centuries later, called it “my idea of hell”. The post of attorney-general for England and Wales is one of the oldest in British government, and a difficult hybrid. The holder is a political animal, who attends cabinet and uses the law to get their colleagues’ business done. But they also have apolitical duties, such as authorising prosecutions for contempt of court. Above all, as the government’s chief legal adviser, they must act as an internal check on the government, and be ready to say “no” to the prime minister.

Critics of Suella Braverman, the incumbent, think she is failing in this balancing act, and allowing her political instincts to cloud her legal judgment. But accompanying claims that Ms Braverman is out of her depth are far too dismissive. She is a leading exponent of a constitutional doctrine which has become a hallmark of Boris Johnson’s government.

Ms Braverman, who was appointed in 2020, shrugs off criticism that she has politicised her role. She isn’t an unelected technocrat, she notes, and her predecessors in the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s were open about the job’s partisan nature. But she does have tabloid instincts: not for her the submarine-like silence that some attorneys general adopt.

She has appeared in person to ask the appeal court to lengthen the “unduly lenient” sentences handed to a series of high-profile killers. In January, when a jury acquitted four protesters who had toppled a statue of a slave owner, she said she would ask judges to review the law. She declared her support for Mr Johnson and a former aide, Dominic Cummings, when both were accused of busting covid-19 lockdown rules. Since her role includes oversight of the Crown Prosecution Service, many lawyers thought it would have been better to say nothing.

Critics put this down to an unfortunate combination of inexperience and careerism. Appointed to the role at the age of 39, she was the youngest attorney-general since 1802, according to James Hand of the University of Portsmouth. With only a decade at the Bar and not yet a Queen’s Counsel, she was more junior than all but one of her predecessors since 1900. Attorneys-general have historically shunned other ministerial roles; Ms Braverman made her name as a hard-line Brexit minister and has a shot at higher office. This, some think, makes her unsuited to the grave decisions that land on her desk, such as signing off on drone strikes. “I feel rather sorry for her,” says one Tory colleague, considering the pressures of the job.

Her supporters note that all attorneys-general rely on external counsel, and detect the condescension that meets many women in the law. And Ms Braverman is a more meaningful figure than her critics allow. Along with many Tory MP s and several conservative legal academics, she thinks the judiciary has become overmighty in the past two decades. She is a driving force behind a doctrine which seeks to “rebalance” the constitution, and which reasserts the ability of politicians to make policy without being gainsaid by judges.

In 2020 Mr Johnson proposed breaking his EU exit-treaty obligations in order to strengthen his negotiating position, prompting the resignation of Jonathan Jones, the head of the government legal department, and Lord Keen, the advocate-general for Scotland. Ms Braverman provided legal advice justifying the breach of international law on the bald grounds that a sovereign parliament can legislate as it pleases. “She was determined that a legal way would be found to introduce those clauses,” says a former colleague.

In a recent speech she argued that the Supreme Court had wrongly strayed into political terrain when it overturned Mr Johnson’s prorogation of parliament in 2019. “The authority of the judiciary must never again be pitched against the authority of the people,” she said. A good many legal academics are alarmed by what they see as the government weakening long-established checks and balances. But as far as Ms Braverman goes, best not to mistake inexperience for incoherence. ■

A T A CEREMONY on April 1st Suh Wook, South Korea’s defence minister, boasted that South Korea could “accurately and swiftly strike any targets in North Korea”. Kim Yo Jong, a high-ranking North Korean official and the sister of Kim Jong Un, the country’s dictator, quickly fired back, accusing the “scum-like guy” of “senseless bluster” for threatening a “pre-emptive strike”. She later added that the South Korean army would “face a miserable fate little short of total destruction and ruin” if it were to attack.

The colourful exchange comes at a time of rising tensions. For over four years the North has refrained from testing nuclear weapons or the intercontinental ballistic missiles ( ICBM s) needed to deliver them to America’s shores, supposedly because the weapons’ development had been completed. Now both programmes appear to be coming out of hibernation.

In late February and early March North Korea conducted two big rocket launches which it claimed were to test reconnaissance satellite equipment. American spooks suspected those launches were laying the groundwork for future weapons tests. Then on March 24th something went up that both sides agreed was an ICBM . North Korea said it was a Hwasong-17, a previously untested missile larger than anything in its arsenal. It backed up this claim with footage of the launch, which paid homage to 1980s action movies. In it a leather-jacketed Mr Kim taps his watch, dramatically tears his sunglasses from his face and nods gravely, as if signalling the start of the action. The launch itself is filmed from several angles.

America and South Korea said the video was doctored. The launch, they said, was probably of the smaller Hwasong-15, which has already been tested. That is plausible. North Korea has faked missile-test footage before. Colin Zwirko, an analyst at NK News, a Seoul-based outlet, thinks the regime may have been trying to make up for a launch that failed on March 16th. Which ever missile it was, North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on ICBM testing is over.

More worrying still is the prospect that nuclear tests will soon follow. Satellite imagery shows new activity around one of the tunnels at Punggye-ri, North Korea’s only known nuclear-testing facility, which Mr Kim shut down in 2018. Analysts believe that testing could resume by mid-April.

That would coincide nicely with the 110th anniversary, on April 15th, of the birth of Kim Il Sung: Mr Kim’s grandfather and the founder of North Korea’s hereditary dictatorship. A large military parade is planned. Mr Kim likes to celebrate big occasions with a bang. Every nuclear test conducted during his reign has fallen within a week of his birthday, his father’s birthday or the anniversary of the country’s founding.

Domestic worries may be one reason for the renewed activity. Everyday life for ordinary North Koreans has become notably grimmer since the start of the pandemic. Mr Kim sealed the country’s borders, causing severe food shortages and battering the informal markets that provide many locals with a living. Mr Kim might be hoping that tests and martial pageantry will bring a little cheer. If indeed the regime did doctor the footage of the latest launch, the intended audience may well have been viewers at home.

But Mr Kim doubtless also wants to improve his military capabilities and thus his leverage in negotiations with adversaries, with the eventual goal of being accepted as a nuclear power. Though he has already shown that he can send ICBM s skyward, he has yet to prove that the missiles can deliver a payload to their targets. He may also be trying to develop low-yield nuclear weapons. Such devices could sit on shorter-ranged missiles aimed at the South, and help further Mr Kim’s ambition to fire multiple warheads from a single ICBM .

Mr Suh’s term ends in May, along with that of his boss Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s current president, who tried to win over Mr Kim. The incoming president, Yoon Suk-yeol, takes a harder line. He repeatedly endorsed the idea of pre-emptive strikes on the campaign trail. The noise on the Korean peninsula—both from missiles and rhetoric—is about to get much louder. ■

L AST MAY Raymond Padilla, a former journalist from the Philippines who arrived in Britain in 2005, was elected to Gloucester City Council. Filipino reporters called his victory historic; it also seemed improbable. Gloucester, in the west of England, is not hugely diverse. At the time of the most recent published census, in 2011, only 14% of its inhabitants were anything other than white and British. The city does not even have a Filipino restaurant. When immigrants want a taste of home, they make do with Thai food.

But the number of Filipinos in Gloucester is growing. That is largely because of its hospital, where Mr Padilla works as a nurse. “We’re all over the place because hospitals and care homes are all over the place,” he says. And that growth hints at a profound change in the pattern of immigration to Britain.

Since the second world war Britain has gone through two big phases of immigration. First came migrants from former colonies such as India, Pakistan and Jamaica, who often availed themselves of free movement within the empire and Commonwealth, just as the British colonists had done. As the Sri Lankan writer and activist Ambalavaner Sivanandan put it: “We are here because you were there.”

Then came a European phase. In 2004 Britain was one of only three EU countries to open its labour market to citizens of the Baltic and eastern European countries that had just joined the bloc. In the two decades to 2020-21 the European-born population in Britain rose from 1.5m to 3.9m, and from 35% to 41% of the foreign-born population, according to the Labour Force Survey.

The European phase ended in December 2020 when Britain enacted a new, post-Brexit immigration system. Free movement to and from continental Europe ceased. But Boris Johnson’s government made work permits easier to obtain.

Companies no longer had to prove that they had tried to hire a native Briton for a role, and the salary threshold that skilled migrants are required to clear was lowered from £30,000 ($39,000) to £25,600. For health-care workers the threshold is even lower, at a mere £20,480. In another change, foreign students in British universities are now allowed to work for at least two years after graduating, restoring a right that they had held under the previous Labour government.

Sixteen months into the new regime, the consequences are clear. Despite the many disruptions of covid-19, Britain is issuing more work and study visas (see chart). The vast majority are not going to Europeans. In 2021 people from India received almost 99,000 study visas, up from a low point of 16,000 in 2015. Nigerians were granted 10,000 skilled-worker visas and 43,000 study visas—about as many as in the previous four years put together. Filipinos received almost 10,000 skilled-worker visas, putting them in third place behind Indians and Nigerians. The country has become an essential source of nurses (the picture shows a training session in Manila). In the six months to September 2021, fully 3,040 Philippines-trained nurses joined the National Health Service. That is more than the number of new NHS nurses trained in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales put together. Britain’s covid-19 vaccination drive began in December 2020 when a Filipina matron, May Parsons, injected Margaret Keenan. Britain’s third phase of immigration looks in some ways like the first, post-imperial phase. As well as Indians and Nigerians, Britain is issuing more skilled-worker visas to people from Kenya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe—all former British territories. But the rising number of visas going to Filipinos and others with scant historical ties to Britain, such as Brazilians, reveals the difference. If the first phase of immigration was post-imperial, and the second European, this one is global and middle-class. Britain smiles on nurses, coders and students from everywhere, and on fruit-pickers from nowhere (although they are eligible for temporary-worker visas). Filipinos are likely to keep moving to Britain, at least for a few years. The government has pledged to hire 50,000 nurses by 2024, points out Billy Palmer of the Nuffield Trust, a health-care think-tank, and “we’re not going to get it from our domestic supply.” An American economist, Michael Clemens, has shown that emigration from a country tends to rise until it reaches a level of income equivalent to about $10,000 per person at purchasing-power parity, before declining. The Philippines happens to be near the peak of the curve.

Another reason to think it will continue is that Britons, who showed their dislike of free movement from Europe by voting to leave the EU , seem happier with the focus on skilled immigrants. Polling by Ipsos MORI shows that the proportion who want to see immigration reduced fell from 67% to 42% between February 2015 and February 2022. Three-quarters of Britons favour letting immigrants take health-care jobs (asylum-seekers coming across the Channel are less popular; see Bagehot).

A bigger problem in the next few years might be attracting enough skilled immigrants. Real wages have stagnated and sterling is weak, reducing the value of remittances. And now that Britain is trying to recruit the global middle class, it is up against other rich, English-speaking countries. “Australia, Canada and Britain are all trying to compete for those skilled workers,” says Kate Hooper of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC . So is America, when politics allows.

In Gloucester, Mr Padilla is doing his bit—and not only by helping new immigrants settle. Sometimes when he rings a British customer-service helpline he is put through to a call centre in the Philippines. Recognising the accent, he switches to speaking Tagalog. At the end of a call, the call-centre worker tends to ask: so, is life better in Britain? He tells them it is. ■

O N A RECENT Thursday morning, the stretch of the Thames that wends through central London is largely deserted, save for the odd river bus or barge moving in with the tide, carrying empty containers to be filled with rubbish. It’s a far cry from the glory days of the 19th and 20th centuries, when ships moored at the city’s Royal Docks, once the largest in the world.

In the post-war years, new container vessels became too big for London’s Victorian-era docks. Deliveries moved east; the city’s last dock closed in 1981. It is now generally cheaper to transport goods to their final destination by road than by river. Cheaper, but not greener. As firms seek to cut emissions, some wonder if the Thames might be an answer.

Londoners have 700m parcels delivered each year, but the lorries and vans that carry those packages snarl up traffic and pump out fumes and carbon. The Port of London Authority ( PLA ), which wants to increase river traffic, says that barges carrying heavy freight emit less than half as much carbon as the five or so lorries it takes to haul an equivalent amount of goods. Vans are even more carbon-intensive because they take relatively few goods for the amount of emissions they spew.

Hence rising interest in the river. Since September 2020, DHL , a delivery firm, has delivered 50,000 parcels via the Thames in a pilot scheme designed to cut down on carbon emissions. Electric trucks carry parcels from Heathrow airport to Wandsworth pier. The packages are then ferried to Bankside pier, before couriers take them to their final destination by bike.

Tideway, the firm managing the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a colossal project to upgrade London’s Victorian-era sewer system, brought most of its materials to its 21 riverside sites in barges. The most construction-heavy phase of the project required about 140,000 lorry trips, less than a third of what would have been needed without using the river.

Whether big carbon savings will flow from greater use of the Thames is unclear, however. The Tideway Tunnel is a one-off project, and the motivation for using the river was largely to do with safety. Parcel delivery currently costs five times more by river than by road, estimates WSP , a consultancy. Tides and topography put natural limits on the river’s capacity. How comparatively green the Thames stays depends on how easily firms can cut emissions from other modes of transport.

More river use will also require more infrastructure, in particular wharves and piers. The PLA must retrofit pedestrian piers in the city for parcel unloading, and hold on to those wharves that still exist to store heavy freight. A big increase in commercial traffic would mean tussles with residents and developers, who pay a hefty premium to be close to the water.

Even so, the Thames is set to become busier. The PLA ’s goal is for 20m parcels to be delivered annually; scaling up would make river delivery more cost-competitive. Firms want to be seen to cut emissions: DHL has recently expanded its pilot scheme. Worsening congestion on London’s roads may also shift the calculus, especially for time-sensitive deliveries. The river will never regain its status as a dominant commercial artery, but the tide is gently running its way again. ■

A S IT NEARS its 40th birthday Channel 4 should have plenty to celebrate. The publicly owned channel emerged from the pandemic with a record operating surplus. Frothy shows like “The Great British Bake-Off” are a hit with viewers, while serious ones like “It’s a Sin” impress critics.

Instead the broadcaster is fighting for its life. One threat comes from America, whose deep-pocketed streaming services are snatching Channel 4’s young audience. The other is from the government, which on April 4th announced plans to sell the channel. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, said private ownership would enable Channel 4 to compete with Netflix and others. Sceptics, including many Tory backbenchers, see it as an attempt to put the liberal-leaning channel in its place.

The worldwide “streaming wars” have sparked a mania for mergers. Last month Amazon bought MGM for $8.5bn. Discovery’s $43bn acquisition of WarnerMedia is about to close. But Channel 4 is a tricky target. Online-only streamers like Netflix, Amazon or Apple have no interest in a legacy broadcast network. Discovery, which already does business in Britain, has its hands full with the Warner deal and a separate plan to buy BT Sport.

Paramount, another American giant, may be interested. It already owns Britain’s Channel 5, so has experience of its complex national broadcasting rules. By filling a third or more of Channel 4’s schedule with content from its American archive it could save up to £150m ($195m) a year, estimates Matti Littunen of Bernstein, a broker. Yet if the government imagines Channel 4 competing with foreign streamers, it may not want it to be swallowed by one.

If the aim is to create a national champion, ITV might fit the bill. Combining Channel 4 with Britain’s oldest and largest commercial network would create “a gorilla as big as the BBC ”, says Claire Enders, a media analyst. But its heft would alert trustbusters. ITV and Channel 4 together control over 70% of Britain’s TV advertising market. Getting the nod would mean persuading regulators that the relevant market was all video ads, including online ones. French authorities are considering just such a case with the proposed merger of TF 1 and M 6. Their decision, expected by the autumn, may inform British thinking.

The problem for all bidders is uncertainty. Channel 4 must follow quotas for airing news and buying content from particular regions and from independent production companies—which, unusually, keep the rights to their content. The government has not said which of these rules will remain. “Every percentage point of content that has to be made out of London, or through independent producers, or whatever other provision is determined, probably takes…something off any offer price,” says one potential buyer. Analysts expect bids of £500m-1.5bn, depending on what strings are attached.

The government says the proceeds would go to creative industries. But production companies prefer the deal they have. Meanwhile, relaxing obligations to make programmes in the regions would jar with the government’s “levelling up” agenda. Some Tories also fear losing distinctively British content. Channel 4 shows like “Derry Girls” are aimed at British audiences, in contrast to series like “Bridgerton”, Netflix’s gleefully ahistorical Georgian romp. And whereas some households dislike paying for the BBC , Channel 4 makes its money through ads (something Ms Dorries seemed surprised to discover at a parliamentary hearing last November).

Privatising Channel 4 was not in the Tory manifesto, so the House of Lords, where the government lacks a majority, faces no pressure to wave it through. Even if it passes, the tender process and potential competition inquiry would probably stretch beyond the next election, due by the end of 2024. Few senior Tories seem to share Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm for off loading Channel 4; Labour describes it as “cultural vandalism”. Plans to privatise the broadcaster have been floated, and sunk, throughout its life. This one may yet go the same way, says Ms Enders. “You can’t find a banker in the City that hasn’t wasted time on a Channel 4 privatisation.” ■

A review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. Little, Brown and Company, 464 pages (May 2021)Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds.” The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input from many individuals averages out the errors of each person and produces a more accurate answer. In contrast, the “madness of crowds” captures the idea that, relative to a single individual, large numbers of people are more likely to indulge their passions and get carried away by impulsive or destructive behaviors. So, which concept more accurately reflects reality?Noise: A Flaw in Human Nature by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein provides the answer. The authors share research indicating that “independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds.” That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.Relatedly, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant has stated that “you get more and better ideas if people are working alone in separate rooms than if they are brainstorming in a group. When people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish, and the whole group tends to conform to the majority’s taste.” People converge on ideas they believe are held by the majority, when often they are simply acquiescing to the most assertive and strident members of the group. Grant suggests that the best way to sidestep this problem is to have people think up ideas on their own before the group evaluates them.In Noise, Kahneman and his colleagues report findings indicating that, in tasks involving estimation, such as the number of crimes in a city or geographic distances, crowds are wise as long as they registered their views independently. But if people learn what others estimated, then crowds do worse than individuals. The book states that, “while multiple independent opinions, properly aggregated, can be strikingly accurate, even a little social influence can produce a kind of herding that undermines the wisdom of the crowds.” There are many reasons why Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow became a groundbreaking hit, while Noise did not reach quite the same heights (Kahneman and his statistically savvy co-authors might cite regression toward the mean). One reason for the difference may be the years in which the books were published. In 2011, the educated class generally favored meritocratic and objective measures for judgment and decision-making. They found the message that we should challenge the role of bias in our everyday judgments appealing, and believed that we should rid ourselves of habits that lead us to judge other people or situations unfairly. Today, however, much of intellectual culture has changed. Now that luxury beliefs are ascendent, relying on objective measures is no longer fashionable.With the paperback version of Noise slated to come out in May 2022, it is worth delving into some of the key arguments contained within this book. It is filled with fascinating insights relevant to current social and political debates.The book begins by making a distinction between two kinds of error. The first—bias—is well-known, in no small part thanks to Kahneman’s influence. The second—noise—is less well understood. Bias refers to judgments that depart from rationality in consistent, predictable ways. If you ask people to estimate the likelihood of dying in a plane crash, you can predict their answers will generally be biased upward because airline accidents are so vividly covered in the media and readily come to mind (the availability bias). In contrast, noise means that judgments are unpredictable, or scattered. If you ask a group of people to guess the weight of a bull, their answers will not be biased. They will be noisy, meaning they all depart from the true weight of the bull in unforeseeable ways.  Bias is characterized by systematic deviation in a predictable manner. Noise refers to random scatter. Interestingly, you don’t need to know the true answer to a question in order to infer the presence of noise in people’s judgments. For instance, if you ask 10 different physicians to diagnose a patient and they each return a different answer, then you can conclude that their answers are noisy, even if the true diagnosis remains unknown. Noise is readily apparent in legal decisions. The authors point out that judges exercise a great deal of discretion when determining appropriate sentencing. Many consider this both just and humane, believing that criminal sentences should be tailored to the defendant’s characteristics and circumstances. And yet Kahneman and his colleagues report research from the 1970s and 1980s, indicating that sentencing depended less on the specific case or the individual defendant than on the individual judge. That is, the same defendant in the same case might get wildly different sentences depending on which judge is reviewing the case. One study found that a heroin dealer could be incarcerated for between one and 10 years, depending on the judge. In another study on burglary, the recommended sentences ranged from five years in prison to a mere 30 days. In a larger study involving 208 US federal judges who evaluated the same 16 hypothetical cases, in only three of the 16 cases was there unanimous agreement to impose a prison term. In 1984, the US Congress enacted the Sentencing Reform Act in order to reduce noise in the legal system by reducing what the book describes as “the unfettered discretion the law confers on those judges and parole authorities responsible for imposing and implementing the sentences.” And yet, although the difference in sentence length between similar cases fell dramatically after the introduction of the guidelines, critics argued that these new guidelines were unfair because they prohibited judges from taking adequate account of the particulars of the case. “The price of reducing noise,” the authors write, “was to make decisions unacceptably mechanical.” Some people are deeply uncomfortable with the elimination of noise, perhaps because they like the idea of appealing to subjective human discretion. Suppose you were a defendant and had to choose between two scenarios. In one, if you are found guilty you are guaranteed to serve three years. In the other, if you are found guilty you will serve either 30 days or 10 years (or something in between). Many would favor the latter. In another study on underwriters and insurance claims adjusters, the authors asked 828 CEOs and senior executives to guess how much variation they expected to find in judgments of insurance premiums. They guessed 10 percent or less. But the median difference in underwriter’s judgments was 55 percent. The book states that for insurance claims, “the price a customer is asked to pay depends to an uncomfortable extent on the lottery that picks the employee who will deal with that transaction.” Likewise, case officers in child protective services vary in how likely they are to place children in foster care. Of course, noise in some judgments is desirable, such as in matters of preference or taste. If 10 film critics watch the same movie, or 10 people read the same novel, you’d both expect and welcome a variety of opinions. But noise is both undesirable and unfair when it comes to medical diagnoses, criminal sentencing, insurance claims, employee selection, and college admissions, among other decision-making domains.What are the sources of noise? One worth highlighting—because it may be the most pernicious—is simply the discomfort of disagreement. Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. Indeed, the book points out that “The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”Relevant to current debates about college admissions, Noise contains a story from a university professor who was helping his admissions office review its decision process. He explained their process for selecting applicants. First, a person read an application file, rated it, and then handed it off with ratings to a second reader, who also rated it. As you can imagine, the first rater holds much more sway than the second, who might be reluctant to challenge the initial evaluation. The professor suggested masking the first reader’s ratings so as not to influence the second reader. In other words, he suggested they use the “wisdom of crowds” method rather than the “madness of crowds” approach. The school’s reply: “We used to do that, but it resulted in so many disagreements that we switched to the current system.” As Kahneman and his colleagues point out, many organizations consider conflict avoidance to be at least as important as optimal decision-making. As more and more top universities are electing to ditch standardized tests, they will be relying on noisier forms of evaluation. Removing information when making decisions is generally unwise. However, removing parts of an application that contain more objective information—test scores as opposed to softer metrics such as essays—will likely inflate the amount of noise to an even greater degree. In fact, recent research from Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Presumably, applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees. On the topic of standardized testing, Kahneman and his colleagues report that “Intelligence is correlated with good performance in virtually all domains. All things being equal, it is associated not only with higher academic achievement but also with higher job performance” and it “remains by far the best single predictor of important outcomes.”In Noise, Kahneman and his co-authors take pains to note that good decision-making should not mix facts and values. Instead, good decision-making must be based on accurate predictive judgments that are not affected by preferences or values. The book presents persuasive evidence of “level noise,” or the variability in the judgments produced by different people. Level noise encompasses the idiosyncratic responses from each unique person making a decision. Perhaps more interesting, though, is what the book describes as occasion noise, or the variability in the judgments produced by the same person. In other words, occasion noise involves your own idiosyncratic judgments that might be affected by mood, weather, time, and so on. For example, how you rate the quality of an essay first thing in the morning after you’ve had your coffee might be different from how you rate it late at night after a stressful day at work. Consider recent research out of Cambridge University on credit loan applications. Tobias Baer and Simone Schnall examined the decisions of credit officers at a major bank. They found that the officers were significantly more likely to grant loan repayment terms to a customer in the morning compared with later in the day, when decision fatigue impaired their ability to carefully assess applications, and so they tended to default to “no.” The book reports research indicating that when the same software developers were asked on two separate days to estimate the completion time for the same task, their answers, on average, differed by 71 percent. It is also common to obtain significantly different diagnoses from the same physicians when they are presented with the same case twice. A study of nearly 700,000 primary care visits found that physicians are significantly more likely to prescribe opioids and antibiotics at the end of a long day. It seems that when doctors are tired and under time pressure, they are more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution. But occasion noise doesn’t just affect doctors. When wine experts at a prominent wine competition tasted the same wines twice, they only scored 18 percent of the wines identically—usually, the very worst ones. This suggests that while people tend to agree with themselves on which wines are bad, they often disagree with themselves on which ones are good. I have wondered about occasion noise in my own judgments. For instance, when asked to provide comments on another person’s writing, there are times when I question whether my feedback would have been different on a different day of the week, before or after lunch, and so on. For my own writing, I often send important drafts to a few different people, seeking what psychologists describe as “inter-rater reliability.” I will typically only implement large changes if two or more people make the same suggestion for improvement.  Kahneman and his co-authors are blunt in their conclusion: “We do not always produce identical judgments when faced with the same facts on two occasions … you are not the same person at all times.” That is, as your mood and external circumstances vary, some features of your cognitive machinery vary too. In short, you are a source of a lot of noise. While some degree of occasion noise is due to weather, stress, fatigue, and so on, much of it may simply be normal. The book describes studies in which researchers administered cognitive tests to participants at different periods. They found that various external factors including time of day, sleep, and so on accounted for only 11 percent of the variance in the performance of a given person. The authors interpret these findings as evidence that the moment-to-moment variability in brain functioning is driven not just by external influences, but is instead characteristic of the way the brain functions.Somewhat reassuringly, at least, occasion noise is smaller than level noise. In other words, you agree with your own judgments less often than you think. But you still tend to agree with yourself more often than with others. Noise can be amplified by groups. For example, researchers carried out an experiment on a website that allows viewers to comment on stories and vote on different comments. You might think that a single initial vote on a comment would not influence the long-term popularity of the comment, but you’d be wrong. When people see an initial up vote on a comment, they are 32 percent more likely to also give it an up vote. A slight boost in the initial popularity of a comment led to an artificially increased mean rating by 25 percent after five months. Initial starting points can influence political views too. The book reports findings indicating that when a group of Democrats saw that a particular view was gaining initial popularity among Democrats, they too would endorse that point of view, ultimately leading most Democrats in the group to support it. However, if they saw that a specific opinion was gaining popularity among Republicans, they rejected it. Republicans behaved similarly. In short, the acceptance of a viewpoint can depend on its initial popularity and the specific group that accepts it. This relates to another topic within the book: Group polarization. This is a special case of the “madness of crowds” phenomenon. Social psychologists have found that when individuals hold certain beliefs, they become more extreme in their beliefs when they interact with others who hold similar views. In a study on jury behavior, researchers gave jurors an eight-point scale to measure how severely they wanted to punish a law-breaker. They found that when individual jurists preferred severe punishment, the overall verdict ended up higher than that recommended by the median juror. Put differently, when individual jurors preferred a severe punishment, deliberation with other jurors sharing this view raised the overall severity of the punishment. One juror might say they want to impose a fine of $10,000, while another might say that anything less than $12,000 is unacceptable. By the end, the fine might increase to an amount far beyond anyone’s initial starting point. Conversely, groups comprised of lenient jurors produced even more lenient verdicts than the one recommended by the median juror in the group. When group members drift in a certain direction, individual members will double-down on that perspective. This drives the group towards extremism even though individual members are not extreme.So what is the best way to make decisions? The book distinguishes between clinical judgments and models. For clinical judgment, you consider the information at hand, perhaps engage in a quick mental computation, consult your intuition, and come up with a judgment. Suppose you are evaluating two candidates. You engage in some deliberate reasoning, compare their resumes, references, and interview performances. This process, plus your gut feeling, is what leads to your clinical judgment. In contrast, the book describes simple models. This comes from work by the mid-20th century psychologist Paul Meehl. He pitted clinical judgment against mechanical prediction for outcomes such as academic success and mental health prognoses. Meehl, a practicing psychoanalyst, was surprised to discover that simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment. Relatedly, in a separate line of research, Lewis Goldberg and colleagues built models of human judges. They had people make a variety of judgments, input their responses into a computer, then they built simple models intended to replicate these people’s judgments. The judgments of the models were highly correlated with the judgments of the humans they were intended to imitate (r =.80). Crucially, though, for real-world outcomes, the models were more accurate than the people. For instance, the models and the people had to predict the GPAs of 98 students using 10 simple inputs. For every one of the 98 students, the model did better than the actual humans. They found similar results for other kinds of judgments. A crude model of your judgments is likely to be more accurate than you are. The book’s authors conclude that “Complexity and richness do not generally lead to more accurate predictions.” In other words, using straightforward models with simple inputs is superior to “holistic” judgments for predicting real-world outcomes. But why is this the case? It seems that the very things we most cherish in humans may lead our judgments astray. Replacing you with a model of you eliminates your subtlety, and eliminates your noise. If I present you with the same candidate at two different periods, you may have very different judgments. But if I present a model of you with the same candidates, it will produce identical judgments both times. As Kahneman and his colleagues put it, “You may believe that you are subtler, more insightful, and more nuanced than a linear caricature of your thinking. But in fact, you are mostly noisier … it proved almost impossible in that study to generate a simple model that did worse than the experts did.” A human’s informed judgment, often guided by less-than-rational gut feelings, typically performs worse than simple statistical formulas. In another example, researchers used two variables to predict a defendant’s likelihood to jump bail: age (older people are lower flight risks) and number of past court dates missed (people who have failed to appear before are likelier to recidivate). This simple model outperformed predicted flight risk better than all human bail judges. Why do we often favor subjective human judgments over straightforward rules? Many experts ignore the clinical-versus-mechanical debate and prefer to trust their own judgment instead. The use of algorithms is not yet routine in medical diagnoses. Few businesses or universities use algorithms when selecting candidates. Hollywood executives green-light movies based on their judgment and experience rather than formulas, and book publishers do the same.When experts listen to their gut, they experience emotionally satisfying rewards, especially when they are proved “right” in the end (overlooking or dismissing all the times they were wrong). Giving up such rewards in favor of more accurate but less intuitively satisfying models is not easy. As Kahneman and his co-authors state, “Many decision makers will reject decision-making approaches that deprive them of the ability to exercise their intuition.”Interestingly, though, when given the choice, ordinary people often prefer advice from an algorithm rather than a human. They’ll give the algorithm a chance, but will stop trusting it as soon as they see it make a mistake. The book states that “As humans, we are keenly aware that we make mistakes, but that is a privilege we are not prepared to share. We expect machines to be perfect.”This explains why so many people do not trust self-driving cars. If a human driver causes a traffic collision, we are often forgiving, depending on the circumstances. But if an autonomous vehicle causes an accident, people respond with intense suspicion. To borrow a popular phrase from Charlotte Whitton, a robot must do twice as well as a human to be thought half as good.Relatedly, recent research led by NYU professor Andrea Bonezzi suggests that the reason people tend to trust humans more than algorithms is that while people see humans as discernible decision-makers, we typically view computers as a “black box.” We foster an illusion that we understand how others come to arrive at their decisions because we project our own intuitive understanding of decision-making onto them. However, we are often mistaken in how other people form their judgments, and we don’t project our decision-making process onto computers, which seem alien to us. The book does offer some solutions to the problem of noise. For example, when rating job candidates, a better predictor of future performance is to rank them from best to worst rather than evaluating each one individually. As the book puts it, “replacing absolute judgments with relative ones, when feasible, is likely to reduce noise.” Another helpful approach: If multiple examiners are called upon to assess a candidate or individual’s performance, they should provide their judgments privately—none of them should be aware of the others’ evaluations. This capitalizes on the wisdom of crowds rather than the madness of crowds.Furthermore, noise can be reduced by using standardized ratings in a forced ranking system. In this approach, raters must abide by a predetermined distribution, which prevents ratings inflation. For example, when I was in the US Air Force, annual performance was evaluated on a scale from one to five. For a time, the majority of members were given fives, and it was considered a career death-blow to get a four, which would impede promotion to the next rank. In 2015, the Air Force revamped their system so that only a small number of people in a given unit could obtain high scores, while the rest would fill out the rest of the distribution.Still, there are many reasons why raters might not want to be honest about a person’s true performance. They might assess people “strategically” in order to avoid a difficult discussion, to favor a person who they believe deserves a long-awaited promotion, or to get rid of an underperforming employee who needs a good evaluation to be transferred to another division. Such hidden motives can introduce noise into important decisions. And this, I suspect, is the reason why some people may not like the book. They want to retain noise (the ability to rely on intuition and individual judgment), and therefore they will dislike Noise (which argues that relying on intuition is harmful and unfair). Any organization that inhibits the noise attributable to human judgment reduces people’s ability to influence ratings in pursuit of their own goals.If you tell people they can no longer rely on their gut feelings and that they must follow a checklist or abide by an algorithm, they will respond with resistance because such policies inhibit their ability to pursue their own hidden agendas. Others may argue that guidelines designed to eliminate noise are rigid, dehumanizing, and unfair. Many people have had the experience of making a seemingly reasonable request to an organization only to receive the response that clear rules prevent the organization from making any exceptions. Many people who plead for exceptions really do believe they are exceptional. But for many decision-makers, they encounter people asking for such exceptional requests all the time. The rules, as the authors put it, “may seem stupid and even cruel, but they may have been adopted for good reason: to reduce noise (and perhaps bias as well).”When people believe an objective system favors them, they want to reduce bias and noise. And when people believe an objective system might disfavor them, they want to retain bias and noise. But Kahneman and his colleagues make a persuasive case that eliminating noise is crucial for a system to maintain legitimacy. Near the end of the book, they conclude that, “It is unfair for similarly situated people to be treated differently, and a system in which professional judgments are seen as inconsistent loses credibility.”  If they are right, then perhaps more people should carefully consider the policies they are supporting. Unfortunately, people who favor noise are often the noisiest. 

I graduated from Rutgers University in 1985 and recently had occasion to visit the campus. I was struck, just as I was decades ago, by the contrast between the look of the dormitories built early in the 20th century like Ford Hall (1915) and Hegeman Hall (1922) and that of the great many put up after World War II such as Frelinghuysen Hall (1956) and Mettler Hall (1964). University campuses tend to harbor that kind of contrast between the doughty old ones and the midcentury-modern-ish new ones. Often, the proliferation of the latter allowed the schools to accommodate a vast increase in the student body in the wake of the G.I. Bill after the war.

It was then that the idea really started settling in that the prescribed path in America is to go to college after high school. In 1940, only about one in 20 adults had completed college (today it’s closer to one in three), and that wasn’t thought of as a tragedy. By contrast, a White House fact sheet on President Barack Obama’s education agenda once proclaimed, “Because economic progress and educational achievement go hand in hand, educating every American student to graduate prepared for college and for success in a new work force is a national imperative.”

The question is why we can’t just prepare students for the work force. Why do we assume that people need four whole years of further education after high school? One answer comes from Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College. He wrote an underattended manifesto about what American education should be, “Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture,” which is 25 years old this year. Before Rutgers, I attended Bard’s subsidiary Simon’s Rock (now Bard College at Simon’s Rock), but I would be singing this book to the skies even if I had never known Bard, Simon’s Rock or Botstein.

The upshot is simple: The idea that in our society the ordinary trajectory after high school is to attend another four years of school has become arbitrary, purposeless and even absurd. Botstein noted, “America has a more elaborate educational system that spreads over more years, reaches more people and ends up with results for the entire population that are worse than those countries with educational systems that are explicitly not democratic and on the surface offer fewer opportunities for advanced education.” This model, he argued, is hardly what we would choose if asked with no experience how things should go. He argued that the model of high school we currently use is from a time when teenagers were, on average, less intellectually mature than they are now. Botstein proposed instead that childhood education can stop at 10th grade and that the education kids get during that year be a richer one than kids typically get today even going up through 12 grades.

You make a big distinction between sweet melancholy and depression. How do you define the difference?

S.C.: I am melancholic by nature, but I think of myself as a happy melancholic. I’m actually not depressive in the clinical sense of that term.

It’s really interesting because there’s a long tradition that goes back centuries of talking about melancholy and its mysterious virtues — more than 2,000 years ago Aristotle was asking why it is that many of the great poets and philosophers and politicians have a melancholic personality. Melancholy and depression are two distinct states, but often no distinction is made.

What fields of psychology are bucking this tendency toward pathologizing melancholy?

S.C.: One psychologist, Dacher Keltner, who I wrote about in the book, has done pioneering work on what he calls the “compassionate instinct,” and he points out that the very word “compassion” means suffering together. So what you’re doing when you’re feeling compassionate is actually experiencing this sorrow of others.

When we think of human nature, we often either cynically or despairingly go to the idea of survival of the fittest, but Dr. Keltner says we should also really be talking about survival of the kindest, because as humans, the only way that we survive is by being able to respond to the cries of our infants. What has radiated outward from there is that we’re not only responding to our own infants’ cries, we react to the cries of other people’s infants and then we react to other human beings in distress in general.

Can listening to bittersweet, minor-key music, prime you for “the bittersweet mind-set” and life’s fragility?

S.C.: Yes, absolutely. In fact, that was actually the catalyst that got me to start writing this book. I would listen to a technically sad song, but what it made me feel instead was a sense of communion with other people who had also known the sorrow that the music was expressing. And with this incredible sense of awe and gratitude toward the musician for being able to translate what had clearly originated in pain and to transform it into beauty. It’s kind of like my church when I listen to that music. My playlist is on Spotify, actually.

Back when I was a graduate student in the Nineties, first at St Andrews University and then at Leeds, philosophy departments were terrifying places. Seminar rooms often felt like amphitheatres.
Every week, the same ritual would unfold in the senior research seminar. First, a visiting speaker from another University would spend an hour explaining the details of his new theory to an ostentatiously bored and listless audience. Grimacing through the faint applause, he would brace himself for what we all knew was to follow.
Previously slouched, comatose-looking figures in the audience would ominously stir into life. Hands would shoot up. The objections would start. Frank accusations of confusion, question-begging, inconsistency, and contradiction would be made, against which the stammering speaker would defend himself as best he could. Tenacious questioners would follow up on their original objections and follow up again, to be stopped only when the speaker eventually muttered the shaming words, equivalent to a “give-up” signal in judo: “I’ll have to think a bit more about that.”  Victory achieved, the questioner would fall back in his chair, visibly satisfied to an almost post-coital degree.

The speaker’s immediate ordeal over, he would be dragged to the pub and force-fed copious amounts of alcohol, then on to some probably awful restaurant, where colleagues who were particularly socially unaware — which, let’s face it, was most of them — would continue explaining to him precisely why he was completely and utterly wrong, with huge enthusiasm, late into the night.
When I was a Masters student at St Andrews, the stated aim of some faculty members was to humiliate visiting speakers, with a “win” for the “home” department declared afterwards. A distinguished Professor from Australia once told me that, years later, he still woke up in the night sweating, reliving how badly his paper at St Andrews had gone. At Leeds during my PhD, there were still a couple of Wittgenstein’s original acolytes knocking about. Apparently first learnt at the feet of the master, the habit had spread among staff of theatrically wrinkling and striking the forehead in an exaggeratedly contemptuous manner when they heard something they didn’t like, in full view of the visiting speaker. Sometimes they would wheel round, sneeringly turn their backs on the speaker, and hold their heads in their hands.
Frankly, these places scared the bejesus out of me. At St Andrews, I think I only ever spoke twice in class. The second time, I was scoffed at by the teacher so effectively that I didn’t speak in class again there, ever. In Leeds, I used to shake with anxiety walking down the endless departmental corridor. Towards the end of my time there, I finally dared to put up my hand to ask a question at a research seminar, and thought I must be having a heart attack, so loudly was my heart banging in my chest.
Most places back then were like this. Academic philosophers were nearly all men, and many (most?) of them were eccentric, obsessive, grumpy men with minds like steel traps. Philosophy departments were places where derision, incredulity, and scorn were manifested on a daily basis without any attempt to hide it.
You probably expect me to say how terrible this all was. Actually, I wonder if it wasn’t the best of all possible worlds in comparison to what came next.
***
In 2011, a report came out that was circulated widely within UK philosophy departments. This was a joint initiative from the British Philosophical Association (BPA) and the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), entitled “Women in Philosophy in the UK”. Its aim was to present a new survey indicating women’s relatively low participation in higher echelons of the philosophy profession, despite large numbers of them at Undergraduate level. At the time, SWIP was an organisation I cared about partly for self-interested reasons, naturally assuming they represented me given my membership of the female sex. Later on, when more senior, I would get involved with their mentoring schemes for women in early career stages.
This report enthusiastically leaned into the fashionable theories and buzzwords of the time, hypothesising that the main causes of women’s diminishing engagement in Philosophy over time must be men’s “implicit bias” against women, and women’s experience of “stereotype threat”, rather than, say, the effects of early educational influences, economic or other structural influences ultimately to do with motherhood, or possible sex-based difference across populations. The salient point for us here, though, is that one of the report’s conclusions was that women were being deterred from postgraduate degrees and jobs in philosophy because of male aggression in arguments. For instance, the report noted:
“One piece of stereotypically male behaviour is an aggressive style of argument in the seminar room. This might include, for example, displaying hostility — by words, tone of voice or body language — towards a speaker or audience (or a class discussion) member whom one thinks has failed to grasp a point or adequately address an objection, or pursuing a point well past the stage where it is obvious that the speaker has no adequate response.”
Since stereotype threat and implicit bias were thought to be difficult to eradicate (and arguably are even more so now, since it’s turned out they probably don’t exist as robustly evidenced phenomena), by far the easiest-looking response to the report was to try to make philosophical discussions less intimidating. This project was taken seriously by many colleagues across the country, including my own. One by one, philosophy departments started to advertise on their websites that they abided by the BPA/SWIP’s new Good Practice Guide. By 2018, a study of the impact of this scheme was able to report that: “As a result of the seminar policies many universities reported that the atmosphere was more constructive and less aggressive.”
More from this authorThe fictional world of trans activismBy Kathleen Stock
Based on my own experience of both giving and attending talks around the country, I too can attest to a change in social norms in the philosophy seminar room during this period — fuelled partly by the influence of the report but also by the increasing numbers of North Americans getting jobs in UK Universities back then, and so bringing cultural norms of US academia with them. (Indeed, the two are arguably linked: one of the BPA/SWIP report’s main authors is American.)
The most obvious manifestation of this change was that younger British members of departments started talking like fake Yanks. An implausible degree of positivity in talks became the norm, even amongst the otherwise terminally morose. Upward inflection became commonplace, as did the intensifier “super”, an implied exclamation mark, and an unfeasibly perky demeanour. Ostentatious expressions of folksy informality became more common: some audience members started — shudder — bringing knitting along to talks. Meanwhile speakers, under a guise of flattening the hierarchies, could show off to others about their acquaintance with powerful figures in the profession by discussing their work on a casual first-name basis (“So here’s what Crispin thinks about higher order vagueness!”).
During question periods, there was also a noticeable shift. Elaborate rules would be announced by the chair at the beginning of every question period, the better to try to control unruly audience members. “Junior and minority scholars” would be prioritised over others to ask their questions first; “a hand” should be raised for a main question; “a finger” for a subsidiary follow-up; “hands” absolutely could not be smuggled in as “fingers”, and so on. A typical interaction between chair and questioner would go: (Chair:) “Is that really a finger, or is it a hand?” (Questioner:) “It’s definitely a finger!” (Reader, it was hardly ever a finger).
It also became much more common for audience members to start by thanking speakers fulsomely for their talk, then offer banal and unfocused lines of questioning such as: “I was really interested to hear you say X in your talk. Could you say a little more about that?” (Other audience members, inwardly: please God no!). Instead of trying to eviscerate the speaker with a devastating question, the new tendency was to try to be constructive and collaborative in one’s approach, identifying not what was wrong with the speaker’s argument, but what was right about it. Generally it seemed to me that, as ostentatious expressions of civility went up, standards of inquiry dropped — because as a questioner, you no longer had to have grasped the form of the argument to ask an acceptable question.
Unlike the authors of the BPA/SWIP report, I’m not convinced that the originally dominant argumentative style within philosophy departments was ever particularly testosterone-fuelled, though males were certainly its principal authors. They weren’t beating each other up, after all. In fact, outside the seminar room, I have found most male philosophers fairly passive and confrontation-averse, which presumably partly explains why so many have proved supine when it comes to rejecting fashionable gender metaphysics.
Whatever the truth about its origins, the demise of the old approach meant that aggression was still knocking around, but now it had to go somewhere else. As the numbers of PhDs being disgorged into the philosophy job market every year increased, and the number of jobs available decreased, competition amongst philosophers, always high anyway, became even more intense than usual. Where that aggression had formerly been expressed and so somewhat contained within the combative rituals of the seminar room, it now sought new outlets. And what it found was the internet.
***
Though more sensible academics tend to eschew social media altogether, Facebook is a favourite platform for many. Many spend lots of downtime scrolling and commenting throughout the working day. Even the most antisocial of philosophers is usually able to build up large numbers of Facebook “friends” on the basis of shared acquaintances in a close-knit profession, and this often includes lots of graduate students and post-docs.
Around the same time as the BPA/SWIP report was published, and as the popularity of Facebook as a platform was taking off, some senior philosophers realised it provided them with the means to build up secure little fiefdoms — not really private, given the large numbers of colleagues and students looking on, but not really public either. Within a few years, high on the fumes of the media attention being given to a few high profile sex scandals in the profession, these same people were furiously cementing a narrative that philosophy was a terribly dangerous and threatening place, not just for women but for other minorities too.
Now, whether or not academic philosophy was (or is) a truly terrible place for minorities is not my question here, but what was clear back then was that these people really, really wanted to believe it was. Particular stories about harassment and prejudice to individuals that emerged online would be seized upon as obviously indicative of what must be happening to a particular minority at scale in the profession, accompanied by heartfelt exhortations to “listen” to that minority, as if its members were functionally interchangeable. And because a narrative like this needs both heroes and villains and a clear storyline, there was also a lot of sneering about white males and other ideological enemies, and the emotional blackmailing of presumed weaklings into recanting public opinions the in-group didn’t like.
Suggested readingKathleen Stock: I won't be silencedBy Julie Bindel
As these figures virtue-signalled, gate-kept, and generally queen-bee’d around in virtual spaces, they consolidated their own power. An example was being set for younger onlookers, desperately hungry to get into the profession permanently, and standing relatively little chance given the paucity of jobs and the high number of competitors. It told them that self-aggrandising and bullying others was acceptable in the philosophy profession as long as it was in the name of social justice. And it told them that drawing attention to their own presumed victimhood was good for their careers, since it was likely to draw the approval of more powerful others.
One website for early career researchers, started around then, was called “The Philosopher’s Cocoon”, helpfully indicating the profession’s new favoured approach. Roughly speaking, this approach goes: tell junior researchers in some particular identity group that the world of academic philosophy will be particularly harsh for them, because of who they are; isolate them from evidence that might disconfirm this, or explain it differently; uplift any narrative that apparently supports it; and reward their ensuing expressions of anxiety with ostentatious cosseting, soothing, and patting. (And also — for the love of God and the continuing flow of student fees and cheap labour — don’t mention that for most philosophy postgrads, there will be no glorious butterfly stage after the cocoon, because there just aren’t enough academic jobs to go round.)
Soon enough, ambitious youngsters who were able to tolerate the obviously infantilising element got the hang of this new game. Via self-published blogposts, comments, and open letters pleading with the profession, they readily became the sort of public victim they sensed their elders would like to see.
Around this time, lots of Facebook groups and dedicated blogs sprang up to support particular identity groups in philosophy. The dynamics of these online spaces were sociologically fascinating to witness. I was a silent member of the group “Academic Mamas in Philosophy” for a while, as well as its parent group the gruesome behemoth “Academic Mamas”, and I still grin when I remember the implicit hierarchies, barely suppressed rivalries, moralised hyperbole, and passive-aggressive spats about exactly who was having to do the “emotional labour” of “educating” others about their linguistic transgressions. (Most of all, I remember the off-the-charts humblebragging: “Hey mamas, just wanted to get your views on whether an hour a week of screen time — supervised, of course — is excessive for a seven-year-old kiddo? And if so, can anyone hook me up to some cool educational websites?”. Ruefully, I would lift my gaze from my computer to wink at my own children, mainlining Penguin biscuits and watching Cars 2 on a loop for the 14th time that day).
But to get back to the main point: by 2017, when junior philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published her article in the journal Hypatia arguing that if transwomen are women, “trans-racial” people like Rachel Dolezal must be black, the groundwork for a debacle of carnivalesque proportions was already prepared. Though Tuvel was earnestly treating her argument as a modus ponens (i.e. since the premises about transwomen seemed true, the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal must also be true), it was obvious to most readers that equally, her argument could work as a modus tollens (i.e. since the conclusion about trans-racialism and Dolezal seems obviously false, there must be something wrong with the premise about transwom… OH SHIT HELP LOOK OVER THERE!).
The resulting attempts to distract from this inconvenient implication involved mass denunciation on a hundred Facebook pages and blogs, widespread public huffing about “failure to engage with the scholarship of trans people and philosophers of colour”, and a comically pompous open letter alleging Tuvel’s incompetence as a researcher signed by big names in feminist philosophy and gender studies. A craven public apology from Hypatia’s own associate editors for having published the article in the first place followed.
The outcome of all of this, predictably, was fear. No-one wanted to be the next Tuvel, and especially not younger and more precarious members of the profession, but the more established ones didn’t much feel like it either. The traditional means of defending a position — using arguments — wasn’t fashionable in online spaces anymore. Instead, moves formerly condemned in first year logic classes were in the ascendancy: ad hominems, failures of charitable interpretation, begging the question, confusion of sufficient conditions with necessary ones, derivations of “is” from “ought”, and all the rest. Any white male over the age of 40 with a permanent job and a modicum of self-awareness took the temperature of the times and slid away to the edges of the online world, confining their robust discussion in public to impenetrable questions about panpsychism or metaphysical grounding.
In 2018, I wrote my own blogpost, having noticed that it could be quite an effective medium for getting philosophers’ attention. I wanted to suggest to them that there was a peculiar and undesirable silence in academic philosophy on the obvious problems around legal self-ID in relation to the Gender Recognition Act, which at that point was being discussed furiously elsewhere in the UK as part of a government consultation.
Reader, you probably already know the rest.
***
To date, to my knowledge, neither the British Philosophical Association nor the Society for Women in Philosophy have ever commented publicly on the circumstances of my resignation from my post at Sussex University. But in October 2021, at around the same time I was facing the prospect of men letting off flares at my campus workplace, angry with me for holding views about the importance of naming biological sex, they published another report on “Women in Philosophy”. This one followed up on their original one after ten years and summarised what they thought had changed. Utterly predictably, one of the things that had changed was that by now they weren’t talking about women anymore.
This new report, written by the original two authors, pretends not to notice that the old one was aimed at improving the lot of females in philosophy. It now says that the focus is “gender”, and talks of “woman” and “man” as “identities”, so making a nonsense of the idea that its aim is somehow continuous with that of the previous project. A “methodological note” describes a “newly included nonbinary gender category” in the associated survey of philosophers, but complains with regret that the number of non-binary people recorded in the survey is probably inaccurate, because departments have “inadequate reporting processes for students to change the gender on their records”.
Suggested readingHow our universities became sheep factoriesBy Arif Ahmed
The report seamlessly adapts to the present cultural climate in other ways too. Though the notion of “implicit bias” is still hanging in there, “stereotype threat” — so heavily leaned on in 2011 — is out with barely a mention. And “intersectional oppression” is now in, a mere 33 years after Kimberlé Crenshaw first wrote about it.
Also predictably, the new report also declares that “philosophy is unwelcoming to trans philosophers”. By “philosophy”, they mean me, and a handful of others still hanging in there within the university system, argumentatively defending age-old, culturally ubiquitous, and still perfectly functional understandings of “woman” and “man” in terms of “adult human female” and “adult human male”. To try to demonstrate their lurid assertion about the environment for trans people, the authors link the reader to an article in the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly, in which non-binary author Robin Dembroff writes:
“The situation in philosophy is, to be blunt, a massive, complex, and thorny transgender trashfire. This trashfire manifests most explicitly in the context of social media, blogs, interpersonal interactions, and the occasional journal publication, and it has serious repercussions. (To name one, a number of high-profile court briefings opposing trans rights in both the United States and the United Kingdom cite blog posts by philosophers such as Kathleen Stock … as evidence that trans persons are dangerous and deluded.)”
Now as a matter of fact, none of this is true, and the footnote supplied by Dembroff to supposedly demonstrate the truth of the last parenthesis doesn’t even come close to doing so. But the energy drains out of me when I think about seriously trying to get the report’s authors, or Dembroff — or anyone at all working in feminist philosophy in a University these days — to correct the public record. For I know by now that in their line of business, stating the truth isn’t remotely the point.
This is adapted from a post originally published on Kathleen Stock’s Substack.

Today, news surfaced via a regulatory filing that Tesla CEO Elon Musk had recently become Twitter's largest shareholder, buying a 9.2 percent stake in the company as of March 14, worth about $3 billion at the time of purchase. This tracks with cryptic tweets he sent a little more than a week later, gauging users' sense of the company's commitment to free speech:

The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2022

It's not clear at present what type of involvement Musk will have in Twitter's decision making processes, or whether he will be asked to join the company's board. (Twitter's former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey will be leaving the board next month.)

Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. 
What should be done? https://t.co/aPS9ycji37
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2022

For free speech supporters who have panned Twitter's content moderation practices, like removing former President Donald Trump from the platform following the January 6 Capitol riots and suppressing sharing of the New York Post's accurately reported story on Hunter Biden's laptop—some of which Dorsey has admitted were errors—Musk's possibly greater involvement is a welcome change. Musk has long considered starting an open-source social media platform to serve as a rival to Twitter. Today's news indicates his interest in fixing what's already there. Or his interest in performance art. Or in making money and sending stock prices soaring with his every move.
"Twitter is particularly vulnerable to outside pressure because, unlike Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Snap, the company's founders don't have special voting control over its future," report Giles Turner and Craig Trudell at Bloomberg. But, "the type of form used [in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing] often indicates the investor isn't seeking to acquire control of a company, or to influence who controls it." Musk has taken a passive stake in the company (though that could change in the future).
"I don't think we should be the arbiters of truth," said Dorsey in response to a farcical March 2021 congressional hearing in which members of Congress hectored tech CEOs about how (ill-defined) misinformation spreads on their platforms, "and I don't think the government should be either." From everything Musk has said publicly, it appears he aligns with Dorsey's ethos. It remains to be seen whether Musk will exercise his newfound influence for good or maintain a more understated, behind-the-scenes presence at Twitter (while continuing to roil normies with memes, of course).
The post Elon Musk Buys 9.2% of Twitter, Mysteriously Polls Users About State of Free Speech appeared first on Reason.com.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just released a “stark report card on the world’s progress on cutting emissions.” It looks at “what the world can do to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.” As Vox reports, one of the main things we need to do is stop burning fossil fuels sooner rather than later. 

In the most ambitious scenario of limiting warming to around 1.5°C, the report concluded, global carbon dioxide emissions would need to peak in the next three years, and fall by nearly half in the next eight. It means most of the world would need to start to abandon existing fossil fuel infrastructure in the next decade, and also nix any new and existing coal-fired power plants and plans to expand offshore oil drilling.

Politico says of the report that it demands “a radical reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and electrifying many of the things that currently run on fossil fuels.” Yet the report comes as “Europeans scramble to find new sources of oil and gas to end its dependency on Russia and the U.S. and others eye ramping up their production to fill the gap.” The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, laid out the stakes in a speech that castigated politicians around the work for their failures to act: 

[The new IPCC report] is a file of shame, cataloging the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unliveable world. We are on a fast track to climate disaster. Major cities under water. Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms. Widespread water shortages. The extinction of a million species of plants and animals. This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies. We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5°C limit agreed in Paris. Some Government and business leaders are saying one thing, but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic. This is a climate emergency. Climate scientists warn that we are already perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts.  But, high‑emitting Governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye, they are adding fuel to the flames. They are choking our planet, based on their vested interests and historic investments in fossil fuels, when cheaper, renewable solutions provide green jobs, energy security and greater price stability. We left COP26 [twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] in Glasgow with a naïve optimism, based on new promises and commitments.  But, the main problem — the enormous, growing emissions gap — was all but ignored… Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But, the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.

Now, let’s be clear: when the UN Secretary-General is talking about lying politicians who say they care about climate change but then don’t take action, his description covers U.S. Democrats. The Washington Post reported in January that while “environmentalists had hopes that President Biden would end the fossil fuel bonanza,” Biden actually “has outpaced Donald Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands,” including “setting a record for the largest offshore lease sale last year in the Gulf of Mexico” and was then “plan[ning] to auction off oil and gas drilling rights on more than 200,000 acres across Western states by the end of March, followed by 1 million acres in the Cook Inlet, off the coast of Alaska.” The Biden administration “declined to defend the Obama administration’s 2016 coal moratorium, which Trump lifted two months after taking office” and instead “argued that environmentalists’ lawsuit to restore it should be dismissed on technical grounds.” The administration has insisted that its hands are tied by the law, but this is false in at least some cases. A federal judge actually canceled 1.7 million acres of drilling leases on the grounds that “the government had justified the sale using a flawed analysis.” Barack Obama has openly boasted about the fact that his administration was responsible for expanding fossil fuel production:

 “It went up every year I was in office. Suddenly America is the largest oil producer. That was me, people. It’s a little like, sometimes you go to Wall Street and folks will be grumbling about ‘anti-business.’ I said ‘Have you checked where your stocks were when I came into office and where they are now? What are you complaining about? Just say ‘thank you,’ please.” 

Obama might not get the thanks he feels he deserves for worsening the climate crisis, but according to the Post, the head of the Independent Petroleum Association of America has said that the Biden administration “should be credited with moving forward with the drilling permits.” 
On the very same day that the IPCC released its warning that we simply cannot build more fossil fuel infrastructure if we are to avoid climate catastrophe, Politico ran a news story saying that progressives in the House of Representatives are becoming more open to proposals that might expand fossil fuel production, if this will get corrupt coal baron Joe Manchin to support other climate policies. Furthermore, Politico says, “many on the left have backed Biden’s call for U.S. oil companies to increase their output to combat high prices — even though that production will drive up greenhouse gasses.” Rep. Ro Khanna commented that “If [Manchin] wants some increase for short-term production for the broader package of $500 billion on renewables, I am open to that… It’s not ideal for the climate, but I am not comfortable with Americans paying 6, 7 bucks for gas.” Donald McEachin, a member of the House Climate Crisis Committee, comments that “Every now and again you have to swallow a toad. And this is swallowing a toad.”
It’s a strange metaphor to use, because one thing about toads is that you do not have to swallow them “every now and then.” In fact, it’s possible to go through life (as I have) without ever swallowing a single toad. But it tells you a lot about the capitulating, easily-bullied spirit of Democrats that they can say things that sound like “Every now and then we all have to let other people dunk our heads in the toilet.” 

This should go without saying: do not swallow poisonous toads. Ever. Some actions are non-negotiable, because they can kill you. You can’t accept them as a “compromise” because suicide is not a rational “middle ground.” The IPCC has made clear that “projected carbon dioxide emissions ‘over the lifetime of existing and currently planned fossil fuel infrastructure’ would ensure the world overshoots the 1.5°C target.” That’s carbon emissions without new fossil fuel infrastructure. So these kinds of “poisonous toad” compromises are off the table. They’re not acceptable, period. There is no room for negotiation here. 
Let’s make it clear to all Democrats: You either accept the findings of the IPCC, or you deny them. If you deny that they are correct, and if you think António Guterres is lying or delusional, then say so. But do not say, as a member of the Climate Crisis committee, that while you are very seriously committed to addressing the climate crisis, you are also open to making it worse instead. If you’re open to making it worse, then get off the committee. Be honest about who you are. 
Jacobin magazine has rightly concluded that “the Democrats are climate deniers,” albeit in a more insidious way than Republicans, because they pretend to accept the science, while acting in ways that you could not rationally act if you actually did accept the science. Influential liberal pundit Matt Yglesias even recently wrote a column arguing that Democrats should embrace “more Manchinism,” castigating progressives for being so anti-Manchin and wondering why they seem so emotional in their opposition to him. The column did not mention climate change once—Yglesias doesn’t seem to grasp why people might be viscerally angry at someone who is guaranteeing their descendants a miserable future through his self-enrichment and sociopathic disregard for the well-being of the planet. 
Every politician, Democrats and Republicans alike, should be confronted constantly with the basic questions: Do you accept the IPCC’s findings or do you think Guterres is a liar? If you do accept the findings, then how do you plan to end fossil fuel use? They should be confronted at press conferences and in the halls of Congress. They should be confronted as they go and eat sandwiches. They should be pestered on the beaches and in the streets. Disruptive action is not enough, but it’s an important start. Those who will not act, or who sign suicidal compromise deals, are enemies of humanity. They are treating an atrocity as acceptable and twiddling their thumbs when we should be in a state of emergency. Anyone talking about “compromising” with measures that worsen the problem should be treated as a dangerous lunatic. They cannot be allowed to shove the poisonous toad of climate destruction down all of our throats. 

Photo by Jakob Rosen via Unsplash 

“A World After Liberalism” is a bracing place to begin this rediscovery, in part because so much of it takes place in liberalism’s era of ascendance, even as it came under violent threat. In the book, Rose profiles Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist and Samuel Francis, five thinkers of the 20th century far right who are experiencing a revival in today’s — increasingly near — right. Some of them reach into our world directly. To take one example, Evola, a not-quite-fascist Italian theorist, has been cited by Steve Bannon and was translated into Russian by Aleksandr Dugin, the philosopher and mystic now sometimes known as “Putin’s Rasputin.”

The argument of the anti-liberals goes something like this: Our truest identities are rooted in the land in which we’re born and the kin among whom we’re raised. Our lives are given order and meaning because they are embedded in the larger structure and struggle of our people. Liberalism and, to some degree, Christianity have poisoned our cultural soil, setting us adrift in a world that prizes pleasure and derides tradition. Multiculturalism, in this telling, becomes a conservative ideal: We should celebrate the strength in cultural difference, reject the hollow universalist pieties of liberals and insist on the preservation of what sets people apart. The genius of this critique, as Rose writes, is that it recasts liberalism’s virtues into vices:

In theory, liberalism protects individuals from unjust authority, allowing them to pursue fulfilling lives apart from government coercion. In reality, it severs deep bonds of belonging, leaving isolated individuals exposed to, and dependent on, the power of the state. In theory, liberalism proposes a neutral vision of human nature, cleansed of historical residues and free of ideological distortions. In reality, it promotes a bourgeois view of life, placing a higher value on acquisition than virtue. In theory, liberalism makes politics more peaceful by focusing on the mundane rather than the metaphysical. In reality, it makes political life chaotic by splintering communities into rival factions and parties.

And yet the process runs in reverse, too. Both liberalism and Christianity become thrilling when described by their critics. Far from the technocratic slog of trade regulations and the deadening work of dragging laws past the filibuster, this liberalism is a marvel of imagination and ambition. It’s an ideology that believes human beings capable of new forms of social organization and a movement capable of untethering them from hierarchies so deeply embedded in our societies that they were thought to represent a natural, or even divine, order.

Christianity, too, gleams with a light it often lacks in today’s politics, and even in its pews: Here is a religion that insists on the dignity of all people and centers the poor and the marginalized. Rose’s subjects fear Christianity because they fear it cannot be tamed; even when the leaders they admire try to subvert it for their own purposes, it infects their societies with a latent egalitarianism, setting a trap that will inevitably be sprung.

Part of the book’s eerie relevance comes from the role Russia plays throughout. Spengler thought that the West was collapsing into incoherence and the next great cultural force might well emerge from a post-Bolshevik Russia. Yockey, one of the most egregious white supremacists in Rose’s menagerie, wrote in “anticipation of a resurgent Russia helping to correct a decadent West.” That is certainly the role Putin has claimed for himself, in speech after speech insisting on an identity rooted in soil and culture, on an imperialism justified by power and past, and on a conception of himself and Russia as lonely bulwarks fighting for traditional European culture.

When Putin gives a wartime statement standing with J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, against cancellation by those seeking rights and recognition for transgender people, this is the serious argument lurking in the inane juxtaposition: Putin is trying to rally those yearning for the certainties of the past and offended by the constant instability of the liberal present. The logic that says Ukraine belongs to Russia now because it belonged to Russia then is close cousin to the logic that defends the social hierarchies of today on the basis of their power in the past. (Rowling, it should be said, wants nothing to do with Putin.)

T O UNDERSTAND FLORIDA , drive south from Miami across the highway spans that arc over the glassy sea. A century ago, trains took a similar path, winding 153 miles (246km) down to Key West, the southernmost city in the continental United States. Crowned the “eighth wonder of the world” when it opened in 1912, the Overseas Railroad was the creation of Henry Flagler, a founder of Standard Oil who spent $50m building railways and hotels in Florida, equivalent to more than $1.6bn today.

In 1935 a hurricane destroyed most of the Overseas Railroad. But Floridians did not accept defeat. After feverish reconstruction, the route reopened as the Overseas Highway, one of the world’s longest overwater roads. Today, a handful of the original spans have been converted into piers for fishermen and paths for tourists. The Overseas Highway embodies a central feature of Florida: a persistent desire to reshape the environment and dominate an inhospitable land. In his book “Finding Florida”, T.D. Allman calls Florida “the Play-Doh State”: people have repeatedly taken the goo and moulded it to fit their dreams.

Continental America’s southernmost state was once a peripheral destination for a few tourists and sun-seekers. Today it is crucial to the country’s future. Whereas America’s population growth has slowed sharply, Florida’s has boomed. Between 2010 and 2020 the state’s population grew by 15%, twice the national rate. Florida has overtaken New York as America’s third-most-populous state (after California and Texas). Some 22m people now call it home, and another 7m people are expected to do so by 2040. From 1940 to 2020, Florida’s population increased 11-fold. It leads the country in domestic migration and, six years ago, overtook California to become the top destination for foreigners moving to America.

Florida has now “challenged California to be America’s cultural and demographic touchstone”, writes the historian Gary Mormino in his forthcoming book “Dreams in the New Century”. The country’s political division can be spotted in images of Donald Trump brooding on his loss of the presidency in 2020 at his Mar-a-Lago golf course in Palm Beach and Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor and a presidential hopeful, railing against President Joe Biden’s covid-19 policies.

Most people looking at Florida see either sunshine or shadows: a tax- and regulation-light recipe for national success, or a cautionary tale of a short-termist society that has ignored long-term vulnerabilities. The collapse last year of a condominium tower in Surfside, which killed 98 people, had a tragic, Floridian edge, born of neglect and short-term savings against long-term sustainability and lack of oversight. As the state with the longest coastline in lower continental America, Florida faces an existential threat from sea-level rise, but has failed to prepare itself for the consequences.

Florida’s prominence is new. St Augustine on its Atlantic coast is America’s oldest permanent European settlement, dating from 1565. But Florida was long the country’s last frontier, a vast swathe of rural swampland where settlers lived in obscurity and poverty. “Florida, sir, is not worth buying,” declared John Randolph, a Virginia congressman, during a debate in 1845 about whether to admit it as America’s 27th state. He called it “a land of swamps, of quagmires, of frogs and alligators and mosquitoes”, and predicted that, “No man would immigrate into Florida, no, not from hell itself.”

For decades Mr Randolph seemed right. A few daring transplants such as Flagler may have worked to alter Florida’s geography and its appeal by building coastal luxury hotels such as The Breakers in Palm Beach. But it was only a century ago, in 1922, that the state passed the milestone of 1m residents. Until the second world war, Florida remained the smallest state in the South by population.

Technology then changed everything. Dredging and in-filling turned swampland into less soggy settlements. The spread of railways, highways and commercial air travel ferried tourists south. Air-conditioning made Florida more tolerable, as did DDT , an insecticide that waged war on mosquitoes (with far-reaching environmental damage). Conflict also played a part. During the second world war, 2m servicemen trained at Florida’s military bases and liked what they saw; many returned in peacetime.

Offering warmth and low cost (Florida is one of seven states to levy no income tax), the Sunshine State is a famous magnet for retirees. Covid-19 and work-from-home policies have increased and broadened its appeal. By opposing mask requirements and vaccine mandates and making schools stay open, Mr DeSantis has positioned Florida as what he calls the “freest state in these United States”, in contrast to Democratic-led states such as New York and California that required masks and vaccines and kept businesses and schools closed for longer.

More young professionals and families with flexible jobs have migrated to the state, as have some financial firms from New York. Florida was once a “carrot at the end of the life well lived, but that’s not true any more”, says Chris Sprowls, the Republican speaker of the state House of Representatives. Now “people are coming here to raise families” and work, he says. Mr Sprowls sees recent immigration as a validation of Florida’s policies. “We’re a blueprint for the country,” he claims.

Southern stinginess

Florida has the lowest number of government employees per head of all 50 states. State spending per citizen is also the lowest in America, at $3,845, 40% less than the average. (This excludes federal spending, and with one-fifth of Floridians over 65, many rely on Social Security pensions and Medicare, federal health care for the elderly.) Tax cuts are a favourite topic of conversation among Floridian politicians. “Our taxes should actually go down every year,” says Rick Scott, a former governor who boasts of using his eight years in office to cut taxes 100 times and to scrap 5,000 regulations. “If you look at the number of people who move to a state like Florida every year, shouldn’t we be able to share the cost of government with everybody?” he asks.

The state is also extremely diverse, with one-fifth of its population born outside America, earning it the label of “southern Ellis Island”. Even those born in America often hail from elsewhere, evident in a panoply of licence plates. As many as 39% of Floridians are from another state, against 16% of Californians and 22% of Texans. Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist in Tallahassee, the state capital, says that Florida is “not really a state” at all. In most states residents share common experiences, but that is not true in Florida, he argues, since so many people import their biases, voting records and cultural affinities from elsewhere. “Other than sunshine, there’s no connective tissue that defines Florida,” says Joe Hamilton, founder of the St Pete Catalyst, an online news site. Aesthetically, the state is also diverse, except for one characteristic: flatness. The tallest “hills” in the state are its overwater bridges. At just 345 feet (105 metres), Florida’s highest natural point is equivalent to a 32-storey building.

This correspondent drove the length of Florida: from Mobile in Alabama to Pensacola in western Florida, across the central corridor, and down both coasts, all the way to Key West. One way to see the state is as an eclectic necklace, with beads of various sizes and materials strung together in an incoherent arrangement.

The northern panhandle is the most “southern” part of Florida, with the largest black population. It resembles Alabama and Georgia, and its people’s drawl sounds southern. The choice of Tallahassee as state capital feels anachronistic, from a time when most of the population lived in the north, cotton was a power crop and slavery was accepted. (Florida fought for the Confederacy.) As if to reinforce the panhandle’s idiosyncrasy, part is so far west as to be in a different time zone, lagging the rest of the state by an hour.

Central Florida is where the old state meets the new. This is farmland and cow country, but also home to fast-growing counties and to the fourth-largest city, Orlando. The Villages, a largely white retirement community that restricts how long children can visit and is sometimes called “Disney World for retirees” is here, an hour’s drive north-west of the actual Disney World. A 90-minute drive south is Polk County, home to a rapidly expanding Puerto Rican population.

The east and west coasts share beaches and water but have different micro-cultures. On the west are buzzing cities like St Petersburg, Tampa and Sarasota, which are younger and more affordable than far-south Naples, which merits its catchphrase of “I never felt so young and poor until I moved to Naples.” The west coast has more Midwesterners and is slower-paced than the east. The east has the Space Coast around Cape Canaveral, an industry that is mostly a low-orbiting sector with touristic appeal, as well as the Gold Coast stretching from Palm Beach to Miami.

Miami is a world in itself, one of the most global cities in America, with a strong Cuban influence. It is reinventing itself as a commercial hub. Southern Florida is the engine of the state economy. The state has 67 counties, but the four that make up southern Florida (Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach) contribute a third of GDP . The south has two of the four wealthiest zip codes in America (Miami Beach and Palm Beach). Yet an hour’s drive into the Everglades is Belle Glade, Florida’s poorest city, a postcard of despair. The Everglades serves as a reminder of the scrub, mangroves and swamps that explorers encountered in the 16th century. But half the Everglades is now gone, drained and filled in for development.

Florida is worth trying to understand for two big reasons. First, it is a window into the wider challenges facing America. It has a powerful seniors’ lobby but also a growing, dynamic group of minorities, including Hispanics, who account for more than a quarter of the population. “We look more like the US at large than any other state,” says Susan MacManus, a professor emerita at the University of South Florida. As America ages and becomes more diverse, Florida may offer lessons for the entire country.

Second, Florida influences the whole country both economically and politically, especially as more people move in. Like California and Texas, Florida is already shaping the nation, with innovative policies that are copied elsewhere. After the 2020 census, Florida picked up a congressional seat and an electoral vote. It now has more than a tenth of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. And it is by far America’s largest swing state.

Indeed, Florida’s voters are predictive of American politics, exposing its stark divisions. In the 12 presidential elections since 1976, Floridians have voted four times for Democrats, eight times for Republicans, and all but twice for the winner. Yet most races were extremely close—typified by the 2000 “hanging-chad” election that gripped the world. Adding up the ballots for every presidential election from 1992 to 2016, the results in Florida were separated by less than 20,000 votes, or 0.04%. The strong performance of Mr Trump in 2020 widened the cumulative gap to 354,000 votes, but that still represented a margin of only 0.6%.

This special report will analyse the Sunshine State from different angles, including the economy, public policy, migration, politics and the environment. An animating theme is Florida’s fragility, but also its rise and growing importance. “The way Florida goes, the way the country goes,” says Annette Taddeo, a Democratic state senator who is running for governor. What happens in Florida, in short, reverberates around the country. ■

Correction (April 11th 2022): The original version of this article said that Florida had the longest coastline in continental America. That honour, of course, goes to Alaska.

F ROM GIANNI VERSACE to Ron DeSantis, Floridians like making fashion statements. On the website for the governor’s re-election campaign, fans of Mr DeSantis can buy “Escape to Florida” T -shirts, featuring prominent Democrats who have visited recently. Those looking for a head-to-toe makeover can opt for “Freedom over Fauci” flip-flops, denigrating Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. Accessories include “Let us alone” beverage coolers and two golf balls with the tagline “Florida’s governor has a pair”.

Wardrobe choices aside, politics is a serious business in Florida, since elections have often been so close. The most famous example was in 2000, when George W. Bush and Al Gore were in a dead heat, triggering a recount and a Supreme Court ruling that handed Mr Bush the presidency, with a recorded majority of a mere 537 votes. Three more recounts occurred in Florida in 2018 alone. The three most recent gubernatorial elections have all been decided by margins of 1.2% or less.

Although Senate, governors’ and presidential races are intensely competitive in Florida, the state’s government has been under firm Republican control for decades. A Democrat was last elected governor in 1994. Between 2002 and 2020, Republicans won 25 statewide elections and Democrats only six. With Republicans close to a super-majority in the state House of Representatives, Democrats’ numbers are so attenuated they have no hope of halting laws they dislike. Evan Jenne, the House minority co-leader, describes Democrats’ experience as “lying down on the train track, even though we know it will drive right over us”.

In November Republicans are likely to beat Democrats in the mid-term elections and use this to highlight further inroads in the Sunshine State. Already they are trumpeting the idea that Florida is a former swing state that they have now permanently won. They point to voter-registration data from 2021, which for the first time showed the number of Republicans as higher than Democrats. It was only by some 43,000 people out of 14.3m registered voters, but that is a striking change from a decade ago, when Democrats’ registration exceeded Republicans by 558,000 voters.

News reports suggest the national Democratic Party is retrenching in Florida to focus on other competitive states, like Wisconsin, bolstering this image of mounting Republican strength. “There is definitely scepticism from national donors about Florida, and it’s scepticism that’s warranted,” says Steve Schale, who helped Barack Obama win Florida in 2008 and 2012. He adds that “a lot of Democrats’ money has been lit on fire in the state” with nothing to show for it.

Still swinging

Yet cut through Republicans’ chest-pounding, and the reality is that Florida has flared red but may not stay that way. It has seen political transformations before. When he was elected in 1998 Jeb Bush (George W.’s brother) became only the third Republican governor of Florida since Reconstruction. “We went from an evolution of being a blue state to a purple state, and now we’re between purple and red,” says Alex Sink, the former chief financial officer, who narrowly lost as a Democratic candidate for governor in 2010.

After Mr Obama carried Florida in 2008 and 2012, Democrats hoped demography was on their side, with growing populations of Hispanics and black people expected to vote blue. Today more than a third of Florida’s voters are non-white. Hispanics account for 17% of voters, non-Hispanic black people 13% and Asians 2%. Yet Hispanics are more diverse than in other American states, where they tend to be of Mexican origin, and there are plenty of blacks from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and elsewhere who do not share other American black people’s Democratic leaning. Demography is not destiny in Florida, at least not yet.

Democrats’ weakness can be explained by four factors. First is a disorganised and disempowered state party. As outsiders intent on taking power in the 1990s, Republicans invested time and money in voter registration and fielding candidates. Democrats had been in power for so long in Florida (as in much of the South) that they did not develop a formal and strategic organising structure to match the Republicans. If Democrats could do only one thing to change their fortunes, they would invest more in voter registration, says Mr Schale. Recently Democrats announced they would spend $2.5m to boost registration, but that is a piddling amount considering the vast size of the state.

A second, connected factor is weaker fundraising. Democrats struggle to raise the same amount as Republicans, which is encapsulated in this year’s governor’s race. As of February 1st Mr DeSantis had raised $81.5m, nine times more than the combined total of the three leading Democratic candidates. “Democrats are always a day late and a dollar short,” says Amy Mercado, a Puerto Rican Democrat who was elected as Orange County property appraiser in 2021 and formerly served in the legislature.

A third explanation is Republicans’ successful messaging to Hispanics. “Florida has been the showcase for where you see the Hispanic vote trending a little bit Republican,” says Ms MacManus of the University of South Florida. Republicans typecast Democrats as socialists, a dirty word for many in the state who fled socialist regimes. They are not just Cubans, who account for 29% of eligible Hispanic voters in Florida. Around 8% of Hispanic voters are Colombian, 3% Venezuelan and 3% Nicaraguan. “The Hispanic vote is a problem for Democrats,” says Annette Taddeo, the state senator and candidate for governor, who thinks Democrats “are not fighting back enough against the socialist label”. Puerto Ricans are a growing force in Floridian politics as well. Tens of thousands moved to Florida after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Puerto Ricans relocating from other American states tend to register as Democrats, but those from the island often choose no-party affiliation, making them more open to Republican outreach.

A fourth issue is the arrival of transplants from other American states. Around 41% of “baby-boomers” in Florida, aged 57-76, register as Republican, against 37% as Democratic, and they turn out in greater numbers. To see this, take a walk around The Villages, a retirement community that was America’s fastest-growing metro area in the past decade and may double in size in the next 15 years. Its 80,000 residents zoom around on golf carts and have an activity schedule that might have been written by a general. An essential campaign stop for Republican presidential candidates, The Villages voted overwhelmingly for Mr Trump. Residents often feel like “they’ve paid their dues and taxes wherever they’ve come from so their kids could go to school, and they don’t have an allegiance here,” explains Cris Andersen, vice-chair of the Sumter County Democrats, who lives in The Villages. “They want to reduce government spending for other people, just not them, so they don’t want to fund Medicaid but don’t want Medicare to be touched,” she explains, referring to health care for the poor and elderly.

As more people of all generations move into Florida from other states, the impact of migration on the state’s politics matters more. There are two schools of thought. One is that people will vote with the values of the states they leave, which are often blue. When covid is the main issue, Florida tilts Republican, but as the pandemic subsides and people vote on a more varied set of concerns, it is going to look more like a purple state and could eventually turn blue, reckons one veteran Republican. Some recent transplants may arrive and react badly to the anaemic level of social services and want the government to have a greater role.

An alternative narrative is that new Floridians are going to make the state even more Republican. Chris Sprowls, speaker of the Florida House, thinks there is already proof of how new arrivals will vote in registration data. “They seem to be registering as Republicans…and realising that there’s a reason they chose to come here,” he says, crediting Republican policies. Jack Abraham, a technology investor who relocated to Miami from the Bay Area, says he has seen “left of centre” people who spend time in Florida “move a little more right on the political spectrum than they were before”. It is also possible that recent transplants, including wealthy financiers and techies, could invest more in Republican campaigns in Florida, further sharpening the fundraising divide between Republican and Democratic campaigns.

Florida will see close electoral battles in future, but the battlefield will become more complex as Republicans and Democrats vie to win over Independents. Nominally independent voters disgruntled with both parties, who are known as no-party affiliation ( NPA ), are the fastest-growing “party” in Florida, with a share rising from 20% in 2004 to 26% now. (Nationally, the share of independents is growing too.) Worrying for both parties, NPA status is popular among Florida’s fastest-growing groups: Hispanics and Asians, as well as the young. More than a third of millennials and Generation Z are registered NPA s, versus 21% of baby-boomers. Some 40% of Asian voters and 36% of Hispanics are NPA s.

C ENTURIES AGO , manatees were symbols of dreams. Early explorers mistook them for mermaids. Now the gentle mammals are symbols of nightmare. Last year 1,100 manatees—around a seventh of those in Florida—died, the worst year since record-keeping began in the 1970s. Pollution-fuelled algal blooms have killed the seagrass they eat, leaving many to starve to death. Concerned researchers on the east coast Indian River Lagoon have started to feed manatees lettuce to sustain them. The manatees’ deaths shocked Floridians, but they are an “even bigger event than people realise, because it means that the environment has reached a tipping point”, says Craig Pittman, author of “Oh, Florida!: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country”.

The environment is at once both Florida’s biggest asset and its greatest liability. Tourists visit and people move in because they are drawn to nature: the beaches, freshwater springs, reefs and national parks. Yet Florida is like an ecological O. Henry story, written with an ironic twist. Wittingly or not, people undermine what they love most through pollution, development and carbon emissions. Algal blooms that kill seagrass are fuelled by fertiliser run-off from gardens and farms, breached septic tanks and other pollution, in turn killing marine life and making beaches unattractive. The blooms spread more quickly in warmer waters, and temperatures have risen with climate change.

Water and swamp

Florida’s environment, already inherently fragile, has been further taxed by the explosion of a built one. The Florida panther, the official state animal, has been killed by habitat destruction and car collisions. Today fewer than 130 Florida panthers are left in the wild. The Everglades, which used to be double its current size, has been drained and filled in for development. As a reminder of how much man has changed the state, Disney World is built on land that once formed part of the Everglades ecosystem. Invasive species like iguanas and pythons have arrived in greater numbers.

Florida’s House of Representatives recently released a risk-assessment report commissioned from the consultancy Willis Towers Watson. Of 72 initial risks catalogued, 22 are linked to the environment, sea-level rise and climate change. With the purview of a ten-year time horizon, the report focuses on the most pressing problems, including water, sea-level rise and extreme weather that is becoming more frequent. Florida has experienced around 40% of hurricanes in America, more than any other state.

These are all difficult generational problems. The state must decide how much to weigh population growth, which fuels the economy, against the cost of investing for long-term benefits that will be appreciated long after today’s leaders have left office. And the problems are technically challenging too.

Consider water. “Without significant intervention” water quality and scarcity “will add up to a severe crisis over the coming years and decades”, the report says. Water problems belong in several buckets. Sometimes Florida has too much, with rainfall and sea-level rise causing flooding. Sometimes it has too little, contributing to drought and scarcity due to insufficient storage capacity. (On average, Florida has experienced a severe and widespread drought at least once a decade for the past 100 years.) Year-round there are concerns about quality, with specific instances like a leak in 2021 at the Piney Point phosphorus plant that led to 205 tonnes of nitrogen being dumped in Tampa Bay. More day-to-day worries include agricultural run-off and septic tanks, which treat one-third of the wastewater in the state and can sometimes contaminate water supply, since rising groundwater causes septic systems’ failure and the release of toxins from untreated sewage.

It may seem surprising that the Republican-controlled Florida House wants such a deep-dive on environmental concerns, but on this issue state Republicans sound more like Democrats than does the national party. “Republicans in Florida are more collectively connected to nature and understand nature as part of the economy,” says Dawn Shirreffs of the Environmental Defence Fund, a non-profit group. Mr DeSantis was elected in 2018 as an environmentalist, who supported bans on fracking and offshore drilling. He is no Teddy Roosevelt, animated by a personal connection to nature. Instead, he made a savvy political calculation, understanding voters’ fears over climate change.

The environment is at once both Florida’s biggest asset and its greatest liability

This is a change from Rick Scott, his predecessor, who banned staff from uttering the words “climate change”. Mr DeSantis has said he does not want to do “left-wing” stuff and is unwilling to tackle the underlying cause of global warming by reducing carbon emissions, but he often speaks about the environment, including the need to restore the Everglades. The state legislature had agreed since 2021 to invest around $670m to fund “resilience” work in projects for communities vulnerable to sea-level rise. Mr DeSantis has also created a “chief resilience officer”, although this position has spent much time vacant and under-resourced. He is trying to walk a tightrope, bringing attention to environmental issues without putting in place regulations that would alienate businesses or curtail development.

Privately many say that the state is not doing enough, considering the extent of Florida’s environmental problems. There have been many headlines on Everglades projects, and both state and federal funding has been diverted there, some of which predated Mr DeSantis. Yet not much has changed, says Michael Grunwald, author of “The Swamp”, who says the problems, including a lack of water storage capacity, “are as bad as they ever were”.

Stronger moves needed

Some issues require bolder action and investment on a completely different scale. A task-force convened by Mr DeSantis to study blue-green algae recommended measures including state inspections of septic tanks, but not all of its suggestions have been implemented. “Florida is like a sick patient,” says Jonathan Webber of Florida Conservation Voters. “We brought the patient to the doctor’s and the doctor gave us a prescription, and then we threw the prescription in the trash.”

Current state funding will convert less than 4% of septic systems into sewers. But population growth and new development are expected to expand the number of septic systems by almost a quarter over the next ten years (the state has 2.6m septic systems, 12% of America’s total). This is an area needing huge investment. To convert septic tanks into sewers costs around $40,000 per residence, so doing it for just a quarter of today’s septic tanks would cost the state $26bn. Lack of action carries costs, though. Willis Towers Watson estimates that, without action, chronic contamination of the water supply will result in $73bn-80bn in damages over the next decade.

Sea-level rise is even costlier. Some 20% of Florida’s property is at substantial risk of flooding, and that will rise to 24% by 2050, according to First Street Foundation, a research group. Key West demonstrates the need to plan for the future. Teri Johnston, the mayor, says the cost of raising roads and making other adjustments for sea-level rise has been “astronomical”. The county is doing shoreline work to reinforce beaches, and the city has changed regulations around height limits for buildings, so they can be built higher above flood elevation. “We’ve invested millions, but it’s going to take billions, with a b,” she says. Tallahassee has provided some funding, but not enough direction, leaving most of it up to counties. “I would like to see more money, more strategy, more support for the entire state,” says Ms Johnston.

Mr Scott eliminated the Department of Community Affairs, which served as the central-planning group for where to develop, bowing to pressure from property firms that complained of red tape. Today there is no statewide strategy for managing population growth alongside environmental protection. “In a state as fragile as Florida, careful planning on where we’re putting homes is vital, and that’s not happening like it used to, at least on a state level,” says Mr Webber. He says that right now, “It’s the Wild West for real-estate developers.” ■

I N 2016 Leung Kwok-hung, a politician also known as “Long Hair”, snatched a folder of confidential documents from a government official during a meeting at Hong Kong’s legislature. Charged with contempt, his case ended up in Hong Kong’s court of final appeal last year. One of the five judges was Lord Reed, the head of Britain’s supreme court.

To anyone unfamiliar with Hong Kong’s tangled history, this may seem odd. But judges from Britain’s highest court have been doing double duty on Hong Kong’s since 1997 as part of the deal that handed the city from Britain to China.

This legacy of Hong Kong’s past will not feature in its future, though. On March 30th Lord Reed and his colleague, Lord Hodge, resigned from Hong Kong’s top court. No other serving British judge will be allowed to succeed them. According to Liz Truss, Britain’s foreign secretary, a national-security law imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 has exerted a “far-reaching chilling effect”. To stay on the top court “would risk legitimising oppression”, she said.

In commercial cases and ordinary criminal cases Hong Kong courts remain independent, says a British barrister who appears before them. But the national-security law has nonetheless had an “insidious effect”. Ambitious judges “are not going to deliver rulings that displease Beijing”. This is true even in cases that are not tried under the national-security law, but are politically charged.

That puts the foreigners on the bench in a tricky position. Hong Kong welcomes judges from common-law jurisdictions—and it has attracted some of the world’s best. Such minds would improve any judiciary. The fact they could resign may also serve as a deterrent, preventing officials in Beijing from meddling more than they do. But by hanging around, foreign judges could also make it seem as if little has changed in Hong Kong. Their presence makes the courts better than they would otherwise be. It also makes them seem better than they actually are.

Even now, some judicial links with Britain remain. Six retired British judges still serve on the top court; others appear elsewhere in the system. And because the legal system has English roots, cases still sometimes cite English precedents. Mr Leung’s (unsuccessful) defence referred to the bill of rights passed in England in 1689. ■

F OR WEEKS the authorities in Shanghai tried to stem an outbreak of covid-19 with a whack-a-mole approach. Individual buildings were locked down, only for the virus to spread elsewhere. Finally, on March 28th, officials decided to lock down all of the city’s 25m residents in two phases, beginning with the east side of town, home to the main financial centre. People scrambled to buy supplies. Vegetables became scarce. Some bankers began sleeping in their offices.

The lockdown is in line with China’s “zero-covid” strategy, which aims to crush outbreaks before they can spread widely. Thousands of new cases of the highly transmissible Omicron variant are testing this approach. The wave has hit most provinces. Restrictions have been imposed on dozens of cities and towns. The experience of Hong Kong is causing Chinese officials to be extra-vigilant. Not long ago the city had very few cases. Now it has one of the highest daily death rates from the virus. The vast majority of the dead are unvaccinated old people. Around 65% of over-80s in Hong Kong had not been jabbed when the Omicron wave started.

The mainland has a similar problem. Unlike other countries, which made jabbing the elderly and other vulnerable people a priority, China focused on its overall vaccination rate. It stands at nearly 88%. But only about half of over-80s have been fully vaccinated (see chart). Less than a fifth have received a booster shot. Some 52m people over the age of 60 have not received two jabs. In official statements, the government sounds alarmed. Its efforts to jab mature folk face big obstacles, though.

Start with the fact that many old people think covid vaccines might be dangerous. When they were rolled out in late 2020, the state only approved shots for healthy people under 60. It cited a lack of clinical-trial data for elderly and vulnerable populations. Many old people assumed that the vaccines could harm them. Some health workers did, too. “The first impression is really critical,” says Chen Zhengming, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford. “Once you have formed your opinion it’s really difficult to change, it requires ten times more effort.”

Since then, the messaging surrounding covid vaccines has not helped. Jingoistic state media have criticised effective foreign-made jabs, which have not been authorised in China for seemingly political reasons. This has probably increased suspicion of Chinese vaccines, too, says Huang Yanzhong of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank in America. Even though the Chinese kind have now been declared safe for old folk, some health workers still tell elderly patients with certain conditions, such as high blood pressure, not to get jabbed. That makes little sense, says Mr Huang. “Even if you’re concerned about side effects, when you weigh that against the risk of getting infected and dying, it’s a no-brainer.”

But the risk of getting infected with covid and dying is, for now, very low in China—and that makes the government’s job tougher. At least until recently, the state’s zero-covid policies have been effective. Many cities have never logged a case. Most old people have hardly been exposed to the virus, and have little fear of it as a result.

Don’t end up like the chicken

Local governments are trying a range of strategies to get old people vaccinated. In the eastern city of Nantong, officials are leaning on younger people, appealing to their sense of filial duty. Get your parents vaccinated so they can become the “silver-haired guardians” of their own health, say the authorities. A city in the province of Hainan has put out a less lofty appeal: get vaccinated and receive a dead chicken. Officials in other towns are offering cooking oil, eggs or cash in return for getting a jab.

In a park in Beijing, two green tents were recently set up for vaccinating old folk. Signs promised 200 yuan ($31) for those receiving their first dose. When your correspondent visited, half a dozen people were sitting in one tent. They had just been jabbed and were waiting to see if there were any side effects. Even with a steady flow of patients, it will take months for China to vaccinate and boost its elderly population. And some will remain unwilling. Outside the tent, in a wheelchair, was a woman in her 80s. Would she get the shot? “Not interested,” she said. “It does no good. And I can’t be bothered.” ■

T HE ROAD to peace in Ethiopia runs for about 500km through some of the most inhospitable land on earth, from Semera in Afar to Mekele, the capital of the state of Tigray (see map). Cutting it is the front line in Ethiopia’s 17-month-old civil war between the forces of Abiy Ahmed, the national prime minister, and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front ( TPLF ), the party-cum-militia that runs Tigray. The road is the only route authorised by the government for aid shipments into Tigray, where hundreds of thousands are starving. No food has moved along it since the middle of December.

The Semera-Mekele highway is thus the proving ground of the “indefinite humanitarian truce” that the government announced on March 24th and that Tigrayan leaders provisionally accepted. If it holds, it could help bring an end to a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives (no official figures are available) and that still threatens to tear Ethiopia apart. The first crucial test is whether aid starts moving along the main road. If it does not, then the fighting could swiftly resume.

As The Economist went to press, telecommunications were still cut off and no lorries were heading to Tigray. Aid workers say this is because the road through Afar, a region mostly under government control, is still too dangerous to use. There have been skirmishes with Tigrayan forces nearby. Many Afars are furious about Tigrayan incursions, which have left hundreds of thousands homeless and hungry. Some have attacked shipments of aid in recent weeks. “First, feed Afar,” says Mussa Adem, an opposition leader in the region.

Part of the problem is a lack of agreement about what the ceasefire actually means. The TPLF has indicated that aid must flow before its troops will withdraw to Tigray’s borders. The government seems to think the opposite. Both are already crying foul. On March 28th the TPLF accused the government of lying about lifting its blockade. The government accused Tigrayan forces of blocking the road.

Some suspect the government’s real aim is to buy time while staving off the threat of American sanctions. “You can’t call it a humanitarian truce and then condition it on a withdrawal,” says a Western diplomat. That Abiy has not made visible efforts to make sure aid gets through Afar unimpeded only adds to such concerns.

Still, there are some grounds for thinking that both sides are inching closer to ending the war. The TPLF , which last year seemed set to storm the capital, Addis Ababa, has since suffered setbacks on the battle field and is unable to relieve the suffering of civilians. Thousands of Tigrayans are crossing into the neighbouring Amhara region to escape hunger and drone strikes inflicted on them by government forces. “I don’t think they’ve got much wiggle room,” says a UN official, referring to the TPLF .

Indirect talks mediated by America and the African Union have begun bearing fruit. Military commanders have made contact and both sides have toned down their rhetoric. Fighting is much less intense than it was last year. Since January the government has released many Tigrayans from prison, including some TPLF leaders. A three-month state of emergency was lifted in February.

Asked to explain the government’s shift, a senior official from the ruling party says, “Diplomatic pressure, the economy, war-weariness—in that order.” David Satterfield, America’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa, was in Addis Ababa days before the ceasefire was announced. America has already suspended duty-free access for Ethiopian goods and two bills on further sanctions are currently before Congress.

Ethiopia’s economy is collapsing. Spending on the war has exacerbated a shortage of foreign currency. Banks are running dry and factories are cutting back for want of imported materials. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means inflation may climb from its current rate of 34%. “There is no choice but to end the war,” says a central banker. “The economic consequence is beyond what the country can bear.”

A S THE SOUTHERNMOST state in continental America, Florida is often pooh-poohed as peripheral. Headlines about crimes committed by Floridians, sometimes involving alligators, alcohol, or a combination of the two, have contributed to a wacky “Florida man” stereotype. Many associate Florida with retirement, rednecks and a world-famous rodent, Mickey Mouse.

In fact, Florida has become emblematic of much of America and central to all of it. The state is on the rise, as our special report this week explains. Between 2010 and 2020 its population grew at double the national rate. Florida has overtaken New York to become America’s third-most-populous state after California and Texas, with a dynamic and diverse demography, including fast-rising numbers of Hispanics. It is now the number-one destination for American and foreign movers. In the year to July 31st 2021, 260,000 more people arrived in Florida than left—equivalent to adding a city the size of Buffalo, New York.

Its economic and political heft is growing, too. Florida’s GDP has doubled since 2002. Were it a country, it would rank as the 15th-largest economy in the world, ahead of Mexico and Indonesia. Having recently gained a 30th electoral-college vote, it has more than a tenth of those required to win the presidency. The largest swing state, in the past 12 presidential elections Florida has voted all but twice for the winner. And as home to musicians, athletes and a recent former president, Florida is a cultural trendsetter, for better or worse, as well as ground zero for the fight over government restrictions related to covid-19.

Americans ignore this powerhouse at their peril—and should heed the lessons it holds. For a start, Florida points to the wider looming battle between generations. Its residents include millions of retired Americans who want to limit government spending, even while they use government programmes, such as Medicare, a health-care scheme for the elderly. Younger Floridians, meanwhile, want to see investment in their own future, and are finding cities like Miami increasingly unaffordable.

The young are also more affected by the threats Florida faces, nowhere more so than over the environment, Florida’s biggest draw as well as its most acute vulnerability. A fifth of its property is at “substantial” risk of flooding because of rising sea-levels. Its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was elected as an environmentalist and has invested in programmes that fund cities’ “resilience”, but the state needs to do much more. Florida has a chance to serve as an inspiration for how to mitigate the damage of climate change, but risks becoming a cautionary tale of what happens when a state government does too little, too late.

Politically, Florida has come to embody the Republican Party and its rightward tilt. If the Florida-based Donald Trump decides not to run again in 2024, Mr DeSantis is the likeliest Republican nominee for president. The rising number of independents in Florida suggests that people are fed up with both parties. But Democrats look especially vulnerable. A decade ago they claimed 558,000 more registered voters than Republicans; today they trail Republicans by 43,000. Nationally, Democrats need to run more optimistic, centrist candidates who can appeal to independent voters like those in Florida. As it is, they are struggling to shake off the “socialist” label that Republicans have given them, turning off many voters, notably Hispanics.

Lastly, Florida offers a case study in economic policy. It charges no income tax, which enhances its appeal, as do the pro-business attitudes of the state’s leaders. The pandemic has prompted people and firms to reconsider where they want to be based, leading many to move out of high-tax, high-regulation states (such as New York and California) to Florida and Texas, which are pro-business and tax-light. Silicon Valley and Wall Street types are attracted to a place where politicians welcome them and never condemn their success.

It is neither practical nor desirable for all other states to emulate Florida’s low-tax, low-spend model. But Florida’s success should give pause to states intent on continuing to raise taxes, to enact new regulations and to slander successful businesses. As America’s population peaks, states will compete with each other for people. Those that prove to be good places to live and work will be rewarded with economic growth.

Florida itself has lessons to learn, too. It has a history of booms and busts, with an over-reliance on property. It thrives as people move there, yet some of its politicians sound anti-immigrant. It should deal with the rising cost of living and its tired infrastructure. The rightward shift in the legislature is concerning for those who have a broad, and inclusive, interpretation of liberty. This week Mr DeSantis signed into law the “parental rights in education” bill, also known as “don’t say gay”, which limits discussion of sexuality in classrooms.

Still, Florida’s surge and struggles are instructive. Mock Florida Man, if you wish, but don’t underestimate him. ■

O N A FIRST posting to China, two decades ago, Chaguan covered a disaster that was as grim as it was revealing: an explosion that killed 38 children at a school where pupils were assembling fireworks to pay their fees. Reporting that tragedy in March 2001 was made possible by the courage of bereaved parents in Fanglin, a remote village in the southern province of Jiangxi. To alert national leaders to their plight they accepted interviews and identified local officials and teachers who forced children as young as eight to fit fuses to firecrackers in classrooms. Exposing this crime took bravery by Chinese journalists, too, notably from risk-taking, commercially driven outlets that enjoyed a golden age in the 1990s and early 2000s, protected by well-placed patrons and by the profits that their livelier content generated. “I have to go, a China Youth Daily reporter is here,” a grieving mother said during a telephone interview, naming one of the feistier newspapers of that time. Locals smuggled Chinese journalists into their village, then hid them from thugs sent to beat them. As for Chaguan, he was detained for “illegal reporting” at a police roadblock outside Fanglin.

An epilogue followed that would be unthinkable now. Days after the blast China’s prime minister, Zhu Rongji, held his annual press conference in Beijing, carried live on television. A Western reporter asked if Mr Zhu stood by his earlier statement blaming the disaster on explosives set off by a deranged villager. Mr Zhu, a gruff economic reformer, acknowledged that foreign and Hong Kong journalists doubted this account. Therefore, he had sent new investigators in plain clothes to Jiangxi: a tacit admission that foreigners might be more reliable than his own bureaucracy. They found that schoolchildren had made fireworks two years previously, but this practice ended before the blast, he said. Declining further debate with “sceptical journalists”, foreign or Chinese, Mr Zhu promised that children would be better protected in future. Soon afterwards Jiangxi’s governor and police chief lost their jobs.

Jump to the present day and another disaster: the unexplained loss of a China Eastern airliner carrying 132 passengers and crew, seen nosediving vertically from cruising altitude into a hillside in the southern province of Guangxi on March 21st. Public reactions reveal a media landscape transformed. Journalists who rushed to the crash site have been scolded by some internet users for getting in the way, and chided to “wait for the official report” into what happened. A press conference with bosses of China Eastern Airlines was rendered all but useless by cautious questions and scripted answers. A reporter from a foreign news agency, Reuters, stood out for asking about practical matters such as the repair record of the crashed Boeing 737. An airline boss intoned that investigators would “carry out relevant tasks in an orderly manner”.

Today’s leaders do not give credit to foreign reporters for their culture of scepticism. Rather, Western media are accused of inventing reports about repression in Xinjiang or Tibet and of scouring China for negative stories to distract from chaos in America or Europe. When floods hit the central province of Henan in 2021 officials incited crowds of locals to report and harass Western journalists. Presenting the country as under siege by America, nationalist commentators urge citizens to refuse interviews with foreign outlets, rather than “hand the West a knife” to stab China. Increasingly, foreigners are called a national-security threat. Cheng Lei, an Australian who worked as an anchor for China’s international television network, CGTN , went on trial in Beijing on March 31st, charged with supplying state secrets to a foreign power. Australia’s ambassador was barred from the closed-door hearing.

Domestic journalists are under pressure, too. Once there was public sympathy when reporters gave coverage to disaster victims and their families, as they sought answers or redress. Doughty Chinese journalists challenged official cover-ups after an earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, a high-speed train crash in 2011, an explosion in a chemicals depot in Tianjin in 2018 and the start of the covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in 2020. Now, the public is turning on purveyors of bad news. After the Guangxi plane crash, an unremarkable if mawkish profile of some victims published by Renwu magazine attracted a storm of hostile comments and was deleted. In a blog post that went viral, a journalism student called Renwu’s writer unethical for interviewing victims’ friends, before primly concluding that disaster coverage should focus on rescue work, not stories of the dead. Netizens condemn journalists and even some victims’ relatives for dwelling too publicly on the tragedy, accusing them of “eating steamed buns dipped in human blood”, a garbled reference to a short story by Lu Xun (a champion of free speech, Lu’s satirical target was actually ignorant superstition).

The news is what the party says it is

Growing anti-media sentiment is driven by politics and economics. Until about a decade ago, journalists at swashbuckling news outlets talked openly of holding the powerful to account. Then the Communist Party struck back, hard, neutering liberal publications and purging newsrooms. To earn press cards today, journalists must take politics tests and attend 90 hours of training each year, stressing their primary mission of “public opinion guidance". As an extra incentive to toe the party line, censors allow online nationalists to savage any journalism deemed unpatriotic. Nationalist zealots hounding “liberal media” do not realise that “what they are attacking is already dead,” says a veteran editor.

Meanwhile, commercial pressures drive high-minded outlets to compete with sensationalist “self-media” blogs and videos, to the despair of surviving reporters. That taints the whole industry and boosts the prestige of staid-but-authoritative arms of the state like Xinhua, a news agency, or China Central Television. Today reporters “are respected because they are the government, not because they are challenging the government”, sighs the veteran. The China of 2001 might as well be another country. ■

Xi Jinping places a bet on Russia (Mar 12th)

“I WANT IT to be less like a rally,” declares Emmanuel Macron in an electoral clip, as he strolls around the empty indoor arena west of Paris in an overcoat and scarf, scouting out the venue: “I want something more like a sporting event.” On April 2nd, a mere eight days before the first round of voting in France’s two-round presidential election, the sitting president will finally hold his first election rally. He might need to take his gloves off at last. He is still the firm favourite. But the race is tightening in the final stretch. And a narrow second-round victory could spell trouble for a second-term president later on.

The average gap between Mr Macron and his nearest rival, the nationalist-populist Marine Le Pen, has narrowed from 13 points on March 15th to seven points two weeks later, according to The Economist’s poll of polls. On March 29th our forecasting model still gave Mr Macron an 89% chance of re-election, and only a one-in-ten chance to Ms Le Pen. But two new polls suggest that, if the pair meet in the run-off as they did in 2017, his victory over her could be as narrow as 53% to 47%.

As Russia’s war against Ukraine drags on, the poll bump that Mr Macron enjoyed from being at the centre of diplomatic efforts to end it has begun to wear off. The French still seem to credit their president for trying, despite his lack of success. But they are now worried about the effects of the war on their wallets. Moreover, the initial damage suffered by three rival contenders—Ms Le Pen, the far-right Eric Zemmour and the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon—owing to their past sympathy for Vladimir Putin seems to have had a lasting impact only on Mr Zemmour. Indeed Mr Mélenchon, a wise-cracking anti- NATO firebrand who is against arming Ukraine, has crept up in the polls. With fully six candidates on the left, including a Communist and two Trotskyists, the sprightly 70-year-old is the tactical choice for leftist voters.

Furthermore, Mr Macron is now saying things that the French do not much care to hear. During the pandemic, he focused on spending “whatever it costs” to protect people and jobs. On March 17th he laid out his plans for a second term. Unlike his manifesto brochure in 2017, which was filled with smiling faces and exclamation marks, this year’s displays sombre images and refers to the “brutal return of the tragic in history”. Mr Macron promises, among other things, to raise the pension age from 62 years to 65; to oblige beneficiaries of basic benefits to enrol in training or work; and to pay teachers more only if they take on more tasks. Mr Mélenchon offers a more appealing alternative: “Retirement at 65 with Macron, 60 with me.” Charges that Mr Macron represents a cosy business elite have also resurfaced, after a report found the government spent €894m ($1bn) on private consulting firms in 2021. This is in line with other countries, but seen as an affront in statist France. Ms Le Pen, meanwhile, has campaigned deftly. On March 29th our model gave her an 84% chance of making it to the run-off. She has taken her promises to cut taxes on motor fuel and ease the cost of living to la France profonde, leaving ranting about immigration to Mr Zemmour. At a time when old fears about migrants and Islamism have given way to support for refugees fleeing Ukraine, his diatribes have jarred. At an outdoor rally in Paris on March 27th, before a crowd waving French flags, his supporters chanted “This is our home!”, an old far-right mantra. At one point, during a passage on the victims of terrorism, they broke into: “Macron, murderer.”

In short, despite having 12 candidates to pick from, voters on April 24th may, as last time, see a run-off between Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen. Some are already saying that, should he defeat her again, it would be a victory “by default”. Mr Macron can hardly be blamed for the mediocrity of his opponents, nor the poor campaigns of the mainstream left and right. Yet muttering about illegitimacy has already begun. ■

“T HIS IS NOT a fight of left against right,” Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s conservative populist president, told a rally in Brasília on March 27th. “It’s a fight between good and evil.” His opponents see the election on October 2nd, in which Mr Bolsonaro will seek a second term, in similarly apocalyptic terms. Many worry that Brazilian democracy would not survive another four years of Mr Bolsonaro, an avowed authoritarian who is contemptuous of the judiciary and the separation of powers. With the stakes so high, Brazil is on the threshold of a dirty and divisive campaign in which disinformation will be the norm and, some fear, violence a possibility.

Mr Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018 was a surprise. Long an obscure backbench congressman, he turned that contest into a referendum on the left-wing Workers’ Party ( PT ), which had governed Brazil between 2003 and 2016, and its leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was barred from running by a prison sentence for corruption. Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain, also won votes by appealing to traditional values, by espousing a harsh line on crime and by exploiting social media. Chance helped, too: he was stabbed by a deranged individual a month before the vote, which brought him sympathy and kept him quiet when he had much to lose by talking.

Mr Bolsonaro ended “the kleptocratic state” and is the “best president since the military government” of 1964-85, claims Frederico D’Avila, a soya farmer from his party in the state legislature of São Paulo. Mr D’Avila displays a poster in his office extolling Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s former dictator, and Margaret Thatcher, a deregulating British prime minister. He shrugs off the president’s mishandling of the pandemic, which involved denying both the seriousness of covid-19 and the value of vaccines.

This is a minority view. Mr Bolsonaro’s approval rating is just 24%. And this time around he is no longer a novelty. Corruption and social conservatism may carry less weight as election issues than in 2018. The president faces an uphill battle against Lula, whose sentence was annulled by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds last year. The latest polls give Lula around 45%. Though many Brazilians would prefer a third option, no other candidate has more than 8%.

The election will mainly be about the economy. Mr Bolsonaro’s economy minister, Paulo Guedes, promised privatisations, plus radical reform of taxes and spending. He has achieved little of that. Emergency payments to 68m Brazilians in 2020 helped the economy bounce back from the pandemic. But it has since stalled. Income per person has not increased under Mr Bolsonaro and unemployment stands at 11%, as it did before the pandemic.

Ahead of the election, Mr Guedes has abandoned fiscal prudence. The government has cut taxes and is giving a renewed dollop of aid this year to 18m poorer Brazilians. That is a factor in a modest recent rise in Mr Bolsonaro’s support. But inflation, running at 10.5%, is quickly eroding the value of the aid. “The economy will get worse between now and the election,” thinks Zeina Latif, a consultant.

Meanwhile Lula, with no rivals to his left, is moving to the centre. He is poised to name Geraldo Alckmin, a former governor of São Paulo from the centre-right, as his running mate. Investors, disillusioned by Mr Guedes’s failures, are giving Lula the benefit of the doubt, says Ms Latif, recognising his pragmatism.

But many analysts expect a closer result than the polls suggest. That is because Lula, skilful politician though he is, has many vulnerabilities as a candidate. He and his party are still associated with corruption in the public mind. Though many poorer Brazilians remember the economic growth and social progress of his presidency in 2003-10, others recall his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, driving the country into its deepest slump in a century.

Mr Bolsonaro could still win, in other words. But a bigger worry is how he would react to his probable defeat. Imitating Donald Trump, his role model, he has tried to undermine confidence in Brazil’s electronic voting system, despite its impeccable record. He has vowed not to leave quietly. He has many supporters in the police and army; his loosening of gun laws means there are now more firearms in the hands of far-right groups and gun clubs. Degraded though they have been by Mr Bolsonaro, Brazil’s democratic institutions have survived so far. Their biggest test is to come.

Juan Orlando Hernández, a former Honduran president, is arrested (Feb 26th)

T HE RALLY stretched half a kilometre along the Danube, past Budapest’s Technical University where in 1956 students launched a doomed rebellion against their communist overlords. It was March 15th, the day Hungary commemorates its revolution of 1848. On the stage Peter Marki-Zay, the opposition candidate for prime minister, was invoking history. In 1848, 1956 and 1989, when the communists were finally ousted, Hungarians had been “on the right side”, he said. Now they were embarrassed by their country, which had become the fief of one man: Viktor Orban.

In 12 years as prime minister Mr Orban had split the nation and enriched only his own supporters. He had turned Hungary towards Russia and autocracy, and away from Europe and the rule of law. Mr Marki-Zay promised support for the EU and NATO in Ukraine, inclusion for gay people and an economy based on merit rather than political connections. Hungarian, Ukrainian, EU and rainbow flags waved in the crowd.

Across the river Mr Orban was addressing a far bigger throng with a very different message. The annual government-sponsored “Peace March” had been turned into a rally for the ruling party, Fidesz. “It is not in our interests to become casualties in someone else’s war,” Mr Orban said. Ukraine’s refugees deserved help (something he did not say about migrants from Syria in 2014-15), but he would not let arms be transferred through Hungary or accept sanctions on Russian energy that hurt its economy. The opposition would drag Hungary into the war, in which it would be a mere pawn on the chessboard of America and Russia. He would stay out—and stop “gender madness” too. Here the flags were of Hungary or Fidesz; the few blue-and-yellow ones were not Ukrainian, but the banner of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians.

Hungary’s election on April 3rd is more than a routine vote in a small central-European country. Because Mr Orban is a hero to many right-wing populists in Europe and America, it is a crucial test for them. The war in Ukraine adds an extra dimension. The Hungarian leader has long-established ties to Vladimir Putin, and has emerged as the most reluctant member of the coalition against him. Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, singled him out in a speech on March 24th to the European Council, demanding that he and Hungary “decide which side you are on”.

That casts the election as part of a global struggle between liberal democracy and populist autocracy. Hungary is still a democracy, but in his three consecutive terms Mr Orban has undermined democratic norms. The media, the courts, the education system and other institutions are largely controlled by Fidesz or by friendly oligarchs. In 2014 Mr Orban spoke of turning Hungary into an “illiberal state”. It has since become the only EU country rated by Freedom House, a watchdog, as only “partly free” rather than “free”.

Mr Orban’s allies see themselves as patriotic Christian conservatives, fighting an alliance of globalists who want to erase national traditions and swamp Europe with migrants. Their bêtes noires are the European Commission and George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire and liberal philanthropist. Mr Orban’s critics think his main goals are actually financial. His relatives and friends in business have become hugely wealthy; much EU aid ends up going to them. To its opponents Orbanism looks like Putinism-light: single-party rule without the need for violence.

The popularity of Mr Orban and Fidesz is genuine and striking. In the past two elections they have drawn about half the vote, while a fragmented opposition split the rest. That was enough to give Fidesz a two-thirds majority in parliament, because it had twisted the electoral system to its own advantage (see Graphic Detail).

A rule change in 2012 shrank parliament and raised the share of single-candidate districts, which naturally favour the biggest party, from 176 of 386 seats to 106 of 199. The rest are determined by proportional representation. It also gerrymandered those districts. In 2020 the government made things even tougher, requiring parties to run candidates in at least 71 districts to get on the proportional ballot.

Last year, fear of Mr Orban’s growing control finally made the opposition co-operate. Two centrist parties, Democratic Coalition and Momentum Movement, a hard-right party, Jobbik, the centre-left Socialists and the progressive Green and Dialogue parties have fielded a single list under the rubric United for Hungary. They ran primaries last October for each single-candidate seat and nationally for the job of prime minister. Mr Marki-Zay, an independent conservative who is mayor of a small city, came out on top.

Such cross-party alliances have unseated populist leaders in other countries, including Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babis. Yet in Hungary Mr Marki-Zay’s chances are not good. Because of the mixed electoral system, The Economist calculates the opposition needs to win about 54% of the vote to get a majority in parliament. Polls show them trailing Fidesz by about 50% to 44%.

Message control

One reason is Mr Orban’s domination of the media. He has turned the country’s state-backed outlets into propaganda megaphones. Nearly all of the country’s big private news sources have been bought by oligarchs friendly to the government. Most were donated in 2018 to a foundation headed by an ally of Fidesz.

Of the plucky outfits that remained, several have since been throttled. Klub radio, a liberal station in Budapest, had its broadcast licence denied in 2020. Index.hu was the country’s most-visited news website until a new owner with links to Mr Orban took over in 2021 and fired its editor-in-chief. “I knew Index would eventually be captured, the only question was when,” says Veronika Munk, who used to be deputy editor. The staff quit and founded a new outlet called Telex, but it has less than half the audience. Other independent websites are read mostly inside the liberal bubble.

Hence the opposition is struggling to be heard. The two main TV news channels, one public and one owned by a government ally, give opposition candidates less than a quarter the speaking time of those from Fidesz, according to Mertek, a media watchdog. Only RTL Klub, a popular foreign-owned channel, presents even-handed news coverage. For months before the election, roadsides were lined with placards of Mr Orban and his slogan “Forward, not back”. These were put up not by Fidesz but by the government. Other posters, some paid for by a murky foundation funded by state-owned companies, portrayed Mr Marki-Zay as the “mini-me” of Ferenc Gyurcsany, an unpopular former prime minister, or depicted the opposition candidates as a “Gyurcsany Show”. (The Democratic Coalition’s entry in the primary was Klara Dobrev, Mr Gyurcsany’s wife.) That leaves social media and “knocking on doors”, says Anna Donath, an opposition MEP . Yet during the primary Fidesz’s social-media spending outweighed the combined budgets of all opposition candidates. Campaign spending limits kicked in on February 12th, and since then the two sides have spent roughly the same amount on advertising. But lots of Facebook ads have been bought by a sketchy new party created in December by the wealthy Hungarian owner of LiveJasmin, a pornography website. The opposition thinks it is a decoy intended to divide the anti-Fidesz vote.

Fidesz makes use of every conceivable government resource for the campaign. In January people who had registered for vaccinations against covid-19 began receiving pro-government emails. A national referendum has been scheduled on the same day as the election. It asks questions like “Do you support the unrestricted exposure of underage children to sexually explicit media content that may affect their development?”—falsely insinuating that the opposition does. In poor rural areas, officials are told that if their municipality does not vote for Fidesz there will be no government jobs. After Budapest had the temerity to elect Gergely Karacsony of the Dialogue party as mayor in 2019, the national government slashed a local tax on businesses, depriving the city of about 20% of its budget, and vetoed a loan from the European Investment Bank to upgrade its trams. Mr Orban wants “to squeeze the city, and then portray the mayor as incompetent,” says David Koranyi, an adviser to Mr Karacsony. The voting rules are biased, too. Mr Orban gave ethnic Hungarians in neighbouring countries the right to vote, along with pensions and other benefits; so most vote for Fidesz. They can vote by post, whereas émigrés (who tend to vote for the opposition) must travel to consulates. There are some concerns about secret balloting and counting votes. But a civil-society group has trained more than 20,000 vote-watchers, enough for the opposition to send two to every precinct in the country. Some tricks are just old-fashioned politics. The government has raised the minimum wage by 20% and paid an unexpected 13th month of pension benefits. Last year Mr Orban eliminated income tax for under-25s, and this year he gave a rebate to every family with children up to the amount paid by an average worker. Zoltan Kovacs, the government’s spokesman, says it wants to reward families and thus raise the birth rate. But like much Hungarian tax policy, the freebies reward the middle class more than the poor, notes Daniel Prinz of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The handouts will also accelerate inflation, which is projected to hit 9% this year, says Peter Virovacz of ING Bank. The government has capped the prices of basic foods and fuel, leading to shortages at petrol stations. Economic growth is strong, though the war in Ukraine has cut forecasts for this year to perhaps 4.5%. Unemployment is a scant 3.8%. The next government, though, will probably need to make unpleasant cuts.

The economy is Mr Orban’s justification for resisting energy sanctions on Russia. In February he travelled to Moscow and extended a long-term gas contract with Gazprom. The terms are secret, but Mr Orban says they are very beneficial. Responding to Mr Zelensky’s criticism, he claimed that without Russian gas and oil Hungary’s economy would “grind to a halt”. (The country’s dependency on Russian energy is high, but not unusually so for central Europe.) In 2014 Mr Orban struck a deal with Rosatom to upgrade Hungary’s nuclear power plant that entails billions of dollars in Russian loans.

For some of its troubles the opposition has itself to blame. It has not found a central theme to hammer away at. The party leaders have campaigned like “six dwarves”, says Gabor Toka, a political scientist. Mr Marki-Zay is more right-wing than most of his alliance, and is prone to odd lines of attack, such as unconvincingly charging the government with sending arms to Ukraine. ( NATO planes based in Hungary are carrying out deliveries, but only between other countries.)

That partly reflects the coalition’s breadth. Dialogue is an urban party that strongly supports gay rights. Jobbik is a rural nationalist party that used to engage in anti-Roma racism. The lack of conflict between such parties during the campaign is striking. Opposition voters, too, seem willing to set aside ideology. “I am economically more free-market, but that doesn’t matter now. The point is to get democracy back,” said Ben Tordai, a student at the rally on March 15th.

For all Mr Orban’s rhetoric about energy prices, his policy on Ukraine reflects a philosophical difference from other Europeans. “Hungary is a country in the buffer zone” between Russia and the West, says Zoltan Kiszelly of the Szazadveg Foundation, a pro-government think-tank. “We fought four wars with Russia and lost all of them. We don’t want to try for a fifth. The Poles had a much worse history, but they want to try one more time.”

This position is starting to hurt Hungary. Mr Orban was once seen as a leader of a group of populist governments across central Europe. Poland is a close ally: its Law and Justice party has imitated Mr Orban by trying to take over its courts and media. The EU is imposing penalties on both for eroding the rule of law. They rely on each other’s vetoes to quash further sanctions. But Law and Justice is vociferously anti-Putin. On March 26th Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, said Mr Orban’s policy would “cost Hungarians a lot”. Poland and the Czech Republic later cancelled a visit by their defence ministers to Budapest.

Yet Hungary’s opposition is having trouble convincing voters this matters, or getting them angry about the corruption at the heart of Mr Orban’s government. As in Mr Putin’s regime, the list of rich Hungarians is filled with Mr Orban’s friends. A former schoolmate is now the richest man in the country. A huge mansion is under construction outside Budapest for Mr Orban’s father. EU funds and state business flow to Fidesz’s backers, who use the money in part to keep the party in power.

R AILWAY DELAYS are the bane of travellers the world over. Occasionally, though, they may be a lifesaver. In October your correspondent boarded a train from Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, to the northern city of Kaduna. A fault held up its departure for 30 minutes. This was just long enough that a train coming in the opposite direction was the first to trigger explosives placed on the track. Luckily, in that attack, the train limped on and nobody was hurt.

Passengers travelling on the same line on March 28th were less fortunate. First a bomb derailed their train. Then gunmen set upon the estimated 400 passengers and guards, killing eight, injuring 25 and kidnapping an unknown number. The attack was the most brazen yet by the kidnapping gangs locally known as bandits that terrorise the region. This lawlessness, in addition to a long-running insurgency in the north-east by jihadists affiliated with Islamic State and regular clashes between farmers and herders, are rendering large parts of Africa’s most populous country ungovernable.

The 190km road between Abuja and Kaduna has long been a favourite hunting ground for the gangs, which regularly ambush travellers and herd them into forest hideouts where they hold them for ransom. In recent years thousands have been abducted, with relatives paying billions of naira (there are 415 naira to $1) for their return. Many hoped that trains, which started running in 2016, would be a safer alternative. But as well-heeled Nigerians switched from road to rail, so the gangs have begun targeting trains.

“We warned that lives will be lost,” fumed Rotimi Amaechi, the transport minister, after the attack, accusing his colleagues of blocking funds for cameras and sensors that might have averted it. “Now lives are lost.”

Two days before the train outrage, gunmen attacked Kaduna airport, killing an employee and further isolating the city. Airlines have suspended flights. Such insecurity is prompting many educated Nigerians to flee abroad. Among them would have been Chinelo Nwando, a young dentist who had planned to emigrate to Canada this month. “I’m in the train, I’ve been shot,” she tweeted, hours before her death was confirmed. “Please pray for me.”

O N MARCH 23rd thousands of Afghan girls headed to school for the first time in eight months, kitted out in bulging rucksacks, neatly pressed headscarves and covid-19 face masks. Within hours, they were at home in tears—and not because of playground fights or test results. In a last-minute pivot, the Taliban had backtracked on a decision to reopen secondary schools for girls and sent them home.

The new Taliban are beginning to look a lot like the old Taliban who ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when women who failed to cover every inch of flesh in public were beaten and adulterers were stoned to death. But Afghan women have changed after two decades of American-backed government. Many have university degrees. Before the Taliban seized power last year, almost 30% of civil servants were women. On the streets of Kabul book-waving girls have been chanting: “open the schools”.

When American forces withdrew from Afghanistan, the big question was how the Taliban would make the transition from a fundamentalist insurgency to running a country. Girls’ education became the litmus test. In August there was some hope they wanted to show a gentler face. Officials were interviewed by female presenters on television. At the Taliban’s first press conference after seizing power, a spokesman reassured the world that women would be “very active” in Afghan society.

That balancing act seems over. The abrupt U -turn on education, which affects over 1m school-age girls, is one of a string of recent repressive edicts. New rules ban women from travelling long distances without a male chaperone. That can mean they need a brother or a husband to enter a government building or a taxi. A surgeon in Kabul says Taliban officials often visit, warning him not to see female patients who turn up alone. “This is a sad moment for all of us,” he adds.

Years of progress are imperilled. Under the previous democratic government, backed by American troops and money, there was corruption and bigotry. But the female literacy rate more than doubled between 2000 and 2018 to 30%. Thousands of women got jobs as doctors, lawyers or cops. Some became entrepreneurs. Maternal mortality declined sharply and female life expectancy rose by ten years.

Now a generation of girls is falling behind. Some risk their lives to attend underground schools. Sexist violence was a problem even before the Taliban takeover, with 87% of women and girls saying they had suffered abuse. Many teenagers will become mothers before schools reopen.

Life is no better for older women who managed to get an education before last year’s takeover. The Taliban have purged women from most workplaces. In a UN survey conducted in October, every single person interviewed knew a woman who had lost her job in the previous month. Qamarulbanat Quraishy has been unemployed since August and is frantically searching for work. But employers are turning away female candidates. Ms Quraishy’s savings have run dry and her debts are mounting. “I have no hope,” says the 24-year-old.

Bigotry affects the economy too. In terms of the increase in hourly earnings from an extra year of schooling, the return on educating girls in Afghanistan was more than double that of educating boys. The children of educated mothers have long been better educated, healthier and likely to earn more later in life. The UN reckons that keeping women out of work costs Afghanistan up to $1bn, or 5% of GDP .

In the midst of an economic crisis, the country can ill afford the loss. When the Taliban took over, sanctions stemmed the flow of money. Foreign aid, which made up three-quarters of the state budget, dried up. Ordinary Afghans cannot withdraw savings from local banks. Many have been unpaid for months. Almost the entire population could be desperately poor by the middle of the year.

The chaotic way in which decisions have been announced points to a split between hardliners and pragmatists within the Taliban. Secondary schools received orders not to admit girls only after they had arrived on campus last week. Taliban leaders have been ambiguous about this policy. In some provinces, such as Kunduz and Balkh in the north of the country, girls were allowed to return to school not long after the Taliban takeover. A handful of high-ranking officials continue to educate their daughters overseas.

As Ashley Jackson at the Overseas Development Institute, a think-tank in London, puts it, “competing visions” within the Taliban are playing out in public. The only hope is that decisions that shut women out of public life could be reversed as quickly as they were announced. ■

I N RESPONSE TO Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West launched an economic war. America banned the sale of a wide range of goods to Russia; big companies pulled out by the dozen; and a number of countries together froze 60% of the central bank’s international reserves. The idea was to send Russia’s economy into free fall, punishing President Vladimir Putin for his aggression. In the week after the invasion the rouble fell by more than a third against the dollar, and the share prices of many Russian companies collapsed.

Is the West’s strategy still going to plan? The chaos in Russian markets seems to have subsided. Since its low in early March the rouble has jumped, and is now approaching its pre-war level. The main benchmark of Russian stocks plunged by a third, but has since stabilised. The government and most firms are keeping up with their payments on foreign-currency bonds. A run on banks that saw nearly 3trn roubles ($31bn) withdrawn came to an end, with Russians returning much of the cash to their accounts.

A battery of policies has helped stabilise the markets. Some are orthodox. The central bank has raised interest rates from 9.5% to 20%, encouraging people to hold interest-bearing Russian assets. Other policies are less conventional. The government has decreed that exporters must convert 80% of their foreign-exchange proceeds into roubles. Trading on the Moscow stock exchange has become, to use the central bank’s euphemism, “negotiated”. Short-selling is banned, and non-residents cannot offload stocks until April 1st.

The real economy, though, is in some ways the mirror image of the financial one: healthier than it seems at first glance. A weekly measure of consumer prices shows that they have risen by more than 5% since the beginning of March alone. Many foreign firms have pulled out, cutting the supply of goods, while a weaker currency and sanctions have made imports more expensive. But not everything is surging in price. Vodka, largely produced domestically, costs only a bit more than it did before the war. Petrol costs about the same. And though it is early days, there is little evidence yet of a big hit to economic activity. According to an estimate based on internet-search data and produced by the OECD , a rich-country think-tank, Russia’s GDP in the week to March 26th was about 5% higher than the year before. Other “real-time” data gathered by The Economist, such as electricity consumption and railway loadings of goods, are holding up. A spending tracker produced by Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender, is slightly up year on year. Part of this reflects people stockpiling goods before prices rise: spending on home appliances is especially strong. But spending on services has fallen only a bit, and remains far healthier than it was during much of the pandemic. Russia seems sure to enter a recession this year. But whether it ends up faring as badly as most economists predict—the wonks are pencilling in a GDP decline of 10-15%—depends on three factors. The first is whether ordinary Russians start worrying about the economy as the war drags on, and reduce spending—as happened in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea. The second is whether production eventually grinds to a halt as sanctions block firms’ access to imports from the West. Russia’s aviation sector looks particularly vulnerable, as does the car industry. Yet many big businesses that started during Soviet times are used to operating without imports. If any economy could come close to coping with being cut off from the world, it would be Russia’s. The third and most important factor relates to Russia’s fossil-fuel exports. Despite the many sanctions imposed on it, Russia is still selling about $10bn-worth of oil a month to foreign buyers, equivalent to a quarter of its pre-war exports; revenues from the sale of natural gas and other petroleum products are still flowing in, too. This provides a valuable source of foreign currency with which it can buy some consumer goods and parts from neutral or friendly countries. Unless that changes, the Russian economy may continue to defy the worst predictions. ■

A LEXIS MARAMBIO grew up in a tiny flat in La Pintana, a poor neighbourhood of Santiago, Chile’s capital. For most of his life he shared a room with his brother; his sister slept in her parents’ bed until she was 13. Leak stains still blotch the walls. Bars on the windows keep out thieves and most sunshine. “This is the raw side of Chile,” he says.

But Mr Marambio, who is now 30, defied the odds. He was the first in his family to go to university. His parents worked day and night to pay for some of his expenses, and he owes around $20,000 in student loans. Education was his ladder out of poverty. After working for the local mayor and then for a polling firm, he moved to a nicer part of town and bought his parents a house. On a visit to La Pintana a former neighbour greets him: “My boy, you’ve come back to visit the poor!”

His story reflects the success of Chile’s education system. Since the country returned to democracy in 1990, the number of students enrolled in post-secondary institutions has quintupled (see chart). By the mid 2000s seven in ten newly enrolled students were from the first generation of their families to attend university. Unsurprisingly, this expansion has cost money. Fully 59% of spending on tertiary education comes from households, compared with an average of 30% across the OECD , a club mostly of rich countries. Tuition fees in Chile are the highest in the OECD relative to purchasing power after Britain and the United States (but, as in both countries, financial support is hefty). Yet discontent with education has led to some of the biggest protests in Chile’s history. In 2006 children demonstrated against perceived inequality in schooling; in 2011 university students did the same. Large, violent protests in 2019 were partly about college fees. It was as a student leader that Gabriel Boric, the newly elected 36-year-old president, rose to fame, along with many in his cabinet. “The fight for public, free and good-quality education was a fight for a different model of society,” he told a crowd in November. As president, he says he wants to reform education. But in its zeal for change, his government could make Chile’s problems worse. Chile’s school system has long been unusual. Under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990, the country widened the use of standardised tests and set up a voucher scheme which provided public funds to privately run schools based on the number of children that enrolled. The idea was to increase competition and choice. Most parents chose voucher schools. Between 1981 and 2020 the share of children in voucher schools shot up from 15% to 54%. The share in government-run schools fell from 78% to 33%; the share in expensive private schools that did not take vouchers remained around 10%. Some analysts credit the system for improving results. Chile scores the highest in Latin America on a test conducted by the OECD on the science, maths and reading skills of 15-year-olds around the world. Yet others fear that the voucher schools increased the gulf between rich and poor. Until 2016, when Michelle Bachelet, a former left-wing president, introduced a series of reforms, these schools often selected students using their own criteria, such as primary-school grades or whether parents were married in the Catholic church. They could also charge top-up fees.

A study from 2016 by Gregory Elacqua and Humberto Santos, two academics in Chile, compared the degree to which rich and poor kids were educated separately under the voucher system in Santiago with what would have occurred if students had attended the school nearest their homes. They concluded that schools were more segregated than neighbourhoods. This contradicts the claim that voucher schools simply reflect the societies they serve.

Richer Chileans also do better at university. In order to get into one, students must take an admissions test similar to the SAT in the United States. More than half of those who achieve top scores come from the 10% who go to elite (ie, non-voucher) private schools. Students who do not score well largely end up in less prestigious technical institutes. This means that many poorer students finish higher education with big debts and degrees that employers do not value much. Fully 54% of students who have taken out the main student loan have defaulted or are in arrears, compared with 32% of student debtors in America.

Successive presidents have tinkered with the system. Sebastián Piñera, the centre-right president during the protests in 2011, lowered the interest rate on the main student loan from 6% to 2%. In 2016 Ms Bachelet made university free for the poorest 60% of students. This bung to students was popular, even if the reform meant that there was probably less public money than there might have been for primary and secondary education. Between 2012 and 2018 public spending on tertiary education increased more in Chile than in any other OECD country, while public spending on non-tertiary education increased only somewhat faster than the OECD average.

Mr Boric has promised to improve state-run primary and secondary schools, but has so far provided few details. He has pledged to continue some of Ms Bachelet’s reforms, alongside increasing funding for public nurseries. However, he also wants to remove “market dynamics” in education, meaning competition. He wants to eliminate some standardised tests and replace an “extensive and content-filled curriculum” with one that emphasises creativity, gender, multiculturalism and the environment. Some teacher evaluations could be scrapped.

Fabián Guajardo of Nodo XXI , a leftist think-tank, says this will reduce pressure on teachers and students, something the teachers’ unions have long favoured. Cristián Cox Donoso of Diego Portales University in Santiago likens it to “tearing down a building that has taken two decades to build”. Policymakers need “to know every year if reading, maths, science, history and social-science targets are being achieved or not, to help them to respond better,” he says, but “the romantic left...wants to get rid of this.” The new education minister used to be a teacher.

Mr Boric also plans to forgive all student debt and extend the free public college scheme. His team puts the cost of forgiving student debt at $4.7bn. Other estimates are higher, if defaulted debts that are already being paid off by the state are included. In December Mr Boric estimated that the total cost of the policy would be $12bn, or 3.4% of GDP . The details of the plan are still being hashed out, but it is likely to be implemented over 20 years.

Mario Marcel, the new finance minister, appears to understand that forgiving student debt is a sop to the middle class. “What one wouldn’t want is for student debt forgiveness to be paid for by workers or slum-dwellers,” he says. He believes the policy should be funded by raising taxes. He aims to raise the total tax take from 21% of GDP to 26% in four years.

It will be hard for Mr Boric to back down from these promises. His supporters want their student loans written off, and will be furious if they are not. As the new president knows all too well, young, educated Chileans are not afraid to make their discontent heard on the streets. ■

T HE STORY of Tsewang Norbu is shrouded in mystery. The Tibetan pop star set himself on fire in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, on February 25th. Fans have spent the past month mourning his death. But on March 28th the Chinese foreign ministry suggested Mr Norbu might still be alive. In response to questions about him, the ministry said a man in Tibet had “attempted suicide by self-immolation”—and that he had been taken for treatment immediately. The man had long been “troubled by mental illness” and “had attempted suicide multiple times”, claimed the authorities. Activists are unconvinced.

Fans were shocked by Mr Norbu’s action. Over the past decade, scores of Tibetans have burnt themselves to death in protest at Chinese rule. But Mr Norbu did not appear to be a dissident. The 25-year-old had competed on a popular reality show, “Sing! China”, only months earlier. The judges called him luobo (radish), a Mandarin homophone for Norbu. In videos he would rap about love. Sometimes he would play piano or guitar as he sang tunes by Camila Cabello and Frankie Valli. With his pierced ears and groomed eyebrows, he could have been a Gen Z-er from anywhere.

But Mr Norbu was from Tibet. That meant he lived in two worlds. There was the Tibet promoted by the Chinese authorities: a glossy, exotic “minority region”, where grateful nomads and monks were being lifted out of poverty. Then there was the Tibet experienced by locals, who have watched the authorities tear down Buddhist statues, close Tibetan-language schools and arrest anyone who resisted the state’s campaign of sinicisation. Those who only saw the first world could not comprehend why one of its stars would set himself on fire. Those who knew the second immediately understood.

When Mr Norbu spoke of Tibet he was careful. He would mention his father, a composer in a state-run song-and-dance troupe whose songs honoured Tibetan culture. Mr Norbu did not speak of the deadly crackdown after protests in Nagchu, where he grew up, in 2013. He certainly did not mention his uncle, Lodoe Gyatso, who served a prison term for murder (his supporters say it was self-defence) and is now in jail for protesting against Chinese rule.

Mr Norbu may not have been outwardly political, but he clearly took pride in Tibet. He avoided the “red songs” performed by his mother, a singer in a troupe run by the Chinese army. Those ditties featured lyrics thanking the “life-saving” Communist Party. Instead Mr Norbu wrote songs like “Tsampa”, an ode to the Tibetan staple food made of roasted barley flour. A video for the song features the singer dancing around Lhasa. At one point he bows, placing a hand on his heart, as two monks pass.

These were signs of Mr Norbu’s true feelings—his reverence for Tibetan identity—say activists. They point to his rendition of “Return to the Homeland” on “Sing! China”. He wore a traditional chupa robe and delivered the first lines in a Tibetan folk-style vibrato: “There is a land known as the homeland, there is a happiness known as the home.” He even changed the lyrics, referring to Tibet instead of Nagchu in the lilting last verse. Secretly, he was singing for the nation, claim Tibetans.

Whereas his songs contained subtle clues about his politics, his self-immolation made them clear. Mr Norbu chose the most sensitive location in Lhasa: the Potala Palace, the traditional residence of the Dalai Lama. And he picked a sensitive time, days before the meeting of China’s parliament in Beijing. To pull off such an act shows not desperation, but the “utmost determination”, says Matthew Akester, a Tibet researcher based in India.

In some ways Mr Norbu seemed like the Chinese government’s ideal minority youth: urban, educated and fluent in Mandarin. On China’s National Day last year, he posted a video of himself bringing his fingers together. “I make a heart for the motherland,” read the accompanying hashtag. But Tibetans saw through that, says Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan writer and activist (who lives under surveillance). “Chinese people only saw the image. They only saw the surface,” says Ms Woeser. “We know Tsewang’s real struggles.” ■

C HINESE LEADERS wanted the mood to be “business as usual”. But the summit between China and the European Union on April 1st will be anything but normal. That is because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and China’s cold-blooded response to it, have exposed the limitations of Europe’s old trade-first China policies.

EU leaders approached the summit, which is being held by video-link, with low expectations. They hoped at least to send a message to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that the Ukraine war is a defining moment for relations, and for China’s image if it refuses to use its influence to end the killing.

In a sense Europe’s representatives at the summit, Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, will be overshadowed by two figures who will not be there: Germany’s former chancellor, Angela Merkel, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. No leader is more closely associated with Europe’s old China policy than Mrs Merkel. In 16 years as chancellor, she promoted an accommodating approach that treated China as an invaluable source of economic opportunity and a potential partner on such issues as climate change, albeit one prone to disappointing lapses on human rights.

Mr Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th was a disaster for advocates of this approach. For Russia’s use of force has enjoyed Mr Xi’s tacit support. Though China claims to be impartial, its true stance is anything but neutral. China blames the war on America, for supposedly trampling on Russia’s legitimate security interests by expanding the NATO alliance to take in former Soviet satellite states. Europeans know that NATO ’s expansion was actually driven by demand from former communist-bloc countries that feared Russian aggression (for good reason). EU governments are horrified by China’s refusal to urge Russia to stop the war. They see this foot-dragging as unworthy of a self-proclaimed global power, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

It took Chinese diplomats a while to realise that European leaders would not agree to a conventional, trade-focused, summit. China’s first offer was an online meeting with its prime minister, Li Keqiang, a technocrat with an essentially economic portfolio. China’s preferred agenda involved the signing of memorandums, and talks about reviving the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment ( CAI ), a trade pact heavily backed by Mrs Merkel. That deal has been frozen since China imposed sweeping sanctions on members of the European Parliament and European diplomats in 2021. It was a lopsided retaliation against narrow EU sanctions on three Chinese officials and one ex-official accused of rights abuses in the north-western region of Xinjiang. Several governments have told China that the CAI cannot return to life until the sanctions are lifted and concerns about forced labour in Xinjiang and other abuses are tackled.

An early idea involved preceding the summit with a long-delayed high-level dialogue on human rights. China’s price for resuming those dialogues was high, diplomats say. The EU and members must stop supporting multinational, co-ordinated statements about Chinese rights abuses in such global forums as the UN Human Rights Council, China demanded. That was rejected. Instead Mr Michel and Ms von der Leyen were due to raise human rights at the summit, touching on such thorny topics as China’s iron-fisted rule over Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. The pair were also expected to raise Chinese threats towards Taiwan, the democratic island that China claims as its own.

China’s hope to mark the summit with a flurry of document signings were also dashed. That would involve progress on various customs and trade rules. And that cannot happen as long as an EU member state, Lithuania, is being subjected to a Chinese trade boycott as punishment for forging quasi-official ties with Taiwan, other governments agree. Indeed, Mr Michel and Ms von der Leyen were expected to express the EU ’s horror over Chinese fondness for economic coercion.

But first and foremost, the summit was seen as a chance to deliver messages about Ukraine. That involved seeking and securing a video call with Mr Xi, the ultimate decision-maker in matters of foreign policy. Pre-summit negotiations were tense. Europeans explained that Mr Xi would hear a warning: that China will face a serious cost if it helps Mr Putin circumvent Western sanctions on Russia, or provides military aid. Chinese officials pre-emptively instructed the Europeans not to threaten their leader.

Divisive predictions

Europe is not used to talking war and peace with China. “Our relations are based on trade and the economy, which makes us very opportunistic,” says a European diplomat in Beijing. Arguably, China is doing Europe a favour by explaining how it expects the West to be a loser from the conflict in Ukraine. Chinese officials boast to ambassadors in Beijing that they see the EU dividing between old and newer members. Those Chinese also predict that transatlantic unity between Europe and America will crumble and that sanctions will fail to break Russia’s will, not least as European voters protest against high energy prices and flows of refugees from Ukraine.

Chinese glee about Western disunity is useful: proving it wrong is a good starting point for an EU strategy towards China. As a second diplomat puts it: “China is watching our Russia policy closely: how much pain we are willing to suffer. Europe is demonstrating that it is united and willing to pay a price.” The stakes are high, he adds. Deterring a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan requires demonstrating that the West is capable of unity and resolve.

Other voices urge calm. China needs Europe as a market, and as a source of technology and investments, they note, especially when China’s ties with America are in dire shape. Some of Europe’s largest companies have lucrative China operations which they are not about to abandon. According to diplomats, there is no sign of China circumventing sanctions on Russia. But Mr Putin is trying to redraw Europe’s borders by force, and Mr Xi will not condemn him. That is a direct challenge to the EU’ s founding principles. It cannot be business as usual. Mr Putin has shown Europe that it needs a new China policy. ■

I N THE WAKE of an invasion that drew international condemnation, Russian officials panicked that their dollar-denominated assets within America’s reach were at risk of abrupt confiscation, sending them scrambling for alternatives. The invasion in question did not take place in 2022, or even 2014, but in 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary. The event is often regarded as one of the factors that helped kick-start the eurodollar market—a network of dollar-denominated deposits held outside America and usually beyond the direct reach of its banking regulators.

The irony is that the desire to keep dollars outside America only reinforced the greenback’s heft. As of September, banks based outside the country reported around $17trn in dollar liabilities, twice as much as the equivalent for all the other currencies in the world combined. Although eurodollar deposits are beyond Uncle Sam’s direct control, America can still block a target’s access to the dollar system by making transacting with them illegal, as its latest measures against Russia have done.

This fresh outbreak of financial conflict has raised the question of whether the dollar’s dominance has been tarnished, and whether a multipolar currency system will rise instead, with the Chinese yuan playing a bigger role. To understand what the future might look like, it is worth considering how the dollar’s role has evolved over the past two decades. Its supremacy reflects more than the fact that America’s economy is large and its government powerful. The liquidity, flexibility and the reliability of the system have helped, too, and are likely to help sustain its global role. In the few areas where the dollar has lost ground, the characteristics that made it king are still being sought out by holders and users—and do not favour the yuan.

Eurodollar deposits illustrate the greenback’s role as a global store of value. But that is not the only thing that makes the dollar a truly international currency. Its role as a unit of account, in the invoicing of the majority of global trade, may be its most overwhelming area of dominance. According to research published by the IMF in 2020, over half of non-American and non- EU exports are denominated in dollars. In Asian emerging markets and Latin America the share rises to roughly 75% and almost 100%, respectively. Barring a modest increase in euro invoicing by some European countries that are not part of the currency union, these figures have changed little in the past two decades.

Another pillar of the dollar’s dominance is its role in cross-border payments, as a medium of exchange. A lack of natural liquidity for smaller currency pairs means that it often acts as a vehicle currency. A Uruguayan importer might pay a Bangladeshi exporter by changing her peso into dollars, and changing those dollars into taka, rather than converting the currencies directly.

So far there has been little shift away from the greenback: in February only one transaction in every five registered by the SWIFT messaging system did not have a dollar leg, a figure that has barely changed over the past half-decade. But a drift away is not impossible. Smaller currency pairs could become more liquid, reducing the need for an intermediary. Eswar Prasad of Cornell University argues convincingly that alternative payment networks, like China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, might undermine the greenback’s role. He also suggests that greater use of digital currencies will eventually reduce the need for the dollar. Those developed by central banks in particular could facilitate a direct link between national payment systems.

Perhaps the best example in global finance of an area in which the dollar is genuinely and measurably losing ground is central banks’ foreign-exchange reserves. Research published in March by Barry Eichengreen, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how the dollar’s presence in central-bank reserves has declined. Its share slipped from 71% of global reserves in 1999 to 59% in 2021. The phenomenon is widespread across a variety of central banks, and cannot be explained away by movements in exchange rates.

The findings reveal something compelling about the dollar’s new competitors. The greenback’s lost share has largely translated into a bigger share for what Mr Eichengreen calls “non-traditional” reserve currencies. The yuan makes up only a quarter of this group’s share in global reserves. The Australian and Canadian dollars, by comparison, account for 43% of it. And the currencies of Denmark, Norway, South Korea and Sweden make up another 23%. The things that unite those disparate smaller currencies are clear: all are floating and issued by countries with relatively or completely open capital accounts and governed by reliable political systems. The yuan, by contrast, ticks none of those boxes. “Every reserve currency in history has been a leading democracy with checks and balances,” says Mr Eichengreen.

Battle royal

Though the discussion of whether the dollar might be supplanted by the yuan captures the zeitgeist of great-power competition, the reality is more prosaic. Capital markets in countries with predictable legal systems and convertible currencies have deepened, and many offer better risk-adjusted returns than Treasuries. That has allowed reserve managers to diversify without compromising on the tenets that make reserve currencies dependable.

Mr Eichengreen’s research also speaks to a plain truth with a broader application: pure economic heft is not nearly enough to build an international currency system. Even where the dollar’s dominance looks most like it is being chipped away, the appetite for the yuan to take even a modest share of its place looks limited. Whether the greenback retains its paramount role in the international monetary system or not, the holders and users of global currencies will continue to prize liquidity, flexibility and reliability. Not every currency can provide them. ■

How oil shocks have become less shocking (Mar 12th)

“T HE LAW IS a business,” says Juan, a 34-year-old who sells legal documents, including copies of the constitution, on a busy street opposite Guatemala’s highest court. “The laws I sell don’t apply; rather those with money get their way.” It is a common view in a country in which gun-toting men sometimes guard judicial offices, ostensibly to protect their inhabitants.

Corruption and impunity damage Central America in many ways, from the drain of public funds into private pockets to a dearth of investment owing to unreliable justice systems. In the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, some $13bn each year is stolen through corruption, estimates the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank in New York. That does not include tax evasion or forgone investment.

In February El Faro, an investigative outlet based in El Salvador, published allegations that Alejandro Giammattei, Guatemala’s president, received illicit funds during his presidential campaign in 2019. (He denies wrongdoing.) On February 15th Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras, was arrested on suspicion of aiding drug gangs. He will be extradited to the United States. Last year Mr Hernández’s brother was sentenced to life imprisonment in New York for drug-trafficking.

It is highly unlikely that either Mr Giammattei or Mr Hernández will be charged in his home country. In 2019 Mr Giammattei’s predecessor got rid of a UN -backed body which, for over a decade, had helped the attorney-general to investigate politicians and businessmen suspected of corruption, including two former presidents. Mr Hernández and Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, have scrapped similar bodies in the past few years. (Xiomara Castro, the president of Honduras, wants the UN to set up an anti-corruption unit.)

Politicians and criminals constantly seek ways to influence the courts. Last year Mr Bukele forced all judges over the age of 60 or with more than 30 years of service to retire, rendering a third of posts vacant overnight. This allows him to stuff the judiciary with loyalists. Over the eight years that Mr Hernández was in power Honduras’s legal system was infiltrated by drug money, claims Lester Ramírez of the Association for a More Just Society, an NGO . He has documented cases of criminals paying off paralegals and magistrates’ drivers.

If money does not work then criminals or corrupt officials often resort to intimidation, instead. In Guatemala many lawyers, facing threats of prison or death, are fleeing north. Some 15 legal officials have been forced out of the country over the past year, including Juan Francisco Sandoval, who headed the office of special prosecutor against impunity, and Erika Aifán, a judge who had presided over cases involving bigwigs. She fled to the United States and resigned on March 21st after receiving death threats and lawsuits. The attorney-general, a friend of the president, tried to strip her of the immunity from prosecution she enjoyed as a judge. Speaking in her cramped office last year, she described how, “gradually, the barriers of protection around us are being dismantled.” ■

W HEN VLADIMIR PUTIN ordered Russian troops into Ukraine he was not alone in thinking victory would be swift. Many Western analysts also expected Kyiv, the capital, to fall within 72 hours. Ukrainian valour and ingenuity confounded those assumptions. As the war enters its sixth week, the side that is contemplating victory is not Russia but Ukraine—and it would be a victory that redraws the map of European security.

Speaking to The Economist in Kyiv on March 25th, President Volodymyr Zelensky explained how people power is the secret to Ukraine’s resistance and why the war is shifting in his nation’s favour. “We believe in victory,” he declared. “This is our home, our land, our independence. It’s just a question of time.”

The battlefield is starting to tell the same story as the president. After several weeks in which the Russian assault stalled, Ukrainian forces have begun to counter-attack. On March 29th Russia said that it will “fundamentally cut back” the northern campaign. Its retreat may well be only tactical, but Russia has in effect conceded that, for the moment, it cannot take Kyiv.

Yet a lot of Ukraine remains in Russian hands, including the strip of land on the southern coast that the Russians now claim was their focus all along. A large chunk of the Ukrainian army, in the Donbas region, is vulnerable to encirclement. Nobody should underestimate Russian firepower. Even if its forces are depleted and demoralised they can dig in. Victory for Ukraine means keeping its Donbas brigades intact and using them to deny Russia a secure hold on occupied territory.

For that, Mr Zelensky told us, the West must impose tougher sanctions on Russia and supply more weapons, including aircraft and tanks. Sanctions deplete Russia’s ability to sustain a long war. Arms help Ukraine take back territory. But NATO countries are refusing to provide him with what he wants. Given what is at stake, for the West as well as Ukraine, that betrays a reprehensible failure of strategic vision.

For Ukraine, a decisive victory would deter yet another Russian invasion. The more convincingly Ukraine can see off the Russian army, the more able it will be to resist the compromises that could poison the peace. Victory would also be the best basis for launching a post-war democratic state that is less corrupted by oligarchs and Russian infiltration.

The prize for the West would be almost as great. Not only could Ukraine invigorate the cause of democracy, but it would also enhance European security. During 300 years of imperialism, Russia has repeatedly been at war in Europe. Sometimes, as with Poland and Finland, it was the invader. Other times, as with Nazi Germany and Napoleonic France, it was seen as a lethal threat and itself fell victim to aggression.

A strong, democratic Ukraine would thwart Russia’s expansionism—because its borders would be secure. In the short term an angry, defeated dictator would be left in the Kremlin, but eventually Russia, following Ukraine’s example, would be more likely to solve its problems by reform at home rather than adventures abroad. As it did so, NATO would become correspondingly less of a drain on budgets and diplomacy. The United States would be freer to attend to its growing rivalry with China.

Alas, much of the West seems blind to this historic chance. America is leading as it must, even if it vetoed sending Ukraine aircraft. But Germany is taking a short-term view of sanctions, balancing pressure from its allies and public opinion against the preservation of its trading links with Russia, the supplier of much of its oil and natural gas. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, claims to speak for Western allies when he argues that to supply the heavy weapons Ukraine needs would turn them into “co-belligerents”. Mr Zelensky accuses such countries of being either short-sighted or timorous. He is right.

Perhaps Germany doubts that Ukraine can leave behind its post-Soviet past. It is true that, after the Maidan protests established democracy in 2014, the country was unable to slough off its corruption and political inertia. And after being pounded by Russian artillery, Ukraine’s economy will be in ruins. However, the EU can help ensure that this time is different by starting work on Ukrainian membership right now. There could be no greater affirmation of the EU ’s founding mission to create peace on a continent ravaged by war.

Bringing Ukraine’s governance in line with the EU ’s will necessarily be lengthy and bureaucratic. The risk is that Brussels strings Ukraine along, as if Europe is deigning to let it join. Instead, the EU should welcome Ukraine eagerly, as eastern Europe was welcomed when it shook off Soviet domination in the early 1990s. That calls for generous aid to rebuild the economy, as well as political support and patience.

The other worry is Mr Macron’s: that NATO will provoke Russia. From the start of this war, when he spoke of “consequences…such as you have never seen in your entire history”, Mr Putin has hinted that Western involvement could lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Wisely, the West has therefore been clear that NATO will not fight against Russian forces—because, if they did, the war could spin out of control, with catastrophic results.

Yet backing away from Mr Putin’s nuclear-tinged threat entails risks, too. Limiting Ukrainian aid would abet Russia in imposing an unstable—and hence temporary—peace on Mr Zelensky. It would reward Mr Putin for his threats, setting up his next act of atomic aggression. By contrast, more powerful weapons and sanctions would mark a change in the degree of aid, but not its kind. And this week, facing Ukrainian success, Russia paused the campaign in the north, rather than escalate. For all those reasons, the best deterrence is for NATO to stand up to Mr Putin’s veiled threat, and make clear that a nuclear or chemical atrocity would lead to Russia’s utter isolation.

Lift up your eyes

Conflict is unpredictable. History is littered with wars that were meant to be short but which dragged on for years. Ukraine has won the first phase of this one simply by surviving. Now it needs to advance, and so Mr Zelensky needs redoubled Western help. It would be terrible if what stood between a bad peace and a good one was a failure of imagination in the capitals of Europe. ■

Watch the full interview with Mr Zelensky, read the transcript, and get a look inside the war room. For more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis, visit our dedicated hub.

J EFFREY SONNENFELD is having what he calls a Marshall McLuhan moment—“15 minutes of prominence soon to subside back into obscurity”. That is because, not long after Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24th, the 68-year-old professor at the Yale School of Management drew up a list of firms withdrawing from Russia, helping catalyse a stampede out of the country—470 businesses have closed or cut back operations. His campaign has generated positive media reviews. It has also put him under siege from public-relations types trying to ensure that the companies they represent do not fall into his “hall of shame”.

The “Ukraine morality test”, as the New York Times called it, has dramatically raised the profile of a man already dubbed the “ CEO whisperer”. Don’t believe it when he talks about returning to obscurity, though. He sees the withdrawal from Russia not just as a virtuous expression of repugnance against Mr Putin’s murderous regime. It is also a nail in the coffin of globalisation. It would be no surprise if he leads a CEO crusade against that next.

Mr Sonnenfeld is no stranger to the limelight. Indeed, he has become the high priest of a belief system in Western business which he started promoting almost 45 years ago, and which has at last come into fashion. He calls it business ethics. Its critics deride it as “woke” (“as if there is something wrong with the past participle of awakening,” he harrumphs). There is nothing too woke about why Western firms are pulling out of Russia. Some might call it high-minded but in most cases it is inherently pragmatic. It pleases customers and staff who are outraged by the war, and because Russia is a tiny part of most firms’ global revenues, it is immaterial from an investor point of view.

It is a slippery slope, though. Less than a year ago Mr Sonnenfeld was helping whip up scores of CEO s in America in a lather about changes to voting legislation in Georgia and other states. He has celebrated protests by business leaders over gun safety, immigration, climate change and transgender rights. He says that after the corporate pullout from Russia, his most recent powwow with chief executives revealed a sharp increase in their concerns about global supply chains, and a consensus about the need for more self-reliance. In other words, free trade may be next in line on the woke agenda. Amid applause for companies’ quick response to Russian aggression, this ethical mission creep is a worry. Where do bosses draw the line as arbiters of rights and wrongs?

In an interview with your columnist, Mr Sonnenfeld elaborates on why he believes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will mark a shift in support for globalisation. As he tells it, the era after the fall of the Berlin Wall engendered a “naive belief” that Western-style capitalism and products like McDonald’s hamburgers would usher in global harmony. Russia’s aggression has buried that notion, he reckons. Asked whether the CEO s he talks to want to change a system that has brought their firms profit, as well as helping lift parts of the world out of poverty, he says they do not want the pendulum to swing back completely to isolationism. But he discerns “diminished enthusiasm for limitless free trade”.

He is not alone in thinking that the war will tilt business opinion against globalisation. In his annual letter to shareholders, Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said on March 24th that he expected it to prompt companies to re-evaluate their supply chains, probably leading them to bring more of their operations closer to home, even if that means higher costs and margin pressures. Such sentiments gained ground amid the Sino-American trade war during Donald Trump’s presidency, then again amid high labour costs and logistical bottlenecks of the covid-19 pandemic. For the time being, statistics that bear out large-scale reshoring are hard to find. But some anecdotal evidence of it is popping up.

That may reflect nothing more than business pragmatism in action. More and better automation helps offset the higher wages in developed countries while reducing transport costs. As countries divide themselves into opposing camps, with China and Russia on one side and America and Europe on the other, their governments may encourage firms to invest domestically in vital technologies such as semiconductors to bolster security of supply. If domestic demand for firms’ goods is increasing, or being subsidised, it makes sense for them to meet it. Moreover, pressure by investors to put more focus on environmental, social and governance concerns may spur Western companies to think twice about having extended supply chains in hard-to-monitor places.

Autocrats in the C-suite

But when businesses wrap themselves in the flag, rather than standing up for pragmatism (and profits), things become more complicated. As bosses are no doubt aware, when pulling out of Russia, they are leaving the field open to local competitors with no qualms about supporting Mr Putin’s regime. They are abandoning Russian employees who may oppose their government. And their crowd-pleasing stance in Russia may help distract attention from other harmful externalities they are responsible for, such as the carbon footprints of their businesses. As with all ideological positions, there is a kaleidoscope of ways of looking at them.

Then there is democracy itself. Mr Sonnenfeld argues that companies are a rare force pressing for social and political change in Western society today. He sees the corporate campaign against Mr Putin’s regime in the same light as divestment from South Africa in the 1980s, which he argues helped bring about the end of apartheid. By being good citizens, firms are upholding and enforcing democratic values. Yet the idea of an unrepresentative coterie of unelected executives making moral choices on behalf of customers and employees could undermine faith in democracy, not shore it up. In a world at risk from autocracies like Russia, that would be a crushing own goal. ■

It’s not easy being an oligarch (Mar 12th)

L UXURY BRANDS used to speak in monologues. News about their latest collections flowed one way—from the boardroom, via billboards and editorial spreads in glossy magazines, to the buyer. In the age of social media, the buyers are talking back. One group, in particular, is getting through to fashion bosses: influencers. These individuals have won large followings by reviewing, advertising and occasionally panning an assortment of wares. Their fame stems not from non-digital pursuits, as was the case with the A -list stars who used to dominate the ranks of brand ambassadors, but from savvy use of Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok. Their posts seem frivolous. Their business isn’t.

For consumers, influencers are at once a walking advert and a trusted friend. For intermediaries that sit between them and brands, they are a hot commodity. For the brands’ corporate owners, they are becoming a conduit to millennial and Gen- Z consumers, who will be responsible for 70% of the $350bn or so in global spending on bling by 2025, according to Bain, a consultancy. And for regulators, they are the subject of ever closer scrutiny. On March 29th news reports surfaced that China’s paternalistic authorities are planning new curbs on how much money internet users can spend on tipping their favourite influencers, how much those influencers can earn from fans, and what they are allowed to post. Taken together, all this makes them impossible to ignore.

Few reliable estimates exist of the size of the influencer industry. One in 2020 from the National Bureau of Statistics in China, where influencers gained prominence earlier than in the West, estimated its contribution to the economy at $210bn, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP . As with many things digital, the pandemic seems to have given it a fillip, as more people were glued to their smartphones more of the time.

EMarketer, a firm of analysts, estimates that 75% of American marketers will spend money on influencers in 2022, up from 65% in 2020 (see chart). Brands’ global spending on influencers may reach $16bn this year, more than one in ten ad dollars spent on social media. Research and Markets, another analysis firm, reckons that in 2021 the middlemen made $10bn in revenues globally, and could be making $85bn by 2028. The ranks of firms offering influencer-related services rose by a quarter last year, to nearly 19,000. The influencer ecosystem is challenging the time-honoured tenets of luxury-brand management. Apart from being one-directional, campaigns have tended to be standardised, unchanging and expensive. An exclusive group of white actresses with the right cheekbones was supposed to signal consistency, as well as opulence. The same smile from the same photograph of the same Hollywood star would entice passers-by to purchase an item for many years. Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman have been the faces of Lancôme’s bestselling La Vie est Belle perfume and Miss Dior, respectively, for a decade. Stars and brands alike are tight-lipped about how much money changes hands, but the figures are believed to be in the millions of dollars. One report put the amount spent by LVMH on the entire Miss Dior campaign at “under $100m” in the past year. Such star-led campaigns can feel aloof to teenagers and 20-somethings who prize authenticity over timeless glamour. And influencers, with their girl- or boy-next-door charm, offer this in spades—for a fraction of the fee of a big-name star. The best ones are able to repackage a brand’s message in a way that is harmonious with their voice, their followers’ tastes and their platform of choice (Instagram is best for all-stars with over 2m followers and TikTok for niche “micro-influencers” with up to 100,000 followers and “nano-influencers” with fewer than 10,000). Influencers are particularly adept at navigating social-media platforms’ constantly evolving algorithms and features. For example, when Instagram’s algorithm seemed to begin favouring short videos (“reels”) over still images, so did many influencers. As social-media apps introduce shopping features, influencers are combining entertainment and direct salesmanship. Such “social commerce” is huge in China, where it was invented. In October 2021 Li Jiaqi, better known as Lipstick King, notched up nearly 250m views during a 12-hour streaming session in which he peddled everything from lotions to earphones ahead of Singles’ Day, that country’s annual shopping extravaganza. He and Viya, a fellow influencer, flogged $3bn-worth of goods in a day, half as much again as changes hands daily on Amazon.

Many influencers manage their production in ways that traditional ambassadors never could. They are video editors, scriptwriters, lighting specialists, directors and the main talent wrapped into one. Jackie Aina, whose beauty tips attract over 7m followers across several platforms, explains the importance of high-quality equipment that can show texture, accurate colour grading—“Not to mention the lighting.” Ms Aina’s 30-second lifestyle TikToks can take hours each to make.

This production value, combined with access to the influencers’ audiences, translates into value for the brands. Gauging how much value, precisely, is an inexact science. Launchmetrics, an analytics firm, tries to capture it by tracing a campaign’s visibility across print and online platforms. The resulting “media impact value” ( MIV ) reflects how much a brand would need to spend to gain a given degree of exposure—itself indicative of the expected return from a marketing drive. On this measure, which brands use to see how they stack up against rivals, the three-day wedding of Chiara Ferragni, an Italian with 27m Instagram followers, a fondness for pink and a Harvard Business School case study, generated a total of $36m in MIV for brands including Dior, Prada, Lancôme and Alberta Ferretti, which made the bridesmaids’ gowns. That compares with $25m for the more conventional—and almost certainly pricier—video campaign for Louis Vuitton’s autumn/winter 2021 collection for which the fashion house enlisted BTS , a hit South Korean pop group.

As well as new opportunities, influencers present new risks, especially for brands whose luxury identities rely on price discipline and exclusivity. Influencer-led live-streamed shopping events in China by Louis Vuitton and Gucci were ridiculed for cheapening their brand. And full-time influencers’ large teams can run up quite a tab. Adam Knight, co-founder of TONG Global, a marketing agency with offices in London and Shanghai, notes how Lipstick King’s live-streaming success has fuelled demand for his services among brands—but also his own kingly demands. Mr Li’s fees, commissions and exclusive perks only pay for themselves if the event is a smash hit. Otherwise, Mr Knight says, the client’s profit “just completely erodes”.

There are more indirect costs to consider, too. A host of younger and more unpredictable brand ambassadors is harder for brands to control than one or two superstars on exclusive contracts with good-behaviour clauses. Though influencers’ shorter contracts make them easier to replace should they step out of line, untoward antics can be costly. Before the latest clampdown Chinese authorities had already forced 20,000 influencer accounts to be taken down last year on grounds of “polluting the internet environment”. Luxury brands are reportedly cutting their influencer spending in China in response. Regulators around the world, as well as some social-media platforms, are beginning to clamp down on influencers who do not tag their content as advertorials.

Such worries explain why some luxury houses are leery of influencers. Hermès, the French purveyor of scarves and Birkin bags, maintains a social-media presence that is conspicuously influencer-free. But more feel the benefits outweigh the costs. Despite Louis Vuitton’s and Gucci’s live-streaming flops, LVMH and Kering, the brands’ respective owners, continue to rely on influencers to create social-media momentum. To be a top-ten brand, says Flavio Cereda-Parini of Jefferies, an investment bank, you have to know how to play the digital game. If you don’t, “you are not going to be top ten for very long.” ■

T O THE ALARM of Australia and New Zealand, the Solomon Islands has reached a security agreement with China. The prime minister, Manasseh Sogavare, confirmed this on March 29th, furious that a draft of the agreement had been leaked a few days earlier. It envisaged the arrival of Chinese military personnel and police and occasional “ship visits” in order “to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”. Already, China has started training the local force in riot control and handling replica weapons, after years when Australia and New Zealand have taken primary responsibility for dealing with unrest in the Solomon Islands and for reforming the police force.

The Solomons switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019. Since then China has begun repairing the country’s only gold mine and taken over Taiwan’s financing of controversial “constituency development funds” for MP s, and the state-owned China Civil Engineering Corporation has started building a stadium for the South Pacific Games next year. China’s Pacific expansion does not offer commercial rewards as big as those available in Africa or South-East Asia, but it does bring important prizes in its long war of diplomatic attrition with Taiwan. Kiribati, too, switched recognition to China in 2019, leaving only four Pacific countries still aligned with Taiwan (Nauru, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and Palau).

But China’s enhanced presence has met stiff resistance from the provincial government on Malaita, the Solomons’ most populous island, whose provincial premier, Daniel Suidani, is the most vociferous opponent of Chinese influence. Mr Sogavare has tried in vain to dislodge him. To back Mr Suidani, many Malaitans in November descended on the capital, Honiara, demanding that the prime minister himself step down. The protests triggered serious rioting, and the destruction of most of the Chinatown business district. Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji deployed peacekeepers. Mr Sogavare now says he wants to diversify his security partners by seeking assistance also from China. He denies Australian media reports of a planned Chinese military base.

T HE SRI LANKAN economy was in danger well before Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine. Burdened by foreign debts and squeezed by the effects of the pandemic on its tourist receipts, Sri Lanka’s government dithered over approaching the IMF for help as the year began. Now a devaluation of the currency and the impact of the war on commodity markets is sending consumer prices soaring. Troops have been deployed to calm the crowds queuing for fuel, and a debt default may be unavoidable. As the prices of everything from oil and gas to corn and wheat surge, other countries may fear a similar fate.

Food makes up a modest share of households’ budgets in the rich world, but accounts for more than 20% of consumer spending across most of the emerging world and about 40% in sub-Saharan Africa. Prices had already risen substantially over the past couple of years, owing to interruptions to production and extreme weather. Global food prices, in real terms, approached an all-time high in February, according to an index maintained by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. They will have only gone up further since.

One consequence of this is a surge in poverty. The Centre for Global Development, a think-tank, estimates that 40m people worldwide will be pushed into extreme poverty as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (By comparison, the World Bank estimated in 2021 that roughly 100m people may have fallen into poverty because of the covid-19 pandemic.) High commodity prices will also add to macroeconomic strains in many places.

Total debt across emerging and developing economies stood at a 50-year high last year, relative to GDP . The cost of servicing those borrowings is rising, as central banks worldwide begin pushing up interest rates in order to check inflation. The tough economic conditions are weighing on emerging-market currencies, raising the cost of foreign-currency debt and forcing governments to drain currency reserves in order to shore up exchange rates. Higher commodity prices could also further complicate the fiscal picture for emerging economies, given that many governments offer generous food and energy subsidies to households.

Sri Lanka’s case is illustrative. Its foreign-exchange reserves shrank from more than $8bn in 2019 to around $2bn earlier this year. Though the government has sought aid from both India and China, it will almost certainly require help from the IMF , with which it is expected to begin negotiations in April (and which may ask for a reduction in subsidies as part of any rescue package).

F IGHTING INFLATION gets harder the longer it is put off—and the Federal Reserve has waited quite a while. For most of 2021 the central bank said that it had the tools to slow price rises, but saw no need to put them to use. Now investors are coming to terms with the fact that the Fed will have to deploy them at scale. Since March 1st the three-year Treasury yield has risen by more than a percentage point, the biggest absolute change since yields collapsed in January 2008 during the global financial crisis.

The move reflects the emergence of expectations that the Fed will increase interest rates by another two percentage points this year, having already raised them by a quarter of a point on March 16th. The impact has been felt worldwide. On March 28th the Bank of Japan promised to buy Japanese government debt in unlimited quantities over four days in order to defend its cap on the ten-year government-bond yield. The yield on ten-year German bunds, which turned positive only in January, now stands at over 0.6%, even as soaring energy prices darken the growth outlook.

The most important question for bond investors in America is whether the higher interest rates that are arriving hard and fast can bring about a fabled “soft landing”, in which the heat is taken out of the economy without provoking a recession. Past experience suggests that this will be difficult; tightening has often preceded downturns. Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chairman, has pointed to successful soft landings in 1964, 1984 and 1993. But those comparisons do not account for the difficulty of the present situation. In none of those cases did the Fed let inflation rise as far as it has today.

The central bank’s latest projections are rosy, portraying what its critics have dubbed an “immaculate disinflation”: three years of steadily falling inflation, despite GDP growth remaining above its long-run trend and both the unemployment rate and the Fed’s policy rate remaining unusually low. Mr Powell may have given up calling inflation “transitory”, but these forecasts make sense only if inflation goes away of its own accord.

It seems likelier that the central bank will have to squeeze inflation out of the economy. Noting that there is no precedent for doing so gracefully, Bill Dudley, a former head of the New York Fed, wrote in a Bloomberg column on March 29th that a recession was now inevitable. The r-word is also in the air because yields on some short-term bonds have risen above those on longer-term bonds. Such a yield-curve “inversion” suggests that investors expect interest rates to be cut eventually as the economy weakens.

An inverted yield curve is often regarded as a sign that markets think the central bank is making a mistake. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that a recession and a mistake are not the same thing if causing a downturn is the only way to restore price stability. In the 1980s Paul Volcker’s Fed vanquished inflation by inducing recessions that pushed the unemployment rate to 10.8%. Nobody accuses it of having done so inadvertently; rather, it chose to pay the high price of disinflation. That is not a position in which today’s central bankers want to be; they talk as much about their duty to support jobs and growth as they do about ensuring stable prices.

The good news for Mr Powell is that for all the chatter about the yield curve, investors remain mostly on his side. Most economists put the neutral level of interest rates, at which monetary policy is pressing on neither the accelerator nor the brake, at around 2-2.5%. Both the Fed and the bond market expect the policy rate to overshoot that level only slightly. Rates a notch or two above neutral can hardly be compared with Volcker’s tightening. The market expects immaculacy, too, believing that modestly tight money will be enough to control inflation.

The recent predictive record of both central bankers and bond markets has been poor, however. Just a year ago the Fed’s message was that it was not even “talking about talking about” tightening monetary policy, and investors expected consumer prices to rise by just 2.7% over the following year. If they are caught out again, the Fed could find that meeting its inflation target demands that it induce a recession. The yield curve would then invert more steeply.

In that scenario America would pay a dear price for the glacial pace of action in 2021, which was justified, ironically, by the supposed dangers of sudden moves. It has left the central bank, the world economy and asset prices on more perilous ground.

Iran’s flourishing stockmarket reflects its resilient economy (Mar 12th)

“N O PAYMENT, NO gas”, growled a Russian government spokesman on March 29th. Angered by the West’s economic sanctions, President Vladimir Putin ordered that “unfriendly” countries must start paying for Russian natural gas in roubles, a demand that ministers from the G 7 group of countries refused. Gas prices began to rise at the prospect that Mr Putin would turn off the taps. On March 30th Germany began bracing for the worst, taking its first step towards gas rationing. By the end of the day, however, the German government said it had received assurances that European firms would not have to make payments in roubles.

Even if an embargo has been averted, the latest confrontation surely strengthens Europe’s desire to relax Mr Putin’s grip on the economy. The EU has vowed to slash imports of natural gas from Russia, which made up some 40% of its consumption of the fuel last year, by two-thirds by the end of 2022. Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, dreams that the EU can “get rid” of Russian imports entirely within a few years. Can America, one of the world’s largest natural-gas exporters, help fill the gap?

When the Trump administration tried to persuade European officials to reduce their reliance on Russian energy by implementing policies to import more liquefied natural gas ( LNG ) from America—which it dubbed “molecules of freedom”—the proposal was ridiculed. Yet President Joe Biden finds himself doing something very similar to his predecessor. On March 25th he and Ms von der Leyen announced a “groundbreaking” plan to help end the EU ’s reliance on Russian gas. It calls for American help in securing an additional 15bn cubic metres of LNG for Europe this year (equal to roughly a tenth of total European imports of Russian gas in 2021). It also promises to “ensure additional EU market demand” for 50bn cubic metres per year of the fuel from America by 2030.

Industry insiders have greeted the ambitious plan with scepticism. One reason is that American gas companies face severe infrastructure constraints. The share of American exports going to Europe shot up from 4% in 2017 to almost 30% last year (equivalent to 22bn cubic metres), as prices soared on the continent. America “has almost 100% of its liquefaction capacity already in use”, reckons Rystad, a research firm, meaning that “there is no additional LNG to be exported” in the short term. Jack Fusco, boss of Cheniere, a big American energy company, confirms that his firm is “maxed out”. It would take four or five years and tens of billions of dollars in investment, not to mention the fast-tracking of regulatory approvals, to change that.

There are also questions about whether the EU has the infrastructure to cope with the imports. Receiving cargoes of LNG and converting them into usable natural gas requires big facilities for regasification. Europe has spare capacity, but much of it is on the coasts of western countries like Spain and France. Poor interconnections mean that these are not very useful in getting imports to eastern parts of the EU , where an embargo would hit hardest. Germany, which has no LNG terminals, has vowed to build two, but that will take several years. Some European countries talk of acquiring floating LNG terminals, which can be set up more quickly—but there is a severe global shortage of them.

Look to the longer term, though, and the new approach to natural gas shows more promise. That is because the EU appears ready to jettison its misguided hostility to long-term gas contracts, which it had discouraged as part of its effort to boost spot markets for gas. The intent had been to promote competition, but, as last winter’s rocketing gas prices revealed, it also left Europe badly exposed to a supply shock. As a top American LNG exporter explains, Europe focused on expanding the spot market when it should have secured “fantastic” long-term pricing instead.

Now the commission says it will encourage long-term contracts “to support final investment decisions on both LNG export and import infrastructure”. That should give investors in American export facilities the confidence to spend the billions required, boosting transatlantic trade. Giles Farrer of Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy, reckons that the infrastructure needed to achieve the aim of 50bn cubic metres of liquefaction capacity in America would cost roughly $25bn, not including upstream investments and supply-chain inflation. Rystad thinks the spending needed to meet Europe’s extra demand could be in the region of $35bn.

Diversification away from Russia in the long term, then, may be possible. But that does little to help with the short-term problem of an aggressive Mr Putin. A rational calculus suggests that he should be unwilling to turn off the taps, considering he profits handsomely from high prices. Energy Intelligence, an industry publisher, reckons Gazprom earned $20.5bn from European gas sales in the first two months of the year, nearly as much as it made from Europe in all of 2020. But few observers would dare to predict the actions of an increasingly erratic dictator. ■

I T IS A sure sign that a hot trend has reached the mainstream when the tax authorities catch up. This week China promised a tax-evasion crackdown on social-media influencers, who are paid by brands to promote products online to armies of followers. One of the big stars, Viya, a 30-something fashionista known as the live-streaming queen, has already been fined $210m for not declaring her income. The size of that levy shows the sheer scale of the industry, which accounts for 12% of online sales in China. Outside China, influencers are also likely to have an enduring role in e-commerce. For all firms with brands—and together those brands are worth over $7trn—it is time to realise that influencing is more than just a hobby.

The use of personal endorsements used to be about harnessing existing celebrity power. Elizabeth Taylor touted Colgate-Palmolive’s shampoo in the 1950s, and Michael Jordan’s deal in 1984 with Nike revolutionised both basketball and branding. Influencers turn the logic on its head: selling things helps make them more famous. Through curated feeds of clipped videos and filtered photos they offer recommendations to consumers, mingled with glimpses into their daily lives that give their artifice an aura of authenticity. Sometimes they disclose how they are paid. Often they do not.

Initially dismissed as credulous Gen-Z folk who had mistaken posting selfies for having a job, these entrepreneurs have become a big business, boosted further by the e-commerce surge from the pandemic. Total spending on influencers by brands could reach $16bn this year. Whereas the number of wannabe influencers outside China is in the millions, an elite of under 100,000 of them who have over 1m followers each get the bulk of revenues and the front seats at fashion shows.

Their staying power suggests that they add value in several ways. They can save money: Elon Musk is an honorary influencer whose raucous online presence lets Tesla do without any conventional advertising (General Motors blew $3.3bn on it in 2021). Influencers’ networks reach new audiences, particularly younger shoppers. Global brands can localise their appeal by cutting deals with them. In China local shopping festivals and style sensibilities matter, so transplanting marketing campaigns from the West does not work. And influencers are technologically proficient in a way that old-style brand ambassadors never were. They are quick to adapt to newer platforms like TikTok and to the ever-changing algorithms of older ones like Instagram.

Yet one-third of brands do not use influencers. They worry about tarnishing their reputation. Having a swarm of freelance advocates is riskier than the command-and-control campaigns of the “Mad Men” era. And the industry is a Wild West, awash with fraud and manipulation.

Despite this, ignoring influencers is a mistake. Their share of digital advertising budgets is still low at perhaps 3%, but it is rising fast. The boundary between entertainment and e-commerce is blurring. And the most popular marketing strategy of the 2010s—ads targeted through Google and Facebook—is under threat as new privacy standards, including on Apple’s iPhone, make it harder to spy on potential customers.

To get the most out of influencers, brands should set a clear strategy. They should expect more regulation on consumer protection: China’s crackdown may also include limits on spending and content rules. The guiding principle should be to use only influencers who disclose to their audiences that their posts are paid. As the Wild West phase ends, brands should also embrace new analytical tools that help them gauge the performance of influencers, sorting the con-artists from the stars. It used to be said that only half of all advertising spending worked, but it was impossible to know which half. Now brands can control only half of what influencers say, but they may be able to calculate 100% of the value they add. ■

I N THE HEYDAY of Vietnam’s communist economy, comrades could expect their health care, education, housing and entertainment to be provided by the government. In the freeish-market Vietnam of today, those necessities are still purveyed by one dominant entity, albeit a capitalist one. Vingroup, the country’s biggest conglomerate, and its two listed subsidiaries, Vinhomes (a property developer) and Vincom Retail (which offers other real-estate services), jointly make up 28% of free-float shares in Vietnam’s stockmarket index (see chart). Their revenues are equivalent to nearly 2% of Vietnamese GDP .

Having made Vingroup into a dominant force at home, its founder and chairman, Pham Nhat Vuong, now wants to turn it into a household name abroad. In December the group announced plans to list VinFast, its electric-car division, in America this year, to open showrooms across the West, and to sell 42,000 electric vehicles ( EV s) globally in 2022, up from a previous goal of 15,000. On March 29th, in the most audacious move yet, VinFast said it would invest $2bn in its first foreign factory, to be built in North Carolina with capacity to make 150,000 EV s a year.

That is quite a ride for a firm that began life in 1993 making instant noodles in Ukraine, where Mr Vuong found himself after studying geological engineering in the Soviet Union. He subsequently expanded operations to his home country and in 2010 sold the Ukrainian business to Nestlé, a Swiss food giant, for a reported $150m. The Vietnamese arm became Vingroup. It has been accruing business lines ever since, turning Mr Vuong, who retains a majority stake in the parent company, into Vietnam’s richest man.

Between 2011 and 2021 Vingroup’s revenues exploded nearly 50-fold, to more than $5bn. Gross operating profit has ballooned ten-fold in the past decade, to around $800m. Vingroup’s share price is also 50 times what it was at its initial public offering in 2007. It spun off Vincom Retail in 2017 and Vinhomes a year later, retaining majority stakes in both. These lucrative property businesses generate most of the parent company’s profits.

Now Vingroup wants more to come from techier sectors, says Le Thi Thu Thuy, Mr Vuong’s deputy at Vingroup and CEO of VinFast. In particular, the company is eyeing EV s. To that end, the group is rejigging its industrial divisions. Last year it wound down VinSmart, an unlisted subsidiary that had grabbed just over 10% of the domestic smartphone market with its own models, and launched two new EV -focused high-tech ventures: Vin ES , a battery-making subsidiary, and Vin AI , a machine-learning arm which is led by a former researcher at DeepMind, Google’s artificial-intelligence unit, and whose task is to develop self-driving technology. As part of the electric shift VinFast will also stop making petrol-driven vehicles by the end of this year.

The plan is to conquer the global EV market with snazzy new models—and a crafty new business model. VinFast will sell cars while leasing their batteries, which account for a large chunk of an EV ’s cost. That lowers the sticker price, as well as alleviating concerns about long-term decline in range as batteries degrade (the company will replace those which no longer recharge adequately). VinFast’s $41,000 VF 8 is one of the cheapest electric SUV s around, even after you factor in the $100 or so monthly battery payments.

Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, whom Mr Vuong took for a spin in a VF 8 at VinFast’s factory in Haiphong earlier this year, certainly looked impressed. Afterwards Mr Phuc reiterated just how Vingroup’s business objectives dovetail with the government’s economic goals. These include the creation of large, internationally competitive conglomerates in the mould of South Korean chaebol such as Samsung. No Vietnamese company fits the bill better than Vingroup.

Ambition does not, though, guarantee success. Vingroup’s industrial businesses, of which carmaking is by far the biggest, recorded a net loss of about $1bn last year. Chris Robinson of Lux Research, an analysis firm, is sceptical about VinFast’s ability to compete with established carmakers like Volkswagen, which is ploughing billions into affordable EV s, or Tesla, the industry superstar. He reckons VinFast will struggle to win a big market share outside South-East Asia. Wall Street’s enthusiasm for upstart EV firms has chilled of late in America, which could dash VinFast’s hopes for a blockbuster New York listing. The world’s motorists and investors may prove harder to impress than Mr Phuc. ■

W HAT DOES it take to rein in two of the biggest companies on the planet? A coalition of Swedish music-streamers, South Korean politicians and Dutch dating apps, apparently. They seem to be succeeding where America’s federal government has failed: to force changes to the way Apple and Google run their app stores.

The app stores are big businesses, with combined sales last year of $133bn, three times the total five years earlier (see chart). Apple and Google take a cut of up to 30%, which is thought to contribute a fifth of the operating profits at Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The 30% levy began in Apple’s iTunes music store and was copied to its iPhone app store, launched in 2008. As people came to use their phones for gaming, streaming and much else, it evolved into a tax on digital activity. Sign up to a service like Disney+ on your phone and Apple or Google get a cut of your subscription for ever. Apps have had to use the tech duo’s payment systems, and could not tell users about other ways to sign up. Gripes from app developers have forced only minor concessions: last year Apple said it would let them link to external payment pages and Google reduced its fees for subscriptions. Now, though, the dam is bursting.

Last summer South Korea banned app stores from forcing developers to use a particular payment system. In December Dutch regulators made a similar ruling against Apple, after a complaint by developers of dating apps. On March 23rd the trend went global. Google announced a deal with Spotify, a vocal critic of app-store fees, to let the music-streamer handle its own billing. Google will lower its commission rate, probably in line with the four-percentage-point cut agreed in South Korea. It says more deals are on the way.

Google’s magnanimity anticipates laws that may require bigger concessions. A bill before America’s Congress would force app stores to allow payment alternatives and let apps advertise other ways to sign up. A bigger threat comes from the EU ’s Digital Markets Act ( DMA ), approved in draft form on March 24th. The colossal bill covers various aspects of digital markets, including app stores. The DMA , which is on track to come into force next year, would force mobile platforms to allow third-party app stores and “sideloading” of apps directly from the web—something Google permits but Apple does not. Offenders face fines of up to 20% of worldwide revenue and bans on acquisitions. Breaking open walled gardens, the DMA ’s proponents say, will strengthen competition.

Apple’s boss, Tim Cook, has warned that sideloading would “destroy the security of the iPhone”. That is a bit much: Apple allows sideloading on its desktop computers without calamity. But Apple’s much bigger share of the mobile market could make the iPhone a juicier target for malware. And the company trades heavily on privacy and security. Despite what the authors of the DMA seem to believe, writes Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, you cannot “pass laws against trade-offs”. ■

B EING A MEMBER of the European Union is, like marriage, a binary thing: either you are or you are not. Unlike marriage, little romance is involved in getting there. Ukraine got a taste of this in 2013 when it negotiated an “association agreement” with the bloc, a deal to keep both sides sweet while they mulled a closer union. The document came in at 2,135 pages. It included 44 uses of the term inter alia and 12 mutatis mutandises. One annexe sets out the quality of paper (“not less than 25 g/m2”) and size (“210 × 297mm; a tolerance of up to minus 5mm or plus 8mm in the length may be allowed”) to be used in certain official correspondence. Even by the standards of pre-nups, it was charmless.

So firm has Ukraine’s belief been that its future lies within the European family of nations that such soullessness did not cool its ardour. In 2019 its aspiration to become a member of the EU was enshrined in its constitution. War has further fanned the flames of attraction, at least in one direction. Within a week of Russia invading on February 24th President Volodymyr Zelensky called for a shotgun wedding under a “fast-track” accession procedure. Europe, in full mutatis mutandis mode, has made clear that there is no such thing and rules are rules. These stipulate that aspirant members must adopt decades-worth of EU edicts on everything from how food is labelled to how banks are regulated. Even that only results in EU membership for those countries the club has committed itself to. Ukraine is not among them.

Europe needs to let go of the ablative absolutes and allow its romantic side to shine through. Yes, the EU has rules and these matter: how else could a marriage of French officiousness and Germanic efficiency have endured for six decades? And indeed Ukraine is not going to meet the accession criteria for several years yet. Nobody thinks it should become the EU ’s 28th member immediately—not even Mr Zelensky, probably. But Ukraine craves a commitment that, if it carries out the necessary reforms over the coming years, it will be allowed to become a member of the club. To this Europe should say: “I will.”

Such a decision is principally one for national governments, all 27 of which need to agree on matters relating to enlargement. Plenty want at least to give Ukraine a “European perspective”, Euro-speak for starting the process of enlargement informally. The eastern European states would like for it to be officially considered a candidate for membership, a step further in the complex accession process. Reluctance from old-timers such as the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as lukewarm French support, mean the EU thus far is only agreeing to “support Ukraine in pursuing its European path”, which is diplomatic lingo for nothing. The European Commission has been asked to produce a report, a time-honoured stalling tactic.

Ukraine’s misfortune—beyond sharing a border with Vladimir Putin’s Russia—is to have brought up the question of EU membership at a time when enlargement fatigue reigns. No new member has been let in since Croatia in 2013. A handful of accession applications from the western Balkans are essentially frozen. That is in part because governments in countries from previous waves of accession, notably Poland and Hungary, have not lived up to their commitments on corruption and the rule of law. Diplomats from founding countries of the EU mutter that they would be keener to divorce existing member states than tie the knot with new ones.

Ukraine is different. Becoming an EU member is a milestone for any country. But it would have special resonance in this case. Mr Putin, desperate to stop Ukraine from slipping out of Russia’s sphere of influence, derailed the signing of that association agreement in 2013. The ensuing Maidan protests in Kyiv featured a sea of demonstrators waving EU flags with more ardour than is ever seen inside the bloc. Dozens were shot and killed for it before a thuggish Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president fled to Russia. The EU deal was ratified in 2014. By then, Russia had annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine, a prelude to the current war.

Amor vincit omnia

Several arguments are made against giving Ukraine even informal assurances of future EU membership. Emmanuel Macron of France says one could hardly open talks about accession with a country at war. That is beside the point, as what Ukraine really wants is a promise that once hostilities cease it can start jumping through the required hoops—a process that took ten years for Croatia, and would take longer for a country needing reconstruction to boot. Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, argues that immediate ways of helping Ukraine, such as supplying it with arms or imposing sanctions on Russia, matter more than long-term aspirations. Yet as Benjamin Tallis of the Hertie School in Berlin points out, the issue of EU accession is important enough for Mr Zelensky, a man with rather a lot going on, to keep bringing it up.

Some argue that any signal that Ukraine will one day join the EU might provoke Russia. Into doing what that it is not already doing, exactly? Others say it would complicate peace talks. Again, Mr Zelensky probably knows best when it comes to Ukraine’s national interest. Is there not a collective defence mechanism in the EU that would tie existing member states to Ukraine? In truth that carries little weight. Bending the rules and giving Ukraine a status other countries have earned through years of reforms would ruffle Balkan feathers. That is true, but manageable.

Much would need to go right for Ukraine to join the EU . It needs to fend off Russia, find a suitable peace then improve what until the war began had been a distinctly patchy record of reforms. If it pulls all of that off, letting a Europe-minded Ukraine into the club would not be a favour to Kyiv, as some stuffier member states seem to think, but a boon to the EU , too. As things stand European leaders are thinking with their heads, as bureaucrats are wont to do. But a union—any union—is a thing of the heart, too. ■

Europe is doing a good job helping refugees from Ukraine (Mar 12th)

With war at its doors, Europe discovers a capacity for action (Mar 5th)

“I AM A gaffe machine,” Joe Biden once admitted, disarmingly. For proof consider his speech in Warsaw on March 26th. Vladimir Putin’s carnage in Ukraine was part of a global “battle between democracy and autocracy”, he declared, closing with an impromptu line: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Was Mr Biden advocating regime change in Russia? No, his aides hastened to say, soon followed by the president himself.

The political gaffe, the commentator Michael Kinsley memorably observed, is when a politician inadvertently speaks the truth. Mr Biden’s many slips often involve him getting muddled or, as in 2012, being unable to catch a double entendre. Seeking to cast Barack Obama as a hard man of world affairs, the then vice-president cited Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum about speaking softly and carrying a big stick. “I promise you, the president has a big stick.”

Mr Biden’s words in Warsaw were different, deliberate and in keeping with insults—“war criminal”, “butcher”—he has been hurling at Russia’s leader. Critics charge that, in suggesting he seeks Mr Putin’s downfall, Mr Biden will harden Russia’s resolve on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. This misses the mark. The reproach rings especially hollow coming from Republicans who still bow to the dangerously wayward and Putin-loving Donald Trump. (On March 29th he urged Mr Putin to reveal dirt on the Biden family.) There is little doubt the world would be better without Mr Putin; and he already thinks America is out to get him.

Rather, Mr Biden’s failing in Warsaw is what might be called the Reverse Roosevelt Doctrine: speak loudly and carry a small stick. To Poles and Ukrainians in the audience, Mr Biden’s most fervent lines carried disturbing implications. Telling Mr Putin “don’t even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory” sounds like giving him carte blanche to do his worst in Ukrainian territory. “We need to steel ourselves for the long fight ahead” implies that he will do nothing to stop horrors quickly.

The parallels he drew—the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Prague spring of 1968 and Solidarity’s strikes in Poland in 1980—all referred to events behind the iron curtain, where America had little influence. Mr Biden did not mention, say, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 or Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, which America halted through military action. Intervention in Ukraine, Mr Biden says, would risk “World War III”.

Finding a course between preventing Russia’s takeover of Ukraine and averting nuclear escalation involves much semantic and legal contortion. What weaponry is defensive, or what action escalatory? Mr Biden sends Ukraine anti-tank weapons, but not tanks; anti-aircraft missiles but not military aircraft. He is at pains to say what he will not do: no to American troops on the ground, no to no-fly zones. His response to Mr Putin’s madman nuclear threats is reassurance that America will not get involved. Mr Biden invoked the words of the late Polish pope, John Paul II, “Be not afraid.” Yet it is the president who seems frightened of tangling with Mr Putin, not the other way around.

How to explain this caution? The first and most obvious reason is that Russia has a bigger stockpile of nuclear weapons than America does, and a greater doctrinal propensity to use them. Even Mr Biden’s fiercest critics agree that getting into a war with Russia would be a bad idea. The second factor is Mr Biden’s aversion to America’s over-reliance on force, given the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military action should be a last resort, not the first, he thinks; and should be used only when vital interests are at stake. His economic sanctions on Russia, he believes, are “a new kind of economic statecraft with the power to inflict damage that rivals military might”.

Left unsaid is that Ukraine is probably not as important to Mr Biden as, say, Taiwan. America sees Russia as a disrupter, and China as the only challenger to its supremacy. Another of Mr Biden’s gaffes last year is telling. Asked whether America would defend Taiwan from a Chinese attack, he replied: “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” The White House rushed to clarify that the president intended no change in America’s “one-China” policy, or its doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” about defending the island. For Taiwan, then, Mr Biden does seem ready to risk nuclear war.

A cynical possibility, which many Ukrainians believe, is that Mr Biden wants a drawn-out war to exhaust Russia, at the cost of much Ukrainian blood. That may be too Machiavellian. There is little sign that the Biden administration has thought much about the end-game. It says it will not dictate the terms that Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, should accept. This is disingenuous given that Mr Biden in effect sets limits on what Ukraine can achieve. If Mr Zelensky does not have the weapons with which to evict Russian forces, he will have to give up territory; if NATO will not admit Ukraine, he will have to accept neutrality.

Shoot the bear?

Now that Russia is bleeding in the battlefield, prominent Americans want Mr Biden to go all-out to help Mr Zelensky rout the Russian army. Victory would revitalise democracy and might even bring down Mr Putin. Mr Biden, however, prefers the long game. Ukraine is bravely holding its ground, Russia is being weakened and China is paying a political cost for embracing Mr Putin. Only Russia’s leader knows what would make him resort to nuclear weapons, but a senior American defence official thinks the triggers probably include “the prospect of all-out conventional defeat of Russia’s military” or a threat to the Russian state (in other words, a threat to Mr Putin).

What about Mr Biden’s chin-jutting in Warsaw? It is probably moral outrage, as he says, with perhaps some cheap rhetoric. The president may be loose in his tough talk, and cautious to a fault in his actions. But in the nuclear age that is surely better than emulating a swashbuckling militarist like Teddy Roosevelt. ■

Joe Biden’s indispensable leadership (Mar 12th)

M ANAGEMENT ENTAILS some unpleasant conversations, none worse than telling employees that they have lost their jobs. There is nothing enjoyable about giving people this kind of news. But it can be done well or it can be done badly—or it can be done in the style of Peter Hebblethwaite.

Mr Hebblethwaite is the chief executive of P & O Ferries, a ferry operator that carries passengers and freight between Britain and continental Europe. On March 17th the company told almost 800 of its workers on a video call that they were being replaced with immediate effect by cheaper foreign contractors. Security guards were on hand to escort the dismissed workers from the ships.

On March 24th Mr Hebblethwaite was hauled in front of a committee of British MP s to explain himself. “Are you in this mess because you don’t know what you’re doing, or are you just a shameless criminal?” was the first question. And that was before he made them really angry. He admitted he had not seen a safety-risk assessment into the implications of replacing the original crews with agency workers (two of the affected vessels have subsequently been held in port because of safety concerns). He openly acknowledged that the firm had broken the law by not consulting on the dismissals with trade unions, but that he would make the same decision again because the unions would never have agreed to the plans.

If you want to know what slack-jawed astonishment looks like, watch someone telling legislators that the law is not worth following. But what if you take Mr Hebblethwaite at his word—that the business was unsustainable and that the firm faced a choice between cutting some jobs immediately and losing them all? This is a kind of managerial “trolleyology”, the name given to a set of moral thought experiments involving a runaway railway carriage that is careering towards a group of people. In these experiments participants are asked whether they would intervene and sacrifice someone else in order to save the lives of others. Dismissing workers in order to save more jobs is the workplace version of this problem.

The Hebblethwaite approach to managerial trolleyology is a simple matter of accounting: saving 3,000 jobs is worth the loss of 800 workers. That meant moving fast, and not bothering with niceties like following the law or affording people due process or dignity.

But the point of trolleyology is that the brute logic of numbers often conflicts with moral intuitions. Ethical considerations can involve nuances of behaviour, not just outcomes. For example, people are much more willing to switch train tracks so the runaway carriage collides with someone else than they are to push someone off a bridge into the path of the train in order to slow it down.

In managerial trolleyology, too, behaviour matters—even to staunch utilitarians. It makes a difference how people are treated when they lose their jobs, and not just to those who are out of work. Callousness affects the morale of those who are left behind: recent research suggests that a toxic corporate culture is more likely to lead to employee attrition than any other factor. How firms handle redundancies also sends signals to prospective employees, customers and investors. Airbnb chose to publish the memo that Brian Chesky, its boss, sent to employees in May 2020, in which he used a blend of compassion and commercial logic to explain his decision to cut 25% of the workforce.

Displays of humanity can be good for the share price. A new study, from academics at the University of Zurich, the London School of Economics and Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, looks at how chief executives responded to the outbreak of covid-19 in early 2020. The authors review transcripts of investor calls in which bosses discussed the pandemic, and find that whereas virtually all of them referred to its economic impact, only about half of them mentioned the human costs. The share prices of firms run by the more compassionate-sounding bigwigs outperformed the others in the early stages of the crisis and well beyond.

Every situation is different. The P & O debacle reflects specific aspects of maritime employment law, for example. But if you want a steer on how to handle mass redundancies, Mr Hebblethwaite does not provide it. Managers routinely have to make tough decisions about letting workers go. Whether to show some common decency in the process is not one of the harder ones.

The return of the crowded office (Mar 12th)

One might be inclined to let Biden’s more unbuttoned approach pass as a personality quirk, especially today, when the line between the formal and the informal in public language has become so much hazier. The president’s oratorical messiness could be seen as consonant with the eclipse of the fedora and dancing according to plotted steps — but not this time. When the topic is war, the old ways are the only proper ones: Biden’s feelings weren’t supposed to edge out the objectivity of officialese, and his contorted effort to explain away his remark is one of his more obtuse moments.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Smith and anything to do with Biden may seem thin. But my take on what Smith did at the Oscars is that in a moment of umbrage, he, too, lost sight of the line — choosing a vernacular, of sorts, while in a regimented setting. To slap Rock was, of course, utterly unpardonable — and to an extent so stark that it gets one surmising about the psychology behind it.

I cannot know precisely what was going on in Smith’s head, but I suspect that a part of him was doing something that he thought the Black community, broadly speaking, would read differently than many other observers. And if so, he may not have been entirely wrong.

The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill wrote that after the slap, she received an avalanche of texts, mostly from Black folks, and that “a lot of them, both men and women, said they at least understood Will Smith’s reaction to Rock’s mockery of his wife, even if they disagreed with how and where Smith showed it.” The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Elizabeth Wellington wrote that “Smith strolled onstage and slapped the taste out of Rock’s mouth,” not exactly a disapproving description, even though she went on to clarify: “Should Smith have hit Rock? No. But I get why he did.” The actress and comedian Tiffany Haddish said “when I saw a Black man stand up for his wife” that “meant so much to me,” calling it “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” After the slap, Smith’s son Jaden tweeted “And That’s How We Do It.”

With that sense, that Smith was doing something “we,” it’s hard not to see a parallel in, for example, the “beef” culture in the rap world focused on duel-style retributions (often, but not always, confined to lyrics) for perceived slights, and a similar trope among gangs on the streets, as documented even by Black and other sympathetic observers.

On Saturday, near the end of a speech made in Poland, President Joe Biden said of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Amid criticism that the comment amounted to a call for regime change, the White House sought to backtrack, and Biden told reporters on Monday that he was merely expressing disgust with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and not announcing a change in American policy. “I was expressing the moral outrage I felt towards this man,” Biden stated. “The last thing I want to do is engage in a land war or a nuclear war with Russia.” Nevertheless, the remark left open a number of questions, among them: how Putin might respond, and whether a negotiated endgame exists. (On Tuesday, following reports that Russia may be pulling back on several key demands, its negotiators met the Ukrainian side in Istanbul for their first face-to-face peace talks in weeks.)

I recently spoke by phone with Angela Stent, an expert on U.S.-Russia relations who served in the Office of Policy Planning under multiple Administrations, and also on the National Intelligence Council. Stent is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; her most recent book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Biden’s comment will affect Putin’s Ukraine strategy, what a plan for Ukrainian “neutrality” might look like in practice, and the biggest mistake in post-Cold War American policy toward Russia.

You’ve written a lot about the ways Russia and the United States interact, or don’t interact. And there’s been a lot of angst about Biden’s comment. Very specifically, what is the problem with the comment? Why is it something that an American President should not say, if in fact you don’t think an American President should say it?

Well, first of all, it was obviously from the heart. He’d spent the day partly with refugees, and I’m sure it was a very emotional day for him to be in Poland and see all of that. And he obviously meant what he said. The reason it’s problematic is that world leaders aren’t supposed to say things like that publicly. And I think people have been concerned because there’s a war going on, and the concern is that making a remark like that could make things worse. European leaders, particularly President Macron, of France, have complained and said that they are trying to negotiate with Putin, and that they are trying to end the war, and that comments like this aren’t helpful. All of those who are involved in these ongoing negotiations prefer some ambiguity here. And that’s why there have been concerns about this. But obviously there are people who think that he said what he felt and it was O.K. to say it.

Just to nail down on what the concern is: Is the idea that Americans should not say things like this because it’s not our business who the leader of Russia is, or Putin will use it as propaganda, or this would change how Putin personally views the West or change what he’s able to convince his citizens about what the West wants? What do you think the heart of the concern is?

Look, Putin has been saying for years that the United States wants regime change in Russia. He said that explicitly, that “they’re trying to defeat us, invade us, cut us up.” So the fact that this was said explicitly is not going to change his view of the United States, which is pretty bad, and he has already convinced himself that we want regime change. It’s not really going to change what the Russian population thinks, because Russia’s state-run media has been telling them for a long time that the United States is the enemy, and that it was going to use Ukraine as a way of invading Russia. I think it’s more that we officially, as the United States, don’t go around saying that we want regime change, and the line is that it’s up to the people of country X to decide who their ruler is.

Sometimes we do go around saying that we want regime change and decide that for other countries, but, yes, go on.

Yeah. Saddam Hussein, for example. But I think it’s partly because what we’re supposed to say, or what it’s politically correct to say, is that it’s up to the citizens of each country to elect their leader. But I think there is also, possibly, a concern not that Putin’s view of the United States has now changed but that Putin and the people around him can use what President Biden said as a way to justify an even harsher military onslaught in Ukraine, and maybe to prolong the war. I personally don’t really think that saying something like that is going to have an impact on what they actually do, but the concern is that they could use what he said to justify that.

Right, but then it seems like everyone is playacting to some degree. Putin is pretending that he’s found something new out, his propaganda will say the same thing, and people in the West will say, “You shouldn’t have said this, because Putin’s going to use it.”

Yeah. But I think the other thing is the European allies. Biden has worked very hard, and he’s been very successful in getting everyone on board with his policy. And I guess to say something like that, which is not what the other European leaders are going to say, could also cause some more ripples in trying to keep this coalition together.

I was reading your most recent book, and one point you make is that it can be especially important to have communications between the American and Russian Presidents because there aren’t that many lower-level diplomatic communications, or as many cordial relationships between the two countries at many different levels as there are with American allies, and so on. Is that a fair characterization?

Yes, and I would say it’s even more so now because of all the expulsions of diplomats and spies in the past few years. We have a skeleton staff at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. We do have the Ambassador, who is a holdover from the Trump Administration. He hasn’t gone, thank goodness. But there’s really very few channels for communication left anymore. And, whereas you do have European leaders who’ve met with Putin physically, or speak to him daily on the phone, apart from a couple of phone calls that President Biden had with Putin in the last month, as far as we know there has been no direct communication between them.

Is that problematic? Do you think that the White House should take more of a proactive approach to talking with him?

Yeah. I think a number of people have for the past month been saying, “If only there was someone, an American, who could go and have a private channel and talk to Putin.” Henry Kissinger used to meet regularly with Putin as a back channel. And now, again, as far as we know there is no one who is performing that function, and, in a way, it would be good if there could be someone who could meet with him. I don’t know what it would produce, but at least make the gesture of trying to figure out if there’s some other way of getting through to him. It’s very difficult to do that, but I think it would be better. I think the lack of communication at the top is something that has to worry us. There are channels of communication. We know that at lower levels, for instance, there are military channels still going on so that hopefully there won’t be any direct conflict between Russia and any NATO member. But that doesn’t seem to be happening too much at the higher levels.

You’ve written extensively about the Russian-German relationship going back to the Cold War. There’s been a lot written in the West about how this has been a transformational moment for Germany in terms of its military, in terms of its energy supplies. But Volodymyr Zelensky has seemed, when he’s talked about it recently, more skeptical that Germany has completely gone in this direction, and moved away from Russia. What is your sense?

       FILE - In this Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021 file photo, vials for the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines are displayed on a tray at a temporary clinic set up by the New Hampshire National Guard in the parking lot of a high school in Exeter, N.H. The Food and Drug Administration ruled that transplant recipients and other similarly immune-compromised patients can get a third dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. But the decision, late Thursday night, Aug. 12, 2021, offers an extra dose only to those high-risk groups -- not the general public. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) Charles Krupa/AP   Biden administration panned for sidestepping advisory panel to allow fourth COVID shot   Haisten Willis  March 29, 05:11 PM March 29, 05:11 PM  The Biden administration's approval of a fourth mRNA COVID-19 shot for those 50 and older has raised eyebrows in political and medical circles.  The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for older adults and people as young as 12 with certain immune deficiencies but did so without convening a meeting of its panel of vaccine experts first, a move that angered healthcare experts skeptical of a fourth shot’s utility.  Video Embed FDA AUTHORIZES SECOND BOOSTERS OF MRNA COVID-19 VACCINES FOR ADULTS OVER 50  "When last asked about boosters, the FDA's advisory committee on vaccines voted 16-2 against authorizing a third COVID-19 shot for people under 65," Heritage Foundation senior fellow Doug Badger wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner. "The FDA hasn't sought their advice ever since."  Badger also questioned FDA's rationale for authorizing the shots, saying the agency doesn't cite any randomized controlled trials concluding that a fourth dose reduces the risk of severe illness, and pointed out that the shots were designed to fight the original strain of COVID-19, which has not been in circulation for nearly two years.  Some public health experts raised similar concerns. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said ignoring input from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee "led to distrust and confusion in the American public" when the third shot was authorized and could do so again this time.  FDA officials did not respond to questions about why it chose to sidestep the committee.  Gandhi noted that many European countries have only approved fourth shots for seniors at least 70 years old and is worried that additional boosters not only won't help younger people but that the decision to allow them for such a large group could lead to a supply crunch.  The authorization comes as the White House and congressional Democrats spar with Republicans over a new $15 billion round of COVID-19 funding. Democrats caution that the money is needed for testing, vaccines, treatments, and research and development, while Republicans counter the money can be redirected from other sources, including previously approved COVID-19 spending. The White House says it has enough money to provide fourth shots for those 50 and over but would need more funding if shots were approved for all age groups.  A final concern for Gandhi is that the FDA's criteria could lead to continual booster approvals that may not be warranted.  "All of these discussions seem to not incorporate cellular immunity in our decisions, only antibody levels, which last around four months after a booster," Gandhi said. "Without a knowledge of the immune system, this discussion of antibodies alone will lead us to want to boost every four months, which is not logistically feasible."  Not all public health experts questioned the move. University of California, Irvine, professor Andrew Noymer said he wasn't sure why the FDA may have bypassed the panel but added that it wasn't a "red flag" for him.  “I think it makes sense to authorize a fourth dose,” he said. “It means that anyone who wants to get one can get one without breaking the rules, and it means insurance companies can cover it.”  It's possible that the Biden administration will eventually authorize a fourth shot for everyone, Noymer said, noting that the virus is still relatively new and that efforts to combat it are evolving.  "We're getting an understanding from data that unfolds in real time," he said. "It's a thorny problem, and I think the FDA's decision makes sense."  The shots will be made available to those who want them, but the FDA is not updating its vaccination recommendation to include a second booster dose yet.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER  Cases are down sharply from January highs, but the latest variant of concern is an omicron offshoot, BA.2, which now represents nearly 86% of all sequenced cases globally, according to the World Health Organization.  In the United States, BA.2 has not overtaken its sister subvariant, BA.1, which drove the devastating omicron surge over the winter months. But it already accounts for more than 54% of sequenced cases nationally. In the Northeast, BA.2 has already overtaken BA.1 as the most dominant variant.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Last Friday, Lakshmi Ganapathi’s son turned 5, and finally became eligible for his first Pfizer COVID shot. Ganapathi’s family had been anticipating that moment for more than a year, yet as of late, she can’t help but feel the slightest bit deflated. At first, the COVID vaccines’ trickle down the age brackets felt worth the wait because the shots were doing such a stellar job at blocking symptoms. The clinical trials kept delivering knockout results: 94 percent efficacy, 95 percent efficacy, 100 percent efficacy, 91 percent efficacy—a near-perfect performance in every tested group from adults to elementary-school-age kids. Then Omicron swept in, slipping around the vaccines’ shields.Researchers studying Pfizer’s vaccine, the only shot available for American kids, began to report drops in protection, especially in children under 12, who receive a lower dose and haven’t yet been told to boost. Moderna, which reportedly plans to seek FDA clearance for its own kid-size shot in mid-April, has turned up lackluster stats too: In clinical trials, the vaccine blocked symptomatic illness just 40 percent of the time, thanks again in part to Omicron’s antibody-dodging ways. After all the anticipation, Ganapathi, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital, still wants what any parent does—the best option possible for their child—which is why her son got his first dose this morning. But that hope suddenly feels a little hard to square with such anticlimactic data. “If he’s going to face COVID,” she told me, “I want to set him up to be as prepared as he can be.”[Read: America is about to test how long ‘normal’ can hold]An infant-and-toddler COVID vaccine, perhaps even two, could debut by summer’s start, if the FDA and the CDC give their official nods. But those long-awaited shots may not be met with much fanfare. “If this were January, I’d be like, Oh my god, get me whatever,” says Stephanie Langel, an immunologist at Duke University, whose son will turn 2 in July. Now that cases have come down, and Omicron has all but guaranteed that our original-recipe shots won’t deliver the same perks they once did, the decisions are tougher for everyone involved. The other COVID vaccines in our roster easily cleared the thresholds that had been set for success. In this last inoculation stretch, the tiniest doses on the table will push parents and federal regulators to grapple, in ways they haven’t before, with what makes a COVID vaccine good enough.The path to regulatory clearance for kids’ COVID vaccines has, by necessity, looked different from the one for adults. When our shots were untested, it made sense to inject huge numbers of adults and wait to see who fell ill. But throughout the pandemic, kids haven’t gotten sick as seriously or frequently as adults. Chasing efficacy data for them would have required “a very long, very large study,” says Ofer Levy, the director of the precision-vaccines program at Boston Children’s Hospital, who also sits on a committee that advises the FDA on COVID vaccines. Instead, the FDA let vaccine makers opt for a common alternative called immunobridging, in which researchers identify a group of people in whom vaccines are working very well (say, healthy adults), figure out what immune responses (such as antibody levels) are typical to them, then try to coax the same results out of another population (kids).[Read: What actually changed for little kids’ vaccines?]The process is trickier than it might at first sound. The first and foremost consideration for any kids’ immunization has to be safety, experts told me. The more vaccine in each shot, the more side effects it might cause. So companies tend to go after “the smallest dose possible that will still be as effective as possible,” Buddy Creech, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he’s running one of Moderna’s pediatric vaccine trials, told me in January. After tinkering with different amounts of mRNA in early-stage trials, Pfizer sliced its doses in rough thirds, offering 30 micrograms to individuals 12 and older, 10 micrograms to 5-to-11-year-olds, and three micrograms to kids under 5. Moderna, meanwhile, cut in halves, giving 100 micrograms to everyone 12 and up, 50 micrograms to 6-to-11-year-olds, and 25 micrograms to children under 6.Each company then ran much larger trials, to see if the antibody data—the information they’d need to present to the FDA—would hold, and to keep monitoring for bad side effects. At this juncture, both companies say they’re meeting safety criteria. Based on the information the firms have made public, “the rates of significant fevers are about on par with other vaccines” we give to kids, which is encouraging, Creech told me. (In Pfizer’s trial, researchers marked fevers as “severe” when they crested above 102 degrees Fahrenheit; in the Moderna trial, a few kids had fevers above 104 degrees.) But in the antibody realm, two doses of Pfizer’s three-microgram dose, which is still in trials, fell short in the 2-to-4-year-old group, prompting the company to add a third shot for all kids younger than 5. Moderna’s two 25-microgram doses for the under-6 crowd, however, did eke out enough antibodies to go toe-to-toe with adults.If antibodies were the end-all-be-all, Moderna’s infant-and-toddler vaccine might, in theory, be a total shoo-in. But alas, they are not. When efficacy numbers are available, they tend to trump all else—and during Moderna’s trials, enough infections, many of them caused by Omicron, swept through the kids enrolled in the study that the company suddenly had sufficient data to calculate the vaccine’s bigger-picture performance. And there, some might argue, is where the shot started to fall short.Back in June 2020, when COVID vaccines were still early in the pipeline, the FDA put its foot down: Successful COVID-19 shots, the agency said at the time, would need to “prevent disease or decrease its severity in at least 50 percent of people who are vaccinated.” The results in adult populations blew straight past that benchmark; now the data from kids seems like they may barely be grasping at it. (The FDA did not respond to my questions about whether that 50 percent efficacy standard applied to kids, who were meant to get by with immunobridging. A spokesperson said only that “we remain committed to conducting a timely and thorough evaluation of the available data and information on the use of COVID-19 vaccines in the youngest children.”)The numbers for infants and toddlers haven’t been … the best. “No one would argue that 40 percent protection is great,” Chandy John, a pediatrician at Indiana University, told me. Here, it’s tempting to blame the dose: Maybe just a little more mRNA would have nudged Moderna’s numbers right over the edge. Similar concerns have been raised about Pfizer’s vaccine, which in a recent study didn’t protect 5-to-11-year-old kids from infection or disease for as long as expected, even though the 10-microgram dose they received had met its immunobridging benchmark in clinical trials. (Another study released shortly after, however, found more encouraging results.) Perhaps immunobridging actually led each company to slightly undershoot their dose size.[Read: Why are we microdosing vaccines for kids?]At this point, such questions are fair game. Immunobridging can be a bigger gamble when researchers haven’t yet identified a specific antibody level above which people can generally be considered well shielded from disease. If such a threshold exists for SARS-CoV-2, it may not translate perfectly among age groups, Levy points out. Perhaps kids actually need more antibodies than adults do to hit the same efficacy benchmarks. Immunobridging was the most practical option for getting vaccines to kids swiftly, Levy said. But “it may not tell the whole story.”That said, Levy and the other experts I spoke with tend to more strongly implicate another culprit: the virus itself. Realistically, with kids’ trials running two doses of original-recipe vaccine during the Omicron era, the shots were probably never going to generate the knockout numbers that the adult shots did. There are now too many viral mutations in the picture; Moderna’s ballpark efficacy of 40 percent is “kind of what we would expect,” especially when transmission rates were as high as they were this past winter, Langel told me. It’s better, even, than the effectiveness of flu shots in years with vaccine-strain mismatches. In a press briefing last week, Anthony Fauci shared similar sentiments. Moderna’s new stats are “quite comparable,” he said, to what scientists have been seeing in other populations as of late. In adults, two mRNA doses just haven’t been as potent as three. All things considered, Fauci said, “the data looks pretty good.” It’s very possible that, were we to rerun studies in adults now, against Omicron, two full-size doses would struggle to get to 50 percent efficacy too.[Read: We’re zeroing in on the ‘holy grail’ of COVID-19 immunity]Forty-ish percent efficacy against symptomatic illness may be about as good as we can get with two doses of mRNA vaccines without sacrificing safety. Maybe a bigger dose for kids would budge the numbers up, but “we have to consider the downside in terms of adverse events,” says Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University. (Edwards is a former adviser to the FDA on vaccines, and sits on a safety-monitoring board for Pfizer’s shot.) Fevers in the littlest kids are an especially big concern because they can cause (self-resolving) seizures, so, even if rare, they could pose a major hurdle to clearing a new shot for use. Myocarditis, too, could be a problem: Moderna’s vaccine, which includes more mRNA in each injection, appears to have produced slightly higher rates of the rare heart-inflammation issue than Pfizer’s in young men. (No cases of myocarditis were picked up in Moderna’s under-6 trials.) “I don’t know that we need higher doses,” Creech told me. Rather, he and others think success will come down to the number of doses and their pacing. Vaccine makers could add a third or fourth injection or space the shots further apart, or both. They could even include an extra immune-system-tickling ingredient to rev the body’s defenses further.Some experts said they were already thinking about 40-ish percent as a sort of interim efficacy; third shots for kids now feel more or less inevitable. Ahead of its request for emergency use authorization for its under-6-shot, Moderna is already considering asking the FDA to okay a pediatric booster somewhere down the line, Kate Cronin, the company’s chief brand officer, told me in an email. At this point, Pfizer’s under-5 vaccine will almost certainly be a three-doser, at least to start, and the company is “evaluating a third dose” in 5-to-11-year-olds as a booster, says Jerica Pitts, a company spokesperson.Just a few weeks ago, Sallie Permar, a vaccine expert, an immunologist, and the pediatrician in chief at New York–Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medicine, told me that she hoped a COVID vaccine for kids would hit that 50 percent efficacy mark before getting the FDA’s emergency authorization. Still, if Moderna’s 40 percent efficacy estimate, which is still tentative, holds, “I’m comfortable with that,” she said. Maybe if kids were still dealing with the original version of the coronavirus, efficacy numbers would match what previous trials had produced. But OG SARS-CoV-2 is long gone.Vaccination is a series of judgment calls by institutions and individuals alike: authorizing a new shot, recommending a booster, deciding to sign up for any dose at all. Data can help inform these decisions, but these choices ultimately depend, in part, on the goal they’re meant to further, which might be shielding against severe disease alone—or blocking as many infections as possible. Policies in the U.S. still aren’t clear about what the ultimate aim of COVID vaccination is. And for kids, fewer of whom end up hospitalized with the virus, the possible gains of vaccination are that much murkier. Such a small number of little kids in the clinical trials ended up seriously sick, in fact, that neither Moderna nor Pifzer has yet produced reliable efficacy numbers against severe disease.But children do fall seriously ill with COVID-19. Since the pandemic’s start, the virus has killed more than a thousand kids; thousands more have developed a serious inflammatory condition called MIS-C. The Omicron wave hospitalized the youngest Americans—the least vaccinated Americans—at rates higher than in any other surge. Any chance to avoid those outcomes is a welcome one. Which is where vaccines should shine. In all other age groups, COVID vaccines have been best at guarding people from the most serious forms of disease, and “there’s no reason that wouldn’t hold true” in the youngest among us as well, says Ibukun Kalu, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Duke. Here, again, experts have to lean on comparisons between adults and kids. But the stubbornness of our shots’ strongholds against severe disease should transcend even the hiccups of cross-age immunobridging, even the wiliness of Omicron; that’s fundamental to how the immune system should work. Even in a downer of a scenario, in which efficacy against serious outcomes came out to exactly 40 percent as well, that “would spare a lot of kids being hospitalized,” John, of Indiana University, told me. If the fundamental question facing the FDA is what performance floor it will accept for kids’ COVID vaccines, Permar and other pediatricians think that threshold must ensure that the shots at least stave off the most serious forms of disease. Moderna seems to be banking on this a bit. The antibody levels the company observed in late-stage trials “should provide protection against important and serious disease,” Cronin told me.[Read: Why a three-dose vaccine for young kids might actually work out]Creech also points to a benefit of vaccines that efficacy numbers alone don’t capture. The umbrella of “symptomatic illness” can cover a light bout of the sniffles, a critical case of COVID-19 that’s bad enough to land someone in the ICU or even kill them, and anything in between. But when post-vaccination infections occur, they’re less serious on average, effectively shifting people toward the gentler end of that spectrum of severity. As a parent, Creech told me, he still considers it a huge deal to make a kid’s course of illness less lengthy and cumbersome, even if the shots can’t block symptomatic disease entirely. (Vaccines may also help curb long COVID, which affects children of all ages.) Every year, experts recommend flu shots even though those vaccines, too, tend to top out at about 60 percent effectiveness against illness.These arguments won’t necessarily sway the FDA, especially if case rates stay low. The United States has eased pandemic precautions almost entirely; the FDA’s coming deliberations could reflect that attitude, and mire pediatric shots in dillydallying muck. Vaccines that are “good enough” to green-light when the virus is running roughshod over the country may not pass muster during a quieter period, when the costs of not vaccinating shrink. And without actual efficacy numbers against severe disease, that bit of the risk-benefit equation will be very tough to weigh. Moderna, if it comes before the FDA and CDC first, may even end up getting a conditional okay—recommended only for high-risk kids, for example. At an extreme, if the FDA is dissatisfied with Moderna’s final stats, the agency could ask the company to add a third dose before it gets the official green light.The FDA’s and CDC’s finish lines won’t be the last for the shots to cross, either. For the youngest among us, the final arbiters of which shots are and are not worth their salt are America’s parents—who so far have been rather reluctant to queue their kids up for injections. As the COVID vaccines have shuffled down the age brackets, uptake has declined; with so many people now eager to put the pandemic behind them, these smallest shots may be our least welcome yet. In many ways, the fate of the next crop of pediatric shots may, more than anything else, mirror Americans’ current sense of the crisis.For now, the future feels foggy—which is exactly why Ganapathi, of Boston Children’s Hospital, was so eager to clinch protection for her 5-year-old son. (Her younger son will turn 2 in July, and will hopefully soon follow his brother into an inoculation line.) The next surge, she told me, is a matter of “when, not if.” She briefly considered holding off on giving her son Pfizer, so they could wait for Moderna’s higher-dose, longer-interval under-6 shot to come through. But of the two brands, only Pfizer was available now. “Do I want a more efficacious vaccine for symptomatic disease? The answer is yes,” she told me. “But we can only deal with what we have on hand, and make the best of it.”

It is no exaggeration to say that the history of the United States has never seen an account of a president’s conduct quite so devastating as the first nine pages of Judge David Carter’s opinion of March 28 in Eastman v. Thompson. The opinion, legally speaking, concerns the Jan. 6 committee’s efforts to secure emails from John Eastman, the law professor who provided President Trump with advice aimed at overturning the 2020 election. But that is not why it will be remembered.

Certainly Watergate produced no document about Richard Nixon comparable to it in its combination of brevity, spare factual simplicity, and total evisceration of its subject’s honor and conduct. Nor did Teapot Dome or the Whiskey Ring scandals produce such material concerning Warren Harding or Ulysses S. Grant. Nothing that Lawrence Walsh had to say about Ronald Reagan or that Kenneth Starr wrote about Bill Clinton, both after years of investigation and exposition at great length, remotely approaches it in power.

Yet at the risk infuriating readers, I want to point out a paradox about the opinion: Despite the power of its narrative, despite its correct statement that Trump likely violated criminal laws, and despite its laying out the contours of those violations clearly and without apparent ambiguity, the opinion will actually not necessitate a Justice Department criminal investigation of the former president.

Before explaining this point, I want to take a moment to appreciate a genuinely historic piece of judicial writing. The opinion’s first section—entitled “A. Facts”—begins on page three of Judge Carter’s opinion and runs through the middle of page 12. In a footnote attached to the word “Facts” in the subhead leading the section, Carter notes in a fashion characteristic of the section’s understatement, “In this discussion, the Court relies solely on facts provided by Dr. Eastman and the Select Committee in their briefing and attached exhibits.”

He is not exaggerating. The section contains no judgments, no legal interpretations, no conclusions. It contains virtually no rhetoric at all. What’s more, the section does not contain a whole lot of new facts. The story of Eastman and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the relationship between that effort and Trump’s concurrent plot to decapitate the Justice Department, and ultimately to the insurrectionary activity of Jan. 6, 2021, has dribbled out bit by bit over months already. And to the extent the current litigation has revealed new material, that mostly emerged in the committee’s briefing and the accompanying exhibits a few weeks ago.

What makes Judge Carter’s account so powerful is that it is linked tightly to record evidence, that it tells the story in an end-to-end fashion crisply and efficiently, and that it thus assembles the evidence into a coherent account of the big picture. I cannot do Carter’s account justice; please do read it. For present purposes, let me just say that it leaves the fair-minded reader in no doubt that the events that took place between Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls and congressional certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 were an all-out effort by the lame duck president to seize and retain power in unapologetic defiance of the law using extra-constitutional means—up to and including violence directed against a coordinate branch of government.

Such a story requires no denunciation from the judge. His account of it alone constitutes its own denunciation, at least it should to decent citizens of a functioning democracy.

Judge Carter’s opinion is attracting attention less because of its opening section than because of its final one, in which he finds that Trump likely committed crimes and that Eastman’s attorney work product, in one instance, is thus not privileged under the crime-fraud exception to the attorney work product doctrine.

On its own terms, the opinion seems uncomplicatedly correct on this point. The question before Judge Carter is whether it is more likely than not that Eastman’s legal services were being used in furtherance of a crime. The standard of proof here is relatively low—the preponderance of the evidence—and the judge did not have before him the many arguments that would complicate, say, an attempt actually to prosecute Trump or Eastman for these crimes.

In this context, the judge certainly appears to be correct that Trump was using Eastman’s legal services in conduct that, as a prima facie matter, violates both 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) and 18 U.S.C. § 371, the former of which forbids the corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding and the latter of which criminalizes conspiring to defraud the United States. In at least one important respect, Carter goes significantly beyond holding that the evidence meets what he takes to be the relevant legal threshold in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He writes specifically that the evidence before him “exceed[s]” even the showing necessary to find that Trump acted corruptly, and he cites voluminous evidence that the former president and Eastman both knew full well that Eastman’s legal arguments were nonsense and that his proposed course of action was unlawful. To have a judge write this, all tied rigorously to specific pieces of evidence, about a former president’s mental state and conscious awareness of criminality is no small matter.

In any event, it is difficult to disagree with Judge Carter that “[b]ased on the evidence ... it is more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” And it is just as difficult to disagree with him that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session[.]”

So I know what you’re thinking: If the opinion is devastating and if it correctly concludes that the president probably committed crimes, doesn’t that require a criminal investigation on the part of the Justice Department?

The answer to that question is complicated in a fashion I am sure will annoy many readers. First, an investigation may already be open. Second, Judge Carter’s opinion could well trigger one if one does not already exist—both of Trump and particularly of Eastman—by changing the Justice Department’s discretionary judgment about whether an investigation is wise at this time. After all, a federal judge saying that crimes have probably been committed in a high-profile matter doesn’t happen every day. That said, third, for reasons I will explain, the decision doesn’t require anything of the Justice Department. If the department has decided for legal reasons that a prosecution of Trump in this matter could not happen—and there are reasons to worry it may have done so, in my view—this opinion will not force it to shift gears.

An important preliminary matter of background: The specific context of Judge Carter’s opinion matters a great deal. The point of this opinion was not to determine whether the former president committed crimes but whether privilege protects certain documents against production to the committee. As such, the judge was using a different standard of evidence and he was not focusing on certain questions the Justice Department will certainly consider. Carter himself acknowledges this point clearly in the final paragraph of his opinion, the one place in the entire opinion where his rhetoric crosses the line into needless rhetorical grandstanding:

More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. This case cannot provide it. The Court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit. At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of “legal theories” gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself. (emphasis added)

Amidst the judge’s apparent call for prosecution, in other words, is a frank acknowledgement that his task is different from the department’s.

Remember also that the facts on the basis of which Judge Carter ruled on Monday have been available to the Justice Department for some time, and the department has long been capable of doing the same legal analysis as Carter did on its own—as, indeed, the committee itself has done and outside analysts have done as well. So the first possibility, as a group of Lawfare writers acknowledged (myself included) back when the committee filed its brief in this case, is that the Justice Department already has opened a case based on these facts. It might be the case, we wrote then:

that the Justice Department or FBI is already quietly investigating these charges (or similar ones) and never needed any prodding from anyone. If that’s the case, then the department is certainly showing extraordinary—even admirable—stealth. At a minimum, we can say with confidence that an investigation, if it has been opened, has not taken the kind of overt investigative steps that make news. The press is aware of no witnesses or documents that have been subpoenaed nor of any search warrants that have been executed. If such an investigation exists, it remains at a relatively preliminary stage.

A related possibility is that there is no specific investigation of this matter in isolation, just the larger investigation of possible crimes committed in connection with Jan. 6, of which this fact pattern presents one among many. Investigations, after all, tend to center around crimes, not people, with the individuals and suspects coming into and going out of investigative scope at different times. In other words, it is possible that as part of the investigation of Jan. 6, the department is considering whether obstruction and conspiracy were committed by Eastman, Trump and others.

What is completely clear, however, is that if the Justice Department has not opened a criminal investigation of Trump and Eastman or contemplated obstruction or conspiracy by them in the context of the larger Jan. 6 investigation, it is not because the evidence on which Judge Carter ruled Monday has been unavailable to the FBI and prosecutors.

In the Lawfare discussion of the committee’s brief early this month, we posited that the likely explanation was discretionary, if the Justice Department were indeed not active on the matter. Perhaps the department is deferring to the committee’s investigation, letting the committee develop the facts on this matter of the president while the department focuses on seditious conspiracy cases against the Oath Keepers, for example.

We also described “[a]nother possibility” that we thought “more remote”: “that the department has studied the legal argument the committee is making and has, for some reason, concluded as a matter of law that it would or could never bring a such a case—and thus that it should not conduct a criminal investigation of a former president based on this theory.”

In reflecting on the matter since helping to write that piece, I have come to think that the legal factors may actually predominate over the discretionary ones. That is to say, if there is no ongoing Justice Department activity with respect to Trump’s conduct under either § 1512(c)(2) or § 371, that may well be because the Justice Department’s own interpretation of the law of the application of criminal statutes to the president makes prosecuting the president difficult—or because the department simply hasn’t made a final decision yet on how the legal principles intersect. If this is correct, Judge Carter’s opinion will likely change nothing.

To understand this point, let’s go back to the time when the Mueller report came out and much of American legal thought (myself certainly included) concluded that the report contained unambiguous evidence of obstruction of justice on Trump’s part.

Writing on Lawfare at the time in this site’s proudest tradition of questioning accepted wisdom when doing so will enrage the most people, Jack Goldsmith raised an important problem:

In a much-cited 1995 opinion by Walter Dellinger, OLC described the presidential clear statement rule as follows: “[G]eneral statutes must be read as not applying to the President if they do not expressly apply where application would arguably limit the President's constitutional role.” Please read this sentence carefully. It says that general statutes—i.e., ones like the obstruction statutes that do not specifically regulate the president—“must” (not may) be read as “not applying to the president” if they do not “expressly” apply, where (i.e., if) application of the statute would “arguably” (not definitely, arguably) “limit” the president’s constitutional role. Dellinger also says: “[S]tatutes that do not expressly apply to the President must be construed as not applying to the President if such application would involve a possible conflict with the President’s constitutional prerogatives” (emphasis added). Other OLC opinions contain similarly broad formulations of the clear statement rule. OLC (or, in one case, the deputy attorney general) has relied on the clear statement rule in at least the four opinions listed below in the Appendix to this piece, though there are probably more. (OLC’s 1996 opus on separation of powers also expressed the rule in broad terms.) In every one of these four opinions, the Justice Department applied a version of the clear statement rule to conclude that a generally worded statute did not apply to the president.

Now let’s leave aside for a moment the question of whether Goldsmith was right that Mueller botched his analysis of the clear statement rule and thus misinterpreted the obstruction statutes. (Goldsmith and I debated the matter at the time, also in the highest tradition of this site, and suffice it to say that I very much hope I prevailed and very much fear I did not.) That question is immaterial to the matter at hand today.

And let’s leave aside as well the question of whether OLC’s interpretation of the clear statement rule has merit—on which matter I am certain I disagree with the executive branch’s historical position, which seems to me extravagant. That question is also immaterial to the matter at hand today.

For present purposes, the only thing that matters is that OLC, in fact, has historically taken this position. And at least until its opinions on the subject are overturned either by OLC itself or by the attorney general or the president, OLC opinions bind the executive branch—though they do not bind Judge Carter.

In other words, while the question before Judge Carter was whether it is more likely than not that Trump violated these two statutes as best interpreted, the question before the Justice Department (unless Attorney General Merrick Garland is willing to reopen decades of OLC precedent) is whether Trump may have violated either of them given that both “must be read as not applying to the President if they do not expressly apply where application would arguably limit the President's constitutional role.” While this additional interpretive baggage does not constrain Judge Carter, the Supreme Court decisions that lie beneath it do. Without the benefit of briefing on those decisions that, in the Justice Department’s view, give rise to the clear statement rule, Judge Carter is working with the statutes in a somewhat simpler form than the Justice Department confronts them.

Note that § 1512(c) is the same obstruction statute that Mueller was dealing with, and that Goldsmith and I were arguing about, and that § 371 no more by its terms applies to presidential conduct than the obstruction statute does.

Note also that it’s certainly possible to distinguish the clear statement rule analysis in this instance from its application to obstruction cases in the Mueller report, so the need to consider it here does not fully answer the question of whether and to what degree it would impede a prosecution under either of these laws. It’s possible, after all, to argue that it’s one thing to apply the obstruction statute where, as in the firing of the FBI director or the attempt to fire the special counsel, you’re contemplating the president’s indictment based on a corrupt exercise of a core and exclusive presidential power—and quite a different matter to preclude application of federal criminal law to a blatant attempt to subvert an election, an activity that does not in any way further the president’s constitutional role. The president, after all, has no role in certifying the election under the Constitution or the Electoral Count Act—the matter in which Eastman was encouraging Trump to interfere.

On the other hand, proponents of executive power might argue, presidents put pressure on vice presidents to carry their water all the time. Surely, criminalizing such an action would “arguably limit the President’s constitutional role.”

Again, my point here is not that this view of the law is correct. My point is only that the Justice Department accepts some version of the clear statement rule, which thus creates a hurdle for the department in contemplating a prosecution of Trump based on the shameful fact pattern that Judge Carter’s opinion lays out. It’s a hurdle that Carter himself did not confront.

To make matters more complicated, the boundaries of the clear statement rule are genuinely contested. There is wide disagreement over both when the rule should be applied and, when applied, what conduct fits within its scope. To know how it might be affecting a possible investigation of Trump’s conduct around Jan. 6, we would have to understand both whether the department thinks the rule applies here at all, what scope it believes the rule to have if it does apply, and how it applies that scope to the conduct at issue.

Yet we actually don’t know how far the Justice Department has gone on the question of the clear statement rule. The reason is that there was almost certainly OLC work product in the context of Attorney General William Barr’s consideration of § 1512(c)(2) when Barr was responding to the Mueller report. But we don’t know how far OLC went in this work in limiting that statute’s application to presidential behavior or how its opinions were reasoned. We also don’t know whether any of those opinions may have been withdrawn by the new administration, some of whose lawyers are known to be hostile to an expansive reading of the rule.

So if you think I’m being eccentric and finicky in thinking that this is an issue on which Justice Department lawyers will spend a lot of time before indicting a former president, consider how Mueller himself handled the issue. As Goldsmith pointed out in our exchange at the time:

One problem with these criticisms of the clear statement rule for purposes of assessing the Mueller report’s legal analysis is that the Mueller report disagrees with them. The [Mueller Report] asserts without qualification that the clear statement rule, which it described as a “requirement,” applies to the obstruction statutes. It maintains without qualification that “the Supreme Court has applied that clear-statement rule in several cases.” It also notes that the Department of Justice “has relied on this clear-statement principle to interpret certain statutes as not applying to the President at all, similar to the approach taken in Franklin.” The report doesn’t hem and haw about the legitimacy of the clear statement rule. It accepts the rule in the broad formulation set out by OLC chief Walter Dellinger in the 1995 OLC memo. And then it purports to apply the rule in a way that I criticize, and that none of the critics defend.

If this question caused Mueller to write a lengthy legal analysis before proceeding to not conclude that Trump committed a prosecutable crime, expect Garland to spend some quality time with the question before concluding that Trump did.

To be sure, a Supreme Court ruling contrary to OLC’s view of the clear statement rule would force OLC to rethink its opinions, and an appeals court decision might well prompt reconsideration. But a district court opinion that does not confront the issue of the clear statement rule at all will not change the Justice Department’s view. And this matter is not likely to generate appellate review, since Eastman has decided not to appeal the decision. So if the Justice Department does not already have an investigation open on this matter, Judge Carter’s opinion will not force it to open one—though the moral suasion of the story itself may well affect the department’s discretionary decisions.

All of which, in my view, has a number of important implications:

First and easiest, the discussion above applies to Donald Trump only. It does not apply to John Eastman. To the extent the Justice Department does not have an open investigation related to Eastman’s conduct in this area, that seems like an indefensibly cautious exercise of discretion. A federal judge has now identified Eastman’s likely criminal activity in what amounts to a presidentially led insurrection—and has done so very publicly in a credibly detailed, significant opinion. It is unfathomable to me that the Justice Department would not now consider action of its own.

With respect to Trump, the department here is in a genuinely tough spot. A lot of commentators will try to make it sound easy. It isn’t easy. Perhaps the most important thing the Justice Department could do is release any OLC opinions from the Mueller report period that might exist bearing on how broadly it has interpreted the clear statement rule with respect to these statutes. More generally, an indication that the department is considering the Eastman case would go a long way to making clear to the public that it is at least thinking about the criminal implications of Trump’s conduct in this period.

In the long run, the most important public policy implications are for Congress. After writing his critique of the Mueller obstruction memo, Goldsmith went on, writing with Bob Bauer in the book After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, to urge Congress to fix this problem by applying these statutes clearly to presidential conduct. “It is an intolerable state of affairs for the president, Congress, and the American people not to have a clearer sense of whether and under what conditions the president can obstruct justice,” they write. Their admonition rings even truer today than it did when Bauer and Goldsmith wrote it. If not for Trump, then for future presidents of comparably low character, the problem that may be holding up the Justice Department really needs to be fixed.

The Jan. 6 committee has made some important noises about clarifying that Trump’s conduct was illegal. This is the low-hanging fruit in that effort. It shouldn’t continue to escape Congress’s attention.

Because when a federal judge writes the most devastating account of a president in American history, the public really should be able to expect criminal charges.

After years of moving around, alternately settling down and touring, Joplin moved to New York City in 1907. But he did not take his place among the cadre of Black musicians who had gathered there by this time, who infused mainstream pop with a Black element. These musicians, often followed by white musicians who reaped more of the glory and rewards, provided the jolt that transformed the Broadway sound: Will Marion Cook, Bob Cole and the brothers J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson got this ball rolling starting at the end of the 19th century, influencing white musicians such as Berlin, Jerome Kern and the now lesser-known Louis Hirsch, celebrated as revolutionizing the show tune.

The more you study his life and career, the more it seems that Joplin was less devoted to Broadway, even though he reportedly wrote a few stage works that are now lost. My sense is that, despite having been a member of the Colored Vaudevillian Benevolent Association, Joplin was not as passionate about the performer-centered genres of vaudeville and Broadway: He wanted audiences to focus on the music itself.

The culmination of Joplin’s trajectory was an opera, “Treemonisha.” It was not precisely a ragtime opera, and not quite a folk opera, though in some ways he anticipated George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” “Treemonisha” is the story of a Black woman in a small town who uses her education to coax her people away from belief in ghosts and charms, and the sinister peddlers who make their living selling them to the naïve. He had trouble drawing interest from publishers, and Joplin’s life ended in illness and poverty, scraping by in an essentially common-law marriage.

The soundtrack of the 1973 heist comedy “The Sting,” with its signature piece, “The Entertainer,” brought his music back into public attention decades later, and the result was a ragtime revival, with E.L. Doctorow writing 1975’s “Ragtime,” a novel that was adapted for the screen in 1981, and a production and recording of “Treemonisha.” But “The Sting” will turn 50 next year, and ragtime is about as obscure now as it was before that movie came along. Why, then, is Joplin important today?

First, there is the sheer beauty of his work. The Joplin pieces you’re still likely to hear today are “The Entertainer” — partly because it’s relatively easy to play — and “Maple Leaf Rag,” because it’s God. But Joplin wrote many other pieces, less known but musically richer than those two, which sit in the mind right alongside Chopin: “Gladiolus Rag,” “Wall Street Rag,” “Magnetic Rag,” “Euphonic Sounds” and others deserve more attention. I have most recently enjoyed Richard Dowling’s recording of Joplin’s catalog. Also, the pianist Lara Downes has just released a fascinating album of creative interpretations of Joplin’s work. Wednesday in New York City, she and I will be talking about his work and why it matters.

The conventional wisdom is that Vladimir Putin catastrophically miscalculated.

He thought Russian-speaking Ukrainians would welcome his troops. They didn’t. He thought he’d swiftly depose Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. He hasn’t. He thought he’d divide NATO. He’s united it. He thought he had sanction-proofed his economy. He’s wrecked it. He thought the Chinese would help him out. They’re hedging their bets. He thought his modernized military would make mincemeat of Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians are making mincemeat of his, at least on some fronts.

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.” Russia’s sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv — two heavily Russian-speaking cities that Putin claims to be “liberating” from Ukrainian oppression — resemble what the Nazis did to Warsaw, and what Putin himself did to Grozny.

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

Some people see tragedy—such as the one currently unfolding in Ukraine—and wonder how a higher power could ever let such a thing happen. This is also known as "theodicy," or the puzzle of why a good God does not intercede to limit or prevent suffering. In other words, this is the problem of evil. What we know of God, at least in the monotheistic faiths, is that he could intercede. And if he is capable of stopping a great injustice from happening, the fact that he doesn't suggests that he is choosing not to stop it. This is intuitive enough, but there are a number of complications that arise from this response to the question of why things that shouldn't happen do. The most obvious complication is that the notion of "choice" is an intrinsically human one. What does it really mean to say that God is choosing to do one thing over another thing? Is God capable of choice in such a manner, or is the act of choosing wrapped up in the fact of human fallibility and finitude? To be conflicted about two potential paths is only possible in light of uncertainty and moral dilemmas. These are human experiences, and it is unclear whether they can be applied to God in any meaningful sense.  If God intervened, which tragedies would meet the requisite threshold? Would he only intervene in the case of genocides, but not mass killings? If mass killings qualified, what about diseases that seem to extinguish life randomly and unfairly—individual tragedies that accumulate into profound collective loss? Then there is the matter of free will. Accountability in the eyes of God—usually in the form of final judgment in the hereafter—only makes sense if humans have some freedom to choose between right and wrong. If they are not free to decide, then it would contravene logic to say that they should be punished for something they had no control over in the first place. Obviously, various religious traditions subscribe to some form of predestination. It is possible to say that God's will contains paradoxes that humans cannot decipher, and that to attempt to divine a rational explanation for punishment and salvation is infringing on God's mystery. If, however, you are willing to accept a "rationalist" account of God's decision-making, then it would follow that God cannot stop individuals from committing horrendous acts against their fellow human beings, because this would undermine the entire structure of divine accountability. In other words, if God had somehow acted to prevent Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine in the days leading up to that fateful decision, then this would, in effect, negate Putin's freedom to decide. What Putin did is not particularly unique in the sweep of human history (although it may seem unique to us moderns), so if God were to "intervene" against Putin, it would necessitate preemptively intervening in perhaps millions of comparable scenarios relating to invasion, war, and oppression that are (or were) the norm in the human experience. So then we're left with a situation of profound injustice, one that is only likely to get worse in the weeks and months to come. There is a reasonable chance that Putin will get away with it. I suppose I am odd, but it's in times of tragedy like this when my belief in God is strengthened. Because I am not willing to accept a world in which justice is beyond us. And perhaps the only prospect of true and ultimate justice for Putin, and those like him, is that they face their reckoning in the next life, if not necessarily in this one. To be sure, limited justice is possible in the here and now—if the Russian military is repelled and Ukraine survives as a sovereign nation. We should hope for that and fight for that, with every means at our disposal. But even if Russian forces leave Ukraine in defeat and disgrace, Putin will likely still be able to live his remaining years in relative comfort. What belief in God allows us, then, is the knowledge that justice may be delayed, but it will come in due time. I believe that heaven and hell exist. But even if they don't, it would be better to believe that they do, especially now.

Last night at the Oscars, Chris Rock made a dumb joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, which prompted her husband—Will Smith—to walk up on stage and slap him across the face. In the year 2022, we are unaccustomed to witnessing notable public figures engage in spontaneous acts of violence, and thus the slap is all anyone can talk about. My colleague, Eric Boehm, had this take.
I agree with him, but this is definitely a two-take event. Additionally, I would like to note that Will Smith has reminded everyone precisely why it is so dangerous to erode the critical post-enlightenment distinction between words and actions. This distinction was a social innovation that made violence less necessary and thus less common; woke liberals trying to reassert the equivalence between speech and violence are (perhaps inadvertently) harkening back to a more barbaric time.
For most of human history, people did in fact live their truth: Speech was violence, and anyone who said something offensive could invite reprisal. People who offended their neighbors would engage in blood feuds for generations. People who offended the political authorities could be dismembered. People who offended the religious authorities could be burned to death. Speech was not viewed as some special, separate category of behavior: Impugning another person's reputation could be considered a provocative act, the same as striking him in the face.
Letting people kill each other every time they get upset about something is not a great way to run a society. Thankfully, over the past three hundred years, many advanced civilizations have evolved cultural norms that delineate words and actions. It's not a universal rule, of course: People do still come to blows after quarreling, though the fact that they can be arrested for such conduct tends to discourage it. Over time, it has become less and less common to encounter reciprocal violence, outside of a few exceptional scenarios: prisons (which contain disproportionate numbers of anti-social people), schools (where kids are still learning how to socialize), and, sometimes, bars (where alcohol lowers inhibitions).
On Twitter, Bridget Phetasy says that Smith's slap shows that "we've reached the inevitable conclusion of 'words are violence.'" The Atlantic's Elizabeth Bruenig pushed back:

i don't know i think fighting a guy who talked shit about your girl is like a historical constant right? there were historical periods in which that was like a legitimate legal reason to do violence against someone lol https://t.co/GyTEZpLzJ2
— Elizabeth Bruenig (@ebruenig) March 28, 2022

They're both right. People attacking each other is what results from a norm of "words are violence"—and we know this because it was the norm for most of human history. That's not so much the case now, but it always could be again. It's why a healthy level of contempt for Smith's behavior is the right attitude. Don't hit people, even if you dislike what they say.
And don't be this person.

It is violence to mock someone's health condition and vulnerability.
It is violence to physically assault someone. 
It is violence to not take responsibility for violent actions.
It is violence to allow and excuse violence. 
It is violence to call for violence.
— Yuh-Line Niou (@yuhline) March 28, 2022

The post Will Smith Reminds Us Why Words Should Not Be Equivalent to Violence appeared first on Reason.com.

(Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)For my Evangelical readers, let me begin with a quick question. If I told you that the chief of staff to the former president of the United States was a committed Christian, would you think that a good thing?If you answered yes, then you’d likely also believe it was a good thing that one of the former president’s personal lawyers was so openly and proudly Evangelical that this was her pinned tweet (the tweet you put at the top of your Twitter profile): “I’m going on record now: If they try to cancel Christianity, if they try to force me to apologize or recant my Faith, I will not bend, I will not waver, I will not break. On Christ the solid Rock I stand. And I’m proud to be an American.”You might then be overjoyed to know that one of the Republican Party’s most prominent young senators was so theologically literate that he once wrote in Christianity Today, (a flagship Evangelical publication) a thought-provoking essay about how Pelagianism has corrupted our culture. Indeed, in the Christian conservative movement of my youth, this triple achievement—an Evangelical chief of staff, an Evangelical presidential lawyer, and a rising-star Evangelical intellectual senator—would have been viewed as a triumph for the church and for the nation. Indeed, as a kid I remember being thrilled when I learned a famous athlete, celebrity, or leading politician shared my faith.Why? For two reasons. First, to borrow a line that you more often hear from the Left, representation matters. When you see someone like you at the heights of culture it signals that you have a place in this land. And I grew up at a time when Evangelicals were perceiving the walls of elite culture closing in, and that our place in the culture (and even our religious liberty) was increasingly tenuous. And many of those concerns were real. I did not spend the first two decades of my professional life litigating against imaginary wrongs. Christian student groups were being tossed off campus. Newspapers were being confiscated by colleges and thrown in the trash. College professors were being denied career opportunities because of their politics and faith. Many of those legal concerns continue to this day. The defense of liberty requires constant vigilance.Second, we cheered the ascent of Christians to the height of power because we believed—in our heart of hearts—that they shared basic moral and political commitments that were good for our country. To simplify the analysis, the presence of outspoken, unashamed Evangelicals in the halls of power meant good people exercising godly discernment and wisdom to do good things for the country we love.But let’s revisit our three examples above. The first person I’m referring to is former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. At a critical moment in American history, his Christianity manifested itself in a fervent, faith-filled effort to steal an American election—an effort fueled by an avalanche of lies. Do you doubt his faith motives? Here’s one of his texts to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas:This is a fight of good versus evil . . . Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.Then we have the second person, Trump attorney Jenna Ellis. Few people spewed more outright falsehoods about the presidential election than Ellis. If you doubt that for a moment, I’d urge you to read this complaint filed against her at the Colorado Supreme Court. The last person is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, and this picture is worth a thousand words:The Recount @therecountHere's Sen. Josh Hawley on January 6: May 4th 202192 Retweets347 LikesLast month, I published a Sunday essay that made a number of people extremely angry. It was called “The Seeds of Political Violence Are Being Sown in Church.”  In the piece I noted that Michael Flynn, a man who called for martial law to help overturn the election, was packing churches across America as part of a “ReAwaken America” tour that was so thoroughly Christian that it was sponsored by one of Pentecostal Christianity’s most important publications, Charisma News. The response to my essay can best be described as “volcanic.” But not because I got my facts wrong. The threats I described in the piece are real. The attendance of thousands upon thousands of Christians at those rallies is real. Flynn’s record is well-documented. The recent record of religiously motivated political violence was very real. (While the Twitter response was furious, I got a number of private messages from prominent Christians who told me that, if anything, I’d understated the problem. I often find a distinct difference in the public and private responses to my pieces.)If I could distill the anger about that essay down to a single sentence (besides simply, “Shut up!”) it would be this: “You talk about the problems in Christian conservatism too much. Talk about the Left more.” And I get it. I really do. In a deeply divided nation where millions of people have convinced themselves that the church is under unprecedented siege, you want Christians who possess a public platform to “defend the church.” There is a deep and profound human desire for advocacy. It’s one reason why clients often bond so deeply with their attorneys.Yet that’s not remotely the model of biblical discourse, especially of how believers talk to each other. And while none of us can remotely compare ourselves to biblical giants, we can learn from their model, which is clear: Early church fathers were far, far more concerned with the faith and virtue of the church than the maladies of the Romans. Indeed, we forget a fundamental truth—our own maladies often make us unable to see the world clearly. Or, as Jesus said, “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” In so many ways, we’ve become the People of the Plank, blind to the pain we’ve inflicted on the public even as we try desperately to protect ourselves from them.This is a confession, by the way. Here’s a bitter personal pill I’ve had to swallow—I carried my own partisan plank for years. As I wrote in my book, at my most partisan moment I once gave a speech in which I said words that shame me to this day. I was speaking at a conservative conference in California just before I deployed to Iraq, and someone asked me why I volunteered to deploy when I was “doing so much” here at home to defend free speech and religious liberty. I responded, “I believe the two greatest threats to the United States are university leftists at home and jihadists abroad.”It was a remarkably silly statement. No, it was worse than silly. It was immoral. It was slander by association. Before I deployed, I had lived in some of the bluest neighborhoods in America. I went to school there, worshiped freely there, made friends there, and raised kids there. I had profound disagreements with many of my neighbors—and still disagree with many of their preferred policies—but I had a good life. In Iraq, the reality was so profoundly different that words can barely begin to describe all the distinctions. I don’t want to list all the atrocities that al Qaeda inflicted on the people of Diyala Province, but I’ll just say that everything you saw ISIS do in Syria, al Qaeda did first in Iraq.  I didn’t exactly become post-partisan upon my return (that came later), but I gained the perspective that permitted me to start the process of pulling the plank from my own eye. Believe me, it takes time. I’m still trying to get it right. But as I’ve struggled to pull the plank away, it’s opened my eyes to many truths that were new to me. Among them, the church should be focused much more on its own virtue than the virtue of the rest of the world. In addition, if there were no grounds for Christians to live with a “spirit of fear” at the height of the Roman Empire, there are no grounds for us to live with a spirit of fear in our nation today. Yet fear seems to dominate Christian political activism—including fear of the left, of CRT, and sometimes even fear for the very existence of a free church in the United States of America.Yet there is no reason to presume that simply because someone calls themself a Christian they will speak the truth, act justly, or even possess a sound mind. We should demand they do. To proclaim your faith in public life is to accept a high moral call. But we can’t assume they will.Even worse, sad experience with Christian leaders teaches us that their professed identity tells us little to nothing about their actual virtue, and virtue should be the guiding concern of Christians in politics, not identity. I now see that my young desire for “more Christians in politics” and “more respect for Christians in public life” was part of the plank in my eye. Indeed, it helped make me gullible and tribal. I found myself loath to admit or confess sins in the church and quick to defend Christians from external fire. By contrast I was often eager to critique secular cultures and slow to respond when my own narratives came under credible attack. To be sure, some of the best people in public life proclaim the name of Christ. But so do some of the worst. While some of the most important fights for justice have been led by Christians—including the civil rights and pro-life movements—some of the most destructive political and cultural forces have been loudly and proudly led by Christians as well. In fact, two of the most destructive political and cultural movements of this new century—vaccine refusal that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and an effort to overturn an election that could have ruptured our republic—were disproportionately dominated by the most outspoken Christian voices. While saying they were acting in the name of Christ, they inflicted immense harm on our nation and its people. A new election season is already upon us. Presidential primary campaigns will be announced soon after. Christian politicians will boast about faith, pledge to defend faith, and relentlessly attack a “Left” that they’ll describe in apocalyptic terms—and they’ll do it for the roar of their adoring crowd. That’s all easy. Here’s what’s hard. Refusing to lie for a president. Refusing to yield to a mob. Resisting the fury of a furious time. And if Christians can’t succeed in that most basic, though often profoundly dangerous, task, then no, we don’t need more Christians in politics. We need more people who possess and demonstrate character and moral courage. It’s a sad reality that we simply can’t assume those virtues follow the profession of Christian faith. One more thing …Last November, I wrote a Sunday essay on the relationship between a Baptist pastor named Dana Moore and a condemned man named John Henry Ramirez. Ramirez is a murderer. He brutally stabbed to death a man named Pablo Castro, killing a father of nine to steal the $1.25 he had in his pocket. Pastor Moore, however, knows and understands that no man is too guilty for the grace of God. He’s been visiting Ramirez in prison for more than four years, and Ramirez is now a member of Moore’s church. Ramirez accepts his guilt, but he had one request—for Moore to touch his foot and utter an audible prayer as Moore died. The state of Texas said no, and it was wrong to say no. Here’s what I wrote:The glorious miracle of God’s grace is that it defies and overcomes our deeds. When Dana Moore gets into a car and drives hundreds of miles to meet a condemned man, he is an instrument of that grace. This is the church at its best, when a pastor lives out the parable of the lost sheep. He’s a shepherd who quite literally leaves his flock behind each day that he drives out to Livingston Texas, to meet the one behind bars, waiting to die. But if Texas does not relent, and if the court does not intervene, we will see the state fail its foundational obligations. The issue is not whether Ramirez deserves the comfort he denied the victim of his own terrible crimes. But one of the cardinal beauties of our system of government rests in a single word from the Declaration of Independence—“unalienable.” The human rights safeguarded by our system of government aren’t “earned,” they simply “are.” They’re a manifestation of a human being’s inherent dignity.Pastor Moore recognizes that dignity, and like countless pastors over the sweep of countless years, he simply wants a dying man to know—to feel—that he is not alone. And now it’s up to the state to fulfill its role, to recognize the centrality of faith to the human experience and protect its most simple expression at a most crucial moment. On Monday, the Supreme Court granted Ramirez’s a crucial victory. In an 8-1 decision, it held that Ramirez is likely to prevail in his request, and sent the case back to the lower courts. It is now almost certain that Ramirez will receive the comfort of prayer in touch in his last minutes. The justice (or injustice) of the death penalty is a subject of a different, larger conversation, but the justice of this ruling to me seems quite clear. A man’s right to exercise his faith can and should be recognized right until the last second of his life.And another thing …This was a confessional newsletter, and this week’s Good Faith podcast is a confessional podcast. Curtis and I start with a confession of contrarianism, then talk about healthy ways to think through conflict and war. It’s one of our best discussions, and I hope you’ll give it a try.  One last thing …If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been sticking with a theme called, “Songs I listen to on loop.” I’m not sure why this song captures my heart (aside from the beautiful vocals, of course). Perhaps it’s connected to what I spoke a bit about above, change as a process, one that so often begins in the quiet of our hearts. 

Sign up for Tom’s newsletter, Peacefield, here.Joe Biden has been a model of restraint during the most serious global crisis in nearly 60 years, and thank goodness for that. He has provided assistance to Ukraine while keeping NATO together against the possibility of a Russian attack against the alliance. He has resisted calls to engage in high-risk escalatory moves—such as a no-fly zone—while inflicting damage on the Russian economy and making clear the depth of America’s outrage at Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest.[Elliot Ackerman: Ukraine’s three-to-one advantage]But Biden broke his long streak of message discipline during a speech in Poland today, when he added an apparently unscripted ending: “For God’s sake, this man”—meaning Putin—“cannot remain in power.”The sound that could not be captured by the cameras after Biden spoke was dozens of staffers slapping the palms of their hands against their forehead. Predictably, media in America and elsewhere seized on this statement as if it were some new policy or a NATO war aim and asked if the president of the United States was calling for regime change in, of all places, Moscow.Biden’s staff lamely offered that the president was saying that Putin “cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” The United States, as Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, later told CNN, does not have a new policy of regime change, and has no overt or covert programs aimed at such a goal in Russia. But the news cycle was already in full swing; CNN and others were quoting Biden in their chyrons and prodding their guests to speculate on the president’s meaning.What Biden was doing, of course, was being Joe Biden. He was speaking for all of us, from the heart. One of the more endearing things about the president—at least for those of us who admire him—is that he has almost no inner monologue and regularly engages in the kind of gaffe where a politician says something that is impolitic but true.[Dina Khapaeva: Putin is just following the manual]This was not the time for such a moment, and even those who think Biden has exhibited sterling leadership during this crisis should admit that the president’s remarks were an unforced error. Putin has already made himself a pariah in the West, and though Biden has been right to call Putin a thug, a butcher, and a war criminal, it is another thing entirely to use language that could be misconstrued by both the American public and the Kremlin as a suggestion that the United States is interested in changing the Russian regime.Biden’s comment was poorly timed, too, because Russia’s high command seems to be preparing for a face-saving retrenchment in Ukraine. So far, the Russians seem to have taken Biden’s remarks more calmly than the American media. Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesperson who never misses a chance to castigate the United States, said only that this was a question for the Russian people, and not for Biden. The Russian people, of course, have no say in who rules them, but Peskov’s answer amounted to a shrug.Still, every day that Russia’s unprovoked war of conquest against Ukraine drags on, the danger of escalation to a world-threatening confrontation between East and West remains. Putin, whose strategic aims have now collapsed, might yet murder more Ukrainians in rage at his humiliation. He might try to provoke NATO into an intervention. Any of the four nuclear powers involved in the conflict could make a mistake or fall victim to a misperception. Now is not the time for improvisation.An international crisis requires steadiness and prudence, and though Biden has shown those qualities in spades, his ad-libbing in Warsaw is a reminder that even small slips pose major risks during tense times. It is especially challenging to stay on message in a 24/7 media environment in which far too many commentators and pundits have already shown an unseemly interest in courting a new world war. When John F. Kennedy was making his way through the Cuban missile crisis, he had only to contend with more easily controlled newspapers and three short newscasts each evening. Biden, by comparison, is living with a Greek chorus of millions offering their commentary and advice—some of it breathtakingly reckless.It is hard to blame Biden for giving in to his famous temper after talking to the people who have suffered from Putin’s barbarism. But the words of every world leader matter right now, and none more than those of the president of the United States. We should now let his remark pass for what it was—an outburst—and get back to helping Ukraine save its independence.

In over twenty hours of grueling confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Jackson's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican Senators (Cruz, Cotton, Hawley, Blackburn, and Graham) found much time to disgrace themselves, using the Judge as a prop for their despicable political ambitions. Meanwhile the Democratic (and Republican) Senators found no time to tap into Judge Jackson's knowledge and analysis of the grave issues regarding the nexus of the power of giant corporations and the Constitution.

Senators, who should have known better, declined to raise the important questions about corporate personhood, or the provision of equal rights for corporations with human beings in a Constitution that never mentions "corporations" or "companies." The Constitution is all about "We the People."

Call them above the law, beyond the law, or the creators of the law, giant and powerful corporations are a major domestic threat to our democracy.

Ignoring the immense power of global corporations over the rule of law, the immunities and privileges these companies use to escape the law and harm people with impunity, and the power of corporations under the 2011 Citizens United case to spend unlimited amounts of money to independently support or oppose candidates for public office were taboo subjects.

These are critical questions that leading citizen groups like Public Citizen and Common Cause would have wanted raised. The hearings, before a large television and radio audience, could have provided a rare educational moment for the public!

In numerous nomination hearings for Associate Justices of the High Court, we have submitted questions to presumably receptive Democratic Senators about corporations and the law. They were never asked. Our requests that Senators submit questions on corporate power to the nominee for written responses were also regularly denied.

Since my testimony with Dr. Sidney Wolfe during Justice Stephen Breyer's confirmation hearings in 1994, outside civic witnesses have largely been prohibited from testifying at these tightly choreographed spectacles. Congress has added this exclusion to their overall closure movement against the civic community.

We are left with submitting testimony for the record, which rarely sees the light of the Judiciary Committee's day. On the last day of the hearings with the nominees, the two Parties each select their own panel of rubber-stamp witnesses (often law professors). Both the media and senatorial attendance declines.

The Committee's arrogance is such that distinguished people asking to testify do not even get the courtesy of a written acknowledgement. They're just treated as nonpersons, instead of valuable contributors to the nomination process.

During the nomination in 2006 of the most right-wing corporatist, unitary-presidency ideologue, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., I wrote that the Senators did not "pose questions relating to access-to-justice, as provided by tort law, nor to the generic constitutional questions relating to NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and their dubious authority to side-step the sovereignty of our three branches of government with their mandatory decisions" affecting workers, consumers, and the environment.

When the most powerful institutions in our country escape scrutiny at these times of peak interest in the rule of law (constitutional and statutory), the charge that Congress refuses to confront corporatism and the supremacy of these out-of-control corporate behemoths comes full circle.

Call them above the law, beyond the law, or the creators of the law, giant and powerful corporations are a major domestic threat to our democracy. They are corrupting elections, dominating the media, blocking union formation, obstructing judicial justice for wrongfully injured people, and destroying our consumer freedom of contract - while strategically planning the future of human beings, down to their genetic inheritance.

Asking Judge Jackson her thoughts about the legal rights of robots, the engagement in military activities by corporate contractors, and the corporate patenting of life forms would have increased public awareness about important legal issues. Even if she artfully avoided judgmental replies, just asking what she knows about the settled law in these and other areas would have educated lawmakers and the public.

To get a sense of the immensity of this overlooked corporate phenomenon, please visit our website nader.org for the list of my previous questions and see the excellent article by the great journalist Morton Mintz in the November 1, 2005 issue of The Nation titled "Serious Questions for Samuel A. Alito Jr.".

Readers, remember Congress is misusing the powers that you have granted it under the Constitution, but you still hold the sovereign power and duty to safeguard and improve our democracy.

W HEN COVID hit, Britain’s ageing prisons could have been sites of mass infection and death. Many of the 118 in England and Wales were built during the Victorian era and are poorly ventilated. Seventy-two were holding more prisoners than their theoretical maximum capacity. Prisoners were often doubled up in cells meant for one—typically three metres by two metres. A trend towards longer sentences meant a growing number of inmates were older, and therefore more at risk of severe illness. Officials estimated that without rigid anti-infection measures, most of the 83,000 they held might catch the disease, and more than 2,000 could die.

Prisons immediately locked down. For the early months of the pandemic, prisoners spent an average of 22 and a half hours per day in their cells. Gym sessions, in-person education, worship and libraries were halted. Family visits were suspended.

As far as limiting infections and deaths was concerned, the lockdowns worked. The most recent figures, published in February, show that only 189 prisoners died for reasons related to covid. Over 35,000 had tested positive. But even as Britain re-opens, prisoners’ lives are not back to their pre-pandemic normal. In some facilities, says Charlie Taylor, Chief Inspector of Prisons, they are still in their cells for up to 22 hours each day.

The Ministry of Justice now permits prisons to remove all but the least intrusive covid restrictions—quarantining new arrivals, separating the most vulnerable inmates from the rest of the population and limiting mixing in large groups. But by March 7th just two adult prisons had done so. The rest were still operating restrictions that complicated access to education, gyms, worship, libraries or family visits, either because some facilities were closed or because of limits on how many prisoners could use them at one time.

Many prisoners without a cellmate have just spent two years in de facto solitary confinement. The harm done to mental health can be permanent after just two weeks locked up alone, says Peter Dawson of the Prison Reform Trust, a campaigning charity. And the continuing restrictions make it less likely that prisoners will receive family visits, which are known to reduce recidivism. According to research by the Ministry of Justice, prisoners who are visited by their family are 39% less likely to offend again.

Many prisons installed in-cell telephones and provided video calls for inmates during the pandemic—both welcome upgrades. But they are no substitute for an in-person visit, says Mr Taylor. And where restrictions make visits more inconvenient—some prisons allow them only on weekdays, when working family members or schoolchildren cannot come—prisoners have missed out. A troubling pattern is developing of visitor slots going empty, says Mr Taylor, possibly because of inconvenience or because families have lost the habit of visiting.

Austerity measures under the coalition government of 2010-15 saw the number of prison staff fall from nearly 25,000 to a total of just 18,000. That has since rebounded to just over 22,000. But the number will have to rise further if prison life is to return to something closer to normal. Moving prisoners around in smaller groups requires extra supervision, as does keeping gyms, libraries and chapels open for longer so that anti-crowding measures do not reduce access overall.

Another difficulty is high staff turnover. Nearly a third of officers have less than three years’ experience, and a substantial number have never worked in a prison without covid restrictions. A report from the prisons inspectorate in September 2021 on Wandsworth Prison found that a quarter of officers had been there for less than a year. The facility was so short-staffed and prisoners allowed so briefly out of their cells that they needed to choose between showering, ordering necessities and getting some exercise.

The Ministry of Justice has launched a recruiting scheme at short-staffed sites. But on top of high turnover and continuing covid restrictions, a further problem is that the prison population is expected to rise—to 98,500 by 2026, according to official predictions. As criminal trials came to a halt during the pandemic, the flow of new prisoners slowed and the total behind bars fell: in February it stood at around 80,000. Courts are now working through a massive backlog in hearings, which is sure to lead to more custodial sentences. A government plan to hire 20,000 new police officers may also lead to an increase in criminal charges—and convictions. ■

Dig deeper

A T LAST, the spring. For months Europeans have lived with the threat of losing the Russian gas that keeps their homes warm. The prospect seems less daunting now that daffodils are blooming. But despite the seasonal serenity, a wrenching energy transition is under way. Europe wants to cut imports of gas from Russia by two-thirds within a year. Behind the scenes, politicians and companies are already scrambling to work out how to cope next winter. The obvious upshot, one might expect, would be a change in consumer behaviour not seen since the 1970s, when dizzying oil prices caused a rethink of how the West lived. Not so. While European leaders exude an air of war-time concern, the public is living as if nothing were amiss in a continent at peace.

Energy prices, whether of petrol, gas or electricity, have rocketed in Europe. Some people might barely have noticed. In France, the authorities have essentially capped electricity and gas bills. Italy on March 18th added €4.4bn ($4.8bn) in subsidies to limit power-price rises for companies and consumers, on top of the €16bn already agreed in recent months. Several countries have cut petrol duties, a much-needed source of tax income. European leaders meeting in Brussels as The Economist went to press were due to discuss new state largesse to households and industry. This is the “whatever it takes” approach at work. As with covid-19, government is paying first and will ask questions later.

What is startling is how little is being asked of Europeans. Even simple measures that might barely inconvenience people are treated as taboo. Earlier this month the International Energy Agency ( IEA ), which advises rich-country governments, suggested that Europeans might consider turning down the thermostat by just one degree centigrade. What might seem like mere virtue-signalling greenery would actually cut consumption by 10bn cubic metres of natural gas over a year. That is roughly one month’s worth of Russian imports. This modest appeal was relayed by precisely nobody in office.

Some EU governments want to ban Russian oil, the Kremlin’s biggest money-spinner. Yet no one is seriously considering the obvious way of using less of it. Lowering motorway speed limits by 10kph would trim fuel use in the rich world by around 15%, not to be scoffed at when Europe is scrambling for any hydrocarbons it can get. Throw in subsidies to boost the use of public transport, a plea to work from home one day a week where possible and a ban on car use in cities on Sundays, and Europe could save perhaps a fifth of the Russian oil it imports, according to IEA figures and Charlemagne’s guesswork. These may or may not be sensible ideas. The point is that they are not being discussed.

Why is Europe not rediscovering the spirit of the 1970s? Back then the European public was expected to accept some discomfort and inconvenience. Speed limits went from the exception to the norm (except on German autobahns, of course). Dutch and German cities were among those that went pedestrian one day a week. France decreed public buildings should be no warmer than 20°C, two degrees lower than today’s European average. Television broadcasting was shut off at 11pm, an idea that could usefully be revived for social media. Daylight-saving schemes adopted during the world wars were soon revived across the continent. “Whatever it takes” involved people donning jumpers.

Lots of ideas to cut back energy use tomorrow are being mooted. But few Europeans are even being nudged to use less energy today. One reason may be that the rich world has changed in 50 years. Past crises have helped make modern economies more energy efficient. The current oil and gas shock is not so painful, especially since the world has become used to seesawing crude prices. But recent history outside Europe suggests that rapid change is possible. After Japan shut down its nuclear plants in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in 2011, a public-information campaign beseeched people to cut back energy use. Trains were slowed, air-conditioners were turned down and employers moved shifts to save power. A similar campaign is nowhere to be seen in Europe.

Keep cool

The absence of such measures reflects three factors. The first is that Europe may not truly be committed to weaning itself off Russian hydrocarbons. More storage of gas at EU level, as looks likely to be agreed, could dent Russia’s stranglehold on Europe. Some might think that will solve the problem, at least if the war ends soon. Keeping the option, if not the necessity, of importing Russian gas would avoid a painful pivot away from cheap power.

Second, energy is a politically toxic topic. The mere mention of speed limits or dearer petrol triggers accusations of urban politicians ignoring the plight of car-dependent provincial folk. Spanish farmers are protesting about energy prices. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, wants no more gilets jaunes protests ahead of an election next month. Europe is on a glide path to “net zero” emissions, to which the Ukraine crisis has given fresh impetus. Sensible long-term policy might be derailed by rash short-term measures in reaction to transient (albeit traumatic) events.

The third, and most depressing, possibility is that politicians now think their electorates are incapable of sacrifice. Two years of pandemic-era nagging has tested the public enough. The end of covid-19 restrictions (if not the virus itself) was meant to presage a new Roaring Twenties. That is no time for hair-shirt preachiness. “A Europe that protects” is a recent Brussels mantra: citizens must not be inconvenienced by a changing world.

This is a shame. Ukrainians are daily making sacrifices on an extraordinary scale. A growing number of Europeans are opening their homes to them and making donations. The public mood in Europe is of defiance towards Vladimir Putin. Nobody needs a politician’s blessing to lower the thermostat or skip a flight. But it is depressing that none of them has even thought to ask. ■

Europe is the free-rider continent (Feb 26th)

Our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here

T HE BATTLE over Western Sahara has long felt as sluggish as the region’s barely shifting sand dunes. It is almost half a century since Morocco claimed sovereignty over the slice of desert, previously a Spanish possession, that runs 900km (560 miles) along the Atlantic coast, south of Morocco proper. The Polisario Front, an indigenous guerrilla group backed by Morocco’s rival, Algeria, is still fighting for independence. For several decades the rest of the world has looked away, parking the dispute with the UN and promising the mirage of a referendum on self-determination to settle the issue. In fact, it has been frozen in the baking desert, seemingly for ever. But of late the sands have been swirling.

On March 18th Spain abandoned its long-held neutrality and tilted in favour of Morocco. Its prime minister called Morocco’s plan to give the Saharans autonomy within the kingdom “the most serious, realistic and credible”. The EU gave a cautious thumbs-up to Morocco, too. (The Americans had already recognised the kingdom’s claim in the last days of Donald Trump’s presidency.) Morocco cheered the latest shift. Algeria fumed.

Morocco’s diplomatic success is partly thanks to its mischief-making. In the past year it has repeatedly let migrants from Morocco and elsewhere in Africa pour into Spain’s north African enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, upping illegal migration into Spain by 40%. A BBC poll of young Moroccans in 2019 suggested that 70% wanted to emigrate—and that was before the rains failed, tourism slumped under covid-19 and the prices of basics like flour soared after Russia invaded Ukraine. In addition, Morocco, seizing a chance to squeeze Europeans harder, reduced intelligence co-operation, boycotted Spanish ports and exports, and withdrew its ambassadors from several European countries. Once a bulwark of pro-Western solidarity in forums such as the UN , this month it failed to vote when the UN General Assembly castigated Russia over Ukraine.

Polisario, meanwhile, is drooping. Its forces have been hammered. Israel has aided Morocco militarily, passing on tanks seized in wars with other Arab armies and helping build a defensive wall through the Sahara modelled on its Sinai fortifications. Its supply of combat drones, soon to be made in Morocco, has turned the tables on Polisario and its backer, Algeria.

The energy crisis should have given Algeria some leverage. It is southern Europe’s closest big source of hydrocarbons. Pipelines link it to Spain and Italy. Europeans worry that Russia may use its influence in Algeria and eastern Libya to gain control over supplies to southern as well as eastern Europe. But Algeria is in a bind. It needs European revenue and Western finance to expand production. And its ageing generals are paralysed by infighting. Algeria recalled its ambassador from Spain, while Morocco’s returned to her post.

Still, the struggle is not over. Spain stopped short of fully recognising the kingdom’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. Though Morocco has agreed to stop the flow of migrants for now, relations with Spain are still dogged by rows over Morocco’s port expansion along its Mediterranean coast and the pittance the EU pays Morocco for fishing off its Atlantic coast.

Meanwhile the kingdom continues to create “facts on the ground”. Its settlers now outnumber local Saharans three to one. Officials from the north often get the best land. A motorway will soon run south to the border with Mauritania. The Moroccans hope that the huge port they are building at Dakhla, the territory’s second city, will enhance trade with sub-Saharan Africa, while cables may bring energy from solar and wind farms to Europe. And if pesky locals still demand independence? One of Dakhla’s largest new developments is a towering prison on the edge of town. ■

I N MID-FEBRUARY Russia seemed on the verge of a revolution with a distinctly reddish tint. Alisher Usmanov, an oligarch, was developing Udokan, a copper mine in Siberia that required removing an entire mountain top. In the Arctic tundra Kaz Minerals, a mining firm, had raised enough cash to build Baimskaya, a rival mine so remote that it needed its own port, icebreaker and floating nuclear plant. For years the projects had been put on hold because of their immense costs. But expectations of soaring demand for copper, used in everything from grids to turbines, had boosted prices of the auburn metal, making the mines viable.

Now the copper price is even higher. But the projects are in trouble. Insiders say they are short of vital foreign equipment that has been blocked by the West after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and that they are starved of the funds they had expected from blacklisted Russian banks. Mr Usmanov, too, faces sanctions. A spokesman for Udokan says, “We are doing everything we can to ensure business continuity.” Yet even if the mine starts producing this year as planned, it is unclear who will buy its output. Foreigners, even the Chinese, are shunning Russian production.

As the world weans itself off dirty fuels, it must switch to cleaner energy sources. The International Energy Agency ( IEA ), an official forecaster, predicts that wind and solar could account for 70% of power generation by 2050, up from 9% in 2020, if the world embarks on a course to become carbon-neutral by 2050. That translates into huge demand for the metals, such as cobalt, copper and nickel, that are vital for the technologies underpinning everything from electric cars to renewables; the IEA reckons that the market size of such green metals would increase almost seven-fold by 2030. And much like fossil-fuel reserves, these commodities are distributed unevenly (see chart 1). Some countries have none at all. Others are blessed with vast deposits.

The metals rush will not be as big as the oil-and-gas boom that toppled King Coal after the second world war. But there are some echoes with the past. Between 1940 and 1970 the share of hydrocarbons in the energy supply of rich countries rose from 26% to nearly 70%. Once-marginal economies in the Middle East were transformed into uber-rich petrostates. Between 1970 and 1980 the GDP per person of Qatar and Saudi Arabia grew 12- and 18-fold, respectively. Bedouin villages became boom towns; fishing dhows gave way to super tankers and luxury yachts.

This time the transition will bring windfalls to countries we dub the “green-commodity superpowers”. We calculate that this club, many of which are poor economies and autocracies, could pocket more than $1.2trn in annual revenue from energy-related metals by 2040.

With the opportunity, however, come risks. As the troubled mining projects in Russia show, important investments can become victims of local conditions and geopolitics. Huge rents could corrode domestic markets and political institutions; autocrats enriched by electrodollars could make mischief beyond their borders. Saad Rahim of Trafigura, a trading firm, says the shift to clean fuels is “less an energy transition than a commodity transition”. It will be a turbulent one.

The green boom is not just another “supercycle”, as prolonged periods of high commodity prices are known. The last such cycle, early this century, was fuelled by rapid urbanisation and industrialisation in China. The combined real GDP of Brazil and Russia, two resource-rich economies, grew by two-thirds between 2000 and 2014. But the rally was largely driven by China alone. When the country’s leaders decided it should build fewer factories and flats, the commodity giants suffered. The green transition, by contrast, stems from the decisions of many governments, not one. And decarbonising the world is likely to be the job of decades.

Another big difference lies in the materials in demand. China’s splurge burned through heaps of coal, iron and steel. The green boom centres on non-ferrous metals that are more niche. Their combined annual revenues today, at $600bn, is equivalent to only a fifth of that of the bulk materials that China favoured. There may be more explosive growth to come.

To understand which commodity producers stand to win and lose from a green transition, we construct a simple scenario for the use of ten “energy-linked” commodities in 2040, assuming that global warming by 2100 stays below 2°C. Based on data from a range of industry sources, we project demand and revenue for three fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) and seven metals (aluminium, cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, silver and zinc) that are critical to building an electricity economy. We assume that prices remain at today’s elevated levels, prompting miners to exploit untapped deposits. And we assume that a producer’s market share in 2040 is in line with its share of known reserves.

Our findings suggest the world will be less reliant on energy-related resources in 2040 than it is today—largely because wind and sunshine, the sources of the future, are free. Total spending on our basket of ten commodities falls to 3.4% of global GDP , from 5.8% in 2021. Spending on fossil fuels, relative to world GDP, falls by half (and would shrink further were it not for gas). The revenue from green metals remains smaller, but rises from 0.5% to 0.7% of GDP. It nearly triples in absolute terms.

The number of big producers of energy-linked commodities falls over time: 48 stand to pocket sales equivalent to more than 5% of their GDP , down from 58 in 2021 (see chart 2). More than half of total spending goes towards autocracies. You can group producers into three buckets, based on the expected change in their revenues from the ten energy-linked commodities between now and 2040. The first comprises the winners—the green superpowers. These electrostates include some rich democracies. Australia has troves of every metal included in our sample. Chile is home to 42% of the world’s lithium reserves and a quarter of its copper deposits, much of them in the Atacama desert (pictured above). Others are autocracies. Congo has 46% of global cobalt reserves (and produces 70% of the world’s output today). China is home to aluminium, copper and lithium. Poorer democracies in Asia and Latin America may also hit the jackpot. Indonesia sits on mountains of nickel. Peru holds nearly a quarter of the world’s silver. The second bucket comprises countries with revenues that stay flat, or fall a little. It includes the low-cost members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries ( OPEC )— including Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia—and Russia. Although oil revenue shrinks, their share of it expands from 45% today to 57% in 2040. Other countries, such as America, Brazil and Canada, lose fossil-fuel earnings but are able to tap vast mineral deposits. Higher-cost petrostates lose the most. Many oil-rich nations in north Africa (Algeria, Egypt), sub-Saharan Africa (Angola, Nigeria) and Europe (Britain, Norway) see their revenues shrivel. Small states like South Sudan, Timor Leste and Trinidad have theirs hit hard. The pain does not spare some Gulf states: the proceeds captured by Bahrain and Qatar, for instance, decline by a fifth or more.

What might prevent the new commodity superpowers emerging? The key ingredient is capital spending. The IEA estimates that major mines that came online in the past decade took, on average, 16 years to build. To meet booming demand by 2040, the industry must splash out on new projects now. The sums required are big. Julian Kettle of Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy, reckons $2trn must be spent on green-metal exploration and production ( E&P ) by 2040. Recent projects suggest digging out enough copper and nickel alone would require $250bn-350bn in capital expenditure (capex) well before 2030.

Pedal to the metal

Some of the outlay is taking place. Anglo American, a miner, aims to expand its copper output by 50-60% by 2030. “We will deliver our part of the bargain,” says Mark Cutifani, its boss. Many others will not. Burnt by the commodity crash of the mid-2010s, mining majors have reduced investment. Liberum Capital, an investment bank, calculates that annual copper E & P capex has fallen by half since 2014, to $14bn. As prices rise, so do profits. But cash is being given back to investors rather than redeployed. “Supply growth has almost become a dirty word,” says Stephen Gill of Pala Investments, a venture-capital firm.

Only China is spending a lot. In Kolwezi, in Congo’s cobalt belt, barefoot children greet all foreigners with shouts of “ni hao”. Chinese groups have nabbed most big commercial deposits; Albert Abel, an artisanal miner, complains they have bought most small mines too. Glencore, an adventurous Swiss trader, is the only Western firm to have a foothold. In Indonesia Chinese miners are clearing swathes of rainforest to dig out nickel.

The capex drought is a result of three daunting problems: the industry’s limited firepower, diminishing investment returns and rising political risk. Start with firepower. Though what miners must spend over two decades is equivalent to only four years of typical oil E & P capex, it still seems beyond the capacity of the comparatively tiny sector. Even big miners can only fund one serious project at a time.

This might be fixed by tapping capital providers beyond the majors’ usually cautious public-market investors. These could include vertically integrated manufacturers that rely on scarce minerals. Tesla, an electric-car maker, has promised to buy the future nickel production of mines in Australia, Minnesota and New Caledonia. Private-equity firms and state-backed national champions tasked with securing supply could also chip in.

A second problem is the worsening quality of mineral deposits. Udokan says it is the last potential mine with copper content above 1% of the rock. The average grade of Chilean copper has fallen by 30% over the past 15 years, to 0.7%. Lower grades are pushing up extraction and processing costs (and carbon emissions). “Today we use 16 times more energy to make the same pound of copper as we did 100 years ago,” says Mr Cutifani.

Innovation may help. Last year BHP , another miner, and Equinor, Norway’s state-backed energy firm, invested in an artificial-intelligence startup that sifts through 20m pages of state and scientific archives to identify where new deposits might lie. In time technological breakthroughs could even make exploring sea floors profitable. The world’s 67,000km of mid-ocean ridges contain a lot of copper, cobalt and other minerals. This, too, could mint electro states: Fiji (8%) and Norway (5.5%) hold the most economic rights to those ridges. Yet innovation also makes future returns less certain. The durably high prices that miners need to invest will also encourage big buyers to seek alternatives to the dearest metals. Tesla’s batteries include less than 5% cobalt, down from one-third just a few years ago. Innovation could also facilitate recycling. By 2040, the IEA reckons, extracting cobalt from old batteries could help meet 12% of total demand.

Game of stones

Perhaps the biggest risk to investment comes from politics. The minerals mania stands to make some poor economies rich overnight. The story of commodity booms over centuries, including the hydrocarbon bonanza, shows that this resource blessing can also be a curse, which could in turn discourage further investment.

Gigantic oil rents have made many countries unstable. Rival factions vie to control riches, fuelling inequality and strife. Vast dollar inflows buoy local currencies, crushing exporters. Debt binges during boom times trigger fiscal crises when the cycle turns. Resentful populations make domestic politics even more fractious. Take Nigeria. In 1965 it exported ten different commodities, from cocoa to tin. Two decades of oil discoveries later, petroleum accounted for 97% of its merchandise exports, and had contributed to political instability.

The worry now is that history repeats itself. Some electrostates are poorly equipped to manage windfalls. The majority of the world’s 96 commodity-linked sovereign-wealth funds are backed by sales of fossil fuels; only seven green-metals exporters have established rainy-day funds, according to Global SWF , a data provider. That is despite a big need for them: much of the spending on metals is expected to take place by 2050, after which demand will ebb and exporters could face leaner times.

Even the prospect of a bonanza could tempt governments to extract more rents from firms. Some tensions are already emerging. Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest miner, was able to restart a long-stranded Mongolian project only after agreeing to write off $2.4bn in loans to the government. In January Serbia withdrew the firm’s exploration permits after protests over plans for a big lithium mine. Peru’s new leftist president is mulling higher taxes; one of its biggest copper mines has been blockaded for weeks by locals demanding a share of profits. Chile is debating nationalising copper and lithium as it works on a new constitution.

This volatile environment suggests metals may have to become pricier still before foreign firms think it worth taking a gamble. Price rises so far have already sent some Western miners to frontiers once deemed too perilous to explore. On March 20th Barrick Gold, a Canadian firm, signed a deal to invest $10bn in a copper mine on Pakistan’s border with Iran and Afghanistan. BHP is returning to Africa with an investment in Tanzania.

But prices may still not be high enough. Last year Ivan Glasenberg, then Glencore’s boss, said copper may have to hit $15,000 a tonne, up from today’s record $10,000, to truly incentivise new supply. The higher prices go, however, the more they run the risk of depressing demand, or making local politics yet more volatile. Either could cause investment to stall again.

Many would-be green giants know they can help avoid climate catastrophe. “If we stop mining, we won’t be able to cut emissions,” says Juan Carlos Jobet, a former energy minister of Chile. To realise their super powers, though, they will need to break the curse. ■

T HE HOMELAND of Galileo and Marconi has proved unexpectedly resistant to digital technology. Many Italians adopted mobile phones while they were still a rarity in other countries, including America. Yet the share who regularly use the internet is no higher than in Turkey.

That partly reflects Italy’s elderly population: it has the EU ’s highest median age. But Riccardo Luna, formerly his country’s representative in the European Commission’s Digital Champions Expert Group, says other factors have also played a role. For eight of the ten years from 2001 to 2011, Italy’s prime minister was Silvio Berlusconi, a TV magnate for whom the internet represented a commercial danger. Telecom Italia, the country’s dominant land line operator, had an interest in slowing the introduction of broadband to maintain the value of its main asset, a copper cable network. In 2020 the share of Italian adults who had used the internet in the previous three months was just 78%—the second-lowest in the EU .

The man charged with changing that is Vittorio Colao, once the boss of Vodafone. Last year Mario Draghi, the prime minister, recruited Mr Colao to be his minister for digital transition. Thanks to the EU ’s colossal post-pandemic recovery fund, Mr Colao has more than €40bn ($44bn) to work with. One goal is to help industry digitise. Another is to bring extra-fast broadband to schools and health clinics, as well as providing broadband and 5 G mobile networks to remote areas. Mr Colao also wants to help the 3m or so Italians who have been left behind by the digital revolution acquire basic computer skills, and to streamline public access to government, largely through smartphone apps.

In that realm, Italy has made impressive progress. Matteo Renzi, a techno-evangelist who was prime minister in 2014-16, launched several projects that have been implemented under his successors. Mr Colao flourishes his smartphone and points to an app called Io (“I”): “I can now pay my social-security contributions for my domestic help directly from this. I showed it to a German politician. He was open-mouthed with astonishment.”

Io and a clutch of similar apps appeared just as covid-19 was spreading in Italy, confining Italians to their homes and encouraging them to become more digitally savvy. The pandemic has helped in other ways too. “We were not a nation of e-shoppers,” says Mr Colao. “And yet [e-commerce] has now become absolutely normal.”

One of his biggest challenges, he says, is convincing businesspeople to invest in digital initiatives. The other is getting officials to integrate systems and harmonise procedures. Digitisation in the public sector has been haphazard. There are an estimated 11,000 databases spread across national, regional, provincial and municipal government. “We spend our time arguing with other ministries and local authorities,” says Mr Colao. “Digital does not need to be centralised, but it does need to be homogenous.”

The rewards are potentially immense. Two of the biggest reasons why the Italian economy has stagnated since the turn of the century have been low productivity and a stubbornly inefficient bureaucracy. Tens of billions of euros will help to tackle both. As Mr Colao admits, ensuring they are spent wisely can be frustrating. “But I always say that if I weren’t frustrated I wouldn’t be doing my job.” ■

T HE MARKET for packaged foods is a competitive one, where price rises by one firm risk pushing shoppers into the arms of rivals. Companies in the industry deal with soaring costs by hedging against spikes in commodity markets using forward contracts, reformulating products so they contain less of the pricier foodstuffs or, failing that, surreptitiously making packages a bit smaller while keeping the ticket price the same.

Amid pandemic-related supply-chain bottlenecks, labour shortages and crop failures, food firms have repeatedly done all that. Even so, they have had to raise prices, often less judiciously than is ideal. The invasion of Ukraine, known as Europe’s breadbasket thanks to its rich soil, by Russia, the world’s top exporter of wheat, is forcing their hand once again. Together the two countries account for 29% of international wheat sales and nearly 80% of sales of sunflower oil. Disruptions to those critical supplies are pushing up food companies’ costs just as energy costs are also sky-high as a result of the war.

It will be harder for European food companies to pass price rises to consumers than for American firms. Supermarkets in Europe are more concentrated than in America, and drive a harder bargain with suppliers. Walmart, America’s biggest, controls 17% of the domestic market. Its British and German opposite numbers, Tesco and Edeka, respectively, have nearly 30% of theirs. Moreover, cost-conscious Europeans shop more at discounters such as Aldi or Lidl. They are also less fussy than Americans about branded products and buy more of the retailers’ own labels.

B RITAIN’S FIRST new nuclear plant in 30 years, by the Bristol Channel in Somerset, is one of Europe’s largest construction sites. With accommodation for 7,000 workers who run shifts around the clock, it is an open-air factory for making one of the most complex objects on the planet. When Hinkley Point C is switched on in 2026, its two identical reactors will produce 3,200 megawatts of electricity, making it capable of supplying 7% of Britain’s needs.

Overseeing it all is Sarah Williamson, the lead engineer for BYLOR , a joint venture between Bouygues Travaux Publics and Laing O’Rourke, French and British construction firms respectively. Her immediate task is to keep the Hinkley “delivery machine” running at peak capacity. Her next will be to copy it for Britain’s next planned nuclear plant, Sizewell C in Suffolk.

The government already regarded nuclear power as an important element of Britain’s energy mix before Russia invaded Ukraine, and oil and gas prices soared. When the prime minister, Boris Johnson, met industry bosses on March 21st, he talked of the need for a “thriving pipeline” of nuclear plants. Whether he gets his wish will depend, in part, on how successful Ms Williamson and her team are in copying Hinkley at Sizewell—and, perhaps, beyond.

Nuclear plants are pricey, and much more so if they are bespoke. Reusing plans, suppliers and people to crank out identical ones should make construction cheaper. One way forward is to design so-called small modular reactors, which can be made in factories and then assembled on site. Rolls-Royce, a British engineering firm, is among those interested in doing this, and the government seems keen. But, at the moment, this is unproven technology.

In the meantime, EDF , the French utility with ultimate responsibility for both Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C , says that making construction more predictable will cut the cost of financing—which at Hinkley accounted for 60% of the total. Investors are more likely to offer capital at reasonable rates if they believe a plant will start pumping out electricity on schedule.

Three other plants of the same kind have already been built, in Finland, France and China. Ms Williamson has visited all three, and brought what she learned back to Britain. At Flamanville in France, for instance, the metal casing that shields the nuclear-reactor vessel was assembled outdoors, which meant poor-quality welds and hold-ups during bad weather. So welders at Hinkley manoeuvre components inside vast temporary structures, something like tents crossed with cathedrals, with the help of the world’s largest crane.

The copy-paste process between Hinkley’s reactors similarly yielded incremental improvements. The average time saved on each task has been 20-30%, says Nigel Cann of EDF . Ms Williamson says she and her team think of Sizewell C ’s two reactors as “Unit 3 and Unit 4”—not merely identical to those at Hinkley, but a continuation of the same build. Efficiency gains are kicking in even before construction starts, as most of the paperwork is the same. She hopes for time savings at least as great as those between the Hinkley reactors.

Just how much money all this will save is as yet unclear, since financing for Sizewell C is still under discussion between EDF and the government. Currently, consumers are supposed to foot the bill as soon as construction starts—an attractive proposition for investors, since it offloads the risk of delay. The government is looking for ways to enhance energy security by pushing out Chinese investment, perhaps by taking a stake in the plant itself. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made reliance on authoritarian states for energy look even more untenable, both politically and in terms of guaranteeing supply.

Regardless of whose money is spent, Ms Williamson’s efforts are crucial to ensuring that both Hinkley and Sizewell go to plan, and that consumers pay as little as possible for Sizewell before the electricity starts flowing. New nuclear plants are central to weaning Britain off Russian oil and gas and reducing carbon emissions. Making construction faster, cheaper and more predictable will be the difference between success and failure. ■

C OSMETIC PROCEDURES used to be the preserve of middle-aged women and often involved surgery. Today they are increasingly sought by girls who want the photoshopped faces of their favourite social-media influencer, and by a growing number of men wishing for fewer wrinkles, fuller lips and sharper jawlines. Globally, more than 14m nonsurgical procedures were conducted in 2020, even amid the pandemic, up from fewer than 13m two years earlier. Increasingly, scalpels are giving way to syringes.

Research and Markets, a firm of analysts, reckons that the global sales of non-invasive aesthetic treatments, currently around $60bn, could more than triple by 2030. A large part of that growth will come from injectables. These include Botox and other substances that freeze facial muscles, as well as dermal fillers which plump softer tissue. Demand has been fuelled by the proliferation of selfies and, during the pandemic, high-resolution video-calls. Snapchat and Instagram filters give users a glimpse of what they could look like with a filler-generated “liquid facelift”. The contrast with what they see on unadorned Zoom can be stark.

In America 2.4m injectable procedures were carried out in covid-hit 2020, roughly one for every 100 American adults. About 700,000 such treatments were performed on Germans, not renowned for an obsession with looks. Brazilians, who are famously beauty-obsessed but much poorer, subjected themselves to around 500,000. Demand for “prejuvenation” work is especially strong in Asia, where younger patients (for, despite the convenience these are still medical procedures) want to pre-empt a craggy visage before any lines actually appear. Since injectables have to be topped up every few months, they guarantee producers of the substances and clinics that administer them a source of recurring revenue. The younger the customer starts, the better for business.

According to a report by McKinsey, a consultancy, over 400 aesthetics clinics, which administer injectable treatments (among others including things like laser fat removal) raised more than $3bn from investors over the past five years. In 2020 AbbVie, an American pharmaceutical firm paid an eye-popping $63bn for Allergan, which has controlled nearly half the market for injectables since it launched Botox for aesthetic use two decades ago and Juvederm, a dermal filler, a few years later.

New products are beginning to threaten Allergan’s dominance. Hugel, a South Korean company, now has a rival offering that is half the price of Botox. It is eyeing the Chinese market, where the stuff is still less common than dermal fillers. Ipsen, a French drugmaker, and Merz Pharma, a German one, also make Botox-style injectables. Ipsen’s Dysport has done well in Turkey and Russia. Merz’s sales are growing briskly in the emerging economies of Asia and Latin America.

Some modern dermal fillers, meanwhile, are formulated with ingredients such as hyaluronic acid that are typically found in mild skincare products. That is less offputting to potential customers than Botox, which is derived from a toxin that occurs naturally in spoilt sausages. Other new treatments are dispensing with foreign substances entirely—though this doesn’t always seem all that more appealing. Certain cosmetic clinics offer to inject stem cells from a patient’s own fat into their face, or platelets from their blood to rejuvenate the skin.

There is a wrinkle. The injectables craze, especially among youngsters, worries regulators. Botox is a prescription drug in most places but many dermal fillers are not. “Treatments are often trivialised on social media and people don’t understand the full ramifications of what can go wrong,” says Tijion Esho, a cosmetic surgeon in Britain. Misplaced injections can lead to abscesses or, in some cases, necrosis. An outcry from doctors and victims of botched procedures forced the British government to announce in February that it would require a licence for people administering nonsurgical treatments. England has already banned them for under-18s. ■

I N 1993, AFTER 14 years of imprisonment, one of China’s most prominent dissidents, Wei Jingsheng, was taken on a tour of Beijing. Authorities hoped that the dazzling new architecture and bustling roads would convince him that the Communist Party he so stubbornly opposed had done great things. Mr Wei admitted to being impressed, but asked to see a bookshop before drawing any firm conclusions.

His tour guides obliged, and later he recounted his “eye-opening” visit. Chinese bookshops remained too conservative, he wrote. They were managed by old officials who didn’t even like books and displayed staid party literature. Bureaucrats would “rather build tall skyscrapers and purchase fancy limousines than…allow the book and culture markets to really open up,” wrote Mr Wei.

Some of China’s state-run stores remain the kind of dull, dusty places described by Mr Wei. Others have spruced up nicely, though. China also now has thousands of independent bookstores, serving coffee and tea and hosting events.

But like their counterparts elsewhere, China’s bricks-and-mortar bookshops are struggling. Their share of book sales declined from 85% to 20% between 2010 and 2020. Online sellers are luring bookworms out of bookshops. In a survey published in November, 80% of bookshop-owners said revenues were falling.

Chinese proprietors have unique problems, too. Only titles that have been cleared by state censors can be placed on shelves. Even the hippest shops feel compelled to display the ponderous works of Xi Jinping, China’s leader. Attempts at edginess carry risks. In February a bookstore in the city of Hangzhou featured works related to the well-known case of a trafficked woman found chained by the neck in a village outhouse. The display, with books about feminism, was decorated with a metre-long metal chain. But the authorities deemed it too controversial, and the store took it down after a few days.

Some sellers are finding other ways to attract potential customers. Bookshops have become a popular destination for Chinese internet celebrities, known as wanghong, and those who aspire to such heights. In pursuit of followers, clicks, sponsorship deals and modelling contracts, they post photos of themselves at attractive locations, which also include museums and amusement parks.

It is easy to find online listings of the hottest wanghong bookshops. Some have big windows with views of famous landmarks. One favourite, part of the Zhong Shu Ge chain, is in north-western Beijing. It features dizzying Escheresque staircases and a mirrored hall. The walls are lined partly with books—and partly with wallpaper that looks like books.

On a recent weekday morning the shop had an ample flow of people browsing and buying. But there were no wanghong in sight. “They all come on the weekends,” said a clerk, “and we just hope they’ll buy something while they’re here. Even if it’s only coffee.”

A MONTH AFTER Vladimir Putin plunged Europe into war, China is ready to explain why it sees no urgent need to stop Russia—its closest strategic partner—from killing Ukrainians. After fine-tuning arguments and propaganda lines for weeks, China’s Communist Party bosses and their envoys now have talking points for every audience.

The most common argument is built on deflection and anti-Americanism. This is used for Chinese domestic consumption and in public contacts with Western governments. As Chinese officials tell it, Russia is defending itself against American aggression and a long campaign of encirclement by NATO . Chinese officials think it is unfair of Western leaders to ask their government to intervene, because only American concessions to Mr Putin can bring lasting peace. Moreover, if the war is going slowly, that is because American interests profit from drawn-out agonies, Chinese diplomats charge. Spelling out the accusation, a deputy foreign minister, Le Yucheng, told a gathering at Tsinghua University that “arms dealers, bankers and oil tycoons” from a certain big country (ie, America) are making “highly immoral” fortunes out of the war, while Ukraine suffers. This hard line comes from the top. China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, has given instructions that Russia is to be defended and America held responsible for Ukraine’s woes, leaving underlings to “backfill a foreign policy” around that decision, a foreign diplomat based in Beijing explains. To dramatise America’s obligations, Mr Xi reached for a Song-dynasty saying during a two-hour video call with President Joe Biden on March 18th, declaring: “He who tied the bell to the tiger must take it off.”

Mr Xi’s scolding, literary tone is striking because, according to American briefings given to foreign ambassadors in Beijing, Mr Biden used the call to convey his concerns that Russia may be contemplating attacks with chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine. His warnings were not a surprise to the Chinese. A few days earlier Mr Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, shared American intelligence about Russia’s possible intentions with China’s foreign-policy chief, Yang Jiechi, during a seven-hour meeting in Rome. Mr Sullivan told Mr Yang that Chinese support for Russian aggression would have a lingering impact on bilateral ties and on Mr Xi’s legacy. Mr Yang, it is related, responded with anger and complaints about America’s support for Taiwan, the democratic island that China claims as its own. Other officials have since copied that same rhetorical pivot to Asia. Mr Le called the crisis in Ukraine and NATO enlargement a mirror for observing American alliance-building in Asia and the Pacific, a trend which if unchecked would push the region “into a pit of fire.”

To Europeans, it might seem a bit parochial for China to draw parallels between a war under way in Ukraine and long-standing Chinese resentments of American alliances in Asia. But seen from Asia, there is a logic to China’s framing of the war in Ukraine as the latest example of global disorder provoked by the West, with a special emphasis on the sanctions being imposed on Russia. In their video call Mr Xi told Mr Biden that intensifying sanctions may gravely disrupt food and energy markets and global supply chains. After meeting African and Asian foreign ministers, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, spoke of a common disquiet among developing nations at being asked to take “black or white” moral positions on complex international questions.

Such ultra-pragmatic talking points, crafted to woo countries from the global South, reflect a Chinese horror of being isolated. But they also resonate with many governments, says a foreign diplomat in Beijing, describing meetings at which ambassadors from non-aligned countries swallow Chinese arguments “like candy”. China has a keen sense of countries with long-standing grievances about the West, or that have been placed under sanctions themselves for rights abuses, notes the diplomat. Against that, some South-East Asian governments, from Singapore to Cambodia, have voiced concerns about the dangerous precedent set by Russia’s attack. China’s growling about alliances cuts both ways, says a second diplomat. “China is worried about an Asian NATO . The only player that could make it happen, guaranteed, is China. Just invade a neighbour and see what happens,” he suggests.

Guarding each other’s backs, against the West

A final talking point is offered more discreetly by Chinese officials and scholars. This coldly realist argument asserts that China’s interests are simply not served by breaking with Russia. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, now at the Centre for International Security and Strategy and its China Forum at Tsinghua University, insists that China is taking a balanced approach to the war. But he predicts that if China were to condemn Russia’s actions, Western governments would pocket the concession and call it China merely doing the right thing. There is little chance that broader, long-term American pressure on China will ease, because China is not about to change its political system, adds Mr Zhou. As a result, “If China ditches Russia, it is only a matter of time before America comes after China once more.”

Wu Xinbo, dean of the international-studies institute at Fudan University, calls it natural that in his conversation with Mr Biden, Mr Xi stressed Chinese concerns about American support for Taiwan. “Russia may worry about Ukraine joining NATO , but Ukraine is an independent sovereign country. Taiwan is part of China. So in this sense, the Taiwan issue is far more important to China than Ukraine is to Russia,” he says.

Western governments are frustrated that China calls itself a peace-loving giant but will not condemn Mr Putin. That is to misread China, a country at once certain that its rise is unstoppable, and sure that America is bent on stopping it. China has ambitions to bestride the world one day. But it remains exceptionally self-absorbed. Suffering in faraway Ukraine will not change that. ■

Vladimir Putin is an imperialist, but China does not care (Mar 5th)

F EW AMERICAN business tactics are as peculiar in a freewheeling capitalist society as the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. P.H. Hanes, founder of the textile mill that would eventually become HanesBrands, came up with it in the 1920s. That allowed him to use adverts in publications across America to deter distributors from gouging buyers of his knitted under garments. Even today many American shopkeepers hew to manufacturers’ recommended prices, as much as they would love to raise them to offset the inflationary pressures on their other costs. A growing number, though, resort to more sophisticated pricing techniques.

A seminal study from 2010 by McKinsey, a consultancy, estimated that raising prices by 1% without losing sales can boost operating profits by 8.7%, on average. Getting this right can be tricky. Set prices too high and you risk losing customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table. Retailers have historically used rules of thumb, such as adding a fixed margin on top of costs or matching what competitors charge. As energy, labour and other inputs go through the roof, they can no longer afford to treat pricing as an afterthought.

To gain an edge, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimisation systems. These predict how customers will respond to different pricing scenarios, and recommend those that maximise sales or profits. At their core are mathematical models that use oodles of transaction data to estimate price elasticities—how much demand increases as the price falls and vice versa—for thousands of products. Price-sensitive items can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up. Merchants can fine-tune the algorithms to prevent undesirable outcomes, such as double-digit price surges or larger packages costing more by unit of weight than smaller ones.

These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence ( AI ). Whereas older models used historical sales data to estimate price elasticities for individual items, the latest crop of AI -powered ones can spot patterns and relationships between multiple items. Makers of pricing software are incorporating new data sources into their models, from customers’ tweets to online product reviews, says Doug Fuehne of Pricefx, one such firm. The cloud-based platform developed by Eversight, another provider, allows retailers to test how slight increases or decreases in the price of, say, Heinz ketchup at different stores affect sales not just of that specific condiment but across the category. It is used by big manufacturers such as Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson, as well as some supermarkets (Raley’s) and clothes-sellers (JCPenney).

All this makes pricing systems “much more three-dimensional”, observes Chad Yoes, a former executive at Walmart who oversaw pricing at the retail behemoth. Retail bosses are keen to promote this sophistication to investors, who value firms’ pricing power at a time of high inflation. In February Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, boasted about its use of analytics and AI to model pricing “on an ongoing basis”. US Foods, a food distributor, has touted its pricing system’s ability to use “over a dozen different inputs” to boost sales and profits.

Price-optimisation may make prices more volatile. “Retailers are pricing faster today than they ever have before,” says Matt Pavich of Revionics, another pricing-software firm. That is especially true in the fast-moving world of e-commerce. But even Walmart reviews the prices of many items in its stores 2-4 times a year, says Mr Yoes, up from once or twice a few years ago.

What pricing systems do not do is lead inexorably to higher prices. Mr Pavich calls this misconception “one of the biggest myths” about products like his. Sysco, a big food distributor which rolled out new pricing software last year, is a case in point. The firm says the system allows it to lower prices on “key value items”—as price-sensitive bestsellers are known in the trade—and raise them on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining margins. That keeps investors content and shoppers sweet. ■

A RSENY, A FASHION photographer, and his boyfriend Vova, a film director, woke up in Moscow on the day Russia invaded Ukraine and realised their country had reached a point of no return. “We had been living a lie,” Arseny says. A few days later, after seeing the streets choked with riot police, they boarded a plane to Istanbul. They and many of their fellow passengers had decided to leave Russia, with little hope of return.

Turkey’s biggest city has been a favourite among Russian tourists for decades. It has now become a temporary haven for Russians escaping Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship. They have few other places to go. All EU countries have banned flights from Russia. Turkey has not, and lets Russians in without a visa.

At least 14,000 Russians are estimated to have moved to Turkey since the war started, according to Turkish media. Most are young professionals: lawyers, bankers, journalists, programmers and artists. Hundreds turned up at a recent anti-war benefit concert by Miron Fyodorov, otherwise known as Oxxxymiron, a Russian rapper. On Telegram, a messaging app, the newcomers are exchanging tips on setting up Turkish bank accounts and applying for permanent residence.

They are following a path beaten by Russian exiles a century ago. In the 1920s some 200,000 Russians, Ukrainians, Azeris and Georgians fleeing Bolshevik rule reached Istanbul on crowded steamships. They included White Russian aristocrats, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, a black impresario born in Mississippi who had run a music club in Moscow and who went on to introduce Istanbul to jazz. A visiting French princess spotted a Russian baron polishing shoes and recognised a waitress as a fellow princess she had seen at a ball in St Petersburg.

In the 1920s nearly all the émigrés moved on to Europe. Most of the new ones do not plan to stick around either. Arseny has applied for an American visa, Vova for a German one. But as long as Mr Putin wages war on Ukraine and on anyone who opposes his invasion, Istanbul will remain a way-station for many of Russia’s best and brightest.

T HE THIRD fall was the one that finally put Gao Ying in the hospital. As a community health worker, she had been helping Hangzhou, her home city, fight a surge in covid-19 cases. She had not slept in her own bed for two weeks. She was exhausted. Still, on March 18th she set off for a meeting on local covid-control measures. That’s when she collapsed three times in a lift, the third time smacking her head on the wall. Video of the incident was captured by a CCTV camera and shared on social media.

Ms Gao’s tireless efforts were in response to an outbreak that most countries would consider trivial. Hangzhou, with 12m people, had recorded just 54 symptomatic cases of covid in the two weeks before her fall. (Ten more were asymptomatic.) Overall, China has logged around 27,000 new local symptomatic cases in March, fewer than America recorded most days this month. Still, it is the biggest outbreak in China since the early days of the pandemic (see chart). And it is straining the country’s “dynamic zero-covid” policy, which aims to stamp out the virus with mass testing, extensive contact tracing and strict lockdowns. Those efforts involve millions of workers like Ms Gao.

Technology, such as tracking software, helps. But much of the work involves clipboards, telephones and barricade tape. An important role is played by some 110,000 neighbourhood committees—legacies of the Mao era, when they helped China’s Communist Party keep order. Each committee has between five and nine members, as well as many volunteers. Today they keep tabs on residents, help enforce lockdowns and organise testing.

A neighbourhood committee member might, for example, ask a person who has just travelled from another city to take a test or stay inside for a few days. During targeted lockdowns of, say, a housing compound, they control who gets to go where. (Security guards and China’s 7.7m food-delivery workers are also important during these times.) Smaller cities, of 5m people or fewer, are supposed to be able to test everyone in just two days. That involves a lot of door-to-door visits by committee members, as well as volunteers who organise people in queues.

Contact tracing, in particular, is labour-intensive. The city of Shanghai alone has 3,000 workers devoted to the effort. Most are public-health officials. During outbreaks they can be on call 24 hours a day. Some sound a little worn out. “In a week of continuous battle with the virus, everyone stayed up all night several times, pushing our bodies to the limit,” says one. “So please can everyone who receives a call be patient and co-operate.”

If some people are frustrated with the state’s zero-covid footsoldiers, it is perhaps because there are so many of them—and they don’t always co-ordinate. A person might receive a call from several different officials: one from where they work, another from where they live and yet another from where they have been recently. The police, neighbourhood committees and businesses work the phones, too, checking on people’s whereabouts. Scammers have tried to take advantage of the situation. Real contact tracers will not ask for your bank details, warns an official guide to the process.

Before the pandemic, neighbourhood committees did not have much power. Now, though, they can confine people to their houses for weeks. Invasions of privacy are common. Cameras are often placed outside flats to ensure compliance with isolation protocols. A person might receive a visit after buying drugs that suggest he has a fever. Some high-profile abuses have left people outraged. Health workers in the central city of Xi’an beat up a young man who violated lockdown to buy a steamed bun. Local officials in some provincial cities killed the cats and dogs of quarantined residents out of fear that the animals might spread the virus.

But for the most part the public has been supportive of those implementing the zero-covid policy. For many Chinese, the country’s relatively low number of cases and deaths justifies the overall strategy. If anything, they feel sympathy for the workers involved. The video of Ms Gao attracted much attention. “It’s the third year of the epidemic. Can’t we find a way to slowly reduce the burdens on front-line workers?” said one commenter.

The highly transmissible Omicron variant will make that difficult. Provinces have tended to share workers, depending on where there is an outbreak. But with Omicron spreading across the country, resources are limited. Chinese doctors hint that changes to the zero-covid policy are coming and that the state’s most stringent measures will eventually be lifted. For now, though, China’s politicians are merely tweaking the strategy. “From beginning to end” China must “put lives above all else”, President Xi Jinping told the Politburo’s seven-member Standing Committee on March 17th. The footsoldiers of zero-covid will remain busy. ■

Dig deeper

I N THE EARLY 1970s a handful of former employees at IBM , then the world’s biggest computer-maker, spent weeks pulling double shifts. During the day they quizzed the workers at a nylon plant in southern Germany about what exactly made their factory tick. At night they painstakingly turned this knowledge into code and tested it. The result of all this toil was one of the world’s first comprehensive pieces of business software. The company behind it, SAP , is still Europe’s mightiest technology titan by revenue, with annual sales of nearly €30bn ($33bn). It has a market value of €123bn as it celebrates its 50th anniversary on April 1st (no joke).

Such stamina is a feat, but also raises worrying questions about the European tech industry. Why has SAP remained Europe’s top digital firm for so long? Why has the continent spawned no trillion-dollar Apfel or Amazonie? Might one eventually emerge? And could such a development be speeded by the EU ’s landmark technology law, the Digital Markets Act (or DMA for short), which the bloc was expected to approve after The Economist went to press on March 24th?

SAP ’s longevity is the easiest to explain. Once firms opt for a certain type of business software, it becomes tedious (and sometimes impossible) to replace it. That guarantees the purveyor a regular revenue stream and a captive market for extensions. SAP also had the foresight to design its software from the start so that it did not become obsolete when the underlying computing infrastructure changed. As a result, it is one of the few information-technology giants that has survived three “platform shifts”: from mainframe computers to more distributed “client-server” systems, then to the internet and, now, to the computing cloud.

Why SAP remains a lonely European presence in a digital realm lorded over by American tech behemoths is less obvious. Oft-heard explanations include the continent’s risk-averse entrepreneurs and consumers, a lack of venture capital ( VC ), red tape and a fragmented home market. Benedict Evans, a former venture capitalist who now publishes a widely read newsletter, thinks the reason is far simpler: tech grew big in its birthplace, Silicon Valley. Until a few years ago, even aspirant American tech hubs, such as Austin, Miami and New York, did little better at spawning digital darlings than Berlin, London or Paris.

SAP itself is proof that appearing in the right place at the right time is instrumental to making it in tech. The firm’s headquarters may have risen on an asparagus field a 15-minute drive south of Heidelberg, but the region combined many factors that contributed to the firm’s success: more than one well-organised factory whose business processes lent themselves to being turned into software; plenty of accountants and physicists who could hone SAP ’s programs; no VC firms to badger it to ship half-baked products in search of a quick buck. Because the German market was relatively small, SAP also designed its code to work with many currencies—a feature that its American rivals, including Oracle, had to add laboriously after the fact.

These days breeding tech stars is easier. Demand for digital services is growing in Europe, attracting money, experienced entrepreneurs and startup-friendly rules, such as a more relaxed attitude to employee stock options, says Annabelle Gawer, who runs the Centre of Digital Economy at the University of Surrey. The number of European tech firms worth more than $1bn, both listed and unlisted, has exploded in recent years. When Mosaic Ventures, a VC firm in London, surveyed such companies earlier this year, before a wobble in tech valuations, it counted about 180 new ones since 2010, collectively worth some $1trn (see chart). The DMA is meant to spur even more such breeding by creating a level playing field on which startups can compete against America’s tech titans. Its provisions will apply to “gatekeepers” which operate one or more “core platform services” and, according to the latest leaks, have a market capitalisation of more than €75bn and had annual revenue in Europe of more than €7.5bn in the last three financial years. The services in question include online search, social networks, video-sharing, operating systems, cloud-computing and online advertising: the bread and butter of America’s big tech, in other words. Specifically, the DMA may, among other things, compel Apple to let iPhone-users bypass its app store and “sideload” software from elsewhere; force Meta to make its WhatsApp and other messaging services work with rival ones; and require Google to show content from European publishers in its search engine. Without such rules, says Margrethe Vestager, the EU ’s top trustbuster, “others will not get room to grow”. Perhaps. But the DMA may also make it harder for European firms to become really big. Some entrepreneurs may prefer to avoid the hassle of complying with its strictures. Investors’ enthusiasm for firms whose growth prospects could be crimped as a result may also be chilled. And enforcing the new rules against deep-pocketed American firms may be tough, says Thomas Vinje, a veteran antitrust lawyer at Clifford Chance, a law firm. To avoid having the DMA applied differently in the EU ’s 27 member states, the European Commission will be in charge. But the 80 officials it has initially delegated to the task may struggle with their in-trays. Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority plans to employ three times as many people to perform a similar function for just one country.

After 50 years SAP is at last seeing serious challenges to its dominance of European techdom. Adyen, a listed Dutch digital-payments provider, has a stockmarket value of more than $60bn. Klarna, a privately held Swedish one, is valued at $46bn. It would be an irony if the EU ’s new rules made it harder for such upstarts to grow beyond a certain size—and an even bigger one if they allowed SAP , whose business software is not deemed a core platform service, to hold on to its crown. ■

W HEN INHABITANTS of Sutton, then a parish of Surrey, gathered for the opening of Trinity Wesleyan Church in 1907, they surely never imagined that a century later its pews would be filled by colonial subjects from the Far East. They would have been baffled by sermons in a strange tongue, and texts in a foreign script. But “everything is guided by God”, says Jimmy, one of the new worshippers. “He led us to settle down here.”

Jimmy is one of around 300 Hong Kongers who have recently joined the Sutton Hongkongers′ Fellowship, which worships at what is now called Trinity Church Sutton. Last year nearly 100,000 visas were granted for the British National Overseas ( BNO ) immigration route for residents of the territory opened in January 2021. Sutton, now a London suburb, has been a popular destination: Hong Kongers are attracted by the low crime rates and local schools. Although only 16% of Hong Kongers are Christians, the share among BNO arrivals seems to be higher. One survey by UKHK , a faith-based project set up to welcome them, suggests that nearly half are Christians, mostly Protestants (the sample, reached via UKHK ’s website, may have been biased towards believers).

The new arrivals have been a boon for Britain’s churches, which were struggling to recruit new members. Between 2009 and 2019 attendance at Church of England services fell by 15-20%. But most Cantonese-speaking congregations in Britain doubled or trebled in size last year, according to the Chinese Overseas Christian Mission, a charity based in Milton Keynes. One congregation, the Manchester Chinese Alliance Church, has quadrupled in size to 600 worshippers.

Christians are particularly likely to feel persecuted in Hong Kong. Although there is still more religious freedom than in mainland China, restrictions on worship are only likely to tighten. Many Christians were vocal in support of the pro-democracy movement that preceded the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on the city. After the introduction in June 2020 of a draconian national-security law, which has been used to punish people retrospectively for their involvement in the pro-democracy protests, they feared that they would be in trouble, says Richard Choi, a community organiser in Sutton.

Churches are hoping that their embrace of Hong Kongers can make the new arrivals feel more welcome than previous cohorts of immigrants. UKHK has worked with hundreds of churches to help make them “Hong Kong ready”, for example by recruiting Cantonese-speaking volunteers. This was in part motivated by a desire not to repeat the “terrible job” that churches did in welcoming the Windrush generation—people from the Caribbean who came to Britain from the late 1940s—says Krish Kandiah, UKHK ’s director. The influx of former colonial subjects from Hong Kong was a chance to ensure that, when it came to offering help, Christians would be “at the front of the queue”.

That help has manifested in various ways. Trinity Church now holds services in Cantonese once a fortnight; nearby Hope Church is offering English-language lessons specifically for Hong Kongers. Segregated services mean that the Trinity worshippers have yet to integrate fully with the wider Christian community. But services in their own tongue are much needed, says Stephen Lam, another Trinity member who arrived from Hong Kong last year. “You use your heart’s language to pray.” ■

Correction (March 28th, 2022): An earlier version of this article said that the Hong Kongers were part of Trinity Church Sutton. In fact they are part of a new fellowship that worships at Trinity Church.

I N GEOPHYSICS, an epicentre is the place on the surface of the Earth closest to the point in its depths where intolerable pressure has triggered an earthquake. In war-torn Ukraine, the Epicentr hypermarket in Zaporyzhzhya is the rallying point in government-held territory closest to the intolerable pressure Russian forces have imposed on Mariupol, some 220km away.

Many of those fleeing the violence—some on foot, some in wheelchairs—have nothing but the shopping centre’s address to guide them. Some make it only to intervening villages. But 2,000-5,000 a day are reaching the hastily organised gathering point, as shocked as the survivors of earthquakes and tsunamis. More shocked, perhaps: the destruction they escaped was not some sudden act of God, but a protracted, deliberate and horribly human assault.

You can sense the arrival of a new convoy before you encounter any of the survivors on board—they carry the smoky smell of the burning city even after days of travel. On arrival they get soup and bread—which they hold to their noses before devouring—fresh clothes and first aid delivered by local volunteers. They fight back tears, not always successfully, as they work out if friends and relatives have managed to escape. They are the lucky ones, they keep saying; the ones who found cars and petrol. They are not still trapped in basements. They are not the old women begging for a lift on the edge of town, money in one hand and icons in the other.

Mariupol, once a city of 400,000, was surrounded by Russian forces from Crimea and Donbas in the first week of the war. It has fared far worse since than the other cities around which the Russians are encamped, in part because of its strategic importance—it is crucial to the establishment of a land bridge from Donbas to Crimea—in part because, unlike Kharkiv or Kyiv in the north, it is entirely encircled.

The Russian forces close to Kyiv have been held at bay for the past two weeks. Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, says the capital is the “best defended place in Ukraine”. No one in the city now believes that Russian forces have the fighting power needed to take and occupy it. There are even some areas where Ukrainian troops are reported to have pushed back the invaders, though at least some of those reports have turned out not to be true. In Makariv, 50km west of the capital, the Ukrainian authorities claimed the Russians had been “driven back”. When your correspondent tried to visit he found a different situation. Fierce fighting made it impossible to get into the town. The local mayor said the Russians had seized 15% of it at the end of February and had neither advanced or been pushed back since then.

In the centre of Kyiv, however, life is improving. Petrol is no longer rationed, and there is more traffic on main roads than at any time since the invasion began on February 24th. Bread is back on supermarket shelves. Trains enter and leave the city.

But the signs, sounds and horrors of war persist. Every day since around March 14th the capital has been struck by a handful of missiles, with the north-west hit particularly badly. Late in the evening of March 20th a Russian missile pulverised a gym, a shopping centre and an office building, hurling debris for hundreds of metres. According to the Russian Ministry of Defence, which produced a video to support its claim, there were Ukrainian missile launchers in a parking area underneath the gym. If true, their detonation in the blast could explain the force of the explosion.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, says that of every four incoming missiles one is intercepted, one hits a military target and two hit civilian targets. “I can’t say that in Kyiv they are trying to hit civilians on purpose but a lot of times they miss,” he says, adding that elsewhere residential areas have been knowingly targeted.

Mariupol exemplifies that savagery. On March 10th Russian aircraft started to bomb the city; unlike Kyiv, it has no air defences. Soon a few bombs a day became a few dozen bombs a day. On March 16th Russian missiles fell on a swimming pool, a cinema and a theatre; all three were being used for shelter by civilians. The theatre contained over 1,000 people, according to an eyewitness there the day before; the word “children” was written in large letters on the pavement outside the theatre, but did nothing to prevent the attack. No one currently knows how many survived, nor how many may remain buried alive. In nine other towns and cities talks between Russia and Ukraine have established humanitarian corridors through which civilians can escape. Such talks have not worked for Mariupol. As things have worsened the escape routes, already dangerous, have become more deadly. Oleksandr Horbachenko, a welder, says that when he left on March 18th the city was in a state of collapse, with no municipal services, no drinkable water and no food. He says at least 80% of buildings are bombed out. “The whole of the centre is in ruins, with wires and glass everywhere. The worst thing is seeing the corpses strewn across the street. There are hundreds of them rotting away near the central market.” On March 20th a Russian bomb hit a school on the eastern side of the city, where 400 people were reportedly sheltering. Later that day, Russia delivered an ultimatum: surrender the city by 5am the following morning. The Ukrainian government refused. But it has no way of breaking the blockade. On March 19th Mr Arestovych said the nearest available forces were more than 110km away. To reach the city they would have to traverse terrain on which they would be completely exposed to Russian air attacks.

Many interpreted the ultimatum as a warning of worse crimes to come, and fighting intensified in the days that followed; ships are currently adding to the bombardment. The city is close to falling. On March 20th Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov regiment, a paramilitary outfit fighting alongside elite Ukrainian forces from the 36th Marine Brigade, confirmed that street-to-street fighting was under way in the east of the city. With 3,500 Ukrainian soldiers facing 14,000 invaders, around a tenth of the total estimated Russian force in the country, their prospects look daunting, even though attackers are generally reckoned to need a large numerical advantage.

The carnage in Mariupol and the success in Kyiv have both strengthened Ukrainian resolve. But the country continues to pursue negotiations with the invaders. And Russia’s requirements from such talks, though still beyond what Ukraine says it is willing to give, are much more modest now than they would have been when the invasion was launched in expectation of an easy and near total victory. The four principal ones are: a declaration of Ukrainian neutrality; Ukrainian demilitarisation; formal acceptance that Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014, is Russian territory and that the Donbas region, some of which was controlled by separatists backed by Russia before the war, is independent; and relief for Russia from Western sanctions.

Ukraine appears ready to agree to some of these demands. It has stated publicly that it will make no concessions on territorial integrity with regard to Crimea and Donbas, but behind closed doors there appears to be more willingness to experiment with different formulas. However its negotiators see no willingness to move on the other side. “They’re not as confident and self-assured as they used to be in the first days,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said in an interview with The Economist. “But on all big issues they are still where they were [when the negotiations began].”

If there is something Russia clearly wants, it is relief from sanctions. “Almost every tenth sentence [Russian negotiators] say is about sanctions,” Mr Kuleba said. “It’s a pain for them.” As a result Ukraine is pressing its Western supporters to turn up the pressure. A cost the Russians do not talk about is their mounting death toll. According to a NATO estimate, 7,000-15,000 Russians have died; the organisation puts the total number of those dead, injured and captured at around 40,000. If casualties are indeed in that sort of range then almost a quarter of the original invasion force is out of action.

But the Ukrainians are not sure that the Russian negotiators know how bad the situation is. The team is “second tier”, according to an intelligence official in Kyiv; Mr Kuleba says they do not appear empowered to resolve issues such as the nature of the security guarantees Ukraine wants.

Mr Putin’s failure to provide better negotiators could well reflect a lack of interest in seeing the negotiations bear fruit, perhaps because he thinks time is on his side. Though many Russian advances have stalled, there are quite a few places where it could increase its bombardments. A security official in Kyiv says that Ukrainian intelligence has had several warnings that a massive, sustained rocket attack on the capital is imminent. For unknown reasons, no such attack has materialised. But it remains a possibility. And Ukraine does not yet have the resources for decisive counterattacks.

Yet Mr Putin has been wrong about this war before. He may be again. Ms Rudik, the MP , says time is of the essence. She just doesn’t know who it favours. “The Russian economy is collapsing but we are dying. The question is who falls first.” ■

W HEN HARRY told me that he was leaving the company, one of the first things he said to me was that he didn’t like sentimental goodbyes. I have decided to take him at his word. Everything you will hear me say tonight is unvarnished and to the point, just like the man himself.

Harry has been in the finance department for seven years. In that time he has not done anything remotely funny. I asked several people if they had anecdotes about him, and the best they could come up with is that he once accidentally changed a formula in the annual budget spreadsheet. Since the mistake was quickly spotted and fixed, it had no impact at all. I asked Charlotte, who has worked with you closely for three years, if she had anything to share. She was silent for what seemed like hours, and then said that she thinks you like walnuts. (Ah, I see you shaking your head, so that is neither funny nor true.)

No matter. We do not hire people because they have an amusing habit of getting stuck in lifts (yes, Brian, I do mean you) or promote them because they can recite pi as a party trick. It is true that a mediocre colleague who happens to have some eccentric habits (and yes, Brian, I still mean you) would have produced a much more enjoyable leaving event than this painfully stilted affair. But that should not obscure more important things. Harry has been a diligent, competent and well-liked employee. He has been a good manager. Every job he has done for us he has done well.

Not so well that he is indispensable, of course. We did offer him a raise when we found out he was planning to leave, but we opted against throwing in a sabbatical. In the end we recognised that he wanted to go and decided that we would cope just fine. There is no shame in that. Everyone is dispensable; it’s just a question of how quickly people come to that realisation. In Harry’s case, it was neither all that slow nor embarrassingly fast.

Since then, we have all been waiting for him actually to leave. Once it is known that a person is moving on from their role, everyone immediately prices it in. People with ambition start writing memos about what they would do if they had that job. Rebecca’s pitch arrived the day after we announced your departure. I can see now that you didn’t know that, and that she didn’t expect me to mention it.

Meetings quickly start to disappear from calendars. Decisions are deferred or simply taken elsewhere. It’s like the period between an election and an inauguration: there is someone in office but no one in power. By the time we get to this point, holding a glass of Prosecco and staring at you as if you are an endangered species, it’s something of a surprise to find that you still exist.

Will Harry be forgotten? Not at all, though for reasons that he may not fully grasp. This is an evening in which the person who is leaving receives presents (as well as a card from people whose names you don’t recognise but who just loved working with you). But the exchange goes both ways. The leavers have a parting gift of their own to bestow: a convenient scapegoat.

When someone dies, the convention is not to speak ill of the departed. When an employee exits a company, it’s the opposite. Things that don’t work as well as they should can be laid at the door of someone who won’t answer back. Frustrations that have been suppressed can finally be blamed on someone. When we speak of you, we will say things like “Harry had many strengths but…”, and we will persuade ourselves that you held us back a bit. This will not be true, but it will be convenient. I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you that we are grateful for this final act of service, which can last for as long as a year after someone has actually left the building.

After that, memories tend to fade. I wish I could promise you that you are part of company folklore, or that your role in banning plastic straws from the office will reverberate through the ages. Instead, the only guarantee I can give is that no one here will ever read your exit-interview notes.

This may all seem a little sad. You have spent many years at the company, and yet will probably leave comparatively little trace. But you should still feel pride in your time here. To have done your work well and to leave at a time of your choosing are achievements that are beyond most people (and on both scores, Brian, I am still thinking of you). So please raise your glasses to Harry. He has been an excellent colleague and won’t really be missed.

Company or cult? (Mar 5th)

S PEAK TO THE bankers and industrialists at the top of India’s economic pyramid and you hear a common refrain. All Indians, they contend, are at heart socialists—themselves included. The popularity of the Indian version of “Shark Tank”, a TV celebration of capitalism (similar to “Dragons’ Den” in Britain) in which ordinary people seek funding for their business ideas from a gaggle of successful entrepreneurs, suggests that this conventional view may be out of date. The show’s 36-episode run, wrote the Hindustan Times, shifted the topic of dinner conversations throughout the vast country from cricket to business plans. Terms like “gross profit” and “ TAM ” (total addressable market) have entered common parlance among its 1.4bn people.

Shows with star judges awarding talent (and panning its absence) have long had a place on Indian television. But they have historically involved song and dance, not spreadsheets. Sony Entertainment received 85,000 applications for “Shark Tank”. These were whittled down to 198 pitches presented to juries of five judges, themselves chosen to reflect India’s new business elite (rather than being scions of industrial conglomerates they had founded firms peddling everything from cosmetics and drugs to a matchmaking app and electronic payments).

The enterprising hopefuls’ televised presentations were heavier on enthusiasm than polish. Rather than being a liability, this resonated with viewers who, as many blogs and social-media posts attested, saw themselves in the contestants. For “Shark Tank” was, in its effervescent diversity, not unlike Indian society. Of the 67 startups that secured some money from the judges, three-fifths were run by first-time entrepreneurs. More than two-fifths had female co-founders and a third were co-founded by someone from a small city rather than a business hub like Bangalore, Delhi or Mumbai. Only nine of the winning businesses had a founder who boasted a degree from the prestigious engineering and business schools that are the traditional pathway into India’s economic aristocracy.

Some of the winning pitches seemed humdrum (banana crisps). Others were ingenious (an engineer whose family had been devastated by the abrupt death of their cow developed an electronic ear clip to monitor bovine health). Some were both (a bicycle-mounted pesticide sprayer). Even some losing proposals won recognition. Reversible dresses (good for a day in the office and a night on the town) were dismissed by one of the judges as suitable for a mop; his wife subsequently appeared wearing one on TV .

R HINOPLASTY HAS long been a rite of passage in Lebanon. Teenage girls want a dainty new nose in time for their graduation parties, celebrated in selfies. Lebanon’s many woes have not hindered the habit. Plastic surgeons are apparently making as much as or more than they did before an economic crisis, starting in 2019, that the World Bank has ranked as the third-worst anywhere, ever.

The World Health Organisation reckons that Lebanon’s economic meltdown prompted nearly 40% of the country’s doctors to leave. But for those who have stayed, the pickings, especially for nose jobs, may have increased. The pool of patients has stayed the same. There are fewer dexterous doctors to paddle in it.

If fewer Lebanese can afford cosmetic surgery, the gap has been filled by patients from abroad. Mostly of Lebanese descent, they provide 70% of the country’s bidders for beauty, reckons Chadi Murr, a plastic surgeon. That is a notably higher share than before the financial crisis, he says.

Beautifying a beak in Beirut is cheaper than in the West. The average Lebanese nose job costs $2,500, less than half the going rate in America. And while the hooter recovers, customers can visit grandparents and cousins. Some say that Lebanon’s diaspora is 15m-strong, twice as big as the beleaguered country’s resident population.

Lebanon’s beauty aficionados are a resilient and resourceful lot. When angry protesters blocked the roads in 2019, hoping to get rid of Lebanon’s government, those bent on cosmetic improvements simply headed for the clinic on foot. While the country lamented a lack of basic medicines, plastic surgeons stocked up on Botox and flesh-fillers. With the electricity supply regularly conking out, Saad Dibo, a plastic surgeon, moved stock into his flat, where his own generator kept the fridges cool.

For about half a year after an explosion in the port of Beirut killed more than 200 people in 2020, many visitors were afraid to come, says Dr Murr. Locals were “not in the mood” for nips and tucks either, he admits. His practice languished. But soon he was busy treating scars and burns from the blast.

“It’s weird” how well his business has managed, he concedes. Bleaker times may return, so he has opened a surgery in Cyprus, where he spends one week in eight. In a country so disaster-prone, you need a fallback. But as long as Lebanese ladies like to tweak their noses, Beirut’s beauty business seems likely to survive.

W HAT WARM weather is to ice-cream vans and popcorn is to dentists, Saharan dust storms are to car washes. A big dust cloud like the one that reached Britain on March 16th boosts revenues by about a quarter, according to Kevin Pay of Wilcomatic, which runs about 800 automatic car washes in Britain. “You love to see it,” he says, as a dusty red Ford Ka joins the queue in Hove in East Sussex, on the south coast.

Until recently Britain’s drivers usually took their dirty motors to car parks and disused petrol stations, where eastern European immigrants had at them with sponges. In 2018 a parliamentary committee was informed that Britain had 10,000-20,000 hand car washes, compared with 2,000 automatic “rollover” machines and about 4,000 do-it-yourself jet washes. Hand car washes were more convenient—drivers simply handed money through the window rather than traipsing into a petrol station to buy a six-digit code—and often cheaper than machines. The industry was a rare example of de-automation.

It is now re-automating. Mr Pay says that Wilcomatic’s car-washing revenues in 2021 were 15% higher than in 2019, before covid-19 arrived. “It’s starting to turn,” agrees Chris Scott of Istobal, another car-washing firm, who says that sales of the chemicals used by machines are higher than they were before the pandemic. At Parkfoot Garage in Kent, David Charman says his four jet washes have been “absolutely flat out” since the dust storm. He has acquired another car-wash site and is seeking a third.

Automatic car washes and jet washes have improved, with contactless payment, superior brushes and theatrical foam. But the main reason for their popularity is that hand car washes are disappearing. The informal ones can be lousy employers: in 2016 a study of Leicester by two academics, Ian Clark and Trevor Colling, found that many paid less than the legal minimum wage. Car washing is a typical first job for an unskilled immigrant. And Brexit means that Britain has fewer newly arrived unskilled immigrants these days.

Covid-19 further tilted the market towards machines. The government shut down hand car washes for longer than automated ones, on the ground that they posed a higher infection risk. The pandemic also discouraged drivers (and everyone else) from paying with cash. That hurt informal car washes, which love cash in part because it allows them to dodge tax.

Alexander Russell of the Car Wash Association, a trade group, says that the industry has gone in a circle. Some petrol stations are now putting automatic car-washing machines into bays that were originally built for them, but were then occupied by hand car washes. Car washing has been in a lather, but it is emerging cleaner.

N O DATE HAS been set for it yet, not even a month. But for every official, the orders are clear. Their work must focus on making sure that a crucial Communist Party congress, to be held in the second half of the year, goes smoothly. The conclave is widely expected to herald the start of at least another five years of rule for Xi Jinping. From the police to economic policymakers, all are trying to minimise untoward events that might overshadow his moment of political glory. “The word ‘stability’ is the key,” leaders intone about the coming year at official gatherings.

It will be a far bumpier ride than they would like. In recent weeks the rapid spread of Omicron, a highly transmissible variant of the virus that causes covid-19, has posed an unprecedented challenge to China’s much-vaunted “zero-covid” policy. Widespread lockdowns have added to the wobbles of an already shaky economy. Just this month Mr Xi contrasted the party’s rule with “Western chaos”. He was referring, in part, to China’s two years of success (after a botched initial response) at crushing covid. If officials relax the policy to protect the economy they would risk a surge of cases that could overwhelm China’s fragile public-health system.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another severe headache. The war began less than three weeks after Mr Xi and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, signed a joint statement in February declaring “no limits” to the two countries’ friendship. Chinese diplomats are now struggling to balance a desire to preserve what they see as this crucial relationship against a risk of even greater tension between China and the West, which could compound China’s economic difficulties.

Public opinion is hard to gauge, but there is little sign that the party’s policies on covid, Ukraine or the economy are widely resented. Many Chinese express support for the tough zero-covid approach. On social media, however, some grumbling circulates—despite censors’ efforts to stifle it. Even in the state-controlled press there have been occasional hints of disagreement over the party’s economic strategy, which last year included a regulatory clampdown on tech firms and a call by Mr Xi for “common prosperity” that scared entrepreneurs by raising the spectre of big redistributive schemes. Intriguingly, the prime minister, Li Keqiang, mentioned common prosperity only once in his state-of-the-nation speech to the national legislature on March 5th.

Among China-watchers, there is much speculation about the extent of opposition to Mr Xi within the elite, and the impact it might have on his political grip. But there is no convincing evidence that his plans could be derailed for the party congress and a meeting immediately afterwards of the Central Committee, which will announce the leadership line-up (including his own likely appointment to a third term as party chief, violating recent norms). Indeed, history suggests that for all the party’s preoccupation with stability in the build-up to party congresses, which normally are held every five years, the power of paramount leaders can survive enormous buffeting.

Mao Zedong, for example, ruled China for nearly 27 years, despite the deaths of millions in a famine of his own making, bitter political struggles within the party and at least one attempted coup. Deng Xiaoping retained authority well after his retirement, despite public resentment of his bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and open criticism of his policies by conservatives in the party who saw them as a catalyst of the unrest. Similarly Jiang Zemin, who had overseen mass lay-offs from state-owned firms (angering millions of workers as well as conservatives), wielded much power long after he retired from his last post in 2004.

Mr Xi’s bid for an extension of his rule must anger some in the party. Cai Xia, a former academic at the party’s most prestigious training centre for officials (she now lives in America), has accused Mr Xi of forcing the party to “swallow dog-shit” by ordering the Central Committee in 2018 to approve a constitutional revision to facilitate his bid. But there is little sign today of the kind of turbulence in elite politics that marked the build-up to Mr Xi’s anointment as party chief in 2012. That year saw near-open feuding involving a prominent political rival, Bo Xilai, a member of the Politburo whom Mr Xi later accused of being involved in a plot to seize power.

Purges have continued. An 18-month “rectification” campaign of the domestic security forces ended late last year, aimed in part at rooting out those disloyal to the party and Mr Xi. Its most powerful targets included a deputy minister of public security, Sun Lijun, who was accused of leading a “political cabal” within the police (he was formally charged with corruption in January), as well as Fu Zhenghua, a former minister of justice. On March 21st it was announced that a former vice-president of the supreme court, Shen Deyong, was under investigation for unspecified crimes.

But there is no sign of any open campaigning for power of the type that Mr Bo engaged in. Mr Xi’s relentless onslaught against corruption—sometimes a smokescreen for attacking his political enemies—has sown such fear within the party hierarchy that it is hard to imagine any such challenge today. Barriers to organising against him are “near insurmountable”, wrote Richard McGregor and Jude Blanchette in a report on post-Xi succession scenarios that was published last year by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

On his management of the pandemic, Mr Xi is showing no sign of wavering. “Perseverance is victory,” he said at a meeting on March 17th of the Politburo’s seven-member Standing Committee. He called for a “step-up” in mobilisation and “unremitting efforts” to combat the current wave of outbreaks. Mr Xi also said that “maximum” effort should be made to minimise harm to the economy and society. But similar phrases have been used by officials before over the past two years.

Crucially, there has been little sign of any let-up in the punishment of officials for letting covid spread on their watch. The South China Morning Post, a newspaper in Hong Kong, has counted more than 70 who have been sacked or reprimanded during this wave. The experience of Hong Kong may encourage mainland officials to stay vigilant. The number of cases detected daily in that city far surpasses the total on the mainland. Daily deaths in Hong Kong have risen to about 200 compared with a handful, if that, in the rest of China. As they see it, Hong Kong’s plight is the result of not pursuing a zero-covid policy thoroughly enough. They note that it lacks the kind of manpower the mainland deploys to ensure compliance.

At this month’s parliamentary meeting Mr Li, the prime minister, admitted the going would be tough. This year, he said, China faced an “obvious increase in dangers and challenges”. But he ended his speech with his usual injunction: “We must unite ever closer around the party centre with Xi Jinping at its core.” It would take daring to do otherwise. ■

O N MARCH 22ND , in a penal colony 1,000km north-east of the front lines around Kyiv, Alexei Navalny, the jailed leader of Russia’s opposition, was sentenced to another nine years imprisonment. To serve them he will probably be moved from Vladimir, where he has been kept for more than a year, to a yet harsher maximum-security jail elsewhere.

The crime for which he was sentenced is fraud. His true crime is one of common enterprise with that for which the people of Ukraine are now suffering collective punishment. The Ukrainians want to embrace many, if not all, the values held dear by other European nations. Mr Navalny wants the same for Russia. Vladimir Putin cannot countenance either desire. As Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, told The Economist, “If Russia wins, there will be no Ukraine; if Ukraine wins, there will be a new Russia.” That new Russia is as much a target of Mr Putin’s war as Ukraine is. Its potential must be crushed as surely as Mr Navalny’s.

This crusade against a liberal European future is being fought in the name of Russkiy mir—“the Russian world”, a previously obscure historical term for a Slavic civilisation based on shared ethnicity, religion and heritage. The Putin regime has revived, promulgated and debased this idea into an obscurantist anti-Western mixture of Orthodox dogma, nationalism, conspiracy theory and security-state Stalinism.

The war is the latest and most striking manifestation of this revanchist ideological movement. And it has brought to the fore a dark and mystical component within it, one a bit in love with death. As Andrei Kurilkin, a publisher, puts it, “The substance of the myth is less important than its sacred nature…The legitimacy of the state is now grounded not in its public good, but in a quasi-religious cult.”

The cult was on proud display at Mr Putin’s first public appearance since the invasion—a rally at the Luzhniki stadium packed with 95,000 flag-waving people, mostly young, some bused in, many, presumably, there of their own volition. An open octagonal structure set up in the middle of the stadium served as an altar. Standing at it Mr Putin praised Russia’s army with words from St John’s gospel: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

His oration, delivered in a $14,000 Loro Piana coat, made much of Fyodor Ushakov, a deeply religious admiral who, in the 18th century, helped win Crimea back from the Ottomans. In 2001 he was canonised by the Orthodox church; he later became the patron saint of nuclear-armed long-distance bombers. “He once said that the storms of war would glorify Russia,” Mr Putin told the crowd. “That is how it was in his time; that is how it is today and will always be!”

A cathedral dome 19.45 metres across

In both his broad appeals to religion and his specific focus on the saintly Ushakov Mr Putin was cleaving to Stalin’s example. After the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany in 1941, the sometime seminarian turned communist dictator rehabilitated and co-opted the previously persecuted Orthodox church as a way of rallying the people. He also created a medal for outstanding service by naval officers called the order of Ushakov and arranged for his remains to be reburied.

This was not a mere echo or emulation; there is a strand of history which leads quite directly from then to now. Links between the church and the security forces, first fostered under Stalin, grew stronger after the fall of Communism. Whereas various western European churches repented and reflected after providing support for Hitler, the Moscow Patriarchate has never repented for its collusion with Stalin in such matters as the repression of Ukrainian Catholics after 1945.

The allegiance of its leaders, if not of all its clergy, has now been transferred to Mr Putin. Kirill, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, has called his presidency “a miracle of God”; he and others have become willing supporters of the cult of war. An early indication of this possibility was seen in 2005, when the orange and black ribbons of the Order of St George, a military saint venerated by the Orthodox church, were given a new pre-eminence in commemorations of the 1941-45 struggle against Germany, known in Russia as the “great patriotic war”. Its garish culmination can be seen in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Kubinka, 70km west of Moscow, which was inaugurated on June 22nd (the day Hitler launched his invasion) in 2020 (the 75th anniversary of the war’s end) with Mr Putin and Kirill in attendance.

The cathedral is a Byzantine monstrosity in khaki, its floor made from melted-down German tanks. But it is not devoted solely to the wars of the previous century. A mosaic commemorates the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the country’s role in Syria’s civil war: angels smile down on the soldiers going about their holy work.

In keeping with this attitude Kirill has declared the current war a Godly affair and praised the role it will play in keeping Russia safe from the horrors of gay-pride marches. More zealous churchmen have gone further. Elizbar Orlov, a priest in Rostov, a city close to the border with Ukraine, said the Russian army “was cleaning the world of a diabolic infection”.

As the cathedral shows, the Russian people’s sacrifice and victories in the great patriotic war, which saw both the loss of 20m Soviet citizens and the creation of an empire greater in extent than any of the Tsars’, are central to Mr Putin’s new ideology of the Russian world. Today, though, the foes and allies of the 1940s have been shuffled around, allowing the war to be reframed as part of an assault on Russia’s civilisation in which the West has been engaged for centuries. The main culprits in this aggression are Britain and America—no longer remembered as allies in the fight against Nazis, but cast instead as backers of the imaginary Nazis from which Ukraine must be saved.

Project Russia

More important to the cult even than the priests are the siloviki of the security services, from whose ranks Mr Putin himself emerged. Officers of the FSB , one of the successors to the KGB , have been at the heart of Russian politics for 20 years. Like many inhabitants of closed, tightly knit and powerful organisations, they have a tendency to see themselves as members of a secret order with access to revealed truths denied to lesser folk. Anti-Westernism and a siege mentality are central to their beliefs. Mr Putin relies on the briefs with which they supply him, always contained in distinctive red folders, for his information about the world

In this realm, too, a turn towards the ideology now being promulgated was first seen in 2005, when a faction within the FSB produced an anonymous book called “Project Russia”. It was delivered by courier services to various ministries dealing with security and Russia’s relationship with the world, warning them that democracy was a threat and the West an enemy.

Few paid much heed. Though Mr Putin’s ascension to the presidency in 2000 was helped by his willingness to wage war in Chechnya, his mandate was to stabilise an economy still reeling from the debt crisis of 1998 and to consolidate the gains, mostly pocketed by oligarchs, of the first post-Soviet decade. His contract with the Russian people was based not on religion or ideology, but on improving incomes. Only dedicated Kremlin watchers, astute artists such as Vladimir Sorokin and a few political activists paid much attention to the new ideology of isolationism appearing in some of the darker corners of the power structure. At a time of postmodernist irony, glamour and hedonism it seemed marginal at best.

Two years later the new way of thinking became much more obvious to the outside world. In his Munich speech in 2007 Mr Putin formally rejected the idea of Russia’s integration into the West. In the same year he told a press conference in Moscow that nuclear weapons and Orthodox Christianity were the two pillars of Russian society, the one guaranteeing the country’s external security, the other its moral health.

After tens of thousands of middle-class city dwellers marched through Moscow and St Petersburg in 2011-12 demanding “Russia without Putin” the securocrats and clerics started to expand their dogma into daily life. A regime which sustained, and was sustained by, networks of corruption, rent extraction and extortion required religion and an ideology of national greatness to restore the legitimacy lost during the looting. As Mr Navalny remarked in a video which revealed Mr Putin’s palace in Sochi, covering up things of such size requires a lot of ideology.

Broken destinies

At that point it was still possible to see the ideology as a smokescreen rather than a product of real belief. Perhaps that was a mistake; perhaps the underlying reality changed. Either way, the onset of the covid-19 pandemic two years ago brought a raising of the ideological stakes. At the time, the most discussed aspect of the constitutional changes that Mr Putin finagled in July 2020 was that they effectively removed all limits on his term in office. But they also installed new ideological norms: gay marriage was banned, Russian enshrined as the “language of the state-forming people” and God given an official place in the nation’s heritage.

Mr Putin’s long subsequent periods of isolation seem to have firmed up the transformation. He is said to have lost much of his interest in current affairs and become preoccupied instead with history, paying particular heed to figures like Konstantin Leontyev, an ultra-reactionary 19th-century visionary who admired hierarchy and monarchy, cringed at democratic uniformity and believed in the freezing of time. One of the few people he appears to have spent time with is Yuri Kovalchuk, a close friend who controls a vast media group. According to Russian journalists they discussed Mr Putin’s mission to restore unity between Russia and Ukraine.

Hence a war against Ukraine which is also a war against Russia’s future—or at least the future as it has been conceived of by Russia’s sometimes small but frequently dominant Westernising faction for the past 350 years. As in Ukraine, the war is intended to wipe out the possibility of any future that looks towards Europe and some form of liberating modernity. In Ukraine there would be no coherent future left in its place. In Russia the modernisers would leave as their already diminished world was replaced by something fiercely reactionary and inward looking.

The Russian-backed “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk may be a model. There, crooks and thugs were elevated to unaccustomed status, armed with new weapons and fitted with allegedly glorious purpose: to fight against Ukraine’s European dream. In Russia they would be tasked with keeping any such dream from returning, whether from abroad, or from a cell. ■

T HE LAST pit in this northern French village closed in 1974, but the silhouettes of its slag heaps still rise in the distance across flat farmland. They bear witness to the muscular past of the mining basin, which a century ago employed 130,000 people. Today its jobless rate is ten points above the national average, and one in five of its people live below the French poverty line of €1,100 ($1,200) a month. Once a week Ma P’tite Epice Rit, a voluntary food truck, stops by the church in Auchy-les-Mines to sell discounted food near its expiry date to those living on less than €10 net a day. The truck serves some 100 residents. “People here are asphyxiated by daily life,” says a local shopkeeper.

Bypassed by high-speed trains and breezy ambition, Auchy belongs to what analysts call “peripheral” France. Peggy Belicki, who a year ago set up the food truck, filled with apples, potatoes, cabbages and chocolate tarts, says she caters to all sorts, from pensioners to single parents: “We offer a sort of moral-support service.” For years, this working-class town looked to the Communist Party to supply social assistance and ideological answers. The mayor, Jean-Michel Legrand, is from the Communist Party, as were his predecessors reaching back over half a century.

Yet in 2017, at the previous presidential election, the nationalist-populist Marine Le Pen topped first-round voting in Auchy. In the run-off, 65% of its voters backed her; just 35% backed Emmanuel Macron. Ahead of the two-round election on April 10th and 24th, polls say she is the most popular choice for blue-collar voters nationally, and again the most likely to face Mr Macron in the run-off. Promising to keep out immigrants and ease the cost of living, Ms Le Pen has built a stronghold in the northern rustbelt, especially among voters who once leaned to the far left. She represents a northern seat in parliament. And, since 2014, her party has run the town hall in nearby Hénin-Beaumont, where this week she took her campaign bus.

Other candidates are also tapping into the yearning in blighted corners like this for an alternative to the sitting president. One is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a razor-tongued 70-year-old from the hard left who is on his third presidential run. He came second in first-round voting in the village in 2017. Another is Eric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist whose latest wheeze is “re migration” to send 1m immigrants “home”.

On a recent weekday, Emmanuelle Danjou, a sales manager, was slipping leaflets for Mr Zemmour into letter boxes on an estate of neat two-storey homes. His programme “is really focused on a reconquest of our country. We’ve lost our values; we’re dismantling our country, our history”, she says; “He says out loud what many French people think in private.” Frédéric Dewitte, from a nearby village, joins her leafleting. He used to back Ms Le Pen but now finds her “too left-wing”, and not Eurosceptic enough. Mr Zemmour, he says, is a “man of culture” who could “possibly save France”.

Dislike of Mr Macron is not universal in Auchy. “Excusez-moi, he hasn’t had an easy task,” says a 70-year-old standing in his garden in plastic slippers. On the high street, where the “Best Kebab” joint sits near a boarded-up insurance agency, another man agrees that it is “unfair” to judge the president too harshly, what with the pandemic and war in Ukraine. Yet there is little love for him. He “values globalisation and Europe more than France”, declares Mr Dewitte. Many locals think he has governed for the rich, not for people like them.

This matters for Mr Macron. Not because he needs their votes: polls suggest that he would easily beat any potential rival in the run-off. But if he is re-elected, Mr Macron will have to govern a discontented and volatile country which readily takes its unhappiness to the streets. Some of his campaign proposals, unveiled on March 17th, would be vigorously contested, notably his promise to raise the pension age from 62 to 65. Mr Macron may be well placed to win the presidency, and possibly even a new majority at parliamentary elections in June. But, as Auchy-les-Mines suggests, governing a fractured France may be even harder the second time around. ■

W HAT DO GUARDIANS and Commanders have in common? Both project enough moxie for sports fans to rally behind, and neither is offensive. The Commanders are the former Washington Redskins, an American-football team; the Guardians are the baseball team once known as the Cleveland Indians. They are the latest examples of the scrubbing of Native American imagery from organised sports. In a video voiced by Tom Hanks, the Cleveland name change is portrayed as the forward march of history, from racism towards justice. For some Native Americans, it’s not that simple.

Brenda Bremner, former general manager of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, has a closet full of Warriors and Braves shirts. Her parents met at the Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, and her father played for the Chemawa Braves. “We wore Indian-type logos proudly,” she says. In 2017 it became illegal for Oregon public schools to have Native American mascots, logos or team names, but an exception—petitioned for by Ms Bremner—allowed schools to retain their mascots by entering into agreements with local tribes. Eight school districts did so.

A similar law is now in the Massachusetts Senate, and the town of Dartmouth is wondering what to do with its high-school team, the Indians. Is the Indian logo racist (causing “shame, horror and harm”, as critics said at a school-committee meeting this week)? A non-binding referendum is scheduled for April 5th.

The Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe, which was living in this area when the pilgrims landed in 1620, is divided on the issue. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe opposes the Dartmouth Indian logo. But 22 members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe signed a letter defending it. The image was drawn by a tribal member. “The symbol is not disrespectful,” the Aquinnah’s Sean Carney said at a previous school-committee meeting, on March 8th. In a separate letter, the Aquinnah chairwoman said the ban attempts to eliminate Native people from “today’s culture and society”.

Mr Carney has no love for the Redskins or for Chief Wahoo, the cartoonish mascot of the Cleveland Indians. The damaging effects of this kind of imagery on students have been well documented, which is why Maine banned such mascots in 2019, and why a new Colorado law will fine any public school with an unacceptable Native-themed team name or logo $25,000 a month from June. But the Dartmouth Indian is not Chief Wahoo.

Statewide bans are a crude instrument. What many tribes want above all is meaningful consultation on decisions ostensibly made in their name. The local approach has worked. Athletes at the University of Utah continue to call themselves Utes, with the approval of the real Utes, in exchange for lesson plans and scholarships for tribal members. It is similar with Florida State University’s Seminoles. Prejudice is the problem, says Ms Bremner, “and you don’t get rid of prejudice without education”.

T ALK TO A Scottish Conservative for five minutes, and you will hear that he or she lives in a one-party state, gripped by what their leader, Douglas Ross, terms the “dead hand of nationalism”. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, has been in office for seven years; her Scottish National Party ( SNP ) has been in power continuously for nearly 15. On the sidelines of the Scottish Conservative Party’s annual conference in Aberdeen on March 18th and 19th, Tories warned darkly that universities, charities and businesses are either run by nationalists or too cowed to dissent. They lament expansive new laws inhibiting free speech and meddling in family life. It is a vision of East Germany without the naturists.

There is a crumb of truth in these complaints. Yet if nationalists dominate Scotland, nowhere is that more obvious than in the Scottish Conservative Party. Just as securing independence has been the SNP ’s purpose since its founding in the 1930s, so stopping it has become the raison d’être of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, to give its full name.

Scottish unionism has a long history: before 1965 the country’s Tories had a separate Unionist Party, with the union flag as its symbol. Yet a decade ago Scottish Conservatives were a marginal force, mocked and loathed. Their recovery is thanks to the 2014 referendum in which Scots voted to stay in the United Kingdom, and the polarisation that followed as the SNP pursued a second vote. Scots vote according to their constitutional preference: 96% of Scottish Tory voters say they would vote against independence, while 90% of SNP voters would back it. The Conservatives have scooped up unionist voters with a simple slogan: “No to Indyref2”.

Publicly, senior figures decry the constitutional stalemate. Privately, they admit they must prolong it. In his speech in Aberdeen Mr Ross declared that Scotland needed to junk the “referendum obsession” and “move on from this toxic debate”. Afterwards he declared he would continue to speak out for the union. Any decision to hold a second referendum lies with the prime minister—and the incumbent, Boris Johnson, has found nationalism a useful bogeyman, warning that voting Labour in England will result in a repeat vote. Just as spy agencies can sometimes inflate threats to sustain their budgets, the party of the union has an interest in warning of break-up. The SNP could not ask for better propaganda.

Scottish Tories used to deride the monomania of nationalists, for whom no issue was too grave or too trivial to serve as a proxy for independence. Now they imitate it. Nationalists saw covid-19 as evidence that Scotland is better governed alone; Tories cite it as proof of the union’s might. Ludicrously, the SNP ’s president drew parallels between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Scotland’s quest for self-determination; Tories exult that the war showcases the importance of Britain’s nuclear weapons, NATO membership and oil reserves, all of which would be thrown into flux by separation. If Russian missiles obliterated Edinburgh, the survivors would crawl from the rubble to explain why it proved them right.

The SNP and Tories have feasted on the Scottish Labour Party, which has seen its voters split on the constitution. That has transformed both. SNP members, once known as the Tartan Tories for their stuffy small-statism, have embraced left-wing economics and social liberalism. Scottish Tories, once a genteel bunch in tweeds and red corduroys, court working-class unionists in former mining and steel towns battered by Thatcherism. Like Brexit, the constitutional question has become a gateway for unlikely new voters: less Range Rovers, more Rangers Football Club.

In his recent book “Standing up for Scotland”, David Torrance, an academic, argues that for more than a century the Scottish Tories have practised “nationalist unionism”, according to which the union can be defended only by those who are proudly Scottish and stick up for the country. Under the SNP ’s dominance the Tories’ Scottishness has become more ostentatious, but the strategy harder to execute. They must demonstrate that they are no mere branch office of the national party and can be relied upon to stand up to Mr Johnson’s unpopular government. But that inevitably lends credence to the notion that Scotland is a land apart in which London has no legitimate role. Either way, the SNP wins.

The result is endless, fruitless debate about rebranding and restructuring—and, on occasion, farce. The Scottish Tories disliked Brexit, but now must defend it. Mr Ross called for Mr Johnson to resign over parties in Downing Street, then declared he should stay during the war in Ukraine, but now refuses to say whether he should fight the next election. It is hard to defend your country’s territorial settlement when your party is a mess.

In elections, competition for voters is supposed to force parties to produce better candidates and policies. But when communities vote as blocks, that process fails. If nationalists can continue to hold half the electorate, no matter what, there is no punishment for Scotland’s failing schools or hospitals. And because nothing can be allowed to undermine the cause of independence, risky reforms are avoided.

Market failure

At his party’s conference, Mr Ross lamented how the promise of an independence referendum was enough to sustain a “hollowed-out shell of a government”, bereft of ideas and lacking ambition. He hopes to widen the Tories’ appeal with social-care reforms and tough measures against sex offenders. But privately his colleagues admit that the permanent campaign against independence has squeezed out any distinctive policy agenda. Nationalist policies—free university tuition and “shooting galleries” for heroin addicts—have been embraced. The result is a party that is wholly unionist, but with precious little conservatism. If Ms Sturgeon were suddenly to announce that the SNP had abandoned the idea of a referendum, says a senior Scottish Tory, “we’d say, my God, what do we do now?” ■

The Conservatives are planning to overhaul the Human Rights Act (Mar 12th)

The rise and fall of Londongrad (Mar 5th)

For twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the world, and especially the United States, enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace. Preparations for great-power war, the anticipation of it, and negotiations with such a war in the background were largely absent from the foreign policies of the strongest powers. The war in Ukraine makes it clear that that happy period has ended. Now it is a matter of urgency to assess how that conflict will proceed and what American and Western policy toward it should be. One way to make such assessments is to refer to America’s most recent experience with great-power competition, the Cold War, which has a good deal both to teach and to suggest.The Twilight Struggle by Hal Brands distills from the Cold War some key lessons for the future. The author, Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, knows Cold War history well and puts his knowledge to good use.The relevant lessons he draws from it include, among others, the importance, but also the difficulty, of managing alliances; the need to correct and learn from the inevitable mistakes; the benefits of having a clear strategy but being flexible both in choosing and changing tactics; and the imperative of acting with prudence as well as occasional boldness. Brands presents these lessons by using episodes in the Cold War, which gives the reader a feeling for how they should—and should not—be put into practice.The current powerful and coordinated Western response to Russian aggression bears out the emphasis the author places on alliances. Because he completed his book well before the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, however, Brands did not have the opportunity to incorporate the ongoing war into his analysis. Moreover, the war in Ukraine differs from the Cold War experience in an important way: after 1945, no large-scale clash of arms occurred in the middle of Europe, although some of the most savage combat in World War I, and much of it in World War II, took place there. In that sense Putin’s war has taken the world back to the first half of the 1940s. In other ways, though, what is taking place in Ukraine repeats patterns familiar from the Cold War.One such pattern is that the conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war, in which one nuclear-armed great power—Russia—is directly engaged in combat and the other—NATO—is providing material as well as political support to its adversary. This follows the pattern of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Now, as in those past conflicts, the nuclear-armed power is fighting on another country’s territory. Now, as then, the weaker party has a hope of holding out because it is receiving supplies through a country with which it has a common land border: in the current war Poland is cast in the role that China and the Soviet Union played in the Korean War, that China played in the Vietnamese conflict, and that Pakistan carried out for the anti-Soviet Afghan insurgency. (The post-Cold War American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan also failed fully to achieve their goals due in part to sanctuaries available to the anti-American insurgents—in Iran and Pakistan, respectively.)In recognition of the fact that wars are dangerous, especially those involving states with nuclear weapons, NATO has scrupulously avoided direct combat with Russian forces, as happened in the proxy wars of the Cold War era. This reflects a deeply ingrained if informal rule of the nuclear age, namely, that such a clash would run an unacceptably high risk of escalating to the use of nuclear weapons and must therefore not be allowed to take place. For that reason, NATO will be extremely reluctant to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, which would require shooting Russian aircraft out of the sky and attacking Russian air defense systems, inevitably killing some of the personnel operating them. Ukrainians can rely for the defense of their country on NATO equipment, but probably not on NATO soldiers or airmen.Yet direct American and NATO combat participation, while unlikely, is not out of the question. At least two contingencies could trigger it: the Russian use of chemical or, in the worst case, nuclear weapons; and an assault on Ukrainian civilians so severe that the NATO countries feel compelled to intervene to protect them, perhaps through airlifts of food and medical supplies.

In another similarity, Ukraine is following the strategy that Vietnam and Afghanistan adopted during the Cold War era: the Ukrainians cannot hope to conquer the Russians and so must try to inflict enough punishment on them—by killing, wounding, or capturing Russian soldiers—that their government will decide to withdraw rather than continue to bleed. The American government made that decision in Vietnam (and, after the Cold War, in Iraq and Afghanistan as well) and the Soviet government made the same decision for Afghanistan. This is a classic strategy of weak powers, turning a conflict into an exercise in competitive suffering in which the weaker side, while incurring more suffering, can inflict enough damage on the presumably less-motivated stronger belligerent to cause it to decide to cut its losses.It is at least conceivable that heavy losses of life and equipment by the Russians, in combination with plummeting morale among its troops, will cause the Russian army to fall apart. That combination, plus the damage from the unprecedentedly broad sanctions the world has imposed on Russia, might also induce the Russian government to negotiate sooner rather than later a settlement to the war acceptable to Ukraine. If the Cold War pattern repeats itself, however, Ukrainian success won’t come, alas, without fighting that goes on for some time and causes even more death and destruction than the Ukrainians have already endured.In its initial weeks the Ukraine war has brought two surprises that, despite being unexpected, also have Cold War precedents. Russia encountered far stiffer resistance than its political and military leadership obviously anticipated. The source of that resistance is Ukrainian nationalism—the determination to live in a country free of foreign control. Similarly, the Vietnamese communists won their war against the United States because they managed to mobilize nationalist sentiment against the Americans. The Afghan resistance prevailed against the Soviet Union by harnessing the local version of nationalism, tribal and religious loyalty. Even in a cosmopolitan and globalized age, nationalism and its close relatives remain the most powerful of political forces.In addition, the vigor and scope of the response from outside Ukraine to Russian aggression has come as a surprise, but that kind of surprise repeats a pattern in American history. Time after time a dramatic event has changed the way Americans have seen the world, their place in it, and the threats they face, triggering a far more robust response than would have been predicted beforehand. The American response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is one such example; the decision in 1990 to evict Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait is another. On the present occasion, the response has come not only from Americans but also from Europeans and others as well, and not solely from governments but also from civil society—individuals and groups that have acted spontaneously to support Ukraine and punish Russia.A final parallel—potential but not actual, at least not yet—with the history of the Cold War offers the hope of a more peaceful future in Eastern Europe. The Soviet failure in Afghanistan was part of the series of events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself, the independence of its fifteen constituent republics, and the establishment of a government in Moscow that, for a time, was far more peacefully inclined than its communist predecessor or the regime of Vladimir Putin. Russian setbacks in the past—in the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Cold War itself—have severely damaged or swept away the regimes that presided over them.Regimes such as Putin’s do not disintegrate slowly and publicly; they crack suddenly. Such a development, if it should take place, has the potential to bring enormous benefits to Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world. In the present era, regime change in Moscow, with Putin ousted from power and a far different successor government in place, is the key to lasting peace in Europe. Whether Putin will survive what is, thus far, a clear setback for his policy in Ukraine and, whenever he does leave power, what kind of government will follow cannot be known. There is at least a chance, however, that a Russian failure to subdue its neighbor will ultimately yield a more peaceful Russian government, which is not the least important reason to try to ensure that Putin’s aggression does fail.Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a member of the editorial board of American Purpose, and author of a forthcoming history of American foreign policy, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower, which will be published in June.Image by Stuart Brown - Central Intelligence Agency Official Web-site, CIA Museum Art Collection, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68673261

The FDA’s vaccine regulation is sliding further into the abyss. Last week, Pfizer announced that it would seek emergency-use authorization for a fourth dose of its mRNA vaccine, based on the original Wuhan strain of Covid-19, in people over 65. Meantime, Moderna announced that it was seeking an even larger market share: a fourth dose in anyone over 18, based on its original mRNA vaccine. If the FDA moves forward on authorizing either product, it will cement a dangerous precedent: inadequate evidence being used to justify widespread vaccination for years to come.

More than 255 million Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccines, 217 million have completed a full course, and 76 million have been boosted, earning Pfizer and Moderna billions of dollars in the process. At least 140 million Americans have had Covid-19. Many have experienced both vaccination and breakthrough infection. Several sources suggest that vaccination remains highly effective against hospitalization and death, while the ability of several vaccines to prevent mild infections has plummeted. This means that it is highly unlikely that additional boosters would block mild infections beyond a few months, or further lower the risk of severe outcomes in an otherwise healthy person who has received two or three doses and possibly had Covid-19 as well.

Further, the FDA is not operating at full capacity when it comes to vaccine regulation. The agency’s director and deputy director of vaccine products resigned last fall, citing White House pressure to approve third doses for all adults and writing damning op-eds critical of the FDA’s subsequent decision to do so. Notably, one vaccine expert, Paul Offit, has advised his own 20-year-old son not to receive a third dose because he was not convinced that it provides a net benefit at that age. These arguments apply even more forcefully to fourth doses and beyond. Medicine, like many other fields, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. It’s increasingly difficult to reduce the risk of bad outcomes for healthy, boosted 20-year-olds (who may also have been infected with Omicron) because their risk is already so vanishingly low.

If the FDA authorizes a fourth dose, we can expect the vaccine mandates to follow soon thereafter. Several institutions have already mandated third doses even in ultra-low-risk populations. Colleges around the country have instituted booster mandates for students. Princeton has refused to exempt healthy students with two doses and a prior infection from its booster mandate. The University of California’s booster policy also applies to the UCLA laboratory school (a high school), mandating a third dose for students aged 12 and up. There is little reason to doubt that institutions like these would quickly mandate a fourth dose.

The data supporting fourth doses aren’t up to medicine’s gold standard: a randomized trial. Instead, we have two observational studies comparing people who rushed to be boosted with those who didn’t. Of course, these two groups comprise fundamentally different sorts of people, as we can see in one of the studies, which appeared to show a large beneficial effect on the first day after subjects received a fourth dose. It’s impossible for a vaccine to work in a single day, so the difference must be due to bias, thus calling into question later estimates as well. The other study, which looked at health-care workers in Israel and relied on actively testing people with no symptoms, found a reduction in infections (30 percent)—a result that, again, the non-randomized nature of the study calls into question. (As even that study’s authors conceded, “Most infected health care workers reported negligible symptoms.”)

No matter how many doses the FDA approves, vaccination will never halt transmission. We will all eventually get a breakthrough infection. Ideally, we should meet the virus on the best of terms, having addressed underlying health problems and received primary vaccination.

The Biden administration’s vaccine policy has fared poorly in this regard. The U.S. has a lower rate of vaccination than Iran, Cambodia, Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil, Peru, Canada, the European Union, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. The FDA unnecessarily got parents excited about vaccinating kids aged six months to four years, based on unreliable data, then pulled the plug on authorization. Now, using more flawed data, it’s poised to cement a regulatory precedent that could lead to annual or biannual boosters. Pfizer and Moderna will get rich, our arms will ache, and no one will know if we made the right decision.

Photo by Pasquale Gargano/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

"...under global capitalism, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts are the only forms of political struggle left."

It seems to me that while nation states make wars, from the beginning of humankind to to the present, there have been hostilities arising from differences of almost any kind. Certainly there have always been conflicts over resources needed for survival, perhaps the earliest kind. Beyond that, conflicts arise over perceived differences between groups and peoples. A clinical psychologist I used to teach with said that persons and groups note differences, probably because from the beginning, differences of any kind threaten survival whether physical, cultural, ethnic, and religious -- and political.

In the Ukraine War we see a dictator deceitfully claiming that Ukraine and Russia are historically and culturally the same as his pretext for his 'military action'. We also know that Mr. Putin wants to turn back the clock to the Soviet Union perceived great empire. Then we see Ukraine fiercely rejecting Putin's claims because they insist that democracy trumps autocracy any time, and Ukraine is its own sovereign nation state. Difference abounds along with hostilities.

Why important to think about? Certainly ecological/climate problems are by far the most existential and necessary to address for the continuation of human life and civilization. They necessitate worldwide cooperation and intense, immediate action to achieve any kind of livable world for both present and future.

Well, we see this starting to happen -- the cooperation among western nations to help Ukraine against the formidable encroachment by Russia. This cooperation is ironically also threatening the planet because of the immediate needs of Europe for fuel was well as the world's needs for wheat that both Russia and Ukraine supply in quantity. It took Putin to get us working together, and it takes a Putin to destabilize what Earth needs to survive.

I cannot think of a practical way out of this. It seems to me that we must recognize the real influence of differences on our psyches and decide to accept each other's human right to survive and make decisions for themselves so long as they do not inhibit the rights of others to do the same. We do not have to make others over into our own image by force. We must "see" one another and then make our own choices of how to live. So far, liberal democracy seems a viable way to do this -- in fact the only way I see. Capitalism has brought both great progress as well as great harm to us all and we need to create more fairness into the system and respect for our common existence.

However, we are not merely passive supplicants at the mercy of prelates imposing lexical fiats from on high. Not everything settles in. For example, we are seeing that proposals for group names are less likely to be embraced when imposed from outside the group itself. When the Rev. Jesse Jackson called for the use of “African American,” his status and authority in Black America were roughly equal to Oprah Winfrey’s today. “African American” would have been much less likely to get around if it had been proposed by academics or lesser-known activists.

That kind of imposition from the outside has meant that “Latinx,” a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino” and “Latina,” is hardly used by the people it purports to refer to. In 2020, Pew Research found that only 3 percent of Latinos use the term. “BIPOC” isn’t doing much better. Too often, we take terminology proposals from academics and journalists as if we will henceforth be penalized — even if only socially — for going against their prescriptions. But their suggestions do not automatically affect language as it is used by ordinary people making themselves understood casually and comfortably.

It can seem that way because academics and journalists do a disproportionate amount of public writing and talking. For example, I suspect that normal people will continue saying “master bedroom”; I certainly will. Thus, there is no need to bristle at the proliferation of “BIPOC” as some kind of glowering fiat. Very few BIPOCs use it, and as Amy Harmon reported last year for The Times, in one national poll, “more than twice as many white Democrats said they felt ‘very favorably’ toward ‘BIPOC’ as Americans who identify as any of the nonwhite racial categories it encompasses.” And that is unlikely to change.

Again, this doesn’t mean “BIPOC” is a failed term. It has simply become part of a burgeoning register of English favored primarily by certain professors and political activists. This is no more a problem than another register, the academese favored by many scholars of literature and the social sciences. People of this realm have a way of writing and even speaking to one another on academic subjects that seems almost exotic to the outsider. For example, the renowned critical theorist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Judith Butler was granted first place in the journal Philosophy and Literature’s tongue-in-cheek bad-writing contest in 1998 for her prose in a 1997 essay, “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time,” that included this passage:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

I find it a little facile to dismiss this genre, even in jest, as simply bad writing. Its practitioners intend it as studiously objective and precise. And the main thing, despite how unaesthetic this writing may be, is that it has no effect on how most of us communicate. It’s an in-group practice that people look upon from the outside with a certain bemusement. It is a jargon.

People who refer to hegemony and structural totalities have a jargon. These days, there is what we could call, yes, a woke jargon. That is where “Latinx” and “BIPOC” live. These terms are not mistakes or misfires in not being taken up by most of the people they refer to, then. Who, after all, has an issue with there being jargons?

I N LATE 2020 administrators at Cambridge University tried to update its free-speech policy to say that faculty and students must be “respectful” of the views and identities of others, rather than merely “tolerating” them. Fearing a chilling effect on research and debate, several scholars succeeded in getting a secret vote on the change. Fully 87% of faculty rejected it.

Six months later the university proposed a scheme, “Change the Culture”, which encouraged reporting of “micro-aggressions”, such as turning your back on or raising an eyebrow at someone. Information left anonymously on a website called Report and Support ( R&S ) would be held by the university and potentially shared with funding bodies. Opponents dubbed it the “snitch portal”.

Again they mobilised—and again successfully. Within days “Change the Culture” was withdrawn and a few months later the vice-chancellor, Stephen Toope, said he would leave his post two years early. The retreat was welcome, says James Orr, a philosopher who led the charge against the scheme, but should not be taken as evidence of a wider shift away from campus censoriousness. In fact, Cambridge was going against the tide. A report in July by Civitas, a think-tank, found that around 60% of British universities have an anonymous reporting tool, and a similar share are members of an external diversity and inclusion benchmarking scheme.

Supporters see reporting and benchmarking as essential to improving life for marginalised faculty and students. “There is a really clear pattern of systemic inequality right across the sector,” says David Bass of Advance HE , an education charity. Black students make up less than 4% of students in the elite “Russell Group” universities, he points out, compared with an average for all universities of 8%. Ethnic-minority students gain fewer first and upper-second degrees, and just 1% of professors are black. Benchmarking, says Mr Bass, is about “creating an environment where there is inclusion for everyone”.

But for critics, such schemes impose a contested ideological outlook and silence dissent. Not everyone agrees, for example, that micro-aggressions play any significant role in minority disadvantage on campus. Encouraging their reporting means universities are not only tacitly endorsing one side in an ongoing debate, but making it risky for staff or students to take the other, since doing so would probably count as a micro-aggression.

The point of a benchmarking scheme, meanwhile, is to shift norms to bring about a specific outcome. Typically, universities pay to be benchmarked, and pay again for training in how to do better. The result is that the external partner’s view of the world becomes institutionalised—even if that impinges on academic freedom. “What an ‘inclusive’ environment really means for these proponents of institutional reform is to silence dissenting views that do not accept their understood notion of justice,” says Jim McConalogue, one of the authors of the Civitas report.

Culture club

Among the most popular benchmarking schemes is Athena Swan, which is run by Advance HE and was set up to boost women in science and technology. In 2015 it recommended collecting data on the basis of self-declared “gender identity”, rather than sex. To join, a university must commit to narrowing the gap between men’s pay and women’s—a commitment blunted by the replacement of sex by gender identity, since that meant male academics being recorded as female if that was how they identified. And since some funding was linked to Athena Swan membership, academics who disagreed with the new, contested definition either had to remain silent or potentially suffer financial detriment.

After criticism, the connection between funding and membership of Athena Swan was dropped, and its charter was rewritten to acknowledge that biological sex is protected under equality law. But those were not the only changes. Now, rather than committing to “tackling the discriminatory treatment often experienced by trans people”, universities must commit to “fostering collective understanding that individuals have the right to determine their own gender identity”. That “opens the door to institutional thought-policing”, says Arif Ahmed, a Cambridge philosopher. (Mr Bass demurs, and says the charter is consistent with academic freedom.)

Similar problems arise with a “diversity champions” scheme run by Stonewall, a charity that campaigns on gay and trans issues. It requires members use its definition of terms such as “transphobia”, which it says means “denying [someone’s] gender identity or refusing to affirm it”. That leads universities to ignore legal provisions that permit single-sex spaces and instead tell students that they may use whichever toilets or changing facilities they feel match their identity. Dissent must be silenced, since any public indication that students or staff oppose the loss of single-sex spaces is likely to lead to being marked down.

A third diversity scheme to which a majority of universities have signed up is Advance HE ’s Race Equality Charter. In 2021 Imperial College in London was awarded a bronze medal for having, among other things, brought in an R&S anonymous-reporting tool and helped the engineering department launch a training video about micro-aggressions. Critics of the charter do not dispute that racial inequality exists, disagreeing only about whether it should always be understood as evidence of present-day discrimination—and therefore, whether such measures can do any good.

A planned Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) bill is supposed to help. Universities will be fined if they fail in their legal responsibility to foster free speech on campus, and a “free-speech champion” will be added to the board of the Office for Students, a regulatory body.

But when universities have outsourced their thinking about discrimination and inclusion, and encouraged anonymous reporting of dissent, such policies will not do much to change campus culture. Major legal clashes are coming, predicts Mr Orr. Universities that sign up to manifestos that commit staff and students to hold specific views on race, gender and equality—or at least to speak and act as if they do—cannot also uphold their duty to ensure free and open dialogue, he says. “There is going to be a lot of legal turmoil for higher-education institutions when it comes to working out which of those two needs to be subordinated to the other.” ■

The United States launched a campaign in 2019 to unseat Huawei Technologies’ global dominance in the telecommunications equipment market on national security grounds. The fight is ongoing, as some countries have followed the United States’ lead and banned Huawei-made gear from their telecom networks. However, some of America’s closest allies—such as Canada—are still indecisive, and the Chinese telecom giant continues to challenge these bans. As of 2021, Huawei’s global market share for telecom equipment was 28.7 percent, down from its high of 31 percent in 2020 but still about as large as those of its two biggest competitors—Ericsson and Nokia—combined.

Curbing Huawei’s dominance continues to be such a challenge because existing efforts to come up with secure and economical substitutes for Chinese-made telecom equipment are inadequate. In the United States, where the Huawei ban is the most strict, the government-funded program to help mobile networks “rip and replace” their existing Chinese 5G gear is already ballooning in cost and facing supply chain hurdles.

But a clear path to rein in China’s telecom security risks does exist. Known as “open” networks for 5G and future-generations wireless systems, the approach is one the United States and allied democracies should work to make a reality.

What’s Wrong With Huawei?

The center of the Huawei fight is an intelligence problem. Chinese telecoms such as Huawei and ZTE, which are designated as U.S. national security threats, dominate the global equipment market for 5G with their proprietary gear sold at very low prices. At its height, Huawei and ZTE’s combined global market share was over 40 percent. As I’ve written previously, consumers’ information flowing on networks powered by these companies could mean invaluable intelligence in Beijing’s eye if—or when—its telecom darlings offer or are compelled to help.

That’s by no means hypothetical. Huawei has denied allegations that it spies for Beijing. Its supporters have also argued that it’s a private company and, hence, not necessarily beholden to the Chinese government. But with more evidence coming to light in recent years, it’s increasingly clear that Huawei is not only willing to help government authorities with surveillance, but it has also found a way for its telecom gear to do just that.

A December 2021 Washington Post investigation revealed over a hundred marketing presentations prepared by Huawei that showcased its technologies’ capability to help governments identify voices, recognize faces, and monitor political individuals of interest, among other Big Brother services. In 2019, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that Huawei employees used their and other companies’ technologies to help the Ugandan and Zambian governments spy on their political opponents.

Then there’s the apparent “smoking gun,” as reported by Bloomberg last year. In 2012, Australian intelligence officials reportedly detected malicious code in a software update from Huawei that was installed on a major telecom network operator in Australia. The bug worked like a digital wiretap that could secretly record communications and send them to China, according to those officials.

Later that year, guided by the tips from Canberra, U.S. intelligence agencies confirmed a similar attack from China that used Huawei’s telecom equipment located in the United States. An Italian telecom provider also discovered a similar backdoor mechanism in its Huawei-made gear around the same time.

Some observers might say that even democratic governments may want technology companies to build a backdoor for law enforcement purposes. But that’s only half the truth. Law enforcement in many democratic countries would need a warrant or court order to tap individuals’ communications, and their laws also prevent telecom gear makers from gaining access themselves without the consent of network operators. But the Huawei malware found in Australia, although it cleverly self-destructed after a few days, was able to “listen in” without the carrier’s knowledge.

Alternatives to Huawei?

The new evidence from the Bloomberg article might explain the years-long pressure against Huawei by the United States and some of its allies, despite former President Trump’s rocky relationship with some of these nations and the otherwise deeply divided Washington. But banning Chinese telecom gear was only the first step, and the next step is more difficult. Current policy proposals to fill Huawei’s void look like heavy-handed industrial policy or even blatant protectionism, inflicting an unnecessarily high economic cost for enhancing telecom security.

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission launched a program to reimburse U.S. telecom carriers for removing existing equipment made by Chinese vendors such as Huawei and ZTE—U.S. telecom networks contain 24,000 such pieces. The program, commonly known as “rip and replace,” carried an initial price tag of $1.9 billion for American taxpayers, but it didn’t take long for the cost to balloon to $5.6 billion and counting.

Eliminating Chinese-made telecom gear is expensive because there are few alternatives, such as Europe’s Ericsson and Nokia. The United States doesn’t even have a full-stack telecom equipment manufacturer to compete on the market. Some commentators have advocated for the U.S. government to take a controlling stake in European telecom leaders and turn them into America’s national champions. A more radical idea would have Washington pay for and build a nationwide 5G network, akin to Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System. But unlike highways, a mobile network generation typically lasts only a decade because of the industry’s fast pace, so a state-run model would require American taxpayers to pick up the tab for 6G, 7G and more.

Countering security threats from China should not come with a high cost for Americans as there is another option. The answer lies in what the telecom industry calls the open radio access network (Open RAN), which can be a cost-effective way to fence off China’s Big Brother while fostering a competitive telecom market at home.

The Promise of Openness

RAN is the part of the wireless infrastructure—consisting of antennas, base stations and much more—that connects consumer devices such as mobile phones and smartwatches to the optical fiber internet. Conventional telecom gear-makers such as Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia offer full-stack RAN equipment where the software is proprietary and the hardware parts are not interoperable (imagine having to light a Marlboro cigarette with a Marlboro lighter). Once a wireless carrier purchases certain gear, the relationship is locked in for at least several years. Huawei’s competitively priced equipment has done very well on that front, boosting its share of the global telecom equipment market to more than 30 percent at its height.

Open RAN aims to revolutionize 5G and future-generations software with open architecture and community-developed standards, which would enable hardware parts, now uncoupled from the software, to be made interchangeably by any manufacturer in any nation. So while the United States doesn’t make full-stack 5G equipment, there are domestic companies that can make at least some parts, and the United States remains the envy of the world in software development.

Besides bringing more competition to the hardware market, Open RAN’s software ecosystem has the potential to be more secure than proprietary systems from attacks from China’s Huawei, ZTE and beyond. Proponents of proprietary software often argue that an open system would expose its vulnerabilities and attract attackers, but that’s a repeatedly recycled myth. When a community of developers collaborates transparently on building a system, more sets of eyes will be watching for bugs and fixing them promptly. Malware like what was in Huawei’s software update in 2012 would be known by more than the intelligence community, and it would not be kept under wraps for 10 long years.

The debate about the security of Open RAN echoes the one about the security of open-source software development, where the source code is completely transparent. The community had debated about its security compared to traditional, proprietary software for years, but the evidence has spoken for itself. Some of the most popular software programs today are open-source, such as the operating system Linux, the programming language Python and the web browser Mozilla Firefox. None of them is any less secure than proprietary programs.

Fulfilling the Openness Promise

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have expressed optimism about Open RAN, seeing not only its economic benefits but also its potential in meeting the telecom security challenge from China. But making this openness strategy work is not without its hurdles because this new avenue is susceptible to protectionism, too. Policymakers are right to want to advance Open RAN, but their support should lie in creating and maintaining a level playing field, not in meddling with one.

The biggest challenge facing the industry’s Open RAN community is to set the open standards by which equipment made by different vendors would work together. Intuitively, an open standard is like a publicly available “cookbook” by which any participant, if it follows the guideline therein, would be able to build new equipment or write new software that would work smoothly with the rest of the system.

Open RAN is still in its infancy when it comes to interoperability, despite the rapid progress in recent years. But this doesn’t mean the nascent process needs government intervention or protection, although some potential beneficiaries of government handouts might want people to believe that. At an Open RAN event hosted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2020, for example, a telecom executive argued that governments should “put their money where their mouth is” and have “taxpayer dollars required to be part of an [Open RAN] network.” Perhaps proponents of that view should ask American taxpayers how they feel about chipping in again after picking up the $5.6 billion tab on the “rip and replace” program.

What Washington policymakers should do is encourage American companies to participate in the standard-setting process and let the industry find the best solution by itself. While the Open RAN community includes Chinese telecom companies, presenting something of a dilemma for their Western counterparts, this is a hurdle that can be cleared.

The world’s two most prominent telecom industry groups that advance Open RAN are the O-RAN Alliance, which seeks to establish Open RAN specifications and standards, and the Telecom Infra Project, which focuses on commercializing interoperable products. Both groups include Chinese companies, some of which are blacklisted by the U.S. government on national security grounds. Some Western telecom players in this space are hesitant to engage and compete with their Chinese counterparts, fearing that they could face penalties for violating U.S. sanctions. Nokia briefly suspended its participation in O-RAN last year for that reason, and when Western players take a step back, the voice of Beijing’s champions gets louder.

The White House can provide clarity and empower those Western telecom companies by honing America’s entity regulations, which broadly ban unlicensed business transactions with blacklisted foreign entities. First, it should continue to vigorously enforce its entity lists. One of them, the list of “Communist Chinese military companies,” is under Section 1237 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999, a task assigned to the executive branch by Congress but not fulfilled until 2020.

Second, the U.S. government should either exempt harmless collaborations within the Open RAN community from restricted transactions or issue licenses to trustworthy Western companies so that they can confidently participate without coming down on the wrong side of regulations. There are precedents for the latter approach: The White House has issued licenses that allowed companies to be on other standard-setting bodies, such as the International Organization for Standardization and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, where some Chinese participants were also on an entity list.

Third, the U.S. government can and should participate in, and provide input to, the Open RAN community. The O-RAN Alliance’s members, for example, include the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (part of Britain’s intelligence and security agency GCHQ) and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (part of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology). There’s no reason Washington’s concerns about Open RAN security can’t be heard in the same forum.

Enhancing national security while limiting the costs to economic freedom is no small task, and the United States must take the lead. The world’s wireless networks are not the place to cede ground to China.

The war in Ukraine has reached a turning point. The Russian troops that invaded the country from the north, south, and east are now scarcely moving. They have targeted schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, and a theater sheltering children, but they are not yet in control even of the places they occupy. And no wonder: Few Ukrainians are willing to collaborate with the occupiers. The overwhelming majority, more than 90 percent, believe they will defeat them. The Ukrainian army refuses to surrender, even in cities badly damaged by bombardment.Russian planners expected the entire war, the conquest of Ukraine, to last no more than six weeks. More than half that time has already passed. There must be an endgame, a moment when the conflict stops. The Ukrainians, and the democratic powers that support Ukraine, must work toward a goal. That goal should not be a truce, or a muddle, or a decision to maintain some kind of Ukrainian resistance over the next decade, or a vow to “bleed Russia dry,” or anything else that will prolong the fighting and the instability. That goal should be a Ukrainian victory.[Eliot A. Cohen: Why can’t the West admit that Ukraine is winning?]Before you can achieve something, you have to imagine what it will look like. And in this war, victory can be imagined without difficulty. It means that Ukraine remains a sovereign democracy, with the right to choose its own leaders and make its own treaties. There will be no pro-Russian puppet regime in Kyiv, no need for a prolonged Ukrainian resistance, no continued fighting. The Russian army retreats back over the borders. Maybe those borders could change, or maybe Ukraine could pledge neutrality, but that is for the Ukrainians to decide and not for outsiders to dictate. Maybe international peacekeepers are needed. Whatever happens, Ukraine must have strong reasons to believe that Russian troops will not quickly return.Imagine, too, the consequences of such a victory. In Washington, most people have long believed that Ukraine is part of a regional conflict, and that Ukraine is a piece of territory that the Russians care more about than we do and always will. But this is no longer true. The Ukrainians, and especially their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, have made their cause a global one by arguing that they fight for a set of universal ideas—for democracy, yes, but also for a form of civic nationalism, based on patriotism and a respect for the rule of law; for a peaceful Europe, where disputes are resolved by institutions and not warfare; for resistance to dictatorship. Zelensky has urged Americans to remember Pearl Harbor. He appealed to the German Parliament with the phrase “Never again”—a mantra used to mean that no Hitler would be allowed to arise again—and told members that, in light of the brutal war in his country, those words are now “worthless.” He called on the European Parliament to “prove that you indeed are Europeans” and admit Ukraine to the European Union.This language is effective because it evokes the principles that bind together the majority of Europeans, Americans, and many other people around the world, reminding them of how much worse the world was in the bloodier past, and how much worse it could be in the future if those principles no longer matter. The words Zelensky uses also reverberate because they are true. A victory for Ukraine really will be a victory for all who believe in democracy and the rule of law. Citizens of existing democracies and members of the democratic opposition in Russia, Cuba, Belarus, and Hong Kong will all be emboldened. “Their struggle is ours,” a Venezuelan acquaintance told me last week. The institutions protecting the states that embody those ideas, most notably the European Union and NATO, will be strengthened too.[Tom Nichols: Only NATO can save Putin]Zelensky’s words resonated further because the Russians have also given this conflict enormous significance. The Russian foreign minister has just declared that this war will change global politics: “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.” Much as Stalin once declared that, when the Second World War ended, “everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach,” President Vladimir Putin had planned for the Russian army to impose Russia’s autocratic, kleptocratic political system on all of Ukraine. Already, the Russian occupation of some eastern-Ukrainian towns resembles the Soviet occupation of Central Europe at the end of World War II. Public officials and civic leaders—mayors and police but also members of Parliament, journalists, museum curators—have been arrested and not seen since. Civilians have been terrorized at random. In Mariupol, authorities report that citizens are being forcibly deported to Russia, just as Soviet secret police deported Balts, Poles, and others to Russia after the invasions of 1939 and 1945. In the case of a Russian victory, these tactics would be applied all over Ukraine, creating mass terror, mass violence, and instability for years to come. And, yes, if we accept that outcome, autocrats from Minsk to Caracas to Beijing will take note: Genocide is now allowed.Precisely because the stakes are so high, the next few weeks will be extremely dangerous. Putin will do what he can to create fear. The extraordinary speech he made last week, describing Russian critics of the war as “scum,” “traitors,” and “gnats,” had exactly that purpose. He spoke of Russia’s need for “self-purification” using a word with the same root as purge, the term that Stalin used when ordering the liquidation of his enemies. Putin is deliberately evoking the worst and bloodiest era of Soviet history to avoid even a hint of domestic opposition. He has just thrown away 30 years of economic gains, 30 years of Russian integration with the outside world, 30 years of investment in order to turn the clock back to the era of his youth—an era that the majority of Russians no longer remember and few wish to see restored. He seems to believe that only elevated levels of fear will prevent them from protesting, once they understand what has happened to their country. He may be right.Putin and his propagandists are dropping hints about chemical and nuclear weapons for the same reason. They want outsiders, and especially Americans, to fear the consequences of helping Ukraine. The use of hypersonic weaponry; the threats of nuclear war made on Russian television; even the habit, established a few years back, of practicing the use of nuclear weapons during military exercises, sometimes to simulate a hit on Warsaw, sometimes to simulate a bomb exploding in the air—all of that has a purpose. So does the strange, ranting, anti-Polish letter issued by Dimitri Medvedev, the Putin crony who briefly served as president of Russia before Putin decided he wanted the job back again. This screed contained insults, veiled threats, and an old Soviet-era complaint that the Poles were “ungrateful” that the Red Army  pushed Hitler out of Poland, and then established a brutal new occupation regime in Hitler’s wake. Among other things, Medvedev was sending a reminder: Poland could be next. The recent Russian strike on a base near the Polish border sent the same message.How should the West respond? There is only one rule: We cannot be afraid. Russia wants us to be afraid—so afraid that we are crippled by fear, that we cannot make decisions, that we withdraw altogether, leaving the way open for a Russian conquest of Ukraine, and eventually of Poland or even further into Europe. Putin remembers very well an era when Soviet troops controlled the eastern half of Germany. But the threat to those countries will not decrease if Russia carries out massacres in Ukraine. It will grow.  Instead of fear, we should focus on a Ukrainian victory. Once we understand that this is the goal, then we can think about how to achieve it, whether through temporary boycotts of Russian gas, oil, and coal; military exercises elsewhere in the world that will distract Russian troops; humanitarian airlifts on the scale of 1948 Berlin; or more and better weapons.The specific tactics will be determined by those who best understand diplomacy and military strategy. But the strategy has to be clear. A month ago, nobody believed this war would matter so much, and I’m sure many people wish it did not. But it does. That’s why every move we make must have a single goal: How does it help Ukraine win?“It’s not our war” was something we might have been able to say three weeks ago. Not now.

ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” [MUSIC PLAYING] Energy policy is foreign policy. It always has been. But it particularly is right now. It’s widely believed that Vladimir Putin timed both his 2014 invasion of Crimea and his 2022 invasion of Ukraine around tight energy markets. It’s thought that he thought, maybe rightly, that he’d have the most leverage to act when Europe was most dependent on Russian oil and gas and when leaders everywhere feared the domestic turmoil that higher energy prices could bring. The reverse theory was an operation, too. In a decision that now looks naive, Germany’s Angela Merkel thought that integrating Russia into Europe through the energy trade might smooth the road to peace, giving Russia too much to lose if it considered doing something like, well, what it’s doing right now. All that is to say, to understand this war, to understand this moment, to understand this world, you need to understand global energy production and global energy markets. You need to understand why a war in Ukraine raises gasoline prices in California. You need to know why the fact that America produces more energy than it needs, the fact that we got to that much vaunted, much desired energy independence, doesn’t actually make us energy independent. It doesn’t actually protect us from disruptions half a world away. And in the bigger, broader sense, we need to think hard about what all of this domestic sensitivity and turmoil around the price of the pump means for the always looming threat of climate change. How do you decarbonize in a world where people care more about the price of fossil fuels today than about the devastating consequences their use will bring tomorrow? So I wanted to bring someone on the show who really does understand global energy markets. Daniel Yergin is an economic historian and writer who The New York Times once called America’s most influential energy pundit. Time magazine said, quote, “if there’s one man whose opinion matters more than any other on global energy markets, it is Daniel Yergin. He’s the author of a bunch of books on the intersection of energy and geopolitics, including the Pulitzer winner “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power” and most recently, “The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations.” And “The New Map,” for a book written a few years ago, ooh, it’s scarily prescient, that the lengthy sections on Ukraine and Russia now read like they were written by someone telling the future. But Yergin doesn’t tell the future. He just watches the energy markets. He’s also vice chairman at S&P Global, focusing on energy, international relations, and economics. So if you want to go deep on how energy markets work and what they mean for world politics, he is the guy to talk to. And so I talked to him. As always, my email— ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Daniel Yergin, welcome to the show.

daniel yergin

Thank you. Glad to join you.

ezra klein

So the average price of regular grade gasoline in the U.S. shot up about 22 percent over the past two weeks, from when we’re talking. And that’s after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But tell me mechanically or operationally, what’s happening behind that? How does a war halfway across the world result in me paying higher gas prices in California?

Ezra, the answer is that it’s really a global system that moves about 100 million barrels a day of oil around the world. And it’s fairly finely balanced. And if you start to have disruptions in one place, it shows up quickly in another. The spot prices go up. People have to scramble to get other oil to replace oil that they can’t ship. So it starts with what’s on the tankers or coming from one part of the world to another. And then you get to the refineries. And once it’s in the refineries, then the prices move up as the whole market moves up. Because the prices for products, which gasoline is the number one product, really are defined by the price of what happens to crude oil.

ezra klein

And tell me a bit about why the invasion of Ukraine has done so much to change the oil price. Because I mentioned it’s shot up in the U.S. about 22 percent. But Russia only accounts for 11 percent of the world’s oil output, and their oil output is still flowing. It’s even making them more money, as we’ll talk about, than it did before. So why is this changing prices so much?

We’ll come back to it, but it’s not flowing the way it did before. It’s really changing. And we’ll come back to this self-sanctioning that’s going on. It’s because there’s not much spare supply in the world. But also, the oil market, look at what’s happened to the stock market. All the markets that register prices of one kind or another are registering, not only in terms of oil, the disruption, but also, the fear factor, that twice Vladimir Putin has threatened— at least twice, he’s threatened to use nuclear weapons, that this is going to escalate. So you could, in a sense, say, why is the stock market going down? Because what does that have to do with Russia? But it’s all caught up in terms of this sense of greater risk and in terms of oil supplies and other commodities, by the way. Wheat prices are shooting up, which is a real problem for Middle East and North African countries, that depend on Russian wheat. So this is part of actually, a larger disruption. It turns out that the goal of the sanctions has been to unplug Russia from the global economy. It turns out there are lots of cords that connect Russia to the global economy. And of course, oil and natural gas are among the most important.

ezra klein

I want you to expand on what you said about Russian oil and gas not flowing as it was before. Because I’ve been surprised. But I’ve seen estimates from, among others, Bloomberg’s, Javier Bloss, saying that we’re paying more to Vladimir Putin’s Russia today, or the West, at least, is, than prior to the invasion for oil and gas, that if you actually watch the pipelines, a lot of it is flowing. But that was a couple— a week or two ago, that he made that calculation. So has that changed? How has the actual flow of energy from Russia shifted?

So just to lay out the numbers, Russia exports 7 and a half million barrels a day of oil. But as you say, it’s 11 percent of the production. But some of that stays in Russia, of course. About half of that goes to Europe. And what’s happening, we see now, is that one or two million barrels a day of Russian oil that would normally be loaded into tankers is not being loaded. Because the tankers aren’t there, because people won’t take the oil. Then there’s the additional thing that there’s Russian oil that’s on the seas in tankers, but can’t find a port, because it’s being rejected. When the U.S. and Europe set out to do this, they said, OK, we’re not going to sanction oil and gas. We’re not going to prevent that from flowing because we want to keep Europe supplied, we want to keep NATO supplied. We want to keep, ironically, Ukraine supplied, because Ukraine uses Russian diesel. And also, we want to maintain the unity. We don’t want people saying, why am I paying so much at the pump? But what’s happened is that you put sanctions on ships or on insurance. Or banks say, I don’t want to finance— short-term finance is what you use to pick up a load of oil. I don’t want to provide you a letter of credit, because I don’t trust the Russians. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t want to take the risk. And you have people, companies, even refiners in Europe, saying, we’re not going to take any more Russian oil, even though we don’t know where we’re going to get the alternative barrel. And people have now come to see it as an ethical thing. We don’t want Russian oil. So there’s what’s kind of a process of self-sanctioning going on. So on the one hand, on every barrel he sells, he makes more money. But he’s selling fewer barrels. And I think this self-sanctioning, the rejection of Russian oil, is going to increase. Gas is flowing, it seems, and hasn’t been disrupted. Gas prices have been very high. U.S. liquefied natural gas now competes with Russian gas in Europe. But there’s expectations that that will be cut back, too. And the Europeans are saying, we are going to cut the cord to Russia. We don’t know how fast we’re going to do it, but we’re going to do it.

ezra klein

Tell me about the relationship between domestic prices and the global market. And let’s focus here on the U.S. A story you tell in your book is that the U.S. has had an energy production revolution in recent decades. And we achieved, in some theoretical way, that longtime political goal of energy independence. We are a net energy exporter. We produce more than we need. And I think a straightforward read of that would say, well, if we’re a net exporter, then, of course, when a time of global turbulence, we can just turn more of our energy to domestic usage and keep prices low. And presumably, politicians would do that if they could. And it seems like they can’t. So why, despite our tremendous amount of energy production now, can we not protect ourselves more from global market fluctuation?

Well, we are certainly protected more on natural gas. People are noticing their natural gas bills are going up. But they’re going up maybe 20 percent, 30 percent. But they’re not going up like in Europe, where they’re four or five times higher than normal. On oil, a lot of the shale oil we produce is not suitable, particularly for making gasoline, because of the quality of it. So that gets exported. And we import other oil that is more conducive to our refineries, which have been set up to process what are called heavier oils. And then, in addition, the Northeast, particularly, is connected to world markets, and it imports product into the United States to make gasoline and things like that. So in the numbers, it looks like, oh, well, we’re even. But it’s the quality of the oil. And so we export the kind of oil that— a lot of the oil it doesn’t work in our refineries, but import other oil. And that’s how you get us to being a net zero importer. But you have to net it out. So we are still— and particularly, gasoline markets are very connected worldwide.

ezra klein

I want to back up to the energy picture before Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine. Because obviously, there have been other invasions of Ukraine in recent years. But backing up a couple of years, a story you tell in your book “The New Map” is that there’s been a real dramatic shift in the energy production markets from it being OPEC, the oil production cartel, basically, and non-OPEC, to what you now call the big three. Tell me about the big three and the shift there.

Well, the number one big three is the United States. And that is the huge turnaround. In 2008, the U.S. imported on a net basis 60 percent of its oil. Today, we’re basically self-sufficient, if you look on a net basis. And we’re the world’s largest oil producer. And this was unthinkable a decade and a half ago. The other two big three are Russia and Saudi Arabia, who trail the United States a little bit. And they’re roughly tied in terms of their production. And so the arrival of the United States has really changed the global market. And one of the stories I have in “The New Map” is in 2019, Iranian Houthi from Yemen and Iranian missiles and drones hit the largest oil processing facility in the world in Saudi Arabia. And if that had happened three or four years earlier, there would have been panic in the market. What changed it was that suddenly, you have the U.S. is a really big player, and it gives a new sense of energy security. But what’s happened in the last couple of years is this thing called spare capacity, which is the oil that’s not being produced, which is like a safety reserve. That has really shrunk. During the pandemic, when things were shut down, oil demand plummeted. Prices went to something that was sort of unimaginable, the negative prices, which meant some oil people were paying people to take their oil away, because they couldn’t get it to market. The oil business is always cyclical. But this has been a really big— the sharpest cycle I know of. And what happened is that coming out of the pandemic, oil demand was much higher than many people had anticipated, with the recovery, with people going out. The world— suddenly, you went from having a lot of extra oil around the world, that you could put into production if you needed it, to a very tight balance. And so even before the crisis, oil prices were getting high. Because the world didn’t have enough supply or seemed to be headed to a place of not having enough supply. And the same thing happened with natural gas, particularly in Asia and Europe, where again, the demand was much stronger than people thought. And so supply was struggling to keep up. So that’s why I say, that even before this began, you basically had an energy crisis in Europe, which has really been hit hard by rising natural gas prices, much more so in the United States, where we are more separated. And then on top of it, you have one of the big three in oil production and one of the big three in natural gas production, the same country, Putin’s Russia, going to war on a whole series of miscalculations. And that’s what’s further disrupted the market.

ezra klein

What was behind the U.S.‘s big energy turnaround over the past couple of decades?

If you go back to 2003, it was thought that the U.S. was going to become the world’s largest importer of natural gas. But there was this thing called the shale revolution, driven basically by one man named George Mitchell, who just had a conviction that somehow, could get gas out of these dense shale rock, which the textbooks said was not possible. And he plugged away at it for over 20 years. And then after about year 25, it was really proved that you could do it using what is called directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking. And it turned out to be much bigger than anybody knew. So first, we went to became a big L.N.G. exporter, because we have so much gas in this country.

ezra klein

LNG being Liquid Natural Gas.

Liquefied natural gas, which is a expensive process. It costs $10 billion perhaps to build an L.N.G. processing plant. And then they said, well, it won’t work for oil, because oil molecules are too big to go through the rocks. Well, it turned out it worked for oil, too, and it was transformative. And a lot of people thought it wouldn’t work. And I have this story in the book about a personal episode I had with Vladimir Putin. I was attending this thing called the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, and he was up there with Chancellor Merkel. And you could see the ice between the two of them. They said, oh, you could ask the first question. So I asked the normal question. What are you going to do, Mr. Putin, to diversify your economy so you’re not so dependent on oil and gas? And they’re really dependent on oil and gas. And I mentioned the word shale, and he started shouting at me before I finished my question about how barbaric and terrible shale is. And as I reflected on it, and it’s become even clearer today, he didn’t like shale for two reasons. One, because he knew that the U.S. natural gas in that form of that liquefied natural gas would be competing with his gas in Europe. And he didn’t like that. And he realized that this change the position of the U.S., that we would have more flexibility in what we do, in our foreign policy, in our relationships with the world, that it would give us a whole new set of relationships with countries like India, that we didn’t have before, and it would strengthen the U.S. position. So he hated shale.

ezra klein

You write in the book that Putin talks about energy more like an energy company C.E.O. than your typical president or prime minister. Tell me about that.

I guess it’s because he regards the energy business in Russia as his business. And so he does act more like a C.E.O., a rational C.E.O. until a couple of years ago, it would seem. And people who have dealt with him and negotiate it with him say that he shows a surprising mastery and interest in the details of the energy business, very knowledgeable. And I think that one of his calculations— miscalculations— was he looked and said, “boy, it’s a tight oil market. It’s a tight gas market. It’s a tight coal market. So that gives me a high card. And then I have another energy card to play. Europe is so dependent on oil and gas, that they’ll do what they did after I took Crimea,” he says to himself, “which is they’ll say, protest and say oh, no, this is bad. And then they’ll say, well, we have to look after our energy supplies, and well, we’ll just stand aside.” And he got completely the opposite reaction. One of the other things he wanted to do was undermine NATO. He strengthened NATO. And he’s done this remarkable thing. He’s changed the policy of Germany. Chancellor Scholz, a couple of weeks ago, basically said, we’re going to back away from Russian energy. We’re going to build terminals to receive U.S. L.N.G., and this relationship with Russia is over. And for Putin, whatever happens in Ukraine, this is a major defeat for him that he’s brought on himself and shows a series of terrible miscalculations that, of course, are having a huge human cost in Ukraine.

ezra klein

Let’s talk a bit about the German-Russian energy relationship. Because this is a story— and the American part of the story, I think, isn’t well known. Germany has had this very commercial relationship under Merkel, who’s understood as a sharp critic of Putin, where she doesn’t just accept, but supports the building of the second big pipeline. And Donald Trump, for whatever his flaws, is this constant angry critic of Europe being so reliant on Russian natural gas. And he harangues Merkel at a meeting, and she sharply snaps back at him. Can you tell a bit about that story?

Certainly. Merkel grew up in East Germany. And I think no one needs to tell her about domination from Moscow. I mean, she lived it. But he did attack her and against Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 1, the first pipeline, there’s a picture in “The New Map of Western” leaders and E.U. leaders and Russians and all sort of turning the pipe to turn it on. But that was 2008, roughly. And this is a very different era. And so this new pipeline became very controversial. If there had not been a war, it would not necessarily have changed the amount of gas that Russia sent to Europe, but it would change the way it got there. Because most of Russian gas used to flow through Ukraine. Because Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, and that’s how they built the pipelines. In this century, Russia has been building pipelines so it can send gas and not depend upon Ukraine. But I think Merkel still regarded it as primarily a commercial deal that wasn’t going to change the overall gas balance. And Germany had, decades ago, pursued peace through trade. That is, they thought if you built up the economic relations with the Soviet Union, that would weaken the Iron Curtain and that it would give a positive side to the relationship, that otherwise was dominated by animosity and nuclear weapons. Detente came out of that. And you can say that that scraped away the Iron Curtain. Because Russians, Soviet people, actually learned about the rest of the world. So Nord Stream 2 was part of that. But obviously, the politics have been changing. Particularly once the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that pipeline is not going ahead. The Germans how to figure out how to get out of it. And they are going to do a new national security evaluation. Because now not just Germany, but Europe is saying, we’re going to use a lot less natural gas from Russia than we’ve used in the past. And we’re going to find a way to use less oil from Russia. Russia is going to pay a price. It’s not a price that they’ll pay tomorrow, but it’s a price over the next few years. And Nord Stream 2 now is going to be in suspended animation, lying at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, that’s never going to be filled.

ezra klein

I think something that is lurking in there is two different ideas of how energy relationships might create power. So one, which is this broader, neoliberal globalization idea, is that trade ties create peace. They create relationships. They create stability. Another argument is that having the energy yourself is what creates power. Trade ties on you create dependence, which is great for your power. And that’s very much been Putin’s view. But it’s also, to some degree, something you argue on America’s behalf, that as we’ve become a more dominant energy producer, it’s given us a level of geostrategic flexibility that we wouldn’t have had if we weren’t this big of an energy producer. Can you talk a bit about that and particularly, in terms of the Russian case? What do you think we’ve been able to do or push for here that we wouldn’t have been able to do or push for in the energy equilibrium of 2001?

Ezra, let me give you a very vivid example. When the U.S. suddenly had this surplus of gas— I’m talking about this thing called L.N.G., liquefied natural gas, which is you basically freeze the gas to a very low temperature and turn a gas into a liquid. You ship it to another country, and they put it into another facility and turn it back into gas and put it into their pipeline system. So we started building these export facilities. They take time. But what they’ve shown is that this turned out to be a geopolitical asset for the United States. There was some time in January, for instance, when the U.S. L.N.G. going to Europe was actually greater than the volumes of gas that Europe was getting from Russia. If we didn’t have L.N.G. exports from the United States, Europe would be in a much worse state and would have a much more difficulty withstanding the pressure from Russia. So this is the classic example where this has turned into a geopolitical asset for the United States beyond its economic, its energy value. I mean, we just had our conference in Houston. And these officials were coming over from Europe, going up to anybody they thought had any potential for L.N.G.— can you get us some more U.S. L.N.G.? Now, there’s also L.N.G. that comes from Qatar, comes from Australia, from Nigeria, from other countries. But the U.S. this year, having not produced any significant L.N.G. until 2016, is going to end up the world’s largest exporter of L.N.G. And that’s something that Putin really saw coming and did not like. That is a very important element now in the balance of power or what the Soviets used to call the correlation of forces in this new struggle that has developed this year.

ezra klein

Something hiding in this conversation is that we’re talking about energy markets, but we’re talking about different markets. And very confusingly, in America, we call oil gas, which is a very good way of conflating different markets. But can you talk a bit about the differences between the oil and gas markets and how they work?

Sure. It’s simpler in Europe. And in England, they call it petrol, so you don’t get this confusion. So the oil market is a truly global market. Supplies move around. There are differences in the qualities of oil. There’s differences in the refineries. But this has been a global market for many decades. Natural gas was much more regional markets. Europe was supplied with gas from a huge Dutch gas field, then from Norwegian gas. And the U.S. was quite separated from it. But this L.N.G. business began decades ago, initially to provide natural gas to Japan for electricity generation and South Korea for electricity generation. But it’s become more of a global market in recent weeks. L.N.G. tankers that were leaving the United States destined for Europe have changed direction and gone and delivered needed gas to Europe. So it’s become more of a global market, but not as connected in the way that the European market is. The U.S. domestic natural gas market is separated from the global market, and prices in the U.S.— although homeowners, when they look at their bills, will see higher— are much lower than they are in other parts of the world. So I guess you could say the oil business is a globalized business and that the natural gas business is becoming more globalized.

ezra klein

I want to talk about one specific example of where the U.S.‘s rise in gas production gave us maybe foreign policy leverage we wouldn’t have otherwise had. I’m typically, relatively skeptical of sanctions and how will they work. But whenever I talk to people who work on sanctions, the example they give me of them working is Iran. And I think that’s correct, that the sanctions did push Iran towards the nuclear deal that later, Donald Trump shredded. But it was an achievement when it was done. But one thing you argue is that it’s the shale revolution that made the Iran nuclear deal possible. Tell me why.

We decided to put sanctions on Iran, step them up, to force them to the negotiating table in 2012. It only been two or three years earlier that people had figured out that you could produce shale oil, as well as shale gas. I know I have a quote in “The New Map” from one of the Iranians saying, the sanctions will never work. The world will need our oil. We’ll be selling the oil. People will be beating on our doors. And they just dismissed the fact that the U.S. production was going to increase so fast, that in a year or two, we were producing more oil than— had added more oil than Iran was exporting. And so that was a time when there was more supply in the world market and unlike where we are now. And so you could go get oil from somewhere else or someone else, because there was a lot of oil around. And it was the shale revolution that made those sanctions work. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

So we’ve been talking here about the transformation of the producer side of the energy market. But there’s also been a pretty big transformation on the buyer side, particularly around China emerging as the world’s largest energy importer. Tell me about their emergence and how that has changed the global dynamic here.

What a change. Until the early ‘90s, China was actually an exporter of oil. And then in the early ‘90s, it started becoming an importer of oil. And for the Chinese, they have memories going back to the Korean War, when we cut off oil supplies to them. And so for them, oil became a strategic issue, and they built up their oil industry, and they took a ministry of petroleum and turned it into a series of energy companies and went around the world and developed oil. And so they’ve become a major player in world oil in different countries. But their consumption, their growth, outrun supply. So today, China is in the position of importing 75 percent of its oil. And they see that as a huge security problem. And they have gone around the world to try and diversify their sources. And that’s one of the bases of the relationship that Putin and Xi and China and Russia have. Because Russia is one of China’s major suppliers, along with the Middle East and along with other Asian countries and Africa. But they regard that as a strategic vulnerability. In fact, despite the fact that U.S.-Chinese relations are in a pretty rocky state, China is signing up long-term contracts to buy U.S. L.N.G. as part of their diversification strategy.

ezra klein

And one geopolitical consequence of that shift, which you gestured at there, is a stronger Russia-China alliance. One of your quotes in the book is, “a relationship that was once based on Marx and Lenin is now grounded in oil and gas.” Tell me about that.

It is so true. And when Putin annexed Crimea, and we put sanctions on him back then— obviously, they didn’t do much good— he hightailed it to Beijing and signs a huge natural gas deal with China. So China Power of Siberia pipeline, these other pipelines, oil and gas has become a very important trade for China, Russia. It’s basically a source of raw materials, and oil and gas are at the top of it. But it’s not only China and Russia. I think it’s really Xi and Putin. And I remember being at another St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where Putin’s main guest was none other than Xi Jinping, president of China. And Putin begins by saying, Mr. President, or whatever he calls him, I apologize I kept you up so late talking. It was 4 o’clock Beijing time when we finished. And Xi said, we never have enough time to talk. And I think we can be sure that one of the things they talk about is the U.S. and Europe and that they want to overturn what they see as an international order that’s led by the U.S. and Europe. And they keep saying that each other’s their very best friends. But I think now we’re really at a hinge point. And we’ll see over the next few weeks, does China align itself firmly with Russia— two countries, by the way, where the leaders are, more or less, president for life— or does China step back from what they may see as Putin’s reckless disaster that he’s launched in Ukraine? So people are looking for which ways the Chinese are going to go. Or are they going to try and play both sides of the street? But they don’t want to see the impact on the world economy. I mean, they pay high prices for oil, too, by the way. But the general disarray that this brings to the world economy and disruption, particularly when Xi is planning to get his third term as president— apparently, no one is running in the primaries against him.

ezra klein

When you look at the trade flows between Russia and China and the energy flows, they’re big, and they’re important. So in 2005, 5 percent of Russian oil exports went to China. Now it’s about 30 percent of Russian oil exports before the war here. Russia passed the Saudis as China’s top oil supplier. The two countries signed this big 30-year $400 billion gas deal in 2014. But a point you make is, that as important a trading partner and a resources partner as Russia is to China, Russia pales before the U.S. as a trading partner to China. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yes. First, Putin has said that the future is in Asia, and we— Russia, that is— has to reorient towards Asia. He regards Europe and the United States as— he calls them decadent countries, that they’re on a downward slide and that the future is Asia. And that really means China. But for China, Russia is important strategically. They share a long border. Russia is important as a source of raw materials and as somebody— as a country that sees the world the same way. But economically, China’s trade with the U.S. is so much more important. And the U.S. and China are so much more integrated than most people recognize, that many of the prescription drugs or over-the-counter drugs that you buy come from China. And China has a similar dependence on the United States. In this era of globalization, production spread out, efficiency was the goal, and China became the workshop of the world. For General Motors, China’s a bigger auto market for them than the United States. So it’s been a two-way street. And China and the United States, I think, in the era of post-Cold War globalization, it was a time of what I call the W.T.O. consensus, that China and the United States were part of the same trading system, and that we would all benefit from being part of the global economy— although, obviously, there would be job loss in the United States, and production would shift and so forth— and that it would be an underpinning of peace. But that’s gone now. We’re in a different era with China, for sure. For “The New Map,” I went back and looked at the National Security statement, the last one from the Obama administration. And it talked about engagement with China, working with them on global issues. And then I looked at the First National security documents from the Biden administration. Didn’t have any of that language. It was strategic competitors, great power rivalry, very different language. And by the way, it’s written by, more or less, the same people. That shows you as or how much it changed in five years. And the Chinese language has changed under President Xi. They talk about unilateralism. And that means the United States, and that’s bad. And they, too, talk about great power competition. And if you look at what the U.S. and Chinese militaries, they’re really, in where they’re spending and where they’re going to be focused, they’re focused on each other. So that’s a different era. And I think when the Biden administration came in, they thought there might be some hope of peeling Russia away from China. Because it would be better off for Russia economically and so it doesn’t end up an economic colony of China. But clearly, that hasn’t worked. So China and Russia are very close strategically. But we still have this very complex economic relationship with China that is more significant for both countries than people recognize.

ezra klein

But let’s talk about the possibility of Russia becoming an economic colony of China. Because for all of Putin’s concern about Russian power and Russian land and Russia’s role in the global order of the future, one of the very likely, it seems to me, long-term outcomes of this is Russia becomes, as people have said, a functional vassal state of China’s for two reasons. I mean, one, because he needs them, and they can buy a bunch of his energy. But two, back up a year or two. And for everything we spoke about with Germany and the pipelines that they were building, Europe was willing to be very dependent on Russian oil, which meant they were willing to pay Russia a lot of money. And whether they can get off of it quickly— and we’ll talk about that— there’s no doubt that one of the primary realizations that Europe has come to in this is they do not want to be dependent on Russian oil and gas. They do not want to be in a position where Vladimir Putin or whoever succeeds him controls Europe’s energy future. So has Putin made a pretty big miscalculation here in terms of Russia’s long-term power. Really only having China and India to sell to just seems like a much weaker economic position.

That’s a very key point. I think so often, history is writing about people’s miscalculations and shutting out information, not understanding what they’re doing. And if we look at, beginning with Putin’s assumption that in five days, Ukraine would collapse— it would be like Crimea part two and just take over the country— Russia supplies 29 percent of Russia’s gas and 35 percent of its oil, a high degree of dependence. And he thought that was locked in, and it wasn’t going to change. But the Europeans have said, we’re done. We’re out of here. Now, they’re not going to get out of it as fast as they think. But we do not want to depend upon Russian gas to the degree we have. We’re going to bring it way down, and we’re going to try and do the same on oil. It’s not going to be easy to do that. But there are a lot of things that they’re going to do right away to do that. So I think what Russia has done is he’s— Russia was, although he didn’t like this term, an energy superpower, what it’s now going do is it’s going to be a reduced energy power. And it’s going to have trouble selling its products. The oil, they’ll be able to sell at a discount to India, to Asian countries, presumably. Natural gas is going to be a bigger problem. Because you can’t just pick up the pipelines that go from Russia to Europe and have them point in some other direction. So they’re going to have a shrinking gas market. So he’s taken steps to impoverish Russia from here on by what he’s done. Russian oil and gas was sometimes as high as 46 percent of his budget, and he’s just not going to have those earnings in the future. It’s going to be rocky. It’s not going to be smooth. And I think consumers are beginning to see that right now. But Russia’s role as— days as an energy superpower, I think, are over. And he’s really signed a death warrant for that.

ezra klein

There’s been a lot of frustration that Europe and to some degree, the United States— although we more recently banned Russian oil imports— but that Europe has maintained this big carve-out in the sanctions for Russian energy. And as you said, maybe the amount of energy getting out of Russia is now going down. But because prices are spiking, Putin and Russia are still making a ton of money on selling energy to Europe every single day. Tell me about the reality beneath that. What would happen to Europe if it just said tomorrow, no more Russian energy, we’re shutting off the flows?

It depends how quickly you can get additional oil from the Middle East. The U.S. sent a delegation to Caracas to talk to Maduro to see if, can we make a deal? Maybe we can get some more oil. Canada, which is actually our largest supplier of oil, can produce some more oil, too. So people will scramble for barrels. It’s easier to scramble for barrels when there’s a lot of extra supply around. There’s not a lot of extra supply. And Iran, on which sanctions are raised because of a new nuclear deal or restoration of the nuclear deal, could put more oil into the market. But it would be tight and disruptive. We’re already seeing the effects of that in Europe in terms of prices. And part of the problem is you have pipes that are in place. And Eastern European refineries, I understand, really can only be supplied with Russian oil, because they depend upon the Russian pipeline, that they can’t easily get other oil. So if you just stopped it all tomorrow, it might even be hard for the Ukrainian military to fight. Because they wouldn’t be able to get any diesel fuel that they need for their equipment. Now, the flows to China are going to continue. So half of his exports go to Europe. The rest go to Asia, basically. And those sales will continue. But over time, that market’s going to decline. And the Europeans are going to do a lot of other things, including be more energy-efficient, build more wind turbines, in order to generate additional electricity with wind rather than natural gas. And I think we’re going to see them burning more coal, at least for the next couple of years.

ezra klein

But I want to pull this out a little bit of the pure, rational economic analysis. Because the frustration is it’s steeped in the blood of this moment. Ukrainians are dying now. Russia is invading Ukraine now. So why doesn’t Europe stop the flows of oil and gas now? I’m not saying they don’t have a good reason, but I want to hear what would happen. What it would mean for Europeans if they just said, tomorrow, no more?

It’s very odious to people to see dollars going back to Russia right now. But on the other hand, Russian oil is 35 percent of European consumption. If you can’t replace it, the economy is not going to work. We already saw, before this began, because of the shortage of natural gas in Europe, factories were actually shutting down, like fertilizer plants, that make fertilizer for the spring planting season, shutting down. So I think you would have that on a larger scale, and you would have somewhat of immobilization. If I go back to think about other oil crises, you would create a kind of panic situation, panic buying, and so forth. So it may, well, come not as formal sanctions, but just self-sanctioning that’s going on. I was talking to a lady in England yesterday, who says an ethical grounds, I don’t want to buy any product that has oil in it— Russian oil in it. These products all get blended together, so sometimes, it’s hard to know what it is. But I would suspect that we’re going to see further degradation of Russia’s exports to Europe, not necessarily because it’s mandated by government, but by companies standing back and saying, we’re not going to handle Russian oil, or we’re not going to pick up Russian oil. So there’s going to be economic disruptions that are flowing from this. I mentioned before what’s happening with wheat prices. Boeing depends upon Russia for titanium. Ukraine produces neon that’s used for making computer chips. So there are going to be a lot of disruptions. But the biggest are going to be involving oil and gas, and that, of course, goes right to Putin’s pocketbook. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

You back up a year, and Germany is shutting down nuclear plants and building a new natural gas pipeline with Russia. And now as the situation has changed, as their estimation of Russia has changed, what you’re hearing from Europe is that the future is not just to be less dependent on Russian energy, but decarbonization. On March 8, the European Commission outlined this plan to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030. That required tripling renewable energy capacity. Germany’s finance minister recently called renewable energy “freedom energy.” What’s your read of how this has changed the European decarbonization and renewables pathway in reality? Is this all rhetoric, or is this accelerating them down a track they’re actually going to take?

I think it’s accelerating down a track that they’ll put additional resources into it. Now we get into the nitty gritty of, are the supply chains there? How fast can you build big offshore wind turbines permitting? I was told, last week, by one of the top manufacturers of wind turbines in the world, at least in the Western world, that it takes seven years to get a permit for an onshore wind turbine in Europe, onshore not offshore. Permitting is a real problem everywhere for building everything. But I think no question, that will speed up. So now, by the way, renewables is not only about climate, but it’s also about energy security. And that’s a different imperative that had been an amnesia about energy security in the Western world, including in the United States. Because we just assumed it’s all OK. So I think that will happen. They’re going to scour the world for more L.N.G. They will burn more coal for a couple of years so they can reduce gas imports from Russia. They’ll accelerate energy efficiency. They’ll accelerate the rollout of electric cars. And I think that they’ll also focus on yet to be developed natural gas reserves in the North Sea and around Cyprus, which is part of the E.U., that I think that will step up as well. So they’re going to move on a lot of fronts. But I think your focus on renewables will be at the very front of what they’re going to do so they don’t have to use as much gas for electric generation.

ezra klein

Has there been a big divergence between the U.S. and Europe on this? I’ve seen some argue, working, I think, more off rhetoric, that Europe is taking this as an opportunity to accelerate decarbonization. And in America, the pressure and the policies have been towards more global oil supply, in particular. Is the U.S. more fossil fuel-oriented in this moment, or is that just a visual difference?

Most countries in Europe don’t produce oil and gas. The United States does. And so one of the changes we’ve seen, and we’ve heard it from the U.S. administration, is that we are committed to our decarbonization goals. But at the same time, we’re in an emergency right now. This is an emergency. Can we increase our production to take barrels away from Russia and asking other countries to do that, too? Pretty intense negotiations going on with the Middle East to try and get them to step up production as well. But Europe has this track anyway that it was going. And so now it’s going to accelerate it. And I think, for Europeans, living on the European continent, seeing what’s happened in Ukraine in the year 2022, happening in Europe, is just shocking and unbelievable to them that this would happen in this century. They have a historic memory of World War II in a way that we don’t in the United States. And so they just want to unhook from Russia, and renewable generation is a very important way to do it. So they’ll step on the gas in terms of solar and wind.

ezra klein

There’s a case being made right now that decarbonization isn’t just a climate change protection policy, but also, a national security policy, that you have consumers in countries less vulnerable to wild swings in the oil and gas markets. Governments would be less beholden to foreign countries who dominate these markets. Do you think that argument is right? Do you think there is a national security case for decarbonization?

It’s interesting. In my previous book “The Quest,” I went back and said, where did the modern wind and solar industry come from anyway? And they only emerged in the 1970s. And for the first 30 years, renewables were more about energy security than about climate. Climate Really wasn’t an issue. And so the big impetus was energy security. And so maybe it’s a sort of a full circle to come back and see this as the energy security now picture is back in the game. And that, in a way, takes you back to the forces that launched the wind and solar in the United States. They weren’t launched because of climate. They were launched to find an alternative to imported oil.

ezra klein

I think one of the observations one can make in the other direction, though, is you’ve really seen over the past— I mean, you’ve seen it repeatedly. But you saw it over the past year, you’ve seen it over the past weeks, how sensitive the domestic politics of all these countries are to rising energy prices. And on the one hand, you can make an idealized argument that we can have this massive energy transition at the speed we need to have it, if everything goes well without big increases in energy prices. On the other hand, I think that might be a little more optimistic than is fully warranted by the facts, that if you want to do full decarbonization at the speed many climate advocates say we need to do it, that you’re going to see prices go up on fossil fuels, even before you see some of the renewable capacity come online. Because it is, in part, the increase in prices on fossil fuels that will get you to the renewable capacity that you need. I’m curious how you read the politics of energy prices in this. Do you think that decarbonization is possible without higher energy prices? And do you think higher energy prices are a significant obstacle for decarbonization?

So you’re really saying, Ezra, does it cut both ways? Last year, the Tesla— I forgot— Model Y, I think, was the 17th best-selling car in the United States. As prices that go up at the pump, and if you’re driving 30 miles a day to work, and you’re seeing what the prices are, you’ll tend to switch to an electric car. Now, a electric car, of course, is 20 percent plastic—

ezra klein

Which means they still need oil for production.

Yes, still need oil. And people don’t realize that Tylenol— you take Tylenol. Tylenol is an oil product. The body of a 787 jet is basically, an oil product. So it’s more pervasive in the economy than people recognize. That said, I believe prices are very important pieces of information. And they do affect behavior. And they affect decisions that people make. A lot of the 2050 goals have been shifted to 2030. And I think we were starting to see in that energy crisis in Europe, before the invasion of Ukraine, that it could be disruptive of trying to do it really fast and that you get reactions against it. Prices go up, and you get what in France were called the yellow vest protest against it. And I think that one of the unsaid worries about completely shutting Russian oil out, when you don’t have replacement, is that it would be such a shock to the economy, that you might get a backlash in Europe, saying, well, why are we standing so strong against Russia? Let’s think about ourselves. And I think nobody’s saying that publicly, but I think that’s a private fear. And of course, it also comes at a time when what used to be called transitory inflation has now just become inflation. And this is feeding into it. So you get a shock. And by the way, you take money out of consumers’ pockets that they might be spending on other things. So there are a lot of ramifications of it. But I think higher prices, basically, will drive in that towards decarbonization. But it’s not a smooth road. It’s not only a smooth road economically and for consumers. It’s also not a smooth role for politicians.

ezra klein

Right. And that’s what’s on my mind here. So in California, we have very aggressive decarbonization goals. And the rise in gas prices, even so, has led to a lot of politicians trying to blunt the rise in gas prices, not using them as a big moment to get people to use less gasoline and burn less fossil fuels. Republicans in the California legislature tried and failed to get a gas tax holiday passed. Governor Gavin Newsom is thinking about a gas tax rebate, which doesn’t so much change the prices you see at— people see at the pump, but is an effort to ease the frustration here. Nationally, we’re releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And so something you’re not seeing here is, if you were making the national security case on decarbonization, you might say that moments like this, when global instability sends prices rocketing, that’s the point the price is a signal that we should take to get off of these fuels. But in fact, the reaction I most often see among politicians is that the high gas prices themselves become the immediate problem, rather than the broader vulnerabilities of being reliant on a fossil fuel, like gasoline, that is maybe lurking underneath all this.

I think that’s right. Gasoline prices are sensitive everywhere in the world. When there was this upheaval recently in Kazakhstan, it started because the price of fuel went up. And so in all different societies, but we certainly know, in the United States, that it is a incredibly sensitive politically, understandably so, because people drive a lot. And it’s very painful for a nurse or schoolteacher driving to work to suddenly see how much they’re paying— how much of their income is suddenly going into gasoline. And the reaction of politicians, then, is to, what can we do to lower gasoline prices? To me, what I think right now needs to happen is that we really do need to regard this as a wartime situation. You need a much closer collaboration between government and industry to understand the things that we’ve been talking about, as for how do the logistics work? What can you do to keep the supplies going? Where can you get other supplies? What’s happening on a day-to-day basis? And I think that’s what really needs to happen. And I we’re just starting to see that. Because this is going to have to be managed, and this may not be a matter of weeks. This could be a matter of months.

ezra klein

One of the other counterarguments I’ve begun to see floating around is that, even in a decarbonization world, there are supply chains you are dependent on, and there are supply chains we don’t control. So this week, Senator Joe Manchin said that, quote, “I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles.” He continued that, “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974, trying to buy gas. I remember those days. I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China,” end quote. And what he’s referring to there is that China does dominate the global lithium ion battery supply chain. They control a lot of raw material refining. If you’re looking at solar power, they are quite dominant in terms of solar panel production. How do you see the supply chain dependence question around decarbonization?

Well, first, let me say, I was there when Senator Manchin made that comment. And it certainly did stand out. And I think he’s pointing to something that I talk about in “The New Map.” We all know the term big oil. I think we’re going to be moving in— and this is what you’re getting at— into an era of big shovels. Because the sun and the wind may be free, but the materials that go into wind turbines or that go into electric cars are very physical things that have to be mined, that have to be processed, that have to be shipped, and have to go through further processing. And so we’re going to have new supply chains for net zero carbon, for decarbonization. It’s going to be more mineral intensive, as opposed to oil or gas intensive. And where those supply chains? Well, the Chinese have been out there in front, as you say, 80 percent of the lithium ion batteries. One of the great things has been the solar revolution. And solar costs have gone down dramatically, dramatically. But the major reason is Chinese manufacturing. Oh, they dominate about 80 percent of the solar panel business as well. And so suddenly, we’re going to wake up, and there’s going to be a new geopolitics around these new supply chains that you’re describing. And where are they going to be mined, the demand for lithium will be enormous— I mean, maybe a 4,300 percent increase, by one estimate. Now, there’s some thought technology will come to bear, and there may be the possibility of producing lithium in North Carolina and Nevada, and so forth. But other minerals, a substantial part of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Copper comes from a limited number of countries. Copper— electric cars really use a lot more copper than your normal internal combustion engine. So I think securing these supplies to support the pace of decarbonization that people want to achieve, that’s going to be a new challenge. And there’s going to be a big focus on that. And then it gets back to— we talked about permitting before. It’s hard to open a new mine in the United States. It’s estimated by one estimate, 16 years to open a new mine from discovery to production. In the United States, the permitting process alone can take 16 or 20 years. So I think you’ve got to look down the road, which is you’re saying and seeing, where is these supplies going to come from? And note, please, that China has a very strong position in them. When I read President Biden’s statement about what we need to do about minerals and metals, and so forth, for decarbonization, I was just struck by how often China was invoked as a reason to do it.

ezra klein

You did a study recently with the former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, looking at potential breakthrough technologies that could accelerate decarbonization. Tell me a bit about what you found. What are what are the possible technologies that you’re most excited about right now, that you wish we were investing more in?

Some of it is actually digital, becoming much more efficient in how we use energy and how we manage buildings which use a lot of energy. I would say that what’s big on the agenda now, almost dramatically from nowhere, is hydrogen. And the Europeans are now talking about getting 25 percent of their energy by 2050 from hydrogen. So that’s a top one. The other is batteries and energy storage. If you had a way on large scale to store electricity generated by wind and solar, so that there were no longer intermittent up and down sources, depending upon the wind and the sun, but you could store them, that would change the energy picture. So I think those are some of the areas. It’s very interesting about hydrogen, just because so many people are jumping on it now. It involves a lot of engineering. But hydrogen is used as— now in oil refineries, it’s used to make fertilizers, and so forth. So the know how is there. The question, can you make it large scale? And what do you make it from? Do you make it from natural gas? Then you need carbon storage. You need to be able to capture the CO2 and store it, called carbon capture. Or can you make from using wind and solar? And you split water, basically. But that would be very expensive. And again, anything you do on energy that’s really going to have an impact, you need to get to scale. And that involves a lot of engineering. It involves a lot of money and involves a lot of execution. Because that goes back to where we started. The system that supports the global economy today, our $90 trillion economy, is very big. And so you need things that are very big. But I think I would put those as some of the top things, and a lot of people working on batteries and trying to find different chemistries for batteries that would make them more efficient and store electricity for far longer periods of time.

ezra klein

If you could get us to spend a lot more political capital, and that capital could resolve into money and funding— it could resolve into changing laws, could resolve into changing regulations— if you were to get us to spend a lot more political capital in something that would speed decarbonization, that you think is currently underutilized, what would it be? You’ve mentioned R&D here. You’ve mentioned permitting. What do you think we don’t give enough attention to that’s a real problem for the execution of a rapid decarbonization pathway?

Well, I think permitting is a very important one. And if you look at the International Energy Agency’s goal for decarbonization by 2030, a big part of that is removing— replacing coal generation of electricity in Asia with natural gas. We could actually be exporting more natural gas, which is a hydrocarbon, but we could displace a lot of coal. And I think that would be one objective. The one thing that unites renewable people and oil and gas people is that they’re all very frustrated by the permitting process, just how long it takes to get things done in the United States and how long they spend in courts and moving through one regulatory agency after another. But I think the biggest thing— I headed a task force in energy R&D for the Department of Energy a number of years ago. And I just come out thinking the most important thing is the money you spend on research and development and then taking things out of the lab. That’s what really pays off. The problem is it doesn’t pay off tomorrow. But even the International Energy Agency said, to achieve the decarbonization goals by 2050, half the technologies you need on a commercial basis don’t exist today. So what we really need, if I’m an optimist about anything, it’s about technology innovation, to see what we’ve seen happen with solar, what we’ve seen happen with shale, and what we need to have happen with new technologies to get to these goals.

ezra klein

I think that’s a good place to come to an end. And so always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

The number one book I would recommend, by far, as most relevant today is Putin’s World,” by Angela Stent. And the subtitle is “Russia Against the West and with the Rest.” And it explains why India, Brazil, Indonesia, and many other countries abstained on the vote condemning Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. And it also gives you insight into what his geostrategic and global strategy is. So I think that’s the book of the day to read.

ezra klein

I think I should get you to make a disclosure on this book, which is an amazing book. But I should have you say it.

Fair enough. I should mention it is written by my wife Angela Stent.

ezra klein

I really wish we could just do a podcast of the conversations the two of you must be having around the dinner table right now.

Oh, it’s very much around these topics, of course. The other book I read was called— it has a title called “The Power Law.” And the subtitle is the “Venture Capital and the Making of The New Future,” by Sebastian Mallaby. And so much of what we have in the world today and we take for granted, the technologies we use every day, came out of venture capital. And understanding how that system works and what it’s done for the economy and for innovation, it’s very interesting. It’s a very colorful story. The third book is called “The Cloud Revolution,” by a fellow named Mark Mills. And it’s about how the convergence of new technologies will create the next economic boom. When we see changes come, things come together. And he’s focused on around the cloud and how it will be sort of like what happened with electricity and radio, and things like that, in the 1920s.

ezra klein

And Daniel Yergin, your book is, or your more recent book is, “The New Map,” which is startling and how relevant it is, how much it has on Russia, Ukraine, how presciently it reads today. People should very much check that out to understand the layer of all of this, that it’s energy-based. Thank you very much.

Well, thank you, Ezra. I’m really glad to have this conversation. [MUSIC PLAYING]

announcer

Often, we are treated to slang in the past as something exotic that flowered, for example, among flappers in the 1920s. It can seem as if slang is something that happens when the culture sparks up for some reason, or as a way of expressing some urgently oppositional identity, such as among teenagers. But slang is also just eternal — dirty pup, doc, syndicating. It’s just that traditionally, while norms of written language have been more formal, slang hasn’t been written down much for posterity. We encounter slang of the past today in shards, from the occasional attempt to compile a dictionary of it, or a quick article about it, although often only capturing what is heard in its place and time.

The elusiveness of how so many people actually expressed themselves in the past is much of why I cherish the informalization of public language in our times. Before the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, public language in America was largely business-casual, in feel at least, with informal speech largely restricted to unrecorded settings. The airing of teenage slang, say, or Black slang, was considered an interesting but trivial departure from the norm, worthy of a snicker after which we would settle back into the “real” English, the hallowed standard variety.

But this ignored so much variety, development and even wit, ever roiling amid people living lives beyond the printed page. With the vernacularization of public language since then, and with how social media allows so many more people to express themselves in the public square, we can be sure that the way we use language now will be resonantly available to people in the future. English in its totality is, in this way, better documented than it once was.

“I can’t even!” — the deftness of the use of “even” in that expression alone makes it worth the ticket. If you doubt it, try explaining to someone new to the language how “even” in this one conveys what you mean. Even what? Think also of the current skeptical intonation of “But is it though?” where on the “is it though” the melody jumps up about a musical fifth. If people had been saying that in the 1860s, we’d never know, because even if someone had deigned to put it in print (they almost certainly wouldn’t have), we couldn’t have heard their voices.

More: Black internet slang and rap lyrics include “yeen,” short for “you don’t even.” “Yeen know” is a dismissive “you don’t even know,” with a finger-wagging flavor. “Yeen” may pass away, but posterity will know of it because it will live online.

Race and Ethnicity
How White Victimhood Fuels Republican Politics

By Alex Samuels and Neil Lewis Jr. and Alex Samuels and Neil Lewis Jr.

Mar. 21, 2022,
at
1:19 PM

Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

On Nov. 4, 2008, Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, was elected the first Black president of the United States. His election was seen as a hopeful moment in America and ushered in lots of think pieces and reporting that his presidency was the start of a new “post-racial” society. At long last — in the eyes of many, at least — there was hope that the racial wounds that have long divided Black and white Americans would heal.
That, of course, never happened. Even at the time, certain white voters refused to vote for Obama because of his race, and a rise in hate crimes followed his win. Moreover, in the lead up to Obama’s first election, some polls showed that only about one-third of white Americans (38 percent) thought Obama would help race relations, compared with 60 percent of Black Americans. Moreover, a plurality of white Americans thought (or, perhaps, hoped) that his candidacy would have no impact on race relations, essentially upholding the status quo. What’s more, some white voters during this period started to become resentful of a Black man ascending to the highest political office. And that backlash, in part, spurred the election of former President Donald Trump eight years later. 
Trump’s election killed any illusions anyone might have had about a “post-racial” America. Indeed, Trump was successful in finding a predominately white audience who lapped up his overt racism toward people of color and who were eager to embrace a rising sense of white victimhood. 
Trump may be out of power, but those feelings aren’t. They may even be growing. 
With President Biden having just passed one full year in office, public opinion research shows that white Americans — and especially Republicans — see whites as victims of discrimination more than, say, Hispanic or Black Americans. According to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, only 17 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning Americans said there is “a lot” of discrimination against Black people in today’s society. That number rose to 26 percent when Republicans were asked whether they believed white people faced “a lot” of discrimination. And intense white racial resentment remains present both among Trump’s base and in our politics today. Case in point: Trump, who’s a (very, very early) favorite to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is still hitting that same drum; during a recent political event, the former president went so far as to falsely claim that white people were currently being discriminated against and sent to the “back of the line” when it came to receiving COVID-19 vaccines and treatment.
Trump is not the first white person to feel like a victim of discrimination or to make claims in that spirit. This phenomenon started long before him. But in the U.S., if we look at things like the racial wealth gap, mortgage denial rates, COVID-19 vaccination and illness rates, police violence rates or myriad other data sets, we quickly see plenty of systemic biases against Black Americans and other minority groups (such as increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans). You can’t, however, find such widespread evidence for anti-white discrimination. So why have many white Americans started to see themselves as the victims of racial discrimination?
Back in 2011, Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton and Tufts University professor Samuel Sommers published a study showing that white Americans perceived bias against whites as increasing from the 1950s to the 2000s. 
According to Sommers, it’s hard to pinpoint just one factor driving this feeling of white victimhood among white Americans. “There’s this sense that there’s only so much of anything to go around, so more of something for other groups or entities might mean less of something for me and my group,” he told us. “That makes a lot of sense when you’re talking about food at the table in front of you, but it feels like it’s getting applied to things like equal rights — or respect and status.” 
These feelings were especially prevalent in the late 2000s, when white people saw a Black man rising to the nation’s highest office. But today, beyond Obama, other perceived “threats” to white Americans — such as an increasingly multiracial nation that could eventually lead to the U.S. becoming a “majority-minority” society, or Trump’s loss in 2020 to Biden — likely fueled existing beliefs and feelings of inadequacy and victimhood among white Americans.
The same is likely true of the discussions about “racial reckonings” following the murder of George Floyd, coupled with a few high-profile examples of Black people breaking barriers. Indeed, previous polling has documented that white Americans — and especially white Republicans — largely think too much attention is paid to race and racial issues. And, as we wrote about in our last article, there are additional concerns about racial minorities getting more than they deserve. Kamala Harris’s ascendance to the vice presidency as well as the nomination of U.S. Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, for example, likely further stoked white Americans’ existing hatred against Black people and other marginalized groups. To use the language of Ohio State University professor Koritha Mitchell, “Black success beckons the mob.” There is a phenomenon Mitchell calls “know-your-place aggression” whereby U.S. culture celebrates the success of straight white men (regardless of their merit) but discourages, diminishes or destroys the achievements of members of other groups. 
This phenomenon is related to one of the other things Sommers told us about: jockeying for stigma. 
“Maybe that’s a more general human phenomenon that transcends race and racism,” Sommers said, “but now we’re talking about it on a much more serious and problematic level.” When white Americans see minorities succeed, it threatens them in a way that makes them feel like victims. As Sommers puts it: “It seems like there’s some kind of status, attention or special treatment that certain white people think will be bestowed on them if they make the claim that they’ve been treated unfairly.”
In other words, for a “post-racial” America to exist, white people would need to see people of color ascending to higher political offices and an increasingly multiracial nation as a win for all of America. Instead, many take these things as a personal attack and view it as a loss of their own status at the top of America’s racial hierarchy. 
We see evidence for this in public opinion data, too. With the help of Kathleen Weldon and Jacob Harris of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research — a research center that has one of the largest archives of public opinion datasets (and where one of us, Neil Lewis Jr., is a faculty affiliate) — and Natalie Jackson from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we looked at perceptions of discrimination against white Americans over time, and how those perceptions vary by both partisanship and race.
Since at least the year 2000, polling firms have been asking Americans questions about how much discrimination they perceive is faced by white Americans, asking respondents to place that discrimination on a scale or to compare it to other racial and ethnic groups. And our analysis of the Roper Center’s data shows that before Obama’s first election, roughly half of Republicans perceived there to be at least some discrimination against white people. Specifically, according to a 2000 poll from Princeton Survey Research Associates/The National Conference for Community and Justice, 56 percent of Republicans said that white Americans faced at least some discrimination, and by 2005, when the organizations asked the question again, that number dipped slightly to 47 percent. However, toward the end of Obama’s first term, other polling found the share of Republicans answering a similar question to be higher, as can be seen for the years 2011 and 2012 on the chart below, which uses data from PRRI.
PRRI has asked a slightly different question — to what extent respondents agree that discrimination against white Americans is now as significant of an issue as discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities — almost yearly between 2011 and 2020. The trend across that timespan is a bit messier, but the share of Republicans who “completely agreed” or “mostly agreed” with the statement was mostly higher during Trump’s time in office than during Obama’s. 
It is noteworthy that Democrats saw things quite differently than Republicans — indeed the clearest trend in the chart above is the polarization of views on this question along party lines. The percentage of Democrats who say there is at least “some” discrimination against whites has steadily decreased since the turn of the century, and this trend is consistent across both Roper and PRRI datasets. These trends are also consistent with new research that builds on Norton and Sommers’s initial work. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, a team of researchers from Tufts, Harvard and the VA Bedford Healthcare System found that race and partisanship shape perceptions of racism as a zero-sum game. “Liberal White Americans saw racism as a zero-sum game they were winning by a lot, moderate White Americans saw it as a game they were winning by only a little,” the researchers wrote, “and conservative White Americans saw it as a game they were losing.”
Of course, race and partisanship are intertwined: The vast majority of Republicans are white, and indeed, if we look at the same question by race, we see similar patterns:
Worryingly, these trends may be increasing after Biden’s inauguration. PRRI didn’t ask the same question again in 2021, so we can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison there. But according to Pew’s 2021 survey, the share of Republicans — including “leaners,” i.e., Americans leaning toward one party or the other — who said there is at least “some” discrimination against white people was 63 percent. This includes 26 percent who said there is “a lot” of discrimination against white people, which looks like an all-time high. 
We say “looks” because the polling data we have is messy. If we compare the Pew data to past Pew data (so that the methodology and question wording is consistent), we see an increase from 2019 (16 percent) to 2021 (26 percent) for the share of Republicans saying white Americans face “a lot” of discrimination. Those are only two data points, of course. We’ll need more polling to know how to interpret that result for sure.
Still, other recent polls have yielded similar findings with different questions. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, using a summer 2021 poll conducted by Project Home Fire and InnovateMR, found that only 38 percent of Trump voters either somewhat or strongly agreed that white people have advantages over people of color (compared with 87 percent of Biden voters). Moreover, 84 percent of Trump voters expressed concern that bigotry against white people will surge in the coming years. Meanwhile, only 38 percent of Biden voters felt the same way.
What’s striking is how these perceptions persist even in the face of extraordinary evidence to the contrary. We have already discussed some domestic evidence about the persistence of racial discrimination against minority groups. Additionally, on the international stage, we see anti-Black racism manifesting even during a war: Journalists monitoring the invasion in Ukraine have reported that Black people are being violently removed from trains trying to get people to safety.
What could be fueling an increase in these views? Following Trump’s loss in 2020, the Republican Party leaned further into messages that paint Republicans and white people as victims of an overzealous movement for racial justice. For example, Fox News coverage of critical race theory — a decades-old framework for legal scholarship — surged during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, according to a Newsweek analysis, only to quickly and starkly dip following Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win. And several pundits pointed to education and critical race theory as reasons for his success. Republicans have also found a seemingly successful political strategy in attacking and amplifying race-related buzzwords, such as “woke,” once used in activist circles. And as FiveThirtyEight contributors Hakeem Jefferson and Victor Ray pointed out on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the current narratives of victimization and the associated backlash to racial progress are some white people’s way of reckoning with the changing times. 
Sommers underscored the gravity of leadership’s role in these processes when we talked with him: “If we’ve learned nothing else in the last five or so years, it’s just how influential top-down attitudes are. When leaders around the country and at a regional level are using racist or vulgar language themselves, that seems to move the needle on what’s considered normative and acceptable behavior in our society.”
If we want to address the inequities that continue to plague and divide our society, white Americans — and in particular, white Republicans — will need to move away from the victimhood narrative and acknowledge our current reality. And the extent that the inequities can be muted or even mitigated depends heavily on what politicians choose to emphasize in the narratives that they construct about the state of our union. The success of minorities does not mean victimization for white Americans. Without recognition that we can all succeed — and that the nation will be better off for it — the patterns of disparities we have discussed throughout will continue to persist, and we will all be worse off for it.

It was daunting preparing to meet Andrew Sullivan, considered one of the cleverest, most fearless journalists of his generation. There is the academic pedigree: the scholarship at Oxford — where he was also president of the union and a celebrated actor — followed by the PhD in political theory at Harvard, where he produced an iconic treatise on the work of British mid-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, performed the entirety of Hamlet all by himself — “a whacked-out mid-1980s” version — and modeled for Gap.
And there is the journalistic firepower. At twenty-eight, in 1991, Sullivan became the youngest ever editor of the New Republic, America’s most august political magazine. He left following his HIV diagnosis (which he kept private at the time), before beginning the world’s first stratospheric political blog, the Dish, on which he and his team were posting up to forty times a day at its height. The blog was published on TIME, the Atlantic and the Daily Beast before going independent in 2013.
I go to visit Sullivan in New England’s gay capital of Provincetown, right on the tip of Cape Cod, on a blustery October morning. We meet in front of his charming little beach shack, home from early summer to late fall, when he returns to DC. It’s right in the middle of Commercial Street, P-town’s main drag, but set back a bit, hemmed in by flowers, the beach just meters from his porch. He has just been out with his three-legged dog, which he drops off before taking me to his daily breakfast spot, literally one door down. We sit at his usual table, the sea wind rustling the windows impatiently, and he orders his usual: an omelette with pork and cheese, and two moon-like quinoa pancakes, plus bottomless coffee (“it’s how I keep my girlish figure”). Friends appear and recede.
Sullivan has a soft voice and is tranquil and friendly. But the England native’s mixture of preternatural journalistic skill and commitment to what he sees as the truth, however unpopular, has endowed him with the kind of political clout that has led him to the very inner circle of DC politics. By the time of the invasion of Iraq, his support for which he has come to violently regret, he was “close with Cheney, I was close with Rummy [Donald Rumsfeld]” and he is still fast friends with Barack Obama, whose presidential campaign, in an unexpected move for a right-winger, he threw himself behind.
Sullivan denies that he is part of an isolationist turn on the right, but his aversion to robust military responses to threats to the post-war world order is marked. He rejoiced in Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan because he believes that real conservatives “don’t believe in transforming the world into a better place through force of arms.” And as Russia pushed Europe to the brink of war, Sullivan was vocal in his support for humoring Putin, tweeting that his requests were “not unreasonable” and that the best way to solve the crisis was to guarantee the limits on NATO demanded by Russia.
And yet, never dogmatic, he has proved more flexible and perceptive than many on the anti-war right, such as Sohrab Ahmari. He wrote a thoughtful piece on his Substack in mid-March that recognized the magnitude of Putin’s wrongdoing and elucidated the idea that as a poster boy for a bombastic, Trump-inflected right, the Russian president has turned out to be a lame and disappointing figure.
Overall, however, Sullivan’s conservatism says that it is wrong for the West to think “you have to prevent a rising power… it does not work, you have to accommodate it.” He applies this to China: “If a power is that great, and a population that large and a civilization that profound, the notion that it cannot have a sphere of influence, that it must be checked at its very sea line when it’s on the other side of the world, is not a sustainable policy.”
Discordant as some of these positions sound to me, Sullivan is first and foremost a political thinker and his views are all underpinned by a serious consideration of ethics and Christian spirit. He remains conservative and Catholic, a politics devoted to the “protection of what is, a love of what is,” a way of thinking that led him to support Republican Ronald Reagan and later Democrat Barack Obama, to loathe Trump, and to be pro-Iraq war and then violently against it. And he has always had a unique knack for weaving together high politics with ideas of sexuality and self. As early as 1989, he made the conservative case for gay marriage, and in 2005, spurred on by America’s misbehavior at Abu Ghraib, he made the case against the use of torture, arguing that using “what is animal in us and deploy[ing] it against what makes us human” was a “totalitarian impulse.”
As the Anglosphere self-immolates on the pyre of identity politics, Sullivan, the iconoclast, the loyalist to the truth, has gone from being a media establishment insider to an outsider, ousted from New York magazine during “the great culling” of 2020 (he’d been a columnist there since 2016). He and the magazine parted ways after his refusal to apologize for a book excerpt of The Bell Curve that he ran in 1994 while editor of the New Republic. The book, by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, argued that there are IQ differences between racial groups. Sullivan stands by his decision to publish. In the febrile climate that followed the murder of George Floyd, he was accused of being an accessory to rank racism, but that only deepened his interest in the “psychometric field” of IQ science.
Distilling the balance between cultural and genetic factors will always be hard, Sullivan allows, but “at some point [the idea that not everything is cultural] is not going to be a matter of debate” — even if for now the left “don’t want to accept that this could be true.” But isn’t the fear that research into racial IQ differences could lean towards making scientific Nazism legitimate? “Of course it isn’t… necessarily” going to go there, he says, arguing that there is huge value to knowing what social problems are caused by racism or sexism­ and which aren’t. Labeling all such inquiries racism is, for the left, simply another “means to excuse not doing things to make things better.”
Whether or not you agree, and I have my doubts, Sullivan is thoughtful, articulate and sticks to his guns. This polite form of iconoclastic free thinking has ensured such an enormous fan base over the years that within four days of his being bumped from New York — the amount of time he was given to pack his proverbial bags — he’d set up a hugely successful Substack, raking in subscriptions to a tune far greater than his New York salary.
Sullivan, who sometimes forgets “how English I am I so many ways,” thinks that Brexit was the perfect conservative response to a populace that felt left behind. Even “leveling up,” he says, is rooted in the “classic Disraeli two-nation idea” of Britain as perilously divided between southern elites and others. Immigration has hit those at the top and bottom of the strata differently.
“There is an anti-immigration argument that’s really built on racism, there’s one that’s laced with xenophobia,” he says, “but there’s also one that’s just wanting to retain something that actually matters, and that gave meanings to people’s lives, and making London cool is not a good social reason to destabilize a whole political culture.”
But Sullivan’s energies lie, at the moment, not in political philosophy but in the epistemological battle to the death between the sane and the ultra-woke, a battle focused, in his view, on the trans debates. Giving in to those who insist that sex is whatever you say it is “makes liberal society much harder to defend. A society that requires you to tell lies is not a liberal society. [We must] stop abusing the English language to avoid reality. That’s what ‘birthing persons’ [instead of ‘mother’] is about.”
A collection of Sullivan’s essays published between 1981 and 2021, called Out On a Limb, came out in August. You wonder, scanning the contents of this book, about the toll taken by a life of such relentless political engagement. Sullivan himself found out in 2015 when he had a breakdown. Forced to step back from the Dish, which he’d kept at continuously for fifteen years, he realized “what the internet had done to me… it was simply the mental exhaustion of absorbing all that information plus formulating it and trying to get it right and doing all that under the glare of constant public scrutiny.” In fact, he describes himself as quiet, with need for solitude. “I have a lot of time by myself,” and instead of the Georgetown dinner parties everyone imagines him to preside over, he prefers to “watch South Park and smoke weed,” and to keep people from normal walks of life around him.
Spirituality looms large for Sullivan, not so much in attendance at mass, which he goes to “sometimes,” but in the sense that “God is everywhere — even on the beach.” Religion has always been there for him personally and politically, but as the world churns with globalization, disenfranchisement and instability, he is increasingly convinced that what it needs more of is Christianity. “I’m increasingly worried that liberal society is actually unsustainable without Christianity and that we may be in serious trouble,” he says. His next book seeks to “reintroduce” Christianity, to “reimagine how we could translate what Jesus was saying to a modern person. I can tell the story of my own faith and in the process wrestle with some of these core challenges of being Christian in the twenty-first century.”
Sullivan assures me that “the book is not just for Christians” and that in casting Christianity aside “we’re [all] missing an astonishing inheritance.” He’s not saying it should be “kept as it always has been,” but rescuing and repurposing Christianity, he says, is a means of finding a “common morality” we have come to sorely lack. Seeing the “individual soul as inviolate is a huge obstacle to totalitarianism, to any form of group identity. It’s the only way that we can live in a very multi-racial, multicultural system and not fall into tribal warfare.”

As a Jew with an angry Old Testament god as my master (well, if I believed), I am not convinced that Christianity will end up being the salve for such a wide range of social and political problems. But I can see that Sullivan is right about a missing dimension in modernity, an emptiness that breeds the urge to escalate and fight in the absence of any other grounding, perhaps even to wage aggressive, amoral and unprovoked wars for nothing more than nihilistic fun.
As my Uber arrives to take me to the tiny Cessna plane to Boston, Sullivan waves me off quietly. His questing spiritualism is a striking counterpoint to much else I encounter, and though it leads him to conclusions many on the right should deplore, particularly the seeming reluctance to take on those who attack the Western order, there is — to mangle Shakespeare — more of heaven and earth in Sullivan’s philosophy than is usually dreamt of, certainly by me.
The post Andrew Sullivan searches for spirituality appeared first on The Spectator World.

When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks. Something similar applies today. Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.So why can’t Western analysts admit as much? Most professional scholars of the Russian military first predicted a quick and decisive Russian victory; then argued that the Russians would pause, learn from their mistakes, and regroup; then concluded that the Russians would actually have performed much better if they had followed their doctrine; and now tend to mutter that everything can change, that the war is not over, and that the weight of numbers still favors Russia. Their analytic failure will be only one of the elements of this war worth studying in the future.[Veronika Melkozerova: The Western world is in denial]At the same time, there are few analysts of the Ukrainian military—a rather more esoteric specialty—and thus the West has tended to ignore the progress Ukraine has made since 2014, thanks to hard-won experience and extensive training by the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. The Ukrainian military has proved not only motivated and well led but also tactically skilled, integrating light infantry with anti-tank weapons, drones, and artillery fire to repeatedly defeat much larger Russian military formations. The Ukrainians are not merely defending their strong points in urban areas but maneuvering from and between them, following the Clausewitzian dictum that the best defense is a shield of well-directed blows.The reluctance to admit what is happening on the ground in Ukraine stems perhaps in part from the protectiveness scholars feel for their subject (even if they loathe it on moral grounds), but more from a tendency to emphasize technology (the Russians have some good bits), numbers (which they dominate, though only up to a point), and doctrine. The Russian army remains in some ways very cerebral, and intellectuals can too easily admire elegant tactical and operational thinking without pressing very hard on practice. But the war has forcibly drawn attention to the human dimension. For example, most modern militaries rely on a strong cadre of noncommissioned officers. Sergeants make sure that vehicles are maintained and exercise leadership in squad tactics. The Russian NCO corps is today, as it has always been, both weak and corrupt. And without capable NCOs, even large numbers of technologically sophisticated vehicles deployed according to a compelling doctrine will end up broken or abandoned, and troops will succumb to ambushes or break under fire.The West’s biggest obstacle to accepting success, though, is that we have become accustomed over the past 20 years to think of our side as being stymied, ineffective, or incompetent. It is time to get beyond that, and consider the facts that we can see.The evidence that Ukraine is winning this war is abundant, if one only looks closely at the available data. The absence of Russian progress on the front lines is just half the picture, obscured though it is by maps showing big red blobs, which reflect not what the Russians control but the areas through which they have driven. The failure of almost all of Russia’s airborne assaults, its inability to destroy the Ukrainian air force and air-defense system, and the weeks-long paralysis of the 40-mile supply column north of Kyiv are suggestive. Russian losses are staggering—between 7,000 and 14,000 soldiers dead, depending on your source, which implies (using a low-end rule of thumb about the ratios of such things) a minimum of nearly 30,000 taken off the battlefield by wounds, capture, or disappearance. Such a total would represent at least 15 percent of the entire invading force, enough to render most units combat ineffective. And there is no reason to think that the rate of loss is abating—in fact, Western intelligence agencies are briefing unsustainable Russian casualty rates of a thousand a day.Add to this the repeated tactical blundering visible on videos even to amateurs: vehicles bunched up on roads, no infantry covering the flanks, no closely coordinated artillery fire, no overhead support from helicopters, and panicky reactions to ambushes. The 1-to-1 ratio of vehicles destroyed to those captured or abandoned bespeaks an army that is unwilling to fight. Russia’s inability to concentrate its forces on one or two axes of attack, or to take a major city, is striking. So, too, are its massive problems in logistics and maintenance, carefully analyzed by technically qualified observers.[David French: This is a uniquely perilous moment]The Russian army has committed well more than half its combat forces to the fight. Behind those forces stands very little. Russian reserves have no training to speak of (unlike the U.S. National Guard or Israeli or Finnish reservists), and Putin has vowed that the next wave of conscripts will not be sent over, although he is unlikely to abide by that promise. The swaggering Chechen auxiliaries have been hit badly, and in any case are not used to, or available for, combined-arms operations. Domestic discontent has been suppressed, but bubbles up as brave individuals protest and hundreds of thousands of tech-savvy young people flee.If Russia is engaging in cyberwar, that is not particularly evident. Russia’s electronic-warfare units have not shut down Ukrainian communications. Half a dozen generals have gotten themselves killed either by poor signal security or trying desperately to unstick things on the front lines. And then there are the negative indicators on the other side—no Ukrainian capitulations, no notable panics or unit collapses, and precious few local quislings, while the bigger Russophilic fish, such as the politician Viktor Medvedchuk, are wisely staying quiet or out of the country. And reports have emerged of local Ukrainian counterattacks and Russian withdrawals.The coverage has not always emphasized these trends. As the University of St. Andrews’s Phillips P. O’Brien has argued, pictures of shattered hospitals, dead children, and blasted apartment blocks accurately convey the terror and brutality of this war, but they do not convey its military realities. To put it most starkly: If the Russians level a town and slaughter its civilians, they are unlikely to have killed off its defenders, who will do extraordinary and effective things from the rubble to avenge themselves on the invaders. That is, after all, what the Russians did in their cities to the Germans 80 years ago. More sober journalism—The Wall Street Journal has been a standout in this respect—has been analytic, offering detailed reporting on revealing battles, like the annihilation of a Russian battalion tactical group in Voznesensk.Most commentators have taken too narrow a view of this conflict, presenting it as solely between Russia and Ukraine. Like most wars, though, it is being waged by two coalitions, fought primarily though not exclusively by Russian and Ukrainian nationals. The Russians have some Chechen auxiliaries who have yet to demonstrate much effectiveness (and who lost their commander early on), may get some Syrians (who will be even less able to integrate with Russian units), and find a half-hearted ally in Belarus, whose citizens have begun sabotaging its rail lines and whose army may well mutiny if asked to invade Ukraine.The Ukrainians have their auxiliaries, too, some 15,000 or so foreign volunteers, some probably worthless or dangerous to their allies, but others valuable—snipers, combat medics, and other specialists who have fought in Western armies. More important, they have behind them the military industries of countries including the United States, Sweden, Turkey, and the Czech Republic. Flowing into Ukraine every day are thousands of advanced weapons: the best anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in the world, plus drones, sniper rifles, and all the kit of war. Moreover, it should be noted that the United States has had exquisite intelligence not only about Russia’s dispositions but about its intentions and actual operations. The members of the U.S. intelligence community would be fools not to share this information, including real-time intelligence, with the Ukrainians. Judging by the adroitness of Ukrainian air defenses and deployments, one may suppose that they are not, in fact, fools.Talk of stalemate obscures the dynamic quality of war. The more you succeed, the more likely you are to succeed; the more you fail, the more likely you are to continue to fail. There is no publicly available evidence of the Russians being able to regroup and resupply on a large scale; there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. If the Ukrainians continue to win, we might see more visible collapses of Russian units and perhaps mass surrenders and desertions. Unfortunately, the Russian military will also frantically double down on the one thing it does well—bombarding towns and killing civilians.[Eliot A. Cohen: America’s hesitation is heartbreaking]The Ukrainians are doing their part. Now is the time to arm them on the scale and with the urgency needed, as in some cases we are already doing. We must throttle the Russian economy, increasing pressure on a Russian elite that does not, by and large, buy into Vladimir Putin’s bizarre ideology of “passionarity” and paranoid Great Russian nationalism. We must mobilize official and unofficial agencies to penetrate the information cocoon in which Putin’s government is attempting to insulate the Russian people from the news that thousands of their young men will come home maimed, or in coffins, or not at all from a stupid and badly fought war of aggression against a nation that will now hate them forever. We should begin making arrangements for war-crimes trials, and begin naming defendants, as we should have done during World War II. Above all, we must announce that there will be a Marshall Plan to rebuild the Ukrainian economy, for nothing will boost their confidence like the knowledge that we believe in their victory and intend to help create a future worth having for a people willing to fight so resolutely for its freedom.As for the endgame, it should be driven by an understanding that Putin is a very bad man indeed, but not a shy one. When he wants an off-ramp, he will let us know. Until then, the way to end the war with the minimum of human suffering is to pile on.

The social cost of America’s economic royalty

So, in this land of plenty, what could possibly be bad about someone chasing the dream and accumulating a larger than normal portion of the pie? Isn’t this what capitalism is supposed to be all about? “Land of the free, home of the brave” and all that…aren’t we all supposed to revel in our freedom to accumulate, particularly if it results from uncommon bravery in risk-taking? Isn’t this just what Bill Gates, George Soros, and Jeff Bezos (not to mention Elon Musk) are so admired for doing?

The problem is that free and unfettered capitalism of the ilk promoted by the GOP and corporate lobbyists in DC is terribly hindered by “government regulation,” too much taxation, and purported “liberal bias for socialism” or, as Tucker might be wont to say, nattering nabobs of negativism.* Actually, that of course is a quote from Spiro T. Agnew, the only (at least I think the only) corrupt Vice President proved to have actually received piles of cash while in the White House. (Rachel Maddow’s superb Bag Man lays out this fascinating story for those who don’t recall the Nixon Years or thankfully are too young to have lived through them.)

Socialism has returned to our political conversation as a kind of epithet thrown at anyone who believes in a social safety net, progressive taxation where higher earners pay more, or constraints on corporate over-reach, like ever-larger quasi-monopolies or price gouging opportunists. In its purest form, “socialism” was used by Marx to describe a transition state between capitalism and communism in the 1800s. But in practice over the nearly 2 centuries since his Manifesto, the concept has evolved into the European notion of “social democracy” which Merriam-Webster defines as “a democratic welfare state that incorporates both capitalist and socialist practices” that describes most European systems that attempt to balance out public and private goods.

But here in the good ol’ US of A, the idea that anyone seriously espouses European social democratic ideas is a joke. The closest we got was FDR in the depression with Social Security and LBJ in the ‘60s with Medicare. Obamacare, in contrast, was a weak echo of those high-minded times, acquiescing as it did to Big Pharma in a sort of Hobson’s Choice (no real option) if a dark-money contaminated DC was even to consider it. And now, of course, the heroic Obamacare vote of John McCain has been replaced by “centrist” Sinema who has taken in Pharma dollars by the boatload. Wonder how she would have voted then, don’t you?

Our political system has become so bloated and corrupt with untraceable money, it barely rates a headline when a billionaire like Peter Theil – an out gay man – announces his departure from the Meta (Facebook) Board so he can work full time on electing Trumpists to Congress so they can join the gay-bashing, Fox-touted, anti-tax, anti-vax, and pro “freedom” crowd. I think it fair to say that Thiel has ignored GOP/Trumpian social policy just so long as another humongous tax cut for the super-wealthy might be engineered. Good ROI for his estimated “$20 million, so far” committed to this good cause. Not that intellectual consistency has ever been the strong suit of the billionaire class.

So let’s for a moment consider just how much $1 Billion really is. Just a one with a lot of zeros you say? In January 2019, historian Rutger Bregman tried to explain to a bunch of billionaires at the World Economic Forum (held in Davos) why philanthropy is not the way to address inequality. Rather, it’s taxes. On his own website, he helps us understand just how much a billion dollars is in 2019 numbers:

If you made $50k a year, and you didn’t ever spend one penny of it — you just put that money into safekeeping and saved it up — do you know how long you would have to work to save up a BILLION dollars? TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS. That’s right… Roughly 4X the length of recorded human history.

In his recent book, Davos Man , Peter S. Goodman has chosen a great subtitle: “How the Billionaires Devoured the World.” Perfect description for all of them from Thiel to Putin. (And, yes, he’s one of them, this vaunted war-monger of a Communist leader who is in the midst of invading Ukraine). By the time this is published, he may well have come to terms with what is now widely perceived as over-reaching actions that could reshape the world order, and not for the better. Whether he will be able to enjoy his super-yacht that barely reached Russian waters just days before his war was launched is anybody’s guess. It doesn’t look, though, that it will be welcomed in foreign ports anytime soon. And, for a billionaire, hanging out on a superyacht is part of what makes life worth living (ask Bezos, owner of the longest superyacht yet built at 400 plus feet). In the current era, the B-people have clear sailing to keep adding to their piles.

So, back to taxes. For the moment, let’s just consider income taxes for the highest tax brackets. Again from Bregman’s website come these compelling numbers:

Here are the marginal tax rates by president (since WWII) for the top income brackets:

FDR — 81% – 94%

Truman — 82% – 94%

Eisenhower — 91% – 92%

Kennedy — 91%

Johnson — 70% – 91%

Nixon — 70% – 77%

Ford — 70%

Carter — 69.13% – 70%

Reagan — 28% – 69.13%

Bush (H.W.) — 28% – 39.6%

Clinton — 39.1% – 39.6%

Bush (W.) — 35% – 39.1%

Obama — 35% – 39.6%

Trump — 37% – 39.6

And we can see that as the top marginal tax rate decreases, so does the strength of the middle class… The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. And they give any attempt to correct this trend the evil & scary-sounding moniker of “Socialism.”

As is clearly demonstrable in the chart, the middle class was in most ways built DURING the period of highest marginal taxation – the 50s and 60s – completely belying the standard GOP “trickle-down” argument that lowering rates creates jobs. But when you overlay this irrefutable data with the Clintonian era’s overt embrace of “Davos Man” calls for globalization abetted by the World Economic Forum (which attracts a fleet of some 1600 private jets every year) you can begin to gather just why working-class wages have been in a tailspin since Reagan’s famous line, “government is the problem, not the solution.” That the right has been so successful in turning the resulting alienation into political rage against immigrants and intellectuals is beyond telling. It is no surprise that Thiel and others continue to invest heavily in anti-government politics and the accompanying phenomenal ROI they achieve by drowning the beast in the bathtub.

Just where this dismal state of affairs ends and the pendulum swings back toward some semblance of balance is not clear. But one thing for sure is true. Dems have to decide if they want to keep dark money flowing and their diminishing number of increasingly safe seats, or if instead they want to step up to embrace powerful economic policies that really would change peoples’ lives. Like a wealth tax. Or the kind of Estate tax in the Eisenhower years (70%). Or serious penalties for hiding wealth off-shore. Or putting the light of day on “shell companies” used primarily to hide assets from tax authorities. Any of those things might begin to erode the emerging economic royalty that is able to permanently endow nearly endless generations of heirs that, thanks to the Supreme Court, will be able to spend untraceable and countless dollars defending their privilege.

First published in the Spring, 2022 Issue of Social Policy Magazine

In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.

In the nineteen-twenties, legislatures in twenty states, most of them in the South, considered thirty-seven anti-evolution measures. Kentucky’s bill, proposed in 1922, had been the first. It banned teaching, or countenancing the teaching of, “Darwinism, atheism, agnosticism, or the theory of evolution in so far as it pertains to the origin of man.” The bill failed to pass the House by a single vote. Tennessee’s law, passed in 1925, made it a crime for teachers in publicly funded schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes challenged the law deliberately, as part of an effort by the A.C.L.U. to bring a test case to court. His trial, billed as the trial of the century, was the first to be broadcast live on the radio. It went out across the country, to a nation, rapt.

A century later, the battle over public education that afflicted the nineteen-twenties has started up again, this time over the teaching of American history. Since 2020, with the murder of George Floyd and the advance of the Black Lives Matter movement, seventeen states have made efforts to expand the teaching of one sort of history, sometimes called anti-racist history, while thirty-six states have made efforts to restrict that very same kind of instruction. In 2020, Connecticut became the first state to require African American and Latino American history. Last year, Maine passed “An Act to Integrate African American Studies into American History Education,” and Illinois added a requirement mandating a unit on Asian American history.

On the blackboard on the other side of the classroom are scrawled what might be called anti-anti-racism measures. Some ban the Times’ 1619 Project, or ethnic studies, or training in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, or the bugbear known as critical race theory. Most, like a bill recently introduced in West Virginia, prohibit “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” and the teaching of “divisive concepts”—for instance, the idea that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist,” or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

While all this has been happening, I’ve been working on a U.S.-history textbook, so it’s been weird to watch lawmakers try their hands at writing American history, and horrible to see what the ferment is doing to public-school teachers. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin set up an e-mail tip line “for parents to send us any instances where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated . . . or where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools.” There and elsewhere, parents are harassing school boards and reporting on teachers, at a time when teachers, who earn too little and are asked to do too much, are already exhausted by battles over remote instruction and mask and vaccine mandates and, not least, by witnessing, without being able to repair, the damage the pandemic has inflicted on their students. Kids carry the burdens of loss, uncertainty, and shaken faith on their narrow shoulders, tucked inside their backpacks. Now, with schools open and masks coming off, teachers are left trying to figure out not only how to care for them but also what to teach, and how to teach it, without losing their jobs owing to complaints filed by parents.

There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s a classroom. Consider the dilemma of teachers in New Mexico. In January, the month before the state’s Public Education Department finalized a new social-studies curriculum that includes a unit on inequality and justice in which students are asked to “explore inequity throughout the history of the United States and its connection to conflict that arises today,” Republican lawmakers proposed a ban on teaching “the idea that social problems are created by racist or patriarchal societal structures and systems.” The law, if passed, would make the state’s own curriculum a crime.

Evolution is a theory of change. But in February—a hundred years, nearly to the day, after the Kentucky legislature debated the nation’s first anti-evolution bill—Republicans in Kentucky introduced a bill that mandates the teaching of twenty-four historical documents, beginning with the 1620 Mayflower Compact and ending with Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.” My own account of American history ends with the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, and “The Hill We Climb,” the poem that Amanda Gorman recited at Joe Biden’s Inauguration. “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: / That even as we grieved, we grew.”

Did we, though? In the nineteen-twenties, the curriculum in question was biology; in the twenty-twenties, it’s history. Both conflicts followed a global pandemic and fights over public education that pitted the rights of parents against the power of the state. It’s not clear who’ll win this time. It’s not even clear who won last time. But the distinction between these two moments is less than it seems: what was once contested as a matter of biology—can people change?—has come to be contested as a matter of history. Still, this fight isn’t really about history. It’s about political power. Conservatives believe they can win midterm elections, and maybe even the Presidency, by whipping up a frenzy about “parents’ rights,” and many are also in it for another long game, a hundred years’ war: the campaign against public education.

Before states began deciding what schools would require—from textbooks to vaccines—they had to require children to attend school. That happened in the Progressive era, early in the past century, when a Progressive strain ran through not only the Progressive Party but also the Republican, Democratic, Socialist, and Populist Parties. Lela and John Scopes grew up in Paducah, but they spent part of their childhood in Illinois, which, in 1883, became one of the first states in the Union to make school attendance compulsory. By 1916, nearly every state had mandated school attendance, usually between the ages of six and sixteen. Between 1890 and 1920, a new high school opened every day.

Some families objected, citing “parental rights,” a legal novelty, but courts broadly upheld compulsory-education laws, deeming free public schooling to be essential to democratic citizenship. “The natural rights of a parent to the custody and control of his infant child are subordinate to the power of the state, and may be restricted and regulated by municipal laws,” the Indiana Supreme Court ruled in 1901, characterizing a parent’s duty to educate his children as a “duty he owes not to the child only, but to the commonwealth.” As Tracy Steffes argues in “School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940” (2012), “Public schooling was not just one more progressive reform among many but a major—perhaps the major—public response to tensions between democracy and capitalism.” Capitalism divided the rich and the poor; democracy required them to live together as equals. Public education was meant to bridge the gap, as wide as the Cumberland.

Beginning in the eighteen-nineties, states also introduced textbook laws, in an attempt to wrest control of textbook publishing from what Progressives called “the book trust”—a conglomerate of publishers known as the American Book Company. Tennessee passed one of these laws in 1899: it established a textbook commission that selected books for adoption. The biology book Scopes used to teach his students was a textbook that Tennessee had adopted, statewide, at a time when it made high school compulsory.

“Each year the child is coming to belong more and more to the state, and less and less to the parent,” the Stanford professor of education Ellwood Cubberley wrote approvingly in 1909. Progressives fought for children’s welfare and children’s health, establishing children’s hospitals and, in 1912, the U.S. Children’s Bureau. Mandatory school attendance was closely tied to two other Progressive reforms that extended the state’s reach into the lives of parents and children: compulsory vaccination and the abolition of child labor.

The New York Times has an article attempting to explain to readers why the Russian military is committing indiscriminate atrocities in Ukraine. The Times tells us that Russia’s “experience in a string of wars led to the conclusion that attacking civilian populations was not only acceptable but militarily sound,” and even calls this a “Russian Way of War.” The article cites Russia’s experience in three previous wars (Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Syria) and claims that these experiences inform a kind of “playbook” in which Russian attacks on civilians have become  “increasingly standard practice.” The message of the piece is unmistakably that while we in the West may care about human rights and civilian lives, Russia has become a brutal country that is willing to commit war crimes in order to achieve its military objectives. The article even provides chilling quotes from a Russian politician and military analyst who appears to argue in the most cold-blooded way that the ends justify the means: 

They also reflect the circumstances of an authoritarian state with few allies, enabling the Kremlin to ignore and even embrace revulsion at its military conduct — or so Russian leaders seem to believe. “​​Massive devastation and collateral fatalities among the civilian population are acceptable in order to limit one’s own casualties,” Alexei Arbatov, a prominent Russian military strategist and at the time a federal legislator, wrote in 2000, during Russia’s second war in Chechnya. “The use of force is the most efficient problem solver, if applied decisively and massively,” Mr. Arbatov wrote, adding that international horror at Russian actions should be “discounted.”

Arbatov’s words are disturbing. When I read them, I wondered how anyone could possibly say something so psychopathic, and I was curious about what the context for them might be. The link goes to a paper published by the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies on the subject of “how the Yugoslav war destroyed remaining hopes for genuine security partnership and military cooperation between Russia and NATO.” The quotes cited by the New York Times appear in the executive summary. Below is the full passage they are taken from, with the quotes the Times used in bold: 

The use of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) aircraft and missiles against Serbia on March 24, 1999 ended the post–Cold War phase of international affairs. The Serbs conducted ethnic cleansing against the Albanians on an unprecedented scale, but these attacks escalated after the initiation of the NATO air campaign. The attack on Serbia suddenly removed a Russian taboo against the use of military force that followed the first war in Chechnya of 1994–1996. NATO’s military action was a final humiliation and a “spit in the face” for Russia, which more than ever before demonstrated the Western arrogance of power and its willingness to ignore Russian interests. Russia has learned many lessons from Kosovo. Above all, the end justifies the means. The use of force is the most efficient problem solver, if applied decisively and massively. Negotiations are of dubious value and should be used as a cover for military action. International law and human suffering are of secondary significance in achieving the goal. Massive devastation and collateral fatalities among the civilian population are acceptable in order to limit one’s own casualties. Foreign public opinion and the position of Western governments are to be discounted if Russian interests are at stake. 

Now, I have to say, I don’t think any honest person, reading Arbatov’s full monograph, can claim the New York Times represented him fairly. Arbatov’s paper is actually one all Americans should read, because he makes the case that NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 had a very substantial effect on Russian policy and thinking. While the quotes in the New York Times make it appear as if Arbatov might be endorsing massive devastation himself, what he is actually arguing is that NATO’s disregard of international law and human rights led Russia to conclude that “force is the most effective problem solver,” and that Western hypocrisy made Russian leaders think they had no reason to care about Western opinion.
The New York Times article on how Russia’s brutality developed does not mention Arbatov’s argument. In fact, even though it’s focused on history, it does not mention the Kosovo war at all, despite the fact that Arbatov argues this was decisive in causing Russian leaders to take a more aggressive posture out of a sense of humiliation. Arbatov writes:

The NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia has left the Russian people with a vivid image of a possible future scenario—with Russia on the receiving end of surgical strikes against industrial, infrastructure, and military targets… [T]he NATO alliance apparently changed its strategy to focus on the destruction of Yugoslav industrial assets, infrastructure, administrative, and communications facilities. In this pogrom against a defenseless country from an altitude of 10,000 meters, NATO air power was highly “successful” (although the famous precision–guided weapons sometimes hit the wrong targets: embassies, like that of China, and even the wrong countries—Macedonia and Albania). Seven weeks of bombarding Yugoslavia destroyed 100 per cent of the oil refineries, 70 per cent of the defense industry, 60 per cent of the fuel storage facilities, 100 per cent of the electrical line transformers, and 40 per cent of the TV and radio stations—including the Belgrade TV center, where 16 civilian employees were killed by missiles. In addition, 68 bridges were destroyed, and 70 per cent of the roads and 50 per cent of the railroads were put out of action. Altogether 1,500 people were killed—two–thirds of them civilians—2,500 lost their homes, and two million became jobless. Other collateral damage included 86 historic monuments, and more than 300 schools, hospitals, etc. … Because NATO proclaimed its right to attack a sovereign state to achieve NATO’s own aims, Russia was all the more entitled to use force on its own territory. Russia would make it clear that no one would be allowed to intervene in Russian domestic affairs. The West would be taught that Russia is not Yugoslavia. This is how Russia thinks today.

Now, if we are to probe the question posed by the New York Times—how did Russia become so uniquely brutal toward civilians—surely the theory that NATO behavior influenced Russia’s own is an explanation that needs to be considered, even if it is rejected. (And even if “NATO Made Us Do It” is not an acceptable justification for anything.) The explanation offered by Arbatov is: the West’s willingness to flout international law and recklessly attack civilians led Russia to conclude that there was no longer any reason not to fight dirty.
It is true that the NATO bombing of Kosovo was both illegal and reckless in endangering civilians, as explained in this Fordham International Law Journal article. As legal scholar David Wippman writes:

NATO’s decision to engage in large-scale military action without prior Security Council authorization raised significant doubts about the status of the law governing the use of force and the viability of United Nations primacy in matters of international peace and security. Second, NATO’s high-altitude bombing campaign, conducted without a single NATO combat casualty but with significant civilian casualties within the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] called into question the appropriate relationship between means and ends in an intervention designed to save lives. 

In other words, NATO flagrantly violated the UN charter and launched reckless attacks against civilian targets. A 75-page Amnesty International report on the bombings concluded that “NATO forces did commit serious violations of the laws of war leading in a number of cases to the unlawful killings of civilians.” Despite the fact that “NATO forces are also under a legal obligation to warn civilians of imminent attacks whenever possible… NATO officials told Amnesty International in Brussels that as a general policy they chose not to issue warnings, for fear that this might endanger the crew of attacking aircraft.” Human Rights Watch said that “of the 500 or so Yugoslav civilians killed in Serbia and Kosovo by NATO bombs, half died because of NATO violations of laws and practices on protecting civilians.” NATO was unapologetic; when it bombed the headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia, killing 16 people— “nearly all of them technicians, security workers and makeup artists”—NATO said that “strikes against TV transmitters and broadcast facilities are part of our campaign to dismantle the FRY propaganda machinery,” with Tony Blair commenting that “these television stations are part of the apparatus and power of Milosevic” and “we are entirely justified as Nato allies in damaging and taking on those targets.” This legitimizing of attacks on non-military targets is what Arbatov says led Russia to conclude that the ends justify the means. 
Aftermath of a U.S. drone strike on a house in eastern Yemen, 2013, in an attack that killed 13 civilians
But to read the New York Times, one would think that indiscriminate killing of civilians was, in their words, simply the Russian Way of War. The article suggests that the explanation for Russia’s revolting conduct in Ukraine is that Russia is an authoritarian state whose government has realized it can abandon all moral standards. In a remarkable passage, however, the Times acknowledges that the central message of the piece, namely that Russian warfare methods have been uniquely deadly for civilians, is actually completely false. The Times says:

The United States, of course, also frequently kills civilians in war, in drone and other airstrikes whose toll the U.S. treats as a regrettable but acceptable cost. Though the intention behind this strategy differs from Russia’s, the distinction may be of little significance for the dead… This does not mean that widely allied democracies like the United States necessarily kill fewer civilians in war. American air campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed large numbers of civilians. Under an Obama administration policy, the U.S. launched drone strikes on groups of people merely because they fit certain profiles, sometimes mistakenly striking weddings or funerals. The U.S. has sometimes used indiscriminate tools of war, for example dropping 1,200 cluster bombs, which much of the world has banned for their danger to civilians, in its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. U.S. strikes on the Syrian city of Raqqa, then held by the Islamic State, killed scores, with a single errant bomb claiming 70 civilians. American officials stress that they strain to avoid civilian casualties, which they know anger local populations they hope to win over. Still, the U.S. has long maintained a strategy, centering on air power and drone strikes, that it knows brings a significant likelihood of killing civilians, even covering up embarrassing incidents. Questions of how to parse the relative morality of these two approaches — deliberately killing civilians versus choosing a strategy that is known to bring it about — may ultimately matter more to the perpetrators of these strategies than to their victims. According to top-level estimates by Airwars, a nonprofit group, the Russian air campaign in Syria killed 6,398 civilians, whereas that by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq killed 13,244. [Note that “As of April 2021, more than 71,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians are estimated to have died as a direct result of the war” in Afghanistan, and total civilian deaths in Iraq are estimated to be well into the hundreds of thousands.]

In other words, both the U.S. and Russia have caused the violent deaths of civilians in huge numbers. The U.S. has accused Russia of war crimes for using cluster munitions1 in Ukraine even though we use them ourselves. The U.S. Ambassador to the UN even got on her high horse about how cluster munitions were “banned by the Geneva Convention.” Her remarks were later edited—not only are cluster munitions not banned by the Geneva Convention, but one reason they’re not universally prohibited is that the “United States fought against the creation of the Convention on Cluster Munitions and is not among the 110 nations that have ratified the treaty.” (Russia and Ukraine have not ratified it either.) 

The Russian bombing of Syrian hospitals was an outrageous war crime, but here’s another headline from Syria, brought to you by Amnesty International: “Unprecedented investigation reveals US-led coalition killed more than 1,600 civilians in Raqqa ‘death trap.’” If we want to talk about the bombing of medical facilities specifically, the United States bombed a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Afghanistan, a maternity hospital in Baghdad, and a medicine factory in Sudan. (The Intercept helpfully compiles some of the other horrors.) “Okay,” one might say, “but these are mere regrettable isolated incidents. The Russian targeting of hospitals was deliberate.” But the same is true of Saudi Arabia’s systematic bombing of healthcare facilities in Yemen, of which over 70 have been damaged or destroyed. Where is the outrage over the Saudi Way of War? Has there been a peep about the fact that the U.S. supplies the weapons that allow Saudi Arabia to starve and massacre Yemenis? As the Brookings Institute documents, the Biden administration has quietly backed off its earlier attempt to discontinue support for the Saudi war in Yemen, and “in practice the U.S. remains a staunch patron of Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman has not been treated as a pariah as Biden promised.” In fact, now we’re practically begging the Saudis for oil, which we need in order to help us hold Russia accountable for its crimes against humanity. 
Inside a Médecins Sans Frontières trauma hospital in Afghanistan after a U.S. airstrike that killed 42 people
The New York Times, realizing that any honest presentation of the evidence makes U.S. actions look exactly as deadly to civilians as those of Russia, draws a pretty feeble distinction: when we kill civilians, we don’t mean to, so while the effects might be the same (or we might even have killed many more innocent people), our intentions are more noble. As the Times notes, this distinction does not mean very much to people who watch their loved ones die gruesome and agonizing deaths in front of them. How meaningful are “good intentions” when the results are the same or even worse? If we assume that the U.S. rains death on Afghan farmers because it does not care enough about their lives to bother verifying whether they’re farmers or terrorists, is it really acting less homicidally than if it bombed the farmers on purpose to achieve some desired end? If I fire a gun wildly into a classroom full of children, how much of a defense is it to say that I was not deliberately aiming at any of them? When the United States dropped 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos, making it the most bombed country on Earth, is it a defense to say that it simply wasn’t thinking about the fact that the unexploded bombs would still be killing children in 2017? Noam Chomsky often says that the correct moral standard to use is: people are responsible for the predictable consequences of their actions. If you knew or should have known that an action would have some result, then you’re as responsible as if you intended it. 
Aftermath of the U.S. Christmas Day bombing of North Vietnam, 1972
Honest acknowledgement of U.S. history makes it almost laughable to read about the development of the Russian Way Of War.. For instance, here is the Times writing about the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the same article under discussion: 

In the valleys around Kabul, the Russians undertook a series of large operations engaging hundreds of tanks, mobilizing significant means, using bombs, rockets, napalm, and even, once gas, destroying all in their path,”a 1984 chronicle of the war recounted. … These costly defeats instilled a reluctance to expose ground troops to direct combat, whose numbers had also shrunk with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Moscow compensated by using its predominant tools of war — the tanks and artillery it had amassed to match NATO — against the civilian populations it now saw, in counterinsurgency campaigns, as the enemy. … In some cases, Russian officers declared certain villages to be “safe zones,” then blanketed them in so-called fuel-air bombs banned under the Geneva Conventions, killing scores at a time.

Replace the names and nearly everything described holds true about the United States in Vietnam, where we, too, adopted the philosophy that it was better to kill a large number of civilians than to risk the lives of soldiers. (“Expend shells, not men,” was the slogan, meaning in practice, Better To Blow The Shit Out of a Village Rather than Risk The Possibility of Being Shot at From It.) 
We can see here why, as Ben Burgis writes in this magazine, it is often important to engage in the practice derisively called “whataboutism.” One does not dwell on U.S. crimes in order to minimize or draw attention away from Russian ones, but because one has to evaluate U.S. conduct in order to evaluate any thesis claiming the existence of a distinctively Russian brutality or a Russian Way of War that is more horrifying than our own. If we ourselves are not conforming to the standard we demand of Russia, then this might explain why Russia feels entitled to completely ignore Western outrage about its behavior.
This is not the first time this magazine has tried to draw attention to U.S. conduct in other contexts while discussing the war in Ukraine, and I’d like to emphasize why it’s important to do so. It is not because I hate America or want to shift blame. It is, rather, because I am horrified by what is being done to Ukraine and I want to have standards of humane conduct by countries that are actually adhered to. Arbatov alleges that there was once a possibility for Russian amicable partnership with NATO countries, but that NATO’s lack of interest in obeying international law led Russian leaders to feel humiliated and abandon their commitment to obeying those laws themselves. I do not claim that what Arbatov argues about the sources of Russian decision-making is true, but I do think we have to discuss whether it could be true, because if he is right, then in conjunction with demanding better behavior by Russia, we should commit to better behavior by our own country. If we want accountability for war crimes, we have to accept that there should be accountability for our own as well, plus those of our allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yet when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court started looking into crimes committed by the U.S. in Afghanistan, the Trump administration revoked his visa and authorized sanctions against the ICC, with White House National Security Advisor John Bolton saying: 

“If the [International Criminal Court] comes after us, Israel or other US allies, we will not sit quietly. […] We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the US financial system, and we will prosecute them in the US criminal system.”

This might be a rather extreme formulation, and the Biden administration has since lifted the visa restriction on ICC personnel, but rejection of the ICC’s jurisdiction is still a bipartisan affair in this country. As Foreign Policy documents, the “for more than 20 years, Democratic and Republican administrations have agreed on one thing about the International Criminal Court: The Hague-based tribunal has no business investigating or prosecuting American forces for serious crimes, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any future conflict, because the United States never ratified the treaty establishing it.” Amusingly enough, Foreign Policy says that some American politicians might be warming up to the ICC now, out of a desire to see Russia prosecuted over Ukraine. In other words, if we’re the ones committing the crimes, we reject the rule of law, but if others are behaving badly, suddenly we’re all about it. This is the most unprincipled stance conceivable.
The United States has killed vast numbers of civilians both deliberately and through negligence. In World War II, we developed a comfort with indiscriminate bombing that was certain to lead to horrific losses of life, and we have kept it up, from the napalming of Vietnamese villages to drone strikes on wedding parties. The U.S. and the Soviet Union both spent the Cold War developing plans and weapons meant to completely eliminate each other’s entire civilian populations within minutes. One could write an article about the American Way of War, trying to explain our unique national brutality, that would be just as persuasive as the Times piece on Russians’ comfort with atrocities.
Here is the truth about war: there are no good, clean wars. That does not mean that all wrongdoing is equally bad, or that we should give up trying to draw moral distinctions between parties engaged in war, but we are brazen hypocrites if we are outraged by Russia’s crimes in Ukraine without being similarly moved by the horrific conduct of our own country and its allies.
What we have to understand is that over the course of the 20th century, every major power was dragged into depravity. We have not yet faced up to this. Powerful countries that waged war always sought excuses for their conduct—Vietnam was a righteous fight against communism, so it was necessary to destroy towns in order to save them. Putin thinks NATO’s bombing of Serbia somehow made war crimes okay. Everyone thinks the other side is comprised of depraved monsters, and wars happen in part because both parties refuse to look at themselves through the other’s eyes and engage in some critical self-reflection. If we are going to end war forever—and we must before it ends us—we are going to need to commit ourselves to the Golden Rule: do not commit crimes that you would object to others committing against you. 

PHOTOS (clockwise from top right): A Yugoslavian man next to the wreckage of his apartment building after NATO bombed it, 1999; a man next to the wreckage of his bookshop after Israel bombed it, 2021; a man next to the wreckage of his house after the U.S. bombed it, Fallujah, 2004; a Shinto gate left standing in Nagasaki in 1945 after the U.S. became the first country to use nuclear weapons on civilian populations.
big bombs that release lots of little bombs—adorably named “bomblets”—in order to kill lots and lots of people in the most horrible possible way ↩ 

The crisis over whether I am getting worse at things, and whether I’ll ever get better, began in the slushy demilitarized zone between the ski resort’s parking lot and the lines for the chairlift.As the ski blogs recommended, for my first day on the mountain this season, I had signed up for a group class. The slopes teemed with first-timers wrestling with their bindings, and it was hard to find my group.“Excuse me, I’m an intermediate?” I said haughtily to the woman who turned out to be my instructor. “I’ve skied many times before.”As a kid, I had cruised the bunny slopes of New Mexico in my Jordache jeans. As an adult, I’ve skied seven or eight times, both in the Rockies and on the East Coast, and even once in Europe. I rarely fall, I’ve never crashed into something, and I stick mostly to the “blue” trails—the ones for intermediate skiers.At first, I didn’t think much of it when, during the lesson, my instructor kept calling me aside and giving me little pointers. I was flattered by the extra attention, but surprised she wasn’t more impressed by the ski performance of me—an intermediate! Bored of the beginner, “green” slopes we had practiced on during the class, afterward I decided to tackle a blue run, one I had done many times before at that exact resort.When I reached the top of the blue-only chairlift, though, something in the atmosphere shifted. The sky clouded over, making it harder to see pockets of ice and powder. Why did the blues look so … vertical? Were they always this steep? Why was it so cold? The chung-chung of the chairlift started to sound less rhythmic and more ominous. I felt my heart start to race.I picked the most benignly named blue trail—Snow Dancer—and tipped my skis over the edge. That’s when the panic really gripped me. It released about 30 minutes later, when I was back at the base, having slowly inched myself down sideways by the edges of my skis. Along the way, a snowboarder stopped to ask if I was okay, and I wasn’t sure what to say. “I—I shouldn’t be on this trail,” I said, accurately.How did I get so much worse at skiing? I wondered this later, while looking up my ski gear online to see if it was somehow broken. Last winter, I had impulse-bought some cheap boots and skis online. Depending on which Luxembourgish boot-size chart you look at, the boots might have been slightly too big for me, but I would snap them onto their tightest setting. Any tighter and I’d struggle to move my toes. I had also purchased skis for tall women who like to go “all mountain,” but despite what the ski blogs said, I now thought they might be too long for me. Then I came across a TikTok of someone skiing on literal two-by-fours. A poor skier blames her tools.It turns out that simply having skied “many times before” didn’t mean I was getting better at it. Instead, like many athletes, musicians, or just humans, I may have been deteriorating over time. My age, my stress levels, and the poor ski techniques I had learned in my 20s might all have been sabotaging me slightly. “There’s a large body of literature showing that practice—or even just doing—doesn’t make us any better at the activity,” says Ulrich Boser, the author of Learn Better and the founder of the Learning Agency.Several studies have debunked the 10,000-hour rule—the idea that mastery simply requires grueling amounts of practice. In one study, students who solved 1,500 physics problems still didn’t understand the concepts behind math all that well. Elite violinists’ levels of performance couldn’t totally be explained by the amount of practice hours they logged. In sports, a meta-analysis showed that practice accounts for only 18 percent of the difference between two peoples’ performance. Some people are just better at certain things, and no amount of practice will change that.Throughout my meager practice hours on the ski slopes, age was working against me. Though I’m still a relatively fit 35-year-old, I’m probably not as strong or as fearless as I was in my 20s. Skiing involves cognitive skills too—a constant judging of how sharply to turn and how to dodge fallen snowboarders. Mental acuity, though, peaks in one’s early 20s, around the time I was best at skiing. “And then it’s kind of downhill after that,” says Zach Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University who studies performance. Pun intended, apparently.Hambrick has found that being conscientious, a personality trait linked with precision and regimentation, can actually work against you when a situation evolves or when something unexpected happens. I am extremely conscientious, and perhaps the changing weather was enough to throw me off mentally. Here I sympathized with Mikaela Shiffrin, an Olympic skier so consistent, she’s referred to as a “metronome.” Instead of skiing to gold in Beijing recently, she balked. Other reliable stars, such as the figure skater Kamila Valieva and the snowboarder Shaun White, similarly floundered when the circumstances weren’t right.A little bit of stress can help performance, but a lot of stress—the amount you might feel during an important competition or, if you’re me, just on a slightly difficult trail—hijacks the brain’s frontal lobe, which is where planning takes place. “Once your frontal lobe is taken over by stress, you have no more capacity for anything else,” says Lisa Son, a psychologist at Barnard College. “You’re probably less likely to focus on how you’re going to move your skis and how you’re going to move your body and your poles.” Or, as in my case, you might not be able to move at all.The weekend after my recent ski disaster, I drove to some farther-away mountains that get natural snow. I clicked on my giantess skis and breathed in the 13-degree air. Mostly, I had the same problem: As 7-year-olds swished past me at 60 miles an hour, I kept flinching on anything steeper than an anthill, twisting my hips and ankles to keep from going too fast.Getting better, or learning, requires switching between different types of related tasks, rather than rehearsing the same thing repeatedly, Boser told me. Someone studying for a test might run through flash cards with a friend, then study alone, then recite the material out loud to someone else. With skiing, “rather than just doing that same blue over and over again, you’d be better off going to the bunny hill, then going to another hill that was icy,” he said. The joy of getting better sometimes necessitates the pain of getting worse.Hambrick recommended that I get help from another ski instructor—the best I could afford. Though I won’t ski-school my way into the Olympics, practicing skiing might make me marginally better. Even if I never become an expert, trained teachers can point out failures in technique that I might be missing.I soon got my chance. One afternoon, I took a chairlift with a retired ski instructor named Bob, who spent the ride talking about the “camber” and “rocker” of skis from the ’70s. When I told him I was struggling, he offered to watch me take an easy slope and diagnose what I was doing wrong. He told me to do a J turn—where you ski in a J shape—and then slide a little down the mountain, like a falling leaf.I had practiced this drill before, but for some reason I now couldn’t do it. Rather than staying parallel, my uphill leg kept locking into an embarrassing wedge shape, the one they teach complete newbies. The wedge brought me to an awkward stop instead of a smooth, professional-looking glide. “Why is your leg doing that?” Bob asked. I had no idea.Son, the Barnard psychologist, reminded me that the learning process is rarely one of constant improvement. Often, it looks a lot like backsliding. When toddlers first learn to talk, they do it by copying adults. They’ll sometimes say correct-sounding things like, “We went to the library today.” Then, as they learn that most past-tense verbs are created by adding an -ed to the end of a word, they might say something like, “We goed to the library today.” Because that’s grammatically incorrect, it may seem like regression. But it’s not: The toddler progressed from mere mimicry to deploying one of the rules of grammar, a more advanced technique. Adults, too, sometimes seem like we’re losing ground, but we’re actually unlocking a new skill.This means that when you’re trying to develop a new hobby, or a new role at your job or in life, there are going to be moments that look like failure. But an awkward stumble or a botched attempt is often a sign that, under the surface, you’re learning.Bob skied with me a bit more, until I had completed enough turns to make him feel like his volunteer-instructor time hadn’t been wasted.“You’re skiing better already!” he hollered at me.“Thank you!” I yelled back.Then I skied a few more feet and fell.

(Photo by SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images)Dear Reader (including those free-speech-defending thought criminals at the New York Times),Years ago, the Goldberg family went through a brief Cincinnati-style chili phase. We don’t talk about it much, and we’ve gotten over it, but I feel like this is a safe space where I can share painful truths with you, my dearest readers. Anyway, in case you didn’t know, among the things that distinguish Cincinnati-style chili—other than disappointed local sports fans using it to soak up large amounts of beer—is that it is often served over spaghetti.Anyway, when my daughter was 4 or 5 years old, she was walking in the winter air with the Fair Jessica, who said something like, “Brrr. It’s chilly outside.”Lucy paused for a moment, and then kid-splained a key insight: “Mommy. You can say it’s ‘chilly outside,’ but you can’t say it’s ‘spaghetti outside.’”It’s funny because it’s true. Although since then, on very cold mornings, I have in fact said, “Man, it’s spaghetti outside.”As should be obvious to even the least-attentive reader, this anecdote leads seamlessly to Confucian philosophy. In The Analects, Confucius argues that society can get into trouble when words don’t line up with reality. His disciple Zi Lu (a terrific dancer by the way) asked Confucius what he would do first if put in charge. Confucius responded, “First it is necessary to rectify the names.” His most famous explication of this idea is as follows:A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.It’s worth noting that many scholars believe Confucius’ main point was political. It gets complicated, so I’ll summarize with indefensible glibness. Duke Chu of Wei, the ruler of Jin, refused to recognize his dad as his father, preferring to call his grandfather his father. This had all sorts of relevance for politics I’m not equipped to explain. But it did prompt Confucius to say, “A monarch must be a monarch, a minister must be a minister, a father must be a father, and a son must be a son.”And that’s a good enough place to move on from. Just as it would cause all sorts of confusion if TV weathermen said, “Bundle up, it’s spaghetti outside,” using the wrong words for things creates problems. If a surgeon asks for a scalpel and the nurse hands him a hamster, no one benefits—the hamster included.The great disconnect.On a more subtle and complicated level, I think a lot of our problems today stem from a mismatch between words and things.George Orwell’s brilliant and indispensable essay “Politics and the English Language” is a fantastic primer on some aspects of the resulting dysfunction when the manipulation of words takes precedence over the description of reality.Orwell writes:Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.Language is incredibly powerful. Think of it like the ocean. You may know exactly where you want to swim to or row to. But if you’re not cognizant of the currents, undertow, waves, etc., it’s easy to get pulled in a direction not of your choosing. Language does this to us all the time, under the best of circumstances.But this analogy fails to capture the challenge we face today, because unless you’re Aquaman, it’s hard to weaponize the ocean or its currents. But we live in an age where the manipulation of words and images (another form of language) is intertwined with politics, culture, class, and economics in ways we’ve never seen before.Beyond the usual partisan and ideological explanations—which have a lot of merit—for why there’s so much resentment of “the media,” there’s a deeper phenomenon at work: a profound sense that the class of people in charge of describing reality want you to believe in their preferred version of “reality.” Right-wingers see this not just in journalism, but pretty much everywhere. But many on the right are blind to it when it comes from the right. Similarly, left-wingers see it wherever the right has the space or platform to offer a contrary or conflicting account of reality but tend to be blind to it from their own side. Fish don’t know they’re wet and all that.This isn’t solely about politics. It’s just easiest to see what people are up to in the political realm.Changing reality—i.e., the facts on the ground—is hard. But changing the words we use to describe reality is much easier, and we’ve never had more tools to do exactly that.If you fail to achieve a desired result, one recourse is to redefine what success looks like. Such games have been the stuff of politics, bureaucracy, and even war for millennia. “Consider for instance,” Orwell writes, “some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.’” Instead, he writes, “Something like this”: While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.He’s largely forgotten now, but during the Obama years, linguist George Lakoff monetized the manipulation of words as a substitute for thinking hard about public policy. People don’t like trial lawyers? Just rebrand them as “public-protection attorneys.” Voters think taxes are too high? The saps are simply enslaved to bad language, according to Lakoff. Just redefine them. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American,” so call them “membership fees.” The stupidity of these kinds of arguments rests on the assumption that Americans who think taxes are too high will suddenly change their mind if you call them something else. I don’t like getting punched in the face, even if you call it a “facial massage.” It’s like when the Clinton administration famously renamed “rogue states”—like North Korea or Iran—“states of concern,” as if changing the name would change the reality of the problem.The transgender issue is an obvious flashpoint in this. The other day, I saw the latest attempt to bend reality to language. Apparently in some quarters the preferred term for women who menstruate is “bleeders.” But let’s move on, because I can’t improve on the res ipsa loquitur-ness of that.I’ll also skip my now familiar rants about scrapping “mother” for “birthing person” or the ridiculousness of the label “Latinx.” But such examples are a good illustration of how names are sorely in need of rectification. Latinx was born in some academic bunker as a way to describe a vast, polyglot group of actual human beings that do not see themselves as part of the same homogenous group the academics do. If Latinx stayed in the seminar room it would be harmless. But it escaped the lab and infected political elites. And when you confuse the name for the actual thing, as Democrats have, you end up treating square pegs like they’re round. And because human beings aren’t pegs—round or square—they get pissed at the attempt to erase not just their individuality, but their communal distinctiveness. Sure, Mexican Americans in Texas have similarities with Puerto Ricans in New York or Guatemalan immigrants in California, but the similarities aren’t nearly as meaningful to members of those groups as the differences. Likewise, if you want to reduce the culture, history, ethnicity, experience, religion, and socio-economic status of roughly 250 million people to “white people” you’re going to find yourself making assumptions that have little bearing on reality.A YouGov poll released this week had a fascinating finding: Americans have very unrealistic—as in not comporting with reality—ideas about the demographic makeup of America.dylan matthews @dylanmattPeople are really bad at estimating America's demographics
today.yougov.com/topics/politic… March 16th 20222,507 Retweets9,249 LikesI have some methodological and definitional quibbles, but even if the poll is merely directionally correct (and I think it is), it says something really profound about our society. If the average American thinks nearly one in three fellow Americans are, respectively, gay, Jewish, atheists, or immigrants, the average American doesn’t have a great grasp on the reality of America. If you think one in five Americans makes a million dollars a year when in reality the number is more like one in a thousand, you might be more inclined to believe Democrats when they say the rich can pay for everything.I’ve argued with college kids who think the proof of America’s racism can be found in the “fact” that blacks are so underrepresented in everything from higher education, to Hollywood, to big business and politics. That obviously has some truth to it. But when you ask them how many Americans are black, they will often say anything from 25 percent to 50 percent. Blacks make up 12 percent of the population. That doesn’t mean problems of underrepresentation or inequality don’t exist. But such confusion can force people to misjudge the scale and scope of the problem.And let’s be clear. Even if everyone understood the numbers accurately, we’d still have the problem of people thinking that they understand the root causes of a problem by the end results of the problem. Disparities in outcomes—of women in the workforce, minority educational achievement, economic inequality, whatever—are boiled down to familiar generalizations about racism, sexism, capitalism, etc. as if such conclusions accurately describe the myriad variables that led to those results. The average woman earns less than the average man because of “sexism,” not because women and men alike make different choices based upon their personal preferences, or because bearing children has downstream consequences.Elite failure.Some of the poll’s findings may have more to do with things like widespread innumeracy, but even so, there’s no way to look at something like this as anything but an indictment of our elites. And I don’t just mean educational elites or political elites, I mean that whole vast stratum of people who drive the national “conversation.” We get our ideas from popular culture as much as we do from schools, journalists, and politicians. And the way elites talk—in the broadest sense—about America is wildly disconnected from the reality of America.So let’s talk about the elites most central to that conversation—politicians, pundits, and intellectuals generally. Elites are always vying for power and influence (see: “Royalty, Real and Imagined”). And one of their key tools for doing that is claiming to speak for large constituencies of non-elites. The enablers of populism on the left and right alike love to claim (or pretend) that they are speaking on behalf of “real” Americans, the “silent majority,” the authentic nation, the “working class,” the “makers” (as opposed to the “takers”), etc. Invariably, they exaggerate not merely the number of people they are speaking for, but the very idea that the people they are speaking for have any clue these supposed leaders speak for them. They also exaggerate the coherence of their constituencies. In other words, lots of folks who speak on behalf of black people or Christian people or really any group of people pretend that their constituency, in its entirety, believes X. (Of course, if an ideological opponent speaks sweepingly about the same group, they’re suddenly attacked for “stereotyping” a diverse community).I don’t think there’s any way to fix such generalizing in politics, in part because generalizing is central to politics and political rhetoric. But if Americans had a better understanding of reality, they’d be more immune to the excesses that define our politics today. When voters are armed with facts, politicians are constrained in what they can lie about.Which brings me to another tool of elites: Claiming that “their people” are being oppressed, disrespected, or short-changed. Of course, sometimes this is true. But it is almost always exaggerated. Our culture rewards victim status. If it didn’t, Jussie Smollet wouldn’t have faked a hate crime and the MAGA crowd wouldn’t wallow for years in being called “deplorable” by a single bad politician.  Large swaths of our national conversation have been hijacked by victimization merchants. How many college courses could be more accurately renamed “victim studies”? How many cable hosts would be scrambling for copy to fill their monologues if they couldn’t inveigh about how the audience is being treated unfairly?  I have no problem with calling out injustice. In fact, I think it is a moral requirement. Where we run into problems is when elites care more about wielding the cudgel of “injustice” than actually dealing with the thorny, complicated, and often very inconvenient facts that yield said injustice, real or imagined.To borrow from Julien Benda, many of our intellectuals are simply in the business of “organizing political hatreds.”The Ukrainian moment.I think there’s too much wish-casting about how the invasion of Ukraine and the pro-Ukraine consensus will squash populism (I also think there’s too much wish-casting from those who think it won’t). But one of the upsides of this utterly tragic and grotesque crisis is that a bunch of “leaders” who claimed to be the authentic voice of the people—or at least of the right people—have been exposed as essentially paper tigers. It turns out that even conservatives who were sympathetic to the largely abstract and theoretical arguments for admiring Vladimir Putin quickly abandon any such sympathy the moment they see who Putin really is. Some of the demagogues and strivers who thought they understood their own constituency are now scrambling to get right with reality and their own troops. And some are doubling down on their own irrelevance, scrambling to attain their own victim status as truth-tellers amidst a time of hysteria. The only problem: They’re not truth-tellers. They’re liars and frauds, and everyone can see it. In the blink of an eye, the same people who monetized and celebrated hysteria now pretend to be in favor of sober restraint.The task of rectifying the names is herculean and this sad chapter will not come close to completing the work. But, in this moment, it is heartening to see the cobwebs of bullshit get cleared, at least for a moment. America is a good country, NATO isn’t a sucker’s game, the West is not a spent force, Russia does not offer a meaningful alternative to the American experiment, Volodymyr Zelensky’s statesmanship proves that heroic leadership is possible and can come in surprising forms, Putin is evil and people who claimed otherwise were either dupes or frauds, military force in the face of evil is noble, and military force in the pursuit of evil is evil. Policy differences endure, as they should. But the reality of the situation is plain for people of good will to see. Truth is having a moment.It’s a terrible price to pay for such rectification, but the value of it is something to be welcomed, and built-upon.Various & SundryCanine update: Zoë and Pippa are doing great. Pippa’s joint problems have finally subsided as she has come to understand the benefits of restraint.  It was a lesson hard learned. Zoë had one of her rare “let’s play ball” moments recently. And the aroos are in ample supply. Meanwhile Gracie continues to be more defiant. Her deference to Zoë’s demands wanes by the day. The only sour note—more like a sour symphony—is that the tooth-pulling remedy for her bad breath did not take. I finally identified the smell: third-world fish market at the end of a hot day before the surfaces are hosed off. It’s not always that terrible. But sometimes it’s enough to make your eyes well up.ICYMIKeeping the metric system down on last weekend’s strange RuminantThe Remnant with Shadi Hamid A tale of two cold warsWednesday’s “news”letter on Zelensky’s speech to CongressNew York’s a go-go with Vin CannatoA jam-packed edition of GLoPThe Dispatch Podcast on Russia, Iran, and America’s responseAnd now, the weird stuffI knew itEverybody has a plan…Open wideHazmat holidays

Inflation! Inflation! Everyone's talking about it, but ignoring one of its biggest causes: corporate concentration.

Now, prices are undeniably rising. In response, the Fed is about to slow the economy -- even though we're still 2 million jobs short of where we were before the pandemic, and millions of American workers won't get the raises they deserve.

Meanwhile, Republicans haven't wasted any time hammering Biden and Democratic lawmakers about inflation.

Don't fall for their fear mongering.

Everybody's ignoring the deeper structural reason for price increases: the concentration of the American economy into the hands of a few corporate giants with the power to raise prices.

Watch:

If the market were actually competitive, corporations would keep their prices as low as possible as they competed for customers.

Even if some of their costs increased, they would do everything they could to avoid passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices, for fear of losing business to competitors.

But that's the opposite of what we're seeing. Corporations are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. Corporate profit margins hit record highs last year. You see, these corporations have so much market power they can raise prices with impunity.

So the underlying problem isn't inflation per se. It's a lack of competition. Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits.

Take the energy sector.

Only a few entities have access to the land and pipelines that control the oil and gas powering most of the world. They took a hit during the pandemic as most people stayed home. But they are more than making up for it now, limiting supply and ratcheting up prices.

Or look at consumer goods.

In April 2021, Procter & Gamble raised prices on staples like diapers and toilet paper, citing increased costs in raw materials and transportation. But P&G has been making huge profits. After some of its price increases went into effect, it reported an almost 25% profit margin.

Looking to buy your diapers elsewhere? Good luck. The market is dominated by P&G and Kimberly-Clark, which--NOT entirely coincidentally--raised its prices at the same time.

Another example: in April 2021, PepsiCo raised prices, blaming higher costs for ingredients, freight, and labor. It then recorded $3 billion in operating profits through September. How did it get away with this without losing customers?

Pepsi has only one major competitor, Coca-Cola, which promptly raised its own prices. Coca-Cola recorded $10 billion in revenues in the third quarter of 2021, up 16% from the previous year.

Food prices are soaring, but half of that is from meat, which costs 15% more than last year. There are only four major meat processing companies in America, which are all raising their prices and enjoying record profits.

Get the picture?

The underlying problem is not inflation. It's corporate power. Since the 1980s, when the U.S. government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement, two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated.

Most are now dominated by a handful of corporations that coordinate prices and production. This is true of: banks, broadband, pharmaceutical companies, airlines, meatpackers, and yes, soda.

Corporations in all these industries could easily absorb higher costs -- including long overdue wage increases -- without passing them on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But they aren't.

Instead, they're using their massive profits to line the pockets of major investors and executives -- while both consumers and workers get shafted.

How can this structural problem be fixed? Fighting corporate concentration with more aggressive antitrust enforcement. And imposing a windfall profits tax on profitable corporations that are using this period of rising costs to gouge consumers.

So don't fall for the fear mongering about inflation. The real culprit here is corporate power

This article has been adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.So much of what we imagine to be new is old; so many of the seemingly novel illnesses that afflict modern society are really just resurgent cancers, diagnosed and described long ago. Autocrats have risen before; they have used mass violence before; they have broken the laws of war before. In 1950, in the preface she wrote to the first edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, knowing that what had just passed could repeat itself, described the scant half decade that had elapsed since the end of the Second World War as an era of great unease: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.She was wrong, or partly so. Although much of the world would remain, for the rest of the 20th century, in thrall to violent and aggressive dictatorships, in 1950 North America and Western Europe were in fact just at the beginning of an era of growth and prosperity that would carry them to new heights of wealth and power. The French would remember this era as Les Trente Glorieuses; the Italians would speak of the boom economico, the Germans of the Wirtschaftswunder. In this same era, liberal democracy, a political system that had failed spectacularly in 1930s Europe, finally flourished. So did international integration. The Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the eventual European Union—all of these institutions not only supported the liberal democracies but knit them together more tightly than ever before. The result was certainly not a utopia—by the 1970s, growth had slowed; unemployment and inflation soared—but it nevertheless seemed, at least to those who lived inside the secure Western bubble, that the forces of what Arendt had called “sheer insanity” had been kept at bay.Now we live in a different era, one in which growth at those 1950s levels is impossible to imagine. Inequality has grown exponentially, creating huge divides between a tiny billionaire class and everyone else. International integration is failing; declining birth rates, combined with a wave of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, have created an angry rise of nostalgia and xenophobia. Worse, some of the elements that made the postwar Western world so prosperous—some of the elements that Arendt’s pessimistic analysis missed—are fading away. The American security guarantee that underlies the stability of Europe and North America is more uncertain than it has ever been. America’s own democracy, which served as a role model for so many others, is challenged as it has not been in decades, including by those who no longer accept the results of American elections. At the same time, the world’s autocracies have now accumulated enough wealth and influence to challenge the liberal democracies, ideologically as well as economically. The leaders of China, Russia, Iran, Belarus, and Cuba often work together, supporting one another, drawing on kleptocratic resources—money, property, business influence—at a level Hitler or Stalin could never have imagined. Russia has defied the entire postwar European order by invading Ukraine.Once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize, a world in which it seems “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”—a description that could almost perfectly describe Vladimir Putin on the one hand and Putin’s Russia on the other. The Origins of Totalitarianism forces us to ask not only why Arendt was too pessimistic, in 1950, but also whether some of her pessimism might be more warranted now. More to the point, it offers us a kind of dual methodology, two different ways of thinking about the phenomenon of autocracy.Precisely because Arendt feared for the future, much of The Origins of Totalitarianism was in fact focused on an excavation of the past. Although not all of the research that lies at the heart of the book has held up to modern scholarship, the principle that led her down this path remains important: To grapple with a broad social trend, look at its history, try to find its origins, try to understand what happened when it last appeared, in another country or another century. To explain Nazi anti-Semitism, Arendt reached back not only to the history of the Jews in Germany but also to the history of European racism and imperialism, and to the evolution of the notion of the “rights of man”—which we now more commonly speak of as “human rights.” To have such rights, she observed, you must not only live in a state that can guarantee them; you must also qualify as one of that state’s citizens. The stateless, and those classified as noncitizens, or non-people, are assured of nothing. The only way they can be helped or made secure is through the existence of the state, of public order, and of the rule of law.The last section of Origins is largely devoted to a somewhat different project: the close examination of the totalitarian states of her time, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and in particular an attempt to understand the sources of their power. Here her thinking is equally useful, though not, again, because everything she writes matches present circumstances. Many surveillance and control techniques are much subtler than they once were, involving facial-recognition cameras and spyware, not merely crude violence or paramilitary patrols in the street. Most modern autocracies do not have a “foreign policy openly directed toward world domination,” or at least not yet. Propaganda has also changed. The modern Russian leadership feels no need to constantly promote its own achievements around the world, for example; it is often satisfied with belittling and undermining the achievements of others.And yet the questions Arendt asks remain absolutely relevant today. She was fascinated by the passivity of so many people in the face of dictatorship, by the widespread willingness, even eagerness, to believe lies and propaganda—just consider the majority of Russian people today, unaware that there is even a war going on next door and prevented by law from calling it such. In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” To explain this phenomenon, Arendt zeroes in on human psychology, especially the intersection between terror and loneliness. By destroying civic institutions, whether sports clubs or small businesses, totalitarian regimes kept people away from one another and prevented them from sharing creative or productive projects. By blanketing the public sphere with propaganda, they made people afraid to speak with one another. And when each person felt himself isolated from the rest, resistance became impossible. Politics in the broadest sense became impossible too: “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other … Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”Reading that account now, it is impossible not to wonder whether the nature of modern work and information, the shift from “real life” to virtual life and the domination of public debate by algorithms that increase emotion, anger, and division, hasn’t created some of the same results. In a world where everyone is supposedly “connected,” loneliness and isolation once again are smothering activism, optimism, and the desire to participate in public life. In a world where “globalization” has supposedly made us all similar, a narcissistic dictator can still launch an unprovoked war on his neighbors. The 20th-century totalitarian model has not been banished; it can be brought back, at any place and at any time.  Arendt offers no easy answers. The Origins of Totalitarianism does not contain a set of policy prescriptions, or directions on how to fix things. Instead it offers proposals, experiments, different ways to think about the lure of autocracy and the seductive appeal of its proponents as we grapple with them in our own time.When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Sign up for Tom’s newsletter, Peacefield, here.Russian President Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Despite his limited gains on the ground in Ukraine, he is facing strategic defeat in a war that no one (including me) would have expected him to lose. The vaunted Russian army has turned out to be a hollow force whose major skill sets seem to be bullying its own conscripts and killing foreign civilians. The Russian air force has underperformed even the lowest expectations; perhaps Russian pilots should have spent more time getting training and logging flying hours instead of doing fancy maneuvers at foreign air shows. At home, Putin distrusts his own security services and is apparently purging some of his top spies. The Russian people are going into the streets, prompting the regime to arrest thousands. The Russian economy is in a deep freeze and is likely to stay there for years.Only one military force in the world can save Putin from utter humiliation now: NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO intervention in Russia’s war on Ukraine could halt that country’s barbarous attacks. But it would mean war between Putin’s regime and the West, and this war would be such a gift to Putin that we should expect that he will soon do everything he can to provoke it.The U.S. and Europe should resist such provocations.First and foremost, NATO intervention would help Putin by allowing him to rally his nation and impose even harsher measures to suffocate dissent. Millions of Russians clearly want nothing to do with this fratricidal war, which is one reason Putin has been desperate to keep them from hearing anything about it other than weird Soviet-era cant about neo-Nazis and weapons of mass destruction. If NATO were to become involved, however, Putin’s regime would gladly play footage of Russian men being blasted to pieces by U.S., British, and other allied jets. (Americans who think that a “no-fly zone” would not require attacking land targets, perhaps even in Russia, are deluding themselves.) And even if the Germans were not participants, Russia would almost certainly fabricate videos of German jets attacking Russian military units to play on the obvious and reflexive nationalistic anger that many Russians will feel at such images.[Brian Klaas: Vladimir Putin has fallen into the dictator trap]Putin knows that the term NATO can still produce a visceral response in Russia. NATO is a traditional enemy—and one many Russians have blamed for their troubles in the past. NATO jets streaking over Ukrainian skies will silence at least some of the protests, and give Putin’s supporters a bigger cudgel when they widen the fascist beatdown of the last Russians who refuse to accept the war.Inside the Kremlin, meanwhile, Putin could likewise use NATO’s intervention to move against any possible dissent or hesitation. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the U.S. Congress yesterday morning, Putin was in Moscow raging away on Russian television against those rich Russians residing abroad “who cannot live without foie gras” and who have now become “traitors and bastards” because they are “mentally” against Russia.Many of those rich Russians living abroad are the children—and mistresses—of Putin’s inner circle. The Kremlin boss was thus firing a warning shot over the heads of his own sycophants as well as the oligarchs whose pursuit of wealth he has enabled: I expect your loyalty, and I know where you and your families live. A war with NATO would make such threats seem patriotic rather than paranoid. The odds of a palace coup against Putin are already low; the odds of such a move while Russia is at war with NATO are even lower.Putin could also use NATO’s participation in the war to override objections in the Kremlin or the Russian defense ministry regarding the use of nuclear weapons. Russian elites who might quail at the idea of deploying nuclear bombs against innocent Ukrainians will be harder pressed to explain their opposition to using such weapons against the NATO air bases from which jets are flying into combat, killing Russian soldiers and turning Russia’s mighty tanks into flaming wrecks.Although some observers may believe that Putin would fold before he approaches the nuclear threshold, and others worry that even the smallest NATO action will inevitably spark World War III, such arguments at both extremes ignore the role of chance and risk. A nuclear crisis is not an orderly duel or a game with rules, but rather a maelstrom of poor information, conflicting signals, and highly charged emotions. To make matters worse, Putin has always been a poor strategist, a risk-taker who foolishly sets in motion—as he has done in Ukraine—forces he cannot control.In any case, even if Putin is too deluded to think about such risks, the rest of us must consider the dangers of ordering the largest military coalition in human history into battle against a disorganized and battered army led by incompetent officers and commanded by an isolated and delusional president. Putting so many military assets in play, with combat breaking out all over Europe, could spark a catastrophe that neither we nor Putin intended. The danger is not that the Russian war on Ukraine becomes a replay of 1939, in which a coalition must stop a mad dictator at all costs, but that a Russia-NATO war becomes a nuclear version of 1914, in which all the combatants would find themselves moving from a crisis none of them expected into a cataclysm none of them wanted.[Anne Applebaum: America needs a better plan to fight autocracy]So what can the U.S. do? We can keep providing the Ukrainians with the weapons they need to defend themselves. We can keep strangling the Russian economy so that Putin cannot fund his war machine. We can continue beefing up NATO forces and defenses. We can make better investments in U.S. and allied defenses. Perhaps we can even open NATO membership to other nations, including Finland and Sweden, now that Putin himself has made a case for an expanded alliance that is more ironclad and convincing than even NATO’s most ardent advocates could have made decades ago.Putin is losing, and he knows it. Rather than finding a way out of his own mess, he is unwinding nearly 30 years of Russian diplomatic, economic, political, and even military development. Worse, his loss is at the hands of the Ukrainians, whose army he thought would collapse under the first barrage of Russian artillery, whose government he thought would flee in terror, and whose people he thought would greet him as a liberator.The Russia that will emerge from this war will be weaker and poorer than the Russia that opened fire on Ukrainian innocents, on brother and sister Slavs, last month—but only if we keep our heads and do not allow the conflict to engulf all of Europe. This is why the United States and NATO must resist Russian provocations, which already include war crimes and atrocities, and which soon could become even more extreme with “false flag” operations that might bring chemical weapons into play.The body count is going to grow. But a NATO intervention would solve almost all of Putin’s problems, and create dangers we cannot predict.

After a war, all parties turn to “lessons learned,” a phrase that has become commonplace. A war is, in a hideous way, a learning opportunity, with the goal being that the successes and failures of one’s own forces are identified and the process that led to either outcome is studied and integrated into planning and training for the next war. This is altogether reasonable and necessary. It is also obvious that the process is an occasion for finger-pointing: Taking credit for another’s victories or shifting blame for defeats is an inevitable part of the learning process, not to mention the promotions process. Officers are human like the rest of us. A more troubling aspect of the learning process is that the war gets elevated to revealed truth, and sometimes guides nations to future defeat, the past towering over all the changes that have rendered the lessons learned not only useless but catastrophic. Napoleon’s infantry charge was much valued in 1914, with leaders initially unable to grasp the meaning of the machine gun.

The world is filled with lessons from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I do my share, but it is important to understand that the middle of a war is not the best place to draw conclusions. Wars are tricky things, as the U.S. learned in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, it is in battle that the most important lessons are learned and implemented without a two-year renewal process. Staying alive is a great motivator for innovation.

The Russians are said to be throwing major reserves into the fight. They are also recruiting Syrian army forces and, it is said, mercenaries from around the world. Obviously, they expect a long war and are running short of infantry, or something else is happening. Perhaps they intend to follow this war by rolling into Eastern Europe, and they are recruiting foreign forces for occupation duty – an interesting theory for which I have not the slightest evidence. The Ukrainians are mobilizing all their citizens. How long will citizens fight if the battle becomes hopeless?

It is on the strategic level, not the operational or tactical level, that the important lessons can be seen. Russia is a poor country with a middling army, and not a great power. But it is surrounded by even poorer countries with even worse armies. Spirit can get you so far, but a ruthless, disciplined army might get you where you want to go. It is not a pretty sight, but it can be very effective.

In the end, you know who won by whose flag is flying over the capital, and that we will find out.

But the most important strategic lesson so far has nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine. The United States has demonstrated that perhaps the most powerful weapon in the world is the weaponized dollar. World trade requires U.S. dollars, either in hand or as the benchmark against which trading takes place. The euro is a distant second, and no one would sign onto a five-year construction project denominated in yuan. In order to access dollars, one must have access to the place that prints them, the Federal Reserve, or to some financial institution swimming in dollars – and such institutions are obsessed with not running excessively afoul of U.S. regulations. The story of how this works is as complex as a naval airstrike, and yet can be more deadly. No dollars means that no one will take local moolah with which to buy anything. The United States, being by far the largest economy in the world and the largest importer, can wreak havoc on a country. As Iran has discovered, lack of access to dollars coupled with blocking exports can cripple a nation’s economy.

The key to weaponizing the dollar and trade is the cooperation of other nations. The United States has mobilized not only most of NATO but also countries like Japan, which is far from the fighting but close to the dollar. The desire of allies neither to engage in kinetic war nor to tick off the United States created a coalition of central banks all cooperating to isolate the Russian economy, which depends on the export of primary commodities (energy) rather than industrial or technical products. The combination of banning Russian energy imports to the U.S. and managing the dollar as a weapon – in concert with a large alliance – poses an unanticipated military crisis for Russia.

It has been said that no nation has been more than three unserved meals away from revolution. The details are nonsense, but the principle is correct. Heroic action is somehow more manageable than long, unremitting misery. It is one thing to die for your country; it is another to see your children go hungry.

The American war strategy is partly derived from not wanting to engage Russian troops in combat, both because of an aversion to losing any more wars and because the center of gravity of the enemy today is not military but financial. Unlike an airstrike, financial strikes don’t suddenly explode. They slowly grind away at the fabric of the nation until the flag itself lies in tattlers. Or that’s the theory.

There is, of course, a downside. In every war the homefront suffers. In the U.S. during World War II, gasoline was severely rationed along with things like cosmetics (metal in the case, oil in the makeup). The United States endured, with grumbling, because unlike the other nations, three meals a day were available and movies were playing.

The United States today is facing a degree of pain in its economic offensive, mostly in the cost of gasoline and other goods. The question is whether it will stand behind the economic offensive to defend a nation of strategic importance to the United States but of little emotional significance. Getting even for the attack on Pearl Harbor was one thing, guaranteeing the safety of Kharkiv is another matter. It is easier to fight than to limit your diet.

So, getting back to lessons learned. The military lessons that people are obsessed with are not definitive. Russia may win, and an ugly win is still a win. Russia may lose, and a loss in Ukraine might mean a lot or a little to the Russians. We are not ready to do what I have done, and discuss the deeper meaning of Russia’s military outcome.

But we are already able to speak of two things. First, the use of the dollar and access to the Fed appear to be a striking weapon. The U.S. has isolated Russia without the need for a blockade. The lesson, tried in a small portion with Iran, proved its effectiveness, and Russia showed it could scale. And most important, it is a weapon only the U.S. has. This week, U.S. officials are talking with Chinese officials. The Chinese have many economic problems and need dollars. That does not mean they will go quietly and without demanding concessions, but the Chinese have learned that Russian military power does not match U.S. economic power. As for invading Taiwan, one glance at Russia’s performance in Ukraine and the U.S. counter proves two things: Do not ever assume a war is a slam dunk. And do not assume the only defenses in a kinetic war are things that go boom.

The outcome of the Ukraine-Russia war is of some strategic importance, and of great moral importance. That outcome is unknown as yet. But the certainty of the U.S. controlling the global trade currency has been demonstrated, at least until an alternative currency emerges and people are prepared to sign five-year deals in it.

I think of this kind of thing in reference to altering standards of evaluation so that Black and Latino students are represented proportionally in various institutions. These days, one is to think of this sort of thing as equity. The idea seems to be that until there is something much closer to equality — as in equal access to resources — throughout society, we must force at least the superficial justice of equity in sheer percentages.

But too often, the message being communicated to Black and Latino people is that our presence is what matters, not our performance. I am uncomfortable, for example, with the domino-effect elimination of standardized testing requirements in university admissions policies across the country.

According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, around 1,800 colleges and universities will not require high school graduates “applying to start classes in fall 2022 to submit ACT/SAT results,” with a list that includes not only U.N.C. and Harvard but also other prestigious public and private institutions, including the University of California, the University of Texas, Yale University and Princeton University. Many of the schools cite the pandemic as the reason for making standardized testing optional, but I don’t buy it. I’ve been in academia long enough and have experienced the decades-long debate over racial preferences long enough to suspect that this is cover for a policy change that some schools wanted to make anyway.

Questions about how predictive the tests are of student performance are welcome, and it’s certainly true that some students with high scores struggle in college while some with low scores thrive. But those questions don’t conclusively refute the utility of the tests as a tool for evaluating which students are ready to succeed in college. And one of the motivations for eliminating these tests or making admissions test-optional (as some colleges now say, as if students are eager to sit for optional exams) is to allow more Black and Latino students to be admitted.

This impulse is based on an assumption that because Black, Latino, Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native kids, on average, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, don’t perform as well on these tests as their white and Asian peers, the tests must be, in some way, racially biased. But what, really, does that mean? Is it that the tests ask racially biased questions? Which ones? Is it that it is somehow unfair to give a Black or Latino student a test of abstract cognitive skill and that Black and Latino students should be tested differently? This would seem dangerously close to saying that they aren’t as intelligent as others. If that isn’t the intention, then is the inference that there is something cultural, broadly speaking, that hinders their ability to perform well on these tests? If so, what?

Why do fitness device makers claim you need to take 10,000 steps every day? Do you also really need to drink eight glasses of water daily? The scientific basis for popular health claims is often thin. A piece in the New York Times, for example, notes that the idea of 10,000 steps was based more on marketing—it was the name of an early pedometer—than science. Data point to clear benefits from moderate exercise—perhaps 7,000 steps or so but not necessarily more.

Often popular wisdom turns out to be only sort of true. The emphasis on so many steps is one instance. Glasses of water is another. If you let yourself get too thirsty, you may be tempted to reach for sodas or sugary coffee drinks, and that's not good. But a scientific review in 2002 found “no scientific studies” that support the eight-glass claim for healthy adults in a temperate climate. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it does mean we probably shouldn't worry if we drink only six.

It's worthwhile to dig a bit into often heard health maxims before accepting them literally. You can sometimes find a nugget of truth that has become seriously exaggerated, or you discover that a claim stems from outdated and poorly applied evidence. The latter is what happened with a famous and specious claim about female fertility.

For decades women have heard distressing warnings about their “biological clocks.” We have been repeatedly told that fertility drops dramatically after age 30, so people who want children either need to get moving or else freeze their eggs. Embryo freezing is now a big business, and discussions of it are commonplace among young professional women. Pregnancy, and age-linked anxiety about it, also occurs among transgender and nonbinary people.

But, as Jean M. Twenge reported in 2013 in the Atlantic, the claim is based on very sparse data, much of them of dubious quality or relevance. The notion stems largely from a 2004 paper based on records from 1670 through 1830. Many things have changed since then, including medical care and nutrition. In wealthier nations, people are now healthier overall and likely to be more fertile for longer periods of their lives. Systematic data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics demonstrate that from 1980 to 2002 fertility rates for women aged 30 and older were going up. It is also worth noting that when infertility treatments started to become more common and more clinics began opening in the 1980s and 1990s, alarms over biological clocks were being sounded by this growing industry with a self-interest in the matter.

Despite the importance of childbearing to so many people—and although infertility treatments are costly, have only modest success rates and are not risk-free—the sad fact is that robust studies of age-dependent infertility are scant. The data we do have tend to show that although fertility does decline slightly at older ages, most women continue to be fertile well into their 30s, and for many people that is a good time to have children. There's a long-standing cultural tendency to blame infertility on women, but when a couple is infertile it is equally likely that the cause can be traced to the man. Male fertility also declines with age, but how often do you hear warnings about the male biological clock?*

Like the female clock or the 10,000 steps, many health beliefs have shallow and flimsy roots. But sometimes the wisdom of the crowd is supported by facts: most of us do need around eight hours of sleep a night, for instance. So where does this leave someone trying to make sense of what they hear or read?

Well, for one thing, people should be skeptical of any large claim based on one study. Good science requires building a multifaceted and detailed case, which takes time and is almost never achieved in a single piece of research. The online medical library PubMed.gov enables people to find out if a subject is well studied or not. And the National Institutes of Health has a medical consensus program that has published more than 160 statements on various diseases and their treatments. Some of them are actually readable, and none relies solely on data from more than a century ago.

*Editor’s Note (2/23/22): This sentence was edited after posting. It originally incorrectly stated that male infertility declines with age.

The United States is supporting Ukraine with aid and weapons and punishing Russian aggression with financial and economic sanctions. But the United States can do more to resolve the global crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine: It can end the ethanol program.For decades, the U.S. government has, at great expense, encouraged farmers to grow more corn so that it can be turned into ethanol, a gasoline additive. Ethanol makers receive all kinds of grants and subsidies. Federal regulations require ethanol to be blended into gasoline, creating a giant industry that would not exist without large subsidies and imperious mandates. America’s largest ethanol company earned annual revenues of $8 billion pre-pandemic. Demand from the ethanol industry, in turn, bids up the price of corn, and the income of those who farm it.Ethanol has become a Washington joke. John McCain often quipped that he started his day with a glass of ethanol. Who could blame him? The ethanol program is a giveaway so big, so entrenched, and so wasteful that laughter might seem like the best response. But as we laugh, we’re missing that America’s ethanol madness has strengthened Russia’s grip upon the world’s food supply.[Annie Lowrey: Can sanctions stop Russia?]Postcommunist Russia has emerged as the world’s largest exporter of wheat. If Putin can absorb Ukraine—also an important wheat producer—the enlarged Russian empire would provide almost one-third of the world’s wheat exports. Russia has become so dominant in wheat markets in great part because America has retreated from them. U.S. wheat production was about one-third lower in 2018 than at its peak in the early 1980s. Wheat has yielded to corn. Almost 70 percent of all U.S. grain production is now corn, up from 47 percent in the late 1960s. And of that immense crop of corn, almost half is formulated into ethanol to drive cars and trucks.Converting corn into fuel has never made economic sense. It happens only because of a mass of federal regulations and subsidies that began during the Carter administration and were widened and deepened in 2005 and 2007. You can read the gruesome details in this Atlantic article from 2019.  But if the rules are complicated, the results are not. From 2001 to 2005, the United States’ share of world wheat exports averaged 25 percent; since the new ethanol rules were adopted in the first decade of this century, the U.S. share has tumbled by half, to about 13 percent.Ethanol was historically justified as an energy-independence strategy. Campaigning in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007, Barack Obama declared that ethanol “ultimately helps our national security, because right now we’re sending billions of dollars to some of the most hostile nations on earth.” Obama had plenty of practice defending ethanol: He’d entered federal politics as a senator from Illinois, the nation’s second-largest corn producer after Iowa.But whatever the (slim-to-none) merits of that argument in 2007, its merits are zero in 2022, when the United States has become the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. And though ethanol may have some small environmental advantages over gasoline, those arguable benefits are nullified by ethanol’s terrible toll on world food output.It may take some time and government assistance to rotate U.S. farmland back from corn-for-fuel to food crops. But unfortunately, the war in Ukraine may last for a long time. If food-importing nations in Asia and the Middle East could be assured that more American wheat, barley, and sunflower oil would be heading their way in 2023, and that more corn would be available for animal feed rather than burned up as automobile fuel, wiser U.S. farm policy could even help consolidate global support for Ukraine.[Derek Thompson: Russia’s economic blackout will change the world]Ending the ethanol mandates and subsidies will boost world food supply. More food supply will reduce price pressures. Less pressure on food prices will remove a Russian weapon of intimidation.Americans and Europeans are discovering how much of the power in Russia’s hands is power that the West carelessly gave up by buying Russian gas, looking away from flows of corrupt money, failing to respond to past aggressions and provocations, and stinting on military aid to Ukraine. One of the biggest and most important of those grants of power was the decision to use U.S. agricultural resources so perversely. Food for people and energy for machines need to be joined together in a broad strategy that enhances national and climate security. North American oil and natural gas can carry the world through the transition to an energy future based on wind, sun, and the atom. The good earth of the U.S. Midwest can contribute more to growing the food to feed humanity. It’s past time to junk the rules and special favors that stand in the way.  

Americans today seem to believe that we live in especially exhausting political times. But the rhythms of our moment—pandemic, protest, pandemic, election, insurrection, pandemic, invasion of Ukraine—have nothing on the Truman era. Between April, 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death thrust Harry S. Truman into office, and January, 1953, when Truman handed the Presidency to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the war in Europe ended, Hitler killed himself, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the Cold War began, the state of Israel came into being, the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear weapons, China underwent a Communist revolution, the West created NATO, the world created the United Nations, and the Korean War began. One could go on.

How much Truman shaped these events, and how much he was buffeted by them, is the puzzle at the heart of Jeffrey Frank’s new book, “The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945-1953” (Simon & Schuster). Truman was the ultimate accidental President, a pipsqueak senator from Independence, Missouri, who had been Vice-President for less than three months when Roosevelt died. Once Truman assumed office, global events seemed to proceed according to their own logic and momentum. Truman inherited daunting challenges, and he borrowed other men’s visions in order to meet them. His own accomplishments occurred somewhere in between.

Truman acknowledged that he didn’t have much choice about whether to drop the bombs. “As a practical matter,” Frank notes, the decision “had been made for him.” Truman’s greatest foreign-policy triumph, the European Recovery Program, is credited to the military giant and Secretary of State George Marshall; we don’t call it the Truman Plan. As President, Truman was accused of “losing” China, but China was, of course, never really his to lose. And it was Senator Joseph McCarthy, more than Truman, who defined the political tenor of the era.

Perhaps Truman’s most significant act as President was his decision to enter and then stick with the war in Korea. Although that conflict was never the political disaster that Vietnam turned out to be, it killed millions, often with shocking brutality. The South was effectively recaptured in the first few months; the long, blood-drenched impasse that ensued accomplished little. On the home front, Truman’s dream of achieving universal health care languished as well. After a bruising battle with the American Medical Association and the Republican Party, he ended up more or less where he started.

So why write a big new book on Truman? And what to do with him as the protagonist? Frank depicts Truman as a limited talent who was promoted above his pay grade. “It’s hell to be President of the Greatest Most Powerful Nation on Earth,” Truman complained in his diary. All the same, Truman did the best he could—an “ordinary man,” in Frank’s formulation, who ended up with an “extraordinary presidency.” Whether he made history or just endured it, Truman was, as Secretary of State Dean Acheson later put it, “present at the creation” of many of the key institutions that still shape both American and global politics.

A former New Yorker editor and the author of three novels set in Washington, Frank is drawn to the human side of this story: the backroom sniping, the jockeying for position, the personality clashes, and the diplomatic pageantry that produced the postwar world order. Famous statesmen abound, most of them more confident, if not more lovable, than Truman. The great and grave George Marshall ordered colleagues to “avoid trivia,” while Truman loved nothing more than chitchat, poker, and fried chicken with pals. Acheson intoned about ancient Athens and Sparta and Rome, while Truman, a self-proclaimed plain-talking Midwesterner, was apt to compare Stalin to Tom Pendergast, the Democratic boss of Kansas City. General Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific theatre and the American potentate of Japanese reconstruction, exuded far more gravitas than the President—and everyone knew it. “MacArthur is brilliant, theatrical, stern, eloquent, usually unapproachable,” a Herald Tribune reporter wrote in 1950. “The President is plodding, stubborn, undramatic, shrewd and earthy.” When Truman journeyed all the way to Wake Island for a brief meeting with MacArthur, an observer likened the President to “an insurance salesman who has at last signed up an important prospect.”

Frank mostly wants us to side with Truman, whose Everyman pragmatism often put him at odds with men who thought that they were better than he was and who sought to give him advice. If there was ever a time when the so-called liberal establishment had real force, it was in the nineteen-forties, as a fast-expanding executive branch brought thousands of credentialled know-it-alls to Washington. Sometimes to his detriment, often to his credit, Truman did not fit in. Frank writes, “He was, inescapably, someone who’d stepped out of the nation’s rural past and found himself in a dizzying mid-twentieth-century world, like a character from a Mark Twain fable: A Missouri Farmer in FDR’s Court.” Frank’s Truman is a populist in the best sense of the word: not a demagogue but a true man of the people.

Unlike many current aspirants, Truman came by that label honestly. He grew up in a small town, and didn’t graduate from college. He worked as a farmer and then struggled as a haberdasher, not exactly the tried-and-true power track. Perhaps his proudest achievement, before entering politics, was persuading Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, his Sunday-school classmate from a well-off family, to accept his offer of marriage. Bess Truman, as she came to be known, plays a major role in “The Trials of Harry S. Truman,” though largely by way of absence. As President, Truman spent a surprising amount of time moping around the White House and writing winsome, reflective letters to his wife, who sensibly preferred Missouri to Washington.

The best-known portrait of Truman as man, husband, and father is still David McCullough’s 1992 biography, “Truman.” In that book, McCullough rescued Truman from the sneers of prior generations. Like much of the mid-century establishment, early Presidential historians tended to dismiss Truman as a second-rater, beholden to heartland America’s small minds and small visions. McCullough turned that Midwestern pluck into a virtue—just what was needed to cut through the moral and political complexities of an epically confusing historical moment. Ivy League types, he maintained, had nothing on good old common sense.

Frank adopts a similar, if more nuanced, view. Near the end of “The Trials of Harry S. Truman,” he pays homage to McCullough’s “masterful” book. At the same time, he acknowledges that Truman’s unschooled, salt-of-the-earth pose was not always what the moment called for. From the bully pulpit, Truman could occasionally reach great heights of rhetoric. At least as frequently, he put his foot in his mouth. “I need not tell you that Harry Truman is not an orator,” a Senate colleague once noted, upon introducing a Truman speech. “He can demonstrate that for himself.”

Frank’s book describes press conferences in which Truman managed to say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. In 1946, for instance, he nearly turned the Cold War hot by championing Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech—which was delivered in Fulton, Missouri—without thinking through the implications. Stalin interpreted Churchill’s words as “a call to war with the Soviet Union.” Truman had to scramble to explain that this was not, in fact, what the United States wanted.

The wise men around Truman got tripped up less often—though, to be fair, they were less often put on the spot. If Truman had a major strength as a chief executive, it was his ability to comprehend and synthesize the learned views of his many advisers and experts, even if the result sometimes served their interests better than his own. Adopting the formulation of the redoubtable George Kennan, the Truman Doctrine argued that the United States needed to contain an aggressive and expansionist Soviet Union, lest the world end up with another totalitarian blitzkrieg across Europe. It was as powerful a grand strategic vision as any President has ever offered. It also led inexorably to calls for a bigger and better security state—which would require still more expert opinion from still more advisers like Kennan.

Drawing on such ideas, Truman presided over a vast transformation of the American security establishment, including the creation of the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the C.I.A. He also helped to bring about the desegregation of an empowered and permanently mobilized American military. Dwight Eisenhower would balefully dub these powerful new institutions the “military-industrial complex”; he warned that they might come to dominate American society. Truman worried less about their existential significance. He took office in a moment of crisis, and the crises never stopped. The big new bureaucracies were mainly just efforts to cope.

The problem of the Soviet Union—what it was, how it worked, what its leaders wanted—occupied more of Truman’s time and thought than anything else. From his first moments in office, Truman viewed the Russians with two-fisted suspicion, ever ready to take and give offense. He got “very snappy” around Stalin, in the words of Secretary of State James Byrnes—and proudly so. “I reared up on my hind legs and told ’em where to get off and they got off,” he wrote home to Bess from the 1945 Potsdam negotiations. Frank’s book does not try to answer the hoary question of who started the Cold War—whether Stalin or Truman or maybe even Churchill was really to blame. It does show that they were all mostly feeling their way in the dark, relying not so much on a ruthless calculus of power as on leaps of instinct and imagination.

The early Cold War found its domestic analogue in McCarthyism, a term that both illuminates and obscures the political dynamics of the Truman years. It was Truman, not McCarthy, who introduced a loyalty program for federal employees. But McCarthy, far more than Truman, put his stamp on the anti-Communist Zeitgeist. When McCarthy announced, in February, 1950, that “I have in my hand” a list of Communists lurking in the State Department, he was attacking Truman’s foreign policy: How could the United States have allowed the Soviets to build a bomb and the Communists to take over China, if not for some act of internal treachery?

McCarthy’s example points up some of the contradictions of the Truman era, and of the politics that limited Truman’s range of action. Today, the postwar years are often seen as a time of bipartisan coöperation and good will, when the Marshall Plan passed by an overwhelming majority, Republicans and Democrats regularly conferred in Washington cloakrooms, and intellectual giants like Kennan bestrode the State Department’s new Policy Planning Staff. It was also an era of vicious, operatic partisanship. McCarthy denounced Truman as soft on Communism, Marshall as a tool of Soviet masters. Truman could give almost as good as he got. “I think the greatest asset the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,” he declared during a 1950 press conference. Just imagine what they would have done with Twitter.

Although he could punch back when needed, Truman often kept his most cutting views to himself. Throughout his Presidency, he made a practice of writing caustic letters to his enemies and critics, then tucking them away unsent, steam effectively blown off. Frank recognizes a precious gift to the biographer: a subject who, miraculously and generously, takes the time to write down his innermost feelings and thoughts.

The letters invite counterfactual speculation: What if Truman had sent them? What if he had actually uttered the words out loud? Sometimes it might have been just what the country needed. Truman privately worried that J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. wanted to become an American “Gestapo.” But although Truman engaged in some backroom wrangling with Hoover, he never tried to fire him or hold the F.B.I. to much public account.

Frank’s book is filled with other might-have-beens. Nuclear power might have ended up under military control; radioactive waste might have been deployed as a weapon; the Korean War might have expanded into China. On the domestic front, Truman might have lost the 1948 election, thus making the Chicago Tribune’s famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline a statement of fact rather than a symbol of bad polling. For all the things that happened during Truman’s Presidency, Frank argues, the events that were averted deserve to be part of the historical discussion, too. Above all, the world did not descend into a nuclear-armed Third World War, a prospect that loomed over every minute of Truman’s Presidency and pervades every page of Frank’s book. That may have been Truman’s greatest accomplishment.

In the nearly seventy years since Truman left office, the institutions that he helped to create have had remarkable staying power. naTO, despite repeated challenges to its relevance, endures as the critical military pact of the Western world. Japan and Germany, with the help of American reconstruction funds, developed into prosperous, stable democracies. Even the U.N. is still limping along—not exactly the great peacemaking body of postwar ambitions but certainly more lasting than its predecessor, the League of Nations.

And yet many of today’s most combustible conflicts can be traced back to Truman’s moment as well. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has cited nato expansion as one justification for the war in Ukraine—and it is NATO (b. 1949) that is preparing to mobilize against him. There is talk of a “new Cold War” with China and of the clarifying if dread-laden politics that it might produce—with Taiwan (also b. 1949) as the up-and-coming hot spot. The dictatorship of North Korea, consolidated in part through Truman’s land war, continues to embrace nuclear-weapons development (also very Truman). In outlets such as Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs, insiders wring their hands over the possible collapse of the “liberal international order,” by which they mean the complex of institutions—NATO, the World Bank, the U.N.—erected in the great world-remaking experiments of the nineteen-forties.

Donald Trump, as a candidate and then as President, helped to fuel anxieties that the postwar order was done for at last. Joe Biden has since tried to shore it up, with the help of appointees who would like nothing more than to go down in history as the twenty-first century’s Kennan or Acheson or Marshall. Politically, too, Biden is a bit like Truman: a decent sort, thrust into office at a moment of crisis, and subject to his own foot-in-mouth problems. Like Truman, Biden is facing a Republican Party in thrall to a demagogue. Whether consciously or not, Trump owes much of his big-lie political style to Truman’s great adversary, McCarthy. And Biden, like Truman before him, has been unable to fully dislodge it.

On the whole, though, Republicans and Democrats sort themselves differently from the way they did in Truman’s day. Back then, each party contained a mishmash of views, both liberal and conservative, in contrast with today’s rigid ideological divisions. On the Democratic side, Franklin Roosevelt’s winning coalition stitched together several seemingly incompatible constituencies: liberal élites, industrial workers, the white “Solid South,” and a small but growing number of Black voters. That coalition started to fracture under Truman, when the Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats) broke away from the Party, with South Carolina’s governor, Strom Thurmond, as their standard-bearer. Sixteen years later, Thurmond became one of the first Southern Democrats of national stature to make the leap over to the Republican Party.

A son of border-state Missouri, Truman actually shared many of the Dixiecrats’ racist views. “The Trials of Harry S. Truman” quotes him using the N-word more than once, and notes that he did not believe in interracial marriage or social equality. Frank is inclined to explain Truman, though, rather than cancel him. “Truman was a man with casual prejudices, some that he tried to rid himself of and some that he simply couldn’t,” Frank writes. Indeed, Truman rose above his raising to champion an ambitious racial-justice agenda. His Committee on Civil Rights, created in 1946 following a surge in white-supremacist violence, came out in support of an anti-lynching law, voting rights for Black Americans, and a more robust system of federal enforcement.

For many of us Cold War kids, the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and the battle between capitalism and global Communism were just background conditions of our youth. But in the United States, what we really talked about wasn’t the Soviets or the Communists so much as the “Russians,” conflating the dominant Soviet ethnicity with the whole nation. Though Russians were only 50 percent of the population of the Soviet Union, Russian language and culture dominated the USSR. Despite being the bulwark of international Communism, the Soviet Union, by the time Joseph Stalin led it in the 1930s, was for all practical purposes the heir of the Russian Empire. This is how a prominent Stalin expert could refer to his subject as the “Red Tsar.”

The abstract rivalry between global alliances and ideologies, between First World capitalism, and Second World Communism, was the concrete battle between Americans and Russians. In 1985’s Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago is a towering figure of Russian muscle, the perfect villain for Sylvester Stallone’s plucky American underdog, Rocky Balboa, to face off against and defeat. And a national rivalry was seen as such an eternal condition that the original Star Trek, set centuries in the future, had a Russian character, Pavel Chekov, to indicate a rapprochement between the two great powers.

The Cold War had its ups and downs, but Americans tended to see the American–Russian rivalry as a permanent fact of the geopolitical landscape. Despite Ronald Reagan’s optimistic rhetoric about defeating the “evil empire,” the rapidity of Communism’s collapse and the dissolution of the Soviet Union came as a shock. Almost overnight, “Russia” was no longer a vast nation-state that stretched from Europe to the Pacific, enfolding within its frontiers everything from chunks of Eastern Europe to Afghanistan, but a more modest, albeit still massive, country. “Russia” was finally just Russia. That it was now officially called the Russian Federation was just a footnote.

In the 1990s, Russia faded from the American consciousness, with such occasional newsworthy events as internecine violence during the 1993 constitutional crisis or its 1998 financial collapse. Geopolitically, it was all quiet on the Russian front until the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo, when Boris Yeltsin objected to the West’s move against Serbia, a historical Russian ally. But change was in the air. On December 31 of that year, Yeltsin resigned, and a then-obscure Vladimir Putin became president. Yeltsin had been a reformer during Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, but as the leader of the Russian Federation in the 1990s he oversaw the rise of oligarchs who came to dominate a society riddled with corruption, while the state became a cat’s paw for Western social engineers experimenting with neoliberal economics. Yeltsin’s descent into alcoholism and personal chaos paralleled the hedonistic anarchy of 1990s Russia.

This is the ship of state and society that Putin righted. His suppression of a violent Islamist rebellion in Chechnya—the suppression proving incredibly violent, in turn—his persecution of the oligarchs, and his ideology of a strong and muscular state were viewed in the West as evidence of a sinister turn, an end to our dream of a liberal-democratic Russia. But it wasn’t that simple in Putin’s country. In the West, oligarchs like the late Boris Berezovsky were seen as bulwarks of liberalism and free speech, but Russians widely viewed them as corrupt gangsters plundering public resources with impunity and living above the law. Finally, the reemergence of a strong central state was a shift back to the traditional pattern Russians had known, not some authoritarian innovation suddenly imposed upon a populace that cherished the Rights of Englishmen. Putin waxed in popularity during the 2000s because he brought order and ended chaos for the common people. If he rules until 2030, his tenure will have matched Stalin’s, and he may appreciate the parallel.

Even Americans now acknowledge that in the decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia did not achieve an idyllic end of history. We heard tales of an American-style liberal democracy rising from Communism’s ashes, not the dispiriting mobster rule that Russian citizens were enduring. Signs abounded that the narrative the American public was fed was missing something. I remember in high school wondering how freedom-loving, liberal-democratic Russians could have a life expectancy of 65 in 1994, already four years shorter than in the final years of Communism. If they were so much better off under democracy and capitalism, why were they dying in such numbers? We now know that this decline was largely driven by massive increases in alcoholism among men.

In 2022, Russia’s self-conception is again a matter of importance, and Putin has reclaimed for his nation the geopolitical center stage. He has become a truly reviled figure in the West. But in Russia, he has long had a broad base of support. Even Gorbachev, who ended the Communist order, endorsed Putin in 2007.

In the twentieth century, we tried to understand Russians because of the Soviet Union’s global importance. The study of Russian history and culture was not simply academic during the Cold War. Then, for most of the decades after the fall of Communism, Russia was not of deep interest. The academic field atrophied, and public attention slackened. (Russianist Condoleezza Rice, for example, had to transfer her skills and expertise to grappling with Middle Eastern geopolitics.) In 2012, Barack Obama famously dismissed Mitt Romney’s assertion about the importance of Russia and its threat to American interests. For most twenty-first-century Americans, Russia is simply the land of vodka, models, and oligarchs.

But Russia has made itself matter again. Russian propaganda operations have become entangled in American politics, and broad swaths of the U.S. citizenry now view Putin and the state he heads with loathing. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 unleashed a far more fearsome wave of anti-Russian sentiment. These public responses don’t get us any closer to understanding the crisis in Ukraine. Clearly, we need to update our understanding of Russia and Russians.

The key to Russian self-conception is not to be found in 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nor will the 1917 October Revolution that ushered in the Communist era shed much light. Russia’s origins as a nation go back to the arrival of the Swedish Viking Rurik in the city of Novgorod nearly 1,200 years ago, and the subsequent conquest of Kiev by his sons. Russian identity is deeply rooted in the conversion of his great-grandson, Vladimir, prince of Kiev, to Greek Christianity in 988 AD. The Russian soul retains trauma from the arrival of the Mongol hordes in the 1250s, two centuries that they refer to as the “Tatar Yoke.” Likewise, Russians continue to feel pride in the expansion of the vast Russian Empire, which spanned the continent from Poland to Manchuria by the 1600s.

Putin’s behavior is obviously beyond the pale, but what is one to do after concluding as much? Some lose themselves in the catastrophic footage pouring out of besieged Ukraine in recent weeks. Others develop a deep interest in transliterations from Cyrillic and scold those who find the difference between “Kiev” and “Kyiv” irrelevant. In the end, perhaps one costless gesture is as good as any other. But a closer look at modern genomics can add to our understanding of the last millennium or so of human history across Russia, Ukraine, and their neighbors.

To understand the position of Russians in the context of Eastern Europe and Asia, as well the demographic forces that shaped them and their neighbors, I explored patterns of genetic relatedness across various populations. In one analysis, Poles, Germans, and Ukrainians clustered together. Russians, meantime, were positioned more toward the eastern populations, in keeping with the fact that Russians did spread eastward (and north) from their East Slavic neighbors. This general picture of Russian cosmopolitanism compared with Ukrainians and Poles holds across data sets.

The lack of Ukrainian genetic diversity is no surprise. As Ed West has observed, Ukraine in the nineteenth century was a wholly peasant culture. After centuries of foreign rule, there were no true ethnically Ukrainian cultural, political, or economic elites. Polish and Lithuanian elites had traditionally governed Ukraine, while the region’s conquest by Imperial Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries meant a new era of rule by outsiders. (Catherine the Great, for example, was German.) Nineteenth-century nationalism, an ethos predicated on linguistic affinity and an elite stratum propagating a common literary culture and history, was hampered from the start in Ukraine because Ukraine’s leadership class was ethnically alien. Lithuanians, Latvians, and Finns faced the same problem.

Despite being from the same original stock as their Ukrainian and Polish neighbors, Russians have long been diverse in their origins. In the sixteenth century, Ivan the Terrible quipped that he himself was not even Russian, as his paternal grandmother was Greek, while his mother came from a powerful noble house with Hungarian and Mongol ancestry. My data show a group of ethnic Russians with strong affinities to Tatars. Throughout history, opportunistic steppe-land arrivistes converted to Orthodox Christianity and assimilated into the elite of Muscovy. The first non-Rurikid Tsar, Boris Godunov, hailed from a noble house with Tatar origins, as did Peter the Great’s mother.

Even more numerous than Russians with clear Tatar affinities, however, are those with ties to Finnic populations. The addition of this component to Russian ancestry probably owed to the migration of Slavic peasants and fur traders northward, into the cold taiga forests then occupied by indigenous Finnic tribes. While the relationship between Tatars and Russians has often been violent, the Finnic tribes of the sub-Arctic lands interacted with southerners mostly through trade. In the medieval period, the forested north supplied much of the world’s furs. The depletion of this natural resource spurred the Russian conquest of Siberia and eventual expansion into Alaska. The Russians absorbed and integrated local Finnic populations gradually, out of the limelight of history and through the daily contact of “truck, barter, and exchange.”

If Westerners know any Tsar by name, it is usually the westward-focused Peter the Great, famous for dragging Russia into the community of European nations. Before Peter, the Russian Empire looked (and expanded) eastward, rather than west. But this had not always been the case with the East Slavic world. The rulers of eleventh-century Kievan Rus cultivated marital alliances with Western European powers.

What changed Russia—severing the world of Kievan Rus from the West—was the Mongol conquest of the 1250s and the subsequent Tatar Yoke under the Golden Horde. Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith has referred to the Russian Empire that emerged in the sixteenth century as a successor state of the Mongol Empire. The rulers of Moscow retained their ancestral language and religion, but their participation in the political games of the steppe (including intermarriage with Genghis Khan’s Golden Family) transformed them.

Meantime, the southwestern portion of Kievan Rus, the old heartland, was put on a different path. The Mongols conquered Kiev in 1240 but lost it in 1362 to the Lithuanians at the Battle of Blue Waters. In 1385, the Grand Duke Jogaila, the ruler of Lithuania, converted to Western Latin Christianity as he unified his duchy with the Kingdom of Poland. This established a firm divide between the territories held by Poland–Lithuania and those dominated by the Orthodox rulers of Muscovy. While Kiev remained officially under Poland–Lithuania until 1667, the nascent Russian Empire focused on swallowing up the Golden Horde’s successor states, thrusting eastward into Siberia on a scale that makes Manifest Destiny seem quaint. In 1689, the Treaty of Nerchinsk established the border between the Chinese Empire of the Qing and the Russians in the Amur valley region. The drive to the east came to an end only when the Russians ran out of land at the Pacific.

Unlike Ukraine or Poland, Russia is a vast and diverse land that transcends ecologies and continents. Russians draw from the same roots as the Belarusians and the Ukrainians. But over the centuries they became a Eurasian-inflected people who were assimilative, absorptive, and expansive, ruling a cosmopolitan empire-state, as attested by the 1915 construction of a Tibetan Buddhist temple in St. Petersburg.

Russia and Ukraine have many similarities, both superficially and substantively, but politically comparing them is a category error. At the United Nations, they are both present as nation-states, but the Russian Federation is a multiethnic and multireligious empire, the heir to the Russia of the Tsars. Putin’s long-time girlfriend is a woman of Tatar Muslim background who converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 2003, a classic case in a long history of mixing between Russians and people from the Turkic steppe. Russia inherits a tumultuous history with disparate threads that stretch back more than 1,000 years. Ukraine, in contrast, is a self-made nation, new to the world in this form. It is a twenty-first-century heir to nineteenth-century European linguistic nationalism, its elites’ sensibilities being forged through existential conflict with Russia and alliance with the West, as they consciously abandon the Russian language they were taught in schools in favor of Ukrainian.

In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin reiterated his position that Ukraine was simply part of historic Russia, with shared roots going back to Kievan Rus and no history of independent political existence. It is true that Ukraine is a new nation-state, analogous to modern Finland or Lithuania, both of which had been ruled by ethnically exogenous elites for centuries. But Putin conveniently ignores that modern Ukrainians share one thing with many of their western neighbors that Russians do not: they are not an imperial people. After the chaos of World War I, numerous small-to-medium-size states were carved out of the interstices between the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and Ukraine resembles these more than it does the hulking Russian Federation to its north and east. An entity being new in the world does not make it any less real. Putin may be wishfully conflating antiquity with authenticity.

Putin’s often-quixotic espousal of Eurasianism reflects a stubborn historical strand that has marked the modern Russian soul. Despite its strong ethnic, linguistic, and religious commonalities with Russia, Ukraine faces west. Its national identity has never stood athwart two continents. Perhaps it is not surprising in hindsight that twentieth-century global Communism, with its multiethnic, imperial aspirations, was headquartered in Soviet Russia. Despite the prediction of orthodox Marxism that it should naturally emerge in the capitalist West, the twentieth century’s most imperial ideology gained purchase in the domains of the Russian Empire.

Though at their root, Russians may be both genetically and culturally European, history has forged Russia into a civilization-state with a constitutive imperial ambition that will always clash with the more modest, cooperative aspirations of other peoples and nations. Perhaps it was not quite inevitable, but where we find ourselves today should not surprise us. History may not be clockwork, but we can count on the past to echo long into the future. It’s up to us whether we choose to listen.

Top Photo by Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images

The world was slow to recognize long COVID as one of the most serious consequences of the coronavirus. Six months into the pathogen’s tear across the globe, SARS-CoV-2 was still considered an acute airway infection that would spark a weeks-long illness at most; anyone who experienced symptoms for longer could be expected to be dismissed by droves of doctors. Now long COVID is written into CDC and WHO documents; it makes a cameo in the newest version of President Joe Biden’s National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan.But for all we know now about long COVID, it is still not enough. Researchers still don’t know who’s most at risk, or how long the condition might last; whether certain variants might cause it more frequently, or the extent to which vaccines might sweep it away. We do not have a way to fully prevent it. We do not have a way to cure it. We don’t even have a way to really quantify it: There still isn’t consensus on how common long COVID actually is. Its danger feels both amorphous and unavoidable. People already struggle to deal with well-known risks, let alone fuzzy, slippery ones. “You can be too afraid of what you don’t understand or just say, ‘It’s not well defined; I’m not going to think about it,’” says Erin Sanders, a nurse practitioner and clinical scientist at MIT. Concern, when we let it, can act like a gas. It expands to fill the space we give it.[Read: How did this many deaths become normal?]This is a precarious position to be in with long COVID, as enthusiasm for pandemic precautions is crumbling. The Biden administration recently reinforced its stance on which COVID-19 outcomes matter most: Since we can’t stave off all infections, we’re shifting our focus to hospitalizations and deaths, a well-defined pair of metrics that we know we can prevent. Where does long COVID—a condition that can spin out of infections of all severities—fit in? “It doesn’t,” says Hannah Davis, of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who has long COVID.But even if long COVID’s prevalence turns out to be a single-digit percentage of SARS-CoV-2 infections—proportionally much smaller than most experts estimate—in absolute terms “that is not small,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, the director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. Millions of people have already developed long COVID; many of them, an untold fraction, have not recovered. This is the challenge of chronic illness: When people join its ranks, they do not always exit. With each new case of long COVID, the virus’s burden balloons.“I worry, now that everyone is moving to the post-pandemic world, we’re going to sweep all these patients under the rug,” Al-Aly told me. Long COVID struggled to gain a toehold in the national consciousness; now it threatens to be one of the first major COVID impacts to slip back into the margins.Researchers have known for many months that long COVID is more a category than a monolith. Al-Aly very roughly likens it to the way we talk about cancer—an umbrella term for diseases that are related but that require distinct diagnoses and treatments. Long COVID has hundreds of possible symptoms. It can batter the brain, the heart, the lungs, the gut, all of the above, or none of the above. The condition can start from a silent infection, an ICU-caliber case, or anything in between. It can begin days, weeks, or months after the virus first infects someone, and its severity can fluctuate over time. “We lump all of that into one broad thing,” Al-Aly said. “It is not.”The condition’s root causes, accordingly, are also diverse. In some cases, long COVID may be collateral damage from the war waged between virus and immune system; in others, it might sprout out of a chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection or, conversely, a quick viral encounter that sets bodily systems on the fritz. These hypotheses aren’t comprehensive or mutually exclusive: There are only so many ways for bodies to run smoothly, and infinite ways to throw those processes out of whack.All of this means that even diagnosing long COVID—an essential step toward understanding it—is still a battle. We don’t have a clear-cut, consensus clinical definition, a single name for the condition, or a standardized set of tests to catch it. Even the CDC and the WHO can’t agree on how long a person must be sick before they meet the condition’s criteria. Some researchers and health-care providers favor one agency’s definition; others, dissatisfied with both, come up with their own. And “there are still doctors out there that do not think long COVID exists,” says Alexandra Yonts, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital, in Washington, D.C. That makes researching the condition fraught, and studies less uniform. Davis, of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, says many efforts are peppered with problems that misrepresent long COVID’s burden. Some studies miss cases because they omit many of the condition’s most common symptoms, for instance, or because they exclude the many long-haulers whose illness comes and goes. Others can botch the numbers when they neglect to include information about long-haulers’ baseline health before infection, or when they fail to establish good control groups of uninfected and infected people who don’t go on to develop long COVID’s chronic symptoms. Too many studies, Davis told me, have “inadvertently included COVID-infected people in their negative control groups” because they rely on fallible tests that can’t adequately determine who’s actually caught the virus.[Read: Long haulers are fighting for their future]In an ideal experimental world, to understand long COVID’s risks, researchers would systematically survey large swaths of the population over long periods of time, watching to see who gets infected, who goes on to develop the condition, what form it takes, and how it impacts people’s health, says Shruti Mehta, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who is studying long COVID. But few institutions have the resources for such an undertaking, which could span many months or years. So many researchers have to make do with the limited data sets that are already available to them. As a result, some studies end up biased toward patients who were hospitalized, while others wind up favoring people who have the time, means, and trust in the health-care system to sign up for long-term studies. Neither group fully captures long COVID’s wide-ranging toll. The situation’s especially tough for pediatric patients, who might be too young to articulate the severity of their symptoms and are often excluded from long-COVID studies. Long COVID certainly exists in kids, but it may not perfectly mirror what goes on in adults: Children’s susceptibility to the virus is different, and their bodies are so rapidly changing, says Yonts, who runs a pediatric-long-COVID clinic in D.C.All told, the study of long COVID has become, as Sanders of MIT puts it, “a data disaster.” Some researchers estimate that a single-digit percentage of SARS-CoV-2 infections bloom into long COVID; Al-Aly is one of them. Others, meanwhile, favor larger numbers, with a few even insisting that the rates are actually more than half. Most of the experts I spoke with said they feel comfortable working in the 10 to 30 percent range, which is where many studies seem to be starting to converge. Finding one answer is tricky, without knowing how many forms long COVID can take—some could be more common than others. Formally splitting the disease into subdivisions could help address some of these ambiguities. But we don’t know nearly enough to start slicing and dicing, says Bryan Lau, an infectious-disease epidemiologist working with Mehta and Priya Duggal.[Read: Even health-care workers with long COVID are being dismissed]If researchers aren’t comprehensively capturing who currently has long COVID, they can’t say for certain who’s most likely to get it either. Many researchers have found that women contract long COVID more frequently than men. Others have uncovered evidence that people who end up infected with gobs of the coronavirus, or who produce antibodies that attack the body’s own tissues, also seem to tilt toward long COVID. Chronic health issues, including diabetes, could up a person’s chances of getting sick and staying sick as well. So might a lingering Epstein-Barr virus infection. But some of these trends are still being confirmed, experts told me, and the extent to which they toggle risk up or down isn’t known. And it’s definitely too early to pinpoint any of these factors as long-COVID causes. “For acute COVID, we know what the risk factors are,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist studying long COVID at Yale, told me. “For long COVID, it’s much less clear.”Still, a couple of other variables feel a bit more nailed down. “The risk is high in people who need hospitalization or ICU care,” Al-Aly said. Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, says she’s fairly confident that the nature of a person’s exposure to SARS-CoV-2 plays a role as well: Heavier and more frequent viral encounters seem to tip the scales toward symptoms that last and last. That’s a concern for people in essential occupations, who “aren’t able to shield themselves,” she told me.If these last few factors directly affect how and whether long COVID unspools, vaccination—which reliably staves off hospitalization and, to a lesser degree, infection—could be a partial preventive. Several studies have shown that shots do seem to muzzle long-COVID rates. (Other interventions that lower exposure also help: masks, distancing, ventilation.) They don’t, however, eliminate long COVID’s odds. To date, experts have yet to find any demographic that has been spared from the condition, despite persistent myths that certain groups, particularly kids, are somehow immune. “We’ve seen it in children of all ages,” says Laura Malone, a pediatric neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, in Baltimore. Some of her patients are toddlers. The virus isn’t pulling any punches either. Every iteration we’ve encountered so far, Omicron included, seems capable of causing long COVID. “No one is not at risk,” Al-Aly said.To this day, most countries do not keep a running tally of long-COVID cases. But ballparks of the burden are staggering. Some 2 percent of all U.K. residents—not just those with documented infections—might currently have long COVID, according to the Office for National Statistics. Another analysis estimates that up to 23 million Americans have developed the condition since the pandemic’s start. More will join them. But Davis worries that those numbers will continue to be left off of national dashboards, and thus out of the public eye. Now that the federal government has tightened the boundaries of its concern to hospitalizations and deaths, the public does not even really have to look away from the national perspective on long COVID: There is next to nothing to see.As people rack up different combinations of shots and infections with different variants, what worsens or soothes long COVID is also getting harder to understand. Many of the experts I’ve spoken with over the past two years have told me that while they think long COVID is essential to study, it’s too complex for them to want to tackle themselves. Meanwhile, long COVID remains the pandemic’s looming specter. We are told there is risk, but not exactly how much; we are told that avoiding long COVID would be ideal, but lack the practical guidance to do so—the virus is so widespread that eventual infection, for many people, feels almost inevitable.At the same time, as researchers look deeper and deeper into the bodies of infected people, they’re only seeing more damage. With each passing month, more studies emerge documenting how the coronavirus alters the function of vital organs such as the heart and the brain. The public has been cultured to think that most SARS-CoV-2 infections are trivial, and the repercussions brief, especially for the young, healthy, and privileged. But long COVID breaks the binary of severe and mild. “It’s going to continue to affect people, even people who are protected from severe illness during the acute phase of infection,” Michael Peluso, an infectious-disease physician and long-COVID researcher at UC San Francisco, told me.[Read: The Biden administration killed America’s collective pandemic approach]No matter where the true numbers on long-COVID risk sit, they are too large to ignore. “Whether it’s 10 percent or 50 percent, at both levels you have to do something about it,” Gurdasani said. Statistics will help sharpen and clarify the condition’s boundaries, and are still worth seeking out. They will not, however, change long COVID’s threat, at its core.Davis, who is nearing her second anniversary of developing long COVID, feels this deeply. She is still experiencing cognitive dysfunction and memory loss. Her heart still races when she stands. “You cannot live your life like you used to,” she told me. “Your life just becomes this shell.” For individuals, for societies, “this is not going away.” Even after much of the world puts the pandemic in its rearview, long COVID will keep filling hospitals and clinics. It will dot the pages of scientific texts, and linger in the bodies of millions of people worldwide. Hospitalizations and ICU admissions are not the only COVID outcomes that can buckle a health-care system.That strain is already being felt by the health-care workers on long COVID’s front lines. Yonts, the Children’s National pediatrician, told me that she’s currently booking patients “out to Memorial Day.” COVID’s global crisis can, in some ways, end when we decide to treat it as done. But that is not an option for a growing fraction of the planet, who cannot put COVID fully behind them. “This is going to be the pandemic after the pandemic,” Gurdasani said.

       Putin’s dangerous nuclear doctrine: A license to kill   Jamie McIntyre  March 10, 11:00 PM March 10, 11:00 PM  Maine Sen. Angus King is one of many Kremlin-watchers unnerved by the Russian president’s increasingly mercurial behavior and nuclear saber-rattling. “Vladimir Putin today is the most dangerous man in the world,” says King, “perhaps the most dangerous man in the history of the world, because he has this blind ambition to reunite the greater Russia at the same time he's sitting on one of the world's great nuclear arsenals.” Since the days of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have successfully deterred a third world war between major powers via the principle of “mutually assured destruction” — the idea that any nuclear attack would trigger a devastating counterstrike and, potentially, an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration. Indeed in January, Russia joined fellow nuclear weapons states China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in declaring “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But under Russia’s 2014 military doctrine, Putin sees a role in using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons, so-called battlefield nukes, to raise the stakes so high that the other side folds. “They actually have a doctrine called "escalate to de-escalate,” says King. “That means using tactical nuclear weapons if they're losing on the battlefield. And Vladimir Putin has made clear that this is something that he considers to be in his arsenal.” Putin’s not contemplating a full-blown nuclear exchange with the U.S. Rather, his doctrine envisions a one-time coup de grace intended to shock the U.S. into capitulation rather than risk an escalation that could imperil the planet. It’s a nuclear doctrine “different from anyone else in the world,” says King, “where they discuss openly the option of using tactical nuclear weapons in a conventional war setting.” “The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it,” says Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied Putin for decades. In an interview last month in Politico, Hill made headlines with her take on Putin: “Every time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.” “If anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again,” said Hill, who was a Russia expert on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump. “There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine,” Hill said, which is “unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin.” In a Feb. 24 speech, Putin warned that any interference with his military operations in Ukraine “from the outside” would be met with consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history” — widely seen as code for a limited nuclear strike, but which could also be interpreted as the threat of massive cyber warfare. And in case his veiled threat wasn’t clear enough, Putin ordered high-profile nuclear exercises and put his nuclear forces on “special alert status,” a term unfamiliar to U.S. intelligence. “They see nuclear weapons as a normal extension of a conventional conflict,” former Supreme NATO Commander retired Gen. Philip Breedlove told the CBS news program 60 Minutes in 2016. “To them, the use of nuclear weapons is not unthinkable.” To that end, Putin has developed a small arsenal of low-yield mini-nukes and other “non-strategic” weapons for which the U.S. has no counterpart. “We know that Russia is in development of Skyfall, which is a nuclear orbiting weapon; Poseidon, which is an undersea, unmanned nuclear weapon that is supposed to pop up on the shores of a nation like the United States and attack our cities; and Vanguard with its hypersonic missiles, which are already deployed,” said Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, at a March 8 hearing on “Worldwide Threats.” “Putin has invested very wisely in these niche weapons,” testified Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. “I believe that he thinks that gives him an asymmetric advantage, and he's also invested in tactical nuclear weapons.” “I also believe that when he says something, we should listen very, very carefully and maybe take him at his word.” If cornered, Putin is gambling that he could use a “mini-nuke” to, say, take out an airfield, an aircraft carrier, or an entire tank division, and the U.S., being the responsible nuclear power, would be unwilling to unleash Armageddon in response. That very scenario was the impetus during the Trump administration for equipping America’s ballistic submarine fleet with a “low-yield” version of the W-76 warhead that sits atop a Trident intercontinental ballistic missile. The result was not a new nuclear weapon, but a less powerful version of an old one — intended to signal Putin that the U.S. could retaliate to a tactical strike with a similar smaller-scale nuclear response. The Biden administration was putting the finishing touches on its new nuclear strategy when Russia invaded Ukraine and was reportedly considering eliminating the low-yield weapon and canceling a sea-launched cruise missile version. That would be a harder sell now that Putin has shown he can play his nuclear trump card without ever having to show his hand. In August 1990, when Saddam Hussein rolled his tanks into Kuwait and declared the Gulf state was historically Iraq’s “19th province,” U.S. President George H.W. Bush famously declared, “This will not stand.” And it didn’t. Now more than 30 years later, in 2022, President Joe Biden has been effectively deterred from making any military moves that might risk triggering Putin’s reckless side, in part because the longtime Russian leader is displaying just the right degree of crazy. Whether or not it’s a bluff, Putin’s “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine has been scary enough to keep the U.S. and NATO from going toe-to-toe with the Russians in a no-fly zone over Ukraine. A week into the invasion, the Pentagon scrubbed a long-scheduled test of a Minuteman-III intercontinental ballistic missile to avoid any chance that Russia could see it as somehow provocative. Republicans in Congress were quick to deride the move, arguing it plays into Putin’s perceived ability to engage in nuclear blackmail. “There's nothing escalatory about long-standing, long-scheduled, routine tests that Russia knows about in advance,” said Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton at a Senate hearing on U.S. nuclear policy. "It's just another example of how we have mistaken actions that would have de-escalated this situation rather than escalated it.” Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

This mission becomes especially urgent when it comes to speech varieties with origins in colonialism and imperialism, created by subordinated, often nonwhite people under various conditions of forced labor or social isolation. In many cases, under conditions like these, adults (as opposed to children, who start learning a language from birth) learned additional languages quickly and without formal instruction, and filled out what they learned with aspects of their native languages, and a good bit of sheer creativity, to fashion something brand-new: creole languages, as linguists call them. These new ways of speaking usually discarded much of the older language’s random material (which any language accretes over time) that is harder for adults to learn and not necessary to communication, anyway. A creole language doesn’t present you with long lists of conjugational endings or randomly assign genders to inanimate objects because many languages worldwide do not, and a language need not. But even when a language doesn’t do these things, it still has a great many rules to pick up, its own grammar, tens of thousands of words and specific ways that sounds are shaped and sentences are intoned. In other words, it’s full human language.

Yet this (rather efficient) shedding of the bric-a-brac, plus the creole’s being spoken by subaltern people, has encouraged a sense of it as a mere “broken” version of an older language. It often distracts even the speakers of these varieties themselves. While there has been, of late, a movement advocating recognition of Jamaican Patois as an official language, experts on the variety are perpetually frustrated by a general misimpression, especially beyond the academy and the arts, that Patois is just broken English, a bad habit.

But one way we know that languages like this are indeed languages is that you can write a detailed grammatical description of each of them, full of complex rules (and exceptions) mapping out how to pronounce words, add tense to verbs, put sentences together, convey nuance — just as in grammatical descriptions of languages such as Ukrainian that aren’t creoles but have suffered similar disrespect.

This brings to my mind Black English. It is a dialect of English rather than a separate language — while Standard English speakers may miss some of it when spoken rapidly, for the most part, they readily comprehend Black English. But traditionally, it has been seen as English gone wrong, just as Jamaican Patois has. The differences between Black English and Standard English are due in large part to the fact that it formed under circumstances like the ones that produced many creoles. Adult learners had a lot to do with its creation, and as such, it let go of some of Standard English’s unneeded bells and whistles, the absence of which is often presented in a way that inadvertently oversimplifies, even diminishes, Black English.

For instance, in various sources providing guidance for teaching reading to kids who speak Black English at home, you encounter the same stock examples showing how Black English relaxes standard English rules: You’ll see the comparison “col’” vs. “cold” show up in more than one place to explain that for some words, the final consonant sound is dropped. You’ll see a basic explanation that the verb “to be” is often superfluous — “she my sister” instead of “she is my sister” and so on.

I’m writing this from Skopje, North Macedonia, where I’ve been for the last week teaching one of our Leadership Academy for Development courses. Following the Ukraine war is no different here in terms of available information, except that I’m in an adjacent time zone, and the fact that there is more support for Putin in the Balkans than in other parts of Europe. A lot of the latter is due to Serbia, and Serbia's hosting of Sputnik.I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications:Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north; the Russians are doing better in the south, but those positions would be hard to maintain if the north collapses.There is no diplomatic solution to the war possible prior to this happening. There is no conceivable compromise that would be acceptable to both Russia and Ukraine given the losses they have taken at this point.The United Nations Security Council has proven once again to be useless. The only helpful thing was the General Assembly vote, which helps to identify the world’s bad or prevaricating actors.The Biden administration’s decisions not to declare a no-fly zone or help transfer Polish MiGs were both good ones; they've kept their heads during a very emotional time. It is much better to have the Ukrainians defeat the Russians on their own, depriving Moscow of the excuse that NATO attacked them, as well as avoiding all the obvious escalatory possibilities. The Polish MiGs in particular would not add much to Ukrainian capabilities. Much more important is a continuing supply of Javelins, Stingers, TB2s, medical supplies, comms equipment, and intel sharing. I assume that Ukrainian forces are already being vectored by NATO intelligence operating from outside Ukraine.The cost that Ukraine is paying is enormous, of course. But the greatest damage is being done by rockets and artillery, which neither MiGs nor a no-fly zone can do much about. The only thing that will stop the slaughter is defeat of the Russian army on the ground.Putin will not survive the defeat of his army. He gets support because he is perceived to be a strongman; what does he have to offer once he demonstrates incompetence and is stripped of his coercive power?The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.The war to this point has been a good lesson for China. Like Russia, China has built up seemingly high-tech military forces in the past decade, but they have no combat experience. The miserable performance of the Russian air force would likely be replicated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which similarly has no experience managing complex air operations. We may hope that the Chinese leadership will not delude itself as to its own capabilities the way the Russians did when contemplating a future move against Taiwan.Hopefully Taiwan itself will wake up as to the need to prepare to fight as the Ukrainians have done, and restore conscription. Let’s not be prematurely defeatist.Turkish drones will become bestsellers.A Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.

Jennifer Grey and Lea Thompson in Red Dawn (1984).Hi,Quinnipiac released a much-discussed poll that has some troubling findings. Apparently, a lot of Americans, particularly younger ones, said that if America were invaded by Russia the way Ukraine is now, they wouldn’t stay and fight. From the summary:As the world witnesses what is happening to Ukraine, Americans were asked what they would do if they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country? A majority (55 percent) say they would stay and fight, while 38 percent say they would leave the country. Republicans say 68—25 percent and independents say 57—36 percent they would stay and fight, while Democrats say 52—40 percent they would leave the country.Among 18-34 year olds, more people say they would leave (48 percent) than stay (45 percent). Now, I’m with Charlie Cooke and others who are fairly disgusted by this, and I agree with Charlie’s argument for why we should be disgusted by it.But I don’t believe any of it. If America were invaded, I’m sure that many of the people who say they’d “stay and fight” would be packing their bags for a refugee center in Mexico or Canada. And I’m sure many of the people who say they’d bug out would be sticking around to make Ivan pay. Yes, I’m saying that some tough-talking dudes with “these colors don’t run” bumper stickers would be high-tailing it out of here, and some snowflake soy boys would be ambushing Russian convoys in northern Michigan.I don’t say this because of any hidden admiration for the soy boys or animosity for the good ol’ ones. I’m just saying that humans respond to reality differently than they respond to hypotheticals. As renowned social-psychologist Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

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A few days after I first spoke with Cornel West, one of the preëminent public philosophers in America for three decades now, he gave a short, impromptu interview to the gossip-and-celebrity-news outlet TMZ. West was in Los Angeles, at the Sunset Plaza mall, and a TMZ reporter, recognizing him, asked for his thoughts on a comment made by Kanye West, who had recently insisted that Black History Month should be forever changed to “Black Future Month.” Kanye’s notion was that we’ve talked enough about slavery and the sundry other horrors of the past. “Ohhh, Kanye’s wrong,” West—Cornel, that is—told TMZ. “Every performance is the authorizing of a future, in the midst of the present, trying to recover the best of the past,” he said, rattling off the tripartite thought quickly and with high animation, as if he’d practiced it many times before, waiting for just this moment. “You get that in Kanye’s music, but you don’t get it in his rhetoric. There’s a sense in which his artistry is much more profound than his rhetoric.” The second time he said “rhetoric,” West forced his voice into a half-melodic and fully ironic sigh that he sometimes uses to punctuate a funny phrase. In answer to Kanye, and to others who might harbor the fantasy of a purely futuristic Blackness, West said that “as long as white supremacy’s around, you’re going to have the need to stress Black love, Black dignity, Black history—those things that are being excluded and rendered silent!”

The quick tabloid-media encounter served as a neat encapsulation of what makes West’s career and comportment unique. He is a product, and a longtime inhabitant, of the academy, having taught in tenured positions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Union Seminary. But he has made it a point of pride to apply his analysis to popular culture and, on occasion, to do so in popular forums. After writing academic manifestos such as “Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity” (1982), he achieved a new degree of fame with “Race Matters,” from 1993, a collection of self-consciously populist essays addressing such hot-button topics as the Rodney King riots, affirmative action, and Black-Jewish relations. More recently, he joined the online adult-education behemoth MasterClass to teach a course on philosophy. In both 2016 and 2020, he served as a tireless surrogate for Bernie Sanders’s Presidential campaign, delivering stem-winders across the country.

When we spoke, he was in California, preparing to return to New York to resume teaching at Union Seminary, the place where he started his teaching career, in 1977. Last year, West got into a dispute with Harvard, where he had been a tenured professor more than a decade earlier, about receiving tenure again; he ultimately resigned, and used the occasion to comment on the “decline and decay” and “spiritual bankruptcy” in élite academia. The pointed note, addressed to his Harvard dean, opened in a cordial way: “I hope and pray you and your family are well! This summer is a scorcher!” It was characteristic of West, who often begins conversations that way, allowing them to radiate outward from the personal and the near at hand. He started our chat by asking after my family, and then about a book I’m writing, about R. & B. music—which I’d mentioned, over e-mail, in a brazen bit of brownnosing, since West, in his rollicking lectures, uses music (John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Curtis Mayfield, and on and on) as a symbol and a model for his ruminations on religion, politics, and race. The rest of our conversation seemed to proceed under the awning of that warm familiarity, as we discussed the crisis in secular confidence, the meaning of public philosophy, the seeming convergence of radical and reactionary attitudes toward American interventionism, and many other things. We spoke twice: once, at length, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and once, briefly, afterward. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Cornel West: How’re your loved ones, man?

Everybody’s good, thank God. It’s just trying to keep track of everybody, you know?

No, I hear you. Brother, you’re writing a book on rhythm and blues, man?

Yes, sir.

Jesus.

Well, it’s still coming together. I’m finishing up a novel first. I’m just, right now, deep in research, and thinking about—I mean, a lot of the things that you talk about: how R. & B. is love music, that it’s about bringing together communities.

Absolutely, man. Oh, that’s beautiful. And what is your novel about?

Well, as a young man, I worked on the Obama campaign—I actually met you while I was doing that.

Is that right? Which city, which town?

In New York. I was on the fund-raising team, and you did an event for Obama at the Apollo.

Oh, I remember that.

I was backstage, and you greeted me very warmly. Of course, I was the youngest and meekest person around. But I’ve never forgotten that. The book is about a young man working on a Presidential campaign and thinking about his religion and his changing ideas about politics and the country—things like that.

And where were you born and raised and reared, my brother?

I was born in New York City. My parents met at a Baptist church. My dad was a musician. My mom was a singer in the choir, and he was a choir director and organ player.

Wow. Which church was it?

White Rock Baptist Church, on a Hundred and Twenty-seventh.

Oh, that’s Ashford and Simpson.

Ashford and Simpson, that’s right. A lot of my mom’s friends knew them very well.

Lord. You got so much nobility coming out of White Rock, man.

All the time, when I was a kid, somebody would show up on the TV and my mom would say, “You know they came to White Rock and sang.” Have you visited there a lot?

I mean, I’ve been there, but I just remember reading all of the works on Nickolas and Val. And, when we finally met, we did a special thing at—I think it was the Schomburg or the Apollo, I can’t remember. Both of them were working with Maya Angelou.

Working with her on what?

A big album together. And when I did an interview with Maya Angelou, she brought ’em there. And so I finally got a chance to meet ’em. We all went out, we went to a club, we danced. Matter of fact, I asked Nick, I said, “Man, I just want to be very respectful of things, but you think it’s all right to dance with Val? I know she’s a free woman and everything, but just want to let you know. It’s just a dance, man. She’s so beautiful.” “Oh, man. Go on out there and do your thing, brother. Go and do your thing.” Me and Val got out there, and, brother, it was a Baryshnikov kind of thing, you know?

She danced you off the floor?

We both danced, man. “I didn’t know you danced like that. You brought things out in Val.” I said, “Man, I was trying to just hang with it. Because Val got so much style, it just oozes out every second.”

It’s funny—during the Bernie campaign, there were several videos of you really getting it in on the dance floor.

Is that right? See, you got me—I didn’t even remember. I remember I was dancing with Sister Nina one time.

I think that might have been it.

Yeah. I remember. That’s true.

This is your second stint at Union. Does it feel different being in a specifically religious environment, as opposed to Harvard, a secular space? Does that change the way you approach not only your teaching but your public presentation?

In many ways, no doubt, because a sense of vocation is a given at Union—people have a deep sense of calling. Everybody’s not Christian: we got Buddhists, we got Jews, we’ve got Hindus, and so forth. But they do have a deep sense of vocation, whereas at Harvard you got a site of formation of professional managers. And so they’re tied to profession, but not as much the vocation—they’re tied to career, not as much to calling. But my sense of vocation and my sense of calling is the same no matter where and what I’m doing. It could be at Harvard, Union, White House, crack house, our mama’s house. You know what I mean?

But at Union, because it’s taken for granted, I’m able to be much more forthright. Because, when you’re in a liberal educational space, it’s good to let folk know where you’re coming from, but you don’t really have the kind of thick, prophetic Christian or revolutionary Christian orientation all the time. You’re one voice among a whole host of other voices in that secular space. And that makes a difference.

Do seminary students, in your observation, these days, feel cowed, or more embattled? They’re entering a world that might be less receptive to the fruits of their training.

I started teaching at Union in 1977. At that time, the secular was much more elevated, and was much more prominent. The secular has taken tremendous wounds and bruises in the last thirty years, because commodification is almost taking it over—and so, when you think of the secular, you don’t think right away of scientific authority, scientific breakthroughs. When you think of the secular these days, you think of careerism, opportunism, hedonism, egoism, individualism—and the ways in which science seems to be driven by corporate greed, seems to be moving toward the explosion of the planet or the collapse of the environment. So that the secular has a very different resonance now than it did in ’77. It’s almost as if everybody recognizes the spiritual decay and the moral decrepitude of the culture. And then the question becomes, Well, what blame do we give to religious institutions for accommodating to the empire, accommodating to capitalism, accommodating to white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, accommodating to anti-Jewish, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, or anti-Palestinian orientation?

Know your desire framework, understand your partner’s

Although desire is highly variable (from person to person and even day to day), sex researchers recognise that people can broadly be placed into two categories based on how they tend to become aroused – spontaneous vs responsive. Inevitably, in many relationships, one partner is generally in a spontaneous (also known as highly reactive) desire framework, while the other partner may often be in a responsive (also known as deliberative) desire framework. Becoming more aware of these differences in your relationship is a useful first step toward reigniting passions. The following descriptions will give you an idea of which camp you fall in:

Do you tend to always initiate sex? If so, it’s quite possible your experience of sexual desire is clear, palpable and forthright. You experience a sexual cue, which metabolises very quickly into arousal to create a strong subjective feeling of desire. This is what’s known as spontaneous desire , and it’s what we see everywhere in the media: two strangers make eye contact across the room, cut to them passionately ripping each other’s clothes off; sex on the beach; sex in a stairwell. Spontaneous desire is passion unbridled. Desire is depicted as a need, a craving, a wanting, a drive, an urge that’s easily triggered.

, and it’s what we see everywhere in the media: two strangers make eye contact across the room, cut to them passionately ripping each other’s clothes off; sex on the beach; sex in a stairwell. Spontaneous desire is passion unbridled. Desire is depicted as a need, a craving, a wanting, a drive, an urge that’s easily triggered. But many people don’t experience desire in a spontaneous or highly reactive manner. If you’re in this category, desire for you doesn’t have an instant onset; getting in the mood happens gradually. Desire isn’t the first thing you feel, it’s more like the second, third or fourth down the line. If you’re someone with this more responsive-desire framework, it can take multiple prompts unfolding over time to generate arousal, and you need to be in a context in which exciters are high and inhibitors are low.

Misunderstandings can easily arise when partners have different desire frameworks: spontaneous-desire partners may be wondering why they’re always initiating and not feeling their desire reciprocated, and the responsive person might wonder why their partner isn’t more concerned about the background context, such as romance, emotional connection or the effects of stress and anxiety. Those in a responsive-desire framework are much more vulnerable to the effects of stressors (both situational and global). Ideally, you and partner will work together to create a shared framework, one in which the spontaneous-desire partner manages their arousal while the responsive-desire partner expresses a willingness to cultivate arousal.

The ‘willingness window’ is a homework assignment I often give couples, which involves them scheduling a window of time (usually 20-30 minutes) in which they agree to show up regardless of their own desire and to engage in some sort of arousal-generating activity to see if responsive desire emerges. I don’t expect couples to show up at the scheduled time with both partners brimming with desire, but I do ask them to show up with the willingness to engage. Some people balk at the idea of scheduling sex – they think it should just happen spontaneously – but when one partner is in a responsive-desire framework (which is often the case), sex needs to be more deliberate. If you and/or your partner are both in the responsive framework, you will need to work together to create a context in which any inhibitors are pushed aside so the exciters can take over. This also means talking about what exciters are going to create a runway into arousal. Try to schedule two willingness windows a week, with one window focusing on an activity that is physical/sensual in nature (a massage, for example, or making out) and the other window centred around an activity that is more psychological in nature. Speaking of which…

Generate mind-based arousal

I’ve mentioned a few times the importance of generating psychological arousal as well as physical. Most couples I work with want to do this, but they often don’t know how. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do it, face-to-face and side-by-side. Face-to-face arousal involves activities such as sharing a fantasy, role-playing a sexy scenario, engaging in sexual power dynamics – activities that can be done between two people with just their imaginations.

But that’s easier said than done. With so much shame and inhibition around sex, generating face-to-face arousal takes willingness, vulnerability and courage. So, I suggest you start out by trying the other way. A side-by-side experience is less pressured, such as: reading some literary erotica aloud together, listening to a sexy podcast, or watching ‘ethical porn’ (the kind where the performers actually want to be there – see the Links & Books section at the end of this Guide for some suggestions).

Remember Jonathan and Chris? In one of our counselling sessions, Chris revealed that he fantasises about dominating Jonathan in roleplay. This piqued Jonathan’s interest and he admitted that he fantasises about being ‘arrested by a hot cop’ and getting ‘interrogated’ and body-searched in every imaginable nook and cranny. Chris said he would be totally into that, yet neither of them felt ready yet to dive in face-to-face. So I encouraged them to start with a side-by-side approach, to watch some ethical porn together that explored the scenario, and later, only once they were ready to transition to face-to-face, I encouraged them to go get some costumes and accessories, and give the roleplay a whirl. It took a lot of reassurance from me for them to move forward, but what ensued was the beginning of a reparative journey in their shared sex life.

Make sure there’s enough ‘outercourse’

Many couples, especially heterosexual partners, focus too much on intercourse at the expense of other forms of sexual activity. According to a study by Debby Herbenick at Indiana University and her colleagues, only about 10 to 15 per cent of heterosexual couples did not include intercourse the last time they engaged in sexual activity together. In my clinical experience, most couples get to intercourse in as little as seven minutes, often sooner than that. What this means is that a lot of pleasure is getting left off the table, especially for the many women who do not orgasm consistently from intercourse.

What else could you be doing? Some ideas come from a major study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine involving 25,000 gay and bisexual men in the US, approximately 65 per cent of whom said their last sexual experience did not involve intercourse. They engaged in many outercourse behaviours, such as oral sex and manual stimulation of the genitals, hugging and kissing. There were 10 discrete outercourse behaviours in all, but the gay and bisexual men in this study put them together in more than 1,300 combinations, with most sexual events involving five to nine different outercourse behaviours. That’s 1,300 personalised paths to pleasure and all outercourse based. So my message to you and your partner is to experiment with turning foreplay into ‘core-play’ and to plan an outercourse-based sexual event from start to finish.

Create an erotic thread between sexual events

For many couples, there just isn’t room in their busy lives for sexual energy to emerge. To engage in quality sex, you have to be in the sort of quality relationship that inspires you to have sex in the first place, and that means maintaining the erotic thread between sexual events: those moments when you can spontaneously express desire, or feel desired, and pivot in and out of a quick sexual charge without a feeling of pressure to do more. Most of the couples I work with are in egalitarian relationships that are free of traditional gender roles. When I’m talking to these couples, I can hear an egalitarian language in how they speak to each other. I can hear a desire to be respectful, fair and considerate, to collaborate. This kind of language serves people well in most aspects of their relationship, but is it an erotic language? Is it sexy, raw and primal? Is it coming from a place of lust or arousal? How, when we’re leading these egalitarian lives, do we give ourselves and each other the necessary permission to slip into language that’s erotically intentional and might be coming from a place that’s anything but egalitarian – a desire to eroticise, objectify, use and possess?

If you and your partner find it difficult to make this switch and need some help breaking the ice, try something simple, such as telling your partner, at an opportune moment, that you had a sexy dream about them. You could say something such as: ‘I don’t know what my subconscious was up to when I was dreaming about you last night, but, boy, was it hot…’ Hopefully, that will pique a partner’s curiosity, and then there’s an opportunity to describe something sexy, or a sexualised way of seeing your partner, without feeling judged.

Picture the sex life you’d like to have together

By the time couples make it into my office, they generally have a lot to say about their sex life, but it’s usually in the form of a complaint. Generally, after hearing about the problem that brought them in, I want to get them thinking about the solution. So I’ll ask them a future-oriented question: ‘Tell me,’ I’ll say, ‘if we were to work together for a relatively short period of time, maybe just a couple of months, meeting every other week or so, with homework assignments in between sessions, and you were actually able to get on the other side of this problem and put it behind you, what would that look like? How would you know things were better? If I were a fly on the wall, what would I see?’ What I’m doing with these questions is asking them to imagine, in very positive terms, a vision of future sex. I’m asking them to reframe a negative – the problem – into a positive: the solution. Once I ask for that future vision of sex and encourage them to elaborate, I start to hear about their sexual hopes and dreams, of how they just want to be wanted, or the languorous kissing they crave, or the sensual oral sex, or the overwhelming power they want to submit to, or the trembling into each other during orgasm, or all of the above! Suddenly, the language has shifted into a vocabulary that’s not only positive, it’s sexy. They’re actually generating the face-to-face arousal I discussed earlier. Sometimes I can even feel the heat in the room rise!

Over Christmas, self-isolating with Covid, I rewatched Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees’s classic BBC documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History. It is a gripping production that looks at the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, their plunging of Germany into war and genocide, and their subsequent fall.
One episode in the series examines the Nazi obsession with order, represented by mass rallies and carefully synchronised set pieces for the cameras at events such as the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Yet, as documented by Kershaw and Rees, much of this was a façade. The Nazis only created an illusion of perfect order. Scratch the surface and administrative chaos prevailed.
It’s not only the Nazis that fooled the world into accepting their state was both stronger and more orderly than the reality. Virtually nobody in the West predicted the peaceful fall of communism. To most Western observers, the Soviet Union appeared to be a mighty military power right up until its demise. Even the intelligence agencies were caught wrong-footed. As Robert Gates, the director of the CIA admitted in the months after the final Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, it was not until 1989 that the agency began “to think that the entire edifice might well collapse”.
I suspect we are labouring under similar illusions about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There is of course every chance that the aggressive, chauvinistic kleptocracy built and sustained by the Russian president over his 22 years in power will lumber on for many years to come. The Kremlin sits on vast natural resources. It can assassinate political opponents overseas and has the capability to launch bloody wars of imperial expansion. It also possesses nuclear weapons.
Many in the West seem to accept – at least on some level – that democracy is inherently more vulnerable to subversion and collapse than dictatorship. “Has China discovered a better political system than democracy?” asked the Atlantic a few years ago. Figures on both the left and right frequently warn against Western politicians “poking the Russian bear”. Dissatisfaction with democracy is increasing across the globe in light of institutional scandals amid a Western democratic malaise.
Superficially at least, the notion that democracy is in an unfavourable position vis-à-vis its challengers feels like a plausible proposition. A rising China, an aggressive Russia, and that populist discontent our own democracies are mired in seems to lend credence to this narrative.
A lack of democratic accountability is more often a source of weakness than an indication of strength, however. Subordinates in dictatorships survive by telling their superiors what they want to hear instead of the truth. This is true of all such systems, whether communist or, as in the case of Russia, nationalistic and chauvinistic. Accurate information is discouraged by a system that rewards obedience and loyalty. Yes-men thrive, while whistle-blowers are ruthlessly purged.
Russia has not yet lost the war in Ukraine; however, there can be little doubt that the conflict is unfolding contrary to how the Kremlin had hoped it would. As Lawrence Freedman writes for the New Statesman, “Russia has now committed well over 90 per cent of the tremendous force that was gathered around Ukraine before 24 February, and is still unable to take its early objectives.” According to the Ukrainian government, Russia lost 11,000 troops in a little over a week of fighting.
It seems increasingly clear that one of the reasons Putin’s war in Ukraine is going badly is because Kremlin courtiers are feeding bad information to their increasingly isolated president. In the lead-up to the invasion, Putin was clearly badly informed about the strength of Ukrainian resolve and its sense of national identity.
[See also: Putin’s war is in disarray]
Evidence has now emerged that shows just how damaging such systematic lying can be. A whistle-blower thought to be from the FSB, Russia’s security apparatus and the successor organisation to the KGB, has described the war as a “total failure” in a leaked 2,000-word document that appeared over the weekend. The document paints a picture of a country under the iron grip of a leadership that has deliberately shut itself off from reality.
This is a feature, not a bug, of dictatorships. In our interconnected, increasingly online world, authoritarian governments can no longer strive for omnipotence. Instead, they pretend that there is no objective reality, only competing visions. As Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Vladimir Putin’s early spin doctors, has written of Putinism: “everyone invents their own ‘normal’ humanity, their own ‘right’ history.”
This has proved to be an effective strategy when it comes to generating fear in the West about so-called information wars. The idea that democracy is being undermined by a climate of “post-truth” has been a central theme in numerous books and op-ed columns that have appeared in recent years.
Yet post-truth is a less useful basis on which to sustain one’s own rule, especially during a crisis. The Soviet Union collapsed because information about the economy was systematically distorted by a system in which the telling of uncomfortable truths was severely punished. In the absence of open and democratic public life, the mechanisms by which clear signals about the health of the economy could be transmitted were non-existent.
This resulted in endemic levels of corruption, waste and, ultimately, the demise of the system itself. As Mikhail Gorbachev’s prime minister-equivalent, Nikolai Ryzhkov, writes of the final decade of Soviet rule: “[We] lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another, and all of this – from top to bottom and from bottom to top.”
Systematic lie-telling is a feature of the contemporary Russian system too. Ordered to assess the impact of Western sanctions, FSB officers were reportedly encouraged to keep a lid on bad news. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor… otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” the leaked document says. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.”
Judging by the unfolding Russian debacle in Ukraine, it seems clear that Putin’s war strategy was based on just such groundless analyses. One wonders how the Kremlin’s courtiers will break the news that the investment bank Morgan Stanley is predicting Russia will experience a Venezuela-style default by mid-spring as a result of sanctions.
It is easy at times to view our divided democracies as hopelessly inept when faced with the apparent unity and single-minded resolve of an undemocratic foe. Yet the unfolding Russian military debacle in Ukraine goes to show that dictatorships can be paper tigers once you strip away the veneer of power and prestige. An army of flatterers is not conducive to an effective battlefield army. Strong political and economic systems depend on accurate feedback – something only democracy can provide.
[See also: “Kyiv holds its breath”: Lyse Doucet’s diary from Ukraine]

One summer afternoon when I was 23 — this was in 1987 — I was twiddling the dial on the radio in the apartment I was subletting on 114th St. when I stumbled on a station that was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. They were in the middle of a story about the Appalachian Trail, profiling some of the people who were hiking its two thousand miles that year. The reporting was calm, patient, intelligent, allowing the subject to find its own shape, unfolding slowly, minute after minute, like the trail itself. 
What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.
The program I was listening to was called All Things Considered, on a network with the unfamiliar name of NPR, short for National Public Radio. I was immediately hooked. In no time flat, I’d put it on whenever I was home. Morning Edition as soon as I opened my eyes, All Things Considered when I got back in the afternoon, Fresh Air during dinner. I fell in love with Robert Siegel’s wit, Renée Montagne’s voice, Scott Simon’s charm. These people got me. They shared my interests, my outlook, my sensibilities. For the first time, I felt myself reflected in the public sphere. “NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of Talk of the Nation and This American Life, of On the Media and Here & Now. NPR became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day.
That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates. A particular line was being pushed. There was an epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans; black people were in danger of being murdered by the state whenever they walked down the street. The protests were peaceful, and when they weren’t, the violence was minor, or it was justified, or it was exclusively initiated by the cops. Although we had been told for months to stay indoors, the gatherings did not endanger public health — indeed, they promoted it. I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to.
But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.
Nor was it only NPR. One by one, the outlets that I counted on for reliable reporting and intelligent opinion — that I, in some measure, identified with — fell in line. The New York Times, which was already in an advanced state of decay, surrendered completely. Ditto The New Yorker. The Atlantic was drifting in the same direction. Inroads appeared in The New York Review of Books. Satirists whom I admired for their alert sense of irony, their ability to recognise the absurdity at all points of the political spectrum  — Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — got the new religion, and started preaching sermons. 
Suggested readingIn defence of wokenessBy Tomiwa Owolade
“Moral clarity” became the new journalistic standard, as if the phrase meant anything other than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s preexisting beliefs. I was lamenting the loss, not of “journalistic objectivity,” a foolish term and impossible goal, but of simple journalistic good faith: a willingness to gather and present the facts that bear upon an issue, honestly and clearly, regardless of their implications.
For months, I felt trapped, alone with my incredulity. Was I the only person seeing this? Every time I turned on NPR, my exasperation grew — basically, I was hate-listening after a certain point — but what was the alternative? I literally couldn’t think of any. Then, by sheer dumb luck, I was invited on a podcast to discuss a book I had recently published. It was The Unspeakable, with Meghan Daum, and while I had never thought of myself as a podcast person, I so enjoyed myself, was so impressed with her intelligence and humour, that I became a listener.
I quickly discovered that there was another person seeing what I had been seeing, and not only seeing it, but talking about it: frankly, fearlessly, incisively, in public. And not only one person. For I also discovered, from references she dropped, that there were other podcasts like hers, ones where things you weren’t supposed to talk about were talked about, where things you weren’t supposed to say were said. But how was I going to find the time to listen to them, on top of all that NPR? And then it came to me: I could just stop listening to NPR.
Suggested readingThe importance of repressionBy Park MacDougald 
So that is pretty much what I did. Now, in addition to The Unspeakable, I listen to Blocked and Reported (Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal), The Dishcast (Andrew Sullivan), The Glenn Show (Glenn Loury, with John McWhorter as a regular guest), Honestly (Bari Weiss), and LibertiesTalk (Celeste Marcus). I don’t agree with everything these people say, still less with everything their guests do. Weiss is on the centre-Left, Sullivan and Loury on the centre-Right, but more to the point, all of these figures are heterodox, which means that their positions aren’t predictable.
But I didn’t start listening to them because I felt I had a civic duty to expose myself to opinions I disagree with. I started listening to them because I couldn’t stand the bullshit anymore. Because I needed to let in some air. They make me think. They introduce me to perspectives that I hadn’t entertained. They teach me things, and they are usually things the Times or NPR won’t tell you.
I have learned about the lab-leak hypothesis before it became an acceptable topic of discourse. About the lunacy of transgender orthodoxy (“affirmative therapy” for small children, the “cotton ceiling”). About the real statistics on police killings of unarmed black people (according to a Washington Post database, the number shot to death came to 18 in 2020, 6 in 2021). About the truth about Matthew Shepard (who was murdered, by a sometime lover and another acquaintance, over drugs), Jacob Blake (who was shot while stealing his girlfriend’s car, kidnapping her children, resisting arrest, and trying to stab a cop), and Kyle Rittenhouse (who worked in Kenosha, had a father who lived there, and was out that night, however misguidedly, to protect property and provide medical assistance).
Suggested readingHow sensitivity readers corrupt literatureBy Kate Clanchy 
More broadly, I have learned of the emergence of an alternative ecosystem of independent-minded journalists, experts, and thinkers, many of them exiles, voluntary or otherwise, from the established media. They are free of institutional allegiances. They are unintimidated by the Twitter mob. They are committed to free inquiry and free speech. They are unafraid of debate. For the first time in a good long while, I feel myself reflected in the public sphere. I have a home, once again, in America.
We talk incessantly these days about political polarisation. Americans are hunkered down in our camps, we say, in our tribes. We are blue versus red, urban versus rural, secular versus religious. But wherever there are tribes, there are individuals who leave their tribe: renegades, heretics, converts; expatriates, emigrants, exiles. The late, great anthropologist David Graeber remarked that despite what we tend to believe about pre-modern social formations — that they were self-enclosed and inescapable — some five percent of their inhabitants, on average, left their group.
So it clearly is today, whatever the exact percentage. We rarely talk about this, but we should. It would help us perceive that our tribes, mentally and socially, are not so inescapable, so self-enclosed. That we have options. That there aren’t just two camps. That you do not have to join a camp at all. Because most of the people who leave one, I would venture to say, do not join the other. They become, as we say, politically homeless: anti-Trump conservatives who do not recognise what’s happened to their movement or their party; progressives, like me, who are disgusted at the spectacle of what progressivism has become.
But maybe the most important reason to talk about the existence of today’s political renegades and ideological heretics is to enable each of them, each of us, to feel less lonely. To live within a tribe is to enjoy the reassurance that you’re one of many. To leave one — to break one’s attachments, to call down the condemnation of one’s peers and friends — is necessarily to feel that you’re alone. But you are not alone.
Suggested readingWhat Biden gets wrong about raceBy Glenn Loury 
So why do people leave? How do they change their minds? Different ways, I think. There is the lightning conversion, the stunning realisation that everything you’d previously thought is wrong, and everything you’d thought is wrong is right. Today that sometimes seems to happen to individuals who are raised in restrictive religious environments and who find themselves exposed, accidentally or otherwise, to the scepticism and relativism of the secular world — though obviously the road to Damascus can lead in the other direction, the direction of faith. There is the opposite experience: the feeling not that you have changed but that your tribe has — something that many are feeling with respect to one or other of the major political formations. There is the slow accretion of countervailing information that eventually leads (gradually, then suddenly, like Hemingway’s bankrupt) to a change in one’s view of reality, the way a scientist changes their mind.
But for me the most important way, and not just because it is the one I find most salient for me, is this. You change your mind when you consent to stop ignoring things you know full well but do not want to think about — things that you push to the edges of consciousness, or all the way out. Few of us are scientists. We do not gather facts through careful, ordered processes; we aren’t compelled to make our arguments in formal terms in front of expert referees. Our thinking is less about finding the truth than about making ourselves feel good. And so when we encounter a countervailing piece of information, an uncomfortable truth, we dismiss it as an anomaly, or as not undermining the general point, forgetting the previous “anomalies” and not regarding how they might together utterly destroy the point.
To overcome such a block, to look in the face an unwelcome reality, is first consternation, then liberation. Anyone who’s been in therapy will understand this. The truth always feels good, on a certain level, just because it is the truth. It relieves us of the psychic stress it costs us to resist it.
A few examples from my own thought. Some concern the recognition that we on our side are not any better, in many respects, than those scoundrels on the other. Yes, conservatives are making common cause with authoritarian regimes, but only lately did I let myself acknowledge that the Left has done the same for many years: with Cuba still today, Nicaragua in the 80s, North Vietnam in the 60s, the Soviet Union in the 30s. Yes, Republican leaders are cowards who refuse to denounce the Trumpian extremists in their ranks, but only recently did I allow myself to see that many leaders on the Left are equally spineless, equally faithless, equally complicit in the face of the extremists on their own side. For a lifelong Leftist pushing sixty, admitting this is, as Joe Biden might say, a big fucking deal.
Suggested readingHow cancel culture hurts the LeftBy Kat Rosenfield 
But those are just examples, and they and others like them add up to far more than the sum of their parts. For knowing now how wrong I think I’ve been about so many things, knowing too that outlets and authorities I trusted have been, at the least, not telling the entire truth, and sometimes outright lying; knowing furthermore that others, ones to which I’m not “supposed” to pay attention, might supply the fact or argument that challenges another unexamined assumption — all this has been, to use one of Daum’s favourite words, destabilising. She started her podcast, she’s said, because she doesn’t know what to think anymore, and when I first heard her say that, I smugly dissented. No more. There are plenty of issues on which I still possess a firm opinion, but there are none, I now believe, on which my opinion cannot be overturned.
History is changing, fast. Stabilities are fracturing; intellectual borders are shifting. New movements have emerged, impelled by hidden emotional currents, impelled in turn by forces economic, technological, environmental. But history, I’ve learned, isn’t just something that happens out there. The upheavals it causes are psychic, as well. I had read about this with respect to people in the past, but now I find that I am living it. But that is the thing about history: we always think of it as happening to others, until it comes for us.
***
NOTE: I originally wrote this essay for a different publication. It was one with which I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship, and the editor-in-chief, who is retiring, invited me to contribute to his valedictory issue. His initial reaction was positive, to say the least. “Like all your best pieces,” he wrote, “and like many of the other best pieces I’ve run, this one makes me a little scared, but also makes me excited by the prospect of waking people up. It wakes me up. I’ve felt some of this without ever quite admitting it to myself.”
 This, I should say, was according to plan. While politically neutral in theory, the journal had been drifting in the same direction as the rest of the mainstream media. Waking up his readers, whom I doubt had ever heard this kind of argument before, was exactly my intention.
Alas, it was not to be. Two weeks later, the editor wrote me again. “[T]he more I’ve thought about it, the less comfortable I’ve become with associating [the journal] with many of the assertions you make…. [T]here is too much in your piece that I could not defend.”
I had written a piece about the truths we aren’t allowed to utter on the Left, but that truth too, apparently, must not be uttered. The editor, it seemed, did not appreciate the irony. – W.D.

By Shadi HamidIf there was any doubt before, the answer is now clear. Vladimir Putin is showing that a world without American power — or, for that matter, Western power — is not a better world.
For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.
Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.
For his part, Putin understood well that the balance of power was shifting. Knowing what he knew, the Russian president wasn’t necessarily “irrational” in deciding to invade Ukraine. He had good reason to think that he could get away with it. After all, he had gotten away with quite a lot for nearly 15 years, ever since the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president. Then he annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened brutally in Syria in 2015. Each time, in an understandable desire to avoid an escalatory spiral with Russia, the United States held back and tried not to do anything that might provoke Putin. Meanwhile, Europe became more and more dependent on Russian energy; Germany, for example, was importing 55% of its natural gas from Russia. Just three weeks ago, it was possible for Der Spiegel to declare that most Germans thought “peace with Russia is the only thing that matters.”
The narrative of a feckless and divided West solidified for years. We, as Americans, were feeling unsure of ourselves, so it was only reasonable that Putin would feel it too. In such a context, and after four years of Donald Trump and the domestic turmoil that he wrought, it was tempting to valorize “restraint” and limited engagements abroad. Worried about imperial overreach, most of the American left opposed direct U.S. military action against Bashar Assad’s regime in the early 2010s, even though it was Russian and Iranian intervention on behalf of Syria’s dictator that bore the marks of a real imperial enterprise, not just an imagined one.
Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This is an odd statement considering that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have an instinctive aversion to American power.
America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good — and the resulting desire to retreat or disengage — hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid sh*t.” Instead of thinking about what we could do, or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers — content to bask under their U.S. security umbrella — could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy — coaxing Germany to commit even 2% of its GDP to defense seemed impossible — became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned, devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.
Suddenly, the EU has been aroused from its slumber, and the parody account was rendered temporarily speechless. This is no longer tepid concern, but righteous fury. Member states announced that they would send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Germany, for the first time, said that it would ramp up its military budget to 100 billion euros. On the economic front, the EU announced some of the toughest sanctions in history. My podcast co-host, Damir Marusic, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, likened it to a “holy war,” European-style.
Sometimes, unusual and extreme events mark the separation between old and new ways of thinking and being. This week, the Berlin-based journalist Elizabeth Zerofsky remarked that the current moment reminded her of the memoir “The World of Yesterday,” written by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig as World War II loomed. In it, he recalls the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an almost naive fondness. On the first day of the Ukraine invasion, I happened to be speaking to a group of college students who had no memory of September 11. I told them that they may be living in history. Those students, like all of us, are bearing witness to one of those rare events that recast how individuals and nations alike view the world they inhabit.
The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?
In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians — and the authoritarian idea itself — are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 69Critical Education Theory Series, Part 6
Possibly the most important topic happening in education, at least if you care about the well-being, health, and safety of children and the future of this country, is “Social-Emotional Learning (SEL).” Social-Emotional Learning is the psychologizing of schooling, and, as one might expect, it comes in a variety of forms. The most contemporary and relevant form is the most Marxist form because the Marxist educators have completely hijacked any legitimacy the program ever had and turned it into a Maoist nightmare to ruin your kids so they can achieve their revolution. In this long, detailed episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay helps you understand the most Marxist version of SEL, Transformative SEL, by reading a full academic paper describing it and the (complete lack of) evidence for its implementation. The paper appeared in Educational Psychologist in 2019, bearing the title ” Transformative Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): Toward SEL in Service of Educational Equity and Excellence,” and is by Robert J. Jagers, Deborah Rivas-Drake, and Brittney Williams. If you want to save our schools, you have to understand what Transformative SEL is (and the CASEL model it has colonized), and you can do that by joining James for this informative episode!
Critical Education Theory Series:
Part 1: Education’s New Marxist Commitments
Part 2: How Education Turned Critical
Part 3: Paulo Freire’s Politics of Education and a New Hope
Part 4: Paulo Freire’s Prophetic Vision for Education
Part 5: Critical Education: What Is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy?

Previous episodes of the New Discourses Podcast are available here.
The post Critical Education: Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) appeared first on New Discourses.

A Book Review of Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be, by Diane Coyle.

Economics has arguably been under greater scrutiny than ever before. Its ontological premises, methodological postulates, conceptual insights, and analytical techniques are under intense appraisal within the academy, with social scientists from non-economic disciplines and even heterodox economists urging the need for comprehensive reform for the discipline. This critical attention has been compounded by the avalanche of best-selling books and popular media commentary that critically reflect on the domain of economics, with the criticisms ranging from charges of excessive formalism through the perceived lack of racial and gender diversity of academic representation within the discipline. It is difficult to identify a more beleaguered endeavor, nowadays, than economics.

In the context of the contemporary revolt against economics, one might be at risk of airily dismissing the value of Diane Coyle’s latest book, Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be. One may be tempted to merely note in passing the book as yet another literary assault on an academic discipline and profession under immense strain, but to dismiss Coyle’s contribution would be a significant mistake. I identify two key reasons as to why scholars, policymakers, and interested lay people should obtain Cogs and Monsters, and to carefully consider its key messages.

The first is that Coyle presents a multi-dimensional critique of economics, but strategically does not overdo some of the well-worn arguments about the ontological realism of homo economics, that much-caricatured economic actor making choices in accordance with well-ordered (and fixed) preferences. As is mentioned early in the book, “[e]conomics has changed a lot in recent decades. It needs to change a lot in future—but the critique needs to move on too, to address what really needs attention” (p. 2). Heterodox economists are prone to critique the economic mainstream but, as illustrated by Cogs and Monsters, the mainstream itself has evolved in relation to the scope of empirical methods and strategies, topical scope, and propensity to engage with other disciplines (such as ethics, psychology, and sociology). In addition to acknowledging intra-disciplinary changes, Coyle sets out a new set of intellectual wrinkles for economists—including challenges to thinking that arise from such phenomena as digitalization, the limits of technocratic expertise, and the public role of economists.

“With its calls for a refashioned economics featuring epistemic humility, and an embrace of the heterogeneous aspects of economic life, the reader of Cogs and Monsters is left with the distinct impression that economics can, once more, be regarded as an indispensable intellectual aid for understanding the bases of material progress, and, in turn, human flourishing.”

The second reason underlining the significance of Coyle’s book is that she complements her contemporaneous criticism of economic science with constructive suggestions to move forward. What impresses upon the reader is that Coyle’s decades-long expertise in policymaking and scholarship has not left an imprint of jaundice and resignation about the possibilities for rehabilitation of economics as a discipline of high esteem and good reputation. Nor does one find the destructively critical presentation of markets that disconcertingly goes with the latest niche-industry of economic critique: “[m]arket economies have made many people better off, innovating in ways that improve our lives, enabling us to make the choices that best suit us, given the constraints of income and time” (p. 39). With its calls for a refashioned economics featuring epistemic humility, and an embrace of the heterogeneous aspects of economic life, the reader of Cogs and Monsters is left with the distinct impression that economics can, once more, be regarded as an indispensable intellectual aid for understanding the bases of material progress, and, in turn, human flourishing.

There is sufficient insight and provocation presented in Diane Coyle’s book to cater for a wide reading audience. What will please scholars and other readers with an interest in Austrian and Virginia schools of political economy is that Cogs and Monsters amply acknowledges the importance of what Mark Pennington has described as “knowledge” and “incentive” problems, with such problems especially affecting the quality—if not the reasonableness—of technocratic policy advice and implementation in a complex world. It is often said that economics places boundaries upon the extent to which policies may be conscripted in the service of refashioning the world. Awareness of the dispersed—and oft-tacit—nature of economic knowledge, opportunity costs, costs of policy implementation and enforcement, the calculational limits of planning, and strategic interest-group incentives to seek rents are all seen to dampen the tendency toward misguided schemes reconfiguring the everyday business of economic life for the sake of grand political visions. As also indicated by Coyle, the reflexive nature of economic policy, whereby agents adjust their behavior in order to minimize the burdens posed by policy constraints, also warrants greater attention.

The ever-present challenge is that awareness of economic policy limitations is not sufficient to incentivize political agents (particularly legislators and their bureaucratic advisors) to engage in good (rule-guided) policy conduct. The temptation to deviate from accumulated economic knowledge—as to what kinds of economic institutions are more likely to harness market-tested entrepreneurial betterments—in an effort to garner the favor of certain interests or constituencies seems always to be in play. Coyle speaks of the continual pressures faced by economic policymakers to please their political paymasters by producing “policy-based evidence” in support of the politically-ordained policy position. In particular, “economists often end up appearing or claiming to be certain where they are deeply uncertain, while at the same time being too diffident about expressing inconvenient truths about which we can be much more certain” (p. 56). The ever-tightening entanglement of bureaucratic advisors with economic qualifications with the legislative class—whom, in turn, entangle with close-knit policy communities that include consultancy firms, large financial intermediaries, and similar organizations—have been increasingly called into question. For her part, Coyle raises issues regarding the tendency toward policy groupthink, and the reliance by technocrats upon close-ended quantitative models in the construction of economic policy advice.

An important contribution of Cogs and Monsters is its critical appraisal of the tendency toward “big data” haulage by policymakers in the development of public policies. The development of information and communication technologies have not only engendered the emergence of a digital economy characterized by increasing returns that, even now, is conceived to be evading comprehension using economic theories and empirical tools devised decades, if not centuries, ago. The Internet, mobile phones, and a new wave of technologies centered upon artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, and so on, are being viewed as the catalysts for the reinvigoration of dreams of a “computer socialism,” wherein digitalization is supposed to usher in possibilities for the central planning that Mises and Hayek previously warned about in the famous “socialist calculation” debates of the 1920s and 1930s.

In Cogs and Monsters, Coyle incisively punctures the hopes of computer socialism to advance the technocratic dream of comprehensive economic planning. The first problem is that a world characterized by increasing returns and network effects radically increases the effective challenge of processing the interactions transpiring in the real economy. The second problem for computer socialists is that computation is incommensurable with what Hayek described as the tacit economic knowledge generated by interactions by heterogeneous agents in circumstances of time and place. Furthermore, “[c]omputers do not do constructive ambiguity” (p. 186) in light of genuinely interpersonal differences in desires and priorities, which are prone to spill over into irreconcilable conflicts. Whilst Coyle urges her economic peers “to start providing policy-makers with guidance for an increasing returns economy,” her ultimate conclusion on the computer socialism question is that “a bias toward government solutions is no answer. The idea that clever people in the centre can now have big enough data to solve such big problems remains illusory” (p. 209).

In light of the difficulties associated with economic policymaking, Coyle invites the reader to carefully consider the intersection of economics and ethics. What is the public contribution and role of economics in a complex, evolving world? What is it that economists should do now? Consistent with the rise of economics within the firmament of the modern bureaucratic state, economists have attributed a host of metaphorical markers to describe what they see as the appropriate contribution of economics toward the policymaking process. John Maynard Keynes believed that economists should work to modify economic deficiencies in a manner akin to the humble competency of a dentist. Esther Duflo urged economists to assume the mindset of a tinkering plumber. Others have considered economists to embrace engineering, in the spirit of adapting planning methodologies and technological availabilities to reconfigure an economy. To varying degrees these ideas hint at a neo-feudalistic, social control mindset in which the advice of economists qua physicians/plumbers/engineers supports projects of nudging (or, perhaps more aptly, shoving) otherwise freely-interacting individuals into modes of economic behavior and conduct as prescribed by policy objectives.

Coyle offers an intriguing alternative descriptor for the role of the modern economist: the economist as storyteller. If my interpretation of her suggestion is correct, the position of the economist as a storyteller (or at least, an interpreter of economic narratives) is intended to encapsulate the inherent endogeneity of an economist as one-of-many interdependent actors in the world. On this view, economists are ultimately incapable of standing outside the models they use to try to represent reality, and the agents that economists try to model are not things of stone and wood—they are fallible-yet-capable beings with the capacity to create, think, persuade, and act entrepreneurially. Coyle’s economist-as-storyteller vision is, then, intended to equip the economist with agency to adjust their narratives as actions and norms reflexively, and potentially structurally, change.

I consider Coyle’s suggestion that economists narrate stories about the economy in which they, and others, interact feeds into broader understandings of the economy as constituted by webs of conversation combined with prices and other symbols. A key insight here is that how economists, and all others, normatively speak about the economy has economic effects. In short, talk is not cheap. After a decade of severe limitations of economic activity—first due to the GFC [Global Financial Crisis] and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis and, now, due to pandemic lockdowns and related restrictions—there is room for economic storytelling not only recognizing the limits of discretionary policy but that underlines the inherently emancipatory function of economic liberalism. Talk that inspires people to pursue their ambitions, to experiment, to use their knowledge in the fruitful economic service of others, and to become who they wish to become might well be necessary to help break the shackles of largely policy-induced economic repression. Conversation of this nature would desirably be accompanied by talk, and indeed action, of a nature institutionally constraining the degree of policy discretion on the part of the legislative-bureaucratic neo-feudal lords of the economic manor.

Diane Coyle’s Cogs and Monsters is an important book that is deserving of wide attention and deep contemplation. With a clear talent for writing about complicated economic ideas in a straightforward manner, Coyle illustrates how mainstream economics has evolved yet remains hamstrung by conceptual and empirical constraints. Economics is not internally unreformable, however, and Coyle provides a range of thoughtful suggestions as to what economists should do now (and next). Fundamentally, Cogs and Monsters presents a call for a humble and humane economics that is genuinely attentive to the needs and concerns of diverse beings as they continually seek material betterments. Scholars familiar with Austrian and Virginia political economy theories, and other heterodox economists, will discover much of value in this book.

In an ideal alternate reality… only the good people—let’s refer to them for simplicity as incorruptibles—would be our leaders, our bosses, our police officers. Meanwhile, the people you wouldn’t want to have in charge—let’s call them corruptibles—would have no power at all…. You would want to make sure that incorruptibles seek power, get it, and hold onto it.

—Brian Klaas, Corruptible, p. 41

W e are familiar with the phrase “Power corrupts.” Brian Klaas argues that the problem lies in the process by which people obtain and retain power. If we fix that process, we can get better leaders.

Klaas says that our first focus should be on the way that we attract leaders. We need to be aware that:

… power tends to draw in people who want to control others for the sake of it. p. 59

He points out that the position of president of a homeowners’ association just looks like a burdensome job to anyone who does not thirst for power:

If homeowners’ associations want to avoid being governed by the neighborhood despot, then they should consider creating incentives (including decent pay) to recruit people who want to do the job for better reasons than to harass the people down the block. p. 59

More generally, we should not limit the candidates for office to the people who want it the most. We should instead try to draft those who are less eager for power.

Klaas uses the example of recruitment advertisements for police officers. An ad that emphasizes the military-style equipment that the department possesses is likely to attract a much more abusive recruit than an ad that emphasizes the police officer’s role in community relations.

Klaas says that we tend to select leaders based on criteria inherited from prehistoric conditions. Height and gender are instinctively appealing to us. Women and short men need not apply. In presidential elections:

Candidates who are taller usually win more votes than their shorter opponent(s). Taller presidents also have a higher chance of being reelected. p. 78

However, it gets worse than just selecting leaders based on irrelevant criteria. Klaas warns that we have a tendency to give power to people with the personality characteristics known as the dark triad:

Machiavellianism… refers to a personality trait marked by scheming, interpersonal manipulation, and moral indifference to others. Narcissism… refers to personality traits that often manifest as arrogance, self-absorption, grandiosity, and a need for recognition from others. And psychopathy—the darkest trait of the dark triad—often shows up as someone who lacks the ability to feel empathy and is impulsive, reckless, manipulative, and aggressive. p. 90

All of us possess these traits to some degree. But people who have them to a very great extent are quite dangerous, particularly if they also have the ability to mask their natures. Unfortunately, we tend to choose leaders with disturbingly high values of dark-triad traits. I see considerable narcissism in Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Mr. Trump’s tweets strike me as manifesting behavior that is impulsive, reckless, manipulative, and aggressive.

Klaas cites a study indicating that, by one indicator, psychopathy is found in 4 percent of aspiring corporate managers, compared with less than 1 percent in the population as a whole. He warns:

Dark triad traits may have a double effect: they make such corruptible people crave power, but can also make them more effective at getting it. And that may come down to an ability to focus laser-like on ruthless self-interest. p. 97

If the process by which people select themselves and are selected for power is a problem, the experience of being in power makes things worse:

Powerful people tend to lose their inhibitions. Being “drunk with power” is an apt description. Increase people’s sense of feeling powerful and they won’t care as much what others think of them. They’ll become less effective at reading people because they’ll feel less of a need to empathize with others. They’ll start to feel as if the rules don’t apply to them. p. 157

Think of all of the politicians who advocated widespread mask-wearing and social isolation during the pandemic and then were found mask-less in social settings.

“How can we better choose leaders and how can we limit the worst tendencies of people who obtain power?”

Klaas turns from diagnosis to prescription. How can we better choose leaders and how can we limit the worst tendencies of people who obtain power?

One way to select leaders who are not worse than normal relative to the population would be to choose them randomly. Klaas sees this process, known as sortition, as impractical for choosing officials. But he does think that it would work for creating an advisory board. When a leader is faced with a decision, the advisory board would be consulted:

Elected officials would be under no obligation to follow this advice, but the wisdom of the randomly selected crowd would be visible to everyone. If politicians had a different view, they’d at least have to explain why they were deviating from the assembly’s proposed solution. p. 190

I think that this would be beneficial to the extent that the only reason that leaders differ from the general public in their views is that leaders are corrupted by power. But I am afraid that the general public has its own dangerous biases—childish economic views, for example—that could be at least as problematic.

Klaas says that we could do more to alleviate two factors that corrupt leaders. One is that they become too remote from the people that they lead. When they lose empathy, leaders make cruel decisions.

Another factor is a sense of invulnerability. All of us behave more judiciously when we are watched. When leaders claim the privilege of making policy in secret, they are more likely to abuse power. Klaas argues that we should make sure that leaders cannot evade scrutiny:

If we’re going to watch people, we can focus on those at the top who do the real damage, not the rank and file. p. 246

Klaas uses research to justify both this diagnosis and his prescriptions. But I thought that he occasionally applies too much scientific veneer. For instance, he writes:

Psychological distance is therefore a dilemma that can be solved by what social scientists call a Goldilocks solution. p. 218

Klaas means that a leader can make bad decisions by being too empathetic with others as well as by being insufficiently empathetic. Klaas could have made this point without trying to make it sound as if he dipped into a deep well of social science and retrieved a profoundly original concept.

The problem that Klaas is trying to address in Corruptible is a challenging one. There is no perfect system for selecting leaders or for ensuring that they use power judiciously.

For example, I think that the reforms that have made American politics more democratic in recent decades have actually made things worse. I think that one of the better presidents during the last 100 years was Dwight Eisenhower. He did not campaign for his party’s nomination. Instead, he was drafted by party leaders. Today, in order to win a nomination, a candidate needs to work much harder to get it. To go through the process, one really has to crave power.

There is room for much more thought in this area. Klaas has contributed some provocative ideas.

The economy added 678,000 jobs in February, an increase from the pandemic-affected January numbers and consistent with the rapid pace of job creation in the second half of 2021. The unemployment rate resumed its rapid decline, falling to 3.8 percent as labor force participation increased. Wage growth in February was, however, nearly flat after 10 straight months of strong nominal wage growth. It is possible this will turn out to reflect noisy data. Over the last three months (adjusted for industry composition), average hourly earnings have grown at a 4.2 percent at an annual rate, the slowest pace since March 2021.

Overall, the economy is still 3.5 million jobs and 1.4 million workers short relative to pre-pandemic projections (adjusted for lower than expected population growth), as labor supply continues to fall short of labor demand. The continued shift from a pandemic to a manageable endemic disease, along with monetary and fiscal policy that remains expansionary, should help continue to close the gap in 2022.

Payroll Employment Continues Its Steady Growth of about Half a Million Jobs Per Month

In contrast to expectations for a slight slowdown in job growth, payrolls rose 678,000 in February, as shown in figure 1. The February reading and additional upward revisions to payroll employment gains in December (+78,000) and January (+14,00) mean that employment growth has remained very strong.

The unemployment rate fell in February and is now only 0.3 percentage point higher than it was prior to the pandemic (figure 2a). The number of workers working part-time for economic reasons increased in February driving up a broader measure of labor market underutilization, U-6, which includes the involuntary unemployed. This is the first time U-6 has increased since April 2020.

Labor force participation remains low. As a result, even though the unemployment rate is nearly recovered, the employment rate for workers ages 25-54 remains 1.0 percentage point below its February 2020 level (figure 2b) after a 0.4 percentage point increase last month.

The Economy Still Remains Millions of Jobs Short of Its Pre-pandemic Trajectory as Labor Force Participation Lags

The labor market moved closer to normality in February, but the economy still remains 3.5 million jobs short of pre-pandemic projections adjusted for slower than expected population growth, as shown in figure 3 (or 4.2 million jobs short of the original pre-pandemic projection). We use the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) January 2020 forecast for a projection of where jobs might plausibly have been absent the emergence of COVID-19 and the economic response it engendered. The civilian noninstitutional population ages 16 and older in January 2022 was 1.3 million (or 0.5 percent) lower than CBO had originally forecast, with excess mortality and reduced immigration both large factors.

Looking at the household survey's measure of the number of workers employed shows a considerably smaller gap than the employer survey's measure of the total number of jobs. In total, 1.4 million fewer people were employed in February 2022 than had been expected pre-COVID-19 (again adjusted for slower than expected population growth) as employment growth (the number of people surveyed who said they had jobs) outpaced job growth (the number of employers reporting a job) over the last year. Two of the reasons the employment shortfall is smaller than the jobs shortfall is that, since February 2020, multiple job holders have fallen by 0.6 million (this results in fewer jobs without any reduction in employment) and self-employment has risen by 0.2 million (this counts as employment but not as a job). Other issues, including different CBO forecast paths and other definitional and measurement differences, account for the remainder of the difference between the jobs and employment shortfalls.

The Labor Force is Returning but Still Well Below its Pre-COVID-19 Rates

The labor force remains substantially smaller than it was in February 2020, with the labor force participation rate down 1.1 percentage point since then. About a quarter of this decline, 0.3 percentage point, can be accounted for by the changing age-sex structure of the population. Because labor force participation tends to decrease at older ages, as the population ages, the overall labor force participation rate would be expected to fall even if the labor force participation rates for every age-sex group had been unchanged. Another 0.2 percentage point of the decline, or about a fifth, is due to some continued elevation of the unemployment rate. That leaves 0.6 percentage point, or more than half of the total decline in the labor force participation rate, unaccounted for by either changing demographics or elevated unemployment. The relative contributions of these three components are shown in figure 4.

Overall, of the 0.9 percentage point decline in the labor force participation rate that is not associated with the changing demographic structure of the workforce (both the “elevated unemployment” and “other” categories in figure 4), about twice as much of the decline has come from women as from men. Labor force participation rates are roughly as expected for younger workers, but there are similar contributions to declining participation from the 25-54 and 55+ age groups. Much of the difference between men and women is the result of a larger contribution from women aged 25-54, with the contributions for men and women similar among those 55 and older. (Note the breakdown of contributions can reflect volatile monthly data; the male-female contributions were roughly equal over the last few months but changed in February.)

Contribution to non-aging component of change in US labor force participation rate, Feb 2020–Feb 2022 (percentage points) Men Women Total 16-24 0.0 -0.1 -0.1 25-54 -0.1 -0.3 -0.4 55+ -0.2 -0.2 -0.3 Total -0.3 -0.6 -0.9 Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey; authors' calculations.

Looking forward, developments in labor force participation and the unemployment rate will shape the trajectory of job growth going forward. The economy needs to create about 50,000 jobs a month over the next 10 months in order to keep the age-adjusted employment rate constant for the remainder of 2022. For the age-adjusted employment rate to return to what it was pre-pandemic would require about 418,000 jobs per month. To fully return to the pre-pandemic employment rate without adjusting for aging would require higher employment rates for similar-aged workers and about 542,000 jobs per month—slightly slower than the pace of job growth over the last three months.

Tight Labor Markets Have Contributed to a Pickup in Wages

Every indicator of labor market slack shows that labor markets are getting tighter. Different indicators still tell a somewhat different story about the degree of slack, but they are generally converging. The prime-age (25-54) employment rate shows slack in February modestly below its average from 2001 to 2018 (a period when the economy was, on average, below full employment). The unemployment rate was somewhat further below its average over that period, as was the ratio of unemployed to job openings, indicating meaningful labor market tightness. The quits rate (for December, the most recent month available) indicated an extremely tight labor market (figure 6).

In November, we investigated which of these measures was the best predictor of wage growth or inflation based on the experience prior to COVID-19 and concluded that all four measures behave in a broadly similar manner. However, with the unemployed-to-job openings ratio and quits rate most consistent with recent rapid wage and price growth through much of 2021, these two measures should get meaningful weight in assessing future wage and price developments.

The official average hourly earnings series for private-sector workers grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate over the last three months, a slowdown from recent months as average hourly earnings only grew $0.01 in February. The official average hourly earnings series is affected by the composition of the workforce, sometimes dramatically. In months when more lower-wage workers are hired back (for example, in the leisure and hospitality sectors), this compositional effect can artificially lower the reported growth of average hourly earnings. Figure 7 shows a chain-weighted alternative that accounts for the change in the industry-level composition from month-to-month and thus eliminates part, but not all, of the composition bias (it is impossible to do more with the data currently available). These numbers are generally similar to the Employment Cost Index, which adjusts for composition but is only available through December.

Prior to the pandemic, productivity was growing about 2 percent annually. If nominal wages continue to grow at a roughly 4 percent pace in 2022, their pace over the last three months and what employer surveys report for 2022, that would be consistent with 2 percent inflation (assuming no change in the labor share). If, as is more likely, wage growth is at or above its 5.5 percent pace last year, including upward pressure due to workers' demands for catch-up wage growth, staggered wage setting, and ever tighter labor markets, then inflation would be closer to 4 percent (assuming no change in the labor share). Nominal compensation growth and the trajectory of business mark-ups over cost are two key variables to watch in thinking about inflation in 2022.

I know that terminology can matter. For instance, given the deep stain that slavery left on our society, I am in favor of nudging consciousness a bit by replacing the term “slave” with “enslaved person.” One can sense an attitude here and there, after all, a notion that slavery is inherent to some people, and it’s not a new one — Aristotle argued, “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjugation.” I understand why we now refer to Ukraine as “Ukraine” and have abandoned the old quirk of calling it “the Ukraine,” which implies that it is merely a region, a locale — and specifically one subsumed by Russia — rather than the separate historical, linguistic, political and cultural entity that it is (a distinction that has had its relevance grimly demonstrated in recent days).

I have also never much liked the term “African American,” because of its implication that Black Americans are African in a way relevant to our current lives. To stress that connection in what we call ourselves always struck me as forced. Although opinions will differ on such things, in my view, the connection to Africa, for most of us, is too many generations removed for “African American” to truly work.

But the capitalization issue is about style and usage, rather than replacing one word with another, and the written rather than the spoken word. And it seems to me that people can process the written word “black” as having many meanings, just as they do when it’s spoken, when, of course, no capitalization is possible.

In writing as well as speech, we effortlessly process that to “pick up” refers to lifting objects, fetching children from school, getting a disease and increasing in speed. We can even handle words able to refer to nearly opposite things: a “fast learner” versus a chair “stuck fast” to the floor. Or the literal and figurative use of “literally,” which so exasperates many but does not create actual confusion. No one thinks someone who announces that they’re “literally boiling to death” on a hot day is melting away like Looney Tunes’ Abominable Snowman.

With the “black” issue, my ultimate sentiment is that we spend an inordinate amount of time concerning ourselves with how matters of power and diversity are expressed. I suspect that activists and agitators of yore would find our obsession with such things rather peculiar and worry that it siphoned off energy from more grounded efforts.

Europe's double standard on refugees, exposed yet again by the war in Ukraine, is morally deaf and geopolitically dumb. The best way Europe can defend itself is to persuade other countries that it can offer them better choices than Russia or China can.

LJUBLJANA – After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Slovene government immediately proclaimed its readiness to receive thousands of Ukrainian refugees. As a Slovene citizen, I was not only proud but also ashamed.

After all, when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban six months ago, this same government refused to accept Afghan refugees, arguing that they should stay in their country and fight. And a couple of months ago, when thousands of refugees – mostly Iraqi Kurds – tried to enter Poland from Belarus, the Slovene government, claiming that Europe was under attack, offered military aid to support Poland’s vile effort to keep them out.

Throughout the region, two species of refugee have emerged. A tweet by the Slovene government on February 25 clarified the distinction: “The refugees from Ukraine are coming from an environment which is in its cultural, religious, and historical sense something totally different from the environment out of which refugees from Afghanistan are coming.” After an outcry, the tweet was quickly deleted, but the obscene truth was out: Europe must defend itself from non-Europe.

This approach will be catastrophic for Europe in the ongoing global struggle for geopolitical influence. Our media and elites frame that struggle as a conflict between a Western “liberal” sphere and a Russian “Eurasian” sphere, ignoring the much larger group of countries – in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia – that are observing us closely.

Even China is not ready to support Russia fully, although it has its own plans. In a message to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a day after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that China is ready to work to develop China-DPRK relations of friendship and cooperation “under a new situation.” There is a fear that China will use the “new situation” to “liberate” Taiwan.

What should worry us now is that the radicalization we see, most clearly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is not just rhetorical. Many on the liberal left, convinced that both sides knew they could not afford a full-on war, thought Putin was bluffing when he massed troops at Ukraine’s borders. Even when Putin described Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky’s government as a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis,” most expected that Russia would just occupy the two breakaway “people’s republics” controlled by Kremlin-backed Russian separatists or, at most, extend the occupation to eastern Ukraine’s entire Donbas region.

And now some who call themselves leftists (I wouldn’t) are blaming the West for the fact that US President Joe Biden was right about Putin’s intentions. The argument is well-known: NATO was slowly encircling Russia, fomenting color revolutions in its near-abroad, and ignoring the reasonable fears of a country that had been attacked from the West in the last century.

There is, of course, an element of truth here. But saying only this is equivalent to justifying Hitler by blaming the unjust Treaty of Versailles. Worse, it concedes that big powers have the right to spheres of influence, to which all others must submit for the sake of global stability. Putin’s assumption that international relations is a contest of great powers is reflected in his repeated claim that he had no choice but to intervene militarily in Ukraine.

Is that true? Is the problem really Ukrainian fascism? The question is better directed at Putin’s Russia. Putin’s intellectual lodestar is Ivan Ilyin, whose works are back in print and given to state apparatchiks and military conscripts. After being expelled from the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, Ilyin advocated a Russian version of fascism: the state as an organic community led by a paternal monarch, in which freedom is knowing one’s place. The purpose of voting for Ilyin (and for Putin) is to express collective support for the leader, not to legitimate or choose him.

Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s court-philosopher, closely follows in Ilyin’s steps, adding a postmodern garnish of historicist relativism:

“[E]very so-called truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have our special Russian truth that you need to accept. If the United States does not want to start a war, you should recognize that [the] United States is not any more a unique master. And [with] the situation in Syria and Ukraine, Russia says, ‘No you are not any more the boss.’ That is the question of who rules the world. Only war could decide really.”

But what about the people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they also choose their truth or are they just a battlefield for would-be world rulers?

The idea that each “way of life” has its own truth is what endears Putin to right-wing populists like former US President Donald Trump, who praised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the act of a “genius.” And the feeling is mutual: When Putin talks about “denazification” in Ukraine, we should bear in mind his support for Marine le Pen’s National Rally in France, Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy, and other actual neo-fascist movements.

The “Russian truth” is only a convenient myth to justify Putin’s imperial vision, and the best way for Europe to counter it is to build bridges to developing and emerging countries, many of which have a long list of justified grievances against Western colonization and exploitation. It’s not enough to “defend Europe.” The true task is to persuade other countries that the West can offer them better choices than Russia or China can. And the only way to achieve that is to change ourselves by ruthlessly uprooting neo-colonialism, even when it comes packaged as humanitarian help.

Are we ready to prove that in defending Europe, we are fighting for freedom everywhere? Our disgraceful refusal to treat refugees equally sends the world a very different message.

History has accelerated; the impossible has become possible. Shifts that no one imagined two weeks ago are unfolding with incredible speed.As it turns out, nations are not pieces in a game of Risk. They do not, as some academics have long imagined, have eternal interests or permanent geopolitical orientations, fixed motivations or predictable goals. Nor do human beings always react the way they are supposed to react. Last week, nobody who was analyzing the coming war in Ukraine imagined that the personal bravery of the Ukrainian president and his emotive calls for sovereignty and democracy could alter the calculations of foreign ministers, bank directors, business executives, and thousands of ordinary people. Few imagined that the Russian president’s sinister television appearances and brutal orders could alter, in just a few days, international perceptions of Russia.[Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in Ukraine]And yet all of that has happened. Volodymyr Zelensky’s courage has moved people, even the hard-bitten CEOs of oil companies, even dull diplomats accustomed to rote pronouncements. Vladimir Putin’s paranoid ranting, meanwhile, has frightened even people who were lauding his “savvy” just a few days ago. He is not, in fact, someone you can do business with, as so many in Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington falsely believed; he is a cold-blooded dictator happy to murder hundreds of thousands of neighbors and impoverish his nation, if that’s what it takes to remain in power. However the war ends—and many scenarios are still imaginable—we already live in a world with fewer illusions.Look at Germany, a nation that has spent nearly 80 years defining its national self-interest in purely economic terms. If the government of some distant place where Germans buy and sell things was repressive, that was never the Germans’ fault. If military aggression was reshaping the outer borders of Europe, that was peripheral to Germany, too. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, although she talked a lot about liberal and democratic values, in practice worried far more about creating good conditions for German business, wherever it was operating. That economy-first attitude infected her nation. Not long after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, I joined a panel discussion in Germany about “the greatest threats to Europe.” Because of the timing, I talked about Russia and assumed the others would too. I was wrong. One of the other panelists called me a warmonger. Another argued vociferously that the greatest threat was a proposed trade agreement that would have allowed Americans to sell chicken washed in chlorine to German supermarkets.I remember that detail because I hadn’t known about the great chlorinated-chicken discussion that was then engulfing Germany, and I had to go home and look it up. But I’ve had some version of that experience many times since. I was on a German television program two weeks ago, along with three German politicians who were, even then, arguing that—despite the thousands of troops and armored vehicles gathering on the borders of Ukraine—the only conceivable solution was dialogue.[Eliot A. Cohen: Cometh the hour, cometh the man]On Saturday, in a 30-minute speech, the current German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, threw all of that out the window. Germany, he said, needs “planes that fly, ships that sail, and soldiers who are optimally equipped for their missions”: Germany’s military should reflect its “size and importance.” The German government has done an about-face and will even send weapons to Ukraine: 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger missiles. More incredibly, this 180-degree turn has the support of an astonishing 78 percent of the German public, who now say they approve of much higher military spending and will gladly pay for it. This is a fundamental change in Germany’s definition of itself, in its understanding of its past: Finally, Germans have understood that the lesson of their history is not that Germany must remain forever pacifist. The lesson is that Germany must defend democracy and fight the modern version of fascism in Europe when it emerges.But the Germans are not the only ones who have changed. Across Europe people are realizing that they live on a continent where war, in their own time, in their own countries, is no longer impossible. Platitudes about European “unity” and “solidarity” are beginning to have some meaning, along with “common foreign policy,” a phrase that, in the European Union, has until now been largely fiction. In theory the EU has a single spokesperson for foreign policy, but in practice European leaders have given that job to people who know little about Russia, and whose fallback position when Russia misbehaves is always the expression of “deep concern.” The previous European high representative for foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, was more interested in EU relations with Cuba than with Kyiv. The current holder of that office, Josep Borrell, stumbled through a meeting with his Russian counterpart last year, and seemed surprised to be treated with disdain.But now everything is suddenly different. “Deep concern” has been exchanged for real action. Less than a week into the invasion, the EU has not only announced harsh sanctions on Russian banks, companies, and individuals—sanctions that will also affect Europeans—but has also offered $500 million of military aid to Ukraine. Individual European states, such as France and Finland, are sending weapons as well, and applying their own sanctions. The French say they are drawing up a list of Russian oligarchs’ assets, including luxury cars and yachts, in order to seize them.Europeans have also dropped, abruptly, some of their doubts about Ukraine’s membership in their institutions. On Monday, the European Parliament not only asked Zelensky to speak, by video, but gave him a standing ovation. Earlier today the parliamentarians, from all across the continent, voted to accept his application for EU membership for Ukraine. Accession to the EU is a long process, and it won’t happen immediately, even if Ukraine emerges intact from this conflict. But the idea has been broached. It is now part of the continent’s collective imagination. From being a distant place, badly understood, it is now part of what people mean when they say Europe.  Ukraine itself will never be the same again either. Events are happening so rapidly, with moods and emotions changing every hour of every day, that I can’t guess what will happen next, or predict how people will feel about it. But I am certain that the events of this week have changed not only the world’s perceptions of Ukraine, but Ukrainians’ perceptions of themselves. In the long run-up to this war, the conversation in Washington and Berlin was always focused on Putin and Joe Biden, Sergey Lavrov and Antony Blinken, NATO and Russia. This was the kind of talk that academics and pundits liked: big topics, big countries. In this conversation Ukraine was, as the political scientist John Mearsheimer put it in 2014, nothing more than “a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia.” But the Ukrainians have now put themselves at the heart of the story, and they know it.As a result, thousands of people are making choices that they too could not have imagined two weeks ago. Ukrainian sociologists, baristas, rappers, and bakers are joining the territorial army. Villagers are standing in front of Russian tanks, shouting “occupiers” and “murderers” at Russia soldiers firing into the air. Construction workers on lucrative contracts in Poland are dropping their tools and taking the train back home to join the resistance. A decade’s worth of experience fighting Russian propaganda is finally paying off, as Ukrainians create their own counternarrative on social media. They post videos telling Russian soldiers to go home to their mothers. They interview captured teenage Russian conscripts, and put the video clips online. Electronic highway signs leading into Kyiv have been reconfigured to tell the Russian army to “fuck off.” Even if this ends badly, even if there is more bloodshed, every Ukrainian who lived through this moment will always remember what it felt like to resist—and that too will matter, for decades to come.And what about Russia? Is Russia condemned always to be a revanchist state, a backward-looking former empire, forever scheming to regain its old role? Must this enormous, complicated, paradoxical nation always be ruled badly, with cruelty, by elites who want to steal its wealth or oppress its people? Will Russian rulers always dream of conquest instead of prosperity?Right now many Russians don’t even realize what is happening in Ukraine. State television has not yet admitted that the Russian military has attacked Kyiv with rockets, bombed a Holocaust memorial, or destroyed parts of central Kharkiv and Mariupol. Instead, the official propagandists are telling Russians that they are carrying out a police action in Ukraine’s far-eastern provinces. The audience gets no information about casualties, or war damage, or costs. The extent of the sanctions has not been reported. Pictures seen around the world—the bombing of the Kyiv television tower today, for example—can’t be seen on the Russian evening news.And yet, there is a strong, consistent drumbeat of alternative information. Yury Dud, a celebrity blogger with 5 million Instagram followers, has posted a photograph of a bombed-out building in Ukraine. The YouTube channel of Alexei Navalny, the jailed Russian dissident leader, has been equally clear to its 6.4 million subscribers. Members of his team are denouncing the war alongside the extension of his prison sentence, both part of the same story of internal and external repression. Millions of Russians know, because they have friends and relatives in Ukraine, that Putin has invaded a neighbor whom they don’t consider their enemy. Some have called those friends, weeping over the telephone, to apologize.What could happen in Russia if the story became better known, the details clearer? What if Russians are eventually able to see the same graphic images that we see? What if the price of this pointless violence becomes tangible to them too? The unpopularity of this war is going to grow, and as it gets bigger, the other Russia—the different Russia that has always been there—will grow larger, too. The Russians who flooded the streets in 1991 to cheer the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians who protested fake elections in 2011, the Russians who turned out in large numbers all across the country to protest the arrest of Navalny in 2021, the Russians, rich and poor, urban and rural, who don’t want their country to be an evil empire—maybe their numbers will expand enough to matter. Maybe, someday, they will change the nature of their state too.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer has been one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps best known for the book he wrote with Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Mearsheimer is a proponent of great-power politics—a school of realist international relations that assumes that, in a self-interested attempt to preserve national security, states will preëmptively act in anticipation of adversaries. For years, Mearsheimer has argued that the U.S., in pushing to expand NATO eastward and establishing friendly relations with Ukraine, has increased the likelihood of war between nuclear-armed powers and laid the groundwork for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive position toward Ukraine. Indeed, in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.”

The current invasion of Ukraine has renewed several long-standing debates about the relationship between the U.S. and Russia. Although many critics of Putin have argued that he would pursue an aggressive foreign policy in former Soviet Republics regardless of Western involvement, Mearsheimer maintains his position that the U.S. is at fault for provoking him. I recently spoke with Mearsheimer by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether the current war could have been prevented, whether it makes sense to think of Russia as an imperial power, and Putin’s ultimate plans for Ukraine.

Looking at the situation now with Russia and Ukraine, how do you think the world got here?

I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO. The Russians made it unequivocally clear at the time that they viewed this as an existential threat, and they drew a line in the sand. Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion. NATO expansion is the heart of the strategy, but it includes E.U. expansion as well, and it includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy, and, from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.

You said that it’s about “turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” I don’t put much trust or much faith in America “turning” places into liberal democracies. What if Ukraine, the people of Ukraine, want to live in a pro-American liberal democracy?

If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO, and a member of the E.U., the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable. If there were no NATO expansion and no E.U. expansion, and Ukraine just became a liberal democracy and was friendly with the United States and the West more generally, it could probably get away with that. You want to understand that there is a three-prong strategy at play here: E.U. expansion, NATO expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.

You keep saying “turning Ukraine into a liberal democracy,” and it seems like that’s an issue for the Ukrainians to decide. NATO can decide whom it admits, but we saw in 2014 that it appeared as if many Ukrainians wanted to be considered part of Europe. It would seem like almost some sort of imperialism to tell them that they can’t be a liberal democracy.

It’s not imperialism; this is great-power politics. When you’re a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think, because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate. States in the Western hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.

The Monroe Doctrine, essentially.

Of course. There’s no country in the Western hemisphere that we will allow to invite a distant, great power to bring military forces into that country.

Right, but saying that America will not allow countries in the Western hemisphere, most of them democracies, to decide what kind of foreign policy they have—you can say that’s good or bad, but that is imperialism, right? We’re essentially saying that we have some sort of say over how democratic countries run their business.

We do have that say, and, in fact, we overthrew democratically elected leaders in the Western hemisphere during the Cold War because we were unhappy with their policies. This is the way great powers behave.

Of course we did, but I’m wondering if we should be behaving that way. When we’re thinking about foreign policies, should we be thinking about trying to create a world where neither the U.S. nor Russia is behaving that way?

That’s not the way the world works. When you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies that the United States pursued during the unipolar moment. We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies. Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East, and you know how well that worked out. Not very well.

I think it would be difficult to say that America’s policy in the Middle East in the past seventy-five years since the end of the Second World War, or in the past thirty years since the end of the Cold War, has been to create liberal democracies in the Middle East.

I think that’s what the Bush Doctrine was about during the unipolar moment.

In Iraq. But not in the Palestinian territories, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or anywhere else, right?

No—well, not in Saudi Arabia and not in Egypt. To start with, the Bush Doctrine basically said that if we could create a liberal democracy in Iraq, it would have a domino effect, and countries such as Syria, Iran, and eventually Saudi Arabia and Egypt would turn into democracies. That was the basic philosophy behind the Bush Doctrine. The Bush Doctrine was not just designed to turn Iraq into a democracy. We had a much grander scheme in mind.

We can debate how much the people who were in charge in the Bush Administration really wanted to turn the Middle East into a bunch of democracies, and really thought that was going to happen. My sense was that there was not a lot of actual enthusiasm about turning Saudi Arabia into a democracy.

Well, I think focussing on Saudi Arabia is taking the easy case from your perspective. That was the most difficult case from America’s perspective, because Saudi Arabia has so much leverage over us because of oil, and it’s certainly not a democracy. But the Bush Doctrine, if you go look at what we said at the time, was predicated on the belief that we could democratize the greater Middle East. It might not happen overnight, but it would eventually happen.

I guess my point would be actions speak louder than words, and, whatever Bush’s flowery speeches said, I don’t feel like the policy of the United States at any point in its recent history has been to try and insure liberal democracies around the world.

There’s a big difference between how the United States behaved during the unipolar moment and how it’s behaved in the course of its history. I agree with you when you talk about American foreign policy in the course of its broader history, but the unipolar moment was a very special time. I believe that during the unipolar moment, we were deeply committed to spreading democracy.

With Ukraine, it’s very important to understand that, up until 2014, we did not envision NATO expansion and E.U. expansion as a policy that was aimed at containing Russia. Nobody seriously thought that Russia was a threat before February 22, 2014. NATO expansion, E.U. expansion, and turning Ukraine and Georgia and other countries into liberal democracies were all about creating a giant zone of peace that spread all over Europe and included Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It was not aimed at containing Russia. What happened is that this major crisis broke out, and we had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves. We were going to blame the Russians. So we invented this story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.

Anagnorisis is that moment of recognition when a character in a play finally understands their predicament and who they really are. It is Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII realizing that he has “ventured … this many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth,” or Richard II saying, “I have wasted time and now doth time waste me.” It happens in war all the time, and it is happening now as Russia pushes forward with its invasion of Ukraine.The surprises come thick and fast. Vladimir Putin was supposed to be a master chess player, but he has shown himself to be erratic, grandiose, and willful in a self-destructive way. Instead of taking Ukraine one bite at a time, a strategy the NATO powers might have found difficult to cope with, he launched a massive invasion that has left his country isolated in ways unimaginable two weeks ago. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was supposed to be out of his depth. But the former comic is an inspirational war leader, at home and abroad.[Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in Ukraine]The Russian army, supplied with new weapons and coming off of (exaggerated) successes in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, and elsewhere, has revealed itself as a mediocre military, filled with bewildered 18- and 19-year-olds, inept at protecting its supply lines, and seemingly incompetent at combined-arms warfare on the tactical level. General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff, who has served for a decade, has long been treated with respect in the West as a major conceptualizer of modern hybrid warfare. Yet he finds himself in a war in the information domain in which victories have gone to Western intelligence agencies (accurately predicting every move) and Ukrainian public-relations experts who shame their enemy by letting captured soldiers call their mothers, while inspiring their countrymen with videos of civilians confronting the uneasy invaders.The European states, paralyzed, some thought, by greed and naivete, turn out to have remarkable willpower: The Swedes are shipping thousands of anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, while Germany—pacific, commercial, Russia-understanding Germany—has announced that it will cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, arm Ukraine, and pour more than twice its annual defense budget into that country’s rearmament. Above all, the United States, under the leadership of a supposedly failing and confused old man, whose team botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, has brilliantly assembled a European and indeed a global coalition to punish and isolate Russia. Asian countries, including Taiwan, Australia, and Japan, are joining in, and the Kenyan representative to the United Nations gave a viral speech denouncing the Russian invasion.One should not make too much of the mere fact of surprise. As Henry Adams noted in his acidic memoirs discussing the Civil War and beyond, “In all great emergencies he commonly found that everyone was more or less wrong.” Even so, these misjudgments are worth analyzing. Why did so many highly intelligent and educated observers get so much wrong?Three explanations loom. One has to do with personalities and characters. Putin’s behavior shocked many people because they bought into his image as a grand master of intricate policy maneuvers, which assumes intentionality, adroitness, and cunning. A more accurate judgment followed from saying to oneself: This is an aging dictator, who after 20 years of absolute power gets no pushback; who is paranoid, dismissive, and brutal; who has physically isolated himself from other people (particularly in the past two years) and surrounded himself with flunkies. Most important, he is someone who has deteriorated both physically and—as seen in his delivery of rambling, querulous speeches—mentally. Shakespeare might have been a better guide here: In the first three acts of Richard III, the murderous aspiring king is clever and indirect even as his minions kill his enemies. Once he has been crowned, he orders the murder of his nephews with blunt relish: “I wish the bastards dead; And I would have it suddenly performed.” It is the beginning of the end for him, as he resorts to crude and open violence that only provokes those who will eventually take him down.Some observers missed the power of personality in a different way, thanks to a belief in structural causes and forces—what passes for “realism,” which is indeed often highly unrealistic. The personality of the Ukrainian president has made all the difference. Volodymyr Zelensky is an Everyman hero: reluctant, initially unsure, but patriotic and courageous. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man,” the saying goes, and so it was.A second explanation is narrower. It has to do with military analysts’ focus on technology at the expense of the human element in war. Again, less international-relations theory and more Carl von Clausewitz would have helped. His teachings in his classic On War are as true today as they were when written two centuries ago: War is a contest of wills; it is unpredictable; it is the domain of accident and contingency; nothing goes as planned; and events are smothered in a fog created by misinformation and fear. Patriotic fervor, hatred of the invader, and knowledge of place and home weigh a great deal, and thus far so they have.Finally, the democratic pessimism of the past two decades has obscured from many the extraordinary power of freedom, and the innate resilience of liberal-democratic countries and institutions. Here too, grand simplicities are at work. The Russian military and intelligence services are great at lying—no one is better. But that weapon, which has played a minor role in confounding American domestic politics (among others), is infinitely weaker than the truth. Some history might have helped here: The BBC during World War II, and Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty afterward, were powerful because they told the truth. A culture of lies is corrosive, breeding cynicism and eventually self-doubt. Truth is not only more powerful but open to all of us, hence Václav Havel’s dictum that the way to resist tyranny is to live in truth.[Read: Putin accidentally revitalized the West’s liberal order]The people of Ukraine are suffering terribly under Russian missiles and shells; they will probably suffer more. But Zelensky was right to tell European leaders that his countrymen and -women were fighting not only for Ukrainian values and rights, but for European—that is, liberal-democratic—values and rights. And when he said that, he opened the floodgates of aid.This war is a humanitarian catastrophe for Ukraine, and we owe its people a deep debt, which should be paid in every form of aid, beginning with military assistance. But Ukraine’s losses are purchasing for the rest of us confidence in fundamental convictions that had not vanished, but rather were dormant. We are living in one of the moments when—unforeseen and astonishingly—the hinge of history creaks and moves, and that is an awe-inspiring spectacle. That should not cause the free world to be complacent, but should give it hope.

In a press conference earlier this month, Vladimir Putin noted that the Ukrainian government does not like the Minsk agreement and then added: “Like it or not, it’s your duty, my beauty.”
The saying has well-known sexual connotations: Putin appeared to be quoting from “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by the Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold: “Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.”
Although the Kremlin press representative claimed that Putin referred to an old folkloric expression, reference to Ukraine as an object of necrophilia and rape is clear. Back in 2002, Putin replied to a Western’s journalist’s question with: “If you want to become a complete Islamic radical and are ready to undergo circumcision, then I invite you to Moscow. We are a multidenominational country. We have specialists in this question [circumcision]. I will recommend that they carry out the operation in such a way so that afterward, nothing else will grow” — a rather vulgar threat of castration.
No wonder Putin and Trump were buddies in vulgarities. The counterargument you often hear here is that at least politicians like Putin and Trump openly say what they mean and avoid hypocrisy. Here however, I am wholeheartedly on the side of hypocrisy: the form (of hypocrisy) is never just a form, it is part of the content, so that when we drop the form, the content itself gets brutalized.
Putin’s obscene remark should be read against the background of the Ukrainian crisis which is presented in our media as the threat of the “rape of a fair country.” This crisis is not without its comical aspects — a proof, in today’s topsy-turvy world, that the crisis is serious. The Slovene political analyst Boris Čibej pointed out the comical character of the tensions around Ukraine at the beginning of 2022: “Those who are expected to attack /i.e., Russia/ claim they have no intention to do it, and those who act as if they want to calm down the situation insist that the fight is inevitable.”
We can go on here: in the past few weeks, the US, protector of Ukraine, was warning that war could explode at any moment while the president of Ukraine, the expected victim of the Russian attack, warned against war hysteria and called for calm.
It is easy to translate this situation into that of a rape. Russia, which is ready to rape Ukraine, claims it doesn’t want to do it — but between the lines it’s making it clear that, if it doesn’t get consent for sex from Ukraine, it is ready to commit rape (recall Putin’s vulgar reply). Russia also accuses Ukraine of provoking it to commit rape.
The US, which wants to protect Ukraine from being raped, rings the alarm bells about the imminent threat of rape so that it can assert itself as the protector of post-Soviet states. This protectiveness cannot but remind us of a local mobster who offers stores and restaurants in his domain “protection” against robbery, with a veiled threat that, if they reject his protection, something may happen to them…
Ukraine, the target of the threat of rape, tries to keep calm, nervous also at US alarm bells, aware that the uproar about rape can push Russia to actually commit rape.
So what lies behind this conflict with all its unpredictable dangers? What if this conflict is so dangerous not because it reflects the growing strength of the two ex-superpowers but, on the contrary, proves that they are not able to accept the fact that they are no longer true global powers?
When at the height of the Cold War, Mao Zedong said that the US is, with all its weapons, a paper tiger, he forgot to add that paper tigers could be more dangerous that self-confident real tigers.
The Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco was just the last in a series of blows to the US supremacy — and Russia’s effort to reconstruct the Soviet empire is nothing but a desperate attempt to cover up the fact that Russia is now a weak state in decay. As is also the case with actual rapists, rapes signal the impotence of the aggressor.
 
This impotence is palpable now that that the act of rape has begun with the first direct penetration of Russian military into Ukraine — first, that is, if we discount the obscene role of the Wagner group, a Private Military Company whose contractors have taken part in various conflicts, including operations in the Syrian civil war, Crimea, central Africa and Republika Srpska in Bosnia. This group of anonymous mercenaries, an arms-length unit of the Russian Ministry of Defense used by the Russian government in conflicts where deniability is required, has for years operated in Donbas, organizing the “spontaneous” resistance to Ukraine (as they already did in Crimea).
All of us from countries which have to witness the sad affair of Ukraine’s rape should be aware that only a real castration prevents rape. So we should recommend that the international community carries out a castrative operation on Russia — ignoring and marginalizing them as much as possible, making it sure that afterwards, nothing else will grow of their global authority.
The post Was Russia’s ‘rape’ of Ukraine inevitable? appeared first on The Spectator World.

Dear God, calamity again!
It was so peaceful, so serene;
We had just begun to break the chains
That bind our folk in slavery
When halt! Once again the people’s blood
Is streaming …
The poem is called “Calamity Again.” The original version was written in Ukrainian, in 1859, and the author, Taras Shevchenko, was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote about slavery. Shevchenko was born into a family of serfs—slaves—on an estate in what is now central Ukraine, in what was then the Russian empire. Taken away from his family as a child, he followed his master to St. Petersburg, where he was trained as a painter and also began to write poetry. Impressed by his talent, a group of other artists and writers there helped him purchase his freedom.   By the time Shevchenko wrote “Calamity Again,” he was universally recognized as Ukraine’s most prominent poet. He was known as Kobzar or “The Minstrel”—the name taken from his first collection of poems, published in 1840—and his words defined the particular set of memories and emotions that we would now describe as Ukraine’s “national identity.” His language and style are not contemporary. Nevertheless, it seems suddenly important to introduce this 19th-century poet to readers outside Ukraine, because it seems suddenly important to make this same set of memories and emotions tangible to an audience that isn’t going to read Shevchenko’s romantic ballads. So much has been written about Russian views of Ukraine; so many have speculated about Russian goals in Ukraine. The president of Russia on Monday even informed us, in an hour-long rant, that he thinks Ukraine shouldn’t exist at all. But what does Ukraine mean to Ukrainians?[Read: How much will the West sacrifice for Ukraine?]The Ukrainians emerged from the medieval state of Kyivan Rus’—the same state from which the Russians and Belarusians also emerged—eventually to become, like the Irish or the Slovaks, a land-based colony of other empires. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Ukrainian noblemen learned to speak Polish and participated in Polish-court life; later some Ukrainians strived to become part of the Russian-speaking world, learning Russian and aspiring to positions of power first in the Russian empire, then in the Soviet Union.   Yet during those same centuries, a sense of Ukrainianness developed too, linked to the peasantry, serfs, and farmers who would not or could not assimilate. The Ukrainian language, as well as Ukrainian art and music, were all preserved in the countryside, even though the cities spoke Polish or Russian. To say “I am Ukrainian” was, once upon a time, a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant you were deliberately defining yourself against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites. Later on, it could mean you were defining yourself against the Soviet Union: Ukrainian partisans fought against the Red Army in 1918 and then again in the dying days of the Second World War and the early years of the Cold War. The Ukrainian identity was anti-elitist before anyone used the expression anti-elitist, often angry and anarchic, occasionally violent. Some of Shevchenko’s poetry is very angry and very violent indeed.   Because it could not be expressed through state institutions, Ukrainian patriotism was, like Italian or German patriotism in the same era, expressed in the 19th century through voluntary, religious, and charitable organizations, early examples of what we now call “civil society”: self-​­help and study groups that published periodicals and newspapers, founded schools and Sunday schools, promoted literacy among the peasants. As they gained strength and numbers, Moscow came to see these grassroots Ukrainian organizations as a threat to the unity of imperial Russia. In 1863 and then again in 1876, the empire banned Ukrainian books and persecuted Ukrainians who wrote and published them. Shevchenko himself spent years in exile.Still, Ukrainianness survived in the villages and grew stronger among intellectuals and writers, remaining powerful enough to persuade Ukrainians to make their first bid for statehood at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Though they lost that chance in the ensuing civil war, the Bolsheviks immediately realized that Ukraine should have its own republic within the Soviet Union, run by Ukrainian Communists. Ukrainian mistrust of authority, especially Soviet authority, remained. When Stalin began the forcible collectivization of agriculture all across the Soviet Union in 1929, a series of rebellions broke out in Ukraine. Stalin, like the Russian imperial aristocracy before him, began to fear that he would, as he put it, “lose” Ukraine: Even Ukrainian Communists, he feared, did not want to obey his orders. Soon afterward, Soviet secret policemen organized teams of activists to go from house to house in parts of rural Ukraine, confiscating food. Some 4 million Ukrainians died in the famine that followed. Mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, linguists, museum curators, poets, and painters followed.There are no simple lines to be drawn between the past and the present. There are no direct analogies; no nation is forced to repeat its past. But the experiences of our parents and grandparents, the habits and lessons they taught us, do shape the way we see the world, and it is perhaps not an accident that in the late 20th century, Stalin’s greatest fear came to pass and the Ukrainians once again organized, this time successfully, a grassroots civic movement that won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Nor, perhaps, is it an accident that many Ukrainians remained wary of the state, even of their own state, in the ensuing years. Because the state—the government, the rulers, the “power”—had always been “them,” not “us,” there was no tradition of Ukrainian civil service or military service; there was no tradition of public service at all. If the cancer of corruption, which afflicted all of the weary, cynical, exhausted republics formed in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, was particularly virulent in Ukraine, this is a part of the explanation.But, in the long tradition of their parents and grandparents, millions of Ukrainians did continue to resist both corruption and autocracy. And precisely because it was opposed to the post-Soviet kleptocracy, Ukrainianness in the 21st century became intertwined with aspirations for democracy, for freedom, for rule of law, for integration in Europe. By the beginning of the 21st century, Ukrainians began to object to the post-Soviet establishment, linked by financial interests to Russia, and began once again agitating for something more fair and more just.[Franklin Foer: It’s not ‘The’ Ukraine]Twice, in 2005 and 2014, self-organized Ukrainian street movements toppled kleptocratic, autocratic leaders who, backed by Russia, had tried to steal Ukrainian elections and override the rule of law. In 2005, Russia responded with a renewed effort to interfere in Ukrainian politics. In 2014, Russia responded with the invasion of Crimea and multiple assaults on eastern-Ukrainian cities. The only attacks that succeeded were in the far east, in Donbas, because the Russian-created “separatist” movement could be backed up by the Russian army.  But Ukraine’s character remained unchanged. In 2019, 70 percent of Ukrainians once again voted against the establishment. A total outsider became president: a Jewish actor born in eastern Ukraine with no political experience but a long history of making fun of those who are in power—the kind of humor that Ukrainians value the most. Volodymyr Zelensky was famous for playing a downtrodden schoolteacher who rants against corruption and is filmed by a student. In the television series, the clip goes viral, the teacher accidentally wins the presidency, and then everyone—his unpleasant boss, his unsympathetic family, rich strangers—is suddenly sycophantic. Zelensky the actor makes fun of them, outsmarts them. Ukrainians wanted Zelensky the real-life president to do the same.During his election campaign, Zelensky also promised to end the war with Russia, the ongoing, debilitating conflict along the border of eastern Ukraine that has taken more than 14,000 lives in the past decade. Many Ukrainians hoped he would achieve that too. He did seek to establish links to the inhabitants of occupied Crimea and Donbas; he asked for meetings with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin; meanwhile, he kept seeking Ukrainian integration with the West.And then, calamity again.
We had just began to break the chains
Ukraine is now under brutal attack, with tens of thousands of Russian troops moving through its eastern provinces, along its northern border and its southern coast. For like the Russian czars before him—like Stalin, like Lenin—Putin also perceives Ukrainianness as a threat. Not a military threat, but an ideological threat. Ukraine’s determination to become a democracy is a genuine challenge to Putin’s nostalgic, imperial political project: the creation of an autocratic kleptocracy, in which he is all-powerful, within something approximating the old Soviet empire. Ukraine undermines this project just by existing as an independent state. By striving for something better, for freedom and prosperity, Ukraine becomes a dangerous rival. For if Ukraine were to succeed in its decades-long push for democracy, the rule of law, and European integration, then Russians might ask: Why not us?I am not romantic about Zelensky, nor am I under any illusions about Ukraine, a nation of 40 million people, among them the same percentages of good and bad people, brave and cowardly people, as anywhere else. But at this moment in history, something unusual is happening there. Among those 40 million, a significant number—at all levels of society, all across the country, in every field of endeavor—aspire to create a fairer, freer, more prosperous country than any they have inhabited in the past. Among them are people willing to dedicate their lives to fighting corruption, to deepening democracy, to remain sovereign and free. Some of those people are willing to die for these ideas.  The clash that is coming will matter to all of us, in ways that we can’t yet fathom. In the centuries-long struggle between autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, Ukraine is now the front line—and our front line too.

“Julia,” which ran for three seasons starting in 1968, was about a Black registered nurse, played by Diahann Carroll in her signature unflappable style. Her character was a professional woman, a single mom of an adorable son and the widow of a Vietnam War veteran, who negotiated a white world in which she occasionally encountered prejudice and dispatched it with crisp dismissal. (Though, it should be noted, many episodes dealt with other issues entirely.) To the N.A.A.C.P. of the late 1950s, “Julia” would’ve been just the ticket, portraying a financially independent, self-assured Black everywoman.

But as Donald Bogle documents in “Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television,” Carroll recalled that Harry Belafonte, the actor and civil rights activist, “launched a full-scale assault on ‘Julia,’ then asked me not to do it.” Bogle notes that Robert Lewis Shayon, a TV critic for The Saturday Review, wrote that the sitcom’s middle-class setting was “a far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America’s explosion potential.” After Carroll responded to Shayon’s criticism by noting that for many, watching TV can be a form of escapism at the end of a typical trying day, Shayon later wrote that the show:

distorts reality and deals in double-truth. The business of TV comedy is not primarily to make people laugh: it is to manage consumption; and if in so doing it dulls critical sensibilities in people who have ‘had a pretty grim day,’ it contributes its share to the rigidity of a way of life in which black Americans suffer more severely than others.

Shayon was white and his take on a show about middle-class Black contentment was what we might now call woke, in some ways more intuitive to many than the N.A.A.C.P.’s response to “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”

Which brings me to the way race is handled on the new HBO Max show, “The Gilded Age.” As Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times reports, the creator, Julian Fellowes (of “Downton Abbey” fame), considered having the show’s central Black female character, Peggy Scott, played by Denée Benton, be introduced to other characters as a maid. This would have been an honest depiction of some Black people’s station amid wealthy white New Yorkers in 1882, but an incomplete one. Benton requested that the creators consider a different conception of her character, and they did — Peggy starts out as the personal secretary to Agnes Van Rhijn, the society matron played by Christine Baranski. And as the show proceeds, we learn that for Peggy, an aspiring writer, a secretarial position is something of a step down, as she eschews the ready-made path that her parents want for her: taking over her father’s pharmacy and her prescribed place in Black society.

Miracle of miracles, “The Gilded Age” is portraying in living color (at least through the show’s most recently released episode) Brooklyn’s Black bourgeoisie of the era, and some of its history. That is, many Black New Yorkers, terrorized by the 1863 Draft Riots — which included the torching of a Black orphanage on Fifth Avenue — and by the generally oppressive conditions for Black people in an openly bigoted Manhattan, moved across the East River to Brooklyn, where a community of prosperous Black families took hold. Who knew that we would ever see, in high-def, this affluent Black Brooklyn, with characters played by actors as august as Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson? (Of note, also, is one of the show’s executive producers, Salli Richardson-Whitfield, known for her acting roles in movies such as “Antwone Fisher,” who directs four “Gilded Age” episodes this season.)

The victory here is the kind that the critics of “Amos ‘n’ Andy” would have saluted, even if the critics of “Julia” might have been more skeptical. That is to say that “The Gilded Age,” at least so far, isn’t reckoning with the 19th-century Black New Yorkers who were making their way in the suffocatingly overcrowded Five Points neighborhood downtown (depicted memorably by Martin Scorsese in “Gangs of New York”). Or in cramped tenements in San Juan Hill on the Upper West Side, where “West Side Story” is set, a neighborhood later demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. In one scene, though, “Gilded Age” does nod to the racial stratification of the time, irrespective of class: As Peggy and her father stand on a sidewalk, white pedestrians pass, and she and her father know that they’re expected to stand aside and make way, and they do — their moneyed status and elegant bearing offering no exemption from being treated as second-class citizens.

(Photo by Brad Vest for the Washington Post/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,Every once in a while, I’ll stop chasing news cycles and instead dig into lesser-known areas of U.S. policy that deserve more attention. And so today we’re going to talk about “dumping”—a terrible-sounding word used by a lot of politicians and domestic interest groups (manufacturers, unions, etc.), usually in reference to some dastardly foreign imports they’re trying to block. But if you look at the actual, legal definition of “dumping”—and the history of U.S. anti-dumping law and policy—you’ll quickly realize that our most widely used “unfair trade” law actually has little to do with “unfair trade” at all, and almost everything to do with naked, costly protectionism. It also provides a cautionary tale for U.S. policy proposals that could establish similar systems today.Rhetoric vs. RealityLike a lot of protectionist policies in the United States, the U.S. anti-dumping law dates back more than a century and has expanded far beyond its original scope and intent. As Dartmouth’s Doug Irwin explains in his book, Clashing Over Commerce, the original Antidumping Act of 1916 was intended to discipline anti-competitive “predatory pricing”: In particular, it “made it illegal to sell imported goods at prices substantially lower than the market value in the exporting country ‘with the intent of destroying or injuring an industry in the United States.’” However, because proving foreign exporters’ “predatory intent” in U.S. courts was difficult and time-consuming, the law was rarely used. So Congress, naturally, went back to the drawing board a few years later and, in the Antidumping Act of 1921, “changed matters considerably.” Under this new version, which (along with the Tariff Act of 1930) is the foundation for today’s anti-dumping law, there is no “predatory intent” requirement; AD cases moved from the courts to the bureaucracy; and AD duties simply police price discrimination. Thus, the treasury secretary could impose anti-dumping duties on imports if an investigation determined that 1) they were sold in the United States at less than “fair value” (i.e., the price charged by the exporter in its home market) and 2) were injuring the U.S. industry making the same product. As Irwin notes, “a foreign exporter charging a lower price on its sales in the United States than in its own home market could be found guilty of dumping”—regardless of the exporters’ intent or any other circumstances. The difference between that home market price (say, $110 per widget) and the U.S. export price (say, $100 per widget) is the “dumping margin,” which is then converted to a final AD duty rate applied to subject imports by dividing the margin over the company’s U.S. sales: In our very simple example, (110-100)/100 equalsa 10 percent tariff—on top of any normal tariff the U.S. already applies on the product. Thus arises the first problem with the anti-dumping law and common allegations of “dumping”: Price discrimination alone is a horrible proxy for any sort of “unfair” or anticompetitive trading practice, including the most common ones today linked to “dumping”—i.e., predatory pricing or closed (“sanctuary”) home markets. As my Cato colleagues have written repeatedly, there are plenty of legitimate, commercial reasons why a company might charge a higher price in its home market than in an export market, and this kind of price discrimination happens every day in the United States—in international or interstate trade—in all sorts of industries. It’s totally normal stuff, yet it’s dutiable under the anti-dumping law.Subsequent revisions to the law define “dumping” as also occurring when a foreign company sells in the U.S. below its cost of production. This is closer to something that might indicate “unfair” trade (e.g., foreign subsidies or sanctuary markets), but there are still many normal (non-predatory) reasons for why below-cost sales might occur: For example, temporary “loss-leader” sales in an important new market or for a new, untested product; financially weak companies selling off assets to pay creditors instead of declaring bankruptcy; severe recessions or currency problems in home markets; and so on. Economically, moreover, this type of “predatory” behavior is rarely—if ever—effective in killing off competitors and establishing market dominance. (See this Don Boudreaux essay for more.) Regardless, the U.S. government has itself acknowledged that “The antidumping rules are not intended as a remedy for predatory pricing practices of firms or as a remedy for any other private anticompetitive practices typically condemned by competition laws.” So that settles that.So why, then, does the U.S. anti-dumping law even exist? As my former Cato colleague Dan Ikenson and others have explained, it was a simple political compromise: Developed countries—particularly the United States—agreed to lower their tariffs if they maintained the right to impose “trade remedies” restrictions on certain imports, i.e., anti-dumping duties and those targeting subsidies (“countervailing duties” or “CVDs”) and global import surges (temporary “safeguards”). In the United States, Ikenson details how this compromise was primarily about placating Congress during past free trade agreement negotiations, particularly at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT):At the founding of the GATT, U.S. negotiators insisted that language permitting the use of antidumping be included. A view widely held—or at least the excuse given—by them at the time was that antidumping rules made deeper trade liberalization possible because they assured Congress that fallback contingencies were available if general tariff cutting exposed domestic industries to too much competition. Without antidumping, the argument went, Congress might not support general tariff liberalization.Evidence that Congress was serious about preserving and protecting the U.S. antidumping law emerged during debate in the Kennedy Round over the implementation of this legislation. During the round, modest changes to domestic antidumping administration had been agreed upon. But Congress refused to accept the agreement’s disciplines on domestic antidumping laws and ultimately carved out those changes from being implemented in the legislation.Thus, the final WTO agreements both codify non-discriminatory tariff cuts and permit discriminatory trade remedies, subject to certain substantive and procedural disciplines enshrined therein.But That Was Then …At one time, this compromise may have been reasonable: According to Irwin, for example, anti-dumping cases were rare in the years leading up to and following the GATT’s entry into force in 1947: “from 1934 to 1954, there were only seven findings of dumping” in the United States. And only a few countries used them at all, while even fewer used CVDs.Since then, however, anti-dumping has turned into a classic “Frankenstein’s Monster” economic policy, smashing trade villages around the world. Most notably, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly rewritten the law to make it easier to find “dumping” or “injury” where these requirements wouldn’t have previously existed. These changes include:Transferring jurisdiction for AD/CVD investigations from Treasury (which looks after the entire U.S. economy) to the Commerce Department (which promotes the narrow interests of U.S. manufacturers).Implementing numerous methodological changes since the 1970s that allowed Commerce to inflate dumping margins—and thus final duty rates—by essentially ignoring even the watered-down “price comparison” objective. Today, for example, Commerce can disregard the financial data foreign exporters submit for sales, production costs, profits, and other items, and it can instead “construct” prices using partial data, “adjusted” figures (biased against the foreigners, of course), or even data from other countries that aren’t under investigation. The last bit of ridiculousness used to apply only to imports from China and other “non-market economies” (basically, Vietnam), but changes snuck into 2015 legislation let Commerce today apply similar approaches for imports from obvious “market economies” like South Korea. The result: creating “dumping” out of thin air.Relaxing the standards by which the International Trade Commission (ITC) can determine whether imports Commerce finds to be dumped or subsidized are “injuring” the domestic industry.Establishing a convoluted “retrospective” system, under which final duties imposed on imports are calculated a year or more after those goods have entered the country—an additional, non-tariff trade barrier that, per GAO and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, confounds U.S. duty collection efforts.Rejecting amendments to the law that would allow U.S. agencies to consider the “public interest” (e.g., consumers, broader national economic or foreign policy interests, or emergency situations) or to apply a “lesser duty” where doing so would remedy the “injury” suffered by the domestic producers. Jurisdictions like Canada and the EU apply these common-sense rules, which sure would’ve been useful when the U.S. applied - in the middle of a global pandemic - AD/CVDs on lumber, fertilizer, intermodal chassis, and other critical goods.As a result of these changes, past studies have repeatedly shown that U.S. anti-dumping actions rarely (almost never) target anything even remotely close to anti-competitive or predatory behavior by foreign exporters or “unfair” policies by their governments. In many cases, “dumping” has been found where foreign companies were actually selling in the U.S. well above the prices in their home markets. So it often doesn’t even target price discrimination!As I wrote a few years ago, Congress has done similar things with the CVD law—including by changing the definition of a “subsidy” to allow for duties on softwood lumber back in the 1980s. Today’s CVD law isn’t as problematic as the AD law, but it’s also used much less frequently—about 75 percent of all U.S. cases are AD cases.Meanwhile, decades of congressional pressure and industry lobbying have resulted in agencies that have been effectively “captured” by a handful of politically powerful companies and unions, especially the steel industry. For example--According to interviews with former congressional and Commerce Department staff conducted by the Office of the Inspector General: “This [pro-steel industry] bias is illustrated by the actions of career Commerce Department officials through whom must pass all Department of Commerce [antidumping] determinations in steel cases. The members and staff of the congressional Steel Caucus meet with them regularly to discuss ongoing antidumping and countervailing duty proceedings pending before the Department of Commerce. At some of these meetings, these officials have shared advance draft investigation results with the congressional Steel Caucus well before they were announced in final form, allowing the Steel Caucus to “comment” on them. Time and again high level officials within the agency have exerted pressure on lower level Department of Commerce staff conducting investigations of foreign steel producers to rerun calculations and alter methodologies, resulting in increased AD/CVD tariffs.As of last week, almost half (311 of 649) of all U.S. AD/CVD orders in place were on iron and steel products—and it’s easy to see why.

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This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely, intriguing conversations and solicits reader responses to one question of the moment. Every Friday, he publishes some of your most thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.With another Valentine’s Day just behind us, I’m reminded of the profound changes in social conceptions of love, marriage, sex, and romance across centuries, and the smaller changes that I’ve witnessed personally during the decades that I’ve been alive. Today’s question concerns today’s norms. In your opinion, what’s the best or worst thing about love, marriage, sex, or romance as conceived in 2022? What would you change if you could? What do we have right? If you have a personal story that captures the zeitgeist as you understand it, tell that too.Email your answers to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of correspondence in Friday’s newsletter.Conversations of NoteIn Canada, convoys of long-haul truckers have spent recent weeks occupying streets, blocking bridges, and shutting down border crossings to protest a COVID-vaccine requirement. In a bid to end the protests, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers Monday to limit public gatherings and prevent funds donated by the public from reaching the protesters. Meanwhile, trucker protests have spread to several other countries.At Spiked Online, Sean Collins sides with the truckers in what he understands to be a class conflict:
If there is one word that is repeated by the truckers and their supporters it is “freedom”—freedom from mandates, freedom to live their lives and make their own decisions about their health. It’s an uncomplicated demand, one that people have called for over centuries. And in today’s context, it is a class-based demand. It is the truckers and other workers who have felt the brunt of Covid restrictions, while the Zooming upper classes have been content to stay indoors and get their supplies delivered to them—by truckers.
… Trudeau has played the role of an aloof elitist to a tee. He has dismissed the protesters as a “small fringe minority” who hold “unacceptable” views. By declaring them Nazis and Confederates, Trudeau has labelled the truckers as a foreign enemy within … Trudeau tweeted that truckers “don’t have the right to blockade our economy, or our democracy, or our fellow citizens’ daily lives”—when his restrictions over the past two years have done more harm to the economy and liberty than anything the truckers have done.
At MSNBC, Ryan Cooper frets that the failure of the police to clear the streets in a timely manner is a sign of their political sympathies:
These protests are just the visible part of a larger right-wing occupation movement, and indicative of a worrying anti-government trend. And equally as worrying is how law enforcement on both sides of the border have responded. Ottawa was terrorized for nearly two weeks by a few hundred protesters honking horns day and night, waving Nazi flags, harassing passers-by, and in one case, allegedly attempting to burn down an apartment building.
Canadian police finally cleared off Ambassador Bridge after the blockaders defied a court order to disperse. But … law enforcement in both countries were astoundingly timid in their responses. Canadian cops had been walking on eggshells; we “are taking a diplomatic approach,” the Windsor police chief told reporters. Ottawa police tried to coax the city occupiers out by cutting off their fuel and getting an injunction against honking horns instead of arresting them. As for U.S. law enforcement, there was no sign that the country’s gigantic security apparatus would crack down on the demonstrations. These events show that when law enforcement is genuinely needed to quash a far-right insurgency, it is timid and reluctant to do anything—a dangerous precedent to set.
At The Week, Samuel Goldman recalls the reactions to the protests that followed the death of George Floyd and doesn’t find much consistency:
Media figures and politicians have flipped the script established during the tumults of 2020. At that time, with protests for policing reform in many major cities, progressives mostly defended disruptive tactics like occupations and road shutdowns, if not actual violence, while conservatives called for harsh penalties. Now Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) argues the Canadian truckers are standing up for freedom, while late-night hosts bemoan the economic and social costs.
Some of this shift has to do with growing enthusiasm for gonzo politics on the right. But the real explanation lies deeper. Very few people uphold consistent opinions on the justice of protest tactics, one way or the other. What matters is their assessment of the goal and participants.
But the New York Times editorial board does get points for consistency:
We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support. Governments have a responsibility to prevent violence by protesters, but they must be willing to accept some degree of disruption by those seeking to be heard. The challenge for public officials—the same one faced by Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 during the protests after the murder of George Floyd—is to maintain a balance between public health and safety and a functioning society, with the right to free expression.
Entertaining the use of force to disperse or contain legal protests is wrong. As Mr. Trudeau said in November 2020, in expressing his support of a yearlong protest by farmers in India that blocked major highways to New Delhi, “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.”
Jonathan Turley expressed particular concern about Canada’s efforts to deprive the protesters of money from grassroots supporters:
GoFundMe, which previously helped fund arrested Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them.
After the money was frozen by GoFundMe, supporters switched to GiveSendGo to “adopt a trucker.” The Canadian government then moved successfully to freeze millions of donations to the truckers, and the Supreme Court of Canada approved the freeze in a major blow to free speech and associational rights in Canada. The freezing of funds supporting the truckers laid bare the anti-free speech trend sweeping across the world, including in the U.S. There is no principled basis for cutting off the ability of citizens to support other citizens in a campaign of civil disobedience. Although ignored by most in the media, the same claim used by the Trudeau government today could have been used to freeze support for the civil rights era’s freedom marchers or for BLM protesters in 2020.
In Reason, Liz Wolfe argued that “this type of situation—one in which protesters are being freezed out by crowdfunding platforms, one in which the government is threatening to suppress demonstrations and surveil financial transactions—is precisely the use case for crypto.” (Meanwhile, in her Atlantic newsletter, Wait, What?, Molly Jong-Fast contends that the wave of social-media support for the convoy is in large part artificial, pointing out that, “According to Grid, two of the biggest Facebook groups related to the protests—‘Freedom Convoy 2022’ and ‘Convoy to Ottawa 2022’—were created by a Bangladeshi digital-marketing firm.”)In The Wall Street Journal, Mary Anastasia O’Grady argues that there are broader reasons to be concerned about liberty:
Canada is advertised as a modern democracy that respects pluralism. This implies differences of opinion peacefully coexisting on a variety of subjects from assessing health risks to raising and educating children to political philosophy. Individuals, even when in the minority, retain rights to free speech and assembly. Yet in practice Canadians who oppose big government increasingly find they are living under a woke, progressive majoritarianism that believes it owns the truth. Dissidents are hounded out of the public square and even the prime minister cancels contrarians without batting an eye.
The reach of Canada’s administrative state rivals that of its southern neighbor. Ottawa and the provinces have their own versions of health departments and agencies staffed with “experts” who wield enormous power yet don’t answer to the electorate … In theory, Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms—which is part of the constitution—ought to protect civil rights. But the Canadian judiciary has been drifting ideologically left for decades. Courts today interpret the constitution through the lens of social justice rather than individual liberty. The state enjoys wide powers to crush dissent.
In contrast, Stephen Marche understands these protests as an extension of American dysfunction:
The truckers matter principally as an example of an American political proxy conflict spilling over our border, and as a harbinger of more such conflicts. Peter Sloly, the Ottawa police chief, has declared that a “sizable element” from the U.S. has been involved in fundraising and organizing. The Ottawa police have been overwhelmed by 911 calls intended to disrupt operations, and “they were coming in from the United States,” according to Sloly. By far, the largest supporters of the trucker convoy on social media are Americans, namely Donald Trump and Elon Musk. (One of Trump’s former “science advisers” has attended rallies.) Republican Senator Ted Cruz is way, way more into the trucker convoy than any Canadian Conservative is. This episode is no doubt just the beginning of the nightmare of living next to the United States in its time of breakdown. As American politics enters a state of complete toxicity, veering into insurgency, its violence and misinformation networks will inevitably spread across the border.
On Caring for ChildrenTwo recent essays in The Atlantic have grappled with questions concerning the rising generation. My colleague Elizabeth Bruenig focuses on their place in liberal societies like the United States:  
Our world is structured around the core notion that people are free and equal, and that ideally they ought to be left alone by state and neighbor to manage their own affairs, so long as their activities don’t impose upon others. From these simple premises and a handful of others that follow in close rhyme, we derive our democratic republic; our freedoms of thought, assembly, religion, association, and speech; and our indignation at being told what to do.
In that sense, children are a paradox for liberalism. On the one hand, it’s crucial that they obey adults in their daily life, because they rely on adult competence and judgment to stand in while they develop their own. On the other, the helplessness of children, coupled with the fact that they too are wholly human persons, obligates others to them—meaning, in short, that children both take orders and give them by nature of their very existence. Children are bundles of obligations, theirs and ours to them, and their vulnerability and needs leave little room for the sort of political freedom the imaginary liberal subject is presumed to have.
Mary Katharine Ham worries about the heavy cost that children have paid during the coronavirus pandemic:
A one-size-fits-all approach to risk, and top-down encouragement to take as few risks as possible, may have been reasonable in 2020, before we properly understood how the coronavirus was transmitted and before we had vaccines. Spurning risk analysis made us all worse at it, however, and children have paid the highest price.
Children are the least at-risk population, but in many areas of the country they continue to face draconian mitigation policies … As David Leonhardt wrote in The New York Times, we’ve inflicted “more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults.” You don’t have to be a psychologist to see something wrong with that exchange. In our focus on one threat, we’ve let a thousand others flourish: learning loss, destabilization of the public-school system due to under-enrollment, self-harm, behavioral problems.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein recently interviewed Janet Lansbury about her novel approach to parenting.Provocation of the WeekRichard Ngo works at an organization focused on ensuring that if and when artificial general intelligence is loosed on the world, it benefits all of humanity rather than trapping us in a dystopian future or killing us. On Twitter last week he proposed a rather fraught biological experiment:
Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent, and reproduce at 1 year old. If we’d started a breeding program 50 years ago, we probably could’ve gotten them smarter than dolphins by now. A disappointing failure of the long-term mad science ecosystem. Four specific reasons their brain size could increase rapidly:

Their brains don’t need to pass through a birth canal
Their head weight is supported by water
They could develop many more neurons in their arms
They have many many offspring which we could select between

The best time to start an octopus intelligence breeding program was 50 years ago. The second-best time is now! People keep asking why. To them I say: we do this thing not because it is easy, but because it is awesome. More seriously: it would be really great to understand general intelligence better. Seems like an important step towards mitigating risks from AGI.
My gut tells me that that’s a bad idea, and that 50 years hence it would be remembered as deeply unethical, but I suspect that it won’t be long until someone attempts an experiment like it, perhaps using gene-editing technology rather than, or in combination with, selective breeding.Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

Irrational political panic is as American a phenomenon as apple pie. It often arises as a result of a potential inability on the part of the powers-that-be to control the outcome of developments that may pose challenges to the interests of the existing socioeconomic order or to the status quo of the geostrategic environment. The era of the Cold War speaks volumes about this phenomenon, but it’s also evident in earlier periods — for example, the first Red Scare in the wake of World War I — and we can see clear parallels in the present-day situation with reactions to Ukraine and the rise of China as a global power.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky delves into the phenomenon of irrational political panics in the U.S., with an emphasis on current developments on the foreign policy front — and the dangers of seeking to maintain global hegemony in a multipolar world.
C.J. Polychroniou: The political culture in the United States seems to have a propensity toward alarmism when it comes to political developments that are not in tune with the economic interests, ideological mindset and strategic interests of the powers-that-be. Indeed, from the anti-Spanish panic of the late 1890s to today’s rage about Russia’s security concerns over Ukraine, and China’s growing role in world affairs and everything in between, the political establishment and the media of this country tend to respond with full-blown alarm to developments that are not in alignment with U.S. interests, values and goals. Can you comment about this peculiar state of affairs, with particular emphasis on what’s happening today in connection with Ukraine and China?
Noam Chomsky: Quite true. Sometimes it’s hard to believe. One of the most significant and revealing examples is the rhetorical framework of the major internal planning document of the early Cold War years, NSC-68 of 1950, shortly after “the loss of China,” which set off a frenzy in the U.S. The document set the stage for huge expansion of the military budget. It’s worth recalling today when strains of this madness are reverberating — not for the first time; it’s perennial.
The policy recommendations of NSC-68 have been widely discussed in scholarship, though avoiding the hysterical rhetoric. It reads like a fairytale: ultimate evil confronted by absolute purity and noble idealism. On one side is the “slave state” with its “fundamental design” and inherent “compulsion” to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world,” destroying all governments and the “structure of society” everywhere. Its ultimate evil contrasts with our sheer perfection. The “fundamental purpose” of the United States is to assure “the dignity and worth of the individual” everywhere. Its leaders are animated by “generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations,” which is particularly evident in the traditional domains of U.S. influence, the Western hemisphere, long the beneficiary of Washington’s tender solicitude as its inhabitants can testify.
Anyone familiar with history and the actual balance of global power at the time would have reacted to this performance with utter bewilderment. Its State Department authors couldn’t have believed what they were writing. Some later gave an indication of what they were up to. Secretary of State Dean Acheson explained in his memoirs that in order to ram through the huge planned military expansion, it was necessary to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’” in ways that were “clearer than truth.” The highly influential Sen. Arthur Vandenberg surely understood this as well when advising [in 1947] that the government must “scare the hell out of the American people” to rouse them from their pacifist backwardness.
There are many precedents, and the drums are beating right now with warnings about American complacency and naivete about the intentions of the “mad dog” Putin to destroy democracy everywhere and subdue the world to his will, now in alliance with the other “Great Satan,” Xi Jinping.
The February 4 Putin-Xi summit, timed with the opening of the Olympic games, was recognized to be a major event in world affairs. Its review in a major article in The New York Times is headlined “A New Axis,” the allusion unconcealed. The review reported the intentions of the reincarnation of the Axis powers: “The message that China and Russia have sent to other countries is clear,” David Leonhardt writes. “They will not pressure other governments to respect human rights or hold elections.” And to Washington’s dismay, the Axis is attracting two countries from “the American camp,” Egypt and Saudi Arabia, stellar examples of how the U.S. respects human rights and elections in its camp — by providing a massive flow of weapons to these brutal dictatorships and directly participating in their crimes. The New Axis also maintains that “a powerful country should be able to impose its will within its declared sphere of influence. The country should even be able to topple a weaker nearby government without the world interfering” — an idea that the U.S. has always abhorred, as the historical record reveals.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Delphi Oracle issued a maxim: “Know Thyself.” Worth remembering, perhaps.
As in the case of NSC-68, there is method in the madness. China and Russia do pose real threats. The global hegemon does not take them lightly. There are some striking common features in how U.S. opinion and policy are reacting to the threats. They merit some thought.
The Atlantic Council describes the formation of the New Axis as a “tectonic shift in global relations” with plans that are truly “head spinning”: “The sides agreed to more closely link their economies through cooperation between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union. They will work together to develop the Arctic. They’ll deepen coordination in multilateral institutions and to battle climate change.”
We should not underestimate the grand significance of the Ukraine crisis, adds Damon Wilson, president of the National Endowment for Democracy. “The stakes of today’s crisis are not about Ukraine alone, but about the future of freedom,” no less.
Strong measures have to be taken right away, says Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: “President Biden should use every tool in his tool box and impose tough sanctions ahead of any invasion and not after it happens.” There is no time to dilly-dally with Macron-style appeals to the raging bear to temper his violence.
Received doctrine is that we must confront the formidable threat of China and stand firm on Ukraine, while Europe wavers and Ukraine asks us to tone down the rhetoric and pursue diplomatic measures. Luckily for the world, Washington is unflinching in its dedication to what is right and just, even if it is almost alone, as when it righteously invades Iraq and strangles Cuba in defiance of virtually uniform international protest, to take just two from a plethora of examples.
To be fair, adherence to the doctrine is not uniform. There’s deviation, most forcefully on the far right: Tucker Carlson, probably the most influential TV voice. He’s said we shouldn’t be involved in defending Ukraine against Russia — because we should be devoting all our resources to confronting the far more awesome China threat. Have to get our priorities straight in combating the Axis.
Warnings about Russia’s mobilization to invade Ukraine have been an annual media event since the crises of 2014, with regular reports of tens or hundreds of thousands of Russian troops preparing to attack. Today, however, the warnings are far more shrill, with a mixture of fear and ridicule for so-called Mad Vlad, whom the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman describes as a “one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door,” or from another perspective, the Russian leader seeking in vain for some response to his repeated requests for some attention to Russia’s expressed concerns. An analysis by MintPress found that 90 percent of the opinion pieces in the three major national newspapers have adopted a hawkish militant stance, with a bare scattering of questioning — a familiar phenomenon, as in the days before the Iraq invasion and, in fact, routinely when the state has delivered the word.
As in the case of the Sino-Soviet conspiracy to gain “absolute authority over the rest of the world” in 1950, the word now is that the U.S. must act decisively to counter the threat of the New Axis to the “rule-based global order” that is hailed by U.S. commentators, an interesting concept to which I’ll return briefly.
The “tectonic shift” is not a myth, and it does pose a threat to the U.S. It threatens U.S. primacy in shaping world order. That’s true of both of the crisis areas, on the borders of Russia and of China. In both cases, negotiated settlements are within reach: regional settlements. If they are achieved, the U.S. will only have an ancillary role, which it may not be willing to accept even at the cost of inflaming extremely hazardous confrontations.
In Ukraine, the basic outlines of a settlement are well-known on all sides; we’ve discussed them before. To repeat, the optimal outcome for security of Ukraine (and the world) is the kind of Austrian/Nordic neutrality that prevailed through the Cold War years, offering the opportunity to be part of Western Europe to whatever extent they chose, in every respect apart from providing the U.S. with military bases, which would have been a threat to them as well as to Russia. For internal Ukrainian conflicts, Minsk II provides a general framework.
As many analysts observe, Ukraine is not going to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the foreseeable future. George W. Bush rashly issued an invitation to join, but it was immediately vetoed by France and Germany. Though it remains on the table under U.S. pressure, it is not an option. All sides recognize this. The astute and knowledgeable Central Asia scholar Anatol Lieven comments that “the whole issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership is in fact purely theoretical, so that, in some respects, this whole argument is an argument about nothing — on both sides, it must be said, Russian as well as the West.”
His comment brings to mind [Argentinian writer Jorge Luis] Borges’s description of the Falkland/Malvinas war: two bald men fighting over a comb.
Russia pleads security concerns. For the U.S., it is a matter of high principle: We cannot infringe on the sacred right of sovereignty of nations, hence the right to join NATO, which Washington knows is not going to happen.
On the Russian side, a formal pledge of non-alignment hardly increases Russian security, any more than Russian security was enhanced when Washington guaranteed to Gorbachev that “not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction,” soon abrogated by Clinton, then more radically by W. Bush. Nothing would have changed if the promise had risen from a gentlemen’s agreement to a signed document.
The U.S. plea hardly rises to the level of comedy. The U.S. has utter disdain for the principle it proudly proclaims, as recent history once again dramatically confirms.
For Washington, there is a deeper issue: A regional settlement would be a serious threat to the U.S. global role. That concern has been simmering right through the Cold War years. Will Europe assume an independent role in world affairs, as it surely can, perhaps along Gaullist lines: Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, revived in Gorbachev’s 1989 advocacy of a “common European home,” a “vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Urals”? Even more unthinkable would be Gorbachev’s broader vision of a Eurasian security system from Lisbon to Vladivostok with no military blocs, shot down without discussion in the negotiations 30 years ago over a post-Cold War settlement.
The commitment to maintain the Atlanticist order in Europe, in which the U.S. reigns supreme, has had policy implications that reach beyond Europe itself. One crucial example was Chile in 1973, when the U.S. was working hard to overthrow the parliamentary government, finally succeeding with the installation of the murderous Pinochet dictatorship. A prime reason for destroying democracy in Chile was explained by its prime architect, Henry Kissinger. He warned that parliamentary social reforms in Chile might provide a model for similar efforts in Italy and Spain that might lead Europe on an independent path, away from subordination to U.S. control and the U.S. model of harsher capitalism. The domino theory, often derided, never abandoned, because it is an important instrument of statecraft. The issue arises again with regard to a regional settlement of the Ukraine conflict.
Much the same is true in the confrontation with China. As we’ve discussed earlier, there are serious issues concerning China’s violation of international law in the neighboring seas — though as the one maritime country that refuses even to ratify the UN Law of the Sea, the U.S. is hardly in a strong position to object. Nor does the U.S. alleviate these problems by sending a naval armada through these waters or providing Australia with a fleet of nuclear submarines to enhance the already overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. off the coasts of China. The issues can and should be addressed by the regional powers.
As in the case of Ukraine, however, there is a downside: The U.S. will not be in charge.
Also as in the case of Ukraine, the U.S. professes its commitment to high principle in taking the lead to confront the threat of China: its horror at China’s human rights abuses, which are doubtless severe. Again, it is easy enough to assess the sincerity of this stand. One revealing index is U.S. military aid. At the top, in a category by themselves, are Israel and Egypt. On the Israeli record on human rights, we can now refer to the detailed reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, reviewing the crimes of what they describe as the world’s second apartheid state. Egypt is suffering under the harshest dictatorship of its tortured history. More generally, for many years, there has been a striking correlation between U.S. military aid and torture, massacre, and other severe human rights abuses.
There is no more need to tarry on Washington’s concern for human rights than on its dedication to the sacred principle of sovereignty. The fact that these absurdities can even be discussed illustrates how deeply the rhetorical flights of NSC-68 permeate the intellectual culture.
Hebrew University lecturer Guy Laron usefully reminds us of another facet of the Ukraine crisis: the long struggle between the U.S. and Russia over control of Europe’s energy, again in the headlines today. Even before Russia was a player, the U.S. sought to shift Europe (and Japan) to an oil-based economy, where the U.S. would have the hand on the spigot. Much of Marshall Plan aid was directed to this end. From George Kennan to Zbigniew Brzezinski commenting on the invasion of Iraq (which he opposed, but felt might confer advantages to the U.S. with the anticipated control over major oil resources), planners have recognized that control over energy resources could provide “critical leverage” over allies. Later years saw many struggles in the Cold War framework Laron describes, now very prominent. Ukraine has had a large part in these confrontations.
Throughout, the shape of world order has of course been a driving concern of policy makers. For post-World War II Washington, there is only one acceptable form: under its leadership. And it must be a particular form of world order: the “rule-based international order,” which has displaced an earlier commitment to the “UN-based international order” established under U.S. lead after World War II. It’s not hard to discern the reasons for the transition in policy and accompanying commentary. In the rule-based order, the U.S. sets the rules.
The same was true in the UN-based order in the early years after World War II. U.S. global dominance was so overwhelming that the UN served virtually as a tool of U.S. foreign policy and a weapon against its enemies. Not surprisingly, the UN was highly regarded in U.S. popular and intellectual culture, along with the UN-based international order, guided by Washington.
That turned out to be a passing phase. The UN began to fall out of favor in U.S. elite opinion as it lurched out of control with the recovery of other industrial societies but particularly with decolonization, which brought discordant voices into the UN and also in independent structures such as the Non-Aligned Movement and many others — all very vocal and active, though effectively barred from the international information order dominated by the traditional imperial societies.
Within the UN there were calls for a “New International Economic Order” that would offer the Global South something better than a continuation of the large-scale robbery, violent intervention and subversion that the colonized world had enjoyed during the long reign of Western imperialism. There were other threats, such as a call for a New International Information Order that would provide some opportunity for voices of the former colonies to enter the international information system, a near monopoly of the imperial powers.
The masters of the world undertook vigorous campaigns to beat back these efforts, a major though largely ignored chapter of modern history — though not completely; there is some fine work of exposure and analysis.
One effect of the Global South’s disruptive efforts was to turn U.S. practice and elite opinion against the UN, no longer a reliable agency of U.S. power as it had been in the early Cold War years. Furthermore, the foundations of modern international law in the few UN treaties that the U.S. ratified became completely unacceptable as the years passed, particularly the banning of “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, a practice in which the U.S. is far in the lead. It is conventional to say that the U.S. and Russia engaged in proxy wars during the Cold War years — omitting the fact that with rare exceptions, these were conflicts in which Russia provided some support to victims of U.S. attack. All topics that should have far more prominence.
In this context, the “rule-based international order” became the favored pillar of world order, and there is much annoyance when China calls instead for the UN-based international order as it did at the rancorous March 2021 China-U.S. summit in Alaska (putting aside the sincerity of these pronouncements).
It’s intriguing to see how the conflict with China plays out in U.S. policy and discourse in other domains. A front-page story in The New York Times is headlined: “House Passes Bill Adding Billions to Research to Compete With China; The vote sets up a fight with the Senate, which has different recommendations for how the United States should bolster its technology industry to take on China.” The official name of the bill is “The America Competes Act of 2022” — meaning “compete” with China.
The passage of the bill was hailed in the left-liberal press: “The House gave President Joe Biden another reason to celebrate on Friday with the passage of a bill aimed at boosting competitiveness with China.”
Could Congress support research and development because it would help American society, as this bill surely would? Apparently not; only because it would “take on China.” Republicans reflexively opposed the bill as usual, in this case because it “concedes too much to China.” Republicans also opposed what they called “far left” initiatives such as addressing climate change. The bill was derided by House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy as the “coral reefs bill.” How does saving humanity from self-destruction help to compete with China?
A side comment: An amendment to the bill was introduced by Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Progressive Caucus, a call to release the near-$10 billion of the Afghan government held in New York banks, so as to help relieve the horrendous humanitarian crisis facing the population. It was voted down. Forty-four Democrats joined Republican brutality. It appears that the China-based Shanghai Cooperation Organization might be planning aid, more of the China threat.
There is no denying that China is a rising superpower confronting the U.S. Reporting a study of Harvard’s Belfer Center of International Affairs, Graham Allison argued further that the so-called Thucydides Trap is likely to lead to a U.S.-China war.
That cannot happen. U.S.-China war means simply: game over. There are critical global issues on which the U.S. and China must cooperate. They will either work together, or collapse together, bringing the world down with them.
One of the most striking developments in the international arena today is that while the U.S. is pulling back from the Mideast, and elsewhere, China is moving in but with a different strategic approach and overall agenda. Instead of bombs, missiles and coercive diplomacy, China is expanding its influence with the use of “soft power.” Indeed, U.S. overseas expansion was always overwhelmingly dependent on the use of hard power, and, as result, it would only leave black holes behind after its withdrawal. To what extent, as some might argue, is this the result of a young nation ignorant of history and with lack of experience in global affairs (although it would be hard to find any examples of benign imperialism)? 
I don’t think the U.S. has forged new paths in Western imperial brutality. Simply consider its immediate predecessors in world control. British wealth and global power derived from piracy (such heroic figures as Sir Francis Drake), despoiling India by guile and violence, hideous slavery, the world’s greatest narcotrafficking enterprise, and other such gracious acts. France was no different. Belgium broke records in hideous crimes. Today’s China is hardly benign within its much more limited reach. Exceptions would be hard to find.
The two cases you mention have highly instructive features, brought out clearly, if unintentionally, by how they are depicted. Take an article in The New York Times about the growing China threat. The headline reads: “As the U.S. Pulls Back from the Mideast, China Leans in; expanding its ties to Middle Eastern states with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.”
That’s accurate; it’s one example of what’s happening all over the world. The U.S. is withdrawing military forces that have battered the Mideast region for decades in traditional imperial style. The evil Chinese are exploiting the retreat by expanding China’s influence with investment, loans, technology, development programs. What’s called “soft power.”
Not just in the Mideast. The most extensive Chinese project is the huge Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that is taking shape within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which incorporates the Central Asia states, India, Pakistan, Russia, now Iran, reaching to Turkey and with its eye on Central Europe. It may well include Afghanistan if it can survive its current catastrophe. Chinese aid and development might manage to shift the Afghan economy from heroin production for Europe, the core of the economy during the U.S. occupation, to exploitation of its rich mineral resources.
The BRI has offshoots in the Middle East, including Israel. There are accompanying programs in Africa, and now even Latin America, over strenuous U.S. objections. Recently, China announced that it’s taking over the manufacturing facilities in São Paulo that Ford abandoned, and will initiate large-scale electric vehicles production, an area in which China is far ahead.
The U.S. has no way to counter these efforts. Bombs, missiles, special forces raids in rural communities just don’t work.
It’s an old dilemma. Sixty years ago in Vietnam, U.S. counterinsurgency efforts were stymied by a problem that was despairingly recognized by U.S. intelligence and by Province Advisers: the Vietnamese resistance — the Viet Cong (VC), in U.S. discourse — were fighting a political war, a domain in which the U.S. was weak. The U.S. was responding with a military war, the arena in which it is strong. But that couldn’t overcome the appeal of VC programs to the peasant population.
The only way the Kennedy administration could react to the VC political war was by U.S. Air Force bombing of rural areas, authorizing napalm, large-scale crop and livestock destruction and other programs to drive the peasants to virtual concentration camps where they could be “protected” from the guerillas who the U.S. knew they were supporting. The consequences we know.
Earlier, the dilemma had been explained by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, addressing the National Security Council about U.S. problems with Brazil, where elites, he said, are “like children, with no capacity for self-government.” Worse still, in his words, the U.S. is “hopelessly far behind the Soviets in developing controls over the minds and emotions of unsophisticated peoples” of the Global South, even educated elites. Dulles lamented to the president about the Communist “ability to get control of mass movements, … something we have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”
Dulles left unsaid the obvious: The poor people somehow don’t respond well to our appeal of the rich to plunder the poor, so with great reluctance we have to turn to the arena of violence, where we dominate.
That’s not unlike the dilemma posed when China “leans in” to the Global South by “expanding its ties with vast infrastructure investments and cooperation on technology and security.” That is one central element of the China threat that is eliciting such fears and anguish.
The U.S. is reacting to this growing China threat in the arena where it is strong. The U.S. of course has overwhelming military dominance worldwide, even right off the coast of China. But it’s being enhanced. Last December, military analyst Michael Klare reports, President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act. It calls for “an unbroken chain of U.S.-armed sentinel states — stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank” — meant to encircle China.
Klare adds that, “Ominously enough Taiwan too is included in the chain of armed sentinel states.” The word “ominously” is well chosen. China of course regards Taiwan as part of China. So does the U.S., formally. The official U.S. one-China policy recognizes Taiwan as part of China, with a tacit agreement that no steps will be taken to forcefully change its status. Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo chipped away at this formula. It’s now being driven to the brink. China has the choice of either succumbing or resisting. It is not going to succumb.
This is only one component of the program to defend the U.S. from the China threat. A complementary element is to undermine China’s economy by means too well-known to review. In particular [in the U.S.’s eyes], China must be prevented from advancing in the technology of the future — actually extending its lead in some areas, such as electrification and renewable energy, the technologies that might save us from our race to destroy the environment that sustains life.
One aspect of these efforts to undermine China’s progress is to pressure other countries to reject superior Chinese technology. China has found a way to get around these efforts. They are planning to establish technical schools in countries of the Global South to teach advanced technology — Chinese technology, which graduates will then use. Again, the kind of aggression that is hard to confront.
U.S. influence is clearly declining across the international system, but one would not easily reach this conclusion by looking at the current U.S. National Security Strategy, which is still designed around the principle of the “two-war” doctrine even without expressly saying so. In this context, could it be argued that the U.S. empire is weakening in the 21st century, and that the end of the U.S. empire might not be a peaceful event? 
It has been widely predicted in foreign policy circles for many years that China is poised to surpass the U.S. and to dominate world affairs, a dubious prospect, in my opinion, unless the U.S. continues on its current course of self-destruction, probably to be accelerated with the predicted congressional victory of the denialist party in November.
As we have discussed before, for some years the former Republican Party has been more accurately described as a “radical insurgency” that has abandoned normal parliamentary politics, to borrow the terms of political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute a decade ago — when Trump’s takeover of the insurgency was not yet a nightmare.
The Trump administration established a two-war doctrine in all but name. A war between two nuclear powers can quickly get out of control, meaning the end.
A step towards utter irrationality was taken last December 27, perhaps in celebration of Christmas, when President Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act, discussed earlier, enhancing the policy of “encirclement” of China, “containment” being out of date. That includes formation of the Quad: U.S.-India-Japan-Australia, supplementing the AUKUS alliance (Australia, U.K., U.S.) and the Anglosphere’s Five Eyes, all of them strategic-military alliances confronting China. China has only a troubled hinterland. As discussed earlier, the radical military imbalance in favor of the U.S. is being enhanced by other provocative acts, carrying great risk. Apparently we cannot let down our guard with the Axis powers on the march once again.
It’s all too easy to sketch a likely trajectory that is far from a pleasant prospect. But we should never forget the usual proviso. We do not have to be passive spectators, thereby contributing to potential disaster.

Glenn Loury is an economist, author, academic, and one of the most perceptive critics of the progressive upsurge in politics and media.
Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn about Joe Rogan and Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Biden’s new Supreme Court Justice, and how to fix America’s torturous racial politics.

Joe Biden has pre-announced that his nominee for the Supreme Court will be a black woman. What do you think about this? 
I think it is strange. I think no one needs to be apologetic about reacting to that announcement with a bemusement and kind of quizzical ‘what?’ This comes out of Joe Biden’s political ambition, and the character of American politics. During the South Carolina primary when Biden was uncertain of prevailing in the contest for the nomination of the Democratic Party, in 2020, he wanted to appeal to the black vote and so he made this announcement. He announced that his vice presidential selection would be a woman and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court, should he be fortunate enough to have one, would be a black woman.
You could call this craven pandering. I’m bemused by it because it unnecessarily raises questions about the fitness of whomever he might appoint, when he might have simply chosen a black woman as his nominee, and crowed about it after the fact. To avoid casting any doubt over the choice that he would have made, he could have said this is the best, most qualified person that I could find. But in any case, as he’s done it now, he’s limited his range of options to a very small percentage of the total population of people who might have been selected, and, you could say, has put an asterisk by the name of whomever it is that he might ultimately select.
Suggested readingThe Godfather of Critical Race TheoryBy Tomiwa Owolade
This is, by the way, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, this is the final stopping point for any legal dispute. There are nine justices serving there, the quality of an appointment is not a small matter. We’re not now admitting a marginal student to an elite college campus, we’re selecting the people who are going to govern the country. The President might have engaged in a kind of subtle and tacit preference, rather than crowing about it and making it overt and explicit. It sows a kind of contempt for the standards that we ought to be employing.

Is it right to aim for public bodies to be “representative” of the population? 
What do we mean by representativeness and who can represent whom? How many Catholics are there on the US Supreme Court? I’m pretty sure there are more Catholics on the court in proportion than there are Catholics in the population. Dare we ask the question: hw many Jews, how about gays, how many openly gay people are on the Supreme Court? How dare we. That’s a rabbit hole that we don’t really want to go down.
And it’s kind of silly because it presupposes that something as superficial as racial identity or sexual orientation is of such fundamental significance that legal counsels must have members present who, when they act out in that context, are acting on behalf of, quote unquote, their group. Well, these individuals are not only women, or blacks, or gays, or Catholics. These are human beings whose humanity supersedes and reaches beyond the categories that we might impose on them.
You were the first African American to become a tenured professor at Harvard. Would you have felt differently about this achievement had the governors at Harvard pre-announced before selecting you that they were going to choose someone of African American heritage? 
My appointment as professor of economics at Harvard, which happened in 1982, was accompanied by an initiative at Harvard to enhance the quality of the Afro American Studies department there. I was jointly appointed: economics and Afro American Studies. I was 33 years old. It would have been entirely fair, for some outside observer looking at that to say: “Oh, well, fine. But if he hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have appointed him.” That’s probably true. So such is the condition that we find ourselves in.
How do you think someone like Whoopi Goldberg can get to the point where said that the Holocaust was not about race? 
I assume it’s because she thinks Jews are white. I would chalk that up to ignorance and naïveté — just not being immersed in the long history of modern Europe and anti Semitism and the ideology of Nazism, in which the notion of race had a very particular meaning. I think Whoopi just didn’t appreciate the actual meaning of the word race, in the context in which the Holocaust arose, revealing her ignorance. She ought not to have put it that way. It is a misstatement or mischaracterisation to say that the Holocaust was not about race — it just wasn’t about ‘race’ in the way in which we in the United States might be talking about race.
Suggested readingWhat liberals get wrong about raceBy Eric Kaufmann 
One finds anti-Semitism not only on the far-Right, with ‘Jews will not replace us’ kind of sentiments, but also in ethnic minority communities. Especially among African Americans, there’s quite a bit of anti-Semitism; there are attacks on Jewish interests. The Reverend Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights leader, got his start in part by demagoguery over incidents in which there was conflict between blacks and Jews. He has a history in which I think anti-semitism would be a fair descriptor.
Why is there not more sympathy for the Asian community among progressive activists? 
The Asians are called a model minority — people say that sardonically. And of course, the subtle implication there is that you must be anti-black if you compare blacks to Asians, and you find the blacks wanting — or anti-Latino.
Some of the corruption and decadence of the legacy population here, black and white, in American society, is exposed by Asian success. They expose the lack of depth and seriousness of too many of our people by their assiduous self application, and their excellence in the mastery of the currency of the modern world. I’m talking about calculus, I’m talking about biochemistry.
Do you think this kind of thinking actually makes racial tensions worse? 
So George Floyd is killed — murdered, a jury has spoken — by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, in 2020. A policeman inappropriately applying force, he had his knee on the man’s neck, the man expires. Was that a racial incident? Now the police officer was white, the man was killed, George Floyd was black — it became a racial incident. A whole movement was launched or abetted by the racial characterisation of that incident. But why should we understand it as a racial incident?
There is very little evidence at all, if any, that Chauvin was motivated by racial animus when he acted. And on the victim side, George Floyd, the fact that a policeman might over use his power and harm a citizen — that’s something that happens to white people, too. There are cases parallel to the George Floyd case in which the victim has been white, which have not occasioned national attention. So that’s one thing.
Suggested readingWhy anti-racism should be resistedBy Asra Q. Nomani 
But the other thing that I would say is that by cultivating a practice of looking at such incidents in racial terms, invites a parallel practice of looking at criminal victimisation of citizens in racial terms. You want to count the number of white cops who have killed unarmed black men, somebody is going to start counting the number of black murderers who have abused, black carjackers who have robbed and threatened, black assaulters who have bludgeoned and beaten white people. There are an endless number of such cases.
There is enough racial blame to go around, and I’d hate to live in a country in which when a white person was victimised by a black criminal, the first words out of their mouth were “a black criminal victimised me”. That’s not good for black people, because there are many black criminals. And that’s not good for our country because the issue is a criminal victimising a person; the criminal’s blackness doesn’t stand in for his race. He doesn’t represent his race when he acts badly. The victim’s whiteness doesn’t stand in for her race.
What would happen if Affirmative Action is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court? 
The Supreme Court has six conservative justices, the majority of whom have publicly stated that they have serious doubts about affirmative action. There’s a very good chance that racial affirmative action will be stricken by the Supreme Court.
If it happens, I assure you, there will be mobs in the streets of this country. No progressive activist is going to take the Supreme Court’s ruling as an opportunity to turn within and consider: “if we want to be at Harvard or the University of North Carolina in larger numbers, why don’t we get busy preparing our youngsters from the cradle to be competitive in this great country that we live in where competition is the coin of the realm?” No, they’re not going to do that. They’re going to interpret that as an anti-black move by a racist Supreme Court. I assure you that it is a disaster and I think we’re headed toward it.
In the past week there has been a big, powerful movement to get Joe Rogan removed from Spotify over historic cases of him using the N-word. What should we make of this? 
I’m not going to say the N-word on your programme, but I should be able to say it, it’s just a word. I’m talking about a word — I’m not talking about a slur. And neither was Joe Rogan’s use of it a slur. He wasn’t pointing to a person and calling them one in a way of being a derogation, of an insult. He was speaking about speaking. That is to say he was saying that the word exists and then he was saying the word in the context of quoting someone else’s use of it or whatever.
Suggested readingKamala Harris was set up to failBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali 
We have a genre here of music, it’s called hip hop or rap, in which the word is used regularly. And they are not using it as a slur either. It’s a part of the English language. Now, this thing that we’re doing here — where we’re making the utterance of certain sounds an indication of a person’s racism, and then seeking to cancel people for it being revealed that they uttered sounds, without any reference to their intent — is a bizarre phenomenon.
And I think that it’s actually not a sign of strength, by the people, black people, who insist that the sound of the word is so injurious to them. I think it’s a sign of their weakness. There’s something almost pathetic about requiring people to indulge you by not making certain sounds with their mouth because hearing it reminds you of lynching, of nightriders coming down on black people who are defenceless and are being set upon and whatnot.
It seems like a lot of the voices that were most upset about this were white. And it seems like more of an intra-elite power battle to do with the nature of the media, in which the race issue is used as a battering ram. What do you think?
Who are those people who listen to Joe Rogan? They are mostly not latte-sipping, National Public Radio-listening, coastal elites in New York City or Washington DC or San Francisco or whatever. They are mostly, or more often than not, male, more often than not, white. There’s some truck drivers among them. There’s some Trump voters among them.
Suggested readingDesignated CriminalBy David Mamet
So this culture war that’s well-advanced here in the United States in which we are in effect, mutually contemptuous of one another based upon what camp we belong in — Joe Rogan is right at the centre of it and his audience substantially is on the ‘wrong side’ from a progressive’s point of view. A lot of this enmity directed toward Rogan is really directed toward his audience.
How do we make it better? 
I’d like to tone down the emphasis on race and be more concerned about the humanity of people. If we want to talk about disadvantage, poverty and the lack of wealth in America, there are more poor white people than there are black people. And anything worth doing, whether it be reform of education, or changes in the tax laws or extension of the welfare state programmes, anything worth doing to help black people is worth doing to help people who are in need of of help. I would have our arguments, that is our African American arguments, couched in broad, humanistic terms. And I think that less attention to racial identity and more attention to human common need is healthy for the country.
This transcript has been lightly edited.

The Encores! series at New York City Center has, a program for the new season reads, “staged weeklong revivals of rarely seen musicals from the Broadway canon” for nearly three decades. It does such a great job that a revival can jump the rails back to Broadway: The current run of “Chicago” started as an Encores! revival and has been going (minus the pandemic break) for around a quarter century. The three Encores! shows each year have become a kind of ritual for many New York theatergoers, and the appeal is obvious: Every now and then, it’s both entertaining and edifying to dust off an old show and give it another look.

But the artistic director of Encores!, Lear deBessonet, named to that role shortly before the pandemic, appears to have something a bit different in mind. Quoted in the program, she said Encores!:

had been this gorgeous archaeological site that had been perfectly excavated. So, what’s next? The question that had always been there but became the most urgent was, “How do we decide when we give audiences a second look at a show?” Almost zero shows written before the 21st century have a worldview and politics that sit well with a contemporary viewer, so what is the criteria? I love that question.

I’m not sure I do.

Nor what the producing creative director, Clint Ramos, had to say: “I’m excited to be bringing a practitioner’s point of view as well as a social justice approach.” He added, “History is written by the powerful, so it’s not just about looking back but how we look back. With ‘The Tap Dance Kid’” — this season’s first production — “we are expanding the definition of a hidden gem.” Its director, Kenny Leon, said, “You have to speak to the audience sitting in the seats today” because “we’re not creating museum pieces.”

As if a museum piece were inherently a mistake. Even though museum pieces are pretty much what Encores! has been pulling out of the proverbial crates all these years — indeed, “museum pieces” is what “Encores!” implies. But per deBessonet, “We knew that the mission was going to grow into its next stage of evolution.” In other words, apparently, Encores! hasn’t been woke enough, and the job is to correct this supposed flaw.

In “The Tap Dance Kid” — based on Louise Fitzhugh’s novel “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change” and staged on Broadway in 1983 — about an upper-middle-class Black family, one of the leads is a nerdy and heavier-set teenage daughter who wants to be a lawyer. The problems that the character, Emma, encounters because of her size were inherent to the plot and woven into the lyrics of her songs. In “Four Strikes Against Me,” she sings: “Four strikes against me/Why don’t they open their eyes?/It’s the worst rotten luck being hopelessly stuck/with my gender, my color, my age and my size.” Her challenges aren’t identical to those I had growing up, but the Emma of the novel was the closest literary analog that I had as a nerdy, awkward Black teenager myself. Legions of Black kids in the 1970s and ’80s could relate.

Not too long ago, it was considered OK for people who aren’t Black to refer to the N-word in conversation. Not to use it, but to mention it. Within the limits of decorum, of course: Someone who, even if only mentioning the word, did so repeatedly within one conversation came off as noxious. However, under normal circumstances, white people could passingly refer to the word without the now-predictable pushback. I’m old enough to have done a couple of radio interviews in the mid-90s where this was the case.

But today, the Rogan reel has become fuel on the fire Rogan ignited by hosting people with controversial views on everything from race relations to, in particular, Covid and vaccination, in the wake of which singers and podcasters, from Neil Young and India Arie to Brené Brown and Roxane Gay, have announced that they’re pulling or suspending their work from Spotify, the streaming service that hosts Rogan’s podcast. Yes, Rogan is also responsible for an inexcusably gross comparison of a movie theater in a Black neighborhood to “Planet of the Apes,” which he addresses in his Instagram video. That said, I hear Rogan’s mentions of the N-word as just that — mentions. And the idea that mentioning as opposed to using the N-word is a cardinal sin is questionable regardless.

The case for making this distinction is perhaps clearer with what happened to the journalist Mike Pesca, who hosted his podcast, “The Gist,” at Slate until last year. Pesca was investigated and then, The Washington Post reported, “mutually agreed to part ways” with Slate. First, for two incidences of mentioning rather than using the N-word, once in an interview and once on a podcast, neither of which, apparently, ever made it to publication. And then for a discussion on Slack about whether non-Black people are forbidden to speak the N-word in any context. Pesca seems to have been judged as rendering the workplace unsafe — in the parlance of our times — and his podcast is now on another platform.

But it’s fair to surmise that 20 years ago, an outlet like Slate wouldn’t have cut ties with Pesca over something like this, and it’s not clear that mores on race then were especially backward compared with today. On the Slate podcast I hosted at the same time Pesca was hosting his, I myself ventured that we all need to observe the difference between use and mention with the N-word — including that I said the word out loud and the full word was included in the written subtitle of the episode. Apparently, this left the workplace safe because I’m Black. But Pesca, in effect, got canned for doing more or less the same thing.

And then there’s the former C.E.O. of a Planned Parenthood regional affiliate based in Seattle, Chris Charbonneau — described in December by The Seattle Times’s Nina Shapiro as “a formidable figure in reproductive rights who worked for Planned Parenthood for nearly 40 years” — who was removed from her position. Why? Because in a conversation with colleagues in which Charbonneau recounted a previous conversation with a Planned Parenthood donor, she quoted the donor, who had spoken the N-word (even, according to Charbonneau, bracketing her retelling with “quote-unquote”). Reportedly, among those who took umbrage at Charbonneau’s mention of the N-word were two white Planned Parenthood staffers who later resigned, citing this episode, seemingly attempting to demonstrate — to signal — their commitment to what we now call antiracism. Charbonneau was faulted for her handling of the interaction with the donor, even though, according to The Seattle Times’s reporting on her side of the story, “the donor quickly said she shouldn’t have said that” and Charbonneau replied, “No, you shouldn’t have.”

One of the early signs of trouble for the British anti-racism movement was a tweet sent by Lee Jasper in April 2013, in which he declared that black people are incapable of being racist, and offered to publicly debate anybody who disagreed. I offered to debate him, as did a number of others. I even suggested a venue: the University College London Union (UCLU), where I’d recently taken part in a debate on censorship. My offer was not taken up, and as far as I know the debate never took place.Jasper, a British-born man of mixed African, Caribbean, and Irish origins, was one of the louder characters in the London anti-racism movement of the 1980s, which sought to oppose the racist far-Right. But he was always intensely ambitious, and skilled at using race issues as a means of self-promotion. In this respect, he was well ahead of the curve, importing Al Sharpton's brand of American race-hustling into the UK long before it became more generally fashionable.By the 1990s, although the far-Right threat had clearly receded, the British Left (in the face of a working class stubbornly uninterested in class struggle) was switching its attention to the politics of identity. This was especially true in London and Jasper started to pop up on late-night TV chat shows. In my own social circles, which were mostly made up of people of West Indian origin, “black activists” were generally not taken too seriously. But in left-wing political circles, people like Jasper became flavour of the month. Here was a provocative spokesman of an oppressed underclass, and surely the Left—increasingly dominated by white and affluent people—needed people like him in order to stay relevant.Lee Jasper / YouTubeOn the subject of racism, the British Left had long been guilty of threat inflation. While racism was certainly widespread in the wake of waves of mass immigration—especially towards the Jamaicans and Trinidadians who arrived in the 1950s and ’60s, and Asians fleeing east African nationalism in the 1970s—Britain had never remotely resembled the United States in this regard. Britain had never been segregated, and had never been home to slaves in significant numbers. There was never a British civil rights movement, because there were no racial laws to overturn. Furthermore, the collapse of the British far-Right was largely the result of cultural movements, rather than politics. The two powerful forces that united black and white people in Britain’s urban centres were music and football. The Left is fond of recalling individual racist horrors—the murders of Kelso Cochrane in 1959 and of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 in particular. But these events were notable primarily for their rarity, as well as the enormous waves of revulsion and shame that swept through British society in their wake.The awakening identitarian Left in the 1990s needed racism to feed its narratives, and if it had previously been guilty of exaggeration, now it turned the dial to 11. The importation of racist black nationalism from America in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder helped to undermine the unity of the anti-racism movement as a force for solidarity and cohesion. In order to build its new narrative, the Left began to ignore the British success story of racial integration. In a handful of decades, Britain had been more successful in creating a mixed-race culture than the United States had in four centuries, but this story did not fit the American racial ideology, which demanded that black people be regarded exclusively as victims.As the political tide turned dramatically towards Labour—nationally in 1997, and in London with the election of the left-winger Ken Livingstone as Mayor in 2000—Lee Jasper’s years of positioning himself as a race and human rights activist began to pay off. In 2004, he was appointed as Livingstone’s Director for Policing and Equalities. An appearance at the mayor’s anti-racist Respect festival helped underline just how far left-wing authorities had drifted from London’s racially diverse communities. Jasper was there on Livingstone’s behalf to welcome festival-goers in a faux British-Jamaican accent (“W’happen mi bredren and sistren?”). The audience, composed largely of teenage Somalis who had turned up to see the Somali-Canadian artist K’naan, looked on in bemusement.Jasper had an instinctive knack for the grievance business. If the London-centric Labour authorities were searching for angry black men, then he was happy to be the angriest and blackest of them all. But since its earliest days fighting fascism in the 1930s, the British anti-racism movement had always understood racism to be hatred towards any person based on their race, colour, nationality, or ethnicity. In order to prosper within that hierarchy, people like Jasper had to toe that line for a while. If Pakistanis, Jews, Poles, or Chinese people were the chief targets of racial hostility, then it was his job to stand up for them too. Which is why his tweet declaring black people to be exceptions to the rules signalled a departure, and an early warning that the anti-racist politics of the British Left was about to take a sharp change of direction.We now know that Jasper’s tweet was sent just as a portal to Hell opened—America’s racialised identity politics was about to hit critical mass and go global and a tsunami of racism followed.Like many Londoners who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, I was used to existing in a white-minority environment, and I had long been aware that black people were no less racist than any other demographic. But racism against whites, Asians, and Jews had always been spoken softly, out of the earshot of most British people. It was not a serious problem, but something that existed in the background. The British anti-racism movement had certainly never pretended that one form of racism was worse than another: racism in any form was, ipso facto, corrosive to communities and opposed on that basis. It just seemed self-evident that hatred from one group would provoke a rise in hatred on the other side. So, British activism was focussed on creating opportunities for greater community cohesion and integration. The most famous upshot was the Notting Hill Carnival, an event founded following the 1959 race riots and intended to bring West London’s divided black and white communities together around a celebration of Trinidadian culture.Most people—black or white—were unaware of ethno-nationalism in the black British community, which was far less marked than in the United States. In the new century, some commentators did begin to discuss the problem openly. For example, in 2004, the outspoken British-Trinidadian activist and commentator Darcus Howe wrote about racism towards Somali immigrants within black communities. Similarly, there have long been tensions between some black and Asian communities. But, generally, those in the political and journalistic classes were either unaware of such issues or reluctant to broach them in public. So, although people raised in parts of London with large black populations, or those in mixed relationships, experienced such bigotry first-hand, the problem was seldom acknowledged.This all changed post-2010 for at least three reasons. First, the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter provided people with an unprecedented ability to share their unfiltered thoughts out loud. Second, the new “antiracist” ideology (I will refer to American antiracism without a hyphen to distinguish it from the universalist British kind) made this racism acceptable, because (as Lee Jasper’s tweet indicated) it wasn’t seen as racism at all. Third, white people on the Left, many of whom rarely socialised with non-whites in real life, provided cover for this development by explaining to other whites that all this new hostility was justified by societal inequity, white privilege, and the colonial crimes of their ancestors. This precipitated a profound fracture in British culture: a belief that bigotry could never be acceptable was replaced with a new idea that, yes, sometimes it could be. Suddenly, racism was everywhere and antiracists refused to condemn it.An antiracist protestor in Brooklyn, 2020. (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)Many black people were appalled and embarrassed by the newly exposed mentality, which did not just target whites but also Indians, Chinese people, and Jews. At least three friends recounted how they had tried to oppose the anti-white sentiment they encountered in black-only forums. But each of them was viciously attacked, labelled an Uncle Tom, a race traitor, an Oreo, or a coconut, and retreated rapidly. The resistance died quickly: under the new ideologies, racism was now not only acceptable but also laudable. New terms bubbled up: anti-racism was replaced by pro-blackness. Among progressives, this was widely deemed to be a good thing, but it was just ethno-nationalism. Black love was also promoted to applause from white progressives and liberals, but this was simply an expression of hostility towards mixed relationships. The question “Is it pro-black to marry a white person?” became the subject of countless videos, articles, and threads. Few of us in 2010 predicted that open opposition to miscegenation was about to mount a comeback, or that it would be tolerated by people calling themselves antiracist. And now that racism had been made socially acceptable, it proliferated. Countless stories suddenly emerged of white people being attacked for having the wrong hairstyle, wearing the wrong clothes, or cooking the wrong food. I had heard about such things from time to time before 2010, but now it was white people on the Left and in the liberal media who were policing and justifying these new norms and standards.The birth of the American Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, and its arrival in the UK following the death of Eric Garner in 2015, made all of this an order of magnitude worse. The BLM movement, which openly espoused black nationalism, was cleverly branded in a way that made universalist opposition to racism effectively impossible. Because racism by black people was now memory-holed the moment it happened, it was allowed to spread unresisted. Occasionally, incidents were reported—for example, in 2017, there was a nasty verbal attack on a mixed couple eating in a black restaurant, in which the aggressor referred to whites as inferior beings. But even when media outlets covered such things, social media largely did not. To even talk about this kind of racism came to be seen as anti-black rather than anti-racist. One of the telling things about this particular video was that it was recorded and shared by the perpetrator, which suggested a belief that he had the moral high ground. Such was the effect of the narrative shift towards pro-blackness.I saw and personally experienced this kind of behaviour on numerous occasions. I was able to stand my ground better than others, because I had long experience as an anti-racism activist, and little fear of being attacked for my white privilege. But it turned out that my previous activism, my mixed family, and my Jewish origins afforded me no protection—instead, they were used against me. I eventually ended my participation in black political and music forums (especially hip-hop ones) because they became hotbeds of black nationalism, riddled with anti-white and anti-Jewish sentiment. White participants were required to acknowledge their responsibility for racism and declare themselves subordinate “allies” rather than equals. Racial equality was no longer considered a valid objective: the Left now demanded equity. Many others suffered worse abuse than I did. In response to the new identity politics, a white British rapper named Alex Dutty created a powerfully emotive video with a universalist, anti-racist message. But he provocatively (and unwisely, in hindsight) named it “Proud to Be White.” He was viciously attacked by other rappers and music journalists (most of whom had presumably not watched the video), and cancelled by the UK hip-hop community.In the past few years, black nationalism has surged in popularity, protected by the shield of Black Lives Matter and ignored or played down by a liberal press anxious not to find itself on the wrong side of the racism debate. Violent (and sometimes deadly) antisemitic attacks, perpetrated by black people on both sides of the Atlantic, have been largely ignored, even as the cultural mainstream continues to insist that racism cannot be tolerated. In the past few days, the latest in a series of assaults on Jews in London by black men has been reported. In 2018, the head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, an outspoken antisemite and one of America’s most influential hate preachers, made an album with stars including Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Snoop Dogg, and Common. Alice Walker, Nick Cannon, and other leading lights in the African American establishment have made antisemitic remarks. Even Whoopi Goldberg blundered into trouble as she clumsily navigated the new discourse on race. In the UK, there has been a rallying of support for Wiley, a well-known music artist, following a series of antisemitic outbursts over the past couple of years.Jews have not been the only target. Violent attacks against East Asians—disproportionately carried out by black people—have recently spiked in America, a foreseeable consequence of a decade’s worth of antiracist agitprop that blamed white, Jewish, and Asian privilege for black oppression. The progressive response to this development has been to blame white supremacy. The antiracist narrative is so far through the looking glass that white people are now held entirely to blame for the worst behaviours of a small minority of black people. This denial of agency and moral responsibility is not just deeply patronising—a soft bigotry of low expectations—but it also amounts to a kind of incitement, as white progressives line up as apologists for racial violence.White people have also become targets for black nationalists, a development even less likely to be publicly acknowledged than black attacks on Jews. The murderous attack on a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, which killed six and injured 62, was almost certainly racially motivated. The attacker had previously posted black nationalist sentiments, but the New York Times hastened to declare that the motive was unclear. This was a departure for a newspaper that in recent years has been quick to offer racial explanations for almost everything. A Black Lives Matter activist declared the Wisconsin attack to be the start of the revolution.The antiracism establishment has crumpled before this ideological onslaught. When the Southern Poverty Law Center reported a steep rise in black nationalist extremism in 2018, its report was couched in almost apologetic language: the rise in black nationalism was (of course) the fault of Donald Trump’s alleged promotion of white supremacists. The report, which did not explicitly point out that black nationalism had risen far more than white nationalism, quoted arch-racist Louis Farrakhan. The SPLC also went to great lengths to absolve Black Lives Matter: “... these black nationalist groups should not be confused with activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and others that work for civil rights and to eliminate systemic racism.” This SPLC positioning comes despite attacks on synagogues and other antisemitic events that have taken place during BLM protests. In Toronto, a leading BLM activist labelled whites as genetic defects (an old belief of the Nation of Islam). When racists are redescribed as antiracists by the media and political class, there is no room for anti-racism.The official response to the rising influence of racist black nationalism has been to ignore it. Today, the SPLC site no longer lists black nationalist groups separately, instead choosing to include them under the inane heading of General Hate, which is by far its largest category, and appears to be dominated by black nationalists. FBI hate crime statistics also suggest that, per capita, more hate crimes are committed by black people than any other group. In 2019, 23.9 percent of recorded US hate crimes were committed by black people who make up just 12.1 percent of the population. Whites, meanwhile, committed 52.5 percent of hate crimes while making up 57.8 percent of the population.It is, of course, important to point out that hate crimes are committed by only a tiny proportion of any demographic group. But the bottom line of the past decade is this: while the media and antiracism community have focused increasingly on white people (and, implicitly, Jews and Asians) as the root of all racist evil, a disproportionately large and increasing amount of racial hatred is emanating from black nationalist movements. The failure of the mass media and antiracism establishment to discuss this dismal development honestly is a scandal.

I love it whenever I see it: “‘Free Pickup and Delivery,’” “‘Fresh Fish’” and the like.

I refer to signage on which quotation marks are used to indicate neither quotation nor irony but just upbeat promotional emphasis, as if the quotation marks were substitutes for capital letters, or perhaps jazz hands.

For years, when I lived in Jersey City, I was delighted every time I passed a neighborhood laundromat that had “CAROLINA’S” — including the quotation marks — emblazoned across its facade, almost as if there were something hypothetical about its washing machines and dryers. (I was saddened to learn that the building had a fire a few years ago.) These days, occasionally one reads a handwritten sign saying, “Please put on a mask,” with quotation marks and all. Or, my favorite example, on the Upper West Side in the early aughts, was a corner grocery that beckoned patrons to come in and “CREATE ‘A’ SALAD.” I assumed the proprietors meant the “A” as indicating excellence.

One senses that this usage of quotation marks is sometimes a matter of nonnative speakers creatively reworking English conventions, and sometimes it’s a reflection of the reality that written and spoken language is driven by everyday usage as much as by the strictures of elementary-school teachers, newspaper editors and professional grammarians.

And I love it.

I’ve long thought of this use of quotation marks as something that should be embraced as a permissible norm. Quotation marks have evolved to encompass a new function — somewhere at the intersection of italics, exclamation points and diacritics — in contrast to what quotation marks most likely mean to some readers of this newsletter. This kind of garden-variety metamorphosis is as ordinary as the hypereducated, woke register in which terms such as “Latinx” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) are established, yet are not catching on beyond. And fine if they don’t — the woke register includes Latinx and BIPOC; the vernacular register includes quotation marks as emphasis. No problem, I say.

People are nicer to you when you’re ill; they pay you more attention. Most of us appreciate this special treatment, but what if you begin to crave it? What if you craved it so much that you started to embellish a little, making your symptoms seem worse than they really were? What if you went further, and pretended you had an illness when in fact you didn’t?
Munchausen’s Syndrome, or as it’s referred to in the medical literature, “factitious disorder”, is one of those conditions that’s rare enough that we don’t know how rare it is. It usually goes unnoticed for years or decades. Patients often visit many different doctors and hospitals, sometimes abruptly disappearing if anyone questions the reality of their illnesses, means it’s difficult to diagnose, let alone study. But there’s plenty of evidence of these fake illnesses ruining real lives.

At the end of last year, Helen Naylor published a memoir, My Mother, Munchausen’s, and Me. The final word in the title could be referring not only to the author, but also to ME — Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — which Naylor’s mother Elinor claimed to have all the way through Naylor’s childhood. She required, she said, long bed rest every day, meaning she was rarely around to look after Naylor. Years later, Naylor discovered that her mother had regularly gone out shopping and on day trips while she was at school.
Over time, Naylor’s mother seemed to forget the ME, instead seizing on a diagnosis of “mild Parkinsonism” — a set of minor symptoms that are related to the vastly more serious Parkinson’s Disease, but are absolutely not the same thing. Doctors told her that it would be decades, if at all, before the symptoms had an impact on her life, and yet she obsessed over it, blowing it out of all proportion, mentioning it at every opportunity and becoming terribly offended when anyone tried to change the subject.
More from this authorDoes depression exist?By Stuart Ritchie
Her diary, which she’d diligently kept for decades, was focused on her never-ending sicknesses. Her daughter’s life, her husband’s death, the birth of her grandchildren: these were side issues, in which she showed little interest — her focus was always on herself, her fragilities, and her visits to the doctor. But her diary entries didn’t display anything like the normal reaction to being ill, which might involve anxiety, stress, or some form of coping mechanism like denial. This was glee: Naylor’s mother delighted in every potential disease she might have caught and symptom she might be showing, regularly researching conditions to find out more of the grisly details.
There is no known treatment for Munchausen’s. It presents all sorts of challenging questions — for instance, whether doctors should confront a patient about their fake illnesses, or whether that would make things worse. Since symptoms vary so much, medical researchers have to rely on small amounts of case experience — doctors describing their experiences with individual patients — rather than any larger-scale samples.
Those case studies often make for grim reading. For instance, one report from 2019 describes a man in his 20s who went from hospital to hospital across the whole of Italy — and sometimes abroad — complaining of a wide variety of symptoms and pains that required investigation. He had a total of 41 known hospitalisations in a four-year period, and managed to convince enough doctors to perform invasive surgical tests that his torso was covered in scars. He was taking a variety of drugs, including testosterone — which was necessary since he’d had both of his testicles removed in one of his numerous unnecessary operations. When asked by aghast doctors the reasons behind this “mutilating operation”, he could only give a vague, noncommittal reply.
As the Italian doctors pointed out, patients like this aren’t delusional per se; nor are they delirious, suffering from some kind of altered state of consciousness — they’re not mistaken about the illnesses they claim to have. And they aren’t “malingering”, which is when people fake illnesses for a specific reason, like avoiding military service or gaining benefits. Neither are they hypochondriacs — neurotics who worry too much about their health (indeed, like Naylor’s mother, they often get great pleasure from the idea that they’re sick). Instead, they have a compulsion that’s more difficult to pin down — an irrational, uncontrollable desire to have more consultations with medical professionals, more hospital visits, and above all more attention.
Suggested readingMental health is a lucrative businessBy Julie Burchill
In 2016, two psychiatry researchers collected together all the published case studies of adults with factitious disorder. They tried to draw out some broad patterns from the 455 cases they found. The first thing they noted was that 66% of patients were female — strange, since a previous edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, psychiatry’s Bible, claimed on the basis of no stated evidence that the disorder was more common in men.
The second interesting observation was that the factitious patients often claimed to have previously worked in healthcare — as a lab assistant in a hospital, say. This makes sense: people who are obsessed with illness might gravitate to jobs where they can observe and research it closely.
But just putting together case reports only gets you so far (even though other case reviews find a similar pattern of results). All the numbers the researchers could provide are subject to huge margins of error — and might be tainted by bias. For instance, cases that are particularly outrageous or extreme are more likely to be written up as case reports and sent to journals, so we might get a skewed image of what the average patient with the disorder looks like. This is, ironically, a kind of scientific Munchausen’s-by-proxy, where doctors hype up the illnesses of their patients, or at least focus on the most shocking ones, to gain attention for themselves.
A suite of studies — again, mainly case reports — now exists on “Munchausen by Internet”, where someone with factitious disorder uses the internet to build a fake persona as a sick person — as well as sockpuppet accounts for fake relatives or friends to buttress their story. They might infiltrate support groups for an illness, or build a social media following, basking in the sympathy they receive from well-meaning commenters and supporters (“you are so brave — keep fighting!”).
More from this authorNever trust a scientistBy Stuart Ritchie
Whether this is a specific new disorder is arguable: it sounds more like a mutation of the old problem. But — and I won’t provide any links, for obvious reasons — there is definitely a new genre of social media account which the owner uses to provide regular updates on what’s often a long list of medical conditions. They post photos of medical equipment such as feeding tubes, and seem to be take a suspicious amount of pleasure in the trials and tribulations of having a long-term medical condition.
Just to be completely clear, I’m not arguing that disability advocates who discuss their conditions and raise awareness on social media are suffering from Munchausen’s. But clearly, in some cases, the internet can become a crucial crutch for a minority who have a tendency to exaggerate (or even fake) symptoms. Indeed, thinking of the often-perverse dynamics of who gets attention on social media, one could hardly imagine this not being the case.
The paradoxical thing about factitious disorder is that although it involves faking and overstating illnesses — and causes immense frustration and distress for family members and doctors who have to deal with it — it is itself a serious medical condition. Many sufferers start to deliberately harm themselves, out of desire for sympathy and medical attention. They might deliberately give themselves cuts and bruises — a relatively easy way to fake an injury. Reports abound of patients rubbing dirt or faeces into their open wounds in an attempt to aggravate them. And the Italian Munchausen’s sufferer who’d been mysteriously castrated actually died, suddenly, during one of his many hospital visits, of acute heart failure. All operations and medical procedures come with risks, and when you subject yourself to dozens of them, those risks begin to multiply.
And in the case of Helen Naylor’s mother, increasingly frantic attempts to fake illness — starving herself and refusing to leave her bed for any reason — eventually turned into the real thing. She was admitted to a nursing home in her 60s, with the frailties of someone far older, and died before her 70th birthday. Chest and mouth infections seem to have been the final straw that led to her death. And just like the doctors and researchers who have studied this disorder — so well-known in culture but so poorly understood by science — her daughter was left not with closure, or explanations, or even relief. There was nothing but sheer bewilderment.
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Breaking news: A new study on a contentious political issue confirmed that a lot of people’s preexisting opinions were correct all along.Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. But when The New York Times published an article about the study last week, it seemed perfectly designed to garner “I told you so”s.The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reported that unconditional cash transfers to poor mothers changed their infants’ brain activity. Using a method called electroencephalography, or EEG, researchers placed a special cap wired with electrodes on each 1-year-old’s head to detect electrical activity as signals were sent back and forth across their brain. Babies whose mothers received $333 a month, the study’s authors claimed, had more of the brain waves that tend to be linked to better cognitive and socio-emotional skills. Since it came from a randomized trial (not just an observational study), the result seemed groundbreaking, with important policy implications. The cash transfers had allowed the parents to change some aspects of the kids’ environment—perhaps through better nutrition, less parental stress, or any number of other impacts—and in turn, the babies’ brains had changed for the better.[Annie Lowrey: Stockton’s basic-income experiment pays off]But within days, that triumphant tale was unraveling. Reviewers on blogs and social media, myself included, pointed out that the study didn’t paint nearly as clear a picture as its authors and media coverage suggested. Vox updated its article to add criticisms of the study; the Niskanen Center, a think tank, added a disclaimer to its blog; and the UBI Center, which looks into research on universal basic income, removed its posts on the study entirely.What went wrong? Put simply, the study provided very weak evidence. Few of the findings were statistically significant. The data suffered from a lot of noise. But what’s more interesting is why so many people were so eager to share the news of research whose results were ultimately anemic. I think two factors are at play: The study’s methods were based in neuroscience, and it had moral implications. Alone, either of those ingredients can tempt people to uncritically believe a study. Together, they’re a recipe for hype.The PNAS paper had an undoubtedly impressive setup: saying that a well-run randomized controlled trial produces the “gold standard” of evidence is a cliché, but that’s because it’s true. One thousand children were recruited for the study, and their families were randomly chosen to receive either $333 or $20 a month (the former was, on average, a 20 percent increase in income for the families). Researchers took EEG readings from 435 of the kids when they were 1 year old, and compared the patterns from the $333-a-month and $20-a-month groups. In the paper, the researchers reported that the kids whose mothers received the higher cash amount had more high-frequency “beta” and “gamma” waves, which the brain tends to produce when a person is paying a lot of attention to a task.But it’s not clear that there really was any meaningful difference between the brain waves of the two groups of babies. Several critics, including the Wharton School’s Joe Simmons and Drake University’s Heath Henderson, pointed out that after the authors ran a statistical correction for false-positive results, all of their planned, preregistered analyses gave statistically nonsignificant results. The only significant findings appeared when the authors ran extra, unplanned analyses. (This is explained in more detail in the Astral Codex Ten newsletter.) These analyses are less convincing than the preregistered ones because they were decided on after the researchers had seen the data. If you already know how the data look, there’s more of a chance of unconscious biases creeping into your analysis decisions, subtly shifting the results in the direction you favor. This is the very phenomenon that preregistering your analyses is designed to avoid.[Read: Psychology’s replication crisis is running out of excuses]The statistician Andrew Gelman also looked into the study’s data—which, to the authors’ credit, they shared openly online—and found that splitting the children into two random groups and running the same analysis produced very similar-looking differences in brain-wave patterns to those found in the study. In other words, the pattern of differences between the $333 and $20 groups could have been a product of chance.Even if the statistical results were clear-cut, though, we would have to follow a daisy chain of logic to conclude that they have societal implications. The most obvious leap is the one between the brain measures and the kids’ psychological development.There’s something beguiling about a study that uses a brain measure as its main outcome, rather than a boring old test result or a self-rating on a questionnaire. It seems to suggest that the research is getting at something deeper—and more scientific. But that isn’t actually true. As the psychiatrist Sally Satel and the late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld argued in their 2013 book, Brainwashed, scientists (and everyone else) tend to be so excited by high-tech brain-imaging results (“This type of therapy changed the metabolic activity in drug addicts’ brains!”) that they forget to ask more prosaic, but more important, questions (“Did the therapy reduce the addicts’ reliance on drugs?”).[Read: How brain scientists forgot that brains have owners]The cash-transfer study supposedly found that extra cash affects kids’ brains. That might be interesting to neuroscientists, but since the study doesn’t report direct evidence of a behavioral effect, it’s not of much use to anyone else—at least yet. The authors did examine the effects of the cash transfer on one psychological variable: parent-reported language “milestones,” such as whether a baby starts to say “ba-ba” and “da-da” at the expected age. But the results were so underwhelming that they were relegated to an appendix and only cursorily referenced in the main paper.If the brain-wave results don’t relate much to behavior now, then in order for the paper to matter for policy, it needs to make a convincing case that they might matter sometime later. The researchers’ plan is to follow the children for several more years and eventually run such behavioral analyses. But for now we need to rely on the previous literature. The authors cited a few studies that found correlations between brain-wave measures and cognitive abilities in older children. But these studies were themselves quite small and ambiguous; EEG is far from straightforward to measure, especially in infants, which adds a lot of noise to the findings. Not only that, but as the researchers themselves pointed out, some other studies have found no such links. Ultimately, the neuroscience in this paper ends up at quite a remove from the psychological effects that society is really interested in.Plenty of people desperately want results like these to be real and meaningful, because they (understandably) want to use science to help poor mothers and their children. This study is just asking to be deployed by advocates for cash transfers or a universal basic income. The researchers couldn’t have planned it this way—after all, the experiment began in 2018—but the study appeared at the same time President Joe Biden is pushing to expand the child tax credit, which likely added extra incentive for supporters of the policy to conclude that the association between cash transfers and baby-brain development is ironclad.But one single study—especially one with as many issues as this study—should never be taken as unshakable proof of anything. Think about what would’ve happened if the study had shown absolutely no effect, or if it had found that the $333-a-month kids had significantly worse brain function. Proponents of cash transfers would not have thrown their hands up and started lobbying against them—nor should they. Think of science the same way you would the news: Pay too little attention, and you risk lacking the information you need to live a healthy life and be a responsible citizen. But grasp onto every breaking story, and you’ll find yourself wading through a sea of red herrings with no sense of the broader narrative.[Read: Scientific publishing is a joke]And there is indeed a broader story about cash-transfer studies. They’ve mostly been run in low- or middle-income countries, and they show promising effects overall, with reviews in recent years pointing to potential benefits in, for instance, child nutrition and mental health. We still have a lot to learn if we want to get the most out of income-boosting interventions (for example, should they be combined with programs that coach parents on nutrition, hygiene, and child development?), but the point is that the scientific literature is large and nuanced. In that context, it’s a mistake to seize on every study that purports to show cash-transfer benefits and publicize them to the high heavens—at least without carefully checking their actual results.The studies add to the many obvious reasons a society might want to make low-income families richer. Some are based on scientific evidence about the detrimental effects of poverty; some are based on ethical arguments about equity and equality; some are based on common sense. But on the list of the most compelling reasons, “it causes hard-to-interpret changes in a notoriously fickle and noisy brain-wave measure” is somewhere near the bottom.

His suspension is unnecessary and unjust.

To be sure, there is so much wrong with Shapiro’s position on Biden’s pending nomination that it’s almost hard to know where to begin. For one, just which metric makes Srinivasan, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the “objectively best” Supreme Court candidate right now is unclear. There are many valid and proven pathways to becoming a Supreme Court justice, and all the Black women that Biden is said to be considering have sterling dossiers, quite comparable to the current members of the high court. Also, Shapiro’s apparent numbness to the significance of there being a Black female justice suggests an almost willful disinterest in America’s social history.

We can’t ignore that Shapiro also dismissed then-judge, now Justice Sonia Sotomayor as an affirmative action hire, writing in a 2009 CNN commentary that “she would not have even been on” President Barack Obama’s “short list if she were not Hispanic” — despite her having spent more time on the federal bench in her career before her Supreme Court service than any of its other current justices.

There’s plenty to take issue with here. But does it justify Georgetown placing Shapiro on leave, investigating him and potentially firing him?

Here’s the first reason I think not. For many, the most offensive part of Shapiro’s tweets is the phrase “lesser black woman,” which is at least unfeeling and arguably hostile. Many are reading this as Shapiro saying that Black women are, in general, less qualified for a Supreme Court position in some inherent sense. That interpretation is understandable, given that when concepts are paired like this, there is often an implication of a general characterization.

As it happens, Sotomayor was the source of a comparable famous example, in a statement of hers that got around during her Supreme Court confirmation process, supporting the idea that the jurisprudence of a “wise Latina” could be especially valuable. The expression could be taken to refer coolly to the subset of Latinas who happen to be wise — not likely in this case; or that the added perspective of being woman of color enhanced her judicial skill set — probably how she meant it. But in living language it can also carry a further implication: that there is something about being a Latina that inherently involves a certain wisdom.

My own lack of emphasis on legacy preferences over the years has essentially been an example of how hard it can be to get out of your own head. Quite simply, I have tended to think of legacy preferences as something of an embarrassment to the university system, and as such, have assumed that any other Black observer speaking on the issue would be as disinclined as I am to suggest something along the lines of: “What’s wrong with affirmative action for Black students when there’s affirmative action for rich white ones?”

That is, however, the kind of argument I have often perceived. For example, in the aughts, not uncommonly during panel discussions and talks on the pros and cons of racial preferences (of which I have participated in quite a few) people would often parry criticisms of racial preferences by tartly noting that President George W. Bush had been a modestly performing legacy student at Yale. It was almost always a guaranteed applause line — white audience members would make that point with especial élan, if memory serves.

I found it ironic, to say the least, to see white progressives earnestly supposing that they were doing the right thing by implying that Black students should found any part of their self-estimation on pointing to the apparently subpar scholastic performance of our 43rd president. It was an example of what one might call unintentionally woke racism or, as Bush himself phrased it more than two decades ago in a speech to the N.A.A.C.P., “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

And I found it sad that Black people in agreement with those white observers were missing that, in favor of a claim that boils down to something approximating the adage “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” That sort of approach strikes me as the antithesis of Black pride. The issue here is not just a matter of who gets certain resources, as in, who gets a goody bag and who doesn’t. It’s about perception as well. Black students often complain about the assumption that they are affirmative action admittees, with consequences ranging from constantly being on the defensive in late-night dorm-room debates to being shunned as study partners. Racial preferences in admissions inevitably reflect on Black students — Black people — as a whole. However unfair it may be, legacy admissions do not reflect on white students or white people, broadly speaking, in the same way.

Zora Neale Hurston, of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” renown, who left us 62 years ago last week, and who today would be considered a Black conservative, had useful words for these issues. Though she didn’t live long enough to comment directly on affirmative action, we can glean what her thoughts would have been in many of her statements, such as this one:

It seems to me that if I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.

Hurston questioned the supposedly progressive notion that the job of an enlightened Black person is to question the basis of the rules — or, in the case of the legacy admissions comparison, to point out when the rules aren’t applied completely fairly — rather than to grapple with the rules and only contest them after we have shown that we can make our way despite double standards and “gotchas” baked into the system. Opinions will differ as to what justifies petitioning for the rules to be changed, and how much, but Hurston’s counsel is an invaluable lodestar for us moderns, regardless.

Back in 2009, I and the sociologist Dalton Conley debated affirmative action with N.A.A.C.P. chairman Julian Bond and Columbia University president Lee Bollinger. In my closing statement I suggested a scenario in which I had a daughter who got into nearly every college she applied to while her similarly credentialed white friends got into schools only here or there. If that happened, I said, the reason, “given the fact that she will not have grown up under anything you could call disadvantage,” would be that:

There are administrators beaming at the fact that by admitting my daughter they are sticking a thumb in the eye at white people who don’t feel guilty enough about their supremacy. If the idea is that the administrators are beaming because my daughter is going to make the campus more diverse; if they are beaming because by admitting my daughter, they are showing that racism is not dead … I will feel that my daughter is being condescended to. I will feel it as a mark of disrespect to me and my ability to get past the ills of the past and to pass on those abilities to my daughter.

The debate was civil in a way that debates, sadly, frequently no longer are, and it was part of a long line of such debates over affirmative action that has since continued, and soon promises to return the issue to the fore.

Affirmative action — broadly speaking, policies that seek, affirmatively, to achieve racial and gender balance in areas such as hiring, contracting and university admissions — has been controversial since it was instituted in the 1960s. It’s frequently thought to have originated, in a formal sense, with President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 and has proliferated throughout American institutions over time. It was controversial at the time of that 2009 debate and it still is, such that in its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will be considering challenges to affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

I now have that daughter. (I don’t remember what made me so sure I would have a girl, since she wasn’t born until a few years later, but here we are, and she’ll be applying to college in eight years, I assume, with my younger daughter doing so three years later.) And not only do I stand by what I said more than a decade ago, I feel it more deeply now.

It’s not that I’m opposed utterly to affirmative action in the university context, admitting some students under different grade and test score standards than other students. I just think affirmative action should address economic disadvantage, not race or gender.

(Photo Illustration by Gerard Bottino/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)Much of the national discussion on COVID has revolved around the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, and what that distinction means for rates of infection, hospitalization, and death. But there is a third group, made up of those who follow the rules, but still face a threat: the immunocompromised. I am one of them, and I faced some important decisions last spring when I learned that the new COVID-19 vaccines did not work for more than half of organ transplant recipients such as myself. The problem is that the medications we take to avert organ rejection can also suppress our antibody-producing cells. Sure enough, testing showed that my first and second vaccine doses produced no detectable antibodies. I got boosted anyway given the chance that the vaccine might strengthen T-cell mediated immunity, another component of the immune system.Despite my vulnerability, I decided to live as normally as possible. Not that I was reckless. I wore a mask indoors, observed the same maniacal hand hygiene I have followed since my first kidney transplant in 2006, and socialized only with people who were vaccinated. I understood, however, why others in my situation chose to stay closer to home. Being immunocompromised not only makes one more vulnerable to infection with SARS-CoV-2, but also more likely to develop severe symptoms if infected.Nonetheless, on a recent Sunday, my birthday, I took Amtrak from my home in Washington, D.C, to New York City for a small celebration … and I got COVID. By Tuesday afternoon my throat was on fire; I felt as if I were gagging on a molten lump. The first home test was negative, but two days later, Friday, it was positive. I emailed my doctor at 9 a.m. and, after a few phone calls with a treatment coordinator, I was racing up I-95 to a clinic in a Baltimore suburb to get a 30-minute intravenous infusion of a precious treatment called sotrovimab, the only monoclonal with an excellent track record against the Omicron variant.The FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the drug last May expressly for the 7 million Americans whose immune systems are impaired, either by cancer or other disease or by the drugs they take, and who are “are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death.” Within a day, the inferno in my pharynx subsided. Nine days after exposure (five days after the infusion), I tested negative. Because sotrovimab is likely to prevent reinfection (which is not uncommon for Omicron) for three to six months, I have some real security for a while. Unfortunately, the resounding medical success that I enjoyed is pretty rare. Profound sotrovimab shortages exist; some medical centers have no supply at all and others dole out the meager allotment the state sends them. Nor does the new anti-viral pill Paxlovid, which is also in short supply, work for immunocompromised people—it interacts dangerously with our anti-rejection drugs. Prevention is the best solution for immunocompromised people. And now this comes in the form of Evusheld, authorized for emergency use by the FDA early in December. Evusheld takes the place of a vaccine for those who don’t mount adequate immune response to COVID-19 vaccination or, for some reason, cannot tolerate it. It is emphatically not intended for otherwise healthy people who refuse vaccination. A “cocktail” of two antibodies, tixagevimab and cilgavimab, Evusheld is delivered as two consecutive jabs and confers protection from infection for up to six months. But Evusheld, too, is scarce. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, for example, is allocating the drug through a lottery until it gets enough to treat all eligible patients, which hospital officials believe is a long way off. As transplant recipients, we are no strangers to scarcity. Many of us waited years for a new kidney, liver, heart, or lungs. Some, like me, were blessed with friends or family who could donate their kidney or part of their liver, but most endured agonized waiting for an organ that might never arrive in time. Thankfully, COVID therapies are not like organs, which must be given as gifts. We can buy more. According to GlaxoSmithKline and Vir, makers of sotrovimab, “the US government will have the option to purchase additional doses through March 2022.” Evusheld is available, too. “The US government could purchase more doses if they wanted to," said an Astra-Zeneca spokesperson. “We already hold inventory of finished product that exceeds near-term forecast demand.” Unfortunately, the government contracted for only 1.2 million doses, a fraction of what will be needed to protect the millions of immune-compromised people in the country, especially as many of them will require treatment every six months. (Dosages can't be sold independently to private entities because they are authorized only for emergency use.)The government has fulfilled its promise to make vaccines available to everyone whose bodies can make good use of them. But now it must also cover everyone who cannot benefit from the vaccines.As for me, I’ll be more cautious in the future. I am chastened by the thought of how easily I could have missed out on a priceless treatment—and anguished by the thought of those who will.Sally Satel is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos School of Physicians and Surgeons.

According to a number of polls and surveys, significant majorities of Republican-aligned voters seem to believe the big lie that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 US presidential election and, consequently, the Biden administration is illegitimate.

Taking these data at face value, a growing chorus insists that we’re living in a “post-truth” era, where members of one political party, the Republican party, can no longer tell facts from falsehood. As a result of the Republican party becoming unmoored from reality, the narratives typically continue, America is drifting headlong into a fascist takeover or a civil war.

Fortunately for all of us, these dire predictions are almost certainly overblown. We are not living in a “post-truth” world. We are not on the brink of a civil war. The perception that we are is almost purely an artifact of people taking poll and survey data at face value despite overwhelming evidence that we probably shouldn’t.

For instance, in the wake of the 2016 election, Trump claimed to have had higher turnout at his inauguration than Barack Obama did. Subsequent polls and surveys presented people with pictures of Obama and Trump’s inauguration crowds and asked which was bigger. Republicans consistently identified the visibly smaller (Trump) crowd as being larger than the other. A narrative quickly emerged that Trump supporters literally couldn’t identify the correct answer; they were so brainwashed that they actually believed that the obviously smaller crowd was, in fact, larger.

Of course, a far more obvious and empirically plausible explanation is that respondents knew perfectly well what the correct answer was. However, they also had a sense of how that answer would be used in the media (“Even Trump’s supporters don’t believe his nonsense!”), so they simply declined to give pollsters the response they seemed to be looking for.

As a matter of fact, respondents regularly troll researchers in polling and surveys – especially when they are asked whether or not they subscribe to absurd or fringe beliefs, such as birtherism (a conspiracy that held that Barack Obama was born outside of the US and was legally ineligible to serve as president of the United States).

However, many academics and pundits do not seem to be in on the joke. Instead, post-2016, a consensus quickly emerged from credulous readings of polls and surveys that America is facing an epidemic of “fake news”, which was leading people to believe things that were obviously false, and to vote for unsavory political candidates. Some of the initial studies on this topic were blatantly prejudicial in their design; other widely shared studies were ultimately retracted.

As more reliable data began to emerge, it turned out that, contrary to the initial hysteria, “fake news” stories were viewed by a relatively small number of voters, and infrequently at that. Most of those served pro-Trump or anti-Clinton “fake news” by social media sites already seemed firmly committed to voting for Trump, or intractably resolved against voting for Clinton (which is why the algorithms served them this niche content to begin with). That is, “fake news” is unlikely to have changed many, if any, votes. It is not a plausible explanation for the 2016 electoral outcome nor Trump’s support more broadly.

Even people who share “fake news” stories typically never read (or even click on) them. That is, people are not sharing the content because they read the stories, grew convinced of their factual accuracy, and are genuinely trying to inform others. Instead, people typically share these stories based on their headlines, for a whole host of social reasons, while recognizing them to be of questionable accuracy (see here, here, here, here and here for more on this).

It should not be surprising, then, that correcting misinformation seems to have virtually no effect on political preferences or voting behavior; misperceptions are generally not driving political alignments to begin with – nor are they driving political polarization.

Contrary to narratives that have grown especially ubiquitous in recent years, Americans are actually not very far apart in terms of most empirical facts. We do not live in separate realities. Instead, people begin to polarize on their public positions on factual matters only after those issues have become politicized. And even then, polarized answers on polls and surveys often fail to reflect participants’ genuine views. Indeed, when respondents are provided with incentives to answer questions accurately (instead of engaging in partisan cheerleading), the difference between Democrats and Republicans on factual matters often collapses.

In other cases, apparent disagreements about factual matters often turn out to be, at bottom, debates about how various facts are framed and interpreted, or disputes about the policies that are held to flow from the facts. That is, even in cases of genuine disagreement, there is typically less dispute about the facts themselves than about what the facts mean – morally or practically speaking.

All said, measuring misperceptions is a fraught enterprise – even when it comes to banal and politically uncontested facts. Attempting to draw inferences about “incorrect” views on matters tied political, moral and/or identity struggles is a far more complicated endeavor. These are not data that lend themselves to being taken at face value.

Similar realities hold for the data that purportedly show we’re on the brink of a new civil war.

There is strong evidence that many of the surveys and polls indicating support for, or openness towards, political violence hugely overstate actual levels of support in the American public. Likewise, data that purport to show high levels of partisan vitriol may be misleading.

In general, behaviors are often a stronger indicator than attitudinal data for understanding how sincere or committed people are to a cause or idea. The number of people who are willing to rhetorically endorse some extraordinary belief tends to be much, much higher than the subset who meaningfully behave as if that claim is true. The number of people who profess commitment to some cause tends to be much, much higher than the share who are willing to make sacrifices or life adjustments in order to advance that cause.

The big lie is no exception. Both the low levels of turnout and the relatively low levels of violence are extraordinary if we take the polls and surveys at face value.

Event organizers were expecting, “hundreds of thousands, if not millions” to take part in the January 6 uprising. This would be reasonable to expect in a world where tens of millions of Americans literally believed that an apparently high-stakes election was stolen out from under them. Even if just 1% of those who purportedly believe in the big lie had bothered to show up, the demonstrations would have been hundreds of thousands strong. Instead, they only mustered 2,500 participants (according to US government estimates).

The lack of casualties was also striking, even when one considers injuries and indirect fatalities. After all, the former president also enjoyed strong support among people who are armed and formally trained in combat, such as active duty and veteran military and law enforcement. A large number of other Trump supporters participate in militias, or are private gun owners.

Yet most January 6 participants did not bring firearms, and those who were armed did not discharge their weapons – not even in the heat of the violence that broke out. The only person shot in the entire uprising, Ashli Babbitt, was killed by a law enforcement officer. In fact, Babbitt was actually the only homicide to occur on that day.

Two other rioters died from heart problems, another from a drug overdose. Police officer Brian Sicknick died from strokes on 7 January; the medical examiner ultimately concluded that this was unrelated to any injuries sustained during January 6. In the months that followed, four other police officers would perish by suicide. All said, then, a total of nine deaths have been associated with the events of January 6 (directly or indirectly). Not one person, however, was actually killed by the rioters. Nor is a single bullet alleged to have been fired by the rioters, despite many participants allegedly possessing guns.

In a world where 74 million voted for Trump, and more than two-thirds of these (ie more than 50 million people, roughly one out of every five adults in the US) actually believed that the other party had illegally seized power and now plan to use that power to harm people like themselves, the events of January 6 would likely have played out much, much differently.

Indeed, had even the 2,500 people who assembled on the Capitol arrived armed to the hilt, with a plan to seize power by force, committed to violence as “needed” to achieve their goals – things would have gone much, much differently.

Instead, most participants showed up expecting Trump would provide them with definitive evidence for his claims of electoral malfeasance, and then unveil some master plan to take the country back. This didn’t happen. Those gathered seemed to have no idea what to do after that. Most of what followed was spontaneous, not planned. Even when they breached the Capitol, most had no information about the layout of the building, little knowledge about the proceedings they were ostensibly striving to disrupt, and no clear agenda of what to do once they got inside.

There was a small number, dozens perhaps, who showed up to the Capitol with a clear intent to forcibly overturn the election – who equipped themselves for violence, researched the congressional proceedings and the layout of the building, developed and executed a plan, etc. These are behaviors consistent with a sincere belief in the big lie, and a strong commitment to doing something “about” it.

Yet, critically, even these actors were operating independently of Trump, motivated in part by frustration with the former president’s apparent inaction. In their telling, Trump himself wasn’t acting like he believed his own rhetoric. There was no urgency. There was no “fire”. There was no focus. There was no plan. The Oath Keepers hoped to engage in a radical act that would push the president to actually behave as if the election was stolen and the republic was on the line. As their leader (currently arrested on sedition charges) put it:

“All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough. We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country.”

Of course, even tiny numbers of genuine extremists like these can be extremely destabilizing under the right circumstances. Had Oath Keepers breached the Capitol instead of being repelled (even as Q-Shaman, Confederate Flag Guy et al wandered the building aimlessly) … January 6 could have played out much differently.

Nonetheless, there is a huge difference in talking about identifying and disrupting small numbers of highly committed individuals willing to engage in revolutionary political violence v tens of millions of Americans genuinely believing the election was fraudulent and being open to violence as a means of rectifying the situation. Those are very different problems. Orders of magnitude different.

The good news is that the second problem, the tens-of-millions-of-Americans problem, is not real. It is an artifact of politicized polling design and survey responses, followed by overly credulous interpretations of those results by academics and pundits who are committed to a narrative that half the electorate is evil, ignorant, stupid, deranged and otherwise dangerous.

In fact, rather than January 6 serving as a prelude to a civil war, the US saw lower levels of death from political violence in 2021 than in any other year since the turn of the century. Even as violent crime approached record highs across much of the country, fatalities from political violence dropped. This is not an outcome that seems consistent with large and growing shares of the population supposedly leaning towards settling the culture wars with bullets instead of ballots. This turn of events does not seem consistent with the notion that tens of millions of Americans – including large numbers of military, law enforcement and militia members – literally believe the presidency was stolen, elections can no longer be trusted, and the fate of the country is on the line.

Indeed, far from giving up on elections, Republican voters are reveling in the prospect of taking back one or both chambers of Congress at the end of this year; they are eagerly awaiting the midterms (likely for good reason).

In truth, most Republican voters likely don’t believe in the big lie. But many would nonetheless profess to believe it in polls and surveys – just as they’d support politicians who make similar professions (according to one estimate, Republican candidates who embrace the big lie enjoy a 6 percentage point electoral boost as compared to Republicans who publicly affirm the 2020 electoral results).

Within contemporary rightwing circles, a rhetorical embrace of the big lie is perceived as an act of defiance against prevailing elites. It is recognized as a surefire means to “trigger” people on the other team. A demonstrated willingness to endure blowback (from Democrats, media, academics, social media companies et al) for publicly striking this “defiant” position is interpreted as evidence of solidarity with, and commitment to, “the people” instead of special interests; it’s taken as a sign that one is not beholden to “the Establishment” and its rules. That is, the big lie seems to be more about social posturing than making sincere truth claims.

For many reasons, this situation is also far from ideal. But it’s a very different (and much smaller) problem than partisans actually inhabiting different epistemic worlds and lurching towards a civil war. Glass half full.

The 8,500 U.S. troops President Biden has ordered to prepare to go to Eastern Europe if Russia invades Ukraine can only be deployed by a consensus vote of all 30 NATO member countries. That could result in a bureaucratic disaster in the middle of the crisis and effectively give a veto over the deployments to countries such as Germany, Hungary or Turkey — a situation Russian President Vladimir Putin is sure to exploit.

Biden said Tuesday, when he announced the move, that he had told Putin that if Russia “continued to build up and/or was to move, we would be reinforcing those troops.” The president said he had also spoken with all 30 NATO allies and all agreed on those terms. But Pentagon officials have held back from commenting on exactly what would trigger the deployment and whether all 30 NATO member countries are really on the same page.

The Pentagon has said that these 8,500 U.S. troops would be placed on “heightened alert” for a possible deployment under the NATO Response Force (NRF). What that means in practice, several officials have confirmed to me, is that the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Lt. General Tod D. Wolters, would have to request their deployment from NATO itself before they could carry it out. The 30-member North Atlantic Council (NAC) would then have to unanimously vote to approve it.

There’s growing concern, especially on Capitol Hill, that this could be a huge problem for two reasons. First of all, considering how far apart NATO countries are on how to respond to Russian aggression now, there’s no reason to be sure that after Putin attacks, they would be united on a massive deployment of the NRF, which in total could send 40,000 NATO troops to places such as Poland, Romania and the Baltic countries. Negotiations over the size and the scope of the mission could drag on.

NATO members who border Ukraine or Russia could easily find themselves in the position of having to beg for approval for security reinforcements from countries that are more Russia-friendly, such as France, Germany, Hungary or Turkey, all of whom have been reluctant to do anything they think might provoke or escalate tensions with Putin. This would give Putin a clear opening to manipulate those fissures in the alliance, as he loves to do.

“It’s a slow bureaucratic process that outsources security interests to leaders in Germany, Hungary and Turkey, who would each have a veto,” said one senior GOP congressional official. “Putin understands the bureaucratic nature of how NATO works and I’m sure will be deftly skilled at exploiting that bureaucracy and the divisions inside NATO.”

What’s more, because the leadership of the NRF rotates annually among the member nations, the U.S. forces would likely be deployed as part of a command led by France, which is led by a president who is actively trying to set up a European defense force to supplant NATO.

U.S. defense officials I spoke with defended the arrangement. They argued that NATO is the natural place to coordinate a military response because NATO has been key in allied efforts to manage the Russia-Ukraine crisis so far. U.S. defense officials also express optimism that the ongoing diplomatic prep work will allow NATO to act quickly if the need for the deployment arises.

“There’s a lot of faith that at the end of the day, that if the Supreme Allied Commander decides to call up the NATO Response Force, many nations of the North Atlantic Council will already be on board,” one U.S. defense official told me. “If the call comes, I’m pretty confident that they would be able to make a decision very quickly.”

The officials pointed back to the last time the NRF was activated. In August, NRF troops helped to evacuate Afghans who had worked with NATO from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over. At that time, the NRF lead country was Turkey, but the Turkish government declined to participate. Still, Turkey did not stand in the way of the mission and the NAC acted relatively quickly.

U.S. defense officials also point out, rightly, that Biden has other options for deploying troops in Europe, or moving other U.S. forces within Europe, if the NATO scheme doesn’t work when the time comes. But countries directly in the line of Putin’s fire want Biden to deploy U.S. forces to help them now. They don’t want to bet their security on the future good graces of leaders in Berlin, Paris or Budapest.

“Given the force imbalance in the region, effective deterrence and defense can be achieved only by capable, in place forces … including persistent, ‘heel-to-toe’ presence of the U.S. forces as a necessary and indispensable element,” wrote the heads of the Lithuanian defense and foreign affairs committees, in a letter they sent last week to all the leaders of the U.S. Congress’s defense and foreign affairs committees.

As Putin points 100,000 guns at Ukraine’s head, Germany is offering Kyiv no weapons, only helmets. But the theory that avoiding any provocation of Putin makes Europe safer is not bearing out. If and when Putin does attack, the fallout will not be contained to Ukraine. Putting U.S. reaction forces under NATO command might work out — let’s hope it does. But Biden might want to start preparing a Plan B now, just in case.

We will salute, then, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker, who last week ruled, in a 74-page opinion, in favor of six professors at the University of Florida who were barred by school officials from acting as expert witnesses in cases challenging state policy on issues ranging from restrictive voting laws to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to withhold funds from schools with mask mandates. (There are also recent reports that U.F. faculty members have been cautioned against using the words “critical” and “race” in the same sentence to describe the curriculums they teach, apparently to head off discussion of critical race theory and its effects on education in a way that might draw a backlash from state legislators or others in the Florida government.)

Judge Walker analogized the actions of University of Florida officials to the removal in December of a statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre from the campus of the University of Hong Kong. He echoed the plaintiffs’ argument that “in an apparent act of vorauseilender Gehorsam,” or anticipatory obedience, “U.F. has bowed to perceived pressure from Florida’s political leaders and has sanctioned the unconstitutional suppression of ideas out of favor with Florida’s ruling party” — admonishing the defendants in a footnote that “if those in U.F.’s administration find this comparison upsetting, the solution is simple. Stop acting like your contemporaries in Hong Kong.”

The judge summed up by noting that “the Supreme Court of the United States has long regarded teachers, from the primary grades to the university level, as critical to a healthy democracy.” He added, “Plaintiffs’ academic inquiry ‘is necessary to informed political debate’ and ‘is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned,’” emphasizing that “when such critical inquiry is stifled, democracy suffers.”

Let’s not forget, either, what happened to the schoolteacher Matthew Hawn last summer: He was fired by school administrators in Tennessee for leading classroom discussions with high school juniors and seniors (in a course called Contemporary Studies; it’s not as if this had been a chemistry lab) on concepts such as white privilege and implicit bias, not long after passage in the state of a ban on teaching critical race theory. As I’ve argued, ideas rooted in that theory do, in refracted form, make their way into how some schoolteachers teach, and it’s legitimate to question the extent of this. But that hardly justifies Hawn’s getting canned for things such as assigning a widely read article by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Hawn is pursuing an appeal of his dismissal, and if justice is on his side, he should win it.

I’m not doing a 180 here or letting those I term the Elect off the hook. The illiberal tendency on the left is just as oppressive and requires equal pushback: The University of North Texas music professor Timothy Jackson, a founder of his school’s Center for Schenkerian Studies, studies the work of the German Jewish music theorist Heinrich Schenker, whose early-20th-century work figures prominently in music theory. In a 2019 speech to the Society for Music Theory, Philip Ewell, a Black music professor at Hunter College characterized Schenker as a racist and wrote in a 2020 article for Music Theory Online (a publication of the Society for Music Theory) that “Schenker’s racist views infected his music theoretical arguments,” that “there exists a ‘white racial frame’ in music theory that is structural and institutionalized” and that by extension, music theory and even the academic field of musicology are racialized, if not racist.

Even before Omicron hit the United States in full force, most of our bodies had already wised up to SARS-CoV-2’s insidious spike—through infection, injection, or both. By the end of October 2021, some 86.2 percent of American immune systems may have glimpsed the virus’s most infamous protein, according to one estimate; now, as Omicron adds roughly 800,000 known cases to the national roster each day, the cohort of spike-zero Americans, the truly immunologically naive, is shrinking fast. Virginia Pitzer, an epidemiologist at Yale’s School of Public Health and one of the scientists who arrived at the 86.2 percent estimate, has a guess for what fraction of the U.S. population will have had some experience with the spike protein when the Omicron wave subsides: 90 to 95 percent.The close of Omicron’s crush, then, should bring the country one step closer to hitting a COVID equilibrium in which SARS-CoV-2’s still around, but disrupting our lives far less. In the most optimistic view of our future, this surge could be seen as a turning point in the country’s population-level protection. Omicron’s reach could be so comprehensive that, as some have forecasted, this wave ends up being the pandemic’s last.[Read: The worst of the Omicron wave could still be coming]But there is reason to believe that this ultra-sunny forecast won’t come to pass. “This wave will not be the last,” Shane Crotty, of the La Jolla Institute of Immunology, told me. “There are not many things that I am willing to be pretty confident about. But that’s one of them.” A new antibody-dodging variant, for one, could still show up to clobber us. And nearly everyone having some form of spike in their past isn’t as protective as it might sound. In a few months’ time, American immune systems will be better acquainted with SARS-CoV-2’s spike than they’ve ever been. But 90 to 95 percent of people exposed doesn’t translate to 90 to 95 percent protected from ever getting infected or sick again; more immune doesn’t have to mean immune enough. By the time the country exits this wave, each of our bodies will be in radically different immunological spots—some stronger, some weaker, some fresher, some staler. Chart that out by demography and geography, and the defensive matrix only gets more complex: Certain communities will have built up higher anti-COVID walls than others, which will remain relatively vulnerable. The malleability of the virus and the United States’ patchwork approach to combatting it has always meant that COVID would spread unevenly. Now the sums of those decisions will be reflected by our immunity. They’ll dictate how our next tussle with the virus unfolds—and who may have to bear the brunt of it.Collective immunity is the key to ending a pandemic. But its building blocks start with each individual. By now we know that immunity against the coronavirus isn’t binary—and while no one can yet say exactly how much more protection Person A (triple vaxxed, recently infected) might have than Person B (twice infected, once vaxxed) or Person C (once infected, never vaxxed), we have figured out some of the broad trends that can toggle susceptibility up or down. Allowing for shades of gray, a person’s current immune status hinges on “the number of exposures [to the spike protein], and time since last exposure,” John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Infections and vaccinations add protection; time erodes it away.Part of this boils down to relatively basic arithmetic. Each exposure to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, whether through injection or infection, can be expected to build iteratively on the quantity, quality, and durability of the body’s defenses The more intensely and more frequently the body is bothered, the more resources it will invest to fend off that same threat. While a duo of vaccines, for instance, isn’t enough to reliably guard against less severe Omicron cases, a trio of shots seems to do the trick for most. It also pays to pace encounters judiciously. Crowd the second and third too close together, for instance, and the latter’s effect may be blunted; a several-months-long wait, meanwhile, can supercharge the body’s response by allowing immune cells sufficient time to mull what they’ve learned.The contents of an exposure can matter too, though immunologists still debate the protective merits of tossing a dangerous, bona fide virus into the mix. Infections can blitz a smorgasbord of proteins from a currently circulating variant into the airway, tickling out immune defenses that in-the-arm, spike-centric vaccines don’t reliably rouse—but they can also, you know, cause COVID, and leave wildly inconsistent levels of protection behind. “It’s really not worth the risk,” Taia Wang, an immunologist at Stanford, told me. Those who already have both types of spike exposures in their history, though, seem to reap some of the relative benefits of each—the two stimuli synergize, and patch each other’s gaps. Post-vaccination Omicron infections, in particular, could awaken immune cells that didn’t respond to the original-recipe spike, broadening the range of defenders available for future fights.[Read: Should I just get Omicron over with?]Neither virus-induced immunity nor vaccine-induced immunity against infection seems to last terribly long, however. (Protection against severe disease, at least, has been quite a bit more stubborn, and some experts hold out hope that additional doses or infections might eventually get our defenses against milder cases to hold as well.) For now, people who have logged only a solo encounter with SARS-CoV-2’s spike, or are many months away from their last viral brush, can reasonably assume that they’re vulnerable to infection again. The fewer past brushes with spike, the speedier that relapse will be, too. Responses might be especially ephemeral in certain people, including older or immunocompromised individuals, whose immune systems aren’t easily tickled by vaccines.But it’s not always obvious why people respond differently to the same viruses or shots. Even within a demographic group, “some people generate really robust responses, and others just never do,” Wang told me. Projections based on a vaccine dosing schedule, or someone’s infection history, aren’t a surefire bet. All of this underlies, then, the massive disconnect between previously exposed and currently protected, Joshua Salomon, a health-policy researcher at Stanford who’s collaborating with Pitzer to model Omicron’s immunological impact, told me. Salomon, Pitzer, and their colleagues estimate that although a significant majority of Americans had rendezvoused with the spike protein by October’s end, fewer than half were still reasonably well guarded against a future infection. (Most retained resilience against severe disease.) People who enter the “well defended” group can also exit it, and join the susceptibles again.Two years, 530 million vaccine doses, and 68 million documented SARS-CoV-2 infections deep into the pandemic, the range of vulnerability in our population has never been larger or more unwieldy. Some high-risk people, never vaccinated or infected, have essentially no protection to speak of; many young, healthy individuals have been triply vaccinated, and are fresh off an Omicron breakthrough. “That’s a huge, huge range,” Wang told me, with a chasm of immunological possibility in between. And none of this accounts for the very real risk that another wonky and wily variant, distinct from Omicron and everything else we’ve seen before, could still upend every rosy immunological assumption we lay down, and send us into yet another devastating surge.And when new variants show up, they will once again reveal the cracks and crevices where protection is lacking. In the same way that single individuals with different exposure histories can’t be expected to achieve the same levels of immune protection, neither can communities with different pandemic histories. Fresh, good-quality immunity simply won’t distribute evenly—we’re likely to see islands, separated by immense seas. Many of these differences will tie straight back to “how inequitably we distributed vaccines,” Elaine Hernandez, a health demographer at Indiana University at Bloomington, told me. Through first, second, and now third doses, we’ve managed to concentrate immune protection among the privileged. Shots remain proportionally sparse in poor communities, rural communities, low-resource communities; unvaccinated people also “tend to concentrate geographically,” Anne Sosin, a health-equity researcher at Dartmouth, told me, seeding fertile ground for the virus to fix in a population and spread. To date, there are still plenty of “pockets that may have not yet had exposure to vaccination or the virus,” Bertha Hidalgo, an epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told me.[Read: It’s a terrible idea to deny medical care to unvaccinated people]After flitting through urban centers, Omicron will find these isolated enclaves. It will pummel them. It will cause debilitating disease and death, but generate perhaps only a flimsy veneer of protection that, unbuttressed by vaccines, might not successfully ward off future waves. By one estimate, a third to half of all Americans may end up infected by Omicron by mid-February. The variant will not encounter all of those people on equal immunological footing, nor will it create such footing. “Some people will be left with immune houses of straw, others of wood, others of brick,” Sosin said. The virus is not an equalizer; it never has been.Appending vaccinations on top of recent Omicron infections in less protected places could help even the playing field—but there may not be incentive to, as Omicron cases eventually fall away. In many parts of the country where vaccinations have struggled to gain traction, “there is a predominant belief that infection means you are now immune, especially if you were quite sick,” Hidalgo told me. If uptake of shots continues to be sluggish, the gaps in protection that existed before Omicron only stand to widen. This is the texture that national curves and figures obscure: knots of vulnerability that many Americans can easily ignore, but that the virus all too easily exploits.[Read: Our relationship with COVID vaccines is just getting started]Omicron’s cross-country sweep won’t amount to nothing. Immunity will be raised, on average, and “we can still expect it to add friction” to any future path the virus takes, Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Chicago, told me. This may well be the last COVID surge that plays out in such a staggering fashion. We may, for a time, get a touch of reprieve. Even if a new antibody-dodging variant screeches onto the scene, there are “limitations to how this virus can evolve,” Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. By this point, perhaps many immune systems will have seen enough to anticipate what hijinks the virus lobs at us next.But future surges of infection will still carry their own problems. They may be more complicated to track, because they are more local; more asynchronous, because outbreaks will start and end at different times; more patchwork, because of the “communities I worry we’ve left behind,” Sosin told me. As immunity ebbs and flows, our fates will continue to splinter, at the level of both individual and population alike. And yet, our geographies are not so divided that the pathogen won’t pass between them. When the threat is this infectious, it’s not our immunological differences that define us, but the common ground we offer the virus when we allow it to spread.

In general, one wants to be aware of such developments. And not just linguists. But the implications the authors draw from their findings are distinctly a headful. They see the new way of using language as evidence of a kind of despair over sociopolitical conditions, necessitating a rather forlorn clinging onto one’s own impressions out of a lack of anywhere else to grab hold. While they concede that causes for the trend they observe are “difficult to pinpoint,” they posit that one reason we use more subjective language now could be due to “tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the economic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies,” as we suffer the “negative effects of the use of social media on subjective well-being.” Further, they write, “If disillusion with ‘the system’ is indeed the core driver, a loss of interest in the rationality that helped build and defend the system could perhaps be collateral damage.”

I’m inclined to think the tendency the authors identify stems from things less agonizing. For one, it is often the case that the process by which language changes is that something starts out being about objective observation and drifts into being, as it were, all about me. The word “rather” began as meaning “earlier.” When Tennyson wrote, “Till rathe she rose, half-cheated in the thought” he meant that the literary figure Elaine of Astolat got up early. But if you do something earlier than something else, chances are you prefer it, and after a while “rather” came to refer to your internal preferences, what you prefer to do over something else — I’d rather do the Charleston. Tennyson’s usage was objective; ours is subjective.

Consider also a recent piece by The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany about how the slang adjectivization of “cringe” — It was so cringe when he did that! — began in the early aughts as a way of expressing sympathetic embarrassment with someone making a fool of themselves in some way, but has drifted into being used unsympathetically to underscore someone or something gauche, repellent or downright mortifying. Now it’s all about the speaker’s judgy feelings apart from any attempt at empathy: more subjective than it began as.

So, the drift from “all about that” to “all about me” is ordinary. The question is: Why would this have happened to such an unusual extent since 1980? My money is less on angst than informality. English usage became less cosseted after the countercultural revolution of the 1960s, to the point that the time traveler to America a century ago would find it a major adjustment to grapple with how strictly general mores policed the formality of public speech and writing. Inherent to informality is being more open about the self, less withholding about the personal, more inclined to the intimate. To “let it all hang out” entails more words about feelings.

And as for the idea that the de-emphasis on the collective must be an index of lesser deliberation and a resort to mere personal impressions, what appears less collective may just be less formal, while still as collective as ever.

Dismayingly few Republican leaders stand foursquare against the base’s insistence that any election Mr. Trump and his followers might lose is rigged. The result is that Republicans are shattering faith in the integrity of our elections and abandoning their commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — the minimum commitment required for democracy to work. This is an unforgivable civic sin, but it hardly exhausts the lists of concerns.

Many Republicans are now openly hostile to the processes Americans rely on to separate fact from fiction. There’s also the deepening cult of despair that has led some on the right to believe that all means of resistance are appropriate. In fact, catastrophism is quite fashionable on the American right these days. Every election is a “Flight 93” confrontation against an apocalyptic enemy; every effort, no matter how extreme, is justified. That attitude is not merely at odds with reality; it is incompatible with liberal democracy’s foundational requirement that Americans compromise and coexist civilly in order to share the country.

Partly as a result, the MAGA movement is drifting toward authoritarianism. The most important media personality on the right, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, released a disingenuous three-part documentary in November suggesting that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation. He and others in MAGA World, including Mr. Trump, also promote Hungary, which Freedom House said in its 2018 report is “sliding into authoritarian rule,” as a model for the United States. The Republican Party is also drifting ever closer to the open embrace of political violence and martyrdom, not merely excusing but defending actions like Ashli Babbitt’s effort to break into the House’s inner sanctum on Jan. 6 — actions that came within seconds of succeeding.

In a recent survey, nearly 40 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” Around the country, Republican officials who defend the election and count votes honestly have been threatened and have needed to leave their homes or live under guard. Josh Mandel, a Republican running for the open Senate seat in Ohio and leading in the polls, said in the aftermath of President Biden’s vaccine mandate: “Do not comply with the tyranny. When the Gestapo show up at your front door, you know what to do.”

Intimidating election officials, lying about elections and storming the Capitol are not actions promoted among mainstream Democrats. And while the progressive left undoubtedly has influence in the Democratic Party, if it exercised the near-total dominance that Republicans claim, Joe Biden would not have won the Democratic nomination. Conservatives certainly have their disagreements with President Biden, but he has not defunded the police, attempted to pack the Supreme Court or promoted the Green New Deal or Medicare for All.

But assume that your threat assessment is different from ours; that as a conservative Republican you believe the danger to the nation is greater from the far left than from the MAGA right. You should still speak out against what is happening to your movement and your party for two reasons: The sins of the left do not excuse the sins of the right; and what is happening on the right is wrecking authentic conservatism in ways the left never could.

In his new book, “We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy,” a Wheaton College historian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, shows that the founders took a deeply conservative view of human nature. They believed that humankind is flawed and fallen, distracted by passions and swayed by parochial interests. Americans, the founders believed, were no exception. Yet they also believed that what John Adams called a “well-ordered Constitution” could go a long way to compensate for human flaws.

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ezra klein

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” What makes the coronavirus crisis so maddening is that it changes constantly. It changes with each new variant, it changes as vaccines wane and boosters come on, it changes from year to year and month to month, it changes in the place you are in, it changes in the stage of life you are in, and it just changed again, profoundly so with Omicron. And I’m watching these changes, in both my personal and professional life, fracture our already pretty fractured dialogue further. Some see the new guidance and facts and behavior, for that matter, of the virus today as evidence of deception yesterday. Why don’t the vaccines work the way I was told they did? And everyone, everywhere is exhausted. I’m exhausted. We all are. But Omicron doesn’t share our exhaustion. It’s spry, ready to go, field fresh. And so, we need a few things now: a clear understanding of what we’re facing and how it’s changed, a set of not just policies, but actually supplies, that will help us cease being surprised and overwhelmed by new variants. We didn’t get that in time this time, and that is partly on the Biden administration. And we’re going to need a sense of grace with each other, which is, I think, harder and harder at this point to come by. One of the less talked about things the virus feeds on is our envy, our anger. One of my first episodes of the show here at “The Times” featured Zeynep Tufekci. Zeynep is a sociologist and a writer who has been relentlessly living in the Covid future, and has done a better job, in my view, balancing the epidemiology and the sociology of the crisis than anyone else. And, by the way, you do need to balance those things. Since then, to my delight, she joined Times Opinion as a columnist, and so I asked her back for conversation about what Omicron is and isn’t, where our pandemic policy has succeeded and failed, and how to build the structures we need to live lives closer to the ones we want. As always, my email for guest suggestions, feedback, whatever, recommendations, is ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. [MUSIC PLAYING] Zeynep Tufekci, welcome to the show.

zeynep tufekci

Thank you for inviting me again.

ezra klein

So we’re well into the Omicron wave now. At this point, what do we know to be true, or think with good evidence to be true, as to the difference between Delta and Omicron?

Think of it like you’re evaluating offense by the virus, and you’re also evaluating defense as a separate thing. At last tracking, I think there was seven — but I think an eighth one just got added — lab studies with very consistent results, which is amazing because if they’re all independent and coherent, you got a finding that this variant is very able to evade the antibodies from previous infection and vaccine, which we’re going to get to in a second, but is less able to infect our lower lungs, which is associated with severity. So if everything else equal — forget the immunity thing — you had identical twins with no immunity, or triplets, this one would be less likely to get to your lower lungs, which makes you sicker. Now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make you sick, it just means it is less able to make you more sick compared to the other ones. So that’s what I’m sure we know, and we have so much data now from other of, not just lab studies, that this looks good. So you have, for example, even when people get hospitalized, you’re getting fewer in the ICU. When people end up in the ICU, you’re getting fewer ventilated. Does that mean it’s nothing? No, of course not. It just means it’s less worse than the alternatives. Now, the second part of the question is, well, what about our immunity? What about our defenses? Now, there, the picture, I think, is also very consistent in that the immune system is an amazing, complicated, wonderful thing, and it works in stages, what I’ve been comparing to bouncers at the, sort of a club. And there is this wonderful metaphor of a castle. You have this castle wall outside, and it is defended by these antibodies. Now, the antibodies are right there, ready to go, stop any kind of person they don’t like. And they have a list of people that they’ve been shown not to let in. But they’re not very bright. They kind of get fooled very easily. So Superman comes, they’re, like, oh, you’re Superman. We know you. You’re on the no-go list. They kick you out. And then Clark Kent comes with the glasses, and they’re, like, oh, you’re a totally different person, and they let him in. They’re not very sharp at getting through the disguises. So those mutations in the spike kind of disguise it to the bouncers. So it gets in through the bouncers. That’s what it means to have a breakthrough or a reinfection. But that is not everything that is in the immune system. And this is where the metaphor kind of breaks down because like, no castle or club is going to have this. You have these things, memory B cells, T cells, which have an imprint, let’s say, of these suspects. But unlike the antibodies, they can recognize the whole thing better. You just put on glasses, they’re, like, I know you. They’re not fooled as easily, and they come in only after the wall has been breached. So when they come in, and they go, I know you. You fool the antibodies, you cause a breakthrough, and then they get to work. And in most people, this is the process that we depend on to keep them out of the hospital, to keep the disease from getting worse. This is how vaccines work. This is like how immunity works in general. It does really do a great job, especially if you have, you know, a booster. It’s just really good at that. But once again, it’s not 100 percent good in the sense that some people will still, regardless of having this sort of protection, will get sicker. This is true for elderly. Even the regular common cold viruses, like OC43, it can cause, you know, fatal outbreaks in nursing homes. So elderly people are always at risk from these kinds of things because the immune system ages and gets less robust. There’s lots of immunocompromised people. Their just — the immune system isn’t working as well. This is the thing. And also, sometimes, you get unlucky. This is sort of this fact of life. Nothing works perfectly, including the immune system. OK, let me add one more thing, is that it’s incredibly contagious. The numbers we’re seeing are amazing. And it’s a combination that we’re not 100 percent certain why this is the case. It’s very good at replicating at upper airways. But since it’s able to get through the castle wall and just get in, you’re seeing the spread very widely, especially in people who are not vaccinated, we’re seeing a lot more issues. So in combination, you get a complex picture. So it’s different. It’s not like Delta. Delta was very contagious, and it was more severe. Everything else equal, if you had two people, and they were identical otherwise, you get — or, bunches of them — and you gave some of them Omicron and some of them Delta, the Delta people will get much, much sicker. And here’s the thing, it is purely luck that this one is less severe because, contrary to popular belief, viruses don’t evolve to be milder. We gain immunity to them, for sure, as we get exposed, but they just want to transmit, they don’t care if you eventually die as long as they transmit through you. So the fact that we got a very contagious variant that happens to be milder — and I’m not saying it’s great. I’m just saying it could have been much worse — is pure luck, evolution luck. So that’s what I think we know right now after six weeks, eight weeks, which is pretty amazing.

ezra klein

Let me ask you about both the pessimistic way of looking at this and the optimistic version I’ve heard. But I’ll start with the pessimistic one, because you just brought it up, which is we got lucky. And to say we got lucky is also to say we could get unlucky. We could have something as infectious as Omicron and more devastating, in terms of its severity, than Delta. But that brings up something you were saying at the beginning there, which is we now have a lot more past infection across the American and also the global population. We have a lot more vaccination across both populations. So is it really the case that we could just see something worse than anything we’ve seen, given all of that now pooled recognition of coronaviruses across the global immune system? Or is it pretty plausible that, in eight months, we’re going to start hearing about a variant — it’s, like, great immune escape, great vaccination escape, and everybody is dead now.

So let me just sort of step back and say — let’s step out of the optimistic-pessimistic thing. The way I like to think about it is, what do we need to do to get ready? The vaccines have been incredible. I don’t think people realize, who haven’t been in this, that most vaccine production doesn’t — most trials don’t work. If you go back and look at the 2020 statements, a lot of people who were, like, this could take years. Just 50 percent efficacy was seen as this high bar. So they work really well. So we have this incredible tool. There’s the other ones, the adenovirus of vaccines, there’s protein subunit vaccines. So there’s a lot of things we could tweak in them that would give us more immunity. And the immune system, it’s like an optimization problem. You have in other fields, like machine learning, you’re trying to recognize something. And the more different angles you see, the better it gets. We should do two things. One, we should try to stop the virus from being able to explore the whole fitness landscape because, yeah, maybe not that likely. But if there’s that one little corner that works, I don’t want it to discover it, which means you vaccinate globally. That is the obvious step. And the second thing is, you want to up your own defenses. So it doesn’t matter. Like even if it finds something, you want it to matter less, and you want to make it harder for the virus to find it by giving it less chances to evolve. So rather than the optimist versus pessimist, I’m kind of, like, how am I going to prepare myself so that the better scenario is more likely? And also, if the scenario turns out to be worse, we are better prepared. And in both of those things, the answer is the same, which is lower transmission. And then, it comes down to something like, will we need annual boosters? And I’m sorry, I have to say, if that’s what it comes down to, that’s the political problem now. If the only thing is, will we need annual boosters, I know it’s going to be a political thing, and people will say blah, blah, blah, all of those things. But for, in the context of human history, bring the smallest violin you can find if that’s the challenge, right? So I think that’s the only remaining question, is, will we need annual boosters if we do everything else from here till about next fall.

ezra klein

I want to hold on the story you just told about vaccines, and I want to be the smallest violin for a minute because I’m having a lot of small violin conversations in my own life right now, which is the experience emotionally that I think a lot of people are undergoing on the vaccine over the past year is, got the vaccine, I was told it would prevent hospitalization, death, and infection. And then it stopped doing that, and I needed a booster, and then Omicron came, and now it’s infecting everybody, even people with the boosters, and you told me these were going to work, and now, are you just telling me it’s endless vaccines. It may or may not do what I thought they would do forever. Obviously, that is also a political problem. I’ll read you a quote here from Ben Domenech, who’s a conservative writer at The Transom, who wrote in his newsletter, “Right before our eyes, the media and the CDC are quietly admitting Covid truce after two years of lies. They are admitting that vaccination doesn’t stop the spread. They are admitting that two Covid vaccine doses aren’t enough, even if it did.” So there is this political problem, and it comes out of this emotional experience I think people are having, which is they were told the vaccines were a miracle, and then what the vaccine could do for them began to change. So how do you tell people to update their sense of that? Why should they not feel disappointed in the vaccines?

Two things. On the one hand, I suspect I don’t agree a lot with that person. But I actually am very, very sympathetic because I do think that the communication around this has been relatively poor. And it’s not necessarily anybody’s fault as much, right? There’s some things I would tweak and do better in retrospect, but everybody’s statements, my own, C.D.C.‘s, everything — but part of the issue is, we went into this with a very high baseline, where most of us in wealthy countries were heavily vaccinated, hopefully. And the very few who are not are very few. And they’re protected by the rest of us who are heavily vaccinated. The few non-measles vaccinated people are protected by the fact that, yeah, we are all vaccinated, so they don’t really encounter it. So you had these very high health expectations that people had, which is great. But that’s because we have existing vaccines and existing, sort of, health care. And then we came into this, essentially, a shock. I used to teach 1918 flu in my college classes, in my introduction to sociology class, to try to explain what globalization means. And I would say, all right, how many people know about the 1918 flu pandemic. And everybody would just look at me. Like, what are you talking about. And there’d be usually one person who said, yeah, my grandparent lost two siblings or something. There’d be some personal thing that would trickle down maybe. So we got the pandemic. It was kind of a shock. And then, we got vaccines fairly quickly, which, again, wasn’t appreciated because people don’t understand, like that was not the expectation. It was just home run after home run. It’s amazing. Mind blowing. It is miraculous. And then, we got the initial communication, which was true, that the vaccines were also holding down infections, which was absolutely true. It wasn’t false. And then, we had a couple of things happen. One of them is the antibodies, the bouncers, they do wane with other vaccines too because kind of happens. It’s just the way it works. You can’t have every type of bouncer wait at the door, at the castle. So it does actually happen.

ezra klein

They’re dumb and forgetful.

They’re dumb, forgetful, and they only work for one type of guy. So the one that recognizes Superman doesn’t recognize Batman. So you can’t hold the Superman and the Batman and the Hulk and the this recognizer at the door. You’d be — there’s not enough space in your body. And then, we got new variants because we did not vaccinate the world. If we had vaccinated the world more widely — the more you let it evolve, the more it’s going to hit something eventually. So we got new variants. So it didn’t really work. And then, I think, in addition, I think we reacted very late to Delta in the U.S, to kind like, of this overreaction, where we started saying things like the vaccines aren’t working, which what you meant to say was, they’re not working as well as before. And the way they worked before was incredible, A-plus, 100, five stars. And now, it’s incredible, A-plus, wonderful for most things. So even to this day, people will say stuff like, well, vaccines don’t stop transmission. Of course, they do. Just not as well as before. They’re still preventing even infections. It just isn’t stopping everyone all the time, and it’s not working as well as before. So I think that disappointment, the psychological managing of the expectations has been — I think that’s completely justified. That disappointment people are saying is justified. But there’s a reality to us versus pathogens. So the question is, compared to last month, compared to two months ago, compared to last year, where is that curve going. And it has been nonstop better for a while, and that’s, again, because of vaccines and immunity and the switch from Delta to Omicron. That’s the luck part. So when I look at it, I see progress and positive things. And not enough. I would like to see a lot more. But if you’re just going by what we were told what happened and this and that, it looks like a back and forth. It’s not, but it looks like it. It feels like it. And of course people are upset. I sympathize with not the substance of the claim, but I understand the subjective feeling of it, and I don’t blame anybody for feeling like that.

ezra klein

Well, that gets to the potentially sunnier interpretation of what we’re going through right now, which is, we got lucky in the respect that this super transmissible, super infectious variant is also somewhat more mild. And so, eight weeks from now, we will have had a tremendous increase in the immunity conferred by past infection, with a lot less of the death and disability that maybe Delta would have brought. And so, there’s going to be that much more protection across the globe, helping prevent hopefully other variants, or at least their severity. I’ve heard some doctors posit this as a more hopeful scenario, like Bob Wachter at U.C.S.F. Do you buy it?

It’s totally plausible. If you have all the future worlds ahead of you, is this one potential one? Yeah, sure. But I go back to — well, we got lucky, and that is, to me, more worrisome, almost than the virus itself. See what I’m saying? Like, what I want to depend on is not counting on what the viral evolution will do. But I want to count on a nimble, effective response, no matter what it does. So there is the scenario that, by February, we have 40, 50 percent of the US infected with this variant, which is totally plausible, I think, in a couple of months that we’ll have 40, 50 percent test positive if they get test, which is part of the issue. And then, will that confer — like, Omicron does confer good antibodies against Delta, which is great because Delta didn’t confer good antibodies against Omicron, from what I remember. So that’s a great scenario. But again, that doesn’t prepare you for the what if, even if it’s a low percent. The last thing we want is to count on the very plausible, good scenario, and then have some curveball come at us and — like, I mean can you imagine one more curveball that we’re not prepared for? The level of despair is already bad, and hospitals can’t deal with more of this. It’s just — mild or is not really the way you want to think about it for hospitals. So that’s why I’m kind of wary of it. Plausible, yes, but so what?

ezra klein

Let’s start here with a bit of a retrospective. I don’t think any of us believe that Omicron showed that we were where we had hoped we were. So what did the Biden administration do well on pandemic policy in its first year in office, and what did they do poorly?

Let me evaluate them on their own because there’s two ways to look at it. They did better than the previous administration. But that’s a very low bar in many ways. So that’s not really what we want to think about. But if you look at the Biden administration election promises, they didn’t do many of the things they promised. They had these very good campaign promises on what they were going to do, on things like rapid tests and masks and all of those things. We did not really get those done. Yes, they cannot control something like an Omicron coming up or not, but surely they had people telling them these are options, because these were always options. And yes, it’s true that they have been greatly hobbled by, essentially, public health undermining of every kind that comes from very high-level media people in the conservative side, and G.O.P. legislatures, and all of that. So they had all those things that are outside of their control. But, you know, once again, like I am not some professor outside of history giving marks to them. I just want to look at what was under their control that they could have done better. And there’s so much there that I think they left on the table, that it is really disappointing because I think those are the parts that are even more important, given the, essentially, sabotage from some corners, and the kind of problems we had in this country. I would have hoped they would have done things like lead in vaccinating the world. We’ve done some stuff, but nowhere near what we could have and should have done.

ezra klein

What could we and should we have done that we haven’t?

Scale up production of especially the mRNA vaccines, which, again and again, have so much data that they are great. And a lot of the focus on that has revolved around their patents. Honestly, I don’t care if we burn their patents on the biggest bonfire. I have no interest in defending their patents. But even if both Pfizer and Moderna turned it all over, that wouldn’t be enough because vaccine production is difficult. You need the vats, you need the nanolipids, you need the know-how, right? Even if we went to court and got some sort of, you know, waiver out of the W.T.O. and just said, all right, you’ve got to turn us the know-how, that wouldn’t solve the problem. We should have been — in fact, globally, the moment we got the trial read-out in September, October, November of 2020, the first thing should have been, these are amazing. What do we need to produce as fast as possible? And the answer turns out to be, you need to, essentially, marshal infrastructure, even if they’re owned by other companies. And again, I’m a pragmatist. I don’t care if you paid them a trillion dollars at this point because we’re wasting so much. Maybe not a trillion, but billions, because we’re already spending that kind of thing. So there needed to be this global leadership to say, all right, where is the spare capacity? How fast can we build more of it? How many people need to be trained? How do we do quality assurance? What’s the supply bottleneck? Is it the nanolipids. Is it this? Is it that? There needed to be this incredible, World War II level upscaling of production, especially of the mRNA vaccines. But the other ones too because we have AstraZeneca. We have Novavax. Never solves this production problem. It’s great. The trial results are great. It’s not anywhere because we should have stepped up and help solve that. Just do it. And then, we would have needed to have an equitable distribution of these things. For example, there’s all these strategies where you could — for example, if you have a lot more supply of AstraZeneca, that could be your first shot and second shot, and you could have maybe an mRNA booster, which is — you get great results, it’s more equitable, it fits your supply constraints. So these are things that require thinking globally. So there’s a world in which we could have just gotten it all together and probably vaccinated everybody in the world by mid-2021 with at least one or two doses, with boosters underway, starting with the most vulnerable. And then we would not be talking about any of this. So that was step number one. We didn’t do it. The second part is, vaccine is your personal protection. There’s all these technologies you can use to lower transmission. So we know this is airborne. I’m still appalled that HEPA filters have never sold out. How can I still just buy as many as I want? Because we have research showing they do help lower transmission because they help filter the air for these viruses and other pathogens. You have better masks. N95s, K95s, KF94s, they are better at protecting the person, they are better at source control. And it’s 2022, and you can’t even find which ones are counterfeit or non-counterfeit. I went to a doctor a couple of weeks ago for — I went to an office, and everybody else was wearing surgical masks except the medical doctor, who was wearing double masks, and just looked at mine and said, where’d you find a non-counterfeit N95. I don’t know how to do this. I was, like, this is crazy. The ventilation. We have spent so much money on things like plexiglass, which research shows probably make things worse because it creates dead zones for ventilation, and is expensive and is bad for schools because it blocks viewing. There’s all these other technologies that do a much better job than plexiglass. Rapid tests. People have been saying for years why it’s not a magic bullet, but it’s a great tool in your arsenal. Like, why can’t we have many, many, many of them. And, in fact, because of its nature, it’s a great tool in our arsenal if people have tons of it and are testing frequently. That’s how it works. It’s a public health tool. We don’t have them. So there’s all these things that they did not do that I think were within their control.

ezra klein

So one of the striking things that I’ve been looking back through the record myself is that, this was all part of their plan, And they did appropriate through Congress a lot of money for it. So you go back to the American Rescue Plan, the very big first piece of legislation, and I’m running these numbers a little bit from memory, but as I remember it, it was something like 20 billion in there to scale up the vaccination program. 50 billion in there, roughly, to scale up testing, which I thought at the time was really interesting. They needed a bunch more money for testing than for vaccination. But they were going to build this national testing infrastructure and expand genomic testing and the whole thing. There’s a huge amount of money in there for school retrofitting and for other kinds of institutions. My understanding was, a lot of that was for ventilation and air filtration systems, but it is certainly not my sense that we have a capable national testing infrastructure right now, and that every classroom and every child care center — which the Biden administration does say it is their priority to keep open — that every one of those rooms has state-of-the-art, excellent air filtration. So one of my questions has been, where did that money go? Some of it is unspent still, I should say, but they got the money. What happened to the implementation?

That’s an amazing question for somebody to track down. I don’t know either. I don’t understand why we didn’t just manufacture a lot more tests. Vaccination scaling up is hard. That would have really required leadership and even commandeering of infrastructure, which I think we could have done. I don’t mean take over the way we did in World War II, but I mean like, pay some companies to cooperate, to just sort of merge their resources. So that, we didn’t do. We could have produced millions and millions of tests so that we had enough for everybody. We didn’t really do. We still don’t have the kind of early genomic surveillance that we need. It’s gotten better. Every time something like this happens, like a new variant comes, I have a bunch of countries whose data I look at. It’s the United Kingdom. It’s Singapore. It’s Qatar. It’s South Africa. So I get my understanding of these things, first and foremost, from other places. And then, much later, some confirmatory looking stuff comes from the United States. Again, like I’m not putting all of this on just them because, clearly, the fractured nature of health infrastructure in this country is part of the problem. But that still doesn’t excuse, in my view, how little we have made use of what we could have done, given our wealth. So there’s a way in which we as a country are not able to execute things. I don’t even understand politically why — forget all my science talk here — politically why he wouldn’t just come into office and then create these distribution centers or mailing centers, starting with, I don’t know, start with the Social Security recipients. The elderly, or people on disability, and just mail them some high-quality masks, some tests, stay safe Joe card. You see what I’m saying? Like, this is a —

ezra klein

No, totally. Every couple of years, there’s a viral article about the Finland Baby Box, right? They give you this box for the baby. It can also be a crib, and it’s a lot of stuff for the baby. We don’t do any public provision of literal goods here.

It’s not like our politicians don’t try to do this. It’s just that Joe Biden did not do this. I would have wanted him to send these kits out. As a politician, I’m just sort of talking about — you can get into the argument on what’s the best way to distribute or not. But if I were a politician of that place, I’d be, like, this is good politics. Why don’t I just empower people and make them understand that I personally care about them, even if I can’t solve every problem with the country, given the political situation, I will do what I can for you and your family. Seems like basic, good politics. And instead, I was just reading today that one of the arguments against more rapid tests was that it would discourage people from getting vaccinated. And one of the arguments against sending more masks was, what about the people not wearing masks? And I would like to say, whoever is coming up with these scenarios is not making sense. The people who are not wearing masks aren’t wearing masks. Distributing better masks to the people who want them doesn’t make the other side of the problem worse by any means. The fact that some people aren’t cooperating means that empowering and upping the protection of those people who are is even more important. And the idea that having more tests would discourage people from getting vaccinated does not make sense. I coined the Zeynep’s Law recently, and it is the idea that, if you’re thinking some second-order effect, like, if you do this, counterintuitively, something will happen is going to overwhelm the benefit of the first-order effect. That’s almost always false. That was the idea that if you give people masks, they won’t wash their hands. Or if you give people masks, they’ll be more risky. It’s this idea of like, too clever. What if better is worse? Well, you know what? Better is almost never worse. So just to put it plainly, if you distribute masks to people that are better, people will be better protected. If you give tests to people, they will have access to tests. You don’t need to come up with scenarios why you shouldn’t do the right thing. I don’t understand where people are getting these ideas about how humans behave. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

You said a moment ago that what we’re seeing is, this country can’t execute. And I want to ask about that because it raises an interesting set of comparative questions. Oftentimes, I use as a comparator for our policy — on a lot of issues, but particularly the pandemic — the U.K. And the U.K. has been so much better on rapid testing than we’ve been. They really have handed those things out. And they’ve been better on a lot of other things. As you know, they have a better data infrastructure, and my sense is masking is a bit better there. They’re now more vaccinated than we are. A lot of the things we’re talking about — not vaccinations specifically, which has other qualities — but masking and air filtration and rapid testing are meant to reduce spread, or meant to reduce transmission. And the U.K. just has had an Omicron wave. We’ll see where ours ends up, but as I’m speaking to you, their wave has still higher peak than ours has yet because they were ahead of us. And so, it didn’t work there. And so, better is better, and I agree with you we should have done all these things, but would it have worked? Was control of this in our power?

So, U.K. is a very interesting case. It’s a mishmash of terrible policies and amazing ones. They have so dragged their feet on airborne transmission. It took them forever and ever to concede the airborne transmission. And, in fact, they have some of the highest death rates of health care workers because of that, because their hospitals were not doing the right things properly in comparison. They have had policies like, we’re going to support restaurants. We’re going to give you vouchers, but you can’t use them for takeout. You’ve got to go in right before the Delta wave. I don’t know who thought about that one. They have really resisted vaccinating younger people. And it’s fine to say young people usually are going to do much better, but, of course, they’re part of the transmission chain. I mean, some young people want, and they are part of the transmission chain. So they’re not 100 percent great in all the way. So they’re not really a great example of that. But you’re correct. They do do better on many other things. So now, here’s the thing about rapid tests. And I think this is one of the least understood aspects of it. The whole point of rapid tests would have been to absolutely flood the zone with massive, frequent testing, and incorporating it into a test to stay strategy. We’re using them as an individual tool, and they do have value as an individual tool. I use them before I’m going to see anybody who might be more vulnerable, especially because I don’t want to transmit, inadvertently, all of those things. But rapid tests, in their core, are a public health tool, in the sense that, if everybody does a lot of it frequently, it’s how they’re supposed to work. So we’ve taken something that is supposed to be — it’s kind of like putting exhaust filters on cars. It is not meant to be only on your car. It is meant to be simultaneously on everybody’s car to get clean air. So we never use that strategy. We never like, use the frequent testing surveillance, test to stay, kind of thing. So what people are doing is, they’re purchasing it on their own and trying to kind of get through the Omicron wave as best they can. So if you want to look at some place like South Korea, which had early outbreaks, right? It had terrible outbreaks early on. It had these super spreader events. It never really shut down lockdown the way that people think about it, but they had the fairly sensible strategy of trying to keep outbreaks from getting too big and getting out of control. And, of course, they did — they face the same problems we face with Delta wave. They got it. Omicron wave, they got it. And they’re doing so much better if you put them on a plot with us. You can’t even see them. You have to squint. The same with, say, Japan and other countries. I’m on purpose not comparing it to places like China, which have done very draconian measures to keep it essentially zero, which I understand that is no longer on our thing. But there are all sorts of different places. So people keep arguing about U.K. or Sweden. Those are middling countries. They’re not very interesting. You want to look at the ones that have — Vietnam. Vietnam has literally — they didn’t get vaccines enough. They are a poor country. They really, really struggle. The vaccine supply was a huge problem, and they’re doing so much better than us because their public health response has been, I have to say, it’s an authoritarian country. I’m not really fond of everything they do. But they’ve been stellar with what little they have while we are doing really badly with a lot of wealth.

ezra klein

And at this point, what are Vietnam and South Korea and Japan doing that we’re not doing? Because I mean, to not get hit this hard by Omicron, given its infectiousness, it’s really got to be something.

Yeah. We’re just the poorly vaccinated country, and a lot of the ones that are doing better are highly vaccinated. So that’s a big difference. Japan and South Korea recognize airborne transmission. They took precautions based on airborne mitigations, which makes a big difference. So instead of having useless plexiglass, you have measures aimed at lowering airborne transmission. You have public health guidance for avoiding close contact in crowded, indoor places. You have all these things. A lot of malls will display their ventilation rates. You can see CO2 monitors, which are a proxy for how much fresh air is coming and going. So there’s all these tools they used before the vaccines that kept the thing — they have much better, smarter contact tracing. Now, I do want to say one thing about the culture, which gets, I think, misunderstood. A lot of this has been attributed to their more obedient or conformist or this or that. And I would like to remind people that South Korea had major protests that ended up with a corrupt president in jail. And Hong Kong, where I’ve done research right before this, has been rocked by very, very strong protests, and it was essentially crushed. The public, yes, obviously cooperated with things like vaccination, other things better, so that is part of the ability to execute. But their scientists were on top of this. I have no other way of saying it. They were on the ball, their scientists on the ball. Their public-health agencies were on the ball. And they had a more coherent response, and they did much better than us overall by pretty much any measure you can look at. And also, I do want to say, people keep arguing the wrong countries. Everybody is still arguing over Sweden. It’s now a highly vaccinated country. People keep pointing it to Israel. It’s not a highly vaccinated country. People just have this first impression they never check. A lot of Latin America right now is highly vaccinated, right? And you see other countries are doing very well in comparison to us. So there’s something wrong.

ezra klein

Let’s talk about air filtration because of the things we’ve discussed, that is the one where I think there is the least public understanding. And I’ll put myself here. I have the least understanding of what a really good step change in ventilation and filtration would look like. I think we know masks. People should be in N95s or K95s if you’re paying attention. Vaccines, you want boosters. Testing, you want rapid tests. What would it look like to take what we’ve learned on airborne transmission seriously and begin upgrading our infrastructure and ventilation practices? What have we seen in other countries that have worked? What could we do here?

So this is a very interesting thing because most people have learned, as you say, the mask part. And I have no objection to it, but the way you think in public health or infection control is that that’s like, the last step. That is kind of like everything else has failed. Now you need a mask. The better way is not to need the mask as much. You may still wear it, but what you want it to be is the last step that is as little necessary as possible. You want what they call the infrastructure level controls. There’s a hierarchy of these things. Filtering and ventilation are those steps. So ventilation is essentially exchanging inside and outside air. You move the air. It’s the easiest one. You can just open the window a little bit, and it will definitely help. The second one’s the filtration. This is the one that I think is baffling to me because it’s the one in which we have an enormous amount of existing infrastructure and standards. The HEPA filter is a standard that is well established. It works. Well tested. We know it. And you can literally go and click on HEPA filter on a store. MERV, which is the standard for air conditioners, air conditioner filters. When you change the air conditioner, it’s like the HEPA. It’s the same thing. It’s just called the MERV filters, and they have gradations. For hospitals and other places, you have these other infrastructures like ceiling UV, which kills the viruses of pathogens, but it’s done in a way so that your skin’s not exposed to it. So this is another thing lots of places could do. It’s a professional thing. You don’t want to wing this because it’s potentially dangerous, but it’s already in there. So we had everything we need. And like me, now you have journalists PR pitches — and not a day goes by I don’t get some pitch for some gimmick, you know, some new mask that is 17, 13, 0H, blah, blah, blah. And I’m, like, thank you — N95. I don’t need your new potentially miraculous science. There’s a very well-functioning, heavily researched existing standard. Or like, you see these air filters with gimmicks and this and that. And some of the gimmicks are bad. You don’t want that. You don’t want that ozone. You don’t want this. You just want a HEPA filter. I have so many examples, I’m collecting them now, with schools being sold, essentially, snake oil, when all they need to do is try to figure out the ventilation and the HEPA filter. Now, there’s also these boxes that people have rigged up. It’s called a Corsi-Rosenthal box. It’s essentially one of those these box fans, and then you just put these cheap filters on it, the MERV standard filters. You just take it, you put the fan, you put duct tape on it, and they work. And schools could, at a minimum, put those in there.

ezra klein

Let’s talk a bit about the schools. We’re talking in a week where there’s been a lot of conflict over this. There are teachers unions fighting being in the classroom. There’s a lot of fissures, I would say, in the liberal coalition on this particular issue. And so, I’ve been thinking about how to talk about it. And I wanted to try something out on you, which is to try to ask, what questions can you decompose the school question into? What are people struggling with when they struggle with the issue of, should our kids be in school? Should I have to be teaching in a school? To me, it looks like it’s dissent, but I want to see if you think these are right or wrong. It’s, what is the danger Covid poses to children, which might be different for vaccinated and unvaccinated? What’s the danger that school closure poses to children? What’s the danger Covid poses to vaccinated teachers? How do we think about the people that average risk levels ignore, be they immunocompromised teachers, or those directly exposed to teachers, or children who are high risk? And then have we done enough to our conversation about filtration and other things to make classrooms safe? Have we fulfilled our end of the bargain, collectively, there? Does that seem like the right set of questions on the school issue to you, or would you add or take away some?

I would do the step back again because it’s one of those things that, if you have an engendered trust in people that you know what you’re doing, it almost doesn’t matter what the answer is. So what I’m saying, if you haven’t gotten people to feel safe, that you’re in control, and there’s a plan, it’s not right to criticize a teacher for not feeling safe because that’s our failing that we haven’t kind of gotten up the kind of infrastructure they need to be able to be in that classroom, or criticize a parent for wondering on what will happen to their kid. But also, you can’t criticize a parent who’s terribly frustrated their kid is out of school because they’re also right. You see what I’m saying? We’ve set up these impossible questions because of the way we failed. Even if I gave you an answer on what I think is the average kid’s risk, or something like that, what does it matter? What has to happen is that parents have to feel like there is a plan in place to keep my kid as safe as possible, and here are the steps, and here’s the science, and it has to come from authorities they trust. So if you don’t have that, what you get is this incredible finger pointing across those fissures. You talk about — rather than thinking, wait, why are we debating this. The point should be, how do we keep those schools open safely and take care of the children, take care of the teachers. Now, what I hear from teachers are things like, I don’t even have access to tests, the students aren’t tested regularly, and I have an immunocompromised parent I live with or a spouse. Like, how am I supposed to do this. And what am I supposed to say to that person? Saying, like, you’re probably OK? That doesn’t seem very comforting. It’s not even false. They’re probably OK, but that’s not how you can do policy. And I think it’s even more for children because there’s a couple of things going on there. One of them is, of course this has been lower risk to children. This is just the way it is operated. But how do you tell a parent your kid is probably OK, and we’re not doing what we need to do? I mean, you can, of course, drive without the seat belt, and it’s so probably OK too, right? True. Most car rides don’t end with rapid braking or accidents, so you’re probably fine not wearing seat belts either. But that’s not how you can think about these things. So if you want to keep the schools open, instead of trying to argue with teachers and parents, what you need to do is put those tests in place, the rapid tests, the test to stay. And not just sort of randomly. You’ve got to flood the place and do them frequently. You’ve got to equip the teachers with the masks and the tests and all of that. You’ve got to put those HEPA filters or Corsi-Rosenthal boxes that people make in the classrooms. You put some CO2 monitors just to see how — if you’re using ventilation. And then, I think most people would feel much better. And then, if somebody said something that wasn’t warranted by what we know, then you could say, well, you know what. I think you’re underplaying or overexaggerating. If it came to, well, here’s what we did everything. And if somebody had an unreasonable confidence or fear either way, then you could try to talk to them and say, look, here’s what the statistics say. So I think a lot of the fissures are — it’s like a symptom of our broader failure, and so it can’t be resolved by answering those questions independently.

ezra klein

I really agree with that, and I appreciate what you’re saying on trust. This is something where I do think the technocratic, evidence-based mindset that I certainly include myself in sometimes really fails as a communication mindset. Because I see a lot of people who are upset that schools are closing. And I don’t want schools to close. If you ask me where I think the weight of the evidence lies, I think they should stay open. But you’re not going to hit somebody over the head with a chart and make them not feel afraid. And at a moment when a lot of both parents and teachers are afraid, to not then give them the tools to feel less afraid, you know, as you’re saying, rapid testing infiltration to say we’re doing everything we can, and I’m sorry, beyond that, there’s just some risk here that we can’t get rid of. But instead, to say, you’re being ridiculous or you’re hurting children. It’s not even that it’s not true that closures would hurt children. It’s just that — particularly in liberal, Covid-conscious America, we spent two years trying to get people to take this really, really seriously and really be afraid of catching it and spreading it. And then to all of a sudden, at a time of high wave, say, well, all the best to you. Hope it goes well in your classroom.

Let me just sort of stop one thing. I think you can even hit people over the head with a chart. But you have to have a competent hand holding that chart. You see what I’m saying?

ezra klein

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Yeah.

You have to assure them that you created that chart —

ezra klein

Yeah, the chart in one hand, a rapid test in the other.

Exactly. There’s a very, very good pandemic preparation document that C.D.C. had prepared before this. And a pandemic is a communication emergency. You have to be right. You have to be first. You have to be credible. So you have to be out there with the information, you have to be credible with the information, and you have to be right about it. And it could be we don’t know. This idea is not that you assure false comfort to people. You say, all right, we got Omicron. It looks like antibody evading could probably cause breakthroughs. We don’t know about severity. But here’s what we need to do for the three different possibilities. That should have been your November 26, November 27 press conference, saying, this is coming. Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know, and here’s the three things we’re putting in place. And if it turns out to be more severe, this is the plan, if it turns out to be this. You put that in place. and once you have that trust — and then you can tell people, OK, now, this is the trade-off we’ve decided. We think that we can operate these schools safely, and here’s the plan we have for the kids who are immunocompromised, or have immunocompromised family members, or the kids — like, here’s the average plan, and this is why it’s going to work best for your kid. And here’s the subsection of kids and families that may require higher levels of protection because of their own personal health situation, and here’s how we’re going to do that. I think that’s how you get there.

ezra klein

It’s been really striking to me. So I have a three-year-old in preschool, and, you know, watching the people who work in the school have to act as risk officers and risk communication specialists, and create a logistics chain for testing and masking, and which ones, and you really see the complete breakdown of — communication is one word for it. But clear guidance, there isn’t just a simple checklist people can download for their institution. It’s, like, OK, do you have this CO2 level. Do you have these masks. Do you have these rapid tests. If you don’t, here’s how to get them. Here’s our supply chain. Here’s how to hook into it. And once you’ve done that, you’re done. And if you have this set of testing outcomes, here’s what you do. And if you don’t, then you stay open. And it doesn’t seem to me it should need to be more than two pages, particularly if you can just click on the link for the supply chain. But instead, we are asking everybody to act individually as a small public health department. And it doesn’t work. People aren’t set up for that.

I mean, not only people aren’t set up for that. As we have seen, things change. So when you get a new variant like Omicron, it is not the same as Delta. If Delta was causing this many breakthroughs, like Omicron, the lengths to which we should go to suppress it are different than the lengths to which you would go for suppressing Omicron transmission. So people can’t be on their feet, reading all the papers, trying to follow the right people, trying to figure out C.D.C.‘s confusing statements on rapid tests this, rapid tests that. Yes, but you can find them anyway. Maybe they don’t work for this, but maybe they work — this is just untenable, and I think that’s the despair. So when I look at the school debate, and I see all the harms of kids not going to school. It’s terrible. But I look at it from the teacher’s point of view, and it’s kind of hard not to sympathize with them because this is just such a mess. Like, how are they supposed to deal with this? I look at it from the parents, who both want their kid to go to school and are very frustrated, and the parents who are afraid for their kid. I kind of see where everybody’s ended up where they are. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

We’ve talked here about the Biden administration as a singular entity, which is on one level true, and on another level false. The government is a bunch of different agencies and institutions, and how they work together matters. And the C.D.C. and F.D.A. here are really quite key. And Biden can appoint their heads, but they also have a lot of independent dynamics of their own and processes, and Biden can’t just dictate what the F.D.A. does. How do you grade the performance, at this point, of the C.D.C. and F.D.A. across the pandemic?

So the F.D.A. doesn’t even have a permanent head at the moment, which I find it baffling. I know some of the political details of the process, this and that, and I honestly don’t care. Whatever the problem was, we should have had a permanent head appointed very early on because there’s a lot of things that need to happen with that kind of leadership that a politically accountable appointee can do, that the interim director — that’s not the same thing. So step one. The same problem, I think, with the C.D.C., that — they do have, of course, Dr. Walensky, who, by all accounts, I know lots of people who know her and think very highly of her, but I don’t think the C.D.C. as an institution, such as — sort of to broaden — has stepped up the way they could have in this year. They responded to Delta late. They did not update their guidance on masks. They could have done it on day one. It was such a low thing. They could have just said, any mask is better than no mask, but if you want to up your protection, here’s N95s, K95s, KF94s, here’s a link to get non-counterfeit ones, and here’s a sign. That it’s. Done, right? They could have stepped up and responded to the rapid testing because F.D.A. has a different mandate. It’s supposed to evaluate clinical, medical stuff, and rapid tests are a public health tool. They’re in the C.D.C. mandate. And they should have said, OK, F.D.A. has approved these as medical devices like this, but this is how we use them for public health, which is a different thing. And they did not do that. So overall, I feel like I think neither of them is doing that well, to be honest. Again, I really do know that there’s an enormous number of people on staff there who are amazing, and I’m sure the leadership in both is great people. And that’s not that. But as a whole, if you look at both agencies and their performance, it’s nowhere where it could have been despite the challenges that are outside their control. It’s still not what they could have done with this landscape in my view.

ezra klein

Do you believe these agencies are not structurally built for emergencies? That they work well in public health peace time, but they’re not for this constant, relentless, fast-moving situation? Or, are these problems always there, but they don’t simultaneously affect enough people, devices, treatments, et cetera to rise up to the level of political concern?

I’m going to say yes. Clearly, there is ongoing problems. There’s no question about it. When the pandemic hit, the C.D.C. couldn’t get functioning tests. We’re still learning about it. In February of 2020, we did not have tests that functioned, and F.D.A. and C.D.C. couldn’t coordinate to get functioning tests. Even though public health labs and universities had them. They were able to build functioning tests, but they were prevented from using them. And the test that the C.D.C. developed didn’t work. And there was either contamination or reagent failure or whatever. There was a bunch of — still being investigated. So we flew blind in the most crucial period because these agencies couldn’t work. So clearly, there was something going up to it too. You have an enormous amount of revolving doors, especially F.D.A. People switch back and forth between the pharmaceutical industry and the agency a lot. Now, is there some role for people with industry experience? Of course. But a public health mindset is not necessarily that. They’re asking the wrong question, you know. They’re asking a table why it’s not a chair. And you’re, like, we’re going to sit on it. That’s what happened with rapid tests. So you’ve got to do two things, because I do really want to — because there’s so many good people working in these places. They’re really working hard, and they’re doing their best. So you want to provide whatever support we can to help them succeed without turning away from what’s actually not working that needs fixing. And in fact, I usually say this. Criticism is an act of support and love because you’re saying, you can do better. Blind support is not a vote of confidence. It’s low expectation. They should have been able to do better. We can appreciate how hard many are working with the best of intentions without losing sight of the fact that, no, it is not — we’re not able to execute. It’s not working. This is not how you do the best pandemic management. And no, it is not completely and solely the fault of people who are irresponsibly and inexcusably sabotaging the effort. Those people are a problem, but they are not the only problem.

ezra klein

One of the things that you’ve written about with the C.D.C., and that I’ve been thinking about more, is the way their guidance is often seemed to be reflecting considerations that they are not clearly stating. A bunch of problems with this early on in masking, where they gave bad guidance on masking but oftentimes, in part, because they’re worried people would buy all the masks. But they could have just said that a little bit clearer. More recently, they came out with guidance on isolation that struck many people as weird. You isolate for five days, come back without any testing. Then they had new guidance for us, like, well, if you have rapid test, test, and if you’re positive, stay in. But if you don’t have rapid tests, don’t worry about it. You made the point maybe that they’re dealing with the reality that there simply aren’t enough rapid tests. I read that, as I’m saying, on some level. Maybe we’re not going to worry about case spread that much here. We’re just going to accept that it would be better for this thing to spread through the country then for it to completely grind the economy and society to a halt with people isolating forever. But whatever it is, it strikes me that this kind of deep reading a lot of people are doing to try to figure out why guidance looks weird does bespeak a breakdown in communication authority. Once people don’t think you’re saying what you’re saying, and that — then it’s pretty bad.

I will say it’s more than communication authority. It is a way of trying to manage the public expectation and behavior in a way that is both illegitimate and worse. It won’t work. It will backfire. I think there has been a lot of, you know, here’s our considerations, and here’s how we’re going to guide these things. And people can feel something’s off. Because if your isolation guidance is, yeah, rapid test, we’re going to use them in two weeks for test to stay in school. But right now, we’re not sure if they can measure infectiousness. By the way, the C.D.C. head is the one that wrote the best paper on why they do. Yeah, that’s not going to work. You’re just going to end up confusing people and losing the trust. So if the problem is, we don’t have enough of them, and you want to preserve what you have, then you have to say, you know what, we screwed up, we don’t have enough. That’s not great. I understand why nobody wants to say we screwed up. But if you screw it up, it’s visible. You not saying it doesn’t make it go away. So might as well say it. And then, you can say, and we’re going to deal with it by triage. We’re going to put all the capacity we have to schools and hospitals and critical infrastructure because that’s important. And in the meantime, we’re asking employers to not ask their symptomatic employees to confirm with a P.C.R. test if they got a rapid test, or just let them be — if they’re symptomatic, just assume Omicron. Let it be to preserve capacity. There’s ways of dealing with it that are both trust building and better for what you’re trying to do that I wish they would do more of. Or, if that’s not the case, if there’s some other reason, and if we’re all misreading this, they need to really explain this. There’s some reason why there’s been this zigzag on what rapid tests are supposed to do and good far and not good for that is some unpublished data or some other consideration. Whatever it is, it needs to be right there on that press conference, explained to people in a convincing manner. Because all you do is like, you know how we went to —we can’t get mad at anybody in the school debate because how are they supposed to trust anything when it feels like you’re being guided rather than informed and empowered? And I don’t think it’s a legitimate way to treat the public. Also, it doesn’t work because it just backfires on you. And I say this with very deep respect to their service as clinicians and medical doctors and all of those things.

ezra klein

Let me end, before we do books, on this question, which is to simply set the expectations for preparation. So what should be true in 10 months in our pandemic policy that is not true today? What if, it were true, would you say we did it, we used the time well, we prepared?

So we should have updated vaccines and vaccinate the world because it’s an incredible tool. I read a lot of history, just out of interest and for work sometimes. But I just like reading history, and I’m so struck by how many people lose kids and young adults to all these things we don’t ever think about anymore. We have vaccines, antibiotics, sanitation, all these things. So the vaccines is clearly the first thing. So we didn’t really talk about it, but there’s a couple of good antivirals, and one or two not so good, in fact, potentially dangerous ones. So we should pick the good ones, the ones at work. Pfizer’s one is good, and it does work, and it’s very highly effective. And we should look into mass producing those and directing them equitably globally, because it just can’t be the case, again, if we just hoard it here. Because that’s the second level. Because there are immunocompromised people and elderly people whose immune system is not going to work as well. They are going to need the therapeutics. Ideally, I want — I don’t know if it’s technically possible. But I want tests for other viral diseases too I want a home flu test. I want a home R.S.V. test. If we can do it for this, can we — it would be great because usually, we just let these things go, but they do damage. If you look at the respiratory disease burden outside of influenza before, this is pretty high. There’s all these other respiratory viruses that do damage. People argue over masks. And, of course, if you don’t need to wear a mask, that’s much better. And the way to get to that is to reduce circulation, and to do air filtering and ventilation. And this is sort of a big project because it’s kind of like sanitation. There was a time in which you couldn’t trust the water. When I grew up, we couldn’t drink tap water. I grew up in Turkey, and tap water wasn’t considered safe. So we moved to a world in which most places, it’s supposed to be safe. So you want the air to be filtered the same way we filter water. And there’s a big infrastructure project there, because there’s some trade-offs because ventilation is great, but it’s energy heavy if you’re also using ACs or something like that. So you need to find these balances of how do you do this in an energy efficient way, and what do you do, and how do you measure it. So there’s a huge, potentially amazing transformation for respiratory illnesses by recognizing that they are also almost certainly, and quite likely, airborne transmission. So you can kind of change your infrastructure around it to mitigate them in workplaces and schools, in place where people are together, or restaurants, and then you will get — so the benefits of doing all of that would be not just we would be better able to face whatever variant curveball came. If the world was vaccinated, if people for whom vaccines didn’t work as well had immediate access to functioning antivirals that were really effective, maybe we could develop antivirals for other things too. And then we had airborne mitigation so that the burden from influenza and other diseases also fell. It’s amazing. You’re not just getting rid of the pandemic part. You’re also preparing yourself for a much better future. And here’s the part that always gets me. We are in such a wealthy moment in history, and our science and our technology is so advanced, relatively speaking, obviously, is that there is nothing but getting over our dysfunction that’s holding us back. If you’re in 19th century, and you’re just puzzling over yellow fever, and you don’t even have germ theory, and you don’t understand mosquito vectors— it’s hard. It’s really hard. I read those histories, and I’m kind of going, it’s the mosquito. I want to give them clues, but they’re looking around, and they — of course, it’s hard. They can’t do it. But right now, we have everything in place. You literally have the cake making thing. You just need to sort of stir it the right way. And it’s our dysfunction that’s holding us back. It’s the global, political dysfunction, our US-specific dysfunction. It’s our — it’s the whole thing. And, of course, every kind of obstacle is terrible, but that is just stomach pain kind of level painful because we could do it. We have the tools. And just need to kind of get our act together, which this is not — this is potentially hopeful.

ezra klein

It is a potentially hopeful place to end. I completely agree. So finally, always our last question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

One of the things that I really like reading about, for people who want to see how hope and despair are intertwined, is books by Irvin Yalom, who is a psychotherapist, but has a lot, a lot of books about how facing the things that are your huge existential fears as humans, as species, the human condition. He has a sort of philosophy — and it’s not just him, obviously. This is sort of deep in both Western and Eastern thoughts — is that facing those fears without sweeping them under the rug is the way to both confront them and also make the best of your life. He has these traditional text books like “The Group Psychotherapy Process,” which I read because I like textbooks. But he has also novels that are really good around this theme. People have been asking me a lot about my interest in these complex systems, the way these systems work. And I have to mention there is a book that caught me on this path, which a lot of people who have any sort of past as a geek or a current as a geek might have heard about, which is James Gleick’s “Chaos: Making a New Science.” It is 1987, so a bunch of things have happened since in the field. So you can follow up with new ones of it too. But it’s kind of like — it’s one of these early books that just opened a lot of our minds into, wait, the world doesn’t work according to the simpler formula that you hope it works according to. All these things interact in all sorts of ways. And it’s a way to think about math and other things. I really like that book. Oh, yeah. You know what, I’m going to recommend something that I read very recently. And I think it’s important to read books like that. And this is going to feed into the despair part. It is called “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy.” It’s a really harrowing story of how humans can lose the plot. We as humans, U.S.S.R. and the United States, and a lot of things — we set ourselves on this incredibly dangerous path, both nuclear weapons and bioweapons and all those things. And you came close so many times to existential level threats that would do untold damage. And just kind of reading how people thought about it at the time. I’m just looking and thinking, how did men and women, adults sit down around the table and say, all right, now let’s develop this and do this and not — so it’s a strong reminder of how people can seem perfectly rational and logical and accomplished and high levels. And I’m not just holding one side or the other, as a world. But then come up with plans to develop things that — when you sort of look at it, you’re, like, they did what. So that will be the scary one.

ezra klein

That one is a bit scary. But those are great. Zeynep Tufekci, thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting me on the conversation. [MUSIC PLAYING]

ezra klein

Early in Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, Roosevelt Montas describes an intellectual origin story that I found strikingly familiar. Montas, a fatherless teenager who had recently immigrated to the Bronx from the sticks of the Dominican Republic and was still learning to read in English, found himself on a winter evening faced with a pile of discarded books, some ornately decorated with gold-edged pages, waiting for the garbage collectors. “I wanted to take them all, but there were too many, and we had no bookshelves,” he writes. “In the end, I grabbed only two hardbacks. One of them was a volume of Plato’s dialogues.” That fortuitous selection—and his dogged efforts to learn what was between those covers—would fundamentally change him.Half a century earlier, in a provincial and segregated Texas community, my own fatherless Black father had a chance encounter with the very same text. And as it freed Montas, it liberated him. It allowed him to build his sense of himself as a reader and thinker, and to forge a connection to a tradition that could not be severed by the accident of his skin or the deprivations his immediate ancestors had suffered.I suppose, then, that I was primed to admire Montas’s earnest defense of the humanities, which is also a personal testament to the power of a liberal education. And I was primed, as well, by my own experiences and observations to agree with his argument that minority and underprivileged students would have at least as much to gain as their more advantaged peers from entry into the larger intellectual culture that has molded the Western societies we must navigate.“Every year, I witness Socrates bringing students—my high school students as well as my Columbia students—to serious contemplation of the ultimately existential issues his philosophy demands we grapple with,” Montas writes. “My students from low-income households do not take this sort of thinking to be the exclusive privilege of a social elite. In fact they find in it a vision of dignity and excellence that is not constrained by material limitations.”[Benjamin Schmidt: The humanities are in crisis]This position may have once seemed obvious (think of how W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Frederick Douglass stressed the importance of universal, humanistic education), but today it is radical and contested. In the all-consuming culture wars, Western customs and habits of thought, which are ever more conflated with oppressive “whiteness,” have been pitted against oversimplified understandings of diversity and group identity. The latter are ascendant. But as Montas’s book and life make clear, ideas and identity needn’t ever be a question of either/or.Identities, resonant as they may feel, are almost always too narrowly drawn in the contemporary pedagogical discourse, particularly when even those with the best of intentions take the interests of Black and brown and otherwise marginalized students into account.“Representation of the cultural backgrounds of a diverse student body as an organizing principle in general education necessarily leads to incoherence, essentialism, and tokenism,” Montas argues. “The criterion of democratic representation—appropriate for politics—is not appropriate for selecting common curricula; to adopt it as such is to abandon the very idea of education and to turn students into interest groups, each lobbying for their own special curricular accommodations.” Yet in this era of seemingly limitless racial reckoning, elite academic institutions have made a devil’s bargain with group identity, in many cases at the expense of the elevating notion that some ideas have withstood the test of time and shaped the contemporary world for a reason. Many academics have stopped arguing that certain ideas are worth understanding no matter the standpoint from which any one individual might approach them.Last year, in a much-discussed article in The New York Times Magazine, Rachel Poser chronicled Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s fervent mission to “save classics from whiteness.” Padilla’s origin story is quite like Montas’s: A child prodigy also from the Dominican Republic, he drew attention and admiration in the New York City homeless shelter he inhabited with his family. There, he fell in love with a textbook titled How People Lived in Ancient Greece and Rome. He excelled in every elite space in which his gifts and drive landed him. Each institution he encountered—from Manhattan’s Collegiate School, to Princeton, to Oxford, to Stanford, to Columbia and then back to Princeton—enacted the principles of a liberal education and catapulted him upward.He distinguished himself early in his career as an authority on the Roman senatorial classes and published original research into the interior and religious lives of the empire’s enslaved population. Nonetheless, even as his star rose, he “began to feel that he had lost something in devoting himself to the classical tradition,” Poser wrote in the Times article. “Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and ‘Western civilization’ had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped.”Here’s Poser describing the revolution in Padilla’s thinking and his intense ambition to excavate his authentic self from the scaffolding of his education, which led him far away from Montas’s universalist worldview.
Padilla has said that he “cringes” when he remembers his youthful desire to be transformed by the classical tradition. Today he describes his discovery of the textbook at the Chinatown shelter as a sinister encounter, as though the book had been lying in wait for him. He … now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty. He permits himself no such relief. “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”
Padilla slaps the sins of slavery, racism, colonialism, fascism, and the production of whiteness on his discipline and told Poser that he “suspects that he will one day need to leave classics and the academy in order to push harder for the changes he wants to see in the world. He has even considered entering politics.” This is extreme, but Padilla is not alone in his refusal to separate ideas from the flawed and compromised men and women through whom they have been transmitted. Even rudimentary educational pursuits such as basic literacy and numeracy have in recent years—and especially since the George Floyd protests of the summer of 2020—been combed over in search of latent and structural anti-Black and -brown biases. A vocal and growing number of people in the knowledge economy now purport to believe, some genuinely and some no doubt expediently, that there is no such thing as an idea devoid of the historical power imbalances inscribed in contemporary identity designations.[John McWhorter: The problem with dropping standards in the name of racial equity]In 2019, Richard Carranza, then the chancellor of New York City schools, held citywide “white supremacy culture” training sessions for administrators, highlighting what was termed “worship of the written word” or emphasis on “documentation and writing skills, rather than the ‘ability to relate to others,’” as evidence of institutional racism. In July 2020, the Smithsonian Institution published (and rescinded) a graphic on its Talking About Race site that identified rational thought, politeness, objectivity, and the Protestant work ethic as harmful “white” characteristics that perpetuate systemic racism. This past February, a consortium of two-dozen education organizations funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation published “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,” which argued that a “focus on getting the ‘right’ answer” and requiring students to “show their work” were facets of white-supremacy culture.Such new perspectives have formed an expanding latticework of self-reinforcing language and assumptions about the inherent capabilities and predilections of entire color categories of students. It is a way of thinking that meanders throughout the nation’s education system, from kindergarten to the Ivy League. The very notion of an education like Padilla’s (or for that matter Montas’s or my father’s) that is rooted in the texts, themes, tastes, and premises—the culture—of a Western lineage has been deemed singularly corrupt. A pedagogy that does not emphasize the politics of identity through an activist lens now strikes many as untenable if not counter-progressive, and certainly not worth fighting to preserve.Montas intervenes in this muddled ideological context, insisting that “the tradition matters, not because it is Western, but because of its contribution to human questions of the highest order.” His unapologetic defense of the Great Books program at Columbia (where he is a senior lecturer in American Studies and English), as well as the humanities more broadly, is structured as an intellectual love letter to four pivotal figures: Socrates, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi. The four exemplify and, in the case of Gandhi, challenge the cultural and intellectual heritage that has produced the comparatively open and democratic swath of the world we are lucky enough to inhabit. Much like Padilla’s, Montas’s story is that of deep talent, recognized and then carefully cultivated. Yet he wears his learning lightly, demonstrating the ways in which the currents of thought transmitted by these four men, which they have also redirected, made possible the imperfect but undeniable progress that conditioned his own ascent.More than anything else, though, his book is a warning. Montas pleads throughout—perhaps romantically or, it could also be said, pragmatically—the case of a “great books” education for the masses. “One of the dangers facing American higher education—and American civic culture in general,” Montas cautions toward the end of Rescuing Socrates, “is a return to a time when liberal education was the exclusive province of a social elite.” The most prestigious liberal-arts colleges and programs that are written off today as vectors of “white supremacy culture,” he argues, are likely to survive, “if not unscathed, at least not fundamentally transformed.” This is because “many well-to-do families from the US and abroad will continue to seek—and pay for—a traditional liberal arts experience for their children,” he continues. “Moreover, alumni are not likely to turn their backs on their alma maters.” But the non-elite and the nonwhite may find themselves driven back to the “technical, vocational, and professional” tracks, or to the whims of merely faddish thinking, to our collective impoverishment.This is, of course, one bitter paradox of what flies under the banner of the new anti-racism: Few among the elite—of any color—would consent in practice to the abandonment of cultural heritage deemed appropriate for less advantaged, mostly Black and brown students. Whether or not the nation’s classics departments continue to shrink, the winners of the meritocracy will not be sacrificing fluency in the shorthand of the educated classes—which is to say, cultural capital—anytime soon.Padilla’s criticisms raise the perennial question of utility—what is an education for?—and inflect it with the social-justice mission that seems to have permeated virtually all of the nation’s academic, cultural, and artistic institutions. Yet it is Montas who answers most persuasively: The purpose of an education is liberation. And the ideas and traditions that support that liberation are not and can never be crudely racialized as one group’s property, thinned out and flattened beneath the rolling pin of identity. We are not only one thing (Dominican! Brown! ESL!) and ideas are not black or white. They are good or bad, worthy or not worthy, useful or not useful—judgments that can shift and evolve with time, and not always for the worse.“Many people today, even academics, take the approach to liberal education based on the study of classics to be elitist and exclusivist, with little understanding of the democratizing impulse behind it,” Montas writes. But “we do minority students an unconscionable disservice” when we steer them away from it. “We condescend to them when we assume that only works in which they find their ethnic or cultural identities affirmed can really illuminate their human experience.”Ideas and identity are not in opposition, and they are not equals. Striving with and against the most durable human thinking to have created and altered the intellectual, cultural, and political landscape beyond our own backyard equips all of us to discover who we are most fully. This is the message brought vividly to life in Montas’s book. It is a simple one. But in times of extreme social tension and tribal polarization such as our own, the act of stating obvious, lasting truths can amount to the most generous form of bravery.

Back to Poitier, then. He’s celebrated as a pioneer, and justly so, as the first Black winner of an Oscar for best actor and one of the first Black leading men in mainstream Hollywood films, among them “No Way Out,” “The Defiant Ones,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lilies of the Field” (for which he won that Oscar) and “In the Heat of the Night.”

But in my callow youth, I must admit I never saw him as a trailblazer in the way that I was supposed to. The reason: I loved what he did, but I sensed him as a Caribbean man.

Poitier was Bahamian (he was born in Miami but spent his early years in the Bahamas) and always sounded it, especially in more passionate moments. Indeed, in 1967’s “To Sir, With Love,” he played a teacher of Guyanese descent working in a struggling multiracial working-class London school. As a kid, it never occurred to me that I was to process him in his roles as someone who had grown up on, say, Chicago’s South Side. In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” I saw him as, well, a young Caribbean gentleman coming to dinner.

And while the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy characters in that film wouldn’t have been at all thrilled about a Caribbean gent marrying their daughter, it seemed to me that they would have been even less enthusiastic if the suitor was a Black man from somewhere like Chicago’s South Side — a point that would have been underscored if the part had been played by a different Black actor of the period, such as the lacrosse and football great Jim Brown, who was in dozens of movies after his N.F.L. career, or Billy Dee Williams, of “Lady Sings the Blues” and “The Empire Strikes Back” fame (though both were a few years younger than Poitier). A “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with Williams, no matter how gracefully he would have played the lead role, almost certainly would never have been made in 1967.

Poitier was certainly a pioneer — but in the sense that he was transitional. In a mid-20th-century America that feared and scorned Blackness and especially Black maleness that came with a hint of sexuality, the first real Black matinee idol was almost inevitably going to be someone who didn’t talk (or move) in modes more typically associated with American Black men. A more local, less global Black voice would have made (or have been assumed to have made) white audiences back then too uncomfortable for a big studio to have greenlighted Poitier’s classic films. He was, quietly but decisively, different. He was from somewhere else, even if you only thought of that subconsciously — as we do to a major degree about language in all of its facets.

(Photograph by Peter Zay/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)Hey,I’m going to try to not lose my temper, but I make no promises.This is from Joe Biden’s inaugural address, which is eight days shy of exactly a year ago.We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward. And we must meet this moment as the United States of America. If we do that, I guarantee you we will not fail. We have never ever, ever, failed in America when we’ve acted together.This is from his speech in Georgia yesterday:So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered? At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?  Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor?  Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?So, what changed? To listen to Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, most Democrats, and a whole bunch of journalists, what changed was an existential threat to democracy. “Voter suppression” is a plague sweeping across the land that literally threatens to end democracy in America. Biden & Co. base this grave appraisal on three distinct claims.The first is that there has been an epidemic of laws “making it harder to vote.”The second is that Georgia is at the bleeding edge of this effort with voter suppression laws so heinous that they, by themselves, represent “Jim Crow 2.0.”Last is that Trump loyalists are in the process of rigging the 2024 presidential election by preparing an end run on legitimate vote counts.So, here’s my grading of these claims: The first is very, very weak. The second is shameful, demagogic, ahistorical garbage. The third is incomplete.Restricting the right to vote.So let’s start with the first claim. It comes almost entirely from an accounting by the Brennan Center for Justice.As Joe Biden said yesterday, “Last year alone, 19 states not [only] proposed but enacted 34 laws attacking voting rights.”Here’s how the Brennan Center put it October:In all but seven states, regular legislative sessions are now over. Between January 1 and September 27, at least 19 states enacted 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote. At the same time, lawmakers in many states responded to Americans’ eagerness to vote by making it easier for eligible voters to cast their ballots. Between January 1 and September 27, at least 25 states enacted 62 laws with provisions that expand voting access.I don’t know which state got in a restrictive law to bump up the tally to 34, but it doesn’t matter. As you can see, nearly twice as many laws enacted expanded voting as restricted it.Now, the Brennan folks make a perfectly fine point that not all voting rights laws are equal. If, for example, a state banned absentee voting—which hasn’t happened—that wouldn’t cancel out a state expanding absentee voting by another week.But here’s the first problem. Many of these laws essentially repealed the changes made to account for the pandemic. A reasonable person can argue that they should all be made permanent, I suppose. But a reasonable person cannot plausibly argue that returning our voting practices to those in effect in 2018—when Democrats had sweeping victories—is proof that democracy is on the cusp of being eliminated and that anyone who supports the status quo ante of 2018 is taking the side of Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor. (Heck, voter laws were much more restrictive across the country a decade earlier, according to the criteria pushed by Democrats. Does that mean Barack Obama was elected our first black president in a Jim Crow country? Big, if true.)Now, some laws went further than that, and I am entirely open to arguments that some of those changes were ill-advised. Heck, I agree that some were ill-advised and unnecessary. But none of these changes amount to “Jim Crow 2.0.” One reason I know this is because nobody—including Joe Biden—has been able to point to a single example of a law that comes within miles of Jim Crow restrictions. If they had such an example, you can be sure they wouldn’t be keeping it secret.Consider voter ID laws, which are constantly cited as part of this racist, undemocratic tsunami. Tightening voter ID laws may or may not be a good idea. Personally, I think they’re fine in principle. But let’s concede that they’re bad. You know who else thinks they’re fine? A very large majority of Americans, including a majority of black Americans. A Monmouth poll this year found that 80 percent of Americans support voter ID requirements and only 18 percent oppose them. That’s not a new finding. In 2016, Gallup also found that 4 in 5 Americans support voter ID requirements, including 77 percent of nonwhite voters.Again, are the majority of Americans siding with Jefferson Davis? Really?And just to be clear, not all of the laws expanding the “right to vote” are good. Democrats have been pushing to make ballot harvesting (allowing individuals to collect ballots from others and drop them off at polling locations or early-voting drop boxes) easier. I think that’s wrong. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. But if you think that makes me a racist, my response is, “Go to Hell.”Georgia, out of their minds.More on that in a moment. Let’s move on to Georgia, which, we are told over and over again, is slipping back into Jim Crow because of an election law, SB 202, passed in March. The next day Biden called the law “un-American” and “Jim Crow 2.0.” Again, I don’t think the law was necessary and there are parts of it that I think are bad, but there are also parts of it that are good. Or, more to the point, good from the perspective of making it easier to vote. It expanded early voting to 17 days, including two Saturdays. It did tighten the window to get an absentee ballot in the first place to … 67 days prior to the election. The horror.A lot has been made of the law’s “ban” on bringing food and water to people waiting in line to vote. But it does allow for polling places to provide water and says this restriction applies only: “(1) Within 150 feet of the outer edge of any building within which a polling place is established; (2) Within any polling place; or (3) Within 25 feet of any voter standing in line to vote at any polling place.” More horror.By the way, the average wait time to vote in 2020 was less than three minutes.Again, reasonable people can disagree about all of these provisions. But Biden is trying to bully reasonable people, especially reasonable Democratic senators, with accusations of racism. That’s grotesque.  Jim, what now?Let’s pause to talk about Jim Crow for a moment. When assessing the very real evils of Jim Crow, restrictions on voting are pretty low on the list. I’m not saying they weren’t evil, but the root of their evil was that they were a means to an end to secure far greater evils—like the ability to beat or lynch blacks, often with impunity. Jim Crow impoverished generations of blacks by preventing them from participating in the economy, traveling, or utilizing their constitutional and God-given rights. Jim Crow was a form of apartheid.If Georgia has been moving toward Jim Crow 2.0, one has to wonder: Why are so many blacks moving there, never mind staying there? The black population of Georgia nearly doubled from 1990 to 2019. Whatever you think about their right to vote, a lot of them voted with their feet to live in Georgia—and disproportionately from states like Chuck Schumer’s New York, where voting is notoriously difficult compared to places like … Georgia. Again, Georgia has 17 days of early voting. New York? Nine. Georgia allows “no excuse” absentee voting. In 2020, Andrew Cuomo signed a bill allowing people to use COVID as an excuse. A ballot initiative to allow “no excuse” voting failed by a healthy margin in 2021, a state where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by more than 2 to 1.They come from below.Okay, let’s move briefly to the third claim: that Trump loyalists are positioning to ignore the will of the people by ignoring legitimate votes. These claims take two forms: 1) Some “Big Lie” Trump loyal Republicans are running for office and can’t be trusted to follow the rules, and 2) Some states have passed laws that put partisan officials in charge of the election process (or empower them to overrule apolitical state officials).Obviously, I would prefer such people not run for office. But to date, they haven’t done anything yet, and so I don’t understand what people think can be done about it. Surely people have a right to run for office and, more importantly, if voters elect such candidates, the self-styled saviors of democracy can’t really be arguing that the will of the voters must be ignored.As for the second problem, I think those changes to state laws were unnecessary, unhelpful, and in some cases indefensible. But again, if duly elected officials change laws within the boundaries of the Constitution, I’m at a loss to see how that is, in itself, undemocratic. It’d be one thing if they were enacting Jim Crow style laws. That would be undemocratic. But. They’re. Not.Dividing America.Okay, I think I’ve been remarkably restrained. So let me speak a bit more freely now. Biden’s speech yesterday, and this whole project, is shameful, dangerous, stupid, and profoundly hypocritical.Because the wheels are coming off his presidency, Biden has decided to divide Americans in ways he vowed he would not. Now, I don’t have any problem per se with politicians “dividing Americans.” Democracy is about disagreement, not unity. Unity is Biden’s bag and, as I pointed out at the time, I thought Biden’s unity schtick was clichéd nonsense. I’ve spent the better part of two decades ranting about the “cult of unity.”But I do have a problem with a president dividing Americans by casting people he disagrees with as evil racists bent on destroying democracy—particularly when it’s not true (and when Biden himself played footsie with the very segregationists he’s now associating with his political opponents). Even worse, his lies are intended to sow even more distrust in our elections purely for partisan gain.And let me just say right now that if any readers come at me with, “But what about Trump?” their arguments will find no purchase. I’ll stack my record of criticizing Trump for spewing hateful lies against pretty much anyone. But Biden staked his entire presidency on taking the high road; on not being like Trump. He vowed in his inaugural address, “I will be a president for all Americans. I will fight as hard for those who did not support me as for those who did.” He cribs Obama’s better rhetoric about there not being red states and blue states but the United States all the time. And he threw it all away yesterday.And for what? I could go on about how the legislation he wants would make our electoral system worse in myriad ways, but that misses a crucial point. This legislation almost surely won’t pass, and probably the only way it can pass is by getting rid of the filibuster (even then it’s unlikely). If Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi actually cared about saving democracy and thwarting the Trumpist threat from below, or the joys of unity and bipartisanship, they’d focus on reforming the Electoral Count Act or writing a bill that could attract the votes of people like Mitt Romney. Instead, they’d rather cast Romney—who, as Sarah Isgur notes, was the first senator in American history to vote to impeach a president of his own party—as a partisan hack in league with Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis. If he cared about letting the “will of majority” prevail in the Senate as he claims, he’d work to craft legislation that a majority of the Senate could support. Instead, he’s saying they have to swallow policies that have been on the shelf for years or be guilty of racism.       That’s cynical and shameful—but it’s also so incredibly stupid. If this thing doesn’t pass, Biden will be the second president in a row to tell voters in Georgia there’s no point in voting because the system is rigged. If it does pass, thanks to a successful effort of abolishing the filibuster, these idiot demagogues will still probably lose the House and Senate in 2022. And if they lose the presidency in 2024—a reasonable bet—they might see all of these “reforms” repealed by Republicans. And Democrats would be powerless to stop them without the filibuster.Biden’s presidency is spiraling into abject failure. Calling tens of millions of Americans racists to change the subject isn’t just bad politics and bad policy, it’s immoral, and it deserves to put him on the wrong side of history he keeps prattling about. 

For weeks, the watchword on Omicron in much of America has been some form of phew. A flurry of reports has encouraged a relatively rosy view of the variant, compared with some of its predecessors. Omicron appears to somewhat spare the lungs. Infected laboratory mice and hamsters seem to handily fight it off. Proportionally, fewer of the people who catch it wind up hospitalized or dead. All of this has allowed a deceptively reassuring narrative to take root and grow: Omicron is mild. The variant is docile, harmless, the cause of an #Omicold that’s no worse than a fleeting flu. It is so trivial, some have argued, that the world should simply “allow this mild infection to circulate,” and avoid slowing the spread. Omicron, as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky would have you believe, is “basically nature’s vaccine.”These dismissals of the variant as trifling—desirable, even—represent “a very dangerous attitude,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, told me. At the core of the problem sits the word mild itself, a slippery and pernicious term that “doesn’t mean what people think it means,” Neil Lewis, a behavioral scientist at Cornell, told me. Less severe forms of COVID-19 can certainly be experienced by individual people, especially if they’re vaccinated. And there are true reasons to think that Omicron, particle for particle, might be less toothy than Delta. But Omicron’s unfettered spread has sowed a situation that is not mild at all. And right now, the notion of mildness is making the pandemic worse for everyone.Much of our Omicron problem can be traced back to a false binary: That the variant is less of a danger too often gets misconstrued as the variant is not a danger at all. Severity works in degrees, which is indeed what we’re seeing. Per capita, Omicron seems less likely than Delta to hospitalize or kill the people it infects. In South Africa, one of the first countries to be hit by the variant, cases have already crested at a record-shattering peak, but hospitalizations, admissions to intensive-care units, and deaths remain far below the heights of prior waves; infections also appear to be decoupling from severe disease in parts of continental Europe. Even in the United States, where the pandemic is as bad as it’s ever been, early data are pointing to a blunting in the propensity of Omicron cases to turn severe.[Read: COVID-hospitalization numbers are as bad as they look]It’s tempting to attribute all of this to the virus, but doing so would be overly simplistic. Disease always manifests as an interaction between pathogen and host, which means there are two main reasons that Omicron cases can present with softer symptoms: a more resilient human, or a more docile microbe. In this current surge, we’re likely seeing both effects collide.The first part of the equation is entirely about us. Two years into a pandemic that’s left hundreds of millions with known infections and prompted billions to sign up for shots, Omicron is knocking up against populations that are better defended than ever. In the United Kingdom, where more than 80 percent of people over 12 are at least doubly vaccinated, the shots are clearly lowering the risk of hospitalization among those infected with Omicron, especially among the boosted. A high number of prior infections from past COVID surges may have had a similarly mollifying effect in South Africa, where the average age of the population is also very young, and thus better steeled against severe COVID-19.The second part of the equation—the inherent potency of the virus itself—unfortunately gets harder to parse when the world is more immune, Roby Bhattacharyya, a microbiologist and infectious-disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told me. Still, even unvaccinated people with Omicron seem less likely to end up hospitalized, in the ICU, or on ventilators. Laboratory rodents infected with Omicron don’t seem to be getting all that sick either, perhaps because the new variant is less adept than Delta at colonizing the lungs, where the wildfire-like inflammation of serious respiratory disease often ignites. Similarly, researchers are finding that Omicron isn’t keen on infecting human tissue extracted from the lung, and may prefer to cloister itself in loftier sites like the throat, Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, told me. What happens in a rodent or a plastic dish can’t recapitulate what happens in a human body. But Iwasaki still thinks “there is something intrinsically less virulent about Omicron.”It’s fair, then, to say that the average Omicron case is indeed “less severe.” And there are plenty of people for whom the math will work out well. They’re hosts who are young, healthy, and up to date on their vaccines, squaring off with a pathogen that packs an oh-so-slightly weaker punch, at least compared with Delta. Keep in mind, though, that Delta is probably nastier than its already-awful ancestors, so to simply call the virus “mild” massively undersells the danger it still poses, especially when it finds its way into unvaccinated or vaccinated-but-still-vulnerable hosts. Even people who are thrice-vaccinated can’t exempt themselves from Omicron’s risk, especially not while cases are rising at such high rates, and exposures are so frequent and heavy.[Read: Hospitals are in serious trouble]The variant offers a harsh lesson in multiplication: So many people have been infected that a relatively small percentage of medically severe cases has still erupted into an absolutely staggering number. In the United States, where most of the population has at least one risk factor for severe COVID-19 and a quarter of people have yet to receive a single dose of a vaccine, the untethering of severe disease from cases is shaping up to be a substantially muted echo of what’s been seen abroad. Hospitalizations have already hit a new pandemic peak. Among them are huge numbers of kids, many of whom are still too young to be vaccinated. When Omicron finds vulnerable hosts, it can still exact SARS-CoV-2’s worst. And Omicron is finding them.COVID-19 doesn’t have to be medically severe to take a toll. Lekshmi Santhosh, a critical-care physician at UCSF, has seen Omicron exacerbate chronic health issues to the point where they turn fatal. “You could say they didn’t die of COVID,” she told me. “But if they didn’t have COVID, they wouldn’t have had this issue.” Iwasaki, of Yale, also worries about the storm of long-COVID cases, which can sprout out of infections that are initially almost symptom-free, that may soon be on the way. “Some of these people are bedridden, unable to return to work for months,” she told me. “There is nothing mild about it.”In high-enough numbers, any Omicron infection can wreak havoc. Across the country, people are entering isolation in droves, closing schools and businesses, and hamstringing hospitals that can already ill-afford a staffing shortage. In many parts of the country, hospital capacities are already being reached and exceeded, making it difficult for people to seek care for any kind of illness. An overstretched system could also, ironically, mask the extent of Omicron’s tear: When hospitals are full, they cannot accept more patients, artificially deflating recorded rates of severe disease, even as total cases continue to rise. “Omicron may be more mild at the individual symptom level,” Duana Fullwiley, a medical anthropologist at Stanford who has studied how the term mild has affected people’s experience of sickle-cell anemia in Senegal, told me. “But we’re not talking about the severity of Omicron as it’s impacting the system.”Omicron also still harbors dangerous unknowns. The variant may snub the lungs, but it still accumulates quickly in the throat and mouth—real estate that positions it to spill easily out of infected people. That, compounded with Omicron’s ability to dodge certain immune defenses, makes it a threat to more of us at once. Subdued symptoms, too, can come with a catch if infected people ignore them and continue to mingle. (And the variant seems to be tougher to detect early in infection with certain rapid antigen tests.) Researchers also don’t yet have a good handle on just how much immunity Omicron infections—especially the gentlest ones—may leave behind.[Read: Should I just get Omicron over with?]Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, told me that Omicron might turn out to be about as inherently virulent as the original SARS-CoV-2 variant, the version of the virus that kick-started all this misery. If that’s the case, it would be ironic. Two years ago is also when mild and COVID-19 first insidiously intertwined: Roughly 80 percent of cases could be described as such, reports noted at the time, inviting dismissive and misleading comparisons to the flu, and jeering calls to push Americans back to work and school. Mild became shorthand for piddling; that soothing framing took hold, then lingered, “diminishing the sense of urgency in prevention,” as the medical anthropologist Martha Lincoln has written, even through the billions of infections, and the many millions of hospitalizations and deaths, that followed.Today, news reports are using mild and COVID-19 together more than ever before, Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, told me. Medically, the term mild originated as an academic catchall for all SARS-CoV-2 infections not severe enough to get someone admitted to a hospital—everything from asymptomatic cases all the way up to people just short of going into respiratory failure. But most of that range squares poorly with mild’s colloquial connotations regarding “temperate, pleasant, generally benign” food, weather, even people, Semino said. Mild, to most of us, is whatever, something that blows almost imperceptibly by.That’s the trap of mildness: the underlying sense of fatalism it engenders. “People say, it’s inevitable; it’s mild; I hope I can catch it and move on,” Santhosh, of UCSF, told me. Calling Omicron “mild” implies that the virus is spontaneously domesticating itself; it punts the responsibility of harm reduction to the pathogen, and away from us. But Omicron is not our deus ex microbe. As Goldstein, of the University of Utah, points out, a virus’s imperative is only to spread—not, necessarily, to treat its hosts more genially. (Omicron is not even descended from Delta, so we can’t frame their severities as a stepwise evolutionary drop.) The attitude that Omicron is hardly anything to worry about is compounding the disaster we’ve found ourselves in: The more opportunities the virus has to enter new hosts, the more variants will arise. And there’s no telling what harm the next SARS-CoV-2 iteration will bring.It’s worth remembering, then, that severity, or lack thereof, is not up to the virus alone. We, as hosts, dictate its damage at least as much—and that’s the side of the equation we can control. SARS-CoV-2 can’t be counted on to pull its punches, but we have the vaccines to pummel it right back. If mildness is what we’re after, that future is largely up to us.

Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Greetings! Before tackling today’s main subject, a prompt for an issue I hope to air later this week.What are the proper roles of parents and teachers, respectively, in the education of children? What conflict between a parent and a teacher would leave you most torn about how to resolve it? If you’ve experienced a parent-teacher conflict, describe it, how you approached it, and how things ended. My email address is conor@theatlantic.com.Conversations of NoteLast week, on January 6, Americans variously marked—or ignored—the one-year anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Today, that event’s meaning and the state of American democracy are top of mind. Some, like the New York Times editorial board, say its ongoing significance is underappreciated:
Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day. It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties. In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy.
Others, like Glenn Greenwald, say its significance is overstated:
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic—three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress—posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
John McWhorter was torn about what to believe in his weekly video conversation with Glenn Loury. The Fifth Column podcast hosted a reporter who was at the Capitol that day to help flesh out their thoughts.My own view is closest to the criminal-defense lawyer and blogger Scott Greenfield’s analysis of what that day signified and portended:
What we lost on January 6th was our national innocence, that we, as Americans, would somehow find a way to overcome all obstacles. Instead, what we saw was our national bond unravel, how a lie perpetrated by puny people undermined our faith in ourselves. There are no laws that can restore our faith in the integrity of our nation, our government, our purpose … Without trust, we will find ourselves mired in endless contention over who’s cheating whom, who’s manipulating what, how everything is dishonest and everyone is lying, how everything is awful and nothing is worth saving. If we can’t break out of this spiral of mistrust, then there is nothing to save. The fringes will point at each other, hurl accusations and do anything to create that plausible justification to lie, cheat and steal to win “at any cost” because the alternative is intolerable.
Several prominent journalists reflected on January 6 by discussing How Civil Wars Start by the UC San Diego political scientist Barbara F. Walter. David Remnick summarized part of its thesis:
When white supremacists, militia members, and MAGA faithful took inspiration from the President and stormed the Capitol in order to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election, leaving legislators and the Vice-President essentially held hostage, we ceased to be a full democracy. Instead, we now inhabit a liminal status that scholars call “anocracy.” That is, for the first time in two hundred years, we are suspended between democracy and autocracy. And that sense of uncertainty radically heightens the likelihood of episodic bloodletting in America, and even the risk of civil war.
Fintan O’Toole drew on the Irish experience to warn against prophecies of civil war. “Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own,” he wrote. “The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing.”And Jacob Siegel warned against succumbing to exaggerated fears as after past national traumas:
What does it mean when President Biden declares an event in which four people died, all of them Trump supporters and only one by violence, the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” and The New York Times marks the anniversary by proclaiming that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now”? The implication is politics as permanent crisis … This obvious threat-inflation, which should be familiar after September 11, is used by governments and private corporations alike to award themselves more unaccountable power.
The anniversary highlighted divisions among Republicans.Patrick Healy explored public perception of that day after observing separate focus groups made up of Republicans and Democratic voters, respectively. “While I wasn’t surprised that some Republican participants, when asked by moderator Kristen Soltis Anderson for one-word reactions to ‘Jan. 6,’ said they thought it was ‘way overblown’ and ‘misrepresented,’ I was struck that other Republicans defied Trumpian orthodoxy and reacted to Jan. 6 by saying ‘scary’ and ‘definitely Trump,’” he wrote. “Not only Republicans, but Democrats had some empathy for some of the Americans who stormed the Capitol, seeing them ordinarily as people who had real, understandable frustrations with ‘the system.’ The rioters took it too far, but their frustrations, with the parties, with Washington, seemed recognizable to some of the Democrats.”In an appearance on ABC’s This Week, South Dakota Republican Senator Mike Rounds affirmed that Joe Biden’s victory and Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 was not due to voter fraud. “We looked at over 60 different accusations made in multiple states,” he said. “While there were some irregularities, there were none of the irregularities which would have risen to the point where they would have changed the vote outcome in a single state. The election was fair, as fair as we have seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans.”In response, Trump lashed out at Rounds, prompting Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney to come to his colleague’s defense. “Mike Rounds speaks truth knowing that our Republic depends upon it,” Romney declared on Twitter. “Republicans like Govs Hutchinson, Baker & Hogan; Sens McConnell, Thune & Johnson; Bush & Cheney; plus 60+ courts and even the right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial page agree: Joe Biden won the election.”Elsewhere on the right, many commentators marked the anniversary by criticizing the people who stormed the Capitol––then pivoting to criticize leftists who protested violently in 2021. At the Capitol, “the rioters tried to impede the constitutional transfer of power, an essential element of civil peace,” Heather Mac Donald wrote. “If uprisings from losing parties become the norm in the U.S., Americans will forfeit the blessings conferred by the Anglo-American political tradition. The vandals boorishly violated the respect due to our national monuments. The rioters who assaulted police officers undermined conservatives’ claim to be the party of law and order.”Here’s the pivot: “The crime and riots that the Democrats alternately tolerate and justify also have the potential to unravel democracy,” she argued. “If law enforcement is delegitimated and hindered from doing its job, if property is not secure, if civilians fear being held up at gunpoint … or shot when they enter the public square or even in their homes, then there is no more security and no conditions for prosperity. The George Floyd riots also took aim at the symbols of government—courthouses, prosecutors’ offices, police stations, City Halls, and squad cars.”In all this, I still find myself most aligned with one concern explored by Barton Gellman: the Trumpist impulse to use parliamentary machinations to overturn election results and the groundwork the GOP is laying to do so more effectively. “Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election,” he reported.
They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
As David Brooks argues, efforts to safeguard democracy should focus there.Provocations of the WeekIn “The Data Are Pointing to One Major Driver of America’s Murder Spike,” Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur argue:
Many factors may have contributed, such as a pandemic-driven loss of social programs and societal and policing changes after George Floyd’s murder. But one hypothesis is simpler, and perhaps has significant explanatory power: A massive increase in gun sales in early 2020 led to additional murders. New data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) suggest that that indeed may have been the case. According to the data, newly purchased weapons found their way into crimes much more quickly and often last year than in prior years. That seems to point to a definitive conclusion—that new guns led to more murders—but the data set cannot prove that just yet.
In “How Plastic Liberated and Entombed Us,” Jeannette Cooperman writes:
The crazy part is that we knew. All along, we knew … In the early days, you did not dare wash plastic in hot water, lest it twist or melt, or freeze it, lest it turn brittle and crack. Left in the sun, it oozed oil … People used to cry out in dismay—“It’s plastic!”—when they noticed that a bit of a new appliance was no longer made of metal or glass. Exciting as its applications could be, plastic also spelled cheap, ersatz, of inferior quality. And the sudden quantity of inferior junk was unnerving. Once he was safely retired, a DuPont chemist predicted that we would all “perish by being smothered in plastic.”
Is it self-hatred, to embrace with abandon a substance you know to be cheap, tacky, often garish, and entirely synthetic? A substance that, when made into a bag, had to be imprinted with warnings, lest a child think it a toy and suffocate?
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       Peter Daszak of the World Health Organization team sits in a car on his way to a field visit in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province on Friday, Jan. 29, 2021. Daszak, part of the team investigating the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, says the Chinese side granted full access to all sites and personnel they requested to visit and meet with. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) Ng Han Guan/AP   NIH unearth more grant violations by Wuhan lab collaborator EcoHealth Alliance   Jerry Dunleavy  January 12, 03:12 PM January 12, 03:12 PM  The U.S. taxpayer-funded nonprofit group that collaborated with a Chinese laboratory on risky bat virus research just before the initial COVID-19 outbreak has earned another slap on the wrist from authorities.  EcoHealth Alliance, which the government has already said broke rules with bat coronavirus experiments that critics call gain-of-function research, has been hit with more violations by the National Institutes of Health. In a letter to EcoHealth sent last week and just made public, NIH Deputy Director Michael Lauer blasted the organization's poor record of complying with agency standards and accused it of charging "inappropriate" rates related to a Wuhan lab grant.  Video Embed The NIH paused its funding of EcoHealth's Wuhan lab research in 2020 but has continued sending money to EcoHealth for other viral research.  “[EcoHealth has] demonstrated a history of failure to comply with several elements of the terms and conditions of grant awards not only for these active awards, but also for the suspended award,” Lauer wrote of EcoHealth, which has reaped millions of dollars in grants from the NIH.  Lauer accused EcoHealth of flouting the rules on several ongoing, U.S.-funded projects, including one $3 million study of “spillover risk of high zoonotic potential viruses from wildlife” conducted in collaboration with international scientists. But the NIH also said EcoHealth overcharged on its "facilities and administrative" costs filed for work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab where a growing number of experts believe COVID-19 originated.  Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, who made the NIH letter public, said it “confirms EcoHealth hid the truth about their risky coronavirus experiments in Wuhan.”  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER  Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, said the new letter shows the NIH is still going soft on EcoHealth.  “Inexplicably, the letter imposes no sanctions on EcoHealth — which continues to receive $2.1 million annually in NIH funding,” said Ebright, one of several scientists who believe EcoHealth and the Wuhan lab were engaged in improper gain-of-function research, or experiments that make naturally occurring viruses more dangerous to humans.  EcoHealth was reprimanded by the NIH's principal deputy director, Lawrence Tabak, in October, when Tabak found that the organization delayed revealing that a U.S.-funded experiment conducted with the Wuhan lab determined that mice with implanted human cells became sicker with an engineered version of bat coronavirus. Terms of the grant required such a finding to be reported immediately.  At the time, Republican lawmakers and others charged that EcoHealth had conducted risky gain-of-function research with NIH funding, but the NIH denied it. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has also been adamant that the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Chinese government lab.  At issue is $600,000 in grant funding that EcoHealth received from NIH in 2019 and steered to the Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research without going through the U.S. government's formalized gain-of-function vetting process and whether that research could be tied to the virus that may have leaked from the lab. Republican Sen. Rand Paul requested last summer that Attorney General Merrick Garland criminally investigate Fauci over Senate testimony in which the doctor said NIH never funded gain-of-function research.  Documents unearthed last year show the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency rejected EcoHealth's $14.2 million funding request for bat virus research in 2018 out of concern it could “potentially involve [gain-of-function] research."  FAUCI SHUT DOWN LAB LEAK HYPOTHESIS  Fauci continued to insist as recently as November that it is “much more likely” that COVID-19 originated in nature rather than from the Wuhan lab.  The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment in the summer stating that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe with “low confidence” COVID-19 most likely has a natural origin.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

I adored Steven Spielberg’s new filmization of “West Side Story.” I thought it undid most of the problematic aspects of the still magnificent 1961 film — including sometimes one-dimensional aspects of its depiction of Latinos — while brilliantly presenting a signature piece of American theatrical art. Though I didn’t really need a refresher, it was still nice to be reminded of why it ranks second on the American Film Institute’s list of “The 25 Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time.”

Only to learn that quite a few critics weren’t sold on Spielberg’s version. They don’t deny its artistry, here and there, but some of them question the very value of rebooting “West Side Story.” CUNY’s Prof. Yarimar Bonilla wrote a guest essay for The Times headlined “The ‘West Side Story’ Remake We Didn’t Need,” cataloging several points where, she says, the remake still falls short, despite Spielberg’s efforts to render cultural details with precision. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody wrote, “instead of reconceiving the story, they’ve shored it up with flimsy new struts of sociology and psychology.” New York magazine’s Andrea González-Ramírez acknowledged that “a ton of work went into details” to make the portrayal of the mid-20th-century New York Puerto Rican community “feel more historically accurate and real” but ultimately thinks “‘West Side Story’ Can’t Be Saved.” Writing for Slate, Odie Henderson called “West Side Story” “a dusty, outdated, racist musical that hit the Great White Way when my mother was in grammar school. Sure, it has some great songs, but so does ‘Porgy and Bess,’ the even more racist opera that also keeps getting restaged.”

So: It’s time to just chuck “West Side Story”?

Why? Partly because of matters from back in the day: In the original 1957 stage version and in the 1961 film, Maria, the puertorriqueña romantic lead, was played by white women. I’d add that the creators of “West Side Story” — Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Arthur Laurents (script), Jerome Robbins (choreography and direction) — made it at a time when a version of the story created by Puerto Rican artists wouldn’t have drawn broad public interest.

Both Brody and González-Ramírez argue that the white creators of “West Side Story” set out to make a musical about a clash between Jewish and either Italian or Irish kids but then, writes Brody, “shifted their focus to people they knew nothing about.”

       Ramazzini's transparency and findings have been questioned. (iStock by Getty Images) gevende   Don’t like biological research? Call the scientist a racist   Debra Soh  January 07, 10:42 AM January 07, 10:42 AM  Following the recent death of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson, a professor of nursing wrote for Scientific American of “the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas.” Within academia, there has been a tireless, insidious movement to derail particular lines of research by terrorizing scientists with unfounded accusations of racism and bigotry. Every week, I am alerted by my readers to yet another case of an academic being tarred, feathered, and dragged as part of a concerted effort to erase biological explanations in favor of blank slateism (the belief that human nature is socially constructed and learned). Video Embed Regardless of whether the topic is race, sex, gender, or something else contentious, critics will claim that biology is dangerous, conflating truth with bad ideas extrapolated from it. They don’t, however, manage to disprove the findings they take issue with, in many cases misrepresenting and straw-manning an individual’s work because they have no understanding of the scientific method and lack any interest in it. Once upon a time, if you disagreed with an academic colleague about their findings, you would write a rebuttal for publication in a scientific journal. Maybe you’d conduct your own study in hopes of disproving theirs. The colleague with whom you disagreed would welcome your dissent. Now, the most effective way to counter ideas you don’t like is to accuse the person holding them of being a racist. The effects are twofold: shutting most people up and successfully derailing any chance they might pursue similar research in the future. While it is reasonable to be concerned about how science is being undertaken and used, this is not the way to go about advocating for research ethics. This intimidation sets the norm throughout society that scientists should fear their own results and that racial justice activism should eclipse scientific discovery. In the meantime, students and up-and-coming scientists are learning that it doesn’t matter whether you’re doing your job properly; anything related to biology or evolution is hateful, and if someone compares you to Nazis, that will be given full consideration even if they have no idea about your work and are incapable of refuting it. Overplaying the “racism” card makes the word meaningless, and racial minorities will, unfortunately, be the ones to pay the price. But ending discrimination is not part of the activist agenda, which is solely invested in purging universities of scientists, dissenters, and white men. Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.      © 2022 Washington Examiner   

According to the reporting of Michael Wolff — of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” fame — Random House passed on publishing an anthology of Norman Mailer’s writing, and among the reasons, Wolff writes, was “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay ‘The White Negro.’” Both Random House and the agent representing Mailer’s estate have contested this account. But if it’s true, it would represent another example of the word “Negro,” once quite respectable, becoming the target of overzealous revisionists.

Not the N-word, but “Negro.”

I wrote recently that William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” is “smashing,” one of the most stirring pieces of classical music I know. But I hear from an experienced conductor that several orchestras have turned down his requests to perform or record it with them, out of wariness of the word “Negro” in its title. In 2020, in the Princeton Summer Journal (part of a summer journalism program for high school students), a student wrote an essay titled “White Teachers: Stop Saying ‘Negro.’” I know of two cases in the past two years of white college professors having complaints filed against them by students for using the word “Negro” in class when quoting older texts. Activists in Vermont have been calling for “Negro Brook,” a stream in Vermont’s Townshend State Park, to be renamed.

Never mind that “Negro” was what Black Americans readily and often proudly called ourselves throughout much of the 20th century, until the preference evolved to “Black” during the civil rights era. And never mind that the issue in these instances isn’t Black people being referred to as “Negroes” today — that would be offensive — but utterances or written reproductions of the word when referring to older texts and titles. The new idea seems to be that saying or writing “Negro” is not simply archaic, but a contemptuous insult in all contexts.

If that’s so, then we’re at a point where, presumably, the filmmakers who titled the well-received James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” will have to revise the title. The title’s purpose was to elide the N-word in the Baldwin quote that it was based on. A few years ago, the poet Laurie Sheck, who was teaching at The New School in New York, was the subject of a student complaint that she had used the N-word in reference to Baldwin’s actual statement — in a discussion about the implications of the film’s title. The New School investigated and eventually dropped the case, but one wonders if today some students would consider it inappropriate if she had only used the documentary’s bowdlerized title.

(Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images.)In January 2008 I published my first book, Liberal Fascism.It did well, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists. It has been published in many languages. It was, to put it mildly, controversial and remains so to this day. While I would certainly write the book differently today, I still stand by much of it, proudly so in many regards. For instance, I take great satisfaction that my hammer-and-tongs attack on Woodrow Wilson’s nativism, racism, and authoritarianism, much ridiculed at the time (the headline of the New York Times review of Liberal Fascism was a mocking “Heil Woodrow!”), is now much closer to conventional wisdom on the left and right.But there’s one important claim that has been rendered utterly wrong. I argued that, contrary to generations of left-wing fearmongering and slander about the right’s fascist tendencies, the modern American right was simply immune to the fascist temptation chiefly because it was too dogmatically committed to the Founders, to constitutionalism, and to classical liberalism generally.Almost 13 years to the day after publication, Donald Trump proved me wrong.Academics tend toward needless complication when trying to define fascism. Roger Griffin defined it as ﻿“a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.” Roger Eatwell argued that fascism’s “essence” is a “form of thought that preaches the need for social rebirth in order to forge a holistic-national radical Third Way.” Emilio Gentile defined fascism as “a mass movement, that combines different classes but is prevalently of the middle classes, which sees itself as having a mission of national regeneration, is in a state of war with its adversaries and seeks a monopoly of power by using terror, parliamentary tactics and compromise to create a new regime, destroying democracy.” Other definitions emphasize a fixation with manliness and struggle, cults of personality, obsession with conspiracies both foreign and domestic, and the decadence of liberal capitalism and democracy.Break definitions like these down into a checklist and replay the events of January 6 and you’ll get writer’s cramp checking the various boxes, starting with Ali Alexander’s tweet at 1:13 a.m., “First official day of the rebellion.” A couple hours later, a leader of QAnon announced that Mike Pence was leading a coup to stab the president in the back and linked to a blog post calling for “the immediate arrest of [Pence], for treason.” The speakers at the Save America rally hit all the themes. John Eastman peddled his cockamamie Americanized version of “parliamentary” tactics to steal the election. Rudy Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Mo Brooks asked the mob to “fight for America” and the crowd chanted, “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!”  “You'll never take back our country with weakness,” the president himself told the crowd, “You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”While defenders of the president and his minions insist that this was yet another example of figurative talk being unfairly mistaken by detractors as literal talk, it’s worth emphasizing that many members of the crowd definitely took this talk both seriously and literally. That’s why they brought military gear, bear spray, zip ties, and even a gallows.Moreover, while it’s fine to talk about how only a fraction of the crowd that marched on the Capitol was violent and that most were not incited by the president’s rhetoric, the march itself was speaking in the language of fascism. Read up on the March on Rome to understand the point.Now, I know enough about fascist theory to provide all of the caveats you can think of and even some you probably can’t. Those academic definitions I mentioned above have their uses, but the truth is that people overthink fascism. For the left, fascism’s similarity to, and common roots with, other ideologies in the revolutionary tradition required ever more elaborate and abstract explanations for why fascism is a wholly distinct phenomenon from other violent and occasionally genocidal ideologies. It is distinct in the same way various flavors of communism are distinct from each other. German fascism was very different from Italian fascism, not least because Germans and Italians are very different.But there is something we can call “generic fascism.” It’s undemocratic. It elevates struggle, strength, and fighting over argument and ideas. It glorifies martial rhetoric as the language of a deeper truth and a greater source of meaning. It splits the world into us and them, and claims a kind of gnostic insight into the true spirit of the authentic people. This is why it glorifies in mass protests (much like many other revolutionary movements) and the spectacle of intimidating throngs.  It has contempt for bourgeois morality and constitutional and democratic norms – particularly when they are obstacles to the pursuit of power. Sometimes it takes traditional religion and reframes it as political ratification of its goals. It glorifies will, specifically the will to do what the weak and unmasculine defenders of democracy are unwilling to do. It’s conspiratorial, believing that powerful forces are driven by sinister ambitions to keep the authentic and deserving people down and divided. If your response to all of this is that this describes a lot of left-wing movements around the world and throughout history, my response is, “You’re right.” But also: “So what?”One of the mistakes I made in Liberal Fascism was placing too much emphasis on intellectual history. I wrote:For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right. And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger. ﻿All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment—John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke—and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to ﻿existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism. ﻿Meanwhile, the ranks of left-wing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition. And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents. The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values—even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments.This was true then and it’s still largely true now among conservatives who haven’t been swept up in the us-vs.-them passions that define the louder and uglier parts of the right. (Though it’s worth noting that there are segments of the right that now flirt with ideas once considered wholly outside the dogmas of American conservatism.)But the truth is that often in politics, especially populist and revolutionary politics, ideas are lagging indicators. Lenin picked up and discarded various ideas like a mechanic rummaging through a messy tool box. So did Mussolini. So did Hitler.My view is that generic fascism asserts itself as passion, not reason. Fascism is a highly concentrated and toxic form of populism that manifests itself as the politics of mobs, not manifestos. The ideological constructs used to defend and proselytize fascist ideologies were instrumental, not elemental, to the cause. Whether it was Hitler’s Führerprinzip or Mussolini’s Nietzschean pragmatism, even fascist intellectuals ultimately conceded that ideas were at best secondary considerations, mere marketing to give the naked pursuit of power more credibility and legitimacy.On January 6, the president of the United States marshaled propaganda and lies to convince a mob that strength and will and violence were required to hold onto power. Sinister, faceless forces were conspiring against the people, and they needed to be confronted regardless of how much it offended the sensibilities of the weak and corrupt. Countless speakers invoked the language of rebirth and vowed to sweep the conspiratorial forces occupying our government. The Buffalo Helmet Viking Guy concluded his prayer in the Senate thus: “Thank you [God] for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”In the days leading up to January 6, Trump’s coterie, including his one-time national security adviser, raised the specter of martial law to set the nation right. This was in the wake of Trump exhausting all legal remedies in front of scores of judges – many of them conservative – who rejected the president’s often spurious claims. In the year since, the president and his defenders have constructed any number of “stabbed in the back” narratives about how they were robbed by sinister forces that are now using January 6 to oppress the authentic people. Some even try to make Ashli Babbitt into some kind of Horst Wessel-like martyr, a woman who was robbed of her life by the shadowy forces protecting our corrupt order. Countless right-wing populists today openly and unapologetically celebrate an event that marks the end of America’s tradition of the peaceful transfer of power. Sen. Josh Hawley wrote yesterday for Fox News that the “true legacy” of January 6 was “the Left’s attempt to use the Capitol unrest to foster a permanent climate of fear and repression.”  Donald Trump insists that “the real insurrection” was Election Day.When Jonathan Karl asked Donald Trump about the chants of “hang Mike Pence,” the former president brushed it off: “Well, the people were very angry.” That’s true! Mobs, pretty much by definition, are angry. It is a fascist trope to insist that the anger of a mob is self-justifying. More importantly, why was the mob angry? Because Trump lied to them. He lied to them for a specific purpose: to use a mob – or simply a huge mass of people –  to intimidate the legislative branch into nullifying an election.Now, you may think this isn’t fascism. And I’ve spent enough time arguing about fascism to imagine a dozen counterarguments that might have some merit. But you can’t convince me that this didn’t indefensibly move the Overton window in a fascist direction. Like so much that defined the Trump years, January 6 represented the abandonment of the dogma that I believe immunized conservatism from the fascist temptation and rendered glib accusations of fascism at small-government conservatives so idiotic and slanderous. I believed that conservatism was too committed to the Constitution, to classical liberalism, to the rule of law, to tolerate the use of extralegal violence and mob intimidation. I still believe that those dogmas are a bulwark against fascism, or a tyranny that goes by any other name. What I no longer have faith in is the right’s commitment to those dogmas. If you want to claim that fascism is right-wing, we can have that argument again. It certainly was in certain European contexts. But in America, at least until recently, the right was committed to Anglo-American definitions of conservatism that are definitionally antithetical to fascism. Remove those commitments and you remove the constraints against the spirit of fascism.Call that spirit something else if you like. I don’t care. The labels matter less than the spirits they describe. And that spirit has nothing to do with conservatism rightly understood.

In this book I have supplemented “liberal science” with the term “reality-based community,” by which I mean the social network which adheres to liberal science’s rules and norms…. The community’s interactions are structured and elaborate and amount to much more than just the sum of its individuals’ doings, and the essential enablers, connectors, and transmitters are institutions. Institutions propagate and enforce norms and rules, evaluate and certify credentials, set agendas and direct resources, enforce accountability, and train future generations… today, the institutions and norms of liberal science, not individuals, are the real targets of attack by nihilists and bullies. —Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge (p. 26) I n his latest book, Jonathan Rauch attributes human success in accumulating knowledge to our willingness to abide by what he calls the Constitution of Knowledge. By that, he means a set of institutions and norms that allow ideas to be freely contested in a process that is fair, open, peaceful, and able to arrive at sensible outcomes. He draws an analogy with the American Constitution, which allows political issues to be contested similarly. “Where Rauch focuses on the attacks on the twentieth-century information order from without, I would emphasize the rot from within.” Four aspects of Rauch’s thinking struck this reviewer. First, I was impressed and persuaded by his emphasis on knowledge emerging from a social process. Second, I concur with his view that this process is undermined by what he calls “trolling” on the one hand and “cancel culture” on the other. Third, I agree that social media has disrupted the information order of the last century, and that this works to our detriment. And fourth, Rauch writes as if a return to the twentieth-century information order can be achieved by taming the disruptive forces. I think that this ignores the decay and corruption that have afflicted the key institutions of journalism and academia. Where Rauch focuses on the attacks on the twentieth-century information order from without, I would emphasize the rot from within.

Epistemology as a Social Process In 2021, a number of prominent authors published books on the topic of truth and error in human thought. In philosophy, the issue of determining what is true is known as the problem of epistemology. Recent and forthcoming books that deal with this issue include: • Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

• Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us

• Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t

• Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, and Oliver Sibony. Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

• Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters These authors, as well as most philosophers, emphasize what an individual should do in order to arrive at true beliefs and avoid error. For example, Julia Galef suggests that we are prone to error when we become too emotionally invested in our beliefs. Rauch puts the emphasis on the social process of acquiring knowledge. He favorably cites the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: He saw more clearly than anyone before him, and also more clearly than almost everyone today, that the concept of objective knowledge is inherently social… “Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve,” he wrote. (p. 74) Rauch takes seriously the fact that human beings differ in our beliefs. This can turn out very badly. He cites the religious wars of the 16th century as a trauma that informed both the political theory that ultimately produced the American Constitution and the intellectual network that, in parallel, produced the Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch sees John Locke as a central figure in both. In the field of politics, Rauch credits John Locke with formulating three fundamental principles: natural rights, which apply to every person; rule by consent; and religious toleration. In epistemology, Locke championed empiricism: What Locke was doing, here, was expelling from intellectual respectability—from the epistemic rule book—claims which, because they are not checkable, are not adjudicable…. Locke saw how untestable certitudes sparked irreconcilable social disputes. (p. 68) Once we accept the Constitution of Knowledge and its norms for toleration and empiricism, differences of beliefs can serve a constructive purpose. When our ideas are contested and evaluated in an agreed-upon manner, using the scientific method as much as possible, the more accurate ideas tend to win out in the end. Thus, as a society we accumulate knowledge effectively, even though as individuals our nature is to be biased and emotionally attached to our beliefs. Under the Constitution of Knowledge, the question of truth is never finally settled. Instead, there is an ongoing evolutionary process. New ideas, like new mutations or new businesses, mostly fail. But a few succeed dramatically well, and society moves ahead by exploiting the successful ideas and discarding the failures. For this evolutionary process to work well, we need to agree to abide by certain rules and norms. For example, because scientific data are important to the process, we need a strong norm against falsifying or misrepresenting data. But in the 21st century, Americans are suffering from rule-breakers in our midst.

Trolls and Cancelers In contemporary jargon, a troll is someone who makes provocative statements in order to attract attention. Trolls do not contribute to the reality-based community. On the contrary, they make a mockery of truth seeking. They promulgate falsehoods and conspiracy theories. When refuted, they merely repeat a lie or go on to tell another. Rauch points out that these are the very same disinformation techniques employed by Communist regimes against democracies. The heart of a troll is nihilist. Studying the spread of hostile political rumors, several researchers… found that many trolls were motivated by a “need for chaos” and “a desire to tear down the system as such.” … From the beginning, troll culture leaned to the right…. People like Alex Jones, who were nonentities in the reality-based world, discovered they could build commercial empires as conspiracy theorists. (p. 180) Rauch recalls that In 2013 someone using the handle @backupwraith tweeted: “I firmly believe that @realDonaldTrump is the most superior troll on the whole of twitter.” Trump quoted the tweet with the comment: “A great compliment!” (p. 16) Note that this was years before Mr. Trump campaigned for the Presidency. Rauch argues that Mr. Trump knowingly used information-warfare tactics in order to undermine confidence in mainstream media, thereby creating a space in which he could lie and get away with it. While the Right was lining up behind the troller-in-chief, the Left was producing its own pathology: cancel culture. This form of information warfare uses threats and coercion. Rauch reminds us that in 1989, Iran’s autocrat, Ayatollah Khomeini reacted to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses by issuing a fatwa calling for the murder of Rushdie and anyone who assisted with the book’s publication. Although Rushdie survived by going into hiding, others were killed as Muslims carried out the fatwa. Many people who were not harmed physically were nonetheless intimidated. In the past few years, young progressives have issued their own fatwas, against people whose views they find offensive. Although they have not inspired the murder of their victims, they have caused them to be fired, shunned, and humiliated. This is cancel culture. Beyond the price that individuals have paid under cancel culture, Rauch argues that the intimidation of the rest of us threatens to ruin the Constitution of Knowledge. It replaces open debate with what Rauch refers to as “spirals of silence”: In principle, a view which may initially not represent a consensus at all, which indeed is in the distinct minority, can make itself first seem dominant and then actually become dominant as holdouts fall silent, succumb to doubt, or convert to what they think is the prevalent view. Spoofed consensus can become real consensus, or at least close enough to be indistinguishable. Moreover, as we know from totalitarian states, once the spiral forms, even obvious facts can fail for a long time to interrupt it. (p. 219)

Social or Anti-social? In theory, the Internet might have produced a golden age for the Constitution of Knowledge. It could speed up the evolution of ideas. “Unfortunately,” Rauch writes, … we forgot that staying in touch with reality depends on rules and institutions. We forgot that overcoming our cognitive and tribal biases depends on privileging those rules and institutions, not flattening them into featureless, formless “platforms.” In other words, we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology. Information can be simply emitted, but knowledge, the product of rich social interaction, must be achieved. Converting information into knowledge requires getting some important incentives and design choices right. Unfortunately, digital media got them wrong. … The metrics and optimization tools were sensitive to popularity but indifferent to truth. (pp. 143-144) Social media as currently structured serves to reward those who foster outrage and beat tribal drums, rather than reward those who are open minded and empiricist. The Constitution of Knowledge depersonalizes persuasion by attacking the hypothesis, not the person. In the reality-based community you can challenge someone’s credentials or track record, but your challenge needs to be measured, evidence-based, and impersonal—and your reputation will suffer if your challenge is abusive. By contrast, in the outrage industry, smearing and trolling are easy and effective ways to capture attention… The reality-based community is a professional network which rewards knowledge and expertise. By contrast, on social media, where attention is the coin of the realm, celebrity and virality are self-justifying… the medium turned out to favor professionals in the arts of manipulative outrage. (pp. 153-154) In short, social media facilitates and rewards trolling and canceling. It acts as an enabler for the enemies of the Constitution of Knowledge.

What About the Enemy Within? Rauch’s recommendations presume that twentieth-century institutions, especially journalism and academia, are basically healthy. The threat comes from outside those institutions. In the case of journalism, the barbarians are the technology companies and the trolls that they enable. In academia, it is the students who grew up in a culture that views disagreement and debate as a threat rather than as an opportunity. He believes that journalism can be fixed by changing the culture of new media giants to be more conducive to truth seeking. For example, he is optimistic that Facebook’s content moderation board can set standards that will bring Facebook content more in line with the Constitution of Knowledge. In the case of academia, Rauch sees one problem as an absence of ideological diversity. Although the Constitution of Knowledge can be served by a faculty that is mostly on the left, it cannot function where conservatives are absent altogether, as is the case in many disciplines nowadays. The other problem in academia is that too many students and faculty remain silent while the cancelers get their way. Rauch believes that they need to be more proactive in their defense of free speech. If Rauch has a blind spot, it is that he overlooks the deterioration that has taken place within twentieth-century institutions. He is unable or unwilling to recognize institutional decay. As one trivial example, Rauch quotes Lisa Page in one place and Peter Strzok elsewhere to buttress minor points. Rauch refers to each only as “a former FBI agent.” In fact, they were infamously lovers who boasted to one another in text messages about their intentions to bring down the Trump Presidency. When this was revealed, their superiors felt it necessary to take punitive action. Rauch mentions none of this, not even in a footnote. For me, this is equivalent to quoting Michael Milken on financial institutions without mentioning that he served time in prison for securities and tax violations.. As a professional journalist, if you view the accusations against Page and Strzok (or Milken) as overblown, then you owe it to the reader to say so, rather than going on as if their records were unblemished. A more significant example is when Rauch writes: Many people, to be sure, will pay a premium for reality-based content (aka “news”). As I drafted this chapter, the New York Times announced that its subscription base had topped 5 million. (p. 156)</li That is a very cheerful interpretation of the rise in NYT subscriptions in the Trump era. A quite different interpretation comes from Andrey Mir in Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. Mir sees the NYT not as beating the social media disinformation warriors, but joining them. In Mir’s view, opposition to Mr. Trump became a business model, gathering in subscribers who donated to the cause. Along the way, the NYT discarded the values of truth and journalistic integrity. Similarly, Rauch is unwilling to address the decay in academia. The culture of excellence has been undermined in many ways. Mediocrity has become endemic at all levels. Students gain admission by manipulating the process. With grade inflation and a generally forgiving environment, many graduate having undertaken little effort and accomplished minimal learning. But many others do not graduate at all, with only a debt burden to show for their excursion into higher education. Among faculty, new “disciplines” have emerged that lack standards for intellectual rigor. The intellectual weakness of these “___ studies” departments once was a source of embarrassment and insecurity for their faculty. Today, they are the tail that wags the academic dog. It is the traditional disciplines that now suffer embarrassment and insecurity, as they stand accused of having angered the Gods of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. For more on these topics, see the EconTalk podcast episodes Jonathan Rauch on the Constitution of Knowledge and Julia Galef on the Scout Mindset . See also “How Economics Drives News Media,” by Arnold Kling, Library of Economics and Liberty, July 5, 2021. When Rauch argues that the Constitution of Knowledge depends on strong institutions, I believe that he is correct. But to me, it does not look as though the twentieth-century institutions are going to come back. To revive the Constitution of Knowledge, we will need new institutions, where the incentive systems have not been gamed and the search for truth and excellence has not been undermined by power plays and conformity rituals.

Steven Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954 and is the Johnstone professor of psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research into visual cognition, psycholinguistics and social relations.
What’s your earliest memory?
It’s highly sensory and from the age of two: the soles of the feet of my pyjamas, with raised azure rubber dots.
Who are your heroes?
I’ve never had heroes. I appreciate people’s accomplishments while accepting them as human. 
What book last changed your thinking?
Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge softened my scepticism that social media fosters modern irrationality.
Which political figure do you look up to?
Eleanor Roosevelt, for shepherding along the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I also admire Mikhail Gorbachev for what he didn’t do: send in the tanks to preserve the Soviet empire at a cost of prolonging totalitarianism.
What would be your “Mastermind” specialist subject?
Photography. It engages my aesthetics, my interest in visual cognition and my love of gadgets.
[See also: Bill Bailey Q&A: “My earliest memory is the smell of nylon waterproofs in a hot car”]
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
New York City in the 1950s. That was the heyday of hard bop jazz, witty Broadway plays, the great American songbook, abstract expressionism, modernist architecture such as the UN headquarters, and the Greenwich Village beat scene.
What TV show could you not live without?
I’m still alive because I’m a serial series binger: The Sopranos, Veep, Silicon Valley, Shetland, Shtisel, Call My Agent, Babylon Berlin, Family Business, Rake.
Who would paint your portrait?
Annie Leibovitz would shoot it.  
What’s your theme tune?
For 25 years I’ve played “Journey to the Center of the Mind”, the only hit by the Amboy Dukes, at the start of my introductory psychology course. Musically superior are two songs called “Think”, one by Aretha Franklin, one by James Brown.  
[See also: Rachel Kyte Q&A: “My carbon footprint is a source of deep discomfort”]
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Before I wrote The Language Instinct, an editor told me that most academics fail to reach a general audience because they treat readers as unintellectual simpletons. She advised me to think of them as intelligent and curious peers who happen not to know certain things that I know.
What’s currently bugging you?
The stupidification of academia in pursuit of dubious “social justice”: logical and statistical fallacies, primitive word magic, character assassination, censoring and memory holing controversial articles, rhetorical dirty tricks such as straw men and guilt by association.
What single thing would make your life better?
Happiness in the people I love.
When were you happiest?
Given my good fortune, singling out any time but “right now” would be cosmic ingratitude. 
[See also: David Thewlis Q&A: “When would I like to live? Any time before all this nonsense began”]
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
A constitutional lawyer, paid to engage in conceptual and moral argumentation. 
Are we all doomed?
In the long run, yes. Biologists say that to an excellent first approximation (99.9 per cent), all species that have ever lived are extinct; we’re unlikely to be the one that cheats death forever. But in the next century, almost certainly not. 
“Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” by Steven Pinker is published by Allen Lane

Many universities have announced a pivot to remote learning for at least part of January, among them UCLA, Columbia, Duke, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan State. The list goes on.This move—in response to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant—feels like a return to March 2020, when virtually all U.S. universities closed for in-person learning, sending students home for spring break and telling them not to come back. At that point, keeping students away from campus was reasonable. Now, however, this decision is a mistake. It reflects an outmoded level of caution. And it represents a failure of universities to protect their students’ interests.Even before vaccines, most college students were at low risk for serious illness from COVID. The people around them, however, were not necessarily. Few Americans had acquired natural immunity. The specter of a student outbreak spreading to higher-risk staff and into the community was very real.[Read: Stop wasting COVID tests, people]When vaccines arrived, universities were out in front in mandating them for students, faculty, and staff. Within the past few weeks, many have also mandated booster shots. Beyond campuses, moreover, vaccines and boosters have been freely, widely available for many months. Anyone who has not been vaccinated at this point is making a conscious choice.The world has changed. Yet the rise of the Omicron variant and the ensuing spike in COVID cases have led many university administrators to articulate the same old concerns: Students could possibly spread the virus to community members, who could in turn end up in hospitals, which could be overwhelmed. Such a chain reaction is of course possible, but the probabilities are not what they used to be, because the great majority of students are now vaccinated and the percentage of people in the surrounding communities who are at risk of landing in the hospital is much, much smaller than it used to be. (The vulnerable population includes those who are unvaccinated by choice and those who are immunocompromised.)From some corners, this concern for the surrounding community will be met with applause. In my view, however, it ignores the primary group that a university serves: its students. Moving to remote schooling when the conditions on the ground have changed so dramatically is an abdication of universities’ responsibility to educate students and protect all aspects of their health.College students are in the midst of a mental-health crisis. Surveys show rising anxiety and depression in this population, including suicidal thoughts. One survey reported that 95 percent of college students have experienced at least one mental-health issue during the pandemic. Not all of these problems are driven by remote schooling, of course, but the top issue cited in that survey was loneliness and isolation, and it’s difficult not to make the connection.Measuring learning losses at the college level is more difficult than at the K–12 level, where they have been substantial. But if you ask virtually any faculty member, they will tell you that while some students do fine and some courses port well to an online format, many do not. Getting through to 50 screens on Zoom is far more challenging than to 50 people sitting in front of you. Students may struggle to focus on even the best lecture in the world if that lecture is on their computer.  [Jessica McCrory Calarco: Why parents kept their kids home from school]I’m a professor at Brown University, which last academic year moved many classes online. Unlike some of our peer institutions, however, Brown did allow faculty to teach smaller classes in person if they chose. I took that option in the spring. My class of 19 was mostly seniors, who in another universe would have been celebrating their way through their final semester of college. Many of them told me that attending my class was the only time they left their apartment other than to get tested for COVID. No surprise, several moved home mid-semester, and onto Zoom. I’m having some mental-health issues, they told me.I don’t know if universities were right to go largely or fully remote in 2020. The world before vaccines was a different one, and the choices were difficult. I am certain, though, that moving to remote instruction is the wrong choice now. Universities do have a responsibility to the wider community. They can fulfill this responsibility through mandating vaccines and boosters for their students and employees. They can provide other help to the community as well through testing capacity or vaccine clinics, or even by encouraging students to assist with the child-care-staffing crisis or by providing expertise in public-health guidance.But universities also have a responsibility to their students. And this is not just a minor responsibility; it is their core responsibility. Parents entrust their children to universities. Many professors—myself included—have looked those parents in the eye and told them a version of I will watch out for your child. We have a responsibility to follow through on this now. We can do it very simply: by letting them go to school.A couple of weeks ago, Brown announced we would be back in January, in person, as planned. This wasn’t a decision the administrators took lightly, I am sure. But it was the right one. I’ll be back in the classroom, with my students, where they belong.

Long ago, on my father’s farm, we had a particularly bumptious, mischievous, even aggressive cow called Arusha. The herdsman, musing one day on her obstreperous behaviour, remarked, “Seems to me, Arusha is more like a cross between a bull and a cow.”

Er, yes!

Arusha came to mind recently when I was interviewed by Josh Glancy of the Sunday Times. The interview was supposed to be on my new book, Flights of Fancy—about all the ways birds, bats, pterosaurs, insects and humans can defy the mundane pull of gravity. But in addition, perhaps pressed by his editor to deliver the kind of clickbait to which birds and bats cannot rise, Glancy mentioned that I had been publicly disowned by the American Humanist Association. Having named me as their Humanist of the Year in 1996, they retrospectively negated the honour in 2021. The reason? A tweet inviting discussion about the habit of “identifying as.”

In Glancy’s words,

“Back in April, Dawkins caused offence when he wondered why identifying across racial barriers is so much more difficult than across sexual barriers. He wrote: ‘In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.’”

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 10, 2021

A lifetime as an Oxford tutor has ingrained in me the Socratic habit of raising questions for discussion, often topics with a mildly paradoxical flavour, conundrums, apparent contradictions or inconsistencies that seem to need a bit of sorting out. I have continued the habit on Twitter, often ending my tweets with the word, “Discuss.” That tweet was one such. Here are two other typical examples of raising a question to stimulate discussion:

Ants communicate by slow-diffusing chemicals (pheromones). If their brains had radio-speed links, would “distributed consciousness” emerge at the colony level, while no individual ant had any conscious awareness at all? Discuss, perhaps with reference to the Internet. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 13, 2021

Conjecture: “There must be a moment in history when two siblings born to the same mother were destined, one to become the ancestor of all humans and the other to become the ancestor of all wombats.” Is the conjecture necessarily true? Discuss. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) November 14, 2021

The second question, by the way, has the interesting property that some people think the conjecture is obviously and trivially true, others that it is obviously and trivially false—binary opposite “trivially obvious” opinions. The answer (spelled out in The Ancestor’s Tale) is that the conjecture is true but by no means obvious.

What is obvious—it is second nature to any teacher worth the name—is that inviting discussion of a question is not the same as taking a position on the answer. Nevertheless, Glancy invited me to take a position: to enter, as it were, the discussion I had initiated with my Rachel Dolezal tweet. And so I said to him the following:

Race is very much a spectrum. Most African-Americans are mixed race, so there really is a spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very slight [African inheritance]. People who have one great-grandparent who is Native American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you could choose what to identify as.

The Sunday Times condensed my words into the headline that I have adopted for this piece: Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary. Unlike my wombat conjecture, this point really is childishly obvious. When a female and a male mate, each offspring is either female or male, extremely seldom a hermaphrodite or intersex of any kind. Arusha really was a cow, not a half-way bull. But her intermediate colouring made us suspect that this “pedigree Jersey” was actually half Ayrshire—an artificial insemination screw-up. When two people of different races mate, their offspring is of mixed race and this shows itself in many ways, including skin colour. After generations of intermarriage, beginning with the exploitation of enslaved women and girls, African Americans constitute a rich spectrum such that some individuals, when required to tick the “race or ethnicity” box on official forms, might justifiably feel free to “identify as” whatever they choose.

The Duchess of Sussex identifies as “mixed race” but is frequently referred to in the press as black. Barack Obama sees himself (and is commonly described) as black although, having one white parent, he might equally well tick the white box. The “one-drop rule,” once enshrined in the laws of some segregationist states, asserted that one drop of African “blood” was enough to make a person count as black—thus making blackness the cultural equivalent of a genetic dominant. It never worked in reverse, and it still exerts a powerful hold on American discourse—while “African Americans” actually run a smooth gamut from those of pure African descent to those with perhaps one African great great grandparent. Were race not a spectrum, Rachel Dolezal’s critics should have spotted that she wasn’t “really” black, simply by taking one look at her. It’s precisely because black Americans are a spectrum that it wasn’t obvious. With negligible exceptions, on the other hand, you can unwaveringly identify a person’s sex at a glance, especially if they remove their clothes. Sex is pretty damn binary.

If I chose to identify as a hippopotamus, you would rightly say I was being ridiculous. The claim is too facetiously at variance with reality. It’s marginally more ridiculous than the Church’s Aristotelian casuistry in identifying the “substance” of blood with wine and body with bread, while the “accidentals” safely remain an alcoholic beverage and a wafer. Not at all ridiculous, however, was James Morris’s choice to identify as a woman and his gruelling and costly transition to Jan Morris. Her explanation, in Conundrum, of how she always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body is eloquent and moving. It rings agonizingly true and earns our deep sympathy. We rightly address her with feminine pronouns, and treat her as a woman in social interactions. We should do the same with others in her situation, honest and decent people who have wrestled all their lives with the distressing condition known as gender dysphoria.

Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly. I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.” For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.

Changing your “race” should be even easier if you adopt the fashionable doctrine that race is a “social construct” with no biological reality. It’s less easy with sex, to say the least. Even the most right-on sociologist might struggle to argue that a penis is a social construct. Gender theorists bypass the annoying problem of reality by decreeing that you are what you feel, regardless of biology. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman even if you have a penis. It would seem to follow that, if feelings really are all that matter, Rachel Dolezal’s claim to feel black, regardless of biology, should merit at least a tiny modicum of sympathetic discussion, if not outright acceptance.

Changing the subject to something much more interesting, the binary nature of sex very nearly handed Charles Darwin the key to discovering the genetic laws now correctly attributed to Gregor Mendel. What we call “Neo-Darwinism” (see below) would not have had to wait till the twentieth century, and would indeed be just plain “Darwinism”—the great naturalist came that close. And it was the binary nature of sex that brought him there.

Darwin was troubled by an anonymous 1867 article in the North British Review, which later turned out to be by Fleeming (pronounced “Flemming”) Jenkin, a Scottish engineer who coincidentally worked on the transatlantic cable with Darwin’s other leading critic, Lord Kelvin the eminent physicist. Jenkin’s argument was couched in the horribly racist terms that were part of the intellectual wallpaper of the time, so I’ll rephrase it more neutrally to avoid distraction. A new genetic type (we’d nowadays call it a mutant) couldn’t be favoured in the long term by natural selection, said Jenkin, because it would be swamped. No matter how beneficial at first, as the generations go by it would be diluted to nothing. Darwin was convinced by the argument and it’s a shame he didn’t live to see the fallacy exposed. Jenkin and Darwin, and everybody else at the time, wrongly assumed that heredity was “blending” and that children were a kind of fluid mixture of mother and father: intermediate, like mixing paint. If you mix black with white paint you get grey, and no amount of mixing grey with grey can reconstitute the original black or white. Therefore, so the erroneous argument ran, selection can’t favour a new mutation so that it comes to dominate a population. It will be diluted out of existence as the generations go by.

It should have been noticed at the time, by the way, that Jenkin’s argument is obviously wrong. If it were right, we should all look more uniform than our grandparents’ generation—like mixing paint, then mixing it again. Jenkin should have realised that he was arguing not just against Darwin but against manifest reality.

Darwin’s acceptance of the criticism, and his consequent rowing back on his convictions, is one of several reasons why later editions of Origin of Species are inferior to the first edition. Darwin was typically right the first time. Jenkin was wrong because “blending inheritance” is false. Inheritance is Mendelian, which is the very antithesis of blending. Genes (as they are now called) are particulate. Heredity is digital, not analogue. Mixing paint is a deeply false analogy. The truth is more like shuffling black and white beads. Beads don’t blend into a grey smudge, they retain their black or white identity. Every gene in a father or mother either is, or is not, passed on to each child as a discrete, particulate entity. As the generations go by, a gene (in the form of copies) either increases or decreases in frequency. Paint doesn’t have frequency.

Although Mendel’s work was published in Darwin’s lifetime, Darwin never read it (his German wasn’t great anyway) and there’s no evidence that Mendel himself, or indeed anybody else, realised its profound significance for evolutionary theory until both Darwin and Mendel were dead. Mendel’s work was rediscovered in the early twentieth century.

The blending fallacy was immediately demonstrated mathematically by Hardy and Weinberg independently. And its significance for evolution is clearly set out in Chapter One of The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection by Sir Ronald Fisher, arguably the greatest Darwinian since Darwin. Fisher and others developed the point into what became the aforementioned Neo-Darwinism. Under Neo-Darwinism, evolution is changes in frequencies of discrete, particulate genes in population gene pools.

Intriguingly, Fisher quotes an 1857 letter from Darwin to T. H. Huxley, showing that he came near to discovering particulate inheritance himself, or at least to noticing the fallacy of “blending inheritance”:

I have lately been inclined to speculate, very crudely and indistinctly, that propagation by true fertilization will turn out to be a sort of mixture, and not true fusion, of two distinct individuals, or rather of innumerable individuals, as each parent has its parents and ancestors. I can understand on no other view the way in which crossed forms go back to so large an extent to ancestral forms. But all this, of course, is infinitely crude.

But even Fisher didn’t realise quite how tantalisingly close Darwin came to independently discovering Mendelian inheritance, indeed, even working with peas, as Mendel did. In an 1866 letter to A. R. Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, Darwin writes:

My dear Wallace …

I do not think you understand what I mean by the non-blending of certain varieties … an instance will explain. I crossed the Painted Lady and Purple sweetpeas, which are very differently coloured varieties, and got, even out of the same pod, both varieties perfect but none intermediate. Something of this kind I should think must occur at least with your butterflies & the three forms of Lythrum; tho’ these cases are in appearance so wonderful, I do not know that they are really more so than every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring …

Believe me, yours very sincerely

Ch. Darwin

The bold type emphasis is mine. This was Darwin’s way of saying that sex is pretty damn binary. He was on the verge of generalising this to the Mendelian point that inheritance itself is pretty damn binary: every one of your genes comes from either your father or your mother. No gene is a mixture of paternal with maternal. Every gene either marches on to the next generation or it doesn’t. Genes never mix like paint. Nor does sex, and that almost gave Darwin the clue.

The reason inheritance often seems to be blending—the reason we seem to be a mixture of paternal with maternal, and the reason racial intermarriage leads to a spectrum of intermediates—is polygenes. Though every gene is particulate, lots of genes each contribute their own small effect to, for example, skin colour. And all these small effects together add up to what looks intermediate. It isn’t really like mixing paint but it looks that way if enough particulate polygenes sum up their small effects. If you mix beads it looks that way too, if the beads are small, numerous and viewed from a distance.

Anyway, the point that is relevant to this essay is that particulate, Mendelian, all-or-none, non-blending inheritance was staring Darwin, and Jenkin, and everybody else in the face. It was staring them in the face all along, in the form of the non-blending inheritance of sex. Sex is pretty damn binary. Male versus female is one of surprisingly few genuine dichotomies that can justly escape censure for what I have called “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind.”

Discuss.

I have some good news and some bad news, and they’re both the same.

Seven independent lab studies have found that while Omicron’s mutations make it exceptionally good at causing breakthrough cases even in people who have been vaccinated or previously infected, they also render it less able to effectively infect the lower lungs, a step associated with more serious illness. Plus, in country after country where Omicron has spread, epidemiological data shows that vaccines are still helping prevent severe disease or worse.

Why isn’t that unalloyed good news? Because it’s just luck that this highly transmissible variant appears to be less dangerous than other variants to those with prior immunity. If it had been more deadly — as Delta has been — the U.S. government’s haphazard and disorganized response would have put the whole country much more at risk. Even with this more moderate threat, the highest-ranking public health officials are making statements that seem more aimed at covering up or making excuses for ongoing failures, rather than leveling with the public.

Nowhere are these issues more apparent than on the confusing and zigzag messaging around rapid antigen tests and N95 masks, both of which are important weapons in our arsenal.

With a barrage of cases threatening vital services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Dec. 29 that people could return to work, masked, five days after they first learned they were infected, arguing that many people are infectious for only a short period. People could return to work even while still sick, as long as their symptoms were abating.

We think we know more than those who came before. Our impressions are novel, ours are the way ahead.

But people way back, despite how quaint they might seem to us now, felt the same way we do. E.L. Doctorow got this just right in “The Waterworks,” set in the Gilded Age in New York City, in which the story’s narrator reminds us early on: “You may think you are living in modern times, here and now, but that is the necessary illusion of every age. We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There was nothing quaint or colorful about us.”

And yet just as that waistcoated, mutton-chop-whiskered, horse-drawn New York looks antiquated, if charming, to us now, we, too, in many of our takes on things (not to mention our attire) will look quite antique and peculiar before we know it.

This occurred to me when I was recently referred to a piece about language from 1946. It was by one of the intellectuals I most revere, Jacques Barzun. He was a historian (as if one academic classification could describe this mega-intellectual Renaissance man) at my own Columbia University during much of the 20th century, a career that included helping develop Columbia’s Great Books courses — the same curriculum I wrote about last month. He lived an unusually long life, dying at 104 in 2012, and was vigorously productive until close to the end.

And speaking of Great Books, one of the 10 greatest books I’ve ever known is one Barzun finished in his 90s, “From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present — 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.” This survey of Western intellectual history has left me in utter awe for years now, and eternally influenced my writing style, my bookshelf and my worldview. One must revisit it yearly along with one’s photo albums, cherished recipes, and either Coltrane or Brahms depending on mood (maybe I’m getting a little specific).

By now, even people who differ on nearly all issues seem to agree on at least one thing: American politics has become riven by tribal conflict. Tucker Carlson claims that “schools are creating tribalism in our kids.” Former President Barack Obama has warned that we risk “turning away from democratic principles in favor of tribalism and ‘might makes right.’” As the journalist George Packer, now of The Atlantic, once summarized the problem, “American politics today requires a word as primal as ‘tribe’ to get at the blind allegiances and huge passions of partisan affiliation. Tribes demand loyalty, and in return they confer the security of belonging. They’re badges of identity, not of thought.” The underlying psychology of “us and them” appears grounded in deep-rooted human tendencies to carve the world into groups and discriminate in favor of one’s own.But although the notion that group solidarity leads inevitably to prejudice, animosity, and conflict is common, it is also incorrect and potentially dangerous.Humans do seem to possess the innate capacity to identify with members of their own groups. People in every culture share the same propensity to form coalitions. This tendency is what the anthropologist Donald Brown calls a “human universal.” But it does not lead inexorably toward intergroup conflict. “Groupishness”—a term some researchers use to describe humans’ tendency to identify with social groups—can be the source of a much wider repertoire of actions, including cooperation, altruism, embracing diversity, and helping people radically different from ourselves.[Read: The threat of tribalism]In our new book, the two of us argue that, to explain collective behavior, researchers and commentators must distinguish between two key concepts: how strongly members identify with their group and its norms. Some members of the same group, for example, often feel a stronger sense of connection to the collective than others. Holiday Catholics are less committed than worshippers who attend every Mass. Zealous sports fans attend every home game and despise fickle supporters who pay attention only when their team makes the playoffs.Members who strongly identify with a group generally conform more to its norms. But those norms vary dramatically. For every hate group, another group, such as the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders, exists that is committed to helping others. And the more deeply members identify with the latter, the more likely they are to help people different from themselves—even at significant personal cost. Recognizing that collective norms can be either positive or negative is a key to understanding why and when tribalism occurs. It also suggests how different groups can find common ground.When people use the term tribalism, they are usually aiming to capture a toxic dynamic in collective life, such as the one that characterizes much of contemporary American politics. But what happens between groups is often both a symptom and a reinforcer of unhealthy patterns within individual groups as well. Such patterns include the suppression of dissenting voices and a cult mentality in which members seek only to affirm one another’s worldview.These characteristics describe how people can behave in groups, but they do not always apply. Indeed, in most cases, they do not. If you think about the many groups in your life, such as your workplace or your daughter’s soccer team, how many of them are at war with a sinister outgroup and try to suppress intergroup contact or internal dissent? Neither of us belongs to many, if any, groups that fit this description.When humans identify with a group, we are motivated to pursue the group’s interests and goals. But while that feeling provides the fuel for collective action, group norms set the direction, determining what forms those actions take. In some experiments, psychology researchers have sought to manipulate whether people believe that their own group tries to treat outsiders fairly. Participants who are led to believe that their group normalizes fairness engage in less in-group favoritism than do people who think that their group has a discriminatory norm.Rather than adopting discriminatory norms, real-life groups can and often do embrace norms of tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion. In a recent experiment, social psychologists questioned Italian high schoolers to discern which of their classmates, in the students’ view, best represented the group norm. Students who believed that their most prototypical classmate would take action to support immigrants expressed greater willingness to organize an event for World Refugee Day or attend a pro-immigrant demonstration.Strikingly, the influence of the quintessential group member was greatest among students who identified strongly with their group. These were the people who agreed with statements such as “I often think about the fact I am a member of this class” and “I have a lot in common with other classmates.” The two of us are immigrants, and these findings give us hope. As the researchers put it, “Ingroup prototypes can have a key role in mobilizing advantaged group members in pursuit of a more equal society.”[Read: The tragedy of President Trump’s tribalism]The power of group norms has long been recognized in other domains. For example, young people’s drug and alcohol use or risky sexual behavior is heavily influenced by what they believe their peers do. This insight has led to promising interventions: Learning that others in your group drink less alcohol than you do can persuade you to cut back on your own excessive consumption. Many students overestimate how much their peers drink. In one study, university freshmen who received accurate information about drinking behavior by students of their own gender reported imbibing about 25 percent fewer drinks a week five months later.Sohad Murrar and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison recently applied the same idea to intergroup relations. In recent years, universities and other organizations have invested heavily in training in which instructors extol the benefits of diversity and urge participants to be mindful of their own implicit biases. But those initiatives have a mixed record. Murrar’s team found that drawing people’s attention to social norms could produce much better results.For example, the researchers showed students five-minute videos suggesting that most peers at their university support diversity and try to behave in an inclusive manner. Almost immediately, attitudes toward outgroups and appreciation for diversity improved among students from non-marginalized groups. Most people want to fit in, and the promotion of inclusive social norms unlocked their desire to be good group members. This intervention also had a profound impact on students from historically marginalized groups, who reported that their peers were behaving more inclusively. They also experienced less anxiety, greater feelings of belonging, and even noted better physical health.Of course, universities are distinct places. In a broader society, the divides between groups are far deeper than on campus.  Yet most humans define themselves in multiple ways. People of different races, political parties, or religious beliefs can share identities professionally, as sports fans, or as citizens. All of these identities are alternative ways of perceiving ourselves and our social worlds, and all are opportunities for communality and solidarity. When Martin Luther King Jr. urged the United States to “live out the true meaning of its creed,” he was calling for new norms of racial equality that were nonetheless grounded in the bedrock of American national identity.Some identities cut across sectarian lines. Following the invasion and then defeat of ISIS in northern Iraq, the Christian and Muslim communities living there were left deeply divided. But they had something in common: a passion for soccer. In an extraordinary recent experiment, the political scientist Salma Mousa recruited amateur Christian soccer teams to join a new league. She arranged for half of the teams to remain all Christian, while the other half were joined by Muslim players. Playing together for a season with Muslim teammates made the Christian players express more inclusive attitudes. Compared with those on homogenous teams, the Christians on religously mixed teams were more prepared to train with Muslims in the future, vote for a Muslim player to win a prize, and sign up for a similar cross-religion experience the next season. The benefits appeared to be particularly pronounced for players on winning teams.   All of this contradicts commonly held notions about the tribal nature of group psychology. What many people call tribalism is not inevitable; rather, it’s a function of group norms. But the constant invocation of tribalism may create a self-fulfilling prophecy; people come to distrust other groups and falsely believe they need to discriminate against outsiders or suppress dissenters to maintain their status within their own group.Understanding how group identities combine with norms to shape human behavior also empowers people—and especially leaders—to focus more on cultivating healthy norms within their group. Rather than assuming that groups will slide into hostility and insularity, humans should hold ourselves to higher standards.

(Photo from Getty Images.)Late last week I had an experience that’s both completely normal and fundamentally absurd. It was this–I spent a ridiculous amount of time agonizing over the wording of a simple Twitter thread. I struggled to use exactly the right words to express what should be a completely normal and reasonable point. As some readers may know, after competing for three years as a male swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania (and earning all-Ivy honors) as a male, a transgender swimmer named Lia Thomas is now competing as a female, and dominating the competition. Thomas’s physical advantage is blatantly obvious. Yes, there are NCAA guidelines mandating testosterone suppressant, but testosterone suppressants don’t repeal puberty.Writing in Swimming World, editor-in-chief Don Lohn describes the problem well: Despite the hormone suppressants she has taken, in accordance with NCAA guidelines, Thomas’ male-puberty advantage has not been rolled back an adequate amount. The fact is, for nearly 20 years, she built muscle and benefited from the testosterone naturally produced by her body. That strength does not disappear overnight, nor with a year’s worth of suppressants. Consequently, Thomas dives into the water with an inherent advantage over those on the surrounding blocks.So, what was my point and what was my struggle? My point was that it is not invidious discrimination to prohibit a biological male from competing in female sports. Indeed, drawing rational distinctions between biological males and biological females might be necessary to protect equal opportunities for women to enjoy access to athletic opportunities. As I’ve written before, the phrase “invidious discrimination” is a legal term of art that refers to “a classification which is arbitrary, irrational and not reasonably related to a legitimate purpose.” Bans on invidious discrimination are legally proper and often necessary. Racial classifications, for example, are virtually always invidious. Sex-based classifications can be invidious as well, but sometimes they’re benign. Sometimes they’re even necessary.To take an obvious example, segregating bathrooms or showers by race is invidious. By contrast, segregating bathrooms and showers by sex isn’t just rational, it’s prudent. There’s absolutely such a thing as invidious discrimination against transgender Americans–imagine if teachers marked down trans students simply because they were trans, or if employers fired productive employees simply because they were trans. But drawing biological sex-based distinctions in sports not only isn’t invidious, it protects women from unfairness. What was my struggle? I wasn’t afraid of cancellation. The Twitter world is full of broadsides against Thomas and the NCAA, and there are legions of right-wing voices who relish taking on this issue, and doing so as contemptuously and snarkily as possible and bask in thunderous applause of their tribe. Besides, thanks to my readers, I’m pretty tough to cancel anyway. No my struggle was simply this: How do I make my point in a way that skeptical and hostile readers will hear it and consider it, rather than simply dismissing it out of hand as the bigoted rantings of a hateful Evangelical? After all, I don’t just want to be heard. I want to persuade. I believe what I’m saying is true, and I want readers to at least consider my words.Take transgender rights—or virtually any contentious issue–and you’ll find that there are million different ways that people will not just reject your reasoning but refuse to engage with you at all. You’re the “wrong” speaker (who wants to hear from a cishet Evangelical?) You chose the “wrong” words (did he use the acceptable pronouns? Was his language offensive in any other way?) You have the “wrong” priorities (American democracy is in peril, and we’re talking about a single trans swimmer at a single school?) At any rate, this was my short thread. You can determine whether I made my points in a way that skeptics at least might listen:David French @DavidAFrenchA legal thread. Stories like this show why it's incredibly important to distinguish between discrimination and "invidious" discrimination. It's proper for the law to prohibit invidious discrimination, but sometimes it's necessary to protect other distinctions. /1 New York Post @nypostTransgender swimmer Lia Thomas' teammates considered boycotting final meet in protest https://t.co/itX9EGHHr5 https://t.co/ZFDo4gD4efDecember 31st 202143 Retweets251 LikesDespite that long introduction, this isn’t a newsletter about transgender athletes. It’s about something much deeper and more consequential. It’s about one of the most common and pernicious ways in which we lose the ability to hear the truth. In many ways, it’s about how we defend ourselves from the truth. Let me introduce you to the “process foul.”A process foul is any perceived breach of trust or decorum in the delivery of the message that distracts from the substance of the message. To be crystal clear, I’m not remotely arguing that process doesn’t matter. Indeed, if you’re about to have a tough conversation (say, for example, an intervention) with a person you love, you often obsess about the process, almost to the exclusion of substance. Do you talk on the phone or gather in person? If in person, where? Who should be in the room? Who should speak first? Who shouldn’t speak at all? Indeed, taking exquisite care in the process of communicating difficult truths is an act of love. We’re talking to human beings, after all, not factbots who can simply hear a hard word (“Dude, you drink too much”) and respond accordingly.Process is so important to persuasion that the persuasion industry is consumed by concepts like manner and method. When I litigated, I didn’t just try to master the facts and law of the case, but I practiced my delivery to the judge and the jury. I worried about my ties. I talked to my client about his demeanor on the stand and even while simply sitting at the counsel’s table. Why do southern trial lawyers have the most impressive accents in the South? Process, not substance. It’s an almost unconscious affectation that says to the jury, “I’m real. I’m you.”The problem, however, should be obvious. Our concerns about process can overwhelm our concerns about truth, and our sense of entitlement about process can completely wall us off from hearing–much less believing–difficult truths. And once you see the process objections in American politics, you can’t unsee them. They dominate our discourse.In my experience, here are the four most common “wrongs” that prevent us from hearing and understanding what’s right.Wrong messenger. This is perhaps the easiest and most popular method of discounting uncomfortable information. Once you categorize someone as “Never Trump” or a “warmonger” or “fake news” or then you’ve put on the bulletproof vest. Nothing that comes out of his or her mouth will penetrate your armor.Wrong motives. Arguments over, for example, the so-called “Evangelical elite” often center around motive. We place a condition on truth that says, “I will listen to true things only when spoken for the right reasons.” After all, why should anyone listen to a “grifter”? And I definitely shouldn’t listen to anyone who’s simply trying to “curry favor with the left” or “wants to be accepted by the elite.” And who makes the judgment about motive? How do we have confidence that we can peer into a man or woman’s heart and know their motivations. I appreciated these words from Thomas Sowell:Thomas Sowell @ThomasSowellIt is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.December 31st 20214,071 Retweets16,224 LikesWrong manner. In our populist age, there are few more deadly accusations than condescension or elitism. There are cases where even the assertion of any kind of expertise is virtually self-discrediting. In far-left spaces, ever-shifting and intolerant language norms can mean that ordinary people can find themselves struggling to even find the right words to discuss contentious topics. Even words like “racism” are subject to different, evolving meanings, and certain terms of art, like “land acknowledgment” or “BIPOC” separate individuals into separate classes of understanding. Wrong target. This is perhaps the most subtle and versatile of the process fouls. It’s how you can still be wrong even when you’re right. It encompasses concepts like “punching down” (people with larger platforms shouldn’t take on those with less influence), misplaced priorities (you’re squeezing out the gnat and swallowing the camel), and whataboutism (Donald Trump has abused women? What about Bill Clinton? Donald Trump hasn’t accepted the results of his election? What about Stacey Abrams?)The process of communication is laden with reciprocal responsibilities. As a communicator, my job is to do my best to know my audience, to understand them, and to speak in words that I believe they’ll hear. In other words, my job isn’t to fly over the target, dump my truth bombs like I’m a B-52 over Hanoi, and then log off congratulating myself for a job well done. I especially shouldn’t congratulate myself for my “bravery” when the response is exactly the flak I was told to expect–or even perhaps hoped to receive. As a listener, however, I have my own responsibilities. I should do my best to shun the calling of process fouls and listen hard to substance. This is not easy. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned have come from the most unlikely teachers. Some of the harshest words spoken to me have turned out to be the most true. One way that truth dies is that when we place such exacting preconditions on its delivery into our lives that there is virtually no messenger or message that can penetrate our hearts.Let’s make this lesson a bit personal. Just before Christmas a pastor in my denomination named Kevin DeYoung wrote a piece in a Christian magazine called World called “The Temptation of the Jeremiad” that gained some traction in my little corner of the world. It was aimed mainly at me and the way in which I’ve mounted various critiques of white Evangelical politics and cultural engagement in the age of Trump.I don’t know Kevin, but I have many friends who do. I respect his work a great deal, and so I listen to his critiques carefully. While he agrees with some things I say, these two paragraphs contain his core complaint:And this is my biggest complaint with the white evangelical jeremiad. It has the same head-shaking “you people” vibe that prompted the “deplorables” to embrace Trump in the first place. It’s one thing to object to an idea or to a set of propositions. It’s another to object to a class of people. Even if French is right, and evangelicals should not have supported (voted for?) Trump and evangelicals should not be skeptical about many of the Covid protocols, there is little sympathy for trying to understand why evangelicals might have behaved in these ways. There is no persuasion, only pique and annoyance.And:At the risk of seeming biased toward my own profession, I can’t help but notice that the leading voices decrying the moral bankruptcy of white evangelicalism are not pastors but professional writers, academics, and full-time commentators. Given the nature of these vocations—valuable, honorable vocations—it is easier to produce frequent jeremiads against the church than to produce a positive vision for the church. If your natural rhythm is not the whole counsel of God Sunday after Sunday, but another critique of the church in your inbox on Sunday morning, that should tell you something. The Lord knows there is much to criticize in the church, but I doubt that relentless, unsympathetic, exasperated censure against one specific people is the best way to convince them of your criticisms, let alone build them up in Christ.These are textbook process fouls. I’m the wrong messenger–not a pastor–delivering the message in the wrong way (with a “head-shaking ‘you people’ vibe’). He says that even if I’m right there is “little sympathy for trying to understand why evangelicals might have behaved in these ways.” I write “only” with “pique and annoyance.”But this doesn’t mean I should disregard what DeYoung says. If I’m trying to communicate things that I believe to be both true and gravely important, and a thoughtful man says I’m communicating through “pique and annoyance” then I need to think very hard about how I write. In fact, I need to repent of my initial response to this essay. Since I believe he mischaracterized much of my work, my initial response was purely reactionary. I defended myself. But I should have reflected more. I should still reflect. As a communicator, am I failing in my responsibilities? Am I communicating a message that I do not intend? At the same time, this sentence from DeYoung troubled me greatly: “It [my work] has the same head-shaking ‘you people’ vibe that prompted the ‘deplorables’ to embrace Trump in the first place.”This is the dark place that an emphasis on process over substance can take you. A distaste for a person’s tone should never “prompt” anyone to “embrace” a man like Trump. After all, even granting that my tone can be better, is that a reason to embrace a person whose tone is inarguably much worse and whose grasp on the truth is inarguably far more tenuous? Are people placing so many preconditions on critique that they’ve effectively walled themselves off from hard truths?When we’re communicating, we should care about people, and that means caring about process and truth. We should do our best as fallen and imperfect people to say true things in a careful, compassionate, and persuasive way. But we cannot ever allow often-shifting and sometimes-escalating demands about process to silence the truth.When we’re listening, by contrast, we should resist the urge to filter truth through process. Strange messenger? Fine. Heck, even one of Jesus’s disciples once tried to reject him by asking, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Obscure or tough delivery? That can work. Jesus often spoke in parables that few understood, and his own speech could be incredibly blunt and direct. And what about the prophets? Could they rake a man over the coals? Google the etymology of the word “jeremiad,” and you’ll find that answer fast.Wrong motives? Who cares? And besides, how can I presume to know a person’s true motivations?In a recent Atlantic essay I wrote about our incredibly difficult task. In an age of cruelty, how do we open ourselves to legitimate critique?  Here’s my answer: “The best folks I know have achieved the near impossible. They’ve constructed a thick skin while preserving an open heart. Their defense mechanisms are porous enough to allow fair critiques to penetrate while keeping the bad-faith actors at arm’s length.” Any other approach and our own heart and mind risk becoming the places where truth goes to die. One more thing …In the lastest Good Faith podcast, Curtis and I talk about how January 6 helped both of us understand that it was time to grow up. We have to be adults now. What does that mean? Please listen to the pod to find out. A personal update …I apologize for the lack of a Tuesday newsletter last week. COVID came to our house, and I caught a breakthrough infection, along with three other members of the family. As the old guy of the bunch, I fared the worst, but it was still never worse than a moderate flu (though with quirky and shifting symptoms!), and we all were on the mend by the end of the week. I’m grateful for the vaccine, and I’m grateful to have recovered so quickly. Millions have faced much greater challenges. One last thing …This is a marvelous hymn and feels right for the first days of a new year that already can feel full of more uncertainty than promise: 

 Jacob Lund/ShutterstockWe are in a crisis now – and omicron has made it harder to imagine the pandemic ending. But it will not last forever. When the COVID outbreak is over, what do we want the world to look like?
In the early stages of the pandemic – from March to July 2020 – a rapid return to normal was on everyone’s lips, reflecting the hope that the virus might be quickly brought under control. Since then, alternative slogans such as “build back better” have also become prominent, promising a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future based on significant or even radical change.
Returning to how things were, or moving on to something new – these are very different desires. But which is it that people want? In our recent research, we aimed to find out.
Along with Keri Facer of the University of Bristol, we conducted two studies, one in the summer of 2020 and another a year later. In these, we presented participants – a representative sample of 400 people from the UK and 600 from the US – with four possible futures, sketched in the table below. We designed these based on possible outcomes of the pandemic published in early 2020 in The Atlantic and The Conversation.
We were concerned with two aspects of the future: whether it would involve a “return to normal” or a progressive move to “build back better”, and whether it would concentrate power in the hands of government or return power to individuals.
Four possible futures

Back to normal – strong government
“Collective safety”

We don’t want any big changes to how the world works. We are happy for the government to keep its powers to keep us safe and get back on economic track.
 
Back to normal – individual autonomy
“For freedom”

We don’t want any big changes to how the world works; our priority is business as usual and safety. 
We want to take back from governments the powers they have claimed to limit our movements and monitor our data and behaviour.

Progressive – strong government
“Fairer future”

What we want is for governments to take strong action to deal with economic unfairness and the problem of climate change. 
We are happy for the government to keep its powers if it protects economic fairness, health and the environment.

Progressive – individual autonomy
“Grassroots leadership”

What we want is for communities, not governments, to work together to build a fair and environmentally friendly world. 

In both studies and in both countries, we found that people strongly preferred a progressive future over a return to normal. They also tended to prefer individual autonomy over strong government. On balance, across both experiments and both countries, the “grassroots leadership” proposal appeared to be most popular.
People’s political leanings affected preferences – those on the political right preferred a return to normal more than those on the left – yet intriguingly, strong opposition to a progressive future was quite limited, even among people on the right. This is encouraging because it suggests that opposition to “building back better” may be limited.
Our findings are consistent with other recent research, which suggests that even conservative voters want the environment to be at the heart of post-COVID economic reconstruction in the UK.
The misperceptions of the majority
This is what people wanted to happen – but how did they think things actually would end up? In both countries, participants felt that a return to normal was more likely than moving towards a progressive future. They also felt it was more likely that government would retain its power than return it to the people.
In other words, people thought they were unlikely to get the future they wanted. People want a progressive future but fear that they’ll get a return to normal with power vested in the government.
We also asked people to tell us what they thought others wanted. It turned out our participants thought that others wanted a return to normal much more than they actually did. This was observed in both the US and UK in both 2020 and 2021, though to varying extents.
This striking divergence between what people actually want, what they expect to get and what they think others want is what’s known as “pluralistic ignorance”.
This describes any situation where people who are in the majority think they are in the minority. Pluralistic ignorance can have problematic consequences because in the long run people often shift their attitudes towards what they perceive to be the prevailing norm. If people misperceive the norm, they may change their attitudes towards a minority opinion, rather than the minority adapting to the majority. This can be a problem if that minority opinion is a negative one – such as being opposed to vaccination, for example.
In our case, a consequence of pluralistic ignorance may be that a return to normal will become more acceptable in future, not because most people ever desired this outcome, but because they felt it was inevitable and that most others wanted it.

We think we know what other people think – but often we’re wrong.
dekazigzag/Shutterstock

Ultimately, this would mean that the actual preferences of the majority never find the political expression that, in a democracy, they deserve.
To counter pluralistic ignorance, we should therefore try to ensure that people know the public’s opinion. This is not merely a necessary countermeasure to pluralistic ignorance and its adverse consequences – people’s motivation also generally increases when they feel their preferences and goals are shared by others. Therefore, simply informing people that there’s a social consensus for a progressive future could be what unleashes the motivation needed to achieve it.
Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 964728 (JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from the Australian Research Council via a Discovery Grant to Ullrich Ecker, from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google), from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN), and from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. He also holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (no. 101020961, PRODEMINFO) and receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s Honesty Project).Ullrich Ecker receives funding from the Australian Research Council. 

I have been engaging on Twitter recently on my ideas on repealing Section 230. Not surprisingly, I provoked a considerable response. While much of it was angry ad hominems, some of it involved thoughtful comments, especially those from Jeff Koseff and Mike Masnick, the latter of whom took the time to write a full column responding to my proposals on repeal.

I will directly respond to Mike's column, but first I should probably outline again what I am proposing. I somewhat foolishly assumed that people had read myearlierpieces, and probably even more foolishly assumed anyone remembered them. So, I will first give the highlights of how I would like to see the law restructured and then respond to some of the points made by Mike and others.

Narrowing the Scope of 230

To my view, the best way to limit the power of a Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey to shape our political debates and influence elections is to downsize Facebook and Twitter, and possibly other sites, that can grow so large as to have an outsize influence on American politics. Restructuring the protection provided by Section 230 can be a way to accomplish this goal.

As it stands, Section 230 means that Facebook and Twitter cannot be sued for defamation for third-party content, either in the form of paid advertisements or for any defamatory material that might be contained in any of the billions of posts made on these sites every month. Newspapers and broadcast outlets do not enjoy this protection for third-party content.

I would propose taking away this protection for sites that either accept paid advertisements or sell personal information. This means that the only sites that would still have Section 230 protection would be sites that either had paid subscriptions or survived on donations.

Since it would not be practical for a major site like Facebook to monitor every post as it was made, I proposed a notification and takedown rule similar to what now exists with material alleged to be infringing on copyrights. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a website, such as Facebook, can be subject to penalties for copyright infringement, if they have been notified by the copyright holder and fail to take down the infringing material in a timely manner.

A similar rule can be put in place for allegedly defamatory material, where the person (or company) claiming defamation notifies the website, which then would have to remove the material in a timely manner in order to shield itself from potential liability.[1] Of course, many people could make complaints alleging defamation that are not justified. If a site owner has made this assessment, the site need not do anything, but it would then risk a lawsuit just as a newspaper or television station does now over circulating defamatory items.

This sort of change would not have much impact on the vast majority of websites. A business that has its own site would generally have no third-party content that it would need to worry about.

Some business sites do have customer reviews of products. For example, many retail sites allow customers to comment on items they purchased. These reviews could include some potentially defamatory comments.

A business could decide to preemptively get rid of its review section, avoiding any potential problems. Alternatively, it could take responsibility for monitoring its reviews and be prepared to remove potentially defamatory reviews if a complaint is made. (I assume that most of these review sections already require some degree of moderation, at least to remove comments that are obscene, racist, or in other ways offensive.) It may also, as a substitute, simply have links to sites that host reviews.

There are also a large number of sites that would still enjoy 230 protection by virtue of the fact that they do not have paid advertising or sell personal information. For example, this would be the case with most websites for policy organizations, universities, or other non-profits.

There would be a clear issue with many sites are essentially dependent on third-party content for their business. This would include sites like Yelp, which is based on customer reviews of businesses, or Airbnb, which prominently features guests' reviews of hosts.

Without Section 230 protection these sites could be held liable for defamatory comments in these reviews. These sites could make the decision to accept responsibility for moderation (they already moderate to exclude offensive content) and be prepared to remove posts that are called to their attention as potentially defamatory.[2]

Another option would be to go to a subscription model where users paid some monthly or annual fee for use of the service. Even large sites could be supported with a fairly limited number of subscribers paying a modest fee.

As I noted in an earlier Tweet thread, the employee-employer website Glassdoor had revenue of $170 million in 2020. This could be covered by 3 million people paying $5 a month or 1.5 million paying $10 a month. That hardly seems like a big leap for a major website.

It is more than a bit far-fetched to claim such fees would make these sites exclusively for the rich. In prior decades it was common for working-class and even poor people to have subscriptions to newspapers, which cost them far more in today's dollars than $10 a month. There are currently over 290 million smartphone users in the United States and almost all of them are paying far more than $10 a month for their service. Needless to say, we do not have 290 million rich people in this country.

Of course, there is no guarantee that every service that exists today on an advertising model would survive a switch to a paid circulation model, but so what? Companies go out of business all the time, that is capitalism. If it turned out that very few people were willing to shell out money for a site like Glassdoor, we can infer that there were not very many people who valued the site.

I don't mean to be glib about the prospect that sites that some people may value a great deal may not survive this sort of change in regimes, but almost policy that accomplishes anything positive will also have negative effects. The growth of Internet retailing put many old-line retailers out of business. And the growth of Facebook, partially fueled by Section 230 protection, has helped to put many newspapers out of business. If we think we have a policy that won't have any undesirable effects, then we probably don't understand the policy.

If we saw many sites switching to a paid circulation model, it is likely that we would see aggregators that charge a fee for access to a large number of sites. This would be similar to the combination of television channels offered by major cable providers. This means that instead of individually subscribing to Yelp, Glassdoor, etc., it would be possible to subscribe to a service that provided access to a wide range of sites.

It's understandable that people would not be happy about paying for access to sites that had previously been free, but we see this all the time. Most newspapers now have paywalls, and many don't even allow a single article to be viewed for free. (In the past, it was common for newspapers with paywalls to allow free access to some limited number of articles per month.)

Forty years ago, free broadcast television accounted for the vast majority of viewing. Households spent just $3.15 billion on cable TV in 1980, the equivalent (relative to the size of the economy) of $22.7 billion in 2020. By comparison, households spent $96.3 billion on cable television in 2020 (more than $700 per household), more than four times as much as in 1980.[3] In short, there is ample precedent for people being willing to pay for items that were formerly available for free, if they value them.

Would This Change Hurt Facebook?

Mike argues in his piece that changing Section 230 in the way that I have proposed would work to the benefit of Facebook, arguing that Facebook is actually now pushing for eliminating Section 230. It is true that Facebook is lobbying to have Section 230 changed, but it does not seem to be advocating eliminating this protection, at least for itself.

I'll confess to not fully understanding the changes Facebook is advocating, but according to the Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF), it would amount to protection from liability for defamation, if a company spent a certain proportion of its revenue monitoring its site for offensive, dangerous, or defamatory material. That is certainly not the same as asking Congress to eliminate Section 230 protection altogether. (The EFF piece is titled "Facebook's Pitch to Congress: Section 230 for Me, but not for Thee.")

If Facebook had to operate without Section 230 protection, as I am proposing, it could face liability for defamation if it left material posted after being given notice by someone claiming damages. It is possible that it would just ignore these notices and operate as it does currently, but it seems more likely that it would take down much of the material that provided the basis for complaints. In fact, if we can extrapolate from the experience with copyright infringement claims, websites have in general been overly cautious after being given notice, often removing material which is not actually infringing.[4]

If we assume Facebook goes the compliance route, many users will see posts removed from their Facebook page over claims that they are defamatory. It seems likely that this would upset users, causing many of them to look for sites that will not remove their posts. Since sites that did not depend on advertising or selling personal information would still enjoy Section 230 protection, it seems likely that many current users would opt to leave Facebook for these alternatives.

I also pointed out that as a simple financial matter, the Facebook leavers are likely to be more affluent, since they could easily afford the fees charged for a subscription site. While most households may be able to pay $5 or $10 for a subscription site, this expense would be trivial for the 30 plus percent of households with incomes over $100,000 a year.[5] This is the group that advertisers on Facebook are most interested in reaching. If a substantial percentage of higher-income users left Facebook, or used the site less frequently, it would be a big hit to the company's profits.

It is also worth noting that, even if alternative sites may be many magnitudes smaller in their potential reach than Facebook, this is not likely to make much difference to the overwhelming majority of Facebook users. While Facebook may have billions of users, almost none of its users will ever reach more than a tiny fraction of the total with their posts. If their friends and family members shared a site that was 0.01 percent as large as Facebook, in almost all cases they could count on reaching just as many viewers. As a practical matter, the billions of users that will never see a person's Facebook page are irrelevant to them.

The other possibility is that Facebook would simply ignore complaints and leave potentially defamatory material posted on its site. Masnick seems to think this is a possibility for Facebook:

"First off, the actual bar for defamation is quite high, especially for public figures. Baker, incorrectly, seems to think that merely saying something false about a public figure is defamatory. That's not how it works. It has to meet the standard of defamation, including the actual malice standard (which is not just that you were really mad when you said it). Second, and much more important for this situation, is that if the speaker was liable, that does not automatically mean that the intermediary would be liable. Under the two key cases prior to Section 230 becoming law, Cubby v. Compuserve and Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, the courts had to wrestle with what makes 3rd party intermediary liability consistent with the 1st Amendment."

Of course, the bar for defamation is high, and especially so for public figures. That doesn't mean that they are not brought and occasionally successful. General William Westmoreland suedCBS News in 1982 for a segment it did on his conduct during the Vietnam War. This suit survived summary judgement (wrong call in my view) and was settled just before the jury reached a verdict.

More recently, the former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura won a suit against American Sniper author Chris Kyle. After securing a judgement at the trial level, Ventura received an out-of-court settlement before the case was appealed.

But the issue of public figure defamation is the less important one. The overwhelming majority of defamation claims on a site like Facebook would not involve public figures but rather comments about a business or worker, friend, neighbor, or family member. It's not obvious why in these sorts of cases, that Facebook should enjoy a greater level of immunity (post-notification) than a newspaper or television station.

If a person had a letter printed in a newspaper, claiming that a restaurant served rotten meat, causing dozens of customers to get sick, the paper, and not just the letter writer, could be sued for libel if the claim was not true. Why should the restaurant have no recourse against Facebook, if it allowed this false claim to continue to circulate, even after they brought it to Facebook's attention?

Apart from the cost that news organizations incur when they defend against, and possibly lose, a defamation suit, they also incur considerable expenses to avoid facing suits. News outlets carefully comb investigative pieces to ensure that they do not contain potentially defamatory material. They review third-party submissions, such as columns and letters to the editor, the same way.

Section 230 ensures that Facebook does not now have to incur these expenses. Repealing this protection will unambiguously raise its costs, both relative to the outlets that do not now have Section 230 protection and also relative to sites that would still enjoy this protection.

It is not clear what constitutional issues Masnick envisions in holding intermediaries liable for carrying defamatory material. The two cases he cites both focus on whether the intermediary could have reasonably been expected to know of the defamatory material, at the time it was posted. In a case where Facebook has been given a takedown notice, they obviously have knowledge of the material. The courts have apparently not seen any First Amendment issues with holding intermediaries liable for carrying material that infringes on copyright, it's not clear why they would then hold that the First Amendment protects them from suits on hosting defamatory material.

Is Mark Zuckerberg a Good Guy and Should We Care?

Facebook has obviously made some effort to limit the amount of false and hateful material that circulates on its site. We can be thankful for this, even if we can debate whether it has done enough.

But the more fundamental question is whether such important decisions should be left to the discretion of a private company. The disproportionate control of the media by large corporations and wealthy individuals has long been a problem, but the situation is much more serious when a single company can have the reach of Facebook.

Even if people are reasonably satisfied with Mark Zuckerberg's moderation of Facebook, he is not going to be running the company forever. Would people be equally satisfied if some Koch-Murdoch-type billionaire were in control? Would it be okay if they started removing any content pointing out that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by a wide margin and that the allegations of vote fraud are absurd?

When a key communications outlet gets as large as Facebook it is a real problem. We can hope that it exercises its power responsibly, but the problem is that it has the power in the first place. At the same time, no one can reasonably want the government to dictate Facebook's moderation policy, which would raise all sorts of First Amendment issues.

The better answer lies in downsizing Facebook so that what Mark Zuckerberg, or any billionaire wants, doesn't matter so much. Taking away its Section 230 protection is an effective route to accomplish this goal.

[1] With a site like Facebook, which effectively has a record of who has viewed any post, there could be an additional requirement that all the users that viewed the defamatory item be notified that it was removed. This would be equivalent to a newspaper publishing a retraction in response to a threat of a defamation suit.

[2] A site like Airbnb could probably also get their hosts to waive their right to sue for defamation as a condition of listing on the service.

[3] These data are taken from Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.4.5U, Line 217.

[4] Mike Masnick called my attention to this issue.

[5] I have argued for a tax credit system, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction as an alternative to copyright for supporting creative work. Such a credit would be a great way to ensure that even the poorest households could afford access to subscription sites.

President Joe Biden signed a record-shattering military budget earlier this week, and a new analysis published Thursday predicted that if recent contracting trends continue, the Pentagon will funnel $407 billion worth of public funds to private weapons makers this fiscal year — more than the federal government spent when sending $1,400 relief checks to most Americans in 2021.
Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, found that “from fiscal year (FY) 2002 to FY2021, 55% of all Pentagon spending went to private sector military contractors.”
“If the privatization of funds rate over the last 20 years holds,” Semler noted, “it means [the] military industry will get about $407 billion from Biden’s first military budget — $16 billion more than the $391 billion those $1,400 stimulus checks cost the government earlier this year.”

Because ~55% of military spending goes to contractors, arms companies will likely get more money from Biden’s Pentagon budget than the public got through his $1,400 stimulus checks: https://t.co/Tbh8X4gOIn pic.twitter.com/u7u8kLh6LL
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) December 30, 2021

The National Defense Authorization Act for FY2022 was passed with broad bipartisan support earlier this month in the House, where the margin was 363-70, and in the Senate, where the vote was 88-11. By signing the bill into law on Monday, Biden approved a record-high $778 billion military budget.
Even though U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan in August, Republicans and Democrats awash in weapons industry cash refused to support popular amendments to reduce Pentagon spending. 
In fact, lawmakers in the House and the Senate added $25 billion — which happens to be the amount of funding that progressive advocacy group Public Citizen says is necessary to ramp up vaccine manufacturing to inoculate the world against Covid-19 — on top of the already gargantuan $753 billion military budget requested by Biden back in May.
Semler’s calculations are based on the Pentagon’s $740 billion “base” budget — that is, the money allocated strictly to the Defense Department and not the additional $38 billion worth of “nuclear funding from the Energy Department or funding from elsewhere, even though that stuff is rightly considered military spending, too,” he pointed out.
“Military spending involves a massive redistribution of wealth from the public to private sector,” wrote Semler. “There are over 700 lobbyists representing for-profit military contractors in D.C., and this redistribution of wealth is why they’re there.”
In a Jacobin essay published Thursday, Semler argued that Biden is doubling down on the “New Cold War” framework embraced by former President Donald Trump, whose administration claimed that the best way for the U.S. to prevent an armed confrontation with China and Russia “is to be prepared to win one.”
According to Semler:

The difference between Trump’s arms race and Biden’s was supposed to be that the latter would bring a commensurate rise in social outlays. Biden campaigned on spending $7 trillion over a decade—or $700 billion per year, on average—for civil infrastructure, transportation, climate, healthcare, education, and other social programs.
Once in office, Biden’s plan was to beat the drum on China, triggering a rally ’round the flag effect that would convince Congress—conservatives included—to budget for both military and economic competition. As a Democratic congressional aide told Vox in the first months of the Biden presidency, “[t]he best way to enact a progressive agenda is to use China [as a] threat.”

“The Biden administration has done its best to put that theory into action,” Semler argued. “But Biden’s Cold Warrior experiment has failed.”

Who needs expanded healthcare, climate action, affordable housing, and free pre-K anyway???
It's not like we're in the middle of a global pandemic worsened by a dramatically changing climate and rampant social inequity…  #CutThePentagon @stephensemler pic.twitter.com/FszHW3z7cQ
— CODEPINK (@codepink) December 30, 2021

“While military spending is shooting up as expected — Biden’s budget allocates nearly $40 billion more than the Trump administration, $170 billion more than Obama’s last budget, and 5% more than he campaigned on — less than 8% of the funding Biden sought for his domestic agenda has come through,” he continued.
“Adjusted on a per-year average,” Semler added, “Biden has only delivered $55 billion of the $700 billion he promised for human and physical infrastructure for fiscal year 2022.”

A boy bicycle-kicks a ball in a flooded area of Iquitos, Peru, on March 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)by Yascha MounkAt the end of 2020, the world looked bleak, but there was a lot of reason to hope that 2021 would turn out to be a lot better. A second COVID wave was rapidly spreading around the globe—but life-saving vaccines were beginning to be rolled out. Donald Trump was still spreading dangerous lies from the White House—but Joe Biden seemed poised to undo much of his damage and move the country beyond intense rancor. And dictators like Vladimir Putin were still trying to sow chaos—but the free world looked as though it was about to regain its strength and resolve.This has made 2021 a year of bitter disappointments. As its last day rolls in, the state of the world seems much more indeterminate than most might have predicted 12 months ago. Dictators seem even more emboldened than they were in the past, with Putin stationing 100,000 troops at Russia’s western border, apparently threatening an invasion of Ukraine. The United States looks more divided than ever, with Trump still enjoying the fierce loyalty of the Republican Party and a significant slice of the American electorate believing that the election was stolen. Most bitterly of all, the pandemic simply refuses to end, with the Omicron variant once again threatening lives and disrupting holiday plans.2022 thus increasingly looks like a hinge point that will help determine what the new normal will look like. Will the new normal include war and military conquest in the middle of Europe? Will the new normal entail ever more democratic backsliding in the United States? And will the new normal be dominated by a terrible virus and the continual strain it exacts on social bonds?What makes these developments all the more worrying is that so few of them seem to be under the control of democratic leaders, much less ordinary people. If they want to avoid a complete erosion of the prohibition on territorial conquest by military means, one of the most fundamental parts of Europe’s postwar order, NATO and the European Union must finally get serious about deterring Russia—but even if they do, Putin may choose a bloody war and occupation. If Democrats want to stop Republicans from taking control of Congress in 2022, and from setting the stage for a comeback by Donald Trump, they need to unite around the popular parts of their program and stop embracing deeply unpopular cultural stances—but even if they do, they are likely to take a drubbing in upcoming midterm elections. And if we finally want to put an end to this pandemic, our public health systems need to become much more innovative by reducing bureaucratic hurdles, green-lighting challenge trials, and speeding up the deployment of booster vaccines—but even if we do everything right, the spread of anti-vaxxer sentiment and the arrival of even more dangerous variants of the virus might extend the pandemic for another twelve months or more.So what should we resolve to do as we enter 2022?Give a gift subscriptionLike many people during times of uncertainty over the last two millennia, I have found myself rereading the great texts of the Stoic tradition. For many of its adherents, Stoic philosophy involved an exhortation to act in the world. We have a responsibility to do what we can to live up to the duties imposed by our offices and social positions—for parents to raise their children, for teachers to educate their pupils, and for all of us to help look after our fellow citizens (for, in a true democracy, citizenship, too, is a kind of office which bestows its own expectations and responsibilities).But even more fundamentally, Stoic philosophy offers a set of instructions for how to make the most of life while accepting that we are not in full command of our fate. In times of deep uncertainty, such as ours, we must be determined both to live up to our duties and to enjoy what is good in the world despite our knowledge that it may be gone tomorrow. That aspiration stands at the core of my resolutions for 2022.Politically, it means that I hope to strike a precarious balance between two seemingly paradoxical goals: I want to do what I can to further the values to which I am most committed, while freeing myself from the ever-present anxiety about their likely fate.I am a committed philosophical liberal. To an extent that some Stoic philosophers may have considered unwise, I care about the maintenance and realization of values that are not under my direct control. I consider it my duty to stand up for them as best I can (and I hope that you will join me in that fight).But to be happy and effective, I cannot allow my political engagement to determine my well-being. If I allowed every new poll or every new spat on social media to drive how I feel, it wouldn’t just make me miserable; it would also distract me from pursuing the activities that have the best chance of, somehow, making a bit of a difference. On my reading of Stoic philosophy, which admittedly takes some interpretative liberties, its most important upshot boils down to: “Do what you can to improve the world—but be at peace with whatever catastrophe might befall you, your loved ones, or the causes you care for.”With the world still stuck in the later—or perhaps, if we get unlucky, the middle—stages of a terrible pandemic, this political disposition also has an equivalent in the personal realm. I will continue to do what I can to help all of us get control of the pandemic by getting my booster shot, informing people about any risks posed by future strains, and taking sensible measures to reduce transmission. But I will also try to make my social life and my willingness to plan for the future less dependent on the latest news about COVID. If 2022 turns out to be the year in which the virus truly becomes endemic, we all will need to learn how to live with it—making the most of being human without either refusing to accept our frailty or becoming indifferent to the fate of our compatriots.Yascha Mounk is the Founder of Persuasion.

That's from the N.Y. State Department of Health, Dec. 27, 2021. The full list:

As Glenn Greenwald points out:
That means that a healthy twenty-year-old Asian football player or a 17-year-old African-American marathon runner from a wealthy family will be automatically deemed at heightened risk to develop serious COVID illness—making them instantly eligible for monoclonal treatments upon testing positive and showing symptoms—while a White person of exactly the same age and health condition from an impoverished background would not be automatically eligible.
This policy was first flagged by New York journalist Karol Markowicz, whose Twitter summary described it as "white people need not apply." That summary is not accurate. White people who are sick from COVID can still be eligible for antibody treatment, but only if they first demonstrate that they have "a medical condition that increase[s] their risk for severe illness." But non-white people have the significant advantage of being automatically eligible without having to demonstrate that, since their non-white race is deemed to inherently constitute an increased risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. In other words, when determining eligibility for life-saving treatments, New York state is explicitly prioritizing some races over others.
For more of Greenwald's detailed analysis, see here. Thanks to Hans Bader (Liberty Unyielding) for the pointer; as he points out, such use of race as a proxy for supposed greater risk—instead of focusing on the more directly relevant factors ("race-neutral alternatives," in doctrinal terms), such as underlying medical conditions, vaccination status, lack of access to good alternative care, or the like—would violate the Equal Protection Clause in this situation.
UPDATE: My UCLA colleague Prof. John Villasenor points out this provision of the New York Constitution:
§11. No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws of this state or any subdivision thereof. No person shall, because of race, color, creed or religion, be subjected to any discrimination in his or her civil rights by any other person or by any firm, corporation, or institution, or by the state or any agency or subdivision of the state.
The post N.Y. Rationing COVID Drugs Based on Race appeared first on Reason.com.

NOTE: The pioneering American biologist Edward O. Wilson passed away on December 26th, aged 92. The following interview was conducted by phone on August 24th, 2009, as part of Alice Dreger’s research for her book Galileo’s Middle Finger. The text has been lightly edited for length and fluency.Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people—probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind—that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism. Biological gender differences could justify sexism, and any imputation that we evolved a human nature, or that human qualities might differ from one race to another, was dangerously racist.So, furious ideologically based opposition had built up in 1978. That opposition had been fanned by a small number of academics including [paleontologist] Stephen Jay Gould and [evolutionary biologist] Richard Lewontin and two or three others on the Harvard faculty who thought this was a very dangerous idea and said so. These people helped organize the so-called “Science for the People” movement, or the branch of it called the “Sociobiology Study Group.” Their purpose was to discredit me personally for having brought up such a dangerous and destructive idea.In fact, at that meeting, InCAR—the International Committee Against Racism—held up signs condemning me and sociobiology and racism in general. Of course, racism never even entered my thinking in developing these ideas. Anyway, after they dumped the water on me, amazingly, they returned to their seats while I was drying myself off. A couple of people then made short speeches—most notably Stephen Gould, of all people, the guy whose agitation and inflammatory essays had been partly responsible for all this. He addressed the demonstrators and said, in effect, that while he fully understood their motivation, violence was not the right way to achieve their goals.As for me, I don’t know why, but I just get calm under a lot of stress. I’ve been in that sort of stressful situation many times, especially in the field. I started thinking to myself, this is probably going to be an historical moment, and it is very interesting. I wasn’t in the least doubt that my science was correct. I knew this was a kind of aberration. I understood the source because I knew the people who had been the chief thinkers, the ideological leaders. An astonishingly good percentage of them were on the faculty at Harvard. I wasn’t concerned this would come to anything in the long term.So, someone found a paper towel and I dried my head. As soon as things settled down, I just read my talk. I knew things were going to work out—there was so much evidence accumulated already for a somewhat programmed human brain. By then, it was already coming from many directions, including genetics and neuroscience. There was no doubt about where things would go. There may be hold-outs but the inevitable conclusion from neuroscience and anthropology and genetics is for this way of thinking. [American anthropologist] Nap[oleon] Chagnon was present and he was certainly a leader in thinking about human nature and how valuable it is, and what its motivations are, by studying groups like the Yanomamö.I knew history was on my side. I was young enough that I thought I would live through a good part of it. I was annoyed! But I wasn’t under stress in an extreme way. Before going home, I went to the next session, at which an anthropologist made the mistake of stating that I believe every cultural difference has a genetic basis, so that I am a racist. Of course, I rebutted that, but that was the kind of thing being exchanged at that meeting.AD: When Nap told me the story of the AAAS, he recalled that you had a broken leg?EOW: Oh, that’s right! I was a runner, and I had slipped on ice and broken my ankle. So, I was hobbling along in a cast. The commotion was mainly due to resistance to the Vietnam War. I think that was the gut issue behind a lot of student demonstrations. Since that occurred during the amazing decade of the civil rights revolution, it all got blended together. So, there was a lot of action like that, of students taking over stages or protesting. That was the context of the event at the AAAS. So, it wasn’t totally surprising.AD: Napoleon Chagnon has told me that he tried to support you in various ways through the years.EOW: I admired him enormously and still do. I admire him for his work on the Yanomamö, quite apart from the fact that he picked up on sociobiology almost immediately and started applying some of its thinking to Darwinian fitness. The originality of his work is admirable, and he based it on solid empirical research into the role of vengeance raids, but also the interest in acquiring women. And that became an empirical theme of his research. He studied the genealogy and pedigrees of these people with the help of blood samples. That was very novel and important research. To me, he represented the new anthropology, the new cultural anthropology, which is finally beginning to take hold. Though, as you probably know, there is still a school of thinking that rejects anything to do with biological research of the kind that Chagnon pioneered. He was very admirable in the way he just entered the Yanomamö society during a period of great risk and uncertainty. They really are a violent people. So, I was already an admirer of his before I met him.In my memoir, you’ll see a photograph from the first meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. He should be in that photograph. They were the founders of sociobiology. There were about six people in the photo, including Bill Hamilton and others. Nap was already a leader in that movement. What a warrior. He was at that meeting at the AAAS, and as soon as those people took the stage, he tried to rush up and fight them, but he couldn’t make his way up through the melee. I couldn’t help but think of him not only as heroic but also as a real friend.AD: Chagnon said that, when he was subject to the controversy over [journalist Patrick Tierney’s 2000 book] Darkness in El Dorado, you called regularly to check on him and to offer support. [Tierney falsely accused Chagnon and his colleague, the geneticist James Neel, of conducting unethical fieldwork among the Yanomamö tribe and of exacerbating a measles epidemic in the Amazon Basin.]EOW: That’s right. We’re talking about 10 years ago now, right?AD: Yes, just about.EOW: There was a group that came to Nap’s defense. I was one of them. By that time, I had some prestige, so I could offer some help. I was a member of the National Academy and had the National Medal of Science, and at least one Pulitzer by then. So, I just put those cards on the table to help him. He deserved it and I thought that was the only thing to do. I did it gladly. And there were others like [American anthropologist, John] Tooby and people who helped from evolutionary psychology. Others were outraged, and threats were being passed on to W.W. Norton for not being more careful and for publishing a clearly libelous book. The tragedy of it was that James Neel—a very established senior scientist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a leader in human genetics—was really subject to libelous attack in Tierney’s book. But there was nothing that could be done because he had died. If he had lived, things would have been a lot easier for Nap. They could have brought suit against Tierney and maybe even Norton itself. They could have cleansed the whole thing in public. But Neel was gone. I learned to my shock that libel suits cannot be conducted by the family of the person libeled. That’s amazing, isn’t it? The family was kind of helpless because they didn’t have the public voice or the weight.We made one hell of a fuss. We really did. I wrote a very pointed letter to the president of Norton, [W. Drake] McFeely, and we had an exchange about this. There wasn’t much he could do but say we did all this in good faith. He didn’t say the book was wrong or anything. He didn’t want to get into anything in print that would allow a breach to be formed for a later libel suit. It died down.Nap, who I thought normally would have gone after them with ferocity, had sort of seemed to lose his spirit at that time. But I was certain he was not guilty of the misdemeanors or crimes Tierney had accused him of. He and I had long talks about this for a time. There was a strong response from part of the community that owed it to Nap, but on the other hand, Nap did not immediately do what we all wanted him to do, and write a true story of what had happened during his studies with James Neel. He had written books describing his adventures, but he really needed to write a book that described just what was being done and what all the work was about. You could get that from the technical papers and his earlier books, but it wasn’t in a form that could serve as a rebuttal to the Tierney book. It was a surprise that Nap didn’t publish something within a year or two. But he let it slide for reasons maybe you understand better than I do. I didn’t keep up too much with him after this.AD: Nap is finishing up his memoir, but I’m not sure he is going to situate his story in that larger context, of what happens in cases like that.EOW: I’m glad you’re working on this. It all needs to be put it in a larger context. That would be a wonderful thing to do. I don’t know if you want to come right up to the Bush administration and the Evangelical advances, the know-nothings’ attacks on science. We have to decide what to do in these situations. I chose to write The Creation. In that book, I set out not to confound the fundamentalists—that’s been done a thousand times, virtually without effect—but rather to call on them for help. That had far more effect on Evangelicals than a hundred volumes by someone like Richard Dawkins condemning religion. I just brushed that aside, said I was a secular humanist, and began with a letter to an imaginary pastor. I said we are not going to save life on Earth unless science and religion can work together.AD: One of the things I really admire about your work is how you try to be constructive. I think that is so much more effective than mere criticism—you work on really moving people to act, to go beyond long-term divisions to ask how we can get somewhere.EOW: I think that work has been very productive. It helped move Evangelicals more decisively into conservation. Once they see what they call “the Left,” the environmentalists and the scientists—what Rush Limbaugh, that expert on climate change, has called “the granola-crunching tree-huggers”—are not necessarily the dangerous threat they thought, they are not as aggressive. I understand Evangelicals well. They circle the wagons, but they are afraid of all these happenings. Once they see they could form a non-threatening alliance for a transcendent purpose, then they could move forward. That’s why I wrote the book. You have 42 percent of the American people who might be rallied for the environment, particularly for conservation. So, that’s made a lot of progress. I was invited to a meeting with the heads of the Mormon Church, and we met at the president’s office.AD: Is that why you were recently in Utah?EOW: I was there to give a talk at the Natural History Museum, and the elders invited me over for a meeting and it worked out awfully well. I had a meeting with the principal bishop the next day. Wonderful things can be done if you give people a reason to come together. You know, if one of those protesters, especially the young woman who dumped the water on my head, were ever to come forward and say, “I’m sorry we were so violent about that,” I would take them to dinner. I would enjoy talking to them today. That’s the way out.However, the attack on Nap Chagnon was different. That may have been motivated by pure ideology—maybe Tierney felt he could strike a blow for his ideology by tearing down someone like Chagnon. But I have the impression he was an opportunist who saw a way to get famous and make money.AD: I think to some extent, Tierney was an opportunist of that sort. But I think he was also a zealot, someone who saw himself as a kind of savior to marginalized people—someone who could save the world, so to speak. I think this is not that different, probably, from the way Gould saw himself. It is ultimately a self-defeating approach—to be so committed that you stop looking beyond what you already believe.EOW: Ultimately it was self-defeating for Gould. Maybe for Dick Lewontin, too.AD: And I think, too, that Gould saw it as a route to being well-known and beloved.EOW: What you said about Gould was correct. But I knew him well enough to know he sought fame and riches. He sought that out. That’s an interesting subject in his own right. I would love to read about Tierney’s background.AD: He is an interesting character. I located and read a book manuscript he never published, a sort of memoir, and it reveals a lot about his allegiances. He certainly saw himself as a good Catholic boy, and so he positioned himself against sociobiology, by which he meant, bizarrely, any explanation of human behavior that saw sex drive as a motivation.EOW: It sounds as though it is coming from the Right. At least a highly conservative view on biology.AD: I’m not sure if those missionaries would be correctly classified as being on the Right. They are in some ways on the Left in terms of their focus on the poor and disenfranchised. It’s hard to say, except that they all saw themselves as saving the poor Indians.EOW: These religious orders have been doing this for centuries, with the help of the Spanish soldiers, they gathered up all the libraries of the Mayans and burned them. Now we only have about four codices left.This is one of the real stresses and strains of a democratic society. It is frightening that this sort of thing can happen in America. We have come through some scares since the Second World War that should have been warning signs. You could excuse anything until the Second World War, even the confinement of Japanese Americans. This was not a sign of a national trend getting worse. This was an emergency response that was wrong. But by the time of McCarthy, and I remember him well, it got scary. Fortunately, that collapsed finally, but we’ve had one movement after another since the ‘60s. We’ve had tighter connections, it appears to me, with specific ideologies or religions, and that to me is a more profound and dangerous trend, if it is continuing. Do you think that what happened in the ‘60s and then the aftershocks in the ‘70s—the conflicts over civil rights, ideological movements, some ideological extremism on the Left—was temporary? Have people come around?AD: Well, extreme leftism does seem to have become embedded in academia.EOW: Yes, it has been. In fact, I’m glad you mentioned that. I’ve often said that the only place certain subjects are completely taboo is the university. In other words, you simply don’t bring up race anymore. You don’t bring up gender differences anymore except very gingerly in a roundabout way. And so, here at Harvard, we got rid of President [Larry] Summers, based on his slip about gender differences in physics abilities. I don’t want overstate it, but it is true that far-leftist ideology has been pretty well embedded.AD: It seems very easy in the Internet age to have someone like Tierney, who is basically a nobody, affect a take-over of someone’s professional identity. What he was able to do to Neel and Chagnon is very disturbing.EOW: Yes, Nap Chagnon got tarred by this takeover of identities, and there was almost no way he could defend himself—it was far-off in Yanomamö-land, and people were just willing to accept the demonic image. It wasn’t Ypsilanti, Michigan, you know—a place Americans had heard of. So, they could just believe all the things said about what went on there. But even before the Internet, there were colleagues I’ve had to watch closely, out of self-defense. Gould and Lewontin could change your identity to evil. Until the end, Gould was continuing to speak out against studies on human genetics and the biological basis of human behavior. At every opportunity, he would put the needle in.AD: Gould and Lewontin were able to do this because they were so well-known and beloved by the Left that they had lots of opportunities to publish quickly and prominently. So, they were able to do the kinds of things that later became possible for more obscure people to do via the Internet.EOW: That’s right—Gould and Lewontin could publish fast and easily. In the early days of forensic DNA analysis, Lewontin came out with a tremendous blast against it and, to my astonishment, he actually had a paper published in Science. He said that since the odds of making a mistake with an African American was greater than making a mistake with whites, forensic DNA analysis was racist and should not be used. He was talking about how the chances of making a false match by chance alone was one in, say, 150 million (I’m just making up numbers here to illustrate his point) in African Americans, while in whites it was something like one in 300 million, so we shouldn’t use the technology. Of course, soon afterwards we saw not people being unjustly convicted, but people being freed when their convictions were overturned, many of whom were African Americans who had been wrongly convicted! I use that as an example of how it is possible for a few individuals like Tierney or Lewontin to do a lot of damage. Lewontin’s forensic DNA paper was quickly forgotten. But in the case of Nap Chagnon, you had a reputation destroyed, or close to being destroyed.AD: Well, in many ways, Tierney was aided and abetted by the American Anthropological Association. The AAA convened the El Dorado Task Force which ended up investigating many of Tierney’s allegations, without investigating Tierney. Nap experienced that as a kind of special persecution.EOW: I had forgotten that aspect of it. That’s true. The AAA was picking up and amplifying the whole thing. The AAA held a meeting around ‘76, and I was invited to give a talk on sociobiology. It was proposed that sociobiology and the whole field be condemned by the AAA. Margaret Mead spoke up and effectively said, “Are you out of your minds?” and the move to vote to condemn sociobiology failed. I remember Nap and several others excitedly meeting me as I came in, saying, “Well, that was a narrow escape!” The AAA really played a villainous role in the case of Nap. I wonder if that would be the case today.AD: I rather doubt it. A lot of the anthropologists I’ve spoken to feel the entire thing was badly handled. They are embarrassed about the AAA’s handling of the matter, particularly with regard to convening the Task Force.EOW: That’s another scandal—the Task Force. It’s shameful. This is coming out of academia. You know, if we’d had honest biology, somehow rigorously held to as a science, we’d probably—this is an impossible scenario, of course—we would somehow not have had the pseudo-racism and the murderous ideology of the Nazis. Suppose that had been the case, if biology had been protected as a science. But it was not, and not in this country either.That is something that the radical Left, including home-grown Stalinist sympathizers, rarely thought about. Of course, there were not many left by my time. But the Khmer Rouge had this notion of the far-Left—which was picked up by the leaders, I’m told, in Paris—that the human mind could be molded to anything to fit the perfect system. What you had to do in Cambodia, then, was bust people out of the “evil” cities and put them in communes and get rid of all those who had been programmed the “wrong way” to get a new paradise. So, on the one extreme, you have the idea of the racial purity idea of an Aryan people, that it’s all about biology. And on the other extreme, an idea of the cultural purity of a radical reforming society. Those are the two extremes, and a lot of people suffered because of them. They were both based on poor science. I guess there are echoes or aftershocks of those ways of thinking, still.AD: I want to ask you about something related to that. Obviously both the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge suffered from the naturalistic fallacy. Some people have objected that you suffer from a naturalistic fallacy, in that you attempt to call upon the good in people to work together to take care of each other. I wonder how you respond to that?EOW: Right from the beginning, it was said that I commit the naturalistic fallacy, and it was always terribly false. I’m now involved in a new development in the theory of the genetic origins of human behavior, and it is creating some controversy. We’re shifting emphasis from kin selection to group selection. It doesn’t make a lot of difference insofar as the goodness of humanity is concerned. Kin selection leads to nepotism and group conflict, and if that is the correct version, of course it can be used to commit the naturalistic fallacy. But similarly, if we look at group selection, we have group versus group, the contest between groups and group aggression. That looks to me like the prime mover of human evolution. By the way, this idea was first promoted by Darwin in The Descent of Man. The point is that the naturalistic fallacy is manifestly a fallacy regardless of what view of humanity you take. Even with the Khmer Rouge. If you conclude that people are infinitely malleable, which they did, you can do this-and-that because what they are is what they should be, and so on. No one in their right mind would say such a thing. I never did. What I’ve done is to say the opposite.What we have in human nature is our inheritance from a prehistoric past going back millions of years. We do have strong predispositions—you can call them instincts—that become dangerous in modern society. So, what we should do is conduct the best research we can, in biology and the social sciences, and find out what it is to be human. And then recognize that these are particular flaws in our nature in a modern techno-scientific world, and work with that knowledge to pull us on through. This is not unlike, say, trying to find the basis for genetic disease, to look for things that make people sick because of mutated genes or pathogens, to find out what causes sickness. Would you then say this sickness is the way things should be, because “is” is “ought”? That is crazy. But the naturalistic fallacy is equally crazy in terms of human nature.The way I’ve characterized this—most recently in a meeting of the Congress on Innovation and American Progress in Washington—is that we live in a civilization like the Star Wars movie series: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. That’s a huge problem! We’re not going to keep our balance and figure out the right things to do as long as we don’t understand or even accept that our emotions are Paleolithic, and that they have an evolved basis. We have to figure out how our institutions came about and decide whether or not they are really viable for us, whether or not we are going to be viable with them, and start moving in the right directions. And that includes a lot of religious institutions. We’ve finally come to realize that religious belief is very dangerous, especially when people are willing to say that something is God’s will. We’re suffering from that idea all the time.I want to hammer at this. I have not committed the naturalist fallacy and never even thought of it. I see exactly the opposite as being the case.AD: It must have been extremely frustrating to witness, again and again, blatant misrepresentations of your work by colleagues who ought to have known better.EOW: It was blatantly unethical. Basically, they were seized by a kind of moral imperative. They believed what they said. Or at least they believed their assumptions about the blank slate.AD: And they were rewarded for it. Clearly, people like Gould and Lewontin were rewarded for what they did to you and your work.EOW: That’s why I have a certain cynical feeling towards Gould. Gould was going around attacking racists wherever he found them, especially in the early part of his career. He was the great anti-racism crusader. He acted as though other scientists were all racists or incipient racists. He almost implied that he was the champion who would step out of science as a scientist and fight racism everywhere. He had a technique. I knew him when he was a graduate student following me around. He used to be very polite and solicitous. I watched him develop into a very different kind of person.He had a technique he repeated. He would examine some 19th century figure—one of his favorites was Louis Agassiz at Harvard, a heroic figure, a founder of the National Academy of Sciences, a man favored by Lincoln and Grant. Then Gould would “discover” a horror—that Agassiz was a racist or that he believed in the inferiority of blacks—and he would eviscerate him. But he would not note this was an almost universal misunderstanding or belief in 19th-century American society. But that was okay. Louis Agassiz’s reputation could hold up. But then Gould had a way of saying “this deeply racist sentiment has not disappeared at all in modern biology. We find it among some modern biologists.” That gave him the launching point to start attacking human genetics.Gould hated human genetics. And he would go after sociobiology, which sent him into angry fits. And he was massively rewarded. He flourished. Students crowded into his classrooms. This was in the critical years of the ‘70s and ‘80s. He’d give speeches about racism. And about his paleontology, too. But he was giving lectures and holding forth in reviews constantly about the racism that pervaded American science and the dangers of genetic and biological behavior studies. He received one honorary degree after another. He became famous as a consequence. So, it was rather hard to distinguish what was his pure belief from his personal ambitions. They made him rich and famous.AD: I met [Harvard Professor of Biology] Ruth Hubbard years ago—it would have been around 2001 or 2002—and I asked her privately what Gould was like. She said he had become a very unpleasant person. I got the sense she had put definite distance between him and her.EOW: That is really interesting. I don’t know where Ruth is now. I always thought of her as burning with a pure fire. She believed all of this. She was dedicated in an honest way to all of this. She was doing other things, too. She was putting herself into civil rights movement, she was an early environmental activist. She was on the wrong side of the problem that culminated in Nap’s difficulties, but at least she was sincere. AD: I met Lewontin briefly in grad school. He was brought in to give a talk. I thought it was very odd. Here was a guy who was an intense Marxist, who spent so much time rallying on behalf of the proletariat, who was all about the class struggle. And he struck me absolutely as a BMW-driving, Cambridge-living, Romance-language-phrase-dropping snob.EOW: You got that. I’ve never fully figured him out. I used to joke that when things got too hot, he could go to his dacha, like a member of the Soviet leadership. He has a place up in Vermont and he could go and be safe there. He was and remains a rather amazing person. He seems to be quite capable of living that kind of contradiction. During the ‘60s, we always thought that he seemed alright. He was doing some authentic science, but then around 1970, just about the time that he came to Harvard, he went through this strange transformation and seemed to have become a true believer. He used words like “the proletariat.” He was suddenly using the favorite catchphrases of the communists. He talked about “the running dogs of capitalism.” But he was always a brilliant speaker. When he was in high school, his friends tell me, he was brilliant as an actor in stage plays. His friends thought he would go into theatre. And that seemed to me to be what we were getting, a kind of persona he created, and finally came to believe in. I’ll tell you a story about all of this. Around 1970, we were searching for someone in population genetics. He looked very good then. And he had this brilliant personality in conversation, this brilliant presentation, a real theatrical power. The search committee decided he was the best person, but this was after he had just adopted his political and public persona and he was known to be joining protests. I remember watching a news report one day about the takeover of a stage at the University of Chicago, where some government functionary had come to speak at the height of the anti-war protests. And to my astonishment, I saw Dick Lewontin rush up and take the microphone!We had a meeting to take the final vote on Lewontin at Harvard, and a group of the older professors said they were worried about reports of his behavior at Chicago—that he might be disruptive or might have gotten away from genetics, and so would not be the right sort of person to be at Harvard. I made the speech I will regret for the rest of my life: I said we should never accept or reject someone because of their political views. I felt so good about myself making that political speech! “I know several key people at Chicago on the faculty,” I said. “Let me ask them about the key question: Is Lewontin’s new political activism affecting his performance at the University of Chicago, or affecting anything connected with his duties?” And they said, okay, ask and let us know.So, I called several people who I knew personally. We were all young guys then and they all said, “No, it’s not causing any problems here. He’s doing fine.” That turned out not to be the case. I reported that, and Lewontin came, and then our troubles with him began. I could tell you stories about him and the department that would make for a hilarious evening. But I won’t, except to say that the whole anti-sociobiology thing broke out about three years after he arrived. It was Gould and Lewontin and Ruth Hubbard, mostly oriented by Lewontin, looking to attack sociobiology and to discredit me.I held up. In response to those attacks, I wrote On Human Nature, which came out in ‘78, and it won a Pulitzer Prize, which helped strengthen my position considerably. I was increasingly confident in my own reputation and my security at Harvard. I wrote [entomologist] John Law, who was then a close friend who had done work with me on pheromones. I said, “John, we’ve had Dick Lewontin here three years”—so this would have been about ‘76—“so now it’s your turn to take him back for three years.” John sent back a message on a scrap of paper written by the President of the University of Chicago, who was also named Wilson coincidentally. The note said: “From one Wilson to another, no way!” Apparently, they had already been having real problems with him.I don’t know exactly what happened. No one seems to understand what happened with him. I wish I could tell you.AD: You said earlier—rightly, I think—that the misrepresentation of your work by people like Gould and Lewontin was “unethical.” Did you ever name their misrepresentation of you as such?EOW: I never used the word. Scientists don’t use that word. In my first response to the letter in the New York Review of Books, I responded with more anger than I probably should have demonstrated, saying that these were false statements. I didn’t say they were unethical.AD: Why didn’t you?EOW: It’s really quite rare for people to cheat and falsify data in science. A lot is made of it, but it is really a rather rare event. I think it is partly due to the fact that you go into science primarily to actually engage in the whole culture, to be a scientist. That’s all based upon a strict code of honesty in reporting, not to be too priggish about it. Further, every person in science knows that if they have even the slightest inclination to be dishonest, they’re going to get caught. And soon. And the more important the discovery, the quicker it will be found. The penalty for dishonesty in science is [reputational] death. Even one act of it can result in death. That’s why I would never have said that they are dishonest. I said that they are wrong, and that they are misrepresenting me. But I didn’t say they were personally being dishonest.AD: Did you think, then, that the charge was too serious for what they were doing? Or that you didn’t want to get them in trouble?EOW: If I had called them dishonest or unethical, I would have opened myself up to charges and countercharges. When you’re engaged in a contest with someone, there are certain lethal moves and practices that you don’t engage in. It’s done in Literature, I know, in the humanities and social sciences. There are accusations of dishonesty in those fields fairly regularly. But I didn’t want to open that can of worms, or get into that territory.AD: I have noticed that about you and your work. You tend to be productive and civil. Personality seems to matter a lot in these controversies. To use a term that some anthropologists or psychologists use, I would say that it is “characterological.” Some people are, well, shall we say, warriors, and that makes them more likely to get into scrapes. You tend to try to be conciliatory, productive, and especially civil.EOW: I like to say I’m a southerner. I felt somehow it was bred into me that I should be a gentleman and I expect others to be the same. But I quickly learned, as I say in The Creation, that if you use moderation, and reserve, and courtesy, you’ll be the victor in any vicious fight. You also have to have the answers and the truth on your side. But I felt like that’s the winning strategy. I think it is an honest strategy, too. I felt the Evangelicals are good people, and I’ve always asked myself how to deal with people like this who I like in every respect. They’re smart, they’re good, and there is a certain area that says “keep out.” How do you handle that?AD: Imagine for a moment that you are watching a younger version of yourself struggle with a younger version of Gould and Lewontin. How would you advise that younger version of you?EOW: I think I would tell him to ignore it. Pay attention, I mean, and respond if there is some really scurrilous thing being said. But, as much as possible, ignore it, and keep working, and you’ll win in the end. I know it isn’t easy during fights. I always said to myself, “Don’t get into a pissing contest with a skunk.” If you ask me what I most resent about that period looking back now, I think the answer is the amount of time I wasted. I spent countless hours talking with journalists who were writing stories about all this. They’d come to me and say, “Well, Professor Lewontin just said so-and-so, Professor Gould just said so-and-so.” Or, “I’ve read in the latest thing that they’ve said this. What do you say to that?” I felt that I couldn’t sit by and let them declare me to be a racist and a proto-Nazi. I couldn’t just say, “No comment.” So, I wasted enormous amounts of energy and time I could have used for something much more valuable. So, my advice would be, this too shall pass. Ignore it as much as you can. Conduct yourself with dignity and with courtesy and let it pass.The Dean or the President of Harvard never called me in and asked me to straighten myself out. They never said, “You’re giving Harvard a bad name.” It was the other way around. In the ‘70s, before Lewontin came after me, he had gone after some other people. Richard Herrnstein was a very good psychologist who had written an article or two on human IQ and the evidence regarding IQ tests. He was studying IQ and heritability which in those days was a really taboo subject. He made himself a target even though he was a decent man whose best work was done in learning behavior of pigeons. He did excellent work, with Skinner.Lewontin personally picked him out and started badgering him, encouraging others on the faculty who were on the radical fringe, to protest against him. When Lewontin found out that Herrnstein had been invited to give a lecture or serve on a committee, Lewontin would call them up and tell them not to have him.AD: That’s really awful.EOW: Well, this was happening. It got so bad. People knew about it at Harvard. Herrnstein wasn’t the only professor being followed around by protesters stirred up with wrong ideas. The dean of the faculty at the time, Henry Rosovsky, formed a committee, and I was invited to be on it—this was before I had my run-in, so maybe it was ‘73 or ‘74. We met in the dean’s office to discuss how to protect Richard Herrnstein from Lewontin and others. There were a couple of others who had joined in the pursuit. The conclusion was that there was nothing we could do. We were committed to freedom of speech, so what could we do? But we called in Herrnstein for our second meeting and told him we understood what was happening and regretted it very much, and if he needed counseling or support that we could give it to him without risking the principle of academic freedom, and that this committee would be there ready to help him. I’m sorry that didn’t get written up anywhere. But that’s what happened at the time.AD: That’s really remarkable.EOW: Unfortunately, I don’t know of any written record of it. It’s probably in the minutes of the dean’s office somewhere.AD: Did you ever find that kind of support at Harvard?EOW: Unfortunately not. In fact, I had several close friends in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department who would sometimes speak to me and just say they were sorry it was happening. One was my close colleague Bert Hölldobler. We were working all the time together in the lab and field. We would spend long periods of time talking about it and trying to figure it out, trying to understand Lewontin. He gave me his unstinting support, and made that clear to Lewontin and others.But no one else said anything or did anything. I think they kind of weren’t 100 percent sure about me. They thought maybe there was something to what Lewontin or Gould were saying. No one ever offered any sympathy or any kind of help. At one point when Lewontin had unleashed some outrageous statement, [evolutionary biologist] Ernst Mayr read it and asked Lewontin, “Why are you doing this? Why are you attacking Ed all the time?” And Mayr told me that Lewontin had said, in effect, well, it’s just my nature or personality.AD: That would be pretty darned ironic, if he said it was just his nature!EOW: He didn’t know what else to say to Mayr. I think he didn’t want to get into a fight with him. Mayr never offered me sympathy personally. On two occasions, Lewontin approached me after a Department of Biology faculty meeting, and said that he wanted me to know that his attacks on me were not personal or motivated by professional jealousy. They were motivated by his ideological beliefs. He said that to me twice.AD: What was your response?EOW: I can’t remember. I think I just said, “Thank you, Dick.” It was beyond professional jealousy, he said, so I accepted what he said. Obviously, we should have standards of civility.AD: You mentioned your correspondence with Norton regarding Tierney’s book, expressing your concerns. I wonder if you kept that.EOW: After all this settled down, I moved from Knopf to Norton, partly because of a brilliant editor I’ve been working with. The person I corresponded with was McFeely, I think. There was a twist there. I didn’t pledge at the time that I would not go with Norton. I still feel that Norton and McFeely made a mistake. If I feel that, it doesn’t stir up too much. I think I simply told McFeely at the time that Tierney’s book is a pack of lies. That it’s false and something should be done about it. It put them on the spot. I don’t know if it changed any of their policies.AD: Norton refuses to answer any questions from me, which I expected. I do know the book became a finalist for the National Book Award, which is outrageous.EOW: That is very disturbing. But I’m solid with Norton now. I’ve sort of forgiven them. But if I find they’re considering another book by Tierney, I’m going to remind them of the fiasco.AD: You are one of the few people on the planet with that kind of ability, that kind of leverage.

Editor's Note: If you're new to Wisdom of Crowds, learn more about our mission and ethos here. If you like this post, please consider signing up for free or becoming a subscriber to gain access to members-only content.This year, like every year, I went to visit my folks in Croatia for winter break. Unlike in normal times, we didn’t have the kind of boisterous Christmas where we saw extended family and friends. People of my parents’ generation are getting on in years, and most were nervous about gathering given the virus (even though everyone I know is vaccinated). Last year was of course much worse: vaccines weren’t yet available, and Croatia was in complete lockdown, with even inter-city travel banned. Still, this year wasn’t Christmas as I knew it. It was a much more muted affair.Maybe it’s not COVID that caused it, but getting old itself. My parents’ generation is starting to die off, and death tends to make people withdraw into themselves—even sometimes from each other. I have not yet felt what it’s like to have all your peers start to disappear around you one by one, but I did have a close friend die some years back. It’s different; it leaves a mark. It’s not like having a beloved older relative die, even if prematurely. That can be a grievous loss, but it also feels like a natural part of life. It points to the passage of time—to mortality in more general terms. But it doesn’t point the finger at you quite like the death of a friend does.It’s natural to recoil in such circumstances, to withdraw into oneself. While we might tell ourselves that we do this to process what has happened, I think it’s more primal than that. Despite knowing better, we hide from death’s gaze, crouching and looking down, hoping not to catch his eye. And in so crouching, we disconnect from the world around us, at least for a time. It’s not fear of death per se—we know our chances of actually dying young are reasonably small—as much as it is a recognition of our vulnerability. We all know we are going to die sometime, but we don’t necessarily appreciate that it could happen at any moment, statistics be damned.A friend of the family stopped by for lunch earlier today, here in Zagreb. Her husband had passed away before COVID, but not too long before. I hadn’t seen her since. She looked the same, but her way of talking was different. Perhaps not yet adjusted to living alone, she seemed to monologue a bit more. Out of the blue, she said that her kids had recently told her to be more charitable to people around her—to both strangers and loved ones alike. She was at first taken aback, but as she thought about it more, she understood what they were trying to tell her. She had always been a bit short with people, she said, but her husband had been a check on her worst impulses. Now, not only was his moderating influence gone, she was also spending more time alone.“And when you are alone all the time, you become more hardened,” she said. “Less tolerant.”COVID may have played a role in taking my uncle last year, and it has killed a close friend of my parents’, but it has not taken any of my immediate friends. Nevertheless, it has, by virtue of crippling collective life, imposed some kind of solitary crouch on each of us. We tell ourselves that we remain connected through technology and social media, and that all that’s missing is more face time with people. But I suspect that’s not exactly right. Speaking for myself, throughout these last two years of the pandemic, I have been fortunate to have a close group of friends whom I have seen regularly. Yet I am without doubt more hardened—less tolerant—than I was before. I am not lonely, nor even alone much of the time. I am not wanting for connection. But the change in me is real, the product of some kind of isolation.It’s less depression and more shell-shock. Events keep coming; it’s just one damned thing after another, no rhyme or reason. The ordered rhythm of what we knew before is gone. We bear witness to a senseless procession, mute, staring with incomprehension. Maybe, like with the death of a friend, our COVID crouch is about vulnerability. Maybe it’s about recognizing not so much our own mortality, but rather the fragility of our entire lives and the broader societies we are embedded in.Rarely do we speak about life getting back to normal any more. And if we do, we smirk knowingly, ironically. “This is the new normal!” I have screamed more than once, with some venom, at strangers on Twitter clinging to the idea that COVID will at some point be vanquished. With the apparently less deadly but much more transmissible Omicron variant now worming its way across the world, we catch glimpses of what is to come. Even with the vast majority of the infected reporting nothing more than flu-like symptoms, many countries are flailing about. The mildest variant still represents radical uncertainty. Just this week, we learned that the most effective vaccines carry tail risks of their own, and that long COVID may be quite a nasty thing.Maybe as the variants get less deadly and we get better at managing sporadic outbreaks of novel mutations, something approaching the previous normalcy will re-emerge. But that’s not really what we mean when we say “getting back to normal.” We want to have our innocence restored, to once again believe in a kind of permanence to our lives. I think that’s gone for good, though. That longed-for permanence is similar to the sense of ourselves we have before we experience the death of a friend. We implicitly believed we were somehow indestructible. Not immortal, but that the same rules didn’t exactly apply to us. A friend’s death shows us that in fact they do. It’s the same with COVID.It’s a lesson we can, with time, choose not to dwell on but can never unlearn. It’s a part of growing wiser. Eventually we move on, having internalized these hard lessons. Eventually, we straighten up out of our crouch and re-engage with the world. We may memory-hole much of the emptiness that characterized the last two years of our lives, but we won’t regain that sense of boundless optimism born of a belief in stability that we had before.What would moving on entail? For me, it would mean getting back some sense of the possible. The pandemic has been all about what we cannot do, and the crouch it has imposed on us has had us dwelling almost exclusively on limitations. I’ll know I’m getting better when that frame has shifted for me—when I’m planning and strategizing rather than watching life passively with detached horror. I’ll know I’m no longer crouching when I’m moving forward again, even if cautiously.It’ll take some time. In the interim, maybe it’s good to heed the advice that my family friend’s children offered: let’s try to be more charitable. It’s good to recognize that we’re all crouching down, trapped in time, mute, helpless.I guess I have my New Year’s Resolution.

Edward O. Wilson, a biologist celebrated for creating the field of sociobiology and a leading authority on ants, died December 26 at age 92.

The influential naturalist "was called 'Darwin's natural heir,' and was known affectionately as 'the ant man' for his pioneering work as an entomologist," the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation wrote in a statement.

A longtime Harvard professor, Wilson won Pulitzer Prizes for the nonfiction works On Human Nature in 1979 and The Ants in 1991. Among his many other accolades are a National Medal of Science and a Crafoord Prize.

Wilson was also dubbed "the father of biodiversity," and was a fervent advocate for protecting the environment. A prolific writer, he published more than 30 books, including a bestselling work of fiction, 2010's Anthill: A Novel.

Many colleagues and admirers paid tribute to Wilson on social media, including former Vice President Al Gore, who also noted the December 25 passing of prominent ecologist Thomas Lovejoy.

"It is heartbreaking to lose Tom Lovejoy & EO Wilson, two towering figures in conservation," Gore wrote on Monday. "Both were passionate defenders of life on Earth who worked with kindness and compassion to advance our understanding of the world around us. I was lucky to know them and call them friends."

It is heartbreaking to lose Tom Lovejoy & EO Wilson, two towering figures in conservation. Both were passionate defenders of life on Earth who worked with kindness and compassion to advance our understanding of the world around us. I was lucky to know them and call them friends. — Al Gore (@algore) December 27, 2021

Wilson first gained prominence within the scientific community with the 1967 publication of The Theory of Island Biogeography. Co-authored by Robert MacArthur, the book's study drew a link between an island's size and the number of species it contained.

He enjoyed another celebrated collaboration with Harvard mathematician William Bossery, and the two extensively studied the secretion of pheromones as a tool of communication among ants. Their work pioneered the study of how not just animals but also plants and microorganisms use scents.

In the 1970s, Wilson created the field of sociobiology, which argued that genetic traits play a role in human and animal behavior, thus rejecting the formerly accepted belief that mental behavior in youth is formed by nurture. These theories were explored in his books The Insect Societies (1971) and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975).

During his later years, Wilson argued for a conservation concept he laid out in his 2016 book, Half-Earth. In that work, he called for the setting aside of half of Earth's lands and seas for other species. Wilson set up the Half-Earth Project to continue this goal.

"E.O. Wilson's holy grail was the sheer delight of the pursuit of knowledge. A relentless synthesizer of ideas, his courageous scientific focus and poetic voice transformed our way of understanding ourselves and our planet," Paula J. Ehrlich, CEO & President of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, said in a statement.

Ehrlich continued, "His greatest hope was that students everywhere share his passion for discovery as the ultimate scientific foundation for future stewardship of our planet. His gift was a deep belief in people and our shared human resolve to save the natural world."

By James Pethokoukis and Benjamin F. Jones
Is federal funding for research and development a critical investment in future economic growth and technological progress or just another example of wasteful government spending? And what mix of basic science and applied research produces the greatest returns? In this episode, Benjamin F. Jones discusses the benefits of science and innovation, the policies that can leverage these engines of prosperity, and the challenges we face.
Ben is a professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Northwestern University as well as the faculty director of the Kellogg Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. This summer he authored “Science and Innovation: The Under-Fueled Engine of Prosperity.”

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.
Pethokoukis: In the paper, you say the US invests about 3 percent of GDP in R&D. Is that a lot, in the post-war era, a little — where does that rank?
Jones: It’s really about
the same. For the most part, the US is quite consistent, like other countries,
in how much they invest — what share of our total resources we invest in a
given year in research and development.
The composition of it has
shifted in an important way, which is to say that the private sector makes up
an increasingly large portion of that 3 percent. And public investment, which
really supports science in particular, makes up a declining share. And, in
fact, the public support portion is now at its lowest level in about the last
70 years.
Does that composition, how it’s divvied up between public and private,
matter?
It matters in the sense that what a lot of the public money is doing is science, and what a lot of the private money is doing is application and the creation of specific goods and services. And those are, of course, complements. You can think of the science as opening up new doorways, and then the private sector is walking through those doorways and making applications from the new knowledge that’s been generated.
The fact that we’re doing
less science as a share of our resources is, I think, concerning because it’s
something that’s opening up many fewer doorways and, therefore, not creating as
many opportunities. We’re not giving as many opportunities to the private
sector, in a sense, for them to make use of.

Why doesn’t government invest in R&D the way it used to?
I think the answer is
probably salience to the public. The public, and I think I would include
policymakers, don’t fully understand the value of these investments to our
future potential and progress. And I think the first thing actually is not so
much that the public share has declined; it’s that 3 percent isn’t a whole lot
to start with. The evidence is that, whether it’s from the private sector or
science and investments, these are extraordinarily high-return investments to
society.
And of course, the stakes
are, in some sense, obvious. We know it’s important. It drives what? It drives
higher standards of living, better products and services, more productive
workers who get paid more and compete better on the world’s stage. It improves
our health, and it makes our lives longer. It makes our lives healthier. And of
course, it’s very important to national security as well. It’s a big puzzle as
to why we only do 3 percent in the first place, given that the evidence seems
to suggest that it is so valuable.
To the more specific
question you asked, I think that our public interest waxes and wanes. I think
it probably becomes more salient in moments of fear and with a sense of
competition internationally. So the Sputnik moment was a moment that sparked
the Apollo program, a moment where the US suddenly feels behind. And not just
behind in general, but behind their Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union. So
then, there’s a huge increase in investment, and of course the Apollo program,
particularly in the space race.
U.S. Army Gen. Gustave F. Perna and U.S. President Donald Trump speak about an administration effort dubbed “Operation Warp Speed” to find a vaccine for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), September 18, 2020. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Take a modern context:
Today, where there’s COVID, we have a very clear challenge. You get Operation
Warp Speed. Suddenly, the government is very invested in trying to solve that
challenge. I think the sense of China rising today is also something that is
pressing on Congress, effectively in many ways, to increase our investments in
this space. I think a sense of threat can make it more salient to the public.
But in some sense, the
deeper question is, why isn’t it more salient in general? Why are we investing
so little all the time? Even in Apollo moments, we’re not investing that much,
given the benefits that it seems to bring.
Walk me through the process of how we figure out how much we should
spend. I would guess that might begin by just looking at the returns to public
spending on R&D.
Let’s just start with a
high-level total number — that 3 percent. Evidence suggests that for every
dollar we put into the R&D machine, across the waterfront of R&D
policies and investments, on average that’s returning something like $5 or more
back in social value. In other words, put $1 in, you get $5 back. That’s an
amazing return. It’s an incredible return. If any of us had that machine
sitting on our desk, you could spend all day — put in 10, get back 50; put in
100, get back 500 — pretty good machine to have. So we seem to be just really
under-investing on the margin, compared to what we could be doing.
You could imagine
doubling it, 3 percent to 6 percent, and that could really elevate the growth
rate of the economy. It could not just elevate the growth rate, it could make
us live longer lives. We would solve problems like Alzheimer’s faster. We might
create clean energy technologies faster. There are all sorts of things that we
would do that would have lots of value.
In some ways, the harder
question actually is, what exactly would you invest in there? It’s harder in
the sense that, first of all, a lot of these policies interact. But also
because we have better information about certain kinds of policies than others.
We just don’t know about certain things. For example, when the National Science
Foundation invests in mathematics, what’s the benefit? It’s a little harder to
trace. You can tell lots of very clear stories where there are enormous
benefits. You don’t get cryptocurrency without mathematics. You don’t get the
mobile technology and GPS satellites without mathematics. All sorts of things.
But that’s a little further away from application, that sort of investment in
math. Whereas, when you look in the private sector, you can often see how an
additional dollar of R&D leads to something very concrete, right in front
of you.
But what I would tell
you, and we can go into this in much more detail if you’d like, is that when
you study these individual R&D policies, you tend to find over and over
again that they have very high returns themselves. A simple policy would be to
just expand our investment across the range of inputs into the R&D process,
which are very many.
Rather than focusing on whether we should spend it on this area or
that area, one of the debates is how much should be very basic research, raw
science, versus more applied. Does that matter in these calculations of return?
I think what we know is
that the returns look high in both cases. We don’t know which return is higher.
Nor are they necessarily separable, because applied research builds on the
basic research. But also, this actually may be more surprising to people, basic
research often builds on applied research. A lot of the really interesting
understandings we’ve developed of nature actually come from people solving very
particular applied work.
So for example, Louis Pasteur,
in the middle of the 19th century. We all know Louis Pasteur because we get
pasteurized milk when we get it from the grocery. He was someone who’s made a
lot of applied work in food spoilage and fermentation. But he’s also the person
who generated the germ theory of disease, which is one of the most basic
biomedical insights there is, and it unleashes much longer lives for all of us,
through antibiotics, vaccines, and other things that come later. But the idea
that these little microbes we couldn’t see are causing us to be ill was not
appreciated before Pasteur. He’s really connecting it to his applied work in
food spoilage.
To try to separate basic
research from applied research — in some ways, it’s a natural question. It’s a
hard question to answer because they interplay so clearly. What we’d probably
do best with is spreading our bets and doing more of both.
So one criticism of basic research I’ve heard is that we, meaning the
United States, will do the initial research, and then other countries take that
new knowledge and create their own industries. Is that something we should
worry about? Or, should we be doing more applied research and helping fund
domestic startups?
There are somewhat
contending imperatives in R&D. The question at some level is, do we just
want to get as good as we can ourselves, or is it really about how we rate
versus somebody else? In a health context, if we can live a longer life and we
can solve Alzheimer’s, we’re pretty happy. And we’re probably pretty happy if
people in Switzerland and South Africa also live longer lives and solve
Alzheimer’s. Whereas in a national security context, it might seem like you
need to be ahead. I think that in particular is where that concern might raise
itself more acutely.
But I would say that
basic research is done by people, and very sophisticated people who are very
specialized and have very deep understandings of certain kinds of phenomena,
from physics and chemistry, to medicine, to computer science, to anything else.
And when you do the basic research and you invest in the basic research, you’re
not just investing in the creation of ideas — you’re investing in creating the
people in your country who are the best world masters of those ideas and are
the ones who are going to be able to fully understand them, and also use them
and take them to the next level. That human capital component, the people part,
is much stickier. It’s in the country you invest in. Those people aren’t going
to the other countries.
I think, in a sense, the
way you hold onto the advantage of basic research is largely because you’re
investing in the people in your country, who are in fact doing it, and then
have this leg-up advantage. One way to see that, of course, is: Why do we see
clustering of innovative activity on the map? Why is it in the US so much? Why
is it in Silicon Valley? Why do you see a lot of biomedical research in
Cambridge, Massachusetts? It’s because that’s where the people are, and they
cluster with all these different specialties. That becomes a very sticky and
self-fulfilling investment.
I think, yes, it will be
the case that basic research will spill over, to some extent, to other
countries. In many ways, that’s a good thing because other people can benefit.
But in terms of keeping ahead, that human capital piece is a key part of why
you do keep ahead through those investments.
Well, we can create those people in this country or we can bring those
people in from other countries. How are we doing in both those areas?
It’s a mixed scorecard.
The US does, obviously, very well at higher-level education in research
institutions. People from all over the world want to come and study in those
institutions.
If you look at our
domestic pipeline, in terms of our K–12 education, we seem to do very poorly
compared to many other countries. Recent evidence suggests that our systems in
the United States create what we might call “lost Einsteins,” which is to say
we see lots of kids who are great at math, say in third grade, and have the
kind of technical capacities that you would think would lead them in very
strong, inventive and entrepreneurial STEM careers, but they don’t get on that
pathway. It could be related to their household income or their gender, their
ethnic group or racial group. So we seem to have a lot of talent that doesn’t
migrate well through the K–12 system in the US — so we’re foreclosing the
pipeline of talent, to some extent. I think that’s a great place for the US to
be trying to do reform and investing, to create that. It’s a matter of not just
overall success of the nation; it’s all a matter of individual opportunity, as
well, for all these kids. I think it very much goes to the American Dream.
The other side, of
course, is importing talent through immigration policy. This is, of course, an
area where the US, for a long time, gained enormously. If you look at who does
a lot of the great research in the United States, who does a lot of the
invention and the patenting, who starts a lot of the great companies, the
answer is surprisingly often people born outside the US who move to the US. So
immigrants, for a long time, have played an outsized role in our scientific,
inventive, and entrepreneurial system and helped make the US the most effective
innovation system in the world. That’s been a strength.
Immigrants to the United States stand as the colors are presented during a naturalization ceremony on Ellis Island, in New York, September 17, 2004. Via REUTERS
But of course, for a
whole bunch of reasons, we have a lot of conflict over immigration policy in
the United States and we’ve been stymied for any kind of major immigration
reform for some time. I think there’s a lot of dimensions to the types of
immigration and what’s going on there, but certainly in terms of foreclosing
access to our system and being able to draw in the best and the brightest
around the world to participate, not just in scientific research but
participate in the United States, is really damaging our long-run prospects as
a nation that will lead in the world.
We’ve had Nick Bloom on here, talking about his work on how game-changing ideas are getting harder to find. And to find those, we need to put resources, including more researchers, into discovery. That seems hard, to keep finding more people to push the technological frontier. Is that a natural limitation on doing science? Or might AI become a super research assistant to complement those activities?
Things like AI will help;
it really depends on people. I don’t think we are actually limited in some
fundamental sense. Innovation may be getting harder and there’s lots of
evidence for that, but again, the US is putting less and less public dollars
into R&D.
It’s interesting. What do
we think drives productivity and the long-run growth rate of the United States?
It’s learning new and better ways of doing things. It’s making us more
productive and that really comes back to R&D. If we have a productivity
growth slowdown, which we seem to have this century, and then we look and we
say, “Oh, the government is not investing as much of the share of GDP as
it used to. It’s half of what we did in 1980.” Well, maybe we should do a
lot more there. It’s scaling funding into R&D.
But of course, to answer
your question as well, it’s not just scaling resources in a financial sense. It’s
scaling the people pipeline. I think we have lots of talented people who are
not going into this space, and there are certainly lots of people abroad who,
traditionally, are very eager to come to the United States and participate but
cannot do so because of visa category limitations.
I wish science policy was just about coming up with a number. It would
be a lot easier to analyze. But it seems like it gets very messy trying to
figure out if we need to be doing something and making those changes, as far as
the actual practice of science.
Yeah, the practice is
quite complex, obviously, and there are effectively many government
institutions that are involved. The biggest: We all talk about the NIH, the
National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy. The Department of
Defense is actually the biggest funder, and on from there. And they have very
different kinds of grant systems — ways of reviewing, length of grants, amounts
of grants. We have a whole rich array of public policy. There are also a lot of
philanthropists who are increasingly in the game of funding science in their
own, rather idiosyncratic ways.
But, if you were to boil
it down for me, I would say that I think diversity of approaches is really key.
I think that there’s, if not systematic evidence but compelling storytelling
evidence that suggests that we herd too much into a smaller set of discovery
pathways. And the reason you want diversity is because, first of all, nobody
has a crystal ball. If we knew what was going to happen when you started an
R&D project, we wouldn’t have to do it. The whole point is that we’re going
into the unknown. We’re basically stumbling around in the dark, looking for a
light switch and trying to flip it on. And we’re going to miss. We’re going to
fail. The best people, Nobel Prize winners, all fail a lot, then they have a
big breakthrough because it’s fundamentally uncertain.
And partly because of
that, you should be very skeptical when someone tells you, “I know that
this is the thing we should be doing.” Because nobody knows that that’s
the thing we should be doing. We have better guesses and we have worse guesses,
but you can never be overconfident. And so, in that sense, spread your bet.
You’d be very surprised where some of the big insights come from and the
spillovers that come and just go in unexpected directions.
Via Twenty20
A classic example of that
would be extremophile bacteria. There are two biologists from the University of
Indiana who go out to Yellowstone National Park, a famous American monument.
And they’re asking a very basic question about life, which is whether life can
exist in really extreme environments. And so they’re looking at hot springs — Old
Faithful, etc. They find, in fact, that there are these bacteria that actually
live in boiling water. Amazing. Who knew life could survive in those conditions?
Okay, that’s just a really curious, interesting discovery about the nature of
life.
But it turns out that
that very bacterium that they discovered has an enzyme in it which later would
prove, in a completely unexpected way, to be absolutely essential to being able
to replicate DNA at scale in a laboratory. Basically, the entire biotechnology
industry in all of its forms, coming even out of COVID vaccines and COVID
testing, all the PCR tests — that process which is the essential tool of
replicating genes depends on that very bacterium and one particular enzyme in
that bacterium. Without that, we wouldn’t be able to do any of these things.
Science is going to open
up entire new industries in ways that we cannot expect. And most of it won’t.
Most of it is going to be people stumbling around in those hot springs and they
come back up: “There’s nothing here.” Or they find something but it’s not
applied any time soon. But you really don’t know where these big insights are
going to come from, so we really need to spread our bets and not pretend that
we have a crystal ball.
When entrepreneurs try something and fail, they’re still celebrated
for their risk-taking. But with government, we don’t seem to have nearly as
much tolerance for failure. If we want to expand government research funding,
will Americans have to become more tolerant of the failures that naturally come
with bleeding-edge research?
I agree. Solyndra, of
course, is the common example people like to throw around of a government
investment misfire. But this is why I go back to salience: People often don’t
see the benefits directly.
The story I just told
you, where biotechnology comes from, most people don’t know. They don’t
understand that that depended on science. They don’t understand that Uber
actually depends directly on Albert Einstein, and that Albert Einstein’s insights
depended directly on a 19th-century map from a person named Bernard Riemann,
because it’s so technical. These are very technical things that spillovers
happen in unexpected and slow ways. So the public does not really appreciate
that.
And then they see
failure, to your point, and they’re like, “Ah, we wasted taxpayer
dollars.” So a couple of points. First of all, venture capitalists waste
money all the time, because they know they don’t have a crystal ball. They
spread their bets and they’re looking for the big thing, and they miss most of
the time. That’s the private sector; that’s not the public sector. For every 10
drugs large pharmaceutical firms try, going into a phase one trial, only one is
going to actually become an approved product. They fail all the time, and
that’s a private sector firm. They’re making the best bets they can possibly
make with their own money and they’re failing all the time. And that’s okay,
because that is the nature of R&D. We have to get into a mindset where we
allow for failure and that we expect failure.
The headquarters of bankrupt Solyndra LLC is shown in Fremont, California. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
And I can tell you one comforting thing. If you look to the public, they may think, “Oh, science is useless, most of it’s totally useless.” If you take every patent issued in the United States (this is a study that I did with a co-author), and you look to see what kind of science they build on — do they reference specific science or not? — you actually find that the vast majority of all scientific articles will flow through eventually into some patent. Maybe not directly, maybe not cited directly by a patent, but a science article is built on by another science article, and then that one is cited by a patent. There’s a process where basic flows towards applied and flows into the actual marketplace inventions that become goods and services in front of people.
We see enormous
connectivity. This kind of idea that there’s an ivory tower and science is
doing things that are not relevant to the public and it’s not valuable — that
is not what we see. It’s not what we see in the macro when we look at the
returns to the investment. It’s not what we see in the micro when we look down
to every particular scientific article and we look at what use it actually has.
We find an enormous range and a rich range of use. Often it’s hard to trace;
you have to actually go and trace it, but it’s there. We need the public to
come to an orientation where they don’t expect to understand every detail — this
is science — and don’t demand that you’re going to succeed when it’s impossible
because there’s going to be failure and you need to fail. And the public needs
to recognize that the stakes here are so high for our standard of living, our
workforce, our health, our national security, that we can just go and make
these investments that drive those things.
When people hear about what’s happening in science, many of them worry
about AI, and robots, and biotechnologies. Some people think we’re progressing
too quickly and we can’t control these technologies that we’re creating. How do
you respond to those fears?
Well, they’re very
interesting questions. If you go back to life before the Industrial Revolution
and before the Enlightenment, say, humans made very, very little progress for
almost all of human history. On net, averaging across all the things we’ve
figured out in science and technology, do we live a better life today than we
did when we only lived to age 35? Your children were likely to die by age five
most of the time and you were a farmer with very few tools, working very long
hours all the time, and struggling with nutrition and starvation much of the
time. That’s one world.
Now, that’s not to say
that certain technologies might not be problematic, and I think we do produce
problematic technologies. You can debate which ones are and which ones aren’t.
There’s a double-edged sword to a lot of these things. But I think when you
look and you step back, and you say, “Well, let’s look at human history
and the human experience,” you realize just that on net, the positives
that have come from this, historically at least, over a long history now, have
really been enormously positive.
When I look at a
technology that comes and that looks potentially problematic — which I might do
with things like echo chambers in social media (it seems like a problematic
aspect of the internet), and there are problematic applications of certain
things in the context of weapons of mass destruction, there’s AI, and they have
complex and problematic properties in some forms, if not in others — I think
the answer to these things: If technology creates a new problem, the answer to
that is going to be actually a new technology, a new insight that’s going to
solve that problem.
So a different way to
think about what science and technology do, in strictly applied applications,
we’re trying to solve problems. We have a problem. We don’t know how to solve
it. People die of cancer. People get Alzheimer’s disease. Everyone is not very
productive on a farm. You’re identifying a problem, and you’re trying to come
up with a better solution to that problem. Science and technology can sound
esoteric, but that’s what we’re doing all the time and that’s this inventive
people, creative aspect.
If technology does good
things, like the internet does a lot of great things, maybe it does some
problematic things. Okay, so what are those problems? Figure out what those
problems are, and let’s try to solve them. That might call in some regulation,
and that could be very useful, some government, institutional ideas as
innovations, but it also can call in new technologies that can try to solve
those problems. New companies that don’t have some of these flaws. These kinds
of things. I think if you looked at the scope of human history, I’d want to bet
on more technology, not on less technology.
Over at my blog and newsletter, I’ve written about the long bet between Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolfsson about whether we’ll see faster productivity growth over the rest of this decade. Where do you come down on that?
I’m a tech optimist in
the sense that I think there are all sorts of problems we know now that we
don’t know how to solve. You hear this generationally. They say, “Oh,
we’ve figured everything already out.” You heard this back in the
Industrial Revolution, at one point. You heard it about the early computers:
“Oh, we’ve done everything we could ever do with computers, there’s no
more application” — that was before the internet. You hear this kind of thing
all the time.
I think I look at the
world and I see all sorts of problems that we’d like to solve. I think just in
health alone, there are so many problems we haven’t solved. And we have many,
many uncertainties and doors to go through, and biology is producing radically
surprising insights into new tools all the time that are incredible. Space
travel, artificial intelligence, any number of deep understandings of nature
and reality that we still haven’t figured out. Physics is puzzling through very
deep questions. I see enormous opportunities for progress. So in that sense I’m
an optimist.
Now, I also think it is
getting harder. I think that we’ve plucked the low-hanging fruit first. One
thing I emphasize in my work is that there’s just so much we’ve already figured
out, that to be an expert now, you have to be very narrow at the frontier. So
your chance for having wide insights as individuals is very low. You take the
first airplane from the Wright Brothers, two people that are leading aeronauts
of their time, and then you go to a modern airframe from Boeing or Airbus and
we’re talking 30 different deep engineering disciplines just to design and
produce the engines. There’s an enormous amount of knowledge that goes into,
say, a modern technological version of something. So for one person to push
that frontier is increasingly challenging.
Crowds at the 100th anniversary of flight celebrations watch a plane flying over the Wright Brothers National Memorial Monday, December 15, 2003. REUTERS/Hart Matthews
That may be why we have a
productivity growth slow down. It is getting harder. But I’m an optimist
because I think there’s so much more we can do and I think we will solve it.
This is where I come back to effort: We just have to try. We aren’t trying very
hard. That’s the reality. We’re not trying anywhere near as hard as we could. We’re
leaving a lot of talent out of the game; we’re not investing anywhere near what
we could — so most of the returns to that looked very, very high. So to me the
path is fairly clear.
To finish up, there’s a lot of interest in Washington about doing more
on R&D and there’s an ever-involving R&D plan moving its way through
Congress. What would be your policy advice on science and innovation investment
in R&D?
Well, the Endless
Frontiers Act and its evolution, I think, is going in the right direction so
I’m very positive about it. I think that the more we can do through the NSF,
the Department of Energy, or other ways, it will be to our collective benefit.
So I think it’s a great investment. When I look at the numbers they’re talking
about, I think it’s still very small compared to what could be done. And so I
think there’s always more to do. But nonetheless, I don’t want to let the perfect
be the enemy of the good and I’m encouraged that Congress is thinking in these
ways.
Whether you get there
from competition with China or some other motivation, it will be hugely
beneficial so I am very glad to see it.
My guest today has been Benjamin Jones. Ben, thanks for coming on the
podcast.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Benjamin F. Jones is a professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Northwestern University.
Learn more: How did SpaceX revolutionize private spaceflight? My long-read Q&A with Eric Berger | Will cloud computing create a New Roaring '20s? My long-read Q&A with Mark Mills | Should we bring back woolly mammoths? My long-read Q&A with Beth Shapiro
The post Investing in science to fuel economic prosperity: My long-read Q&A with Benjamin Jones appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 60
More and more people are waking up every day to the fact that our schools have become an undeniable catastrophe, and they’re starting to realize alongside that fact that it isn’t an accident. It is purposed. It is intentional. It is a strategy, and it uses our children as pawns for achieving a nightmarish agenda, no matter how much damage it does to them to achieve it. In this Groomer Schools series on the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay has already walked you through (in Part 1) the long Communist Party strategy to use sex education in schools to destabilize society and sever ties between generations and just how specifically grotesque this grooming sexual agenda is (in Part 2). Here, in the third part of the series, Lindsay puts these two pieces together, explains their purpose, and illustrates how Critical Race Theory works alongside Queer Theory (grooming) for a blatantly Maoist purpose: to create an American Red Guard meant to overthrow our society and start all over from a new Year Zero. Join him to understand the evil Maoist tactics being employed in our schools to turn our children into Revolutionaries for the purpose of undermining America and the West.

Subscribe to the New Discourses podcast on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or by RSS.
Previous episodes of the New Discourses podcast are available here.
The post Groomer Schools 3: The Creation of an American Red Guard appeared first on New Discourses.

Edward O. Wilson in his office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, in 2014. Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty ImagesE. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I met Edward O. Wilson in 1982, he had already made at least five such contributions to science.
Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies.
Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O. – as he was fondly known – was an academic god for many young scientists like me. This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study. 

E.O. Wilson reflects on insect society, human society and the importance of biodiversity in 2009.

Big insights from small subjects
In 1982 I cautiously sat down next to the great man during a break at a small conference on social insects. He turned, extended his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” Then we talked until it was time to get back to business. 
Three hours later I approached him again, this time without trepidation because surely now we were the best of friends. He turned, extended his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” 
Wilson forgetting me, but remaining kind and interested anyway, showed that beneath his many layers of brilliance was a real person and a compassionate one. I was fresh out of graduate school, and doubt that another person at that conference knew less than I — something I’m sure Wilson discovered as soon as I opened my mouth. Yet he didn’t hesitate to extend himself to me, not once but twice.
Thirty-two years later, in 2014, we met again. I had been invited to speak in a ceremony honoring his receipt of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science. The award honored Wilson’s lifetime achievements in science, but particularly his many efforts to save life on Earth.
My work studying native plants and insects, and how crucial they are to food webs, was inspired by Wilson’s eloquent descriptions of biodiversity and how the myriad interactions among species create the conditions that enable the very existence of such species. 

Biologist E.O. Wilson with models of his life’s greatest subject, ants.
Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

I spent the first decades of my career studying the evolution of insect parental care, and Wilson’s early writings provided a number of testable hypotheses that guided that research. But his 1992 book, “The Diversity of Life,” resonated deeply with me and became the basis for an eventual turn in my career path.
Though I am an entomologist, I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes.
Throughout his career Wilson flatly rejected the notion held by many scholars that natural history – the study of the natural world through observation rather than experimentation – was unimportant. He proudly labeled himself a naturalist, and communicated the urgent need to study and preserve the natural world. Decades before it was in vogue, he recognized that our refusal to acknowledge the Earth’s limits, coupled with the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth, had set humans well on their way to ecological oblivion. 
Wilson understood that humans’ reckless treatment of the ecosystems that support us was not only a recipe for our own demise. It was forcing the biodiversity he so cherished into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one caused by an animal: us. 

E.O. Wilson long advocated conserving the world’s biodiversity hot spots – zones with high numbers of native species where habitats are most endangered. This image shows deforestation from 1975 to 2013 in one such area, West Africa’s Upper Guinean Forest.
USGS

A broad vision for conservation
And so, to his lifelong fascination with ants, E. O. Wilson added a second passion: guiding humanity toward a more sustainable existence. To do that, he knew he had to reach beyond the towers of academia and write for the public, and that one book would not suffice. Learning requires repeated exposure, and that is what Wilson delivered in “The Diversity of Life,” “Biophilia,” “The Future of Life,” “The Creation” and his final plea in 2016, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”
As Wilson aged, desperation and urgency replaced political correctness in his writings. He boldly exposed ecological destruction caused by fundamentalist religions and unrestricted population growth, and challenged the central dogma of conservation biology, demonstrating that conservation could not succeed if restricted to tiny, isolated habitat patches. 
In “Half Earth,” he distilled a lifetime of ecological knowledge into one simple tenet: Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.
But is this possible? Nearly half of the planet is used for some form of agriculture, and 7.9 billion people and their vast network of infrastructure occupy the other half.
As I see it, the only way to realize E.O.’s lifelong wish is learn to coexist with nature, in the same place, at the same time. It is essential to bury forever the notion that humans are here and nature is someplace else. Providing a blueprint for this radical cultural transformation has been my goal for the last 20 years, and I am honored that it melds with E.O. Wilson’s dream. 
There is no time to waste in this effort. Wilson himself once said, “Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.” Whether humans have the wisdom to meet that deadline remains to be seen.
[Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]
Doug Tallamy received funding from NSF 2015 for research on Chickadees. 

Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer's integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.

The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power.

Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into "worthy" and "unworthy" victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States. It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can't say the words "Belarus," "Myanmar" or the Chinese tennis star "Peng Shuai" fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime. PEN America only stopped accepting funding from the Israeli government, which routinely censors and jails Palestinian journalists and writers in Israel and the occupied West Bank, for the literary group's annual World Voices festival in New York in 2017 when more than 250 writers, poets and publishers, many members of PEN, signed an appeal calling on the CEO of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, to end PEN America's partnership with the Israeli government. The signatories includedWallace Shawn, Alice Walker, Eileen Myles, Louis Erdrich, Russel Banks, Cornel West, Junot Diaz and Viet Thanh Nguyen. To stand up for Assange comes with a cost, as all moral imperatives do. And this is a cost the careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks, who leverage corporate money and corporate backing to seize and deform these organizations into appendages of the ruling class, do not intend to pay.

PEN America is typical of the establishment hijacking of an organization that was founded and once run by writers, some of whom, including Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, I knew. Nossel is a former corporate lawyer, listed as a "contributor" to The Federalist Society, who worked for McKinsey & Company and as Vice President of US Business Development for Bertelsmann. Nossel, who has had herself elevated to the position of the CEO of PEN America, also worked under Hillary Clinton in the State Department, including on the task force assigned to respond to the WikiLeaks revelations. I withdrew from a scheduled speaking event at the 2013 World Voices Festival in New York City and resigned from the organization, which that same year had given me its First Amendment Award, to protest Nossel's appointment. PEN Canada offered me membership which I accepted.

Nossel and PEN America have stated that the prosecution of Assange raises "grave concerns" about press freedom and lauded the decision by a British court in January 2012 not to extradite Assange. Should Nossel and PEN America have not taken this stance on Assange it would have left them in opposition to most PEN organizations around the world. PEN Centre Germany, for example, made Assange an honorary member. PEN International has called for all charges to be dropped against Assange.

But Nossel, at the same time, repeats every slanderous trope and lie used to discredit the WikiLeaks publisher facing extradition to the United States to potentially serve a 175-year sentence under the Espionage Act. She refuses to acknowledge that Assange is being persecuted because he carried out the most basic and important role of any publisher, making public documents that expose the multitudinous crimes and lies of empire. And I have not seen any direct appeals to the Biden administration on Assange's behalf from PEN America. "Whether Assange is a journalist or WikiLeaks qualifies as a press outlet is immaterial to the counts set out here," Nossel said. But, as a lawyer who was a member of the State Department task force that responded to the WikiLeaks revelations, she understands it is not immaterial. The core argument behind the U.S. effort to extradite Assange revolves around denying him the status of a publisher or a journalist and denying WikiLeaks the status of a press publication. Nossel parrots the litany of false charges leveled against Assange including that he endangered lives by not redacting documents, hacked into a government computer and meddled in the 2016 elections, all key points in the government's case against Assange. PEN America under her direction has sent out news briefs with headlines such as: "Security Reports Reveal How Assange Turned an Embassy into a Command Post for Election Meddling." The end result is that PEN America is helping to uncoil the rope to string up the WikiLeaks publisher, a gross betrayal of the core mission of PEN.

"There are some things Assange did in this case, or is alleged to have done, that go beyond what a mainstream news outlet would do, in particular the first indictment that was brought about five weeks ago focused specifically on this charge of computer hacking, hacking into a password to get beyond the government national security infrastructure and penetrate and allow Chelsea Manning to pass through all of these documents. That, I think you can say, is not what a mainstream news outlet or a journalist would do," Nossel said on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on May 28, 2019.

But Nossel did not stop there, going on to defend the legitimacy of the US campaign to extradite Assange, although Assange is not a US citizen and WikiLeaks is not a US based publication. Most importantly, left unmentioned by Nossel, is that Assange has not committed any crimes.

"The reason that this indictment is coming down now is because Assange has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for years trying to escape his extradition request," she said on the program. "He faces an extradition request to Sweden where he has been charged with sexual assault and now this huge indictment here in the US and that proceeding will play out over a long period. He will make all sorts of arguments about why he faces a form of legal jeopardy that should immunize him from being extradited, but there are extradition treaties. There are legal assistance treaties where countries are able to prosecute nationals of other countries and bring them back to face charges when they have committed a crime. This is happening pursuant to that. There are US nationals who are charged and convicted in foreign courts."

WikiLeaks released U.S. military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, a cache of 250,000 diplomatic cables and 800 Guantanamo Bay detainee assessment briefs along with the 2007 "Collateral Murder" video, in which U.S. helicopter pilots banter as they gun down civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. The material was given to WikiLeaks in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, then private first class Pfc. Bradley Manning. Assange has been accused by an enraged U.S. intelligence community of causing "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." Mike Pompeo, who headed the CIA under Donald Trump, called WikiLeaks a "hostile intelligence service" aided by Russia, rhetoric embraced by Democratic Party leaders.

Assange also published 70,000 hacked emails copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and earned the eternal hatred of the Democratic Party establishment. The Podesta emails exposed the sleezy and corrupt world of the Clintons, including the donation of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and identified both nations as major funders of Islamic State [ISIL/ISIS]. They exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. They exposed Clinton's repeated dishonesty. She was caught telling the financial elites that she wanted "open trade and open borders" and believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy while publicly promising financial regulation and reform. The cache showed that the Clinton campaign interfered in the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the Republican nominee, assuming he would be the easiest candidate to defeat. They exposed Clinton's advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate and her role as the principal architect of the war in Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.

The Democratic Party, which blames Russian interference for its election loss to Trump, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers. Hillary Clinton calls WikiLeaks a Russian front. James Comey, the former FBI director, however, conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary, and Assange has said the emails were not provided by "state actors."

"A zealous prosecutor is going to look at someone like Assange and recognize that he's a very unpopular figure for a hundred different reasons, whether it's his meddling in the 2016 elections, his political motivations for that, or the blunderbuss nature of these disclosures," Nossel said on Leher's program. "This is not a leak that was designed to expose one particular policy or effectuate a specific change in how the US government was going about its business. It was massive and indiscriminate, while in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals. I was actually working at the State Department during the WikiLeaks disclosure period, and I was briefly on a task force to respond to the WikiLeaks disclosures and there was really a sense of alarm about individuals whose lives would be in danger, people who had worked with the US, provided information, human rights defenders who had spoken to embassy personnel on a confidential basis. There is a problem of over classification, but there is also good reason to classify a lot of this stuff and they made no distinction between that [which] was legitimately classified and not."

Any group of artists or writers overseen by a CEO from corporate America inevitably become members of an updated version of the Union of Soviet Writers where the human rights violations by our enemies are heinous crimes and our own violations and those of our allies are ignored or whitewashed. As Julian Benda reminded us in "The Treason of the Intellectuals," we can serve privilege and power or we can serve justice and truth. Those, Benda warns, who become apologists for those with privilege and power destroy their capacity to defend justice and truth.

Where is the outrage from an organization founded by writers to protect writers about the prolonged abuse, stress and repeated death threats, including from Nossel's former boss, Hillary Clinton, who allegedly quipped at a staff meeting, "Can't we just drone this guy?" (and didn't deny it later) or from the CIA which discussed kidnapping and assassinating Assange? Where is the demand that the trial of Assange be thrown out because the CIA through UC Global, the security firm at the embassy, secretly taped the meetings, and all other encounters, between Assange and his lawyers, obliterating attorney-client privilege? Where is the public denunciation of the extreme isolation that has left Assange, who suffered a stroke during court video proceedings on October 27, in precarious physical and psychological health? Where is the outcry over his descent into hallucinations and deep depression, leaving him dependent on antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine? Where are the thunderous condemnations about the ten years he has been detained, seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly three in the high-security Belmarsh prison, where he has had to live without access to sunlight, exercise and proper medical care? "His eyes were out of sync, his right eyelid would not close, his memory was blurry," his fiance Stella Morris said of the stroke. Where are the demands for intervention and humane treatment, including an end to his isolation, once it was revealed Assange was pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall? Where is the fear for his life, especially after "half of a razor blade" was discovered under his socks and it was revealed that he called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself "hundreds of times a day"? Where is the call to prosecute those who committed the war crimes, carried out the torture and engaged in the corruption WikiLeaks exposed? Not from PEN America.

Melzer in his book "The Trial of Julian Assange," the most methodical and detailed recounting of the long persecution by the United States and the British government of Assange, blasts those like Nossel who blithely peddle the lies used to tar Assange and cater to the powerful.

When Assange was first charged, he was not charged with espionage by the United States. Rather, he was charged with a single count of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion." This charge alleged that he conspired with Manning to decrypt a password hash for the US Department of Defense computer system. But as Melzer points out, "Manning already had full 'top secret' access privileges to the system and all the documents she leaked to Assange. So, even according to the US government, the point of the alleged attempt to decode the password hash was not to gain unauthorized access to classified information ('hacking'), but to help Manning to cover her tracks inside the system by logging in with a different identity ('source protection'). In any case, the alleged attempt undisputedly remained unsuccessful and did not result in any harm whatsoever."

Nossel's repetition of the lie that Assange endangered lives by not redacting documents was obliterated during the trial of Manning, several sessions of which I attended at Fort Meade in Maryland with Cornel West. During the court proceedings in July 2013 Brigadier General Robert Carr, a senior counterintelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the US Department of Defense, told the court that the task force did not uncover a single case of someone who lost their lives due to the publication of the classified documents by WikiLeaks. As for Nossel's claim that "in the beginning they worked with journalists to be careful about redacting names of individuals" she should be aware that the decryption key to the unredacted State Department documents was not released by Assange, but Luke Harding and David Leigh from The Guardian in their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy.

When the ruling class peddles lies there is no cost for parroting them back to the public. The cost is paid by those who tell the truth.

On November 27, 2019, Melzer gave a talk at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to dedicate a sculpture by the Italian artist Davide Dormino. Figures of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, cast in bronze, stood on three chairs. A fourth chair, empty, was next to them inviting others to take a stand with them. The sculpture is called "Anything to Say?" Melzer stepped up onto the fourth chair, the hulking edifice of the US Embassy off to his right. He uttered the words that should have come from organizations like PEN America:

For decades, political dissidents have been welcomed by the West with open arms, because in their fight for human rights they were persecuted by dictatorial regimes. Today, however, Western dissidents themselves are forced to seek asylum elsewhere, such as Edward Snowden in Russia or, until recently, Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. For the West itself has begun to persecute its own dissidents, to subject them to draconian punishments in political show trials, and to imprison them as dangerous terrorists in high-security prisons under conditions that can only be described as inhuman and degrading. Our governments feel threatened by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, because they are whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights activists who have provided solid evidence for the abuse, corruption, and war crimes of the powerful, for which they are now being systematically defamed and persecuted. They are the political dissidents of the West, and their persecution is today's witch-hunt, because they threaten the privileges of unsupervised state power that has gone out of control. The cases of Manning, Snowden, Assange and others are the most important test of our time for the credibility of Western rule of law and democracy and our commitment to human rights. In all these cases, it is not about the person, the character or possible misconduct of these dissidents, but about how our governments deal with revelations about of their own misconduct. How many soldiers have been held accountable for the massacre of civilians shown in the video "Collateral Murder"? How many agents for the systematic torture of terror suspects? How many politicians and CEOs for the corrupt and inhumane machinations that have been brought to light by our dissidents? That's what this is about. It is about the integrity of the rule of law, the credibility of our democracies and, ultimately, about our own human dignity and the future of our children. Let us never forget that! Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture

The tenuous return to power of the Democratic Party under Joe Biden, and the specter of a Republican rout of the Democrats in the midterm elections next year, along with the very real possibility of the election in 2024 of Donald Trump, or a Trump-like figure to the presidency, has blinded human rights and press groups to the danger of the egregious assaults on freedom of expression perpetrated by the Biden administration. The steady march towards heavy handed state censorship was accelerated by the Obama administration that charged ten government employees and contractors, eight under the Espionage Act, for disclosing classified information to the press. The Obama administration in 2013 also seized the phone records of 20 Associated Press reporters to uncover who leaked the information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot. This ongoing assault by the Democratic Party has been accompanied by the disappearing on social media platforms of several luminaries on the far right, including Donald Trump and Alex Jones, who were removed from Facebook, Apple, YouTube. Content that is true but damaging to the Democratic Party, including the revelations from Hunter Biden's laptop, have been blocked by digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Algorithms have since at least 2017 marginalized left-wing content, including my own. The legal precedent set in this atmosphere by the sentencing of Assange means that anyone who possesses classified material, or anyone who leaks it, will be guilty of a criminal offense. The sentencing of Assange will signal the end of all investigative inquiries into the inner workings of power. The pandering by press and human rights organizations, tasked with being sentinels of freedom, to the Democratic Party, only contributes to the steady tightening of the vise of press censorship. There is no lesser evil in this fight. It is all evil. Left unchecked, it will result in an American species of China's totalitarianism capitalism.

“Future generations are going to forgive us our horrible genocidal wars, because it’ll pass too far in history. They will forgive us all of the earlier generations’ follies and the harm. But they will not forgive us having so carelessly thrown away a large part of the rest of life on our watch.” Edward Osborne Wilson was one of the great biologists of the 20th century, a classical naturalist drawn to wild places. “Here is a nest of the infamous fire ant.” He was the world’s foremost specialist in the biology of ants. But his mind and talent ranged far beyond insects. He was a profound thinker who developed major theories in ecology and evolution. He became an unlikely celebrity, taking center stage in two controversies of 20th-century science. Over the course of his career, he won nearly every major award in science — and two Pulitzer Prizes. “I’d like to say a word on saving biological diversity — the rest of life.” The New York Times sat down with him in his office at Harvard in March of 2008 for this interview to discuss his life and how his love of science grew out of his love of the natural world. “I believe that a child is, by nature, a hunter. I started with a butterfly collection when I was 9 years old. And I fancied myself an explorer, and decided that I would conduct an expedition and collect insects. And I started it, and I never stopped.” His early expeditions led to the description of hundreds of new species. His breakthroughs in studying social insect behavior and communication changed the way we view ourselves. “Some people have called you a modern-day Darwin. Setting aside false modesty, how does that sit with you?” “Of course, he, being the pioneer and a man of just almost unbelievable acuity, I think he’s matchless. But among current living people, I think I’m the best approach.” The early part of Wilson’s career was marked by conflict and controversy. The 1950s and ‘60s were turbulent years in science. The discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson forever changed biology. Tensions arose between those in the new discipline of molecular biology and classical biologists, whose focus on whole organisms and species seemed old-fashioned. Perhaps no place was the rift more pronounced than at Harvard. And Edward Wilson and James Watson clashed. “He was insistent that all that old biology needs to go away because now, the future of biology lay with molecular biology. And the sooner we get on that, the better. And he was very rude about that. I took it very personally, because I looked up to the man. He was only a year older, but here was someone who had achieved an advance truly historic. I called him the Caligula of biology. And he could do anything he wished, and everybody would applaud.” In time, the two eminent scientists mended fences, speaking highly of one another in public and occasionally appearing together on television. In the 1970s, Wilson became the center of a political storm when he pioneered a new discipline called sociobiology. He extended his ideas on social insect behavior to animals and then humans, thrusting himself center stage into the debate over nature versus nurture. “This is the fundamental principle of sociobiology. Genes for particular social behaviors exist, and that they have spread by natural selection. But scientists are deeply divided as to the scientific and social implications.” “What it did was to flutter the dovecotes of the social sciences and, generally, of the political far left. All of those had decided that the human brain is a blank slate, and that everything is determined by history and by contingency. And anybody that said that there was a biologically based human nature would have to be up to no good. What you were doing was opening the door to racism or sex discrimination. The opposition to sociobiology at Harvard was particularly virulent. It was led by Richard Lewontin and Steve Gould. They set out to discredit entirely of any merit to sociobiology.” “We know nothing about why some people are more aggressive than others, some people are more entrepreneurial, indeed why some people have more musical ability than others. There is no evidence at all that such individuals differ in their genes.” For Wilson, the criticism took a more concrete form at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “My turn came to give the talk. And this group, they rushed the stage. They grabbed the microphone. One of the young women came up behind me, seized the pitcher of ice water and poured it on my head. I was saying to myself, this is very interesting. I think I’m going to be the only scientist ever physically attacked in recent years for an idea.” Seeing the controversy, he set out to address it directly. “Even moderately centrist papers — Time magazine, for example — has come to accept that this was some sort of extreme belief about human genetic basis of behavior. So I sat down and wrote the book “On Human Nature,” which was to explain the human aspect as I saw it, including a lot of the new evidence. That won a Pulitzer Prize. And that’s sort of still the shouting crowd, as they say at a football game after the opponent makes a touchdown. It was a lot less after that.” Edward Osborne Wilson was born in 1929 in Birmingham, Ala. His home life was difficult. His father was an alcoholic who eventually committed suicide. But these hardships were paired with a natural love of the outdoors. “My father had jobs that took him to many places, to several localities in Alabama, and then Pensacola and so on. I went to something like 15 or 16 schools in 11 years of schooling. I was pretty much on my own as an only child, so I had woods to myself, so to speak. And I felt like an explorer every day I went out.” Wilson was blinded in one eye in a childhood fishing accident The resulting lack of depth perception made some observations difficult. But he could hold insects up to his good eye. “I brought home black widows. My parents actually allowed me to breed black widow spiders in big jars on the back porch.” “Were you religious as a boy?” “Well, I was Southern Baptist, of course. And of course I was devout, because everybody was devout, just like everybody in southern Alabama was racist. It was part of the culture that was unquestioned. When I arrived at college, I discovered evolution, and combined that with the natural rebelliousness of a 17 and 18-year-old — I drifted away from fundamentalist Protestantism.” “So do you believe in God?” “I’m not an atheist, because I think it would be foolish to deny, dogmatically, the possibility of some form of superior intelligence. But religion is simply an expression of tribalism that includes the belief, the hope, the desire that that particular tribe is blessed by God. Satisfied with that explanation, I then find it a lot easier to talk with tribal chiefs, also known as priests, rabbis and pastors.” His 2006 book, “The Creation,” was specifically directed to Christians. “I have become very friendly with evangelical leaders as a result of my call for cooperation between scientists and environmentalists to engage in the saving of Earth’s biodiversity.” “We have to paint the — ” At the time of this interview, Wilson, age 79, was keeping busy at his lab at Harvard, starring in a “Nova” episode on PBS and writing books. He was looking forward to publication of his first novel, a political allegory set in an anthill. His greatest legacy may be his effort to preserve the planet’s declining biodiversity. “What we have to keep in mind in considering the rest of life on Earth, is that we’re losing it. And it is the part that cannot be brought back. We are destroying species and ecosystems, which are millions of years old and invaluable to humanity and future generations. And we don’t know how fast they are disappearing. How to wake things up? So I wrote a paper called the “Encyclopedia of Life.” And this caught very quickly. A lot of people said, yes, that’s the way to do it. Electronic encyclopedia with a website for each species of organisms in the world, even if there turned out to be 100 million of them.” The Encyclopedia of Life launched in February of 2008. It was merely the latest of Wilson’s many efforts to heighten public awareness of species loss. “How would you like to be remembered?” “As a successor to Darwin. [laughs] As having carried the torch, at least for a short while.”

We still don’t know how severe the Omicron wave will be, and debates are raging about closing nightclubs, alcohol curfews and work-from-home guidance. It can sometimes feel like last Christmas all over again. But one decision should be clear. Given the tools and knowledge we have now, school closures should be off the table.

Why were schools closed at all in previous lockdowns? The best approach was to minimise risk, given the limited knowledge about Covid-19 transmission and with no vaccination available to protect against severe health outcomes and death. Concerns about many different groups factored into policy decisions on schools.

The first concern was the risk to teachers and school workers such as cleaners and security guards being in an environment where they could contract Covid-19 during their working day. Then there was risk to family members, particularly grandparents and vulnerable parents, of children first contracting Covid-19 at school and then bringing it home to their households. There was also the risk to children themselves of contracting Covid-19 at school; the concern for children was less about severe outcomes and death, and more about long Covid and potential long-term health impacts.

The final concern was modelling data that suggested that schools being open led to wider overall societal mixing, and a greater number of contacts per person, which could increase the R number and drive exponential growth in transmission levels. But vaccines, testing and knowledge on how to manage Covid-19 transmission have radically altered all of the previous considerations.

We now have safe vaccines that are effective at reducing the severe health outcomes of Covid-19, especially with boosters for over-18s. It is positive news that the JCVI has supported vaccinating at-risk children aged between five and 11 and those living with immunocompromised people. However, the UK is again out of line with other countries, many of which opened up vaccination to all children in that age group some months ago.

We know that we can reduce transmission in indoor settings such as schools through good ventilation and air-filtration systems: this can range from opening windows to allow a breeze through classrooms and hallways to HEPA filters that completely clean the air several times in an hour.

And rapid at-home lateral-flow testing is a simple, quick way of identifying infectious individuals and ensuring they stay out of the school environment until they’re past the infectious period. Probably the biggest impact on slowing Covid-19 spread and breaking chains of transmission is to have infectious individuals isolate and not pass on Covid-19 to anyone else. The UK has led in offering free at-home testing to teachers, school staff and pupils, and that is seen as one of the factors in slowing spread within schools.

We also now have concrete evidence on the harms of children being out of school, which we must balance against the risk of harms from Covid. While some cling to the idealised version of online learning with middle-class children with devoted parents sitting next to them teaching with fast broadband and a laptop per child at home, this isn’t the reality for most children, especially those in low-income households.

Access to devices such as computers and tablets, and the internet – and having parents with enough free time to support students – are not guaranteed. Children may also have to do work within the household, for example taking care of younger siblings. And they may have to figure out how to set up the technology themselves if they are in households where parents are working outside or absent. In short, virtual learning works for rich families, but not for poor people.

This is not just about educational attainment. In-person schooling is also about providing children with a safe, heated space during the day, food, books, outdoor play areas and access to adults trained in teaching and interacting with children. School closures also lead to a loss of play and social interaction, they’re associated with increased domestic abuse, a decrease in physical activity, delayed access to paediatric care, and more mental health issues.

Whatever Covid-19 control measures are discussed, school closures should be off the table. Home or remote schooling just doesn’t work and shouldn’t be seen as an acceptable outcome for children. The risks from Covid are better known, and we have more tools to fight it.

So instead of closing schools, we need to focus on improving the protections we now have: better vaccination coverage, ventilation and filtration of the air, and identifying infectious individuals with rapid testing. Now is the time to start making plans for schools as essential societal infrastructure, just as hospitals, supermarkets and other essential institutions stayed open even during the strictest lockdown measures.

In April, the US Centres for Disease Control paused the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They had noticed that among the 6.8 million people who had been given the J&J jab, six people had suffered a rare blood clot known as a “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis” (CVST). They said in a statement that they were recommending that healthcare providers stop using it, until the FDA had reviewed the evidence, and that they were doing so “out of an abundance of caution”.
Caution is a strange word to use. On the day they released the statement, about 70,000 new cases of Covid were confirmed in the United States, and about 1,000 people died of it. Is it “cautious” to stop using a vaccine which would almost certainly reduce those numbers, because of an uncertain chance that it might have negative effects in a tiny cohort?
But caution, in this sense, has been rife during the pandemic. The governments of various European countries stopped the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over similar concerns. Germany, the Guardian reported in March, “was the first country to refuse to allow people over the age of 65 to have the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the absence of evidence of how well it worked in older people, indicating a more cautious approach than most”. 
Over the last two years, again and again, the fears of some possible risk caused by something we might do have outweighed the fears of a thoroughly real, utterly obvious risk which was killing people at the time. And it has, I think, been a failure of the field, or at least the practice, of bioethics.

Bioethics is the study and application of ethical philosophy as it applies to medical and biological research and practice. As a former philosophy student, I have always found the idea very strange – after years spent arguing over the wildly different implications of minor-seeming differences in ethical frameworks, it was amazing to me that you could corral ethicists into things called “ethical review boards” or “independent ethics committees” which would then give you an answer to the question “so is this ethical or not?”
(“We are pleased to inform you, Herr Doktor Kant, that the board rules that you may lie to the murderer for the purpose of concealing your friend’s whereabouts.”)
Drugs continue to be licenced and trials continue to be carried out, so I suppose not every ethics committee gets bogged down for three thousand years in discussions of what we mean by “the good”. And perhaps in normal times, the system works reasonably well, although you do hear some horror stories.
But during the pandemic, something has gone terribly wrong, and I think that the system of ethical approval in medicine has probably cost tens of thousands of lives, at a conservative estimate.
There’s a tweet from 2018 by a California software engineer, about the ethics of self-driving cars. It goes:

Philosophy: so sometimes it goes haywire & ends up-
Me: do the thing that kills fewer people
Philosophy: but it's very salient th-
Philosophy: but the human element of control is-
Me: do the thing
Me: that kills
Me: fewer people
— Mason 𐃏 (@webdevMason) April 2, 2018

I think about it quite a lot. There are interesting questions, sure: if a self-driving car kills someone, who is responsible, the driver or the manufacturer? If you’re designing a safety system for the self-driving car, should it value the life of the occupants more highly than those of people outside?
But they’re quite niche questions. If, in the future, it turns out that a self-driving car will, on average, kill fewer people than a human-driven car, then it would be the ethical thing to do to get a self-driving car. Even if, every so often, the self-driving car does something really weird, like mistake a cyclist for a road marking, or a lorry for the sky, fewer people will be killed in a world where humans don’t drive and robots do. And that is good, so – all else being equal – we should say that self-driving cars are the ethical choice.
You can construct clever scenarios in which that is not true. But they have to be clever. As a starting point, as a reasonable first draft, “Do the thing that kills fewer people” is hard to beat.
In bioethics, though, we’ve overcomplicated things. For instance, early in the pandemic, people were campaigning for “human challenge trials” into Covid vaccines. In normal vaccine trials, people are given the vaccine (or a placebo or other control), and then the researchers observe how many people get the disease naturally. If it’s significantly fewer in the vaccine group, then we say that the vaccine works.
But it can take months for enough people to catch the disease naturally. When I was on the AstraZeneca trial in summer 2020, prevalence was low – there was real concern that it would take many months to get enough data.
With human challenge trials, participants agree not only to be given the vaccine but also the disease. It lets you use far fewer participants, and get your results far quicker, than a traditional vaccine trial.
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A promising vaccine candidate, the Moderna mRNA vaccine, was ready in a lab in January 2020. The hundred or so doses that would have been required to get very solid evidence of effectiveness could have been made at lab scale in a few days. We could have known by February, or March at the latest, whether the vaccines worked. Yes, we’d still have had to scale up production, and that would have taken months. But the whole process would have started earlier. Instead, Moderna’s vaccine was not given emergency use approval in the US until December.
As the philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell points out, there are obvious-seeming objections to human challenge trials. You have to give people a potentially dangerous disease: what if it kills one of them?
But one plausible estimate is that roughly 18 million people have died of Covid during the pandemic – that’s an average of about 28,000 a day. Bringing the end of the pandemic forward by even a single day could easily save thousands of lives. A small risk to a small number of young, healthy volunteers was hugely outweighed by a very likely large reduction in risk to many thousands of old, vulnerable people.
Philosophy fans might think that this is a classic utilitarianism problem: is it OK to sacrifice one to save many; can I torture the terrorist in order to find the bomb? But as Chappell notes, in fact it is not. There are willing volunteers offering a (small but real) sacrifice for the greater good. It is an act of altruism, or even heroism, not coercion. “In what other context would the default assumption be to ban heroic acts of immense social value?”, asks Chappell.
There have been other failures. Recently, the drug Paxlovid was shown to be highly effective against severe disease. So effective, in fact, that the trial was stopped midway, because it was deemed unethical to give half of the participants a placebo when it was clear the real drug worked.
But the drug is still not approved in the US. So as Zvi Mowshowitz points out, “It is illegal to give this drug to any patients, because it hasn’t been proven safe and effective,” but also, “It is illegal to continue a trial to study the drug, because it has been proven so safe and effective that it isn’t ethical to not give the drug to half the patients.” 
Suggested readingThere is no spiking epidemicBy Tom Chivers
This is not the only such case. A trial of a drug designed to protect against HIV was stopped last year, because the drug was so effective that it was unethical to give placebo. But the drug was not actually approved by the FDA until … Monday!
There are two important points to make, here. First, while I’m talking about “bioethics”, it’s not clear that it’s actually bioethicists who are the problem. For instance, Peter Singer of Princeton, probably the world’s most famous bioethicist, is on the board of 1DaySooner, the human challenge advocacy group, as is his fellow bioethicist Nir Eyal, of Harvard. Leah Pierson, a Harvard bioethicist who is writing a book about the failings of bioethics during the pandemic, stresses that when the CDC paused the use of the J&J vaccine, lots of the bioethicists she knows were appalled at the decision. But the practice of bioethics as actually carried out in major institutions, such as the FDA and CDC, often leads to these bad decisions. Matt Yglesias makes a good case here that public health agencies tend to follow somewhat rigid rules, rather than the best available science, leading to bad outcomes like a delay in approving fluvoxamine: perhaps I should complain about “institutionalised public health” rather than “bioethics” per se.
Second, as Pierson points out, “When these systems work well you probably don’t hear about it.” No doubt there are lots of drugs that get approved relatively smoothly, and trials which go ahead without much fuss. I don’t know how representative these problems are.
But the problems do exist, and they seem to be exacerbated by the pandemic. Chappell thinks that the main problem is one of status quo bias: that is, that changing things feels like the “risky” option, and keeping things the same feels “safer”. And, he admits, that may (or may not) be true in non-pandemic times. But in the pandemic, the status quo is visibly very dangerous. Throwing some low-but-not-zero-risk options into the mix, like early approval of vaccines or human challenge trials, are almost certainly lower-risk, in terms of the likeliest expected outcomes, than sticking with the status quo. 
There is also an issue that humans instinctively think there’s a difference between bad outcomes caused by our actions, and bad outcomes caused by inaction. It’s hard to make a good philosophical case for this, and what the distinction between an “act” and an “omission” is (Jonathan Bennett had a go), but it’s how we feel. Killing one person by giving them a faulty vaccine feels worse, somehow, than letting a thousand die because we let the vaccines sit in a warehouse for another 24 hours.
And it’s easy to come up with reasons why we need to put more hoops in place for researchers and clinicians to jump through, because the one guy who dies in a botched human challenge trial is very obvious, whereas the thousands of people who would have died if the trial never took place are completely invisible.
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But whatever the reason is that the hoops are in place, they are in place, and people have to jump through them to get things done. It took until December for the UK to decide to vaccinate the under-12s, despite it being well established that schoolchildren were driving the pandemic, because bioethicists could only take into account direct risk to the patient at the time – not the likelihood that prevalence would go up, or whether the children would rather not put their own relatives at risk. And it’s amazing, with hindsight, to read this approving piece from October last year about how a doctor prevented Donald Trump from forcing through early approval of a Covid vaccine.
It’s rare that academic philosophy can have such a direct impact on people’s lives. But how we apply bioethics really can save or kill thousands, just by changing the speed with which we approve drugs. In peacetime, perhaps, it’s OK to argue the toss and act with caution. But in a pandemic, perhaps we really ought to apply the standard of “Do the thing that kills fewer people”.
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Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is taking heat for sinking, at least for the moment, the Biden administration’s Build Back Better Act. But before pointing fingers, Democrats should use those fingers to count votes.The past may cast some light on the politics of narrow majorities. Republicans had a bad election in 2000. They lost two seats in the House, reducing their majority in that chamber to a precarious three votes. Republicans lost four seats in the Senate, resulting in a 50–50 tie. Vice President Dick Cheney was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, just as Vice President Kamala Harris is now. And, of course, George W. Bush entered the presidency under the cloud of the Florida recount, having lost the national popular vote to Al Gore.This outcome severely limited the new President Bush’s governing options, especially before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, reshaped U.S. politics. Bush shrank his legislative agenda to two broadly popular items: first, a tax cut that passed the House with 230 votes and the Senate with 58; then an education bill that passed early in 2002 with 381 votes in the House and 87 in the Senate.Like Biden’s ambitions, the Bush administration’s first-year agenda was beholden to the least reliable members of the president’s party in the Senate. In 2001, those were Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and James Jeffords of Vermont. Jeffords would switch parties in 2001, tipping the partisan balance of the Senate. The whims and vagaries of those two officeholders transfixed and baffled the Bush White House just as the moods and caprices of Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema transfix and baffle the Biden White House now.Bush took office at a more placid time than Biden did. He arrived with a less ambitious legislative agenda too. But if the times have changed, the grammar of power has not.“When I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner.” That was Washington Irving’s advice to travelers. It’s good advice for politicians too.Relative to its strength in Congress, the Biden administration has proved outstandingly successful. In 11 months, Biden has done more with 50 Democratic senators than Barack Obama did with 57. He signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021: $1,400-per-person direct payments, $350 billion in aid to state and local governments, an extension of supplemental unemployment-insurance benefits and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. He signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill in November. He signed some 75 executive orders, many of them advancing liberal immigration goals. He’s also won confirmation for some 40 federal judges, more than any first-year president since Ronald Reagan, and twice as many as Donald Trump confirmed in his first year with a 54-vote Senate majority.[Read: Transforming America with a one-vote majority]But sooner or later, Biden was bound to bump into congressional constraints.Indeed, from a progressive point of view, it’s a miracle that he did not bump into those constraints even sooner than he did. Had Trump accepted defeat in November with any kind of grace or decency, Republicans would surely have held at least one of the two Georgia Senate seats, and President Biden would have had to negotiate his agenda past Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.It’s bad psychology and worse political science to use electoral outcomes to make grand pronouncements about public opinion. But if we should be very careful in our statements about what voters wanted, we can easily see what the electoral system delivered. That system delivered a decisive repudiation of the Trump presidency in the presidential election in November, then a repudiation of the Trump post-presidency in Georgia in January. Beyond that, however, the system did not deliver the opportunity for progressive change that it delivered in 2008, let alone in 1964 or 1932.[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]Instead of fulminating against Manchin for calling quits when he did, Democrats might want to reflect on how much of their agenda got enacted only thanks to the team spirit of a senator from a state that Trump won in 2020 by 39 points.Anybody can win a poker game with a good hand. It takes a real maestro to play a bad one.Biden won a bigger pool with worse cards than any Democratic president ever. He won that pool because Manchin gave Biden more loyalty under more adverse conditions than the moderate Democrats of 2009 gave to President Obama.Perhaps it’s not the nature of Democrats to appreciate the glass half full. But half full it is.The Democrats have a year remaining in the present Congress. That’s too little time to waste on recrimination, but time enough to secure voting rights, to accelerate the shift to carbon-zero fuels, and to complete and publish the investigation into the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. A rebuff is not a retreat. It’s a sign to proceed in a different direction.

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

So began Toni Morrison’s 1995 address to Howard University, entitled Racism and Fascism, which delineated 10 step-by-step procedures to carry a society from first to last.

Morrison’s interest was not in fascist demagogues or fascist regimes. It was rather in “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems”. The procedures she described were methods to normalize such solutions, to “construct an internal enemy”, isolate, demonize and criminalize it and sympathizers to its ideology and their allies, and, using the media, provide the illusion of power and influence to one’s supporters.

Morrison saw, in the history of US racism, fascist practices – ones that could enable a fascist social and political movement in the United States.

Writing in the era of the “super-predator” myth (a Newsweek headline the next year read, “Superpredators: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?”), Morrison unflinchingly read fascism into the practices of US racism. Twenty-five years later, those “forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems” are closer than ever to winning a multi-decade national fight.

The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump.

My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. And my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life to discuss it. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her.

Philosophers have always been at the forefront in the analysis of fascist ideology and movements. In keeping with a tradition that includes the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, I have been writing for a decade on the way politicians and movement leaders employ propaganda, centrally including fascist propaganda, to win elections and gain power.

Often, those who employ fascist tactics do so cynically – they do not really believe the enemies they target are so malign, or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests. Nevertheless, there comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy.

Fascist forces have found a popular leader, unconstrained by the rules of democracy, in the figure of Donald Trump. Photograph: Carol Guzy/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock

Fascist propaganda takes place in the US in already fertile ground – decades of racial strife has led to the United States having by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. A police militarized to address the wounds of racial inequities by violence, and a recent history of unsuccessful imperial wars have made us susceptible to a narrative of national humiliation by enemies both internal and external. As WEB Du Bois showed in his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction, there is a long history of business elites backing racism and fascism out of self-interest, to divide the working class and thereby destroy the labor movement.

The novel development is that a ruthless would-be autocrat has marshalled these fascist forces and shaped them into a cult, with him as its leader. We are now well into the repercussions of this latter process – where fascist lies, for example, the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, have begun to restructure institutions, notably electoral infrastructure and law. As this process unfolds, slowly and deliberately, the media’s normalization of these processes evokes Morrison’s tenth and final step: “Maintain, at all costs, silence.”

Constructing an enemy

To understand contemporary US fascism, it is useful to consider parallels to 20th century history, both where they succeed and where they fail.

Hitler was a genocidal antisemite. Though fascism involves disregard for human life, not all fascists are genocidal. Even Nazi Germany turned to genocide only relatively late in the regime’s rule. And not all fascists are antisemitic. There were Italian Jewish fascists. Referring to the successful assimilation of Jews into all phases of Weimar era German life, my father warned me, “if they had chosen someone else, some of us would have been among the very best Nazis.” We American Jews feel firmly at home. Now, where the fascist movement’s internal enemies are leftists and movements for Black racial equality, there certainly could be fascist American Jews.

Germany’s National Socialist party did not take over a mainstream party. It started as a small, radical, far-right anti-democratic party, which faced different pressures as it strove to achieve greater electoral success.

Despite its radical start, the Nazi party dramatically increased its popularity over many years in part by strategically masking its explicit antisemitic agenda to attract moderate voters, who could convince themselves that the racism at the core of Nazi ideology was something the party had outgrown. It represented itself as the antidote to communism, using a history of political violence in the Weimar Republic, including street clashes between communists and the far right, to warn of a threat of violent communist revolution. It attracted support from business elites by promising to smash labor unions. The Nazis portrayed socialists, Marxists, liberals, labor unions, the cultural world and the media as representatives of, or sympathizers with, this revolution. Once in power, they bore down on this message.

In his 1935 speech, Communism with its Mask Off, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described Bolshevism carrying “on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such”. By contrast, “National Socialism sees in all these things – in [private] property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism – these forces which carry on every human civilization and fundamentally determine its worth.”

The Nazis recognized that the language of family, faith, morality and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things. The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews, and ultimately to justify their criminalization.

Trump supporters constructed a gallows near the Capitol in the hours before the 6 January riot. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Contrary to popular belief, the Nazi government of the 1930s was not genocidal, nor were its notorious concentration camps packed with Jewish prisoners, at least until the November pogrom of 1938. The main targets of the regime’s concentration camps were, initially, communists and socialists. The Nazi regime urged vigilante violence against its other targets, such as Jews, separating themselves from this violence by obscuring the role of agents of the state. During this time, it was possible for many non-Jewish Germans to deceive themselves about the brutal nature of the regime, to tell themselves that its harsh means were necessary to protect the German nation from the insidious threat of communism.

Violent militias occupied an ambiguous role between state and non-state actors. The SS began as violent Nazi supporters, before becoming an independent arm of the government. The message of violent law and order created a culture that influenced all the Nazi state’s institutions. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Tyranny, “for violence to transform not just the atmosphere but also the system, the emotions of rallies and the ideology of exclusion have to be incorporated into the training of armed guards.”

In the US, the training of police as “warriors”, together with the unofficial replacement of the American flag by the thin blue line flag, augur poorly about the democratic commitments of this institution.

A thin blue line carried at a Blue Lives Matter rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin, 30 August 2020. Photograph: Morry Gash/AP

For a far-right party to become viable in a democracy, it must present a face it can defend as moderate, and cultivate an ambiguous relationship to the extreme views and statements of its most explicit members. It must maintain a pretense of the rule of law, characteristically by projecting its own violations of it on to its opponents.

In the case of the takeover of the mainstream rightwing party by a far-right anti-democratic movement, the pretense must be stronger. The movement must contend with members of that party who are faithful to procedural elements of democracy, such as the principle of one voter one vote, or that the loser of a fair election give up power – in the United States today, figures such as Adam Kinzinger and Elizabeth Cheney. A fascist social and political party faces pressure both to mask its connection to and to cultivate violent racist supporters, as well as its inherently anti-democratic agenda.

Armed members of the New England Minutemen militia group at an anti-mask and anti-vaccine ‘world wide rally for freedom’ in Concord, New Hampshire, 15 May 2021. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

In the face of the attack on the US capital on 6 January, even the most resolute skeptic must admit that Republican politicians have been at least attempting to cultivate a mass of violent vigilantes to support their causes. Kyle Rittenhouse is becoming a hero to Republicans after showing up in Kenosha, WI as an armed vigilante citizen, and killing two men. Perhaps there are not enough potential Kyle Rittenhouses in the US to justify fear of massive armed vigilante militias enforcing a 2024 election result demanded by Donald Trump. But denying that Trump’s party is trying to create such a movement is, at this point, deliberate deception.

Black rebellion, white backlash

Street violence proved invaluable to the National Socialists in their path to power. The Nazis instigated and exacerbated violence in the streets, then demonized their opponents as enemies of the German people who must be dealt with harshly. Trump’s rise followed Black protest, at times violent, of police brutality in Ferguson and Baltimore. More recently, the murder of George Floyd and a historic protest movement in the US in the late spring has given fuel to fascist misrepresentation.

All of these recent developments take place as only the latest in a long US history of Black rebellion against white supremacist ideology and structures, and a parallel history of white backlash.

White vigilante groups regularly formed in reaction to Black rebellions, to “defend their families and property against Black rebellion”, the historian Elizabeth Hinton writes in her recent history of these rebellions. Hinton shows that police often acted in concert with these groups. For decades, the instigator of these rebellions has typically been an incident or incidents of police violence against members of the community, following a long period of often violent over-policing that exacerbated these communities’ grievances.

Armed police forced people to lie face down in the street during the Watts riots, Los Angeles, in August 1965. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Street movements in the US have often been accompanied by vigorous campus protests, from the protests against the Vietnam war of the 1960s, to recent campus protests for racial justice that attracted media rebuke (paradoxically, for “chilling free speech”). Politicians in both parties have feasted on these moments, using them to troll for votes. During these episodes of protest and rebellion, US politicians from Barry Goldwater onwards, placing campus protests together with Black rebellion against over-policing, have encouraged harsh law and order policing and crackdowns on leftists. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top advisers, said that Nixon’s campaign and administration “had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people”, and invented the drug war to target both:

You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Politicians have shown less interest in addressing the underlying conditions that lead to violence in poor Black urban communities – the widespread availability of guns, the massive and persistent racial wealth gap and the effects of violent policing and mass incarceration. And why should they? As long as these underlying conditions persist, politicians of either party can run for office by milking fear and promising a harsh law and order response. Morrison’s 1995 address is a warning that these conditions are ripe for harnessing by a fascist movement, one targeting democracy itself.

In its most recent iteration, in the form of the reaction against Black Lives Matter protesters and the demonization of antifa and student activists, a fascist social and political movement has been avidly stoking the flames for mass rightwing political violence, by justifying it against these supposed internal enemies.

Rachel Kleinfeld, in an October 2021 article, documents the rise of the legitimation of political violence in the US. According to the article, the “bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and require defending – and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, in particular, who will safeguard their way of life.”

This kind of justification of political violence is classically fascist – a dominant group threatened by the prospect of gender, racial and religious equality turning to a leader who promises a violent response.

How to topple a democracy

We are now in fascism’s legal phase. According to the International Center for Not for Profit Law, 45 states have considered 230 bills criminalizing protest, with the threat of violent leftist and Black rebellion being used to justify them. That this is happening at the same time that multiple electoral bills enabling a Republican state legislature majority to overturn their state’s election have been enacted suggests that the true aim of bills criminalizing protest is to have a response in place to expected protests against the stealing of a future election (as a reminder of fascism’s historical connection to big business, some of these laws criminalize protest near gas and oil lines).

The Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy. The fascist movement in the Republican party has turned to critical race theory instead. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment. Using the bogeyman of critical race theory, 29 states have introduced bills to restrict teaching about racism and sexism in schools, and 13 states have enacted such bans.

Opponents of critical race theory protest outside the Loudoun county school board offices, in Ashburn, Virginia, 22 June 2021. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

The key to democracy is an informed electorate. An electorate that knows about persisting racial injustice in the United States along all its dimensions, from the racial wealth gap to the effects of over-policing and over-incarceration, will be unsurprised by mass political rebellion in the face of persistent refusal to face up to these problems. An electorate ignorant of these facts will react not with understanding, but with uncomprehending fear and horror at Black political unrest.

Sometimes, you trace a fascist movement to its genesis in Nazi influence on its leaders, as with India’s RSS. In the United States, the causal relations run the other way around. As James Whitman shows in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the Jim Crow era in the United States influenced Nazi law. In 2021, legislators in 19 states passed laws making access to the ballot more difficult, some with specific (and clearly intentional) disparate impact on minority communities (as in Texas). By obscuring in our education system facts about this era, one can mask the reemergence of legislation that borrows from its strategies.

Trump supporters outside the Pennsylvania convention center, where ballots were being counted, 6 November 2020. Photograph: Bryan R Smith/AFP/Getty Images

Indeed, the very tactic of restricting politically vital information to schoolchildren is itself borrowed from the Jim Crow era. Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today.

Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.

According to National Socialist ideology, abortion, at any point in pregnancy, was considered to be murder. Just as it was acceptable to murder disabled people and other groups whose identities were considered dangerous to the health of the “Aryan race”, it was acceptable to perform abortions on members of these groups. In the first six years of Nazi rule, from 1933 to 1939, there was a harsh crackdown on the birth control movement. Led by the Gestapo, there was a punitive campaign against doctors who performed abortions on Aryan women. The recent attack on abortion rights, and the coming attack on birth control, led by a hard-right supreme court, is consistent with the hypothesis that we are, in the United States, facing a real possibility of a fascist future.

If you want to topple a democracy, you take over the courts. Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 by almost 3m votes, and yet has appointed one-third of supreme court, three youthful far-right judges who will be spending decades there. The Roberts court has for more than a decade consistently enabled an attack on democracy, by hollowing out the Voting Rights Act over time, unleashing unlimited corporate money into elections, and allowing clearly partisan gerrymanders of elections. There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the semblance of democracy to crumble, as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered Republican statehouses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.

There has been a growing fascist social and political movement in the United States for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but no less of a threat to democracy. Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat out solely for his own power and material gain. By giving this movement a classically authoritarian leader, Trump shaped and exacerbated it, and his time in politics has normalized it.

Donald Trump has shown others what is possible. But the fascist movement he now leads preceded him, and will outlive him. As Toni Morrison warned, it feeds off ideologies with deep roots in American history. It would be a grave error to think it cannot ultimately win.

It is difficult to keep up with the ever-mutating scientific consensus on masks. In the early days of the pandemic, White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci told the public not to bother with them before abruptly adopting a wear-a-mask-any-mask stance. After vaccines became widely available last winter and spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the vaccinated no longer needed to wear them, and then reversed course after determining that the delta variant was much more contagious than the original strain. And the CDC's support for mask mandates in schools rests upon a study that has now been substantially debunked.
Enter Leana Wen, a medical analyst for CNN and former president of Planned Parenthood. Wen is one of cable news' most vigorous supporters of coercive COVID-19 measures: She previously suggested that the government should prohibit unvaccinated people from traveling (and, perhaps, from leaving their homes at all). During a CNN appearance on Monday, Wen made the provocative statement that the commonly used cloth masks are essentially useless at preventing the spread of the omicron variant.
"Don't wear a cloth mask," she said. "Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There's no place for them in light of omicron."

.@DrLeanaWen: "Don't wear a cloth mask. Cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. There's no place for them in light of Omicron." pic.twitter.com/Kpoj18sxdi
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) December 21, 2021

Huh? As Townhall's Spencer Brown points out, Wen's view of the science contradicts the guidance from the White House and the CDC, which holds that cloth masks are good enough. In fact, the CDC has specifically instructed people not to wear N95 masks.
Wen is a supporter of mandates, so perhaps she thinks the higher quality masks should be required in some settings. Yet if she's right, it means the masks that the overwhelming majority of people are wearing in order to comply with mandates—in public schools, on public transportation, in many workplaces, gyms, and even social settings—aren't doing any good. They represent another element of pandemic hygiene theater: a public health requirement that makes people feel safer without offering them much actual protection.
Against the initial strain, some studies found that mask wearing helped to decrease the spread of COVID-19; others were more mixed. Delta and omicron, of course, are significantly more infectious, and thus Wen's contention that the commonly-used masks aren't doing very much is probably correct. This should be an argument for getting rid of all mask mandates, not making the mandates stricter. The government checking the quality of people's masks would be an absurd overreach; the mandate is already difficult to enforce, as people constantly (and understandably) pull their masks beneath their noses in order to make it easier to breathe.
It would be better for the public health bureaucracy to admit that we cannot mask our way out of the pandemic. At this point, COVID-19 is too contagious to be effectively constrained by the tools at the government's disposal. It would take transforming into a China-style totalitarian state: This is a path the U.S. government is constitutionally, morally, and practically prevented from taking.
It's time to end mask mandates in schools, on airplanes, and in other settings where they are required. Rational policy makers should conclude that these mandates' failure weakens their legitimacy.
The post CNN's Leana Wen: 'Cloth Masks Are Little More Than Facial Decorations' appeared first on Reason.com.

Last week, the Russian government took the highly unusual decision to publish two draft treaties, complete with articles and formal legalistic language, on European security — one between Russia and NATO, one between Russia and the United States. During my five years in the Obama administration, I often participated in talks with the Russians on major agreements, including two that we succeeded in completing, the New START Treaty and Russia’s accession agreement to the World Trade Organization. In those serious negotiations, Moscow never started by issuing a list of demands.

In fact, few serious negotiations begin with one side drafting, let alone publishing, an entire agreement. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move has the feel of an ultimatum. And ultimatums, as we know from history, are often pretexts for annexation or war. Leaders in Washington, Brussels and Kyiv should be worried that Putin does not really want to negotiate a new agreement on European security. His deployment of 175,000 troops on the border suggests, instead, that he is more interested in escalating the current war in eastern Ukraine.

But what if Putin really wants to talk about European security? If so, U.S., Canadian and European leaders should embrace the opportunity. Some of the great pillars of European security of the past — the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, the Vienna Document, the Paris Charter, the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances for Ukraine and the Helsinki Final Act — are either now defunct or no longer serving their originally intended purposes.

Many of the demands in the draft treaties now floated by Putin, however are nonstarters and violate agreements Moscow signed before. To mention but one example, great powers cannot dictate to other countries what multilateral organizations that can and cannot join — contrary to Moscow’s expressed desire to limit’s Ukraine choices regarding affiliations with European security institutions. That violates the Helsinki Final Act. Still, a few ideas in the Russian treaties are worthy of discussion, including limits on arms, deployments and exercises.

But if there is to be a serious negotiation on a new European security architecture, then the Russian government must accept two kinds of friendly amendments to their draft proposals — changes in the participants and an expansion of the agenda.

First, on participants. As made clear by his proposals for a treaty between the United States and Russia, Putin wants a replay of the 1945 Yalta agreement (in Russia they even speak of “Yalta 2.0”). In this new version, the United States and Russia (this time excluding Britain) would carve out spheres of influence in Europe. That is completely unacceptable.

Putin also wants to negotiate a second treaty on NATO with Washington — over the heads of many European countries. That is also a nonstarter. All European countries would have to be included in such negotiations. The Organization for European Security and Cooperation in Europe is the obvious venue, whose members include the United States, the other members of NATO and Russia, but also Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia and Azerbaijan. We need a Helsinki 2.0, not a Yalta 2.0, so that smaller countries in Eastern Europe can be assured that Moscow and Washington will be discussing “nothing about us without us.”

Second, the menu of European security issues outlined in the Russian proposals must be expanded dramatically. Russian actions and policies undermining European security must also be addressed, not forgotten. Here are some additional amendments to the Russian draft treaties.

To enhance European security and strengthen the sovereignty of all European countries, Russia must agree to withdraw its soldiers and weapons from the territory of the Republic of Moldova.

To jump-start real negotiations to restore the territorial integrity of Georgia, Russia must renounce its recognition of the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent countries.

To recommit to the set of treaties, agreements and multilateral institutions that helped to strengthen European security at the end of World War II, including most importantly the norm against annexation, Russia must return Crimea to Ukraine and end support for violent separatist movements in eastern Ukraine.

To enhance strategic stability in Europe, Russia must remove its SS-26 Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad and all other deployment locations that allow this highly accurate missile to attack European targets in minutes. Russia should also remove from Kaliningrad all tactical nuclear weapons. Talks on new limits on these kinds of weapons throughout Europe could then begin.

To strengthen the sovereignty of all members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia must commit to stopping the theft of digital property, ending direct support of anti-democratic individuals and organizations, and curtailing disinformation operations that aim to disrupt free and fair elections and democratic practices more broadly.

To enhance the security of individual Europeans — a norm codified in numerous European security agreements that Moscow has already signed — Russia must commit to ending assassination operations, such as those conducted in the European cities of London, Moscow, Salisbury, Berlin and Tomsk. Russia also must pledge to stop aiding European dictators who kill and arrest Europeans exercising freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.

There are many other important European security issues that also need new attention. But this list of amendments to the Russian draft treaties is a good place to test whether Putin is serious about an actual negotiation on a new European security architecture — or whether he’s interested merely in issuing an ultimatum, designed purposely to be rejected, as a pretext for greater military action against Ukraine.

It certainly might not seem like it given the pandemic mayhem we’ve had, but the original form of SARS-CoV-2 was a bit of a slowpoke. After infiltrating our bodies, the virus would typically brew for about five or six days before symptoms kicked in. In the many months since that now-defunct version of the virus emerged, new variants have arrived to speed the timeline up. Estimates for this exposure-to-symptom gap, called the incubation period, clocked in at about five days for Alpha and four days for Delta. Now word has it that the newest kid on the pandemic block, Omicron, may have ratcheted it down to as little as three.If that number holds, it’s probably bad news. These trimmed-down cook times are thought to play a major part in helping coronavirus variants spread: In all likelihood, the shorter the incubation period, the faster someone becomes contagious—and the quicker an outbreak spreads. A truncated incubation “makes a virus much, much, much harder to control,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me.Already, that’s what this variant seems to be. In less than a month, Omicron has blazed into dozens of countries, sending case rates to record-breaking heights. If, as some scientists suspect, this variant is so primed to xerox itself more quickly inside us—including, it seems, in many people with at least some immunity—that leaves punishingly little time in which to detect the virus, intervene with antivirals, and hamper its spread.[Read: America is not ready for Omicron]A pause here. We are still just weeks into our fight against Omicron, and it’s not easy to gather data on incubation periods, which might differ among populations, or suss out exactly how the virus is tangoing with our cells. But the early warning signs are here—and as my colleague Sarah Zhang has reported, we know enough to act.All of this, then, ups the urgency on having tests that can quickly and reliably pinpoint Omicron. “If Omicron has a shorter incubation period, that’s going to wreak havoc on how we test for it and deal with it,” Omai Garner, a clinical microbiologist in the UCLA Health system, told me. But testing in the United States remains slow, expensive, and, for many, infuriatingly out of reach. We’re ill-prepared for the incoming Omicron surge not just because it’s a new version of the coronavirus, but because it’s poised to exploit one of the greatest vulnerabilities in our infection-prevention toolkit. The coronavirus is getting faster, which means it’s also getting harder to catch.Since the World Health Organization designated Omicron as a variant of concern at the end of November, the virus seems to have popped up just about everywhere. Researchers are tracing cases of it back to schools, child-care centers, hotels, universities, weddings, and bars. And they’re finding it at office holiday parties, like the one at a restaurant in Oslo, Norway, where about 80 people may have caught or transmitted Omicron.In a research paper describing the Oslo outbreak, scientists noted that, after the event, symptoms seemed to come on quickly—typically in about three days. More troubling, nearly every person who reported catching Omicron said that they were vaccinated, and had received a negative antigen-test result sometime in the two days prior to the party. It was a clue that perhaps the microbe had multiplied inside of people so briskly that rapid-test results had rapidly been rendered obsolete.The time lines described by the Norwegian researchers are preliminary, and might not be representative of the rest of us. But they appear to match up with early, sometimes-anecdotal reports, including some out of South Africa, one of the first countries to detect and report Omicron’s existence. Shorter incubation periods generally lead to more infections happening in less time, because people are becoming more contagious sooner, making onward transmission harder to prevent. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me he still wants more data on Omicron before he touts a trim incubation. But “it does make sense,” he said, considering the variant’s explosive growth in pretty much every country it’s collided with. In many places, Omicron cases are doubling every two to three days.[Read: Omicron’s explosive growth is a warning sign]Nailing the incubation interval really is tough. Researchers have to track down sizable outbreaks, such as the Oslo Christmas party; try to figure out who infected whom; wait for people to report when they start feeling sick—always a fickle thing, because symptoms are subjective—then, ideally, track whether the newly infected are spreading the virus too. The numbers will vary depending on who was involved: SARS-CoV-2-incubation periods could differ by vaccination status, underlying health conditions, infection history, age, and even the dose of the virus people get blasted with. To complicate things further, the start of symptoms tends to lag behind the start of contagiousness by, on average, a couple of days; when symptoms begin earlier, transmission might not follow to exactly the same degree.If Omicron’s incubation period turns out to be conclusively shorter, we would still have to figure out how it got winnowed down. Some of it could be inherent to the virus itself. Omicron’s spike protein is freckled with more than 30 mutations, some of which, based on previous variants, could help it grip more tightly onto cells and wriggle more efficiently into their interiors. Two recent laboratory studies, neither yet published in scientific journals, may be hinting at these trends. One, from a team at Harvard University, showed that a harmless virus, engineered to display Omicron’s spike on its surface, more easily penetrated human cells in a dish; another, out of Hong Kong University, found that Omicron multiplied dozens of times faster than Delta in tissue extracted from the upper airway. The findings won’t necessarily translate into what goes on in actual bodies, but they support the idea that Omicron is turbocharging the rate at which it accumulates to contagiousness. The faster that happens, the more quickly the virus can spill out of one person and into the next. If the data pan out, “this could go a long way in explaining the rapid transmission,” Lisa Gralinski, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me.The unvaccinated remain most at risk, but this trend would have troubling consequences for the vaccinated and previously infected too, especially if they’re unboosted. Many of the antibodies we marshaled against previous versions of the coronavirus don’t recognize Omicron very well, and won’t be able to sequester it before it foists itself into cells. Eventually, a vaccine- or infection-trained immune system will “catch up,” Ryan McNamara, a virologist at Harvard Medical School, told me, churning out more antibodies and launching an army of T cells that can quell the virus before it begets serious disease. But those defenses take a few days to kick in and might not arrive in time to forestall the early, and often most potent, stages of transmission. The faster Omicron sprints, the more of a head start it gets against the body’s defenses.The picture on Omicron is coalescing both microscopically within us and broadly in communities—steep, steep, steep slopes in growth. The two phenomena are linked: A shorter incubation period means there’s less time to pinpoint an infection before it becomes infectious. With Omicron, people who think they’ve been exposed may need to test themselves sooner, and more often, to catch a virus on the upswing. And the negative results they get might have even less longevity than they did with other variants, Melissa Miller, a clinical microbiologist at UNC, told me. Tests offer just a snapshot of the past, not a forecast of the future; a fast-replicating virus can go from not detectable to very, very detectable in a matter of hours—morning to evening, negatives may not hold.This, especially, could be bad news for PCR tests, which have been the gold standard throughout the pandemic and essential for diagnosing the very sick. (Thankfully, most PCR tests do seem to be detecting Omicron well.) These tests have to be processed in a laboratory before they can ping back results—a process that usually takes at least a few hours but, when resources are stretched thin as they are now, can balloon out to many days. In that time, Omicron could have hopped out of one person’s body and into the next, and into the next. It’s a particular gamble for people who don’t have symptoms and who are still out and about while they await their results. The more swiftly the virus becomes infectious, the more important testing speed becomes too.Rapid at-home antigen tests—which can be purchased over the counter, and can return results in about 15 minutes—could fill some of the gaps. Their results would also come with quick expiration dates, but they’d also manifest faster, and, potentially, offer a better representation of what’s happening in the body right now.[Read: COVID tests weren’t designed for this]But rapid antigen tests aren’t a perfect solution. Compared with PCR tests, they are less able to pick up on the virus when it’s present at pretty low levels—which means they might have a harder time homing in on the virus while it’s simmering early in infection, or might even fail to detect it in people who are already contagious. A few experts told me that they’re worried some antigen tests will struggle to pinpoint the highly mutated Omicron at all, something still being monitored by the FDA.People could test themselves repeatedly to lower the chances that they miss the microbe, but a strategy like that quickly starts to verge on impractical. You can’t reasonably ask people to test themselves every 12 hours, Nuzzo said. And the products still aren’t available in high enough numbers to meet anywhere near that kind of demand. They’re also wildly expensive, keeping them out of the hands of many of the vulnerable communities that need them most. Some states are passing out rapid tests for free, but they’re still in the minority. And the Biden administration’s limited reimbursement plan won’t take effect until next year. On grand scales, American supply is still massively, massively falling short. That fact, married with Omicron’s probable pace, means “we’re not going to catch everybody who has it,” Nuzzo said.[Read: Coronavirus variants have nowhere to hide]The variant’s fleet-footedness is likely to have big ripple effects in clinical settings too. Garner and Miller, who both run clinical labs, are worried that the coming testing surge will delay results for patients who have to be screened before going into surgery, or who need a diagnosis for treatment. That could be especially problematic for doling out the much-anticipated antiviral pills to treat COVID, which need to be taken very early in the course of illness to effectively halt the progression of disease. Stretched laboratory capacity could also compromise testing for other pathogens, including the flu, which is creeping back into the population just as health-care systems are starting to buckle once more. Nationwide, Garner said, “we are as unprepared for a surge as we were a year ago.”People shouldn’t give up on tests, experts told me; they’ll still make a big difference when and where they’re used, especially for diagnosing the sick. But Omicron’s speed is a sharp reminder of humanity’s own sluggishness during this pandemic. Until now, tests offered only a porous safety net; in the era of Omicron, the holes are even wider. We’ll need to close the gaps by doubling down further on preventive measures: masking, vaccination, ventilation, and, unfortunately, cutting back on travel and socializing. Viruses don’t actually move that fast on their own—they need human hosts to carry them. If things stay as they are, though, we’ll keep giving this one the ride of a lifetime.

This has been a turbulent Advent season at our Catholic parish. My family and I attend a church in New Haven, Conn., St. Mary’s, that was in the care of the Dominican friars for 135 years. But now no longer, because the Archdiocese of Hartford decided that its plans to consolidate New Haven’s parishes — a slew of lovely, fading churches in no-longer-very-Catholic neighborhoods — required using St. Mary’s and its attached residence as a hub for the archdiocese’s priests, which in turn required moving the Dominicans somewhere else.

The order, for whom our church has been a home for generations, preferred not to be shunted elsewhere. So after a negotiation carried on in a very Catholic style — meaning that the laypeople of the parish were barely informed it was going on — we received the announcement from on high that our priests would simply be departing.

It was a pretty brutal experience, but our church, I hope, will survive the trauma and thrive under its new pastors. For the archdiocese, though, the outcome seems like folly. The painful consolidation of parishes reflects, among other things, increasing shortages of priests. But the Dominican Order in the Eastern United States is flourishing, with many priests and vocations. So if, as seems likely, most of the Dominicans depart Connecticut entirely, for the sake of taking over one particularly lovely and well-situated church the archdiocese will have cost itself exactly the thing it needs most — ministers of the sacraments and preachers of the gospel.

This personal experience has tended to confirm my general sense that the leaders of my faith have — how to put this charitably — no clear idea what they’re doing. They are in a difficult position, managing decline and transformation, but even judged by that gentle standard, they are failing.

Contra Caplan on Covid caution By: Scott Sumner

Bryan Caplan has a new post that contests some of the claims I made in my recent post about the regulation of safety. I do agree with Bryan on several points. First, most of the Covid regulations were misguided. Second, today many people are foolishly being far too cautious about Covid. (I’d add that many people are not cautious enough, i.e. unvaccinated adults.) But I also disagree on a number of points:

1. It’s not obvious to me that the widespread Covid caution during 2020 was unwarranted.

2. I think Bryan underestimates the risk posed by Covid and overestimates the hardship of Covid caution.

3. I think Bryan puts too much weight on regulatory differences between jurisdictions, which played only a very modest role in Covid caution.

4. While I oppose some of their draconian restrictions, I’m not convinced that the lifestyle sacrifices in places like Australia were any greater than in America.

Part of this post will address specific claims of Bryan, but another part will address claims I’ve seen made by others in the comment section. So for instance when I talk about “innumeracy”, I’m certainly not talking about Bryan.

Bryan suggests the costs of reaction may be 15 times as high as the cost of the pandemic:

By my math, the total cost of the reaction for the U.S. was roughly fifteen times the total cost of the pandemic itself. (Similar calculations for Canada here). But that’s fifteen times a genuinely enormous cost of 800,000 lives, implying many trillions of dollars of overreaction.

He links to a November 24, 2020 post, which cites this estimate:

A few weeks ago, the NYT reported that “The Coronavirus Has Claimed 2.5 Million Years of Potential Life.”

The earlier post then discusses Caplan’s poll of how much regular life people would trade off for one year of living under Covid restrictions. He estimates that the average person views a year of Covid life as worth about 5/6 years of regular life, and then makes this claim:

So what? Well, we’ve now endured 8 months of COVID life. If that’s worth only 5/6ths as much as normal time, the average American has now lost 4/3rds of a month. Multiplying that by the total American population of 330M, the total loss comes to about 37 million years of life. That’s about 15 times the reported estimate of the direct cost of COVID.

As I’ll explain later, I don’t accept that claim. But even if it were true, the claim would be meaningless. To see why, consider this analogy. Suppose the US could have been 100% shielded from Covid with one small intervention—say a travel ban from China until a vaccine was developed. (Yes, in practice that wouldn’t have done the job, but consider it as a thought experiment.) Also suppose that this China travel ban reduced social welfare in America by $1 billion. Don’t you think most Americans would support it? Remember, I’m assuming this one small intervention would have reduced Covid deaths in America to zero. But Bryan’s cost approach would suggest that it’s a bad idea. Because in that case you’d have a billion dollars in regulatory restrictions weighed against zero Covid costs. Obviously the correct comparison is with the number of people who would have died without Covid restrictions, not with the restrictions.

How could Bryan have made such a basic error? He didn’t. In the November 24, 2020 post he added the following:

Casual readers will be tempted to declare that the cure has been much worse than the disease. The right cost-benefit comparison, however, is not to weigh the cost of prevention against the harm endured. The right cost-benefit comparison is to weigh the cost of prevention against the harm prevented. You have to ask yourself: If normal life had continued unabated since March, how many additional life-years would have been lost? I can believe that the number would have been double what we observed, even though no country on Earth has done so poorly. With effort, I can imagine that the number would have been triple what we observed. There’s a tiny chance it could have been five times worse. But fifteen times? No way.

When he wrote this post, the US death toll was under 275,000. Long time readers know that I have often argued that Covid would have killed 2 million Americans if people took absolutely no precautions to avoid the illness. A year ago, commenters seemed to view my claim as being far fetched, even though that’s the implication of the 0.6 IFR. There are two complications, which push the estimate in opposite directions. Herd immunity might have kicked in at 80% or 90%, somewhat lowering the death toll. But most of the deaths would have occurred quite rapidly, overwhelming hospitals and before best practices for treatment had been fully worked out. So I still think 2 million is a ballpark estimate. We already have over 800,000 dead, and would have had far more if not for the fact that a very high proportion of older people were vaccinated in early 2021

So yes, there is only a “tiny chance” that it could have been 5 times worse, but that’s because it likely would have been 7.5 times worse.

In Bryan’s recent post he cites the “15 times” figure without this qualification from the 2020 post. I’d argue that even if his estimate of Covid costing the equivalent (in utility) of 37 million life years were accurate, the correct ratio would be 2 to 1, or perhaps 5 to 1 if you account for living through 21 months of Covid (although restrictions became less onerous after vaccines, and in my view we should have gone “back to normal” at that time). But I don’t think the poll results he cites have any value at all, for all sorts of reasons:

1. Most people are whining drama queens

2. Most people focus on costs and forget benefits

3. Most people are innumerate

4. Talk is cheap

If someone asked me this question in a bar, I might also have thrown out a figure like 5/6ths. But when I really think about it, that can’t be right. Most of the costs I faced in 2020 were small. I wore a mask when visiting the grocery store. I cut my own hair. I did takeout rather than in-person dining. But I still visited my mom in Arizona. Missing a teeth cleaning was no big deal. Not having to fly to the office in DC was a big benefit in terms of my utility. (How many people take into account avoiding all those annoying commutes to work.) Honestly, there are lots of other things in my life that affect my utility far more than Covid caution–such as health problems.

I get that I was one of the lucky ones, and don’t doubt that the average person was more adversely affected. But I don’t trust their self reported estimates of life equivalents. I’m not saying that Bryan is clearly wrong, just that these estimates are very unreliable.

BTW, if I were a crude utilitarian, I might argue we’d all be better off (in aggregate) if everyone lived a wild, hedonistic, risk-taking lifestyle, which reduced life expectancy by 5% on average. Then bump up the birthrate enough to prevent any decline in the aggregate flow of life years for the total population. What do you think of that idea? Plan to get your son a motorcycle and lifetime cocaine supply for his birthday? That may seem like a ridiculous analogy, but Bryan isn’t discussing the cost and benefits of specific governmental regulations, his thought experiment involves a world of zero private voluntary Covid caution. So I can also do far-fetched thought experiments.

One problem with the motorcycle and cocaine idea is that it ignores the pain a parent suffers when their son dies in an accident. Similarly, if I died of Covid, the loss of utility for my (8 years younger) wife would be at least 10 times greater than the loss of utility for an old curmudgeon like me. (Of course if you take the hedonic set point hypothesis seriously, then almost nothing matters—so ultimately I’m agnostic on all these calculations.)

When I read critics on Covid caution (not Bryan), I see a lot of innumeracy. People talk about a 1% chance of dying as if it’s a small risk. Only a bit over 2% of US soldiers died in the Vietnam War, and an even smaller percentage in Iraq. Yet war is pretty risky. If you had a 1% risk of being bitten by a mosquito, that’s no big deal. A 1% risk of dying is actually pretty large. Even worse, at least some of the people who make this claim will also say things like “That horribly dangerous Boeing 737 Max never should have been allowed to fly!” Really? Why not?

Some argue that the Covid death figures are overstated, even though the alternative excess death data suggests that the official Covid death figures are understated.

Or they talk as if there are only two types of people. “Old people” at high risk of dying and “young people” at extremely low risk. It’s not that simple. Old people are more likely to die, but it’s a continuum. Roughly 200,000 Americans under the age of 65 have died of Covid. That’s a lot! Only about 5000 people were under the age of 30, but high school students are often taught by 60-year old teachers. (That’s not to deny that school closings were greatly excessive, especially after vaccines.) Or they’ll suggest that society could have been neatly partitioned between “young” and “old”, with the young going on with their lives. But if my daughter caught Covid, very likely I would have as well. She was cautious for that reason.

Am I old? I guess at age 66 the answer is yes. But when I think of my 95-year old mom, I don’t feel like I have one foot in the grave. Some talk about the risk for the under 65 group being merely people with pre-existing conditions, as if those people are sickly invalids. But I often see pictures in the media of healthy looking cops who have died of Covid. On closer inspection, some of them looked a bit overweight. And of course obesity is a major a pre-existing condition. I’m rather thin, and play tennis three times a week. So I’m healthy, right? Actually I’ve had crappy lungs my entire life, with several bad cases of pneumonia in my 30s. (If I’d been born before antibiotics, I doubt I would have lived to age 40.) So am I at higher risk? I honestly don’t know. But I really don’t see the point of people saying Covid is only a problem for the old and those with pre-existing conditions. Lots of people have at least one pre-existing condition. Obesity is not exactly rare in America.

And death is not the only risk; people get flu vaccines because getting the flu is unpleasant. NBA player Joel Embid said after recovering from Covid that he’d felt so sick he thought he was going to die. Other NBA players have struggled for many weeks to get back to normal. And these are some of the healthiest people on the planet.

Bryan also compares America to other countries:

I’m now convinced that the U.S. had the least-bad Covid response of any major English-speaking country. The United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand all beat us in terms of fatalities/population. But almost no part of the U.S. ever put innocent people under house arrest. For most of Covid, I lived in one of the strictest regions of the U.S., yet there was never a day I couldn’t walk outside with my family, mask-free. I never even had to pretend to shop or exercise.

I don’t necessarily disagree here, but this issue is trickier than it looks at first glance. Based on what I’ve read, there are places such as Western Australia where daily life went on normally all though the pandemic, with the exception of travel. From a utilitarian perspective, it’s not easy to weigh the costs of very strict actions taken against some people, which allow the majority of people to live under much fewer restrictions than in the US. I tend to oppose most of the restrictions imposed by governments, but I also am not a fan of governments that don’t do enough to control the pandemic, but do have enough restrictions to make our lives more frustrating. We don’t have the worst of both worlds, but we have the pretty bad of both worlds, whereas Western Australia is worse in one respect and far better in most others—even from a libertarian perspective.

And finally, as I’ve previously argued I think people tend to grossly overestimate how much of the response reflects government restrictions, and underestimate how much reflects private actions. There’s a reason that Sweden’s economy was hit just as hard as the other Nordic countries.

When I travel to more restrictive states (Washington) and less restrictive states (Arizona), I hardly notice the difference in government policies at all. Rather what I notice is different cultures. Even within California, people in the Bay Area are much more Covid cautious than down here in Orange County. I’ve never paid any attention to mask mandates. Like Matt Yglesias, I just look in the window. If people are wearing masks, I put one on before entering. If not, then I don’t. No big deal. (Wearing a mask is a pain? All I can say is if you think that’s a major problem, I wish I could have your life!!) In the spring of 2020, I recall hearing about some sort of “stay at home order”. But when I went outside, people were strolling along the sidewalk just like normal.

To reiterate, I think we are often overreacting to Covid (especially after vaccines), and I am a libertarian who opposes government restrictions except in a few extreme cases. If a travel ban from China really would have protected us from Covid long enough to help us prepare, I would have reluctantly favored it. In most cases, however, government regulations have made the problem worse. But I don’t buy the argument that Covid caution is some sort of huge problem, not when compared to 400,000 Americans being in prison for violating drug laws, and not even compared to residential zoning restrictions. Most Covid caution in 2020 was justified.

       Author J.K. Rowling appears at the world premiere of the film "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" in Paris on Nov. 8, 2018.  (AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File)   J.K. Rowling is being erased for defending women   Debra Soh  December 17, 08:00 AM December 17, 08:00 AM  Those seeking to understand why the average person is too terrified to speak up against transgender activism need only to look to J.K. Rowling. In a promotional trailer for Rowling’s forthcoming film, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which she co-wrote and co-produced, her name barely appears. This contrasts with how prominently her name was featured in previous advertisements for the franchise. Rowling has endured a continued campaign of punishment and harassment ever since she (rightfully) ridiculed the term “people who menstruate” last year on social media. Her most recent transgression, according to activists, was criticizing the police in Scotland for classifying offenders based on their gender self-identification. This means that a male rapist who identifies as female will have his offense recorded as being committed by a woman. Why might rapists want to be categorized as female and subsequently housed in women’s prisons? One does not need to have a background working with incarcerated sexual offenders, as I do, to wager a guess. Of course, it is important to take into consideration that some offenders may legitimately experience gender dysphoria at the time of committing an offense and that transgender women who are incarcerated will be at greater risk of harm if they are housed with male inmates. But the fact that questioning gender self-identification policies is considered completely unacceptable demonstrates how those pushing these policies operate in an alternate reality. In the last 18 months, 12 Scottish male inmates convicted of sexual or violent crimes were transferred to women’s prisons because they identified as female. Of those offenders, only one had undergone transition. The cruel reality of these decisions is realized not by those petitioning for these practices but by female inmates. Classifying crimes by self-expressed gender obfuscates the truth of the matter, creating confusion that puts everyone in the community at risk. Some might argue Rowling’s wealth offers her a certain level of protection. I can tell you from my experience the harassment that accompanies this particular strain of activism is not something I would wish upon anyone. Additionally, being labeled as “anti-trans” and a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (or “TERF”) by the media and being disavowed by some of the franchise’s cast members sends the message to everyone watching that challenging this ideology, no matter how compassionately or sensitively, is unacceptable. Many surely think to themselves: If Rowling is not safe from abuse, what chance do I have of surviving? Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.      © 2021 Washington Examiner   

I turn 40 today, and I was planning to have a party. The Delta surge made me nervous about it. The arrival of Omicron made me cancel it.The plan was to have an extended house party, with a couple dozen people popping by over the weekend. On the one hand, it would have been an unmasked, indoor event—the kind in which the coronavirus, in all its incarnations, spreads most easily. On the other hand, everyone who was going to be there is fully vaccinated, and most of them, myself included, have been boosted. A month ago, I would have felt comfortable about that trade-off, especially if people got tested in the preceding days, as eight friends did when they came over for Thanksgiving.Omicron didn’t much shift the way I weighed my personal risk. Although the new variant can evade some of our immune defenses, early data suggest that boosted people are roughly as protected against Omicron infection as people with two vaccine doses are against Delta. That protection isn’t foolproof, but even if immune systems can’t block the virus from gaining an initial foothold, they should still be able to stop it from causing too much damage. If I got the virus on my birthday, I’d expect to be knocked down for a time but okay by Christmas—and I’d expect the same to be true for everyone who was meant to come.I don’t know the odds that this would happen. But I know that said odds are rising with every passing day, given how quickly and easily Omicron is spreading, even among highly vaccinated populations. I know that many of my friends, like many vaccinated Americans, have been going out to restaurants, bars, gyms, and movie theaters. I know that Omicron’s incubation period—the gap between infection and symptoms—seems unusually short, so that even people who tested negative a few days ago might still be infected and infectious. I know that even mild infections can lead to long COVID.If someone got sick, I know others could too. A week later, many of my friends will spend Christmas with their own families. At best, a cluster of infections at the birthday party would derail those plans, creating days of anxious quarantine or isolation, and forcing the people I love to spend time away from their loved ones. At worst, people might unknowingly carry the virus to their respective families, which might include elderly, immunocompromised, unvaccinated, partially vaccinated, or otherwise vulnerable people. Being born eight days before Christmas creates almost the perfect conditions for one potential super-spreader event to set off many more.My friends, of course, are adults who can make informed decisions about their own risks and their own loved ones’ risks. But the logic of personal responsibility goes only so far. Omicron is spreading so rapidly that if someone got infected at my party, my decision to host it could easily affect people who don’t know me, and who had no say in the risks that I unwittingly imposed upon them. Omicron is unlikely to land me in the hospital, but it could send my guests’ grandparents or parents to one.I also know the state of those hospitals. Over the past two years, especially while I was reporting a new article last month, hundreds of nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers have told me that they, and the system they work in, are utterly broken. Some have quit jobs or careers that they thought they would keep for life. Others spoke of a system in the midst of collapse, in which the dwindling workforce can no longer provide a normal level of care for its growing pool of patients—not just COVID patients, but all patients. Several said that they’re struggling to hold on to empathy for people who are putting themselves at risk. Many cried on the phone during our interview. Many just sounded hollow.I feel haunted by their words when I make decisions about the pandemic. When I stare out my window, the world looks normal, but I know through my reporting that it is not. This has already changed the way I behave, and not just to avoid getting COVID. I’ve been trying to drive more carefully, in the knowledge that if I got into an accident, I wouldn’t get the same care that I would have two years ago. I feel that the medical system in this country is at a tipping point—a fragile vase balanced so precariously on an edge that even a fly could knock it over. Omicron is a bullet. It’s one that we can each choose whether to fire.For many people, this will all sound like a lot of melodrama. Surely the odds are still low that anyone at the party would have Omicron at all, let alone that any resulting infections would be severe enough to bother a hospital? Even if that wasn’t true, with people widely partying and traveling, surely canceling any one event would be an impossibly small drop in an impossibly large bucket?I sympathize with those arguments. But I’ve tried to take to heart the lesson I keep writing about—that the pandemic is a collective problem that cannot be solved if people (or governments) act in their own self-interest. I’ve tried to consider how my actions cascade to affect those with less privilege, immune or otherwise. Instead of asking “What’s my risk?,” I’ve tried to ask “What’s my contribution to everyone’s risk?” I’ve done things that personally inconvenience me to avoid contributing to the much greater societal inconvenience of, say, a collapsed health-care system. I still mask indoors. I still eat outdoors at restaurants. I still avoid large gatherings. I’m still writing articles that take a toll on my own resilience, to help our readers make sense of a crisis that I desperately want to never think about again. I’ve tried to put we over me.A birthday party is almost the antithesis of that ethic—an asymmetric gathering in which we celebrate me. I talked with my wife, Liz, and two of my colleagues about ways of mitigating the risks—could we ask people to do a rapid test just before coming?—but, ultimately, simply canceling felt easier and safer. The growing number of anecdotes about outbreaks within boosted parties has only made me feel more confident about that choice. These decisions are hard. Plans and hopes have their own inertia, and canceling things is a pain. A birthday party isn’t ultimately a big deal, but I’m still sad about not seeing my friends, and a celebration would certainly have improved my fraying mental health. Those trade-offs, which we’ve been asked to make now for almost two years, have an erosive power as they add up.Our Christmas will also be quiet. I don’t know how to think about everyone else’s. For two straight years, America’s leaders have largely punted the responsibility for controlling the pandemic to individuals, and now Omicron leaves said people with few options beyond boosting, masking, and—the one nobody wants to hear—avoiding social gatherings. If people really hunker down over the next week, eschewing the kinds of exposures that they would have felt comfortable with a mere month ago, they might be in a more secure position to gather by Christmas. But as my colleague Ian Bogost has written, to have to wrangle with these choices again, just as the holiday season begins, feels like a cruel joke.It is easy to despair, but we cannot afford the luxury of nihilism. Grim though the stories I’ve written may be, I have tried to infuse every one with some hope—with the acknowledgment that a better future is at least possible, if not probable. And despite everything, I firmly believe that it is. Failed systems constrain us, but we still have agency, and our small choices matter immensely. The infectious nature of a virus means that a tiny bad decision can cause exponential harm, but also that a tiny wise decision can do exponential good.This time last year, with effective vaccines and a new administration on the horizon, I tweeted that I was “gently hopeful about being able to have a party.” That wasn’t to be. But canceling doesn’t mean that I can’t have a joyful weekend, or that I can’t have a party again, or even a 40th-birthday party again. I can imagine reviving the idea if transmission falls back to a gentle simmer. The cost of waiting for such a moment feels low, and certainly much lower than the consequences of reckless impatience. And I know, despite the relentless nature of the past two years, that pandemics do eventually end.
I turn 40 a year today, and I’m gently hopeful about being able to have a party by then.
— Ed Yong (@edyong209) December 17, 2020

Harvard University has decided to extend its pandemic policy of making SAT and ACT scores optional for applicants until at least 2026, which means standardized test scores won't play much of a role in admissions decisions for years to come, if ever again at all.
Harvard cited the pandemic as the reason for the extension, but the broader push to abolish the ACT and SAT in college admissions is grounded in a misguided idea that the tests are unfair to underprivileged teenagers. The University of California system, for instance, has moved to stop requiring the exams due to concerns that they disfavored black and Hispanic applicants. As EdSource notes, this was part of a settlement with anti-test activists:
The settlement marks the end of a lawsuit that was filed in 2019 by students, community organizers and the Compton Unified School District. The settlement was praised by critics who say standardized tests are biased against low-income students, students with disabilities and Black and Latino students.
The historic settlement "marks an end to a sordid chapter in the history of the University of California. The Regents' stubborn insistence over generations upon usage of the SAT and ACT despite indisputable evidence that these exams only measured family wealth cost hundreds of thousands of talented students of color a fair opportunity to matriculate in their state's system of higher education," Mark Rosenbaum, one of the attorneys representing students in the case, said.
Contra Rosenbaum, the evidence is highly disputed. As Freddie de Boer, author of The Cult of Smart, has argued very persuasively, some combination of grade point average and SAT/ACT scores is highly predictive of success in college. And it's simply not true that prioritizing test scores punishes racial minorities more than alternative admissions standards. On the contrary, the more that schools rely on non-academic criteria such as extracurricular activities and legacy status, the more they reward applicants who are wealthy and well-connected. A gifted but impoverished Latino teen who is the first in his family to finish high school has a better shot in a system that cares about his SAT score than in a system that cares if his parents paid for clarinet lessons and secured him a spot on the water polo team.
"There is no reason to believe that getting rid of the SATs will increase what people actually mean by 'diversity' at elite colleges, and every reason to believe colleges will continue to game these systems," writes de Boer.
If institutions like Harvard really cared about being fair to the unprivileged, they'd take a machete to legacy admissions: a special boost to applicants who are the scions of previous graduates. From 2014 to 2019, the general admittance race for Harvard applicants was six percent—but the admit rate for legacies was 33 percent, according to The Harvard Crimson.
The most prestigious educational institution in the country should take the brightest students, and standardized tests are a better metric for that than the alternatives on offer.
The post If Harvard Cared About Equality, It Would Abolish Legacy Admissions, Not ACT and SAT Requirements appeared first on Reason.com.

On September 28, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky shared the results of a new study that appeared to confirm the need for mask mandates in schools. The study was conducted in Arizona over the summer, and published by the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: It found that schools in counties without mask mandates had 3.5 times more outbreaks than schools in counties with mask mandates.
The significance of that finding should have raised eyebrows, according to The Atlantic's David Zweig. "A number of the experts interviewed for this article said the size of the effect should have caused everyone involved in preparing, publishing, and publicizing the paper to tap the brakes," he wrote in a new article that explores the study's significant flaws. "Instead, they hit the gas."
His article demonstrates quite convincingly that the study's results are suspect:
But the Arizona study at the center of the CDC's back-to-school blitz turns out to have been profoundly misleading. "You can't learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study," Jonathan Ketcham, a public-health economist at Arizona State University, told me. His view echoed the assessment of eight other experts who reviewed the research, and with whom I spoke for this article. Masks may well help prevent the spread of COVID, some of these experts told me, and there may well be contexts in which they should be required in schools. But the data being touted by the CDC—which showed a dramatic more-than-tripling of risk for unmasked students—ought to be excluded from this debate. The Arizona study's lead authors stand by their work, and so does the CDC. But the critics were forthright in their harsh assessments. Noah Haber, an interdisciplinary scientist and a co-author of a systematic review of COVID-19 mitigation policies, called the research "so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse."
It turns out that there were numerous problems with the study. Many of the schools that comprise its data set weren't even open at the time the study was completed; it counted outbreaks instead of cases; it did not control for vaccination status; it included schools that didn't fit the criteria. For these and other reasons, Zweig argues that the study ought to be ignored entirely: Masking in schools may or may not be a good idea, but this study doesn't help answer the question. Any public official—including and especially Walensky—who purports to follow the science should toss this one in the trash.
In other COVID-19 news, the CDC is now recommending the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines over Johnson & Johnson due to the rare blood-clotting issues relating to the later. According to Fox Business:
Regulators eventually decided that the benefits of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine outweighed the risks, but the FDA released new data this week showing that more cases have occurred in the summer and fall.
Women between the ages of 30 and 49 are most affected by the blood clotting issue at a rate of about 1 in 100,000 shots.
Health officials have confirmed 54 cases of the blood clots, nine of which have been fatal, CDC official Dr. Isaac See said Thursday. Two more deaths are suspected to be related to the blood clotting issue.
The J&J shot doesn't seem to provide much protection against the now-surging omicron variant, in any case.
Speaking of omicron, the latest COVID-19 variant is spreading throughout the U.S., and is already causing a wave of shutdowns on some college campuses, including Cornell University, Stanford University, Georgetown University, New York University, and Princeton University. That these campuses all saw cases spike despite 95 percent vaccination rates likely means that the vaccines are not doing nearly enough to slow and stop infection, though they still seem to offer significant protection against severe disease and death.
That will end up being key: In Washington, D.C., for instance, high vaccination rates meant that while the delta wave did cause a spike in cases, the city's death rate did not increase at all.

https://t.co/SJhI78rZdq pic.twitter.com/meRssoWdIo
— Christian Britschgi (@christianbrits) December 16, 2021

Hopefully, we see something similar with omicron, though everyone should prepare for Democratic officials to bring back mask mandates (and maybe lockdowns) in response to rising cases. Mayor Muriel Bowser will probably reinstate D.C.'s mask mandate—just as soon as her own holiday parties are over.

FREE MINDS
Last week, a British court ruled that Julian Assange could face extradition to the U.S. Assange's legal team has argued that doing so would put Assange's health in grave danger: He has already suffered a mini stroke, and his brother has said, "I have no doubt he will die" if extradited.
For years, the founder of WikiLeaks hid in the U.K.'s Ecuadorian embassy to evade government authorities who want to prosecute him for publishing the Chelsea Manning leaks, which revealed horrific wrongdoings perpetrated by the U.S. military. The effort to punish Assange is a blow to freedom of the press and the First Amendment, and one that all civil libertarians ought to oppose.
One MSNBC columnist, Frank Figliuzzi, is treating the possible extradition of Assange as a potential window into…the Mueller investigation:

Former President Donald Trump already faces a future filled with legal battles in multiple federal, state and local jurisdictions from Georgia to the District of Columbia to New York state and Manhattan. And, now, a British court decision against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could resurrect the two seminal questions from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation: Did Trump obstruct justice, and did his campaign collude with Russia? Assange, an Australian citizen sitting in Her Majesty's Prison Belmarsh in southeast London, may hold the key that reopens the prosecutive possibilities.

Liberals should be howling about the unjust persecution of Assange, not salivating at the near-zero chance that he would provide new information that would bring back the possibility of criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.

The Republican Party is paying Trump's legal expenses, according to The Washington Post:

The Republican Party has agreed to pay up to $1.6 million in legal bills for former president Donald Trump to help him fight investigations into his business practices in New York, according to Republican National Committee members and others briefed on the decision.

The party's executive committee overwhelmingly approved the payments at a meeting this summer in Nashville, according to four members and others with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private meeting of the executive committee.

That means the GOP's commitment to pay Trump's personal legal expenses could be more than 10 times higher than previously known.

Last month, the GOP said in campaign-finance filings that it had paid Trump's personal attorneys $121,670 in October. More payments have been made since then. A party official said Thursday that the RNC paid $578,000 in November to attorneys known to be representing both Trump and his businesses.

QUICK HITS

New York City's new mayor, Eric Adams, wants to close Rikers.
Trump's efforts to force the Senate to ditch Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) aren't going very well.
Many universities are requiring students to get booster shots.
A Florida man was banned from a United flight after attempting to wear a red thong as his mask.
Anthony Fauci prefers the word "requirements" to "mandates."
A Soho Forum debate announcement:

I'll be debating the brilliant @JonHaidt on the resolution "The federal government should increase its efforts to reduce the harms caused by social media." Event is February 17th in New York City. Get tickets here:https://t.co/bcEVIDSc9G pic.twitter.com/2NhUBll63x
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) December 16, 2021

The post The Study That Convinced the CDC To Support Mask Mandates in Schools Is Junk Science appeared first on Reason.com.

The Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, that country’s major scientific funding organization, is developing a comprehensive research plan, called NSERC 2030, to guide its priorities over the next decade. In the current phase, NSERC is engaging with external stakeholders through a series of discussion papers aimed at finding new ways to support researchers and enhance the impact of their work. Predictably, there is a heavy focus on diversity, with stakeholders being asked to address the following two “discussion questions”:Participation rates by women, visible minorities and racialized groups vary significantly across programs … and across disciplines. Should NSERC explore specific measures to address these diversity gaps? Should special programs be targeted exclusively to certain underrepresented groups to provide better opportunities?Determining fair access to research support involves ensuring parity between the proportion of applicants from an identity group and the proportion of awards to applicants from that group. To accelerate this process, should NSERC explore other equity measures, such as dedicated funding to institutions, to career stages, or to identity groups? Should it explore setting targets and/or equalizing outcomes?The standard of “fair access” that NSERC planners set out here implies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between mandating equality of opportunity—which is desirable—and mandating equality of outcome. The latter would lead to overt identity-based discrimination against members of groups whose applications, in some cases, would otherwise be successful under a purely merit-based approach. That a major research-funding agency is promoting such a misunderstanding in regard to policy formulation is an issue of some concern.While Canadian science marches down this misguided road, Australian science is under attack on a related front: Earlier this month, the journal Nature ran an article with the headline “Outcry as men win outsize share of Australian medical-research funding,” approvingly describing a petition calling for the imposition of gender quotas to govern the awarding of “investigator grants” by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia’s principle medical-research funding body. The petition, which has been signed by about 7,000 Australians, was created by two female biology researchers who’d outlined the statistical basis of their complaint in a report for the Australian news site Women’s Agenda. “Although an equivalent number of grant applications were received from female and male researchers,” wrote Professor Louise Purton and Dr. Jessica Borger, “men were disproportionately awarded a staggering 23% more grants, corresponding to an extra $95-million in funding” (all figures in $AUS).The available numbers don’t tell us if there was any evidence of systemic bias in the underlying grant criteria, or in the evaluation of applications against those criteria. However, they do provide information that helps explain the sex-based discrepancies at play—although not in a way that advances Prof. Purton and Dr. Borger’s argument.A bar chart included in a previous Nature article on this subject shows the total value of grants awarded to men and women in 2019, categorized by seniority quintile. In the first (most junior) quintile, women actually were awarded more grant money than men got. In the second quintile, men had a slight edge. This edge grew substantially in the third and fourth quintiles, leading up to a massive difference in the fifth (i.e., most senior) quintile, which shows the most senior male scientists being awarded $81 million, compared to just $21 million for the most senior female scientists. This means that, of the money going to senior scientists, women got just over 20 percent.Male (red) vs. Female (green) Investigator Grant recipients in 2019, by applicant seniorityThe latest Nature article concludes with a quote from Teresa Woodruff, an obstetrician and advocate for women in science at Northwestern University. She describes the data as a wake-up call to funders, who now should “address the issues.” But the Nature analysis glides over one of the more obvious issues lying in plain sight: As the 2019 article showed, there tends to be fewer senior women (just 17 in 2019) applying for grants, as compared to senior men (75). In 2021, the numbers were similar: According to Nature, “at the most senior level … there were about four times more male than female applicants”—an 80/20 male-female applicant split that corresponds almost exactly to the $81 million/$21 million split in awarded 2021 grants.This pattern has an obvious explanation: There are simply more men than women in the senior ranks of Australia’s health and medical researchers—a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since most scientific fields were, until just a few decades ago, almost entirely dominated by men. Thankfully, this era is over, and Australia’s medical schools achieved gender parity in admissions a long time ago. Thus, one might expect that the funding of male and female medical researchers at the junior level would be roughly even, while being progressively more skewed toward men among older generations—which is exactly what the data reported by Nature shows to be the case.Unfortunately, many activists would prefer to force a quick fix through gender quotas, a policy which would assign money on the basis of identity, not research quality. Signatories of the “Fund women in STEM equitably” petition, for instance,are calling on the to improve equity for women in STEMM [Science Technology Engineering Maths and Medicine] by allocating the same amount of funding to each gender (including a separate pot for non-binary applicants) and to set quotas at each of the Investigator Grant (fellowship) levels for each gender to ensure that all academic levels are supported with equity.The opportunity for abuse and discrimination within such a system is obvious (even putting aside the somewhat strange proposal that extra money be put aside for individuals who claim to be “non-binary”). And so it is not clear that such a system would be warranted, even if the existence of discrimination had been proved. But no such proof has been offered. Rather, the outcry seems to be based on an incomplete and arguably misleading presentation of the available data.Notably, Nature glosses over the fact that, as NHMRC CEO Anne Kelso points out, funding rates for men and women are nearly equal in regard to the NHMRC’s entire $1.1 billion funding budget as a whole, of which the $398 million earmarked for investigator grants (the subject of the petition and the Nature article based on it) is but one component. This overall pattern is hardly compatible with the suggestion that the NHMRC is a hive of sexism. (Note that of its CEO, General Manager, and three executive directors, only one is a man.) Nor is it compatible with the broad accusations against NHMRC repeated by Nature, such as the claim by quota advocate Megan Head, an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, to the effect that “Australia has a terrible record with gender equity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”We have gone down this road before, when strict quotas were placed on Jewish scientists within my own academic sphere, physics, as a means of excluding Jews (including very nearly, future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman) from US graduate schools. Today, we properly regard such policies as shameful, both for discriminating against individual human beings and for misdirecting society’s scientific resources. Medical science is a life-and-death endeavor, and decisions about how that science should be funded must be based on the quality of research proposals, not the skin color or sex of those submitting them.

However, Menand wraps this all up by arguing something that caused me the same alarm that has called Montás to the academy’s battlements: that humanists such as Montás “need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos” and that “the idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.” Menand concludes:

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a Great Books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was 17. But I don’t think I’m a better person.

Hmm. He doesn’t? For several years I taught the Core Curriculum course “Contemporary Civilization,” and I do think it made a better person out of me, as well as the dozens of students I ushered through it.

That course is a two-semester marathon requiring every sophomore to read dense texts week after week and come prepared to discuss and write about them. It starts with Plato’s “The Republic” and continues with (this is but a partial list) Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, St. Augustine, the New Testament, Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Du Bois, Fanon and many others. And as much of a climb as this can be for students (and their teacher), it does make one a better person.

Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” for example, is initially a forbidding piece of work, seeming to meander through assorted definitions of vague- and perhaps quaint-sounding concepts such as happiness and virtue. However, to guide students through what Aristotle is getting across is to reveal invaluable insights about the human endeavor — one of my favorites of which is that what Aristotle means by virtue is excellence, as in excelling. His “Ethics” offers a light to shine through the difficulty in figuring out what the point of existence is — of finding something we do well and doing our best in it as a prime justification for existence. One day, it’s over for each of us, but you tried, and did, your best with what you were given.

Rousseau is perhaps best known for his concept of humans beginning as “noble savages.” These figures supposedly led largely solitary lives and lacked language and even capacities for discernment. We must, in a nod to Menand, acknowledge that anthropology and paleontology have put this to rest as any kind of scientific fact about the origin of humans — humans emerged as, and have always been, social, rational beings. And we must acknowledge the Eurocentricity in his characterizations.

The key thing is that Rousseau did not see this “noble savage,” a clueless brute, as noble at all. His notion of semi-paradise was small, basically egalitarian societies, with the idea that everything went to pieces when humans conglomerated into hierarchical civilizations. The problem as Rousseau saw it was masses of people condemned to wrest “iron and wheat” from the earth — while a fortunate few reaped the benefits thereof.

Updated at 12:00 p.m. on December 16, 2021America was not prepared for COVID-19 when it arrived. It was not prepared for last winter’s surge. It was not prepared for Delta’s arrival in the summer or its current winter assault. More than 1,000 Americans are still dying of COVID every day, and more have died this year than last. Hospitalizations are rising in 42 states. The University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, which entered the pandemic as arguably the best-prepared hospital in the country, recently went from 70 COVID patients to 110 in four days, leaving its staff “grasping for resolve,” the virologist John Lowe told me. And now comes Omicron.Will the new and rapidly spreading variant overwhelm the U.S. health-care system? The question is moot because the system is already overwhelmed, in a way that is affecting all patients, COVID or otherwise. “The level of care that we’ve come to expect in our hospitals no longer exists,” Lowe said.The real unknown is what an Omicron cross will do when it follows a Delta hook. Given what scientists have learned in the three weeks since Omicron’s discovery, “some of the absolute worst-case scenarios that were possible when we saw its genome are off the table, but so are some of the most hopeful scenarios,” Dylan Morris, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA, told me. In any case, America is not prepared for Omicron. The variant’s threat is far greater at the societal level than at the personal one, and policy makers have already cut themselves off from the tools needed to protect the populations they serve. Like the variants that preceded it, Omicron requires individuals to think and act for the collective good—which is to say, it poses a heightened version of the same challenge that the U.S. has failed for two straight years, in bipartisan fashion.The coronavirus is a microscopic ball studded with specially shaped spikes that it uses to recognize and infect our cells. Antibodies can thwart such infections by glomming onto the spikes, like gum messing up a key. But Omicron has a crucial advantage: 30-plus mutations that change the shape of its spike and disable many antibodies that would have stuck to other variants. One early study suggests that antibodies in vaccinated people are about 40 times worse at neutralizing Omicron than the original virus, and the experts I talked with expect that, as more data arrive, that number will stay in the same range. The implications of that decline are still uncertain, but three simple principles should likely hold.First, the bad news: In terms of catching the virus, everyone should assume that they are less protected than they were two months ago. As a crude shorthand, assume that Omicron negates one previous immunizing event—either an infection or a vaccine dose. Someone who considered themselves fully vaccinated in September would be just partially vaccinated now (and the official definition may change imminently). But someone who’s been boosted has the same ballpark level of protection against Omicron infection as a vaccinated-but-unboosted person did against Delta. The extra dose not only raises a recipient’s level of antibodies but also broadens their range, giving them better odds of recognizing the shape of even Omicron’s altered spike. In a small British study, a booster effectively doubled the level of protection that two Pfizer doses provided against Omicron infection.Second, some worse news: Boosting isn’t a foolproof shield against Omicron. In South Africa, the variant managed to infect a cluster of seven people who were all boosted. And according to a CDC report, boosted Americans made up a third of the first known Omicron cases in the U.S. “People who thought that they wouldn’t have to worry about infection this winter if they had their booster do still have to worry about infection with Omicron,” Trevor Bedford, a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me. “I’ve been going to restaurants and movies, and now with Omicron, that will change.”Third, some better news: Even if Omicron has an easier time infecting vaccinated individuals, it should still have more trouble causing severe disease. The vaccines were always intended to disconnect infection from dangerous illness, turning a life-threatening event into something closer to a cold. Whether they’ll fulfill that promise for Omicron is a major uncertainty, but we can reasonably expect that they will. The variant might sneak past the initial antibody blockade, but slower-acting branches of the immune system (such as T cells) should eventually mobilize to clear it before it wreaks too much havoc.To see how these principles play out in practice, Dylan Morris suggests watching highly boosted places, such as Israel, and countries where severe epidemics and successful vaccination campaigns have given people layers of immunity, such as Brazil and Chile. In the meantime, it’s reasonable to treat Omicron as a setback but not a catastrophe for most vaccinated people. It will evade some of our hard-won immune defenses, without obliterating them entirely. “It was better than I expected, given the mutational profile,” Alex Sigal of the Africa Health Research Institute, who led the South African antibody study, told me. “It’s not going to be a common cold, but neither do I think it will be a tremendous monster.”That’s for individuals, though. At a societal level, the outlook is bleaker.Omicron’s main threat is its shocking speed, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has reported. In South Africa, every infected person has been passing the virus on to 3–3.5 other people—at least twice the pace at which Delta spread in the summer. Similarly, British data suggest that Omicron is twice as good at spreading within households as Delta. That might be because the new variant is inherently more transmissible than its predecessors, or because it is specifically better at moving through vaccinated populations. Either way, it has already overtaken Delta as the dominant variant in South Africa. Soon, it will likely do the same in Scotland and Denmark. Even the U.S., which has much poorer genomic surveillance than those other countries, has detected Omicron in 35 states. “I think that a large Omicron wave is baked in,” Bedford told me. “That’s going to happen.”More positively, Omicron cases have thus far been relatively mild. This pattern has fueled the widespread claim that the variant might be less severe, or even that its rapid spread could be a welcome development. “People are saying ‘Let it rip’ and ‘It’ll help us build more immunity,’ that this is the exit wave and everything’s going to be fine and rosy after,” Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease physician at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, told me. “I have no confidence in that.”To begin with, as he and others told me, that argument overlooks a key dynamic: Omicron might not actually be intrinsically milder. In South Africa and the United Kingdom, it has mostly infected younger people, whose bouts of COVID-19 tend to be less severe. And in places with lots of prior immunity, it might have caused few hospitalizations or deaths simply because it has mostly infected hosts with some protection, as Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University, explained in a Twitter thread. That pattern could change once it reaches more vulnerable communities. (The widespread notion that viruses naturally evolve to become less virulent is mistaken, as the virologist Andrew Pekosz of Johns Hopkins University clarified in The New York Times.) Also, deaths and hospitalizations are not the only fates that matter. Supposedly “mild” bouts of COVID-19 have led to cases of long COVID, in which people struggle with debilitating symptoms for months (or even years), while struggling to get care or disability benefits.And even if Omicron is milder, greater transmissibility will likely trump that reduced virulence. Omicron is spreading so quickly that a small proportion of severe cases could still flood hospitals. To avert that scenario, the variant would need to be substantially milder than Delta—especially because hospitals are already at a breaking point. Two years of trauma have pushed droves of health-care workers, including many of the most experienced and committed, to quit their job. The remaining staff is ever more exhausted and demoralized, and “exceptionally high numbers” can’t work because they got breakthrough Delta infections and had to be separated from vulnerable patients, John Lowe told me. This pattern will only worsen as Omicron spreads, if the large clusters among South African health-care workers are any indication. “In the West, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner because most countries have huge Delta waves and most of them are stretched to the limit of their health-care systems,” Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, told me. “What happens if those waves get even bigger with Omicron?”The Omicron wave won’t completely topple America’s wall of immunity but will seep into its many cracks and weaknesses. It will find the 39 percent of Americans who are still not fully vaccinated (including 28 percent of adults and 13 percent of over-65s). It will find other biologically vulnerable people, including elderly and immunocompromised individuals whose immune systems weren’t sufficiently girded by the vaccines. It will find the socially vulnerable people who face repeated exposures, either because their “essential” jobs leave them with no choice or because they live in epidemic-prone settings, such as prisons and nursing homes. Omicron is poised to speedily recap all the inequities that the U.S. has experienced in the pandemic thus far.Here, then, is the problem: People who are unlikely to be hospitalized by Omicron might still feel reasonably protected, but they can spread the virus to those who are more vulnerable, quickly enough to seriously batter an already collapsing health-care system that will then struggle to care for anyone—vaccinated, boosted, or otherwise. The collective threat is substantially greater than the individual one. And the U.S. is ill-poised to meet it.America’s policy choices have left it with few tangible options for averting an Omicron wave. Boosters can still offer decent protection against infection, but just 17 percent of Americans have had those shots. Many are now struggling to make appointments, and people from rural, low-income, and minority communities will likely experience the greatest delays, “mirroring the inequities we saw with the first two shots,” Arrianna Marie Planey, a medical geographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. With a little time, the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna could be updated, but “my suspicion is that once we have an Omicron-specific booster, the wave will be past,” Trevor Bedford, the virologist, said.Two antiviral drugs now exist that could effectively keep people out of the hospital, but neither has been authorized and both are expensive. Both must also be administered within five days of the first symptoms, which means that people need to realize they’re sick and swiftly confirm as much with a test. But instead of distributing rapid tests en masse, the Biden administration opted to merely make them reimbursable through health insurance. “That doesn’t address the need where it is greatest,” Planey told me. Low-wage workers, who face high risk of infection, “are the least able to afford tests up front and the least likely to have insurance,” she said. And testing, rapid or otherwise, is about to get harder, as Omicron’s global spread strains both the supply of reagents and the capacity of laboratories.Omicron may also be especially difficult to catch before it spreads to others, because its incubation period—the window between infection and symptoms—seems to be very short. At an Oslo Christmas party, almost three-quarters of attendees were infected even though all reported a negative test result one to three days before. That will make Omicron “harder to contain,” Lowe told me. “It’s really going to put a lot of pressure on the prevention measures that are still in place—or rather, the complete lack of prevention that’s still in place.”The various measures that controlled the spread of other variants—masks, better ventilation, contact tracing, quarantine, and restrictions on gatherings—should all theoretically work for Omicron too. But the U.S. has either failed to invest in these tools or has actively made it harder to use them. Republican legislators in at least 26 states have passed laws that curtail the very possibility of quarantines and mask mandates. In September, Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University told me that when the next variant comes, such measures could create “the worst of all worlds” by “removing emergency actions, without the preventive care that would allow people to protect their own health.” Omicron will test her prediction in the coming weeks.The longer-term future is uncertain. After Delta’s emergence, it became clear that the coronavirus was too transmissible to fully eradicate. Omicron could potentially shunt us more quickly toward a different endgame—endemicity, the point when humanity has gained enough immunity to hold the virus in a tenuous stalemate—albeit at significant cost. But more complicated futures are also plausible. For example, if Omicron and Delta are so different that each can escape the immunity that the other induces, the two variants could co-circulate. (That’s what happened with the viruses behind polio and influenza B.)Omicron also reminds us that more variants can still arise—and stranger ones than we might expect. Most scientists I talked with figured the next one to emerge would be a descendant of Delta, featuring a few more mutational bells and whistles. Omicron, however, is “dramatically different,” Shane Crotty, from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told me. “It showed a lot more evolutionary potential than I or others had hoped for.” It evolved not from Delta but from older lineages of SARS-CoV-2, and seems to have acquired its smorgasbord of mutations in some hidden setting: perhaps a part of the world that does very little sequencing, or an animal species that was infected by humans and then transmitted the virus back to us, or the body of an immunocompromised patient who was chronically infected with the virus. All of these options are possible, but the people I spoke with felt that the third—the chronically ill patient—was most likely. And if that’s the case, with millions of immunocompromised people in the U.S. alone, many of whom feel overlooked in the vaccine era, will more weird variants keep arising? Omicron “doesn’t look like the end of it,” Crotty told me. One cause for concern: For all the mutations in Omicron’s spike, it actually has fewer mutations in the rest of its proteins than Delta did. The virus might still have many new forms to take.Vaccinating the world can curtail those possibilities, and is now an even greater matter of moral urgency, given Omicron’s speed. And yet, people in rich countries are getting their booster six times faster than those in low-income countries are getting their first shot. Unless the former seriously commits to vaccinating the world—not just donating doses, but allowing other countries to manufacture and disseminate their own supplies—“it’s going to be a very expensive wild-goose chase until the next variant,” Planey said.Vaccines can’t be the only strategy, either. The rest of the pandemic playbook remains unchanged and necessary: paid sick leave and other policies that protect essential workers, better masks, improved ventilation, rapid tests, places where sick people can easily isolate, social distancing, a stronger public-health system, and ways of retaining the frayed health-care workforce. The U.S. has consistently dropped the ball on many of these, betting that vaccines alone could get us out of the pandemic. Rather than trying to beat the coronavirus one booster at a time, the country needs to do what it has always needed to do—build systems and enact policies that protect the health of entire communities, especially the most vulnerable ones. Individualism couldn’t beat Delta, it won’t beat Omicron, and it won’t beat the rest of the Greek alphabet to come. Self-interest is self-defeating, and as long as its hosts ignore that lesson, the virus will keep teaching it.This article originally misstated the rise in the COVID-patient count at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. According to corrected information from the hospital, the increase was to 110, not 120.

(Photographs from Getty Images.)Screw it.I’ve shown a good deal of restraint since news broke that I left Fox News.I haven’t done any TV about it, and I’ve let a lot of nonsense go by without a response.A major reason I chose to leave with more than a year left on my contract was that I felt conflicted about speaking freely. Fox understandably doesn’t like to pay people who criticize Fox or its talent, and there is something unseemly about it.So that was one reason why I left.Another was that I didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.That’s the thing. I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (“Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?”) Punditry and politics is a very small world—especially on the right—and if you add-up all the congressmen, senators, columnists, producers, editors, etc. you’ll probably end up with fewer people than the student population of a decent-sized liberal arts college.Yes, yes, some people started to drink the Kool-Aid and actually came to believe their own lies, but that’s a subject for another time. Suffice it to say, however: Just because you’ve come to believe a lie that doesn’t make that lie true.I never deliberately lied on Fox, but over time I felt like I was becoming complicit in a series of lies of omission. I’ll come back around to explain that in a moment. But let’s start with the news of the day.The Meadows texts.Too much and too little has been made of the Meadows texts released this week. On the one hand, we already knew that lots of Trump boosters were horrified by what they saw on January 6. Heck, I suspect that the vast majority of pro-Trump Republicans were horrified. Even Lindsey Graham, who spent much of Trump’s presidency as the Renfield to his Dracula, famously said he was done with Trump from the well of the Senate that very day. We know that Kevin McCarthy, a political homunculus who makes Lindsey Graham seem Churchillian by comparison, was outraged and expressed his outrage directly to the president during the riot—because he knew the president was responsible.So it’s no surprise that Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade were aghast at the spectacle. (It is a bit surprising however, that Donald Trump Jr. was appalled.) The only person who we know for sure wasn’t appalled by what Trump had wrought was Trump himself.The significance of those texts isn’t that they recognized the truth of that day. What’s relevant is the contrast of that private behavior with their public behavior over the 11 months that followed.Last night, Laura Ingraham made a huge deal of the fact that she condemned the violence on her show on the evening of January 6. And she did. Although she sprinkled it with all sorts of fan service nonsense about Antifa provoking the violence and insinuations that the mob was right to be angry about the allegedly rigged election. But she did say, “Political passions boiled over today, and it will only serve to make the lives of MAGA supporters more difficult and even imperil this movement they fought so hard for.”What she didn’t say is that the mob’s passions boiled over because of Donald Trump’s lies—and the megaphone she and her colleagues gave to those lies. From her texts it’s reasonable to assume that she believed—rightly—that this mob was Trump’s to command because the mob believed it was doing Trump’s bidding.But that truth is what she left out that night—and, as far as I can tell, every night since. In other words, the central truth of the texts isn’t that what the mob was doing was condemnable, but that Trump was responsible for the condemnable behavior. By the time the cameras went on, Laura was still willing to condemn the president’s mob, but not the president. And if you read the transcript, much of the show was dedicated to rationalizing the mob’s behavior, with various GOP congressmen changing the subject to the supposed real outrage of the stolen election. “Laura, this is bigger than the president of the United States,” Rep. Lee Zeldin explained. “This is bigger than 2020. What we saw in this administration of the 2020 presidential election, rogue state actors, state elections officials, secretaries of state, courts, they usurp state legislative authority. They decided to administer elections however they see fit. And we need to have that conversation today.”Yes, that was the pressing conversation we needed the day a mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” and bludgeoned cops with flag poles.Laura spent the next 11 months cleaning up the president’s mess.“No reasonable person thinks that what happened on January 6 was, as Biden said, the worst attack on the Capitol since the Civil War,” she said last July. “Come on, guys. Buffalo head guy was poised to take over the U.S. Government? Are you kidding me? We’ve had many protests, many riots in American history. We had many last year that were far worse than this.” When Capitol police testified before Congress, she dismissed it all by giving out “Best Performance” awards like they were all actors. And she said the police had “no one to blame but themselves” for letting the mob inside the perimeter.That’s not what she was texting Mark Meadows.For months,  many hosts and guests on Fox prime time focused on exonerating Trump, condemning liberal hypocrisy, and disseminating rumors that Antifa was really responsible.About that: I’ve never understood the moral logic that says the riot was bad if Antifa or the deep state provoked it, but no big deal if it was just a spontaneous uprising. If Antifa or the deep state were the real culprits, that would be very bad. But they weren’t. And how was the riot just a tourist visit gone awry if they weren’t pulling the strings? Either it’s bad to bring bear spray, zip ties, and paramilitary gear to storm the Capitol, smear feces around its halls, chant “Hang Mike Pence,” and look to take hostages—or it’s not.Similarly, if you are very angry about the BLM riots—and I am—how does that make January 6 okay (as Hannity intimated just last night)? Violent mobs are bad, period. A “law and order” conservatism that says, “As long as liberals fail to condemn thuggish violence for their side, we feel no obligation to condemn thuggish violence on our side,” cares neither about law and order nor conservatism.Moreover, we now know that the January 6 mob was orchestrated as part of a larger effort to steal the election on behalf of Donald Trump. As Kevin Williamson brilliantly puts it, “A riot that is part of a coup d’état is not very much like a riot that is part of a coup de Target.”I have no idea if Hannity and Ingraham knew what Trump was trying to do with John Eastman and all that. But given how chummy they are with the administration, I see no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. And we do know that prior to January 6, they and their colleagues stoked the very passions that “boiled over.”Whatabout whataboutism? Okay, about me.During the Trump years a lot of people found safe harbor in changing the subject or playing tu quoque games. It only makes sense. If you can’t defend something indefensible, bring up something the other side did that’s not defensible either and talk about that. To any inconvenient charge or fact about Trump, his defenders would respond, “What about …?” the Democrats, Antifa, Hillary, the New York Times, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, the designated hitter rule, whatever. There are three chief advantages to such rhetorical tactics. First, we live in an idiotic age where people believe that the alleged hypocrisy of a critic nullifies the merit of criticism. A parent who smokes is a hypocrite for telling his kid not to smoke—but that doesn’t mean the kid should therefore smoke.Second, it’s what the audience wants to hear. And no “principle” explains cable news opinion shows more than “the customer is always right.” The Fox audience craved permission to be saved from its own cognitive dissonance and whataboutism as an exit ramp from having to confront the actual facts.Finally, it lets you avoid explicitly lying. You just don’t answer the question that matters by pointing out the flaws of the other team. The problem, at least for me, is that if you follow this approach too long you’ll eventually become complicit in a larger deceit. And that’s where the lie by omission comes in.For example, let’s say someone asks you, “What do you make of the credible evidence that Donald Trump is a sexual predator?” And you answer, “What about Bill Clinton!?” (Forget that this is not actually a defense of Donald Trump in the same way the smoking parent’s hypocrisy isn’t an affirmative case for smoking.)Asking “What about Bill Clinton?” can be—and often was—an indictment of the questioner’s double standard. After all, plenty of people in the mainstream media smugly dismissed attacks on Bill Clinton’s predatory priapism as nothing more than prudish partisan nonsense. It’s a fine point to make—and I’ve made it many times. Here’s the difference, though: I believe both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump should be held to account for their behavior. But if all you’re ever allowed to say is the stuff about Bill Clinton without referencing Donald Trump, you’re left sounding like all you care about is the other side’s hypocrisy.The whole point of these whataboutist games is to exempt yourself from consistency. If your only goal in pointing out this double standard is to let Trump off the hook for arguably worse behavior, you’re adopting the same double standard you claim to be condemning. This kind of thing has been the overriding ethos of Fox opinion hosts and pundits for five years (with a few honorable exceptions). It wasn’t always explicitly whataboutist. Sometimes the whataboutism was simply implied. Don’t talk about Trump’s lies, mistakes, or misdeeds, just focus on the hypocrisy or hysteria of liberals who point out Trump’s lies, mistakes, or misdeeds. Sometimes the technique becomes so ingrained there’s no double standard at all, simply a ridiculous non-sequitur. “Democrats are arguing that Trump welcomed and incited a violent incursion into the Capitol,” Laura Ingraham once fumed, “when it is they who are enticing illegals to bust through our borders, exploit our resources, and commit crimes.” Uh, what?For most of the Trump years, when I was invited on Fox it was to talk about anything but Trump. And as a conservative, I was perfectly willing to criticize Democrats and progressives. But opportunities to criticize Trump were studiously avoided. (Though sometimes I managed.)  With one exception, I was never told by anyone what I should or shouldn’t say. But—outside of Special Report with Bret Baier and Fox News Sunday—I was really only welcome to train my fire leftward. Eventually, I felt like a cog in the whataboutist machinery. And as a conservative who passionately believes the conspiracy-mongering, demagogic, populist, personality cult nonsense that defines so much of  prime time Trumpism is not conservatism rightly understood, or even conservative in any meaningful sense, I felt I couldn’t associate myself with it. Perhaps I waited too long, but because I consider myself a writer, not a TV personality, I consoled myself by telling the fuller truth in print.Regardless, while I will miss many decent people who try to do what they can where they can at Fox, I am utterly content with my choice. Let me repeat my favorite line from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Two years after Hong Kong’s students led millions of people into the streets to protest for democracy and freedom, the crisis there seems to have disappeared from Western headlines and Western government agendas. But for thousands of young Hong Kongers, now fleeing or in exile, the fight for Hong Kong’s future (and their own) is just beginning. They need our help, now more than ever.

“For me, democratic backsliding is not an abstract theory, but a personal and painful story,” former student leader and Hong Kong legislator Nathan Law said during President Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week. “Unfortunately, the free world lacks a determination to coordinate a pushback. … We must change. We must act to show we can do better.”

Now living in exile in the United Kingdom, Law, 28, cut ties with his family in Hong Kong to protect them. Trumped-up charges from Hong Kong authorities may prevent him from ever returning home. But he is among the lucky ones. Many of Law’s freedom-fighting friends are behind bars, including fellow student activist Joshua Wong and newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai.

Meanwhile, thousands of young protesters who took to the streets to demand their promised rights have no clear pathway to safety. Stuck in legal and physical limbo, they are appealing for refuge to the same democratic governments that encouraged them to rise up in 2019.

Sunny Cheung, a 25-year-old former student activist leader, is now living in exile in the D.C. region and applying for political asylum. He told me that most of the student protesters can’t even submit an application for asylum or refugee status. Their anonymity protected them on the streets, but it now works against them in the eyes of the U.S. asylum system.

“It’s really hard for them to prove they are in danger of being arrested when seeking asylum, because it is a faceless movement,” said Cheung, who advises the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a D.C.-based pro-democracy nonprofit organization. “Ironically, they are the heroes. They have really sacrificed a lot.”

Thousands of former protesters are stranded in Taiwan. Increasingly desperate, some have fallen victim to human traffickers. The protesters were almost all young adults or teenagers, meaning most are too young to qualify for the U.K.’s established pathway to citizenship. Out of 10,000 people arrested in protests as of last October, around 2,000 were in primary or secondary school, according to a report by the U.K.-based nonprofit organization Hong Kong Watch.

Joey Siu, a 22-year-old Hong Kong democracy activist and student leader, told me the United States is lagging behind Britain, Australia and Canada, all of which have instituted “lifeboat policies” to respond to the crisis. The Biden administration in August offered temporary “safe haven” to Hong Kongers already in the United States. But what about the rest?

“We're not doing enough to save all these freedom fighters in Hong Kong,” she said. “For all those protesters in Hong Kong who have been sacrificing their futures, we must fulfill our responsibility and lead by example.”

Hong Kong Watch is calling on Congress to pass the Hong Kong Safe Harbor Act, a bipartisan bill led by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) that would enable Hong Kongers to apply for refugee status from outside the United States. In the House, there is the Hong Kong People’s Freedom and Choice Act, sponsored by Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), which would also expand visas for skilled workers from Hong Kong.

“That’s what says to the Chinese, ‘If you crush Hong Kong, you will lose your best and your brightest to us,’” Malinowski told me. “These are amazing people who will make huge contributions to the United States, just as so many refugees from the Soviet Union did during the Cold War.”

This week, House Democrats and Senate Republicans came together to negotiate over a bill to prevent Uyghur forced labor products from entering the United States. They then passed it unanimously. This shows how much support for human rights remains in Congress — and how much can get done when our leaders cut the political and bureaucratic nonsense.

Once people have experienced freedom, they will never tolerate having it stolen from them. These young Hong Kongers believed us when we told them they deserved these rights. They have sacrificed too much to stop now. Their struggle could last decades. We must show them they are not fighting alone.

In 1712 King Louis XIV of France signed the lettres patentes that formally established Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences, Belles Lettres, and Arts, a social club of intellectual inquiry and public edification. In contrast to the more conservative University of Bordeaux, whose primary objective was to educate the country’s priests, doctors, and lawyers through lessons compatible with Scripture, the Bordeaux Academy saw itself as “enlightened”: its objective was advancing scientific truth as part of a larger program intended to promote “mankind’s happiness.”

Every year, the academy organized an essay contest that it publicized throughout Europe. In 1739 the members announced the subject of the competition for 1741: “Quelle est la cause physique de la couleur des nègres, de la qualité de leur cheveux, et de la dégénération de l’un et de l’autre?” (“What is the physical cause of the Negro’s color, the quality of [the Negro’s] hair, and the degeneration of both [Negro hair and skin]?”) Embedded in this question was the academy’s assumption that something had happened to “Negroes” that had caused them to degenerate, to turn black and grow unusual hair. In short, the academy wanted to know who is black, and why. It wanted to know, too, what being black signified. The winner was promised a gold medal worth three hundred livres, roughly the annual earnings of a common worker at the time.

The 1741 contest was only the latest iteration of non-Africans’ fascination with dark skin. When the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Arabic peoples first described the inhabitants of Africa, it was Africans’ color that struck them most. Over many centuries, African “blackness” grew into an all-encompassing signifier that substituted for the range of reddish, yellowish, and blackish-brown colors that the skins of Africans actually express. The color black also became synonymous with the land itself; many of the geographical names that outsiders assigned to sub-Saharan Africa—Niger, Nigritia, Sudan, Zanzibar—contain the etymological roots of the word “black.” The most telling example is the name Ethiopia. Derived from the Greek aitho (I burn) and ops (face), it became the most widespread label for the entire sub-Saharan portion of the continent until the late seventeenth century. It even hinted at the cause of blackness itself.

Over the course of 1741 sixteen submissions attempting to explain the source of blackness arrived at the Bordeaux Academy, from as far away as Sweden, Ireland, and Holland. Now housed in Bordeaux’s municipal library, this collection of manuscripts has survived the ravages of mice and moths, humidity and fire—not to mention the French Revolution and two world wars. One finds anything but consensus in this early modern focus group: there are biblical scholars who argue that blackness may have been a curse; climate theorists who affirm that Africans’ bodily humors—particularly their bile—have been thrown out of balance by the continent’s scorching heat; an anatomist who announces that he has discovered the secret of blackness while dissecting African cadavers on a New World plantation ; and an essayist who hints, four decades before racial taxonomies began to seduce European naturalists on a large scale, that he could classify “Negroes” as a specific race or even species. Taken as a whole, these essays do not yet reflect the assumed biological and cognitive inferiority that would soon be attributed to both free and enslaved Africans. Still, they certainly allow us to glimpse the insidious relationship between “science” and enslavement—and, to amend W.E.B. Du Bois’s resonant phrase, the dusk before the dawn of race.

In announcing its competition on the origin of blackness, the Academy of Sciences made no mention of slavery. And yet, this seemingly clinical interest in specific African traits obviously emerged in tandem with the growing dependence on chattel slavery throughout the New World. In 1741—the year when the essays arrived at the academy—62,485 African men, women, and children in chains are estimated to have boarded ships along the west coast of Africa, destined for plantations in Brazil, Central America, the Caribbean, and North America. A disturbing number of these humans invariably died en route, 9,454 in this year alone. Although the transatlantic slave trade had not yet reached its peak, the number of Africans who had been forced to make this dreaded voyage already totaled well over four million. By the end of the eighteenth century, the era we have come to know as the Enlightenment, another 4.5 million Africans were forced to leave their home continent for a life of brutal enslavement in cities, farms, and plantations on the other side of the Atlantic.

Johann Moritz Rugendas: Nègres à fond de calle, circa 1830

Bordeaux, despite its position as a major Atlantic port city, remained a relatively minor player in the slave trade at the time of the contest. By 1837, however, the city’s armateurs (shipowners) had organized roughly five hundred expeditions to Africa, resulting in the deportation of approximately 150,000 Africans to French plantations. This figure represents approximately 13 percent of the 1.2 million enslaved Africans who survived the sea voyage and arrived in French colonies. It also far exceeds the total population of Bordeaux itself in 1789 (around 110,000).

Much of the wealth that was flooding into Bordeaux in the 1700s—the city’s so-called golden century—came from its ventures in the Americas, especially France’s three major colonies, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti). By midcentury, Bordeaux’s relationship with the Caribbean helped transform its port into the busiest and most important anchorage in France, with more than thirty ships fully dedicated to the colonial trade in the Antilles. Ships leaving Bordeaux for the islands transported flour, lard, beef, ham, rolls of iron, copper utensils, pottery, roofing, hardware, tools, fabrics, clothing, and the weapons and ammunition used to control the islands’ Black populations. These same vessels returned to Bordeaux with cocoa, coffee beans, cotton, ginger root, and millions of pounds of muscovado sugar.

Profits from the colonial trade also funded some of the five thousand stone buildings, apartments, and opulent townhouses built during the era. The most visible evidence of Bordeaux’s colonial involvement in the Caribbean (and the slave trade) can be found on the façades of several eighteenth-century buildings near the old customs house on the banks of the Garonne. Looming above the massive portes-cochères, or covered entryways, of these former townhouses, mascarons (sculpted stone faces) with African features look down at the passersby below.

An African mascaron atop the Place de la Bourse in Bordeaux, January 2010

The forty members of the Bordeaux Academy by and large did not soil their hands in the transatlantic slave trade. (This is unsurprising since the academy did not admit merchants, even rich merchants, to its ranks.) And yet many academy members did have significant contacts with and financial interests in the French Caribbean. Some of the academicians belonged to aristocratic dynasties whose flagging fortunes had been revived by the royal allocation of plantations in Martinique or Saint-Domingue. This was the case for Nicolas-Alexandre de Ségur and for Louis-Charles Mercier Dupaty de Clam and his brother, Jean-Baptiste Mercier Dupaty; Jean-Baptiste was born on the family estate in Saint-Domingue. The academy also welcomed André-Daniel Laffon de Ladebat, François-Armand de Saige, and Pierre-Paul Nairac, all of whom came from families with ties to the slave trade. Nairac, with his two brothers, had actually been involved in the business himself; the family’s company had deported more than eight thousand African captives to the French colonies, more than any other syndicate or individual in the city.

All of these links to the Caribbean dovetailed with the academy’s larger “scientific” interest in developing knowledge related to French colonies generally and to the enslaved peoples on those islands more specifically. It was likely with this in mind that the academy admitted the Martinique-born botanist, colonial administrator, and plantation owner Jean-Baptiste Thibault de Chanvalon to its ranks in 1748.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of connection came, however, in 1738, when the aristocratic members of the academy who were simultaneously seated in the Bordeaux Parlement were called upon to pass judgment on the question of the legal status of the city’s Black population. Before 1716, enslaving a person in France was, at least theoretically, illegal; according to a royal principle dating from the fourteenth century, any enslaved person who set foot on French territory was immediately freed. In 1571 the Bordeaux Parlement had famously upheld this when a Norman slave trader arrived in the city and attempted to sell his cargo of African slaves. The parlement, citing the principle that “no one is a slave in France,” both freed the slaves and ordered the owner taken into custody.

The status of this so-called Free Soil principle was first called into question during the Regency (1715–1723), the interim period between the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. In this age of rampant colonial expansion, Philippe d’Orléans, regent of France, proclaimed in 1716 that enslaved Africans from the Caribbean, whom the 1685 Code Noir deemed meubles, or property, were no longer automatically emancipated when they arrived on French soil. After four hundred years, slavery in France was once again legal.

Over the next two decades, an increasing number of enslaved Africans were taken to French cities, including Nantes, Saint-Malo, La Rochelle, Orléans, Paris, and Bordeaux. Bordeaux itself was home to several hundred enslaved Africans at any given time during the eighteenth century. Most of this Black population labored in or near the port, often for short periods before returning to the islands on merchant ships or, on occasion, escaping. Others lived with rich merchants or former ship captains, working as servants in some of the city’s great townhouses. Some came from the colonies to be trained as cooks, valets, or porters. A few of the youngest Africans to come to the city spent their early years as so-called négrillons, often represented in European art as devoted, even beloved extended family members hovering expectantly around their masters as living emblems of their power and opulence. It is estimated that some four thousand Africans or Caribbean-born Black people passed through or lived in Bordeaux during the eighteenth century.

By 1738 Louis XV felt compelled to issue a declaration clarifying the status of these Black populations. To avoid the fear of miscegenation, which was already a legal and social concern in the Caribbean, and the possibility of a “spirit of independence,” he limited the stays of enslaved Africans in France to three years. He also stipulated that those residing in France needed to be engaged in either religious or trade-related training. Owners who violated either part of this decree were to be fined a thousand livres and have their slaves confiscated and returned to the colonies.

In the year before the contest on blackness was announced, provincial parlements, including Bordeaux’s, were called upon to ratify or reject this declaration. The appellate judges who composed the Bordeaux Parlement—including a dozen or so men who were simultaneously members of the Academy—voted to accept Louis XV’s proposal. The ostensible goal of this statute was to control or even limit slavery in France; what it did, however, was further codify the legality of human bondage on French soil.

The presence of enslaved Africans in the city of Bordeaux surely contributed on some level to the genesis of the 1741 contest. Just what the Academy discovered from the competition was quite limited, however. Many essayists attempted to reconcile the origin of African skin with short biblical timescales, including the literalist reading of Scripture that maintained that God had created the earth precisely 5,741 years earlier. This powerful conviction intersected with providentialism, the belief that everything on earth is part of a larger divine plan.

Despite these shared beliefs, the religiously minded writers who contributed essays to the contest produced a wide range of explanations for blackness: that Adam or Eve was Black, or Adam was half Black; that blackness is a mark from God denoting sinfulness; that blackness is a gift from God allowing people to live in the “torrid zone.” Some of the essayists, however, attempted to combine their scriptural knowledge with more recent discoveries in the sciences. One asserted that blackness was passed down through the soul of the African father; another claimed that a moral defect in African parents had led God to make their progeny dark.

Several possible explanations for the source of blackness came directly from the Book of Genesis. The first of these was the curse of Cain, according to which Cain lied to God about murdering his brother Abel and was therefore “marked” or, according to some interpretations, “darkened”—a curse passed on to his descendants.

Far more convincing for some of the other essayists was the so-called curse of Ham or, more accurately, the curse of Canaan. According to this allegory, Noah fell asleep one night after drinking too much wine and lay naked and exposed to his three sons. The first two, Shem and Japheth, covered their father’s body to preserve his modesty. But Ham, his third son, had indiscreetly glanced at his sleeping father, an act of impropriety that led Noah to curse Ham’s only son, Canaan. Canaan was thus sentenced, with all of his descendants, to a life of slavery as a “servant of servants.” Several of the submissions to the contest not only cited this story but claimed that Ham had also undergone a physical “blackening,” a theory that had first been proposed by early Talmudic and Christian scholars in the third century CE .

The academy also received a number of climate-based explanations for blackness, all of which can be traced to the Greek physician Hippocrates and his belief that there was a causal relationship between extreme environments and the bodies of people living in such lands. Some of the contributors made use of these ideas to render the biblical story of Noah’s children slightly more scientific. This same understanding of the impact of the environment also allowed one thinker to identify the temperate European zone as the source of white people’s cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical preeminence. Anticipating what Montesquieu (a member of the Bordeaux Academy at the time of the contest) would write in his 1748 Spirit of the Laws, this contestant claimed, “It is only in intermediate regions, especially the warmer ones, that we find fertility and agile minds, an agreeable activity in external manners, and a delicate sensibility in pleasures.” These Eurocentric uses of climate theory were accompanied by more properly proto-racist and humoral notions that asserted that the heat, sun, and/or humidity of the torrid zone, bounded on the north by the Tropic of Cancer and on the south by the Tropic of Capricorn, had not only darkened African skin but may have thrown African bodies out of equilibrium, introducing imbalances that produced an excess of black bile, a condition supposedly leading to melancholia.

Climate theory also allowed some of the essayists to propose a far more dynamic understanding of nature and thus of humankind’s many varieties. One essayist not only claimed that an original white prototype group had degenerated in extreme climates; he proposed himself as a living example of climate’s ability to change one human type into another over time:

Although my [skin] color is the same as that of my [European] people, I am nevertheless the great-great-grandson of an Ethiopian who was brought from Africa to Germany by Emperor Charles V during the war in Mauritania, and whose children gradually turned from a black to a white color. Therefore, the truth is confirmed: the color of the Ethiopians is not inherent.1

Similar statements were also made about the potential mutability of white populations during the era: transport a family of Englishmen to the Congo, it was commonly asserted, and over the next two hundred years or so their descendants would degenerate and become black.

In May of 1741 the academicians met to discuss and debate the sixteen manuscripts in the academy’s headquarters. After a lengthy discussion—which was so shambolically recorded by the institution’s secretary that the resulting manuscript is virtually unreadable—they were disappointed to find that their contest had not solved the question of blackness. They themselves did not know what the right answer was, but they knew what the answer was not. Some of the men surely thought that the essays were not scientific enough; others were perhaps put off by naturalistic explanations that made no mention of God.

At some point, the members agreed that the contest was a failure. A short note in the Mercure de France stated that the Bordeaux Academy’s competition on blackness had received mediocre submissions. Following a procedure established in the late 1720s (after several other contests had concluded without a winner), the academicians presumably reallocated the prize money and purchased shares in the name of the academy from the Compagnie perpétuelle des Indes (Perpetual Company of the Indies). This new trade conglomerate, which oversaw all French slave trading in Africa after 1719, had been involved in the deportation of 37,000 Africans to the Caribbean by the time the contest concluded.

The Bordeaux contest, despite its failure and some especially fanciful submissions—one essayist was convinced that African mothers imprinted blackness on their fetuses through the power of the maternal imagination—did attract entries that anticipated the crystallization of race during the coming decades. In retrospect, one can see that material causes, be they linked to the environment or some humoral pathology, were beginning to trump religious explanations in many of the essays. Several submissions hinted that human phenotypes came about through some form of mutation over time.

The one truly influential essay among the submissions was an “empirical” entry written by a physician and botanist named Pierre Barrère. Unlike the other contestants, Barrère had actual experience with Africans. Serving as a plantation surgeon in Cayenne (Guyana), Barrère had not only treated the enslaved men, women, and children who fell ill in the colony, but also conducted autopsies on members of this population when they died. Shortly after the contest concluded, Barrère published his Dissertation on the Physical Cause of the Color of Negroes, virtually the same text as the one he had submitted. In his short introduction, he claimed that he was encouraged to do so by the Bordeaux Academy itself.

Wellcome Collection, London The thumb and two pieces of skin of an African woman; colored mezzotint by Jan L’Admiral, from Bernhard Siegfried Albinus’s Second Dissertation on the Origin and Cause of the Color of the Ethiopians and of Other Men, 1737

To a certain extent, Barrère’s work harked back to an earlier generation of anatomists, especially Marcello Malpighi, the seventeenth-century Italian physician who discovered the rete mucosum, or Malpighian layer, the basal layer of skin where pigmentation resides. But Barrère’s aspirations went far beyond Malpighi’s; he was the member of a new generation of anatomists seeking out deeper (if fictional) physiological structures in African bodies. In the essay, Barrère declared that blackness was far more than the effect of the sun burning the skin; it was, he claimed to have discovered, a jaundice-like excess of dark bile that darkened the blood, a pathology that led not only to a rapid heartbeat but also to the extreme “lecherousness” of the Negro.

Barrère’s ideas echoed for decades. Seven or eight years after the contest concluded, the most important naturalist of the eighteenth century, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, read Barrère’s text while developing his own theory related to the African. Though he admitted that Barrère’s research seemed persuasive, Buffon attempted to downplay the importance of anatomy when discussing human varieties. Instead, he proposed a far more genealogical understanding of humankind—the story of a prototype group of white humans that slowly mutated into the world’s different human varieties as they moved into different climates. “All humans,” Buffon wrote, “are little more than the same man who has been adorned with black in the torrid zone and who has become tanned and shriveled by the glacial cold at the Earth’s pole.”

Buffon’s unease with the temptation of anatomy did not prevent a new generation of physicians from following Barrère’s lead. In 1755 the German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel announced that his dissection of a Negro man had revealed that Africans had bluish brains and darkened pineal glands; ten years later Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, a French anatomist working in Rouen, claimed that his own dissection studies had allowed him to identify an elemental black fluid, which he called oethiops, that coursed from the African’s brain through to the nerves, organs, skin, and even sperm. These and other “breakthroughs,” which were generally received as fact, were quickly disseminated in scientific journals. They even appeared in Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

The anatomical explanations of blackness that emerged in the 1750s and 1760s coincided with a more essentialized, or racialized, classification of Africans. In 1758, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus reduced Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans to specific zoological phenomena based on pigmentation, humoral tendencies, physical traits, temperament, clothing, and political orientation. Linnaeus’s classification of the so-called Homo africanus was withering; among other things, he described Black Africans as flat-nosed and thick-lipped, lazy and phlegmatic. He wrote that African women had elongated labia and profusely lactating breasts. He also claimed that, while European society was based on law, the governing principle of the African people was caprice.

Classifiers and anatomists were not the only thinkers contributing to a far more deterministic understanding of the African (including the “African mind”) in the 1750s; two of the era’s most celebrated Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume and Voltaire, chimed in as well. Both of these sworn enemies of intolerance identified “Negroes” as a distinct and inferior species. Hume’s most notoriously racist screed came in an endnote that he added to the revised 1753 edition of his essay “Of National Characters.” In addition to asserting that human beings come in “four or five different kinds,” Hume—who was recently revealed to have facilitated the purchase of several plantations in the Caribbean—maintained that one could survey the entire African continent and find “no arts, no sciences” among its peoples—a statement that not only denied Black Africans the ability to reason, but reason’s necessary corollary, civilization. To further his point, Hume belittled Francis Williams, the free Black poet from Jamaica who had become well known in London for his Latin-language odes. Though Hume had never met Williams, he described the poet as a “parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”

Three years later, Voltaire added his own eerily similar indictment of Africans’ ability to think and to reason in his 1756 Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations. As he put it:

The race of Negroes is a species of man different from our own, in the same way that the breed of spaniels is different from that of greyhounds…one could say that if their intelligence is not of a different species from our own, it is far inferior. They are not capable of much attention. [Negroes] combine few ideas and do not appear to be made for either the advantages or the disadvantages of our philosophy.

It was in Germany, however, where the idea of a national character or spirit reached its full expression—where reason was ultimately painted white. This process began when Immanuel Kant responded directly to Hume’s musings on national character in his 1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. Ranking human races by their supposed cognitive aptitudes, the German philosopher declared that black-skinned Africans lacked any “feeling that rises above the trifling.” This, he maintained, was directly related to the fact that being “black from head to foot” was not simply a matter of pigmentation, it was clear proof that Africans were, by definition or a priori, “stupid.”

Johann Friederich Blumenbach: Drawing representing the five races, from Treatise on ‘De generis humani varietate nativa,’ 1795

In his subsequent anthropological writing, Kant continued to assert that black skin corresponded to a lower cognitive potential, a lack of reason, and an inferior and unchanging moral character—all of which prevented Africans from reaching the state of civilization.2 These views became the foundation of his seminal 1777 essay, “Of the Different Human Races,” in which Kant provided the first philosophically rigorous definition of race, one that not only asserted the biological permanence of racial categories—“(1) the race of the Whites, (2) the Negro race, (3) the Hunnish (Kalmuck or Mongolian) race, (4) the Hindu or Hindustani race”—but positioned the African race as seemingly less than fully human, a group whose fundamental liabilities were “unchanging and unchangeable.”3

This was no longer the dusk before the dawn of race; it was the first light of scientifically rigorous racism: an era when naturalists and taxonomists divided the world’s peoples into discrete subspecies, when skin color and category became synonymous with racial destiny.

The human classification schemes that came into existence in the 1770s and 1780s lent tremendous authority to scientific falsehoods—especially those related to Black Africans, people of African descent, and black skin. Nowhere is this more evident than in Thomas Jefferson’s discussion of the Black people whom he had come to know in his capacity as plantation and slave owner. Commenting on a litany of anatomical information on Africans—some of which comes directly from the essay that Barrère submitted to the Bordeaux Academy—the future president of the United States wrote in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia:

The first difference [between Blacks and Whites] which strikes us is that of color. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, the color of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?

Like many eighteenth-century thinkers, including the members of the Bordeaux Academy, Jefferson remained unsure just what constituted the physical essence of blackness. Yet he shared the belief that the “fixed nature” of black skin was undoubtedly rich with taxonomical and political significance. The debate had shifted from the cause of blackness to its effect.

As the notion of biological races began coalescing throughout Europe, the Bordeaux Academy of Sciences began thinking about Africans from a supposedly more enlightened point of view. In 1741 the Academy presented the riddle of blackness as a strictly scientific problem—an almost apolitical quandary having nothing to do with the fact that millions of Africans were enslaved in European colonies at the time. Thirty years later, the institution finally acknowledged the reality of slavery. In 1772 it organized a prize-problem focused on the dangers of the deadly Middle Passage: “What are the best ways of preserving Negroes from the diseases that afflict them during the crossing to the New World?”

The motivation behind this appalling contest reflects a forgotten trend during the first years of the abolitionist era: the notion that, through science, slave traders and planters could reform, rationalize, and “improve” existing enslavement practices, moving the colonies toward a form of bondage that was supposedly more benevolent. Emblematic of the academy’s belief in both philanthropy and practicality, this contest was clearly designed to promote a more “humane” crossing for the slaves who were enriching Bordeaux’s economy—while also helping ship captains and their owners decrease mortality and thereby increase profits. Such were the limits of the era’s humanism and universalism: the Enlightenment’s quest to improve the human condition seemed perfectly compatible with the economic imperatives of African chattel slavery.

Though the academy ultimately extended the entry dates for the contest, it received only three submissions. Two had abolitionist leanings that the members probably did not find suitable. The reliability of the third, which had been sent in by a Bordeaux apothecary, was called into question by someone inside or outside the academy. In 1778, the academicians decided to abandon the Middle Passage contest as well.

For the next fifteen-odd years, the academy went back to its business of organizing public events and competitions. In 1793, however, France’s revolutionary government abolished institutions that, like the academy, were bastions of aristocratic privilege and power. Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences was no more.

This was the least of the city’s problems at the time. In the 1790s, uprisings in the richest colony in the world, Saint-Domingue, disrupted the critical economic ties that Bordeaux had maintained with the Caribbean. At the end of 1793 more than half of the remaining colonists from Saint-Domingue returned to France, most of them to the Bordeaux region. Eleven years later, the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti an independent republic. Bordeaux’s “golden century” had come to a close.

The legacy of the Bordeaux Academy’s failed contests remains a footnote—largely forgotten during the eighteenth century, even less remembered today. The only prominent traces of the first international contest on blackness, in fact, are found in the most famous book of the eighteenth century, Voltaire’s Candide, published in 1759. Candide, who is traveling with an enormous red sheep that he had acquired in the utopian country of El Dorado, arrives in Bordeaux on his way to Paris. Candide realizes that he can no longer take care of his exotic pet and donates the animal to the Bordeaux Academy of Sciences. The academy, according to Voltaire’s story, saw the sheep’s unusual color as an excuse for yet another competition and quickly “proposed a prize competition for that year on the subject of why the wool of this sheep was red.” The winning scholar, as the story goes, “demonstrated by A plus B, minus C, divided by Z, that the sheep had to be red and would die of the mange.”

That the history of our species came in stages was an idea that came in stages. Aristotle saw the formation of political entities as a tripartite process: first we had families; next we had the villages into which they banded; and finally, in the coalescence of those villages, we got a governed society, the polis. Natural law theorists later offered fable-like notions of how politics arose from the state of nature, culminating in Thomas Hobbes’s mid-seventeenth-century account of how the sovereign rescued prepolitical man from a ceaseless war of all against all.

But it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a hundred years later, who popularized the idea that we could peer at our prehistory and discern developmental stages marked by shifts in technology and social arrangements. In his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality (1755), humans went from being solitary brutes to companionable, egalitarian hunter-gatherers; but with the rise of metallurgy and agriculture, things had taken a dire turn: people were civilized, and humanity was ruined. Once you found yourself cultivating a piece of land, ownership emerged: the field you toiled over was yours. Private property led to capital accumulation, disparities of wealth, violence, subjugation, slavery. In short order, political societies “multiplied and spread over the face of the earth,” Rousseau wrote, “till hardly a corner of the world was left in which a man could escape the yoke.”

Even people who rejected his politics were captivated by his origin story. In the nineteenth century, greater empirical rigor was brought to the conjectural history that Rousseau had unfolded. A Danish archaeologist partitioned prehistory into the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; a British one split the Stone Age into the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. For the emerging discipline of anthropology, the crucial stages were set out in Ancient Society (1877) by the American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Human beings, he concluded, had emerged from a hunter-gatherer phase of “savagery” to a sedentary “barbarian” era of agriculture, marked by the domestication of cereal grains and livestock. Technologies of agriculture advanced, writing arose, governed towns and cities coalesced, and civilization established itself. Morgan’s model of social evolution, presaged by Rousseau, became the common understanding of how political society came about.

Then came another important stage in the story of stages. In the 1930s, the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe synthesized the anthropological and archaeological findings of his predecessors: after a Paleolithic era of hunting and gathering in small bands, a Neolithic revolution saw the rise of agriculture (again, mainly harvesting cereals and herding ruminants), a soaring population, sedentism, and finally what he called the “urban revolution,” distinguished by large, dense settlements, administrative complexity, public works, hierarchy, systems of writing, and states. This basic story of social evolution has been refined and revised by later scholarship. (One recent point of emphasis is that grain, being storable and hard to hide, lent itself to taxation.) But it’s mainly taken to be—as we like to say these days—directionally correct. There was a stepwise connection, we think, between sowing cereals in our primeval past and waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, assails the proposition that there’s some cereals-to-states arrow of history. A mode of production, they insist, doesn’t come with a predetermined politics. Societies of hunter-gatherers could be miserably hierarchical; some indigenous American groups, fattened on foraging and fishing, had vainglorious aristocrats, patronage relationships, and slavery. Agriculturalist communities could be marvelously democratic. Societies could have big public works without farming. And cities—this is a critical point for Graeber and Wengrow—could function perfectly well without bosses and administrators.

They eloquently caution against assuming that what actually happened had to happen: in particular, that once human beings came up with agriculture, their descendants were bound to be subjects of the state. We’ve been persuaded that large-scale communities require some people to give orders and others to follow them. But that’s only because states, smothering the globe like an airborne toxic event, have promoted themselves as a natural and inevitable development. (Graeber, who died last year at fifty-nine, was, among other things, an anarchist theorist, advocate, and activist.)

Both Hobbes and Rousseau, The Dawn of Everything argues, have led us badly astray. Now, if you don’t like states, you’ll naturally be rankled by the neo-Hobbesian claim, made in books like Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), that we’re ennobled—less prone to violence and generally nicer—when we submit to centralized authority, with its endless rules and bureaucratic strictures. Yet the neo-Rousseauians aren’t a big improvement, in Graeber and Wengrow’s account, for they represent the sin of despair. It’s all very well for the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (Graeber’s Ph.D. adviser at the University of Chicago) to have talked about the superiority—moral and hedonic—of the hunting-foraging lifestyle to our own, or for Jared Diamond to have said, for similar reasons, that the agricultural revolution was a terrible mistake. The fact remains that our planet can’t sustain 7.7 billion people with hunting and foraging: there’s no going back when it comes to the rise of agriculture. If growing grain leads to governments—if it entails our submission to state power—there’s nothing much to be done; we are left to watch YouTube videos of happy !Kung people in the Kalahari and sigh over our mug of fair trade coffee.

Graeber and Wengrow reject such paralytic pessimism. They believe that social evolutionism is a con, aimed at making us think that we had no choice but to forfeit our freedom for food and that the states we find everywhere are the inexorable result of developments ten or twelve thousand years ago. The Hobbesian spin leads to pigheaded triumphalism; the Rousseauian spin leads to plaintive defeatism. In their view we should give up both and reject the inevitability of states. Maybe history doesn’t supply any edifying counterexamples—lasting, large-scale, self-governing, nondominating communities sustained by mutual aid and social equality. But, Graeber and Wengrow argue, our prehistory does. To imagine a future where we are truly free, they suggest, we need to grasp the reality of our Neolithic past—to see what nearly was ours.

The Dawn of Everything, chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read. Graeber, who did his fieldwork in Madagascar, was well known for his caustic wit and energetic prose, and Wengrow, too, has established himself not only as an accomplished archaeologist working in the Middle East but as a gifted and lively writer. A volume of macrohistory—even of anti-macrohistory—needs to land its points with some regularity, and Graeber and Wengrow aren’t averse to repeating themselves. But for the most part they convey a sense of stakes and even suspense. This is prose it’s easy to surrender to.

But should we surrender to its arguments? One question is how persuasive we find the book’s intellectual history, which mainly unspools from the early Enlightenment to the macrohistorians of today and tells of how consequential truths about alternate social arrangements got hidden from view. Another is how persuasive we find the book’s prehistory, in particular its parade of large-scale Neolithic communities that, Graeber and Wengrow suspect, were self-governing and nondominating. On both time scales, The Dawn of Everything is gleefully provocative.

Among its most arresting claims is that European intellectuals had no concept of social inequality before the seventeenth century because the concept was, effectively, a New World import. Indigenous voices, particularly from the Eastern Woodlands of North America, helped enlighten the Enlightenment thinkers. Graeber and Wengrow focus on a dialogue that the Baron de Lahontan, who had served with the French army in North America, published in 1703, ostensibly reproducing conversations he had during his New World sojourn with a Wendat (Huron) interlocutor he named “Adario,” based on a splendid Wendat statesman known as Kandiaronk. Graeber and Wengrow say that Kandiaronk, in his opposition to dogma, domination, and inequality, embodied what they call “the indigenous critique.” And it was immensely powerful: “For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored.”

Mainstream historians, such as Richard White, seem inclined to think that Adario’s voice is partly Kandiaronk’s and partly Lahontan’s. Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, maintain that (allowing for embellishment) Adario and Kandiaronk were one and the same. It’s of no consequence, they say, that Adario’s claims that his people had no concept of property, no inequality, and no laws were (as they acknowledge) simply not true of the Wendat. Nor is any weight given to the fact that Adario shares Lahontan’s anticlerical Deism, expresses specific critiques of Christian theology associated with Pierre Bayle and other early philosophes, and offers a strikingly detailed critique of the abuses of the French judiciary. If the dialogue presents no conceptually novel arguments, that’s to be expected; after all, Graeber and Wengrow say, “there are only so many logical arguments one can make, and intelligent people in similar circumstances will come up with similar rhetorical approaches.” Maybe so. Still, our understanding of the indigenous critique would have been strengthened had they tried to determine what, for its time, was and was not distinctive in this dialogue.

But then they would have had to discard the thesis that Europeans, before the Enlightenment, lacked the concept of social inequality. This claim is plainly wide of the mark. Look south, and you find that Francisco de Vitoria (circa 1486–1546), like others of the School of Salamanca, had much to say about social inequality; and he, in turn, could cite eminences like Gregory the Great, who in the sixth century insisted that all men were by nature equal, and that “to wish to be feared by an equal is to lord it over others, contrary to the natural order.” Look north, and you find the German radical Thomas Müntzer in 1525 spurring on the Great Peasants’ Revolt:

Help us in any way you can, with men and with cannon, so that we can carry out the commands of God himself in Ezekiel 14, where he says: “I will rescue you from those who lord it over you in a tyrannous way…”

A vehement opposition to domination and to social inequality was certainly part of the Radical Reformation. Consider the theory and practice, in the same period, of such Anabaptist groups as the Hutterites, among whom private property was replaced by the “community of goods” and positions of authority subject to election.

Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow even hurry past the famous Montaigne essay from 1580 that takes up an episode in which explorers brought three Tupinamba from South America to the French court. The Tupinamba marveled that people at court should defer to the diminutive King Charles IX rather than to someone they selected out of their own ranks. They further marveled, Montaigne writes, that “there were amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities” while others “were begging at their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty.” The Tupinamba wondered that these unfortunates “were to suffer so great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set fire to their houses.” It’s as if Graeber and Wengrow feared that this indigenous critique would detract from the shock to the system they associate with Kandiaronk.

What about their positioning of Rousseau? Following Émile Durkheim and others, they insist that his how-things-turned-bad story was never meant literally; it was merely a thought experiment. It’s true that the Discourse has a sentence to that effect: “One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin.” But more plausible interpretations—notably the one offered by the intellectual historian A.O. Lovejoy—take that disclaimer to be a publishing precaution, or what Lovejoy calls “the usual lightning-rod against ecclesiastical thunderbolts.” The account is simply too detailed (metallurgy, Rousseau hypothesizes, arose from observing volcanic lava) to think he wasn’t serious about it.

Then Graeber and Wengrow repeat the familiar line that Rousseau thought everything was great until the state arose, while Hobbes thought everything was rotten. That’s why they say that Rousseau’s version of human history, just as much as Hobbes’s, has “dire political implications”—if granaries inevitably mean governments, “the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces.”

Yet those implications don’t follow. In fact, Graeber and Wengrow have read past the fact that Rousseau and Hobbes were, on a critical point, in agreement: in the period that directly preceded the rise of the state, things were awful. Where Hobbes talked about a bellum omnium contra omnes, Rousseau invoked a “black inclination to harm one another.” You could say that Rousseau starts his story earlier than Hobbes (Lovejoy attentively counted four stages that come before political society in the Discourse, though you could draw the lines slightly differently); but the two wind up in the same place. The problem Rousseau identified is that the wealthy sold us on a rigged social compact that secured their interests at the expense of our freedom. And the solution wasn’t to return to the happy days of foraging and hunting; it was to craft a better social compact.

Graeber and Wengrow’s most significant claim, in the realm of intellectual history, is that “our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization” was “invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique”—that those grain-to-government stages represented a “conservative backlash” against the voices of freedom. They were designed to persuade us that we can’t do without obedience to centralized authority and should bloody well do as we’re told. Let’s put aside the perplexing inference that Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, in this account, at once promulgated the indigenous critique and smothered it. When we look at prominent social evolutionists, do we find apologists for centralized authority?

Rather the opposite. “Centralization is the tendency and the result of the institutions of arbitrary and despotic governments,” Lewis Henry Morgan maintained in his 1852 lecture “Diffusion Against Centralization,” denouncing a political order in which “property is the end and aim.” In Ancient Society, he aimed to revitalize, not neutralize, a politics of emancipation. “Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society,” he wrote.

Morgan’s tripartite scheme was revisited in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Peaceable and productive savages, in Veblen’s telling, gave way to more predatory and less productive barbarians; the rise of property rights and state power is essentially an outgrowth of patriarchy. But Veblen was hostile to determinism of the sort he found in Marx. What he favored was not surrender to the status quo but a nonstatist version of socialism, which some scholars have labeled anarchism. V. Gordon Childe, for his part, was a socialist with syndicalist tendencies who had hopes for radically different political arrangements.

In the mid-twentieth century, when social evolutionism fell from favor among anthropologists, its most vigorous advocate in the discipline was Leslie A. White. And White—who trained Sahlins, who trained Graeber—was a socialist leery of statism. Perhaps the most notable recent rendering of the cereals-to-states story appears, with novel elaborations, in Against the Grain by James C. Scott, who’s also the author of Two Cheers for Anarchism. If this metanarrative was purpose-built to reconcile us to an impoverished status quo, it’s curious that its greatest exponents advocated political transformation.

Graeber and Wengrow could be all wrong in their intellectual history, of course, and completely right about our Neolithic past. Yet their mode of argument leans heavily on a few rhetorical strategies. One is the bifurcation fallacy, in which we are presented with a false choice of two mutually exclusive alternatives. (Either Adario is Kandiaronk or Kandiaronk has no presence in Lahontan’s dialogue.) Another is what’s sometimes called the “fallacy fallacy”: because a bad argument is made for a conclusion, the conclusion must be false; or because a bad argument has been made against a conclusion, the conclusion must be true. And the absence of evidence routinely serves as evidence of absence. Through a curious rhetorical alchemy, the argument that a claim isn’t impossible gets transmuted into an argument that the claim is true.

Graeber and Wengrow tend to introduce a conjecture with the requisite qualifications, which then fall away, like scaffolding once a building has been erected. Discussing the Mesopotamian settlement of Uruk, they caution that anything said about its governance is speculation—we can only say that it didn’t have monarchy. The absence of a royal court is consistent with all sorts of political arrangements, including rule by a bevy of high-powered families, by a managerial or military or priestly elite, by ward bosses and shifting council heads, and so on. Yet a hundred pages later, the bifurcation fallacy takes effect—there’s either a royal boss or no bosses—and we’re assured that Uruk enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.” A naked “what if?” conjecture has wandered off and returned in the three-piece suit of an established fact.

A similar latitude is indulged when we visit the Trypillia Megasites (4100–3300 BC) in the forest-steppe of Ukraine. The largest of these settlement areas, Taljanky, is spread over 1.3 square miles, archaeologists have discovered more than a thousand houses there, and Graeber and Wengrow tell us that the per-site population was, in some cases, probably well over 10,000 residents. “Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralized administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.”

Proof? An archaeologist they draw on extensively for their account, John Chapman, indicates that the headcount Graeber and Wengrow invoke is based on a discredited “maximalist model.” Those thousand houses, he suspects, weren’t occupied at the same time. Drawing from at least nine lines of independent evidence, he concludes that these settlements weren’t anything like cities. In fact, he thinks a place like Taljanky may have been less a town than a festival site—less Birmingham than Burning Man.

A reader who does the armchair archaeology of digging through the endnotes will repeatedly encounter this sort of discordance between what the book says and what its sources say. Was Mohenjo Daro—a settlement, dating to around 2600 BC, on one side of the Indus River in Pakistan’s Sindh province—free of hierarchy and administration? “Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley,” Graeber and Wengrow write, and they cite research by the archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. But Kenoyer has concluded that Mohenjo Daro was likely governed as a city-state; he notes, for instance, that seals with a unicorn motif are found throughout Indus settlements and infers that they may have been used by officials “who were responsible to reinforce the economic, political and ideological aspects of the Indus ruling elite.” Why should we hesitate to dignify (or denigrate) such a place with the name “state”?

Then there’s Mashkan-shapir in Iraq, which flourished four thousand years ago. “Intensive archaeological survey,” we’re told, “revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth” and “no obvious center of commercial or political power.” Here they’re summarizing an article by the archaeologists who excavated the site—an article that actually refers to disparities of household wealth and a “walled-off enclosure in the west, which we believe was an administrative center,” and, the archaeologists think, may have had an administrative function similar to that of palaces elsewhere. The article says that Mashkan-shapir’s commercial and administrative centers were separate; when Graeber and Wengrow present this as the claim that it may have lacked any commercial or political center, it’s as if a hairbrush has been tugged through tangled evidence to make it align with their thesis.

They spend much time on Çatalhöyük, an ancient Anatolian city, or proto-city, that was first settled around nine thousand years ago. They claim that the archaeological record yields no evidence that the place had any central authority but ample evidence that the role of women was recognized and honored. The fact that more figurines have been found representing women than men signals, they venture, “a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.” What they don’t say is that the vast majority of the figurines are of animals, including sheep, cattle, and pigs; it’s possible to be less sanguine, then, about whether female figurines establish female empowerment. You may still find yourself persuaded that a preponderance of nude women among depictions of gendered human bodies is, as Graeber and Wengrow think, evidence for a gynocentric society. Just be prepared to be flexible: when they discuss the Bronze Age culture of Minoan Crete, the fact that only males are depicted in the nude will be taken as evidence for a gynocentric society. Then there’s the fact that 95 percent of Çatalhöyük hasn’t even been excavated; any sweeping claim about its social structure is bound to be a hostage to the fortunes of the dig.

And so it goes, as we hopscotch our way around the planet. If, a generation ago, an art historian proposed that Teotihuacan was a “utopian experiment in urban life,” we will not hear much about the murals mulled over and arguments advanced by all the archaeologists who have since drawn rather different conclusions. The vista we’re offered is exhilarating, but as evidence it gains clarity through filtration. Two half-truths, alas, do not make a truth, and neither do a thousand.

Peter Marshall/Alamy Live News David Graeber, London, 2016

Of man’s first obedience: The Dawn of History has much of interest to say about the nature of the state. But if you take it to be a stress test of mainstream prehistory, you’ll discover that its aims and its deliverances are not quite in alignment. Indeed, when the dust, or the darts, have settled, we find that Graeber and Wengrow have no major quarrel with the “standard historical meta-narrative,” at least in its more cautious iterations. “There are, certainly, tendencies in history,” they concede, and the more reputable versions of the standard account concern not inexorable rules but, precisely, tendencies: one development creates conditions that are propitious for another. After agriculture came denser settlements, cities, governments. “Over the long term,” they grant, “ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it’s hard to envisage modern life without them.” They don’t dispute that forager societies—with fascinating exceptions—tend to have less capital accumulation and inequality than sedentary farming ones. They emphatically agree with many evolutionists of the past couple of centuries that “something did go terribly wrong in human history.”

At the same time, a wholly plausible insight flows through The Dawn of Everything. Human beings are riven with both royalist and regicidal impulses; we’re prone to erect hierarchies and prone to topple them. We can be deeply cruel and deeply caring. “The basic principles of anarchism—self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid—referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity,” Graeber wrote about the nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004). “The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination.”

The Dawn of Everything can be read as an effort to build out the “as long as humanity” thesis. We should readily accept that human beings routinely resist being dominated, even if they routinely seek to dominate; that self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid are vital forces in our social history. It’s just that Graeber and Wengrow aren’t content to make those points: they want to establish the existence of large, dense, city-like settlements free of rulers or rules; and, when the fumes of conjecture drift away, we are left without a single unambiguous example.

Whatever its empirical shortcomings, the book must be counted an imaginative success. Marx’s Capital came with an edifice of prehistorical and historical conjecture; the core tenets of Marxism do not stand or fall with it. The Dawn of Everything, too, has an argument to make that is independent of all the potsherds and all the field notes. In an era when social critique largely proceeds in the name of equality, it argues, in the mode of buoyant social prophesy, that our primary concern should, instead, be freedom, which it encapsulates as the freedom “to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties.”

It must be said that Graeber, in books like The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018), was exactly such a social prophet: satiric, antic, enthralling. It is impossible not to mourn the loss of that voice. His vision is of particular significance because it doesn’t fit easily within the usual political positions of our era. What readers of The Dawn of Everything should not overlook is that the sort of inequality we mainly fret about today is of concern to its authors only inasmuch as it clashes with freedom. At its core is a fascinating proposal about human values, about the nature of a good and just existence. And so we can profitably approach this book with Rousseau’s disclaimer in mind: “One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin.”

Yes, plenty of arguments can be made against Graeber and Wengrow’s anarchist vision; some double as arguments against libertarian ones. (Note, for instance, the paradoxical nature of the “freedom to disobey”: we cannot be commanded—and therefore we cannot disobey commands—without institutions that authorize command.) But these are, precisely, arguments; they could be wrong, in part or whole. They should be weighed, assessed, tested, and perhaps modified in the face of counterarguments. And the worst argument to make against anarchism—against a polity without politics—is that we haven’t quite seen it up and running yet. “If anarchist theory and practice cannot keep pace with—let alone go beyond—historic changes that have altered the entire social, cultural, and moral landscape,” the eminent anarchist Murray Bookchin wrote three decades ago, “the entire movement will indeed become what Theodor Adorno called it—a ‘ghost.’” We live in an era of the World Wide Web, same-sex marriage, artificial intelligence, a climate crisis. We don’t need to peer into our prehistoric past to decide what to think about these things.

“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’” an epicurean reverend asks a political economist in Thomas Love Peacock’s novel Crotchet Castle (1831). This habit, so entrenched in that era, has persisted through ours. The Dawn of Everything sometimes put me in mind of Riane Eisler’s international best seller from 1987, The Chalice and the Blade. Eisler, trawling through the Neolithic, saw a once-prevalent woman-friendly “partnership” model of “gylany” being supplanted, in stages, by the “dominator” model of “androcracy.” Like Graeber and Wengrow, she had a deep antipathy toward domination; like them, she cherished a vision of freedom and mutual care; like them, she thought she glimpsed it in Minoan Crete.

But the moral argument here doesn’t depend on whether we believe that gylany was once widespread: an ancient pedigree doesn’t make patriarchy right. Social prophets, including those in the anarchist tradition—from Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman to Paul Goodman and David Graeber—make the vital contribution of stretching our social and political imagination. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see.

That’s what Rousseau came to think. By the time he published The Social Contract (1762), he had given up the notion that political argument needed to be buttressed by some primordial utopia. “Far from thinking that neither virtue nor happiness is available to us,” he argued, “let’s work to draw from evil the very remedy that would cure it”—let’s reorganize society, that is, through a better social compact. Never mind the dawn, he was urging: we will not find our future in our past.

Christopher Hitchens outside the New Statesman's former office. Photo by John Dempsie/ANL/Shutterstock

If a week is a long time in politics then ten years is an eternity. This feels especially true of the decade that has just passed. Looking back to 2011 it is possible to detect the beginnings of the tumultuous political events that would follow. The financial crash of 2008 – and the rapacious model of capitalism that produced the crisis – unleashed the discontent that paved the way for Brexit and other populist revolts. Liberal interventionist overreach in Iraq had laid the foundations for American retreat – and consequently for Russian interventions in Ukraine and Syria.

The world that the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens left behind a decade ago this week is, on the surface, strikingly different from our own. Yet it is also recognisably the same. To slip into tautology, the positions that Hitchens and others staked out in the years following the 9/11 attacks produced the world we live in today. The era of US hegemony and free markets was undone by its own ideological hubris – a hubris that has become posthumously associated with the bombast of polemicists such as Christopher Hitchens.

If Hitchens’s death from oesophageal cancer on 15 December 2011 represented in some small way the passing of that era, it also corresponded with a transformation of intellectual life facilitated by technology. The 2010s were the decade in which social media finally took over. And as James Marriott writes for the Times: “Hitchens stood between two worlds: the old world in which serious political and cultural debate was conducted at length and in print, and our new world in which it is conducted glibly and furiously on screens.”

Unusually for a deceased journalist Hitchens is still discussed and written about, especially by his enemies. Speculation abounds as to what Hitchens would have made of Donald Trump and “woke” identity politics. Much of this is pointless because Hitchens did write about these things while alive: Trump was a “ludicrous figure” and identity politics resembled “the narcissism of the small difference“.

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While Hitchens’ critics like to pejoratively dub his crusades against luminaries such as Henry Kissinger, Princess Diana and the Clintons as “contrarianism”, in reality all were products of Hitchens’ fealty to his hero George Orwell. Orwell was adamant that a writer should tell the truth – regardless of whether it might “give ammunition to the enemy“. As Orwell put it, Soviet atrocities were still atrocities even if the Daily Telegraph said so. And as Hitchens ventriloquised it, Saddam Hussein was still a monster even if George W Bush believed so (in another context Hitchens once described Bush as “unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent and amazingly inarticulate”).

This is why I was never persuaded by the argument that Hitchens underwent a metamorphosis from left to right – or “from a butterfly back into a slug”: as George Galloway disobligingly phrased it when the two men debated in New York in 2005. If anything, Galloway’s own political trajectory over recent decades – from former Labour MP to windy apologist for dictators – validates Hitchens’ concerns about a contemporary left that “cannot discern the essential night-and-day difference” between fascism and liberal democracy. Michael Moore’s anti-Bush film Fahrenheit 9/11 depicted Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a happy paradise. This “anti-war” narrative – ubiquitous during the George W Bush presidency – was “not even seriously wrong, but frivolously wrong”, as Hitchens rightly pointed out.

Of course, the official “left” long ago disavowed Hitchens over his support for the invasion of Iraq. I too opposed that war (if it matters); and yet I still find immense value in Hitchens’ writings. You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons, as Arthur Koestler once put it. And I believe that Hitchens was sometimes wrong for the right reasons. The Americans wanted to overthrow Saddam, and Hitchens believed that revolution from above was better than no revolution at all.

And yet I am far from unique among writers when I say that I have “grown out” of Hitchens somewhat in the years since his passing. The qualities in Hitchens’ work that I (mostly) recoil from nowadays are the prevailing sense of certainty. This was a feature of his boorish rants about Islam as well as his portentous dismissal of the welfare state as “little more than Christian charity”. And the less said about columns featuring triumphalist bromides such as “Ha ha ha to the pacifists”, the better.

Today I find such belligerence off-putting, perhaps because there is so much of it about. Online at least, we are practically downing in bellicosity. I would wager that it is this stridency that makes YouTube “Hitchslap” videos so appealing to teenage atheists. Certainty tickles the juvenile urge. But at some point you grow out of that; or at least you ought to.

And yet I do miss Hitchens, not least because the technologies that took off just as he was departing the scene have furnished us with only pale imitations. Today’s “free thinkers” are slaves to the algorithm. Whereas Hitchens – even when he was wrong – derived his positions from first principles such as internationalism and universalism, today’s contrarians seem to adopt subversive positions purely for the sake of clicks. Audience capture is the order of the day. Which perhaps explains why “contrarianism” tends to be increasingly synonymous with the promotion of quack Covid cures and the anti-vaxx agenda.

Hitchens was the enemy of self-satisfied politicians, received wisdom and hypocrisy. And yet contemporary online life is anathema to the combination of indignation and intellect that made him so compelling. We have an abundance of indignation. Yet in a world where the boundaries of acceptable opinion are assiduously policed by competing internet tribes, to go dramatically “off-brand” à la Hitchens is career suicide.

In the social media age, ideological conformity – being relentlessly “on-brand” – is the difference between prominence and obscurity. In the years since Christopher Hitchens left us, the romance of genuine marginality – to think for yourself and live with the consequences – has lost its allure.

I didn’t grow up listening to musical theater cast albums. But one of the family LPs often in rotation was something related: the magnificent soundtrack recording from the 1959 film of “Porgy and Bess.” The movie itself doesn’t really hold up, in part because Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge are so obviously dubbed when they sing. But that’s irrelevant when listening to the recording, where Robert McFerrin (yes, Bobby’s dad) and Adele Addison sounded like deities, and André Previn’s scoring was superb.

When the opera was restored to its original length in 1976 by the Houston Grand Opera, my mother took me to see it when it came through Philadelphia. Eleven though I was, this production shattered me utterly and remains one of the most cathartic theater experiences of my life. For years, however, I retained a sense of “Porgy and Bess” as something majestic but apart.

As in, an unusual experiment, greeted somewhat coolly by critics after it premiered in 1935. They didn’t quite know what to make of a piece written in operatic language but laced with several hummable show tunes and some other things that seemed out of place — perhaps too Black — in the genre typified by “Rigoletto.” As The Times’s Samuel G. Freedman reported at the time of its 50th anniversary, when “Porgy and Bess” debuted:

The New York Times dispatched both Brooks Atkinson, its drama critic, and Olin Downes, its music critic, to review “Porgy and Bess.” Atkinson hailed the opera and praised Gershwin’s music for adding a passion that the stage version of “Porgy” — adapted by Dorothy Heyward from DuBose’s novel — had not possessed. But Downes complained that Gershwin did not “utilize all the resources of the operatic composer, or pierce very often to the depths of the simple and pathetic drama.” Virgil Thomson, the composer and critic, went further, calling “Porgy and Bess” “falsely conceived and rather clumsily executed … crooked folklore and halfway opera.”

Over time, some Black observers also have looked askance at the opera as stereotyping, with its characters living in poverty and its story involving drug abuse and murder, or as inauthentic.

Unknown to me in 1976 was that in some cases, producers have had a hard time recruiting top-level Black creatives for “Porgy and Bess” since “many African Americans have found” the opera “to be a kind of Uncle Tomism, a rip-off of black culture” as Itabari Njeri of The Los Angeles Times explained in a 1990 review of the book “The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess: The Story of an American Classic.”

The legal landscape of the past weeks and months has prompted questions of which people and entities are legitimate interpreters and enforcers of the law and what happens when you take the law into your own hands. Mississippi and other states took the recent changes in personnel on the Supreme Court as an invitation to defy the Court’s constitutional rulings on abortion, and those states now seem likely to prevail.

During oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, last Wednesday, the three liberal Justices often seemed to be delivering dirges, as though they had accepted a loss and were speaking for posterity. Mississippi’s ban on abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, which boldly flouts the Court’s precedents setting the line at around twenty-four weeks, is likely to be upheld by the conservative Justices. The arguments offered scant reason for hope that Roe v. Wade will be reaffirmed; the newest conservative Justices, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, signalled no qualms about overruling Roe as wrongly decided, which would make a majority of at least five. At a time when the Court’s legitimacy appears extremely fragile, it is telling that the majority’s response to having the supremacy of the Court’s decisions defied seems to be acquiescence and approval.

The open challenge to the Court’s authority perhaps broadly reflects a spirit of legal self-help that is running through the land. For instance, we normally think that the role of law enforcement belongs to the states, not to random neighbors, but two recent homicide cases appeared to put vigilantism on trial. On November 19th, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges for shooting three people, two fatally, during racial-justice protests in August, 2020. Rittenhouse, who was then seventeen, had travelled to Kenosha from his home in Illinois and armed himself with a semi-automatic weapon, purportedly to keep the peace and to prevent property destruction. The jury concluded that he shot his victims in self-defense, because he reasonably feared his own death or serious bodily harm.

On November 24th, a jury in Georgia rejected a self-defense claim, returning murder convictions for three white men who, in February, 2020, chased down and shot Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was out jogging. The defendants claimed that they had pursued Arbery because they suspected him of committing burglaries in the area, and that the fatal shots were fired in response to his allegedly reaching for a shotgun that one of them was pointing at him. They tried to justify the pursuit by invoking a Georgia citizen’s-arrest law that authorized anyone who had “reasonable and probable grounds of suspicion” to arrest an escaping suspected felon. The law has since been repealed, but similar laws have long existed in nearly every state.

Any vigilante revivalism today goes hand in hand with private citizens’ increased ability to carry guns in public. The Supreme Court is currently considering the most important gun-rights case since it held, more than a decade ago, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to keep handguns in the home for self-defense. On November 3rd, it heard arguments challenging a New York law that allows a license for the concealed carry of handguns outside the home, but only upon a demonstration of “proper cause.” The perverse, self-fulfilling truth is that, as gun ownership has proliferated, an individual’s claim to need a gun for protection has become more plausible. But the idea that ordinary people need to carry guns flows directly from the tradition that champions the use of force by private citizens to uphold the law, instead of—or even against—the state. Looking to the history of carrying arms in early America, the conservative Justices appear likely to extend the right to bear arms to toting guns on the street.

The spirit of vigilantism is also notable in a case that the Court is considering concerning a Texas law that bans abortions after roughly the sixth week of pregnancy. S.B. 8 specifically does not allow state officials to enforce the law, authorizing only private citizens to do so, by suing an abortion provider for damages of ten thousand dollars for each procedure performed—what several Justices referred to, during oral arguments on November 1st, as a “bounty.” The law was designed to circumvent its being challenged in federal court. The arguments were about whether a state may indeed insulate unconstitutional laws from federal-court review simply by delegating their enforcement to the general public. An amicus brief filed by civil-rights organizations linked S.B. 8 to “the violent history of citizen’s arrests and racist vigilantism in the South.”

For the most part, even the conservative Justices seemed offended by Texas’s gambit, not least because Texas had to admit that liberal states could use the same enforcement scheme to insulate unconstitutional restrictions on gun rights from challenge. The Court will likely push back and allow abortion providers to pursue a constitutional challenge to S.B. 8 in federal court. But the ground on which such a challenge could ultimately have been expected to succeed will have radically shifted. Unconstitutional when it went into effect, S.B. 8’s six-week ban may well be constitutional in several months’ time, even if its enforcement mechanism is not, if the Court issues a decision in Dobbs that overturns Roe. Yet, notwithstanding what publicly transpired during the Dobbs oral arguments, a compromise might still be hammered out behind the scenes, in which Chief Justice John Roberts enables a basic right to abortion to remain, while allowing Mississippi and other states to ban abortion as early as fifteen weeks, and leaving it for another day to decide how much before that is too early.

During last week’s arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor lamented, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?” The stench, so to speak, is a by-product of the unresolved ambivalence within the legal system about who has the authority to decide what the law should be. The conservative Justices seemed eager to “return” the question of abortion to the people. But the point of a fundamental constitutional right is that it shouldn’t be at the people’s mercy, particularly when the composition of the Court itself has been shifted through political means for this purpose. The spectacle of states brazenly flying in the face of the Court’s constitutional precedents, shortly followed by the Court’s discarding those precedents to make illegal actions legal after all, would effectively communicate that the Supreme Court is not, in fact, supreme. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated where Kyle Rittenhouse acquired his weapon.

The 1994 movie PCU, about a rebellious fraternity resisting its politically correct university, was a milestone. Not because the movie was especially good—it wasn't. It was a milestone because it showed that political correctness had officially become a joke.
The derisive term "P.C." had referred to a genuine and powerful force on campus for the previous decade. But by the mid-1990s, it had become the butt of jokes from across the political spectrum. The production of a mainstream movie mocking political correctness showed that its cultural moment had passed.
At the same time, punitive campus speech codes were being struck down. Among the most prominent cases was Stanford Law School, which boasted a notorious speech code banning "speech or other expression…intended to insult or stigmatize" an individual on the basis of membership in a protected class arguably including every living human. You don't have to be a lawyer to see how a ban on anything that "insults" would be abused: Even showing PCU itself, which makes fun of campus activists, feminists, and vegetarians, could potentially get you in trouble under such a broad and vague rule. The 1995 court defeat of the Stanford speech code marked the end of the First Great Age of Political Correctness.
Some assumed this meant political correctness was a fad that was gone forever. On the contrary, it gathered strength over the next two decades, rooting itself in university hiring practices and speech policing, until it became what people now refer to as "wokeness" or the much-abused term "cancel culture."
Political correctness didn't decline and fall. It went underground and then rose again. If anything, it's stronger than ever today. Yet some influential figures on the left still downplay the problem, going so far as to pretend that the increase in even tenured professors being fired for off-limits speech is a sign of a healthy campus. And this unwillingness to recognize a serious problem in academia has helped embolden culture warriors on the right, who have launched their own attacks on free speech and viewpoint diversity in the American education system.
We've fully entered the Second Great Age of Political Correctness. If we are to find a way out, we must understand how we got here and admit the true depths of the problem.
The Ignored Years
In the decades that followed the First Great Age of Political Correctness, you could be forgiven for assuming that campus attacks on free speech were a thing of the past.
Professors and administrators dismissed concerns, claiming there was no shortage of viewpoint diversity (and that those who suggested otherwise had sinister, probably racist motivations). Speech codes had been roundly defeated wherever they were legally challenged. The P.C. movement had been reduced to a punchline. Indeed, it was such a common punching bag that some pundits rejected the whole idea as a kind of right-wing hoax. Problem solved, right?
Hardly. In reality, the major change after the mid-'90s was that professors were less openly enamored of speech codes. The campus speech wars entered their Ignored Years, during which far less attention was paid to campus speech even as the underlying problem grew worse. It was during this period that the seeds were sown for a deeper change just one generation later.
After the Stanford policy was defeated in court in 1995, speech codes should have faded away into legal oblivion. Instead, their number dramatically increased. By 2009, 74 percent of colleges had extremely restrictive codes, 21 percent had vague speech codes that could be abused to restrict speech, and only eight of the top 346 colleges surveyed had no restrictive code. Unlike in the '90s, many of these policies were championed by a burgeoning administrative class rather than by faculty.
Meanwhile, viewpoint diversity among professors plummeted. In 1996, the ratio of self-identified liberal faculty to self-identified conservative faculty was 2-to-1; by 2011, the ratio was 5-to-1, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
More recent statistics paint a starker picture. A 2019 study by the National Association of Scholars on the political registration of professors at the two highest-ranked public and private universities in each state found that registered Democrat faculty outnumbered registered Republican faculty about 9-to-1. In the Northeast, the ratio was about 15-to-1.
In the most evenly split discipline, economics, Democrats outnumber Republicans "only" 3-to-1. The second most even discipline, mathematics, has a ratio of about 6-to-1. Compare this to English and sociology, where the ratios are about 27-to-1. In anthropology, it's a staggering 42-to-1.
In the Ignored Years, higher education became far more expensive and considerably more bureaucratized. From 1994–95 to 2018–19, the inflation-adjusted cost of public college tuition nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the administrative class expanded, from roughly one administrator for every two faculty members in 1990 to nearly equal numbers of faculty and administrators in 2012.
What's more, preliminary research showed a "12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators," wrote Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College in The New York Times in 2018. His conclusion: "It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate—and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators." Following the Times article, Abrams was targeted twice by students in an unsuccessful campaign to get him fired for speaking out.
The '00s also brought the popularization of "bias-related incident programs," commonly known as "bias response teams" or "BRTs." These programs exist to root out "bias" (once called "prejudice") on campus by empowering anyone within the community to file complaints with the administration, often anonymously. They are attempts to enforce campus orthodoxy in ways that might be (just barely) constitutional. By 2016, nearly 40 percent of surveyed colleges had BRTs.
Early versions of BRTs involved policing inside jokes and pop culture references. Eventually, reported speech included everything from a "snow penis" at the University of Michigan to a humor magazine at the University of California San Diego that had satirized the idea of safe spaces to an incident at John Carroll University in Ohio, where an "anonymous student reported that [the] African-American Alliance's student protest was making white students feel uncomfortable."
It was also in the '00s that ideas such as "trigger warnings" and "microaggressions" burrowed their way into everyday campus parlance. Meanwhile, the number of speaker disinvitations, in which speaking requests were rescinded because of protests or other objections, slowly crept up.
Education schools, in particular, became even more activist, which had an outsized impact on where we are today. The early 2000s began with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE)—the accreditor of over 600 graduate education programs—"recommending" that education students be required to demonstrate a commitment to social justice. The extremely influential Teachers College at Columbia University adopted the requirement, as did others. In 2005, in the face of protest from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where I am president and CEO, NCATE removed the recommendation. But many schools, including Columbia's Teachers College, did not.
Education school graduates who had been steeped in social justice activism went on to dominate not only K-12 teaching but also the swelling ranks of campus administrators. A random sample taken by Sarah Lawrence's Abrams indicates that 54 percent of college administrators have degrees from education schools.
Two education school graduates helped develop and popularize "orientation" programs, implemented in various forms around the country, that could be described as efforts at thought reform. At the University of Delaware in the late '00s, for example, students were subjected to interrogations by student leaders about all manner of personal topics—their views on gay marriage, their own sexual orientations, when they discovered their sexuality, whether they would consider dating members of other races and ethnicities, and more. The program then sought to provide students with "treatments," such as mandatory one-on-one sessions with their resident advisers, meant to inculcate them with "correct" moral beliefs.
Requiring "diversity statements" as a condition of faculty hires and promotions is yet another way colleges enforce ideological conformity on campus. These statements effectively require faculty to affirm and provide examples of their commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion—which, of course, are rarely defined. Like NCATE's recommended social justice requirement, they function as political litmus tests—demonstrations of one's commitment to prevailing orthodoxies.
The University of California, Berkeley, uses a rubric to score prospective faculty on adherence to specific ideological positions. Candidates are scored negatively, for instance, for attesting to the position that one should "ignore the varying backgrounds of their students and 'treat everyone the same.'"
During the Ignored Years, then, university administrators created infrastructure to keep P.C. alive—moving from speech codes to BRTs as speech codes were shot down in court; encouraging the hiring of even more politically homogeneous professors and administrators; and reframing speech policing as a crucial part of protecting students' mental health.
An Explosion in Censorship
If a single piece of writing marks the end of the Ignored Years, it's Jenny Jarvie's "Trigger Happy," a March 2014 New Republic article critical of campus trigger warnings—the practice of alerting students anytime a potentially sensitive topic is about to come up in class conversation if the teacher thinks it may "trigger" a trauma response in students or just upset them in some way. Jarvie's piece presaged a marked increase in coverage of such issues beyond conservative media. Other milestones included Jonathan Chait's New York magazine article "Not A Very P.C. Thing to Say" and Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed, both published in 2015. Suddenly, people were paying attention to speech on campus again.
But it wasn't just an increase in coverage. Something else had changed on campus. During the previous two decades, administrators were usually the leaders of campus censorship campaigns. Students, in turn, resisted those efforts. In late 2013, however, there was an explosion in censorship that was student-led. The infrastructure built during the Ignored Years was producing downstream effects.
The generation hitting campuses in 2013 had been educated by the graduates of those activist education schools. In some cases they were literally the children of the students who had pushed for (or at least were OK with) speech codes in the '80s and '90s.
This generation also grew up with social media; it had a genuine awareness of how hurtful and nasty speech can be, especially when anonymous and online. But it had not been taught that freedom to engage in nasty speech is necessary to the functioning of our democracy and to the production of knowledge.
In 2015 alone, there were multiple high-profile free-speech blowups on campus. Perhaps most famous was the confrontation between sociologist Nicholas Christakis and students at Yale that began over school guidance about inappropriate Halloween costumes.
In 2017, there was outright violence at Berkeley and Middlebury College, with activist students using force in response to speech they opposed. (At Middlebury, a professor named Allison Stanger was permanently injured in a melee during an appearance by the author Charles Murray.) Then came 2020, with hundreds of high-profile examples of attempts to get professors and students canceled, all across the country.
One might assume that the increased media attention and the numerous high-profile incidents of campus speech crackdowns—including violent confrontations caught on video—would have definitively demonstrated that the campus free speech situation has become dismal. Yet not only were there debates about whether campus speech was really in crisis but new arguments appeared insisting that campus censorship and academic freedom simply weren't problems at all.
Stranger Than Fiction
Netflix's The Chair is a smart, well-written, well-acted show. The series examines the many challenges facing an English professor and her department at an elite liberal arts college with dwindling admissions. One of the series' main throughlines occurs when a tenured professor is pushed out of his job after giving a satirical Nazi salute during a lecture on modernism. Students call him a Nazi and demand his resignation.
It's not quite as overtly comic, but it could be seen as this era's PCU, in that it signals that it's OK to mock and resist the illiberalism we've seen emerge on campuses over the last five or six years. And it might be taken as a sign that people are finally willing to address the repressive atmosphere at many colleges.
But not all viewers saw it that way. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that "a real-world tenured professor like Bill would be extremely unlikely to lose his job for making fun of Nazis in the wrong way." She also posited that concern about the climate on campus is really about people over 40 feeling ashamed of being "repelled by the sensibilities of the young."
In fact, polling finds that Generation Z (the cohort of young people born in 1996 or after) has the most negative outlook on cancel culture of any generation. And Goldberg's assertion that The Chair used an implausible example of a threat to free speech on campus is undermined by the fact that something very similar actually happened earlier this year.
In January, University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Robert Schuyler was pushed into retirement after he reacted to being silenced in a departmental meeting by giving a mock Nazi salute. Critics characterized this one-second gesture as "heinous acts" and called on the university to punish Schuyler in order to demonstrate its opposition to "all forms of prejudice." The student newspaper dutifully reported that Schuyler told it "he does not endorse Nazism," as if his sarcastic reply to the rigid enforcement of faculty meeting rules could legitimately be interpreted as an expression of support for the National Socalist philosophy.
For those who defend free speech on campus, a case involving a Nazi salute would be among the less sympathetic cases in a given year. (The fact that Schuyler's gesture was sarcastic barely registers in an age when the alleged effect of speech is deemed more important than the intent.) But it doesn't take an accusation of Nazism to get you in trouble these days. Professors have been targeted for quoting James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.; for asking students to analyze the consequences of the historical shift in trading and travel patterns known as "Columbian exchange"; and for speculating on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, University of Illinois Chicago law professor Jason Kilborn was placed on leave and subjected to months of investigation after students complained about a self-censored reference to two epithets—literally, "N_____" and "B____"—in a law school exam hypothetical about workplace discrimination.
If anything, The Chair made the students demanding the professor's resignation look more reasonable than they often do in real life. The series features a confrontation with students evocative of Christakis' confrontation in 2015, an encounter I witnessed. There, students surrounded Christakis, screamed at him, broke down in tears, called him disgusting, and told him he shouldn't sleep at night. The cause? Nicholas' wife, Erika, had argued in an email that students should be able to decide which Halloween costumes to wear—an argument in favor of student autonomy that was surely less offensive than a Nazi salute.
Since 2015, there have been at least 200 attempts to get speakers disinvited from campuses; 101 of those were successful. But even when the events go on, student protesters sometimes physically block the entrance to speeches deemed problematic or chant, bang drums, or pull the fire alarm so the speeches can't be heard. A few speakers have actually been assaulted, including unknown chemicals sprayed at conservative podcaster Michael Knowles at University of Missouri–Kansas City. Riots at Berkeley in 2017 over a Milo Yiannopoulos speech included smashed windows, bloodied spectators, and fire bombs.
The 'Chilling Effect'
Goldberg's article was premised in part on the claim, advanced by Liberal Currents editor Adam Gurri, that only a small number of professors have been targeted for cancellation. "If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale," Gurri wrote, "we would consider it effectively solved."
Gurri's count of targeted professors comes from data collected by FIRE. In context, it does not show a problem effectively solved.
From 2015 through mid-October 2021, FIRE identified 471 attempts to get professors fired or punished for their constitutionally protected speech, with almost three-quarters of them resulting in some type of sanction. In 106 of those cases, the sanction included the loss of a job. The frequency of these attempts has risen dramatically, from 30 in 2015 to 122 in 2020. And the list includes 172 tenured professors who were punished, 27 of whom were fired.
Tenure was designed to be a nearly invincible protection from termination for one's speech, beliefs, teaching, or research. Until very recently, even a single fired tenured professor for anything related to his or her speech or scholarship was a huge deal. Twenty-seven tenured professors fired in a handful of years for their expression is unprecedented. It undermines the whole function of tenure, which is to protect academic freedom by assuring professors they won't find themselves unemployed for exercising it. Contrary to Gurri's framing, this number is not small.
His argument resembles another misleading argument made by those who say campus speech culture is not a problem. It typically starts by noting that there are 6,000 colleges in the country and then shrugs off the hundreds of attempts to push out professors as a small number. This makes the problem look diffuse. In reality, it's quite concentrated.
Of the top 100 schools according to U.S. News & World Report, 65 have had a professor targeted since 2015. Meanwhile, the top 10 schools had an average of seven incidents each.
In fact, if you start with the top 100 universities and then eliminate the schools that appeared in FIRE's Scholars Under Fire database, schools with severely restrictive "red light" speech codes, schools where FIRE intervened on behalf of a student or faculty member, schools with a successful disinvitation campaign, and schools with a Bias Response Team, you are left with only two institutions: the California Institute of Technology and the Colorado School of Mines. If you eliminate schools with vague "yellow light" speech codes as well, there would be no colleges in the top 100 left.
But the problem is disproportionate in some places. Take the "most influential university in the world," Harvard, which educates a notably large share of America's ruling class. Keep in mind that the Harvard faculty, as at most elite colleges, is politically homogeneous: Just 2.5 percent of its faculty of arts and sciences identifies as "conservative" and 0.4 percent as "very conservative." Despite that overwhelming ideological unity, there have been 12 public attacks on professors just since 2015.
In 2017, Harvard rescinded the admission of 10 would-be students over offensive memes in a Facebook group. In 2013, the school surreptitiously scanned resident deans' email accounts in the wake of a cheating scandal—not to find the cheaters but to sniff out who had leaked an email about the scandal, a gross violation of faculty privacy.
By downplaying the scale of such problems, Gurri and others are wishing away the "chilling effect," the well-recognized fact in both law and psychology that when people have to guess as to which opinion, joke, or idea will get them in trouble, they tend to self-censor. Indeed, professors have been telling us they are chilled for years. As far back as 2010, when the Association of American Colleges & Universities asked professors to respond to the statement, "It is safe to have unpopular views on campus," only 16.7 percent strongly agreed.
According to a 2021 report from Eric Kaufmann at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, 70 percent of conservative academics in America say that there is a hostile climate toward their beliefs, and 62 percent of conservative graduate students agree that "my political views wouldn't fit, which could make my life difficult." Meanwhile, 1 in 5 faculty members openly admit to having discriminated against a grant proposal because it was perceived as conservative or "right-leaning," and slightly more than 1 in 10 faculty members say they have discriminated against conservatives on both paper submissions and promotions.
Perhaps the saddest story of a targeted tenured professor is that of University of North Carolina Wilmington criminology professor Mike Adams, whose struggles at the school spanned nearly 20 years. After Adams was denied tenure because of his conservative writing, he filed a successful lawsuit, which not only won him tenure but also resulted in an important 4th Circuit appeals court decision protecting academic freedom in five states. Nonetheless, last summer, Adams was pushed into early retirement after he tweeted a sarcastic comparison of COVID-19 restrictions to slavery. In the weeks that followed, he killed himself.
Race to the Gutter
Of the 471 incidents mentioned above, most have come from the left of the targeted scholar. But 164 of them have come from the scholar's right. In fact, many of the efforts by conservatives to turn the tide on campus have mutated into approaches that look uncomfortably like the very speech codes they battled for decades.
In one case, researchers trying to determine whether liberals were becoming more comfortable with political violence were targeted by conservative author Todd Starnes, who insisted that a survey to discover student attitudes was equivalent to endorsing violence. In another case, the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party demanded that the University of Virginia investigate professor Larry Sabato for tweets that were critical of former President Donald Trump.
Across the country, conservatives trying to reduce the influence of campus-style identity politics have passed laws banning what they dub "critical race theory" (CRT), a catchall term for a constellation of ideas that encompass a certain perspective on race and its intersections with society. For most of its history, critical race theory was a niche area of study within the academy. But since the George Floyd protests of 2020, it has gone mainstream with the political left and become a villain to the political right.
The laws that Republican lawmakers have written in their effort to counter CRT are almost always unconstitutional as applied to higher education. What's more, they're likely to backfire. Giving campus administrators permission to get rid of professors who teach or subscribe to a particular ideology will almost always be used to get rid of dissenters. And conservatives who honestly express their opinions are, by definition, dissenters on most campuses today.
What's remarkable about this debate, as The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has pointed out, is that the right and the left have swapped places. Two of CRT's leading thinkers, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, were two of the strongest proponents of hate speech laws and campus speech codes in the '80s and '90s. And both have contributed to books with titles such as Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. By relying on the idea that ideas are dangerous, the anti-CRT laws now being promoted by activists on the right are direct descendents of the speech policies long favored by Matsuda and Delgado.
Pennsylvania H.B. 1532 bans requiring "a student to read, view or listen to a book, article, video presentation, digital presentation or other learning material that espouses, advocates or promotes a racist or sexist concept" in public K-12 schooling and higher education and bans hosting or providing a venue for a speaker that "espouses, advocates or promotes any racist or sexist concept." Laws in Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma ban courses that teach that "any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex"; bills in eight more states would impose the same language; and a federal bill referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform proposes restraining Washington, D.C., schools in the same way.
As with Matsuda and Delgado's work, the underlying notion is that some discomforting speech—especially speech that causes discomfort about race or gender—is harmful and should be prohibited.
Defenders of anti-CRT laws usually concede that the legislation's language is overbroad and poorly crafted. Almost invariably, they then insist the laws' vagueness should be ignored because of the scale of the problem and because those crafting the laws are on the side of the angels. I have seen this exact same argument made for decades to defend speech codes aimed at addressing racism and sexism on campus: In the face of such a terrible problem, the specifics of the law don't matter; only the intentions do.
As anti-CRT laws have proliferated, many on the left suddenly became aware of how broad and vague speech codes can be used to punish ideologies, and educators, they are fond of. Meanwhile, many on the right suddenly began to embrace the same sorts of codes they had fought for decades, hoping such codes could be the weapon they've long needed in order to turn the ideological tide on campus.
True believers from across the political spectrum seem to believe that some weapons are good if they're wielded by the right people and bad if wielded by the wrong people. That's a problem that needs to be solved, lest campus culture become a tit-for-tat race to the proverbial gutter.
How To Save Higher Ed
Amid the Second Great Age of Political Correctness, American higher education has become too expensive, too illiberal, and too conformist. It has descended into a period of profound crisis wrought by shifts in hiring, student development, and politically charged speech codes developed during the Ignored Years, when too few were paying attention. American campuses should be bastions of free expression and academic freedom. Instead, both are in decline.
We cannot afford to just give up on higher ed. College and university presidents can and should do the following five things:

Immediately dump all speech codes.
Adopt a statement specifically identifying free speech as essential to the core purpose of a university and committing the university to free speech values.
Defend the free speech rights of their students and faculty loudly, clearly, and early.
Teach free speech, the philosophy of free inquiry, and academic freedom from Day One.
Collect data and open their campuses to research on the climate for debate, discussion, and dissent.

Those who donate to colleges should refuse to do so without demanding these changes.
But we need to do more than reform our existing institutions. We need alternative models to traditional higher education.
In early November 2021, an upstart called the University of Austin announced the intention to create a new academic institution on the principles of radically open inquiry, civil discourse, and engagement with diverse perspectives. Publicly available information is sparse, but according to Pano Kanelos, the incoming president of the University of Austin and a former president of St. John's College, it plans to launch masters programs in 2022 and 2023 and an undergraduate program in 2024.
Meanwhile, Khan Academy is an online program where anyone can watch free, high-quality instructional videos on a variety of topics and receive an assessment of their abilities in return. Minerva University is an ambitious hybrid model offering brick-and-mortar facilities in San Francisco and several foreign cities and online instruction to students around the world. It focuses on teaching "critical wisdom" to top-tier students and claims to be more exclusive than the most elite colleges. It's not too hard to imagine a future in which employers value a mastery level from the Khan Academy or a degree from Minerva more than a degree from a middling traditional university.
The bottom line is that the opinions of professors and students should be ferociously protected, and that those who run universities must reject the idea that colleges and universities exist to impose orthodoxies on anyone. Over the past decade, too many academic institutions have grown used to promoting specific views of the world to incoming students.
Radical open-mindedness would be wildly out of place at most contemporary universities. Getting there will take substantial cultural and political change.
That starts with self-awareness. One lesson of the First Great Age of Political Correctness and the P.C. wars of the 1980s and '90s is that it was a huge mistake to think that because a movie like PCU skewered campus culture, the problem had already fixed itself. As a result, the problem was allowed to grow worse.
We can't make that mistake again. The ideal time for achieving real change in higher ed was 30 or even 40 years ago. The next best time is now.
The post The Second Great Age of Political Correctness appeared first on Reason.com.

(Photo by Scott McIntyre/Washington Post/Getty Images.)One of the most important questions in American politics and culture is this: Is white Evangelical politics primarily a product of consistent theological conviction or primarily a product of culture, tradition, and history? I single out white Evangelicals because they are both the most important constituency in Republican politics and increasingly outliers in their political views. If they’re outliers because of consistent theological conviction, then so be it. Their (increasingly) lonely stands become a collective version of Martin Luther’s famous declaration, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” But what if the reality is otherwise? What if white Evangelicals are disproportionately flocking to outlier political positions because of a combination of factors that have little to do with theology at all? Instead, what if they’re shaped by far more mundane (though still quite powerful) cultural forces that ultimately have little to do with faith and then misinterpreting the cultural as theological?Then both the nation and the church have a problem. The church’s problem is quite obvious—it misrepresents the nature and meaning of the Christian faith to the American people (and the world). It misrepresents the nature and meaning of the Christian faith to itself. The nation’s problem is obvious as well. It’s forced to deal with a community that treats ideas and policies that are both highly debatable and culturally contingent as if they’re matters of fierce religious conviction. It’s one thing to discuss an issue with someone who understands their position is debatable. It’s another thing entirely to engage with a person or community who equates compromise with apostasy. This isn’t a new debate. I’m an old-school religious conservative. I came of age politically during the era of the Moral Majority. I’ve been hearing sociological and historical critiques of Christian conservatism since college.I’ve always recognized the flaws in the movement, and my response to the question of whether theology and doctrine were of primary importance to the movement was always the same—for all its flaws, Republican Christian conservatism is mainly driven by deeply rooted, theologically coherent faith convictions and not by the perhaps more deeply rooted “folkways” or customs of a disproportionately white, disproportionately rural, and disproportionately Southern American subculture. I no longer believe this to be true. I now see that when theology and culture collide—or when theology and partisanship collide—a disturbing number of white Evangelicals will choose culture. But they’ll still believe they’re choosing faith, and that profound misunderstanding is contributing to a dynamic that is tearing this nation apart. Why have I changed my mind? The answer is quite simple—the theological convictions of Christian conservatism were put to a profound stress test, and the convictions failed. Partisanship prevailed. Populism prevailed. In some ways, the South prevailed. Let me put it another way. I’m old enough to remember the words and expressed beliefs of even some of the most enthusiastic Trumpist Evangelicals before they supported Trump, and this much I know: If I’d told them in December 2014 that white Evangelicals would shortly vote in overwhelming numbers for a thrice-married man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, appeared in a Playboy movie, paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star, and was facing multiple corroborated claims of sexual harassment and sexual assault, they’d say that only Democrats were that hypocritical. Then, if I followed that up by saying that a disproportionate number of that same Evangelical community would shun pre-vaccine mask-wearing and social distancing in the midst of a deadly pandemic that would claim hundreds of thousands of American lives and then disproportionately reject life-saving vaccines, they’d think I was an anti-Christian bigot.If I capped off my prophecy by noting that white Evangelicals would be far more likely than virtually any other American community to embrace wild election conspiracy theories and then a subset of that community would literally storm the Capitol with prayers on their lips, then their assessment of me would be clinched. They’d think I’d simply lost my mind. But that’s where we are. And don’t think for a minute that those views are the only Evangelical outliers. Here are some others.On matters of race, for example, the disparities are just staggering. Last year, the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture documented an extraordinary gulf. There’s a 50-point gap between white Evangelicals and black Americans on the question of whether “racism—unequal treatment of whites and blacks—is a very serious threat.” There’s a 30-point gap between white Evangelicals and white non-Evangelicals. There are similarly giant gaps on questions of police brutality and perceptions of American history. And if you think those gaps are mainly driven by theology, non-white Evangelicals are much closer to secular Americans in their perceptions of race problems in the United States. In addition, non-white Evangelicals are, “twice as likely as White Evangelicals to say that inequality and poverty are a very or extremely serious threat to the country.”This is not the result you’d expect from a community whose politics is centered around biblical justice. It is the result you’d expect from a community disproportionately shaped by the history, culture, and traditions of the white American South. The white Evangelical political distinctions extend well beyond relationships between black and white. On immigration, white Evangelicals are again extreme outliers. They’re far more likely to support family separation when parents enter the country illegally. They’re far more likely to support decreasing even legal immigration by 50 percent. They’re more likely to have supported Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. Again, these positions depart substantially from those of non-white Evangelicals. Moreover, if you think that all this is just noise, and that the true measure of white Evangelical voters is their virtuous commitment to ending abortion (a commitment I share), then think again. There’s powerful statistical evidence that white Evangelicals aren’t really that committed to the legal pro-life cause. Majorities don’t want to ban abortion. Majorities don’t prioritize abortion. Indeed, there’s strong evidence that “white evangelical Republican support for Donald Trump is based more on immigration policy than his view of abortion.”Consider this (partial) white Evangelical outlier list—Trump, masks, vaccines, the 2020 election, police brutality, family separation, Muslim bans—how many of these outlier Evangelical positions flow directly from an unambiguously biblical theology? Do any of them? “Deconstruction” is a hot topic in elite Evangelicalism. It’s a word with many meanings. At its best it can represent an honest, critical re-examination of not just your personal faith, but also the theology and behavior of your faith community. We should be in a constant process of interrogating our own beliefs and actions in light of the person and example of Jesus Christ. White Evangelical politics are due for deconstruction. But a critical part of that deconstruction can and should note that white Evangelicals are not operating in a political vacuum. In reality, America is dealing with the toxic effects of two powerful outlier communities, and both feed on each other’s dysfunction to justify their own radicalization. At the same time that white Evangelicals have radicalized in ways that would shock the conscience of the 2014 version of even an enthusiastic Christian Trumpist, millions of white progressives have gone through their own version of a quasi-religious political revival. The phenomenon has been amply documented. White Democrats are now far more secular than nonwhite Democrats. They’re to the left even of black Democrats on racial issues. The core of “progressive activists” on the far left of the political divide is not only overwhelmingly white (almost as white as the heavily religious “devoted conservatives” who anchor the American right), they’re far more likely to be ashamed to be American, to “never” pray, and to view individual outcomes as matters of “luck and circumstance.” The result is a relentless cycle of competing extremes. A school in a secular progressive community tries to teach young children about the evils of “whiteness.” Outraged at this “wokeness,” legislators representing conservative religious communities attempt to ban books. Both radical acts reinforce the perceived necessity of a radical response. And when it comes to the radical response, a segment of white Evangelicals are defaulting not to theology, but rather to culture and tradition—the “folkways” I mentioned above. “You’re ashamed to be an American? Our patriotism merges with our faith!”“You’re in favor of gun control and want to ban AR-15s? Behold our gun-toting Christmas cards!” “Cancel culture? Two can play at that game!”“You’re taking aim at masculinity? Our movement is manly and muscular!”The goal is opposition. The method is reaction. And because it’s all taking place in a deeply religious community, the blurring of culture, tradition, and faith is nearly complete. The result is a political culture that I do not recognize but now see that I should have foreseen. Yet all is not lost. As this summer’s battles at the Southern Baptist Convention illustrate, there are many Evangelicals who are deeply distressed at the cruelty, extremism, and extraordinary political focus of the deeply reactionary neo-fundamentalist movement in American Christianity. These distressed Evangelicals aren’t “woke.” They’re not even “moderate” by any conventional description. They are, however, profoundly worried about the politicization of the church and cannot consent to any form of Christian nationalism. They’re pro-life because love and justice demand that communities protect their most vulnerable members. They’re also deeply concerned with racism in part because they know the church itself played its own dreadful role in protecting and indulging America’s original sin. They welcome refugees, and they respect religious liberty. Many of them are political conservatives looking for ways to oppose extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, they often don’t see the new right as “conservative” at all. But those voices aren’t heard enough. They’re shouted down by the radicalized extremes and sometimes quite literally threatened into silence. Any internal critique is seen as giving aid and comfort to the hated foe. And millions of Americans are thus deceived. They’re taught their politics are the logical and thoughtful expression of profound faith, rather than an often-destructive artifact of a history and culture that was not always just and sometimes rejects the truth of the very scriptures they seek to protect. One more thing …In the latest Good Faith podcast, Curtis and I do a deep dive into the struggle to define a truly “Christian” politics, including the difference between correlation and causation in faith and politics. I continue to be so encouraged by your responses, including your incredibly thoughtful emails and arguments in response. And good news! After a few technical hiccups, we’re on Spotify. If you haven’t tried the podcast yet, please give it a shot. One last thing …I asked for Christmas music suggestions, and you delivered. Thank you. So this week I’m embedding a reader suggestion, a lesser-known hymn that’s simply marvelous. Enjoy:

Yglesias on monetary policy By: Scott Sumner

Matt Yglesias has a new post that explains his views on monetary policy. Overall, Yglesias’s views are to the left of mine. For instance, he favors the aggressive use of fiscal policy, whereas I am skeptical. But on monetary policy our views align in quite a few areas. Readers of my two blogs are familiar with arguments similar to the following:

1. No “wait and see”:

Now there are lags here, but they are lags in the sense that financial investments (the price of copper going up) happen faster than physical investments (because copper is more expensive now, the copper mines increase production). But the proximate mechanism is essentially instantaneous. If your goal in an inflationary environment is to reduce expectations of future nominal growth, then you can tell more or less immediately whether or not that happened by looking at financial markets. And critically, while doing things can and does influence expectations, so does talking about doing things.

2. Beyond hawks and doves:

Another implication of my view is that when you have clearly overshot, it’s time to pivot hard. This is why after over a decade of being one of the most dovish figures in the macroeconomic debate, I’m now very much on the hawkish side. Economy-wide nominal spending and nominal income have fully recovered to their pre-pandemic trends. Whatever economic problems we have today are not problems of inadequate demand

3. Do “whatever it takes”:

What we need is for Powell and company to say clearly, and repeatedly, that they are proud and excited that nominal income has fully recovered but that since it has fully recovered, they want it to grow more slowly in the future than it did this year. . . . What will they do to accomplish that? Well, they will accelerate tapering. They will do an interest rate hike or two. If necessary, they will do three or however many are needed to hit their target. They could do 17! They won’t, of course, but they could. And the point is that if people believe they will do whatever it takes, then it won’t actually take much doing — the markets do it themselves.

I strongly encourage people to read Yglesias’s entire substack post.

PS. Of course expectations must be about something. Keynesians would argue that they are about the future path of short-term interest rates (relative to the time-varying natural interest rate if you are a sophisticated Keynesian.) I say they are about future expected changes in the supply and demand for base money.

Right-wingers oppose social programs like Medicare for All on the grounds that they create "powerful new bureaucracies." But it’s means-tested benefits, not universal programs, that empower bureaucrats to act like petty tyrants.

President Bill Clinton signs the controversial welfare reform bill into law in the White House's Rose Garden in 1996. (Dirck Halstead / Getty Images)
 
In my recent debate with Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk, I asked him how he can call himself a populist when he doesn’t even support pro-worker policies like Medicare for All. He responded that while a social safety net is fine, when that net becomes an overly generous “hammock,” it empowers government bureaucrats rather than ordinary people.

As I explained in the debate, that’s completely wrong. Bureaucrats are empowered not by broad and generous social programs but by means testing. It’s democratic socialists, not capitalism’s defenders, that want to give bureaucrats less sway.

Socialism and Bureaucracy
The idea that more socialism means more bureaucracy seems obvious to many people. But why?
It’s true that democratic socialists want to strengthen the regulatory state with environmental protections and laws against union-busting and racial discrimination. It’s also true that these types of policies involve empowering officials who work in offices and spend a lot of time filing paperwork — i.e., bureaucrats — to enforce them. Popular culture often portrays such people as petty tyrants that make life difficult for struggling businesspeople. Think about the officious health inspector on Bob’s Burgers (played by Sam Seder) or the villainous Environmental Protection Agency official in the original Ghostbusters.
But less than 10 percent of the US population is business owners. To be sure, that’s a category that includes far more small businesspeople than genuine members of the economic elite, but the idea that regulations empower bureaucrats at the expense of the great mass of ordinary people doesn’t make much sense in terms of pure arithmetic. A person in the United States is vastly more likely to be a worker protected by labor regulations than a boss dealing with annoying regulators.
The connection might make more sense if we shift our focus from regulatory policies enacted under capitalism to socialism as a postcapitalist economic system. Under capitalism, economic enterprises are owned by individuals or stockholders. Anyone who’s ever had to deal with a human resources department knows that corporations can be as bureaucratic as anything the public sector produces, but it’s true that the socialism that existed in countries like the USSR was different. The economy was run by a state bureaucracy that wasn’t answerable to any other part of society.
This isn’t the only possible form of a postcapitalist economy, though. For example, firms producing consumer goods could be collectively owned and democratically operated by the workers themselves. (This is the “full democratic socialism” advocated in the book I’m cowriting with Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Beggs.)
Even if we’re talking about the Soviet system, the power of bureaucrats didn’t come from the fact that Soviet citizens enjoyed social services more expansive than Americans. Similarly, if we’re talking about “partial democratic socialism” — policies like Medicare for All advocated by socialists as reforms within capitalism — nothing about these measures would strengthen the power of bureaucrats. Exactly the opposite is true.

Means Testing and Bureaucracy
Consider K–12 public schools in the United States. In the current setup, these are free at the point of service, but we could imagine a means-tested version of the public school system. Only families below a certain threshold would be able to send their kids to school for free. Everyone above the cutoff would pay tuition.
Which do you think would involve more aggravating interactions with bureaucrats: enrolling your kids in the local public high school in that world or in this one? In both scenarios, you’d have to fill out some information either at an office or on a website that would eventually reach someone with an office job. But the key difference is that in our world, the people in those offices don’t exercise much influence over the outcome. If you live in the district, they have a legal obligation to educate your kid, free of charge. In the world with means-tested K–12 education, you’d have to prove to these gatekeepers that you qualified. They’d scrutinize your income sources while you sweated.
Happily, we don’t live in that world (at least for precollege public education). But we very much do live in that world when it comes to health care. Are you a low-income person applying for Medicaid? Public-sector bureaucrats will take a hard look at whether you’re poor enough to qualify. Are you a middle-income person with employer health insurance? If you have to use it in an emergency, private-sector bureaucrats applying byzantine rules will decide if the company will pick up some or all of the tab. Given your own perusal of those policies, do you think they should have picked up more? Get ready for many fun hours pleading with them over the phone.
Tell someone in a country with universal health insurance about these experiences and they’ll look at you with a mixture of horror, amusement, and pity. More than one American who’s moved to such a country has noted the liberating experience of realizing they never have to talk about the health care they’re receiving with anyone who isn’t a doctor or a nurse.
Taking sectors of the economy like health care and higher education entirely out of the market, with no ifs, ands, or means testing, is a very good idea for many reasons. People stay in terrible jobs and even abusive marriages for fear of losing their health insurance. Gay children of fundamentalist parents have good reason to worry that their parents might stop writing tuition checks if they come out of the closet. A disturbing number of people die every year because they didn’t go to the doctor to check on something that could be nothing because they didn’t want to deal with the co-pay. Along with these more dramatic considerations, an excellent reason to support socialist policies in these areas is that doing so disempowers bureaucrats.
When right-wingers try to scare people with vague talk of bureaucracy, they’re appealing to an understandable human urge to avoid having to jump through hoops and justify ourselves to petty gatekeepers. But their argument doesn’t make any sense. If you don’t want to give government officials control over your life, you shouldn’t want them to have the power to decide whether you qualify for basic goods like education and health care and housing. You should want to live in a society where receiving such benefits is regarded as a right that everyone has by virtue of being a human being.
In other words, if you’re worried about overzealous bureaucrats, you should be a socialist.

In 1981, as a young scientist, I applied for my dream job as a geologist with the British Antarctic Survey. As a child, I had adored snow and ice. Winter was my favorite season (and still is). My most cherished book was Wilson A. Bentley’s atlas of snowflake photographs, and I avidly read the accounts by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton of their Antarctic expeditions. As a teenager, I enjoyed hiking and camping. I studied earth science in college, and when I graduated with top honors from a premier university in Britain, it did not seem like a stretch to apply for a job as a geologist in a cold and snowy place.

The Survey promptly rejected me via a curt and slightly defensive letter. I could not be considered for that position—or, indeed, for any scientific position—because I was a woman.

The letter explained the rationale: Survey geologists had to sleep in tents. It did not explain why this was disqualifying for a woman. Perhaps they believed that a “lady geologist” (a common phrase at the time) could not use a tent. Or perhaps the Survey could not imagine hiring enough women to share a shelter. So despite my qualifications—and despite the fact that I had slept in tents many times—my application would not be reviewed.

Fast-forward to the present, and it may seem that things have not improved much. Women still struggle to be fully recognized in science. The top tiers of institutions are still populated primarily by men, typically white men. Harassment and hostility remain common. In a 2020 Nature survey of postdoctoral researchers, four out of 10 reported gender discrimination; 90 percent of those people were female. It is not just women who face big hurdles. It is young scientists broadly. And right now, on top of institutional challenges, scientists increasingly have to contend with public and government hostility—at times even harassment—when they work on socially contested subjects such as environmental science, the effectiveness of gun control and public health.

But inclusivity has gotten better in one scientific area, and because 2021 has been so brutal, I decided to try to close out this year by highlighting that field: polar science, the very discipline that once kept me out. Outright exclusion is gone, and scores of women are making major contributions.

Caroline Gleich, a ski mountaineer and climate activist leading an Antarctic expedition this month, has compiled a brief list of women active in cryospheric science today. She came up with more than two dozen. They include Alison Banwell, who studies ice-shelf stability, crucial for anticipating climate-induced sea-level rise; Indrani Das, who works with ice-penetrating radar to understand ice sheets; Cécile Agosta, who is using stable isotopes to understand climate variability in Antarctica; and many more. Several of these women are making extensive efforts to support others: Oregon State University’s Erin Pettit, for example, uses field experience to build confidence among underprivileged women considering science careers. And of course, there are women who paved the way, such as Ellen Mosley-Thompson, who in the 1980s pioneered the use of ice cores in climate reconstruction.

It is striking that many in the current generation of women polar scientists are working on the stability of ice shelves and sheets. This is one of the most important areas of research at the moment because it speaks directly to the impacts of climate change. If the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica start to disintegrate rapidly, they could add many additional meters of sea-level rise globally. Rapid ice-sheet disintegration is a frightening scenario. Once it starts, it will probably be impossible to stop, and people will have very little time to adapt. Women are not working at the margins of climate science; they are working to answer one of its central and most consequential questions.

None of this is to assume that all is well in Antarctic science. I’m sure that women doing research in that region—like women in all areas—continue to face many challenges. But it is to say that 40 years after the British Antarctic Survey refused to consider my application, women are now in the mainstream of polar science. So far as I know, nobody worries about them sleeping in tents.

In the ultimate exhibition of campus intersectionality, student communists at Princeton University connected their protest of an author they view as "transphobic" to their fight to end capitalism.
"LGBT oppression has a central role in maintaining the capitalism means of production," Princeton's Revolutionary Student Action group wrote in a letter plastered around campus ahead of a speech by Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. "The liberation of the working class IS liberation from gender oppression!"
The student flier argues that combating Shrier's book, billed as a deep dive into what she calls a "trans epidemic" in young girls, was part of their "fight for a socialist future."

Revolutionary Student Action is a student branch of Workers' Voice, an openly Marxist organization that believes "capitalism can only be overcome through a socialist revolution." Its website, which is linked on the Princeton flier, says the group's mission is to "pave the road to communism" and a "classless society free of exploitation and oppression."
Shrier's Wednesday event was co-hosted by the Princeton Open Campus Coalition and the Princeton Tory, the school's conservative newspaper. The event was held at an off-campus location disclosed only to attendees, organizers told the Free Beacon, to protect students from harassment from groups like Revolutionary Student Action, which isn't recognized by the university.
"We are thrilled that the event itself took place without disruption, but the visceral reaction of certain Princeton community members is indicative of an ailing culture surrounding open discourse and robust dialogue," said Myles McKnight, president of the Open Campus Coalition. "We feel that students should be excited to engage with differing points of view on controversial issues about which reasonable people disagree."
Opposition to Shrier's event was not limited to the communist group. McKnight said several students reported being verbally harassed by peers who knew they were attending the event. Several students turned to social media to slam the university for allowing the event to proceed.
"This woman has openly demonstrated in her twt [sic] feed that she's arriving on campus with the mission of engaging in transphobic discourse with princeton [sic] students," one Instagram post shared with the Free Beacon reads.
Princeton's Gender and Sexuality Resource Center hosted a counter-event, a "teach-in" on transgender issues, Wednesday night in collaboration with the Princeton Pride Alliance.
Several prominent figures in recent years have faced backlash for deviating from the progressive line on transgender issues, both on college campuses and off. Kathleen Stock, a sex and gender researcher, resigned from the University of Sussex in October after mobs of students protested against her belief in the existence of biological sex. Internationally acclaimed author J.K. Rowling has been shunned for suggesting that the elimination of sex erases women—it is widely believed she was left out of the 20th anniversary celebration of her Harry Potter series because of her comments on transgenderism.
Shrier posted her full remarks at Princeton shortly after her appearance, in which she addressed the pushback she's gotten from many on the left.
"I'm not a provocateur. I don't get a rush from making people angry," Shrier said. "You don't have to be a troll to find yourself in the center of controversy. You need only be two things: effective, and unwilling to back down."
The communist letter said Shrier's appearance "put people's lives at risk by further marginalizing them."
The post Princeton Marxists Protest Campus Appearance by ‘Trans Epidemic’ Speaker appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Scott Galloway begins our phone call with an admission. “To be honest, I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of a profile,” he says before I’ve asked him any questions. “I suffer from imposter syndrome. I’m waiting for the profile that reveals me for the less talented, lower-character person I am.” He pauses. “Anyways, here I am.”
Radical honesty—unusual for a public figure—is characteristic for Galloway, who has fashioned himself as an earnest, candid truth teller for an audience obsessed with business, tech and culture. He speaks his mind; he calls people out; he makes bold predictions and admits when he’s wrong (see his advice to sell Tesla’s stock when it was priced around $45 a share–it’s now at over $1,000)—and he isn’t afraid of a Twitter fight.
The 57-year-old juggles a wide array of professional ventures. He has two podcasts: Pivot, which he has hosted with Kara Swisher since 2018, and The Prof G Pod, which he hosts solo and launched just before the pandemic. He sends out a weekly newsletter, “No Mercy No Malice,” pontificating on topics ranging from “Squid Game” to the metaverse, each with a grabby illustration and typically a series of illustrative charts. He has founded a number of companies and has taught marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business for the past decade. He has written several best-selling books. And he tweets regularly to his more than 420,000 followers, sometimes posting photos of his dog and sometimes weighing in on political and cultural events and sometimes getting into public spats with Elon Musk.

This article is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America’s two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this in part by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.
Take this brief tour of the industry’s history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency? 
The John D. Rockefeller Myth
Ida Tarbell is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history. Long before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, Tarbell’s reporting broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. In 19 articles that became a widely read book, History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, she exposed its unsavory practices. In 1911, federal regulators used Tarbell’s findings to break Standard Oil into 33 much smaller companies.
David had slayed Goliath. The U.S. government had set a monopoly-busting standard for future generations. John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil’s owner, lost. The good guys won—or so it seemed.
In fact, Rockefeller saw what was coming and ended up profiting—massively—from the breakup of his company. Rockefeller made sure to retain significant stock holdings in each of Standard Oil’s 33 offspring and position them in different parts of the U.S. where they wouldn’t compete against one another. Collectively, the 33 offspring went on to make Rockefeller very, very rich. Indeed, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that tripled his wealth and made him the wealthiest man in the world. In 1916, five years after Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire. 
Say It Ain’t So, Dr. Seuss!
One of the offspring of Standard Oil was Esso (S-O, spelled out), which later launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. It did so by relying on the talents of a young cartoonist who millions would later adore under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Decades before authoring the pro-environment parable The Lorax, Theodore Geisel helped Esso market “Flit,” a household spray gun that killed mosquitoes. What Americans weren’t told was that the pesticide DDT made up 5% of each blast of Flit.
When Esso put considerable creative resources behind the Flit campaign, they were looking years ahead to a time when they would also successfully market oil-based products. The campaign ran for 17 years in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time an unheard length of time for an ad campaign. It taught Esso and other Standard Oil companies how to sell derivative products (like plastic and pesticides) that made the company and the brand a household name in the minds of the public. In its day, “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was as ubiquitous as “Got Milk?” is today.
At the time, the public (and even many scientists) didn’t appreciate the deadly nature of DDT. That didn’t come until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. But accepting that DDT was deadly was hard, in part because of the genius of Geisel, whose wacky characters—strikingly similar to the figures who would later populate Dr. Seuss books—energetically extolled Flit’s alleged benefits. 
Geisel later said the experience “taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words.” The Flit ad campaign was incredibly smart and clever marketing. It taught the industry how to sell a dangerous and unnecessary product as if it were something useful and even fun. Years later, ExxonMobil would take that cleverness to new heights in its advertorials. They weren’t about clever characters. But they were awfully clever, containing few, if any, outright lies, but a whole lot of half-truths and misrepresentations. It was clever enough to convince the New York Times to run them without labeling them as the advertisements that they, in fact, were. Their climate “advertorials” appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America.”
Controlling Climate Science
Big Oil also saw climate change coming. As abundant investigative reporting and academic studies have documented, the companies’ own scientists were telling their executives in the 1970s that burning more oil and other fossil fuels would overheat the planet. (Other scientists had been saying so since the 1960s.) The companies responded by lying about the danger of their products, blunting public awareness, and lobbying against government action. The result is today’s climate emergency. 
Less well-known is how oil and gas companies didn’t just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change. 
The companies embedded scientists in universities and made sure they were present at important conferences. They nominated them to be contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose assessments from 1990 onward defined what the press, public, and policymakers thought was true about climate science. While the IPCC reports, which rely on consensus science, were sound, Big Oil’s scientific participation gave them an insider’s view of the road ahead. More ominously, they introduced the art of questioning the consensus science in forums where every word is parsed.
The industry was employing a strategy pioneered by tobacco companies, but with a twist. Beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry cultivated a sotto voce network of scientists at scores of American universities and medical schools, whose work it funded. Some of these scientists were actively engaged in research to discredit the idea that cigarette smoking was a health risk, but most of it was more subtle; the industry supported research on causes of cancer and heart disease other than tobacco, such as radon, asbestos, and diet. It was a form of misdirection, designed to deflect our attention away from the harms of tobacco and onto other things. The scheme worked for a while, but when it was exposed in the 1990s, in part through lawsuits, the bad publicity largely killed it. What self-respecting scientist would take tobacco industry money after that? 
The oil and gas industry learned from that mistake and decided that, instead of working surreptitiously, it would work in the open. And rather than work primarily with individual scientists whose work might be of use, it would seek to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole. The industry’s internal scientists continued to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles, but the industry also openly funded university collaborations and other researchers. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Exxon was known both as a climate research pioneer, and as a generous patron of university science, supporting student research and fellowships at many major universities. Its scientists also worked alongside senior colleagues at NASA, the Department of Energy, and other key institutions, and funded breakfasts, luncheons, and other activities at scientific meetings. Those efforts had the net effect of creating goodwill and bonds of loyalty. It’s been effective. 
The industry’s scientists may have been operating in good faith, but their work helped delay public recognition of the scientific consensus that climate change was unequivocally man-made, happening now, and very dangerous. The industry’s extensive presence in the field also gave it early access to cutting edge research it used to its advantage. Exxon, for example, designed oil platforms to accommodate more rapid sea level rise, even as the company publicly denied that climate change was occurring. 
Don’t Call It Methane, It’s “Natural” Gas
Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, yet it has received far less attention. One reason is that the oil and gas industry has positioned methane— which marketing experts cleverly labeled “natural gas”—as the future of the energy economy. The industry promotes methane gas as a “clean” fuel that’s needed to bridge the transition from today’s carbon economy to tomorrow’s renewable energy era. Some go further and see gas as a permanent part of the energy landscape: BP’s plan is renewables plus gas for the foreseeable future, and the company and other oil majors frequently invoke “low carbon” instead of “no carbon.”
Except that methane gas isn’t clean. It’s about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. 
As recently as a decade ago, many scientists and environmentalists viewed “natural gas” as a climate hero. The oil and gas industry’s ad guys encouraged this view by portraying gas as a coal killer. The American Petroleum Institute paid millions to run its first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2017, portraying gas as an engine of innovation that powers the American way of life. Between 2008 and 2019, API spent more than $750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications (for both oil and gas interests), an analysis by the Climate Investigations Center found. Today, most Americans view gas as clean, even though science shows that we can’t meet our climate goals without quickly transitioning away from it. The bottom line is that we can’t solve a problem caused by fossil fuels with more fossil fuels. But the industry has made a lot of us think otherwise. 
There’s little chance the oil and gas industry can defeat renewable energy in the long term. Wind, solar, and geothermal, which are clean and cost-competitive, will eventually dominate energy markets. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, GridLab, and Energy Innovation have found that the U.S. can achieve 90% clean electricity by the year 2035 with no new gas and at no additional cost to consumers. But the oil and gas industry doesn’t need to win the fight in the long term. It just needs to win right now so it can keep developing oil and gas fields that will be in use for decades to come. To do that, it just has to keep doing what it has done for the past 25 years: win today, fight again tomorrow. 
A Spider’s Web of Pipelines
Here’s a final example of how the oil and gas industry plans for the next war even as its adversaries are still fighting the last one. Almost no one outside of a few law firms, trade groups, and congressional staff in Washington, DC, knows what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does. But the oil and gas industry knows and it moved quickly after Donald Trump became president to lay the groundwork for decades of future fossil fuel dependency. 
FERC has long been a rubber stamp for the oil and gas industry. The industry proposes gas pipelines, and FERC approves them. When FERC approves a pipeline, that approval grants the pipeline eminent domain, which in effect makes the pipeline all but impossible to stop. 
Eminent domain gives a company the legal right to build a pipeline through landowners’ properties, and there is nothing they or state or county officials can do about it. A couple of states have successfully, though temporarily, blocked pipelines by invoking federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act. But if those state cases reach the current Supreme Court, the three justices Trump appointed—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett—are almost certain to rule in the industry’s favor.
Oil and gas industry executives seized upon Trump’s arrival in the White House. In the opening days of his administration, independent researchers listened in on public trade gatherings of the executives, who talked about “flooding the zone” at FERC. The industry planned to submit not just one or two but nearly a dozen interstate gas pipeline requests. Plotted on a map, the projected pipelines covered so much of the U.S. that they resembled a spider’s web. 
Once pipelines are in the system, companies can start to build them, and utility commissioners in every corner of America see this gas “infrastructure” as a fait accompli. And pipelines are built to last decades. In fact, if properly maintained, a pipeline can last forever in principle. This strategy could allow the oil and gas industry to lock in fossil fuel dependency for the rest of the century. 
In hindsight, it’s clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they’ve pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.
Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies. But their actions speak louder than words. It’s clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly—regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we’re in a race to a clean energy future, it’s time to recognize that they simply can’t be trusted as partners in that race. We’ve been fooled too many times.

The big event in the Prime Minister’s week had nothing to do with parties, wallpaper or pandemics. His wife, Carrie, gave birth to their second child, a baby girl. Boris Johnson is now officially on paternity leave. This may give him a breather in which to take stock and advice. To whom should he turn?

As usual, Shakespeare has le mot juste for his present predicament. “When troubles come,” Claudius says in Hamlet, Act IV,” they come not single spies but in battalions.” Boris may perforce have put his biography of the Bard on the back-burner, but he knows the works as well as any politician. This weekend, if he gets a quiet moment in between the red boxes and phone calls, while looking after little Wilfred or attending to Carrie and her newborn, the man in whom the country placed its trust just two years ago might do worse than to reread this most political of playwrights, as prophylaxis against the plots that are now proliferating. He may have need of such forewarning in the coming weeks and months.

Take, for example, Richard II. This was the play that in 1593 almost got its author hanged, drawn and quartered for sedition. As Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, mounted his attempted coup against Elizabeth I, one of his co-conspirators ordered Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s men, to stage a special performance of Richard II as a signal for the uprising.

Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke is a far subtler regicide than the real rebel who sought to emulate him. So inept was Essex, indeed, that within two years he went from being the Queen’s favourite, via his calamitous campaign in Ireland, to reckless rebellion and finally to an ignominious end upon the scaffold. Bolingbroke, by contrast, never states openly his ambition to overthrow Richard II; he merely denounces the corruption at court and lets others do the dirty work. Having contrived to force Richard to acquiesce in his own abdication, the usurper proceeds to have the deposed monarch done away with — but, crucially, the deed must be deniable.

Bolingbroke, now Henry IV, lets it be known that he longs to be rid of the threat posed by the incarcerated prisoner at Pomfret Castle, repeatedly asking in front of witnesses: “Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?” Sir Pierce of Exton takes the hint and murders Richard, but is then disowned and banished by Henry. Ironically, the most memorable passages in this disturbing play are those that celebrate monarchy and, of course, England — “this royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle”.

Richard II is the first of a tetralogy of Shakespearean history plays, continuing with the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V — chronologically the first of the sequence of eight plays that ends with Richard III, although the latter was probably written several years before Richard II. Shakespeare’s understanding of politics evolved over the 1590s and when we compare his portraits of the two usurpers, Henry Bolingbroke is a far more complex character than the caricature villain Richard, Duke of Gloucester. In real life, the rivals who undermine and finally oust the dominant ruler do not usually advertise the fact and are quick to disclaim responsibility for the act of treason.

For Boris in his hour of need, the question is: who would play the part of Bolingbroke in any plot to overthrow his leadership? He himself has played that part more than once: first by taking the helm of the Brexit campaign and thereby destroying David Cameron — though his bid for the succession was botched. Two years later he fatally weakened Theresa May’s premiership by resigning as Foreign Secretary, thereby making himself her chief rival and heir apparent.

Now Boris himself is threatened, with a major backbench rebellion likely next week over vaccine passports, a possible by-election débacle and rumours of a vote of no confidence in the New Year. How can he deflect or defuse such challenges to his authority?

Here again, Shakespeare is the best guide. The ancient topos of hubris followed by nemesis is ubiquitous in his dramas, both histories and tragedies. But the one that perhaps bears the closest resemblance to Boris Johnson’s story is Antony and Cleopatra. Some will question the comparison with a man who, as he dies, still implores his lover to remember him as “the greatest prince o’ the world, the noblest”. How can one appeal to the better nature of a man who, in their eyes, possesses no virtues at all — who is, as his former lieutenant Dominic Cummings claims, a “shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other”?

When I suggested in this column a few days ago that in order to survive “Partygate” the Prime Minister should apologise, instigate an inquiry and above all tell the truth, he actually did all these things. But this was not what struck some readers, including some of great eminence. What they objected to were the words “as a man of honour — which he is — Boris Johnson…”

I stand by those words. For all his flaws, this Prime Minister has a highly developed sense of honour. He has stood by friends and colleagues in adversity — not least Cummings himself — when it was hardly in his interest to do so. He has resigned on principle, taken on the British Establishment and the European Union, made bold decisions against the conventional wisdom but also defied his party base and even his former employer, the Daily Telegraph, when he judged it necessary.

Yes, he has been an execrable office manager, as the endless washing of Downing Street’s dirty linen in public demonstrates, but delegating too much rather than too little is a fault pardonable in a Prime Minister. In the battles that matter most to the electorate, he has shown leadership and even courage. As the accusations multiply under the media’s magnifying glass, it is easy to forget what has been accomplished: we have survived the worst domestic crisis in most of our lifetimes with an economy that is growing more robustly than most of our neighbours’.

Britain remains, as Liz Truss put it this week, “the greatest country on earth” — and under this Government, ministers are not afraid to say so. Anyone who doubts it should ask the millions who long to live here. If Boris Johnson is to be blamed for everything that has caused discontent, he must also be credited with a magnanimity, a grandeur and, yes, a charisma that all other contemporary politicians now strutting on the world stage lack.

So the comparison with Mark Antony is not entirely far-fetched — but that play is, of course, a tragedy, the tragedy of two extraordinary individuals who lose the world for love. If he is an Antony, is Carrie a Cleopatra? The day may come when she laments: “The soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls are level now with men; the odds is gone, and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.”

If Boris and Carrie are to avoid the fate of Antony and Cleopatra, they will perceive the present peril and spend at least some of their precious postnatal time together preparing to fight back against their enemies. The country will forgive a great deal in a leader as long as they still like him. Boris was never so popular as when he lay in hospital, suffering along with the rest. He needs to rediscover the stoicism that has sustained him in the past and cheerfully endure the seemingly overwhelming slings and arrows. As Antony says, comforting Cleopatra in distress: “Fortune knows we scorn her most when most she offers blows.”

(Photograph by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images.)The best thing that could be said about Tucker Carlson’s love letter to Vladimir Putin on his show Tuesday is that it didn’t sound any better in the original Russian. It sounded much more like a work of translation than anything original, because we’ve been hearing it all from Russian state TV for years. Many of those classic lies and themes were presented. Carlson claimed Russia’s border vulnerability was genuine, that NATO exists solely “to torment Vladimir Putin” who “has no intention of invading Western Europe,” that it is the U.S. hyping the threat of war, and more. He indulged in pathetic worship of Putin’s manufactured machismo at the same time he presented Biden as weak and not in charge. As I tweeted in reply to Mike Pence in 2016, Putin is a strong leader the way arsenic is a strong drink.Even after the Trump years, when sometimes you weren’t sure if you were watching Fox News or Russia Today, it’s still a shock to hear American commentators of influence recite talking points straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook. Carlson did his best to twist them into MAGA-friendly soundbites, but it’s an impossible task. If there’s anything Putin wants for America, it’s for it never to be great again.The topic at hand was Ukraine, back in the news not for impeachable reasons but because Russia once again has been building up a massive military force on its neighbor’s border—a border it already crossed by force in 2014. It’s been bizarre to hear the Biden White House talk about what may happen “if Russia invades Ukraine” when that invasion happened seven years ago and the war is still ongoing, with thousands of casualties.Contrary to Tucker Carlson’s pleas, Putin’s assault on Ukraine has nothing to do with NATO or any threats real or imagined against Russian borders or national security, about which Putin cares nothing anyway. Like every other decision Putin makes from morning to night, it was about keeping his grip on total power in Russia.Attacking Ukraine and seizing Crimea in 2014 served the dual purpose of distracting Russians from their many woes and disrupting Ukraine’s unwelcome move toward democracy and Europe—and away from Putin and his kleptocracy model. Ukrainians had just kicked out Viktor Yanukovych, Putin’s corrupt lackey, in a popular uprising against his attempt to block Ukrainian integration with Europe, doubtless at his boss in Moscow’s direction.(Another relevant note on Putin’s timing is that the 2014 Olympic Winter Games had just finished in Sochi, Russia. A global sporting spectacle with the dictator playing the preening host to the world has been known to inspire a sense of invincibility at least since 1936. Biden’s diplomatic boycott of China’s upcoming Winter Games isn’t as good as moving them out of the CCP’s clutches, but it’s a worthwhile measure.)A thriving democratic Ukraine would be a terrible model for Russians, in Putin’s view. Like every dictator, he’s having trouble explaining why everything in his country is such a mess after over 20 years in unchallenged power. Enemies are needed, ones big enough to be credible, and that means Europe, NATO, and, especially, the United States. Ukraine is hardly enough of a believable threat. Most Russians consider Ukrainians to be the same people, a feeling that was largely reciprocated until Putin declared his undeclared war.And while far too many Russians support Putin’s brazen theft of Crimea, few have any appetite for continued hostilities despite years of Russian propaganda portraying Ukraine as simultaneously overrun by fascists and Jews. (Nobody ever said that misinformation had to make any sense to be effective.) And so, NATO was called once more into rhetorical service as the bogeyman, despite its unfortunate disinterest in Ukraine. It’s no coincidence that Putin invaded Georgia and Ukraine, the two ex-Soviet states that moved away from Moscow’s orbit without being let into NATO like the three Baltic nations were in 2004.Even though it was demoted to Zoom instead of the pomp of their June summit in Geneva, the Biden-Putin call over Russia’s military build-up against Ukraine deserves attention. First off, what was it for? As with the earlier Biden-Putin summit in Geneva, there was little explanation from the Biden White House as to why it would reward a hostile mafia boss like Putin—a “killer” in Biden’s own words—with a one-on-one with the president of the United States. The call itself was a tangible achievement for Putin, well worth shuffling some troops and tanks around. It again elevated him as an equal, a playmaker on the international stage instead of the pariah he should be for his criminal acts and belligerence.Still, if Biden managed to communicate that there are credible threats to the finances of Putin and his cronies, it wasn’t worthless. It would have been even better had amendments promising such sanctions been included as planned in the National Defense Authorization Act. The new NDAA, stripped of these measures and others aimed at the Kremlin, was announced soon after the Biden-Putin call. One hopes that the whiff of a potential Ukrainian quid pro quo at this timing is just my natural Russian paranoia. But after Biden already waived sanctions against Putin’s beloved Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a little paranoia is warranted.Putin deserves no say whatsoever in the decisions of the sovereign nation of Ukraine—not about NATO or anything else. Ukraine deserves U.S. and NATO support because democracy needs their support. As I wrote in the days of the invasion in 2014, Ukraine is on the front line of a war that the U.S. and the rest of the free world doesn’t want to admit is happening. Hiding behind America First won’t save you, not for long. It never has. There is also self-interest, if not immediate national security interests. More and healthier democracies means a safer and more stable world, something of real value to the most globalized of all nations.If the rule of international law is to matter at all, Putin’s mafia gang should be sanctioned into oblivion until every inch of Ukrainian territory is returned. Kick his oligarchs and their families out of their posh properties in the free world, where they enjoy luxuries that few Russians can dream of—like freedom of speech. Seize their looted assets, treat them like the criminals they are. All this leverage is available, but the will to use it has been absent.This makes Carlson’s blather about being too tough on Putin even more laughable. Putin is a hostile actor, an enemy who has repeatedly attacked American interests abroad and in the homeland. Russian hackers and disinformation campaigns target everything from racial strife to vaccine effectiveness to US elections. Why would a flag-wrapped nationalist like Tucker Carlson take Putin’s side? Because Putin took Trump’s? Because he’s admiring of Putin’s authoritarian powers?Or perhaps it’s that Trumpists, much like Putin, don’t see democracy as anything but trouble despite their claims of being freedom-loving patriots. Praising a dictator is to praise dictatorship, and what could be more un-American than that?Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Despite countless investigations, lawsuits, social shaming, and regulations dating back decades, the oil and gas industry remains formidable. After all, it has made consuming its products seem like a human necessity. It has confused the public about climate science, bought the eternal gratitude of one of America's two main political parties, and repeatedly out-maneuvered regulatory efforts. And it has done all this in part by thinking ahead and then acting ruthlessly. While the rest of us were playing checkers, its executives were playing three-dimensional chess.

Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market.

Take this brief tour of the industry's history, and then ask yourself: Is there any doubt that these companies are now plotting to keep the profits rolling in, even as mega-hurricanes and roaring wildfires scream the dangers of the climate emergency?

Ida Tarbell is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists in American history. Long before Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal, Tarbell's reporting broke up the Standard Oil monopoly. In 19 articles that became a widely read book, History of the Standard Oil Company, published in 1904, she exposed its unsavory practices. In 1911, federal regulators used Tarbell's findings to break Standard Oil into 33 much smaller companies.

David had slayed Goliath. The U.S. government had set a monopoly-busting standard for future generations. John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil's owner, lost. The good guys won--or so it seemed.

In fact, Rockefeller saw what was coming and ended up profiting--massively--from the breakup of his company. Rockefeller made sure to retain significant stock holdings in each of Standard Oil's 33 offspring and position them in different parts of the U.S. where they wouldn't compete against one another. Collectively, the 33 offspring went on to make Rockefeller very, very rich. Indeed, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that tripled his wealth and made him the wealthiest man in the world. In 1916, five years after Standard Oil was broken up, Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire.

Say It Ain't So, Dr. Seuss!

One of the offspring of Standard Oil was Esso (S-O, spelled out), which later launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. It did so by relying on the talents of a young cartoonist who millions would later adore under his pen name, Dr. Seuss. Decades before authoring the pro-environment parable The Lorax, Theodore Geisel helped Esso market "Flit," a household spray gun that killed mosquitoes. What Americans weren't told was that the pesticide DDT made up 5% of each blast of Flit.

When Esso put considerable creative resources behind the Flit campaign, they were looking years ahead to a time when they would also successfully market oil-based products. The campaign ran for 17 years in the 1940s and 1950s, at the time an unheard length of time for an ad campaign. It taught Esso and other Standard Oil companies how to sell derivative products (like plastic and pesticides) that made the company and the brand a household name in the minds of the public. In its day, "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" was as ubiquitous as "Got Milk?" is today.

At the time, the public (and even many scientists) didn't appreciate the deadly nature of DDT. That didn't come until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. But accepting that DDT was deadly was hard, in part because of the genius of Geisel, whose wacky characters--strikingly similar to the figures who would later populate Dr. Seuss books--energetically extolled Flit's alleged benefits.

Geisel later said the experience "taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words." The Flit ad campaign was incredibly smart and clever marketing. It taught the industry how to sell a dangerous and unnecessary product as if it were something useful and even fun. Years later, ExxonMobil would take that cleverness to new heights in its advertorials. They weren't about clever characters. But they were awfully clever, containing few, if any, outright lies, but a whole lot of half-truths and misrepresentations. It was clever enough to convince the New York Times to run them without labeling them as the advertisements that they, in fact, were. Their climate "advertorials" appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and were part of what scholars have called "the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America."

Big Oil also saw climate change coming. As abundant investigative reporting and academic studies have documented, the companies' own scientists were telling their executives in the 1970s that burning more oil and other fossil fuels would overheat the planet. (Other scientists had been saying so since the 1960s.) The companies responded by lying about the danger of their products, blunting public awareness, and lobbying against government action. The result is today's climate emergency.

Less well-known is how oil and gas companies didn't just lie about their own research. They also mounted a stealth campaign to monitor and influence what the rest of the scientific community learned and said about climate change.

The companies embedded scientists in universities and made sure they were present at important conferences. They nominated them to be contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose assessments from 1990 onward defined what the press, public, and policymakers thought was true about climate science. While the IPCC reports, which rely on consensus science, were sound, Big Oil's scientific participation gave them an insider's view of the road ahead. More ominously, they introduced the art of questioning the consensus science in forums where every word is parsed.

The industry was employing a strategy pioneered by tobacco companies, but with a twist. Beginning in the 1950s, the tobacco industry cultivated a sotto voce network of scientists at scores of American universities and medical schools, whose work it funded. Some of these scientists were actively engaged in research to discredit the idea that cigarette smoking was a health risk, but most of it was more subtle; the industry supported research on causes of cancer and heart disease other than tobacco, such as radon, asbestos, and diet. It was a form of misdirection, designed to deflect our attention away from the harms of tobacco and onto other things. The scheme worked for a while, but when it was exposed in the 1990s, in part through lawsuits, the bad publicity largely killed it. What self-respecting scientist would take tobacco industry money after that?

The oil and gas industry learned from that mistake and decided that, instead of working surreptitiously, it would work in the open. And rather than work primarily with individual scientists whose work might be of use, it would seek to influence the direction of the scientific community as a whole. The industry's internal scientists continued to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles, but the industry also openly funded university collaborations and other researchers. From the late 1970s through the 1980s, Exxon was known both as a climate research pioneer, and as a generous patron of university science, supporting student research and fellowships at many major universities. Its scientists also worked alongside senior colleagues at NASA, the Department of Energy, and other key institutions, and funded breakfasts, luncheons, and other activities at scientific meetings. Those efforts had the net effect of creating goodwill and bonds of loyalty. It's been effective.

The industry's scientists may have been operating in good faith, but their work helped delay public recognition of the scientific consensus that climate change was unequivocally man-made, happening now, and very dangerous. The industry's extensive presence in the field also gave it early access to cutting edge research it used to its advantage. Exxon, for example, designed oil platforms to accommodate more rapid sea level rise, even as the company publicly denied that climate change was occurring.

Don't Call It Methane, It's "Natural" Gas

Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, yet it has received far less attention. One reason is that the oil and gas industry has positioned methane-- which marketing experts cleverly labeled "natural gas"--as the future of the energy economy. The industry promotes methane gas as a "clean" fuel that's needed to bridge the transition from today's carbon economy to tomorrow's renewable energy era. Some go further and see gas as a permanent part of the energy landscape: BP's plan is renewables plus gas for the foreseeable future, and the company and other oil majors frequently invoke"low carbon" instead of "no carbon."

Except that methane gas isn't clean. It's about 80 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is.

As recently as a decade ago, many scientists and environmentalists viewed "natural gas" as a climate hero. The oil and gas industry's ad guys encouraged this view by portraying gas as a coal killer. The American Petroleum Institute paid millions to run its first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2017, portraying gas as an engine of innovation that powers the American way of life. Between 2008 and 2019, API spent more than $750 million on public relations, advertising, and communications (for both oil and gas interests), an analysis by the Climate Investigations Center found. Today, most Americans view gas as clean, even though science shows that we can't meet our climate goals without quickly transitioning away from it. The bottom line is that we can't solve a problem caused by fossil fuels with more fossil fuels. But the industry has made a lot of us think otherwise.

There's little chance the oil and gas industry can defeat renewable energy in the long term. Wind, solar, and geothermal, which are clean and cost-competitive, will eventually dominate energy markets. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, GridLab, and Energy Innovation have found that the U.S. can achieve 90% clean electricity by the year 2035 with no new gas and at no additional cost to consumers. But the oil and gas industry doesn't need to win the fight in the long term. It just needs to win right now so it can keep developing oil and gas fields that will be in use for decades to come. To do that, it just has to keep doing what it has done for the past 25 years: win today, fight again tomorrow.

A Spider's Web of Pipelines

Here's a final example of how the oil and gas industry plans for the next war even as its adversaries are still fighting the last one. Almost no one outside of a few law firms, trade groups, and congressional staff in Washington, DC, knows what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does. But the oil and gas industry knows and it moved quickly after Donald Trump became president to lay the groundwork for decades of future fossil fuel dependency.

FERC has long been a rubber stamp for the oil and gas industry. The industry proposes gas pipelines, and FERC approves them. When FERC approves a pipeline, that approval grants the pipeline eminent domain, which in effect makes the pipeline all but impossible to stop.

Eminent domain gives a company the legal right to build a pipeline through landowners' properties, and there is nothing they or state or county officials can do about it. A couple of states have successfully, though temporarily, blocked pipelines by invoking federal statutes such as the Clean Water Act. But if those state cases reach the current Supreme Court, the three justices Trump appointed--Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett--are almost certain to rule in the industry's favor.

Oil and gas industry executives seized upon Trump's arrival in the White House. In the opening days of his administration, independent researchers listened in on public trade gatherings of the executives, who talked about "flooding the zone" at FERC. The industry planned to submit not just one or two but nearly a dozen interstate gas pipeline requests. Plotted on a map, the projected pipelines covered so much of the U.S. that they resembled a spider's web.

Once pipelines are in the system, companies can start to build them, and utility commissioners in every corner of America see this gas "infrastructure" as a fait accompli. And pipelines are built to last decades. In fact, if properly maintained, a pipeline can last forever in principle. This strategy could allow the oil and gas industry to lock in fossil fuel dependency for the rest of the century.

In hindsight, it's clear that oil and gas industry leaders used outright climate denial when it suited their corporate and political interests throughout the 1990s. But now that outright denial is no longer credible, they've pivoted from denial to delay. Industry PR and marketing efforts have shifted massive resources to a central message that, yes, climate change is real, but that the necessary changes will require more research and decades to implement, and above all, more fossil fuels. Climate delay is the new climate denial.

Nearly every major oil and gas company now claims that they accept the science and that they support sensible climate policies. But their actions speak louder than words. It's clear that the future they want is one that still uses fossil fuels abundantly--regardless of what the science says. Whether it is selling deadly pesticides or deadly fossil fuels, they will do what it takes to keep their products on the market. Now that we're in a race to a clean energy future, it's time to recognize that they simply can't be trusted as partners in that race. We've been fooled too many times.

From the education of a Nobel Prize-winning economist to debates about privacy and the drawbacks of global supply chains, Professor Diane Coyle of Cambridge University's Bennett Institute for Public Policy chooses the best economics books of 2021. These are highly readable books that also shed important light on the Covid pandemic and the world we live in.

As you’ve kindly done for a number of years now, you’ve selected the best economics books of 2021 for us. Let’s go straight to your first choice, which is by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. Tell us about his memoir, Home in the World.

Sen is a really important and inspirational thinker. He is known for advocating the capabilities approach in economics. Conventional economics is based on the idea that people maximize their utility or maximize their profits. It’s one dimensional. Sen has advocated this much richer capabilities approach, where you try to take account of the many different kinds of things or dimensions that would affect people’s well-being. It’s been incredibly influential in development economics and, increasingly, in other areas of the subject, because of a new appreciation of the importance of the environment or of unpaid care, for example. This memoir is really fascinating. It’s beautifully written, a really good read. It’s all about his intellectual formation, growing up in Bengal in British India—which became part of Bangladesh—in a school established by Rabindranath Tagore and the philosophy of education that instilled in him. I suppose the fact that he received such a different intellectual formation, from such a different background, made it possible for him to challenge the conventional approach to economics that he would later be taught.

Tagore was a poet, right?

He was a poet and creative writer, but also a philosopher, statesman, and a very influential thinker.

As an account of someone’s intellectual formation, I think it’s an absolutely fascinating book. The questions Sen raises are of growing importance in how we think about what it is that economics is supposed to be all about. If you think of a person giving policy advice on the basis of economics and asking, ‘What am I doing to make things better?’ you really ought to be interrogating what you mean by ‘making things better’—for whom and in what ways. Like all conventional economists I’ve been trained in a very uni-dimensional social-planner way of thinking about doing things, so I really enjoyed reading the book.

He was 19 when he went to Cambridge. Was he subsumed into conventional academia quite early on or was he a rebel from the beginning?

It was a bit more complicated. The book goes up to the period where he has been a student at Cambridge and he’s got his first job in academia, in the United States. He was obviously an incredibly able student in terms of conventional economics. But one interesting thing about his background is the way that the mode of education in his school was to question. So there are passages in the Cambridge section where he talks about how much he enjoyed the conversations he had with senior figures, but also the disagreements he had with them. I don’t think he was being a rebel, particularly. It was just this ingrained habit, through his early education, of questioning.

Let’s move on to Shut Down: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze. So this is back to the big story of 2021?

Yes, it’s about the impact of the pandemic. Adam Tooze is an economic historian so he brings a historical perspective to the way he writes this first draft of history. It’s not a piece of journalism, but it’s very much addressing something that’s still happening to us. It’s this instant analysis of what happened.

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There are some other excellent books about the science of the pandemic, like the book by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, Vaxxers, on the vaccine development, and Spike by Jeremy Farrar on the epidemiology and policy. But for an economist, what’s interesting about Adam Tooze’s book is the integration of economic policymaking alongside the unfolding events of the pandemic. It’s mainly focused on the US but does touch on global events too. His previous book, Crashed, was about the great financial crisis. What that very clearly established was the important role that the Federal Reserve Board played in maintaining world systemic economic stability. That, in effect, happened again in 2020. The actions the Fed took to make sure that we didn’t have an even bigger economic crisis—through financial markets seizing up and panicking—were important. The book is a ripping yarn of events, month by month. You feel that you’re plunged into that decision-making and it was economic aspects of the decisions that I found particularly interesting.

In comparison to the global financial crisis, it seems to me there’s been very little public discussion of the economics of the pandemic. That could be because it’s all happened behind closed doors, or it could be that there’s been a vast consensus about it, and so the arguments over policy in this area have been limited. Or it could be because it’s been handled incredibly well. Has there been much discussion?

In the US, the discussion has been about the size of the fiscal stimulus needed, so there has been some debate, and there’s also a debate around modern monetary theory and how much you should worry about ‘printing money.’ But I think you’re right to suggest that policy has actually succeeded incredibly well. As a result, the economic debate has been lacking a tempestuous quality, I suppose.

When this all started, it was an unprecedented event in modern history, that economies were shut down by governments. It was remarkable that governments could do that at all, given that we had got so used to thinking about how limited and ineffective they are compared to market organisations. The fact was that, despite this, there wasn’t a massive recession. If you cast your mind back to March and April 2020, the Bank of England, for instance, was saying that we would have the worst recession in 300 years. Measures of GDP absolutely plunged. Obviously, there are many people who were worse off as a result, but it wasn’t a complete disaster. In that sense, the economic policy response has been very successful. There’s also, in a more subterranean way, integration going on between the epidemiology and the more detailed economics—trying to understand better people’s own personal responses to the news about the virus in terms of their economic activity. Previously, these two kinds of modelling had gone on parallel tracks. Over time, once the pandemic started, they became more integrated with each other.

Do you think the global financial crisis was helpful as an early run of how to coordinate massive government interventions internationally?

I think so. That’s certainly what Adam Tooze argues. I find it very persuasive. And, of course, it was relatively recent in the scale of economic history.

The next book you’ve chosen for your best economics books of 2021 list is Good Data by Sam Gilbert. This is another book with a positive message. Tell us about this one.

I have to disclose, first of all, that this is by a colleague of mine here at the Bennett Institute, Sam Gilbert. It’s a very healthy counterbalance to the ‘surveillance capitalism’ trope that has become so popular. The underlying reality is that there are pros and cons of this new digital data economy in which we find ourselves. There’s a genuine trade-off between the degree of privacy that we might want in an ideal world and the goods and services that can be created for us using the information based on data.

Sam Gilbert was one of the co-founders of a very successful online insurance company and was responsible for a lot of the use of data in marketing that they deployed. He’s done a lot of subsequent research. The point about data is that it’s not useful in itself, it’s useful for the information it gives us that we can act on, or that allows us to do things differently, in order to give us better outcomes.

Quite often things that are useful require different sources of data to be brought together. To give you a pandemic related example, if I take my temperature, it’s only useful information to me if I know what the population average is, so I know what’s normal. In current circumstances, if I have a temperature that might also be useful information for other people. So there are these positive spillovers of data. At the same time, I’ve got reasonable expectations of privacy. Completely understandably, I might not want people to know many details about my health. These are the kinds of trade-offs that we’re trying to navigate in this world and yet the surveillance capitalism idea has made a lot of people just think it’s terrible that we’re sharing data at all.

“The point about data is that it’s not useful in itself, it’s useful for the information it gives us that we can act on”

If you think back to the start of the pandemic, there was a fuss about whether the NHS app to track people’s contacts, could actually have private information centralised and shared in the government database. That’s incredibly useful if you want to do a track and trace operation, and it’s what the physical track and trace operation does: it asks people about their personal contacts and follows them up. But because the data privacy debate has got to where it has in terms of surveillance, the government was not able to do that on the app and had to use the Google and Apple version, with embedded privacy. It’s all very decentralised. You alone will know if you’ve been near somebody who’s tested positive and they’ve reported it. But that’s much more limited in use when it comes to containing a pandemic, which is all about spillovers between people. So you can reasonably debate whether we got to the right point in that trade-off. That’s what the book is about. It’s about opening up that debate and saying it’s not all one-sided.

You’ve given examples from the pandemic, but the book also deals with much broader areas of political control. For instance, he argues that improved data use can help improve issues around inequality in society.

Using data in all kinds of ways can help address either public policy problems or business problems, or help businesses come up with new ideas. The potential is very wide. But, if we’re going to tap into that potential, we need to have a clear set of protocols about what data could be used when and by whom. There are certainly examples, like children in so-called ‘troubled families.’ If you can join up health data, school data, police data and social services data effectively, you can see that might help address all kinds of problems—social problems, inequalities—and help children at risk. But, equally understandably, there would be concern about anybody who got tagged with that label. Who would know that about them? How long would it follow them as they lived through their lives? Would that be a permanent digital fingerprint or could it be forgotten? There’s a lot of quite intricate policy detail to discuss. I find the surveillance capitalism argument very unsophisticated: it ignores the detail.

And Gilbert’s view is that data can be used properly, in the right way, to effectively improve society in many areas?

That’s the argument. I’m a bit less confident because it depends very much on the governance arrangements that we set in place, and they’re just not there yet. We’re only just starting this debate.

Okay. Let’s move on to Vaxxers by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green, two professors at the University of Oxford.

This is a fantastic account, absolutely gripping, by two of the principals involved in the development of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. There are all kinds of really interesting insights. One thing that interested me was how early people in the epidemiology community spotted the warning signs of the coming pandemic—well before it hit the headlines, and well before it came to the attention of people in Whitehall who are responsible for spotting trouble ahead. A bit like the financial crisis, there were some people who saw it coming well in advance, but it didn’t permeate through into the public consciousness or the policy consciousness as quickly as you might have hoped.

“One thing that interested me was how early people in the epidemiology community spotted the warning signs of the coming pandemic”

And—for somebody who’s in research—there’s a lot of very interesting material about how research gets funded and how hard it is actually to get the money for what might turn out to be fundamentally important research. You have to spend so much of your time writing proposals for short-term or relatively small pots of money, that it’s very difficult to sustain fundamental strands of research. So, kudos to the University of Oxford: they stumped up the money at their own risk for the vaccine development work to continue, before it was clear that it would get funded through the normal kinds of research channels. There’s also great material in the book about how to scale up, how to work alongside manufacturers, because the research facilities were quite small-scale and we needed millions, billions, of doses of vaccine eventually. So the discussions about how it got commercialised, how AstraZeneca came to be part of it and, actually, how well they come out of it in the sense of not taking a profit during the crisis, is all very interesting.

Then, at the human level, these are mothers juggling responsibilities of what are busy jobs at the best of times, and the sheer pressure of working at pace and this intensity on something of such fundamental importance. It’s a description of science in action, of how important research is, and raises questions about the kinds of structures of work and research funding that we have in place. Quite apart from this current pandemic, it leaves those as open questions for the future and for other areas.

There must have been very different models for development in the UK, the US and Russia and China. Generally, was this fundamentally a positive story, of people getting stuff right in the heat of the moment? Or is much more complicated than that?

This gets glossed in different ways. The science is clearly amazing, the vaccine development happening so quickly. I do remember back in March 2020 people talking about vaccines, and thinking, ‘but they take years and years to develop and get through clinical trials, how on Earth is that going to happen so quickly?’ So there is that fundamental awe at what the scientists have been able to do. But there are other structures that made it happen at such speed. There was a very interesting lecture by Kate Bingham, who headed the UK government’s Vaccine Taskforce, a couple of weeks ago. It was about how many barriers there were to getting things done that quickly and effectively, in terms of usual government procedures, and the battles she had to fight to overcome the risk aversion of civil servants, who wanted to go through lengthy procurement processes, and the lack of joining up across different departments in government.

5 Radical Potter by Tristram Hunt Read

The last book you’ve chosen for your best economics books of 2021 list takes us back to the Industrial Revolution. This is Radical Potter by Tristram Hunt.

I like reading history because when you’re researching technological change and innovation, as I do, there’s not a lot of non-historical data to go on. You have to look at the examples that we have from the past. This is a biography of Josiah Wedgwood. What’s interesting about it is the way it illustrates how you integrate basic research into manufacturing. He did lots of experiments about how glazes worked, what temperatures were needed, what kinds of clay gave you which different kinds of effects and so on. There are some beautiful illustrations of the kind of samples he created. It was basic research, but the book also shows the way that interacts with the manufacturing process, understanding the skills of the people who are actually loading the kilns and handling the pots. Then, further, the integration of what he could produce using these new techniques and styles with marketing. Marketing led to the importance of the designs of the different tea services and vases that he was creating. He sent free gifts to famous people, to influencers such as royalty, who would then help create the middle-class market for his goods.

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It was clearly a time when the Industrial Revolution was making a lot of middle-class people better off and they could start to think about affording luxuries, like a different tea service with a new pattern. But it’s that whole process of vertical integration—from basic research and digging up different kinds of clay on expeditions, through to a real attention to the detail of the design and the marketing and how you created that mass market—that has been taken out of a lot of modern manufacturing by global supply chains. Different stages get done in different places now. There are lots of companies that have outsourced manufacturing to Southeast Asian countries or are trying to. With hindsight, that looks like a mistake in terms of national policy. It might be fine for the companies themselves if they save money in the short-term. But that deep knowledge of how you innovate in the light of the manufacturing techniques you’re going to have to use—I think that’s something really valuable that’s been lost, and it was one of the things that really leapt out of this book.

And over what sort of period has that been lost—20, 30 years, or longer?

Since the 1980s, when globalisation started to take off. Trade liberalisation made it possible and information and communication technologies made it seem easy to have these very extended global supply chains. So it’s been relatively recent. But a lot of British companies lost their way with spending on R&D earlier. We’re not very innovative. The number of companies that say they do R&D in the UK is pretty low.

I remember a TV series called Troubleshooter, presented by Sir John Harvey-Jones. He was a famous businessman, very successful. He used to go to failing businesses to ask them what was going wrong. Could he help give them some advice? And he actually went to one of the pottery companies in Stoke-on-Trent. They had, in effect, stopped spending on the design part, the R&D, to cut costs in the face of overseas competition. So they had lost that magic source that made Wedgwood and other British pottery companies so successful in the first place. That was, essentially, his diagnosis in the TV programme. The book illustrates how important the research and innovation was.

Awash, as we are, in discussion of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, I am, like everyone else, struck by the menacing uncertainty about its potential impact, including scattered economic worries and new speculation about (good grief!) a fourth vaccine dose. But as a linguist, I of course find the word itself serendipitous. “AH-mih-kron,” most of us say, or maybe “OH-mih-kron,” with many of us at least initially unaware of how it’s spelled and hearing only the sound of it.

Having spent so much of this year wringing our hands about the Delta variant, and because the word “delta” is relatively common, the advent of Omicron may be the first time many of us have taken time to notice that as we name Covid-19 variants, we’re running through the Greek alphabet, with some skips — there seems to be no shortage of new variants but there was no Nu variant. And even those who know that omicron is a Greek letter may never have unpacked the original meaning, which is “small O,” as in a “micro” O.

Contrast it with omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. At one time, at least, the two letters distinguished between the long and short “O” sounds. Omega’s name means “big O” as in “mega” O, although the way we pronounce it, we don’t hear the “mega” part as related to the prefix we use in words like megawatt or megabyte. In the same way, when we say “Omicron,” the last thing we’re thinking about is the prefix “micro” we use in microscope or microphone.

Over time, words’ pronunciations get battered around in millions of mouths and change. Words get shorter, they get longer, they smush up, their sounds change places. Meanwhile, their meanings extend to other things. “Audition” used to refer only to hearing. Then it came to refer to hearing someone try out for a play by reciting lines. After a while it referred to assessing applicants for a performance in general — now, you can audition to be a mime.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images Democratic Senators Tom Udall, Chuck Schumer, and Sheldon Whitehouse unveiling to the press the For the People Act at the Capitol, Washington, D.C., March 27, 2019

The State Department is hosting a democracy summit this week. Representatives from around the world will assemble, virtually, “to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal.” For the United States, the state.gov webpage declares, “the summit will offer an opportunity to listen, learn, and engage with a diverse range of” democratic actors. America will also, the page continues, in what is certainly the money quote of the whole conference, “showcase one of democracy’s unique strengths: the ability to acknowledge its imperfections and confront them openly and transparently, so that we may, as the United States Constitution puts it, ‘form a more perfect union.’”

I’m not certain who precisely is going to be showcasing our own “imperfections.” The agenda online is incomplete. But it is right that we “confront” these “imperfections” “openly and transparently.” Because what’s most striking about America’s understanding of our own democracy is our ability to see what’s just not there. We are not a model for the world to copy. The United States is instead a failed democratic state.

At every level, the institutions that the US has evolved for implementing our democracy betray the basic commitment of a representative democracy: that it be, at its core, fair and majoritarian. Instead, that commitment is now corrupted in America. And every aspiring democracy around the world should understand the specifics of that corruption—if only to avoid the same in its own land.

*

The corruption of our majoritarian representative democracy begins at the state legislatures. Because the Supreme Court has declared that partisan gerrymandering is beyond the ken of our Constitution, states have radically manipulated legislative districts. As Miriam Seifter, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin–Madison summarized in a recent article for the Columbia Law Review, “across the nation, the vast majority of states in recent memory have had legislatures controlled by either a clear or probable minority party.” Her work was based in part upon an extraordinary analysis published by the USC Schwarzenegger Institute, which found that after the 2018 election, close to 60 million Americans “live under minority rule in their US state legislatures.” The most egregious states in this mix are also among the most important in presidential elections. In Wisconsin, for example, the popular vote for Republicans in 2018 was 44.7 percent; but Republicans controlled 64.6 percent of the seats in the statehouse. Likewise, Republicans in Virginia won just 44.5 percent of the vote but received 51 percent of statehouse seats.

State legislatures, as Seifter characterizes them, are “the least majoritarian branch” of our representative democracy. Yet this fact is all but invisible to most Americans—including, as she evinces, justices on the Supreme Court. We are all outraged when the Electoral College selects a president who hasn’t won a plurality of votes, something it has done five times in its history. Why are we so sanguine about legislatures that are regularly controlled by the party that won fewer votes across the state?

These gerrymandered states then spread their minoritarian poison in two distinctive ways. First, they have taken up the most ambitious program of vote suppression since Jim Crow. Through a wide range of techniques, Republican state legislatures are making it selectively more difficult for presumptively Democratic voters to vote, by reducing the number of polling places in Democratic districts, by ending early voting or voting outside of ordinary working hours, by deploying biased ID requirements that selectively allow forms of identification commonly held by Republicans (gun club registration cards) while disallowing those held by likely Democratic voters (student cards), by understaffing polling places so voters must queue for hours to vote, and by many other creative techniques. In Georgia, the legislature has even made it a crime to give water to people waiting in line to vote. What possible legitimate state interest could that law serve?

These acts are often framed by their opponents in racial terms. That framing is a strategic mistake. I’m happy to stipulate that some who push these techniques of suppression may well be motivated by race—after all, many of the techniques were those of race discrimination before —though most would surely disavow any such thing. But every single person pushing these techniques of suppression is certainly motivated by politics. It is raw partisan power, driven to destroy the electoral prospects of the other party, that explains what is happening here. Before the United States Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked lawyers from the Republican National Committee why they were opposing provisions enabling more people to vote. Because it “puts us at a competitive disadvantage,” the lawyer was untroubled to reply. How can it be permissible for the party in power nakedly to rig the system against its opponents?

The second way that minoritarian state legislatures spread their poison is by gerrymandering the United States House of Representatives. Partisan gerrymandering was first perfected in its modern “big data” form by Republicans in 2010, and the Democrats then spent the following decade trying to get the Supreme Court to put a stop to it. When the Court announced it would not, there was little left for the Democrats except good government initiatives, aiming at moving the redistricting process away from the most egregiously partisan influences. That did some good—until the 2020 election signaled to Republicans that their party faces virtual annihilation if the majority gets its say. The efforts to gerrymander for 2022 will therefore be the most sophisticated seen yet. Barring a legislative miracle to safeguard voting rights, by the next presidential election Republicans will have secured through gerrymandering the control of the House of Representatives, whether or not they succeed in winning more votes than Democrats. And if the plans of some extremists come to fruition, a critical mass of state legislatures will also have passed laws by then that give them the power to overturn the results of a popular presidential election in their states.

These two techniques of minoritarian rule—gerrymandering and partisan vote suppression—could have been resisted by the courts. Yet what’s striking about the United States Supreme Court is not only that it has done nothing to resist minoritarianism but also that its most significant recent interventions have only ratified perhaps the most egregious aspects of our minoritarian democracy: the influence of money in politics.

While most mature democracies have various techniques for minimizing the corrupting effect of money in politics, the US Supreme Court has embraced the most radical conception of campaign money-as-free speech of any comparable democracy. While the Court has upheld limitations on direct contributions to political campaigns, it has simultaneously held, in its infamous decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010), that any limitation on independent spending violates the First Amendment. Lower courts have then read Citizens United to mean that any limits on contributions to independent political action committees would violate the First Amendment as well. These rulings together gave rise to the so-called Super PACs that now dominate political spending, and enable strategic coordination of influence that is more effective than spending alone. In 2020, for example, the ten top Super PACs accounted for 54 percent of outside spending.

What’s critical to recognize is that the real power of this money comes not from its effect in persuading voters. Its power comes instead from the dependence it creates within our political system. Candidates know they need the support of Super PACs, either to make the case for them or to defend them from others who would attack. That dependence produces enormous power in the Super PACs concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of very wealthy individuals (who are presumptively but not necessarily Americans). In a nation of hundreds of millions, a few hundred families now dominate political spending.

Here again, there is no shame. In June 2021, the political action committee (PAC) No Labels had a call with Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, about legislative priorities in the balance of the year. On the call, the founders of the PAC emphasized the power their group had in Washington—not because of their ideas, but because of their money. The ultra-wealthy donors supporting No Labels were able to “hand out $50,000 checks,” its cofounder, Andrew Burskey, bragged. And those checks, he explained, represented the most valuable money in any political campaign. This was “hard” money, money given to candidates directly, which FEC rules allow the candidates to spend themselves. And then to prove just why that money was so valuable, Burskey offered the incredibly revealing picture of just why the economy of influence in Washington gave the ultra-wealthy so much power in Congress. As he explained:

[Most House members] are spending four hours on the telephone, dialing for dollars. And so what [a large contribution from donors] does—aside from sending the very strong message that there are folks who will have your back if you take tough votes that by partisan nature that may not be popular within your party [sic]—it also in real life frees them to do more work, because it’s spending less time raising those funds.

Burskey is remarking upon the obvious dependence that exists with our current system for campaign finance: the dependence of representatives on fundraising. Because of that dependence, particular kinds of funders—namely, large funders—are especially valuable. Large contributors give members two things at the same time: first, and obviously, money; but second, and even more critically, time. A $50,000 contribution gives members of Congress the chance to breathe, even as it naturally obliges them to the interest of the person who enabled that chance.

*

Universal Images Group via Getty Images Engraving showing the detention of men who had tried to vote illegally in the violently contested Rutherford–Hayes presidential election, New York, 1876

The legislative branch, of course, is not the only minoritarian institution within our republic. Because of the way states allocate Electoral College votes, the executive branch is effectively minoritarian, too. Not just in the most egregious way, when the candidate who wins fewer votes nonetheless becomes the president, but also, and more significantly, in the most regular way: because of the way states allocate their Electoral College votes, it is only a tiny fraction of American voters who actually matter to the ultimate result. All but two states give the winner of the popular vote in their state all of the electors from that state. This means that the only states that are actually contested in any presidential election are the “swing states,” at most a dozen or so of the fifty in the union. Those swing states represent a minority of America—less than 40 percent of the electorate depending on the election. That minority is in turn radically unrepresentative of America itself. The voters in the swing states are older and whiter. Their occupations are more traditional. For example, seven and a half times more people work in solar energy in America than mine coal, yet we never hear anything about solar energy industry workers as an important political bloc in a presidential campaign because those people live in non-swing states like Texas and California. Coal miners live in battleground states, so they become the central focus of the candidates running for president.

It is thus this tiny, unrepresentative minority that effectively selects the occupant of the Oval Office—making the president, as political scientists (such as Douglas Kriner and Andrew Reeves) have shown, especially responsive to this unrepresentative few. Federal spending is higher, all things being equal, in swing states over non-swing states, and regulators are particularly accommodating of swing states’ regulatory concerns. Does America tinker with steel tariffs or ethanol subsidies because either policy makes any sense? No. We live with these policy vagaries because their beneficiaries live in Pennsylvania and Iowa (both swing states).

And so, too, with the courts: if any institution within a representative democracy is supposed to be minoritarian, or at least, countermajoritarian, courts are. That is true substantively, but it is not supposed to be true politically. Substantively, of course, courts are meant to uphold constitutional rights, regardless of popular majorities. My First Amendment right to speak should not depend upon whether my views are liked by a majority. But the institution of the judiciary is also populated through political action. And to the extent that those actors have power because of a minoritarian corruption of representative democracy, the courts they populate are likewise tainted by minoritarianism.

Consider the Supreme Court: the current bench is divided 6–3, with the majority dominated by extremely conservative justices. That division is in no sense representative of America. Two thirds of the US is certainly not “conservative.” And while the random nature of Supreme Court turnover can sometimes produce such unrepresentativeness, this Court was expressly constructed by Senate leaders who changed the norms of confirmation to effectively steal a Supreme Court seat. In February 2016, then Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared, after Justice Scalia’s death, that it was “inappropriate” to confirm a nominee of President Barack Obama’s because it was an election year. But when Justice Ginsburg died just six weeks before an election, McConnell declared that it was perfectly appropriate to rush a nominee through the Senate before the 2020 election. In record time (for a modern appointment), Justice Amy Coney Barrett—certainly among the most conservative of the justices now seated on the Supreme Court—was confirmed by a Republican Senate.

*

Yet, without doubt, the most extreme institution of minoritarian democracy in America today is the United States Senate. Of course, that flaw was in a sense intended: the only way small states were going to agree to the new Constitution in 1787 was if the Constitution gave them extra power. That compromise enraged James Madison, but he could read the political writing on the wall and eventually became a defender of this counter-majoritarian compromise at the heart of our republic.

Even then, though, the minoritarianism built in to the Senate was muted in the first century after the Constitution’s signing. It was muted first because the differences in states’ populations were much smaller than they are today. The largest state in 1790 (Virginia) was thirteen times more populous than the smallest (Delaware). Today, the largest (California) is sixty-eight times more populous than the smallest (Wyoming). But it was muted second, and more fundamentally, because until this century the Senate did not regularly block the will of the majority of senators. The original Senate rules expressly protected the power of the majority, a simple majority, to vote on any bill whenever it wanted. It was only when Senator John C. Calhoun, the proslavery Democrat of South Carolina, began to muck about with those rules fifty years after the Constitution was ratified that the will of the majority was placed in jeopardy.

We miss this fact because the technique of this blocking has a name that has long been part of Senate lore: the filibuster. And given the tactic’s long pedigree, it is easy to imagine that what we are talking about today is the same as existed in the Senate for most of the institution’s history.

The reality is radically different.

The filibuster that existed for most of the Senate’s history was a device that simply slowed the consideration of legislation. It didn’t kill it. The one exception to that characterization was civil rights legislation: the only examples of laws being blocked by filibuster all the way through 1965 were anti-lynching laws, and laws to improve civil rights. For the rest, the filibuster simply delayed the debating and passage of legislation. And for that delaying tactic to operate, the Senators supporting the filibuster had to do real work: if a Senator was to filibuster a bill, he would have to stand on the floor of the Senate and speak, for many hours without a break. Strom Thurmond, Democrat of South Carolina, held the floor for twenty-four hours to hold up the 1957 Civil Rights Bill. That was not mere showmanship as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s recent eight-hour filibuster was. It was the only way that a filibuster could have any effect.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell commenting at a news conference on a Supreme Court ruling about gerrymandering, Washington, D.C., June 27, 2019

Today, however, the mechanism of the filibuster is radically different. All a senator must do to assure that a bill is filibustered is make a request to their party leader. That request—which can literally be by e-mail or text—then shifts the bill from being one that will pass if a simple majority supports it to being one that cannot even be debated unless a supermajority of sixty senators supports it.

The effect of the old filibuster was to keep a bill on the floor of the Senate as the filibusterers were debating. That allowed their dissent to be better understood, if not in the Senate, then at least by the public. The effect of the new filibuster is exactly the opposite: its effect is to block any debate until a supermajority allows it. Thus, the For the People Act—a bill that would have reversed much of the state suppression of the vote, ended partisan gerrymandering, and changed fundamentally the way campaigns are funded—has been blocked from debate on the floor of the Senate now twice, even though a majority would vote to allow that debate to occur. This modern filibuster thus doesn’t enable debate or understanding. The modern filibuster is just a gag rule on any legislation a minority does not like.

Even this description, however, masks the real corruption in the system. The norms that limited the filibuster to important issues are gone. Both parties killed those conventions over the past twenty years, the Republicans more aggressively than the Democrats. The filibuster has now become a routine hurdle that any significant legislation must clear. What that means is that we have now introduced a procedural requirement into the passage of legislation that makes the process more institutionally minoritarian than that of any legislature in any comparable representative democracy. Senators from the twenty-one smallest and most conservative states, representing just 21 percent of America, now have the power to block any non-budget legislation.

This filibuster lock alone—setting aside all the gerrymandering in the states, the gerrymandering of Congress, the suppression of the vote in elections, the Electoral College, the corrupting dependence of money—would be enough to categorize America as a “minoritarian democracy.” Like segregationist or sectarian regimes such as South Africa under apartheid, or the Sunni rule of Baathist Iraq, or Syria under the Alawi, the American republic, originally designed to be a majoritarian representative democracy, has become minoritarian. Or more precisely, at every level of the current institutions of our representative democracy, we have rendered those institutions unrepresentative. This fact alone should be enough to lead aspiring democracies around the world to look elsewhere for models for how democracy might be made to work. Our only lesson for these democracies is the consequence of our own failure.

*

In 1997, after he had surprised the world by winning reelection decisively, Bill Clinton convened a small dinner with the top donors to the Democratic Party at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. What should he do in his second term? What did they think he could achieve? It was a moment of great hope and possibility—nine months before the revelations of a White House intern would deflect the administration from achieving anything of significance.

As the story is told, about thirty of America’s superwealthy sat around a table. The president asked each in turn to give him their views. One by one, they rose to speak. The last to rise was a businessman, the founder of Stride Rite Shoes, and the second-largest contributor to the Democrats in 1996. As he stood up, few had any sense of what he would say. When he sat down, few could believe he’d actually said what he did say.

“Mr. President,” Arnold Hiatt began, “I know you’re an admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So I want you to put yourself in FDR’s shoes in 1940—the year when Roosevelt realized that he was going to have to convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy. Because that, Mr. President, is precisely what you need to do now—to convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy.” That would not, of course, be a war against fascists. It would be a fight against fat cats—people like Hiatt, rich people, and people who believed (unlike Hiatt) that just because they are rich, they’re entitled to dinner with the president at the Mayflower. Hiatt was challenging the president to recognize that “current campaign finance practices are threatening this nation in a different, but no less serious way,” he said. “Only your leadership and your office can turn this around.”

There was silence when Hiatt finished. No doubt, some were uncomfortable. Hiatt remembers the president being “gracious.” The only published account reports him as being less than gracious: “Clinton’s response effectively slashed Hiatt to pieces,” according to Peter Buttenwieser, “humiliating him in front of the group.”

At the time Hiatt spoke, Citizens United was still more than a dozen years in the future. We had not yet seen the pathological gerrymandering of 2010. Few could have imagined the open efforts by partisans in state legislatures to suppress the votes of their political opponents. Not a single Republican in any state legislature was then considering legislation to allow state legislatures to override the popular vote for president. And though the filibuster had been deployed beyond the domain of civil rights by then, it would be nine years before the architect of the modern filibuster, Mitch McConnell, would be elected to lead his party in the United States Senate. And no one—literally, no one—could have imagined an event like January 6 taking place in the United States of America. From our perspective today, Hiatt spoke at a time of relative health in the American democracy. And yet to him, and to many others then—including an eighty-eight-year-old woman who, nine months later, would begin a 3,000-mile walk across the country with the words “campaign finance reform” emblazoned across her chest—the corruption of money was already reason enough to “wage a war to save democracy.”

Olivier Doutliery/AFP via Getty Images Members of Congress gathered in joint session preparing to evacuate as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Washington, D.C., January 6, 2021

Today, we confront a Republican Party that has effectively declared war on majoritarian democracy. At every level, the leadership of that party challenges the fundamental idea of majority rule. Rather than adjust their policies to appeal to a true majority of Americans, Republicans have embraced the minoritarian strategy of entrenching what has become, in effect, a partisan, quasi-ethnic group against any possible democratic challenge. They rig the system so the majority cannot rule.

In the face of this threat, what America needs is what Hiatt said FDR had been: a leader who could “convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy.” Or maybe better, what America needs is a leader like Winston Churchill, who could convince a distracted nation that there is a fundamental threat to our democracy that we must now wage war to save.

Yet we don’t have a Churchill leading this fight. We have a Chamberlain. Rather than name the threat, and rally America against it, President Biden has been keen to negotiate the differences in conciliatory fashion—as if the modern filibuster were not a fundamental threat to democracy and as if the fight against majoritarianism were not a threat either. Biden has been eager to engage in a bizarre nostalgia, recalling a golden age when white men from different parties somehow got along, rather than recognizing that American democracy has never faced a threat like one—even if this is precisely the political reality that Black Americans have known for all of the country’s history.

There was real hope this year for effective action to address this corruption of democracy. Every single major candidate for president in the Democratic Party in 2020 (with the exception of Kamala Harris) had committed to making the For the People Act a top priority in the first hundred days; some had promised even more. Speaker Nancy Pelosi maintained that momentum and passed the act in the House. And after she succeeded in the House, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer committed to getting the Senate to do the same.

Standing in the way, however, was the filibuster.

For most of this year, President Biden defended the filibuster and stood practically silent on this critical reform. He has focused not on the crumbling critical infrastructure of American democracy, but on the benefits of better bridges and faster Internet. Democratic progressives in Congress were little better on this question. Although Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren all supported the For the People Act, in the public eye the issues they’ve championed have overlooked the country’s broken democratic machinery: forgive student debt, raise the minimum wage, give us a Green New Deal…. As a progressive myself, I love all these ideas, but none of them are possible unless we end the corruption that has destroyed this democracy. None of them will happen until we fix democracy first.

It may well be that nothing could have been done this year. It may well be true that nothing Biden could say or do would move Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, the two who are apparently blocking reform just now. Yet we have to frame the stakes accurately and clearly: if we do not “confront” those “imperfections” in our democracy, “openly and transparently,” in the State Department’s words, we will lose this democracy. And no summit will bring it back.

One of the problems with the “break them up” mantra—and here I plead guilty to having helped popularize it!—is that while people may want it, they are smart enough to know that big divestiture cases can take a decade, and it doesn’t seem like it will change their lives, or the tech industry, fast enough. But once we understand that breaking up isn’t just about dismantling but also about forcing open access, it’s a lot easier to see short-term changes, analogous to the recent right-to-repair changes, that would transform the industry in the short term.

If we enforce existing law and pass new laws directed at the particular problem of data concentration, we can imagine a future where all individuals control and direct their own data—their own history of interactions of shopping and reading—much as they now log their financial activity in a private bank account. The information is kept in a bank but not controlled by the bank, and each person can take it where they want to go. Because antitrust enforcers will break up, open up, and won’t allow the walled gardens to develop, they will be able to shift easily between different service providers, which in turn will allow those service providers to flourish when they provide good services—not just when they engage in lockouts.

We have immense power and public support to open up the app stores and open up online shopping and open up social and open up search. You’ll have greater privacy and control, and along with that, a renewed sense of personal dignity. But we’ll also have riches in innovation we never dreamed of, when the human spirit, human curiosity, and human power to create the unimaginable are unleashed. We simply have to begin to use the tools we already have against the behemoths that are telling us not to.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an “infodemic” of false information and conspiracy theories since the virus first emerged nearly two years ago. Exposure to misinformation can reduce plans to get vaccinated, and may potentially put more people at risk. 
This tension between those who are vaccinated and those who reject vaccines or dispute the science can divide families and rip apart friendships especially when loved ones are immersed in conspiracy theories about, for example, the origin of COVID-19 or mask wearing. 
With Germany hit by a significant fourth wave of COVID infections, several German states are now trying new ways to tackle COVID denial and false information about vaccination. Building on research about disinformation, which refers to incorrect information that is deliberately spread, some states have created centres with free, confidential counselling for people who are either looking for help in dealing with family members who believe false information or just want to check facts.
German disinformation centres
For example, a centre in the state of Baden-Württemberg provides telephone counselling. According to its annual report many people ask questions such as: “How can we deal with those who believe in conspiracy theories?” or “Are there conversation strategies to convince the other person that he is wrong?” 
Baden-Württemberg centre staff handled more than 300 requests for advice and information in 2020. The largest category was inquiries about conspiracy theories. Similar centres to counter the negative impact of conspiracy theories are in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Studies repeatedly reveal an association between the belief in conspiracy theories and the rejection of sometimes life-saving preventive measures such as vaccinations. In Germany research has linked a higher acceptance of misinformation to support for the far-right AFD party as well as a reliance on social media for news. And even before the pandemic, studies found that exposure to conspiracy theories can lead to people making decisions that are hazardous to their health.
According to some early work on disinformation, yet to be fully reviewed, it could reduce compliance with social distancing, which in turn could lead to more cases.
The German centres’ advice also builds on a technique known as motivational interviewing. This relies on asking open-ended questions. For example, instead of trying to overwhelm a friend or family member with facts about the safety of vaccines, one should give the person space to express his or her fears by asking, “What do you think about vaccines?” Instead of saying, “No, you’re wrong,” or instead of mocking the other person one should present the other person’s decision-making process as perfectly understandable. “Oh yes, I also read that on social media. Sounded really scary.”
Rebutting false information
After demonstrating respect and empathy in this manner, one can then offer to provide facts by asking: “Would you mind if I tell you what I know about these posts on social media?” There is no guarantee of success, but failure is more likely if one takes a direct, confrontational approach - however tempting that may be.

Read more:
COVID disinformation and extremism are on the rise in New Zealand. What are the risks of it turning violent?

The centres also provide leaflets to help people spot conspiracy theories. Our research has culminated in a handbook, available in ten languages, on how to rebut COVID disinformation and how best to communicate the scientific knowledge about vaccines.

An anti-vaccination protest in Leipzig, Germany.
Eric Lenz/Shutterstock

One promising avenue of research that we report on uses inoculation theory. This gets its name because the idea of it is like a medical vaccination, it provides people with a defence against a later attack by misinformation. Inoculation involves giving people information about how they might be misled, without necessarily anticipating what exactly they will encounter later. Knowing how disinformers operate (such as by making incoherent arguments or appealing to emotion), can “inoculate” people against being swayed by misinformation.
Anyone can find themselves confronted by loved ones who suddenly embrace various conspiracy theories. Initiatives such as the ones in Germany, and digital or printed guides are one way to try to treat and prevent further psychological damage of COVID-19 in families and friends. 
Science-based crisis communication skills rely on empathy and critical thinking. These must play a more central role in professional training for doctors in discussing these issues with patients, but they are also available to better prepare the public for the infodemic and its potential effects.
Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 964728 (JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from the Australian Research Council via a Discovery Grant to Ullrich Ecker, from Jigsaw (technology incubator created by Google), from UKRI (through Centre of Excellence REPHRAIN), and from the Volkswagen Foundation (Germany). He also holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (PRODEMINFO) and receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s “Honesty Project”).Philipp Schmid receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 964728 (JITSUVAX).

Welcome to our list of notable behavioral science books published in 2021. 
The end of the year is a time for looking back and for looking forward. As we set intentions for the year ahead, we also reflect on the year we’ve had. We benchmark next year’s personal and professional expectations against this year’s results. We count down, the ball drops, and we cross the threshold from our old self to new.
To do this well, we need to have a solid understanding of who we are—our strengths and weaknesses, biases and blindspots, what motivates and supports us. We also need a solid set of tools at our disposal. 
This year’s notable behavioral science books provide us with both. On this year’s list, you’ll find books we’ve covered over the course of the year, through excerpts, commentaries, and Q&A’s, as well as other new titles we wanted to introduce to you. There are books that provide insight into how we make up our minds or change them; the intricacies of our relationships with time, technology, and one another; ideas for how to bring behavioral science to bear on the world, and new ways of seeing old problems—through subtraction, by noticing noise, and by illuminating the essential elements of choice.
We’re pleased to invite your past and future selves to this year’s list.
— Antonia, Heather, and Evan
P.S.—You can find our list of notable behavioral science books from 2020 here.

This year we’re continuing our partnership with Bookshop.org, a website dedicated to supporting local and independent bookstores. When you purchase a book using a link below, we’ll receive a small commission that helps us sustain our nonprofit mission. All of the books on this list and covered on our site are independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. (Bookshop is still relatively new, so shipping is currently only available in the U.S. Head here for Bookshop UK.)

The Behavioral Code: The Hidden Ways the Law Makes Us Better or WorseBy Benjamin Van Rooij and Adam Fine
From the back cover: “Why do some laws radically change behavior whereas others are consistently ignored and routinely broken? Why do we keep relying on harsh punishment against crime even though it continues to fail? Professors Benjamin van Rooij and Adam Fine present the first accessible analysis of behavioral jurisprudence, which will fundamentally alter how we understand the connection between law and human behavior.”

The Behaviorally Informed OrganizationEdited by Dilip Soman and Catherine Yeung
From the back cover: “Despite its centrality to organizations, we do not have a good scientific framework for behavior change or a good understanding of how organizations can embed insights from behavioral science into their operations. To overcome this void, this book develops an overarching framework for using behavioral science. It shows how behavioral insights can be embedded in organizations to achieve better outcomes, improve the efficiency of processes, and maximize stakeholder engagement.”
Read an adaptation from The Behaviorally Informed Organization on Behavioral Scientist: “Despite its clear value-add, we believe that behavioral science has still not reached its full potential within organizations. We have a highly relevant and well-developed science of human behavior, but we do not have a science of how organizations can embed insights from behavioral science into their operations.”

Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less PolarizingBy Christopher A. Bail
From the back cover: “We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Breaking the Social Media Prism challenges common myths about echo chambers, foreign misinformation campaigns, and radicalizing algorithms, revealing that the solution to political tribalism lies deep inside ourselves.”

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward EquityBy Claudia Goldin
From the back cover: “Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed—and the barriers they faced—in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are “greedy,” paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men.”
Read our Q&A with the author: “[Egalitarian-minded couples] want to pursue what I call couple equity. But instead, when they have children or some other very important care responsibilities in which at least one of them will need to have a job with a certain amount of flexibility, they have to then ask themselves, “How much are we willing to pay for this equity?”  Equity may be expensive. And the expense is due to the notion of greedy work.”

Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness ItBy Ethan Kross
From the back cover: “Ethan Kross explores the silent conversations we have with ourselves. Interweaving groundbreaking behavioral and brain research from his own lab with real-world case studies—from a pitcher who forgets how to pitch, to a Harvard undergrad negotiating her double life as a spy—Kross explains how these conversations shape our lives, work, and relationships.”
Read an excerpt of Chatter on Behavioral Scientist: “Although the inner voice functions well much of the time, it often leads to chatter—the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. This often happens precisely when we need our inner voice the most—when our stress is up, the stakes are high, and we encounter difficult emotions that call for the utmost poise.”

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of FearBy Carl L. Hart
From the back cover: “[Carl L. Hart] draws on decades of research and his own personal experience to argue definitively that the criminalization and demonization of drug use—not drugs themselves—have been a tremendous scourge on America, not least in reinforcing this country’s enduring structural racism.”

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide MattersBy Eric J. Johnson
From the back cover: “Going well beyond the familiar concepts of nudges and defaults, The Elements of Choice offers a comprehensive, systematic guide to creating effective choice architectures, the environments in which we make decisions. The designers of decisions need to consider all the elements involved in presenting a choice: how many options to offer, how to present those options, how to account for our natural cognitive shortcuts, and much more.”
Read an excerpt from The Elements of Choice on Behavioral Scientist: “It’s Friday night after a long week, and you’re definitely going to relax and watch a movie. So you turn to Netflix, the world’s largest streaming service. It is also the prototypical choice engine: its goal is to help you find something to watch. It does not just passively present options, it tries to customize the set of things that you see, it gives you some control over what is presented, and it even helps you comprehend new options you might like.”

The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School YearsBy Emily Oster
From the back cover: “Professor of economics and mom of two Emily Oster offers a classic business school framework for data-driven parents to think more deliberately about the key issues of the elementary years: school, health, extracurricular activities, and more.”
Read our Q&A with the author: Samuel Salzer and Aline Holzwarth speak to Emily Oster about data-driven parenting during the elementary school years.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for MortalsBy Oliver Burkeman
From the back cover: “The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks … Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with ‘getting everything done,’ Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society―and that we could do things differently.”

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get OutBy Amanda Ripley
From the back cover: “High conflict … is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side … Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.”

How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to BeBy Katy Milkman 
From the back cover: “In a career devoted to uncovering what helps people change, Milkman has discovered a crucial thing many of us get wrong: our strategy. Change, she's learned, comes most readily when you understand what's standing between you and success and tailor your solution to that roadblock.”
Read an excerpt of How to Change on Behavioral Scientist: “We found that encouraging people to copy and paste one another’s best life hacks motivated both more exercise and better class preparation in adults who wanted to work out more and college students seeking to improve their grades, respectively … When we’re unsure of ourselves, a powerful way the people around us can help boost our capacity and conﬁdence is by showing us what’s possible.”
Read our Q&A with the author: “I think there’s an overemphasis on big goals. It’s not that goals aren’t useful. There’s tons of research showing that having a certain kind of goal—a clear, concrete, achievable goal, or a stretch goal—really is valuable. But it’s not solving a problem … You still have to deal with the challenges of procrastination, temptation, forgetting, self-efficacy, and whether or not your peers are supporting you.” 

How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science That Will Help You Find LoveBy Logan Ury
From the back cover: “Great relationships don’t just appear in our lives—they’re the culmination of a series of decisions, including when to get out there, whom to date, how to end it with the wrong person, when to commit to the right one, and everything in between. But our brains often get in the way. We make poor decisions, which thwart us on our quest to find lasting love … Logan Ury reveals the hidden forces that cause those mistakes.”
Read our Q&A with the author: “Dating apps, unfortunately, perpetuate some of the superficiality, and people focus on those things more, as opposed to what they should be focusing on, the things that we know relationship science has found are correlated with long-term relationship success. Things like kindness, loyalty, emotional stability, the ability to make hard decisions together, a growth mindset. And, perhaps most importantly, what side of you they bring out.”

Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of PersuasionBy Robert B. Cialdini
From the back cover: “In the new edition … [Robert Cialdini] explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these insights ethically in business and everyday settings.”

Know Thyself: The Science of Self-AwarenessBy Stephen M. Fleming
From the back cover: “How do we know what we and others know—or as importantly, don’t know? As cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Fleming shows in Know Thyself, we do this with metacognition. Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, is the most important tool we have for understanding our own mind. Metacognition is an awesome power: It is what enables self-awareness as well as what lets us think about the minds of others. It is the ultimate human trait, and in its most rarefied forms is a power that neither other animals, nor our current artificial intelligences, have.”

Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide UsBy Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro
From the back cover: “Morson and Schapiro examine how rigid adherence to ideological thinking has altered politics, economics, religion, and literature in ways that are mutually reinforcing and antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that animate democracy. In response, they propose alternatives that would again make serious dialogue possible.”
Read our Q&A with the authors, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro: “Instead of professing that we believe in science, Morson explained, ‘We should respect the scientific method and the spirit behind it, which involves the careful weighing of evidence, testing ideas by those who doubt them, and arriving step by careful step at the best available answer, subject to revision in the light of future evidence.’”

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our LivesBy Michael Heller and James Salzman
From the back cover: “A hidden set of rules governs who owns what—explaining everything from whether you can recline your airplane seat to why HBO lets you borrow a password illegally—and in this lively and entertaining guide, two acclaimed law professors reveal how things become ‘mine.’”

The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with RobotsBy Kate Darling
From the back cover: “There has been a lot of ink devoted to discussions of how robots will replace us and take our jobs. But MIT Media Lab researcher and technology policy expert Kate Darling argues just the opposite, and that treating robots with a bit of humanity, more like the way we treat animals, will actually serve us better.”
Read our Q&A with the author: “It always bothered me that we are limiting ourselves and falling into this technological determinism that robots can, will, and should replace people, and I just feel like animals are such a salient analogy that everyone gets. [An animal] is also this autonomous thing that can sense, think, make decisions, and learn that we’ve dealt with previously.”

The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our PlanetBy Michael E. Mann
From the back cover: “Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we've been told can slow climate change. But the inordinate emphasis on individual behavior is the result of a marketing campaign that has succeeded in placing the responsibility for fixing climate change squarely on the shoulders of individuals.”
Read our Q&A with the author: “Those who are framing it as a tipping point we’ve crossed as if it’s too late to do anything—those narratives are steeped in distortions of the science that are almost as bad, if not as bad, as distortions of the science on the denialist side.”

Noise: A Flaw in Human JudgmentBy Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein
From the back cover: “In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.”
Read our Q&A with author Daniel Kahneman: “I’ve been studying bias all my life, but a few years ago encountered an instance of noise, and I was very impressed both by how much noise there was (among underwriters judging exactly the same thing) and mostly I was impressed by how little people knew about it.”

Nudge: The Final EditionBy Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
From the back cover: “The authors have rewritten the book from cover to cover, making use of their experiences in and out of government over the past dozen years as well as an explosion of new research in numerous academic disciplines. To commit themselves to never undertaking this daunting task again, they are calling this the ‘final edition.’ It offers a wealth of new insights, for both its avowed fans and newcomers to the field, about a wide variety of issues that we face in our daily lives—COVID-19, health, personal finance, retirement savings, credit card debt, home mortgages, medical care, organ donation, climate change, and ‘sludge’ (paperwork and other nuisances we don’t want, and that keep us from getting what we do want)—all while honoring one of the cardinal rules of nudging: make it fun!”
Read or watch our Q&A with author Richard Thaler: “The release of new Nudge provided the occasion for our recent conversation, but our conversation went beyond the book. We corrected the record on organ donation, he revealed why he wished the original subtitle included the phrase “choice architecture,” his thoughts on replication in behavioral economics, and what advice he’d give organizations looking to apply behavioral science.”

Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic WorldBy Nina Kraus
From the back cover: “Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs we ask our brains to do. In Of Sound Mind, Nina Kraus examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing for the first time that the processing of sound drives many of the brain's core functions. Our hearing is always on--we can't close our ears the way we close our eyes--and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don't just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brains when we hear a word--or a chord, or a meow, or a screech.”

The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social HarmonyBy Jay Van Bavel & Dominic Jay Packer
From the back cover: “If you're like most people, you probably believe that your identity is stable. But in fact, your identity is constantly changing—often outside your conscious awareness and sometimes even against your wishes—to reflect the interests of the groups you belong to. In The Power of Us, psychologists Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel integrate their own cutting-edge research in psychology and neuroscience to explain how identity really works and how to harness its dynamic nature”
Read an adaptation from The Power of Us on Behavioral Scientist: “A sense of common fate produces a shared identity, the knowledge that we, together, are part of a group. In turn, that shared identity produces solidarity and the ability to work together collectively. When they cohere, shared identities become foundations on which people can coordinate and cooperate. It allows them to face and overcome a crisis that might have been difficult to address alone.”

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It MattersBy Steven Pinker
From the back cover: “Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply irrational--cavemen out of time saddled with biases, fallacies, and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives, and set out the benchmarks for rationality itself.  We actually think in ways that are sensible in the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we’ve discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update beliefs and commit to choices individually and with others.”
Read an excerpt from Rationality on Behavioral Scientist: “The godlike host reminds us how exotic the Monty Hall problem is. It requires an omniscient being who defies the usual goal of a conversation—to share what the hearer needs to know (in this case, which door hides the car)—and instead pursues the goal of enhancing suspense among third parties. And unlike the world, whose clues are indifferent to our sleuthing, Monty Almighty knows the truth and knows our choice and picks his revelation accordingly.”

Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human ConnectionBy Marissa King
From the back cover: “Conventional wisdom says it’s the size of your network that matters, but social science research has proven there is more to it. King explains that the quality and structure of our relationships has the greatest impact on our personal and professional lives.”

The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the WorldBy Nichola Raihani
From the back cover: “[Nichola Raihani] reveals that the species that exhibit cooperative behavior—teaching, helping, grooming, and self-sacrifice—most similar to our own tend not to be other apes; they are birds, insects, and fish, occupying far more distant branches of the evolutionary tree. By understanding the problems they face, and how they cooperate to solve them, we can glimpse how human cooperation first evolved.”

Subtract: The Untapped Science of LessBy Leidy Klotz
From the back cover: “We pile on ‘to-dos’ but don’t consider ‘stop-doings.’ We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: we don’t subtract.”
Read an adaptation from Subtract on Behavioral Scientist: “Subtraction is the act of getting to less, but it is not the same as doing less. In fact, getting to less often means doing, or at least thinking, more.”

The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for MeaningBy Paul Bloom
From the back cover: “We are not natural hedonists—a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty—and worse than that, boring.”
Read an excerpt from The Sweet Spot on Behavioral Scientist: “Once you look for paradoxical reactions, you see them everywhere. We laugh at what’s funny, but we also laugh when anxious or embarrassed. We grin when happy, but sometimes we grin when angry. Smiling is associated with joy, but when researchers asked people to watch a sad movie scene—the part of Steel Magnolias where a woman is speaking at the funeral of her adult daughter—about half of the subjects smiled.”

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t KnowBy Adam Grant
From the back cover: “Too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard … [Grant] investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners.”
Read our Q&A with the author: “I do not want to have both-sides conversations anymore. Whenever somebody says, here’s the other side, my first question is, ‘Can you tell me what the third angle and the fourth look like?’”

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?By Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
From the back cover: “Engineers plan transport systems, people use them. But the ways in which an engineer measures success—speed, journey time, efficiency—are often not the way that passengers think about a good trip. We are not cargo. We choose how and when to travel, influenced not only by speed and time but by habit, status, comfort, variety—and many other factors that engineering equations don’t capture at all.”
Read an adaptation from Transport for Humans on Behavioral Scientist: The greatest fallacy is that travel time is wasted time, so the only option is to speed it up or cut it out. In reality, we need to invest in higher-quality travel for more people, while also enabling some people to travel less or by different means.

Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving BrainBy Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler 
From the back cover: “Everyone agrees that lies and self-deception can do terrible harm to our lives, to our communities, and to the planet. But in Useful Delusions, host of Hidden Brain Shankar Vedantam argues that, paradoxically, deceiving ourselves and others can also play a vital role in human success and well-being. The lies we tell each other and the lies that we tell ourselves sustain our daily interactions with friends, lovers, and coworkers. They explain why some people live longer than others, why some couples remain in love and others don’t, why some nations and tribes hold together while others splinter.”
Read an excerpt of Useful Delusions on Behavioral Scientist: “Rather than seek to annihilate self-deception and all it represents, a better goal would be to think carefully about what it does, and ask ourselves how we can work with it. In other words, we ought to care less about whether something is simply true or untrue and ask more complicated questions: What are the consequences of self-​deception? Whom does it serve? Do the benefits justify the costs?”

The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic PolarizationBy Peter T. Coleman
From the back cover: “Surveys show that Americans have become more fearful and hateful of supporters of the opposing political party and imagine that they hold much more extreme views than they actually do. We have cordoned ourselves off: we prefer to date and marry those with similar opinions and are less willing to spend time with people on the other side. How can we loosen the grip of this toxic polarization and start working on our most pressing problems?”
Read our Q&A with the author: "With the kinds of polarization that we’re in today . . . we have to understand them as complex systems that stabilize into strong patterns that resist change and even good faith attempts of changing them."

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Make Us Who We AreBy David M. Henkin
From the back cover: “Reconstructing how weekly patterns insinuated themselves into the social practices and mental habits of Americans, Henkin argues that the week is more than just a regimen of rest days or breaks from work, but a dominant organizational principle of modern society. Ultimately, the seven-day week shapes our understanding and experience of time.”

When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of SleepBy Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold
From the back cover: “When Brains Dream reveals recent discoveries about the sleeping brain and the many ways in which dreams are psychologically, and neurologically, meaningful experiences; explores a host of dream-related disorders; and explains how dreams can facilitate creativity and be a source of personal insight.”
Read our Q&A with author Robert Stickgold: “Salvador Dalí sat in an armchair with his hand on the arm of the chair. He’d hold a key right over the end of the chair and think about a painting he wanted to make. As he fell asleep, the key dropped and woke him up, and he got an image in his mind. He got these images that he then painted. [My colleague, Adam Horowitz,] wants to ask the question, can everybody harness it? And the answer is they probably can.”

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication OverloadBy Cal Newport
From the back cover: “We have become so used to an inbox-driven workday that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. But they do exist. Drawing on years of investigative reporting, author and computer science professor Cal Newport makes the case that our current approach to work is broken, then lays out a series of principles and concrete instructions for fixing it.”

You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It MattersBy Vanessa Bohns
From the back cover: “Whether attending a meeting, sharing a post online, or mustering the nerve to ask for a favor, we often assume our actions, input, and requests will be overlooked or rejected. Bohns and her work demonstrate that people see us, listen to us, and agree to do things for us much more than we realize―for better, and worse.”
Read an adaptation from You Have More Influence Than You Think on Behavioral Scientist: “While the times you’ve tried and failed to influence someone may loom large, there are undoubtedly far more examples of times you’ve influenced someone without trying at all—​and without ever seeing the influence you had. On the other hand, this also means there have likely been times you influenced someone unintentionally, in ways you may even wish you hadn’t.”

Disclosure: Leidy Klotz, Katy Milkman, and Dilip Soman are members of organizations which provided financial support to Behavioral Scientist in 2021. Richard Thaler and Emily Oster are members of the Behavioral Scientist's advisory board. Advisory board members and organizational donors do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine. Evan Nesterak of Behavioral Scientist served as an editorial consultant on the books Chatter and Subtract. All of the books on this list and covered on our site are independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. 
The post Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2021 appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that scientists should have more data by the middle of next week that will show how well the currently available vaccines stand up to the new variant, which is known to boast more than thirty mutations to the spike protein.

New data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)are indicating that the highly mutated omicron coronavirus variant that was first detected in southern Africa two weeks ago now has been found in more than fifty countries and nineteen states across the United States.

“While we are still working to understand the severity of omicron as well as how it responds to therapeutics and vaccines, we anticipate that all of the same measures will at least, in part, provide some protection against omicron,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky noted during a White House COVID-19 press briefing on Tuesday.

Jeff Zients, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, added that approximately 12.5 million vaccine shots were administered over the past week, seven million of which were boosters.

More Data Next Week

White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that scientists should have more data by the middle of next week that will show how well the currently available vaccines stand up to the new variant, which is known to boast more than thirty mutations to the spike protein. Those particular mutations could be potentially associated with a decrease in antibody protection and higher transmissibility rates.

“We’ll be able to determine whether or not antibodies induced by all vaccines lose their capability of effectiveness with omicron,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said during the briefing.

“In addition, we are doing animal studies to evaluate immune protection as well as efficacy of antivirals,” he added.

New data released over the weekend from South African researchers suggested that the variant might cause only mild disease, but Fauci cautioned that “this can be influenced by the fact that many in this particular cohort are young individuals.”

Heading to Endemic Phase

Meanwhile, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claimed that the omicron variant “extends the timeline” on when coronavirus will go from a pandemic to another virus that the world learns to live with.

“I still think this is going to be a transition year,” Gottlieb, a physician who worked at the FDA under former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush and now serves on the board of COVID vaccine maker Pfizer, told CNBC on Tuesday night.

It is likely we will “go from a pandemic into a more endemic phase,” he added.

Regarding the milder cases seen in South Africa, Gottlieb claimed that “the reason why you’re seeing less severe disease and fewer hospitalizations relative to cases is many people in South Africa had infection with delta. So, when they’re getting reinfected with this variant, maybe their delta immunity isn’t protective against infection but protecting them against symptomatic disease and severe outcomes.”

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters

Looking for a silver lining from COVID-19? Here’s one: Due to the pandemic, the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy will be online only. Why is that a good thing? Because it will minimize the amount of scarce presidential and staff time devoted to what is at best a secondary activity.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with convening the world’s existing democracies to discuss how to strengthen and advance liberal ideals. Indeed, one might even regard it as an urgent task in an era when democracy is under siege in many places and facing important challenges, such as social media, surveillance capitalism, and autocratic meddling. And you can’t blame U.S. President Joe Biden for wanting to deliver on a campaign pledge that doesn’t require him to engage in endless efforts to accommodate Sen. Joe Manchin.

Even so, one must still question the merits of pushing ahead with this idea right now. For starters, it’s still not clear what the ultimate objective of the gathering is. Is it supposed to yield tangible results—new commitments or programs with a measurable impact on the robustness of democracy worldwide—or is it going to be a talk-fest that eventually issues some pious proclamations but generates little substance? This is an important question because the real way to sell democracy—as Biden, himself, has stated—is to show that democratic societies can out-perform autocratic alternatives. That means delivering citizens more prosperous, secure, and satisfying lives while preserving the freedoms and civic virtues that true democracy depends on.

Unfortunately, the United States is not in the best position to lead this effort right now. The Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States to the category of “flawed democracy” before former U.S. President Donald Trump was elected, and nothing has happened to reverse that status. On the contrary: One of the United States’ two major political parties still refuses to accept that the 2020 presidential election was legitimate and is working overtime to erode democratic norms and rig future elections in its favor. Some Republicans are even whitewashing the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, treating it as little more than a prank by some overzealous patriots. That’s hardly the right look if you’re trying to lead a democratic revival.

Moreover, the list of participants is arbitrary and inconsistent. I can see why Hungary wasn’t invited, given Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s steady assault on liberal principles, but why include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose Freedom House democracy scores are lower than Hungary’s? Indeed, they are so low that Freedom House labels it “not free.” The inclusion of leaders, such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro or Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, should raise eyebrows as well: Both were democratically elected but have been openly dismissive of key democratic norms.

Viewed as a whole, the enterprise illustrates two recurring problems in U.S. foreign policy: the inability to set clear priorities and stick to them and a tendency to proclaim lofty goals and then to fail to deliver on them. A great power can pursue more than one objective at a time, of course, but it needs to recognize the trade-offs between them and know which goal comes first. It also needs to be careful not to take on too much because there will always be unexpected developments that eat up time, attention, and resources.

So what is the Biden administration’s main foreign-policy concern? If it thinks the chief danger today is “autocracy” in general and the threat it poses to the world’s democracies, then gathering the world’s democracies together for a pep talk and some forward-looking initiatives might make sense. But if defending democracy and human rights is the guiding star of U.S. foreign policy, then it should stop supporting authoritarian rulers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and instead distance itself from states veering in autocratic directions (like Turkey and Hungary) or systematically denying political rights to millions of people (like Israel and China). The summit’s guest list would be a lot smaller, but at least it would be ideologically consistent.

If the central problem today is a rising and increasingly assertive China, by contrast, then Washington can’t be so choosy about who its friends are. From a geostrategic perspective, welcoming Angola and snubbing Singapore seems rather shortsighted. If great-power politics is the main concern, expressing a strong preference for democracy could reduce U.S. influence in certain areas and provide China with the opportunity to cultivate countries that aren’t going to reorganize their political arrangements to make Uncle Sam happy. Although it may have been somewhat easier for the United States to work with its fellow democracies during the Cold War, being on good terms with anti-Soviet autocrats was often smart geopolitics as well. For that matter, the most valuable ally the United States ever had may have been Stalinist Russia, given the central role it played in defeating Nazi Germany. And Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer. My point is if China is the central challenge the United States faces today, emphasizing democracy may not be the best way to address it.

But what if problem No. 1 is actually a big global problem like climate change or the pandemic? If so, then U.S. foreign policy’s main task is to foster cooperation with countries of every sort instead of dividing the world into “good” and “bad” states, such as those whose political systems are like the United States’ versus those that aren’t. If that is Biden’s top priority, then a summit that quite consciously excludes a lot of big and important countries is likely to be counterproductive.

I may be too pessimistic. Maybe this online gathering is a necessary first step that will help the administration develop and implement a more effective democracy-support program in the years ahead. (The model here might be former U.S. President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Security summits, which did produce tangible and positive results.) Maybe an online pep talk is what everyone needs. If so, then future historians might look back on this meeting as the moment when the past 15 years’ anti-democratic tide finally turned. As someone who is grateful to live in a liberal society and continues to worry about its possible demise, I hope that is the case.

But there is a final danger: If the summit and its successors do not create real results, it will reinforce the perception that democracy itself is no longer fit for its purpose. I don’t think that is the case, but you can understand why some people think so given the recurring failures of the past 20 years and the pervasive corruption and lack of accountability within many democratic orders. A recurring criticism of U.S. politics is it is long on talk and short on action—and that elites are better at feathering their own nests and protecting their pals than they are at providing for the population as a whole.

And I can’t quite escape the lingering fear that this week’s summit is an unnecessary distraction. The best way to heal the United States’ ills—and they are serious—is to deliver voters real results. That’s also the best way to make democracy look appealing to citizens elsewhere and encourage them to want something similar for themselves. Deep down, I suspect most of the Americans who will cast ballots in the next election care more about jobs, COVID-19, economic security, education, and hot button issues like abortion or immigration than they do about whether corruption is going down in Malawi or Pakistan or if human rights are more or less respected in Malaysia. If the Biden administration can’t deliver in the United States—and the Republican Party has already shown it will do everything in its power to prevent him from making Americans better off—then he’ll be a one-term president, and either Trump or one of his clones will replace him. If that happens, the effort to revitalize democracy will come to a crashing halt, and we will look back on this summit as a well-intentioned but misguided waste of time.

There’s something about how we talk about race in America that strikes me as novel, which I get the feeling more and more Americans are coming to think of as ordinary: These days we’re told that race issues are not only urgent — racist ideology became “ascendant” during Donald Trump’s presidency, but also complex — race isn’t rocket science, “It’s so much more complicated.”

And in ways, the complexity entails what seems to be a self-contradictory quality.

For example, it’s considered a given that diversity on college campuses enhances the educational experience for all students. A 2019 entry on American University’s website says, “A more diverse university community opens all students up to a broader range of perspectives, helping them become better problem solvers and introducing them to new ways of thinking.” A 2015 report by Harvard University’s College Working Group on Diversity and Inclusion reads:

Harvard’s heterogeneous campus environment and pedagogical emphasis on intellectual cross-pollination is intended to inform the choices and habits Harvard graduates will carry into their respective spheres of influence. Therefore, Harvard embraces, and must constantly reaffirm, the notion that a richly diverse student body is essential to its pedagogical objectives and institutional mission.

But we’re also reminded, at intervals, that students of color sometimes consider it offensive when they’re expected to represent the “diverse” point of view in classes or interactions with their classmates. In 2007, one Harvard Crimson columnist chafed at “Being the token black person,” writing, “I am expected to be an authority on the lives of all black people.” This year a PopSugar article surveyed the challenges faced by Black students at predominantly white institutions, or P.W.I.s (the terminological analogue to historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s), including “a myriad of microaggressions that are exhausting to deal with” and carrying “the burden of representation when it comes to speaking about things from a historical context,” which is “exacerbated when they are the only Black student in their class.”

It can be hard to know where to go on that if diversity is a key component of a well-rounded education but an indefensible burden on the very people representing the diversity.

Another example: Sometimes Black television writers object — justifiably — to being ignored when white writers have Black characters doing and saying things that would be unrealistic coming from actual Black people living in a racist America. On a 1994 episode of the Black sitcom “Family Matters,” when the family’s teenage son comes home after being harassed by a white police officer, his father, a cop himself, asks him if he did anything to provoke the officer’s harassment. “Are you absolutely sure?” Sgt. Winslow (Reginald VelJohnson) asks his son, Edward (Darius McCrary). As The Atlantic’s Hannah Giorgis reported in September, Felicia Henderson, a Black woman who was then a writer on the show, recounted telling her white colleagues that no Black father, and especially not one who was a police officer, would have had that as a first response to his son’s version of events. Despite her skepticism, that line stayed in.

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.Even in defeat, Trump has gained strength for a second attempt to seize office, should he need to, after the polls close on November 5, 2024. It may appear otherwise—after all, he no longer commands the executive branch, which he tried and mostly failed to enlist in his first coup attempt. Yet the balance of power is shifting his way in arenas that matter more.Trump is successfully shaping the narrative of the insurrection in the only political ecosystem that matters to him. The immediate shock of the event, which briefly led some senior Republicans to break with him, has given way to a near-unanimous embrace. Virtually no one a year ago, certainly not I, predicted that Trump could compel the whole party’s genuflection to the Big Lie and the recasting of insurgents as martyrs. Today the few GOP dissenters are being cast out. “2 down, 8 to go!” Trump gloated at the retirement announcement of Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House Republicans to vote for his second impeachment.[From the November 2020 issue: Barton Gellman on the election that could break America]Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.At the edge of the Capitol grounds, just west of the reflecting pool, a striking figure stands in spit-shined shoes and a 10-button uniform coat. He is 6 foot 4, 61 years old, with chiseled good looks and an aura of command that is undimmed by retirement. Once, according to the silver bars on his collar, he held the rank of captain in the New York Fire Department. He is not supposed to wear the old uniform at political events, but he pays that rule no mind today. The uniform tells the world that he is a man of substance, a man who has saved lives and held authority. Richard C. Patterson needs every shred of that authority for this occasion. He has come to speak on behalf of an urgent cause. “Pelosi’s political prisoners,” he tells me, have been unjustly jailed.Patterson is talking about the men and women held on criminal charges after invading the Capitol on January 6. He does not at all approve of the word insurrection.“It wasn’t an insurrection,” he says at a September 18 rally called “Justice for January 6.” “None of our countrymen and -women who are currently being held are charged with insurrection. They’re charged with misdemeanor charges.”Patterson is misinformed on that latter point. Of the more than 600 defendants, 78 are in custody when we speak. Most of those awaiting trial in jail are charged with serious crimes such as assault on a police officer, violence with a deadly weapon, conspiracy, or unlawful possession of firearms or explosives. Jeffrey McKellop of Virginia, for instance, is alleged to have hurled a flagpole like a spear into an officer’s face. (McKellop has pleaded not guilty.)Patterson was not in Washington on January 6, but he is fluent in the revisionist narratives spread by fabulists and trolls on social media. He knows those stories verse by verse, the ones about January 6 and the ones about the election rigged against Trump. His convictions are worth examining because he and the millions of Americans who think as he does are the primary source of Trump’s power to corrupt the next election. With a sufficient dose of truth serum, most Republican politicians would likely confess that Biden won in 2020, but the great mass of lumpen Trumpers, who believe the Big Lie with unshakable force, oblige them to pretend otherwise. Like so many others, Patterson is doing his best to parse a torrential flow of political information, and he is failing. His failures leave him, nearly always, with the worldview expounded by Trump.We fall into a long conversation in the sweltering heat, then continue it for weeks by phone and email. I want to plumb the depths of his beliefs, and understand what lies behind his commitment to them. He is prepared to grant me the status of “fellow truth-seeker.”“The ‘Stop the Steal’ rally for election integrity was peaceful,” he says. “I think the big takeaway is when Old Glory made its way into the Rotunda on January 6, our fearless public officials dove for cover at the sight of the American flag.”What about the violence? The crowds battling police?“The police were seen on video in uniform allowing people past the bicycle-rack barricades and into the building,” he replies. “I mean, that’s established. The unarmed crowd did not overpower the officers in body armor. That doesn’t happen. They were allowed in.”Surely he has seen other video, though. Shaky, handheld footage, taken by the rioters themselves, of police officers falling under blows from a baseball bat, a hockey stick, a fire extinguisher, a length of pipe. A crowd crushing Officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, shouting “Heave! Ho!”Does Patterson know that January 6 was among the worst days for law-enforcement casualties since September 11, 2001? That at least 151 officers from the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, chemical burns, and a Taser-induced heart attack?Patterson has not heard these things. Abruptly, he shifts gears. Maybe there was violence, but the patriots were not to blame.
In the mayhem of January 6, at least 151 police officers suffered injuries, including broken bones, concussions, and chemical burns. Above: A law-enforcement officer is attacked. (Mel D. Cole)
“There were people there deliberately to make it look worse than what it was,” he explains. “A handful of ill-behaved, potentially, possibly agents provocateur.” He repeats the phrase: “Agents provocateur, I have on information, were in the crowd … They were there for nefarious means. Doing the bidding of whom? I have no idea.”“‘On information’?” I ask. What information?“You can look up this name,” he says. “Retired three-star Air Force General McInerney. You got to find him on Rumble. They took him off YouTube.”Sure enough, there on Rumble (and still on YouTube) I find a video of Lieutenant General Thomas G. McInerney, 84, three decades gone from the Air Force. His story takes a long time to tell, because the plot includes an Italian satellite and Pakistan’s intelligence service and former FBI Director James Comey selling secret U.S. cyberweapons to China. Eventually it emerges that “Special Forces mixed with antifa” combined to invade the seat of Congress on January 6 and then blame the invasion on Trump supporters, with the collusion of Senators Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.In a further wrinkle, Pelosi, by McInerney’s account, became “frantic” soon afterward when she discovered that her own false-flag operation had captured a laptop filled with evidence of her treason. McInerney had just come from the White House, he says in his monologue, recorded two days after the Capitol riot. Trump was about to release the Pelosi evidence. McInerney had seen the laptop with his own eyes.It shook me that Patterson took this video for proof. If my house had caught fire 10 years before, my life might have depended on his discernment and clarity of thought. He was an Eagle Scout. He earned a college degree. He keeps current on the news. And yet he has wandered off from the empirical world, placing his faith in fantastic tales that lack any basis in fact or explicable logic.McInerney’s tale had spread widely on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, and propaganda sites like We Love Trump and InfoWars. It joined the January 6 denialist canon and lodged firmly in Patterson’s head. I reached the general by phone and asked about evidence for his claims. He mentioned a source, whose name he couldn’t reveal, who had heard some people saying “We are playing antifa today.” McInerney believed they were special operators because “they looked like SOF people.” He believed that one of them had Pelosi’s laptop, because his source had seen something bulky and square under the suspect’s raincoat. He conceded that even if it was a laptop, he couldn’t know whose it was or what was on it. For most of his story, McInerney did not even claim to have proof. He was putting two and two together. It stood to reason. In truth, prosecutors had caught and charged a neo-Nazi sympathizer who had videotaped herself taking the laptop from Pelosi’s office and bragged about it on Discord. She was a home health aide, not a special operator. (As of this writing, she has not yet entered a plea.)The general’s son, Thomas G. McInerney Jr., a technology investor, learned that I had been talking with his father and asked for a private word with me. He was torn between conflicting obligations of filial loyalty, and took a while to figure out what he wanted to say.“He has a distinguished service record,” he told me after an otherwise off-the-record conversation. “He wants what’s best for the nation and he speaks with a sense of authority, but I have concerns at his age that his judgment is impaired. The older he’s gotten, the stranger things have gotten in terms of what he’s saying.”I tell all of this and more to Patterson. McInerney, the Military Times reported, “went off the rails” after a successful Air Force career. For a while during the Obama years he was a prominent birther and appeared a lot on Fox News, before being fired as a Fox commentator in 2018 for making a baseless claim about John McCain. Last November, he told the WVW Broadcast Network that the CIA operated a computer-server farm in Germany that had helped rig the presidential vote for Biden, and that five Special Forces soldiers had just died trying to seize the evidence. The Army and U.S. Special Operations Command put out dutiful statements that no such mission and no such casualties had taken place.Of course, Patterson wrote to me sarcastically, “governments would NEVER lie to their OWN citizens.” He did not trust the Pentagon’s denials. There are seldom words or time enough to lay a conspiracy theory to rest. Each rebuttal is met with a fresh round of delusions.Patterson is admirably eager for a civil exchange of views. He portrays himself as a man who “may be wrong, and if I am I admit it,” and he does indeed concede on small points. But a deep rage seems to fuel his convictions. I asked him the first time we met if we could talk “about what’s happening in the country, not the election itself.”His smile faded. His voice rose.“There ain’t no fucking way we are letting go of 3 November 2020,” he said. “That is not going to fucking happen. That’s not happening. This motherfucker was stolen. The world knows this bumbling, senile, career corrupt fuck squatting in our White House did not get 81 million votes.”He had many proofs. All he really needed, though, was arithmetic. “The record indicates 141 [million] of us were registered to vote and cast a ballot on November 3,” he said. “Trump is credited with 74 million votes out of 141 million. That leaves 67 million for Joe; that doesn’t leave any more than that. Where do these 14 million votes come from?”Patterson did not recall where he had heard those figures. He did not think he had read Gateway Pundit, which was the first site to advance the garbled statistics. Possibly he saw Trump amplify the claim on Twitter or television, or some other stop along the story’s cascading route across the right-wing mediaverse. Reuters did a good job debunking the phony math, which got the total number of voters wrong.
Richard Patterson, a retired firefighter, in the Bronx. Like tens of millions of other Trump supporters, Patterson firmly believes that the 2020 election was stolen. (Philip Montgomery for The Atlantic)
I was interested in something else: the worldview that guided Patterson through the statistics. It appeared to him (incorrectly) that not enough votes had been cast to account for the official results. Patterson assumed that only fraud could explain the discrepancy, that all of Trump’s votes were valid, and that the invalid votes must therefore belong to Biden.“Why don’t you say Joe Biden got 81 million and there’s only 60 million left for Trump?” I asked.Patterson was astonished.“It’s not disputed, the 74 million vote count that was credited to President Trump’s reelection effort,” he replied, baffled at my ignorance. “It’s not in dispute … Have you heard that President Trump engaged in cheating and fraudulent practices and crooked machines?”Biden was the one accused of rigging the vote. Everybody said so. And for reasons unspoken, Patterson wanted to be carried away by that story.Robert A. Pape, a well-credentialed connoisseur of political violence, watched the mob attack the Capitol on a television at home on January 6. A name came unbidden to his mind: Slobodan Milošević.Back in June 1989, Pape had been a postdoctoral fellow in political science when the late president of Serbia delivered a notorious speech. Milošević compared Muslims in the former Yugoslavia to Ottomans who had enslaved the Serbs six centuries before. He fomented years of genocidal war that destroyed the hope for a multiethnic democracy, casting Serbs as defenders against a Muslim onslaught on “European culture, religion, and European society in general.”By the time Trump unleashed the angry crowd on Congress, Pape, who is 61, had become a leading scholar on the intersection of warfare and politics. He saw an essential similarity between Milošević and Trump—one that suggested disturbing hypotheses about Trump’s most fervent supporters. Pape, who directs the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats, or CPOST, called a staff meeting two days after the Capitol attack. “I talked to my research team and told them we were going to reorient everything we were doing,” he told me.Milošević, Pape said, inspired bloodshed by appealing to fears that Serbs were losing their dominant place to upstart minorities. “What he is arguing” in the 1989 speech “is that Muslims in Kosovo and generally throughout the former Yugoslavia are essentially waging genocide on the Serbs,” Pape said. “And really, he doesn’t use the word replaced. But this is what the modern term would be.”Pape was alluding to a theory called the “Great Replacement.” The term itself has its origins in Europe. But the theory is the latest incarnation of a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants, and the rise of nonwhite citizens, to take power from white Christian people of European stock. When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”Trump borrowed periodically from the rhetorical canon of replacement. His remarks on January 6 were more disciplined than usual for a president who typically spoke in tangents and unfinished thoughts. Pape shared with me an analysis he had made of the text that Trump read from his prompter.“Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period,” Trump told the crowd. “You’re the real people. You’re the people that built this nation.” He famously added, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”Just like Milošević, Trump had skillfully deployed three classic themes of mobilization to violence, Pape wrote: “The survival of a way of life is at stake. The fate of the nation is being determined now. Only genuine brave patriots can save the country.”Watching how the Great Replacement message was resonating with Trump supporters, Pape and his colleagues suspected that the bloodshed on January 6 might augur something more than an aberrant moment in American politics. The prevailing framework for analyzing extremist violence in the U.S., they thought, might not be adequate to explain what was happening.When the Biden administration published a new homeland-security strategy in June, it described the assault on the Capitol as a product of “domestic violent extremists,” and invoked an intelligence assessment that said attacks by such extremists come primarily from lone wolves or small cells. Pape and his colleagues doubted that this captured what had happened on January 6. They set about seeking systematic answers to two basic questions: Who were the insurgents, in demographic terms? And what political beliefs animated them and their sympathizers?Pape’s three-bedroom house, half an hour’s drive south of Chicago, became the pandemic headquarters of a virtual group of seven research professionals, supported by two dozen University of Chicago undergraduates. The CPOST researchers gathered court documents, public records, and news reports to compile a group profile of the insurgents.“The thing that got our attention first was the age,” Pape said. He had been studying violent political extremists in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East for decades. Consistently, around the world, they tended to be in their 20s and early 30s. Among the January 6 insurgents, the median age was 41.8. That was wildly atypical.Then there were economic anomalies. Over the previous decade, one in four violent extremists arrested by the FBI had been unemployed. But only 7 percent of the January 6 insurgents were jobless, and more than half of the group had a white-collar job or owned their own business. There were doctors, architects, a Google field-operations specialist, the CEO of a marketing firm, a State Department official. “The last time America saw middle-class whites involved in violence was the expansion of the second KKK in the 1920s,” Pape told me.Yet these insurgents were not, by and large, affiliated with known extremist groups. Several dozen did have connections with the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, or the Three Percenters militia, but a larger number—six out of every seven who were charged with crimes—had no ties like that at all.Kathleen Belew, a University of Chicago historian and co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy, says it is no surprise that extremist groups were in the minority. “January 6 wasn’t designed as a mass-casualty attack, but rather as a recruitment action” aimed at mobilizing the general population, she told me. “For radicalized Trump supporters … I think it was a protest event that became something bigger.”Pape’s team mapped the insurgents by home county and ran statistical analyses looking for patterns that might help explain their behavior. The findings were counterintuitive. Counties won by Trump in the 2020 election were less likely than counties won by Biden to send an insurrectionist to the Capitol. The higher Trump’s share of votes in a county, in fact, the lower the probability that insurgents lived there. Why would that be? Likewise, the more rural the county, the fewer the insurgents. The researchers tried a hypothesis: Insurgents might be more likely to come from counties where white household income was dropping. Not so. Household income made no difference at all.Only one meaningful correlation emerged. Other things being equal, insurgents were much more likely to come from a county where the white share of the population was in decline. For every one-point drop in a county’s percentage of non-Hispanic whites from 2015 to 2019, the likelihood of an insurgent hailing from that county increased by 25 percent. This was a strong link, and it held up in every state.Trump and some of his most vocal allies, Tucker Carlson of Fox News notably among them, had taught supporters to fear that Black and brown people were coming to replace them. According to the latest census projections, white Americans will become a minority, nationally, in 2045. The insurgents could see their majority status slipping before their eyes.The CPOST team decided to run a national opinion survey in March, based on themes it had gleaned from the social-media posts of insurgents and the statements they’d made to the FBI under questioning. The researchers first looked to identify people who said they “don’t trust the election results” and were prepared to join a protest “even if I thought the protest might turn violent.” The survey found that 4 percent of Americans agreed with both statements, a relatively small fraction that nonetheless corresponds to 10 million American adults.In June, the researchers sharpened the questions. This brought another surprise. In the new poll, they looked for people who not only distrusted the election results but agreed with the stark assertion that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president.” And instead of asking whether survey subjects would join a protest that “might” turn violent, they looked for people who affirmed that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency.”
“Stop the Steal” protesters in Detroit on November 6, 2020. Republican county authorities later attempted to rescind their votes to certify Detroit’s election results. (Philip Montgomery)
Pollsters ordinarily expect survey respondents to give less support to more transgressive language. “The more you asked pointed questions about violence, the more you should be getting ‘social-desirability bias,’ where people are just more reluctant,” Pape told me.Here, the opposite happened: the more extreme the sentiments, the greater the number of respondents who endorsed them. In the June results, just over 8 percent agreed that Biden was illegitimate and that violence was justified to restore Trump to the White House. That corresponds to 21 million American adults. Pape called them “committed insurrectionists.” (An unrelated Public Religion Research Institute survey on November 1 found that an even larger proportion of Americans, 12 percent, believed both that the election had been stolen from Trump and that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”)Why such a large increase? Pape believed that Trump supporters simply preferred the harsher language, but “we cannot rule out that attitudes hardened” between the first and second surveys. Either interpretation is troubling. The latter, Pape said, “would be even more concerning since over time we would normally think passions would cool.”In the CPOST polls, only one other statement won overwhelming support among the 21 million committed insurrectionists. Almost two-thirds of them agreed that “African American people or Hispanic people in our country will eventually have more rights than whites.” Slicing the data another way: Respondents who believed in the Great Replacement theory, regardless of their views on anything else, were nearly four times as likely as those who did not to support the violent removal of the president.The committed insurrectionists, Pape judged, were genuinely dangerous. There were not many militia members among them, but more than one in four said the country needed groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. One-third of them owned guns, and 15 percent had served in the military. All had easy access to the organizing power of the internet.What Pape was seeing in these results did not fit the government model of lone wolves and small groups of extremists. “This really is a new, politically violent mass movement,” he told me. “This is collective political violence.”Pape drew an analogy to Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, at the dawn of the Troubles. “In 1968, 13 percent of Catholics in Northern Ireland said that the use of force for Irish nationalism was justified,” he said. “The IRA was created shortly thereafter with only a few hundred members.” Decades of bloody violence followed. And 13 percent support was more than enough, in those early years, to sustain it.“It’s the community’s support that is creating a mantle of legitimacy—a mandate, if you would, that justifies the violence” of a smaller, more committed group, Pape said. “I’m very concerned it could happen again, because what we’re seeing in our surveys … is 21 million people in the United States who are essentially a mass of kindling or a mass of dry wood that, if married to a spark, could in fact ignite.”The story of Richard Patterson, once you delve into it, is consonant with Pape’s research. Trump appealed to him as an “in-your-face, brash ‘America First’ guy who has the interest of ‘We the People.’ ” But there was more. Decades of personal and political grudges infuse Patterson’s understanding of what counts as “America” and who counts as “we.”Where Patterson lives, in the Bronx, there were 20,413 fewer non-Hispanic white people in the 2020 census than in 2010. The borough had reconfigured from 11 percent white to 9 percent.Patterson came from Northern Irish stock and grew up in coastal Northern California. He was a “lifetime C student” who found ambition at age 14 when he began to hang around at a local fire station. As soon as he finished high school he took the test to join the Oakland fire department, earning, he said, outstanding scores.“But in those days,” he recalled, “Oakland was just beginning to diversify and hire females. So no job for the big white kid.” The position went to “this little woman … who I know failed the test.”Patterson tried again in San Francisco, but found the department operating under a consent decree. Women and people of color, long excluded, had to be accepted in the incoming cohort. “So, again, the big white kid is told, ‘Fuck you, we got a whole fire department of guys that look just like you. We want the department to look different because diversity is all about an optic.’ ” The department could hire “the Black applicant instead of myself.”Patterson bought a one-way ticket to New York, earned a bachelor’s degree in fire science, and won an offer to join New York’s Bravest. But desegregation had come to New York, too, and Patterson found himself seething.In 1982, a plaintiff named Brenda Berkman had won a lawsuit that opened the door to women in the FDNY. A few years later, the department scheduled training sessions “to assist male firefighters in coming to terms with the assimilation of females into their ranks.” Patterson’s session did not go well. He was suspended without pay for 10 days after a judge found that he had called the trainer a scumbag and a Communist and chased him out of the room, yelling, “Why don’t you fuck Brenda Berkman and I hope you both die of AIDS.” The judge found that the trainer had “reasonably feared for his safety.” Patterson continues to maintain his innocence.Later, as a lieutenant, Patterson came across a line on a routine form that asked for his gender and ethnicity. He resented that. “There was no box for ‘Fuck off,’ so I wrote in ‘Fuck off,’ ” he said. “So they jammed me up for that”—this time a 30-day suspension without pay.Even while Patterson rose through the ranks, he kept on finding examples of how the world was stacked against people like him. “I look at the 2020 election as sort of an example on steroids of affirmative action. The straight white guy won, but it was stolen from him and given to somebody else.”Wait. Wasn’t this a contest between two straight white guys?Not really, Patterson said, pointing to Vice President Kamala Harris: “Everybody touts the gal behind the president, who is currently, I think, illegitimately in our White House. It is, quote, a woman of color, like this is some—like this is supposed to mean something.” And do not forget, he added, that Biden said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.”What to do about all this injustice? Patterson did not want to say, but he alluded to an answer: “Constitutionally, the head of the executive branch can’t tell an American citizen what the fuck to do. Constitutionally, all the power rests with the people. That’s you and me, bro. And Mao is right that all the power emanates from the barrel of a gun.”Did he own a gun himself? “My Second Amendment rights, like my medical history, are my own business,” he replied.Many of Patterson’s fellow travelers at the “Justice for January 6” protest were more direct about their intentions. One of them was a middle-aged man who gave his name as Phil. The former Coast Guard rescue diver from Kentucky had joined the crowd at the Capitol on January 6 but said he has not heard from law enforcement. Civil war is coming, he told me, and “I would fight for my country.”Was he speaking metaphorically?“No, I’m not,” he said. “Oh Lord, I think we’re heading for it. I don’t think it’ll stop. I truly believe it. I believe the criminals—Nancy Pelosi and her criminal cabal up there—is forcing a civil war. They’re forcing the people who love the Constitution, who will give their lives to defend the Constitution—the Democrats are forcing them to take up arms against them, and God help us all.”Gregory Dooner, who was selling flags at the protest, said he had been just outside the Capitol on January 6 as well. He used to sell ads for AT&T Advertising Solutions, and now, in retirement, he peddles MAGA gear: $10 for a small flag, $20 for a big one.Violent political conflict, he told me, was inevitable, because Trump’s opponents “want actual war here in America. That’s what they want.” He added a slogan of the Three Percenters militia: “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.” The Declaration of Independence, which said something like that, was talking about King George III. If taken seriously today, the slogan calls for a war of liberation against the U.S. government.“Yo, hey—hey,” Dooner called out to a customer who had just unfurled one of his banners. “I want to read him the flag.”
Protesters rally in Michigan in the days after the election. (Philip Montgomery)
He recited the words inscribed on the Stars and Stripes: “A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”“George Washington wrote that,” he said. “That’s where we’re at, gentlemen.”I looked it up. George Washington did not write anything like that. The flag was Dooner’s best seller, even so.Over the course of Trump’s presidency, one of the running debates about the man boiled down to: menace or clown? Threat to the republic, or authoritarian wannabe who had no real chance of breaking democracy’s restraints? Many observers rejected the dichotomy—the essayist Andrew Sullivan, for instance, described the former president as “both farcical and deeply dangerous.” But during the interregnum between November 3 and Inauguration Day, the political consensus leaned at first toward farce. Biden had won. Trump was breaking every norm by refusing to concede, but his made-up claims of fraud were getting him nowhere.In a column headlined “There Will Be No Trump Coup,” the New York Times writer Ross Douthat had predicted, shortly before Election Day, that “any attempt to cling to power illegitimately will be a theater of the absurd.” He was responding in part to my warning in these pages that Trump could wreak great harm in such an attempt.[The Ticket podcast: Barton Gellman on how Trump could tamper with the 2020 vote]One year later, Douthat looked back. In scores of lawsuits, “a variety of conservative lawyers delivered laughable arguments to skeptical judges and were ultimately swatted down,” he wrote, and state election officials warded off Trump’s corrupt demands. My own article, Douthat wrote, had anticipated what Trump tried to do. “But at every level he was rebuffed, often embarrassingly, and by the end his plotting consisted of listening to charlatans and cranks proposing last-ditch ideas” that could never succeed.Douthat also looked ahead, with guarded optimism, to the coming presidential election. There are risks of foul play, he wrote, but “Trump in 2024 will have none of the presidential powers, legal and practical, that he enjoyed in 2020 but failed to use effectively in any shape or form.” And “you can’t assess Trump’s potential to overturn an election from outside the Oval Office unless you acknowledge his inability to effectively employ the powers of that office when he had them.”That, I submit respectfully, is a profound misunderstanding of what mattered in the coup attempt a year ago. It is also a dangerous underestimate of the threat in 2024—which is larger, not smaller, than it was in 2020.It is true that Trump tried and failed to wield his authority as commander in chief and chief law-enforcement officer on behalf of the Big Lie. But Trump did not need the instruments of office to sabotage the electoral machinery. It was citizen Trump—as litigant, as candidate, as dominant party leader, as gifted demagogue, and as commander of a vast propaganda army—who launched the insurrection and brought the peaceful transfer of power to the brink of failure.All of these roles are still Trump’s for the taking. In nearly every battle space of the war to control the count of the next election—statehouses, state election authorities, courthouses, Congress, and the Republican Party apparatus—Trump’s position has improved since a year ago.To understand the threat today, you have to see with clear eyes what happened, what is still happening, after the 2020 election. The charlatans and cranks who filed lawsuits and led public spectacles on Trump’s behalf were sideshows. They distracted from the main event: a systematic effort to nullify the election results and then reverse them. As milestones passed—individual certification by states, the meeting of the Electoral College on December 14—Trump’s hand grew weaker. But he played it strategically throughout. The more we learn about January 6, the clearer the conclusion becomes that it was the last gambit in a soundly conceived campaign—one that provides a blueprint for 2024.The strategic objective of nearly every move by the Trump team after the networks called the election for Joe Biden on November 7 was to induce Republican legislatures in states that Biden won to seize control of the results and appoint Trump electors instead. Every other objective—in courtrooms, on state election panels, in the Justice Department, and in the office of the vice president—was instrumental to that end.Electors are the currency in a presidential contest and, under the Constitution, state legislators control the rules for choosing them. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the 19th century, every state has ceded the choice to its voters, automatically certifying electors who support the victor at the polls, but in Bush v. Gore the Supreme Court affirmed that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” No court has ever said that a state could do that after its citizens have already voted, but that was the heart of Trump’s plan.Every path to stealing the election required GOP legislatures in at least three states to repudiate the election results and substitute presidential electors for Trump. That act alone would not have ensured Trump’s victory. Congress would have had to accept the substitute electors when it counted the votes, and the Supreme Court might have had a say. But without the state legislatures, Trump had no way to overturn the verdict of the voters.Trump needed 38 electors to reverse Biden’s victory, or 37 for a tie that would throw the contest to the House of Representatives. For all his improvisation and flailing in the postelection period, Trump never lost sight of that goal. He and his team focused on obtaining the required sum from among the 79 electoral votes in Arizona (11), Georgia (16), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), Pennsylvania (20), and Wisconsin (10).Trump had many tactical setbacks. He and his advocates lost 64 of 65 challenges to election results in court, and many of them were indeed comically inept. His intimidation of state officials, though it also failed in the end, was less comical. Trump was too late, barely, to strong-arm Republican county authorities into rejecting Detroit’s election tally (they tried and failed to rescind their “yes” votes after the fact), and Aaron Van Langevelde, the crucial Republican vote on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, stood up to Trump’s pressure to block certification of the statewide results. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused the president’s request to “find” 11,780 votes for Trump after two recounts confirming Biden’s win. Two Republican governors, in Georgia and Arizona, signed certificates of Biden’s victory; the latter did so even as a telephone call from Trump rang unanswered in his pocket. The acting attorney general stared down Trump’s plan to replace him with a subordinate, Jeffrey B. Clark, who was prepared to send a letter advising the Georgia House and Senate to reconsider their state’s election results.[Read: How close did the U.S. come to a successful coup?]Had Trump succeeded in any of these efforts, he would have given Republican state legislators a credible excuse to meddle; one success might have led to a cascade. Trump used judges, county boards, state officials, and even his own Justice Department as stepping-stones to his ultimate target: Republican legislators in swing states. No one else could give him what he wanted.Even as these efforts foundered, the Trump team achieved something crucial and enduring by convincing tens of millions of angry supporters, including a catastrophic 68 percent of all Republicans in a November PRRI poll, that the election had been stolen from Trump. Nothing close to this loss of faith in democracy has happened here before. Even Confederates recognized Abraham Lincoln’s election; they tried to secede because they knew they had lost. Delegitimating Biden’s victory was a strategic win for Trump—then and now—because the Big Lie became the driving passion of the voters who controlled the fate of Republican legislators, and Trump’s fate was in the legislators’ hands.
A woman bears a flag inscribed with the Second Amendment at a gun-rights rally in Virginia in 2020. (Philip Montgomery)
Even so, three strategic points of failure left Trump in dire straits in the days before January 6.First, although Trump won broad rhetorical support from state legislators for his fictitious claims of voter fraud, they were reluctant to take the radical, concrete step of nullifying the votes of their own citizens. Despite enormous pressure, none of the six contested states put forward an alternate slate of electors for Trump. Only later, as Congress prepared to count the electoral votes, did legislators in some of those states begin talking unofficially about “decertifying” the Biden electors.The second strategic point of failure for Trump was Congress, which had the normally ceremonial role of counting the electoral votes. In the absence of action by state legislatures, the Trump team had made a weak attempt at a fallback, arranging for Republicans in each of the six states to appoint themselves “electors” and transmit their “ballots” for Trump to the president of the Senate. Trump would have needed both chambers of Congress to approve his faux electors and hand him the presidency. Republicans controlled only the Senate, but that might have enabled Trump to create an impasse in the count. The trouble there was that fewer than a dozen Republican senators were on board.Trump’s third strategic setback was his inability, despite all expectations, to induce his loyal No. 2 to go along. Vice President Mike Pence would preside over the Joint Session of Congress to count the electoral votes, and in a memo distributed in early January, Trump’s legal adviser John Eastman claimed, on “very solid legal authority,” that Pence himself “does the counting, including the resolution of disputed electoral votes … and all the Members of Congress can do is watch.” If Congress would not crown Trump president, in other words, Pence could do it himself. And if Pence would not do that, he could simply disregard the time limits for debate under the Electoral Count Act and allow Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz to filibuster. “That creates a stalemate,” Eastman wrote, “that would give the state legislatures more time.”Time. The clock was ticking. Several of Trump’s advisers, Rudy Giuliani among them, told allies that friendly legislatures were on the brink of convening special sessions to replace their Biden electors. The Trump conspiracy had made nowhere near that much progress, in fact, but Giuliani was saying it could be done in “five to 10 days.” If Congress went ahead with the count on January 6, it would be too late.On the afternoon of January 5, Sidney Powell—she of the “Kraken” lawsuits, for which she would later be sanctioned in one court and sued in another—prepared an emergency motion addressed to Justice Samuel Alito. The motion, entered into the Supreme Court docket the next day, would go largely unnoticed by the media and the public amid the violence of January 6; few have heard of it even now. But it was Plan A to buy Trump some time.Alito was the circuit justice for the Fifth Circuit, where Powell, on behalf of Representative Louie Gohmert, had sued to compel Mike Pence to take charge of validating electors, disregarding the statutory role of Congress. The vice president had “exclusive authority and sole discretion as to which set of electors to count or even whether to count no set of electors,” Powell wrote. The Electoral Count Act, which says quite otherwise, was unconstitutional.Powell did not expect Alito to rule on the merits immediately. She asked him to enter an emergency stay of the electoral count and schedule briefs on the constitutional claim. If Alito granted the stay, the clock on the election would stop and Trump would gain time to twist more arms in state legislatures.Late in the same afternoon, January 5, Steve Bannon sat behind a microphone for his live War Room show, backswept gray hair spilling from his headphones to the epaulets on a khaki field jacket. He was talking, not very guardedly, about Trump’s Plan B to buy time the next day.“The state legislatures are the center of gravity” of the fight, he said, because “people are going back to the original interpretation of the Constitution.”And there was big news: The Republican leaders of the Pennsylvania Senate, who had resisted pressure from Trump to nullify Biden’s victory, had just signed their names to a letter averring that the commonwealth’s election results “should not have been certified by our Secretary of State.” (Bannon thanked his viewers for staging protests at those legislators’ homes in recent days.) The letter, addressed to Republican leaders in Congress, went on to “ask that you delay certification of the Electoral College to allow due process as we pursue election integrity in our Commonwealth.”For weeks, Rudy Giuliani had starred in spurious “fraud” hearings in states where Biden had won narrowly. “After all these hearings,” Bannon exulted on air, “we finally have a state legislature … that is moving.” More states, the Trump team hoped, would follow Pennsylvania’s lead.Meanwhile, the Trumpers would use the new letter as an excuse for putting off a statutory requirement to count the electoral votes “on the sixth day of January.” Senator Cruz and several allies proposed an “emergency” 10-day delay, ostensibly for an audit.This was a lawless plan on multiple grounds. While the Constitution gives state legislatures the power to select electors, it does not provide for “decertifying” electors after they have cast their ballots in the Electoral College, which had happened weeks before. Even if Republicans had acted earlier, they could not have dismissed electors by writing a letter. Vanishingly few legal scholars believed that a legislature could appoint substitute electors by any means after voters had made their choice. And the governing statute, the Electoral Count Act, had no provision for delay past January 6, emergency or otherwise. Trump’s team was improvising at this point, hoping that it could make new law in court, or that legal niceties would be overwhelmed by events. If Pence or the Republican-controlled Senate had fully backed Trump’s maneuver, there is a chance that they might in fact have produced a legal stalemate that the incumbent could have exploited to stay in power.Above all else, Bannon knew that Trump had to stop the count, which was set to begin at 1 p.m. the next day. If Pence would not stop it and Alito did not come through, another way would have to be found.“Tomorrow morning, look, what’s going to happen, we’re going to have at the Ellipse—President Trump speaks at 11,” Bannon said, summoning his posse to turn up when the gates opened at 7 a.m. Bannon would be back on air in the morning with “a lot more news and analysis of exactly what’s going to go on through the day.”Then a knowing smile crossed Bannon’s face. He swept a palm in front of him, and he said the words that would capture attention, months later, from a congressional select committee.“I’ll tell you this,” Bannon said. “It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. Okay, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in.” Earlier the same day, he had predicted, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”Bannon signed off at 6:58 p.m. Later that night he turned up in another war room, this one a suite at the Willard Hotel, across the street from the White House. He and others in Trump’s close orbit, including Eastman and Giuliani, had been meeting there for days. Congressional investigators have been deploying subpoenas and the threat of criminal sanctions—Bannon has been indicted for contempt of Congress—to discover whether they were in direct contact with the “Stop the Steal” rally organizers and, if so, what they planned together.Shortly after Bannon signed off, a 6-foot-3-inch mixed martial artist named Scott Fairlamb responded to his call. Fairlamb, who fought under the nickname “Wildman,” reposted Bannon’s war cry to Facebook: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, after driving before dawn from New Jersey to Washington, he posted again: “How far are you willing to go to defend our Constitution?” Fairlamb, then 43, answered the question for his own part a few hours later at the leading edge of a melee on the West Terrace of the Capitol—seizing a police baton and later punching an officer in the face. “What patriots do? We fuckin’ disarm them and then we storm the fuckin’ Capitol!” he screamed at fellow insurgents.Less than an hour earlier, at 1:10 p.m., Trump had finished speaking and directed the crowd toward the Capitol. The first rioters breached the building at 2:11 p.m. through a window they shattered with a length of lumber and a stolen police shield. About one minute later, Fairlamb burst through the Senate Wing Door brandishing the baton, a teeming mob behind him. (Fairlamb pleaded guilty to assaulting an officer and other charges.)Another minute passed, and then without warning, at 2:13, a Secret Service detail pulled Pence away from the Senate podium, hustling him out through a side door and down a short stretch of hallway.Pause for a moment to consider the choreography. Hundreds of angry men and women are swarming through the halls of the Capitol. They are fresh from victory in hand-to-hand combat with an outnumbered force of Metropolitan and Capitol Police. Many have knives or bear spray or baseball bats or improvised cudgels. A few have thought to carry zip-tie wrist restraints. Some are shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” Others call out hated Democrats by name.These hundreds of rioters are fanning out, intent on finding another group of roughly comparable size: 100 senators and 435 members of the House, in addition to the vice president. How long can the one group roam freely without meeting the other? Nothing short of stunning good luck, with an allowance for determined police and sound evacuation plans, prevented a direct encounter.The vice president reached Room S-214, his ceremonial Senate office, at about 2:14 p.m. No sooner had his entourage closed the door, which is made of opaque white glass, than the leading edge of the mob reached a marble landing 100 feet away. Had the rioters arrived half a minute earlier, they could not have failed to spot the vice president and his escorts speed-walking out of the Senate chamber.Ten minutes later, at 2:24, Trump egged on the hunt. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” he tweeted.Two minutes after that, at 2:26, the Secret Service agents told Pence again what they had already said twice before: He had to move.“The third time they came in, it wasn’t really a choice,” Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, told me. “It was ‘We cannot protect you here, because all that we have between us is a glass door.’ ” When Pence refused to leave the Capitol, the agents guided him down a staircase to a shelter under the visitors’ center.In another part of the Capitol, at about the same time, a 40-year-old businessman from Miami named Gabriel A. Garcia turned a smartphone camera toward his face to narrate the insurrection in progress. He was a first-generation Cuban American, a retired U.S. Army captain, the owner of an aluminum-roofing company, and a member of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a penchant for street brawls. (In an August interview, Garcia described the Proud Boys as a drinking club with a passion for free speech.)In his Facebook Live video, Garcia wore a thick beard and a MAGA cap as he gripped a metal flagpole. “We just went ahead and stormed the Capitol. It’s about to get ugly,” he said. He weaved his way to the front of a crowd that was pressing against outnumbered police in the Crypt, beneath the Rotunda. “You fucking traitors!” he screamed in their faces. When officers detained another man who tried to break through their line, Garcia dropped his flagpole and shouted “Grab him!” during a skirmish to free the detainee. “U.S.A.!” he chanted. “Storm this shit!”Then, in an ominous singsong voice, Garcia called out, “Nancy, come out and play!” Garcia was paraphrasing a villain in the 1979 urban-apocalypse film The Warriors. That line, in the movie, precedes a brawl with switchblades, lead pipes, and baseball bats. (Garcia, who faces six criminal charges including civil disorder, has pleaded not guilty to all counts.)“It’s not like I threatened her life,” Garcia said in the interview, adding that he might not even have been talking about the speaker of the House. “I said ‘Nancy.’ Like I told my lawyer, that could mean any Nancy.”Garcia had explanations for everything on the video. “Storm this shit” meant “bring more people [to] voice their opinion.” And “‘get ugly’ is ‘we’re getting a lot of people coming behind.’ ”But the most revealing exegesis had to do with “fucking traitors.”“At that point, I wasn’t meaning the Capitol Police,” he said. “I was looking at them. But … I was talking about Congress.” He “wasn’t there to stop the certification of Biden becoming president,” he said, but to delay it. “I was there to support Ted Cruz. Senator Ted Cruz was asking for a 10-day investigation.”Delay. Buy time. Garcia knew what the mission was.Late into the afternoon, as the violence died down and authorities regained control of the Capitol, Sidney Powell must have watched reports of the insurgency with anxious eyes on the clock. If Congress stayed out of session, there was a chance that Justice Alito might come through.He did not. The Supreme Court denied Powell’s application the next day, after Congress completed the electoral count in the early-morning hours. Plan A and Plan B had both failed. Powell later expressed regret that Congress had been able to reconvene so quickly, mooting her request.For a few short weeks, Republicans recoiled at the insurrection and distanced themselves from Trump. That would not last.Ballroom A at the Treasure Island Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas is packed with college Republicans. There is a surfeit of red ties, vested suits, and pocket squares. A lot more young men than women. Two Black faces in a sea of white. No face masks at all. None of the students I ask has received a COVID vaccine.The students have gathered to talk about the Second Amendment, the job market, and “how to attack your campus for their vaccine mandates,” as incoming Chair Will Donahue tells the crowd. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, a featured speaker, has another topic in mind.“Let’s talk about January 6,” he proposes, and then, without further preamble: “Release the tapes!”There is a scattering of applause, quickly extinguished. The students do not seem to know what he is talking about.“The 14,000-plus hours,” Gosar says. “Let’s find out who actually—who caused the turmoil. Let’s hold accountable. But let’s also make sure that the people who are innocently charged are set free. But let’s also hold those responsible for what happened accountable.”Gosar is not a natural orator, and it is often difficult to parse what he is saying. He bends at the waist and swings his head as he speaks, swallowing words and garbling syntax. No one in the Las Vegas audience seems to be following his train of thought. He moves on.“We’re in the middle of a verbal and cultural war,” he says. “Very much like a civil war, where it’s brother against brother … We are the light. They are the darkness. Don’t shy away from that.”A little sleuthing afterward reveals that 14,000 hours is the sum of footage preserved from the Capitol’s closed-circuit video cameras between the hours of noon and 8 p.m. on January 6. The Capitol Police, according to an affidavit from their general counsel, have shared the footage with Congress and the FBI but want to keep it out of public view because the images reveal, among other sensitive information, the Capitol’s “layout, vulnerabilities and security weaknesses.”Gosar, like a few fellow conservatives, has reasoned from this that the Biden administration is concealing “exculpatory evidence” about the insurrectionists. The January 6 defendants, as Gosar portrays them in a tweet, are guilty of no more than a “stroll through statuary hall during non-business hours.” Another day he tweets, baselessly, “The violence was instigated by FBI assets.”This is the same Paul Gosar who, in November, tweeted an anime video, prepared by his staff, depicting him in mortal combat with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In it he raises a sword and kills her with a blow to the neck. For incitement of violence against a colleague, the House voted to censure Gosar and stripped him of his committee assignments. Gosar, unrepentant, compared himself to Alexander Hamilton.It’s the same Paul Gosar who, twice in recent months, has purported to be in possession of secret intelligence about vote-rigging from a source in the “CIA fraud department,” which does not exist, and from the “security exchange fraud department,” and also from someone “from Fraud from the Department of Defense,” all of whom were somehow monitoring voting machines and all of whom telephoned to alert him to chicanery.Gosar has become a leading voice of January 6 revisionism, and he may have more reason than most to revise. In an unguarded video on Periscope, since deleted but preserved by the Project on Government Oversight, Ali Alexander, one of the principal organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally, said, “I was the person who came up with the January 6 idea with Congressman Gosar” and two other Republican House members. “We four schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting.”
A participant in a September 2020 Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, in support of Donald Trump (Philip Montgomery)
“Stop the Steal” organizers created and later tried to delete a website called Wild Protest that directed supporters to trespass on the Capitol steps, where demonstrations are illegal: “We the People must take to the US Capitol lawn and steps and tell Congress #DoNotCertify on #JAN6!” Gosar was listed on the site as a marquee name. In the final days of the Trump administration, CNN reported that Gosar (among other members of Congress) had asked Trump for a preemptive pardon for his part in the events of January 6. He did not get one. (Tom Van Flein, Gosar’s chief of staff, said in an email that both the pardon story and Alexander’s account were “categorically false.” He added, “Talking about a rally and speeches are one thing. Planning violence is another.”)Assembled in one place, the elements of the revisionist narrative from Gosar and his allies resemble a litigator’s “argument in the alternative.” January 6 was a peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights. Or it was violent, but the violence came from antifa and FBI plants. Or the violent people, the ones charged in court, are patriots and political prisoners.Or, perhaps, they are victims of unprovoked violence themselves. “They get down there, and they get assaulted by the law-enforcement officers,” Gabriel Pollock said in an interview from behind the counter at Rapture Guns and Knives in North Lakeland, Florida, speaking of family members who are facing criminal charges. “It was an ambush, is really what it was. All of that is going to come out in the court case.”The most potent symbol of the revisionists is Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran and QAnon adherent who died from a gunshot wound to the left shoulder as she tried to climb through a broken glass door. The shooting came half an hour after the mob’s near-encounter with Pence, and was an even closer call. This time the insurgents could see their quarry, dozens of House members clustered in the confined space of the Speaker’s Lobby. Rioters slammed fists and feet and a helmet into the reinforced glass of the barricaded doorway, eventually creating a hole big enough for Babbitt.Whether the shooting was warranted is debatable. Federal prosecutors cleared Lieutenant Michael Byrd of wrongdoing, and the Capitol Police exonerated him, saying, “The actions of the officer in this case potentially saved Members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large crowd of rioters who … were steps away.” The crowd was plainly eager to follow Babbitt through the breach, but a legal analysis in Lawfare argued that the unarmed Babbitt personally would have had to pose a serious threat to justify the shooting.Gosar helped lead the campaign to make a martyr of Babbitt, who was shot wearing a Trump flag as a cape around her neck. “Who executed Ashli Babbitt?” he asked at a House hearing in May, before Byrd’s identity was known. At another hearing, in June, he said the officer “appeared to be hiding, lying in wait, and then gave no warning before killing her.”“Was she on the right side of history?” I asked Gosar this summer.“History has yet to be written,” he replied. “Release the tapes, and then history can be written.”As word spread in right-wing circles that the then-unidentified officer was Black, race quickly entered the narrative. Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, shared a Telegram message from another user that said, “This black man was waiting to execute someone on january 6th. He chose Ashli Babbitt.” An account called “Justice for January 6” tweeted that Byrd “should be in jail for the execution of Ashli Babbitt, but instead he is being lauded as a hero. The ONLY racial injustice in America today is antiwhiteism.”[Ibram X. Kendi: “Anti-white” and the mantra of white supremacy]The penultimate stage of the new narrative held that Democrats had seized upon false accusations of rebellion in order to unleash the “deep state” against patriotic Americans. Dylan Martin, a student leader at the Las Vegas event at which Gosar spoke, adopted that view. “The Democratic Party seems to be using [January 6] as a rallying cry to persecute and completely use the force of the federal government to clamp down on conservatives across the nation,” he told me.Trump himself proposed the final inversion of January 6 as a political symbol: “The insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” he wrote in a statement released by his fundraising group in October.It is difficult today to find a Republican elected official who will take issue with that proposition in public. With Trump loyalists ascendant, no room is left for dissent in a party now fully devoted to twisting the electoral system for the former president. Anyone who thinks otherwise need only glance toward Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, so recently in the party’s power elite, has been toppled from her leadership post and expelled from the state Republican Party for lèse-majesté.In the first days of January 2021, as Trump and his legal advisers squeezed Pence to stop the electoral count, they told the vice president that state legislatures around the country were on the cusp of replacing electors who’d voted for Biden with those who would vote for Trump. They were lying, but they were trying mightily to make it true.Marc Short, Pence’s closest adviser, did not think it would happen. “In any sort of due diligence that we did with a Senate majority leader, a House minority leader, or any of those people, it was clear that they had certified their results and there was no intention of a separate slate of electors or any sort of challenge to that certification,” he told me. Trump might have support for his maneuver from “one or two” legislators in a given state, “but that was never something that actually garnered the support of a majority of any elected body.”The letter from wavering Pennsylvania state senators suggests that the situation wasn’t quite so black-and-white; the dams were beginning to crack. Even so, Trump’s demand—that statehouses fire their voters and hand him the votes—was so far beyond the bounds of normal politics that politicians found it difficult to conceive.With the passage of a year, it is no longer so hard. There is precedent now for the conversation, the next time it happens, and there are competent lawyers to smooth the path. Most of all, there is the roaring tide of revanchist anger among Trump supporters, rising up against anyone who would thwart his will. Scarcely an elected Republican dares resist them, and many surf exultantly in their wake.A year ago I asked the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse how he explained the integrity of the Republican officials who said no, under pressure, to the attempted coup in 2020 and early ’21. “I think it did depend on the personalities,” he told me. “I think you replace those officials, those judges, with ones who are more willing to follow the party line, and you get a different set of outcomes.”Today that reads like a coup plotter’s to-do list. Since the 2020 election, Trump’s acolytes have set about methodically identifying patches of resistance and pulling them out by the roots. Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, who refused to “find” extra votes for Trump? Formally censured by his state party, primaried, and stripped of his power as chief election officer. Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, who certified Biden’s victory? Hounded off the Board of State Canvassers. Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona, who signed his state’s “certificate of ascertainment” for Biden? Trump has endorsed a former Fox 10 news anchor named Kari Lake to succeed him, predicting that she “will fight to restore Election Integrity (both past and future!).” Future, here, is the operative word. Lake says she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona, and even promises to revoke it (somehow) if she wins. None of this is normal.Arizona’s legislature, meanwhile, has passed a law forbidding Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, to take part in election lawsuits, as she did at crucial junctures last year. The legislature is also debating an extraordinary bill asserting its own prerogative, “by majority vote at any time before the presidential inauguration,” to “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election.” There was no such thing under law as a method to “decertify” electors when Trump demanded it in 2020, but state Republicans think they have invented one for 2024.In at least 15 more states, Republicans have advanced new laws to shift authority over elections from governors and career officials in the executive branch to the legislature. Under the Orwellian banner of “election integrity,” even more have rewritten laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Death threats and harassment from Trump supporters have meanwhile driven nonpartisan voting administrators to contemplate retirement.Vernetta Keith Nuriddin, 52, who left the Fulton County, Georgia, election board in June, told me she had been bombarded with menacing emails from Trump supporters. One email, she recalled, said, “You guys need to be publicly executed … on pay per view.” Another, a copy of which she provided me, said, “Tick, Tick, Tick” in the subject line and “Not long now” as the message. Nuriddin said she knows colleagues on at least four county election boards who resigned in 2021 or chose not to renew their positions.Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, excommunicated and primaried at Trump’s behest for certifying Biden’s victory, nonetheless signed a new law in March that undercuts the power of the county authorities who normally manage elections. Now a GOP-dominated state board, beholden to the legislature, may overrule and take control of voting tallies in any jurisdiction—for example, a heavily Black and Democratic one like Fulton County. The State Election Board can suspend a county board if it deems the board to be “underperforming” and replace it with a handpicked administrator. The administrator, in turn, will have final say on disqualifying voters and declaring ballots null and void. Instead of complaining about balls and strikes, Team Trump will now own the referee.“The best-case scenario is [that in] the next session this law is overturned,” Nuriddin said. “The worst case is they start just pulling election directors across the state.”The Justice Department has filed suit to overturn some provisions of the new Georgia law—but not to challenge the hostile takeover of election authorities. Instead, the federal lawsuit takes issue with a long list of traditional voter-suppression tactics that, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, have the intent and effect of disadvantaging Black voters. These include prohibitions and “onerous fines” that restrict the distribution of absentee ballots, limit the use of ballot drop boxes, and forbid handing out food or water to voters waiting in line. These provisions make it harder, by design, for Democrats to vote in Georgia. The provisions that Garland did not challenge make it easier for Republicans to fix the outcome. They represent danger of a whole different magnitude.The coming midterm elections, meanwhile, could tip the balance further. Among the 36 states that will choose new governors in 2022, three are presidential battlegrounds—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—where Democratic governors until now have thwarted attempts by Republican legislatures to cancel Biden’s victory and rewrite election rules. Republican challengers in those states have pledged allegiance to the Big Lie, and the contests look to be competitive. In at least seven states, Big Lie Republicans have been vying for Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, the office that will oversee the 2024 election. Trump has already endorsed three of them, in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.Down in the enlisted ranks, Trump’s army of the dispossessed is hearing language from Republican elected officials that validates an instinct for violence. Angry rhetoric comparing January 6 to 1776 (Representative Lauren Boebert) or vaccine requirements to the Holocaust (Kansas House Representative Brenda Landwehr) reliably produces death threats by the hundreds against perceived enemies—whether Democratic or Republican.The infinite scroll of right-wing social media is relentlessly bloody-minded. One commentator on Telegram posted on January 7 that “the congress is literally begging the people to hang them.” Another replied, “Anyone who certifies a fraudulent election has commited treason punishable by death.” One week later came, “The last stand is a civil war.” In response, another user wrote, “No protests. To late for that.” The fire burns, if anything, even hotter now, a year later.Amid all this ferment, Trump’s legal team is fine-tuning a constitutional argument that is pitched to appeal to a five-justice majority if the 2024 election reaches the Supreme Court. This, too, exploits the GOP advantage in statehouse control. Republicans are promoting an “independent state legislature” doctrine, which holds that statehouses have “plenary,” or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors. Taken to its logical conclusion, it could provide a legal basis for any state legislature to throw out an election result it dislikes and appoint its preferred electors instead.Elections are complicated, and election administrators have to make hundreds of choices about election machinery and procedures—the time, place, and manner of voting or counting or canvassing—that the legislature has not specifically authorized. A judge or county administrator may hold polls open for an extra hour to make up for a power outage that temporarily halts voting. Precinct workers may exercise their discretion to help voters “cure” technical errors on their ballots. A judge may rule that the state constitution limits or overrides a provision of state election law.Four justices—Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas—have already signaled support for a doctrine that disallows any such deviation from the election rules passed by a state legislature. It is an absolutist reading of legislative control over the “manner” of appointing electors under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last appointee, has never opined on the issue.The question could arise, and Barrett’s vote could become decisive, if Trump again asks a Republican-controlled legislature to set aside a Democratic victory at the polls. Any such legislature would be able to point to multiple actions during the election that it had not specifically authorized. To repeat, that is the norm for how elections are carried out today. Discretionary procedures are baked into the cake. A Supreme Court friendly to the doctrine of independent state legislatures would have a range of remedies available to it; the justices might, for instance, simply disqualify the portion of the votes that were cast through “unauthorized” procedures. But one of those remedies would be the nuclear option: throwing out the vote altogether and allowing the state legislature to appoint electors of its choosing.Trump is not relying on the clown-car legal team that lost nearly every court case last time. The independent-state-legislature doctrine has a Federalist Society imprimatur and attorneys from top-tier firms like BakerHostetler. A dark-money voter-suppression group that calls itself the Honest Elections Project has already featured the argument in an amicus brief.“One of the minimal requirements for a democracy is that popular elections will determine political leadership,” Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School expert on election law, told me. “If a legislature can effectively overrule the popular vote, it turns democracy on its head.” Persily and UC Irvine’s Hasen, among other election-law scholars, fear that the Supreme Court could take an absolutist stance that would do exactly that.One sign that legislative supremacy is more than a hypothetical construct is that it has migrated into the talking points of Republican elected officials. On ABC’s This Week, for example, while refusing to opine on whether Biden had stolen the election, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise explained in February 2021, “There were a few states that did not follow their state laws. That’s really the dispute that you’ve seen continue on.” Trump himself has absorbed enough of the argument to tell the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, “The legislatures of the states did not approve all of the things that were done for those elections. And under the Constitution of the United States, they have to do that.”There is a clear and present danger that American democracy will not withstand the destructive forces that are now converging upon it. Our two-party system has only one party left that is willing to lose an election. The other is willing to win at the cost of breaking things that a democracy cannot live without.Democracies have fallen before under stresses like these, when the people who might have defended them were transfixed by disbelief. If ours is to stand, its defenders have to rouse themselves.Joe Biden looked as though he might do that on the afternoon of July 13. He traveled to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which features on its facade an immense reproduction of the Preamble in 18th-century script, to deliver what was billed as a major address on democracy.What followed was incongruous. Biden began well enough, laying out how the core problem of voting rights had changed. It was “no longer just about who gets to vote” but “who gets to count the vote.” There were “partisan actors” seizing power from independent election authorities. “To me, this is simple: This is election subversion,” he said. “They want the ability to reject the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate loses.”He described the means by which the next election might be stolen, though vaguely: “You vote for certain electors to vote for somebody for president” and then a “state legislator comes along … and they say, ‘No, we don’t like those electors. We’re going to appoint other electors who are going to vote for the other guy or other woman.’ ”And he laid down a strong marker as he reached his rhetorical peak.“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole,” he said. “I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”But then, having looked directly toward the threat on the horizon, Biden seemed to turn away, as if he doubted the evidence before his eyes. There was no appreciable call to action, save for the bare words themselves: “We’ve got to act.” Biden’s list of remedies was short and grossly incommensurate with the challenge. He expressed support for two bills—the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—that were dead on arrival in the Senate because Democrats had no answer to the Republican filibuster. He said the attorney general would double the Department of Justice staff devoted to voting-rights enforcement. Civil-rights groups would “stay vigilant.” Vice President Kamala Harris would lead “an all-out effort to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote, and then get the vote out.”And then he mentioned one last plan that proved he did not accept the nature of the threat: “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote.”So: enforcement of inadequate laws, wishful thinking about new laws, vigilance, voter education, and a friendly request that Republicans stand athwart their own electoral schemes.Conspicuously missing from Biden’s speech was any mention even of filibuster reform, without which voting-rights legislation is doomed. Nor was there any mention of holding Trump and his minions accountable, legally, for plotting a coup. Patterson, the retired firefighter, was right to say that nobody has been charged with insurrection; the question is, why not? The Justice Department and the FBI are chasing down the foot soldiers of January 6, but there is no public sign that they are building cases against the men and women who sent them. Absent consequences, they will certainly try again. An unpunished plot is practice for the next.Donald Trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.Democracy will be on trial in 2024. A strong and clear-eyed president, faced with such a test, would devote his presidency to meeting it. Biden knows better than I do what it looks like when a president fully marshals his power and resources to face a challenge. It doesn’t look like this.The midterms, marked by gerrymandering, will more than likely tighten the GOP’s grip on the legislatures in swing states. The Supreme Court may be ready to give those legislatures near-absolute control over the choice of presidential electors. And if Republicans take back the House and Senate, as oddsmakers seem to believe they will, the GOP will be firmly in charge of counting the electoral votes.Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.Joe Stephens contributed research and reporting.This article appears in the January/February 2022 print edition with the headline “January 6 Was Practice.”

What is terrorism? And who is a terrorist? Two recent attacks in America — one carried out by a 39-year-old black man and another by a 15-year-old white teen — sharply illustrate just how polarised and confused the country is over these two seemingly straightforward questions.
Last Tuesday a 15-year-school boy, recently named as Ethan Crumbley, allegedly shot and killed four fellow students, injuring seven others. This happened at a high school in suburban Detroit, Michigan. The week before, Darrell Brooks allegedly drove his SUV into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring many more. According to witnesses, he appeared to be intentionally trying to hit people; one of the victims was an eight-year-old boy. At the time of the attack, Brooks was on bail, after being charged with running over the mother of his child in a domestic dispute earlier last month.
Prosecutors in Michigan have levelled one charge of terrorism against Crumbley, in addition to four first-degree murder counts and numerous other charges. No charges of terrorism have been brought against Brooks; he instead faces six counts of first-degree homicide. 

This raises all sorts of questions about the politics of categorising mass-causality violence. While school-rampages often result in multiple deaths and terrorise those who are victimised in them, they are not conventionally classified as terrorism, since the motives of those who carry them out are typically personal. They are not intended to further a political cause or ideology. So it is curious that the authorities in Michigan have levelled a charge of terrorism.
Crumbley’s alleged motives are as yet unclear, although he reportedly left some writings that may shed some light on his thinking. Explaining the terrorism charge to CNN, Karen McDonald, the Oakland county [Michigan] prosecutor, said that Crumbley had set out to kill and injure as many people as possible. “If that’s not terrorism, I don’t know what is,” she said, in the process enlarging the concept of terrorism far beyond its standard meaning of politically-motivated violence against civilians and into the far broader domain of criminal murderousness. McDonald also noted, by way of further explanation, “how terrifying it is to be in close proximity of another student shooting and killing fellow students. I mean, it’s terror”.
Suggested readingThe myth of lone-wolf terrorismBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Brooks’s alleged motives are similarly unclear, although we know that he had advocated for attacks against white people on social media and shared an anti-Semitic meme praising Hitler. We also know that vehicular rammings, unlike high school shootings, are a common modus operandi of terrorists. Scores of ISIS-inspired and directed operatives, for example, have used cars and trucks as weapons of mass-slaughter. So it is seems worth noting that Brooks, who clearly harboured extremist sentiments, and whose alleged victims were all white, has not been given a terrorism charge. Needless to say, Brooks’s alleged actions would have been terrorising to those who were on the receiving end of them.
What is even more curious is the incuriosity of the elite media and extremism experts about the Brooks case. Had he been a white male who had expressed misogynistic views about women it is certain that they would have staged a giant moral panic about the global menace of incels and the far-Right.
But Brooks, who is a registered sex offender and trader in online hate, has attracted little sustained discussion or concern. To be clear: I’m not saying that the Brooks case should occasion a moral panic, or that he be given a terrorism charge. There’s still much that we don’t know about him, his state of mind, motives and indeed mental health. But I do think we should ask questions about the selection bias of the credentialed commentators and experts who command so much of our attention.
As the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari has recently documented, the coverage of the Brooks case by mainstream media outlets has been quite appalling. The Washington Post, in a tweet, described the ramming attack as a “tragedy caused by a SUV”. A CBS national correspondent made reference to “the Wisconsin parade crash”, as if what happened was an unfortunate accident. If this sounded coldly dispassionate and euphemistic in the extreme, it is because it was. What it emphatically wasn’t was an inferno of alarmist online commentary and outrage about the perpetrator’s vile beliefs.
The Michigan attack, by contrast, has provoked a very different kind of commentary and critical probing. Thomas Renard, director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague, tweeted: “This case raises so many questions: What is terrorism? Does terrorism offence bring any added value in such case? Could it be counter productive? Should we use CT [counter-terrorism] toolbox more often, to deal with more forms of extremism, or not? Pros and Cons?”
Renard is right: the Michigan school shooting does raise many questions, one of which is why extremism scholars like Renard had nothing to say about Brooks’s alleged vehicular ramming attack and how that case might raise questions about terrorism and ideologically motivated violence more broadly.
To be fair to Renard and my fellow extremism researchers, perhaps they just hadn’t clocked the news about the Waukesha attack, especially given that it had attracted relatively little media attention. Or perhaps they had heard about it, but were apt to ignore it because Brooks wasn’t charged with terrorism.
Suggested readingWhy Prevent will never workBy Tom Chivers
But neither explanation holds up to scrutiny. Many terrorism experts and extremism researchers are very online. Some of these people, evidently, are never not online. It’s hard to think that the Waukesha attack would have escaped their notice.
There’s also a whole cottage industry of counter-extremist entrepreneurs which thrives on churning out report after report on the wider online “eco-systems” of misogynistic hate and racialised invective. So it’s odd that Brooks’s violent rhetoric, and past violence against women, didn’t raise any eyebrows among a group of researchers who are nothing if not hyper-vigilant when it comes to spotting signs of hate.
I suspect other and deeper imperatives and incentives are at work. One is to do with what the American sociologist Erving Goffman called “impression management”, while the other relates to the politics of grift. The triumph of identity politics, and the fear of running afoul of the puritanical scolds who police it, has meant that whenever an act of mass-casualty violence has been perpetrated by a white male — that reviled figure of opprobrium in the cosmology of the what Wesley Yang terms the “successor ideology” — it is tempting to vigorously call it out and to account. The act of doing so has become a familiar ritual in public life, the purpose of which is to communicate one’s virtue.
It is to pronounce, in effect, “I really care about the evil of systemic racism”. In a Durkheimian sense, it also allows people to bond with other morally upstanding people, and in a way that is emotionally seductive.
The temptation to call out or draw attention to the mass-casualty violence of the far-Right is even stronger for extremism researchers, since many have made decent careers out of researching and writing about jihadist groups and violence. This makes them vulnerable to the charge of islamophobia and racism, or both, and perhaps even gives them a bad conscience. From the perspective of their Left-leaning critics, these researchers are guilty of focusing disproportionately on the jihadist threat or perpetuating dangerous “essentialist” tropes about Islam and Muslims.
Nobody wants to be accused of Islamophobia or racism, and one way of forestalling or neutralising that accusation is to constantly amplify the threat of the far-Right. Of course, extremism researchers would deny that they’re in the business of impression management, of trying to foster a righteous impression before others. And if they’re sounding alarmist about the far-Right threat, this is because the threat is so goddamn alarming that it keeps them awake at night.
Another reason why extremism researchers are now so transfixed on the far-Right threat is because it’s unquestionably good for business. It’s where all the grant money is. You certainly won’t receive state or private funding by saying that the QAnon threat is exaggerated or that incels are more dangerous to themselves than to others. And no publisher is going to offer a lucrative book deal for How Terrorism is Overblown.
More from this authorThe theatre of terrorBy Simon Cottee
This isn’t just an American pathology. Here in Britain two recent acts of lethal violence engendered two very different responses. One was a killing spree by a 22-year-old man called Jake Davison. In just 12 minutes he killed his mother in the house they shared and then went on to shoot to death four others, before turning his weapon on himself. Devon and Cornwall Police initially ruled out terrorism as a motive, although it was known that Davison had visited incel online forums and was a disgruntled virgin. This prompted a slew of commentary on how Davison was a terrorist, and how incels were far-Right extremists. The Guardian ran a story titled, “Should the Plymouth shootings be declared an act of terror?” Quite why the headline-writer thought it necessary to phrase the headline as a question was unclear, since the whole substance of the piece sought to argue that there was little doubt that it should be declared an act of terror.
Then, in October, Ali Harbi Ali, a 25-year-old British-Somali man, allegedly stabbed to death the Conservative MP David Amess. The police soon declared this a terrorist incident, and had referred to “a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism”. Yet the main focus of the media response was not on the political motives of the perpetrator, but rather the scourge of online hate aimed at British politicians more generally, as if somehow the dark corners of the internet had murdered Amess.
It gets boring to keep pointing out the double-standard here, which is that progressives are liable to deny or sanitise the political violence of those with whom they are in sympathy (pre-eminently minorities), while amplifying the political violence of their enemies (pre-eminently the running dogs of white, heteronormative patriarchy). Of course, the Right is also prone to a similar double-standard, pointing out the mental health problems of far-Right attackers while prioritising the role of militant religiosity in jihadi attacks. But it’s imperative for terrorism experts and extremism researchers to resist this sort of tribal temptation.
What is terrorism and who is a terrorist? A lot of ink has been wasted in trying to answer this, but it’s really not that complicated. Terrorism, as the Australian philosopher Tony Coady has usefully defined it, is “the organised use of violence to attack non-combatants (i.e. civilians) or their property for political purposes”. Correspondingly, a terrorist is someone who commits this kind of violence.
The trouble with terrorism, as a concept, relates not to its core meaning, but to its practical application. Was the Michigan school-shooter a terrorist? Was Darrell Brooks? The honest answer to both questions is that it’s still too early to tell — and that both cases are complex. Yet it’s striking that only one of those questions is being publicly asked right now, and it’s not the second one.

“There’s a growing recognition that the way our economy has been structured has not always been to serve people,” Khan went on. “Frankly, I think this is a generational issue as well.” She noted that coming of age during the financial crisis had helped people understand that the way the economy functions is not just the result of metaphysical forces. “It’s very concrete policy and legal choices that are made, that determine these outcomes,” she said. “This is a really historic moment, and we’re trying to do everything we can to meet it.”

Amazon taught a generation of consumers that they could order anything online, from packs of mints to swimming pools, and expect it to be delivered almost overnight. According to some estimates, the company controls close to fifty per cent of all e-commerce retail sales in the U.S. and occupies roughly two hundred and twenty-eight million square feet of warehouse space. It makes movies and publishes books; delivers groceries; provides home-security systems and the cloud-computing services that many other companies rely on. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, wants to colonize the moon. During the Presidency of Barack Obama, Amazon’s relentless expansion was largely encouraged by the government. The country was emerging from a devastating recession, and Obama saw entrepreneurs like Bezos as sources of innovation and jobs. In 2013, in a speech given at an Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Obama described the company’s role in bolstering the financial security of the middle class and creating stable, well-paying work. He spoke with near-awe of how, during the previous Christmas rush, Amazon had sold more than three hundred items per second. Obama was also close with Eric Schmidt, the former executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. An analysis by the Intercept found that employees and lobbyists from Alphabet visited the White House more than those from any other company, and White House staff turned to Google technologists to troubleshoot the Affordable Care Act Web site and other projects. Between 2010 and 2016, Amazon, Google, and other tech giants bought up hundreds of competitors, and the government, for the most part, did not object. The analysis also found that nearly two hundred and fifty people moved between government positions and companies controlled by Schmidt, law and lobbying firms that did work for Alphabet, or Alphabet itself. When Obama left office, many of his top aides took jobs at tech companies: Jay Carney, Obama’s former press secretary, joined Amazon; David Plouffe, his campaign manager, and Tony West, a high-ranking official at the Department of Justice, joined Uber; and Lisa Jackson, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, went to Apple.

The ascent of Donald Trump spurred activists across the political spectrum to become interested in the new power of tech companies, upending many traditional partisan differences. The role that Facebook played in the 2016 election, and the enormous influence that the company had over the information that people were seeing, was an electrifying moment. In fact, many of the major tech companies were accused of playing a role in the conditions that led voters to choose Trump and his populist message: Uber and Lyft, with their gig-economy jobs, were blamed for undermining labor unions and the middle class; Amazon had helped drive Main Street businesses into bankruptcy; Facebook was the site of Russian disinformation campaigns and a platform of choice for figures from the far right; Apple made most of its luxury devices in factories in China, reaping enormous profits while creating relatively few jobs in the U.S.; Google, through its subsidiary YouTube, hosted hate speech.

As a result, antitrust policy, especially as it pertains to big technology firms, has emerged as one of the starkest differences between the Biden Presidency and the Obama one. Stacy Mitchell, a co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly think tank, described the contrast as “night and day.” Obama’s politics were “very much in the center of the road, in terms of the dominant thought of the last several decades,” Mitchell told me. She noted that evidence of this world view could be seen early in Obama’s tenure, when his Administration declined to break up the big banks that had helped cause the 2008 financial crisis, and, instead, allowed them to become even larger and more powerful, while millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure. “Because of his identity as someone who was very progressive on a lot of other issues, I don’t think people saw that very clearly,” she said.

Through a series of appointments to regulatory and legal positions, the Biden Administration has indicated that it wants to reshape the role that major technology companies play in the economy and in our lives. On March 5th, Biden named Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and an anti-monopoly advocate who has argued that Facebook should be broken up, to the newly created position of head of competition policy at the National Economic Council, which advises the President on economic-policy matters. On March 22nd, Biden nominated Khan to her current role. And, in July, he selected Jonathan Kanter to head the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. Kanter left the law firm Paul, Weiss in 2020 because his work representing companies making antitrust claims against Big Tech firms posed a conflict for the firm’s work for Apple, among others. Wu, Khan, Kanter, and a handful of other anti-monopoly advocates have been referred to as members of a “New Brandeis movement,” after the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose decisions limited the power of big business. Because of Khan’s youth, she has also been called the leader of the “hipster antitrust” faction, but this doesn’t capture the seriousness of her intentions. On August 19th, she re-filed an aggressive antitrust complaint that the F.T.C. had initiated in 2020, seeking to break up Facebook. In September, the agency published a report analyzing hundreds of acquisitions made by the biggest tech companies which were never submitted for government review. Although the report didn’t call for any specific action, it was a sign that Khan intends to look far deeper into Big Tech’s business than her predecessors did.

The F.T.C.’s headquarters, in Washington, D.C., occupies a limestone building from 1938 whose hulking proportions were meant to convey the steadiness of the federal government. The lobby is lined with black-and-white portraits of former F.T.C. chairmen and commissioners, almost all depicting white men. The agency has been under a work-from-home order since March, 2020, but Khan goes in whenever she can. (She lives in New York City, where her husband, Shah Ali, a cardiologist, works.) On a recent afternoon, I visited her in her third-floor office, where she was preparing for a meeting with members of a foreign law-enforcement agency. “Coming in, I was aware that this is potentially a historic moment,” she said. “If there are ventilator shortages after a merger we approved—these are all problems tied up in policy decisions.” When I asked when she first became aware of the concept of injustice, she said, “Most kids are aware of bullies, and of who has power and who doesn’t have power.”

Khan, who has dark eyes, angular features, and dark-brown hair that’s often tied in a loose bun, was born in London to parents from Pakistan. When she was eleven, the family moved to the U.S., where her father was a management consultant and her mother worked at Thomson Reuters. They settled in Mamaroneck, a suburb of New York City, where Khan and her two brothers attended public school.

“I can’t tell whether you’ve had too much or not enough.” Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop

After working at Open Markets for three years, Khan applied to law school and to several journalism jobs. She was accepted at Yale, and the Wall Street Journal offered her a position as a reporter covering commodities, in part because editors there had seen work she had published for Open Markets on the manipulation of commodities markets by firms such as Goldman Sachs. “It was a real ‘choose the path’ moment,” Khan told me. She chose Yale, which has been home to some of the most prominent antitrust legal scholars in the country, albeit ones who subscribe to a view that Khan finds outdated.

In his compact yet far-reaching book “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age,” Wu traces the history of the idea that the government should restrain companies that become extremely powerful. He describes the more than two thousand manufacturing mergers that occurred between 1895 and 1904 as a “monopolization movement,” when business moguls argued openly that too much competition among companies was bad for the country. By the early twentieth century, most major industries were controlled, or soon would be, by one giant firm. These conglomerates were called trusts, for the complicated legal structures that sometimes obscured their ownership. Among the most famous were those operated by John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil came to own more than ninety per cent of the domestic oil-refining market, and by John Pierpont Morgan, who controlled an empire of steel manufacturing, railroads, shipping, and communications networks. The first antitrust law, the Sherman Act, passed in 1890, outlawed collusion or mergers among businesses that would lead to control of a particular market. The intention was to protect fair competition, but its terms were vague, and the new law was not strongly enforced until at least a decade later.

Louis Brandeis, who was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1877 and practiced law in St. Louis and Boston. He believed that, when individuals or corporations amassed too much economic power, they could exert pressure on the political system to favor their interests, undermining democracy. He worked on cases that fought Morgan’s railroad monopoly and defended labor laws. In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign to break up the trusts, filing lawsuits seeking to dismantle Standard Oil and Morgan’s railroad conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company. He initiated lawsuits against more than forty major corporations during his tenure, while expanding the federal government’s ability to investigate private enterprise. Roosevelt’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, appointed Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916.

Brandeis helped popularize the belief that the government had a duty to prevent any single entity from becoming too dominant, and thus to insure competitive markets. This idea influenced public policy for decades. “Antitrust through the nineteen-seventies was Brandeisian,” Lynn said. “Anti-monopolism is the extension of the basic concept of checks and balances into the political economy.” In the mid-seventies, a group of economists and legal scholars with ties to the University of Chicago and the economists Gary S. Becker and Milton Friedman began to argue that markets could regulate themselves, providing a check against government overreach and, potentially, against totalitarianism. In 1978, the jurist Robert Bork published “The Antitrust Paradox,” which applied the Chicago School’s arguments to competition policy. Bork wrote that antitrust law was not intended to maintain fairness in an abstract sense; harm to consumers was the only metric that mattered. If the price that people were paying for a product did not rise dramatically, Bork argued, then there was no antitrust violation, regardless of a company’s size or market share. This came to be known as the consumer-welfare standard.

During the Reagan Presidency, the Chicago School’s theories took over mainstream economics. Lynn described this shift as “the most radical change in thinking about power in the United States since the country’s founding.”

“Once the enforcement of our monopoly laws was weakened, you saw explosive growth of these dominant monopolies,” Stoller, of the Economic Liberties Project, told me. “These are creatures of law and policy.” As an illustration, he pointed to the growth of Walmart, which in 1970 became a publicly traded company and had approximately forty-four million dollars in annual sales; in 1980, it reached more than a billion dollars. By 2010, the company was reporting annual sales of four hundred billion dollars.

“I went into law school knowing that we were at this moment where we needed to rehabilitate our antitrust laws,” Khan said. The main antitrust course at Yale was taught by George L. Priest, who had worked as a consultant for Microsoft in the early two-thousands, after the Justice Department filed an anti-competitive-behavior suit against the company. Priest was a friend of Bork’s, and Bork had been a professor at Yale’s law school when President Ronald Reagan nominated him, in 1987, to the Supreme Court. (He was rejected by the Senate after a bitter nomination battle.) Priest encouraged his students to read “The Antitrust Paradox” before the class started.

Benjamin Woodring, who worked with Khan on the Yale Journal on Regulation, said that she seemed more sophisticated than the typical law student. “She understood the political dimension of regulation and the lawmaking process,” Woodring told me. “It’s so easy for law students, especially relatively green ones coming straight from college, to just treat the study of law as this disembodied language in a vacuum. But, in reality, especially with things like antitrust and civil rights, it is very much a political struggle, a complicated journey that involves all three branches. She was comfortable with the nuts and bolts of how that process worked.”

In early 2016, when Khan was in her second year, she was invited, along with Lynn, Kanter, and Teddy Downey, the executive editor of the Capitol Forum, which researches antitrust issues, to dinner with Senator Elizabeth Warren in her Senate office. Warren, who had previously taught at Harvard Law School, where she studied the erosion of the financial security of the middle class, was trying to better understand the relationship of monopoly to inequality. Lynn recalls that, at dinner, Warren’s eyes gleamed as she listened to them talk about the threat that economic concentration posed to a free and equal society. “Having had dozens of these kinds of conversations with experts and policymakers all around the world, this was one of just a few where you start to talk to someone and they get it immediately,” Lynn said. Several months later, at an event hosted by Open Markets, Warren gave a speech on the subject of competition in the U.S. economy. Warren was known as a critic of Wall Street, and as the creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; the speech announced that she planned to target the major tech companies in a similar way. “Google, Apple, and Amazon have created disruptive technologies that changed the world, and every day they deliver enormous value,” she said. “They deserve to be highly profitable and highly successful. But the opportunity to compete must remain open for new entrants and smaller competitors who want their chance to change the world.” It was the first time that such a high-profile political figure had publicly embraced the ideas that Khan, Lynn, and other activists were advocating.

If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists. 
~Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)
Throughout history, work has been the common lot of humanity—at least, outside of the idle rich and those who could not find any. It was celebrated by the Calvinist capitalists described in Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as a means for people to achieve their “own salvation.” Labor for its own sake was embraced by the Marxist canon as well—work, wrote Friedrich Engels, “is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.”Yet today’s baffling shortage of workers in high-income countries may presage something different: a post-work society, in which only a select few labor. For most, economic maintenance would come from some form of universal basic income (UBI). This notion has been tried as part of the COVID-19 relief program and in President Biden’s proposed Build Back Better initiative, which allows benefits for those who could join the workforce but don’t care to.This idea is arising at a propitious time. A strong majority of people in 28 countries around the world, according to a recent Edelman survey, believe that capitalism does more harm than good. More than four-in-five worry about job loss, particularly from automation. Rising inequality and general fear of downward mobility have boosted support for expanded government and greater re-distribution of wealth.Surplus classesAs early as 1995, author Jeremy Rifkin suggested that automation would eliminate work for most and create the basis for a society where “large numbers of people could be liberated from long hours in the formal marketplace.” This would allow them to focus on “leisure activities,” a kind of technological utopia for the masses.It’s a compelling vision in some ways, but right now it looks dystopic. The ranks of what Marx called the “reserve army of the unemployed” are simply disengaging. A decade ago, Gallup’s Jim Clifton wrote about The Coming Jobs War, in which he predicted a global struggle for diminishing employment. Now there is plenty of work but people are not interested. In the US, labor participation rates have fallen from 80 percent in 1950 to 61 percent now, down from 64.4 percent in 2010. Nearly one-third of American working-age males are not in the labor force, suffering high rates of incarceration, or drug, alcohol, and other health issues.And, to be sure, opportunities may be further reduced by technology, which could accelerate the loss of many kinds of jobs that once provided a means of upward mobility: postal workers, switchboard operators, machinists, computer operators, bank tellers, travel agents. For the 90 million Americans who work in such jobs—and their counterparts elsewhere—the future could be bleak. By 2030, Oxford Economics predicts that 20 million factory jobs worldwide will fall to automation—1.5 million in the US, 2.5 million in the EU, and 12.5 million in China.The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, notably in the service sector. With the shift to online and takeout food, chains like McDonald’s are perfecting electronic delivery systems that reduce the need for human labor. Large capital investments are necessary for such adaptations, which—as France’s Thomas Piketty has noted—favors larger corporations as opposed to smaller family businesses.Globalism, automation, and its effectsA plausible future scenario is a society in which a small, hyper-productive technical and managerial elite delivers food, housing, and pleasure to the plebes, like those in the later centuries of the Roman Empire. Their only role in society would be to take and not threaten the imperial state—a system that only worked due to the presence of slaves and huge territories to pillage.In the West, globalization has worked to undermine much employment and promoted a pervasive sense of what historian Martin Wiener calls “psychological de-industrialization”—a loss of interest in making things. Between 2000 and 2007 alone, the United States hemorrhaged 3.4 million factory jobs, about 20 percent of the sector’s total. The trade deficit with China, according to the Economic Policy Institute, has cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000, and similar symptoms have spread to Germany, long an industrial paragon.Many of these problems are of our own making. Pundits have long been predicting the demise of factory jobs, and by now, according to Rifkin, factories should be “near workerless.” Yet as automation kicks in, American factory managers increasingly complain of a distressing lack of skilled workers. Due to an aging workforce, as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs are expected to be generated this decade which cannot be filled. The current shortage of welders could grow to 400,000 by 2024. Amid a mild recovery in the US, by May, an estimated 500,000 manufacturing jobs were left unfilled.In contrast, our non-Western competitors, notably China, are building a skilled workforce that can operate sophisticated automated facilities. As a report from American Compass noted, “Only five percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees.” Meanwhile, in the US, Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed, “you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” This helps explain why the company maintains virtually all its production in the Middle Kingdom.The green dawn of post-industrialismWhile Asian countries are focusing on future work, Western societies seem determined to eliminate gainful employment for blue-collar and middle-management workers. Many jobs that could support families have disappeared, and most new opportunities tend to be low-wage service work. One widely cited reason for the recent labor shortages relates to a post-pandemic reluctance to accept low wages, including those in the “gig” economy, where pay and hours are often uncertain.Some low-paid workers have also found state support during the pandemic to be, in some cases, more profitable than work, and a way to remove the risks associated with crowded offices and public transport. Yet, although the pandemic was the trigger for this withdrawal, high levels of public welfare delinked from work have also been associated with the persistently high unemployment that has plagued countries such as Italy and Spain.Not everyone sees mass idleness as an unalloyed negative. “Post-work” fits neatly with the de-growth philosophy pushed by climate activists today. This notion seeks to ratchet down consumption among the masses by reducing the size of homes, cars, air travel, and air conditioning. Particularly hard-hit would be millions of working-class people, particularly those in well-paying manufacturing, construction, and energy jobs. UBI would provide the basics for a properly austere ecological lifestyle.Perhaps the most perverse impact of all this is that, by raising energy and other costs, it accelerates the de-industrialization of countries like the United Kingdom, and could make it harder to shift production to places like India and China, by far the world’s largest emitter. By the time China, India, and other developing countries have to embrace lower emissions, likely with nuclear power, the largely self-driven de-industrialization of the West will likely be all but complete.Building the post-work societyThe most powerful groups advocating for a post-work future are precisely those most illustrative of the economic transformation of our times. Leading tech entrepreneurs may behave like obsessed workaholics, but they see no reason for the plebes to live the same way. Greg Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most of them believe that “over the (very) long run, an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.”Numerous figures such as Mark Zuckerberg, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman, founder of the Y Combinator, have embraced a “guaranteed wage,” that would cover most critical household bills. This notion of a work-free future may be enticing to some, but the reality may be far less pleasant. As author Aaron Renn suggests, for those parts of American society where income transfer has become a way of life, like Native Americans, the result has been shocking levels of drug abuse, alcoholism, and idleness.In our era, a broad-based UBI would necessitate high taxes, particularly on the already beleaguered middle class. The question will then be who gets what and who pays? Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s campaign was built around UBI, and his plan was estimated to cost around $2.8 trillion annually, paid for by a national value added tax, and higher capital and social security taxes. But some on the Left see even UBI as inadequate, and seek to seize tech wealth and commandeer their technology to create “fully automated luxury communism”—a leisure society paid for by Apple and its counterparts.Unsurprisingly, much kneejerk opposition to UBI comes from the Right. But Damon Linker, a liberal writing for the Week, describes UBI as the road to “spiritual ruin,” particularly for those most dependent on it. Some on the Left even see it as the construct of a neoliberal “income scam” to hasten the end of productive work and upward mobility. Most voters, according to an October Morning Consult poll, also oppose permanent income supports. Yet Democratic strategists realize that such largesse, once offered, will be likely accepted by recipients and so want to continue it ad infinitum.The hard work alternativeThe current labor shortage, and predictions of its continuance, suggest that the market for work has not disappeared in areas such as manufacturing, logistics, and home-building, precisely where labor shortages are most acute. In his 1995 book, The End of Work, Rifkin suggests that industrial employment would be eliminated early in this century, but labor demand, not only in manufacturing, is on the rise.Rather than embrace expanded welfare, we could see a resurgence of higher wage work, including in blue-collar fields. Demographic forces in the West and China have created a diminished workforce. US population growth in the working-age cohort, 16–64, has dropped from 20 percent in the 1980s to less than five percent in the last decade. These trends were evident before the pandemic, when working-class Americans were making significant income gains for the first time in a generation.The labor force is now down 8.4 million over the past year in the US alone, and with a record 10.1 million job openings, even restaurants are being forced to hand out “signing bonuses” as workers remain on the sidelines, awaiting higher pay. These shortages are appearing in virtually all high-income countries, including the EU, the UK, Japan, and even China, where the workforce fell by over five percent in the last decade. Similar developments have been seen in other countries, including Australia, where the western mining industry is being slowed by a lack of drivers.Economists may hate labor shortages for raising business costs, but the pandemic could help ameliorate the growing inequality in advanced countries by raising wages and reaffirming the value of work itself. As occurred in the wake of the far more deadly Medieval European plague, workers and entrepreneurs who somehow survived that contagion found new opportunities and greater demand for labor.What kind of society do we want?We have two options. We can surrender our future prosperity for an automated society in which the standard of living drops to levels comparable to those in the Soviet Union than in late-20th century Europe, Japan, or America, or we can continue to improve our societies. There are many necessary things we can do with well-compensated labor that extend beyond algorithms.There’s a clear need for new housing and other infrastructure, providing medical care, and, perhaps most critically, getting humanity an exit pass from this planet. As anyone who has visited the space factories here in Southern California will know, we still need people—from engineers to machinists—to build rockets, drones, and moonwalkers. Much of this demand could be satisfied with intensely targeted skills training, and most employers now prefer this for many jobs over a college degree.This work-society follows the path that led, albeit with some cruelty, to the exploration of the oceans, the mass settling of continents, the conquest of diseases, the building of healthier cities and, in the past half-century, the spread of prosperity to East Asia and other once-poor areas. These are emblems of a society moving forwards, worthy heirs of progress from the “age of exploration” to the heady days of Silicon Valley.The alternative system, particularly under the de-growth regime, offers a different prospective future. This society may be secure in the basics, but it will be parasitic and stagnant, much like the last centuries of the Roman Empire or the Ch’ing Dynasty. It is a society in which young people can look forward to subsidized schooling, housing, and perhaps part-time work, but may never buy a house, raise a family, or start a significant business.In a post-work world, the whole diverse character of our lives—the last remaining vestiges of autonomy—would disappear. It may be true that artificial intelligence will deliver goods and services efficiently, but would they be able to provide personalized service, or allow for human creativity? We may exist in a digital age, but the analog is where we live, and without it our lives will be very bleak indeed—our democracy will be functionally dead as we go from contributors to permanent dependents. In our understandable desire to eliminate poverty and raise basic living standards, we need not embrace a system that turns most people into quiescent drones. The price of security must not be a new and cushy kind of slavery.

(Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.)Happy Saturday! I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and didn’t miss this newsletter too much. After a very quiet holiday last year, we had family in town and multiple days of celebrating. It was a lovely time, except for a few hours on Saturday when my beloved Ohio State Buckeyes lost to Michigan for the first time in a decade. The biggest story of the week was the Supreme Court arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health, as the court considers the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks. The court could decide to uphold the law and overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that upheld Roe but changed the framework for acceptable abortion restrictions from one based on  trimesters to one based on fetal viability. Or it could uphold the Mississippi law on narrow grounds and leave Roe and Casey in place. (The court could also strike down the Mississippi law. Given that there are six conservative justices, and based on reporting from the arguments, however, I would not bet my kids’ college savings accounts on that outcome.)I mention this not to jump in with my own punditry on the matter. For one thing, few people write as eloquently on this issue than our own David French. Plus, he and Sarah, who are both lawyers, are far better equipped to discuss the jurisprudence. (And in fact they did in a fantastic episode of Advisory Opinions. Listen!)No, I bring it up because of a tweet I saw earlier this week. Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, shared a letter she got after writing from a pro-life perspective for the New York Times. The letter writer said “With luck every woman in your family is raped and pregnant as a result, then forced to give birth to a psychopath’s baby.” Once upon a time, I used to write a little about abortion. I was the only conservative woman at Slate, and we had a blog about women’s issues where I got to write about pretty much whatever I wanted. I hoped that perhaps if I wrote thoughtfully and carefully about the issue within a largely liberal environment that, even if I couldn’t change any minds, I could  at least have a positive effect on the discourse. No luck. I don’t remember being subjected to anything as vile as the comments that Prior faced, but I was called a misogynist more than once. And self-loathing. I was told I wasn’t allowed to call myself a feminist.Eventually, I just stopped. It’s not that I didn’t have thick skin. It’s not that I thought my opinions and writing were above critique or even reproach. And I will add that having intelligent exchanges with some of the more thoughtful pro-choice writers did change some of my thinking. It’s that abortion is an immensely emotional issue, and I hated feeling my blood pressure go up when I read the worst of the comments. I hated wasting mental energy formulating responses that I knew I’d never put on paper, because I didn’t want to get down in the mud like that.Now, the world has been just fine without my musings. There are smarter and better people who do that everyday. Like Karen Swallow Prior, for example. But reactions like that do have a chilling effect on the discourse. And when people who want to engage respectfully on an issue put themselves on the sidelines, we all suffer.I will also say that it’s not just pro-life women who are subject to such vitriol. There are plenty of pro-choice writers who have sincere and carefully considered beliefs in support of abortion rights. And they get called “baby killers.” That’s not better. Because here’s the thing. Abortion will always be a fraught issue. It’s conventional wisdom by now that with Roe, the Supreme Court heightened the tensions by taking the matter away from states. But even without that, abortion is an issue where two parties have competing fundamental rights. Pro-lifers who dismiss that pregnancy can be a risk to a woman’s health and that carrying an unwanted pregnancy is a significant burden are no better than pro-choicers who call the unborn a “clump of cells” or a “parasite.” I imagine that this is an issue of concern to many of you reading this newsletter. As you seek out information, please consider reading not just David French or Ross Douthat or Karen Swallow Prior. Look for smart coverage from writers like Caitlin Flanagan. Read my friend Will Saletan. Read this piece that ran in the New York Times this week by a woman who got pregnant at 19 and described how getting married and giving birth affected her. You don’t have to agree with them if you’re pro-life. But they can provide important perspectives. And, if you do disagree with them, please think twice before dashing off a comment that you might regret later. Enjoy your weekend and thank you as always for reading.Join nowWhat to Expect If You’re Expecting SCOTUS to Overturn Roe v. WadeAndy Smarick wrote this as a preview to the Supreme Court arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women’s Health that took place on Wednesday. But his predictions as to what to watch for were spot-on, and it’s worth reviewing them here as the decision itself likely won’t come down for months. While the court has a 6-3 split between conservatives and liberals, and while it’s likely that all six believe that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided, that doesn’t make it a slam dunk. Smarick writes about how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh are “conservative in judicial philosophy but also conservative in temperament. Their restraint reveals itself in a number of ways—for example, penning narrow decisions, avoiding dramatic holdings, and hoping to maintain the court’s public standing.” He predicted that the key to overturning Roe would be whether the state of Mississippi could offer a sound alternative.The Fox News Distortion Field and Other Media MaladiesIf you watch cable news and pay attention to ratings, you know that Fox News is by far the most popular news network on the airwaves. But the network’s online presence is vastly more dominant. In French Press (🔐), David shares a chart showing that FoxNews.com gets almost 94 million unique visitors a month. The rest of the top 20 conservative websites (sorry folks, we didn’t quite make the cut—share The Dispatch with your friends!), combined get only 59 million.  Fox News is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, and everyone else operates with that in mind. “Fox is like a red supergiant star, and each orbiting planet is defined by its presence and its heat. Some of the planets will burn hotter. Some cooler. But they’re all just planets, living in the solar system Fox defines.” Kevin McCarthy’s DilemmaYou’ve probably heard by now that part of our mission at The Dispatch is to focus on serious reporting and sober commentary. We’re not going to react to every stupid thing politicians say or wade into every Twitter controversy. But sometimes, we can’t ignore the crazy.  And a handful of House Republicans are causing headaches for Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy by dealing in a special brand of crazy. Just in the last few weeks, Rep. Paul Gosar shared an anime video depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Rep. Lauren Boebert has joked with constituents that Rep. Ilhan Omar is a terrorist, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has mixed it up with fellow Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, calling her trash. (To which Mace responded that Greene is, as Jonah Goldberg might put it, “bat guano crazy.”) What’s a minority leader to do? In Uphill (🔐), Haley writes that McCarthy has chosen not to do much: “While Republican lawmakers and former senior staff say it’s easy to understand why McCarthy would avoid making enemies in his quest to be speaker after the 2022 midterms, some members are becoming increasingly frustrated with his lax approach, especially as they have come into the crosshairs of the right.”Join nowAnd now for the best of the rest:The head of Britain’s MI6 just undertook the unusual task of making a public speech—not exactly something spy chiefs normally do. In Vital Interests, Tom Joscelyn says it was an important move as it’s imperative for the intelligence communities of Western democracies to regain the public’s trust.In the G-File, Jonah writes about listening to a podcast featuring a climate-science grad student who spent little time talking about climate change and plenty of time talking about social justice. The scientist expressed concern that the academic environment can be “not safe” for people of color. Jonah’s reaction? “Really? Places like Stanford are often unsafe environments for people with ‘minoritized identities’ and ‘bodies of color’?”Walter Olson writes about what happens when public officials weigh in on criminal trials before verdicts are rendered. Spoiler alert: nothing good. It’s not just that they embarrass themselves, it’s also destructive to the independence of the judiciary.News out of Turkey doesn’t always penetrate our outrage-heavy, domestic-focused news coverage, but we had two important pieces this week. Eric Edelman and Aykan Erdemir report that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is using “hostage diplomacy” to achieve certain ends, and that it’s the Turkish people who are paying the price. And Charlotte looks at why Erdoğan, who has a good personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, is selling drones to Ukraine, which is fighting Russia-backed separatists.It was a great week on the pods: Jonah’s conversation with Chris Stirewalt on The Remnant is probably the most enjoyable podcast we published this week, as they describe the Build Back Better Act as the “kitchen junk drawer” of legislation. On The Dispatch Podcast, Sarah and Steve interview ABC News’ Jonathn Karl about his new book, Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. And don’t forget to listen to Sarah and David on the Dobbs arguments on Advisory Opinions. 

But it’s possible to extend this sympathy to Biden and also hold him accountable for the things he can control or influence. For one thing, his challenges aren’t unique: The whole world has had to deal with the unpredictability of the virus, and the United States is not the only rich nation with a lot of vaccine skepticism. And if this White House has been a victim of events, it has also cooperated in its own victimization, taking a somewhat passive approach to the changing pandemic.

The most obvious examples of this passivity are booster shots and at-home testing. A big push for boosters should have begun once we had reasonable evidence of waning vaccine effectiveness — which is to say, in late summer or early fall. Instead Biden promised boosters but the public health bureaucracy resisted, and we had a period of partial availability and mixed messaging that gave way to general recommendation only around Thanksgiving. As a result, in booster shots, the United States is behind countries like Britain — not because of Fox News or vaccine hesitancy, but because the executive branch lost months to internal disagreement.

At-home rapid testing, meanwhile, has been a long-running disaster, with the United States lagging many European countries in making these tests available and cheap, thanks in part to the same kind of bureaucratic overcaution that delayed the booster rollout. And almost a year into this presidency, the Biden White House now plans to widen access to these tests by having insurers reimburse their cost — adding a layer of bureaucratic hassle for consumers, instead of just spending more money directly to make them all but free.

Then alongside those clear failures, there’s been a wider dearth of energy and imagination. Once Delta arrived in earnest, for instance, there was no national attempt to do something truly radical to reach the unvaccinated. (Paying out large vaccine bonuses was the wild idea that I and others floated at the time.) Instead it was back to masking and full speed ahead with a federal vaccine mandate that’s been litigated ever since — the former imposing dubious Covid theater on heavily-vaccinated blue states, the latter further solidifying the Covid culture war.

Similarly, the administration hasn’t shown all that much creativity or urgency around the distribution and approval of therapeutic treatments — both the ones we have, monoclonal antibodies especially, and the ones we might have soon, like the promising Paxlovid pill from Pfizer. As winter nears, the White House is promising “strike teams” (presumably like those deployed by Ron DeSantis in Florida over the summer) to help with antibody treatment. But amid the summer wave, American hospitals nationwide had used only about half of the monoclonal antibody supply distributed to them — a failure of public-health organization that, if it had happened under Trump, would have been laid instantly at his administration’s feet.

The emergence of the Omicron variant shows that the world is “closer to the start of the pandemic than the end”, one of Britain’s most senior scientific figures has warned, as he lamented a lack of political leadership over Covid.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust who stepped down as a government scientific adviser last month, said the progress in combatting Covid-19 since its emergence was “being squandered”.

Writing in the Observer, he said rich countries had been taking “a very blinkered domestic focus, lulled into thinking that the worst of the pandemic was behind us”. He said while he was cautiously hopeful that current vaccines would protect against severe illness from Omicron, that may not be true for future variants.

“The longer this virus continues to spread in largely unvaccinated populations globally, the more likely it is that a variant that can overcome our vaccines and treatments will emerge,” he writes. “If that happens, we could be close to square one.

“This political drift and lack of leadership is prolonging the pandemic for everyone, with governments unwilling to really address inequitable access to the vaccines, tests and treatment. There have been wonderful speeches, warm words, but not the actions needed to ensure fair access to what we know works and would bring the pandemic to a close.”

He said that the urgent action needed had not changed – “wearing masks indoors, increasing testing, social distancing, isolating if positive (with support to do so) and vaccination will all help to drive down transmission and protect against illness.”

Farrar’s intervention came as a major charity raised concerns about the government’s booster jab campaign, which it sees as the best current method of combating the virus. Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said the programme was “frankly in a mess”. She said: “It’s way behind where it should be, and to hear this week that as many as one in five care home residents have not yet had their boosters was nothing short of alarming.”

She spoke out after some targets for GPs were suspended to allow them to concentrate on administering jabs. Routine health checks for the over-75s and for new patients may be deferred under the new guidance.

“Against this context we agree that the top priority now is to turbo-charge the booster programme, to ensure as many older and vulnerable people as possible get their jabs, and fast,” said Abrahams. “In the end this situation is another demonstration of how underpowered our GP system has become. Unless and until we invest more heavily in it we will continue to see these hard choices arising whenever a crisis comes along, and that’s certainly not in any one’s interests, least of all older people’s.”

Booster jabs being administered at St John’s Church in west London on 4 December 2021. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images

Sajid Javid, the health secretary, called on all eligible people to have a booster before spending time with family this Christmas. “It’s absolutely crucial that everybody who is eligible gets their booster jab to top up their immunity before spending time with loved ones,” he said. “While our brilliant scientists learn more about the new Omicron variant, we need to do everything we can to strengthen our defences, and vaccines are the best way to do that.”

On Saturday, Downing Street announced that it was introducing pre-departure tests for people travelling to the UK. From 4am on Tuesday, travellers will have to complete a lateral flow or PCR test 48 hours before entering the country. Nigeria has been added to the red list, and from 4am on Monday arrivals will have to quarantine in hotels. Officials said the moves came as evidence emerged that the Omicron strain had been reported in more than 40 countries, with apparent community transmission in places such as Norway. They also said there was evidence that the incubation period was shorter than for other variants.

Labour had been pushing for the introduction of the tests. A Downing Street source said that new evidence about the spread of the variant and its characteristics had driven the decision. It will cause further frustration for the travel industry, which has been heavily affected by Covid restrictions.

The sudden spread of Omicron has dismayed many scientists. “What has really surprised me has been the rapidity of the increase in numbers of cases being reported from South Africa,” said Prof François Balloux of University College London. “Cases are doubling at a rate I have never seen before. It is very worrying.”

Early estimates have suggested this rise is being driven by the fact that the Omicron variant can infect between three and six times as many people as Delta, over the same time period. It is an alarming figure that has been balanced by early reports which have suggested the variant is, at present, less likely to lead to hospitalisation.

However, scientists last week warned caution should be taken with such data. “It is already a tight situation. Even if Omicron is less likely to cause severe illness, it may still cause more hospitalisations and put further strain on the health service, because so many more people will become infected,” said Prof Rowland Kao, of Edinburgh University.

There is also evidence that more than one in four (27%) British workers would turn up for work with symptoms of the Omicron variant because they needed the money, including 23% of those whose job puts them at increased risk of infection. Also, 16% of workers say they would be able to work from home, but are not allowed to by their employer, according to polling for the Royal Society for Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA). Just 31% say they would get support from their employer beyond statutory sick pay.

“To secure the economic recovery, workers must be economically secure,” said Anthony Painter, RSA’s chief research officer. “In the short term, we need to see an ‘auto-furlough’ system and more generous sick pay, but long term, both the Conservatives and Labour must spell out how they will address the deep economic insecurity Covid has only exposed.”

Saturday saw further demonstrations in Europe against various governments’ coronavirus measures. In Austria, the first country in the EU to announce that it is to make vaccination against Covid mandatory, more than 40,000 joined a protest in Vienna.

The Dutch city of Utrecht saw several thousand demonstrate against restrictions that were introduced last weekend. Protesters carried banners reading “Medical Freedom Now!”. Many protesters denounced what they see as increasing pressure from the Dutch government to get vaccinated if they want to participate in regular society.

In Frankfurt, Germany, police broke up a demonstration of several hundred people for failing to wear masks or maintain social distancing, using batons and pepper spray after they were attacked by a group of protesters. In Berlin, small groups gathered to protest after a large demonstration was banned.

Hollywood’s interest in real-life Silicon Valley stories is a tale of two Aaron Sorkin scripts. The best of times came in 2010 with “The Social Network,” which garnered eight Academy Award nominations and $225 million at the box office. The worst of times? That would be 2015’s “Steve Jobs” and its disappointing $34 million haul. Since then, Hollywood has more or less stuck to fictional representations of the industry (HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” FX’s “Devs,” “The Circle”).
But a shift is underway, with true-life corporate origin stories gaining new relevance both on the screen and in society. In 2022, several prestige projects, featuring A-list actors playing well-known and notorious tech founders, will shine spotlights on the culture of the Valley. Hulu will present Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes in the limited series “The Dropout” next year, while Apple TV+ cast Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as WeWork’s Adam and Rebekah Neumann for its limited series “WeCrashed.” There are also adaptations in the works focusing on Travis Kalanick (to be played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Sheryl Sandberg (Claire Foy).
Of course, the juiciness of these particular tales (and the meaty roles a Holmes or a Neumann provide for an actor) are certainly contributing factors to the influx. Additionally, tech has become a force in the daily cultural conversation that it wasn’t even just a few years ago. Today, the Theranos trial is covered as a full-fledged pop-culture event, and CEOs and founders are pictured regularly in the Daily Mail. These stories are no longer niche, but rather represent central social forces in culture.

The unemployment rate fell 0.4 percentage points in November, even though the economy added just 210,000 jobs. The drop in the unemployment rate went along with an increase in the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) of 0.4 percentage points, corresponding to a rise in employment of more than 1.1 million in the household survey. The unemployment rate had not fallen this low following the Great Recession until September 2017.
The 210,000 job growth in the establishment survey is slower than generally expected, but it is important to note that it went along with an increase in the average workweek. The index of aggregate hours in the private sector increased by 0.5 percent in November. This would be the equivalent of more than 630,000 new jobs, with no change in the workweek.
This fits a story where employers are increasing hours since they are unable to hire new workers. We are seeing a reshuffling of the labor market where workers are looking for better jobs and employers are competing to attract workers, especially in lower paying sectors.
Declines in Unemployment Largest for Disadvantaged Groups
Nearly every demographic group saw a drop in unemployment in November, but the falls were largest for the groups that face labor market discrimination. The unemployment rate for Blacks fell by 1.2 percentage points to 6.7 percent, a level not reached following the Great Recession until March 2018 and never prior to that time. For Hispanics, the decline was 0.7 percentage points to 5.2 percent.
The unemployment rate for workers without a high school degree fell by 1.7 percentage points to 5.7 percent. By contrast, the unemployment rate for college grads fell by just 0.1 percentage points to 2.3 percent, 0.4 percentage points above its pre-pandemic low. The 5.7 percent rate for workers without a high school degree is 0.7 percentage points above the pre-pandemic low, although the monthly data are highly erratic.
The unemployment rate for people with a disability fell by 1.4 percentage points to 7.7 percent, while the EPOP rose by 1.1 percentage points to 21.5 percent. The latter figure is almost 2.0 percentage points above pre-pandemic peaks, indicating that the pandemic may have created new opportunities for people with a disability.
Share of Long-Term Unemployment Edges Up
The share of workers reporting they have been unemployed more than 26 weeks edged up slightly to 32.1 percent. It had been falling rapidly from a peak of 43.4 percent in March. It was under 20.0 percent before the pandemic hit. On the plus side, the share of unemployment due to voluntary quits increased by 1.0 percentage points to 12.5 percent. This share is still low for a 4.2 percent unemployment rate, but the high share of long-term unemployed depresses the share attributable to quits.
Wage Growth Still Strong for Lower Paid Workers
The average hourly pay of production workers is up 5.9 percent year-over-year. It has risen at a 6.6 percent annual rate comparing the last three months (September to November) with the prior three months (June to August). For restaurant workers the gains have been even larger, with the average hourly wage for production workers up 13.4 percent year-over-year, although the annual rate of growth slowed to 5.7 percent comparing the last three months with prior three months. Wages for the lowest paid workers are far outpacing inflation.

Manufacturing and Construction Both Add 31,000 Jobs in November
This continues a pattern of strong job growth in these sectors. Employment in construction is now down 1.5 percent from pre-pandemic levels, while manufacturing employment is down 2.0 percent.
Employment Lagging in Hard-Hit Sectors
By contrast, employment is still lagging in the hardest hit sectors. The motion picture industry shed 3,400 jobs in November. It is now down 21.9 percent from pre-pandemic level.
Low-wage sectors are clearly having trouble attracting workers. Nursing and residential care facilities shed 11,000 jobs in November. Employment is now down 423,700 jobs (12.5 percent) from pre-recession level, accounting for most of the drop in health care employment. Childcare lost 2,100 in November, while home health care lost 300 jobs.
Retail lost 20,400 jobs in November. Employment in the sector is now down 1.1 percent from pre-pandemic levels; although the index of aggregate hours is up 1.1 percent.
Restaurants added just 11,000 workers, while hotels added 6,600. However, the index of aggregate hours for the leisure and hospitality sector (which comprises the two industries) rose 0.6 percent. This corresponds to a gain of almost 800,000 jobs with no change in the length of the workweek.
State and Local Governments Shed Another 27,000 Jobs
State and local government employment is now down 951,000, or 4.8 percent from pre-pandemic levels. This is almost certainly a supply side story, where these governments cannot easily raise pay to compete with the private sector in attracting workers.
Overwhelmingly Positive Report
This is another overwhelmingly positive report. The unemployment rate is more than a full percentage point lower than what CBO had projected before the passage of the American Recovery Plan. The most disadvantaged workers are seeing the greatest benefits in pay and employment opportunities. The economy looks to be very strong as long as another surge in the pandemic doesn’t derail it.

The latest data sent mixed signals for what happened in US labor markets in November, with the normally more reliable payroll survey showing only 210,000 jobs added while the household survey showed a dramatic decline in the unemployment rate to 4.2 percent as labor force participation grew and employment rose by more than 1 million. The difference between these two may be in large part due to measurement error and noise, and the payroll number itself will be revised over time.

In this blog, we step back to analyze the evolution of the labor market over the last year. While talk of the "Great Resignation" may leave the impression that employment is surprisingly low, that is not the case. Since last December, the economy has added an average of 555,000 jobs per month, about the monthly pace expected by the Survey of Professional Forecasters in forecasts published earlier this year. This is the result of two offsetting factors: The demand for labor increased much more rapidly than most people expected, as evidenced by an estimated 11 million job openings in November, but at the same time the supply of labor has disappointed, as evidenced by the continued low level of labor force participation. Together, these developments have contributed to faster nominal wage growth, with nominal wages well above their pre-pandemic trends—although this increase has been lost to higher inflation.

The unemployment rate is lower than expected, below the 4.9 percent rate that the Survey of Professional Forecasters in May was expecting for November. At the same time, the labor force participation is likely lower than what was implicitly forecast.

Overall, the economy is still 5 million jobs short of pre-pandemic projections (adjusted for changes in population growth). It is likely that this gap will continue to narrow in the coming months, but rapid progress could get harder both because the jobs may get increasingly harder to fill and because of the uncertainty associated with the rise of the Omicron variant. Nevertheless, the fact that the economy continued a relatively rapid pace of job growth after the rise of the Delta variant suggests that continued economic progress is likely.

The Labor Market Is 5 Million Jobs Short of Normal

The state of the labor market can be understood by looking at the set of indicators shown in the table.

November 2021 Difference from pre-pandemic value/trend Nonfarm payroll employment (thousands) 210 -4,697 Unemployment rate 4.2% 0.7 pp Realistic unemployment rate 5.4% 1.9 pp Employment-population ratio 59.2% -1.4 pp Labor force participation rate 61.8% -1.0 pp Job openings rate 7.1% 2.7 pp Unemployed per job opening 0.61 -0.21 Average hourly earnings, total private 0.3% #N/A Average hourly earnings, private production and nonsupervisory 0.4% #N/A pp = percentage point Note: October 2021 value is 1-month change for nonfarm payroll employment and average hourly earnings. Pre-pandemic trend based on CBO January 2020 forecast for nonfarm payroll employment adjusted for slower population growth. Pre-pandemic (February 2020) value for remaining measures. Difference from pre-pandemic value for employment-population ratio and labor force participation rate adjusted for changes in the age-sex composition of the population. Job openings are estimated based on growth in Indeed Hiring Lab job postings. Average hourly earnings growth is chain-weighted based on aggregate hours by industry sector. Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics via Macrobond; Indeed Hiring Lab; Congressional Budget Office; authors' calculations.

The gap between the labor market and normality continued to narrow in November, but the economy remains 5 million jobs short of pre-pandemic projections adjusted for population as shown in figure 1 (or 6 million jobs short of the original pre-pandemic projection). We use the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) January 2020 forecast for a projection of where jobs might plausibly have been, absent the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic response it engendered. The civilian noninstitutional population ages 16 and older in November 2021 was 2.1 million (or 0.8 percent) lower than CBO had originally forecast, with excess mortality and reduced immigration both large factors. By scaling down CBO's original employment forecast by 0.8 percent, we are effectively assuming that CBO was projecting employment rates not employment levels. (Note, the employment rate of people who have died because of COVID-19 was likely lower than the CBO average, but the employment rate for missing immigrants would likely have been higher than CBO forecast, so the two errors in this simple adjustment likely roughly cancel out.)

The unemployment rate is now only 0.7 percentage point higher than it was prior to the pandemic. But with 1.8 million fewer people in the labor force than would be expected given the state of the economy, the labor market is less recovered than the unemployment rate would suggest. The "realistic" unemployment rate, which adjusts for misclassification and the unusually large decline in the labor force participation rate since the beginning of the pandemic, was 1.9 percentage point above its pre-pandemic level in November (figure 2). This is consistent both with the still depressed labor force participation rate and employment-population ratio, which are 1.0 and 1.4 percentage point below their respective pre-pandemic values (adjusted for demographic changes).

Job Growth Has Been Consistent with Expectations This Year

Job growth this year has been roughly consistent with economic forecasters' expectations this year. We rely on the median forecast from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, which surveys leading economic forecasters every three months. (We make minor assumptions to produce monthly numbers broadly consistent with their reported quarterly and annual values.) Overall, the level of jobs in November 2021 was at or ahead of most forecasts made since the emergence of COVID-19 in 2020, several of which are shown in figure 3. Specifically, the economy added an average of 555,000 jobs per month in the first 11 months of 2021, faster than the 432,000 per month projection published in November 2020 and near the 562,000 per month projection published in May 2021 after the passage of the American Rescue Plan.

The unemployment rate has fallen farther and faster than the Survey of Professional Forecasters expected. The unemployment rate in November was 4.2 percent, well below the 5.8 percent forecast made in November 2020 or the 4.9 percent forecast made in May 2021.

A similar pattern of job growth and/or unemployment rate reduction meeting or outpacing expectations emerges when looking at other forecasters like the Blue Chip consensus or individual forecasters like IHS Markit.

The developments in the job market appear to reflect two offsetting errors made by analysts earlier this year. The first is that the amount of labor that workers are willing to supply at a given wage is lower than expected, with the labor force participation rate lower than expected by forecasters like the Congressional Budget Office and IHS Markit (most others do not publish their labor force participation rate forecasts). The second is that labor demand, the amount of labor that companies want to hire at a given wage, appears to have increased as evidenced by the estimated 11 million job openings in November, at or near a record level. These two errors roughly offset each other with respect to employment forecasts, but both errors have driven wages up much faster than anyone expected.

Reduced Labor Supply: The Surprising Fall in Labor Force Participation

The labor force remains substantially smaller than it was in February 2020, with the labor force participation rate falling by 1.5 percentage point over that period. About a third of this decline, 0.5 percentage point, can be accounted for by the changing age-sex structure of the population. Because labor force participation tends to decrease at older ages, as the population ages, the overall labor force participation rate would be expected to fall, even if the labor force participation rates for every age-sex group had been unchanged.

Historically, higher levels of unemployment are associated with lower labor force participation, as some workers who would prefer to work stop looking because of the reduced likelihood of finding employment. Applying the relationship between unemployment and labor force participation from the Great Recession to the current labor market, we would expect the demographically-adjusted labor force participation rate to be about 0.3 percentage point lower because of the elevated unemployment rate, accounting for about a fifth of the total decline in labor force participation since February 2020.

That leaves 0.7 percentage point, or about half of the total decline in the labor force participation rate, unaccounted for by either changing demographics or elevated unemployment. The relative contributions of these three components are shown in figure 4.

Labor Demand Has Been Surprisingly Strong

Businesses' desire to hire workers has been surprising strong. Job openings recovered strongly even in 2020 but have soared in 2021 to record highs and have stayed near that level. The ratio of unemployed workers to openings was 0.6 in November, the lowest level in the history of the series, which began in 2000.

Rapid Wage Growth Points to Very Tight Labor Markets

Different labor market indicators are sending different signals. The prime-age (25-54) nonemployment rate (1 minus the more familiar prime-age employment rate) shows slack in November near its average from 2001 to 2018. The unemployment rate was slightly below its average over that period, while the ratio of unemployed to job openings indicated a very tight labor market and the quits rate (for September, the most recent month available) an even tighter one (figure 5).

We recently investigated which of these measures was the best predictor of wage growth or inflation based on the experience prior to COVID-19 and concluded that all four measures behave in a broadly similar manner. However, with the unemployed–to–job openings ratio and quits rate most consistent with recent rapid wage and price growth, these two measures should get meaningful weight in assessing future wage and price developments.

Nominal wage growth slowed somewhat in November, up 0.3 percent (3.1 percent at an annual rate). This likely slightly understates true wage growth because of compositional effects as lower-wage workers were added (a rough composition adjustment to reflect the changing industry mix showed wages up 3.8 percent at an annual rate in November). While this is slower than September's particularly fast wage growth, wage growth over the past three months has still been well above the pace prior to the pandemic.

As shown in figure 6, which combines the Employment Cost Index (not seriously distorted by composition effects but only available through September) with average hourly earnings (more timely but sensitive to composition effects), strong nominal wage growth has meant that wages are well above their pre-pandemic trend.

On average, however, inflation has outpaced these nominal wage gains so that real wages have fallen both relative to their pre-COVID level and especially relative to pre-COVID trends (through October; there is not yet inflation data for November).

The Outlook for Labor Markets Going Forward

While the pace of job growth slowed in November, other measures of the labor market showed meaningful improvement. The economy should be able to create jobs at a faster pace if other aspects of labor markets were following their usual patterns, including a higher exit rate of people from unemployment to employment and labor force participation rates rising as the unemployment rate fell.

More time should help with the recovery of millions of jobs, but it remains uncertain whether it will bring back all 5 million missing jobs or just a subset of them and how long this process will take. The two biggest wildcards are the desire of workers to find jobs and how it, along with labor demand, will interact with the continued spread of the Delta variant and the rise of the Omicron variant.

Fiscal policy will be expansionary over the coming year, albeit less expansionary than before, as an additional more than $500 billion from the American Rescue Plan is expected to spend out this fiscal year and Build Back Better may add more. The stance of monetary policy likely will and should remain expansionary over the next year as well, although it may be less expansionary than it has been recently. Together with time, this should continue to return the economy closer to where it was prior to the pandemic. A big question is whether it can end up in an even better place, with higher productivity and tighter labor markets supporting greater real wage gains than before the pandemic. Time will tell.

       A woman, who declined to give her name, wears a mask, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2020 in New York. (Mark Lennihan/AP)   The effects of COVID-19 run deeper than the virus   Debra Soh   December 03, 10:00 AM December 03, 10:00 AM  The first cases of the omicron variant were detected in the United States this week. On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced his strategy for coping with omicron and delta this winter, which will include expanding vaccination and booster initiatives and stricter testing for international travelers. Even though Biden has said his strategy will not involve shutdowns or lockdowns, many nevertheless feel increasingly isolated due to the political division resulting from COVID-19. Approximately 780,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus. Needless to say, the pandemic should be taken seriously, and people should follow their physicians’ advice, including on the topic of vaccination, to make the right decisions for themselves. At the same time, it is understandable why some have responded to omicron with indifference and why skepticism continues to grow: Despite reassurance that there is “no reason” to panic, many seem intent on keeping society in a constant state of fear. I’ve heard from people who are being coerced into complying by way of their employers or schools. They feel as though they are losing their minds because it has become so socially unacceptable to question any aspect of what is unfolding before us. Friendships and relationships also suffer. In some cases, friends and family members proudly disown people, writing them off as ignorant, selfish, conspiratorial, or worse. This is reflected in a recent study about how vaccination status is dividing the public. More than 1 in 4 vaccinated adults have stopped associating with a loved one because they are unvaccinated. Vaccinated Democrats are twice as likely as vaccinated Republicans to report doing so. No one deserves to be discriminated against or shamed for choices pertaining to his or her personal health. Coping with the stigma and social isolation that comes with speaking up may feel insurmountable, but know that your feelings are valid. You are not alone. Social support becomes extremely important. If people close to you are not supportive, avoiding the topic of COVID-19, and perhaps politics more generally, in conversation may be the best approach to salvaging those relationships. If possible, try to find at least one other person in your life with whom you can share your concerns. If that fails, as difficult as it may be to find them in our censorious climate, online communities can offer support. You don’t necessarily need to agree with each other. What’s important is the ability to discuss freely and without judgment. Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.      © 2021 Washington Examiner    

Jon and Greg wrote an afterword for The Coddling of the American Mind in the summer of 2021 to be added to a second edition of the book in 2022, but it grew so long that it would have raised the page count and cost of the book substantially. Instead, the nine sections of the afterword will be released in separate parts. The first five are linked below. In this latest part, the authors discuss how ideas about emotional safety that emerged on university campuses have migrated into the workplace.Sections from the new afterword to “The Coddling of the American Mind” previously published by FIRE and Persuasion:Part 1: Gen Z’s Mental Health Continues to DeterioratePart 2: It’s Social Media — More Than Screen Time — That Matters for Mental HealthPart 3: Increasing Persecution on CampusPart 4: The Polarization SpiralPart 5: International CoddlingAfter our book The Coddling of the American Mind came out in 2018, business leaders from the corporate and non-profit sectors began contacting us about internal issues they are having with recent hires. They told us that their youngest employees show increased levels of anxiety, depression, and fragility; a tendency to turn ordinary conflicts between co-workers into major issues requiring the attention of the Human Resources Department; and greater insistence that the organization must share and express their personal political values related to social justice. In short: Beginning around 2018, parts of the corporate world began to experience the same changes we saw in universities from around 2014. This makes sense once you realize that members of Gen Z began to arrive on campuses in 2013 and 2014—they spent four years within institutions that largely catered to their new needs and demands, and began to graduate from four-year colleges around 2017 or 2018. A 2021 survey found that 48% of Gen Z respondents reported feeling stress all or most of the time, and the top source of worry among them was career prospects. As for the increased internal conflicts and tensions among employees, the title of a 2021 article on the front page of the business section of The New York Times sums it up well: “The 37-Year-Olds Are Afraid of the 23-Year-Olds Who Work for Them.” Friction and punishment campaigns in the corporate world seem to be hypercharged by Slack and other internal company messaging platforms. The turmoil at The New York Times in 2020 offers multiple case studies of personal and political conflicts intermixing, as individual journalists ran afoul of the new sensibilities. Bari Weiss, a staff editor and Op-Ed writer, resigned in July 2020. In her resignation letter, Weiss mentioned “constant bullying” and how she was subjected to what one outlet described as “‘Mean Girls’-styled sniping at her in company Slack channels.” Science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. resigned in 2021 over criticism of his behavior on a company-sponsored trip to Peru in 2019 (primarily his repeating a racial slur to clarify how it was being used in a story told by a student on the trip). McNeil had already been disciplined for his behavior on the trip, but co-workers, accusing McNeil of racism, complained that he hadn’t been fired. A month after his resignation McNeil wrote, “I’m surprised by how quick some colleagues who barely know me were prepared to accept those accusations and even add more on a Times alumni Facebook page.”The biggest change in the corporate world has been the explosion of social justice movements, employee political activism, and internal conflict about that activism since 2017, all playing out on social media. To be fair, there was no shortage of issues to be concerned about since that time. In early 2017, Donald Trump implemented restrictive executive orders on immigration that many CEOs opposed. That August, the corporate world reacted to the “Google Memo,” in which an engineer questioned the value of implicit bias training and offered alternative explanations for the gender imbalance in STEM jobs. A week later, the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march took place. Two months after that, the #MeToo movement gained national attention. A string of police killings of unarmed African Americans, including George Floyd in May 2020, led to a surge of corporate support for the Black Lives Matter movement and employee activism.But why would Gen Z have any meaningful influence on corporations during this turbulent period—2017 to 2020—when they had just arrived in the workplace and were present only in small numbers? The primary reason comes back, again, to social media. Gen Z is the first generation where a critical mass of young people grew up as social media natives (with a 2018 survey finding 97% on at least one social media platform). This allowed them to organize and mobilize in a way that was simply not available to previous generations. A single employee who is adept at using social media can create a PR nightmare for employers, often leading to nearly instantaneous public capitulation accompanied by a formulaic apology. Social media played a key role in the ouster of James Bennet from The New York Times in the summer of 2020, when many NYT staffers tweeted that he “[put] Black @nytimes staff in danger” by running an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton in favor of deploying military force during civil unrest—phrasing they were advised to use by their union due to the existence of employment protections for speech relating to workplace safety. And social media isn’t the only place Gen Z is willing to take on their co-workers. Human resources is a growing field with expanding influence in modern corporations. Both of us have been told by business leaders that their human resources departments are struggling to keep up with increased utilization of HR by Gen Zers. One contributing factor we hypothesize is that Gen Zers graduating from modern colleges have carried with them an inclination to appeal to intermediary authority in solving conflicts—an inclination which is fostered in K-12 and continues in higher education through systems like Bias Response teams.But despite these two advantages, we believe the main reason Gen Z wields more influence is because a critical mass of their Millennial bosses and managers are sympathetic to them. Unsurprisingly, for both generations, personal ethics plays a larger role in their decisions about where and how to work.Five years ago, about three-quarters of Millennials said business was a force for good; at the time, Gen Z made up about five percent of the workforce. Today, Gen Z makes up about a quarter of the workforce, and fewer than half of Millennials say that business is a force for good—bringing them roughly in line with Gen Z. Whether the convergence came about by Gen Z influencing Millennials or because both generations responded in similar ways to the avalanche of social unrest since 2017 is unclear. But either way, Millennials seem to share Gen Z’s skepticism about capitalism, and many of them share a willingness to prioritize social causes over company goals.Ever since they entered the corporate world in the early 2000s, some members of the Millennial generation (born 1982 to 1996) have pushed for being able to “bring their whole selves to work.” Companies in the creative industries encouraged this shift, erasing boundaries between work life and private life. But as America became ever more politically polarized, the problem with this policy became evident: Some whole selves cannot tolerate working alongside other whole selves that have different political beliefs and voting patterns.At the same time, the tech booms of the late 1990s and 2000s saw an increased passion for what Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey calls “conscious capitalism”: a desire by founders and CEOs to take a more positive role in social and environmental causes. Both of us have great sympathy for this movement and have been enthusiastic proponents. But in recent years we have seen some significant drawbacks.One of the most interesting critiques of corporate social justice is Vivek Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. Ramaswamy makes a strong case that corporations’ claims to be serving the greater good often hide dishonesty, self-promotion, self-dealing, and even outright corruption. Even when the desires of CEOs and companies are altruistic, Ramaswamy argues that the deviation from their narrow purpose confers more power on corporations than they are supposed to have in democratic society. The limited focus of companies is there in no small part to protect democracy from corporations becoming excessively powerful super-citizens (as Milton Friedman argued in an influential essay back in 1970). On an everyday level, the move towards corporate social justice and the expectation of company-wide solidarity with specific causes can lead to what has (controversially) been dubbed “cancel culture”. One of its defining patterns is that employees face calls for discipline or termination for expressing non-conforming opinions, even when those opinions are expressed away from the workplace or with no hostile intent. Data scientist David Shor was fired from Civis Analytics for a tweet sharing academic research indicating violent protest decreased votes for Democrats while non-violent protest increased it. Emmanuel Cafferty was fired for even less from his job as a line locator for San Diego Gas and Electric after a passing driver filmed Cafferty’s arm hanging out the window; the driver claimed Cafferty (who is of Mexican descent) was making an “OK” sign, which online trolls have associated with white power ideologies. Cafferty says he was just cracking his knuckles and not making a sign of any kind.Corporations, of course, have the First Amendment right of association and therefore can decide whom they employ—at least insofar as they comply with anti-discrimination law. Our fear, however, is that if too many corporations see themselves both as businesses and as participants in social movements, then employees who disagree face a stark choice: Keep your mouth shut, or express yourself and face possible termination.Haidt is the cofounder of Heterodox Academy and Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), both of which are mission driven non-profits. For organizations whose telos (goal, end, purpose) is a particular kind of social change, it is mission-consistent to hire and retain people in part because they share the mission. However, if every company becomes like a cause-based non-profit, and decides to enforce ideological conformity—even if their primary function is to create widgets, apps or automobiles—what happens to our pluralistic democracy? If the sanction for dissent is that you become unable to secure desirable employment in your industry, you can see why Ramaswamy was right to be concerned about corporate social justice posing real world threats to democratic participation.One of Ramaswamy’s solutions is to make political belief a protected class under current law. We fear that this would, in fact, backfire and make the employee activists essentially unfireable even if their activism is harming the company by, for example, driving away talent. Before trying top-down approaches, the first step should be to encourage corporate leaders to reflect upon the long-term risks and benefits from taking stands on political issues not closely related to core business interests. In the current environment it can be risky for heads of corporations to say no to employee pressure to take public stands. But several are beginning to do so. Cryptocurrency company Coinbase made waves in the tech world last year following a blog post from CEO Brian Armstrong, who pledged that his company would not take a stand on social issues. Armstrong argued that doing so was a distraction and created internal division, citing “internal strife” at Facebook and Google. He offered a severance package to employees who could not countenance working for an apolitical tech company, which was taken by at least 60 employees, about 5% of the company. It is too soon to know whether the policy has improved morale and productivity at Coinbase or not. But given the tendency of the American culture war to poison ever more aspects of personal and professional life, we think that leaders of all institutions should closely consider the costs of allowing their organizational culture to become what can increasingly feel like just another extension of Twitter.For companies that wish to hire talent of all political stripes, or to reduce the frequency of campaigns to fire employees for political nonconformity, we offer the following advice.1. Expand your definition of diversity. While racial diversity and gender expression often dominate what people mean by diversity on campus, for a company trying to serve a diverse market in a fast-changing economic environment, having diversity of opinion, diversity of experience, and diversity of social class and geographic background can be even more important. In fact, the kind of diversity most often found to confer advantages on teams is not demographic diversity but rather diversity of perspectives on topics closely related to the task at hand. This includes both functional diversity (e.g., what roles people play in the company) and political diversity (at least when trying to find truth about politically controversial topics). 2. Reconsider what colleges you hire from. While elite colleges offer the promise of bright and hard-working employees, the problems we covered in our book are generally more severe at elite private colleges. You might want to consider hiring from large state schools, and ones from regions of the country other than the West Coast or Northeast. This will increase your diversity by social class and region, and it may help your organization avoid the elite college groupthink that seems to be damaging some organizations, potentially giving your organization a competitive advantage. You might want to go still further and consider hiring people who have not attended college at all, if you can put in place standards that still guarantee hard-working employees with relevant skills. We believe that the numbers of bright, hard-working, and talented people choosing to skip college or to learn through a less traditional alternative will increase in the coming years, while the ability of elite college graduates to work well with those who do not share their beliefs will continue to decline.3. Orientation: Be direct with candidates and new hires. If you decide that you want your organization to be politically neutral or self-consciously politically heterogeneous it’s a good idea to say so in job postings, and to introduce that idea to employees from their very first day. For example, you could state: “Our company’s culture is oriented toward success in our mission, which is [lay out business mission here]. We therefore do not take public stands on issues that are not central to our business mission. If you're not willing to work for such a company, or with people who disagree with you on some of your deepest beliefs, this might not be the right organization for you.”4. Have a talk with the human resources department. A lot of the problems we see off-campus derive from ever-expanding definitions of harassment and discrimination, some of which come from institutions like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The role that human resources has in preventing sexual or racial harassment is very important, but, unfortunately, similar departments on campus have been misused in order to police the expression of political opinion and ideological non-conformity. In The Coddling of the American Mind we discussed Manning and Campbell’s idea of moral dependency—that is, the problem of younger people being accustomed to dealing with any difficult interpersonal relationship by appealing to an authority. This makes sense in situations when you’re talking about children; when reaching adulthood, however, students and potential employees should be able to navigate social interactions (even unpleasant but not harassing ones) themselves. Make sure your human resources department understands that employees are expected to deal with each other and navigate a way of getting along, and that they should only come to human resources if it involves something more serious. 5. Survey employees to see if there’s a problem. Conduct anonymous surveys to figure out if employees feel there's a problem with the overall culture and climate, particularly to find out if it is seen as being unwelcoming toward members of any demographic or political group. Don’t rely on your impressions from social media, which are often wildly out of sync with the real distribution of opinions. 6. If a social media firestorm demands that you fire an employee, slow down. If you're in a situation where online mobs are demanding that you get rid of an employee, you have a problem. Sometimes the mob may actually have a point—maybe you have hired somebody who has done unforgivable things that damage your organization’s reputation. However, if that is the case, it will still look that way in two weeks or a month. Have a process in place that slows things down and allows time for careful investigation and due process. Twitter firestorms lose energy quickly so even having just a mandatory two-week cooling off period can get you past the critical period. 7. Don't make firing a first or preferred punishment. If someone has shown extremely poor judgment but has otherwise been an exemplary employee, consider something short of firing. As a society we should revive the virtue of forgiveness, and learn to accept apologies again. 8. Ask yourself "where does this end?" If you have an employee who other employees want terminated, and you do terminate them, you have set a precedent for what counts as a fireable offense. Over time, that line tends to shift in one direction only. Eventually, you may be left only with employees who share a narrow ideology and a punitive orientation toward all but the most doctrinaire speech. In conclusion: Many of the dynamics we described in The Coddling of the American Mind, which transformed college campuses beginning in 2014, are now spreading rapidly through the corporate world in the U.S. We expect that the other English speaking nations are only a few years behind us. We predict that internal cross-generational conflicts are going to get much more intense as more of Gen Z joins the Millennial generation and brings its additional concerns about emotional safety and its focus on individual words into the everyday misunderstandings of workplace interactions. We hope that the lessons learned on campus will be helpful for all generations as they navigate this difficult transition.Jonathan Haidt, a member of the Persuasion advisory board, is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy.Greg Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer and president and chief executive of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The Role of Mental Shortcuts in the Delivery Room 

By Bapu Jena, MD, PhD 

December 3, 2021 

Bapu Jena is an associate professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School, a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and a member of the 2021 Tradeoffs Research Council. His research interests include the economics of physician behavior and the physician workforce. Physicians regularly have to make quick decisions in high-pressure situations. Ideally, these decisions are based on years of experience and evidence, but a number of studies have shown that physicians often rely on simple mental shortcuts known as heuristics to make these life-or-death calls. A new study looks at whether these mental shortcuts influence one of the most important medical events — childbirth.In a paper published in the journal Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst Professor Manasvini Singh used electronic health record data on more than 80,000 births to see whether one of the most critical choices obstetricians make when choosing how to deliver a baby — cesarean section or vaginal birth — is susceptible to what’s known as the “win-stay, lose-switch” heuristic. She found obstetricians were more likely to switch delivery modes after having a complication in the previous delivery. In other words, if there were complications with a vaginal birth, obstetricians were less likely to attempt a vaginal birth in the next patient (and vice-versa for c-sections), even though switching may not have been appropriate clinically. (The effect was only statistically significant for the birth immediately following the complication.)There are some important limitations to this study. It only uses data from two academic hospitals in one state, and it cannot definitively tell us whether the complication was the reason the obstetrician switched delivery modes, since it can’t tell us what the original birth plan was. But Singh’s rigorous analysis is pretty convincing. The results are interesting to me for two reasons. First, they suggest that in a high-stakes environment like childbirth where we might think (or hope) that mental shortcuts are used less, they still occur. This could have troubling implications if these heuristics reinforce physician biases and/or lead to suboptimal decisions. Singh suggests algorithms could help guide physician decision making, but algorithms can also reinforce biases.Second, I think this study (along with others like it) illustrate a way to use behavioral economics to answer other questions in health care. Heuristics like the one in this paper could create “natural experiments” for comparing the effectiveness of different forms of care. In this case, the heuristic could be seen as effectively randomizing which patients got a c-section or vaginal delivery, which could allow researchers to compare which delivery mode works best in different scenarios. While there is good evidence that c-sections are overused, there are many other areas of medicine — like oncology, surgery and nearly every medical specialty — where we often lack high quality data on how various treatments or services compare to one another. 

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Earlier this year, schools around the country received more than a hundred billion dollars from the federal government—American taxpayers, in truth—in order to recover from the pandemic and finally get back to the task of teaching kids.
The feds stipulated that 20 percent of that money be put toward addressing learning losses during the pandemic, but the bulk of it can be spent at schools' discretion. Which means, of course, that many schools are using this sudden injection of cash to make improvements that have nothing to do with keeping COVID-19 at bay.
"Some districts are investing big money in initiatives that don't appear at first glance strictly COVID-related," notes Education Week. "Miami-Dade schools plan to spend $30 million, or $86 per student, on cybersecurity. Raleigh County schools in West Virginia lists a $9 million effort—more than $800 per student—to expand an elementary school, adding nine classrooms, upgrading the library, expanding the kitchen, and separating the cafeteria and the gym. The Newport News school district in Virginia is spending $840,000 for a new student information system to help teachers catalog students' academic progress."
An unnamed school district will use some of its COVID-19 relief funds to install vape detection devices, purchase new student ID cards, and build a tennis court.
Indeed, many districts seem to be spending significant chunks of money on upgrading athletic facilities and expanding stadiums, according to Education Week. Athletics can be an important part of many students' lives, and letting kids get back to sports was a good reason (among many) to move away from the soul-crushing farce of virtual learning and get everybody back in school. But a slightly nicer football field probably isn't going to improve students' test scores or make them safer from COVID-19, which after all are the two primary justifications for all the spending.
In October, Reason's Brian Doherty noted a terrific report from ProPublica that detailed one Texas school district's plan "to spend $4 million of its education pandemic relief funds to construct a 5-acre outdoor learning environment connected to a local nature and birding center owned by the city." The project is not expected to be completed until 2024, at which point it will no longer be necessary—hopefully—to hold classes outdoors.
The American public education system's grand reopening, which largely took place this fall, has not produced severe outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools. Given this, it might actually make some sense for schools to spend the money on things that don't involve pandemic mitigation. Of course, if they spend the money on personnel, they could eventually end up with a shortfall once the pile runs out; districts certainly won't want to lower salaries or fire staff once that happens.
In any event, the decision on how to spend the money rests with state and local officials. The federal government has asked states to pay attention to where the money is going, but there's little incentive for districts to report responsibly. In North Carolina, several colleges with fewer students received significantly more money than other colleges that enroll more students. WRAL, a local station, asked dozens of the schools to explain how they planned to spend the money. Not a single one replied.
The post School Districts Are Using Their COVID-19 Relief Money on Vape Detectors, Tennis Courts appeared first on Reason.com.

Whether you think of me as a contrarian, as I’m often labeled, or a cranky liberal, as I sometimes refer to myself, I do a lot of complaining about our supposedly brave new world: Cancel culture is real, and out of hand; wokeness frequently oversimplifies and infantilizes us; the term “woke” is broke. But believe it or not, there are things I like about our current era, including, as you know, cheering on “they” as a singular pronoun. So, after the Thanksgiving holiday seems a good time to point out some other things I appreciate about our times.

One of them is land acknowledgments. There is an increasingly common practice, especially in academic circles, of prefacing public presentations or events with a ritual acknowledgment that the land the event is taking place on was originally occupied and cared for by Native Americans, with a specification of the particular Indigenous nation of that land.

I’m glad this is happening, despite the opinion of some, such as the New York Post columnist Kyle Smith, who called land acknowledgments “the latest in meaningless self-scourging progressive fashion statements.” I’ve always found it quietly dismaying that the land that America occupies was wrested from people who had lived on it for millenniums before, and that today Native Americans represent such as small percentage of our body politic, and so much has been built up on the land, that there’s no realistic way, given the magnitude of the injustice, to reverse it or even adequately redress it. I’ve often thought, “Under this parking lot, right where that subdivision is, whole lives and societies existed that are now utterly lost.” The least we can do is to regularly — yes, ritually — mention this, especially if this least is the best we’re willing to do.

I like what I see on television. Particularly children’s television. I look over my daughters’ shoulders and see a heartening multiplicity of Black stars and characters on their favorite shows that just wasn’t there a few years ago. One that comes to mind: Netflix’s delightful baking show, “Nailed It!” is hosted to perfection by Nicole Byer, a young Black woman. No, I haven’t forgotten that the wonderfully diverse “Sesame Street” has been with us since 1969. But the sheer frequency with which today’s children’s shows (and not just the stuff of public television) are, yes, centering people of color feels different. “Sesame Street” once felt like a televised utopia; today’s fare, especially animated, commercial programming, often presents diversity as something blissfully unremarkable.

The World Trade Organization was supposed to meet this week to consider a proposal that has been languishing for the past year: a temporary waiver of pharmaceutical intellectual property during the pandemic to allow poor countries to make many of the same tests, treatments, and vaccines that rich countries have had throughout the pandemic. Yet, in a cruel reminder of the urgency of the problem, the WTO meeting was postponed, owing to the emergence of the Omicron variant, detected by scientists in South Africa (though precisely where it originated remains unclear ).

There is near-unanimous agreement that vaccinating the entire world is the only way to end the pandemic. The higher the vaccination rate, the fewer chances the virus will have to acquire dangerous mutations. Before quickly becoming the leading global variant, Delta was first detected in India, where under 3% of the population had been vaccinated. Today, Africa has the world's lowest vaccination rates, with only 7% of Africans having been fully vaccinated.

While the WTO dithers, Brazil has taken matters into its own hands, giving us the closest thing we have to a way out of this crisis.

There is a simple reason why poorer countries don't have enough vaccines: there aren't enough doses to go around. Donations haven't solved the problem, because no country has surplus vaccines in the multiple billions that are needed. Philanthropy, too, has fallen short. The COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility, an international consortium that promised to send two billion vaccine doses to poor countries by the end of 2021, has shipped only 25% of that amount.

The world is not making as many vaccines as it could. Every firm in every country that has the capacity to make vaccines should be doing so. Yet after paying Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer/BioNTech to develop their vaccines, the US and German governments are unwilling to require these companies to share their technology with manufacturers in other countries.

Unless these governments change their position, the companies will continue to exploit the lucrative monopoly power granted to them by the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which was created when the organization was formed in 1995. According to WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the proposal for a TRIPS waiver is "stuck." Though the number of rich countries opposing it has dwindled, there is still enough opposition to thwart a solution.

But while the WTO dithers, Brazil has taken matters into its own hands, giving us the closest thing we have to a way out of this crisis. In April, Brazilian Senator Paulo Paim proposed a bill that would allow the country to bypass the barriers erected by TRIPS. The legislation seizes on the fact that, as the trade law scholar Frederick Abbott explained to us, "Article 73 of the TRIPS agreement, covering the protection of security interests, already provides each government with the authority to take whatever action it considers necessary to address the COVID-19 pandemic, including suspending intellectual-property rights."

If this option is already available, why are so many countries still waiting around for the WTO to grant them formal permission? The answer is that ever since the WTO's creation, rich countries have punished developing countries for doing what they are entitled to do under the organization's own rules. When South Africa, Brazil, India, and Thailand sought to override monopolies on unaffordable anti-retroviral drugs during the HIV/AIDS crisis, the United States and the European Union put them on trial--sometimes literally. This history has created a chilling effect.

The current waiver proposal, therefore, would operate like a promise from the big kids not to bully the others during recess. Brazil's response represents another option: the bullying victims can take control of their own circumstances. The new legislation attracted support from across the political spectrum, passing both the Brazilian House and Senate with large majorities. Among other things, the bill sought to establish a permanent provision for overriding IP monopolies on essential technologies needed to address health emergencies (beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic). And it would provide for the transfer of vaccine know-how--something like a manufacturing instruction manual--to alternative pharmaceutical manufacturers.

In September, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro signed the bill into law, but not before using his veto powers to remove or revise crucial clauses, including those specifying when and how the law would come into effect, and those requiring pharmaceutical companies to share their know-how, data, and biological material. One month later, the Brazilian Senate recommended charging Bolsonaro with "crimes against humanity" for causing unnecessary loss of life in the pandemic. But the charges did not include his mangling of the IP bill--an act that could lead to even more unnecessary loss of life.

The law returned to the Senate, which can override Bolsonaro's vetoes. But the Senate missed its deadline for rectifying the legislation, and then failed to set another. It now must move quickly to eliminate the uncertainty created by Bolsonaro's cuts, as well as withstand resistance by pharmaceutical-industry associations from the US and Europe, whose leaders tried to kill the bill, even threatening to cut off vaccine supplies if Brazil followed through.

Brazilian lawmakers must keep their eyes on the prize. They have drafted a law that would dismantle the pharmaceutical monopolies that are blocking a solution to the pandemic. There is a lesson here for everyone--both those asking the WTO for a waiver and those opposing it. As goes Brazil, so will go others. As for the world's richest countries and the institutions beholden to them, it remains to be seen how much of their credibility they are willing to sacrifice in the service of enabling pharmaceutical companies to enjoy their monopoly profits just a bit longer.

We are fighting a war on two fronts: one against COVID-19, the other against the pharmaceutical companies whose profits depend on high prices and restricted output. Sooner or later, we will realize, as Brazil already has, that we cannot prevail on the first front without winning on the second.

In mid-September, Clarence Thomas told a crowd of more than 800 students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame that the US supreme court should not be viewed in political terms, and that justices don’t base their rulings on “personal preferences”.

But if not political or personal preferences, where exactly do they discover the law? Thomas never said. When asked whether the attorneys presenting oral arguments ever compel him to change his mind, Thomas said, “almost never”.

In late September, the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, told a crowd in Kentucky that supreme court justices are not a “bunch of partisan hacks”.

If there’s any doubt about the partisan hackery of the supreme court’s six Republican appointees, it will be on full display when they overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion and prohibited states from banning the procedure before fetal viability, about 23 weeks.

That ruling is expected next July. The case they’ve teed up to do the dirty deed is Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which centers on a Mississippi law that bans almost all abortions after the 15th week. Moving the constitutional prohibition to 15 weeks would disregard decades of precedent.

On Wednesday, during almost two hours of intense oral argument and questioning from the justices, the court’s six Republican appointees signaled their comfort with the Mississippi law, even though it would flatly overrule Roe. Several of them appeared ready to dispense with Roe entirely, letting states decide whether and when to ban abortions.

Until the last few years, there was no realistic prospect of overruling Roe. But Donald Trump vowed to name justices who would do so. And courtesy of the machinations of then Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Trump got an opportunity to appoint three justices – who have now created a six-justice conservative supermajority.

During Wednesday’s argument, the three justices appointed by Democratic presidents warned that overruling Roe so soon after a change in the court’s membership would undermine the court’s legitimacy.

“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked. “If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the court survive?”

It’s the key question. As the framers of the US constitution well understood, the supreme court is the one branch of government with neither the power to command obedience by force nor to gain it by doling out money. It relies totally on its moral authority. If the public begins to see it as just another political branch, it will lose that authority.

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the supreme court decided Roe. Also in my class at the time was Clarence Thomas, along with Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the Socratic method – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis – Latin for “to stand by things decided”. It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary – even, shall we say? – political.

In those classroom discussions almost 50 years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the supreme court. It appears that he and his Republican-appointed colleagues – three appointed by a president who instigated a coup against the United States – are getting ready to violate stare decisis, judicial precedent.

I don’t expect them to give a clear and convincing argument for why.

If you could upload your consciousness to the cloud and live forever as a mind in the metaverse, would you do it?

Think carefully before answering. In “Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious,” neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues that consciousness is far more than an algorithmic process. Uploading your consciousness to the cloud, he says, would be like experiencing a meal by reading a recipe rather than by eating.

BOOK REVIEW — “Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious,” by Antonio Damasio (Pantheon, 256 pages).

So then what is consciousness? That’s the question at the heart of this book. Damasio is a professor of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology and the director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, as well as the author of the 2018 book “The Strange Order of Things,” in which he extols the power of homeostasis, the force that keeps all living beings in equilibrium and therefore alive.

Consciousness is such a slippery and ephemeral concept that it doesn’t even have its own word in many Romance languages, but nevertheless it’s a hot topic these days. “Feeling & Knowing” is the result of Damasio’s editor’s request to weigh in on the subject by writing a very short, very focused book. Over 200 pages, Damasio ponders profound questions: How did we get here? How did we develop minds with mental maps, a constant stream of images, and memories — mechanisms that exist symbiotically with the feelings and sensations in our bodies that we then, crucially, relate back to ourselves and associate with a sense of personhood?

Damasio argues that the answers are not simple (not so simple as an algorithm, anyway) but it’s also not as complex as some theorists and scientists believe. Proponents of the so-called hard problem of consciousness argue that even once we’ve unlocked all the physiological components of the brain, we will still not be able to define or explain consciousness. For many of these theorists, there is something mysterious and even magical about it.

But Damasio disagrees, and this book attempts to show why. His major argument is that when studying consciousness, hard problem theorists fail to account for processes that take place outside the brain. Consciousness is not just about what happens in our minds; it’s about what happens in our bodies, and what happens when our minds interpret our bodies and feelings and reflect their processes back to us. In order to understand consciousness, Damasio maintains, one must understand it from the ground up: from the sensing experienced by plants to the social cooperation observed in bacteria, through the advent of the animal mind and the dawn of feelings, and finally the evolution of consciousness.

In the course of four brief sections and an epilogue, Damasio walks us through each of these concepts, exploring what consciousness is and is not. He distinguishes between non-explicit intelligence (which hums along in the background, keeping us alive) versus explicit intelligence (the kind of which we’re aware). He writes about the transformative nature of the nervous system. And he explains that while plants are not conscious in a traditional sense, they are nonetheless able to sense and communicate with each other “blindly — by which I mean that they do not know why or how they do what they do.”

Consciousness is not just about what happens in our minds; it’s about what happens in our bodies, and what happens when our minds interpret our bodies and feelings and reflect their processes back to us.

The latter half of the book is devoted to “On Feelings” and “On Consciousness and Knowing,” and it is here where Damasio’s arguments start to coalesce. In “On Feelings,” he delves into the remarkable mechanisms that allow us to feel, whether base feelings like pain and hunger or socially driven feelings like shame or joy. He marvels at how feelings probably began as a “timid conversation” between the chemistry and nervous system of a being, then evolved to shepherd us in the right direction during the “uphill battle” of staying alive.

In the final section, he explores what exactly consciousness is and what it’s not, and what it’s good for — chiefly, keeping us alive more efficiently by identifying and processing a particular organism’s experiences and advocating for that organism’s needs. Here, he also emphasizes the importance of the body — the substrate, as he calls it — to the experience of consciousness. Artificial intelligence as it’s currently constructed is limited in its ultimate level of creativity and intelligence, he writes, because AI removes the body — an essential component in the evolution of human intelligence.

In style, Damasio’s book has more in common with experimental memoirs like Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” (2009) or Carmen Maria Machado’s “In the Dream House: A Memoir” (2019) than with a conventional science text. The writing is spare and his argument accrues mainly by searching and building on developments in brain research, including his own work. A playful tone often helps leaven the science. (“One has to have a soft spot for a person who talks to plants, as Prince Charles is supposed to do.”) But the spareness occasionally renders the book frustrating or inaccessible to those who aren’t already well-versed in conversations around consciousness. After all, this is a topic that asks us to grapple with abstract, brain-twisting paradoxes: The power of feelings comes from the presence of a conscious mind, for instance, but we are also able to be conscious because we have feelings. Damasio might have done well to include more real-life examples to ground some of the more nebulous concepts in his book.

But at the same time, there is something seductive about the succinct, almost literary, chapters and Damasio’s unabashed wonder at and reverence for the concept of consciousness — although he believes it can be explained using the disciplines known to us, he is no less in awe of its mechanisms. It is clear, for example, that Damasio holds in reverence the fact that our bodies can both experience feelings and modify those feelings within the same vessel. And often, this awe shines through in charming, allusive, whimsical sentences. On the subject of feelings, Damasio writes, “the alignment of homeostasis, efficiency, and varieties of well-being was signed in heaven, in the language of feeling, and it was made popular by natural selection. Nervous systems officiated.”

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At the end of the day, why should any of this matter? Besides the fact that consciousness allows us to read and write articles, to live in complex societies, to solve complex problems, to appreciate great art, and to, well, do everything that makes us human, Damasio includes another argument for why we should trust his view of consciousness: its universality. Rather than viewing it as some mystical process bestowed on humanity alone, we should acknowledge that consciousness is the sum of feelings, nervous systems, social cooperation, homeostasis, and other biological processes that have their root in other life forms like bacteria, plants, and nonhuman animals.

When seeking to understand consciousness, Damasio writes, we should not see ourselves as singular. Rather, we should position ourselves as one part of the “big biological stage” of life.

And in positioning ourselves where we belong, perhaps we can help judiciously undo some of the damage that the human conscious mind has wrought. “Recognizing interdependence may come in handy,” he concludes, “as we cope with the ravages that we humans have inflicted on the earth and on its life, ravages that are likely responsible for some of the catastrophes we currently face, climate changes and pandemics being two prominent examples.”

Emily Cataneo is a writer and journalist from New England whose work has appeared in Slate, NPR, the Baffler, and Atlas Obscura, among other publications.

If it doesn’t happen with this variant, it’ll happen with the next one, or maybe the next. Some version of this coronavirus is bound to flummox our vaccines. In the past two years, SARS-CoV-2 has hopscotched across the globe, rejiggering its genome to better coexist with us. The latest coronavirus contender, Omicron, has more than 50 mutations, making it the most heavily altered coronavirus variant of concern that researchers have identified to date. Even in the fully vaccinated, at least a few antibodies will likely be stumped, and at least a few cells infected. Our collective defenses may soon bear an Omicron-shaped dent.But immunity isn’t a binary switch that some party-crashing variant can flip off. Even if a wily virus erodes some of the safeguards that our original-flavor vaccines have raised, it’s nearly impossible for a variant to wipe them away completely. “I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to square one of having no immunity against this virus,” Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Defenses, if they drop, should fall stepwise, not all at once: first against infection, then transmission and mild symptoms, and finally the severest disease. And vaccinated immune systems are extraordinarily stubborn about letting those last fortifications go.The degree and speed of erosion remain very much up for debate. Our vaccines may turn out to be a meh match for this variant; vaccine makers might rush to update their shots. We should know more in the coming weeks. But now, actually, is still a pretty good time to sign up for a booster, as the CDC, the FDA, and the president have urged—yes, of the OG variety, that might not exactly mirror Omicron’s every quirk. A vaccine that’s only a so-so match for a virus variant can still create a stellar shield. Sometimes, dips in immunization quality can be rescued with a little extra quantity.[Read: The body is far from helpless against coronavirus variants]Consider, first, what happens when a vaccine trains a body using a near-perfect pantomime of the pathogen that later appears. A COVID-19 shot pumps in a little lesson on coronavirus spike, modeled on the original virus; immune cells study its contents and panic, then scramble to sweep away the interloper. When the actual virus appears, the process repeats itself more swiftly and smoothly. T cells home in on infected cells and annihilate them; antibodies, churned out by B cells, anchor themselves stubbornly all over the spike, gumming on as tightly as “superglue,” as Christopher O. Barnes, a structural biologist and antibody expert at Stanford, puts it. This sticky strategy is particularly powerful: Antibodies can prevent SARS-CoV-2 from using its spike to dock onto vulnerable cells, or earmark the virus for violent destruction. The microbe can be cleared from the body before it even has time to cause symptoms or spread to someone else.When a new version of the virus shows up, freckled with mutations, certain antibodies may start to lose their grip. (More than 30 of Omicron’s mutations are in its spike.) Some could stop tethering to the microbe entirely, while others might slip on and off the pathogen as if slicked with heavy palm sweat. That leaves the virus’s key protein uncovered more frequently, giving the microbe “more opportunity to interact with your cells,” Goel said, and wriggle its way inside.That scenario is less than ideal but not necessarily a crisis. Spike’s a big protein, and some of the antibodies sparked by the original vaccines should still be stage-four clingers. Even antibodies with subpar stickiness “can still act in concert,” as long as they’re abundant enough, Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. Although each individual antibody might detach fairly frequently, if tons of others swoop in, even noncommittal molecules can keep the virus out of our cells. Antibody levels drop in the months after people get their shots—a natural and expected phenomenon—but boosters buoy them right back up, sometimes to new heights.Quantity, of course, can’t infinitely compensate for quality. Immunologists and vaccinologists are now trying to get a handle on how bad the current variant-vaccine mismatch might be. One of the most straightforward experiments involves growing some Omicron (or an artificial look-alike), mixing it up with antibodies from immunized people, and seeing if the microbe can still infiltrate cells in a Petri dish. This test assesses antibody neutralization—how well the molecules waylay viruses outside cells without assistance from other immune defenders. (Vaccine makers are already doing this, and Pfizer expects to have “initial data in the coming weeks,” Kit Longley, a company spokesperson, told me.) Thanks to all the typos in Omicron’s genome, “we suspect there will be a drop” in the number of antibodies that can successfully sequester the variant, Barnes told me, compared with what scientists have measured for the OG SARS-CoV-2. But neutralization assays are imperfect proxies for vaccine effectiveness. A fivefold drop in virus-blocking capacity, for example, doesn’t directly translate to a shot that’s now five times worse at protecting people.In an actual human body, antibodies don’t have to work alone. Some of them pop onto the virus and flag down hungry cells that want to gobble it down. And the antibodies we have in our blood at any given moment aren’t the ones we’re stuck with. If, for instance, a small contingent of middling antibodies was struggling to pin Omicron in place, the rest of the immune system would notice and reawaken dormant, vaccine-taught B cells to help. Wised up to the mismatch, some of these veteran Bs would hunker down to learn Omicron’s features, then churn out more compatible antibodies. Totally new B cells—ones that didn’t respond to the original-recipe vaccine—would also rally, producing their own custom-made antibodies to hook onto Omicron.[Read: The good part about ‘waning’ immunity]Reinforcements would be marshaled from the T-cell side too, and unlike finicky antibodies, these assassins are tough to confuse. “It’s much harder to evade a T-cell response than an antibody response,” Pepper said. Faced with mutations, T cells will usually simply ignore them and annihilate their targets all the same. T cells on their own can’t stave off infection entirely. But they can help bring disease under control before it gets too severe.First vaccinations post up these defenses in the body so they’re raring to go when a virus arrives. Boosters then build on that foundation. Each additional dose serves as a scare tactic, terrifying the body into vanquishing a foe it was sure had been defeated before. More immune cells get mobilized. Antibody numbers skyrocket. B cells will manufacture antibodies that are sharper, stronger, and more sophisticated, better able to recognize and trounce coronavirus variants of all kinds—a response that’s expected to keep getting better. Months after vaccination, researchers can still see evidence of B cells trying to hew their antibodies into better weapons, just in case the virus returns. Fighting this variant could be, in many ways, a new and important reason to dose up again.It’s possible OG boosters on their own won’t do the trick. Some immunized people will probably still get infected with Omicron, even a bit sick; if that happens too frequently, or if post-vaccination cases are consistently severe, we’ll need to trot out our contingency plans. Moderna is testing whether a third full dose of its current shot (rather than the standard half-dose booster) might be enough to counteract Omicron’s stealth. It’s also mixing up some tweaked formulations that account for the variant’s mutations; Pfizer says it may do the same. Similar concerns fueled the development of Beta- and Delta-specific boosters earlier this year, but we never actually had to use them. Beta mostly petered out on its own; against both variants, the original-recipe shots seem to have done just fine.Omicron’s genetic architecture threatens to combine some of Beta’s and Delta’s most concerning and immunity-elusive traits. “Is Omicron going to be worse? I think it might be,” Jonathan Abraham, a physician and immunologist at Harvard, told me. But he and others advise against waiting for a more bespoke vaccine. Although mRNA vaccines can be modified very quickly, they still have to be studied and cleared by the FDA. If that process kicks into gear, it’ll be at least a few months before the public can sign up. “Everything is a matter of timing,” Grace Lee, the chair of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices, told me. Omicron’s already been detected in the United States; we have only a small head start to dole out protection before the virus spreads more widely, she said. Viral variants will always turn around faster than new vaccines.[Read: The coronavirus could get worse]Boosters alone won’t stop Omicron. Their power is mainly iterative, restorative; they lift what has already been laid down. If anything, the threat of Omicron is a reminder of the potency of first doses. These “remain the most important line of defense,” Luciana Borio, a senior global-health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. The more people who stay unvaccinated, the more difficult it will be for the fully vaccinated, and the boosted, to keep a fast-moving, fast-changing virus at bay. If Omicron’s the super-speedster some worry it could be, the stakes in the race between virus and vaccine just went up. There’s no time to waste.

Philip Zelikow’s eminent career has spanned academia and public service in a way that makes him a modern-day counterpart to the Wise Men who created the post-World War II global order. He has served at all levels of American government, from holding positions in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon to winning election to his town’s school board. He has taught for the Navy, worked as a career diplomat in the Foreign Service, directed the 9/11 Commission, and served as a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board for both Presidents Bush and Obama. He has taught and directed research programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is now the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he has also been dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and directed the Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Zelikow’s engagement with both academia and public service has given him unique insights into the successes and failures of government. In his most recent book, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-17, he overturns a century of conventional historical thinking to show how U.S. President Woodrow Wilson missed the opportunity to broker an early peace between the European combatants in World War I, which Zelikow judges to be “the most consequential diplomatic failure in the history of the United States.” At the same time, his scholarship on the policy-making successes that allowed the U.S. and the Allies to win World War II has given him a highly critical view of the quality of current U.S. policy engineering.
In this interview, Philip Zelikow discusses his experiences in and out of government that inform his diagnosis of declining U.S. state capacity. He describes the leadership failures of Woodrow Wilson, the strengths and limitations of the “moderate” perspective in politics and government, and the essence of successful political problem-solving. He explains the business and military cultures that contributed to the country’s successes during World War II and over the following decades, as well as the more recent deterioration in public service training and staff habits. He talks about his current work as director of the COVID Commission Planning Group, and suggests how Americans can rebuild our national competency and regain our global image as the ultimate “can-do” country.

Philip Zelikow: Politics is simply the matter of what do you do when you have to share power with other people. It turns out, when you get into it, that just about anything important in American life involves sharing power with other people if you want to get anything done. If you want to get anything done, you’ve got to work with other people who have some stake or portion of the relevant power.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello, I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m honored to be joined today by Professor Philip Zelikow, who is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he also has been dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and director of the Miller Center.
He has served in multiple levels of government across five administrations. His federal services included positions in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. He also directed the 9/11 Commission and the earlier, privately organized Carter/Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform and other important commissions and committees. He is the author of numerous books including most recently a book published just this spring, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917. Welcome, Philip.
Philip Zelikow: Thank you, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: As I mentioned to you before, there’s really no way to cover your career as an author, a historian, an attorney, a diplomat, an administrator, or in public service in any real depth in an hourlong interview. But I would like to focus on aspects of your work that touch upon the Niskanen Center’s emerging interests in addressing declining state capacity. Before we get to that, however, can you tell me something about your origins and what led you to pursue your particular path?
Philip Zelikow: Sure. I grew up in Houston, Texas — that’s where I’m from. Did most of my schooling there, finishing with a law degree. I practiced trial and appellate law in Texas and then disrupted what might have been a promising career as a litigator — in criminal and civil rights stuff mostly — to see if I could make a career in foreign affairs. And I went back to graduate school, went to the Fletcher School, did well there and started my career in foreign affairs.
After teaching for the Navy for a year, I joined the Foreign Service at the entry level. And that turned into a very interesting career in the service that led me to the White House, and then became abbreviated when I was offered a teaching position at Harvard in 1991, which eventually led me to resign from the service. At first, I went to Harvard on leave to see if… because I liked the service and I wanted to see if that would work out. It turned out that it did. And so, since then I’ve had kind of a mixed career, largely in academic posts but alternating with periods of government and public service.
Geoff Kabaservice: How would you describe yourself politically? And it may not be in terms of Republican versus Democrat or liberal versus conservative.
Philip Zelikow: Yeah, it’s hard. I would describe myself as an independent. I think in Washington world I’m usually regarded as a Republican because my most prominent service was in Republican administrations. But the only time I’ve really taken part on a partisan basis, really actively in a political campaign, was actually in 1992 when I did actively campaign for the reelection of George H. W. Bush — who, as you may recall, was not reelected, was defeated by President Clinton.
But in general I regard myself as a practical person — with certain convictions about what one should try to achieve in America and the world, but predominantly concerned with how to do it. And then I have tended to align with parties that I thought (or people who I thought) were practical and competent and most likely to do constructive work.
Geoff Kabaservice: That description calls to mind one of the figures with whom I believe you worked early on in your Foreign Service career, George Shultz.
Philip Zelikow: Yes, though I didn’t really know Shultz. I did get to know him some later. At the time, I was a junior Foreign Service officer working for the secretary on the seventh floor, but in staff jobs in the State Department’s 24-hour crisis center, and then in the department which is called the Secretary of Staff, which staffs principals of the department. And so I had a chance to see the way Shultz and his team worked pretty well, but I wasn’t really part of the inner circle at all.
I think a more powerful experience for me back then as a Foreign Service officer, partly, was a period of apprenticeship working for Bob Blackwill, who was my first key boss as an ambassador at the arms control talks in Vienna, before I went back to the department. And then I was quite impressed with Jim Baker and team during the Bush 41 period, even though at the time I was working at the White House for Brent Scowcroft and Bob Gates, with whom I was also quite impressed.
And so I think I was very fortunate, early in my career, in having a chance to closely observe and work on crucial issues where I was kind of at the center of things, on the momentous issues of the day, with as competent a group of practitioners as our government has ever deployed.
Geoff Kabaservice: You were detailed to join the National Security Agency during the George H. W. Bush…
Philip Zelikow: National Security Council.
Geoff Kabaservice: …National Security Council, excuse me, during the George H. W. Bush administration.
Philip Zelikow: Yeah.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you mentioned Baker and Scowcroft…
Philip Zelikow: Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: And as I think about other positions you’ve held…
Philip Zelikow: Incidentally, just to interject, Geoff… It was interesting and a comment on the times that even though I joined the NSC staff at the outset of the Bush 41 administration, no one in that group knew what political party I belonged to or even asked. It simply was not even an issue that arose.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, on that subject, it seems that a lot of the people whom you worked with, particularly on things like the 9/11 Commission, were moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats. And I’m thinking about Tom Kean, who was the chairman of that commission — he was the former governor of New Jersey; Slade Gorton, the former Republican senator from Washington; John Lehman, the former secretary of the Navy; Jim Thompson, the former governor of Illinois; and then on the Democratic side, of course, Lee Hamilton, who was the co-chair; and Max Cleland, who just died yesterday…
Philip Zelikow: Cleland left the commission right away and was replaced by Bob Kerrey, the former senator from Nebraska.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s right. And to this list, we might actually also add Linwood Holton, the former Republican governor of Virginia, who was very instrumental…
Philip Zelikow: Kind of my boss at the Miller Center of Virginia, but was not involved with the 9/11 Commission. Yeah, you’re right. It is worth speculating, commenting a little bit about what is meant by “moderate.” And among people who style themselves as moderates, there’s an assumption that moderate is simply naturally a positive adjective and one need not to say more. One is moderate in their temperaments, which implies a certain balance — that’s true — as opposed to immoderates on either side. And then you can ask oneself: Well, really is moderation always a virtue? And for people who feel quite strongly, they regard moderates as temporizers, compromisers, unprincipled. I think it turns out that one gets labeled as a moderate if one does not have an automatic reflexive position and actually listens to views across the spectrum and on both sides. That does not mean that you end up coming down with a position that is invariably in the middle of the spectrum, but it does mean that your position is a little less automatic and predictable.
And it does imply receptiveness to arguments and evidence from people with whom on other things you may disagree. And it’s worth commenting, Geoff, it’s an aspect of my background. I was involved in intercollegiate debate and then I was a trial lawyer. A really good trial lawyer can make the arguments on the other side just about as well as they can. A really good trial lawyer actually knows all the strengths and weaknesses of their own case, and also knows all the strengths and weaknesses of the other side’s case. See, you’re not a good trial lawyer if you don’t fully understand the other side’s case and can make their case and understand their evidence just about as well as they can.
But you see, that habit of mind, being of that clinical empathy, kind of forces a certain openness, combined with rigorous attention to the relevant factual detail, that ends up putting people in positions where they take stances that others then may call moderate. And it’s a handy shorthand. But it’s so important, actually, to many things that the Niskanen Center does that it’s worth calling that out and noticing it — and noticing what’s more important is what produces the so-called moderation, not simply automatic applause for one’s balanced temperament.
Geoff Kabaservice: I am somewhat guilty of that, I must confess. But in terms of the various moderate Republicans and Democrats we’ve been mentioning here, were there in fact some common threads that connected them all?
Philip Zelikow: Well, the best of them… And the 9/11 Commission, for example, was selected on extremely political grounds by the respective party leaders in Congress in both houses — though the partisan atmosphere was bad then but not as bad as it is now. What did distinguish them is a lot of these people were relatively secure in their own skin and confident and capable about their ability to try to work on the practical aspects. Now, here it’s really… And practical aspects and how to do things is really — the focus on that is an important feature of my whole career and whatever it is I bring to my scholarship and my work. And so here it’s very important to just distinguish really between sort of two families of people who comment and work in public affairs.
Most mass politics is cultural; it’s not really about policy. It pretends to be about policy, but usually what people are looking for are policy positions that are cultural signifiers. And that allows… This is not — I’m not being pejorative. People tend to want to support people whom they think share their beliefs, and therefore they trust those people more. That means they’re looking for cultural affinity. And to find cultural affinity, they judge on these cultural poses. But therefore, to work on a mass scale in politics… And by the way, I’ve run for elective office and was elected to a local school board once upon a time. So, I mean, I’ve done grassroots electoral politics and understand that side of the world a tiny bit.
But to come back to what happens, then, is quite a lot of what passes for political debate in the public sphere is a matter of choosing poses and positions. And a lot of what people do then is they work very hard on constructing their talking points, or their statement that’s meant to strike the suitable pose. And for a lot of people, that is the be-all and end-all of politics, choosing which pose to strike because you’re choosing which cultural image you are going to project, which affinities you’re going to seek.
This should be distinguished from a family of people who try — while balancing some of that if they’re in mass politics — very hard actually to go about solving problems. The world of problem-solving is really very different from the world of striking poses. And I’m trying to be empathetic to the need to strike poses, because that’s an inevitable and necessary part of mass politics. But if you actually want to work on problems and solve them, you have to move into a different mode.
I’ve often found, actually, that if you want to bring people together, you’re most likely to bring them together if you can bring them together around some practical problem that they’re joining in trying to solve — whether it’s building a house or putting out a fire or figuring out whether or how to build a school. After you get past sort of broad cultural identities, and you really roll up your sleeves and get into the practical problems involved, those tend to have some force and power of their own. And people can rally around those and you can bring people together.
So in some of these cases you mentioned about these people I worked with and were drawn to… And Slade Gorton, by the way, the late Slade Gorton of Washington State, is a very good example of this and one of the best. Gorton, by the way, was regarded as quite conservative in many ways on the stump. And he was, but Gorton had another side. He was really a quite gifted person, super smart. And he juggled these different sides. And he was also very deliberate, purposeful, and effective. Actually, Gorton commented somewhat scornfully, bemusedly, of another colleague — that his colleague, he said, “has never had an unexpressed thought.” Gorton did have unexpressed thoughts. But when it came to actually working problems, he could be extremely effective. And the work he did would then sometimes cross traditional party lines.
Let me give you a concrete illustration of what I mean. You mentioned that I directed the Carter/Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform. This commission, which was after the Florida debacle of the election of 2000… Congress was so angry about that on both sides that they couldn’t create a commission, so it was created privately. I was asked to direct it. Gorton was on the commission. By the way, Carter and Ford took an active role, especially Carter.
In the course of this work, it was Gorton who suggested that the commission should recommend a new feature called provisional ballots. And probably by this time almost everybody who knows anything about our election system has heard of provisional ballots. Back then, no one did. That was a brand-new innovation that had been pioneered in Washington State. Gorton suggested this because there were all sorts of controversies over whether someone was registered in the right precinct, or this or that. And rather than get embroiled in all of that, just take their vote and check it out later. And if their vote could count, you count it. And then there are some ways to administer this. Gordon proposed that we should include provisional balloting in the commission’s recommendation. We did, and it was adopted — the last time actually, we did meaningful national election reform, which was a bill passed with bipartisan support in 2002, opposed by the extremes in both parties.
Now, I call out this example because Gorton had just lost his reelection campaign for the U.S. Senate in Washington State in that same election of 2000. He had lost that election, in part, because of provisional ballots. The provisional ballots had mainly gone against him; that’s why he had lost it. But rather than being infuriated and frustrated by that example, he still thought it was a good-government innovation and one that we should recommend.
Geoff Kabaservice: Interesting. In your opinion — maybe it’s just a hypothetical matter — is it possible to have a highly ideological problem-solver?
Philip Zelikow: Of course it is, from either side. Indeed, a lot of the people who are most passionately drawn to trying to solve public problems draw that passion from some sort of set of powerful ideological convictions. And you don’t necessarily want to forfeit the passion in the process. The challenge, then, is whether the ideological passion puts on blinders so that you just don’t see some stubborn facts or can’t deal with others. It turns out, in politics… People tend to think of politics in negative terms: “It’s all politics.” And it’s usually a pejorative expression.
Really, look, politics is simply the matter of what do you do when you have to share power with other people. It turns out, when you get into it, that just about anything important in American life involves sharing power with other people if you want to get anything done. If you want to get anything done, you’ve got to work with other people who have some stake or portion of the relevant power. So if you actually want to get things done in a situation where power is shared — often shared in quite wide and complex ways — well then, you’ve got to actually listen and pay attention to a lot of other concerns and lots of facts. And if your ideological passion disables you from being able to do that, you’re simply going to be less effective in getting things done — except in the utopian vision in which you are the world’s dictator and you can just tell everybody what to do. And by the way, even in those cases, it’s a little less likely that what you invent will last.
Geoff Kabaservice: To return to the subject of moderation… It is indeed a slippery term. And I was reminded of this anew while reading your fantastic new book, The Road Less Traveled, where President Woodrow Wilson’s position prior to U.S. entry into the Great War was most often described as moderate. That is to say, he was intermediate between the interventionists and the non-interventionists.
And parenthetically, I have to say that I found your book fascinating. And I am at least as fascinated by the fact that, with all of your responsibilities, you somehow found time to produce and write a beautifully written and truly pathbreaking book on a subject of which historians had been almost entirely unaware, namely the missed opportunity to broker a peace agreement to end World War I…
Philip Zelikow: Oh, it’s a huge story.
Geoff Kabaservice: …in late 1916 or 1917. This sounds like this was actually a long-germinating subject for you.
Philip Zelikow: It is. I actually came on this in partnership with a historian who had himself written one of the foundational accounts of American entry into World War I, the late Ernest May. In the 2000s, not long before May died, he and I were in involved in another project, and we went back over this midwar period in World War I. This is the period of the turning point of the war. It turns out, when you dig into it, it’s a turning point of the war. Because the war was either going to widen or it was going to wind up and end in 1916-17. Most people, even most World War I scholars, don’t know this because they don’t realize that the Allied side was about to go bankrupt in the dollars that they needed to sustain the war effort.
I’m not the only person who has discovered that point, but it has not been fully absorbed by the bulk of scholars. The war could not have continued. So it either had to widen or actually, probably, come to an end. A few key people in a number of capitals realized this, and there was an intense peace process. And the Germans ended up declaring the U-boat war because the peace process they’d been pursuing for five months they thought had failed — although the chancellor actually had not given up on it, right to the end. And Wilson botched it for reasons he himself never quite understood. And then there’s a fascinating British story, which is a key to it.
So May and I came across the emerging evidence about this story. The problem was, when May had first written on this in the ‘50s — and actually for most scholars since then… There had been some suggestive German evidence that some sort of peace moves had been underway. But the standard British-American account after World War I had pooh-poohed it, said the Germans were in bad faith, it was all propaganda, and it never had a chance anyway. That account was false, and a number of people involved knew it was false.
And that account was sustained because some evidence was actively concealed, especially on the American side — that’s a more involved story — and really all the relevant British evidence was publicly unavailable really until the 1970s at the earliest, because the public records were secret. And quite a lot of the key evidence was still in private hands, like the diaries of some key figures and so on. And the established accounts basically had a complete grip. No one knew this narrative even existed, because everyone had just kind of accepted the conclusion: “Oh, their peace process never had a chance.” And no one had understood these financial issues that I mentioned a minute ago.
All of that began to surface in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but no one, frankly, put all the evidence together carefully from the British and American and German sources. And May and I began to see this and start working on this. May passed away in 2009. I kept chipping away at this then for the next 10 years, first developing a really long paper (which I started presenting at different places) and then a book.
I want to call out… Because independently other scholars were beginning to notice some of this too. I’m not the only one. I think my book is the only one to put together the evidence from all the major archives on this and then analyze the diplomacy. But I want to call out and give credit to Dan Larsen at Cambridge, whose book Plotting for Peace is the outstanding treatment now of the British side, which joins in revolutionizing our whole understanding of the British and Allied position at this stage of the war — including on these financial issues, which Larsen completely understands. He’s not the only one in Britain. Actually, the American historian John Milton Cooper started noticing some of this in the early ‘70s, and Kathleen Burke did too. Then there’s some terrific work that’s been done on the German side. And I call out, for those who are interested, the work of Holger Afflerbach, which is the best on the midwar period.
But the good news, in a way, is that it shows that — and I’ve found this on a number of subjects… People think a lot of these big historical questions are done and settled, and the evidence is all in place, and there’s nothing new to add. And on almost issue after issue I’ve looked at, that is often not the case. In the last 40, 50 years, we have significantly reinterpreted many of the major episodes on which the conventional wisdom still mostly lies undisturbed, because people aren’t keeping track of the historical scholarship.
For instance, the whole history of the atomic bomb episode and the end of the war with Japan, really that that whole scholarship has been completely overhauled in the last 20 years. And I think a lot of people are just not even aware of it. I could go on and on. The Cuban Missile Crisis, this World War I story… Actually the whole story of the origins of the American Civil War and the secession crisis was completely redone and freshly understood in the ‘50s and ‘60s, led by the work of David Potter.
I’ll stop there, but the larger point that’s worth making is that on some really big stuff, historical scholarship really does evolve. And this World War I case, which is a truly momentous case — not just for the U.S. but for the whole world, it’s a world history story — is an amazing story. And I think it’s perhaps the most significant scholarly findings in my whole work, my whole published work. I think I’ve done some good work on other subjects, but I think this may be the most significant of those findings.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, grad students often think that every subject that could be covered has been covered, which is why they try to go ever smaller in the hope of finding something that someone hasn’t found. But this missed chance for peace in 1916 and ‘17 is actually hugely momentous, because we would live in an entirely different world if that effort had succeeded.
Philip Zelikow: Right. No Bolshevik takeover in Russia — a revolution, yes, but I think every serious scholar would concede that if the war had ended, there’s no way the Bolsheviks ever take over power. And then there’s no Soviet Union as we understand it. I could go on and on. There’s just all sorts of…
Geoff Kabaservice: The violent breakup of the Habsburg Empire, or the downfall of the Ottoman Empire… One could go on and on. But again, this is just one of the biggest subjects in history. Your verdict ultimately is harsh but fair: you say that Wilson’s was “the most consequential diplomatic failure in the history of the United States.” To what extent were his mistakes attributable to his qualities, or rather maybe his missing qualities?
Philip Zelikow: And you say that, and you’ve quoted me correctly, and you would think: “Oh, well, he must just have this scathing polemical view of Woodrow Wilson.” But as you know, having read the book, in many ways Wilson comes across in the book as a sympathetic character. And I found him a very interesting figure, because it would be easy if we could just cartoon him. But in fact he was gifted in a number of ways, and his broader strategic insight about the situation was profoundly right. His sense of the importance of the moment — right. His sense of the broad approach of how this ought to come out — right. His sense of urgency about getting this done and America’s role in it — all correct. He rather brilliantly orchestrated the move to effectively cut off American financing for the Allies in November 1916 — a move which, by the way, most historians still really don’t quite notice or recognize.
And he did this — though it was only one plank in a whole series of things he put in motion — entirely by himself, by the way, to try to get the mediation process going. And then the story of how all this floundered and failed is part of the intricate story I try to retell in the book, alongside the British and German stories. So in many ways he’s a sympathetic character. And a deep point, and one that relates in a way to your state capacity project, is that it’s entirely possible to be realistic and even brilliant about diagnosing a problem yet be entirely incompetent in figuring out how to solve it. And that in a way was Wilson’s problem. And Wilson, through his own failings, did not have a machinery to help him solve this problem — did not even have the rudimentary machinery prior presidents like Theodore Roosevelt or William McKinley had used in the then still very rudimentary American setup. He didn’t even use that. And he relied on this dilettantish private advisor Edward House, which turned out to be epically unfortunate.
But in a way, it relates to the fact that Wilson’s broad “position” is fundamentally sound. And in a way, the great tragedy ensues from the incapacity to carry that position into practice — to actually know how to do that. Although even though a lot of things from the Germans and the British were all coming together to try to show him how to do it, it just got flubbed in this particular way that I detail. And that’s one of the reasons I think the book is such a powerful lesson for today. It’s a lesson about how much these practical skills of statecraft matter. And by illustrating the incredibly tragic consequences of their neglect, it’s a way of underscoring how much attention we need to focus on these practical skills, rather than simply saying, “As long as someone more or less has the right position, we’re good.”
Geoff Kabaservice: You do, as I say, draw out Wilson’s good qualities: his extremely high intellect, the fact that he was taking a moderate and pragmatic position prior to U.S. entry into World War I, which is inclined to strike someone like me as a good position to take. But there’s a number of factors that you also lay out that led to his failure: as you say, the absence of staff work, which led to an absence of information. His overreliance on Edward House… I, by the way, am one of the very few, with you, who’s had the misfortune of having to get through Philip Dru: Administrator…
Philip Zelikow: You need to tell your audience what Philip Dru: Administrator was.
Geoff Kabaservice: Oh dear, yes. Colonel House’s bizarre science fiction novel about a world dictator…
Philip Zelikow: Published anonymously. Hardly anyone knew House had written it.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s true.
Philip Zelikow: What on earth caused you to read that? It’s a hard thing to read.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. There’s a Yale connection to Colonel House. His papers ended up at Yale because essentially his biographer and the editor of his diaries was Charles Seymour, who then became president of Yale. And unfortunately, Seymour expurgated a lot of the more bizarre aspects of House’s story, which would’ve discredited him much earlier than he actually was discredited.
Philip Zelikow: Yes, and which turned out to be part of the reason that our knowledge of this whole episode was delayed for so long — it’s Seymour’s grip on the House papers, which did not relinquish until Seymour’s death in the early ‘60s.
Geoff Kabaservice: Right. And Wilson massively overrelied on House, who turned out to be a person of poor judgment, until they actually broke during the 1919 peace negotiations after the war.
Philip Zelikow: Correct.
Geoff Kabaservice: But Wilson also, for example, as you point out in the book, failed to go to Theodore Roosevelt, his predecessor, to understand how Roosevelt had brokered the 1905 armistice in the Russo-Japanese War.
Philip Zelikow: Right, which is unfortunate. Now, understandable at one level, because Theodore Roosevelt by that time was America’s leading Wilson-hater. So there’s no way he goes to Roosevelt personally for any advice about anything. But he might have then just puzzled over: How did he do that? And it would’ve been very easy for people to have given him some information on how this was done. There were a number of people… Short of talking to Roosevelt himself, it would not have been hard to give Wilson a 15-minute reconstruction of how America mediated the end of the last Great Power war, which would have inspired a lot of thoughts as to how Wilson should proceed in mediating the end to this one. But neither he nor anyone working in the U.S. government bothered to do any of that work, even though the precedent was known to everybody, cited by many, and had happened only 10 years earlier. But no one checked. If that serves as a little illustration of the problems of historical knowledge and institutional memory, good.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. You, in an echo of a Donald Rumsfeld saying, point out that Wilson didn’t know what he didn’t know. And there’s also an analogy you used that I liked, which is that Wilson was like a poker player who gets three kings in his hand and throws away one of those kings hoping to get something better. That’s great. He just didn’t know how to broker a peace conference, ultimately.
Philip Zelikow: Yes, that’s right. And the book actually… At one point I pause and kind of map out for people who — most of my readers don’t know how to broker a peace conference, either…
Geoff Kabaservice: True.
Philip Zelikow: …very few people having done things like that. So actually at one point, at a key point in the book, I kind of stop and say: Okay, folks, here’s how one would go about doing this. It turns out, if you know this, you begin noticing a lot of things in the record, because the British and Germans understood this. And a lot of things that they’re doing begin to make more sense to you as a scholar if you put them in that context. And I kind of map it out, like: Okay, here’s how you go about doing it. Step one, you know… And this was — the professionals understood these things, but Wilson didn’t have the benefit of any professional advice. There were a couple… He had a couple of very good younger diplomats in the American service and overseas — one in particular in London named Buckler and another very good one, the young Joseph Grew, in Berlin. But he didn’t really use them to help with any of this, and the people he had working for him in Washington were either incompetent themselves or untrustworthy.
Geoff Kabaservice: The next world war, World War II, was at the heart of another of your writings that I’ve been very taken with, which is your Texas National Security Review article “To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Problem-Solving,” which came out in September of 2019. So, moving from Wilson’s failures and the failure of the bureaucracy around him, you wrote in the introduction of that article that “the quality of U.S. policy engineering is actually much, much worse in recent decades than it was throughout much of the 20th century. This is not a partisan observation — the decline spans both Republican and Democratic administrations.” And you wrote that pre-COVID.
Philip Zelikow: Yes, that’s right. I am sorry to say that the COVID crisis has been a vivid illustration of the arguments I made in that essay, yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: So what were some of the things you had in mind, from your vantage as a historian and public servant, when you were thinking about the decline in the quality of U.S. policy engineering at that point?
Philip Zelikow: Oh, well, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. And actually the recent stuff with Afghanistan is yet a further illustration. But a lot of other things too. And I’d had opportunities from different perspectives, including economic, some economic stuff, because I work on a lot of domestic subjects as well as the foreign stuff. And so I’ve had unusual opportunities to see a lot of contemporary staff work and also to see staff work in the archives over time, over more than a hundred years. And it’s really fascinating, for those who can do that, to compare and contrast the quality of the written staff work, say in the ‘40s and ‘50s, to the quality of the written staff work that I personally read in recent years on some of these subjects.
And that article you mentioned was really animated by two things. First is just a historical puzzle. I think it’s generally believed now, with too much cause, that our organs of government are relatively incompetent at executing stuff, and that resources are inefficiently used, and we’re bogged down by procedures, and we’re not very competent at implementing and doing things. There are admirable exceptions, but I think that’s a general view. It animates what the Niskanen Center is doing in its planned State Capacity Project. Contrast that image — which is widely held and even held outside of the United States now — with the image the United States had of itself and the world had of us after World War II. We were the can-do country.
The whole world… I mean, kind of like it’s a typical image: Americans land on an island and two days later they have a functioning airstrip. They can build atomic bombs. They can launch Marshall Plans. They are unencumbered by ideology: practical, ingenious doers. We were the quintessential can-do country, regarded and admired throughout the world for our pragmatic ability. How did we get from that America — mid-20th century — to the reputation and performance of today? That’s a very interesting question.
Geoff Kabaservice: It is indeed.
Philip Zelikow: And then the second part of that, which I have as an educator, is: Does academia have anything to do with this? Is it that we taught stuff really well back then and we don’t teach that stuff now? I think the quality of our education for public problem-solving now is mediocre to worse. I know that from having been involved in some of the key institutions that did this and in the core of some of those institutions. So it’s a first-hand observation, and I’ve been struggling over how to improve this for some time.
And then I wanted to look back: So did they just have way, way better training and teaching back then? And so then that led me into trying to understand the historical question in order to then bring that into: Okay, how do we fix the way we teach people and train people today? And part of the answer to the historical question was that the skills that we had in mid-20th century did not come from academia and therefore they never migrated back to academia.
Where then did they come from?, one might say. They came, I believe, from very strong cultures, organizational cultures, that had two large streams running into them. One was a strong set of cultures in the business world, the American business world of the first half of the 20th century. This is a culture dominated by engineers and tinkerers of every kind. And it was a culture dominated by the staff cultures of the engineering world, which actually had a lot of positive attributes about problem-solving: the way you wrote directions, the precision of guidance, careful reporting of what you were doing, emphasis on all sorts of written staff work that had developed over a period of a couple of generations and was really at its peak in mid-20th century America. And the top leaders in the corporate world were the exemplars of this engineering/scientific ethos.
Meanwhile, on the military side in the War Department, there was a very strong culture that venerated high-quality written staff work. It had German origins in the 19th century, then parroted and mimicked especially by the British, which became paragons at it. And then we had had a lot of exposure to British practices, especially in the war, and admired and tried to emulate them in many ways, the high-quality British staff work. These streams all kind of came together. Plus we had a ton of trial-and-error in the New Deal period.
And people back then were very ruthless about firing people who screwed up and made mistakes — and there were lots of screw-ups and lots of mistakes. And in this winnowing process, the people who were competent performers tended to get promoted, and then they tended to promote these kinds of staffing habits. George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower were exemplars of these traditions, but there were many, many others. And you can just see all sorts of evidence of this culture, even in the official histories done of the Second World War and their qualities.
You contrast that then 50 years later. Because these qualities did not migrate back into academia, academia pursued other fashions of how to train people for public service that didn’t really exemplify these qualities. And these qualities essentially were lost. They began getting just passed down through oral traditions and apprenticeship. And effectively, by the end of the 20th century, the quality of training and staff habits in the American government had really kind of fallen apart — to the point that lots of staff work simply consisted of: What’s our position? What are our talking points? And then telling people what we want.
And then you’d have… The quality of formal training is just terrible. There are a few exceptions to this, but generally just terrible. I mean, someone would go to work on the NSC staff with literally no training for that job at all — I mean none, not one day in how to do policy development and how to do systematic policy analysis. No training. There are some people in the military who would sometimes realize this and be aghast.
Now, there are brilliant improvisers and people who had learned through apprenticeships or on the job. And that sometimes worked. But increasingly, when the quality of written staff work goes down, what happens is that people tend to substitute more and more meetings, and higher- and higher-level meetings, because they can’t get stuff done. And then they talk more and more, and then have to keep bumping it to higher levels, which then puts more stress and pressure on the people at the apex of the pyramid. And the things become more and more dysfunctional. The agencies turn into functionaries instead of people with real delegated authorities. And we’re now at a kind of a trough of this vicious spiral downward over a long period of time.
This is why, actually, I’m just so impressed and gratified that the Niskanen Center is taking on problem in a much broader context. Because I’m not the only person to notice facets of this. A lot of other people have noticed different facets of it. My perspective perhaps is a little more of the insider. Others kind of more political science-y have noticed the external facets, the symptoms of this. Frank Fukiyama is a good example. And I’m so grateful that people are going to try to spotlight this and work on it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, thank you. I was struck by a number of things both in what you just said and also in your article, one of which is that the Allies won the war in part because we had better policy-making abilities than the Germans and the Japanese.
Philip Zelikow: Incidentally, for those who don’t follow World War II literature — who are interested in World War II literature but don’t follow it very closely — there’s a really important recent book on this, and I didn’t write it so I can… Phillips Payson O’Brien has written a book on How the War Was Won. He’s also written a biography of Leahy, which has some strengths. But this How the War Was Won book is an idiosyncratic book, but in that book is some very powerful stuff about the significance of the production work and the quality of the production work and the staff work, especially on the air and sea power sides. It’s one of the more important books written on the war in the last 20 years.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. And one of the lessons from that book, if I’m remembering correctly, is that most of the United States’ military innovations were actually the product of multiple iterations. None of them were first-generation.
Philip Zelikow: Right. Paul Kennedy makes that point too in a recent book he did called Engineers of Victory that is excellent and that makes some of these same points from a different angle.
Geoff Kabaservice: There was also a certain humility to American policymakers in those days in that they were willing to borrow from the British.
Philip Zelikow: Oh yes. The famous P-51 Mustang — and Kennedy tells the story very well… The P-51 was a failed aircraft design until some brilliant Brits and a British test pilot said, “Let’s try this airframe with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine” — this British aircraft engine — which turned out to be a match made in heaven. And then the P-51 becomes this very important aircraft that changes the tide at the strategic bombing campaign over Europe in ‘44. But that’s a story of this Anglo-American marriage again. It’s a terrific story.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course the British had experience in staffing an empire…
Philip Zelikow: Yep.
Geoff Kabaservice: which we did not have.
Philip Zelikow: Yes, and the origins of their good staff system — and Maurice Hankey is a huge figure in the story in the 1910s and 1920s — starts with their Committee of Imperial Defence. And those staffing practices moved into the War Cabinet system they developed during World War I.
Geoff Kabaservice: When you talk about business’ contribution to the U.S. war effort, I think people are more likely to think of Donald Trump than they are to think of the dollar-a-year men. But really what you’re getting at is a kind of practical problem-solving approach and decentralized decision-making that characterized this engineering culture.
Philip Zelikow: Yes. And actually one of the tragedies in the United States is the change in the business culture. Now there’s some very good stuff that’s been written on this, and not by me. But it’s commented that the American business culture itself began going through a profound change — there are some very good books on this — that begins picking up speed in the late ‘50s and into the ‘60s, but then really gets going: the fundamental shift from operations and production to basically financial engineering, and the whole change in the culture of what was taught in business schools, the change in the culture of what was prized in higher-level executives. And this change therefore in the overall culture of American businesses, where businesses less and less emphasized the culture of doing stuff and building things. We would then outsource the building of things to others — and of course the Chinese.
It turns out, though — and others have pointed this out really well — that when you outsource building things to others, you outsource a lot of other stuff too with it. And those American companies that are still in the business of making stuff… A good example of this would be Corning, which outsources quite a lot of its fabrication but keeps quite a lot of it in the United States, because they need that know-how and they need to keep that know-how in the company. But the general fashion in a lot of American business was that you didn’t need to know how. All you needed to do was know how to manipulate the results of that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I helped Amo Houghton write his autobiography. He was the…
Philip Zelikow: Who?
Geoff Kabaservice: Amo Houghton was the long-time CEO of Corning. So I have some experience…
Philip Zelikow: So you may have heard these complaints before.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have heard these complaints before, shall we say. You point out that one of the last gasps of this government culture of meticulous written staff work and efforts to go back and find the sources of problems was the Pentagon Papers.
Philip Zelikow: Yes. Ironically, the culture that produces the Pentagon Papers is a very reflective, professional culture. The notion that McNamara would commission a project to study the history of how we got into the war in Vietnam was not a shocking, controversial idea when McNamara came up with it. People thought that that was the kind of thing that you did back then. If you’ll notice, there were multiple studies of the Bay of Pigs catastrophe that were done internally. John F. Kennedy asked Dick Neustadt to study one of his failures. There was a culture in the U.S. government of rigorous study of what went right and what went wrong, at a highly professional level. And the quality of the Pentagon Papers is in a way a symptom of what then was already beginning to be a dying culture.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. If there is an effort underway to try to honestly and searchingly figure out what went wrong with our exit from Afghanistan, or our whole enterprise in Afghanistan, I’m not aware of it.
Philip Zelikow: Right. There is currently… Tammy Duckworth and others are proposing an Afghanistan commission that they’re trying to get into the National Defense Authorization Act, right at this minute.
Geoff Kabaservice: But such a commission will actually run up against the demise of this kind of high-quality written staff work — partly because the Pentagon Papers cast a significant echo and people now are into CYA mode. They don’t want to actually write down what happens in meetings.
Philip Zelikow: Right. And so then, however, what the commission might do is administer a really hard dope-slap that calls out the fact that when you quit doing serious written work and begin making policy by bloviating, you get catastrophic results. Which might — might — contribute to people trying to do things differently.
Geoff Kabaservice: You and I actually met for the first time at the Kennedy School at Harvard back in the ’90s. Ernest May was my advisor. And I can’t help but feel, reading your Texas National Security Review article, that there’s actually a problem in Harvard’s shift from the Littauer School of Public Administration to the Kennedy School of Government.
Philip Zelikow: Well, actually, I have been close friends to the founders of Kennedy School. And I taught in the core curriculum of the Kennedy School for a time, which is probably the time in which we came across each other. And so I was very well acquainted with a lot of the complaints and sadness of the people who had helped found the Kennedy School about what the school had become. I have some sympathy with what some of the school’s strengths are, but I’m very well aware of the disappointment many of those co-founders feel about what the school became. Because they effectively felt the school had been hijacked by a particular academic orthodoxy that ended up not being very helpful in training people for public problem-solving.
I get into this in the article, and it’s basically a set of approaches to policy analytics that are drawn out of microeconomics. By the way, they are quite powerful tools for certain kinds of policy analysis, but not for general policy development. And the article gets into this a little bit more. But you’re quite right. Already by the ‘90s, I was part of a movement even in the Harvard Kennedy School, and which a number of other professors joined, to try to change the core curriculum. That movement failed. It was a very close vote, but it failed. And I left the school and came to Virginia shortly thereafter — not for that reason, for other reasons. It was one opportunity, but the opportunity is not yet lost.
I think there are possibilities here and there to try to generate a movement to revamp the way we train people in public problem-solving in America. We should use these failures — Afghanistan, the pandemic crisis — as a prompt to change our training. We have to understand why we have the training we have, that it comes out of these odd historical circumstances, and then try to adopt different kinds of training. And let this be part of a lot of general ferment and unease about the stultification of American higher education and American professional education. But I think nothing is more important than this effort to rebuild our competency as a country. Nothing is more important than that cause.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. And this business of declining state capacity tends to put one in a pessimistic frame of mind.
Philip Zelikow: It does.
Geoff Kabaservice: And also to consider the related although not completely similar subject of American national decline. But you ultimately end that Texas National Security Review on an optimistic note.
Philip Zelikow: I do.
Geoff Kabaservice: You write in your last sentences: “Americans can reflect on a proud heritage, not far in the past, when Americans were notorious around the world for their practical, can-do skills in everything from fixing cars to tackling apparently insurmountable problems, public as well as private. These seemingly bygone skills were not in their genes or in the air. They may not be consigned to wistful nostalgia. The skills were specific. They were cultural. And they are teachable.”
Philip Zelikow: Exactly. And they can be taught again. And I think there are a lot of things… There are a lot of promising things in the society that are headed in this direction. There’s enormous interest all over the country, actually, in relearning how to build and make things in the liberating environment that the digital revolution is creating in many ways.
Actually, the wide admiration for people like Elon Musk partly has some of this in it. He’s admired for being eccentric, but he’s also admired because he’s an innovator who makes cool stuff. And America, in a way, they’re gravitating to him as if he were the Henry Ford or the Tom Edison of the 21st century. And it’s just noteworthy noting the cultural moment: the supply chain problems and a lot of different problems are actually potentially opportunities to rethink a lot of the sinews of our economy and our culture.
And as I say, we’ve done this before. A lot of the innovations we made in the Progressive Era — and other people have called attention to this — in the early 20th century came out of a period of terrible neglect, terrible civil strife in the country, huge social tensions, and a sense that a lot of people were very pessimistic about the country. But they responded to that. And we have a chance to do that now. It’s interesting… What you can do, too, is go around the country and look for things that work. By the way, Jim and Deb Fallows have done a little bit of this in their work, and getting in their plane and hopping around.
Geoff Kabaservice: I really like their book Our Towns.
Philip Zelikow: Right. Their book, Our Towns, which is the HBO series and this project they’ve got. And what they did is find out: You know what? There are Americans all over the country who are actually doing a lot of really neat stuff and are very ingenious and have all this native talent. And mostly the national discourse doesn’t notice them. And so they want to try to call those people out, and quite rightly. So you can be sad and pessimistic about a lot of things. But if you want to find reasons for optimism, it’s not that hard to find.
Geoff Kabaservice: As promised, you have way too much going on, and that you have done, to talk about in an hour. But before we leave, can you just tell me something about the COVID Commission Planning Group of which you are the director right now?
Philip Zelikow: Sure. About a year ago, a group of funders led by Eric Schmidt thought it was obvious that coming out of this gigantic COVID crisis, which may be the most impactful crisis since 1945 in many ways, surely there would be a national commission that would do a major investigation of just what did happen and why, so that we could learn a lot of lessons from that. It was obvious to them we would do that. Because it would be such a large-scale investigation, they thought they could help by getting the work done right away to start planning it. And they recruited and hired me to lead a group to do that planning. I then quickly gathered around me dozens of subject matter experts and others to help. We have a website on this: COVIDcpg.org — that stands for COVID Commission Planning Group.org, COVIDcpg.org.
And for the better part of a year now we’ve been kind of planning how one would do a large-scale commission of this kind, organized around (in our view) four principal task forces, and recruiting people to help lead those task forces, and identifying what the issues would be, and drafting launch work plans. But right now, there is no such commission. Congress is currently considering legislation that might create one. The legislation has pros and cons, which would be another subject to get into. But if Congress doesn’t do it, probably the only alternative is for a group of private philanthropies to band together to create an independent commission but then seek the help they’ll need to get access to people and so forth from the Biden White House and maybe some help from members of Congress of both parties.
Geoff Kabaservice: You told Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post recently that “Tackling an understanding of this crisis is actually a harder problem than the 9/11 Commission was.” Why is that?
Philip Zelikow: 9/11 was hard, the COVID crisis harder. The 9/11 crisis primarily involved the federal government, so it was pretty Washington-focused. There was some attention to the foreign terrorist organizations, and there were some of the first responder stuff in New York City.
The scale and scope of this crisis is much larger. You’ve really got to understand nationwide crisis management involving people all over America. You’ve got an international picture having to do with the causes of the pandemic, how you prevent pandemics, how we get early warning. That’s very international. You’ve got a challenge of medical countermeasures and how to harness the Bio Revolution that is also both national but also very international. So intellectually, from an investigative point of view, in terms of the number of subject matter areas on which you need to have some competence, it’s a sprawling problem.
And then you have to ask yourself: On which of all these things could a commission actually add value? Look, if other people and the natural processes are going to do certain work, well, then just let them do that. You don’t need a commission to recapitulate what other people will do just fine. And we do ask ourselves: On what questions do we think a commission can really add insight by assembling a lot of horsepower and maybe some access to people or records? And we think we’ve got a plan for how to proceed. And now we’re waiting to see if the United States will create a suitable commission.
The British have already announced they’re going to launch their public inquiry early next year and name its head before Christmas. Others, like Sweden and so forth, or Brazil, are already launching their inquiries. But we’ve been reluctant to stand one up on our end. And part of that is for some of the same cultural reasons that we’d been discussing earlier in this podcast.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. You’d mentioned earlier that the 9/11 Commission was partisan, certainly in terms of who served on it and the discussion around it. But in comparison to today’s polarization, that seems like a veritable Era of Good Feelings. And we are talking also after Congress refused to allow a commission to be created to look into the January 6th Capitol invasion.
Philip Zelikow: Yes, that’s right.
Geoff Kabaservice: So to what extent is this polarization impeding our ability to do the kind of work you have in mind?
Philip Zelikow: Oh, it’s impeding it quite a lot. We’re pretty familiar with views on Capitol Hill about this. I mean, that’s why the commission hasn’t been created yet, as many Republicans think the Democrats just want to create such a commission so that they can pin the blame of the crisis on Trump and make this all about another anti-Trump thing. For their reasons, they don’t want to go along with that.
On the Republican side, they have a blame narrative that is focused on China, or as Rand Paul might say, some of China’s fellow travelers. So you’ve got these blame narratives on both sides. You’ve got culture war narratives on both sides. Let’s say one side says, “We follow science,” one side says, “We protect Americans’ liberties and livelihoods.” You’ve got all that and in this very polarized environment, and a lot of mutual suspicion, and the experience with the January 6th commission, just as you said.
It is interesting though, right now, there is a possibility Congress might create a commission. There is a bill that’s just been proposed. And the basic bipartisan deal there is Republicans insist on a commission to get to the bottom of the origins issues, as best anyone can, and Democrats insist in turn that any commission needs to have a broad scope to examine a lot of facets of the crisis. And that might be a basis for bipartisan agreement. But because of the polarized environment, I’m not sure it’ll get there.
Then, if that fails, we’re left with whether or not philanthropies choose to try to create an independent commission. And there, the position of the Biden White House and whether it will facilitate that will be instrumental. The Biden White House so far has been preoccupied and noncommittal. They need to decide whether or not they want to remain in that stance.
Geoff Kabaservice: Professor Philip Zelikow, I wish you all the luck in the world with this enterprise. Congratulations on your wonderful new book, and thank you for joining me here today.
Philip Zelikow: Thank you, Geoff. This has been delightful.
Geoff Kabaservice: It really has. And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
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When the coronavirus pandemic first hit, many states and towns closed everything, including schools. Public-health experts didn’t know enough about how COVID was spread or how contagious it was, and the health-care system was overwhelmed in parts of the country. The American public could see the disaster unfolding in Italy, and many people believed that the U.S. needed to act before things got out of control.By the fall of 2020, still without vaccinations, many older Americans continued to be at significant risk. Given that kids could bring infections home, even if they weren’t at huge risk themselves, many schools remained online, in full or in part.[Read: COVID vaccine mandates for kids are coming]By the start of the next school year, vaccines were widely available for anyone age 12 or older. And many schools that reopened were able to implement measures that other institutions struggled with. Even so, people continued to worry about the danger that schools posed to society.Then classes began, and … widespread doom never really came—or, if it did, it didn’t come from schools.The Delta surge began long before classes resumed, and looking at the state-by-state data, you’d be hard-pressed to find bumps that can be pinned on the beginning of the semester. Last year, no surge happened in September either. Most states didn’t see any significant rise in COVID cases last fall until well into October.Schools aren’t the problem. They never have been.One of the frustrating things about the pandemic has been our inability, even at this late date, to understand why surges occur. They hit communities with mask mandates, and communities without. Last year, we believed that the surge from October through February was caused by seasonal changes. The cold drove everyone indoors, where COVID was much more likely to spread, and therefore cases developed more quickly. This year, though, the surge began long before the weather turned cold. Vaccines are certainly protective and likely mitigate the severity of surges locally. Even so, things may worsen again—the data right now aren’t looking good for much of the country, and many people fear more hardship to come from the emergent Omicron variant—but no predictable pattern has emerged to explain what sets off periods of dramatic increases.[Read: Omicron’s best-case scenario]What is pretty certain, however, is that schools are not to blame. They didn’t cause the surges. They didn’t cause the massive numbers of hospitalizations and deaths that Florida experienced this summer and that Michigan appears to be experiencing now. They haven’t done nearly as much damage as bars, restaurants, and indoor events (including kids’ birthday parties), which never seem to receive the same amount of attention.This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t getting COVID, of course. It doesn’t mean that kids aren’t in danger, haven’t gotten sick, haven’t been hospitalized by the thousands, and even died. Kids catch COVID, and transmission does occur in schools, but it is rare when precautions are taken. Because of this, the level of school transmission is sometimes lower than that of the surrounding community. Most schools are on guard, at least. Many require masks. More are being thoughtful about close contacts and group dynamics, and they enforce isolation and quarantine as much as they can. That may be inconvenient, but it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t made a difference.[Jessica McCrory Calarco: Why parents kept their kids home from school]This is especially true in higher education. Many colleges have led the way in the past year in protocols, testing, surveillance, and even vaccinations. And they’ve consequently been able to steer back to a state of near-normalcy. This seems to perplex much of the country, which doesn’t appear to appreciate how safe things are on campuses today. Images of packed football stadiums this year have been followed by predictions of horror to come. Many people see kids screaming and yelling in huge numbers and assume that outbreaks are imminent. For the most part, they haven’t occurred. Football games are outdoor activities, and those are pretty safe. Further, many more of those kids are likely vaccinated than the surrounding public, and vaccinations work.Some colleges made perfunctory-at-best efforts to control COVID, which did lead to some avoidable outbreaks, and even some closures. Other universities may arguably be going too far. Some are engaging in massive testing programs of the already vaccinated, which may pick up infections that are unlikely to be contagious. Others are limiting how many friends students can see in a day, or asking asymptomatic, vaccinated people to mask up outside and even in between bites and sips if they’re drinking or eating too slowly. Some schools have reverted to online-only classes because of breakthrough cases.It’s important to understand that preventing new cases completely is nearly impossible. Continuing to regulate behavior when you’ve already achieved a massive level of vaccination is likely to backfire. A school cannot expect to have no COVID cases when the community has COVID. Our goal needs to be “safe enough,” not perfection. That’s the approach many schools have taken, including Indiana University, where I serve as chief health officer.The public can stop fixating on schools. Schools are open and kids are safe—especially now that most can be vaccinated. We should celebrate that and stop holding these essential institutions to a standard that no other is even close to achieving.

As I’ve argued before, the two key events giving rise to the Great Awokening (the sudden increase in woke sentiment beginning in around 2012) were the launch of social media and the Occupy Wall Street protests. These two events led to the formation of a bootlegger-baptist coalition, with social-media activists as the self-righteous baptists, and woke corporations as the self-serving bootleggers. This woke coalition then proceeded to engineer the most rapid cultural shift in recent history.

However, those two events didn’t occur in a vacuum. While they may explain the timing of the Great Awokening — why it got going in around 2012 — they aren’t sufficient to explain its origins. Indeed, there are several contextual factors without which the Great Awokening might never have happened. One is the legal regime instigated by the Civil Rights Act (something Richard Hanania has written about in detail). Another is the massive leftward shift of academia: the increase in the proportion of academics with left-wing views, and the corresponding rise of Grievance Studies.

The best illustration of academia’s leftward shift is this chart, which shows the proportion of US academics identifying as “Far left/liberal” and “Far right/conservative” from 1989-90 to 2013-14. All the data come from the same long-running survey, so there can be little doubt that the shift is real, as opposed to being due to changes in methodology. As the chart’s creator Sam Abrams notes, “The data is comparable and responsibly collected over a long period of time.” (Though I’m not aware of any more recent data, it’s plausible that the dark blue line is now even higher.)

I suspect that most of academia’s leftward shift was due to self-reinforcing processes: social homophily (conservatives not wanting to enter a profession where there aren’t many conservatives); political typing (conservatives feeling that an academic career “isn’t for them” in the same way that some women feel that a construction career “isn’t for them”); and discrimination (conservatives being discriminated against in hiring, research and funding).

However, one other possible cause of academia’s leftward shift, and of the rise of woke activism in particular, is the influx of women into that institution. Note: this factor is at least partly exogenous to the phenomenon we’re trying to explain. Although more women may have entered the academy in part because it became more left-wing (people with left-wing views tend to be more concerned about gender equality), the influx was also caused by the general rise in opportunities for women in society.

Incidentally, I’m focusing almost entirely on the US because that’s where the Great Awokening started, and that’s where most of the relevant data come from. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of “faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions” who are women increased from 33 per cent in 1987 to 50 per cent in 2018. Note: the figure of “50 per cent” includes part-time as well as full-time faculty, and masks considerable differences by level of seniority. For example, there are still twice as many male professors as female professors. Nonetheless, it’s clear that there are many more women in academia than there used to be.

Women are consistently less supportive of free speech than men

So, why would the influx of women into academia have contributed to its leftward shift, and to the rise of woke activism in particular? As the psychologist Cory Clark notes, women are consistently less supportive of free speech than men, and consistently more supportive of censorship. Compared to men, they’re more likely to say: that hate speech is violence; that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker; that controversial scientific findings should be censored; that people need to be more careful about the language they use; and that it should be illegal to say offensive things about minorities.

Clark argues, convincingly in my view, that this stems from women’s greater aversion to harm and conflict. They interpret various forms of speech as harmful to vulnerable groups, and wish to censor them for that reason. Whether these gender differences are cross-cultural universals remains a matter of debate. Women being more averse to harm and conflict would certainly make sense from an evolutionary point of view, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the differences are hard-wired. As with most traits that vary, I suspect there’s both a genetic and an environmental component. Whatever the precise mix, women’s greater aversion to harm and conflict does show up in many WEIRD countries, not least the United States.

Clark isn’t the only scholar to have noticed that women’s aversion to harm and conflict has profound implications for academia. Drawing on the work of psychologist Joyce Benenson, Arnold Kling notes: “Women have a social strategy that works well for protecting their individual health and the health of their children: emphasize safety, covertly undermine the status of unrelated females, and exclude rivals rather than reconcile with them.” This leads him to speculate that adding a lot of women to formerly male domains has made the culture of those domains more consistent with female tendencies. “The older culture valued open debate,” Kling notes. “The newer culture seeks to curtail speech it regards as dangerous.”

We know that, on average, women are less favourable to free speech and more favourable to censorship. Is there any more specific evidence that this has changed the culture of academia? Yes, as I will explain in the remainder of this article.

First, women are disproportionately represented in Grievance Studies (i.e., disciplines like Gender Studies and Critical Race Theory), which are often little more than a vehicle for left-wing activism. The chart below shows the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women for different humanities disciplines. Notice the light green line at the top: almost 80 per cent of bachelor’s degrees in “Ethnic, Gender, and Cultural Studies” are awarded to women.

The next chart shows the same information for doctoral degrees. Once again, notice the light green line at the top: about 65 per cent of doctoral degrees in “Cultural, Ethnic, & Gender Studies” are awarded to women — a higher percentage than in any other subject shown. (Note: women are also disproportionately represented in biomedical science, which is obviously more rigorous than Grievance Studies, though it’s becoming increasingly woke.)

As I mentioned above, academia has a substantial left-wing skew. Interestingly, this skew appears to be greater among female academics than among male ones. In a 2016 paper, Mitchell Langbert and colleagues analysed voter registration data on approximately 4,000 US academics. As the table below indicates, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was “only” 9:1 among men, but it was almost 25:1 among women. An alternative way to summarise these data is to say that while 10 per cent of male academics are Republicans, less than 4 per cent of female academics are.

Thanks to Mark Horowitz and colleagues, we also have detailed surveys from two of the most left-leaning disciplines: sociology and anthropology. The table below shows the proportion of male versus female sociologists (from a sample of 479) who agreed and disagreed with various items. Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Sociology should be both a scientific and moral enterprise”, and that “Sociology should analyze and transcend oppression”. They were less likely to say that “More political conservatives would benefit discipline”, and that “Advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity”.

What about anthropology? The next table shows the proportion of male versus female anthropologists (from a sample of 301) who agreed and disagreed with various items. Compared to men, women were more likely to say that “Science is just one way of knowing”, and that “Postmodern theories have made important contribution”. They were less likely to say that “Field is undermined by antiscientific attitudes”, or agree with “Advocacy and fieldwork kept separate for objectivity”.

Finally, there is the evidence supplied by Eric Kaufmann in his mammoth report for the CSPI. Kaufmann compiled data from several different surveys of graduate students and academics. He found that women were more likely to support dismissal campaigns, more likely to discriminate against conservatives, and more likely to support diversity quotas for reading lists. Overall, they had significantly more left-wing views. To quote Kaufmann: “if the share of women rises, we should expect the balance of internal opinion to move in the direction of emotional safety over academic freedom.”

Compared to men, women are less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. Within academia itself, they are more left-wing, more inclined toward activism, and less inclined toward dispassionate inquiry. And they’re disproportionately represented in disciplines like Race and Gender Studies. It’s important to note, of course, that this is Not All Women! I’m only talking about averages: some men are pro-censorship than most women; and some women are more pro-free speech than the vast majority of men. Nonetheless, the differences do exist (at least in the Anglosphere).

It’s therefore plausible that the influx of women into academia over the last thirty years contributed to academia’s leftward shift, and to the rise of woke activism in particular. (It was by no means the only contributor; most of academia’s leftward shift was probably caused by social homphiliy, political typing, discrimination and other self-reinforcing processes.) To the extent that women’s entry into academia did contribute to its leftward shift, the phenomenon can be considered one of several factors that led to the Great Awokening.

This article was reproduced by kind permission.

To have been a war reporter over the past ten years is to have worked under the shadow of the modern American way of war. From Libya a decade ago to my last reporting trip in Syria in 2019, the outcome of the wars that followed the Arab Spring have been decided by the presence or absence of American air power. 
I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.
Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 
The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 
By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?
It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.
Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.
A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 
Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.
As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 
With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.
More from this authorThis is how civilisations collapseBy Aris Roussinos
From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 
Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of activists and human rights activists, who demanded ”even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.
It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 
The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.
As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.
Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.
More from this authorHow America can save TaiwanBy Aris Roussinos
Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 
But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.
A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.
We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.
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Earlier this year, Baroness Kennedy was contacted by the two daughters of Paul Rusesabagina — human rights campaigner, winner of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and real-life hero of the film Hotel Rwanda. The pair sought help with their father’s case; he had been kidnapped and jailed by the regime of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan dictator infamous for his government’s use of assassination, imprisonment and smears to silence his critics.

After investigating the charges of terrorism levelled against Rusesabagina, the Labour peer and human rights lawyer concluded there were serious concerns over the rendition and the trial. “We expanded the Commonwealth to include Rwanda on grounds they would follow the rule of law and correct standards but the country has kidnapped a man in poor health, who was ill-treated in custody and denied a fair trial,” said Kennedy, who is also director of the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute.

Her views are shared by other prominent human rights campaigners. “Illegal rendition and false arrest are a travesty of justice that demand a response from the West,” said Bill Browder, the financier who started pushing for worldwide imposition of ‘Magnitsky legislation’ to sanction despots, killers and torturers after the murder of his lawyer in Russia. “This law was meant for cases like this where a government goes so far beyond acceptable behaviour.”

Browder and Kennedy hosted a meeting last week in parliament with Carine and Anaise Kanimba to press for sanctions on the Rwandan officials behind the illegal rendition and false imprisonment of their adoptive father. Kennedy, however, was contacted by former aid minister Andrew Mitchell — whom she admires despite their party differences due to his usually robust stand on such issues — who strongly objected to her stance. “I fear Andrew has allowed his friendships to cloud his judgment,” she tells me. “I also celebrated the arrival of Kagame after the genocide but he has not lived up to expectations. It was the same with Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, Andrew seems to have locked in his hopes.”

Mitchell has long been a strong and vocal supporter of the Rwandan government. Indeed, he even calls Kagame a hero, despite so much evidence of human rights abuses, his crushing of democracy and disruptive meddling in neighbouring nations. Such is Mitchell’s steadfast defence of the brutal central African regime that one colleague described him mockingly to me as their MP for Kigali. Now — as the Government slides in polls over its handling of sleaze — the veteran Tory politician is facing uncomfortable questions after taking a lucrative consultancy from a bank run by close allies of Kagame.

Mitchell is being paid £39,600 a year by SouthBridge for just nine days advice “on African matters”. This fee, working out at an impressive £4,400 a day, is one of six consultancies that earn him £182,600 annually — more than double his salary as MP for Sutton Coldfield. Intriguingly the investment bank — based in Rwanda, France and Ivory Coast — is run by a former Rwandan finance minister, while the managing director of its operations in the country’s capital previously oversaw the ruling party’s sprawling commercial interests.

Details of Mitchell’s starring role in what has been branded “the Tories’ second-jobs gravy train” particularly alarms human rights activists, because the 65-year-old MP — who lost his Cabinet post after allegations he called a Downing Street police officer a “pleb” — chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Rwanda. “I’m amazed he can’t see how bad this looks,” said Michela Wrong, author of Do Not Disturb, an expose of the Rwandan regime. “Mitchell’s always been Kagame’s most dogged British defender, never missing a chance to justify the regime’s acts.”
Suggested readingThe corruption of BritainBy Ian Birrell

Wrong, like some Rwandan dissidents, is particularly disturbed by the apparent conflict of interest when Mitchell heads the all-party group while “taking money from an institution so close to this truly sinister regime”. The Tory MP — who took up the post in March last year — has told friends “there is no institutional link to the Rwandan state”. But Wrong argues that his financial ties to SouthBridge, with two of Kagame’s most trusted former financial aides at its helm, undermines claims of independence. “Before, he could at least assure his critics no money had changed hands — that he was speaking purely from passionate personal conviction. No more.”

SouthBridge has two managing partners: Donald Kaberuka, who was Rwanda’s finance minister for eight years before becoming president of the African Development Bank, and Lionel Zinsou, a former prime minister of Benin, based in Paris. Kaberuka was a core member of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power after the genocide in 1994 when an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered and has since run the country. He remained close to the Rwandan dictator as a member of the presidential advisory panel.

During Kaberuka’s time as finance minister, the United Nations accused Rwanda of looting the Democratic Republic of Congo’s vast mineral wealth to fund its armed forces after Kagame sparked two wars that left millions dead. Rwandan troops were accused of slaughtering fleeing refugees among other atrocities. One unusually-damning UN report said revenues from the systematic extraction of gold and diamonds by Rwanda “directly influence national decision-making” and were “hidden from the scrutiny of international organisations”. Another UN inquiry identified 617 separate incidents of war crimes committed by 21 rebel groups and eight foreign armies in the maelstrom of horror.

SouthBridge’s managing director in Kigali is John Birungi, former chief executive of a key RPF-run conglomerate with wide interests stretching from property to security. It has been accused in the past of trading in conflict minerals, while also leasing jets for Kagame despite the impoverished nation’s dependence on foreign aid — including about £900m from Britain since Kagame took control of this nation of 13m people.
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The bank lists three offices on its website in Abidjan, Paris and Kigali. Curiously, the telephone numbers given for Abidjan and Paris did not function when I called them, while the line in Rwanda went unanswered on several attempts. The address given for the Paris office turned out to be a four-story building in an upmarket district near the Arc de Triomphe. There were no signs on display for SouthBridge. “I’ve never heard of it being a bank,” said a neighbour. “There are flats at the top but I’m not aware of any offices or businesses inside.”

The Ivory Coast office is in a three-storey building that looks empty on the top two storeys with a rental sign outside. Three non-security staff were visible on the ground floor during a recent visit. The office manager declined to discuss staff numbers but said they had also a Paris office.

Mitchell’s support for Rwanda dismays those fighting for democracy and the families of citizens falling foul of the regime. David Himbara, Kagame’s former economic adviser and now a prominent dissident, describes Mitchell as “indifferent to the regime’s atrocities” and one of its “diehard supporters”. Another exile who has met him told me they were disgusted to hear Mitchell echo regime propaganda, even lecturing them on the need for stability in their own nation. “I felt so insulted — like he was saying we were all animals who would devour each other.”

His enthusiasm for this despotic regime has led Mitchell into previous controversy. On the MP’s last day as aid minister in 2012, he restored funding for Rwanda after it had been suspended for supporting militia in Congo engaged in mass murder, rape and forcing almost half a million people from their homes. The move was condemned by MPs and over-turned briefly by his successor — although the UK remains a backer of Kagame, who is even hosting the next Commonwealth summit.

Mitchell has registered his interests as required. These show he also took a three-day trip in 2019 to visit Rwanda’s army academy, funded by its ministry of defence — valued at £5,092 for flights and hotels — despite evidence that the military has been heavily involved in atrocities and the looting of neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. The MP says he spoke on human rights to senior military officers from across Africa at a conference.
Mitchell is also friends with Emmanuel Ndahiro, the Rwandan president’s former doctor and intelligence chief whose phone number was linked in court to an attempted assassination in South Africa. Earlier this year, Freedom House, the US human rights group, cited Rwanda alongside China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey as one of the world’s most prolific practitioners of “transnational repression”. Ndahiro was also named in the Panama Papers as one-time director of an offshore firm reported to own a private jet.
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SouthBridge, meanwhile, said it was a respected pan-African investment bank that operated in several countries on the continent. “We make sure that we are in compliance with all applicable legislation and regulations, including rules that may concern our trusted external advisors,” said Caroline Ndirangu, Director of Finance and Administration.

Mitchell insists his lucrative SouthBridge consultancy is not linked to his position on Rwanda, saying it involved “a new and highly-respected pan-African bank chaired by a distinguished former President of the African Development Bank”. Although he declined to comment on “commercially confidential matters” he added that he was happy to give one example: “We advise on debt risk and how to minimise it. My input is drawn from my experience as a former director of an insurance company and many years in investment banking as well as my knowledge of Africa.”

I have long disagreed with Mitchell on aid, yet respected his intentions and ideals despite our differences. He says his support for Rwandans is “heartfelt and genuine” — although others would argue that there is a world of difference between supporting Kagame and supporting the citizens of this blighted country. Regardless, to take money from an institution run by people so close to a cruel dictator at the very least looks bad, especially as he becomes an increasingly lonely voice defending this loathsome regime.

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Editor’s Note: Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of “The End of Greatness: Why America Can’t Have (and Doesn’t Want) Another Great President.” Miller was a Middle East negotiator in Democratic and Republican administrations. The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN —

Having spent a couple decades in and around failing Arab-Israeli negotiations, I know a negotiation that’s in serious trouble when I see one. The Iran nuclear negotiations that resumed this week in Vienna after a suspension of almost five months are a case in point.

Aaron David Miller Courtesy Aaron David Miller

Indeed, right now, probably neither the Biden administration nor Iran’s Supreme Leader believes a mutually acceptable agreement is feasible. And it’s not so certain that one of the parties – Iran, which seems to be using the talks as cover to ramp up its nuclear program – believes that an accord is even desirable right now.

All of which is to say that the game has just begun, and the outcome will be neither a quick accord nor a collapse. Indeed, today Iranian representatives presented texts of their own on sanctions removal and their own nuclear activities, offering to stay in Vienna to continue negotiating. Instead, we’re likely in for a prolonged game of maneuvering and pressure by each side to achieve what they want, or failing that, to ensure that, if talks do crater, the other side takes the lion’s share of the blame.

As a general rule, an impasse in negotiations is broken when there are sufficient amounts of pain and gain present to change the parties’ calculations. As anyone who’s been a part of a negotiation will tell you – whether it’s with the Israelis, Palestinians, or Russians – pressure and pain alone rarely if ever work, especially when a nation perceives its vital interests are at stake.

President Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign against Iran is an example. Sanctions severely damaged Iran’s economy, but they didn’t force Iran to make concessions; in fact, Trump’s sanctions resulted in Iran ramping up its nuclear program.

The challenge facing the negotiations today is that the factors that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear accord are all missing. As US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley noted, the combination of pressure and inducements that led to the previous accord are no longer in alignment.

Moreover, the unilateral US withdrawal from the accord; Iran’s breaching of the agreement by expanding its uranium enrichment, after initially adhering to the pact after the US abandoned it; additional US sanctions; Iran’s refusal to allow IAEA monitoring of sensitive nuclear sites have not only shattered what trust and confidence existed, particularly between the US and Iran; but also raised serious questions – with some key provisions due to sunset by 2025 – about whether the original agreement was becoming obsolete and irrelevant.

To make matters worse, since US withdrawal from the accord in 2018, the politics on both sides have hardened significantly. A new, harder-line Iranian government came to power in June and the Supreme Leader – clearly never a fan of the original accord – has now publicly admitted it was a mistake.

The uptick of withering criticism of the previous Rouhani government by a new foreign minister and of the very process of negotiations by a new harder-line lead negotiator have created a set of fanciful demands that will be hard for Iran to simply amend or drop without additional concessions from Washington.

As for the Americans, the Biden administration’s intention to rejoin the accord was complicated by the President’s other priorities; the new web of sanctions imposed on Iran by his predecessor; by Biden himself; and by growing opposition by Republicans and some Democrats alike to an accord that didn’t cover Iran’s efforts to spread its influence in the region, especially its support for pro-Iranian groups striking US military bases in Syria and Iraq and its burgeoning ballistic missile programs.

Indeed, even if, by some miracle, Biden was able to rejoin the nuclear deal anytime soon, it would likely be a political liability for a president whose approval ratings are tanking. One can be forgiven for imagining Biden’s political advisers urging him to delay any would-be reentry into the reviled (at least by some in Washington) JCPOA.

Suffice to say, things don’t look good as a seventh round of negotiations between Iran, the Europeans, Russians and Chinese opened in Vienna. (Iran still refuses to meet directly with the US.)

Whatever else happens in Vienna this week, not a great deal of progress is likely to be made. Indeed, if Iran comes back with new and fanciful demands, as its foreign minister and lead negotiator have recently outlined – i.e., that the talks have nothing to do with the nuclear issue, only removing ”inhumane” US sanctions, one can imagine a game of gotcha with each side trying to persuade its friends and the rest of the world that it’s the other party who’s being unreasonable. Former Secretary of State James A. Baker called this tactic ”dead cat diplomacy,” where he’d lay the dead cat at the doorstep of the most recalcitrant party.

Malley, the US envoy, hinted at such an approach in a recent BBC interview where he suggested that if Iran overplayed its hand, the world would come to see that Tehran had a chance to strike a deal but chose not to.

Iran is preparing its own talking points to try and lay the blame at Washington’s door, asking how Iran can enter another deal without a US guarantee that it won’t bolt again. Iran will be counting on Russia and China to take its side in the gotcha sweepstakes.

This round of negotiations may initially turn on what Iran brings back to the table after a delay of five months. And it’s likely that neither the US, Iran or the Europeans, Russia and China want the talks to end. But if they do, we’ll be lucky to escape with a game of gotcha.

Alternatives to reentering the JCPOA – a smaller deal, less sanctions relief for fewer curbs on Iran’s nuclear activities or a longer and stronger accord that extends the curbs on Iran’s nuclear activities – seem unrealistic. Israel’s so-called Plan B discussed with the Biden administration – more sanctions; cyber war; and threat of military action against Iran’s nuclear sites – is a plan that Biden, preoccupied with domestic priorities, doesn’t want to embrace.

The last thing the President needs now is an Iranian-Israeli blow-up that drags the US into a war with Tehran. But if negotiations don’t succeed, sooner or later that may be where we’re heading. As one British journalist wrote, there’s more snow in Vienna these days than optimism.

This piece has been updated to reflect the latest events.

This week, a private U.K.-based investigative panel released what it says are classified Chinese government documents that appear to show how Chinese President Xi Jinping personally laid the groundwork for the systematic forced assimilation of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. It’s the most damning proof to date of the ongoing Uyghur genocide. So why can’t Congress pass a simple bill to stop the products connected to that genocide from ending up in U.S. homes and businesses?

The documents, which likely come from the same tranche of leaked Chinese Communist Party communications revealed by the New York Times over two years ago, add to the already abundant evidence that the Chinese government’s mass internment, mass forced labor, forced population control, family destruction and cultural erasure of the Uyghurs fit the United Nation’s definition of genocide as “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.”

Yet the Democrat-led Congress can’t seem to get the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which passed the Senate unanimously in July, to President Biden’s desk. Pointing to procedural issues and promises of future action, Democratic leadership in both the House and Senate can’t seem to agree on a strategy to pass the bill through both chambers, despite publicly claiming they support it.

On Wednesday, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the co-sponsor of the Senate’s version of the bill, pushed to add it as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass piece of legislation. Senate Democrats objected under a procedural rule that bars amendments that affect appropriations. Rubio called that a dodge.

“This is about the fact that they don’t want this bill to pass over at the House,” Rubio said on the Senate floor, referring directly to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Rubio also said U.S. corporations that profit from forced labor in China, such as Apple and Nike, have been lobbying against the bill, which is true. On Thursday, Pelosi denied Rubio’s accusations of stalling and promised her chamber would pass the House’s version of the legislation, introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), which the House passed last year 406 to 3. In an interview, McGovern told me his bill will be voted on and likely passed again in the House next week.

But if and when that happens, that won’t be the end. The two chambers will still have passed two different versions of the bill, with no firm plan for how to reconcile them.

Meanwhile, Biden administration officials have been quietly telling lawmakers to slow down. Administration sources confirmed that in an October call between Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the other co-sponsor, Sherman made it clear that the administration prefers a more targeted and deliberative approach to determining which goods are the products of forced labor. She also told Merkley that getting allied buy-in was critical and more effective than unilateral action.

“To be clear, the Department of State is not opposing this amendment,” a State Department spokesman told me. “We share the Congress’ concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang.”

In other words, while the administration supports the legislation in public, they are asking Democrats to essentially water it down in private. Sherman’s specific criticism relates to a part of the bill that would require a presumption that all products coming from Xinjiang are tainted by forced labor unless the importer can prove otherwise. This happens to be the exact provision corporations are also objecting to. Maybe it’s a coincidence.

“It isn’t partisan or in any way controversial for the U.S. to be unequivocally, resoundingly opposed to genocide and slave labor,” Merkley told me. “The Senate passed this legislation in July, and it’s time to get it over the finish line.”

There is a legitimate concern that supply chains for everything from solar panels to sneakers could be affected by the bill. But our dependency on products from an area where genocide is occurring is the root of the problem. Passing the bill now would send industry a clear signal to speed up what they are already doing, which is to stop doing business in areas riddled with forced labor. Also, forced labor products from China put U.S. manufacturers at a severe disadvantage.

“We must shine a light on the inhumane practice of forced labor, hold the perpetrators accountable and stop this exploitation,” Pelosi said while passing the bill last year. “And we must send a clear message to Beijing: These abuses must end now.”

Another year has gone and the bill still lingers. Pelosi has been a champion for human rights in China for decades, but the fight is not over and the ball is in her court. Overall, it’s up to both parties and both chambers to act to stop a genocide now. There’s no good reason to delay.

Entrenched leftists within the U.S. State Department are supporting the effort to demote Viktor Orban from prime minister of Hungary, if a report in Financial Times is correct. The Biden administration also left Hungary off its invitation list for a forthcoming international virtual Democracy Summit on Dec. 9 and 10 to which some 100 countries were invited.

“Trump and his enablers and those who invaded and attacked our Capitol, they don’t like the world we’re living in and they have that in common with autocratic leaders from Russia to Turkey, from Hungary to Brazil, and so many other places,” Hillary Clinton explained to MSNBC.

Hungary’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó retorted that Clinton’s remarks about the Democracy Summit proved that “the event has a domestic political character, with invitations withheld from countries whose leaders had good ties with former President Donald Trump . . . We need nobody to judge the state of Hungarian democracy as if in a school exam.”

A superficial reading of this would conclude it’s the big bad Central Euro authoritarians complaining about another American-backed regime change, but there’s more to it and this is just the latest connection to a broader ideological war unfolding across the Euro-Atlantic.

The European Culture War

Hungary has been an important point of discussion among U.S. conservatives. Orban’s party, Fidesz, leads a family-friendly conservative government, where women are tax free if they have more than three kids. Orban’s government has also crushed gender studies and other disciplines, defunded universities, closed Hungarian borders to illegal mass migration, stopped LGBT programs targeted towards children as propaganda, and cut down on abortion.

Alongside Poland, Hungary has formed a semi-alliance of Christian conservative central European powers, and has been an example of sorts for Western conservatives. Hungary offers what Sweden does to leftists: an functioning example of what a social-conservative government might look like in practice.

This is drawing attention from liberals and conservatives alike. Rod Dreher of the American Conservative lived in Hungary on a fellowship often writing about it, and Tucker Carlson of Fox News shot a whole documentary for a week from Budapest.

It’s also invited transnational opposition. Germany’s new center-left coalition of red and green parties insisted they will start a full-on culture war with Poland and Hungary while making the European Union a stronger transnational government.

“Countries which do not live up to the EU’s standards should not expect to receive EU money—a clear message to Poland and Hungary. This general approach applies to the United Kingdom as well,” a recent analysis stated, adding that the German coalition wants to make it legal for “trans people to self-identify.”

Meanwhile, Belgium and Netherlands are planning to fund abortion across Poland and Hungary, which limit the practice. “The Dutch parliament adopted a resolution approving the use of state funds to help Polish women obtain abortions, reports Deutsche Welle… The decision follows a similar move in September by Belgium, whose government agreed to provide funding for women in Poland to obtain terminations abroad, as a growing number have done since the near-total abortion ban was introduced,” according to a report.

Just to take one example, consider the implications of Germany allowing self-identification of transgenders, a process that fundamentally goes against biological reality. Given the Schengen borderless mandates within the EU, German transgender individuals could travel everywhere and use their EU special protections to undermine individual national policies about transgenderism, as well as the religious traditions of Hungary and Poland, which are stricter (and, one can say, more democratic) about such rules.

That likely sequence further indicates these countries are not “liberal democracies” (the key word here being liberal), opening them up for further charges of growing authoritarianism, and further clashes in EU courts, the rulings of which are increasingly considered superior to national democracies and lawmaking. In the past that has resulted in the EU clashing with Poland over fossil fuels and with Hungary over LGBT legal preferences and national courts.

Intellectual Compatibility Across Borders

The Polish conservative government, as well as Orban, bear similarities to the socially conservative section within the Republican Party, which consolidated under Donald Trump with increasing exchanges of intellectuals and conferences. The left’s reaction to that ascendence of social conservatives across the globe was therefore somewhat expected, given the new Biden administration staffed with Hillary-era culture warriors.

The culture war is transnational and the battle lines being drawn are naturally ideological as well. On one hand, there’s evangelical internationalist liberalism, which is imperial in nature and is therefore clashing with localist reactions from Virginia schools to villages in Hungary.

“Hungarian-American relations were at their peak during the Trump presidency,” Szijjarto of Hungary also noted when the FT reporter asked why Hungary was the only EU country left out of the planned Democracy summit by Joe Biden. “We have a great deal of respect for the former president, a respect that is mutual. We give the same respect to every elected U.S. president — regardless of what we get in return — but it is clear that those who were on friendly terms with Donald Trump were not invited.”

Hungary was the only country in the EU to be snubbed even when the U.S. State Department coyly added that that was not the case. “As an important part of our bilateral agenda, we continue to press our Hungarian counterparts when we have concerns about developments that erode space for independent media and civil society, curtailed LGBTQI+ rights, and undermined judicial independence,” the State dept said, according to FT. Within hours of its report, someone leaked an old speech of one of Orban’s closest allies that heightened political tensions in the nation.

One of Viktor Orbán's closest allies secretly gave a speech to the national security services. He told them that the opposition is the biggest threat and asked them to focus on it. We obtained a recording of the speech and here's our story in English:https://t.co/umj4zaZjIC — direkt36 (@direkt36) November 27, 2021

Democracy Isn’t the Issue; Sexual Chaos Is

Ultimately, however, there are two emerging questions to ponder. One, the complete hypocrisy of the Biden administration is visible. New Zealand, which is growing rapidly authoritarian with vaccine passports, second-grade citizenships, and lockdowns, is invited, but not Hungary, where people can move freely. The undertone of this decision is not lost on conservatives across Europe and possibly the United States: it is not about democracy at all, but about liberalism and sexual rights.

Are Republicans astute enough to see through this, and understand the potential long-term damage the left’s culture war is causing to America’s reputation as the ruling Democratic Party turns increasingly woke, revolutionary, and ideological? Democrats are actively building ideological solidarity and fellowship with other leftist parties across the world, but there’s no such equivalent among conservatives. If it is coming down to a battle of ideas across national boundaries, perhaps cultivating that is something to think about.

The second, and far more crucial, question is: what next for Poland and Hungary and how long can they survive within an openly hostile EU? The combined GDP and manpower of the four conservative central V4-Euro powers led by Poland and Hungary can compete with Germany and France. But at translating that into power, hard and soft, there’s no visible effort of unity.

France and Greece, for example, recently made a bilateral treaty that consolidated their foreign policy into one. There’s no such treaty between Poland and Hungary, or one alongside the UK, for example. Nor is there any visible effort of promoting a socially conservative order across Europe even when the situation is ripe with right-wing voters opposed to a leftist social revolution feeling increasingly voiceless, especially across Northern Europe.

Glimpses of that ideological movement building were once seen in an Orban speech asking Christian refugees from Europe to head to Hungary: “Of course we can give shelter to the real refugees: Germans, Dutch, French, Italians; scared politicians and journalists; Christians who had to flee their own country; those people who want to find here the Europe that they lost at their home,” he said.

If Orban wins re-election this time, against the odds, will we see the consolidation of a conservative bloc right at the heart of Europe? Because the days of hedging might soon be over. When the world turns binary, fence-sitting is usually no longer an option.

Dr. Sumantra Maitra is a senior editor at The American Conservative, a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, and an elected associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, and can be reached on Twitter @MrMaitra.

Many socialists believe that education is a universal human right. But evidently, not Arizona State University's (ASU) Students for Socialism. On Wednesday, they staged a protest to pressure campus administrators to expel Kyle Rittenhouse, the recently acquitted Kenosha shooter.
"Join us and rally against racist murderer Kyle Rittenhouse being permitted on our campus," said the student group on Twitter.
If video footage of the event on social media is any indication, it seemed sparsely attended. In fact, pro-Rittenhouse counterdemonstrators appeared to outnumber the socialists. When a leader of the protest—who was equipped with a megaphone—denounced Rittenhouse as a white supremacist killer, spectators pointed out that all three of the people he shot were white; this did not deter the protester, who responded that Rittenhouse was a descendant of white colonists who had murdered black and brown people.
In any event, there is little chance of Rittenhouse setting foot at ASU: He is not currently enrolled as a student. (He was, at one point, signed up to take online classes while awaiting admission.) But if he did, the public university would have no reason to evict him, and it should consider his hypothetical application as if he were any other student. He is a free man who was deemed innocent by a jury of his peers—a jury that agreed he acted in self-defense when he shot three men after each had allegedly attacked him. He is neither a murderer nor does he appear to be a racist; he has publicly declared that he supports Black Lives Matter and lamented that prosecutors can use their power to mistreat defendants of color.
Leftist students have free speech rights, and they can exercise those to protest Rittenhouse if they wish. But a great many university administrations—whose formal stances on public policy matters unrelated to education would be better left unsaid—have also taken sides against Rittenhouse.
The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf noted in a recent article that the Universities of California at Santa Cruz and Irvine, as well as The New School in New York, all released statements protesting the outcome of the trial and suggesting that Rittenhouse's not-guilty verdict was evidence of the power of white supremacy in U.S. society.
"We are disheartened and dismayed by this morning's not guilty verdict on all charges in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse," wrote U.C. Santa Cruz in a statement. "We join in solidarity with all who are outraged by this failure of accountability. Trials such as these that have race-related implications can cause our BIPOC communities distress and harm. This is harm that is endured everyday through acts of racism, the pervasiveness of white supremacy and a flawed justice system."
At U.C. Irvine, the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion and chief diversity officer said in his official capacity that "the conclusion of this trial does not end the reckoning about systemic racism in the United States. If anything, it has simply made it more legible."
It's difficult to understand why the chief diversity officer of a school thousands of miles away from Kenosha felt the need to weigh in on this matter on behalf of the school, and in a manner that suggests any student who disagrees might be an accomplice to racism. But weigh in he did.
The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system said the verdict was a reminder "that systems of inequity were not built in a day or a moment—they have been manufactured, crafted, and honed through generations of practice and reinforcement." And Fitchburg State University's Center for Diversity and Inclusiveness set up racially segregated safe spaces—separate spaces for students of color and white students—to process their trauma regarding the outcome.
It would have been entirely proper for colleges and universities to foster vigorous debate on Rittenhouse's acquittal, and to make it possible for students and professors dismayed by the verdict to speak up and explain their perspectives. But when administrators treat the outcome as obviously and undeniably wrong—and in fact, racist—they are more likely to render such a discussion impossible.
ASU's administration, to its credit, did not join in. A spokesperson confirmed to the media that Rittenhouse wasn't actually enrolled, but said nothing about keeping him off campus—to the disappointment of the socialists, undoubtedly.
Some conservative and libertarian students, on the other hand, said that they would welcome Rittenhouse. The student organization Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) released a statement chiding the left for hypocrisy.
"How ironic that the same socialists who call higher education a 'human right' also want to deny Rittenhouse that fundamental human right," said Sean Themea, YAL's chief of staff.

The post Socialist Students Want Arizona State University To Expel 'Racist Murderer' Kyle Rittenhouse appeared first on Reason.com.

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 56
The ideology that is most conveniently identified as “Wokeness” is much more accurately described by the phrase Identity Marxism. That is, Wokeness is a Marxian approach to identity politics for similar aims to those Marxism has always touted. In this regard, Critical Race Theory is Race Marxism; Critical Gender Theory is Gender Marxism; Queer Theory is Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Marxism; Fat Studies is Fat Marxism; Postcolonial Theory is Postcolonial Marxism; and Disability Studies is Disability Marxism. All together, working intersectionally, they are one new species of Marxism: Identity Marxism. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, James Lindsay walks the listener through a history of the various strains of Marxist thought to make the case that Wokeness is best thought of this way. Indeed, it must be understood this way. In so doing, he elucidates what Marxism really represents as a broad, overarching philosophy (or, religion) and indicates that the various species of Marxism, including vulgar, Cultural, neo-, and now Identity Marxism, are all essentially the same project in different guises. Join him for a penetrating discussion that frames Wokeness as it really is.

The post A Brief History of Identity Marxism appeared first on New Discourses.

“Oh, mon Dieu! He is a terrible pessimist.” For many people, DH Lawrence’s verdict on HG Wells, made in a letter to a friend in 1909, will be surprising, even perverse. Wells spent much of his life working to transform the human world into something better ordered, and more beautiful, than it had ever been before. Yet Lawrence’s observation contains a neglected truth. Wells did not really believe in the future of humanity. He could not banish the suspicion that humankind would remain incurably irrational, until eventually it destroyed itself.
Wells’s view of the human animal is expressed in his early masterpieces of speculative fiction. In The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1897), science had opened up vistas of progress wider than any hitherto conceived. Yet the end point of evolution would be a dying planet covered with lichen; trying to turn animals into rational humans would produce a tormented hybrid; the ancient dream of invisibility proved to be a curse; and all the resources of modern civilisation were powerless against invasion by a more advanced species. These visions, which came to Wells as revelations of his innermost doubts, never left him.
There have been many lives of Wells. Claire Tomalin’s gives us a picture of the writer that is vividly compelling and freshly detailed. She captures the young Wells’s vitality, showing him battling against poverty and illness, finding his way in British intellectual life and forming tangled relationships with a wide variety of women.
Wells was born in 1866 in Bromley, Kent, the fourth child of Joseph Wells, shopkeeper and cricketer, and Sarah Wells, a maid and then housekeeper at Uppark, a grand 17th-century house on the South Downs. His schooling was erratic. He learned most when he was bedridden as a result of illness or accident, reading books his father brought from the local library. In 1877 Joseph had a bad fall, ending his cricketing career. With the family finances depleted, Wells was apprenticed in a draper’s shop, then a pharmacy, positions he loathed. In 1883, after briefly contemplating suicide, he persuaded his mother and father he would do better as a pupil-teacher in a grammar school. He gained the post, and without telling his parents applied for a scholarship at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington.
[See also: From the NS archive: HG Wells, the man I knew]
By September 1884, not yet 18, Wells had become the student of TH Huxley, president of the Royal Society and the world’s leading Darwinist. Living in London on a guinea a week, a gaunt Wells could barely keep body and soul together. He watched as two fellow students fainted from hunger in the laboratory. Failing to get a degree, he took up a position at a boys’ school. Disaster struck when he was injured in a rugby game. He became an invalid, and on more than one occasion nearly died.
He seized the catastrophe as an opportunity, and began writing stories for magazines from his sickbed. At the bottom of a list of his published work showing he had made a grand total of £1, he noted: “Someday I will succeed, but it is a weary game.” He never gave up. For one thing, he had no intention of dying a virgin.
In theory Wells was a radical collectivist. In practice he was an unabashed individualist. Nowhere was this truer than in his relations with women. In the world of the future, everyone would practice “free love”. For Wells, others had to serve as instruments of his needs.
Wells’s sexual career began when he married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells in 1890, but it was not played out within his marriage. After a six-year-long engagement throughout which he had been faithful, their wedding night was a fiasco. Wells launched himself into what he called “an enterprising promiscuity”. In 1894 the couple separated, and Wells moved in with one of his students, Amy Robbins, later known as Jane, who became his wife in October 1895. Wells treated Jane abominably, spending much of his time with lovers. He returned to be with her only when she was dying from cancer, even then leaving regularly to spend a few days in France, where his current lover was living.
“Wells was desired by many clever and interesting women,” Tomalin writes, “for his energy and charm, for his reputation as a lover… as well as his fame, and, for some, his riches.” But as Tomalin goes on to show, his most serious lovers were outstandingly gifted women whose personalities he found compelling. Amber Reeves, with whom Wells fathered a daughter, was a brilliant Cambridge student, founder of the university’s Fabian society and later a feminist author. Rebecca West, with whom he had a son, was a celebrated writer. Elizabeth von Arnim was a bestselling novelist; Odette Keun a prominent Dutch socialist; Margaret Sanger a world leader in the campaign for birth control; and Dorothy Richardson a noted critic and author of the 13-volume Pilgrimage, a modernist classic.
Wells’s last and greatest love was Moura Budberg, the most extraordinary of them all. Tomalin writes:
She had lived a life of spectacular difficulty and danger, and saved herself – and her children – by courage, charm and ruthlessness… Whatever Wells knew or worried about in her past – marriages, love affairs, imprisonment and spying in Russia, Berlin, Estonia and Italy – he did not waver in his determination to keep her.
All of this is true, but hardly does justice to Moura or the pivotal role she played in Wells’s life. Tomalin sets out to present Wells up to the age of 40 but follows him well into his fifth decade, while her book’s final chapter takes us up to his death in August 1946. It is a pity that she fails to explore Wells’s relationship with Moura more fully, for it posed the severest challenge he ever faced to his view of the world and himself.
Many who knew her commented on Moura’s serene fatalism, others on her unyielding determination. Born in 1892 the daughter of a Tsarist nobleman, she faced becoming a “former person” after her husband was shot dead on the family estate in 1919. Many of her papers were destroyed in a fire in Italy, where she died in 1974. Much about her remains obscure.
Wells met Moura when she was Maxim Gorky’s secretary. She was also his lover; a relationship she had been encouraged to develop by the Cheka – the Soviet secret police. She eventually confessed this to Gorky, and years later made a similar confession to Wells when he discovered she was secretly visiting Gorky in Russia. She had been planted on Wells too. Collaborating with the Cheka, she explained, was the price of life in Soviet Russia. In an exchange Tomalin does not mention, reported by Wells’s son Anthony West in HG Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984), Moura mocked Wells’s surprise at what she had done. Had he not studied biology? Did he not know survival was the first law of evolution? For the species, Wells replied, not the conscious individual. Laughing lightly, Moura let the matter go.
Moura’s attraction to Wells may have been real enough – she told Somerset Maugham that Wells’s skin smelt deliciously of honey – but it was intermixed with self-preservation, calculation and deception. When they became lovers in Gorky’s apartment, Wells writes he “believed every word she said to me”. Now he found he could no longer believe in her at all. Yet nor could he live without her. He asked her to marry him, and she calmly declined. He begged her to live with him, and she refused. She remained his companion, a comforting presence in his despairing last years, on her own terms.
In his relationship with Moura, Wells realised he was no more a conscious individual than were the deluded masses. The rational elite to which he imagined he belonged, which could direct the future course of human evolution, did not exist.
Tomalin quotes George Orwell as writing: “Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.” It is a remarkably obtuse judgement: it would be truer to say that Wells was possessed by the madness of his times. His early fictions and the utopias he later promoted are two sides of the same divided mind. If anything, Wells’s schemes of world-transformation are more horrifying than his nightmares of human decline and extinction.
Referring to his non-fiction bestseller Anticipations (1901), Tomalin cites Wells’s assertion that in the New Republic, the coming World-State, those who could not keep up with “higher types” would “have to die out”. She does not share with us what Wells actually wrote:
The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility… and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of silly and contemptible creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incompetence and stupidity, [they] will have little pity and less benevolence… The Jew will… cease to be a physically distinct element in human affairs… And for the rest, those swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency?… I take it they will have to go… It is their portion to die out and disappear.
Tomalin claims Wells “was soon retreating from this racist position altogether”. But in a talk to a Liberal Summer School in Oxford in 1932, Wells declared, “I am looking for liberal Fascisti, enlightened Nazis.” As late as 1939, in The Fate of Homo Sapiens, Wells felt it necessary to include a chapter on “The Jewish Influence” in which, while condemning the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, he managed to convey the impression that it arose from a hostility that was in some ways quite understandable.
Wells was not, of course, a Nazi. His books were burned along with those of Stefan Zweig and Sigmund Freud, and he was near the top of the SS execution list if Britain was invaded. But like much of the progressive intelligentsia of his time, he was gripped by ideas –eugenics, racism, a cult of “efficiency” – that the Nazis took to their genocidal conclusions. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote to Wells thanking him for Anticipations, discussed “an extensive use of the lethal chambers” as “a part of eugenic politics” in a 1910 lecture to the Eugenics Education Society. Some have suggested Shaw was satirising eugenics, but it is interesting that his name does not appear on the Nazi death list.
Like Shaw, Wells was enchanted by tyrants, seeing them as engineers of souls who could remould the wayward human animal. Following an interview with Stalin in 1934 (published in this magazine), Wells wrote: “I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to those qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia.”
[See also: How HG Wells invented the modern world]
Tomalin passes quickly over Wells’s hideous New Republic, and spends much of two chapters considering his relations with the Fabians. There are moments of interest – Beatrice Webb prissily cutting Wells off because of his racy private life, for example – but on the whole it is a dull tale. She also spends too long on Wells’s novels of social commentary, Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Kipps (1905), Ann Veronica (1909) and The History of Mr Polly (1910), quaint relics of a world that has faded from memory.
In contrast, Wells’s speculative fictions have become popular myths. The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man are part of everyone’s imagination. The Time Machine is a potent reminder that Darwinian evolution is not an upward spiral towards ever more conscious forms of life but an aimless process that could end with lichen. The Island of Doctor Moreau – “an upsetting story… I still hesitate before returning to it”, writes Tomalin, who gives it a single paragraph – concerns an experiment in vivisection designed to remake animals as rational beings. What emerged was “not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain”. The story reads today as a premonition of the attempts to remould the human animal that Wells foresaw, and in some moods supported, in the 20th century.
In his last book, Mind at the End of its Tether, published in December 1945, Wells noted that in the past “there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality”, only to conclude: “There is no ‘pattern of things to come’.” By then he was mortally sick with cancer and diabetes. The vitality that had sustained him was gone. His hopes for the future had come to nothing, but the myths he created will endure as long as modern civilisation survives.
John Gray is a New Statesman contributing writer. His most recent book is “Feline Philosophy” (Allen Lane)
The Young HG Wells: Changing the WorldClaire TomalinViking, 272pp, £20

“It was alright as long as you didn’t get ill”.
My step-grandfather used to say this to me when reminiscing about life growing up in the Welsh valleys in the 1930s. Pre-war Britain could be a cruel place, especially if you were from a poor family (which he was). It could be crueller still if you had the bad luck to be poor and sick – a cursed combination. A visit to the doctor could set you back half a week’s wages.
We have come a long way as a country since then. We have the NHS for starters, founded by the former Labour health secretary, Aneurin Bevan, who grew up in Tredegar, a few miles down the road from where my grandfather lived. Yet today, in pandemic Britain, access to adequate healthcare feels once again out of reach to many who fall ill.
Anecdotes about the difficulty of getting a doctor’s appointment in 2021 are ubiquitous. You phone up your local surgery and wait on hold for half an hour. You are told to call back at 8 o’clock the next morning; then the process begins all over again. If you manage to get through to a receptionist, you are sometimes told that a face-to-face appointment is unavailable. Instead, the doctor will call you back, perhaps in a week’s time. At what time, you ask? We can’t guarantee a specific time, comes the reply.
This was my own recent experience. For the more assertive among us it’s usually possible (eventually) to navigate the Kafkaesque booking system and obtain an appointment. But many simply give up. The most recent GP People Survey found that 42 per cent of people have avoided making a GP appointment in the past 12 months.
The government’s national Covid policy last year instructed GPs to conduct appointments remotely. Switching back is proving a challenge: in August, just 58 per cent of appointments were conducted face-to-face, compared to a pre-pandemic figure of 80 per cent. In light of this, certain media outlets have been campaigning for more face-to-face GP appointments. The corresponding stories have frequently been coloured by depictions of GPs as lazy, entitled and obstinately uncooperative. “GPs still ignoring orders to allow patients face-to-face appointments”, boomed a recent headline in the Daily Telegraph. The Spectator has accused doctors of “hiding behind Zoom screens”. The Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, responded to the negative press coverage by announcing “league tables and hit squads for those that fail” to offer face-to-face appointments.
[See also: If you’re struggling to see your GP, it doesn’t mean they are “hiding” from you]
Healthcare workers have frequently been on the receiving end of public ire during the pandemic. We “clapped” for NHS staff last year, but since then many NHS workers have had to endure verbal abuse from Covid deniers and anti-vaxxers, including comparisons to Nazi war criminals. Others have been spat at and subjected to physical violence: in November a member of staff at Lewisham University Hospital was stabbed by a patient. A hospital in Norfolk has even stationed private security at its main entrance overnight following increasing incidents of “rude and abusive behaviour” against staff.
Is it any wonder some GPs are reluctant to return to giving in-person consultations amidst a climate of such animosity? Another recent survey found that more than half (51 per cent) of GPs experienced abuse in the month of July this year.
Of course, it’s easy to rail at doctors when you’ve just wasted an hour on the phone only to be informed that, regrettably, there are no appointments. I know because I’ve felt this emotion welling up inside me too. If it really is “our NHS” – as the mawkish slogan has it – then why does getting a GP appointment feel like such a big ask?
Yet the fault probably doesn’t lie with your local doctor. The health service is dealing with record numbers of patients and there simply aren’t enough GPs to take up the slack. It is this simple equation – rather than the purported indolence of GPs – that is causing patient frustrations.
The previous government acknowledged as much back in 2015 when it promised to hire 5,000 extra GPs within five years – a target it subsequently failed to meet. Indeed, a recent analysis by Sky News found that the number of fully qualified GPs had fallen in four out of five areas of England since March 2016. In the lead up to the 2019 General Election, the then health secretary, Matt Hancock, acknowledged this; the incoming government sought to cushion the failure with a fresh pledge to recruit 6,000 GPs by 2025.
This too has failed to materialise. According to the Royal College of GPs, the number of practicing GPs fell by 1,307 to 28,096 between September 2015 and March 2021. As of September 2021, there were 1,704 fewer fully qualified full-time GPs compared to 2015.
Today, England requires around 50,000 extra doctors to meet the country’s health needs. At present there are just 2.8 doctors per 1,000 people, compared to 3.7 in similarly developed EU countries. Much as in the bad old days, access to healthcare is significantly worse for the poor. According to recent analysis, deprived areas have fewer GPs than wealthier ones and this gap has been widening over time.
[See also: In the consulting room, the doctor isn’t always the one giving the reassurance]
This dwindling band of doctors is having to cater to a record number of patients. There were 4 per cent more GP sessions in 2021 than in the same period in 2019. The typical GP practice has 1,849 more patients today than six years ago and there were 7.3 million more appointments (or 3.1 million more if you exclude Covid vaccinations) in June of 2021 compared to the same period in 2019.
Unsurprisingly against this backdrop, many GPs are struggling under the pressures of increased workloads. According to a survey by the British Medical Association, nearly half of doctors said they were suffering from depression, anxiety, stress, burnout, emotional distress or another mental health condition. Some GPs are looking to exit the health service altogether, compounding the problem of staff shortages. More than one in 10 GPs questioned in a survey said they planned to leave the NHS.
More patients and fewer, increasingly frazzled, GPs: it’s easy to see why many of us are crashing up against answerphone messages when we call the local surgery. Though it might feel emotionally gratifying to take out those frustrations on doctors, our anger would be better directed elsewhere. If we have a primary care system that increasingly resembles the bad old days, it is down to the government’s longstanding failure to solve the NHS recruitment crisis.

COVID-19 mitigation policies like masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and school closures may have harmed the cognitive development of infants: Verbal, non-verbal, and early learning scores dropped among babies born during the pandemic, according to a new study from Brown University.
"We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic," wrote the study's authors. "Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development."
Outcomes were worse for males than females, and children in lower socioeconomic households were worst off.
The study has not yet been peer-reviewed, and it has several limitations. Researchers gathered data on 118 children born during the pandemic and compared their cognitive outcomes to a dataset that included 605 kids who were between the ages of 3 months and 3 years in the 2011 to 2020 period. While the pandemic may feel as if it has gone on forever, it's actually only been 20 months, which is not a lot of time for a newborn to develop sufficiently testable skills. Sean Deoni, an associate professor at Brown and one of the study's authors, cautioned that the findings should not be generalized to all kids.
"I think only time will tell if we see prolonged effects, or if this is transient and they recover or normalize as they get older; and if it impacts more 'mature' skills like executive functions and social skills," he tells Reason.
The Daily Mail's report on the study emphasized the possibility that face masks were responsible for the measured cognitive decline, though none of the kids in the pandemic dataset are old enough to be covered by mask mandates.
"I did not speak with the reporter/writer from the Daily Mail, and I don't agree with the rather sensationalized headline that masks are doing harm to our kiddos," he says. "Indeed, we were not able to directly test whether the trends we observed were due to mask wearing, or other potential environmental factors. The best we can say is that we are observing that children have reduced development relative to children we have tested previously."
Deoni pointed out that the largest reductions were in the categories of motor skills and language skills, which may indicate other mitigation efforts, such as social distancing, as likelier culprits.
Still, this pandemic-era drop in cognitive outcomes is notable. And even if the harms end up being smaller than they appear in this study, it's worth keeping in mind that the benefits of COVID-19 restrictions are extremely limited for this age cohort. Due to the virus's age discrimination, young people were almost entirely spared from negative health outcomes relating to the disease itself. Only about 500 children in the U.S. have died of COVID-19, and it is likely that a significant number of those victims had other health problems or compromised immune systems. For the overwhelming majority of healthy kids, there is no good evidence that they should have to wear masks, practice social distancing, and frequently miss school.
Yet in much of the country, the restrictions on young people are currently more stringent than the restrictions on adults and the elderly. In large Democratic cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., schoolchildren are generally masked. And when it's time to eat lunch, they do so outdoors—even as the weather grows colder.
Having to eat lunch outside in the cold is a punishment currently endured by school kids, and only school kids. Adults are eating indoors at restaurants and drinking indoors at bars. Now that D.C.'s mask mandate has ended, indoor gyms can once again let their customers go maskless—but in many places, masks are still required for indoor school sports. It doesn't make any sense that authorities are enforcing the harshest restrictions on the least at-risk people.
The rules for the college-aged are, if anything, even more extreme: Many campuses severely limit interactions between students, require masks even outside, and discourage nearly all forms of socialization. What's occurring is something close to the exact opposite of the ideal: Whatever mitigation policies are in place for adults and the elderly, the policies for young people should be less restrictive, not more.

The post Pandemic Restrictions May Harm Infants' Cognitive Development, New Study Finds appeared first on Reason.com.

If international organizations are subject to karma, last week's abrupt postponement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, the body's first major decision-making gathering in four years, was fated to be. News of the emergence of Omicron, the latest coronavirus variant, not only caused the meeting to be delayed but it also shined a light on how the international community has failed to get the virus under control.

The WTO waiver is an obvious way of increasing supply and helping put an end to the pandemic for good.

Over the past two years, the global scientific community has figured out the pathogen that causes Covid-19 and developed vaccines and antivirals to fight the virus. Rapid production has meant that everyone in wealthy countries who wanted a vaccine has gotten one. But the market, on its own, has failed to provide enough for the rest of the world.

Since October 2020, a large number of WTO member countries have sought a temporary waiver of the organization's expansive intellectual property restrictions, which limit the production of vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests to certain pharmaceutical companies. But a few WTO members have blocked this initiative, which is needed to ensure sufficient supply of Covid-19 medicines to inoculate the world and end the variant cycle that otherwise will indefinitely prolong the pandemic.

The WTO must not postpone this decision. It needs to call an online meeting of its General Council and adopt the waiver this week.

While citizens in wealthy countries are already on to their boosters, fewer than 7% in low-income countries have even had their first shot.

As the Omicron variant shows, as long as there are raging outbreaks anywhere, Covid-19 will mutate and the possibility of more infectious or deadly strains increases. That's why, unless people everywhere are vaccinated, we face the prospect of an endless pandemic.

The underlying problem is a lack of global supply. The world required at least 11 billion doses for 2021 before boosters and vaccination of children began. Billions of doses will be needed every year for boosters and to combat new variants, and universal access to the promising new anti-virals will be crucial to save the lives of those who do get infected.

The WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which went into force in 1995, requires the organization's member nations to enforce expansive intellectual property restrictions domestically. Last year, South Africa and India proposed a temporary suspension of the TRIPS barriers for Covid-19 vaccines, treatments and diagnostic tests. This would allow the many qualified producers in developing countries to manufacture effective vaccines and other Covid medicines rather than face death and economic devastation while waiting for drug companies and rich countries to send help their way.

It's only fair play. The highly effective mRNA vaccines now on the market were developed using billions in US and European government (meaning taxpayer) funds.

Health advocates have long warned of TRIPS' danger for developing countries' access to medicine, but no one imagined that advanced countries would put drug company profits above the well-being of their own citizens. The Biden administration initially won praise for supporting the WTO waiver back in May. President Biden's statement on Omicron last week urged countries to adopt the waiver now. But the President has put too little effort into actually achieving final agreement at the WTO to enact the waiver.

Now another October has come and gone, and while more than 100 countries support a waiver, the European Union, pushed by Germany, plus Switzerland and the United Kingdom, continue to oppose. They are exploiting the WTO's consensus decision-making practices, and the unusually passive role the US is playing in the negotiations to block the waiver, even as millions of people die waiting to be inoculated.

"In delivering the WTO waiver and leading the mission to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden has a golden opportunity to restore US standing around the world."

Western market democracies are taking a major reputational hit for denying billions of people in poor countries access to life-saving vaccines and treatments. And the WTO is rightly viewed globally as an obstacle to ending the pandemic. An international "rule of law" and an economic system that puts profits over lives is not going to win the hearts and minds of those in the rest of the world. Stocks and oil prices fall as Moderna CEO says current vaccines will struggle with Omicron

Meanwhile, China and Russia have been working with governments throughout the developing world to build vaccine production facilities. China has already provided doses to more than 80 countries that total nearly half of the more than 7 billion administered worldwide, and just announced a plan to send one billion additional doses to Africa. Russia has shared its vaccine technology widely. Both countries have been vigorously and successfully waging vaccine diplomacy, although it has not been without controversy.

China's existing Sinovac and Sinopharm shots are less effective and its two homegrown mRNA vaccines are still in final trials. (BioNTech, the German firm partnering with Pfizer, also shared its mRNA vaccine technology with Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical, but only for sales within China.) Russia's Sputnik V production has encountered problems, and there is a limited supply of its shots. Yet even so, to a lot of the world it looks like autocracies value lives and democracies value profits.

It is imperative for the US to exert leadership and get the WTO to organize an emergency online General Council meeting this week to deliver a meaningful waiver deal.

Back in September, the Biden administration underscored the importance of vaccinating 70% of the world's population. The recent announcement about the administration's plan to work with companies in figuring out how to increase production spotlights the ongoing shortages. But how many more doses that proposal delivers--and when--remains unclear.

Omicron highlights the urgency of the WTO waiver. The President needs to put pressure on the few countries, all close US allies, that are holding out so production can ramp up around the world. None of this will happen without stronger US leadership. And, to put it in a narrow-minded way, nothing could be more important to the health of Americans and the American economy.

In delivering the WTO waiver and leading the mission to end the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden has a golden opportunity to restore US standing around the world and revive his domestic support, which has been hard hit by continuing public anxiety about this seemingly endless pandemic.

Goldberg: These are also experiences that many women will never recover from. I have two very wanted kids, but both pregnancies changed my body for the worse, and I don’t mean just cosmetically. Luckily I’ve been able to spend thousands of dollars on physical therapy and bodywork to deal with the muscle and joint injuries that come from a weakened abdomen. Obviously not everyone can do that. And the injuries I’m describing are on the very mild side. Julie Rikelman, who argued against the Mississippi law, said it was 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than to have a pre-viability abortion.

Douthat: There are absolutely limits to what even the most generous society can do to help women carry those burdens; part of that burden is irreducible and nontransferable. But once the child exists, outside of the cases where its imposition is literally forced on the women — rape and incest — the just society has to put all its efforts toward making the experience something other than degrading and terrifying, not toward using lethal violence. And in many, many cases that end in abortion right now, what makes the situation terrifying is material circumstances, not the child itself. This is where conservatives have not done enough, and should and must do more, to lift or ease those burdens, including on basic issues like maternal care that affect all pregnancies, wanted and unwanted and in between.

Blow: Abortion is not “lethal violence.” Good grief.

Douthat: It may be many other things, and as necessary as Lulu suggests, but it is certainly is that.

Blow: No, sir, it’s just health care for women.

Garcia-Navarro: I’ve lived in countries with no abortion access, including Brazil, and I’ve reported on what happens in places where there is no access to safe abortion. And what you see is that women are forced to have unsafe abortions, and primarily lower-income women bear the brunt of the outcomes for their health and safety. And it doesn’t actually stop abortions there.

Goldberg: I’ve also reported from a lot of countries where abortion was illegal and visited hospitals where the obstetrics wards were full of women recovering from botched or septic abortions. And I’ve been to countries where unexplained miscarriages lead to criminal charges. Given that we already prosecute women for miscarriages tied to illegal drug use, I have no doubt that the end of Roe is going to lead to women going to jail. I do hope that the advent of the abortion pill means that self-administered abortions are safer than they used to be.

Nearly a year ago, University of Illinois at Chicago law professor Jason Kilborn came under criticism from students, administrators and colleagues for including a hypothetical on his civil procedure exam involving an individual telling an investigating lawyer that former co-workers "expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a "n____" and "b____" (profane expressions for African Americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her." Once complaints surfaced, Kilborn apologized but the controversy and allegations only grew. Students eventually brought in Jesse Jackson to bolster their demands that Kilborn be fired. Kilborn was suspended and investigated. He eventually reached a settlement with the university that would allow him to return to his teaching duties, but the university has subsequently reneged on that agreement. It continues to single him out for opprobrium, discipline, and reeducation. The chancellor of UIC has now dug in his heels on the matter. Northwestern University law professor Andy Koppelman has written about this case from the beginning and has appropriately decried the university's actions as a "witch hunt."
The Academic Freedom Alliance has released the letter that it sent to law school dean at UIC. From the letter:
For the University of Illinois at Chicago to retaliate against and sanction Professor Kilborn for constitutionally and contractually protected classroom speech would be a grave violation of academic freedom. The Academic Freedom Alliance stands firmly behind Professor Kilborn in this matter, calls on the University of Illinois at Chicago to adhere to its academic freedom principles and to abandon any conditions on his full return to his academic duties, and to publicly and emphatically reaffirm that professors at the university are free to conduct classroom discussions and to draft class exams that engage relevant but controversial language and materials.
Read the whole thing here.
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Professor Allyn Walker was a sociologist at Old Dominion University. Walker's research included "minor attracted individuals," which was the topic of Walker's new book recently published by a well-respected university press. When Walker's research came to public attention, it generated immediate controversy, including threats against Walker and the campus and calls for Walker's immediate termination. The university initially defended its commitment to academic freedom, but soon placed Walker on administrative leave. Walker has now resigned from the faculty.
Cathy Young has recently called "the Allyn Walker story is a test case for both progressives and conservatives," and she's right. Old Dominion seems to have failed its test.
When Walker was suspended, the Academic Freedom Alliance warned Old Dominion University that it was caving under pressure and sending a chilling message to every member of the faculty who might be engaged in controversial research. Unfortunately, the university continued down that path and allowed the mob to drive a professor from the campus. Although the Walker case has now been resolved with the professor's departure from campus, the issues raised by the controversy remain all too relevant.
The AFA has now released publicly the letter that it sent to the administration of ODU. As always, the AFA is not concerned with the substance or merits of a professor's work or ideas but with the principle that universities should be places that tolerate controversial ideas and that allow free inquiry and debate, not public opinion or political pressure, to separate error from truth. Universities should not allow threats and intimidation to short-circuit that process of critical inquiry and should not allow ideas to be suppressed and scholars defenestrated simply because they are perceived to be heretical or even dangerous.
From the letter:
It cannot be consistent with academic freedom for a university to cave in to hostile reaction on and off campus to a professor's scholarly work. The fact that students or members of the public might be offended or disturbed by a professor's research agenda, arguments or terminology is no basis for sanctioning the professor. The fact that they might express their outrage by making threats to the professor or to the campus only heightens the responsibility of the university to ensure that the professor is capable of continuing to perform their academic duties unmolested. For a university to validate such a "heckler's veto" by suspending rather than protecting the faculty member will only encourage such campaigns of threats and intimidation. There are far more appropriate steps for a university to take in response to credible threats of violence or disruption that would be compatible with rather than contrary to academic freedom and the university has a responsibility to take such steps.
. . .
There is no doubt that the questions being examined by Professor Walker are important ones. Academia should be a place where such difficult questions can be boldly and honestly investigated. If a scholar's analysis is mistaken, then it should be rebutted or ignored. But the scholar should not be driven from campus for daring to ask such difficult questions or for reaching the wrong or unpopular answers.
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Candidate Joe Biden presented himself as committed to reforming the presidency. But President Joe Biden and his administration have so far secured no accomplishments to match this commitment, and it is not clear what steps they have taken to fulfill it. In one respect, this is understandable. The administration has many more pressing short-term priorities, and most reforms would bite the Biden administration in the first instance. But Biden ran as a reforming president, and it is important to U.S. democracy and the president’s legacy that his administration actively and openly support at least some of the central reforms now on the table.

The case for comprehensive reform is straightforward. President Trump, building in some instances on the practices of his predecessors, exposed gaps and weaknesses in the law and norms that had governed the presidency since the great reforms of the 1970s. The Biden administration appeared to present a unique opportunity for contemporary reform. Most presidential administrations would reflexively oppose new restraints on the presidency. But Biden had served 36 years in the Senate, understood the need for checks on the presidency and seemed to support new restrictions on the presidency.

And yet the administration has done little to achieve urgently needed reforms. It issued a contacts policy to govern relationships between the White House and federal agencies, especially the Justice Department. But every administration since the Ford administration, including the Trump administration, had done this, and Biden’s policy, while sound, was not materially different from many of its predecessors. The Biden administration also issued an executive order on ethics that was in most respects an improvement over Trump’s order and a return to the Obama administration’s position. Neither of these policies amount to reform of the presidency.

Most of the significant presidential reforms require legislation. Numerous bills on Capitol Hill would bring serious accountability and constraint to the presidency. And the White House says in general terms that it supports reform. “We strongly support efforts to restore guardrails and breathe life back into those longstanding norms,” said White House spokesman Chris Meagher in September. “We’re working with Congress to do that,” he added.

But, with one exception, the White House has not spoken publicly in favor of any particular presidential reform bill or proposal. The exception is revealing. The administration supports repeal of the 2002 military force authorization for Iraq—a law that, the administration acknowledges, by itself supports “no ongoing military activities.” But the administration has not taken a similarly concrete position for the reform of the war authorization that matters—the 2001 force authorization that has been the all-purpose legal basis for global war against Islamist terrorists. The administration has issued bromides of support for serious war powers reform but has not yet publicly followed through.

The administration has been similarly silent on the many reform bills in Congress. The public still does not know the administration’s official position on the many presidential reforms in the Protecting Our Democracy Act, including ones (like emergency powers reform) that have strong bipartisan support. The White House has reportedly expressed concerns about a bipartisan proposal to enhance congressional subpoena power vis-a-vis the presidency. The White House has not, however, told the public concretely what reforms it is for. If it would do so, the chances of passage for whatever it supported would be greatly improved. The administration’s quietude significantly weakens any prospect for reform.

The Justice Department has also been disappointingly silent on the reforms it can implement on its own. Attorney General Merrick Garland has spoken eloquently about “the norms that have become part of the DNA of every Justice Department employee since Edward Levy’s stint as the first post-Watergate Attorney General.” But during the 2016 presidential campaign and the Trump years, it became clear that many such norms—on the politicization of law enforcement, on investigative announcements close to elections, on preinaugural investigations related to presidential campaigns, on speaking out about ongoing investigations and more—were ambiguous, unsettled or not reflected in written policy. Garland has so far taken no public action to fix these problems. And his department has opposed a proposal with broad bipartisan support to enhance the authority of the department’s inspector general.

In a few weeks the Biden administration will host a Summit for Democracy. In announcing the summit, President Biden stated: “No democracy is perfect, and no democracy is ever final. Every gain made, every barrier broken, is the result of determined, unceasing work.” It remains to be seen what determined work the Biden administration will do to support reforms of the presidency that are vital to U.S. democracy.

Since the 1930s, there has been a debate in the United States over a foreign policy based on “America First,” a nationalistic policy that prioritizes U.S. objectives over others’. It’s an idea that has at different times been central to Democrats and Republicans alike. The positions have ranged from the right urging that the U.S. not take responsibility for the fate of other nations, and the left condemning the United States for acting as the world police. The left has supported a strategy that the United States must remain enmeshed in the world through alliances. On the right, there has been the belief that the U.S. must remain enmeshed in the world in order, for example, to defeat communism. It has taken on the character of a moral principle and prudent action in both ideological tendencies, and as a moral obligation in both as well.

The question of the proper relationship of the United States to the rest of the world has been a central issue since America was founded. Thomas Jefferson warned against entangling alliances, while George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were maneuvering to try to get France engaged in the American Revolution. America was founded as an alternative to Europe and a new order of the ages. It was also one nation among many, and for a while a very weak one. The American relationship to the world has always been ambiguous as a practical and a moral matter and at different times for both sides.

The modern notion of America First emerged in the years before World War II. The United States had been drawn into World War I, in many ways against its will, and the general and reasonable view was that little was gained by the war, which was about to reignite. The left saw intervention against Hitler as a moral obligation. The right argued that the primary moral obligation of the United States was to the well-being of Americans, and that if intervention was a moral necessity, Stalin would be a more appropriate target.

The United States assumed that the oceans separating the U.S. from Europe would protect America from Europe’s follies. The problem with this reasoning was that it wouldn’t. As Hitler conquered France and launched a war against Europe, a vast danger appeared. Britain had the world’s most powerful navy. If Germany defeated Britain, it might take control of its vessels, and it followed that it would take control of the North Atlantic and pose an existential threat to the United States. The America First movement saw intervention as a charitable act, not as a strategic imperative. America First overestimated the security of the United States in a dangerous world. Isolationism was dangerous.

After World War II, the American view was that the cost in American lives was the result of a failure to act sooner against Germany and Japan. As a result, it reacted to Soviet power by reducing its wartime force but never actually demobilizing. The United States created the most entangling alliance possible, NATO, and undertook a policy whereby, as President John Kennedy, put it, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” This was, of course, the most extreme commitment any nation could make. It was the logical continuation of liberal interventionism, and it opened the door to a series of wars, beginning with Vietnam, that continue to this day. And he was supported on the whole by the right wing. Isolationism and America First had become discredited, seen as they had been as immoral principles, and Kennedy’s vast commitment was simply the summary of the American interest.

In Vietnam, the war went neither badly nor well. It simply went. And as it went, the mood contained in Kennedy’s statement withered. The Kennedy Doctrine was attacked by the left, which argued that the U.S., in assuming responsibility for the world, had become an imperialist monster, waging a ruthless war that was none of its business. The view went beyond Vietnam to the notion that American influence and power throughout the world was exploiting and crushing the rights of other nations. The left made the case for American withdrawal from the world, not as an America First doctrine but as a doctrine by which it was immoral for the United States to be the world police. Nuances aside, the practical application was America First without the celebration of America.

The interventionism in Kennedy’s speech was a reaction against pre-World War II America First. Under attack from the left, the principle survived. The United States has spent more time at war since 2000 than in any prior century in total. (And since 9/11, it has waged war largely unsuccessfully.) Time is not intensity, but it still reshapes the nation’s understanding of itself.

America First is a self-evidently reasonable doctrine if it means placing American interests at the center of consideration. Every nation in the world places its own interests first. Alliances must serve the national interest, as must isolation. None are strategic doctrines themselves. They are means to an end. The government has a moral obligation to protect the nation. Sometimes that requires allies and sometimes war, but to undertake Kennedy’s vision would be to create a set of obligations that can break a nation and has in fact cost the United States a great deal.

And if the idea of Americans putting America first is self-evident, then what that means in practice is subtle and complex. The isolationists on the right thought the United States invincible as it stood. Isolationists of the left thought the United States a brutal oppressor. Both analyses were simplistic, harmful and untrue. But at the core of any national strategy must be an understanding of the national interest, which is never simple, nor self-evident. And it defies simplistic ideologies. The world is a dangerous place, and even if we don’t want war, war may want us. And a moral principle that demands constant war is unbearable.

The issue is always what we shall do now. Not what we did before, nor even what we will do later. The future always surprises us. The issue is to be thoughtful and subtle and to always put America first, which may take us to many parts of the world. America First is not isolationism, it is our moral commitment to the nation.

(Photograph by Sean Krajacic/Getty Images.)“Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.” That's what Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat from New York and fifth-ranking member of the House Democratic leadership, tweeted November 10, nine days before a jury acquitted Rittenhouse on all charges following claims of self-defense in the shooting deaths of two men during the Kenosha riots in 2020. Jeffries, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, had, ironically, made a name for himself as an advocate of defendant-oriented criminal justice reform.The Jeffries comment, on which he later doubled down, passed with little national notice. Believe it or not, however, it was once expected that prominent elected officials in the U.S. speak in cautious and tentative tones about allegations of criminality before a verdict had been reached in court.In 1970 President Richard Nixon imprudently suggested at a press conference that cult leader Charles Manson, then on trial for the still-infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, was in fact guilty. An outcry promptly forced Nixon to issue a statement walking back the comment. An excerpt:"My remarks were in the context of my expression of a tendency on the part of some to glamorize those identified with a crime. The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances."To set the record straight, I do not know and did not intend to speculate whether the Tate defendants are guilty, in fact, or not. All of the facts in the case have not yet been presented. The defendants should be presumed to be innocent at this stage of their trial."Of course, when it comes to destroying norms surrounding discussion of the judiciary, no public figure has done as much as Donald Trump, who rose to power amid chants of "Lock her up!" directed at opponent Hillary Clinton, who was never charged with anything, much less convicted. Both as a presidential candidate and as president, Trump weighed in loudly and regularly on pending legal matters, even going so far as to repeatedly demand the death penalty for persons not yet on trial for charged offenses. (The liberal Brennan Center compiled a roundup.)Trump may be uniquely bad, but he has company even in some of his most distinctively awful moves, such as menacing judges with consequences over rulings that come out the wrong way. (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has done that too, targeting Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.)Citing a list of instances, law professor Josh Blackman has made the case that Barack Obama went well beyond the standard of his near predecessors in the White House in pronouncing on the merits of pending Supreme Court cases. In a separate and less lofty matter, Obama backed off after controversially wading into a dispute between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police, but the episode appears to have hurt him in polls.There are plenty of solid reasons to back up the old norm. To begin with, if we want a judiciary that is independent and impartial, that independence should be both real and visible, free from the appearance as well as the reality of political pressure. Juries and judges must be free to do their work without looking like they heeded signals from political leadership.In fact, high-profile statements can complicate the task of preserving a fair trial. After Nixon's 1970 comments made big headlines, Manson's lawyers smuggled a copy of the L.A. Times into court. Manson himself then waved a copy of the paper around the courtroom displaying the headline “MANSON GUILTY, NIXON DECLARES.” His lawyers then demanded a mistrial, a motion the judge denied after individually interviewing jurors to determine that they had not been improperly influenced. Afghan war deserter and former Army Sgt. Bowie Bergdahl, too, fought without success to get his (relatively light) punishment dismissed on grounds that Trump, both as commander in chief and as public figure, had prejudiced his military trial.It is also worth noting that when politicians speak cautiously they protect themselves from being embarrassed by later events. When initial reports emerged of a possible hate crime against actor Jussie Smollett on the streets of Chicago in January 2019, Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker responded by calling it an “attempted lynching” requiring a congressional response. That went well beyond the facts that could have been known at the time, and has since left them out on a limb, with actor Smollett facing trial starting this week on charges of filing a false police report in the case. The norm has collapsed, I know. But I miss it.

But always, and forever, Sondheim has been my favorite. His work centers the genre for me — everything is either before or after him — and is one of my favorite things on Earth. His passing last week threw me quite a bit: He had been talking about a new work coming, and there was a possibility that I would have the opportunity to interview him myself for an audiobook series.

Alas, that won’t be in the cards. But Sondheim’s work has threaded throughout my life since that night in 1984: The second musical my older daughter saw was a production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” She and my younger daughter argue in the car over whether we’re going to listen to “Follies” or “Company.” Way back, I (rather miscast) played the lead in a small production of “Merrily We Roll Along,” and I have played piano for productions of “Funny Thing” and “Into the Woods.” Somehow, Sondheim has never gone away for me.

Part of the reason is that Sondheim’s characters are often saturnine types like me. In “Sunday in the Park With George,” the painter George Seurat sings of the difficulty in deriving ultimate pleasure from creation, as his lover seeks his company. Any writer can relate: “Look, I made a hat,” he quietly declares, as if to say, “Here’s why I couldn’t be with you — isn’t it worth it?” To me that might as well be, “Look, I wrote an essay.”

In “Follies,” Ben in middle age rues the things in life he didn’t get to, and now knows he never will in “The Road You Didn’t Take.” When I heard that song in my 20s, I just knew I was going to feel that way when I was Ben’s age and dreaded it. Now, here I am, musing on exactly that sort of thing as I consider that in four years, I’ll be 60. Then there’s the architect Addison Mizner (yes, Sondheim wrote a musical about him and his brother) coming to realize, as he gathers a mess of objets from parts hither and yon, that he has found his métier at last. Only Sondheim, in “Addison’s Trip,” would write a song about a man finding what Aristotle called virtue.

When I became a musicals addict in the ’80s, I noticed that there was a type of 50-something fan who had never taken to Sondheim’s music; they stopped roughly at “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Mame” and “Pippin.” I always vowed I would not become like them and would always be as open to the new stuff as to the old. But in truth, while they couldn’t get to Sondheim, I’m not sure I have ever really gotten past him.

The Academic Freedom Alliance has released a public letter to the University of Rochester objecting to the treatment of an English professor there. Professor David Bleich has long taught classes dealing with sensitive subjects in race and gender. Those courses include readings that make use of offensive language. As is often the case, the details of the assigned texts need to be discussed in class and the texts need to be read aloud and quoted accurately in order to facilitate that careful analysis. Such conversations can sometimes be difficult but they are at the heart of what it takes to do college-level work in literary criticism and analysis.
This semester, Professor Bleich is teaching a class on Gender and Anger. He read aloud from a short story that had been assigned to the class. The portion of the text he read included the n-word. Students objected, and there was a vigorous conversation about the use of the word. In a subsequent class, Professor Bleich read to the students a section of Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy's Chronicle of Higher Education article on the use of the n-word in classroom settings.
The university responded by suspending him from teaching his class and putting in place various restrictive conditions that must be satisfied before he would be allowed to resume teaching. The university is taking the position that it is never appropriate for a professor to say the n-word aloud in a college class.
This issue has become a common one at universities across the country. Some professors have been insufficiently thoughtful about the language they use in classes, and these controversies have sometimes led to a desirable reconsideration of how instructors approach their teaching. But these controversies have also stifled the ability of professors to engage in the kinds of conversations that should be taking place in college classrooms. It is not appropriate for professors to hurl slurs at their students, but it is academically essential that professors be able to discuss slurs and how they are used. Universities ought to be able to understand the difference between the use of a word and the mention of a word.
The Bleich case highlights the dangers here. A dean from a completely different discipline has made a unilateral decision about how English professors should conduct their literature classes. The same sweeping edicts from above would have implications for a host of other classes where offensive language might need to be discussed frankly and clearly in disciplines ranging from anthropology to history to philosophy to linguistics.
The University of Rochester is going down a path that violates its own clearly stated contractual commitments to academic freedom, and in the process it is doing a disservice to both its students and its professors.
From our letter to the University of Rochester:
As the AAUP has elaborated on the implications of this freedom to teach, it has repeatedly emphasized that classroom discussions of the type at issue here are well within the bounds of the principles of academic freedom to which Rochester has contractually committed itself and that are generally accepted within the profession. The AAUP's 1994 report on freedom of expression firmly concluded that it would be a breach of professional ethics and outside the bounds of academic freedom for a professor to ridicule or harass a student in the classroom, but that such "verbal assaults" had to be sharply distinguished from the expression of hateful ideas, including the words that are used to express those ideas. Offensive speech must sometimes be used in the classroom, and it is subversive of the protection of freedom of classroom teaching to depart from established legal standards of harassment to proscribe frank classroom discussions of the ideas, words and behaviors that might be used to harass.
You can read the whole thing here.
Unsurprisingly, Professor Kennedy was unamused by the suggestion that it is inappropriate for a college professor to read aloud from Kennedy's own work. As he told the AFA:
"It is profoundly disturbing to see an instructor investigated and disciplined for grappling in class with a term that has had and continues to have a hugely consequential place in American culture. The demand to make this term – 'nigger' – literally unmentionable is a demand that ought not be honored. Compelled silence or bowdlerization is antithetical to the academic, intellectual, and artistic freedom essential to higher education."
The University of Rochester should immediately reverse course and reaffirm its commitment to being an institution of higher education and a university that respects the intellectual abilities of its students and the academic freedom of its professors.
The post Academic Freedom Alliance Letter to the University of Rochester appeared first on Reason.com.

Not by my lights. Standard theories of civil disobedience tend to focus on cases in which people break the law publicly in order to draw attention to an injustice. And a defective policy isn’t necessarily an unjust one. That a queue could have been better designed doesn’t, by itself, give you permission to cut it. Getting a jab under false pretenses, even with the knowing cooperation of the pharmacist, hardly amounts to an act of protest. Rosa Parks didn’t try to pass for white so she could sit in the front of the bus.

My young nephew has been undergoing treatment for cancer. He is severely immunocompromised. His parents are apparent Covid deniers and have repeatedly exposed the child to crowds. They posted photos to Facebook of him being held by nonfamily members, just days after he was released from the hospital. Nobody in the photos (which have dozens of people in them) is wearing a mask. There have been two events for this child: each was held outside, but each involved a lot of close contact. Nobody in the extended family dares say anything because his family will just explode in anger. But as a former medical worker, I find it deeply upsetting to remain silent. (The child almost died recently from a mild infection.) I would like to report the family to the child’s oncologist. Would this be unethical of me? I know these parents love their child, but if they will not listen to me, they might listen to his doctor. What do you think? Name Withheld

You say these parents will explode in anger if you mention the issue? Oh, dear. They may be among those people whose aberrant views about Covid have become a measure of their commitment to an identity. People in that frame of mind are quite willing to do things that put their lives — and those of their children — on the line. So I’m not terribly hopeful that they’ll shift course on a doctor’s advice. In fact, I’d be surprised if their oncologist hasn’t already explained to them that their child needs protecting from immunological challenges.

But you should certainly feel free to tell the doctor, who can make sure to reinforce the medical considerations here. The behavior you’re describing isn’t something you were told in confidence; it’s visible on Facebook. Your nephew’s parents regard these ill-advised interactions with pride, not with shame — alas.

My employer is a small, disorganized nonprofit. Recently, I received two direct deposits in one pay period, one right after the other. One was my regular paycheck amount, and the second was about $100 more. I was essentially paid twice. It’s likely to be a mistake, even though last year a “bonus” appeared in my account without warning. I don’t want to be ungrateful, but my boss is a terrible manager, and my bitterness about other things makes me feel that it’s not my problem if they can’t get paychecks right and that I should just keep the money. Can I do so and leave my integrity intact? Name Withheld

Nigel Warburton —the philosopher, broadcaster and creator of the popular Philosophy Bites podcast—selects five of the best public philosophy books published in 2021, including a defence of righteous rage, an examination of the concept of 'time management,' and an intellectual biography of the political philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt.

Has 2021 been a good year for philosophy books?

I’ve got a very broad conception of what philosophy is, so there are certainly a lot of potential candidates for inclusion on this list. But what struck me about 2021 is the number of excellent works of public philosophy—by which I mean, accessible books that are outward facing, that deal with real life problems, and connect with a wider readership.

Many of them have been written by women. I could easily have come up with an all-woman list for this. I’m not sure why that has happened this year.

I know you’ve spoken about this before, but I like this idea of philosophy as a broad church. Why do you think that’s so important now?

Within academic philosophy, there’s a lot of worry about demarcation, where you draw the line between philosophy and other subjects. But I’ve always felt that ‘philosophy’ is more of a family resemblance term. Lots of qualities are shared by works of philosophy, but there’s no essence that a book must contain to make it philosophy. There are some clear-cut cases, and some at the edges.

So, I’m very happy to include Kierkegaard as a philosopher, for example, as most philosophers are, although some of what he wrote is basically imaginative fiction—exploring viewpoints rather than presenting a logical case with clear premises that lead to a conclusion. Another obvious example from the history of philosophy is Candide, Voltaire’s short novella, which is philosophy through a fictional form.

There have been huge advances in both psychology and neuroscience in the last twenty or thirty years that are very significant for philosophy. In the 18th century, there wasn’t a big division between what we call psychology and philosophy, and someone like David Hume quite happily moved between the two. For much of the history of the subject philosophers speculated about the mind from their armchairs without getting involved in what was happening in neuroscience. But now that would be unacceptable. Recent research in neuroscience is too dramatic to do that. It would be absurd to discuss the mind without some awareness of what has been discovered.

This is obviously relevant when thinking about consciousness.

Right. You can’t analyse consciousness from your armchair without awareness of recent findings about the brain and about human behaviour. But similarly, if you’re talking about politics and doing that in a vacuum, that seems to me a fairly meaningless pursuit about the definition of terms, rather than anything that might meaningfully connect with how we live.

I’ve deliberately chosen books that are accessible to a general reader because this is not a site for specialist academic philosophers. And obviously this is limited by the range of books that I’ve actually read. But the best writing that I’ve seen this year uses some kind of empirical evidence, whether that’s science, elements of personal biography, historical archives, or current events.

Obviously the philosophy is foregrounded, there’s a sense in which people are using arguments, building a case, and linking to the history of philosophy, but they’re not afraid to go off-piste, as it were, and draw upon other disciplines to understand the topic they are discussing better.

I think this might lead us to the first of the 2021 philosophy books that you want to recommend, which is written by a neuroscientist: Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

Although Anil describes himself as a neuroscientist, he’s also very well read in philosophy. He uses a certain amount of autobiography in this book too — discussing the phenomenology of his own conscious life in order to illustrate points, drawing on his experience of witnessing a brain operation, and even his mother’s apparent loss of self at a certain point.

It’s a book about the nature of consciousness, one of the most intractable problems that human beings have come across. How do we understand how we, as apparently material beings made of flesh and bone—and, in particular, millions of neurones—get to the position of having qualitative experience, through the experience of the world through our senses, reflection and experience. It’s not an easy problem to unravel. The philosopher David Chalmers talks about the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, the problem of how you get from physical matter to conscious state—how you explain what the relationship between those two is.

“The best writing that I’ve seen this year uses some kind of empirical evidence, whether that’s science, biography, history, or current events”

Seth’s approach is more pragmatic in some ways. As a neuroscientist, his view is that we should deal with what he dubs the ‘real’ problem of consciousness; there is some kind of phenomenological thing that we want to explain, but by chipping away at a range of issues that connect physical processes in the brain with certain mental states, we can try to understand the relation and gradually piece together an understanding of what we are.

His own take is that our conscious experience of the world around us is a kind of controlled hallucination created by predictions and revisions that we make. We are not passive recipients of sensory information, we project an expectation and gradually refine that through our interactions with the world. This produces some weird illusions and other phenomena when things go wrong. When things go very wrong, the loss of connection with the world means that the phenomenological experience is not something that other people necessarily share. But, in a sense, we are all hallucinating the world; none of us is getting a direct picture. We project a probable scene, but that’s tested against further sensory input, and a constructive reality emerges that is constantly refreshed.

In very general terms, that’s what the book is about.

A few years ago, I interviewed Professor Dick Passingham for this site. He was one of my tutors when I studied experimental psychology. His argument was that the philosophical study of consciousness had been static for decades; only through empirical study could we possibly wrestle with this question. Neuroscience, in other words, was making the philosophy of mind obsolete. But the way you talk about this, you almost view neuroscience as a branch of applied philosophy.

It depends on the neuroscientist, I think. Anil Seth is somebody who is very philosophical in his approach, very thoughtful, and well-read in philosophy. He talks to philosophers and a range of other people interested in the mind. It would be hard not to, in the field of consciousness studies. And there are many contemporary philosophers who aren’t trained as neuroscientists, but who take neuroscience very seriously. Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, for example. Both have been hugely interested in neuroscience. And in a younger generation, Keith Frankish. So there is a sense that those barriers are being broken down. I’m skeptical that philosophy will become obsolete, but it will become much more interesting through the interplay with science, in my view.

And the book is well written.

Beautifully written, easy to read, hard to put down. It’s passionate, it’s not patronising, not simplistic or anything like that. But because he’s such an elegant writer with a light touch, he knows how to get in and out of an issue and on to the next one. In some ways it reminds me of Oliver Sacks’s writing because Seth is very humane and sensitive and thoughtful as a writer. It’s a great book.

Brilliant. Your second 2021 philosophy book recommendation is a biography of one of the great modern thinkers, Hannah Arendt. Tell us about this book.

This is a part of a series called ‘Critical Lives.’ It’s an excellent example of an intellectual biography. Hannah Arendt was a super-powered intellectual, and was always, always thinking and writing, and thinking through writing—that’s one of the things she said she did: write to think. And when she wasn’t writing, she was mostly reading or listening to music, or just sometimes hanging out with friends. Arendt didn’t even see herself as a philosopher, but we tend to categorise her as one. I mean, she trained as a philosopher, but also wrote on a wide range of issues, probably most famously On the Origins of Totalitarianism, but also on the Eichmann trial where she famously coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil,’ and got into deep water as a result.

This book is brilliant. It’s written by Samantha Rose Hill, who must know as much as anyone about Hannah Arendt. She’s dived into Arendt’s surviving papers, notebooks, and even poetry, spending many hours in the archive. She knows every little bit of paper that Hannah Arendt scribbled on. And what’s so great about this as a biography is that Hill has done something that biographers rarely do—she’s been highly selective in what she’s included.

“Arendt is frequently misunderstood. Some people thought that by ‘banality,’ she meant that evil was commonplace”

The main part of the book is only just over 200 pages of a small-format book. It could have been 700 pages. There’s no doubt that Hill knows enough and could have spun this out to make a much longer book. As a result, we have the benefit of a highly intelligent writer, selecting what she feels to be most important to bring out about Arendt. We don’t get the feeling of being overwhelmed by details of an individual life—how many cigarettes she smoked on this day, and who she bumped into on that—but rather get to understand what really mattered. We still get a flavour of her life and interactions with friends and critics and so on. All of this is seen in sharp focus through Hill’s critical eye.

Here we have a very elegant story about Arendt’s life that brings out key moments and the most important themes in her thought.

I like that sense of reconstructing her thought and how it has developed over time through digging through her own notes. It’s a beeline directly into her brain.

Another thing about biography is that most writers cop out and only quote, say, half a line. What Hill has chosen to do, now and then, is quote five or maybe ten lines from something written by or about Arendt. Quotations from private letters, that sort of thing. You get a better sense of her voice with this. But that’s very hard to pull off. If you do too much of that, it breaks up the flow. But I think it works perfectly here. And it’s nicely illustrated, with photos throughout.

Tell us about Arendt getting into deep water. You mentioned it earlier.

The most controversial aspect of Hannah Arendt’s life (apart from her affair with Martin Heidegger when she was his student), was her writing about evil. In 1961 she went to Jerusalem to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official. He was the person responsible for sorting out the deportation of people to death camps.

Arendt was particularly interested to see a senior Nazi up close. She’d never seen such a high-ranking Nazi, one who had been responsible for so much evil. She wanted to try to understand that. Famously her reaction was to describe him in terms of ‘the banality of evil.’ This was in a commissioned article for a magazine, originally, but came to be the book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Hill zooms in on that issue in chapter 15. First of all, Arendt is frequently misunderstood. Some people thought that by ‘banality,’ she meant that evil was commonplace—that we’re all capable of doing the kinds of things that Eichmann did. But she didn’t mean that. What she was referring to was the banality of his thought, an attitude to the world which didn’t allow him to make any kind of imaginative identification with other people’s experience. What he lacked was what she calls “an expansive imagination.”

In Arendt’s words,

Eichmann was perfectly intelligent, but in this respect he was stupid. It was this stupidity that was so outrageous. And that was what I actually meant by banality. There’s nothing deep about it—nothing demonic! There’s simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing

She is saying that she wants to destroy the legend that evil is some kind of demonic force. This, and some other things she said in that book, resulted in a lot of criticism, particularly from some Jewish critics who felt she was wrong to talk about the complicity of the Jewish councils in overseeing the selection process for deportation. Some also criticised her ironic tone.

I learnt from this biography that it wasn’t until 2000 that the Eichmann in Jerusalem was available in Israel; it was first published in 1963, and is generally thought of as a classic book, or at least one worth reading and thinking about. So it’s remarkable that it wasn’t available, either in translation or in English there, until so recently. She really was a very controversial figure. Hill covers this all in about 14 or 15 pages—it’s brilliant, so elegantly done. This is very skilful writing, to get all the ideas into such a short space, so lucidly and without feeling rushed. I’m left with a much better understanding of the coining of that phrase, ‘the banality of evil,’ and what was actually meant by it after reading 12 pages by Hill.

I love a concise book that is nonetheless intellectually rigorous. What an efficient use of reading time! Let’s move onto our next 2021 philosophy book. This is Myisha Cherry’s The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle. Cherry is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the book is described as “a philosophical defence of anger at racial injustice.” It feels like a book of the moment.

This is very consciously written as public philosophy. All the books I’ve chosen for this list are written for a general audience, but Cherry is explicit that that’s what she’s doing. She’s a very clear writer. She draws on her own experiences of being a victim of racism a various points in her life. But she also confronts the wider issues in protesting against racism and draws on recent history to make her case.

The general argument is opposing something that has its origins in a form of Stoicism. Seneca put forward the idea that anger is a form of temporary madness, and that, wherever possible, we should extirpate it. Get rid of it. It’s a bad thing because it makes people rash, makes them do stupid things. It clouds judgment and makes us do terrible things. We should instead be cool-headed and not bring that kind of passion into human relations, particularly political relations. Fairly obviously, anger has a close link with violence, so there’s the sense that once you get angry, you release the inhibitions that stop us harming other people. So, Stoics concluded it’s always a bad thing, and they even came up with exercises to help us eliminate it from life.

There’s some logic in that.

Well, perhaps in some situations. Myisha Cherry makes the case for a certain kind of rage, rage being a subset of anger. Rage for justice in the face of injustice is her main focus. She calls this ‘Lordean rage’, after the black feminist, activist and writer Audre Lorde.

Cherry’s argument is that the energy and the possibility of collective channelled action, inspired by rage, justifies this approach, and makes it superior to a more neutral response to something as outrageous as the cold-faced racism in Charlottesville, for instance. It’s been a theme in America, particularly, for hundreds of years: this refusal to treat people of different races equally, and enshrining that in law or institutionally, and also within the police where racism has repeatedly reared its ugly head, for example, as it has done to some extent in the UK.

This book is an expansion of that idea, that rage can be a good thing and not something to be avoided. It’s clearly written, and easy to read. And it looks at specific cases in which anger has been used in positive ways. This is a case for seeing some instances of anger as positive, and important, and not as a psychological problem or something to fear.

Rage as motivational force.

Exactly. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s not a complicated argument. But it’s certainly stands in opposition to some other philosophical writers in this area who have argued that we need is to reach the state of understanding and forgiveness, and that’s how we get political progress. Martha Nussbaum has, for example, taken this line. But Myisha Cherry thinks that righteous anger, which has a long and noble tradition, is something that should be celebrated and recognised within the struggle for greater racial equality and fairness of treatment. She’s not saying, ‘get angry when someone steps on your toe,’ it’s not a wholesale justification for rage. It’s this specific kind of Lordean rage that she’s celebrating. It’s very nicely done. Again, it’s very short—a small format book of under 200 pages. It’s excellent.

Is this a book for activists, specifically?

It’s definitely of relevance to them, because it contains practical advice and justifications for it. But this is not just a book for activists. It also provides an understanding of how protests unfold, and how and why not to denigrate rage when it’s justified. She’s not advocating violence, but she is clear that there’s a place for this kind of motivational rage that works in the antiracist struggle very effectively—it inspires people and brings them together, collectively, to stand up against injustice.

And for your fourth 2021 philosophy book you’ve chosen Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. In the UK, it has the subtitle ‘Time and How to Use It,’ but I like the American one better: ‘Time Management for Mortals.’

Some people won’t see this as a philosophy book, but it is. It’s a book about what we do with our limited time on Earth, how we decide to prioritise and proportion our time. To that extent it’s a book of ethics in the face of inevitable death. Even if you or I live to 90, as he points out at the beginning of the book, that will only be 4,700 weeks of existence. I have to admit that when I read the title I checked the calculation because 4,000 weeks sounded far too few for a life. That’s frighteningly short. And, obviously, most people who read the book will have far fewer than 4,000 weeks left.

It’s a combination of sometimes witty, sometimes terrifying exploration of the human condition, and at the same time an antidote to those time management books that tell you how you can maximise your productivity, taking on more and more tasks and completing them efficiently. As he says, you’ll inevitably end up underachieving on some things because your time and energy are finite (something that authors of those breathless self-help books don’t always acknowledge).

He has the style of writing which draws you in and feels very personal and likeable, and he includes elements of autobiography too. He’s got a degree of distance, a degree of irony, but he’s immersed himself in the world of self-help and philosophy. It holds up a mirror to what we sacrifice, because we feel that work is the most important thing.

He points out that there is no end to a to-do list. It only grows longer.

Yes, he’s somebody who’s been absolutely caught up in all those schemes for making your life more efficient, ticking off achievements. It’s like a former alcoholic writing about drinking. He’s been there. He definitely doesn’t see busyness as a virtue, and even thinks it a good idea that we practise doing nothing. That’s an ingredient of a good life for him.

There’s a great section of the book called ‘Cosmic Insignificance Therapy’ where he spells out why he believes ultimately most people won’t put a dent in the universe, and how we can turn that to our advantage. If my life is insignificant in the grand scheme of things—and ultimately all lives are—I don’t need to beat myself up for failing to achieve something that only a few dozen people in the history of humanity have ever achieved. Once I realise that I can enjoy a modestly meaningful life through a wide range of activities, I can also perhaps come to realise that the anxieties that take up so much of our energy are, if we zoom out a bit, irrelevant. That’s the idea anyway. Burkeman is very good at giving us permission to be satisfied with doing worthwhile things on a small scale, and failing to achieve things too, without being obsessed with productivity. That in a sense is the human condition.

As with all philosophy books, you don’t have to agree with the author for this to be worth reading. This is a book that invites you to think, and possibly disagree with the author. In the process you’ll probably get clearer about what you believe matters and where you find meaning in life.

And your fifth choice is Free by Lea Ypi. It’s newly out, but has been making quite a splash.

This is a book which I’ve only just finished reading. It’s written by an LSE professor of political theory, Lea Ypi, who is also an expert on Immanuel Kant. It’s mostly a memoir about growing up in Albania. But that doesn’t adequately describe the book, because, as its title suggests, it’s really about different conceptions of freedom, told through experience and reflection on that experience. It’s very different from my other choices here. It’s a really fascinating and wonderful book, and beautifully written too. You won’t regret buying this one, for sure.

Why have you chosen this for a list of the best philosophy books?

It’s not straightforwardly philosophical throughout, but the underlying political questions emerge through a child’s experience of growing up in Tirana as Albania’s form of socialism is collapsing, as it finally did in 1990. Ypi describes her childhood in a communist state, where she is so much in thrall to what she is taught about freedom under communism that she even goes to hug a statue of Stalin. Her curiosity about the world reveals that her world of certainties, particularly in relation to her family, is not quite what she thought it was.

It’s a book about freedom both under Stalinist communism and in a liberal capitalist system, written from experience, and told through her and her family’s encounters with different ways in which their freedom has been curbed. Ypi thinks that if you believe you are free is a living in London, that is just as much a delusion as it was for her growing up in Tirana believing that she was free. It’s a book about a family and the degree to which historical circumstances shaped freedom for its members.

There’s a passage near the end of Free where Ypi describes how this book was originally going to be an overtly philosophical one about overlapping ideas of freedom in liberal and socialist traditions, but that as soon as she started writing it, the abstract ideas turned into people she knew, people who were the product of social relations for which they were not responsible. The result is unexpected and far more than just a collection of memories. We are very fortunate that she went in this direction. Not many writers could have pulled this off with such grace and elegance.

Leaving Albania for Italy and ultimately for London was not a journey for her to a place of freedom. That would be the Hollywood version of her life. In a way this is a spoiler, but liberalism for her carries with it associations of the destruction of solidarity, and of turning a blind eye to injustice, with victims of the system whose lives are very far from free. There is a kind of ideological delusion that we suffer from in liberal societies, she argues.

Where there any other philosophy books published in 2021 that didn’t quite make your list, but which you’d like to mention?

There are two books which caught my eye, both of which could have made the list, for different reasons. Both address contemporary issues using philosophical tools. Both are provocative, though in different ways. They force the reader to think. Amia Srinivassan’s The Right to Sex, a collection of essays on themes as varied as whether or not students should sleep with their professors (her answer is no, largely for psychological reasons about the relationship), whether we should think of people who sell sex as sex workers and decriminalise prostitution (yes), whether we should abolish prisons (ultimately, in an ideal world, yes), and much more. And, more controversially perhaps, Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, which is a clearly-written argument about gender and the implications of allowing self-declaration to be a sufficient criterion for gender change. This is a book that has been much maligned, often by people who haven’t taken the trouble to read it. There are points I disagree with in both books, but I am grateful for both writers for helping me think more clearly about the issues they address. That, I think, is the role of good public philosophy.

Part of our best books of 2021 series.

The office of New York's attorney general released thousands of pages of testimony relating to the sexual harassment allegations against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the new information makes it abundantly clear that CNN host Chris Cuomo involved himself in his brother's efforts to survive public scrutiny. Contrary to Chris Cuomo's claim that he did not act as an official advisor to his brother, the documents reveal that he actively used his journalistic access and connections to find out more information about the accusers—and potentially, to discredit them.
Chris texted his brother's long-serving handler, Melissa DeRosa, about one of the accusers, saying, "I have a lead on the wedding girl." The wedding girl is Anna Ruch, who accused Andrew of making a pass at her. Chris's "lead" was a possible means of casting aspersions on her accusation; Chris told the attorney general's fact-finders that he had learned of a source who might say Ruch had ulterior motives.
Despite claiming during his interview with the attorney general's office that "I would never do oppo research on anybody alleging anything like this," he was clearly engaged in a form of opposition research. He wasn't just passively listening to his brother's side of the story and offering words of encouragement: He took part in the strategizing.
That's not a crime, of course. It's unsurprising that he would take his brother's side and want to help him. But it was wrong for Chris to mislead his viewers about the role he played, and it was wildly unethical to ignore the scandal during his broadcast while privately participating in the governor's response efforts.
The matter was badly handled by the network: At the height of the pandemic, CNN broke its own policy and allowed Andrew to give fluff interviews to Chris that glamorized the then-governor's response to COVID-19. These interviews never should have taken place, and they look especially ridiculous now that we know about the nursing home scandal and subsequent coverup.
Given that Chris significantly understated his involvement in his brother's strategizing, CNN must discipline him. The network says it's reviewing the anchor's conduct. It is difficult to imagine any competent review reaching the conclusion that he should keep his job. An important television journalist being the brother of a high-profile government official was an ethically challenging situation at best, and if there was some line in the sand that made it workable enough, Chris Cuomo clearly crossed it.
"By keeping Cuomo on the air and in his job, CNN would send the message that journalistic ethics are only for the little people and viewers are on their own," wrote The Atlantic's David Graham. "Cuomo should take some time off and reflect on his chosen profession—and if and when he comes back, perhaps he should choose a new beat."
An entirely new line of work might be for the best.

The post Chris Cuomo Violated Journalism Norms To Help His Brother and Should Resign From CNN appeared first on Reason.com.

When Russia blows up a satellite in space with a missile (as it did this month), or when China tests a new hypersonic missile (as it did last month), the ongoing arms race in space leaps into the news. But in between these “Sputnik”-like moments, outside the public’s view, the United States and its adversaries are battling in space every day.

While Washington officials and experts warn of the risks of an arms race in space, the United States’ adversaries are constantly conducting operations against U.S. satellites that skirt the line between intelligence operations and acts of war. The pace of conflict is intensifying, according to a top Space Force general, who told me that China could overtake the United States to become the number one power in space by the end of the decade.

“The threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time,” Gen. David Thompson, the Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations, told me in an interview on the sidelines of the recent Halifax International Security Forum. “We’re really at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened.”

Right now, Space Force is dealing with what Thompson calls “reversible attacks” on U.S. government satellites (meaning attacks that don’t permanently damage the satellites) “every single day.” Both China and Russia are regularly attacking U.S. satellites with non-kinetic means, including lasers, radio frequency jammers and cyber attacks, he said.

Thompson repeatedly declined to comment on whether China or Russia has attacked a U.S. military satellite in a way that did permanent or significant damage, telling me that would be classified if it had happened. The Chinese military is quickly deploying ground-based systems for doing battle in space, such as lasers that can damage nosy U.S. intelligence community satellites, which could be considered an act of war.

“The Chinese are actually well ahead [of Russia],” Thompson said. “They're fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.”

Both the Russians and the Chinese are working on satellites that can attack other satellites, he said. For some time now there have been reports that China was developing a satellite that could claw another satellite or grab one with a robotic arm or a grappling hook. The Chinese government has several reasons to want to disable U.S. satellites, which have been useful in revealing concentration camps built to intern Uyghur Muslims and new Chinese nuclear missile silo fields.

In 2019, Russia deployed a small satellite into an orbit so close to a U.S. “national security satellite” that the U.S. government didn’t know whether it was attacking or not, Thompson said. Then, the Russian satellite backed away and conducted a weapons test. It released a small target and then shot it with a projectile.

“It maneuvered close, it maneuvered dangerously, it maneuvered threateningly so that they were coming close enough that there was a concern of collision,” he said. “So clearly, the Russians were sending us a message.”

China is building its own version of satellite-based global positioning systems, said Thompson. That’s in addition to the “couple of hundred” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites China has now deployed to watch over any part of the globe. China is also putting satellites into space at twice the rate of the United States, meaning that if nothing changes on our end, China will surpass the United States in capability in space in a few years, he estimated.

“We are still the best in the world, clearly in terms of capability. They're catching up quickly,” he said. “We should be concerned by the end of this decade if we don't adapt.”

While China is quickly weaponizing space, its government points fingers at United States, claiming that Washington is the diplomatic stumbling black. There are reports that the Biden administration is reaching out to Beijing to establish new negotiations for a nuclear arms control, as well as international norms for cyberspace and space, but U.S. officials say that China won’t meaningfully engage.

The U.S. military is trying to speed up the procurement and deployment of space assets by creating structures like the Space Rapid Capabilities Office and the Space Development Agency, he said. Thompson’s idea is to deploy a large number of relatively low-cost satellites in constellations that increase the resiliency of U.S. space assets if they come under attack.

Conventional thinking about how to deter an enemy from attacking on the ground, by sea or in the air doesn’t really apply to space. New doctrines and norms for space need to be established, mostly by diplomats. That work will take years. Meanwhile, the arms race in space is heating up, and the United States risks losing it if it doesn’t recognize this reality.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

[music]

Today, the World Health Organization has declared that the omicron variant of the coronavirus poses a, quote, “very high risk to public health.” I spoke with my colleague, Apoorva Mandavilli, about how it is that scientists came to that conclusion so quickly. It’s Tuesday, November 30. OK, I think we’re ready. When you’re ready to record, we’re ready to record, so.

apoorva mandavilli

Really quick, we got an email about pronunciation. Is it omicron or omicron? I mean, I’ve been saying—

I think it’s O.

—omicron. It’s like somewhere in between. It’s neither ah nor—

Wait, wait, what are you saying?

Omicron, omicron. It’s kind of like omicron, but it’s not omicron. You know what I mean? It’s like omicron.

Can you just say it really slowly so we all can get on the same page?

Omicron?

Omicron, not omicron.

Yeah, not omicron. Yeah, I mean, I don’t think it really matters that much, honestly. I’m going with omicron. That OK?

Omicron, omicron, omicron.

Yeah.

OK, at this point, Apoorva, I’m curious, what named variant are we on now in terms of numbers? What number is this?

We’ve probably seen thousands and thousands of variants of the virus. But in terms of ones that have been important enough or of concern enough to get a Greek letter, this is seven. And if you want to think about the ones that the World Health Organization said are really serious variants of concern, as the WHO calls them, this is number five. So there was alpha and then beta and gamma and delta, and now we’re on omicron.

Mm-hmm. And we’re talking to you at what feels like a curious moment in the story of this variant, omicron, when public health experts have told us that we should be worried about it, but also not too worried because there’s so much that they say they don’t know. So I think the best place to begin this conversation is with the question of why those experts got so worried in the first place. And where do you think that story starts?

The story starts in Southern Africa, where this variant was first detected. And I want to be very clear, that’s where it was first detected. We don’t know if it really originated there. And it starts, really, less than a week ago.

archived recording Now scientists in South Africa are warning of a new strain of Covid-19.

South African researchers first heard of this variant last Tuesday. And they sequenced this variant, which means they looked at the genetic code of the virus. And they saw something that made them really nervous.

Which is what? What did they see?

archived recording The variant, which is yet to be named, appears to have a high number of mutations.

They saw that this variant has dozens of new mutations and dozens of mutations that they had not seen before.

archived recording And that is of concern because there’s a possibility it could be able to evade our immune response and be even more transmissible.

Well, explain that. I mean, my sense from talking to you, talking to our colleagues on the science desk, is that the coronavirus mutates constantly. So what is it about these mutations that got them anxious?

Right, the virus is always acquiring new mutations. So it’s not just the number. It’s that it has a lot of mutations in parts of the virus that are really important. So this variant has 50 mutations. And more than 30 of them are on the spike protein, which is arguably the most important part of the virus. And of that, 26 are unique mutations, meaning mutations that we’ve never seen before. By contrast, Delta had 10 unique mutations, and Beta had six. So this is just a lot that they’re seeing now in this variant.

Right.

And when scientists look at mutations within viruses, they worry about three things. Is the variant more contagious? Is it going to cause people to get sicker? And will vaccines continue to work against it? This time, with this particular variant, they’re seeing mutations that make them worry about all three of those things.

Hmm. So scientists are seeing mutations, just to summarize this, that could impact all three of the ways in which this variant could become a very real threat and make the pandemic worse.

Right, and they’re seeing multiple mutations that they think will affect each of those qualities that we don’t want to see in a virus.

OK, give us an example of a set of mutations and how it might affect one of the three categories you just mentioned— contagiousness, severity of illness, or being able to evade vaccines.

Let me pick the one that we probably worry about the most, which is, will vaccines continue to work against this variant? There are three main parts of this virus that are important for antibodies to recognize the virus. In previous variants, we’ve seen, at most, mutations in two of those regions. And that’s been bad enough. Like with the Beta variant, for example, we saw mutations in two of those regions. And the Beta variant was not as sensitive to vaccines as Delta or Alpha. This time, they’re seeing mutations in all three of those regions. And so that makes them worry that this one will be resistant to vaccines and more so even than any variant they’ve seen before, including Beta.

So you’re saying that scientists immediately detect that this variant has many, many mutations that can make it harder for vaccinated people to fight off this virus.

Correct.

Got it. OK, so let’s return to this chronology for a minute. You have these researchers in South Africa who start to sequence the genome of this new variant. They discover all these mutations in places on the virus that freak them out and make them nervous. It could make the virus more contagious, make illness from it more severe, and make the virus evade vaccines. What happens next?

The scientists did what all virus researchers do these days, which is they deposited the sequence in this database that geneticists all over the world look at. And scientists all over the world immediately saw the sequence, and they all got worried.

So they agree with the scientists in South Africa that this is a worrisome set of mutations.

They do. In fact, one scientist told me after seeing the sequence that it was like a collection of the greatest hits of the variant that you never wanted to see together.

Huh. OK, so I have to imagine that this is the moment, Apoorva, late last week when all our cell phones here in the United States started buzzing around Thanksgiving with news alerts that there was a scary new variant that had been first detected in South Africa.

It was. It was the moment when scientists everywhere started to sound the alarm. And by Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the W.H.O. said this was a variant of concern. In the past, they’ve taken weeks to get to that point for any other variant. And this happened just about three days after the first detection of the variant. So this has all happened very fast. And that’s because of how many mutations this new variant has.

But at this point late last week, and correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like a lot of this anxiety is on paper, right? It’s anxiety based on what scientists are seeing in the genetic sequencing. It’s not based on sudden or alarming changes in how people are responding to this variant on the ground.

Well, not entirely. I mean, these scientists have a reason for worrying, which is that, usually, when you see a cluster of mutations like this, it’s because there’s some advantage for the virus to have it. It allows the virus to survive better. But you’re right that we don’t know anything for sure yet and that most of it is still on paper. There are early hints from South Africa that maybe it’s more severe and maybe hospitalizations will go up. But it’s just too soon to say. Let me give you an example. So the scientists are worried that maybe this variant won’t respond to vaccines very well. But that’s not something they can just tell from looking at the sequence. So as soon as South African scientists found last week that this variant was circulating, immediately, within an hour, in fact, some South African scientists started doing those experiments. And by now, there are dozens of labs all over the world, all trying to answer this question. Will the vaccine still work against this variant?

Mm-hmm, but we don’t have an answer.

We don’t have an answer yet because it takes time for these scientists to build an artificial version of this variant that they can then test against the vaccines. So it’s probably going to be at least a couple of weeks before we know anything. And that goes for the other two questions as well.

Got it. So we won’t be able to answer the three big questions. Is this variant more contagious? Does it produce greater illness? Does it evade vaccines? We won’t know that for several weeks.

That’s right. We have to basically wait and see. Is it spreading really fast? Are a lot of people ending up in the hospital? And then we have to wait for these lab experiments to tell us, does it respond to vaccines?

We’ll be right back. Of course, over the weekend, Apoorva, we did not see governments around the world wait for more scientific data about the variant or wait to react to these fears that it could be more serious.

We did not.

archived recording The White House is now restricting travel from South Africa and seven neighboring countries. Hong Kong is also banning visitors from eight— Any of these countries within the last 14 days will be barred from entering Canada. To protect the U.K. against the variant coming here from Southern African countries and added four more countries to the Red List.

And you can see the impulse there. They’re all scrambling to contain the spread of the virus. And many countries declared right away that they were going to restrict visitors from Southern African countries.

archived recording We are raising a red flag. We understand that we’re on the verge of a state of emergency.

And some, like Israel, Japan and Morocco, decided that they would bar all foreign visitors. But I’m not sure that really works, because as of today, the virus is already in at least 15 countries.

Well, I think that brings us up to now, where we have countries imposing these travel restrictions and simultaneously finding that the virus is already inside their borders. So I think a question that many people have is, do these travel restrictions, which seem to be the world’s primary response, while we wait these two weeks for results on all this research, do they make any sense?

Pretty much every public health expert talked to says they don’t, that these travel bans do, really, nothing. They may delay it a tiny bit, but really, by the time countries discover that there is a variant that’s circulating, that variant is already everywhere.

archived recording Good morning. The prime minister is urging calm after the new coronavirus variant called Omicron was detected in Australia.

It’s been in several European countries. It’s in Canada. It’s in Hong Kong. It’s in Australia.

archived recording Also today, Britain, Germany, and Italy announced their first Omicron cases. They follow Belgium. You almost have to expect that it’s going to eventually find its way into Canada. I think people were expecting—

Really, the world does not sequence enough of the virus to detect enough of the virus to be able to know which variants are circulating. So by the time anybody has sounded an alarm, the horse has left the barn already.

Mm, so by the time the U.S., for example, as we just have, says no travelers from eight countries across Southern Africa, it’s too late.

Today, President Biden said it’s probably just a matter of time before it’s here.

archived recording (joe biden) Travel restrictions can slow the speed of Omicron. It cannot prevent it, but here’s what it does. It gives us time.

But really, I think the scientists that I’ve talked to say it’s probably here already. We just don’t know that it is. And the other problem with these travel restrictions is that to the people in those countries, it feels like a punishment. It basically disincentivizes them from telling the world that there is this dangerous new variant that’s circulating.

Why would it disincentivize them from sharing a variant with the world?

archived recording Now these restrictions are completely unjustified and unfairly discriminate against our country and our Southern African sister countries.

When you block visitors from those countries and you impose these travel bans, you’re delivering a huge economic blow to a lot of those countries. And they were already doing poorly because of the pandemic till now.

archived recording The prohibition of travel is not informed by science, nor will it be effective in preventing the spread of this variant.

So the South African officials and the scientists that I’ve been talking to are very upset because they feel that they did the world a favor by alerting everybody to this variant. There are scientists from all over the world asking them for samples and for sequences. And at the same time, they’re being told, you’re not welcome in our country.

archived recording The only thing the prohibition on travel will do is to further damage the economies of the affected countries and undermine their ability to respond to and also to recover from the pandemic.

So it makes sense that the South African president just came out and said, please lift these travel restrictions, because it’s really unfair.

On the subject of Southern Africa, Apoorva, what, if anything, should we make of the fact that this is where this variant was first detected?

Well, we one thing about Africa, which is that very few people in that continent have been vaccinated. And scientists have been saying for months now that the more people we leave unvaccinated in certain parts of the world, the higher the chances that we’ll see a dangerous new variant. In Africa, in particular, there are a lot of people who have weak immune systems, whether that’s because of H.I.V. or T.B. or malaria or these diseases that really sap people’s strength. There are a lot of immunocompromised people. And we know now that the virus acquires mutations the best in somebody who is immunocompromised.

Can you just explain that?

In somebody who is immunocompromised, the virus will continue to replicate, to multiply for a long time at a very low level. So it’s like giving the virus this playing ground to experiment and come up with all kinds of new mutations. When you see a variant like Omicron that has 50 new mutations, it’s usually because it’s had a lot of time in one person, rather than acquired them one at a time in different people.

Got it.

But this is basically what scientists have been warning us for months, that apart from the moral argument for vaccinating the world, we’re really rolling the dice when we leave hundreds of millions of people unprotected in parts of the world where the virus can really gain a foothold and really replicate and acquire a lot of new mutations.

But isn’t it possible that an immunocompromised person anywhere in the world could have given us this variant?

Absolutely. That’s a really excellent point. This is why we should be vaccinating as much of the world as we can. The more people we have unvaccinated, the more chances that we’ll see another variant that’s dangerous.

But what if this variant, as many scientists fear, is resistant to vaccines? Does that still hold true?

It’s not all or nothing. It’s not that if this variant is not as sensitive to vaccines, that the vaccines don’t work at all. It just means that they’ll be a little less effective. But they’ll still probably prevent most people from getting really sick. And the vaccines are really still our best defense against this virus. And that’s even more true for boosters because they really amp up your antibody levels. And they’ll give you an even better chance of fighting off this variant.

So it sounds like you and the experts you talked to are saying that the answer to preventing variants like omicron and enduring them is not severe travel restrictions. It’s just a lot more vaccinations.

We know what works. It’s vaccination, it’s masks, it’s social distancing, and probably not travel restrictions.

[music]

Apoorva, we started this conversation with an acknowledgment that public health officials are telling us to be worried, but not too worried. And I wonder if that’s where your head is right now.

It really is because we don’t know enough to panic yet. I think this is one of those very frustrating moments when we just have to wait for the answers, and until we know that we should panic, not panic.

Well, Apoorva, when we get that answer, we will turn to you again. For now, thank you very much.

Thank you.

One way to clear this threshold would be to identify some quality that makes the unborn different in kind from other forms of human life — adult, infant, geriatric. You need an argument that acknowledges that the embryo is a distinct human organism but draws a credible distinction between human organisms and human persons, between the unborn lives you’ve excluded from the law’s protection and the rest of the human race.

In this kind of pro-choice argument and theory, personhood is often associated with some property that’s acquired well after conception: cognition, reason, self-awareness, the capacity to survive outside the womb. And a version of this idea, that human life is there in utero but human personhood develops later, fits intuitively with how many people react to a photo of an extremely early embryo (It doesn’t look human, does it?) — though less so to a second-trimester fetus, where the physical resemblance to a newborn is more palpable.

But the problem with this position is that it’s hard to identify exactly what property is supposed to do the work of excluding the unborn from the ranks of humans whom it is wrong to kill. If full personhood is somehow rooted in reasoning capacity or self-consciousness, then all manner of adult human beings lack it or lose it at some point or another in their lives. If the capacity for survival and self-direction is essential, then every infant would lack personhood — to say nothing of the premature babies who are unviable without extreme medical interventions but regarded, rightly, as no less human for all that.

At its most rigorous, the organism-but-not-person argument seeks to identify some stage of neurological development that supposedly marks personhood’s arrival — a transition equivalent in reverse to brain death at the end of life. But even setting aside the practical difficulties involved in identifying this point, we draw a legal line at brain death because it’s understood to be irreversible, the moment at which the human organism’s healthy function can never be restored. This is obviously not the case for an embryo on the cusp of higher brain functioning — and if you knew that a brain-dead but otherwise physically healthy person would spontaneously regain consciousness in two weeks, everyone would understand that the caregivers had an obligation to let those processes play out.

Or almost everyone, I should say. There are true rigorists who follow the logic of fetal nonpersonhood toward repugnant conclusions — for instance, that we ought to permit the euthanizing of severely disabled newborns, as the philosopher Peter Singer has argued. This is why abortion opponents have warned of a slippery slope from abortion to infanticide and involuntary euthanasia; as pure logic, the position that unborn human beings aren’t human persons can really tend that way.

Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a book called PC, M.D. How Political Correctness is Corrupting Medicine. One chapter explored “multicultural counseling,” a form of therapy that encouraged white clinicians to ask themselves, “what responsibility do you hold for the racist oppressive and discriminating manner by which you personally and professionally deal with minorities?” Another chapter documented flaws in research studies purportedly showing that physicians, as a matter of routine, were racially biased against their patients. I devoted another chapter to the quest for social justice in the field of public health. In the epilogue, which I called “The Indoctrinologist Isn’t In…Yet,” I cautioned: “those who care about the culture and practice of medicine must be alert to the encroachment of political agendas.”Today, the Indoctrinologists are officially in. These health professionals argued early in the COVID pandemic that, if hospitals were forced to ration ventilators, they should ration based partly on minority status rather than exclusively by standard criteria, such as clinical need or prognosis. They urged vaccine priority for black Americans to compensate for “historical injustice.” And 1,200 of them cheered, via open letter, the message of an epidemiologist from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who told would-be marchers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” In each instance, the experts allowed their own moral commitments, not objective metrics of risk, to shape their advice.The latest manifestation of Indoctrinology is a 54-page document from the American Medical Association called Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts. The guide condemns several “dominant narratives” in medicine. One is the “narrative of individualism,” and its misbegotten corollary, the notion that health is a personal responsibility. A more “equitable narrative,” the guide instructs, would “expose the political roots underlying apparently ‘natural’ economic arrangements, such as property rights, market conditions, gentrification, oligopolies and low wage rates.” The dominant narratives, says the AMA, “create harm, undermining public health and the advancement of health equity; they must be named, disrupted, and corrected.”One form of correction that the AMA recommends is “equity explicit” language. Instead of “individuals,” doctors should say “survivors”; instead of “marginalized communities,” they should say, “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization.” We must also be clear that “people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable.” Accordingly, we should replace the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” with “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.”Although the guide contains page after page of “medical newspeak,” as linguist and New York Times commentator John McWhorter called it, a solid kernel of truth lies buried within it. The guide rightly calls attention to the “social determinants of health”—the psychological, social, and cultural contexts that contribute to disease and shape people’s choices regarding their health. The increased awareness of these contexts over the last 20 or so years has been a major advance in medical training. It is indeed important for doctors to realize that even their most motivated patients may not be able to afford a medication, take time from work to keep an appointment, or understand a complex medical regimen. We must be prepared to enlist social workers and case managers to help.However, the guide recklessly stretches context beyond the realm of clinical outreach. It rebuffs “programmatic fixes,” such as the case manager who arranges for a patient’s transportation, because such fixes “ignore the social responsibility of corporations and government agencies.” With its emphasis on “power relations” and its push to “redistribute power and resources,” the guide reads more like a postmodern manifesto than an actionable blueprint for physicians.In important ways, I hardly recognize my profession. After the death of George Floyd, however, the radical justice project caught fire. Last year, the Association of American Medical Colleges, a major accrediting body, informed medical schools that they “must employ anti-racist and unconscious bias training and engage in interracial dialogues.” One of my colleagues told me that her school jettisoned lectures in bioethics to make room for the anti-racist curriculum. “Which is ironic,” she said, “because that was where students were taught about subjects like the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.” What other essential subjects will anti-racism training displace?The implementation of the social justice agenda has constrained collegial discourse, challenged the maintenance of standards, and suppressed honest analysis of certain problems. In her article called “What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?,” Katie Herzog wrote of “doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism) … I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.”Two cancellations have attracted notice. Last year, Norman Wang, a cardiologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who expressed skepticism about mandatory affirmative action after conducting a careful review of the data was stripped by his department of his directorship of the electrophysiology fellowship and barred from having contact with medical students, residents, or fellows because his views were “inherently unsafe.” His peer-reviewed paper, ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity: Evolution of Race and Ethnicity Considerations for the Cardiology Workforce in the United States of America from 1969 to 2019,’ which appeared in March 2020 in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) was retracted by the journal without Wang’s consent. The American Heart Association, which publishes JAHA, tweeted that his article “does NOT represent AHA values.” The cardiologist has sued both the university and the American Health Association.In another case, the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association was effectively forced to resign last June for a somewhat tone deaf, but otherwise unremarkable, 15-minute podcast on racism in medicine and because of a tweet advertising it. “Although I did not write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, as editor-in-chief, I am ultimately responsible for them,” he said in a statement. What other examples have escaped attention? “Most who are troubled by this are keeping their heads down and keeping their mouths shut,” said my colleague Thomas Huddle, an internist and professor who retired this year from the medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one of the few physicians willing to go on the record. “They’re deeply afraid of social media mobs and of academic administrative superiors who’ve taken this stuff on,” he said of his colleagues to Real Clear Investigations.Especially vexing, as Huddle and I have commiserated, is the reflexive attribution of group differences to systemic racism. “It’s axiomatic at this point,” said a colleague who had participated in a group discussion of stress and rising suicide in black youth. The tacit rule was that only fear of police aggression and subjection to racial discrimination were allowable explanations, not the psychological torture of bullying by classmates or the quotidian terror of neighborhood gun violence.I strongly agree that much of black Americans’ disadvantage in health and access to care is the cumulative product of legal, political, and social institutions that have historically discriminated, and sometimes continue to discriminate, against them. Systemic racism may indeed have broad explanatory value regarding health disparities, but, as an analytic framework, it doesn’t yield realistic prescriptions. Just what are physicians supposed to do? Become activists? The AMA’s answer is yes. In a strategic plan it released last spring, the organization urged doctors to “push upstream to address all determinants of health and the root causes of inequities, dismantle structural racism and intersecting systems of oppression.”This is no solution. Physicians cannot—and should not—“dismantle racism and intersecting systems of oppression” as part of their clinical mission. To imply that such activity falls within our scope of expertise is to abuse our authority. Doctors can reasonably lobby for policies directly promoting health, such as better coverage for patient care or more services, but we will lose our focus and dilute our efforts to care for patients if we seek to address the perceived root causes of health disparities.After all, even seasoned policy analysts can’t readily tease out strong causal links between health and sprawling upstream economic and social factors. With so many intervening variables at play, reforms in the service of health may well create unwanted repercussions elsewhere in the system. Any physician is free, of course, to pursue progressive reform as a private citizen but, as doctors, we already have a job: to diagnose and treat.Still, much can be done to expand immediate access to treatment for underserved minority populations. In California, for example, when patients with colon cancer were treated at an integrated health care system—a point of entry where all aspects of care were delivered under one roof—black patients fared much better than black patients treated in usual settings. As a result, survival rates were the same for blacks and whites. The Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force reduced mortality by helping women, mainly black women, navigate the health care system. The Comer Children's Pediatric Mobile Medical Unit brings service to Chicago's South Side, including immunizations, physicals for school, and screenings for vision, hearing, lead poisoning, and anemia. Medical centers partner with inner-city barbershops to help black patrons control diabetes and high blood pressure and to prevent heart attack and stroke. These community-based projects may not be the seeds of revolution, but they can improve and save lives.On January 8th, 2021, I had my own encounter with intolerance in academic medicine. Via Zoom, I gave a Grand Rounds lecture to the Yale Department of Psychiatry, where I had been a resident for four years and an assistant professor for five. I left New Haven in 1993 to pursue a health policy fellowship in Washington, DC and eventually joined a think tank there, but remained a lecturer in the department. My talk was about the year I spent assisting with treatment efforts in Ironton, a small, embattled town in south-eastern Ohio that was reeling from the opioid crisis.I discussed the “deaths of despair” phenomenon and showed photos of haunted industrial landscapes and the lonely downtown area. I presented national data on the characteristics of individuals who abused prescription pills and on the frequency with which addiction develops. I talked about the culture of prescribing in rural mining towns and the myriad factors that caused the crisis. I closed by highlighting the heroic efforts of Irontonians to boost the economy and the morale of their beloved town.One month later, I received an e-mail from the chairman of the department, a fine man and brilliant researcher whom I have known since we were interns together in the 1980s. He admitted that he had not anticipated “the extent of the hurt and offense that folks would take” to my presence. He appended an anonymous complaint that he had received from an unspecified number of “Concerned Yale Psychiatry Residents.”The residents told the chairman that my talk, coming only two days after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, “was further traumatizing to us.” They wrote that, “the language Dr. Satel used in her presentation was dehumanizing, demeaning, and classist toward individuals living in rural Ohio and for rural populations in general … We find her canon to be beyond a ‘difference of opinion’ worth debate.”  My earlier writing on health disparities was deemed a “racist canon.” They expressed “shock and disappointment” at the chairman’s failure to “take a public stand against” me and questioned his commitment to the department’s anti-racist agenda. “Will you continue to invite Grand Rounds Speakers with racist and classist mindsets, like Dr. Satel?” the residents asked.  Although they requested that the chairman “revoke” my lectureship at Yale, he did not do so.Academic medicine is in the midst of a risky institutional experiment. How will the AMA’s new call to “focus attention on inequitable systems, hierarchies, social structure, power relations, and institutional practices” affect the formation of trainees’ professional identities? Are we truly to believe that health is so thoroughly contingent on malign forces that doctors shouldn’t bother educating patients about how they can take responsibility for their wellbeing? And how will the adoption of a zealous social justice agenda affect public trust?Some of the people who are refusing the life-saving COVID vaccine are alienated from mainstream institutions, which they view as house organs of the political Left rather than trustworthy arbiters of truth. They may see the AMA’s prescription as further confirmation of their suspicions.Most important, will patients benefit when the AMA and other leaders position medicine as a vehicle for activism? We must remember that “Do no harm” is a covenant that doctors make with their patients, not with political systems and hierarchies.

1. Chart of the Day I (above) shows the narrative-destabilizing labor market reality that according to BLS data (here and here) Asian women out-earned white men in six of the last nine quarters. For the most recent quarter (2021:Q3), Asian women earned 9.1% (and $102) more per week than white men. How to explain this gender earnings gap favoring Asian women? Gender discrimination and male privilege are always the “go-to” explanations for any gender earnings gap favoring men, so perhaps there’s discrimination in the labor market against white men in favor of Asian women? And when there are white-black earnings gaps that favor whites, we often hear that “white privilege” is the reason, so perhaps “Asian privilege” is a factor in the labor market especially because it’s also true that Asian men out-earn white men. 
Related: The REAL reason women earn less at work: Harvard professor says sex discrimination, gender bias or a glass ceiling aren’t to blame – it’s ‘greedy’ jobs that are impossible to sustain once women have children

2. Chart of the Day II (above) shows the declining search interest over time on Google for the term “peak oil.” Remember that misguided obsession in the days before hydraulic fracking and especially horizontal drilling revolutionized US oil production starting about 2009 and reversed a thirty-year decline in output in only ten years on the way to making the US the world’s No. 1 crude oil producer? Peak what? 

3. Chart of the Day III (above) shows why we’re experiencing the highest inflation in 30 years and why it might not be “transient.” Since 1981, the Federal Reserve has increased M2 by about $19.5 trillion. If we divide that M2 growth into three periods when $6.5 trillion of new M2 was created, it took 336 months between January 1981 to December 2008 to create the first $6.5T, then 127 months from January 2009 to July 2019 to create the next $6.5T of new M2, and then only 27 months from August 2019 to October 2021 to create the last colossal, eye-popping addition of $6,500,000,000,000 in new M2! For another graphic that helps to understand just how much money (M2) has been created in less than two years, check out this stunning FRED chart. 

 4. Chart of the Day IV (above) displays some market-based evidence of the California-to-Texas exodus that has been taking place in recent years. Demand is so high for one-way 26-foot U-Haul trucks (and supply is so low) from San Francisco to Dallas relative for the low demand for one-way trucks in the opposite direction that it costs 8.3 times more for San Francisco-Dallas ($7,054) than for Dallas-San Francisco (only $854). The $854 cost for a 26-foot truck from Dallas to San Francisco in mid-December is actually less than the cost of a one-way rental for an SUV from Enterprise of $918. The difference in one-way U-Haul truck rental rates between a pair of US cities is a great example of market forces (supply and demand) in action. High Demand + Low Supply = High Price and Low Demand + High Supply = Low Price. 

5. Chart of the Day V (above) shows that for more than a century from 1800 to 1913 prices in the US were relatively stable based on Federal Reserve data. But since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, its monetary policies increased the CPI by 27.5X, decreasing the value of the US dollar by more than 96% in the process. 

6. Chart of the Day VI (above) shows another look at how the value of the US dollar has decreased over time since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. 

7. Venn Diagram of the Day (above) on the inconsistency among some about their concern for state borders vs. national borders. 

8. Chart of the Day VII (above) illustrates the signficant difference between how economists view changes in oil prices over time vs. how politicians and non-economists view oil prices. 

9. Chart of the Day VIII (above) displays an important, but frequently overlooked downward trend in US CO2 emissions that started in 2007 and brought emissions to the lowest level last year since 1983. For that dramatic drop in CO2 emissions to a 37-year low, we can thank hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling which facilitated the increasing substitution of clean natural gas for coal as the main fuel source for the nation’s electric power. 

10. Chart of the Day IX (above) is also an important, but frequently overlooked energy fact — the US leads the world in the reduction of CO2 over the most recent decade (2010-2020) for which data are available. As above, for that “greening” of America, we can thank the revolutionary technologies of fracking and horizontal drilling, which have accessed oceans of previously inaccessible natural gas beneath the ground in US states like Pennslyvania, Texas, Louisiana and Alaska. Ten years ago coal was the fuel source for 42% of America’s electricity while natural gas provided only 24.7%. Last year, natural gas provided 40.5% of the nation’s electricity compared to coal’s share of less than 20%. 
The post Monday afternoon links, all graphic edition appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

In democracy’s global trajectory over the last seventy-five years—from its worldwide conflict with international communism during the Cold War, to the surge of democratization from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, to the end and indeed partial reversal of its progress in the “democratic recession” of the last several years—India has played an important role. The world’s most populous democracy, it also qualifies as one of the least likely: it includes many different linguistic, social, and religious groups; and it had no real tradition of democratic governance or even national unity before its independence from Great Britain in 1947. Despite these handicaps, however, and with a twenty-one-month hiatus from June 1975 to March 1977, India has remained staunchly democratic, demonstrating both the breadth of democracy’s appeal and the strength of its institutions—until recently, when it began to drift in an undemocratic direction.The principal credit for the country’s initially democratic course belongs to modern India’s two founders, Mohandas Gandhi (known as the Mahatma), the leader of the movement that secured independence, and Jawaharlal Nehru, for seventeen years thereafter India’s prime minister. Both were educated in Britain, where they absorbed a commitment to democratic values. The two determined that their country would become not only democratic but a “civic” democracy that honored and protected the rights of all its citizens, including the 20 percent who were not, as Gandhi and Nehru were, Hindus. The largest minority religion was then and continues to be Islam, the faith of more than two hundred million Indians today. The two founders established the principle of secularism, whereby all religions enjoyed equal legal standing.In the last decade, however, India has joined the ranks of the democratic backsliders. Secularism in particular has eroded in practice. The architect of this regression is the country’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi. He led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its roots in India’s century-old Hindu nationalist movement that Gandhi and Nehru vigorously opposed during their lifetimes, to victories in the 2014 and 2019 national elections. On both occasions it won a clear majority in the Indian parliament. The BJP had previously participated in governments but had always had to do so as part of multiparty coalitions. The fact that it represented, above all, the interests of high-caste Hindus, the most influential although not numerically the largest segment of India’s population, had limited its appeal.Modi managed to extend his party’s electoral reach by emphasizing religion rather than caste, and he did so by making clear his hostility to Islam to its practitioners in India, and to Pakistan, the neighboring country carved out of British India in 1947, where Islam is the official state religion. His strategy involved mobilizing the country’s Hindu majority against alleged threats to it from Muslims.The prime minister’s electoral success stemmed as well from three additional sources. His humble origins helped him to present himself as a populist, opposing, on behalf of the people as a whole, what he designated as the country’s self-serving, corrupt elite. His particular target was the Congress Party—in Nehru’s day the country’s dominant political force but now severely reduced in political strength. Modi demonstrated formidable personal political skills. He is also an energetic and often magnetic campaigner. In addition, he employed, in both his victorious elections, the most advanced digital technology to a far greater extent and to much better effect than his opponents.In office, Modi’s government has tolerated, encouraged, and in some cases carried out anti-Muslim initiatives. It has looked the other way when groups of Hindu vigilantes have assaulted Muslim communities. It has enacted legislation harmful to the interests of Muslims, such as the law suspending the special status of India’s only Muslim-majority province, Kashmir. It has intimidated, directly and indirectly, critics of these and other policies who work in the press and the universities. It has worked to limit the legal protections Muslims enjoy from India’s courts.In his book Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Christophe Jaffrelot, who holds academic positions in Paris at CERI-Sciences Po/CNS and in London at King’s College, recounts in great detail the prime minister’s political rise and the way BJP-dominated governments at both the national and provincial levels have worked to turn the civic, secular, liberal democracy that Gandhi and Nehru established into what he calls an “ethnic” democracy, in which religious minorities have a legal and political status inferior to that of the majority.

The principal rationale that Modi’s colleagues and followers give for their anti-Muslim activities are not based on facts. The claim that all or even many Indians who adhere to the Islamic faith are terrorists, for example, or the assertion that Muslims are displacing Hindus demographically, in part by the seduction of Hindu women by Muslim men in what those who propagate this allegation call a “love jihad,” are not true.Some features of the BJP’s appeal are, however, grounded in reality. Its harsh populist attacks on the opposition Congress Party gain credibility from the fact that the Congress leadership is in practice determined by the non-democratic principle of heredity. A few years after Nehru’s death, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, succeeded him as prime minister. When she was assassinated, the office passed to her son, Rajiv Gandhi, and when he, too, died violently his Italian-born wife, Sonia, became the party’s leader. Her only qualification for the position was her marriage. Rajiv and Sonia’s son Rahul was the party’s candidate for prime minister in the most recent election, but he did not, to put it mildly, present a dynamic, compelling alternative to Mr. Modi. Moreover, although India’s Muslims do not carry out acts of terrorism against their country, the government of Pakistan does, which, unfortunately, only serves to increase anti-Muslim sentiment among India’s Hindus.While India’s democratic slippage has been under way for the seven years that Modi has been prime minister, it is not necessarily destined to continue. The reason that this is so goes back to democracy’s basic structure. It is a hybrid form of government, combining two equally important component parts. One is popular sovereignty—free and fair elections. The other is liberty, which comes in three varieties: economic, religious, and political. The first part involves how governments are chosen, the second what governments can and, more importantly, cannot do once in power. (The distinction is a theme of my 2006 book, Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government.)The BJP used its success in elections to violate norms of liberty. An electoral defeat for the party would bring to power a different government, with every chance that the new leaders would be more committed to civic than to ethnic nationalism; and such a development is entirely possible.Elections will continue to be held in India. They will not be suspended and cannot be successfully rigged. Indians expect, value, and participate enthusiastically in them, and while Modi’s BJP has managed to tilt the electoral playing field in its favor by raising far more money than its opponents and constraining the operations of the country’s electoral oversight body, the country is too big and its citizens too rambunctious to permit the governing party to control the outcome of national voting.Even in its greatest triumph, in 2019, moreover, the BJP received only 37 percent of the popular vote, the rest being divided among the Congress Party and a number of regional parties. Almost two-thirds of the electorate, that is, spurned Modi. (In India, as in other countries such as Great Britain with similar electoral systems, a mere plurality of the votes can yield a majority of the seats in the legislature.) Historically, moreover, in the country’s many national, provincial, and local elections, incumbents have regularly lost power. That did not occur in 2019, but the election of that year took place under special circumstances. Shortly before the voting, India suffered a Pakistani terrorist attack in Kashmir, in which forty people died. Modi ordered a retaliatory strike on Pakistan and claimed, without convincing evidence, that the Indian strike had inflicted serious damage. He then campaigned as the stalwart defender of the nation. The tendency of the public to rally around the leader of the moment in such circumstances, in evidence in many countries throughout history, surely added to his vote total.Under normal circumstances, Indian incumbents have often lost power because they have not fulfilled their campaign promises. Modi has not fulfilled his: the acceleration of economic growth and the alleviation of economic inequality that he promised in 2014 have not materialized. Nor did his government perform well in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In the elections during that year to choose the governments of several major provinces he campaigned vigorously but achieved disappointing results, suggesting that his formula for political success might be losing its potency.The course of Indian politics, like the course of politics in every country, is unpredictable. It is impossible to know the outcome of the next national election, scheduled for 2024; but it is not at all impossible for the BJP to lose it. Elections have consequences, and one consequence of such an outcome could well be the end of the policies that Narendra Modi and his party have carried out since 2014 and a return to the older and more fully democratic political tradition of the India of Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a member of the editorial board of American Purpose. His new history of American foreign policy from 1765 to 2015, The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower, will be published in June 2022.Modi image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38865695Nehru image: AFP, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37641536Gandhi image:, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76882768

Over at SCOTUSblog, I’ve written a case preview for American Hospital Association v. Becerra, which is being argued tomorrow. The case is not only important for what it could mean for administrative law. It’s important in its own right because billions of dollars in hospital payments are at stake.
The case centers on part of a 2003 law that gives Medicare two options for how to pay for [certain expensive outpatient] drugs. Under the first option, Medicare would survey hospitals about what it cost them to acquire the drugs. Medicare would then draw on the survey data and reimburse hospitals for their “average acquisition costs,” subject to variations for different types of hospitals. It’s a rough-cut way to make hospitals whole without requiring them to submit receipts for every drug purchase.
But Medicare immediately encountered a problem: It just wasn’t practical to survey hospitals about their acquisition costs. Fortunately, the law anticipated that possibility and gave Medicare a second option. In the absence of survey data, Medicare could pay the “average price” for the drug, “as calculated and adjusted by the Secretary [of Health and Human Services] as necessary for purposes of this [option].”
This approach turned out to be costly. A drug’s “average price” is fixed elsewhere in the Medicare statute, typically at 106% of the drug’s sale price. As a policy matter, this “average sales price plus 6%” approach is hard to defend. Because 6% of a large number is bigger than 6% of a small number, hospitals have an incentive to dispense more expensive drugs, even when there are cheaper and equally effective therapies.
Other developments soon made the payment policy look even more dubious. Back in 1992, Congress created something called the 340B program to support health-care providers that serve poor and disadvantaged communities. Eligible providers get steep discounts on the drugs that they purchase — anywhere between 20% and 50% of the normal price.
Initially, few hospitals qualified for the 340B program. Today, more than two-thirds of nonprofit hospitals participate. (For-profits are excluded from the program.) For years, Medicare kept paying those 340B hospitals 106% of the average sales price of their outpatient drugs. The upshot was that hospitals were buying highly discounted drugs and then charging the federal government full price. That heightened the incentive to prescribe very expensive medications — which is partly why Medicare spending on outpatient drugs has ballooned, growing an average of 8.1% per year from 2006 through 2017.
I’ll also be recapping the oral argument and discussing the outcome when the case is resolved. Read the whole thing here!
@nicholas_bagleyThe post Chevron deference at stake in fight over payments for hospital drugs first appeared on The Incidental Economist.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, and Tim Palmer, a Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Physics at the University of Oxford, write:

In a recent column in Scientific American, Naomi Oreskes argues that we understand the physics of climate change well enough now. She writes that the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Working Group 1 (WG1)—the ones tasked with assessing the physical science basis of climate change—should “declare their job done.” According to Oreskes, we should instead now deal with the problem by focusing on adaptation and mitigation.

It is true that the scientific basis of global long-term trends is settled. We know that sea levels are rising, average temperatures are increasing, and glaciers are dying. We know that business as usual will put our and future generations at risk of great suffering. But we do not have a good understanding of the regional impacts of climate change, and uncertainties in the long-term predictions currently span a range that could mean anything from a serious but manageable inconvenience to an existential threat.

Indeed, Oreskes has previously been critical of WG1’s reports: a February 2013 paper she co-authored in Global Environmental Change argued that the IPCC reports have consistently underpredicted ”at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases.” But why is that? It’s because the job of climate scientists is not done.

A key reason for the underestimates that Oreskes and her colleagues belabored is that current-generation climate models are crude representations of the complex dynamical system that is our climate. For example, current global climate models can’t represent cloud systems using the laws of physics because the grid spacing is too coarse (a hundred kilometers or more). In the models, therefore, clouds are represented by highly simplified empirical formulas that describe the clouds’ true properties in a relatively crude way.

But clouds are a vital part of the global hydrologic cycle and therefore play a key role, not only in determining the magnitude of global warming but also in shaping extreme weather events around the world. Because of the simplified representations of clouds, current climate models tend to systematically misplace the principal regions in the tropics, known as the intertropical convergence zones, where rainfall occurs. In midlatitudes, the models underestimate the number of long-lived high-pressure systems known as anticyclones, which are associated with heat waves, forest fires and drought. All of these errors are typically at least as large as the climate-change signals the models attempt to simulate.

The consequence of our inability to model essential climate processes very accurately is that we cannot correctly simulate extreme weather and climate events. The horrendous weather events of 2021—the near-50-degree-Celsius heat in British Columbia and the devastating flooding in the Eifel region in Germany, China’s province of Henan and New York City—are completely outside the range of what current-generation climate models can simulate.

This in turn means that, at the moment, we cannot quantify the extent to which such extreme events were caused by climate change. Despite this, weather event attribution has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, particularly in the media. For such attribution, climate scientists run climate models twice, once with the observed current-day levels of carbon dioxide and once with preindustrial levels. Using these runs, they attempt to estimate how the likelihood of a particular type of weather event changes as a result of our carbon emissions.

But because current climate models cannot correctly simulate any of the extreme events of 2021 with their observed intensity, we cannot actually estimate how much the probability of these events increased—we just get a meaningless likelihood ratio of 0:0. Therefore, to estimate the probability, one has to look at less extreme events that have a higher probability of occurring than those that actually took place. As a result, the estimate one gets for how much the probability of extreme events has increased might be orders of magnitude too low. Perhaps these events were 50 percent more likely because of climate chance; perhaps they were 50,000,000 percent more likely—we can’t tell. The science of extreme event attribution is far from done and dusted. Indeed, it has hardly begun.

More important than quantifying what is happening now is quantifying what is about to happen. Countries will need sound model projections to prioritize adaptation strategies. If climate change could bring enhanced flooding and storminess on the one hand and stronger heat waves and drought on the other, how should money be spent most effectively to make a nation more climate resilient? We can’t answer this question if we can’t accurately quantify the likelihood of these alternative scenarios.

Further, we need reliable models if we are ever to take climate geoengineering seriously. If we one day consider spraying artificial aerosols in the stratosphere as a way to offset global warming, we need models to tell us what this would do, say, to the rainfall patterns associated with the Asian summer monsoon.

To add one final reason, we also need better models to understand how changing wind and cloud patterns will affect our electricity production by renewables later this century. We do not know, for example, whether to take seriously the possibility of “global stilling,” the idea that, because of Arctic warming, the pole-to-equator surface temperature gradient is weakening, leading to a reduction in Northern Hemisphere midlatitude wind systems. So how are we to decide whether wind turbines are a good investment?

In short, to address fundamental issues in climate mitigation, adaptation and geoengineering—the sorts of things Oreskes says we should now focus on—we need to understand the physical basis of climate much more quantitatively than we currently can. Research on basic science and downstream solutions should develop hand in hand.

To confront these problems and pool resources, the world needs to come together to create a federated international center for climate change, a sort of “CERN for climate change.” Each arm of the federation would have state-of-the-art exascale computers. Here, scientists could develop a new generation of ultra-high-resolution climate models with a grid spacing around one kilometer—an improvement that would greatly alleviate the shortcomings of current models by reducing the need for these empirical formulas and instead allowing small-scale processes to be represented by the basic laws of physics. Instead of hanging up their boots, WG1 would then be able to provide a much clearer picture of how climate change will manifest itself.

Climate change has all the makings of an unfolding global disaster, yet scientists still have much to understand. Claiming that the science is done when it isn’t, risks that more people will die because they weren’t prepared for what was to come.

The Response

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, replies:

Hossenfelder and Palmer object to the suggestion that there might be a case for less climate science, but they misunderstand my argument. I am not calling for an end to climate science. I am calling for wrapping up a particular project that has achieved its ends.

Science as a process of learning and discovery is never done. From our current vantage point, early-20th-century pronouncements that physics was finished (on the eve of the relativity and quantum mechanics revolutions) look preposterous. So do late-20th-century declarations of the “end of science.” But history shows that particular lines of inquiry have ended as scientists concluded that they were misguided (phrenology), unachievable (specific short-range earthquake prediction) or answered (the link between smoking and cancer).

My argument is not that climate science is done; it is that scientists have answered the question that was posed to them in the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: What level of anthropogenic interference constitutes “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system? The answer, encapsulated in a recent IPCC report and WG1’s latest assessment, is warming at or above 1.5 degrees C. When you have answered a question, the next thing to do is stop.

Moreover there is a cost to not stopping: large assessments consume huge amounts of scientific time and energy, not to mention leaving heavy carbon footprints. Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist long involved in the IPCC, estimates that about one quarter of his working time over the past decades has been dedicated to IPCC reports. Multiply that by the thousands of scientists who work on any single IPCC assessment, and you’ve got tremendous time and labor not spent on other scientific challenges and a huge amount of energy-consuming travel. Large ongoing assessment reports also send a mixed message to the public: that the science is at the same time “unequivocal” and in need of further evaluation. That doesn’t help the cause of public understanding. And the appraisals take such a long time to produce, noted climatologist Kevin Trenberth, who has been a lead author on several IPCC scientific reports, that by the time they come out they may not be quite up-to-date.

Should scientists continue to improve climate models so that we can better understand climate feedbacks and forecast the effects of our interventions? Should scientists continue to work to improve our understanding of climate impacts on the regional and local level and their relation to extreme weather events? Do we need better data on wind and cloud patterns as we transition to a renewable-energy economy? Yes, yes and yes. (I have long argued that better understanding of regional and local effects is essential to planning for adaptation.) The question is not “Do we need this science?” The question is whether yet another big assessment is the best route to it.

To the scientists who have done the job they were asked to do, I say: Thank you! Declare victory and pass the baton to the experts in the social, political and economic questions essential to finding and implementing effective solutions to the climate crisis. Doing so would not only be a service to the world; it would be a service to science as well.

Although masks, distancing, ventilation, testing, and contact tracing have all helped forestall a collapse of the American health-care system under the weight of COVID-19, the pandemic will come under control in only two ways: Preventives—specifically vaccines—will harness people’s immune system to keep them from becoming infected, getting sick, and spreading the coronavirus, while targeted therapeutics will offer hope to those who have already developed symptoms. The emergence of Omicron, a worrisome new variant of the coronavirus, underscores the need to use multiple tools to fight the disease. In infectious diseases, control of a pathogen means reducing its impact even if it remains endemic in the world. Fortunately, the United States is poised to authorize two oral antivirals: molnupiravir and Paxlovid. The former is the generic name of a drug made by Merck; the latter is the trade name of a drug combination made by Pfizer. Both come in pill form, and a five-day treatment course of each will provide certain patients with significant benefits.These miraculous drugs arrived with minimal fanfare but represent the biggest advance yet in treating patients already infected with COVID-19. The supply of vaccines in the U.S. has exceeded demand for some time, and authorities recently widened eligibility to include children as young as 5, but uptake is not universal. Millions of Americans have decided, for a variety of reasons, not to get shots, while many more around the globe have yet to be offered a vaccine. And although the vaccines have remained amazingly effective against severe disease, some patients, especially those who are older or immunocompromised, remain at risk of hospitalization if they get a breakthrough infection. The widespread use of oral treatments for influenza hints at the value of COVID drugs that can be provided in an outpatient setting and reduce the severity of symptoms for unvaccinated and vaccinated patients alike.[Read: Timing is everything for Merck’s COVID pill]Molnupiravir and Paxlovid are particularly exciting because antivirals that effectively target viruses at specific points in their life cycle are the “holy grail” of viral therapeutics—as past experience with other viruses has shown. Infection with HIV was fatal for nearly all patients until antivirals were developed against enzymes crucial to viral replication and researchers figured out how to combine those drugs to maximize their effectiveness and limit the emergence of resistant viral strains. These changes revolutionized HIV treatment, massively improving the prognosis for people who had access to  antivirals. Instead of developing severe illness, treated patients could live healthily and expect normal life spans.The development of these highly active oral antivirals for HIV infection took a decade and a half after the disease first came to light; the incredible progress in COVID-19 therapeutics took 18 months. Intriguingly, the COVID-19-treatment research borrowed many ideas from the HIV field; the two new COVID-19 drugs focus on similar pathways in the viral life cycle that HIV drugs target. In essence, these drugs prevent the target virus from reproducing itself. Because they work differently from the majority of COVID-19 vaccines, which teach the immune system to identify and attack the coronavirus’s characteristic spike protein, the antivirals remain effective against mutant variants whose spike proteins are harder for immune cells to recognize. Designing, manufacturing, and distributing vaccines updated for new variants will take time, so the availability of antivirals will be all the more essential.The rapid development of vaccines against COVID-19—something that doesn’t yet exist for HIV—has overshadowed the progress on treatments. And yet, the need and public demand for effective medications are evident. Doctors and patients have sought out potential oral COVID-19 treatments, including drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, that did not prove effective in clinical trials. But researchers needed to keep working on the question, because COVID-19 will be with us for the long haul. Although health experts agree that preventing a disease is better than treating its symptoms, not everyone will get vaccinated. People who become infected are worthy of compassion and care, regardless of the circumstances of their infection, and medical treatments that shorten the period of viral transmission and keep unvaccinated COVID-19 patients out of hospital beds will protect everyone.The COVID-19 treatments that have shown some effectiveness up to this point have significant drawbacks. Remdesivir is an intravenous antiviral used for hospitalized patients with COVID-19. But by the time a patient is admitted, the virus may already have caused considerable damage, and viral replication may have stopped. An intravenous drug has far less power to affect the trajectory of the pandemic than affordable, effective, and short courses of oral pills do. Until now, the only outpatient therapeutic for COVID-19 has been monoclonal antibody treatments, which are effective in preventing severe disease in high-risk patients. But they are expensive and require intravenous infusion or subcutaneous injection, and health-care providers must monitor their administration closely.Although molnupiravir—which is named after the Norse god Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir—was being tested for the treatment of the Ebola virus, researchers had not settled upon a purpose for the drug before SARS-CoV-2 arrived on the scene. Early studies of molnupiravir showed that its recipients cleared the coronavirus more rapidly than recipients of a placebo did. The drug did not help patients who were already hospitalized, but in outpatients with mild to moderate disease who had a high vulnerability to severe disease, it reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by 30 percent if given within five days of developing symptoms. The drug proved so beneficial that the clinical study was called off early. Merck applied for emergency-use authorization, and the FDA is expected to review the drug this week. Merck has promised to share its technology with the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), which will allow for more affordable global access to molnupiravir.Paxlovid, a formula developed largely from scratch for the current pandemic, is actually an RNA-virus protease inhibitor called PF-07321332 “boosted” with another drug called ritonavir. It too was the subject of a clinical trial that was stopped early because the treatment looked so effective. Outpatients who had both COVID-19 and medical conditions that put them at high risk of severe illness were 89 percent less likely to be hospitalized if they received Paxlovid twice daily for five days than if they got a placebo. The FDA will likely review this important therapeutic before the end of the year. The U.S. government has bought millions of courses of molnupiravir and Paxlovid for Americans in anticipation of the authorization of both. Moreover, Pfizer has promised to accelerate worldwide access to Paxlovid through an agreement with MPP.[Read: A much-hyped COVID-19 drug is almost identical to a black-market cat cure]The importance of these two highly anticipated outpatient antivirals for COVID-19 cannot be overstated. Both medications were studied in unvaccinated individuals, of which the U.S. and other countries around the world have many. For the vaccinated, “breakthrough” infections are generally mild, but they can lead to time out of work and require cutting back contact with others. Not only should rapid treatment with one of these two antivirals shorten symptoms in breakthrough infections (as is the case with influenza), but bringing down the viral load quickly by inhibiting viral replication should limit transmission.Further study of the new COVID-19 drugs is under way for potential use in lower-risk individuals and as preventive medications. The development of HIV antivirals also led to the development of “post-exposure prophylaxis,” a strategy in which people who have come in contact with that virus take antivirals to avoid becoming HIV-positive. The new COVID drugs have at least the potential to provide a similar benefit. Moreover, the development of these two antivirals is spurring research on other COVID-19-specific antivirals. So despite the arrival of Omicron, we still have grounds for optimism. Last year ended with the authorization of highly effective COVID-19 vaccines, and 2021 should end with the availability of highly effective, targeted COVID-19 treatments that will help the world live with COVID-19.

       Parents of transgender children and other supporters of transgender rights gather in the capital outdoor rotunda to speak about transgender legislation being considered in the Texas House and Texas Senate, Wednesday, April 14, 2021, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay) Eric Gay/AP   Transgender activists prey on sympathetic parents   Debra Soh   November 29, 06:00 AM November 29, 02:19 PM  Last week, a children’s book reading commemorating the Transgender Day of Remembrance in a Denton, Texas, library was canceled due to safety concerns following public backlash. In response, the mother of a trans-identified child organized a "transgender story time" at a new location, with hundreds of people reportedly in attendance.  While seeming benign due to their celebratory nature, these types of "inclusive" events are not innocuous. All of the research literature shows that the majority of gender dysphoric children will outgrow their dysphoria by puberty. Because gender has become a fashionable accessory, children quickly learn that deciding to identify as anything but their birth sex will increase their popularity and foster adults' attention and adulation.  I do believe adults with gender dysphoria should be supported in transitioning, because they possess the cognitive maturity to make life-altering decisions. Children who are struggling with their gender identity similarly deserve love and support. They should be allowed to dress how they’d like and play with their preferred toys; however, this doesn’t necessitate a social transition, or embracing a political agenda that has no interest in their well-being.  Many well-meaning parents erroneously believe that celebrating the so-called transgender child is the kind and ethical thing to do. Activists, many of whom are not transgender, have cleverly tricked parents into doing the heavy lifting for them. It is akin to the way suicide statistics have been used to manipulate caregivers into allowing a child to transition, when these numbers pertain to adults experiencing gender dysphoria, and have little relevance to children.  There will surely be more gender identity-themed events in the future, and as satisfying as dissenters may find it to shut these events down successfully, I would argue that doing so is counterproductive.  As is commonly seen when opinions are censored and speakers are deplatformed, the Streisand effect brings about greater interest, support, and sympathy. In the case of gender activism, an additional, unpleasant side effect is that individuals feel even more self-righteous and justified in persisting with this nonsense.  A more effective approach would be to speak openly about why these beliefs are harmful so that more parents become aware that these nice-sounding ideas lack any basis in science or reality. Actively challenge the folks you know who senselessly repeat talking points such as "trans kids know their authentic selves" so that they are unable to defend their vacant sense of moral superiority.  Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.  © 2021 Washington Examiner    

The US government is set to spend twice as much on the military as on Joe Biden’s social spending programs over ten years. Instead of apologizing for social spending, Biden should stop rubber-stamping defense spending and start using it as leverage.

US Air Force personnel secure an MQ-9 Reaper drone upon its return to Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico, on December 16, 2016. (Airman Magazine / Flickr)
 
As inflation reached a three-decade high this month, conservatives in Congress capitalized on the moment by pinning the surge in prices entirely on government spending. The Republican National Committee advised Americans, “Be prepared to pay more this holiday season because of Bidenflation.”
This narrative is far from universally accepted, but it has put Democrats on the defensive as one of Joe Biden’s staple pieces of legislation — the $1.75 trillion reconciliation bill, or Build Back Better Act — awaits consideration in the Senate. The real or imagined threat of inflation could derail its progress entirely.
Biden didn’t help his cause when he blamed inflation on the $1,400 stimulus checks authorized by the COVID-19 relief bill. Prices have gone up because “people have more money now because of the first major piece of legislation I passed,” Biden said in a speech earlier this month, calling it an “irony.”
Instead, Biden should have illuminated more relevant culprits for inflation — like corporate greed, for example. But even if inflation was entirely contingent on government expenses, Biden fingering social spending legislation as a primary culprit would still be unwarranted.
The reconciliation bill and COVID relief bill authorize $1.75 trillion and $1.9 trillion in federal spending over ten years, respectively. The recently passed infrastructure bill provides $550 billion over five years. If the reconciliation bill passes intact, Biden’s economic agenda will obligate a little over $4 trillion over a decade.
Military spending is expected to be twice that amount. According to the ten-year funding plan endorsed by Senate Appropriations Committee Democrats, the Pentagon should get at least $8.31 trillion from fiscal years 2022 through 2031.

The difference between military and social spending is more than just a (vast) funding disparity, however. Military spending plays by a different set of fiscal rules entirely.
Earlier this month, House Democrats ordered the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to “score” the reconciliation bill’s impact on the national debt. The purpose was to find out whether the bill was in fact fully “paid for” by the various offsets — like raising taxes and better enforcing existing ones — included in the bill that Democrats had spent months tinkering with.
Congress behaves much differently when a military spending bill is on the floor. The Pentagon budget for next year stands at $778 billion, or roughly 4.5 times the average annual cost of the reconciliation bill. Even though it is not “paid for” at all, the Pentagon budget bill will likely pass the chamber handily. It’s even scheduled to be voted on before the reconciliation bill.
The House passed a military bill of the same value in late September. At no point did House Democrats call in the CBO to calculate its impact on the deficit. Moreover, its passage wasn’t delayed by months to figure out how to offset its cost, either. Military budgets don’t get asked “How do you pay for it?” like budgets for social uplift do.
At least they haven’t since the Vietnam War. No US wars since then have been “paid for” with a corresponding tax increase.

The Pentagon budget might be the final source of leverage Biden has left to advance his economic agenda. In the near term, this means he must commit to vetoing the Pentagon budget until the Senate passes his reconciliation bill intact.
Biden will likely have to deploy similar tactics for the rest of his term if he intends on passing other social spending bills. However, there is no indication that Biden will do this on his own, so it’s incumbent on progressives to present this case to him, publicly and relentlessly.

Here in the US, as Sunday of a long Thanksgiving holiday weekend rolled around, I was debating what to write about or even if to update and recycle a post from my not-so-super-secret other blog. (Clearly, with the tryptophan hangover persisting, I wasn’t up to do any in-depth analyses of some of the newer statistical nonsense out there about how COVID-19 vaccines are supposedly killing more people than they save, but fear not. I do intend to get to that at some point because it’s more misuse of VAERS , only on mega-doses of steroids.) Then I saw a rather long post over on one of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the website of one of the oldest and most influential antivaxxers out there, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and I knew I had my topic. The article was published the day before Thanksgiving and is titled “14 ACIP Members Who Voted to Jab Your Young Children — and Their Big Ties to Big Pharma“. Unlike most articles on CHD, it’s not credited to any single author, but rather to the Children’s Health Defense Team. Whenever I see that credit, I can’t help but speculate that maybe no one wanted to take personal credit for this article because it’s so misleading and bad, but then I remember: This is RFK Jr.’s website. Misleading is his business model.

Then I saw that there was a second article with the same theme credited to the same team, “17 Pharma Henchmen Who Voted to Experiment on Your Kids — and How to Shun Them“. This article is referring to the members of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), the committee that had previous decided to issue an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5-11. I was sensing a theme.

But back to the first article that had caught my attention. It was referring to the decision announced by the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this month to recommend the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for children 5-11 years of age after VRBPAC had decided to recommend the EUA for that age group. ACIP reviewed the evidence regarding the balance of benefits versus risks in vaccinating children 5-11 years old and concluded that the benefits outweigh the risks. Naturally, as has been the case all along with any decision by the FDA’s VRBPAC and CDC’s ACIP to expand the EUA for COVID-19 vaccines, this announcement didn’t sit well with antivaxxers like RFK Jr., leading to articles like the one on the CHD website, with an “editor’s note” saying:

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following the Oct. 26 meeting of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), Children’s Health Defense argued it is time to shun the individuals — and institutions — that are selling out America’s children without even a prick of conscience. At the close of this article about the members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), we reiterate our list of suggestions for shunning.

I can’t resist a bit of snark here by expressing my amusement how the editor of CHD linked the word “conscience” to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of the word. That’s some world-class argumentation there! I’m torn between wondering if CHD did this just to appear more authoritative or if its editor thinks its readers are too ignorant to know the definition of the word “conscience”. Take your pick.

Still, the reason I was drawn to these articles is because they collectively demonstrate a lot about the antivaccine mentality. First of all, as I have argued many times before, if all science denial is based in conspiracy theory (and it is), then the denial of the safety and efficacy of vaccines is science denial on steroids, at least when it comes to the conspiracy theory aspect. The central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement is simple, when boiled down to its essence, but can rapidly become very complicated as the various layers of conspiracy theory are piled on. In brief, the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement posits that vaccines are harmful and ineffective, but that “they” don’t want you to know about it, the “they” behind the coverup apparently being big pharma, doctors, the FDA, the CDC, various state medical boards, basically every legitimate medical professional society (as opposed to faux medical professional societies functioning as ideological advocacy groups disguised as medical societies—like the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, or AAPS). The motivations behind the efforts of “them” to promote vaccination—and, of course, suppress the “truth about vaccines” showing how horrible and ineffective they are—include, as always, money and the “pharma shill gambit“, but also a desire for power, tyranny, and “control”.

None of this is to argue that conflicts of interest (COIs) aren’t important, particularly undisclosed conflicts of interest. Indeed, I have argued for a broader definition of such COIs, which is one reason why when I co-authored a BMJ article about the American Institute for Economic Research‘s (AIER’s) role in drafting the eugenics-adjacent Great Barrington Declaration as part of the new merchants of doubt, I insisted on including in the disclosures section my role as editor of this blog and a mention that I had previously written posts critical of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). It’s also why I keep harping on AIER, despite its insistence that it never paid the GBD signatories, to publicly reveal whether it paid for their travel and lodging. However, such a broader definition of COI is not what antivaxxers are about, as you will see. CHD’s message is that 14 members of ACIP have “deep ties” to pharma. But do they?

Before ACIP and its “pharma ties,” some antivaccine nonsense

You can tell where CHD is coming from right from the opening volley in its ACIP article, which is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (at least not any reasonable scientific objections):

On Nov. 2, the members of ACIP voted 14–0 to recommend Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) COVID shot for children 5 –11 years old. Committee members readily voted “yes” despite many unknowns about long-term safety, including a complete lack of data on the risk of heart problems like the ones experienced by some adolescents who received COVID vaccines. Neither the disgracefully unscientific vote nor CDC Director Rochelle Walensky’s prompt endorsement came as a surprise. Though billed as “independent,” the 14 ACIP members — like the 17 members of FDA’s VRBPAC who voted the same way the previous week — have deep ties to pharma, with careers that hinge on promoting and rubber-stamping the United States’ destructive one-size-fits-all vaccination agenda. Describing the VRBPAC and ACIP meetings as “a total sham,” Children’s Health Defense President Mary Holland said, “Sadly, approval from these committees means nothing in terms of safety.” Political scientist Toby Rogers agreed, stating the ACIP meeting “was not a scientific review. It was banal bureaucrats announcing plans for a Blitzkrieg and the bought white coats were cheering them on.” With their vote to give young children the dangerous injections, ACIP members signaled that they, too, deserve to be shunned, along with the powerful institutions with which they are affiliated. The latter include the nation’s top universities and leading pediatric hospitals.

I couldn’t help but note the addition of the word “Blitzkrieg” in the introduction. It’s actually a rather subtle Godwin for antivaxxers (no mention of Nuremberg…yet) and adds just the right touch of comparing vaccine advocates to Nazis, and no antivaccine screed would be complete without that. The visual imagery lurking in the background, though, is unmistakably Adolf Hitler giving a speech to cheering crowds about invading Poland.

Given the gravity of the charge, namely that all these ACIP members are so utterly compromised by filthy pharma lucre and/or “deep ties” to pharma, I was expecting something more. I had to wait, because next CHD went on to rant:

Without exception, all the universities at which ACIP members have appointments — Brown, Drexel, Harvard, Michigan State, Ohio State, Stanford, University of Maryland, University of Washington, Vanderbilt and Wake Forest — have mandated COVID vaccines.

Oh, dear. So has my university! Whatever will I do? I must be hopelessly compromised! No, wait! I had zero to do with my university’s decision. Of course, I fully approve of the vaccine mandate at my university. Indeed, if anything, I don’t think it goes quite far enough, because it allows for religious exemptions in addition to medical exemptions, but I realize that’s a fight vaccine advocates in few areas are likely to win in the current political environment. In any event, this charge is rather silly even by CHD standards. Where’s the evidence that any of these ACIP members had anything to do with drafting the COVID-19 vaccine requirements at these universities, and even if any of them did, so what? Apparently to CHD, you can only be “free of COI” in this respect if you actively opposed the COVID-19 vaccine mandate at your university. I also can’t help but mention, even if it might cause me some trouble if certain people read this, that I was very disappointed in both of the major hospitals where I work for being very slow to require COVID-19 vaccination of their doctors, nurses, and staff. (One of them only just requested that I upload my vaccination card before December 1.) Would that make me more acceptable as an ACIP member to RFK Jr.? Somehow, I doubt it. Funny how COIs like this only work in one direction, though.

It’s also funny how before getting to “naming names,” the CHD Team Gish gallops through a veritable antivaccine “greatest hits” about COVID-19 vaccines, including citing Paul Thacker’s awful and highly deceptive BMJ “investigation” claiming sloppy research practices at a clinical research organization (CRO) subcontracted by Pfizer last year to run three sites (out of 153) doing the initial phase 3 clinical trial of its vaccine, claims about the use of “fetal cell lines” in developing COVID-19 vaccines, and, of course, the “toxins” gambit, this time with a hilarious bit that, I must admit, I had never heard before:

Equally disturbingly, Strickler McAtee told other journalists that Pfizer’s vaccine exhibits an unusual fluorescent blue glow, stating she had “never once [previously] seen anything do that, not even close” during her 10-year career inspecting “hundreds of thousands of units” of vaccines. She also reports that her co-workers at the plant are being unprecedentedly kept in the dark about what the vaccine’s ingredients are.

Unsurprisingly, both articles come from conspiracy sites like LifeSite News. It was also McAtee, whoever she is, is claiming that there’s luciferase in the Pfizer vaccine. Here’s the thing. Luciferase is an enzyme that takes a substrate and then converts it into a luminescent—not fluorescent—compound. In fact, there are multiple different kinds of luciferase, the most commonly used type being the enzyme that fireflies use to produce that pretty glow at night, although another common type comes from the sea pansy. They are, in fact, very “natural” in that they are enzymes that were found in nature. Scientists recognized their usefulness as markers of gene expression for experiments; so they isolated and cloned the genes for these enzymes and plopped them into various plasmid expression vectors. Here’s the thing. None of these enzymes produce bioluminescence—again, not fluorescence—unless the substrate for the enzyme is present and the temperature is correct. Basically, none of the COVID-19 vaccines contain luciferase, and even if they did they wouldn’t glow because they don’t contain the substrate, and even if they did contain substrate, they’d have to be at room temperature (or, better yet 37°C) to produce their characteristic luminescence. (The Pfizer COVID vaccine needs to be stored at -70°C or at least on dry ice.)

And, no, the fact that those making this claim about a “blue glow” cite a paper from last year describing the discovery of a previously undescribed type luciferase produced by the larvae of cave worms that produced blue bioluminescence does not make this nonsense any more plausible. That the sources cite such a paper tells me that either they are ignorant of the science or know that their readers are ignorant and don’t know that there are a number of kinds of luciferase. (Take your pick.) In any event, this kind of luciferase is not used in biological research as a marker. So even if the Pfizer vaccine contained luciferase (which it does not) it would not contain this specific luciferase enzyme, which is why I laughed heartily when I read this:

Strickler told LifeSite that she emailed the company and asked if luciferase was in the Covid vaccine and was told that it was “only used in the testing of the vaccine,” but would not be included in the final product. “But the way I see this is the whole thing is experimental,” Strickler said.

Again, the sorts of luciferase enzymes used in many molecular biology generally produce a greenish-yellow or red light, you know, just like the firefly species from which it originated! It is true that Renilla luciferase, which is sometimes used as a marker, produces more of a green to greenish-blue glow, which is why it is often used with in dual luciferase assays with firefly luciferase when two different colors are needed to distinguish two different reactions, but in general firefly luciferase is the workhorse, so much so that when scientists say “luciferase” it’s generally assumed that they mean firefly luciferase. If they don’t, they will specify the type of luciferase. I discussed the use of luciferase in the testing of the Pfizer vaccine a lot more here. The only reason I spent a couple of paragraphs on this nonsense is to demonstrate that CHD is going to spew unrelated antivax misinformation, even when it’s trying to tar ACIP members as pharma shills. RFK Jr. and his minions just can’t help themselves.

Then there’s this:

Pediatric hospitals, meanwhile, are playing a frontline role as COVID vaccination sites. Promoting the injection for 5-year-olds, First Lady Jill Biden visited Texas Children’s Hospital straight away, applauding the hospital for the 39,000 pediatric vaccine appointments it had already scheduled. Also worthy of shunning are the 20,000 individual vaccine providers who were pre-positioned to “hit the ground running” and “get shots in little arms.” Within two days of ACIP’s and Walensky’s verdicts, these providers had administered the jab to thousands of 5- to 11-year-olds, and within the first week, according to the White House, 900,000 children had been injected.

It’s also funny—but not surprising—that CHD views advocating for vaccines and being ready to vaccinate children against a serious infectious disease as bad things, something so horrible that either of them should disqualify you from serving on ACIP and make you worthy of “shunning.” With that background, let’s move on to see what CHD views as so horrible that shunning is demanded.

“Conflicts of interest”

So CHD has two articles, one on ACIP members and one on the members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC, the committee that decides to issue EUAs or full approval for vaccines and other biological products) alleging horrific COIs. Because between the two committees there are 31 members and both articles are long, I decided to look for the absolute worst, most damning “COIs” that RFK Jr. and his minions could come up with, although I will start with the chairs of both committees. First, here’s CHD about ACIP’s chair Dr. Grace Lee:

Dr. Grace Lee ([email protected]) chaired the November ACIP deliberations. Lee has been associate chief medical officer for practice innovation at Stanford Children’s Health and a pediatrics professor at Stanford School of Medicine since 2017, after having spent two decades at Harvard and Boston-area hospitals. In addition to policy work focusing on financial rewards and penalties to reshape hospital performance, Lee has built her reputation by shoring up the pretense that the nation has a functioning vaccine safety surveillance system. Lee served as past principal investigator for the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a large database that includes comprehensive longitudinal medical and vaccination records for two million children and seven million adults. Although VSD analyses have the potential to permit enlightening vaccinated-unvaccinated comparisons of health outcomes, the CDC has sole access to the data.

Where I see someone with fantastic qualifications to chair ACIP, having actually run one of the largest vaccine safety surveillance systems in the US, antivaxxers of course see a hopelessly conflicted person. First, it’s a lie that the CDC has “sole access” to VSD data. It does not. In fact, the CDC does not control who gets access to VSD data. The National Center for Health Statistics Research Data Center (NCHS RDC) does, as I will discuss. To lead to this, I like to point to an example from 2003, when antivax father-and-son grifters Mark and David Geier got access to VSD data and were busted trying to merge different VSD datasets in a way that could have potentially linked personally identifiable fields to adverse events reports, an analysis that was not included in the institutional review board (IRB)-approved protocol. (They also tried to abscond with renamed files.) At the time, the Geiers were looking for evidence in the VSD that thimerosal-containing vaccines were linked with an increased risk of autism. Funny how CHD doesn’t mention that part when complaining about the VSD.

In any event, any investigator who wants to can access publicly available VSD datasets. For more analyses not possible with those datasets, investigators can submit a research proposal to NCHS RDC and the IRBs of the relevant participating VSD sites using a process described in more detail here. Note again that the CDC doesn’t actually even control access to the data. Basically, if CHD wants access to VSD data, all they have to do is to develop a scientifically and ethically sound research protocol and submit it to the RDC and the relevant IRBs. One wonders why they haven’t. (Actually, I at least do not.)

Now let’s look at VRBPAC’s chair:

Dr. Arnold Monto ([email protected]) is professor of public health and epidemiology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Monto has been acting chair for VRBPAC’s COVID-19 vaccine deliberations since October 2020. Previously, he was a four-year VRBPAC member (through January 2020). Monto was a key player in pandemic planning and response for many decades, including during past headline-grabbing pandemics (real or invented) such as the 1968 Hong Kong influenza, bird flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Monto is a key proponent of the unproven theory that schoolchildren must be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity.”

He was a full member of VRBPAC and has been a key player in pandemic planning and response for decades? He, too, certainly sounds eminently qualified to me to be chairing his committee. But not to CHD, obiously.

So tell us more, cranks:

Notably, the University of Michigan houses the nation’s #5-ranked School of Public Health and one of the country’s largest university health systems. In 2020, the university received $144 million in revenue via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act — most of which (94%) was associated with the Provider Relief Fund administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The CARES monies represent an amount nearly equal to what the university received in private gifts ($149 million) from foundations and others. The University of Michigan has been embroiled in a massive sex abuse scandal, with allegations that it covered up decades of abuse by the university’s late athletic physician Robert Anderson — reportedly “the largest scale of sexual abuse by a single person in U.S. history.”

Let’s see. Just because U. of M., one of the top medical schools in the country and arguably the top public medical school in the country—and I’m not just saying that because I graduated from there—received lots of coronavirus aid money and receives lots of federal grant funding, Dr. Monto is…conflicted? Seriously, this is the same sort of “law of contagion”-like COI to which I’ve been subjected. You might remember that because my university received a large grant from Sanofi-Aventis antivaxxers tried to portray me as hopelessly in the pocket of big pharma, even though I never got even a tiny taste of that sweet sweet pharma lucre and had nothing to do with the research projects funded.

Here’s the worst RFK Jr. could apparently come up with about Dr. Monto:

Monto founded and co-directs the University of Michigan-based Michigan Influenza Center, one of five centers across the country that collects data for CDC.

Monto has served as principal investigator on studies funded by CDC, the National NIH and Sanofi Pasteur.

According to POGO and Open Payments, between 2014–2020, Monto received 117 payments totaling more than $176,000 (65% for consulting and speaking fees) from Pfizer as well as Seqirus, Hoffmann-La Roche, Sanofi, Genentech, Novartis and Shionogi.

Monto has consulted for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

In earlier clinical trials (2006–2008 and 2011–2013), Monto laid the groundwork for the “nonpharmaceutical interventions” that have been brought to the fore during COVID (e.g., masking, “sequestration” and social distancing).

So I’ll accept that receiving consulting fees is a legitimate COI, but it’s not an undisclosed COI as far as I can tell. Similarly, having served as PI of a Sanofi Pasteur study is a legitimate COI. Even so, is this so “conflicted” that Dr. Monto would steer the committee towards whatever pharma wants? Hardly. I also find it odd that the mention of his having received consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies is buried in a list of bullet points, rather than front and center, given that this is arguably a COI, while the other “COIs” that CHD rants about are not. It just goes to show how warped RFK Jr.’s perspective is.

Let’s see some of the other “worst” COIs, starting with this VRBPAC member:

Dr. Hayley Gans ([email protected]) is a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University Medical Center and has served on VRBPAC since mid-2019. Gans has been at Stanford since her medical internship and residency in the early 1990s. In 2015, Stanford received $50 million from the Gates Foundation to “accelerate” efforts in vaccine development. Unsurprisingly, Gans is a staunch vaccine proponent, stating, “History and science support vaccines as one of the safest and most effective infectious disease prevention strategies, second to clean water.” The bulk of Gans’ research and publications focus on infant immunity and the “challenges of tailoring vaccines and effective immunizations for young children,” notably measles vaccines made by Merck. Gans advocates vaccinating severely immunocompromised children and adults, including those about to receive organ transplants. At the December 2020 meeting at which VRBPAC recommended Pfizer’s first EUA, Gans initially expressed reservations about including 16- and 17-year-olds but then voted with the majority anyway in favor of the vaccine for those 16 and up.

Note again the homeopathy-like “law of contagion”-style COI: Just because Stanford University received money from the “evil” Gates Foundation, Dr. Gans must be hopelessly conflicted. (You know that if CHD could show that she had received any of that money herself they’d have been all over it; in fact, at the time Dr. Mark Davis was running the center that got the money to develop new vaccines.)

Dr. Gans did get $4,700 from GlaxoSmithKline, which seems to be a pretty small price to agree to be a pharma shill, and apparently consulted with Merck, but here’s the thing. Few are the heavy hitter scientists who’ve never, ever in their entire career accepted money from pharmaceutical companies to fund research. Also horrible to CHD is the fact that Dr. Gans has received funding/grant support from the National Institute of Health’s National Vaccine Program Office and has consulted for Department of Health and Human Services. Again, one thing that antivaxxers frequently get wrong is their belief that if you’ve ever received grant funding from the NIH you must be hopelessly in the pocket of the powers-that-be. They don’t understand that, for instance, NIH grant applications go through multiple rigorous levels of review, starting with a study section review, and that reviewers really do concentrate almost exclusively on the science, not your belief system.

I rapidly got tired of all the innuendo that had nothing to do with any payments from pharmaceutical companies; so I went through and looked for just that. The following ACIP members were reported to have received payments from pharmaceutical companies: Oliver Brooks, Wilbur Chen, Camille Kotton, Katherine Poehling, Pablo Sanchez, and Helen Keipp Talbot. In addition, the following VRBPAC members received funding from pharmaceutical companies: Arthur Monto, Hayley Gans, Ofer Levy, Michael Nelson, Steven Pergam, and Jay Portnoy. Of course, both VRBPAC and ACIP have very stringent reporting requirements governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, in which all advisory committee members are required to report all paid or unpaid positions and all income or gifts greater than $1,000.

Indeed, the COI regulations are so stringent that even CHD had to admit that pharma’s representative on VRBPAC, Paula Annunziato of Merck, is a non-voting member. That’s right, pharma is represented on VRBPAC, but only as non-voting members.

Meanwhile for other members, CHD goes all “law of contagion” again:

Dr. H.. Cody Meissner ([email protected]) is professor of pediatrics and chief of pediatric infectious disease at Boston’s Tufts University School of Medicine, an institution to which he appears quite loyal. After going to medical school at Tufts in the early 1970s, Meissner remained in Boston for postgraduate training at Boston Floating Hospital, Dana Farber and Harvard, devoting a brief two years to NIH before accepting a faculty position at Tufts in 1979. Since 2014, Tufts Medical Center has received more than $14 million in “general payments” from companies that include Boston Scientific, Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals, Jansswen, Biogen, Amgen, Pfizer, Gyrus Acmi, Sanofi, Otsuka and Genentech. More significantly, Tufts has received more than $38.5 million in research payments — with Pfizer as the top funder (12% of total). Other biopharma companies providing research monies include Merck, Gilead, Shire, Takeda, Abiomed, Otsuka, Novartis and AbbVie.

And:

Meissner has served on ACIP since 2008 as well as on various committees of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), a medical trade group notorious for its own conflicts of interest.

Since 2010, Meissner has sat on the Massachusetts Vaccine Purchasing Advisory Council and, since 2017, on HHS’s National Vaccine Advisory Committee.

These are bad things exactly…why?

Patrick Moore, M.D., MPH ([email protected]) has been a professor of microbiology and medical genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI) since 2002. Pittsburgh is home to influential foundations such as the Richard King Mellon Foundation — which just announced a $150 million grant for the city’s development of science, technology, robotics and manufacturing — and the Pittsburgh Foundation. Moore holds the Pittsburgh Foundation Endowed Chair in Innovative Cancer Research. Moore had a varied career prior to settling at Pittsburgh, including (like CDC’s Amanda Cohn) a two-year stint as a CDC EIS officer (in the “special pathogens” branch), some time at CDC’s Fort Collins lab, two years as Deputy Commissioner for the New York City Department of Health and eight years in Columbia University’s epidemiology division.

See the game here? If you are faculty at a medical school that has ever received pharmaceutical funding, particularly from Pfizer, you’re hopelessly conflicted. Again, this is no different than what antivaxxers tried to do to me 11 years ago. It’s worse than that, though. If your university has ever received grants from any foundation that RFK Jr. doesn’t like, again you’re hopelessly conflicted. RFK Jr. also either doesn’t understand or knows that his readers don’t understand (take your pick) the nature of endowed chairs, in which the endowment-granting agency has no say over who is chosen for the chair or how the funding for the chair is used.

Melinda Wharton, M.D., MPH ([email protected]), the second CDC member of VRBPAC, is director of the Immunization Services Division in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Wharton’s training spans Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan and Duke University. Wharton’s entrée into CDC was as an EIS officer in the mid-1980s, followed by “positions of increasing responsibility” in CDC’s immunization program through the present day. The Defender reported in January that concomitant with the plummeting vaccination rates triggered by COVID lockdowns was “an overall drop in reports of infant vaccine adverse events,” including “a precipitous drop in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) reports” — the lowest yearly number recorded in the history of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System ( VAERS ). This good news did not stop Wharton from fretting over “lagging” childhood vaccination rates.

The claim that lagging vaccination rates had decreased the rate of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) comes from the deceptive use of statistics by two antivaxxers, Amy Becker and Mark Blaxill. The claim that vaccines cause SIDS is a longstanding one in the antivaccine movement that’s led grieving mothers to become antivaccine activists. The bottom line is that vaccines, if anything, likely protect against SIDS; at the very worst we know that the are not linked with it. Of course, to RFK Jr., Dr. Wharton’s real sin is to be long serving high ranking career official at the CDC, given that the CDC is one of the triumvirate of key villains of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement. (The other two are the FDA and the American Academy of Pediatrics.)

CHD seems especially peeved at members of these two committees who don’t have identifiable financial COIs but are interested in health disparities and equity in access to health care. In one case, ACIP’s Beth Bell, they go to rather ridiculous extremes:

At UW, Bell is on faculty at the UW Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness (formerly called, until fall 2020, the MetaCenter for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Health Security), which “harness[es] big data and forward-thinking strategies to devise more unified approaches to current and future health security risks.” “Health security” and biosecurity are the linchpin buzzwords that global technocrats are using to push for complete control over people’s “ability to work, to socialize, to travel, conduct business, access public services and to purchase essential goods and services.” Like many of the individuals who make their way onto FDA and CDC committees, Bell started her CDC career as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a branch that journalist Jon Rappoport has dubbed the “medical CIA.” As Rappoport notes, EIS graduates’ occupancy of “key positions in the overall medical cartel” furnishes an “unparalleled opportunity” to control information — and disseminate disinformation.

You see where this is going, right? Of course, as I’ve described before, Jon Rappoport is a major antivaccine conspiracy theorist. Examples of his misinformation include claims that COVID-19 vaccines are part of a “global depopulation agenda“. Before the pandemic, Rappoport was known for having promoted conspiracy theories about Ebola and claims that the tetanus vaccine was an example of “racist population control” in Kenya based on the false antivax claim that the vaccine was sterilizing young women.

It gets “better”:

Bell’s comments about wanting to make sure “socially vulnerable” communities and people of color have access to COVID shots echo troubling racially oriented remarks made by Melinda Gates early on in the pandemic. Located in Gates’ backyard, UW not only benefits from close ties with and extensive funding from the Gates Foundation — an organization tainted by allegations of medical experimentation and an underlying eugenicist ideology — but also enjoys extensive support from Microsoft.

The theme emerges again. Not only is Bell somehow tainted because UW receives funding from the Gates Foundation, but she is linked to a “eugenicist agenda.” Where did that come from? It came from a reasonable speculation by Bill Gates about hard trade-offs about funding medical care, particularly in the last three months of life:

You’re raising tuitions at the University of California as rapidly as they can and so the access that used to be available to the middle class or whatever is just rapidly going away. That’s a trade-off society’s making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, “Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient—would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?” But that’s called the “death panel” and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.

Asking this question is, of course, not “eugenicist,” but a simple question of financial trade-offs versus ethics. No one is saying not to provide any end-of-life care, but it is questionable whether very expensive heroic care benefits either the dying or society. This is a discussion that bioethicists deal with all the time, but because Bill Gates brought it up it’s “eugenicist.” Of course, the irony is that it is the antivaxxers who advocate, rather than vaccinating as much of the population as possible, just letting the virus rip through the population in order to achieve “natural herd immunity,” never mind that such a strategy will result in millions more deaths around the world. Truly, it is antivaxxers who are the eugenicists.

What is to be done?

Far be it from me to deny that financial COIs are important and should be disclosed, even if they are small. I cringe whenever I hear colleagues claim that their judgment is not at all affected by tangible rewards, be they financial or just meals or pharma tchotchkes like pens, mugs, or folders. Such denial is usually based in hubris, the belief that one is immune to normal human tendencies that research has demonstrated again and again. Issues of regulatory capture and “revolving doors” between academia, government, and pharma are real concerns.

That being said, it is not real-world practical solutions to these problems that RFK Jr. is looking for when he castigates ACIP and VRBPAC members as mindless pharma shills who’ve sold out our children. Among the issues of research and consulting payments from pharma that some of the members of these two committees have received (which make up a shockingly small proportion of the two articles), he basically tries to poison the well against everybody by throwing anything he can find against the wall and seeing if it will stick, including trying to tar anyone whose university has ever accepted research funding from a pharmaceutical company (related to vaccines or not), the Gates Foundation, or any other foundation that RFK Jr. deems to be evil, whether the member received any of that funding or not. Again, I’ve been at the receiving end of this tactic in my own way, even though I never received even a tiny portion of the largess that my university received. I refer to the “law of contagion” from homeopathy to describe this, because that’s what it reminds me of. Apparently if a university has ever been in contact with pharmaceutical company money, it is hopelessly compromised, and therefore every one of its faculty is hopelessly compromised. That is patently ridiculous, but antivaxxers eat it up.

Finally, given the current capitalist society that we have, no major scientific breakthrough can be turned into a widely available medical product or device that can benefit the populace without the involvement of pharmaceutical and device companies. As a result, the heaviest hitters in medicine and medical science will often have consulted for or received research funding from pharmaceutical or device companies, sometimes substantial amounts, just because they want to see their discoveries turned into medicines, vaccines, or devices that benefit humanity. There are a number of possible responses to this issue, such as more public funding of research, with government and universities getting a share of the returns from any products developed, as well as more rigorous reporting of potential financial conflicts of interest. Again, practical, workable, real-world solutions to real issues are not what RFK Jr. is about. What he is about is demonizing VRBPAC and ACIP members as greedy pharma drones who decided to issue an EUA for the Pfizer vaccine for children aged 5-11 not because they believed that the data show that the benefits outweigh the risks, but rather because of greed.

That’s because part of the central conspiracy of the antivaccine movement is that no one can ever be pro-vaccine because of a rational evaluation of the risk-benefit ratio of vaccinating. It must be because they are blinded by ideology or in the pockets of big pharma, and these CHD articles reflect that. In fact, I would say that it is RFK Jr. and his antivaccine propagandists who should be shunned, not any of the members of VRBPAC or ACIP.

It may not feel like it, but with Omicron, the new Covid variant, we need to count our blessings.
Omicron has been detected — and may have first arisen — in Gauteng province, South Africa. There have only been a few hundred cases detected, so it’s hard to say much about it with any real certainty. But it appears to be more transmissible and there are concerns that immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection, will be less effective against it. There have been, as I write, three cases detected in the UK, and there are real (and justified) fears that we are heading once again into a lockdown Christmas. 
But nonetheless, we have been very lucky.

We mustn’t forget that the virus is constantly mutating. Every time it copies itself, there is a chance that it will make some minor error. Most of those mutations either have no effect or make it less effective at spreading. But every so often one will improve it: perhaps make it harder for the immune system to see, or make the virus quicker at copying itself.
The other new variants, notably Alpha and Delta, had several mutations, but Omicron has dozens: around 50. And 10 of them are on the bits of the “spike” protein on the virus’s surface which bind with our cells — the “receptor binding domains”. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and former member of SAGE, tells me that these are exactly the kind of mutations which virologists have been expecting and dreading: “It’s biologically plausible that they will drive higher transmission. They’ve been identified before as ones we should be really careful about.”
More from this authorIs the WHO inventing diseases?By Tom Chivers
So far, it doesn’t sound very lucky. But in one mutation, Omicron has been kind to us. Like Alpha before it, it has a particular mutation, 69-70del, two missing RNA letters in its genome — part of the “S gene” which codes for the spike protein. By happy chance, those missing letters are at one of three places that many PCR tests look at.
What it means is that if a PCR test comes back positive on two out of its three areas — if it has an “S-gene dropout” — then you can be pretty sure you’ve got one of the variants. It means that Alpha last year and now Omicron can be tracked pretty effectively, just with PCR testing: even without sequencing the genomes, you can see where these S-gene dropout results are happening and it’ll give you a good idea of how the variant is spreading.
“It’s a complete gift that the S-gene dropout hits this variant,” says Ewan Birney, the deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. If it didn’t, we would have much less of an idea where Omicron is. (We’ve actually been lucky twice. If Delta hadn’t replaced Alpha, then the S-gene dropout wouldn’t have told us anything, because both the circulating variants would have had it.)
So far, so good. But is the new variant more transmissible and/or more able to bypass our immunity, whether from vaccines or infection? And is it more or less dangerous to people who catch it?
These are hard questions to answer, because at the moment, we only have data from South Africa, and South Africa’s population is tricky to compare with ours. It’s younger, for a start — the median South African is 26-years old, while the median Brit is 40. It’s also much less vaccinated: somewhere around 75% of Britons have been double-jabbed, while barely a quarter have in South Africa (which is, to my surprise, more to do with uptake than supply). It has also had far fewer confirmed cases per capita.
That said, we can make some guesses. When a new variant emerges, it’s difficult to tell whether it has spread because it is better at spreading, or because it happens to have arisen in a convenient place. Imagine a virus which happened to mutate into a new variant in someone who was about to go to a major conference. It might infect hundreds of people and show up all over the country, but it wouldn’t be because it was any more transmissible — it was just that it got lucky.
More from this authorThe great climate change fallacyBy Tom Chivers
With Omicron, this seems unlikely to be the case. Thanks to the S-gene dropout, we can see that it’s spreading faster than you’d expect. Farrar says that “there has been a clear upswing of transmission in Gauteng, which seems to be driven by the variant”. “It probably can outcompete Delta,” says Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, “although by how much is still up in the air.” 
Is that because it’s better at spreading in general, or because it can evade immunity? So far, we don’t have the data to say for sure. Soon, we’ll start to get results from laboratory studies, and later from epidemiological observations, but Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks it’s “a few weeks before we get useful information, and the other side of Christmas before we know anything definitive”.
But on the plus side, antibodies aren’t the only part of our immune system. We also have T-cells, which are less easily fooled by mutations. To oversimplify, antibodies stop you getting infected in the first place, but T-cells stop you from getting very ill. So Javid and Birney think it is plausible that Omicron will spread quite easily among vaccinated and/or previously infected people, but will be less likely to kill them or make them severely ill.
There has also been speculation that Omicron is inherently less deadly to people with no pre-existing immunity. That’s not impossible, but everyone I spoke to said that any definitive conclusions are premature. “The speculation is extremely uninformed,” says Beale. “We just don’t know until it gets into a more vulnerable population, which sadly it seems it’s likely to. We can hope it’s less pathogenic, but it’s foolish to make that assumption.”
So it might be better at spreading, and able to escape our immunity to at least some degree; and while it’s theoretically possible it might be less deadly, that’s certainly not a proposition we want to put any weight on. The question is: what should we do, and are we facing a second bleak Covid winter?
The pandemic should have taught us that acting early is usually better than acting late, and that preparing for worst-case scenarios is important. It’s like chess, says Beale: “You play your moves in the most flexible order.” If we assume it’ll all be OK, we might be right, but if we’re wrong, we’ll end up with Omicron spreading all over the place. Whereas if we assume it’ll be pretty bad, we can always open up again later on.
I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them very sensible, suggesting that there’s no point closing borders to South Africa because variants will get through anyway, and that it’s just punishing countries for doing good surveillance. But I think they are wrong. 
Yes, the variant will get through, if it hasn’t already. Farrar points out that it was first identified on 11 November, and its sequence suggests that it had already been circulating for some time before then. “I think it may already be on every continent,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to reduce its spread. “Border closures might buy you a little time.” Birney agrees: “Shutting the borders until we understand it, minimising the seeding events, is a good rational move.”
More from this authorThe men who failed BritainBy Tom Chivers
It’s true that there’s a risk of punishing countries for responsible surveillance, but I don’t see what the alternative is — pretending that they don’t have lots of Omicron circulating? Perhaps the thing to do is also put restrictions on countries with poor surveillance.
Because “buying a little time” might be important. If nothing else, it gives us time to understand it: if Omicron is highly virulent and vaccine-resistant, then our best response will be rather different to what it would be if it isn’t. It also gives us a chance to get more boosters in arms and to stockpile antiviral drugs. 
All the same arguments apply to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as introducing vaccine passports or asking people to work from home if possible. But there are other things Britain can do, too. 
One thing is to hugely increase our vaccine manufacturing capacity — something which would be good for us and for the world. Rolling out children’s vaccines and booster jabs faster wouldn’t hurt. One scientist I spoke to suggested making antiviral meds available by post when people get a positive result: “They need to be given quickly to have a good effect, so you can’t rely on GP appointments. You need to link them to Track & Trace”. Cheaper, quicker PCR testing at airports would help.”
But while those measures are important, they’re not addressing the root of the issue. For Farrar, the emergence of Omicron is just another reminder that we need to vaccinate the world, not just the rich world. “There’s been political drift for months now, in terms of access to vaccines,” he said. “The rich world thought it was over, so they’ve been kicking it into the long grass.” Variants like Omicron will continue to arise until the world has a decent level of immunity.
Suggested readingWhy Rotterdam eruptedBy Senay Boztas
We’ve been lucky, with Omicron. But it may well still end up becoming the dominant strain, just as Delta did before it. If it doesn’t, then another one will come along. And it will be “incredibly disruptive”, says Farrar: “Everyone’s putting restrictions in.” Certainly, to avoid another lockdown Christmas, we need to act now.
But if we want to be sure we don’t have another one next year, we need to get this pandemic behind us — and that means billions more doses of vaccine, distributed around the world. We won’t always be so lucky.
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Jack Dorsey has resigned as CEO of Twitter, having served in various leadership roles at the company since its inception in 2007.
"I've decided to leave Twitter because I believe the company is ready to move on from its founders," he explained in a statement.
While Facebook has attracted significantly more attention in recent months, due to widespread concerns—some of them overblown—that the site spreads hate and misinformation and is making teenagers depressed, Twitter is the preferred site of the media and political classes. The virtual blue bird's nest may have significantly fewer users than Facebook (300 million versus 2 billion), but its importance to policymakers means that it plays a larger-than-merited role in political discussion. If a change in leadership leads to significant internal policy changes, this could have an outsized effect on the news media.
Anyone who harbors concerns that social media have already grown too intolerant of dissenting opinions—too inclined to silence viewpoints that depart from liberal orthodoxy—should be worried about Dorsey leaving. That's because the long-serving CEO has occasionally articulated an ideological commitment to the principles of free speech; of all the tech industry pioneers who have been hauled before Congress to answer absurd questions, he was by far the most hostile to the idea that the government should serve as the internet's speech police.
While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come out in support of tweaking Section 230, a change that could give Congress more power over content moderation policies, Twitter has remained defiantly opposed to increased regulation. When I interviewed Lauren Culbertson, Twitter's head of U.S. public policy, for my book Tech Panic, she warned that chipping away at Section 230 could "entrench incumbents" and "stifle innovation and competition." When activists sued Twitter, demanding that the site remove then-President Donald Trump's account, Twitter refused, citing Section 230. Trump may now be gone from Twitter—having finally behaved in a way that manifestly violated the site's policies—but without both the protections of Section 230 and Dorsey's support for free speech, the site might have acted much earlier and in much more heavy-handed fashion. (Undoubtedly, there are many Democratic politicians and progressive media figures who wish that it had.)
Twitter's board has unanimously approved Parag Agrawal, the company's current chief technical officer, as the new CEO. Agrawal's main project at Twitter has been Bluesky, an initiative designed to create "an open and decentralized standard for social media that would help better control abusive and misleading information on its platform." In an interview a year ago, Agrawal commented that he thought Twitter should "focus less on thinking about free speech."
"Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation," he said. "The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed."
Agrawal is correct, of course, that Twitter is not bound by the First Amendment; as a private company, it can make whatever moderation decisions it wants. But under Dorsey's leadership, Twitter has been a place for wide-ranging conversation on topics of political importance, despite some undeniably questionable moderation decisions. Dorsey has resisted pressure from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers to bring the company more in line with their views. Whether Agrawal will do the same remains to be seen.
The post Jack Dorsey's Exit From Twitter Could Worsen Tech Censorship appeared first on Reason.com.

The Renew Democracy Initiative, a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization, has been on the front lines of the battle to preserve American democracy since its founding in 2017. Its newest project: Using dissidents from oppressive countries around the world to highlight America’s veer toward authoritarianism. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The initiative, called Frontlines of Freedom, brought together 52 dissidents from 28 countries in an open letter calling on the United States to serve as a “global democratic inspiration.” I asked RDI chairman Garry Kasparov, a Soviet dissident and former Russian chess grandmaster, about the undertaking. His message was simple: “The very existence of well-functioning liberal democracies threatens dictators’ legitimacy.” He explains that authoritarians “will do all they can to undermine free nations and make them appear to be as corrupt as their own. This ties the fate of the free world to the fate of global dissidents. By supporting them, we are defending the integrity of our own free societies.”

What follows is our conversation, edited slightly for length and style:

Rubin: Why did RDI believe the experience of foreign dissidents could help promote American democracy?

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Kasparov: Foreign dissidents benefit from two things Americans by and large lack: personal experience resisting authoritarianism, and the ability to look past partisan politics and see threats to democracy for what they are. In some ways, you can call them the global experts on how authoritarian tendencies spread through society and how democratic institutions crumble. We’d be crazy not to consult them.

They can’t be accused of having a dog in the partisan fight. They have nothing to gain and, if American democracy falls, everything to lose. Most importantly, they want to help Americans see the U.S. through their eyes. During the darkest days of their struggles, American democracy often inspired them. RDI launched Frontlines of Freedom in the hopes that their stories might now inspire us.

Rubin: To what degree is the United States’ current situation a reflection of worldwide trends, and to what extent is it uniquely American?

Kasparov: From 1990 to 2008, the world experienced one of the greatest increases in prosperity and freedom that it’s ever known. However, during that time period, democratic nations assumed that liberal democracy had essentially won the narrative war and failed to make a case for it. Needless to say, history did not end because evil does not die. It might stay dormant under the rubble of the Berlin Wall for a while, but inevitably, it will reemerge. Meanwhile, because most free nations did not offer a sufficiently strong defense of democratic values on their own merits, many people supported democracy only so long as it brought economic prosperity. As soon as the financial crisis hit in 2008, everything changed.

Wealthier democracies had to begin dealing with a public backlash to automation, immigration, an increasingly interconnected world and rapidly evolving social values. In most industrialized democracies, this has led to the rise of radicalism on both the left and right, though the far right has enjoyed a particularly powerful resurgence. Ultimately, both sides promise simple answers to the complex problems facing liberal democracies. Their answers are more satisfying and easier to understand than the answers offered by more moderate groups. That’s what makes them so dangerous.

The current situation in America is a local version of the broader global crisis. Each nation has its own unique history and culture which helps determine the exact contours its conflict will take. But the underlying forces remain the same.

Rubin: What can we learn from other countries about the necessity for and means of forging cross-partisan coalitions in defense of democratic institutions and values?

Kasparov: Dictators know that divided societies are easier to subdue, so their goal is to sow dissension. Unfortunately, they often succeed. The key is for us to recognize three things: First, that we are going to have to work with people we may not like; second, that we’ll have to prioritize the broader struggle for democracy over our personal policy preferences; and third, ego is the enemy of unity.

The Spanish Civil War offers us a cautionary tale. In the late 1930s in Spain, moderates were essentially sidelined and society was ripped apart at the seams by fascists and communists. This reminds us that any movement we build in defense of democracy must be inclusive. We need to avoid purity tests and welcome people with a wide range of political views. Ultimately we need to prioritize the survival of democracy over all else. In chess, when your king comes under threat, you don’t think about what you’re going to do during the endgame; you focus on dealing with the immediate danger. We should approach democracy the same way.

Rubin: How big of a problem is social media?

Kasparov: Social media is a democratizing force, allowing anyone with an Internet connection to put out whatever information they want into the world and also to consume whatever information they want. This of course is both a problem and an opportunity.

We’ve all heard about its harms — that it allows people to live in information silos hearing only that which will reaffirm their preexisting beliefs; that it not only allows for the spread of misinformation, but actually algorithmically promotes false or misleading information more than the truth; that it represents yet another weapon in a dictator’s tool kit against dissidents and the free world. All of these are of course incredibly dangerous, and there’s a certain irony to dictators using technology that was developed in the free world to attack the free world.

But ultimately, social media is a tool like any other. It can be used for both good and ill. Much in the same way that dictators have been able to weaponize it to attack democratic countries, democracy activists can leverage it to get around authoritarian restrictions, organize themselves, share information, protest, etc. [Russian dissident Alexei] Navalny was using social media to great effect in Russia. His video about Putin’s secret palace garnered over 100 million views and sparked a rare conversation in Russia. YouTube should never have agreed to take down Navalny’s videos in Russia. Meanwhile, Twitter may well have been justified in banning [former president] Donald Trump, but why were Iranian mullahs allowed to continue using the platform?

(A door gunner in a CH-47 Chinook helicopter scans the horizon during a night mission over northeastern Syria in 2021. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)Thanksgiving is a particularly special time in the French household. Yes, we’re grateful for all the normal reasons. God has blessed us richly. But 14 years ago, the Thanksgiving holiday took on an entirely new meaning for our family. I told that story in the pages of National Review, and Rich Lowry was kind enough to let me reprint it in The Dispatch today. It’s a story of war, of pain, and of loss. It’s also a story of hope and love. Most of all it’s a story of God’s sovereignty and grace. I’m sure you have your own Thanksgiving stories, and please feel free to share them in the comments below. This is ours, and we remember it every year.  I don’t just remember where I was on Thanksgiving day in 2007. I can feel it. I can close my eyes and be there again, instantly. It was my first day in Iraq. The first real day of my deployment. The location was Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad. My unit, Second Squadron, Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, had just flown in via a series of C-130 flights, and now the first group of us was waiting, in the very early morning hours, for the helicopter flight that would take us to our new temporary home, Forward Operating Base Caldwell. Our base was in the eastern part of Diyala Province, just a few miles from the Iranian border.I wasn’t a young soldier, but I was most certainly a rookie. I joined the Army Reserve late in life, responding to a fierce conviction that I could no longer in good conscience support a war that I wasn’t willing to fight. So, at age 37, I got an age waiver, joined the JAG Corps, and shipped off to officer basic training at Fort Lee, Va. One year later, at age 38, I volunteered to go to Iraq.On Halloween, I left my home and traveled to Fort Benning, Ga. One week after that, I was in Kuwait, the lone reservist joining an armored cavalry squadron. Two weeks after that I was on a tarmac in Balad. No one knew me. I knew no one. And, when it came to war, I knew nothing.At around 3:00 a.m. on November 22, two CH-47 Chinook helicopters emerged out of the dark sky. The noise was unbelievable, even through my ear protection. On command, my troop stood, each of us staggered by the weight of our weapons, body armor, backpacks, and duffel bags. I was one of the first ones in, and I took a position behind one of the gunners. I could just see over his left shoulder.I had never been in a helicopter before.We took off and started flying across the Iraqi countryside, low and fast. Looking out at the landscape, I could see the fires from distant fights. Then, it hit me like a thunderclap. This is real. I’d like to say that I immediately felt a sense of resolve, a steely determination to do my duty. Instead, I was afraid. Even though I was just a lawyer—not a cav scout or an armor officer—and I wouldn’t be outside the wire as much as most of my new comrades, I knew that soon enough I’d be out there where the fires were. I wondered what the heck I’d volunteered to do.So I prayed. I asked God for some assurance—a sense of peace, maybe—that I’d come home, that I’d see my family again. I felt no peace. I felt no assurance. So I prayed for courage to not embarrass myself in front of men whose jobs were far more dangerous, who would face far more risk.When we landed at the base, it was still dark. I must confess that I don’t have much of a poker face. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and it must have been apparent, even through the gloom of night, that I was a bit alarmed. As I gathered my gear and prepared to move to my new quarters, one of the troop commanders—a man I’d later count as a dear friend—walked up, put his arm around me, and said, “Lawyer, if you live through this, it will be the most important year of your life.”All I could think was, “What do you mean, if?”My friend was right. The almost-year I spent in Iraq was the most important time of my life. I gained brothers. I lost brothers. I saw things I’d never imagined and pray that I’ll never see again. I experienced stress and fear at levels I didn’t know I could take, and I served with heroes who did things that ordinary Americans can’t comprehend.That year changed me. The man who came home was substantially different from the man who left. I was better in some ways, worse in others, and I was on the beginning of a road that so many veterans walk. How do you become the best version of your new self? How do you live with grief without letting it consume you? How do you deal with the loneliness—yes, loneliness—of separation from your brothers, the men who served beside you?Something else happened that same day. My youngest daughter was born, and I had no idea.At the same time that I was flying into Iraq, full of fear, a single mother in southern Ethiopia was in labor with a daughter she’d name Konjit. While she knew who the father was, she didn’t tell, and shortly after she gave birth, she handed the child over to her own mother and disappeared into the urban sprawl of Addis Ababa.While I was spending the most important year of my life in sight of Iranian mountains, my little girl was fighting for her life. Her grandmother and grandfather were subsistence farmers, and they barely had enough food and resources to keep themselves alive. She was malnourished. She couldn’t seem to grow.Then, disaster. Her grandfather died. And so the girl born to a single mom was now the girl being raised by a single grandmother, a woman who’d just lost the man who quite literally put the bread on the table.Konjit started to die. Just before her second birthday, when all hope seemed lost, she was abandoned — relinquished for an adoption, clinging to life. According to her medical records, at almost two years of age she weighed barely more than 14 pounds. Millions of American babies hit that weight in the first few months after they’re born. For comparison, the average American two-year-old girl weighs about 26 pounds.As my pastor has said, every adoption begins in brokenness. Even the most idyllic stories, the ones where a young mom works with a loving family to arrange adoption beginning the moment of birth, involve a separation that most of us can’t comprehend. Little Konjit’s story involves separation after separation, profound loss and profound pain.Under the care of loving nurses and a good doctor, hope and health returned. Konjit slowly but surely gained strength. She lived in an orphanage in Addis Ababa, waiting for a family to bring her to a new home. She didn’t have to wait long.My wife and I decided to adopt before I left for Iraq, but for obvious reasons we waited to start the long, expensive process until after I returned. We chose Ethiopia in part because our church supported missionaries there, and we chose our adoption agency because of its sterling reputation.Throughout the adoption process, I quite frankly struggled. I couldn’t sleep. The nighttime pace of operations in Iraq meant that virtually every night — no matter how exhausted I was — I’d get an adrenaline surge. By 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. I was wide awake. And that pattern continued in my civilian life. Months after the deployment was over, I’d still get that same shot of adrenaline late at night, and it was wearing me down.Formerly a patient person, I became irritable. I used to be slow to anger. Now I was hot-tempered. In years past, I’d been relatively happy and care-free, even in stressful times. Now I was brooding and sad — I couldn’t stop thinking about the brothers we lost.And my faith suffered. I felt distant from God. It was my own stupid fault. I was actually arrogant enough to think that I could go off to war, come home, and restart my civilian life, unscathed. I thought I was old enough, mature enough, not to suffer the same kinds of consequences as younger soldiers. I was so wrong.It was in the midst of this crisis of faith and family that we forged through the adoption process. Finally, in late 2009 we received our referral. It was Konjit. As I looked at her picture and scanned her medical information, my eyes fell on her birthday. November 22, 2007. My daughter was born the day I flew off to war. The day I was filled with doubt and fear.If you talk to many adoptive families, they can tell you story after story of the providential details (or what more secular folks might call “cool coincidences”) that bond new parents to their adopted child. This is our special bond.The very night that I was praying fervently for peace — and not receiving it — God was preparing the next phase of our family’s life, in an Ethiopian village thousands of miles away. The very night that a young mom was fearful and desperate, and a grandmother was preparing for a challenge she didn’t expect, God was shaping Konjit’s new family, putting us through an ordeal that ultimately made my marriage stronger and my biological kids more wise and mature.This evening my oldest daughter will come home from college to celebrate Thanksgiving, but first we’ll have a party for Konjit — now Naomi Konjit French. She’s a remarkable little girl, one of the most joyful and exuberant spirits you’ll ever encounter. She’s recovered from her early physical struggles so well that she’s big for her age. She’s between soccer seasons, loves Junie B. Jones, and is prepping for an ensemble performance at her school’s Christmas program. Life is good.I’m reminded of the scripture that declares “a bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” In adoption, God’s mercy was made manifest, but not just for our youngest daughter. A tiny bruised reed joined a family of bruised reeds, scarred by their own experiences but ready to love a child suffering from loss that words can hardly express.On November 22, 2007, one life changed, one life began, yet God remained the same — sovereign, loving, and directing the steps of a father and child. This Thanksgiving isn’t just a time for gratitude, it’s a time of remembrance. I remember the men who were on those helicopters and never came back. I remember the man I was. I remember my lack of faith. Then I’ll look across the table and see my daughter’s face, and I’ll remember that the Lord is good, and his mercy endures forever.Happy (late) Thanksgiving, readers. May God richly bless you. This day and every day.One more thing …I truly can’t thank you enough. We launched the new Good Faith podcast just last week, and by Tuesday it was a top five podcast in Apple’s “Religion and Spirituality” category. I’m incredibly grateful. This week’s episode tries to answer the question, “What the heck is an Evangelical?” It explores the definition of the term and the extent to which faithful Christians should embrace or abandon the label. For more on the topic, I recommend reading my friend Russell Moore’s review of Dan Stringer’s new book, Struggling with Evangelicalism: Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay.To listen to each and every episode of Good Faith, you can either watch this space or follow us on Apple podcasts or every other place where podcasts are found. And thank you again for a wonderful launch.One last thing …I know we’re past Thanksgiving, and the Christmas season is upon us. But I want to linger for a moment, with this wonderful song of gratitude by Andrew Peterson:

As the House debated whether the Republican congressman Paul Gosar should be censured for depicting the murder of his colleague, one Democratic leader took a moment to reflect on the chamber’s long history of violence.

Speaking on the House floor last week, the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, argued that Gosar had grossly violated the chamber’s rules of conduct by sharing an altered anime video showing him killing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacking President Joe Biden.

“When those rules were written, they did not anticipate that a member would threaten violence directly against another member,” Hoyer said. “Not because it’s never happened – a congressman from South Carolina nearly beat to death a senator from Massachusetts, Senator Sumner, because he wanted to abolish slavery.”

The 1856 caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks is probably the most infamous example of violence between members of Congress, but it is far from the only one. In her book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, the Yale history professor Joanne Freeman details the many threats and attacks between lawmakers during the antebellum era.

The Guardian spoke to Dr Freeman about the history of congressional violence and what it can tell us about the current state of US politics and the significance of Gosar’s censure. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Besides the caning of Sumner, what were some of the other examples of congressional violence in the pre-civil war era?

The research that I did revealed there were at least 70 violent incidents in the House and in the Senate. Some of them were canings. Some of them were fist fights. Some of them were actual brawls with groups of congressmen. In the well of the House where we saw [Gosar’s] censure take place, that was actually a location for several fights in those decades before the civil war.

And there was a lot of deployment of threats and intimidation. Most of these were offered by southerners and usually were deployed against people who had anything to say against slavery. Obviously the goal of that was to silence people or intimidate people so they wouldn’t even stand up to say anything that was not going to be to the liking of southerners.

What effect did those threats have on public debate over slavery in Congress?

There’s a diary entry from a very prominent, very aggressive anti-slavery advocate, named Joshua Giddings from Ohio. And when he first gets to Congress, he reports something like, “Our northern friends are afraid.” They’re afraid to stand up against the southerners. So there’s clearly evidence that people were afraid to stand up.

And not only does it shape the direction of debate, the people who do that kind of threatening very often are wildly supported by the folks back home. I suppose that’s what we’re going to see now; the person who does that kind of bullying and that kind of threatening gets a good degree of support for it.

Although Gosar was censured and stripped of his committee assignments, he was also somewhat rewarded for his behavior. Donald Trump immediately offered Gosar his endorsement, and the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, suggested that he might get “better committee assignments” when Republicans regain control of the House. Is there a history of lawmakers being rewarded for violence?

Unfortunately, yes. Most notoriously, look at Preston Brooks, who caned Charles Sumner, and Laurence Keitt, who held people off from intervening in the caning. There was discussion of expelling Brooks. He does not get expelled, but he resigns in protest when the debate is attacking him for what he did. He resigns in protest and is immediately re-elected. And Laurence Keitt, who actually is censured, is immediately re-elected. So sometimes these violent acts are done partly for the base, for constituents, for “the cause”. And sometimes that is indeed rewarded.

So historically, have censures been effective in changing lawmakers’ behavior? Or do they sometimes encourage more of that same behavior?

On the one hand, you could say people are proving that they’re willing to stand up for something, and for some populations, that gets applause. But the thing is, if people are really being offensive in some way or another, and they’re not called on it … that’s basically an endorsement. And it’s also a sign that the rules of Congress almost don’t exist. They’re just not in play.

For reasons of just upholding that there are lines that can be crossed, I think it’s important for that to happen. The message of that kind of censuring is that this person did this thing and is accountable for that. And if you don’t hold people accountable for their actions, that too is a passive stab at democracy.

How did the violence in Congress before the civil war both reflect and intensify the divisions in the country itself?

The violence in Congress reflects and affects the violence and politics throughout the nation at large in a few ways. By the time you get into the 1850s and you have the telegraph, which is spreading that kind of information very quickly around the nation more broadly than ever before, Americans can see that happening. So that sets a tone for politics all by itself.

Some of it is playing to an audience. Depending on how it’s acted out and the language that’s used and the posturing that’s taken by the members of Congress, it’s deliberately intended to rile up Americans, which it does. That kind of violence can encourage violence, intensify political rhetoric [and] seemingly justify extremism and violence. It has an impact on the public.

If the public gets riled up, they’re going to demand more things from their representatives – more violence, more extremism.

Given everything you know about the congressional violence that happened leading up the civil war, what do you think the censure of Gosar says about the direction of our country now?

It certainly reflects the tone and tenor of our politics right now, and that almost goes without saying. It gestures towards what’s coming next because he’s going to be rewarded for it in some ways, and because of that, there will be others that follow in that model.

It also shows a certain lack of respect for the institution of Congress. The censure doesn’t matter clearly to this person. It’s a moment that shows how far party is above government and above institutions of government and above institutional stability. That’s not a very comforting thing to consider either.

We’re in very unpredictable times. We never know from one moment to the next what direction things are going to lean towards. It’s tempting to see an incident like [the Gosar censure] and assume from it we’re doomed. We’re in a moment of extreme contingency, and indeed things might become much worse.

But during that kind of moment of extreme contingency where anything can happen, those are also moments where it’s possible to make positive change. It’s possible in a moment of instability to really push for some kind of a change that isn’t necessarily in the direction of force and violence, but is rather in a direction of inclusion and rights. I think we as Americans need to be thinking about that right about now.

Is there a relationship between Covid and politics? Sure seems so.

By the end of October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of counties Donald Trump won by wide margins had died from Covid. That was more than three times higher than the Covid death rate in heavily Biden counties, of 7.8 per 100,000.

Counties where Trump received at least 70% of the vote had an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60%.

Presumably, this is because Trump counties also have the highest unvaccinated rates in the US. Almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.

There are some obvious reasons why Trump voters have been hesitant to get vaccinated. Trump politicized the issue – making the jab a hallmark of his peculiar form of rightwing populism. He and Fox News spread false rumors and conspiracy theories about the vaccine. By the time Trump finally called on people to get vaccinated, the damage was already done.

In other words, it’s the same trifecta of rightwing media, inadequate education and rejection of science that gave us Trump in the first place.

But this isn’t the whole story, because the US as a whole trails every other advanced country in the rate of vaccinations. Why?

In recent weeks I’ve discovered that several anti-vaxxers live around me – in the bluest region of the bluest county of the bluest state in America. I’ve known several for years. They are well-informed and well-educated. But they’re as opposed to getting a shot as any Trump anti-vaxxer.

Some are ex-hippies, now in their late 60s and early 70s, who regard their bodies as “sacred” and don’t want anything or anyone to “invade” it.

One, who grows her own food and lives by herself in a cabin not far from here, told me she didn’t want anything going into her body that she didn’t control. When I asked whether she had been vaccinated against smallpox, measles, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, she told me she assumed so but had been too small to have had knowledge or control.

Others – also in their late 60s and early 70s – don’t trust big pharma. They see Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson as greedy global corporations in search of people to exploit and tax havens to park their exorbitant profits.

“Why in hell would I trust a fucking thing Pfizer says or does?” one of them asked me.

None of these people trusts the government. Their generation (which is also mine) came to political consciousness during the Vietnam war – a time when the American flag became an emblem of fascism, particularly in lefty coastal enclaves. They now believe the government has been so corrupted by big money that they don’t trust agencies charged with protecting the public.

I’m sympathetic to their distrust of both big pharma and big government. But this doesn’t mean the science is wrong.

One of them referred me to a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found that about a third of the drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration between 2001 and 2010 had safety problems after reaching the market.

I checked and he’s correct. But he left out a critical fact: as soon as the FDA discovered the problems it forced manufacturers to pull the drugs or issue warnings.

Deep down, I think these blue anti-vaxxers are motivated by something different from mere distrust. When I pointed out that they could well be endangering others (including me), they remained unmoved.

When I suggested that their concerns, however valid, had to be weighed against the public’s overall interest in conquering this epidemic, they said they didn’t care.

My conclusion: They’re infected not by Covid but by a narcissism that refuses even to consider the risks and costs they’re imposing on others.

I can’t say for sure that Trump anti-vaxxers share this narcissism, although the leader of their cult surely does. And, of course, my sample size was so small I can’t even generalize to all blue anti-vaxxers.

If we blame Trump and the culture that produced him for the relatively low rate of vaccinations in the US, we’re missing a character trait that may offer a fuller explanation.

This trait is found among Democrats and independents in blue America as well as Republicans in Trumpland. In fact, I think it’s been near the core of the American personality since before the founding of the nation – a stubborn, selfish, me-first individualism.

Omicron, the name of the new Covid-19 variant that is sending worrying signals from southern Africa, sounds like something from Transformers. It has caused panic across the world, among governments, the public and the stock markets. After adding a number of southern African countries to the red list, the UK government has reimposed mandatory masks in England from Tuesday, and will require anyone travelling to the country from abroad to take a PCR test. Omicron is probably the first variant to have scientists worried since Delta became the predominant strain in every country last summer. But how bad is it? What does it mean for future lockdowns – and future deaths?

Scientists are waiting on three pieces of data before they will be able to tell what effect this new variant will have over the next six to 12 months. The first is how infectious Omicron is. Can it outcompete Delta? Earlier this year we saw another worrying variant, Beta, that luckily faded away as a result of a selective advantage in Delta that allowed it to transmit faster between people. Limited data from South Africa shows that Omicron is very infectious, but whether it will become the predominant strain remains to be seen.

The second thing scientists are waiting for is data showing the impact of this new variant on health outcomes – both in terms of hospitalisations and deaths. The reason governments impose lockdown measures is because hospitals fill up; limiting social mixing helps to slow the spread of the virus and reduce the impact on health services. In an optimistic scenario, Omicron may cause less severe disease and become more like the common cold. In a more realistic scenario, it could cause the same disease levels that we’ve seen with Alpha, Beta and Delta.

The third and most concerning piece of data is the potential for Omicron to erode the immunity afforded by vaccines. Crucially, this wouldn’t necessarily mean that our current vaccines would stop working against Omicron. It would mean they would be less effective at stopping transmission – and, most worryingly, at stopping people from going into hospital and dying. This is based on a virological analysis of the sequencing of Omicron’s genome, and we don’t yet know the implications it will have in the real world. Companies such as BioNTech, which developed the Pfizer vaccine, are already trying to gauge the impact their vaccine will have on this variant.

So what does this mean for each of us? Right now, we need to continue to do all the things we should already be doing to get through the harsh winter months: getting vaccinated, and boosted, to protect ourselves; using the free home-testing kits to ensure we’re not infecting others, whether in friends’ homes or in pubs and restaurants; wearing masks in crowded places such as public transport and shops; and being attentive to how many close contacts we have.

For governments, it means having to plan for several scenarios. The first (and best) would be that Omicron can’t outcompete Delta, or results in milder forms of the disease, or vaccine effectiveness remains high. The worst would be that an updated vaccine is urgently required (scientists could theoretically deliver one in a matter of weeks), followed by a massive vaccination campaign to get this variant-specific booster out to populations as quickly as possible. Governments have learned that it’s better to move earlier with precautionary measures rather than waiting and watching a crisis unfold.

Scientists are increasingly cast in the role of “bad guys”; we’re the ones who convey difficult messages and uncertainty to the public, and are transparent on what we know and don’t know. Right now, everyone just wants Covid to be over and normal life to resume. Yet “when will this end?” is the wrong question to be asking – a more appropriate one is: “How do we manage this infectious disease in a more effective way so we get back more of our normal life?”

Last winter was particularly bad. This winter will be bad, but not to the same degree. The hope is that by the spring, and definitely by next winter, we will be in a strong position to manage this disease through testing, vaccines and antiviral therapies. But, if nothing else, Omicron has shown that all humans on this planet are in the same boat (albeit in different cabins with differential access to vaccines), and the pandemic will only be over when it’s over in all parts of the world. Not just in Britain.

The Economist on the growth of government By: Alberto Mingardi

The Economist devotes its last cover to “The triumph of big government”. The brief is an interesting piece on governments getting bigger all the time. A citation of Bob Higgs’ Crisis and Leviathan would have been nice, as the piece deals with the core ideas of that, marvelous book, but to its credit The Economist interviewed and quoted a couple of libertarians, like John Cochrane, Johan Norberg and Mark Littlewood of the IEA. Mark is credited with the only thing which looks like a proposal in the entire piece, albeit a vague one. He suggests allowing people to pay less in taxes in return for renouncing some state services. If the tax cut is attractive, but still less than the cost of supplying the service, that saves money”. But, writes The Economist, “because the people keenest to step out from under the umbrella of the state will always be those who already rely least on its protection, the state’s tax revenue would probably decline by a lot more than demand for its services.”

The article insists on the many forces behind government growth and quite correctly puts the decade of the 1980s in perspective. Though Reagan and Thatcher’s rhetoric produced such a shock on the international left that they are still dreaded by many, in fact the cases in which government spending was reduced are very few:

Examples of genuine state retrenchment in developed countries are few and far between. Sweden managed it in the 1980s. In the early 1990s Ruth Richardson, then New Zealand’s finance minister, cut the size of the state drastically. Wags called her plan “Ruthanasia”. The patient did not die. State spending is now six percentage points lower as a share of GDP than it was in 1990. But this is a rare achievement, and perhaps one doomed to pass. Grant Robertson, the current finance minister, pledged to “address the most inequitable of the changes made 30 years ago” as he promised a large boost to welfare payments.

Even austerity, The Economist writes, has been little more than a left wing scapegoat:

Some countries buck the trend, a bit, for a while. Germany’s spending as a share of GDP in 2019 was the same as it was in 2006, Angela Merkel’s first full year as chancellor. But the stable level was also a pretty high one. And German attempts to impose frugality elsewhere were short-lived. Spain and Italy both went on courses of strict austerity during the euro-zone crisis of the early 2010s. But in both cases public-sector spending, relative to GDP, was higher in 2019 than in 2006.

The magazine’s editorial asks how classical liberals should respond to the new era of Big Government which has been ushered by the pandemic and generous fiscal policies made possible by non-conventional monetary policies. Its response is a catalog of good intentions:

One task is to maximise the role of markets and individual choice. Climate change should be fought with a price for carbon, research-and-development subsidies and highly scrutinised public investments, not by rationing flights, promoting green national champions or enlisting central banks to distort financial markets. The welfare state should focus on redistributing cash and letting those in need choose what to do with it, not setting up new bureaucracies such as President Joe Biden’s proposed federal child-care system. Taxes should be broad-based and friendly to investment. The state must also seek to be nimble and efficient. Income support for households should be automated where possible as the financial sector becomes more digitised. Much form-filling can be eliminated, as Estonia’s war on paperwork has shown. If there were fewer, better-paid bureaucrats, the public sector could attract more talented staff. And politicians should be willing to start afresh when tackling new problems, rather than relying on lacklustre incumbent departments. The biggest successes of governments during the pandemic have come from internal startups like Operation Warp Speed, which helped bring about America’s development of vaccines. The state should strive to be impartial. Narrow interests, whether the unions and anointed victim groups favoured by the left, or the right’s chums in business, will always seek to capture it. To resist, bureaucrats do not need relentless cynical, self-serving attacks on their integrity from politicians, but transparency and support for the ethos of public service. Though rising total spending on the old is justified, a full-scale gerontocracy is not. Retirees with deep pockets do not need public handouts. On the contrary, they should bear a heavier burden as taxes shift from wages, towards property, inheritance and consumption.

We have here something which is often troubling in classical liberal accounts of current affairs. Classical liberals tend to be realists: they see the “objective” forces behind government growth (pressure groups but also, for the Economist, “prices of the services welfare states provide, such as health care and education, grow faster than the economy because of their high labour intensity and low rates of productivity increase”) but then, when it comes to a positive program, they come up with a few good ideas which would nonetheless require a profound modification in the very system of politics which produced bigger government in the first instance. We tend to be (me included) consistent realists when it comes to the reason why we got here, but idealists when it comes to how to move forward, by appealing to the best sense of the people and leveraging the rationality of our message. Does this work? I would have expected, in the Economist’s piece, some attempt at creative constitutional engineering. Tipping points could be searched for to make the growth of government at least a bit more difficult. When it comes to how (if) the growth of government could be slowed or stopped, there are two relevant questions the Economist seems not to consider.

The first one is to what extent is the growth of government economically harmful. Are people suffering, and will they be poorer because of it? Who will it harm the most? Answering this question will be useful to try to identify who could be the next constituency for limited government. The Economist seems to think that, since the world is more complex, governments needs to do more, hence the case for classical liberalism is intellectually more challenging now than it was at Thatcher’s time. I don’t think that is the case. Actually, perhaps the sophistication of the argument of statists would be an interesting test for that assumption. Do we find contemporary advocates of bigger governments to be more sophisticated than, say, John Maynard Keynes or William Beveridge? My impression is that the argument for government is actually less sophisticated and simply assumes that government is the best answer to a whole series of problems, without proving very much. I think the problem is different. In Thatcher’s time, it was pretty clear that the constituency for reducing the scope and action of government lay within the productive middle class that saw itself as penalized by taxation and regulation and which retained a strong culture of autonomy and self help. Is that still the case now? It seems to be that it is now, but another constituency for a smaller government hasn’t been found yet.

There was no reason for the world ever to hear the name Kyle Rittenhouse. Except that in the summer of 2020 this country was staring over a precipice. The Covid lockdowns effectively ended after the killing of George Floyd by a Minnesotan policeman. Suddenly mass gatherings in the name of BLM were a public-health duty and, because it was an election year, neither Democrats nor Republicans seemed to know how to react to protests that soon degenerated into serious disorder.
For a country that is only one bad police interaction away from meltdown, it was inevitable that something would happen again. Sure enough in August a man called Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There was a warrant out for Blake’s arrest and he was shot after fighting with police, wielding a knife and having already been tasered. Though Blake was not killed, BLM and other protest movements immediately had another martyr to hold up as evidence of systemic racism in America. And once again the peaceful movements turned very violent indeed. For two nights businesses were looted and burned to the ground. “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests” was how CNN captioned events as its correspondent reported from in front of the fires.
The police and national guard proved wholly ineffective at stopping this looting, and Rittenhouse, whose father lives in Kenosha, decided with a friend that they should go out and try to protect local businesses. They had spent part of the day cleaning graffiti off buildings and, as the evening came in, Rittenhouse offered to help the owner of an as yet unburned-out car lot protect his business. After being threatened and then chased by a mob, seventeen-year-old Rittenhouse ended up shooting three men, killing two of them. And as with everything else in America, the country promptly divided over whether Kyle was a hero or a villain.
The country’s left-wing media immediately announced that Rittenhouse was one of these fabled white supremacists we hear so much about but so little from, and that he had deliberately targeted innocent BLM protesters. The same media said he had crossed “state lines” with his weapon, meaning that media and politicians who have no problem with thousands of people illegally entering the nation’s southern border had to pretend to have serious concerns about people moving around inside the country. There were other problems to get over. One was that Rittenhouse’s victims were all white. And it would be an odd sort of white supremacist who went to Kenosha to target white people. The left-wing media also had to pretend that Kenosha was at peace during the period in question and that there was no justification whatsoever for Rittenhouse or anyone else to take on the role that law enforcement abandoned during that period.
Supporters of Rittenhouse had a couple of problems of their own. One was that it was not clear why a seventeen-year-old from Antioch, Illinois needed to end up in Kenosha shooting two men dead. When details of the dead men came out there was better material to work with. One of them was a convicted child rapist. And neither of Rittenhouse’s victims was in any way sympathetic. In fact they were both manifestly violent — including on the night in question — and most likely insane. Still, it is not as though Rittenhouse knew that one of his victims was a convicted child rapist.
For two weeks, the trial itself beamed from screens in bars and restaurants across the country. It was clear from very early on that Rittenhouse fired that night in self-defense and in justified fear of his life. The prosecution for their part wished to claim he was the cause of the fire rather than a fire-fighter. As the jury’s deliberations went on past their first day it seemed again as though the security of a nation rested on the shoulders of men and women trying to reach a verdict based on the evidence put before them and not on the fears of what might flow from that verdict. There was talk of potential unrest if the verdict went the “wrong’ way. In fact the not-guilty verdicts were both predictable for anyone watching the trial and clearly insufficient to start another bout of unrest in American cities.
For America today is a country where the identities of people matter more than anything else. If Rittenhouse had shot three black men then his acquittal may have led to riots. The British former paper known as the Independent got around this problem by claiming in an online headline that Rittenhouse had “shot three black men with rifle.” Other media were happy to mislead their consumers in similar ways. And in its way it is perfect.

For in such cases anybody can be whatever you want them to be. Convicted pedophiles, armed with guns, stalking around Kenosha threatening to shoot people can be turned into “peaceful protesters.” White men can be made black. Fires that burn on camera for all to see can be erased from the collective memory. A thug can be turned into a martyr. And a naive young man can be turned into a stormtrooper of white supremacy.
As the Rittenhouse case was going on I happened to take a brief swing through Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson was the scene of the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 when BLM protesters claimed Brown had his hands in the air and shouted “Hands up, don’t shoot” as he was shot. It later transpired this was untrue. Brown had been robbing a store and lunged for the arresting officer’s gun when confronted. But the lie went around the world and the crowds came out in Ferguson. The town they burned has stayed burned, by the way, with huge lots sitting like missing teeth in the areas the rioters moved through. The American media and political activists move on, but the places riddled by the lies they leave behind do not
The post Kyle Rittenhouse and the American identity crisis appeared first on The Spectator World.

Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion, is the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative and chairperson of the Human Rights Foundation. He is a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors.In this week’s conversation, Garry Kasparov and Yascha Mounk discuss how he came to oppose the Soviet regime, why he quickly recognized the dangers posed by Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and what to make of illiberal tendencies on the left.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Garry, one of the things that really strikes me is that you were right on the big thing at every critical juncture. You were right about the Soviet Union. You were right about Putin. You were right about Trump. You may even be right about some of the transformations in America today. How did you start getting interested in politics? You were a champion chess player. The incentive was to shut up about politics, to become a stooge of the regime like some other chess players were. How did you get drawn into distancing yourself in various ways, small and large, from the Soviet regime?Garry Kasparov: First, I was right about many things. But I was wrong about many things. I'm not a Nostradamus. Everything I said was based on my experience, and the fact that I read tons of books. Also I had the chance, thanks to my Soviet education, both in school and also in life, to apply this knowledge to reality. It's probably a much easier task for those who were born on the other side of the Iron Curtain. As a rising star in the Soviet Union, I had to face a lot of challenges based on my race, my blood. I'm half Armenian, half Jewish, and the man I had to challenge [for the world champion title] was Anatoly Karpov, the darling of the system and the Russian champion. I always want to tease my American audience by saying I was born and raised in the deep south, right next to Georgia, which is technically correct: deep south of the USSR, right next to the Republic of Georgia. Going back to the Soviet days [...] I stayed in a house with my grandfather, who was a diehard communist, but my uncle was more of the classical Jewish intelligentsia. He introduced me to people that had a very opposite view of the Soviet Union. And also, I was a voracious reader. So that's why I read a lot of books, and many of them, actually, probably all of them, were not available to me through public libraries. Very quickly, I could see the gap between the official propaganda and story of the great Soviet Union and the reality. My first trip abroad was in 1976, when I was 13. To travel to France in 1976 was a big deal. I was probably the only person who did so from our neighborhood—and Baku was a big city, the fourth largest city in the Soviet Union, after Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, with more than a million people. I became kind of a hero, not because I played chess, but because I saw something that nobody could actually imagine, except in watching movies.Mounk: There was presumably a narrative about the Soviet Union being politically and economically superior to Western countries. As a 13-year old, you got to see Paris and you said, “Hang on a second…”Kasparov: Absolutely. But in the Soviet Union, the average person on the street had very little doubt about the economic superiority of the West. There was a growing gap between official propaganda and people’s senses. They saw the reality of the long lines just to buy food or proper clothes. The whole system was based on the power of distribution. If you were connected to party or government structures, you had access to special shops where you could purchase normal things, but they were not available for the general public. And, of course, there was a black market. Having said that, I don’t want to pretend that I wanted to become a hero. All I wanted was to become world champion. That's it. I don't want you to upgrade my story. It is what it was. In ‘79 and ‘80—while I was highly critical of the system, and we talked in the kitchens and had jokes about Brezhnev—all my mind was about winning the title, which meant I had to play by the rules, because I already had problems as I described—being half Armenian, half Jewish, and from Baku, trying to challenge [reigning world chess champion] Anatoly Karpov was a big deal.Mounk: How did you come to have this reputation as somebody who's critical of the regime?Kasparov: I don't think it took long for party officials in Moscow and the KGB to figure out that I will not be like Karpov, controlled by authorities and a loyal party soldier. If not for some lucky political changes in the Soviet Union—lucky from my perspective—I wouldn't have made it to the very top because Karpov had many layers of protection before I could beat him at the chess board. I had to play by the rules. I attended official events, Komsomol events. In 1984, I had to become a member of the Communist Party. You had to play by the rules in order to actually challenge Karpov.In 1984 I played my first match with Karpov. That was the longest match in the history of chess or any other sport. It took more than five months. And it was no result. While Karpov was winning in the beginning of the match, I picked up my game at the end. After game 48, when I had just won two in a row, they decided to close the match. That was a big scandal. And that was the first time where I took a stand. If you want to look at the beginning of my “dissident career,” that's when we have a date: February 15, 1985.Mounk: They think you are about to win this epic match.Kasparov: I was still trailing five to three. But after losing five to zero and winning three games, especially the last two games, I had the initiative and Karpov was in terrible psychological shape. So I had a real chance of winning. And the Soviet authorities didn't even want to consider this possibility. Let's say my chances were 25-30%, as I myself anticipated. That was still too much for them to live with. So they called for the FIDE [chess association] president, who had a long history working with the KGB. He showed up and closed the match. I was there, and I said, “No, I'm not tired. I’m not exhausted. I'm here and I want to play.”That was the first time I said something in public. The auditorium was packed with cameras. So I made a statement in front of the foreign press, which means in front of the world, challenging the decision of the Soviet authorities. That was the beginning. Basically, it reinforced the suspicions of top authorities about Garry Kasparov’s reliability as a good member of the Communist Party, because I didn't hesitate. I just said, “No, I want to play.” Eventually the match was still closed. But the authorities had to actually announce a second match.In May 1985, I had an interview with Der Spiegel magazine. I called FIDE an international chess mafia controlled by the KGB. Now, in 1985, Gorbachev had just taken over, but it was still the Soviet Union. And I faced disqualification because there was not just an uproar [about the interview]. It was more than a scandal. Again, I was lucky: the head of the ideological department of the Communist Party, Alexander Yakovlev, told me that when the matter went all the way up to the Politburo, he convinced Gorbachev, saying “What the hell? One Soviet grandmaster playing another Soviet grandmaster, why should we bother? Let them decide who is the best at the chessboard.” And Gorbachev said “guys, you know, we're too busy. Just move on.” So that's how I was saved.When I became world champion, the dominant thought in my mind was “I did it. So many people never made it. So why should I keep silent?” It was like a duty. I had to show the other people that they could rise. The Soviet people had genetic memory of what happened to those who raised their voice in disagreement. But World Champion was a very sacred title. I was almost untouchable by Soviet standards. Chess was viewed as the most important ideological tool to actually prove the intellectual superiority of communism over the decadent West. Mounk: In the mid to late 1980s, did you think the idea of communism was sound and the problem was the Soviet regime? Did you hope it could be reformed? Or were you already convinced of the superiority of something like free markets and liberal democracy?Kasparov: You’ve pointed out the big debate in the Soviet Union. I grew up on the impression that things were probably not that bad: “Maybe we have to find a new clean version of communism. Maybe if you just go to the origins and you analyze it, you actually can make something out of it.” For me, and for many like me, the late 1980s was the time when these illusions died.Fairly quickly, I shifted from the naivete of someone who believed in Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet Union into far more radical opposition, recognizing that it's not shortcomings. The whole system is rotten and had to be replaced. When Gorbachev talked about socialism with a human face, my response was, “Frankenstein also had a human face.” In 1989, I was already quite adamant in my opposition to communism. I was a member of the Communist Party from 1984, and I'm not proud of that. But I'm proud that in January 1990, almost two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I sent an official letter to the Azeri sports committee where I was registered, informing them that I was leaving, that I had no more illusions, that it was a criminal regime, that I just wanted nothing to do with it and to consider me gone. And I immediately jumped into the pool of the newly-born politics. I couldn't resist the temptation to become part of this very chaotic gathering in Moscow that ended up creating the first non-communist party in the Soviet Union since the Bolsheviks abolished the parties in the 1920s. [...] In September 1990, I became the first Soviet athlete to announce I would no longer play under the Soviet flag. […]In 2005, I stopped playing chess and decided to dive into the muddy waters of Russian politics. I publicly stated my opposition to Putin's regime, and I made many warnings. Those are warnings I'm proud of, but they were not heeded. They were ignored. People said “that is radical.” In 2006, the organization that I founded, United Civil Front, had a congress and we published a document looking at the trends of Putin's regime. We said “this regime will not leave power through elections or through the normal democratic process. It will not be changed by the ballot.” We were labelled radicals and told we were standing in the way of evolution. Inside Russia, many liberals thought we were cursed. And in the West, no one wanted to hear about it.I remember in 2006 when Putin hosted the G8 meeting. It was impossible to explain [our concerns] to Americans or Europeans. Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov—who was one of the earliest defectors from this systemic opposition into the radical wing—no matter what we said, people looked at the TV screen and saw Putin sitting with Bush, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Berlusconi, and thought, “of course, he's a democrat!” So how could we beat this? How could we beat this picture and the state propaganda that had been trumpeting the fact that Putin was fully recognized as a democratic leader? Now we know we wasted very precious time. If the free world had seen the threat the way we saw it back in Russia, we probably could have stopped Putin from coming back after 2008. Maybe there was still a chance to force Putin out and at least to avoid the clear threat of a one-man dictatorship that was really looming on the horizon. We already had the Nord-Ost theater where gas was used to kill so many hostages. We had the Beslan school tragedy in which more than 300 people were killed. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed in 2006. Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. By 2007, we already had enough to recognize the danger of Putin’s staying in power. Mounk: When I was a grad student at Harvard University, you came to speak there to present one of your books. I think this must have been around the time that Barack Obama ran for reelection, and it was striking because at this point you were in political exile from Russia. You were warning about Putin being a dictator, but also about Russia having expanded ambitions to be a spoiler on the international scene. This was around the time Obama had announced the reset with Russia.Kasparov: In my book, Winter Is Coming, I talked about all the top American officials who became aware about the threat coming from the KGB and Putin after they left office. It's amazing. You read their memoirs, whoever—Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, a long list. They all knew, but somehow when they were in office, they acted differently. From my previous life, I already knew what the KGB was. I read enough books, and I saw the growing threat of Putin to the free world, not only to Russia, but also to neighboring countries, the rest of Europe, and eventually to America. And Putin was not shy in using his resources to bribe politicians. The fact is that he could buy former German Chancellor Schröder and many other politicians, though few of that caliber. Former Prime Minister of Finland Paavo Lipponen and now former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon are on a long list of politicians who decided to sell their souls and principles—if they had any—for Putin’s cash. That was a clear and present danger. Putin attacked the Republic of Georgia—technically Medvedev was in power, but I have no doubt that it was Putin’s push—to punish Saakashvili for his independent politics. It was not rocket science: Any country that tried to escape from the sphere of influence of the Kremlin would be subject to an attack. Thank God the Baltic states were under the NATO umbrella—though, these days, probably even NATO doesn't offer full protection. But Ukraine was a clear target of Putin's aggression. I had no doubt that he would look for any opportunity to spread chaos around the world, because that's what he needed. You can’t blame him with hiding his intentions. You just had to follow what Putin had been saying all along. His speech in Munich in 2007 was a clear message to the world that he was going to depart from the arrangements of the post-Cold War and would restore Russian imperial power. Today, in 2021, we still have people saying that maybe we shouldn’t take these types of words at face value. We must, because with every success they become more emboldened. Dictators never ask “why?” It’s always “why not?”Mounk: Tell us how you took some of the insights you developed in Russia, seeing the rise of Vladimir Putin, and applied them to the candidacy of somebody like Trump.Kasparov: I think of Donald Trump’s ascent, and the KGB operations to help him get elected. I saw the Russian propaganda machine fully supporting Trump, and using the newly-built troll factories and fake news industry to help Trump to be elected. And whatever Trump’s relations with the KGB were in the past—I believe there were—it was clear that Putin thought that was a time to go for this final blow to divide America, to create in American democracy a friction it couldn’t heal. Trump was an ideal agent of chaos. It’s like an icebreaker, destroying the American political system. I don’t think Putin expected Trump to win, but I think he thought that Trump could do what he is doing now [sowing division].Now, the new administration that needed to heal the damage caused by Trump demonstrated its impotence, or some would say incompetence, with the clear and present danger in dealing with Putin. The summit in Geneva was a disaster beyond imagination.Mounk: How do you see the state of American democracy now?Kasparov: I'm an incorrigible optimist by nature. I still believe American democracy is strong enough to survive this challenge. But the challenge is much tougher than I thought. In chess, you always look at trends—not just the current result, but where things are going. The latest trends are not looking good. It’s the polarization that bothers me so much. That's why I founded the Renew Democracy Initiative, and I spent nearly five years working with people in the center trying to bring people from the left and right to just work together to build a strong coalition that could resist the pressure from radicals on the far left and far right. It's not there yet. Both parties are under tremendous pressure from different forms of radicalism. On one side, we have a cult of personality. The criterion for being Republican now is loyalty to Trump. On the other side, their loyalty is to a concept, to ideology. It's a principle to win debate by ending debate, and knowing that there are certain unchallengeable dogmas that you must obey. In the morning, you look at the New York Times and you’re horrified. In the evening, you hear Tucker Carlson. You have a plague and you have cholera. How are you going to deal with that? Practically, I think the country needs a third party, because it's no longer about debating small issues, like higher tax rates; it's about preserving the country. My biggest nightmare is that in 2024 we will see Donald Trump running against a progressive. That's what both sides hope for. Donald Trump cannot beat a reasonable Democrat, any moderate Democrat. Even a past-his-peak Joe Biden beat Trump. It’s the same story in reverse: any reasonable Republican will beat the progressive.Mounk: The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recently implied that American political correctness reminded him of the Cultural Revolution in China. What do you make of that comparison? Do you think the culture of ideological purity has an authoritarian streak? Or do you think that is a significant overstatement? Kasparov: It's something that threatens the free flow of ideas, the freedom of speech. Our recent RDI project was released on CNN, and it’s called Voices of Freedom. We brought together 52 dissidents from 28 countries that expressed their grave concerns about the current state of American democracy, looking at both sides—looking at January 6 and “cancel culture,” whatever name you want to use for this—to warn Americans about dangers to democracy. I was recently part of a debate on the Intelligence Squared platform called “Cancel Culture is Toxic.” It’s good that we’re debating it. It seems to me that the defenders of cancel culture have two contradictory arguments: that cancel culture doesn't exist, and that those who have been canceled deserve it. It's difficult to bring them together.More and more of the Democratic party understand the risk of the party being hijacked by the radicals. Hopefully the latest elections in Virginia and New Jersey send a clear message. [...] If Donald Trump is again the candidate, and the Democrats do not have a proper candidate to stop him, then American democracy could be in grave danger.Mounk: What can those of us who are very worried about the prospect of Donald Trump coming back in 2024 do to minimize the likelihood of that outcome? And what can the world do to stand up for liberal democracy against its enemies, foreign and domestic?Kasparov: Speaking about Trump's chances to be reelected, there are two stages: one is whether he will be nominated. And until recently, I thought it would be impossible. After the vote in Wyoming, I'm not sure. Few are taking the side of Liz Cheney. That sends a very bad signal about the chances of Donald Trump not being reelected and re-nominated in 2024. Having the third candidate, unfortunately, is unlikely. I would love to see someone in the middle. Someone strong like young Schwarzenegger but born in America, just as a fantasy. I don't see anyone on the horizon right now. The radicals need each other. I always say that the best fundraiser for AOC is Trump, and the best fundraiser for Trump is AOC. As for global affairs? I don't know if this administration can do it, but we are all waiting for this global summit on democracy. There's no way that America can look inwards and just concentrate on domestic affairs. America must lead the world. Because if America walks away, we know what happens. When Yankee goes home, Putin, Xi Jinping, the Taliban, and Iranian mullahs all come in. They're not just coming for regions that they want to control. Eventually, it hits America as well. I think now more people recognize it. There was [for example] a great article by Anne Applebaum. I hear the voices that confirm what I knew 15 years ago. But as we say in chess, better late than never.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: https://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was out hunting for supplies, running through scenarios and planning for contingencies. I found myself at a local gun shop, where a line of edgy patrons stretched out the door and down the block. It’s not the kind of place my high school self would have imagined my middle-aged self would frequent. I am, after all, an American liberal, and American liberals, as a rule, believe that our founders (fresh from a war they won with muzzle-loaded weapons) left us in a terrible mess with respect to modern guns.
Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.
I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.
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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.
And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.
The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.
In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.
I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.
There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”
“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”
There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.
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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.
In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.
To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.
They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.
The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.
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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?
As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.
It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.
I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.
The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.
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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.
This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.
But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?
When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.
The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.
I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.
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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?
I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.
But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.
This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.
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On transmissibility, the data, while early, look worrisome. This new variant appears to have taken off very quickly in South Africa, with early national data suggesting the variant already makes up the majority of sequenced cases in the country. It’s possible that this early data will be revised as epidemiologists look closer at factors other than transmissibility, such as whether an early Omicron superspreader event led to the variant appearing more highly contagious than it really is. While this is possible, the more likely scenario is that Omicron does spread more easily than Delta.

Because the variant is so new, scientists simply do not have adequate data yet to assess whether the new variant causes more severe disease. Answering this question will require careful case tracking in hospitals along with expanded viral sequencing efforts, both in South Africa and elsewhere. A key part of this analysis is ensuring that countries are doing adequate testing of a broad sample of people. It will most likely take weeks to sort this out.

Finally, the big concern with Omicron is immune escape. Let’s be clear: It is extremely unlikely that Omicron will render the Covid-19 vaccines completely ineffective. And right now, there’s not much data on how much the vaccines may be less effective against this variant, although there is reason for concern. Omicron has a large number of mutations, including in the spike protein — the part of the protein that the virus uses to bind to and enter human cells. These areas of the protein are critical for vaccine-induced (and infection-induced) antibodies to protect against the virus. Even small hits to vaccine efficacy will leave us more vulnerable to infection and illness and can make it harder to contain the virus.

The Biden administration just announced a travel ban against foreign nationals coming from eight African countries. This will slow the spread of the virus into the United States by a modest amount at best. And it sends a negative signal to South Africa, which has done an extraordinary job in first identifying the variant and then quickly sharing the information with the global community. Whether the travel ban will be worth it or not is far from clear.

But there are things the Biden administration can do to prepare the country.

The United States must support ongoing studies that help researchers answer the key questions about how transmissible the variant is, whether it causes more severe disease and whether it can evade immunity. This will give health authorities a more complete picture as quickly as possible.

Last weekend I considered what the Democratic Party should expect from politics after Covid — the hope of revived popularity for Joe Biden under return-to-normalcy conditions, the danger that the left-tilting party might be losing ground across multiple different demographic groups. Now, after an interlude of giving thanks, let’s consider how post-Covid politics might look from the Republican side.

Republicans have a lot to be thankful for. In the years since George W. Bush, their party has staggered around without a governing ideology, veering from one style of fantasy politics to another, and twice nominated a ridiculously unfit reality-television star for the presidency. Yet through it all, the party has never collapsed, never fallen more than a little distance out of power and almost always retained a certain capacity to block the Democrats, which is the only thing its constituencies can agree on.

This pattern seems unlikely to be broken even if Biden’s poll numbers bounce back across 2022 and 2023. In that scenario Republicans will still probably narrowly recapture the House of Representatives, returning to the position that they held immediately after last November’s election — as a minority coalition, but a large one rather than a rump, which thanks to its structural advantages can always hope to hold at least part of Congress and ride a few lucky breaks into the White House.

But in a way, that advantage is also the core Republican weakness, and the party’s good fortune in avoiding profound punishment for all its follies is the reason those follies will probably continue. The problems in the Democratic Party — the danger that its progressive turn is costing it conservative-leaning minority votes, even as anti-Trump suburban voters could swing back to the G.O.P. — create an opportunity for Republicans to win real popular majorities at the national level, on the scale of Bush in 2004 if not quite Ronald Reagan. But the fact that they don’t need to be a majority coalition to exercise a certain power means that they’re more likely to choose badly, and stay roughly where they are.

I am not aware of any Communist Revolution in any nation historically that was not a bloodbath. Mao was its Military Leader in China and purged his political opponents once he overtook Nationalist China through civil war. His despotic actions caused many deaths among the people, but he established the dominance of the CPC which still carries on today. Stalin did the same for the Soviet Union. The CPC easily curtailed the recent upheavals in Hong Kong against Communism, based on the acceptance of the CPC's authoritarian dominance. Communism is an authoritarian ideology that does not allow dissent against the rule of the Communist Party "For the People".

I seriously question if America is not also an authoritarian state under Republicanism clearly described in the Federalist Papers as Antisocialists/Antidemocratic and ruled by wealthy white male capitalist elites. The Republicans are as Antisocialist even more than the CPC is Anticapitalist. Xi is proving that China is a mixed economy, ruled by Pragmatism rather than Elitism.

Deng Xiaoping liberalized the Chinese economy with Private Capitalism. China's enterprise is now 30% owned by the State and 70% owned by private citizens.

What I see are significant pragmatic adjustments within the CPC based on their situation analysis regarding what is good for "The People", in concordance with the Communist philosophy that its purpose is to serve "The People" in the most practical manner and not allow greedy private wealth to dictate government actions. Consequently, the CPC maintains the authority to curtail private greed that disserves the interests of "The People". Xi is curtailing Deng's movement towards private Capitalism from "Going too Far" to the extreme of disfavoring "The People" and serving only China's wealthy private capitalists.

I heard no Westerner say that Deng Xiaoping was an Autocrat, but the fact is he appeared to be much more like an Autocrat of Capitalism than a Communist. I see Xi Jinping correcting a "Movement Going Too Far" to reign in the Chinese political economy to favor "Power of the People" (Democracy) over Autocratic Capitalism which the West wanted China to evolve into.

I don't see the evolution from Mao's bloody military victory over dissenters to Communism through Deng's mixed communist/capitalist economy then Xi's curtailment of capitalist excesses as anything more than an honest attempt on his part to maintain CPC control "For the People", against the takeover of China by Authoritarian Capitalism.

Here's What You Need to Remember: If the US does not lead an international effort to tackle Afghanistan’s opioid and meth production, the Taliban’s power—and ability to commit atrocities—will only grow and its narco-state will serve as a haven for al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist groups. As matters stand, the world can expect a major surge in international terrorism and drug overdoses in the months and years ahead.

The strategic folly of US President Joe Biden’s Afghanistan policy has been laid bare in recent weeks. First, the country came back under the control of the Pakistan-reared Taliban. The announcement of the interim government’s composition then dashed any remaining (naive) hope that this Taliban regime would be different from the one the United States and its allies ousted in 2001. Beyond the cabinet including a who’s who of international terrorism, narcotics kingpins occupy senior positions.

Afghanistan accounts for 85% of the global acreage under opium cultivation, making the Taliban the world’s largest drug cartel. It controls and taxes opioid production, oversees exports, and shields smuggling networks. This is essential to its survival. According to a recent report by the United Nations Security Council monitoring team, the production and trafficking of poppy-based and synthetic drugs remain ‘the Taliban’s largest single source of income’. So reliant is the Taliban on narcotics trafficking that its leaders have at times fought among themselves over revenue-sharing.

The Taliban is hoping to expand its drug income as much as possible. Since its takeover, prices of opium in Afghanistan have more than tripled. In India—which is situated between the world’s two main opium-producing centres, the Pakistan–Afghanistan–Iran ‘golden crescent’ and the Myanmar–Thailand–Laos ‘golden triangle’—seizures of Afghan-origin heroin have increased. As the UN Office on Drugs and Crime warns, the economic crisis Afghanistan currently faces will only increase the appeal of illicit crop cultivation for local farmers.

The problem extends beyond opioids. In recent years, Afghanistan has drastically expanded its production of methamphetamine. The appeal lies in the fact that meth offers producers a higher profit margin than heroin, owing to lower overhead costs and inexpensive ingredients, especially now that its chemical precursor, pseudoephedrine—a common ingredient in cold medications—is being produced locally.

Last year, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction warned that Afghanistan’s meth industry could soon be as large as its heroin industry. While the Taliban was not yet in control of Kabul at the time, it controlled the majority of Afghanistan’s small, clandestine meth labs.

The Taliban uses several smuggling routes to move opiates. It moves output to Western Europe via the Caucasus and the Balkans, and from there all the way to North America. With the help of the Tajikistan-based terrorist group Jamaat Ansarullah, it also uses a northern route to Russia. The southeastern route, which snakes through Pakistan, is enabled by Pakistani security officials, who cooperate with the Taliban and smuggling syndicates, known locally as ‘tanzeems’, in exchange for bribes.

In 2008, a Taliban drug trafficker was recorded boasting that most of his product ended up abroad. ‘Good’, he gloated. ‘May God turn all the infidels into dead corpses. Whether it is by opium or by shooting, this is our common goal.’ With the Taliban channelling profits from drug sales directly into its terror machine, the connection between Islamist violence and drug trafficking could not be starker.

This is not exclusive to the Taliban; Islamist groups like Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda are also linked to drug trafficking. But not all terrorist groups are on board with this approach. As a 2020 UN Security Council report points out, the Islamic State–Khorasan—IS’s Afghan arm—opposes the drug trade.

This is one reason why the outfit is an enemy of the Taliban, despite the two groups’ longstanding personal relationships, common history of struggle and shared belief in violent Islamism. In fact, when IS-K had control of the Afghan border province of Nangarhar, it blocked the Taliban’s trafficking routes into Pakistan. The link was restored only when the US and Afghan government forces smashed the IS-K stronghold there.

This highlights the failure of the US—and the West more broadly—to recognise the complex but clear links between drug trafficking and Islamist terrorism. Had the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan been followed by a US campaign to arrest and prosecute Taliban leaders for their narcotics-trafficking activities in American courts, the group’s appeal among fundamentalist Muslims might have been severely diminished.

Such a plan was proposed in 2012. In a 240-page memo, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and several Justice Department officials recommended prosecuting 26 senior Taliban leaders and allied drug lords for criminal conspiracy. A similar approach worked in Colombia, and helped to force the narcotics-funded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to make peace with the Colombian government in 2016, after 52 years of guerrilla war.

But successive US presidents refused to use this strategy against the Taliban, which was a strategic mistake with costs that are only beginning to be revealed. By allowing the Taliban to enrich and sustain itself with drug profits during the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the US contributed to its own humiliating defeat at the hands of a narco-terrorist organisation.

It’s not too late for the US to start targeting the Taliban as a drug cartel through its federal courts. After all, Afghan-origin opioids have resulted in high rates of drug addiction and deaths around the world, from the US and Europe to Africa and Asia. And, given Afghanistan’s economic woes, the Taliban has a strong incentive to ramp up production and trafficking.

By highlighting the nexus between Islamist terrorism and the global narcotics trade, US indictments of the Taliban’s drug kingpins would help to build multilateral cooperation to crush the group’s primary source of income, such as by blocking shipments and seizing illicit profits, often parked in banks and real-estate investments abroad.

If the US does not lead an international effort to tackle Afghanistan’s opioid and meth production, the Taliban’s power—and ability to commit atrocities—will only grow and its narco-state will serve as a haven for al-Qaeda and other violent jihadist groups. As matters stand, the world can expect a major surge in international terrorism and drug overdoses in the months and years ahead.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi–based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of several books, including Asian juggernaut, Water: Asia’s new battleground and Water, peace, and war: confronting the global water crisis. This article is presented in partnership with Project Syndicate © 2021.

This article was originally published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

As the famous saying goes, history does not repeat, but she does rhyme. A lot of people are trying to guess what is she rhyming with this time?

I would, personally , think, it still rhymes more with 1929 than it does with 1970, though there is some mixing. It certainly does not rhyme with 1960, when the US was still an undisputed leader of the world in the post WW2 era.

The whole discussion of inflation seems a tad confused to me. The US suffered from galloping inflation for at least three decades now. The inflation has just been selective, as it involved asset prices, which translated for an average person into rapidly rising costs of housing. Combine this with rapidly rising costs of education and health care, and you have a picture of galloping inflation occasionally punctuated by deflationary busts which were, however, quite temporary, as the central bank would reflate in a hurry by printing more credit.

The difference today is that consumer prices are rising in some unusual places. Except for energy prices, this is likely transitory, as the manipulation of credit by the central bank is raising the cost of housing for vast segments of the population which will limit their purchasing power for everything else in a hurry.

One relatively new element in this picture is the cost of energy ,which is likely to stay high indefinitely. To be sure, there could be a speculative bust, or two, along the way, but there simply is not enough energy to go around for everyone in the world and the industrialized West can no longer monopolize these resources for itself. Until commercially viable substitutes are introduced, the energy will stay expensive, which will depress economic growth in the foreseeable future. Hyperventilating climate hysterics do not help, as they may limit the supply of what could still be available.

Woke: the oldest profession

The modern hegemony of the “liberal professions” has become one of the principal challenges to liberal democracy

This article is taken from the December/January 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issue for just £10.

What has led to the triumph of woke? The suddenness and swiftness of the victory mean that we naturally turn for an explanation to the New Media — and to Twitter in particular. It’s Twitter which orchestrates the “pile on” that delivers summary justice to the heretic. And Twitter which provides the illusion of a virtual public opinion that lends a vestige of legitimacy to the lynching.

The Great Awokening combines the worst aspects of the Romantic Movement and the Religious Revival

Which is why, in her great manifesto against woke, Bari Weiss accused the New York Times of having made “Twitter … its ultimate editor”. More fundamentally, the web, which has imprisoned so much of humanity in an actual Plato’s Cave, has fatally eroded the distinction between truth and falsehood on which the intellectual revolution of the western mind was based in the half millennium since the Renaissance and Reformation.

The result is the Great Awokening, which echoes and combines the worst aspects of the Romantic Movement and the Religious Revival that were the nineteenth century’s reaction to the Age of Enlightenment.

But, I would argue, older, deeper forces are at work as well. Including one of the oldest and deepest: the idea of a “profession” as distinct from (and of course superior to) a mere trade. The professions — more properly the “liberal professions”— draw their origins from the twin sources of western civilisation: the Classical World and Christianity. Unlike us, the Romans did not have two distinct words for profession and trade. Instead they divided the “arts” (“skill as a result of knowledge and practice”) into two groups.

These were distinguished, like most other things in the Roman world, by whether their practitioners were free men or slaves. The “Liberal” (the word means free) arts were those practised by free men and included the literary arts, such as rhetoric, law, politics and poetry; and the useful arts, including medicine and architecture. These “arts” were “clean”, literally and figuratively, and they required brain rather than brawn.

Opposed to these “liberal” arts were those considered “sordid”. These were the occupations of slaves and key examples included portitor (boatman or carrier) or fenerator (usurer or capitalist). Lowest of the low were the craftsmen who worked with fire — such as smiths or potters. Their skills were called banausic in Greek and mechanical in Latin; their jobs were seen to be as dirty as their persons and were beneath contempt. Hence Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals”.

This acute value distinction between white and blue collar jobs enters our own culture twice over: in the sixteenth century, when the sons of the gentry went to Oxford and Cambridge to learn Latin and Greek; and again in the nineteenth century when the Classics formed the backbone of the curriculum in the public schools which turned out the masters of Empire.

But if the Classical world inculcated the snobbery, the sanctimoniousness inherent in the distinction between profession and trade came from Christianity (as do most of the other accoutrements of our professional organisations).

For the collapse in the West of the Roman Empire and its urban civilisation destroyed the liberal arts of the ancient world just as it liberated the

mechanical ones from the curse of slavery. On the ruins of the former rose the Roman Catholic Church. This long monopolised the literacy that was the foundation of the liberal arts, while its clergy formed the first modern profession and hatched the others, like lawyers and doctors.

The incubator was the universities. Established from about 1200, their undergraduate courses polished Latin literacy while their higher faculties of Theology, Law and Medicine supplied the specialised training for the newly emergent professions. To begin with, all their practitioners were clergy also. Indeed, the very name derives from the profession of religion. As does the word clerical when it denotes activities associated with writing. Or the habit of other professionals of wearing clerical black.

First to branch away in England were the lawyers. English Common Law, as it developed from the twelfth century, was pleaded and increasingly written in Norman French, that strange amalgam of French and English. This meant it could be neither taught nor studied in Oxford and Cambridge, which dealt only in Latin. Instead the new training schools of the Inns of Court were founded in London. These differed in that teachers and taught were laymen, not clergy. And they tended to be gentry, rather than the bright sons of the poor who sought promotion via Oxbridge.

Medicine was far slower to develop. The Royal College of Physicians was not founded till 1518 and the profession only laicised with the Reformation, with William Butts being the first doctor to be knighted by his grateful patient, Henry VIII.

This snail like pace of change accelerated dramatically in the nineteenth century. The process began on the margins of the ancient professions. Surgeons and solicitors had been the “rude mechanicals” to the learned elite of respectively physicians and barristers. But in the early nineteenth century they too became fully fledged professions with the establishment of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1800 and the Law Society in 1825. Where they led, others followed — from architects to vets — as a richer, more complex society created new needs, and new wealth to pay for them.

By the First World War, the lineaments of what amounted to a new estate of the realm were clear. It was given its classic formulation by those practiced purveyors of the higher humbug, the Webbs. “A profession,” they declared, “is an occupation founded upon specialised educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.”

There it is in a nutshell: the Classical World’s disdain for the “rude mechanicals” of trade, on the one hand, and the claim to specialised, quasi priestly knowledge, on the other, which is the Christian legacy. The result is to invert the usual relationship between buyer and seller: the tradesman gives his customer what he wants; the professional gives his client what he thinks is good for him. Which inverts the power relationship also.

The problem becomes acute at the beginning of our own century, when the most mundane of occupations — policemen or midwives or teachers — have draped themselves in stolen professional dress. Hence the Morecambe Bay midwives scandal, when 11 babies died unnecessarily because the midwives subscribed unbendingly to their professional credo that “natural birth” was best.

Brexit was the famous victory of the rude mechanicals over the expert professionals

Or the outrage that the police, in accordance with the “authorised professional practice” of the non statutory College of Policing, persist in logging legal activities as “non crime hate incidents”.

Or the response (in Virginia, as it happens) to parents who objected to the teaching of critical race theory in schools that they “shouldn’t be telling schools what they should teach”. Because of course the professional teacher (or the professional policeman or the professional midwife) knows best. And what they know now of course embraces the whole litany of woke.

The result is a supreme paradox. The “liberal professions” are the very seedbed of liberalism. But their modern hegemony has become one of the principal challenges to liberal democracy.

The essence of this was formulated by Aristotle in exactly the terms that I have been using. “The dinner guest,” he wrote, “judges the feast better than the chef.” But the professional chef says the opposite. And it is his voice that is increasingly heard as we move to a new Plato’s Republic in which his incorruptible Guardians are replaced by our expert professionals with their “disinterested objective counsel”.

There are signs of restiveness. Michael Gove declared, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” and Brexit, which was the famous victory of the rude mechanicals over the expert professionals, showed that he was right.

But one victory does not win a war and, despite Brexit and Levelling Up, the juggernaut of woke professionalism rolls on, crushing all before it.

In their own best interests of course.

The Private School Boy is an object of endless horror and fascination. Every few years, the media outrage cycle will crest towards another scandal—a leaked video of a sexist chant, allegations of sexual misconduct or orgiastic excess—and the discourse machine will dissect the sexual mores of elite teenagers with a libidinal investment that speaks to its own lost youth. A prurient moral panic is fomented by the likes of the Sydney Morning Herald, which reports in graphic detail how “young women are raped while comatose at parties; they wake up naked, sometimes with penises in their mouths, or with their underpants soaked in blood, after having been groped, penetrated then discarded like a used condom.” Private schools have a toxic masculinity problem, we are reminded over rolling footage of gangly, pixelated boys in uniform, sickeningly unaware of their class privilege.Sex, schoolkids and where it all goes wrongPrivilege. Porn. Parent-free parties. An alcohol-fuelled climate in which being nice to girls is considered uncool. A wave of sexual assault allegations involving students from some of our top private schools underlines the need to foster a healthier brand of manhood. WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT.The Sydney Morning HeraldDavid Leser, Natassia ChrysanthosIn 2016, police investigated an Instagram page created by students of Brighton Grammar called “young sluts.” In 2019, St Kevin’s College in Toorak made international headlines after a viral video emerged of students chanting that they “wished that all the ladies were holes in the road.” A few weeks ago, James Robinson photographed his burning blazer in the middle of St Kevin’s School oval in protest against the “bubble where privileged men can rehearse oppression without consequences…” St Kevin’s ex-student says burning blazer protest symbolised ‘regeneration’James Robinson said the protest on his former school’s grounds represented his hope “a new kind of St Kevin’s can rise from the ashes”.ABC RadioRafael EpsteinWhat appears at first to be edgy and transgressive has all the trappings of a politically correct viral news-item—to be applauded, shared, and retweeted in the age of meme warfare. In response to Robinson’s work, many private school alumni came forward with their own stories of trauma and victimisation. This is a telling indication of the internal expectations of the Professional Managerial Class—be both hypercritical of the privilege from which you came, and offer stories of triumph over the social inequalities you conquered as a means of legitimising your successes and failures. This is a function of what Blake Smith calls the new “woke meritocracy” and its inner contradictions.I am a private school graduate whose migrant parents worked in hazardous waste removal and on automobile assembly lines to afford the exorbitant school fees. I harboured a great deal of animosity towards the Private School Boy for his bravado and self-assurance. Those of us who did not come from dynastic wealth felt as though we were observing Australia’s liberal elites in order to carefully study and appropriate their cadence and intonations. From that perspective, the Private School Boy seemed to represent a kind of narcissism par excellence. As a teenager, I wanted to be him, go out with him, and possess the capacity to publicly reject and humiliate him. But, with maddening nonchalance, the Private School Boy appeared to already have everything he could possibly need—his desire functioned only in service to himself, like a hermetically sealed, circular self-obsession. I felt psychically impoverished by my own lack of cultural capital in contrast to an archetype I had created from a composite image of real and imagined characteristics in my head. I’m therefore sympathetic to James Robinson’s protest and confess that part of me felt a revenge-of-the-nerds-style vindication when I first saw his photographs. But then it occurred to me that those images—and the responses they elicited—were also a kind of competitive narcissism and psychic projection.René Girard’s theory of conflictual mimesis proposes that our desires arise from the desires of others—“I’ll have what he’s having.” Mimetic rivalry stems from an ever-expanding locus of interpersonal conflict before reaching a fever-pitch of chaotic self-expression that threatens to destroy everything in its wake. It is at this point that the violence of all-against-all within a community is transformed into the violence of all-against-one in the form of a “surrogate victim” who can be blamed for the community’s misfortune and ritualistically purged to restore social cohesion and harmony. The history of humanity, according to Girard, can be explained by the “scapegoat mechanism” and its ritualised re-enactment in all forms of religion. Similarly, according to Peter Turchin, an overproduction of elites graduating from private schools and universities into a diminishing job market causes social unrest that threatens to destabilise the entire community. And, because we are unable to satisfactorily blame the complex mechanisms of neoliberalism, the Private School Boy is our porn-addled, homophobic, misogynistic instantiation of the Patriarchy and a convenient receptacle for our inchoate rage and frustration. Freud observed his grandson playing a game in which he would repeatedly throw a cotton reel out of his cot. He theorised that the baby, with his limited agency, enjoyed this game because it gave him a sense of mastery over his own situation and allowed him to play-exact a kind of revenge over his own powerlessness. The powerlessness we feel in the face of private-school educated elites who run the country, who own property portfolios from which we rent, and who continue to consolidate their generational wealth can be ritualistically purged from time to time through mass outrage generated by the misbehaviour of the Private School Boy. Because he represents a miniaturised version of the shadowy cabal he will someday join, he is neutered of any actual power and authority. So, he can safely be sacrificed now and then as a representative of “Capitalism” or the “Patriarchy” without rocking the boat or upsetting the prevailing order of things.This is neither an attempt to dismiss the real pain and suffering experienced within the private system, nor is it an apologia for Private School Boys, because this is not about the Private School Boy. It is about the stories we tell ourselves when attempting to legitimate our own power. The reason Robinson’s photographs and the yearly investigative news reports fall short is because they pantomime protest and the pursuit of Truth and Justice while really just rehashing what has already been established as the status quo. The mainstream media has lambasted the behaviour of the mythical Private School Boy for the past decade or so—either about a particular individual or about the “culture” of toxic masculinity in general. And each time a scandal erupts, it provides those within the private school orbit with an opportunity to portray themselves as exemplary symbols of perseverance and humanity while the principals and co-ordinators of these institutions grovel and promise to do better.The moral panic surrounding Private School Boys is a symptom of cultural impoverishment and our inability to think through what education is for and who it should serve. The private school in turn has continually found ways to justify its own existence. And if the current attitudes of the ruling elites are any indication, the tide is turning towards nebulous forms of power that are difficult to detect let alone critique because they are hidden behind the noblesse oblige of traditional land acknowledgments and anti-racist sensitivity training. It’s no secret that a private school education offers little more than an opportunity to develop the affectations of the rich. So, when the media class performs its annual horror show about the debauched activities of their sons and daughters, they are really just helping to manufacture cosmetic reforms that will bring these institutions into line with the Overton window of liberal tolerance and progressivism. The goal of course is that the Private School Boy may continue to pursue a path of unbridled ambition—albeit as a newly re-educated feminist ally.With each new PR crisis comes a variation on the theme of how these boys are being institutionally groomed to believe that they will be tomorrow’s leader, that they shall inherit the Earth, and that the women they accost are merely the spoils of a victory won by virtue of their birth. They are alpha-males-in-waiting and rampant misogyny and heteronormativity are baked into the system’s crust. This, we are told, is a conspiracy that requires urgent redress despite the fact that it is largely a reflection of their immediate, material reality. I respectfully counter that the opposite may also be true. That the Private School attempts to instil in its students a sense of outward-facing tolerance and integrity—not because they are virtues to be upheld in and of themselves—but because they effectively couch our mercenary class interests behind a thin veneer of likability. Seen in this context, the violent outbursts, the sexual aggravations, and the lewd comportment of the Private School Boy is not a function of his design. It is simply the cognitive dissonance of a child who is told with a wink that yes, he will inherit the Earth but it’s best not to act like it.

If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.”[Franklin Foer: Russiagate was not a hoax]The usual suspects in the pro-Trump media ecosystem will of course endorse and repeat everything Trump says, no matter how outlandish. But it’s not pro-Trumpers who are leading the latest round of Trump-Russia denialism. This newest round of excuse-making is being sounded from more respectable quarters, in many cases by people distinguished as Trump critics. With Trump out of office—at least for the time being—they now feel free to subordinate their past concerns about him to other private quarrels with the FBI or mainstream media institutions. On high-subscription Substacks, on popular podcasts, even from within prestige media institutions, people with scant illusions about Trump the man and president are nonetheless volunteering to help him execute one of his Big Lies.The factual record on Trump-Russia has been set forth most authoritatively by the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina. I’ll reduce the complex details to a very few agreed upon by virtually everybody outside the core Trump-propaganda group.
Dating back to at least 2006, Trump and his companies did tens of millions of dollars of business with Russian individuals and other buyers whose profiles raised the possibility of money laundering. More than one-fifth of all the condominiums sold by Trump over his career were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies, a 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found.
In 2013, Trump’s pursuit of Russian business intensified. That year, he staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Around that time, Trump opened discussions on the construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow, from which he hoped to earn “hundreds of millions of dollars, if the project advanced to completion,” in the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Trump continued to pursue the Tower deal for a year after he declared himself a candidate for president. “By early November 2015, Trump and a Russia-based developer signed a Letter of Intent laying out the main terms of a licensing deal,” the Senate Intelligence Committee found. Trump’s representatives directly lobbied aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin in January 2016. Yet repeatedly during the 2016 campaign, Trump falsely stated that he had no business with Russia—perhaps most notably in his second presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, in October 2016.
Early in 2016, President Putin ordered an influence operation to “harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Again, that’s from the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
The Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos “likely learned about the Russian active measures campaign as early as April 2016,” the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote. In May 2016, Papadopoulos indiscreetly talked with Alexander Downer, then the Australian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, about Russia’s plot to intervene in the U.S. election to hurt Clinton and help Trump. Downer described the conversation in a report to his government. By long-standing agreement, Australia shares intelligence with the U.S. government. It was Papadopoulos’s blurt to Downer that set in motion the FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, a revelation authoritatively reported more than three years ago.
In June 2016, the Trump campaign received a request for a meeting from a Russian lawyer offering harmful information on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump Jr. and other senior Trump advisers accepted the meeting. The Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for. But the very fact of the meeting confirmed to the Russian side the Trump campaign’s eagerness to accept Russian assistance. Shortly after, Trump delivered his “Russia, if you’re listening” invitation at his last press conference of the campaign.
WikiLeaks released two big caches of hacked Democratic emails in July and October 2016. In the words of the Senate Intelligence Committee: “WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.”
Through its ally Roger Stone, the Trump campaign team assiduously tried to communicate with WikiLeaks. Before the second WikiLeaks release, “Trump and the Campaign believed that Stone had inside information and expressed satisfaction that Stone’s information suggested more releases would be forthcoming,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In late summer and early fall 2016, Stone repeatedly predicted that WikiLeaks would publish an “October surprise” that would harm the Clinton campaign.
At the same time as it welcomed Russian help, the Trump campaign denied and covered up Russian involvement: “The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort,” the Intelligence Committee found.
In March 2016, the Trump campaign accepted the unpaid services of Paul Manafort, deeply beholden to deeply shady Russian business and political figures. “On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information” with a man the Intelligence Committee identified as a Russian intelligence officer. “Taken as a whole, Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services … represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the committee found. Through 2016, the Russian state launched a massive Facebook disinformation program that aligned with the Trump campaign strategy.
At crucial moments in the 2016 election, Trump publicly took positions that broke with past Republican policy and served no apparent domestic political purpose, but that supported Putin’s foreign-policy goals: scoffing at NATO support for Estonia, denigrating allies such as Germany, and endorsing Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Throughout the 2016 election and after, people close to Trump got themselves into serious legal and political trouble by lying to the public, to Congress, and even to the FBI about their Russian connections.
All of these are facts that would be agreed upon even by the latter-day “Russia hoax” revisionists and, for that matter, anybody this side of Breitbart or One America News Network.The confirmed Trump-Russia record leaves many mysteries and uncertainties unresolved. Even now, the U.S. public still does not have a full and final picture of his business dealings with Russia before and even during his presidency.The confirmed record may not add up to a criminal conspiracy either, not as that concept is defined by U.S. law. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team stated that they could not prove any such conspiracy. But the confirmed record suggests an impressive record of cooperation toward a common aim—even if the terms of the cooperation were not directly communicated by one party to the other.Since Donald Trump declared for president in 2015, it’s seldom been possible to get to the bottom of one scandal before Trump distracts attention with a bigger and worse scandal. For more than a year, the United States has been convulsed by Trump’s frontal assault on election integrity and the peaceful transfer of power. He has, one by one, eliminated from politics Republicans who upheld the rule of law, and urged their replacement by stooges who repeat his Big Lie. Republican candidates for office talk more and more explicitly about taking power by violence if necessary. These dark threats have understandably overwhelmed the effort to fill in the blanks of the Trump-Russia scandal of yesteryear.[Read: Putin is well on his way to stealing the next election]Christopher Steele was a former British intelligence officer working for a firm that was hired first by anti-Trump Republicans, then by Democrats, to collect opposition research on Trump’s Russia connections. As his dossier circulated behind the scenes, experts on Russian disinformation warned of its dubious reliability. But it found an audience anyway within parts of the U.S. government and U.S. law enforcement, and in January 2017, BuzzFeed published it.That decision was strenuously criticized by many. As our David Graham wrote then, “the reporter’s job is not to simply dump as much information as possible into the public domain … It is to gather information, sift through it, and determine what is true and what is not.” The veteran Russia correspondent David Satter warned in National Review that the dossier’s more lurid allegations reminded him of “the work of the ‘novelists’ in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) whose job it is to come up with stories to discredit individuals without much regard for plausibility.” (Satter wrote the definitive account of FSB involvement in the 2000 apartment bombings that helped bring to power Vladimir Putin, and was booted from Russia in 2014 by the Putin regime for his reporting.)The Steele dossier undertook to answer the question “What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia?” The Senate Intelligence Committee found that the FBI investigation gave the Steele dossier “unjustified credence.” But the disintegration of the dossier’s answers has not silenced the power of its question.It was to silence that question that the outgoing Trump administration appointed a special counsel of its own to investigate its investigators. John Durham has now issued three indictments, all for lying to the FBI about various aspects of the Steele dossier. None of these indictments vindicate Trump’s claims in any way. It remains fact that Russian hackers and spies helped his campaign. It remains fact that the Trump campaign welcomed the help. It remains fact that Trump’s campaign chairman sought to share proprietary campaign information with a person whom the Senate report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.” It remains fact that Trump hoped to score a huge payday in Russia even as he ran for president. It remains fact that Trump and those around him lied, and lied, and lied again about their connections to Russia.Outright pro-Trump people remain deeply invested in those lies. But Trump’s media effort has often relied heavily on people who are not pro-him, but anti-anti-him. And the secret to successful anti-anti-Trumping has always been to fasten onto side issues and “whatabouts.”Anti-anti-Trump journalists want to use the Steele controversy to score points off politicians and media institutions that they dislike. But as media malpractice goes, credulous reliance upon the Steele dossier is just a speck compared with—for example—the willingness of the top-rated shows on Fox News to promote the fantasy that the Democratic Party hacked itself, then murdered a staffer named Seth Rich to cover up the self-hack. (Some versions of this false claim include suggesting that Rich himself committed the crime.) Fox News ultimately settled with Rich’s family for an undisclosed sum even as the Fox host who had done most to promote the false story insisted on his radio show that he had retracted nothing. The story was crazy and cruel. But the story protected Trump, and that was proof enough for a media organization much more powerful than any of those that accepted the Steele dossier.[Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes: To Trump, ‘complete and total exoneration’ is always right around the corner]Not every journalist has to work on every story. Smaller abuses and lesser failures also demand attention alongside the greater abuses and larger failures. But if you choose, as a journalist or a consumer of journalism, to focus on smaller issues, you need to retain your perspective about what is bigger and what is smaller.So by all means, follow the trail on Steele. But be mindful that much of that trail was prepared by people who want to misdirect and mislead. Take care how far you step along that trail. Be alert to how the twists of the trail block your view of the surrounding landscape. Otherwise, you may discover too late that you have also been misdirected and misled, and that in setting out to explore a small truth, you have become a participant in the selling of a greater lie.

Stein’s Law, named after the eminent American economic Herbert Stein, holds that “if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” The law holds for the government accounts: at some point the tendency for the stock of public debt to grow faster than the economy will have to stop. There are limits on the share of tax revenues that can be devoted to debt service without crowding out socially valued and economically valuable projects. Modern monetary theorists dispute this, but other economists do not.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s October 2021 autumn budget is, as far as I can see, the first major statement by a government official since the pandemic which details plans for slowing the growth of public debt and stabilising the debt/GDP ratio. On its basis, the Office for Budget Responsibility sees public sector net debt as a share of UK GDP falling from 98.2 per cent to 97.8 per cent in the next two fiscal years. This is a modest adjustment compared to the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, when there were equivalent tax increases but also severe cuts in discretionary spending. Evidently, the lessons of premature austerity have been learned.
The OBR then sees the debt ratio falling to 88 per cent of GDP in 2026/2027, assuming the economy continues to expand. The argument for reducing the ratio is that this must be done in order to enhance the government’s capacity to meet the next emergency. This may be another financial crisis or novel coronavirus. It could be a geopolitical event or climate-related disaster. No one can say. But prudent governments budget for contingencies.
And not for the first time is the government weighing how it should do so. It is instructive when considering options for the UK today to look to history. Only then can we draw conclusions about the speed and extent of debt reduction that can realistically be achieved.
Two centuries ago, Britain emerged from the French and Napoleonic Wars with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 200 per cent, twice current levels. On the eve of World War I, that ratio had been reduced to less than 30 per cent. That contemporaries saw another conflict coming had concentrated minds. The extent of the franchise was still limited even after the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884, making for strong creditor representation in the House of Commons. The long 19th century was a period of peace by earlier standards. Not having to engage in large amounts of military spending, the government was able to run primary budget surpluses (revenues minus spending net of interest payments), excepting only during the Boer War.
Obviously, this is not an experience that can be replicated. Today’s political environment creates intense pressure to devote revenues to objectives other than debt retirement. The government can aspire to fiscal restraint, but not with the same single-mindedness.
The UK then emerged from World War I with another massive debt, approaching 200 per cent of GDP in 1923. Agreeing on tax increases and spending reductions was more difficult in this era of universal franchise. The Treasury argued against deficits. The Colwyn Committee, set up in 1924 by then chancellor Winston Churchill, made a forceful case for debt reduction. Backed by these arguments, the government delivered primary surpluses from 1923 to 1929.
But it reduced the debt ratio only to a limited extent. Interest rates were high, reflecting doubts about the government’s commitment to debt consolidation. They were higher than the growth rate of the economy, causing the denominator of the debt/GDP ratio to lag behind the numerator. Alarmingly, this is an experience that can be replicated. Productivity growth in the UK has disappointed for a decade. Failing to solve this problem will make stabilising the debt ratio well-nigh impossible.
After World War II, in contrast, the stars were aligned for debt consolidation. Between 1945 and 1973, a debt burden of more than 250 per cent of GDP was reduced to less than 50 per cent. Helped along by a backlog of unexploited investment opportunities and a favorable external environment, growth was rapid even in what was now “the sick man of Europe.”
Moreover, interest rates were below growth rates, unlike before. Strict regulation compelled banks to invest in government bonds, pushing prices up and yields down. Capital controls bottled up savings, benefiting the market in gilts.
“Between 1945 and 1973, a debt burden of more than 250 per cent of GDP was reduced to less than 50 per cent”
Today’s environment is different. Capital controls are not coming back, Brexit or not. Their views informed by the Global Financial Crisis, regulators see force-feeding government bonds to the banks as creating a “diabolic loop” in which bank and government balance sheets destabilise one another. Some see the Bank of England as capping bond yields by purchasing an ever-increasing share of public debt. But, sooner or later, this will threaten inflation. At that point, in my view, an independent central bank and powerful creditors’ lobby will push back.
Critically, in the quarter century following World War II, government was able to run primary budget surpluses while at the same time expanding the welfare state. Although social spending rose from 5 per cent of GDP in 1938 to nearly 8.5 per cent in 1974, surpluses were maintained.  Some criticise the postwar expansion of programmes to alleviate poverty as insufficiently ambitious. But this is what happens when it is necessary to use one instrument (the budget) to pursue two targets (poverty alleviation and debt reduction). More positively, this experience points to the possibility that debt consolidation can be consistent with support for the National Health Service, with the need for public spending on tackling climate change, and with “levelling up” the north.
How were these imperatives reconciled after World War II? First, rapid economic growth made for buoyant revenues. There were no major economic dislocations like those of the 1920s and 1930s to throw revenue growth off course.
Second, there was a willingness and ability to levy taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. Willingness, given the arguments for social solidarity inherited from the war. Ability, since controls limited the scope for relocating to lower-tax jurisdictions. Those limits didn’t prevent the Rolling Stones from moving to France, but they did permit the maintenance of higher tax rates on corporate profits (which were taxed at the same rate as ordinary income until 1965).
It is beyond the capacity of the UK today to replicate the miraculous reductions in the debt ratio following the French Wars and World War II. A century of budget surpluses, like those of the Victorians, is beyond our political grasp. Statutory limits on interest rates like those after World War II are not on the cards. Inevitably, debt consolidation will be more difficult and halting.
But what the UK must do is figure out how to grow the economy, enhancing its debt-bearing capacity and augmenting government receipts. It can use taxes on corporations and the wealthy to increase revenues; the recent G20 agreement on a 15 per cent minimum corporate tax is a first step. It can devote those resources to prudently expanding social programmes while also running primary budget surpluses. This may not be the best imaginable debt-management strategy. But it is the best available strategy.
The post UK public debt stands at almost 100 per cent of GDP. History shows how to respond appeared first on Prospect Magazine.

For Thanksgiving, we’re bringing you something a little different—an episode of Rational Security, our light, conversational show about national security and related topics. This week, Alan, Quinta and Scott were joined by special guest, Quinta's co-host of the Arbiters of Truth series on the Lawfare podcast feed Evelyn Douek! They sat down to discuss:

—“Getting Rittenhoused”: A jury recently acquitted 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of murder charges for shooting two men in what he claimed was self-defense during last summer’s unrest. What does his trial and its aftermath tell us about the intersection of politics with our criminal justice system?

— “Now That’s a Power Serve”: A global pressure campaign by professional tennis players has forced Chinese officials to disclose the location of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, who disappeared after publicly accusing a former senior official of sexual assault. Is this a new model for dealing with Chinese human rights abuses?

— “Duck Say Quack and Fish Go Blub—But What Did Fox Say?”: Two prominent conservative commentators have resigned from Fox News over its release of a Tucker Carlson film that they say spreads misinformation and promotes violence. Will this be enough to force the network to curb its behavior?

For object lessons, Quinta endorsed her favorite pie dough recipe. Alan in turn made an unorthodox recommendation of what to put in that dough: sweet potato pie. Scott encouraged listeners to follow up that big meal with a cup of coffee, made on his beloved Aeropress with a Prismo filter attachment. And if that doesn't work, Evelyn suggested folks tuck in for a nap with her favorite weighted blanket from Bearaby.

Now that safe spaces and universal acceptance have become the norm, it is fashionable to tolerate all kinds of proclivities and inclinations in the name of diversity. But until recently, we respected the nebulous line that faintly dissects the parameters of what we consider to be good and evil. Not so today, where there is a growing campaign to destigmatise everything, even if doing so requires us to unpick the moral fabric of our society.
How else are we to explain the two most disturbing causes trumpeted by modern progressives: of paedophilia and of polygamy? To some extent, they can’t be compared. Polygamy remains legal in a number of countries — from South Africa and Malaysia to Iran and Morocco. Paedophilia, on the other hand, has long been considered beyond the pale, and is effectively banned across the world. Most countries have an age of consent — and those that don’t, such as Sudan and Afghanistan, require a couple to be married before sex is legally allowed.

And yet, in America of all places, activists are now campaigning for the destigmatisation of paedophilic desires. To remain horrified is bigoted; we need to feel empathy for the “suffering” that paedophiles face. What makes this movement even more disturbing is that its advocates are not confined to some progressive fringe: even those whose jobs it is to end child sexual abuse now support it.
Only last week, Elizabeth Letourneau, Director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at John Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, tweeted: “Many adults with sexual attraction to children want help to control it, hate the feeling, don’t want to act on it. Helping them prevents #childsexualabuse. Stigmatizing the conversation puts kids at risk. #prevention.”
More from this authorAmerican education needs a revolutionBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
She was responding to the debate sparked at Old Dominion University earlier this month, after word spread around campus that one of its professors, Allyn Walker, had released a book over the summer titled A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. The book, according to its blurb, “offers a crucial account of the lived experiences of this hidden population”. In reality, all it offers is a disconcerting defence of paedophilia.
Walker, whose preferred pronouns are they/them, is concerned for the well-being of ‘minor-attracted people’ or MAPs, the new preferred term for individuals attracted to children. When asked about the use of MAPs in a recent interview, Walker responded: “I think it is important to use terminology for groups that members of that group want others to use for them. It is less stigmatising than other words like paedophile.” In other words: let’s not hurt the paedophiles’ feelings.
Throughout the interview, Walker deploys terms taken straight from the social justice playbook — as if paedophilia were just another sexual preference in need of its own Pride. Activists talk of “lowering stigma”; of a minority that is “at-risk” and “universally maligned”. But for Walker, at least, this is more than a fashionable cause — Walker genuinely believes that paedophiles are maligned. As far back as 2017, in a PhD thesis titled Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals, Walker argued that paedophiles should be permitted to view child pornography as a “harm reduction technique”. Providing “easy access to a wide variety of engrossing and high-quality child pornography” could, Walker wrote, “serve as a substitute for involvement with actual victims”.
Although A Long, Dark Shadow was published in June, Old Dominion did not place Walker on leave until November 16th, after students began to protest. A petition was launched, making clear that paedophilia “should not be considered a sexual preference” and Walker should be fired. It has received more than 14,000 signatures.
Yet despite such overwhelming condemnation from the student body, the university’s statement regarding the situation was short, vague, and inadequately critical of Walker’s views. For Walker, however, the university’s action reflected the “gravity of the threats to me and other people on campus”. Walker’s critics’ disapproval was part of a “coordinated effort” against the LGBTQ community and academic freedom.
I am a firm defender of academic freedom. And I believe the problem of paedophilia needs to be studied. But that does not mean that we can ignore the danger destigmatising paedophilia poses to children. We should not be normalising the idea that it is tolerable to fantasise about sex with children. A university and a university press should not be pushing this kind of harmful material.
More from this authorProgressives are a gift to IslamismBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
And yet this dangerous tendency to tolerate every and any proclivity, no matter how wicked, has become widespread: along with paedophilia, polygamy — a practice which should have ended centuries ago — is making a comeback as an acceptable form of relationship. Last year, Utah enacted Senate Bill 102, which lowers the penalty for polygamy from a felony to an offence on par with a traffic summons, as long as the new spouse consents to the marriage. Even pop culture is embracing the trend. Just this week, millennial influencer Lauryn Bosstick posted her thoughts on polygamy to her 1 million Instagram followers: “i am in to freedom of choice. i don’t waste my energy worried about what people’s relationship choices are – everyone’s different. if not hurting anyone & it works for you, go for it.”
But polygamy is harmful — to women, in particular, but also to society in general. Earlier this year, I interviewed Dr Dan Seligson on my podcast about its harms and dangers. He explained that polygamy actually breeds poverty in societies. It turns the human female into a commodity, destroys trust in society, and produces unhappiness in families. Growing up in Somalia, I have seen this all first-hand: my father had four wives. Not one of them was happy; not one of them thought their union was empowering.
And yet proponents of polygamy in the US today model their movement on the successful (and legitimate) campaign for same-sex marriage, pretending it is a similar form of liberation. Two practising polygamists summed up this tactic in a peculiarly supportive recent New Yorker profile: “I wish people would be as accepting with us as we try to be of everyone else.”
Here is where the slippery slope becomes a terrifying cliff face. Ingeniously, ‘minor-attracted people’ and polygamists are seeking the protection of the progressive umbrella. They want recognition as ‘maligned’ minorities who have been marginalised and overlooked by society. They want the freedom to love whomever they want, regardless of a person’s age or number of other partners. And it is working. The social justice movement is heeding their calls.
At the core of what we are seeing today is an assault on Western civilisation. In the West, we have a general moral framework. We share a broad understanding of right and wrong. But our norms and values are under attack. We have abdicated our responsibility to make moral judgements — and evil has started to seep in.
More from this authorWhy is child marriage legal in the West?By Ayaan Hirsi Ali
There will be some who claim that I am overreacting; that those arguing in favour of destigmatising paedophilia and polygamy are small groups who live in the dark corners of Twitter and will never have any real staying power. But the first steps have been taken. The path ahead is clear. As activists like Allyn Walker insinuate themselves into the social justice fold, the ranks of their warped campaigns will swell.
I have been a vocal advocate for women, children, homosexuals, apostates, and religious minorities for the past two decades. I believe in giving the voiceless a voice. I have also been a free-speech fundamentalist. But there must be a red line. No matter the context, there will never be anything progressive about paedophilia or polygamy.
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It’s not as strange a question as it might sound. Does depression exist? I don’t mean to imply that those with depression should just “pull themselves together”: of course depression symptoms exist (and are sometimes life-ruining). And of course those symptoms often overlap with each other, which certainly implies that there’s a common cause. But is there a thing we can point to in someone’s brain — or some identifiable part of their psychology — that’s called “depression”?
In their understandable desire to get on with trials that might help people who are suffering, many researchers have sidestepped the question of what depression actually is. Instead, they’ve simply agreed on a definition and stuck to it. The Beck Depression Inventory is a questionnaire routinely used to diagnose and define depression: if you’ve ever spoken to your GP about feeling low, you might have come across it. It’s named after Aaron Beck, one of the most important figures in the history of psychiatry (who died aged 100 on November 1st this year). He came up with 21 questions that cover guilt, feelings of failure, weight loss, insomnia, and suicidal thoughts, among other common depressive complaints.

The problem is that the medical profession, and psychiatry researchers, might be relying a little too much on that list of symptoms. Indeed, in an odd, unintentional, circular move, they might have actually turned lists of symptoms into the very definition of depression. An essay by the eminent psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler argues that this is a fundamental mistake: the number of boxes a patient ticks on the list of symptoms that get you a diagnosis isn’t the same as “depression” (nor is their Beck Depression Inventory score) — even if psychiatrists and researchers often act like it is. The Inventory is very often used as the criterion for improvement in studies of treatment: if you achieve a 50% drop in symptoms as measured on his questionnaire, you count as having been positively affected by the treatment. But these criteria are a decent index of many of the common symptoms — not all of them. We know anxiety commonly comes alongside depression, Kendler notes, but it’s not on the standard diagnostic list. If we confuse the disease itself with a useful-but-limited list of its manifestations, we’ll find it harder to truly understand patients’ experiences.
Some researchers have gone a step further: should we stop using the concept of “depression” entirely? One study of thousands of depression patients found over 1,000 unique combinations of symptoms that all still count as “depression”. Maybe it’s time, argue some, to focus on understanding subtypes, or even just specific symptoms, rather than the monolithic entity of “depression” itself.
Suggested readingIs the WHO inventing diseases?By Tom Chivers
In some senses — and perhaps ironically — this accords with Beck’s philosophy: he was known for being sceptical of focusing on the ultimate, root causes of mental illness. Which brings us to the other major contribution for which he is remembered: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Beginning in the 1960s, Beck reacted against the most popular form of therapy at the time, which was based on Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of the mind. Beck — who himself was originally trained to administer psychoanalytic therapy — began to doubt that depression symptoms were always caused by childhood traumas and unconscious repression. Some of the Freudian theories were rather far-fetched — as Tony Soprano says to his psychoanalytic therapist, after she suggests for the umpteenth time that he might be harbouring some Oedipal desires: “I don’t wanna fuck my mother! I don’t give a shit what you say — you’re never gonna convince me!”
Instead, Beck suggested a much more proximal reason for the disorder: depression patients (and those with other disorders) are suffering from “thought distortions”. For example, they might catastrophise, blowing minor unfortunate occurrences in life out of all proportion. They might overgeneralise, thinking that a fallout with one friend means that they’re hated by everyone they know. As well as focusing his Depression Inventory on these kinds of thought patterns, Beck argued that therapy should target them and train patients out of them, rather than looking for some underlying explanation for all their symptoms.
Beck won the argument: although psychodynamic therapy still exists, CBT has now become the most popular — and by far the most studied — type of psychotherapy. New NHS guidelines, announced this week, recommend group CBT rather than antidepressants as the first line of treatment for mild depression; but even before then, it was among the first ports of call. Its application goes well beyond depression: the language of CBT, with all its ideas about catastrophising and perfectionism and self-blame, is now, as Scott Alexander has memorably argued, “in the water supply”. But “popular” and “culturally influential” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”. What do the studies say about whether it works?
Suggested readingPsychoanalysis doesn't workBy Tomiwa Owolade
Despite the sheer volume of research, the evidence is actually quite poor. The meta-analyses (reviews of all the studies that have looked at a particular question) do conclude that CBT works compared to doing nothing (a common control group, to which the therapy is compared, is made up of people who are on a waiting list for treatment). But it’s worth remembering that positive studies are more likely to be published than ones concluding that the experiment in question doesn’t work. And the overall literature on psychotherapy does show signs of this kind of bias.
So, even if the studies are right that CBT is beneficial (and in my view they most likely are), the extent of the benefit might be somewhat exaggerated. Those meta-analyses compare CBT to other common forms of psychotherapy, including the psychoanalytic kind (these days usually called “psychodynamic” therapy). The general picture is this: the effects of CBT are essentially the same as any other kind of psychotherapy. They all reduce depression symptoms, and they all still seem to work up to a year later (this particular kind of meta-analysis has to assume all the trials are comparable, though — and that’s often quite a big assumption).
It’s a very similar story for drugs: the meta-analyses show that essentially all forms of antidepressant work better than placebo. But these effects are likely a bit overblown by all the dodgy practices in the scientific literature. And the evidence for one antidepressant being substantially better than another is, to use the kind of language one often sees in the review studies, “limited” (which means researchers only have the vaguest clue).
Although this is good news in one sense, it’s worrying (even depressing) in another. There is evidently a gaping hole in our evidence base on treating depression. If essentially all the major therapy types work to the same degree, despite being based on entirely different — often opposing — principles, it’s pretty difficult to pin down exactly why they work. What exactly are the therapists doing in their sessions that makes the treatment effective? Can we really say that Beck was correct about CBT being the best treatment if other forms of therapy, which take an entirely different approach, can do the same job?
Maybe it doesn’t matter whether therapists stick to Beck’s plausible cognitive theories or Freud’s absurd psychosexual ones. Maybe just having a regular interaction with a smart, sympathetic, well-organised person who focuses on your problems is what helps. That wouldn’t explain, though, why the analyses showed that some forms of self-directed therapy can also make a difference. Either way, all this begs the question: how can we make our therapies better if we don’t know the active ingredients? But then, how can we establish the active ingredients if we don’t even know what we’re treating?
 
You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.
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A little over a year ago, Rochelle Walensky—then a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, now the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—gave an interview to WBUR in which she noted the purported successes of lockdown policies in authoritarian countries.
"To give you a sense of what lockdowns were able to do in other countries—and, I mean, really strict lockdowns—in China, their death rate is three per million," she said, lamenting that the death rates in comparatively lax Sweden and the U.S. were much higher.
Whether China's "really strict" lockdowns can truly be deemed a success largely depends on whether that government's reported COVID-19 cases and death totals are accurate—an important question, given how much the Chinese Communist Party has already lied about the pandemic—and whether it will ever be possible to relax them. More than a year after Walensky sounded an admiring note, China's pandemic authoritarianism is still in full-swing; despite sporadic shutdowns of entire cities, the country has not completely stamped out of the coronavirus. Dozens of new cases are reported everyday, and again, it's difficult to say if those numbers represent undercounts. At every stage of the pandemic, Chinese government officials have misled their own citizens, and indeed, the rest of the planet, about the virus.
But even if China does have COVID-19 under control, harsh pandemic mitigation measures exact a steep price in return. One Chinese town bordering Myanmar was recently locked down by the government, and what followed was brutally repressive:
Residents left starving inside makeshift quarantine centers fashioned out of shipping containers. Businesses forbidden from selling goods – even online. A baby reportedly tested for COVID 74 times.
Earlier this year, his wife went to work one morning, only to be forced to find somewhere else to stay for a 45-day quarantine after the city district was sealed off because of a handful of cases discovered nearby. She was rounded up and told to shelter in place, with no date of release and no regular supply of food. Wang says he was finally able to get her out by asking a well-connected friend to bring her to a hospital on medical grounds, after which she did another two week hotel quarantine before being allowed to return home.
Yet despite the anger in Ruili, most people in China support the country's strict pandemic prevention policies, despite their huge economic cost and the risk of being suddenly quarantined or tested during frequent contact-tracing investigations. Local governments are under enormous pressure to ensure no infections crop up; officials who fail are often publicly shamed and fired.
People unlucky enough to test positive or — more commonly — cross paths with a close contact can find themselves ensnared in successive and expensive quarantines. Others have found themselves stuck in limbo, unable to leave cities under lockdown, including Ruili, and also banned from returning to their hometowns.
As Reason's Eric Boehm noted, China is hardly an exception in this regard: The quest for covid zero has steered many countries down the path of illiberalism and oppression. "More than 20 percent of countries have used their militaries to enforce COVID controls," wrote Boehm, citing a new report from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. "According to the report, 69 countries have made violating COVID restrictions an imprisonable offense, with two-thirds of those countries being ones the group considers to be democracies. Albania and Mexico have the most punitive laws on the books, allowing prison sentences of 15 years and 12 years, respectively, for violating pandemic-related protocols."
When health officials like Walensky fantasize about what they could do if the U.S. government was just a bit less constrained by civil liberties protections and human rights law, it is these repressive regimes that they seek to emulate.
But tellingly, this kind fantasizing only ever seems to run in one direction—toward bigger and more powerful government. Here's a question: Does Walensky ever fantasize about how the U.S. coronavirus response have been improved by a government that was smaller and more constrained? Because there's a good argument to be made that less authoritarianism and central control would mean fewer Americans dying of COVID-19.
Nothing illustrates this point better than the Federal Drug Administration's failure to immediately approve Paxlovid, Pfizer's pill-form COVID-19 therapeutic, which may reduce the risk of death by a whopping 89 percent. Substack writer Scott Alexander notes that prediction markets believe the FDA will approve the drug somewhere between January and March. For the FDA, this is remarkably fast—but it still means that thousands of people will die needlessly between now and the date that the drug is approved. If the FDA would get out of the way, people could take the drug much sooner, and lives would be saved.
"It's pretty weird that the FDA agrees Paxlovid is so great that it's unethical to study it further because it would be unconscionable to design a study with a no-Paxlovid control group—but also, the FDA has not approved Paxlovid, it remains illegal, and nobody is allowed to use it," wrote Alexander. "One would hope this is because the FDA plans to approve Paxlovid immediately. But the prediction market expects it to take six weeks— during which time we expect about 50,000 more Americans to die of COVID."
These delays are costly but hardly surprising; after all, the FDA has repeatedly failed to approve COVID-19 tests that would doubtlessly save lives if the government would make it legal for Americans to purchase them.
"Companies trying to get the Food and Drug Administration's approval for rapid COVID-19 tests describe an arbitrary, opaque process that meanders on, sometimes long after their products have been approved in other countries that prioritize accessibility and affordability over perfect accuracy," wrote Lydia DePillis and Eric Umansky in ProPublica.
It gets worse:

The FDA reviewer who quit this May described what the delays looked like from the inside. With a background in virology, he could evaluate the hundreds of pages in an application within a few days. But then, something strange happened: The applications would go nowhere for months as higher-up officials seemed paralyzed by indecision.
"I could easily process dozens of them, but I ended up with one or two in my queue constantly. They would stay there forever," he said. "I had a lot of free time."
His experience is reflected in an outside review of the EUA process conducted by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which found that the median number of days it took the FDA to issue a decision on original applications rose to 99 in November 2020 from 29 the previous April, with denials taking substantially longer than authorizations. The assessment also found "limited understanding in the test developer community on how to appropriately validate a diagnostic test."

Instead of waxing philosophical about what might have been possible if the U.S. government were less constrained, it would be nice if federal health bureaucrats conceded that the most ideal, pie-in-the-sky scenario is one in which their authority was more limited rather than less. If Walensky and her ilk care about saving lives, they should daydream about smaller government, not stricter lockdowns.
The post CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Lauded the Success of China's 'Really Strict' Lockdowns appeared first on Reason.com.

This Thanksgiving post has been an annual tradition at CD and I feature a slightly revised version again this year!
Like in previous years, most of you probably didn’t call your local supermarket ahead of time and order a Thanksgiving turkey this year. Why not? Because you automatically assumed that a turkey would be there when you showed up, and it probably was there when you appeared “unannounced” at your local grocery store and selected your Thanksgiving bird this week. We got two frozen Butterball turkeys on Monday at Costco for $0.99 per pound — what a bargain!
The reason your Thanksgiving turkey, like ours, was waiting for you without an advance order? Because of the economic concepts of “spontaneous order,” “self-interest,” and the “invisible hand” of the free market. Turkeys appeared in your local grocery stores primarily because of the “self-interest” (greed?) of thousands of turkey farmers, truck drivers, and supermarket owners and employees who are complete strangers to you and your family. But all of those strangers throughout the turkey supply chain co-operated on your behalf and were led by the “invisible hand” to make sure your family had a turkey (or two) on the table to celebrate Thanksgiving this Thursday. The “invisible hand” that was responsible for your holiday turkey is just one of millions of everyday examples of the “miracle of the marketplace” where “individually selfish decisions must lead to collectively efficient outcomes,” as economist Steven E. Landsburg observed.
In a 2003 Boston Globe article titled “Giving Thanks for the Invisible Hand,” syndicated columnist Jeff Jacoby offered a wonderful tribute to the miracle of the invisible hand that makes affordable turkeys available so efficiently every year at Thanksgiving through the power of “spontaneous order” and without the need for any central planning or “turkey czars”:

Isn’t there something wondrous — something almost inexplicable — in the way your Thanksgiving weekend is made possible by the skill and labor of vast numbers of total strangers?
To bring that turkey to the dining room table required the efforts of thousands of people — the poultry farmers who raised the birds, of course, but also the feed distributors who supplied their nourishment and the truckers who brought it to the farm, not to mention the architect who designed the hatchery, the workmen who built it, and the technicians who keep it running. The bird had to be slaughtered and de-feathered and inspected and transported and unloaded and wrapped and priced and displayed. The people who accomplished those tasks were supported in turn by armies of other people accomplishing other tasks — from refining the gasoline that fueled the trucks to manufacturing the plastic in which the meat was packaged.
The activities of countless far-flung men and women over the course of many months had to be intricately choreographed and precisely timed, so that when you showed up to buy a fresh Thanksgiving turkey, there would be one — or more likely, a few dozen — waiting. The level of coordination that was required to pull it off is mind-boggling. But what is even more mind-boggling is this: No one coordinated it.
No turkey czar sat in a command post somewhere, consulting a master plan and issuing orders. No one forced people to cooperate for your benefit. And yet they did cooperate. When you arrived at the supermarket, your turkey was there. You didn’t have to do anything but show up to buy it. If that isn’t a miracle, what should we call it?
Adam Smith called it “the invisible hand” — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many. Out of the seeming chaos of millions of uncoordinated private transactions emerges the spontaneous order of the market. Free human beings freely interact, and the result is an array of goods and services more immense than the human mind can comprehend. No dictator, no bureaucracy, no supercomputer plans it in advance. Indeed, the more an economy is planned, the more it is plagued by shortages, dislocation, and failure.
It is commonplace to speak of seeing God’s signature in the intricacy of a spider’s web or the animation of a beehive. But they pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic energy and productivity of the free market. If it is a blessing from Heaven when seeds are transformed into grain, how much more of a blessing is it when our private, voluntary exchanges are transformed – without our ever intending it – into prosperity, innovation, and growth?

Bottom Line: As you celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow with your family and friends, remember to express some thanks and gratitude to the thousands of “invisible” strangers who won’t be there in person, but who were led by the “invisible hand” of the market over the last several months to become your “Thanksgiving benefactors” and make sure your affordable holiday feast was possible once again.
I’ll end the post with a great, related quote from President Ronald Reagan, who said in 1981:

The societies that have achieved the most spectacular, broad-based progress are neither the most tightly controlled, nor the biggest in size, nor the wealthiest in natural resources. No, what unites them all is their willingness to believe in the magic of the marketplace.

On Thanksgiving Day, we should all remember to be thankful for the “miracle and magic of the marketplace” and the “blessings of spontaneous order and the invisible hand” that are directly responsible for the economic prosperity and abundance that we enjoy not just on a single holiday once a year, but every day of the year living in a market economy.
Related: See recent CD post “Despite concerns about inflation, the real cost (and ‘time cost’) of Thanksgiving dinner this year is among the most affordable in history.” We’ve also heard numerous media reports recently about the “most expensive Thanksgiving dinner in history,” which are inaccurate misrepresentations of economic reality. Of course, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner is almost always higher every year measured in nominal (current) dollars. But to correctly measure the real cost of a turkey dinner over time is to adjust for inflation and compare the annual cost in constant, inflation adjusted dollars. Or even better, we should compute the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner measured in the amount of time (in hours) the average American needs to work to earn enough income to pay for the menu items in a traditional turkey dinner. By either measure, the cost of a Thanksgiving this year is among the most affordable in US history. 
Bon appetit!
. 
The post Giving thanks for the magic of the marketplace, the invisible hand of strangers, and no turkey czars appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Nobody understands quantum mechanics,” Richard Feynman famously said. Long after Max Planck’s discovery in 1900 that energy comes in separate packets or quanta, quantum physics remains enigmatic. It is vastly different from how things work at bigger scales, where objects from baseballs to automobiles follow Newton’s laws of mechanics and gravitation, consistent with our own bodily experiences. But at the quantum level, an electron is a particle and a wave, and light is a wave and a particle (wave-particle duality); an electron in an atom takes on only certain energies (energy quantization); electrons or photons can instantaneously affect each other over arbitrary distances (entanglement and teleportation); a quantum object exists in different states until it is measured (superposition, or popularly, Schrödinger’s cat); and a real physical force emerges from the apparent nothingness of vacuum (the Casimir effect).

For a theory that nobody understands, quantum physics has changed human society in remarkable ways.1 It lies behind the digital technology of integrated circuit chips, and the new technology of light-emitting diodes moving us toward a greener world. Scientists are now excited by one of the more elusive notions in quantum physics, the idea of ephemeral “virtual” photons, which could make possible non-invasive medical methods to diagnose the heart and brain. These connections illustrate the flow of ideas from scientific abstraction to useful application. But there is also a counter flow, where pragmatic requirements generate deep insight. The universal laws of thermodynamics have roots in efforts by 19th-century French engineer Sadi Carnot to make the leading technology of the time, the steam engine, more efficient. Similarly, the growth of quantum technology leads to deeper knowledge of the quantum. The interplay between pure theory, and its outcomes in the everyday world, is a continuing feature of science as it develops. In quantum physics, this interaction traces back to one of its founders, Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Jurik Peter / Shutterstock

In 1913, Bohr applied quantum ideas to the simplest atom, hydrogen. He found that the lone electron could occupy only certain orbits around the central proton, each with a specific energy, but not the spaces or energies in between. The electron jumps to other orbits by absorbing energy, or by emitting it as a photon at a wavelength set by the orbital energies involved. Bohr’s model scored a huge success when it predicted the exact wavelengths of light emitted by energized hydrogen gas. Quantum jumps across the gaps between energy levels also produce the vividly colored light from advertising signs filled with neon and other gases, from lasers, and from LEDs.

Energy gaps are also at the heart of digital electronics and computing, which depend on the semiconducting transistor, invented in 1947. Semiconductors lie between metals, with many free electrons that carry electrical current, and insulators, whose electrons are held within its atoms and cannot form a current. The electrons in a semiconductor are also confined to its atoms, but once they jump across a so-called band gap, they can travel freely to form an electrical current. This current can be precisely manipulated to turn on and off as a switch, amplify signals, and perform other electronic functions when the semiconductor is formed into a transistor. Produced in millions within integrated circuit chips made of semiconducting silicon, transistors control the digital technology that defines our world. The band gap underlying all this is a pure quantum effect that arises because the electrons in a semiconductor occupy bands of energy separated by forbidden regions.

The fact that energy is discontinuous at small scales is at odds with our view of the ordinary world, but now we take this aspect of nature for granted. However, superposition, entanglement, and teleportation raise deeper questions about quantum theory, yet also inspire new technology.

Superposition is tied to Erwin Schrödinger’s famous equation, published in 1926. It is the quantum equivalent of Newton’s equation F = ma (that is, force = mass x acceleration, the basic equation of particle motion) but it describes a sub-atomic entity such as an electron as a wave, not a particle (although without telling us what this wave is). However, the equation’s solution, called the wavefunction, can be used to calculate any property of the entity such as its position, but not definitively. The wavefunction only gives the probability that the electron can exist at a given position in an atom. In principle each location is possible according to its probability until an electron is measured, when the wavefunction is said to “collapse” to that value.

One promising idea is to use this technology to examine the human heart and brain without physical contact.

This view of quantum behavior is called the Copenhagen interpretation because of Bohr’s role in developing it. It is like saying a deck of cards contains 52 different states that a selected card could take, in this case, with equal probabilities; but once you pick a card, that becomes the actual state, leaving the other 51 irrelevant. But the analogy is imperfect: We firmly believe that the suit and value printed on each card are real and fixed whether someone picks a card or not. In classical physics too we assume that objects have definite properties even if they are not being measured, a belief called realism. But the Copenhagen view makes it questionable whether an electron or photon has definite values independent of a measurement.

If, reading this, you are wondering how and why the act of measurement somehow deeply affects the nature of the thing measured, you are not alone. This is one of the enduring questions that Einstein, among other physicists, and philosophers too, have asked but not yet answered, leaving the full meaning of quantum theory unsettled. The Copenhagen view is widely used, but other interpretations attempt to resolve the issues it raises.

Regardless, superposition enables a novel approach to computation. For example: A photon has an electric field that can be polarized to point in a given direction. This can be arranged so that under superposition, the photon has a 50 percent probability of pointing either vertically or horizontally, representing binary “1” or “0” respectively. The result is a quantum computer bit (a “qubit”) that is both 1 and 0 until it is measured. An ordinary computer bit is only either 1 or 0, so using qubits enhances computing capacity by a factor of 2n where n is the number of qubits; for instance, four ordinary bits can hold only one of the 16 binary numbers 0000 to 1111 (decimal 0 to 15) but four qubits hold all 16 simultaneously. By handling many pieces of data in parallel, a quantum computer takes computational power to unprecedented levels.

Also in Physics Paradox Is Illuminating the Black Hole By Gabriel Lynch An Introduction to the Black Hole InstituteFittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first astronomical evidence that they exist....READ MORE

Besides photons, qubits can be based on quantum objects and systems such as electrons,2 ions, and superconductors. Researchers are now testing these approaches to find the best one for commercial quantum computation. IBM projects a 1,000-qubit superconducting chip in two years.3 Even a smaller 11-qubit computer, one based on ion qubits, can in principle juggle 2,048 numbers at once.4

Entanglement provides other new ways to handle data; but when Schrödinger invented the term in 1935 he was thinking about entanglement as “not one but apparently the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.” This defining feature can be illustrated with a pair of electrons. Due to the property called spin, electrons are like tiny magnets with a north pole that points either up or down. It is possible to create a pair of electrons with total spin zero, with one north pole up and the other down, but we don’t know which is which. Now separate the two electrons as far apart as you like and measure the spin direction of electron A; then whatever the result, a measurement of the spin direction of electron B always gives the opposite value.

This is entanglement, where a measurement of a property of one of two linked quantum objects instantaneously sets the value of that property in the other, regardless of distance. Numerous experiments confirm that quantum objects are correlated in ways that ordinary objects are not, even if far apart. In 2017, a group under Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China showed that a pair of photons remained entangled over a record distance of 1,200 kilometers. Experiments also show that any interaction between entangled objects occurs more quickly than the speed of light would allow. This violates the condition called locality that arises from special relativity, which is what troubled Einstein when he called entanglement “spooky action at a distance.” With quantum realism already dubious, many physicists are tending to the view that both realism and locality do not apply in the quantum world.

It’s like saying that once you pick a card, that becomes the actual state, leaving the other 51 irrelevant.

Nevertheless, through its role in teleportation, entanglement enables quantum telecommunication, even at a global scale. In 1993, Charles Bennet of IBM and colleagues theorized about how to exactly copy and send the unknown state of a quantum system to a distant receiver, that is, teleport quantum information. This was revolutionary because in quantum theory, one cannot exactly clone, say, a photon with an unknown polarization, since making copies would provide a way to evade the uncertainty principle. But entanglement provides another workaround: If you measure the polarization of an entangled photon, you know the polarization of its partner without a direct measurement. The Bennett paper proposed using entangled photons A and B, located respectively with the sender and the recipient, to transmit the unknown state of a third photon X to photon B.

In 1997 Anton Zeilinger, then at the University of Innsbruck, and colleagues successfully teleported the unknown polarization state of a photon. Such experiments have opened the door to distributing data in the form of polarized photon qubits, with a huge bonus: The quantum nature of teleportation makes the transfer of confidential information secure against tampering or eavesdropping. This is not merely an issue in spy novels: Security is essential in a host of electronic transactions that support internet commerce and financial transfers and carry private information.

For security, these transmissions are encrypted, then decoded by the recipient with a secret key sent via a separate secure channel, which is where the method is vulnerable. In a quantum system, however, the key is a random string of qubits, which is tamper-proof: If a third party reads or alters the key, that amounts to a quantum measurement, changing the key in a way that the sender and recipient can detect. With this feature, quantum teleportation raises the possibility of an utterly secure worldwide network implemented through space satellite transmissions over large distances. The 1,200 km transmission of entangled photons was carried out between a space satellite and ground stations.5 It is a first step toward a global quantum internet.

The quantum effects that translate into technology are anti-intuitive and hard to visualize, but one recent development brings us back to the familiar world of Newtonian mechanics with an actual physical force—except that it arises from the quantum vacuum, which unlike the classical idea of vacuum, is not empty. Instead, in the extension of quantum mechanics called quantum field theory, the vacuum of space is the lowest energy state of the universe and supports “virtual” elementary particles that briefly pop into existence. These include virtual photons with varied wavelengths. In 1948, the Dutch theorist Hendrik Casimir predicted that two barely separated parallel metal plates placed in this quantum vacuum would be attracted to each other. This happens because only waves that fit exactly into the gap between the plates survive there, producing a lower energy density than exists outside the plates and hence an inward force. This force is extremely small, and so is the necessary spacing between the plates, around 100 nanometers.

Apart from its usefulness, quantum technology shows that applied quantum physics can broaden fundamental understanding.

Finally in 1997 delicate measurements quantitatively confirmed Casimir’s prediction, and other results show that the effect also occurs for non-metals in different geometries. Since then, researchers in micro- and nano-electromechanical systems—chip-size devices that combine electrical and mechanical functions—have begun exploiting the Casimir force. Its sensitivity to small distances allows ultra-precise measurements by tracking mechanical movements. One promising idea is to use this technology to examine the human heart and brain without physical contact, by measuring the extremely small magnetic fields they generate. At present this is done with bulky equipment that needs cryogenic cooling. An electromechanical chip would instead use the Casimir effect to analyze a heart or brain right in a physician’s office at room temperature.

Apart from its usefulness, quantum technology shows that applied quantum physics can broaden fundamental understanding. Ingenious quantum scientists showed that teleportation can make an end run around the uncertainty principle and achieve a real-world result, secure telecommunications. In this case, researchers learned how to manipulate quantum effects to evade one basic principle; but also appreciate that the secure nature of teleported keys made up of qubits arises from other basic quantum properties, randomness, and sensitivity to measurement.

But will we ever fully understand why quantum theory works so well? Feynman’s graduate adviser, the distinguished theorist John Archibald Wheeler, did not have the answer but clearly stated the goal when he wrote in 1984 that “the most revolutionary discovery in science is yet to come! … not by questioning the quantum, but by uncovering that utterly simple idea that demands the quantum.”

Sidney Perkowitz is Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus, Emory University. His latest books are Physics: A Very Short Introduction and Science Sketches (forthcoming, 2022).

1. Adesso, G., Lo Franco, R., & Parigi, V. Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 376, 20180112 (2018).

2. Valich, L. One small step for electrons, one giant leap for quantum computers. www.rochester.edu (2019).

3. Gambetta, J. IBM’s roadmap for scaling quantum technology. www.research.ibm.com (2020).

4. Wright, K., et al. Benchmarking an 11-qubit computer. Nature Communications 10, 5464 (2019).

5. Popkin, G. China’s quantum satellite achieves “spooky action” at record distance. Science (2017).

Lead image: Bakhtiar Zein / Shutterstock

Our sun is not a typical star. Most stars are one tenth as massive and will live hundreds of times longer than the sun. Moreover, most stars formed billions of years before the sun, based on the observed star formation history since the big bang.

Why were we born so late in cosmic history around a relatively massive star like the sun? Statistically speaking, we were more likely to exist earlier or around a lower-mass star.

The Copernican principle asserts that we are not privileged observers of our universe. It stems from the discovery made half a millennium ago by Nicolaus Copernicus that we are not located at the physical center of the cosmos as thought previously. If this mediocrity principle applies to all of our cosmic circumstances, then there must be physical reasons for why our particular form of intelligent life did not arise around an early or dwarf star.

Two obvious explanations come to mind. First, the material that assembled to make early stars lacked the heavy elements that are essential for life as we know it. This includes the heavy elements that make rocky planets like the Earth, as well as the oxygen and carbon needed for water-based organic chemistry. Second, dwarf stars are fainter, bringing their habitable zone closer in. Given this proximity, Earth-like planets would have their atmosphere stripped by stellar winds or their surface sterilized by UV flares from these dwarf stars.

Nevertheless, many sunlike stars with a similar heavy element abundance must have formed long before the sun because we see the products of their death as white dwarfs. It is therefore difficult to imagine that we are the first advanced civilization to appear on the cosmic scene. Can we find evidence for earlier participants in the cosmic story of life?

One approach is to search for signatures of life around older stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The search could target biosignatures, such as oxygen and methane in the atmospheres of planets around them, or technosignatures, such as radio or laser transmission, industrial pollution or city lights.

A second method is to search for early technological civilizations that produced powerful beacons of light or transformed their environment in ways that are detectable across cosmological distances. For the fingerprints to be visible over the vast universe requires them to possess tremendous advances relative to our technological capabilities, as we are still struggling to harvest a tiny fraction of the solar power intercepted by Earth.

The third and simplest way is to search within our solar system for technological packages that were shipped to interstellar space by advanced civilizations billions of years ago. The Perseverance rover could bump into the wreckage of such objects on the surface of Mars. We could also search our moon, which serves as a museum for collecting ancient artifacts that crashed into it over time, because it lacks an atmosphere that would burn them up before impact and has no geological activity that would mix them with its interior after impact.

In total, we should explore early cosmic life in all possible ways to recognize who predated us and what can we learn from them.

The ancient Greek culture during the time of Homer, the reputed author of the Iliad and Odyssey, valued hospitality to new guests. So much so that the Greek god Zeus was also called Zeus Xenios in his role as a protector of strangers. The concept of xenia reflected the kindness of hospitality.

The ritualized friendship to guests by the ancient Greeks was beneficial, as it enabled them to access new information from visitors who arrived to their doorstep from distant territories. Today, one might regard this motivation as outdated because of the easy flow of information across the Earth through the internet, global trade and air travel. However, the flow of information about life across interstellar space is currently lacking—at least for us. In that context, we should follow the ancient Greeks and endorse xenia with a modern twist.

Interstellar xenia suggests that we should welcome visitors—even if they arrive in the form of old hardware with artificial rather than natural intelligence—which carry information from earlier times. Our technological civilization could benefit greatly from the knowledge it might garner from such encounters. After all, we share the same cosmic neighborhood as these visitors do.

On a recent breezy evening, I noticed an unfamiliar visitor standing in front of my home and asked for his identity. He explained that he used to live in my home half a century ago. I welcomed him to our backyard where he noted that his father buried their cat and placed a tombstone engraved with its name. We went there and found the tombstone.

Our galactic neighborhood could have been visited many times by passing visitors over the past 10 billion years. To find them, we need to monitor the sky and search for unfamiliar objects near our home planet. This is precisely the rationale behind the recently announced Galileo Project, which aims to identify the nature of unusual interstellar objects in the vicinity of Earth.

If we find old visitors, they might provide us with a new perspective about the history of life in our cosmic neighborhood. In so doing, they would bring a deeper meaning to our own life within the keen historic friendship that we owe them in our shared space.

Interstellar xenia might be the key to the prosperity of our culture, just as it led to the intellectual richness of the ancient Greek philosophy and literature.

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Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images

Excerpted from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. © 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Reprinted with permission from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time, we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 B.C. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.
This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat one another badly—the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?
It is basically a theological debate. Essentially, the question is: Are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. “Good” and “evil” are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, was good or evil, because “good” and “evil” are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another.
Nonetheless, on those occasions when people do reflect on the lessons of ancient history, they almost invariably come back to questions of this kind. We are all familiar with the Christian answer: People once lived in a state of innocence yet were tainted by original sin. We desired to be godlike and have been punished for it; now we live in a fallen state while hoping for future redemption.
Today the popular version of this story is typically some updated variation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the “Agricultural Revolution,” and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in “civilization” and “the state”—which also meant the appearance of written literature, science, and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions, and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.

 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Of course, this is a very crude simplification, but it really does seem to be the foundational story that rises to the surface whenever anyone, from industrial psychologists to revolutionary theorists, says something like “but of course human beings spent most of their evolutionary history living in groups of 10 or 20 people,” or “agriculture was perhaps humanity’s worst mistake.” Many popular writers today—including Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Yuval Noah Harari—make the argument quite explicitly. The problem is that anyone seeking an alternative to this rather depressing view of history will quickly find that the only one on offer is actually even worse: if not Rousseau, then Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”— basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else. Insofar as there has been any progress from this benighted state of affairs, a Hobbesian would argue, it has been largely due to exactly those repressive mechanisms that Rousseau was complaining about: governments, courts, bureaucracies, police. This view of things has been around for a very long time.
Human society, in this view, is founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place. The modern-day Hobbesian, then, would argue that, yes, we did live most of our evolutionary history in tiny bands, who could get along mainly because they shared a common interest in the survival of their offspring (“parental investment,” as evolutionary biologists call it). But even these were in no sense founded on equality. There was always, in this version, some “alpha-male” leader. Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts, or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else.
As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:
(1) simply aren’t true,
(2) have dire political implications, and
(3) make the past needlessly dull.
The Dawn of Everything is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful, and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines; evidence that points toward a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.
To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: It is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step toward inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.

 Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images

In short, the prevalent “big picture” of human history—shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike—has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that’s now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.
To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). Such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the 18th century.
The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with Indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk. Revisiting what we will call the “Indigenous critique” means taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those Indigenous peoples who Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels or its devils.
Since the financial crash of 2008, and the upheavals that followed, the question of inequality— and with it, the long-term history of inequality—have become major topics for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes that levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Pointing this out is in itself a challenge to global power structures; at the same time, though, it frames the issue in a way that people who benefit from those structures can still find ultimately reassuring, since it implies no meaningful solution to the problem would ever be possible.
Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (“Can you imagine? The richest 1 percent of the world’s population own 44 percent of the world’s wealth!”)—but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such “unequal” social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others, or that other people end up being told their needs are not important and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality, and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.
What ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.
Today there is a veritable boom of thinking about inequality: Since 2011, “global inequality” has regularly featured as a top item for debate in the World Economic Forum at Davos. There are inequality indexes, institutes for the study of inequality, and a relentless stream of publications trying to project the current obsession with property distribution back into the Stone Age. There have even been attempts to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Paleolithic mammoth hunters. (They both turn out to be very low.) It’s almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies “everyone was equal because they were all equally poor.”
The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 percent.
Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces, or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.
A first step toward a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. Strangely enough, though, this is often seen as a reactionary move. “So, are you saying true equality has never been achieved? That it’s therefore impossible?” It seems to us that such objections are both counterproductive and frankly unrealistic.
First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one—not only in Altamira, but anywhere on Earth—experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that?

Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. Of course, to exercise that capacity implies that there should be something meaningful to decide in the first place.
If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.
What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
This excerpt has been edited slightly for length, style, and clarity.
The post Do Things Have to Be This Way? appeared first on SAPIENS.

Over recent years various “awareness” days and months have increasingly appeared in our calendars. For example, November is simultaneously “National Diabetes Month”, “Men’s Health Awareness Month” and even “National Novel Writing Month”.
Big business has managed to get in on the act and carve out its own awareness day. “Black Friday” – as it is officially known – is the resulting orgy of consumption that now afflicts us in the final week of November.
A cultural imposition from the United States, the term Black Friday was first coined in 1869 after plummeting food prices caused the stock market to crash. Since then it has unfathomably morphed into an all-out celebration of shopping, a day on which stores offer highly promoted sales at heavily discounted prices. In the US, it is routinely the busiest shopping day of the year. An estimated 72.4 million American adults plan to shop on Black Friday, which falls on 26 November this year.
Those who intend to stay at home needn’t feel left out. Black Friday offers something for non-participants/combatants too. Videos of people trampling each other to get their hands on things they could never normally afford – an unedifying and ghoulish spectacle – have in recent years become a source of popular online entertainment, with “Black Friday brawl” videos clocking up tens of thousands of views on YouTube.
Public entertainment has often been derived from watching poor folk fight each other (in this case for fridge freezers and widescreen televisions). But you needn’t engage in poor-baiting to recognise that Black Friday truly brings out the worst in people. Black Friday falls on the day after Thanksgiving in the US. Thus a mere 24 hours after being “thankful” for what they have, frenzied consumers lay siege to retail stores and the unfortunate staff who work there. Who said Americans don’t understand irony?
There is a human cost to all of this. The “Black Friday death count” website records the grim tally of Americans killed and injured while out foraging for bargains (14 deaths and 117 injuries since 2010). The former includes Walter Vance, a 61-year-old pharmacist who collapsed at a Target store in West Virginia in 2011. Rather than coming to his aid, frenzied shoppers stepped over Vance’s incapacitated body as they searched for discounted goods. He later died in hospital.
A few years before, in 2008, a Walmart worker was killed when “out of control” shoppers smashed down the doors of one of the company’s stores in Long Island, New York. According to police and witnesses, store officials who rushed to the victim’s aid were also trampled and reportedly shouted at when they tried to close the store because of the death.
Black Friday first arrived in the UK in 2010. Announced initially by the online retailer Amazon, as a celebration of consumerism it didn’t truly take off until 2013 when supermarket chain Asda (owned at the time by US retail giant Walmart) started promoting heavily discounted deals. Along with the emergence of the exploitative “gig” economy, this formed part of a broader attempt by business to return capitalism to profitability in the aftermath of the global financial crash. As governments in the West tightened their belts and announced solemnly that there was “no money left”, citizens were urged to shop even harder as consumer spending powered the recovery.
Today, as we emerge from the pandemic, we appear to be tiring of the destructive hype. A report by Sitecore, a digital marketing agency, finds that 40 per cent of Brits believe Black Friday no longer offers good deals, while more than a third (35 per cent) associate the day with overconsumption. The same poll records that nearly six in ten of us (58 per cent) prefer experience-based gifts over “more stuff”. Another survey by GlobalData found that nearly two-thirds of shoppers (62 per cent) are not intending to buy anything on Black Friday this year.
Black Friday’s carnival of consumerism feels increasingly untethered from reality in what are for many people financially straightened times. British consumers have already racked up more than £4.1bn in outstanding debt this year. Moreover, the Bank of England is preparing to wean us off of record low interest rates and inflation sits at its highest level in a decade. In the US, household debt now stands at a whopping $15.2trn.
As the emails and promotions arrive in our inboxes this week enticing us to buy things we would never normally buy, there is an even bigger elephant in the room. A 2019 report, which looked at 94 of the world’s biggest cities, found that the consumption of goods and services “including food, clothing, aviation, electronics, construction and vehicles” was responsible for 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Black Friday (together with Christmas) plays its own part in environmental degradation. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, American household waste reportedly increases by more than 25 per cent.
Mindless consumerism may power the economy but it is hastening the destruction of the planet – and at a time when most of us are looking to government to reverse climate change. According to 2020 polling, two-thirds of Britons want the government to take action on climate change; a similar figure was polled in the US.
Yet outsourcing it all to government is a cop out: as individuals, we must undoubtedly reform our own behaviour too. We might kickstart that process by staying at home on this Black Friday (also known simply as “Friday”) and eschewing the “bargains” that are rarely any such thing (nine in ten Black Friday deals are no cheaper than the rest of the year).
As a country we needn’t slavishly follow every cultural fad emanating from the United States – the home of possessive individualism (to possess; to grab). There is also more to life than shopping. Indeed, sustaining a liveable planet depends on each of us acknowledging as much.
[See also: “Dark stores won’t conquer grocery delivery”: Beelivery’s Paul Gott on the future of shopping]

Perhaps you’ve figured this out already: The pandemic will not have a discrete end. The coronavirus will not raise a white flag. There will be no peace treaty, no parade, no announcement from the CDC that the United States is done worrying about COVID. You will not get closure. The signs remain too mixed. The virus continues to spread, even as widening vaccine eligibility, booster shots, and improved medical treatments limit the damage the virus can do. The death rate has been declining since late September, but more than 1,000 Americans have perished each day for most of the past two weeks. A minority of Americans are still acting irresponsibly; a smattering of people would even prefer to lose their job than take a free, lifesaving vaccine.But America remains in limbo for another reason: The Biden administration has yet to come out and say that the emergency is ending. To even contemplate it seems disrespectful to the nearly 800,000 dead. The Delta variant and vaccine resistance scuttled President Joe Biden’s hopes of declaring a “summer of joy” this past Fourth of July. Yet even though the threat still exists, the country needs to be nudged into the recovery phase—and only elected leaders can provide that nudge.Biden and his party pledged to “follow the science” in dealing with the coronavirus. Their embrace of professionalism was a point of distinction between them and former President Donald Trump, who in the early days of the pandemic denied the seriousness of the viral threat and refused to help states acquire essential supplies.Yet the question of when a crisis is over isn’t an objective matter that Anthony Fauci or any other scientific expert can decide. What is an acceptable trade-off between preventing infections and promoting the resumption of pre-pandemic routines? Should employers and school districts base their policies on the expectations of the most risk-averse people or those who have a higher tolerance?[Juliette Kayyem: Unvaccinated people need to bear the burden]Meanwhile, the perception that the emergency has not ended, and perhaps will never end, has consequences too. Some Americans who are acting cautiously—for instance, by routinely masking outdoors, even after being vaccinated—seem more worried than they should be. In areas with high vaccination rates, schools that extend mask mandates longer than necessary or reinstate rigid socializing rules after a few positive tests risk damaging students’ education with marginal benefit to public health. Americans need not throw out all precautions; indeed, efforts to promote vaccination, whether through gentle cajoling of vaccine refusers or overt pressure on employers, are essential to ending the emergency. We must focus urgently on our recovery—and assess how cautious we should be when the virus becomes endemic but widely available vaccines radically reduce the possibility of hospitalization and death.In a normal disaster-management framework, an immediate harm—such as a terrorist attack, an ecological catastrophe, or an earthquake or a hurricane—triggers a multifaceted initial government response: search and rescue, mass sheltering, and emergency medical care. Firefighters, police, health officials, and other professionals step in to protect people who cannot protect themselves. But this period gives way to a recovery mode, in which the focus shifts to mourning the dead, rebuilding damaged physical and social infrastructures, and revitalizing the economy. The first responders who take command in the early days are replaced over time by builders and city planners who, in consultation with the public, chart a long-term plan to get systems running again. Many of the decisions that have to be made in a recovery are judgment calls—mere guesses about the best uses of resources. Indeed, one might call them political.I was working at the Department of Homeland Security when a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The Coast Guard oversaw the immediate efforts to deal with the spill, America’s largest-ever marine oil disaster. But to oversee the recovery, President Barack Obama tapped a politician: the Navy secretary and former Mississippi governor Ray Mabus. Mabus’s job wasn’t to pick up tar balls on the seashore. It was to oversee the billions of dollars in recovery funds that BP had put up to support rebuilding efforts in the fishing and oil industries, the cleaning of marshlands and beaches, and the equitable distribution of funds to Native American and Black communities harmed by the spill.Likewise, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, organized the government’s recovery efforts. He wasn’t saving people from drowning; other professionals had handled the initial phase. Donovan’s mandate was to distribute post-Sandy relief in order to better prepare communities for the future. These roles require not specialized technical expertise but an ability to mediate between competing values and priorities.Similarly, the enormous challenges of America’s pandemic recovery—lost learning and lost staffing in schools, the great exodus from the workforce, and a profound disruption of office life—have no scientific solutions. We must own the political nature of this recovery, and it’s not anti-science to recognize that not all decisions are matters of science.Elected officials do science no favors by putting fundamentally political decisions in the hands of technical experts. The recent local and state pushback against the federal government’s original limited guidance on eligibility for booster shots underscores the problem. Biden himself was pushing for boosters. He clearly understood that, in the face of organized vaccine resistance, many Americans who had been rigorously observing safety protocols for a year and a half would want to maximize their own immunity before resuming travel, in-person work, and other activities. Many public-health experts, in contrast, expressed skepticism about offering boosters to American adults rather than sending vaccine doses overseas. Two top FDA vaccine regulators resigned in protest over what Politico called “Biden’s top-down booster plan.”[Yasmin Tayag: The booster-shot debate was a debacle]In September, the FDA and the CDC authorized booster shots only for certain high-risk groups. But the agencies’ task arguably should have been limited to assessing whether boosters were safe and would help the people to whom they would be administered; the answer on both counts was obviously yes. After even Democratic mayors and governors balked at limitations on booster shots, the FDA and the CDC finally opened up boosters to all adults.The muddle was avoidable. Elected officials must make political decisions without hiding behind scientific advisers’ white coats. Doing so forthrightly will, in the end, protect the integrity of science.The coronavirus arrived like a tidal wave, but its worst effects are now ebbing, at least for vaccinated people. The United States has entered a phase that I have previously described as an adaptive recovery, a long period in which the virus persists but Americans figure out how best to manage it. The choice now facing the U.S. is whether to acknowledge the progress we’ve made—and the subjective, political, nonscientific nature of the value judgments that face us.

European integration was very succesful when the Comman Market was shaped.

This success came to an end when the EU was shaped and the Euro implemented, some 20 years ago.

- the EU turned the cooperation of friends, doing business together and building a huge market, into a bloc. The numbers of rulings were tremendously expanded and internal beaurocratic politics expanded.

- the introduction of the Euro was a disaster. It was recklessly implemented by France and the EU commission. It led to the Greek and very costly Euro crises.

That very diverse economies adopt a common currency seldom turns into a success.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and others warned for that.

However Europhiles never listen, their ambition to achieve a Superstate justifies everything.

The Euro created just mistrust, at at time you needed trust.

Now, after the Next Generation Corona Fund, the question arises how to proceed with the EU.

The EU has been very beneficial to France and Italy. But their debts had to be paid for by Northern members. Draghy has done a good job is granted.

However the author suggests that the EU should proceed by introducing EU taxes.

But in light of the experience over the past two decades, I think we should consider how the ties can be loosened.

For examply by introducing an Euro for the weaker economies. Or by appointing a Northern European as a President of the ECB.

The author speaks only speaks about 3 EU members. However the EU has 27 members.

The idea of the Union is that cooperation is being encouraged. We do not need another ambitious leader surpressing the others.

And why would the EU be involved in former French colonies in Africa ? Why would the EU sail with submarines in the Pacific ?

(Photograph by Brent Stirton/Getty Images.)(Editor’s note: Jonah Goldberg’s syndicated column appears in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday and runs in The Dispatch and other publications on Wednesday. We are running this as a supplement to the brief post from Jonah and Steve on Sunday night explaining their decision to leave Fox News.) As we shared with Dispatch members and readers on Sunday, Steve and I quit Fox News after more than a decade each as contributors. The decision was a long time in coming. Like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it came gradually and then suddenly.The sudden part came thanks to Fox host Tucker Carlson’s streaming special Patriot Purge. It’s a perfect example of propaganda that weaves half-truths into a whole lie. It insinuates that the January 6 riot at the Capitol might have been a “false flag operation,” orchestrated by the FBI or the Deep State. Worse, it suggests the Biden administration is coming for the “real patriots”— i.e., Trump voters. “The domestic war on terror is here,” says one of the “experts” in Patriot Purge. “It’s coming after half of the country.”This dangerous nonsense was the last straw for me (and Steve). It was an unhappy decision for us. We have many friends at the network, and there are many people, particularly on the news side, that do good, honest journalism.People keep asking me, “Why’d it take you so long?” The short answer is we hoped— and had reason to believe—that Fox would get back on course, and we wanted to help get it there. If your view is that Fox News was always irredeemably bad, that explanation will fall flat. I can’t help you there. But for us, the release of Patriot Purge was proof that waiting for Fox to get back on track would be like waiting for Godot.I also have a broader point to make. As a fairly prominent critic of Donald Trump from the political right, one of my chief frustrations with Fox, and with cable news generally, is what you might call manufactured consensus.Liberals are expected to be loyal Democrats and to criticize Republicans, and vice versa for conservatives. Superficially, that’s understandable, even though it erases the fact that most of the interesting debates in America are intra-partisan. But here’s the real problem. Opinion journalists are treated as interchangeable with partisan flacks who are literally paid to defend a party and its positions.Over time, if you’re not careful, it’s easy to internalize the idea that your job as an opinion journalist is to carry water for your party, at least on TV. The last thing a producer wants is some pundit offering nuanced criticism of his own side. Everything has to be a fight between the extremes. This dynamic has always existed at MSNBC and CNN as well as at Fox.But Trump’s ascendency made things much worse at Fox. Because Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist, he has no tolerance for criticism, and neither do his very vocal fans among the viewers and the punditocracy. This is why he was a leading champion of “cancel culture,” attacking conservative critics like Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Steve, and me.Traditionally, conservatives—including conservative politicians—influence presidents by praising them when they make the right decisions and criticizing them when they don’t. Trump was impervious to criticism, and over time, many conservatives stopped offering it and Fox stopped providing opportunities to present any kind of critique.As a result, if you watched only Fox, particularly Fox prime time, you’d have little idea that even some very pro-Trump Republicans are nuanced about Trump. They might hate his enemies or like some of his policies, but they might also dislike the way he handled COVID or used Twitter to vent petty grievances. Such objections to Trump, however legitimate, were cast as left-wing propaganda or irrational Trump hatred — or both.I’ve talked to scores of elected Republicans and conservative pundits, with opinions ranging from principled disagreement to outright contempt for Trump. But good luck getting many of them to say it publicly. The message, amplified constantly by Trump and his boosters, is that all “true” conservatives love Trump in every regard.In the wake of the January 6 riot, it became routine for Trump partisans to claim that criticism of his effort to steal the election amounted to an insult to everyone who voted for Trump, as if 74 million people voted for the riot and the lies that led to it.That’s the propagandistic mindset behind that new “war on terror” nonsense. The government is not coming for “half the country”—it’s lawfully prosecuting a few hundred people who broke the law on January 6. But we’re supposed to believe that the Trump base is not merely indivisible but defined by a tiny sliver of the worst actors on the right. That’s the real insult to the 74 million.

Can you be addicted to video games? In 2018, the WHO decided to create a new entry in its big book of recognised diseases, the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD-11. That entry was “gaming disorder” or “internet gaming disorder” (IGD), also known as gaming addiction, which involves “impaired control over gaming… gaming [taking] precedence over other life interests and daily activities… [and] negative consequences”.
You can even be treated for it. You can get specialist treatment at a dedicated NHS clinic. South Korea has gaming “rehab centres”. Gaming addicts have “lost interest in their own lives” and “​​do not feel the passing of time in the real world”, according to a doctor who treats the condition there.

But it is far from clear that “gaming disorder” or gaming addiction exists, at least as a well-defined condition separate from any other compulsive behaviour; and there is a hint that the WHO has made the decision under political pressure from China and other countries. 
The WHO says that its decision was based on “reviews of available evidence and reflects a consensus of experts from different disciplines”. But when you look at WHO-commissioned evidence, the studies are completely wild. This review of the literature carried out on behalf of the WHO found that “the prevalence of IGD ranged from 0.21-57.5% in general populations”. This one was rather less crazy, but the studies it was aggregating found that between 0.16% and 14% of people had the disease. Another found 0.7% to 25%.
For comparison, about 8% of people who take opioids in the US end up addicted. So video games might, if we take those numbers at face value, be several times as addictive as opioid painkillers, which seems… unexpected. Or, equally, it could barely exist at all.
More from this authorThere is no spiking epidemicBy Tom Chivers
“The problem,” says Dr Pete Etchells, a psychologist at Bath Spa University and author of Lost in a Good Game, “is that depending on your definition, your understanding of who has or doesn’t have this disease varies wildly in the literature”. That is because, he says, “we don’t know what it looks like, we don’t know what it is, and we don’t know what its unique features are that separate it from other behavioural or impulse disorders”.
Obviously, some people have problems with playing video games too much. You will have read stories about South Korean teenagers wetting themselves rather than getting up from their gaming chair, or people developing blood clots. But rare anecdotes don’t tell us much about the wider problem, and people can develop problematic relationships with almost every form of enjoyable human activity — with exercise, with sex, with tanning.
The question is whether there is something unique to gaming which causes these problems. Dr Andy Przybylski, a psychologist at the Oxford Internet Institute, has worked on gaming addiction in the past, and argues that — as far as we know — there isn’t. He carried out a study in 2017, which looked at people who were classified as “addicted” to gaming at one time, and checked whether they still were six months later. If gaming “addiction” was comparable to, say, tobacco, gambling, or alcohol addiction, then you’d expect that most people would be. 
But as it turned out, of the 6,000 people recruited, none of them met the diagnostic criteria for gaming disorder at both the beginning and the end of the study. That is, no one stayed “addicted” for six months. Dr Netta Weinstein, another author of the study, told me at the time that it’s “a question of whether a diagnosis is stable”, and it suggests that internet gaming probably isn’t an addiction like smoking or alcohol.
Przybylski, then, was surprised to see that the WHO decided to classify IGD as a separate illness, and has been asking the WHO whether or not they have any more evidence. Recently he received an email which said: “It is challenging, if not impossible, to document and communicate through WHO channels the rationale and justification for each decision.” 
But obviously you can prove, or at least provide strong and convincing evidence for, the existence of most illnesses, and the WHO could very straightforwardly point to that evidence. There’s a reason why Covid denialists are considered crackpots and cranks: because it’s pretty straightforward to develop diagnostic tests which show you the presence of a virus, and you can tell that the presence of that virus correlates strongly with a particular set of negative health outcomes.
With psychiatric conditions, of course, the picture is often messier. You can’t swab someone and see if they have depression; you can only ask them a series of questions, or observe their behaviour. But there are established criteria by which to do so, and when you test someone with one twice, a week apart, they usually give the same answer.
But with gaming disorder, as we’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case. So the WHO creating a new diagnostic category is a big deal. It gives clinicians licence to treat the disorder, and — perhaps more importantly — it tells people, and parents, that gaming disorder is a real thing. “It’s a very emotive topic,” says Etchells. “If you say suddenly that games can be addictive, so many people play them that that can be a really scary thing. We already know that parents are scared and concerned. Throwing it out there without any explanation or caveating, I feel it’s quite irresponsible.” He worries that the WHO decision will pathologise normal, healthy behaviour, like playing video games after work to destress.
The question, then, is why has the WHO done it? They didn’t need to; the American Psychiatric Association hasn’t yet added it to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists hasn’t formally recognised it. 
One possible answer is that the WHO has been pressured into doing it. Professor Geoffrey Reed, a medical psychologist at Columbia University and senior project officer for the WHO’s ICD-11, told another psychologist by email in 2016 that the WHO was “under enormous pressure, especially from Asian countries” to include IGD.
(I’ve asked both Professor Reed and the WHO about this; the WHO has declined to comment at short notice, and if Prof Reed gets back to me, I’ll include any response here.)
There has been huge concern about video gaming in several east Asian countries. In Japan and South Korea, there have been years of worries about the “hikikomori”, young adults who shut themselves off from society, living in their parents’ homes, never leaving, eating delivery food, watching Netflix, browsing the internet and playing games. The phenomenon has also been widely reported in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. These countries are huge consumers and producers of video games, and notably of spectator e-sports, and people have been quick to blame video games for the condition.
And this has led to a widespread reaction which looks suspiciously like a moral panic. South Korea banned under-16s from playing internet games between the hours of midnight and 6am in 2011 to improve children’s sleep, a decision that was only overturned in August. Etchells says that research showed the ban was counterproductive — it increased children’s time on the internet and “had no meaningful effect on increasing sleep”. China recently enacted an even more stringent law, banning under-18s from using internet games between 10pm and 8am. 
Societies are entitled to ban anything they want, of course. But the concern is that they’re hiding behind science to do it. “It’s an extreme example of people pathologising things they find distasteful,” says Dr Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist at King’s College London. “Some people find video games distasteful — they don’t like the idea of kids shooting at each other. But you have to ask what the quality of the evidence is.” Przybylski agrees: “If people want to create rules, they should create rules. But if you’re saying it’s based on evidence or science, you should show your notes.”
Suggested readingDoes Grand Theft Auto save lives?By Stuart Ritchie
“We’re talking about very complex generational issues, and trying to explain them by looking at one simple factor, and that’s never the case,” says Etchells. If there was a simple causal link, he points out, given the billions of users, you’d expect to see enormous effects, not weird ambiguous trends in messy data.
The trouble is, as Przybylski says, that mental health provision is poorly resourced and expensive. If a teenager is diagnosed with a mental health condition in the UK, he says, “they can age out of being a teenager before you’re seen by a psychiatrist”. Video game addiction, on the other hand, is shiny and exciting, and it sounds cheap, because it seems like there’s an off switch — just turn off the console!
But it comes at a cost. For one thing, even if hikikomori is a real problem in China and other countries, and even if a causal link can be shown to video games, it makes no sense to create a global diagnosis for a highly region-specific problem. For another, it frightens gamers and their parents, perhaps unnecessarily, and gives cover to any old quack or charlatan who wants to promise to treat “gaming addiction” at their expensive clinic, despite there being no clear diagnostic criteria and no agreed treatment.
Most of all, though, there’s a reputational risk for the WHO. “It’s putting its credibility on the line,” says Przybylski. It’s supposed to be a neutral scientific body: it cannot be seen to be making scientific decisions for political reasons. For the last two years, it’s faced criticism of cosying up to China over Covid – praising the Chinese government for transparency and for “setting a new standard for outbreak response” even as it censured doctors for trying to spread the word about the disease. If it transpires that the WHO has put gaming disorder into the ICD-11 as a result of political pressure, whether from China or elsewhere, its credibility will be even more undermined.
The academic community and the WHO have “really dropped the ball” on gaming disorder, says Etchells, rather than being brave enough to stop, take stock, and work out whether it really exists at all as a coherent concept. “I can see how it’s difficult for the WHO to go against these strong opinions, but they need to,” he says. “They can’t come up with disease classifications built on politics.”

Three centers of power increasingly dominate our lives, but are less and less accountable: The Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, and Big Tech.

The Supreme Court

Start with the high court. These nine unelected individuals--all appointed for life--are about to revolutionize America in ways the majority of Americans don't want. This court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 reproductive rights ruling; declare a century-old New York law against carrying firearms unconstitutional; and strip federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency of the power to regulate private businesses. And much more.

Let me remind you that five of the current justices were put there by presidents who lost the popular vote in their first election. Only 40 percent of the public now approves of the Supreme Court's performance, a new low. Yet because justices are appointed for life, its members are immune to checks and balances, no matter how unpopular their rulings may be.

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve is almost as unaccountable as the high court.

Presidents appoint Fed chairs for 4-year terms, but tend to stick with them longer for fear of rattling Wall Street, which wants stability and fat profits. (Alan Greenspan, a Reagan appointee, lasted almost 20 years, surviving two Bushes and Bill Clinton). President Biden has just reappointed Jerome Powell, the current Fed chair, for example.

Because it sets interest rates and regulates finance, the Fed can either keep the economy going near full employment or put millions of people out of work. Powell has kept interest rates near zero --appropriate for an economy still suffering the ravages of the pandemic.

But he has also bailed out America's biggest corporations by taking on their junk debt, which they then used to buy back their own stock to the benefit of their CEOs and major investors. And he's allowed Wall Street to go back to risky betting--prompting Senator Elizabeth Warren to say this:

Warren: "Your record gives me grave concern. Over and over you have acted to make our banking system less safe, and that makes you a dangerous man to head up the fed.

Big Tech

Lastly, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook all wield enormous power over our lives, and they too are unaccountable to the public good. They're taking on roles that once belonged to the government, whether it's blasting into space or running cybersecurity.

And their decisions about which demagogues are allowed to communicate with the public and what lies they're allowed to spew have profound consequences for whether democracy or authoritarianism prevails.

Worst of all, they're sowing hate and division. As Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed, Facebook's algorithm is designed to choose content that will make users angry. Why? Anger generates the most engagement--and user engagement turns into ad dollars. (The same is likely true of the algorithms used by Google, Amazon, and Apple.)

And yet, decisions at these companies are accountable only to their shareholders, not the public.

Beware. Democracy depends on accountability. If abuses of power go unchallenged, those who wield power will continue to consolidate it. It's a vicious cycle that erodes faith in democracy and breeds cynicism.

So how do we break the cycle and hold these power centers accountable?

Rotate Supreme Court justices with appellate judges and add more justices to the Court. Demand transparency from the Fed, and have an open debate on who should run it instead of letting Wall Street effectively decide. And finally, treat Big Tech companies as public utilities and regulate them, or break them up.

I'll be honest. It will take vast amounts of public pressure and intentional organizing to get these solutions enacted.

Our only option is to turn up the pressure and keep fighting for our democracy.

Watch:

Linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky this week condemned the Biden administration's aggressive anti-China foreign policy, while dismissing the imperialist notion that Beijing poses a threat to the United States and urging a departure from the "provocation" that for decades has characterized the U.S. stance toward the rising giant.

"There is constant talk about what is called the China threat... What exactly is the China threat?"

Appearing on Democracy Now! earlier this week, Chomsky--a renowned critic of American militarism--accused President Joe Biden of continuing a perilous policy of confrontation with China.

While acknowledging that Biden "has eliminated some of the more gratuitously savage elements" of former President Donald Trump's policies--including suspending U.S. funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)--Chomsky contended that "the trajectory is not optimistic."

"Biden has pretty much picked up Trump's foreign policy," he asserted. "The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That is very dangerous."

Chomsky continued:

By now there is constant talk about what is called the China threat. You can read it in sober, reasonable, usually reasonable journals, about the terrible China threat, and that we have to move expeditiously to contain and limit the China threat. What exactly is the China threat? Actually that question is rarely raised here. It is discussed in Australia, the country that is right in the claws of the dragon. Recently the distinguished statesman, former Prime Minister Paul Keating, did have an essay in the Australian press about the China threat. He finally concluded realistically that the China threat is China's existence.

Speaking at the National Press Club of Australia earlier this month, Keating--who served as prime minister representing the center-left Labour Party from 1991 to 1996--accused his country's right-wing government of acting against its own interests by supporting the United States as it engages in what anti-imperialists have called "saber-rattling" over Taiwan.

"Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest," Keating insisted in his controversial speech. "We have no alliance with Taipei."

"We are committed to ANZUS for an attack on U.S. forces, but... not an attack by U.S. forces, which means Australia should not be drawn, in my view, into a military engagement over Taiwan," he added, referring to the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty.

That Cold War-era pact is now 60 years old. More recently, the U.S. and some of its close allies have antagonized Beijing by signing the anti-China Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) military agreement. The U.S., Australia, India, and Japan have also launched the Quadrilateral Security Dialog to address concerns about China.

"One U.S. submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons."

Chomsky said U.S. antagonism toward China is motivated by the fact that the burgeoning superpower cannot be controlled by Washington.

"The U.S. will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does but pursues its own course," he said. "That is the threat."

While acknowledging the "terrible things" the Chinese government does within its own borders, Chomsky insisted that "they are not a threat."

Turning the rhetorical tables, he asked: "Is the U.S. support for Israel's terrorist war against two million people in Gaza where children are being poisoned--a million children are facing poisoning because there's no drinkable water, is that a threat to China?"

"It is a horrible crime," he said, "but it is not a threat to China."

Critics of U.S. foreign policy have noted that while China has not started a war in over a generation, the United States has invaded, bombed, or occupied over a dozen nations since the 1980s.

Chomsky called the imbalance in military power between the United States--which has thousands of nuclear weapons and spends more money on its war machine than the next 10 nations combined--and China "laughable."

"One U.S. submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons," he noted. "China in the South China Sea has four old noisy submarines which can't even get out because they're contained by superior U.S. and allied force."

As Americans worked around the clock to evacuate soldiers, diplomats, and allies earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Afghans rushed to flee their war-torn country. Some drove to the nearest land borders in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Iran. The lucky ones found refuge in a handful of Western countries, while other countries strengthened border security measures to prevent any immigration whatsoever.

It is at this inauspicious moment that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s latest book, “Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights,” is remarkably prescient. Ali is an immigrant success story. Surviving the suffocating pieties of Islamic fundamentalism across the Middle East and Africa, Ali sought sanctuary in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, Europe was not the safe harbour she envisioned. Her collaboration with filmmaker Theo van Gogh to document the mistreatment of Islamic women led to the documentarian’s assassination at the hands of a radicalized Dutch Moroccan Muslim. Ali fled to America, renounced her Islamic faith, and went into hiding with around-the-clock bodyguards.

These distressing firsthand experiences frame Ali’s discussion of Islam throughout her book. “As an immigrant and former asylum seeker of Somali origin, I am for immigration. I have no objection to people packing up their possessions and leaving their homes to try to improve their circumstances. I completely understand why they would wish to do so because I did it myself,” Ali acknowledges.

However, “My concern is with the attitudes some bring with them, with the behaviors that these attitudes generate in a minority of migrants, and with the seeming inability of Western countries to understand how to cope with the resulting problems.”

Unlike the usual suspects who dismiss the latest conservative “white-replacement fearmongering” about Afghani refugees, “Prey” is an earnest and thoughtful investigation of the challenges multiculturalism poses to sexual equality. Ali argues that European women’s rights have been eroded in recent decades largely due to Muslim migration and the failures of cultural assimilation.

The statistics she marshals are staggering. Although predominantly Muslim asylum seekers make up less than 1 percent of Austrians, in 2017 they represented 11 percent of the accused in all reported rapes and sexual harassment cases.

Similar arithmetic is found in Denmark, where “non-Western” immigrants and their descendants accounted for roughly 40 percent of rapes and 25-33 percent of groping convictions despite comprising approximately 10 percent of the population. Swedish public television aired a documentary on sex crimes based on court rulings from 2012-2017 finding 58% of perpetrators were foreign-born.

Sprinkled throughout the book are dozens of harrowing accounts. Youth offenders raping female concertgoers and receiving community service; Swedish pamphlets notifying migrants about “Information for you who are married to a child” (yes, you read that right); German brochures instructing swimming pool patrons not to grope women and girls.

Surrendering Women’s Rights to Wokeness

Identity politics and its fetishization of multiculturalism has curtailed frank discussions about the cultural baggage young Muslim men as a group carry with them. Look no further than Jill Filipovic’s hatchet job review of “Prey.” Highlighting the mundane fact that young Muslim males frequently hold views antithetical to Western feminism is, in Filipovic’s mind, “bigotry.”

The brunt of Ali’s thesis “latches onto the trope of men of color threatening virtuous white women,” Filipovic contends, seemingly unaware of the book’s section explicitly examining “migrant-on-migrant” victimization. Moreover, where would such a robust analysis be without a parting shot comparing Ali to Hitler?

The rift separating Ali and Filipovic exemplifies the broader intellectual divide plaguing Westerners these days. While both condemned Joe Biden’s “betrayal” of Afghanistan, mourning the impending brutalization of women under Taliban rule, their views on migration and assimilation could not be farther apart. Filipovic’s review is a microcosm of how important issues raised in “Prey” are routinely, and disingenuously, dismissed.

It is these very progressive voices, Ali argues, that have surrendered women’s rights to the golden calf of wokeness. Ali terms this tension “The Feminist Predicament,” lamenting how “the concepts of universal women’s rights yielded ground to the new ideals of multiculturalism and intersectionality.”

The blame lies squarely on “Western feminists” who argue “that imposing their values on the Muslim world was a form of neocolonialism.” Consequently, European institutions — police, media, judges, academia — have buried and obscured damning stories about sexual assault in the name of multiculturalism.

Look no further than the Rochdale child sex trafficking gang outside Manchester. From 1997 until 2013, the group exploited “at least 1,400 children,” an independent inquiry revealed afterward. Breaking up the ring led to the arrests of nine men: eight Pakistani and one Afghan.

Unfortunately, police downplayed and ignored earlier accusations of abuse from victims because of their discomfort over allegations of racism. As the post-op investigation noted:

By far the majority of perpetrators were described as ‘Asian’ by victims, yet throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue. Some councillors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.

Labour Member of Parliament Ann Cryer had raised the alarm a decade earlier following direct testimonials from mothers of abused children. However, when Cryer sought to spotlight the issue, she was ostracized from Labour and called a racist.

Likewise, when reports throughout Germany emerged on New Year’s Eve 2015 that thousands of women had been sexually assaulted in public, Ali shows how authorities equivocated. Officials and journalists downplayed the disproportionate role of young migrant men despite accounts suggesting otherwise. The majority of those indicted following the episode were Algerian, Moroccan, and Iraqi. Similar coverups occurred in Sweden.

Where Is Me Too Now?

Growing social awareness in the wake of Me Too should have clarified the importance of confronting sexism and sexual assault publicly and proactively. That’s what woke activists mean by “silence is violence.” However, cowed by these very activists, authorities have turned a blind eye to the escalating sexist violence.

European women are now claustrophobically painted into a corner. Many, as Ali documents throughout the book, are fearful of being “called a racist” despite their leftist and antiracist credentials. Forced to fend for themselves, women are beginning to fill the void left in the absence of political leadership. German entrepreneur Sandra Seilz created rape-proof underwear because she narrowly survived a gang rape while jogging.

Fears of physical violence have transformed daily life for European women. Ali cites studies from the European Union and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that find European women are increasingly immobile compared to men. Like Seilz, many have been compelled to recognize “no-go zones” or to innovate, developing “harassment map apps” alerting female tourists against visiting specific locales.

This is the simple reality “Prey” seeks to voice. Women, not men, will suffer from the “see no sexism, hear no sexism” farce of identity politics; that cancel culture and stifling speech will endanger women not men; that hard-fought feminist victories can be undone.

Today, many feminists are fearful of speaking up and being branded a racist, xenophobe, or Islamophobe. Thankfully, Aayan Hirsi Ali is willing to.

Ari David Blaff is a freelance journalist based in Toronto. His writings have appeared in National Review, Tablet, Quillette, and Globe & Mail.

Dear Readers, This week you will find a thorough legal analysis of the Rittenhouse trial by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Faculty Director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute. You'll find that Sullivan's analysis looks at the facts of the case, and the details of Wisconsin law, two elements that have been conspicuously absent from some high-profile media commentary.In addition to Sullivan on the Rittenhouse trial, we have Aaron Sarin on the vanishing of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai and Robert Tracinski on a growing rift in the American Right with The Enemy of My Enemy.We also have two new essays on the dynamics of social media and distorted beliefs by Thomas Harper and R. James Carter, and following this thread, don't miss Jon Kay on the parallels between conspiracism and contemporary social justice rituals. For our American readers celebrating Thanksgiving, we wish you a very happy and healthy holiday full of laughter, good cheer, and loved ones. 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Sullivan Jr.The Enemy of My EnemyDuring a recent conference of nationalist conservatives—a faction attempting to bring intellectual substance and coherence to the political phenomenon of Trumpism—one of the movement’s leading figures, Yoram Hazony, proposed “a new deal between national conservatives and traditionalists on the one h…QuilletteRobert TracinskiOn Pleasurable BeliefsIn November 2021, a few hundred people set up camp outside Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, where John F. Kennedy was assassinated 58 years earlier. The people gathered there believed that the slain president’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, was aboutQuilletteThomas HarperWe Can’t Keep Going Like ThisAll the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust. ~J.M. 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For all other animals, survival knowledge is extro-genetic.For humans, survival knowledge is extra-genetic. We are not born with a sufficient, pre-wired, instinctual code that will automatically direct our actions towards life-sustaining behavior. Everything we must know to fulfill the conditions of our human existence must be learned.Unfortunately, everything that we learn is not life-enhancing. Sometimes, what we are taught, and then either by mistake or by force, integrate into our thinking, is contrary to the conditions of human life. 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When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murdering two men during anti-racism protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week, the verdict was celebrated by far-right politicians and pundits across the US. Several Republican lawmakers offered Rittenhouse an internship and Fox News host Tucker Carlson called him “a sweet kid”.

Kathleen Belew, a historian of American white power movements and author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, argues that the fact that Rittenhouse’s trial is being read as a victory by more mainstream components of the right has the potential to serve as a rallying cry for increased militant vigilantism against US racial justice protesters.

Belew spoke with the Guardian about how perpetrators of rightwing violent action in the US have been empowered by verdicts like Rittenhouse’s in the past, and how the outcome of the case should be read in the context of growing militant social movements.

Kathleen Belew is a historian of American white power movements. Photograph: Brian McConkey/Harvard University Press

On Friday, when Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty of all charges, you tweeted: “It has never taken more than a whisper of approval to fan the flames of militant right action, and the Kenosha acquittal is a shout.” What did you mean by that?

There have been many acquittals and partial verdicts that the white power movement and militant groups have taken as signs that they can continue their activities unabated. I’m thinking of the acquittals in the Greensboro trials at state, federal and civil levels, [when members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi party shot and killed five marchers in an anti-Klan rally organized by the Communist Workers party in 1979], the acquittals in the seditious conspiracy trial in 1987-88 [after an all-white jury acquitted 13 white supremacists who were charged with plotting to overthrow the US government and kill federal officials] and the partial prosecution of Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City bombing, where we saw the conviction of just one of a few conspirators rather than a prosecution geared at a movement, which is what this was.

I think Kenosha is a much more significant moment. It’s not my place to second-guess our judicial system. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in jury trial. But we know from the historical record that every time there is an incident like this, it has set off renewed activity by the white power movement, often with imminent casualties. Kenosha has not just been watched by extremists, but by a whole bunch of people on the right. It is a moment that animates not only the fringe, which is what we’ve seen before, but also components of the mainstream.

On the topic of the fringe and the mainstream, I often find myself not wanting to use the word extremist any more because it seems like we’re seeing fringe beliefs increasingly become more mainstream.

I’m a historian. The period I study is the 1980s and the 1990s and in that time period the white power movement really did not think it had any chance of making inroads in mainstream politics. But that’s clearly not the case any more. There was just a story going around about how at least 28 elected officials are current or former members of the Oath Keepers, which is an extrajudicial militia group, a private army. The idea that we can have elected officials from a private army is deeply, deeply concerning.

To clear up for readers who may get snarled when we use the word militia: all legal militia activity was incorporated into state national guard units in 1903 in the Dick Act. Everything else is extralegal. There are laws in the books in all 50 states that limit having private armies. And yet here they are. We have elected officials who report to these groups.

There are at least 10 people who participated in the insurrection on 6 January and have now been elected into office in the GOP. We’re not talking any more about one person with questionable quotes or one person who said something scandalous a long time ago. We’re talking about a movement of people who are acting in concert. This is a much different thing. We need to not only be thinking about the threat of mass casualty events, which has been imminent for the last several years, but also the threat to our democratic system.

In 2019, there were mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, El Paso, Texas, and Poway, California . In each of these cases, the alleged shooter posted a manifesto on the message board 8Chan. In October 2018, before the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, the shooter posted on the social media site Gab. Kyle Rittenhouse used social media to find community in his militant beliefs. The use of social media is one connective piece between these shootings. As a historian, do you see these events as interconnected?

Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Photograph: Harvard University Press

We tend to treat acts of politically motivated violence by people affiliated with the militant right and the white power movement as carried out by individual or the work of a few bad actors. You’ll often see the phrase “lone wolf terrorism”, though I have not seen that used as much around Kyle Rittenhouse. This is a more complex story, partially because he was a child at the time of the shooting and partly, because the way that the organization worked was somewhat different than usual. It was a sort of flash mob called for via Facebook more than an organized action by a coherent group that met before. But that doesn’t mean it’s not ideological.

The thing that we have to remember is that first of all, the idea of the lone wolf came from the white power movement in the 1980s with the express purpose of confusing everybody about what this movement was. It follows an action called “leaderless resistance” that is effectively cell-styled terror and both of those things are meant to direct public attention away from what it is, which is just an interconnected social movement.

So when we think about Charlottesville, Charleston, El Paso and Pittsburgh and the other communities that have been impacted by this violence, what we usually see is El Paso branded as anti-Latino violence, Charleston as anti-Black violence and Pittsburgh as antisemitic violence, but they’re all acts of white power violence. And by putting these stories together, I think these communities can link more effectively in efforts to combat this problem.

What is the role of social media platforms, both as curators of news and as gatherings places for the communities that can foster violence?

One thing to remember, that people often don’t, is that white power activists have been using social network activism since the early 1980s with pre-internet computer-to-computer message boards. They had a network called Liberty Net, which they established by distributing millions of dollars in stolen money to groups all around the country and then instructing them to get Apple computers and then directing them in how to set up and use this network. And the network, in 1983-84, had not only things like assassination targets and ideological content, they also had things like personal ads. This is tiny compared to the juggernaut that is social media in all of our lives today, but it’s important to remember that these activists are decades, if not generations, into using technology. They were early adopters, if not pioneers, of this kind of work.

It would be a mistake to think that they won’t be able to, or ready to, manipulate this kind of space.

We’ve talked about how the acquittal of Rittenhouse creates a backdrop of permissiveness for people with hateful beliefs, but how does that play out looking forward?

I would say that there are two main components. One is what is happening with legislation and court action around gun ownership, where we really do see the needle move further and further toward unfettered access to weapons with absolutely no barrier every time there are decisions that increase permissiveness.

The other part of it has to do with white power and militant right groups that are essentially opportunistic. They are looking for a window and this is a big window. Because what it does is, it allows them to not only mount similar shootings like the one carried out in Kenosha to see if they could do it elsewhere, it also lets them mobilize in a sector of the rightwing mainstream that is sympathetic to the Rittenhouse story.

This is kind of a bonanza of a case. And we should be attuned as well to the verdicts that are coming out of the Ahmaud Arbery shooting and in Charlottesville with the Kessler civil action, which I’m sure will be read along the same lines.

Editor’s note: On Tuesday a jury found the key organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, responsible for $25m in damages to counter-protesters under state law. The jury remained deadlocked on whether the organizers violated federal civil rights law.

There are more than 200 dead bodies on Mount Everest. Some of these frozen corpses – of mountaineers who succumbed to hypoxia or exhaustion, or got caught in blizzards, or fell into ravines – are lying in plain view, and have to be stepped over by later climbers. One calculation suggests that there’s a one in 20 chance that, once you reach the top, you won’t make it back down. Why on earth do people take this risk?

This question – of why people willingly choose danger and suffering in their life – motivates the psychologist Paul Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot. It’s not just mountaineering: he also covers more mundane, but still puzzling, choices. Why do people watch films that make them scared and disgusted? Why do people have sexual fantasies – and practices – that involve violence? Why do they have kids?

These are all tricky to explain if you’re a pure hedonist and believe that people merely want to maximise the amount of pleasure they have in their life. Many of the things we find pleasurable involve a large dose of real (or imagined) pain. One way out of this paradox is to say that we value effort: if some outcome, such as climbing Everest, involves a struggle, it has higher value. If you were helicoptered to the summit, it just wouldn’t feel the same (OK, successfully flying a helicopter to the top of Everest is also extremely effortful, but you know what I mean).

Bloom only obliquely references economics, but this discussion is redolent of one of the biggest historical debates in that subject. Is the worth of some product determined by how much work someone puts in to make it? Adam Smith thought so; Karl Marx made it the basis of his theory of capitalism. But modern economists aren’t fans of the labour theory of value: there are too many phenomena it just can’t explain (I’d be willing to pay a great deal for a can opener if I were starving and all I had was a tin of peaches, but not so much if there were already such a tool in my kitchen – the value of things is contextual and subjective).

Meaningful pursuits – such as having children – often bring suffering along for the ride

So too for the effort theory of pleasure. Not only does it fail to shed much light on horror movies or BDSM (for those, Bloom runs through a series of evolutionary-tinged rationales, which he admits are often tenuous – for instance, is watching scary films a kind of “practice” for encountering danger in real life?), but it’s also missing meaning. Meaningful pursuits – such as having children – often bring suffering “along for the ride”, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Even if The Sweet Spot lacks the opinion-changing gravity of Bloom’s previous book, Against Empathy, it still throws up many questions. Bloom has a cheerful writing style that’s impossible to dislike – the opposite of academics who apparently believe in an effort theory that adds value to their impenetrable, jargon-filled texts.

My own form of masochism is reading those academic texts, checking whether the studies cited in popular-psychology books stack up. The Sweet Spot weaves in studies to back up philosophical points, and little of it hinges on this or that result being solid. Nevertheless, there are some references I probably would not have used: the statistics in a study on people’s mood while listening to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring don’t look entirely convincing; and given the absolute pounding it has had over the past decade, I’d probably just keep away from the literature on ego depletion (the idea that willpower is a finite resource).

But this is nitpicking – Bloom is clear that the evidence he cites varies in strength, and is hardly uncritical in general. Indeed, at one point he debunks the entire theory of post-traumatic growth. The idea – that those who suffer can not only bounce back but can improve themselves in unique ways – is both Pollyanna-ish and callous, and Bloom is rightly sceptical. He offers a reductio ad absurdum: would proponents agree we should punish criminals much more harshly, since the trauma might make them into better people? I rather doubt it.

In trying to understand why people risk death by mountaineering, Bloom cites a classic paper by the economist George Loewenstein that lists potential motivations: winning prestige; completing goals; mastering the environment; adding meaning in an indifferent universe. Bloom endorses motivational pluralism: we’re all a tangled mess of complicated drives and enthusiasms, and finding the sweet spot that includes just the right mix of suffering and value and satisfaction is, as the book’s subtitle puts it, the “key to a good life”.

We might, though, have to resign ourselves to never fully understanding people’s motivations: that Loewenstein paper takes as its title the ultimate non-explanatory explanation, given by the doomed George Mallory as to why he’d want to climb Everest: “Because it’s there.”

Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He is the author of Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science. The Sweet Spot: Suffering, Pleasure and the Key to a Good Life is published by Vintage (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

China’s human rights abuses have been getting a lot of attention in the run-up to the Beijing Winter Olympics in February. The disappearance and apparently staged re-appearance of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai in creepy videos posted online have shocked millions. The Chinese government will silence anyone who dares speak up against the behavior of the ruling Communist Party — including its ongoing genocide campaign against Uyghur Muslims.

After the Olympics, when the cameras have turned away, Beijing will have one less reason to fear the scorn of the international community. But behind the scenes, the infrastructure for a long-term divestment movement is being built by the one group of Americans with no diplomatic or financial conflicts of interest: college students. There’s a historical precedent that shows why it just might work.

In 1977, a group of students at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., successfully persuaded the school’s board of trustees to divest all holdings of companies that did business in South Africa in order to protest Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment and the policy of apartheid. Although the small school removed just $39,000 in stocks, by 1988, 154 more colleges had followed suit. The divestment movement became a key plank in the anti-apartheid movement, which helped speed the fall of that oppressive system.

In 2021, students in universities across the country are organizing to protest China’s ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., may have just scored the movement’s first big success. On Oct. 18, the student government association unanimously passed a resolution calling on the university to divest any and all of its financial holdings connected to Xinjiang atrocities. In response, university officials told student leadership, and confirmed to me, they have commissioned an independent audit of endowment holdings for anything related to mass internment, forced labor, mass surveillance or other crimes committed against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China.

“All universities should have a commitment to avoid being complicit in mass atrocities,” student senator Gerald Sharpe, who introduced the resolution, told me. “This method works. This is just the beginning.”

Sharpe worked on the resolution and the campaign with members of the Athenai Institute, a bipartisan, student-run nonprofit organization founded at Catholic, which has been working to highlight Chinese Communist Party influence on U.S. campuses. The student government and Athenai are now planning to export this model to universities throughout the country.

Catholic was a good candidate for divestment because it already has a screening process to prevent investments that run afoul of the institution’s values. But every university should follow suit, Sharpe said.

“I see this as non-negotiable for universities, particularly Catholic ones, whose mission is to explicitly uphold what China explicitly violates: human rights and human dignity,” he told me.

Rory O’Connor, an Athenai co-founder who helped draft the resolution, told me the campaign began with conversations among regular students in dorm rooms, hallways and cafeterias, all of whom became more and more shocked by the Chinese government’s actions. The university’s agreement to audit its endowments is positive, he said, but what it ultimately does with results remains to be seen.

“This is the first university in the United States to commit to divesting from companies that are complicit in the genocide,” said O’Connor. “We’re definitely going to hold them to it.”

The Catholic University’s example sets a precedent that can be used to push for divestment in schools across the country and the world, said John Metz, Athenai’s executive director. Importantly, the resolution specifically calls out Wall Street index funds, which routinely funnel money from institutional investors — such as university endowments — into Chinese companies, including many that are connected to human rights abuses.

“This is not just about how colleges and universities in this country relate to China, it’s also about how investors with hundreds of billions in managed funds relate to China,” he said.

The student anti-genocide movement is already working hand in hand with other human rights groups, including the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Students for a Free Tibet, Keep Taiwan Free and many more. The efforts to raise awareness of the Chinese government’s various atrocities are getting increasingly organized.

The students are taking the lead because our political and business class have abdicated responsibility for stopping the Chinese government’s human rights abuses. This next generation of activists is determined to force all of us to decide if we want to be complicit in a genocide or not. The movement’s success may be the Uyghurs’ only hope.

Right-wing Democrats who have spent the past several months griping about the cost of the Build Back Better Act — and lopping roughly $2 trillion off the bill’s top line — are facing growing pushback from progressive lawmakers and analysts as Congress gets ready to approve a military budget that’s far more expensive on an annual basis.
Stephen Semler, co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, estimated Monday that projected U.S. military budgets over the next decade will cost roughly $8.31 trillion — double the combined price tag of the Biden administration’s big-ticket agenda items, which include the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure law, and the $1.75 trillion reconciliation package.
“Social spending bills — despite being more urgent/relevant for everyday security than military spending — will continue to bear the brunt of austerity politics,” Semler wrote in a blog post.
The Senate is currently debating a sweeping $778 billion military policy bill that would allocate $768 billion to the Pentagon in Fiscal Year 2022, significantly more than the current budget approved under former President Donald Trump.
After President Joe Biden requested a $753 billion military budget earlier this year, committees in the House and Senate — both narrowly controlled by Democrats — proceeded to tack on $25 billion more. Over a decade, that increase alone would amount to more spending than all of the healthcare provisions currently in the Build Back Better Act.

Strange that hardly anyone in power yells about inflation for Pentagon spending, even though it’s 2x the cost of Biden’s whole economic agenda: https://t.co/XqpjFS2T4f pic.twitter.com/yl3V38uOk7
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) November 22, 2021

In total, as HuffPost’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported last week, the annual Pentagon budget “approves more than four times as much spending as Biden’s Build Back Better Act.”
“The National Defense Authorization Act would approve $778 billion in spending in 2022, compared to the approximately $170 billion in spending that Biden’s social policy would entail next year,” Ahmed added. “Hawkish Democrats worked with Republicans to ensure that the defense bill would be $25 billion greater than Biden’s proposal for the military budget, and to quash progressive efforts to trim costs.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, tweeted Monday that “my colleagues seem to be so concerned with the deficit when it comes to addressing the needs of working people, but all of a sudden forget about the deficit when we’re talking about an annual defense budget of $778 billion.”
“What hypocrisy,” added the Vermont senator, who said he plans to vote against the NDAA.
Last week, in an effort to block the proposed $25 billion increase, Sanders and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced an amendment that would bring the proposed NDAA back down to what Biden requested in May.
“Let me be clear: this is not a radical idea, it is the military spending amount proposed by the president of the United States and the amount requested by the Department of Defense,” Sanders said in a floor speech. “I should also point out that this extraordinary level of military spending comes at a time when the Department of Defense is the only agency of our federal government that has not been able to pass an independent audit, and when defense contractors are making enormous profits while paying their CEOs exorbitant compensation packages.”
It’s unclear whether the Sanders-Markey amendment will have any more success than other recent efforts to reduce the latest U.S. military budget, which have been defeated by Republicans and Democrats bankrolled by the defense industry.
Many of the right-wing House Democrats who have held up the Build Back Better Act over purported concerns about its costs — including Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Stephanie Murphy of Florida — voted with Republicans in September to tank an amendment aimed at reversing the $25 billion add-on.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the major obstacles to the Build Back Better Act in the upper chamber, voted to advance the full $778 billion NDAA last week without once complaining about its price tag. Over the past decade, Manchin — a self-styled enemy of “fiscal insanity” — has voted in favor of over $9 trillion in military spending.
The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill wrote Sunday that “while there is much media focus these days on the intensely polarized dynamic on Capitol Hill between Democrats and Republicans, as well as domestic legislative battles among Democrats, none of this has stopped the work of the empire from moving forward.”
“Legislation aimed at increasing funding for social programs, education, and other public goods is consistently held hostage by politicians harping over the costs,” Scahill noted. “This has been the case with Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, which has seen some conservative Democrats join their Republican colleagues in gutting social spending in the name of fiscal responsibility.”
“The original BBB 10-year projection was $3.5 trillion and has been steadily chiseled down to half that size to appease critics,” he added. “Juxtapose this with the bipartisan ‘defense’ spending spree that has the U.S. on course to produce a Pentagon budget of more than $7 trillion over the next decade, and the priorities of this government’s political class come into sharp focus.”

Updated at 12:44 p.m. ET on November, 23 2021In a world with perfect coronavirus tests, people could swab their nose or spit in a tube and get near-instant answers about their SARS-CoV-2 status. The products would be free, fast, and completely reliable. Positives would immediately shuttle people out of public spaces and, if needed, into treatment; negatives could green-light entry into every store, school, and office, and spring people out of isolation with no second thought. Tests would guarantee whether someone is contagious, or merely infected, or neither. And that status would hold true until each person had the chance to test again.Unfortunately, that is not the reality we live in—nor will it ever be. “No such test exists,” K. C. Coffey, an infectious-disease physician and diagnostics expert at the University of Maryland, told me. Not for this virus, and “not for any disease that I know of.” And almost two years into this pandemic, imperfection isn’t the only testing problem we have. For many Americans, testing remains inaccessible, unaffordable, and still—still!—ridiculously confusing.Contradictory results, for instance, are an all-too-common conundrum. Cole Shacochis Edwards, a nurse in Maryland, discovered at the end of August that her daughter, Alden, had been exposed to the virus while masked at volleyball practice. Shacochis Edwards rapid-tested her family of four at home, while the high school ran a laboratory PCR on Alden. One week, 11 rapid antigen tests, 3 PCRs, and $125 later, their household was knee-deep in a baffling array of clashing results: Alden tested negative, then positive, then negative again, then positive again, then negative again; her father tested negative, then positive, then positive, then negative; Shacochis Edwards, who tested three times, and her son, who tested twice, stayed negative throughout. “None of it was clear,” she told me. Months after their testing saga, Shacochis Edwards is pretty sure the positives were wrong—but there’s simply no way to know for sure.Some conflicting results are just annoying. Others, though, can be a big problem when people misguidedly act on them—unknowingly sparking outbreaks, derailing treatment, and squandering time and resources. And the confusion doesn’t stop there. The tests come in an absurd number of flavors and packages, with subtle differences between brands. They’re deployed in a disorienting variety of settings: doctors’ offices, community testing sites, apartment living rooms, and more. They’re being asked to serve several very different purposes, including diagnosis of sick patients and screening of people who feel totally symptom-free.Our tests are imperfect—that’s not going to change. The trick, then, is learning to deal with their limitations; to rely on them, but also not ask too much.Tests can tell us only whether they found bits of the virus, at a single point in time.Tests are virus hunters. The best ones are able to accomplish two things: accurately pinpointing the pathogen in a person who’s definitely infected—a metric called sensitivity—and ruling out its existence in someone who’s definitely not, or specificity. Tests with great sensitivity will almost never mistake an infected person for a virus-free one—a false negative. High specificity, meanwhile, means reliably skirting false positives.Our tests accomplish this in two broad ways. They search for specific snippets of the virus’s genetic material, putting them in the category of molecular tests, or find hunks of pathogen protein, which is the job of antigen tests. (Most of the rapid tests you can find in stores are antigen, while PCR tests are molecular.) Both types will make mistakes, but whereas molecular tests repeatedly copy viral genetic material until it’s detectable, making it easier to root out the pathogen when it’s quite scarce, antigen tests just survey samples for SARS-CoV-2 proteins that are already there. That means they’re likelier to miss infections, especially in people with no symptoms.Even super-sensitive, super-specific tests can spit out more errors when they’re mishandled, or when people swab themselves sloppily. That can be pretty easy to do when instructions differ so much among brands, as they do for rapid antigen tests. (Wait 24 hours between tests! No, 36! Swivel it in your nose four times! No, five! Dip a strip in liquid! No, drop the liquid into a plastic strip! Wait 10 minutes for your result! No, 15!)[Read: The wrong way to test yourself for the coronavirus.]Random substances can also dupe certain tests: Soda, fruit juice, ketchup, and a bunch of other household liquids have produced rapid-antigen false positives, an oopsie that some kids in the United Kingdom have apparently been gleefully exploiting to recuse themselves from school. Manufacturing snafus can also trigger false positives, as recently happened with Ellume, a company that sells rapid antigen tests and had to recall some 2 million of them in the United States. (Sean Parsons, Ellume’s CEO, told me that the issue is now under control and that his company is “already producing and shipping new product to the U.S.”)Even when they’re perfectly deployed, tests can detect bits of the virus only at the moment a sample is taken. Testing “negative” for the virus isn’t some sort of permanent identity; it doesn’t even guarantee that the pathogen isn’t there. Viruses are always multiplying, and a test that can’t find the virus in someone’s nose in the morning might pick it up come afternoon. People can also contract the virus between the tests they take, making a negative, then a positive, another totally plausible scenario. That means a test that’s taken two days before a Thanksgiving gathering won’t have any bearing on a person’s status during the event itself. “People want tests to be prospective,” Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “None are.”Tests can serve a ton of different purposes.Recently, I asked more than two dozen people—co-workers, family members, experts, strangers on Twitter—what they envisioned the “perfect” coronavirus test to be. The answers I got were all over the place.People wanted tests that were cheap and accessible (which they’re currently not), ideally something that could give them a lightning-fast answer at home. They also, unsurprisingly, wanted totally accurate results. But what they wanted those results to accomplish differed immensely. Some said they’d test only if they were feeling unwell, while others were way more interested in using the tests as routine checks in the absence of symptoms or exposures, a tactic called screening, to reassure them that they weren’t infectious to others.[Read:]Massachusetts actually might have a way to keep schools openAt least for now, certain tests will be better suited to some situations than others. “The best test to use depends on the question you’re asking of it,” Coffey told me. When someone’s sick or getting admitted into a hospital, for instance, health-care workers will generally reach first for the most precise, sensitive test they can get their hands on. A missed infection here is high-stakes: Someone could be excluded from a sorely needed treatment, or put other people at risk. But lab tests are inconvenient for the people who take them, and very often slow. Samples have to be collected by a professional, then sent out for processing; people can be left waiting for several days, during which their infection status might have changed.Using a rapid test can be much more convenient, especially if people feel unwell at home—and these tests do work great for that. But things get hairier when these products are used for screening purposes. Asymptomatic infections are a lot harder to detect in general, because there’s no obvious bodily signal to prompt a test. “You’re essentially randomly sampling,” which means more errors will inevitably crop up, Linoj Samuel, a clinical microbiologist at the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan, told me. To patch this problem, the FDA has green-lit several rapid tests that tell users to administer them serially—at least once every couple of days. A test that misses the virus one day will hopefully catch it the next, especially if levels are rising.But for those hoping to narrow in on the people who are carrying the most virus in their airway—and probably pose the biggest contagious risk to others—rapid antigen tests might be enough to do the trick precisely because they are less sensitive. They won’t catch all infections, but not all infections are infectious; a positive antigen result, at least, could be a decent indication that someone should stay home, even if they’re feeling perfectly fine. That logic isn’t airtight, though. Antigen-positive is not precisely synonymous with infectious; antigen negatives cannot guarantee that someone is not. “For SARS-CoV-2, we don’t know the threshold—how much virus you need to be carrying” to be contagious, Melissa B. Miller, a clinical microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. People on the border of positivity, for instance, might still transmit.Many tests weren’t designed for one of the most basic ways we are using them.People are turning to testing for asymptomatic check-ins that can give them peace of mind before a big event, or even give them the go-ahead to travel overseas. But a lot of these screening tests were initially designed to diagnose people who were already sick—and the tests’ performance won’t necessarily hold when they’re being repeatedly used on symptom-free people at home.Part of the problem can be traced back to how the United States’ thinking on testing has evolved. Early on in the pandemic, regulatory agencies like the FDA prioritized tests for symptomatic patients; the agency has since noticeably shifted its stance, authorizing dozens of tests that can now be taken at home. But there are still some relics that have influenced how the tests have, and have not, been evaluated for use.Tests such as the Abbott BinaxNOW, for example, were first studied as a rapid diagnostic that people could take shortly after their symptoms first appeared. It can now be used as a screener, when it is serially administered at home to asymptomatic people (which is why the tests are sold in packs of two). But to nab that expanded authorization from the FDA, the company didn’t have to submit any data on the test’s performance when it was serially administered at home, or how well it worked in asymptomatic people. Instead, the FDA has been green-lighting serial tests based on how well their results match up to PCR results in symptomatic people. They just have to detect 80 percent of the infections that the super-sensitive molecular tests do, in a clinical setting.[Read: The one Thanksgiving necessity America forgot to stock.]I asked the FDA why that was. “The FDA does not feel that requiring specific serial-testing data from each manufacturer is necessary due to the current state of knowledge on serial testing,” James McKinney, a spokesperson, told me. (Some companies that already have products for sale, including Abbott and Becton, Dickinson, are collecting additional data now under FDA advisement.)The repurposing of tests feels a little weird, experts told me. “I don’t see how you can reuse the same data, for very different goals,” Jorge Caballero, a co-founder of Coders Against COVID, who’s been tracking coronavirus-test availability and performance, told me. That doesn’t mean these tests are useless if you don’t have symptoms. But without more evidence, we’re still determining exactly what they’re able to tell us when we self-administer them once, twice, or more, even as we’re feeling fine.Test results can tell us only so much.The results produced by a coronavirus test aren’t actually the end of the testing pipeline. Next comes interpretation, and that’s a nest of confusions in its own right. Sure, tests can be wrong, but the likelihood that they are wrong changes depending on who’s using them, how, and when. People don’t always talk about what to do when they’re shocked by a result—but that sense of surprise can sometimes be the first sign that the test’s intel is wrong. “People should have some confidence on how likely it is they have the disease when they test,” Coffey told me. “Ideally, the test should confirm what you already think.”Consider, for example, an unvaccinated person who starts feeling sniffly and feverish five days after mingling unmasked with a bunch of people at a party, several of whom tested positive the next day. That person’s likelihood of having the virus is pretty high; if they test positive, they can be pretty sure that’s right. Random screenings of healthy, vaccinated people with no symptoms and no known exposures, meanwhile, are way more likely to be negative, and positives here should raise at least a few more eyebrows. Some will be correct, but truly weird results may warrant a re-check with a more sensitive test.Yet another wrinkle has become particularly relevant as more and more people get vaccinated. Tests, which look only for pieces of pathogens, can’t distinguish between actively replicating virus that poses an actual transmission threat, and harmless hunks of virus left behind by immune cells that have obliterated the threat. A positive test for a vaccinated person might not mean exactly the same thing it does in someone who hasn’t yet had a shot—maybe, positive for positive, they’re less contagious. That’s not to say that noninfectious infections aren’t still important to track. But positives and negatives always have to be framed in context: when and why they’re being taken, and also by whom.Tests will have to be part of our future, for as long as this virus is with us. But understanding their drawbacks is just as essential as celebrating their perks. Unlike masks and vaccines, which can proactively stop sickness, tests are by default reactive, catching only infections that have already begun. In and of themselves, they “don’t stop transmission,” Coffey told me. “It’s about what you do with the test. If you don’t do anything with the result, the test did nothing.”This article previously misstated the type of coronavirus test manufactured by the company Ellume.

Russia is not a trustful country – for good reason. Germany invaded it twice in the 20th century, France invaded it once in the 19th century, and Sweden once in the 18th century. These were not the nibbling incursions that Europe was used to, but deep penetrations meant to capture the Russian heartland and permanently subordinate it. Each century saw an assault on Russia that threatened its existence. It’s hard to forget something like that, and it’s hard for Russia not to be suspicious of moves on its periphery. There is nothing in Russian history to cause its leaders to think otherwise.

This attitude makes Russia a threat to its neighbors. The West saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as Russia simply giving independence to foreign countries. The Russians, stunned by what had happened, were prepared to view it this way as well. Moscow assumed the best from the West. It assumed that the newly independent countries would be neutral and would therefore not be a threat to Russia. The dynamics of history are not so orderly, and over time the Ukrainian government and Russia drifted closer. This threatened to undermine the Western vision of the post-Soviet world – as well as the expectation of many Ukrainians.

Just 24 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a revolution in Ukraine toppled the country’s pro-Russian government. From the Western (and particularly the American) standpoint, Ukraine was an independent nation – its affairs had nothing to do with Russia. Russia had a corrupt and repressive regime, and as part of the American moral project, the U.S. would support those who rose up against that regime and claimed their democratic rights. Russia saw things differently. From its perspective, the overthrown government was the legally elected government of Ukraine, and the United States (and others) had engineered a coup in order to impose a pro-Western government. In so doing, the United States capitalized on the collapse of the Soviet Union to take control of Ukraine. For scale, Poltava, Ukraine, where the Russians halted the Swedish advance in the 18th century, was only 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Moscow. The actual distance from the Ukrainian border to Moscow was substantially less than this.

Whatever the Americans thought they were doing, the Russians saw this as violating Russia’s right to national security, using the pretense of encouraging democracy to threaten Russia. From the American point of view, Ukraine had the right to national self-determination. From the Russian point of view, it did not have the right to pose an existential threat to Russia. From a geopolitical point of view, the American intent didn’t matter. Intentions change, and a pro-American Ukraine was merely a new chapter in a long story of Russian insecurity. Russia had survived previous invasions by putting distance between an invader and Moscow. All of the previous centuries’ invasions failed because invaders had to traverse so much territory that a summer invasion would end in the Russian winter. With Ukraine an American “puppet,” that distance is dramatically reduced, the buffer zone dissolved. What had guarded Russia for centuries no longer guarded it.

For Russia, this was the tipping point of the post-Soviet era. Ukraine was a critical element of Russia’s defense, but it wasn’t the only element. The main line of attack into Russia is the North European Plain, which stretches from France almost to Moscow. The Soviet Union’s western frontier was Belarus and was anchored on its border with Poland.

A second, more difficult line of attack into Russia is through the Caucasus, which separate Russia from Turkey, Iran and their allies. The Soviets controlled the massive North Caucasus mountains, including Chechnya and Dagestan. Though they formed a solid barrier against the south, they were populated and thus potentially destabilized by Islamist militants. The South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia), formerly part of the Soviet Union, is also an important buffer.

A third line of attack lay in Central Asia. The countries of the region pose no threat to Russia themselves, but the withdrawal of the U.S. from Afghanistan has muddied the waters. There is a real threat of spillover violence from Islamists, and the U.S. continues to seek air bases in the region to support limited operations in Afghanistan. For Russia, Central Asia is thus important to secure.

To the east, there is the border with China. Russia shares an interest with China in blocking the United States, but there is a deep historic distrust between the two countries. The Russians had previously invaded China and Manchuria. The Soviets considered bombing Lop Nur, China’s nuclear weapon center, and approached the United States in collaborating on the operation. There were serious border conflicts between China and the Soviet Union in the 1960s, including a major battle along the Ussuri River. Mao was hostile to the Soviet Union. The entente between the United States and China in the 1970s and 1980s was directed against Russia. Given this history, The Chinese-Russian border is a place of vulnerability.

In other words, Russia is surrounded by vulnerabilities. So it has developed a soft approach to deal with them. It does not send in tanks; it uses political and economic problems to increase its influence. Thus is the case in Belarus, where the instability under President Alexander Lukashenko allows Russia to increase its power and destabilize the border with Poland. In Central Asia, it uses economic relations and the tension between Central Asian states to increase its influence. In the South Caucasus, it has inserted peacekeepers to maintain a truce between Azerbaijan and Armenia, giving it various avenues for leverage. It maintains good relations with China of course, but both remain wary of the other.

The North European Plain, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Chinese border are all vital. But the central issue for Russia is Ukraine. Ukraine is where the United States has, from the Russian point of view, sunk its claws. Russia can manage Belarus, but it cannot exert soft power in Ukraine because of the potential for American intervention. There are rumors of a Russian invasion in the coming weeks, but real invasions are not announced. On the other hand, invasions you do not want to launch (because you could lose) should be announced. It becomes a psychological weapon to try to force a settlement in which Russia holds a strong veto on internal processes.

It should be remembered that Russia is facing a bunch of complex and dangerous challenges on its borders. Any one of them might spin out of control. And like all nations, Russia has limited bandwidth. Moscow is clearly trying to move sequentially, rather than simultaneously, but that assumes it has time. And since the U.S. is unlikely to act, time may well be on Moscow’s side. But Russian fears feed on themselves and can cause imprudent actions. And most important, in managing regions that host enemies, a defining crisis can arrive without invitation.

Russia, from its point of view, has to at least mitigate the threats of the Soviet era. So the pressures on Russia are great, but there are plenty of opportunities to act. Russia tends to move deliberately, but reality might not give it the option. The Americans are, among other things, unpredictable these days.

Sacred calves

Parental regret should be taboo — because the children might be listening

We live in a time thick with taboos, which stand about our cultural landscape like totems on ancient burial grounds. There are all kinds of things one cannot say about religion, race, sex, sexuality, health, appearance et cetera without severe social sanctioning.

These codes of speech and behaviour are rarely called “taboos”, at least by the people who enforce them, because the term itself has acquired connotations of oppressive irrationality. “Taboos” are the stuff of snooty schoolmarms and joyless patriarchs.

Journalists have been prodding this taboo with great enthusiasm

Yet I do not think taboos are bad per se. The health of our public square demands that some language and deeds be excluded. Cursing in front of the elderly or infants? Dropping n-bombs? Discussing one’s sexual attraction to livestock? Scold that I am, I think such things should incur reputational damage.

Yet there are trickier cases. On Twitter in recent days, people have been discussing whether women should feel inhibited in expressing their regrets about becoming mothers. “So many women regret it but they cannot say a word,” said one academic. “It really is one of the biggest taboos in the world.”

Is it? Let us conduct an experiment. One woman expresses her regrets about having children and another voices her belief in some spicy flavour of biological determinism. Who will come out worse? Still, we can agree that there is something of a taboo surrounding maternal, and paternal, regret. It is not something we can discuss around other people without at least the possibility of losing friends.

In recent years, though, journalists have been poking and prodding this taboo with great enthusiasm. Article after article has explored “the explosive taboo”, “the breaking of a taboo” and so on. While these articles are not entirely acclamatory, giving a platform to regretful parents suggests that these writers do not think it should have this taboo status.

It is bizarre how infrequently children’s interests are mentioned

Now, some parents will inevitably regret having kids, and who am I to judge them. Sure, I can imagine bad reasons for doing so. Pining for one’s youthful hedonism, say, is childish as such behaviour inevitably grows pathetic whether or not someone has kids. I am sure that in some trying circumstances the stress and struggle become difficult to bear, however. This is something one could certainly explore with a psychiatrist, a priest or an especially trustworthy friend.

Still, I think that it should be taboo for parents — men as well as women — to express these feelings in public. Why? Because the children might be listening. It is bizarre how infrequently their interests come up in these kinds of discussions. One article in Psych magazine that endorses greater openness towards expressions of parental regret entirely subordinates the child’s feelings to those of the parent and does not even mention how the average kid might feel on hearing that their existence is a source of sadness. (I know people who have heard this, and I do not think it was a valuable experience.)

Does this mean some people should be less than wholly honest about their emotions? Yep. Sorry. When we enter into relationships of any level of commitment, we sacrifice aspects of ourselves for the sake of others. This is not the only such example. Imagine that a married man or woman has an accident or contracts an illness and requires care. I am sure their wife or husband might have moments where they wish but they had never married such an unfortunate person. Should they express that? No. How is the disabled person meant to feel? Again, someone with the intelligence to even ask themselves such moral questions should have enough intelligence to realise that sometimes the interests of others come before their own.

There are more productive expressions of regret

There are more productive expressions of regret that people should feel free to voice. If a mother, or a father, or a carer regrets having no time for themselves, for example — if they really do have no time for themselves — it is the duty of their relatives and friends to rally round and take some of the strain. If a parent or a carer regrets their miserable economic circumstances, there might be cause for state or charitable institutions to step in. While most parents are happier for becoming so, as illustrated by recent research from the Institute for Family Studies, that is not always the case and it is in all of our interests not to make parenthood, or caregiving, more of a burden than it has to be.

Yet this sort of problem-solving is quite different from the unfiltered public divulgence of mere regret — which, quite apart from the harm it does to others, is of no proven benefit to oneself. The idea that raw public confession is inherently good is suspiciously popular among people in journalism and entertainment to whom it is of professional use.

“Civilised life cannot be lived without taboos,” wrote Theodore Dalrymple in Our Culture, What’s Left Of It. I am not as civilised as the good Dr Dalrymple but I agree with him. We might disagree on what taboos we should maintain but we cannot live without them. They are how we can uphold a system of common morality by integrating our individual interests into a whole. Sometimes this means that our individual interests do not take precedence. This is part of growing up, whether or not we have kids.

Kid Rock feels like he emerged from a time capsule left for us in the Nineties, perhaps along with Dunkaroos and the decaying corpses of the Simpsons, who were replaced with inferior clones around the dawn of the millennium.
In those heady days of nu-metal, Jackass and the Attitude Era, bored suburbanites and neglected “rednecks” unleashed their frustrations into jubilantly crass and confrontational entertainment that turned the raising of a middle finger into a kind of sacred ritual.
Mr. Rock’s breakout hit “Bawitdaba” hailed “the topless dancers” and “the…heroes at the methadone clinic,” and scorned “the crooked cops” and “all you bastards at the IRS.” Both he invited to, well, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.”
This kind of inchoate anti-authoritarianism finds a voice again on Mr. Rock’s new single. On “Don’t Tell Me How To Live,” Rock tells the “snowflakes” and “pussies” that, well, they can’t tell him how to live. “Every kid got a motherfucking trophy,” he sneers, and “every opinion has a millennial offended.”
Let us be frank: the song is trash. But its trashiness is worn as a badge of pride. What else can one conclude when the lyrics feature lines about being “like Brad Pitt” except “[slinging] more dick” and the video features Rock soaring on a giant middle finger? It dares critics to insult it — and, in doing so, give Rock a perverse form of praise. You imagine that he was delighted to see Rolling Stone call his song “terrible.” Let the finger waggers wag their fingers, I’m sure he thinks. What matters are the good times!
His flaunting of bad taste used to make Rock a curious outlier among Republicans. He offended veterans when he wore an American flag that had been cut open and shaped into a poncho at the 2004 Super Bowl, perhaps evading greater controversy only because Janet Jackson’s nipple slip occurred on the same evening.
Yet when the nonetheless pro-war Rock performed at President Bush’s inauguration in 2005, social conservatives were appalled. Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for Children and Families was moved to condemn the singer, whose debut single had announced that “the best type of oochie coochie is the type that tastes like sushi.” “If this sex-crazed animal, whose favorite word is the F-word, is allowed to sing at Bush’s inauguration,” Thomasson said, “this will send a clear message to pro-family Americans that the Republican Party has taken them for a ride and ditched them in the gutter.”
Rock did not appear (leaving that honor to Hilary Duff, 3 Doors Down and a band named Fuel, whose lead singer no doubt sent Mr. Thomasson’s blood pressure lurching when he dropped a cheerful F-bomb). He then drifted away and voted for Obama in 2008 but was back to campaigning for Romney in 2012. Romney even used his 2010 single “Born Free” as his campaign song (God knows what poor Mr. Thomasson thought of that). Donald Trump, in all of his natural irreverence, was Mr. Rock’s ideal candidate, and the singer was among his most energetic supporters in 2016 and 2020.
Mr. Rock is an especially ornate example of how cultural figures whose crudeness and social liberalism jar with traditional images of Republicans have ended up drifting to the right. You could also mention Dave Portnoy, CEO of the jock-ular Barstool Sports empire, or Dana White, the swollen president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Their anti-authoritarianism puts them at odds with the safetyism and censoriousness of progressives, as does their instinctive American patriotism. As Rock illustrated as far back as 1998 with “Bawitdaba,” they do not think much of taxation. Added to all this is their deep contempt for people who look down their noses at them — which applies to suited moralists and liberal sophisticates alike.
This demographic — sketched out, granted, in broad terms — is an expansive one, ranging from the macho libertarian-inclined cash-flashers of Las Vegas and Miami that the social commentator Matthew Walther dubbed “Barstool conservatives” to the ranch-dreaming Southerners who blast out Kid Rock as they screech into the sun. It is an important demographic for Republicans as they contemplate 2024.
It is interesting to reflect on how, or whether, there can be concordance between Kid Rockian conservatives and the more religious, traditionalist, authoritarian and intellectual right-wingers of the “New Right” who gathered at Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism conference in Orlando. The always interesting commentator Tanner Greer sees an insurmountable contradiction: “The New Right faces a fundamental mismatch of means and ends: they hope to build a post-libertarian national order on the backs of the most naturally libertarian demographic in the country!”
This, Greer concludes, “is an unstable foundation for a post-liberal body politic if there ever was one.”

Well, mutual dislike counts for a lot. If traditional and religious conservatives could overlook so much of what President Trump has spent his life saying and doing, perhaps Kid Rockian conservatives can overlook what may strike them as the wackier and stuffier elements of the New Right if it lands punches on snowflakes, oikophobes, mask mandaters and music critics.
Still, there will be conflict, or compromise, or both. A lot of people who might now be singing “Don’t Tell Me How to Live” with thoughts of SJWs and Dr. Fauci in mind will not take kindly to being told that actually the common good does mean that people have the right, in certain circumstances, to tell you what to do. You can only imagine how Mr. Rock would respond to that. Perhaps it would go something like, “Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy.” You might disagree with his beliefs but you cannot fault his energy.
The post Kid Rock conservatism appeared first on The Spectator World.

In our current era of wildly overheated political discourse, there are few things as remarkable as the gap between people’s stated preferences (what they say they believe) and their revealed preferences (what they actually do). We see this in the recent trend for liberal Americans, particularly in the country’s northwest, to begin a speech with a preamble acknowledging that they stand on land stolen from one Native American tribe or another, without showing any intention of actually divesting themselves of their property and returning it to the tribe in question: it’s a purely rhetorical device, and surely quite insulting in its effect. 
We’ve stolen your land, they say, and we’re very sorry about this terrible injustice — but we’ll keep it all the same. Similarly, when purveyors of political discourse claim that America is now a white supremacist or even Nazi state — as in this response to the Rittenhouse verdict — you wonder why they aren’t urgently fleeing to some safer location, or at the very least organising some kind of underground armed resistance movement. People say all kinds of wild things, but if they don’t follow through on the logic of their claims, then it’s very hard to actually believe them.

A similar dynamic is observable in terms of climate change discourse, particularly with the Extinction Rebellion movement and its offshoot, Insulate Britain. Both their activists and spokespeople make the most alarming claims about the imminent end of civilisation, perhaps within the next couple of decades. But their revealed preferences don’t seem to match the intensity of their predictions. 
Personally, if I genuinely believed that Britain was going to become a post-apocalyptic wasteland within the next twenty years, I wouldn’t be campaigning for the Government to retrofit British houses with insulation: I’d be selling everything and fleeing to the hills in a desperate effort to keep my family alive. And yet they don’t. I have friends who go on XR demonstrations, and repeat their most apocalyptic prophecies, yet show no inclination of altering their middle-class lives in London: their revealed preferences therefore cast great doubt on their stated beliefs.
It seems that, with climate change in particular, there are only two modes of thought for most people: either nothing will change at all, or everything is about to collapse in horrible and world-destroying ways. There is a more obvious conclusion that people seem resistant to thinking about: that things will change, in many ways for the worse, but life will go on. As the Green philosopher Rupert Read asks: “why do we find it so hard to think about a world where the climate has changed massively, veering between ‘it won’t make much difference, everything is going to be fine’ to ‘it’s the apocalypse, the end of the world, there’s nothing we can do’, but refusing to think about the awful, but more middling realities?” 
It would seem more productive, then, instead of continuing with the path of climate change mitigation — which is probably now too late to succeed — or of giving everything up for lost, to instead focus popular attention on adaptation: on making the best of a situation we cannot change, but which is far from an apocalypse, at least for the UK. 
The issue at hand is that Britain is responsible for a mere 1% of global carbon emissions, so that even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow, nothing will change in terms of arresting climate change. China’s increase in coal production this autumn alone is already greater than Britain’s total carbon emissions: halting this process is, in the real world, almost entirely out of our hands. 
But if we can’t change what is about to happen, we can at least prepare for it. If you read the Climate Change Commission’s risk assessment for the rest of the century, it assumes that Britain’s temperature will rise by two degrees by 2100, in the worst scenario as much as four degrees. Such an outcome will be disastrous for much of the world’s population, and I am not dismissing the gravity of the situation for billions of guiltless people.
But I live in Britain, and for Britain having a similar climate to central France will not be the end of the world — but we should start planning for it now. Just as no-one now starves their families in solidarity with the hungry of the Global South, it is absurd and irresponsible to not plan a resilient and comfortable near future for our own country out of fatalism or an inchoate sense of global solidarity.
More from this authorInside Insulate BritainBy Aris Roussinos
A rise of two degrees will return Britain to its climate during the Roman Warm Period, when an admittedly lower level of civilisation functioned perfectly well. The risk assessment highlights the risk of flooding in low-lying areas, the risk of drought in summer, and the risks of disruption to international trade. But its observations are all, with sufficient planning and adaptation, perfectly manageable. It even observes that there are opportunities as well as risks, and promotes a vast expansion of vineyards on British soil, which with appropriate planning could become a £50 million annual industry. In just such a way, if the British government cannot change what is about to happen, it can at least start shaping the inevitable near future in ways that are beneficial for this country. And by doing so, and by being seen to act as if they believe what they claim to believe, the Government is far more likely to convince people about the inevitability of climate change.
To understand why, consider the early days of the Covid crisis. When governments and newspapers were dismissing the severity of the coming pandemic, I was convinced to take it seriously by witnessing friends stockpiling masks (while we were being assured they were useless and even harmful) and laying in stores of food and other essential goods in case of trade disruption. Seeing people whose opinions you respect take a potential crisis seriously, and planning how to navigate the changed world that comes with it, is a convincing signal that you should take action yourself. It means far more than hearing the government warn about doom on the horizon and then doing absolutely nothing — like closing the borders — to mitigate against it. Deeds are convincing in a way words are not.
In the same way, I personally take climate change seriously. I believe in the predictions of the vast majority of the world’s scientists, and thinking through the potential outcomes of such a world-changing process, I am planning how to adapt my lifestyle to best manage what is seemingly inevitable. In the New Year, barring some unforeseen eventuality, I will sell my house and buy a smallholding somewhere hilly (and so at less risk of flooding than the coastal town where I currently live) and with enough land that I can ensure my family’s food supply in case of trade disruption or rising prices. Already, in suburban Kent, we produce our own eggs and grow our own vegetables, but I want to be self-sufficient in meat and milk, beer and cider, clean drinking water and bread. (I intend to document our progress in this column.) 
It’s a way of living some are calling Doomer Optimism: I don’t believe that society will collapse within my lifetime, or that starvation will soon stalk the land. But I do think there’s a strong possibility that the cost of living will become significantly higher within the next two decades or so, just as the after effects of Covid are now manifesting, to such a degree that it makes sense to rethink my family’s way of living now to ensure a decent future quality of life in the years ahead. 
Suggested readingI can't escape my eco-anxietyBy Henry Wismayer
The question here isn’t one of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but of ensuring an atmosphere of comfort and plenty in a likely world of consumption taxes and restrictions brought in through poorly-thought out climate change mitigation efforts, the intervention of corporate interests, and occasional disruptions to international trade. The current discourse around radically limiting food consumption presents such a dystopian and wildly unattractive future that it is no wonder people reject it, especially when it does nothing to address the over-consumption of the world’s richest. I will not, as they say, live in the pod, and I will not eat bugs, and neither should you. We should demand better, and there are alternative futures. 
But first we need to show that we’re tackling the problem seriously. As Rupert Read remarks in the recent book Deep Adaptation, “every time we are seen to be preparing for possible/likely hard times ahead… we are making it possible for people and politics to start to really face climate reality.” As he observes, if you act as if you mean what you say you believe, people will believe you. If you don’t, they won’t. In this way, Read argues, “it is a political act to act as if collapse is possible”, even if you don’t believe it is likely, just as you still install fire alarms even if you don’t believe your house will imminently burn down.
As with individuals, so with government. The Government’s push for Net Zero is expending a great deal of political capital on a mitigation effort that, whatever its moral worth, will do nothing to alter the risk of climate change one way or another. In doing so, it is alienating many people who appreciate, even if only subliminally, the vast disjunct between what the Government claims is about to happen, and its broader actions. If the threat is so real, people naturally think, why isn’t the nation mobilising to deal with the coming effects? The narrow focus on Net Zero, along with the attempt to prioritise individual, essentially meaningless mitigation efforts like eating less meat, is at this stage wildly counterproductive. 
Instead, the Government should, like my family, say that they can’t change what is coming, but that we can at least adapt to it now so that the wrench is less painful when it comes. What would that mean on a national level? If we accept that flooding is likely on Britain’s most productive agricultural land in East Anglia, we should be planning to open up currently marginal hill pasture for crops to ensure a more stable food supply. What would that look like? It would probably be less mechanised, and smaller scale, simply due to the topography: so we should be relearning how to manage such a mid-20th century form of agriculture at sufficient cumulative scale, which we are currently not doing.
Suggested readingClimate change is no catastropheBy Michael Shellenberger
If the Thames floodplain is at risk of occasional but devastating flooding, not from the sea but from built-over inland rivers, we should discourage building in flat estuarine land — as insurers are already warning — and instead rezone hilly land in London’s outer suburbs for housebuilding, as well as improving London’s overwhelmed Victorian drainage infrastructure. 
If the Government is incapable of building HS2 properly, it is surely poorly-equipped to deal with the amount of adjustment that will be necessary to maintain currently functional levels of infrastructure. We should be making railtracks more resilient to flooding, building viaducts where necessary and digging new water features and marshlands to absorb sudden deposits of water. We should be overhauling our water supply to minimise the risk of drought and prevent avoidable water losses through leaky pipes. We should be pedestrianising and planting trees in cities now to make them cool and shady in twenty or thirty years time, and building clean new transport infrastructure to take the place of cars. We should be building more houses, relaxing planning restrictions for family homes in the countryside so that more people are affordably able to take control of their personal family food supply. If we claim that disasters are on the horizon, yet do not build up the infrastructure now to cope with them, why should anyone take these claims seriously?
There is a great deal of ingenuity in this country only now being focussed on technologies such as nuclear fusion, which may soon provide clean sources of almost limitless energy, or on fast electric aeroplanes and capacious electric airships, which may be better used for freight than for human transport. The medium term may be uncomfortable, but the long-term future may be very good indeed, if only for Britain. 
To manage this will take a certain frontier spirit, a willingness to make the best of and thrive in a harder situation than we are accustomed to. Instead of prophesying doom and then doing nothing about it, we should be imagining a positive vision of what a Britain adapted to climate change would look like: a country of high-speed trains hurtling across tall viaducts between new hill towns, with lush vineyards overlooking the broad new wetlands on what was once farmland. It is not too late to make the Britain of the near future not just liveable, but an improvement on what we have now. Life will go on: it is our duty to make it as comfortable and prosperous as possible, not just as individuals, but as a nation.

Clobbered from all sides by the pandemic, climate change and disruptions in virtually every industry by the rise of artificial intelligence, the capitalist dream is dying — and a new, mutant form of socialism is growing in its place. In the US, perhaps it’s no surprise that most Democrats have a better opinion of socialism than capitalism. Far more startling is the fact that they are not alone: the Republican party and the corporate establishment, which once paid lip service to competitive capitalism, are both starting to embrace the importance of massive deficit spending and state support.
But unlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.
As a result, this new variant of socialism seems more feudal than Marxist. As Edwin Aponte, editor of the socialist blog The Bellows, has observed, Marx opposed utopian socialists, with their dreams of a return to the cohesive social order of feudal times — instead, he favoured using technology and economic growth to lift them up.
More from this authorDid critical race theory lose Virginia?By Joel Kotkin
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may not realise that the much-admired European socialist system was built on the back of a private sector. But the truth is that virtually all the successful welfare states — Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia — rose on competitive economies: Swedish steel, Dutch chemicals, German machine tools and cars were critical to funding socialist programs in capitalist countries. But as this model slowly crumbles, as Europe loses its competitive edge to China and elsewhere, this lesson appears to have been forgotten. And in its place has risen a New Socialism that serves Wall Street, the City and the tech oligarchy.
The usual response from environmental activists is that the rapid transition to “zero carbon” will create oodles of new, well-paid jobs. In reality, however, these jobs generally pay less, offer fewer hours and are rarely unionised. The reality facing the middle class is an acceleration of our class divides and lower living standards. It’s long been de rigueur on the Green Left to cut back on homeownership, limit use of private cars or even fly on vacation. In other words, those who will suffer most are the very people whom socialism is supposed to save. Already energy poverty is on the rise in those places — from California to the EU — where punitive fuel costs have been increased.
Elsewhere, supply chain problems and inflation are now dismissed as “high-class problems”, even if it also means high prices for essentials such as milk, gas and rent. The Atlantic, a premier voice of the gentry Left, grumbles that “America’s central organizing principle is thoughtless consumption”, echoing the kind of homily handed out by Medieval clerics to disgruntled serfs.
Yet nowhere is the hierarchical nature of feudalistic socialism clearer than in the property markets. Social democrats may have once celebrated people owning homes or cars, but new green-tinged policies would lead to those becoming an option only for the rich, while opening a vast market for financial firms to buy single family homes and turn them into rentals. Just look at California, where Green progressives wield almost unlimited power, and which is now home to rising inequality, the nation’s highest poverty rate and the second lowest percentage of homeowners.
More from this authorCan the South escape its demons?By Joel Kotkin
Of course, this mindset is not confined to the Left. In the UK, for example, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have proposed climate-based rules that would force homeowners — their political base — to retrofit their homes for thousands of pounds, while forcing them to abandon affordable gas heaters for less effective electric ones. This reflects what one socialist neatly labels “eco-Thatcherism in Britain“.
But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.
Ultimately, many of the old Left-wing parties may end up losing out to the ascendant Greens, who could be the real winners of the rise of New Socialism. It is not inconceivable that they could take power across Europe — particularly in Germany where the country’s traditional industrial base has shrunk. In the US, although there’s not much chance of the Greens challenging the ruling political duopoly, there are clear signs that the Democrats could find themselves torn between the need to represent both progressives and the party’s blue-collar base.
Yet it didn’t have to be this way. The Left’s Green policies might be big on virtue, but moves to eliminate energy and industrial jobs make no sense if we are going to depend on fossil fuels for at least the next few decades. It seems futile to be shutting down domestic pipelines, curbing energy production and raising electricity prices while begging the Saudis or the detestable Putin regime to drill more.
A more traditional socialist would promote domestic production, particularly natural gas, while also trying to shift production away from coal-dependent China, the world’s primary emitter. China’s Xi continues to build new coal plants and arrange for long-term oil supplies from the Middle East. Unlike our Left-wing parties, Xi knows the grip on keeping power rests on meeting the aspirations of his subjects, not dampening them.
To remain relevant, the Left needs to return to the basics. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, and allow for improvements in daily life. Throughout history, economic growth has been critical to making societies wealthier, while making it far easier to distribute salves to the poor, invest in environmental improvements and work to improve conditions for historically disadvantaged minorities. Good jobs and “economic expansion,” notes economic historian Benjamin Friedman, are the best antidote for “rising intolerance and incivility”.
Is there still hope for a more socially beneficial kind of socialism? Certainly, elements of the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill could help American industry compete with China. People, more than anything, want roads, bridges and ports fixed. But all this risks being undone if the Democrats continue to press for more extreme measures: more moderate Democrats will lose their seats, and the GOP will gain control of the House.
Many on the Left deny the electoral reality, and claim the party can only win by moving towards more assertive redistribution, anti-racist and draconian climate policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans are redoubling efforts to forge a social democratic agenda, crafting an aggressive programme of tax breaks for working families, upholding educational choice in states such as Virginia, and committing to aggressive re-shoring for industry. Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio has even called for a “divorce” with the financial and corporate elite.
It’s an encouraging sign, even though such moves will be adamantly opposed by the bearers of libertarian orthodoxy who have shaped the party for a generation and have the support of many of the party’s big funders. In the end, then, both the libertarians and feudal socialists could find themselves rejected by the majority of the population. After all, a society bedevilled by rising inequality, racial tensions, a pandemic and complex issues around climate change is as unlikely to accept honeyed words about ‘the market being efficient’ as it would tolerate an increasingly intrusive state that squashes their aspirations in the name of environmental virtue.
Something else is needed: policies that address the competitive economy while preserving upward mobility, economic growth and an environment improved by technological changes. In other words we need a socialism that is rooted in the needs of the working and middle classes — not one that seeks to keep them in their place.

Politicians and journalists will sometimes mischaracterize their opponents’ views and then argue against those phantoms rather than real views. It is a cheap but effective political and journalistic trick. Medical news sources have adopted this tactic during the pandemic, with disastrous consequences for public trust in public health and medicine.

The latest example comes from Medpage Today, a medical news site popular among doctors. Many physicians get their pandemic information from Medpage Today.

Once trusted sources that provided the latest medical information from a variety of perspectives, medical news sites like Medpage Today have turned into political mouthpieces for governments that imposed unsuccessful lockdown policies resulting in more than 750,000 U.S. Covid deaths and enormous collateral damage.

A population panicked by public health messaging closed schools and skipped basic medical care resulting in worse cancer, cardiovascular diseases, mental health, and educational outcomes. Universal lockdowns dragged out the pandemic over a longer time period.

Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries implemented more limited restrictions, focusing instead on protecting older, high-risk citizens. The result? Scandinavia has lower Covid mortality than most other European countries and less collateral harm. In the United States, Florida shifted to a similar approach, resulting in a lower age-adjusted Covid mortality than the national average and less collateral harm.

In October 2020, with Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we authored the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). With multiple concrete proposals, we argued for better protection of high-risk older people while letting low-risk children and young adults live near-normal lives to minimize the collateral public health harm. Ours is a middle path between lockdowns and a let-it-rip strategy.

Unfortunately, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other President Trump government officials (save Dr. Scott Atlas) failed to engage seriously with our ideas. Fauci labeled the GBD’s focused protection strategy “nonsense,” claiming it was impossible to implement well-established measures to protect the elderly.

Indeed, the lockdowns did not protect the elderly; nearly 80 percent of COVID deaths were among people age 65 and up. Instead, they protected younger, low-risk, work-from-home professionals such as administrators, journalists, and scientists.

In a recent article about the newly formed Brownstone Institute, Medpage Today takes this pro-lockdown propaganda one step further by falsely claiming that the GBD “promoted the spread of COVID-19.” That is just as dishonest as claiming that work-from-home journalists promoted the spread of Covid-19 by ordering home delivery of pizza.

Medpage Today also falsely claims the previous White House “embraced” the Great Barrington Declaration. Public health scientists have an obligation to politicians of all stripes. In late August 2020, we met with President Trump, Vice President Pence, and others at the White House, with no effect.

The federal government and most governors continued to rely on the advice of the White House Coronavirus Task Force members Drs. Deborah Birx and Fauci. Our failure to sway White House officials was one reason we decided to write the Great Barrington Declaration a month later.

The most dangerous example of the politicization of medical news is the attempt to smear opponents with the false anti-vaccine label. Contrary to the claim by Medpage Today, the benefits of COVID vaccines are “readily accessible on the Brownstone website.”

The three GBD authors all favor vaccines, two have long careers as vaccine researchers, and none have spread any “vaccine misinformation.” To publish a claim that falsely alleges that the anti-vaccine movement has the support of professors of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities is damaging for vaccine confidence. Such a false charge is highly irresponsible, damages public health, and is unworthy of Medpage Today.

All journalists can make a mistake, but Medpage Today has refused to correct these errors. Several members of its editorial board of physicians and scientists, such as Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Vinay Prasad, have written excellent articles during the pandemic.

Surprisingly, the editorial board does not have much say over the journalistic content, as we have learned it was the non-medical editorial staff who refused to make the factual corrections. Just like the non-scientist Big Tech “fact-checkers” who censor public health scientists, journalists have taken over the dissemination of medical information, blindly following Fauci’s edicts.

We think the politicization of medical news has led to increasing distrust in public health and medical professionals. If public trust in medicine is to be improved, trade publications have an obligation to provide accurate medical and scientific information from a variety of perspectives.

The first step should be to correct errors, a minimal obligation of all ethical journalism. A second step requires more balanced reporting about the pandemic by, for example, honestly reporting about the success of the pandemic strategies employed by Florida and the Scandinavian countries. The alternative is a continuing erosion of trust in medicine and public health.

Drs. Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya are senior scholars at the Brownstone Institute and authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

In Washington, foreign interests use money to influence policy through a variety of schemes, often hidden. Foreign lobbying must be reported, by law, but that’s only one conduit foreign money can use to enter U.S. politics. Dozens of D.C. think tanks and other policy organizations take money from foreign countries and corporations without ever disclosing the details. The staffers who have received this financing then write policy papers and testify before Congress, posing as objective, disinterested experts.

It’s a win-win for the think tanks, which collect millions, and for the foreign actors, who can successfully spread their influence in D.C. without scrutiny. But our democracy loses, because this system of soft corruption undermines the integrity of our policymaking process. Americans have now woken up to the risks of foreign influence on Facebook, but think-tankers are still allowed to use loopholes to testify to Congress without disclosing which foreign countries are funding them. Why are we letting them get away with it?

As a New Republic investigation released last month illustrated, even though House Democrats strengthened the conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements for witnesses last January, think-tankers and others are abusing huge loopholes to skirt the intent of the new rules. It’s easy for witnesses to claim they are representing themselves rather than their organization (which is the one actually taking cash from a foreign government) — so many witnesses do just that.

Now a group of House Republicans is trying to close that and other loopholes in congressional rules. Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) has introduced a “Truth in Testimony Reform Resolution,” which aims to close those loopholes and force congressional witnesses to disclose their foreign paymasters.

“Congress works best when all the cards are face up on the table,” Banks said in a statement. “It’s past time we expose malign foreign influence and we take the masks off those individuals working for other countries who are testifying before Congress. I urge my colleagues to pass this rule as soon as possible.”

The rule has 43 co-sponsors, all Republican. There has been some interest on the Democratic side in joining the effort, but no Democrats are publicly supporting it yet. According to House procedures, this rule could be adopted by a simple-majority vote. The Senate currently does not have any requirement for witnesses to disclose foreign funding sources at all.

The new House rule would force all congressional witnesses to disclose all foreign funding sources over $5,000, regardless of whether the witness claims to be testifying on behalf of themselves or their organization. The rule would also eliminate the loophole that compels think-tankers to disclose their foreign funding only if they define themselves as a “fiduciary of any organization or entity with an interest in the subject matter of the hearing.”

Think-tank fellows are not the only class of witnesses that would be required to disclose their foreign financial ties. Consultants, advisers and all paid associates of foreign governments, foreign political parties and foreign state-owned enterprises and their subsidiaries would now have to disclose. Foreign consulting contracts usually fall outside of legal reporting requirements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the main regulatory framework for representatives of foreign governments, because they claim not to include lobbying. But under the Banks rule, that distinction would go away if these experts wanted to testify on Capitol Hill.

Under the proposed rule, those witnesses who work on behalf of foreign adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea would come in for additional scrutiny. This is meant to give extra attention to the efforts by countries including China to spread foreign influence through organizations such as think tanks. Just for one example, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), which was founded and funded by a top member of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front influence operation, has funded several D.C. think tanks over the years.

The Banks rule is supported by leaders of those Washington think tanks that don’t take foreign funding, such as the American Foreign Policy Council and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“Policymakers in Congress need to be confident they are receiving advice that isn’t influenced or distorted by foreign or commercial interests,” said AFPC Senior Vice President Ilan Berman. “This bill will help insure the dependability of the insights that Congress receives from the experts it relies upon.”

There’s no good reason to continue letting foreign governments, much less foreign adversaries, covertly influence our legislative process and our public discourse by channeling their money through American think tanks and consulting shops. The House should pass this rule on a bipartisan basis, and the Senate should follow. Both houses of Congress, and both of our main political parties, have an interest in draining this swamp.

Take English: When the Normans ran England for a spell after 1066, French was the language of writing, government and ceremony while English was thought of as the language of the peasantry, unwritten and unobserved. During this time and afterward, French words flooded into English, such that today we use many French words as a matter of routine: “art,” “pleasant” and even “very” all came from French. To be sure, there were wonks who found this, and the similar flood of Latin words, annoying. They thought English would be purer and even clearer if it stuck to using its own roots to form new words, and thus they advised words like “endsay” instead of “conclusion” and “inwit” instead of “conscience.”

But few listened, they’re dead and here we are. Nobody now regrets that, for example, this very sentence has four French and Latin words. We think of the procession from the Old English of “Beowulf” to the Middle English of Chaucer to the Early Modern English of Shakespeare as a noble procession, handed down by official decree, perhaps as French horns coo Hollywood-kitsch medieval. But if today someone uses “structure” as a verb or tries to clear up the ambiguity between singular and plural “you” by saying “you all,” they’re often told they’re doing something wrong.

The phenomenon goes much wider than English and Spanish, of course. (And, of course, every European language spoken in America, including English, started out as an immigrant language.) The classic model of what happens to immigrant languages in America is simple but oversimplified: that immigrant generations are more comfortable with the language of their land of origin, even if they use English for utilitarian purposes; the next generation is bilingual, but perhaps a little more comfortable with the new language; and the generation after that frequently only speaks the old language in bits and pieces.

Linguists these days are looking more closely at the language of that second generation, and it is becoming clear that the mixed nature of Spanglish represents a general phenomenon. Among people born in and growing up in neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach — where it’s common to hear Russian and Ukrainian spoken — lots of English words are mixed in. A term like “Russglish” wouldn’t roll off the tongue quite the way “Spanglish” does, that’s why there isn’t one. But the pattern among the second generation still fits: Because they didn’t grow up as profoundly immersed in Russian as their parents, and while they are probably fluent speakers, their rendition lets go of some of the knottiest aspects of the grammar that take the most practice to get used to. Spanglish can be like this as well. An English speaker often finds Spanish’s subjunctive mood tricky to get the hang of. Spanish speakers born in the United States and brought up in Spanish-speaking households, while knowing their way around it, sometimes use it less than their parents.

And this new Russian isn’t used just by younger folks at home with their families. Russian-speaking peer groups speak it among themselves in any number of everyday situations. Among many of them, English, too, is taking on new forms below the radar. Many have definite Russian accents despite having been born in New York City. Life in Brighton Beach is so profoundly Russian — some born there casually refer to New York beyond the neighborhood as “America” — that an outsider can forget he’s in the United States at times. Naturally, one can grow up there and hold on to the accent of one’s parents, instead of letting it go as you get older and spend most of your time with peers who speak mainstream American English.

For the past year and a half, people everywhere have been in the grip of a pandemic – but not necessarily the same one. In the affluent world, a viral respiratory disease, Covid-19, suddenly became a leading cause of death. In much of the developing world, by contrast, the main engine of destruction wasn’t this new disease, but its second-order effects: measures they took, and we took, in response to the coronavirus. Richer nations and poorer nations differ in their vulnerabilities.

Whenever I talk with members of my family in Ghana, Nigeria and Namibia, I’m reminded that a global event can also be a profoundly local one. Lives and livelihoods have been affected in these places very differently from the way they have in Europe or the US. That’s true in the economic and educational realm, but it’s true, too, in the realm of public health. And across all these realms, the stakes are often life or death.

The three countries I mentioned have a median age between 18 and 22 years, and the severity of Covid-19 discriminates sharply by age. A big way that Covid can kill is by hampering the management of other diseases, such as HIV, malaria and TB. In Africa alone, 26 million people are living with HIV and, in a typical year, several hundreds of thousands die of it, while malaria, which is especially deadly to infants and toddlers, claims almost 400,000 lives.

Those are big numbers, and yet they used to be much bigger – a major healthcare effort brought them down. Amid the pandemic, though, people stopped visiting clinics, in part because it became harder to get to them, and healthcare workers had to curtail their own movements. According to a Global Fund survey of 32 countries in Africa and Asia, prenatal care visits dropped by two-thirds between April and September 2020; consultations for children under five dropped by three-quarters.

Public-health experts predict that, as an indirect consequence of the Covid pandemic, twice as many people around the world could be at risk of dying from malaria. There could be 400,000 extra deaths from TB in the next few years, and half a million extra deaths from HIV. Across much of the world, in short, the response to the coronavirus has ushered in a shadow pandemic. The coronavirus’s real death toll, then, has to be calculated not just in deaths from Covid, but also in deaths that would otherwise have been prevented, from malaria, TB, HIV, diabetes and more.

This shadow pandemic isn’t simply a story about disease – it’s about poverty, hunger, truncated education and stunted lives. A suggestive comparison can be made with the climate crisis. In the affluent world, some people think of climate breakdown as a matter of how long the air conditioning stays on, but for many in the developing world, it’s already a matter of floods, droughts and famine.

These disparities between the global north and south are likely to be a feature of crises to come. The tale of two pandemics, then, is a tale of two international orders. The post-pandemic challenge, in turn, is to take seriously the rhetoric of an “international community”, and integrate the two into one.

The economies of rich nations have, of course, been buffeted by the pandemic as well. But these nations have been able to spend enormous sums toward relieving the financial distress that has resulted from lockdowns and social-distancing protocols. Lower-income nations don’t have those resources. Borrowing money is costly for them, and their tax base in the formal economy is a shallow, narrow plinth. Country by country and village by village, there’s little to cushion the blow. Not long ago, a team of researchers studied living standards during the pandemic via household surveys across nine developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. They found that the direct health impact of Covid in these relatively youthful countries was less than in richer (and, invariably, older) countries, but that economic vulnerability was decidedly greater. Households typically reported a drop in income – people lost jobs or had a harder time selling their goods. Half of the rural households in Kenya they surveyed had to skip meals or shrink them; in Sierra Leone, that number was nearly 90%.

When the pandemic came to India, meanwhile, 140 million migrant workers found themselves effectively stranded or simply shipped back to their home villages, plunging their dependents into dire circumstances. “For those who were living from hand to mouth to start with,” the eminent India-based economist Jean Drèze observed as it was happening, “lockdown is almost a death sentence.”

The number of people in extreme poverty around the world has risen for the first time since 1997, and analysts don’t expect a quick toggle back once the health crisis subsides. Africa was on track to see economic growth of 3.2% in 2020; now that’s estimated to have been 0.8%. When you’ve got a population growth rate of about 2.5%, that means less food on the table for many, and outright malnutrition for some. In rich countries, Covid’s medical consequences killed elderly people. In developing countries, Covid’s economic consequences killed the poor.

Taleni Ngoshi, a softly spoken 32-year-old businesswoman in Namibia, described the situation to me precisely: “The gap between the rich and the poor here is quite huge. The line between the middle class and the poor is very thin.” Her people are Ovambo, from northern Namibia, where she was born in a town without electricity, eventually got work in a nursery, and found she had a green thumb. Down in Windhoek, the nation’s capital, she started a small business helping people with their gardens. Stories like hers help to explain why, a dozen years ago, the World Bank reclassified Namibia: it went from being a lower-middle-income country to an upper-middle-income one.

Migrant workers outside Delhi in April attempt to return to their villages following a government-ordered lockdown. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

With the pandemic, though, business came to a standstill: most of Ngoshi’s regular clients cancelled their contracts, fearful of any visitors. When she looks around, she sees people losing their houses and cars along with their jobs. Her husband’s small government salary at least puts food on her table. So mainly she worries about the three people who work for her part-time – and the six or seven people who depend on each of them.

The story is different from place to place, and also the same. The low-income nation of Mozambique, which has been identified as the African country most vulnerable to climate change (extreme weather events cost it billions in 2019), found its economy contracting in response to the pandemic, with depressed markets for its commodities and, of course, for tourism. In the lower-middle-income nation of Kenya, where, in 2020, GDP shrank for the first time in almost 30 years, millions of families, living close to subsistence, were squeezed hard. Women there have been especially stricken, in part because they’re heavily involved in retail, hospitality and tourism. (Global tourism losses have been estimated at $8tn.)

To get a proper sense of how the pandemic roiled a country like Kenya, though, bear in mind that one of Kenya’s biggest exports is cut flowers – lilies, carnations, baby’s breath and roses. In fact, Kenya has, in recent years, emerged as the main exporter of rose stems to the EU, supplying almost 40% of the market. Floriculture employs perhaps 2 million Kenyans, directly and indirectly. Dozens of large flower farms can be found around Lake Naivasha, an hour’s drive north-west of Nairobi, and about 1,800 metres above sea level. It’s sunny there, and well supplied with water for irrigation. Despite transport requirements, the carbon footprint per stem was a fraction of that for flowers grown in heated Dutch greenhouses.

Over the past year and a half, as you might guess, those sales wilted. Social distancing meant fewer functions – wedding, funerals, celebrations of all kinds – and fewer functions meant fewer flowers. Millions of rose stems were dumped into pits as flower farms found most of their orders cancelled. Workers were furloughed or saw wages reduced. Once the pandemic settled in, those sales disappeared.

In west Africa – in Ghana and Ivory Coast, in particular – the big story wasn’t about roses; it was about chocolate. Cocoa trees are picky about temperature, humidity and soil, and large swaths of these west African countries hit their sweet spot. Together, the two countries account for about two-thirds of the global cocoa supply. It’s Ivory Coast’s biggest export. In Ghana, gold and oil exports are greater in monetary value, but they don’t matter as much to the country, because they don’t employ as many people and they don’t generate as much public revenue. Economists have estimated that as much as a third of Ghana’s workforce depends on cocoa, directly and indirectly.

During the pandemic, though, chocolate consumption declined. Not mine, and maybe not yours. But it turns out that a lot of chocolate is bought at retail shops and vending machines. They’re gifts or impulse buys: the pre-ribboned box you pick up at the airport, the KitKat bar that pleads for release from its plexiglass prison. Then there’s all the chocolate bought for gatherings at Christmas, Easter, Halloween – or, more to the point, all the chocolate not bought when those festivities don’t take place.

A girl is given an anti-malaria injection in Ziniare, north-east of Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou. Photograph: Olympia de Maismont/AFP/Getty Images

Both countries had big plans for 2020. Ghana and Ivory Coast have state-run boards in charge of buying and selling the cocoa harvest, and had jointly agreed to impose a new surcharge on cocoa exports, amounting to $400 per tonne. It was dubbed a “living income differential”, and was meant to benefit the farmers. Chocolate is a $130bn-a-year industry, but only a few percentage points go to the millions of west African smallholders who do the cocoa cropping. And they have a tough time of it: on average, each cultivates about 3.5 hectares, while trying to support half a dozen or more family members. It’s hard work. The trees are susceptible to sun scald, and those beans arrive inside pods a little smaller than rugby balls. They take months to mature – during which time they can be afflicted by various pests and pathogens, like “black pod” rot. Just in the past half decade, the swollen-shoot virus has forced the destruction of hundreds of thousands of hectares of cocoa trees.

Many cocoa farmers barely eke out a living; a 2018 Unicef report calculated that the average west African cocoa farmer made between $0.50 and $1.25 a day. (When my father was a member of Ghana’s parliament, in the 1960s, he had a lot to say about cocoa farmers getting shafted by the government board that set their prices.) In fact, the growers now tend to be middle-aged, because their kids see how bad they have it, and find other ways of making a living. When the new “living income differential” programme was announced in 2019, growers increased their output, hoping for a sweeter deal.

Instead, they found themselves stuck with beans they didn’t have the capacity to store. As Covid shrank the chocolate market, buyers in the west asked for their deliveries to be suspended. Local middlemen, known as pisteurs, demanded deep discounts to take the bean off the growers’ hands.

Wilting flowers, mouldering cocoa – when you hear stories about how poorly served the global south has often been by the systems of international trade, it’s not surprising that some people have been tempted to urge withdrawal from those systems. Among certain African and Asian scholars, there’s been a revival of interest in arguments from the late great Samir Amin in favour of “déconnexion” – unplugging from an unjust order in which development and underdevelopment were just two sides of a coin.

Amin, an Egyptian economist who spent much of his career in Senegal, urged that development be “national and popular”, and directed toward greater autonomy, or what he termed a strategy of self-reliance. Real political independence called for economic independence, in his view. Although he denied that his plans amounted to “autarky” – the aim of total self-sufficiency – he insisted that a nation’s “external relations” submit to the requirements of internal development: autarky-lite, then.

Alas, there is little encouragement to be found in those postcolonial African regimes, such as Guinea under Sékou Touré, that attempted something like this. In fact, the story of rising global interdependence is also one of rising equality among the nations. Over the past two decades, more than 30 countries have moved from the lower-income category to the middle-income category, to go by the official World Bank designations. Certainly, the 21st century saw enormous advances in the country of my childhood. GDP per capita in Ghana rose fivefold between 2002 and 2016. In recent years, most of the world’s fastest-growing economies were in Africa. And many of the pandemic-linked economic shocks are short-term ones: the market for flowers and chocolate – and timber and bauxite – is rebounding.

All the same, there are morals to be drawn from the vulnerability of the global south amid the pandemic. One is that self-directed programmes of national development don’t work when they simply ignore market realities or leave internal impediment unaddressed. Here, Ghana’s cocoa conundrum is an illustrative instance. In February 2020, Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, travelled to Switzerland and announced that his country wouldn’t be dependent on the export of raw materials. Instead, it would get into the business of manufacturing chocolate and ascend the manufacturing chains, soaring high like Ghana’s animal mascot, the tawny eagle.

A couple of generations earlier, Ghana’s leaders were intent on building up a steel industry: that’s what they thought modernisation looked like. Akufo-Addo has pinned his hopes on bars of a different sort. Why shouldn’t Ghana have vast Toblerone-type factories, with temperature-controlled vats and conveyor belts and wrapping machines? True, the country lacks a dairy industry, and has a rather paltry sugar sector, but it has no shortage of cocoa beans.

A volunteer in Johannesburg directs two men towards a medical tent where they will be tested for Covid as well as HIV and TB. Photograph: Jérôme Delay/AP

Yet Ghana, like most developing nations, has been trammelled by conflicting demands and interests. A fascinating recent paper by a Soas economist and an Accra-based cocoa analyst lays this out. Because Ghana’s central bank needs US dollars – foreign-exchange reserves – the state cocoa boards must sell the commodity to multinational companies. In the meantime, the country is stifling local production by imposing a 60% tax on domestic sales of chocolate and “semi-finished” cocoa products. Special tax exemptions are reserved for firms that export most of their production, hindering those that would first build skills and capacities by developing local markets. All these statutory legacies run contrary to Akufo-Addo’s hopes of ascending the manufacturing chain. If Ghana’s cocoa policy had a mascot, it wouldn’t be the tawny eagle; it would be the pushmi-pullyu.

There are other impediments. A patchwork-quilt land-ownership system makes it hard for smallholders to gain title to their farms. (In Ghana, where so much terrain is in the hands of the traditional chiefs, land reform is a huge, and hugely complicated, issue.) And west African cocoa yields have scarcely improved in the past century. There are now programmes that promote more sophisticated and sustainable cocoa-growing methods – including “smart irrigation” – but they’ve had a late start.

These quandaries are typical of developing nations. Countries throughout Africa and Latin America have economies organised around the export of fairly raw commodities from fishing, farming or mining. Most go through minimal processing before being sold on – the “value add” is meagre. You see a lot of subsistence entrepreneurship, and a lot of vulnerability associated with informal labour and low savings rates. Meanwhile, the climate crisis makes everything worse. When you farm inefficiently, you need more land, which worsens deforestation, which worsens climate change, which worsens your farming efficiency. (West Africa’s seasonal Harmattan winds – hot, dry and dusty – have been growing more expansive over the past couple of decades.) In truth, the turbulences of climate change are akin to those of Covid in slow motion. The price is paid by those least able to afford it.

In the shadow pandemic of the global south, the most lasting consequences could relate to schooling and skills – to what economists call human capital. School closings have obviously been a big problem everywhere. Around the planet, schooling has been interrupted for 1.6 billion students. Yet classrooms in Africa have been shut longer than the global average – and this is a continent where the median age is under 20. (In South America, it’s 31.) Low-income countries, World Bank researchers say, “could lose more than three full years of their investment in basic education”, exacting a commensurate loss in future labour earnings.

For many families, the problem isn’t access to the internet – it’s access to electricity. Between April and August of last year, a team from Human Rights Watch conducted interviews with people across Africa, and found plenty of children receiving no instruction at all. Even when a school had managed to put its lessons online and a parent had a smartphone, the parent might not have a sufficiently generous data plan to make use of them. A teenager in Garissa, Kenya, told the HRW team that lessons were offered on a local radio station, “but I never tuned in because we don’t have a radio”.

When classrooms close, researchers say, female students are hit especially hard: they’re at an elevated risk of child marriage, early pregnancy, domestic abuse and child-labour exploitation. For all these reasons – along with the simple fact that girls are regularly asked to take on child-rearing duties and household chores – Unesco researchers fear that 11 million girls around the world may never return to school. Think of it as another way of being a Covid “long-hauler”.

That gender disparity is worrisome for a variety of reasons. It has been estimated that women’s wages go up by 11.5% for each additional year of schooling, a couple of percentage points more than for men. As the notably unsentimental economist Lawrence Summers once observed, “investment in the education of girls may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world”. When women are more highly educated, they have fewer children but invest more in each child; their children are healthier and, in turn, better educated. Civic participation is higher among educated women, too, and, as the Nobel prize-winning academic Amartya Sen has suggested, expanding female education may help reduce gender inequality within families.

For men and women alike, all these things matter to a society’s prospects of freedom and wellbeing. When development experts say that the pandemic-linked interruptions to education threaten to push 72 million students into “learning poverty”, then the consequences aren’t simply financial. This represents an immense squandering of human potential.

‘Covid is the tide that went out and exposed our nakedness,” a well-known Lagos-based business consultant, Sanyade Okoli, told me. “It revealed all the weaknesses in our health system, educational system, governance structures etc.” Those regional weaknesses can be seen in the spreadsheets; they can also be seen in the streets. A woman with a communications firm in Windhoek offered me a very specific view of the situation: “Ten people a day are at my doorstep asking for food or for work.”

According to World Bank economists, more than 80% of the 120 million people whom Covid ushered into extreme poverty – defined as having earnings equivalent to $1.90 a day or less – are from middle-income countries, a capacious category that encompasses India, Indonesia, much of west Africa and much of Latin America.

That shouldn’t be a surprise. People who live in middle-income countries are peculiarly vulnerable to global contractions; they buy from you and they sell to you. They’re thoroughly enmeshed in a globalised economy. That enmeshment has allowed for some marvellous advances, but lately it feels as if they’re trying to climb an escalator moving down.

The solution is not to get off, or stay home. Even if all you want to do is cultivate your own garden, you’re hardly independent from others when it comes to your seeds, your fertiliser, and – as we’ve all learned – your weather. The way to rebuild a post-Covid world is not to withdraw from internationalism, but to strengthen it.

A worker gathers roses in Eldama Ravine, Kenya. Photograph: Aldo Pavan/Getty Images

Catastrophes are fractal. They have to be understood – and addressed – in macro and in micro ways. When affluent nations in Europe and North America shut down in order to slow the pandemic, their governments offered their citizens targeted relief. (A comparable programme in Nigeria was scantily funded and – Nigerians I spoke to maintained – opaque to the point that it largely benefited government cronies.) In the US, Paycheck Protection Program loans were made to distressed business, which would not need to be repaid if certain conditions were met. In the UK, Bounce Back Loans and the like allowed financing on easy terms. These programmes – an ad-hoc method of social insurance – were imperfect, but they helped a great deal.

Something like this approach is needed on an international scale. The affluent world, in the aggregate, gains enormously from globalisation. We cherish our chocolate and roses, not to mention the aluminium, lithium, tantalum, yttrium and neodymium on which our mobile phones depend. In many respects, it’s a common enterprise – a system of cooperation – from which we all benefit. Yet, as we all know, its yields are greater for some than for others. If the trading partners of the rich nations lose faith in the system, they might be tempted to give up on it. That would be costly to them, but it would be costly to those rich nations, too.

That’s why the system is sustainable only if it involves a sense of shared responsibility. When things go wrong, we who benefit from the system have a duty to do internationally what we do at home: help the vulnerable weather the storm. When public-health measures to “flatten the curve” in rich countries can push people elsewhere on the planet into penury, it’s our problem, too. An integrated global system is imperilled when risk is shifted to those most vulnerable.

Our international responsibilities in the age of Covid have often been discussed in absurdly narrow ways – as if we just needed to ship more vaccines to the under-vaccinated populations. Yes, programmes such as Covax, the international vaccine distributor, need to be better supplied, but all the vaccines in the world won’t remedy the moral and practical perils of inequality. In richer nations, economic turbulence puts more people on the dole. In poorer ones, it puts more people in the grave. If the gains in alleviating global poverty over the past generation were heartening, they have also proved perishable. Okoli, in Nigeria, recalled that, early in the pandemic, people with means took care to feed those in need. “There was a sense,” she added mordantly, “that if we don’t feed them, they’ll eat us.”

The Covid pandemic is, in the words of the eminent economic historian Adam Tooze, “the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era”. In his view, it has put paid to the notion that globalisation will move the whole world toward greater economic and social equality – what he calls the “millennial vision”. The question is what will replace it.

To come to grips with global inequality on a post-pandemic planet, we’ll need more sensitive measures of fragility. No simple jab will resolve the vulnerabilities and inequities that arise from our global interdependence. Still, people in the public and private sectors will do well to think hard about a range of issues: ways of restructuring, forgiving or otherwise mitigating debt burdens when indebted governments have put the money to good use; ways of promulgating smarter and more sustainable agriculture (and other forms of resource exploitation); ways of encouraging better governance at regional and national levels; ways of building and maintaining supple and inclusive global institutions.

And, of course, ways of targeting assistance to do the most good. When, earlier this year, the UK decided to cut foreign aid by $4bn, it was signalling a retreat at a time when history is calling for an advance. The most thoughtful critics of foreign aid make an important point: we want governments that are principally accountable to their people, not to foreign donors and lenders. But the right kind of assistance (including the Covid-related financing and debt-service suspension organised by World Bank Group over the past 18 months) needn’t have this distorting effect on governance. And the expansion of human capabilities is never a money hole.

As the climate crisis was telling us long before Covid blared the message, what happens in one place can have repercussions in many places. That’s why the pandemic must be understood not as an anvil-from-the-sky medical crisis, but as something far more encompassing. “Science is the exit strategy,” the head of the Wellcome Trust famously said, early in the pandemic. But, though science is necessary, it’s hardly sufficient, particularly when we’re interested not simply in exit but in re-entry. As raucous, inward-turned nationalisms continue to claim followers, we’ll need to resist the go-it-alone fantasies of autarky. Rather, a post-pandemic era calls for a richer sense of our mutual obligations.

I think of what Taleni Ngoshi, in Namibia, told me about how she was affected by those whose livelihoods depend on hers. “There are days when you wake up in bed and you think to yourself, ‘I’m tired of this,’” she said. “And one minute later you think, ‘I have to do something. If I stay in bed and wallow in misery, what will the others eat tomorrow?’”

They depend on her, just as, ultimately, she depends on them. Around these small, local circles of reciprocal caring, we need to build larger, global ones. Resilience shouldn’t be reserved for the rich. An international conjuncture that’s fairer and more secure requires that we keep track of systemic risks conceived in the broadest possible way. And trade without responsibility is itself an unaffordable risk – as tempting as a box of chocolates, as perishable as a cut flower.

By James Pethokoukis and Beth Shapiro
From GMOs to Jurassic Park, Americans have been told that scientists’ attempts to alter nature are a recent —and dangerous — development. But humans have been adapting our environment to suit our needs for millennia. And while humans and our technologies can have a destructive influence on the ecologies we inhabit, the latest scientific tools also hold the power to accelerate conservation efforts. Should we embrace the power of modern science to usher in a less natural future or should we stop messing with things before it is too late? To answer that question, I’ve brought on Beth Shapiro.
Beth is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her latest book is Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review. 
Pethokoukis: One of my favorite science-fiction concepts is terraforming, where we go to a moon or a planet and start changing it to make it more suitable for humans. But it’s not just a science-fiction concept. We’ve actually been doing it for a long, long time to this planet: changing the ecology and the animals that have been inhabiting that ecology. That’s something humans have always done.
Shapiro: Yeah, pretty much our role in nature is to terraform the Earth to make it more suitable for us.
When I was reading Life as We Made It: How 50,000 years of human innovation refined – and redefined – nature, the two things that popped in my head were dogs — and when my dog is bad, I say, “Ah, that’s the wolf coming out of you. You’re being very wolf-like today” — and then, of course, fruits and vegetables. If you look at what they used to look like — we have paintings of watermelons from 300 years ago — they looked very, very different. Even the landscape, what we think of as North America, changed over the eons as Indigenous people changed it. So, we’ve always been modifying the environment. But why are we so squeamish about that notion going forward?
I think what you’ve been talking about are all these different technologies that our ancestors have been developing and using for tens of thousands of years. And we have made huge, huge differences to things. You mentioned dogs: I mean, when we think about dogs, what we think about really are the things that we have today. And the breeds that we have today really, are not 10, 20, 30,000 years of innovation. These have emerged really in the last couple of hundred years, but it’s clear that we’ve been manipulating these plants and animals around us for much, much longer than that.
I think that when people think about what’s next, this idea that we might be using genetic tools to manipulate DNA from organisms directly, they see this — I think correctly to some extent — as something that’s different than what we’ve been doing in the past. We have been manipulating DNA, but we haven’t really been able to get rid of that element of chance that is evolution as we’ve been doing this. When we take two lineages and we breed them together, there is some randomness in how their DNA combines. And what we’re trying to do now is really eliminate that sense of randomness to make changes in an organism that we know are going to get into the next generation, and then into all the generations that come after that. And that makes us feel a little bit squeamish, I think.

It’s almost like it should be the opposite. Before we’ve been doing this, we had that random element and didn’t really know what we were doing, maybe not thinking very many steps ahead. And now we are, and now people seem far more worried about it.
It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s like human nature fighting with itself. We’ve been trying forever to become as good at directing evolution, and propelling something — another organism — into the future in exactly the way that we want it to do. And now that we finally have the capacity to do this, we’re like, “Wait a minute, did we really mean that?” And it’s really interesting, as you point out.
Before we talk about what these technologies can do, let’s say what these technologies are. What is synthetic biology?
It’s a sort of catch-all phrase. Synthetic biology refers to the suite of biotechnologies that we have that allow us to directly manipulate the genomes of other species. This might include something that we call cisgenic changes. So, this is a really big, important category of differences: the idea of cisgenic, which means that we’re making changes within the species or a lineage (really within a species), and transgenic, which means that we’re moving DNA between lineages. And the anti-GMO movement for a long time was focused just on transgenics, this idea of moving DNA between organisms that might not happen in nature. And there really is a huge ethical and technological divide there.
Cisgenic technologies, for example, can create new organisms, or new lineages of organisms by doing things like turning off a gene, or turning up a gene, or maybe moving genes between lineages, things that might be able to admix or hybridize in nature. But that would be a little bit messier. An example of this, because it’s kind of confusing: There’s a woman at UC Davis, Alison Van Eenennaam, and she’s working with dairy cattle trying to create strains of dairy cattle that naturally don’t grow horns. And beef cattle, Angus cattle, have a genetic mutation that’s existed for several thousand years that was selected for by people that make them not grow horns. So her idea is to take that mutation that evolved in beef cattle, in Angus, and transfer it to Holstein so that you have this Holstein cattle that don’t grow horns.
The rationale for this is really an animal rights kind of thing. When cattle are born the farmers are often mandated to physically remove the horns because they can injure other cattle and they’re dangerous. This is painful and expensive, and we don’t like it. So, wouldn’t it be better if we had a bunch of dairy cattle that are elite dairy cattle that just don’t grow horns? You could create that elite dairy cow that doesn’t grow horns by just breeding together an Angus bull and a dairy cow,  and then seeing what happens in the future. The offspring wouldn’t grow horns because they would inherit that allele from their dad, the Angus cow, that makes them not grow horns, but they would also have a whole half of their DNA come from their dad. And the animal would neither be an elite beef cow nor an elite dairy cow.
And they could get back to this by back-breeding that hybrid individual with dairy cows, but it would take generations. And over those generations, the farmers would be losing money and we would’ve lost all of the selected evolution that people had put into creating that dairy cow. But if we can transfer just that one gene to make them not grow horns, we maintain this elite dairy cow, but it doesn’t grow horns. So this is an example of a cisgenic change — a change that could happen in nature, but we can just speed it up using the tools of synthetic biology.
And how has this technology advanced over the past, let’s say, seven to 10 years?
The real advance has come with CRISPR gene editing, which makes it much easier to make the desired changes that you want, especially when you’re just doing cisgenic changes, when all you want to do is turn a gene off that stops something from happening or turn a gene up.
So there’s a good example of this. There’s recently been a tomato that’s been introduced to the market in Japan. There’s a new tomato that’s been made where people have figured out that they can turn off the expression of the protein that suppresses the production of the heart-healthy proteins. So, in essence, this tomato just keeps making heart-healthy proteins until there’s way more of it than you would get in a normal tomato. And that’s just by turning off a gene in the tomato. There are no genes introduced from other organisms. So it’s a cisgenic genetically modified organism and it could have been produced in nature, but we know exactly what to do. So we can use these tools of synthetic biology to make this change really quickly.
But biodiversity is more of a global issue. How does synthetic biology play into that?
Yeah, so there’s been a lot less attention that has gone to thinking about how we might use synthetic biology for conservation and biodiversity preservation than for agriculture. And I think that there is tremendous potential here. We can use these same tools that we can use to create new lineages of tomatoes or mushrooms or papayas, and we can help species to adapt to changes in their environment or habitat.
A great example here is with corals. We know that there are some populations of corals that are better able to survive in warmer waters than others. If we could discover what it is genetically that makes these corals better able to survive in warmer waters, perhaps, we could move those genes using the tools of synthetic biology into other coral populations, or even species, giving them a better chance to be able to survive in what is a warming environment.
Another great example is the black-footed ferret. This is an amazing project that is being led by Revive & Restore, which is a biotech-based conservation nonprofit that is based in Sausalito. And they have been working with US Fish and Wildlife and the San Diego Frozen Zoo for some time to figure out whether we can use the tools of synthetic biology to help to save the black-footed ferrets. This is a cute little predator that lives across the Midwestern plains, and everybody thought that it was extinct for some time. It was, in fact, one of the first species that was listed when the Endangered Species Act first came into existence. There was a population that was living at the time, and people brought it into captive environments to try to figure out whether they could help it breed. And they never could; they couldn’t figure out what to do. And the captive population eventually went extinct and people thought that the species was gone.
And then, in the ’80s, a population was discovered near Meeteetse, Wyoming. And this gave everybody a second shot at figuring out how to help black-footed ferrets reproduce and survive in captivity so they could try to come up with a program to reestablish them across their native range. And this was great for some time, until they noticed that the wild population started looking very sick. And in a last ditch effort to save them, they brought the remaining individuals they could find into captivity. They had better luck this time. They did manage to solve some of the problems that were plaguing the previous captive breeding program and figure out how to make the animals breed in captivity.
But there remained a problem. And that was that whenever these captively bred individuals were released into the environment, they ate a prairie dog because that’s what they do. And they got plague from eating this prairie dog and they died. Now, there’s a vaccine against the Sylvatic plague, but vaccinating individuals and releasing them into their habitat and capturing them and re-vaccinating them is not a sustainable program. So Revive & Restore and Fish and Wildlife and other stakeholders thought, “Is there another way that we can help these animals? Is there a tool from our synthetic biology toolbox that might work?” And, in fact, there are several tools that these teams are now working.
The first is, there’s very little genetic diversity in the existing captively bred population and, therefore, the existing wild population. In fact, only seven founder individuals are contributing genetic diversity to all black-footed ferrets that are alive today. But in the San Diego Frozen Zoo, they had tissue samples, frozen tissue from individuals from the previous captive breeding program, which was from a different population than the one that was discovered near Meeteetse, Wyoming in the ’80s. And about a year ago, this team of researchers managed to use that frozen tissue to clone an individual. And Elizabeth Ann, a baby black-footed ferret, was born from 30-year-old frozen tissue that was preserved at the frozen zoo. And when she reaches reproductive maturity, she will make an eighth founder individual to this population. And because her genetic diversity is from a different population, this will be a welcome increase in diversity that will, hopefully, give them a better chance to survive in the wild.
There’s also another potential solution that Revive & Restore and Fish and Wildlife and their partners are looking into. And that is that the cousin of black-footed ferrets, which is the domestic ferret, is naturally immune to plague. They evolved in Europe alongside plague, and they have some natural immunity to it. So they’re working to discover what the genetic underpinning of this natural immunity to plague is. And, once this is known, their plan is to use gene editing to introduce that natural immunity from domestic ferrets into the captive population of wild black-footed ferrets. And, in doing so, they will have created a black-footed ferret that is mostly black-footed ferret with a little bit of DNA from the domestic ferret that allows them to survive when they get released into the wild and come into contact with plague. So these are just some examples of how we might use synthetic biology for conservation.
One of the five black-footed ferrets released on the Walker Ranch in Pueblo West checks out the new territory on Friday, November 19, 2021. Via REUTERS.
I’m originally from Chicago and we used to live back there. And every once in a while I would take my kids, I would drive them by the house I grew up in. And I’d always say, “That’s the house, but it didn’t look like this, this area.” Because when I was a kid, we had these huge elm trees on our block, but then they all got Dutch Elm disease, and they had to cut them all down. Then they planted these really horrible replacement trees. Could we bring back those elm trees, but make them disease resistant? Is that the kind of thing people are working on?
Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing people are working on. In fact, there is one organism, and it’s a tree, that is the furthest along in using synthetic biology to try to help to restore ecosystems that used to exist. And that’s the American Chestnut tree. American Chestnut trees were once the dominant tree in eastern forests across North America, but there was a fungus, a blight that was introduced from Asia in the early part of the 20th century, or late 19th century. And within just a few decades, millions, all of the American Chestnut trees were mostly dead. Some roots and shoots would survive underground, but as soon as they grew up, and became large enough for the fungus to start to attack them again, they would also die.
And there’s a team out of SUNY in New York led by Bill Powell that have been working to try to figure out how they could use synthetic biology to save the American Chestnut tree, the bits that are left. And what this fungus does is it releases an acid into the bark of the tree, into the trunk of the tree that burns holes through the tree through which the fungus can then proliferate. But lots of plants deal with this sort of acid-secreting fungi, and they have evolved ways of doing this.
So they looked to some other plants and found a gene in wheat that produces an enzyme that neutralizes the acid. So it doesn’t kill the fungus; iIt just stops it from being able to burn the tree up from the inside. And they’ve introduced this gene from wheat into American Chestnut trees, and now they have this fungus-resistant American Chestnut tree that is capable of surviving alongside the fungus that is actually all over the place right now. They have trees that are still alive underground, and there are also stands of American Chestnut trees that people planted as they moved from the east across the country, in the 18th and 19th centuries. So they have tons of diversity of American Chestnut trees out there that they can breed this wheat based resistance into.
And now they have these trees — it’s called the Darling lineage. It’s amazing. And they’re currently going through this process of approval through the EPA, the USDA, and the FDA. When it is approved or shown to be safe — and I have high hopes that it will be — it will be the first genetically modified organism that has been produced specifically for the purposes of ecological restoration and saving a species that is really on the path to becoming extinct without this technology.
We are almost 20 minutes into this, and I have shown great restraint in not asking you about woolly mammoths. What are we doing with woolly mammoths, and why are we doing it?
Well, there’s a lot of excitement about the possibility of bringing species back that are gone.
De-extinction.
De-extinction, yes. My enthusiasm for this is tempered a bit. We have so much to do to help species that are still alive today to be able to live. And with all of the technological, ecological, and ethical challenges that come with bringing something back, I prefer to focus on how we might use these technologies to maintain the biodiversity that exists today, but everybody wants to talk about mammoths. So, I’m happy to do so.
And there are lots of technical challenges here. First of all, everybody wants to know, “Can we clone a mammoth?” The answer to that is no, because in order to clone something using the same technologies that brought us Dolly the sheep and Elizabeth Ann, the black-footed ferret, you need living tissue. The tissue that was used to clone Elizabeth Ann was still alive. It was in deep freeze, but it was still alive. And there isn’t any mammoth tissue that is still alive. So we’re not going to be able to clone a mammoth.
The next thing that one might do, and this is what George Church’s group was doing and the new company, Colossal — that’s just been formed by George Church and tech entrepreneur Ben Lamb —  intends to do. They would take the DNA sequences that we have from several different mammoths that people have been able to extract and reassemble from preserved remains of mammoths from across their former range and compare that to the genome sequence of the Asian elephant. We know there’s about a million and a half DNA letter differences between mammoths and Asian elephants. And their idea is that they will either make all or some important subset of those differences using the tools of gene editing to Asian elephant cells that are growing in a dish in a lab. And they can just tweak those cells a little bit at a time until they’re Asian elephant cells that contain a mammoth genome, or an approximate mammoth genome, rather than Asian elephant cells that contain an elephant genome.
And then you have a living cell that you could clone, assuming that you could clone an elephant, which we can’t do right now. There’s lots of technological challenges there. But George and Colossal’s idea is that they will build an artificial womb that will be capable of growing a mammoth for the two years of gestation. 
That sounds like an added level of complexity.
An added level of complexity, for sure. And then, they would release these animals into the Arctic Tundra where they will live happily ever after.
Now, there’s a supposed anti-climate change purpose here, right?
Well, George has liked to say he’s been working with this Russian scientist called Sergey Zimov who has an enclosure up in Northeastern Siberia that he calls Pleistocene Park. Pleistocene Park is the geological epoch during which we had things like mammoths, etc. So, he’s clearly riffing off Jurassic Park here, but thinking Ice Age rather than dinosaurs. And Sergey has shown that where you have animals, and he has horses, bison, deer, and muskox out in Pleistocene Park, they push the snow away from the surface of the dirt during the winter because they’re looking for grass that they can eat.
Sergey Zimov checks for permafrost at the Pleistocene Park. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
And, in doing so, they expose the surface of that dirt to the really cold winter air in Siberia. But without the animals, the snow stays on top of the surface, and snow is a really efficient insulator. And it keeps in all that warmth that was trapped in the dirt during the summer. So with the animals there, the dirt gets colder. And without the animals, the dirt stays warmer. So the idea is to bring in these animals and they’ll push the snow away. The dirt will get colder, and the permafrost will stop melting, and that will stop the release of methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Now, I think you would need a ton of mammoths and elephants and woolly rhinos and whatever you’re going to have up there to make much of a difference. And so I think it’s a little unfair to broadcast this as a solution to what is clearly a way more pressing problem than we can solve by hundreds of years from now having populations of woolly mammoths wandering around Siberia.
But I am excited about Colossal, this company that’s just been formed, despite not being particularly enthusiastic about bringing mammoths back to life, because one of the things that those of us working in synthetic biology for conservation always get is blamed for taking money away from other approaches to conservation that have a better chance at working.
First of all, that’s not fair. This is not a zero-sum game. The same people who are going to give money to biotech for conservation are not going to give money to “Save the Panda” or something like this. It’s a different source of funds. And we can say that until we’re blue in the face and nobody believes us. But now there’s Colossal. And it’s obvious that we’re right. This is new money into conservation and they, I have no doubt, are going to make tremendous strides in developing tools, ideas, and approaches that are going to be useful to make this suite of tools something that we really can apply to solving the biodiversity and extinction crisis that’s going on right now. So I am super excited about the establishment of this company, and the new source of money, and the new source of ideas that are going to go into developing tools that we can use to save species, populations, and ecosystems that are in danger today.
Now, if I were going to make a movie about how all this goes, terribly, terribly wrong — 
Oh, it’s already been made, come on.
— with unintended consequences and the mosquitoes that we engineer to not give us malaria actually give us something worse, I would include a very enthusiastic character like yourself.
I’m not saying we should absolutely run at this without bothering to evaluate what the risks might be. Obviously, with new tools and new things like this, there are new risks.
Well, what’s the alternative, I guess, right?
What do conservation efforts look like if we just eschew this technology, we reject it?
I think, clearly, there are risks associated with adopting new technologies. But, to my mind, there is a far greater risk with being so scared of these technologies that we don’t at least allow ourselves to have this conversation, to start to think as a global community of stakeholders that are normal citizens, scientists, business people, government agencies, and Indigenous groups. We should, as a group, care about the future of the biodiversity on this planet. And if we just wholeheartedly reject these technologies because we’re afraid of some unintended consequences that might be, we’re also rejecting the intended consequence, which is to maintain a planet that is both biodiverse and has the capacity to support a whole bunch of people. And I think that’s the future we want to live in.
I don’t understand the plan B.
Maybe it’s full circle here. Plan B is terraforming a different planet. Let’s start somewhere.
We can either go to a different planet, or we can have a radically different life here. It just does not seem realistic to me. If you care about the environment, you worry about sustainability and biodiversity, the technology here may have been a stressor on the planet, but it’s also, I think, the only realistic path forward. You can’t go backwards, you just need to keep going forward.
Yeah, the only way to preserve nature may be to use these tools and make it just a little bit less (what most people might call) natural.
Is there something you need for public policy? Are there regulations, or do you need more funding? Is there anything in those areas?
Everything, yeah. I mean the establishment of Colossal is a good step to actually generating some funding. That’s going to go toward thinking about these things. But we need groups that are really interested in having the hard conversations about who gets to make these decisions. And how far can we go? We really do need to start thinking as a global society. One of the biggest problems with all genetic modification, or synthetic biology, whether it’s biodiversity or agriculture, is that the regulatory pathways are so different in different parts of the world that it’s really impossible to know how to proceed. And it makes it a very complicated landscape for everybody except the richest industries to try to navigate, which then just feeds back into the lack of trust that people have because it seems to be a technology that only these big rich companies can get into. And this is partly because we’ve been so nervous about this that we’ve made it so difficult for anybody else to break through.
I mean, look at what has happened with golden rice where everybody’s like, “Golden rice is a terrible thing.” And Greenpeace is burning down the crops of golden rice in the Philippines, where so many children go blind and then eventually die from vitamin A deficiency. And people are like, “That’s because it’s big business.” It’s not. It’s an entirely academic venture. Nothing is intended to be sold for profit. This is a really great thing that could save children’s lives. But the way that we think about this is just so messed up because of our fear and our mistrust.
Where does that come from?
Well, it comes from the anti-GMO movement that started very early in the days. And part of that is scientists’ fault because people, in the early days of these technologies, were so reticent to do something that seemed like they weren’t appropriately calculating risk, that people who were opposed to this idea just glommed onto this idea that scientists thought that this was scary — all because scientists just wanted to do this the right way. They have fed this idea that, “Oh look, even the scientists are so scared of this. We really shouldn’t be doing it.” But it was appropriate hesitancy, I think, that has been mischaracterized and misconstrued.
Activists protest against the production of herbicides and GMO (genetically modified organisms) food products outside Monsanto headquarters. REUTERS/Kate Munsch
And now it’s very hard to find truth in conversations about genetic engineering and gene editing technologies online because there’s such a loud voice of a minority of people who are deliberately spreading misinformation to keep people scared. And I worry about that. I think that this is really to our global detriment as a society. I don’t really know how to get beyond this other than having louder voices that are trying to have conversations with all of the stakeholders to make people really understand what’s going on.
But I mean, look at the mess that we’re in with vaccines. And I don’t know how to do this with our global community right now. One of the ways might be to think about the past and the present, and really think more about how this isn’t a sudden shift into people controlling nature. We’ve been controlling nature for a really long time. Yes, it’s the new suite of technologies that allows us to do things at a more rapid pace, but this is also a pace that might be the only thing that lets us keep up with the pace of the crises that the world is going through.
My guest today has been Beth Shapiro. Beth, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.
Thank you.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Beth Shapiro is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 
 Learn more: Looking back on the Space Race: My long-read Q&A with John Logsdon | The techno-optimism of World's Fairs: My long-read Q&A with Charles Pappas | Will taxing billionaires help Democrats build back better? My long-read Q&A with Kyle Pomerleau 
The post Should we bring back woolly mammoths? My long-read Q&A with Beth Shapiro appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

It might seem decidedly out of step with the times, but I've been thinking about the French postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze's insistence that "the right to say nothing" is underappreciated and, in its own way, quite beautiful. Not to gratuitously mix high and low culture, but Justin Timberlake echoed this sentiment more recently with the line: "Sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all." (I was not aware of this, or much of anything about Justin Timberlake, until I read Slate's big takedown of Timberlake last night).What's interesting about the context of Deleuze's quote is that he associates the right to silence with democracy.  Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing.Silence is resistance, in this reading. As it happens, I was also not aware that on November 4, 1995, Gilles jumped to his death from his apartment window in Paris. I was in France last week, including a 5-day bout of relative isolation on the island of Corsica. I had told my AirBnb host to disconnect the WiFi. She did, and I told her not to give me any hints about where I might find the router. And so I came back to find myself completely unaware of a series of ominous developments in Europe, particularly the Balkans. But there was a relief in deciding that I didn't want to know too much. Because I didn't know enough to actually have an opinion, I was then liberated from having a position. I was not aware, also, that the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse was happening, which meant that I found myself caught off guard when the verdict was announced. What I found most interesting (yet unsurprising) was the diametrically opposed reactions from people I follow on Twitter. In part because I write about and think about rightwing thought, I go out of my way to follow proper right-wingers, and my understanding of the world is richer for it. Let's just say that they have a very different view of Rittenhouse than the folks on "my side." What seemed clear to me is that there is no "reality" of what happened the night of August 15, 2020. There are a string of facts, and those aren't so much in doubt. How we interpret those facts, connect them, and contextualize them very much is. For example, how you feel about open carry laws—Rittenhouse was legally carrying a semi-automatic rifle—is likely to affect how you view the verdict. How you view the protests of Summer 2020 and to what extent they were justified and good is likely to shape how you view the overall context in which Rittenhouse descended on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin that night.  The trial itself was not about any of these bigger questions. As David Graham wrote in The Atlantic: [The trial] couldn’t say something about the state of race relations in America. The jury could never have rendered a yea-or-nay verdict on the saturation of guns in American society.The most important questions aren't about "facts"; they are about values. And it is difficult to split the difference on foundational differences regarding the common good. As I have said before, there is no such thing as "the common good," or at least not one we can agree onThe rise and fall of Justin TimberlakeWhich brings me to Justin Timberlake. Since I wasn't aware that his star had fallen in recent years—Pitchfork's review of his last album, Man in the Woods, is painful to read—I was trying to process a lot of new information in a short amount of time. Apparently, Justin (or the idea of Justin, as Deleuze might say) is undergoing a bit of a cultural reckoning, so that by itself is quite interesting. It's not about anything he's done in the last 10 years, but rather things he said in the early 2000s that were deemed acceptable then but no longer are. Basically, it all started when Timberlake, who had an acrimonious breakup with Britney Spears, told a radio show that he had, in fact, had sex with Spears. Spears' virginity subsequently became public fodder. She was demeaned and shamed. This undermined Britney's girl-next-door aura, especially since she had said that she wanted to remain celibate until marriage. Timberlake would routinely offer up thinly-veiled attacks on Britney in his songs, most famously in "Cry Me a River." Then there was his role in Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl. The onus of the fallout fell almost entirely on Jackson, whose career never quite recovered. Why was a white male able to escape unscathed, and why was a black woman punished for what, in hindsight, seems like something pretty trivial?  How do we reassess the past in light of new cultural norms? Cultural revisionism has its dangers, of course. The standards of rightness are always changing. Obama opposed gay marriage in 2008. But he supported gay marriage in 2014. Can that really mean that Obama wasn't a liberal in 2008 but became one just a few years later? There's also the tyranny of the tastemaker, running with trends, particularly those having to do with wokeness that might themselves have to be reassessed in in due time.  All of that said, I couldn't finish the takedown of Timberlake without thinking that progress is real. The 2000s sound awful. The Bush years were uncurious, chaste, and conformist. For God's sake, the Dixie Chicks were canceled for saying something that seems pretty innocuous in retrospect about George W. Bush. Also, I find some solace in thinking that it would be difficult for mainstream media outlets to shame Britney Spears today the way they did in the early 2000s.But perhaps it's more accurate to say that all eras suck, they just suck in different ways. We'll likely look back at the woke excess of 2018-202(?) and lament that it could have gotten so bad. And we will be right, but only up to a point. It seems tragic that there is no common good to be had in today's America. But "common goods" are only possible if there is consensus, and the notion of consensus frightens me. There is a reason I like quoting the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe on this. Except on the most obvious things, any consensus today is likely to be artificial and imposed. Consensus is only possible when there is already a consensus, and there rarely is. “All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion,” she notes.This might be presentist bias, but I would take 2021 over 2003 any day.What I'm reading (and watching)I absolutely loved the most recent episode of Succession, which includes (perhaps for the first time in a major television show) and explicit reference to the recent popularization of "integralism" on the Catholic right. There's also this rather amusing quote: A well-regulated election is a transmission frequency for God's grace.Meanwhile, I'm belatedly trying to finish Richard Stern's Other Men's Daughters, which is the third in the triptych of semi-depressing novels I set myself out to read over the summer. For more context on why, see this piece.  Also, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I'm currently reading Stephen King's On Writing, intriguing subtitled "A Memoir of the Craft." 

Economists have long relied on measures of slack, like the unemployment rate, to predict variables like the inflation rate or nominal wage growth. This analysis investigates three questions: First, what was the best univariate predictor of changes in wage or price growth in the United States over the roughly two decades prior to the pandemic? Second, which measures of wage or price growth are most predictable? And third, how might the answers to these two questions be changing in the current circumstances and going forward? Based on performance prior to the pandemic, all of the predictors work in a broadly similar manner in predicting different measures of wage and price growth. The job quits rate is the best predictor of nominal wage growth followed by prime-age (25-54) nonemployment and total unemployment. The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings is the best predictor of core Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation followed closely by the quits rate and the unemployment rate. And prime-age nonemployment is the best predictor of real wage growth.

Today, these measures of slack are telling very different stories about the economy. The unemployed-to-job openings ratio and the quits rate, which have indicated much more tightness than other measures of slack, have been most consistent with recent fast wage growth and inflation and should get meaningful weight in judgments about the future of labor markets and price growth—likely more weight than the prime-age nonemployment rate (which varies a lot for reasons unrelated to slack over time) and possibly even the unemployment rate.

The predictor: Measures of labor market tightness

Originally, the Phillips curve was based on the relationship between unemployment and wage growth—when the unemployment rate is lower, wage growth is higher or rising or above its expected value (depending on the version of the Phillips curve). In recent years, economists have explored the relationship between wage growth and inflation and a wide range of alternative measures of slack including short-term unemployment and the prime-age employment rate (which reflects changes both to unemployment and labor force participation). There has been resurgent interest in looking at measures that include information from the employer side, such as the ratio of unemployed to job openings, to assess labor market tightness.

In our analysis we examine four different predictors: the headline unemployment rate (or U-3), the prime-age nonemployment rate (this is one minus the more familiar prime-age employment-to-population ratio so that lower is consistent with a tighter labor market), the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings, and the quits rate (quits divided by total nonfarm employment). In the roughly two-decade period prior to the pandemic (the longest period for which all four measures of slack we consider are available) these different predictors largely moved together closely as shown in figure 1, which rescales them to ensure they all have the same mean and standard deviation for ease of comparison (to be directionally consistent with the other three measures of slack, in regression models and graphs we use 1 minus the quits rate so that higher values correspond to a higher degree of slack). While there are some differences, for example, prime-age nonemployment recovered more slowly following the Great Recession of 2007-2009 than the other measures, the overall trends are very similar. This general similarity in movements means that in normal times they make the same broad predictions.

Lately, however, these predictors have behaved very differently, giving rise to renewed interest in distinguishing between them. In particular, the quits rate and the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings are the tightest on record and would predict rapid wage and price growth over the next year. In contrast, the prime-age nonemployment rate is almost exactly at its average for our sample period, predicting normal wage and price growth. The unemployment rate is somewhat below average.

The predicted: Consequences of labor market tightness

The Phillips curve has been used to predict both inflation and wage growth. Some aspects of price inflation, like energy prices, are largely determined by global factors that are not tightly related to labor market tightness in the United States. As a result, it is more useful to use labor market slack to predict core inflation, which excludes the relatively volatile and more internationally determined food and energy categories, rather than overall inflation. Additionally, these international concerns are likely less of a concern when using measures of domestic labor market slack to predict measures of domestic labor market performance, such as nominal wage growth, real wage growth, or the degree to which real wage growth exceeds productivity growth (i.e., real unit labor costs).

These different metrics of the consequences of labor market tightness are relatively noisy and often have behaved very differently from each other over the last 20 years as shown in figure 2.

Assessing these different metrics in two prediction models

We assess the different predictors in two different Phillips curve models. The first is a traditional Phillips curve that relates current measures of slack to changes in prices or wages over the next year. This model gives rise to a permanent tradeoff between unemployment (or other measures of slack) and inflation (or other measures of the consequences of slack). This may be most appropriate when inflation expectations are very stable. The second is an autoregressive Phillips curve, with the lagged term serving as a proxy for time-varying inflation or wage growth expectations. The equations for these two are:

We estimate these models using measures of slack from 2001, the first year all four measures of slack are available, through 2019 for wage growth and inflation. Our sample deliberately ends before the pandemic.

The traditional Phillips curve models can be illustrated with scatterplots, which are shown here for nominal wage growth as the predicted variable with our four predictors (figure 3). All four models work reasonably well.

We present results for a total of 40 models using 4 different predictors * 5 different predicted variables * two specifications. As expected, the coefficient on the lagged slack term was negative in all models for each predicted variable, except real unit labor costs, with the negative coefficient statistically significant at the 5 percent level or better in 27 of the models (the exceptions are some models for core Personal Consumption Expenditures [PCE] inflation and real Employment Cost Index [ECI] wage and salary growth).[1]

We compare the full set of models, predictors, and predicted variables by comparing their adjusted R2s, a measure of what fraction of the variation in the predicted variable is explained by the different measures. These are shown in the table. (We also looked at a range of other variables including job openings rate, short-term unemployment, ECI total compensation, and average hourly earnings with similar or slightly worse results than these.)

Adjusted R2 from Phillips Curve Regressions Prime-age nonemployment Unemployment rate Unemployed per job opening 1 - quits rate Traditional Nominal ECI - Wages and Salaries 0.71 0.69 0.55 0.76 Core CPI 0.22 0.33 0.42 0.41 Core PCE 0.09 0.07 0.05 0.10 Real ECI - Wages and Salaries (Core CPI) 0.41 0.28 0.13 0.28 Real Unit Labor Costs (Core CPI) 0.04 -0.01 -0.01 -0.01 Autoregressive Nominal ECI - Wages and Salaries 0.75 0.70 0.65 0.77 Core CPI 0.22 0.35 0.45 0.47 Core PCE 0.08 0.07 0.05 0.09 Real ECI - Wages and Salaries (Core CPI) 0.42 0.28 0.17 0.29 Real Unit Labor Costs (Core CPI) 0.03 -0.02 -0.01 -0.02 Note: Real ECI - Wages and Salaries and Real Unit Labor Costs are nominal measures deflated by core CPI price index. Prime-age nonemployment is the share of the civilian population aged 25-54 that is not employed. Unemployment rate is the U-3 unemployment rate. The quits rate is quits divided by total nonfarm employment. ECI is employment cost index for civilian workers.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bureau of Economic Analysis via Macrobond; authors' calculations.

A few observations on these results:

There is generally not a large difference between these predictor variables. All of them do a reasonably similar job of predicting over this period.

Wages are much more predictable than prices. Because nominal wages are more sensitive to slack than prices, the real wage is procyclical, rising more quickly when slack is low. Finally real unit labor costs are so noisy that they are effectively unpredictable in these frameworks.

The predictive power of each predictor tends to vary across outcome variables. The quits rate performs the best for nominal wage growth, the ratio of unemployed to job openings has the most predictive power for core CPI inflation (although the quits rate is very close), and the prime-age nonemployment rate outperforms the other predictors for real wage growth. Autoregressive Phillips curve models are broadly consistent with the traditional Phillips curve results.

How stable are the relationships between these variables?

The fact that two variables have a predictive relationship in one historical period does not necessarily mean that they will going forward. On ex ante grounds there is good reason to prefer the unemployment rate over the prime-age nonemployment rate. The unemployment rate has the advantage that for over a century it has been stationary—that is, it rises and falls but generally moves around the same range—with most of its movements related to cyclical changes in the economy. In contrast, the prime-age nonemployment rate has not been stationary, falling from 37 percent in 1948 to 20 percent in 2019 as a result of not just economic fluctuations but also structural changes like the entry of women into the workforce or the exit of men from the workforce. As a result, using prime-age nonemployment rates to make predictions out of sample may be worse if any further structural changes are affecting labor force participation.

Even though the relationship between prime-age nonemployment and wages works well in the 18 years prior to 2019, it works very badly over a longer period as shown in figure 4, panel a. It is possible that all of the structural shifts that have affected labor force participation rates over the previous decades have played out and that labor force participation has stabilized, but the many slow-moving structural factors that affect even prime-age participation rates over time and across countries suggest that counting on stability is risky.

However, despite the generally stationary nature of the unemployment rate, its relationship with wage growth also varies substantially over time as shown in figure 4, panel b. When estimated on all available data, instead of only the roughly two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, there is essentially no measurable relationship between wage growth and the unemployment rate. While the direction of the relationship between wage growth and the unemployment rate does not reverse like it does for prime-age nonemployment, it also is clearly not stable over time. That this relationship is unstable even with a relatively stationary measure of slack like the unemployment rate suggests that substantial caution is warranted when attempting to predict future wage or price growth.

In addition to the general concerns about the stability of these relationships over time, economists have also raised questions about how well jobs openings data capture employers' true demand for workers. Employers may have an active job posting because they are seeking to hire someone imminently, but they may also have a job posting because they might want to hire someone at some point in the future. Over time, the average amount of employer search intensity per job opening can fluctuate, which affects the interpretation of job openings as a measure of demand for workers. There are similar fluctuations in the job search intensity of the unemployed, but a technological shift towards more online hiring raises concerns that job openings today mean something different than they did 15 years ago.

This is a reasonable concern, but we do not find much reason in the data to think that such technological shifts resulted in a unique change to the predictive relationship within our sample window for the ratio of unemployed to job openings. The intercepts and/or coefficients in the regressions change around the Great Recession across our models, and the change does not appear to be systematically larger for models that include job openings (see appendix figures). It is possible that the relationship between measured job openings and true slack will change but at least since 2001, the data show that the number of unemployed workers divided by job openings has been meaningfully predictive, something that would not be the case if the structural changes and variations in the meaning of openings over this period were particularly large.

Applying these results to the present situation

The four measures of labor market slack behaved similarly in the 18 years leading up to the pandemic but have behaved very differently since the start of the pandemic. This divergence has continued in recent data with the prime-age nonemployment rate at its average over the roughly two decades prior to the pandemic but the ratio of unemployed to job openings and the quits rate indicating the tightest labor market on record, with the quits rate even more tight relative to its historical values than the ratio of unemployed to job openings. This presents the sharpest test of potential differences in the properties of these predictors, albeit one that is heavily confounded by all of the other changes happening as the US economy emerges from the pandemic.

Over the last six months nominal wage and price inflation have both been very high, with ECI wages and salaries growing at a 3.4 percent annual rate (compared with a 2.4 percent annual rate in the 18 years prior to COVID-19) and core CPI prices growing at a 3.0 percent annual rate (compared with a 1.9 percent annual rate in the 18 years prior to COVID-19). These increases are likely due, at least in part, to one-off factors that are outside of this extremely simple model, like supply chain issues and the reallocation shock associated with the pandemic. They do, however, lend some greater weight to the explanatory power of the unemployed-to-job openings model and the quits rate as compared with the other two.

An economist trying to predict wage or price inflation over the next year would expect it to be about average if they used the prime-age nonemployment rate, above average if they used the unemployment rate, and well above average if they used the ratio of unemployed to job openings or the quits rate (which suggest the labor market is tighter than ever). So far, the unemployed-to-job openings and quits rate model predictions are doing a better job making sense of what is happening—and suggest additional pressures on prices and wages as well as faster inflation-adjusted wage growth going forward.

Note

1. Statistical significance calculated using Newey-West standard errors with a lag order of autocorrelation of 8.

The legacy of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this fall was perhaps best encapsulated by its president, who bowed his head and — close to tears — actually apologized for the process, which ended with a last-minute watering-down of participants’ pledges on coal.
“May I just say to all delegates I apologize for the way this process has unfolded and I am deeply sorry,” said Alok Sharma, the British politician who served as president for COP26. The conference ended on November 13 with a disheartening “compromise” deal on the climate after two weeks of negotiations with diplomats from more than 190 nations.
In the interview that follows, leading public intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin offer their assessments of what transpired at COP26 and share their views about ways to go forward with the fight against the climate crisis. Chomsky — one of the most cited scholars in history and long considered one of the U.S.’s voices of conscience — is Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. He is joined by one of the world’s leading economists of the left, Robert Pollin, who is Distinguished Professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Chomsky and Pollin are co-authors of the recently published book, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy to Save the Planet. 
C.J. Polychroniou: COP26, touted as our “last best hope” to avert a climatic catastrophe, has produced an outcome that was a “compromise,” according to United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, while activists conducted a funeral ceremony at the Glasgow Necropolis to symbolize the failure of the summit. Noam, can you give us your analysis of the COP26 climate agreement?
Noam Chomsky: There were two events at Glasgow: within the stately halls, and in the streets. They may have not been quite at war, but the conflict was sharp. Within, the dominant voice mostly echoed the concerns of the largest contingent, corporate lobbyists; rather like the U.S. Congress, where the impact of lobbyists, always significant, has exploded since the 1970s as the corporate-run neoliberal assault against the general population gained force. The voice within had some nice words but little substance. In the streets, tens of thousands of protesters, mostly young, were desperately calling for real steps to save the world from looming catastrophe.
The outcome of this conflict will determine the course of history — or more precisely, will determine whether future human history will be “nasty, brutish and short” (to lift philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s words) or full of promise and opportunity.
The conflict is nicely encapsulated in a report of Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research. It is dated October 27, just a few days before COP26 opened, offering space for fine words and eloquent promises about saving the Amazon forests, a precious resource for Brazil’s future, and the world’s.
The Institute reported that “the area deforested in Brazil’s Amazon reached a 15-year high after a 22% jump from the prior year, [an outcome that] flies in the face of [the Jair] Bolsonaro government’s recent attempts to shore up its environmental credibility,” to put it politely.
It was put less politely by spokespersons for Brazilian and international environmental organizations: “We are seeing the Amazon rainforest being destroyed by a government which made environmental destruction its public policy…. This is the real Brazil that the Bolsonaro government tries to hide with fantastical speeches and actions of greenwashing abroad. The reality shows that the Bolsonaro government accelerated the path of Amazon destruction.”
Within the halls there were many “fantastical speeches,” while the outside world revealed much that “flies in their face.” Within, there was great enthusiasm about the $130 trillion that will be provided by financial institutions to rescue us. U.S. chief negotiator John Kerry was exultant that the market is now on our side.
He might be right, if we understand the phrase “the market” to refer not to the “fantastical” concept that is conjured up in public discourse but to the real world market: What Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein call the neoliberal “bailout economy.”
How the holy market works in this case is outlined by political economist Adam Tooze. Lending by the holders of the rescue package of $130 trillion “will not be concessional,” he writes.

“The trillions, Kerry insisted to his Glasgow audience, will earn a proper rate of return. But how then will they flow to low-income countries? After all, if there was a decent chance of making profit by wiring west Africa for solar power, the trillions would already be at work. For that, Larry Fink of BlackRock, the world’s largest fund manager, has a ready answer. He can direct trillions towards the energy transition in low-income countries, if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are there to ‘derisk’ the lending, by absorbing the first loss on projects in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Even more money will flow if there is a carbon price that gives clean energy a competitive advantage.”

“It is a neat solution,” Tooze adds: “The same neat neoliberal solution that has been proffered repeatedly since the 1990s. The same solution that has not been delivered.” And won’t be delivered unless the friendly taxpayers (excluding the rich, who are granted ways to exempt themselves) perform their neoliberal duty in the “bailout economy.”
Others added their own interpretation of the lofty rhetoric within the halls. Not least Washington. “We must seize this moment,” President Joe Biden declared in Glasgow. On returning home, he “opened the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history,” carrying out a program set in motion by former President Donald Trump.
In defense, the administration held that it was obligated to proceed because of “a preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge in June, saying that its proposed pause on new leases would be illegal.” Environmental groups point out a variety of options, but the main conclusions stare us in the face: The reigning institutions, whether federal or judicial, are unwilling to take the steps needed to save us from catastrophe.
Threats will mount when, as seems likely, the denialist party storms back into power, having successfully blocked government programs that would help the population but bolster their political opposition, along with a flood of lies about saving innocent little children from the “critical race theory” villains who are teaching them that they are by nature brutal oppressors, and whatever other hysteria they can whip up.
As Trump took over sole possession of the Republican Party, the percentage of Republicans who regarded global warming as a “serious problem” declined from 50 percent to 40 percent while, “The proportion of Democrats who see climate change as an existential threat rose by 11 points to 95 percent over seven years.” It’s not hard to imagine how the wrecker and his minions will gleefully exploit the renewed opportunity to race as quickly as possible toward irreversible tipping points, while enriching their corporate masters.
The “last, best hope” in Glasgow was not the conference of 120 world leaders, but the competing event that was taking place in the streets outside. They are the ones who can compel the powerful in government and corporate headquarters to act expeditiously to use the options available to avert the race to destruction and to create a better world.
Can we draw hope from the promise made by the countries meeting in Glasgow to “revisit and strengthen” new plans by the end of 2022, or should we interpret this pledge as another way on the part of world leaders to just keep kicking the can down the road?
Chomsky: There were a few positive developments within the halls in Glasgow, though far short of what is urgently needed. The question of how to interpret the pledge brings to mind Karl Marx’s 11th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach: The task of those committed to decent survival is not to interpret the pledge but to act to insure that it is more than pious verbiage.
Bob, first what’s your own assessment of the key outcomes from COP26, and what do you make of the position of those countries which were fiercely opposed to calls for the inclusion of fossil fuels in any final agreement and phasing out coal and fossil fuel subsidies? 
Robert Pollin: The first thing to say about the COP26 conference is that it demonstrated, yet again, the breathtaking capacity of high-level diplomats to discuss issues of human survival almost entirely disconnected from reality. For example, it was considered an achievement of the conference that, for the first time, the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy was officially recognized as a cause of climate change. The only way that we can consider this progress is in relationship to the flat-out absurdity that the previous 25 COP agreements had all failed to acknowledge the long-established reality that burning fossil fuels is responsible for producing about 75-80 percent of the greenhouse gases causing climate change.
Beyond this measure of “progress,” the COP26 diplomats still wrangled over whether they objected, full stop, to governments providing fossil fuel subsidies or rather, whether they objected only to fossil fuel subsidies that are “inefficient,” whatever that means. Not surprisingly, the final document ended up only opposing “inefficient” subsidies. Similarly, at the very end of the meetings, China and India managed to substitute a reference to “phasing down” coal rather than the original text that referred to “phasing out” coal.
Amid such word-parsing exercises, the underlying reality is that, even with all the pledges made at the last major COP conference, COP21 in Paris in 2015, almost nothing has been accomplished in terms of reducing CO2 emissions. Thus, in its 2021 “World Energy Outlook,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that, according to its “stated policies” scenario — i.e. a scenario that takes account of all government pledges made at Paris along with what they have actually accomplished relative to these pledges — global CO2 emissions will not fall at all as of 2030 and will fall by less than 6 percent as of 2050, from 36 billion tons of emissions today to 33.9 billion tons as of 2050. This, again, is within the context of the Paris agreements, in which all 196 countries committed to stabilizing the global average temperature at 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. To succeed in stabilizing the global average temperature at 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has established that global CO2 emissions must fall by 45 percent by 2030 and reach zero emissions by 2050.
All of this tells us that we will never move on to a viable climate stabilization by relying on the words or pledges agreed to in any such diplomatic documents. The only way to move seriously onto a viable climate stabilization path is through grassroots political organizing that forces governments to take actions that they will otherwise never take. If there was any good news out of COP26, it is that political organizers were in the streets in Glasgow in full force and could not be ignored.
Their presence did force some concessions into the final document: About half of the nearly 200 country delegations agreed to cut methane emissions by 30 percent as of 2030. The full body pledged to end deforestation by 2030. The full body also acknowledged “with deep regret” that the rich countries that are responsible for the climate crisis have not fulfilled their financial pledges to support green transition programs in low-income countries. It remains an open question as to whether this “deep regret” will lead to serious financing commitments that will actually be met. 
Why is the transition to clean energy so slow? Is it a question of lack of investments and technological know-how, or something else?
Pollin: By some metrics, the transition to clean energy is proceeding fairly quickly. For example, as of 1985, solar energy provided less than 0.01 percent of the world’s electricity supply. By 2020, that figure is up to 3.3 percent. This is an increase of nearly 3,000 percent in 35 years. Of course, we are starting in 1985 with a miniscule base of solar production. More importantly, the level of solar supply can’t remain stuck in the range of 3 percent of electricity in order to meet the climate goals. It rather needs to be in the range of 60-70 percent as of 2050.
A major factor that had prevented the expansion of clean renewable energy from expanding more rapidly had been cost. As recently as 2010, the average cost globally of producing a kilowatt of electricity through solar energy was 38 cents. As of 2020, the average cost had fallen to less than 7 cents. Meanwhile, the comparative average cost for fossil-fuel-generated electricity has remained stable over this decade at between 5-15 cents per kilowatt hour. In other words, solar is now fully cost-competitive with fossil fuels, which had not been true previously. Both onshore and offshore wind are also now fully cost-competitive with fossil fuels. As such, when we include energy efficiency investments along with those for renewable energy, the overall result is that this clean energy infrastructure can deliver both a zero emissions economy and lower energy costs.
Even with renewable energy costs dropping sharply, several critical issues still remain outstanding. One is the intermittency of solar and wind power supply — that is, the sun doesn’t shine at night and wind doesn’t blow all day everywhere. So transmission and storage questions do need to be addressed — for example, how to deliver wind-powered electricity reliably and at low cost from a farm in Western Pennsylvania to the center of Philadelphia? A lot of progress is being made toward resolving these issues. But also keep in mind that we don’t need to solve them completely right now, before we can proceed with the clean energy transition. We aren’t going to eliminate the use of fossil fuels next week, no matter what. We have roughly two decades to develop the transmission and storage technologies that we will need to operate the global economy on 100 percent renewable energy supply.
Another challenge with building the renewable energy infrastructure is land use. This is a serious question that has emerged in many places. Where do we site the wind turbines and arrays of solar panels without wrecking neighborhoods or natural environments? Part of the solution is to make as much use as possible of artificial surfaces — such as putting solar panels on rooftops or building solar canopies in parking lots. Such measures are becoming increasingly viable, with the costs of even residential solar installations now also reaching cost parity with both fossil fuels as well as utility-scale solar farms. A similar pattern is also occurring with offshore wind platforms.
Broadly speaking then, the technology, intermittency and land use issues are being addressed effectively despite inadequate levels of government support. Still, we need to find the funds to build this global clean energy infrastructure. That is going to require something like 2.5-3 percent of global GDP per year, i.e., about $2.5 trillion next year, then averaging about $4.5 trillion per year between now and 2050, according to figures in our book, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal.
What was clear from COP26 is that government funding at sufficient levels will never be forthcoming without political struggles. This is despite the fact that the 2.5 percent of GDP that is required can be provided readily through some financing combinations that we have discussed previously. For example, converting all existing fossil fuel subsidies into clean energy subsidies, transferring only 5-10 percent of military spending into clean energy investments, or having the major central banks purchasing global green investment bonds. Such bond purchases could be in the range of 2 percent of the bailout injections that the Federal Reserve injected into Wall Street to prevent a financial collapse the COVID recession.
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that people shouldn’t expect international climate summits like COP26 or governments to solve the climate crisis, but at the same time defended the Green New Deal plan. How do we realize the goals of the Green New Deal from below? This is a question addressed to both of you.
Chomsky: How was the New Deal realized, or any other step forward in human history? Virtually without exception by dedicated persistent activism. This time will not be different.
Elements are there. Thanks in no small part to Bob Pollin’s active engagement, backed by sound analytic work, unions are taking up the cause. That includes the United Mine Workers, proceeding well ahead of coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin, a congressional champion-in-receiving-funding-from-fossil-fuel-industries who is cooperating with rock-solid Republican opposition to steps to reverse the race to destruction.
There’s ample precedent for organized labor taking the lead, as it did in bringing the New Deal to fruition. One of the earliest environmental activists was Tony Mazzocchi of the Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, workers who are the most immediate victims of poisoning the atmosphere. His efforts to form a Labor Party failed, and it’s not easy in the rigidly monopolized U.S. political system, but there are ways to progress even in this domain. There are encouraging signs that labor is reviving from the bitter 40-year neoliberal assault. The mass refusal to return to rotten and dangerous jobs is only one sign. The malaise that is leading to an unprecedented wave of “deaths of despair” in the white working class can, and must, be overcome and directed to the kind of militant labor action that 90 years ago created a base for social democracy in the U.S. while Europe was descending into fascist horror. 
A third of Americans, overwhelmingly Republicans, don’t even regard global warming (let alone the much broader crisis of environmental destruction) as a “serious problem.” All must come to recognize, soon, that it is not only a serious problem but an urgent one, and that how we deal with it, right now, will determine the fate of human life as well as that of the countless species we are casually destroying. To achieve that essential goal requires major educational and organizational efforts, omitting no sector of the society, including those in thrall Trump-style malevolence.
In Congress, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey have reintroduced a 2019 resolution calling for a comprehensive Green New Deal along the lines of the detailed work of Robert Pollin and his colleagues and, with somewhat different models from economist Jeffrey Sachs, now also backed by the IEA. Local and state-level initiatives are underway. There are major international actions, mostly by the young.
That’s the barest sample. There’s lots of work to do. This is not the time for musing on the sidelines.
Pollin: We need to be organizing at all levels of society to advance the global Green New Deal project. This means fighting to stop any and all communities and institutions from relying on burning fossil fuels to provide energy and to build a zero-emissions-energy infrastructure through investments in both energy efficiency and clean renewables. Note that this is distinct from demanding that institutions divest their ownership shares of fossil fuel stock and bonds. The divestment movement has played a critical role in raising consciousness about the climate crisis. But its effectiveness is limited by the reality that if, say, a university sells its stocks in Exxon-Mobil, those stocks are getting purchased by hedge funds that are happy to buy the stocks at reduced prices. The hedge fund will then continue to earn dividends from their fossil fuel stocks as long as people continue to consume oil, coal and natural gas to meet their energy needs. So the Green New Deal program must start with the project of ending reliance on fossil fuels. And we certainly can’t wait for the next COP conference to settle the matter. 
We then need to be clear that the case for the Green New Deal is overwhelming, at many levels: It is the way through which we can realistically get to zero emissions by 2050. The investments to build the clean energy infrastructure will be a major engine of new job opportunities, in all regions of the world. My co-workers and I have estimated that clean energy investments at about 2.5 percent of GDP per year would generate, for example, about 4-5 million jobs per year in the U.S. and about 20 million jobs in India. Creating these new jobs will also open opportunities to increase union organizing and raise the pay and benefits associated with these jobs. Building the clean energy infrastructure will also create new possibilities for small-scale public, private and cooperate ownership of renewable energy assets. It will eliminate the largest sources of outdoor air pollution, and thus significantly raising public health standards. The Green New Deal must, critically, also be committed to just transition for the workers and communities that are currently dependent on the fossil fuel industry that will need to be phased out.
In combination, these various features of the global Green New Deal provide a powerful platform for committed and effective organizing. The diplomats that argued last week over what may constitute “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies will then be forced into finally seeing the reality before their eyes. 
Note: This transcript has been lightly edited.

Summary

Standard epidemiological models predict that, in the absence of behavioral changes, an epidemic should continue to grow until herd immunity has been reached and the dynamic of the epidemic is determined by people’s behavior.

However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been plenty of cases where the effective reproduction number of the pandemic underwent large fluctuations that, as far as we can tell, can’t be explained by behavioral changes.

While everybody admits that other factors, such as meteorological variables, can also affect transmission, it doesn’t look as though they can explain the large fluctuations of the effective reproduction number that often took place in the absence of any behavioral changes.

I argue that, while standard epidemiological models, which assume a homogeneous or quasi-homogeneous mixing population, can’t make sense of those fluctuations, they can be explained by population structure.

I show with simulations that, if the population can be divided into networks of quasi-homogeneous mixing populations that are internally well-connected but only loosely connected to each other, the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even in the absence of behavioral changes.

I argue that, while there is no evidence that can bear directly on this hypothesis, it could explain several phenomena beyond the cyclical nature of the pandemic and the disconnect between transmission and behavior – why the transmission advantage of variants is so variable, why waves are correlated across regions, why even places with a high prevalence of immunity can experience large waves – that are difficult to explain within the traditional modeling framework.

If the population has that kind of structure, then some of the quantities we have been obsessing over during the pandemic, such as the effective reproduction number and the herd immunity threshold, are essentially meaningless at the aggregate level.

Moreover, in the presence of complex population structure, the methods that have been used to estimate the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions are totally unreliable. Thus, even if this hypothesis turned out to be false, we should regard many widespread claims about the pandemic with the utmost suspicion since we have good reasons to think it might be true.

I conclude that we should try to find data about the characteristics of the networks on which the virus is spreading and make sure that we have such data when the next pandemic hits so that modeling can properly take population structure into account.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been ongoing for more than one year and a half now, but we still don’t understand its dynamic well. What is perhaps more surprising, however, is that the fact that we don’t understand it well is not more widely acknowledged. For the most part, governments continue to rely on projections based on models that have systematically proved to be massively unreliable, while this fact receives almost no attention in the public debate. Occasionally, one can hear people briefly acknowledge that we don’t really understand why waves of infections come and go (typically after the epidemic took a turn that wasn’t predicted by the models used to make projections), but they almost never follow up with a real effort to try and figure out why the pandemic exhibits this cyclical pattern. People often claim that it’s because respiratory infections are “seasonal”, but meteorological variables are not associated with transmission strongly enough to explain this pattern, so in practice this boils down to the claim that infections rates fluctuate over time, which is not a genuine explanation but just a restatement of what is to be explained. In theory, transmission should ultimately be determined by people’s behavior, but the effective reproduction number often fluctuates wildly even when, as far as we can tell with the data we have, there were no behavioral changes.

In this post, I propose that such fluctuations could be the result of population structure, which is mostly ignored in the models used in applied work on the pandemic. Indeed, while standard epidemiological models assume that the virus spreads in a homogeneous or quasi-homogeneous population (i. e. that infectious people have the same probability of infecting anyone else in the population or at least in their age group), this is a very crude idealization. In reality, the virus spreads on a complex network, which depends on people’s patterns of interactions. I show with simulations that, if real populations depart sufficiently from the homogeneous mixing assumption, the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even in the absence of behavioral changes. I argue that, although we don’t have evidence bearing directly on this hypothesis, in addition to the disconnect between transmission and behavior that has often been observed, it could explain several other puzzling phenomena. Finally, I show that if real populations really have the kind of structure posited by my theory, then the methods used in the literature to estimate the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions are totally unreliable. Thus, even if that hypothesis turned out to be false, as long as we have good reasons to believe it might be true, we should take the conclusions of studies on the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions, many of which are of dubious quality even if we ignore the issue of population structure, with a large grain of salt.

What epidemics are supposed to be like according to standard epidemiological models

There are many different approaches to model the spread of infectious diseases, but the most commonly used models are compartment models, which are called that because they divide the population into several compartments and model the way in which individuals move from one compartment into another in the course of the epidemic. For instance, the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model, which is arguably the most famous epidemiological model, divides the population into 3 compartments. At the beginning of the epidemic, everyone is susceptible, but after the virus is introduced in the population people start infecting each other and move into the infectious compartment, then finally into the recovered compartment when they are no longer infectious and can no longer be infected because they have become immune. Variants of this model can be obtained by adding or removing compartments and transitions between them, which makes this approach very flexible. For instance, the Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model adds a compartment for people who have been exposed but are not yet infectious because they are still in the incubation period, as well as a transition between the exposed and infectious compartments. Of course, the SIR model can also be adapted to take vaccination into account, which reduces the share of the population susceptible to infection.

In this post, I will use a closely related model, which is essentially a stochastic, discrete-time version of the SIR model with overdispersion. Don’t worry if this sounds like gibberish to you, the model is actually very simple and the way in which it works can be explained without complicated jargon. The key quantity governing the dynamic of the epidemic in the model is the basic reproduction number. It’s the average number of people that someone who is infected would infect during their infectious period if everyone in the population were susceptible. It must be distinguished from the effective reproduction number, which is the actual number of people that people who are infected will infect on average. The effective reproduction number is always lower than the basic reproduction number, because not everyone is susceptible in the population, so some people that would have been infected after interacting with someone infectious will not actually be infected because they are no longer susceptible. The model assumes that everyone has immunity after they have been infected and that everyone in the population interacts with everyone else randomly. Thus, if the basic reproduction number is 3 and at one point during the simulation 50% of the population has already been infected, the effective reproduction number at that point is only 1.5, because on average 50% of the people that infectious people interact with can no longer be infected. At the beginning of the simulation, the population is seeded with a few infected people to get the epidemic started. On each day, the model randomly draws the number of people that each person infected on that day will eventually infect from a negative binomial distribution with a mean equal to the effective reproduction number on that day and a dispersion parameter of 0.1, so as to model superspreading. Then, for each secondary infection caused by a person infected on that day, it randomly draws how much time later this secondary infection takes place from a gamma distribution with a mean of 4.8 days and a standard deviation of 1.7 days. This process is repeated until the end of the simulation.

This graph shows how a typical epidemic unfolds in that model with a basic reproduction number of 3 in a population of 10 million: As we shall see, a crucial assumption of this kind of model, which is called the homogeneous mixing assumption, is that people interact and infect each other randomly. However, as long as that assumption holds and even when it’s somewhat relaxed, a compartment model will always generate a qualitatively similar epidemic if the basic reproduction number remains constant and the immunity acquired by people who have recovered doesn’t wane. In other words, while the height of the curve at the peak and the area under it may vary depending on what assumptions were made, it will always have this kind of shape as long as the basic reproduction number remains constant, immunity doesn’t wane and the homogeneous mixing assumption or something close enough to it holds.

As we have seen, the basic reproduction number is the number of people that each infected individual will infect on average when everyone in the population is susceptible. It depends on how many contacts infectious people have and how often those contacts result in transmission of the virus. Thus, in a framework where immunity is assumed to be permanent and the homogeneous mixing assumption is made, the basic reproduction number only depends on people’s behavior. It goes up when people have more contacts with each other or have contacts that are more likely to result in transmission of the virus and goes down if they have fewer contacts or have contacts that are less likely to result in the transmission of the virus. This is a key assumption of the standard modeling framework, so it’s important to understand this point, because as we shall see shortly there are good reasons to doubt that it’s true. As I already noted, in the simulation that was used to generate the epidemic depicted on the graph shown above, the basic reproduction number was assumed to be equal to 3. A population of 10 million was seeded randomly with a few infections during the first 30 days of the simulation and some of them started chains of infections that eventually resulted in the large epidemic shown in the graph. The basic reproduction number was assumed to remain constant over time, which is equivalent to assuming that people didn’t change their behavior during the course of the epidemic or at least not in a way that affected the basic reproduction number.

As you can see on the graph, during the initial phase of the epidemic, the daily number of infections — which is called “incidence” — is growing exponentially. This makes sense because, while everyone or almost everyone is still susceptible, each person infects 3 people on average after being infected, each of whom then go on to infect 3 people on average, etc. However, as the epidemic grows, the average number of people infected by infectious individuals, which as we have seen is called the effective reproduction number (as opposed to the basic reproduction number that would obtain if everyone were susceptible), goes down since more and more of the people they interact with and would have infected when everyone was susceptible have immunity because they have already been infected previously. Eventually, the epidemic reaches a point where each person only infects 1 other person after they have been infected, which is called the herd immunity threshold. If the basic reproduction number is 3 as I have assumed in the simulation, the herd immunity threshold is reached when 2/3 of the population has already been infected and is no longer susceptible, because at this point 2 out of 3 people that would have been infected by each infectious person have immunity and can’t be infected anymore. Once the herd immunity threshold has been crossed, incidence starts to go down, until eventually it reaches zero and the epidemic is extinguished.

This is what happens when the basic reproduction number stays constant, but things are different if people voluntarily change their behavior or are forced to do so by the government. For instance, suppose that initially the basic reproduction number is 3, but that on the 50th day of the simulation the government declares a lockdown for 60 days, which temporarily brings down the basic reproduction number to 0.75 before it goes back to 3 after the lockdown is lifted. This graph shows the result of a simulation under this scenario with the same model as before: As you can see, after the lockdown comes into effect, incidence starts to go down. However, exponential growth resumes as soon as the lockdown is lifted, which results in a very large second wave. This wave only starts receding when the herd immunity is reached, which as before happens when 2/3 of the population has been infected, since after the lockdown is lifted the basic reproduction number goes back to 3 because we’re assuming that people only changed their behavior in response to restrictions.

As I already noted, there are many variants of the SIR model, but they exhibit the same qualitative behavior in almost every case. This is true even when the homogeneous mixing assumption is somewhat relaxed. For instance, the herd immunity threshold in the SIR model is (where is the basic reproduction number), but it’s lower in a model that divides the population into groups of people who differ in how much social activity they have. However, even in such a model, incidence keeps growing until the herd immunity threshold is reached and can no longer grow after that threshold has been reached. Thus, while the height of the epidemic curve and the area under it may be different in different models, as long as they assume that immunity doesn’t wane and do not depart too much from the homogeneous mixing assumption, the epidemic curve always has the same basic shape, with a phase of exponential growth that gradually slows until the peak corresponding to the herd immunity threshold is reached, after which incidence starts decreasing until it reaches zero and the epidemic is extinguished. Moreover, even if the basic reproduction number is temporarily reduced by non-pharmaceutical interventions or voluntary behavior change and the effective reproduction number drops below 1 in such a model, incidence starts growing again as soon as the basic reproduction number goes back to its previous level unless the herd immunity threshold has been reached or the number of infected people has dropped to zero before that.

Standard epidemiological models fail to explain the dynamic of the COVID-19 pandemic

As we have just seen, based on the SIR model and most of its variants, we would expect the COVID-19 pandemic to exhibit a specific type of dynamic. In particular, as long as the population is still far from the herd immunity threshold, the epidemic should grow quasi-exponentially unless people change their behavior in a way that affects the basic reproduction number. However, if we look at real data during the COVID-19 pandemic, we see that actual epidemic behavior radically departs from this prediction. First, as I noted previously, there are many cases in which incidence started to fall long before the herd immunity threshold could plausibly be assumed to have been reached and despite the absence of a lockdown or other stringent legal restrictions. The most famous example is what happened in Sweden during the first wave, but it’s not a very good example if we’re trying to show that standard epidemiological models can’t explain the data because there is very good evidence that people in Sweden engaged in massive voluntary behavioral changes despite the absence of stringent restrictions: As you can see, the daily number of ICU admissions for COVID-19 started to fall in early April, which suggests that incidence started to fall about 2 weeks before that. But as I noted above, this graph also shows a large reduction of mobility around the same time. Thus, if this reduction of mobility was associated with behavioral changes that resulted in a reduction of the reproduction number (which is likely because it’s hard to imagine that such a large reduction in mobility was not accompanied by a reduction in the number of contacts people had with each other), it’s not surprising that incidence fell despite the lack of stringent restrictions, since that’s exactly what standard epidemiological models in which the basic reproduction number is allowed to vary predict.

However, there are many examples where the same thing happened, but without any evidence that voluntary behavioral changes could explain why incidence started to fall even though herd immunity was still a long way. For instance, it happened in Florida during the summer of 2020, where there was a large wave of infections that peaked in the middle of July: A variety of restrictions were in place during this period in Florida, which varied on a county-by-county basis, but in most places they were implemented in June or at the beginning of July and remained in place until after the wave had peaked, so non-pharmaceutical interventions can’t explain why incidence started falling in mid-July. Moreover, as you can see on the chart, while mobility was significantly reduced compared to the pre-pandemic period, there was virtually no change in mobility except for a temporary drop around the Fourth of July. I could make the same point about the wave of infections that Florida experienced last winter, which receded in January before vaccination could possibly have made any difference, while there were virtually no restrictions and despite the fact that mobility didn’t change during that period except for Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Another example is what happened in Spain last winter when the country experienced a very large wave, yet the government refused to order another lockdown, as it had during the first wave. Local governments did put in place a variety of restrictions, but the national government prevented them from ordering a regional lockdown and, in some regions, restrictions remained minimal during most of the period. In particular, this was the case in Madrid, but it didn’t prevent incidence from peaking around the same time as in the rest of Spain: The only significant change in the legal restrictions that applied in Madrid during this period was a set of new rules, including a curfew between 11 pm and 6 am, that came into effect on January 18, but taking into account the incubation period the peak of infections almost certainly happened before that. Moreover, as you can see in the upper panel of the chart, this didn’t have any detectable effect on mobility. The fact that incidence started to fall around the same time in Spain, despite the wide variety of restrictions that local governments imposed in different regions, also suggests that government intervention wasn’t a key factor. If we look at mobility, which captures behavioral changes regardless of whether they were voluntary or induced by restrictions, there was a drop associated with Christmas, New Year’s Day and the Epiphany, as well as a significant fall that lasted for about a week after the Epiphany and was presumably caused by the snowstorm that paralyzed Madrid for several days at the time. In theory, this could have temporarily reduced transmission, but since mobility started to reverse to previous levels as soon as the snow was cleared from the streets this reduction should have been temporary and standard epidemiological models predict that epidemic growth should have quickly resumed. However, that is not what happened, since incidence continued to fall after that and didn’t rise again until the end of March. Vaccination also couldn’t possibly explain why the epidemic receded since it was still progressing at a very slow pace in Spain at the time and, even by the end of January, only 0.8% of the population was fully vaccinated.

Thus, incidence often starts falling long before it should according to standard epidemiological models, but it also starts to rise when, according to the same models, it should not. The debate has focused on what makes waves of infections recede, but if we’re trying to understand the dynamic of the epidemic, the question of why incidence rises when it does is just as important. Sometimes, it seems that incidence starts blowing up for no particular reason, since none of the factors that are assumed to govern the dynamic of the epidemic by standard epidemiological models have changed. For instance, France experienced a large wave of infections last fall, yet neither changes in restrictions nor changes in mobility can explain why the epidemic growth exploded when it did: As you can see, incidence plateaued in September before suddenly exploding in October, but there were no non-pharmaceutical interventions until mid-October and mobility doesn’t seem to have changed before that.

In this case, I think it’s illuminating to also compare mobility to the effective reproduction number and not just the daily number of cases, because it illustrates the fact that restrictions and voluntary behavior changes can’t explain the way in which transmission changes over time: As you can see, the effective reproduction number fell sharply in September before increasing rapidly at the beginning of October (which led to a large wave of infections and ultimately the second lockdown), but again there were virtually no restrictions until mid-October in France and it doesn’t seem that changes in mobility can explain those fluctuations either.

I could literally go on for hours about other similar examples, which are difficult to reconcile with the way epidemics are supposed to behave according to standard epidemiological models, but you get the idea. In general, when looking at data on the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s striking how volatile the effective reproduction number is and how little of those fluctuations make sense within a framework that assumes that, as long as the population isn’t close to herd immunity, the dynamic of the epidemic is driven by changes in behavior, whether voluntary or induced by non-pharmaceutical interventions. This conclusion is not the result of cherry-picking, since it’s also clear when you perform more systematic analyses. Indeed, while many studies reported a strong correlation between mobility and epidemic growth early in the pandemic, this association became very weak almost everywhere after the first wave. There seem to be other factors besides changes in behavior that have a large effect on the dynamic of the epidemic. However, the overwhelming majority of epidemiological models used to study the pandemic don’t take into account any other factors, so it’s unsurprising that they have performed so abysmally. It’s well-known that, when incidence is low, stochastic factors can play a large role, but this can’t be the explanation for the large fluctuations of the reproduction number we observe in the data that are not accounted for by changes in behavior since, as we have just seen, such fluctuations were often observed during periods when incidence was high.

Among the factors that have been put forward to explain the fluctuations of the effective reproduction number, this only leaves meteorological variables. However, while I do not doubt that meteorological variables affect transmission, I don’t think they can explain the large fluctuations that the effective reproduction number often undergoes even in the absence of behavioral changes. First, while several studies have found a relationship between meteorological variables and the effective reproduction number, the association seems relatively weak. Indeed, places with very similar climates have experienced waves of infections at very different times of the year, while places with completely different climates have experienced waves at the same time, which should already make clear that meteorological variables only have a limited impact even without looking at the data in a more systematic way. Moreover, to the extent that meteorological variables affect transmission, we expect their effect to be at least partly mediated by people’s behavior. Indeed, meteorological variables can in theory have both a direct and indirect effect, but only the former is independent from behavior. The direct effect is the effect that meteorological variables have on the mechanism of transmission at the biochemical level, while the indirect effect is the effect they induce by causing behavioral changes. Indeed, as we have seen above in the case of the snowstorm that paralyzed Madrid for several days last January, weather affects people’s behavior, which in turn can affect transmission. Since part of the effect of meteorological variables on transmission is mediated by people’s behavior, it’s even more unlikely that meteorological variables could explain why the effective reproduction number often undergoes large fluctuations even in the absence of meaningful behavioral changes. This suggests that standard epidemiological models can’t be fixed by taking into account more variables, but that a more fundamental change of framework is called for.

Of course, if you are really committed to standard epidemiological models, you can always come up with a story to reconcile the data with those models. For instance, in my discussion so far, I have used mobility as a proxy for the behavioral variables that affect transmission, but one could object that data on mobility don’t reflect the relevant behavioral changes and that it’s therefore wrong to infer from the weak association between mobility and epidemic growth that behavior can’t explain the dynamic of the epidemic. It could be that, with better data on people’s behavior, we’d find a stronger association between behavioral changes and the effective reproduction number. A recent study based on GPS tracking data from over 1 million cellphones in Germany suggests that, with more fine-grained data, we may indeed be able to do that. The authors used the data to determine when people were physically close to each other, considered it a contact when they remained close for long enough and used that to construct a graph of people’s contacts. Based on that graph, they were able to compute not only the average number of contacts over time, but also what they call a “contact index” that takes into account both the average number of contacts and its variance. They also computed this index because theoretical results suggest that heterogeneity of contacts and not just the mean number of contacts people have affect the epidemic’s reproduction number. They show that, while the average number of contacts is poorly correlated to the effective reproduction number after the first wave, the contact index remained predictive of the effective reproduction number after that. Of course, this study has many limitations (starting with the fact that it’s limited to data about Germany), but I think it’s nevertheless a very important paper that has unfairly been ignored and hopefully this post can help rectify that.

This study provides some evidence for the claim that, while aggregate mobility data is not very predictive of the effective reproduction number, we’d be able to find a stronger association between transmission and behavior if we had more fine-grained data on the latter. However, while I have no doubt that mobility data are a very imperfect proxy for the relevant behavioral changes and that we’d find a stronger association between the effective reproduction number and behavior with better data, the disconnect between mobility and epidemic growth is so extreme in so many cases that I find this response totally unconvincing if it’s meant to imply that, except for a small part of the variability that can be explained by factors such as meteorological variables, behavioral changes are sufficient to explain the fluctuations of the effective reproduction number. In general, it’s always possible to protect any theory against falsification if you’re willing to add enough epicycles to it, but it doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable to do so. If there were just a few anomalies in the data, it would make sense to explain them away by assuming that a few unknown factors that generally play a small role sometimes conspire to falsify standard epidemiological models that don’t take them into account, but anomalies are ubiquitous so I think it’s clear that something else is going on here. Everywhere waves come and go in a way that is impossible to reconcile with the predictions of standard epidemiological models without tying yourself into knots and the effective reproduction number frequently undergoes large fluctuations that can’t be explained by changes in behavior. While epidemiologists have mostly ignored this fact and continue to use models that have systematically and massively failed, I think it’s time to accept it and try to understand what, in the absence of meaningful behavioral changes, could explain the large fluctuations of the effective reproduction number that we have observed.

Population structure as the missing piece of the puzzle

At this stage, we seem to be faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, as we have seen, the effective reproduction number of the epidemic frequently undergoes large fluctuations even in the absence of behavioral changes. On the other hand, we have strong theoretical reasons to expect that ultimately transmission depends on people’s behavior, since we know that SARS-CoV-2 transmits by contact. Thus, it seems that any theory that can explain why the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even in the absence of meaningful behavioral change must deny this basic fact about the mechanism of transmission, making it a non-starter. In this section, I will try to square this circle by presenting a theory that, while consistent with the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted by contact and therefore that ultimately transmission depends on people’s behavior, explains why large fluctuations of the effective reproduction number can nevertheless occur even in the absence of meaningful behavioral changes. The first thing to consider is that, from the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted by contact, it doesn’t follow that large fluctuations of the effective reproduction number can only result from large behavioral change. In fact, I have already implicitly acknowledged that fact above when I said that meteorological variables probably affect transmission, even if their effect doesn’t seem large enough to explain the large fluctuations of the effective reproduction number that we frequently observe even in the absence of behavioral changes. Another example of a factor that could affect transmission even if people don’t change their behavior is the emergence of more transmissible variants. As I argued previously, I think that Alpha’s and Delta’s transmissibility advantages over the previously established strains have been vastly overestimated, but you don’t have to agree with me on that to agree that it can’t be the whole story behind the disconnect between transmission and behavior. Indeed, as the examples I used above show, the effective reproduction number has often undergone large fluctuations in the absence of meaningful behavioral changes even when the distribution of variants remained stable. So there must be another factor that explains this phenomenon and, in this section, I will propose that it’s population structure.

As we have seen, in order to study the spread of infectious diseases, epidemiologists use models that make various simplifying assumptions. In particular, they typically assume a homogeneous mixing population, which means that contacts between people are totally random, so everyone is equally likely to infect everyone else if they are infected. However, this assumption is totally unrealistic, because in the real world transmission occurs in a highly structured population and contacts are not random. If you are infected, the probability that you are going to infect most people in the population is effectively zero, because you’ll never have any contact with them. Of course, there are many people you will never have any contact with, but whom you could nevertheless indirectly infect by starting a chain of infections that goes through them, but for most people the probability that this will happen is infinitesimal, whereas it’s much higher for people you interact with often because they are your colleagues, friends, members of your family, etc. and people who frequently interact with them. In reality, the virus doesn’t spread in a homogeneous mixing population, but in a highly structured one where each individual has different patterns of interactions with different people. How the virus spreads depends on who interacts with whom, how often they interact and what type of interaction they have, since those facts determine what chains of infections can exist and how likely each of them is depending on where the virus starts from in the population.

Thus, while standard epidemiological models represent the population as a collection of particles that interact randomly with each other, it’s better seen as a complex network where nodes are individuals and edges represent potential interactions between them that could result in transmission. Each edge in the network has a weight that indicates how easily transmission can occur along that edge if one of the individuals it connects happens to be infectious, which is determined by the frequency and nature of the contacts between them. Epidemiologists of infectious diseases have produced a voluminous literature on models that assume a virus spreads on these kinds of networks, so it’s not as if they didn’t know that real epidemics don’t spread in a homogeneous mixing population and hadn’t studied how population structure can affect transmission, but this literature had essentially no effect on applied work during the pandemic, perhaps because the kind of data that would be necessary to model real epidemics in that way is almost never available. Yet I think that population structure could hold the key to the mystery I have identified above, namely that the effective reproduction number often undergoes large fluctuations that, as far as we can tell, can’t be explained by changes in people’s behavior. Indeed, what I’m proposing is that we can solve this mystery by postulating that the network on which the epidemic spreads has what in network science is called “community structure”, which means that it can be divided into subnetworks whose nodes are internally densely connected while the subnetworks are only loosely connected to each other.

To illustrate this concept, here is a graph I found in this paper that shows the friendship network of a few thousand people on Facebook, where community structure is clearly visible:

Of course, the networks on which the COVID-19 epidemic spreads are far more complicated, since they can involve millions of people. Moreover, the edges between nodes don’t have the same meaning, since you can be friends with someone on Facebook but never have any interaction with them that could result in transmission of the virus and you can have that kind of interaction with someone you aren’t friends on Facebook with. But fundamentally what I’m proposing is that, when the epidemic spreads in a country, it does so in a network that has this kind of structure.

But how would that explain why the effective reproduction number of the epidemic can undergo large fluctuations even when people’s behavior doesn’t change? Well, if the virus is introduced in a network of this type, it will spread easily within the subnetwork where it has been introduced, but it will have a harder time leaving that subnetwork to spread into others, because subnetworks are loosely connected to each other. As it spreads through a subnetwork, the prevalence of immunity will increase in that subnetwork and, unless it manages to reach another subnetwork from there, the effective reproduction number of the epidemic will go down. When the virus is introduced in another subnetwork where the prevalence of immunity is low, either because that subnetwork has been seeded from the outside or because the virus managed to reach it from another subnetwork through one of the edges connecting them, the effective reproduction number will go up again and so will incidence, until that subnetwork is also saturated. Thus, if the population has that kind of structure, waves of infections will tend to be restricted to one or a few subnetworks, which in turn would explain why they come and go even when people don’t change their behavior. On this hypothesis, the virus is still transmitted by contact and therefore transmission still depends on people’s behavior, so it’s consistent with what we know about the basic mechanics of transmission, but how behavior at the individual level translates into the effective reproduction number at the aggregate level depends on population structure. This theory can therefore solve the dilemma I identified at the beginning of this section of the apparent impossibility of reconciling our knowledge of the mechanics of transmission at the individual level with the data at the aggregate level. In short, according to it, population structure was the missing piece of the puzzle.

Simulating the effect of population structure on transmission

The claims I just made about how population structure affects transmission seem intuitively plausible, but intuition can be misleading, so in this section I’m going to present the result of simulations that confirm that, when the network that encodes the information about people’s interactions can be divided into subnetworks that are internally densely connected but only loosely connected to each other, the effective reproduction number of the epidemic can undergo large fluctuations even if we assume that people’s behavior doesn’t change. Instead of simulating the spread of the virus on a network of individuals, which is very computationally intensive if the network is large, I assumed that parts of that network could be considered homogeneous mixing populations and modeled the spread on a network of subpopulations. I construct the network in such a way that it can be divided into subnetworks containing subpopulations that are well-connected to each other, but only loosely connected to subpopulations in other subnetworks. Since I assume that each subpopulation in the network is approximately homogeneous mixing, the spread of the virus within each subpopulation is modeled with the stochastic, discrete-time SIR-type model I described in the first section. However, people who have been infected in one subpopulation can spend their infectious period in another, as long as the subpopulation to which they belong is connected to it. I came up with this approach on my own when I started thinking about this, but it turns out that it’s similar to what epidemiologists call metapopulation modeling, which is not surprising since it’s a very natural way of modeling population structure. However, in the literature on that kind of models, subpopulations are often interpreted as spatially separated from each other, whereas for reasons I will explain later I make no such assumption.

I assume the population is divided into 100 subnetworks and randomly draw the number of subpopulations each of them contains from a Poisson distribution with a mean of 100. This resulted in a network of 10,105 subpopulations distributed across 100 subnetworks. The size of each subpopulation is randomly drawn from a discrete power law with a minimum size of 250 and a scaling parameter of 2.9. The result is that subpopulations have a size of about 520 on average, for a total population of approximately 5.2 million, but the vast majority of subpopulations are smaller than that while a few are much larger because power laws are fat-tailed. Each subnetwork is generated randomly using a method called the configuration model. Roughly, the number of edges connected to each node — which is called the degree of that node — is randomly drawn from a Poisson distribution with a mean of 5, then nodes are connected to each other randomly so as to respect this pre-defined degree distribution. Once the subnetworks have been generated, it remains to connect them to each other. In order to do so, for each subnetwork, I first randomly draw the number of edges connecting a node in that subnetwork to a node in another subnetwork, which can be seen as the analogue of the degree of a node for subnetworks, from a Poisson distribution with a mean of 5. Then, I randomly pick a node in one subnetwork and connect it to a randomly chosen node in another subnetwork, so as to respect this pre-defined degree distribution. The result is a network that can be divided into subnetworks that are internally densely connected, but only loosely connected to each other.

Here is a visualization of the network that was generated by this procedure and used for the simulation whose results I’m going to present shortly:

In order to make the community structure easier to visualize, I assigned a different color to each subnetwork and used a graph drawing algorithm to cluster the nodes by subnetwork.

Connectivity in the relevant sense doesn’t only depend on the number of edges connecting different subpopulations, but also on the probability that someone who belongs to one subpopulation will travel along one of those edges to another subpopulation and spend their infectious period over there. Thus, in order to model that, each edge is assigned a weight that corresponds to the probability that someone who has been infected in one subpopulation will travel along that edge and spend their infectious period in another subpopulation. I used a weight of 0.05 for within-subnetwork edges and a weight of 0.0001 for between-subnetwork edges. In other words, infectious people in one subpopulation have a 5% chance of spending their infectious period in each of the subpopulations in the same subnetwork to which it’s connected, while they have a probability of 1 in 10,000 of spending their infectious period in each of the subpopulations in a different subnetwork to which it’s connected. Thus, the virus can travel much more easily within subnetworks than between them, since nodes within the same subnetworks are both more densely connected and the edges connecting them have a greater weight than nodes belonging to different subnetworks. Nevertheless, by the time a subnetwork has been completely saturated by the virus, the probability that it has traveled to another subnetwork from there — where it may or may not start a large outbreak — is about 25%, so it’s hardly impossible and will often happen.

I seed the population randomly at a constant rate for the whole duration of the simulation and, on each day, infected people from the outside are randomly distributed across subpopulations. You can think of the population I’m modeling as a country that is being continuously and randomly seeded from abroad at a constant rate. This isn’t very realistic, because in reality the rate at which a country is seeded depends on the state of the epidemic in other countries to which it’s connected and which subpopulation is seeded is not random but depends on what connections they have to foreign countries, but it’s good enough for my purposes in this post. The basic reproduction number in each subpopulation was randomly drawn from a normal distribution with a mean of 2.5 and a standard deviation of 0.1 and was assumed to stay constant for the duration of the simulation. Here is a graph that shows the results of the simulation at the level of the population as a whole: As you can see, at the aggregate level, the effective reproduction number undergoes large fluctuations and several waves of infections come and go, yet behavior didn’t change since we assumed a constant basic reproduction number in each subpopulation and the fluctuations of the effective reproduction number at the aggregate level are purely the result of population structure.

In order to help you get a more intuitive grasp of what is happening, I made this animation that shows how the virus spreads across subpopulations, which are represented by rectangles whose area is proportional to their size inside larger rectangles that represent the subnetworks to which they belong:

As you can see in this animation, once a subpopulation is invaded, the virus quickly spreads to the other subpopulations in the subnetwork to which it belongs. Different subnetworks are invaded at different times, either because the virus managed to spread to them from another subnetwork or because they were seeded from abroad, so what we are seeing at the level of the population as a whole is really the result of aggregating several distinct though linked epidemics. By the end of the simulation, only 27.6% of the population has been infected. Yet, as you can see in that animation, many subnetworks are still untouched by the time it’s over. Thus, if any of them were seeded with the virus, it would likely result in another wave.

Within each subpopulation, the epidemic is progressing as standard epidemiological models predict and if we plotted the epidemic curve it would look like the curve I showed in the first section, but once aggregated they produce something completely different. When the virus is spreading in subpopulations where most people are susceptible, the effective reproduction number for the population as a whole goes up, but it goes down if most of the infections are taking place in subpopulations where a lot of immunity has accumulated. Of course, the accumulation of immunity in some subpopulations can also be more or less balanced out by the fact that the virus started to spread in subpopulations where almost everyone is susceptible because they had so far been spared, in which case the effective reproduction number for the population as a whole remains pretty stable. Depending on the topology of the network and stochastic factors, the model can produce all sorts of epidemic curves at the aggregate level, not just waves that come and go in relatively quick succession but also long periods during which incidence remains high, as we have also seen in some countries. But this variety of epidemic behavior at the aggregate level has nothing to do with behavioral changes, since at the level of subpopulations behavior and therefore the basic reproduction number is assumed to be constant. Thus, simulations confirm that, if the population is divided into networks of subpopulations that are internally densely connected but only loosely connected with each other, the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even if people’s behavior doesn’t change, as seems to happen in the real world.

Unsurprisingly, if we increase the connectivity between subnetworks enough, the model behaves more like a model with homogeneous mixing. For instance, if I use the same method to generate a network but multiply the average number of edges between subnetworks by 10 and the weight of those edges by 100, I obtain this epidemic: However, unless we increase connectivity between subnetworks a lot, the model’s behavior remains very different from that of a model with homogeneous population mixing and, as we shall see, this has radical implications.

The relationship between the model and the real world

Of course, the fact that simulations based on this model generate epidemics that are similar to real data doesn’t mean that the model accurately describes reality and, to be clear, I have no doubt that it leaves out a lot of factors that matter. First, even if I’m right that populations have the sort of structure posited by the model, it’s certainly not the case that, as the model assumes, people’s behavior doesn’t change in a way that affects transmission. Indeed, as I already noted, the fact that the effective reproduction number sometimes undergoes large fluctuations even in the absence of behavioral changes doesn’t mean that behavioral changes doesn’t affect transmission. Not only can it do so by changing the basic reproduction number at the level of subpopulations, but it can also do so by modifying the network. Indeed, while I have assumed for the simulation that the network was constant, a more realistic model would use a time-varying network where, as people change their behavior, some edges can appear or disappear and the weight associated to them can change. I have only assumed that the basic reproduction number at the level of subpopulations was constant and that the network didn’t change over time because I wanted to show that, even in the absence of behavioral changes, population structure alone could result in large fluctuations of the effective reproduction number, but I obviously don’t believe that population is the only factor and that people’s behavior doesn’t matter. In fact, not only is the hypothesis that population structure explains some of the fluctuations of the effective reproduction number not inconsistent with the hypothesis that behavioral changes does, but they are complementary because, as I just noted, taking into account population structure allows one to see that behavior can affect transmission not just by modifying the rate at which transmission occurs along the edges of the network but also by modifying the network itself.

Moreover, the hypothesis that populations are structured in the sort of way assumed by the model is hardly obvious and, until we have evidence bearing directly on that, it will remain a conjecture. Unfortunately, we may never have evidence bearing directly on that, because it’s doubtful that we’ll ever have the kind of data we’d need to construct a graph that summarizes the pattern of interactions between individuals that can result in transmission. One reason to be skeptical of this hypothesis is that, in most countries, waves of infections have been synchronized to a significant extent across regions. For instance, here is a figure that shows the daily number of infections over time in each French department relative to the maximum incidence reached in that department over the whole period, which starts after the first wave and runs until now: As you can see, waves of infections tend to be synchronized across departments, but the extent to which this is true varies a lot depending on the wave. Thus, incidence peaked around the same time in almost every department during the second wave (at the beginning of November of last year), but there was less synchronicity during the third wave (which peaked between the end of March and April of this year) and even less during the fourth wave (which peaked in August of this year). The dataset doesn’t cover the first wave, but judging from the data on deaths, the amount of synchronicity it exhibited must have been somewhere between the third and fourth wave. I used French data to illustrate this point, but data from other countries show something very similar.

Now, for the kind of population structure I have suggested to explain this synchronicity, it has to be the case that subpopulations inside each subnetwork are distributed across several regions, because otherwise incidence would peak at very different times in different regions and waves would not be correlated across regions as much as they are. In other words, the population in each region must be distributed into different subnetworks that cut across regional boundaries, which many people will no doubt find implausible. For instance, what this means is that the population is structured in such a way that it’s sometimes easier for the virus to spread from a part of the network consisting of people who live in Paris to another part of the network consisting of people who live in Bordeaux than for it to spread from the former to another part of the network consisting of people who also live in Paris, even though Bordeaux and Paris are several hundreds of kilometers apart. Now, to be clear, I do not deny that intuitively this seems implausible. In fact, when I first considered the possibility that population structure might explain the cyclical dynamic of the epidemic about a year ago, I rejected it precisely for that kind of reasons, but I changed my mind since then for several reasons. First, while this objection has intuitive force, I don’t think we have any reason to trust our intuition on this issue. Indeed, each one of us is only familiar with a minuscule part of the network since we only know what kind of interactions we have with a handful of people and at best what kind of interactions some of them have with even fewer people, but in order to know whether the population has that kind of structure we’d have to be able to know the whole network, so I don’t see why anyone should trust their intuition on this question. In the absence of data bearing directly on that issue, the only thing we can go off is explanatory power, but I don’t know any other theory that can explain more parsimoniously why the effective reproduction number sometimes undergoes large fluctuations in the absence of behavioral changes.

Moreover, as I already noted, I am not claiming that population structure is the only factor explaining the dynamic of the epidemic. In particular, I don’t question that people’s behavior also matters a lot, so it’s not as if population structure had to explain everything on its own. I would expect population structure to matter relatively less for waves that are more synchronized across regions and relatively more for waves that are less synchronized across regions. Simulations show that, even if you assume that the subpopulations in each subnetwork are to a large extent concentrated in just one region, it’s easy to obtain the amount of synchronicity we observe in real data except for the most highly synchronized waves. For instance, here is a graph that shows what happens when I randomly distribute the subpopulations in the network used for the simulation I presented above into 15 regions, randomly assigning a region to each subnetwork and assuming that each subpopulation in that subnetwork has a probability of 2/3 to be in that region while the rest of the probability is distributed uniformly across the other regions:

As you can see, even when I assume that subnetworks are heavily concentrated in one region, we can still end up with something that looks a lot like the synchronicity we find in real data. Thus, I don’t think the objection based on how synchronized waves in real data are is very powerful, at least as long as we don’t claim that population structure is the only factor driving the dynamic of the epidemic.

Again, ultimately the hypothesis that population structure has been a significant factor driving the dynamic of the epidemic will remain conjectural until we get data that bear directly on it, which may never happen. In any case, as long as we don’t have such data, we have to consider how much explanatory power each alternative theory has. Now, not only can this theory explain the fact that the effective reproduction number often undergoes large fluctuations despite the apparent lack of behavioral changes better than standard epidemiological models, but this isn’t the only phenomenon it could help to explain. For instance, most people have been surprised that, even after the vast majority of their population has been vaccinated, many countries still experienced large outbreaks. The most striking example, though hardly the only one, is the large wave that started in England this summer and is still ongoing: The prevalence of people with antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in England at the end of June was estimated at 91.9% among people 16 and over. If we assume that 25% of people under 16 in England had been infected by that point and that everyone who tests positive for antibodies is immune, this implies a prevalence of immunity of approximately 79% in the population as a whole, which is well above the herd immunity threshold predicted by standard epidemiological models unless we assume a very high basic reproduction number. For instance, in the SIR model, the virus would need to have a basic reproduction number of more than 5 for a country where 79% of the population is immune. If you complexify the model a little by taking into account different age groups, but still assume that people in the same age group mix homogeneously, the basic reproduction number you have to assume is even higher.

It’s true that the Delta variant that was associated with the latest wave in England is widely believed to be more than twice as transmissible as the original strain, which probably implies a basic reproduction number greater than 6 in England, but as I argued at length elsewhere, Delta’s transmissibility advantage is probably vastly overestimated. Moreover, even if I’m wrong about that, the basic reproduction number in the sense that is relevant for this discussion is not a fixed quantity but depends on people’s behavior. Now, as you can see on this chart, mobility data show clearly that even now people in England still have not returned to their pre-pandemic behavior: Thus, even if Delta were really twice as transmissible as the original strain, this presumably would translate into a basic reproduction number much smaller than estimates obtained by multiplying the basic reproduction number at the beginning of the pandemic by 2. For instance, if we assumed that Delta would have a basic reproduction number of 6 under the conditions that prevailed in England before the pandemic, the fact that people still haven’t returned to their pre-pandemic behavior would only need to reduce it by less than 15% for England to be above the herd immunity threshold this summer, which is hardly inconceivable. Of course, if I’m right that Delta’s transmissibility advantage has been significantly overestimated, it’s even harder to make sense of what happened in England within the traditional modeling framework.

Now, my argument so far has implicitly relied on the assumption that people who have recovered or have been vaccinated can’t be infected again, but the protection conferred by immunity, whether naturally acquired or induced by vaccination, is not perfect and it seems to wane over time, so this is not true. Standard epidemiological models can be modified to relax this assumption and, if you assume that vaccine efficacy wanes quickly enough, it’s possible to explain English data without assuming an implausibly high basic reproduction number. However, while I do not doubt that more transmissible variants and waning are part of the story here, I still think that, unless you model complex population structure, you have to make rather implausible assumptions to make sense of large outbreaks in places where the rate of people who have antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 is very high. Again, the point is not that models that make the homogeneous mixing assumption or something close to it can’t explain the data, which is trivially false because as I have already noted standard epidemiological models are remarkably flexible and it’s always possible to make them fit the data. The problem is that, in order to do so, you often have to make assumptions that are implausible. In the case of the assumptions you have to make to explain why places where the prevalence of immunity was very high nevertheless experienced large outbreaks, I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as when you have to assume massive behavioral changes even though mobility data don’t show any, but I still think that you have to make dubious assumptions. On the other hand, if the population has the kind of structure I have assumed in my simulations, then it’s not surprising that places where the prevalence of immunity is much higher than the herd immunity threshold predicted by standard epidemiological models can nevertheless experience large outbreaks, because that’s exactly what is going to happen if part of the networks that had been spared so far are seeded. To be clear, I do not doubt that more transmissible variants and waning are part of the story, I just think that population structure could be another part of it. In fact, just as the effect of behavioral changes on transmission can be mediated in part by the effect it has on the topology of the network on which the virus is spreading, the emergence of more transmissible variants and the waning of immunity can affect transmission not just directly but also through the effect they have on that topology.

Another phenomenon that is even harder to explain within the standard modeling framework, which I already discussed at length before, is the way in which Delta and before that Alpha replaced previously established lineages in most countries. The standard view is that both of them had a very large transmissibility advantage over previously established strains of the virus. In other words, other things being equal, people infected by Alpha cause more secondary infections than people infected by previously established variants and people infected by Delta cause more secondary infections than people infected by Alpha and the other variants that coexisted with it. The estimates of this transmissibility advantage vary wildly for both Alpha and Delta, but the estimate of 50% seems to have stuck in both cases for no particularly good reason that I can see, which is why people often say that Delta is more than twice as transmissible as the original strain of the virus. The problem with that standard view is that it can’t explain why both Alpha’s and Delta’s transmission advantages relative to previously established strains have been fluctuating wildly over time and space. For instance, here is a chart that shows Delta’s transmission advantage over previously established variants across French departments earlier this year, plotted against the prevalence of that lineage in each department during each period:

As you can see, not only is there a clear downward trend as the lineage becomes more prevalent, but at any point in time the estimates of Delta’s transmission advantage vary wildly across departments.

As I also noted at the time, the same thing happened before with Alpha, not just in France but also in the UK. In fact, if we look at Alpha’s and Delta’s transmission advantages in the UK, we also see them undergo wild fluctuations over both time and space:

On the standard view, it’s hard to see how this extreme variability of Alpha’s and Delta’s transmission advantages could be explained in a model that assumes the population is mixing homogeneously. You would have to assume that mysterious factors present in some places but not in others or during some periods but not others had a massive effect — much larger than Delta’s alleged transmissibility advantage or even than the ridiculously large effect that some studies ascribe to non-pharmaceutical interventions — on Delta’s transmission but not on the transmission of the other variants or the other way around.

On the other hand, as I explained in my post about Delta’s transmissibility advantage, there is nothing particularly surprising about this variability if the population is structured in networks that are internally well-connected but loosely connected to each other. The idea is that, if different variants don’t spread in the same networks and some of them spread in networks where the prevalence of immunity is low because they had been relatively spared so far, a variant’s transmission advantage over the other strains of the virus can significantly overestimate its transmissibility advantage. Indeed, in that case, it will spread much faster relative to other variants than it would have other things being equal, because it’s spreading in networks where the prevalence of immunity is lower than in the networks where other variants are spreading and things are therefore not equal. Thus, it’s crucial to distinguish a variant’s transmission advantage over another (i. e. how fast it’s actually spreading relative to it) from a variant’s transmissibility advantage over another (i. e. how fast it would spread relative to it other things being equal), because they can diverge radically in the presence of complex population structure. This could also explain why, in France, both Alpha’s and Delta’s transmission advantage collapsed after the initial phase of expansion. This is what you would expect if a new variant initially expanded in networks where the prevalence of immunity was relatively low, while the previously established variants had nearly exhausted the pool of susceptibles in the networks where they are spreading, because they have been circulating for longer. Moreover, because there is no reason to expect that subpopulations in each network are distributed uniformly across regions and, on the contrary, every reason to expect them to be heavily concentrated in one region, it’s also entirely unsurprising if the population is structured in that way that a variant’s transmission advantage varies wildly across regions.

At the time, I laid out the argument in purely intuitive terms, but now I can back it up with simulations. In order to show that one variant could easily have a very large transmission advantage over another without being intrinsically more transmissible, I used the same model as above, randomly generating a network of subpopulations in the same way. However, instead of seeding the network with the same variant for the whole duration of the simulation, I seeded it with one variant during the first 150 days and, starting on the 180th day, with another for the rest of the simulation. Crucially, I have assumed that both variants have exactly the same basic reproduction number in each subpopulation, so by assumption neither has any transmissibility advantage over the other. This figure shows the daily number of infections in that simulation, with infections for both variants summed in the upper panel and disaggregated in the lower panel: As you can see, after the population is no longer seeded with the first variant, it continues to circulate for a while but after about 150 days it can’t find anyone susceptible in the networks where it was spreading anymore and dies out. Meanwhile, after the second is introduced into the population, it eventually reaches a network where the prevalence of immunity is low and starts new waves of infections.

If we compute the transmission advantage of the second variant over time, keeping only observations with at least 100 infections for each variant (in order to eliminate any large fluctuations that might occur at low incidence due to the stochastic nature of the transmission process), here is what it looks like: As you can see, although by assumption both variants are equally transmissible, the second variant nevertheless has a very large transmission advantage that undergoes large fluctuations over time but trends downward. This demonstrates that, even if a variant has no transmissibility advantage whatsoever over another, it can still have a large transmission advantage over it because it’s spreading in networks where the prevalence of immunity is lower. Of course, as I explained in my post on Delta’s transmissibility advantage, I don’t claim that Alpha and Delta have no transmissibility advantage, but that it has been largely overestimated because people have been careless in inferring a transmissibility advantage from the observed transmission advantage, which as this simulation shows can easily diverge radically from the transmissibility advantage because populations don’t actually mix homogeneously.

I also computed the second variant’s transmission advantage separately in each region, after randomly assigning regions to subpopulations in the same way as before. In order to do that, I only kept observations with at least 25 infections for each variant and excluded regions in which that left less than 20 observations (this removed 3 regions out of 15), to avoid the extreme variability that can be caused by the stochastic process of transmission at very low incidence. As you can see, as in real data, we find even more variability than at the aggregate level: Thus, not only can population structure explain why the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even in the absence of significant behavioral changes, but it can also make sense of the wild variability of Alpha’s and Delta’s transmission advantages, which standard epidemiological models that make the homogeneous mixing assumption can’t. The fact that epidemiologists have largely ignored this variability doesn’t negate this advantage of my theory, because they shouldn’t have ignored it and, if they have, it’s probably in large part precisely because it’s impossible to make sense of it within the traditional modeling framework. Again, this doesn’t prove that my theory is correct, but I think it’s enough to seriously consider the possibility that complex population structure of the sort I assume in my simulations plays a significant role in the real world and to ponder what implications it would have if that were true, which is what I turn to in the next section.

Have we been thinking about the dynamic of the pandemic in the wrong way all this time?

If real populations have the kind of structure my theory posits, then a lot of what people who study the pandemic have been doing is completely wrong. Thus, if I’m right that we should take that hypothesis seriously, it should at least make everyone nervous. First, since the beginning of the pandemic, we have been obsessed by quantities — the effective reproduction number and the herd immunity threshold — that are essentially meaningless at the aggregate level in a model with complex population structure. In the modeling framework I have used above, they make sense at the level of subpopulations, but at the aggregate level they are uninterpretable or misleading if we interpret them as if the virus were spreading in a homogeneous mixing population. As we have seen, not only can incidence fall even in the absence of behavioral changes when the prevalence of immunity is much lower than the herd immunity threshold predicted by a model with homogeneous mixing or something close enough (because the virus has exhausted the pool of susceptibles in one part of the network and wasn’t able to reach another part from there before this happened), but it can also rise when the prevalence of immunity is significantly above that threshold (because there are still parts of the network where most people do not have immunity). Similarly, while the effective reproduction number may be meaningful for parts of the network that can be idealized as homogeneous mixing populations (as I have done for my simulations), at the level of the population as a whole it just aggregates the dynamics of the epidemic in different parts of the network and doesn’t have the meaning that has been ascribed to it by everyone since the beginning of the pandemic. In particular, changes in the effective reproduction number at the aggregate level cannot be interpreted as a sign that people change their behavior in a way that affects transmission, that non-pharmaceutical interventions work or don’t work, etc. Yet this is what everyone has been doing for more than a year and a half and it’s what everyone is going to keep doing this winter.

The problem is not limited to journalists and public officials, who have spent the entire pandemic trying to read some kind of causal story into changes of the effective reproduction number, it also affects the scientific literature on the pandemic, which has been used to guide policy. Indeed, if the population has the kind of structure I have proposed, then not only are the methods used to estimate the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions, behavior and even vaccination on transmission completely unreliable, but so are the projections based on the estimates that were obtained with those methods. As I have explained before, studies on the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions can roughly be classified into 2 groups, depending on whether they assume a particular epidemiological model or use seemingly more agnostic econometric methods to estimate the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions. The first type of study basically asks what effect non-pharmaceutical interventions must have had on transmission to explain the data if we assume they were generated by a standard epidemiological model. Thus, if the daily number of infections went down before the herd immunity threshold implied by the model was reached, this method will ascribe a large effect to whatever non-pharmaceutical interventions started around that time, because that’s the only way it can fit the data. But what if the data were not generated by a standard epidemiological model, with a homogeneous or quasi-homogeneous mixing population? In that case, this method may also find that non-pharmaceutical interventions had a very large effect, even if they only had a small effect or no effect whatsoever! In particular, if the population has the kind of structure I have assumed for my simulations, this method may conclude that non-pharmaceutical interventions have a very large effect even if they didn’t have any or only a small one. The most famous example of this type of study, which may also be the most cited paper during the pandemic (it has already been cited 1,662 times as I write this), is Flaxman et al. (2020), which I have already criticized in detail elsewhere. However, it’s hardly the only example, there are dozens and probably hundreds of others that use the same method.

In order to illustrate the problem with this method, I fitted a standard epidemiological model with homogeneous population mixing to the first 200 days of data (corresponding to the first wave) from the simulation with complex population structure and a single variant I presented above, but I told the model that a lockdown was in effect from the 105th day and that it wasn’t lifted until 2 months and a half later: Of course, no lockdown whatsoever played any role in the data generating process, but the model doesn’t know that, so it tries to figure out what effect this non-existent lockdown must have had on transmission to fit the data as best it can on the assumption that the virus was spreading in a homogeneous mixing population. What it concludes is that the lockdown reduced transmission by more than 40%. Thus, although there was no lockdown and therefore its real effect was zero, using the same method that epidemiologists have used in countless studies since the beginning of the pandemic, I find that it had a very large effect. This is because the model wrongly assumes a homogeneous mixing population, so it assumes that herd immunity hasn’t been reached yet, but in fact it has been reached in the part of the network where the virus was spreading during the first wave. As a result, it ascribes this reduction of transmission to the lockdown (which didn’t even happen and therefore had no effect whatsoever), even though it was the effect of population structure. Thus, if the population has the kind of structure my theory posits, this method will be completely unreliable, yet dozens of studies have used it to estimate the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions since the beginning of the pandemic.

The other type of studies that estimate the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions use a more traditional econometric approach. Roughly, instead of assuming a particular epidemiological model that includes parameters for the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions and fitting epidemic data to that model, they look for correlations between non-pharmaceutical interventions and the growth of the epidemic. On the surface, this approach seems more agnostic than the previous one, but this is largely an illusion. While this method doesn’t require that one explicitly make strong mechanistic assumptions about the data generating process, if the effects are to be interpreted causally, one still has to make strong assumptions about that process. While many papers using that approach keep those assumptions implicit, a paper by Chernozhukov et al. I criticized a few months ago actually spelled them out explicitly by using the SIR model to motivate their econometric model, which makes clear that it rests on the homogeneous mixing assumption. It’s actually not hard to understand intuitively why, if this assumption doesn’t hold, their model and similar econometric approaches will not be able to recover the causal effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions. As we have seen, in the presence of complex population structure, the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even without any behavioral changes. For instance, it can suddenly fall because the virus has exhausted most susceptibles in a part of the network, but failed to reach another part of the network with more susceptibles from there. Therefore, if a non-pharmaceutical intervention happened to be in place around the time this happened, there will be a correlation between that non-pharmaceutical intervention and the growth of the epidemic. This correlation will be interpreted as the causal effect of the non-pharmaceutical intervention, even if it didn’t have any causal effect on transmission. In theory, this could also bias the estimate of the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions in the other direction and make one conclude that non-pharmaceutical interventions increase transmission, but in practice I think it’s unlikely since decision-makers typically order non-pharmaceutical interventions when incidence has reached a high enough level and tend to keep them in place for a relatively long time after it has started to go down.

We can also illustrate this point by fitting a simple version of the model used in Chernozhukov et al. (2021) to the same data I used above to show that the method used in Flaxman et al. (2020) was not reliable when the homogeneous mixing assumption doesn’t hold and the virus is spreading in a population that has strong community structure. This model leverages the variation of non-pharmaceutical interventions across time and regions to estimate the effect they have on the daily growth rate of infections by looking at how the presence or absence of non-pharmaceutical interventions is related to that variation. I randomly drew a date between the 100th and 140th day of the simulation in each region, told the model that a lockdown was in effect in that region for 60 days starting from that date and the model used that information plus the data on infections to estimate the effect of this non-existent lockdown. I repeated this procedure 1,000 times and here is the distribution of the estimates it found:

As you can see, according to the model and depending on when the lockdown was supposed to be in effect in each region, a lockdown that never took place and therefore had no effect whatsoever reduced the daily growth of infection by 7% to 10%. Not only is this a very large effect, but it was statistically significant at the conventional 0.05 level in every single case, which shows that the kind of model used in Chernozhukov et al. (2021) is completely unreliable in the presence of complex population structure of the sort that is assumed by the model used to generate the data.

This discussion illustrates a deep point, which most scientists understand but the public does not, namely that statistics can only help you to answer questions about the world by making assumptions about the world. If those assumptions are false, the answers it gives you cannot be trusted. For instance, in the case of the methods used above to estimate the effect of a lockdown, the model assumes that the virus spreads in a homogeneous mixing population. If that assumption is true or close enough to the truth, it may allow you to estimate the effect of a non-pharmaceutical intervention pretty accurately, but if that assumption is completely false, as is the case in the data I generated with a model that assumes the virus is spreading in a network of homogeneous mixing subpopulations that can be divided into subnetworks that are internally well-connected but only loosely connected to each other, then it will produce completely unreliable estimates, as we have just seen. Indeed, while it’s true that the effect of the lockdown is estimated from the data, it’s not estimated just from the data, because the estimation also relies on the assumptions that are made about the data generating process. This is always the case, because you can never estimate a causal effect just from the data and you always need to make assumptions about the world. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize that, so they think that the results of empirical studies can be taken at face value because the effects of such-and-such intervention was estimated “from the data”.

In the case of studies that estimated the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions on transmission, homogeneous population mixing was usually assumed (regardless of whether the authors realized it and whether they realized that it was not a trivial assumption), so if I’m right that we have good reasons to think that real populations depart significantly from that assumption, we cannot trust their conclusions. Note that I’m not even saying their conclusions are false, although I think they are (as I have explained at length before there are other reasons to think so beside the fact that real populations are not mixing homogeneously), I’m just saying that we have no reason to be confident they are true because we have no reason to think the homogeneous mixing assumption on which they rest is close enough to the truth for the methods they use to be reliable, which is a much weaker claim. Even if that assumption is close enough to the truth, the fact that we don’t know that and that we even have good reasons to doubt it should result in a healthy dose of skepticism toward studies that implicitly rely on it, but unfortunately neither experts nor public officials have demonstrated much skepticism about their conclusions. In fact, they have used the results of those studies — which are sometimes comically bad even if you set aside the issue of the homogeneous mixing assumption — to make projections that were used to guide policy, which may be part of why those projections have systematically and massively failed since the beginning of the pandemic. If the population has the kind of structure posited by the theory I explored above, then it’s not surprising that projections were so unreliable. Indeed, if the virus spreads on a network that has that kind of community structure, then at best aggregate-level statistics can be used to forecast the short-run evolution of the epidemics (as some machine-learning techniques have been able to do with a measure of success), but any attempt to forecast the epidemic beyond that is pointless because there is no way to predict if or when the virus will reach another part of the network where it will find enough susceptibles to expand again.

I have argued that, while there are solid theoretical reasons to think that ultimately the dynamic of the epidemic depended on people’s behavior, there is also strong evidence that the effective reproduction number sometimes underwent large fluctuations that could not be explained by changes in people’s behavior. The cyclical nature of the epidemic has often been noted, but except for the vague claim that respiratory infections are “seasonal” (which is true but doesn’t actually explain much), nobody has really tried to explain it. In this post, I have proposed that population structure could be part of the explanation, because real populations are not homogeneous mixing. This theory can explain why, although ultimately transmission depends on people’s behavior, the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even in the absence of behavioral changes. While there is no evidence bearing directly on this hypothesis one way or the other, it can explain many phenomena that are difficult to explain with standard epidemiological models, which assume homogeneous mixing or something close to it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that other factors, such as behavioral changes but also more transmissible variants, vaccination and meteorological variables, don’t also play a role, which I’m sure they do, but I think that we should at least take the possibility that population structure plays a large role seriously. Indeed, even if this possibility turned out to be false, the fact that we have good reasons to believe it’s true should lead us to question how we have been thinking about the pandemic so far. If real populations are structured in the way my theory posits, not only are several quantities, such as the effective reproduction number, we have been obsessing over largely meaningless at the aggregate level, but the methods used in the literature to estimate the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions, vaccinations, etc. could be totally unreliable. This suggests that we should build the capacity to collect data about the characteristics of the network on which infectious diseases spread, so that when the next pandemic hits, modeling can take into account population structure and therefore produce better projections and more reliable estimates of the impact of interventions.

Addendum on the relationship between the hypothesis discussed in this post and the earlier debate about the effect of heterogeneity in social activity

Based on the response to this post, many people seem to think what I’m saying is the same thing as what people who argued back in 2020 that heterogeneity in social activity might lower the herd immunity threshold, but while this is related to what I’m talking about here it’s actually different so I thought it might be useful to briefly explain why. I’m actually familiar with the debate that took place about that last year, since I even wrote a post about it at the time. In both cases, the point is that heterogeneity affects the dynamic of the epidemic, but it’s not the same kind of heterogeneity. What people were arguing last year is that, if people’s level of social activity varies a lot, herd immunity will be reached sooner because the people who spread the virus the most are also the most likely to be infected early in the pandemic. This intuitive argument is supported by models showing that, when you introduce that kind of heterogeneity, herd immunity does in fact occur sooner. If we model the spread of the virus on a network, this debate was mostly about the degree distribution, i. e. the distribution of the number of edges connected to each individual in the network. The point was that, when this distribution is more dispersed than standard epidemiological models implicitly assume, the herd immunity threshold will be lower than predicted by those models.

However, the kind of epidemic behavior I discuss in this post only arises when the network has community structure, which is about a lot more than the variance of the degree distribution. In particular, the network must exhibit a specific kind of clustering, but this doesn’t just depend on its degree distribution. In fact, it’s conceivable that at the level of the parts of the network that I idealized as homogeneous mixing population in my simulations, the herd immunity threshold is lower than predicted by standard epidemiological model due to heterogeneity in social activity, even though at the aggregate level it’s higher due to community structure, as I explained above. So while most people have interpreted the fact that many places with a high prevalence of immunity have recently experienced large outbreaks as proof that people who argued that heterogeneity in social activity could lower the herd immunity threshold were wrong, this is not actually the case if the network on which the virus is spreading has the kind of structure assumed in this post. Of course, like the rest of this post, this is very speculative, but it goes to show that the spread of infectious diseases is a lot more complicated than people generally assume.

Addendum on what I expect the import of population structure to be going forward

As I have explained before, the pandemic is on its way out and the virus is going to become endemic, though not every place is at the same stage of that transition. If I’m right that population structure has played a key role in the dynamic of the pandemic so far, what role should we expect it to play as the virus becomes endemic? I haven’t tried to model this, but it’s an interesting question, so I figured that it would be useful to add a few words about this. Basically, while I expect that population structure will continue to be relevant even after the virus has become endemic (because the population still won’t be homogeneous mixing), I also expect that it will become less relevant as we get closer to the endemic equilibrium and that seasonal effects due to meteorological variables will progressively become dominant. This is what I expect mainly for 2 reasons. First, as more and more people have been infected or vaccinated, the different parts of the network will become more homogeneous in terms of susceptibility to infection. Second, although the population will not magically become homogeneous mixing as the virus becomes endemic, I nevertheless expect that it will get closer to this idealization because once people go back to their regular behavior it will presumably increase connectivity between different parts of the graph. So eventually I think it will leave other factors, mainly seasonal effects due to the direct and indirect effects of meteorological variables but also the occasional emergence of new variants that are more transmissible or better able to evade prior immunity, will dominate the effect of population structure and the occurrence of waves will become more reliably predictable.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, what has been missing from our medical tool kit is an easy-to-take treatment that keeps people out of the hospital. Yet, within the next few weeks, we will have two new antivirals: Merck’s molnupiravir and Pfizer’s Paxlovid. As part of the unimaginable speed that has characterized the medical countermeasure response to COVID, the advent of two highly effective treatments for COVID is nothing short of game-changing.

But given that nearly 30 percent of adults are not fully vaccinated against COVID, it is natural to wonder if having these highly effective oral drugs will diminish the value or role of COVID vaccines in our response. There is a real fear being voiced by public health practitioners that if highly effective treatments stand at the ready, people who have so far shunned the vaccine will likely never get vaccinated. That they will get COVID is likely inevitable, prolonging the pandemic, continuing to endanger high-risk individuals, and further taxing our hospitals and their staff.

This is troubling, because as those of us in the world of infectious disease know from centuries of past experience with pathogens, preventing infection is always better than treating it. Always. This is especially true for COVID, when we can prevent infection easily with safe and highly effective vaccines; in clinical trial data Pfizer’s vaccine was 95 percent effective in preventing infection in adults, Moderna’s vaccine was 94 percent effective, and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was 66 percent effective. And all COVID vaccines are extremely effective at preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death. To many of us, this matters more than preventing infection.

The most valuable asset we have in the fight against COVID-19 is still unequivocally vaccination, and the presence of effective drugs doesn’t change that.

The concern that unvaccinated people will never get vaccinated if we now have effective treatments for COVID is not new; a similar scenario has already occurred with monoclonal antibodies authorized to treat people who are either infected or who have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus. These medications have been effective in preventing hospitalization in those early cases and exposures.

In Florida, these products are readily available, and some have practically promoted the antibodies as vaccine alternatives. Many unvaccinated people have taken them, and they likely have avoided serious illness. Paradoxically, some people who are averse to vaccines and the cutting-edge science behind them welcome monoclonal antibodies that are also the result of cutting-edge science. This is likely because people change their conceptions of risk once they find out they have COVID. When they get sick, they become more willing to accept interventions than when they are healthy; the risk/benefit calculation changes for many of them.

With the prospect that an unvaccinated person can take a pill rather than injectable or infusible antibody treatments, this type of thinking might become even more prevalent. Yet however compelling this line of reasoning might seem at first glance, it is wrong. We must enhance our efforts to get unvaccinated people vaccinated by proactively dispelling the myths the anti-vaccine crowd spreads, and by enlisting primary care physicians—who are greatly trusted by their patients—to counsel hesitant people.

COVID, especially in unvaccinated people, is something to avoid even for those who are at low risk for serious disease. Whereas in high-risk groups, COVID-19 hospitalizes and can kill, in nearly everyone it is disruptive and contagious. In a small proportion of those infected, it causes what’s called long COVID—lingering symptoms that interfere with daily life. A positive case invariably requires a local public health official to notify close contacts. That person who is infected has to self-isolate and get tested repeatedly. And for people who are significantly exposed, they face days of quarantine.

Vaccines unquestionably and significantly decrease the likelihood of any part of this negative cascade ever happening.

COVID antivirals, like monoclonal antibodies before them, are not a substitute for vaccinations. They are a complement to vaccines, and they serve an important function. When the influenza antiviral Tamiflu became available, it did not diminish the importance of the flu vaccine. People still get flu vaccines, and if they get sick (regardless of whether they got the flu shot), they are sick for fewer days and less likely to be hospitalized or experience complications because of Tamiflu.

These new COVID antivirals will be used in any eligible person, regardless of vaccination status, and clinicians will greatly value the drugs, as they do monoclonal antibodies. In addition, because remdesivir, the only available treatment for COVID, requires hospitalization and dedicated space in a hospital, having these oral antivirals helps us achieve one of the most important goals of managing the pandemic: preserving hospital capacity.

Once they are available in the U.S., these antivirals (United Kingdom regulators have approved molnupiravir for use there), our COVID-19 armamentarium will be robust. We will have hundreds of diagnostic tests, multiple treatments and proven vaccines. These additional tools will continue to get us closer to the off-ramp of the pandemic in the U.S.

That this disease can be transformed within less than two years into a vaccine-preventable infection that can be diagnosed at home and is amenable to treatment with monoclonal antibodies and, soon, oral antivirals is truly remarkable.

Even so, COVID is not a disease that will be eliminated. It is an efficiently spreading respiratory virus with an animal reservoir, and it spreads quickly, even before people have symptoms. The virus is here to stay, but we can keep adding tools to manage its consequences better. As the virus transitions to something endemic, like influenza, the aim is to keep it from hospitalizing and killing people. It is a crucial task to develop a menu of medical countermeasures, including treatments. But, by any analysis, vaccines remain the chief tool needed to accomplish this task.

In the battle against COVID, we still need to prioritize vaccination, even as optimism abounds with the arrival of oral antivirals. It is inestimably valuable that there now exist multiple treatment options to forestall severe disease in infected individuals, but, without a doubt, it is still better to prevent as many infections as we can.

The euro area and the United States both adopted highly expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic and support workers affected by business closures. But the United States is now recording much higher inflation than the euro area. In October 2021, the United States recorded 24-month inflation at an annualized rate of 4.0 percent, around 2 percentage points higher than in the euro area.

Many international drivers of inflation are likely to wane in 2022. Global energy prices should level off and fall, supply chain bottlenecks will gradually ease, and lingering pandemic fiscal support will lapse.

But several indicators suggest that inflation in the United States could persist above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target. Demand will likely remain elevated as reduced consumption during the pandemic and fiscal stimulus measures have bolstered personal savings. US labor force participation remains well below its expected level given demographic changes. Higher home and rental prices, which often take time to show up on measurements of inflation, could be coming. Finally, wage growth expectations have shifted up, which could pass through to higher prices.

In light of these market conditions, the Fed should recalibrate monetary policy accordingly and pivot towards a less expansionary approach now in order to prevent the need for drastic and painful steps in the future.

This PIIE Chart is based on research in Jason Furman's paper delivered at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, What the Federal Reserve should do now: An elaboration.

One point I’ve long made about so-called “alternative” medicine is how many of its precepts are more religious than rational or scientific in nature. In particular, a huge part of alternative medicine relies on the concept that “contamination” (these days more frequently referred to as “toxins”) cause most, if not all, disease. Indeed, nearly five years ago, I was discussing how the various “detoxification” regimens that make up so much of alternative medicine (and, not coincidentally, the basis of many treatments for many conditions—like autism—that antivaxxers used to attribute to vaccines) have more in common with religious ritual purification rituals than they do with science or medicine. This concept of “purity” versus “contamination” (implied to be with evil) also has a lot to do with the idea that “natural immunity” to a disease (which in reality should be called post-infection immunity given that vaccine-induced immunity is natural) and has infected the discourse over COVID-19 vaccines, so much so that one of my go-to video clips when discussing this topic is of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper from one of my favorite movies of all time, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb explaining how fluoridation is a Communist plot to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of real Americans, mainly because anti-fluoridation, antivaccine, and anti-GMO pseudoscience all tap into the alternative medicine fear of “contamination” as a cause of ill health and “purity of essence” (again, from Dr. Strangelove) as key to good health. Not coincidentally, concepts of “contamination” versus “purity” are also behind the fear stoked by antivaxxers that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines “permanently alter” your DNA, thus contaminating and corrupting it with evil (the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein).

There is, however, another, darker, side to this concept of “contamination” or “corruption” as a cause of illness and “purity” as an indication of health, and it’s a concept that’s been supercharged since the COVID-19 pandemic began. I realize that Mike Adams is always an easy target—some might argue that he’s too easy a target—but I often cite his website, Natural News, because it doesn’t say anything that other antivaxxers and quacks aren’t saying. Rather, it just takes what other antivaxxers are saying and cranks it up to 11.

The example comes from this article, Only PUREBLOODS will survive the vaccine / radiation holocaust being unleashed against humanity… the spike protein in vaccines causes genetic DISINTEGRATION:

Today’s podcast is a bombshell that needs to be understood by anyone hoping to survive the vaccine holocaust, because it’s really a “genetic bomb” against humanity. The vaccine, by suppressing the natural DNA repair mechanism in the body — known as NHEJ, or Non-Homologous End Joining—makes people highly susceptible to devastating, cancerous mutations—even when exposed to very low levels of ionizing radiation such as sunlight exposure or mammography. With NHEJ suppressed by the spike protein, the body can no longer repair its damaged DNA, and cells mutate out of control, devastating the entire body and bringing about genetic disintegration of the organism. The study documenting all this was published in the MDPI journal “Viruses” and was carried out by scientists at Stockholm University, Sweden:

I’ll discuss the cited study briefly in a moment. Suffice to say that, even if its in vitro cell culture findings were to pan out more generally, this study does not show anything of the sort and, in fact, is a rather crappy crappy study. I won’t explain why details here, but if you really want to know the gory details, you can read this deconstruction. (Since then, I’ve also realized that the authors of this study have no clue about how the immune system works.) It has, however, been embraced by antivaxxers to claim that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer.

As I said, though, Adams is just turning up to 11 the conspiracy noise of antivaxxers dating back months during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is just an echo of longstanding concepts in the natural health and antivaccine movement of “purity” versus “corruption” and “contamination”. (Indeed, it’s a very ancient concept that’s long been used to trace royal lineages and “pure” bloodlines.) When I first saw this concept being applied to COVID-19 vaccination, it quite quickly reminded me of all manner of fascist ideas about “purebloods” and “racial purity”. Indeed, a few months ago, when mainstream media first took note, the concept of unvaccinated “purebloods” was appearing on social media, in particular on Tik Tok, invoking concepts from the Harry Potter novels and movies:

The term “pureblood” doesn’t exactly have the best connotations. But now unvaccinated people on TikTok are, er, trying to reclaim the term as a way to tout their “superiority” over their jabbed fellow citizens. The phrase was popularized by J.K. Rowling’s villain Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series as a way to distinguish between those with “pure” wizard ancestry and everyone else, drawing parallels with the Nazi doctrine of the “master race.” As a concept, basically, it’s been used to justify some of the worst crimes against humanity in history. The new “pureblood” trend seems to have gotten a big boost from conservative TikToker influencer Lyndsey Marie in a post shared last week replete with hashtags like #harrypotter, #pureblood, and #unvaccinated. “From now on, I refuse to be referred to as ‘unvaccinated,'” she declared. “I want everyone to now call me Pureblood.”

Here’s an example:

When I first encountered antivaxxers using this term from the fictional universe of Harry Potter, I was somewhat amused—while still being simultaneously appalled—at how utterly unconcerned they seemed (and continue to seem) how by embracing the whole concept of “purebloods” versus “mudbloods“, a highly derogatory term in the Harry Potter universe for a Muggle-born wizard or witch (Muggle meaning a person born to nonmagical parents and possessing no magical abilities) or “half-bloods“, a term denoting wizards or witches with Muggle parents or relatives in their recent lineage (e.g., grandparents, etc.) was not-so-subtly echoing Nazi ideology. After all, it’s not as though it wasn’t incredibly clear in the Harry Potter novels and movies that the magical “pureblood”/”mudblood” dichotomy was a very obvious metaphor for Nazi ideas about racial “purity” and superiority, with the Muggles being viewed by Voldemort and his followers as inferiors who were “contaminating” the pure wizard race, complete with a horror on the part of Voldemort at the thought of magical people mating with Muggles and having children that was every bit as strong as the disgust that Nazis expressed at Jews mixing with “pure Aryans”. In brief, there’s a reason why it was the villains, not the heroes, in the Harry Potter universe who so proudly used the term “pureblood” versus the disdainful term “mudblood”.

I’ve alluded to antivaxxers proudly co-opting the term “pureblood” before, but I want to explore in a bit more detail how “natural health” and antivaccine ideology naturally lead to such a term. In this, I have to disagree with Alan Levinovitz, associate professor of religious studies at James Madison University and author of Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science , when he argued:

Troubled observers have variously tied this term to the Harry Potter franchise (in which purebloods are Wizards untainted by muggle ancestry) and the eugenic Nazi fantasies of pure Aryan blood. But both comparisons miss the mark. The meaning of the hashtag is inseparable from vaccine refusers’ strong preference for “natural immunity,” a seemingly innocuous term that is actually a centerpiece of anti-vaccination ideology and ought to be abandoned immediately.

While Levinovitz is correct that the use of the term “pureblood” by antivaxxers does reflect a strong preference in antivax ideology for “natural immunity” (as I agreed when I quoted him), it also reflects an inherent acceptance of the concept (that predates Nazi-ism) of “purity of essence” and “pure blood” that to antivaxxers indicate health (and superiority) that must not be “contaminated” with anything as awful (to antivaxxers) as a vaccine. Similarly, if that “pure blood” is somehow contaminated, then it must somehow be “purified” (i.e., “decontaminated” or “detoxified”—or ritually purified) in order for one to reclaim a “natural” state of health and superiority, just as those who have sinned must, in some religions, atone through rituals designed to “purify” them.

I’ll discuss a couple of examples.

“Detoxification” of vaccines

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a story making the rounds about how, with COVID-19 vaccine mandates spreading, leading some antivaxxers to make the choice to be vaccinated or lose their jobs, some are scrambling to “undo” their vaccinations through “detoxification” treatments:

In a TikTok video that has garnered hundreds of thousands of views, Dr. Carrie Madej outlined the ingredients for a bath she said will “detox the vaxx” for people who have given into Covid-19 vaccine mandates. The ingredients in the bath are mostly not harmful, although the supposed benefits attached to them are entirely fictional. Baking soda and epsom salts, she falsely claims, will provide a “radiation detox” to remove radiation Madej falsely believes is activated by the vaccine. Bentonite clay will add a “major pull of poison,” she says, based on a mistaken idea in anti-vaccine communities that toxins can be removed from the body with certain therapies. Then, she recommends adding in one cup of borax, a cleaning agent that’s been banned as a food additive by the Food and Drug Administration, to “take nanotechnologies out of you.” In reality, in addition to being potentially harmful as a skin and eye irritant, a borax “detox bath” will not remove the effects of the Covid vaccine from your body.

I first discussed Dr. Carrie Madej before (almost a year ago, believe it or not). Even among COVID-19 contrarians, deniers, cranks, and antivaxxers, she stands out. She’s on record as not just saying that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines will “permanently alter your DNA” but that they are, in fact transhumanism. You might recall that I also briefly discussed how transhumanism is social, scientific, and philosophical movement devoted to the idea that humans can be enhanced by technology, be it biological, computer-based, or physical. The idea is that such technologies would augment or increase human perception, physical abilities, intelligence, and cognition, and also radically improve human health and extend human life spans. Unsurprisingly, the movement’s adherents tend to be employed in technology, biotech, and academia, and there is a strong link between libertarianism and transhumanism. The ultimate outcome is thought to be the “singularity”, a time when computers become so advanced that artificial intelligence transcends human intelligence, potentially erasing the boundary between humanity and computers, even leading to the merging of humans and computers. I also pointed out how I’ve always looked a bit askance at transhumanism, because I have without a doubt encountered a lot of woo in the movement over the years.

Still, one can’t help but note a bit of disconnect here. If, as Madej claims, mRNA vaccines “alter your DNA” so much that they are “transhumanism” and can make you somehow different than human (to the point where she claimed that these vaccines could make one into a “genetically modified human”), then how on earth are a pleasant salt bath with Borax and consuming a bit of bentonite clay going to reverse that? If, as Madej was also claiming a year ago, mRNA vaccines actually insert tracking nanotechnology—which Madej has referred to as “branding”, as in “we’re all going to be branded” with this tech—into your bloodstream, a nice salt bath and consuming some clay are not going to get those pesky nanobots out of your bloodstream; that is, unless they can somehow leach them through the skin and lining of the gastrointestinal tract.

Of course, Borax baths and clay consumption are generally not likely to cause significant harm. The bath might be relaxing, and you’ll be clean afterwards, while the clay will just pass through your GI tract. Elsewhere, there are more potentially harmful suggestions, for instance at the website of an MD who also has an ND (and is therefore a naturopath), Valerie (Richey) Bazylewicz MD, ND of The Healthy Path clinic near Cincinnati. She has a post about “vaccine detoxification” that includes all the antivax tropes about vaccines containing “toxins” such as mercury (not in childhood vaccines for nearly 20 years), “aborted baby cells”, formaldehyde, antifreeze, alcohol (wait, you don’t drink wine or beer?), and more, warning, ominously:

All vaccines and covid shots contain many harmful substances such as mercury, thimerosal, aluminum, dangerous chemicals, polyethylene glycol and lipids (to help transport toxins into brain), etc. They are usually grown on cell lines from aborted fetal tissue. Also, animal cells contain species-specific virusesthat cause diseases in humans. The covid shots contain either manufactured mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) or manufactured DNA with adenovirus (Johnson & Johnson, Astrazenica [sic]) that have never been studied in humans until now. Keep in mind that harmful components of vaccines can be removed with vaccination detoxification, but any changes to your DNA that may have occurred from the covid shot appear to be irreversible .

She also repeats the false claim that COVID-19 vaccines are not, in fact, “real” vaccines but gene therapy:

Please note that the covid shots are not actually vaccines because they do not contain any covid virus as per the legal definition of vaccines. At this time, these shots are experimental for emergency use only; they are not FDA approved. Comirnaty was FDA approved, but it is not available anywhere. Thus, all covid shots available on the market now are not FDA approved; they are experimental and authorized for emergency use only. All of the covid shots are designed to hijack your genetic machinery and even possibly change your DNA in order to produce spike proteins that cause the covid disease. In other words, they are turning you into a genetically modified organismor transhuman which produces the spike protein that actually gives you the disease that you think that you are preventing. And there is no shut off mechanism included in the shot.

I’ve discussed the false claim that mRNA- and adenovirus-based vaccines are not vaccines but “gene therapy” before, as well as the false claims that the available Pfizer vaccine is not the FDA-approved vaccine; that the vaccine gives you COVID; that tens of thousands have been killed by the vaccines; etc. It’s all nonsense, basically standard antivax talking points. But what is this “detox”?

So what is the “vaccine detox,” though? It’s really not very impressive and includes:

Eat a “healthy organic diet”. Avoid “toxins”, which apparently include “fragrances (perfumes, beauty products, fabric softeners, cleaning products, room/car fresheners, etc), candles (beeswax candles are OK), automobile exhaust, unnecessary medications, and so much more”. Use supplements from a company called Research Nutritionals, including Cytoquel, TriFortify Glutathione, C-RLA (Liposomal C & R-Lipoic Acid) Vanilla Caramel, ToxinPul, and MycoPul.

Particularly odd:

Make a paste with one or two opened capsule(s) of MycoPul (see above) and oil (such as coconut oil or olive oil) and then generously apply to the injection site immediately after the injection and cover with a large bandage. Reapply about every 6-8 hours for the next 3 days.

MycoPul includes:

Humic and Fulvic powder blend with trace minerals

Activated Charcoal

G-PUR® purified Zeolite (Clinoptilolite)

Microchitosan

Silica

Nope, there’s no evidence that any of this will work. As they say, once you’re vaccinated, you can’t “unring the bell,” so to speak. You’re vaccinated.

Unfortunately, again, none of this is new. It’s also not a coincidence that many of the treatments for “vaccine-induced autism” or any other condition falsely attributed to vaccines are represented as “detoxification”. They are basically purges, to purge the “evil humors” that antivaxers believe vaccines to be packed full of. It’s not for nothing that I’ve frequently described alternative medicine “detoxification” as being akin to ritual purification of the sort found in many different religions. Think of chelation therapy and all the “detoxification” treatments used by autism quacks as basically an effort to restore the purity of the child’s precious bodily fluids. It should thus not be surprising that COVID-19 treatments are no different.

Back in the day, I used to blog about quack treatments that fell under the rubric of what antivaxxers like to call “autism biomed”. Going back to the days before the pandemic when the main pseudoscientific unsupported claim made by antivaxxers was that childhood vaccines cause autism, there was a whole subset of quackery known as “autism biomed” that was based on “reversing” the effects of vaccines, specifically “vaccine-induced autism”. I’m not going to recount the abundant evidence that there is no detectable increase in autism risk associated with vaccines, such as the MMR vaccine, or with vaccine ingredients, such as the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be in some childhood vaccines up until 20 years ago.

A major component of “autism biomed” involved “detoxification” of the “toxins”, be they mercury, formaldehyde (in some vaccines in tiny amounts), or whatever. For mercury, it involved chelation therapy, which was supposed to remove the mercury from vaccines and thereby reverse autism. For other “toxins”, there were all manner of “detoxification” protocols coupled with hormonal manipulations like the use of secretin. The results of “autism biomed” could at times be truly horrific, as exemplified by, for example, the case of Alex Spourdalakis. In reality, as I wrote 12 years ago, “autism biomed”, when you boil it all down, is uncontrolled and unethical experimentation on autistic children, complete with bogus medical tests practically guaranteed to demonstrate various forms of “toxicity” that are supposedly the “root cause” of autism.

Of course, these concepts are very much at the root of many varieties of alternative medicine as well.

Even more dangerous consequences

Part and parcel of the concept of “toxins” or “contamination” associated with COVID-19 vaccination is an antivaccine lie that I’ve been discussing for a long time, namely the idea that the “vaccinated” are so contaminated that they are a danger to others. In the past, it was the idea that those who had received attenuated live virus vaccines (like MMR) were shedding virus and giving measles to others. (The measles strain used in the MMR is much less dangerous than actual measles.) In the age of COVID-19, it’s the idea that, as Adams put it above, those who have received mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines are “spike protein factories” for whom the spike protein is a deadly toxin and is also shed from the vaccinated in an almost magical miasma-like manner to make others around them sick. Never mind that the amount of spike protein made due to these vaccines is tiny and mostly localized to the injection site, and the amount of spike protein getting into the bloodstream is so tiny that a new assay had to be developed to detect it.

This has led to a number of absurd beliefs about the “contamination” of the vaccinated among antivaxxers. One is kind of funny, namely the meme that went around that “unvaccinated” sperm is superior to the sperm of the vaccinated, to the point where antivaxxers think that their sperm will skyrocket in value after the pandemic.

It’s easy to laugh at that idea, but less funny is the claim that vaccines will so contaminate our DNA that they will lead to mass death from cancer in the next few years. (Never mind that carcinogens, even potent ones, generally don’t result in cancer anywhere near that fast.) Even less funny is what happened to a rather famous antivaxxer in June, who basically could have died because he refused a transfusion with “vaccinated blood”. I’m referring to Del Bigtree, who in May was diagnosed with so much chronic blood loss from hemorrhoids that his hemoglobin (Hgb) level had fallen to 4.8 g/dL, a level that’s not life-threatening in and of itself if the blood loss was slow, but could easily become so with further blood loss. (In a male, normal is around 13-17 g/dL, depending on the lab, and a level of 4.8 g/dL leaves no room for error, so to speak, when it comes to further blood loss, even if subsequent blood loss is slow.) Bigtree was symptomatic, with lightheadedness and dizziness. Still, he refused a transfusion at first because he didn’t want any “vaccinated blood” (although he didn’t refuse a procedure to stop the bleeding). According to his story, he managed to get a sympathetic ER doctor to find a unit of “unvaccinated” blood, which he did accept, and then he flew to Mexico on a private jet paid for by his fans to get a transfusion at a quack cancer clinic in Mexico.

This concept has led to social media posts like this:

That's a good question. Due to producing too many red blood cells, I'm a literal blood factory and donate often. So if anyone needs unvaccinated B+ I'm here for em. — Name Matters Not (@Impurebred1) June 4, 2021

“Unvaccinated blood will be the next bitcoin.” — Jefe🇺🇸 (@Jefe_Patriot) November 18, 2021

Regarding that last one, he might be right, but not in the way he thinks.

Even so, let’s circle back:

Again, it really is all about the “purity.” That concept is at the root of a lot of alternative medicine, became a major thread in antivaccine pseudoscience. You can see how it so easily meshes with concepts of racial and genetic purity as well. Unfortunately, those very concepts are far more religious and ideological than scientific, and they have real world consequences. We just didn’t notice them so much before when “toxins”, “detoxification”, and “purity” were seemingly just the province of New Age gurus and alternative medicine. Now that it’s contributing to the claim that “natural immunity” is the only worthwhile immunity, that vaccines are hopelessly full of toxins (including genetic toxins), and fear of vaccines in the middle of a pandemic, we can’t ignore it any more.

It’s official: President Biden will seek to keep Jerome Powell at the helm of the Federal Reserve for another four-year term. Mr. Powell has his work cut out for him. With inflation rising to alarming levels, the Fed should be making moves to cool the economy. But under its dual mandate the agency is also obligated to ensure maximum sustainable employment.

At present, the Fed is erring too much on the side of maximum employment. Instead, Mr. Powell must tip the scales back in favor of price stability. If he doesn’t, he risks inviting a sluggish economy — or even a recession — in the coming years.

The Fed’s loose monetary policy — keeping the key interest rate it controls close to zero and purchasing large quantities of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities — provides juice to the economy and increases employers’ need for workers. It has contributed to troubling price increases that show signs of accelerating. On net, over half of small businesses, the highest on record, plan to increase their prices in the next three months, according to a National Federation of Independent Business survey. Investors in the bond market expect inflation to average around 3 percent over the next five years — nearly double their expectation from one year ago.

By running the economy so hot, Mr. Powell may think he is giving idle workers their best shot at re-entering employment. By one calculation, there are six million fewer jobs than there would have been without the pandemic. Among workers ages 25 to 54, work force participation is down 1.4 percent from February 2020, before the start of the pandemic. The rate for younger workers is 2.1 percent lower, and workers over the age of 54 have had a nearly 5 percent reduction in participation.

On Friday, the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief I authored for them in the Title 42 "public health" expulsion case. I previously wrote about this case, which is currently before the DC Circuit, here. The brief itself is available here. And here is a summary of the brief adapted from the Cato website:

Since March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), has used its supposed powers under Section 265 of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 to expel hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the southern border. Several of those affected challenged these actions, and the D.C. federal district court ruled in their favor. The government has now appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—and Cato filed an amicus brief supporting the lower‐​court ruling.

The government's interpretation of the CDC's powers would render the statute unconstitutional by violating the nondelegation doctrine. As the Supreme Court recently explained (Gundy v. United States, 2019), that principle of separation of powers holds that "Congress … may not transfer to another branch 'powers which are strictly and exclusively legislative.'"
While Congress can give executive branch officials a wide range of discretion, it The latter is exactly what the CDC would enjoy if the government prevails in this case: It would have the power to exclude or deport virtually any entrants into the United States at any time.
Section 265 gives the CDC "the power to prohibit… the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate" whenever the agency "determines that by reason of the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States." If this language is interpreted as giving the CDC virtually unlimited power to bar or deport migrants from such countries as it designates, it would violate constitutional constraints on Congress's delegation of the legislative power.
By contrast, there would be no such nondelegation issue if the term "introduction" were limited to situations where the entry of persons from the country in question could result in the spread of a disease not already prevalent in the United States. The problem could also be averted if the D.C. Circuit adopts the
For similar reasons, the CDC's position also violates the longstanding principle that courts must not assume that Congress has delegated to the executive the power to decide a "major" question of public policy, unless Congress has clearly indicated its intent to do so.
The Supreme Court recently reaffirmed this vital rule in blocking another Covid‐​related CDC action, the eviction moratorium. In Alabama Association of Realtors v. HHS, the Court rejected the CDC's claims that another provision of the Public Health Service Act gave it essentially limitless power to regulate housing. "Even if the text were ambiguous," the Court found, "the sheer scope of the CDC's claimed authority under Section 361(a) would counsel against the Government's interpretation."
The same agency has made the same mistake here. Rather than heed the admonition that Congress "does not … hide elephants in mouseholes," (Whitman v. American Trucking, 2001),the CDC has tried to squeeze yet another pachyderm into a narrow provision of the Public Health Service Act.
There are few bigger elephants than near‐​total control over entry into the United States. The D.C. Circuit should affirm the ruling against these expulsions, a policy begun under the Trump administration that has largely continued under President Biden.

This brief also has the support of the "other" Ilya: Cato Institute Vice President Ilya Shapiro, who oversees Cato's amicus brief program. The two of us get confused with each other often enough that there is an #IlyaConfusion hashtag on Twitter. I have written a comprehensive guide to telling the two Ilyas apart.
As I point out in the guide, we often differ on legal issues involving immigration. This case is a rare exception! Hopefully, with not one, but two Ilyas arrayed against it, the government doesn't stand a chance.
On a more serious note, this is also a rare case that features both major legal issues and enormous real-world impact. If the government prevails, it would - for reasons set out in the brief - set a very dangerous precedent. And the lives and freedom of large numbers of people are at stake, as well (a point we also cover in the brief.
 
The post Amicus Brief in Title 42 "Public Health" Expulsion Case appeared first on Reason.com.

Global problems require global responses. And we have plenty of global problems. Is a single, unified authority – a world government – required to solve them? Is that even feasible? It rather depends, doesn’t it, on what we mean by the phrase. An emperor with a single empire? Some form of democratic federal government of the world? Star Wars features a galactic republic, but then that’s science fiction.

It is hard to imagine a global government with global citizens in a world with such strong local identities and such different political and social systems. As we have realised since the end of the cold war, the nation state is not only alive, it is kicking. The EU struggles with its members; think of that on a world scale. One person, one vote won’t work either when in certain countries a single leader would cast the votes for millions.

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If we accept, however, that government can be the exercise of power over the peoples of a particular area with or without their consent then, yes, it is possible to imagine some hegemonic power or a collection of powers governing the world, perhaps even benevolently. The Roman empire controlled its known world for centuries. Chinese emperors claimed the “mandate of heaven”, which, they assumed, gave them authority to maintain order on Earth. After the Napoleonic wars, the great powers formed the Concert of Europe to settle disputes peacefully and maintain a largely conservative order.

As our knowledge of each other expanded over recent centuries, so too did our capacity to imagine a truly global order. The European empires justified themselves by claiming to bring civilisation to their subjects. Supporters of an earlier version of the Anglosphere dreamed of a condominium of the British empire (especially its white parts) and the United States to govern the world. Lenin, Stalin and Mao had a still different vision, where a single communist state dissolved national borders.

Immanuel Kant dreamed of another possibility, where nations sharing liberal values cooperated willingly and peacefully. In the aftermath of the first world war, the US president Woodrow Wilson spoke for millions with his vision of a more liberal and democratic world order where nations worked together against common threats to humanity, from disease to war. Its embodiment was the League of Nations, which, with its council, assembly and bureaucracy, mirrored democratic governments but lacked their monopoly of force or ultimate authority.

If Hobbes and his followers are right, a state of anarchy among nations is all we can hope for

The League did not prevent the second world war, but lessons were drawn from its failure, perhaps most crucially that international unity from the start could prevent the spread of aggression. The shattered world of 1945 faced enormous challenges, both to rebuild and to prevent a third, even more catastrophic war. As head of the world’s strongest power, President Roosevelt was able to insist that the new United Nations have more power and more authority than the League.

The UN’s founding conference in San Francisco created a body that incorporated authoritarianism and democracy. Roosevelt’s Four Policemen for the globe – Britain, China, the US and the Soviet Union – were permanent members of the security council (France was added as a courtesy) with, as the UN charter says, “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security”. By 1948, the UN had created its own peacekeeping forces, something the League was never able to do. It also oversaw a host of agencies, such as the World Health Organization or the International Labour Organization, that created international standards and policies in areas such as health and labour, and became centres of global expertise.

Roosevelt also insisted on a general assembly where all nations from the biggest to the smallest would sit as equals. In time it developed its own blocs that, on issues such as the dissolution of the European empires, were able to mobilise world opinion and exert pressure on the powerful. At the very least, the general assembly is a forum for 193 nations, from North Korea to Sweden. It is fashionable now to write off the UN, but its existence helps us to think globally. The other key lesson the world’s leaders took from the 1930s was that reacting to the Great Depression by erecting trade and other barriers prolonged the misery and poisoned international relations. The Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and, eventually, the World Trade Organization, have helped manage the world’s economy and foster development. And, yes, there is much to criticise but, as with the UN, we would be worse off without them.

However, as the American academic Anne-Marie Slaughter argues, world governance involves far more than formal institutions. Rather, it exists in the thickening networks of special agencies and interest groups from police forces to charitable NGOs that operate across and in spite of borders. Whether they are fighting crime, managing international flows of capital or helping refugees, such networks are sustaining a global order, even spreading shared values and norms.

Will Covid-19 encourage us to make that order even stronger? Past great catastrophes made us think differently. New ways of managing international relations came out of the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars. The pandemic has highlighted weaknesses, for example in supply chains, and exacerbated inequalities. The world’s nations have too often resorted to blaming each other, and the distribution of vaccines to poorer countries has been shamefully slow. Yet there was an impressive international effort to develop and administer vaccines. Are we going to learn some lessons?

We had better do so quickly, for we face more pandemics, more global turbulence and, above all, the existential threat of climate change. Can we start, as Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan recently suggested in an article for Foreign Affairs, with a new Concert of Powers, with the limited goal of maintaining stability? The obstacles are formidable. Rogue nations defy world opinion. Regional rivalries threaten to spill over into war. Powerful leaders act as if there is no tomorrow, leaving long-term damage. Donald Trump betrayed and insulted allies. Britain continues to alienate its neighbours and biggest trading partners. “Donnez-moi un break” is not going to bridge the gulf that has opened up with the French.

You have to be an optimist at the moment to believe in a world government built on cooperation and shared values. If Hobbes and his followers are right, a state of anarchy among nations is all we can hope for. Or does the future hold one of those other models? A Concert of Great Powers, or something else? We thought the age of empires was over; maybe it has merely been resting.

Margaret MacMillan is Engelsberg chair in history and international affairs at LSE IDEAS and author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.

Reading list

Governing the World: The History of an Idea by Mark Mazower (Penguin, £12.99)

A New World Order by Anne-Marie Slaughter (Princeton, £32)

The World: A Brief Introduction by Richard Haass (Penguin, £23.99)

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

By David Graeber and David Wengrow

Farrar, Straus & Giroux (2021)

This book is plain fun — an intellectual romp through 200,000 years of human history that overturns all the conventional wisdom about our ancestors. And it offers encouraging new directions for social change.

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David Graeber, who died in 2020, was not only an anthropologist but an anarchist. Not a bomb-thrower, but a believer in people sorting out their problems, agreeing on the solutions, and carrying on — without coercion. He was a leading figure in the Occupy movement 10 years ago and is said to have coined the phrase “We are the 99 per cent.”

David Wengrow is an archaeologist, and the two created this book over a decade as a kind of hobby, swapping the manuscript back and forth as it gained more documentation, and realizing it would need at least three sequels to cover the material properly. I hope Wengrow can provide at least some of those sequels, but this book is a feast in itself.

First all, it’s full of surprising and fascinating information about the societies of the past, especially since the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. The information may be well known to experts, but it hasn’t reached the general public yet.

I was amazed to learn that the people who built Stonehenge had experimented with farming and rejected it; they built a new economy based on gathering hazelnuts. Similarly, the vast Toltec city of Teotihuacán, near modern Mexico City, supported a population of 100,000 — most of them living in excellent social housing.

Second, and more important, Graeber and Wengrow use this information to overturn the whole myth of “progress” from hunting and gathering to farming to cities, kings and bureaucracies, and then to the modern industrial state. That myth assumes our ancient ancestors lived in small groups for 200,000 years, rarely interacting with others. Then they invented farming and began to live in larger communities. Only then did social complexity and surplus food supply permit the rise of social institutions like monarchs who commanded great projects built by obedient subjects, with literate bureaucrats to collect taxes and record events.

Resources for centuries-long projects

On the contrary — the peoples of the Stone Age, this book contends, were as intelligent and rational as we were, and quite capable of projects requiring hundreds or thousands of workers, over very long periods of time. When they felt the need, they experimented with social models. Instead of living in a brutal Hobbesian war of all against all, they travelled and traded safely over great distances.

They also had the resources to support projects like Poverty Point, a huge system of earthworks in Louisiana started 6,000 years ago and continued for 600 years. We have no idea what the system’s purpose was, but it required co-operation and logistical support on a grand scale for many generations. Thousands of years later, another civilization we call Cahokia rose on the Mississippi near St. Louis. Graeber and Wengrow suggest it collapsed when it became totalitarian:

“For those who fell within its orbit, there was nothing much between domestic life — lived under constant surveillance from above — and the awesome spectacle of the city itself. That spectacle could be terrifying. Along with games and feasts, in the early decades of Cahokia’s expansion there were mass executions and burials carried out in public.”

Graeber and Wengrow argue that Cahokia fell thanks to three freedoms enjoyed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors: the freedom to walk away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to choose new kinds of social organization. Moreover, the horror of Cahokia traumatized the peoples of eastern North America into ever considering such a “civilized” society again.

So when French settlers arrived in what is now Canada, they found Indigenous peoples living in small communities, farming and foraging. But they lacked the great structures and institutions that the French defined as civilization. That meant the Indigenous peoples were “savages.”

The Mi’kmaq and Huron-Wendat thought no better of the newcomers. They had some useful gadgets like firearms, but they were always quarrelling, and always obeying someone else’s orders.

French Jesuit missionaries got a shock from the people they had come to convert. The “savages” could argue them point for point, and defeat them. Thousands of years of Indigenous spoken discourse had made reasoned debate a valued skill, beating even the Jesuits’ training.

‘They brand us for slaves’

Lessons in Democracy from Haida Gwaii read more

Graeber and Wengrow even argue that the Enlightenment itself was the result of reports that scandalized Jesuits sent home, describing the Indigenous critique of European culture. Perhaps the most influential was a book by a French explorer and official, Lahontan, relating his conversations with the Wendat Chief Kondiaronk.

As Lahontan put it, Indigenous people who had been to Europe, like Kondiaronk, “… were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There is no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society; they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the differences in ranks which are observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.”

Europeans were both titillated and scandalized by this critique. They liked the new idea of invoking outsiders who could safely criticize the European status quo, and many similar books soon appeared, reporting the views of fictitious foreigners; Gulliver’s Travels turned the foreign-critique genre into outright satire.

But Indigenous “savages” in North America didn’t quite fit their concept of serious thinkers and social analysts. The French economist Turgot and Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others, invented a whole new system of social evolution: hunter-gatherers lived in small, egalitarian groups and became farmers who could support kings, bureaucrats and priests living in cities, which in turn became kingdoms and empires; these had climaxed in the European nation-states, and would soon clinch their superiority by inventing the industrial revolution.

This tidy system relegated Kondiaronk and other non-Europeans to irrelevant relics of a lost Eden of freedom and equality. Obedience and inequality were just the price to be paid for being part of an advanced society. Imperialism now had an intellectual foundation as the engine of progress. Those who resisted would be defeated, exploited and perhaps eventually raised to civilization in some distant future.

Living like rentiers, sustainably

Graeber and Wengrow demolish this myth of social evolution, citing decades of recent findings about ancient societies around the world. Societies did not evolve and progress; they improvised and experimented, arguably with more success than we modern Canadians. As managers of productive ecosystems, Indigenous peoples could live like rentiers on the interest from their living wealth. Like our own billionaires, they could afford to spend their excess wealth and leisure time on projects like Poverty Point and Cahokia.

Unearthing the Work of Indigenous Master Horticulturalists read more

And when supporters of such projects lost interest, they walked away, talked things over, and built new societies depending on their situation. When those new societies ran into trouble, their members worked out something else.

The authors argue that we have become stuck in societies that rule their members through three principles: a monopoly on violence, control of information and personal charisma. Earlier societies ran on none, or just one or two, of these elements. It took the Enlightenment to pull them all together and turn freedom and equality into Orwellian parodies. Even Marxist revolutionaries accepted the three principles, and governments around the world of all political stripes endorse them as well.

I have plenty of quibbles with this or that example of Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments, and advocates of Big History will have more. But the authors make their key point irrefutably. We’ve walked away from bad societies for tens of thousands of years, or just said no, and then built better societies after long debate.

We can do it again.

(Photograph by John M. Chase/Getty Images.)The story of Elizabeth Axley, as told in this comprehensive ProPublica report alleging that Liberty University mishandled reports of sexual abuse, is difficult to read. At an off-campus party, she drank too much, her memory got hazy, she apparently passed out, and then when she woke up, she said a man was on top of her. He said he was covering her mouth, raping her.When she got back to her dorm, she called the campus police, and they took her to the hospital, where “a nurse documented 15 bruises, welts and lacerations on her arm, face and torso.”When Axley told her RA about the alleged attacks, she said the RA urged her not to report the incident. Axley had been violating the Liberty code of conduct—the “Liberty Way”—in part by drinking. But Axley reported it anyway. She had text messages supporting her claim. She had pictures (you can see them on the ProPublica report) taken at the hospital showing her injuries. Yes, the young man denied wrongdoing. But she had supporting evidence. Her case was more than simply he-said, she-said.But Liberty’s response was deeply disturbing. When Axley looked at the case file, she said the pictures of her wounds weren’t there. Why? She claims that a school official told her they were “too explicit.” She said she was asked to “sign a document acknowledging that she could be found to have violated the university’s code of conduct.”Ultimately the university ruled that the accused student was “not responsible” for the rape, but—as ProPublica notes—the decision letter had some rather stark omissions, including “the text messages from friends that weekend expressing concern about what had taken place,” and “the photographs of her bruises and cuts.”Axley’s story goes much deeper than the brief summary above. She attempted suicide. The young man briefly sued her (before they entered into a settlement agreement), but I highlight her case because I find the year of her claims particularly intriguing. She alleged she was raped in 2017, and in that year Liberty University was flying very high indeed.In fact, it’s arguable that in that moment no single university in the United States was more directly politically influential than Liberty. The president of the university, Jerry Falwell Jr., was a friend of the president of the United States. He was one of his first and most prominent unabashed supporters of Donald Trump.But at the same time that young women were alleging that the school was deterring them from reporting dreadful sexual misconduct because they’d been drinking, their own school president was an open and notorious drunk. His wife was accused of affairs with younger men, and one of those men claimed that Falwell liked to watch.And what of the POTUS who granted Liberty's president so much access and whom so many members of the Liberty community adored? He was of course just emerging from a presidential race in which he’d paid a porn star for silence about their affair and had his own extraordinarily checkered past, including appearing in a soft-core Playboy porn movie called Playmate 2000: Bernaola Twins.The Liberty Way, it should be emphasized, does not approve of pornography. Rarely in my life have I ever seen a single significant American institution face such a staggering run of scandal and controversy as Liberty University, and Liberty happens to be America’s largest Christian college, the place that prides itself of education “champions for Christ.”At the beginning of the Trump presidency, Liberty was a juggernaut. Its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., had rescued the school from financial peril, built the endowment to more than $1 billion, and presided over its growth into an educational enterprise that enrolled almost 100,000 students (the vast majority are online). To put that number in perspective, Liberty’s enrollment placed it close to the enrollment of the entire Ivy League. Arguably no other university president in America spent more time in the Oval Office than Falwell. The school started a “think tank” called the Falkirk Center (named after Falwell and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk) and named as “fellows” a number of pop culture celebrities of the Trumpist right. Liberty was rich. It was powerful. It was influential.Correction: It is rich. It is powerful. It is influential. It’s also in a state of moral collapse.It’s difficult to quickly summarize Liberty’s scandals, but let’s try. On August 25, 2020, Falwell resigned as president of the university. It’s hard to say that any single action or scandal ended his tenure. He posted “provocative photos” on social media. His wife, Becki, had an affair with a pool boy the Falwells had met on vacation. The pool boy alleged that Falwell was aware of the affair and even watched them have sex. The hits kept on coming. A former student alleged that Becki had sexually exploited him at the Falwell family home. Falwell sued the university, then dropped the suit. The university then sued Falwell for more than $10 million, claiming that Falwell had withheld key information from the school while he negotiated the terms of his severance agreement. The Falwell scandal was bad enough, but it was but a harbinger of worse things to come. In July a dozen women filed a federal lawsuit against Liberty, alleging that the school systematically mishandled allegations of sexual harassment and assault and created an “unsafe campus environment.” Here’s the core claim:Liberty University has created an unsafe campus environment in three key ways: (a) the creation and weaponization of a student honor code called “the Liberty Way” that makes it difficult or impossible for students to report sexual violence; (b) the promotion of a tacit but widely observed policy that condoned sexual violence, especially by male student athletes; and (c) the public and repeated retaliation against women who did report their victimization.A complaint of course presents only one side of the story. The university has ample opportunity to respond. But then, in October, ProPublica put considerable flesh on the bones of the plaintiffs’ complaint. It published its own comprehensive investigation of the university. ProPublica also focused on how the “Liberty Way” put young women through a unique ordeal as they made claims of dreadful sexual misconduct:Three students, including Axley, recalled being made to sign forms acknowledging possible violations of the Liberty Way after they sought to file complaints about sexual assaults. Others say they were also warned against reporting what had happened to them. Students say that even Liberty University police officers discouraged victims from pursuing charges after reporting assaults.The day after ProPublica ran its story, Liberty’s former spokesman, Scott Lamb, sued the university, claiming—as the Washington Post wrote—that “the school fired him after he opposed its handling of a series of sexual assault and harassment complaints.”Lamb has detailed steps that Liberty took to suppress public criticism on social media. The ProPublica report contains this email, which it says was sent by the marketing department to university officials:Ironically enough, the university’s former Falkirk Center, now called the “Standing for Freedom” Center, is very much against online censorship.Standing for Freedom Center @freedomcenterluThe fight against Big Tech censorship continues.
Florida Gov. DeSantis signs first state law combating Big Tech censorshipLegislators in Texas, Arizona, North Dakota, and Utah have introduced bills to combat Big Tech censorship, but yesterday Florida became the first state to make it law after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed “Florida’s Big Tech Bill.” Quick Facts Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, signed a bill that fi…standingforfreedom.comMay 26th 20211 Retweet13 LikesLast week, a website called the Roys Report reported that the university gave large financial gifts to ministries run by school trustees. It also highlighted a speech by former Liberty board chair Allen McFarland claiming that he “got in trouble, trouble big time” after he said “things like, ‘We’re raising champions for Christ, not champions for the Republican Party. We’re raising champions for Christ, not champions for Donald Trump.’”He was replaced as board chair by Tim Lee, a prominent evangelist. I know that there are knowledgeable readers who are at this very moment yelling at their computer screens, “David, you’re barely scratching the surface!” Indeed, an entire season of the documentary podcast series Gangster Capitalism is dedicated to unfolding scandals at Liberty, and Politico has produced a number of deeply reported stories detailing the profoundly dysfunctional culture at the university. The rot runs deep.But I also know there are readers who are yelling different things at the screen. “David, why are you doing this? Why are you once again highlighting the failures of a Christian institution when we all know that the rot runs deep in secular progressive spaces? After all, don’t you know that Yale Law School is overrun with scandal?” Indeed I do. My colleague Sarah Isgur and I spent much of a podcast exclusively talking about Yale this week. Controversies at Yale matter. The place is disproportionately powerful and disproportionately influential.But Liberty also matters, and it matters a great deal. First, and most importantly, Liberty’s virtue matters for the victims of sexual assault and sexual abuse on campus. Few people are more vulnerable, more frightened, and more alone than individuals who’ve been abused and violated. When I read story after story of mishandled claims—all occurring against the backdrop of the thunderous success of the university’s fundraising and enrollment—I was reminded of a different powerful Christian institution, Kanakuk Kamps, which ignored red flag after red flag that it had a superpredator in its midst. After all, he was so successful. He was so appreciated. The applause for him was thunderous.And thus we see powerful institutions of the church create horrifying double standards. The more powerful and successful you are, the greater the grace for your personal conduct. But if you’re powerless? Well then, the rules apply, with a vengeance. After all, this is a Christian ministry, and there are standards to uphold. When Ravi Zacharias was first accused of sexual misconduct, he refused to turn over his personal technology for examination and investigation. Would his ministry have permitted a junior employee to withhold his phones and/or computers? If there’s one lesson to learn from listening to the invaluable podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” which traces the reasons for the collapse of Mark Driscoll’s immense Seattle church, it’s that success often becomes its own suit of armor, degrading character requirements in leaders until the sin and abuse become too overwhelming to ignore. Then everyone wonders (once again), “How did this go on so long?”But these double standards fail in light of biblical commands. There is no one too important for consistent accountability. A person can’t be promoted out of character requirements, just because they can deliver people and profits. After all, Christ himself said, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”This represents an inversion of the world’s order. Prioritize the powerless. The last shall be first.Second, as a Christian ministry, it is Liberty’s sacred responsibility to be “salt” and “light.” Again, here are the words of Jesus:You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet.“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.Numbers and dollars are not synonyms for salt and light. Otherwise, there are multiple secular organizations that are blazing forth with much greater radiance than Liberty. They have more money. They have more influence. Yet some of them have also struggled with profound scandal.But this gets to a third point. The frustration at those who highlight scandals within the church is directly contrary to the emphasis of the church fathers. If anyone could claim to be an embattled minority, it was the early church. If anyone could claim that they were beset by overpowering cultural forces, it was the early church. American evangelicalism is the most powerful political faction in one of the two most powerful political parties in the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Early Christians would be gobsmacked at our influence.Yet in 1 Corinthians 5, when the church was but a tiny presence in a vast empire, surrounded by a debauched culture, Paul demanded that the church purge from its presence those who committed “immorality that is not even tolerated among the Gentiles.” And then he wrote these oft-ignored words: “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. ‘Purge the evil person from among you.’”A few days ago I was eating dinner with a small group of students at a Christian university, and the subject of post-liberalism came up. A person directly asked me why I seemed to object to formally seeking Christian governance in the United States. I answered his question with a question, “Why do you think it would be better than what we have?”I was thinking both historically and presently. Historically, one could arguably locate the apex of Protestant power in the United States as somewhere around the time of Prohibition. After all, Christians were powerful enough to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, all as part of an effort to improve public morals and public health.Yet what was the state of American righteousness at that time of apex Christian power? Lynch mobs roamed the South. The entire region was an oppressive nation-within-a-nation, largely cut off from the rule of law. Anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments proliferated across the United States. Not even religious liberty was safe when Christians ruled. And what about the present? Its largest institutions reel from scandal. A great mass of its members have succumbed to conspiracy theories. Its “religious” anti-vaxxism is claiming lives by the thousands. Liberty’s current president, Jerry Prevo, was caught on tape saying that “getting people elected” was one of the “main goals” of its think tank. But given the staggering failures outlined above, who can trust Liberty’s wisdom in electoral politics? But there is hope. There is always hope. The scandal-ridden flyspeck of a Corinthian church was ultimately part of a movement that fundamentally transformed the world. Indeed, Paul’s stern correction itself has been part of a persistent call for reform across two millennia of church scandals. There is always a check on sin. There are always voices crying in the wilderness. Liberty is responding to its failures. As ProPublica reports, it has expanded amnesty policies when students self-report violations of the Liberty Way (though there are concerns about the policies’ implementation). The school has also commissioned an independent investigation of the way it’s handled sexual assault claims. Prevo has told students, “I can tell you this, we’re not going to try to cover up anything, we’re going to look back, have that investigated. And also, if we’ve done wrong, we’re going to correct that wrong the best we can. I’m not here to cover up.” These are good words.But that investigation is insufficient, at least so far. In the face of a staggering amount of corruption, the institution should commission a far more comprehensive inquiry. In the the tweet thread linked below, one of America’s most important attorney-experts in sexual abuse in the church, Rachael Denhollander, outlines the necessary steps for true institutional introspection and true institutional change:Rachael Denhollander @R_DenhollanderI am disappointed and grieved to say that this is not what survivors and advocates actually called for and not what LU needs. I hope that this is the result of a lack of understanding on the part of LU and that it will be rectified quickly.
*thread*
Liberty University agrees to independent sex assault probe, advocates claimAdvocates for sexual assault victims at Liberty University announced Thursday that the school’s president, Jerry Prevo, agreed to ask the evangelical Christian institution’s board of trustees Friday to approve an independent investigation into the school’s handling of assault cases.m.washingtontimes.comNovember 6th 2021110 Retweets437 LikesTens of thousands of Americans have attended Liberty University and had wonderful experiences. There are thousands of students and alumni and hundreds of faculty members who not only do their best to live out the values of their faith, they’re grieved by the corruption in their institution. They don’t see enrollment numbers and donor dollars as proof of righteousness. They want change. They want repentance. And they understand that no matter the condition of the world around their university, its humility and obedience are imperative. The future is grave for the church in America if its salt loses its taste or its light goes out. One more thing …The new podcast is here! And the inaugural episode gets real deep, real fast. My friend and co-host Curtis Chang and I discuss Liberty and the concept of institutional sin. Curtis lays out a theology of institutions that will make you think. Are institutions really “created in the image of God”? Does that include secular institutions? And how should Christians respond to institutional failures when they feel besieged by a more-powerful culture. These questions (and more) are asked and answered (to the best of our ability, anyway) in the inaugural episode. Please give it a listen—and subscribe to the podcast feed—here.One last thing …Last week I featured a song by Tenielle Neda, and the response was overwhelming. You loved her. So here she is, back by popular demand, with a beautiful song looking forward to ultimate redemption, when all things are indeed made new: 

In a recent talk with the Lowy Institute, Jake Sullivan argued for a détente with China. Arguing that America recognizes that China is going to be a factor in the international system for the foreseeable future, Sullivan said that there should be effective and healthy competition with China. “We are not seeking a new Cold War, we’re not looking for conflict, what we’re looking for is effective competition with guardrails and risk-reduction measures in place to ensure that things don’t veer off into conflict. And also with the capacity to work together with China, where it’s in the common interests of our countries and in the interests of the world to do so,” Sullivan argued, adding that China is not going anywhere, but nor is the United States. A coexistence is, therefore, necessary, and rightly so.

What was not mentioned in that speech and subsequent conversation even once was the word “Taiwan.” And incidentally, the same day there were news reports about U.S. congressmen visiting the island nation. What was even more surprising was that a day from the talk, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the United States and allies will “take action” if Taiwan was invaded or any alteration of the status quo was done by force. “Blinken did not say what sort of action he was referring to,” the Reuters report noted, claiming immediately after that “Those remarks appeared to depart from a long-held policy of “strategic ambiguity,” not making clear how the United States would respond.” On the contrary, one must add, that everything in the last few days made it feel that the United States is not just ambiguous about China’s border question but is fundamentally rudderless. Ambiguity here is not a strategy, but a byproduct of cluelessness.

This is not surprising. China has been the topic of debate everywhere I went in the last few months and is the topic that divides not just the foreign policy community overall, but also the realists in particular. Everyone agrees that the rise of China is a significant factor and that all else being equal, the rise of Chinese hard power would result in some revanchism abroad. But that’s where the alignments end. In the recently concluded Second National Conservative Conference in Orlando, former Trump national security spokesperson Michael Anton of the Claremont Institute was called an appeaser of China by the neoconservative Hudson Institute’s Michael Pillsbury. It was a particularly bizarre moment in the overall ideologically incoherent venue. But China also dominated in other conferences. In the Advance Security summit in Washington, DC, John Mearsheimer argued for confronting China, whereas Ben Friedman and Eugene Gholz argued for a more offshore approach. Elsewhere, former U.S. deputy assistant secretary Elbridge Colby argued that we must defend Taiwan, to the point that even after the island falls, America and allies must go to war with China to retake the island back.

Ultimately, what appears is that there’s an increasing disconnect between the objective of the U.S. and the subject of the target. Everything starts, therefore, with a few key questions. First, is China a revisionist or a status quo power? Do we have sufficient information to decide on a grand strategy? China being a status quo power would mean a satisfied Chinese power with a more elevated place in the Asia Pacific balance. Commensurate with the Chinese rise in GDP, Chinese interests are going to expand, and with those Chinese military power. But as long as China is willing to work within the established framework, that should not be an issue unless the United States goes all-in on a primacist grand strategy. A greater risk, however, is the United States turning from a status quo power to a revolutionary power seeking to export its ideologies across Asia, which will certainly mean not just alienating potential partners such as a majoritarian and increasingly illiberal India, but also creating a conflict with China.

The second question then is what will be the ultimate American objective? If America’s objective is primacy at all costs, then there is no chance of coexistence no matter how much Sullivan argues for it because any even minimal growth of Chinese power is a threat to the balance which needs to be redressed at any cost. That would mean the destruction of Chinese power if the need arises. The third question is what the United States means by the destruction of the Chinese power in Asia. Does that mean working towards the collapse of the Chinese government and communist party and defending or promoting democracy? Or does that entail containment and the neutering of Chinese power with a chain of alliances surrounding China, without any effort to roll back Chinese power? The former will lead to war, most importantly but not exclusively, over the status of Taiwan. The latter would have no problem with Taiwan falling to China as long as that means twenty years of Chinese quagmire in pacifying a rebel province. The former would see Taiwan as a unit to defend and a tool towards the ultimate goal of checking China. The latter would believe that the broader balance of power doesn’t alter in Asia even with Taiwanese collapse, as China will still be surrounded by Japan, India, Vietnam, and Australia, and there’s no indication about Chinese will or capability regarding an expansionist war of conquest across Asia.

The final question is whether the Americans know what the full cost of sliding to a great power war with a nuclear rival entails, especially over a territory barely miles from Chinese coastal missile batteries. Most Americans are neither aware of how civilization-destroying even a limited nuclear war can be. To give an example, the total casualties of the War on Terror for twenty years, including the 9/11 attacks, were around 12,000 dead and several thousand injured. The number of people dead if a carrier group is sunk in the first hour of a full-contact fight will be more. And that’s not even half a day of fighting, in one specific domain. Not to mention, air force and missile attacks, or God forbid a nuclear showdown. Are Americans willing to go to war for Taiwan, and risk such numbers of casualties?

Ultimately, however, the bigger challenge will not be about facing China in a nuclear showdown. As the brief India-China border clash in the Himalayas (with spiked clubs and hatchets) showed, most great powers now know the risk of a nuclear showdown and are, therefore, gearing up for premodern conflicts below the threshold of war. Same Roman legionnaire tactics are now being seen in the Polish-Belarus-Ukrainian border to defend Europe from weaponized mass migration, a problem that is not just limited to Europe. A far more existential question is whether the Western force structure is ready for such a grey-zone conflict. The answer, given the current American trends , might not be satisfactory.

Sumantra Maitra is a National Security Fellow at the Center for the National Interest. He is also a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center and an elected Early Career historian member at the Royal Historical Society, UK.

Image: Reuters.

Social media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.One major question, though, is how much proof parents, regulators, and legislators need before intervening to protect vulnerable young people. If Americans do nothing until researchers can show beyond a reasonable doubt that Instagram and its owner, Facebook (which now calls itself Meta), are hurting teen girls, these platforms might never be held accountable and the harm could continue indefinitely. The preponderance of the evidence now available is disturbing enough to warrant action.Facebook has dominated the social-media world for nearly a decade and a half. Its flagship product supplanted earlier platforms and quickly became ubiquitous in schools and American life more broadly. When it bought its emerging rival Instagram in 2012, Facebook didn’t take a healthy platform and turn it toxic. Mark Zuckerberg’s company actually made few major changes in its first years of owning the photo-sharing app, whose users have always skewed younger and more female. The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]The available evidence suggests that Facebook’s products have probably harmed millions of girls. If public officials want to make that case, it could go like this:1. Harm to teens is occurring on a massive scale.For several years, Jean Twenge, the author of iGen, and I have been collecting the academic research on the relationship between teen mental health and social media. Something terrible has happened to Gen Z, the generation born after 1996. Rates of teen depression and anxiety have gone up and down over time, but it is rare to find an “elbow” in these data sets––a substantial and sustained change occurring within just two or three years. Yet when we look at what happened to American teens in the early 2010s, we see many such turning points, usually sharper for girls. The data for adolescent depression are noteworthy:Some have argued that these increases reflect nothing more than Gen Z’s increased willingness to disclose their mental-health problems. But researchers have found corresponding increases in measurable behaviors such as suicide (for both sexes), and emergency-department admissions for self-harm (for girls only). From 2010 to 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm did not increase at all for women in their early 20s, or for boys or young men, but they doubled for girls ages 10 to 14.[The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’]Similar increases occurred at the same time for girls in Canada for mood disorders and for self-harm. Girls in the U.K. also experienced very large increases in anxiety, depression, and self-harm (with much smaller increases for boys).2. The timing points to social media.National surveys of American high-school students show that only about 63 percent reported using a “social networking site” on a daily basis back in 2010. But as smartphone ownership increased, access became easier and visits became more frequent. By 2014, 80 percent of high-school students said they used a social-media platform on a daily basis, and 24 percent said that they were online “almost constantly.” Of course, teens had long been texting each other, but from 2010 to 2014, high-school students moved much more of their lives onto social-media platforms. Notably, girls became much heavier users of the new visually oriented platforms, primarily Instagram (which by 2013 had more than 100 million users), followed by Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.Boys are glued to their screens as well, but they aren’t using social media as much; they spend far more time playing video games. When a boy steps away from the console, he does not spend the next few hours worrying about what other players are saying about him. Instagram, in contrast, can loom in a girl’s mind even when the app is not open, driving hours of obsessive thought, worry, and shame.3. The victims point to Instagram.The evidence is not just circumstantial; we also have eyewitness testimony. In 2017, British researchers asked 1,500 teens to rate how each of the major social-media platforms affected them on certain well-being measures, including anxiety, loneliness, body image, and sleep. Instagram scored as the most harmful, followed by Snapchat and then Facebook. Facebook’s own research, leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, has a similar finding: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression … This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.” A recent experiment confirmed these observations: Young women were randomly assigned to use Instagram, use Facebook, or play a simple video game for seven minutes. The researchers found that “those who used Instagram, but not Facebook, showed decreased body satisfaction, decreased positive affect, and increased negative affect.”[Read: Teens are bullied ‘constantly’ on Instagram]4. No other suspect is equally plausible. Many things changed in the early 2010s. Some have suggested that the cause of worsening mental health could be the economic insecurity that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. But why this would hit younger teen girls the hardest is unclear. Besides, the American economy improved steadily in the years after 2011, while teen mental health deteriorated steadily. Some have suggested that the 9/11 attacks, school shootings, or other news events turned young Americans into “generation disaster.” But why, then, do similar trends exist among girls in Canada and the U.K.? Not all countries show obvious increases in mood disorders, perhaps because technological changes interact with cultural variables, but the societies most like ours (including Australia and New Zealand) exhibit much the same patterns.Correlation does not prove causation, but nobody has yet found an alternative explanation for the massive, sudden, gendered, multinational deterioration of teen mental health during the period in question.To be sure, there is evidence on the other side. Dozens of studies and several meta-analyses (studies of groups of studies) have examined the relationship between greater digital-media use and worse teen mental health, and most have found just small correlations, or none at all. The most widely cited of these studies, published in 2019, analyzed 355,000 teens across three large data sets from the U.S. and U.K. The authors found only a tiny correlation—no larger than the correlation of bad mental health with self-reports of “eating potatoes.” Facebook cites this research in its defense.But here’s the problem with these studies: Most lump all screen-based activities together (including those that are harmless, such as watching movies or texting with friends), and most lump boys and girls together. Such studies cannot be used to evaluate the more specific hypothesis that Instagram is harmful to girls. It’s like trying to prove that Saturn has rings when all you have is a dozen blurry photos of the entire night sky.[Derek Thompson: Social media is attention alcohol]But as the resolution of the pictures increases, the rings appear. The subset of studies that allow researchers to isolate social media, and Instagram in particular, show a much stronger relationship with poor mental health. The same goes for those that zoom in on girls rather than all teens. Girls who use social media heavily are about two or three times more likely to say that they are depressed than girls who use it lightly or not at all. (For boys, the same is true, but the relationship is smaller.) Most of the experiments that randomly assign people to reduce or give up social media for a week or more show a mental-health benefit, indicating that social media is a cause, not just a correlate.Facebook would have you believe that merely cutting back the time that teens spend on social media will solve any problems it creates. In a 2019 internal essay, Andrew Bosworth, a longtime company executive, wrote:While Facebook may not be nicotine I think it is probably like sugar. Sugar is delicious and for most of us there is a special place for it in our lives. But like all things it benefits from moderation.Bosworth was proposing what medical researchers call a “dose-response relationship.” Sugar, salt, alcohol, and many other substances that are dangerous in large doses are harmless in small ones. This framing also implies that any health problems caused by social media result from the user’s lack of self-control. That’s exactly what Bosworth concluded: “Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves.” The dose-response frame also points to cheap solutions that pose no threat to its business model. The company can simply offer more tools to help Instagram and Facebook users limit their consumption.But social-media platforms are not like sugar. They don’t just affect the individuals who overindulge. Rather, when teens went from texting their close friends on flip phones in 2010 to posting carefully curated photographs and awaiting comments and likes by 2014, the change rewired everyone’s social life.Improvements in technology generally help friends connect, but the move onto social-media platforms also made it easier—indeed, almost obligatory––for users to perform for one another.Public performance is risky. Private conversation is far more playful. A bad joke or poorly chosen word among friends elicits groans, or perhaps a rebuke and a chance to apologize. Getting repeated feedback in a low-stakes environment is one of the main ways that play builds social skills, physical skills, and the ability to properly judge risk. Play also strengthens friendships.When girls started spending hours each day on Instagram, they lost many of the benefits of play. (Boys lost less, and may even have gained, when they took up multiplayer fantasy games, especially those that put them into teams.) The wrong photo can lead to school-wide or even national infamy, cyberbullying from strangers, and a permanent scarlet letter. Performative social media also puts girls into a trap: Those who choose not to play the game are cut off from their classmates. Instagram and, more recently, TikTok have become wired into the way teens interact, much as the telephone became essential to past generations.[Evelyn Douek: 1 billion TikTok users understand what Congress doesn’t]Facebook’s researchers understand the implications of this rewiring. In one slide from an internal presentation on Instagram’s mental-health effects, the presenter notes that “parents can’t understand and don’t know how to help.” The slide explains: “Today’s parents came of age in a time before smartphones and social media, but social media has fundamentally changed the landscape of adolescence.”Social-media platforms were not initially designed for children, but children have nevertheless been the subject of a gigantic national experiment testing the effects of those platforms. Without a proper control group, we can’t be certain that the experiment has been a catastrophic failure, but it probably has been. Until someone comes up with a more plausible explanation for what has happened to Gen Z girls, the most prudent course of action for regulators, legislators, and parents is to take steps to mitigate the harm. Here are three:First, Congress should pass legislation compelling Facebook, Instagram, and all other social-media platforms to allow academic researchers access to their data. One such bill is the Platform Transparency and Accountability Act, proposed by the Stanford University researcher Nate Persily.Second, Congress should toughen the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. An early version of the legislation proposed 16 as the age at which children should legally be allowed to give away their data and their privacy. Unfortunately, e-commerce companies lobbied successfully to have the age of “internet adulthood” set instead at 13. Now, more than two decades later, today’s 13-year-olds are not doing well. Federal law is outdated and inadequate. The age should be raised. More power should be given to parents, less to companies.Third, while Americans wait for lawmakers to act, parents can work with local schools to establish a norm: Delay entry to Instagram and other social platforms until high school.Right now, families are trapped. I have heard many parents say that they don’t want their children on Instagram, but they allow them to lie about their age and open accounts because, well, that’s what everyone else has done. Dismantling such traps takes coordinated action, and the principals of local elementary and middle schools are well placed to initiate that coordination.Haugen’s revelations have brought America to a decision point. If public officials do nothing, the current experiment will keep running—to Facebook’s benefit and teen girls’ detriment. The preponderance of the evidence is damning. Instead of waiting for certainty and letting Facebook off the hook again, we should hold it and other social-media companies accountable. They must change their platforms and their ways.

In Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, Christopher Mims announces his goal up front: to convince you of "this astonishing fact: You live inside a factory. We all do. And you are also a worker inside that factory." Although Arriving Today doesn’t quite end up making that argument, it paints a compelling picture of the elephantine supply chain that delivers products to our doorsteps. Needless to say, its publication is timely.
Mims, who by day is a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, maintains a healthy skepticism of the supply chain’s mechanization, and the ways in which the interchangeability of the system’s components have made jobs in the industry more punishing and alienating. His chapter on the cargo ship sailors who were trapped at sea for the better part of a year during COVID is especially eye-opening. But he balances skepticism with an infectious awe at the scale of the system. "90 percent of the world’s goods travel by ship," he explains, and as those ships cross the Pacific they sit "1.2 miles higher above the surface of Earth than the peak of Mt. Everest." Similar factoids dot the text, along with insights into the human-machine melding required to make the system work. Mims describes a ship as "a giant suit worn by its humans"; at another point, he rides along as a harbor pilot takes "total command of the largest mobile, man-made object on Earth," guiding it into its port resting place with inches to spare.
But Arriving Today also manages to capture the quirky, inefficient, and deeply human parts of the supply chain. As containers full of goods arrive in the Los Angeles port, they’re unloaded onto land by massive cranes, and then spend several days being "groomed," or shuffled around into more accessible stacks, by smaller cranes. After a local trucker transports the container to another distribution center, the goods are unpacked and enter America’s long-distance trucking ecosystem.
This world is riddled with strange structural inefficiencies: Despite being essential and in high demand, truckers are worked to the bone and paid little. Barely one-third of the 10 million Americans with a commercial driver’s license are working as truckers, a sign of the industry’s high turnover. Mims leads readers through the neon world of roadside truck stops and ably describes the murky regulations meant to protect truckers that indirectly endanger them. Logging devices, introduced to track hours and stop truckers from driving sleepy, end up increasing speeding from drivers without affecting the number of total crashes.
Although trucking is a messy business, things change dramatically when we arrive at Amazon’s warehouses. Over the course of the pandemic, Amazon increased its "frontline workforce" by half, crossing the million-employee mark before Mims’s eyes. The author describes the "fundamental Darwinian" workplace culture, where warehouse employees are constantly surveilled and compared with their compatriots. Mims argues that this system of "stack ranking" contributes to the high rates of injury (in some warehouses, four times higher than the industry average). Arriving Today is at its most winsome when Mims attempts to perform the physical exertions of warehouse and delivery workers and finds that "industrial athletes" display levels of strength, agility, and endurance far beyond the typical office worker’s capacity.
Mims got lucky with his timing: His narrative, starting with a tour of Vietnamese ports, begins right as COVID breaks out in China in 2020. As a result, he gets to interweave the usual workings of the supply chain with the distended turmoil of the pandemic. Mims is an able chronicler of the changes and keeps one eye on the broader historical context. "What America’s Rust Belt once was, that swath of productive enterprise stretching from Baltimore to the Great Lakes, places like Vietnam have become—only for the whole world."
If Arriving Today merits a complaint, it’s that it’s not long enough, and thus misses the chance to break down the world of policy around global shipping and trade. He hints at a number of fascinating rabbit holes without leading us down them: For instance, that the 11 major shipping companies are really just three "ocean alliances" that each share ships and containers internally. The timespan covered in the book ends just before the Long Beach bottlenecks that made national news.
There are a couple points where Arriving Today breaks down: Hitler and FDR are included in a list of "people whom history has mostly forgotten," while crossing the Pacific is "a study in contrasts." Mostly, though, Mims keeps his prose tight and focused on the people who knit the world of goods together: the Filipino and Ukrainian sailors flying Panamanian flags, weary American truckers, and Amazon warehouse workers ground down by "despotic Taylorism." Those human cogs in the great machine enable a level of consumer convenience unthinkable to our ancestors. Mims leaves it to the reader to judge whether that convenience is worth the cost.
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims
Harper Business, 336 pp., $29.99
The post Scenes from the Supply Chain appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

The disposition of the Boeing manslaughtering of 346 trusting passengers and crew in the 737 MAX crashes (Indonesia - 2018 and Ethiopia - 2019) further weakens the system of tort law and individual pursuits of justice after wrongful deaths.

Federal District Court Judge in Chicago, Jorge L. Alonso, couldn't even wait for the scheduled hearing by Boeing's law firms and the cooperating plaintiffs' lawyers. He approved the stipulation a day earlier, without comment, that, among other surrenders, took away the right to argue punitive damages for Boeing's admitted criminal conduct, stopped the discovery and depositions of the most culpable top executives, and set the stage for mediation to reduce the number of trials for compensatory damage to a very few of the 156 wronged families. These mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers lost their loved ones when a stealth software, unknown to the pilots, seized control of the 737 MAX planes and drove them down at 550 mph into smithereens.

"Consolidated cases" like those of the 737 MAX disasters are not class actions. They are individual lawsuits from around the country brought together in one court for convenience and alleged efficiencies. Before plaintiffs are informed fully, they find themselves swept into one global deal after closed-door negotiations that unite both the corporate defendants and lawyers for the plaintiffs into one settlement framework

As these cases of corporate violence increase (think the opiates of the Perdue Pharmaceutical Company/Sackler Family and the transvaginal mesh cases), the company executives escape fines, admissions, and often are promoted or let go with huge multi-million-dollar severance payments. Meanwhile, the company pays insurable and deductible monetary damages. The great majority of such cases are not tried in court before a jury. All are under a secrecy order covering up all discovered materials, testimonies, ad infinitum. Deterrence and public disclosure - two important purposes of tort law - are lost. While the compensation, according to leading plaintiff lawyer, Shanin Specter, is far less in a global deal than what could be achieved by the pursuit of individual lawsuits. (See article: Plaintiffs lawyer rips colleagues over multidistrict litigation fees, pressure tactics by Daniel Fisher, December 11, 2020).

Year after year, these deteriorating practices, choreographed by law firms such as Perkins Coie and Winston & Strawn, get more dictatorial and more secret. Corporate perpetrators are exonerated and their interests preserved. The plaintiffs' interests in punishment and public disclosures of the crimes for all the world to see are undermined or destroyed.

Until the 1970s, according to trial lawyer James C. Sturdevant, depositions were publicly filed on completion, and plaintiff attorneys did not enter into overreaching "protective orders" shrouded in extreme secrecy, that often exclude review by the wrongfully injured or next of kin plaintiffs themselves.

This is only one example of the inside shredding of the tort law system that evolved over the centuries from medieval England to serve the just interests of the aggrieved. Our U.S. Constitution's seventh amendment guarantees a right to trial by jury. In recent decades, notwithstanding millions of wrongfully injured people, there has been a very sharp decline in civil jury trials, leading to articles titled "the vanishing jury trial." This is just what the scheming corporate attorneys have been promoting with the tempted plaintiff attorneys growing accustomed to "sue and settle," in the pejorative phrase of the remaining courageous trial lawyers.

The direct assaults on the Tort system since about 1980 have come from state legislators - indentured to corporate campaign cash - passing bills severely restricting plaintiffs' rights. These include caps on damages for the most severe wrongful injuries (e.g., California's notorious MICRA [Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act] Law limiting damages for serious medical malpractice to $250,000 for a lifetime of pain and suffering). (See more on MICRA at ConsumerWatchdog.org).

Other destructions of access to justice are limiting tort liabilities for corporations such as those operating atomic power plants and outright immunities for companies favored by Congress (such as the manufacturers of vaccines). The list of obstructions to a wronged plaintiff's right to his or her day in court is long and cruel. (Visit the Center for Justice and Democracy for more details).

Another assault on the right of people to use tort law affects everybody who signs those fine print contracts that sometimes extend into dozens of pages. Airbnb ties up homeowners with a fine print contract peonage totaling over 160 pages.

This contract servitude keeps getting more brazen by these dictatorial corporations - almost none of whose contract terms and conditions competitively differ from one to another. People are forced to give up charging defendants with liability for wrongdoing and to accept prohibitions on the right to a jury trial. These and other handcuffs herd citizens into private compulsory arbitration, favoring the company, in cases of any dispute.

In short, these "mice print" unilateral contracts (as Senator Elizabeth Warren calls them) are destroying tort law.

Because we don't study at all in high school and college these two great pillars of freedom - the citizen laws of torts and contracts, most Americans have little idea of what they are being stripped of by autocratic companies and their law firms. Ideally, you should have the right to freely negotiate contracts you enter into with vendors. Ideally, should you be wrongfully injured, you should be free to retain a contingent fee attorney (paying only if there is a recovery) and have your full day in court without all kinds of corporate-bred rules to bend the contest in their favor.

Alas, year after year, these freedoms are taken away piece by piece with little media coverage and no marches or demonstrations. The autocratic corporatization of the law would have shocked our founding fathers and the patriots who defied King George III in 1776.

Can we not rise to the challenge of protecting and advancing these two pillars of tort and contract freedoms being subjected to systematic destruction by corporate predators and their toady politicians? Last heard, "We the People" are constitutionally sovereign, and we far outnumber these insatiable, profit-maximizing corporatists.

An intelligent observer could probably have guessed that Kyle Rittenhouse was going to be found innocent when the prosecution decided to focus on his fondness for violent video games. Whatever your legal competence, this is not a tactic you resort to if you have a solid case.

In the heat of the summer of 2020 left-wing activists had filed the word “complex” away

Let us return to the beginning of this squalid tale. Facts must be established before judgements can be made. In August 2020, police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin were called to the home of a woman who reported that her boyfriend, Jacob Blake, had entered her home without permission. Mr Blake had a warrant out for his arrest, based on charges of sexually assaulting this woman. When the officers arrived, according to their testimony, Blake was putting a child into a car and a woman was heard to cry, “He’s got my kid. He’s got my keys.” Believing that a kidnap was in progress, the officers attempted to tase Blake, but it was ineffective. Blake allegedly fought the officers (though his lawyers deny this) and then walked towards the car, holding a knife. According to the police, Blake turned towards the officers, at which point one of them shot him seven times. He survived.

Whether or not the officer’s decision was defensible, it was clearly a complex situation (unlike, say, the outrageous shootings of Philando Castile or Daniel Shaver). In the heat of the summer of 2020, though, left-wing activists had filed the word “complex” away. For them, it was just another case of the police callously murdering an innocent black man. They descended on Kenosha — many of them holding riotous intentions.

A lot of demonstrators were peaceful. Others, though, torched businesses. Some were violent towards people. An old man tried to defend a shop where he worked and had his jaw broken by a rioter. In response, many citizens appointed themselves defenders of law and order, guarding businesses as protests continued. One was Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old from Antioch, Illinois, twenty miles from Kenosha.

Rittenhouse was a young man with energetic aspirations towards being a pillar of his community. A police cadet and trained lifeguard, he wanted to put his law and order values and medical skills to good use. He asked an older friend of his to buy him a rifle and turned up in Kenosha with his weapon and his medical kit.

Rittenhouse was seen and even interviewed as he guarded buildings and provided medical care on the night of August 25th. (Foolishly, he claimed to be an EMT, which he was not.) Rittenhouse was also present when a protestor named Joseph Rosenbaum allegedly confronted the militia and told them that if he caught any of them by themselves he would kill them. Eccentrically, for a white Black Lives Matter activist, he was also filmed repeatedly saying what others of his ilk might have more decorously styled as “the n-word” instead.

Later, Rittenhouse was indeed alone. He encountered Rosenbaum and another man, Joshua Ziminski. What happened next is disputed but what we know is that Rosenbaum chased him into a car dealership. Ziminski fired his gun into the air, at which point Rittenhouse spun around and pointed his weapon at Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum reached for the gun and Rittenhouse shot him four times. Rosenbaum died.

Protestors chased Rittenhouse as he fled towards police cars. One of them, Anthony Huber, attacked him with a skateboard and Rittenhouse shot and killed him as well. Another, Gaige Grosskreutz, pointed his gun at Rittenhouse, who shot him, blowing off his bicep.

The prosecution tried to portray Rittenhouse as being a man who sought violence. The judge refused to allow them to present as evidence two videos, one of which allegedly showed Rittenhouse punching a girl in the middle of a brawl and one which allegedly records him saying, as he watches the looting of a shop, that if he had a gun he would “start shooting at them”. On the other hand, the judge also refused to give Rittenhouse’s lawyers permission to use as evidence the fact that Rosenbaum was a convicted child molester and Huber had been convicted of strangulation, suffocation and false imprisonment.

Rittenhouse was fortunate not to be prosecuted for possession of a firearm at his age. In Wisconsin, apparently, the law decrees that 17-year-olds can carry weapons if the barrels are longer than sixteen inches. (Four years before they can drink. Curious.) If it was indeed his voice on the video outside the pharmacy it would be hard to argue that he has never had a thought of vigilantism. On the other hand, if you believe that he set out to kill people in August 2020 you also have to believe that by coincidence he was threatened, pursued and attacked by hostile men who were attempting to seize his gun.

You cannot create a violent situation and be surprised when it ends in violence

Left-wing responses have been shell-shocked. The author Umar Haique claims that Rittenhouse’s acquittal represents “an open license to kill Black people and Jews” (all the people Rittenhouse shot were white but never mind). The journalist Paul Mason calls it “a key stage in the fascist progress.” For the record, I am firmly against killing people, and I think that teenagers should be at home studying and not wandering around the streets with a rifle. But a lot of mainstream commentators defended the violence that drew men like Rittenhouse into Kenosha. Kellie Carter Jackson, assistant professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College, hailed “the utility of riotous rebellion” in the Atlantic. A branch of Hachette Book Group published a book named In Defense of Looting, for which you had to pay money to buy.

You cannot create a violent situation and be surprised when it ends in violence. Had Joseph Rosenbaum not pursued Rittenhouse for no good reason, he and Huber would be alive, and had some people not decided to respond to the complicated circumstances of Jacob Blake’s shooting with the destruction of random properties, Kyle Rittenhouse would never have gone to Kenosha.

I have to say to Kyle, though, that sharks are circling — not just leftists out for revenge but right-wing opportunities who will want turn an eighteen-year-old who has been through an immense amount of trauma into a figurehead. Focus on yourself — and, perhaps, the occasional defamation suit.

Since the pandemic became global, there has been a sharp increase in the percentage of remote workers. Liberals have championed this shift but ignored the fact that allowing people to work remotely does nothing to combat the exploitation inherent in capitalist labor.

The advantages of working from home depend on the power workers have in relation to their employers. (Getty Images)
 
Among the many transformations to people’s ways of living since the start of the global pandemic, none has received as much attention from the media as the increase in the prevalence of remote work. The World Economic Forum has observed that the opportunities to work remotely are not equally distributed: well-paid workers in “high-skilled” industries are more likely to work from home than their service-industry counterparts. So worrisome is this trend that economists have gone as far as to refer to it as a ticking “time bomb for inequality.”
The vast majority of workers have not moved to remote working. Both service-sector employees and those based in productive industries have, in most cases, continued to work on-site. Despite this fact, a disproportionate amount of media coverage has focused on remote work. One perhaps obvious explanation for this is that the people tasked with writing about workplace conditions are very often remote workers themselves.
Less clear within the reams of coverage that the media and policy think tanks have given to working from home is what this move augurs for the conditions of workers. Is remote work, as its advocates argue, emancipatory, or do the same forms of exploitation found in regular work continue to predominate?

The Boss’s Remote Work Is Different Than Ours
During the first wave of the pandemic in April 2020, millions of people discovered remote work for the first time. Until then, a small yet globally distributed group, often in management, had been enjoying the benefits of remote work for years. These champions of working from home argued that doing so could fuel creativity, reduce unwelcome interruptions, and save on commute times.
In cases where workers have more power vis-à-vis their employer, remote work can in fact make good on the promises made by its defenders. Brian Pallister, the former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba and longtime working-from-home advocate is poster boy for elite fantasies about working from home. Pallister, who governed the province until September 2021, was profiled by Maclean’s Nancy Macdonald, who reported on the former politician’s working conditions from his opulent second home in Costa Rica. Pallister’s primary home is in the notoriously cold provincial capital, Winnipeg (often called “Winterpeg” by locals).
Macdonald was impressed by what she found at Pallister’s residence:
Everything he needs is here: a basketball half-court for shooting hoops, a shaded porch for reading. The guest house was transformed to a gym, with treadmills and weights. Two large satellite dishes keep him connected; a transformer ensures he can power the place. But the pool he pretty much ignores. . . . When he needs to, he and his wife get around in a silver Land Cruiser, and a pair of Honda ATVs.
Unsurprisingly, during his first term in office, from 2016 to 2019, Pallister spent a total of 146 days at this idyllic retreat. At the time, his absence caused a small scandal. Not fazed by the criticism, the premier pointed out that there were many practical merits to the work life he had chosen. “It’s easier to work here than in Manitoba, where I’m constantly interrupted by meetings,” he said to Maclean’s. Conference calls with his senior staff every other day kept him in the loop. For everything else, as he told the reporter, “there’s email and text.”
Most workers’ experiences of remote work bear very little resemblance to Pallister’s. As the Washington Post has reported, management have deployed sophisticated surveillance technologies that extend their reach directly into the homes of employees to maintain control over their workforce from a distance. We should, of course, be wary of treating these technologies as novel. In normal workplaces, companies’ power to surveil workers reflects the power dynamics between bosses and employees, and the same holds for surveilled remote workers.
Early summer optimism about widespread vaccination across Canada and the United States prompted plans for office reopenings. Writing for the Atlantic in July, Ed Zitron argued that many workers don’t want to go back. According to Zitron, remote work has revealed a whole layer of management to be superfluous:
Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.
Zitron does not go so far as spelling it out as a socialist would — that it is workers, as the primary producers of value, that contribute to the bottom line — but his observations are nonetheless a useful springboard for conversation. Socialists have focused their attention on the divide between workers and capitalists. During the pandemic, another divide — perhaps almost as stark — has manifested. This is the one between workers and managers. Management has traditionally carried the responsibility of coordinating labor and keeping workers on task. But most remote workers have reported increased productivity during the pandemic without management superintendence.
The increase in prevalence of remote work generated by the pandemic has further shown that the interests of senior managers, company owners, and board members — or premiers of provinces — are, more often than not, in conflict with the interests of their employees.

Bullshit Jobs vs. Essential Jobs
Zitron’s comments call to mind the series of classifications of different forms of work that the late David Graeber developed in his classic book Bullshit Jobs. There Graeber made a convincing case, based largely on his own research, that many salaried white-collar workers spend their days completing tasks that they personally think are of little to no importance. These jobs don’t contribute to the happiness, health, or security of others; they may not even be connected in any tangible way to generating profit.
For Graeber, the absurdity of work under capitalism was so great that it was hard to distinguish from fiction. In 2002, a tax auditor in Helsinki, Finland, died at his desk and his colleagues, not realizing he had become a corpse, worked around him for forty-eight hours. How different was this from the scene in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King where an auditor at the Inland Revenue Service dies at his desk and it takes days for anyone to notice?
Graeber argued that workers can get away with doing next to nothing as long as their boss can see them. Workers sitting idly at their desks, secretly wondering if eliminating their jobs would make little to no difference to their organizations or the broader world, are unwittingly proving the truth of Graeber’s bullshit jobs thesis.
Of course, this does not mean that all jobs are bullshit. One measure of the value of a particular profession is to ask what would happen if workers withdrew their services: for non-bullshit jobs, it would not take long for the consequences to become unbearable. Consider the exploited, overworked, and underpaid workers in senior homes in Quebec. In April 2020, afraid that COVID would kill or sicken them, these workers quit or deserted their positions in large numbers.

Coercion at Home and at the Office
Graeber cites a survey in which the time American office workers said they devote to their actual duties declines from 46 percent in 2015 to 39 percent in 2016. This seems like a very sharp decline from an already low figure. Nonessential time, survey respondents said, was filled with answering emails, “wasteful” meetings, and administrative tasks.
We often understand capitalism as an economic system aimed at maximizing productivity and efficiency. It is therefore strange to think that within capitalist industries there could exist positions whose primary function is creating unnecessary tasks that produce no value. We should not be surprised by this contradiction. This division of the workday into discrete units of time rather than tasks encourages inefficiency. Once the day is broken up in this way, work becomes less about production and more about being present within a particular place for a particular amount of time.
In the postindustrial age, the keyboard jockeys of the “knowledge economy” are engaged in dislocated Sisyphean tasks, the product of which is at best hard to discern. The abstractness of the work produced within the knowledge economy becomes even more apparent when compared to other sectors. Grocery store clerks, subway station cleaners, bus drivers, mail carriers, nurses, teachers, and home care staff are all workers whose output is intelligible.
On the one hand, office workers — while often wage laborers — are distinct from blue-collar laborers and enjoy the consequent perks of mental labor, such as the possibility of working from home. On the other hand, the fact that the result of such work is often nebulous increases the sense that one’s time on the job is, in fact, a total waste of human energy. In either instance, it remains the case that the advantages of working from home come to very little without proper pay and benefits. Escaping costly and time-consuming commutes, for instance, is thin gruel for working parents earning minimum wage without the benefits of childcare.

The Bosses Should Not Decide
However, there is reason to believe that remote work can at least offer a way out of the dreary and meaningless state of affairs described in Bullshit Jobs. An ADP–Angus Reid survey of 1,500 workers compared respondents’ work lives in April 2020 versus April 2021. It found that “despite working longer hours, 42 percent of Canadian remote workers are feeling more productive and over a third (37 percent) have noticed an increase in the quality of their work.” It seems plausible that the increased productivity is the result of a decline in the amount of bullshit these workers are forced to manage during a typical workday.
The flipside of this change, however, is that office workers are reporting working longer hours, feeling stressed, and burning out. In addition to this, workers are forced to put up with intolerable levels of surveillance.
Given the variance in the preferences of office workers themselves — about 40 percent say that a fifty-fifty split between remote and in-office would suit them the best — the most labor-friendly solution is to let workers themselves decide what they want. This will only be possible when workers have more power in the workplace. Increasing the levels of unionization across all sectors will be an essential component in giving workers more autonomy.
The value of work has for too long been measured by bosses rather than by the socially positive contributions made by wage labor. Shortly before his untimely death, Graeber observed this fact, writing that “we are a collection of fragile beings taking care of one another, and that those who do the lion’s share of this care work that keeps us alive are overtaxed, underpaid, and daily humiliated.” Until the basic structure of workplace hierarchies based on capitalist production is overcome, remote workers will suffer the same deprivations as their on-site and in-office comrades.

Michael Powell is a reporter for The New York Times, covering issues including free speech, education and identity politics. His reporting takes him from the campuses of elite universities and private schools to the halls of the ACLU.In this week’s conversation, Michael Powell and Yascha Mounk discuss whether the left has cooled on free speech, what’s lost in the national discussion about critical race theory, and how establishment institutions across the United States are being transformed.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Every time we get a story about an attack on liberalism, in part from the right but also from the left, it is dismissed by partisans as just some crazy story, an extreme example — “this really isn't a broad phenomenon going on in the country”, etc. Do you think all of the stories that you've been writing about add up to a bigger picture?Michael Powell: I think the answer is almost certainly yes. About seven months ago, I did a story on a particular racial incident at Smith College, an elite liberal arts school in Massachusetts. I spoke to at least 15 faculty members, all of them tenured. As I recall, three of them went on the record. With perhaps one exception, none disputed that there was an illiberal stream running through liberal higher education these days, and specifically at their school. Almost all had particular tales to tell—not all hair-curling. But it was quite striking that I'm talking to—in almost all cases—senior tenured faculty, and none were willing to go on the record. Untenured people, I very much understood. I thought to myself, “This is a fine liberal institution, an elite liberal institution, and this isn't good.” After the piece appeared, the president, as I expected might happen, denounced the piece, denounced me, and went to the faculty meeting. One of the faculty members called me a few hours afterwards, and she was chuckling. She named a number of people who stood up and denounced the piece and several of those were people who had given me chapter and verse on the problems that the university was running into on these very issues. I took that as a bad sign on the state of many of these institutions.Mounk: Being back in Europe for a few months, I haven't had anybody say to me, “But of course, I would never say this publicly.” And I suddenly realized that this is a phrase that I would hear more or less every day in the United States, often from people who are very much on the left, who are very progressive, who supported Bernie Sanders, who are deeply engaged in the fight against discrimination and so on. Their position is perfectly reasonable, but they would be afraid to speak publicly. When did you first sense that cultural transition?Powell: I've only really started writing on this in the last year and a half. I was writing a sports column, actually, for about four or five years before this. I bounced all over the place. The Times being the Times, it's sports column in which you can write about all sorts of social issues as well. And I started to come across this when I was looking at Title IX abuses which were, frankly, in some cases quite problematic from a civil liberties point of view. And doing that reporting—this is casting back four or five years—I was running into the same problem: that lawyers handling the cases were perfectly willing to talk to me, but when I would try to talk with professors and others on college campuses, people were wary of it. Feminists were leery of it—with, I should say, some spectacular exceptions. There are people who've been very forthright on this question from the liberal feminist community. But it just feels to me this is a stream that runs quite strong through our culture right now. And not simply universities and colleges.Mounk: Your work covers a broad range of issues, and I want to do justice to that. So I understand you're currently in Texas, reporting on some of the so-called anti-critical race theory (CRT) laws. Can you give us a little bit of a sense of what's going on there and what you're covering at the moment?Powell: Sure. Texas has—as is true in about eight or nine other states—enacted several laws that set lines for how public school teachers can talk about. Actually, it's a little more chilling than that. For instance, you can talk about the real history of the Alamo in Texas; you can talk about, theoretically, how the Texas Rangers lynched Mexicans, which happened with tragic frequency for quite a while. But the law basically says you can't make children feel uncomfortable. In this way, it's kind of a funhouse mirror of some of the stuff that you see on the left. You can't make children feel uncomfortable. In this case, say, white children. I've talked with a lot of teachers down here—public school, high school, middle school, social studies teachers, mainly—and they say if you're going to talk about history (let's put CRT just off to the side for now), if you're going to wrestle with history in all of its glories and unpleasantness and messiness, you run the imminent risk that you're going to make a student uncomfortable or upset—not personally, but because it's difficult stuff to handle. Right now, theoretically, a teacher who does that—and if a couple of students or parents were to complain—literally could run the risk of losing their teacher's license. Similarly, you have librarians who are very worried. This is not in the law, but there have been a couple of legislators who put out these very long lists of books on all manner of things from race to the Holocaust. People are just very, very worried. It's a bad place for free inquiry right now.Mounk: You're not primarily an education reporter, but what can you tell us about how race is actually taught in public schools across the United States? Local control is so strong in America that what you're likely to be taught in a school district in New York City is so different from what you're likely to be taught in a school district in Alabama. In most schools, you probably do have serious engagement with the negative aspects of American history. We have some outliers where those events are denied and not discussed at all. But you also have some outliers where something like a non-academic, applied cousin of critical race theory is taught. Do you have a sense, from your reporting, on this question?Powell: I honestly don't, and I'm not sidestepping. I agree with you that education runs a great gamut. My own kids went to public school in Brooklyn, New York, and there was a great difference between the two elementary schools they went to, and the two junior high schools they went to; and even within that, teachers have a fair degree of agency. I would argue that's a good thing, at some level. I remember my younger son at one point in middle school came home in a huff because he had that rarest of beasts in Park Slope, Brooklyn: a Reaganite social studies teacher. I told him, “Look, this is great. You're not getting exposed to much of that in Park Slope. And as long as he's letting you disagree and debate things with him, have at it.” Now, as it turns out, he was not the most exceptional teacher. But I thought it was useful for him to get exposed to that. Having said all of this, I also think that there is some sleight-of-hand that journalists, teachers, and liberals sometimes use around CRT. It is certainly true that no one is teaching CRT to a seventh grade social studies class. It is also true that, to some extent, a number of the teaching colleges are very much influenced by what we might call a sort of anti-racism, in everything from long-standing pedagogy, to popularizers like Ibram X. Kendi, to CRT. Those are threads that run through many of our teaching colleges. To some extent, you get teachers who are very much dipped in those intellectual waters. I'm looking for how they apply those lessons. I think it is fair to say that these are important intellectual currents right now in liberal-left circles, and it would be rather strange if it weren’t having some impact on teachers.Mounk: It often seems that left-leaning people at places like universities or the ACLU are reluctant to speak up about wokeness, or critical race theory, or the successor ideology, whatever you want to call it. Tell us a little bit about what's happening in those places.Powell: To cite one recent example, I wrote on the case of this renowned physics professor Dorian Abbot, at the University of Chicago. He's one of the foremost experts on exoplanets and the degradation of atmospheres on exoplanets. There are all sorts of revealing analogues to what that might tell us about our own atmosphere through climate change and pollution. His work is at the heart of a very important—one might argue, existential—threat to our future. He was invited to MIT to give a prestigious lecture purely on science. He is also fairly outspoken in his critique of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and he has real concerns about affirmative action. I would say he's probably center-right in the larger sweep of American society. If you look at polls, he is very much mainstream. In fact, in California—the prototypical blue state—voters in the last election turned down an effort to reinstate affirmative action in the University of California system. And that was a strong majority of Asians and apparently a majority of Latinos as well, who voted against reinstating it. Abbot is not somebody who holds extreme right-wing views. Whatever one makes of his views, they're—not to insult him—unremarkable. But when it was announced that he was going to give a speech at MIT, faculty and STEM grad students, really across the United States, reacted with outrage and peppered MIT—one of the highest churches of science education in the world, really—with all sorts of objections: “How can you have this man? You have a DEI policy. It's hypocritical to invite him. This is going to be damaging. This creates harm.” And MIT, I think, rather remarkably, backed down and decided they weren't going to do the lecture this year, and said he can come and address the faculty at some later point in time, but not in this prestigious lecture.I talked to several faculty who had gone on Twitter to denounce Abbot and say that MIT should cancel his speech, and they were remarkably strong in simply saying that they believe in free speech, but also believe in consequences for free speech; that it doesn't give you a right to talk wherever you want. Perhaps I'm dating myself, but I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a very liberal neighborhood, and free speech was a kind of holy of holies. It was seen as the founding stone of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. It's been quite striking to hear very liberal-left professors saying freedom of expression is a value that's predominantly been exercised by white men. You do hear similar sentiments quite often now, especially if you choose to hang around the disreputable neighborhood of Twitter.There was a coda to that, which was that a very prominent physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, went to his colleagues and said, “Well, this is an important moment in free speech and science. We need to invite Abbot out here to talk to us, to essentially make a statement of where we stand,” and apparently a reasonable number of these colleagues said, “Pass. We're not going to do that.” And this professor, David Romps, who headed up a rather prestigious center there, ended up resigning not as a professor, but from the center.Mounk: The other striking thing on the topic of free speech specifically is that many of the institutions which were built around defending a very expansive conception of free speech—and which you would think would be thriving precisely in the moment in which the defense of free speech is urgently required—seem to be balking at the fight. At the ACLU in particular, there is a really roiling internal debate between people who want to live up to the organization’s historic mission, and people who seem to want to turn it into a progressive organization that will decline to defend free speech when it is offensive.Powell: When I took on this beat, this was a story that I wanted to do, because I had been hearing about this from friends for a long time. The ACLU, in many ways, is kind of a perfect petri dish for observing these debates. There are terrific First Amendment attorneys there who continue to do good work, but that coexists with, for example, others who have publicly urged a book to be essentially banned. After the horror in Charlottesville, which was a march of Neo-Nazis that got out of control, the ACLU had argued—again, very much consistent with its history—that the alt-right had the right to march; not to commit violence, but to march. And afterwards, some two hundred employees signed a really vitriolic letter denouncing the leaders of the ACLU and the ACLU put out a statement that I think—they debate this—clearly backed off a bit, saying “Well, we have to take other issues under consideration if we're going to think about representing these groups in the future.” It’s a remarkable moment, again, because growing up in New York, you thought that free speech and free expression was the sine qua non of that organization. Now, there's very much a sense that that's an important but secondary concern to some of the other issues that they're involved with.Mounk: You had a really interesting story on elite private schools in New York City. But this is happening in cities around the country trying to deal with how to teach students about racism, which is a very important thing—but who, in the process, seemingly essentialize racial attributes. I'm obviously concerned that in the name of trying to raise awareness of racism, [some of these schools] actually are pushing students to identify as strongly as possible with their ethnic or racial identity, and that the long-term consequences of that are not going to be progressive at all, but rather to deepen mutual mistrust and prejudice and so on.Powell: I think your summary is spot on. I found the elite private schools to be an interesting window into the high end of the socioeconomic scale. I was struck particularly by this notion of the written word as the exclusive domain of the white man or women. As a kid, my discovery—with the help, frankly, of public school teachers at the time—of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Claude Brown (specifically Manchild in the Promised Land) convinces me that that notion is just profoundly ahistorical and, in my view, condescending and demeaning.Mounk: What's really striking to me about these examples is that it's not reverse racism, it's just racism, right? This is just saying, “Black people aren't interested in intellectual rigor, the written word, or objectivity.” That is not an attempt to overcome historical injustice; it is, in the name of anti-racism, ascribing an intellectual deficit to black people in a way that, to my mind, is and will always remain just straightforwardly racist.Powell: That's certainly an argument that is made against these sorts of approaches. These were all in Manhattan and very elite schools, roughly $60,000 a year private schools, where white kids and faculty are herded into a room to talk about so called “white problems,” black kids are put in a room to talk about the particularities of being black, and so on. I went to a private school for two years as a scholarship kid, and I'm a white guy. I felt very much apart from the very financially elite student body. I understand there's going to be a natural desire at times—if you're one of the few black kids at a predominantly white school, for instance—to want to occasionally compare notes with other black students, and likewise across the spectrum. But this kind of enforced identity is a strange thing. I've talked about this a lot with my own sons: your best conversations are when you get together with black and Latino and other friends, and you're talking with each other. And that isn't to say this is some kumbaya moment. These can be, if you will, deep conversations.Mounk: Obviously, individuals should be free to self-assemble in groups. And often, they will do that in groups that are structured around religion or ethnicity, and that's part of a free society. Students aren't entirely adults, but we give them a lot of freedom to decide whether they want to pursue dance or chess in extracurriculars or interest groups. I'm completely comfortable with the existence of affinity groups in middle schools and high schools in which students can choose to spend time with people of their own ethnic, cultural, or religious background. Where I really start to worry is when this is facilitated in a way that becomes, in effect, mandatory; if the school with its authoritative voice tells teenagers or even small children, “The most important thing about you is the color of your skin, and off you go into this group to be with people of your kind.”To be clear, some version of that is in fact happening at a substantial number of private elite schools around the country now?Powell: Without a doubt. I could have as easily written that story in a dozen private schools. They're in San Francisco and Chicago and LA. This is very much a nationally distributed model of education right now in the privates. The public schools are a far vaster landscape, and it varies school district to school district across the United States.Mounk: One of the dimensions of many of these stories that you've reported on seems to be a sort of hidden class conflict. At Smith College, as in a few other instances, the person who ends up at the receiving end of being fired, censored, vilified, is in some way a less “privileged” position. They may be white, but they're working class, or they may be an immigrant, or they may be somebody who doesn't speak English perfectly, or are neurodiverse, perhaps a little bit on the autism spectrum. Have you come across that repeatedly in your reporting, or do you think that's just a few cases?Powell: It’s one that I see repeatedly and I think it plays out in our politics. To cite but one example: if you look at Virginia, if you look at the Rio Grande Valley in 2020, you're seeing working class Latinos behaving in ways that suggest that they have not bought into this aspect of the left-liberal project, and I've seen a lot of class resentment. One of my favorite stories was when the Democratic Socialists of America had invited Adolph Reid—a prominent black left scholar who taught at the University of Pennsylvania—to address them on issues like identity. He's a Marxist and very much a non-sectarian sort, and takes the view that these questions of class are not just urgent, but urgent in the sense that the only real chance of change in society comes when people of different ethnicities and races form a coalition—even a cross-class coalition. His talk at the New York Democratic Socialists was cancelled by a number of prominent young socialists who took the view that, actually, race is both the primal divide and the primal organizing aspect for the left, and to suggest that class is challenging the primacy of identity was dangerous. This is remarkable for a socialist organization, which is normally predicated on the importance of, at least, class awareness, if not class primacy. The view that race and identity are the central organizing themes is very much an aspect of today's liberal left. That plays out in all sorts of ways. But there's not only an interesting philosophical divide; it holds some electoral peril.Mounk: Do you want to hazard any prediction of where we might end up five or ten years from this cultural moment?Powell: My crystal ball is perpetually cracked, and so I'm simply not doing that, because I will no doubt predict or forecast something that will prove wrong. One of the things I've been struck by in writing on these subjects—and I've certainly tried to engage with all sides in these disputes—is that there is great reader interest in stories like this. And this is not to pat myself on the back, but simply to say, if you write about these subjects, you get an enormous response. In the comments on the pieces, which often run into the thousands, you see people who would be clearly identified as liberals with a great diversity of opinion on questions where the argument is often made that there's really not a lot to discuss here. Much as with Dorian Abbot and affirmative action—people say “this is settled”, “this is a bad thought”, “this is dangerous”, “this puts us at risk of harm”. If you look at these comments, you see a great diversity of thought, and opposition to the view that this is all settled neatly as either good or bad.And I definitely suggest that this may be a path to cultural hegemony, but is not necessarily the path to political hegemony, and can in fact prove perilous. But I don't know where it’s heading.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: https://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

A few weeks ago, I saw a rave review in the American Conservative of a new book, The Reactionary Mind: Why “Conservative” Isn't Enough. Judging by the review and what I know of the reviewer, I fully expected to hate it.I got the book, picked it up, and … I loved it. It’s written in brisk, inviting, oddly unpretentious prose. The author, Michael Warren Davis, is a knowledgeable, confident writer, who writes of cobwebby things with remarkable clarity and verve. It’s fun, informative, thoroughly quirky in a good way, and full of things—mostly of secondary or tangential relevance to his thesis—that I agree with to one extent or another.And now that I’ve gotten the sure-to-be-unexpected, blurbable praise out of the way, I should get to my primary criticism: It’s b------t.Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Davis’ advice at the end about how to live a good life is lovely and constructive, if not necessarily universal or wholly practical in its applicability. His proudly reactionary interpretations of history are fun and occasionally enlightening, but also on many occasions jaw-droppingly wrong.To drive the point home, the first chapter begins with an astonishingly wrong assertion of fact. Davis writes:﻿Imagine a land where the average citizen lives on about twelve acres of land, and the poorest of the poor get by with just one. None of them have ever seen the road darkened by a skyscraper or heard the air split by the sound of a passing airplane. Nearly 100 percent of the population lives and works in the great outdoors. Their skin is a healthy bronze; their hands are strong and calloused; their muscles are hard, taut, and eminently practical, earned through long days of wholesome labor.And:﻿For the most part, these folks walk everywhere they need to go. It keeps them fit and limber. Besides, they’re never far from town: everything they need is, at most, a few miles from the front door. Not one of them has ever seen a throughway or a byway, and no tractor trailer has ever disturbed the quiet of this ﻿little domain. The only sounds a man hears are the whistle of the scythe as his son mows the barley, the low of the heifer as she brushes away flies with her tail, and the voice of his wife calling him in for lunch.He goes on for pages like this with palpable envy for the more fulfilling and authentic life of the humble serf, writing about how, in the spring, men feast on roast pig and craft beer while boys chase rabbits through the briar and woo girls with memorized poetry. (Autumn is similarly idyllic.) And then, he declares, “﻿Welcome to a day in the life of a serf.” Davis’ depiction of serfdom reads like the promotional literature for some five-star rehab resort, where the idle rich can detox through New Age organic diets and strenuous labor. Davis concedes that this Dark Ages as Dude Ranch, serfdom as summer camp is “a slightly romanticized view”… but only slightly.I guess slightness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.The reality of the serf’s existence was, by any objective metric, horrible. Serfs were not, in the strictest sense, slaves, but they weren’t far above them, either. They could not leave their lands without permission, and when they did leave it was on the orders of their lords to carry brutally heavy loads (often on their own backs) great distances while risking death at the hands of highwaymen. The feudal custom of angaria empowered lords to compel their serfs to be beasts of burden. Even when they weren’t on the road, the serf’s life was defined by backbreaking labor. “Peasants labored harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals,” writes William Manchester.Nor was village life an idyllic fairy tale of good Christians wishing peace on their fellow man and living under the noble protection of their lords. “Although homicides were twice as frequent as deaths by accident,” Manchester notes, “English coroners’ records show that only one of every hundred murderers was ever brought to justice.” Those lords were judge, jury, and, often, executioner. “Medieval Christians, knowing the other cheek would be bloodied, did not turn it. Death was the prescribed penalty for hundreds of offenses, particularly those against property,” Manchester continues. “The threat of capital punishment was even used in religious conversions, and medieval threats were never idle.”The feudal lord had little respect for the family beyond the role it played in maximizing the efficiency of labor. The lord could, and very often did, tell women whom they could marry. And as a rule, no woman could get married without prior approval and payment for a license. Men, too, could be forced to marry widows or other available women if the lord felt it was a useful way to consolidate lands. Women were often required to obtain permission to have children and still paid a fee when they got it.Such fees are particularly cruel when considered against the backdrop of larger cruelties of serf and peasant life—and death. Estimates vary considerably, but somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of children in the Middle Ages didn’t survive their first year. Large numbers of women often died giving birth and even more died from postpartum infections. And let’s be clear: Serf life was gross. They lived in hovels, often lightless and windowless, full of disease-carrying vermin, and, very often, livestock. They cooked their food inside, filling their huts with smoke that saturated everything. Most serfs wore the same coarse, uncomfortable clothes every day. Everyone defecated outside, but not that far from where they lived. Workplace injuries were common, particularly for children, and the treatment for things like burns was often a mix of dung and animal fat. Serfs rarely if ever got to see a doctor, not that it would do much good. Almost no one could read, and even if they could, they couldn’t afford books or candles to illuminate them (daylight was for work after all).I am happy to concede that these are generalities and conditions varied by region and century. Indeed, having read quite a bit about precapitalist Europe for my own book, Suicide of the West, I was actually looking forward to some effort on Davis’ part to rebut the historical consensus about the plight of serfs, and humans generally, in the Middle Ages. And it seemed like he was going to do just that. Right after conceding that his Norman Rockwell serfdom is “slightly romanticized,” he writes, “Our view of the Middle Ages has been clouded by centuries of bad history piled on top of one another. So, before we go any ﻿further, we must clear up three common misconceptions about our friend the serf.”But rather than offering new data, surprising historical examples, or research of any kind, he engages in philosophical apologetics and a very strange form of whataboutism. The three misconceptions we moderns have about serfs are “The Serf Was Oppressed,” “The Serf Was Ignorant,” and “The Serf Was Miserable.”But under none of these headings does he actually make the affirmative case for any of these misconceptions. Instead, he argues, the serfs were not oppressed because we moderns are the ones oppressed by a riot of consumer choices. Sounding a lot like an old school Marxist or Bernie Sanders ranting about how there are too many brands of deodorant, Davis argues that capitalism is the real oppressor for weighing us down with too many options pushed on us by advertising and other forms of manufactured desire. There’s nothing about the intergenerational bondage of serfdom; the arbitrary cruelty enshrined in law and custom by “banal Lordship.” ﻿We are always free to choose, but never free from choice,” Davis writes. “We lack the greatest freedom of all: freedom from desire, otherwise known as gratitude.” By this logic, the freest people in America are those lucky souls in maximum security prisons. He concludes with rhetorical flourish of nonsense that would do Herbert Marcuse proud: “So we can’t say that the serf was oppressed merely because he lacked choices. In fact, I would argue that he was freer, because he was free from meaningless choices. If he wanted bread, he baked it.” Of course, even a cursory review of the literature would tell you that often the serf could not bake bread on demand, which is why so many died when the crops went south.He plays the same game with the idea that the serfs were ignorant. It’s beside the point that serfs couldn’t read, most never saw the world outside their village, and all lacked the basic knowledge of medicine and hygiene to make their lives a little less miserable. The real ignorance on display could be found in those who thought improving the lot of the serfs might be a worthwhile endeavor: “﻿It never occurred to these men that most people might not want to be lettered.”And then there’s the myth of serf misery. There’s no nod to the plagues, the starvation, or the mandatory bondage under arbitrary rulers. But there’s a lot of whataboutist fooferall about how Christianity is the cure for contemporary unhappiness. I have no objection whatsoever to Christians believing things would be better if more people got some religion in their lives. I even agree, albeit with all manner of caveats. But I stop nodding when I read statements like this, ﻿“We cannot remake the world as twelfth-century France, but what we can do is recognize that a happy society would look much more like twelfth-century France than twenty-first-century America.”Again, I get his point. But it is predicated on so much B.S. that would take such effort to clear away that Hercules’ cleaning of the Augean stables is the only appropriate metaphor. In the aforementioned piece in the American Conservative, the reviewer sums up Davis’s treatment of serfdom thus: “The argument at the center of the book is that life was just better eight centuries ago; the medieval serf, for all his technological primitiveness, at least had the advantages of an integral social order and an integral worldview.” It’s a fair summary. But is that a trade you really find all that tempting? I mean, an integral social order—whatever you think that means—might be awesome. But if it comes at the price of antibiotics, plumbing, decent food, healthy children, and electric light—not to mention human liberty and the rule of law—I’m squarely on team “thanks, but no thanks.” A good Christian or sincere adherent of some other faith might say it profits a man nothing to gain the creature comforts of modern living if it costs him his soul. And they may be right. But your soul is not what’s on offer here. “Integral social order” is not salvation. It’s a fancy way of saying that we need to make other people live the right way, even if it costs them dearly.This gets to my fundamental problem with the new “integralists.” When they talk of the “common good” they aren’t speaking to how they want to live, but how other people should. And buried in that Trojan Horse are any number of absurd assumptions about their ability to design society and the economy in ways to bring in the collective redemption they desire. This is all on display in The Reactionary Mind. Davis’ discussion of feudal economics reads like it was gleaned from a romantic painting showing well-fed peasants loading carts or dancing around maypoles.The integralists have many fine, or at least plausible, critiques of the dysfunctions and disorders of modern life. But they often act like they’re the first to discover these critiques, when in reality these arguments were old before they were born. Marx was prattling on about alienation nearly two centuries ago, and Rousseau was making similar arguments more than a century earlier. Nostalgia for the serf’s cooperative life is little more than the Hippie communitarianism and Frankfurt School Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s with some paleo-bro testosterone caulked into the seams and some ultramontane Catholic gold leaf slapped on. In Davis’ defense, he offers something a little different: crankery. And I have a huge soft spot in my heart for conservative cranks out of step with the times. My own father was in some ways this sort of guy. He couldn’t march with the crowd because he could only hear the drummer inside his head. When I was no more than five or six, my brother and I made protest signs that read “Bring Back the Czar” because we knew my dad would approve. Some of my favorite conservative intellectuals wore capes. One of them, cited by Davis, was Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a brilliant, polymathic weirdo who pined for the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I love that stuff.And Davis clearly does too. He is under no illusion that we can restore the coherent moral order that brought us serfdom, as much as he allegedly pines for it. He is rather the latest stranger-in-a-strange-land conservative who cannot forgive mankind’s wrong turn. He quotes Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.” Davis argues that “For the reactionary, it goes back much further than that, because he knows that the Jacobins did not just fall from the sky.” He goes on to indict the Renaissance, but in the opening pages he puts Aristotle in the dock for the sin of claiming that ﻿“All men by nature desire to know.” There’s a grand tradition of this stuff on the right. Erik Voegelin and a few others thought everything went ass-over-tea-kettle with Joachim of Fiore’s Gnosticism. Again, I love it. But I also like counterfactual fiction that asks, “What if the Germans won World War II?” or “What if Gavrilo Princip missed?” It’s fun to talk about, but it offers little insight into how to solve today’s problems.The danger is that people will take this kind of thing seriously. For example, Davis wants to be ruled by a king. He claims that “genocide is the great vice of republics, not monarchies,” and puckishly argues that even if a king wanted to kill his subjects, he lacked the technological wherewithal to do it.There’s more sleight of hand here than a Doug Henning show. For starters, plenty of monarchs did their best to be genocidal, and even Christian rulers got in on the deal. For instance, Pope Innocent III launched the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of France, killing between 200,000 and a million people. More importantly, Davis’ framing—monarchies versus republics—allows him to take totalitarian marketing at face value. After all, most of the mass killing of the 20th century was conducted by self-declared “Peoples’ Republics.” Lumping actual democratic republics in with totalitarian regimes amounts to a fairly grotesque slander against liberal democratic societies. A better understanding of modern genocides—in the USSR, China, Nazi Germany, et al.—is that this kind of bloodshed is what you get when you try to reestablish absolutism based on non-democratic, non-Christian lines. Stalin is more recognizable as a modern czar than as a defender of republicanism. Kim Jong-un is no small-r republican. He is the latest monarch in a hereditary line of monarchs, whether they use the term or not. (And North Korea actually has serfs today, by the way. Anyone want to trade places?)Davis would obviously want a monarch bound by Christianity—though Russia had plenty of those, and it didn’t work out too well for my great-great-grandparents. But that’s almost beside the point. The real problem is suggesting that the answer to our individual misfortunes or concerns lay in rejecting liberal democracy in favor of some salvific ruler.As a meditation and exploration of one writer’s crankery, I enjoyed and profited from The Reactionary Mind. As a guide for individual improvement—ignore politics, devote yourself to family, etc.—it’s a welcome contribution. As a guide for how politicians should actually organize society, it’s a massive step—800 years backward—in the wrong direction.

REVIEW ESSAY

Woke, Inc.:

Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam

by Vivek Ramaswamy

Center Street, 2021, 368 pages

In our political culture, there is no issue quite like wokeness. The conversation it provokes tends to be about everything and nothing at the same time. It is central to our politics because Republican resistance to it is perhaps the single greatest force binding the American Right together. And while the mass messaging of Democratic politicians tends to focus more on health care and jobs, in institutions that the Left con­trols, like academia, it punishes opposition to wokeness more stringently than any other heresy.

At the same time, the conversation is, in a sense, not actually about anything. CPAC can hold entire conferences on the theme of “cancel culture” without producing any real policy suggestions. Although at the state level, politicians will occasionally address narrow issues, like whether to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, there is no concrete anti-wokeness agenda that conservatives hope Republicans will implement the next time they return to power in Washington.

While voices on both left and right have argued that the United States is going through a cultural revolution more extensive than anything we have seen since the 1960s, it remains a kind of background noise to our political culture. Into this debate steps Vivek Ramaswamy with Woke, Inc., a book that combines features of an autobiography, a work on policy, and a cultural critique.

As a practicing Hindu, a son of immigrants, and a successful biotech founder—but also a conservative—his is a uniquely American story. And it is an endearing one, written by an author who is widely rumored to have a future in politics, with the kind of résumé and background that Republican strategists dream about. Indeed, as the party suffers a long-term brain drain among both its leaders and its voters that has only accelerated since 2016, intelligent conservatives should hope Ramaswamy has a future in their party. Unfortunately, however, when Ramaswamy puts forward policy suggestions for responding to our cultural drift toward identity politics and more stringent forms of speech restriction, he re­veals the larger shortcomings of the anti-wokeness movement.

Using Greed to Rein In Corporate Power

One of Woke, Inc.’s main targets is “stakeholder capitalism.” This is the idea that, contra Milton Friedman, corporations should not simply seek out the most profit, but serve the common good. Ramaswamy is strong­ly against the idea.

Corporations are an artificial creation of government, given special rights. Perhaps the most important of these is limited liability, which means that the owners of businesses do not (in general) have to worry about being financially responsible for any damages caused by the oper­ation of the business. If we did not have corporations offering such pro­tections, the argument goes, too few people would take the risk of starting a business.

The problem with these special rights is that corporations can become too powerful. One check on this possibility, whether intended as such or not, was to ensure that corporations were legally responsible to their shareholders, effectively mandating that they seek to maximize value for them. Paradoxically, greed could rein in corporate power, as it would put most kinds of social engineering and political activity in conflict with fiduciary duties. Of course, as Ramaswamy acknowledges, sometimes these fiduciary duties can incentivize antisocial behavior, but based on his own personal experience, he thinks such instances are rare. Moreover, even when it is good business to lobby for a narrow cause, only a small minority of political activity can plausibly be connected to a positive business outcome. In the author’s view, then, shareholder pri­macy limits corporate political activity, while the concept of stakeholder capitalism allows businesses to push a broad social agenda. As business moves away from the “Friedman Doctrine” and toward stakeholder capitalism, Ramaswamy worries about concentrated power, corporations cynically adopting political causes to distract from bad behavior, and what happens to social cohesion as more of life becomes politicized.

One of the most visible debates around growing corporate political activism concerns Big Tech censorship. Here, in contrast to politicians like Senator Josh Hawley, who have teamed up with left-wing activists to demand that government use antitrust as a cudgel with which to punish internet platforms, Ramaswamy sensibly urges caution. As Woke, Inc. points out, not only is the antitrust strategy legally questionable, but it would also do nothing about censorship, the issue that moti­vates most conservative concerns over the power of Big Tech in the first place. While Republicans may have other reasons to be angry at Big Tech, the direct link between antitrust and limiting censorship has yet to be established. Instead, Ramaswamy recommends conditioning Section 230 liability protections on corporations operating their platforms ac­cording to First Amendment principles—meaning that they can avoid liability for posts on their sites only as long as they do not censor constitutionally protected speech.

Fighting Woke Capital by Empowering the Woke

One could argue that shareholder primacy, which gained prominence in the 1980s and ’90s and remains the dominant principle of corporate management today, has done little to stem the rise of wokeness in recent years. Yet Ramaswamy’s arguments are logical and straightforward, and likely to find a favorable audience among conservatives. His other policy suggestions, however, are on shakier ground, and may even make the problems he identifies worse. Ramaswamy is a sharp critic of relatively unpopular woke excesses, but seems unwilling to directly confront the more challenging issues at their foundation. In the end, his policy ideas demonstrate why fighting the woke phenomenon is so difficult, and why politicians who have tried to do so have had little to show for their rhetoric, both in law and in the wider culture.

One of Ramaswamy’s main proposals is expanding civil rights law to cover political beliefs. He argues that this can be done without passing new legislation and relies on the kind of creative legal argumentation usually associated with those on the left who advocate for a “Living Constitution.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (CRA) already bans dis­crimination based on religion. Relying on Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Supreme Court decision that wrote gender theory into federal law, Ramaswamy argues that if an employee can’t be fired for opposing gay marriage on religious grounds, a different person who has the exact same views, minus the religious beliefs, must have similar pro­tections. Otherwise, the law would give fewer protections to an indi­vidual based on the fact that they are secular, which is impermissible under the CRA. Similarly, Ramaswamy recommends that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) define wokeness as a religion, in which case an employer can’t force such beliefs onto work­ers.

While these suggestions are clever, they fundamentally miss the root causes of wokeness and the reasons why it has come to dominate our culture. To understand this development, it is necessary to explain a little bit about how we got here. The CRA is best known for ending Jim Crow and the right to privately discriminate. Yet as it evolved under various administrations and the courts, it also became the legal basis for enforcing ideas, practices, and behaviors across American institutions that have now morphed into what we call “wokeness.”

Building on the CRA, a series of Executive Orders forced institutions to become conscious of race and sex. The two most important of these were one issued by President Johnson in 1965 that imposed affirmative action requirements on government contractors, and another by Presi­dent Nixon in 1969 that did the same for the federal government. These actions coevolved with innovations coming out of the bureaucracy and the courts. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) made it more difficult for employers to engage in any kind of hiring practice or performance evaluation that creates a disparate impact by race, in this case intelligence tests. The idea of a “hostile work environment,” also coming out of the CRA, ended up covering everything from the most egregious forms of sexual harassment to off-color jokes, and even political opinions. As Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin points out in his book Inventing Equal Opportunity (2009), the human resources bureaucracy, and ulti­mately the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) complex, arose in response to employers trying to make their way in a world where gov­ernment and the courts were always on the lookout for “discrimina­tion,” a term whose definition was unclear and continually expanding.

Notice the deep cultural effects that such laws and regulations were sure to have. To know whether a practice has a “disparate impact,” an employer must classify everyone they come into contact with through the interview process or on the job according to race and sex. Forms asking people to identify themselves became a normal part of the private and public sectors, and practically every decision an institution faced became a potential landmine. The HR bureaucracy created to manage all of this began to have its own interests and act accordingly.

The main components of wokeness can be traced to legal developments in the 1960s and 1970s: among them the ideas that disparities imply discrimination; that offensive speech must be curtailed; and that people must be conscious of race throughout their daily lives. Surely wokeness has intensified in recent decades, but civil rights law can help explain why no institution wants to be the one to stand up to woke mobs. If every other company is making investments in DEI and invit­ing critical race theorists to speak, how does it look if yours is the one business that does not? This can be seen as a collective action problem, in that while businesses would have fewer costs if they did not have extensive HR and diversity bureaucracies, every individual company has an incentive to do at least as much as everyone else to prove to governments and the courts (as well as NGO activists, elite university grad­uates, the media, and so forth) that they are sufficiently fighting “dis­crimination.” One way to understand the “Great Awokening” of the last decade is that culture, aided by social media, is finally catching up to fundamental assumptions of the law.

At the level of major institutions, ignoring race and sex is for all practical purposes illegal today. Fighting woke capital effectively, and also woke government and woke institutions more generally, would have to begin by changing that, and at the very least requiring explicit evidence of discrimination for there to be a violation of civil rights law.

Ramaswamy goes in the opposite direction, essentially thinking that “if you can’t beat them, join them.” But to protect conservatives, he needs to rely on the same courts and bureaucrats who created wokeness in the first place. These are the people who took the CRA, which explicitly banned discrimination based on race and sex, and interpreted it to mean that discriminating based on race and sex was mandatory through affirmative action. The doctrine of disparate impact takes it further, and often requires explicit and conscious discrimination against whites and men to ward off the possibility of even unintentional harm to women and minorities.

Thus, any attempt to protect political speech in the workplace will run up against already established civil rights law. And given what we know about institutions like the EEOC, it is not difficult to predict how this would end.

One can see this in the case of James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired for circulating a memo on differences between men and women. Ramaswamy presents this case to demonstrate why we need civil rights law to protect against political discrimination. What goes unmentioned is that Damore was employed in California, a state that already prohibits discrimination based on political views. He actually did sue on those grounds, and in response many legal observers argued that Google needed to punish Damore, because otherwise it could have been liable for creating a hostile work environment for women.

Eventually the case was settled, so perhaps it is good that California bans discrimination based on politics, and the plaintiff in this case was at least able to get some relief. Maybe it will make Google think twice the next time it wants to fire someone for political speech. But what is notable is that an antidiscrimination law applied to political beliefs has not stopped tech companies based in California from going woke. And I’m sure that Google still fears being sued for gender discrimination far more than it does angering the next white male engineer with a dissident opinion.

The fundamental problem with Ramaswamy’s solution is that it assumes that legal arguments are all that matter, rather than who is being empowered by a particular policy. Any expansion of civil rights law ultimately funnels power and resources to trial lawyers and the HR industry, along with bureaucrats in the EEOC and their equivalents at the state level. Make no mistake: defining practically every belief a person might have as “religious” in nature will only create more of a need for such people, both in government and in the private sector. This might be tolerable if someone had a plan to encourage more conservatives to go into fields like civil rights enforcement, but that does not seem like a realistic option.

It is easy to see why ideas like banning political discrimination can be so appealing. The civil rights movement is the closest thing America has to an object of national religious reverence. It is therefore much safer to argue that we haven’t gone far enough in ensuring nondiscrimination than to argue that we have gone too far. This is one reason why Republi­can politicians haven’t even been able to hint at realistic solutions to wokeness, despite the fact that it is probably the single issue that most animates their base. Conservatives’ acceptance of the worldview under­lying wokeness can also be seen in their recent adoption of talking points based on antidiscrimination principles to argue against vaccine mandates in the private sector.

A similar problem exists with Ramaswamy’s recommendation that the United States require national service during high school summer break as a way to bring the country together. He argues that exposing American students to people of different backgrounds and giving them a common mission will create a sense of appreciation and shared purpose. But the only institution that can rival the civil rights bureaucracy in the promotion of woke ideology is public education, which shapes Ameri­can youth according to the beliefs and ideas coming out of the most radical corners of academia.

A great accomplishment of the conservative movement has been making options like homeschooling and private schools more realistic for parents. Conservatives have shown little ability to constrain or reform left-wing bureaucracies, even when Republicans win elections. Thus, parents have come to realize that the answer to public school indoctrination is to avoid public schools. While elite liberal private schools have gone all-in on wokeness and grab most of the headlines in conservative media, many more private schools teach a Christian morali­ty regarding gender and sexuality that would be illegal in a typical public school.

As with civil rights law, it would be a fundamental mistake to go in the opposite direction and give government more control over people’s lives, in this case children. Who precisely would run the national service program? Who gets to decide what counts and what doesn’t? Most likely, it would end up like public education, which has become a constant battleground over culture war issues like gender ideology and critical race theory, with the Left usually winning. Ramaswamy suggests high schoolers work with the police, which would be embraced by one half of the country and seen as incipient fascism by the other. Liberals would surely have their own definitions of “national service” that con­servatives would find equally distasteful. Such a program would be fun­damentally in conflict with the author’s goal of depoliticizing American life, taking away summer as a respite from the culture war fights over exactly what government should have children do with their time.

In his discussions of stakeholder capitalism and Big Tech censorship, Ramaswamy argues that socially oriented corporations and stronger antitrust law only empower forces hostile to conservatism, like activist organizations and liberal lawyers. He should have applied this lesson—that who possesses authority can matter just as much as, if not more than, what an objective reading of the law would suggest—more broad­ly. Ramaswamy’s muddled approach reflects the larger dilemma faced by conservatives: On the one hand, the American Right has shown little appetite or aptitude for creating its own activist government to pursue conservative goals. On the other, its efforts to limit government bureaucracies may have strengthened corporations, but they have not empowered the private sector to become more conservative; in fact, business has gone in the opposite direction.

What’s the Problem with Wokeness?

For a work that centers around the problems with wokeness, Woke, Inc. tells us surprisingly little about why wokeness is bad. Yes, the author is concerned that it distracts and divides us, and that conservatives feel put upon by the ideological conformity demanded by major corporations. But one way out of that division is for the opponents of wokeness to simply give up. If two sides are fighting a war, the most natural path to peace is for the weaker side to lay down its arms, not for the one that’s winning to surrender. From the book, one never understands why that isn’t an option.

In some cases, Ramaswamy himself uses racial disparities as a justification for his own preferred policies. While he says he rejects theories of “systemic racism,” he argues for national service during the summer on the grounds that minorities fall further behind when they’re out of school. There are a few problems with this argument, most notably that it is unclear how most forms of national service would close any gap. (It is also unclear that kids doing worse on tests in the short run has much to do with real intellectual achievement anyway, since it is quite obvious that the function of schooling is mostly some combination of daycare and signalling.)

Putting that aside, once you justify a policy as necessary to close gaps, you beg the question of why you are not doing more to achieve equality. The fact of the matter is that liberals are not imagining differ­ences in test scores, income, and incarceration rates between racial groups. There is no evidence that government can realistically close these gaps, though it can force a more balanced distribution of jobs through affirmative action. If anti-wokeness is to mean anything, it must oppose such policies, and that is difficult to do while portraying the anti‑woke agenda as the one that will eliminate statistical disparities.

Ramaswamy’s arguments might have been more effective had he offered an alternative vision, such as one championing freedom and excellence. Sometimes, that will promote equality of outcomes, but often it will not, especially when the metrics are based on contrived census categories.

A Politically Convenient but Flawed Theory of Wokeness

Unwilling to acknowledge wokeness as rooted in civil rights law, or to question fundamental premises regarding the causes of inequality, Ramaswamy proposes a theory of its origins that is somewhat bizarre. The author echoes many on the populist right when he argues that wokeness was created in response to Occupy Wall Street. To distract people from demanding economic redistribution, this argument goes, corporate fat cats promoted activism focused on race, gender, and sexual orientation. This theory appears to be based on nothing but the observa­tion that Occupy Wall Street occurred before corporate wokeness took off. There is no evidence that any individual ever actually thought this way.

Nor does the theory even make sense on its own terms. Why would wokeness be a distraction from economic redistribution? Politicians and organizations that embrace identity politics also tend to be most in favor of redistribution. The Biden administration has been highly conscious of race (for example in its campaign rhetoric and cabinet selection), while also being to the left of the Clinton and Obama administrations on economics and government spending. At the same time, states with the most liberal racial and social policies tend to have the highest taxes on the rich, and those that share Ramaswamy’s opposition to identity poli­tics tend to create the most business-friendly environments. If corporations wanted to distract people with wokeness simply to benefit their own bottom line, why not encourage them to become Republicans, who at least want to cut their taxes?

Moreover, if wokeness does in fact distract people from pursuing socialism, then why shouldn’t conservatives support it? Ramaswamy is in the strange position of being a capitalist who is criticizing corporations for defending capitalism! If big business didn’t distract people with talk of systemic racism, maybe we would have a true socialist government, and our standard of living would collapse. When you combine the fact that Woke, Inc. does not present a strong case against wokeness with its implicit argument that wokeness saved capitalism, taking these ideas seriously would imply that conservatives should embrace gender ideology and policies designed to dismantle the patriarchy.

Readers might suspect that Ramaswamy does not have much confi­dence in his own story on the origins of wokeness. Nonetheless, it is a politically convenient theory, and it allows one to avoid the uncomfort­able questions about civil rights overreach and the actual causes of racial and gender inequalities.

Anti-Wokeness as Institutional Pluralism

Displacing a civic religion that has captured every major institution in the country is not going to be easy or come without political costs. Ideas like national service and applying antidiscrimination laws to political views seem achievable because they sound good and would likely poll well. But that does not mean they will be effective, and serious resistance to the cultural and legal trends that conservatives oppose will have to focus on the ultimate sources of the problem. Repealing the Civil Rights Act, as Christopher Caldwell recommends, is probably not realistic, and it would be a mistake to reject its original goal of eliminating state-sponsored racial discrimination. But some expansions of civil rights law, like disparate impact and hostile work environment, are easier targets, and many of the necessary changes can be done through the executive branch and the courts, where conservatives have a fighting chance.

Of course, rolling back civil rights law and supporting more school choice will not “solve” wokeness, any more than one can “solve” a perceived problem with conservative Islam in Afghanistan. A worldview that has captured every institution, from the federal government and health organizations to fashion magazines, is not going to be extracted from American society. There is no getting around the fact that liberals care more about politics and show higher levels of engagement. As long as this is true, institutions will respond to greater pressure coming from one side, both internal and external.

What rolling back civil rights law and supporting private education can do is create alternative spaces where conservative communities and institutions can at least survive, before potentially expanding and influ­encing the wider culture. This might be a depressing message, but when one side controls virtually everything, survival is the best any remaining opponents can realistically hope for in the short term. Given the current state of affairs, expanding the scope of civil rights law and national service move in the opposite direction, giving government bureaucrats more of a say in private affairs and over how children spend their time. That would mean fighting wokeness on its own territory, with a greater dependence on institutions where conservatives are heavily outnumbered.

The implications of this understanding of the causes of wokeness is that the conservative movement has to a certain extent gotten it right, even if it has not prioritized the issues that would be most effective in pushing back the cultural tide. School choice and stopping civil rights overreach should not simply be things leaders might get to once they’ve enacted the latest tax cut or launched a new war. If the American Right is actually motivated by cultural concerns, then conservatives need to pressure their leaders to reflect their own priorities, not those of the donor class, and develop coherent policy approaches to achieve them.

To date, this has for the most part not occurred, and the failure to connect cultural concerns to policy goals could be seen throughout the Trump presidency. In particular, how did the anti-PC president do so little on affirmative action, given the extent to which the entire system rests on executive orders? Moreover, the Covid-19 crisis, the behavior of teachers unions, and the demand for stimulus created a once-in-a-life­time opportunity to take money out of the hands of public education and give it to parents. Instead, GOP leaders and conservative pundits did little more than demand that public schools reopen, and although some Republicans did argue for school choice, President Trump ended up signing two stimulus bills worth over $3 trillion that did practically nothing to advance their causes. Under Biden, many Republicans have given their assent to further Covid stimulus without getting much in return. In fact, the bills have given more money to public schools, even as teachers unions continue to demand over-the-top safety measures and less in-person learning, making the United States an outlier among developed nations in the extent to which it has allowed Covid-19 to disrupt the lives of children.

The Trump administration, to its credit, killed an effort to add a Middle East category to the census. Any gain in statistical knowledge from more fine-grained classification would have been outweighed by the creation of a new victim group and the lawsuits and handwringing over inequalities that would result. The existence of the category of “Asian American Pacific Islander” and the refrain #StopAAPIHate show the extent to which government categorization can shape culture. A true anti-wokeness agenda would go a step further, however, with the understanding that the less government knows about the racial makeup of the population, the better. Countries like France and Canada, where governments and institutions are less likely to or sometimes even banned from collecting racial data, tend to be less prone to woke excess­es.

The Supreme Court in recent years has given more room to religious freedom, and some of the decisions in this area should be applauded. But understanding the evolution of civil rights law should make conservatives dread the ultimate implications of Bostock. If wokeness is a big enough social problem to make it a central concern of the conservative movement, then conservative jurists must be willing to defend the view that the right to privately discriminate on some matters of identity is a much lesser evil than giving activists and bureaucrats more tools with which to shape institutions according to their values. Whether the conservative movement sees the current LGBT agenda as something like the pre-1964 civil rights movement, with a minority justifiably fighting for basic rights, or the post-1964 movement, involving increasing infringements on the freedom of others, matters a great deal to how it approaches issues like legislation and court decisions surrounding transgender issues.

It is beyond the scope of this review to show what a comprehensive anti-wokeness agenda would look like. For now, conservatives must realize a few basic points: wokeness is rooted in civil rights law; the public education system shapes the culture; politicians can be held accountable for what they do about wokeness; any victory will be limited given the power disparities between the Right and Left; and the Right must move in the direction of more institutional pluralism, not less.

The Need for a New Conservative Elite

Ramaswamy deserves credit for at least trying to advance the discussion surrounding wokeness in a serious way. That is more than can be said about most politicians and media figures on the right concerned with these issues, who are more cultural commentators than serious thinkers.

Perhaps it is too much to expect Ramaswamy to come out of the biotech world with fully formed ideas about the relationship between civil rights law and modern wokeness. This is something that conservatives should have spent the last half century educating people about, and yet they have fundamentally failed. Criticisms of the excesses of the 1960s tend to occur at the most abstract level—blaming the Frankfurt School or “Cultural Marxism,” while mostly ignoring American law—or simply rewriting history to pretend that civil rights was a movement that came from the political Right, having only been recently corrupted by liberals rather than one that sought equality of outcomes from the beginning.

More broadly, opposition to wokeness has suffered from two inter­related flaws: lack of human capital and lack of ideas. Conservative politicians and media personalities who make wokeness a defining issue for their audiences tend to be the least substantive people on the right. There is therefore a vicious cycle, in which the anti-woke are poor thinkers, so they have flawed ideas that they present in unappealing ways, which leads to a selection problem in which more individuals with bad ideas join them.

Intelligent people can adopt new ideas, while the incompetent and the cynical are less likely to correct their flaws. Wokeness has won for a variety of factors, not the least of which is the low capabilities and poor strategy of its opponents. Those on the left who want to raise taxes, enact gun control measures, or expand access to abortion meet fierce resistance from the other side. People with conservative views on these issues have been able to organize and make their voices heard in the political process.

The same cannot be said for opponents of identity politics and cancel culture, despite the important role they play in right-wing media. Con­servatives know something is wrong, but they do not know how to fix it. Republican politicians have therefore gotten the best of all worlds in recent decades: they can rail against liberal social engineering, without their voters expecting them to actually do anything about it.

The failures of the Trump era have made clear that elites exercise an outsized influence on policy and culture, and a party that is capturing a small and shrinking share of that elite has no hope of creating the kind of society it wants, no matter how often it wins elections. Given this reality, recruiting and appealing to people who are smart and idealistic has to be a top priority for those hoping to create a healthier and more effective political Right.

Ramaswamy clearly meets both of those criteria, which is more important than having the policy details of an anti-wokeness agenda perfectly worked out as he dips his toes into the political water. I hope he one day plays an integral role in a new conservative elite that not only recognizes the problems the country faces, but is willing and able to do something about them. If at some point Ramaswamy wants to make opposition to wokeness central to his political career, and be the first major thinker in the Republican Party to put forth substantive ideas on how to resist it, the path is certainly open.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume V, Number 4 (Winter 2021): 171–83.

Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?

—tweet by Lawrence Summers, former head of President Obama’s National Economic Council, March 21, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic brought tragedy and disruption to America. But it has also provided another stark warning concern­ing the country’s disastrous overreliance on overseas production. It has demon­strated that without a strong, self-reliant industrial base, this country’s ability to forge a healthy, prosperous future—and even its ability to defend itself against foreign enemies—will be severely compromised.

The fact that the world’s largest, and theoretically most advanced, economy could not provide basic medical equipment like masks or the basic components of pharmaceuticals came as a shock, particularly as the country was forced to lean on its leading geopolitical rival, China, to address a health emergency that originated there.1 These developments have stirred some businesses and politicians in both parties to seek ways to encourage domestic production.2

Unfortunately, the response could prove too little and too late. Offshoring is not fundamentally a supply-side problem, as some sug­gest, caused by a lack of skilled workers or technical expertise in the United States, but stems from the insatiable demand of U.S. firms for cheap, non-union, and (if possible) politically unfree labor. Firms engage in offshoring to avoid paying American citizen-workers and sometimes, even at home, exploit short-term foreign workforces lacking in politi­cal, civil, and labor rights.

Rather than simply rehearsing the common boilerplate of “fixes” now being discussed, however necessary, reviving America’s industrial base will require the stronger medicine of a comprehensive national industrial policy. These tools include support for skills training and tax incentives, but would extend to policies like government procurement, local content requirements, tariffs, and quotas to compel firms to local­ize production in the United States, using American workers, and—if necessary—using the power of the government to mandate strategic production.

The Problem

The pandemic demonstrated in the starkest possible way the vulnerabilities brought about by deindustrialization. Camille Farhat, a for­mer top executive at General Electric, Baxter, and Medtronic, and now CEO of Michigan-based manufacturer RTI Surgical, argues that many critical medical products can be produced domestically. “Any­thing in this space is not too difficult to bring back,” the Beirut native suggests. “It’s often a product not of skill and labor but taxation that drives companies else­where. We have to ask ourselves sometimes is America for America?”

Farhat hopes the pandemic will convince other business leaders to stop “destroying the supply ecosystem” that makes production possi­ble. “To stay safe, you have to do contingency planning—you have to restore the network and maintain surplus production capacity. Hope­fully, we are learning that lesson.” The undermining of what has been described as “the industrial commons,” which encompasses not just production, but research and development, supply chains, embedded process development, and engineering capacity, is now widely recog­nized as a critical problem.3

This extends well beyond medical equipment. This year auto pro­duction was curtailed due to a shortage of semiconductors tied to a drought in Taiwan.4 America’s push into renewable energy runs head-on into China’s dominance of solar panels and the essential metals needed to produce “clean” electricity and electric cars.5 And in technology, U.S. companies, even under Trump, increasingly look to places like India, the Baltic states, and the Philippines for high-tech support, and increasingly design as well.6

The most critical loss has been in manufacturing. Between 2000 and 2007 alone, the United States hemorrhaged 3.4 million jobs, about 20 percent of the sector’s total. It lost a further 1.5 million manufacturing jobs between 2007 and 2016.7 These rapid losses were unique in American history, and without parallel in other major Western coun­tries. Throughout the period between 2004 and 2017, the U.S. share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 percent, while our reliance on Chinese inputs doubled, even as our dependence on Japan and Germany shrank. The trade deficit with China, according to the Eco­nomic Policy Institute, cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000.>8

This deficit now extends even to high-tech products, which sank from a surplus of $32 billion in 1997 to a deficit of $200 billion in the twelve months through February 2021 (in constant 2000 dollars). Innovation remains, but often merely lags production in being off­shored.9 When companies move production abroad, they often follow up by shifting research and development there as well.10;Remarkably, this has also included sources of critical components for military goods, many of which are now produced in hostile countries like China.11

These shifts of production overseas may boost temporary profits but have proved a disaster for many communities, and ultimately many companies. Between 2000 and 2015, the death rate increased for middle-aged white Americans with a low educational level. Anne Case and Angus Deaton say this trend is attributable primarily to “deaths of despair”: suicides as well as deaths related to alcohol and drugs, includ­ing opioids, that are par­ticularly concentrated in deindustrialized communities.12John Russo and Sherry Linkon have described how the impact of deindustrialization on communities like Youngstown, Ohio, an old steelmaking center, undermines the sense of worth and optimism among residents, many of whom can recall better days:

In places like Youngstown, many people still remember what life was like when employment was high, jobs paid well, workers were protected by strong unions, and industrial labor provided a source of pride—not only because it produced tangi­ble goods but also because it was recognized as challenging, dangerous, and important. The memory of what it felt like to transform raw ore into steel pipes and to be part of the connect­ed, prosperous community that work generated still haunts the children and grandchildren of those workers. They long for the sense of pur­pose that industrial labor brought, even as they stock shelves at Walmart, wait tables at Applebee’s, and try to persuade strangers to make donations from a cubicle at the local call center.13

A New Beginning?

Are we at the point of finally addressing these issues? Trade expert Beth Baltzan, Democratic counsel to the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee from 2012 to 2016, is hopeful about changing attitudes in both parties on trade. “Covid-19 has exposed a critical flaw in the global trading system: a manufacturing base that has left the world vulnerable to shortages of life-saving supplies,” she ex­plains.14 Economic nationalism, notes the left-leaning American Pros­pect, has gone “mainstream,” even though it was initially raised to prominence by former president Trump, with his often hyperbolic “America First” rhetoric.15

The pandemic further undermined the case for economic globalism. Democrats like New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and Michigan’s Gary Peters joined Trump and Republicans like Senators Rob Portman and Josh Hawley to call out our ruinous depend­ence on Chinese medical supplies and high-tech gear. Democrats, sug­gests former Indiana senator Evan Bayh, need to embrace a pro-U.S. manufacturing stance if they want to compete effectively in the Heartland.16

While rejecting Trump’s often crudely unilateral approach, the Biden administration has continued to pursue many of Trump’s themes.17 The Biden administration has announced plans to bolster U.S. industrial production under its “build back better” rubric and has expanded “buy American” government procurement programs. Both parties favor more robust efforts to meet China’s mounting challenge in science and technology, such as the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which recently passed the Senate by a wide margin.18

These programs should both favor American companies and en­courage foreign corporations to locate more production here. One promising sign is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s decision to build a $12 billion new plant in Arizona. Samsung, a Korean chipmaker, is also shopping for sites in the United States for a $17 billion plant.19 These investments could help tighten supply chains on critical goods.20

The onshoring trend shows signs of expanding to other industries. Black and Decker has recently moved production to a new facility in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of its reshoring strategy. Appliance giant Whirlpool has reshored over two thousand jobs, while General Elec­tric, Apple, Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, and Polaris have reshored some functions as well. This also means new opportunities for smaller U.S. companies who supply these firms and form what has been called America’s “industrial commons.”21

Indeed, even some American firms long dependent on imports are looking for domestic alternatives. Little Tikes, a major toy maker based in Hudson, Ohio, has started shifting production out of China and back to Ohio.22 Executive vice president and worldwide general manager Thomas Richmond says that manufacturing more of its toys at its northeast Ohio plant, instead of overseas, has advantages in allowing the company to meet demand quickly. When Little Tikes started out more than forty years ago, everything was made in the United States, but most production moved to China in the 1980s and ’90s, when that country’s manufacturing sector began to take off. Now, “the wheel is kind of coming full circle,” Richmond says.

Producers of transportation equipment like Extreme Trucking have started shifting factories back to the United States from China and other developing countries as well. Based in Redwood City, Cali­fornia, the company has shifted to sourcing production from firms located in Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. Com­pany president Daniel Burrows cites several reasons for the move: the threat of trade wars and tariffs, rising costs in China, and the need to be close to major customers, who are clustered in North America. Although this process started before the pandemic, the disruptions made the shift ever more critical. Notes Burrows, “The simplification of our supply chain and logistics cannot be overestimated, especially in our current Covid-19 environment. The pandemic demands fast and strategic decisions in the face of uncertainty. We can still serve our customers if a plant in Mexico is shut down because we have a supplier in Ohio up and running.”23

Blame America First

It is necessary to understand, however, that such sentiments are still relatively rare. Despite some isolated examples of reshoring, there is no evidence that most companies will engage in significant reshoring on their own. Trump’s tariffs did not have the big impact Trump promised. The annual rate of jobs coming from offshore, observes the Reshoring Initiative, increased from 6,000 in 2010 to 180,000 in 2017—a good beginning, but still a mere 5 percent of total U.S. industrial employment.24

Resistance to reshoring remains entrenched, particularly among com­panies with strong Chinese supply links.25 According to a survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 71 percent of U.S. firms have no intention of leaving China in spite of Sino-American trade tensions and growing security concerns. The Economist Intelli­gence Unit predicts that large-scale reshoring to North America will not take place on its own and that multinationals will continue to offshore production to low-cost, mostly Asian countries once pan­demic fears subside.26

The justifications for offshoring are often couched in what could be called a “Blame America First” argument. In this narrative, cor­porations say they would love to keep production in the United States—they really would, honest to God!—but America’s taxes, regulations, and poor workforce make this impossible. Although there is some truth to these assertions, the Blame America First narrative peddled by American business lobbies obfuscates the main reasons for corporate offshoring: boosting corporate profits by means of labor and regulatory arbitrage.

Chinese and Mexican and Bangladeshi workers are not more brilliant than American workers, and not necessarily more skilled. They are just much cheaper. This is unlikely to change in the fore­seeable future, and it’s also unlikely that countries such as China won’t continue to adjust the scales in their favor through intellectual property theft, massive subsidies to producers, and currency manipulation of the kind China has practiced in the past.

It is pointless to denounce corporate leaders for being unpatriotic. If one company sacrificed its profits to support the interests of U.S. workers or U.S. national security, it might lose its markets to more ruthless competitors. Moreover, all multinationals will seek access to all of the world’s major markets—emphasizing North America and Europe and China today, perhaps India tomorrow.

But governments can dictate terms for allowing market access. Lever­aging market access in this way may violate the neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated the “post-historical” three decades after the Cold War. But when powerful countries like China choose to employ classic national development techniques like state-owned corporations, subsi­dies, tariffs, and barely enforced intellectual prop­erty rights, the United States needs to respond in kind to protect its interests.

Beyond Tax Breaks and STEM:

Putting the Traded Sector First

For the United States to hold its own in global rivalries requires an industrial policy that places the U.S. traded sector at the center of federal, state, and local policies in a variety of fields, from infrastructure to energy policy as well as education policy. The traded sector consists of goods and services that can be sold outside of the region in which they are produced. The nontraded sector is the opposite—goods and services that must be consumed where they are produced, like haircuts. Christina D. Romer, the former head of the Council of Economic Ad­visers in the Obama administration, dismissed “manu­facturing policy” as nostalgia driven by “sentiment,” declaring, “American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.”27

But there is a big difference in terms of the trajectory of American economic development. Unlike the local hair salon, the market for washing machines is potentially national or global; a factory that makes parts for washing machines in a city, state, or region draws money into the local area from sales far away. Moreover, manufacturing has one of the highest multiplier effects of any sector—mean­ing that one manufacturing job in a community is likely to generate numerous other direct, indirect, and induced jobs, both locally and elsewhere.28

The traded sector may represent a small part of the labor force, but its importance is far greater than the number of direct employees. Among the 32 million U.S. jobs that were created between 1990 and 2008, only 779,000 were created in the tradable sector, according to economist Michael Spence. More than 31 million were created in the non-tradable sector of goods and services like government, health care, retail, accommodation and food service, and construction.29 But manu­facturing jobs generally pay more, enjoy higher productivity growth, provide higher levels of value added per employee, and overall define the global competitiveness of the U.S. economy.30

Nor can intellectual property payments, like royalties to tech compa­nies, compensate for the loss of national and global market share in manufacturing and other goods industries. In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. goods exports were worth $1.67 trillion, in comparison with $875.8 billion in service exports. Even smaller were information and communications technology (ICT) exports, which added up to only $42.2 billion in 2017, while in 2019 charges for the use of intellectual property were worth only $114.05 billion.31

These realities suggest that, like other countries, we should give priority to traded sector firms—both small traded sector firms that are capable of major growth, as well as existing large firms in traded indus­tries. This emphasis should not be confused with a bias against small businesses. In a flourishing biological ecosystem, large trees provide shelter under which smaller trees and bushes can grow and support a variety of organisms. In the same way, large firms in a region can provide a healthy environment for local firms of all sizes, in addition to providing a consumer for their goods and services.

The Case for Strategic Trade

Most of the growth in global consumption in the future will take place outside of U.S. borders. Simply protecting America’s large but still limited market for traded sector goods and services would be self-defeating, especially if the price of American protectionism is foreign retaliation that locks U.S. exports out of foreign markets.

At the same time, the United States cannot simply let trading part­ners dominate global markets while driving American producers out of major traded sector markets in the United States itself. Simply adopting unilateral free trade and allowing other countries to target U.S. industries for destruction can no longer be an acceptable option.

If both mindless protectionism and ideology-driven free trade must be rejected, what is the alternative? The answer is strategic trade. After all, most major nations, and blocs like the EU, insist on having their own shares of global industries important for national security or their spillover economic effects, like steel, silicon chips, automotive and aerospace production, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and others. They understand the dangers of overdependence on foreign suppliers or offshore production and recognize that simply mouthing free market homilies is not enough. Indeed, as two Harvard researchers have sug­gested, “Believing in the power of markets does not preclude the judicious use of appropriate government policies.”32

Far from being un-American, all of these industrial policy tech­niques have precedents in the United States from the administration of George Washington until the late twentieth century. In 1794, Congress author­ized the construction of federal arsenals to ensure that U.S. military weapons and supplies would be made in America. Following the War of 1812, the country established five federal arsenals, located at Springfield and Watertown, Massachusetts, Watervliet, New York, Frankford, Pennsylvania, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia. These and other federal arse­nals, by training workers and diffusing technologies, helped to jump-start civilian manufacturing across the United States.

Similarly, during World War II and the Cold War, Congress scat­tered U.S. defense production plants across the American land mass. The so-called “Gun Belt” helped to spark the transformation of the South and West from impoverished commodity-producing hin­terlands into today’s dynamic “Sunbelt.” In the current era, if we want to avoid all-out trade wars and the creation of autarkic regional trading blocs, we must balance the need for transnational economic integration with the need to nurture our own critical indus­tries. This in turn requires us to think of strategic industrial sectors and supply chains as the equivalents of traditional military services.

Decentralizing Traded Sector Industries

In addition to reshoring some strategic sectors and preventing others from being eliminated by offshoring and foreign competition, the U.S. government should also encourage the decentralization of high-value-added, traded sector supply chains so that every American region can benefit from the ability to export advanced goods and services to markets in the United States and abroad.

This does not mean trying to recreate Silicon Valley in its familiar form everywhere in the country. Instead, we need to get beyond the prejudice that only “new economy” jobs matter and embrace the bless­ings of our industrial heritage, resource base, and huge land mass.

The old industrial regions have distinct advantages in a reshoring economy: a concentration of necessary skills, a central location for shipping products, low housing costs, and for the most part, business-friendly administrations. In contrast, the high property prices, taxes, and onerous regulatory environments of the Northeast and West Coast make these areas relatively unattractive for new investment. Unlike in previous recessions, most Heartland states—notably all the Great Lakes states, outside Illinois—have recovered faster than California or most north­eastern states from the pandemic, with lower unemployment and better job creation.33

A program for revitalizing the American economy must include every region, but the central role may be played by what we call the New American Heartland.34 The continental United States is divid­ed naturally into three parts. One is the strip of land east of the Appalachian mountains, and another lies west of the Rockies and Sierras. The third portion is the huge region that consists of the Great Plains and the funnel-shaped drainage area of the Mississippi River. For nearly two centuries after the American Revolution, the division between the free yeoman-farming North and the slave-plantation South bisected the North American core. American industrial capital­ism flourished be­tween the Northeast and the Great Lakes, joined by the Erie Canal and later by the St. Lawrence Seaway, while the cot­ton‑exporting South languished as an agricultural backwater.

This pattern was transformed following World War II, spurred by New Deal rural modernization and later by wartime defense plant and infrastructure construction, the civil rights movement, and corporate relocation of manufacturing to anti-union, right-to-work states in the South and Southwest. Today, the old American Heartland, consisting of the Midwest, has been replaced by a much larger New American Heart­land, incorporating Texas and Florida and the South along with parts of the Great Plains. Along the vertical axis of the New American Heartland, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, runs what is increasingly a single manufacturing belt, including Japanese and Ger­man auto­mobile industry transplants in the Ozarks and Appalachia. The top exports of Texas by freight volume now include aircraft engines and computer parts, along with petroleum products. The manufacturing belt in the expanded American Heartland, which in­cludes the South and Texas, continues into the industrialized north and center of Mexico.

The infrastructure modernization currently being contemplated should consider this new industrial Heartland. The infrastructure needed to connect Heartland factories with foreign consumers is not as fashionable as the windmills and high voltage lines of the “Green New Deal,” but it is more important to America’s future.

Ports and inland waterways. Nine-tenths of global trade is trans­ported by ship. This means that producers in the American Heartland must be connected to foreign consumers via the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes by way of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. While nine out of the ten largest container ports in the world are found in Asia, Houston, the world’s fifteenth largest container port in tonnage, along with other Gulf ports (like New Orleans and Mobile) and Atlantic ports (including New York and Savannah) may grow in importance thanks to the expansion of the Panama Canal. Increased global shipping will put strains on America’s inland waterway system, making imperative the modernization of the more than twelve thou­sand miles of inland water­ways, in addition to Gulf and Atlantic intracoastal waterways.

Rail. Despite fantasies about high-speed passenger rail, the U.S. railroad system will remain focused on freight transportation, and rail congestion is a major bottleneck to U.S. economic growth. A quarter of freight rail traffic passes through Chicago, North America’s most sig­nificant railroad hub, through which a freight train sometimes takes more than a day to pass.

Highways. A major, long recognized flaw of the existing Heartland transportation system—both rail and surface—is the lack of adequate north-south freight corridors. Most major rail networks and highways run east to west, yet the future of economic and demographic growth requires North American trade corridors aligned on a north-south axis as well.

Telecommunications. What telegraphy was in the railroad era and telephony was in the trucking era, 5G Wi-Fi networks and more exotic telecommunications platforms may be in the age of autonomous vehi­cles, drones, robot factories, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Unlike in the past, when America’s continental infra­structure was safe from foreign attack and sabotage, the webs and grids of the New American Heartland must be built or rebuilt to be invulnerable to enemy sabotage, terrorism, or criminal hacking and extortion.

With state-of-the-art infrastructure in place, the New American Heartland can benefit from its greatest assets—a temperate climate and cheap land for factories, power plants, and logistics hubs, as well as hospitals and biotech facilities, and inexpensive housing. In his second annual message to Congress, President Abraham Lincoln spoke with a Midwesterner’s pride of “The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets. . . . A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the Republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it.” He predicted that if the Union were held together, the vast continental interior could become “the Egypt of the West.” A successful national strategy to revitalize American manufacturing in the new American Heartland can make Lincoln’s prophecy come true in the twenty-first century.

The Training Imperative: Workforce Policy in the Service of Industrial Policy

The human side of infrastructure is similarly important. For a genera­tion, we have deemphasized basic skills training in favor of a single-minded emphasis on four-year colleges. Even there, the emphasis on engineering and technical skills has been far less than what is seen in competitors like China. Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China. As of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees.35

The problems may be even more profound on the factory floor. Arvind Kaushal, leader of the manufacturing practice at Booz & Com­pany, estimates that as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to be generated this decade cannot be filled. Part of the problem is an aging workforce: The portion of the skilled manufacturing workforce over the age of fifty-five has doubled in the last ten years, Kaushal says, to 20 percent of active workers. And there is not a deep bench—50 percent of the active workers are above the age of forty-five. The current shortage of welders, now at 240,000, could grow to 340,000 by 2024.36

Much of the problem stems from a perceived lack of choices among young people and a failure to market opportunities to the new generation. “We have told young people that you essentially have two choices in life,” says Diane Auer Jones, now vice president at the Career Education Corp., either get a four-year degree or face a life “on Skid Row.” Even among those who manage to finish, more than 40 percent of recent graduates are underemployed, meaning that they’re working in jobs that don’t require their degree, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports.37

For many, trade school offers a third, and more practical, option. Tuition and fees for in-state students to attend a community or technical college in Washington State, for example, come to less than half the cost of a four-year public university. After graduating, they also often do better financially than those who attend a four-year college. In Virginia, Colorado, and Texas, where earnings are tracked, students with certain technically-oriented credentials (short of bache­lor’s degrees) earn an average of $2,000 to $11,000 more per year than bachelor’s degree–holders, the American Institutes for Research found.38

Boosting such opportunities is particularly critical at a time when concern about rising inequality has grown, as has concern over racial inequalities. When nonwage benefits are counted, manufacturing work­ers earn 13 percent more in hourly compensation than comparable workers elsewhere in the private sector.39 In 2016, manufacturing still accounted for more than one-fifth of all blue collar work paying more than $15 an hour, twice its share of the overall workforce.40

Reshoring is also not about old white men, but young people and growing minority populations. To make reshoring work in the United States will require an increasingly diverse workforce. Today, barely 58 percent of all working-class Americans are white; according to a 2016 Economic Policy Institute study, people of color will constitute the majority of the working class by 2032.41

Even in rural communities, immigrants and minorities account for an increasing percentage of the labor force. WCCO Belting, based in rural Wahpeton, North Dakota, has seen a surge of orders from in­dustrial and agricultural clients, in part due to Covid concerns, adding jobs to a two-hundred-person plant where fourteen languages are spoken and half the employees are female, notes company president Thomas Shorma.

At Retrax, another North Dakota manufacturer, about 12 percent of the company’s workforce is composed of refugees, and the share contin­ues to rise. The company has made small changes, such as installing foot‑washing stations and adjusting shifts to accommodate the Muslim holiday Ramadan. “In my opinion, it’s simple, easy changes,” says the company’s human resources manager Larissa Campbell. She attributes the addition of refugees to the community as a key factor in helping the company grow.42

Of course, even with large-scale reshoring—the Reshoring Initia­tive’s Harry Moser estimates we could bring up to 20 to 30 percent of produc­tion back—not all the old jobs will return. Due to automation and other process improvements, many industries will likely employ smaller num­bers of workers, though in technically more demanding and potentially better-paying jobs, as the sectors become more com­petitive.43

American citizens, whatever their background, should be the primary beneficiaries of this shift. But this also means a shift in immigration policies. We cannot expect Americans to learn difficult skills as long as employers are allowed to discriminate against American workers and permanent residents in favor of guest workers, like those brought in under H-1B programs, willing to work for lower wages with fewer benefits and rights. These programs essentially allow companies to exploit labor arbitrage by hiring foreign workers for short-term exclu­sive contracts. In one particularly egregious example, in 2015, Disney laid off 250 of its IT workers—while requiring some of them to train their replacements coming from India. When some of the workers sued, they lost because under U.S. law this practice is perfectly legal.44

In 2018, three-quarters of the tech workforce in the San Francisco Bay Area was foreign-born.45 Many of these digital workers, dubbed “technocoolies” by some in India, come to America as “non-visa immigrants,” meaning that they cannot qualify for a green card, no matter how long they stay in the United States—unless their employer, out of charity, decides to sponsor them. All of this creates an easily frightened, subservient workforce.46 These workers can be expelled from the United States if they complain or quit in protest, as opposed to American citizens and legal immigrants with full economic rights, who generally command higher wages.47

Reviving Our Industrial Legacy

Reshoring, particularly of manufacturing, is critical and creates poten­tial for significant economic gains from advanced technology in a wide array of industries.>48 It is a mistake to think that apps are the future while everything else is the past. Robots, drones, satellite data, biotechnology, and information technology also should be used to revolutionize “old” industries—those that are labor-intensive and based on old methods—making them more efficient and profitable. Apart from completely obsolete industries, there are no industries of the past, only industries that have not been modernized yet.

We also have to move past the ideological globalism of the Ameri­can establishment. The view from BlackRock and Apple is very differ­ent from the view on Main Street or in the Rust Belt, and among our increasingly diverse working class. Their voices and concerns have been largely ignored, one reason for Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016 and surprising gains among minorities in 2020.49

Improving prospects for the middle and working classes, however, could be made more difficult by progressives’ embrace of a rapid and forced transition from fossil fuels to “green” energy, defined in a way that excludes zero-carbon nuclear energy. To the extent that anthropogenic global warming is viewed as a threat, rather than as a long-term nuisance that can be managed by adaptation, the emphasis should be on less cumbersome interventions, like a modest carbon tax, expanding remote work, and restoring our nuclear power industry. It is difficult to see how an industrial revival can take place without reliable energy like natural gas and nuclear—not unreliable, intermittent energy like that provided by solar and wind, which has to be clumsily backed up by other sources when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. Yet such an industrial revival will be necessary if firms are to exit notoriously high-carbon supply chains in China, which now emits more greenhouse gases than the United States and the EU combined.50

Under any circumstances, restoring our “industrial commons” will not be easy for businesses or consumers. This undertaking cannot sur­vive partisanship that prioritizes exploiting divisions over rebuild­ing the economy.

Fortunately, as we have seen with the response to the production of critical medical supplies, there is a broad-based bipartisan coalition to support manufacturing and the recovery of supply chains in critical, strategic markets, including medical goods, communications equipment, and the strategic metals that these technologies depend on.51 Support for such actions can be found among both liberals and conservatives.

To make America more productive and Americans more secure, we have to look beyond the memes of a corporate establishment that has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned our national interest in pursuit of short-term profits, foreign favor, and public relations ap­proval. What America needs is not richer tech oligarchs or more virtue-signaling by Wall Street financiers, but policies that focus on boosting dynamic traded sector production and jobs in our communities, restoring Ameri­ca’s lead in the productive economy.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume V, Number 4 (Winter 2021): 35–52.

Notes

       Shot of an adorable young family of four relaxing together on the sofa at home (iStock)   Most Americans believe they can live meaningful lives   Clay Routledge   November 20, 12:00 AM November 20, 12:01 AM  Meaning in life is central to individual and societal flourishing. People must believe that they have the power to live meaningful lives. The good news is that the majority of Americans do believe they have this power, but there are reasons for concern that should inspire our society to focus more on understanding the factors that promote meaning in life.  A large body of research reveals that meaning is important for mental, physical, and even financial well-being. People who view their lives as meaningful are not only more satisfied with their lives, but they are less at risk of depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide. Meaning in life also predicts gains in household income and net worth over time. The more people believe that they have a meaningful role to play in the world, the more inspired they are to behave in ways that help keep them alive and thriving. Meaning also orients people toward helping others. Indeed, based on studies my colleagues and I conducted, the more people are focused on living a meaningful life, the more likely they are to engage in prosocial behavior such as volunteering and charitable giving. A society populated by existential agents, people who believe in their ability to live meaningful lives, will be a more flourishing society. This raises the question: Do Americans view themselves as existential agents? At the Archbridge Institute, we recently partnered with NORC at the University of Chicago and its AmeriSpeak panel to conduct a survey exploring this question. We asked a nationally representative sample of just over 2,000 U.S. adults to what extent they agree or disagree that they have the power to live a meaningful life. We found that the majority, 63%, agree or strongly agree that they have the power to live a meaningful life. Men and women are equally likely to view themselves as existential agents, and there is very little difference across distinct regions of the country. Education is positively associated with existential agency, but the majority of people who have at least a high school level of education agree or strongly agree that they have the power to live a meaningful life. Similarly, household income is positively associated with existential agency, but the majority in every income group agree or strongly agree they have the power to live meaningfully. The importance of work and marriage cannot be overstated. Sixty-two percent of employed and 65% of self-employed people agree or strongly agree that they have the power to live a meaningful life. This number drops to 46% for those who are not working but looking for work. Seventy percent of married people, 62% of divorced people, and 46% of separated people agree or strongly agree that they have the power to live a meaningful life. There are notable age differences that warrant concern. Fewer than 40% of people between 18 and 24 years of age agree or strongly agree they have the power to live a meaningful life. For all older age groups, the majority view themselves as existential agents. This may seem counterintuitive, given that young adults are generally viewed as idealistic and have much of their lives ahead of them. In addition, thanks to social, scientific, and technological progress, young people today have greater access to accumulated knowledge and a wider range of opportunities that allow them to reach their full potential. Perhaps existential agency naturally develops with age and life experience, and there is little reason to worry. However, the current findings are consistent with other research indicating that young adults are increasingly anxious, pessimistic, and distrustful of others. The American dream is another interesting factor — pursuing it is tied to existential agency. Nearly 80% of those who believe they have achieved the American dream and two-thirds of those who believe they are on their way to achieving it agree or strongly agree that they have the power to live a meaningful life. This number drops to 32% among those who believe the American dream is out of reach. At a time of fear, outrage, victimhood, and despair, Americans should be encouraged by our findings. Most people believe they can live meaningful lives, and many are. As a society, we must focus more on promoting cultural messages and educational experiences that encourage existential agency. The more our society recognizes and celebrates the ways that humans have engaged their existential agency to improve their own lives and the lives of others, the more people will recognize their own potential and strive to realize it. Clay Routledge is a senior research fellow at the Archbridge Institute, a faculty scholar at the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, and the Arden & Donna Hetland distinguished professor of business at North Dakota State University.  © 2021 Washington Examiner    

(Photograph by Frédéric Soltan/Corbis/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (Including you truly blessed souls who’ve dreamed of listening to Kevin McCarthy for eight straight hours. Congrats on your cowbell moment!), Okay, strap in, because we’re going for a ride. Well, you, dear reader, are figuratively going for a ride—I’m literally going for a ride. I’m filing this from a rest stop off I-70 in Somerset, Pennsylvania, en route to Washington state.Yuval Levin wrote a brilliant piece for The Dispatch earlier this week. Two of our AEI colleagues, Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox, issued a fascinating report on fertility and family formation identifying the centrifugal forces dividing America. It’s worth reading.“But,” Yuval writes, “I was most struck by something else about the portrait they paint. The report embodies a significant change in how we think about the basic character of social breakdown in America, and what we take to be the obstacles to human flourishing in our time.”“Not long ago,” he continues, “it would have been taken for granted that social order in our free society is a function of our capacity to restrain and govern our most intense longings. Human beings are moved by passionate desires for things like pleasure, status, wealth, and power.”  I don’t want to cut and paste the whole piece here, so I’ll summarize. When conservatives used to talk about social breakdown, we pointed at things like crime, sexual promiscuity—both heterosexual and homosexual—drug use and the violence it produces, out-of-wedlock births, divorce, etc. When progressives used to talk about social breakdown—not their preferred term—they pointed to greed, capitalism run amok, and a lack of social welfare policies that provided “security.”Obviously, we still talk about such things, because these are still problems and always will be when dealing with human beings. But something is different. As the report documents, divorce rates are down because marriage rates are down. Fewer people get married and the ones that do are more committed to it, so fewer people get divorced. Out-of-wedlock births and abortion are down in part because fewer people are having sex. Drug use is a real problem, but the overall rate of drug use has been trending down and the kinds of drugs people use have shifted from stimulants like cocaine and meth to opiates like heroin and its prescription substitutes.Say what you will about cocaine, it’s a social drug for people on the go. Heroin is like a pharmacological beanbag chair that lets you check out from the hassles of life.I’m reminded of Susan McWilliams’ observation that 2006 marked a terrible turn in American civic life. That was the year when Americans started drinking bottled water more than beer. “Why is this important?” she asked. “It’s important because beer is a socially oriented beverage, and bottled water is a privately oriented one.” Beer commercials have happy fun people doing stuff together. Bottled water commercials, meanwhile, “tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise—even though they are not being chased.”In the famous (or infamous) Moynihan Report, Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified the problems that came with rapid urbanization: “It was this abrupt transition that produced the wild Irish slums of the 19th Century Northeast. Drunkenness, crime, corruption, discrimination, family disorganization, juvenile delinquency were the routine of that era.” The rapid urbanization of American blacks, Moynihan argued, was a replay of the same problems.Yesterday’s dysfunction was a byproduct of too much bad dynamism. Today’s dysfunction is a byproduct of too much bad lethargy. Technology is obviously part of the explanation. Yuval writes:Particularly for Americans who live in cities, the internet has also come to mediate different parts of our real-world experience (from dating to calling a taxi to getting food at a restaurant) in ways that have let more people live as functional loners, meeting their needs with a minimum of eye contact or interpersonal risk. And countless younger Americans dissipate their erotic energies in similar seemingly riskless substitutes for human contact, particularly video games and pornography—the latter of which has grown into a hideous, colossal scourge that our society has inexplicably decided to pretend it can do nothing about.Yuval doesn’t use the word “entropy” (or Ross Douthat’s “decadence”) but that’s what he’s talking about.Japansclerosis.Which brings me to Japan. About a decade ago, people started noticing that something was amiss in the Land of the Rising Sun. People weren’t having sex, at least not a lot of it. A 2013 survey by the Japan Family Planning Association found that 45 percent of women aged 16-24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.”  More than 1 in 4 men felt the same way. Terms like “hikikomori”—shut-ins or hermits—and “parasito shingurus”—“parasite singles,” adults who are still living with their parents into their mid-30s—became popular buzzwords. “Otakus”—geeks—cared more about playing esports than playing the field at bars. Soshoku danshi—“herbivore men” or “grass eater men”—are passive, unassertive men who have lost any interest in marriage or “manliness” as traditionally understood.A lot has been written about all of this, and many of the factors Yuval identifies are often part of the diagnosis.I’ve been to Japan only once. It was in the mid-1990s and the internet really wasn’t a big thing yet. But man, porn was. I was amazed by the depravity and ubiquity of it. And I was—I swear—only going by the cover art on DVDs and the stuff in comic books (though Rapeman was no longer on the shelves when I got there). What really amazed me—beyond the grotesque images of nurses hung on meat hooks and pedophilic school girl scenes—was that these things were on display right next to the sections with Disney movies and the like. It reminded me of Bart Simpson scolding his sister, Lisa, for covering her eyes during a bloody scene in a movie: “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.” One major theory has to do with the structure of Japan’s economy and its work culture generally. The emphasis on careerism and working your way up the system leaves little room or energy for family formation. Other theories cover the waterfront, from the vacuum left by the abandonment of militarism, to the culture shock of feminism, to hypofrontality caused by large scale porn addiction. I have no idea how to weigh the different variables. Porn probably plays a big role for some people and not for others. Ditto video games, the internet, political economy, etc.Cultural norms are weird.An idea or custom can emerge for specific reasons and then catch on and grow because others emulate it. Once a critical mass is reached, the thing that originally caused it becomes incidental. Suggestibility and social contagion are real things and not just for yawning and laughing. Consider, for instance, the recent weird rise in Tourette’s syndrome—or Tourette’s-like behavior. Some people have Tourette’s for physiological reasons beyond their control. Others, apparently, consciously or unconsciously mimic it when exposed to it through TikTok videos. In 1374, Europe saw sudden outbreaks of uncontrolled dancing. It wasn’t an early version of Footloose, but a bizarre contagious act of mimicry remembered as St. Vitus’ Dance. No one knows what sparked it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it started with a few people who actually had Sydenham chorea (colloquially known as St. Vitus’ Dance, named after the weird event). Personally, I think the sudden onset of transgenderism in teenagers can be at least partially explained by this kind of thing.Velocity of life.But let’s move on to inflation. My friend David Bahnsen, after many attempts, has finally persuaded me that the thing to really worry about is deflation, not inflation (our podcast conversation about this will come out next week). I’m not going to get in the weeds—this is a math-free zone—but the basic problem is that there are trillions of dollars sitting in bank accounts like so many Otakus playing video games in their parents’ basements. Our current bout of inflation is mostly a supply-side problem driven by supply chain snags. As with all inflationary periods, too much money is chasing too few goods (and services). But unlike the 1970s, the problem today isn’t the “too much money” part; it’s the “too few goods” part. That may sound strange given that since the financial crisis of 2007-08, the Fed has pumped trillions of dollars—at least on paper—into the economy.But here’s the thing: The word people don’t focus on enough in Uncle Milton’s famous dictum about too much money chasing too few goods is “chase.” The velocity of money—how often a unit of currency changes hands and circulates around the economy—is the key here. There’s so much money sitting in banks because lenders can’t find good and productive ways to invest it. In effect, it doesn’t matter if there’s a lot of money out there if it’s not chasing anything. This is why David worries that the real danger is that we will become like Japan, which has been “printing money” for 30 years and its economy has been stagnant that whole time.As with declining fertility, I’m sure the internet is part of the problem. The internet (and automation generally) is incredibly good at cutting out middlemen. Why go to the store in your car and pay for stuff when you can have it delivered to your house? Why go to the movies when you can “Netflix and chill”? Why deal with the social awkwardness—fueled by how we raise kids to be fragile—of dating when you can watch porn?You see what I’m getting at? David is worried about the velocity of money, Yuval is worried about the velocity of people. The pandemic magnified both problems in very similar ways. This is why I sincerely believe that part—but not all—of the answer to both problems is real, robust, and sustained economic growth. Economic growth fuels both the velocity of money and the velocity of people. It creates avenues for real life satisfaction through a sense of accomplishment and pride that comes from honest work and improving the lives of those you care about.Nationalism and the last man.Which brings me to nationalism. The other day, I reluctantly wrote a very long piece (now available to everybody) criticizing my friend Christopher DeMuth’s embrace of “national conservatism.” One point I didn’t address was DeMuth’s strange embrace of bombastic or “excessive” politics.Demuth believes that the proper response to left-wing radicalism is to lean into nationalistic, populist fury, though he puts it more soberly: “National conservatives recognize that in today’s politics, the excesses are the essence. Like Burke after 1789, we shift to opposing revolution tout court.” To me, this is a polite way of saying the right should give into the dark side. Let the rage and anger flow, because persuasion and reformist approaches are no longer adequate to the task.The reference to Burke’s (justified) opposition to the French Revolution is telling. Burke was writing about dismaying affairs in another country. For many nationalists, the “blue” parts of the country are simply enemy territory, which is why so many nationalist demagogues and buffoons (though obviously not DeMuth) give rhetorical oxygen to the idea of secession. But blue America is America too. Indeed, some of the best places in America are governed by Democrats. I’m happy to argue that they vote wrong. But I reject the idea that they aren’t my fellow countrymen. I think it’s better to engage in the pre-French Revolutionary Burkeanism of persuading voters to vote better than to pay lip-service to the idea that they’re not really Americans at all.When I wrote Liberal Fascism, I insisted that there was simply no appetite for the “traditional” militaristic fascism we saw in mid-century Europe. The American right was too wedded to classical liberal dogma to tolerate such stuff, at least for long (though we came close under Woodrow Wilson, whose “ardent nationalism” Chris admires). The real danger wasn’t Orwell’s 1984 but Huxley’s Brave New World, in which people grew soft from soma use and prepackaged joy delivered to their doorstep. The only way real fascism could arrive is if we so drained life of meaning and the quotidian glories of earned success that a new generation would find itself attracted to manufactured political or ideological sources of meaning and glory.Raise enough “men without chests,” in C.S. Lewis’ famous phrase, and one day a man on a white horse will seem like a thrilling way to find meaning deprived to them by the lack of velocity in their lives.  The most famous passage of Lewis’ lament is depressingly apt for our current moment:And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue toclamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly opena periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needsis more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastlysimplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men withoutchests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and areshocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.The attraction of nationalism, like identity politics and many political “movements,” is that it allows people to buy meaning on the cheap. Unable to chart a path for your individual pursuit of happiness, you hitch your wagon to a great cause that, via the transitive properties of tribalism and identitarianism, gives you a poor substitute for individually earned success. When starved for food, you’ll eat whatever is on offer. When starved for meaning, you’ll sign up for whatever you can find. But nationalist or socialist victory won’t make you any less lonely when you leave the crowd or the mob. Only those little platoons of friends, family, faith, and the freedom to pursue happiness as you see it can provide those things.Various & SundryCanine update: The girls were very, very excited to see the materfamilias arrive last night and had no idea what was in store for them this morning. And now I think they believe this is how their life will be for the rest of time. Anyway, I really do have to get back on the road. But expect cross country canine updates later.ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileFeeling ambivalent?Ridley me thisWhat inflation and CRT have in commonCurb your inflation with The Dispatch PodcastA regrettable midweek “news”letter, released to the massesThe week’s second Remnant with gold jacket wearer Will SaletanAnd now, the weird stuffPunk rockDivine providence High timesFearlessSpecial deliveryDemocracy manifest

The headline chosen for Harvard economist Jason Furman's November 15 commentary in the Wall Street Journal was both apt and sad. It was apt, because it repurposed then-President Gerald Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" slogan from 1974, and sad because Furman's advice comes straight from that era--and because his prescriptions could reprise the economic and political disasters of those years.

Furman, formerly the chair of President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, writes that "ultimately inflation is a macroeconomic problem," meaning it is an issue that afflicts the economy as a whole. In exploring the causes of the problem, Furman writes of "rapid recovery," "tight labor markets," excessive fiscal stimulus, and too-easy money. The US economy, in his telling, has too much spending pressing on its capacity to produce. It is too big.

"Democrats should remember that Volcker's shock led to 12 long years of Republican rule, under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush."

Except that it's not. According to the latest GDP report, the actual size of the US economy--measured in inflation-adjusted dollars--is still smaller than it was in the last quarter of 2019. Americans are spending and producing in real terms less now than we did then. For all the hot air about high growth rates, low interest rates, and big deficits, America is not even back to the starting gate. That means there is no way that our current inflation rate is "macroeconomic."

Furman goes on to insist that "it's the Fed's job to keep [inflation] under control." That also is not true. The US Federal Reserve operates under the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, which stipulates that full employment and reasonably stable prices are goals for the US government as a whole.

The drafters of that law--I was among them--did not buy the dogma that inflation "is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," as Milton Friedman had argued. Rather, we believed, and the law states, that all of the economic objectives had to be pursued with all of the available tools, and by all of the agencies.

Now as then, oil is the most obvious price problem. Back then, the culprit was OPEC; today, other forces have driven up prices of gasoline, fuel oil, and natural gas by 50% or more since last year's trough. Some of the increase reflects the rebound from the pandemic lows, and some of it is the result of supply constraints, owing to cuts to shale-energy production.

Commodity speculation may also be a factor, as it was just before the 2008 global financial crisis. If so, this activity can be curtailed by raising margin requirements--over which the Fed has authority. Energy prices can be stabilized by selling from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, as US President Joe Biden's administration may be about to do, in cooperation with China. Production will soon pick up, as is already happening in the Permian Basin.

The other common factor between inflation 50 years ago and now is military spending. Economists in the 1960s and 1970s knew that the Vietnam War was inflationary; war always is. Somehow, this fact has been forgotten as we spend more than $700 billion per year on weapons and defense--creating bottlenecks, burning fuel, cutting into civilian output, and diverting new technologies and talented people from things we could use toward things we cannot use. All of that activity is inflationary.

The other issues Furman raises are peripheral. There is no sign yet that higher wages are a source of higher prices for consumer goods or even for services. The Chinese did not raise their prices by anything close to the amount of the increase caused by Donald Trump's tariffs (if they had, they would have lost market share).

By contrast, the supply-chain problem is real, particularly in semiconductors, where the downstream effects on automobile production have resulted in higher used-car prices; but this issue will work itself out. The ports are indeed clogged, and that is adding to costs; but, again, it's not a macroeconomic issue.

More to the point, none of America's price problems would be helped by higher interest rates. Tighter credit would get in the way of the business investment that the US economy needs to expand capacity and keep costs down. Interest is a cost, and therefore will get passed on to consumers.

With less capacity and higher costs, inflation would get worse until the Fed tightened so much that the economy cracked. That is what happened--and what finally squelched inflation--after Paul Volcker became Fed chair in 1979. Democrats should remember that Volcker's shock led to 12 long years of Republican rule, under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Furman is right that Biden's next big policy package--the Build Back Better Act--isn't inflationary. And to be fair, Furman is not demanding higher interest rates immediately. He wants the Fed to announce that the benchmark federal funds rate will rise soon, but not if growth slows or inflation recedes. Well, growth was just 2% in the latest quarter, and the annual inflation rate will start to fall as soon as last spring's gas-price hikes fall out of the 12-month window.

So, while Furman's formula could lead to disaster, the most likely scenario, if it were adopted, is that nothing would be done. In that case, the Biden administration and Congress would have a new macroeconomic problem, because they would have done too little, not too much.

Back in the 1970s, the leading voice on economics in Congress was my boss, the chairman of the House Banking Committee, Henry Reuss of Wisconsin. He liked to say that we need a "rifle-shot" anti-inflation policy, not a "blunderbuss." The focus should be on stabilizing energy prices, cracking down on speculators, cutting the Pentagon budget, unclogging the ports, and ensuring that sorely needed wage increases go mainly to the lowest-paid workers.

What most certainly should not be done is to turn a manageable problem into a big crisis by handing it off to the Fed.

Last weekend I wrote about how the landscape of 2021 is suddenly letting Republicans play politics on “easy” mode, by giving them back the kind of issues that built Ronald Reagan’s majority in the 1970s and 1980 — rising inflation, rising violent crime, a Cold War rivalry (Chinese rather than Russian this time) and backlash against a culturally ascendant but overreaching and self-deceiving left.

I also wrote that this state of affairs was probably temporary, defining the environment as we head toward the 2022 midterms but not actually catapulting us permanently back to the world of 1980. In which case it’s fruitful to speculate about what the world after this strange, Covid-mediated moment holds for our two political coalitions — starting this weekend with the view from the Democratic perspective and continuing with the view from the G.O.P. side next week.

If you’re a Democrat right now, you can tell yourself a reasonably optimistic story, even in the face of disastrous midterm polling, about what the world after 2021 looks like for your party. In this hopeful scenario inflation is a challenge for a year but not a decade, and much of the simmering public discontent with the Biden administration reflects a simple exhaustion with Covid-era abnormality — an abnormality that, with child vaccinations, therapeutic drugs and widespread immunity, should really and truly be over with next year.

If that abnormality goes, so might a bunch of related issues that are currently hurting Democrats, including not just economic problems but cultural ones as well. The current education wars, for instance, have clearly been inflamed by school closings and masking policies, not just by parental doubts about new progressive curriculums. So once Covid-era interventions are finally in the rearview mirror, it may be that the Critical Race Theory debate recedes somewhat as well.

A lot of people are surprised that Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man who shot three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year killing two of them, was just found not guilty on all charges, including on two counts of homicide. The furious responses are already pouring in: just minutes after the verdict came down, “MURDERER,” “WhitePrivilege,” and “Amerikkka” began trending on Twitter. MSNBC quickly published a piece titled “Kyle Rittenhouse trial was designed to protect white conservatives who kill.” A number of very high-profile figures, ranging from New York mayor Bill de Blasio to Wajahat Ali of The Daily Beast expressed similar sentiments immediately after the verdict on Twitter.To these observers, Rittenhouse’s acquittal on all charges confirms what they already knew about our justice system: It is a grotesque machine that will forever forgive white supremacist violence. From their perspective, Rittenhouse clearly killed two people illegally, and it’s baffling that he got away with it.But for those who have watched this case closely since that terrible night in Kenosha, this isn’t a surprising result. The large amount of video footage available since almost the very start of this controversy revealed that Rittenhouse always had at least a decent self-defense claim, and potentially quite a strong one. The fact that so many people were so confused about the facts of this case—not only on the self-defense question but on basic matters like whether the people he shot were black or white, whether he took his rifle “across state lines,” and whether he had preexisting family or social ties to Kenosha—suggests that, despite all the understandable talk of the right’s “fake news” problem, partisan news coverage and punditry on the left is becoming a serious problem in its own right.Rittenhouse says he decided to take part in helping to protect and clean up Kenosha after watching the wave of destruction that hit the city following the police shooting of a black man named Jacob Blake. Videos of him at various points during his day there showed he helped clean graffiti off of a school, interacted with protesters peacefully and asked them if they needed medical assistance (he apparently had some rudimentary first-aid training as a lifeguard but, contrary to what he told someone filming him at one point, was not an EMT), and took part in guarding various businesses—all while toting an AR-15-style rifle. Then darkness fell and things turned catastrophic. The violence appears to have been sparked by Joseph Rosenbaum, a deeply disturbed man with a tragic history who had just been released from a hospital following a suicide attempt, who witnesses said had threatened to kill Rittenhouse earlier in the day, and who could be seen in one video seeking to provoke a group of armed protesters by yelling “Shoot me, n*gga,” repeatedly.Rittenhouse testified that Rosenbaum ambushed him, and that appears to be borne out by the videos: Rosenbaum chases him a significant distance, and Rittenhouse, now hemmed in by parked cars and lacking an easy escape, only shoots Rosenbaum after he lunges at him. Most of this was clear from the video that went online shortly after news of the killings went viral, but more recently released drone footage shows those final moments with greater clarity than before: Rosenbaum really was reaching for Rittenhouse or his rifle at the moment he was shot.The other two men Rittenhouse shot chased him after they and others in the crowd realized he had shot someone. Video shows that Anthony Huber, who was killed, caught up to Rittenhouse and struck him with a skateboard. Gaige Grosskreutz, who survived and testified during the trial, acknowledged in a devastating moment for the prosecution that at the moment Rittenhouse shot him in the arm, he was pointing his own handgun at the teenager.According to Wisconsin state law, lethal force is only legally permissible if someone “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself.” Even if a defendant provokes a confrontation, they’re still allowed to resort to deadly force if those criteria are met and they have exhausted other reasonable means of escape. Little else matters, really—not the politics of the case, not whether Huber or Grosskreutz thought they were chasing someone who had just killed someone in cold blood (which they may well have been). Many observers, myself included, thought that Rittenhouse couldn’t legally carry the AR-style rifle he used in the shootings. This only would have been a misdemeanor violation anyway, with a maximum sentence of nine months, but it turned out to be a moot point: The judge tossed the charge earlier this week because that law “applies to minors armed with rifles or shotguns only if those weapons are short-barreled,” as US News put it.Whatever one thinks of these laws, they are the relevant laws here. And they made for an uphill battle for the prosecution all along, because the videos showed that Rittenhouse was, in fact, threatened by the people he shot. The videos alone didn’t prove that a self-defense claim would definitely prevail, of course, but they did come pretty close to proving that Rittenhouse did not instigate any of the shootings in question. All of this was right there, on video and in the relevant statutes, for anyone with eyes to see. Why did so many people—including influential people who are paid to get the news right—look away?I first wrote about the case in a pair of newsletter posts not long after it happened. I was astounded at the distance between what was on the video and what news outlets (not to mention the Twitter brigades) were saying. “First he allegedly killed a protester, by shooting him in the head,” was how Tess Owen described the violence in Vice on August 27th. Writing in Slate, Mark Joseph Stern wrote that Rittenhouse “placed himself at the center of the violence, then escalated it by shooting a man in the head.” Countless other journalists and online personalities treated the case similarly. Even some elected officials got in on the act. Rittenhouse was quickly and publicly labeled a “white supremacist domestic terrorist” by Rep. Ayanna Pressley on Twitter. After Rittenhouse was released on $2 million bail—an amount raised by supporters—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in: “Does anyone believe Rittenhouse would be released if he were Muslim & did the same thing in a diff context?” she tweeted. “For people who say ‘systemic racism doesn’t exist,’ this is what it looks like: protection of white supremacy baked deep into our carceral systems.”The endless invocation of “white supremacy” as an explanatory factor in this controversy was strange, given that all three people Rittenhouse shot were white and given that, contra Pressley’s claim, no evidence ever emerged that he had any connection to white supremacists. Pressley was recently asked (by Fox News, in an admittedly leading email) if she stood by the comments and did not respond. (After the case went viral, Rittenhouse was embraced as a right-wing cause celebre and was photographed with some members of the far-right Proud Boys at a bar, but there’s no evidence he had a prior connection to that or any other radical group.) Vice and Slate were far from the only outlets that contorted the facts of the case or published truly dishonest analysis. Intercept columnist Natasha Lennard wrote that Rittenhouse “chose to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and hunt down anti-racist protesters with an assault rifle,” an astonishingly misleading description of the actual chain of events. Other progressive writers expressed outrage that when he took the stand, Rittenhouse began sobbing. Jamil Smith wrote in Vox that “It isn’t simply that a killer cried about his own fear, rather than the lives he took. It represented the exercise of entitlement, the enduring perception of the youth of white men and boys who commit illegal acts.” Of course, the fact that Rittenhouse also cried—and vomited—when he turned himself in to the police suggests that there’s at least a chance he was actually traumatized by what happened. But telling readers about that prior incident would complicate the narrative that he is an embodiment of entitled white evil.Every step of the way, a subset of journalists and commentators have done everything they could to paint Rittenhouse in as negative a light as possible, even when doing so has involved distortion or selective forgetting. Take the endlessly regurgitated claim that he “crossed state lines” to get to Kenosha. First of all, this is geographically trivial: Rittenhouse lived with his mother in Antioch, Illinois at the time. Antioch borders Wisconsin, meaning that Antioch residents can “cross state lines” to grab a cup of coffee. Second, the whole point of that language is to make the gun charge sound more serious, to portray Rittenhouse as an outsider seeking carnage, or both—but all of this was debunked many months ago. Rittenhouse didn’t bring his rifle across state lines, full-stop. A friend bought it for him and kept it at his (the friend’s) stepfather’s house in Kenosha. And those few journalists who did deep reporting into the case—Charles Homans of the New York Times Magazine (a former colleague of mine at Washington Monthly) and Paige Williams of The New Yorker both deserve plaudits for their work—quickly established that Rittenhouse had many ties to Kenosha, where he worked as a lifeguard and where his father, grandmother, aunt, uncle and a cousin all lived. The overall effect of all this bad journalism and irresponsible, inflammatory punditry was the creation of an entirely separate version of events that bore almost no resemblance to what really happened that awful night in Kenosha. It was “fake news” in the same sense progressives often use that term: the creation of alternate realities as a result of partisan outlets and journalists more interested in narrative-promotion and ideological point-scoring than in fact-checking.Of course, these false and distorted ideas about the Rittenhouse case didn’t emerge fully formed from a vacuum. For a very long time, American authorities at every level really did look the other way in the face of vigilante right-wing violence. Reconstruction failed in large part because federal authorities would not protect black Americans from a terrifying onslaught of white violence in the South. And the much more recent racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder led many Americans to become more attuned to the possibility of racism lurking within everyday interactions, especially those involving law enforcement. So it’s understandable how, to the casual onlooker, all these viral claims about Rittenhouse being a white supremacist who went out looking for trouble might feel true, might feel like the sort of thing that could happen in America. Whether we should fit the Rittenhouse case into that preexisting historical mold is a separate question—and all the available evidence suggests it would be foolhardy to do so. And think about the consequences of all this misunderstanding, of millions of people having false ideas about Kyle Rittenhouse, what he did, and the justice system’s treatment of him: It will surely increase the probability of post-trial violence, for one thing, because people will be surprised that such an “obvious” case of murder was acquitted. And even if that outcome is averted, this result will be taken as yet more “proof” that the justice system is beyond redemption. This sense of nihilistic hopelessness, that justice for Jacob Blake would be impossible through judicial channels, is part of the reason Kenosha burned in the first place, and it’s terrible to think of the consequences of this belief spreading further.The misinformation also has a pernicious effect on conservatives. It’s been clear to many of them, from early on, that the media wasn’t treating this case fairly and that to get a more accurate version of the story, they would have to turn to alternative news sources. Many of those sources are right-wing and not particularly concerned with truthfulness either: they tended to portray Rittenhouse as some sort of bona fide American hero, when we obviously shouldn’t be encouraging 17-year-olds to embrace the roles of paramilitary foot soldiers. Continuing to drive conservative Americans away from mainstream outlets will only exacerbate our national divide and all the problems that come from it—from conservative belief in conspiracy theories like QAnon and #StopTheSteal to the increasing distrust, fear, and hatred that Americans have of the other political party.Even if we can understand where the false narrative about Kyle Rittenhouse came from, we should not excuse this sort of fake news. The mainstream media has a responsibility to report facts honestly, whether or not they line up with preexisting narratives or ideological priors. If they fail to do so, their actions will only drive America further down its present, dangerous path.Jesse Singal is a contributing writer at New York Magazine, the cohost of Blocked and Reported, and the author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. You can read more of his writing, including his initial coverage of the Rittenhouse case, on his newsletter, Singal-Minded.

Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who shot and killed two men during the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last summer, was acquitted on Friday. Prosecutors had charged him with first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide, attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and two counts of first-degree recklessly endangering safety, but the jury was persuaded by Rittenhouse's argument that he acted in self-defense.
For anyone who had followed the trial closely, this outcome is unsurprising. The prosecution simply did not meet its burden of proof, and Rittenhouse's defense team presented considerable evidence that he reasonably feared for his life each time he pulled the trigger. A witness testified that Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man shot by Rittenhouse, had threatened Rittenhouse's life and was attempting to wrest control of Rittenhouse's AR-15. The second man, Anthony Huber, struck Rittenhouse with a skateboard. And the third man—Gaige Grosskreutz, who survived—admitted on the stand that he had first pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse; Rittenhouse shot him in response to this perceived threat. As former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) put it: "The Rittenhouse case was a clear case of self-defense based on the evidence presented. The initial media narrative was false. Justice prevailed."
Indeed, people who did not follow the trial closely, and instead relied on secondhand punditry from liberal media figures, probably missed some very basic facts about the case, including that it had little to do with race: Rittenhouse and all three of his victims were white. This is an important point that some mainstream media coverage continues to miss. At MSNBC, for instance, Ja'han Jones, a writer for show host Joy Reid's blog, reacted to the verdict by explicitly saying Rittenhouse's whiteness produced the acquittal:
The case had the makings of an acquittal before the trial even began. The outcome seemed clear even before an almost exclusively white jury pool was selected, even before Judge Bruce Schroeder created an uproar by ruling that the slain protesters could be referred to as "rioters" and "looters" but not "victims," even before Schroeder refused to punish Rittenhouse for what prosecutors said amounted to a violation of his bond conditions. Rittenhouse is a white teen who abides by white rules, and white people empathetic to those rules seemed poised to insulate him from repercussions.
Rep. Cori Bush (D–Mo.) described the verdict as "white supremacy in action":

The judge. The jury. The defendant.
It's white supremacy in action.
This system isn't built to hold white supremacists accountable. It's why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free.
I'm hurt. I'm angry. I'm heartbroken.
— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) November 19, 2021

The accounts of former quarterback Colin Kaepernick and the Black Lives Matter movement made similar statements. These remarks all reek of ignorance: A jury acquitting a white defendant for killing three white men is hardly an example of white supremacy.
Perhaps it's not surprising that activists and Democratic politicians would reflexively cite white supremacy in a trial outcome that disappoints Team Blue. More troubling is the response to the verdict from an organization that should know better: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In a statement reacting to the verdict, ACLU-Wisconsin Interim Executive Director Shaadie Ali lamented the "deep roots of white supremacy" in Kenosha that prevented Rittenhouse from being "held responsible for his actions."
"Kyle Rittenhouse was a juvenile who traveled across state lines on a vigilante mission, was allowed by police to roam the streets of Kenosha with an assault rifle and ended up shooting three people and killing two," said Brandon Buskey, director of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project. "These are the simple, tragic facts. His acquittal comes after an ACLU investigation exposing how Kenosha law enforcement used violence against protesters and drove them toward white militia groups, in ways that escalated tensions and almost certainly led to these shootings."
In a Twitter thread, the ACLU complained that Rittenhouse was not held accountable for his "conscious decision to travel across state lines and injure one person and take the lives of two people protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake by police."
Of course, it is not illegal to travel across state lines; the fact that Rittenhouse wandered outside the boundaries of his home and entered a neighboring municipality was irrelevant to the case. The jury did not agree with—and the facts of the case did not support—the claim that his decision to shoot three people was "conscious" in the sense that it was premeditated. He argued that he rationally believed his life was in imminent danger, and the surviving shooting victim provided testimony that supported this argument.
One might have expected that an organization dedicated to the preservation of civil liberties would not so cavalierly take the side of prosecutors against the concept of self-defense. In the past, the ACLU has done terrific work shining a light on prosecutorial misconduct—the tremendous power the state has to stack the deck against defendants. The ACLU purports to believe that all people, even the guilty, deserve due process protections. The organization is evidently outraged by the verdict: Is the ACLU outraged that the prosecutor tried to argue that Rittenhouse exercising his Miranda rights was evidence of his guilt?
It is not necessary to elevate Rittenhouse to hero status, or to agree with his very poor decision to involve himself in the Kenosha riots, to accept that the prosecution failed to prove the charges against him. Rittenhouse is now a free man—not because of white supremacy, or because the criminal justice system failed. Activists, politicians, and media figures who purport to care about civil liberties should work toward empowering other defendants to avail themselves of due process, rather than complain that in this one case, the prosecutors did not get its way.
The post The ACLU Thinks Kyle Rittenhouse's Civil Liberties Got Too Much Protection appeared first on Reason.com.

The launch of the University of Austin, Texas (UATX) last week has reignited the simmering conflict over what the left and the right think has gone wrong with American liberal arts education. The left has “deconstructed” (and, in some cases, dismissed) traditional liberal arts as irretrievably biased against nonwhites, women, and sexual and gender minorities. For the right, such education is often seen as irrelevant to earning a living and, at worst, an adversary of traditional American values because of the deconstruction I just mentioned.
What the left and the right share in
common is a skepticism of the liberal arts grounded in a highly instrumental
understanding of the purpose of education. Study is not for its own sake, but for
other goals like social reform or employment. This is a profound and often
unacknowledged shift with ramifications for institutions of higher education,
for students, and for American society.
It was the perceived need to
reinvigorate traditional liberal arts that led to the foundation of UATX. A
significant part of the criticism leveled at this project emanates from the
academic left, which both questions the need for such an institution while also
calling into doubt the motives, integrity, and judgment of the founders. This
is a very unfortunate new front in the nation’s ongoing culture war, and it
represents an effort to extinguish an interesting new model before it has a
chance to take shape.  
To help provide some context to the UATX story, we have developed a transcript of a conversation I had with the new president of the university, Pano Kanelos, who prior to joining UATX, led St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. St. John’s provides a “great books” education centered on the classic works of Western Civilization, and, not surprisingly, this kind of schooling is a key element in the kind of education UATX plans to offer. Our conversation explores why such education is necessary to human flourishing and how it is, against expectation, also surprisingly good career preparation.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full transcript is available here.
Orrell:
Let’s start with you talking about your own life, the influences that brought
you to where you are today, what kind of conclusions you’ve reached about what
actually creates human happiness.
Kanelos: I am one of the least likely
people to have ended up to be a college president. I wasn’t even really
supposed to go to college at all. My family are Greek immigrants. I grew up in
the back of a Greek diner. Neither of my parents were educated, and nobody in
my family had ever been to college at all. I was the oldest in our immediate
family, none of my cousins or anybody. So there weren’t really, kind of,
evident pathways for me, other than my fears for going off to college. But I
somehow stumbled my way into college.
I went to a Jesuit high school in
Phoenix, Arizona. It was a place where everybody was oriented towards college.
And I would say one of the things that really propelled me forward: I had a
couple fantastic English teachers. I really developed a love for literature, a kind
of insatiable appetite for wanting to read more books.

I’ll just share an anecdote to show
you how naive I was.
I went to Northwestern University in
Chicago. My very first week of being there, I was sitting in my dorm room with
my new roommate and we were just chatting. He came from a family that was
pretty privileged, and I was a bit intimidated by him. He looked at me and he
said, “Pano, so what are you going to major in?” I had no idea what he was
talking about. I didn’t know what a major was. I thought you went to college
like you went to high school.
This of course was before you could
look things up on Google so I started asking people as quietly as possible, “So
what are you majoring in?” It dawned on me that, oh, you pick something like a
specialty and then you make your way forward. I was an English major, creative
writing is part of that, which is fantastic. I did Teach for America
immediately after college and taught in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the
very bottom of Texas towards the point on the border, in a very interesting
community there.
And then I went into a graduate
program at Boston University called the University Professors Program, which is
kind of interdisciplinary and in line with somebody like me, who really was
just using graduate school as a platform to read even more books. And they had
this wonderful collection of really amazing, towering figures, which I only
came to appreciate in retrospect. People in the program, faculty included, Elie
Wiesel, Derek Walcott, and two people who became very important in my life, the
poet Geoffrey Hill and the philosopher Roger Scruton.
From there, I did a postdoc at
Stanford, and then onto teaching gigs at the University of San Diego, Loyola in
Chicago. Moved on to be the dean of the Honors College, the Great Books Honors
College at Valparaiso University called Christ College, wonderful program,
great place. And then from there, St. John’s made the totally irrational
decision to hire me as president four years ago, and I’ve been here in
Annapolis since.
The
question that I want to pose to you is, what have you learned? You talked
earlier in this conversation about you discovered the importance of the life of
the mind. What’s the life of the mind, and then why is it important?
Life of the mind is a life that takes very
seriously the self-reflection that others have engaged in, usually through text
and works of art. Human beings are separate from the rest of creation, the rest
of the material universe, in a sense that we can come to know ourselves, but
not entirely.
Students walk through the University of Michigan campus. REUTERS/Emily Elconin
So a life of the mind is not just a
game. It’s about asking the fundamental human questions and orienting ourselves
around our search for those answers. I think anybody who is thoughtful and
attentive to the world, and attentive to their own place in the world, and who
reads, and who looks around them with curiosity in the world, I think all of
that is life of the mind.
How
does knowing yourself lead to a happy life, as some of the people at St. John’s
might think of happiness?
When I think of happiness, I think of
Aristotle, who defines happiness essentially as fulfilling one’s purpose. So
we’re all imbued with a sort of potential. As we strive to reach that potential
we reach a state of happiness. It’s not a euphoric state. It’s a state of, I
think, feeling fulfilled. I think this does circle around to the life of the
mind. Human beings are creatures of language. Language allows us to perceive
the world in very, very complex, nuanced, and sophisticated ways.
And so as our perception of the world
is amplified, enhanced as we learn more about ourselves and the world around
us, I think we feel like we’re doing what human beings have been engineered,
designed — I don’t know what the right word is — to do. And I think it is very,
very gratifying.
I
want you to talk to us about St. John’s College, give us its origin story and
what it’s designed to do. How does it go about achieving its purpose?
So St. John’s actually has, I think,
two origin stories. There’s two St. John’s. There’s the one that spans most of
the history of the college, and then one that started more recently. The college
was originally founded in 1696, so it’s the third oldest college in the country
after Harvard and William and Mary. And it was founded as a conventional,
colonial liberal arts institution, first called the King William School. But as
you might imagine, towards the end of the 18th century, naming things after
British monarchs was less popular than it had originally been so the name was
changed to St. John’s. And so for most of the college’s history it’s been one
among many of the, sort of, archetypal, East Coast, traditional liberal arts
But in the early 20th century, the
college took a turn. In 1937, the college had been on financial rocks at many
points throughout its history. Most colleges can say that. And there was sort
of an existential crisis in the 1930s between the wars. The originators of the
new program of instruction were two fellows named Scott Buchanan and
Stringfellow Barr. They decided that it would be revolutionary to move from
what had been a relatively conventional program of study that you would find in
almost any college to a program that exclusively focused on about 200 of the
Great Books of the Western tradition, studied by all the students collectively
in the same order over a period of four years.
And so at that time the new program
began, and it was mapped out as a study from the ancient world to the modern
world, integrated program of literature, philosophy, math, science, music,
languages, and very ambitious. At that time there was a general movement
towards Great Books that was meant to democratize elite education. The idea was
that the authors that had formed the canon of the Western tradition should not
be the exclusive province of families who could send off young sons to elite
prep schools, but that they should be the inheritance of everybody.
So what if we created this curriculum
and made it available to everybody? And for 80-ish years we have been
conducting what we call the “new program.” It’s stayed roughly the same. Every
student comes in; there are no majors. Everybody follows the same course of
study. The books — there is some change over time of the books. Some books make
their way onto the program; some are taken off. But it’s, I would say, glacial
in terms of change.
All the students share the same
material, same discussions, same sequence of study. What’s even more
extraordinary about it is that our faculty come to us with PhDs from all
different backgrounds, but they all have to teach all the texts in the program
over the course of their career. So they, over the course of their teaching
career, exemplify the comprehensive approach to the program that we want our
students to undertake. It’s really unlike anything you’d find anywhere else.
What’s
the product, do you think, the student product for getting people graduating
from St. John’s? Since they’re not being equipped for a technical field,
they’re not being equipped as experts in history, or philosophy, or some
subject matter?
And one of the things I always say is,
there’s no such thing as a liberal art. There are only liberal arts. So to be
educated in liberal arts means you have to be educated comprehensively across
disciplines.
In studying mathematics, in studying
music, studying ancient languages, modern languages, you come to understand the
world and the human condition through a kind of prism, through different
lenses, different angles, all aiming at the same thing, which is
self-understanding, but coming at it from different angles. And what you find
is those things start to cross over and converge. I’ll give an example.
We study biology in the natural
sciences extensively. The very first thing we have our students do when they
begin their study of the natural world of biology is we don’t open a textbook.
There’s no, sort of, quiz about anatomy or anything like that. We send them
outside. It happens to be a time of year where the wonderful magnolia trees we
have on campus are in blossom. And we have them each sit apart from each other
with a sketchbook and draw a magnolia, focus on the plant, on the living
organism. And they have to do it for, like, an hour.
And what they learn is, through
intensive observation of a natural organism, they start to ask questions. Why
is it shaped this way? What about its coloration? What about the different
textures on its surface? What about the magnolia’s position relative to the
rest of the natural world around it? And a whole series of questions arises
from that. So they return to the classroom and they start sharing the questions
that they have, and start thinking about those questions.

What they’re essentially doing is
going back to what natural philosopher has always done: observe, ask questions,
and then try to figure the answers. So we don’t begin with the answers, right,
which we get in a textbook. We begin with the process of questioning and then
the process of trying to teach oneself how to answer the question. That’s what
you get from a St. John’s education: intense habits that ask fundamental
questions about the world and then the ability to find a way to answer those
questions, to use one’s own native resources, one’s own intellect, to answer
questions and solve problems.
I can’t imagine that there’s any
employer out there in the world that doesn’t want a person who has been trained
to identify problems and use their own resources to solve those problems, all
right? I actually think when you study things within the disciplines it can be
debilitating over time. I always say that a liberal arts education is not about
the transfer of information but about transformation. And so what we’re doing
at St. John’s is we’re transforming young people into seekers of knowledge with
the capacity to find the thing they’re looking for.
Is
that something St. John’s teaches people to do? Or does it draw people who are
already predisposed to that kind of learning and that kind of an approach to
life?
I think it’s a both/and. Students understand
that they are embarking upon an education that’s unconventional and that is
book-centered. So we tend to draw students who have a natural inclination to
seek out books. Now in terms of stepping back, pausing, and thinking about
questions, those are habits that we purposefully form here.
Customarily our classes begin with an
opening question. So the students will do the reading, prepare for class, come
in, and it’s usually the tutor but sometimes a student who’s tasked with an
opening question. They’ll just pose a question that comes out of the reading.
Sometimes it’s a simple question, sometimes it’s complex, sometimes it’s
nuanced. But it could be something like we just finished reading the middle
section of Machiavelli’s Prince.
Machiavelli suggests that the ends justify the means. Is he right?
There are sometimes these prolonged
silences. And you’re right, under any other circumstances you would think the
students were unprepared. But what they’re doing is processing. One of the
greatest sins at St. John’s is to speak in a less than thoughtful way, to just
speak to be heard. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to formulate a
response, and most of them are not eager to be the first one to speak. Because
what they really want to do is hear what other people have to say. They want to
listen and then respond to that.
We
have such a performative educational culture of people needing to be right and
to gain the affirmation of the authority figure in a classroom. And at St.
John’s, I think you’re pushing against a deeply entrenched culture. How long
does it take students to get into a rhythm?
By sophomore year it’s almost like
you’re at a different institution. Freshman year, they tend to be eager and they
tend to bring with them the habits that they’ve acquired elsewhere, the ones
you described. It takes, kind of, going back to knowing ourselves. To be able
to be quiet takes a degree of self-confidence, right? I mean, why do we speak
out and try to receive the approval of our authority figures? It’s because we
need assurance that we’re okay, that we’re not dumb, that we’re smart. 
Where
do they wind up after they leave St. John’s?
A significant number of them do end up
doing graduate studies. They’re not all going to become PhDs in philosophy.
Many of them are going into the sciences. A significant number are going into
tech. A significant number are going into medicine, some into business. They go
in every direction.
A lot of our students go into education
in one form or another, not surprisingly. But then we have these, sort of,
clusters of students in very unexpected places. The most famous winemaker in
Napa Valley is a graduate of St. John’s College. People joke out there that the
two most important schools for winemakers are UC Davis and St. John’s College,
and I don’t think they’re wrong.
There aren’t too many significant
patterns, I would say. What most of them are looking for is careers where
learning can continue to happen. I would say that’s a trend that I see.
I
want to ask you about the pushback that we’ve seen against college
bachelor-level study and education over the last couple years. “We don’t need
more philosophers. We need plumbers; we need electricians; we need welders; we
need people who work with robots in factories to build things.” How do you
react when you hear that and you’re leading a college where you’re doing the
opposite?
I think there’s two things that prompt
the questioning of the value of the four-year college degree. The first is, if
you treat higher education simply as something instrumental, it makes a heck of
a lot of sense to try and find an end around a four-year education. It’s
expensive. It’s time consuming. 
The other is a fault of the system
itself, of higher education. Four-year degrees have essentially come to be what
I call 120 credit delivery systems. The whole point is you’re, kind of, racking
up this abstract thing called college credit that’s attached to an assortment
of classes that mostly don’t add up together to anything in particular. At
least half of the credits most students take are general electives that are
disconnected from one another, general education requirements, one-off classes.
Things are done buffet-style. And even within majors, sometimes the pathways
aren’t very clear.
The disconnectedness of higher
education, the fact that it’s not holistic in its approach, where there’s a sequence
of coursework that is adding up to something greater than the sum of its parts —
I think that’s very frustrating to a lot of students. I think a lot of students
feel like they’re spinning their wheels taking classes that are just checking
boxes.
I would say that I think four-year
education should be questioned. I don’t really understand why college is four
years, to be honest with you. It’s a convention. Think of it this way, we look
at graduate programs that are perfectly comfortable with graduate programs
having different lengths. You do three years for a law degree but eight years
for a medical specialty. One year or two years for an MBA. The length of those
programs is dictated by the course of study and what it is that one needs to
encounter. Why is every bachelor’s degree essentially the same shape and size?
I don’t know.
Do
you think there isn’t an answer to that question? How did it evolve into a four-year
program?
I think it is a convention here
roughly mirroring the four-year convention of the high school years.
We have this elastic sense of college. You show up. You hang out. You explore. You figure out what a major means, and then you hone in on what you’re going to do. It’s very expensive to do that. It’s very expensive. If we were to shorten our bachelor degrees by a single year, so if we made three years the standard, we would lower the cost of higher education by at least 50 percent? Twenty-five percent of that would just simply be the cost of that fourth year, tuition and otherwise, and then the opportunity cost in there of not being employed that year would be added back into the cost of education.
We would solve the financial crisis of
higher education in one fell swoop if we could convince our accreditors, the
whole system to certify three-year college degrees, unless they’re justified. I
mean, there are programs, for example, engineering, or maybe nursing, where
four years is really critical. I think four years at St. John’s is critical. We
use every second of that time very purposefully. But I think it’s something to
take seriously.
You’ve
been at St. John’s for four years and you’ve done some really remarkable things.
But you’re moving on. I’d like to know where you’re going and what you’re
doing. What are you trying to create?
I’ve been asked to found a new university, and that will be near Austin, Texas. And the reason for this institution is to solve some of the problems we’ve been talking about, the questions of the right scope of higher education, how one combines all the benefits of a liberal arts education towards professional life in the modern world. And also to try and move us back towards a center in higher education where we recommit to principles of freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and freedom of conscience and model those critical freedoms as best as we can.
Learn more: The labor market needs the ‘soft’ skills older workers have | Benefits cliffs: Highlights from my conversation with Alex Ruder | The future of remote work: Highlights from my conversation with Nicholas Bloom
The post What has Annapolis to do with Austin? My conversation with Pano Kanelos appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

"The people who are calling themselves black people saviors don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help."
That's New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter talking about his best-selling new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and The 1619 Project undermine the success of black people by sharpening racial divides and distracting from actual obstacles to real progress.
His shortlist for what would most help black America? "There should be no war on drugs; society should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way; and we should make solid vocational training as easy to obtain as a college education."
Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.
Photo credits: Photo by BP Miller on Unsplash; Tim Evans/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Eddie Moore/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Photo by Devin Berko on Unsplash; Photo by Matheus Viana on Unsplash; Jacquie Boyd IKON Images/Newscom; John Marshall Mantel/ZUMA Press/Newscom
Music credit: "Seductive," by Evgeny Bardyuzha via Artlist.io 
Audio production by by Ian Keyser, intro by Regan Taylor 
The post John McWhorter: 'Woke Racism' Has Betrayed Black America appeared first on Reason.com.

A statue of Jean Jacques Rousseau in Paris, France at Pantheon Square (Photo: Getty) “What if everything you learned about human history is wrong?” This is the way The New York Times titled its article covering the publication of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: ​​A New History of Humanity. The book, which draws on archeological evidence to offer a new story about how human societies first developed, is hardly lacking in ambition. It also packs a powerful political punch, suggesting that the new story it tells can inspire political action in line with the anarchist principles that Graeber, in particular, long espoused. And even before its publication this month, the book received an ecstatic reception. In The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz called Graeber “a genius,” and the book “a gift” whose authors “demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces.” The Guardian’s reviewer termed it “an exhilarating read.” For Jacobin, it was “an instant classic.” As of this week, it is number two on the Times’s best-seller list for non-fiction. Graeber, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 59, was a legendary figure in academia, a rebel anthropologist who did much to inspire and start the Occupy movement.But does the story stand up? Although Graeber and Wengrow concern themselves primarily with humanity’s early history, they begin by examining how Western thinkers have previously treated the subject, and in doing so they first turn to the French Enlightenment. This happens to be my own area of expertise, and I was curious to see what they would make of it. Quite frankly, I was appalled. Unfortunately, despite its promise, the work suffers from a slipshod and error-filled approach to this key moment in modern intellectual history.Graeber and Wengrow focus their discussion of the Enlightenment, not surprisingly, on the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his enormously influential 1754 Discourse on the Origins and Foundation of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau engaged in conjecture about humans in their original “state of nature,” and in the earliest stages of social development. In it, he posited, as Graeber and Wengrow put it, that “there was a time when human beings were equal – and that something then happened to change this situation.” Graeber and Wengrow call this insight “quite a startling thing for people living under an absolutist monarchy.” They argue that in eighteenth-century France, “almost every aspect of human interaction… was marked by elaborate pecking orders and rituals of social deference.” So how did Rousseau come by his insight, and why were so many of his contemporaries convinced by it? Their explosive answer is that Europeans only came to meditate on questions of equality in this way when prodded to do so by indigenous Americans. The chapter that follows elaborates on what they call “the indigenous critique” of European society, and the way it sparked a European “conceptual revolution.” They add that historians of European ideas, who have a practice of “infantilizing non-Westerners,” have effectively suppressed the story: “among mainstream intellectual historians today it is almost a heresy.” But some scholars, “most themselves of indigenous descent,” have begun to make the case, and “here we follow in their footsteps.”It is an inspiring and defiant call to arms, and for me, as a scholar of the Enlightenment, a troubling one. If true, it would overturn almost everything I thought I knew about my own scholarly field. But how do Graeber and Wengrow make their case? Do they really know what they are talking about?The history of equality, as a concept, is a long and complex one. In the Western world it has many roots: notably in ancient Greek philosophy, in the Roman tradition of civic republicanism, and of course in Judaism and Christianity. “The first be last and the last first.“ “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” It would be “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to the kingdom of God.” Eighteenth-century French people might not have had much experience of equality in their daily lives, but they could find plenty of evocations of it in their schoolbooks and their scriptures. Graeber and Wengrow’s apparent disregard for this commonplace of intellectual history already raised a warning flag. Still, the existence of this intellectual heritage did not preclude the possibility that indigenous thinkers had pushed European thinking about equality in a fundamentally new direction. Was this the case?Right at the beginning of the chapter, Graeber and Wengrow give readers a very big reason to doubt their scholarship. Jean-Jacques Rousseau composed his 1754 essay as an entry for an essay competition sponsored by the learned Academy of Dijon. Graeber and Wengrow write that “the authors who submitted their essays to this competition were men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants… Rousseau was one such man: an ambitious young philosopher, he was at the time engaged in an elaborate project of trying to sleep his way into influence in court. The closest he’d likely ever come to experiencing social equality himself was someone doling out equal slices of cake at a dinner party.”These short sentences contain a simply astounding collection of errors. As anyone would know from a few seconds’ perusal of Wikipedia, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in no sense a member of France’s upper crust. The son of a poor Genevan artisan, he himself had worked as a domestic servant in aristocratic households and had lived for many years in real poverty. In 1754, he was 42 years old – not exactly young. As for “trying to sleep his way into influence in court,” I have no idea what Graeber and Wengrow mean, considering that two years earlier Rousseau had refused a comfortable sinecure from the French court in order to preserve his moral independence. All of this is well known because Rousseau told the stories himself in what still stands as perhaps the most famous autobiography of all time: the Confessions.Mistakes of this sort do not inspire confidence, to say the least, but they are still not, by themselves, crucial to Graeber and Wengrow’s argument. Unfortunately, the rest of the chapter is just as sloppy and erroneous.The authors start out with a point that is correct, but also uncontroversial and unoriginal, namely that “European intellectuals had come to fix on the idea of primordial freedom” in large part because of travel literature that made them aware of non-European societies, including especially ones lacking large, organized states. Since the time of Columbus, works that described the religious, political, social and sexual practices of such societies had fascinated European readers, and challenged them. Here were examples of people who lived without the stultifying social hierarchies and moral restrictions that characterized European states. Above all, here were people who lived without a knowledge of Christianity. And yet they often seemed healthier and happier than Europeans, and quite capable of arguing back in sophisticated terms against European missionaries trying to convince them of the error of their ways. In the late sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne famously argued that even if some Native Americans ate human flesh, it was Europeans, with their vicious persecutions and religious wars, who were the true “cannibals.” It is not always easy to excavate what indigenous people actually said from the European texts that reported on them. Still, their voices were not by any means entirely erased or obscured. Missionary reports—especially the ones known as Jesuit Relations—were written in part to instruct future missionaries on what they could expect in their missions. They therefore generally made every effort to report accurately on indigenous customs, and on the arguments that indigenous people might make in response to attempts to convert them to Christianity.Graeber and Wengrow devote many pages to this literature. Their survey, however, does little but repeat points that many scholars—Anthony Pagden, Tzvetan Todorov, Sankar Muthu, Michèle Duchet, David Allen Harvey and Antoine Lilti, to name just a few—have made before them. And while they are correct to say that this literature played a role in the genesis of Enlightenment thought, so did many other things: the scientific revolution, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, the radical religious ideas of Benedict Spinoza, the rise of the periodical press, critiques of absolute monarchy. Enlightenment thinking, on human equality as on many other matters, had multiple, complex roots. To make a case that the “indigenous critique” mattered more than everything else requires looking at the Enlightenment in its full complexity and weighing its different elements against each other. This, Graeber and Wengrow fail to do.The truly egregious part of their analysis, however, goes beyond simply the repetition of commonplaces and an exaggerated emphasis on one part of the story. Graeber and Wengrow don’t just attribute Enlightenment thought on equality to the “indigenous critique” in general, but to one “indigenous intellectual” in particular. The figure in question was named Kandiaronk, a leading figure in the Native American nation known variously as the Huron, Wendat and Wyandot. After the destruction of their homeland by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the seventeenth century, many of them ended up in French Canada. Kandiaronk impressed many French observers with his eloquence and brilliance, frequently met with the royal governor, Count Louis de Buade de Frontenac, and may himself have traveled to France. In the 1680s, he also almost certainly met a young French soldier with the elaborately aristocratic name of Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron Lahontan, who traveled extensively in North America and learned Native American languages. Lahontan returned to Europe in the early 1690s, and ten years later published a series of works about North America, including one known under the title Dialogues with a Savage. It purported to be an accurate recreation of debates between himself and a Huron he called “Adario,” in which the Huron brilliantly refutes Lahontan’s arguments about the truth and superiority of Christianity, and more generally criticizes European customs. This character was probably based at least in part on Kandiaronk.Lahontan’s Dialogues fit into a long European tradition of what Anthony Pagden calls the “savage critic.” It extends back at least as far as an anticlerical Spanish work of 1519 that featured a Native American chieftain who exposed the delusions of European Christian society. Although often informed by encounters with indigenous people, and with works like the Jesuit Relations, these works were still fundamentally fictional. Critics have almost always assumed the same thing about Lahontan’s Dialogues. The work owes an obvious stylistic debt to the ancient Greek satirist Lucian. Adario’s exposition of Huron religion sounds suspiciously like contemporary European deism. His critique of European marriage customs echoes many European works of the period, including those of the proto-feminist philosopher François Poulain de la Barre. In short, the Dialogues are a classic early Enlightenment work that blend observations of non-European societies with arguments drawn from European intellectual traditions to produce new and radical thought about society, politics and religion, all given extra spice by the figure of the wise “savage” who deliciously exposes one European custom after another as harmful and absurd. It was also just one of many works that used similar devices, including Montesquieu’s vastly more popular Persian Letters of 1721, and Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman of 1747. Lahontan certainly influenced Rousseau, but so did many others.Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist that Lahontan’s Dialogues had greater influence than any of these other books. And more importantly, they also insist that the work was not fictional, but a recreation of actual dialogues between Lahontan and Kandiaronk. Far from being a fictional character devised by a European to criticize his own society, “Adario” was a real indigenous intellectual whose powerful words amazed Europeans with the force of truth, and forced a fundamental reevaluation of European notions of equality. It is a striking claim.But what is the evidence for it? Graeber and Wengrow cite many different sources in their impressive footnotes, but not all of them actually support their case. The Canadian scholar John Steckley, for instance, in an article they cite, writes of the Dialogues: “Although some turns of phrase sound Native, and may have been lifted from Kandiaronk's speeches, Adario's critical voice of pristine purity spoke with Lahontan's jaded intellectual accent. It reflects a wealth of embittering experiences the Baron had had with European society in areas of life that had not touched the Wyandot of Michilimakinac.” This does not exactly support the claim made in the text of The Dawn of Everything. The most important source Graeber and Wengrow draw on is a book entitled Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands, by Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Seneca descent. Graeber and Wengrow not only quote her at length, but paraphrase her arguments very closely. Mann argued that the “flat dismissal” of the Dialogues as an authentic transcript of a Native American voice reflected racism and a “western sneer.” She argues that in fact a “beguiled Lahontan” took elaborate notes as he conversed with Kandiaronk, and then later put them together into the Dialogues.But what is Mann’s principal evidence? In her book, she triumphantly quotes Lahontan himself: “When I was in the village of this [Native] American, I took on the agreeable task of carefully noting all his arguments. No sooner had I returned from my trip to the Canadian lakes than I showed my manuscript to Count Frontenac, who was so pleased to read it that he made the effort to help me put these Dialogues into their present state.” The case seems irrefutable, except for one important point: These words come from the preface to the Dialogues themselves. And as anyone familiar with European fiction knows, there was no conceit more common for European authors of this period than presenting a fictional work as a first-hand account of real events. “The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend…” This is how Jonathan Swift began his most famous work of fiction, but few of his readers believed that a real Lemuel Gulliver had actually visited a land called Lilliput. Nor did they believe that the best-selling novels Pamela and Clarissa were real collections of letters. If serious scholars have failed to give Mann’s work much credit, it is not because of racism or a “western sneer,” but because her arguments on this score simply do not hold water.The error that Mann makes—and that Graeber and Wengrow uncritically repeat—is in some ways an understandable one. It can be very tempting to mistake Western critiques of the West, placed in “indigenous” mouths, for authentically indigenous ones. The language is familiar, and the authors know exactly which chords will resonate with their audience. Genuinely indigenous critiques, coming out of traditions with which people raised in Western environments are unfamiliar, can seem much more strange and difficult. The reductio ad absurdum of this mistake comes when people take as authentically Native American the words of Pocahontas, in the Disney film of the name: “You think you own whatever land you land on / The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim…”The error is also—of course—deeply political. It fits what Graeber and Wengrow describe in their conclusion as a principal aim of the book: to “[expose] the mythical substructure of our ‘social science,’” and to reveal, contrary to what social scientists insist, that humans still have “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.” Many Native Americans in the time of Kandiaronk still possessed this freedom, they claim. European societies, meanwhile, were incapable of real self-criticism. It took the wise Huron to open Western eyes to the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics. Graeber and Wengrow themselves now want to play a similar role.Unfortunately, if their treatment of the Enlightenment is any indication, in pursuing this goal they are willing to engage in what comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice. I don’t have the expertise to comment on Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments about matters other than the French Enlightenment, but the quality of their scholarship on this subject does not bode well for the remainder of the book, to say the least.David A. Bell teaches history at Princeton and is the author, most recently, of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).Update: An earlier version of this piece mistakenly cited the author of Gulliver's Travels. The work is by Jonathan Swift, not Daniel Defoe.

A video showing controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson's remarks about institutional racism has gone viral after he used air quotes when discussing the issue during a Thursday appearance on the BBC show Question Time.

Peterson, 59, alongside other guests, was discussing whistleblower Azeem Rafiq's ordeal with the racism he experienced while he played for Yorkshire County Cricket Club.

Rafiq, 30, who is of Pakistani descent, told a British parliamentary on Tuesday committee that he experienced "inhuman" treatment during his time with the club. He played for Yorkshire from 2008 to 2014.

Read more Jordan Peterson Says COVID Vaccine Mandates Imitate Totalitarian States Jordan Peterson Says COVID Vaccine Mandates Imitate Totalitarian States

"This cricket player was experiencing racism, by his own account," said Peterson in a clip that has at the time of writing amassed more than 400,000 views. "The question is: Who, when, what, exactly— because otherwise it degenerates into something like a discussion of structural racism."

"And when it becomes obstructed up to that level, it pits group against group which I think is entirely counterproductive. That actually doesn't address the issue," he continued.

Using his hands to make air quotes when saying "racism," Peterson said it is a "global and vague term."

Peterson was interrupted by Scottish National Party MP Stephen Flynn on his use of the hand gesture, who asked: "Sorry, why would you possibly do that, what does that mean? The inverted commas as if it's not a real thing?"

Peterson responded by claiming he meant the gesture is "indicative of low-resolution thinking."

After a brief silence, he added: "What I mean by that is we use all these terms frequently in discussions like this which are containers of undifferentiated content."

Read more Jordan Peterson's '12 More Rules For Life' Surges into Amazon Top 10 Jordan Peterson's '12 More Rules For Life' Surges into Amazon Top 10

The 59-year-old went on to defend his use of air quotes, saying that he is not "denying his [Rafiq's] experience."

"What I'm asking is who and when and you just answered that," he said. "So I would say those specific people should be held specifically to account to their actions, before any movement up the hierarchy to something like discussion of racism, which I don't think is helpful."

"It doesn't address the issue—that does not mean "racism" [in air quotes] does not exist, that is not what I'm saying in the least," Peterson continued.

"Maybe let's do less of the hand movements and look at the evidence," Labour MP Stella Creasy told Peterson.

Earlier, on Wednesday, Rafiq said he expects that his account of racism in the English game may encourage other victims to come forward with their ordeals.

"I do feel now it's going to be a little bit of floodgates and a lot of victims of abuse are going to come forward and we need to listen to them, hear them, support them and work out a plan to make sure this doesn't happen again," Rafiq told Sky Sports.

According to Jonathan Savoir, CEO of supply chain technology company Quincus, retailers are ordering products from multiple manufacturers, rather than a single supplier, as they seek to minimize the risk of shortages this holiday season.

The data he tracks shows that electronics and household items are the products being over-ordered the most.

Over-ordering puts extra strain on logistics providers, and these retailers also risk ending up with leftover stock after the holidays.

"People don't look at in aggregate," he said, "they look at it from their point of view: 'I want to have my store filled, I don't want to have it empty when Black Friday comes around and there are people storming into my stores.'"

Again, thanks to the pandemic, most consumers also over-react by consuming and storing more than the right amount of commodities.

---

So, it's a classic "Fallacy of Composition" problem.

Without this fallacy, there would be no macroeconomics, and we would only have microeconomics.

What's a rational decision at the individual level has become, at the macroeconomic level, a general market failure, generating many unexpected harmful externalities, like inflation, logistics problems, and much higher energy and commodity prices than otherwise.

The government's money-distributing "generosity" has simply added further fuel to the fire, by adding to the aggregate demand and reducing the labor supply, showing once again the road to hell is paved with sincerity.

---

So, what appears to be a supply-side problem is actually a demand-side one.

The "wrong price signals" would lead to over-real-investment, and the resulting excess productive capacities everywhere will, after the global pandemic has fully tapered, turn the current global inflationary pressure back into a deflationary one, or so-called secular stagnation, meaning that the main macroeconomic problem will still be a relative lack of global aggregate demand.

--

Exactly 20 years ago today, President George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law and created the Transportation Security Administration, better known as the TSA. A response to the 9/11 attacks, the TSA was thought to be a necessary tool for confronting the new reality of terror in the skies.
Two decades later, the TSA has more than 54,000 employees, a budget of $8 billion dollars, and a long track record of harassing passengers for no good reason. Far from contributing to actual safety, the TSA is a stunning example of government failure: Its absurd travel restrictions make air travel no safer, deprive passengers of their civil liberties, and make the process of flying much more costly, time-consuming, inconvenient, and unenjoyable. The agency should never have been created, and its 20th birthday is as good a time as any to abolish it.
For starters, the TSA routinely fails at its main purpose: preventing passengers from carrying deadly weapons onto airplanes. TSA agents constantly miss weapons, drugs, and other illicit items when government agents try to smuggle them in as part of testing.
"TSA screeners failed to detect weapons, drugs, and explosives almost 80 percent of the time," noted the Heritage Foundation in 2017. "While the exact failure rate is classified, multiple sources indicate it is greater than 70 percent." During one test, at the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport, the TSA's failure rate was 95 percent.
The 9/11 terror attacks, in which a small number of men were able to use crude, simple weapons to hijack airplanes and crash them into important buildings, were a scarring moment for the nation. The U.S. government vowed to be more vigilant. But the truth of the matter is that preventing hijackings is now trivially easy: Pilots can lock the cockpit doors, which are almost impossible for intruders to breach. Prior to 9/11 most airplane hijackings involved detours to different locations; hijackers did not intend to crash the planes, and thus neither crews nor passengers had much reason to fight back. This calculus is forever changed: Would-be plane hijackers will face insurmountable difficulties, whether or not they've received aggressive pat-downs from the TSA.
Meanwhile, the TSA's security theater has made air travel a much more grueling process. It's not just the ritualistic humiliation of having to remove belts and shoes, empty out backpacks and suitcases, and submit to full-body scanners. TSA agents are also frequently caught stealing from passengers, groping them, and delaying them for no reason. Again, there is no point to any of this. It does not make people safer. If anything, it makes us less safe: It is likely that some people choose to drive to their destination, rather than deal with the hassle. Car travel, though, is far more dangerous than air travel—many more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes each year. And not even COVID-19 could tip the scales in airplanes' favor, according to The Washington Post.
Enough is enough. There is not a single good reason that Americans should have to endure such misery at the hands of this utterly pointless bureaucracy. The best time to abolish the TSA was right after it was created. The second-best time is now.

FREE MINDS
New York Times columnist David Brooks has written a terrific recap of the recent National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, for The Atlantic. His article makes many of the criticisms that Reason's Stephanie Slade has leveled at the right's latest intellectual trend:

The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called "the left" that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.
They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.…
Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.…
Sitting in that Orlando hotel, I found myself thinking of what I was seeing as some kind of new theme park: NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that America's rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.

Read the full article here.

President Joe Biden has nominated Gigi Sohn, an attorney and progressive foe of many conservative media organizations, to serve on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Sohn previously co-founded Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that encouraged cable providers to stop airing right-wing channels. She previously called on the FCC to rescind Sinclair Broadcast Group's broadcast license, due to the channel's conservative bias:

This, and its lack of candor during the failed merger with Tribune, calls into question Sinclair's fitness to be a broadcast licensee. Will @FCC do anything when Sinclair's licenses are up for renewal? https://t.co/EPNExBfXS0
— Gigi Sohn (@gigibsohn) October 21, 2018

She has also said that Fox News is far more dangerous for democracy than Facebook. Breitbart's tech reporter, Allum Bokhari, described her as a "pro-censorship partisan leftist" and warned that her confirmation to the FCC would be terrible for conservative news channels.
But one conservative channel disagrees: specifically, One America News Network (OANN). The network is "working behind the scenes to rally conservative support for Gigi Sohn," according to The Washington Free Beacon. Why? Well:
Conservative political operative Bradley Blakeman told the Washington Free Beacon that OANN's president personally arranged for him to appear in a pro-Sohn segment on the network and that OANN executives believe Sohn will be an ally in the network's fight to wrest market share away from Fox News.
The belief is rooted in Sohn's criticism of Fox News. Sohn has questioned whether Fox News should be investigated for being "state-sponsored propaganda with few if any opposing viewpoints." Fox News and OANN compete for many of the same viewers, and former president Donald Trump encouraged his voters to leave Fox News for OANN or right-wing outlet Newsmax.
Sohn has called for the FCC to intervene in disputes between major cable companies and smaller content providers like OANN. In 2018, OANN, Newsmax, and Sohn found themselves fighting on the same side against the more powerful conservative network Sinclair. According to Blakeman, OANN executives believe that, if confirmed, Sohn will support them in "carriage disputes" with carriers like AT&T and Comcast.
OANN president Charles Herring endorsed Sohn in a letter last week, praising her "strong belief and advocacy for diversity in the programming lineup." A source with knowledge of the situation said Herring is meeting with Republican senators on Capitol Hill to advance Sohn's nomination. He also arranged for Blakeman, a former adviser to George W. Bush, to praise Sohn on the air.
In an interview that aired Friday on OANN, Blakeman noted approvingly that Sohn "disagrees with" cancel culture and touted her regulatory credentials.
A conservative news network is supporting the confirmation of a progressive government bureaucrat because management believes the bureaucrat will make life even worse for its competitors. So much for principles.

QUICK HITS
• Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is begging Democrats to reform marijuana laws before the GOP retakes control of Congress. "If the Republicans get back in charge, which I think we will, the bills are never going to happen because our leadership doesn't like them."
• Vice President Kamala Harris' communications director has resigned.
• The College Democrats of America is collapsing amid several different cancel culture scandals: One young leader has been asked to denounce a bad tweet she sent when she was 13.
• An analysis of National Science Foundation grants between 1990 and 2020 found an increasing leftward slant.
• "Futurists have their heads in the clouds": some predictions for the year 2050.
• Early midterm preference for Republicans has reached an all-time high:

Jesus Christ.
Strongest preference for Republicans since 1981.
If something doesn't change soon, we're in for an enormous red wave in 2022. pic.twitter.com/cYTEXzdIOc
— Noah Smith ???? (@Noahpinion) November 18, 2021

The post The TSA's 20th Birthday Should Be Its Last appeared first on Reason.com.

Faced with a wave of Covid-19 cases, EU countries are reintroducing significant restrictions. Belgium has made working-from-home compulsory four days per week. Austria has imposed a lockdown on the unvaccinated and looks set for a full one in certain areas of the country. The Netherlands has forced early closure of shops and restaurants and even banned spectators from attending large, outdoor sporting events.
Here we go again, you might think: another winter wave, bringing fresh threats that if these measures don’t alleviate cases, fuller shutdowns could result. Despite having vaccines for nearly a year, better testing technologies than before, and new treatments, policies once deemed emergency measures seem have become unnervingly routine.
What exactly is the thinking here? As I explain in my book Economics in One Virus, Covid-19 was a thorny externality problem initially because any person’s behaviour risked having extremely damaging effects on others’ health. Nobody knew who was infectious, so to protect the most vulnerable and avoid the prospect of overcrowded hospitals, politicians made us act as if everyone might be infected. Lives were saved, but the costs of such crude shutdowns were huge. Business closures, lost schooling, and lost liberties clearly brought big net harms to most people’s wellbeing, whether or not the value of lives saved outweighed these effects across society as a whole.
Notice, though, the most robust argument for mandates: that if we’d had no lockdowns, too much unnecessary death would have resulted. ‘Stop the spread’ was, at best, about buying time for building more hospital capacity, producing effective treatments, and, ultimately, vaccines, to mitigate the worst human costs of this disease killing people in the future. As economist Alex Tabarrok explained at a Cato event in April, as a precautionary measure in spring 2020, or when vaccines were imminent, such extreme measures to save lives were most defensible. They are far less sensible as an ongoing tool for managing the pandemic.
How on earth, then, are such restrictive measures back on the agenda today? It’s clear Covid-19 is here to stay. With a more transmissible variant, cases might rise very acutely in winter months of ‘normal’ behaviour, even though vaccines do mitigate the risk of symptomatic disease. But what the vaccines are particularly good at is reducing the risk of hospitalisation and death. There’s still an ‘externality’ risk, but the worst costs have been severely dented and, to put it bluntly, personalised. The best thing anyone can do to mitigate their own risk is get vaccinated or boosted. If they don’t, the biggest risks fall primarily on themselves, so long as others have the possibility of vaccination too.
Covid-19 for the vaccinated now appears to produce death risks similar in magnitude to seasonal flu, whereas in a susceptible population it was thought to have an infection fatality rate perhaps 14 times higher. Yet the US CDC now says the unvaccinated are 6.1 times more likely to catch Covid-19 and 11.3 times more likely to die than the vaccinated. The UK government likewise believes its vaccines are 65-90% effective against symptomatic disease and that even among known cases in the oldest age groups after this protection has been breached, death rates for the unvaccinated are almost three times higher.
Given we don’t impose lockdowns for these flu risks, then, why are governments contemplating such restrictions in heavily vaccinated populations? The Netherlands has vaccinated 85% of adults, and the figure is higher still in Belgium.
One argument is that with modest proportions of populations still unvaccinated, a very large outbreak will still cause needless illness and high numbers of unnecessary deaths. Yet this raises an impolitic question: what burdens, in the form of coercive mandates and indefinite suspensions of normal life, should large groups bear to protect the unvaccinated, the overly neurotic, very low-risk children, or the much smaller proportion of the population left immunocompromised or unable to get vaccinations? 

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The unvaccinated can get vaccinated and front the consequences of not taking the shots. Pandering to the neurotic offers no path to normality and intolerable costs. Kids surely stand to suffer more, on average, from ongoing life disruption, given their risks of death are tiny. Those still at severe risk are most deserving of some protection, but in a vaccinated world are more identifiable and smaller in number – indeed, vaccines make genuine ‘focused protection’ of the most immunocompromised and vulnerable more achievable. Whatever you thought about it last year, that approach of protecting care homes and those at highest risk is surely more cost-effective today.
A second argument is that, absent new restrictions, hospitals still risk being overwhelmed with another big surge. If true, though, this is a shocking indictment of government planning. Covid-19 has now been with us for nearly 20 months; the more highly transmissible Delta variant has been known for almost a year. That seems plenty of time to have built or at least adjusted facilities, beefed up ICU capacity, and expanded hospital staffing to manage them. Are our continental neighbours expected to live partial lives each winter because of this gross mismanagement?
In reaction to the baffling Dutch measures, its football federation and top two professional leagues described the new restrictions as ‘policy poverty’. It’s difficult to disagree. Just as Europe failed to learn quickly the East Asian lessons last year about lower cost ways to reduce risks, it has failed to adjust its thinking about when to intervene to the new context today. And so, we get the lazy 2020 playbook of shutting things down on repeat.

The post Returns to lockdown in Europe are a sign of lazy 2020 thinking appeared first on CapX.

That was illustrated at the recent 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) climate summit, in Glasgow, where governments, automakers and airlines worked on deals to cut global transport emissions. Because transportation is responsible for one-fifth to one-quarter of global emissions, that seems like a good step.

But there are problems.

Shifting away from consumerism and supporting local businesses and production would go as far or farther in reducing shipping emissions, although cleaner ways to fuel ships are needed.

With aviation and shipping, the main idea is to switch from polluting fossil fuels to "biofuels." But with expected increases in both sectors, that could mean destroying more natural areas or displacing food-growing lands with crops for fuel production.

And as George Monbiot points out, "Flying accounts for most of the greenhouse gas emissions of the super-rich, which is why the wealthiest 1% generate roughly half the world's aviation emissions. If everyone lived as they do, aviation would be the biggest of all the causes of climate breakdown." Finding better fuels is important, but cutting back on flying--which would mostly affect the affluent--is just as critical. But, of course, that doesn't fit with the current growth-and-profit economic paradigm.

As for shipping, Reuters notes around 90 per cent of traded goods travel by sea, and shipping accounts for about three per cent of global emissions. Our current global economic system encourages corporations to go where resources and labour are cheap and standards are often low to maximize profits. Shifting away from consumerism and supporting local businesses and production would go as far or farther in reducing shipping emissions, although cleaner ways to fuel ships are needed.

With the automobile industry, it's all about electric vehicles. And the focus is on direct emissions rather than the many other environmental impacts, from production to massive infrastructure requirements. Few people even question car culture--why we've decided so many people should each have large machines to transport them in isolation. And why they should be provided with the massive infrastructure to make it possible, from roads and parking to malls and drive-throughs.

This idea of constant economic growth--with the excessive consumption and waste required to fuel it--has become so ingrained that we resort to incremental measures in the midst of a crisis. We just can't imagine different ways of seeing, and so we try to shoehorn solutions into an outdated system that wasn't designed to be sustainable.

As for the COP26 automakers' pledge--which would require all cars and vans sold to be zero-emission by 2040--as inadequate as it is, not everyone is on board.

Again, electric vehicles are important. They pollute far less than internal combustion engine vehicles and can last longer. But what we should really focus on is reducing private automobile use, through good public transit, active transport like cycling and walking, increasingly popular modes like e-bikes and scooters, better urban planning and design, and new technologies like self-driving vehicles that can facilitate car sharing and efficient ride-hailing services. All this would dramatically reduce congestion and pollution, and would even make it possible to convert massive amounts of road and parking to green space.

And while electric vehicle sales are increasing rapidly, they're still far outnumbered by gasoline and diesel car sales. As for the COP26 automakers' pledge--which would require all cars and vans sold to be zero-emission by 2040--as inadequate as it is, not everyone is on board. Even though Volkswagen and Toyota are major electric and hybrid vehicle manufacturers, they didn't back the commitment. The U.S., China and Germany also refused to support the pledge.

According to Reuters, "The wider lesson is that private players can't be relied on to stick their necks out if public action is absent." This shows how essential it is for society to get involved. It's mainly up to governments, business, industry and international agencies to resolve the climate crisis, but without massive public pressure, they'll continue down the status quo road until it's too late to keep the planet from heating to catastrophic levels.

Climate conferences such as COP are important, and perhaps they're more than just "blah, blah, blah," but until we replace the outdated human-invented systems that got us into this mess, we'll only be downshifting rather than putting on the brakes. That's not good enough.

pamela paul

How do you balance work, family, moving and a diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease? Ross Douthat will be here to talk about his new book, “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” What happens when a model-turned-journalist heads to North Dakota to report on the oil boom and a divided America? Elisabeth Egan will join us to talk about “O Beautiful,” our November pick for Group Text. Liz Harris will be here to talk about what’s going on in the publishing world. Plus, my colleagues and I will talk about what we’re reading. This is the Book Review podcast from The New York Times. It’s November 19. I’m Pamela Paul. Ross Douthat joins us now from New Haven. He is an opinion columnist for The New York Times, my colleague here. He was previously an editor at The Atlantic. He’s the author of many books, including “The Decadent Society,” “To Change the Church,” “Bad Religion” and “Privilege.” And his latest book is called “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” Ross, thanks for being here.

Thanks so much for having me.

So you and I have never met, never spoken.

We’ve exchanged some excellent emails, though.

Yes, we have emailed.

I feel like I know you very well.

Right, in the way that the internet works, we are long-term acquaintances. So this is a really different book for you. It’s a memoir. Let’s start with before the book. What happened?

I guess the genesis of the book was a great folly, where my wife and I, about almost seven years ago now, were living in Washington, D.C. And we were both from New England, from Connecticut. Our families were up here. And we had this idea. And maybe it was sort of a special fantasy for me in particular of getting out of the city, living somewhere between the suburbs and the country, raising our kids with fields and stone walls and chickens and all kinds of sort of urban dwellers’ ideas of what people in the country have and enjoy and do. And we weren’t the only people who had this fantasy, but unlike some of our friends, we actually decided to make it real. And so we sold our house in D.C. and plowed the money into this 1790s farmhouse about an hour and a half from New York, with a barn and a pasture and all kinds of good things. And unfortunately, literally as we were in the process of making the move, I became very, very sick. And the first phase of that sickness, while we were still in Washington, was just sort of total mystery, where I basically, over a matter of months, became just a shell of myself. I lost 40 pounds. I was sleeping an hour a night. I had bizarre pain all over my body, phantom heart attacks, went to the emergency room all the time. And nobody knew what was wrong with me, none of the doctors in D.C. I probably saw 12 doctors. And basically, they all said, “Your blood tests look negative. You’re probably under a lot of stress. And this is some sort of anxiety-induced condition.” The only people who didn’t think that were the psychiatrists I saw, interestingly, who said, “no, this is almost certainly a physical problem, Ross. And you need to figure out what it is.” And then when we got to Connecticut and literally sort of dragged ourselves there and collapsed in this dream house that was now a terrifying, crumbling haunted house, then the doctor said, “Oh, no, we see this all the time. You almost certainly have Lyme disease,” this tick-borne illness named for a couple of cute antiquing towns on the Connecticut shoreline. And that’s where I entered into the second world, which is the meat of the story of the book, which is the world of not medical mystery, but medical controversy.

All right, we’re going to just do some Lyme disease basics for people who are not from Connecticut, or frankly, now, all of New England, the mid-Atlantic region, and probably much of the rest of the country, where Lyme disease lurks. I take it that you walked into a field or even just grass at some point during this process of buying a house in Connecticut.

It was a very overgrown property. And we did the house inspection. And I literally walked down to the field and pushed aside branches. And I saw a herd of deer. And Lyme disease is, of course, carried by the deer tick. So almost certainly that is when I got bitten, yes.

So this is like the what-not-to-do of being in tick country. But most people, again, think, oh, but Lyme disease, surely you must have noticed a tick bite.

So I had a red swelling on my neck. I did not see the tick. This happened at a time of year when, I later learned, ticks are in what’s called their nymphal stage, when they’re about the size of a poppy seed.

Right, there’s a terrifying online thing where they show a lemon poppy seed muffin that has a few ticks on it. Have you seen this?

No.

And it’s like “spot the tick.”

This is triggering.

I’m sorry.

No, that’s about right. So it’s very easy to get one, especially at that time of year, and not see the tick itself. I did have a red swelling that I was told by one of the first doctors I saw before I started to feel really sick was probably just a boil and would go away. I never got the bull’s-eye rash. There is a conventional presentation of Lyme disease where you get a bull’s-eye rash and then you get a fever, and then if you don’t treat it, later, you get joint pain. And having grown up in Connecticut, that was just sort of how I understood Lyme disease. But in fact, only about 50 percent of people get the bull’s-eye rash. And the blood tests are early on only about 50 percent accurate. And the presentation of Lyme disease can be, it turns out, incredibly complex. And then there’s this argument that’s been going on for decades about what you do if the initial round of treatment doesn’t get you better. And most people who get Lyme disease, 80 percent, let’s say, take four to six weeks of antibiotics and mostly feel better. But a lot of people don’t. And to put it mildly, doctors do not agree about what you do then.

All right, I want to get into the controversy in a minute, but just to go back to the symptoms for a moment, because what you described sounds kind of flu-like, right? It’s a fever, it’s joint aches. But earlier, when you were talking about it, you were talking about nightmares and one hour of sleep at night. What were the symptoms actually like? And did you get brain fog?

So I got brain fog later on, deeper into some of the weirder things I did for treatment. What I got initially was this sort of baseline feeling of disintegration, which I think is fairly common with people who have chronic illnesses. One writer compared it to feeling like every cell of her body was somehow dissolving. And to me, it felt sort of how you feel like in the last day of a fever, when your body is disassociated from yourself. So that was sort of the baseline. But then there was pain, pain just moving around, really severe pain in my shoulder one day, in my ankle the next day, inside my throat, my chest. Hence the feeling that, oh, this must be a heart attack. Or I would wake up in the night feeling like my throat was closing up. And the medical system is based around specialization, so you have stomach problems, you go to a gastroenterologist. You have chest pain, you go to a cardiac specialist. And in fact, Lyme disease is not the only disease that does this, but it gets in everywhere, basically, and causes weird symptoms all over your systems, and particularly in your muscles and joints. Then once I started taking antibiotics, I stabilized. The dissolving feeling went away. The sleeplessness went away. But the pain just stayed. There was just always, always this kind of migratory pain that basically, this is not something I had ever understood before, but your body can sort of feel like a cage, right, that you’re trapped inside. And that was how I felt five to six days out of seven every week.

All right, you mentioned before that after four to six weeks of antibiotic treatment, most people get better. Tell us a little bit about what long-term Lyme is, for those who don’t get better after that initial four to six weeks of antibiotic treatment.

I mean, basically, it’s just the persistence of these strange various symptoms without relief or with periodic relief and then relapse across months and years. And it varies from person to person. There are people for whom it takes the form of terrible exhaustion, just can’t get out of bed, to people who have terrible brain fog. Amy Tan, the “Joy Luck Club” novelist, had chronic Lyme disease and wrote about it as — she would drive to the grocery store and forget what city she was in, forget how to get home. So it can have these strong mental symptoms. But again, in my case, it was mostly physical pain. And I was fortunate, as horrible as the pain was, that, for the most part, my mind continued to work, which enabled me to continue writing newspaper columns for this newspaper. And readers of those columns from 2016 or so can go back and judge for themselves, I guess, how much my mind was affected.

But you grew up in Connecticut. You are not unfamiliar with Lyme disease. I’m curious as, before you had Lyme yourself, what did you think of this idea of long-term Lyme, which falls into this kind of general family of diseases that are kind of looked at with a jaundiced, skeptical eye, like fibromyalgia, like chronic fatigue syndrome? There’s this question mark around it. Does it really exist? Are these people pretending? Is it psychological? What did you think before you had it?

I mean, I guess I would say that to the extent that I had a clear opinion, there is some chronic illness in my family. And having known people who were chronically ill, I generally tended to think it was real. Like, I was not the kind of person who said, oh, you’re just tired and malingering or complaining or something. But I also assumed that it wasn’t actually that bad, I guess, right? That it’s like, oh — it’s sort of like a Victorian woman on a fainting couch, right? And in fact, depictions of chronic illness are often gendered in this way, where it’s assumed to be this woman problem that’s kind of mysterious. And that’s something that you see once you get deep into the culture of chronic illness and the debates about how it’s treated. Traditionally, it’s often been male doctors telling female patients that these diseases are all in their head. I was relatively open-minded at an intellectual level to the possibility that there are diseases that existing medical science doesn’t know how to treat. But I was not prepared for what was actually just how bad these diseases could be and also just how extreme, when you have something like this, you can be willing to get, right? So, eventually, I followed what is the outsider medical approach to treating chronic Lyme, which is to take lots of antibiotics over a long period of time. And that is the core thing that eventually helped me get better. But I went to extremes. I took more antibiotics than even my outsider doctors recommended. I did things like have a chiropractor put magnets on your body. You go and get IV vitamin C from a nurse practitioner who has tarot cards all over her office.

Did you think you would ever get to this point?

No, and you tell yourself — I mean, this is sort of — there are these stages, right, where in your first stage, you say, well, I’m sick, but I’m not that sick. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to do that. And then you do that thing, and then you move on to the next stage. And I now have a frequency generator. It’s actually sitting in the attic where I’m recording this podcast. It generates sound frequencies that are alleged to shatter bacteria. And it’s the kind of thing if you read about it on the internet, it seems like the purest pseudoscience. And I never would have imagined myself trying it. But in the end, not only did I try it, I acquired such a box and used it periodically over a period of many years and actually found it tremendously helpful. And when you tell this kind of story, and hopefully, this works in the book, right, you’re trying to strike a balance between — on the one hand, I want to persuade the skeptical reader that, one, chronic Lyme disease is real, two, it can be treated, three, it can be treated in a scientific manner that is not just mystical and woo-woo. So I want to be persuasive on that point. But you also want to be true to the sheer weirdness of this experience, right? So the strange things that you do and the even stranger fact that you do them and then they seem to work, right? So that’s the hopefully successful balance of the narrative in the book.

All right, the strangeness of the treatment, I want to talk about. But let’s talk first about what drove you there. I mean, describe in your own words, what did it feel like at its very worst?

I mean, at its very worst, it was this double prison, basically, where, first, your self is sort of trapped inside your body, and your body is always in pain. And you wake up with pain, you go to sleep with pain. You can never predict exactly what the pain is going to be from day to day. Lyme disease has been called the Great Imitator, which I think is a name they originally gave to syphilis, which similarly gives you symptoms all over your body. So when you have symptoms in your head, right, you get this pounding feeling that almost takes sort of — not almost — that you get a sort of very temporary suicidal ideation, right? You’re like, oh, my God, I just want to kill myself. And that lasts, mercifully, for half an hour, and then it stops. And suddenly, you’re dealing with burning pain on the soles of your feet. And so it’s just, it’s incredibly bizarre. Once you get a little better, the absurdity of it just becomes more apparent. But while you’re in it, it’s just like, my body is a prison. Every normal pleasure is gone. You can’t just eat a normal meal or collapse on the couch and watch TV without being constantly aware of your body in these straits. And then we were in this house, right? This dream house in the country that was basically the Overlook Hotel for us, right? It was like, I was a writer. My wife was pregnant with our third child. And then we had a baby. She’s a writer, too, so neither of us had anywhere to go. We were sort of trapped with each other. Everything we thought we liked about the place became frightening. We didn’t want the kids to play outside or go down to the field or anything like that. And for my wife, it’s like, OK, you trust your husband, you love your husband. He says he has this illness. There are doctors who agree he has this illness, but he can’t get better from it. And you can’t see the physical manifestations of it. He’s just describing symptoms. They change every day. And so part of the drive to get better is just you want relief from the symptoms, but you also want to prove that you can get better, right, to prove to the people who love you that you aren’t writing, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” on your laptop. You basically try and prove the reality of your illness by making it go away. That was what I felt like I needed to do, that if I got better, it would prove that I had really been sick.

How did this experience affect how you’ve reacted to news of Covid and to the treatment of it and to the medical profession generally?

Well, I was a Covid alarmist early because, yeah, I sort of did my own research on the internet and decided this was going to be bad before most other people had decided it would be bad. That did not prevent me from getting Covid early on while traveling on an earlier book tour. So that just goes to show you that having foreknowledge of something doesn’t necessarily help you. But then I’ve had a very mixed and complicated view of the Covid era because first, there was the period of deep uncertainty where nobody really understood anything about the disease. And of course, if you’ve had a chronic illness, you’ve lived with that kind of uncertainty for longer periods of time. So that was familiar to me. And then, so were the medical debates that quickly broke out, these distilled versions of the kind of controversies that I was familiar with. Then you had long haul Covid, right? So you have the chronic form of Covid, which has some clear similarities to chronic Lyme disease, but sort of swept on society much more suddenly, and so got a very different kind of response. But so I’ve been very interested in both talking to people who are dealing with that and writing about it a little bit.

Do you have the long form Covid?

I had the classic presentation of Covid at the start with shortness of breath, chest issues and so on. That went away. And then I had weird Covid symptoms that were different from my Lyme symptoms that lasted until about August of that year. So that is technically long Covid, but then it went away. So it was one illness that my body was actually capable of clearing Covid, seemingly, in a way that it had struggled to clear Lyme. But I mean, the thing that I try and stress about Covid is that I have more sympathy than I would have before for people who are just deeply skeptical of the medical system, because my experience with the medical system with Lyme disease was pretty terrible. At the same time, you’re trying not to let that skepticism curdle into a full rejectionism, where you end up saying because Anthony Fauci got these three things wrong, I’m not going to take the vaccine, right? I mean, I’m vaccinated. I think the vaccines work. I’ve done my own research.

No doubt.

No doubt, right, and so I got vaccinated. And I think there has to be a balance that you strike when you have this kind of weird experience that I’ve had, where you are able to say, look, I’ve been to the fringes. I know there are things on the fringes that are actually probably true that the establishment gets wrong. At the same time, I’m not going to live completely on the fringe and reject everything that the establishment has to offer, because official medicine does a lot of things incredibly well. I think that’s clearly a tough balance for both individuals and cultures to strike.

So it’s fitting that we’re talking about Covid now, even though we started with Lyme, because you and I were scheduled to talk about your previous book on the podcast when the world shut down, went into lockdown. And so you were one of the three episodes that didn’t happen of this podcast in 2020. And this is a very different book from that book and from all of your previous books. What was it like writing a memoir? How is the experience different from working on your much more argument-based, historically-based, politically-oriented books?

I mean, it’s a strange thing to say about a book that’s about a very harrowing experience with overtones of Stephen King, but it was a lot of fun to write. And part of that, I’m sure, is just a catharsis of spending many years as a writer, as a kind of quasi public figure, writing constantly and never actually writing about the most important thing that was happening to me. So it’s nice to have actually done that now. But also, it’s a different kind of writing that has its own real pleasures. The book is, to the extent it works, is, in part, a sort of evocation of the New England landscape, the weird Stephen King-meets-Nathaniel Hawthorne vibes of beauty and horror that the northeast of the United States somehow contains. It’s a sort of psychological and spiritual and emotional portrait and into doing a lot of things that you just don’t get to do when you’re trying to analyze what happened in the Virginia gubernatorial election. God willing, nothing this interesting will ever happen to me again, so I don’t intend to write more memoirs. But this kind of more literary writing is actually a great pleasure. And maybe I’ll find a different way to do more of it in the future.

But that it doesn’t involve you getting —

Yeah, I’m not going to go infect myself with West Nile virus in order to produce a sequel.

“The Deeper Places.”

Even deeper.

All right, the book, again, is called “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery,” by Ross Douthat. Ross, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]

You’ve heard me talk before about our biggest list of the year, which comes out at the end of this month. It’s the 10 Best Books of the Year, 2021 in this case. And if you’re a Times subscriber, we hope you’ll join us on the morning of November 30 for a virtual live edition of this podcast, where we’ll announce the list for the very first time before it gets published. I’ll be joined, of course, by my Book Review colleagues here and many of the people you know from the podcast. And also, actor, writer, and producer Lena Waithe, who recently announced that she’ll be starting her own book imprint, will kick us off with a welcome. Afterwards, like last year, we’re holding a virtual afterparty, where we want to hear from you about your favorite books published this year. You can RSVP at nytimes.com/tenbestbooks. That’s ten, T-E-N, spelled out with letters. My colleague Elisabeth Egan joins us now to talk about her latest pick for Group Text. Liz, thanks for being here.

elisabeth egan

Pamela, thank you for having me.

Before we talk about your pick this month, which is called “O Beautiful,” let’s pause for a moment and rewind a little bit and talk about Group Text more generally, because maybe not all listeners are familiar with it. Maybe they missed earlier episodes in which you talked about it. Can you tell us about the concept here for this monthly feature and what makes a book a Group Text book?

A Group Text book is a book that is perfect to read with your book group. If you don’t have a book group, it’s a perfect book to read with a friend, with your mother, with your neighbor, and just casually compare notes. The idea is it’s a casual book club, low commitment, no guilt. And I pick books that have a discussion-worthy hook, whether it’s ambition, family, money, the future, the environment, something that you can sink your teeth into and have a robust conversation about. And once the review comes out — two weeks later, I do an Instagram Live with the author, where we invite people to come, readers to come and ask questions about the book.

Are all of your Group Texts endorsements? Are you essentially saying all of these are great books, or at least, good enough?

I’m saying all of these are good books to talk about with somebody. I do include some criticism in my reviews. I don’t think they’re all perfect books by any means, but I actually think that’s something that makes a book almost more fun to discuss. I mean, is there any such thing as a perfect book? Actually, in “O Beautiful,” which I’m about to talk to you about, I thought there was too much in this book. There were certain plot threads I might have removed. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I really look forward to talking about it with people, but I think with any book, we’re all critical people in this line of work. I can usually point to something that I might have adjusted, but there’s still plenty to talk about and mull over with friends or whoever you’re talking with about it.

One more general Group Text question — so you’re picking these almost every month. Occasionally, you might skip a month if there’s nothing you feel truly enthusiastic about or think is worthy of discussion. Do you look at these books collectively and say, OK, last month I did a thriller, and this month I need something more serious, or is it really month to month, you’re kind of trying to find the best discussion-worthy book?

It’s a little bit of both. I tend to be drawn like a magnet to certain types of depressing family stories.

This is why we get along.

Exactly, I don’t quite know what it says about me. Maybe it makes me feel better about my own life, but I do have to check myself to avoid getting pulled into the same domestic drama every single time. So I do look back over what I’ve written about in the past few months. And I also try not to always have the books take place in the same place. Nobody wants to read four months in a row a story that takes place in Brooklyn. This month’s book takes us to North Dakota. Last month’s book took us to Colorado. I try to go a little further afield than my own backyard.

I feel like you also have a certain appetite for two other genres that I enjoy — the juicy thriller and the traumatizing memoir.

Guilty as charged. 100 percent. The more stressful and the more depressing, the better for me.

The more fun the conversation. No.

Yes, exactly.

A little bit. Well, let’s talk about this month’s pick, “O Beautiful.” What is this book? Who’s it by? Is it a first book?

This is Jung Yun’s second book. Her first book is a thriller called “Shelter.” And “O Beautiful” follows a young woman — actually, she’s a soon-to-be middle-aged woman — a former model who has left that profession to pursue a career in journalism. She is sent to the oil fields of North Dakota on a reporting assignment that she inherited from her former teacher, who she has had a romantic relationship with. He’s had to step aside from this article that he’s writing because he’s getting a hip replacement. And he sends her in his stead. And he sends her with prescheduled interviews, lists of questions to cover while she’s in North Dakota in this oil boom town, looking for a story. And she’s uniquely qualified to go to this town — It’s called Avery, North Dakota — because she grew up somewhat nearby and is familiar with what the landscape looked like before the oil boom. And she gets there and quickly discovers that what Richard, her professor, has set up for her isn’t really the story that she wants to tell. And she starts to unravel her own story, and it becomes a novel about insiders and outsiders and about this town that’s completely ill-equipped for this influx of somewhat desperate people who are there to work and live in really, really unpleasant and sometimes dangerous conditions in order to have these jobs working on the oil fields. So we follow her as she builds her own story and gets the confidence to stand on her own two feet as a journalist. But it’s also a story about her relationship with her sister, who still lives in the area. And they’ve had a somewhat rocky relationship. Another plot thread I have a weakness for is the sister story, which is well covered here.

Well, you said earlier that there’s almost a little bit too much in this book. What makes you say that?

There’s just a lot of action. There are a lot of characters. She interviews a lot of — her name is Elinor Hanson, I should say. She interviews a lot of people for the story. And there are a bunch of threads — I don’t want to give too much away — that I felt leads into this story that she’s investigating that I felt kind of hit dead ends. But then, again, if you’re a reporter covering a big story, that’s what happens.

All too realistic.

Yes, we all know that.

Are you drawn to books with journalist characters?

Absolutely, are you?

Yeah, but I like movies with journalists, too. They move faster. I like a good “Spotlight.”

Oh, yes, that’s one of my favorite movies. It’s always interesting to see somebody at work. And usually, when we’re reading a book about a journalist, it tends to be somebody who’s more of a veteran journalist. So what I love about Elinor is that she’s just getting started, and she’s gone back to school to get a journalism degree kind of later in life. And I’m always rooting for someone who gets a fresh start not when they’re 25 years old. And her fresh start is extremely complicated by this relationship she’s had with her former teacher. She has a complicated relationship with her editor, who has an entanglement with her former teacher. So you’re really pulling for her to make this new career work.

How good a job does the book do in depicting a journalist? I mean, it got the dead ends right. What else?

It got the all-consuming nature of following your nose. Elinor has a sense that there’s more to this world that Richard has tried to set up in advance of the trip. And she has that sense because she knows this world. And you see her alone at night in her hotel room really struggling with what direction to take the story and how to navigate this landscape that’s both familiar to her and unfamiliar to her, how to tackle the really rampant sexism and sexual harassment and worse that she’s encountering in this mostly male universe that she’s dropped into. And you just see how all-consuming it is. I’ve never been on the heels of a big story the way that she is here, but it’s exactly how I would imagine it to be. And she’s worried about her recording and making sure she takes good notes. And those are all things, even if you’re someone who’s mostly interviewing authors, those are all things you can relate to, and you understand that stress.

Let’s go back to the setting, North Dakota. Earlier you mentioned how you like to find stories that take place in different parts of the world. And in your column this month, you write, “Yun’s field trip to North Dakota provides an on-ramp into conversations about racism, environmentalism, journalism, economics and sisterhood.” Tell us a little bit more about that. We talked about the journalism part. Maybe let’s talk about the racism.

Elinor is half Korean. Her father met her mother while he was stationed overseas in Korea. And she moved to the United States to be with him. And Elinor and her sister grew up on an Army base, where her mother remained an outsider, despite her efforts to put down roots in this place. And her mother eventually leaves when the girls are pretty young. So the book is also about missing her mother, about this unsteady alliance she formed with her sister in her mother’s absence. And wherever Elinor goes, she doesn’t feel entirely American and she doesn’t feel entirely Korean. And when she goes to North Dakota to report this story, she’s not completely confident in her role as a reporter or a journalist. She’s struggling with impostor syndrome in every area of her life. And in terms of the environment, there is almost a gold rush vibe to this town, but the gold is oil. And there are people sleeping six men to a hotel room. Everywhere she goes is totally overcrowded. And in fact, she gets evicted from her hotel room at one point — I won’t go into too much detail about that — but ends up spending some time sleeping in her car in a parking lot that is completely full of RVs and converted trucks, where people are living and cooking in the parking lot at night and using a convenience store for groceries. There’s sort of a “Nomadland” vibe. She’s also exploring the overcrowding and the land grab and the oil grab and the sense, again, of being an outsider there.

You just mentioned “Nomadland,” which has, of course, turned into a movie, but originally a book by the journalist Jessica Bruder. And you also recommend in the column, you compare it to that book and another nonfiction book by a journalist, “Amity and Prosperity,” by Eliza Griswold. It’s kind of interesting that you thought of two nonfiction books when looking for further reading.

I guess it is, but especially “Amity and Prosperity” read to me like a novel. And in fact, Eliza Griswold going to rural Pennsylvania to report on fracking in these two towns that are actually called Amity and Prosperity, to report on the impact of fracking, Elinor Hanson reminded me of Eliza Griswold, who I think of as a poet first and foremost.

And she is.

She is, and she brings this poet’s eye to the telling of this unbelievable story. And she does it with a really light touch. It read, in some ways, like nonfiction in the same way that Eliza Griswold’s book read as fiction. I think the best books sometimes leave you a little bit — not confused but maybe you get so drawn in, you almost forget, is this true or is this not true? And to me, that’s the mark of a really good novel.

All right, so if you were actually in a completely functional, low-key book club, you didn’t have to cook anything or clean up your house before a meeting or worry about Covid, and you were settling down to start talking about this book, what would you really want to know from fellow readers? What would you want to talk about?

I’d want to know which of the stories in this book spoke the most to them. Is it the environmental piece of it? Is it the sister piece of it? Is it the ambition piece of it? Is it the racism and sexism? There are so many different ways the conversation could go. I would just throw the floor open to see where people’s minds went.

And when it got to your turn, what would you say was the part that really spoke most to you in this book?

Surprisingly, to me, it was the sister piece of it because Elinor has been estranged from her sister, who lives a couple of hours away and eventually comes to Avery. And Elinor is really reluctant to reestablish any relationship with her and soon realizes that her sister has an ulterior motive for being there, which I won’t tell you about. But it just got under my skin. It felt like they had so much unfinished business. And that unfinished business remained at the end of the story, which I think is often the case with sisters and with family relationships; not with my own sister, who is an avid fan of this podcast and listens every week. I just want to make that very clear. But the sister story just — it really touched me.

All right, well, that leaves us with a lot to think about and I think will pique many people’s interest. Now I’m very curious. So hopefully, they will all turn to this book, which is called “O Beautiful,” by Jung Yun. And Liz, thanks so much for telling us about it.

Pamela, thank you so much for listening and for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Liz Harris joins us now with some news from the literary world. Hey, Liz.

liz harris

Hey, Pamela. So the National Book Awards were this week, which is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world, which can really change the trajectory of a book and an author’s career. The award for fiction went to Jason Mott, who won for his novel “Hell of a Book,” which weaves together three different narrative threads. There’s an account of a Black author’s book tour, the story of a Black boy in the rural South, and a third character called the Kid, who is possibly imaginary. Mott is a poet, as well as an author. And he said in his speech that his agent picked him out of the unsolicited slush pile 10 years ago, which is great. The nonfiction winner was Tiya Miles, who won for “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake.” The book traces the history of a family through a cotton sack that an enslaved woman gave to her daughter in the 19th century when they were about to be sold apart. Dr. Miles is a historian and a professor at Harvard. And one thing this book has been celebrated for is examining lives that traditional archives and traditional approaches to historical research suppress. The award for poetry went to Martín Espada for his book “Floaters,” which honors migrants who have drowned in the Rio Grande. The award for translated literature went to “Winter in Sokcho,” which is by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. That book is set in a South Korean resort in the off-season. Then the award for young people’s literature went to “Last Night in Telegraph City,” by Malinda Lo, which follows a queer 17-year-old in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Red Scare, who is falling in love for the first time. So those are the big winners.

What was the event like? It was virtual, right?

liz harris

Yeah, this was the second time they had to hold it completely virtually because of the pandemic. They had hoped earlier in the year that they might be able to do this one in person. It’s usually at Cipriani Wall Street. They called it off. But I’ve never been. But you’ve been, right? What’s it like usually?

I have been many times. It’s usually — it’s really fun. I mean, the best part is cocktail hour, of course, because everyone’s wandering around and chatting, and you get to see people and meet people that you might not know and haven’t seen in a long time. And that is followed by the dinner and awards, which are also obviously great and can be incredibly moving. I mean, John Lewis was up there, Bob Caro in recent years, talking about some of the big awards. Edmund White most recently got the big Literarian Award for his body of work. And I know it’s sort of fun and glamorous, and there’s a press pit where you’ll be, Liz. And it’s apparently super fun, even better over there. And you don’t have to wear uncomfortable shoes. And then people get up and they mingle before dessert. And then after, there’s a dance party. And I have never stayed for the dance party. That’s for a different demographic, I feel.

liz harris

I would really like to see this dance party, though. A literary dance party? Can I watch?

Yeah, no, I feel like it’s a mixed metaphor. I don’t know. It’s not quite an oxymoron, but I’m sure lots of things happen there that I just, I don’t need to know about, but are probably fun. So next year, Liz, you’ll be there. And we will wave at one another from across the room and exchange gossip.

liz harris

I’ll see you at the dance party. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Joining us now to talk about what we’re reading, my colleagues Greg Cowles and Andrew LaVallee. Hi, guys.

greg cowles

Hi, Pamela.

andrew lavallee

Hey, Pamela.

So, Greg, tell us what you’re reading right now.

Well, I’m reading a novel that came out in 1990 called “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man,” by Denis Johnson. It is his fourth novel, and I think it was his last book before he became a big star a couple of years later with the story collection “Jesus’s Son.” I’ll tell you, even if you had stripped his name off the cover and anywhere else it appears, there’s no way you wouldn’t recognize this as a Denis Johnson novel because it’s got that misfit Pilgrim protagonist who’s a spiritual seeker at loose ends, who’s kind of wild-eyed and ecstatic, and probably as a direct result of those things, also a little awkward. People aren’t sure how to react to him. In this book, that protagonist is Lenny English. He is a middle-American everyman from prairie Kansas who has survived a suicide attempt and ended up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod in the off-season, where he falls in love with a lesbian and finds work as a radio DJ and a private eye, eventually trying to track down a local artist who’s gone missing. And that’s basically the whole storyline.

You’ve basically told us the beginning, middle and end, is what you’re saying?

Yeah, I mean, plot isn’t really the thing in a Denis Johnson novel. It’s very voicey. It’s all voice. You can tell the publisher was angling to make this his big breakthrough. The version I’m reading is a signed and numbered uncorrected proof, which is just a real bid for attention. And it makes sense because he was so talented and so cool and so much in the sweet spot of that era’s literary voice. It’s funny how when you get a little distance from an era, you suddenly see all the commonalities that you might not have seen at the time, like, oh, who realized Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello sounded so much alike? I guess that was the ‘80s. And so was Denis Johnson, in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s. And this book has a very similar vibe to Robert Stone and Joy Williams and Don DeLillo, even as it carves out its own territory. But I also see why it didn’t break through the way that “Jesus’s Son” did, partly because it overworks some of its religious themes and partly because even though English himself is this great tormented soul, there’s something almost clinical or remote in his observations of the other characters, especially the gay characters. It’s set in Provincetown, and there’s a big gay community there, obviously. But the gay characters in this book come off as maybe too colorful, too side-showy. But it’s still, it’s really fun and funny and beautiful and kind. If we have time, I’d love to read the opening paragraph. “He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn’t have come here at this moment. And also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off. He’d been through several states along the turnpikes, through weary tollgates and strained mechanical restaurants. And by now, he felt as if he’d crossed a hostile foreign land to reach this fog with nobody in it, only yellow lights blinking and yellow signs wandering past the car’s windows silently.” It goes on from there. He goes to a bar and gets drunk, all in this opening paragraph. He gets in a car crash. The cop comes. A cab driver comes to pick him up and tells him, “You made a wrong turn.” And the paragraph ends: “English did not dispute this.” And so there’s a real comedy and a real warmth to this kind of lost soul. And it’s, of course, a resurrection story. It’s there in the title. And there are times that English intimates that maybe he did die in the suicide attempt and that this is all some kind of afterlife. He feels called, maybe not to the priesthood but he meets the love interest at mass. Johnson is really working on all this stuff throughout.

That opening part that you read is just amazing. Just the use of the word “off” alone, it’s really striking.

I’ve read “Jesus’s Son,” of course, and his other story collection, the posthumous “Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” and his debut novel, “Angels.” And then he won a National Book Award for his novel “Tree of Smoke,” which I also read. And it’s kind of a prequel of sorts to “Angels,” even though it’s also entirely a standalone novel and a Vietnam novel. And I’ve read some of his nonfiction. But Denis Johnson was really prolific, and there’s a lot I haven’t read. So this is just kind of going back and filling in gaps when I can. Andrew, what are you reading right now?

I am reading “Our Country Friends,” by Gary Shteyngart, which is — it just came out, and it’s getting a fair bit of attention as kind of being billed as a pandemic novel. And I think that is true. It’s set during the pandemic. Basically there is a main character who’s a somewhat has-been novelist. And his wife and child kind of escape New York City during the pandemic to their house in the Hudson Valley. And they invite three old friends, one of this character’s former students and one character who is known only as the Actor to kind of ride out Covid with them. And it’s about how these six months actually play out in their lives. So the pandemic is the backdrop, but it really is sort of about how their friendships evolve and change, and some of these characters go way back with each other and they have a lot of baggage with each other. And there’s ways that they’ve wronged each other. There’s relationships that they’ve shunted aside. And now they’re all thrown together with not much else to do. And they have to deal with some of this stuff when it comes up. And there’s also these other characters who are a little bit more on the outside who throw other wrenches into the plot. Shteyngart, he’s written a lot of funny stuff. And he has a way of skewering the characters a little bit, even the one who seems to resemble him a little bit.

A little bit. [LAUGHTER]

And I definitely found myself laughing, even at little descriptions of characters in passing. Like, there’s one reference to this guy’s Los Angeles agent. And he describes her voice, “smooth and deceptively creamy like a chilled chia seed parfait.” And there’s another character who he is sort of falling in love with, one of the other occupants of this estate. And he’s spending time with her and just wondering if they’re on a date, but doesn’t want to make it awkward. And there’s a passage where he describes that he had “studiously avoided that type of incident his entire life and had many empty Moleskine diaries to show for it.” [LAUGHTER] So there’s a lot of things like that happen really quickly, but they help offset some of the heaviness that the book gets into, which is a little bit of a departure from some of Shteyngart’s earlier work. The dinner parties are some of those places where it feels so real, like the descriptions of the food and also the descriptions of the affectations of these big-city people who are in this more rural setting, but they still want fancy things. Some of that hit a little too close to home for me.

Gary, of course, was a guest a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. And I can’t remember if this was in the segment or not, but I had a lot of fun decoding which towns in the Lower Hudson Valley he was talking about for each thing. I was like, I see a little bit of Kingston over here. And over here, we have Tivoli and little Upper Red Hook going on.

Yeah, exactly. There’s even one character who is, I sort of realized with some regret, probably one who’s closest to me. And he’s this kind of globetrotting, cool gentleman type. And there’s even a reference to this shop in Hong Kong where he’s bought gifts or something like that. And it’s a shop that I remember going to all the time when I lived there.

I’m going to call you cool, globetrotting guy now.

Yeah. [LAUGHS] Pamela, what are you reading?

So I recently read Richard Powers’s “The Overstory,” just, like, four years after everyone else read it. And of course, the book won the Pulitzer Prize, and I read it right after reading “Bewilderment,” his new novel, when he was a guest on this podcast to talk about that. And I started reading it in a very appropriate place, which was Yosemite. So I thought, when in Yosemite, what are you going to read? I bought “The Overstory.” And you can see the giant sequoias on the cover of the book. I have to say, I don’t remember the hardcover, what it looks like. I have the paperback. And it’s one of the most beautiful covers I’ve seen in a long time. I’m going to talk about the things I like, like the cover. So what everybody had said for a long time was like, this is a book in which trees talk. And part of me was like, oh, that sounds cool, in an Ent, kind of “Lord of the Rings” way. But also, maybe it sounds like something I wouldn’t like. So that both drew and repelled me for a long time and is maybe why I didn’t read it sooner. But it’s more than that. It basically uses, really — let’s see, it’s eight different characters and their stories — it’s nine, but one is a couple — and their family histories, and brings them all up to the present, to apocalyptic “they’re cutting down all the trees” moment that I guess we are still in. And there were things in the book that I really loved, a lot of facts that I enjoyed and didn’t know. For example — did either of you read this book?

Yeah, I read it. I enjoyed it more than I’m sensing you did.

I did not.

Well, OK, I’m going to give away the most fun fact, which is that chestnut trees used to be all over the place in this country and are no longer. Did you know that, Greg?

I didn’t know it until I read “The Overstory,” no.

I have to say that was sort of my favorite fact. And it’s rare that I will interrupt a novel to go over to the internet and just dive into a subject. But I did that with the chestnut tree, because I just thought it was so interesting. You see roasted chestnuts on the streets of New York around this time of year, but where are those chestnuts coming from if they’re all dead? Anyway, I liked that. And I liked — there were scenes that take place at the crown of these giant trees that I found incredibly evocative, not necessarily believable but they’re the stories of people who protest quite actively the chopping down of trees by squatting in the trees.

Yeah, setting up platforms.

Yeah, and refusing to leave. And I’ve never watched news segments on those. I’ve never seen footage. I don’t know if you have. But for me, it was really vivid and I thought powerful and moving. And even a microscopic sliver of me was like, maybe I’ll go move to the top of a tree for a while. It just, I loved that part. What I did not love is, I don’t love books that are preachy or didactic or laden down with a message. I kind of feel like that’s not what I want in a novel. There are ways to explore ideas through different means, I mean, whether it’s Dickens and you’re exploring social and economic issues through character and situation, or with Katie Kitamura with “Intimacies,” where it’s just a little bit more subtle. But I felt like this was very much where op-ed and novel meet, which is, like, in a — I don’t know — a dark bar that I don’t go to. So that part, I didn’t love. I’m curious to hear what you thought about it, Greg.

I really liked it. It is undeniably tendentious. I mean, it has a strong point of view. It’s very much an environmental novel. I feel like it caught an early wave of environmental novels coming out. And so, I was willing to roll with that and just say, OK, this is his point of view and his message. It also came out right after a couple of big nonfiction books on trees and how amazing they are, kind of the networks through the roots and how they help each other and send out chemical messages and things like that. And I feel like Powers incorporates a lot of that into this book. And so what I liked about it was the way that it took that stuff, all that kind of nonfiction knowledge that we are gleaning about trees now, and wove it into a really big, epic, fictional narrative that takes place — I mean, yes, there are these eight storylines, human storylines intersecting with the trees, but it takes place outside the scope of human narrative time. I mean, it connects us to these entities, these trees that live for hundreds and hundreds — like 800 years. And it’s a perspective that fiction does not typically give you.

I agree with everything you just said, everything. And you just said it much more eloquently than I would have and forgotten that, but yes, that is correct. But OK, can I ask one thing, though? And one editor to another, did you also feel that it was just a teeny weeny bit long?

Yes, and I had some problems with the ending. I think that he tries to — well, I don’t know if you’ve reached the ending.

I’m done.

OK, so I think that he casts the ending — it’s an attempt to be optimistic. And oh, everything’s OK, but where the story itself is not driving toward an optimistic ending, and I feel like that’s kind of a cop-out in an attempt to appeal to the audience. It was too long. We could have gotten less of — I don’t know if it’s the biologist or the protester. I don’t know which story you would trim or if you just kind of cut throughout. It felt a little bit long. He maybe knew that. “Bewilderment” came in at, like, 200 pages.

Yeah, or maybe he was just tired after all that. One of the interesting stories was a fictionalized version of a real person who was a previous guest to the podcast, Suzanne Simard, who wrote “Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.” And she is one of the scientists who looked into inter-tree communication and the ways in which trees will communicate with one another through underground networks, using mushrooms in some way and roots, things that go beyond my capacity for scientific understanding. But I think it is based in science. All right, let’s run down the titles of the books we talked about today. Greg?

I’m reading “Resuscitation of a Hanged Man,” by Denis Johnson.

And I’m reading “Our Country Friends,” by Gary Shteyngart.

Our times often put me in mind of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” when Big Daddy says: “What is the smell in this room? Don’t you notice it, Brick? Don’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?”

These days, an aroma of delusion lingers, with ideas presented to us from a supposedly brave new world that is, in reality, patently nonsensical. Yet we are expected to pretend otherwise. To point out the nakedness of the emperor is the height of impropriety, and I suspect that the sheer degree to which we are asked to engage in this dissimulation will go down as a hallmark of the era: Do you believe that a commitment to diversity should be crucial to the evaluation of a candidate for a physics professorship? Do you believe that it’s mission-critical for doctors to describe people in particular danger of contracting certain diseases not as “vulnerable (or disadvantaged)” but as “oppressed (or made vulnerable or disenfranchised)”? Do you believe that being “diverse” does not make an applicant to a selective college or university more likely to be admitted?

In some circles these days, you are supposed to say you do.

The San Diego State University physics department is seeking a physicist. The job description asks candidates to show how they “satisfy” at least three of the following criteria: “(a) are committed to engaging in service with underrepresented populations within the discipline, (b) have demonstrated knowledge of barriers for underrepresented students and faculty within the discipline, (c) have experience or have demonstrated commitment to teaching and mentoring underrepresented students, (d) have experience or have demonstrated commitment to integrating understanding of underrepresented populations and communities into research, (e) have experience in or have demonstrated commitment to extending knowledge of opportunities and challenges in achieving artistic/scholarly success to members of an underrepresented group, (f) have experience in or have demonstrated commitment to research that engages underrepresented communities, (g) have expertise or demonstrated commitment to developing expertise in cross-cultural communication and collaboration, and/or (h) have research interests that contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education.”

They’re all admirable activities and aims. However, they are vastly less applicable to becoming or being a physicist than to, say, social work, education or even disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. That an applicant to the university’s physics department would be required to meet such benchmarks is a very modern proposition, and probably leaves most people now reading this job posting — physicists or not — scratching or shaking their heads. Yet this emphasis is increasingly found in fields related to the hard sciences: Earlier this year, for instance, leaders of the National Institutes of Health announced their “UNITE initiative,” a “framework to end structural racism across the biomedical research enterprise.”

The Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin seeks an emerging leader in cybersecurity law and policy to join its team as an in-residence Cybersecurity Fellow for the 2022-23 academic year (and perhaps beyond). This is an exciting opportunity to teach, conduct policy-relevant research, and participate in the larger life of our varied programs.

Qualifications. The ideal candidate will be an early-to-mid-career expert with strong academic potential and demonstrable knowledge of cybersecurity legal and policy issues. In identifying the Cybersecurity Fellow, the Strauss Center will prioritize potential for success in the classroom as a teacher; the ability to produce policy-relevant academic writing; expertise in cybersecurity policy, law, or both; and ability to succeed as part of a collegial, highly-motivated faculty-staff team that places significant emphasis on kindness, goodwill, and a sense of humor.

Duties. The Fellow will teach one course each semester (most likely cross-listed with both the School of Law and the LBJ School of Public Affairs), on a topic to be determined in conjunction with the Center’s leadership. The Fellow also will produce original, policy-relevant scholarship on cutting-edge cybersecurity issues, and will participate in the larger project of developing the Strauss Center’s transdisciplinary academic offerings on cybersecurity and interacting with students associated with that program. The Fellow will also be involved in cybersecurity-related events we host, including our speaker series and the Austin Round of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber 9/12 competition.

Other details. The Fellow will receive a competitive salary and benefits as a full-time employee of the University Texas at Austin. The successful candidate will need to be on campus in Austin no later than the beginning of the fall semester in 2022, though an earlier start date may be possible. Renewal beyond the first year is possible as well.

Interested candidates should apply at this link. Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis. However, interested candidates are encouraged to apply before the close of business on January 15.

From today’s annual report and press release from the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) on the cost of a classic holiday meal “Survey Shows Thanksgiving Dinner Cost Up 14%“:
Enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends is a priority for many Americans, but paying attention to how the meal will impact the budget is also important. Farm Bureau’s 36th annual survey indicates the average cost of this year’s classic Thanksgiving feast for 10 is $53.31 or less than $6.00 per person. This is a $6.41 or 14% increase from last year’s average of $46.90.The centerpiece on most Thanksgiving tables – the turkey – costs more than last year, at $23.99 for a 16-pound bird. That’s roughly $1.50 per pound, up 24% from last year, but there are several mitigating factors.  Several factors contributed to the increase in average cost of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner,” said AFBF Senior Economist Veronica Nigh. “These include dramatic disruptions to the U.S. economy and supply chains over the last 20 months; inflationary pressure throughout the economy; difficulty in predicting demand during the COVID-19 pandemic and high global demand for food, particularly meat,” she explained. Further, “The trend of consumers cooking and eating at home more often due to the pandemic led to increased supermarket demand and higher retail food prices in 2020 and 2021, compared to pre-pandemic prices in 2019.” “Taking turkey out of the basket of foods reveals a 6.6% price increase compared to last year, which tracks closely with the Consumer Price Index for food and general inflation across the economy,” said Nigh. 
Some comments:
1. Compared to $46.90 last year, the cost for a classic Thanksgiving Day dinner for 10 people this year is 13.7% higher at $53.31 (see blue line in top chart). Going back to 1986 when the AFBF annual survey started, the 13.7% increase in cost this year was the second-highest annual jump since a 16.8% increase in 1990. There were also double-digit increases of 13.2% in 2011 and 10.9% in 2007. 
2. The average price for a 16-pound turkey this year ($23.99) is 23.7% (and $4.60) higher than last year’s price of $19.39, and the prices of 10 other food items on the menu are slightly higher than last year. The only item of the 12 products on the AFBF’s Thanksgiving menu that decreased in price since last year is cubed stuffing, which is 18.5% cheaper than last year. 
3. Adjusted for inflation in 2021 dollars, the cost of a classic Thanksgiving dinner this year ($53.31) is only 7% more expensive than last year at $49.83, compared to the much larger 13.7% increase in current (nominal) dollars (see the brown line in the top chart). The significant difference in percent increases between nominal and real prices is because CPI inflation has gone up by 6.2% over the last year. In real, inflation-adjusted dollars the only other larger increases than 7% since 1986 than 7% were in 2011 (9.3%) and 1990 (9.8%), so this year’s increase is the third-largest in the history of the AFBF survey. But the real, inflation-adjusted cost of a Thanksgiving dinner this year at $53.31 is lower than any of the 12 years between 2007 and 2018, and also more affordable than any of the five years from 1986 to 1990 and seven of the nine years from 1995-2003. 
4. Measured in the amount of time worked at the average hourly wage for all private production workers of $26.26 in October of this year (a year-over-year wage increase of 5.76%), the “time cost” of this year’s classic turkey dinner is only 2.03 hours, up from 1.89 hours last year. Importantly, even though the “time cost” is higher this year than 2020, it’s the second-lowest cost of a classic Thanksgiving dinner in the 36-year history of the annual AFBF report (see bottom chart above). 
Compared to 1986 when the average American would have worked 3.21 hours to earn the income necessary to purchase the turkey dinner for 10, the “time cost” for a worker today at roughly only two hours is 37% lower. Another way to think about is that if the “time cost” of 3.21 hours hadn’t changed over the last 36 years, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner this year would have been $84.29 instead of only $53.31. 
Bottom Line: The fact that a family in America can celebrate Thanksgiving with a classic turkey feast for ten people for just over $5 per person and at a “time cost” of only two hours of work at the average hourly wage for one person means that we really have a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving: an abundance of cheap, affordable food despite the challenges of the pandemic, supply chain issues, and rising energy prices. The average American earns enough money by the time of his or her morning coffee break working on just one day to be able to afford the cost of a traditional Thanksgiving meal for ten. Compared to 1986, the inflation-adjusted cost of a turkey dinner today is 26% cheaper, and 37% cheaper measured in “time cost” for the average worker. Despite all of the hand-wringing and alarm bells about inflation, this year’s Thanksgiving dinner in America is among the most affordable of the past 36 years relative to our income and relative to the cost of in past years. 

Happy Thanksgiving and bon appetit!
The post Despite concerns about inflation, the real cost (and ‘time cost’) of Thanksgiving dinner this year is among the most affordable in history appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

By James Pethokoukis and John Logsdon
After a half-century break from manned lunar missions, NASA has announced its intent to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. Today, private companies like SpaceX have lowered launch costs, making space more accessible than ever. But is the commercialization of space distracting from continued exploration? In a recent podcast episode, John Logsdon discussed the history and future of space exploration.
John is the founder and Professor Emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of several books on the space program. His most recent is Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier.

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.
Pethokoukis: How do you address critics who say Apollo was a waste of valuable resources or that space exploration is about little more than national pride or maybe some sort of soft-power geopolitics?
Logsdon: Amitai Etzioni published a book in 1963 called Moon-Doggle and it is a trenchant criticism of the priority allocated to Apollo, and it was an entirely legitimate criticism. I didn’t agree with it then; I don’t agree with it now. But there were choices made about how to spend public money, not on education, not on welfare, but on competing with the Soviet Union for global space leadership. And you could say that was or was not worth it.
John Kennedy, when he decided to send Americans to the Moon, was very clear that it was an element of national security strategy. But the problem since the ‘60s has been: What’s the question to which the answer is “Go to Mars” or “Return to the Moon”? My own view is that space exploration is an element of human experience that is worth investing in.
What role have American presidents played in the history of US space programs?
It’s been my view that government space programs are really presidential issues, where a president sees the link between space exploration and some important national priority: national image, national intervention, national morale. Some of the presidents have seen that, others have not.
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin with President Richard Nixon.Via REUTERS
Jimmy Carter wasn’t interested in human space flight at all. Ronald Reagan saw human space flight as kind of a new frontier, but he didn’t put money behind that thought. George H.W. Bush was convinced to set a return to the Moon and then on to Mars as a goal. But Congress was opposed, and there wasn’t any strong public support. Bill Clinton was focused on using the space station as an instrument of post–Cold War diplomacy. George W. Bush had to react after the Columbia accident in 2003, but he set out again a vision of long-term, sustained exploration with people as well as spacecraft.
Those starts and stops have persisted since 2004. Certainly Mr. Trump saw the dramatic potential of space and set us on a sustained course of exploration. President Biden has said he’s going to stay that course. We’re on a path now to return to the Moon with humans some time in the next five to seven years.
How did the Apollo missions and manned space exploration come to an end during the Nixon administration?
President Nixon knew he had to define what happened after Apollo. The Space Task Group chaired by a well-known space expert named Spiro Agnew, his vice president, recommended going to Mars in the mid-1980s. If that recommendation had been accepted, it would have been a very different program. Nixon had no interest in spending money on doing that.
He was skeptical of continued lunar exploration. But after Apollo 13, he tried very hard to cancel what turned out to be Apollo 16 and 17. It was NASA that canceled the final two planned missions, and told Nixon they’d rather spend the money on new programs than on repeating trips to the Moon. So NASA has really not embraced exploration as much as it has embraced building and operating the space shuttle, building and operating the space station, and only then turning to, “What do we do next?” The answer is resume exploration.
How do you think about the commercialization of space that has occurred in the past decade?
Well, I think what has been going on is a paradigm shift. Space is a place to do business, and the lowering of launch costs is key to that. One has to give credit to SpaceX and Elon Musk and the introduction of reusability. Now there’s the possibility of trying and failing without great cost and trying and succeeding in various lines of business. So space has become an area for profit-making, for applications that benefit humanity. In a sense, it’s become dull.
I still am captured by space exploration, by going places, seeing new things. But that’s been kind of overcome, except on occasion, by space exploitation, by finding all the useful things you can do from the orbital perspective and eventually beyond. The government still has the lead in exploration, both robotic and human, because nobody has figured out how to monetize it. The maturing of space means that people who are there — not because of the excitement of exploration but because of the possibility of creating new businesses, new wealth, new jobs — see it as an area with a lot of potential.
The Space Race began as a geopolitical rivalry. Now there seems to be a rivalry between the US and China. Do you think that will be helpful in keeping Americans interested in space?
I do. It’s very different than the Cold War and the Space Race in the sense that there are so many more capable space actors. Clearly China is an ambitious space power. The United States has maintained its commitment to a leading position in space. I think the competition between those two is very different in character than the US-Soviet Cold War competition, and it’s probably good for both sides to stimulate activity. You can compete without racing. What China is doing in civil space, I think, is in a sense good for everybody. It is a separate issue that China is developing military space capabilities that are threatening to the US ability to fight and win wars. That is very much a matter of concern. But China’s lunar exploration program, our Artemis exploration program, private ventures, and return to the Moon, I think, are all good for everybody.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” John Logsdon is the founder and Professor Emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
Learn more: 5 questions for Charles Fishman on the Apollo program | 5 questions for John Roth, Rich Boling, Mike Gold, & Matthew Weinzierl on the future of commerce in space | 5 questions for Daniel Deudney on the geopolitics of space exploration
The post 5 questions for John Logsdon on the commercialization and exploration of space appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Two years in, there is no doubt the Covid pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is also little doubt that the bat carrying the progenitor of the virus lived somewhere else.
Central to the mystery of Covid’s origin is how a virus normally found in horseshoe bats in caves in the far south of China or southeast Asia turned up in a city a thousand miles north. New evidence suggests that part of the answer might lie in Laos.
The search for viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 took a new turn in September when a team of French and Laotian scientists found one in a horseshoe bat living in a cave in the west Laotian province of Vientiane. Other related viruses had been found in Cambodia, Thailand, Japan and elsewhere in China, but this one, Banal-52, was different. For the first time since the pandemic began, this was a virus genetically closer to the human SARS-CoV-2 virus than one called RaTG13, collected in southern Yunnan in 2013. RaTG13, which had been stored for six years in a freezer in a lab in Wuhan itself, is genetically 96.1 percent the same as SARS-CoV-2; Laos’s Banal-52 is 96.8 percent.
The discovery of Banal-52 was greeted with relief by champions of the theory that the virus must have jumped into people in a natural spillover event, not an accident inside a laboratory. If Covid’s closest cousins are flitting about in bats in southeast Asia, then that sample in the freezer in Wuhan looks less suspicious. ‘I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,’ said Linfa Wang of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, a close collaborator of the Wuhan scientists.
True, the Laos virus lacked a critical feature in a key part of a key gene that makes Covid so infectious: a special twelve-letter segment of genetic text called a furin cleavage site. It’s a feature that has never been seen in a SARS-like virus, except for SARS-CoV-2. Apart from that, it seemed that the Laotian virus might have knocked the burden of proof back across the philosophical net into the court of the proponents of lab-leak.
Then last month a bunch of emails, uncovered by a lawsuit from the so-called White Coat Waste Project, returned the ball right back over the net. They comprised an exchange between the American virus-hunting foundation, the EcoHealth Alliance and its funders in the US government. The scientists discussed collecting viruses from bats in eight countries including Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 2016 and 2019. But to avoid the complication of signing up local subcontractors to their grants in those countries, they promised to send the samples to a laboratory they already funded. And where was this lab? Wuhan.
Some of the emails talk about sending data, not samples; but some talk repeatedly about sending actual samples. “All samples collected would be tested at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” reads one from 2016. Another in 2018 even talks of sending bats themselves. The emails make it clear that Wuhan scientists would sometimes be working in the field alongside their US colleagues.
Remember the central issue is how a bat virus got to Wuhan. So now, in both Yunnan and Laos, the only people who knowingly transported bat virus samples to Wuhan — and only to Wuhan — were scientists. Gilles Demaneuf, a New Zealand-based data scientist who’s been analyzing this issue, says the natural spillover theory has “no explanation for why this would result in an outbreak in Wuhan of all places, and nowhere else.”
As for that missing furin cleavage site, another leaked document revealed in September by Drastic, a confederation of open-source analysts like Demaneuf, sent shock- waves through the scientific community. Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, spelled out plans to work with his collaborators in Wuhan and elsewhere to artificially insert novel, rare cleavage sites into novel SARS-like coronaviruses collected in the field, so as to better understand the biological function of cleavage sites. His 2018 request for $14.2 million from the Pentagon to do this was turned down amid uneasiness that it was too risky; but the very fact that he was proposing it was alarming.
Most of the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from the Chinese not the American government, after all; so the failure to win the US grant may not have prevented the work being done. Moreover, exactly such an experiment had already been done with a different kind of coronavirus by — guess who? — the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
It is almost beyond belief that Dr. Daszak had not volunteered this critical information. He played a leading role in trying to dismiss the lab-leak idea as a “conspiracy theory,” using his membership of the WHO-China investigation to support the far-fetched theory that the virus reached Wuhan on frozen food.
If the trail to the source of the pandemic leads through Laos, it is possible western countries can find out more. The Chinese government has blocked anybody who tries to get near to the mineshaft in Yunnan where RaTG13 was found. But now that we know the US government was funding virus sampling in Laos, the EcoHealth Alliance should be required to report in full on exactly what was found. Saying “Oh, that data belongs to the Chinese now” is not good enough. American taxpayers funded the work. Belatedly, the US National Institutes of Health has requested more information.

The Wuhan Institute had a database of 22,257 samples, mostly from bats, but took it offline on September 12, 2019, supposedly because somebody was trying to hack into it. The lab has published few details of viruses collected after 2015, so details of any found in Laos since then are presumably in that database. Dr. Daszak says he knows what’s there and it’s of no relevance. Yet he refused even to request that the Wuhan Institute release it, despite his close relationship with the scientists in question.
But even finding relevant viruses in Laos still won’t answer the question of how they got loose in Wuhan. And with the continuing failure to find any evidence of infected animals for sale in Chinese markets, the astonishing truth remains this: the outbreak happened in a city with the world’s largest research program on bat-borne coronaviruses, whose scientists had gone to at least two places where these SARS-CoV-2-like viruses live, and brought them back to Wuhan — and to nowhere else.
Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 is out now. This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
The post The Covid lab leak theory just got even stronger appeared first on The Spectator World.

Many Americans were shocked by last month’s 6.2 percent leap in the consumer price index over last year’s figure, despite economists warnings for months that rising inflation was a normal and temporary byproduct of the recovering U.S. economy. Consumer demand is surging as COVID restrictions ease, they say, but products are in limited supply because of pandemic-driven difficulties getting goods manufactured and delivered. Still Americans are growing frustrated, and President Biden is facing dismal new approval numbers, ratcheting up fears among Democrats about what this might mean for next year’s midterm elections. But what can a president realistically do? The Gazette asked economist Jeffrey A. Frankel, James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard Kennedy School, about what tools Biden has and how political expediency might affect the administration’s decision-making. The interview was edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
Jeffrey A. Frankel
GAZETTE: The 6.2 percent figure alarmed a lot of non-economists. Does it indicate something’s wrong with the economy?
FRANKEL: I don’t think it indicates anything is wrong with the economy if one allows for the pandemic and the recovery from the pandemic. But it is a high level of inflation, much higher than we’ve gotten used to over the last 20 years. Some forecasts that the effects would be very transitory or mild have been disproven. It’s stronger than some people were expecting.
Jeffrey Frankel. Photo by Benn Craig/Harvard Kennedy School
GAZETTE: Why does it continue to climb by larger increments than expected?
FRANKEL: Demand has been recovering from the pandemic-induced recession faster than supply has. That’s to be expected. We know why supply is recovering slowly: A lot of people are staying out of the labor force for the time being for various reasons, and there are bottlenecks in the supply chain. Those will ease over time. But for now, further recovery in demand is pushing against capacity, and capacity is temporarily below what it should be in the long run. Real GDP has attained what it was before the pandemic, and the various measures of the labor force also indicate that we’re back to where we were before the pandemic. So, we got through it. But a long-run upward trend, in what economists call “potential output,” is always to be expected. We haven’t caught up with the long-run trend.
By no means has inflation ever been or should it be the primary indication of how well the economy’s doing. There’s a sense in which this is a good problem to have. Our current inflation is a result of rapid increase in demand and by some measures unprecedentedly rapid recovery from the recession, which is much better than having stayed with economic activity and employment as depressed as it was in early in the spring of 2020.
GAZETTE: The Federal Reserve based its approach to inflation on the idea that it would rise 2 percent on average over an undefined period of time, a strategy called flexible average inflation targeting. That has not happened. Was that a mistake?
FRANKEL: They clearly underestimated how much inflation was going to go up or how long it was going to last. Getting the forecasts wrong I don’t think has really had a serious effect on behavior. And in case you’re going to ask about politics, I don’t think that’s had an effect on what the Fed’s done. On the average inflation targeting, I wasn’t necessarily in favor of it, unlike many of my friends and colleagues. But it allowed inflation to overshoot somewhat above 2 percent, which is what you would want, given our circumstances. The AIT decision was done way before the pandemic. At a time when demand is increasing faster than supply, it’s inevitable that inflation is going to go above 2 percent unless you’re just going to have a continuation of the worst of the recession, which would be a much worse situation. So average inflation targeting has worked out better than I expected, in that they can say, with honesty, that “this is consistent with their targets,” whereas before that, they would have had trouble justifying inflation going above 2 percent.
Because of the inflation, which they had underestimated, they have started tapering now and will raise interest rates sooner than they had previously anticipated, based on other signaling. You might think that the end of the quantitative easing, which is what tapering is, and raising interest rates faster than they previously said, you might think that would spook the financial markets and precipitate a sharp fall in securities prices. But the current Fed has succeeded in signaling their intention so thoroughly, if they started raising short-term interest rates in the middle of next year, I don’t think that’ll catch markets by surprise.

“There’s a sense in which this is a good problem to have. Our current inflation is a result of rapid increase in demand and by some measures unprecedentedly rapid recovery from the recession.”

GAZETTE: The Biden administration has pledged without specifics to address the labor shortage and supply chain issues. What can be done to turn around these two complex problems?
FRANKEL: I’m not sure how much can be done. That’s an open question about the supply-chain bottlenecks. You would think that the ports and logistics companies would have plenty of incentive to get the job done. But the White House can and it helped a bit on the margin. On the labor force returning: If everybody got vaccinated, that would go a lot faster. We hear so much about vaccine reluctance, but what about a reluctance among workers to expose yourself to the virus, which is a more widespread phenomenon, I think.
In terms of what the president can actually control to reduce inflation, one neglected tool is trade policy. Former President Donald Trump put these tariffs on aluminum and steel, and everything we import from China — all kinds of goods. The tariffs raise prices to consumers. It seems to me a no-brainer to undo those barriers. Biden should be able to get China and other countries to reciprocally lower some barriers against us. But with or without that, removing tariffs could bring down consumer prices and prices to businesses for steel and aluminum and all kinds of inputs immediately. That’s the one thing that the government could most rapidly control.
Another tool that the administration could deploy if it wanted is to allow state governments implementing the new infrastructure spending to source from abroad if the price is lower, rather than insisting on buying American regardless of cost.
GAZETTE: Thus far, the Biden administration appears to have been following the advice of economists on inflation. But the political pressure is mounting. What actions should he take or not take now?
FRANKEL: What would be good to do would be to allow more imports, as I said, from an economics viewpoint. Maybe it doesn’t occur to the political people. But it would bring prices down on all kinds of household appliances, autos, and other goods. It would pay off right away.
GAZETTE: Presidents from both parties always fret about high gas prices because it’s the first thing voters mention when they complain about the economy. What could he do?
FRANKEL: There’s not much a president can do about the price of gas. Gas prices and energy prices, generally, are back to where they were in 2014, but still well below the peak of 2008 and, in real terms, the late 1970s.
The two things that Biden, like any president, reaches for when feeling political pressure and when choosing not to listen to the economists, is to try to jawbone oil-producing countries into producing more oil, which he’s already tried to do, and Trump tried to do it, too. We probably won’t see more of that because they already tried it and failed. The other one is the strategic petroleum reserve. The market for oil is a world market. I don’t think the strategic petroleum reserve would be a very effective tool. But he might try it.
GAZETTE: Opponents of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Biden signed into law this week argue that spending $1.2 trillion will drive up inflation. Are the two linked?
FRANKEL: The Republican argument is that Biden’s infrastructure bill and, hopefully coming, his social spending bill are adding to demand, and that’s what is causing inflation or will cause more inflation in future. And so, they would say, we shouldn’t expend for all those bills. That’s not an option Biden’s going to do, and also, that’s not right economically. A really big increase in demand, like further monetary or fiscal stimulus, would worsen inflation. But contrary to what you would think from these huge numbers — $1.2 trillion on infrastructure and more on social spending — those are very misleading, because: 1) they’re spread over 10 years; 2) some of that increased spending would be in line with a growing economy anyway; and 3) the White House proposal is to fully pay for the social spending bill by raising taxes in a targeted way and funding IRS enforcement. Now, it’s not very likely that’ll happen because politically, they won’t get the tax increases through. But I think they should pass these bills whether they succeed in raising taxes or not because infrastructure spending is stuff we badly need. But the basic logic that continuing to increase demand more rapidly than supply would lead to the prolongation of inflation or even rising inflation, I think is right.

“One way to think about the act of annotating is that you are that meddlesome party gossip, telling the reader how to draw connections between the different parts of the text.”

To call Merve Emre an associate professor of English at Oxford is only to name one of many identities. A Turkish American polymath who is a contributing writer at the New Yorker, Emre has written on topics ranging from the institutions that shaped the Cold War­–era reception of US literature (in her 2017 book, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America) to the history of the Myers-Briggs test (2018’s The Personality Brokers). She has also experimented with genres ranging from general-audience essays (The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine) to multi-author projects (The Ferrante Letters, with Sarah Chihaya, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, which came out in 2019).

Her latest publication is something different again: a new edition of an often-edited novel. As someone who’s always been interested in literary intermediaries—abridgers, censors, transcribers, cataloguers—I jumped at the chance to ask Merve Emre about the challenges of this latest role. We talked on Zoom in September.

Leah Price (LP): I was not surprised when I heard that you were working on Mrs. Dalloway. But I was puzzled when it turned out that what you were working on was not a monograph or an article or the kind of essay of which you’re written so many, but an edition. It’s a constraining genre; there are many kinds of things that literary critics like to do that you can’t do in an edition. It’s almost like a fixed poetic form that has, for better and worse, its own rules.

Why did you choose to engage with this text through an edition? What did you learn from doing an edition that you wouldn’t have learned in some other scholarly genre?

Merve Emre (ME): One of the things I really like about doing an edition is that it gives you the opportunity to be many kinds of reader at once. There is a promiscuity to the types of readerly identities that you can take on, which is less available when you are writing an article or possibly even a monograph. In those forms, there needs to be a consistency of approach, a consistency of argument, and often, due to the constraints of time and space, you can proffer only a single argument, maybe two, to your reader.

The beauty of doing an annotated edition was that I could inhabit many different kinds of scholarly and nonscholarly personae, more or less in tandem. One of those personae is the attentive historicist reader, who is working throughout the introduction and the annotations to put the novel in its proper sociohistorical context.

Another is the appreciative interpreter, who is doing what most annotators do not: seizing on particular sentences, passages, aesthetic constructs like character, and offering the reader mini lectures on those segments or fragments of text.

Finally, there is the creative reader: the reader who is interested in creating some continuity between the voice that authors the novel and the voice that one encounters in the annotations. You see this most clearly when I’m talking about background characters one glimpses throughout the novel, characters whose names appear as decorative artifacts. For instance, in the name of the timepiece shop that Clarissa walks by, “Dent & Co.” Or in “Rumpelmayer,” the name of the confectioner whose employees are coming to take the doors off their hinges. It became an opportunity to extend Woolf’s own project of creating character by constructing mini biographies of the unobtrusive, not-even-rising-to-the-status-of-minor characters who populate the novel.

So those are just some examples of the different kinds of reader that I thought doing an annotated edition allowed me to inhabit. But that’s only the first answer.

LP: Go for the second answer.

ME: The second and just more pragmatic answer is that I started doing this in March 2020, when schools shut down and my children were at home.

I’m a writer who really needs an open eight hours in order to work on a book. At that time, I realized that I could not work on the academic monograph that I was trying to finish. But I didn’t only want to write articles. This was the perfect project for the time constraints of taking care of children during lockdown. One can annotate in snatches of two or three hours, whereas I have trouble writing substantive chapters in two- or three-hour increments. That’s another reason why I thought doing the work of annotation during this time felt like a good way to direct what had become a limited set of resources.

LP: It’s interesting that you explain editing as a response to domestic work. Because, sometimes, universities (more on my side of the Atlantic than on your side) tend to frame editing as a feminized service work. It’s caring for the text, cleaning it up, setting the table for the real literary-critical event.

Obviously, you and I are skeptical of both the value judgement attached to that domestic work and the value judgement attached to that editorial work. Yet one of the interesting things for me about seeing a scholar with your public profile engaging in what has sometimes been defined as the “dirty work” or the “grunt work” of academia is that you are lending it prestige.

ME: I have become interested in a slightly different capacity in the history of editing and its relationship to the discipline of philology. When I started annotating Mrs. Dalloway, the other thing I was also doing was beginning a chapter on the disciplinary history of philology and its various manifestations in the present. And one of the things that chapter argues is that the remnants of philological work—like editing, the authentication of textual editions, the creation of an authentic text, translation—have become feminized enterprises, and that, as feminized enterprises, they are increasingly performed by contingent laborers, in institutions that sit outside of departments and divisions. And one of the things that was interesting to me about Mrs. Dalloway, in particular, is that the novel itself is so explicit about the kinds of feminized parallels between the work of authoring a text and the work of organizing a party.

So there’s a sense in which this was actually the perfect novel to make visible that feminized dimension of the philological practice of choosing an edition, editing it, cleaning it up, prettifying it. And it was also a perfect opportunity to think about the different ways that that practice could be done. My goal was not to confront the reader with a boring, scholarly series of footnotes pointing him or her to places and dates. Instead, I wanted to help to create a new text and a new mode of interacting with that text, on the margins of what we think of as “the real literary-critical event.”

The beauty of doing an annotated edition was that I could inhabit many different kinds of scholarly and nonscholarly personae, more or less in tandem.

LP: This is not an Oxford world’s classic, it’s not a paperback reprint that gets assigned chiefly in college classrooms. One of the most puzzling and fascinating things about this is the physical object. It hovers uneasily on the border: Is it big and heavy and hardback and squared-off because it is a textbook for use in the classroom? Or is it big and heavy and hardback and squared off, because it is a coffee table book?

The cover is, if you’ll pardon the cliché, Instagrammable. And, looking at the layout of the book, I was torn between seeing it as something like a double-columned newspaper or a double-columned textbook, or as a website with sidebars, or as something like what people in Virginia Woolf’s youth referred to as a grangerized or extraillustrated book, meaning a book that has been disbound and cut open and then interleaved with illustrations to turn it into a scrapbook.

Can you say something about how you were trying to redefine what a scholarly edition is and for which of those promiscuous readerly identities it is designed?

ME: What exactly is the genre of this book? Is it a scholarly edition, is it a coffee table book? When I was putting it together, my thought was that it could be both of those things and more. That it could show us how those genre categories are insufficient or can be transcended to offer the reader something like an education: a pleasurable education, both historic and aesthetic, within the covers of a single book object.

When I was putting it together—in collaboration with the amazing designers at Norton—we were thinking very carefully about how you can create a single book that does the work of many other kinds of books. So, the genre question, I’m afraid, is not an easily answerable one. But that is the point of this edition.

LP: At the start, you talked about creating an occasion for yourself to inhabit a promiscuity of different readerly identities. So that it’s not simply that you’re writing for a multitude for different kinds of readers, but, rather, that you are laying out for each reader a bundle or a braid of different kinds of reading experience. And I love your metaphor of the edition as a party—an antidote to the idea of a critical edition as dull assigned reading.

I especially love the parallel that seems to be implicit in what you’re saying, between your decision to transcribe the text with your own hands—your own fingers—rather than outsourcing that work. And in the first line of the novel, Mrs. Dalloway says she’ll buy the flowers herself: the novel opens with the mistress of the house deciding not to delegate to servants a kind of work that is both aesthetic and manual. So, one direction in which we might take that is your argument about the value of different kinds—or, rather, different combinations—of scholarly labor. This series, after all, is called Public Thinker; it encourages guests to talk about the relation between their more inside-baseball scholarly writing and their more general-audience writing.

Part of what I love about this edition is that you’re disentangling the question of narrow versus wide audience from the question of assigned reading versus pleasure reading. And there’s the additional twist that an edition like this is likely to reach not only more readers than a scholarly monograph ever will, but possibly more readers than some of your general-audience writing.

ME: For very good reasons, we tend to think of ourselves as writing to an already known audience—to an audience whose preferences or desires are known, but also who ascribe to certain professional norms of what reading and writing ought to look like.

For the last year or so particularly—as I write more and more about older or relatively unknown authors in places like the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books—I have felt a little bit hubristic about my ability to instantiate my own audience. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant at all. I don’t mean to imply that I don’t care about the received preferences or norms of audiences, or that they don’t matter. Instead, I’m saying that I think there is more space for creating, or cultivating, readers who are interested in literary objects and in ways of reading them that academics might think of as discipline specific, or as strictly academic. This book, and its exploding form is, in part, part of that larger project that I think of myself and my work as participating in.

LP: It’s a happy thought that you have formulated, about the emergent nature of audiences—that they aren’t waiting out there for us to address them: we, or you, shape them and call them into being in the act of writing. And that seems especially crucial for this particular edition because, looking at the list in the front of the book of other annotated editions from Norton, the others are almost without exception books that are associated, at least in part, with younger readers.

The first of these editions was Martin Gardner’s wonderful annotated edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. And then we had The Wizard of Oz, Huckleberry Finn, A Christmas Carol, Sherlock Holmes, Fairy Tales, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Frankenstein.

Mrs. Dalloway is in some ways a strange addition to that list. Virginia Woolf famously called Middlemarch the only English novel for grownup people. And Woolf herself tends to get thought of as a difficult writer, a writer for adults—not a writer of books, like so many of the other Norton critical editions, that are read either by children or by adults who are regressing into some form of passive readerly pleasure.

Can you talk about what you did to make the difficulty of this novel a source of pleasure, rather than (or as well as) a source of frustration for your readers?

ME: There is a childish delight, even for the most sophisticated readers among us, in opening a novel like Mrs. Dalloway and having the opportunity to place Woolf’s words alongside the extraordinarily vivid splashes of color that we get from painters like Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

To that I would add that there’s also an obvious and enduring fixation with Bloomsbury as a coterie, and the magic of its social history. Part of the visual dimension of the book is pulling together the photographs from Woolf’s album of people like John Maynard Keynes and his wife, Lydia Lopokova, of T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne—there’s a rather extraordinary picture of her scolding him that I quite like—of Leonard and Virginia Woolf in Sussex. Bloomsbury, and what it has come to represent for both English and American readers, means that a transportive sense of wonder can be marshalled for a novel like Mrs. Dalloway. That’s one answer to the question of why this novel might actually be coextensive with the kinds of delights that the other annotated editions present, even if it isn’t a novel for children.

The question of how to make a difficult book like Mrs. Dalloway accessible is a different and equally interesting one. Part of the process of making it friendlier to a reader—to a reader who perhaps hadn’t encountered it before, or if they had, had encountered it with some frustration in an English literature class or in a composition class—involved reading Woolf’s notes and manuscripts and realizing how meticulous she was about planning the novel. You see how thoughtful she was about stitching the novel together—how deeply she thought through its “philosophy of life,” as Leonard puts it; its theory of character construction; its politics; its understanding of the ethical relationship between its characters. This unlocks parts of the text that might have seemed to frustrate any attempts at understanding, let alone interpretation.

This is a novel that benefits from having another voice in your head as you are reading it. To go back to the metaphor that we both used of the edition as a party: one of the things I like most about parties, and one of the things I miss most about parties, is encountering someone who will explain to you who the other strangers in the room are. Do you know what I mean? The thrill of stumbling into the party gossip, who will tell you how it is that the other guests are related to one another, and what the tensions between them might be, and what the dramatic possibilities are for the rest of the night.

One way to think about the act of annotating is that you are that meddlesome party gossip, telling the reader how to draw connections between the different parts of the text—the different guests at the party you have shown up to empty handed.

LP: One final question picking up on what you said about individuality. What feels like a very long time ago now—almost exactly two years ago—you interviewed me about my then-new book What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. During that interview, you revealed that the Library of Congress call numbers of the books you had written were your tattoos. One way of asking whether you think of an edition as a different project than a monograph would be to ask: Do you, or will you ever, have the call number of this volume as a tattoo?

ME: Yes, I will get the tattoo. But this is a complicated question for me. I also annotated and introduced a second edition of Mrs. Dalloway for a series that Norton puts out called the Norton Library: fairly cheap paperback editions, retailing for less than $10 apiece, that are designed for introductory classes—and, particularly, introductory classes at institutions where one would not want to ask students to spend, say, $25 or $40 on a Norton Critical edition.

I was joking with a friend that I would get the call number for the annotated Mrs. Dalloway tattooed, but I would not get the Norton Library edition. The latter has no images, its introduction is much more streamlined and reads much more like the standard introduction to a critical text. The footnotes are all in the back, and they have been standardized so that they cannot be stitched together narratively the way many of the footnotes in this edition can be. The particular combination of intellectual insights and appreciative or affectionate attention that has been paid to the novel in the annotated version is simply not present in that other edition.

Talking about this with you helps me see why it is that I wanted to get a call number for this edition tattooed but not the other one. Because this edition does feel like it is a new object; an object unto itself; an object that must be considered separately from other versions of the novel; an object I do not feel embarrassed about claiming as my own. Whereas, the other edition is a novel by Virginia Woolf, and I would feel like a fraud getting that one tattooed on my ribs. So, yes, this edition will go on there as soon as the tattoo parlor opens back up. [Laughs]

LP: And since you began by talking about the constraints of time and space, there may be another good reason not to get both tattooed: simply that, at the rate you’re going, you may run out of skin before you run out of ideas.

ME: Well, I have another side of my ribs, so once I exhaust the left side, I suppose we can always go on to the right.

LP: Like the two halves of a pagespread—

ME: Separated by the spine.

Featured Image: Merve Emre. Photograph courtesy of Merve Emre.

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the right—the Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovard’s speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers, declare math to be white supremacist, finance ethnic cleansing in western China, and who partied, a mile high, on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express.”[Read: It’s a weird time to be young and conservative]The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, “but in reality, it’s just an old boys’ club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. It’s Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors!” She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound I’m hearing is the future of the Republican Party.When I came down to Florida for the National Conservatism Conference, I was a little concerned I’d get heckled in the hallways, or be subjected to the verbal abuse I occasionally get from Trump supporters. Judging by their rhetoric, after all, these are the fire-breathers, the hard-liners, the intellectual sharp edge of the American right.But everyone was charming! I hung around the bar watching football each night, saw old conservative friends, and met lots of new ones, and I enjoyed them all. This is the intellectual wing of the emerging right. Many of them have spent their lives at progressive places like Princeton, New York, Hollywood, and D.C. Their bodies and careers are in the Republican coastal megalopolis—but their minds and mouths are in Trumpland. As one young man told me late one night, “We’d like to dislike Bill Kristol, but he got us all jobs.”The movement has three distinctive strains. First, the people over 50 who have been hanging around conservative circles for decades but who have recently been radicalized by the current left. Chris Demuth, 75, was for many years president of the American Enterprise Institute, which used to be the Church of England of American conservatism, but now he’s gone populist. “NatCons are conservatives who have been mugged by reality,” he told the conference. Seventy-three-year-old Glenn Loury, a Brown University economist, was a conservative, then a progressive, and now he’s back on the right: “What has happened to public discourse about race has radicalized me.”The second strain is made up of mid-career politicians and operatives who are learning to adapt to the age of populist rage: people like Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard), J. D. Vance (Yale Law), and Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale).The third and largest strain is the young. They grew up in the era of Facebook and MSNBC and identity politics. They went to colleges smothered by progressive sermonizing. And they reacted by running in the other direction. I disagreed with two-thirds of what I heard at this conference, but I couldn’t quite suppress the disturbing voice in my head saying, “If you were 22, maybe you’d be here too.”The Information Age is transforming the American right. Conservatives have always inveighed against the cultural elite—the media, the universities, Hollywood. But in the Information Age, the purveyors of culture are now corporate titans. In this economy, the dominant means of economic production are cultural production. Corporate behemoths are cultural behemoths. The national conservatives thus describe a world in which the corporate elite, the media elite, the political elite, and the academic elite have all coagulated into one axis of evil, dominating every institution and controlling the channels of thought.At the heart of this blue oligarchy are the great masters of surveillance capitalism, the Big Tech czars who decide in secret what ideas get promoted, what stories get suppressed. (The NatCon gospel includes great martyrdom stories, such as when Twitter and Facebook suppressed a New York Post story on Beau Biden’s laptop, and when various social-media companies have tried to de-platform The Babylon Bee, the right-wing version of The Onion.) “Big Tech is malevolent. Big Tech is corrupt. Big Tech is omnipresent,” Ted Cruz roared.In the NatCon worldview, the profiteers of surveillance capitalism see all and control all. Its workers, indoctrinated at elite universities, use “wokeness” to buy off the left and to create a subservient, atomized, defenseless labor pool. “Big Business is not our ally,” Marco Rubio argued. “They are eager culture warriors who use the language of wokeness to cover free-market capitalism.” The “entire phalanx of Big Business has gone hard left,” Cruz said. “We’ve seen Big Business, the Fortune 500, becoming the economic enforcers of the hard left. Name five Fortune 500 CEOs who are even remotely right of center.”[Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture]The idea that the left controls absolutely everything—from your smartphone to the money supply to your third grader’s curriculum—explains the apocalyptic tone that was the dominating emotional register of this conference. The politicians’ speeches were like entries in the catastrophism Olympics:“The left’s ambition is to create a world beyond belonging,” said Hawley. “Their grand ambition is to deconstruct the United States of America.”“The left’s attack is on America. The left hates America,” said Cruz. “It is the left that is trying to use culture as a tool to destroy America.”“We are confronted now by a systematic effort to dismantle our society, our traditions, our economy, and our way of life,” said Rubio.The first great project of the national conservatives is to man the barricades in the culture war. These people have certainly done their homework when it comes to cultural Marxism—how the left has learned to dominate culture and how the right now needs to copy their techniques. If I’d had to drink a shot every time some speaker cited Herbert Marcuse or Antonio Gramsci, I’d be dead of alcohol poisoning.Hawley delivered a classic culture-war speech defending manhood and masculinity: “The deconstruction of America depends on the deconstruction of American men.” Listening to Hawley talk populist is like listening to a white progressive Upper West Sider in the 1970s try to talk jive. The words are there, but he’s trying so hard it sounds ridiculous.Another speaker, Amanda Milius, is the daughter of John Milius, who was the screenwriter for the first two Dirty Harry films and Apocalypse Now. She grew up in L.A. and wound up in the Trump administration. She argued that America needs to get back to making self-confident movies like The Searchers, the 1956 John Ford Western. This was an unapologetic movie, she asserted, about how Americans tamed the West and how Christian values got brought to “savage, undeveloped land.”This is about as dumb a reading of The Searchers as it’s possible to imagine. The movie is actually the modern analogue to the Oresteia, by Aeschylus. The complex lead figure, played by John Wayne, is rendered barbaric and racist while fighting on behalf of westward pioneers. By the end, he is unfit to live in civilized society.But we don’t exactly live in an age that acknowledges nuance. Milius distorts the movie into a brave manifesto of anti-woke truths—and that sort of distortion has a lot of buyers among this crowd.The first interesting debate among the NatCons is philosophical: Should we fight to preserve the classical-liberal order or is it necessary to abandon it?Some of the speakers at the conference were in fact classical liberals, who believe in free speech, intellectual debate, and neutral government. Glenn Loury gave an impassioned speech against cancel culture, the illiberal left, and the hyper-racialized group consciousness that divides people into opposing racial camps. Loury asserted that as a Black man he is the proud inheritor of the great Western tradition: “Tolstoy is mine! Dickens is mine! Milton, Marx, and Einstein are mine!” He declared that his people are Black, but also proudly American. “Our Americanness is much more important than our Blackness,” he said, before adding, “We must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress universality and commonality as Americans.” This is the classical-liberal case against racial separatism and in favor of integration.But others argued that this sort of liberalism is a luxury we cannot afford. The country is under assault from a Marxist oligarchy that wants to impose its own pseudo-religious doctrine. If you try to repulse that with pallid liberalism, with weak calls for free speech and tolerance, you’ll end up getting run over by those who possess fanatical zeal, economic power, and cultural might.Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. “Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated,” he said. “To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majority—that seems to me to be completely crazy.”[Read: How voters feel about Josh Hawley’s ‘attack on men’]The problem in America, Hazony continued, is that LGBTQ activists today, like American Jews in the 1950s, are trying to expel Christianity from the public square. This threatens to render the public square spiritually naked. Wan liberalism collapses in the face of  left-wing cultural Marxism. “Eliminating God and scripture in the schools … was the turning point in American civilization,” Hazony said. “Above all else we’ve got to get God and scripture back in the schools.”Another interesting debate among the NatCons is political and economic. Conservatives have lately become expert culture warriors—the whole Tucker Carlson schtick. This schtick demands that you ignore the actual suffering of the world—the transgender kid alone in some suburban high school, the anxiety of a guy who can’t afford health care for his brother, the struggle of a Black man trying to be seen and recognized as a full human being. It’s a cynical game that treats all of life as a play for ratings, a battle for clicks, and this demands constant outrage, white-identity signaling, and the kind of absurd generalizations that Rachel Bovard used to get that room so excited.Conservatives have got the culture-war act down. Trump was a culture-war president with almost no policy arm attached. The question conservatives at the conference were asking was how to move beyond owning the libs to effecting actual change.Christopher Rufo, the architect of this year’s school-board-meeting protests against critical race theory, argued that conservatives had erred when they tried to slowly gain power in elite cultural institutions. Conservatives were never going to make headway in the Ivy League or the corporate media. Instead, Rufo argued, they should rally the masses to get state legislatures to pass laws embracing their values. That’s essentially what’s now happening across red America.My old friend Rod Dreher of The American Conservative argued that because the left controls the commanding heights of the culture and the economy, the only institution the right has a shot at influencing is the state. In these circumstances the right has to use state power to promote its values. “We need to quit being satisfied with owning the libs, and save our country,” Dreher said. “We need to unapologetically embrace the use of state power.”This is where Viktor Orbán comes in. It was Dreher who prompted Carlson’s controversial trip to Hungary last summer, and Hungarians were a strong presence at the National Conservatism Conference. Orbán, in Dreher’s view, understands the civilizational stakes of the culture war; he has, for instance, used the power of the state to limit how much transgenderism can be taught to children in schools. “Our team talks incessantly about how horrible wokeness is,” Dreher said at the conference. “Orbán actually does something about it.”This is national conservatism pursued to its logical conclusion: using state power to break up and humble the big corporations and to push back against coastal cultural values. The culture war merges with the economic-class war—and a new right emerges in which an intellectual cadre, the national conservatives, rallies the proletarian masses against the cultural/corporate elites. All your grandparents’ political categories get scrambled along the way.Will it work? Well, Donald Trump destroyed the Reagan Republican paradigm in 2016, but he didn’t exactly elucidate a new set of ideas, policies, and alliances. Trump’s devastation of the old order produced a grand struggle on the right to build a new one on Trumpian populist lines.The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956. Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.[From the September 2021 issue: How the bobos broke America]One big thing the NatCons are right about is that in the Information Age, the cultural and corporate elites have merged. Right-wing parties around the world are gradually becoming working-class parties that stand against the economic interests and cultural preferences of the highly educated. Left-wing parties are now rooted in the rich metro areas and are more and more becoming an unsteady alliance between young AOC left-populists and Google.NatCons are also probably right that conservatism is going to get a lot more statist. At the conference, Ted Cruz tried to combine culture-war conservatism with free-market economic policies—free trade and low taxes. Marco Rubio countered by, in effect, arguing that you can’t rally cultural populists if you are not also going to do something for them economically. Cultural populism leads to economic populism. Rubio’s position at least has the virtue of being coherent.Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it. Thus the display of Ivy League populism I witnessed in Orlando might well represent the alarming future of the American right: the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung.Sitting in that Orlando hotel, I found myself thinking of what I was seeing as some kind of new theme park: NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.

Uncontrolled Spread: Why Covid-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next PandemicScott GottliebHarper, 512 pages, 2021You could easily stage Oedipus Rex against the backdrop of March 2020. The story begins with a plague, after all—and very likely was the product of the one that swept an Athens sealed against wartime incursions in 430 BCE, the year before its first performance.Sophocles wrote about more than Oedipus’s quest to discover who killed his predecessor: this begins as a way to rid Thebes of a pestilence that’s killing people, cattle, and crops. Oedipus seems like the man for the task. He’s a rationalist and empiricist, clearly the smartest person in Thebes. His intellect has already rid them of one threat—the Sphinx—and brought him to the kingship. Sophocles pits Oedipus’s method—secular, almost scientific—against a view that looks to prophecy and believes in fate’s control. It’s not so much that Oedipus’s methods fail as that his personality does. What he examines, he examines with rigor. But there are things he simply can’t allow himself to know.It won’t be too long, I suspect, until we see that production, its stage filled with terribly smart people devoted to public service who, cut off from the information they need, compounded their errors by refusing to acknowledge them. After all, that’s the one-sentence summary of Scott Gottlieb’s account of America’s failures in the first year of Covid-19. Uncontrolled Spread is most valuable as a clarifying and dispassionate history of those early months. In its pages, the former FDA Commissioner and current Pfizer board member shows that once SARS-CoV-2 escaped China—once it went pandemic—our plans for mitigation and containment and the agencies tasked with carrying them out were simply too fragile to succeed.Fragile systems might be complex, effective, and well-constructed—but they can suffer cascading failures when faced with the unanticipated. They can’t, as economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb has illustrated, learn from errors. America’s pandemic response, like Oedipus’s intellect, proved fragile in this way, each suffering the curse of knowing what we already knew a little too well.One thing we knew—and knew early—was that, as the public health refrain went, “Covid-19 is not like the flu.” It’s strange to think of this as a kind of failure; it shouldn’t have been. But it was. The two diseases were dissimilar in infectiousness, in death rates, and in the ways they affect the body. Such differences helped raise public alarm.But there were more ways, ways more important to shaping a public health response, in which the illnesses were not alike. These differences were not only unknown, or overlooked—but actively resisted: that, unlike influenza, Covid spreads primarily not by microscopic droplets but by much smaller aerosolized particles; that schools and schoolchildren play a far smaller role in transmission than is the case for influenza; and—most importantly—that those not yet showing symptoms could be important, perhaps even primary, drivers of viral spread.The pandemic response plans which the CDC, White House officials, and other public health agencies followed, however, were designed on the assumption that a pandemic would be caused by a strain of flu. It’s not an unreasonable prediction. But the result was systemic fragility: a plan designed for a single category of virus and the specific ways it spreads.So, in the absence of Covid-specific diagnostic tests, the CDC relied on 

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Lawmakers in Washington have spent months now negotiating legislation to address climate change and other environmental issues, and it is still not clear what they will end up doing or whether those actions will be enough given the significant environmental damage that has already been done. Meanwhile, just this year, Americans have experienced a series of extreme weather events that left millions in the cold, destroyed their homes and battered their communities and burned millions of acres of land around them. 
But this is not an article about Washington’s inaction, polar vortexes, hurricanes, wildfires or any other particular environmental issue. Instead, it is an article about the people who are affected by these issues, and the perceptions and misperceptions Americans have about those people.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the structure of American society makes it difficult for many people to understand the racial wealth gap that still exists between white and Black America. Many of those same social structures also matter for how Americans experience — and perceive — environmental issues.
Let’s start by how we, as a country, experience environmental issues. 
Decades of research has found that the risk of exposure to environmental hazards is unequally distributed by race and class in the United States. That is, racial and ethnic minorities and low-income Americans are more likely to live in what environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor calls “toxic communities” — places with higher levels of pollution, more hazardous waste sites and toxic facilities — and as a result, they are more likely to experience worse health and well-being outcomes than their white and more affluent peers.
These differences in exposure to risk are not accidental, either. 
Numerous scholars from both inside and outside of academia have studied how policy decisions over the previous several decades created these conditions. In one early study conducted in the 1980s, for instance, the U.S. Government Accountability Office19 found that a disproportionate number of waste sites were placed in African American communities in the South. A few years later, another study built on the GAO results and found that the percentage of racial and ethnic minorities in a community was a large predictor of where commercial hazardous waste facilities were placed around the country. 
By the early 1990s, those initial studies garnered enough attention that the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking disparities, using metrics such as lead exposure and air pollution exposure. Whether we look at individual studies or at meta-analyses of multiple studies, the research suggests that environmental disparities are based on racism, income inequality or some combination of both. 

Related:
How You View Climate Change Might Depend On Where You Live Read more. »

But it is not just our experiences with environmental issues that differ by race or socioeconomic status. How different groups of Americans perceive environmental issues also differs by race and class. 
For instance, in research that my colleagues and I conducted, we found that while participants largely agreed that “eco-oriented” issues like climate change and drought counted as environmental issues, they differed on whether more “human-oriented” issues like poverty and racism counted as environmental issues, with nonwhite and lower-income participants far more likely to rate those issues as environmental than their white and wealthier counterparts. This reflects how it is often easier for members of groups who regularly experience these risks to make these connections than it is for members of other groups who do not regularly experience poverty, racism or environmental risks.
If you live in a poor, predominantly minority-serving neighborhood, you may notice that not only are there issues with the air quality and water quality, but also there is not as much green space to get regular exercise. You may also notice that the people around you suffer from more health conditions. And seeing these things may lead you to conclude that they are all related — part of a larger, interconnected set of problems. On the other hand, if you live in a rich white neighborhood, you may not see many (if any) of these problems, and thus you would not know that they are related. 
In fact, if you find yourself in that latter group, environmental issues may be more of an abstract political issue for you. Indeed, a recent paper examining how the American public has thought about climate change from 2008 through 2019 found that white people were far more likely than people of color to be politically polarized on climate change. For many white Americans, these issues were largely seen as political, but for Americans of color, they were viewed as issues of survival, with people of color far more likely to say that global warming poses a danger to them. 
That low-income people and people of color are more concerned than white people about environmental issues is important because it points to a glaring disconnect in what most Americans think. 
In 2018, a team of environmental social scientists ran a study in which they asked Americans how concerned they thought a variety of groups were about environmental issues, in addition to how concerned they were individually. And they found that while most people thought white people, young people and women were the most concerned about the environment, it was actually people of color and poor people who reported the highest levels of environmental concern.
Because Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks and bear the brunt of those risks, it makes sense that they would be more concerned. The striking part is that people starkly misperceive — and, specifically, underestimate — the environmental concerns of low-income, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans. Why? 
In part, it is related to the larger structural issues I mentioned before, and to how we make sense of the world around us. Our position in society either leads us to easily see some issues (like environmental injustices), or it makes those issues much harder to see. In my previous article, I also discussed how the segregated and stratified nature of American society affects things like who we’re friends with, which also affects what we learn about. But there are other factors at play here. 
One factor is the media we consume. News coverage is also divided along racial lines, and that, in turn, affects the stories that get told. Many editors and producers at mainstream media outlets have white audiences in mind, which shapes the stories they create. And in the environmental realm, there has been the whitewashing of stories about climate and other environmental movements, which contributes to a perception that it is primarily white people who are concerned about environmental issues. The people who tend to get spotlighted in the environmental movement are also wealthy white people. Because of that, Americans end up thinking those are the people who care most about the environment.
It is not just the media, though, that overlooks the contributions of people of color to environmental movements. Environmental organizations are also overwhelmingly white. This is true not only in governmental and nongovernmental environmental organizations but also in the environmental sciences, which are less diverse than many other scientific disciplines.
This lack of diversity has real consequences, too. For instance, research on gender in climate change policies has found that men were more likely to positively evaluate climate arguments that were about science and business than about ethics and environmental justice. Consider, though, that it was a failure of ethics and environmental justice that led to something like the Flint water crisis — a decision-making process that at least one environmental scholar has described as “the most egregious example of environmental injustice in recent U.S. history.”
It’s why the omission of people of color in conversations and research about the environment is such a problem. When we make decisions about who gets to participate in environmental discussions, who gets to participate in environmental research, who gets to be featured in stories about environmental issues and who gets to work at environmental organizations, we are implicitly making decisions about whose lives and futures matter. And we have to remember that those decisions have important implications for what we learn about environmental issues, and for the policies and practices that get developed as a result of that knowledge.
Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/buy-us-political-forces-aligned-climate-change-silver-80888230

Every few months throughout the pandemic, Wesley Thompson, a communications consultant in Washington, D.C., has driven to Indiana with his wife and two kids to visit his parents. He wanted to escape COVID cabin fever and give his 4- and 2-year-old some room to run around, which they could do more easily in his parents’ small town.

The trips have offered him a glimpse into how Americans who live between the coasts have been spending the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, some people around his parents’ hometown “would look at us like we’re crazy for wearing masks in public,” Thompson told me. At one point, the family ate at a Mexican restaurant where the workers weren’t masked and thought the Thompsons were strange for wanting to sit outside on a hot day.

That winter, the pandemic became so bad that Hoosiers largely donned masks too. But once vaccines rolled out this past spring, they seemed quick to lose them. “This year, we went up for the Fourth of July, and we still had our kids wearing masks when they’re on the playground,” Thompson said. “And other parents would be like, ‘Why are you doing that? Are they sick?’”

Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town

When he goes to the grocery store in Indiana, he can wear a mask, or, like some fellow customers he encounters, just go without—the state has no mask mandate. But, he said, “if I went into a grocery store here in D.C. without a mask on, someone’s gonna say something.” His kids are now so accustomed to masks that his 2-year-old recently asked to wear one around the house.

Technically, the Washingtonians, in their strictness, are doing it right. The CDC now recommends that fully vaccinated people wear a mask indoors if they live in an area of “substantial or high transmission”—a definition that both the District of Columbia and almost the entire state of Indiana meet. Going maskless if you’re vaccinated might be an acceptable choice. The problem, though, is that Indiana also has a lower vaccination rate: About half of its residents are vaccinated, compared with about two-thirds of the population of Washington.

The difference between the COVID-19 precautions Thompson has observed at home in D.C. and the looser rules he’s witnessed in Indiana are part of a common—and, for public-health workers, vexing—trend emerging at this point in the pandemic. Some parts of the country have given up on masks, outdoor socializing, and working from home. They feel, in short, that the pandemic is “over.” Unfortunately, those are also some of the areas where COVID-19 vaccination rates are lowest.

According to a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, compared with people in urban or suburban areas, people in rural areas are most likely to feel like things are “back to normal” where they live—45 percent thought so, compared with 30 percent of urbanites and 36 percent of suburbanites. Rural Americans were also the least likely group to say they wished their neighbors would be more cautious about COVID-19.

People in rural areas are also significantly less likely than the other two groups to wear a mask indoors at restaurants and bars, or at work. They were the least likely group to say that their kids are required to wear masks to school or day care. They are also more likely to socialize with friends indoors without masks on: 68 percent said they now do this, compared with 54 percent of urbanites. A typical worker in D.C. might send his kid to preschool in a mask, ride to work on the Metro in a mask, and meet friends for drinks at an outdoor café, just in case. An hour and a half away, a typical worker in Culpeper, Virginia, might spend her day exactly as she would have in 2019.

Rural Americans are returning back to normal even though they are less likely to say that most adults they know are vaccinated: 48 percent of rural respondents answered “yes” to this question, compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 63 percent of urbanites. (To be fair, 24 percent of rural respondents said they weren’t sure, compared with about 15 percent of the other two groups.) This result mirrors the lower vaccination rate among rural adults found in other research.

For the poll, Leger surveyed 1,006 American adults from November 5 to November 7. The urban-rural divide is the strongest difference that emerged in current attitudes toward the pandemic, but we did not control for education or political orientation, which might explain some of the disparity. We also allowed respondents to self-select as urban, rural, or suburban, and some people might have thought they were “rural” without meeting the census definition. Thompson’s parents’ town is not technically “rural”—it’s at a juncture between developments and farmland. But his experience shows how even in more developed areas, large swaths of America are through with the pandemic. “For a lot of people who aren’t wearing masks or getting vaccinated, they think that this has just been blown out of proportion, and that people are just too fearful and need to go about their lives,” says Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Among the rural unvaccinated, this is a false sense of security. COVID is spreading rapidly in rural areas, which is worrisome because rural people tend to be older, poorer, and in worse health to begin with. If they do get sick, they have less access to hospitals—more than 100 rural hospitals have closed since 2013. The COVID-19 death rate in rural America is now twice the death rate in urban areas. And the longer that pockets of unvaccinated Americans remain, the greater the likelihood that new variants will take hold and spread elsewhere.

Read: The rural pandemic isn’t ending

The urban-rural split in COVID-19 caution is in part a reaction to early pandemic restrictions, such as limits on gatherings, that were targeted at cities but also hit rural areas where cases were initially low. Standing in the middle of a midwestern cattle ranch in the spring of 2020, you might have been confused as to why a disease in Manhattan was affecting your life. “Rural communities were swept up in that and may not have agreed with those policies, and now they’re taking back control,” says Brian Castrucci, the president of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public-health nonprofit.

Meanwhile, policy makers haven’t tried very hard to understand rural America’s view of the pandemic. “Who’s even talking to these folks? Who got out to the rural communities to talk to them about why we should have these policies and the importance of vaccination?” Castrucci says. Many counties in rural America lack health departments, doctors, and now, news outlets. Of course they feel abandoned, and at this point, defiant.

At the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health, the COVID-19 program manager Rachel Foster has noticed “rising levels of resistance” to measures such as vaccination and masking. Her department recently interviewed 57 Pennsylvanians around three counties about their views on COVID vaccination. Among those who were vaccine-hesitant, the top reasons were that “the vaccines are unsafe, that people can actually get COVID-19 from the vaccine, or that the rollout was too fast. We’ve heard that people feel if they already had COVID-19, that they’re safe. We’ve heard some strong expressions of freedom and personal choice,” she says. In the words of one of her respondents, “If I have gotten this far without getting COVID, why would I need a vaccine?”

People who live in rural areas are also more likely to be Republican, and as COVID-19 became politicized, Republicans grew less likely to get vaccinated voluntarily or to endorse masking and other restrictions. Rural areas and red states issued fewer restrictions, such as mask mandates, throughout the pandemic, so it makes sense that they’d have fewer restrictions now. “This is a very long-standing difference in our country of what sort of pandemic measures we had,” says Polly Price, a law and global-health professor at Emory University. “You had different pandemic experiences depending on where you live.”

Of course, rural America, like the rest of America, contains multitudes. Some attitudes seem to vary by region: In our poll, masks in day cares and schools were more common in the Northeast, and less common in the South. Similarly, northeasterners were more likely than southerners or midwesterners to say they had to wear a mask to the office, but also that most of the adults they knew were vaccinated. (Even though this could not possibly be the case, given that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women everywhere, men were more likely than women to say things are “back to normal,” and that they no longer have to wear a mask indoors in restaurants and bars.) I spoke with John Ortiz, a day-care provider in Louisa, Virginia—population 1,744—who is vaccinated, unlike most of his county, and still avoids crowded places. He has kept his day care closed because he worries he’ll be held liable if a child gets COVID. In other rural places, vaccination rates might be low not because people are hesitant but because pharmacies are scarce in their area, or residents had to move for work. “A person might be in one place and get a vaccination, and then 100 miles away working a different area when it came due for their second shot,” says Daniel Derksen, a public-health professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in rural health.

How can the rural population witness so much death from COVID-19 while simultaneously dismissing the pandemic? Tom Pyszczynski, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, chalks it up to denial. Not everyone dies of COVID. “If you’re motivated to believe that COVID is not a real threat,” he says, “knowing someone who’s had the disease and recovered, or had a mild case, sort of validates that belief.” To those who want to believe, a few vivid stories of miraculous recovery will drown out an impersonal statistic like 760,000 dead.

The other phenomenon is an attitude akin to fatalism. “In some places, there’s sort of a feeling that maybe there’s nothing that can be done, or it’s God’s will,” says Carrie Henning-Smith, a health-policy professor at the University of Minnesota who studies rural health.

Jeani Vichayanonda, a home-based physical therapist in Rolla, Missouri, about 100 miles southwest of St. Louis, says some of her patients need help relearning basic life skills, such as walking and dressing, after they’ve suffered a severe case of COVID. Many didn’t acknowledge COVID until they had it, she says. Some denied it even then: They tried to recover at home until their oxygen saturation dropped too low. “A lot of them were in the hospital because they weren’t vaccinated and they went down really hard, and I see them after they get out of the hospital,” she told me.

When she walks into her patients’ homes, Fox News is often blaring. If a family member dies of COVID, her patients sometimes rationalize it by saying that person must have had other health problems. The attitude seems to be, “Yes, there are these deaths. And it’s very sad, that neighbor down the road died, but you know, I’m just gonna keep on living my life,” she said.

In September, Vichayanonda contracted COVID from one of her patients. But because she’s vaccinated, she’s doing fine.

Every few months throughout the pandemic, Wesley Thompson, a communications consultant in Washington, D.C., has driven to Indiana with his wife and two kids to visit his parents. He wanted to escape COVID cabin fever and give his 4- and 2-year-old some room to run around, which they could do more easily in his parents’ small town.The trips have offered him a glimpse into how Americans who live between the coasts have been spending the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, some people around his parents’ hometown “would look at us like we’re crazy for wearing masks in public,” Thompson told me. At one point, the family ate at a Mexican restaurant where the workers weren’t masked and thought the Thompsons were strange for wanting to sit outside on a hot day.That winter, the pandemic became so bad that Hoosiers largely donned masks too. But once vaccines rolled out this past spring, they seemed quick to lose them. “This year, we went up for the Fourth of July, and we still had our kids wearing masks when they’re on the playground,” Thompson said. “And other parents would be like, ‘Why are you doing that? Are they sick?’”[Read: What we lost when Gannett came to town]When he goes to the grocery store in Indiana, he can wear a mask, or, like some fellow customers he encounters, just go without—the state has no mask mandate. But, he said, “if I went into a grocery store here in D.C. without a mask on, someone’s gonna say something.” His kids are now so accustomed to masks that his 2-year-old recently asked to wear one around the house.Technically, the Washingtonians, in their strictness, are doing it right. The CDC now recommends that fully vaccinated people wear a mask indoors if they live in an area of “substantial or high transmission”—a definition that both the District of Columbia and almost the entire state of Indiana meet. Going maskless if you’re vaccinated might be an acceptable choice. The problem, though, is that Indiana also has a lower vaccination rate: About half of its residents are vaccinated, compared with about two-thirds of the population of Washington.The difference between the COVID-19 precautions Thompson has observed at home in D.C. and the looser rules he’s witnessed in Indiana are part of a common—and, for public-health workers, vexing—trend emerging at this point in the pandemic. Some parts of the country have given up on masks, outdoor socializing, and working from home. They feel, in short, that the pandemic is “over.” Unfortunately, those are also some of the areas where COVID-19 vaccination rates are lowest.According to a recent Atlantic/Leger poll, compared with people in urban or suburban areas, people in rural areas are most likely to feel like things are “back to normal” where they live—45 percent thought so, compared with 30 percent of urbanites and 36 percent of suburbanites. Rural Americans were also the least likely group to say they wished their neighbors would be more cautious about COVID-19.People in rural areas are also significantly less likely than the other two groups to wear a mask indoors at restaurants and bars, or at work. They were the least likely group to say that their kids are required to wear masks to school or day care. They are also more likely to socialize with friends indoors without masks on: 68 percent said they now do this, compared with 54 percent of urbanites. A typical worker in D.C. might send his kid to preschool in a mask, ride to work on the Metro in a mask, and meet friends for drinks at an outdoor café, just in case. An hour and a half away, a typical worker in Culpeper, Virginia, might spend her day exactly as she would have in 2019.Rural Americans are returning back to normal even though they are less likely to say that most adults they know are vaccinated: 48 percent of rural respondents answered “yes” to this question, compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 63 percent of urbanites. (To be fair, 24 percent of rural respondents said they weren’t sure, compared with about 15 percent of the other two groups.) This result mirrors the lower vaccination rate among rural adults found in other research.For the poll, Leger surveyed 1,006 American adults from November 5 to November 7. The urban-rural divide is the strongest difference that emerged in current attitudes toward the pandemic, but we did not control for education or political orientation, which might explain some of the disparity. We also allowed respondents to self-select as urban, rural, or suburban, and some people might have thought they were “rural” without meeting the census definition. Thompson’s parents’ town is not technically “rural”—it’s at a juncture between developments and farmland. But his experience shows how even in more developed areas, large swaths of America are through with the pandemic. “For a lot of people who aren’t wearing masks or getting vaccinated, they think that this has just been blown out of proportion, and that people are just too fearful and need to go about their lives,” says Marcus Plescia, the chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.Among the rural unvaccinated, this is a false sense of security. COVID is spreading rapidly in rural areas, which is worrisome because rural people tend to be older, poorer, and in worse health to begin with. If they do get sick, they have less access to hospitals—more than 100 rural hospitals have closed since 2013. The COVID-19 death rate in rural America is now twice the death rate in urban areas. And the longer that pockets of unvaccinated Americans remain, the greater the likelihood that new variants will take hold and spread elsewhere.[Read: The rural pandemic isn’t ending]The urban-rural split in COVID-19 caution is in part a reaction to early pandemic restrictions, such as limits on gatherings, that were targeted at cities but also hit rural areas where cases were initially low. Standing in the middle of a midwestern cattle ranch in the spring of 2020, you might have been confused as to why a disease in Manhattan was affecting your life. “Rural communities were swept up in that and may not have agreed with those policies, and now they’re taking back control,” says Brian Castrucci, the president of the de Beaumont Foundation, a public-health nonprofit.Meanwhile, policy makers haven’t tried very hard to understand rural America’s view of the pandemic. “Who’s even talking to these folks? Who got out to the rural communities to talk to them about why we should have these policies and the importance of vaccination?” Castrucci says. Many counties in rural America lack health departments, doctors, and now, news outlets. Of course they feel abandoned, and at this point, defiant.At the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health, the COVID-19 program manager Rachel Foster has noticed “rising levels of resistance” to measures such as vaccination and masking. Her department recently interviewed 57 Pennsylvanians around three counties about their views on COVID vaccination. Among those who were vaccine-hesitant, the top reasons were that “the vaccines are unsafe, that people can actually get COVID-19 from the vaccine, or that the rollout was too fast. We’ve heard that people feel if they already had COVID-19, that they’re safe. We’ve heard some strong expressions of freedom and personal choice,” she says. In the words of one of her respondents, “If I have gotten this far without getting COVID, why would I need a vaccine?”People who live in rural areas are also more likely to be Republican, and as COVID-19 became politicized, Republicans grew less likely to get vaccinated voluntarily or to endorse masking and other restrictions. Rural areas and red states issued fewer restrictions, such as mask mandates, throughout the pandemic, so it makes sense that they’d have fewer restrictions now. “This is a very long-standing difference in our country of what sort of pandemic measures we had,” says Polly Price, a law and global-health professor at Emory University. “You had different pandemic experiences depending on where you live.”Of course, rural America, like the rest of America, contains multitudes. Some attitudes seem to vary by region: In our poll, masks in day cares and schools were more common in the Northeast, and less common in the South. Similarly, northeasterners were more likely than southerners or midwesterners to say they had to wear a mask to the office, but also that most of the adults they knew were vaccinated. (Even though this could not possibly be the case, given that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women everywhere, men were more likely than women to say things are “back to normal,” and that they no longer have to wear a mask indoors in restaurants and bars.) I spoke with John Ortiz, a day-care provider in Louisa, Virginia—population 1,744—who is vaccinated, unlike most of his county, and still avoids crowded places. He has kept his day care closed because he worries he’ll be held liable if a child gets COVID. In other rural places, vaccination rates might be low not because people are hesitant but because pharmacies are scarce in their area, or residents had to move for work. “A person might be in one place and get a vaccination, and then 100 miles away working a different area when it came due for their second shot,” says Daniel Derksen, a public-health professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in rural health.How can the rural population witness so much death from COVID-19 while simultaneously dismissing the pandemic? Tom Pyszczynski, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, chalks it up to denial. Not everyone dies of COVID. “If you’re motivated to believe that COVID is not a real threat,” he says, “knowing someone who’s had the disease and recovered, or had a mild case, sort of validates that belief.” To those who want to believe, a few vivid stories of miraculous recovery will drown out an impersonal statistic like 760,000 dead.The other phenomenon is an attitude akin to fatalism. “In some places, there’s sort of a feeling that maybe there’s nothing that can be done, or it’s God’s will,” says Carrie Henning-Smith, a health-policy professor at the University of Minnesota who studies rural health.Jeani Vichayanonda, a home-based physical therapist in Rolla, Missouri, about 100 miles southwest of St. Louis, says some of her patients need help relearning basic life skills, such as walking and dressing, after they’ve suffered a severe case of COVID. Many didn’t acknowledge COVID until they had it, she says. Some denied it even then: They tried to recover at home until their oxygen saturation dropped too low. “A lot of them were in the hospital because they weren’t vaccinated and they went down really hard, and I see them after they get out of the hospital,” she told me.When she walks into her patients’ homes, Fox News is often blaring. If a family member dies of COVID, her patients sometimes rationalize it by saying that person must have had other health problems. The attitude seems to be, “Yes, there are these deaths. And it’s very sad, that neighbor down the road died, but you know, I’m just gonna keep on living my life,” she said.In September, Vichayanonda contracted COVID from one of her patients. But because she’s vaccinated, she’s doing fine.

The University of Austin, America’s newest university, was launched this month. I am one of five founders, because I am convinced that higher education is at considerable risk. A new ideology — sometimes called social justice, and revealed in numerous ways, but most succinctly called “woke” — is taking a huge toll on the free exchange of ideas.
Safe spaces and trigger warnings are demanded by students, and many faculty as well, rather than recognizing that challenge, risk, and discomfort create strength of will, and wisdom. Instead of being the adults in the room, scared and hapless administrators capitulate to their demands.
We are told that borrowing from other cultures is inherently predatory — “cultural appropriation” — rather than being one of the most ancient ways that humans have expanded our repertoire, making connections between both people and ideas. We are asked to believe anew in original sin, this one based on skin color. Faculty and students who step outside of the new orthodoxy risk being ridiculed, shouted at, even chased off campus. Tenure means nothing when a mob is at the door. The very concepts of objective reality and merit are taken to be offensive at best, outdated and untrue at worst.
These are instantiations of a self-limiting ideology that mocks the very premises of America’s founding documents, and of the mottos of many established universities as well. Harvard proclaims veritas; Yale adds lux to the mix. But there is little truth in the woke ideology, and little light.
These manifestations of the new ideology are a caricature of deep thought, from the naivete of the beliefs to the insistence that they not be questioned. But there are forces older and yet more influential in play, which for decades have bent research and curriculum to their will.
The culprits in this decades-long process are many. We have seen the subordination of content to resort-like offerings for students, and bloated administrations. The education of undergraduates has been offloaded to grad students and adjuncts, in order to free the most ambitious faculty to dedicate themselves to grant writing. The grants themselves all too often arrive with strings — sometimes invisible, sometimes not — which drive the direction of research, facilitating some research programs, while driving others extinct. Theoretical work, which often brings in no grant money, has been eclipsed by data collection, which does. In a world calling for more generalists, who have the ability to cross disciplinary divides, we instead see the ever-increasing specialization of faculty, and therefore of the students.
All of these things lead to an academy in which some questions are never explored, when what we need is utter freedom of inquiry. The search for truth is an apolitical activity, and a necessary one.
Allow a medical analogy, if you will. Sometimes when a person dies, what is put on their death certificate is true at one level, but incomplete. We desire concise answers and simple prescriptions, but the causes of illness are often complex. A person’s death certificate may say they died of the flu, but if they were in their eighties, they were surely made vulnerable by age, and only pushed over the brink by influenza.
Like that elderly patient, higher ed is in danger, at risk of being pushed over the brink by an epidemic of wokeness — an epidemic that has managed to compromise every single institution nearly equally. But wokeness was only able to take hold in an educational body that had been left defenseless by a kind of analytical immuno-deficiency: terrible ideas took over a system in which new ideas, and the discussion thereof, were increasingly rare.
It would never have happened had our universities been vibrant and healthy. There would have been no appetite for it in a system that generally provided good value to students, awakening their minds and enhancing their capacity and insight, while providing faculty true and unfettered freedom of inquiry.
Our institutions haven’t been healthy in a very long time. While it is true that they have only recently begun actively miseducating students, this came after decades of generally failing to educate them.
The challenge before the newly launched University of Austin is therefore this: can we build a new kind of institution that once again fosters a culture not just of competence, but of insight? One where the authoritarianism and self-flattering assertions of the woke would persuade no one? One in which analysis and creativity, exploration and discovery, are pursued by all? Can we, in some sense, spark a new Enlightenment?
I believe that we can.
Doing so is not simply a matter of creating a non-woke university, however. That is necessary, but it is far from sufficient.
Imagine a university in which entire humans are engaged, not just as brains to be filled with facts, or as future workers, or payers of tuition. Imagine a university in which everything can be questioned, but the old is not thrown out simply because it is old, nor the new adopted simply because it is new. Imagine a university that is actually capable of addressing the injustices that wokeness is supposed to be about. Imagine a university in which all of the faculty know something of value, know how to communicate it, and have an unflinching belief in the fundamental humanity of all of their students.
There is hunger for all of this, from students and faculty alike. People want to think new thoughts and strange ones, to experiment and question, and to have the freedom to change their minds.
The post Can the University of Austin spark a new Enlightenment? appeared first on The Spectator World.

Christopher DeMuth. (Photo by Derzsi Elekes Andor/Wikimedia Commons.)This isn’t really a column I want to write.I admire Christopher DeMuth deeply. He is, without qualification, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and I’ve spent my whole career surrounded by very smart people. He was the president of the American Enterprise Institute when I first started working there as a larval policy gnome in the 1990s. He often knew more about various policy issues than the specialists studying them. He’s charming, friendly, and again, quite brilliant.But if history has taught us anything, it’s that smart people can be wrong. And it’s because I respect him so much that I think it’s worth engaging him at some (possibly unforgivable) length. If “national conservatism” is going to succeed, it will be because people like DeMuth put their well-deserved reputations behind it.Last week, he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed based on his remarks to the National Conservatism Conference—which he chaired.It’s a very strange piece, one that has caused a lot of head scratching among friends and admirers.Read in a friendly light, it makes national conservatism seem fairly anodyne. As Matt Continetti notes in a letter to the editor:Christopher DeMuth’s “Why America Needs National Conservatism” (op-ed, Nov. 13) was so fascinating I read it twice—and the second time I conducted an experiment. I removed the adjective “national” whenever it modified “conservatism” and found that it didn’t make much of a difference to his case.You should definitely read the whole letter. I think Matt nails the generous, albeit skeptical, interpretation of DeMuth’s essay.I, regrettably, want to shine a less forgiving light on it.“Natcons are conservatives who have been mugged by reality,” Demuth writes in a nod to Irving Kristol’s famous definition of a neoconservative. He goes on:When the American left was liberal and reformist, conservatives played our customary role as moderators of change. We too breathed the air of liberalism, and there are always things that could stand a little reforming. We could be Burkeans—with an emphasis on incremental improvement, continuity with the past, avoiding unintended consequences, and working within a budget.But now the American left is so radical that the Burkean “conservative instinct for moderation is futile and may be counterproductive.” The new progressive enemy we face cannot be reasoned with because “compromise is antithetical to their goals and methods.”“National conservatism”—which we never get a good definition of—is the answer because progressives are anti-nationalist. He asks, “Why national conservatism?” and then answers the question thus:Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls, and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.The left’s anti-nationalism is another sharp break with the past. Democratic presidents of previous eras—including the original progressive, Woodrow Wilson —were ardent nationalists.As you might guess, this is where I heard the record scratch. But we’ll get to Woodrow Wilson in a moment.First, to Matt’s point, there is literally nothing in this “national conservative” indictment of the left that is at all new or distinct. I could find you dozens of examples of AEI scholars from the DeMuth years—or decades earlier—who made these arguments. There are probably 10 National Review articles, per decade if not per year, on each of these topics. Even the idea that the concept of the American nation is central to the conservative project is nothing new. (Heck, I was railing against progressive cosmopolitanism in the pages of NR almost 20 years ago.) Our mutual hero, Irving Kristol, often made the point that nationalism could and should be husbanded to the conservative project (or vice versa): “The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.” It was also central to his understanding of neoconservatism: “Neoconservatism is not merely patriotic—that goes without saying—but also nationalist. Patriotism springs from love of the nation’s past; nationalism arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness.”I have my conceptual and terminological quibbles here, but suffice it to say any definition of nationalism that Irving Kristol could embrace, I probably could too (and the same might go for DeMuth’s if I understood it better). But that raises plenty of questions about DeMuth’s thesis. What does he mean by national conservatism? Why and how is it new? It remains a mystery.  His first example of how Biden isn’t a nationalist is odd. He writes that “in 2021 President Biden gazed on his countrymen’s epic invention of COVID vaccines and concluded that he should help the World Health Organization seize their patents.” But this is a conservative complaint, not a nationalist one. A nationalist president could conclude that throwing “greedy” American corporations under the bus in order to paint America as the savior of the world is in the national interest. The conservative argument against this is the traditional one of property rights, moral hazard, and the glories of the free market.The nationalism comes out when DeMuth talks about Big Tech, making the case for unspecified regulation. He doesn’t explicitly embrace industrial policy and protectionism, but there are several passages that advocates of such an approach would reasonably assume are supportive of just that. “Private enterprise is the source of cornucopian blessings, but it needs boundaries and discipline,” DeMuth writes. This is true, but it’s not new.The left were what now?Which brings me to DeMuth’s larger story.I should note that DeMuth’s argument about the voraciousness of the Democrats stumbles on the fact that the Democrats elected the most moderate candidate available. And while Biden’s moderation has not lived up to the hype, the fact that Biden is so unpopular stems in no small part from his failure to stand up to the left. Republicans are poised to punish Democrats with perhaps historical severity, suggesting that the stakes are not so steep nor the situation so dire as DeMuth suggests.But put that aside. DeMuth’s argument suffers fatally from recency bias. I understand the desire to argue that today’s left is worse than ever, and in some cases I’m happy to concede the point (I did write several books on such stuff). But DeMuth needs to make the case that progressive radicalism is not just a difference of degree, but a difference in kind. This categorical transformation of the left is required to justify a categorical transformation of the right. This is why he buys into the “Flight 93” and “American carnage” talk. What was once a justification for Trump becomes a justification of Trumpist nationalism without Trump.In order to make this plausible, he slaps a gauzy nostalgia on, of all people, Woodrow Wilson, because Wilson was, DeMuth writes approvingly, an “ardent nationalist.”Wilson was indeed a nationalist of sorts. But his nationalism was firmly rooted in his belief that America should emulate European countries, specifically Bismarck’s Prussia. He was a champion of the administrative state DeMuth decries. He was also a terrible person. It’s worth recalling Wilson lamented that the wrong side won the Civil War. He admired Lincoln’s means—wartime autocracy—while lamenting his ends: ending slavery. Wilson also fomented ethnic divisions—see his denunciations of “hyphenated Americans”—and reimposed Jim Crow in the federal government and the District of Columbia. He threw dissidents into prison, unleashed paramilitary goons on protestors, censored the press, and created the first modern propaganda ministry of the 20th century. Even as an educator, Wilson was a radical who believed the purpose of a “university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible”—something the woke progressives the NatCons are at war with could get behind.One might think that the specific policies of Wilson’s “ardent nationalism” might cause DeMuth to have second thoughts about embracing nationalism at all rather than seeing it as Wilson’s saving grace.The progressives of Wilson’s era were also quite radical. “We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement,” insisted activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, “and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many.” Herbert Croly, the intellectual godfather of progressive nationalism, was a eugenicist, with seething contempt for checks on nationalist fervor. He wanted a president who was a ﻿“national reformer … in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight,” to heal decadent America from above. He also believed that the ideal of “blind justice”—i.e. the rule of law and the idea of equality before the law—needed to give way to a more modern faith. He celebrated that the “idea of individual justice is being supplemented by the idea of social justice.” He wanted the old symbol of Lady Justice, with her balancing scales and blindfold, to be replaced by something more modern:Instead of having her eyes blindfolded, she would wear perched upon her nose a most searching and forbidding pair of spectacles, one which combined the vision of a mi- croscope, a telescope, and a photographic camera. Instead of holding scales in her hand, she might perhaps be figured as possessing a much more homely and serviceable set of tools. She would have a hoe with which to cultivate the social garden, a watering-pot with which to refresh it, a barometer with which to measure the pressure of the social air, and the indispensable type- writer and filing cabinet with which to record the behavior of society. . . . [H]aving within her the heart of a mother and the passion for taking sides, she has disliked the inhuman and mechanical task of holding a balance between verbal weights and measures.I could go on about FDR—another ardent nationalist admired by many NatCons these days—who scaled up Wilson’s administrative state.But let’s move on to the era that gave birth to the supposedly purely “reformist” conservatism that has outlived its usefulness. Historian George Nash begins that story with the “Revolt of Libertarians” and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. A short while later, William F. Buckley launched National Review (not Transnational Review, I should note) with a declaration about “standing athwart History, yelling ‘Stop.’” It rallied around Barry Goldwater, who offered a “choice, not an echo” and spoke of “rollback, not containment” in international affairs. Shortly before the launch of National Review, Buckley was enticed by McCarthyism and the widespread conservative belief—sometimes warranted—that parts of the left were dedicated to an even more fundamental destruction of American institutions than that contemplated by woke activists today. His friend, Whitaker Chambers, famously believed his move to the right was a move to the losing side.In the 1960s and 1970s, the neoconservatives joined the ranks of the right, disgusted by the anti-Americanism of the New Left. These were the days when the militant left wasn’t dedicated merely to blowing up binary gender categories with tweeted “truth bombs,” but to blowing up buildings, and occasionally people, with real bombs. During the summer of 1970 alone, there were 20 bombings a week in California. ﻿“It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig,” Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground mused. “It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” Jane Fonda held “F*** the Army” rallies and in 1972 let herself be used by the enemy as a propaganda tool, even posing behind the trigger of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. The Black Panthers—lionized even by many liberals—made Black Lives Matter seem like a debating society. And as bad as the BLM and Antifa riots of 2020 were—and they were very bad—they pale in comparison to many riots in our past.The primary point of this detour down memory lane is to illustrate that DeMuth’s version of American history is drenched in nostalgia for a past that never was. But it’s also to note that it colors his view of the present. By his own account, national conservatism is required to deal with a wholly new threat that traditional American conservatism is not equipped to deal with.This not only leads him to rehabilitate the left of the past, it requires denigrating or minimizing the success of the right. His tale of conservatives being little more than speed bumps and reformist brakes on progressive excess mirrors Sam Tanenhaus’ version of conservative history. But that’s not how conservatives themselves saw it. Indeed, DeMuth himself was a vital warrior in what he himself called the “Reagan Revolution,” not the Reagan Piecemeal Reform Movement.Demuth ends by noting that “the originalist in me notes that the president is not only CEO of the executive bureaucracies but also, and primarily, head of state, responsible for the nation’s success and all of its citizens’ welfare.” Reading in a favorable light, this is defensible enough. But one of the things I learned from DeMuth himself is that the economy is too complex, America too diverse—both in the modern sense but also in the Madisonian sense—to be managed by any president or by Washington itself. Our most nationalist presidents—Wilson, the Roosevelts, even LBJ—rejected this view, and understandably so. There is no limiting principle within generic nationalism. Turning presidents into nationalist tribunes of “the people” responsible for all of the nation’s successes and the peoples’ welfare, by its own logic means denigrating restraints on his power. I don’t want a St. Michael in the White House with an R or D after his name.When Irving Kristol said neoconservatives were liberals mugged by reality, he had in mind the realization that the unconstrained vision of progressivism led to folly. The laws of unintended consequences, the limits of reform, and what Friedrich Hayek called “the knowledge problem” were too powerful to overcome (at least predictably and reliably) with even the most well-intentioned planning from above. This is why he considered the American Revolution a “successful revolution”—because it took human nature into account.  DeMuth makes it sound like conservatives embraced market-based policies only because the left wasn’t all that bad. But that’s not how it worked. They embraced market-based policies partly out of principled conviction, but also because they thought the left’s approach, based in technocratic arrogance and the blunt use of political force, was both wrong and dangerous (particularly in the context of the Cold War). In short, they were realists. DeMuth’s “mugging” inverts Kristol’s. The “NatCon” realists are now mugged by nationalism, and fantasies of total and permanent victories for the “highest good” defined entirely on their terms. They forget that Hayek’s warnings against planning were universal in application. Conservative planners don’t skirt the knowledge problem because their intentions are “better.”Maybe the left is worse than ever in some ways, but I think in other ways it’s almost certainly not. Things are complicated. But what is obvious to me is that the threat to the country is not lessened when conservatives think the answer to that threat is to emulate progressive tactics and categories of thought. To his credit, DeMuth doesn’t embrace some of the more sectarian and identitarian ideas swirling around national conservatism, but he ignores the fact that the nationalist populism fueling this movement is itself a form of identity politics. “We” must defeat “them” is its defining ethos, and if classically liberal or constitutional rules get in the way, they must be circumvented. As Donald Trump put it in 2016, “the only important thing is the unification of the ﻿people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”The threats to constitutionalism and American exceptionalism are only new if you cut yourself off from the past. In reality they’re the same threats they’ve always been, just in different garb and with new buzz phrases. The political answers to those threats will change in some ways with the changes in partisan fashion. But the more fundamental problems—and answers—are the same as they have always been, because human nature does not change. As Ronald Reagan said in 1967, “﻿Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

Last week, in an attempt to explain away the supply chain woes that are increasingly leading to goods shortages in America, President Biden cited a popular neoliberal fable. He observed that to make a pencil, wood and graphite must be sourced from the other ends of the world before the finished product can end up in American hands. “It sounds silly, but that’s exactly how it happens,” Biden mused, “that’s just the nature of the modern economy.” But the result, he added, is that “when global disruptions hit… it can hit supply chains particularly hard”. 
For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.
 
They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home. 
As archaeologists and historians have increasingly begun to stress, our globalised world has seen two antecedents in the past: in the interconnected, hyper-specialised trading systems of the Bronze Age, and those of the Roman Empire at its height. When both buckled under a wave of unexpected shocks, the result was not decline or recession but total collapse, a process defined by the great theorist Joseph Tainter as “fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. 
This is, as Tainter observes, “a suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated” society, where “the flow of information drops, people trade and interact less” and “specialization decreases and there is less centralized control”.  This is not a Spenglerian moral fable of societal decline, but an inexorable process whereby growing complexity and sophistication bring with them a growing fragility: when a combination of shocks arrive, the entire society is suddenly forced to reorganise itself. It is not an extinction event or the end of the world: life goes on, just in a poorer, simpler fashion.
The great trading civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean present just such an example. As the archaeologist Eric H. Cline notes in his recently reissued book 1177 BC, for more than two thousand years the great civilisations of Egypt, Western Asia and the Aegean had formed a single interconnected trading system, dependent on complex trading networks that “were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts”.
When crisis struck, shortly after 1200 BC, it took down all the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean simultaneously. As Cline notes, “perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession”. A “domino effect” followed, in which, thanks to the globalised nature of their world,  “the disintegration of one civilisation led to the fall of the others”.
The collapse of Roman civilisation, a product of an overextended, underfinanced empire weakened by internal feuding among its political elites, presents another apposite example. As the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins emphasised in his 2005 book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the most remarkable aspect of Roman civilisation, archaeologically speaking, was the ability of even the poorest members of society to afford cheap and high-quality consumer goods, enabled by immense specialisation in production and an interconnected trading network that spanned the entire empire.  
Yet after Rome collapsed, such goods were only available for the very richest members of society. In the production of ceramics, the use of coinage and the construction of stone buildings, the Western half of the empire suddenly sank back to a level of societal complexity lower than in Iron Age prehistory, not returning to a Roman level of sophistication until the later Middle Ages. And indeed, as Ward-Perkins warns, the Roman economy’s complexity was the precise reason its collapse was so total: “economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists — sometimes working hundreds of miles away — for many of their material needs.” While this worked well in times of stability, it precipitated collapse when trade routes were disrupted.
More from this authorCrisis is the new normalBy Aris Roussinos
Like Friedman, or Biden, Ward-Perkins observes that today “we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing”. Yet he draws a very different conclusion about the desirability of this situation, noting that now “we would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency”. 
Yet of course, even as they were living through its early stages, the Romans were unaware their society was collapsing. Yes, goods were harder to come by, infrastructure was increasingly degraded, urban life was increasingly unsettled, economic growth was only a memory, and new religions boomed as people tried to make sense of their declining prospects. But even still, the military failures on the empire’s eastern fringes barely impacted life in the imperial centre. For some people, great profits could still be made: for most, things went on much as before, though with a lower standard of living with each passing year. No doubt, things will improve soon, Romans told themselves: this is only a temporary blip.
The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. This is the process of what Greer terms “catabolic collapse” — “the stairstep sequence of decline” where decades of crisis are followed by decades of seeming improvement, though the underlying society is left weaker and less resilient before the next crisis hits: “rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.” 
This gloomy view accords well with the Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis that the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, has led us into a period of civilisational entropy and decay. For him, we experience “life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck”. It is a period where the state can no longer guarantee its citizens order or security, where “deep changes will occur” in an unpredictable fashion, and where every last effort to squeeze profit out of a collapsing system further undermines the social structure. 
For Streeck, this interregnum is a time when personal wealth dwindles and financial insecurity becomes the norm. Indeed, as Streeck observes, it is a period where “as growth declines and risks increase, the struggle for survival will become more intense”. It offers “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”. It is not a vision of hell, or of the kind of apocalypse fantasised by Hollywood, but simply of a degraded version of the present: a world closer to the modern Global South than our recent past. It is not necessarily a sudden cataclysm, but a process that will take decades, perhaps even centuries, to fully reveal itself.
Suggested readingCrisis is the new normalBy John Michael Greer
Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. As Ward-Perkins warns, Rome’s system of complex supply chains “worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted”.
The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. As Tainter notes, “the whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator” of decline. A focused effort on domestic resilience is, after all, in itself evidence of reduced civilisational complexity: as trade routes wither and consumption begins to drop, we should strive to ensure that we are heading towards a controlled descent and not a sudden, cataclysmic crash. The imperial centre may not hold, but our lives must go on.
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Where did the virus that changed the world come from?
The prevailing theory for a long time was that wild animals sold as food at a wet market in Wuhan, China, had started the outbreak.
One of the first scientists to seriously question the official narrative was Botao Xiao, who in February 2020 published a pre-print paper arguing that "the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan."
The author pointed out that there was no evidence that the vendors at the wet market in Wuhan sold bat meat. On the other hand, there were two research labs studying bat-borne coronaviruses located in Wuhan, where a virus could have accidentally infected workers, causing them to spread the disease to the general public. Xiao withdrew the paper two weeks later, after Chinese authorities declared that the lab-leak theory had no merit.
The Chinese government proceeded to clamp down on research into the virus's origins and ordered the closure of a lab that had shared the virus's genetic sequence with other scientists in January 2020. The government also forced the lab to destroy its viral samples.
To this day, the Chinese government won't allow outside researchers to test blood drawn from employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology who, according to a U.S. intelligence report, were hospitalized for a flu-like illness in November 2019—weeks before the first documented human-to-human transmission. Chinese authorities cited privacy concerns to the World Health Organization (WHO) team that requested the samples.
There's no direct proof that the virus originated from a lab. But there's also no such proof that humans first became infected by eating bats or through exposure to pangolins, theories that were treated as unimpeachable fact early in the pandemic.
In February 2020, a group of scientists signed a statement published in The Lancet denouncing speculation about potential nonnatural origins of the virus as "conspiracy theories."
Only following the publication of leaked emails did it become clear that the scientist who brought his colleagues together to co-sign the Lancet statement was Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that secured U.S. government funding for controversial research on bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak assured his co-signers that the EcoHealth logo wouldn't appear on the letter and wrote that he hoped "to avoid the appearance of a political statement."
Daszak also co-authored a June 2020 op-ed in The Guardian headlined "Ignore the Conspiracy Theories: Scientists Know COVID-19 Wasn't Created in a Lab" without disclosing a potential conflict of interest.
Media coverage following the publication of the Lancet letter overwhelmingly framed discussion of the lab-leak hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory," often tying it to former President Donald Trump after he and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made public statements promoting the lab-leak theory as the explanation.
"That episode does not reflect well on scientists," says science writer Matt Ridley, co-author of the new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
Ridley says that White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci's emails, which were made public through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that behind the scenes scientists were taking the lab-leak theory seriously all along.
"A number of leading virologists were talking to each other and were saying to each other, 'we think this might look a bit like a virus that's been engineered in the laboratory,'" says Ridley, referencing a January 31, 2020, email in which researcher Kristian G. Andersen says that "one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered." Fauci replies a day later, "Thanks, Kristian. Talk soon on the call."
"And at the end of that phone call, they all did a very rapid volte-face, and started writing articles almost immediately," says Ridley, referring to an influential article Andersen and his colleagues published in Nature on March 17, 2020, stating that "our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." On March 6, Andersen emailed Fauci to tell him the paper had been accepted for publication, to which Fauci replied, "Nice job on the paper."
But Ridley says that it's Daszak's efforts to obscure his connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology while publishing attacks on the lab-leak hypothesis that are most alarming.
"It does raise very serious concerns that Dr. Daszak needs to answer," says Ridley. "I've tried to correspond with him numerous times. I've never yet had a response…I never said anything rude about him, but he blocked me on Twitter. So I can't get answers out of him." 
Daszak did not reply to Reason's interview request.
Ridley's writing partner on the new book is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard's Alina Chan, one of the earliest and most outspoken public skeptics of the natural-origin hypothesis. She says that when she and her colleagues published a pre-print paper questioning the consensus, she hadn't been aware of the Lancet letter organized by Daszak. She says she believes it could've had a major chilling effect on the scientific discussion in those early days.
"They were saying that anyone saying that this virus didn't come from nature is a conspiracy theorist," says Chan. "Other people, when they read this letter, they might have thought, 'I'm not going to put my neck out to say that this may have come from a lab.'" 
Chan, a molecular biologist, argued in the paper that because SARS-CoV-2 was so well adapted to humans, there was reason to be skeptical that it had recently come from an animal. If it had recently come from bats or pangolins, she would've expected the virus to have been rapidly mutating in the early days of the pandemic to become better adapted to human tissue.
Chan partially credits this insight to her experience in the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003, which she lived through in Singapore.
"In that situation and that outbreak, the virus had rapidly picked up dozens of mutations in the early three months," says Chan. "By comparison, for SARS-CoV-2, that had very few of these mutations. So it's suggested to me that this virus had really picked up many useful mutations for infecting and transmitting amongst humans prior to its detection in December 2019."
Another major difference is that during the 2003 outbreak, authorities discovered previous SARS infections among animals being sold at markets in south China within a couple of months. That's not the case with SARS-CoV-2, despite initial suspicions that a wet market was to blame.
"Even though the first class of cases identified was at the seafood market, they never found any signs of animals that were infected by this virus," says Chan. "So up until today, there's no sign of an animal [in Wuhan] that was ever infected by SARS-CoV-2 and then gave it to humans."
When the WHO sent a team to investigate the virus's origins in January 2021, Daszak was the only American member included. The team dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis before WHO leadership later backtracked.
Daszak granted an interview to 60 Minutes following that trip to Wuhan and suggested that farm animals were the likely culprit.
"Now what we've gotta do is go to those farms and investigate. Talk to the farmers. Talk to their relatives. Test them. See if there were spikes in virus there first," Daszak told 60 Minutes. But no farm animals have been identified as the hosts yet.
There's a detail that emerged after the 60 Minutes report that Ridley would like Daszak to explain: Recently-leaked documents show that EcoHealth Alliance applied for a research grant related to inserting what's called a furin cleavage site into SARS-like coronaviruses. This very furin cleavage site may be what makes SARS-CoV-2 so infectious, and it's what distinguishes it from any SARS-like coronaviruses as yet found in the wild. The grant request was rejected. But did the Wuhan laboratory engage in this research even without funding from that grant? Daszak may be able to help answer that question.
"The fact that that is probably the feature that makes the virus sufficiently infectious to start a pandemic means that it is a highly important thing," says Ridley. "So you would think that a scientist who knew that he had put in a grant application in 2018 to put furin cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses…would volunteer that information early in the pandemic."
Ridley and Chan also find it suspicious that when China's premier bat coronavirus expert—and Daszak's collaborator in Wuhan—published her complete analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, she neglected to mention this highly unusual furin cleavage site.
After the 60 Minutes interview, more leaked documents showed that EcoHealth Alliance worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make several bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses—and even Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)—more infectious to human cells.
Chan and Ridley say that when they started writing the book they didn't have a strong view about which theory was correct, but these recent revelations have shifted their thinking in favor of the lab-leak theory.
"In light of grant proposals and reports released in the past 2 months," Chan wrote on Twitter, "we know novel SARS-like viruses were being synthesized and engineered at unprecedented scale."
"That changed my mind completely, knowing that there actually was a plan, a pipeline, a protocol for doing this work in 2018. So now for me, genetic engineering is very much on the table," says Chan. "If it came from a lab, [the likelihood is] close to a 50–50 chance that [genetic engineering] happened."
This question was at the center of a heated exchange between Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) over possible National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding of so-called gain of function research, which involves purposely making a virus more infectious to humans.
But much of the blame for the devastating scope of the pandemic, says Ridley, rests on Chinese authorities, who punished whistleblowers like ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who tried to get the word out about the emergence of a new SARS-like virus to his colleagues. The government successfully kept human-to-human transmission of the disease under wraps for weeks and maybe longer.
"Communist regimes tend to be secretive," says Ridley. "There tends to be an assumption that you don't talk about things unless you're allowed to, rather than the other way around. But [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, being a much more dictatorial and authoritarian ruler than his immediate predecessors, by 2019 it was more and more the case that scientists in laboratories and doctors in hospitals were under orders not to communicate with the outside world about things that the regime might not want them to…Did that play a part in the epidemic escaping and getting to the rest of the world and turning into a pandemic? You bet it did." 
The Wuhan Institute of Virology houses samples of RaTG13, a bat virus that is one of the closest known genetic matches to SARS-CoV-2. But to this day, information about other coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab hasn't been released, so we don't know if the lab was working with a virus that's even more closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
The lab's public database of viral samples could hold some answers, but it was taken offline in February and had been modified in December, which we know because of work by the Dedicated Research and Scientific Team Investigating COVID-19 (DRASTIC), a decentralized group of volunteers who compile and analyze open-source material and leaked documents to investigate the origins of COVID-19.
"Once I realized [the lab-leak hypothesis] was being discredited without any evidence, I just couldn't stay silent," says Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur and one of the founding members of DRASTIC.
A key revelation uncovered by the group was that the Wuhan Institute of Virology database was first taken down in September 2019, three months before the pandemic became publicly known. A description of the database was modified on December 30, 2019, the day Shi Zhengli told Chinese state television that her lab first obtained samples of the virus in Wuhan.
Wuhan scientists accessed the database a few times before it was permanently removed in February 2020 for alleged "security concerns."
"For them to take it down is very suspicious. And of course, Shi's explanation that she took it down to prevent hackers from attacking is complete bullshit because it was a public database to begin with," says Deigin.
A member of the DRASTIC team also discovered that the Wuhan team had collected key samples—including one of the virus's closest known genetic matches—from a mine where some workers had fallen sick and died after clearing out bat droppings. Chinese authorities have denied outsiders any access to examine the mine.
Though there's mounting circumstantial evidence to support the lab-leak theory, government officials maintain that the natural-origin hypothesis is more likely. A U.S. intelligence report declassified on October 29, 2020, said four intel agencies had low confidence that the virus most likely emerged in nature; one agency had moderate confidence that it leaked from a lab; and analysts at three agencies remained "unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information." The report did conclude that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to be a biological weapon.
NIH Director Francis Collins, who didn't reply to Reason's interview request, told computer scientist and podcast host Lex Fridman in early November that he's open to the lab-leak hypothesis but still believes strongly that the virus is of natural origin.
Between July 2020 and January 2021, an international team of scientists captured bats in Laos carrying a newly discovered coronavirus that's the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2—even closer than the virus held in the Wuhan lab, which some say supports the natural-origin theory. But Ridley, Chan, and Deigin point out that it lacks the crucial furin cleavage site, which they suspect scientists inserted in a lab.
Supporters of the natural-origin theory point out that no "smoking gun" virus has yet been found in the version of the Wuhan database uncovered by DRASTIC. But Chan points out that this version of the database is years out of date because the Wuhan researchers generally don't enter new viruses until they've had a chance to sequence and publish studies about them.
"So we have barely any concept of what viruses and sequences they might have found after 2016 in the years leading up to COVID-19," says Chan. "So without access to the information it becomes very difficult for us to guess whether or not they finally found the precursor of SARS-CoV-2 in the labs and were working with it."
Ridley says that he doesn't want a fear of biotechnology, which he credits for alleviating human suffering, to hamper scientific progress because of what may have happened in Wuhan. But he thinks scientists should convene an international forum to set stricter ethical guidelines prohibiting dangerous types of research, such as harvesting bat viruses from faraway caves and bringing them to large urban centers to run experiments that make them more infectious to human cells. One China-produced documentary released in December 2019 showcases researchers doing this work, some of them without proper protective gear.
"Going out and harvesting viruses in wild places with pandemic potential and bringing them back to cities to work on them, probably isn't very sensible," says Ridley. "If we could get the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Japan, other major countries to sign a treaty saying, 'When there's an outbreak in our country, we promise to open up as far as possible and tell you everything we know,' then the very fact that some countries won't sign that treaty will itself put pressure on them."
He points to the emergence of the International Atomic Energy Agency as a model for nations to follow in terms of preventing future lab leaks of potentially pandemic-causing pathogens.
And Ridley says that despite the months of obfuscation by Chinese authorities, virologists, and even some U.S. media outlets, he's optimistic that the truth will emerge in time.
"It may take a long time," says Ridley. "The fall of the Soviet Union did lead to significant revelations about biological accidents there…I think therefore it may take a change of regime in Beijing before we find out more. But I think there are people who know what happened, whatever happened, even if it's just what happened in a market…There are plenty of people who say it's too late; we've lost the chance to find out. I'm not one of them, at least not yet."
Produced by Zach Weissmueller; graphic intro and timeline graphics by Tomasz Kaye; additional graphics by Calvin Tran
Images: He Huan / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Yin Gang / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Imagine China/Newscom; Kyodo/Newscom; Hitoshi Katanoda/Polaris/Newscom; Dickson Lee/SCMP/Newscom; DESIGN CELLS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Newscom; Wang Bingyu/EyePress / EyePress/Newscom; EyePress / EyePress/Newscom; Edwin Remsberg / VWPics/Newscom; SHEPHERD ZHOU/FEATURECHINA/Newscom; Xie Huanchi / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Li Xueren / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Wang Ye / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Imagine China/Newscom; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; SHI ZHI/FEATURECHINA/Newscom; Xiao Yijiu / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Christophe Gateau/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Yin Gang / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Andre Malerba/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; u Peng / Xinhua News Agency/Newscom
The post Was It a Lab Leak? The Mysterious Origin of COVID-19 appeared first on Reason.com.

“All men would be tyrants if they could.” — John Adams* 
“It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous, as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.” — John von Neumann
“Humankind’s covetousness is boundless…  Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” —  Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island, Earth Island* 
“Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed?… The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.” — Milton Friedman 
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.” — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene*
“No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it’s all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.” — Steven Pinker 
“For this can be said of men in general: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites.” — Machiavelli* 
“Our nature is not only destitute and empty of good, but so fertile and fruitful of every evil that it cannot be idle.” — John Calvin* 
“As a rule men do wrong whenever they can.” — Aristotle
“Remove the elementary staples of organized, civilized life—food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security—and we all go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.” — Timothy Garton Ash*
“No one likes to think they’re a Nazi, but everyone is one.” “Granted the opportunity, how many of us would not be Hitlers?” — Jordan Peterson1

One common view of human beings is that we are “by nature” selfish, violent, cruel, and untrustworthy, and that, to the extent we manage to restrain these base instincts, it is because we are taught to be generous, and punished if we go around hurting others. Sometimes this view is accompanied by a story about human development: once upon a time, life was nasty, brutish, and short, a war of all against all. Prehistoric human beings were violent barbarians. Fortunately, civilization has gradually brought out the better angels of our nature. Free markets can actually direct humans’ natural selfishness toward socially beneficial ends, and laws backed by the threat of violence are able to ensure that a semblance of order is maintained. But this progress is fragile and depends on maintaining our existing institutions roughly as they are. Civilization could easily be destroyed if you tamper with it, and we could lapse back into barbarism. The primatologist Frans de Waal coined the term “veneer theory” to describe the idea that morality and civilization are essentially a thin veneer that is easily cracked, and that beneath it is a “natural” state in which we are warlike and irrational. 
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, in Humankind: A Hopeful History (newly issued in paperback), destroys this story utterly. Bregman, perhaps best known for driving Tucker Carlson nuts by daring to criticize Carlson on his own show, claims this is nothing more than a myth or fable about humanity. It is a dangerous one, too, because believing in it can shape the policy choices we make and the way we treat each other. Alarmingly, most people do seem to hold a cynical or pessimistic view of other people, seeing them as untrustworthy. But Bregman’s remarkable book shows that when we actually look at the real world of human social life, and get past the powerful pessimistic tales about original sin, the state of nature, the darkness in all of our hearts, etc., we find that human beings are, on the whole, far more inclined to be sociable and selfless than “treacherous and knavish.” 

One of Bregman’s most helpful contributions is to expose that many of the most vivid examples used to support the pessimistic view of “human nature” collapse when we look at evidence from the real world. Many of us read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in high school, with its haunting portrait of well-educated boys reverting to tribal chaos (poor Piggy!) when isolated and deprived. Golding intended it to be a realistic novel, showing how, contrary to romantic illusions, boys trapped on an island would “really behave.” No matter how well-intentioned and innocent they started off, things would descend because, in his words, “our nature compels us” in that direction, since “man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”
But while Golding’s novel might be a ripping yarn, Bregman shows that it’s in no way a realistic depiction of human social behavior under such conditions. In fact, in emergencies, the opposite tends to happen: a remarkable instinct toward solidarity, compassion, and collectivism displays itself. It’s in precisely the situations where we might expect people to panic and “revert” to a brute struggle for survival that we see perfect strangers willing to give their lives for each other. In fact, as Rebecca Solnit shows in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, shared dire circumstances tend to create social bonds so strong that the results are almost utopian, offering a weird and beautiful vision of the kinds of radical social transformations that we are capable of. 
Bregman shows that “Lord of the Flies”-style myths about post-disaster chaos are simply at odds with the facts. Post-Katrina New Orleans was portrayed in early press accounts as a place of lawlessness and violence, with reports of murders and rapes among the residents huddled together in the Superdome. (From The Guardian: “Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin… looting, rape and armed terror…. emerged within hours in New Orleans.”) In fact, these were rumors based on prejudices, and the real story of the city after the storm is of a place of resilience where neighbors who had lost everything worked together to slowly rebuild and preserve an extraordinary place. 
Bregman even tracked down a real-world “Lord of the Flies” situation, to see whether Golding was right about what schoolboys trapped on an island would “really” do. In 1965, six boys from Tonga ended up stranded on a barren islet for 15 months. What happened? Well, while in Golding’s novel the boys fight viciously over who is to maintain the fire, “those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.” Lifelong bonds were generated. It was a heartwarming story, but it didn’t get widely told.  
So life diverges sharply from Golding’s supposedly “realistic” fiction. But Bregman also shows that many of the real-world case studies used to prove “veneer” theory and the pessimistic view of human nature are almost equally fictitious. The infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance, in which students were assigned the role of “prisoner” or “guard,” and the guards became savage and brutal, supposedly shows that ordinary people given a role to inhabit can quickly transform into sociopaths. It offered support for Jordan Peterson’s notion that any one of us could be Hitler, and showed that it would take precious little for the veneer of goodness to disappear and the brutes within us to come out. 
But the experiment, cited endlessly in introductory psychology courses (it is one of the things I most vividly remember from high school AP psychology), was a fraud. The demented and sadistic stuff was intentionally dreamed up by the experimenter, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, not spontaneously by the student guards. As French sociologist Thibault Le Texier, author of the paper “Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment,” told Bregman:

“It took me a while before I accepted the idea that it could all be fake. At first, I didn’t want to believe it. I thought: no, this is a reputable professor at Stanford University. I must be wrong.”

It turns out that reputable professors at Stanford can indeed be fakers. As Le Texier found, the experiment caught people’s attention because it was a powerful moral allegory, but it was worthless as scientific research. The guards who abused prisoners appeared to be doing the things that Zimbardo wanted them to do, not what they were naturally inclined to do in the contrived situation, and it’s unclear to what extent the whole thing was play-acting on the part of both the guards and the prisoners, all of whom knew they were in a role-playing exercise. Drawing conclusions about human nature from the Stanford Prison Experiment is like concluding from watching Macbeth that seemingly normal actors can quickly turn into serial murderers. Zimbardo himself said that “the research itself is a dramatic piece. It is really like a Greek drama—what happens when you put good people in an evil place? There is a stage-like setting, costumes, actors, auxiliary actors… . There is deep dramatic focus.” So Zimbardo did not conduct an experiment testing a hypothesis. He dramatized a widely-believed story, and because that story was already widely-believed, the fraudulence of the project as a scientific enterprise went totally under-discussed in popular presentations.2
The Stanford Prison Experiment may be one of the most egregious pieces of fake science about human nature, but Bregman shows that other popular “case studies” similarly crumble under scrutiny. Take the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, which also became a staple of psychology textbooks. The standard story, popularized by an article in the New York Times, was that when Genovese was attacked, there were 38 witnesses who either saw or heard what happened but did not intervene or call the police. Dozens of neighbors supposedly “watched [Genovese] get knifed to death in a New York street” yet “not one of [them] made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police,” as science fiction writer Harlan Ellison related the tale. 
In fact, it later turned out that the Times had, by its own admission, “grossly exaggerated the number of witnesses and what they had perceived. None saw the attack in its entirety. Only a few had glimpsed part of it, or recognized the cries for help.” The Times reporter later admitted that he concealed the fact that the witnesses didn’t realize what was happening, because “It would have ruined the story.” 
Furthermore, a neighbor did rush to help Genovese. Her name was Sophia Farrar, and she “actually raced from her apartment to rescue Ms. Genovese, knowing she was in distress,” despite being unaware whether the assailant was still present. Genovese died in Farrar’s arms, as Farrar comforted her and promised that “help is on the way.” The fact that Genovese was helped by someone who put themselves at risk undercuts the story of her killing as a tale of our indifference to the fate of others. The absence of that fact from the story also meant Genovese’s relatives experienced more pain and disillusionment than they needed to. Genovese’ brother said later that “it would have made such a difference to my family knowing that Kitty died in the arms of a friend.”  
In fact, as Bregman documents, bystanders are actually capable of a lot of remarkable heroics. Bregman cites as one example an incident in which, over the course of just two minutes, four perfect strangers come together to jump into the water and save a woman from a sinking car. It is true that, in cases where people assume somebody else has a situation under control, or that their own intervention wouldn’t help, they can refrain from offering aid. You have probably seen situations yourself where you are tempted to do something but worry you will only make things worse. But when people know they’re needed, they tend to leap into action. Human beings who have never shown any prior sign of special heroism or bravery suddenly reveal themselves to be so committed to the welfare of those they do not know that they are willing to die for them. Bregman quotes a survivor of the 9/11 attacks who recalls that as the towers were being evacuated, people did not push and shove past others but actually said, “you first.” 

In instance after instance, where Bregman investigates the “pessimistic” story about natural human inclinations, he finds that it doesn’t hold up. The story is believed not because it has been proven to be true, but because it rings true. The story of how Easter Island’s civilization destroyed itself through lapsing into war and cannibalism, retold by the bestselling pop science writer Jared Diamond, is probably false. Bregman debunks statistics presented by Steven Pinker purporting to show that life before civilization was hyper-violent. He discusses the work of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose book Yanomamö: The Fierce People, profiled an Indigenous society in the Amazon that supposedly engaged in “incessant warfare,” who led Chagnon to speculate that “violence may be the principal driving force behind the evolution of culture.” The book became perhaps “the best-selling anthropology text ever,” but another field researcher who spent a decade among the Yanomamö insisted “fierce people” was “the biggest misnomer in the history of anthropology.” “I never saw what Chagnon reported that he saw in terms of the violence…” he said. It was “as if someone had stood on a mean corner in Manhattan chronicling muggings and murders and then had written a book titled ‘New Yorkers: The Mugging and Murdering People.’” Yet the “fierce people” picture of the Yanomamö has been used (e.g., by Pinker) to support the view that humans’ natural pre-Enlightenment condition is a violent one. Surveying the anthropology literature, Bregman concludes: “How much proof is there that war is in our nature? The answer is almost none.”(David Graeber and David Wengrow’s new magnum opus The Dawn of Everything offers a great deal of further evidence that “primitive” societies are actually more complex and less brutal than portrayed in simplistic stories that characterize human history as a march from barbarism to Enlightenment.) 
Another famous social psychology study, psychologist Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment, was based around the conflicts that arose between two groups of young boys separated into teams. It had “Lord of the Flies” vibes, but as with the Stanford Prison Experiment, the conflict did not arise organically but was intentionally stoked by the researchers. In fact, the first time Sherif ran the experiment, he “believed he could make the two groups… sworn enemies via a series of well-timed ‘frustration exercises.’” To his “dismay, however, the children just couldn’t be persuaded to hate each other.” He tried again with more subtle manipulations by the research team, “egg[ing] the boys on [and] providing them with the means to provoke one another.” Eventually Muzafer managed to stoke some antagonism, including “raids on cabins, vandalism and food fights,” and the results were used to develop “realistic conflict theory.” But he suppressed the results of the first attempt where no fighting occurred, and Gina Perry, author of a book on the experiment, explains that Muzafer’s research practices came out of a “tradition in the [19]30s of using experiments as demonstrations—as a confirmation, not to try to find something new.” In other words, flagrantly violating the basics of the scientific method. 
Amusingly, when artificial scenarios like this are tried without the manipulation, the results have often been rather dull. The BBC put together a modernized and slightly more ethical version of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and apart from the lively moments in which the prisoners tried to reorganize the prison as a democratic commune, and a brief breakout attempt, very little serious conflict occurred. CBS, in its infamous 2007 Kid Nation reality show, put a bunch of kids together alone to try to run their own town. They were evidently expecting Lord of the Flies, but according to kids who participated, it took a lot of selective editing to wring real drama out of the situation.  

Bregman also looks at the way that crude economic assumptions about humans as “rational self-interested maximizers” (homo economicus, the study of a person “solely as a being who desires to possess wealth,” in John Stuart Mill’s formulation) have distorted our understanding of the ways people actually operate. For instance, a famous 1968 article by Garrett Hardin called “The Tragedy of the Commons” argued that because of human selfishness, property held in common for all would quickly be used up and destroyed. Hardin wrote: 

“The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy. As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, “What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?” … the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another … But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination to-ward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

To economists, who believe that “rationality” is synonymous with “trying to maximize one’s individual gains,”3 the story makes sense. Under a certain theory of what human beings are like and how they act, this hypothetical does indeed describe what would logically follow. 
But as it happens, the theory is false. Economist Elinor Ostrom decided to actually look at what does happen when property is held in common and used by groups. The answer is that, across thousands of successful commons, the groups establish norms that are followed, and the situation Hardin foresaw is avoided, because people aren’t like that. This is not to say that it cannot occur—sometimes it does, when people are foolish and can’t get their act together—but “rational” people actually do not try to maximize their gains at the expense of everybody else, because this (1) is sociopathic and (2) destroys everything. Instead, as Ostrom documented in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, they create institutions for managing the commons so that everyone benefits. 

In fact, it is not just that the popular examples adduced to prove human selfishness fall to pieces when scrutinized. It’s that we also have plenty of counter-evidence to show a totally different picture of our basic moral selves. Bregman shows many cases of human beings being natural everyday communists, constantly acting to assist one another without any expectation of reward. Cynics can always find a way to attribute a selfish motive to an altruistic-seeming act (“ah, you gave him some change because you wanted to appear good, not because you wanted to do good”), but in experimental settings, even when people stand to gain nothing reputationally from being generous, they still try to do what is fair rather than what is most self-serving. There is a famous experiment called the “dictator game” in which subjects are given a sum of money and told they can decide how to split it with another subject (even if they decide to give the other person nothing). Usually people do not give the stranger nothing, as they would if they were operating on pure self-interest. 
As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis write in A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, mounting evidence has challenged old-fashioned views of human beings as typically concerned with their own individual interest. In fact, human beings are constantly working together and assisting each other, and this is a good part of the reason why our species has been so successful. Bregman comments that as our species developed, “rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.” Nor is altruistic behavior self-serving beneath the surface. People genuinely care about each other. Bowles and Gintis summarize: 

“People cooperate not only for self-interested reasons but also because they are genuinely concerned about the well-being of others, try to uphold social norms, and value behaving ethically for its own sake. People punish those who exploit the cooperative behavior of others for the same reasons. Contributing to the success of a joint project for the benefit of one’s group, even at a personal cost, evokes feelings of satisfaction, pride, even elation. Failing to do so is often a source of shame or guilt … [W]e came to have these “moral sentiments” because our ancestors lived in environments … in which groups of individuals who were predisposed to cooperate and uphold ethical norms tended to survive and expand relative to other groups, thereby allowing these prosocial motivations to proliferate.” 

The idea that “rational” human beings would engage in a dog-eat-dog Social Darwinist competition (one that, as the famous prisoners’ dilemma showed, ends up leaving nobody well off) was contradicted by evidence of what human beings actually do. “As the prisoner’s dilemma and the tragedy of the commons were becoming staples of undergraduate instruction,” Bowles and Gintis write, “field evidence from anthropology and micro-historical studies of social movements pointed in an entirely different direction.” For instance, it was long suspected that “rational-self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests” because lazy free-riders could just let others do the work. In reality, as the history of the labor movement and the civil rights movement shows, people will band together and make immense sacrifices to achieve goals that they themselves may never actually get to see realized. 

So, given all this rosy and uplifting material about the natural goodness of humankind, how do we explain all the completely horrible stuff that human beings have done and are capable of doing? Fine, Philip Zimbardo faked his findings, but Auschwitz was a real place, millions upon millions of people have died enslaved, and horrible crimes are committed every day. There has been no shortage of brutality, bloodshed, and exploitation. How can we deal with these facts?
Bregman argues as follows: first, even in situations of terrible human evil and destruction, things are often more complicated than they seem, and the number of truly twisted people may be smaller than the amount of suffering suggests. He points to striking evidence that soldiers in war over the years have shown a reluctance to actually kill anyone, and that it appears to be quite difficult to train the average person out of their instinctive aversion to violence. This is one reason that violent protest movements succeed less often than nonviolent ones; it is simply more difficult to recruit people to a violent movement and gain support for it, because people don’t like to see others hurt and don’t like doing it. 
Bregman recalls the World War I Christmas Truce of 1914, in which troops from the British and French side left the trenches and made merry with troops from the German side, getting to know one another, singing carols, playing football, etc. The event was spontaneous and unauthorized: soldiers on the two sides simply realized the other side was comprised of human beings, and the natural instinct to be sociable kicked in. Their commanders were horrified, and strict regulations had to be put in place to make sure there were no more instances of enemies accidentally becoming friends. Over the years, training regimens have been perfected that are better at desensitizing soldiers to murder, though the prevalance of PTSD among combat veterans shows that it is not easy to get people accustomed to violence. (During the Vietnam War, one of the techniques for turning American teens into killers was requiring them to practice the disgusting racist dehumanization of the Vietnamese, who were only ever referred to using ethnic slurs.) It also becomes easier to overcome this by making killing a more clinical and detached act; it may be harder to stab someone than to drop an atomic bomb on them, because the dropping of bombs is conducted by pressing a button from miles up in the sky. 
Even in cases where people carry out true indefensible acts, Bregman argues that only for a very few true psychopaths does cruelty create pleasure. Rather, there are often other motivations at work. In the infamous Milgram experiments, for instance, people showed a disturbing willingness to inflict painful electric shocks on others when they were instructed to do so by an authority figure. Milgram saw his experiment as proof that human beings are disturbingly obedient to authority, and the findings as important in explaining the Holocaust.
Bregman does not dismiss the Milgram experiments entirely, but adds a few complications: for instance, it’s not necessarily clear that people complied with Milgram because they were “obedient” to authority, simple amoral automatons who simply did whatever they were told to do. Interviews revealed that those who suppressed their conscious revulsion at the task did so in part because they were told they were helping science and they wanted to be useful. They were told that the experiment would be a failure if they didn’t comply, with the implication that they could be preventing the accumulation of important scientific findings that would help people learn. (The cover story for the whole thing was that the electric shocks were being administered in an effort to discover how the learning process worked.) And as video of the experiment shows, many showed extreme reluctance and discomfort. When they did comply, it was often under great distress and anguish. 
This still isn’t particularly encouraging. It does mean that people are insufficiently stubborn in their disinclination to harm, and that many can be pressured into doing the indefensible. But the direction of the inclination is clear. We are not simply robots who can be directed by authority figures to do any kind of sinister act. The overwhelming majority of us do not want to cause harm. To cause harm,  our better instincts must be overridden. 
Furthermore, the factors that make us do terrible things are often because we are social and want to please and be helpful. People do not want to be a bother and are reluctant to challenge others. One of the less-discussed findings of Milgram’s experiments is that people are far more likely to refuse to do an immoral thing if they see someone else refusing. Participants in the Milgram experiment who watched someone else refuse to administer the shocks rarely agreed to continue. (Incidentally, transcripts of instances in which people did confront the experimenter offer inspiring examples of courageous human moral behavior. If we are disturbed by conformity and acceptance of authority, we should in equal measure admire resistance and consider what brings it about.) 
Milgram himself said that the experiments did not show that human beings were amoral, but that our moral concern can “shift to a consideration of how well [we are] living up to the expectation that the authority has.” Even acts of obvious evil can come of a desire to do good: “The virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority.” Bregman himself dares to point out that ordinary front-line Nazi troops were often not particularly ideologically committed to Hitler’s doctrine, but had a desire to serve their country and their friends. This is not a defense of them, but an important piece of the picture: take an ordinary person and put them in a situation where “helping your country” means helping a genocidal nightmare, and your Perfectly Normal Person without evil intent will become part of a monstrous enterprise. 
To the extent normal people can do awful things, then, it is often because they are embedded in systems that put immense pressure on them to override their moral instincts: the insurance adjuster who is too generous granting claims will not last long in the company, the draft dodger who does not want to kill will be treated as a coward, the teenager who joins a gang does so for protection and a desire to fit in. A capitalist economy rewards those who exploit others, and the business owner who is too generous will lose the struggle of the marketplace. One of the central insights to take from the prisoner’s dilemma is that we can easily get trapped in situations where we want to cooperate, and it would be good for us, but we can nevertheless end up betraying one another. World War One is an astonishing example of a situation that is desired by nobody coming about because of a failure to properly coordinate, and a hierarchical social structure where a few powerful people can order the deaths of millions. It does not, however, tell us that we are cruel and selfish. 
Nevertheless: plenty of people are clearly not very good. They swindle, they lie, they abuse, and they kill. What of them? First, Bregman reminds us that if we are trying to produce a rational assessment, we need to look at the norm rather than the exceptions. He notes that if one reads the newspaper, one can see life as a parade of nothing but murders and catastrophes, because that’s the stuff that makes the newspaper, but all of the people who are not murdering are not news. But Bregman also makes a strong case that where people are at their worst, it is because they are in positions of power, meaning that other people are less likely to call them on their bad behavior, because those people are being ruled over. If I care about the judgment of others and shape my behavior accordingly, but I am a billionaire surrounded by sycophants who always insist they are pleased by everything I do, then I do not face social sanctions for immorality. Power, Bregman argues, really does corrupt, and he warns that we have to keep sociopaths from rising to positions where they can command other people. 
Milgram’s findings are not wrong; ordinary people can indeed be induced to participate in atrocities. But it often takes manipulation by the powerful. Moral panics can be created through propaganda. The media can terrify people through creating a distorted image of the world, and convince people that foreigners are fundamentally different somehow. Zimbardo may have produced a morality play rather than scientific research, but part of the argument he made is certainly true: we have created, in the contemporary American prison, an institution where people are routinely dehumanized, and where this dehumanization has become something normal. 

What are the implications of taking a more positive view of the average human being? Bregman says that there are major consequences. Once we reject the pessimistic view of our nature, we must “rethink how we organize our schools and prisons, our businesses and democracies.” He cites American criminal punishment as a clear example of a set of failed policies that comes from a lack of faith in people. If you view “criminals” as a class of people who are simply “bad,” because they have “reverted” to their “natural” instincts, then throwing them away in a cage for a long time makes rational sense. Bregman cites “broken windows policing” as an example of bad policy based on a pessimistic view of human nature. The theory was classic “veneer” thinking: if you allow vandals to break a few windows here and there, you are on a slippery slope to complete anarchy and chaos. “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” wrote the theory’s originators. Thus it is important to punish the small offenses, to make sure the first window never gets broken. (The theory was built on a misinterpretation of another dubious study by Philip Zimbardo.) This totally speculative theory was hugely influential and changed policing practices such that officers treated  “ordinary people like potential criminals” because “the smallest misstep could supposedly be on the path to far worse.” These policies didn’t reduce crime but did result in the racist terrorizing of ordinary people going about their business. 
Bregman argues that if, on the other hand, we do not assume that society is one broken window away from collapse, we will take a far more effective approach to actually reducing violence in society. He looks at Norwegian prisons, which are famous for treating their inmates as humans by offering them what is basically a normal life. The “soft” approach works—the Norwegian prison system “boasts a 20 percent recidivism rate (compared to the 76.6 percent recidivism rate in the U.S.) and includes Halden Prison, considered the most humane prison in the world.” Bregman argues that if you treat people well and expect the best of them, they become better, and that pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. He cites an incredible story of a social worker who, while being mugged, invited his mugger to dinner. The evening ended with the return of his wallet and a new acquaintanceship.   
This is, of course, a rather exceptional anecdote, and it is perhaps not best practice for dealing with a violent assailant. But Bregman has the courage to defend the humanity of the people seen as most inhuman, even including terrorists, who are less fanatical and far more human than one might think from judging their horrifying acts alone. The right-wing perspective on crime is that bleeding hearts need to get “tough,” and that “realists” understand that the strict enforcement of the law is necessary, because people who are not disciplined lapse into bad behavior. In fact, Bregman’s book is an argument that taking pessimism and cynicism as synonymous with “realism” is mistaken. In fact, as the success of the “bleeding heart” model in Norwegian criminal punishment shows, it is the cynics who have departed from reality, and that departure means that we have chosen to accept more crime (because people reoffend) than we would have if we were “realistic” enough to understand that rehabilitation is more effective than retribution.4 It is standard to assume that the legal system should be constructed on the assumption that people are bad—as David Hume advised, “in contriving any system of government … every man ought to be supposed to be a knave and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.” But that is a bad model that results in bad policy.5
Bregman warns us that the consequences of accepting “veneer” theory can be horrific. During World War II, the Germans assumed that if they bombed London enough, the British would be demoralized and social order would break down. Exactly the opposite happened: the Blitz created a spirit of solidarity and strengthened the social order like nothing before or since. But the British had the same assumption about the Germans, and conducted saturation bombing of German cities on the identical false theory, with the same lack of effect. Tough circumstances can lead to a remarkable level of cooperation, a trait that has allowed human beings to flourish as a species. To ignore this and to assume that bombing a civilian population enough would lead to a “war of all against all,” only leads to the pointless colossal taking of life.
When we view our fellow humans with suspicion, we make it harder to solve our collective problems. Understanding that the people of Russia and China, for example, are pretty much like ourselves in many essential ways is critical if we are to avoid increasing levels of international tension. In a nuclear-armed world, we cannot afford to assume the worst of other people. (John von Neumann, a pioneer of game theory, publicly suggested that it was rational to start a preemptive nuclear war with the USSR as soon as possible.) We have to get past our suspicion and believe in the full humanity of those who are officially portrayed as sinister others and enemies. 

“Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! … The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature.” — Emma Goldman6 

“People don’t refuse the ambition to become Hitler because they don’t have the genocidal motivation. They don’t follow that pathway because they don’t have the organizational genius. They’ve got the damned motivation!” — Jordan Peterson 

When someone describes “humanity” as selfish and cruel, they are more likely to be describing themselves than the bulk of actual human beings. Lord of the Flies author William Golding said, “I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.” Jordan Peterson, speaking of being a concentration camp guard torturing people, said: “I know perfectly well that I could do that sort of thing… and maybe I could even enjoy it … ” Those who lack empathy may assume that the rest of us are the same,7 and that the “veneer” of morality can easily be peeled away, revealing the beast within us all.
In fact, as Bregman writes, “modern science has made short work of the veneer theory of civilization.” Even the disturbing Milgram experiments showed that on average, people are reluctant to inflict pain on each other, and tend to go forward with it only under immense pressure from others. In reality, a good source of the problem is that we are not individualistic enough, that we care too much about what others want and expect from us, to the point where we may be willing to commit atrocities if it seems like the socially appropriate thing to do.8
Bregman discusses the contrasting visions of human nature as the difference between the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes believed that human beings were naturally in a warlike state, and needed to surrender their freedom to the great Leviathan of the state in order to have any hope of achieving a civilized order. Rousseau believed the “civilized order” was the problem and that the trouble with humanity had started when private property arose.9 The conservative economist Thomas Sowell describes a similar dichotomy between two “visions” of nature. Sowell calls them the “constrained” or “tragic” vision and the “unconstrained” or “utopian” vision. The tragic view emphasizes how flawed human beings are, and tries to construct institutions that tame our natural bad instincts. The utopian view treats us as infinitely perfectible and capable of anything. For Sowell, this results in excessively idealistic policy-making that results in catastrophe.
In reality, neither binary view of human nature is helpful. Even the term “human nature” is too imprecise to be especially meaningful. We know that some people are more selfish than others, and that other than the true sociopaths and true saints, each of us has a mixture of both base and generous motives. I don’t think it is necessary to believe human beings are “fundamentally good at heart”—though some beautiful souls have managed to maintain this view—because in fact what we are depends a lot on our circumstances. Good people can be turned hateful and cruel through exposure to propaganda, or can be too cowardly and conformist to prevent a hideous crime. I do think, however, that we need to completely reject the simplistic narrative of a “base” or “knavish” nature that must be aggressively restrained through discipline. Humankind: A Hopeful History shows persuasively that this view is a myth that will only come close to being true if we choose to act as if it is true. Our default assumption should be to believe in people. Not all people, and not all the time. But on average, humans are a cooperative species. We want to be fair and to help each other. This fundamental fact about us needs to be understood, so that we can move on to the more difficult question of why we fail to uphold our values when we do fail to uphold them. Let us begin with a respect for, rather than a cynicism toward, the average human being. 
Quotes with * were found in Bregman’s Humankind. Thanks to Troy Parfitt for supplying Peterson quotes. ↩Academics, to their credit, have spent decades harshly criticizing the “experiment.” ↩This is not a caricature. Influential economist Anthony Downs said that “when we speak of rational behavior, we always mean rational behavior directed primarily to selfish ends. It is extraordinary the degree to which sociopathy has become normalized by economics, to the point where it is treated as synonymous with being rational. This is one example of what critics of economics are talking about when they argue that it contains embedded normative ideological assumptions that make the discipline’s claim to be a “science” ridiculous. ↩Interestingly, North Dakota is currently conducting an experiment in Norwegian style rehabilitation. Bregman quotes the head of the state’s department of corrections, who had seen Norwegian prisons: “How did we think it was okay to put human beings in cagelike settings?” ↩In The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens, Samuel Bowles shows why economic policy should not be made on the supposition that people are motivated chiefly by financial self-interest, and we actually make people worse than they would otherwise be when we think this way. ↩Quoted in Bregman ↩It should be noted that one major flaw in Bregman’s book is that he endorses the dubious argument made by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, in Against Empathy, that because empathy tends to be selective we should abandon it in favor of a more detached and rational “compassion.” I have previously shown at length why this argument is wrong and harmful, and I do not agree at all with the claim that less rather than more empathy would make us better off. ↩Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat character often engages in tests of how much horrifying behavior Americans will tolerate. The answer is a surprising amount, much of which seems to come from the desire to be agreeable. ↩“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” ↩ 

Why is meaningful action to avert the climate crisis proving so difficult? It is, at least in part, because of ads.

The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers about the climate crisis and its solutions. This has involved a remarkable array of advertisements – with headlines ranging from “Lies they tell our children” to “Oil pumps life” – seeking to convince the public that the climate crisis is not real, not human-made, not serious and not solvable. The campaign continues to this day.

As recently as last month, six big oil CEOs were summoned to US Congress to answer for the industry’s history of discrediting climate science – yet they lied under oath about it. In other words, the fossil fuel industry is now misleading the public about its history of misleading the public.

We are experts in the history of climate disinformation, and we want to set the record straight. So here, in black and white (and color), is a selection of big oil’s thousands of deceptive climate ads from 1984 to 2021. This isn’t an exhaustive analysis, of which we have published several, but a brief, illustrated history – like the “sizzle reels” that creatives use to highlight their best work – of the 30-plus year evolution of fossil fuel industry propaganda. This is big oil’s PR sizzle reel.

Early days: learning to spin

Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) was not self-conscious about the potential environmental impacts of its products in this 1962 advertisement touting “Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt 7 million tons of glacier!”

Life Magazine, 1962

The truth behind the ad: Three years earlier, in 1959, America’s oil bosses had been warned that burning fossil fuels could lead to global heating “sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York”.

Their knowledge only grew. A 1979 internal Exxon study warned of “dramatic environmental effects” before 2050. “By the late 1970s”, a former Exxon scientist recently recalled, “global warming was no longer speculative”.’

‘Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)’

In 1991, Informed Citizens for the Environment, a front group of coal and utility companies announced that “Doomsday is cancelled” and asked, “Who told you the earth was warming … Chicken Little?” They complained about “weak” evidence, “non-existent” proof, inaccurate climate models and asserted that the physics was “open to debate”.

Both ads from the Informed Citizens for the Environment, 1991

The truth behind the ads: Instead of warning the public about global heating or taking action, fossil fuel companies stayed silent as long as they could. In the late 1980s, however, the world woke up to the climate crisis, marking what Exxon called a “critical event”. The fossil fuel industry’s PR apparatus swung into action, implementing a strategy straight out of big tobacco’s playbook: to weaponize science against itself.

A 1991 memo by Informed Citizens for the Environment made that strategy explicit: “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”

‘Emphasize the uncertainty’

Mobil and ExxonMobil ran one of the most comprehensive climate denial campaigns of all time, with a foray in the 1980s, a blitz in the 1990s and continued messaging through the late 2000s. Their climate “advertorials” – advertisements disguised as editorials – appeared in the op-ed page of the New York Times and other newspapers and were part of what scholars have called “the longest, regular (weekly) use of media to influence public and elite opinion in contemporary America”.

Left: New York Times, 1984. Right: New York Times, 1993

Between 1996 and 1998, for instance, Mobil ran 12 advertorials timed with the 1997 UN Kyoto negotiations that questioned whether the climate crisis is real and human-made and 10 that downplayed its seriousness. “Reset the alarm,” one ad suggested. “Let’s not rush to a decision at Kyoto … We still don’t know what role man-made greenhouse gases might play in warming the planet.”

Left: New York Times, 1997. Right: New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications, 2000

The truth behind the ads: “Exxon’s position”, instructed internal strategy memos from 1988-89, was to “extend the science” and “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions” about the climate crisis. Or as a 1998 “Action Plan” by Exxon, Chevron, API, utilities companies and others declared: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens” and the “media ‘understands’ (recognizes) uncertainties in climate science”.

ExxonMobil continued to fund climate denial through at least 2018. One of their 2004 advertorials claimed “scientific uncertainties” precluded “determinations regarding the human role in recent climate change”. That was untrue. Nine years earlier, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had concluded a “discernible human influence on global climate”. ExxonMobil’s chief climate scientist was a contributing author to the report.

Economic scaremongering

“Don’t risk our economic future,” implored the Global Climate Coalition, a front group for utility, oil, coal, mining, railroad and car companies. This 1997 ad also targeted the Kyoto negotiations and was part of a $13m campaign that was so successful that the White House told GCC: President Bush “rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you”.

Global Climate Coalition, 1997

The truth behind the ad: Put “emphasis on costs/political realities”, instructed a 1989 Exxon strategy memo. Just as the fossil fuel industry funded contrarian scientists to deny climate science, it also touted the flawed economic analyses of industry-funded economists.

The best predictors of fossil fuel industry ad spending are media scrutiny and political activity. Today, economic scaremongering has gone digital, with huge spikes in television and social media ad spending by oil lobbies each time climate regulations loom. In the runup to the 2018-20 US midterm and presidential elections, ExxonMobil spent more on political advertising on Facebook and Instagram than any other company in the world (except Facebook itself).

It’s not our fault, it’s yours

From 2004 to 2006, a $100m-plus a year BP marketing campaign “introduced the idea of a ‘carbon footprint’ before it was a common buzzword”, according to the PR agent in charge of the campaign. The targets of this campaign were the “routine human activities” and “lifestyle choices” of “individuals” and the “average American household”. In 2019, BP ran a new “Know your carbon footprint” campaign on social media.

Both ads were published in various publications from 2004 to 2006.

The truth behind the ads: Big oil’s rhetoric has evolved from outright denial to more subtle forms of propaganda, including shifting responsibility away from companies and on to consumers. This mimics big tobacco’s effort to combat criticism and defend against litigation and regulation by “casting itself as a kind of neutral innocent, buffeted by the forces of consumer demand”.

Greenwashing: talk clean, act dirty

“We’re partnering with major universities to develop the next generation of biofuels,” said Chevron in 2007. This is also a top talking point of BP, ExxonMobil and others.

The New Yorker, 2007

ExxonMobil has been trumpeting its research into algae biofuels for more than a decade – from black-and-white print ads (2009) to digital commercials (2018-21).

New York Times, 2009

New York Times, 2018

The truth behind the ads: Greenwashing confers companies with an aura of environmental credibility while distracting from their anti-science, anti-clean energy disinformation, lobbying and investments. The goal is to defend what BP calls a company’s “social license to operate”.

One way fossil fuel companies give themselves a green sheen is to establish – then boast about – what a 1998 API strategy memo termed “cooperative relationships” with reputable academic institutions. Big oil’s colonization of academia is pervasive. Shell’s ongoing sponsorship of the London Science Museum’s climate exhibition comes with a gagging clause prohibiting the museum from discrediting the company’s reputation.

As for algae: America’s five largest oil and gas companies spent $3.6bn on corporate reputation advertising between 1986 and 2015. ExxonMobil has spent more on advertising than on algae research.

‘We’re part of the solution!’

BP “developed an ‘all of the above’ strategy” for marketing energy from 2006 to 2008, “before any presidential candidates spoke of the same”, according to BP’s PR lead.

Big oil continues to promote this narrative of “fossil fuel solution-ism’, including its “all of the above” language, on social media, in Congress and in paid-for, pretend editorials in the Washington Post. To make this spin stick, fossil fuel companies have been calling methane “clean” since at least the 1980s. “Natural gas is already clean,” said API Facebook ads and billboards last year.

One of BP’s many ‘all of the above’ ads grouping oil and natural gas with renewable sources

American Petroleum Institute native advertising in the Washington Post, 2021

The truth behind the ads: In contradiction to the science of stopping global heating, big oil asserts that fossil fuels will be essential for the foreseeable future. The “all of the above” energy mantra was – as BP’s advertising creative put it – “co-opted by politicians in 2008” and became a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s energy policies. The campaign also positioned methane as a “clean bridge” fuel.

Like “clean coal”, calling methane “clean”, “cleanest” or “low-carbon” has been deemed false advertising by regulators.

Distorting reality in the 2020s and beyond

A Shell TV ad last year featured birds in the sky, fields of wind and solar farms, the CEO of a Shell renewables subsidiary saying she’s “made the future far cleaner and far better for our children”, and not one reference to fossil fuels.

The truth behind the ad: Between 2010 and 2018, 98.7% of Shell’s investments were in oil and gas. Such misrepresentations are industry-wide.

Today, we’re all inundated with ads that leverage a combination of narratives, including those illustrated above, to present fossil fuel companies as climate saviors. It’s way past time we called their bluff.

The narratives highlighted here are a selection of “discourses of climate denial and delay” previously identified by the authors and other researchers. The advertisements selected to illustrate these discourses were identified by the authors based on a review of dozens of peer-reviewed studies, journalistic investigations, white papers, ad libraries, newspaper archives, social media reports and lawsuits.

Jacob Chansley, the horned, shirtless figure known as the QAnon Shaman who participated in the mob storming the Capitol on January 6, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his part in the riot.
If a 3.5-year sentence sounds harsh for what was ultimately a nonviolent charge—obstructing an official proceeding in Congress—consider that Chansley has already spent the past several months in jail in solitary confinement.

He got 41 months in prison, after already spending 10 months in solitary confinement.
Only a sick, punitive society imprisons non-violent protesters for years in harsh conditions -- or one that regards particular ideologies as inherently criminal: https://t.co/GvyYTQ07mK
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 17, 2021

According to NPR:
Before announcing his sentence, Judge Lamberth told Chansley he believes that his remorse is genuine and heartfelt, but he also told Chansley that "what you did was terrible."
He said Chansley had made the right decision to plead guilty and take responsibility for his actions, instead of going to trial where he faced a much longer possible sentence.
"You were facing 20 years, Mr. Chansley. The one advantage you get here is you're only facing now 41 months," Lamberth said. "It may not feel it today, but let me guarantee you, you were smart and did the right thing."
The sentenced handed down was less than the 51 months the Justice Department had recommended for Chansley, whom prosecutors described as the "flag bearer" of the Capitol riot.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kimberly Paschall told the court at the start of the hearing that such a sentence was necessary "to send a strong message" to Chansley and anyone who would wish to do harm to the country.
Chansley felt he had no choice but to accept the plea deal that came with that 41-month sentence, of course, because he couldn't risk a trial that could send him to prison for 20 years. This is the sad reality of the criminal justice system: Defendants often plead guilty in order to avoid absurdly long mandatory sentences, and are thus denied the opportunity to actually attempt to prove their innocence before a jury of their peers.
The people who entered and defaced the Capitol on January 6 are not political prisoners, and they are certainly not heroes. They committed trespassing and broke other laws, and it's legitimate for the government to prosecute them. But this sentence is too harsh; Chansley did not commit a violent crime, and is certainly unlikely to re-offend. If prosecutors disagree, they should have to prove that to a jury: Unfortunately, the threat of an even lengthier sentence prompts most defendants to fall in line.

FREE MINDS
Scott Alexander has penned the definitive summary of the available evidence on ivermectin as an effective COVID-19 therapeutic. Writing for his Substack, Astral Codex Ten, Alexander argues that many of the ivermectin studies involved unreliable methodologies or should be dismissed for other reasons. But others appear to hold up, and his ultimate conclusion is that ivermectin does seem to provide a very, very small but measurable benefit for patients infected with COVID-19.
Alexander notes, however, that the studies where ivermectin appeared to do the most good seem to be concentrated in certain parts of the world—India, Bangladesh—with higher-than-average intestinal worm problems. His theory—and it's a very good one—is that ivermectin doesn't directly improve COVID-19 outcomes: Rather, these studies were disproportionately likely to include patients suffering from worms, which had rendered their immune systems less able to fight off other infections. Since ivermectin is highly effective at fighting worms, it indirectly resulted in an improvement over the placebo group by helping patients overcome their intestinal worms—a not insignificant boon in their simultaneous battles against COVID-19. Alexander explains:
Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going…
The most relevant species of worm here is the roundworm Strongyloides stercoralis. Among the commonest treatments for COVID-19 is corticosteroids, a type of immunosuppresant drug. The types of immune responses it suppresses do more harm than good in coronavirus, so turning them off limits collateral damage and makes patients better on net. But these are also the types of immune responses that control Strongyloides. If you turn them off even very briefly, the worms multiply out of control, you get what's called "Strongyloides hyperinfection", and pretty often you die. According to the WHO:
The current COVID-19 pandemic serves to highlight the risk of using systemic corticosteroids and, to a lesser extent, other immunosuppressive therapy, in populations with significant risk of underlying strongyloidiasis. Cases of strongyloidiasis hyperinfection in the setting of corticosteroid use as COVID-19 therapy have been described and draw attention to the necessity of addressing the risk of iatrogenic strongyloidiasis hyperinfection syndrome in infected individuals prior to corticosteroid administration.
Although this has gained importance in the midst of a pandemic where corticosteroids are one of few therapies shown to improve mortality, its relevance is much broader given that corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive therapies have become increasingly common in treatment of chronic diseases (e.g. asthma or certain rheumatologic conditions).
So you need to "address the risk" of strongyloides infection during COVID treatment in roundworm-endemic areas. And how might you address this, WHO?
Treatment of chronic strongyloidiasis with ivermectin 200 µg/kg per day orally x 1-2 days is considered safe with potential contraindications including possible Loa loa infection (endemic in West and Central Africa), pregnancy, and weight <15kg.
Given ivermectin's safety profile, the United States has utilized presumptive treatment with ivermectin for strongyloidiasis in refugees resettling from endemic areas, and both Canada and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control have issued guidance on presumptive treatment to avoid hyperinfection in at risk populations. Screening and treatment, or where not available, addition of ivermectin to mass drug administration programs should be studied and considered.
This is serious and common enough that, if you're not going to screen for it, it might be worth "add[ing] ivermectin to mass drug administration programs" in affected areas!
The good ivermectin trials in areas with low Strongyloides prevalence, like Vallejos in Argentina, are mostly negative. The good ivermectin trials in areas with high Strongyloides prevalence, like Mahmud in Bangladesh, are mostly positive.
Alexander notes that he's only about 50 percent confident in his hypothesis. He could be wrong, of course. But it's quite an elegant solution to the ivermectin riddle.
Reason's Ronald Bailey has written that ivermectin is clearly "not a miracle cure," though it might have some marginal efficacy.

Detroit's public school district will move to virtual education on Fridays in December, in part because administrators think additional time to clean the buildings will help slow the spread of COVID-19. According to Chalkbeat:

The Detroit school district is moving to remote instruction for three Fridays in December in an effort to slow the spread of COVID and give the staff time to deep clean schools.
The move was announced Wednesday on the district's web site. It comes as the state is leading the nation in new COVID cases.
Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in that statement that he and the school board made the decision "after listening and reflecting on the concerns of school-based leaders, teachers, support staff, students, and families regarding the need for mental health relief, rising COVID cases, and time to more thoroughly clean schools."
Learning will move online on Dec. 3, Dec. 10, and Dec. 17.

Cleaning schools more thoroughly will not slow the spread of COVID-19. No matter how desperate some education officials are to pretend otherwise, scrubbing down surfaces is a component of COVID-19 hygiene theater. The disease primarily spreads via people expelling respiratory droplets at each other. Virus particles do not survive on surfaces for long.
Moreover, the extremely small benefit of more cleaning is more than canceled out by the massive drawback of additional school closures. Students who had to deal with virtual school for a year are suffering significant pandemic-related learning losses; at this point, given that COVID-19 poses very little threat to kids, schools must fight to stay open as much as possible.
Unfortunately, some schools would sooner close than deal with reality. A middle school in Oregon has decided to shut down for three weeks "to address student fights and misbehaviors." The New York Times' Michelle Goldberg correctly characterized this as a school "closing to deal with the catastrophic fallout of school closures."
Detroit's public schools aren't the only ones closing, either. In Southfield, a suburb of Detroit, students will be virtual on Fridays through January.

Children in the Detroit public schools, whose 50K enrollment is 3% white, will attend school only 4 days/week next month. This follows a similar move in the heavily Black suburb of Southfield. Striking to see such inequity become normalized after the year-plus of remote learning. https://t.co/TjkdmYgivU
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) November 17, 2021

If public schools refuse to actually do the job of educating children and providing day care services for working parents, then families should be able to withdraw their per-pupil funds and spend these education dollars where they would actually do some good.

QUICK HITS
• The judge in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial doesn't like the way he was covered in the media and is turning against courtroom cameras.
• Two men convicted of killing Malcolm X in 1965 have been exonerated.
• The House of Representatives voted to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R–Ariz.) for sharing an edited anime video in which a figure with his face slays a monster with the face of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.).
• Steven Pinker and Robert Zimmer are no longer involved in the University of Austin.
• The HBO Max special celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Potter movie will not include J.K. Rowling.
The post 'QAnon Shaman' Jacob Chansley Gets 41 Months in Prison appeared first on Reason.com.

Americans are becoming concerned about China’s increasingly menacing military stance toward Taiwan. But the talk about whether Chinese President Xi Jinping intends to take the island by force obscures a more complex struggle. Beijing’s campaign to exert pressure and influence on the island — mostly in nonmilitary ways — is intensifying, and Taiwan needs more help from the United States and its partners to counter it.

President Biden seems to get this, but he has struggled to convey a clear and consistent message on Taiwan. On Monday, Biden and Xi took part in a virtual summit. The next day, Biden made a remark that seemed to contradict the United States’ carefully calibrated policy of “strategic ambiguity,” according to which the U.S. government avoids taking a public position on whether Taiwan is an independent country.

"It's independent. It makes its own decisions,” the president told reporters. Biden later clarified that he was “not encouraging independence,” saying that the Taiwanese people could choose it if they wanted to. “Let them make up their mind. Period,” he said.

The White House played down the president’s comments, affirming that U.S. policy is based on the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (which Biden voted for as a senator) and repeating the long-standing talking point that “the United States strongly opposes unilateral efforts to change the status quo.”

It is possible that Biden simply misspoke, but just last month he also made comments on Taiwan in which he seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud. Asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese attack, the president said, "Yes, we have a commitment to do that.” The White House quickly clarified again that U.S. policy hadn’t changed.

Both of these gaffes were unintentionally revealing. They showed that Biden truly believes in preserving the democracy and freedoms that Taiwan enjoys right now, enabling the island to make its own decisions about its future. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese government, led by President Tsai Ing-wen is loudly warning that the threat from China is not just military, that it is “increasing every day,” and that 23 million Taiwanese citizens are fighting to preserve liberal democracy.

“If we fail, then that means people that believe in these values would doubt whether these are values that they (should) be fighting for,” she said last month.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) led a congressional delegation to Taiwan last week and met with Tsai and other political and business leaders there. During an interview, Cornyn told me that the United States has to marshal the international community in a more comprehensive effort to bolster Taiwan’s economic resilience, and not just help Taiwan arm itself to deter a physical attack by China.

“This has been a discussion about, ‘How do we prevent an invasion of Taiwan?’ This trip convinced me, we need to open the aperture and look at other ways that we can deter China,’ he said. “The key to deterrence is to rely on the thing the [People’s Republic of China] does not have, which is our friends and allies in the region.”

The United States and its partners also have a practical incentive for defending Taiwan, Cornyn told me. The island is a critical node in the high-technology supply chains the world depends on. The deal between Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC and the Trump administration to build a semiconductor factory in Arizona is just one small example of how Taiwan has become integrated into U.S. supply chains (and vice versa). Some call this relationship a “silicon shield,” because it links Taiwan’s survival to our economic security.

Allies including Japan, India and Australia are all becoming more vocal about the fact that Taiwan’s fall would be a problem not just for Taiwan, but for the region as a whole. To its credit, the Biden administration has been cautiously moving to coordinate its Taiwan policy with these countries. But much more needs to be done.

There’s no shortage of ideas on how to increase U.S.-led international support for Taiwan, helping it to maintain its democracy without “encouraging independence.” The Biden administration could open free-trade talks with Taiwan and encourage other countries to do the same, expand government-supported cooperation in the private and nongovernment sectors, push harder for Taiwan’s inclusion in international organizations, and actively thwart Beijing’s attempts to pry away Taiwan’s last few remaining diplomatic allies.

“The long-term military threats to Taiwan are increasing,” said Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington. “But the more immediate threats are actions taken by China that fall into the realm of hybrid warfare and political warfare aimed at subverting institutions and eroding the psychological resiliency of the people of Taiwan.”

The United States’ “strategic ambiguity” about Taiwan’s independence should not stop us from setting out clear policies on how we will help Taiwan to stay free, democratic and prosperous. This objective must be a U.S. national security priority. Deterring China from a military invasion is only one piece of that puzzle.

The American Medical Association (AMA) is the paramount advocate, lobbyist, and trade association of doctors and other medical professionals. Its influence in the health care industry cannot be overstated. And it just released a report, co-signed by the Association of American Medical College's Center for Health Justice, titled "Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts."
The report contains different sorts of advice for making health care more equitable. But it mostly focuses on language. And unfortunately, its authors were clearly influenced by the same kind of progressive activists whose jargon has infected academia. The guidance ranges from bad to actively harmful.
Take a look:

Of course medical professionals should avoid unintentional blaming. But what's the benefit of avoiding words like "tackle" and "target"? Should we no longer tackle obesity, or target infections? What's dehumanizing about terms like "vulnerable" or "high-risk"? The benefit of these words is that they have been around a long time, and we know what they mean. That's the point of language: to clearly communicate ideas. We want terminology that people understand, not terminology that is maximally politically correct.
Most of the AMA's new preferred terminology involves additional syllables. You're not supposed to say homeless; you're supposed to say people experiencing homelessness. You're not suppose to say disabled; you're supposed to say person experiencing disability. Doctors often spend only a few minutes with a patient, especially an underprivileged patient. I don't think the best remedy for that is to ask doctors to use longer phrases when shorter ones would do.
Some of the new terminology is also inaccurate. The report wants doctors to stop using the word "minority" and instead say "marginalized." But not all people who are part of a minority are marginalized, and some people who are marginalized are not part of a minority. The report also suggests replacing "vulnerable" with "oppressed," but not all people with a health vulnerability are facing or have faced oppression.
Last week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky inadvertently demonstrated how silly some of this new language would be when she made the following statement: "We know that vaccination helps to decrease community transmission, and protect those who are most vulnerable." Imagine if she had said "most oppressed" instead. That would make absolutely no sense.
"Men are more vulnerable to COVID-19 than women, but not because men are more oppressed," writes The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf. "My grandmother is far more vulnerable to the disease than a wrongfully incarcerated teenager, yet she is far less oppressed."
Meanwhile, the report avoids criticizing one of the foremost structures standing in the way of health equity: the AMA itself. As Matthew Yglesias notes in a Substack post criticizing the new guidance, there are all sorts of ways that the AMA works to prevent a better health system from emerging. He cites this chart, which shows that the U.S. has far fewer doctors per person than other countries:

One reason this is the case is that the AMA is constantly "blocking increased scope of practice for nurses, making it hard for foreign-trained doctors to practice in the United States, and historically pushing to train too few doctors here at home," writes Yglesias. "It's a trade association and, unfortunately, this is what trade associations do."
Similarly, the economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok write, "If the AMA really wants to do something for health equity they should stop trying to police language and instead support nurse practitioners, midwives, physician assistants, and other healthcare professionals who want to expand their practices, lobby for more physicians and an end to the absurd residency bottleneck, and support greater hospital competition. Physician heal thyself."

The post The American Medical Association Would Like Doctors To Use Woke Jargon appeared first on Reason.com.

What is the United States’ greatest advantage relative to other countries? Is it the country’s large and still innovative economy? No doubt economic strength is important, but how did the U.S. economy get so big? Is it America’s well-armed, well-trained, and far-flung military? Military power is obviously valuable, but what allows Washington to deploy these forces all over the world and worry relatively little about defending the homeland? Or is the secret ingredient the United States’ array of allies? Guess again: Some U.S. allies add to its strength , others create more problems than they solve, and others are more like protectorates rather than meaningful additions to U.S. power.

What is the United States’ greatest advantage relative to other countries? Is it the country’s large and still innovative economy? No doubt economic strength is important, but how did the U.S. economy get so big? Is it America’s well-armed, well-trained, and far-flung military? Military power is obviously valuable, but what allows Washington to deploy these forces all over the world and worry relatively little about defending the homeland? Or is the secret ingredient the United States’ array of allies? Guess again: Some U.S. allies add to its strength, others create more problems than they solve, and others are more like protectorates rather than meaningful additions to U.S. power.

In fact, America’s unique advantage has been its status as the only great power in the Western Hemisphere—and thus, the only “regional hegemon” in modern political history. By expanding across North America, assimilating incoming immigrants, and maintaining high birth rates for many years, what were originally 13 weak and loosely connected colonies grew into the world’s largest economy in little over a century. With no powerful rivals nearby, the United States also enjoyed a level of “free security” other great powers could only dream of.

The resulting combination of size, population, and economic might allowed the United States to create a vast military establishment, beginning when it mobilized for war in the late 1930s. At the same time, geographic isolation freed the United States from having to spend a lot of time and money defending its own soil. It also allowed the United States to enter the two World Wars later than anyone else and left its territory unscathed during those destructive global cataclysms. Distance helped make the United States an especially attractive ally during the Cold War: It was strong enough to help protect its distant partners but sufficiently far away that they didn’t worry the United States might try to subjugate them.

From this perspective, the Northern victory in the Civil War was a critical moment with far-reaching implications. Preserving the union enabled the country to complete its western expansion and eventually amass capabilities that dwarfed its neighbors. Had the South won the war and gained independence, the two resulting countries would each have been weaker and almost certainly remained wary rivals for many years. One can easily imagine the two states fighting again, and foreign powers would have meddled in hemispheric affairs by allying with either the North or the South or with Mexico and Canada. International politics in North and Central America would have become more like the multipolar continent of Europe, where rival great powers feared each other, competed for power and influence, and occasionally fought punishing wars.

I was reminded of all this when I read that Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told a group of students that Texas might have to secede (again) if Democrats tried to “destroy the country.” Granted, Cruz is a grandstanding popinjay whose idea of political responsibility consists of flying off to vacation in Cancún while his constituents shiver through a brutal power outage. He may not have meant what he said, but he clearly thinks this kind of loose talk will rebound to his political advantage. It is also the height of cynicism for Cruz to warn about Democrats trying to pack the Supreme Court or “expand voter fraud” when it is the modern GOP doing everything in its power to disenfranchise voters and gerrymander its way into permanent minority rule.

Secessionist movements have been part of the political scene for a long time, of course, and they typically don’t amount to much. Moreover, as writer Casey Michel noted in Politico last year, modern secessionism is less about actually leaving the union than about trying to obstruct government initiatives that certain groups don’t like. Even so, some polls suggest that support for various secessionist proposals is uncomfortably high, and a growing number of people (overwhelmingly on the political right) are now willing to threaten physical violence against elected officials whose views they oppose. And I hear that an armed mob even invaded Congress to overturn last year’s presidential election, and its actions are being whitewashed and defended by prominent politicians, including some of its possible targets.

Moreover, it’s not as if the “secessionist obstructionist” impulse is wholly confined to the political right. California defied former U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to roll back environmental protection measures and its threats to withhold federal health care funds over abortion rights, and Massachusetts filed numerous lawsuits to block a wide array of Trump-era initiatives, often in league with other like-minded states. If a future president tried to enact Gilead-style social policies or further stack the electoral map in his or her party’s favor, it is not inconceivable that blue states in the west or northeast would simply refuse to go along.

There are two dangers here. The most obvious (and likely) is that polarization and obstructionism make it impossible for the government to take prompt and effective action in critical policy domains, no matter which party is in power. Need I remind Americans that this shoot-ourselves-in-the-foot tendency is precisely what Chinese President Xi Jinping is counting on and is central to China’s claims that it has a superior political model? The less likely but more worrisome possibility is existing divisions will harden and today’s loose talk about secession starts to gain real political momentum.

Do I think this outcome is likely? Certainly not. Established nations rarely break up, and civil wars are even less common among democracies unless—here’s the scary part—their political institutions are weak or failing. But this danger should not be entirely dismissed. A few democracies have split up in recent decades, and secessionist efforts can be a costly distraction even when they ultimately fail, as the cases of Quebec, Catalonia, and Scotland all suggest.

Here’s the part I don’t get. Despite the many blunders that have occurred on the United States’ watch (Iraq, the Iran-Contra affair, the 9/11 attacks, North Korea’s nuclear test, etc.) Republicans like to portray themselves as responsible grown-ups when it comes to national security. Yet they also seem ardently opposed to any serious effort to prepare the country for a serious geopolitical competition. One can disagree with a lot of the Biden administration’s policy proposals, but its objectives shouldn’t be controversial: Reduce polarization; put the pandemic behind us; maintain the United States’ technological edge; and enhance long-term productivity by investing in infrastructure, health, education, and other broad social goods. Oh, and stop destroying the environment that human life depends on. These initiatives might not work, but the goal is to make most Americans better off and put the country in a better position to compete with rival powers like China. It’s a win-win.

Republicans like Cruz like to pontificate about the need to beat China, but he and his ilk are doing everything they can think of to make that task impossible. Loose talk about secession, opposition to vaccines, ignoring vigilantism, and endlessly stoking the culture wars undercut any hope of having a successful foreign policy, let alone winning a geopolitical contest with a peer competitor. And let’s not forget that Cruz also believes U.S. foreign policy will somehow be more effective if he blocks key ambassadorial nominations, leaves these posts vacant, and opens the door wider for Beijing.

Remember: Should the secessionist impulse ever gain momentum and succeed in breaking up the country, it would squander the United States’ most vital geopolitical asset. Or to put it more simply: “Together we stand; divided we fall.” Could someone embroider that message on a nice red, white, and blue sampler and send it to the junior senator from Texas?

The pandemic has proved to be a nearly two-year stress test that the United States flunked, with an already distrustful populace exposed to a level of institutional failure that added fuel to the angry battles over how to respond. Dr. Martin Cetron, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention veteran of battles against Ebola in Africa, described people’s losing confidence during an epidemic as a “bankruptcy of trust.” Right now, America is bankrupt.

It once seemed that if the United States ever faced a viral pandemic, it would be more than up to the challenge. Just weeks before the first Covid-19 cases were reported in China, the United States was ranked No. 1 out of 195 countries in pandemic preparedness by experts convened by Johns Hopkins University, The Economist and others. After all, the C.D.C. is one of the most respected public health institutions in the world, and the United States is home to many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and academic research institutions.

The fact that the United States fared so poorly, despite all the seeming advantages that dazzled those experts, is a profound sign of how decayed our institutions and capacity have become. To understand how we fell so far short and to navigate a second full Covid winter and future pandemics and challenges requiring collective action, it’s important to review the outbreak’s early days to see why the United States — once considered the global leader in public health — is floundering in mistrust, paranoia and exhaustion.

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One of the most dangerous things about Covid-19 is not necessarily what it does to any given person who is infected by the coronavirus but that someone can be contagious and not even know about it for days — if at all. The disease can spread before symptoms start and sometimes even without any ever appearing.

At the start of the pandemic, this meant that the number of people who needed to be tested would be far, far greater than the number of people who were visibly sick after suspecting that they came into contact with the virus. This was the first major test for the Food and Drug Administration and the C.D.C. — develop a test and deploy it at scale — and it was one they resoundingly failed.

America is overflowing with good news. Unemployment is down, wages are up, consumer confidence is rebounding, and consumers are spending more (retail sales jumped 1.7% in October, the third monthly increase). Covid seems to be in retreat, at least among those who have been vaccinated. And two big parts of Biden’s legislative agenda – last spring’s $1.9tn American Rescue Plan, and his recent $1.2tn infrastructure plan – have been enacted.

So what’s not to be happy about? Apparently, plenty. Biden’s job approval rating is 12 points lower than when he took office – now just 41% (around where Trump’s was for most of his presidency). Most registered voters say that if the midterm elections were today, they’d support the Republican candidate. Even Trump beats Biden in hypothetical matchups. More than 60% of Americans say the Democrats are out of touch with the concerns of most Americans. And Republican congressional candidates now hold their largest lead in midterm election vote preferences dating back 40 years.

How can the economic and pandemic news be so good, and so much of Biden’s agenda already enacted – yet the public be so sour on Biden and the Democrats?

Some blame Biden’s and the Democrat’s poor messaging. Yes, it’s awful. Even now most Americans have no idea what the “Build Back Better” package is. It sounds like infrastructure, but that bill has been enacted. “Human infrastructure” makes no sense to most people.

Yet this can’t be the major reason for the paradox because the Democrats’ failure at messaging goes back at least a half century. I remember in 1968 after Nixon beat Humphrey hearing that the Democrats’ problem is they talk policy while Americans want to hear values – the same criticism we’re hearing today.

Some blame the media – not just despicable Fox News but also the corporate mainstream. But here, too, the problem predates the current paradox. Before Fox News, Rush Limbaugh was poisoning countless minds. And for at least four decades, the mainstream media has focused on conflict, controversy and scandal. Good news doesn’t attract eyeballs.

Some suggest Democrats represent the college-educated suburban middle class that doesn’t really want major social change anyway. Yet this isn’t new, either. Clinton and Obama abandoned the working class by embracing trade, rejecting unions, subsidizing Wall Street and big business and embracing deregulation and privatization.

So what explains the wide gap now between how well the country is doing and how badly Biden and the Democrats are doing politically?

In two words: dashed hopes. After four years of Trump and a year and a half of deathly pandemic, most of the country was eager to put all the horror behind – to start over, wipe the slate clean, heal the wounds, reboot America. Biden in his own calm way seemed just the person to do it. And when Democrats retook the Senate, expectations of Democrats and independents soared.

But those expectations couldn’t possibly be met when all the underlying structural problems were still with us – a nation deeply split, Trumpers still threatening democracy, racism rampant, corporate money still dominating much of politics, inequality still widening, inflation undermining wage gains, and the Delta variant of Covid still claiming lives.

Dashed hopes make people angry. Mass disappointment is politically poisonous. Social psychologists have long understood that losing something of value generates more anguish than obtaining it generated happiness in the first place.

Biden and Democrats can take solace from this. Hopefully, a year from now the fruits of Biden’s initiatives will be felt, Covid will be behind us, bottlenecks behind the current inflation will be overcome, and the horrors of the Trump years will become more visible through Congress’s investigations and the midterm campaigns of Trumpers.

Most importantly, America’s irrational expectations for quick deliverance from all our structural problems will have settled into a more sober understanding that resolving them will require a huge amount of work, from all of us.

Then, I suspect, the nation will be better able to appreciate how far we’ve come in just two years from where we were.

(Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,As you’ve probably noticed, things are getting more expensive out there. (I, for example, thought I might need to take out a loan to pay for my last trip to Costco.) What was once supposed to be a short spike in consumer prices—tied to economic reopening and pandemic-related shortages—has persisted for much longer than most policymakers expected and thus turned into a major economic and political story. It’s also sparked an increasingly heated debate among economists about what caused the current bout of inflation and whether it’s the new U.S. normal or just “transitory.” I, for one, tend to think it’s more likely the latter, but this honestly misses the point—about the risks now out there and the broader lessons that the current moment can teach us about U.S. economic policy.Rhetoric Meets RealityRegardless of whether you think inflation is temporary or longer-lasting, there’s little doubt that U.S. policymakers have repeatedly been too sanguine about how hot prices would get, how broad these price pressures would be, and how long they would stay that way. The Federal Reserve, for example, projected in March that its preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index, would hit 2.4 percent for full-year 2021. And that same spring, various Fed officials and other economists told us that “transitory” price pressures would abate by the summer as supply adjusted and workers returned. Shortly thereafter, however, the Fed upped its 2021 PCE forecast to 3.4 percent, while Chairman Jerome Powell even in August maintained his view that recent spikes—in things like used cars—were isolated and abating, and thus that broader inflationary pressures were contained.In late September, however, the Fed again raised its 2021 PCE forecast, this time to 4.2 percent—indicating, once again, more significant and persistent price pressures than earlier forecasts. They haven’t yet updated the September figures, but professional forecasters surveyed by the Philly Fed on Monday now see the 2021 PCE index coming in at 4.9 percent—another large upward revision.Given the new data from a separate inflation gauge, the consumer price index (CPI), it’s easy to see why. Although year-over-year data (blue lines below) showing “record” CPI prints suffer from “base effects” because inflation was basically negative when the pandemic first hit, the monthly data (red lines) justify renewed concern. For example, in the four years preceding the pandemic, monthly CPI gains averaged about 0.2 percent. Since April of this year, however, the average has more than tripled at a little over 0.6 percent per month, and the late-summer CPI swoon that had “Team Transitory” taking a victory lap has disappeared.As helpfully calculated by CFRB’s Marc Goldwein, we're now looking at full-year 2021 CPI growth to clock in at more than 6 percent—again well above where basically anyone on Team Transitory thought we’d be in March or April of this year:Furthermore, price increases aren’t isolated like Powell and others predicted this summer. As explained in a recent Reuters piece, for example, alternate CPI measures from the Cleveland Fed that are intended to account for volatile items (gas, food, etc.) or isolated factors (hotels, rental cars, etc.) are also showing significant and persistent upticks and even a little acceleration this fFall:Median CPI—an alternative measure that many economists like because it trims the highest and lowest figures—now annualizes at 5.1 percent for 2021 because price increases have broadened out:Of particular concern going forward is housing, as these prices account for a large portion of the overall CPI print and are—as was expected—finally catching up to the on-the-ground rent and home price realities we’ve been seeing in many U.S. housing markets. Another concern is that higher labor costs and historically frothy producer prices (driven in part by higher import prices) will get passed on to consumers in the coming months:Today, the expectation—even among many inflation doves—is that this “transitory” inflation will be with us until at least early next year and could actually accelerate in the next few months: “It won’t be until the first quarter, when demand for consumer goods is much lower, that supply constraints might ease. If inflation looked hot in October, just imagine what November and December might bring." Other experts, however, see potential supply-side constraints lasting through the end of2022. Given these concerns, the tone in Washington has abruptly changed, as Reuters notes: “For both the Fed and the Biden administration, what was an adamant faith in transitory inflation has been tempered”—to say the least.So What Happened?I dare not get too far into the weeds as to why the confident “transitory” predictions seem to have fallen so flat, but a few things are worth noting:First, per Harvard’s Jason Furman (repeatedly, in this Twitter thread), the U.S. experience right now really is, contra Paul Krugman and others, unique:Furman also notes in that series of charts/tweets and in a separate series teaching some broader macroeconomic points that the common argument from Team Transitory that all of this is just supply-side stuff—pandemic-related shortages of workers/output or supply chain problems at ports and elsewhere—just doesn’t hold water. For example, all of the countries above are dealing with similar pandemic and supply-side issues, yet the U.S. experience still stands out (a lot). (Feel free to click through the links to learn more—the last one is particularly useful.) Furman—who was most definitely not an inflation hawk earlier this year and generally supports Biden’s agenda—therefore argues in a new Wall Street Journal op-ed that, while there are some supply-side constraints, most of the blame for the current inflationary situation in the United State should fall to the demand-side, i.e., the U.S. fiscal and monetary response to the pandemic:Inflation in the U.S. was similar to what the euro area experienced going into the pandemic, but prices have risen a cumulative 4% more in the U.S. over the past two years. The oversize and poorly designed $2.7 trillion fiscal stimulus passed in December and March is at least partly to blame for the divergence. The Federal Reserve has continued de facto to loosen, with the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions Index showing that the combination of lower long-term rates, higher stock prices and other financial changes has been the equivalent of more than a percentage point cut in the federal-funds rate since November 2020.In other words, we spent a ton of deficit-financed money, and the “real” (inflation-adjusted) federal funds rate (the rate the Fed sets for overnight bank lending) actually fell—right in the middle of an already-strengthening economic recovery. Ther result: “uncomfortably high” inflation that’s likely to persist into next year.Others share Furman’s diagnosis and conclusions. For example, AEI’s Jim Pethokoukis recently pointed out this handy chart and quote from hedge fund Bridgewater: “Today, demand is surging, and supply is also growing, but it just can’t keep up with demand. There are not enough raw materials, energy, productive capacity, inventories, housing, or workers.” Such analyses seem to vindicate the relatively few Beltway voices in early 2021 who were urging caution on—if not outright opposition to—the American Recovery Plan. As you’ll recall from my cautionary contribution in February, there were plenty of signs at that time that (1) with vaccines proliferating and restrictions easing, the U.S. economy was on its way to recovering; (2) that the pandemic recession bore little resemblance to the deeper, more systemic Great Recession (and thus called for a different policy response); and (3) the ARP’s fiscal stimulus far exceeded the “output gap” between current and pre-pandemic-trend production and, when combined with previous trillions in pandemic spending and super-easy Fed policy, could produce inflationary pressures. As I noted then, “[e]ven some left-leaning economists,” such as Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard, “warn that even more front-loaded stimulus, plus the aforementioned economic conditions (consumer spending, etc.), could spark a serious bout of inflation, thus triggering a harsh response from the Federal Reserve (higher interest rates, monetary ‘tightening’), and possibly causing another painful recession.”In the last week, both Blanchard and Summers have taken their victory laps. And others are joining in.Why It MattersMaybe they’re all wrong and inflation will subside relatively soon, thus vindicating Team Transitory” (at least using a very liberal interpretation of that adjective), but plenty of risks remain.

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In the summer of 1969, NASA’s Apollo program succeeded in its mission to put a man on the Moon. But in the 49 years since Apollo 17, neither NASA nor any other space agency has brought man beyond low-Earth orbit. How have American presidents and the public thought about manned space flight in the past half century? And what does the future for space flight hold as private companies venture beyond the atmosphere? To answer those questions and more, I’m joined by John Logsdon.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.
Pethokoukis: What did you think about the William Shatner ride into space?
Logsdon: Well, it’s great PR for Blue Origin and his reaction is almost literally priceless. He really captured the excitement of being in space that motivates a lot of us to continue to support space exploration, not just exploitation.
One thing that I noticed about his response after landing was rather than thinking about Earth in the classic Carl Sagan-Pale Blue Dot way, he instead seemed to focus on how precarious life seemed to be. On how we have the Earth, with just a thin layer of blue and then surrounded by the black. I don’t know, it’s maybe just a little bit of a different way of looking at it than how people often describe the Earth.
Well, I think a number of people that have had the experience of being in orbit — and of course Shatner didn’t go into orbit — have experienced what they call the “overview effect” of looking back at Earth and indeed perceiving just how fragile this planet is and how thin our atmosphere sheltering us from the void of the cosmos is and how important it is to preserve this planet. And it will take work.
Star Trek actor William Shatner, 90, after his flight in a capsule powered by Blue Origin’s reusable rocket engine, New Shepard. October 13, 2021. REUTERS/Mike Blake

After his ride, not unexpectedly, there were some politicians criticizing it as “billionaires taking joy rides.” I think after some of the previous flights, Bernie Sanders said something similar. Their critiques are about billionaires and wealth but also probably about how resources are being spent. This is not a new critique. Certainly during the Apollo age, there were a lot of critiques of Apollo as a waste of valuable resources, weren’t there?
Well, yes, and I’ll come back to that in a minute. But I think it’s worth pointing out that this flight with Shatner was totally private. There was no public money, no government money, except on the very margins, involved in the enterprise. So private people can spend their money as they choose and be subject to criticism, but it’s not the same as misplaced priorities in government spending. That was the argument during Apollo. Even during Apollo, Amitai Etzioni, the social critic (he’s still with us), published a book in 1963 called Moon-Doggle and it is a trenchant criticism of the priority being allocated to Apollo, and it was an entirely legitimate criticism. I didn’t agree with it then; I don’t agree with it now. But there were choices made about how to spend public money, not on education, not on welfare, but on competing with the Soviet Union for global space leadership. And you could say that was or was not worth it.
If I recall correctly, after it became clear that the Apollo program was going to come to an end, there was a New York Times editorial which said something like, “We’ve been critical of the program all along, that it was only merely about prestige. Now that the space race is won, it’s over. So any other reason that you may have given for going to space, well, obviously that was just a phony reason because now it’s over.” I think that sort of criticism still hurts efforts today: that the Apollo program and any new vision about manned space exploration are about little more than things of national pride or maybe some sort of soft-power geopolitics. But there’s not a substantially good reason for people leaving the Earth.
Well, I think it is, but I think there’s more to it than that. John Kennedy, when he decided to send Americans to the Moon, was very clear that it was an element of national security strategy, that it was a way of demonstrating leadership, vis-a-vis the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. That was something of crucial national interest and importance in the early ‘60s. So he made a very calculated decision that the prize was worth the cost. He revisited that. Whether he would’ve kept that had he lived all the way through is an interesting question.
The problem since has been that there’s no answer like: “How do you beat the Soviets? Go to the Moon.” What’s the question to which the answer is “Go to Mars” or “Return to the Moon”? There really is no compelling answer to that. It becomes a matter of choice — I think societal choice, as long as it’s government money. My own view is that space exploration is an element of human experience that is worth investing in. I think less than half of one percent goes into the NASA budget. Given all the other things we spend money on, spending money on exploring space and the human adventure of exploring space, I think, is worth the cost.
Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. poses beside the deployed flag of the United States during the Apollo 11 Moon landing on July 20, 1969. Via REUTERS.
You mentioned President Kennedy. The Apollo program ended under President Nixon. Have American presidents thought fairly similarly about space?
Oh, I think they have differed pretty dramatically from president to president. I’ve been working on a study of the presidents since Nixon and their attitudes towards a space program, and you see they’re highly variable. Jimmy Carter wasn’t interested in human space flight at all and gave it very low priority. Ronald Reagan saw human space flight and space in general as kind of a new frontier. He had a frontier attitude towards life. He wanted to push new frontiers, and he saw space that way, but he didn’t put money behind that thought. The NASA budget was basically the same percentage of the federal budget as Reagan came in and when he left.
George H.W. Bush was convinced to set a return to the Moon and then on to Mars as a goal. But that didn’t take. Congress was opposed, and there wasn’t any strong public support. But he proposed on the 20th anniversary of Apollo going back to the Moon. Then Bill Clinton didn’t have high interest in space exploration. He was focused on the space station, using it as an instrument of post–Cold War diplomacy. George W. Bush had to react after the Columbia accident in 2003 and the criticism, of which I had a hand, from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that the program lacked a vision. W. Bush set out again a vision of long-term, sustained exploration with people as well as spacecraft.
Those starts and stops have persisted since 2004. Certainly Mr. Trump saw the dramatic potential of space and set us on a sustained course of exploration. President Biden has said he’s going to stay that course. So we’ll see. We’re on a path now to return to the Moon with humans — “the first woman and the next man” is the cliche — some time in the next five to seven years.
Of my favorite television shows — I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it — is a show called For All Mankind.
Yeah, I’ve seen some of the episodes.
It’s kind of an alternate history show and the premise is the Soviets get to the Moon first and that sets into motion a variety of events in which the space race never really ends. The Soviets keep going to the Moon. We keep going to the Moon. Technology keeps advancing. Was there a scenario where Apollo doesn’t end and a new manned space program ends up being the successor program to Apollo? Was there a conceivable scenario where that happened?
Well, was it a scenario? I’m not sure it was proposed. President Nixon knew he had to define what happened after Apollo. He chartered a thing called the Space Task Group chaired by a well-known space expert named Spiro Agnew, his vice president, to come up with definitive recommendations of what to do after Apollo. They recommended going to Mars in the mid-1980s. If that recommendation had been accepted, it would have been a very different program. Nixon had no interest in spending money on doing that. He liked the astronauts, but he didn’t see continued exploration as an important element. He said, “It’s just another program funded in competition with all the other things that are important.” In that competition, space went from 4 percent of the budget to one half or 1 percent of the budget. It has stayed there or around there now for the past 25 or 30 years, maybe even more.
With Nixon, was it purely just that he didn’t grasp that idea of human adventure? I’ve read that the near disaster of Apollo 13 also may have played a role. That really shook him up.
Yeah, it really did. He got very emotionally engaged with the fate of the Apollo crew. Even before then, he was skeptical of continued lunar exploration. But after Apollo 13, he tried very hard to cancel what turned out to be Apollo 16 and 17. It was NASA that canceled the final two planned missions, and told Nixon they’d rather spend the money on new programs than on repeating trips to the Moon. NASA, at least some of the people in NASA, also got cold feet after Apollo 13, realizing just how risky this was. So NASA has really not embraced exploration as much as it has embraced building and operating the space shuttle, building and operating the space station, and only then turning to, “What do we do next?” The answer is resume exploration.
Apollo 17 Commander Gene Cernan pictured on the moon, December 14, 1972.Via REUTERS
To what extent have the changes in the program been driven by a fickle public? We all love the notion of Apollo and politicians love putting scenes of the Moon landing in their ads, but America’s interest in space might not be as great as one might think. Given our love of Apollo, not to mention our love of science-fiction films, if the American public was more enthusiastic about the notion, would the politicians follow? And am I characterizing the public opinion correctly?
Well, James, I don’t know how old you are. I know how old I am. And I was at the launch of Apollo 11. So I’m very much of the Apollo generation. But 60 percent of the people alive today have been born since Apollo, and that’s not part of their memory. So for those of us that it is, it’s kind of sad that there isn’t continued enthusiasm.
But look at all the interest in sending Shatner, even just on this little suborbital jaunt. The people followed the Inspiration4 private orbital mission. I think instead of the Apollo astronauts, we now have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. And the things that they’re trying to do certainly are capturing a fair amount of public attention. It’s been my view that government space programs of the character of Apollo and similar are really presidential issues, where a president sees the link between space exploration and some important national priority: national image, national intervention, national morale. Some of the presidents have seen that, others have not.
The fact that we have not left low-Earth orbit in a half century, does that mean Apollo was a failure? In what ways do you think Apollo was a failure? In what ways, looking back, was it a success beyond the goal of actually getting on the Moon?
Well, for John Kennedy, the point of Apollo was a demonstration of American technological (implicitly military) and organizational potency. It was an act of national power and national prestige. In those terms, I think it was totally successful. The rest of the world was more impressed by Apollo at the time than the people in the United States. But it was also by defining it as a race — once you won the race, there was no reason to keep racing. As I said earlier, the race rationale has not been replaced by any other compelling rationale strong enough to rally political support for the funds that are necessary to do things like this.
Even beyond the space station and the space shuttle, we still have an active space program, just not a manned space program. I think we sometimes forget that we continue to send probes to planets, to asteroids. I mean, that’s not an inconsiderable achievement.
Yeah. There’s a mission going to the asteroids called Lucy. We’ve explored the solar system. On December the 18th, we’re going to launch the successor to the Hubble telescope called James Webb, that will look back in time and out in space to the origins of the universe. It’s been an extremely exciting robotic space exploration program.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket for a mission to study the Trojan asteroids in the outer solar system. October 15, 2021. REUTERS/Steve Nesius
In addition, space has become a place for business. There’s a $400 billion space economy in existence, mainly doing useful things — communications, Earth observation, positioning and navigation. Space capabilities become central to everyday life, at least in the advanced world. Then there’s the whole other use of space for national security and military power, which is very real. In the last year and a half or so, the United States created a Space Force to symbolize the importance of national security in space.
I think if we would’ve had our conversation a decade ago, it might’ve purely been about space probes and us reminiscing about the Apollo program, but clearly that has changed. That has changed partially at least, if not primarily, due to the dramatic decline in launch costs. What has been going on in space the last 10 years, and how excited are you that space seems to have been opened up in a way that we haven’t really considered for quite some time?
Well, I think what has been going on is a paradigm shift, to use a kind of jargony phrase. Space is a place to do business, and the lowering of launch costs is key to that. One has to give credit to SpaceX and Elon Musk and the introduction of reusability as a key element in the lowering of launch costs, which means there’s the possibility of trying and failing without great cost and trying and succeeding in various lines of business. So space has become an area for profit-making, for applications that benefit humanity. In a sense, it’s become dull. It’s just another place to do useful things. I still am captured by space exploration, by going places, seeing new things. But that’s been kind of overcome, except on occasion, by space exploitation, by finding all the useful things you can do from the orbital perspective and eventually beyond.
I think some people find it untoward that NASA does not seem to be leading America in space, that it is the private sector doing so instead. Are you fine with the private sector taking the lead in space for the United States?
Well, taking the lead is kind of a slippery concept. We’ve gotten to the point where there’s not one thing called space or space activity. The government still has the lead in exploration, both robotic and human, because nobody has figured out how to monetize it. You do have people like Musk who are visionaries with a personal preference for exploration. Elon still talks about a million-person city on Mars and never justifies that on economic terms. But the maturing of space means that people who are there not because of the excitement of exploration, but because of the possibility of creating new businesses, new wealth, new jobs, see it as an area with a lot of potential. So there’s more than one track in space activity, and I’m certainly fine with that.
The International Space Station photographed by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking, October 4, 2018. NASA/Roscosmos/Handout via REUTERS
The space race began as a geopolitical rivalry. Now there seems to be a rivalry between the US and China. Do you think that will be helpful in keeping Americans interested in space?
I do. It’s very different than the Cold War and the Space Race in the sense that there are so many more capable space actors. It’s not just as it was in the ‘60s with the United States and the Soviet Union. But clearly China is an ambitious space power. The United States has maintained its commitment to a leading position in space. I think the competition between those two is very different in character than the US-Soviet Cold War competition, and it’s probably good for both sides to stimulate activity. You can compete without racing. After all, competition is the American way of life. So what China is doing in civil space, I think, is in a sense good for everybody. It is a separate issue that China is developing military space capabilities that are threatening to the US ability to fight and win wars. That is very much a matter of concern. But China’s lunar exploration program, our Artemis exploration program, private ventures, and return to the Moon, I think, are all good for everybody.
What would you like America to be doing at a governmental level? Is there anything that the government should stop doing? What would be your policy advice?
Right now the policy advice I would give is to stay the course. The Trump administration left a space heritage for President Biden. President Biden embraced that heritage and said, “We’re going to keep moving forward.” So “staying the course of consistency of purpose,” I guess, is the jargon phrase. Let’s continue to prepare for human exploration in the end of this decade and beyond. It’s time to go back. It’s time to go somewhere again, not just in circles around the Earth.
Final question: Would you accept an invite from Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin?
Well, Shatner was 90. By the time this airs I will have turned 84. He’s in better shape than I am. So probably, yes. I don’t want to downgrade what has happened, but it’s a joy ride, going up and down in 10 minutes. If I were going to take the risk, I’d want to go to orbit, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.
I like that answer. My guest today has been John Logsdon. John, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Good to be with you.
Learn more: The techno-optimism of World's Fairs: My long-read Q&A with Charles Pappas | Will taxing billionaires help Democrats build back better? My long-read Q&A with Kyle Pomerleau | America’s labor shortage and the ‘Great Resignation’: My long-read Q&A with Michael Strain
The post Looking back on the Space Race: My long-read Q&A with John Logsdon appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The question of whether the novel is dead is one that often occupies those in the business of writing or commenting on novels, much as the question of self-driving cars doubtless occupies truckers. One’s attitude towards the question largely depends on one’s attitude towards genre fiction and Sally Rooney.
Still, whatever its truth, it is inarguable that, as Joseph Bottum wrote in his 2019 book The Decline of the Novel, “art forms are not immortal or incapable of collapse when their social foundations shift.” To that end, authors have been attempting to innovate. The “alt-lit” community have been using social media for years, both as a source of thematic material and as a means of publication, and even grizzled vets are learning new tricks. Salman Rushdie has been publishing his latest novel, The Seventh Wave, in a serialized form on Substack.
And Thomas Pynchon?
Well, here lies a mystery. A user of the r/ThomasPynchon board on Reddit has noticed something unusual. Paul Thomas Anderson, who adapted Pynchon’s book Inherent Vice, has a new film, Licorice Pizza. A character in Licorice Pizza is an old guy in the movie business named Sam Harpoon.
Harpoon appears to have “his” own Twitter account where he posts fictional movie anecdotes, in what feels like a tribute to the rambling Facebook posts of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull screenwriter Paul Schrader. Sample brilliance: “this boggles my mind (not my imagination – nothing boggles that).” Despite having fewer than 2,000 followers, Harpoon is followed by Hollywood big hitters like Looper and Knives Out director Rian Johnson. Some of Harpoon’s anecdotes appear to drop sly references to Pynchon’s work. For example, he writes:
2022 marks 50 years since I began the journey of crafting “Rainbow,” my studio debut and the film which has defined my career for better or worse (arguably both). Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, while not his first book, was published in 1973 and has defined his career (for better or worse). Another Reddit wag pointed out that a “Harpoon” is a missile. The plot of Gravity’s Rainbow concerned missiles and Pynchon worked as a technical writer of Boeing.
Could Pynchon be tweeting as a minor character from a Paul Thomas Anderson film? There are similarities between their thoughts and style. “Harpoon” writes:
Gurdjieff once wrote, “Essence is the truth in man.” This was the guiding philosophy at the heart of “Juju and the Caper Crew” which I made for Fox in 1974. However due to a financing snafu with Westinghouse it was only shown at the NATO training base in Szczecin. Great film! SH.
Various Pynchonian elements are there: tricksy humor, esoteric philosophy and strange military machinations. Could it be? Could it be?
Well, none of this is direct evidence for the furtive novelist’s involvement. As fun as all this speculation is, the cold hands of probability have to rest themselves upon our shoulders. Pynchon is 84. He famously avoids the limelight. He has never had a verifiable social media presence. Is it realistic to imagine that he is spending his golden years posting away online to a small audience of amused movie bigwigs and curious Redditors?
Then again, it is certainly someone, and someone well-connected, trying to sound Pynchonesque. It would not surprise me if it was Paul Thomas Anderson himself, who shares Harpoon’s enthusiasm for lost subcultures and, obviously, filmmaking. But perhaps it is nothing more than a stunt — an attempt to gain publicity from bozos like your humble commentator through manufacturing speculation that directs people towards the film.
If it is a stunt, it is a clever one. No other author’s name invites such conspiratorialism. He produces Pynchon novels but he also inspires a universe of Pynchonalia. He has been alleged (almost certainly falsely) to have published a novel under a different name. When he published his novel Bleeding Edge, there were suggestions (again, almost certainly false) that he was posting on the strange and lurid messageboard 4Chan. When Paul Thomas Anderson directed Inherent Vice, there were claims, which led to feverish theorizing, that the famously camera-shy novelist had made an appearance. USA Today even asked various authors to submit their own “Thomas Pynchon conspiracy theories,” with Teddy Wayne, author of Loner suggesting, “Thomas Pynchon is really J.D. SALINGER.”
Pynchon’s enigmatic public image has created a Pychonesque drama in itself — a seething mass of speculation aimed towards…what? Trying to see an old man’s face? Trying to find out whether he wrote some humorous tweets? Well, damn it, I want to know as well. If knowledge is hard to acquire, then curiosity inflates its value out of all proportion. The internet has made that even truer because we know so much about so many different people and events. The unknown becomes especially tantalizing.
Sam Harpoon, whoever he is, is writing a chapter in a sort of abstract novel — a collection of texts that illustrate the stranger reaches of human inquisitiveness. Will it have an ending?
The post The return of Thomas Pynchon? appeared first on The Spectator World.

Quantum mechanics is nearly one hundred years old, and yet the challenge it presents to the imagination is so great that scientists are still coming to terms with some of its most basic implications. Here I will describe some theoretical insights and recent experimental results that are leading physicists to revise and expand their ideas about what quantum-mechanical particles are and how they behave. These new ideas are centered around a topic traditionally known as quantum statistics. The name is misleading: the basic physical phenomena do not involve statistics in the usual sense. A better title might have been the quantum mechanics of identity, but the new developments make that name obsolete too. A more accurate description would be the quantum mechanics of world-line topology. Since that is quite a mouthful, most researchers now simply refer to anyon physics.

Unity and Divergence

Quantum mechanics achieves a strange and wonderful unification between forms of matter that appear to be vastly different. Prior to the advent of quantum theory, electrons and atomic nuclei were regarded as particles, conforming to Isaac Newton’s classic definition: “hard, massy, impenetrable.” During the nineteenth century, light came to be understood in terms of waves or, ultimately, space-filling electromagnetic fields. That description supplies a rich and accurate account of interference, diffraction, and many aspects of the interaction between light and matter.

In quantum theory, electrons, light, and all other forms of matter are described using the same mathematics. A more general concept, sometimes expressed as the wavicle, governs everything. The wavicle is a space-filling function—the wave function—that describes the probability of finding a particle at different places. This common framework accommodates both the wave behavior of electrons, manifested in electron diffraction, and the particulate nature of light, manifested in the all-or-none response of the photoreceptor cells responsible for color vision.

Most popular and even introductory textbook accounts of quantum theory stop there. But the great wavicle unification has an important qualification: it applies only to single particles. When we compare the quantum description of two or more electrons with that of two or more photons, we find fundamental differences.

Bosons and Fermions

Electrons, neutrons, and protons are examples of fermions, named in honor of Enrico Fermi, who pioneered their study. Fermions are antisocial by nature. More precisely, they obey the Pauli exclusion principle, which states that no two fermions of the same kind can be in the same quantum state. The exclusion principle plays a central role in our understanding of atoms, atomic nuclei, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and matter in general:

In many-electron atoms, the exclusion principle forces the electrons to occupy different orbitals. This behavior is essential for building up the shell structure of atoms, which underlies the periodic table of elements and chemistry.

Similarly, in atomic nuclei, the exclusion principle governs the behavior of the protons and neutrons, building up the shell structure that controls the nuclear chemistry of fission and fusion.

Freeman Dyson and Andrew Lenard demonstrated mathematically that if the equations of quantum theory are applied to the ingredients of ordinary matter without taking into account that electrons are fermions, the mixture implodes. Once the electrons are treated as fermions, all is well.

White dwarfs are the evolutionary final state of moderate-sized stars, such as our sun. After they have exhausted their nuclear fuel, these stars collapse to much smaller sizes. The sun, for example, will eventually become Earth sized. Beyond a certain point, the electrons within these objects prevent further compression because too small an object would contain too few orbitals to accommodate them.

Neutron stars are the final stage in the evolution of somewhat larger stars. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar demonstrated that there exists a limit to how much pressure electrons can withstand. Past the so-called Chandrasekhar limit, stellar remnants up to about twice the sun’s mass collapse further, down to a few kilometers in radius, whereupon the exclusion principle for neutrons halts the process.

Due to their Fermi statistics, identical fermions exhibit a repulsive force of quantum-mechanical origin that is over and above the four conventional forces of the Standard Model—strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. That effective force is not merely an esoteric addition to the basic forces, but a central pillar in our understanding of nature.

Photons, together with gravitons, the Higgs particle, and many other particles, are examples of bosons, named in honor of Satyendra Bose, who was the first to study them. In contrast to fermions, bosons are natural conformists and prefer to be in the same state. The probability for multiple occupancy, which vanishes for fermions, is enhanced for bosons, which are said to obey Bose statistics.

Laser beams epitomize the bosonic behavior of photons. Within a laser beam, many photons have succeeded in occupying the same state with the same color, same direction, and same spatial profile. More complex material manifestations of Bose statistics are superfluidity and superconductivity. In those low-temperature states of matter, large numbers of 4He atoms or Cooper pairs of electrons, respectively, occupy the same quantum state and thus flow coherently. At low temperatures, when they are less distracted by the noise of the external world, one might say that bosonic particles get to do what they want to do—which is to do the same thing.

Combining Partial Amplitudes

Quantum mechanics coalesced during the 1920s. Decades of adventurous discovery followed, in which many new particles were identified. The behavior of these particles involved many qualitatively new phenomena, including antimatter, strangeness, oscillatory changes in identity, and violation of spatial parity and time-reversal symmetry. Particles that could not be observed in isolation—quarks and gluons, which are fermions and bosons, respectively—became fundamental ingredients in our best description of nature. During all these upheavals, the division of the world of particles into just two kingdoms, those of fermions and bosons, remained intact. By the 1970s these notions had become conventional wisdom, bordering on dogma.

In 1977, two Norwegian physicists, Jon Leinaas and Jan Myrheim, challenged that consensus. Subsequent investigation has clarified the profound roots of quantum statistics, why bosons and fermions are so pervasive, and the possibility of alternatives. Before proceeding further, it is worth taking a moment to review the ultimate source of boson and fermion behavior, as presently understood.

The fundamental task of quantum mechanics is to calculate the probability for a specified event to occur. This is done by calculating an auxiliary quantity, the amplitude of the event, and then squaring the amplitude to obtain the probability.

There are several ways to calculate quantum mechanical amplitudes. The most transparent method was discovered by Richard Feynman. The “sum over histories” approach involves a consideration of all possible ways in which a process might have happened. The dynamical description of the system provides a definite mathematical rule, or algorithm, that assigns a numerical base-amplitude to each possible history. The total amplitude is obtained by adding all the base-amplitudes. In this framework, the central task of fundamental quantum theory is to discover the rules for calculating base-amplitudes in different physical situations. Physicists often look to classical physical for guidance, because for large objects the quantum rules must reproduce observed classical behavior.

With that framework in mind, consider a process in which two indistinguishable particles—two electrons, say, or two photons—start at two positions (A, B) and end up at two other positions (C, D). The possible histories underlying this process fall into two distinct classes. In one class, the particle originating at A travels to C, while the particle originating at B travels to D. In the other class, the particle at A travels to D while the particle at B travels to C. Since the particles are indistinguishable, one cannot tell, by looking only at the outcome, which class of historical process led to it. Guided by classical physics, physicists can develop rules for how to assign base-amplitudes within each of the two classes. Adding the base-amplitudes within each class yields two partial amplitudes.

The remaining issue is to determine a rule for combining the two partial amplitudes into the total amplitude. Classical physics offers no guidance here. Indeed, classical physical theory assures us that in principle we can keep accurate tabs on particles. But if that is the case, the two topologically distinct classes of histories correspond to physically distinct processes, each of which is characterized by a separate probability. In quantum theory, on the contrary, one cannot keep tabs. That is an aspect of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which limits how well a particle’s position can be resolved. When the uncertainties in the positions of our two particles overlap, it becomes impossible to keep track of who is who.

The rule for combining the two partial amplitudes must then involve some essentially new consideration that goes beyond classical physics. Quantum statistics, with all its weighty implications for physics, ultimately comes down to this rule. The traditional rules are as follows: for bosons, add them, and for fermions, subtract them. These are the only two available choices. These are the only two available choices, it seems, because quantum theory imposes an important general consistency requirement. If we apply our rule twice to the process (A, B) → [(A, B) or (B, A)] → (A, B)—we must obtain the same result as we get by applying it directly—e.g., to (A, B) → (A, B). Thus, since a double exchange is equivalent to no exchange at all, the factor x that we can associate with an exchange must satisfy x2 = 1. This implies that either x = 1, as for bosons, or x = –1, as for fermions.

Anyons in Flatland and in Reality

This elegant and superficially profound understanding of why there can be bosons and fermions, and nothing else, relies on an important implicit assumption that escaped attention of physicists for more than fifty years. Consider two particles whose motion is confined to two dimensions—specifically, a plane. To carry out the sum over histories, one must consider how the particles move in time as they progress from (A, B) to (C, D). In visualizing this problem, it is convenient to regard time as a third dimension, perpendicular to the two spatial dimensions. The motion of each particle then defines a path in a three-dimensional space-time known as a world-line.

The world-lines of two particles can wind around one another; and if they do, there is a discrete topological distinction among the histories from (A, B) to (C, D)—namely, the number of times the world-line of the first particle winds around the world-line of the second particle. Mathematicians refer to this as the winding number. In cases of more than two particles, world-lines can become interwoven in elaborate patterns termed braids.

For particles that move in three dimensions, the need to consider winding and braiding processes no longer arises. The contrast between the rich topology of multiparticle histories in two dimensional spaces—i.e., three-dimensional space-times—and the paltry topology of multiparticle histories in three-dimensional spaces—i.e., four-dimensional space-times—is closely related to the fact that in four dimensions, though not of course in three, knots are always easy to untangle. In the topology of braids, less is more, since a smaller ambient space means less room for untangling maneuvers.

In three dimensions, the only two topologically distinct classes of histories are the ones involving exchanges of position. Given that mathematical fact, the potentially profound argument given in the previous section then becomes definitive. The meagre topology of multiparticle paths in three-dimensional space offers only the choice between bosons and fermions, with no other options. This is a very satisfying result because it justifies the classification into bosons and fermions that physicists had discovered empirically.

By contrast, the richer topology of multiparticle paths in two-dimensional space supports a much bigger menu of consistent quantum-mechanical rules. One can add partial amplitudes that arise from infinitely many topologically distinct classes, and the consistency conditions are less constraining. In a 1982 paper, I introduced the term anyon to describe this situation, with the connotation that anything goes. While it is not literally true that anything goes, theoretically speaking, the move to flatland opens up many new possibilities for the quantum statistics of particles. Indeed, the kingdom of anyons has many mansions.

The consistent rules for quantum statistics in two space dimensions can become quite complicated—at least as complicated as braids. I will describe here only the very simplest anyons precisely, and briefly acknowledge some others. Even in the simplest case, the anyon rule for combining different partial amplitudes uses basic concepts about complex numbers. There are different topological classes of braids, distinguished among other things by the number of times different strands wind around one another. A rule is needed for combining the partial amplitudes from those sectors. The simplest anyon rule is as follows: multiply the partial amplitude for each class by the complex number eiαW, where W is equal to the total number of windings, counting all pairs of particles. Different values of α define different species of anyons.

More structured, so-called non-abelian anyon rules are sensitive to other details associated with braids. These rules usher in more complicated wave functions that are not simply complex numbers, but arrays of numbers. The different components in the array represent possible values of an emergent degree of freedom, roughly analogous to the possible colors of quarks. When non-abelian anyons wind around one another, their joint wave function is transformed by more complicated operations than multiplication by a number—that is, multiplication by a unitary matrix. In this way, non-abelian anyons acquire a strange, capacious storage capacity. Their quantum-mechanical wave functions carry a more detailed record of the braids their world-lines build up, which tracks more information than total winding.

The possible rules defining different species of non-abelian anyons are intricate and diverse. Here, a few names and references will have to suffice: Ising anyons, Fibonacci anyons, parafermions of several kinds, and Majorinos. It is fascinating to observe that world-lines can wind even among particles that are not indistinguishable. That possibility, which I named mutual statistics, highlights the novelty of the new, more general perspective on quantum statistics.

These extraordinary new possibilities for physical behavior are fun to think about, but they might also seem somewhat academic or fantastical. After all, we do not live in flatland. But we can still visit. In fact, the physical world abounds in flatlands, and they play starring roles in modern technology. Planar circuits photolithographically etched onto layered surfaces, otherwise known as chips, are the workhorses of modern microelectronics. In electronic chips, the motion of electrons is essentially confined to two dimensions. If the electrons that live on a chip were zapped with enough energy they could be removed. But so long as their energies don’t get too big, the electrons are confined to two dimensions, and the quantum mechanics of flatland applies.

Emergent Anyons

Physicists have learned to organize their fundamental descriptions of the quantum world by focusing on the behavior of energy concentrations that are reasonably stable and exhibit reproducible properties. Such entities are termed elementary particles, and they are used as the building-blocks in our best model of the physical world.

In thinking about exotic materials and states of matter, it has been fruitful to consider them as worlds in themselves: quasi-worlds, inhabited by quasiparticles.

Suppose that a crystalline solid is zapped with a well-focused laser pulse and an electron is ejected. The remaining material will then contain a localized unit of positive charge where the electron used to be. After radiating some excess energy, this excitation may settle into a stable, reproducible form—a quasiparticle. This kind of quasiparticle, which reflects the absence of an electron, is usually referred to as a hole. In semiconductors, holes are units of positive charge that are cheap to produce and much easier to move than protons. Understanding the properties of holes was a key step in the invention of solid-state transistors and the emergence of modern microelectronics.

That success story, and others like it, has inspired some physicists to cultivate an art that might be described as designing quasi-worlds. To begin with, one must imagine quasi-worlds with interesting properties, and then seek out or manufacture materials and states of matter that embody them. Of course, that strategy can only work if the quasi-worlds are not too outlandish. Success requires discipline and good taste, as well as inspiration.

I first began to consider the ideas and new possibilities for quantum statistics in 1982. At the start, I was unaware of the work of Leinaas and Myrheim, which had attracted little attention. I was simply imagining quasi-worlds. In my conceptions, three lines of thought came together:

Fractionalization: properties of particles that ordinarily appear only as whole-number multiples of a fundamental unit might occur in smaller multiples within quasi-worlds. Roman Jackiw and Claudio Rebbi abstractly, and Wu-Pei Su, Robert Schrieffer, and Alan Heeger concretely, demonstrated that quasiparticles could carry half a unit of electric charge, i.e., half the charge of an electron. Jeffrey Goldstone and I had shown that in other quasi-worlds different fractions of charge could occur. I wanted to see if a similar fractionalization could happen for angular momentum, that is, spin.

Flux tubes: I soon realized that fractional angular momentum was indeed possible by means of a very specific physical mechanism: particles orbiting around tubes of magnetic flux. That was an encouraging result, because the theory of flux tubes was already a well-developed, respectable subject. Flux tubes occur in a large class of superconductors, so-called type II superconductors, and in promising, though speculative, unified field theories.

Dimensional reduction: from a slice of a narrow tube, one can obtain a small, essentially point-like structure that can be considered a particle. Thus, the calculated behavior of narrow tubes in three-dimensional space could be used to construct new kinds of particles in two-dimensional space.

When I gave a seminar about these ideas at Caltech, my friend and colleague John Preskill reminded me that there is a deep connection between the spin of a particle and its quantum statistics. If there is fractional spin, he asked, shouldn’t there also be fractional statistics? This was a question I had not considered. In fact, I didn’t see right away what the term fractional statistics could even mean. On the drive back to Santa Barbara, I realized that the right thing to think about was braiding, and that braiding flux tubes would yield behavior that could be interpreted as fractional quantum statistics. Within a few days I pulled my thoughts together in two short papers. Anyons had now acquired a name and a more-or-less plausible, though not yet concrete, path to physical embodiment.

The Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

Strange things can happen when one exposes two-dimensional droplets of mobile electrons—in a narrow range of densities and held at ultralow temperatures—to strong magnetic fields. Under these conditions, as one varies the strength of the magnetic field, a large family of new states of matter is produced. These states, known as fractional quantum Hall liquids (FQHL) are interrelated, but still distinctly different. Though the required conditions are very special and hard to achieve, the properties of FQHL states are so new and interesting that they have become a preoccupation for many researchers since FQHLs were first discovered in 1982.

The most direct physical manifestation of FQHL states is the phenomenon referred to as quantized Hall conductance. This can be observed if one puts four leads—A, B, C, and D, in that order—at different points on the boundary of the sample. A voltage is applied across A and C by connecting them through a battery, for example. The current flowing between B and D is then measured. As one varies the magnetic field, the conductance—that is, the ratio of voltage to current—does not always vary continuously. Instead, it holds constant around a series of so-called plateau values.

To the uninitiated this behavior might seem an esoteric curiosity, but to physicists it came as a shocking departure from prior experience and expectations. Each plateau represents a new state of matter—a distinctive quasi-world, with its own quasiparticles. Robert Laughlin shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical elucidation of the phenomenon, together with Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui, who discovered the effect experimentally. Laughlin’s theory remains the foundation of our present understanding.

For the purposes of the current discussion, the most relevant part of Laughlin’s theory, originally published in 1983, is his picture of quasiparticles in the FQHL states. In short, one produces a quasiparticle by subjecting the material to the influence of a notional flux tube. The resulting quasiparticles have remarkable properties, that differ from one plateau to another. Notably, their electric charge is a fraction of the electric charge of an electron. In the FQHL state that is easiest to produce, the one-third state, the electric charge of a quasiparticle is one-third of the charge of an electron, or e/3. There is also a one-fifth state on a different plateau, where the quasiparticles have charge e/5. There are many other states in which the quasiparticle charges are other fractions.

My colleagues Daniel Arovas and Schrieffer were aware of my interest in the theory of fractional quanta and provided tutorials on the nascent theory of the FQHL. When we came to the part about flux tubes, I was able to teach them something in return: the ideas about anyons, and their realization through flux tubes, that I sketched above. Within a few days, we figured out how to bring those general ideas to bear on the FQHL. In a paper published in 1984, we demonstrated mathematically that the FQHL quasiparticles are anyons, in the precise sense that when you move them around each other—that is, when you braid their world-lines—their wave function does exactly what anyon wave functions are supposed to do. At the time, I thought it would be easy to test our prediction experimentally. In the years that followed, many people tried to do just that. But nobody succeeded, due to a variety of technical challenges. It was not until 2020 that two groups were able to obtain decisive results.

Experiment One: Levels of Conformity

Hugo Bartolomei et al. set up a kind of quasi-accelerator within the quasi-world of the 1/3 FQHL state. As part of their experiment, they produced channels in the shape of an X through which quasiparticles could flow and injected quasiparticle beams flowing upward at the bottom. At the crossing, quasiparticles could meet and scatter from one another. By studying the output at the top, one obtains information about how the quasiparticles interact, through a process physicists term scattering.

The quantum statistics of the quasiparticles affects how they scatter in ways that can be calculated confidently. Since two bosons like to do the same thing, they will have a much-enhanced probability to scatter in the same direction, i.e., to enter the same upper arm. Fermions, on the contrary, will strongly prefer to enter different arms. The observed results, falling in between, fit neither of those expectations. Instead, they align well with predictions derived from the kind of anyon quantum statistics predicted for the 1/3 FQHL state.

Experiment Two: The Beauty of Braiding

James Nakamura et al. set up an ingenious arrangement modeled on interferometers, a workhorse tool in optics. The central idea in interferometry is to offer a light beam—or quasiparticle—two alternative paths from source to detector. Influences that alter the balance of the paths then show up as changes in the output.

In their experiment, which was likewise performed in the 1/3 FQHL state, a flow of quasiparticles can follow one of two paths that together enclose an island within the sample. From the perspective of a quasiparticle within that island, those two paths differ by a winding. If the quasiparticles are anyons, each island anyon will alter the way the sub-amplitudes for the flowing anyons should be added together, in a predictable way. Thus, anytime an additional anyon appears in the island, the output will suddenly jump, also in a predictable way. This is what they observed.

The beauty of this experiment is how clearly it maps onto the most basic defining characteristic of anyons, namely their response to braiding. The jumps can also be measured accurately, which allows for a clean quantitative comparison with the theoretical predictions. Thankfully, they are in agreement.

Why were Nakamura et al. able to succeed where many others fell short? Over the years there have been steady improvements in the purity of the materials and in the techniques available for setting up tiny currents and measuring them accurately. The crucial innovation added by Nakamura et al. was to surround the sample with a bath of electrons that can move to compensate for inhomogeneities of charge within the sample. The compensation process damps out other forces, while leaving the effect of quantum statistics intact. As a result, the behavior of the quasiparticles becomes more reproducible, and more clearly dominated by their quantum statistics. The strategy employed in this experiment should be adaptable to other FQHL states, which are predicted to support other kinds of anyons.

Experiment Three: Switching from Afar

Using related ideas and as part of work that has extended over several years, Robert Willett et al. applied interferometry to several FQHL states, including some that are suspected, theoretically, to contain non-abelian anyons. In this scenario, the addition of anyons to the central island, one at a time, changes the behavior of the output in different ways at each step. The anyons create something akin to a sophisticated toggle switch.

As part of their work, Willett et al. collected signals that were consistent with theoretical predictions for anyons. At present, their experiments seem to call for more cautious interpretation than those of Nakamura et al., mainly due to questions about the integrity of the island. That said, there is every reason to think that with further work these delicate experiments will become more clear-cut, while their central conclusions will remain valid.

Experiment Four: Engineering Anyons

To conclude this brief survey of recent experimental results, it is appropriate to mention a rather different kind of endeavor that involves realizing anyons within designed systems, as opposed to in natural states of matter.

Collaborators from Austria, China, and Germany set up ingenious circuits involving a mix of conventional and superconducting electronics that support two different kinds of localized excitations. The circuits were designed so that those two kinds of quasiparticles would exhibit nontrivial mutual statistics—and indeed they do.

This construction is meant to be more than a one-off demonstration. It is part of a program to produce fault-tolerant elements for use in quantum computers, based on the ideas of Alexei Kitaev.

Anyons Galore

Existing realizations of anyons in fractional quantum Hall states are not an ideal vehicle for detailed studies or possible applications. This is because the realizations require ultrapure materials, ultralow temperatures, and high magnetic fields.

It seems possible that different realizations might be free of these drawbacks. Anyons have been predicted to occur in many other quasi-worlds of two-dimensional matter. Numerical simulations have offered support for these ideas. In some cases, there is also suggestive evidence for the predicted behaviors. Crucial experimental tests have been proposed, but they are technically challenging, and they have not yet been carried out.

Another topic for future research is what happens when many anyons are close together, in the same material. Fermion and boson behaviors, as noted previously, have dramatic consequences for many-particle systems. Even simple anyons are predicted to support a rich variety of collective behaviors, including a new mechanism of superconductivity. The behavior of an ensemble of more complex anyons and mixtures containing several kinds of anyons with mutual statistics remains largely unexplored.

Quantum Computing

Several ancient Andean civilizations, including the Inca, developed a versatile and nonverbal method to record and process information that served them well for many centuries. Quipus are formed from a sequence of colored strings containing knots. Each of the strings is tied at one end to a common cord, so that when the cord is suspended the strings hang down and can be scanned easily. The colors of the strings and the placement of the knots might convey an accounting ledger, a historical chronicle, or a military roster. In the quantum world, one might imagine using braids to represent information in a similar manner. Anyons empower such an approach, because the wave functions of multi-anyon systems store memories of the braids formed by their world-lines.

The memory capacity of the simplest anyons, which only keep track of the total winding, is very limited. But well-designed systems that use more complex anyons, whose wave-function rules bring in non-abelian and mutual statistics, can capture much more detailed information. Such systems are the basis for topological quantum computing.

This way of representing information could have important advantages:

Capacity: the storage capacity of multi-anyon braids grows exponentially fast as the number of anyons or the length of the braids increases, quickly outstripping the capacity of more conventional memories.

Parallelism: in weaving a single strand through the others, one is confronted with many choices that can produce many different new braids. From the opposite perspective, a single anyon operates in parallel on the information that the preexisting braids encode.

Noise immunity: the two preceding advantages are characteristic of quantum computers in general. The most distinctive advantage of anyons is their potential reliability. Anyons store and manipulate information about braids, and braids retain their overall form—their topology—even if they are jostled a bit. Since the main technical challenge in quantum computing is avoiding errors, ensuring reliability is a big deal.

Topological quantum computing is currently an active area of research. Microsoft has made substantial investments in the area, and has put forward a concrete, long-range plan for making it into a practical, largescale technology. The process will be far from easy, but the challenges appear more technical than fundamental. In this, as on several other fronts mentioned above, anyons will keep physicists fruitfully engaged for years to come.

Recently The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology published a consensus statement on the use of do-it-yourself (DIY) closed-loop automated insulin delivery (AID) systems – “Open-source automated insulin delivery: international consensus statement and practical guidance for health-care professionals“. (The full article is available free but requires registration to access.) The issue is worth exploring because it raises a host of issues relevant to SBM , involving the relationship between scientific evidence, professionalism, regulation, and self-care.

The specific practice at issue here is the increasing use among those with Type 1 diabetes of DIY AID systems – open-source software to control insulin pumps connected to glucose monitors. Continuous glucose monitoring involves a small sensor wire inserted under the skin that can measure glucose levels in interstitial fluid. This is covered by a patch so that it can be worn continuously, even in the shower. Systems typically provide a glucose measure every five minutes 24 hours a day. When glucose monitoring is connecting to an insulin pump and controlled with a computer algorithm that is called a closed-loop system (or colloquially an artificial pancreas).

There are commercial systems available that are tested and approved. However, they are also quite expensive, and there are many people with Type 1 diabetes who cannot afford or do not have the insurance to cover these systems. As a result, in recent years a community of people with diabetes have developed open-source software that can control the insulin pumps based on data from the continuous glucose monitor. Open-source software is free for anyone to use and update, it is crowd-sourced without any central control. Because it is free it has made AID systems available to thousands of patients who could not afford a commercial version. Many of these systems run on smart phones, and have a higher level of control and customization that their commercial counterparts.

The emerging question for professionals has been – what are the ethics and legal considerations of patients using unapproved AID systems, and what are their professional responsibilities as their doctors? This is the purpose of this international statement – it essentially supports the DIY community and encourages physicians to work with and support their patients who use open source AID devices. This is very clarifying for physicians in this situation, but the statement is also very open about the limitations and trade-offs here.

First and foremost – there is a distinct lack of scientific evidence for the safety and efficacy of DIY devices, specifically there are no double-blind placebo-controlled trials. There are real-world observational studies which support the safety and efficacy of these devices. The obvious solution here is to do more studies, but this field is a moving target. Which DIY system do you study and which version? These systems are constantly being updated and customized, so a well-controlled study is essentially impossible. The same is true, however, or many medical treatments, and we often have to be content with lesser standards of clinical evidence, such as open-label treatment (you can’t double-blind surgery, for example).

These DIY systems are also not a panacea. While they make closed-loop systems more available, specifically to those who cannot afford commercial systems, they are still highly selective in who benefits. Adopters need to have a certain level of technical savvy. They will have to do all updates and customization themselves, and there is no centralized support structure. There is a DIY community of support, however.

Essentially, the recommendation of the international panel of experts authoring this paper is that physicians should not work against the DIY community, but rather work with and support them. In this specific context the recommendation makes sense, but it definitely had me thinking about the broader implications for the practice of SBM in an increasingly digital and DIY world. This is also an extension of a broader discussion we have had within SBM about the following dilemma – when it comes to paraprofessional or non-professional medical interventions that are clearly not science-based, do we push for full regulation and banning, or emphasize reform and collaboration? We have not arrived at any consensus on this question, because I don’t think it has one clear answer. It is very context-dependent, with strengths and weaknesses in each approach.

Ultimately the question may be taken out of our (meaning the medical community’s) hands. Perhaps this is part of the evolution away from the old paternalism model of health care. I was educated within the paradigm of the cooperative model, where patients are given fully informed consent and are partners in the clinical decision-making. The role of the physician is not so much to make decisions as to provide information and offer options. In practice this also varies considerably depending on the situation. For chronic medical conditions, however, the cooperative model is not only preferred – it is essential. Patients need to become partners in their own care.

This is hugely complicated, however, by the existence of unregulated over-the-counter snake oil, and unscientific pseudoprofessionals and gurus whose practice seems to be based on giving the worst and most unscientific advice possible. Further, there is a wealth of health misinformation on social media, and entire ecosystems built on conspiracy theories and antiscientific notions. This makes helping patients treat themselves feel more like throwing them to the sharks. But like it or not, this is the world in which we are now practicing.

Which brings us back to this core dilemma. I think the only answer is to take an individualized hybrid approach. Some practices and products just need to be regulated. There is no legitimate role, for example, for homeopathy, which is 100% magical snake oil. There is no way to work with a patient to manage their illness with homeopathy, and the only advice a science-based practitioner can give is that it is worthless and not recommended at all.

At the other end of the spectrum are over-the-counter products and lifestyle choices that are highly evidence-based. The role of the practitioner here is to educate their patients about these options and their optimal use, to monitor outcomes, and help their patients manage their own illness with these options, along with those requiring prescriptions or procedures.

In between there is a vast gray-zone. There are products like CBD and Kratom that are drugs, even powerful drugs, with all the risks and benefits that implies. Kratom is essentially an addictive opioid-like drug that is available over-the-counter. There are many practices like intermittent fasting, ketogenic diets, deep-tissue massage, even hot-yoga that have some rationale, but often come with claims that go way beyond the evidence and have some safety concerns.

The modern physician needs to be aware of all these things, and be able to work with their patients to help them navigate these options, while minimizing risk. It would be simpler and easier if all medical interventions were regulated and controlled, but that world never existed and is getting farther away, if anything. We essentially have no choice but to collaborate with the DIY medicine model to some extent. In this way we may be able to make it a bit more science-based, and at least have more of an open discussion with our patients so that they can make better decisions. We also need to better study these options, not to promote them but to understand their risks and benefits better. Meanwhile we need to push for better regulations, to at least reduce the extent to which the market is flooded with fraudulent, harmful, and useless products and services.

The DIY AID treatments are a good example of when this model can work. In fact, it shows how we can leverage the open-source community to improve the care of our patients and bring cutting edge technology to those who would otherwise not be able to access it.

Most recent discussions of Stoicism as a practical philosophy for contemporary living have focused on the work of authors such as Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. But there is a lesser-known Roman Stoic, Gaius Musonius Rufus, whose writings deserve more attention.

Musonius was born in Etruria, north of Rome, c20-30 CE. He became a famous teacher in the time of the emperor Nero, as well as a member of the so-called Stoic opposition, a group of senators and philosophers critical of what they perceived as Nero’s tyranny. As a result, he was sent into exile, twice by Nero, and once more by a later emperor, Vespasian.

Musonius was millennia ahead of society in his defence of gender equality. Here is what he says about women and the ability to think rationally:

Women as well as men … have received from the gods the gift of reason, which we use in our dealings with one another and by which we judge whether a thing is good or bad, right or wrong … Moreover, not men alone, but women too, have a natural inclination toward virtue and the capacity for acquiring it, and it is the nature of women no less than men to be pleased by good and just acts and to reject the opposite of these.

This is rather stunning for someone who was alive in the 1st century of the modern era, but it was actually common opinion among the Stoics (and the Epicureans). Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, had written that the ideal society will treat men and women in the same fashion (much as Plato had done in his Republic). Epictetus, the slave-turned-teacher who studied with Musonius, criticised his contemporaries for objectifying women and valuing only their physical appearance. And Seneca, the advisor to the emperor Nero, wrote to his mother that he regretted that his father had forbidden her to study philosophy, because women have the same intellectual abilities as men, and it is just as important for them as for men to form an understanding of right and wrong.

Does Stoicism, as a philosophy of life, have the tools to provide us with the ethical guidance we need in the 21st century?

Musonius considers the four cardinal virtues of Stoicism – practical wisdom, courage, justice and temperance – and asks how it is conceivable that a woman could do without them, while they are thought to be necessary for a man. Women, just as much as men, need to understand how to navigate the world successfully, the courage to stand up to bullying, a sense of justice and the ability to act with self-restraint. This is why young girls should be taught philosophy – understood as the study of how to live a life worth living – just as much as boys. Musonius makes this very clear:

If then men and women are born with the same virtues, the same type of training and education must, of necessity, befit both men and women … if it is necessary for both to be proficient in the virtue which is appropriate to a human being, that is for both to be able to have understanding, and self-control, and courage, and justice, the one no less than the other, shall we not teach them both alike the art by which a human being becomes good? Yes, certainly we must do that and nothing else.

All of the above notwithstanding, the ancient Stoics cannot be regarded as feminists in the modern sense of the term. Not only because the label would be obviously anachronistic, but because they were, inevitably, a product of their own times and cultures. (Just as we are, let us not forget!) Musonius, for instance, thought that a woman should occupy herself primarily with the management of the household, while Epictetus referred to the feminine ideals of modesty and decency. Then again, both philosophers also criticised men for thinking that they are, by nature, above ‘womanly’ tasks, or for being immodest themselves.

While the ancient Stoics ought to be commended for being ahead of their time with respect to the treatment of women, a more urgent question is whether modern Stoicism, as a philosophy of life, has the tools to provide us with the ethical guidance we need in the 21st century. According to the scholars Scott Aikin and Emily McGill-Rutherford, the answer is a resounding yes. In a landmark paper in the journal Symposion, they focus on one of the fundamental principles of Stoicism: oikeiosis, or the need to ‘appropriate’ other people’s concerns.

The Stoics had articulated a remarkably modern theory of what we would today regard as developmental moral psychology. They thought that human beings are naturally good, as the philosopher Philippa Foot has also argued (along with some evolutionary biologists). In modern terms, we would say that Homo sapiens evolved as a prosocial, cooperative species. Such basic goodness is, however, insufficient to deal with the complexities of ancient Greco-Roman or 21st-century societies. We need to use another of our natural gifts, reason, to understand that other people – no matter where they are in the world – are just like us, sharing many of our same needs, wants, fears and hopes. This idea is the basis of the Stoic notion of cosmopolitanism, the attitude that we should regard every other human being as our brother or sister (or other gender).

Modern Stoicism is not the passive life philosophy of enduring whatever life throws at you with equanimity. That is a caricature

According to Aikin and McGill-Rutherford, oikeiosis and cosmopolitanism logically entail feminism as understood in modern times. Since women, regardless of where they happen to find themselves on the planet, are human beings endowed with reason, then it necessarily follows, within the Stoic framework, that they ought to be treated on equal terms with men: with compassion, respect and justice.

This, however, is still not enough to get us from a personal attitude of fairness toward women to political activism in support of a 21st-century feminist agenda. Indeed, some modern critics of Stoicism insist that the philosophy is quietist when it comes to social issues, because it focuses on what the individual can and should endure, not on effecting systemic changes. Much of Stoic training, after all, is specifically geared toward not reacting to events, maintaining a calm inner state in the face of externalities. This too, say Aikin and McGill-Rutherford, is a misconception. In their paper, they write:

Epictetus prepares to go to the baths by readying himself for the rude and raucous behaviour of others. When he goes and is splashed or has someone act inappropriately around him, he must understand that he signed up for the whole experience. And so he is ready to endure what must be endured. But this is not an endorsement of the rude or raucous behaviour.

Precisely. There is no contradiction between aiming at political change and at the same time bracing oneself for the reality on the ground. Doing the latter without the former would be quietist and self-centred. But doing the former without the latter would be foolish and self-destructive. Which is why one of the most useful tenets of Stoicism is what is often called the dichotomy of control, a notion made explicit by Epictetus: some things are up to us, while others are not. A good life results from trying to change for the better what is up to us, while developing an attitude of equanimity toward the things that are not up to us.

Let us take a specific example from contemporary political debate. Should a Stoic support the notion of equal pay for equal work between men and women? Absolutely, as not doing so would violate the principle of oikeiosis. But we also need to recognise that equal pay is not yet an acknowledged standard in a number of countries around the world. And even where it is enshrined in the law, as is the case in both the European Union and the United States, this doesn’t necessarily mean that women are actually treated accordingly. In fact, often they are not.

So we deal with the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. But we constantly strive to make it a better place for everyone. Modern Stoicism is not the passive life philosophy of enduring whatever life throws at you with equanimity. That is a caricature. It is a philosophy that recognises both the limitations on our capacity to change the world and the possibility of making some change. Striving to find the sweet spot between endurance of the world as it is and the drive to improve things without battering your head against an immovable wall is the essence of Stoicism. What is genuinely surprising is the degree to which thinkers such as Musonius Rufus laid the foundations for radical egalitarianism 2,000 years ago. We should recognise these Stoics as at least protofeminists, and build on their insights.

(Photograph by Xinhua/Getty Images)How is inflation like critical race theory?A lot of voters have a hard time explaining how either works, but they know they don’t like it when they see it.Obviously, it’s a silly comparison on the merits. For starters, some voters actually like critical race theory while nobody likes paying higher prices. But, politically, the comparison is apt for two reasons.First, the country is in a mood to blame the party in power for things it doesn’t like, even if it’s not abundantly clear the party in power is responsible.The recent fights over CRT in Virginia’s elections—whatever you think of the issue— had little to do with Joe Biden or Congress. The same is mostly true for other hot button issues such as “defund the police” or transgender bathrooms. But national Democrats are still being blamed for them. Tip O’Neill’s maxim “all politics are local” has been replaced with all politics have been nationalized.A new ABC-Washington Post poll has Republicans leading among registered voters by 10 points, the biggest lead in the 40-year history of the survey. The main driver of the voter dissatisfaction is the economy in general and inflation in particular. The latter hit a 30-year high in October and shows few signs of abating any time soon.Inflation is a miserable problem in its own right, but it’s an agonizing one for politicians in power because it affects everyone on a daily basis, especially those living paycheck to paycheck, and fuels a larger psychological fear that things are out of control. Among policy problems, it is almost uniquely immune to happy talk and political spin. Politicians can tell voters not to believe their lying eyes about the scope of some scandal, but you can’t tell people they’re not actually paying higher prices for milk, gas, or their kids’ shoes. Everyone is an expert about their own pocketbook.And this is the second reason why the CRT comparison is apt. Trying to talk people out of their concerns only makes them angrier. Whether the Virginia schools were technically teaching CRT misses the point. Parents, exposed to what their kids were learning to an unprecedented degree thanks to COVID-related school closures, knew they didn’t like what they were seeing. The label was incidental and attempts to tell parents they didn’t know what they were talking about came across as condescending and out of touch.Inflation presents the same dilemma on a far greater scale. President Biden spent much of the year dismissing inflation concerns, pressing ahead with huge spending proposals. “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way,” Biden insisted in July (even though former Obama Treasury Secretary Larry Summers suggested otherwise). Then he transitioned to the argument that it is a “transitory” problem driven by supply chain hassles.And now he’s landed on acknowledging it’s a real problem but says that it just so happens that the same spending priorities he championed when he denied inflation was a concern will fix the problem. That’s a remarkably convenient coincidence many voters are unlikely to buy.I think Biden is probably right that inflation started as a supply-side phenomenon, driven by shortages of products and services and higher energy prices (though he dismisses concerns that his policies could drive energy costs higher). Our last bout of inflation—which helped crush the reelection hopes of both Presidents Ford and Carter—was a demand-side problem.But there’s no reason to believe that it will stay a supply-side problem. Inflation causes changes in behavior and, at some point, if people believe inflation is here for the duration they can make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Throwing trillions more into the economy with the Build Back Better “human infrastructure” plan could be inflationary, or it could just convince people to behave as if it were.And since that legislation can pass only if Democrats use reconciliation on a straight party-line vote to sidestep the Senate filibuster, they will own the consequences politically.On a host of fronts—the Afghanistan withdrawal, the Delta variant, the precarious balance in the Senate, and, of course, inflation—Biden’s first year has been plagued by problems made worse by his chronic underestimation of the risks or his misunderstanding of the facts on the ground.If inflation is still raging in mid-2022, Democrats will probably be swept from Congress. If it lasts much longer than that, Biden will probably join Carter and Ford in the one-termers’ club, and there’s nothing he can say to stop it.

Last week marked 32 years since the Berlin Wall dividing communist East Germany from West Germany was pulled down. By the summer of 1990, all of the communist governments of eastern Europe had collapsed and been replaced by democratically elected governments.
Cuba was expected to follow suit. Yet there would be no mass uprising of Cubans against Fidel Castro’s communist government, at least not on a scale large enough to threaten the regime (there was a day of riots – the “Maleconazo” – in the summer of 1994 in Havana). Not until this year.
On 13 July 2021, something unprecedented happened: Cubans took to the streets in large numbers for the first time in 62 years to protest against the government. Images and videos of crowds chanting “libertad” (freedom) and “abajo la dictadura” (down with the dictatorship) appeared on social media. Frustrations – at severe food shortages, electricity blackouts, Covid restrictions and political repression – had created a febrile atmosphere on the island that finally boiled over. The tightening of sanctions by the Donald Trump administration, as well as the shuttering of Cuba’s economy to international tourism, had made an already bleak situation even worse.
The Cuban economy has been mired in economic stagnation for many decades. Much like in the vanished, centrally planned economies of eastern Europe, day-to-day economic policy in Cuba consists of the centralised control of systematically induced shortages. The US economic embargo, introduced in 1960 after Cuba nationalised US-owned Cuban oil refineries, inflicts additional economic hardship on Cuba’s economy.
July’s protests – the first mass uprising since the overthrow of the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro’s rebel army in 1959 – spooked the Cuban government. As events unfolded it cut off the internet, and in the aftermath rounded up thousands of opposition activists as well as ordinary Cubans who had decided to protest. According to Reporters Without Borders, 15 journalists were “threatened, attacked, arrested or placed under house arrest by State Security during or shortly after the anti-government protests”. As of October, many who took to the streets that day still languish in Cuban jails.
While the Cuban government was shaken, opposition activists – those who hadn’t been rounded up – were emboldened. In the ensuing weeks, a group calling itself Archipiélago announced a “Civic March for Change” for 3pm on 15 November 2021. By announcing the date of the planned protest – an unusual step in the one-party state, where citizens can be pre-emptively arrested for the “crime” of “social dangerousness” – the group set the authorities on red alert. But the activists hoped the announcement of a publicly planned protest would build on the momentum generated by July’s protests and ignite a similar uprising.
The Archipiélago Facebook group has around 38,000 members, and is a loose coalition of activists with no particular political line; organisers of the rallies scheduled to take place on the 15 November coalesced around calls for democracy, the release of political prisoners and opposition to violence. Members of the group requested permission from the government to protest on that day but the request was rejected.
As November approached, Cuban state television declared the protest “destined to fail” and denounced the organisers, accusing them of being in the pay of the US (an accusation the government levels at almost all of its critics). “Cuba has never allowed and will never allow actions of a foreign government in our territory trying to destabilise the country,” Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez told diplomats in Havana last week.
Together with strong words, the government mobilised the state’s repressive apparatus. In the days leading up to the protests a heavy police and state security presence was reported in the streets of Cuba’s major cities. Entire blocks were militarised and cordoned off by Cuban special forces, known as “boinas negras” (black berets). At least 40 opposition activists were detained.
Others who planned to protest were placed under house arrest, a tactic long used by the Cuban government to suppress dissenting voices. Daniela Rojo, one of Archipiélago’s coordinators, was arrested on Friday. According to members of the opposition activist group, her whereabouts remain unknown. Víctor Ruiz, an activist in Santa Clara who signed a letter notifying the authorities of his intention to peacefully march on 15 November, was prevented from leaving his home by state security agents. Independent Cuban journalist Luz Escobar, who has been subjected to repeated harassment by Cuban authorities in the past, was also blocked from leaving her home.
Across Cuba there were many similar reports of activists being detained at home or arrested. Leinier Cruz Salfrán, a march planner in Guantánamo, was detained after speaking at an online event organised by CNN en Español. Yunior García, a 39-year-old playwright and leading organiser of 15 November’s demonstration, had announced a plan to march, white rose in hand, down a central street in Havana. He was prevented from leaving his house by state security officials on the day of the protest, who subsequently lowered a Cuban flag over García’s front window to cover a sign he had put there saying “Mi casa está bloqueada” (“My house is blocked”). The entire street where the playwright lives was blocked by a stationary bus manned by state security agents.
On the day of the protest itself, organised flash mobs of government supporters picketed the houses of opposition activists from early in the morning. The crowds were recorded chanting pro-government slogans along with insults and obscenities. Saily de Amarillo, a pro-democracy activist and member of the Archipiélago group, awoke at 5:30am on Monday to find a crowd of government supporters outside her house holding placards and preventing her from leaving.
The president Miguel Díaz-Canel had announced that 15 November, the day of the demonstration, would mark a return to a “new normality” for Cuba as it reopened its borders to international tourists after months of pandemic restrictions. Children were also scheduled to return to school.
As the day unfolded, the president’s version of Cuba – the “tranquillity” alluded to by the government in its appeal for tourists to return to the island – looked to have prevailed. The protests were more subdued than the events of July, with few videos emerging on social media of the sorts of crowds that frightened the government during the summer. Yet this was as much a product of the state’s heavy-handedness than proof that Cubans wish to return to the normalcy alluded to by the president – a normalcy that is synonymous for many islanders with poverty, scarcity and political repression.  
Members of the Cuban exile community will undoubtedly be disappointed that the streets of Cuba did not erupt on 15 November. Meanwhile, supporters of the Cuban government, both at home and abroad, will point to it as evidence that the Cuban opposition lacks support on the island.
Yet it would be a mistake to read too much into the numbers who did (or did not) turn out to protest. As Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch told the New York Times yesterday, the Cuban government resorted to “a strategy of total suppression” to prevent a repeat of the events of July. Anyone caught participating would have faced at least a year in one of Cuba’s spartan prisons, notorious for poor conditions and the physical mistreatment of inmates.
The stakes are high in Cuba when it comes to challenging the government. An atmosphere of fear prevails, something that is difficult to comprehend for outsiders who have never lived under a systematically repressive regime. As the late, gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas phrased it in Before Night Falls, his memoir of persecution and exile at the hands of the communist dictatorship: “The difference between the communist and [liberal democratic] capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream.”

With states, cities and even neighbourhoods lining up to secede, with all signs of a common culture slowly dissipating, it’s become commonplace to assume that the United States has never been so divided. This is mirrored in the increasing polarisation of the Democrats and Republicans: few are willing to switch their vote from one election to the next.
But the blocs aren’t monolithic. Hairline cracks at the margin of each coalition foreshadow the defections that often decide elections.
That, at least, is the implication of a new report from the Pew Research Center. According to its findings, the Democrats are divided by cultural issues such as critical race theory — look at how many of them flocked to Glenn Youngkin in Virginia — while the GOP are split over economic questions. Indeed, it’s all too easy to forget that an important minority of Democratic voters is patriotic, worried about cancel culture, and wants border control and strong policing. Likewise, a significant bloc of Republican voters is sceptical of banks and large corporations and wants them to pay higher taxes.
These observations echo the analyses of David Shor, Michael Lind, Lee Drutman and others: that the median voter leans Left on the economy and Right on culture. The serious challenge for both parties, then, is whether they can resist influential factions in their respective parties: for the Democrats, that’s the AOC-Elizabeth Warren progressive caucus; for the Republicans, the Paul Ryan-Mitch McConnell corporate tax-cut wing.

Drawing on a large representative sample of Americans, Pew has developed a nine-cluster typology of voters, including four Republican and four Democratic categories, in addition to one in the middle. Clusters group people’s answers to a large number of questions by the degree to which their responses correlate. For example, if people who support Black Lives Matter tend to support higher immigration and higher taxes, then those three questions can be reduced to one measure. If, however, there is a group of people who support the first two but not the third policy, that becomes a separate cluster.
Ignoring the less distinctive middle three clusters of the Pew report yields six groupings: three for each of the two main parties. For Republicans, ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ are on the Right of pretty much every question. ‘Committed Conservatives’ are more moderate, with a final category, ‘Populist Right’, who are conservative on immigration, progressivism and race, but moderate on economics and somewhat centrist on religion. ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ tend to be older, while ‘Populist Right’ voters are distinguished by lower levels of education and religiosity.
Among Democrats, the ‘Progressive Left’ are very Left-wing on essentially all issues, while the ‘Establishment Liberals’ are a more moderate group. ‘Democratic Mainstays’ are Left-wing on economics, but centrist on cultural issues such as immigration or cancel culture. The ‘Outsider Left’, meanwhile, is largely made up of voters who opted for Biden but are frustrated with the party and its leaders. Of these, the ‘Progressive Left’ make up just 12% of Democratic voters and are the whitest Democratic cluster, at 68%. They are also younger: the share of Progressive Leftists among Democrats under 30 is 18% compared to just 8% among the over 50s.
On the face of it, splitting the two parties into these groupings reveals where the two parties are most strongly united. Across the four Democratic clusters, for example, 75% or more generally support higher taxes for high earners and say big business earns too much profit, while 85% support Black Lives Matter. On the other hand, more than 80% of Republicans oppose BLM; a similar proportion believe that government assistance to the poor does more harm than good, creating welfare dependency. These are the issues which unify each party’s coalition.
More interesting, however, are the fissures that divide them, presenting opportunities for the other party to poach supporters and win the tight contests that mark the current electoral era. This is most clear with the ‘Populist Right’ Republicans and ‘Democratic Mainstay’ Democrats.
Adapted from Pew, ‘Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology’, p. 86
Figure 1, above, adapted from Pew’s report, illustrates the responses to two statements. The first highlights threats to free speech: “People being too easily offended by things others say is a major problem in the country today.” The second concerns hate speech: “People saying things that are very offensive to others is a major problem in the country today.”
Notice that all four Republican groups lie inside the red circle in the top left quadrant. This means that most Republicans, more than three-quarters of most GOP clusters, think there is a problem with free speech while only a minority think there is too much offensive speech.
On the other hand, the blue circle includes clusters in both right-hand quadrants; they are less closely aligned. Indeed, despite what a number of progressive politicians would have you think, some 81% of the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ cluster believe people are too easily offended, aligning them with Republican opinion. Nor is this a small minority: this group makes up 28% of the Democratic coalition — and is older, less educated and relatively Black and Hispanic. It voted heavily for Biden in the primaries, but is much cooler toward candidates like Sanders or Warren.
It represents, therefore, an important target group for the Republicans. As Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia revealed, culture war issues can act as an important wedge issue for the GOP, making it imperative for the Democrats to put distance between themselves and unpopular progressive causes. And the ‘Democratic Mainstay’ group diverges from the small ‘Progressive Left’ wing in more ways than one. On increasing legal immigration, 63% of Progressive Leftists agree, but only 28% of Democratic Mainstays do; 71% of the first group think American institutions are systematically biased and must be rebuilt, but only 38% of the latter agree.
Meanwhile, the Right is also riven with its own divisions. The biggest outlier is the ‘Populist Right’ cluster which makes up a sizeable 23% of Republican voters. Its members were more likely to say Trump was the best president in recent times rather than Reagan, whereas other Republican clusters either split or favoured Reagan. 87% of this relatively less educated and less religious group say “the economic system in this country unfairly favours powerful interests”, and more than half want higher taxes on people earning over $400,000 a year.
Crucially, this puts them at odds with most Republican voters — and in the company of most Democrats. Here, then, lies an opportunity for the Democrats: if they can peel away populist Right-wing voters turned off by country-club Republicanism, they can split the GOP and flip some Trump voters while uniting their own ranks.
Similarly, the relatively old and evangelical ‘Faith and Flag Conservatives’ cluster is also distinct in its religious Americanism. Among its members, 75% say the “Government should support religious values and beliefs”, whereas fewer than 30% of Republicans outside this cluster agree. On same-sex marriage and abortion this group is more than 20 points more socially conservative than other Republican groups.
Suggested readingDid critical race theory lose Virginia?By Joel Kotkin
So if Republicans shift too far toward religious conservatism, they will open an opportunity for Democrats. But while Pew’s findings reveal that the Republicans are more fragmented than many would expect, it is still the case that the Democrats should be more concerned. For ultimately, Pew’s research reinforces the conclusions of More in Common’s recent Hidden Tribes report. Using data from 2018, Hidden Tribes identified a heavily white 8% ‘Progressive Activist’ segment of the population that was Left-wing on identity issues, unconcerned with free speech and highly active on social media. Pew’s report finds a similar segment: the 6% ‘Progressive Left’ group, who share the same elite, young and white social profile that David Shor and James Carville warn is too dominant among Democratic staffers.
In both surveys, a much larger group of moderate Left-wing voters — often non-white, older and less educated — reject the activists’ progressive politics. And since cultural issues in recent western elections appear to be more important in motivating voters to switch than economic questions, the activist Left could prove a distinct electoral liability. This was the story told by recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Seattle. And as long as the Democrats fail to realise this, it’s only a matter of time before more of its support base is lured across the political aisle.

Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury recently joined Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson on the Current Affairs podcast to discuss his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (newly reissued by Harvard University Press) and to dive into questions about the pervasiveness of systemic racism in the United States. 
Professor Loury has had a long career as a commentator on economics, race, and sociology. He was the first Black tenured professor in the Harvard economics department in his early 30s, and coined the term social capital. Earlier this year he testified before the Senate Banking Committee, where he expressed skepticism of explanations for racial inequalities that emphasize the role of historical or systemic racism. However, his Anatomy book is partly concerned with defending a theory of the way racial biases passed down across generations have far-reaching social consequences. Much of the conversation is devoted to exploring this perceived tension in his work. 
The transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 
Robinson   
The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is where Iâd like to start. This book is an attempt to do a few things. You originally published it in 2002. Itâs a fascinating book. I am a sociology PhD student, and economists generally don’t take much interest in sociology. But this book shows how the work of economists can be enriched by sociology, and I don’t think many people are doing this. And it’s really quite cool, just from an academic perspective. But I want to get to the core theory of the book. What you’re attempting to do is, as I understand it, clarify some of our thinking about what race is, what racism and discrimination are, whether those terms are the terms we should use, and to help us understand how racial inequalities develop. You are associated with conservatism. But it seems like you differ from a lot of others on the right. And, in fact, I think you’ve said that you’ve broken from some on the right in that you reject very strongly in this book the idea of ârace blindness.â You say that the fact that there is no biological racial essentialismâwhich leads some people to say that race is a figment, so we should just ignore itâdoes not mean that race is less âreal.â So perhaps you could draw the distinction between you and some others who say, well, race is a social construct, so we can just ignore it and move past it.
Loury
So what is race? I’m saying, basically, you’ve got marks on human bodies that people are taking to be significant. They don’t have to be intrinsically significant. The meaning can emerge out of the way in which people associate their expectations, and I have the concept of stereotyping. I have the concept of stigma. But it’s a socially constructedâand not a biologicalâconception of race.
Robinson  
Is it fair to analogize to a hypothetical society in which everyone was given a labelâone or two, or A or Bâand then they started to attach meaning to these labels? Identities developed around these labels. People labeled number one started developing conceptions about the people labeled number two. These categories would become very, very salient in explaining how the society worked. They’d be salient in understanding people’s identity and the way they perceive each other. It could just be a random assignment. It could be totally arbitrary. Is that what you mean by socially constructed?
Loury  
Yeah, that is what I mean. And once these associations, or identifications, come into being, they become facts in and of themselves. So to say that it is irrational to give meaning or invest identity in oneâs racial colorationâbecause after all, this is all very arbitrary, and there are no intrinsic differences between people based on that, and we’ve only freighted these meanings on top of itâto say that it’s irrational is a mistake. If, in fact, you anticipate that other people are going to interact with you in a particular way, or if the way in which you understand your history reduces total complexity to a meaningful narrative for yourself, is built around these superficial traits, then that becomes fact in and of itself. The meanings are facts even if the framework on which those meanings are hanging, is, in some sense, arbitrary.
Robinson  
One of the most fascinating parts of your book is when you talk about what you call self-confirming stereotypes. That is when meanings or prejudices are attached based on racial categories. And then the stereotypes become true through having been assigned. In one example that stuck with me, you talk about the cab driver who assumes that young Black men at night are going to be criminals and robbers. And you point out that even if the rate of offending among young Black men is actually no higher [than non-Black men], through the cab drivers’ decisions, it may be thatâ¦ We start off with cab drivers in 1952, and they’re prejudiced. So as a result, young Black men who aren’t robbers think, âWell, I can’t get a cab, so I’m gonna find some other form of transit.â Then, because of a kind of selection effect, the cab driver will be correct that out of the percentage of young Black men who would get in his cab that night, there is a disproportionate number of people who would want to rob him, even though the rates of offending are no different. And so the prejudice has made the thing true. Is that a correct description of that?
Loury  
Thatâs brilliant. Thatâs exactly what’s going on. And the whole thing is that the cab driver is able to make different assumptions about whether he will be robbed based on race only because he can see the race. It’s this marker that the cab driver can see. But the example is meant to capture exactly what you said, which is this idea that there could be no difference in the background condition between these populations. But the equilibrium pattern could be very unequal, and could be, justifiably, a source of generalized suspicion or differential behavior. The cab driver is not the wrong actor. He’s not making a mistake in the example that you described. He correctly anticipates he’s more likely to be robbed by a Black guy, but the only Black guys who are hailing cabs proportionately are robbers, because the non robbing Black guys know that the cab is not going to stop for them. So why are they out there? But the robbing Black guys will be willing to wait all day in order to get somebody to stop. So that’s not real inequality in the endowments of the populations, but it is equilibrium inequality because the cab driver can differentiate this behavior based upon race. Race has been made meaningful in this context, but it doesn’t have an intrinsic meaning. And that was one of the things that I wanted to try to get across in the book. I wanted to ask people to reflect on the following: if indeed this kind of phenomenon can be happening, it would be understood to be happening. That is, would an observer be prepared to consider that the apparent inequality was really an artifact, and not a deep or essentialist feature of the two groups? I’m talking about racial inequality, the anatomy of racial inequality. So I’m trying to build a ground in which the inequality need not be an indictment of the population that’s on the short end.
Robinson   
Could you discuss one of the core distinctions that you make in the book? This is between the language of discrimination and racism, and the language that you prefer in this book, which you called biased social cognition along with stigma. You emphasize that the terms are clarifying in thinking about what is actually going on to create contemporary racial inequality.
Loury   
It’s a long story, Nathan. I’m trying to say the social meanings that are attached to a particular racial marker. So I’m saying blackness. So blackness is stigmatizing in the American context, because it’s associated with the people who descend from slaves. You can’t have that kind of an institution that is racial in its construction without it tainting the connotations and associations that are brought to mind by the racial markers on it. This is stigma. The political question is: what explanations do people give to account for the disparities that they’re seeing? So if they think the disparities are within the systemic interactions, and therefore subject to the possibility of change, that will be one thing. But if they think that the disparities are a reflection of the intrinsic nature of the different groups, then they will be less inclined to affirm to take social responsibility. Take incarceration, for example, where there’s a huge racial disparity. Is that a reflection of the systemic interaction between people in the society or is it a reflection of the nature of the racially identified group, of their culture, or even of their genes? So that’s what I think is at stake in the debate about The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. 
Robinson  
I want to dive into incarceration. This is a really fascinating area in which there is a tension in your work. I see you emphasizing factors that are intrinsic. You had this tweet recently where you were like, âstop emphasizing Black victimhood.â In your testimony that you gave to the Senate Banking Commission, I want to reconcile two things here. You were talking in this testimony about incarceration and racial inequality, and you said there are those who blame systemic racism for mass incarcerationâthe higher number of Black people in jailâand regarding those who you say claim that that [mass incarceration] self-evidently is a sign of racial antipathy…when you respond, âno, it’s mainly a sign of antisocial behavior by criminals who happen to be Black,â people will dismiss you as a moral reprobate. But you say that people are not being arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race. âThose in prison are mainly those who have broken the law. Seeing prisons as a racist conspiracy to confine Black people is an absurd proposition. No serious person could believe it.â 
That’s from the testimony. Okay. But then I go back to The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. And when you’re talking about mass incarceration in that book, you talk about stigma, âthe non-attribution of a common humanity at the core of the problem of treatment.â This is regarding the treatment of criminals. You say that our public responses to a social malady, say drug involvement, depend on the races of those suffering the problem. You argueâas I understand the argumentâthat there may be differences in rates of criminal offending. But what is driving our responses to those, and the reason that race is still a salient factor in explaining mass incarcerationâand you talk heavily about thisâis the difference in the degree to which people are granted a common humanity. And you say that âthese cognitive distinctions tend to be drawn to the detriment of millions of racially stigmatized citizens.â And that explains why instead of treating drug use with a therapeutic responseâthe way suburban dwelling drug buyers or sellers would be treatedâwe treat city dwelling drug buyers or sellers with a punitive response. 
And so I want to ask you to try to reconcile these perspectives. On the one hand, you say, âWell, we can’t talk about race because itâs not the problem with mass incarceration, it’s lawbreaking, and we need to look at culture.â And then on the other hand, you say, âBut also, we put people in prison because we disregard their common humanity, and stigma affects the worth that we assign people. And stigma is based on race.â
LouryÂ Â Â 
That’s very brilliant. I think you summarize the lay of the land. And I’m not even sure I can reconcile the things. Times change, and the context in which you’re operating changes. So I might be reacting to some degree to the nature of the larger conversation that’s ongoing. And it becomes a matter of emphasis. But you’re right to point out that I was very influenced, for example, by this book by Khalil Muhammadâa historian at the Harvard Kennedy Schoolâ called The Condemnation of Blackness. It’s about race and criminal justice issues in the turn of 20th century America, 1890 to 1920. And he’s interested in the stigma of race coming out of the postbellum American Reconstruction periodâwith the incorporation of African Americans…and that time in American political intellectual historyâhe’s pointing out that Blacks were seen as different. European immigrants were coming in large numbers to eastern seaboard American cities. And the Europeans also had various social behavioral issues and criminality and whatnot. But their criminality was taken to be specific to their social location, whereas Black criminality was somehow seen as intrinsic. I was very taken by that book, very taken by the kind of social psychological etiology of the war on drugs and the condemnation of drug addiction and whatnot and the way in which racial tropes and racial stereotypes play into that. And I don’t disavow this idea that the catastrophe of mass incarceration, for low-income Black communities, didn’t register to the same degree within the social political consciousness as it might have because of stigmatizing social meanings of blackness. But I’m taken by another idea. If this doesn’t square the circle of my apparent contending views, I think it might help. 
Robinson
Okay.
Loury 
First of all, notice that all of what I said had to do not so much with the administration of law, but with the kind of larger political framing in which the legal thing wasn’t about police singling out Black people for law enforcement. It was about whether or not you really wanted to have as punitive a response to the fact of illicit drug traffic as you elected to have. The idea that there would be a conspiracyâthat is, to say the idea that discrimination is the issue, that it’s the police unfairnessâthat is the question. That itâs somehow white supremacy that is stalking us when in fact I have a homicide rate that’s off the charts. I have carjackings and so forth. I have the fact of criminal behavior. It doesnât follow from the fact that there is deep social causation to a ghetto community where lawlessness is widespread…it doesnât follow from the fact that that is a social product, that no responsibility falls on the individual actors who are, in fact, killing each other, mugging and robbing and raping people. To talk about crime is not to take a stand against the quest for social justice. It seems a category mistake to me to preclude a fervent defense of the innocent victims of criminal activity. To preclude it [talking about victims] on the argument that big social forces are at work here…I think itâs a category mistake.
Robinson   
You helpfully categorize three different possible explanations of racial inequality. You describe external structures to the groupâthat is, civic and public institutions that provide opportunities and rewards; schools; policing; the rules governing market transactions, etc. Then you describe non-external factorsâthat is, things that are influenced by an internal group culture mediating between subjects and opportunities. And then you describe a third explanation, which is racial essentialism, which is a kind of Charles Murray view, which says that essentially, race is real. Race is a biological fact. And there are things that are intrinsic to Black people that are not even even cultural that are the cause of these things. One of the points that you make is that racial essentialism essentially allows you to have a kind of excuse for not doing anything. And you emphasize both in the book and in your testimony that it is the responsibility of Americans to see racial inequality as a problem that we all care about. And I think one of the issues seems to be that when people hear you talk about explanation number twoâwhat you call non-external structuresâthey hear explanation number three. And so they hear the attribution of internal defects to African Americans. And obviously, people have a very visceral reactionâand quite rightlyâto what amounts to an essentialist kind of racism. That partially explains why these conversations are so emotional.
Loury   
That’s a very fine setup to characterize the three different possible explanations: (1) external forces of oppression, (2) internal lack of coordination and development of the cultural nexus to support success, or (3) âthere’s something wrong with these people.â And it hymns in the discourse, the fear that you might give credit to the essentialist theory, and the injury, that any entertainment of the idea that Black people are somehow inferior or unfit or somehow in their nature, not able to, you know, accommodate the modern world. Thereâs a threat to the psyche, to the sense of value. So yes, that’s all true. And I’m an internal man. And I’ve had a conversation with Charles Murray on my podcast, actually, about his book Facing Reality, but we got into some of the other stuff. And I didn’t condemn him as vociferously as I think some of my listeners would have wanted me to do. I tried to have a civil, respectful conversation with him. But I wanted to highlight this distinction between thereâs nothing wrong with Black people that we canât fix, which is the internal. I’m acknowledging that there might be something wrong with Black people. That’s already saying quite a bit. I’m acknowledging the out of wedlock birth rate, I’m acknowledging the intellectual achievement gap, I’m acknowledging the over representation amongst criminal offenders, I’m acknowledging that the dysfunction that we see manifest in one way or another is a real quote unquote problem with Black people. That’s already a huge, huge step. Because most would say that itâs entirely external, that there is no space for any consideration of this thing that I’m talking about when I talk about the internal and cultural. So to be able to have that conversationâwhile at the same time being mindful of the essentialist out there who would want to use the confession of dysfunction as evidence of intrinsic unfitnessâis a difficult thing to do. But we must have the conversation.
Robinson   
I was totally fascinated by the book, and then I was totally angered by the Senate testimony. The book was so beautifully nuanced. And then in some of the stuff that you write, I hear you say that you’re an âinternalâ man. Well, I understand it from one perspective, because I’m not Black. I think it would be very different if I was Black, and I was talking to other Black people aboutâI just think the conversation is different, right? If you’re telling a Black child the story of what they can do, you tell them a different story. You don’t tell them that they can’t accomplish anything, that there are all these barriers in their way. You tell a kind of conservative story about fulfilling your dreams, because otherwise you have a self-fulfilling prophecy where you demoralize a child, and then the barriers do become real. 
But when you’re talking to the Senate Banking Commission, I feel like there’s all this stuff in your book that I think is so important that you donât give. In your testimony, youâre rejecting an account of systemic racism. But your book seems to be an account of an intelligent way to understand how systemic racism is, in fact, very important, and how things that happen over the course of generations are really, really difficult to purge. And why it is incredibly difficult for Black people, internally, to overcome these social cognitive biasesâyou talk about the inheritance of these conceptions of dishonor, these conceptions of low worth. These are massive systemic factors affecting Black people in today’s generation growing up in the United States, with the institutions having people in them who do not see Black people as sharing in the equality of human worth. That seems to me to be an inescapable conclusion of what you say about stigma in the book. You emphasize that there’s all these leftists who say it’s systemic racism, but âwe need to look at ourselves, we need to look internallyâ seems to me to be much less nuanced than the very interesting account that you give in the book, where the internal culture is always at war against this giant inherited racial stigma.
Loury 
Again, youâre very wonderful in your summary observations here. It’s very stimulating. Look, I’m reissuing the book. I’m the same guy. I haven’t disavowed the book. I say in the new preface, this is a better theory of systemic racism than the theories of systemic racism that youâve heard. I’m proud of having a subtle and deep sociological sensibility, which I’ve honed over decades by reading sociologists. Some of them were my friends. So I’m not repudiating the nuance, and it’s gonna sound like hackery, isn’t it? Itâs gonna look like this is a hit piece somehow. I mean, so now I’m a flack. And that’s not a good look. So I should probably try to defend myself here. The fact that there is a deep stigma and anti-blackness embedded within the DNA and the sinew and the consciousness and the Freudian subconscious and whatnot, is an unavoidable reality in this society. Inveighing against it changes nothing. If the issue was, do I have a narrative that indicts white people and allows me to have an elaborate conversation, indeed a reckoning within society, about the fact of the durability of racial stigmaâif that’s what I was interested in doing, if I was just interested in lamenting the fact that this exists…But I’m talking about the quest for equality, and I’m saying, this is the me who is no longer emphasizing the structural predicate, but rather insisting upon the existential imperativeâ¦ Can I say that again? Nathan, I’m contrasting a sociological, almost Marxian-like, causal account and some big structural forces weighing against, how do you live? How do you actually get from one place to the other in life? How do you find dignity? Where do you find a meaningful expression of the fullness of your humanity? And I’m talking about Black people, we’re talking about 40 million people in the United States of America. And what I’m doing is shifting my emphasis from the subtle and nuanced and brilliant, if you will, dissection that I provide in that book to the contemporary emphasis, as was reflected in that banking committee. I’m fighting for the existential dignity of my people. I’m sorry for how that sounds. Because we can go on forever. Nobody is coming to save us, is what I’m saying, Nathan.
Robinson   
Iâm struggling with this tension between the book and the testimony. In the testimony, you say, âcommon sense suggests that on the whole, people are not being arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race, but because they broke the law.â But then the part on mass incarceration in the book is all about how that is technically true, but it is misleading, because it avoids confronting the fact that the institutions that we’ve built to deal with crime are based on differential evaluations of people’s social worth by their race, and that has resulted in a system where we don’t mind the fact that millions of young Black men are essentially tossed in cages and given up on.
Loury 
I’m sorry, I have to disagree with you. I don’t think there’s any inconsistency at all. In saying on the one hand, the genesis and the organic evolution of the structures of order maintenance, are tainted by racism and racial stigma, and so on, and to say on the other hand that most of the people under lock and key today are there because they raped somebody, robbed,somebody, hurt somebody, and were duly processed and convicted. I say somewhere not in this bookâa million cases, each one rightly decided, can still add up to a historic wrong. It can be true at one in the same time, that each one of the cases that resulted in the person being incarcerated was a faithful administration of judicial process, unbiased with respect to race. And it also be the case that the jails overflowing with young Black men in city after city around this country is a historical travesty. Those things are not inconsistent with each other. We have to decide, indeed, whether or not the summer of 2020âwhere cities were aflameâis going to happen again in 2022 when inevitably another incident in which a white police officer kills a Black kid happens. We have to decide whether or not we’re gonna allow this vulnerability that we have to the mass mobilizations consume our democracy. That’s not putting too fine a point on it, actually. And that’s what I’m fighting over here about, Nathan.
Robinson   
Let me ask you this, though. I’m a man of the left. I tend to feel like I agree with what you said that the two things can be reconciled. This is âstructureâ and âagency,â in sociological terms. Individuals have personal agency, but they operate within broader social structures. But it’s always seemed to me that people on the right need to be educated on the structure, and the leftists need to get a better understanding of the agency. When you tell Republicans that they don’t have to care about structural racismâthat itâs an empty term, it’s an explainer of everythingâthat, to me, suggests that they don’t have to confront all of the stuff from The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, which is deep-seated. You don’t use the term âimplicit bias.â But that is another attempt to describe the kind of phenomenon you are talking about, which is that there are these deep inherited stigmas. And I feel like that’s actually quite an important part of the story.
Loury   
My message is that nobody is coming to save us. We must look African Americansâ reality in the face. We must accept responsibility for the way we raise our children, and how we conduct ourselves, what we do with our time, for the nature of our family life, for the foundation of the development of our full reach of our human potential. This is what’s not happening. So I’m beginning with a factual predicate. I say the law could be fruit from a poisoned tree. The law could be deeply, deeply quote unquote racist, but the law-breaking behavior… 
Robinson    
That makes sense to me to a Black audience. American conservatives and Republicans, when they hear that, they think, âWe don’t have to care about police reform.â Because it’s all the fault of these dysfunctional communities. So we don’t have to worry about the police.
Loury
The alternative would be to allow the way in which you reacted to the reality of the law-breaking behavior, the way in which you reacted to it, to allow that to be driven by your anticipation of how addressing the factual circumstance, will redound to their reaction. I mean, you’re now hostage to this political bank shot that you’re making,
Robinson   
So, the police example. The number of encounters with police among Black people that are negative are reported as being very, very high compared to white people. I mean, even the Roland Fryer study saying that there’s no racial bias in shooting suggested there is a lot of racial bias in the level of force used by police. Even people like Tim Scott and Jason Riley have said that their encounters with police have been horrible. So there is a need to build a public consensus among people who don’t really care about reforming the police that the police don’t treat Black people well in very large swaths of this country. The Justice Department’s reports on various police departments have really been horrifying. Thereâs a major need for reform there. And people need to understand that even if police aren’t intentionally hateful, they have biased social cognition that results inâI know you don’t like the term racismâbutâ¦ racism.

Loury
I grant you that police need to be regulated in their behaviors. I grant you that there exists plenty of evidence that there is racial bias in police behavior. It’s a legendary feature of the thing. I’m not against sensible reforms. I don’t want to defund police departments or abolish police departments. But those practical issues of the regulation of police need to be dealt with. But the narrative that there’s open season on Black peopleâthat’s Benjamin Crumpâs book, that’s the title of the bookâthat America needs to take its knee off the neck of Black people, that’s Al Sharpton at George Floyd’s funeral in Houston. The narrative is about blackness. We all have these anecdotes like, I was stopped by a cop, the cop was rude and assumed I had drugs in my trunk, he made me get out of my car. This has happened to me. I could tell this story. I’m not gonna tell it. We don’t have time for that. That this is a major phenomenon of justice in this society, such that the intensity of protest and violent demonstration against an order that is said to be repressiveâI think it’s hysteria, Nathan, frankly. I think it’s a very interesting moral panic. It’s a phenomenon of social psychology that should be studied. It’s completely disconnected from reality. Because what we’re doing here is we’re arguing about the narrative, we’re arguing about how the account is going to be told. And these things are apiece with one anotherâthe critical race theory controversy in American schools about how you frame the teaching of race related historical issues, the 1619 Project at the New York Times, and contestation over how you represent the narrative, the diversity training in corporate America and internal institutional contestations, which are about racial power within corporations and the comfort with which various employees feel in their work relations with one another, which then get politicized and assimilated to this larger narrative of racial reckoning. And I’ll tell you what I think is at the root of it. The Civil Rights Movement is a 50-year-old history. The leverage to racial claims of unfairnessâthe elasticity as it wereâon any social outcome that we could point to, the big changes have already happened. The country is moving and it’s moving on. And we’re 50 years into the regime, and people cling to it. No, I don’t think the issue of police violence against black people is a major first order, second order, or third order social phenomenon. I think it’s a moral panic.
Robinson 
Does 50 years seem like a long time to you? It doesn’t seem like a long time to me. That seems very brief to undo hundreds of years of built up institutions and all the stigma you discuss in the book, these inherited conceptions, the structure of wealth in the country. That’s less than a human lifetime.
Loury  
Okay, well, I’m saying the country has completely changed in these 50 years. There weren’t any Asians to speak of within the American structure in 1965. America will not in my opinion in the mid-21st century, still be vulnerable to the idea of, we had slavery, we had Jim Crow, Black people were mistreated. We’re an exception. African Americans are an exception. The country is going to process this however it’s going to process it. The meaning of the American experiment is at stake. When you see a sitting member of Congress, Maxine Waters, make reference in this border patrol treatment of Haitian migrants to slavery. You see what I mean? That dog is not going to hunt, as they say in Texas. Thatâs not gonnaâ¦
Robinson
Really? Isn’t the whole point, again, that if the inherited dishonor and stigmaâthis stuff from Orlando Patterson that you discuss in the in the bookâthat the assessment of the worth of Black lives is based on bias, based on physical markers on the human anatomy, is passed down generationally, then the treatment of Haitians you would expect to have some some link to this history? You can link it to history.
Loury   
No, I think that’s wrong. I think it’s quite wrong. I mean, you can link it, but youâre just making a mistake. And I’m not disavowing anything that I’ve said about racial stigma. Those are Haitians. Haitians are not the descendants of American slaves. Those are not people organic to the American political culture.
Robinson  
But your theory of race doesn’t have to do with country of origin.
Loury 
Youâve essentialized the color of their skin when you assimilate them to the descendants of American slaves. You’ve made a dramatic, gigantic leap. You’re saying that skin color is the only thing that matters. It’s not the language that they’re speaking. It’s not how they comport themselves. It’s only that their skin is dark. And you’ve jumped over a century and a half of history. I’m sorry, I don’t buy that as a social, psychological, historical explanation. But I’m also very suspicious of the motive of anyone making that leap. They are dealing in a certain kind of currency, there’s a certain kind of moral blackmail, there’s a sleight-of-hand that’s happening here when you do that. The issue with respect to Haitians at the border is about refugee policy and desperate people who want a better life. It’s not about the color of their skin. Black Americans don’t have the political capital to spare, to lend to that cause. We can take whatever positions we want to about that cause. But please don’t appropriate the 300-year history of my people in this country on behalf of that cause. That is a bait and switch. It’s a trick of optics with respect to politics, and it needs to be disputed. I’m disputing Maxine Waters taking the history of slavery and using it as a trope, as a prop, to argue that we ought to let Hatians into the country. If she wants to let him into the country, let’s discuss that. But let’s not say that it was slavery, because it was not. I’m not a racial essentialist. Do you see? 
Robinson  
I understand race is a construct of perception, right? 
Loury  
Well, yes. But that’s not the totality of the things that we have to consider. Black people are situated within the American nation-state. We’re Americans. Nothing happens for us, whether it’s police reform or social policy, that doesn’t get processed through the institutions of public deliberation and decision making, which is the Democratic Republic of the several States of the United States of America. So the fact of racial stigma of Americans needs to be situated within the larger frame of the American project. And I say this in particular with reference to the example we were just discussing about the border. To elide the racial thing with the national thingâwhere’s the boundary of the country, who are the American people?âwe can argue about it. People have different views, but to let it be driven by a superficial assimilation of skin color commonality into a narrative of [booming voice] âsystemic racism is gonna get your mama,â thatâs what I’m objecting to over here.
Robinson  
I have one final question for you. You believe that the most important priority is cultural change internal to Black Americans. Let me put this possible critique to you and you can respond: Youâre being impractical because you’re asking each individual to try and solve what is ultimately a collective action problem. One person, one young man in Chicago, for exampleâare you preaching to that person? Are you saying that there are particular decision points that individual people need to make? Or are you saying that a decision needs to be made in the abstract? Your criticisms of the impracticality of acknowledging systemic racismâwe can accept those. But what about the counter-criticism, which says, âOkay, but how does one change a âcultureâ when each of us are just individuals wandering through the world?â Arenât you just shifting the responsibility in a way that doesn’t end up actually being able to alter anything?
Loury   
Okay. So everything is not politics and policies. Some stuff is higher than that. It’s about spirituality. And it’s about fundamental commitment. So I don’t have an answer to the question. I mean, you’re right. I introduced earlier the structural and the existential. I’m speaking not from the point of view of a doctor administering a remedy to a condition. I’m not prescribing in that sense. I’m speaking from the point of view of someoneâit’s hortatory in the literal sense of the word. Itâs meant to be a kind of prophetic or visionary injunction. I am sorry for the way that that sounds, I apologize in advance for the self-aggrandizement that’s implicit in that characterization. I’m saying let me try to give an analogy. Okay. Let me try to give an example. âI’m Black, and I’m proud. Say it loud. I’m Black, and I’m proud.â That was a popular tune by James Brown. Back in the late 60s, if I’m not mistaken. Black Power. Black is beautiful. Negritude. Black is beautiful. We should know our African heritage, Kwanzaa, communal re-enactment of whatever, okay? That would be one example. Let me give another example. Religious revival, which has swept through cultures at different times, sometimes with horrible results of massive, inspirational uprising, a movement within the people of this sort of intense quest for the defining of what gives their lives meaning. And so on. That’s a different sphere of human activity. It’s not instrumental as a policy prescriptive, but it’s nevertheless a part of our human culture. So I’m speaking to everybody. And I want to come back to that audience. Iâm mainly in my mind, speaking to, quote unquote, my people, by which I mean, African American people slash/American people. I’m speaking to the dual antecedent. They’re my people, African American people/American people. There’s multiple audiences here. And I’m saying the clock is ticking here in the existential sense, in the sense of how are we going to reckon with the realities that are actually confronting us? And I’m saying that politics is only a part of that. When you mentioned culture, you were not dismissive, but you characterized it in a way that made me feel uncomfortable because it made it feel trivial. I’m talking about raising children. Again, let me give an example. So there was this case in Chicago where police officers shot to death an 11-year-old boy, at 1 a.m., somewhere because the kid had a device, the officer thought it was a gun, there wasn’t any gun. And of course, it’s a horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy. And the policeman may have not exercised good judgment, and it might have been affected by the kidâs race. I’m not just saying that any of that was not true. What I’m saying is that an 11 year old was on the streets with a device that looked like a gun running from a police officer, an 11 year old at 1 a.m. If I may say so, that reveals something profoundly problematic about the structure of social support within which that youngster was embedded. And we can begin to talk about who’s responsible there, that would be a long conversation, and about what practically can be done about it, there will be no panaceas. But to avoid noticing that the failure of the structures of social support for that young person is implicated in his deathâbecause I’ve made a political calculation, that red states like that rhetoric better than blue states do, is just not something an intellectual should do. This is George Orwell talking to you.
Robinson   
What I meant was more like a practical matter: Isn’t it easier to try and get the police not to shoot people than to change what 11-year-olds do? Or isn’t it easier to say: âWell, kids in Detroit go to horrible schools and kids in white suburban Michigan go to great schools, so we’re going to give every kid in Detroit tutoring,â than to say, âAre these parents in Detroit raising their kids badly?â Isnât that just like shifting the responsibility without practically being able to alter the situation?
Loury   
I’d love to give kids tutoring. And I’d like to use some of the money that the public school unions are consuming, in many places, to no particular distinctive effect. I’d love to see a thousand flowers blooming in education. By no means do I mean to abandon the discussion about policy to say that policy is not the only thing worth discussing. I don’t have to choose between talking about educational policy in Detroit, and talking about parents needing to make sure that they turn the television off, and that the kids do the homework. And if I’m in a city like New York Cityâwhere in the excellent exam schools, Asian American immigrant children, half of whom are qualifying for reduced-price or subsidized lunches, are acing a test that a handful of Black kids are performing well onâI don’t decide to completely scuttle the testing regime for the selecting of excellent students in order to accommodate the underperformance of the communities of color whose kids are underrepresented in these schools. I can do both things at the same time. I can address myself to the policy needs of tutoring and other such educational innovation, which I wish more fresh air were allowed within that monopolized system to allow that to happen. And also say, if you don’t teach your kid how to read their letters, their numbers, their shapes, by the time they get the first grade, if you don’t make sure that your kid is getting homework brought home…Why would I not talk about parenting? Because I think that there are legitimate questions on whether there’s enough funds going into the school system. I don’t have to choose.
Robinson   
Well, I truly appreciate all the time you’ve given me. The book is The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, second edition, from Harvard University Press. And I should also mention that the book is dedicated to your late wife and includes a very heartwarming and moving tribute to her at the beginning, which I feel the need to mention because it’s such a beautiful dedication. The book itself is incredibly stimulating and provocative and a really fascinating mixture of sociology and economics that draws from various intellectual traditions to answer some of the hardest questions that I think we can pose about the difference between structure and agency, about what race is, about how we should think about it, about what racism is. Professor Glenn Loury, thank you very much for joining me.
Loury  
Nathan, thank you. Thank you so much for a penetrating interview and a wonderful intellectual experience. I love that you so closely read and thought about my book. Thank you.Â 

After the interview, Prof. Loury and I had an email exchange continuing the subjects discussed. It is reprinted below with permission and is also on Prof. Loury’s Substack. 
Robinson to Loury
Okay, sorry, I need to ask you one thing, though, because I found your explanation reconciling the book and the testimony satisfying during our conversation, but now I’m reading this 2012 lecture and I just cannot find a way to reconcile in my head the argument from the testimony that mass incarceration is not racist but a result of Black law-breaking driven by âdespicable behaviorâ and the argument you made in 2012 that mass incarceration is clearly racist and that the critic who sees disparate crime rates as proof the system isnât racist is “ahistorical, shortsighted, and ethically challenged” because they’re focusing on individual/community responsibility rather than social responsibility, history, and public policy. See the below quotes.1
Likewise with “I do deny the causal social-historical connection between the fact of slavery and Jim Crow on the one hand and the plight of contemporary African-American communities on the other” (Vox interview) and “much rests on my conviction that the history of slavery in America casts a long shadow, one with contemporary relevanceâ¦. I claim that an honest assessment of current American politicsâits debates about welfare, crime, schools, jobs, taxes, housing, test scores, diversity, urban policy, and much moreâreveals the lingering effects of this historically engendered dishonor” (Anatomy)
I don’t think these are completely wildly apart. As we talked about, a lot of it just depends on whether you decide to emphasize structure or agency, each being part of the story. But here’s why I press you on this: I feel as if in your recent public speeches on this, you lapse into the very kind of binary thinking that you’ve done such an elegant job getting us around in the earlier work. Like today you declared yourself to be on the culture side of things. I understand why you would choose to do this; as you say in the Vox interview, it’s a “bleak moral landscape” if human choices don’t matter and we’re billiard balls pushed around by historical forces. What I would object to is the attack on the systemic racism explanation of mass incarceration. I think it’s fair to say that that explanation is true but incomplete, but unfair to go before Senate republicans and encourage them to think of it as absurd. I think your 2012 lecture is completely correct, and while it’s perfectly reasonable to place different emphases for different audiences, I think that saying it’s ridiculous or foolish to place the emphasis on law/history/society/economics rather than ‘despicable behavior’ is exactly the kind of un-nuanced thinking that the 2012 lecture warned about.
I go into this at length because I am depressed at the breakdown of dialogue between positions that I think ultimately be reconciled. I thought the Senate testimony was great in one way in saying that we needn’t take a side between cultural explanations and collective social responsibility, but then went into a cultural explanation on mass incarceration that I think missed an opportunity to present the much more interesting perspective that comes out of Race, Incarceration, and American Values” and The Anatomy of Racial Inequality.
I think I can show what I mean by “lapsing into the very false dichotomy you are warning us against” with this quote from your Vox interview:

It becomes a practical question whether single-parent families, in which 70 percent of African-American children live, is rightly thought of as social phenomenon over which we have control, if it’s thought of as the inheritance of Jim Crow slavery and American racism. Are the structures of African-American social life the derivative consequences of the political and economic history of African Americans, or are they subject to being reshaped and reformed and remade in an image that we will for ourselves and our progeny? The latter is the stance I’m taking. The alternative is a bleak moral landscape for me.

It seems to me like that isn’t an either-or and your work has shown exactly why it isn’t an either/or. Both of those are true and the Anatomy is the best explanation I’ve yet read of why they’re both true.
I am sorry to be argumentative. I promise you it is out of respect. I read your work closely, I enjoy it, I take it very seriously, and I want to understand it because it is profound. One reason I feel the need to quibble is that I don’t think we’re ever going to get anywhere if conservatives dismiss leftists as peddling something fantastical when we talk about systemic racism (or, we could call it, the institutional consequences of widespread biased social cognition, since I don’t like flabby buzzwords either). The interesting question to me is how you can reconcile the fact that it’s quite real with a need for individual humans to seize control over their lives and not see themselves as victims who cannot act. I feel that for that conversation to happen, the left absolutely does need to get over its belief that the state, and state policy, are the only levers that can be controlled in order to make society, and the right needs to be more charitable and grant some basic left contentions, e.g. that differential lawbreaking rates do not exonerate the prison system from charges of racism because it can still have come out of an insufficient regard for equal Black humanity on the part of those charged with responding to social problems.
All best,
Nathan
Loury to Robinson
What a remarkable letter, Nathan! I’m grateful to you for your careful attention to my work, for your keen intelligence, for your passion and for caring enough to challenge me and engage me in this way. I had not expected to gain nearly so much when I agreed to be interviewed for your podcast.
You’re right. I have lost sight of the profound wisdom in my earlier work, where I was able to dissect with rigor and nuance the systemic forces which underlay persistent and profound racial disparities. As I wrote in the new preface for ARI: “The effect I was after when talking about racial stigma, and the reason I employed the seemingly loaded phrase ‘biased social cognition,’ was to identify the politically consequential cognitive distortions that occur when the observably inferior position of a racial group is thought to have emerged from qualities intrinsic to that group, even though the actual causation entails a system of social interactions.” I go on to write that, “This is a theory of ‘systemic racism’âusing the language of our timeâthat I advanced two decades ago, and which I believe remains relevant to this day.”
My latter-day denunciations of “systemic racism” as “a bluff and a bludgeon” — as fanciful, absurd and preposterous — constitute a willful abandonment of ths wisdom, and it is incumbent upon me to ask: Why? Why have I allowed my distaste for Black Lives Matter and the Critical Race Theorists of our time (Di Angelo; Kendi; N.H. Jones, etc.) to obscure in my own mind those hard-won insights into the nature of racial politics in America? Part of the answer, I think, is what you allude to — a shift in emphasis; a conviction that internal cultural matters require more attention; a revulsion at the crude anti-racist blame-game where “white supremacy” is the source of all evil; where “personal responsibility” has no place in the discourse, etc. But that’s only part of the explanation, I fear. 
I went back and listened to that lecture (2012) on incarceration that I presented at the Univ. of Michigan. It was a remarkable experience for me. I remember the guy who gave that speech; I can still evoke some of the passion which animated him, but the embers have cooled quite a bit. I was furious about the mass imprisonment of the least advantaged, most challenged segment of our society — this as the sole governmental response to the profoundly unjust structures of our political economy. I could see the multi-layered historical antecedents of this sorry state of affairs. I knew that the disproportionate presence of blacks among those being imprisoned was the bitter fruit of historical racism. And I knew this was so, even if every single one of those imprisoned had been duly and fairly judged guilty of criminal offenses by juries of their peers: “A million cases, each one rightly decided, can still add-up to a great and historic wrong,” I was inclined to tell my audiences. I had almost forgotten about the feelings which underlay my writing sentences such as that. I am grateful to you for reminding me of my earlier self, and for challenging me to reconcile my contemporary argumentation with the obvious truths upon which I had seized in ARI, RIAV and elsewhere.
I will be taking all of this to heart as I prepare for a major address I am to give, tomorrow night in Orlando, Florida, to the  National Conservatism Conference. They may be surprised at what they hear. So, too, may I!
With gratitude,
Glenn Loury
One of the passages that I found most moving in Anatomy was (pp. 81-83):

This is the Land of Liberty, yet some class/race-defined segments of the society literally live in a police state. Now, perhaps that must be so. But why is there no public reflection about it? Why does this circumstance not create dissonance? How is it that our moralists and our political leaders are able to sleep at night in the face of these facts? Dramatic racial disparity in imprisonment rates does not occasion more public angst, I claim, because this circumstance does not strike the typical American observer at the cognitive level as being counterintuitive. It does not to a sufficient degree disappoint some deeply held, taken-for-granted expectations and assumptions about the nature of our society. It can be accounted for by a narrative line attributing the outcome to the inadequacies of the persons who suffer the condition, not to any as yet undiscovered problems with our own social organization. […] So the question becomes, What disturbs us? What is dissonant? What seems anomalous? What is contrary to expectation? A racial group is stigmatized when it can expe- rience an alarming disparity in some social indicators, and yet that disparity occasion no societal reflection upon the extent to which that circumstance signals something having gone awry in OUR structures rather than something having gone awry in THEIRS.

I think this is not only moving, but also useful in explaining what it means for a ‘society’ to be ‘racist.’ I have a friend who is a schoolteacher in Detroit, your typical Poor Inner City School, and half her kids come to school without having eaten, and a bunch have behavioral problems, parents with addiction, etc. And of course it’s possible to say, well, they’re being parented horribly and there are no books in the house and they’re being shuffled from place to place, and in the 1950s marriage rates were higher and all that. But that passage above captures something that has always struck me whenever my friend tells me about her kids, which is, yeah, but it’s also the case that “Black poverty in the cities” is just accepted as a normal state of affairs in this country, nobody really gives a shit. The white people in the suburbs aren’t sufficiently troubled that they live in a big ring around a city that has been hollowed out and where the houses and school buildings are all falling down. There is an empathy gap, and that empathy gap has to do with the fact that racial inequality has come to be seen as kind of natural, and even if the number of “hateful” racists goes down and down, and the Klan and the Nazis are marginal now, there’s this very disturbing kind of American acceptance that Detroit and Gary and New Orleans will always be the way they are, or these are internal problems that do not require a national response. I do think that one thing that was consistent both in your 2012 lecture and your 2021 testimony was an insistence that it is the obligation of people to care about what happens to each other, and for America to accept the moral burden of caring equally about all of its citizens. The plea against indifference is something I respect, and is one reason why I enjoy your work even when I disagree completely with you.
I’m very gratified to have helped you see again some of the value that I have found in your previous work. I agree with you that ‘systemic racism’ has been a woolly and frustrating concept, and as good social scientists obviously we detest explanations with imprecisely defined mechanisms. The lasting contribution of Anatomy, I feel, is that it identifies the mechanism very clearly and therefore allows ‘systemic racism’ to go from being a term used to mean ‘vague big structural forces’ to something that has content and can either exist or not exist.
One reason I liked the approach was that instead of, as many conservatives do, seeing the most extreme absurdities of the left as a reason to assume there is nothing to their analysis, it is a constructive critique that says: what about this concept is redeemable? What parts can we test? What is a system? What is racism? And it does not answer by saying ‘if a term is woolly and used as a catch-all, it must not be true that racism can persist without racists,’ but ‘here is a way for this to go from a slogan to a testable social scientific proposition.’
My own view is, in general, that I think conservatives have a lot of valuable critiques of the left, but that they throw the baby out with the bathwater by often declining to be constructive in this way. This is going to come up in my interview with John. My problem with Woke Racism is that he’s so angry at the idiocy of the worst people that he doesn’t do the interesting intellectual work of trying to engage the least-unintelligent versions of their position. So, for example, even with Robin DiAngeloâwhom I find almost completely worthlessâthere is one interesting discussion that her work can produce, if we are trying to be charitable and find some kernel of worthwhile thought, which is: how do defense mechanisms around biased social cognition prevent honest confrontations with it? Her book is supposedly about how white people are fragile and get angry when you call them racist, which is true, but we know that mostly they probably get angry with her because she is patronizing and unpleasant and says that if they disagree with her it just offers more proof of their racism. Still, why not discuss the question of whether her concept of “white fragility” is getting at anything? I personally do think there’s something to it, there is a genuine social phenomenon where people are reluctant to admit their biases even when presented with evidence of them.
Alright, so she’s probably not very redeemable. Kendi is a more interesting case. Stamped from the Beginning is a pretty serious work of history based on a great deal of research, but it’s harmed by the fact that he’s got a fuzzy definition of what’s racist and what isn’t, and he doesn’t seem to have done the serious philosophical work of working out what he means by his terms. He’s infamous for saying that all racial disparities are attributable to racism, because if they weren’t, then they must be the result of racial inferiority. I am sure you find that statement absolutely maddening and wish he’d read a few pages of Thomas Sowell to understand why that’s false. But even if he’s wrong, I think it can serve as a starting point for a valuable discussion, which is: how do we identify “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” disparities, if such exist? Does the “Kendi rule” work better if it is taken as a presumption rather than an absolute? Or does the Sowell presumption, which is that inequalities are to be expected and are the rule rather the exception, serve us better?
One of the things I have tried to do over the course of editing Current Affairs is take conservative ideas seriously, even when I think they are terrible and misguided. I get exasperated that other leftists just feel they can write the right off without dealing with the best and most persuasive version of the arguments. I don’t think it’s intellectually honest to just pretend Thomas Sowell’s books don’t exist, which is what the New York Times and most of academia does. However, one thing I’d say to you (and John) is that the opposite is true, too. People on the right who become convinced the left are a bunch of hysterical wackos lapse out of serious engagement. (I quite understand why. Many of my people are unbearable.) For example, Woke Racism dwells on all the ludicrous examples of the term “cultural appropriation” being used seemingly to create strict rules against any kind of cultural mixing or borrowing. Yes, that’s silly. But my colleague Briahna Joy Gray wrote a fascinating article on the subject in which she asked the question: what are people trying to get at with this concept? Is there something redeemable in it? Because it’s easy to dismiss the absurdities, but there are cases where there does seem to be some kind of moral violation in lifting someone else’s cultural practice, bastardizing it and commercializing it, without offering credit or really understanding it, and how do we describe that? And I wished reading John’s book that he’d dealt with the interesting questions (can there be cultural property? Is one obligated to respect other cultures? Is it wrong for me to go to a poor country, borrow their culture, and get rich off it?) rather than going after the most extreme and obvious absurd doctrines. Because he certainly has a deep grounding in the history of culture, and I felt like he took the easy way out.
Another example from our conversation: you described last year’s uprisings over policing as a “moral panic,” and said (an argument I hear commonly on the right) that the rates of police killings are so much lower than the rates of street killings that the reaction does not make sense and clearly BLM’s priorities are out of whack. Perhaps, but I think there are also interesting questions raised here, like: How different is a killing by a safety officer to any other killing? For example, if the president shot someone, it would be a far bigger news story than if an ordinary criminal shot someone. To what extent is it irrational to give greater weight to a transgression committed by the state than one committed by a private person? Is it not the fact that police are the very people we trust to help us that gives these killings a uniquely outrageous quality, the same way a betrayal by someone thought to be a friend hurts more than a betrayal by a stranger? Is it not also perhaps the product of convenience, where it’s easy to protest the state because the state can make policy, but difficult to protest murder because murderers don’t respond to public political pressure? How do we test whether those explanations or a moral panic theory is true? I think those are interesting questions, and while I am open to being convinced of the argument that the left just has its priorities completely out of whack, I think both left and right would be less likely to see one another as insane if, instead of taking the most ludicrous and irrational versions of the other side’s position, we strove hard to find the most defensible and charitable version of the position. Again, to come back to Anatomy, I think that that is what it does so well. It is an exercise in constructive criticism of the systemic racism concept that ‘saves it from its defenders,’ so to speak.
Personally, I have become a more intelligent commentator because I read conservative books and take them seriously, though I have lost none of my fiery leftism. I think many of the people so exasperated by woke-ism, pseudo-CRT, etc would find themselves having more illuminating things to say if they got past the fact that it is almost impossible not to react with visceral loathing to DiAngelo and instead tried to fix the analysis.
Would be very keen to hear what you said in your speech. I truly enjoyed the Christian economist article which seems to me another example of you doing the extremely difficult work of synthesizing seemingly incommensurate intellectual traditions and positions.
Sorry to ramble. Thank you for your extremely gracious reply. A lot of people react very badly to being challenged or contradicted, or being told their old stuff was better, but I think you and I both share the understanding that knowledge cannot move forward unless we are able to sharply disagree on terms of mutual respect. I appreciate you taking my questions and comments in the spirit in which I mean them.
âNathan
Senate Testimony (2021) 
âWhat are those folks saying when they declare that âmass incarcerationâ is âracismââthat the high number of blacks in jails is, self-evidently, a sign of racial antipathy? To respond, âNo. Itâs mainly a sign of anti-social behavior by criminals who happen to be black,â one risks being dismissed as a moral reprobate. This is so, even if the speaker is black. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas. Nobody wants to be cancelled. But we should all want to stay in touch with reality. Common sense and much evidence suggest that, on the whole, people are not being arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race. Those in prison are, in the main, those who have broken the lawâwho have hurt others, or stolen things, or otherwise violated the basic behavioral norms which make civil society possible. Seeing prisons as a racist conspiracy to confine black people is an absurd proposition. No serious person could believe it. Not really. Indeed, it is self-evident that those taking lives on the streets of St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago are, to a man, behaving despicably. Moreover, those bearing the cost of such pathology, almost exclusively, are other blacks. An ideology that ascribes this violent behavior to racism is laughable. Of course, this is an unspeakable truthâbut no writer or social critic, of whatever race, should be cancelled for saying so.â
“Race, Incarceration, and American Values” (2012) 
âWe’ve come from a history of racial slavery and institutionalized racial subordination, and the principle venue in which the legacy of that history remains vividly apparent in our public life, is in the realm of punishment. We’re becoming a nation of jailers, and if I may say, racist jailers at that.Â  â¦ State sanctioned violence continues to ravage the lives of the black — of the black poor, some among the black poor, and to impede their participation in our common national life. Contempt for young black men remains abroad in the land, and a new enthusiasm for their debasement has gripped us. …Â  But this is different, my critic is going to say, toe-tapping impatience and all. So long as laws are enforced without racial bias, the mere fact of some disparity in the incidence of incarceration, is in no way indicative of a new anti-black animism, my hypothetical critic might continue. As I see it, an argument more or less of that form, underlies the passivity, even the enthusiasm, with which so many informed Americans have greeted these new developments. â¦ All of this is a piece with an increasingly common view, not only on the right, about the woeful tragedy now playing itself out amongst the black poor, which might be paraphrased as follows. Blacks may languish, but this is their own faultâ¦.Â  If the blacks would marry, they would embrace the responsibilities of their own freedom. They would cease to see themselves as victims, if they would just stop their lawbreaking.Â  Then their prospects would brighten.” I find this line of argumentation, to be a shockingly ahistorical, shortsighted, and ethically challenged response, to what is one of the great social transformations of our time. â¦Â  I once made a fine public career, using quite similar arguments myselfâ¦.Â  I want to suggest that the racially despaired incidence of this massive punishment structure is, when viewed in historical context, patently unjustâ¦Â  I want to present a cursory overview of the history of the rise of race and classâof the race class punishment nexus since the 1960s. Covering the basic facts, concerning incarceration rates and how the incidence of punishment varies by social location.Â The social and epidemiological harm that punishment can inflict on the communities, from which offenders come, and to which they return. And the connection of this development to the rhetoric of social discipline, at large in our political culture of today. Rhetoric about dependency, personal responsibility, social hygiene, and punishment as the reclamation of public orderâ¦. History is presenting us with a nightmare scenario, one that goes to the heart of the contradictions of the liberal democratic society that has been poisoned by race. I will suggest that this punishment policy complex has become a principle way in which racial hierarchy is reproduced in our society and I will insist that this matter requires, and deserves, a concerted attention of the nation’s policy makers. [D]urable racial inequality can be understood as the outgrowth of a series of vicious circles of cumulative causationâ¦ The association of blackness in the public imagination with unworthiness, distorts cognitive processes, promoting essentialist causal misattributions.Translated, they see the disparity among blacks, but they don’t think of it as saying anything about the structures in which people are embedded, but they rather impute the outcomes to the deficiencies of the persons involved. And they’re more likely to do so with as a psychological matter, to the extent that it’s African-Americans, given the history of race and racial stigma in the society.Â  is the fact that there’s opened a racial gap in the acquisition of cognitive skills, in the extent of law abidingness, in the stability of family relations, the attachment to the workforce, and the like.Â And this is a disparity in human development, which is, as a historical matter, rooted in political, economic, social, and cultural factors, peculiar to this society and reflective of its unlovely racial history.Â  That is the inequality of human development that is reflected in widely despaired rates of criminal offending by race in this country, is a societal, not a communal or personal achievement. I just want to underscore this. It’s a societal product, it’s something in which we are all implicated. â¦ These are choices that we’re making in an ongoing way.Â The law is endogenous.Â We have lawbreakers, we also have lawmakers.Â The lawmakers have choices.Â Their choices have consequences.Â They can mitigate the impact of what we’re doing in the pursuit of public safety, to the extent that it produces the kind of cost and the differential incidence of those costs that I’ve called attention to here.Â  To the extent that they elect not to, those also will be choices that they’ve madeâ¦” ↩ 

While the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has largely captured the media's attention for the last few weeks, another murder trial of significant public interest has been happening at the same time.
Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, was shot and killed by Gregory and Travis McMichael, a father and son pair, in Brunswick Georgia back in February 2020. Their neighbor, William Bryan Jr., has also been charged. The trio of white men is accused of chasing down and murdering Arbery, who was jogging through the neighborhood.
The prosecution rested its case on Tuesday, CNN reports:

On Tuesday, Georgia Bureau of Investigation forensic pathologist Dr. Edmund Donoghue—the man who performed Arbery's autopsy—detailed Arbery's injuries as jurors saw graphic photos from the examination.
Donoghue's autopsy report from April 2020 did not detail the order in which Arbery's gunshot wounds happened. But he testified Tuesday that he could do so now, combining the autopsy with widely seen cell phone video taken by Bryan. Arbery and Travis McMichael can be seen in the video wrestling over the firearm before the shooting.
Though three shots were fired, only the first and third struck Arbery, Donoghue testified. The first not only grazed his right wrist—hitting an artery and causing severe bleeding—but also struck his center chest, he said.
The third shot struck his left chest and armpit, hitting his axillary vein and axillary artery, Donoghue testified.
While a tourniquet could have remedied the wrist injury, nothing could be done on scene to save Arbery's life after either of the torso wounds, Donoghue said.
Prosecuting attorney Linda Dunikoski asked whether Arbery's first set of injuries—the wrist and chest being hit by the same shot—could be "consistent with someone pushing a shotgun away from them" or "consistent with someone maybe grabbing the shotgun."
"It could be, yes," Donoghue answered to both questions.

The Washington Post has more:

Attorneys for Travis McMichael say their client sought first to scare off Arbery and "de-escalate," firing as Arbery got close and fearing that the unarmed man would take McMichael's weapon. Prosecutors contend that McMichael cannot claim self-defense because he, his father and their neighbor were the aggressors—pursuing Arbery in their trucks and then confronting him in their coastal Georgia neighborhood of Satilla Shores in February 2020.

The defense previously tried to bar Al Sharpton from sitting with the family of the victim, arguing unsuccessfully that this amounted to jury intimidation.
While the Rittenhouse trial, which increasingly looks like it may result in an acquittal, has been wrongly framed by some in the media as an issue of racial animus, the Arbery case is much more straightforward: Three white men chased down a black man who had done nothing wrong and killed him. He didn't have a gun, and he wasn't threatening them. It's much easier to argue that the McMichaels were the aggressors—though ultimately, the jury will decide.

FREE MINDS
Jedediah Bila is a Fox News pundit and a former host of The View. On Tuesday, she appeared on her old program as a remote guest to plug her new book. The conversation went south very quickly when host Joy Behar brought up the fact that Bila is unvaccinated, which necessitated the remote setup.
Bila explained that she did not get the vaccine because she has a "medical exemption to the vaccine" co-signed by three different doctors. "I am not a candidate for this vaccine," she said. She further clarified that she was not anti-vaccine in general, but because of her own health issues—and her natural immunity from a prior COVID-19 infection—it did not make sense for her to get the vaccine.
This perfectly sensible statement did not seem to alarm the hosts, but when Bila brought up the (unfortunately true) fact that the vaccines do not prevent transmission of COVID-19, Behar and the audience lost it.

Jedediah Bila was just on #TheView to promote her new book and things just went South. Like way South past the Mexico border South. The cohosts basically said she was too dangerous to be on air. pic.twitter.com/kt8nFKZid2
— The Chat (@LiveOnTheChat) November 16, 2021

Sunny Hostin accused Bila of prioritizing "your personal freedom over the health and safety of others" and stated that The View should not even allow Bila to voice such "disinformation." This was a remarkable claim since nothing Bila said was remotely false. Nevertheless, Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali celebrated Hostin for shutting down Bila.

Well done @sunny. Anti vaxxers and others who peddle dangerous disinformation don't have a right to mainstream platforms. This is how it gets normalized. Glad it was shut down. Jedediah Bila is neither a victim nor martyr. 
 https://t.co/Kwkd7HpcgQ via @thedailybeast
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) November 16, 2021

Again, Bila did not make any false claims. Her claim that natural immunity from a prior infection gives her robust protection from COVID-19 was true. Her claim that the vaccines—while terrific at reducing severe hospitalization and death—do not prevent the spread of COVID-19 was also true.

NPR, America's government-funded media outlet, published a story on Monday that sounded a negative note about incoming Boston Mayor Michelle Wu's historic win—she's the city's first Asian American mayor—because… she beat out several black candidates. Here's a screenshot of the tweet:

NPR subsequently deleted the tweet after receiving much-deserved criticism.
"We realize we don't always get things right the first time, and our previous tweet/headline misrepresented the story," wrote NPR. "We deleted the previous tweet, which was causing harm, and have updated the story."
The replacement tweet was only marginally better, and the real issue was that the entire premise of the story itself was hopelessly flawed. The initial tweet did not misrepresent the story at all: It was an unending parade of outrage from social justice activists of color that Bostonians had dared to elect an Asian woman. This weird obsession with race is tokenizing and insulting, yet unfortunately has come to dominate NPR's coverage, as noted by journalist and podcaster Katie Herzog.

It doesn't bother me that NPR talks about race. It bothers me than NPR talks about race to the exclusion of everything else, and that they have one acceptable narrative about race that no one ever deviates from. https://t.co/i9SVo9JF2j
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) February 2, 2021

QUICK HITS

For The Atlantic, David French explains that while Kyle Rittenhouse is plausibly innocent, that does not make his actions heroic or praiseworthy.
White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci is moving the goalposts again, saying that in order to get to pre-pandemic normal life, cases in the U.S. must fall below "well below 10,000" a day.
Some Democratic strategists want to defend critical race theory and accuse Republicans of putting "white supremacists" in charge of the curriculum.
Brad Polumbo of the Foundation for Economic Education raises a valid point:

I oppose vaccine mandates, but I am individualist who believes in limited government. 
How can natcon conservatives oppose these mandates? 
Aren't they just using the state to assert the "common good" above individual autonomy—aka what y'all clamor for?
— Brad Polumbo ???????? ????‍???? (@brad_polumbo) November 16, 2021

The post Prosecution Rests in Ahmaud Arbery Murder Trial appeared first on Reason.com.

Indiana University recently got a new president. A law professor there wound up trying to peer into the process of how the old president was departing and how the new president was selected. The university preferred that such information remain behind closed doors.
Next thing you know the professor was getting public record requests from a local law firm for his emails on his university account. The law firm would not reveal who was behind the requests, but there is reason to think that university officials are the ones doing the snooping.
The Academic Freedom Alliance has objected to this apparent attempt to harass and intimidate a member of the faculty by the university administration.
As a public employee at a state university, the university email of Professor Sanders is legally subject to public records requests. Nonetheless, such procedures can be abused and have been used as a means to intimidate and silence university professors and chill speech. It would be a particularly troubling attack on academic freedom if faculty emails are accessed at the request of university officials.
. . . .
The announced purpose of the Indiana's open records law is to facilitate giving "the people . . . full and complete information regarding the affairs of government and the official acts of those who represent them as public officials and employees." It would fly in the face of this policy if a public university were to use the open records law to harass one of its own professors for bringing to light important matters of public concern about the conduct of that university's officials. Even worse would be a university covering its tracks by hiring a law firm to carry out a public records request to achieve this end.
The university should firmly disavow any involvement with or continuation of this effort to discourage faculty inquiries into how the university managed its presidential transition. The full letter from the AFA to Indiana University is here.
 
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will not enforce the Biden administration's COVID-19 vaccine mandate, at least until the mandate's legal status is resolved.
The announcement came on Wednesday. OSHA's website now stipulates that while the agency "remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies, OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the [COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard] pending future developments in the litigation."
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit halted Biden's vaccine mandate, which applies to all private businesses that employ at least 100 people, last week. A three-judge panel described the mandate as "fatally flawed" and "staggeringly broad." Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum dove into the legal arguments against the mandate here, while I tackled some of the broader philosophical objections here.
Despite OSHA's certainty that the mandate falls under its authority to keep workplaces safe, it remains to be seen whether the U.S. Supreme Court will agree. This mandate, after all, extends to remote workers who might rarely come into contact with their coworkers, and thus be at little risk of encountering COVID-19 as a workplace hazard (if the disease can even be classified as such).
It's not completely clear that the Biden administration expects the vaccine mandate to hold up in court, but the federal government is clearly keen to push businesses to require vaccination for as long as it possibly can. At least OHSA is standing down—for now.
The post OSHA Halts Enforcement of Biden Vaccine Mandate, Pending Litigation appeared first on Reason.com.

With winter approaching, it’s time to talk about the optimal Covid-19 strategy again – and for that, we need to look once more at what’s happening in South Korea.

It has vaccinated 79.2% of its population with two doses, and, if it continues administering 220,000 doses a day, will have covered almost 90% of its population by the end of the year. Compare this to the UK, where 68.6% of the population has received two doses, and the US, where this figure is at 58%. If we compare deaths, the numbers are even more shocking. South Korea has suffered only 3,137 from a population of 51.8 million. For the UK, the corresponding figures are 142,945 deaths from a population of 67.2 million, while in the US there have been 783,575 deaths from a population of 329.5 million. In addition, in the first quarter of 2021, South Korea became one of the first high-income countries to see its economy recover to pre-pandemic levels, after it managed to only experience a 1% contraction in GDP in 2020 (the second-best performance behind China).

How did South Korea escape the pandemic relatively unaffected economically, with deaths at such low levels, while now vaccinating at such a high level that it has protected itself from future waves of illness and harsh lockdowns? That’s the question we should all be asking, and a clear vindication of the “zero Covid” approach as the optimal short-term strategy.

South Korea has attracted a lot of attention for following a specific “east Asian” playbook of maximum suppression: I wrote about this in March 2020, pushing countries to follow the “Seoul model”, and again in May 2020, laying out the key components of the strategy. This involved finding Covid cases through mass testing, tracing contacts, and supporting isolation to ensure chains of transmission were broken. This was supported by strict travel restrictions to prevent new cases being imported, and strong messaging to the public about wearing masks in public spaces, and the dangers of a new infectious disease. The government worked to protect its people (not to enrich its own interests) and the response was pre-emptive, organised like clockwork, and efficiently delivered. South Korea had experienced Mers, another coronavirus, and understood the dangers of a hands-off approach.

As a short-term strategy, maximum suppression helped buy time for scientists to get to work, and therefore find a sustainable exit from the crisis. In 2020, it allowed numerous vaccines to be developed and approved, followed in 2021 by several promising therapeutics that keep people out of hospital and safer from descending into severe disease.

Once these new tools became available, the medium- to longer-term strategy evolved, too. The next step after zero Covid has been a focus on vaccinating the population to a high threshold, and acquiring antivirals that can be given in outpatient care to keep the burden off healthcare services. The pivot from maximum suppression to mass vaccination was a rational and logical shift to achieve a successful transition out of the pandemic.

The countries that followed this model – South Korea, Taiwan, and even their Pacific neighbours, Australia and New Zealand – are now managing to vaccinate their populations and protect both lives and livelihoods. Each person that wasn’t infected in 2020, thanks to these maximum suppression strategies, could live on into the phase we are now in: where vaccines and therapeutics are allowing people who catch Covid to survive, when they might otherwise have died.

Mistakes have clearly been made in both the UK and US – in particular, a cynical fatalism that no scientific solution would emerge, that mass infection was inevitable and that there was little to be learned from other parts of the world. It’s the grim worldview that underscores the infamous words Boris Johnson is alleged to have said to his staff last year: “Let the bodies pile high.”

It is never too late to learn lessons from countries such as South Korea, which pursued maximum suppression, and succeeded. Yes, there will be future outbreaks of pathogens with pandemic potential, and we are now working to prepare for these. Over the past six months I’ve been vice-chair of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Nasem) commission advising the US government on how to prepare for the next pandemic, most likely flu. Our report is out next week, and looks at how we can move quickly from identifying new viruses, sequencing them, and getting testing, treatments and vaccines deployed within 100 days. A universal flu vaccine and pan-coronavirus vaccine are both on the horizon, and would mean moving even faster than that time period.

Within those 100 days, all countries would hopefully focus on maximum suppression and follow the South Korean playbook of buying time for the scientific cavalry. Most of the deaths in the US and UK were preventable, and so was the economic contraction.

In the UK we spent a long time debating what to do at the start of the pandemic, but it was always clear what had to be done: stop people becoming infected, without locking everyone in their homes. The challenge was how to do it, and to learn quickly from other countries that were managing to keep their economies open while keeping infection numbers low. Debate for the sake of debate costs lives and is divisive and confusing.

Let us hope that next time we can agree on what needs to be done, and just get on with doing it – and that we have leaders who care enough about their people to make the effort.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

When Donald Trump heard Fiona Hill was publishing a memoir, he characteristically tried to land a pre-emptive blow, dismissing his former Russia adviser as “a deep state stiff with a nice accent”. As Trumpian insults go, it was enough of a backhanded compliment for one of Hill’s friends to have it printed on a T-shirt as a gift.

A lot has happened since Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in late 2019 in which Hill gave evidence, not least a frontal assault on US democracy by his supporters. But people still remember her accent. There was something so calm and matter-of-fact in Hill’s flat County Durham vowels that was the antithesis of Trump’s bullying bravado. Her voice, that of a coalminer’s daughter from northern England describing the turmoil and corruption inside the White House, instantly raised the question: “How did she get there?”

Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here, is a long, thoughtful answer to that question. It takes in the story of industrial and political rot in three nations: the UK, the country of her birth; the US, the country of her choosing; and Russia, the object of her lifelong vocation.

The powerful currents driving the modern history of those three states carried her on her remarkable life’s journey. The state-assisted euthanasia of the British coal industry in the early 80s drove her from her home town of Bishop Auckland, where her family had been miners for generations.

The book’s title was a warning from her father, Alf, to get out while she could. He had first gone down the pit at the age of 14, but by the time Fiona was growing up, the only job he could find was as a hospital porter, the bottom of the heap with no way up. The Hill family were the archetypal victims of the post-industrial decline she would go on to study. “We were living data points,” she realised.

Following her dad’s advice she worked her way out through study. She went to St Andrews University and then to the Soviet Union in time to observe its last climactic years. The expertise she gained took her to the US and Harvard as a Russia scholar with a growing reputation that ultimately brought her to the White House.

Trump took his pre-publication shot at Hill because he naturally assumed her book, like a shelf-full of others by former staffers, would be all about him. But for Hill, the ex-president is just the symptom of a deeper, chronic dysfunction.There is plenty here about the craziness of life in the Trump administration and Hill has a knack for capturing the absurdities of the court of King Donald. She describes the scramble to get his attention (he had no idea who she was and on one occasion mistook her for a secretary), the relentless bullying (she was called the “Russia bitch” by her “colleagues”), and the universal fear the president would turn against them.

While other Trump-era memoirs have focused almost solely on the carnival, Hill’s scope pans out to the wounded country that put him in office, and then wider still, across the Atlantic to Britain and then across Europe to Russia.

What they all had in common is rapid, catastrophic deindustrialisation. In Russia, that came about through the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. In the US and the UK, it was inflicted by the political leadership and their economist gurus.

“Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off,” Hill notes. Those buried alive, in that memorable metaphor, lost their sense of community and self. Being a miner was more than a job to Alf Hill and his contemporaries, it was an identity.

That is where political populism comes in, offering to fill the hole with comforting illusions. Hill points out that 61% of voters in Bishop Auckland chose Brexit even though it meant cutting off EU structural funds vital to its attempts at regeneration. It is also why American rust belt voters convinced themselves that Trump understood them.

It is an analysis that has been laid out by others before, but what makes it particularly compelling here is that it is intertwined with a unique life story of a working-class English woman who ended up sitting across from, and cooly observing, the preening “strongmen” of our age.

Where Hill is most provocative is in her warnings that having centuries of democratic experience will not necessarily protect us from Russia’s fate. “Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future”, she argues, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust and heal our political polarisation.” What if the next Trump is “less personally insecure and more capable”? And what if the next insurrectionary mob that invades the US Capitol is better prepared, Hill asks in this fascinating book. The answer? “They might just manage to hold it.”

The moment that broke Cassie Alexander came nine months into the pandemic. As an intensive-care-unit nurse of 14 years, Alexander had seen plenty of “Hellraiser stuff,” she told me. But when COVID-19 hit her Bay Area hospital, she witnessed “death on a scale I had never seen before.”Last December, at the height of the winter surge, she cared for a patient who had caught the coronavirus after being pressured into a Thanksgiving dinner. Their lungs were so ruined that only a hand-pumped ventilation bag could supply enough oxygen. Alexander squeezed the bag every two seconds for 40 minutes straight to give the family time to say goodbye. Her hands cramped and blistered as the family screamed and prayed. When one of them said that a miracle might happen, Alexander found herself thinking, I am the miracle. I’m the only person keeping your loved one alive. (Cassie Alexander is a pseudonym that she has used when writing a book about these experiences. I agreed to use that pseudonym here.)The senselessness of the death, and her guilt over her own resentment, messed her up. Weeks later, when the same family called to ask if the staff had really done everything they could, “it was like being punched in the gut,” she told me. She had given everything—to that patient, and to the stream of others who had died in the same room. She felt like a stranger to herself, a commodity to her hospital, and an outsider to her own relatives, who downplayed the pandemic despite everything she told them. In April, she texted her friends: “Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you’re supposed to be keeping people alive.” Shortly after, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and she left her job.Since COVID-19 first pummeled the U.S., Americans have been told to flatten the curve lest hospitals be overwhelmed. But hospitals have been overwhelmed. The nation has avoided the most apocalyptic scenarios, such as ventilators running out by the thousands, but it’s still sleepwalked into repeated surges that have overrun the capacity of many hospitals, killed more than 762,000 people, and traumatized countless health-care workers. “It’s like it takes a piece of you every time you walk in,” says Ashley Harlow, a Virginia-based nurse practitioner who left her ICU after watching her grandmother Nellie die there in December. She and others have gotten through the surges on adrenaline and camaraderie, only to realize, once the ICUs are empty, that so too are they.Some health-care workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, while others have been forced to leave because they’ve contracted long COVID and can no longer work. But many choose to leave, including “people whom I thought would nurse patients until the day they died,” Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, told me. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the health-care sector has lost nearly half a million workers since February 2020. Morning Consult, a survey research company, says that 18 percent of health-care workers have quit since the pandemic began, while 12 percent have been laid off.Stories about these departures have been trickling out, but they might portend a bigger exodus. Morning Consult, in the same survey, found that 31 percent of the remaining health-care workers have considered leaving their employer, while the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses found that 66 percent of acute and critical-care nurses have thought about quitting nursing entirely. “We’ve never seen numbers like that before,” Bettencourt told me. Normally, she said, only 20 percent would even consider leaving their institution, let alone the entire profession. Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University, told me that she now cringes when a colleague approaches her at the end of a shift, because she fears that they’ll quietly announce their resignation too. Vineet Arora, who is dean for medical education at University of Chicago Medicine, says that “in meetings with other health-care leaders, when we go around the room, everyone says, ‘We’re struggling to retain our workforce.’ Nobody says, ‘We’re fine.’”When national COVID hospitalizations fell in September and October, it was possible to hope that the health-care system had already endured the worst of the pandemic. But that decline is now starting to plateau, and in 17 states hospitalizations are rising. And even if the country dodges another surge over the winter, the health-care system is hemorrhaging from the untreated wounds of the past two years. “In my experience, physicians are some of the most resilient people out there,” Sheetal Rao, a primary-care physician who left her job last October, told me. “When this group of people starts leaving en masse, something is very wrong.”Health-care workers, under any circumstances, live in the thick of death, stress, and trauma. “You go in knowing those are the things you’ll see,” Cassandra Werry, an ICU nurse currently working in Idaho, told me. “Not everyone pulls through, but at the end of the day, the point is to get people better. You strive for those wins.” COVID-19 has upset that balance, confronting even experienced people with the worst conditions they have ever faced and turning difficult jobs into unbearable ones.In the spring of 2020, “I’d walk past an ice truck of dead bodies, and pictures on the wall of cleaning staff and nurses who’d died, into a room with more dead bodies,” Lindsay Fox, a former emergency-medicine doctor from Newark, New Jersey, told me. At the same time, Artec Durham, an ICU nurse from Flagstaff, Arizona, was watching his hospital fill with patients from the Navajo Nation. “Nearly every one of them died, and there was nothing we could do,” he said. “We ran out of body bags.”Most drugs for COVID-19 are either useless, incrementally beneficial, or—as with the new, promising antivirals—mostly effective in the disease’s early stages. And because people who are hospitalized with COVID-19 tend to be much sicker than average patients, they are also very hard to save—especially when hospitals overflow. Many health-care workers imagined that such traumas were behind them once the vaccines arrived. But plateauing vaccination rates, premature lifts on masking, and the ascendant Delta variant undid those hopes. This summer, many hospitals clogged up again. As patients waited to be admitted into ICUs, they filled emergency rooms, and then waiting rooms and hallways. That unrealized promise of “some sort of normalcy has made the feelings of exhaustion and frustration worse,” Bettencourt told me.Health-care workers want to help their patients, and their inability to do so properly is hollowing them out. “Especially now, with Delta, not many people get better and go home,” Werry told me. People have asked her if she would have gone to nursing school had she known the circumstances she would encounter, and for her, “it’s a resounding no,” she said. (Werry quit her job in an Arizona hospital last December and plans on leaving medicine once she pays off her student debts.)COVID patients are also becoming harder to deal with. Most now are unvaccinated, and while some didn’t have a choice in the matter, those who did are often belligerent and vocal. Even after they’re hospitalized, some resist basic medical procedures like proning or oxygenation, thinking themselves to be fighters, only to become delirious, anxious, and impulsive when their lungs struggle for oxygen. Others have assaulted nurses, thrown trash around their rooms, and yelled for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, neither of which have any proven benefit for COVID-19. Once, Americans clapped for health-care heroes; now, “we’re at war with a virus and its hosts are at war with us,” Werry told me.Beyond making workdays wretched, these experiences are inflicting deep psychological scars. “We want to be rooting for our patients,” Durham told me, “but anyone I know who’s working in COVID has zero compassion remaining, especially for people who chose not to get the vaccine.” That’s why he has opted to do travel-nursing stints, which are time-limited and more lucrative than staff jobs: “It just isn’t worth it to do the job for less than the most I can get paid,” he said. He’s still providing care, but he finds himself emotionally detached, and unsettled by his own numbness. For a health-care worker, being shaken by a patient’s death comes with the job. Finding yourself unmoved is almost worse.Many have told me that they’re bone-weary, depressed, irritable, and (unusually for them) unable to hide any of that. Nurses excel at “feeling their feelings in a supply closet or bathroom, and then putting their game face back on and jumping into the ring,” Werry said. But she and others are now constantly on the verge of tears, or prone to snapping at colleagues and patients. Some call this burnout, but Gerard Brogan, the director of nursing practice at National Nurses United, dislikes the term because “it implies a lack of character,” he told me. He prefers moral distress—the anguish of being unable to take the course of action that you know is right.Health-care workers aren't quitting because they can’t handle their jobs. They’re quitting because they can’t handle being unable to do their jobs. Even before COVID-19, many of them struggled to bridge the gap between the noble ideals of their profession and the realities of its business. The pandemic simply pushed them past the limits of that compromise.The United States uses the rod of Asclepius—a snake entwined around a staff—as a symbol of medicine. But the pandemic suggests that the more fitting symbol might be the Ouroboros, a snake devouring its own tail.Several health-care workers told me that, amid the most grueling working conditions of their careers, their hospitals cut salaries, reduced benefits, and canceled raises; forced staff to work more shifts with longer hours; offered trite wellness tips, such as keeping gratitude journals, while denying paid time off or reduced hours; failed to provide adequate personal protective equipment; and downplayed the severity of their experiences.The American Hospital Association, which represents hospital administrators, turned down my interview request; instead, they sent me links to a letter that criticized anticompetitive pricing from travel-nursing agencies and to a report showing that staff shortages have cost hospitals $24 billion over the course of the pandemic. But from the perspective of health-care workers, those financial problems look at least partly self-inflicted: Many workers left because they were poorly treated or compensated, forcing hospitals to hire travel nurses at greater cost. Those nurses then stoke resentment among full-time staff who are paid substantially less but are often asked to care for the sickest patients. And in some farcical situations, “hospitals hired their own staff back as travel nurses and paid them higher rates,” Bettencourt said.Whatever the intentions behind these decisions, they were the final straw for the many health-care workers who told me that they left medicine less because of COVID-19 itself and more because of how their institutions acted. “I’ve been a nurse 45 years and I’ve never seen this level of disaffection between clinicians and their employers,” Brogan told me. The same is true across almost every sector of the U.S. Record-breaking numbers of Americans left their jobs this April—and then again in July and August. This “Great Resignation,” as my colleague Derek Thompson wrote, “is really an expression of optimism that says, We can do better.”The culture of medicine makes it hard for health-care workers to realize that. Most enter medicine “as a calling,” Vineet Arora told me, which can push them to sacrifice ever more of their time, energy, and self. But that attitude, combined with taboos around complaining or seeking mental-health help, can make them vulnerable to exploitation, blurring the line between service and servitude. Between 35 and 54 percent of American nurses and physicians were already feeling burned out before the pandemic. During it, many have taken stock of their difficult working conditions and inadequate pay and decided that, instead of being resigned, they will simply resign.Molly Phelps, an emergency doctor of 18 years, considered herself a lifer. Her medical career had cost her time with her family, wrecked her circadian rhythms, and taxed her mental health, but it offered so much meaning that “I was willing to stay and be miserable,” she told me. But after the horrific winter surge, Phelps was shocked that her hospital’s administrators “never acknowledged what we went through,” while many of her patients “seemed to forget their humanity.” Medicine’s personal cost seemed greater than ever, but the fulfilment that had previously tempered it was missing. On July 21, during an uneventful evening spent scrolling through news of the Delta surge, Phelps had a sudden epiphany. “Oh my God, I think I’m done,” she realized. “And I think it’s okay to walk away and be happy.”America’s medical exodus is especially tragic because of how little it might have taken to stop it. Phelps told me that if her workplace “had thrown a little more of a bone, that would have been enough to keep me miserable for 13 more years.” Some health systems are starting to offer retention bonuses, long-overdue raises, or hazard pay. And the next generation of health-care workers doesn’t seem to be deterred. Applications to medical and nursing schools have risen during the pandemic. “That workforce is apparently seeing the best of us, and maybe their vision and energy is what we need to make us whole again,” Esther Choo told me.But today’s students will take years to graduate, and the onus is on the current establishment to reshape an environment that won’t immediately break them, Choo said. “We need to say, ‘We got this wrong, and despite that, you’re willing to invest your lives in this career? What an incredible gift. We can’t look at that and change nothing.’”The health-care workers who have stayed in their jobs now face a “crushing downward spiral,” Choo told me. Each resignation saddles the remaining staff with more work, increasing the odds that they too might quit. They don’t resent their former colleagues, but some feel that medicine’s social contract, wherein health-care workers show up for one another through tragedy, is fraying. Before the pandemic, “I knew exactly who I would be working with in every single role,” Choo said. “There was a lot of unspoken communication, and my shifts were so smooth.” But with so many people having left, the momentum that comes from trust and familiarity is gone.Expertise is also hemorrhaging. Many older nurses and doctors have retired early—people who “know that one thing that happened 10 years ago that saved someone’s life in a clutch situation,” Cassie Alexander said. And because of their missing experience, “things are being missed,” Artec Durham added. “The care feels frantic and sloppy even though we’re not overrun with COVID right now.” Future patients may also suffer because the next generation of health-care workers won’t inherit the knowledge and wisdom of their predecessors. “I foresee at least three or four years post-COVID where health-care outcomes are dismal,” Cassandra Werry told me. That problem might be especially stark for rural hospitals, which are struggling more with staff shortages and unvaccinated populations.This decline in the quality of health care will likely occur as demand increases. Even in the unlikely event that no further COVID-19 infections occur, the past months have left millions with long COVID and other severe, chronic problems. “I’m seeing a lot of younger people with end-stage cardiac or neurological disease—people in their 30s and 40s who look like they’re in their 60s and 70s,” Vineet Arora told me. “I don’t think people understand the disability wave that’s coming.”Hospitals are also being flooded by people who don’t have COVID but who delayed care for other conditions and are now in terrible shape. “People are coming in with liver failure, renal failure, and heart attacks they sat on for weeks,” Durham told me. “Even if you take COVID out of the equation, the place is a mess with sick patients.” This pattern has persisted throughout the pandemic, trapping health-care workers in a continuous, nearly two-year-long peak of either COVID or catch-up care. “It doesn’t feel great between surges,” Choo told me. “Something always replaces COVID.”Throughout the pandemic, commentators have looked to COVID-hospitalization numbers as an indicator of the health-care system’s state. But those numbers say nothing about the dwindling workforce, the mounting exhaustion of those left behind, the expertise now missing from hospitals, or the waves of post-COVID or non-COVID patients. Focusing on COVID numbers belies how much harder getting good medical care for anything is now—and how long that trend could potentially continue. Several health-care workers told me that they are now more concerned about their own loved ones being admitted to the hospital. “I’m worried about the future of medicine,” Sheetal Rao said. “And I think we all should be.”A life outside medicine can be hard for people who have built their identities within it. For some, it’s like returning from war and mingling with civilians who don’t understand what you went through. “I met up with some friends who are really bright people but who said, ‘Wait, the winter was traumatizing?’” Molly Phelps told me. She thinks that “health-care workers are either preparing for work, at work, or recovering from work,” which leaves little time for talking about their experiences. And those who do talk can hit a brick wall of pandemic denial.Cassie Alexander also struggled with the fact that she was struggling. “I built my whole identity around being the toughest person I knew, and it was shattering to admit that I was broken and needed help,” she said. She returned to work last week, partly for financial reasons and partly to prove to herself that she can still do it. Others have peeled off to less intense medical roles. And some have no plans to return at all—but feel guilty about abandoning their colleagues and patients. “People going into medicine want to be of service in moments of crisis, so it was hard to watch [further surges] and feel like I was on the sidelines,” Lindsay Fox told me.Some former health-care workers have found new purpose in tackling health problems at a different scale. Sheetal Rao has helped launch an environmental nonprofit that plants trees in Chicago, especially in poorer neighborhoods that lack them. “In primary care, we focus on prevention, but that’s also about advocating for cleaner air so I’m not just sending my patients home with an inhaler,” she told me.Dona Kim Murphey, a former physician who now has long COVID, started a political action committee to get doctors into office as part of a plan to reform medicine. “I was growing increasingly concerned about how inhumane our profession is,” she told me. “There’s no culture of physicians organizing and fighting for their rights but that’s something we should think about to leverage the outrage and frustration that people have.” For the same reason, Nerissa Black, a nurse in Valencia, California, is staying in medicine. She was so disillusioned by her hospital’s handling of the pandemic that she almost left nursing entirely. But she changed her mind to continue being part of the National Nurses United union and advocating for better working conditions. For example, California is the only state that caps the ratio of patients to nurses, and she wants to see similar limits nationwide. “I feel more resolute,” she told me.Phelps, meanwhile, found the last thing she expected—a sense of peace. She used to scoff when she heard people say that you’re more than your job. “I thought, That may be true for all you nonmedical laypeople, but I am a doctor and it’s who I am,” she told me. And yet, she has experienced no identity crisis. After her last shift this September, she was on a random weekend trip with her children when, in the middle of a pumpkin patch, she started sobbing. “I realized that I was happy, and I hadn’t experienced that in almost two years,” she told me. “I’m not sure I can ever see myself going into an ER again.”

“Woke” has also followed a trajectory similar to that of the phrase “politically correct,” which carried a similar meaning by the late 1980s and early 1990s: “Politically correct,” unsurprisingly, went from describing a way of seeing the world to describing the people who saw the world that way to describing the way other people felt about the people who saw the world that way. Some in the politically correct crowd on the left had a way of treating those outside it with a certain contempt. This led to the right refashioning “politically correct” as a term of derision, regularly indicated with the tart abbreviation “P.C.” The term faded over the years, and by 2015, when the presidential candidate Donald Trump was declaring that “political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country,” “woke” already had greater currency.

Over the past few years, it has become all but impossible to use “woke” neutrally. It has been refashioned, like “P.C.,” as an insult. One could say that this was simply because of contempt for leftist ideas, even ones relating to improving lives for Black people, but only at risk of oversimplification. Wokeness, as a kind of ideology, has irritated so many because of the tendency for some of its partisans to see those who dissent from their views as disingenuous, antidemocratic and even immoral. To be woke, past tense, is to be awake, present tense, to a way of perceiving societal matters. But it’s a short step from seeing matters this way to assuming that it is the only reasonable or moral way to see. That latter assumption has a way of rankling those who see things differently.

Now, those on the left, from Ocasio-Cortez on down, face a new iteration of an old dilemma: A neutral descriptor of their worldview saddled with a negative connotation.

It’s easy to forget how antique, or at least vague, “liberal” feels lately. Much of the reason is that the term was tarnished by the right almost as much as woke has been. In an era spanning, let’s say, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Newt Gingrich’s House speakership and Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush, those who thought of themselves as liberals in commitment to nudging America toward ever broader embodiments of its ideals, especially those involving the dignity of all individuals, were tarred as unpatriotic sentimentalists dedicated to big government and with insufficient interest in family values.

Writing for The Times in 2009, Timothy Garton Ash hoped we might reclaim the classical meaning of the lowercase-L liberalism we learn about in college, espousing grand but abstract ideas such as “liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism and some notion of human equality, reason and progress.” After all, who could possibly be against any of that?

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser will finally relax the city's mask mandate, she announced on Tuesday.
On Monday, November 22, many indoor spaces will once again be allowed to forgo masks for customers, visitors, employees, and residents. Notable exceptions include public schools, public transportation, and government buildings.

Here are the details of where masks will continue to be required in D.C. Also: businesses will still be able to set their own rules on indoor masking. pic.twitter.com/agM5MJEYtn
— Martin Austermuhle (@maustermuhle) November 16, 2021

"We are encouraged by the numbers that have opted into vaccination now, some of them encouraged by mandates," said Bowser, according to The Washington Post. "There may even be an increase in cases…but what we haven't seen is an increase in hospitalizations and deaths. That is the promise of vaccination."
Bowser previously rescinded the mask mandate, then brought it back in July when COVID-19 cases began to increase due to the delta variant taking hold. Unlike the actions of local officials in nearby counties, including in Montgomery County, Maryland, who linked the mandate to a certain case threshold, Bowser never gave any indication what metrics would be used to determine when to relax the mandate. And while the delta wave did cause an increase in COVID-19 cases in Washington, it had no effect whatsoever on D.C.'s death rate. The city's seven-day death average has hovered at one or below the entire time that delta has been a serious issue. (It was last above one on May 24, 2021.)

It would be hard to argue that the mask mandate was what kept delta deaths at bay, since all those masks failed to prevent cases from increasing. Widespread vaccination—which dramatically reduces severe disease and death—is the public health initiative that's working well, not the mask mandate.
Yet Bowser's administration leaned hard on mask mandates as a pandemic prevention tool, even prioritizing them over vaccination in some curious cases. When D.C. gyms petitioned the city government to allow them to require their customers to be vaccinated rather than masked, for example, city health officials said no.
Bowser's decision to keep the mask mandate in place for schools is a perfect example of the government's incoherent thinking about COVID-19 risks. While many school-aged children remain unvaccinated, they are at very low risk of a negative coronavirus health outcome—whether they are vaccinated or not. Elderly Americans who are vaccinated have much more to fear from COVID-19 than kids do, so it makes little sense to link the withdrawal of mask mandates to the degree of vaccination among the kinds of people who congregate in a given location.
It is long past time to accept that COVID-19 is endemic and that there will always be some level of risk associated with it. People can drastically reduce their risk by getting vaccinated, getting booster shots, or even practicing greater caution if they so choose. It is not the government's responsibility to assign the correct level of risk to each individual American, and local officials like Bowser should not get to reimpose mask mandates just because they feel like it.
The post Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser Will Finally Relax D.C.'s Stubborn Mask Mandate appeared first on Reason.com.

THE GREEK REVOLUTION

1821 and the Making of Modern Europe

By Mark Mazower

Historians love anniversaries, especially centenaries. Leaning on the calendar to argue for the relevance of something they know well, scholars usually get only one chance to write about a centenary. But seductive as it is, the anniversary book can often misconstrue the complicated mess of a life, a place, an intricate history.

If anyone can navigate these potential pitfalls, it is the Columbia historian Mark Mazower, who began his career as a historian of Greece and the Balkans and has since ventured far beyond to write increasingly ambitious and truly seminal works on the history of the United Nations and the idea of internationalism. His latest book, “The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe,” represents the perfect union of these two poles of his career — a largely internationalist history of what is often seen as a local event.

“Not so much a single war as a set of interconnected regional conflicts,” Mazower writes, the Greek Revolution (or the Greek War of Independence, as many Greeks prefer it) began in the conversations of learned societies and among a clandestine network of Greek religious revolutionaries known as the Filiki Etaireia (Friendly Society). Together they spawned an armed conflict that eventually won autonomy for pockets of territory from the centuries-old Ottoman Empire. With a pulsating narrative — dizzying for some perhaps, not enough for others — Mazower’s book sends us scrambling up mountain ascents, slogging down into the valleys and paddling onto craggy island coasts as Greeks of all stripes, mercenaries and commoners, nuns and priests, fought for “freedom or death” against a depleted Ottoman Army. After six years, in 1827, the Battle of Navarino assured a Greek victory. The intricacies Mazower presents are gripping, the details compelling and harrowing: hungry townspeople frying dogs in olive oil; the meaning of the mustache in revolutionary aesthetics; the existence of a mosque in the Parthenon.

Mazower devotes significant attention as well to the often lofty meanings others invested in the Greek struggle, in particular the crucial idea of the post-Napoleonic nation-state. The French writer Louise Belloc described “Bonaparte and the Greeks” as the 19th century’s twin heroes, each in their own way cementing the territorial state as the ultimate repository for the sovereign rights of ethno-linguistic nations. Tapping into the traditional adoration of ancient Greece, philhellenic Europeans argued for the classicism of the revolutionary goals of independence and the emerging international order. Support for the Greeks became a way to raise questions about some of the pressing moral and political issues of the day: humanitarian intervention, slavery and abolition, the concept of Europe, the relationship between land and capitalism, population resettlement and the place of the press in a free society. Mazower productively plucks from the outpouring of writing about the Greeks and their fight — from European and American newspapers to the weightier texts of writers like Alexandre Dumas, the Shelleys and, of course, Lord Byron.

I turn 60 today, and I feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like I’ve somehow let myself go, like I’ve been bingeing on decades and wound up in this unappealing condition.Chances are, most of you haven’t crossed this border station yet, so you’d better listen up. Because if you play your cards right, it’s going to happen to you too.  Here’s what it feels like to turn 60: weird. On the one hand, you’re still going to the gym and to dinner parties. Sixty-year-olds still perform surgery on people who could choose other doctors. There’s no dithering yet—the senescence is almost undetectable.But on the other hand, you have been on this Earth for a really, really long time. I have a photograph of myself at age 3, standing on the docks of Cork Harbor, about to sail to New York. When I look at the picture of that small child on her sturdy legs in the foggy past, I don’t feel any connection to her. The photograph looks like something I would discover after many days on Ancestry.com. It looks like a snapshot of my own great-aunt.
Courtesy of the author
There’s a reason the photograph looks like it’s from another time. Because it is from another time; it was taken more than half a century ago. How can I be in a photograph from that long ago? The math makes sense, but my own life doesn’t.When I stood on that dock, “man” hadn’t walked on the moon; Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were all alive; the Beatles were still playing the Cavern Club. World War II had ended less than 20 years earlier; none of the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center had been born. How can all of the things that happened since that photograph was taken have occurred in one lifetime? How can people walk around holding this much of the past inside them? How do they possibly add in another two or even three decades of experience? I’m topped up! I’m going to have to start erasing the larger files. Maybe I already have and don’t know it.[Caitlin Flanagan: I’ll tell you the secret of cancer]Don’t get me wrong: I’m feeling pretty upbeat about becoming what David Sedaris calls “officially old, the young part of old, but old, nevertheless.” Not in some sort of “active senior” way. (Gross!) I feel good about making it to 60 because almost 20 years ago, I was diagnosed with a vicious cancer, and there wasn’t an oncologist in the country who would have given me Vegas odds on five years.The thing about cancer is that there’s a wild card in every deck. And I got one: At the exact time that I was diagnosed, there were huge breakthroughs in my exact kind of breast cancer. In a sense there isn’t any such thing as cancer at all, because the disease is made up of so many unique pathologies, many of which respond to different agents. I thought these discoveries were going to be too late to help me, but they started arriving in waves, and they keep coming. Even though I currently have Stage IV cancer and will be on chemotherapy for the rest of my life, here I am. I’ve gotten to see my children grow up, and I never thought that would happen.The last year of any decade is a tough one—the odometer’s about to tick over, and you can’t stop it—but how could I complain? I envisioned turning 60 as a series of consumer decisions: Go on a Viking cruise; buy a few postsexual separates from Eileen Fisher; get one of those oxygen facials. But then it got real. One day a few weeks ago, I got old. It just suddenly happened, and there isn’t a sports car in the world I can buy to make it otherwise.One thing that doctors don’t tell you about cancer is that even if you get lucky, there’s a price: The treatments add up in your body. I don’t look sick. But things have gone wrong inside me that have nothing to do with the cancer itself. The obvious symptom is that I’m tired. “Everyone’s tired!” other people my age tell me. But I’m as tired as they are, plus decades of chemotherapy and radiation that damaged my lungs. Every time someone asks me how I’m doing, it’s like grand rounds. I’m fine, I say; fine! The big problem, when I’m out and about, is that sometimes I just really, really want to sit down. Sometimes I’d rather sit down than do anything else in the world.Airports are some of the worst places if you’re a person who needs to sit down. There are all those soulless corridors, and—a design flaw, it seems to me—the gates never seem to have as many seats as the planes. Last month I flew to see my older sister. When I finally got to my gate, it looked like I was in luck—plenty of empty seats! But when I got closer, I realized that every other chair was covered with tape, in one of those meaningless displays of pandemic safety that California is committed to. I was about to spend five hours locked in a plane with these people; was 15 minutes at the gate really going to make a difference?Anyway, I felt a tingle of panic. In my youth I spent a lot of time sitting on the floors of airports, waiting for dirt-cheap flights that were always delayed by many hours. An 18-year-old girl sitting on the floor looks like she’s on an adventure. A 60-year-old woman looks like she’s in need of assistance. I walked to the next gate, but there were no chairs there either, or at the next one.Finally I saw a mirage: three empty seats in a row. They were real, but (damn it) they were reserved for other people, people who need some extra help. I long ago promised myself that no matter what happened, I was never going to do any learning or growing from cancer. But there’s one lesson that you can’t be this sick for this long without learning: There is no such thing as other people. There’s just all of us, with our secret or public burdens, muddling through the best we can, many of us not doing an especially good job of it. There was a time when I could manage my cancer without having to understand myself as “disabled,” but at 60, that time has passed.  I sat down, and my bones settled so heavily around me—and the relief was so immediate—that I knew I’d done the right thing. But I also knew that through that simple, necessary gesture, I had become old.[Caitlin Flanagan: The cancer celebrities]Some people have the idea that only in modern-day, consumerist America do people fear aging. There’s always some mystical country (usually France) where older women in sophisticated clothes are trailed by dumbstruck young suitors, and everyone runs out of nightclubs when they hear some 80-year-old is across the street, dispensing tribal wisdom. But that’s not true. People everywhere have mourned getting old. Turn to the poets. They will tell you.
What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?
Yeats, of course. He must have spent his whole life waiting to get old, because when the time came, he had the goods. Your body does become a caricature of its former self. But here are the next lines of that famous poem:
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible.
I’ve thought about sitting in that chair a lot since it happened, and I’ve actually begun to feel a bit emotional and proud. Just by staying alive, I’ve witnessed a lot of life and a lot of history. I’ve done so many things in these six decades—I’ve survived some serious shit. In many of the ways that don’t involve the mortal coil, I’m stainless steel.And on the inside, I’m still me—probably more myself than ever. In this light, that old snapshot looks different. There’s my big sister standing next to me, casting a worried, watchful eye over me as she has for 60 years; there’s a little bit of my mother—my mother! It’s been so long since I’ve heard her voice—and there’s my father, present in his absence, recording the moment with his camera. This was many years ago, of course. When my parents were still young, and when man hadn’t walked on the moon. This was when we were the only people in the world who completely understood one another.The four of us: the Flanagans. I know that girl. I am that girl.

This was no talk of the kind we most often encounter these days, but an oration, opening with: “Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and nature.” He spoke of the hypocrisy of slavery in a country that was supposed to be free, the crime of the Confederacy’s rebellion and the horrors of war.

People actually thrilled to these very long speeches in this era. It was very common to attend them. As strange as they may seem to us now, these events were no more peculiar than what we know as stand-up comedy these days, in which someone strides onto a stage with self-conscious bonhomie and spends about 20 minutes making an audience laugh with general, often self-deprecatory remarks and then thanks the audience and walks off. Stand-up in those days would have seemed as weird as watching someone talk in long sentences for hours seems to us.

I also think, as I read a book about 19th-century England, of the way parliamentarians used to communicate. The men regularly made their points to their colleagues in speeches that could run far beyond what anyone could write out and memorize word for word, in contrast to now, with speeches subject to time limits. Or: Black people of letters, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Maya Angelou, engaged in oratory contests when they were young, competing for prizes according to how gracefully and how convincingly they made a case for some proposition. The tradition of such contests continues in the Black community.

When I have given oral presentations, I reach people more directly than if I’d written everything down for them to read. When people can see your face and hear the melody of your voice, your point gets across more vividly. Language evolved, after all, for face-to-face contact, not rendered as glyphs on paper.

The question is why oratory of this kind is so much less central to the culture than it once was. The fact that there exists an organization like Toastmasters, which fosters ability in public speaking, only underscores that this skill is no longer a given from schooling and general acculturation.

Perhaps I was naïve, but when Brandeis University offered me an honorary degree in 2014, I accepted it in good faith. Brandeis’s motto, after all, is “Truth, even unto its innermost parts”. Yet what followed proved the very opposite: that, at Brandeis, the innermost parts of truth don’t count.
After a bit of encouragement from my usual critics, the Council of Islamic Relations, followed by a petition from a motley array of faculty members, Brandeis rescinded their offer. Frederick Lawrence, who was then the university’s president, rang me just hours before the university issued a public statement.
At the time, I dismissed it as a one-off incident; an anomaly that could simply be brushed off. How wrong I was. That same year, a group of Muslim students tried to cancel my study group on the political theory of Islam at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of the Kennedy School. First, they complained to the university’s administration. When that didn’t work, they sent a letter to the funders of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Then they suggested that I should install an imam in my class to counter my arguments. Unlike at Brandeis, the university authorities didn’t capitulate.

In both incidents, the challenge to academic freedom and free speech was posed by Islamists. But that didn’t disturb me: as an apostate who has spent many years criticising them, and received death threats in return, I was used to their antipathy.
Fast forward to 2021, however, and it seems I was wrong to dismiss this censorious attitude as an Islamist impulse. Hardly a week goes by without reports of a professor being protested, disciplined, and sometimes fired for violating the new and stringent norms of academic discourse. We read of scholars such as Kathleen Stock being driven to resign from their positions after constant hounding and threats. We read of a lecturer being no-platformed for daring to suggest that evaluations should be based on academic merit. We read of a Native American student being forced to apologise by a Yale University diversity tsar for making a harmless joke in an email.
Suggested readingCritical Race Theory's new disguiseBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
And that’s just in the past month. We have reached a point where grace and forgiveness are extinct on American campuses; where reputations built over decades can be destroyed in a week. Some people still describe the phenomenon as “political correctness”. But this is much more like a religious movement. It’s hardly surprising that the Islamists’ opportunity to piggyback on existing illiberal and intolerant forces is now even greater.
Social justice, critical race theory, diversity, equality and inclusion — such terms are difficult to object to when taken at face value. And as a consequence, they have grown and spread like weeds in almost every institution. By the time we recognised the deeply illiberal notions that lurked behind these bland phrases, it was too late; they had already taken over whole departments, embedding their extensive roots into the fabric of academic institutions.
I didn’t see this coming. Seven years ago, I considered those who sounded the alarm to be engaged in histrionics. But today it is impossible to deny that the alarmists were right.
After the Brandeis cancellation, I published my intended remarks, stating that “we need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged”. At the time, I was hopeful. Yet every passing year, free discourse increasingly became the exception in academic settings.
And while countless academics have been crucified for daring to speak out, it is ultimately their students who have suffered most in this tragedy. Our education system is failing them: rather than being a place of learning, universities have transformed into a place of fear. They demand safe spaces and a life free from all forms of aggressions: micro and macro. They graduate ill-prepared for the future, no longer equipped with the critical skills needed to thrive in a society where safe spaces, trigger warnings and preferred pronouns are not the norm. Their lives as students have been stripped of opportunities to overcome challenges and adversity, to develop inner-strength and confidence.
Faced with such a toxic climate, riddled with the weeds of intolerance, one might think the solution is to simply give up. But to do so is not only cowardly; it ignores the fact that there is cause for optimism in the future. There are seedlings sprouting that point to renewal.
This is partly because America’s markets remain strong and reactive, bringing supply to wherever there is demand. The American market is hungry for a new approach to education. Demand is high for a university that delivers on academic freedom, merit-based recruitment of students, and is a safe space for people to learn and exchange ideas, not imagined injuries. And the supply is coming.
This week, I joined an intellectually diverse and curious group of professors and scholars in launching the University of Austin (UATX). It is an institution that stands, above all, for the pursuit of truth. It will offer a rigorous, liberal education from leading experts in their fields; a place that will teach students how to think, not what to think; a place where they will be intellectually challenged and, at times, made to feel uncomfortable.
Professors will be able to explore ideas and topics that are taboo elsewhere, without threats to their reputation, livelihoods or well-being. Unlike nearly a fifth of universities, we will not require statements of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. All we are looking for is a commitment to learning. And that doesn’t seem to be in short supply: within 12 hours of announcing the University of Austin, more than 900 academics submitted inquiries seeking a position.
Their students, once applications open, will be accepted on the basis of merit, based on an admissions exam. The university states: “UATX will not arbitrarily factor in race, gender, class or any other form of identity into its decisions. UATX stands firmly against that sort of discrimination in admissions.” Of course, none of this matters if spaces are only reserved for a wealthy elite. So we are working on a financial model that will help lower tuition costs and provide scholarships or bursaries, providing an equal opportunity for students, regardless of their financial background.
Starting a new university will no doubt be challenging, but the truth is that this is only the beginning — the first of many new educational institutions. American parents all over the country are in revolt against the increasingly divisive educational opportunities available to their children (witness the results of the Virginian gubernatorial elections). In the coming decade, it is not inconceivable that the market will deliver new grade-school opportunities for students, as well as other new institutions of higher education.
There are those who fear that the political extremes of the Left and Right may one day destroy the republic. But the only way to destroy America is to destroy our market system. As long as individuals have choice and the market self-corrects, we will continue to thrive. Where there is demand — and the result in Virginia prove there is demand — the supply will follow.
This is what the University of Austin symbolises: a new choice for all those disillusioned with the established institutions. For too long we have looked on as universities have been disfigured, blissfully unaware that all we needed to do was create our own. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a new Renaissance.

Jackie Calmes is one of the country’s foremost political reporters. As the Wall Street Journal’s chief political correspondent, the White House correspondent for the New York Times during the Obama administration, and now a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, she has an unparalleled knowledge of how Congress and American politics have changed in recent decades — particularly on the Republican side. 
Her new book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court is at the same time a revealing biography of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, an in-depth analysis of his controversial 2018 confirmation hearings (and what they left out), and a historical examination of the Republican Party’s radicalization leading to the presidency of Donald Trump. As she writes in the book’s preface, “Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was the logical result of the party’s ever-rightward, populist, and antigovernment evolution, a shift that coincided with my career in political journalism and was its single biggest story.”
In this interview, Jackie discusses her four decades in journalism, her studies of the influence of right-wing media on Republican politics, and her writing of Dissent. She covers the influence of Newt Gingrich in shifting the Republican Party toward populist conservatism, the rise of the Federalist Society and its role in conservative battles over court appointments, and Trump’s triumph in the 2016 Republican primaries. She describes the sexual assault allegations leveled against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford in the confirmation hearings — but also the allegations that the FBI inadequately investigated. She also predicts what Kavanaugh, as the pivotal justice in what’s now a 6-3 conservative-dominated Supreme Court, may rule on contentious issues like abortion and gun rights. 

Transcript 
Jackie Calmes: The Tea Party — there was no leader. It was almost amorphous. But it was the base that, writ large, had been created and radicalized by this combination of post-Newt Gingrich politics and conservative media.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m thrilled to be joined today by Jackie Calmes, who’s one of America’s greatest political reporters. She covered Congress and the White House for 18 years with the Wall Street Journal, starting in 1990 and ultimately becoming the paper’s chief political correspondent. She was then a White House correspondent for the New York Times during the Obama administration as well as a national politics reporter and chief economic correspondent.
Since then, she’s been the White House editor and a correspondent with the Los Angeles Times’ Washington Bureau, and she is the author of the terrific new book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. Welcome, Jackie.
Jackie Calmes: Good to be with you, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: Good to have you here. Jackie, as you know, I am a big fan of the reportage in Dissent, which focuses on Brett Kavanaugh’s personal history, his rise through conservative activist circles, and his tumultuous Supreme Court confirmation hearings. But I’m equally a fan of your work in that book as a historian and your ability to place the Kavanaugh hearings, as well as the Trump presidency, in the context of changes in the Republican Party. And I want to read from the opening lines of Dissent because I was so struck by this. You wrote: “As my fortieth anniversary in journalism approached, Donald Trump had just been elected president. While his victory was a surprise, including to himself, he was no political aberration.
“Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was the logical result of the party’s ever-rightward, populist and antigovernment evolution, a shift that coincided with my career in political journalism and was its single biggest story.” In many ways, that is the history that I’ve been following as well in my own research and writing. And I really love how you told this tale. But before we get into some of the specifics of your pursuit of that story, can you tell me something about your own background and how you came to be interested in political reporting as a career?
Jackie Calmes: Wow, that’s a big question. Well, from my earliest childhood, I gravitated to reading books of history and biographies. As a child, I remember there was this series of biographies in the public library that were biographies written for children about famous characters — mostly men, of course, but there were a few on women. And I read them all. And so when people talk about Nancy Drew and those sorts of books, I don’t know what they’re talking about because I wasn’t reading fiction, I was just reading history.
Then as I got older, and I knew I liked to write — I loved history — it was a matter of figuring out: How do I make a living at that? The only way I really could figure that out was journalism. And the other advantage journalism has is you can do… You can get a job with a bachelor’s degree. I wouldn’t have had to come up with the money for advanced degrees — although I then did get a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern, but that’s another separate story I won’t bore you with.
I also got into journalism because I wanted to see the country. When I grew up… People think I gravitated towards journalism because I sort of came of age during the Watergate period — Bernstein and Woodward — and I wanted to be the female version. But I had actually… My interest predated that. Like I say, it went back into elementary school. So when I was at Northwestern, a recruiter came to the school for a chain of Texas papers and he had an opening at one of their fourteen papers in Abilene, Texas, in west Texas. And so I thought, “Well, I’ve never been out of the Ohio-Michigan-Illinois area, so that’s a part of the country I’d like to see.”
I took the job. I didn’t particularly like living in Abilene, but within the year I was transferred and promoted to cover state government in Austin for the paper’s chain. So within a year of getting out of college, I was covering politics and government, and I’ve never stopped. I’ve loved it from the start. And I’ve seen the country, I’ve seen the world with presidents — and there’s really no better way to see the world than traveling with a U.S. president. You get into rooms you would never get into as a tourist and see people — like a drunk Boris Yeltsin in Moscow one time. It’s been great all around. I never would’ve guessed how much the journalism industry would change and how much politics would change in that forty years. So it’s been quite a ride.
Geoff Kabaservice: You grew up in the Toledo, Ohio area, correct?
Jackie Calmes: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: Did you grow up reading the Toledo Blade?
Jackie Calmes: Yes. I’m old enough that my father also subscribed to the Toledo Times, which for a while was what we called the morning paper and the Toledo Blade was the afternoon paper. That also made me interested in journalism. How in the world do you know about the Toledo Blade?
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I’ve actually been thinking about this because the Niskanen Center website just published a paper that I edited by Robert Saldin, Kal Munis, and Richard Burke on the decline of local newspapers. That has a real connection to the decline of local community and perhaps the decline of local democracy as well. On the television side, there actually was an interesting set of posts in the, I think it’s the Knight-Cronkite News Lab, on the talent shortage in local TV newsrooms. It really seems to me that there actually was great value in having started your reporting career in a place like Abilene, Texas after having read a strong, quality local newspaper like the Toledo Blade.
Jackie Calmes: Right. It’s interesting because when I was at Northwestern, a lot of my, shall we say, more privileged classmates were holding out for job offers from the likes of the networks or the national newspapers. And probably… Well, I know it was because I didn’t have the luxury — I needed to immediately get a job so I could pay all of my school debt. I took the job as I did at a small paper. And I have, ever since that time, I have considered that I was the smarter. Not only did my friends not get those jobs they were holding out for, but they didn’t get the sort of experience I did.
You get to do everything when you’re at a small local paper, and you get to… I think it’s important, especially if you’re going to go on to cover politics, that you see things from that local level. I mean, it was just a stroke of luck that I was seeing Texas when I did at that point where the government — it was just the eve of the Reagan revolution — and the South, including Texas, was about to switch from one-party Democratic to eventually one-party Republican. I’m looking forward to this paper you described because I really do think the decline of local journalism — and it’s getting worse by the day — is one of the reasons we find ourselves in the position we do of our democracy being under threat.
I have a friend, for instance, who used to… He had been in journalism with me years ago, but then he got a law degree and ultimately became chief of staff to a governor of Oregon. And he told me not so long ago that there’s next to no local coverage in the state capital or local papers, in the state capital press corps in Salem, Oregon. And he said, “The state legislators can get away with murder.” That’s the thing. I mean, the accountability — you’re missing a whole level of accountability, nonpartisan accountability, that voters need to make informed decisions.
Geoff Kabaservice: I totally agree. As you mentioned, 1978 was a momentous midterm election during the Jimmy Carter presidency in the South, because that really marked some of the first breakthroughs of the Republican Party into what had been the Solid South. And Texans elected Bill Clements, who was the first Republican governor since Reconstruction. And even some of the Democrats who got elected that year, like Phil Gramm, were very conservative, Boll Weevil Democrats…
Jackie Calmes: Charlie Stenholm in Abilene.
Geoff Kabaservice: Right, who went on to become proto-Republicans. What I find interesting is you also reported that year on one of the Republicans who lost, which was George W. Bush, who was running in Texas’s 19th district, which I guess is somewhat near Abilene.
Jackie Calmes: Yeah, to the west, Midland-Odessa.
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s a great story… I still remember that he lost to Democrat Kent Hance, who was kind of a folksy guy. George W. Bush had been a Yale graduate and business school graduate not that long beforehand, and he shot a campaign ad that showed him jogging, presenting a strong physical appearance. But joggers were pretty rare in that part of Texas, and Hance’s comment was: “The only time folks around here go running is when someone’s chasing ‘em.”
Jackie Calmes: I tell you, Hance had a great sense of humor. That was one of the things that helped get him elected. He had been a state senator in Texas. And yes, it was… But again, George W. Bush did better in that election in 1978 than he was expected to. But Democrats had a real advantage back then, and the fact that Bush did as well as he did was a sign of the wave to come for Republicans.
Geoff Kabaservice: And then, of course, Texas went for Ronald Reagan in 1980, although they had gone for Carter in ’76. The Senate also turned Republican for the first time since the Eisenhower presidency. You really were sort of witnessing the beginning of the conservative revolution at that time.
Jackie Calmes: Absolutely.
Geoff Kabaservice: Then you moved to Washington in 1984 to work for Congressional Quarterly. For our friends who don’t live inside the Beltway, what is CQ?
Jackie Calmes: Well, CQ is not… Back then, it was different from what exists today. It’s been sort of folded into other publications now. But back then it was a weekly magazine, even though it was called Congressional Quarterly, and then they took to calling it CQ Weekly. It was someone who, when they heard I was coming to Washington, said that if I really wanted to learn about Congress, I should go to Congressional Quarterly. It was sort of an adjustment because I like newspapering and daily deadlines, and just the pace of a newsroom… CQ was a little bit more… It was slower and more detail-oriented. But boy, did I get to know about Congress, down to the technical and procedural parliamentary level.
I was there for the better part of five years. It was another advantage I had over daily newspapers, is that… Not having a daily deadline, I could, at the end of a day, walk around the halls of the congressional offices and just pop in and talk to staffers, even talk to a Member sometimes after hours. I’d have red wine with Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, the Republican whose family were Italian immigrants, and he loved to get out the red wine. It was a real learning experience, not just in what I was writing but in what I was able to do in taking the time to build sourcing and learn things that reporters don’t really have today in our 24/7 Internet age.
Geoff Kabaservice: I know it’s a big and ultimately unanswerable question, but how was Washington, how was Congress, how was politics different at that time from what it is now?
Jackie Calmes: Well, it was all new to me at the time, pretty much. But it was interesting in that it seemed very partisan. I mean, I remember writing things and we’d talk and members would kvetch about just how partisan things were. And yet you had, in each party, you had a range of members from left to right on the spectrum. You had liberal Republicans and you had very conservative Democrats. Over time, they all left. The liberal Republicans, their party got rid of them in Republican primaries when more conservative people ran against them. And a lot of the most conservative Democrats either switched parties to the Republican Party or lost in their party primaries.
So you had this homogenization of both parties over time. But in the Reagan era, it still seemed very partisan, and yet now we look back and it seems like the good old days compared to what we have now. I don’t even consider it partisanship — it’s polarization now. It’s almost a parliamentary government where you have each party sort of voting in lockstep for the most part. Democrats, as we see, are less guilty of that than Republicans are. But it was really exciting. Because you had diversity within each party, to some extent, it made the votes on legislation hard to predict and more sort of exciting to watch.
What I saw really started to change big-time with the Newt Gingrich era in the ’90s, in the House — I say in the ’90s, but it had actually started by the mid-to-late ’80s when I was there. You could see the ferment among House Republicans who had been a minority since the early ’50s and were restless about it. They considered that the leadership of the party was too complacent, too cooperative with the Democrats, and had a minority mindset. The Republicans in the House started to radicalize when they decided that the way to shake things up was to be far more militant. Forget legislative compromises — let’s just battle it out and then take it to the voters.
Geoff Kabaservice: And how much of that change do you ascribe to Gingrich?
Jackie Calmes: I ascribe a lot of it to Gingrich. But he started out as a, what you and I know or used to call Rockefeller Republicans — the more liberal-to-moderate variety of Republicans that reflected former New York governor and then vice president Nelson Rockefeller. He was an opportunist, Gingrich was, who sort of saw that this was taking hold in the Republican Party, because it was taking hold already because of the license that Ronald Reagan had given to the conservatives in the party. Ronald Reagan represented — you know better than me — a victory for the conservative wing of the party in what had been a decades-long battle within the party between the moderate establishment and the conservative activists and the conservative wing. This wing, under Reagan, became empowered. And through the ’80s, they became restive and wanted to exert their power.
And Reagan, likewise, gave rise to things like very conservative think tanks on the right that also provided ideas, new ideas for Republicans. There were also groups empowered that brought a more militant style to the party. And Gingrich harnessed all of that by the mid-to-late ’80s. He had started what was called the Conservative Opportunity Society. As I write in my book, some of the members who were aligned with him on that came to say that Newt Gingrich was more opportunist than conservative. But nonetheless he, by the late ’80s, had made his way into House Republican leadership. And the establishment chafed at his style.
He didn’t come to Congress to pass legislation. That became more and more true of Republicans in general that were elected with his help. He had what was called GOPAC, the political action committee, which provided not just money for other conservative candidates but also tapes for them about how to talk, in fact. And his slogan was “Be nasty,” which pretty much encapsulated his style. He, I think, harnessed what was already percolating within the Republican Party and then took it to a whole new level and personalized it.
People that weren’t around at the time don’t realize just… He was sort of the pre-Trump. He was everywhere. He was on the cover — you remember he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” And he was a big deal and the pre-Trump.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. Which segments of the Republican Party or the conservative movement seemed to care most about the courts in your estimation?
Jackie Calmes: The courts were more in the background, in my experience, up to then. I mean, I knew about the Federalist Society, which was one… When I say that Reagan’s victory and his presidency empowered and gave license to some of these groups… The Federalist Society was formed on Yale’s campus. Yale and University of Chicago law professors were its mentors, not least Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. And it formed in 1982, like I say, and it just surprised itself by its success in going from an organization of conservative students on campuses to, when they graduated, becoming lawyer groups in the cities where they found jobs. And the next thing you know, there’s a de facto job ladder for Federalist Society members, who could then get into administration jobs in the Reagan and Bush administrations, and then get on federal judgeships, and all the way on up until we have now, today, all six of our Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been or are Federalist Society members.
I don’t remember… There were fights over judicial nominees in the Senate from the time I came. But they, again, were not as pitched as they would become — in part because you had Republican senators, for instance, who would vote against a Reagan appointee or a George Bush appointee as being too extreme, too far right. And it was really obviously the Bork… Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987 was the first big fight that I covered and that a lot of people will remember. And to this day, obviously, conservatives go back to… In the book, I could refer to Robert Bork’s nomination fight, and then Clarence Thomas’ in 1991, as the bloody shirts that conservatives to this day like to wave whenever there’s a Supreme Court nomination, as if to suggest that Democrats are more liable than Republicans for making battles against judicial nominees and doing so in a way that amounts to what the other side would call character assassination. And so that really was something that evolved too, on a parallel track with the increased radicalization of the Republican Party itself.
Geoff Kabaservice: So skipping ahead a bit, you and I first crossed paths, I think, in early 2015, when you were a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. How did that fellowship come about?
Jackie Calmes: It fell in my lap, luckily. At the time I was a New York Times White House reporter. All throughout my career, I’d been too busy, mostly with my job but also raising two kids, to think about taking things or applying for seminars or fellowships. And I got a call one day from the head of the program at the Shorenstein Center asking if I would like to be a fellow. And I said, “Sure.” I checked with my bureau chief at the New York Times. She was very supportive. But that meant, since I hadn’t applied, that I also didn’t have a research topic to propose working on during the semester. And I pretty quickly… I talked to a couple of my colleagues and I pretty quickly came to one idea that had been gnawing at me for a long time, which was… To summarize my area of study, what I researched at that point was the expansion of conservative media in the Internet Age and its corrosive of impact on the Republican Party.
And so in my earliest research, in order to see how the Republican Party had come to where it was, one of the first (if not the very first) books I read was yours, Rule and Ruin — I always have to look if it’s Rule or Ruin or Rule and Ruin — The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party. And then I also had consulted… In addition to you, also central to my thinking on getting me started was Nicole Hemmer, a political scientist who was working on her doctorate. And she was studying and continues to study the impact of conservative media.
And I was so interested in this because I had this… It wasn’t actually… I didn’t consider it a particularly novel idea, to say the least. But having watched the Gingrich era and then on through George W. Bush’s presidency and the Tea Party, and in that time from 1996 on I had seen the growth of Fox News. But even more influential, it seemed, were these websites that were forming that were on the far right, like Breitbart.com.
Not only could I see the impact it was having on among Republicans in Congress, but I was fielding complaints and had been for several years from Republican leadership, staffers, or Members about just what a corrosive impact it was having on their Members. They had no control over their Members anymore because their Members were just going on Fox or going to Breitbart. There was just this back-and-forth that empowered the Members that had this channel to this media that was… It was sort of a chicken-and-the-egg. Which one was calling the shots? Were the conservative media just trying to get clicks and viewers by putting out really right-wing stuff, extreme stuff? Or were they reflecting what the grassroots wanted? And in any case, there was this cross-pollination that was just really coming to impact what was happening on the Hill and the increasing polarization. And so it was a really good opportunity for me to stop and look into that.
Geoff Kabaservice: And your paper, called “‘They Don’t Give a Damn About Governing’: Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,” did anticipate a lot of the themes of Niki Hemmer’s book Messengers on the Right. And I particularly like the quote you had from Tom Latham, who I guess had just retired as a Republican member of the House, which gave your paper that quote. He was talking about conservative media, how they really just ignored the need for deliberation and compromise that the Founders built into the legislative process. And he told you: “They will not take 80 percent. It’s got to be 100 percent or you’re not pure. They don’t give a damn about governing.”
Jackie Calmes: Yeah. The interesting thing about Tom Latham, at that point a retiring Congressman from Iowa, is that he had been a member of the Gingrich revolutionary Republican Class of 1994, elected in 1994. And he began, at the time he arrived in Congress in January ’95, he was among the most conservative members. And by the time he left, he was completely disillusioned and worried for his party.
And it was worse than what you say about they discouraged or looked down on compromise, which as you and I would agree is essential; as they say, it’s the art of politics. They not only looked down, they penalized it. You had seen by 2015 a number of examples of prominent and undeniably conservative Republicans who were challenged and defeated in Republican primary elections or conventions because they had committed the mortal sin of compromising with a Democrat.
I mean, the best example that pops to mind — and which really put a chill in many Republicans in Congress — was in 2010, the Tea Party year, when Robert Bennett, a conservative senator from Utah, was defeated for renomination in a convention of the Utah Republican Party, chiefly because he had specifically compromised, come up with a compromise healthcare plan with Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon. And the idea that this respected conservative could be not conservative enough simply because he had compromised with a Democrat was just so memorable. I’m here talking about it today. But it really did scare other Republicans into not compromising anymore. You could just see it, the impact of that. So the extent to which compromise became a four-letter word was so destructive.
Geoff Kabaservice: Your paper didn’t quite predict the triumph of Donald Trump…
Jackie Calmes: No.
Geoff Kabaservice: But you did notice that Trump was one of the relatively few Republican presidential candidates in 2015 who would repeatedly appear on second- or third-tier radio shows like the Steve Deace show out of Iowa, and would get a very favorable response from his audience.
Jackie Calmes: Yeah, because he really was speaking to that audience. People just liked that he was saying what they thought, and saying it in a way that they especially, and we’re talking… I mean, these audiences were predominantly white male and he had great appeal to them. Now, Steve Deace himself, the conservative, who’s still a conservative broadcaster in Iowa, and who takes his influence from the fact that he does work in the state that is the first to vote in presidential nominating contests… He came not to like Trump himself, and especially was turned off when in 2015 — later, after I’d already written my paper — when Trump famously said that he didn’t like Senator John McCain because he didn’t like people in the military who got captured. And Deace, that turned him off. But Deace has since become much… He seems pretty Trumpy to me as I follow him on Twitter. So he just is indicative of much of the rest of the Republican Party, which in fact has become the Trump party.
Geoff Kabaservice: There are a thousand reasons we could come up with for Trump’s success both in the Republican presidential primaries in 2016 and then in the general election. But what, in hindsight, seemed to be to you to be some of the big reasons?
Jackie Calmes: For the rise of Trump? I think Trump was the ultimate opportunist. He saw that the Republican Party base was one that… I mean, it played to the issues that he had actually, in fairness, been talking about since the late ’80s: a xenophobic message against immigrants. He went back and forth, sort of like the Republican Party was doing at that point, on military. He didn’t like military adventurism and yet he wasn’t quite isolationist. To this day, he insists he wasn’t once in favor of the Iraq invasion, when actually he was.
But this base was there. And he, having been 14 seasons on “The Apprentice,” he knew how to play the media, use the media, and to a mass audience of — I don’t want to say lowest-common-denominator, but it wasn’t exactly highbrow television, “The Apprentice.” And so he was very adept at the media. And like I say, he spoke their language. He had been shameless from the time he was in the New York tabloids in the ’80s. And he shocked everyone.
He was in a field in 2015, 2016, for that 2016 nomination fight that included some of the stars of the Republican Party, led perhaps by Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio. And Ted Cruz was in the mix, of course, and Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. I mean, nobody in the Republican Party I talked to was predicting that Trump would emerge as the winner. And people didn’t even take him seriously, including in journalism. People put their B-team reporters on Trump. And within a short time, he had come to the front of the polls, as you remember. And then once the voting started, it was virtually over. And by March of 2016, he was the nominee apparent.
But he took this base that had already been radicalized by first Newt and then through the Tea Party era. And he spoke their language and he was shameless. And unlike the members, the leadership of the party, which had been throwing red meat to the base for years but knowing that they wouldn’t do anything about it once they were elected, because they either couldn’t (like as in balancing the budget) or knew it would be terrible politics for general elections (like defunding Planned Parenthood or repealing Obamacare)… The base had become so disillusioned by all of these broken promises and stoked by conservative media, which was constantly complaining about the Republican establishment at that point, that Trump was able to waltz in as the most anti-establishment candidate of them all and win the nomination.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. But to return to those first sentences in your book, you said that “Trump was no political aberration. His rise was the logical result of the party’s rightward trajectory…” You know, in 2015, 2016, he was far from the most orthodox conservative candidate. In fact, he might have been the most un-orthodox conservative.
Jackie Calmes: Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: So was there a contradiction there?
Jackie Calmes: I don’t think so, in part, because of what the base had… The extent to which, by the time he came along, the base was sort of like the tail wagging the dog. The base was effectively calling the shots. The leadership of the party was reacting to the base. And conservatism, as we think of it… Policy ideas no longer seemed to be all that important, or at least the old ideas that united the party weren’t. You had trade free trade and immigration of a somewhat liberal… I don’t mean open borders, but immigration was considered a good thing, and balanced budgets, low spending. And Trump was opposed to all of that. But so was the base.
In the Tea Party, for instance, you had people protesting Congress, saying “Keep your hands off my Medicare.” The base had rejected the Paul Ryan kind of ideas of entitlement reform. And so when I say Trump was the logical extension, I’m thinking in terms of what that the leadership of the party had… And not just Gingrich and post-Gingrich had created this more militant base that eschewed compromise, but also the conservative media had done so. I mean, I think we all tend to underestimate the impact of conservative media in this — I can’t think of the word. The relationship was sort of, like I say, chicken-and-egg between the audience and who was influencing whom, the audience or the broadcasters. But in any case, there was this mutual radicalization. That’s what Trump was the logical extension of, the fact that the party had become [radical].
I talk about four revolutions of which Trump was the fourth. Reagan, and then Gingrich, and then that third revolution, the one that was the predicate for Trump, which was bottom-up. Any previous political movement usually had a leader that was associated with it. In this one, the Tea Party, there was no leader. It was almost amorphous. But it was the base that had been writ large, that had been created and radicalized by this combination of post-Newt Gingrich politics and conservative media. And so that was what Trump was an extension of. He took that headless movement and he harnessed it and he became the leader of it.
Geoff Kabaservice: In hindsight, one of Trump’s most durable legacies, I am sure, will be seen to have been his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the nomination process for each was extremely controversial. In Gorsuch’s case, because then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell failed to allow a vote to confirm President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, allegedly because the vacancy occurred during the 2016 election year. In Barrett’s case, the nomination was controversial because the Senate, controlled by Republicans, confirmed her days before the 2020 election. Then controversies surrounding Kavanaugh, of course, were in a different register altogether. But the appointment of those three judges, as you describe it, brings to fruition this forty-year conservative movement plan to get a conservative majority on the Court — even though that goal was tangential at best to Trump’s populist vision, to the extent that he had one. So how did you come to the idea of writing a book about Brett Kavanaugh as a representative figure for the Republican Party’s rightward transformation?
Jackie Calmes: Well, again, it was one of these things that fell in my lap — which is why, I guess, I was smart to never make Five-Year Plans. But I had been talking to an agent and an editor at one of the publishing houses since early 2017 after Trump’s election, and I had left the New York Times and wanted to do more in-depth journalism, including writing a book. So I was talking to this agent and this editor about trying to come up with a book concept that would allow me to tell the story of the forty years that I had witnessed (or was coming up on forty years) of the evolution of the Republican Party. At that point I was calling it the “evolution” or the “transformation.” I thought “radicalization” was a bridge too far. But I quickly dispensed with that thinking, and “radicalization” seemed just right.
But in any case, because of the press of… I then got a job as a White House editor, and I was just too busy to think about the book. Then they came to me in 2018, just as Brett Kavanaugh was about to be confirmed, and they wanted a book on the controversial confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh — about him. I didn’t particularly want to write a book that was just about him, so I countered by suggesting… By that point I knew a little bit about him, and I thought he was the perfect what some people call “petri dish Republican” — that he represented the perfect specimen of what it takes to succeed in the Republican Party these days, which is a blend of politics as well as conservative policies record.
But he just was, again, also… What a couple senators called him was a Forrest Gump or Zelig-like figure, where he just was uncannily at the scene of some of the biggest moments in the Republican Party’s evolution. So what we came to is I would write this book about Kavanaugh and his story, from his birth within the Beltway of Washington, D.C. to a Republican lobbyist father and a mother who had changed parties from Democrat to Republican in this same era (as so many people did), and juxtapose his story with what was happening more broadly in the Republican Party, both in the political arena and in this evolution of the Federalist Society and other conservative organs to create this de facto system of identifying and vetting what would be considered true conservatives for the judiciary from district to appeals court to Supreme Court, which has been successful beyond any of the founders’ dreams.
So that’s what I did. I think it worked pretty well. I mean, just to summarize… Kavanaugh, when I say that he was a Zelig or Zelig-like figure… He was, like I say, born within the Beltway. He went to Yale (which was the founding camp) and Yale Law School, and joined the Federalist Society just a couple years after it had been formed. He quickly saw that it was a good point of reference to have on your resumé if you wanted to move up in Republican circles. He worked for Ken Starr, who was the Solicitor General under George H. W. Bush — did I get that right?
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes.
Jackie Calmes: Or was it at the end of Reagan? I think it was George H. W. Bush. And he clerked for some of the most conservative judges on the federal bench, and then ultimately for Anthony Kennedy, who wasn’t one of the most conservative but he was a Republican appointee on the Supreme Court. So from there, Kavanaugh went to Ken Starr, and for four years worked for Ken Starr on the investigation of Bill and Hillary Clinton, which I think was really the era in which he, like so many other people, became much more… He became more partisan and the country became more divided along political lines. Then he briefly did some private practice in which he worked at what he considered pro bono on some politically charged cases that were popular in the conservative community.
And then from Bush v. Gore — in which he, like a lot of Republican lawyers, had a role — he secured a job in the West Wing of George Bush’s White House, George W. Bush’s White House, and immediately was seen as… Again, he’d been marked for the federal bench because he was not just a proven conservative but a loyal Republican. So the rest is history.
The other thing… When he was nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, he became representative of what had become by that point — you asked earlier about the judicial fights… By the George W. Bush era, the judicial confirmations, there were more battles than not in a lot of these Appeals Court nominations. His took three years. And then George W. Bush predicted that some Republican president would make Brett Kavanaugh a Supreme Court Justice, and indeed Trump did.
Geoff Kabaservice: Although interestingly you also point out that Kavanaugh’s associations with the Bushes counted against him in the Trump era, at least among some of Trump’s most populist advisors.
Jackie Calmes: Yes. So Trump had come out with these three lists to reassure evangelical voters, and conservative voters generally, that he would indeed name conservatives to the Court and to the courts of all levels. He put out this list twice before he was elected, of actual people he would name. No one had done this. Yet Brett Kavanaugh’s name, even though anybody you asked in the conservative legal community would’ve named Brett Kavanaugh as among their prospective Supreme Court candidates — he didn’t make Trump’s list until after Trump was already president. And it was a year into his presidency (or nearly a year) when Trump came out with a third list. A lot of it was just this…
Trump, as you suggest, wanted nothing to do with anything that smacked of the Bush era. He was as dismissive of George W. Bush and everything he represented as he was of Barack Obama. But I think the thing that overcame it was, in a large part, Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn. He knew Kavanaugh well and really liked the fact that Kavanaugh, like Neil Gorsuch, is somebody who casts a real skeptical eye, opposes much federal regulation of business and the environment and such — the administrative state, as they say. And so he was really keen. I think without Don McGahn, Brett Kavanaugh would not have been a Trump nominee.
Geoff Kabaservice: But then, curiously, what does endear Kavanaugh to Trump supporters is his lashing out at the left during his confirmation hearings.
Geoff Kabaservice: You provide a very detailed, sensitive, nuanced discussion of those hearings, the accusations brought against Kavanaugh by psychologist Christine Blasey Ford, as well as what really had been under-reported stories about sexual incidents in which he’d been involved as an undergraduate at Yale.
Jackie Calmes: Yeah. I do think… I mean, a lot of people will say that Trump should not have gotten to fill the Scalia seat that went to Neil Gorsuch or the Ruth Bader Ginsburg seat that went to Amy Coney Barrett. But I think the one seat Trump was obviously within his rights as president to have filled was the one from Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. But there’s a lot of other conservatives who could have filled that seat other than Brett Kavanaugh.
I think we all know about Christine Blasey Ford. But the case that Republicans, being the majority in the Senate right then, were able to just railroad was the allegation from Debbie Ramirez, who had been his classmate at Yale. She suggested that he had — and she acknowledged she had been very drunk — that he had exposed himself to her and, with his friends, essentially forced her to handle his penis.
She never got the hearing that Christine Blasey Ford did. I met Debbie and talked to her at length multiple times. I think she would’ve been at least as credible a witness as Christine Blasey Ford. And you don’t have to take my word… I mean, it was Trump himself who, after Christine Blasey Ford testified publicly, said she was both credible and compelling. Of course, this was before he subsequently and ever since has called her a liar. It was disturbing to me the way they were able to just railroad it through. They only allowed for an FBI investigation when they had to, because they would’ve lost at least two Republican votes if they didn’t have this investigation. But the investigation was a sham. It was really no investigation at all, as I go into in my book.
There were so many of Brett Kavanaugh’s classmates who wanted to testify as to his… It didn’t have anything to do with the sexual assault allegations, but the fact that they felt — and these were people who had been friends of his, friendly acquaintances of his — and they said when they saw him on Fox News (and then in his testimony before the Senate) that he had lied about the extent of his drinking. He had lied when he denied that he had never blacked out from drinking, couldn’t remember what he had done. All of that was central to his defense, because if he had blacked out or couldn’t remember what he had done, it would’ve been more possible to believe that he had sexually assaulted someone when he was terribly drunk and just didn’t remember it. So it would undercut his denials.
But in addition to that, there was a third allegation from another Yale woman who — and this has been reported — which never came out. She says she does not remember. I’ve talked to her friends. She was so drunk that she didn’t remember. But there is an eyewitness, a very credible eyewitness. But he wanted only to talk to the FBI and to the Senate and off the record — the thinking being that if he told them what he had seen on top of the other allegations, that the senators would go to the White House and tell Trump to nominate someone else. He was never allowed to talk to… The FBI, to this day, has not contacted him. He was never allowed to talk to the senators privately. And so Kavanaugh’s confirmation was rushed through.
But as I say in the book, and I’ve written since, you can set aside the sexual assault allegations if you like, if you think those things can never be determined. There are other what I think are lies that Brett Kavanaugh told under oath, not just about his college-age drinking but also about things that he had been asked about: incidents that occurred when he was a White House aide to George W. Bush having to do with a Senate scandal over Democrat stolen emails, over judicial nominees that Brett Kavanaugh worked on, and some policy areas — for instance, having to do with the handling of foreign detainees in what the Bush Administration called the War on Terror. All of these things undercut his credibility, even before you get into a he-said/she-said fight.
To me, the argument is compelling when you take the allegations which can’t be answered, the record that suggests very strongly that he at best misled the senators under oath, at worst lied. And add to that what I would consider — and frankly what former (now the late) Justice John Paul Stevens considered — his disqualifying tirade on September 27th, 2018, when he testified after Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee in such an angry, partisan, confrontational manner, completely opposite to anything we would consider as reflecting judicial temperament. I think by all rights his nomination should have been withdrawn and another conservative put in his place.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was a year behind Kavanaugh in college. I do remember him with a beer in hand and a look of an aggrieved opossum on his face, which I suppose is neither here nor there. But I guess the question is: Do you think the Democrats could have handled this nomination in a way that would’ve led to some other outcome? Or is his nomination simply a product of the polarized dynamic that we have now in Congress?
Jackie Calmes: I don’t think there were… I mean, there are certainly things Democrats could have done better and should have done. I mean, somehow the allegation from the eyewitness — there should have been a way to force that into the Senate inner circle in a way that maybe would’ve kept it from becoming public, but at least senators would’ve known about it. But frankly, I don’t think there’s anything Democrats could have done that was going to overcome then-Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell’s determination to ram that nomination through. And combined with that, what was critical to Kavanaugh’s success was the continued support of Donald Trump. I mean, we all watched Donald Trump for four years. He could just as well have kicked Kavanaugh to the curb and named somebody else on his list. But he didn’t. And, perversely, I think part of that is because of the nature of the allegations against Trump.
Trump has a well-known record and long one (and he’s added to it since) of coming not only when allegations are lodged against him, but against any man, of a sexual nature. It just gets his juices going. And he came to the defense. This was his kind of fight. He was going to defend Brett Kavanaugh against this. And Brett Kavanaugh’s angry performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was like so many other things Republicans did in the Trump era: it was for an audience of one.
It pleased Trump, who already had made known that he was not happy with Brett Kavanaugh’s appearance on Fox News with his wife earlier, in which he thought Kavanaugh had been too much of a whimpering puppy. And he wanted him to go on the attack, and Don McGahn coached Kavanaugh to that effect. But I’m not… Kavanaugh was politically savvy. I don’t even think he… Well, people have suggested to me — forget what I think. Republicans have suggested he didn’t need Don McGahn to tell him to come out with all guns blazing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He knew that’s what Trump wanted. And Trump embraced it. Trump nominated him and Trump made sure he got confirmed. And Mitch McConnell, of course, was equally responsible.
Geoff Kabaservice: There was an article just a few days ago in the New York Times which is talking about how “Kavanaugh has come to wield enormous power as the justice at the Court’s ideological center” — which of course is not to be confused with making him a moderate. He’s not a moderate.
Geoff Kabaservice: He’s come down on the right side on a number of issues. But he has voted, I think, 91 percent of the time in divided decisions with John Roberts, the chief justice, and he seems to share some of Roberts’ concerns for protecting the institutional authority of the Court.
Jackie Calmes: Yeah.
Geoff Kabaservice: So it’s the sort of $64 question here in Washington, but how do you think Kavanaugh is likely to vote in some contentious issues we can see coming up, particularly abortion?
Jackie Calmes: Well, abortion specifically, I see him… I mean, I ultimately think the Court is going to find a way — the conservatives on the Court, the six-justice super-majority — to greatly undercut if not effectively do away with abortion rights, much as Texas has effectively done away with abortion rights even though they haven’t come right out and banned them altogether. They’ll find a way to do that in these two cases from Texas and Mississippi without producing the headline that says: “Court Overturns Roe v. Wade.”
And I very much think Kavanaugh will be in… Being on the D.C. Court of Appeals, that’s a court considered the second-most prestigious, based here in Washington, that mainly handles, is known for handling cases having to do with issues of which the federal government is a party. And so you didn’t get a lot of abortion cases. But towards the end of his twelve-year tenure there, there was one in which he was very much — people say he was auditioning for a Supreme Court nomination by his coming down very strongly in an anti-abortion way in a case that came before that court.
So I have no doubt that he will be deciding against abortion. But I also think that partly because of what you suggest about how he and the chief justice are cognizant of the Court’s public standing and institutional standing, he will not want to just flat-out overturn Roe. But I also think, in his case, it reflects his political savvy. This is a guy who was working, from the Ken Starr years on through the Bush first term, very much as someone who was at the center of the biggest political fights of our day. And I think he knows that it would not be good for the Republican Party to have an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade. But he will support anything that goes right up to that point.
The other major case of the term, of course, is going to be on gun rights. And he has signaled throughout his judicial career — on this court of appeals and in his short time on the Supreme Court — that he is very much for expanding gun rights and for expanding the individual right to bear arms, which was only carved out on the Supreme Court in 2008 in the Heller case.
And he, in fact, was quite vocal in terms of one of his judicial writings in a dissent about — well, more than just once — about bemoaning the fact that the Court had not accepted a gun case in a decade, in more than a decade since Heller and McDonald, and that he was very eager for the Court to take up a case. And now they have one, and I think he will definitely be in favor of expanding gun rights.
Geoff Kabaservice: It does seem, for a number of reasons, that the Republicans have been much more focused on the courts and appointing conservative justices than the Democrats have been interested in and made a priority of judicial appointments in recent decades. Does that seem like a fair statement?
Jackie Calmes: Oh, absolutely. And it’s a cause of no small concern to a lot of Democratic activists. And frankly, I’ve wondered through the years… I mean, going back to the early ’90s when the famous case that upheld Roe v. Wade — although it limited it a bit — was the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case out of Pennsylvania in 1993. So those are considered the two big abortion cases, Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
And I have always long seen that abortion rights among others were in danger of the precedents being overruled. And Democrats, Democratic voters never seemed to care as much about the courts. But when you think about it, it makes sense. Because the Earl Warren era, the ’60s that so greatly expanded civil rights and the like, criminal rights… You know, there was a complacency on the left and the center-left, while the right was really mobilized by cases going back to the ’60s having to do with prayer in the schools, then Roe v. Wade and religious rights. There was more reason for…
And the more you brought evangelicals into the Republican Party, that became even more true. And then the business wing of the Republican Party wanted to fight a lot of these environmental regulations and other business regulations. So there was much more incentive on the right — and center-right, even — to have the Court be an issue.
That started to change with Bush v. Gore, when Democrats sat up and thought, “Holy cow, a 5-4 conservative majority could essentially pick the president.” And so you saw the beginnings of efforts to form an analogue to the Federalist Society. But it just didn’t work. The Democrats just don’t have the incentive that the right does to work the courts. That is beginning to change, has changed some. And you see it in Joe Biden’s judicial nominations, the sort of people he’s nominating to the courts. But it’s still an imbalance, a great imbalance.
Geoff Kabaservice: And one gets a sense, for example, that a Republican administration, if the situation had been reversed, would’ve strongly encouraged someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire rather than die in office and give the opposing party a chance to appoint…
Geoff Kabaservice: … a justice of their liking. It doesn’t seem that the Democrats have been playing politics all that well in recent years.
Jackie Calmes: Right. And Stephen Breyer continues to resist the pressure he’s under. And I get that. That said, take Ruth Bader Ginsburg… I mean, Barack Obama went to the extent of having lunch with her and making it clear… We don’t know how explicit he was, but it’s clear what the point of their talk was. And she essentially… She loved her job so much, she just wanted to stay there.
And Stephen Breyer feels much the same way. He sort of operated in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s more senior shadow for years, and he’s finally now the most senior Democratic appointee. So whenever they’re in the minority, as the three Democratic appointees often are, he gets to decide who writes the opinion — and he gets first dibs. And so, he’s finally, for this term, for the first time in that position. And he doesn’t… You can see why he doesn’t want to give that up.
That said, he’s also someone who worked as a staffer for Ted Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has seen what Mitch McConnell has done to politicize the judicial confirmation process to the extent of giving Trump three, instead of just one, Supreme Court seats to fill. You would think that he would sort of step aside — I mean, he’s in his eighties — step aside and let Biden name his younger replacement.
But this is a club of nine. As much as they may disagree on things, they also are very protective. Instead of doing what I just described that I think he should do and what a lot of other people think he should do, he has written a book in which he virtually (and on his book tour) denies that there is any sort of political bent to the Supreme Court, which…
All you have to do is read some of the opinions of Sam Alito and the things they do. And the fact that Amy Coney Barrett, despite her showing she’s not as far right as maybe people thought, she nonetheless gives a speech at the Mitch McConnell Center, with Mitch McConnell at her side, to insist that the Court isn’t very partisan, which was like… Clearly this Supreme Court justice does not have a press advisor at her side, because it was a really stupid thing to do. It only made the point.
Geoff Kabaservice: Since you’ve mentioned Mitch McConnell now…
Jackie Calmes: Several times.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s interesting that your book ends by throwing the spotlight on McConnell. And you seem to give him the award for the most consequential and perhaps malignant figure in American politics of the past several decades.
Jackie Calmes: Yeah, and that’s very perceptive of you to bring that up. Because I thought about that. I thought… This book is essentially about Kavanaugh and what he reflects about the party at large, and then I’m ending with this other individual.
But I thought it was appropriate. And I do think he’s consequential. I can’t take anything away from Mitch McConnell’s effectiveness, God knows. But I’m not one of these journalists who thinks that effectiveness is the be-all and end-all. I think there has to be a “What is the end that justifies these means?” And he would tell you it’s a more conservative government. I think he has undermined the institution of the Senate and the institution of the Supreme Court — two of our branches of government, not bad. And I think that has consequences.
And I can actually say I was covering Congress the year he arrived, in January of 1985 when he was elected to the Senate from Kentucky. And I was struck from his very first term that this was a guy who — like Gingrich, for instance — didn’t want to be a legislator. He wasn’t interested in legislating. He was interested in blocking legislation and working to expand things that would help the party — things like expanded campaign finance, things within the Senate. He clearly wanted to get on the leadership ladder.
So where he differed from Gingrich is… McConnell’s was very much an inside game, working inside the Senate to move up, where Gingrich wanted to be this sort of outsize, outside figure, running the House but being this leader of a conservative movement. And so McConnell, obviously, has been the most long-lived and more effective than Gingrich ever was. And I just think he’s had a huge impact and not a good one.
And I have to add… What I think of McConnell is he is the ultimate of what John McCain used to say: party over country. And I could (but won’t) tick off examples — aside from what we’ve talked about in terms of his bending all norms and rules to get both Gorsuch — well, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — on the Court, despite any clear hypocrisy that he evidences in doing so.
But there have just been so many things over the years as I watched him that I just have to wonder. And now, ultimately, he has said some of the right things about Donald Trump and his attempted coup and the extent to which Donald Trump has weakened democracy. But he’s then turned around and said he would “absolutely” support him as the nominee of the party in 2024, and in every other way has enabled Donald Trump.
So I just think he will continue on. And whatever happens to Trumpism, Mitch McConnell will remain. And so he is, I think, an overlooked… He gets a lot of attention, but I still think people overlook just how consequential he has been.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Jackie, congratulations again on your book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. And thanks so much for joining me here today.
Jackie Calmes: Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
The post The Influence of Gingrich, the Triumph of Trump, and the Legacy of Conservative Court Appointments, with Jackie Calmes appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Can white voters who back a Black candidate still hold racist beliefs and views?
That question has come to the fore in the wake of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in the blueish state of Virginia. Conservatives were quick to counter claims that Youngkin’s win represented the effectiveness of stoking racial fears with results from Virginia’s down-ballot election for lieutenant governor — a contest where the Republican candidate, Winsome Sears, made history by becoming the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, for example, emphatically mocked the notion that “voters called white supremacists elected a Black Lt. Gov.” Conservative commentators on Fox News and Twitter, including Sears herself, also used the historic victory as an ostensible shield against accusations of Republican racism.
But supporting a Black candidate hardly precludes voters from harboring racist beliefs and motivations. Republicans are increasingly more likely than Democrats to hold prejudiced views of minorities, so Black Republicans like Sears often draw especially strong support from white Americans with otherwise anti-Black views simply because they draw most of their support from Republican voters.
A clear example of this was in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Ben Carson made a bid to become the GOP’s first African American presidential nominee. Support for Carson was positively correlated with the belief that Black Americans have too much influence on U.S. politics, according to data from Washington University in St. Louis’s American Panel Survey (TAPS) in late 2015:
Whites who thought African Americans had “far too little” influence disliked Carson and preferred Hillary Clinton by 60 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup. Meanwhile, Carson was very popular among whites who were most concerned about African Americans having “too much” influence in politics. So much so that whites who thought African Americans have “far too much” influence preferred Carson to Clinton by 45 points.   
Again, much of that relationship is down to partisanship — Republicans are more likely to hold prejudiced views and also more likely to support a Republican candidate. But that’s the point: For many white GOP voters, anti-Black views don’t seem to get in the way of supporting a Black Republican.
You can see a similar pattern in the January 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Study. Carson received more favorable evaluations among the sizable minority (40 percent) of overtly prejudiced whites who agreed with the racist stereotype that “most African Americans are more violent than most whites.” This group rated Carson significantly more favorably on a 0-100 scale than the white moderate Republican presidential candidate, Jeb Bush (52 to 39, respectively). Then-candidate Donald Trump was the only politician in the survey who was rated higher than Carson among overtly prejudiced whites.1                
The contrast between how prejudiced whites rated Carson and Obama is rather revealing, as well. The sharp negative relationship between support for Obama and the endorsement of anti-Black stereotypes is consistent with several studies showing that prejudice was an unusually strong predictor of opposition to Obama from the 2008 election through the end of his presidency. These patterns also fit well with other political science research showing that racially prejudiced whites tend to be more opposed to Black Democrats than to white Democrats.          
To make sense of why racially prejudiced white Americans are willing to support some Black candidates, it is worth considering why they so strongly oppose Black Democrats in the first place. Given the racialized nature of the two-party system in the United States, most Black political candidates are Democrats who embrace liberal positions on issues of race and justice. When asked whether they would support such a candidate, research shows that racially prejudiced white voters worry that these candidates will represent the interests of Black Americans, both because of a shared African American identity  and because Democrats are perceived as the party more supportive of Black interests. So, it makes sense that racially resentful white Americans oppose candidates like Obama, as his racial identity and partisanship signaled to voters that he was more supportive of Black interests than prior presidents. 
Put another way: Racially prejudiced white voters are not opposed to Black candidates simply because they are Black, but because they believe that most Black candidates will fight for “those people” and not “people like us.”
Black Republicans, on the other hand, are perceived differently by racially prejudiced white Americans. Their embrace of the Republican Party and its conservative ideology help assure racially prejudiced whites that, unlike Black Democrats, they are not in the business of carrying water for their own racial group. Instead, they are viewed as distinct from other Black elites. If Blackness is viewed as intertwined with a kind of racial liberalism that is antagonistic to the interests of white Americans, Black Republicans’ partisan and ideological commitments allay concerns that they are for “them,” not “us.”
This argument is buttressed by more recent scholarship in political science, which has found that Black candidates who embrace a “bootstrap” ideology — an ideology that focuses on individual versus structural explanations of inequality — are more positively evaluated by racially prejudiced whites relative to their white competitors. Explaining this finding, the authors note that racially prejudiced white voters “might find black Republicans delivering an individualism message more favorable than they might find other candidates delivering a similar message precisely because the aesthetic character and the partisan affiliation of the messenger contradict racial and political expectations.” LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, a professor of political science at Princeton University, similarly shows in her book “Race to the Bottom” that racially resentful whites respond well to Black candidates who take stances against the expected positions of their racial group — a phenomenon she calls “racial distancing.”
Finally, voting for Black Republicans may also be especially appealing to racially prejudiced whites because it assuages concerns of being seen as racist by enabling them to say, in essence, “I can’t be racist! I voted for a Black candidate!” Psychologists call this “moral credentialing,” and there’s even some evidence that voters who expressed support for Obama shortly after the 2008 election felt more justified in favoring white Americans over Black Americans. Electing a Black Republican like Sears, who railed against critical race theory during the run-up to the election and supports voting restrictions that adversely affect racial minorities, is similarly used as a symbolic shield by the entire party from inevitable charges of championing racist policies. As we mentioned earlier, conservative media outlets and politicians are already weaponizing her victory against anyone who would dare suggest so.    
But, of course, the role race and racism play in American politics is much more nuanced than those simplistic defenses suggest. When racially prejudiced whites oppose Black candidates, it’s not just because of the candidate’s skin color. It’s also because they perceive (sometimes wrongly) that Black candidates, especially Black Democrats, have ideological commitments that are at odds with the interests of white Americans. Likewise, when racially prejudiced whites support Black Republicans, it’s hardly the case that they’ve become progressive on race. Racially prejudiced whites did not vote for Sears because they appreciated her attachment and commitment to Black people. They were willing to support her because they discounted it. 
Race, after all, is a social construct. It has meaning because we imbue it with meaning. Racially prejudiced whites are not hostile to Blackness, per se. They are hostile to a particular manifestation of Blackness — one that reflects a commitment to racial justice and the advancement of the group’s collective goals. Racially prejudiced whites are not bothered much by a manifestation of Blackness that is ideologically consistent with their own identities and attitudes. Why would they be? Sears’s conservative politics don’t threaten the racial hierarchy, and her candidacy provides cover for a party that’s often antagonistic to racial minorities. For racially prejudiced whites, the real question is what is there not to love about Black politicians like Sears?               

Recent weeks has seen the announcement of two new drugs that could potentially treat acute COVID-19 infections. The UK approved molnupiravir by Merck, which will now be tested in clinical trials and likely licensed early next year. Meanwhile, Pfizer a day later announced Paxlovid, which it says is 89% effective in preventing hospitalizations and death, and now seeks FDA approval. If one or both of these antiviral drugs works out, what could this mean for the pandemic?

Right now there are several tools we have for tackling the COVID pandemic. One is public health measures to reduce spread of the disease – masking, social distancing, avoiding crowds, especially in indoor spaces, isolating if exposed or sick, testing, and contact tracing. Together these methods have been critical to minimizing the spread of COVID, but they are not enough on their own to stop the pandemic or prevent spikes in infection. There are also, of course, vaccines, which reduce the chance of contracting the illness if exposed, reduces the severity of illness if you do get it, and reduces the chance of passing on the virus to others. Vaccines are rightly considered our best hope for ending the pandemic, or at least having life return mostly to normal.

We also need to treat people who become sick with COVID despite preventive measures. Here also there are two types of interventions: supportive, and anti-viral. Supportive measures reduce the symptoms and complications of infection, and keep people alive until their immune system can fight off the infection. Using steroids like prednisone has turned out to be one of the most effective measures, because the most severe outcomes from COVID are likely due to the body’s immune reaction to infection, the worst being so-called cytokine storm. It may also be necessary to intubate patients with severe illness so that a ventilator can breathe for them until their lungs recover, although it was discovered that delaying intubation as long as possible may improve outcomes. A March 2021 systematic review, however, found no difference in all-cause mortality between early and late intubation, so at least there is no advantage to early intubation and no risk from delay.

The high-tech treatment for COVID has been some type of immunoglobulin treatment. This can be intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), which is simply pooled antibody proteins from many donors. It can also be hyperimmune gamma globulin, which is taken from donors who have had COVID-19 (convalescent plasma), and is considered more effective than regular IVIG. There are also monoclonal antibodies, which are one type of antibody against SARS-Cov-2 (usually the spike protein) which have to be produced in a bioreactor (not taken from people). Research into all of these antibody treatments is ongoing, but overall they have some efficacy in reducing the severity of illness. However, they are expensive and of limited availability, and so by themselves are not going to have a large impact on the pandemic.

Finally, we have therapeutic treatments, specifically direct anti-viral drugs. This treatment option for COVID has so-far eluded medical experts. There have been many proposed treatments, the most famous (or infamous) have been hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. We have discussed these two drugs extensively here so I won’t go over them again, except to say that neither drug has been shown to be an effective treatment for COVID-19 in clinical trials, and neither is recommended for use. They have, however, become very politically controversial. As an aside it does demonstrate how easy it is for those with political or anti-science agenda to flip the script as needed. In this case some of them reject a safe and effective preventive measure (vaccines), in favor of an unproven pharmaceutical treatment for the disease once it occurs.

Despite all the controversy over the past almost two years, we may now finally have two antiviral drugs that actually work. The data for Pfizer’s Paxlovid is particularly impressive, if it holds up to review. They report the result of a phase 2/3 double-blind placebo-controlled trial in patients with COVID who were not hospitalized:

The scheduled interim analysis showed an 89% reduction in risk of COVID-19-related hospitalization or death from any cause compared to placebo in patients treated within three days of symptom onset (primary endpoint); 0.8% of patients who received PAXLOVID™ were hospitalized through Day 28 following randomization (3/389 hospitalized with no deaths), compared to 7.0% of patients who received placebo and were hospitalized or died (27/385 hospitalized with 7 subsequent deaths).

This is a good absolute and relative risk reduction, essentially making COVID a much less deadly illness. If used widely this treatment would significantly reduce the COVID burden on the hospital system. While the data was presented as 89% relative risk reduction in hospitalization or death, it should be noted there were zero deaths in the treatment group (compared to 7 in the placebo group). The FDA must now review this data and determine if they will give the drug an emergency use authorization (EUA) and start the process for full approval. They may also ask for more data, which would certainly come in any case as researchers track the results of treatment.

Merck’s drug, meanwhile, was shown to have a 50% reduction in hospitalization – from 14% to 7%, with deaths decreased from 8 to zero. This is a similar outcome, but it’s hard to do a direct comparison because of different populations and methods. But it’s safe to say that both drugs are highly effective.

Hopefully by early next year one or both of these drugs will be available to treat patients newly diagnosed with COVID-19 (whether under an EUA or as part of ongoing clinical trials). What does this mean for the pandemic? This is, potentially, huge news, and could be a game-changer. In the best-case scenario where both drugs are confirmed to be safe and highly effective, this would mean that the lethality of COVID-19 is dramatically mitigated, reducing hospitalizations and deaths. This would be a very welcome respite for overburdened hospital systems and workers, which will have a significant downstream benefit to health care overall. We may also finally start to see the mortality rate for COVID start to dramatically come down.

The vaccines have clearly been the most important medical development for tackling this pandemic, and this will remain true. Vaccines are necessary to reduce spread and avoid spikes in illness, and to allow life to return to normal. But it also increasingly looks like, despite the availability of vaccines, we are going to have to live with COVID-19 for the foreseeable future. It will likely become endemic like the flu. Having effective anti-viral treatments will therefore be essential to reducing the health burden of this virus.

A couple weeks ago at my local CVS, I spied them in the wild for the very first time—Abbott BinaxNOWs, currently America’s most sought-after rapid, at-home coronavirus test, piled neatly behind the counter.With the fall and winter holidays on the way, I figured it was a good opportunity to stock up. But after I asked for a few tests to cover my multi-person household, the pharmacist plucked just a single box off the stack. “One box per customer,” she told me, shaking her head as if she’d already had this conversation four or five times that day. “Sorry, but we can’t keep these tests on the shelves.” She paused. “I mean,” she added, “there’s two tests in this box.” I left the store clutching my lone, overpriced purchase ($23.99! For one box!) to my chest like contraband, feeling frustrated.As the weather cools and people flock indoors, tests, when combined with other measures such as vaccines, ventilation, and masks, could help make our upcoming festivities safer—we’ve known that for a very long time. But nearly two years into the pandemic, America still hasn’t bothered to prepare for the tough months ahead. Cheap, at-home coronavirus tests have been in short supply, and although their availability is slowly ticking up, a crush of demand around Thanksgiving will almost certainly make the search difficult again. This year, tests, not turkeys, might turn out to be the most expensive, prep-heavy fixtures of many a Thanksgiving table. The power of tests depends on people being able to access and afford them, and use them correctly and frequently enough. But scarcity could prompt people to use the tests in nonideal ways, as my pharmacist was verging on advising me to do.“A box of two tests is really meant to be used on one person,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. The goal here is serial testing, particularly if the first result is negative. Tests offer snapshots, not forecasts, and a virus that’s at first sparse in the airway can rocket up to high levels in a matter of hours or days, especially if it’s a speedster like the Delta variant. The BinaxNOW actually spells this out in the instruction manual: “A positive result is highly accurate, but a negative result does not rule out infection.”Other types of coronavirus tests, including PCR tests, typically need just one try to detect the virus. (Of course, no test is perfect.) Those tests repeatedly xerox SARS-CoV-2’s genetic material, so they can pick up the pathogen even when it’s not abundant. Antigen tests such as the BinaxNOW, however, simply scan for the bits of coronavirus proteins that are already there. They’ll probably catch most dense infections—ones that saturate the airway with virus, as tends to happen when people are quite contagious—but an early, low-level infection could be easily missed. The tests are also best at spotting the virus in the few days after symptoms first appear; when they’re used to screen people who feel healthy, including people who were very recently exposed, the results can be a bit more mixed. Those imperfect results wouldn’t be such a big deal if we could say that people carrying less virus didn’t pose a huge transmission risk. But “we still don’t know how much virus you need to transmit,” Esther Babady, a clinical microbiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, told me. A negative result can’t guarantee that someone won’t spread the virus.To buoy accuracy, Abbott tells users to take a second test 36 to 72 hours after the first—that’s how the product can provide “the best coverage,” Mary Rodgers, a principal scientist in Abbott’s diagnostics business, wrote in an email. Say I split a box of two tests between my spouse and me; the confirmation goes away, and the products lose punch.[Read: The wrong way to test yourself for the coronavirus]After my disappointing CVS encounter, I wanted the security of having more tests around. But when I checked, CVS was sold out of the tests online too, as well as a very similar product, the Quidel QuickVue. So was Walgreens. And Walmart. Amazon had the QuickVue in stock—if I was willing to buy 45 two-packs for $1,079.55 (and swaddle myself in swabs while my bank froze my credit to investigate aberrant spending). It’s no wonder that several experts told me they’d started stockpiling tests for the holidays weeks, if not months ago, long before most Americans were even thinking about preordering their birds.Even when not purchased in bulk, the tests quickly add up in cost: For Thanksgiving, for example, I’d ideally want a two-pack for myself, so I could take one in advance, a day or two before the dinner, and then a second one right before the event. Then I’d want another two-pack that I’d start about three days after, to make sure that I hadn’t caught the virus while celebrating. Multiply that by eight people—a totally reasonable size for a Turkey Day soiree—and I’d be looking at 32 tests, packaged into 16 boxes, and close to a $400 bill, if we’re talking standard-price BinaxNOWs. (Consider: A budget turkey, buxom enough to feed eight people, can go for about $15; even truly bougie birds don’t often cost more than $150.) Even absent a shortage, that’s way out of reach for most American families, including many of the ones who most need access to fast and easy tests.The Biden administration has, in recent months, taken big steps to juice up the manufacture and distribution of rapid tests in the United States, including invoking the Defense Production Act, and pledging some $3 billion in federal funds to the cause. Dozens of these products already have an emergency green light from the FDA; more will follow. Mara Aspinall, an expert in biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University, told me that she expects tests to be significantly more available through November and December. (Aspinall is on the board of OraSure Technologies, one of several companies that manufactures rapid coronavirus tests.)Not all of those tests will be headed straight to drugstore shelves, though. Many will end up in doctors’ offices and other health-care settings, to be used as point-of-care alternatives to slower laboratory tests; others will be bought by businesses hoping to screen people at conferences or workplaces, perhaps to comply with a mandate. The Biden administration’s pledge to produce more “rapid” tests is also a catchall—every test that falls into this category is fast, but not all are intended for easy, at-home, over-the-counter use. A few require a prescription; a few need a telehealth proctor to supervise the process. Their design and price tags vary too; some, like the BinaxNOW, look for antigens, while others, such as the Lucira, are sped-up PCR-like tests. Those latter ones also tend to cost a lot more, many upwards of $50 a pop. The administration has said that about 200 million at-home rapid tests could be available to Americans each month by the end of the year, but in a country with 330 million residents, that will go only so far.[Read: The nonsensical loophole in Biden’s vaccine mandate]I’ve been intermittently checking online retail sites since the CVS incident, and the tests do seem to have become more available. My CVS is still limiting purchases, but in the past couple of days, I was told once that I could now buy two boxes and another time that I could buy four. Even so, several experts told me they’re worried about the surge in demand that could come in the few days before Thanksgiving. “Trying to get those tests the week of will be an unmitigated disaster,” Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told me. The best move will probably involve nabbing some tests well before the turkey starts defrosting or brining.Aspinall also recommends taking a “test agnostic” approach. Serially administering antigen tests is great; so is scoring a no- or low-cost PCR swab at a community site, if there’s time to wait for results. If needed, families with no recent exposures, who are headed into low-risk gatherings—at which everyone’s vaccinated and meeting outdoors, for instance—might be able to get away with antigen-testing just once. Shortcutting tests, though, gets riskier when entering crowds of strangers or places where the virus is surging, or mingling with uninoculated people, sans masks or indoors. “Then you should be doing two [at-home rapid] tests,” Aspinall said. (She and her husband always test twice before visiting their young grandson.) And no matter how or how often negative results are produced, they aren’t insta-armor against SARS-CoV-2, Babady told me. Tests offer none of the protection that vaccines do, and work best when accompanied by other measures that actively prevent infection from taking hold.But tests can be such a powerful partner to shots and masks that they’re worth seeking out. After spending some quality time with my laptop this weekend, I was able to find several retailers selling at-home antigen tests at $14 per two-pack (about as cheap as they come in the United States); I finally bought enough to keep my household supplied through our expected December gatherings. Even testing at home drains time and resources. More supply will hopefully solve the first problem and help with the second—but for now, adequate testing remains a privilege reserved for those who can afford it.

Special forces troops patrol at Prado Avenue following the protests in Cuba, Havana (Photo: Yander Zamora/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)Watching the Berlin Wall come down from political exile in London, the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote that it was “socialism that has defeated socialism.” Even as the Soviet Union could send a man into space and produce enough rockets to incinerate the globe many times over, it was unable to provide its people with basic necessities. The Soviet Union’s socialist economic model disincentivized productive activity, which led to economic stagnation. When the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to reform the system, it collapsed. More than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the distortions that plague Cuba today resemble those of its former benefactor, whose economic model the island adopted in the early 1960s following Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the American-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. In recent months, socialism’s economic failures have produced an increasingly febrile atmosphere on the island, particularly among the nation’s youth. And in July of this year, angered by the government’s inability to provide essential goods including food and medicine, something unprecedented happened: Cubans took to the streets in large numbers to protest against the regime. Since the protests, Cuba has largely disappeared from the headlines. The Cuban government’s response to the protests was swift and brutal. On the surface, at least, an appearance of calm prevails on the streets of Cuba. Yet, the material conditions that gave rise to July’s protests are still present. Indeed, while change in Cuba is by no means imminent, the kaleidoscope has been shaken. As the revolutionary generation dies off and loses its grip on power, the dictatorship looks increasingly unsteady.The last time any significant protest occurred in Cuba was in August 1994, at the height of the so-called Special Period of economic hardship following the collapse of the Soviet Union. After aid from the Soviet Bloc was cut off, Cuba lost about 35% of its GDP. The protests were relatively small in number, and in an era before social media, most Cubans didn’t know they happened at all.The advent of social media made this July’s protests different. Videos of the protest beamed across the island on social networks with the hashtags #SOSCuba and #CubaLibre. As the footage spread, thousands of Cubans, from Holguin in the east to Havana in the west, took to the streets chanting “Liberty” and “Motherland and Life,” the latter a play on the government’s macabre slogan “Homeland or Death.” The Cuban government’s response was immediate. Cuban special forces, known as “boinas negras” (black berets), were deployed to the streets, as were plainclothes state security officials. In coordination with the police, they arrested and rounded up protestors in large numbers. Soon, reports of abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of the authorities began to leak out.Within hours of the protests starting, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel appeared on state television to issue a “combat order,” in which he encouraged government supporters to take to the streets and violently confront the protesters. The authorities temporarily shut down the internet and blocked messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. The Cuban government also punished journalists and critical voices by targeting them for arrest and restricting their movement. According to Reporters Without Borders, 15 journalists were “threatened, attacked, arrested or placed under house arrest by State Security during or shortly after the anti-government protests.” During a particularly dramatic moment, the Cuban activist and critic of the government Dina Stars was arrested live on air during an online interview with a Spanish news program.Over the ensuing days, hundreds of more people that the government accused of being associated with the protests were arrested. According to Cubalex, a non-profit organization that promotes human rights in Cuba, at least 949 people were detained following the protests. According to a Human Rights Watch report released on October 19, hundreds of Cubans remain in prison or under house arrest, including some children under age 18. Opposition activists report being refused lawyers, though the Cuban government denies this. To understand the recent protests, it is important to look beyond the romantic socialist iconography surrounding “Fidel” and “Che” and understand how Cuba arrived at such a dire economic situation.  Though the Cuban dictatorship and its sympathizers claim that American imperialism is to blame for most of Cuba’s economic troubles, the vast majority of the blame truly rests with the state socialist model. The distortions that stymie the Cuban economy resemble those that have historically plagued other Soviet-style systems. The poor performance of agriculture—a sector the leftist Cuban American intellectual Samuel Farber refers to as “the Achilles’ heel of Soviet-type economies”—means that Cuba imports between 60 and 70 percent of its basic foods. Sugar production, once central to the Cuban economy, has declined precipitously over the years due to a failure to adequately maintain and modernize sugar mills. The island’s economic failures are compounded by bureaucratic authoritarianism, which means that functionaries tell their superiors what they want to hear, rather than the truth, resulting in erroneous economic data and decision making.To be sure, there are real effects of the American economic embargo on Cuba. For example, the embargo reduces Cuba’s access to dollars, hindering its trading relationships with the rest of the world. And for the greater part of 60 years, the embargo has also blocked American investment and tourism on the island. Yet, as Farber has persuasively argued in his book, Cuba since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment, those effects “have helped to hide from the Cuban people and the regime’s sympathizers abroad the systemic inefficiency and waste inherent in the bureaucratic system.” The aggressive actions of the Trump administration—many of which the Biden administration has kept in place—only strengthened the hand of such belligerent, anti-reformist elements in the Cuban government, who could now claim that all of the island's economic woes were the product of American repression. The economic situation in Cuba has been dire for many decades, but Covid-19 delivered a sharp blow to the Cuban economy by shuttering the island’s tourist industry, one of the country’s primary sources of hard currency. Though Cuba was praised internationally for its initial Covid-19 efforts that kept case numbers relatively low, a rush to re-open the island to tourists in 2021 brought cases of the especially contagious Delta variant. By July of this year, Cuba had the highest rate of Covid-19 cases in the Americas. The country’s vaunted healthcare system was overwhelmed with Covid patients and reportedly close to collapse in parts of the country. The combined economic and health disasters fueled a wave of discontent which finally erupted in the July protests.Though the protests exposed a previously unseen level of disaffection with the Cuban communist regime, they were also disorganized and lacked ideological coherence. There is no official opposition in Cuba, and the government has successfully infiltrated even mildly critical opposition movements with its network of spies.As long as members of the so-called “historic generation” of revolutionaries cling to power, any political and economic reform will face considerable government resistance. Moreover, the centralized economic model prevents ordinary citizens from accumulating capital and becoming powerful enough to challenge the status quo, while a Leninist political culture stamps out any nascent civil society before it can emerge. Even so, minor shifts in the currents of power are occasionally discernible: reforming voices within the Cuban government have already taken advantage of the July protests to push through reforms allowing more freedom for small and medium-sized businesses. But the screws have been tightened in other areas too. In August, the government introduced Decree-Law 35, a draconian ruling that requires telecommunications providers to interrupt, suspend, or terminate their services when a user publishes information that is “fake” or affects “public morality” and the “respect of public order.”Change in Cuba, when it comes, will likely be driven by factions within the military because that is where true power in the country rests. Upon succeeding his brother Fidel in 2008, Cuba’s long-standing defense minister, Raul Castro, oversaw the expansion of the military into key sectors of the economy. As a result, today the military is one of the key pillars of the system holding things together. The Armed Forces Business Enterprises Group (GAESA), a subsection of the Cuban military, controls between 40 percent to 60 percent of the Caribbean island’s foreign exchange earnings. GAESA’s tourism arm, Gaviota, manages 83 of the island’s hotels (comprising over a third of all available hotel rooms). The military also controls supermarkets and other stores which sell expensive imported products in hard currency.For now, July’s protests have been repressed, and an enforced political silence prevails on the streets of Cuba once more. However, behind closed doors, yet another generation of young Cubans will undoubtedly be dreaming of a new life elsewhere, away from their homeland. In the meantime, they must wait: wait for hours in lines for basic necessities, and wait for change in a country whose creaking communist revolution offers only the same tired slogans. James Bloodworth is a journalist and the author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain.

(Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)Republicans are in a triumphalist mood. Last week’s red wave election has many in the GOP counting on a crimson tsunami come next year’s midterms and fueled even more confidence that Joe Biden will be a one-term president. Some skepticism is in order, though a little triumphalism is warranted as well.Democrats can obsess all they want about alleged racist dog whistles in Virginia to explain how Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor—and Winsome Sears, the black Republican candidate for lieutenant governor—won so handily, flipping Democratic counties red, outperforming former President Donald Trump’s 2020 margins everywhere, and erasing Biden’s huge margins in 2020. Even if you believe that the GOP bought the Virginia victory on the race card, it doesn’t explain why New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy won by a very slim margin against his Republican challenger when Biden had a 16-point margin of victory in New Jersey against Trump in 2020.How the midterms will go depends largely on events outside of Republican control, partly for the obvious reason that Republicans don’t control anything in Washington. If the congressional elections were last week, it’s not unreasonable to think the Democrats might have lost 40 or 50 seats in the House and several seats in the Senate. But a year from now the supply chain problems could be worked out, the Delta variant and inflation could be a distant memory, and the overall economy heading back to the post-COVID boom we thought was coming early last summer. If schools have a return to normalcy too, perhaps the parent revolt in Virginia and New Jersey will dissipate. Also, the bipartisan infrastructure package Biden secured on Friday may turn out to be popular enough to make everyone forget the ugliness of the process that delivered it.The biggest X factor, however, is Trump. Some Republicans believe that Youngkin’s hyper-disciplined campaign shows the path out of the Trump captivity: Take his endorsement, praise him enough not to make him or his supporters mad, but not so much that you alienate independents and anti-Trump Republicans. This needle-threading ruined former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s plan to repeat California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent recall strategy of running against Trump.Here’s the problem: This strategy depended not just on Youngkin’s discipline but on Trump’s as well. Trump wisely didn’t get in Youngkin’s way, despite desperate taunting from McAuliffe with even Biden joining in. Youngkin proved that if Trump is a team player and doesn’t tell his voters to stay home (as he essentially did in the Georgia January Senate runoffs, costing two seats) they’ll come out. Any formula that hinges on Trump’s being a team player is going to run into trouble. ABC’s Jonathan Karl reports in his new book that last January, Trump wanted to leave the GOP and start his own party.Besides, in the wake of Virginia’s election, a strategy premised on the idea that the secret to success is keeping Trump at arm’s length is particularly fraught. Even if Trump isn’t planning to run for president in 2024, he will not tolerate the idea that he’s not the leader of the Republican Party. Unsurprisingly, Trump has already said he’ll be “very involved” in the midterms, which means the Youngkin strategy is already something of a nonstarter.Fortunately for Republicans, there’s considerable room for Trump to meddle in the midterms—and exact more vengeance on those who supported impeachment—without hampering the party’s ability to take back the majority in the House. However, the Senate, which requires candidates to run statewide with more diverse electorates, could be a different story.The real question is 2024. One of the lessons of last week’s elections is that Republicans can win back suburban and independent voters by talking about real issues, exploiting Biden’s weaknesses, and highlighting the Democrats’ excesses. If Trump is in the race, he has made it clear what he’ll talk about. “If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020,” Trump said last month, “Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It’s the single most important thing for Republicans to do.”Youngkin could avoid talking about Trump’s false claims about a stolen election while running for governor without antagonizing Trump or his superfans. It’s a lot harder to sidestep Trump when he’s actually onstage with you in a presidential debate.

All respiratory pandemics follow a script, one that's as much social and political as it is medical or epidemiological, says Yale sociologist and medical doctor Nicholas Christakis, who has just released a new paperback edition of his authoritative book, Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.
In his conversation with Nick Gillespie, Christakis pulls no punches when slamming the failures of our politicians and public health officials to act quickly and speak honestly about the COVID-19 pandemic which has left 750,000 Americans dead. 
As a newly minted member of the advisory council for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and a high-profile target of ultra-woke campus activists, Christakis talks about how COVID misinformation has also been spread by pundits and politicians who seem more interested in pushing ideology than science and why the best way forward—really, the only way forward—is through robust debate in the public square. He also argues that recent events on campuses—such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology canceling a talk by a scientist due to his critical views on affirmative action—underscore the need for a radical shift in favor of free speech at our colleges and universities. 
Christakis previously appeared on The Reason Interview in April 2019, to discuss his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society and his viral showdown with students over Halloween costumes. Listen to it or watch it here.

For the past half-century, postmodernist thinkers have been trying to discredit truth, identity and reality. Identity is a straitjacket, and truth is just some middle-aged academic’s opinion. As for reality, it has become as obsolete as dressing for dinner. Objectivity is a myth in the service of the ruling powers. If only we could shed these illusions, we could revel in a world of infinite possibility. Instead of waking up to the same tedious old self each morning, we could flit from one identity to another as easily as David Bowie. The final liberation is that anything can mean anything else. Once you kick away fixed meanings and firm foundations, you are free to enjoy yourself. Postmodernism is meant to be fun, even if a current of nihilism runs steadily beneath it. As Stuart Jeffries suggests in this splendidly readable survey, there is something vacuous at the heart of its exuberance.

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Even so, postmodernism is intended to be subversive. Since civilisation works by order and authority, challenging these things is bound to seem disruptive. The trouble is that neoliberalism challenges them too. Nothing is more fluid and flexible than the marketplace. Nobody on Wall Street believes in absolute truth. The true anarchists are the free marketeers. So is postmodernism a critique of the status quo or a capitulation to it?

Postmodernism may be playful, witty and depthless, but so is the British prime minister

Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both – to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to distinguish the boss from the bohemian. Postmodernism may be playful, witty and depthless, but so is the British prime minister. It is unashamedly populist, defiantly embracing the everyday, but so is Nigel Farage. As Jeffries points out, Steve Jobs was “selling conformity masquerading as personal liberation”. He may have thought of himself as a hippie, but the Chinese factories that made his products had suicide nets beneath the windows of its dormitories for exploited workers. Madonna is seen by some as a feminist guerrilla fighter and by others as peddling rape fantasies, along with the most successful coffee table book (Sex) of all time. Post-truth politics may have started on the left bank of the Seine, but they ended up in the White House.

Some studies of postmodernism are cultural, some are historical and a few of them are philosophical. The achievement of this book is to roll all three approaches into one. This is rare, because those who know about Sid Vicious may not be avid readers of Michel Foucault, while those who are deep in Jacques Derrida are not always fans of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. Jeffries packs a remarkable knowledge of postmodern culture into these pages, from punk, hip-hop, film and photography to anti-psychiatry, the Rushdie fatwa and queer theory. All this is set in the context of the neoliberalism of the 1970s, showing how a revamped capitalism gave birth to a culture of the flexible and provisional – of short-termism, endless consumption and multiple identities.

Postmodernism may be a historical fact, but it finds history itself a bore. The past is simply a collection of styles to be recycled, while the future will be just like the present only with a richer array of options. There are no more grand narratives like the idea of progress, no momentous transformation to be feared or hoped for. The point is not to change the world but to parody it. History has come to an end with Ben & Jerry’s and Grand Theft Auto.

When two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, a new grand narrative – the conflict between the west and Islamism – began to unfold. For some observers, this spelled the end of the postmodern era. Jeffries himself is not so sure: it may have lost some of its youthful zest, but its malign spirit still lives on. Postmodern ideas certainly survive in the current scepticism of truth. For a whole generation of young people, simply to have a conviction is to be guilty of dogmatism. When asked about his convictions, Boris Johnson replied that he had picked up a couple of them for speeding. To suggest that someone’s opinion is false is a form of discrimination. Every viewpoint should be respected, except for racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism and antisemitism, which are deeply offensive. So they are, but how do you decide this if moral objectivity is for the birds? There are writers today who rightly insist that women have been shackled and humiliated throughout history, yet who put words like truth and reality in scare quotes.

The most useless theory of knowledge is one that prevents us from saying with reasonable certainty, for example, that a great many Africans were once enslaved by the west. Yet you can find such theories of knowledge in most seminar rooms, even if those who tout them can rightly think of little more outrageous than slavery. Perhaps Jeffries’s compelling critique will help to sort them out.

The US president, Joe Biden, faces a critical decision: whom to appoint as chair of the Federal Reserve – arguably the most powerful position in the global economy.

The wrong choice can have grave consequences. Under Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the Fed failed to regulate the banking system adequately, setting the stage for the worst global economic downturn in 75 years. That crisis and policymakers’ response to it have had far-reaching political consequences, exacerbating inequality and nurturing a lingering sense of grievance in those who lost their houses and jobs.

There are a host of cliches about why the current chair, Jerome Powell, should be reappointed. Doing so would be a demonstration of bipartisanship. It would reinforce the Fed’s credibility. We need a seasoned hand to steer us through the post-pandemic recovery. And so on. I heard all the same arguments 25 years ago when I was chair of the US president’s Council of Economic Advisers and Greenspan was being considered for reappointment. They were enough to convince Bill Clinton, and the country paid a high price for his decision.

Ironically, former president Ronald Reagan gave short shrift to these arguments when he effectively fired Paul Volcker in 1987, denying him reappointment after he had tamed inflation. Reagan owed Volcker a great deal, but because he wanted to pursue deregulation, he opted for Greenspan, an acolyte of Ayn Rand.

Economic policymaking requires careful judgment and a recognition of trade-offs. How important is inflation versus jobs and growth? How confident can we be that markets are efficient, stable, fair, and competitive on their own? How concerned should we be about inequality? America’s two main parties have always had markedly different but clearly articulated perspectives on these matters (at least until the Republicans’ descent into populist madness).

To my mind, the Democrats are right to worry more about the consequences of joblessness. The 2008 crisis showed that unfettered markets are neither efficient nor stable. Moreover, we know that marginalised groups have been brought into the economy and wage disparities reduced only when labour markets are tight.

The coming years are likely to test any Fed chair. The US is already facing tough judgment calls concerning inflation and what to do about it. Are recent price increases mostly hiccups resulting from an unprecedented economic shutdown? How should the Fed think about the African-American employment rate, which still has not recovered to its pre-pandemic levels? Would raising interest rates (and thus unemployment) be a cure worse than the disease?

Equally, while the mispricing of mortgage-backed securities was central to the 2008 meltdown, there is now evidence of an even greater and more pervasive mispricing of assets related to climate change. What should the Fed do about that?

Powell is not the man for the moment. For starters, he supported former president Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda, risking the world’s financial health. And even now, he is reluctant to address climate risk, even though other central bankers around the world are declaring it the defining issue of the coming decades. Powell would say that climate issues are not included in the Fed’s mandate, but he would be wrong. Part of the Fed’s mandate is to ensure financial stability, and there is no greater threat to that than climate change.

The Fed is also responsible for approving mergers in the financial sector, and Powell’s record suggests that he has never seen a bad one. Such laxity is the last thing the economy needs right now. A glaring lack of competition and the absence of adequate regulation are already allowing for outsize profits, diminishing the supply of finance for small businesses, and providing the dominant players greater scope for taking advantage of others.

Some commentators have given Powell credit for the Fed’s response to the pandemic. But any college sophomore would have known not to tighten monetary policy and raise interest rates during a recession. Moreover, as Simon Johnson of MIT has argued, Powell does not have a deep commitment to full employment. On the contrary, as a member of the Fed board of governors for the past decade, Powell has a history of misjudgments in tightening monetary policy dating back to the “taper tantrum” of 2013.

Though many Fed watchers insist that inequality is not the central bank’s business, the fact is that Fed policies have major distributional effects that cannot be ignored. Just as prematurely raising interest rates can choke off growth, weak enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act allows for deeper concentrations of market power.

Finally, the recent ethics scandal involving market trades by top Fed officials has undermined confidence in the institution’s leadership. Powell’s seeming insensitivity to conflicts of interest has long worried me, including in the management of some of the Fed’s pandemic-response programs. With four years of Trump having already weakened trust in US institutions, there is a real risk that confidence in the Fed’s integrity will be undermined even further. No Fed official should need an ethics officer to decide when certain trades would appear unseemly.

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The Fed is in some ways like the US supreme court. It’s supposed to be above politics but, at least since Bush v. Gore, we’ve known that’s not true. Trump clarified that for any doubters. The Fed, too, is supposed to be independent, but Powell and Greenspan, as they followed their party’s deregulatory agenda, made clear that that also was not the case. But while the board makes crucial decisions affecting every aspect of the economy, power historically has been concentrated in the chair – far more so than with the supreme court chief justice. It is the Fed chair who decides what to bring to a vote, and which issues to slow-roll or fast-track. The climate issue is just one example of where it absolutely matters who is at the head of the table.

The US needs a Fed that is genuinely committed to ensuring a stable, fair, efficient, and competitive financial sector. Anyone who thinks that we can rely on unfettered markets, or that regulation has already gone too far, is not seeing clearly. We need neither an ideologue like Greenspan nor a Wall Street-minded lawyer such as Powell. Rather, we need someone who has a deep understanding of economics, and who shares Biden’s values and concerns about both inflation and employment.

There are undoubtedly many figures who could meet these conditions. But Biden doesn’t have to look far to find someone who has already shown her mettle. Lael Brainard is already on the board, where she has demonstrated her competence and gained the respect of markets – without compromising her values. Biden can have his cake and eat it: a Fed chair who maintains continuity and won’t roil markets, but shares his economic and social agenda.

Joseph E Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics, university professor at Columbia University and chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute.

Ⓒ Project Syndicate

SCIENTIST

E. O. Wilson: A Life in Nature

By Richard Rhodes

The scientist and naturalist E. O. Wilson has always reminded me of the great 19th-century German polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt: Both obsessed with empirical observation and detailed field study, they are also great synthesizers. They have the ability to focus on the tiniest detail — the minuscule gland of a fire ant, for example, in Wilson’s case — but can also zoom out to examine comparative patterns across species and global environments. Their minds are microscopic and telescopic at the same time. Their scientific books are sweeping in scope and thoroughly researched but also reveal their deep love for the natural world. And both are driven by what Wilson calls the “amphetamine of ambition.”

Wilson did not have a happy childhood. He was born in 1929 in Birmingham, Ala. His parents divorced when he was 7 and after that he lived an itinerant life with his alcoholic father. Over a period of nine years, Wilson went to 14 different schools. He found comfort in nature because “animals and plants I could count on,” he later explained, “human relationships were more difficult.” The young boy spent as much time outdoors as possible — Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., Wilson remembers, “became Uganda and Sumatra writ small.”

He was a lanky teenager who crawled on forest floors in search of the fascinating “netherworld” of ants. A childhood fishing accident left him partially blind and so he turned his healthy eye to small things that could be picked and brought up close to be inspected. At the age of 13, Wilson decided to survey a vacant plot of land next to his family’s house to find every nest and species of ant there. He made, in his own words, “the find of a lifetime” when he discovered an ant he had never seen before: an invasive red fire ant that had arrived from Argentina. In 1942, when he spotted it, no one had yet reported the presence of the invasive species in America. He also became a dedicated member of the Boy Scouts, an organization that brought his favorite pursuits together: outdoor life and natural history.

But one issue that kept coming up deserves particular attention: the sheer financial and logistical challenge of getting a new university going. This issue was cited by critics as proof that the project would inevitably end up as a diploma mill or grift, while friendlier voices cited it as reason that the figures involved in the new university should be trying to strengthen existing institutions instead.

The point itself is absolutely correct: You can’t start a real competitor to our major universities on the cheap. At the same time, though, America is an extremely rich country, with many great new fortunes rising in the internet era, and we’re supposed to be a dynamic one — the kind of place where competitors are always rising and falling, where start-ups regularly overthrow monopolies, where big social and technological changes yield new thinking, new movements, new institutions.

That’s our self-image, at least. Whether it matches reality is more doubtful — and the fact that we have seen so few important universities established since the 19th century, and that people who set out to start one are assumed to be engaged in a quixotic or foredoomed quest, is a notable case study in American stagnation.

A version of this point was made by Niall Ferguson, one of the advisers to the University of Austin, in a column making the case for the project. You don’t have to agree with his entire argument to recognize that he’s right about the striking dearth of new academic institutions, the striking sameness of the U.S. News & World Report lists year by year. Yes, occasionally existing schools dramatically reinvent themselves (as N.Y.U. and Washington University in St. Louis did in recent decades), or outsider colleges succeed as business propositions (like Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, cited by skeptics as an example of where the University of Austin might end up). But overall the elite-college landscape looks more like a cartel than a zone of thriving innovation.

This puzzle is not resolved by suggesting that it takes more money to start a top-flight college than it did when Leland Stanford or Johns Hopkins helped establish the schools that bear their family names. True, it would take hundreds of millions of dollars today, if not billions, to set a new college on its way. But the Stanford and Hopkins gifts came to hundreds of millions in today’s dollars, and as Ferguson notes, donors gave nearly $50 billion to American higher education in the 2019 fiscal year. Is it so implausible to imagine a world where 5 or 10 percent of that spending went to a few significant start-up universities? Alternatively, the federal government spent about $150 billion on higher education in 2018; a billion-dollar endowment for a new public university would cost a tiny fraction of that.

Astronomy seems to be in trouble, as it is increasingly populated by researchers who seem more concerned with terrestrial politics than celestial objects, and who at times view the search for truths about nature as threatening. This became obvious in recent years, once the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project in Hawaii was being blocked by Indigenous protestors, who view the mountain it is to be built on as sacred. With a resolution 12 times finer than the Hubble space telescope, the TMT could offer abundant new observational opportunities in astronomy and astrophysics. But a protest in support of the Indigenous groups by advocates in the astronomy community now means that it is an open question as to whether the TMT will ever be built.Mauna Kea is sacred to Native Hawaiian people. The Hawaiians who have been protesting construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope are trying to protect a sacred site from further desecration. I stand in solidarity with them. #TMT https://t.co/uInzGrrQp6— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 23, 2019
Last week yielded another ominous sign of the times, as eminent astronomer John Kormendy retracted an article intended for publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from a preprint website. His article focused on statistical results relating to the evaluation of the “future impact” of astronomers’ research as a means to “inform decisions on resource allocation such as job hires and tenure decisions.” Online critics attacked Kormendy’s use of quantitative metrics, which may be seen as casting doubt on the application of diversity criteria in personnel decisions, at which point Kormendy felt the need to release an abject apology (more on this below).Astronomer John Kormendy, photographed in 2006. Of course, statistical analyses of real-world human data are always subject to the possibility that systematic biases can inappropriately skew the claimed results. And I would never suggest that Kormendy’s work is beyond criticism. But the traditional scientific manner of engaging in such criticism is that other scientists present alternative proposals, and explore other data sets, to search for possible flaws in the original analysis. That is how science should be done. Those who claim in advance, without new analysis or data, that someone else’s research results are “harmful” or threatening, without challenging its accuracy, should consider another profession.I have been a professor of astronomy (as well as physics) for over 35 years, at a variety of research institutions on three continents. But I wouldn’t classify myself as an astronomer. My educational background is in another area—theoretical particle physics—and my professional forays into astrophysics and cosmology have stemmed from my longstanding interest in observing scientific phenomena from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, astronomy included, as a means of testing fundamental notions about nature.Nevertheless, I have worked with many astronomers over the course of my career, and consulted and learned from a far larger number. So I know enough about the social and professional dynamics of the profession to be concerned.One of the astronomers whose work I have been aware of for decades—and which reflects my interest in dark matter and the formation of the universe’s structure—is John Kormendy himself. Indeed, I briefly met him while visiting the Dominion Astrophysics Observatory in Victoria, Canada.That was several decades ago. But when I recently checked in with a colleague to determine how Kormendy’s reputation had fared during the interim, I was told he stands as one of the “world’s premier researchers on the formation and structure of galaxies.” He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, winner of numerous awards in his field, and his research work has been cited over 33,000 times by other astronomers.Kormendy has been interested for some time in metrics that scientists can use to ensure that their assessment of potential hires and promotions are less subjective. As with all areas in which decisions depend on human perceptions, there is no methodology that is universally guaranteed to work. Though I personally wouldn’t spend my own research time exploring this area, I appreciate that there are those willing to try to investigate it systematically, in spite of the many obvious obstacles.Following five years of accumulating data, and consulting colleagues across the globe, Kormendy produced a book on the subject, published in August by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, entitled Metrics of Research Impact in Astronomy, as well as the related (and now retracted) paper submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on November 1st under the title ‘Metrics of research impact in astronomy: Predicting later impact from metrics measured 10-15 years after the PhD.’Research Impact versus Total Citations for studied astronomy scholars, adapted from Figure 1 in Metrics of research impact in astronomy.Kormendy began his paper cautiously, recognizing that his emphasis on applying quantitative metrics to human-resource evaluation would be viewed with skepticism by those who claim that such metrics embed systemic biases, and that their use presents obstacles to inclusion. Notwithstanding such anticipated concerns, he argued thatwe have to judge the impact that [a] candidate’s research has had or may yet have on the history of his or her subject. Then metrics such as counts of papers published and citations of those papers are often used. But we are uncertain enough about what these metrics measure so that arguments about their interpretation are common. Confidence is low. This can persuade institutions to abandon reliance on metrics. [But] we would never dare to do scientific research with the lack of rigor that is common in career-related decisions. As scientists, we should aim to do better.”He makes it clear up front that quantitative metrics cannot tell us everything we need to know about a candidate. In the “Significance Statement” provided on the first page, he statesThis paper develops machinery to make quantitative predictions of future scientific impact from metrics measured immediately after the ramp-up period that follows the PhD. The aim is to resolve some of the uncertainty in using metrics for one aspect only of career decisions—judging scientific impact. Of course, those decisions should be made more holistically, taking into account additional factors that this paper does not measure (my emphasis).The bulk of the paper focuses on three out of 10 metrics—citations of refereed papers, citations normalized by numbers of coauthors, and first-author citations—which Kormendy attempts to develop into a prediction machine, correlating the metrics evaluated over the early part of a researcher’s career with their later “impact.”This latter index was constructed by asking 22 scientists who are well-known in their respective subfields to evaluate the impact of 512 astronomers from 17 major research universities around the world whose other early-career metrics could be correlated with those evaluations. Specifically, Kormendy sought to determine whether such evaluation of individuals’ “impact” 10 to 15 years after they’d received their PhDs correlated, in a significant way, with the metrics evaluated at that time and to those corresponding to these scholars during the early period following their PhD (in other words, whether the metrics could predict the evaluations rendered by the advisory panel). The paper claimed to demonstrate, not surprisingly, that averaging the three different metrics produces, on average, a better predictive estimate than any of the metrics do separately.One can question many aspects of this model, including the significance of its conclusions. That early-career citation counts correlate with later impact may seem almost tautological. (Why would you not expect that having a large number of citations early on in one’s career would be correlated with attaining a reputation as a high-impact scholar later on?) Also, the proposition that averaging several metrics produces a better predictive fit than does any individual metric in isolation would only really be noteworthy if it turned out not to be true.Finally, one can always question the subjective assessments of those 22 designated sages tasked with measuring “impact,” especially since their assessments (and Kormendy’s own decisions in regard to who performs this task) may reflect the same kind of subjectivity that Kormendy’s whole project is designed to avoid.I am not sure Kormendy understood the can of worms he was opening. But the response from the astronomy Twittersphere was swift. One could have anticipated the arguments in advance if one were familiar with the standard concerns of those who tend to view any quantitative metrics applied to assessment (including standardized test results) as being inherently suspect at best, or sexist and racist at worst. Kormendy further tempted fate by focusing only on subjects from well-known schools, and by recruiting mostly well-known male senior scientists as members of his expert “impact” panel.As it happened, those who rained criticism on Kormendy didn’t just limit themselves to these generalities. It was also specifically claimed that junior researchers who might read Kormendy’s paper would feel threatened, or that their careers might be negatively impacted by selection committees whose members were now further encouraged to be systematically biased against them.Nevertheless, even imperfect quantitative metrics can improve on qualitative assessments made in the absence of such metrics. And it is quite true that Kormendy’s analysis, if applied as a means to recruit or promote, would expose, for better or worse, those whose metrics are low. There may be lots of reasons for such low scores, including bias. But low scores can also mean that the evaluated researchers are simply not productive or impactful. Either way, it exposes potential problems (either with the candidate or his or her academic environment) that could be addressed. Moreover, as much as one might dislike quantitative—or “objective”—merit-based metrics, the alternatives have, historically, usually been worse—and include nepotism and cronyism.Yet by the standards of modern cancel culture, the online barrage of criticism against Kormendy did not seem especially ferocious. Unlike other furors, this one did not feature virally circulated demands for his sacking or other forms of cancellation. But surely there must have been some other pressure coming to bear on Kormendy, because he not only retracted his published paper and put further publication of his book on hold, but he also posted an apology whose language seemed out of all proportion to his actions:I apologize most humbly and sincerely for the stress that I have caused with the PNAS preprint, the PNAS paper, and my book on using metrics of research impact to help to inform decisions on career advancement. My goal was entirely supportive. I wanted to promote fairness and concreteness in judgments that now are based uncomfortably on personal opinion. I wanted to contribute to a climate that favors good science and good citizenship. My work was intended to be helpful, not harmful. It was intended to decrease bias and to improve fairness. It was hoped to favor inclusivity. It was especially intended to help us all to do the best science that we can … But intentions do not, in the end, matter. What matters is what my actions achieve. And I now see that my work has hurt people. I apologize to you all for the stress and the pain that I have caused. Nothing could be further from my hopes. The PNAS paper and … preprint have been withdrawn as thoroughly as the publication system allows. The … withdrawal—if accepted by them—should be in the Wednesday posting … I fully support all efforts to promote fairness, inclusivity, and a nurturing environment for all. Only in such an environment can people and creativity thrive.It is hard to know what specifically induced this kind of Maoist mea culpa. But Kormendy (or someone with authority over him) presumably was swayed by the online tempest. And an unfortunate effect will be that anyone observing how this played out will be warned off making their own inquiries in this field, for fear that they will meet the same fate. This is one reason why scientific articles should never be retracted simply because they might cause offense. Truth can hurt, but too bad.What makes this example particularly sad is that Kormendy’s intent was clearly to stimulate healthy discussion and improve fairness—notwithstanding the fact that the mobs claimed (and, if his apology is to be taken at face value, convinced him) that he was doing exactly the opposite. In his lengthy apology, he writes that “intentions do not, in the end, matter.” But of course, they matter. And in this case, not only were Kormendy’s intentions benign, but his original paper actually addressed (and even echoed) many of the critiques he later got:I emphasize that the goal of … this paper is to estimate impact accrued, not impact deserved. Historically, some people who made major contributions were, at the time, undervalued by the astronomical community. I hope that this work will help to make people more aware of the dangers of biased judgments and more focused on giving fair credit. How to make judgment and attribution more fair is very important. But it is not directly the subject of this work…My goal has been to lend a little of the analysis rigor that we use when we do research to the difficult and subjective process of judging research careers. But I do not suggest that we base decisions only on metrics. Judgments—especially decisions about hiring and tenure—should be and are made more holistically, weighing factors that metrics do not measure. For faculty jobs, these include teaching ability, good departmental citizenship, collegiality, and the “impedance match” between a person’s research interests and the resources that are available at that institute … Also, many factors other than research have, in the 2020s, become deservedly prominent in resource decisions. Heightened awareness of the importance of inclusivity has the result that institutions put special emphasis on redressing historically underrepresented cohorts. Urgent concerns are gender balance and the balance of ethnic minorities. How, relatively, to weight research impact and these concerns are issues that each institution must decide for itself … My job is restricted to one aspect only of career decisions—the judgment of research impact as it has already happened and as it can, with due regard for statistical uncertainties and outliers, be predicted to happen in future.I emphasize again that metrics measure the impact that happens, not the impact that should happen. It helps us to understand what happens in the real world. The real world is the only one that we have to live in. My hope is that a healthy—but not excessive—investment in impact measures will make a modest contribution to better science.Unfortunately for Kormendy, the “real world” is also a place in which claims of victimization and inequity now dominate many academic discussions, to such extent that attempting a modest contribution to better science can be attacked—and, in this case, literally expunged—by those who believe that a quantitative exploration of certain data sets can be harmful or threatening.

Wagner and Weitzman's Asymmetric Treatment of Non-Carbon Energies By: David Henderson

In his well-deserved victory lap about his bet with Daniel Reeves, co-blogger Bryan Caplan points out that one major flaw in Gernot Wagner’s and Martin L. Weitzman’s book Climate Shock is its treatment or, rather, non-treatment of nuclear power.

Bryan writes:

Wagner and Weitzman barely mention nuclear power or the absurd regulatory burden under which it labors. This fits with the Social Desirability Bias story, and makes me further distrust them.

In a comment on Bryan’s post, bettor Daniel Reeves responds:

I may be more trusting than you but I’d only have distrusted them on those grounds if they’d argued against nuclear energy. Wagner and Weitzman think policy intervention should be limited to carbon taxes. Nuclear energy doesn’t emit carbon so they are implicitly pro-nuclear. I’m sure they’d agree about the absurd regulatory burden as well. They do spend a lot of time in the book on the absurdity of the current fossil fuel subsidies, which I’m sure you also despise.

I think Dan is way more trusting than Bryan and way more trusting that is justified. I reviewed the book for Regulation in 2015-16 and read every page and every footnote. Reeves is right that the authors don’t argue against nuclear energy. But they have an asymmetric treatment of alternative non-carbon energies. On pages 17 and 18, they praise solar energy. On page 34 they advocate subsidizing innovation in solar panels. On page 144, they write: “Wind, solar, and all sorts of low-carbon technologies win.”

What goes unmentioned? The N-word: Nuclear.

If authors consider alternatives to carbon-based fuels and mention some explicitly, it’s reasonable to conclude that they don’t favor the ones they don’t mention at all.

You will find “nuclear” in the index, though. Here’s what you’ll find:

Paul Shafer is an assistant professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. He tweets @shaferpr.
A recent article, I published in Tradeoffs looks at a study in JAMA Network Open examining how needing to physically show up at a social service agency office dampened participation in a critical food assistance program—Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)—during COVID-19. Administrative burdens can keep people out of programs that they are eligible for, with big implications for health and health equity given the populations that programs like this serve.
In it, I write:
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) supports women with low incomes and their children, and the program has proven to help narrow racial and ethnic disparities in infant health. WIC benefits are provided on an electronic debit card, which some states automatically reload (“online states”) and others reload only at in-person WIC office visits (“offline states”).
The authors estimated that offline states experienced a nearly 10% drop (-9.3%) in WIC participation during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic relative to online states. This was a product of both increased participation in online states and decreased participation in offline states. Meanwhile, the authors found that participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (often referred to as “food stamps”) — a program that renews remotely in all states — saw no significant changes in participation during COVID-19.
Read the full piece at Tradeoffs!
Research for this piece was supported by Arnold Ventures.The post The Big Impact of Little Barriers to Public Benefits first appeared on The Incidental Economist.

I know how I am supposed to feel about “Let’s go, Brandon”: Mocking the president this way is uncivil, a sign of the collapse of once-routine public courtesy, etc., etc. How I really feel about it, though, is that it’s fascinatingly serendipitous, seriously funny, and intriguingly fecund. From that one meme, others are being born.

Last month, an NBC reporter interviewing the victorious NASCAR driver Brandon Brown heard fans in the stands chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” in lustily contemptuous unison. The reporter insisted to viewers that the fans were in fact chanting “Let’s go, Brandon.” This improvisation made no sense. Brown had won, so why would anyone cheer him on by saying “Let’s go!” after he’d just accomplished quite a bit of going? Since then, Biden’s detractors have adopted “Let’s go, Brandon” as a kind of in-group salute—a coded way of saying, well, the other thing. The meme has found its way onto T-shirts, masks, signs at other sporting events, the House floor, and (reportedly) airplane intercoms, and was parodied this weekend in an online video from Saturday Night Live.

Interestingly, despite its very American origins, the catchphrase is rather South African. Stay with me: In traditional societies there, such as in Zulu and Xhosa communities, a woman marrying into a family shows respect by refraining from using any words that sound like her husband’s or in-laws’ names and subbing in other words. Imagine if someone married William Green, the son of Robert Green, and instead of saying, “She will not eat green yogurt,” had to say, “She refuses to eat grass-colored yo-mix”—because will and green are her husband’s names and the second half of yogurt sounds like the end of Robert. The practice is called hlonipha, and “Let’s go, Brandon” is a coy substitution of the same kind.

Conor Friedersdorf: The fight against words that sound like, but are not, slurs

However, the anti-Biden euphemism is of a meaner tone. This is not your grandfather’s darn, heck, shoot, or fudge. Those are polite terms, expressed without the teeth-baring ardor of the words they stand in for, imaginable as things that characters played by Edie McClurg might say in ’80s movies such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Let’s go, Brandon” springs from the mangier, madder place of euphemisms such as snafu—which during World War II everyone in the American military knew was an acronym for “situation normal, all fucked up”—or right-wingers’ dismissal of conservatives who do not toe the party line as cuckservatives, rooted in the word cuckold.

Those who dislike seeing President Biden’s name used disparagingly should welcome the latest development: People on the left are declaring “Thank you, Brandon” in praise of the administration’s accomplishments thus far. We are witnessing the birth of a diagonal reference to Biden that signals a defense of him from the slurs of the right. Brandon could well take its place as one of those bemusingly opaque code names such as Yeezy for Kanye West or Boz for Charles Dickens—or as one of those pseudonyms that some members of Congress direct their staff to use for them when talking about work in social settings. (A friend of mine who worked on Capitol Hill in the late 1980s referred to her boss as “Bubo,” lest eavesdroppers in public spaces pick up insider gossip about congressional business.)

We might simply embrace that sentiments will differ about this Brandon person in exactly the same way as they do about, well, Biden. Calling him Brandon when dissing him could be seen as a kind of American hlonipha. And yet, in elite circles, one senses a bifurcation: Brandon is warm and wise when preceded by Thank you but an unacceptable epithet coming from Republicans.

Few of the commentators who decried the supposed vitriol and vulgarity of “Let’s go, Brandon” appear to mind Democrats’ attempt to repurpose the race-car driver’s name. The tacit idea would seem to be that when the left throws shade, it counts as speaking truth to power and is thus okay. Until the late ’80s, some people on the left used politically correct unironically to suggest, without saying so, that right-wing views are inherently and incontestably wrong. The designation of conservatives outside Democratic enclaves as “deplorables” didn’t come from the right, either.

Read: When deplorability is no longer a dealbreaker

Overall, “Let’s go, Brandon” is simply fascinating. A time traveler from 2019 would have been mystified at the bewigged people going as Karen this Halloween (I saw two) as well as those in mustaches going as Ted Lasso (of which I also saw two). In the same way, think how utterly opaque “Let’s go, Brandon” would be to a time traveler from just Labor Day. The meme is a wild, woolly kink in the intersection of language, politics, wit, and creativity, and is a prime example of why language change is a spectator sport.

The United States lives in a fundamentally unique geopolitical reality. It’s the only major power that doesn’t face the risk of a land war, so it doesn’t need a massive force to defend the homeland. Instead, it can concentrate on maintaining control of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If it retains control of the seas, the only threat to the United States would be air and missile attacks. These are not trivial threats, but they are far more manageable without having to worry about an invasion by land or sea. The United States itself has offensive options it can indulge in – even if it doesn’t always use them prudently, and even if it leads to defeat elsewhere. The U.S. has not faced a foreign presence on its soil since the 19th century. Even nuclear weapons are countered by mutual assured destruction, which has protected the U.S. homeland for over half a century.

This happy condition is the foundation of American power. During the harshest of wars, World War II, where much of Europe and Asia was torn asunder, the American homeland remained untouched. This is such an obvious fact that it tends to be neglected.

So too are the geopolitical reasons behind American security. Any attack on the United States must either be an amphibious assault from across the sea or a land assault from either Canada or Mexico. The U.S. fought numerous times with Mexico in the 19th and very early 20th centuries, and in the 1960s, the Quebec independence movement prompted fears in the U.S. that an independent Quebec might align with the Soviet Union. But today, neither country can attack the U.S. itself, hence the first layer of American security. The second layer is that neither country wants to align with powers hostile to the United States. Had Germany secured their allegiance in World War II, or had the Soviet Union in the Cold War, or had China in the past few decades, the risks to American security would have soared, and the U.S. invulnerability to war on the homeland would have evaporated. American history would have been very different, along with the history of humanity.

Therefore, in any discussion of American strategy and of its strategic priorities, the most important issue is not the South China Sea or NATO but the maintenance of relations with Canada and Mexico. It’s true that at the moment each country has an overriding interest in maintaining their relationship, for reasons ranging from trade to social links. It’s also true that the United States could impose its will militarily on either country. However, waging war on neighbors is dangerous and exhausting. America is a global power pursuing global interests, and its domestic stability would be the first casualty of a land assault against Canada or Mexico.

On the surface, this whole line of reasoning sounds preposterous. But the fact that it seems so arises from the misconception among Americans that the current relationship with Canada and Mexico is unchangeable, and thus requires no care. But one of the most obvious observations of history is the speed at which the apparently obvious dissolves and a new normal takes its place. Given the overwhelming importance to the U.S. that neither neighbor shift its national strategy, the comfortable assumption of continuity is perhaps the most reckless element of U.S. policy. Certainly, there is no current danger of a shift, nor any danger on the horizon. But this is precisely the time when a prudent power devotes significant attention to an issue. Reversing a shift in policy is far more difficult than preventing one.

There are forces driving the U.S. apart from these two countries, countries that are not in a position to cause a break, but which in the future, when other issues are added to them and enticing new relationships show themselves, might change the equation. In the case of Canada, the manner in which the United States canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, a project that was important to Canada, signaled a profound indifference to Canada’s interests. There was little consultation, no offer of compensation, nor any attempt to create an alternative project. By itself, this is not enough to cause a break with the United States, but it certainly reminds Canada that Washington sees it as subordinate to its interests rather than as the object of its interests.

In the case of Mexico, the U.S. obsesses over immigration, an issue that is nonessential to Mexican interests. There has been a surge of migrants at that border, most on their way to the United States, but all creating significant problems on their way north. The United States views Mexico as a source of illegal immigration. Mexico sees the problem of immigration as having its origin at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Mexico has therefore requested American help in closing its southern border, which has been refused. Instead, Mexico is demonized for the immigration the U.S. will not help stop. (I have no interest in the question of which country is right. All such matters are complex, and every nation is certain that another nation is at fault.)

For the United States, obsessing without alienating either Canada or Mexico is essential to its national interest, if not its national policy. The physical security of the United States and its trade system depends on these two countries. A rational policy of extreme awareness of their internal processes and a willingness to indulge their needs even to the disadvantage of the United States is a low-cost, high-return policy. When someone takes a client to lunch, he picks up the tab, even if the client has ordered the most expensive items on the menu. The cost of lunch is vastly less than the business you will get.

The most interesting part of geopolitics is that a current state of affairs feels eternal. Nothing in geopolitics’ past should give anyone that confidence. Maintaining a beneficial status quo requires effort, painful until the alternative is considered. But since the belief is that nothing will change, then no effort is needed. The U.S. is a dominant global power because its homeland is secure from attack. Its homeland is secure because Canada and Mexico secure it. The failure to understand that they have options – and are far from exercising them – means their treatment is determined by America’s passing interests. From a geopolitical point of view, this is understandable: Power blots out vulnerability. From a policy standpoint, it ignores reality.

In Virginia itself, the Department of Education’s website has a page devoted to “Anti-racism in Education,” and at the end of a long list of “Terms and Definitions” it reads, “Drawing from critical race theory, the term ‘white supremacy’ also refers to a political or socio-economic system where white people enjoy structural advantage and rights that other racial and ethnic groups do not, both at a collective and an individual level.”

In the 2022 draft revision of the California Department of Education’s “Mathematics Framework,” the chapter on “Teaching for Equity and Engagement” includes this language: “Empowering students with mathematics also includes removing the high stakes of errors and sending the message that learning is always unfinished and that it is safe to take mathematical risks. This mind-set creates the conditions for students to develop a sense of ownership over their mathematical thinking and their right to belong to the discipline of mathematics” — a truly artful way of saying that “diverse” kids should not be saddled with the onerous task of having to get the actual answers.

In February, the Oregon Department of Education sent an update to math educators that linked to a document titled “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction/Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.” It contains a section on “Deconstructing Racism in Mathematics Instruction” positing that “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom can show up” in a variety of ways, including when “Preconceived expectations are steeped in the dominant culture,” “Superficial curriculum changes are offered in place of culturally relevant pedagogy and practice” and “Students are required to ‘show their work’ in standardized, prescribed ways.”

Perhaps a reasonable objection would be that these are only teacher guidelines and that we cannot know exactly how, or whether, teachers are adhering to them in classrooms. But these guidelines, apparently sanctioned by state departments of education, contradict the notion that concepts derived from critical race theory — or are, at least, C.R.T.-lite — is nowhere near our schools, that the C.R.T.-in-schools debate “isn’t real,” merely a fiction designed to cloak racism.

In some cases, evidence of C.R.T.-lite is easier to spot at various private schools. Granted, governors can’t “ban” private school curriculums, but the experience at some tony New York prep schools, for instance, demonstrates how C.R.T.-lite isn’t simply found in teacher trainings but can make its way into the classroom and schools’ educational philosophy. As The Times reported earlier this year:

The Brearley School declared itself an antiracist school with mandatory antiracism training for parents, faculty and trustees, and affirmed the importance of meeting regularly in groups that bring together people who share a common race or gender. Kindergarten students at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx are taught to identify their skin color by mixing paint colors. The lower-school chief in an email last year instructed parents to avoid talk of colorblindness and “acknowledge racial differences.”

Some of those who say that critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools may not be aware of these developments. Others most likely are, and suppose that they are healthy, that this is indeed how education should be.

That’s a respectable stance, but one ought not harbor it in disbelief that any intelligent, morally concerned person could feel differently. One can ardently support that students learn about racism and its legacies in a way that doesn’t crowd out obvious lessons about the history of undeniable racial progress. One can do that while questioning whether students should be immersed in a broader perspective that offers overbroad, clumsy and, frankly, insulting portraits of what is inherently white and what is Black, Latino, Asian American or Native American, and fosters — even if unintentional — a sense of opposition between the groups in question.

To be sure, voices on the political right, including Youngkin, must do better when it comes to specifying what they oppose. They, and we, would be better off if they explained that they oppose philosophies influenced by critical race theory, rather than claiming C.R.T. itself is being taught. Bills intended to ban the teaching of C.R.T.-lite shouldn’t be worded as if the intent was to ban the teaching of anything about race at all. And if that’s what any of these bills do mean, they should spell it out in clear language in order to expose that intent to debate — one within which I would be vociferously opposed, I should note. The horror of slavery, the hypocrisy of Jim Crow, the terror of lynching, the devastating loss of life and property in Tulsa and in other massacres — no student should get through, roughly, middle school ignorant of these things, and anyone who thinks that is “politics” needs to join the rest of us in the 21st century.

Lies, in many cases, are comparable to sparks. They might not be very dangerous in and of themselves but under the right conditions — or, perhaps, the wrong conditions — they can lead to spectacular fires.
Consider, for example, how a chain of events that began with an anonymous message being posted on an obscure message board in October 2017 led, four years later, to hundreds of Americans gathering in Dallas, Texas, to await the return of the long dead JFK Jr.
Back in October 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting bizarre messages on the /pol/ board of the notorious website 4Chan. Q, claiming to have high level White House security clearance, spoke of “the Storm,” an event in which President Trump and his allies would arrest hundreds of his rivals and expose them as child-eating Luciferians. Somehow, this event failed to transpire.
In fact, Q had something of a talent for failed predictions. He, and his followers in the colorful pro-Trump movement that we know as “QAnon,” predicted the arrests of everyone from Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks, all of whom have remained conspicuously free. They predicted that Donald Trump would be inaugurated, which, somehow, has failed to happen.
In an insightful 2018 essay, Michael Barkun, an American political scientist, predicted that “the less heavily invested [Qanon believers] will eventually drop away” but that “a core group will remain, even in the face of predictions or prophecies that simply didn’t happen.” When it comes to true believers, Barkun wrote,
the belief is likely to be one around which they have structured their view of the world. That certainly was the case with QAnon’s predictions. This was to be the final battle between the virtuous forces of Trump and his allies against the quintessential evil of the deep state, after whose defeat some final quasi-paradise would presumably emerge. When that kind of prediction goes wrong, it carries a lot of potential psychological damage with it.
Many Q believers have drifted away. Firstly, and perhaps most significantly, a concerted attempt by Big Tech to stamp out the movement, which entailed the banning of hundreds of accounts from Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, has limited its reach. An approving report from the Atlantic Council found that in the aftermath of this campaign, QAnon advocacy “all but evaporated from the mainstream Internet.”
But I think Q would have many lost adherents anyway. Other causes have attracted more marginal followers, such as campaigns against vaccine mandates and critical race theory. A Republican comeback, vividly manifested in Glenn Youngkin’s triumph in Virginia, has also given American rightists optimism, with less need to seek grandiose rationalizations of failure.
Even Ron Watkins, the shadowy administrator of the 4Chan spin-off 8Chan, who appeared to make an accidental admission to posting as Q in a recent documentary, said after President Biden’s inauguration that it was time to “go back to our lives as best we are able.”
But a core group remains. Many of them have invested thousands of hours and dollars, and alienated friends and relatives, in furthering their cause. Their imaginative framework is built around the movement. So even though Q himself apparently advised them in 2018 that JFK Jr. was not alive and thus had no chance of returning to endorse Donald Trump, hundreds of hardcore Q believers gathered in Dallas to welcome him, speculating, allegedly, that other dead celebrities like Robin Williams and Kobe Bryant would also join this eccentric entourage.
It is easy to laugh, but it is also too easy, not because there is anything credible in these beliefs but because scorn, for true believers, can become a badge of honor. Oh, I’m crazy? Or is everyone crazy? Everyone has heard the often misattributed quote “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Fewer reflect that people might laugh at you for good reasons.
The marginalization of QAnon has led to division. Some think the JFK Jr. stuff is a bizarre distraction (and it takes a lot for QAnon believers to think that). Others, under the guidance of a man named Michael Brian Protzman, aka “Negative48,” think it is just the beginning. They have been employing half-baked numerology to predict the resurrection of JFK himself. Yes, JFK is basically Christ and Trump is the Holy Spirit foreshadowing his return.
As if this was not enough, these Q-inspired numerologists — Q-merologists? — are enriching their millenarian beliefs with speculations about ancient bloodlines. According to another QAnon guru — Quru? — “Whiplash347,” JFK, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley and Julian Assange are descended from the Arabic minority the Druze, who, according to QAnon lore, are the “real Jews.” You can see the direction that could go in.
Within a few years, then, a theory that posited a clash between Donald Trump and the Deep State has spiraled into an ornate, intricate fantasy about a clash between the soldiers of God and the forces of the Devil.
Where does it end? One hopes not with Q believers doing a great deal of harm to themselves and others but if they are prepared to swallow as much as they have done, no one should be confident that they would reject the murderous or self-destructive claims of a modern Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite. More peripheral believers could hop out of the rabbit hole without having a lot of dirt attached to themselves. The minority of people who are prepared to accept that JFK will return to represent the noble Druze bloodline, on the other hand, have gone so deep into the dark that they can dig.
The moral of this story is to base your beliefs on truth. If you start with an element of sheer fantasy, you can expect it to mutate and expand out of control.
Anyway, I have to dash. I’m interviewing Kurt Cobain about his little known Levantine heritage.
The post Down the QAnon rabbit hole appeared first on The Spectator World.

Elon Musk's wealth has surpassed $200 billion. It would take the median U.S. worker over 4 million years to make that much.

Wealth inequality is eating this country alive. We're now in America's second Gilded Age, just like the late 19th century when a handful of robber barons monopolized the economy, kept wages down, and bribed lawmakers.

The rich have enough political power to cut their taxes to almost nothing--sometimes literally nothing.

While today's robber barons take joy rides into space, the distance between their gargantuan wealth and the financial struggles of working Americans has never been clearer. During the first 19 months of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires added $2.1 trillion dollars to their collective wealth and that number continues to rise.

And the rich have enough political power to cut their taxes to almost nothing--sometimes literally nothing. In fact, Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes in 2007 or in 2011. By 2018, the 400 richest Americans paid a lower overall tax rate than almost anyone else.

Watch:

But we can not solve this problem unless we know how it was created in the first place.

Let's start with the basics.

I. The Basics

Wealth inequality in America is far larger than income inequality.

Income is what you earn each week or month or year. Wealth refers to the sum total of your assets--your car, your stocks and bonds, your home, art--anything else you own that's valuable.Valuable not only because there's a market for it--a price other people are willing to pay to buy it--but because wealth itself grows.

As the population expands and the nation becomes more productive, the overall economy continues to expand. This expansion pushes up the values of stocks, bonds, rental property, homes, and most other assets. Of course recessions and occasional depressions can reduce the value of such assets. But over the long haul, the value of almost all wealth increases.

Lesson: Wealth compounds over time.

Next: personal wealth comes from two sources.The first source is the income you earn but don't spend. That's your savings. When you invest those savings in stocks, bonds, or real property or other assets, you create your personal wealth-- which, as we've seen, grows over time.

The second source of personal wealth is whatever is handed down to you from your parents, grandparents, and maybe even generations before them--in other words, what you inherit.

Lesson: Personal wealth comes from your savings and/or your inheritance.

II. Why the wealth gap is exploding

The wealth gap between the richest Americans and everyone else is staggering.

In the 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent owned about 20 percent of the nation's total household wealth.Now, they own over 35 percent.

Much of their gains over the last 40 years have come from a dramatic increase in the value of shares of stock.

For example, if someone invested $1,000 in 1978 in a broad index of stocks--say, the S&P 500 -- they would have $31,823 today, adjusted for inflation.

Who has benefited from this surge? The richest 1 percent, who now own half of the entire stock market. But the typical worker's wages have barely grown.

Most Americans haven't earned enough to save anything. Before the pandemic, when the economy appeared to be doing well, almost 80 percent were living paycheck to paycheck.

Lesson: Most Americans don't make enough to save money and build wealth.

So as income inequality has widened, the amount that the few high-earning households save--their wealth--has continued to grow. Their growing wealth has allowed them to pass on more and more wealth to their heirs.

Take, for example, the Waltons--the family behind the Walmart empire--which has seven heirs on the Forbes billionaires list. Their children, and other rich millennials, will soon consolidate even more of the nation's wealth. America is now on the cusp of the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. As wealthy boomers pass on, somewhere between $30 to $70 trillion will go to their children over the next three decades.

These children will be able to live off of this wealth, and then leave the bulk of it--which will continue growing--to their own children ... tax-free. After a few generations of this, almost all of America's wealth could be in the hands of a few thousand families.

Lesson: Dynastic wealth continues to grow.

III. Why wealth concentration is a problem

Concentrated wealth is already endangering our democracy. Wealth doesn't just beget more wealth--it begets more power.

Dynastic wealth concentrates power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, who can choose what nonprofits and charities to support and which politicians to bankroll. This gives an unelected elite enormous sway over both our economy and our democracy.

If this keeps up, we'll come to resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Dynastic wealth makes a mockery of the idea that America is a meritocracy, where anyone can make it on the basis of their own efforts. It also runs counter to the basic economic ideas that people earn what they're worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them.

Finally, wealth concentration magnifies gender and race disparities because women and people of color tend to make less, save less, and inherit less.

The typical single woman owns only 32 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by a man. The pandemic likely increased this gap.

The racial wealth gap is even starker. The typical Black household owns just 13 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white household. The pandemic likely increased this gap, too.

In all these ways, dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy that runs counter to the ideals we claim to live by.

Lesson: Dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy.

IV. How America dealt with wealth inequality during the First Gilded Age

The last time America faced anything comparable to the concentration of wealth we face today was at the turn of the 20th century. That was when President Teddy Roosevelt warned that "a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power" could destroy American democracy.

Roosevelt's answer was to tax wealth. Congress enacted two kinds of wealth taxes. The first, in 1916, was the estate tax--a tax on the wealth someone has accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherit that wealth.

The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax--a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets are sold.

Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax were created to curb wealth concentration.

But both of these wealth taxes have shrunk since then, or become so riddled with loopholes that they haven't been able to prevent a new American aristocracy from emerging.

The Trump Republican tax cut enabled individuals to exclude $11.18 million from their estate taxes. That means one couple can pass on more than $22 million to their kids tax-free. Not to mention the very rich often find ways around this tax entirely. As Trump's former White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn put it, "only morons pay the estate tax."

What about capital gains on the soaring values of wealthy people's stocks, bonds, mansions, and works of art? Here, the biggest loophole is something called the "stepped-up basis." If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, their heirs inherit them without paying any capital gains taxes whatsoever. All the increased value of those assets is simply erased, for tax purposes. This loophole saves heirs an estimated $40 billion a year.

This means that huge accumulations of wealth in the hands of a relatively few households can be passed from generation to generation untaxed--growing along the way--generating comfortable incomes for rich descendants who will never have to work a day of their lives. That's the dynastic class we're creating right now.

Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax have been gutted.

Why have these two wealth taxes eroded? Because, as America's wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy have more capacity to donate to political campaigns and public relations--and they've used that political power to reduce their taxes. It's exactly what Teddy Roosevelt feared so many years ago.

V. How to reduce the wealth gap

So what do we do? Follow the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt and tax great accumulations of wealth.

The ultra-rich have benefited from the American system--from laws that protect their wealth, and our economy that enabled them to build their fortunes in the first place. They should pay their fair share.

The majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, believe the ultra rich should pay higher taxes. There are many ways to make them do so: closing the stepped up basis loophole, raising the capital gains tax, and fully funding the Internal Revenue Service so it can properly audit the wealthiest taxpayers, for starters.

Beyond those fixes, we need a new wealth tax: a tax of just 2 percent a year on wealth in excess of $1 million. That's hardly a drop in the bucket for centi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but would generate plenty of revenue to invest in healthcare and education so that millions of Americans have a fair shot at making it.

One of the most important things you as an individual can do is take the time to understand the realities of wealth inequality in America and how the system has become rigged in favor of those at the top--and demand your political representatives take action to unrig it.

Wealth inequality is worse than it has been in a century--and it has contributed to a vicious political-economic cycle in which taxes are cut on the top, resulting in even more concentration of wealth there--while everyone else lives under the cruelest form of capitalism in the world.

We must stop this vicious cycle--and demand an economy that works for the many, not one that concentrates more and more wealth in the hands of a privileged few.

In the New York Times, Professor Sean Wilentz (Princeton) review Feldman's new Lincoln book, titled "The Broke Constitution." Wilentz confirmed my suspicions about the book: in order to support the narrative that Lincoln broke the Constitution, Feldman would have to adopt the pro-Confederacy understanding of the Constitution. You should read the entire review, but this passage sums things up well:

The framers, [Jefferson] Davis pronounced, had enshrined in the Constitution the right to hold property in humans, but frenzied antislavery Northerners undermined the law of the land; and now the flood was surging, pouring "turgid waters through the broken Constitution." Davis's pro-slavery remarks provide Noah Feldman with both the epigraph and the title of his new book about Jefferson Davis's nemesis, Abraham Lincoln, which seems a very odd choice. Unlike Davis, Lincoln never believed that the Constitution had been broken, even after the slaveholders began their rebellion in 1860-61. Instead, Lincoln charged that the insurrection Davis helped to lead was "the essence of anarchy." On both points, though, Feldman contends that Davis was right and Lincoln was wrong. Moreover, Feldman argues, despite Lincoln's professed fidelity to the framers' work, he was the one who finally broke the Constitution during the Civil War by turning the presidency into a quasi dictatorship, much as his Confederate and Copperhead enemies alleged he did. Only then, Feldman concludes, paradoxically, could America redeem its claims to nobility by purging the original sin of slavery, refounding itself by embracing what he calls a new, expansive "moral Constitution."Feldman's reliance on Jefferson Davis to frame a book on Abraham Lincoln thus makes perfect sense: Aside from the slaveholders' insistence on the ethical legitimacy of slavery, Feldman's constitutional analysis consistently backs their arguments over Lincoln's. Less than perfect, unfortunately, are the renderings of American history he offers to support his surprising thesis.

Wilentz skewers Feldman's incomplete history. The Harvard law professor downplays and even omits material that does not support his thesis.

From the start, however, Feldman's depiction of the Constitution's connection to slavery is questionable. Although he calls it the "compromise Constitution," Feldman's Constitution was almost seamlessly pro-slavery. The famous negotiations that offered concessions to the slaveholders come across more like abject submission. Feldman ignores the antislavery currents inside the Federal Convention that challenged and sometimes defeated the pro-slavery delegates. He overlooks how much the Constitution's provision authorizing abolition of U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade was an antislavery victory over the lower South, which tried to block it as a dealbreaker — a measure that, even when weakened by a maneuver Madison bemoaned, was the first serious blow ever against the trade undertaken in the name of a national government. Feldman fails to see the Constitution as an ambiguous document that offered protections to the slaveholders but also contained considerable antislavery potential, sufficient for thoughtful if wishful Northern abolitionists like Benjamin Rush to hail it as the death knell of slavery. Having erased the Constitution's ambiguities over slavery, Feldman claims antislavery activists down to Lincoln could not seriously invoke the Constitution in order to attack slavery "because the Constitution said nothing against the practice."

On the specifics, Feldman did a shoddy job discussing the Emancipation Proclamation.
Still, it strains credulity to indict Lincoln for tyranny because he took emergency actions, almost exclusively against Confederates, spies and other traitors, in order to save democratic government, all the while holding open elections and suffering the merciless attacks of Democrats. Finally, Feldman cuts corners to claim that the Emancipation Proclamation was an arbitrary violation of slaveholders' property rights.
Words you never want to see in a book review: "ignores," "overlooks,"  "fails," and "erased," "strains credulity," and "cuts corners."
Feldman is not alone with sidling up to confederate constitutionalism. The 1619 Project agrees with Chief Justice Taney's interpretation of the Constitution in Dred Scott. So much of the modern progressive project depends on the original Constitution being a failed, sinful document. That argument must be accepted as a doctrine of faith to undermine originalism. How can anyone be an originalist, they argue, if the Constitution was itself "broken." Willentz explains:

Eradicating slavery, Feldman insists, would require breaking the very Constitution that Lincoln claimed to venerate.

See, Feldman contends, Jefferson Davis was a more faithful adherent of the Constitution than was Lincoln! To say it aloud is to realize how misguided these professors are. The better answer is that Davis and Taney were wrong, and Lincoln was right! It is a shame how many sophisticated people feel compelled to agree with the confederates. Yet, we originalists are considered the white supremacists!
Randy Barnett and I are working on a book on slavery and the Constitution, which should be ready by the Fall of 2022--just in the time for the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. I hope our book provides a more balanced account of this important topic.

“I go on this great republican principle,” James Madison said in 1788, “that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.”The notion that a virtuous people will select virtuous representatives to exercise their judgment is at the core of the American experiment. Populism—the notion that “the people” are always right by virtue of being numerous and ordinary—is utterly antithetical to our national idea. The Founders hoped America would be led by people of moral and intellectual excellence; they built anti-majoritarian firebreaks into the Constitution precisely to avert sudden and intemperate movements.[Read: Peacefield, a subscriber newsletter by Tom Nichols]Countries that fall to populism inevitably pay the price of misrule. Populism is an excellent vehicle for motivating an angry population, but it’s a lousy path to better government. Turkey is the most recent nation to learn this lesson the hard way. Since 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has purged tens of thousands of civil servants (including judges) from the government. The result, as the Turkish writer Semra Alkan recently noted, is that “the Turkish state has fired its way into disaster,” with Turkey in free fall in every aspect—including its economy and its foreign policy—due to a “government of incompetent lackeys.”Which brings me to New Jersey.I genuinely have no idea if now-defeated New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney should have lost his seat. He may well deserve to join the ranks of those such as Eric Cantor and Joe Crowley, members of Congress who thought they were invulnerable until a groundswell against them in their primaries proved otherwise.But I am not moved by the narratives surrounding the candidate who bested him, a truck driver named Edward Durr. “I’m absolutely nobody. I’m just a simple guy. It was the people, it was a repudiation of the policies that have been forced down their throats,” he told reporters on Thursday. Durr says he ran because he was upset about being unable to obtain a concealed-carry permit for a weapon in New Jersey.The plucky ordinary fellow taking down the mossy old Trenton pol has been catnip for many of my former comrades on the right, including many I greatly respect. But they seem to be acting on the belief that the local voter is always right and the long-serving politician is always wrong.[Tom Nichols: This Republican Party is not worth saving]Or, at least, that the local voter is always right if the challenger is a Republican. This is not a narrative, I should add, that any conservatives seem willing (as far as I know) to apply to upstarts such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Few Republicans applauded the temerity and grit of a young state legislator named Barack Obama, whom they argued was just a pushy gate-jumper.Inexperienced people who will carry forward your agenda are good; inexperienced people who will oppose you are merely inexperienced and arrogant.I find this kind of populist celebration of inexperience particularly painful, because I know that local action can be powerful. Some 40 years ago, my working-class city in western Massachusetts was in the grip of its postindustrial slide. Our small neighborhood was tucked up against the polluted banks of the Connecticut River, shining with oil and dead fish, and our view of the water was marred by paper factories on the opposite shore dumping chemicals day and night. Property values, never particularly high, suffered; tidy three-deckers were abandoned and then repopulated by a rough crowd, including drug dealers.My parents were trying to run a struggling restaurant during the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the short walk from our house to the business took us right past a small drug market. Cars pulled up and sales were made in plain sight. My mother tried to get the city to do something, but there were only so many police, and the landlords of the building seemed immune to zoning or health infractions.My mother ran for local alderman on the single-issue platform of getting drugs out of the neighborhood. She wasn’t trying to run the city, or become the governor, or solve the Soviet-American arms race. She just wanted the drugs gone.[Yascha Mounk: You can’t win elections by telling voters their concerns are imaginary]She won. In a year, working with other city officials, she had helped bring a police substation to the area and demanded better enforcement of city ordinances against the landlords. The market was driven from the neighborhood.But my mother also learned something about governing. In particular, she learned that she was not very good at it. City budgets were complicated; her knowledge of other neighborhoods in the city was limited; she didn’t have the experience to do the million small things that constituents demanded. She was trying to run a business with my father at the same time, and she could not juggle the many hours in the day that both jobs required.After one term, she was defeated by the same machine politician she had unseated. In her honest moments later, she admitted she probably shouldn’t have run for reelection, but the race had a kind of grudge-match feel to it, and she let herself be talked into one more campaign, despite having already achieved the one thing she wanted to accomplish. I was no fan of the man who beat her, but he did know how to get potholes filled, and my mother did not.I sincerely hope this truck driver turns out to be a good legislator. The early signs are not encouraging. His tweets and posts suggest he might not be the virtuous and patriotic underdog his supporters believe him to be. In December 2019, for example, he tweeted, “Mohammad was a pedophile! Islam is a false religion! Only fools follow muslim teachings! It is a cult of hate!” His Twitter account is now deactivated. (In a statement issued to several media outlets yesterday, he wrote, “I’m a passionate guy and I sometimes say things in the heat of the moment. If I said things in the past that hurt anybody’s feelings, I sincerely apologize. I support everybody’s right to worship in any manner they choose and to worship the God of their choice.”)People who air grievances tend to carry more than a few of them, and so it seems in this instance. I love the David and Goliath stories of politics, but only if David isn’t also a Philistine—in which case, the contest is a draw no matter who wins.“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people,” Madison said in his 1788 address, “is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men.” Conservatives hammer the gong of “a republic, not a democracy” when it suits them. If America abandons Madison’s warning, we might still be a democracy, but we will no longer be a republic. We should think hard about that distinction before drinking too much of the populist moonshine.

In 2005, the psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala was researching extremist groups, trying to understand what leads people to commit acts of terrorist violence. She began to notice something that looked a lot like what the 20th-century scholars Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm had referred to as “group narcissism”: Golec de Zavala defined it to me as “a belief that the exaggerated greatness of one’s group is not sufficiently recognized by others,” in which that thirst for recognition is never satiated. At first, she thought it was a fringe phenomenon, but important nonetheless. She developed the Collective Narcissism Scale to measure the severity of group-narcissistic beliefs, including statements such as “My group deserves special treatment” and “I insist upon my group getting the respect that is due to it” with which respondents rate their agreement.Sixteen years later, Golec de Zavala is a professor at SWPS University, in Poland, and a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, leading the study of group narcissism—and she’s realized that there’s nothing fringe about it. This thinking can happen in seemingly any kind of assemblage: a religious, political, gender, racial, or ethnic group, but also a sports team, club, or cult. Now, she said, she’s terrified at how widely she’s finding it manifested across the globe.Collective narcissism is not simply tribalism. Humans are inherently tribal, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Having a healthy social identity can have an immensely positive impact on well-being. Collective narcissists, though, are often more focused on out-group prejudice than in-group loyalty. In its most extreme form, group narcissism can fuel political radicalism and potentially even violence. But in everyday settings, too, it can keep groups from listening to one another, and lead them to reduce people on the “other side” to one-dimensional characters. The best way to avoid that is by teaching people how to be proud of their group—without obsessing over recognition.[Read: The self-confidence tipping point]Groups may differ in their narrative about why they are superior—they might believe that they’re the most moral, the most culturally sophisticated, the most talented, the most powerful, or the most protective of democratic values. They may think that their greatness is God’s will, or that they’ve earned it through exceptional suffering in the past. Regardless, collective narcissists are resentful of other groups, and hypersensitive to perceived intergroup threat. As a result, collective narcissism often breeds prejudice. In one study, for instance, participants in Poland who rated high in collective narcissism were more likely to hold anti-Semitic beliefs. In other research conducted on Americans, high collective-narcissism scores predicted negative attitudes toward Arab immigrants.Collective narcissists tend to respond to the perceived threats of other groups in outsize, often aggressive ways. In Portugal, a sample of collective narcissists who perceived Germany as having a more important position than their nation in the European Union “rejoiced in the German economic crisis”—and supported “hostile actions” toward Germans. Meanwhile, group narcissists glorify positively valued in-group members and tend to overlook their moral transgressions. A recent study conducted in Poland, Britain, and the United States found that those high in collective narcissism were more likely to judge a group member’s action—such as a verbal altercation provoked by a pub customer—as moral if it served in-group interests.But group members don’t always benefit from this thinking: Collective narcissists are hypervigilant about “enemies within,” members who, in their opinion, reflect negatively on the group. And ironically, some studies have suggested that collective narcissists are actually more likely to leave their group for personal gain, and to use in-group members as tools to advance their own goals.When people think of narcissism, they typically conjure up the chest-thumping, boastful, grandiose narcissist. But psychologists, myself included, have identified a more vulnerable form of narcissism, involving a fragile, uncertain sense of self-worth, deeply steeped in shame and distrust, along with the typical antagonism and self-entitlement. In some countries, including the U.S., collective narcissism is more strongly correlated with grandiose narcissism—but overall, those scoring high in vulnerable narcissism are actually more likely to fall into collective-narcissistic thinking. Collective narcissists might be obsessed with receiving group recognition because, on a personal level, they feel deeply insecure about their own value and they desperately need validation. They might also be lacking in emotional resilience: Collective narcissism is associated with sensitivity to negative environmental stimuli and negative emotions, which could override prosocial instincts—especially toward out-group members.Ultimately, though, collective narcissism isn’t a successful coping strategy; studies show that it doesn’t improve self-esteem. In fact, having collective-narcissistic beliefs probably increases one’s level of individual vulnerable narcissism: People who believe that their group’s greatness is not appreciated seem likely to start worrying that their own personal greatness is not appreciated. Indeed, preliminary data suggest that this is the case. In an experimental study, a situational increase in collective narcissism, stimulated by researchers, resulted in an increase in vulnerable narcissism. This speaks to the very human potential for group narcissism. We’re all susceptible to it, especially when narcissistic beliefs become more widespread and normalized within our own groups.Nowhere do we see this possibility more clearly than in the political arena. Fromm, who wrote about the rise of group narcissism in the aftermath of World War I, said that “group narcissism is a phenomenon of the greatest political significance … He is nothing—but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.” To be clear, patriotism is not necessarily group narcissism. It’s entirely possible to have healthy pride for your nation or political group and the unique aspects of your culture without being consumed by the desire to tear down other groups and by the need for your group to be seen as superior.Collective narcissism can be found anywhere on the political spectrum, left or right, but it seems to be particularly alluring to populists. National group narcissism has been linked to support for populist parties and politicians around the world. One study found that collective narcissism was the second-strongest predictor (after partisanship) of voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It was also associated with support for Trump’s followers attacking the Capitol, and support for Trump staying in power using undemocratic means. (A longitudinal analysis even found that group narcissism uniquely predicted growth of conspiracy thinking over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign.) Group narcissism was also found to be linked to pro-Brexit voting in the United Kingdom, anti-environmentalism in Poland, and negative attitudes toward the EU in Hungary.But in smaller groups and lower-stakes settings, collective narcissism is still an ugly problem. One study showed that sports fans high in collective narcissism were more likely to feel threatened by a news report about their team that they perceived as critical—and were more likely to say they’d like to hurt the author of the report or “teach him a lesson.” In another study, students with higher collective-narcissism scores were more likely to respond to negative comments about their university with retaliatory aggression—by denying a hypothetical research grant to a member of an offending out-group when they had the opportunity to act as student evaluators.How, then, can we curtail the spread of group narcissism and promote more intergroup harmony? The good news is that, just as it’s possible to have healthy individual self-esteem, it is possible to have healthy in-group love—where being a member of your group feels good and you have great pride in its genuine accomplishments, but you’re not so preoccupied with recognition of the group’s superiority. That positive in-group satisfaction is linked to increased well-being: Unlike collective narcissism, it’s been associated with greater levels of life satisfaction, positive emotionality, social connectedness, and gratitude.To be sure, the nature of people’s feelings about their groups is not all up to the individual: According to Golec de Zavala, group narcissism may be more likely to spread in environments where there is great uncertainty about personal significance—which she’d expect to be fueled by extreme economic deprivation or marked social inequalities—and under leaders who spread the sense that a group is unfairly treated. But because some narcissistic personality characteristics predict interest in group-narcissistic ideas across a variety of settings, it’s worth focusing on personality change—which, though not easy, is possible. People can cultivate self-transcendent emotions—a type of prosocial emotion that links people to something greater than themselves—such as gratitude, awe, or compassion.[Read: The opposite of toxic positivity]In one preliminary study, Golec de Zavala and her colleagues at the PrejudiceLab found that after participating in a six-week mindful-gratitude training, designed to fortify the ability to regulate negative emotions and cultivate a sense of gratefulness, collective narcissists were less likely to demonstrate sexism, homophobia, and prejudice toward immigrants. As I’ve written recently, existential gratitude is a resource we can all draw on to help regulate our negative emotions and find meaning in our traumas. In another preliminary study from the PrejudiceLab, Martyna Komorowska, a grad student at the time of the study, found that participants who watched a touching video meant to induce kama muta—the sudden feeling of oneness with others—were less likely to show prejudice toward Syrian refugees, compared with those who watched a control video.It’s not clear how long all of these effects last, but these studies at least provide hints that group narcissism is not inevitable. Group-narcissistic beliefs can form early in life, but they need not develop. Children can be taught that their social identity doesn’t need to be externally validated to bring them meaning. They can feel inherently worthy without needing to feel superior. And that will benefit others, too: Those with healthy self-esteem are often motivated to use their personal strengths to benefit their in-group. They’re not too preoccupied with taking down others.You can’t force everyone to see the value in your group, just as you can’t force everyone to see the value in you as an individual. But you can control how you see yourself, and the narrative you tell yourself about your group and the world. The only way out from the group-narcissism trap is up, by transcending your group’s feelings of entitlement and connecting with fellow humans—even when it’s easier to believe that you’re special.

These exotic treatments, from acupuncture to IV vitamin C to magnet therapy and more, weren’t the core of what helped me eventually gain ground and improve — strong and various doses of antibiotics played the central role. But they were the most educational part of my slow, still-continuing recovery, in the sense of what they revealed about the complexity and strangeness of the world.

The strangest of them all was the Rife machine.

The name comes from Royal Raymond Rife, an American inventor who achieved brief renown in the 1930s for claiming to have discovered a “mortal oscillatory rate” for various pathogens, a frequency at which they would vibrate and then shatter, somewhat like a wineglass exposed to the pitch of a skillful opera singer. This discovery was, alas, suppressed by powerful medical interests — or so Rife’s admirers claimed, after his death in obscurity in 1971.

His work was taken up thereafter by entrepreneurs of the medical fringe, who sold frequency-generating machines that promised to rid the body of all kinds of pathogens, often peddling them in multilevel marketing schemes, with sketchy endorsements from dubious research institutes. The caliber of person drawn to this work can perhaps be inferred from the case of a saleswoman named Kimberly Bailey, a California woman whose career as a Rife machine entrepreneur was cut short when she was convicted of plotting the kidnapping and murder of her business partner and lover at the hands of hit men in Tijuana.

When I read up on Rife machines online, these were the stories I immediately encountered — the purest quackery, unfiltered snake oil. But thousands of Lyme sufferers swore by the machines. A sympathetic 2013 portrait of chronic Lyme patients in The New Yorker began with one such case, Kaleigh Ahern, a Saratoga Springs, N.Y., teenager who spent more than eight months on antibiotics after a tick bite led to chronic illness, with crippling headaches, burning muscles and insomnia. Seeing little improvement on the drugs, she switched to a regimen of dietary changes and treatments with a Rife machine — which allowed her to recover sufficiently to graduate from college and go into medical work herself.

This was the kind of testimony that finally persuaded me to try the machine myself. So did the fact that I had been sick for almost two years at this point, and your risk-reward calculus changes radically when it seems like you could be sick forever.

Some people have questioned why I do not use the term “anti-white” to describe aspects of Critical Social Justice Theory and activism that explicitly generalise negatively about white people. Instead, when someone points out that a statement is racist about white people, rather than focusing on the fact that the denigrated group is white, I am likely to address it as a failure to consistently oppose racial essentialism and the evaluation of the worth of any individual by their race.
The main reason I do this is because I think it is important to focus primarily on first principles rather than identity. The first principle of liberal opposition to racism is that it is stupid and unethical to evaluate people’s worth by their race or attribute any characteristics, traits, values or behaviours to them because of the colour of their skin. That is, the first principle of liberal approaches to racial equality is an individual and universal one that racist generalisations are always factually and ethically wrong. There is enormous value in foregrounding this universal principle because liberally minded people of all races can get behind it. It is this consistency of opposition to racism that will bring us together to oppose both the ideological loons whose negative racial generalisations are about black and/or brown people and the ideological loons whose negative racial generalisations are about white people.
Negative generalisation about individuals on the grounds of their race is a concern shared by all people who oppose racism in genuinely liberal ways. Even though the people who denigrate black and brown people and the people who denigrate white people are different people who are motivated by different ideologies, there is value in pointing out that they are manifesting the same factual and moral failures. Despite the fact that negative assumptions made about black and brown people by white identitarians are different to the negative assumptions made about white people by Critical Social Justice anti-racists and impact people differently, there is still value in calling upon the first principle of liberal opposition to racism in order to oppose both.
This does not mean that we should not address the differences above. If we want to oppose white supremacist ideas, we will need to focus on their ideological framework. It is necessary to look at how they are specifically anti-black and how they make specific false claims about the unintelligence and criminality of black people. It is important to look at how this specifically affects black people. If we want to oppose CSJ approaches to anti-racism, we will also need to focus on their ideological framework. To do this, we need to look at how they are specifically anti-white and make specific false claims about white people being racist, arrogant, ignorant and entitled, and how this affects white people. We don’t need to make any false equivalencies when addressing both of these forms of racial stereotypes. We can openly acknowledge the mountains of historical evidence that the people most grievously impacted by racist views have been black. We can and should also acknowledge that the legacy of this can be measured today in the comparative prosperity of white and black people.
However, we need to look at what will best address and remedy both the legacy of historical racism and the racial polarisation we are facing today. The universal liberalism of the Civil Rights Movement is best equipped to do this, and there is much evidence to support this view. Society makes most progress when it appeals to our shared humanity. When Martin Luther King said he dreamt of a day his children would be judged by the content of their character not the colour of their skin, he was appealing to white Americans’ hopes for their own children and their claimed liberal values. He was saying ‘We are human just like you. We have needs and personalities and abilities and feelings just like you. Yet we are treated as inferior and denied full access to society.’ This appeal to empathy and common humanity was something that white people could relate to and get on board with. With liberal feminism and Gay Pride working in much the same way, we saw much legal progress between 1960 and 1980, and have seen much social progress since. This works with our best impulses of fairness, empathy and reciprocity.
Identity politics, on the other hand, works against those best impulses and brings out the worst in human nature – our in-group bias (tribalism) and tendency to callously disregard the wellbeing of the out-group. When Robin DiAngelo calls upon white people to be less white – by which she means less arrogant, ignorant and oppressive – this does not appeal to their empathy and create a sense of shared humanity. In fact, she rejects universalism explicitly. This causes mostly resentment from white people who are none of the above, and resulted in DiAngelo writing a whole book about how fragile white people are as the only possible explanation for them being unreceptive to her approach. Other appeals to identity which categorise certain groups as oppressors and others as oppressed have caused the same closing in and shutting down reaction. DiAngelo can call it ‘fragility’ but I would call it completely unnecessary alienation of whole sections of society from what should be a shared endeavour that is in the best interests of all of us – a society free of racism, sexism, homophobia and all other bigotries.
This is why I think the term ‘anti-white’ is seldom useful. It may certainly sometimes be valid to use the term to point out that the race being denigrated in this case is white in order to address the problem specifically. However, as a general rule it is better to refer to principles rather than identity because shared principles are something that bring us together, while shared identities can too often drive us apart.
A black person being abused because of her race can say “This is anti-black and that is wrong.” A white person being abused because of her race can say “This is anti-white and that is wrong.” They can both say “This is prejudice against an individual because of her skin colour and this is wrong.” In this last case, there is no element of identity politics – just consistently liberal principles.
We are seeing the rise of a new and largely reactive white identity politics and a new white victimhood narrative at the moment. White identity politics have always existed, of course. That’s what underlies the historical racism that has caused so much harm to non-white people. But we have made remarkable progress toward overcoming that old racism which just ignorantly assumed the superiority of white people. What we are seeing now is something new which is appearing in response to the identity politics and victim narratives of the Critical Social Justice movement. It is a defensive response to theories which make negative claims about white people such as that they are all racist, oppressive, arrogant, entitled, selfish, ignorant and more. This occurs alongside the development of concepts like ‘whiteness’ which is nebulous and indefinable, is explained in the Theory as a kind of ideology held by white people that upholds white supremacy but is often used in practice to mean existing while white which is inherently bad.
There are good grounds for seeing these ideas as racist and ‘anti-white’ and you are not fragile if you are a white person who feels wronged by being presented in this way when you are actually none of those things. You are feeling the sting of injustice and it is natural to feel defensive. However, it is essential that what you defend is consistent principles of opposing racial essentialism in all its forms and not evaluating people by their race. Do not defend being white – thisis an accident of birth and not something you should feel either proud or ashamed of, be credited for or blamed for. If you find yourself defending your white identity, you could be slipping into white identity politics which could separate you from everybody else who consistently opposes evaluating people by their race. This is a fatal error as a post-racial future is a vitally important goal that requires the combined efforts of all of us. Such a future is the only truly liberal outcome and it is impeded by anybody who behaves in ways that add salience to race itself rather than consistently opposing racism. I do not claim that people who use the term ‘anti-white’ are embracing white identity politics or asserting a white victimhood narrative. Most of them do not and are not. They are simply describing an incident specifically. However, I would advise strategically to avoid doing this.
Instead, rise above any efforts to demean you as a person whose skin happens to be white by consistently objecting to anybody being demeaned because of the colour of their skin. This keeps you in sync with liberal opponents of racism of all races, and they do come in all races. Three people who have come to Counterweight for help in defending white colleagues against language that is demeaning to white people have been black. Two of them said they did so because they have experienced racism, and they know what it feels like and they cannot stand by and allow people to be denigrated solely on the basis of their skin colour. These are genuine liberals whose opposition to racist generalisations is absolutely consistent. I have the greatest respect for them and so should you. Join them and all the other liberals of all races in working towards the post-racial future that will benefit us all.
 
The post Why I Am Not a Fan of the Term “Anti-White.” appeared first on Counterweight.

Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe for the governorship of Virginia should make Democrats—and anyone else who fears that a Republican Party still beholden to Donald Trump poses a serious threat to American democracy—very worried about what is to come.Republicans are now favored to recapture Congress in 2022. Betting markets indicate that Trump is the most likely victor of the 2024 presidential election. Difficult though it is to draw lessons from any one election, the task is crucial if Democrats are to change the political trajectory on which the country finds itself.That makes it all the more worrying that one line of interpretation seems to dominate the Democratic ecosystem. If cable-news analysts and newspaper columnists are to be believed, Youngkin, an extremist posing in the garb of a suburban dad, was able to incite “white backlash” by exploiting “fake” and “imaginary” fears about the teaching of “critical race theory” in public schools.But this account does not help explain the inroads Youngkin seems to have made in blue suburbs, among political independents, and even among Black voters. Nor does it help Democrats develop a plan for how they can avoid further political losses when Republicans across the country emulate Youngkin’s strategy next year.The truth, I fear, is rather different. Youngkin capitalized on a widespread public perception that Democrats are out of tune with the country on cultural issues. In doing so, he demonstrated that Republicans who attack identity politics without embracing Trump’s extremist rhetoric can be highly competitive in purple and even solidly blue states (such as New Jersey, where another gubernatorial election that was meant to be an easy win for Democrats has turned out to be unexpectedly close).[Read: If Democrats can lose in Virginia, they can lose almost anywhere]If Democrats want to avoid losing control of Congress next year and the White House in 2024, they need to take an unflinching look at what just happened.For most of 2021, Youngkin struggled to generate any enthusiasm for his campaign. His strategy of keeping Trump at arm’s length without explicitly criticizing him seemed to have succeeded in holding the Republican coalition together, but not in appealing to the swing voters he would need to come within striking distance of the governor’s mansion. The race looked predictable, and McAuliffe was likely to win by a safe margin.Then Youngkin started to home in on a new theme: education. Responding to widespread anger among parents across the commonwealth, he lambasted public schools for failing to reopen for in-person classes for most of the pandemic. Then, capitalizing on growing unease about curricular content—which parents who were home with their kids could eavesdrop on via Zoom—he warned that teachers were trying to indoctrinate students with radical political ideas, collectively referring to them as “critical race theory.”The pivot worked. Voters usually consider education to be one of many important issues and tend to trust Democrats to handle it better than Republicans. This was the case in Virginia as late as September, when voters who prioritized education favored McAuliffe by 33 points. But, especially after McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” the wind turned. A week before the election, a Washington Post poll found that a plurality of voters in Virginia ranked education as the election’s most important topic. Among those who did, Youngkin was now up by nine points.Other polls taken in the run-up to the election provide further evidence that Youngkin owes his victory to his focus on education. According to one poll taken in the week before the election, for example, Youngkin led McAuliffe by three percentage points among all likely voters. But among K–12 parents, the Republican led the Democrat by 15 points.Why was Youngkin so successful in turning education into the signature issue of his campaign and winning plenty of swing voters over to his side?If you listen to Democratic politicians or read the mainstream news, the answer to that question seems to be that most voters were duped. The New York Times, for example, largely missed the degree to which the debate over education was fueling Youngkin’s rise. And when the newspaper of record did finally send a reporter to write an extended piece about how Youngkin had become a “culture warrior,” it implied—as a matter of fact, not opinion—that parental concerns over curricular content were based in confusion.[Zachary D. Carter: The Democratic unraveling began with schools]Critical race theory, the article stated, is “an academic body of thought about the effects of systemic racism that has galvanized conservatives around the country. It is generally not introduced until college and is not part of classroom teaching in Virginia.” In other words, the main topic around which Youngkin built his campaign does not exist.That has also been a widely held view within the Democratic echo chamber over the past 24 hours. According to one viral tweet, “It is incredible the GOP successfully made Virginia governor’s race about teaching critical race theory in public schools, something that is not taught in any public school anywhere in America.” Or as another quipped, “White and suburban kids in Virginia are now saved from CRT and Sharia and Bigfoot and Unicorns.”In this analysis, the opposition to critical race theory is nothing more than a racist dog whistle. Supposed concerns about it aren’t just lies; they are an exercise in “race-baiting.” The real goal of Republicans like Youngkin is, simply, to prevent any discussion of the history of slavery or even to perpetuate “white supremacy.”The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. Few middle or high schoolers are poring over academic articles written by Richard Delgado or Kimberlé Crenshaw. But across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.”Effective opponents of these developments, such as Youngkin, explicitly acknowledge the importance of teaching students about the history of slavery and even the injustices that many minority groups continue to face today. They do not pretend that grade schoolers are reading academic articles. Instead, they focus the ire of many parents on curricular content that can fairly be described as popularized, less sophisticated cousins of critical race theory.Youngkin’s victory is a kind of road map that other Republicans can use to run successful campaigns over the coming years. To respond effectively, Democrats will have to stop dismissing concerns over curricular content as “fake outrage.”[Read: The GOP’s ‘critical race theory’ obsession]That leaves Democrats with two principal options. They could defend the need to teach students ideas that are rooted in critical race theory, arguing that an unrelentingly bleak view of American history or a depiction of contemporary America as still defined by omnipresent forms of structural racism are accurate reflections of reality. Personally, I have substantive disagreements with this view as well as deep concerns about how popular such a message is likely to prove. But an open defense of the need to make radical changes to the way students are taught about the history and the nature of their country would at least stand a chance of persuading some voters and have the virtue of treating them like adults.Alternatively, Democrats could become more willing to disavow curricular content that is incendiary or misguided. Exercises that ask elementary-school students to rate themselves on a scale of privilege or presentations that imply that Black people are somehow less interested in the written word may be relatively rare. But voters who worry about them are much more likely to be reassured by politicians who are willing to condemn them than by those who pretend they don’t exist. Doing so is both right and expedient.Regardless of the choice Democrats make, they should, at the same time, denounce Republican plans to prohibit teachers from discussing ideas that might make their students uncomfortable as illiberal assaults on free speech that will lead to unacceptable forms of overreach. In the coming years, the introduction of such laws—which Youngkin favors—is likely to lead to a significant number of teachers who are unfairly punished for doing their job. If Democrats manage to decry such injustices while simultaneously distancing themselves from the most unpopular content now being taught at schools, public opinion will probably be on their side.But the one option that is both intellectually dishonest and electorally disastrous is to insist on a verbal trick unworthy of a middle-school debate team: to keep claiming that widespread concern over these ideas is misguided because the term by which they have publicly come to be known technically applies to an academic research program rather than the lessons that real children are being taught in real schools. And yet, this is precisely what McAuliffe and so many others attempted to do—with disastrous results—over the closing months of his campaign.For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.

(Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images/Canadian American Business Council.Last week my friend Bari Weiss reached out to me and asked me to write a guest post on her indispensable Substack, Common Sense. The subject was an extension of a debate I had with Chris Rufo on her podcast months before and something I’ve written about at length at the French Press—the threat to free speech from the anti-CRT laws that are sweeping America.When I first debated Chris, the threat was theoretical. I was anticipating what these laws would do. Now we know what they are doing, and it’s not pretty. I’d urge you to read the entire post for the details, but we’re witnessing in real time increasing efforts to ban books, including books that no person could possibly label as critical race theory, efforts to identify key “trigger words” to identify grounds for making complaints under CRT law, and even efforts to ban photographs and other images from our nation’s history.For example, in my home county a group called “Moms for Liberty” has filed a complaint under the state’s new anti-CRT law that takes aim in part at Norman Rockwell’s famous depiction of Ruby Bridges desegregating Little Rock public schools. It’s a tough painting to look at—it contains the n-word—but it portrays an American hero, standing tall, in a moment of incredible distress. But that’s not the focus of this newsletter. I want to expand on a bit on the paragraph below. After describing the very real threat of left-wing illiberalism, I wrote this:But something is going wrong on the right. An increasing number of politicians, lawyers, and activists are responding to fears of left-wing intolerance with their own efforts to censor, suppress, and cancel. They’re doing so in different places and different jurisdictions—the very places and jurisdictions where the right is dominant and where, all too often, the echoes of America’s most painful past can still be heard.Here’s where we are—while it is absolutely the case that our nation is awash in conspiracy theories and paranoia, there is enough absolutely real intolerance and illiberalism on both sides of the political spectrum to cause rational people to be tempted to retreat toward tribalism as a means of perceived self-defense and self-preservation.In other words, each side looks at the other’s abuse and takes extreme measures in the jurisdictions it controls, all to declare we can’t let that happen here. Beginning back in 2016, just as I was beginning to be shocked and angry at Trump’s relentless rise, I made a very conscious change in my social media and reading habits. I intentionally tried to follow and read roughly equal numbers of thoughtful people on the left and the right. Note I said “thoughtful.” I try to follow the best of both sides. And it was a transformative experience. Time and again, I’d see different people write compellingly about different outrages, and the stories and takes were all true. The injustices they described were all real. Let’s take these two truths, for example. My good friends (and former colleagues) at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have compiled a sobering list of 471 scholars who’ve faced threats of termination since 2015. Here’s one partisan truth: “The left is responsible for 65 percent of attempted cancelations!”Here’s another partisan truth: “The right is responsible for 60 percent of the physical threats!” Then, here’s the partisan argument: “Your problem is worse than my problem!” Online, this observation is called “both sides-ism,” and people hate it. They demand that you declare which side is worse, and then dedicate the lion’s share of your efforts to defeating the true threat. And those critics have a point. There are greater and lesser threats, and one of the hardest parts of my job is discerning the difference. Cancel culture is a long-term threat to America’s culture of free speech, but if Mike Pence had made a different choice on January 6, the entire republic could have faced an immediate, mortal threat. My friend Jonathan Rauch calls this distinction the difference between a heart attack and cancer. When a person is facing a heart attack, you focus your efforts on making it through the next hours and days. But that doesn’t mean you don’t also keep treating the cancer. 

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Writing on his Substack “Noahpinion,” Noah Smith offers some opinions about the paper “Cost Disease Socialism” I co-authored with Samuel Hammond and Steven Teles. He’s got some nice things to say about the paper, especially the general framing. He makes some criticisms, too — arguing that we place too much emphasis on regulation as a driver of cost driver for key goods, notably health care:
There are some big problems with the Niskanen thesis — in particular, its explanation for why costs are already too high. In construction, there is good evidence that regulation — especially rules allowing NIMBYs to block new projects — is a major source of excess cost. Regulation (especially rules mandating very low child-to-worker ratios) might be the issue in child care as well…In health care, meanwhile, it’s obvious that in countries where medical services are much cheaper — i.e., every single other rich country — health care is more regulated than in the United States. In fact, price controls of one sort or another are a very common feature of other health systems, and are commonly cited as a factor that holds down costs. It’s easy to identify individual regulations that increase the cost of individual medical services, but economists who study the reasons for excessive health costs rarely point the finger at regulation as a big overall driver. [Italics in original, bold emphasis added].So Niskanen’s diagnosis for the existing cost problem is highly incomplete and needs a lot of work, especially when it comes to health care and higher ed.
Smith’s point is valuable in the abstract — certain interventions can bring down prices. But his critique is wrong not only because the notion that health care is “more” regulated in other developed countries is debatable at best, but because his argument in the above quotation implicitly (though probably not intentionally) embraces a “more” versus “less” framing of the issue of regulation. It’s far more productive to examine which regulations are “better” or “worse.” Though determining which rules are “more” or “less” restrictive is often a valuable exercise, his framing of the issue ironically embraces the so-called “market fundamentalist” view in which all regulations are an intrusion on the liberty to truck and barter — even if he comes out on the other side. In the economic sectors our paper focuses on, the most urgent need is to lift counterproductive regulations, but this does not mean we embrace a slash-and-burn approach to “deregulate” across the board: our interest is in whether a particular regulation is fixing or exacerbating inequality and lack of access, not whether it would imply “more” or “less” regulation We don’t discuss markets that are “worse” because they’re “more” regulated; we discuss markets that are “worse” and happen to be “more” regulated.
One of my objections to market fundamentalism of the snake-handling variety is the tendency to shout “regulation!” whenever the price of this or that good or service is too high or access is too low. The dose makes the poison, and how you determine if a given market is “more” or “less” regulated than another is subjective. This “more” or “less” framing also makes it possible to skirt the issue of whether or not a given rule or regulatory regime is better or worse than the alternative. In other words, questions about over- or under-regulation tend to distract from the often-more-relevant discussion of misregulation. 
On some issues, a consensus can emerge on which rules are more burdensome than others and which sectors are “more regulated.” For example, a regime that requires a license to practice a particular trade is “more regulated” than one which doesn’t. 
But things get more complicated very quickly. Looking at the Institute for Justice’s “inverted pyramid” of labor market regulations, we see that they rank private causes of action as an option less restrictive than inspections, and both of those are less burdensome than mandatory bonding. This ranking is generally fine as a rule of thumb. But what if you’re Bob Belcher and have to deal with a health inspector with an axe to grind, but your liability insurance provider charges low premiums because you’re a reputable establishment? What if your health inspections are infrequent and painless, but Saul Goodman comes forward with a crop of customers who mysteriously complain that their finger food actually contains fingers?
All of this is to say that while there are some clear-cut cases when calling this or that market “more” or “less” regulated, it’s generally more useful to analyze whether a given regulatory regime is “better” or “worse” regulated, not only in the outcomes it produces, but in the degrees of freedom available to private parties. Smith partly saves himself by adding the qualifier that “[i]t’s easy to identify individual regulations” (take, for example, the U.S. versus European policy related to at-home COVID tests). But it’s not at all clear to me that the dynamic he identifies is “obvious,” and Smith needs to do more work if he wants to italicize “more.” 
Beginning with the only example cited, we have what appears to be a clear instance where other developed nations more heavily regulate their health care markets than the United States: drug price negotiation. There’s really no argument that this, in isolation, is a more heavy-handed approach than what happens in the U.S. But we need to take a broader view. There are many contributors to high drug prices, and if we really want to look at all the ways the prescription drug market is regulated, we can’t avoid discussions of intellectual property.
All developed nations have patent systems that are broadly similar to America’s in providing regulatory subsidies to patent holders in the form of temporary exclusivity. But patents are often overlooked as a type of regulation, thanks to a robust and well-argued but ultimately unconvincing body of work which categorizes them as private property — a cornerstone of the free market system — rather than as public franchises. Intellectual property is the employer exclusion of innovation policy: a feature of the “submerged state,” that  veils itself by operating indirectly through an “incentive[], subsid[y], or payment[] to private organizations or households to encourage or reimburse them for conducting activities deemed to serve a public purpose.”
The generic drug industry isn’t perfect, but a little entry goes a long way to bring down drug prices. In the absence of generic entry, negotiation is one way to bring down prices. However, such prices are themselves the product of a regulatory subsidy given to private parties to generate new drugs. There are plenty of critiques to be made of the current patent system (and no shortage of good ideas on how to fix it), and the U.S. has tools to soften patent law’s sharp edges, mainly in the form of compulsory licenses to limit the effects of regulatory exclusivity and enhance market competition. But if we view it as “more” or “fewer” rules, these are add-ons just like drug price negotiation is.
How should we view a regime that checks the excesses of rules by stacking on more rules? Though a code of federal regulations with text to limit the effect of other regulations will be longer than one without it, it doesn’t make sense to call the former “more regulated” than the latter. When the Copyright Office announces new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, the law becomes more complicated but also more liberal.
To use an even more relevant example from the world of occupational licensing, look to North Carolina Dental Examiners v. FTC, where a 6-3 Supreme Court ruled that state-action immunity from federal antitrust enforcement did not apply. “Because a controlling number of the Board’s decision makers [were] active market participants in the occupation the Board regulates,” the Court explained, “the Board can invoke state-action antitrust immunity only if it was subject to active supervision by the State.” A number of states in recent years have enacted laws requiring state supervision of licensing boards.
In this case, we have state governments stepping in to check the excesses of quasi-private boards that themselves control competition in the market by acting as gatekeepers to enforce regulations crafted by the state. These reforms are praised by free marketeers — as they should be — even though they involve more government intervention and add complexity to labor market regulations. If we’re willing to call a licensing board supervised by the state a less-regulated regime than a licensing board free of supervision, it’s tough to see why we shouldn’t call a regime of negotiated drug prices less regulated than one where pharma companies name their price.
That’s all a very long way of saying that Smith mischaracterizes our position when he casts us as hostile toward “regulation” of health care in general, and oversimplifies the relationship between regulations and markets when he calls other systems “more regulated” than the U.S. The other side of this coin is that in many ways, the market for health care delivery is much more free in Europe than in the United States.
The ability to travel and receive medical treatments in another EU country is one area where our friends across the pond are able to cut costs by cutting regulations on human movement. Terms and conditions apply and a Belgian traveling to get surgery in the Czech Republic jumps through more hoops than if he were going to be treated in Thailand, but it is absolutely an example of a laxer regulatory regime which the U.S. would benefit from.
Dean Baker explored this issue (sometimes called “medical tourism”) in a 2017 paper for the American Enterprise Institute. Using hip replacement, knee replacement, bypass surgery, and angioplasty as examples and data on the number of procedures performed in 2010, he found that even modest uptake of medical travel with reimbursement would save consumers and taxpayers over $10 billion annually. There are numerous details that would need to be worked out for a robust regime of medical travel to be established in the United States, but considering the differential between the costs of treatment in countries like Spain or Argentina and the U.S., there are significant savings to be found.
Mobility and jurisdictional recognition of licensing is another case where Europe has a leg up on the U.S. While progress is being made in America, the practice of medicine across jurisdictions is governed by a patchwork of inconsistent state regimes. In the EU, full reciprocity has been policy for years.
Beyond where health care practitioners can ply their trade, the EU’s system is also far more rational when examining what they have to do to practice. In addition to subjecting more professions within the health care system in general to licensing, the United States throttled the number of residency slots for physicians decades ago, and we have yet to recover from the effects of this policy. It also takes about as much education to become a specialist in the EU as it does to become a physician of any kind in the U.S.
The costs of the regulations that the United States imposes but peer nations avoid or limit are major drivers of America’s sky-high health care prices. This, of course, is not to dismiss the desperate need for a comprehensive universal coverage regime in the U.S., the need for aggressive antitrust enforcement against hospital consolidation, and other areas where state intervention could go a long way to bring down costs to taxpayers, insurers, and those paying out-of-pocket. There’s a reasonable debate to be had over whether or not an America with a health care system comparable to those in similar nations would be more or less regulated than the one we have now. But it would be a debate, not a blowout. More importantly, we should think about regulatory reform in health care like a good doctor. The question is not whether your patient needs more treatment or less. The question is how you diagnose the disease and what interventions are necessary to fix it.
Photo: doomu via iStock
The post There’s “Regulation” and Then There’s “Regulation” appeared first on Niskanen Center.

 ShutterstockDoctors are under increased pressure today – with hospitals and health settings under strain, extra COVID safety protocols in place, and patients fraught with worry. 
Many doctors will be working long hours under stressful conditions, after years of gruelling training and groundwork. Some will suffer from extreme exhaustion and, at worst, burn out and leave the profession. 
We studied 751 Obstetrics and Gynaecology doctors working in Australia and New Zealand and used an established test of “grit”. 
We found those who had it were less likely to suffer burnout. Our findings might help other doctors or those outside the medical field altogether.

Read more:
Hospital emergency departments are under intense pressure. What to know before you go

Measuring grit and burnout
For our survey we recruited members of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RANZCOG). We divided them into three groups: core trainees (in the early years of their training placements), advanced trainees (in their penultimate years of training) and fellows (fully qualified specialists). 
Grit is defined as passion and sustained persistence for long-term achievement. It combines resilience, ambition and self-control. 
We measured grit using the Short Grit Scale, and burnout using the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory – two of the most recognised and widely validated tools in this field of psychological assessment.
The Grit Scale was developed by Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth’s GRIT score consists of ten self-assessment questionnaires with multiple-choice answers ranging from “very much like me” through to “not like me at all”. Prompt statements include: “My interests change from year to year”, and “Setbacks don’t discourage me. I don’t give up easily”. 
We used the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory to assess burnout in terms of disengagement and exhaustion. Like the Grit Scale, the Oldenberg Inventory asks respondents to rate themselves on a scale from “Strongly disagree” to “Strongly agree”. Statements include: “I always find new and interesting aspects in my work”, and “During my work, I often feel emotionally drained.”
In 2017, American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists reported up to 75% of Obstetrics and Gynaecology doctors experience some form of professional burnout during their career. 

Grit has been studied in other contexts including children’s learning and sporting achievement.

Read more:
You should care about your doctor's health, because it matters to yours

True grit and gynaecology
In our study, the level of seniority and grit were the only two factors that significantly predicted the level of burnout among obstetricians and gynaecologists. 
Specialists scored higher on the grit scale and experience less burnout than the training doctors. This isn’t surprising, given they’ve already shown they can power their way through the tough training years to achieve the senior rank of specialist. 
But doctors across the spectrum with higher grit scores are also less likely to report burnout. This is consistent across age, gender, location of practice and seniority level. It shows the amount of grit a doctor has, can protect their well-being and predict success.
In Australia, our research paper is the first study investigating the concept of grit and burnout in medical speciality training. The relationship between grit and burnout has been studied in other fields of medical training across the world, including ear, nose and throat specialists in the United Kingdom, neurosurgery and orthopaedics in the United States, and medical students in Slovenia. 
The grit concept has been studied outside the medical field too, in military academies for training, among teachers for academic engagement and learning outcomes for students and within sporting teams. 

Read more:
Grit matters when a child is learning to read, even in poor South African schools

Duckworth suggests grit is a useful concept for reflection and research, but cautions against using it as a decision-making tool for “selecting employees, admitting students to college, gauging the performance of teachers, or comparing schools or countries to each other”. She adds researchers have yet to find significant grit score differences between the sexes. 
There have been critics of the Grit Scale, who say it measures two constructs – perseverance plus consistency of interests – as one. 

Researcher Angela Duckworth explains it isn’t good looks or IQ that determines success – it’s grit.

Can we foster grit for doctors and others?
There is understandable interest in fostering grit among doctors. However, little is known about how to foster the development of these traits within individuals. 
Grit is likely to develop over time and be learnt through challenges, rather than being taught. 
A “growth mindset” – a belief capability can be developed with effort over time – rather than a fixed mind-set has been associated with the presence of grit in individuals. This might prove a useful approach.
Our surveys show grit has a protective role in combating burnout among doctors. Assessing doctors’ grit could become a standard test to minimise the likelihood of burnout or be useful for them – indeed anyone – to reflect on their goals and monitor risks to their well-being. Incorporating the concept of grit may have the potential to identify doctors intrinsically more susceptible to workplace stress and burnout and its consequences.

Read more:
How to avoid 'toxic positivity' and take the less direct route to happiness

Donald Angstetra is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at Gold Coast University and Gold Coast Private Hospitals

Since the economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic, production has rebounded to pre-pandemic trends. But the effects of the pandemic are ongoing in the US labor market, with stagnant labor force participation rates and a shortage of workers to fill vacant positions. Michael Strain joined a recent episode of “Political Economy” to explain what’s going on.
Mike is the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy and the Director of Economic Policy Studies at AEI.

Pethokoukis: What is the state of the labor market right now?
Strain: If you look at some indicators, you see a labor market that’s in great shape. There are more vacancies than there are unemployed workers. A big problem that the US labor market has had in the past couple of decades has been the opposite. Now, jobs are chasing workers; workers are not chasing jobs. People wouldn’t voluntarily quit their job unless they were pretty confident they could get a better job or at least the job that was at least as good. Nominal wages are growing really rapidly. So all of that really points to a very strong labor market.
Labor demand is white hot, employers are rapidly raising wages and creating job vacancies that they’re trying to fill. At the same time, we’re six or seven million jobs in the hole, workforce participation isn’t really improving, and we have millions of people on the sidelines who shouldn’t be there.
A sign in Augusta, Maine advertises job openings amid the shortage in labor due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo by Samuel Rigelhaupt / Sipa USA
Why aren’t they coming back to work?
Well, I think it’s a combination of factors. Some people are still worried about the pandemic and don’t feel comfortable coming back to work as a consequence of that. Schools are open for the most part, daycare centers are open for the most part, but they’re still really affected by the pandemic. The likelihood that we might get an email or a phone call that says, “Hey, your kid’s classroom is going to be shut down for a week or two,” is a daily reality for us, and that’s just not the kind of thing that people had to worry about before the pandemic. And I think that is keeping some people from reentering the workforce.
Another big factor is the generosity of unemployment benefits. President Biden, as part of the American Rescue Plan, increased the generosity of unemployment benefits by $300 a week. On average, unemployment benefits are typically about $350 a week. So going from 350 to 650 is a really large increase, and that has kept people on the sidelines. That program expired last month, but it takes people a while to start their job search and to find a job. And so, I think that’s another factor keeping people on the sidelines.
Some people are saying workers are not going to go back because they’ve had this time away and they now realize they hated those jobs. Those people aren’t going to come back unless the wage structure of the United States changes. Do you see something like that happening?
No, I don’t, and I hope that isn’t happening. I think people have been thinking about the jobs that they used to have, but they’re making those evaluations in a pandemic context. It’s a context of schools being uncertain. It’s a context of still being able to get a decent income from not working. As that context changes, their assessment of their employment opportunities, I suspect, will also change. And we should hope that it does.
Businesses are able to produce goods and services as if there never were a pandemic, even though we’re six or 7 million workers in the hole. And my concern is that businesses will have figured out how to get by with fewer workers. By the time workers are ready to come back, labor demand might have cooled off and businesses might say, “Hey, we just need fewer workers than we used to need.” And the jobs that they’re counting on returning to may not be there for all of them.
And in that kind of situation, either these people need to increase their skills so they’re more attractive or, what, we start paying people a basic income not to work? Is this a permanent shift?
Right now, wages are growing at about a 5 percent annual rate. One place that wages come from is from the productivity of workers. And then another determinative of wages are things like bargaining power, the power balance between workers and firms. You’re seeing wages go up because, at the macroeconomic level, demand is surging and supply can’t keep up. And that is not increasing worker skills; it is tilting the balance of power away from businesses and towards workers.
But there are no institutional changes in the US economy that are permanently altering that balance. It’s not as if unionization rates are wildly increasing, or it’s not as if there are all sorts of new laws being passed. As demand moderates and as the supply side of the economy is able to expand, we’re going to start to look more and more like we used to, prior to the pandemic. And the power balance between workers and firms is going to normalize as well. We’re going to be left with a workforce that isn’t more skilled and dynamics between businesses and workers that look more like they always have. Nothing that’s happening this summer or fall is permanent.
As I hear about this “Great Resignation” and critiques of the US labor market, there seems to be an actual disagreement of the value of work. Do you have a different philosophy of the value of work than some other people?
There are jobs that are physically demanding and that are unpleasant for a myriad of circumstances, for sure. And there are people in public life who argue that that’s not a good thing. And I think that their view gets some things right. The labor market should be characterized by upward mobility — that people can climb a ladder and not just get stuck on one of the rungs. But I think that view misses a lot about the inherent dignity in all work and about the ability of people to make real contributions to society in all those jobs.
I think it’s unfortunate that there are prominent voices in public life who refer to those kinds of jobs as dead-end jobs. I think it’s a bad message to send, telling millions of people that their jobs are dead ends. They’re making valuable contributions and they can serve as stepping stones to even larger contributions and even better jobs.
Learn more: 5 questions for Nicholas Bloom on innovation and work from home | 5 questions for Ed Glaeser on the survival of cities | 5 questions for John Haltiwanger on how the pandemic has changed US entrepreneurship
The post 5 questions for Michael Strain on the labor market appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

For much of the 20th century the political right was preoccupied with the threat to free societies posed by the state. In its scariest incarnation, the big state was represented by totalitarian entities like the USSR.
Yet classical liberal thought, which would come to dominate right-wing political parties in the West during 1980s, saw a common thread running directly from social democratic welfarism to the gulag – a “road to serfdom”, as the title of Friedrich Hayek’s famous defence of laissez-faire capitalism phrased it.
The Austrian-born Hayek’s traumatic experience living on the periphery of a collapsing Weimar Germany fostered in him a belief that social democracy – as opposed to a decrepit capitalism – generated the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. It laid the groundwork for fascism, Hayek argued, by sapping people’s attachment to individual liberty.
While Hayek’s view of social democracy was overblown – post-Second World War Europe enjoyed a period of remarkable freedom and prosperity under mixed economies with interventionist states – he was surely right to argue that state collectivism at least contained the seeds of despotism. As George Orwell wrote in 1944 in his review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (and as millions behind the Iron Curtain were discovering for themselves), the technocratic state “gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of”.
And yet, an obsession with the overmighty state – part of our 20th-century Hayekian inheritance – can also blind us to the threats to freedom posed by private corporations. Indeed, the gravest threat to liberty in the West – for the time being at least – arguably comes not from state-backed totalitarianism, but from private Big Tech corporations.
The revenues of the big six tech firms – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix – individually outstrip those of many nation states. In 2019, Alphabet, the holding company that owns Google and its video platform YouTube, brought in $162bn in revenues – more than Hungary’s entire economy.
We increasingly rely on Big Tech algorithms to facilitate everything from our connections to one another via social media, to the people we date, to the information we consume. And platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (also owned by Facebook) and YouTube (owned by Google) have the power to censor us should they wish to. The fact they don’t (usually) is surely beside the point. The fact is, most of us could probably do very little about it were we to be suddenly expelled from their platforms.
Last week we were given a useful reminder of just how powerless we are when Novara Media, a left-wing broadcaster with 170,000 subscribers, had its YouTube channel abruptly taken off the air. In an email to Novara, YouTube reportedly said the broadcaster was guilty of “repeated violations” of YouTube’s community guidelines. According to the company, a YouTube channel is “terminated” if it accrues three “strikes” by flouting the platform’s “community guidelines”.
Something similar recently happened to a friend of mine. The filmmaker and former BBC and Channel 4 journalist David Fuller branded YouTube “unfit for the purpose for hosting journalism” after the platform arbitrarily took down two videos from his Rebel Wisdom channel – films that presented critiques of anti-vaccination arguments – on the basis that they constituted “medical misinformation”. Fuller’s channel was also given a YouTube “strike”.
In both instances, YouTube later reversed its decisions and released statements saying the videos had been incorrectly removed. It appeared that YouTube’s error-prone algorithm was to blame. YouTube, the world’s largest video platform, deletes around 2,000 channels every hour – so many in fact that human employees outsource at least some of the platform’s moderation to algorithms. Yet many of the rules governing what gets taken down by YouTube – or “demonetised”, a step sometimes taken to prevent content creators from generating ad revenue – remain opaque to company outsiders.
Right-wing content creators have frequently been on the receiving end of Big Tech censorship. And so, until YouTube came for Novara’s left-wing channel, many progressives stayed conspicuously silent about Big Tech censorship – or worse, they unthinkingly cheered on the removal of content by the tech giants. Their reasoning for doing so often sounded more libertarian than leftist. As Novara Media’s very own video editor Gary McQuiggin put it back in 2020 when US president Donald Trump was banned from Twitter, “It’s not censorship when a private company decides to remove you from its platform.”
Some of this liberal complacency arguably stems from the assumption that modern corporations share their socially liberal attitudes. Indeed, in recent times the rise of “woke capitalism” has seen corporations turn virtue into profit. Big Tech has grown adept at talking the language of “equality” and “diversity” – while simultaneously pursuing its own profit-driven agenda. Amazon, the largest multinational in the world – where I discovered workers urinating into Coca-Cola bottles when I went undercover at the company in 2016 – even lists “equity” as one of its guiding principles.
Big-state totalitarianism may have been the curse of the 20th century. Yet as the philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote, an obsession with totalitarianism can lead to us “becoming blind to the numerous small and not so small evils with which the road to hell is paved”.
Our apparent willingness to let Big Tech dictate the information we consume is an apposite example of the “blindness” Arendt was referring to. When Big Tech corporations wield a greater degree of power than many modern nations, the big state is probably not the only bogeyman we should be worried about.
“This is what we believe,” Margaret Thatcher is rumoured to have told Conservative Party colleagues while brandishing a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty. In our complacency about private corporations, we still live in Hayek’s shadow. But as Orwell noted in his review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Hayek was blind to the fact that “free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly”.
Monopoly is precisely what Big Tech has bestowed upon us when it comes to our online lives. As such, the issue of Big Tech censorship can no longer be waved away as a private corporation acting on its own private interests. Indeed, it’s high time we sloughed off the outdated dogma that says that the state alone is capable of thwarting political liberty.
[See also: The goodness business: how woke capitalism turned virtue into profit]

In the months since Pfizer announced its plans to adapt its COVID-19 vaccine for kids, the nicknames have been rolling in. Lil Pfizer, Pfizer-Mini, Pfizer Jr. (sorry, BioNTech; everyone tends to forget you). Others offer a cheeky play on Comirnaty, the shot’s tongue-twisting official title: Comirnito, Baby Comirnaty, or my personal favorite, ComirNatty Light.These monikers not only nod to the smaller humans the shots are designed for, but the actual size of the doses themselves. If Pfizer earns the expected thumbs-up from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky this week, children 5 to 11 years old will be getting 10 micrograms of RNA in each Pfizer shot, a third of the 30-microgram recipe that’s given to people 12 and older. Further down the road, pending another set of votes, authorizations, and recommendations, kids 4 and younger will get a wee 3 micrograms, a tenth of what their parents get.It sounds, at first, like some pretty weird COVID math. Five-year-old bodies look nothing like 11-year-old bodies; it might seem bizarre that they’d get the same dose. And certainly nothing physiologically revelatory happens when someone turns 12: “You don’t wake up one day and have a different immune system,” Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician and vaccinologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told me. But somehow, the difference of a day can triple a child’s inoculation dose. The picture appears even murkier when considering other brands, like Moderna, which did its calculations differently: 100 micrograms of RNA for adults; 50 micrograms for 6-to-11-year-olds; 25 micrograms for 5 and younger. Scientifically, what gives?Thankfully, there is a logic to how pediatric shots are designed and dosed. Children aren’t just miniaturized adults, and vaccines aren’t sandwiches: Pairing the two appropriately requires more than splitting shots into quarters or halves. The goal is to get the shot to be not just kid-size, but kid-friendly, which means finagling a whole slew of factors, including dosing—but also how vaccine recipes are stabilized and stored, how much liquid gets injected into arms, and even who doles the vaccines out and the color of the vials they use.[Read: Five big questions about COVID vaccines for kids]Consider, first, that kids’ vaccines aren’t dosed like most medications are. Many drugs don’t work unless they hit a certain concentration in the blood, and so need to be dosed by a child’s size (think Tylenol). It’s a Goldilocks principle: There needs to be enough drug around to be therapeutic, but not so much that it risks toxicity. A similar sweet spot exists for vaccines—not too little, not too much—but the math plays out differently. Here, researchers are paying less attention to weight, and more to how readily a body is able to marshal an anti-pathogen defense. Many aspects of kids’ immune systems are feistier than adults’; their bodies pack a more natural punch. Ten-year-olds of different sizes should be expected to react to vaccines in ways that are “basically, functionally the same,” Edwards told me. (Obesity, notedly, has been shown to blunt responses to some vaccines, but whether or how that might impact COVID shots isn’t known.)“Children’s immune systems are probably at their best around 15 years of age,” Archana Chatterjee, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Rosalind Franklin University, told me. Data submitted by Pfizer to the FDA, for instance, showed that freshly vaccinated 12-to-15-year-olds produced more antibodies than adults do after a full-size shot. (A similar phenomenon was observed with the HPV vaccine, which is targeted to adolescents.) After that, defensive moxie declines, growing more sluggish and forgetful over time. The less natural defense the immune system can offer, the more vaccine it needs.This broad pattern means it can be safer and more practical to give even younger children trimmed-down versions of adult doses, a strategy already employed for the shots we use to block other viral diseases, such as influenza and hepatitis A and B. (The trend can also work in reverse: Flu vaccines are given at higher doses to people over 65—an extra jolt for an immune system on the wane.) Dosing conservatively is also a good way to minimize bad outcomes, which tend to get more common the more the immune system is provoked, Chatterjee told me.Pfizer tested that idea out in an early-phase clinical trial that included kids aged 6 months to 11 years, who were given four different doses of the company’s vaccine: 3 micrograms, 10 micrograms, 20 micrograms, and 30 micrograms (the adult dose). Researchers monitored side effects and immune responses, and selected the two smallest doses for further study. The 10-microgram dose for 5-to-11-year-olds, in particular, seemed to tickle out blood antibody levels “comparable” to what the company had seen in older teens and young adults, Pfizer said in a recent press release. And the company’s final numbers, submitted to the FDA, show that the pediatric dose was 90.7 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19 in this age group in the few months after inoculation, including over the summer, against the Delta coronavirus variant. The low dose’s side effects were also the standard stuff that’s been seen in older children and young adults—arm pain, fatigue, headaches—but many of them were milder and more tolerable. (Those symptoms got a bit worse at higher vaccine doses, a disincentive to move the kids up the scale.)With 10 micrograms, “we think that we have optimized immune response and minimized reactions,” Bill Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president of vaccine clinical research and development, told a panel of advisers to the FDA last week. Striking that balance is crucial, Grace Lee, the chair of the committee that advises the CDC’s recommendations on vaccines, told me. “If you can get the same level of protection at a lower dose, that just makes sense.”[Read: Vaccine data for kids under 5 are coming ‘before the end of the year]’One asterisk on Pfizer’s so-far-comforting safety data is a pair of rare but serious side effects that have been detected in other age groups who have gotten mRNA vaccines: myocarditis and pericarditis, inflammation of the heart and its surrounding tissue, which seem to appear more frequently in boys and young men. Pfizer’s trial of 5-to-11-year-olds didn’t detect any cases, but it enrolled only thousands of children, too few to reliably pick up a signal. The hope is that a lower dose will slash risks of these events too—and if there’s a link between myocarditis and testosterone, as some researchers have hypothesized, kids who haven’t yet hit puberty might be less vulnerable. But the urgency of protecting young kids—who, almost a year into the vaccine rollout, still don’t have a full inoculation green light—means “we have to make some decisions under uncertainty … and be willing to change our minds if more data emerge,” Lee told me.None of this is to say that the exact age groups Pfizer chose represent hard scientific boundaries. When I asked the company how it had selected its age cutoffs for vaccination, Kit Longley, Pfizer’s senior manager of science media relations, told me that “we chose those ages based on our vast experience in vaccine development for pediatric populations and in consultation and agreement with FDA.” Sure.Kate Cronin, Moderna’s chief brand officer, was a bit less cryptic. She pointed to puberty as one of the considerations her company used to cordon off age ranges, above and below 12. (Hormones can gently futz with immune function.) There are logistical considerations, too, for when kids start to mingle with others, and what schedules have been used for other vaccines. Children tend to head off to school around age 5 or 6, a time when a lot of vaccine boosters are administered. And up to age 2 might be a reasonable range to demarcate “infancy,” a period when the newborn immune system is finding its footing. (There’s actually little point to giving certain shots before six months of age: Babies teem with antibodies inherited from their mother, and need time to tee up their own immune defenses.)Some of the lingering squishiness is probably why a lot of parents have been wondering what to do with kids who are teetering on 12—an age jump that would instantly triple their vaccine dose. But experts told me that parents shouldn’t fret about the precision of age. “Your immune system doesn’t know exactly when your birthday is,” she said; kids on this precipice will likely respond enthusiastically to either dose. (A draft of the CDC’s interim clinical considerations for Pfizer’s pediatric vaccine, posted today, notes that children should receive their doses based on “age on the day of vaccination”—which means a kid who turns 12 between Pfizer’s two doses could get 10 micrograms, then 30. But two 10-microgram doses “is not considered an error”; Pfizer had some participants who turned 12 during its kids’ trial, and they got the same injection each time.)The bigger consideration is about how soon an inoculation can raise a kid’s defensive shields. Protection takes a while to kick in, even after the second shot, and “you never know when COVID will enter your life or your child’s life,” Sallie Permar, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me last week. Edwards, the Vanderbilt vaccinologist, agrees that waiting is a gamble. Five of her seven grandchildren are in the 5-to-11 age group, she said. “All five of them will be getting the vaccine the first day they can.”

Here’s Part III of my 2021 update “For every 100 girls….”, see Part I here and Part II here. The entire 70-item list including Parts I, II, and III is available here. 
5. Higher Education and Labor Market (9)
For every 100 women enrolled in US colleges (degree-granting postsecondary institutions) at all levels there are 75 men enrolled. Source: National Center for Education StatisticsFor every 100 women enrolled in US graduate schools there are 68 men. Source: Council for Graduate Schools (2020)   For every 100 women who earn associate’s degrees from US colleges, there are 61 men. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2021-2022)For every 100 women who earn bachelor’s degrees from US colleges and universities, there are 73 men. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2021-2022)  For every 100 women who earn master’s degrees from US colleges and universities, there are 65 men.  Source: National Center for Education Statistics   For every 100 women who earn doctor’s degrees from US universities, there are 85 men. Source: National Center for Education Statistics   For every 100 women who are recent college graduates but not in the labor force, there are 108 men.  Source: Department of Labor For every 100 women with an advanced degree but not in the labor force there are 114 men. Source: Department of Labor For every 100 women ages 16-24 in the civilian labor force who are enrolled in college there are 68 men. Source: Department of Labor

6. Crime, Incarceration, Alcohol and Drugs, Homelessness and Wounded Military (16)
For every 100 women who were victims of violent crimes in 2020, there were 106 men. Source: Federal Bureau of InvestigationFor every 100 women murdered in 2020, there were 344 men.  Source: Federal Bureau of InvestigationFor every 100 women who were victims of robbery in 2020, there were 187 men.  Source: Federal Bureau of InvestigationFor every 100 women who were victims of aggravated assault in 2020, there were 115 men. Source: Federal Bureau of InvestigationFor every 100 women who were victims of property crimes in 2020, there were 126 men. Source: Federal Bureau of InvestigationFor every 100 women who were victims of motor vehicle theft in 2020, there were 167 men. Source: Federal Bureau of InvestigationFor every 100 women who are homeless, there are 158 men.  Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (2020)        For every 100 women who are homeless and unsheltered, there are 234 men. Source: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (2020)           For every 100 women who abuse illicit drugs and alcohol, 180 men do so. Source: Addiction CenterFor every 100 women who had an alcohol use disorder in 2019, there were 175 men. Source: Centers for Disease Control  For every 100 women who have an alcohol-related hospitalization, there are 232 men. Source: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism For every 100 females in local jails in the US, there are 614 males. Source: Department of Justice via Wikipedia For every 100 females in state and federal prisons, there are 1,225 males.  Source: Department of Justice For every 100 females in federal prison, there are 1,331 male prisoners.  Source: Federal Bureau of Prisons    For every 100 female military personnel who have been wounded in action during Operation Enduring Freedom, 5,098 men have. Source: Congressional Research ServiceFor every 100 female military personnel who have been wounded in action during Operation Iraqi Freedom, 4,982 men have. Source: Congressional Research Service
See the chart above that includes some of the items above, and items that appear in Part I and Part II. 
The post 2021 Update: “For every 100 girls…..” Part III appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Listen & subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket CastsThe road to purposeful work is paved with good intentions, but for many, happiness at work can feel like a hopeless cause. What if the secret to happiness at work has less to do with our extrinsic motivations (money, rewards, and personal gain) and more to do with intrinsic motivations—the meaningful relationships we build, and the ability to be in service to people who need it?In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we’ll explore workplace practices to live out purpose-driven principles. We’ll also talk about why authenticity is vital to strong leadership and “walking the talk,” and how to factor emotional needs into our workplaces. A conversation with the chief happiness officer and CEO of Delivering Happiness, Jenn Lim, helps us tackle one big question at work: Why do I do this every day?Click here to listen to other full-length episodes in this series.This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael.Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091.Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche de Luces”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”).This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Arthur C. Brooks: People like to complain about their jobs, and there’s a lot in popular culture about people having terrible bosses, but it’s amazing to me when I look at the data on work satisfaction and how it’s actually gone up over the last few years.As I’ve written about in my column in The Atlantic, Gallup asks a sample of American adults kind of a loaded question: How much do you like your job? The portion of Americans who say they are completely satisfied at work has risen dramatically over the past two decades, from 41 percent in 2001 to 55 percent in 2019.And in 2020, despite the fact that millions of Americans had shifted to remote work, still, 89 percent said that they were either completely or somewhat satisfied. That’s great news. But there’s bad news too. For better or for worse, people spend their time and most of their mental energy at work. Now, let’s think about what we’ve tackled on this show so far. We’ve talked about emotional management and mindfulness with Dan Harris—managing your emotions so they don’t manage you. We’ve talked about the importance of relationships and friendships and reorganizing our priorities to ensure that we live a people-centric life, with Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general. We’ve talked about avoiding self-objectification or the idea that you are your job or you are a particular role in life. We talked about that with Dr. Shefali. But what about the thing that most often distracts us from all these projects? Work!Jenn Lim is the CEO and chief happiness officer of Delivering Happiness, a company redesigning workplace organization around positive psychology. Jenn’s mission is to embed happiness and humanity in all workplaces, from the individual to the institutional level. Delivering happiness applies science-based happiness research to help companies improve their corporate strategy and their company culture, which all begins with individuals showing up to work with their most authentic selves. Jenn co-founded Delivering Happiness with the late Tony Hsieh, who also was the famous entrepreneur behind Zappos, and who wrote the book called Delivering Happiness, which was a huge best seller. Tony passed away in 2020, sadly, and this was a tragedy for a lot of people, including Jenn, but he continues to be an inspiration to her and many people around the world.Jenn Lim: We’re focused on workplace happiness and what scientific happiness means, using that research and academics around all that body of work of positive psychology. How do you make it practical and tactical in the workplace?It’s not just the inspirational stuff—that’s important, but that’s short-lived, and that’s kind of like a rah-rah keynote or workshop. But we’re all about systemic change and making sure that we embed these kinds of practices behaviorally so that companies can actually not just be “happier” from a sustainable basis, but also realize the results from an ROI perspective. So in terms of retention, attraction of the right people and especially right now, as we see the great resignation, it just seems like more than ever, it’s important to have these things embedded in how we actually grow companies for the long term. So it’s been pretty cool to see how this whole, you know, lofty rainbows-and-unicorns happiness thing has actually landed in a universal way.Brooks: Congratulations. So the question, before we talk about the results that can actually come from this, is what do you mean by systemic change with happiness? What does that actually look like?Lim: So the systemic stuff comes in the very non-sexy, very nonglamorous side of org design. Basically, how do you design the organization in a way that these kinds of things are not just nice words on the wall, like, Oh, this is our purpose, and oh, these are values, but actually embedded into how we recognize people, how we reward them, how we incentivize them—to the point of hiring and firing based on it. So that even if they’re a rock-star kind of performer in whatever they do, if they’re actually not living up to those values of what they believe in, then it doesn’t become systemic.Brooks: So without divulging any confidentiality, obviously, give me an example of going into a company finding something that’s a real barrier to the happiness of the company and therefore the performance of the company, quite frankly. And some changes systemically that you’ve made that’s resulted in greater happiness of the employees and the executives. And then the kind of results that you’d see.Lim: My freshest example is Starbucks. So we were there for years and then it was like we were about to go into this huge project that they’ve never really done before, because Howard Schultz—the leader—he’s super iconic. To his credit, he did a lot of stuff just bringing that whole culture, Italian culture, coffee culture into American society. And then his leaving and having a new leadership team, new CEO, they are like, How do we exist for another 50 years? So we’re about to embark on this whole vision project. What is Starbucks today? How do we make them more current? I don’t know—can I cuss on this or is this not really that?Brooks: You can say anything you want!Lim: You know, when the pandemic shit hit the fan, as we know, like when shit hits the fan for an individual, the true character of that person shows, and I believe that of companies as well. So basically, they’re triaging at the same time as saying, Wait, who are we and what do we stand for? And this was most interesting to me because, you know, here’s a company that’s been known for their brand and known for being purpose-driven for so long, and rightfully so.It was really eye-opening to see how people, when they are actually led by that statement of that purpose and that mission, how they all can just leave all the other baggage behind, all the politics behind, and say, actually, yes, this is what we’re here for. I think everyone around that time, and even more so, you know, as time goes on in this next phase of COVID, are just asking those questions, like, Why am I waking up again and going to this job? Or, you know, Why am I spending every minute of this day, you know, towards this activity or role or event?In addition to triaging, what they did for their people and customers and especially their partners—what they call their employees—they launched this whole other program of what their next 50 years will be, which is not just profit-positive, and they’ve been doing amazingly well in that space, but it’s also people-positive and planet-positive. So they basically put themselves on the line to say, Hey, we’re going to be accountable for this. I think it’s a big lesson learned, to see what can happen when big shifts happen in the world.Brooks: What are the values of an organization most correlated with happiness?Lim: The way we go about it is that we’re not here to twist people’s arms and say, Hey, you got to be happy now, like, look what you have. Be grateful, and do your gratitude journal and, you know, all those things. That’s not how it works.So we call them levers—little handles that we have of what we can do to increase our happiness. And that’s a sense of autonomy, control, call it freedom, a sense of progress.Am I learning? Am I growing? Do I have a growth mindset? Do I feel like I am developing in any and all ways of life, not just work? Connection. And this one’s a big one. And it’s not just about connectedness anymore, but you know, belonging is kind of this buzzword that’s going on now with what that means and having a sense of not just being invited to the dance or being allowed to dance, but just being able to dance however you want and being accepted for that, and then actually having a turn at [being] the DJ.Brooks: Okay, back to Jenn Lim in a second. But right now, let’s talk a little bit about business plans.By that I don’t mean business plans for actual businesses; I mean plans for the business of your life. When you’re going to work, when you’re taking your whole self to work, when you’re trying to be a happier person in your work, you need something like a little business plan for your life.A business plan, it has the answer to four basic questions: What am I doing? Who am I doing it for? How am I doing it? And most importantly, why am I doing it? Why am I doing this thing? Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, How do I find that “why”? That’s the hardest question, isn’t it?Well, good news. There’s somebody who’s thought an awful lot about that that can help. His name is Simon Sinek. You may have heard of him because he wrote a best-selling book called Start With Why. That’s about how you can find your why. I sat down with Simon, and he gave me some great ideas on how each one of us can do it.Simon Sinek: I’ve never defined myself by what I do. I define myself by why I do it. Start With Why is something I live every day of my life and have since I first articulated the concept. “Why” is this deep-seated purpose, cause, or belief. It’s the sum total of how we were raised and the lessons we learned as kids that made us who we are. It’s sort of the core of our personality. It is unchangeable and fully formed by the time we’re probably in our mid-to-late teens. In other words, you are who you are.And understanding the deep core of what inspires you and makes you who you are is the value you provide to the world as well. It’s the reason your friends love you. It’s the reason your colleagues trust you. It’s the reason clients are drawn to you. It’s being your true self in how you show up in the world and in your work, and it feels really good.What the process is of uncovering one’s why is to go through a rational process. So we identify stories and experiences from your life in which we can discern patterns, and that pattern is the why. And then the opportunity is to do it on purpose, to live with purpose on purpose, as opposed to what most of us do, which is to live with purpose by accident.The reason most people struggle with it is because they start with the question “What do I want to be” or “What do I want to do?” It’s not that it doesn’t exist. It’s like love, right? It’s hard to put into words our feelings for another person, so we use metaphors and analogies. Human brains have an easier time talking about stuff and things because they’re easier to see and understand than the ethereal.Brooks: Simon Sinek makes a really important point, which is that it sounds easy to come up with your why, but it’s really hard. You know when you see it, but you can’t really describe it. It’s an interesting problem, isn’t it?So I decided that the best way for me to be able to really put my finger on it so that I could pursue my why most effectively, I was going to stop trying to say it, and I was just going to try to—I was going to walk it into existence. In the middle of 2019, when I left my job at the end of June, I got on a plane and I went to Spain. I was going to walk the Camino de Santiago, which is a walk across northern Spain.It’s a pilgrimage that people make, basically because they want to find the why of their life, either for religious or nonreligious reasons, when they want to walk the why into their lives. And that’s exactly what I did day after day, hour after hour asking for my why. And when I finished, weirdly, I knew it had gone from my feet into my brain, and then it was on my tongue. The why of my life is to lift people up and bring them together. It worked for me, and it can work for you too. But you’ve got to do the work.Lim: Going back to that sense of purpose, we could talk about all this all we want from an organizational standpoint, but unless we, as individuals, can actually ground ourselves in our own purpose and our own values and define it for ourselves first, whenever I step into that work, you know, hat on, is it really the same hat that I’m wearing in my life? And what’s most meaningful to me?There is a reason why people are quitting their jobs. Most of them without even knowing where their next step is going to be. And so I think the most important part of being our individual self, whether we’re a CEO or a frontliner, is really getting real with that and revisiting those kinds of concepts of, like, how am I going to lead people? And even if I’m not a CEO, how am I going to be a leader of myself at work and in life?Brooks: So there’s two big points that I want our listeners to pay attention to that Jen has just raised; they’re super important, really, really profound points. No. 1 is that the happiness values, the happiness levers that are the difference between a company that’s bringing happiness and is not—they’re all about people.They’re all about the values that are going to serve the people—actualize people inside the organization—being autonomy, progress, and connection, of having work, be an affirming force in your life. In other words, work should be something that brings happiness to your life as opposed to unhappiness in your life. And the two characteristics to work that will bring happiness to your life are earning your success, which is accomplishment, autonomy, progress, and a sense that you’re serving other people. Okay, that’s the first big thing. The values of a company that are going to bring happiness and create more success for the company are all about values that you bring for the people in your world. Let’s call that Jenn’s truth No. 1.Jenn’s truth No. 2 for leaders is to put your own oxygen mask on first. People ask me all the time, “You know, you teach happiness at Harvard, and you write about it in The Atlantic and all that. You must be the happiest guy in the world.” It’s like, what are you talking about? If I’m the happiest guy in the world, I wouldn’t be writing about it. I’m looking for it; it’s me-search! The effort of trying to get my oxygen mask on is actually delivering it to others. This is the point, and this is what you’re actually trying to bring to leaders. Isn’t that right, Jenn?Lim: Totally spot on. I get all geeked out on this stuff, like, when it all kind of boils down to this. Like, how do we actually bring that into a practical way of living life? One of the things that I thought was really interesting during the research of the book was I didn’t know that Maslow actually added another pyramid level on top of self-actualization. And so basically before he passed away, he realized that it’s not actually self-actualization at the top, it’s actually transcendence. Transcendence is when you’re actually providing and helping others self-actualize too.Brooks: A quick side note to our listeners here. Jenn is talking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which is a kind of a famous model based on the work of the social psychologist Abraham Maslow from the 1940s. He believed that the basest needs that we have are for food, shelter, and security, and if we get those, then we move on to higher needs, like love and companionship. But at the very top, if we can get through all those other things, we get to these higher-higher-higher-order needs, like self-actualization, and as Jenn just told us, at the very highest level, transcendence.So give us some worst practices; what are the toxic companies; what are the ones that have one foot on a banana peel and the other one in the grave? What do they look like with respect to their workplace-happiness practices?Lim: I’m going to caveat this because behind every tainted brand, there are really good people in it, because sometimes we kind of cast brands as like, “Oh, everyone in there must be like—why would they choose to work there?”So what first comes to mind, and this is different now because there’s a new CEO, but Uber has to come to mind of what was probably a poster child of toxic culture. I’m not trying to throw Travis under the bus, because I know him, and I’ve seen him grow over the years. I would say that their culture was already not established or grounded in values or a purpose other than what they were seeking at that time.Brooks: By the way, for those who weren’t following, Uber’s founder and CEO Travis Kalanick ran the company and ran into problems having to do with workplace culture. So what did you see? I mean, people talk about bro culture in Silicon Valley. They talk about excessively long work hours, the inability to get any sort of work-life balance. People talk about the fact that they were never really appreciated, never really noticed; other people would steal and take credit for their work—not necessarily at Uber, but at many companies that are noted to have toxic cultures. You, as a happiness expert in the corporate context, what are you going to look out for?Lim: There are leaders that I’ve met along the way and worked with, actually, that are just trying to check off a box. And they’re saying, “Oh, this is important now. Oh, we need to actually prioritize people and actually make it known that we want to focus on culture. So let’s invest in that and say we got it—done!”And so, No. 1 is being able to hold up the mirror and truly reflect on what it is that you’re doing that is not just self-actualization in your own right, but helping other people. And depending how you answer that, then that will answer that question of, like, what are the indicators of a toxic culture? No. 1, are people walking the talk? Are people being consistent in living up to what you believe your values to be? And it’s not just values, either. It’s actually defining specific behaviors.Another poster child of what went wrong: Enron, one of their top values was integrity. We all know where that went. So it’s kind of like, Well, how do you define integrity? It’s like, Oh, well, I’m just going to squander all this money for myself. This is where the systemic change makes me the geek about how to embed this stuff.So being able to look at whether or not people are actually living according to what you think your values are and how you define them and how you define your behaviors by them. That’s, I think, the biggest indicator of whether or not you’re going in the right direction. And one of our metrics is it’s not just, you know, retention or attraction, but it’s also “How happy are people?”And now, more than ever, it’s not just the rainbows and unicorns, like, you know, happy hours and raises—the extrinsic stuff, as you know—it’s the intrinsic stuff. And being able to have those honest and open conversations that bring up tensions and bring up the state of where we are mentally or emotionally. You know, all these factors that were taboo not, you know, just even 10 years ago, but now it’s just like, Hey, we have to talk about this stuff. Brooks: When I am talking to an executive, you’re telling me, if I’m going to go in, I’m gonna coach an executive and that executive is like, “Yeah, yeah, I want a culture in which people can live up to their transcendental values. And they have friends here, and they have time off for their family, and they understand that their work is the place where they can be realized and serve others. But I’m, really, personally about money, power, pleasure, and fame.” You’re like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, red lights on the dashboard. That inconsistency, per se, will be perceived immediately, and no matter what you say, it simply will not work. Is that a true statement?Lim: It could work for a lot of short-term gain. It won’t work for the long-term gain. And it won’t work when the future of work is basically, well … we’re living it now. We didn’t know until the pandemic, social unrest, and global recession came, Oh, we’re actually living it now.So what does that mean? Well, we have to adapt as companies, as people. And if companies don’t adapt, they’re not going to be around. And then all of a sudden it becomes, unfortunately, this sort of survival mentality and this sort of scarcity mentality. And at the end of the day, if we are comfortable living that kind of life and having those kinds of priorities where it was extrinsic—of the money, title, status, and grow, grow, grow, buy, buy, buy, then that’s up to us for us to live and die by. But I think there’s been a huge reckoning of leaders that are more vulnerable and not as fearful of going down deep into, you know, whatever happened, those traumas that happened in childhood or, you know, upbringing and et cetera, et cetera. That’s when it gets real.Brooks: In the time that we have left, I want to talk about your new book, and it’s got a pretty interesting title: Beyond Happiness. Jenn, is there something beyond happiness? You’re killing me.Lim: Coming from you, Arthur, that’s kind of a big question. Like, really? You don’t think so?Brooks: But what we’re doing, of course, is that we gotta define happiness now and then we have to say what’s more important than happiness, so to take us there.Lim: So my history background is, like, Delivering Happiness, launched with Tony, running the company, and it was going well. I mean, the concepts that are born out of the scientific levers of happiness and all that, it works. But in the last several years, it just started feeling like there’s something more here that I’m missing. And so I started, you know, petri-dishing on myself and just kind of doing my social-scientist thing and with clients and just being real, like, Wait, there’s something else here.So one of our models is me, we, community. It starts with the me in the middle. Then it kind of ripples to the we and then to the community, which is our customers, partners and vendors and ecosystem. So what I realized is that unless we start with the me first, then the other stuff can’t really actually fully, you know, get to the potential.Then 2020 happened. And all of a sudden, these hypotheses and things that we were working with CEOs that were checking off the box and then realized, You know what? Holy shit, this was about me. And then they realized, Oh, this is what we’re going to do. We’re not going to do this just for the company. We’re going to do this for our community. We’re going to do this for our country. We need to be real with ourselves. So that was the light bulb of what’s beyond it. Because, I think, from a societal level, we have automatic connotations of what we think happiness to be. But then unless we dig a little deeper and realize that we learn as much of ourselves from our highs and our lows.The buildup of all these events of 2020 and then the passing of Tony in November, then I just, you know, as I was processing his passing and as I was processing what I wanted to really try and capture, it had to be something beyond. And you can look at it in very different ways. And I guess I’m making it ambiguous purposefully because there is a spiritual element here of what truly is beyond. And then there’s the practical, you know, “here we are” level in life—of what can we create and understand and be real with? Celebrating our highs and and also really getting real with our lows.Brooks: Hmm. This book is, you know—going from delivering happiness to beyond happiness is kind of the move from self-actualization to transcendence in Jenn Lim’s life, it sounds like to me. A person fully alive is a person who is really living everything, and that’s the essence of transcendence. This is a book that digs into your own personal journey to be fully alive, isn’t it?Lim: It is, yeah. And I think people might be surprised when they actually read it. They’re like, Wait, I thought, this was about happiness. The “beyond” part is like, there’s something more to that and [by] digging deep into that within ourselves—freaking sucked that it had to happen in that way with what happened with Tony in 2020 of all those things—but now I feel that this is squarely where I was trying to get to. As you’re describing it, living fully. We’re all going to have freaking crappy days, but we’re all gonna have those days, and how are we going to be more human about it? And being able to say, you know, just be gentle with ourselves, say what’s going on, like, it’s okay; just emote. Or just asking your co-worker, Hey, you all right?Brooks: I think that you are saying something that’s even deeper than it’s okay if it’s not all right. I think that you’re saying it’s actually part of the deal, and it’s a good thing because [otherwise] you’re not getting a full experience; you’re getting the two-dimensional version; you’re getting the cardboard cutout, the cartoon.If we’re really staying on the positive, we’re not staying on the fully alive part. And it’s hard, you know, holding bad feelings close to you. I can only imagine when you went through. You were very close to Tony.Lim: The lowest moment of my life before Tony passed was when my dad passed 18 years ago, and this was before Delivering Happiness was born. But that was a moment where I got laid off; 9/11, you know; my dad got cancer; all those things. And that really put me to this place where what you’re speaking of, it’s that fullness and wholeness, and it has taken all these years—I would say just up until, like, four or five years ago—to realize that. I started reading more about grief and and the beauty of grief, and being able to understand that. And the more I read about it, the more I tapped into that side of acceptance and sitting with it. But until you experience it, feel it, and actually understand how that works within our life and our emotions and our psyche and our spirit—that’s a whole other thing.Brooks: You’re talking about the sacredness of suffering, which of course, is as ancient as any wisdom, tradition, and any serious religion that has ever existed.Lim: Part of this book is to get us back to that place. There’s so many things of ancient religions, our sense of rituals that are lost. There was a place and reason why we have funerals. There’s a place and reason why there’s, for some cultures, there’s the mourning period for an extended period of time; it’s not just a funeral service.And I think that, okay, let’s update that now and actually be able to speak about this, especially with all the loss that we felt—I’m not talking for me; everyone in the world felt—and make this not something that we want to shy away from or don’t want to face when that day comes for us, but actually embrace it in a way that that’s how we live fuller lives.Brooks: What a wonderful integration of delivering happiness and going beyond to the essence of being fully alive; what a gift you’ve given us. Thank you, Jenn.Lim: Thank you, Arthur. Thank you for all those great questions too.Brooks: As a happiness researcher, people are always my subject of choice. We put out a call to action for our listeners to answer this question: When is the last time you remember being truly happy?Listener submission: Hello, this is brother Joe Trout. I’m coming to you from Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago. Actually, just last night, I was pondering this question of feeling really happy. I had worked an incredibly long day. I’m a high-school morality teacher, and then a cross-country coach, and part of a religious community. So I got up for prayer at 6:30, was off to school, worked an 11-hour day and then came back home for prayer and community time and then spent another two hours doing research for my classes. By the end of it, I was dead tired, and out of nowhere just had this overwhelming sense of how wonderful it was, how great it was that I got to do something meaningful all day. You know, a lot of people think of trying to teach morality to teenagers as some horrible job, that they just want to do whatever they want. But it’s not true at all. They’re deeply invested in the question of how to live a rich, meaningful life. It’s exhausting at times, but it’s fun. You know, teachers, we don’t see the fruit of our work all the time. We often are left hoping, but I just, at a certain level, don't really care; I enjoy it and I see what they’re doing now, and I hope they’ll turn out well. I don’t—I don’t know what more I could ask for. Brooks: Today’s exercise is called turning your job into your mission. Now, it sounds pretty bold, doesn’t it? There’s the old story about somebody who’s walking down the street, and he sees somebody who’s putting one brick on top of another. And he asks him, “So what are you doing?” He said, “Well, obviously, I’m just laying bricks.”There’s the guy next to him doing the same thing. So he says to him, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m building a wall.”There’s a third guy doing the same thing, and he says, “What are you doing?” And he said, “I’m building a cathedral.” So what’s your answer? Are you laying bricks? Or are you building a cathedral? If you want your job to be a mission, you need to do two things.And this is where the exercise comes in. The two things that take a job and make it into a mission, that make it truly meaningful—now and going forward into the future—are earning your success and serving others.I’m going to talk about how you do each one. Earning your success is the opposite of what the great social psychologist Martin Seligman calls learning your helplessness. In his research, he’s found that learned helplessness occurs when people feel like they don’t have any control—that no matter what they do doesn’t really affect the outcomes. It’s actually really clear in the research that it’s correlated with depression and anxiety.The opposite of learned helplessness—where you just feel helpless, you’re not going to do anything, you’re not going to put any special effort forward, you’re certainly not going to like what you’re doing—the opposite is earned success, where you’re creating value with your work. To do that, you need a feeling of accomplishment and a path forward. So ask yourself this in your work: What am I doing? What am I accomplishing, and what is my path forward?Now, I realize that this can be hard to do, depending on your job. For example, let’s just say you’re an insurance agent. It’s easy to be thinking, Well, I’m trying to sell people insurance, and they don’t necessarily want it. I feel like I’m trying to get people to eat their brussels sprouts because it’s a responsible thing to do. I guess that’s helping them. But on a lot of days, you probably feel like you’re an annoyance.Well, let’s think a little bit deeper. I’ve done a lot of research on that very industry. Insurance is truly a happiness engine for people because it takes uncertainty and takes fear out of people’s lives. Go forward every single day saying, “I’m going to remove fear from somebody’s life today, so that that person can feel free to earn their success and so that they can, without fear, serve other people.” That’s a beautiful thing to do. And you can do that. And you can find that kind of link in any job that you have. That’s honest and that, in fact, is serving your values.If you think [about] where what you’re doing is leading you and how it’s creating value and how the value you’re going to create is going to build on the value you’re currently creating, you’ll be building a cathedral. That’s earning your success. Write it down. Make a plan. See what it looks like over the next 10 or 15 years.Your job can’t be about you primarily. Not even that often. You need to serve other people. Think to yourself, Who am I serving? I know it can be circuitous. I know it can be hard. I know it can be hard to imagine who it might possibly be. And on some days, it’s really, really frustrating.But in some way, shape, or form, something that you’re doing should be able in your mind to get to somebody who needs you, somebody with less power than you, somebody who will benefit, maybe benefit greatly from your work. Think of that person. Dedicate your work to that person, and watch your satisfaction grow.

Both Beijing and Brussels are shooting themselves in the foot, and Washington could lose the U.S.-China tech competition if it does the same.

The campaign to “rein in Big Tech” in America continues to gain momentum. The recent Facebook whistleblower testimony in Congress on the platform’s alleged harm to children and democracy—though not an antitrust issue—was followed by the introduction of a Senate “antitrust reform” bill. That legislation would heavily regulate Big Tech business transactions by blocking companies like Amazon and Google from advertising their products on their own platforms, among other restrictions. Far from promoting competition, the net result would be an intrusive weakening of U.S. international competitiveness.

Notwithstanding other controversies about these platforms, many Big Tech critics argue that the large players in the field are limiting competition and stifling innovation, and those critics increasingly point to Europe and China as justification for a similar U.S. crackdown. But this assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. Both Beijing and Brussels are shooting themselves in the foot, and Washington could lose the U.S.-China tech competition if it does the same.

Big Tech’s opponents often claim that because of megafirms’ market power, smaller companies are reluctant to invest in challenging their dominance and that successful startups are often bought out by resourceful incumbents. But venture capital wouldn’t have supported many of the startups if there weren’t a chance of being acquired. As prominent tech industry analyst Ben Thompson points out, “investors have the freedom to be more speculative in their investments, and pay more attention to technological breakthroughs and less to monetization, because there is always the possibility of exiting [investments] via acquisition.” This positive effect of potential acquisitions was also acknowledged by a European Commission report in 2019.

What’s more, startup acquisitions by large platforms benefit consumers by speeding up the diffusion of new technologies. The potential of being acquired by such platforms also inspires small entrepreneurs who specialize in invention but not in large-scale production to establish startups dedicated to new technologies.

Big Tech platforms have plenty of incentives to innovate on their own, too. According to the 2020 EU industrial R&D investment scoreboard, six of the top ten investors in Research and Development (R&D) are U.S. companies, and the top four of those six are tech giants: Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. They all have significantly ramped up their R&D investment from five years ago while making acquisitions.

China’s spectacular catch-up with the West on technology has much to do with its lenient antitrust enforcement, and Beijing knows that. For years, Chinese regulators’ approach to the tech sector has been known by the slogan “tolerance and caution”—on their part. In 2017, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stressed that, in order to create favorable conditions for innovation, China’s regulatory regime needed to be accommodating and prudent as long as companies did not cross the Communist Party’s red lines. For over two decades, hundreds of Chinese companies, including Alibaba and Didi, were able to exploit a regulatory loophole to raise the needed capital in U.S. stock exchanges because of Beijing’s acquiescence.

Beijing started to talk up antitrust regulations only before the recent tech crackdown. In February, China’s antitrust regulator published a guideline on the platform economy that changed its accommodating approach to “targeted and scientific enforcement.” But the reversal was primarily motivated by Beijing’s national security strategy rather than any epiphany that reining in on Big Tech would spur innovation—it wouldn’t. Beijing’s recent moves showed a determination to pull its economy away from America, and clamping down on its tech giants that are so intertwined with Western interests is necessary for enforcing the new red line. But that approach may well slow the rate of Chinese platform innovation.

Unlike China, the European Union has consistently employed a regulatory antitrust approach toward “dominant” high-tech firms. In recent years, this has repeatedly featured high antirust fines levied against leading American winners, including Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Qualcomm. This approach has not strengthened the hand of European platforms, as none of the twenty largest digital platforms have European origins. Despite clear harm to innovation, the EU antitrust enforcers appear to be doubling down with a “precautionary approach” that regulates novel business conduct by big digital platforms.

The lesson for U.S. policymakers is unequivocal: The American ingenuity that spawned the internet economy and created amazing new products and industries has not happened by accident. The internet economy and its latest manifestation, Big Tech platforms, have thrived in an environment of “permissionless innovation” that has avoided heavy-handed regulatory intervention. Abandoning this recipe for success in favor of statist Chinese or European controls over big companies would be a sure way to undermine American innovation and high tech-driven economic growth.

Alden Abbott is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and formerly served as the Federal Trade Commission’s General Counsel.

Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory in which a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and was plotting against Donald Trump throughout his presidency. Since 2018, an increasing number of Americans have become aware of QAnon, primarily through social media sites such as Facebook and online forums such as Reddit.

Understanding why QAnoners believe what they believe is by no means an abstract or niche question. The dissemination and acceptance of QAnon-related misinformation has had a number of real-world implications since the emergence of the conspiracy in 2018. For instance, the spread of misinformation about child sex trafficking led Polaris, an anti-human trafficking organization, to warn that its hotlines were being overwhelmed by false reports, thus preventing individuals from providing valid information.

In 2019, the FBI also published a report expressing concern over the potential for QAnon beliefs to motivate individuals to commit political violence – the first time the agency had rated a fringe conspiracy theory. These concerns were realized on January 6, 2021, when many QAnon believers were arrested for taking part in the storming of the U.S. Capitol building.

By identifying the types of messages that might lead to a weakening in support for the conspiracy, a variety of actors – for instance, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and social media platforms – should be better placed to develop strategies to combat misinformation.

In our new paper, we conducted an experiment to learn what types of messages might change QAnon beliefs, relying on a representative sample of 1,405 Americans. In testing what types of messages might increase support for QAnon, we exposed survey respondents to some information about QAnon support in Congress. We identified two Representatives – Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) and Lauren Boebert (CO-3) – to use in our experiment. When respondents learned that these Representatives had expressed support for QAnon in the past, we found that they became more likely to support the movement relative to those who did not receive this information. However, this effect was largely driven by Republican respondents, who exhibited significantly higher levels of support for QAnon than Democrats who received the same information.

In testing for what types of messages might decrease support for QAnon, we also exposed survey respondents to some information about racist and anti-Semitic posts on Voat.co, a Reddit-esque news aggregator that provided a platform to many QAnoners. When respondents became aware of these posts, we found that such individuals expressed less support for QAnon. Racism and anti-Semitism are taboo belief systems, and by connecting them to QAnon, it may be possible to reduce support for the conspiracy theory.

We also tested whether learning about the origins of QAnon on the fringe online message board 4chan, or the many incorrect predictions made by QAnon influencers, led to a decrease in support for the conspiracy. We found that exposure to this information mostly had no effect either way.

Beyond these various messages, we also found that a number of individual-level factors shape support for QAnon. Specifically, QAnon supporters knew less about politics, and were more likely to be Republican, politically conservative, younger, non-Hispanic and Catholic.

Our results indicate that, if non-profit organizations, government agencies, and social media companies wish to better combat misinformation and dispel conspiracy theories, then an effective strategy might be to connect them to racist and anti-Semitic views. Political endorsements also seem to matter, although when they were combined with disconfirming information in our experiment, the effect went away.

Even if the percentage of Americans who support QAnon remains in the low single figures, the events of January 6 indicate that any changes in support might be critically important for reducing the number of individuals who ultimately engage in political violence.

Jack Thompson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. His research interests include misinformation attitudes and voter behavior.

Sierra Davis is a PhD student in Political Science at Stanford University and a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for American Democracy. Her research interests include political beliefs and partisanship, gender in politics, elections and voting behavior, and ideology and public opinion.

The public often assumes that scientists are atheists. The reality, however, is more complex.  SIphotography/iStock via Getty ImagesDistrust of atheists is strong in the United States. The General Social Survey consistently demonstrates that as a group, Americans dislike atheists more than any other religious group. According to various studies, nearly half of the country would disapprove of their child marrying an atheist, some 40% of the public does not believe atheists share their view of American society, and only 60% of Americans would be willing to vote for an atheist in a presidential election. 
There is one field, however, where atheism is often assumed: science.
People often view scientists as “Godless.” Some of these views may be a result of people hearing more from vocal atheist scientists such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Sam Harris and others who are at the vanguard of a movement known as “new atheism.” New atheists are not simply scientists who are convinced there is no God or gods. They couple their irreligion with an aggressive critique of religious belief as a threat to societal well-being. 
These scientists espouse a frequently derisive rhetoric on religion and the religious public. Dawkins, for example, has argued that religion is a form of “mental illness” and one of the world’s “great evils” comparable to smallpox. 
But such strident attitudes may not be representative of scientists in general.
A recent research study we conducted reveals that most atheist scientists in the U.S. and U.K. are not anti-religious. 
The real story of atheism in science
Drawing on quantitative surveys with 1,293 scientists who identified as atheists, 81 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted from 2013 through 2016 and context material collected since then, we found that scientists’ views of religion are much more diverse than the image conveyed by new atheists. 
Each of the scientists in our study selected the statement “I do not believe in God” when asked about their views of God – and selected this choice over options including agnosticism, the view that the existence of God or the divine is unknowable. 
As sociologists, we view religion as multidimensional – consisting of beliefs, practices, traditions and identities – and seek to understand such dimensions in the lives of atheist scientists and their views of religion. 
One of our main findings is that most atheist scientists do not want to be aligned with rhetoric that condemns religious people. Although we did not specifically ask about Dawkins in interviews, scientists often brought him up. 
As one biologist that we interviewed in the U.K. said of him, “Well, he has gone on a crusade, basically … I think that [religion] is an easy target, and I think that he’s rather insensitive and hectoring.”
Even atheist scientists who harbored occasional negative views of religion expressed concerns that such rhetoric is bad for science. 
Not only are many atheist scientists not hostile to religion, but some think religion can also be beneficial to society; in the words of one of our respondents, “you can see the benefits of going to church.” Many, for example, discussed the sense of community one finds in churches. Others emphasized religious attendance as a force of good, encouraging people to act more charitably.
Indeed in the U.S., 29% of atheist scientists also say they are culturally religious. That is, despite their lack of belief in God, they routinely interact with religious individuals or organizations, such as having a religious spouse, sending their children to a religious school, or attending services themselves.
As one atheist biologist told us: “I enjoy going to church for the suspension of disbelief, for the theatrical experience, for reading, for the liturgy, for the magnificent stories and the mythic quality of those stories, which is intensely spiritual. That’s a real experience.” 
Atheist scientists and the religious
We also found that atheist scientists and persons of faith have more in common than most people may think, such as the experience of awe and wonder. Whereas many religious individuals experience spirituality through their faith, some atheist scientists speak of their work with similar notions of awe and wonder.
These scientists talk about “intangible realities that imbue wonder, motivate their work and are beyond observation” – realities that they call spirituality. 
[This Week in Religion, a global roundup each Thursday. Sign up.]
As sociologists Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis and Douglas Hartmann explain, when asked about atheists on surveys, Americans are most likely imagining a theoretical person who rejects the idea of God, rather than thinking about an actual atheist they may have encountered. 
Indeed, in an ideologically segregated society such as the U.S, religious and nonreligious individuals may not interact in ways that would actually inform their perspectives of one another. As a result, religious and nonreligious individuals’ views of one another are heavily reliant on stereotypes of each group. 
Consequently, when people think about atheist scientists, it is all too easy to imagine the picture painted based on those presented in the public sphere, such as Dawkins and others, in the absence of one who inhabits their community. 
What is more, it is difficult to know an atheist when you see one, especially if they are sitting down the pew from you in church, as our research indicates they might. 
In an era where our lives literally depend on trust in the scientific community, telling the truth about who atheist scientists are through research on them, rather than allowing them to be represented by the loudest atheist scientist voices, is consequential.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Christopher Anderson / Magnum
Few choices are more important than whether to have children, and psychologists and other social scientists have worked to figure out what having kids means for happiness. Some of the most prominent scholars in the field have argued that if you want to be happy, it’s best to be childless. Others have pushed back, pointing out that a lot depends on who you are and where you live. But a bigger question is also at play: What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper than, happiness?  
This article was adapted from Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot.(Ecco)
The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In one study, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked about 900 employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one of their activities and how happy they were when they did them. They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. Other studies find that when a child is born, parents experience a decrease in happiness that doesn’t go away for a long time, in addition to a drop in marital satisfaction that doesn’t usually recover until the children leave the house. As the Harvard professor Dan Gilbert puts it, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.”After all, having children, particularly when they are young, involves financial struggle, sleep deprivation, and stress. For mothers, there is also in many cases the physical strain of pregnancy and breastfeeding. And children can turn a cheerful and loving romantic partnership into a zero-sum battle over who gets to sleep and work and who doesn’t. As the Atlantic staff writer Jennifer Senior notes in her book, All Joy and No Fun, children provoke a couple’s most frequent arguments—“more than money, more than work, more than in-laws, more than annoying personal habits, communication styles, leisure activities, commitment issues, bothersome friends, sex.” Someone who doesn’t understand this is welcome to spend a full day with an angry 2-year-old (or a sullen 15-year-old); they’ll find out what she means soon enough.But, as often happens in psychology, although some research provided simple findings—in this case, “having children makes you unhappy”—other efforts arrived at more complicated conclusions. For one, the happiness hit is worse for some people than for others. One study finds that fathers ages 26 to 62 actually get a happiness boost, while young or single parents suffer the greatest loss. And crucially, there are geographic differences. A 2016 paper looking at the happiness levels of people with and without children in 22 countries found that the extent to which children make you happy is influenced by whether your country has child-care policies such as paid parental leave. Parents from Norway and Hungary, for instance, are happier than childless couples in those countries—but parents from Australia and Great Britain are less happy than their childless peers. The country with the greatest happiness drop after you have children? The United States.[Read: It isn’t the kids. It’s the cost of raising them.]Children make some happy and others miserable; the rest fall somewhere in between—it depends, among other factors, on how old you are, whether you are a mother or a father, and where you live. But a deep puzzle remains: Many people would have had happier lives and marriages had they chosen not to have kids—yet they still describe parenthood as the “best thing they’ve ever done.” Why don’t we regret having children more?One possibility is a phenomenon called memory distortion. When we think about our past experiences, we tend to remember the peaks and forget the mundane awfulness in between. Senior frames it like this: “Our experiencing selves tell researchers that we prefer doing the dishes—or napping, or shopping, or answering emails—to spending time with our kids … But our remembering selves tell researchers that no one—and nothing—provides us with so much joy as our children. It may not be the happiness we live day to day, but it’s the happiness we think about, the happiness we summon and remember, the stuff that makes up our life-tales.”These are plausible-enough ideas, and I don’t reject them. But other theories about why people don’t regret parenthood actually have nothing to do with happiness—at least not in a simple sense.One involves attachment. Most parents love their children, and it would seem terrible to admit that you would be better off if someone you loved didn’t exist. More than that, you genuinely prefer a world with your kids in it. This can put parents in the interesting predicament of desiring a state that doesn’t make them as happy as the alternative. In his book Midlife, the MIT professor Kieran Setiya expands on this point. Modifying an example from the philosopher Derek Parfit, he asks readers to imagine a situation in which, if you and your partner were to conceive a child before a certain time, the child would have a serious, though not fatal, medical problem, such as chronic joint pain. If you wait, the child will be healthy. For whatever reason, you choose not to wait. You love your child and, though he suffers, he is happy to be alive. Do you regret your decision?[Read: How adult children affect their mother’s happiness]That’s a complicated question. Of course it would have been easier to have a kid without this condition. But if you’d waited, you’d have a different child, and this baby (then boy, then man) whom you love wouldn’t exist. It was a mistake, yes, but perhaps a mistake that you don’t regret. The attachment we have to an individual can supersede an overall decrease in our quality of life, and so the love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to bring them into existence has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness.This relates to a second point, which is that there’s more to life than happiness. When I say that raising my sons is the best thing I’ve ever done, I’m not saying that they gave me pleasure in any simple day-to-day sense, and I’m not saying that they were good for my marriage. I’m talking about something deeper, having to do with satisfaction, purpose, and meaning. It’s not just me. When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their life was no happier.Raising children, then, has an uncertain connection to pleasure but may connect to other aspects of a life well lived, satisfying our hunger for attachment, and for meaning and purpose. The writer Zadie Smith puts it better than I ever could, describing having a child as a “strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight.” Smith, echoing the thoughts of everyone else who has seriously considered these issues, points out the risk of close attachments: “Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation?” But this annihilation reflects the extraordinary value of such attachments; as the author Julian Barnes writes of grief, quoting a friend, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.”This article was adapted from Paul Bloom’s new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning.

Prince Charles has announced that the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow will be “the last chance saloon” for the planet. The COP26, as it is known, will not produce any breakthroughs that will lead to any immediate solutions, even if the leaders of the world effusively agree with him. If he’s right, we are all dead meat. So at the very least, we need to consider the origins of the responses to his despair.

One explanation is that these leaders don’t actually believe in the dangers of climate change but are publicly demonstrating that they do to pander to those who fear the apocalypse. That they have children and grandchildren (not to mention political offices they want to hold onto) makes their posturing seem reasonable. If they didn’t posture, they may actually have to do something.

A second explanation is the global economic chaos created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many nations in the Northern Hemisphere are suffering from labor shortages, high energy demand, gridlocked transportation networks and so forth. Indeed, the global economy is reeling in ways not seen outside of war. Given that we are in uncharted waters economically, assuming the worst is not an unreasonable approach. Unleashing a suite of climate change reforms globally this year would be a massive risk not only to the global economy but to the very officeholders who made them. For example, the pledge on cutting coal use would wreak havoc on China. At a time when the Chinese economy is trying to regain its balance, a coal shortage is the last thing it needs. Fighting climate change requires the reconstruction of the global economy and our lives.

Another reason might have to do with a social reality. Climate change is a scientific theory, and the truth is that many people don’t trust scientists. This kind of distrust isn’t new, but it has intensified in the wake of the pandemic – the solutions to which had untold social, political and economic consequences. They ignored the fact that large numbers of people all over the world had refused to be vaccinated in the past, whatever their reasons may have been. The attempt to force vaccinations will likely fail and certainly will not enhance medical counsel. No doubt the reasoning behind vaccines is scientifically sound, but the world is far more complex than it may appear to a scientist, and risks unthinkable to physicians are reasonable in the minds of others.

Similarly, the scientific evidence for climate change is real, but it’s not clear to me that the planet will be destroyed by it. Anyone – especially a politician or head of state – who claims to know with certainty that it will has something to prove. And to say it will be universally catastrophic, as the prince did, ignores the available data that shows it will vary from region to region.

Finally, there is a cynicism on the part of the public about apocalyptic claims. For years, I have heard horror stories about population explosions and global starvation told by demographers who failed to consider that the birthrates of what we now call Baby Boomers were an anomaly, and that once it ran its course the population might start declining. I also recall that the advent of nuclear weapons would eventuate only in self-annihilation. It turns out that politicians understood that being killed was bad, so they avoided it.

It’s possible that Prince Charles is right, and that the politicians kicking the can down the road are killing us. If so, I doubt that a delay means the annihilation of the planet. Whatever the outcome, it is going to be more complicated than that. Me – I don’t trust anything that everyone knows, and climate change has become one of those things.

No one would have expected that COVID-19 measures would lead to something resembling economic gridlock. The connections of everything human are stunningly complex. Surely the seriously committed researchers at the National Institutes of Health couldn’t have imagined what has happened. The world is far more complex than is dreamt of by any of us, and all I know is that what you expect is probably not going to happen, and what does happen will be mightily weird.

Here’s Part II of my 2021 update “For every 100 girls….”, see Part I here and Part III here. The full 70-item list with all three parts is available here. 

3. K-12 Education (13)
For every 100 girls who repeat kindergarten 145 boys repeat kindergarten. Source: National Center for Education Statistics For every 100 girls whose entry into kindergarten is delayed 139 boys are delayed. Source: National Center for Education StatisticsFor every 100 girls suspended from public schools in grades 6-12, 195 boys are suspended. Source: National Center for Education StatisticsFor every 100 girls expelled from public schools in grades 6-12, 223 boys are expelled.  Source: National Center for Education Statistics For every 100 high school girls who took the SAT test in 2021, 94 boys took the test. Source: College Board (2021)For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls in the top 10% of their class, there are 79 boys.  Source: College Board (2016)For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls with an A or A+ grade point average, there are 65 boys. Source: College Board (2016) For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in math there are 82 boys. Source: College Board (2016)For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in Natural Sciences there are 79 boys.Source: College Board (2016)For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in Foreign/Classical Languages there are 64 boys. Source: College Board (2016)For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in Art/Music there are 54 boys.Source: College Board (2016)For every 100 college-bound high school senior girls who take AP/Honors courses in English/Language Arts there are 64 boys. Source: College Board (2016)For every 100 high school girls who took an AP course in 2020, there were 76 boys.Source: College Board (2020)
4. Special Education (8)
For every 100 girls ages 3-17 years diagnosed with communication disorders there are 168 boys. Source: Centers for Disease Control and PreventionFor every 100 girls 4 to 17 years old diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) there are 238 boys. Source: National Center for Education StatisticsFor every 100 girls ages 3 to 5 years old served by public schools under the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA),” there are 227 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2019-2020)For every 100 girls ages 6 to 21 years served by public schools under the “Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA),” there are 193 boys.  Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2019-2020)For every 100 girls ages 6-21 who receive services in public schools for autism, there are 492 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2019-2020)   For every 100 girls ages 6-21 who receive services in public schools for developmental delay, there are 235 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2019-2020)For every 100 girls ages 6-21 in public schools classified as having an emotional disturbance, there are 255 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2019-2020)For every 100 girls ages 6-21 in public schools who are classified as having a specific learning disability, there are 144 boys. Source: National Center for Education Statistics (2019-2020)
 See the chart above that includes some of the items above, and also items that appear in Part I and Part III. 
The post 2021 Update: “For every 100 girls…..” Part II appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

In 2011, Thomas G. Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, D.C. and independent higher education policy analyst, put together and published the 100+ item list “For Every 100 Girls….” on Education Week. In an email, Tom explained to me that “At the time I initially wrote it I was hearing and reading that boys were no different than girls, and the data I was looking at said something very different. Our differences are important, to both genders, and should be respected. Education has a long way to go to recognize, appreciate, and address these differences through educational opportunities tailored to these differences.”
With Tom’s permission, I’ve updated about half of the items on the original list with the most recent data available and added some new items that demonstrate empirically the many significant differences between boys (men) and girls (women) on many measures of health outcomes, educational outcomes, educational and learning disabilities, suicide and homicide rates, incarceration rates, alcohol and drug abuse, behavior problems leading to suspension or expulsion in school, homelessness, job deaths, military deaths, crime victimhood, etc. Part I appears below and Part II appears here and Part III here. The full 70-item list with all three parts is available here. 
1. Birth and Death (20)  

For every 100 girl babies who die in the first 27 days of life 127.5 boy babies die.
For every 100 girl babies who die after the first 27 days but in the first year of life 130 boy babies die.
For every 100 infant girls who die under one year old, 128 infant boys die.
For every 100 girls ages 1 to 4 years who die 141 boys die.
For every 100 girls ages 5 to 14 years who die 130 boys die.
For every 100 girls and women ages 15 to 24 years who die 270 boys and men die.
For every 100 women ages 25 to 34 who die 227 men die.
For every 100 women ages 35 to 44 who die 177 men die. 

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics

For every 100 women who die by opioid overdose, 227 men die.    Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
For every 100 female deaths attributable to alcohol worldwide, there are 329 male deaths. Source:  National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health
For every 100 women who die on the job, 1,118 men die working. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

For every 100 females ages 15 to 19 who commit suicide there are 293 males. Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 females ages 20 to 24 who commit suicide there are 464 males.  Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 females ages 25-29 who commit suicide there are 418 males.  Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 females ages 15-19 who die of homicide, there are 642 males. Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 females ages 20-24 who die of homicide, there are 717 males. Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 females ages 25-29 who die of homicide, there are 579 males. Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 females ages 30-34 who die of homicide, there are 488 males. Source: Centers for Disease Control

For every 100 female military personnel who have died during Operation Enduring Freedom, 4,506 men have died. Source: Congressional Research Service

For every 100 female military personnel who have died during Operation Iraqi Freedom, 3,915 men have died. Source: Congressional Research Service

2. Educational Attainment of Young Adults (4) 
For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have an associate’s degree, there are 89 men.For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have a bachelor’s degree, there are 88 men.For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have a master’s degree, there are 61 men.For every 100 women ages 25 to 29 years who have a first professional or doctor’s degree there are 80 men.
Source:
National
Center for Education Statistics  
MP: For those in the social constructionist movement who argue that the differences between men and women are entirely social conventions, how can these significant differences in gender be explained?
 See chart above that includes some of the items above, and items that will appear in Part II and Part III. 
The post 2021 Update: “For every 100 girls…..” Part I appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

We are “quite literally” in the “last chance saloon,” says Prince Charles. Humanity is “about 5-1 down at half-time,” says Boris Johnson. People will curse this generation of politicians worse than they did that which appeased Hitler, says Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, because they are allowing “a genocide on an infinitely greater scale”.
Are things quite that bad? Well, if you read the headlines, yes: we’re on course for disaster and we don’t seem to be turning. “Business as usual” will lead to a catastrophic collapse of Himalayan glaciers; and devastating heatwaves in the southern United States, according to the New York Times. What’s more, the same newspaper said last week ahead of COP26, “If we continue with business as usual, by the end of the century, it will be too hot to go outside during heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia.”
But all these stories share one thing: they are based on the IPCC’s RCP 8.5 scenario. It’s not an exciting name, but 8.5 is often described as “business as usual”. Hence the headlines.
RCP 8.5 is not business as usual, though; it’s an unlikely worst case. This means a large fraction of the public debate on climate change mitigation is driven by an increasingly implausible scenario, which was unlikely when it was proposed, and is even less so now. The more we focus on this scenario, though, the more pessimistic — and the more hopeless — the situation will seem.

Back in 2007, after the fourth IPCC report was published, climate scientists wanted to create new emissions scenarios, imagining how they might change in the coming decades and what impact they would have on the climate. But while there was a plan to make in-depth scenarios ahead of the fifth report in 2013, scientists would need to start running models for that report as soon as 2010. They needed something that could be used in the meantime.
So four “representative concentration pathways”, RCPs, were developed: RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.51. They were, roughly speaking, a highly optimistic scenario regarding emissions, two middling scenarios, and a highly pessimistic one. RCP 8.5 was there as a realistic worst case. Even at the time, it was viewed as unlikely. But two unfortunate things confused that picture.
First, of the four RCPs, only 8.5 imagined a world with no climate policy. And second, its authors described it as “a high-emission business as usual scenario” – meaning that it was at the high end of emissions for business as usual, but which was taken to mean in some quarters that high emissions were business as usual.
So RCP 8.5 became synonymous with “business as usual”. There are dozens of studies published every year describing it as such: this one says that “Business-as-usual will lead to super and ultra-extreme heatwaves in the Middle East and North Africa”. It is a mainstream part of climate science.
“The problem isn’t that people study these scenarios,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute. “It’s that they frame them as the most likely outcome in the absence of policy. That was probably never true, but I’m sure it’s not true now.”
Most obviously, we don’t live in a world without climate policies. The Paris protocols commit signatories to goals of keeping warming below 2°C and aiming for below 1.5°C. So “business as usual” is a global effort to reduce emissions.
Suggested readingWhy climate change isn't the end of the worldBy Tom Chivers
Second, and most important, the world has changed its energy mix far faster than RCP 8.5 expected. Hausfather points out that “current solar prices are below what the models think they’ll be in 2050”, and coal use has dropped in recent years. In order for emissions to reach what RCP 8.5 imagined, we’d need to increase coal use per capita by about 700% from today’s levels, spectacularly reversing the recent decline.
And this means that the really devastating levels of warming envisioned by RCP 8.5 are even less likely: we’re probably looking at a situation of 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels, compared with the 4°C, 5°C or even 6°C that RCP 8.5 predicts. As Hausfather said in a Nature piece last year, 3°C is still “a catastrophic outcome”, but it’s a heck of a lot better than it used to be.
It’s worth noting that while the emissions that get the world to RCP 8.5 are highly unlikely, the outcomes that 8.5 predicts are still plausible. One of the uncertainties in the climate is the feedbacks. For instance, as the world gets hotter, ice melts. Ice reflects sunshine, while dark earth absorbs it. So the less ice there is, the faster the world warms, reducing ice. That’s a positive feedback system: it tends to accelerate changes.
On the flip side, the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the faster plants grow, and the more they suck from the atmosphere. That’s a negative feedback system, and it tends to moderate changes.
Suggested readingCan we trust the climate scientists?By Tom Chivers
The exact magnitude of the many possible feedback systems in the atmosphere is uncertain. As the Siberian permafrost melts, will it release gigatonnes of CO2? It is possible that even under more optimistic emissions scenarios, the feedback systems will push more carbon into the atmosphere, so we end up with the same CO2 concentrations as we would have done under RCP 8.5. And there’s another layer of uncertainty, which is “climate sensitivity”. It’s not precisely known how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentrations will cause; perhaps even if the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is relatively low, the warming will be greater (although that now looks less likely).
So really bad outcomes are possible even without RCP 8.5-level emissions. We’d have to get “incredibly unlucky” with feedbacks for the world to end up warming that much, says Hausfather, but we can’t eliminate the possibility.
As a result, there’s an ongoing row among academics about whether RCP 8.5 (and its equally pessimistic successor2) should be used at all. Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of public policy and environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that it essentially has no place: that it’s based on an implausible scenario, even if you could end up somewhere similar because of uncertainties elsewhere. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he says.
But Richard Betts, a climate scientist at Exeter University and the Met Office, and one of the authors of the UK government’s climate change risk assessment, argues differently. We need to be aware of the risks of these 4°C worlds that we could – plausibly – still find ourselves in, he says. And there’s been lots of research done on worlds like that, mostly using RCP 8.5.
Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, adds that using extreme scenarios allows modellers to tease out causality in a way that more narrow ones don’t. “It allows you to see non-linearity, allows you to look for thresholds,” he says. “You get a stronger signal to noise ratio.” The actual emission scenarios are less likely, he agrees, but studying them helps us understand the climate system better.
Suggested readingHow science has been corruptedBy Matthew Crawford
The trouble is that if a journalist sees two graphs in a study, one of a plausible RCP 4.5 world and one of a much more dramatic RCP 8.5 world, they’ll probably want to run the RCP 8.5 graph, “because it’s more impressive,” says Hausfather. “And they’ll say scientists predict this much sea level rise, or this many heat deaths. And it’s not accurate because you’d need to add ‘but only if we burn all our coal or get very unlucky’.”
There’s also a risk that RCP 8.5 will crowd out research into other areas. For instance, Our World in Data’s almost all the research into coral reef collapse has been carried out using RCP 8.5. Predictably enough, longstanding mutual animosity, and Schmidt feels Pielke Jr has “spent 20 years trying to elbow out scientists from the centre ground” on climate change. So it’s hard for a journalist to get involved without taking sides.
But it’s important, because the more we associate the worst-case scenario with business as usual, the more pessimistic the public debate will be. “It might demotivate people,” says Hausfather. “It’s much easier to see the Paris goals [of no more than 1.5°C warming] as achievable if you know we’re on course for a 3°C world, rather than a 5°C one.”
Suggested readingWhy we stopped trusting 'experts'By Oliver Traldi
I disagree with Pielke Jr: RCP 8.5 has its place, because as Betts says, there’s a whole range of research into unlikely but plausible scenarios using it, and if you’re doing risk assessments, you need to look at outcomes that probably won’t happen but which would be disastrous if they did, so you can try to avoid them. At the moment the papers looking at those scenarios all use 8.5.
But on the other hand, if the IPCC puts out RCPs without explicitly saying which are the most likely, then policymakers and journalists will take whichever scenario most suits their needs, whether that’s pretending there’s no problem, or magnifying the problem for the sake of a headline. This isn’t the fault of climate modellers. But no one involved in the IPCC is explicitly saying “RCP 8.5 is pretty unlikely,” and that fateful phrase “business as usual” is still attached to it.
Hausfather has a solution for this: attach explicit percentage likelihoods to the different scenarios – say that RCP 4.5 is 45% probable, or RCP 8.5 is 5% probable. They’d be necessarily subjective but at least it would show that no one thinks they’re all equally likely, or that RCP 8.5 is the course we’re already on. Betts agrees.
There’s a risk that climate sceptics will leap on ideas like this, and say that climate scientists have systematically overstated the risk of climate change; Betts says that this already happens. But climate change is an unhedgeable risk, and we need to pay attention to even unlikely outcomes if they’re very bad, in the same way that you wouldn’t play Russian roulette even if it’s only a 17% chance of death. Besides, even the less dramatic 3°C worlds involve dangerous levels of sea level rise, heat waves, and millions of unnecessary deaths a year. You’d think that’d be worrying enough.
Every week, people see headlines, based on RCP 8.5 scenarios, that say things like three billion people could face “near-unliveable conditions” by 2070. Understandably, people are rattled; and some are even saying they’re not having children. People are more scared than they need to be.
Climate change is extremely bad. But we’re not in the “last chance saloon”, if that means that we face some inevitable catastrophe, or 5-1 down and facing ruinous defeat; and the politicians at COP26 are not guilty of facilitating a worse genocide than Hitler’s. Archbishop Welby apologised for that. But it’s an understandable mistake if he’s always being told that “business as usual” means a march to doom.

FOOTNOTES

 The numbers refer to the amount of “radiative forcing”: that is, the change to the Earth’s energy balance, in watts per metre squared. So under RCP 6.0, each square metre of the earth’s surface would absorb six more watts of energy than it would lose to space, relative to pre-industrial times.
 In the latest IPCC report, the RCPs have been replaced with something else, called SSPs. Only one of the new SSPs, SSP5, is compatible with RCP 8.5. Research using both is combined into a scenario called SSP5-8.5. I’m going to refer to RCPs throughout, for simplicity.

The Armed Forces, and the Army in particular, are surely the only arms of the British state that still retain a popular reputation for institutional competence. Consider the recent book The Habit of Excellence, a sort of retread for civilian CEOs of the motivational anthologies handed out at Sandhurst. Or the Government’s drafting in of the former Vice-Chief of Defence Staff (though a Royal Marine rather than a soldier) to institute wide-ranging reforms to the NHS — a clear nod to the military’s residual reputation for no-nonsense, hard-nosed efficiency.
It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.

This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies  by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.
Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims. 
It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war. 
Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence. 
The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.
Indeed, to exercise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.
They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative. 
As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.
More from this authorThe Tories can save Blue LabourBy Aris Roussinos
Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result. 
But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.
For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.” 
For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.” 
Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform. 
More from this authorHow bin Laden wonBy Aris Roussinos
The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”. 
Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds. 
Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise. 
But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw. 
It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era. 
Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of General Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers. 
Suggested readingAmerica's forgotten Powell DoctrineBy Edward Luttwak
The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.
Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century. 
The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.
Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack. 
As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.

A senior member of the UK government’s pandemic advisory body has left the group, saying that the picture in the UK is “concerning”.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, who has been a part of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) since the start of the pandemic left the group at the end of October, Sky News has reported.

The director of the charitable Wellcome Trust had pushed for more mask wearing, use of ventilation and greater Covid testing to try to tackle rising cases, in a plan which has been termed “vaccine plus”.

However the government has stuck to its current strategy of trying to encourage people to get vaccinated and for those eligible to take up booster jabs.

Farrar revealed in a book published earlier this year, Spike: The Virus v The People, that he almost resigned in September 2020 when cases were rising and the government had just finished its “eat out to help out” scheme to try to drive people back into hospitality venues.

He had also been among those to call for a lockdown in mid-March 2020, as Covid infections increased and other countries like Italy and France saw large numbers of people in hospital with the virus

In a statement, he said Sage had come under huge pressure during the pandemic, and that he was leaving to devote more time to the Wellcome Trust.

He said: “The Covid-19 crisis is a long way from over, with the global situation deeply troubling.

“The high levels of transmission seen in the UK remain concerning, but I stepped down as a participant of Sage knowing ministers had been provided with most of the key science advice needed over the winter months.

“Throughout this crisis Sage has provided vital evidence, and independent, expert, transparent advice to support the UK response, often under huge pressure.”

He added: “My focus now must be on our work at Wellcome. This includes supporting the international research effort to end the pandemic, ensuring the world is better prepared for inevitable future infectious disease threats, and making the case so the full potential of science is realised to inform and drive change against all the urgent health threats we face globally.”

The government updated public documents detailing Sage’s membership on Tuesday, but Sir Jeremy’s name remained on it.

A government spokesperson said: “Throughout the pandemic we have been guided by scientific and medical experts and thanks to our collective national effort we have saved lives, vaccinated tens of millions of people and protected our NHS.

“We knew the coming months would be challenging – this is exactly why we set out our Covid plan for autumn and winter. We are monitoring all the data closely, and the prime minister has been clear that it does not yet show that Plan B [such as compulsory face masks in some settings, asking people to work from home and introducing vaccine passports] is necessary. But it is ready should we need to act to avoid a rise in hospitalisations which would put unsustainable pressure on the NHS.

“Our focus remains on our booster campaign, vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds, and encouraging those who haven’t yet come forward to have their jab.”

During her lecture Monday at the National Conservative Conference in Orlando, Florida, Ayaan Hirsi Ali claimed that “wokeism”, not white supremacy, is the ideology posing the greatest threat to America.

“The ideology that threatens us today, and has the potential to ruin our societies is a different one. It goes by many names, but I will call it, ‘wokeism,'” Ali said at the conference. The Hoover Institute Scholar likened woke ideas to white supremacy, which, she argues, “has remarkable similarities” with “race-centered wokeism.” She also argued that both “wokeism” and white supremacy “ranks human beings” into hierarchies purely based on their skin color.

WATCH:

@Ayaan at the National Conservatism Conference: The ideology that threatens us today is not White Supremacism, rather, Wokism.#NatCon pic.twitter.com/0o9BeRVxYm — NatConTalk (@NatConTalk) November 1, 2021

Ali mentioned that white supremacy is only found in the most fringe groups in society and that the claim “white supremacy is the biggest domestic threat we face is nonsensical, histrionic and self-serving,” according to Fox News. She also declared that a core component of wokeism lies in the “contamination of language,” and highlighted its “lexicon” of terms that have created a situation in which adherents are able to police language. According to Ali, adherents “seek unchecked and absolute power.”

Ali went on to say that “wokeism” in its entirety is continuing to divide Americans and weaken their freedoms. “If you think that white supremacy is the biggest domestic threat that we face, I want to say to you – get a grip,” she reportedly said.

This is not the first time Ali has been highly critical of woke ideologies. In an opinion article published in May, Ali likened the current political culture to being “tribal”, saying that our “deeply divided country” resembled “clan or tribal life” back in Africa. She also has been outspoken against teaching Critical Race Theory, saying that it will teach Americans to both “hate” America and each other. (RELATED: Biden Is ‘Endorsing And Enforcing Sharia Vigilantism,’ Hoover Institute Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali Tells Tucker Carlson)

I have long admired Noah Feldman's work. Amidst the hornet's nest in Cambridge, he was consistently a sober voice. But the quality of his recent writings have declined, precipitously. Look no further than his "fan fiction" about Justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett. I couldn't bring myself to write about his last column on Court packing. It made me think of a meme: That's a nice nine-member Court you got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it.
Today, Feldman plugs his new book about Lincoln in the New York Times. He writes that in the span of 18 months, "Lincoln violated the Constitution as it was then broadly understood three separate times."
First, Feldman writes that Lincoln "waged war on the Confederacy." I'm sure his book explains that Lincoln argued there was no war--merely a suppression of insurrection. But that fact doesn't make it into the essay. This inconvenient truth doesn't advance Feldman's narrative that Lincoln "broke[] and remade" the Constitution.
Second, Feldman cites the Emancipation Proclamation as another unconstitutional act. On balance, I agree with Justice Curtis that the Proclamation was unconstitutional. But Lincoln offered a cogent defense of the Proclamation as a wartime measure to appropriate confederate property. Again, Lincoln did not think he was violating the Constitution.
Third, Feldman cites the suspension of habeas corpus:

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without Congress, arresting thousands of political opponents and suppressing the free press and free speech to a degree unmatched in U.S. history before or since. When Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court held that the suspension was unconstitutional, Lincoln ignored him.

No, no, no. Lincoln did not ignore Taney. Read Seth Barrett Tillman's article, Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History, and Scholarship. At this point, the failure to engage with Seth's work is academic malpractice. Feldman is not alone. Many prominent scholars continue to repeat this shibboleth.
Constitutional law is built on an elaborate mythology. I very much enjoy debunking those myths: United States v. Burr, Ex Parte Merryman, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, Cooper v. Aaron, and others.

But I’m making a stronger argument. What has become clear to me is that even before the passage of those Reconstruction amendments — indeed, as a kind of precondition for them — Lincoln fatally injured the Constitution of 1787. He consciously and repeatedly violated core elements of that Constitution as they had been understood by nearly all Americans of the time, himself included.

Through those acts of destruction, Lincoln effectively broke the Constitution of 1787, paving the way for something very different to replace it. What began as a messy, pragmatic compromise necessary to hold the young country together was reborn as an aspirational blueprint for a nation based on the principle of equal liberty for all.

Today, when the United States is engaged in a national reckoning about the legacies of slavery and institutional racism, the story of Lincoln’s breaking of the Constitution of 1787 is instructive. It teaches us not only that the original Constitution was deeply compromised, morally and functionally, by its enshrining of slavery, but also that the original Constitution was shattered, remade and supplanted by a project genuinely worthy of reverence.

Let’s go back to the 18th century. Americans today tend to think of the Constitution of 1787 in exalted moral terms. But the history is otherwise: The original Constitution was a complex political compromise grounded in perceived practical necessity, not moral clarity.

The need to garner the support of smaller states, for example, gave us the Senate. More damning were the compromises over slavery, without which the Constitution could never have been ratified: the repugnant “three-fifths” provision, by which enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of political representation; the promised 20-year preservation of the slave trade; and the fugitive slave clause, which required even free states to support slavery by returning escapees to their putative masters. These compromises were reaffirmed and reinforced by further compromises enacted by Congress from 1820 to 1850.

I also hear English as having all kinds of coded ways to throw shade, of a kind that learners could be taught just as carefully as they are taught something as straightforward as putting an “s” on a verb in the third person singular. These aren’t idioms in the sense of “call it a day” or “on the ball”; they’re grammar. Black English has even more such constructions, using the otherwise neutral verb “come”: “He come saying nobody knew until today” implies that you’re not happy with him. Black English even has a future perfect of disapproval: “I’ll be done left if she tries getting here late again.” (I owe this observation about this construction to the linguist and poet Alysia Harris.)

There are many other things that hit a linguist’s ear that way: As one of “A Hundred Million Miracles” that Oscar Hammerstein wrote about in a song for the musical “Flower Drum Song,” one was a baby learning to walk who “nearly doesn’t fall.” Or “own”: It’s a verb, but also an adjective, as in “my own book.” But why not “my owned book”? And as an adjective, it’s odd: What’s own about the book? And while you can say “the red book” and “The book is red,” why not “The book is own”? It goes on: I have “my very own car” — but I can’t say “I have a really own car.” We say, “He came into his own” — but his own what? I’ve heard Britons say “She got her own back” to mean she got back at someone. But again, her own what?

Few of us ever have reason to think what a quirky thing our humble “own” is. But imagine being new to the language and having to master just how we use this crazy little thing: I once knew such a guy who would say “I just rented a own apartment,” and I felt genuinely pleased that I picked up his meaning before I had to think about it!

Then there are the things that strike people as mistakes, where a linguist just sees the language moving along. Most of what distinguishes the language of “Beowulf” or “The Canterbury Tales” from the English we know is what started as “mistakes.” One example these days, which people often write me about, is “versus” becoming a verb. Kids, especially, hear it as “verses” and for years now have been saying things like “We versed them in baseball last year.”

A preposition becoming a verb — “What’s next?” you might ask. And I would say, more of that, and all power to it. After all, the word “newt” is a mistake that happened when people said “an eft” so often that they began to think it was “a neft,” and later “neft” became “newt.” Today, “eft” is found mostly in crossword puzzles, and I wouldn’t want to give up “newt.” The singular “cherry” is “wrong” — it started as the French “cerise” and people misheard the “s” sound as a plural and made up the singular word “cherry.” Who would have it otherwise now?

A couple of weeks ago I published an article in the Wall Street Journal describing the tyranny that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies are imposing on universities and scientific institutions. This includes excluding talented scientists who are not effective enough in displaying their DEI allegiance, enforcing ideological adherence among faculty and students, and suppressing debate on the topics of merit, quotas, free speech, and a range of gender and race issues.Opinion | How ‘Diversity’ Turned TyrannicalWhat began as an effort to hire more minorities has turned into a demand for ideological engagement.The Wall Street JournalLawrence KraussIn that article, I gave a piece of partial evidence of the gulag-like environment currently existing in higher education. Numerous faculty responded to an earlier Wall Street Journal piece by me about ideological corruption in science, through emails in which they indicated they were writing under pseudonym accounts out of fear that colleagues or university officials might find out that they supported my concerns.Happily, in response to my most recent piece, no respondents suggested they were shielding their identities, although a number indicated they were writing from their “non-university” email addresses—just in case—or felt comforted by now being retired and free to write. What they present, in summary, is a chilling perspective of the pervasive and divisive atmosphere that is continuing to develop in educational and scientific institutions. I felt it worth sharing a number of these perspectives, after having consulted the individuals involved. Unless otherwise directed, I have worked to ensure the anonymity of my correspondents.Numerous correspondents wrote to me concerned about their specific areas of scholarship. Particularly worrying were emails from those in the medical and legal professions.Here’s one from a professor at a very prominent US medical school:Dear Dr Krauss,Your op-ed in WSJ barely touched the problem of DEI in American biomedical science and clinical practice. The societies (e.g., Amer Society of Cell Biology) and the journals (esp Elsevier) are rife with DEImania. This is affecting clinical medicine. It is the death spiral of American medicine, with unintended consequences for the very groups it is supposed to help.What can one do?While this is concerned in more general terms with possible impacts on the field, a very poignant email from another professor in a biomedical field illustrates the personal impact that this environment of fear and suppression is taking on the psyche of scientific researchers:I feel like the turtle in the picture with the neck out and about to get chopped ... It is strange to me that this is happening because I am a Hispanic woman with Spanish, North African, Chinese, and Native American ancestry that speaks four languages and has lived everywhere in the world, so I should be the pinnacle of what DEI is aspiring for. Nevertheless, I am experiencing the tyranny of DEI because it is not about diversity of race or sex but more about a loyalty test. This will not last forever, but the question is how much damage this will do ... This year has been an authoritarian year full of tyrannical mandates and intolerance. I have never experienced having moral (mandatory DEI trainings that forces me to affirm things that go against my conscience), medical, or religious tests in order to work before this year. Innovation and intellectual greatness come as a result of freedom. Suppression of speech and ideas will result in a reduction of greatness and innovation. Freedom of speech can only be real freedom if speech that we do not agree with is allowed. Let's include diversity of thought and ideology in what you want to protect.Beyond academia, I wrote about the growing inhibitory impact of DEI mandates in scientific institutions, including private ones like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In this regard, I received the following email from an HHMI employee that sent shivers down my spine:Dr. Krauss, I am a HHMI employee and I am grateful to you for your WSJ piece. The lowest point for me was February 8th this year, when all employees were expected to read Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo. Ms. Oluo led a virtual talk that day for all HHMI employees. I trust that you know that the core motivation for HHMI’s DEI effort is to preempt any liability or negative press for two major discrimination lawsuits against HHMI by female Asian scientists. The journal Science covered these two lawsuits on 12/18/2019. Thank you again.When it came to law schools and DEI, I received several emails from law school professors saying that the piece resonated with their own experience. I received two other legal-related responses that are of particular interest.The first was from a student at a California law school. Several cases of law professors who have been caught up in unwarranted DEI adjudications of racism are well known and have been written about, including by me. However, the impact on their students is not so well known. Here is the email I received:After reading your WSJ piece on “Diversity” as tyranny, I wanted to thank you for writing it. I know that took courage, especially in this political environment. Your discussion of “monomania” hit close to home. I’m a law student at [law school name omitted], and this week a brilliant torts professor has come under fire for baseless claims of racism. I wrote a letter to our DEI office defending him, though I doubt it will help.The last line is particularly relevant because it points to the recognition, even by students such as this, that efforts to write in support of faculty who come under DEI investigation are generally ignored. This has certainly been the general experience of all faculty I have talked to. DEI offices are usually only interested in documenting complaints. They often don’t even document letters of support.The other email came not from a law student, at least as far as I can tell, but someone who was a litigant in an affirmative action case. They wrote:Lawrence, You might want to read a DOJ letter written in the aftermath of a US Supreme Court decision on “Adarand.” Note where it talks about eligible engineers. ThanksSpurred by this note, I subsequently read two Department of Justice “Memoranda to General Counsels” related to the case of Adarand Constructors, Inc v Peña, in which the Supreme Court held that federal affirmative action programs that use racial and ethnic criteria as a basis for decision-making are subject to strict judicial scrutiny. Under strict scrutiny, such programs must serve a compelling governmental interest and must be narrowly tailored to serve that interest. There are several interesting comments in these memoranda that should be of interest to those who may wish to pursue legal relief in cases of concern.One memorandum states:An underrepresentation of minorities when compared to the general population or the general civilian labor force, however, would not be a sufficient predicate for the use of racial criteria in employment decisions when special skills or qualifications are required to perform the job … For example, if an agency or office sought to determine whether it had an underrepresentation of African-American engineers, it would not compare the percentage of African-American engineers that it employed with the percentage of African-Americans in the civilian labor force generally, or with the percentage of African-Americans in a “professionals” category of which engineers may be only a part. Since engineers possess unique qualifications not shared by the population or professionals at large, the comparison should be between the percentage of African-American engineers employed by the agency or office and the percentage of African-American engineers in the civilian labor force. Where the fit cannot be so precise, the agency should use the qualified labor force that most closely matches the agency's qualifications for the jobs at issue.The other states:Outreach and recruitment efforts conceivably could be viewed as race-based decision-making of the type subject to Adarand if such efforts work to create a “minorities-only” pool of applicants or bidders, or if they are so focused on minorities that non-minorities are placed at a significant competitive disadvantage with respect to access to contracts, grants, or jobs.Respondents to my article were not limited to those in the US. I received a variety of personal examples of concern from correspondents in Canada.A young researcher in a STEM field at Dalhousie University remarked on the impact of DEI on student course questionnaires. Of concern were new questions added at the request of the Dalhousie Student Union “to give students an opportunity to identify racist, sexist, homophobic, and any other oppressive content in course curricula and literature.” Specifically, one question asked students to comment on whether “The instructor did not include materials that contained offensive or discriminatory ideas except to educate students about discrimination, oppression, or educate about other existing perspectives.” This student sensed the dangerous possibilities inherent in such language and suggested it would elicit “anonymous reporting of hurt feelings, rather than an objective way to improve academic outcomes and reward effective teachers.”I was also informed that, not to be outdone at Dalhousie, the Dean of the Engineering School there recently sent the following message to seniors, essentially “canceling” the early history of the school out of concerns of present day inclusion:In the hallways of D and B building, the picture of graduating classes from the early Nova Scotia Technical College and TUNS days showed an engineering history of mostly white male students. We had received many comments about this not being consistent with the vision of a welcoming campus for all students. These class pictures have now been removed, archived with the help of Dal Libraries and will be available online in the future to alumni and others. Many of these wall spaces are now empty, but we will look for opportunities in the future to project a more diverse and inclusive vision of engineering.From another Canadian university came a note from two science researchers which provides perhaps the most ridiculous example I have seen of how DEI statements are used to adjudicate grant applications. In this case, the grant was simply for a piece of scientific equipment, valued at $150,000, to be used by the scientists in their research. Yet, as one of them writes:Yet even here for literally just an instrument, we have to write some DIE text … I am now forced to lie for the first time since age 7 when I stole the candy.Returning to the US, one distinguished California scientist wrote to me about his confusion induced by DEI requirements regarding gender pronouns when writing a letter of recommendation for a scholarship for a promising high school student. As part of the recommendation form he was required to provide his pronouns. He claimed he spent some time navigating the form to determine if he was a “He/Him” or “He/His”. In his words “I didn’t dare get it wrong.”I have saved the most egregious example of DEI abuse I was reminded of in response to my piece for last. In this case, it is not anonymous, as the faculty member in question is fighting for his livelihood following a remarkably vicious action by his university. The following came from David Porter:Going through my e-mail files I realized it’s been a while since I’ve updated you on my case against Berea College.Our discovery and deposition phase is now complete. Several weeks ago, we spent 5 hours with a $300/hour mediator. We were asking for $750k and emeritus status. Although the college had originally been open to considering emeritus status, after lunch, the president reported that this would not be acceptable to campus (without specifying with whom on campus he’d spoken). This (along with the fact that their idea was for a $200k settlement) effectively ended the mediation. Early the following week, the mediator contacted my lawyer and asked that we remain open, since the mediator, the college lawyer, and the law firm representing the college all agreed that emeritus status was appropriate and were trying to persuade the president…I was suspended for publishing an academic survey of perceptions about academic freedom and hostile environments which contained some incidents and events that had occurred on campus – none of which were either “private” or “confidential.” These examples simply showed that the administration of Title IX issues was inconsistent and sometimes unfair. The chair of the IRB had worked closely with me in preparing the survey, advised me that because this was local rather than generalizable knowledge, used an anonymous response Qualtrics option, and was directly related to my course, formal IRB approval would not be required. (Under administrative pressure, he later changed his mind and disavowed having taken the position documented in his e-mails to me and the dean.) Along with my suspension, came an edict from the president not to communicate with students, not to come to campus without special permission, and not to use or share data from the survey. Exaggerated social media postings, mostly by students who had never been in any of my courses and faculty grievants and their allies, roiled the campus. An official message from one of the Faculty Advisor[s] to the SGA filled with false and defamatory information, thwarted the independent efforts of some of my students to award me with the Student Government Association’s Annual Student Service Award. The administration, well-aware of these defamatory messages, did not refute them or even address their impropriety with the perpetrators of the misinformation. The many breaches of due process over the 10 weeks until my hearing are described in this article. My tenure was terminated and I was dismissed from the college 30 Sep 2018. I suffered a stroke 14 November, 2018. I have been engaged in the legal battle ever since…I thought your recent article in the Wall Street Journal was superb. This is a war we must win – not only [in] academia but our democracy depend[s] on it...David’s final admonition should be a clarion call. What happened to him is indefensible, and only by speaking out about the abuses that my correspondents have described here can we try and dismantle the current strangle-hold that DEI bureaucracies have on researchers and students alike and restore academic freedom and excellence as the hallmarks of science and education.

The rise and fall of the China Question

Balance China realistically: let her overstretch and bleed

The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict by Elbridge A. Colb (Yale, £30)

Former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby’s new book, The Strategy of Denial, is a fine contribution to the literature dealing with the end of the post-Cold war era. Colby, the architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, argues for a total recalibration of the American grand strategy, shifting from the “war on terror” era, to focus on the coming era of great power rivalry. Colby’s arguments are straightforward. Unipolarity is over, and great power rivalry is back. In reality that means that the relative power of the US is in decline, compared to the rise of a peer rival in China. Colby isn’t the first to argue that the American strategy of imperial policing and counterinsurgency has wrecked American relative power. Jacqueline Hazelton’s new book argues succinctly as to why counterinsurgency should return to its brutal roots and forego any idealism. But Colby’s focus is on China, as Beijing is the strongest peer rival that Washington has ever faced, based on sheer aggregate power.

The policy prescription is straightforward. America grand strategy historically ensures that no great power achieves hegemony in two of the core theatres, Europe and Asia. In that cause, the US should seek “favourable military-economic balances of power” in the key regions, such as Asia, Europe, North America, Persian Gulf. Of those, North America and the Persian Gulf have no chance of seeing any regional hegemons. In Europe, potentially the EU of the future could turn imperial, but so far the military balance remains in America’s favour, and the local actors remain divided. That leaves China and Asia.

To stop a Chinese attempt at hegemony the US needs to facilitate what Colby terms as an “antihegemonic coalition”, to prevent China from dominating Asia, “by convincing important states that it would prevail in a systemic regional war.” Colby writes that the hegemon’s “goal is positive: establishing predominance. The coalition’s goal, by contrast, is negative: denial.” Colby argues that in order to do that the US should be ready to defend Taiwan, as the fall of Taiwan would result in a loss of American credibility. The US, therefore, should focus on defence planning that denies China any fait accompli, by arming Taiwan and making it clear, that the Chinese invasion of Taiwan would lead to a war with this “anti-hegemonic” coalition.

It is not certain that an anti-hegemonic coalition will emerge

There is a lot to learn from this book and agree with. China is the greatest challenge to Pax Americana, and as the world turns multipolar, America should indeed focus on Asia-Pacific. However, there are questions, which for the sake of, well, balance, we should consider. For example, Colby is confident that an anti-hegemonic coalition will emerge, almost as an iron law of international relations, but it is nowhere certain that such a coalition will, nor even if it does, that it would risk a potential war with China.

It is one thing for America, Australia, and Japan, alongside the UK and the rest of the Anglosphere to confront China as a reaction to an invasion of their homelands, but other than that, it is unlikely a coalition will form. The idea that China can be deterred simply by American resolve over Taiwan, barely miles from the Chinese coastal missile batteries, and where China has a historic interest, is essentially a bluff. The problem with bluffs, is that they can be called. If China engages in a seaborne invasion of Taiwan, the burden of “escalation dominance” will then be on the US. Are Texans or Tennesseans, for example, willing to risk an actual nuclear war to save Taipei, the fall of which does not alter the actual balance of power in the region?

And no, even the hypothetical fall of Taiwan, does not alter the regional balance. Chinese aggregate power is due to trade with the West, economic growth, and the simple fact that it never faced a long, bleeding war. Change those variables, and the scenario to contemplate will be not Chinese hegemony, but a major shock from sudden Chinese state collapse. India, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam are all adversaries of China and are all stable, powerful, and moderate to rich powers. Is there any scenario where one can realistically contemplate China being engaged in simultaneous great power wars of expansion with Japan, India, and the US, three major naval powers, two of them with functioning nuclear triads? If not, then what Chinese expansionism should one be worried about?

Colby noticeably never engages with a very classical American grand strategy of “buck-passing”

For a realist, Colby noticeably never engages with a very classical American grand strategy of “buck-passing”. In crude terms, America, as Britain before her, has always relied on foreign foot soldiers first in a great power war as cannon fodder, only engaging herself as an “offshore balancer” of the last resort. Nothing wrong with that, it is a clever strategy that ensured American hegemony. The same principle is applicable here as well. China, even though a peer-rival, isn’t like the Soviet Union. It’s massive, but also completely alliance-less, surrounded by rival powers, who are currently far more powerful to balance China, compared to war-shattered Britain and France in 1949. Both of whose populations, metropolitan and colonial, had activist cadres of Soviet sympathisers. China enjoys none of this today.

The prudent and cynically realist strategy, in this case, would be to wish for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, a heavily armed hostile province of 24 million people, giving the People’s Republic their own twenty year quagmire. A Chinese seaborne invasion and subsequent occupation of Taiwan would bleed China dry and will do nothing to increase any threat of invasion to mainland US. Why should the US then risk kinetic conflict with China herself, when all the great war a Tainwanese tripwire would trigger would be for is whether or not a Chinese Afghanistan is prevented? If the goal is stopping Chinese hegemony, isn’t letting Beijing enjoy one of those the more prudent and risk-free way? Empires collapse after overstretching and bleeding themselves dry trying to restore order for the sake of prestige or moral crusades whipped up by deluded mobs.

Despite some such unanswered questions, The Strategy of Denial is a terrific new contribution to the literature. Colby is right to point out that there are limitations on what the US can do, and that it is time for threat prioritisation and trade-offs: this is a vital injection of realism to an American strategic debate sorely in need of it.

The main lesson from this book is that the days of idealism are over, and realism is back, and with that, hard choices loom, not just for the US, but for all the European free-riders who relied on American hard power for the last seventy years. To quote a formidable grand-strategist, Gregory Peck, from The Guns of Navarone, their by-standing days, are over soon too.

As the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, millions of Americans are quitting their jobs in a labor market that’s already short on workers. On top of this “Great Resignation,” the labor-force participation rate still hasn’t rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. All the while, supply chain interruptions and trillions in government stimulus are pushing prices up. To find out what’s going on with the labor market and broader American economy, I’ve brought on Michael Strain. 
Mike is the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy and the Director of Economic Policy Studies at AEI. 

Pethokoukis: The unemployment rate is falling. Lots of jobs seem to be created every month, but yet it seems people are concerned that Americans somehow are not coming back to work. I’ve heard the phrase, “The Great Resignation.” I’m not sure exactly what that means. Some people are resigning; other people are just not going back to work. What is the state of the labor market right now?
Strain: Well, I think the state of the labor market is confused. If you look at some indicators, you see a labor market that’s really exceptionally strong and it’s in great shape. We can tick through a few of those. The number of unemployed workers for every job vacancy is well under one. In other words, there are more vacancies than there are unemployed workers. A big problem that the US labor market has had in the past couple of decades has been the opposite — there are too few jobs for available unemployed workers.
We have the opposite problem right now. Jobs are chasing workers; workers are not chasing jobs. We have record numbers of job openings in the economy. We have a record number of workers who are quitting their jobs. And the reason why quitting is considered a sign of a strong labor market is that people wouldn’t voluntarily quit their job unless they were pretty confident they could get a better job or at least a job that was at least as good.
So the fact that workers are feeling like they’re able to quit in large numbers suggests that they have the upper hand in the labor market right now. Perhaps most compellingly, the strength of the labor market can be seen in wage growth. Right now, wages are growing at about a 5 percent annual rate. If you look at wages in the leisure and hospitality sector, they are growing at an 11 percent annual rate. So really rapid wage growth. It is common to hear businesses say, “There’s a labor shortage, we can’t find good workers,” etc. The right instinct is to be skeptical of those claims because those claims typically occur without wage increases.
A now hiring sign in Montgomery, Alabama, Sept. 1, 2021. Via REUTERS
And so, when you typically hear businesses talk about labor shortages or not being able to find workers, what they really mean is, “We’re unable to find workers at the wages that we’re currently able to offer.” And they’re not taking steps to be able to increase their wage offerings. That isn’t what’s happening now. You really are seeing businesses put their money where their mouths are, and nominal wages are growing really rapidly. So all of that really points to a very strong labor market.

So the confusion is that it also seems as if people are unhappy about their jobs. They’re not returning to their jobs. It’s almost been described as if the American labor force has had a great awakening — that they’ve all discovered that those jobs that they had before were terrible, and now they don’t want to go back. So what are those confusing factors?
Well, I think the most confusing factor is that workers aren’t coming back in any aggressive fashion. If you look at workforce participation among prime age workers — workers who are too old to be in school, too young to be retired — what you see is that there really has been no improvement in their workforce participation since the summer.
If you look at how this has evolved over the course of the pandemic, you see that workforce participation among this group of workers fell by around 4 percent during the lockdowns. Then in the spring of 2020, that recovered to a little over 98 percent of its pre-pandemic level. So employment was down about 2 percent for this group, and that’s basically where it still is today. One source of the labor shortage surely is early retirements. But when you’re looking at people who are in their 30s, 40s, and early 50s, that’s not going to be a big part of the story. So there must be other reasons keeping these workers on the sidelines other than early retirement.
Does the story that you’re about to tell differ by skill level, education level, income level? Is it a different case for lower-wage workers than for upper-wage workers, or is it a similar story?
You see this largely across the board. I mean, as it often happens, the job losses when the recession began were concentrated among lower-wage workers and lower-income households. And so the gains are disproportionately among those workers that are higher income or they’re just less sensitive to the business cycle in general. But fundamentally, we still have this economy where workforce participation really isn’t improving and where we are several million jobs in the hole — six million, seven million jobs below where we should be and below where we would’ve been, if it weren’t for the pandemic.
This is a confusing situation. On the one hand, labor demand is white hot, employers are rapidly raising wages. They are creating job vacancies that they’re trying to fill. At the same time, we’re six or seven million jobs in the hole, workforce participation isn’t really improving, and we have millions of people on the sidelines who shouldn’t be there. So this is why I characterize it as confusing.
Well, I think it’s a combination of factors. Some of these factors are related to the pandemic, for sure. I mean, I think you do still see in surveys that some people are still worried about the pandemic and don’t feel comfortable coming back to work as a consequence of that. This has been a consistent story throughout the last year and a half, pretty much since the lockdowns were lifted in the late spring of 2020, when you see the share of the population that is unable to work due to COVID dropping. But when there’s a COVID spike, like we’ve had with the Delta variant, you see that decline suspended, you see people saying, “Oh, well, yeah, I think COVID is making it hard for me to work.”
There are lingering childcare issues for sure. Schools are open for the most part, daycare centers are open for the most part, but they’re still really affected by the pandemic. And this is something that I think parents of school-aged kids all experience every day. Certainly, I do with my kids’ school. The likelihood that we might get an email or a phone call that says, “Hey, you have to come pick up your kids,” or, “Hey, your kid’s classroom is going to be shut down for a week or two,” is a daily reality for us, and that’s just not the kind of thing that people had to worry about before the pandemic. And I think that is keeping some people from reentering the workforce. I think some people are saying, “I’ll go back to work once I can be confident that I’m not going to be called home randomly, or my kid’s classroom is going to be closed down.”
It seems like every month numbers come out and people look at those numbers and say, “Well, see, we don’t detect any impact of these unemployment benefits.” So what is the case that you are wrong? But why aren’t you wrong?
Look, this has certainly been a source of controversy. Let me present three different buckets of evidence and we can sort through them. One bucket of evidence comes from the US labor market from the 1970s until the eve of the pandemic. And if you look at studies of that period, there’s a strong consensus in the evidence that when unemployment benefits become more generous, people stay unemployed for longer. And there’s debate about the magnitude of that effect, the size of that effect, but I think that’s pretty close to a consensus view.
When the pandemic began, the CARES Act, signed by President Trump in March of 2020, significantly expanded the generosity of unemployment benefits. And studies of that unemployment benefit expansion do not find that it led people to be unemployed for longer. So that’s in conflict with the evidence that came before that.
U.S. President Donald Trump signs the CARES Act in the Oval Office of the White House, March 27, 2020. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The question, I think, about the effect of President Biden’s $300 expansion really kind of boils down to a question of whether the economy in the summer and fall of 2021 (the economy of June, July, August, September, October, where we are now) was more like the pre-pandemic economy — more like a normal economy — or more like the economy that existed in the spring and summer of 2020, during the initial months of the pandemic. And it has elements of both. I don’t think there’s any question about that. But in my view, the economy was much, much closer to normal in the summer and fall of 2021 than it was to a pandemic economy.
So our expectation should be that the relationship between unemployment benefits and the duration of unemployment looks a lot more like the half century before the pandemic than it looked like in 2020. There is evidence accumulating about this. About half the states, I think 26 states, turned off that $300 and reduced expanded eligibility.
When did they do that?
In June. You could look to see whether or not we have data for July, August, and September, and you can look to see, “Okay, in July, what does it look like? In August? Did those states that stopped participating, did they see employment recover faster?” And there’s some disagreement about this. I’ve done some work on my own on this, and it looks to me pretty clear that the states that stopped participating in this program in June really did see transitions from unemployment to employment accelerate. That looks especially true if you focus on the leisure and hospitality and retail sectors that are really heavily affected by the pandemic.
I think there’s some mixed evidence on that, but in my view, the evidence points to unemployment benefits as a real factor in keeping people on the sidelines. And I think it’s hard to make super strong conclusions with just two or three months of data. So we’ll have to let some time pass. But I think, in my view, that’s pretty clearly where the evidence is pointing right now. Another important factor is savings. The government has given households a lot of money.
Those cash balances have just really exploded. I mean, they’re up, what, maybe 50 percent?
Yeah. Excess savings are $2 trillion or $2.5 trillion right now throughout the economy. And so that is, I think, making it easier financially for some people to take a little longer searching for a job and to take a little longer reentering the workforce.
But those balances are going to be worked down. So those people will be coming back.
For sure. Those balances are going to be worked down and that’s going to be another factor pushing the labor market toward normalization as we end 2021 and go through 2022.
So, let’s go back to the great awakening theory, and that is something more systemic. Let’s take the early retirements and set those aside. But for the other kinds of workers, the people behind the great awakening theory are saying that they’re not going to go back because they’ve had this time away and they now realize they hated those jobs. They’re wildly underpaid. And unless the wage structure of the United States changes so people just pay a lot more for jobs, particularly on the low end, those people aren’t going to come back. I’m not sure what they’re going to do, but they’re not going to come back. To get those labor force participation rates back somewhere close to normal, the US has to stop being a low-wage country. It has to start being something better than that. Do you see something like that happening?
No, I don’t, and I hope that I don’t as well. In other words, I hope that I’m right that it isn’t happening. I think that people make decisions and they take into account all their options. And at a time when you could earn more money not working than working — which was true for a large share of the workforce over the course of the year — going back to a job similar to the one that you used to have doesn’t look all that appealing. If after your unemployment benefits normalize and after you burn through some of your savings, not working is a worse deal, then going back to a job that was similar to the job that you used to have all of a sudden becomes more attractive.
And I think that is going to be a lot of the dynamic that you see. If you are a low-wage services worker — and let’s say you’re a single mom going back to work at a time when your phone could ring at any minute and you have to go pick your kid up from school and your kid’s stuck at home for two weeks — then you’re worried you’re just going to get fired at that point or something. That kind of uncertainty in your job security is much more of a drawback at a time when your kid’s school situation is much more uncertain. If we get to a point where parents can really count on school staying open and kids being able to stay in their classrooms, then that affects the way that a job looks to you, too. The job starts to look better as well.
A school crossing guard holds a bus as a woman and child cross the street. Photo by Anthony Behar/Sipa USA
I think people, over the past several months, have been thinking about the jobs that they used to have. And there are aspects to those jobs that are unpleasant and that aren’t attractive, but they’re making those evaluations in a context. And that context is a pandemic context. It’s a context of schools being uncertain. It’s a context of still being able to get a decent income from not working. And I think when that context changes — and the context is changing right now, and the context will continue to evolve hopefully pretty rapidly over the next several months — their assessment of their employment opportunities, I suspect, will also change. And we should hope that it does.
One of the interesting economic realities right now is the ability of the economy to produce goods and services without all these workers. The level of economic output, GDP, is back to where it would’ve been if there was never a pandemic. And businesses are able to produce goods and services as if there never was a pandemic, even though we’re six or seven million workers in the hole. And my concern is that businesses will have figured out how to get by with fewer workers.
And if there are workers who are lingering on the sidelines — because their unemployment benefits were generous, or because their kid’s school can’t stay open, or because they have so much money in the bank from all the stimulus checks — those workers may be lingering. And by the time they’re ready to come back, labor demand might have cooled off and businesses might say, “Hey, we just need fewer workers than we used to need.” And the jobs that they’re counting on returning to may not be there for all of them.
And in that kind of situation, either these people need to increase their skills so they’re more attractive (I imagine that would take some time) or, what, we start paying people a basic income not to work? This is the great transition to a basic income. Because at the same time that you’re expressing this concern that these people might not have jobs to go back to if companies figure out they don’t need them, there are also people pushing for even higher minimum wages. They critique the United States economy for being a low-wage economy. Maybe we need a $20 minimum wage or a $25 minimum wage. That would seem to exacerbate the very issue you’re worried about.
Yeah, I think it would. Think about wages as coming from two places. One place that wages come from is from the productivity of workers. It’s kind of a market factor. And then another determinative of wages are things like bargaining power, the power balance between workers and firms and that sort of stuff. If you want wages to go up, then you either need to get people more skills so they can be more productive or you need to change the power balance between workers and firms, and neither of those things are happening right now. You’re seeing wages go up because, at the macroeconomic level, demand is surging and supply can’t keep up. And that is not increasing worker skills, it is tilting the balance of power away from businesses and towards workers, but not in a permanent way.
There are no institutional changes in the US economy that are permanently altering that balance. It’s not as if unionization rates are wildly increasing. It’s not as if there are all sorts of new laws being passed that restrict the freedom of businesses to design employment contracts for workers and things of this nature. It’s temporary. And as demand moderates (which it will over the course of 2022) and as the supply side of the economy is able to expand (as it will over the course of 2022) we’re going to start to look more and more like we used to, prior to the pandemic. And the power balance between workers and firms is going to normalize as well. We’re going to be left with a workforce that isn’t more skilled and dynamics between businesses and workers that look more like they always have. Nothing that’s happening this summer or fall is permanent.
Do you have a different philosophy of the value of work than some other people? As I hear about this “Great Resignation” and critiques of the US labor market, there’s a group out there that doesn’t look at work the same way, and maybe these are also the people pushing for a universal basic income. But there seems to be an actual disagreement about the value of work and whether people should really be forced to work. It’s almost like it’s a human rights issue.
Look, yes, I think that’s right. I mean, I think this is one of the big dividing lines in American public life right now: the importance of work and the inherent value of work. And that is a dividing line that I think has become sharper and more salient as a consequence of the pandemic. There are unpleasant jobs in the United States, certainly, and there are jobs that are physically demanding and that are unpleasant for a myriad of circumstances, for sure. And there are people in public life who argue that’s not a good thing. And one of the goals of public policy should be to make it so that people don’t have to hold those kinds of jobs if they don’t want to.
And I think that view gets some things right. We shouldn’t want somebody to be in a minimum wage job for 20 years, that shouldn’t be the goal. We shouldn’t want people to be stuck in jobs that they don’t want to hold. Another way to say that is that the labor market should be characterized by upward mobility — that people can climb a ladder and not just get stuck on one of the rungs. But I think that view misses a lot. I think it misses a lot about the inherent dignity in all work and about the ability of people to make real contributions to society in all those jobs.
I think you’re right to characterize it as a philosophical disagreement. A lot of it is an empirical disagreement as well, about the level of upward mobility and about the ability of those sorts of jobs to serve as a conduit to other and better jobs. But there is a real philosophical divide here, too. And in my view, the goal of public policy should be participation — that people participate in society, and that a lot of that participation takes place through participating in market activities, through participating in the economy. And that’s a normative view. It’s a view about what is important to lead a flourishing life and to lead a good life, a full life. And I think a full life and a flourishing life involves contributions.
And I think if you’re working a minimum wage job at a grocery store, or you’re flipping burgers at a McDonald’s, or you’re a custodian in a hotel or whatever, you’re making a contribution. You’re contributing to society through those jobs. And I think it’s unfortunate that there are prominent voices in public life who refer to those kinds of jobs as dead-end jobs, and who make arguments about how those jobs are beneath the dignity of Americans or things of that nature. I think that’s not true. And I think it’s a bad message to send, telling millions of people that their jobs are dead ends.
They’re not dead ends. They’re making valuable contributions, and they can serve as stepping stones to even larger contributions and even better jobs. So the goal of public policy shouldn’t be to make it so that people don’t have to work or to make it so that people don’t have to work in lower-wage jobs. The goal of public policy should be to get people involved in economic life, to set people up so that they can make contributions to society through their employment and through market activities, and to build skills and to create on-ramps of opportunities so that people can have a career and progress up the employment ladder and not get stuck on any one rung.
My guest today is Michael Strain. Mike, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.
 Learn more: Does America need more planning? My long-read Q&A with Neil Chilson | Can geothermal energy replace oil and gas? My long-read Q&A with Jamie Beard | The coming fusion revolution: My long-read Q&A with Arthur Turrell 
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Limiting global warming to 1.5º Celsius remains just about attainable, but the path to this target is formidable. The United Nations climate summit now underway in Glasgow will indicate whether political efforts to achieve this goal are likely to heat up as fast as scientists tell us the planet is.

CAMBRIDGE – As world leaders gather at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, there is tremendous ebullience about the potential of green energy sources. But the hard fact is that fossil fuels still account for 80% of global energy, as they did when governments signed the Paris climate agreement to much fanfare at COP21 six years ago. And even though many economies have not yet returned to their pre-pandemic GDP level, the world is on track in 2021 to post its second-largest annual increase in carbon dioxide emissions on record.

True, the International Energy Agency’s recent flagship World Energy Outlook report, which remains the gold standard of energy analysis, strikes an optimistic note by placing greater emphasis on what can be done to limit global warming. But at the same time, “keeping the door to 1.5°C open” seems to involve so many moving parts, innovations, adaptations, and, yes, sacrifices, that it is hard to see how it will work without the global carbon price most economists regard as necessary. In particular, a carbon tax simultaneously incentivizes and coordinates emissions-reduction efforts, and allocates resources accordingly, in ways that state planners simply cannot achieve.

The idea of a carbon tax remains political anathema in the United States; it briefly came to the fore in the recent budget negotiations but was dropped like a hot potato. Instead, President Joe Biden will promote a mélange of measures – such as a shift to electric cars and an end to fossil-fuel development – that are mostly good ideas, but together are vastly more expensive and less efficient than a carbon tax.

The European Union, with its Emissions Trading System (a cap-and-trade alternative to a carbon tax), has made more progress on carbon pricing. Even so, the scheme currently covers only about 50% of the EU’s greenhouse-gas emissions and gives many allowances for free. No wonder, then, that policymakers in emerging and low-income economies react so cynically when they are asked to risk slowing down their countries’ economic development in order to help combat climate change. Many of them instead ask why global climate accords do not push all countries to achieve similar levels of per capita emissions.

Even if a global carbon tax magically came to pass, the world would still need a mechanism for transferring resources and know-how to developing economies to prevent them from becoming the major emitters of the future. I have promoted the idea of establishing a dedicated World Carbon Bank that would house technical expertise, facilitate the exchange of best practices, and help channel hundreds of billions of dollars in grants and loans to lower-income countries.

Buy-in from developing countries is essential. Coal, which accounts for 30% of global CO 2 emissions, is cheap and plentiful in countries such as India and China. Although 21 countries have pledged to phase out coal-fired power, nearly all of them are in Europe, and they account for only about 5% of the world’s coal-fired power stations. China’s recent pledge to stop building new coal plants abroad is a good start. But China itself produces more than half of the world’s coal-fired power, and many other countries, such as Vietnam, will presumably now build more coal plants on their own.

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Moreover, even with a carbon tax, regulators will still have to tackle myriad issues, such as deciding where wind turbines can be built, how legacy coal-powered electricity plants can be phased out, and to what extent natural gas can be used as a transitional energy source. Because wind and solar are intermittent energy sources, there is a strong case for a renewed push to ramp up nuclear power. This would involve using much safer modern technologies to build both large-scale power plants and the kind of small-scale generators used in nuclear submarines.

Green political parties may cringe at such an idea, but climate literacy needs to be married with energy literacy. Achieving “net-zero” CO 2 emissions by 2050, by which time the world may have two billion more people than it does now, requires some hard choices.

Convincing policymakers and the public to confront those choices is not easy. A lack of wind this past summer has contributed to the current energy crisis in Europe, where leaders are now hoping that Russian President Vladimir Putin will provide the region with more natural gas. Likewise, with energy prices set to soar this winter, Biden has implored OPEC countries to produce more oil, even as his administration attempts to reduce domestic fossil-fuel production.

Environmental, social, and governance investing, whose proponents aim to choke off capital for fossil-fuel investment, has been all the rage, and for a while even seemed to offer handsome returns. But with energy prices surging again, that may no longer be the case. In any event, even if advanced economies – perhaps including the US and recalcitrant Australia – ban fossil-fuel exploration, less developed economies will still have powerful incentives to expand the exploitation of their own CO 2 -emitting resources.

It is encouraging that the IEA still sees limiting global warming to 1.5°C as an attainable target, even if the path is formidable. Unfortunately, it remains very much in question whether political efforts to achieve this goal will heat up as fast as scientists tell us the planet is. When it comes to climate summits, therefore, one can only hope that the 26th time is the charm.

Dave Chappelle, early in his new, predictably incendiary Netflix special, “The Closer,” says, in an understatement of the obvious, “I’m rich and famous.” He says it en route to the larger observation that, if the pandemic has been trying for him—he contracted COVID-19 in January but was asymptomatic—it has been far more so for people who fall into neither category. But from there he detours into an extended series of jokes about the L.G.B.T.Q. community—he refers to being trans as the gender equivalent of wearing blackface—which have mired the special in controversy.

For two weeks after its release, on October 5th, “The Closer” was among the ten most viewed programs on Netflix—but it was also met with outrage. Jaclyn Moore, the showrunner for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” who is white and trans, denounced “The Closer” and pledged not to work with Netflix in the future. (This led to a social-media backlash from people asking why “Dear White People,” a show about Black perspectives on white racism, had a white showrunner to begin with.) B. Pagels-Minor, a Black trans nonbinary Netflix employee who was helping organize a workplace walkout to protest “The Closer,” was fired for allegedly leaking internal documents about the special to the press. (Pagels-Minor denied leaking the material.) The walkout took place on October 20th.

Meanwhile, in response to allegations that Chappelle’s comments in “The Closer” might lead to violence against trans people, Ted Sarandos, a Netflix co-C.E.O., in a memo sent to employees, defended the special and cited other more L.G.B.T.Q.-positive content on the platform, such as the comedian Hannah Gadsby’s two specials. Gadsby responded by denouncing Netflix, with poetic economy, as an “amoral algorithm cult.” Sarandos also noted the company’s “strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.” This was a curious position, and, on Wednesday, Sarandos felt compelled to concede that, in fact, “content on-screen can have an impact in the real world, positive and negative.” Comedy is powerful precisely because it riffs on and ridicules mores and habits. And within that arena no one is more successful, relevant, or influential than Chappelle.

And no one is seemingly more aware of the power of his comedy. In 2005, Chappelle walked away from a reported fifty-million-dollar contract with Comedy Central for two additional seasons of “Chappelle’s Show,” his sketch-comedy series. Years later, he explained that he’d been conflicted about the effect of his brand of racial humor, which relied heavily on enacting stereotypes in order to ridicule them. He had begun to wonder whether his audience got the second, more subtle layer of his work, or whether it was entertained purely by the stereotypes. Some critics said that the pressure and the expectations that came with the contract and the success of the show’s previous seasons had been so intense that the comedian just decided that he wanted out. But Chappelle, as he told David Letterman, was attuned to nuances in his work that it would have been more convenient (and more lucrative) to ignore. There was always the risk, in riffing on the racial absurdities of American culture, of reinforcing rather than undermining them.

The absence of concern of this kind about “The Closer” is striking, and suggests that Chappelle’s line about being rich and famous is more significant to the controversy than has been noted. Onstage, he refers to himself as the man who walked away from fifty million dollars, but the credibility he derived from that act sixteen years ago is now being deployed defensively and cynically, as if to place above suspicion any possible motive for telling denigrating jokes about trans people. He is also the man who walked into a reported sixty-million-dollar Netflix deal.

The “Closer” controversy is not happenstance; Chappelle notes that this will be his last special “for a while.” It may even be seen, along with some of his previous work, as cancel bait. In “The Bird Revelation,” which aired on Netflix in 2017, Chappelle defended Louis C.K., whose own television series had been cancelled owing to allegations—which he admitted to—of sexual misconduct, including masturbating in front of female colleagues. In “The Closer,” Chappelle jokes that he hoped to “negotiate the release of DaBaby,” the rapper who was criticized for making homophobic comments and insulting people with H.I.V./AIDS during a performance in July. (DaBaby apologized on Instagram, albeit in a way that only compounded his problems; he later deleted the post.) Chappelle has argued that taking away people’s livelihoods via cancellation is tantamount to killing them—a statement that carries weight coming from someone who has spent three decades creating work that critiques racism. Yet the principle at stake here is not equality but impunity.

“The Closer” marks a new iteration of the ongoing debate about cancel culture, but not necessarily for the reasons that Chappelle intended. In 2005, it meant something for a Black man to reject an enormous pile of money in the name of integrity. The past two weeks reiterated a contrasting point: that Black men, too, can be invested in the prerogatives that wealth purchases. Earlier this year, Netflix removed old episodes of “Chappelle’s Show” from the platform at the comedian’s request, forgoing the revenue it would have reaped, after he called the contract that allowed Comedy Central to profit from the show more than a decade and a half after its release exploitative. Sarandos has dismissed requests from trans employees that “The Closer” be removed.

The most reactionary and dangerous parts of our current politics and culture are driven by powerful people who claim to be the victims of groups that are far more vulnerable than they are. The irony is that these dynamics are increasingly present in matters of racism. Days after “The Closer” aired, Chappelle performed at a sold-out event at the Hollywood Bowl, before an audience that included Nas, Lizzo, Stevie Wonder, Brad Pitt, and Tiffany Haddish. He remains powerful and influential, despite the protests from a comparatively small community of activists and their supporters. The turbulence around “The Closer” will, in all likelihood, amount to just another speed bump in Chappelle’s path. In gliding through this situation, he has emphasized a fact about power that was never particularly noteworthy. Because the one thing that has not been cancelled is the check. ♦

The Academic Freedom Alliance has released its public letter on the situation at the University of Florida. The administration of the University of Florida has attempted to block three political science professors from serving as expert witnesses in a lawsuit against the state over the recently enacted voting law, as discussed by co-blogger Eugene Volokh here. This is an egregious violation of academic freedom and the First Amendment. If accepted in this case, it would have broad ramifications for how state universities operated across a host of other cases.
I write on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance to express our firm view that this decision is a serious violation of the academic freedom principles to which the University of Florida is committed. The university is mistaken in thinking that this decision is consistent with the principles of free speech and academic freedom and has construed the potential conflicts of interest in this case in a manner that is incompatible with maintaining academic freedom in the future. It has long been a central feature of academic freedom in the United States that when university professors "speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline." Whatever interest a state university might have in preventing members of its faculty from acting as political partisans when operating within their duties as state employees, that interest cannot be understood to extend to restricting the speech activities in which professors might engage when operating outside their university duties and acting as private citizens.
You can read the full letter here.

For nearly a decade, activists have been trying to get the federal government to determine how much a secretive surveillance court can keep its conclusions out of the public eye. Today the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
Since 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been filing motions to get the federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to release secret opinion connected to the collection of Americans' communications data. The first motions began after Edward Snowden's disclosures that the National Security Agency (NSA) was using Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to scoop up millions of Americans' internet and phone records, without warrants and without the targets' knowledge, allegedly as part of the post-9/11 war on terrorism.
Much of what the FISC, authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, does is classified, because part of its purpose is to permit the covert observation of people who may represent a threat to national security. But another part of the court's purpose is to make sure that Americans are protected from unauthorized secret surveillance. Snowden's disclosures suggested a breakdown in those protections.
The ACLU hoped to uncover the legal justification for this use of the PATRIOT Act. When Section 215 was replaced by the USA Freedom Act in 2015, the group filed a new motion under the new guidelines. And in April of this year, the ACLU, along with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the law firm Gibson Dunn, filed a petition to the Supreme Court asking the justices "to recognize a First Amendment right of public access to the FISC's opinions—ensuring that the opinions are released with only those redactions necessary to prevent genuine harm to national security."
In this morning's orders, the Supreme Court declined to consider the argument. The justices didn't explain why they turned it down, which is typical. But Justice Neil Gorsuch penned a notable dissent that was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
The federal government has argued that because these reports are so heavily classified, it's the sole province of the executive branch—not the judicial branch—to determine what may be released. Indeed, it has argued that the judicial branch doesn't have any role to play in this process at all (aside from FISC, which has ruled that it doesn't have the authority to consider whether reports should be released). This did not sit well with Gorsuch, who writes:
This case presents questions about the right of public access to Article III judicial proceedings of grave national importance. Maybe even more fundamentally, this case involves a governmental challenge to the power of this Court to review the work of Article III judges in a subordinate court. If these matters are not worthy of our time, what is?
The ACLU and Knight First Amendment Institute put out a joint release expressing disappointment at the court's rejection of the petition.
"The Supreme Court has left in place a system that makes informed public debate about government surveillance exceedingly difficult," writes Alex Abdo, the Knight Institute's litigation director. "Without access to the FISC's opinions, the public cannot evaluate the powers that the government's surveillance agencies are exercising in its name. The FISC shouldn't be exempt from the constitutional right of access that applies to other courts. It's past due for the Court to establish this principle."
In the meantime, we'll have to keep relying on the whistleblowers.

These patterns are clearly evident in the United States, where wealth gains have been especially concentrated among the top 0.1 per cent. The share of national wealth held by those below the top 10 per cent has fallen since the 1980s by 12 percentage points, the same proportion that the top 0.1 per cent have gained. Today, roughly half of all Americans earn less than $35,000 annually , living essentially pay cheque to pay cheque.

After the brutalities of the early Industrial Revolution, and two world wars, the middle class thrived not just in America, but also in Britain, Australia, Canada and increasingly in East Asia. But by the 1970s we began what has become an inexorable march towards an ever more feudalistic structure. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has noted that, across the 36 wealthier countries, the uber-wealthy have taken an ever greater share of national GDP in recent decades, while the middle class ‘looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters’.

After the autocratic Middle Ages, both human progress and self-rule came back as the middle classes began to rise – first in Italy but then more profoundly, and more pervasively, in the Netherlands and the British Isles, before spreading to North America and Oceania, where there was no true hereditary aristocracy. Students of classical experience, such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Adams, all considered the over-concentration of property in a few hands as a basic threat to republican institutions, an insight shared by such intellects as Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Adam Smith (1).

With climate, as with many other issues, the upper classes are inflicting their own preferences on working- and middle-class people. As nonprofits, oligarchs and bureaucrats plot out the future, small business owners and the middle class, as one entrepreneur put it , are ‘not at the table – or even in the room’. This is the very class – what I refer to as the yeomanry – that has driven much of the West’s economic progress and nurtured self-government. Democracy was born when both Athens and later Rome included small property owners in governance. Democracy died when these small owners lost power to what Aristotle labelled the ‘oligarchia’.

These policies are fine with ‘woke’ corporatists like BlackRock, who see enormous profits in the regulated shift in energy, even as they seek to expand their business with the world’s dominant polluter, China. What’s missing is any focus on how to cut emissions without causing high inflation, raising energy prices and destroying the middle class. So far, more palatable options, like increasing remote work, geothermal energy, natural gas, nuclear power and varied new technologies, have not managed to get on to the agenda.

Nevertheless, none of this will force the climate activists to reconsider how the current strategies against global warming could break the backs of the already beleaguered working and middle class. (For British readers, I use the phrase ‘middle class’ here in the American – less bourgeois – sense.) The climate chorus of celebrities , oligarchs and royals may feel virtuous, but for most people the future could prove to be propertyless proletarianisation. Many of those in Glasgow at the moment pray at the altar of ‘ de-growth ’. They want to limit the consumption of the working and middle classes, undermine their jobs, raise their energy bills, and inhibit their ability to buy property or travel.

Like its global predecessors, the COP26 Glasgow conference will usher in a new wave of apocalyptic warnings about climate change . It will also likely prove no more successful, in terms of actually addressing the issue, than its predecessors, particularly as China, India and other developing countries ramp up their emissions.

This lopsided distribution of income parallels a growing concentration of corporate power. Both in the US and Europe this has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy . In Silicon Valley, the renowned garage culture has morphed into a collection of giant firms with market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 to 90 per cent of their markets. ‘Free entry’ into tech and other markets is increasingly difficult without access to enormous financial resources.

Even with their robust social-welfare provisions, over two thirds of European Union countries , including Sweden, have experienced declining social mobility. Germany is significantly less equal than its EU peers, with richer households controlling a bigger share of assets than in most other Western European states. The bottom 40 per cent of German adults hold almost no assets at all ; barely 45 per cent of Germans own homes. Even in theoretically socialist China the top one per cent of the population hold about one third of the country’s wealth . Meanwhile, the prospects for the Chinese middle class are fading, particularly in light of the recent debt and housing crisis.

As executive pay at the big tech and finance firms has hit the stratosphere, small businesses – the bulwark of the yeoman class – face ‘an existential threat’, according to the Harvard Business Review. Experts are warning that one third of small businesses could shut down for good. Hundreds of thousands have already disappeared, including nearly half of all black-owned businesses. Overall, according to a report from May this year, roughly 37 per cent of all US small business owners can’t pay their rent.

Loose monetary policy imposed during the pandemic has allowed larger firms to increase their share of the pie. Since the 2008 financial crisis, financial assets have consolidated and small banks, often critical for lending to small businesses, have been acquired or simply driven out of business. The Covid lockdowns also played a role in accelerating the continued shift towards large chains and online platforms like Amazon (which now uses its power to coerce small businesses to give up their data).

The lockdowns may seem tragic to operators on Main Street, but some greens see them as providing the basis for a bureaucratically controlled future where credentialed mandarins determine the minutiae of daily life. This includes policies designed to change how people live. Already climate-oriented policies have underpinned efforts to block affordable homes being built on the periphery and force ever more density on urban areas. This has had the effect of raising prices, resulting in declines in homeownership, particularly among the young, notably in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia.

In the UK, the government’s Climate Change Committee is putting forward proposals that would make it impossible to sell single-family homes – including those built mere decades ago – that do not meet stringent energy standards. Such a regulation could escalate an already massive affordability problem. Similarly, California progressives, some developers and their media boosters seek a world in which single-family owners morph into permanent apartment renters. President Biden’s administration seems to be determined to push this across the US.

As in the Middle Ages, property is becoming ever more concentrated. Property ownership in Europe rests increasingly in fewer hands. In Britain, where land prices have risen dramatically over the past decade, less than one per cent of the population owns half of all the land. Even in the United States, a country that never experienced feudalism, property ownership now increasingly depends on inheritance. The offspring of property-owning parents are far better situated to own a house eventually (often with parental help) and enter what one writer calls ‘the funnel of privilege’. In America, those in Generation Z are three times as likely as Boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. Among the youngest cohort, those aged 18-22, over 60 per cent see inheritance as their primary source of sustenance as they age.

This feudalisation of ownership may soon get worse. Enjoying record profits, some large banks like Britain’s Lloyds bank are working to gobble up an emerging market in distressed properties, apartments and even single-family homes. This trend is already pronounced and growing in the US, led by firms like BlackRock. In the first quarter of 2021, investors accounted for roughly one out of every seven homes bought, a marked increase from previous years. Analysts predict that soon most middle-class people will be ‘priced out’ of ownership in a ‘rentership society’, where homes, furniture and other necessities are turned into rental products offering endless cashflow to the oligarchs.

All this fits what the Davos crowd calls the ‘great reset’, a top-down effort at refashioning capitalism and daily life along green lines. The goal is not just to turn potential owners into tenants but also to reduce all consumption in general, as part of a move to a ‘net zero’ future where cars will become rarer, miles will be taxed and only expensive electric cars will remain, largely only for the rich.

The anti-middle class jihad also threatens the livelihoods of millions of working-class people, particularly those in well-paying manufacturing, construction and energy jobs. Green policies have already accelerated the de-industrialisation of countries such as the United Kingdom, and could undermine recent efforts to bring factories back from China. Those much heralded ‘green jobs’, so central to the climatista pitch, turn out to pay far less and are far less likely to be unionised. Many of them may end up in developing countries anyway.

Meanwhile, the likes of Jeff Bezos – who earlier this year gave $10 billion to environmental groups – continue to live in Nero-like luxury, flying in private jets and spewing many times more greenhouse gases than the ordinary mortal. It’s no surprise that US climate tsar John Kerry – another frequent flyer on private jets – believes his proposals are not a ‘sacrifice’ but ‘an opportunity’. He will no doubt be joined by Amazon, other tech firms and Wall Street in investing in renewable schemes, often subsidised by governments. Such firms are primed to be major beneficiaries of new green-infrastructure spending.

All this threatens to force much of the yeomanry towards a serf-like status. Many, particularly the propertyless young, will join a swelling proletariat dependent on government transfers and working limited hours if indeed they work at all. The scolds arriving in Scotland may claim to be saving humanity, but it’s the middle and working classes who are designated to pay the price.

The only way we can change this situation is for ordinary people to challenge elite policies – as has already happened, albeit chaotically, in France and several other countries. Even as we confront climate challenges, we must not allow green politics to become yet another nail in the coffin of the once great yeomanry.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His latest book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is out now. Follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin

Pictures by: Getty.

“You don’t tell us what to put in our bodies! You either believe in individual liberty and freedom or you don’t. Body sovereignty. You have sovereignty over your own body.” — Dan Bongino, Fox News
Many on the right argue that policies requiring people to get vaccinated, whether as a condition of employment or entering a business establishment, are infringements on people’s personal freedom. The Attorney General of Missouri, in announcing a lawsuit by multiple states opposing the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors, said the mandate “would trample upon liberty.” The Arizona attorney general has called the mandate “one of the greatest infringements upon individual liberty…by any administration in our country’s history.” 
Rep. Madison Cawthorn has introduced a bill called the “Justice for All Businesses (JAB) Act,” which would “prohibit the Secretary of Labor from enforcing any government mandate requiring employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.” Cawthorn says that it is “not a matter of health, it’s a matter of liberty” because “forced injections mandated by the federal government are nothing short of subsidized medical apartheid.” 
Right-wingers are not the only ones arguing that vaccine mandates are problematic. When Noam Chomsky suggested that people who refuse to get the vaccine ought to isolate themselves, Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal said it was a “call for the state to segregate The Unvaccinated from society.” Marxist economist Richard Wolff has suggested (falsely) that the recent wave of strikes in the United States has occurred because vaccine and mask mandates by employers have “become intolerable for employees.” Contrarian YouTuber Jimmy Dore appeared sympathetic to the anti-mandate movement when he said that “anti-mandate is not anti-vax.” 
The argument made here is that regardless of whether you think one ought to be vaccinated, coercing people to get vaccinated is morally wrong, because it violates their freedom of choice. This is fairly easy to understand: I can believe that people ought to eat vegetables without believing they ought to be fired or forcibly separated from society for deciding not to. Freedom means that people get to make choices we do not like. Fox’s Dan Bongino, quoted at the outset, stresses that one’s position on vaccines is separate from one’s position on mandating them. Or, as a Twitter user called “Conservative Momma” put it, “you can be for the vaccine and completely oppose vaccine mandates—that is if you believe in bodily autonomy, individual liberty and freedom.”
This argument may seem  sensible. There may be things that would be good for us to do, but that the government should still not make us do. But the argument overlooks one important fact, which is that “the freedom to make choices that may directly result in the deaths of other people” may differ in critical ways from other freedoms like “the freedom to choose between chocolate and vanilla ice cream.” 
The “harm principle” articulated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which has come to be foundational to libertarianism, states that our freedom can only be restricted in order to prevent us from doing harm to others. In other words, I am free to do as I like so long as I am not inhibiting other people’s ability to do as they like. Libertarians often interpret this to mean that the government’s role is very limited: government is allowed to stop you from stealing and murdering, but a lot of other behavior (such as exploitation, greed, lying) should be permissible. One libertarian manifesto sums up the basic idea in its title, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff. As long as people aren’t causing physical harm or violating property rights, you shouldn’t interfere with them. (Yes, this usually turns into a justification for letting billionaires hoard wealth.) 
But under the basic libertarian framework, preventing people from causing deaths falls squarely into the category of things that government is allowed to do. Freedom means that you are allowed to do the things that do not result in harm to those around you. But during a pandemic, spreading an airborne virus that will continue to kill millions if it is not contained is clearly something that does cause harm to people. Not only could you infect someone and cause their suffering and death, but further spreading the virus creates countless downstream effects, like contributing to the overwhelming of hospital resources (which causes harm to those who then cannot get treated for non-COVID conditions). Preventing you from infecting someone with a dangerous virus is an attempt to stop you from infringing on their liberty.1 If you knowingly take the risk of killing someone, say by walking into a nursing home without having been vaccinated against a contagious virus that could kill the people there, you are the threat to freedom, just as a murderer is violating the basic rights of the person they murder. 
Let us imagine a pandemic somewhat more severe than COVID-19. Let us imagine a plague, in which anyone within six feet of an infected person is guaranteed to catch the disease and die. Does an infected person have the right to go wherever they please? No. Because there is no reason why their right to free movement should trump everybody else’s right to life. This is especially the case if there are things that a person could do (such as obtain a vaccine or wear a mask) to reduce the risk they pose to other people. If someone was a sufficiently deadly threat to other people, it would be legitimate to isolate them in order to protect the rights of others, and it would certainly be legitimate to place conditions on their interactions with others (if you wish to exercise your guaranteed right to movement, you must take a measure that ensures other people will not have their own right to life violated unnecessarily by you). 
What about the right that Bongino speaks of, the right to “bodily autonomy”? Some people say that the government should not tell you what you have to put in your body, and that this is an absolute right. That is indeed the case; if the government strapped you down and forcibly injected you with a vaccine, that would be wrong. But what we are talking about when we talk about vaccine mandates is a conditional requirement, a requirement that is imposed on you if you wish to do certain things.
For example: there was recently a protest by employees at a health center here in Louisiana against a mandate requiring “all physicians, providers, and employees to be fully vaccinated.” One protester said that “it is about the freedom to choose. We are standing for freedom and against the [vaccine] mandate.” But they do have the freedom to choose. They could choose to work at a health center, in which case they will have to agree to take measures to make sure they don’t put the people they work with at risk. Or they could choose not to work at a health center. If you choose to join the Air Force, you can be required to do jumping jacks and have a physical. (You will also have to get certain immunizations and submit to necessary medical treatment.) This might be said to violate your “bodily autonomy.” But the violation is conditional on the choice to join.
AP Images
In fact, many right-wing arguments about violations of “personal freedom” do not recognize the crucial fact that the “violations” are conditional on choices. For instance, many on the right object to requirements that bakers create wedding cakes for all customers. They say that this is “forcing people to bake cakes,” as if the government has shown up at a random person’s house and turned them into a pastry chef at gunpoint. In fact, the requirement is conditional: if you choose to open a public-facing establishment, and wish for the government to enforce your property rights, you must agree to serve everybody and not discriminate. Likewise, some conservatives object to job contracts that require union membership, saying that this is “forcing people to join unions.” At the same time, conservatives are big fans of “right to work” laws that prohibit this kind of contract, in the name of “freedom.”
But it’s worth pointing out that right-wing objections to workplace mandates are usually made inconsistently. Employers require all kinds of things of employees. They can make you wear a uniform. They can make you take a drug test. They can make you treat your boss with deference. Why is “making you join a union” singled out as uniquely coercive? “Freedom of contract” means that you are given a choice: if you do not like the terms that are offered to you, you can go somewhere else where the terms are different. 

Of course, leftists are critical of this notion of “freedom of contract,” and do believe certain employment terms can be coercive. But the question then becomes: which kinds of requirements are legitimate as conditions of employment, and which cross the boundary into violations of people’s dignity and freedom? However we come down on that, the kinds of requirements that do not seem to be violations of personal freedom are those that have been determined safe and that simply involve protecting the health and welfare of everybody else, i.e. keeping you from killing people. Vaccine mandates say: if you wish to be around others, you must take reasonable steps not to hurt them. A vaccine, despite being something you “put in your body,” is a reasonable step, and your right to sovereignty does not entitle you to risk violating other people’s sovereignty by putting something in their bodies (coronavirus). 
We should always prefer the least restrictive means of guaranteeing basic freedom. This is why, when Chomsky was asked about vaccine mandates, he stressed that we should primarily be trying to create a social norm of taking the vaccine, rather than using the coercive power of the state (Chomsky has anarchist political leanings): 

“I think people who refuse to accept vaccines, I think the right response for them is not to force them to, but rather to insist that they be isolated. If people decide “I am willing to be a danger to the community by refusing the vaccine,” they should also say “I have the decency to isolate myself. I don’t want the vaccine, but I don’t have the right to run around harming people.” That should be a convention. Enforcing is a different question. It should be understood, and we should get it to be understood. If it really gets to the point where they are severely endangering people, then of course you have to do something about it. So if smallpox becomes rampant again and some people are insisting on running around in public places where they might have smallpox, then you’ve got to do something about it. We’re not in quite that situation but I think it’s a similar one. So I think you should first attempt to establish conventions that will be understandable by people with some moral capacity, convince them that it’s your right to refuse to get a vaccine, but then it’s your responsibility to isolate yourself so you don’t harm others.”

Chomsky compared it to people who insist on running red lights, because they don’t think the government has the right to tell them to stop at a traffic signal. People who don’t want to obey traffic laws are putting others in danger,  so they shouldn’t drive. If they become enough of a threat to public safety, they may need to be stopped by force. 
Some believed Chomsky was an authoritarian for these remarks. Libertarian commentator Dave Rubin said that Chomsky was a “truly disgusting human being” who had revealed the “evil nature which lays just beneath every oh-so-tolerant progressive.” 
But Chomsky’s argument seems completely unobjectionable to me, and it’s telling that instead of refuting it, Rubin simply resorts to words like evil and disgusting. If someone does not want to take the vaccine, it’s their right, but they should not expose others to the harmful consequences of their decision. And it’s the right of others to exclude people whose choices are causing harm. One can describe isolation of an unvaccinated person as “segregation” if one is being as inflammatory as possible (someone even said Chomsky was calling for “concentration camps”). But the need for people at high risk of spreading COVID-19 to isolate themselves seems to follow from the basic recognition that spreading a virus that can cause terrible disease is not something people have an inherent right to do.
The natural response will be to say something like “Well, colds kill people, should you not be able to go out if you have a cold?” And the answer is, well, first, if I’m sick with a cold I do tend to isolate myself, so that I don’t make people sick. But the conditions that can be imposed on a sick person increase relative to the threat posed. Chomsky invoked smallpox as an example of a situation where the state really would have to get tough about not letting people infect others. If we had a new plague of sufficient deadliness, a lot of restrictions on what people could do would be justified, because otherwise none of us would be free. COVID-19 is an in-between case, which means that the measures justified are relatively moderate: here in New Orleans, if I want to go to the gym, I have to show proof of vaccination, so that I am less likely toinfect fellow gym-goers, but I am free to bike through the city without showing proof of vaccination, because that doesn’t pose much of a risk. 
There is a kind of mindless pro-“freedom” rhetoric that I refer to as “reflexive libertarianism” because it reacts angrily to perceived violations of individual liberty without thinking seriously about what freedom really is. For instance, mindless defenders of property rights will see any attempt to tax and redistribute wealth as a violation of their “freedom,” even though their property rights may themselves have come from an abridgment of other people’s freedom. (This is why an intelligent libertarian, philosopher Robert Nozick, acknowledged that consistent libertarianism may require reparations to the descendants of slaves or grants of land to Native Americans. Taking property rights seriously requires massive reparations for climate change and may even require the abolition of capitalism.) People who have this kind of unthinking libertarianism may be surprised when the ACLU declines to oppose vaccine mandates—and will see it as yet another sign that the ACLU has become a partisan defender of Democratic policies rather than a principled defender of liberty. But they haven’t thought seriously about the real liberty questions here, and the ACLU has. What looks like a demand for freedom, the right to go around infecting people, is in fact a demand to be allowed to violate the freedom of others. A consistent civil libertarian not only can, but should, support vaccine requirements as a condition of certain kinds of participation in public life. 
Of course, both vaccinated and unvaccinated people may spread the virus. But vaccination does significantly reduce the spread of the virus and shortens the period in which an infected person is contagious. Of course, vaccination does not obviate the need for other precautions such as masking. ↩ 

In August, Brené Brown, the Houston-based writer, researcher, professor, social worker, podcast host, C.E.O., and consultant-guru to organizations including Pixar, Google, and the U.S. Special Forces, met with a group of graduate students at the McCombs School of Business, at the University of Texas at Austin, to talk about emotions. Brown, fifty-five, was wearing a shiny maize blouse, jeans, and a black face mask. It was the first day of her new class, Dare to Lead, and she stood onstage in a small auditorium. There were about a hundred people in the room; Brown had them stand up and introduce themselves. “Howdy!” a Black student in a fleece jacket said, giving a Longhorns salute. “Who else is from Washington, D.C.?” Other students were from Texas, Nigeria, Ohio, Hong Kong. They were concentrating in fields like accounting and management, and they were going to confront one another’s humanity.

For more than twenty years, Brown, a Ph.D. in social work, has combined her research results—about shame, vulnerability, and other pillars of emotional life—with stories that illustrate them, delivered with a potent blend of empathy and Texan bravado (“Curiosity is a shit-starter”). Her work comes in many forms: five Times No. 1 best-selling books, two Spotify podcasts, a Netflix special. At the University of Houston, she’s a research professor of social work; at McCombs, a visiting professor of management. She’s also a business in her own right, with programs that train people and organizations to contend with vulnerability and courage. In all realms, her conclusions tend to surprise, then resonate, like a Zen koan: “When perfectionism is driving us, shame is always riding shotgun.”

Brown’s new book, “Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience,” will be published in November. It’s about emotions—specifically, the emotions we have trouble naming, and thus understanding. Most people can recognize only three emotions, she said on her podcast “Unlocking Us”: “Happy, sad, pissed off.”

At the university that day, unnameable emotions abounded. It was the start of the fall semester, and students and educators were returning amid a burgeoning crisis. In recent weeks, COVID-19 cases in Texas had risen by more than four hundred per cent. Only two I.C.U. beds remained available in Austin. The governor, Greg Abbott, was vigorously fighting mask and vaccination mandates, and he had recently tweeted a photo of himself at a Republican event, happily playing a fiddle. (Headlines had referenced Nero.) That week, Abbott announced that he had COVID-19.

U.T., as a state university, was prohibited from requiring vaccinations. “I have two elderly parents who are dealing with health issues right now,” Brown said. “So I appreciate that y’all are wearing masks.” During the class, the students would learn how vulnerability was key to courageous leadership; to do so, Brown said, they had to let go of the need to be cool. She had them stand up and do a few uncool, vulnerability-inducing things. “Bye-bye, Miss American Pie,” she sang, waving her arms; the class, with tuneful gusto, sang about the good ol’ boys drinking whiskey and rye. Then Brown played “Shut Up and Dance,” and the students, smiling behind their masks, complied.

Brown gave a brief overview of the Dare to Lead curriculum, which was drawn from her book and training program of the same name. Eventually, the class would break into small groups and role-play various work scenarios: receiving criticism without getting defensive (“armoring up”); not letting fear of being disliked warp their judgment (à la Enron). One student, who had worked at a consulting firm, asked about managers who “delivered feedback in an awful way”: “At what point should we practice empathy for shitty people who don’t know how to do their job?”

They’d come back to this, Brown told her. “I don’t want to be theoretical—I want you to have fifteen sentences you can use,” she said. She looked at the students intently. “From the time we’re born, we get feedback from people who are unskilled, starting with our parents. Are your parents all really skilled feedback-givers?” The students laughed. “We have to learn how to find the pearl,” Brown said. “And we have to learn how to draw the line when we’re being shamed.”

At first glance, Brown might seem similar to other best-selling providers of wisdom: writers of business-friendly, big-ideas books like Malcolm Gladwell; life-hackers like Marie Kondo; rawly uplifting memoirists like Glennon Doyle. A distinction that Brown tends to emphasize is that she’s an academic, and one who reconciles the tangible (data) with the intangible (emotion). She refers frequently to her research, and to its ever-growing volume—but she also transmutes it into insights, which lodge deep in people’s emotional lives. A clinical psychologist told me that her patients hear “the voice of Brené” inside them; last year, on “Unlocking Us,” Vivek Murthy, now the U.S. Surgeon General, thanked Brown for “helping make the world better for me and for my kids.”

Brown rose to fame in 2011, after a TEDx talk that she gave in Houston, “The Power of Vulnerability,” went viral. (It’s now one of the top five TED talks of all time.) In it, she wears a brown dress shirt, and her presence is neither self-important, like any number of terrifying motivational speakers, nor awkward. She explains that she’s a researcher-storyteller—“Maybe stories are just data with a soul”—and that she’s going to talk about a discovery that “changed the way that I live and love and work and parent.” As a doctoral student, she says, she’d wanted to study what makes life messy, so that she could “knock discomfort upside the head.” If you happen to be a person who resents life’s messiness but could never imagine knocking discomfort upside the head, taking advice from someone who would has a certain appeal.

Connection, Brown goes on, is the essence of human experience. When she studied it, she found that what impeded connection was shame—the feeling that some quality prevented us from being worthy of love. Transcending that shame involved vulnerability: the “excruciating” act of allowing ourselves to be truly known. “I hate vulnerability,” Brown continues. But the happiest people in her research had embraced it; they accepted their imperfections, risked saying “I love you” first. Once Brown had this realization, it led to a “breakdown”—a year in therapy, not unlike a “street fight,” during which she was forced to confront her dread of exposure. “I lost the fight, but probably won my life back,” she says.

Brown, who described herself to me as “scary strategic,” is deliberate in her storytelling; she’s a longtime fan of Joseph Campbell, and many of her narratives take the form of a Campbellian hero’s journey, in which the protagonist leaves the realm of the familiar, ventures into a challenging unknown, and emerges victorious. Like a certain kind of preacher, Brown steers her stories toward a moment of reckoning, but she doesn’t present herself as an oracle. Audiences enjoy “watching me struggle with my own work,” she told me. “I’m saying, ‘Here’s what the research says. I think this is going to suck, but I’m going to give it a shot.’ ” (Another Brownian maxim: “Embrace the suck.”)

Before the TEDx event, Brown had been giving talks about vulnerability for several years; there, though, she decided to be vulnerable. In her subsequent work, we hear more about her family, her history, her “opportunities for growth.” (She prefers this term to “flaws.”) Over time, people began speaking her language, Instagramming her maxims—“The opposite of belonging is fitting in”; “Authenticity is a practice.” Brown is a y’all-saying “language populist,” as she put it to me recently, but she isn’t saccharine (no calling the reader “Dear Heart”), and she frames her ideas as discoveries we’re making together. Tarana Burke, the activist and writer who started the MeToo movement, in 2006, said that she’d read self-help books that made her feel “broken”; Brown’s writing, especially about shame, made her feel less alone. Burke and Brown eventually became friends, and they co-edited a book of essays, out this year, titled “You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.”

Brown launched “Unlocking Us” in March, 2020, at the dawn of the pandemic. On the first episode, she introduced another term: “F.F.T.s,” or “fucking first times.” “I’m white-knuckling about five different F.F.T.s right now,” she said. She’d planned to début the show at SxSW; now she was recording in a closet, “on top of my son’s dirty Under Armour clothes.” Also, she went on, “we busted my mom and her husband out of assisted living.” Brown, her husband, and their two kids were living at home; with the grandparents on the scene, they’d all been having “a lot of hard conversations.” Brown took a stab at describing her emotions. “If I had an instrument right now, I would ask for a tuba,” she said. “I would crawl inside of it and hide, and then I’d ask someone to push the tuba down the hill in our back yard and roll it into the lake.” She paused. “I don’t even know where that came from.”

“We are looking for volunteers to give up their seats and not attend some college friend’s wedding in Chicago.” Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop

During the pandemic, Brown also hosted a few church services on Instagram (“Unofficial—I’m not a priest/pastor,” she wrote), and in September she started the “Dare to Lead” podcast, with guests including Jon Meacham and Barack Obama. Despite all this, she often notes that she’s an introvert. The “Power of Vulnerability” experience “gave me one of the worst vulnerability hangovers of my life,” Brown told me. A few unkind online comments made it worse, and she found comfort in a Teddy Roosevelt speech, from 1910. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” and who, “if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

Jon and Greg wrote an afterword for The Coddling of the American Mind in the summer of 2021 to be added to a second edition of the book in 2022, but it grew so long that it would have raised the page count and cost of the book substantially. Instead, the nine sections of the afterword will be released in nine parts. The first three parts were published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and are linked below. In this latest part, the authors discuss the post-2014 Great Awokening on the left and the dangers of monomania on the right.Sections from the new afterword to The Coddling of the American Mind previously published by FIRE:Part 1: Gen Z’s Mental Health Continues to DeterioratePart 2: It’s Social Media — More Than Screen Time — That Matters for Mental HealthPart 3: Increasing Persecution on CampusThe early chapters of our book, The Coddling of the American Mind, are about a set of destructive and illiberal ideas that emerged on American college campuses in the years 2014-2016. Because campuses lean decidedly left, these chapters are critical of ideas and practices associated with the left. But we worked hard to take a holistic and multi-faceted view of the problem, and we devoted a full chapter—chapter 6—to situating campus events within the broader American culture war in which each side drives the other to do ever-more-outrageous and illiberal things. In fact, we opened the chapter with Newton’s third law and then we modified it for life in a polarization spiral: “for every action there is a disproportionate reaction.”As probably will surprise no one, the polarization spiral between the left and the right has only gotten more intense in the last three years. Most alarming is the growing acceptance of political violence as a justifiable method for achieving political goals. A survey in 2019 found that approximately one-fifth of partisans in both parties believed that violence against the opposing party would be at least “a little” justified if their party lost the 2020 election. Between 2020 and 2021 the share of students surveyed who said violent protest was “never acceptable” dropped from 82% to 76% and at most elite schools it was even lower.We now know a lot more about the polarization spiral and who is driving it. The Hidden Tribes study, published in 2018 by the UK-based group More In Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in December 2017 and used a statistical technique to identify groups of people who had similar core beliefs. They found seven groups. The one furthest to the right they labeled the “Devoted Conservatives.” This group makes up 6% of the population. Its members are “deeply engaged with politics” and hold “strident, uncompromising views.” Devoted conservatives see themselves as the last defenders of traditional values that are under threat from the far left. This group was clearly overrepresented in the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021.The group furthest to the left were the “Progressive Activists.” This group, which makes up 8% of the population, is “highly sensitive to issues of fairness and equity, particularly with regards to race, gender and other minority group identities.” Progressive Activists talk frequently about “power structures” and how they cause and maintain inequality. They are the most active of all groups on social media. This group is clearly overrepresented in campus protests and in mass marches for progressive causes.Although the Devoted Conservatives and Progressive Activists make up just 14% of the US population, they wield enormous influence on American political discourse as they passionately express their hatred for each other—despite their unexpected similarities. It may not surprise you to learn that the Devoted Conservatives were the whitest of all seven groups (88% white), but would you have expected that the Progressive Activists were the second whitest (80%)? Likewise, it may not surprise you to learn that the Progressive Activists—who were the most highly educated—reported the highest annual income, but would you have guessed that the second wealthiest group was the Devoted Conservatives? The Great Awokening (On the Left)Around the same time the Hidden Tribes survey was conducted, evidence of a large shift to the left among white liberals on issues related to race and identity began to emerge in multiple datasets. Because of the suddenness and the increased fervor with which white Americans were espousing new beliefs about race, gender, and immigration, the journalist Matt Yglesias called this shift the “Great Awokening.” Yglesias noted that The Awokening began in 2014, before Donald Trump had announced his candidacy. This was a year with two high-profile police killings (Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York City). In the aftermath, white liberals shifted sharply to the left on survey questions about race (as well as immigration and gender), while black people and conservatives barely moved. We also see a sharp shift around 2014 in the frequency of words related to social justice in The New York Times and other major media. The phrase “social justice” itself was used with roughly the same frequency from 1980 through 2010—appearing in only one or two out of every thousand articles. It rose to three out of a thousand in 2014, and then shot up to seven out of a thousand by 2018. The same is true for words about bigotry such as “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and “transphobia.” Why the sudden shift among white liberals? After we wrote our Atlantic essay in 2015, it became clear that politics was changing rapidly not only on campus, but off campus as well, and not just in the United States but in many liberal democracies that were being shaken by populist movements, particularly right-wing populism. Jon began to feel as if something had changed in the operating system of society; the old rules just didn’t seem to apply anymore. He began thinking that the change had something to do with the historically unprecedented increase in connectivity that had happened since the Internet became a global phenomenon in the late 1990s, or since social media platforms emerged around 2004. But if those were the culprits, then why didn’t things get weird back then? Why the sudden change around 2014?It was only when Jon teamed up with the technology writer Tobias Rose-Stockwell that we found what we believe is the thing that warped the fabric of social space-time. It was the introduction of the “like” button, by Facebook, in 2009, which Twitter promptly copied, combined with the introduction of the “retweet” button by Twitter that same year, which Facebook copied in 2011. Before 2009, social media feeds were almost entirely chronological—content was mostly personal (rather than political) and social media was not particularly polarizing. But once users had two super-fast ways to say what they liked, and could do so many times a minute, the social media companies had vastly more information on each user’s behavior, and they began to optimize people’s newsfeeds using algorithms that continuously improved the platform’s ability to engage users and keep them clicking.At first many thought this viral sharing could be a good thing for democracy, especially after a Facebook page in 2011 helped to start a revolution in Egypt that brought down a corrupt and brutal dictator in just a few weeks. But the rapid increase in public expressions of outrage—not just at murderous dictators but at young adult fiction writers, people who accidentally make the “OK” sign, fellow employees, fellow students who said something, professors who said something—at pretty much anyone at any time for almost any reason—this was the planetary change. If not for these changes in social media that occurred during President Obama’s first term, we believe that America would not have lost its collective mind during Obama’s second term. Few of the witch hunts and other campus events that we described in The Coddling of the American Mind could have happened—it would have been hard to conduct rapid public shamings of professors and administrators for words or phrases embedded in well-intentioned emails. There would have been no Great Awokening in 2014, and no presidential campaign run on Twitter in 2016.As former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has pointed out in his book Revolt of the Public, social media is adept at tearing down institutions, ideas, and even people, but so far has shown little ability to be constructive. Finding a way to harness the negative power of social media for positive ends will be a defining challenge for the next decade.Monomania and Trumpism (On the Right)Readers of our book might be surprised to know that almost all of the hate mail that we get about the book comes from readers on the right, not the left. They mainly accuse us of perpetuating the “Charlottesville Hoax,” which is the claim that Donald Trump called the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and KKK members of the 2017 Unite the Right Rally “very fine people.” The claim that this is a “hoax” relies on the fact that soon after in that same wild press conference, Trump mentioned, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists—because they should be condemned totally.”This seems like a good point to make against someone asserting that “Trump called neo-Nazis and white nationalists very fine people.” But that’s not what we wrote. We wrote: “With those three words—‘very fine people’—the president showed that he was sympathetic to the men who staged the most highly publicized march for racism and antisemitism in the United States in many decades.”We watched all three press conferences carefully, multiple times, before we wrote what we wrote. In his remarks after the murder, his contemporaneous tweets, and even as recently as September 2021, Trump showed that he was sympathetic to the aims of the Unite the Right marchers: to oppose the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia. But in the same remarks where he mentioned “very fine people,” Trump showed sympathy for the Unite the Right organizers, specifically, comparing them favorably to the counter-protestors by saying “you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest” and pointing out the pro-statue protestors “had a permit,”1 unlike the counter-protectors. That permit was obtained, in fact, by prominent white nationalist and recurring Stormfront radio guest Jason Kessler. Trump also praised the protesters from “the night before,” perhaps trying to de-emphasize the Unite the Right protestors on the day of the violence. But the only documented protest in Charlottesville on August 11 was the march by neo-Nazis and white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us.”Defenders of the “hoax” accusation like to claim Michelle Piercy as one of the kind of “good people” Trump mentioned. The New York Times reported that Piercy was “a night shift worker at a Wichita, Kan., retirement home, who drove all night with a conservative group that opposed the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.” While the article said that she “had no interest in standing with Nazis or white supremacists,” her organization, a heavily-armed militia group called American Warrior Revolution (AWR), served as a sort of self-appointed security force for a march that included Klansmen in full regalia, neo-Nazis with swastika signs, and numerous other white supremacist and antisemitic groups. But even assuming Piercy counts as a “very fine person," AWR was present at the August 12 event—not “the night before.”So, even the people who say Trump called the white supremacists, KKK members, and neo-Nazis “very fine people” have a good argument. Trump may not have known who the people who got the permit were; he may have contradicted himself in that press conference; but nothing turns the claim that he complimented racist protesters into a “hoax.”This reflexive, overzealous defense of Trump, especially at his worst moments, is part of a growing monomania on the right. Monomania means an exaggerated and unhealthy obsession with one thing. One strand of it is that Trump must be defended in all situations from criticism. The other strand could be simply stated as “anything to own the libs.” This becomes apparent on college campuses as well. Let’s consult the Scholars Under Fire database collected by Komi German and Sean Stevens at FIRE that was released in September (but is regularly updated, most recently on October 15). Of the 471 incidents we found of attempts to get professors fired, about 164 of them (35%) were from the right.Indeed, among scholars targeted for sanction who also reported receiving threats (about 67 scholars) 60% of them said those threats came from their right rather than their left. Sadly, intimidation and harassment is very common online. To fully evaluate the nature of threats and who they come from would require a massive study of professors. We suspect there are thousands of examples of threats of physical violence against professors that have never been reported.Sometimes when the conservative mob goes after professors, it misrepresents what those professors actually said. For example, Asheen Phansey, a former adjunct professor of business at Babson College, was investigated then fired for sarcastically tweeting that, in retaliation for former President Trump’s threat to target Iranian cultural sites, “Ayatollah Khomenei [sic] should tweet a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb,” including “Mall of America,” and the “Kardashian residence.” His tweet was somehow taken seriously, with one writer explaining that “[b]egging a religious lunatic who oppresses women and gay people to blow up American cultural sites is sadly par for the course for your run of the mill college professor in 2020, and likely will end with him getting tenure.”Sometimes the speech that gets professors in trouble is very unsympathetic but nonetheless protected by free speech and extramural academic freedom. For example, Fresno State University investigated a professor following a 10,000 signature petition calling for her firing for tweeting that Barbara Bush was an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal”, in response to news of her death. Like the case at Babson, FIRE was there to help the professor, but unlike at Babson, Fresno State did the right thing and dropped the investigation. Other professors—even ones with tenure—have not been so lucky. We count 27 professors with tenure fired since 2015.The polarization spiral, which is fed and accelerated by social media, is making extremists on both right and left more extreme, more powerful, and more intimidating. Both sides feed off of each other. Both sides are essential for a polarization spiral. And that means that neither side can win by attacking or humiliating the other side. Such tactics only serve to energize the other side.Jonathan Haidt, a member of the Persuasion advisory board, is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy.Greg Lukianoff is a First Amendment lawyer and president and chief executive of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.Jon and Greg would especially like to thank Greg's Research Assistant Ryne Weiss for his excellent help with the research about the “Charlottesville Hoax.”1“But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest, and very legally protest—because, I don’t know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit. So I only tell you this: There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country—a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country.”

In his classic “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” Gunnar Myrdal observed that “even the white man who defends discrimination frequently describes his motive as ‘prejudice’ and says that it is ‘irrational.’” In other words, the Everyman acknowledged racism but felt no need to disavow it. For example, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson harbored no special guilt about the challenges faced by Black America but eventually saw it as politically prudent to court the Black electorate.

Thus, in the 1960s, civil rights leaders were able to take advantage of chance configurations. We might take a page from them. The gradual legalization of marijuana could be the start of a general reanalysis of the war on drugs that ravages Black communities. Beyond the current fight over President Biden’s legislative agenda, a new and more targeted demand on infrastructure could and should undergird a focus on training or retraining underserved working-class Black Americans for solid, well-paying vocational jobs. White guilt would be of little relevance amid such on-the-ground developments.

In that light, it bears mentioning that over the decades since the 1960s, when the idea that white Americans need to be guilty settled in among a contingent of Black thinkers, it seems that somehow, no matter what we say or do, white people are never guilty enough and white guilt is supposed to go on in perpetuity. Might it be that the effort to make white people any guiltier than they are is a Sisyphean effort? The dream that white people will, en masse, shed their “fragility” and embrace feeling really, really guilty is about as likely as Schoenberg’s ever being brunch music for more than a rarefied few.

We seek for enlightened white people to acknowledge that they are complicit — to use a term especially popular in recent years — in a system constructed for the benefit of whites. Note that even that word is a strategy to shake white people by the collar, in that telling them they are complicit is a fresher way of saying that they should be guilty. Because many white Americans have a way of resisting feeling guilty about things racial that they know are bad but that they themselves didn’t do, using a euphemism such as “complicit” is a way of trying to make the case without eliciting those typical objections: “I’ve never discriminated against anyone”; “I didn’t own slaves.”

But even phrased as complicity, the charge requires not just the occasional acolyte but the white populace as a whole to feel guilty about things people did not individually do, that were often done in the deep past rather than by their parents and that were done within a vast societal system, the operations of which even experts disagree on. That’s a lot. Recall also that most human beings are not, and will never be, dedicatedly history-minded — we live in the present.

Ross Douthat’s memoir starts with a confession: “I have always wanted to move back to New England.” The New York Times opinion columnist was living in a row house in D.C. with his wife and two kids when they decided to buy a million-dollar house in Connecticut—a beautiful old place with stone walls, lawns, and a guesthouse, one well-suited to be the stage for this particular privileged fantasy of retreat. The tale that follows is a little bit about how Douthat transformed his life—but not, as he expected, by escaping the rush of the city to get in touch with the land and tend to his flock of offspring (by the end of the book, he does have four of them). No, before the ink was fully dry on the property paperwork, Douthat was bitten by a tick. Then, he got very, very ill.

Douthat’s book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, published Tuesday, is about his yearslong attempt to heal a bad case of chronic Lyme disease. The debilitating condition that afflicts self-identified sufferers with pain, fatigue, brain fog, and a range of other symptoms, and one that the medical establishment often denies, and certainly does not know how to effectively treat. It joins several other books about chronic Lyme and other chronic illnesses recently published by respected journalists: Pamela Weintraub, 2008; Julie Rehmeyer, 2017; Porochista Khakpour, 2018; Meghan O’Rourke, forthcoming.

This list forms a little shelf of misery and uncertainty and rage, wrapped in beautiful prose. In a way, these volumes are the hardcover, researched-and-edited faces of thousands (millions?) of patients’ words about chronic Lyme and chronic fatigue syndrome, which exist in the form of posts to forums, messages to email groups, updates to Facebook groups of fellow sufferers. Though the addition of “long COVID” advocates to this group has pushed chronic, mysterious illnesses into the spotlight, getting recognition is still difficult. Mainstream doctors have been slow to accept that chronic Lyme exists at all, pushing patients who believe they have it into the margins, looking for treatments in unorthodox places.

Douthat’s contribution to the modern corpus of chronic Lyme stories is notable for the professional political leanings, as well as the gender, of its author. Previous similar memoirs by women have been met with disbelief (reality star Yolanda Hadid’s entry into the genre is titled with a plea: Believe Me), and he knows it. Douthat is an unusually genial and interesting right-ish pundit, and has joked that he’s “the radical left’s favorite conservative.” In characteristically self-aware fashion, he dwells upon the distinction between his story and that of the stereotypical chronic Lyme patient, while also using it to prop himself up as a rational one. “I became determined to be the exception to this pattern—the Lyme patient who didn’t get tugged too far into the paranoid realm, the Lyme patient who experimented only with treatments that had some kind of clear basis in the material and quantifiable,” he writes of his attitude during the early depths of his illness—“the (male, conservative, New York Times columnist) Lyme patient whose account, once I was better, would be more convincing to skeptics influenced by sexism and wary of reality-television stars.”

The ambition to be the “good Lyme patient” quickly shatters. It is impossible to follow mainstream doctors’ advice, he finds, when they have nothing to offer him. As his illness unfolds, Douthat ends up experimenting with many unproven treatments. Installed in the upstairs study in his centuries-old Connecticut home, he lines up pill bottles, antibiotics, and herbal supplements. He begins dosing himself, alternating antibiotics prescribed by some of the many “Lyme-literate” doctors he sees with herbs like cat’s claw, artemisia, and Japanese knotweed, in ways that provoke the intense, twitchy Jarisch Herxheimer reactions that many chronic Lyme patients undergoing antibiotic treatment experience, and that he finds are followed by exhaustion, and then finally some relief from his Lyme symptoms. He tries intensive vitamin C and therapeutic magnets. He acquires a thousand-dollar Rife machine, an emitter of particular frequencies that’s not scientifically proven to work, but that he finds helpful in weaning off the many antibiotics he’s relied upon. He prays—to Mary, different saints, and dead relatives—and swears that this also produces the Herxheimer reactions … though he knows how that sounds. By the end of the book, he can largely rejoin his family’s life after three or four years of pain, tension, and preoccupation. But the symptoms and flare-ups never completely leave—he is forced to abandon the goal of getting completely, 100 percent “better.”

Douthat allows himself to learn from this. His decision to buy the house stemmed from a sense of optimism, he explains in the book, that governed his life in a way that he didn’t really recognize until he got sick. “I only really believed in upside,” he writes of making the choice to relocate. While the Connecticut house is very unlike a more extreme right-wing libertarian retreat (Idaho bunker, guns and ammo, freeze-dried food in buckets), there was still a lot of small-C conservative isolationism that went into the idea of buying this family home. “I had a vision of myself going out in the world, flying around to various Babylons for important meetings and interviews, and then coming home on a summer evening, down a winding road, up a drive lined with oak trees, to find my two—no, make it three; no, make it four—kids waiting for me, playing on swings in the July dusk in front of a big white colonial, my wife behind them, the whole scene an Arcadia,” he writes. But this isn’t what happened. “Our experience of returning to New England was like coming into one of those places in literature or film where the surface of beauty and neighborliness conceals a dark secret,” Douthat writes. “Except, instead of the human sacrifice in Midsommar or the small-town stoning in ‘The Lottery,’ it was the widely shared understanding that the price of all those lovely lanes and stone walls was the possibility that you could lose years, or more, to Lyme.”

As Douthat and his wife talk to neighbor after neighbor and discover how many have had their lives blighted by the disease, he begins to feel that Lyme has created “parallel worlds” that overlap, the worlds he describes as “Lyme is no big deal” (the point of view of the doctors he encounters who walk the mainstream line when it comes to Lyme treatment) and “Lyme is devastating” (the reality inside a number of those large, monied homes). Abigail Dumes, an anthropologist who wrote a book about chronic Lyme and the medical establishment, made special room for an analysis of the striking contrast between the disease’s dark mystery and the visually utopic places where it was born: lush Connecticut, the fancy suburbs of New York, and Long Island, where New York City’s masters of the universe retreat to give their families the gift of peace and quiet. “It’s the environmental privilege of being able to live in or close to ‘nature’ that makes possible the environmental risk of Lyme disease,” Dumes writes. If Douthat has read Dumes’ book, he doesn’t mention it, but his experience serves as an apt illustration of her point: Lyme is a creeping problem that intrudes on the Northeastern idyll of wealth and tradition, bringing uncertainty, pessimism, and pain.

I spent a lot of the pages marveling at Douthat’s relative privilege, which shone through his misfortune of chronic illness and which (to be fair!) he acknowledges multiple times. One lesson of the book ends up being that you can, to an extent, buy your way out of pain with pricey experimental treatments. And then there is his gender: I suspect some people who have (rightfully) noted the unfairness of the historically gendered reaction to chronic Lyme patients, who tend to be female, may bristle a bit at this book, in which the author tries, in one stretch, to set himself up as not the “kind of person” who would have a disease that has been regarded as psychosomatic. (“I was entirely healthy, entirely normal, with no tofu or carob in my diet, no need for herbal remedies or a laying on of hands,” he writes, contrasting himself with his mother, who had a nebulous chronic illness when he was young.) Douthat insists through this that his journey is scientific, in its own way; he describes the careful exploration of treatments and his subsequent reactions as “the most empirical work I have ever attempted in my life.” This is at once correct and a little frustrating: Who, after all, gets to decide they are being empirical, even while working with a study subject of one person who is also themselves? I don’t think anyone would believe Yolanda Hadid if she described herself this way.

But the staunch Lyme fearers and longtime tofu eaters, like me, are maybe not who this memoir is for. (Though I have to say, I mostly liked it.) I hope people who hold the view that treatments and illnesses that fall outside the current grasp of medical science are woo-woo will pick up and finish the book. The final few chapters—the one where Douthat covers the extreme treatments, and then, the obligatory chapter on COVID-19—are where the writer’s most profound takeaways on medicine, illness, and the body can be found. Whether or not you think that chronic Lyme “exists,” the specter he presents, of thousands of people with chronic illness who can’t seem to get help from doctors, is something anybody interested in understanding why people mistrust medicine should read.

As a volume, I think it will be convincing. In addition to offering his brand of level-headed conservative maleness as an on-ramp, Douthat’s book lands at a time when more people than ever viscerally get that an invisible foe can upend life. “COVID offered a terrible crash-course education in the reality of chronic illness, the gap between what a disease was supposed to do in its ‘normal’ presentation (symptoms in the throat and lungs for the coronavirus, a bull’s-eye rash and fever and joint pain for Lyme) and how often the actual presentation is something else entirely,” Douthat writes. We are all coming to understand “how many weird cascades a single invader can set off, how easily a previously healthy person can fall into a pit.”

The 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which takes place in Glasgow from October 31-November 12, will bring together more than 120 world leaders for 12 days of talks aimed at forming an agreement on how to tackle the climate emergency. The expectation is that countries will produce 2030 emissions reductions targets that will secure global net zero by 2050. For that to happen, the phase-out of coal must be accelerated, deforestation must be curtailed and investment in green energy must rise significantly.
The urgency for action at COP26 cannot be overstated. We are running out of chances to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. But in order for the stated goals of COP26 to be attained, it is imperative that narrow views of national interest be put aside and great powers steer clear of geopolitical confrontations. Indeed, without international cooperation, the continued use of fossil fuels is set to drive societies across the globe into climate chaos and collapse.
So, what can we expect from COP26? Definite action or, as Greta Thunberg recently put it, more “blah, blah, blah?” In this expansive and eye-opening interview, leading scholars Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin share their thoughts and insights about the upcoming global climate summit and what must ultimately be done to save humanity and the planet from a global climate catastrophe. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. Chomsky, one of the most cited scholars in history and long considered one of the U.S.’s voices of conscience, is joined by one of the world’s leading economists of the left, Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Chomsky and Pollin are co-authors of the recently published book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy to Save the Planet.
 C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, COP26 is believed to be our “last best hope” for meaningful action to tackle the climate crisis. Why is COP26 so important? And wasn’t pretty much the same thing said about COP21?
Noam Chomsky: It was indeed, and correctly. The concept of “last best hope” keeps narrowing. What’s the last best hope at one point is gone later, and the remaining last best hope becomes far more difficult to realize.
That’s been true since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, ratified by 192 nations, but not the U.S. The Senate would not accept it. George W. Bush pulled out completely; later Canada, did as well. Kyoto was the last best hope in 1997. If the U.S. had joined, the task of escaping devastating climate change would have been far easier.
By 2015 (the Paris Agreement, COP21), the “best hope” was much more remote and difficult to realize. Again, the U.S. Senate blocked it. More precisely, the plan was for a verifiable treaty, but Republicans would not accept that, so it was reduced to toothless voluntary agreements. And shortly after, Trump pulled out completely. Biden has formally rejoined, but what that means remains to be seen.
Right now, the Republican commitment to destroying the planet in the interest of short-term profit for their prime constituency of extreme wealth seems unassailable. But it was not always so. As we’ve discussed before, in 2008, there were signs of a deviation towards minimal concern for the fate of humanity, but it didn’t last long. A juggernaut by the huge Koch Brothers energy conglomerate quickly returned the Party to obedience, since unchanged.
In defense of the stand of what was once a genuine political party, we should take note of the fact that the U.S. very rarely accepts international conventions, and when it does so, it is with reservations that render them inapplicable to the U.S. That’s even true of the Genocide Convention.
One may plausibly argue, however, that these fine distinctions are all irrelevant. Even when the U.S. fully accepts international treaties, it violates them at will, hence also violating the U.S. Constitution, which declares them to be the Supreme Law of the Land, binding on the political leadership. The clearest case is the UN Charter, the basis for modern international law. It bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, with reservations irrelevant to the constant violation of the Treaty (and the Constitution) by U.S. presidents.
The U.S. very rarely accepts international conventions, and when it does so, it is with reservations that render them inapplicable to the U.S.
So normal that it virtually never elicits a comment.
Discourse on international affairs has found a way around these inconvenient facts by devising the concept of a “rule-based international order,” as contrasted with the old-fashioned “UN-based international order.” The former is preferred, since the U.S. can set the rules and determine how and when they can be enforced — an interesting topic, but not for now.
A treaty on climate change, if it can be reached, is in a different category. Survival is at stake. The basic facts are brutally clear, more so with each passing year. They are laid out clearly enough in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released on August 9. In brief, any hope of avoiding disaster requires taking significant steps right away to reduce fossil fuel use, continuing annually with the goal of effectively phasing out fossil fuel use by mid-century. We are approaching a precipice. A few steps more, and we fall over it, forever.
Falling off the precipice does not imply that everyone will die soon; there’s a long way down. Rather, it means that irreversible tipping points will be reached, and barring some now-unforeseen technological miracle, the human species will be entering a new era: one of inexorable decline, with mounting horrors of the kind we can easily depict, extrapolating realistically from what already surrounds us — an optimistic estimate, since non-linear processes may begin to take off and dangers lurk that are only dimly perceived.
It will be an era of “sauve qui peut” — run for your lives, everyone for themselves, material catastrophe heightened by social collapse and wholesale psychic trauma of a kind never before experienced. And on the side, an assault on nature of indescribable proportions.
All of this is understood at a very high level of confidence. Even a relic of rationality tells us that it is ridiculous to take a chance on its being mistaken, considering the stakes.
We might tarry for a moment on the date of the release of the IPCC report: August 9. Whether by accident or design, the choice is a momentous date in human affairs: the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Putting aside the horrors and the dubious efforts at justification, the Hiroshima bombing a few days earlier demonstrated that human intelligence would soon reach the level of being able to destroy everything. Nagasaki demonstrated that the commitment to attain this goal was deeply entrenched in the reigning sociopolitical system and intellectual culture. What remained open was whether human moral capacities, and the institutions humans had created, had the capacity to overcome what human intellect was on the verge of achieving: total cataclysm. After 75 frightening years, the question still remains open even as prospects shrink for a hopeful answer.
The crisis of environmental destruction — which extends well beyond the crime of global heating — raises quite similar questions.
The evidence at hand is not encouraging. Let’s go back to August 9, 2021, with its clear warning that we must begin now to reduce fossil fuel use.
Immediately on receipt of this grim warning, the president of the most powerful state in world history issued an appeal to the global oil cartel OPEC to increase production. Europe followed suit, joined by the rest of what is called “advanced society.” The reason is an energy crunch. That’s doubtless a problem. One way to deal with it is to race towards the precipice. Another is for the rich in the rich societies, the major culprits, to tighten their belts while we sharply accelerate transition to sustainable energy.
The choice is unfolding before our eyes.
Petroleum industry journals are euphoric, announcing promising new discoveries that they can exploit to enhance production and reveling in the prospects for growing demand for their poisons. A few examples fill in details.
Germany is reacting to the August warning by joining in the call for increasing fossil fuel use and making its own contribution, for example, by destroying villages to expand coal mining.
Turning to the U.S., a mere 60 percent of voters regard global warming as an urgent problem for government. It is only the most urgent problem that humans have ever faced.
The party breakdown is the usual one: Among Republicans, 45 percent of “liberal/moderate Republicans” see global warming as an urgent problem along with 17 percent of “conservative Republicans.” The persisting lethal denialism is not a great surprise in the light of pronouncements of the leadership and the media to which they are exposed.
Thanks to significant popular activism, Biden’s major program, now being torn to shreds in Congress, did include some useful steps on climate change. Nothing seems likely to survive. Republicans are 100 percent opposed. Democrats need unanimity to pass anything. The Senate chair of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is a right-wing Democrat, also a coal baron and the leading recipient of fossil fuel funding in Congress: Joe Manchin. His position on climate concerns is simple: “spending on innovation, not elimination.” Straight out of the fossil fuel industry playbook.
In South America, destruction of the Amazon is proceeding apace for the benefit of the domestic and international corporate sector, which has been hailing the policies of Chicago School Economics Minister Paulo Guedes: “privatize everything,” and who cares about the consequences. Recent scientific studies have found that “the southeastern Amazon was releasing more carbon that it was absorbing, even in rainy years when scientists had expected the forest to be in better health. It meant a part of the rainforest was no longer helping to slow climate change, but adding to the emissions driving it.”
That is a disaster for Brazil and indeed for the world, given the role of the huge tropical forests in regulating the global climate.
A leaked report of governmental efforts to weaken the IPCC study shows that the usual scoundrels are at work.
Saudi Arabia calls for eliminating such phrases as “the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales” and “the focus of decarbonisation efforts in the energy systems sector needs to be on rapidly shifting to zero-carbon sources and actively phasing out fossil fuels.” It is joined by OPEC, along with fossil fuel producers Argentina and Norway.
Saudi officials elaborated further. Giving no details, one Saudi prince explained that a transition to net-zero carbon emissions is welcome, but it must be reached through a “carbon circular economy” — a plan built around initiatives such as recycling and carbon removal.
Just innovation, no elimination.
Saudi officials and the chief executive of Saudi oil giant Aramco, the press reports, “expect demand for oil to continue and for it to be the dominant energy source for decades to come, and argue that reducing supply before demand drops risks a dangerous oil price spike, hurting economies such as Saudi Arabia’s that are dependent on oil and gas.”
Turning elsewhere, “A senior Australian government official rejects the conclusion that closing coal-fired power plants is necessary” — a stand that is perhaps related to Australia’s position as the world’s leading coal exporter.
Continuing with the submissions to the IPCC, “Brazil and Argentina, two of the biggest producers of beef products and animal feed crops in the world, argue strongly against evidence in the draft report that reducing meat consumption is necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Both countries call on the authors to delete or change some passages in the text referring to ‘plant-based diets’ playing a role in tackling climate change, or which describe beef as a ‘high carbon’ food.”
Again, not surprisingly, “A significant number of Switzerland’s comments are directed at amending parts of the report that argue developing countries will need support, particularly financial support, from rich countries in order to meet emission reduction targets.”
In brief, as we fall off the precipice, the near-uniform reaction is that: I want to grasp my share of the loot as doomsday approaches.
Returning to the still-open question posed by the August 9 anniversary, do human moral capacities, and the institutions humans have created, have the capacity to overcome what human intellect and these institutions have shown themselves capable of achieving: total cataclysm?
The answer will soon be known.
If governments make pledges, they won’t implement them without extensive popular activism.
And while reflecting on the unanswered question, we should never forget that human intellect has also forged feasible solutions to impending crises, easily at hand, though not for long.
Given our experience up to now with global climate talks, should we really have high expectations about the outcome of COP26? After all, in addition to everything you mentioned above, global oil demand is booming, China continues to build coal-fired power plants around the world, the U.S. is bent on maintaining its hegemonic status in the world system, and we not only have a divided world but a world where now the majority of citizens say that their country’s society is more divided than ever before. Indeed, what can we realistically expect from COP26?
Chomsky: The business press is generally fairly realistic. Its audience has a stake in knowing what’s happening in the world. So, to answer the question, it is useful to open today’s (October 24) business press and read the first paragraph of the major article on what we can realistically expect: “As the prospects for strong government action to curb climate change grow less certain, energy shares, and especially coal mining stocks, are generating astonishing returns.” The article goes on to review the great opportunities for huge short-term profits for the super-rich while they destroy the diminishing hopes for a livable world for their children. 
Economists soberly explain that this is a “market failure” caused by “externalities” — uncounted costs. Not false. The article quotes a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study that found that that “market-based fossil fuel prices in 2020 failed to account for $5.9 trillion in global environmental costs, equivalent to 6.8 percent of global gross domestic product. The I.M.F. estimated that the gap will rise to 7.4 percent of world G.D.P. by 2025.”
Not false, but misleading. Market failures occur all the time, with increasing intensity since the heralded “market revolution” that has assaulted the world since Ronald Reagan opened the doors to wholesale robbery 40 years ago. But the anodyne phrase “market failure” does not begin to do justice to the monstrous crime that state-backed capitalist institutions are perpetrating.
The business press gives little reason to be optimistic about the outcome of COP26, but it’s worth remembering that it does not consider what humans can accomplish, if they choose. With regard to human effort and action, the outcome of COP26 doesn’t matter all that much. If governments make pledges, they won’t implement them without extensive popular activism. If they don’t make pledges, they won’t be driven to adopt and implement them without extensive popular activism. The message is much the same whatever the outcome: More work, lots more, on many fronts, not excluding the long-term dedication to dismantle lethal institutions and the doctrines that chain people to them.
Bob, the economics of global warming and global climate stabilization are quite straightforward. Indeed, a broad consensus has emerged about the economic impacts of global warming, although there is disagreement among economists about the best solutions to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions. Why is it so difficult to implement viable climate policies even at the national, let alone the global, level? 
Robert Pollin: Let’s start with the most obvious obstacle to advancing viable climate policies, which is the implacable opposition of the fossil fuel companies. Here I refer to both the private companies, such as ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell as well as public corporations such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom in Russia and Petrobras in Brazil. Let’s assume we are working with the target set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we must stabilize the average global temperature at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) above preindustrial levels. Within that framework, the most recent careful research by Tyler Hansen shows that the extent of total fossil fuel assets owned by these corporations that are “unburnable” — i.e., cannot be burned to produce energy if the world has a chance of achieving the 1.5°C stabilization target — amounts to between $13-$15 trillion. Of this total, about 75 percent of these fossil fuel assets, between about $10-$11 trillion, are owned by the public corporations, with the remaining $3-$5 trillion owned by private corporations. We should not be surprised that the fossil fuel companies are fighting by all means available to them to continue profiting lavishly from selling this oil, coal and natural gas still in the ground. They don’t want to hear about dumping $15 trillion in assets.
The enactment of a robust just transition program in California, led by the state’s labor unions … will also provide a model for comparable measures to be adopted throughout the U.S. and globally.
It’s true that the publicly owned national companies, controlling approximately 90 percent of the globe’s total fossil fuel reserves, do not operate with precisely the same profit imperatives as big private energy corporations. But let’s be clear that this does not mean that they are prepared to commit to fighting climate change simply because their stated mission is to serve the public as opposed to private shareholders, and because we, the public, face a global environmental emergency. Just as with the private companies, producing and selling fossil fuel energy generates huge revenue flows for these publicly owned companies. National development projects, lucrative careers and political power all depend on continuing the flow of large fossil fuel revenues.
Overall, then, there is no getting around that the interests of these fossil fuel companies will simply have to be defeated. Obviously, that will not be easy to accomplish. We are seeing this right now in the U.S., with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia doing everything possible to kill even the minimally decent climate provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better program. Manchin himself started his own coal brokerage company in the state and continues to receive large profits from it. We are also seeing it on a global scale, with Russian President Vladimir Putin issuing dire warnings of upcoming energy shortages if investments to expand fossil fuel supply do not increase.
But it is also critical to recognize that the fossil fuel companies are not the only obstacle to advancing a viable global climate stabilization project. There is also the matter of pure inertia, which cannot be overlooked. We are faced with the challenge of building a new global energy infrastructure on the foundations of high efficiency and clean renewable energy, while also phasing out our existing fossil fuel-dominant energy infrastructure. This has to be a hugely challenging project, even under the best of circumstances and even putting aside machinations of the fossil fuel companies. I have experienced this firsthand, for example, in our project at UMass-Amherst in which we built the first zero-emissions office building in western Massachusetts to house the Economics Department. There are lots of new ways of doing things that need to be learned, in terms of engineering, use of materials and workers developing new skills. It also requires people cooperating effectively.
There is also the absolutely critical question of “just transition” for workers and communities whose livelihoods are, at present, dependent on the fossil fuel industry. In my view, just transition has to be at the center of any global Green New Deal project. There is no denying that these workers and communities throughout the world will lose out in the clean energy transition. In order for the global clean energy project to succeed, it must provide adequate transitional support for these workers and communities. It is a matter of simple justice, but it is also a matter of strategic politics. Without such adjustment assistance programs operating at a major scale, the workers and communities facing retrenchment from the clean energy investment project will, predictably and understandably, fight to defend their communities and livelihoods. This in turn will create unacceptable delays in proceeding with effective climate stabilization policies.
My co-workers and I have estimated the costs of a very generous just transition program for all workers in the United States now tied to the fossil fuel and ancillary industries, working with the assumption that all fossil fuel production will have been shut down by 2050. This program would include a re-employment guarantee with wages at least matching the workers current pay, along with pension guarantees, and, as needed, retraining and relocation support. We estimated these total costs as averaging about $3 billion per year. This would be equal to roughly 1/100 of one percent (0.01 percent) of average U.S. GDP between now and 2050. In other words, in terms of financing, it would be a trivial matter to establish this sort of just transition program throughout the U.S. 
In fact, path-breaking developments are occurring right now in California toward advancing a just transition program in the state. This movement is being led by visionary labor leaders in the state, including leaders of the state’s oil refinery workers’ union. One such leader, Norman Rogers, a vice president of United Steelworkers Local 675, recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times that,

Though the energy transition is inevitable, a just version is not. Workers know what happens when whole industries go away: Companies maneuver behind our backs, squeeze every last drop of work out of a dying auto plant, steel mill or coal mine and shutter it overnight, devastating communities and stiffing workers out of jobs, pensions and healthcare. The fear is real of jobs lost with no plan for when operations begin to phase out. 

Rogers emphasizes that “many speak of a ‘just transition,’ but we’ve never seen one. No worker or community member will ever believe that an equitable transition is possible until we see detailed, fully funded state safety net and job creation programs.” But he, optimistically, is arguing that, “With a fully funded equitable transition plan — meeting the immediate need for a safety net for workers and communities, and offering a bold vision to restructure our economy — we can jump-start recovery and move California’s workers, communities and the planet toward a more secure future.”
The enactment of a robust just transition program in California, led by the state’s labor unions, including its fossil fuel industry unions, will also provide a model for comparable measures to be adopted throughout the U.S. and globally. Supporting such initiatives should therefore be understood as an absolute first-tier priority for the U.S. and the global climate movement. 
China, the U.S. and the EU are responsible for 54 percent of all global emissions.
China has emerged as a global economic superpower in the last couple of decades and, in fact, since 2008 tops the annual list of being the largest emitter of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, although we get a different picture if we look at carbon emissions per capita. Be that as it may, what sort of finance conditions need to be introduced in countries like China and in emerging economies for a successful transition to clean energy resources without sacrificing economic and social development? 
Pollin: As of the most recent data, global carbon dioxide emissions were at about 34 billion tons. China is generating about 10 billion tons, 30 percent of this total, making it by far the country with the largest share of total emissions. The U.S. is next at about 5 billion tons, 15 percent of the total. The countries of the European Union (EU) account for another 9 percent. Thus, China, the U.S. and the EU are responsible for 54 percent of all global emissions. They all need to drive their emissions down to zero no later than 2050 for there to be any chance of meeting the IPCC’s global emissions reduction targets of a 45 percent decline by 2030 and a net-zero global economy by 2050.
It’s true that in terms of emissions per person, China’s figure, at 7.4 tons per person, is still less than half the 15.2 tons per person figure for the United States. But it remains the case that China must go from its current total emissions level of 10 billion tons down to zero by 2050, just as the U.S. needs its emissions to fall absolutely, from 5 billion tons to zero.
It also follows that, even if China, the U.S. and the EU managed to push their carbon dioxide emissions down to zero tomorrow, we would still be only a bit more to halfway to achieving the global zero emissions goal, since the rest of the world is today responsible for about 46 percent of all emissions. It is therefore obvious that the transition to a global clean energy system has to be a global project. The transition has to be advancing in India, Vietnam, Australia, Kenya, Puerto Rico, Chile, South Korea, South Africa and Mexico just as much as in China, the U.S. and EU.
Building clean energy infrastructures in developing economies will not entail sacrificing economic and social development. Indeed, the Green New Deal remains focused on expanding good job opportunities, raising mass living standards and fighting poverty along with driving emissions to zero. All of these aims can be realistically accomplished, since investments in clean energy will be a major engine of job creation. Moreover, the costs of clean energy investments are already lower, on average, than those for fossil fuels. Building a clean energy infrastructure will also support the expansion of a range of new public and private ownership forms. This includes small-scale community ownership in rural low-income communities, such as in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, roughly half of such communities still do not have access to electricity of any kind, despite generations of promises made by politicians of all stripes.
At the same time, we cannot expect low-income countries to finance their clean energy and just transition programs on their own. I have sketched out a global financing framework, in which there are four main components. Other approaches could also be viable. These four funding sources are: 1) a global carbon tax, in which 75 percent of revenues are rebated back to the public but 25 percent are channeled into clean energy investment projects; 2) transferring funds out of military budgets from all countries, but primarily the U.S.; 3) eliminating all existing fossil fuel subsidies and channeling 25 percent of the funds into clean energy investments; and 4) a Green Bond lending program, initiated by the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, with other major central banks in China, the U.K. and Japan also participating. Strong cases can be made for each of these funding measures. But each proposal does also have vulnerabilities, including around political feasibility. The most sensible approach is therefore to combine the measures into a single package that minimizes their respective weaknesses as standalone measures. 
I work through some of the details of these proposals in our 2020 book, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. But let’s briefly consider the Green Bond financing proposal by way of illustration. This program will not take money out of anyone’s pocket. It rather involves the world’s major central banks effectively printing money as needed. This would be just as they did during both the 2007-09 global financial crisis and during the COVID recession, except on a far more modest scale than the largesse that the central banks showered on Wall Street and global financial elite to keep them afloat. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the U.S. Fed or European Central Bank should rely on this policy — what is technically known as “debt monetization” — on a routine basis. But we need to be equally clear that this is a fully legitimate option that the major central banks have in their toolkit, and that this option should indeed be brought into action under crisis conditions. Note here that the funds will be generated by the major central banks but then distributed globally on an equitable basis, to underwrite the clean energy investment projects at scale in all regions of the globe. Public investment banks in all regions, but especially in low-income countries, will then serve as primary conduits in moving specific investment projects forward. 
What would you consider as the optimal outcome of the talks at the COP 26 summit? 
Pollin: The optimal outcome would be for the summit to not produce another round of what Greta Thunberg has accurately described as the “blah, blah, blah” which has resulted from previous such gatherings. COP26 needs to establish truly binding commitments on all countries that would include the following: 

Meeting at least the IPCC’s emissions reduction targets, of a 45 percent global emissions cut by 2030 and to achieve zero emissions by 2050;
Mounting robust just transition programs in all countries and regions, to support workers and communities that will be negatively impacted by the emissions reduction project; and
Paying for these binding commitments through strongly egalitarian financing measures.

Noam, the impact of human activities on the environment is so real and profound that past, present and future are interlinked in such way that there can be no blurring between the empirical and the normative. The climate crisis has created a global storm and cooperation and solidarity are essential prerequisites to the survival of the planet. However, given the daunting task that lays ahead (shrinking and ultimately eliminating emissions while advancing at the same time a framework of development that embraces both developed and developing countries and guaranteeing a socially just transition), how do we encourage activists and concerned citizens alike to remain committed to a struggle where the outcome is uncertain without succumbing to defeatism? 
Chomsky: Outcomes have always been uncertain. Defeatism is not an option; it translates as “species suicide, bringing down much of life on Earth with it.”
There are steps forward. Crucially, there is widespread understanding of the measures that can be take, quite realistically, to avert impending disaster and move on to a much better world. That includes the comprehensive and detailed studies by our friend and colleague economist Robert Pollin, by economist Jeffrey Sachs, and by the International Energy Agency, all coming to generally similar conclusions. These results have also reached Congress in a 2019 resolution recently reintroduced by its sponsors, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. It’s all there to be acted upon.
And while Sen. Joe Manchin is working assiduously to block any congressional action that departs from the “no elimination” death warrant issued by the energy corporations, his constituents in West Virginia are showing more concern for survival. A recent report of the United Mine Workers recognizes that, “Change is coming, whether we seek it or not. Too many inside and outside the coalfields have looked the other way when it comes to recognizing and addressing specifically what that change must be, but we can look away no longer.”
The union supports a transition to renewable energy, rightly insisting that workers receive good jobs — which should in fact be better jobs, as can be readily accomplished along lines that Bob Pollin has laid out in his studies and conveyed to the public in his grassroots work in West Virginia and other mining states, where unions are moving in the same direction.
There has also been considerable progress since COP21: sharp reduction in cost of sustainable energy, significant steps towards electrification and constant pressure to do more, mostly by the young, those who will have to endure the consequences of our folly and betrayal of their hopes. The recent global climate strike was a noteworthy example.
Another hopeful sign is the recovery of the labor movement from the state-corporate blows that were a salient feature of the neoliberal years from their outset, with deep roots in the origins of neoliberal doctrine in interwar Vienna. That’s a long and important story, but there are many indications that it is underway, somewhat reminiscent of the early 1930s. The vibrant U.S. labor movement had been almost crushed by state-corporate violence. But as the Depression hit, it began to revive, and spearheaded the New Deal moves towards social democracy that greatly improved the lives of [many, though not all] Americans. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the business counteroffensive became powerful enough to restore a system of radical inequality and suppression of the basic rights of the great majority. Today, that assault is being challenged and may be overcome. One sign of many is the massive refusal to return to the rotten, dangerous, precarious jobs offered to the workforce during the neoliberal class war. The catastrophic “market failure” of environmental destruction is a catalyzing factor.
If that happens, we can hope for — and try to nurture — a revival of core features of labor activism from the early days of the industrial revolution, among them solidarity and internationalism. We’re all in this together, not each alone trying to collect as many crumbs as we can for ourselves. That consciousness is essential for survival, at home and abroad.
In particular, there must be an end to provocative confrontations with China and a serious rethinking of the alleged “China threat” — experiences we’ve been through before with dire consequences, now literally a matter of survival. The U.S. and China will cooperate in approaching the urgent crises of today, or we’re doomed.
The choices before us are stark. They cannot be evaded or ignored.

Wealthy nations have received over 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than poorer nations dependent on the COVAX program backed by the Word Health Organization, according to a new Financial Times analysis. COVAX, which was set up to ensure global equitable access to vaccines, has delivered only 400 million doses after promising 1.4 billion this year. Higher-income countries struck separate vaccine deals with manufacturers, leaving COVAX with less negotiating power. While the United States rolls out booster shots and stockpiles six vaccines per person, less than 3% of people in low-income countries have received at least a single dose. Infectious disease expert Dr. Monica Gandhi says she will not receive a booster as a healthcare worker because of the global vaccine inequity, and argues the push for boosters “detracts from the fact that we in no way have fulfilled a moral and ethical obligation to the world.” We also speak with Kate Elder, senior vaccines adviser for Doctors Without Borders, who says that it is a structural issue caused by global leaders who are not “equitably sharing vaccines around the world.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
Rich countries received 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than poorer nations dependent on the WHO-backed COVAX program, which was set up last year to give people in poor countries equitable access to vaccines. That’s according to a Financial Times data analysis compiled by UNICEF. Officials in the African Union predict COVAX will deliver less than a quarter of the two-shot vaccine doses needed for more than 1.3 billion people in Africa by the end of the year, as here in the United States the discussion moves from third to fourth booster shots for the immunocompromised.
We look now at how less than 3% of people in low-income countries have received even a single dose of the vaccine. We’re joined by two guests. In New York, Kate Elder is with us, senior vaccines adviser for Doctors Without Borders. And in San Francisco, Dr. Monica Gandhi, an Infectious disease physician, professor of medicine at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital.
Dr. Gandhi, you’ve said you will not receive a booster as a healthcare worker because of the global vaccine inequity. Explain.
DR. MONICA GANDHI: Yes. So, when President Biden announced that every American should get a booster by September 20th in mid-August, it was actually a huge surprise to many infectious disease experts, for two reasons. One is that the vaccines are actually holding up extremely well, especially in those less than 65, against severe disease. And, in fact, that kind of messaging can reduce confidence in the vaccines.
The second reason was the incredible global vaccine inequity, that there are many promises made by rich countries and the administration — at the G7 meeting in early June, the rich countries pledged that there would be a 2 billion dose donation to other countries, and that hasn’t really even been touched in terms of fulfilling that pledge. And then, at high-level meetings, like the U.N. meeting in September, these pledges are made again. But we have about six doses for every American stored up. We have — that’s true of many rich countries. And it just — the complete ignoring of that sort of lets — that moral and ethical failing blew a lot of people’s minds, to be honest, to talk about boosters.
And then, if we think about what’s been going on in this country for the last three months, the conversation has been almost exclusively about boosters and how to mix and how to match. And, you know, it’s important. It’s important for Johnson & Johnson people. It’s important for those over 65. I think those are the two groups that the data is very clear. But what it does is it detracts from the fact that we in no way have fulfilled a moral and ethical obligation to the world. And let’s forget about moral and ethics just for a minute. It is — where do variants come from? They come from places in the world with high transmission. So we are also not doing the right thing by public health.
So, right, I am not — you know, this is a very public stance. But I am a healthcare worker. I am fully vaccinated. I got vaccinated early. And I can’t bring myself to take a booster unless some of this gets better and is corrected.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Kate Elder, you’ve been working on this issue of vaccine equity since the pandemic began, of COVID-19 vaccine equity. Just lay out: What are the main obstacles to enabling more of the world to gain access to these vaccines? And what is preventing, to this day, pharmaceutical companies from sharing their technology with the World Health Organization’s mRNA tech hub and other capable manufacturers around the world?
KATE ELDER: Yeah. Good morning. Thanks very much for talking about this important issue.
I mean, as Dr. Gandhi just said very, very clearly, right now we’re in a global crisis, not only of moral and ethical magnitude, but really just of a rationale, a scientific rationale for emerging from this pandemic. Everybody around the world, of course, wants to emerge from this pandemic, and global leaders have not decided to take the route that’s most scientifically sound to do that, which is equitably sharing vaccines around the world.
From the start of this pandemic, although there were very lofty claims and platitudes about future COVID-19 vaccines at that time — vaccines, of course, weren’t available, but there were global leaders that came together from the European Union, with the leadership of WHO, to say that future COVID-19 vaccines would be considered global public goods, and they would be shared equitably around the world, and we would not repeat mistakes of the past. You know, unfortunately, those declarations were made, and then high-income country governments turned around and went forward in the pursuit of shoring up stocks for their domestic use at an incredible speed, which saw us that in a very short period of time we had most of these theoretical vaccines at that time already spoken for by high-income country governments, by the wealthiest governments, so that when we did see these vaccines start coming off the line, the production line, they were already promised to the wealthy. And that’s why we’re in this situation right now where, you know, about 60% of adults in the wealthiest countries have received their first dose, whereas just about 3% of people in low-income countries, in the poorest countries of the world, have received their first dose.
Now, I mean, the barriers to really rectifying this, it’s very clear. I mean, first, we need the vaccines that are available, that are sitting in cold storage rooms, that are not being used, urgently redistributed to places where we need them. There is a tremendous volume of excess doses right now here in the United States. We calculate that by the end of 2021, the U.S. government might have about half a billion excess doses here in the U.S. That’s including if people get their boosters. We need to redistribute those doses rapidly to the places that are begging for supply. That’s the acute step that needs to happen.
Secondly, we need to make sure that the places, the regions that have been left behind, regions like the Africa region, the Middle East, are given the tools to make vaccines themselves. Right? So, there’s an issue of supply, and there’s an issue of being able to make more supply now and for potential future pandemics, as well. So, regions like the Afro region, governments like South Africa have been asking for the technology to be able to make these vaccines themselves. Now, that would be the second step that needs to happen. We need the transfer of technology and the supporting elements around it, the know-how, the training, to be transferred from the companies that have it to the places that are capable for making these vaccines.
And then, thirdly, we need the intellectual property barriers lifted. Right? There are IP barriers around these vaccines, and we need those immediately waived so that governments and other manufacturers can pursue making these vaccines themselves, so that we don’t perpetuate this crisis.
Now, the reason I think it — it’s very straightforward, the reason why the technology transfer is not happening, despite the call from WHO. And, of course, the World Health Organization is the global custodian of health. They know the best route for emerging from this pandemic. They have established these mRNA technology transfer hubs and invited companies to share their technology with them. And there are a number of companies that have lined up, are waiting in the queue to receive this technology. Of course, the originator companies are not sharing willingly that technology. I mean, you know, they what to hold onto it for their own commercial interests.
But it’s important to remember that much of this technology was developed with public financing, U.S. taxpayers. Just using one company as an example, Moderna, Moderna received about $10 billion in U.S. taxpayer funding to stimulate the research and development and also in advance purchases of those vaccines. So, really, the public has a very high stake. But, of course, the companies are looking to hold onto that technology. It’s very lucrative. Pfizer is estimated to make $33 billion in 2021. I think the estimates for Moderna are about $20 billion in revenue. So they’re going to really hold onto that technology, despite it being in the world’s best interest for it to be shared.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to underscore this point of the amount of U.S. funding that has gone into the development of these vaccines, yet they have kept their recipes proprietary, private. And I want to put this question to Dr. Monica Gandhi. The Sammies were just announced, the sort of Oscars to people in government service. Among those who won for Federal Employee of the Year, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, an amazing African American woman, a scientist, and Barney Graham, for their work, both of which led to the development of the coronavirus vaccine at record speed, both at the Vaccine Research Center of the former National Institutes of Health. They were working for the U.S. government. How is it possible that at this point, when even if you just look at the United States completely in a selfish way, if you will, just protect the United States — we have learned from this pandemic if you don’t deal with this pandemic globally, the U.S. can never be protected — the idea that the U.S. has poured so much funding in the research of these vaccines and guaranteed buying of these vaccines, in the case of Pfizer, and yet they refuse to make available the secret sauce, the recipe, that would allow many pharmaceutical companies to make these vaccines around the world?
DR. MONICA GANDHI: Yes. I mean, I think there’s two comparisons that come to mind. One is the field of pre-exposure prophylaxis, PrEP, to prevent HIV infection. In this case, actually, there was a drug that was made by a pharmaceutical company, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. government funded all the clinical trials to show that tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/emtricitabine, which is this drug that Gilead had, was effective to prevent HIV infection. There have been many congressional urging of Gilead to make this drug freely available, since these were essentially — all the major clinical trials were funded by the U.S. government. And the company very promptly made a more expensive drug and marketed that. It is critical to say that we funded, especially Moderna. There was public funding put into this. And it was literally, like you just said, with our taxpayer dollars. And the fact that they won’t share this technology with places that are just ready and willing to receive it, so that they will not only make it for their own countries but make it for others, is one of the — I mean, I just have to say that my mind is constantly blown by this degree of injustice.
And then, you know, the other thing that I want to remind us is October 2020 was the time when India and South Africa appealed to the World Trade Organization. They anticipated that there could be waves in their country. India had been spared, actually, up ’til that point. They knew the technology was coming. And they said to the World Trade Organization, “Ensure, please, that we get a waiver, that there’s a waiver made on the intellectual property of these life-saving vaccines,” because there is a waiver that’s possible in the setting of life-saving technology in the middle of something as globally urgent as a pandemic. The WTO said no. And then, on March 7th, you can literally watch the wall of new infections that happened in India and the subsequent death and suffering for the next two months, that could have been completely averted by having that request honored. This is so reminiscent of HIV infection that it is a living nightmare to watch, that 10 years into HIV, when most of the problem was in sub-Saharan Africa, that we were still arguing over TRIPS and patent waivers.
And one thing I do want to say about Pfizer, Pfizer makes a very life-saving medication called fluconazole, which was essential to prevent one of the severe opportunistic infections in AIDS. And in the late ’90s, they made a billion dollars in one year over this life-saving, easy-to-make medication. So this is not new. The problem is it’s tragic, and right now we’re getting lots of boosters into Americans’ arms so that they can, you know, travel and not have a positive test. And, like, there’s something really incorrect going on here. So, you’re right about the public investment.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Kate Elder, can you talk about one effort that was made earlier this week? On Tuesday, BioNTech signed an agreement with Rwanda and with Senegal and a Senegal-based manufacturer to begin construction of an mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility in Africa by the middle of next year, mid-2022, but this is bypassing the World Health Organization’s mRNA vaccine tech transfer hub in South Africa. Could you comment on that and whether you think it’s significant and may have a significant effect, an important effect, on vaccinating Africa, which is one of the lowest — has one of the lowest rates of vaccination?
KATE ELDER: I think it is — you know, it’s an interesting development. It’s probably partially in response to the tremendous pressure that has been mounted by civil society, by advocates for access to COVID-19 vaccines, in the face of companies really acting very reprehensibly in terms of prioritizing sales to the wealthiest and prioritizing their supply to the wealthiest, while the developing world goes without. So, it is a notable development.
There are challenges with it, however. There are limitations. I mean, one, you know, what is the scope of this agreement? The challenge with having it be so privately brokered, with no transparency, is that we don’t know the terms and conditions around it. Will that facility ultimately have the ability to share with others? Will that facility have the ability to sell beyond Africa, or will there be a very certain limitation of where the doses can go? This is the challenge when deals are brokered in secrecy and there’s no transparency around the ultimate — what ultimately comes out in the contracts, is you just don’t know the terms and the scope of it. So, I mean, many of these, what we would call, voluntary technology transfer or voluntary initiatives by industry come with significant limitations. They come with limitations of geographic scope. They come with limitations of what the recipient company can do with that product, with that technology. So, although it is notable and it’s exciting to hear that a plant will be developed in Rwanda and there will be partnership in West Africa to Senegal, there’s a lot of questions.
I mean, I think we have to go back to the point of there are globally agreed-upon forum and processes that are done intergovernmentally, led by developing countries themselves, that have been established with the support of the World Health Organization, which, you know, of course, WHO truly knows what’s needed in the face of this pandemic. The mRNA hub, led by the South African government with support from WHO, is an end-to-end plan, an end-to-end plan where it included components of training staff, it included components of making sure the regulatory landscape was set for these vaccines. It had a longer-term vision, as well. I mean, that is the process that we need to look towards. That is the process that has the future in mind, rather than something that is, you know, fully steered and controlled by pharmaceutical companies, because at the end of the day we know pharmaceutical corporations have a very specific mandate. I mean, their mandate is to serve their shareholders and to commercialize, to the extent possible, their products. So, I mean, I think it’s notable, but we need a lot more. And it’s particularly notable that WHO has set up this tech transfer hub, and yet none of these originator companies have volunteered to come forward and actually participate.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Dr. Monica Gandhi, your thoughts on the Merck story, that said it will share the formula for its COVID-19 drug molnupiravir with poor countries, allowing manufacturers to produce the cheap generic?
DR. MONICA GANDHI: Yeah, I mean, I’m excited about Merck making that announcement. One thing is that molnupiravir is a treatment, and at that point you’ve already contracted the COVID-19 infection. Prevention is always better than treatment. So, vaccine availability would be better than treatment, but, yes, this is an example, at least, to the other pharmaceutical companies about what to do.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease physician at UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital, and Kate Elder, senior vaccines adviser with Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières.
And that does it for our show. On Saturday afternoon, I’ll be moderating a live discussion with Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald as part of the virtual War on Terror Film Festival. It will be 1:30 Eastern Standard Time. You can check out the details at democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for two positions: director of finance and administration and human resources manager. Learn more and apply immediately at democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran. Special thanks to Julie Crosby, Miriam Barnard, Denis Moynihan. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

As we head into what might – or might not – be a perilous winter, it would be nice to have the answer to some vaccine questions: depending on how long ago you had yours, how protected against Covid-19 are you right now? Has your vaccine waned in its effectiveness? What if you had Covid at some point this year? Are you better off having had one brand of vaccine versus another? And how much do you need a booster shot?
These are difficult questions to answer. As case numbers go up and down, as people’s behaviour changes, and as natural immunity levels rise, it becomes increasingly messy to draw conclusions. Different groups of people were offered different vaccines as the rollout went on, adding a potential confounder into any analysis. And let’s not forget the different variants: studies have to ask whether any decline in protection is due to the vaccine actually waning, or the older virus being replaced with the more dangerous Delta variant (in that case, the waning presumably wouldn’t continue if no new variants of concern appear).
How much does vaccine efficacy actually decline?
On 23 October, a paper appeared in preprint (that is, not yet peer-reviewed) form. It reported an analysis of every single severe Covid case in Scotland since the introduction of vaccines in December. That “severe” part is important – in this study we’re talking about people who ended up in intensive care or who died due to the virus.
There’s good news and bad news. Vaccines’ efficacy did seem to decline – whether that was due to the appearance of the Delta variant or for other reasons. A double-vaxxed person, who had 92 per cent protection against severe Covid no matter which vaccine they received, saw that protection decrease steadily in approximately the first ten weeks (nearly two-and-a-half months) after the second dose. The good news is that the mRNA vaccines – Pfizer and Moderna – only declined slightly, and seemed to stabilise after that point: they levelled out at about 90 per cent efficacy against severe disease after 20 weeks. Alas, in this study at least, the AstraZeneca vaccine kept reducing in its efficacy: by 20 weeks, its protection against severe disease was as low as 60 per cent.
What about the longer term? Does AstraZeneca just wane and wane to absolute zero? Or does its efficacy drop for a while and then level out like the mRNA vaccines? The authors did some extrapolation: they produced models of what their data predicted would happen in future. This is educated guesswork, but nevertheless: one of their models implied AstraZeneca would keep declining to the point that, by 30 weeks (almost seven months), people who got it would have essentially no difference in risk from someone who hadn’t been vaccinated at all. This seems unlikely to be true, but the fact that the data even points in this direction should make us concerned about the AstraZeneca shot in the long term.
It suggests an obvious policy: give booster shots as soon as possible to those who have had AstraZeneca, but not necessarily Pfizer or Moderna. And that’s what the scientists argued in their paper.
Do I need a booster vaccine?
That Scottish study looked at severe disease – but Covid short of hospitalisation is hardly fun in a great many cases. Frustratingly, the best study (also still a non-reviewed preprint) of the effectiveness of mRNA versus AstraZeneca for infection in general, rather than severe disease, only goes up to 16 weeks – just before the severe disease study started seeing substantial differences in the waning trajectories of the vaccine types. But that study does show a waning effect for both Pfizer and AstraZeneca in terms of reducing infection.
You can see why there’s been hand-wringing about booster shots. If we want to contain Covid, we want to exceed the herd immunity threshold and ensure everyone has the highest degree of protection. We know that, for Pfizer at least, a booster dose increases the protection again, to over 95 per cent. But a stable 90 per cent is pretty good going: boosters don’t seem anywhere near as crucial for those who’ve had mRNA vaccines. For AstraZeneca vaccines, though, the boosters are much more urgent. Although booster shots in the UK don’t currently discriminate by the original vaccine type, perhaps they should: the encouragement to come along for your third shot should perhaps be targeted more strongly at those who had the less effective, faster-waning vaccine.
Do I need a vaccine if I’ve already had Covid? Is natural immunity better?
It doesn’t help that the natural immunity issue has become politically polarised, especially in the US. In Israel, one paper (again, not yet peer-reviewed) caused a stir by arguing that natural immunity was both longer-lasting and stronger than that induced by the Pfizer vaccine. But that is inconsistent with other research – including a Public Health England preprint from February and a UK Office for National Statistics report from last week (18 October) – that implies the immunity levels from prior infection are worse, or about the same, as those from vaccination.
At the moment it’s hard to draw strong conclusions about natural immunity – it’s unclear why the studies vary so much. But there’s an odd circularity in the “natural immunity over vaccines” argument: to get the protection natural immunity provides, you have to have already had the disease you want to be protected against – with all the risks that entails.
Let’s return to our questions from the start. Your vaccine is probably less effective than it was when you first got it, especially if you had it before Delta became the dominant variant. If you had an mRNA vaccine a few months ago, it seems you have a lower, but fairly constant level of protection. If you had AstraZeneca, though, the models suggest you should apply for your booster shot sooner rather than later.
[See also: Would the British public support another Covid-19 lockdown?]

US gross domestic product (GDP) growth slowed from its pace over the previous year, falling to a 2.0 percent annual growth rate, around the economy's underlying potential growth rate but not at a pace that would narrow the economy's continued shortfall. GDP growth in the third quarter of 2021 was entirely accounted for by a slower drawdown of inventories as consumption growth was weak (with increases in services spending only slightly outpacing reductions in spending on goods) and business investment in equipment and structures fell.

Overall, the US Commerce Department reported October 28 that GDP was 2.6 percent below its pre-pandemic trend, essentially unchanged from the shortfall in the second quarter. The large increase in the trade deficit along with continued weakness in business fixed investment were the biggest sources of the shortfall. Final domestic demand, which is the total amount purchased by consumers, businesses, and government, was only 0.9 percent below its pre-pandemic trend. But US production could not satisfy this level of demand, so the difference was covered by drawdowns in inventories and a rise in the trade deficit as exports were diverted to domestic use and imports increased. In addition, price increases have absorbed much of the increase in demand as real production has run up against supply-chain bottlenecks and sluggish labor supply. Overall, the economy is in considerably better shape than was expected earlier this year, but its performance has disappointed relative to optimistic expectations from the spring and summer.

GDP is Short of Its Pre-pandemic Trend and Likely Short of Potential

In the third quarter of 2021, US real GDP was 2.6 percent below its pre-pandemic trend, as shown in figure 1. It is not necessarily the case, however, that real GDP was 2.6 percent lower than what it would have been absent the pandemic (a negative for GDP) and absent the fiscal and monetary policy response (a positive for GDP). The growth rate in the years prior to COVID-19 was boosted by continued declines in the unemployment rate as the economy's cyclical position improved. Most forecasters did not expect this improvement to continue at the same pace, instead expecting growth to slow even absent the pandemic. Our trend assumes that growth would have continued at a 2.3 percent annual rate while the Congressional Budget Office's last pre-COVID forecast was for growth at a 2.0 percent annual rate in 2020 and 2021.

In addition, the pandemic itself may have lowered potential output. Business investment fell during the pandemic and remains low. To the extent that this investment is permanently lost, the economy will have less productive capital, permanently reducing output. The cumulative reduction in business fixed investment over the course of the pandemic totals about 3 percent of the capital stock, which would be expected to reduce the level of output per hour by about 1 percent. In addition, dramatically reduced immigration and some labor force scarring have further lowered potential output. Some factors could go the other way, including the possibility of increased productivity and the possibility that output was below potential just prior to the pandemic. Overall, however, it is likely the economy's shortfall from potential is much smaller than 2.6 percent and could even be less than 1 percent.

Demand is Almost Back at Pre-pandemic Trend

Final domestic demand includes consumer spending, business investment, homebuilding, and government purchases. Overall, this demand rose only at a 1.0 percent annual rate in the third quarter as much of the production increase went towards less drawdown of inventories. Since the start of the pandemic, however, final domestic demand has been stronger than GDP. In the third quarter it was just 0.9 percent short of its pre-pandemic trend (figure 2). Moreover, to the degree that growth was expected to slow after 2019 as the economy neared or exceeded its potential, this level of demand is arguably very close to where it would have been absent the pandemic and the policy response—and possibly even above where it would have been.

The composition of demand has changed dramatically, as shown in figure 3. The biggest shortfall is in business investment, which is 6 percent short of its pre-pandemic trend, and responsible for about a third of the overall GDP shortfall. Consumer spending has also not fully recovered but is very close in aggregate, with the 0.5 percent shortfall responsible for less than a fifth of the overall GDP shortfall. Residential investment remains well above trend while government purchases are slightly below their trend.

The Biggest Shortfall in Domestic Demand is Business Investment

Although consumer spending has gotten more attention, the biggest reason that domestic demand is short of where its pre-pandemic trend would be is weakness in business fixed investment—even though consumer spending is more than four times as large as business investment. Business investment in equipment and structures fell in the third quarter as investments in intellectual property products rose. Relative to pre-pandemic trends, business investment was well below normal for transportation equipment, structures, and research and development. Business investment is elevated in information processing equipment like computers, however.

Weak supply and weak demand are likely contributing to low business investment. Prices for investment goods rose sharply in the third quarter, growing at the highest rate in nearly forty years (with the exception of some gyrations during the financial crisis of 2008). But this increase follows more muted increases in previous quarters unlike consumer prices, which have been rising strongly all year. As a result, since the end of 2019, prices for business investment have increased 1.3 percent at an annual rate, compared with 1.2 percent annual increases before the pandemic. This trend suggests that weak demand is playing a comparatively bigger role in restraining investment than it is in restraining consumer spending. But the data also indicate that supply constraints were more binding in the third quarter. In addition, both the level of interest rates and the spreads on corporate borrowing are low, another sign that investment demand is not particularly high.

While low demand seems to be a big contributor to weak business investment, the reasons for this low demand are unclear. The cost of capital is extremely low so does not appear to be a constraint on investment. One possibility is that businesses may be holding off on investment due to concerns about the Delta variant wave or the future of COVID-19. And with a possible shift towards increased work from home, some business investment, such as in office buildings or equipment, could end up on consumer balance sheets instead. The labor supply shortage could also be playing a role as, at least in the short run, new business equipment and other investment require labor to install and operate. Finally, supply constraints, including the microchip shortage and trucking and shipping delays that are complicating the delivery of new equipment, are also likely playing a role.

Going forward, business fixed investment could be an important contributor to growth. New orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft have risen very sharply over the last year. Moreover, business investment tends to be negatively correlated with its recent past, with periods of weakness followed by periods of strength and vice versa.

Overall, the cumulative business investment shortfall since the onset of the pandemic totals about $1.7 trillion, which is about 3 percent of the total capital stock. That decline would be expected to reduce the level of total economy labor productivity—and of potential GDP—by about 1 percent.

The Composition of Consumer Spending Has Shifted from Services towards Goods

Spending has been highly elevated on goods and very restrained on services. That gap narrowed somewhat in the third quarter as goods spending fell at a 9.2 percent annual rate and services spending rose at a 7.9 percent annual rate. But overall, the pattern is still stark, with goods spending 9 percent above its pre-pandemic trend (figure 4). The increases in goods spending relative to pre-pandemic trends have been widespread (table 1). Based on detailed monthly data available through August, spending was more than 10 percent above trend for most durable goods categories, including used cars, motor vehicle parts, furniture, appliances, dishes and flatware, household tools, sporting equipment, recreational vehicles, musical instruments, jewelry, and telephone equipment. One notable exception was new cars, where production constraints and price increases appear to have restrained sales, keeping them slightly below trend.

Despite the large increase in the third quarter, services spending remains 5 percent below its pre-pandemic trend. About one third of the shortfall is explained by health spending, which has not returned, while low spending on transportation, recreation, and other services has also contributed to the shortfall.

Personal Consumption Expenditures, 2021Q3 Difference from Trend (percent) Contribution to Aggregate Difference from Trend (p.p.) Personal Consumption Expenditures -0.5 -0.5 Goods 8.5 2.7 Durable Goods 11.2 1.2 Motor Vehicles & Parts 7.2 0.3 Furnishings & Household Equipment 12.2 0.3 Recreational Goods & Vehicles 10.0 0.3 Other Goods 21.1 0.3 Nondurable Goods 7.2 1.5 Food & Beverages Purchased for Off-Premises Consumption 7.7 0.6 Clothing & Footwear 15.6 0.4 Gasoline & Other Energy Goods -1.2 0.0 Other Goods 5.8 0.5 Services -4.6 -3.2 Household Consumption Expenditures -4.9 -3.2 Housing & Utilities 0.0 0.0 Health Care -6.9 -1.2 Transportation Services -17.3 -0.6 Recreation Services -19.3 -0.8 Food Services & Accommodations -4.5 -0.3 Financial Services & Insurance 5.3 0.4 Other Services -8.6 -0.7 Final Consumption Expenditures of Nonprofit Institutions Serving Households (NPISHs) 0.8 0.0 Gross Output of Nonprofit Institutions -3.8 -0.4 Less: Receipts from Sales of Goods & Services by Nonprofit Institutions -5.6 0.5 Note: Pre-pandemic trends based on log-linear regression of values from 2018Q1 to 2019Q4.

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis via Macrobond; authors' calculations.

Domestic Production Has Not Been Able to Fully Satisfy Demand

Domestic production could not keep up with very strong demand over the course of the pandemic. As a result, much of the real increase in demand has been satisfied by drawing down inventories since the start of the pandemic, which continued to fall in the third quarter but at a slower rate (figure 5). In addition, much of the increase in durable goods consumption has been satisfied by a rising trade deficit as exports were reduced (effectively diverting some of that production to domestic consumption) and by increased imports (figure 6). Some of these patterns partially reversed in the third quarter as inventories were rebuilt.

In addition, increased demand was also absorbed by price increases. Overall, nominal GDP is just short of trend (figure 7) because price increases are well above trend (figure 8). Overall, nominal GDP increased at a 7.8 percent annual rate in Q3, slower than its 12.1 percent annualized pace in the first half of the year but still very high.

The economy is ahead of pre-American Rescue Plan Forecasts but Falls Short of Recent Optimism

The level of real GDP in the third quarter was well above all the major private-sector and official forecasts made prior to the American Rescue Plan, including by the Congressional Budget Office, Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as shown in figure 9.

But the level of real GDP is well below the more optimistic forecasts made over the spring and summer as shown in figure 10. In August of 2020, forecasters were projecting that the economy would still be considerably smaller in the third quarter of 2021 than it was in the fourth quarter of 2019. Since then, forecasters have raised their forecasts as the recovery continued and Congress passed additional fiscal support. By the spring of 2021, after the passage of the American Rescue Plan, forecasters had become much more optimistic, predicting that the economy would have been 2.9 percent larger than it was at the end of 2019. While forecasters moderated their expectations over the summer, they still expected the economy to be about 1 percent larger in the third quarter of 2021 than it actually was.

What This Means Going Forward

The single biggest constraint on the economy in the third quarter appears to have been the inability of supply to adjust as quickly as demand. For example, the number of ships waiting to dock continued to increase over the summer even as container import volumes at the five top ports in the first eight months of 2021 were up 19 percent from 2019. In some cases, there were negative supply shocks, like reductions in microchip and other production due to COVID-19 in Southeast Asia and due to the electricity crisis sweeping Chinese factories. Perhaps the biggest constraint on supply has been workers not returning to the labor force and taking jobs as reservation wages remain highly elevated in the face of record job openings and rapid nominal wage growth. All of these supply constraints should fade eventually but how long they will take to fade is unclear.

The second biggest constraint on the economy in the third quarter appears to have been the Delta variant. Monthly data indicate that restaurant spending continued to increase over the quarter and roughly normalized but other in-person services like travel and live entertainment either experienced setbacks or did not enjoy the growth they otherwise would have. The dynamics of COVID-19, Americans becoming increasingly inured to the virus, and booster shots should all help reduce some of the constraints the virus has placed on the economy in the coming months. But there is considerable uncertainty about additional virus variants and the persistence of behavioral changes.

Demand was not as extremely strong as it was in the first half of the year when fiscal support totaled about 14 percent of GDP. But demand did remain strong in Q3. Given large cash balances, an additional $500 billion of fiscal stimulus spending out this fiscal year, and virtually unprecedentedly accommodative monetary and financial conditions, it could remain strong going forward. To the degree that it remains very strong, demand should continue to put substantial upward pressures on inflation. This trend could keep inflation above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target for a sustained period of time—especially if the supply side of the economy does not adjust quickly.

The easiest phase of growth is well behind the US economy. Going forward, it will be tougher to make up for the remaining lost ground, especially to the degree that the virus stays at a relatively high level. But there is no reason the economy cannot continue to grow well above its underlying potential rate as it continues to close the gap between where it is today and its full potential.

In 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created as a joint venture between the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program to advise global leaders on the risks of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.* In 1992 the charge was made more specific, as the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change defined the concept of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI) with the climate system. Scientists were asked to define the level of climate change that would constitute DAI and evaluate what its consequences might be. This past August one of the IPCC’s three working groups issued its sixth comprehensive report. One media outlet called it “devastating.” Another called it “grim.” Crucially, the report confirmed that the current level of warming—just over one degree Celsius—has crossed the DAI threshold.

The report was released during a catastrophic summer of fires and floods during which ordinary observers could see the effects of climate change unfolding in real time, and this no doubt contributed to a high level of media and public interest. But for those of us who have been following the issue, there was little that was really new. Back in 1995 the IPCC had already concluded that the human effect on the climate system was “discernible.” In 2001 the panel told us that “abrupt and irreversible” changes could occur. By 2007 warming largely attributable to human causes was “unequivocal,” accelerating a measurable loss of mountain glaciers and terrestrial snow cover that was in turn contributing to significant sea-level rise. And there was already strong evidence that warming was exacerbating extreme weather events and that heating and acidification of the oceans were threatening the future of coral reefs and other marine life. The main thing that was new in the latest IPCC report was not so much the science but the tone. In the past, IPCC scientists have bent over backward to be calm and not to overstate the case. But in the latest report, the tone was alarmed. That’s good because when the facts are alarming, it is rational both to be alarmed and to convey that alarm to others.

But this raises a question for the IPCC: What now? The answer is for scientists of Working Group 1 to declare their job done and pass the baton to the rest of the scientists who populate the organization. Many people don’t realize that the IPCC has three working groups. Working Group 1 (WG1), which issued this summer’s statements, addresses the “physical science basis” of climate change. WG2 deals with “impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability,” and WG3 looks at mitigation. Put another way, WG2 explores in detail why climate change matters, and WG3 tries to figure out how to stop it. Now that we know that DAI is fully underway, it’s time to focus on preventing the problem from getting even worse and figuring out how to adapt to the changes we can no longer prevent. One step that could help that happen would be for the IPCC to declare the job of WG1 to be done and close it down.

After all, if human-made warming is as unequivocal as these scientists insist, then why do we need more reports to tell us the same thing? Closing WG1 would answer that question and would allow climate scientists to refocus on basic science, which is, after all, what most of them are trained to do. And it would encourage public and policy attention to shift to solving the problem. This change in focus will require us to pay closer attention to what our economists, sociologists, urban planners and biologists have to say than we have to date, and these experts are mostly to be found in the IPCC’s other two working groups.

Over the past 30 years the physical science that explains the dangers of our interference with the climate system has become ever clearer. Yet our ability to tackle the problem seems to have stood still. When the IPCC first gathered in 1988, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide stood at 352 ppm (parts per million). Today it is 410 ppm and rising. More than half of all emissions have been generated since the IPCC began. Climate change is no longer a question of physical science. So let’s thank the climate scientists who have worked so hard to clarify the problem and look to others who can help us figure out how to solve it.

*Editor’s Note (12/30/21): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the name of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What if Bill Clinton had told the truth? Would America’s sexual and political history be different? The thought occurs because of the new TV drama Impeachment about the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Somewhat unfairly to both main parties, it is part of the American Crime Story series. Previous subjects have included O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan, who killed Gianni Versace. It’s a bit rich putting Bill Clinton in the same bracket as these murder cases. Nonetheless, the result is intriguing, not just because of the magnificent acting and production — and not only because in the quarter of a century since the world’s most famous blowjob a certain axis of society seems to have turned.
Back then Monica Lewinsky was the butt of every joke. In the ancient-modern parlance she was “shamed.” Late-night comedians, like everyone else on the planet, did jokes you can still rattle off: “Girl in her class voted most likely to suck-seed” — that sort of thing. A friend was at a post-Oscars party in 2001, the year Bjork came dressed as a swan. Shortly afterwards Monica Lewinsky entered the room. “Should have come as a swallow,” my friend quipped.
Of course, in the light of #MeToo, all that has changed. Now Bill Clinton (played by Clive Owen) is a brooding menace. He literally comes out of the shadows every time they meet. He is the abuser, she the abused. Because that is how all male-female power relations have been reformulated in recent times. It doesn’t hurt that Lewinsky is a producer on the show, allowing herself to come across almost wholly as an innocent little victim. Personally this grates with me — because as well as being an obsessive and a nut, the woman playing Lewinsky looks like that actress from Hairspray who made me grind my teeth and turn off in under five minutes.
But none of this is what is interesting. What is interesting is the question that has only come up once in the show so far: what, as I say, if Bill Clinton had told the truth?
The scene where this is made explicit comes when Clinton has already perjured himself by telling the special prosecutor’s office that he did not have sexual relations with his former intern or anyone else. He then calls in the pollster Dick Morris and asks what would happen if he ’fessed up. Morris lays it out with some secret opinion polling. Here are the approval ratings if you admit to having had an affair (not disastrous). Here are the approval ratings if you admit that, while president of the United States, you committed perjury (the numbers are through the floor). So in the drama, at least, Clinton knows he’s going to have to push on with the lie.
But that same thought keeps occurring: what if he’d just admitted to it earlier? What if the moment the Lewinsky affair started to come out he had just said it was true? People say he couldn’t have done that because of Hillary. Yet if you are married to a man like Bill I would say that you can work out pretty quickly what kind of a guy you’ve got. I’ve only met him once, but I have heard the most surprising women say what they would like to do if they got him in a room alone — and none of it was remotely vengeful. He’s one of those highly sexual people who, when they’re attractive, have people flinging themselves at them. (When they’re not attractive, we just warn our friends that they’re not safe in taxis.)
Imagine if 23 years ago Clinton had said something like this: “Look, I’m not especially proud of it, and I’m deeply sorry to have embarrassed my wife. But you know, we’re all human, and about half of us in this country are men. And, well, things happen and although marriage vows are sacred and people should stick to them, not everybody does or can, and that’s just a fact of life. Not the best thing in the world, and not the worst. Now let’s try to sort out healthcare.”
I don’t know what it would have done for him in the polls. Or for relations with Hillary. But for the country?
In France the public and politicians have a famously more grown-up attitude towards human sexual relations. They recognize that adults have sex and that it isn’t a matter of perennial amazement or much of anyone else’s business. In Britain we remain stuck somewhere in the era of adolescence, viewing sex — when it is mentioned — as mainly a subject for humor, like some other embarrassing bodily functions.

But in America? Wow, is America screwed up about sex. In public life perhaps the most sexualized society in the world still views sex through a presbyterian prism in which sex outside marriage is seen as a scandalous, potentially imprisonable matter.
It is one of many things that helps destroy American politics. After the Clinton affair, it turned out that one of Clinton’s biggest Republican pursuers, the speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, had cheated on both his first and second wives. Democrat Al Franken resigned from the Senate three years ago after a photo of him emerged doing a comedy skit pretending to cup a woman’s breasts. Donald Trump somehow got away with pretending to be some God-fearing monogamist. And just this August, the Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo had to go when it transpired that, among other transgressions, he had put a hand on a woman’s cheek at a wedding and asked if he could kiss her. There is so much to blame Cuomo for. His administration’s cover-up of COVID nursing-home deaths is one thing that springs to mind. But a sex scandal in which no sex occurred was what did it for him.
So I wonder what would have happened if Clinton had come clean all those years ago. True, a few more vases might have been airborne in the White House that night. But gosh it could have helped the nation fracture a bit less.
The post What if Clinton had come clean? appeared first on The Spectator World.

Losers don’t usually get a second chance in modern U.S. presidential politics. Back in the days of nominating conventions and party bosses, an Adlai Stevenson or a Thomas Dewey could gain two consecutive nominations. Richard Nixon actually won the presidency in 1968 after losing in 1960. But since the coming of primary contests, it’s win—or retire. Even Al Gore, who won the popular vote in 2000, was debarred in 2004.Donald Trump, who upended so many previous presidential precedents, now seems likely to upend one more. Trump has to be considered the massive front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. He’s already running hard, and he’s already dominating the field. Fox News’s intense promotion of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as an alternative to Trump is not working out any better in 2024 than its similar effort on behalf of then–New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2016. Trump dominates in the polls. He has the lead in fundraising. Down-ballot races turn on loyalty to Trump. Potential rivals vow they will not run for president if Trump does.It’s an amazing spectacle, because Donald Trump was no ordinary political loser. He was a huge political loser. He lost the popular vote in two consecutive presidential elections, the second time by a margin of 8 million votes. He led his party to a brutal midterm defeat in 2018 amid the strongest economy since the late 1990s. He was the first president to have been impeached twice, the second time for inciting a mob to invade and attack Congress to overturn a national election result. He now faces more criminal and civil jeopardy than Richard Nixon did ahead of his presidential pardon in 1974.[David Frum: Trump may not have to steal 2024]Trump is campaigning on two themes: nostalgia for the strong pre-pandemic economy, plus resentment over the outcome of the vote in 2020. It’s not much, but it’s enough—enough to force DeSantis, the would-be Trump replacement, into desperate stunts to prove himself Trumpier than Trump: handing out $5,000 rewards to cops who refuse vaccination; identifying himself with a state surgeon general who advises anti-vaxxers to trust their “intuitions.”But nobody is Trumpier than Trump. There’s no Trumpism that’s bigger than Trump. “It’s about a movement, not a man” is a venerable cliché applied to populist politics. In this case, though, it’s about a man, not a movement. In 2016, Trump endorsed allowing transgender people to “use the bathroom they feel is appropriate.” In 2017, he crammed through a huge tax cut for the rich. On the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump was negotiating a giveaway trade deal with China. Those are all supposed populist no-no’s. Trump followers paid no mind. If Trump does it, it’s okay. They don’t much care about the content of his politics. They care about its mood.Anybody who follows politics even casually can see the Trump comeback emerging. Well-sourced reporters carefully detail the comeback’s mechanics. But almost nobody is prepared for the malicious destructiveness of what is to come.In a 2011 speech, Donald Trump explained his single top rule in life: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it.” He’s repeated the same idea over and over again in speeches, tweets, and books published under his byline. In 2024, the targets of Trump’s revenge are American law and American democracy. At a September 25 rally in Perry, Georgia, Trump excoriated state Republican officials who failed to subvert the state election for him. In Iowa two weeks later, Trump delivered more attacks on the 2020 election process, focusing this time on state Republicans who failed to steal Arizona for him.In 2016 and through the early part of Trump’s presidency, there was often an edge of Friars Club comedy to Trump’s rally performances: not very nice comedy, a little out of style in tone and sensibility, but comedy all the same. Not in 2021. Now it’s all dark and bitter.[David A. Graham: America is not ready for Trump’s second term]Here’s video from a Georgia television station of the entirety of Trump’s Perry rally. Trump’s own speech starts at 1:37:38. Watch as much as you can stand and tell me if you detect even a moment of humor, Friars Club or otherwise. The most quoted bit—Trump’s quasi-endorsement of the Democrat Stacey Abrams as a better governor for Georgia than the Republican Brian Kemp—is not any kind of joke. It’s a deliberately delivered challenge, lower jaw jutting beyond the upper teeth, eyes slitted with anger.That’s the guy who wants to return as the 47th president.In Trump’s first term, the country was protected to some degree by his ignorance and ineptitude. He kept trying to do bad things, but it took him a while to figure out how the controls operated, where the kill-switches were located. By the time of his attempt to extort the Ukrainian president, in 2019, Trump had achieved a higher degree of mastery. But by then it was too late. Then the pandemic struck, and Trump bumped into a new wall of failure. In a second Trump presidency, however, the burglars will arrive already knowing how to bypass the alarms and disable the locks. He’ll understand that it’s not enough to install an ally as attorney general—he must control the secondary and tertiary ranks of the Justice Department too. He won’t allow himself to be talked into another chief of staff with an independent sense of duty, such as John Kelly, who averted much harm from the middle of 2017 to the beginning of 2019. It’ll be Mark Meadows types from day one to day last. And he’ll bring with them a new generation of Republican officeholders whose top priority will be rearranging their states’ election laws so that Republicans do not lose power even if they lose the vote.That’s the future Trump is preparing.Be ready.

With climate action trailing so far behind rhetoric, it is natural to wonder if all the talk is just hypocrisy. But it need not be: If we want to bequeath a livable planet to future generations, it is crucial to understand why there may be a disjuncture between what each person intends to do and what the group actually delivers.

ITHACA – Both anxiety and hope are increasing in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. There is anxiety because, barring a handful of the willfully blind, we can all see the damage we are doing to the planet. Fires, floods, and rising sea levels are creating havoc around the world, while environmental destruction and the resulting conflict are triggering large-scale refugee movements that evoke biblical images.

But there is also hope, because some – not least the climate activist Greta Thunberg, with her longstanding and heartening call for more ambitious action – recognize the scale of the challenge facing humanity. In that spirit, the European Union has launched the European Green Deal, which aims to make the EU carbon-neutral by 2050.

The United States also aims to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century, and recently announced that it would double its financial contribution to help developing countries tackle the climate crisis, to $11.4 billion per year. Some US lawmakers, notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, have proposed a Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to redesign the US economy and eventually eliminate all US carbon dioxide emissions.

Yet, despite these efforts, the fact is that we started out late in combating climate change and now need to accelerate corrective action if humans are not to go the way of the dinosaurs. The climate crisis is a global issue and requires action from all countries, but many developing economies, including some of the most climate-vulnerable ones, lack the financial wherewithal to do enough on their own. Some emerging economies, including South Africa and much of South and Southeast Asia, are hugely reliant on coal, and will have to undergo a disruptive green transition.

We therefore need a collective commitment to design support systems – financial and scientific – to help all countries do their part. The 2015 Paris climate agreement was a diplomatic success, marshaling the support of almost 200 countries. But the world is falling woefully short of meeting the target – limiting global warming to 1.5º Celsius, relative to preindustrial levels – that was agreed in Paris.

Will the gathering in Glasgow catalyze genuine action? Thunberg recently warned that “the leaders will say we’ll do this and we’ll do this, … and then they will do nothing.” And the widespread frustration at leaders’ insufficient climate ambition is not limited to young people. Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II expressed a similar sentiment, saying that “it’s really irritating when they talk, but they don’t do.”

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Such despair is natural. When we see climate action trail so far behind rhetoric, we inevitably wonder if all the talk is just hypocrisy.

But it need not be. If we want to bequeath a livable planet to future generations, it is crucial to understand why there may be a disjuncture between what each person intends to do and what the group actually delivers. Iconic games like the prisoner’s dilemma have shown this to be the case in the domain of selfish decision-making. Mobilizing the determination and commitment needed to address the climate crisis is a problem for the social sciences and moral philosophy as much as it is for politicians.

Contrary to what neoclassical economics would have us believe, the modern economy does not operate as a series of impersonal markets driven purely by the aspirations of individual actors. Rather, as Mariana Mazzucato notes in her book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, markets are “embedded in rules, norms, and contracts affecting organizational behavior, interactions, and institutional designs.”

It is therefore a mistake to equate collective action with the sum of individual intentions. When people say they want to do everything to avert climate disaster but do little, this may not be hypocrisy. They may be in the grip of what I have described in a recent paper as “Greta’s Dilemma.”

In this game, a group of people initially pursue their own interests, with no concern for how the environmental damage caused by their actions will harm future generations. If people then become environmentally conscious and take corrective action, traditional economic models would predict that such a shift will lead to improvements in future generations’ welfare.

But in the complex, strategically connected world that we inhabit today, the outcome may be different. Greta’s Dilemma illustrates the paradoxical result whereby individuals who become environmentally conscious collectively do greater damage to the environment. Akin to one of those paradoxical paintings by M.C. Escher, it is the intertwining of small individual steps that lead the group to a destination they did not seek. Far from helping future generations, they end up hurting them.

Admittedly, this game is crafted deliberately to highlight the paradox. But it shows that, in today’s complex global economy, we need to devote much greater attention to the strategic foundations of human interaction in order to design policies that can help us turn away from the brink of climate disaster.

This may sound like a narrow academic argument, but it is not. If we are to realize Thunberg’s ambition, which I believe many people – including many leaders – genuinely share, we need to use Greta’s Dilemma as a basis for designing the policies and institutions we need.

So, although we are right to fret that leaders may not do enough at COP26, we also have to be aware that there is a scientific problem here. On climate change and other issues, we need to understand the social and economic game we are playing, and try to alter its rules so that our individual moral intentions are reflected better in collective outcomes.

Ross Douthat is well-known for his insight-rich commentary on politics, culture, and religion (and for being the last conservative at The New York Times). But in his new book “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery,” Douthat lets his readers into something achingly personal: the story of his journey through chronic illness.

In the summer of 2015, Douthat — healthy, 30-something, and on the cusp of moving his young family to the countryside — was suddenly beset by debilitating pain. It began as a mystery and was later identified as chronic Lyme disease, but not before several doctors had suggested his suffering was all in his head.

“The Deep Places” explores the medical controversy involved with chronic illness in general, and Lyme in particular. Douthat’s journey will be painfully familiar to any sufferer of mysterious ailments: he starts with a firm faith in modern, mainstream medicine and finds himself edging ever closer toward the fringe in search of help — and someone who believes him.

While his story may be familiar to many, Douthat tells it better than most. As someone with multiple chronic Lyme sufferers in my family and community, I’ve often heard them tell their stories, discuss their symptoms, and share their discoveries. But in these complicated conversations full of “biofilms,” “Herxheimer reactions,” and “Rife machines” (yes, I’d heard of those too), I often find myself unable to follow — and, I admit, a little mystified.

Douthat makes his battle with a complex illness understandable and riveting. I found the book hard to put down, finishing it at two o’clock in the morning. Those who, like me, love someone with chronic illness will find something invaluable in this book: an opportunity to enter into the mind, heart, and daily reality of the sufferer. The book will also resonate with anyone who grapples with the larger experience of human suffering — and the question of why God allows it.

Sharing his Vulnerability

One of the most refreshing things about this book, in our age of online fakery and bravado, is how fully Douthat lets his guard down. He invites the reader into his physical experiences at their most humbling and bizarre, and into his spiritual experiences at their most visceral and desperate. Anyone who has ever believed in God through deep suffering will be moved by Douthat’s stories of slowly ascending a church staircase on his knees, or begging God for a sign in the form of a sand dollar at the seashore.

It’s these transparent accounts of raw pain that give Douthat the credibility to speak on the larger questions. “What I learned from my illness,” he writes, “is that chronic suffering can make belief in a providential God, if you have such a thing going in, feel essential to your survival, no matter how much you may doubt God’s goodness when the pain is at its worst. To believe your suffering is for something, that you are being asked to bear up under it, that you are being in some sense supervised and tested and possibly chastised in a way that’s ultimately for your good, if you can only make it through the schooling — all this is tremendously helpful to maintaining simple sanity and basic hope.”

“Absolutely religion is a crutch,” he admits, “and it’s not only useful for the weak of mind but for anyone dealing with severe weakness.”

Limits of the Expert Class

If such a thing can be called a spoiler, I’ll alert you to one here: Douthat did eventually make it through the schooling. Through a long process of trial and error, in which he sought help from alternative practitioners, gained knowledge from online forums of fellow sufferers, and conducted medical experiments on his own body, he fought his way back toward wellness — if not complete health, something much nearer to it.

The ordeal forced Douthat, a member of the old-guard establishment media, to grapple with the limitations of the expert class — in this case, establishment medicine. It was only by journeying past the edges of accepted, certified knowledge that he found help, and this understandably shaped his view of the way we accept and certify knowledge. Of course, this is nearly the same question many are fiercely debating in the age of COVID-19 (which is discussed near the end of the book), as the whole world confronts a new and mysterious illness.

Douthat strikes a balance, not rejecting the medical establishment, but asking it to rethink its approach. “What chronic Lyme patients are asking of these skeptics is not a new certainty to replace the old one, not the endorsement of any single protocol or theory,” he writes in the final chapter. “What they are asking — what is entirely reasonable to ask in the face of so much suffering — is for doctors not to simply wash their hands of us, but to instead embrace the experimental spirit that chronic sickness seems to obviously require.”

“The Deep Places” is a moving personal memoir with a hint of true-crime mystery, featuring microscopic spirochetes as the villain. It’s told with the pathos, insight, and humility of someone chastened by suffering. In a culture filled with hidden sickness — of the body, mind, and soul — it’s a worthwhile read.

Jayme Metzgar is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She is the founder and president of Romania Reborn, a Christian non-profit working to find families for abandoned children. She believes in private charity, free markets, individual liberty, and baking with real butter. Jayme and her husband live in West Virginia with their four children, whom she educates at home.

Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor at the centre of a row over her views on gender identification and transgender rights, has announced her resignation from the University of Sussex.

Stock’s resignation comes three weeks after a protest by some students at the university’s Brighton campus, which included posters and graffiti calling for her dismissal.

She has said she believes gender identity does not outweigh biological sex “when it comes to law and policy”, and that people cannot change their biological sex.

In an email to staff, Adam Tickell, Sussex’s vice-chancellor, said: “We had hoped that Prof Stock would feel able to return to work, and we would have supported her to do so.

“She has decided that recent events have meant that this will not be possible, and we respect and understand that decision. We will miss her many contributions, from which the university has benefited during her time here.”

1) Sad to announce I’m leaving @SussexUni. Here’s the University statement. This has been a very difficult few years, but the leadership’s approach more recently has been admirable and decent. I hope that other institutions in similar situations can learn from this. https://t.co/eaYDERr03z — Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) October 28, 2021

Stock tweeted that she was sad to leave: “This has been a very difficult few years, but the leadership’s approach more recently has been admirable and decent. I hope that other institutions in similar situations can learn from this.”

She added: “This has been an absolutely horrible time for me and my family. I’m putting it behind me now. On to brighter things soon, I hope.”

A university spokesperson said: “Over the past several weeks, the University of Sussex has vigorously and unequivocally defended Prof Kathleen Stock’s right to exercise her academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech, free from bullying and harassment of any kind.

“These freedoms and protections apply to and benefit us all, and we will defend them today and in the future. Rather than conflicting with our progress on equality, diversity and inclusion, these freedoms and protections are in place to support those with protected characteristics, particularly those who are under-represented or disadvantaged.

“Universities must remain places where everyone – staff or student – has the right to, and benefits from, lawful freedom of speech.

“The university has been consistent and clear that everyone in our community has the right to work and learn, free from bullying and harassment of any kind, which has not been the case for Prof Stock.

“There were no substantive allegations of wrongdoing made against her. Prof Stock leaves the University of Sussex with our gratitude for her significant contributions as a teacher and academic. Prof Stock’s successes in the field of philosophy have been of great benefit to the university. Her departure is a loss.”

Michelle Donelan, the universities minister for England, said: “It is absolutely appalling that the toxic environment at the University of Sussex has made it untenable for Prof Kathleen Stock to continue in her position there. No academic should ever have to fear for their personal safety.”

Posting on Twitter, Donelan later asked “that universities come forward and offer [Stock] a suitable position in their own faculty – we must stand up for free speech”.

An Instagram account claiming to represent trans students at the university posted: “Massive win for Sussex LGBTQ+ students today … Let’s take a minute to appreciate this.”

Earlier this month Stock said she had been told by police to stay away from campus, and feared her 18-year career at the university had been “effectively ended” after the Sussex branch of the University and College Union called for an investigation into institutional transphobia.

After the protest against Stock, Sussex University students’ union said: “Students have a right to protest when their rights are being questioned, or when there are discriminatory narratives about them being shared.” It said that trans and non-binary students had complained of feeling threatened and lacked support from the university.

Labour MP Taiwo Owatemi, the shadow equalities minister, had also entered the controversy after saying she was “concerned” by Stock’s role as a trustee for the LGB Alliance – which campaigns for rights based on sexual orientation rather than gender identity. But Owatemi stressed that she “was not passing judgment on Prof Stock’s academic work, and did not call for action to be taken against her”.

The philosophy professor was awarded an OBE in the 2021 new year honours list for services to higher education.

But hundreds of academics criticised the decision, signing an open letter that criticised Stock’s comments on transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The letter claimed her “harmful rhetoric” about transgender and gender non-conforming people reinforced “the patriarchal status quo”.

“Academic freedom comes with responsibility; we should not use that freedom to harm people, particularly the more vulnerable members of our community,” the letter added.

“Conflating concern about the harms of Stock’s work with threats to academic freedom obfuscates important issues.”

Richard Nixon’s legacy will be forever tarnished by the Watergate scandal that led him to become the first and only U.S. president to resign from office. But Nixon was also a political mastermind whose impact continues to resound in both domestic and world politics. 
John R. Price served on the domestic policy side of the first Nixon administration, eventually becoming Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs. He has written about his experience in a compelling new memoir and history, The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider’s Perspective on Nixon’s Surprising Social Policy. In this interview, Price talks about his background as one of the founding memoirs of the Ripon Society (a moderate Republican activist group in the 1960s), his efforts on behalf of progressive Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits, and his work in the Nixon administration for the eminent Harvard sociologist (and later U.S. Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. 
Price describes his efforts with Moynihan and Nixon to create the Family Assistance Plan, a far-reaching welfare proposal that would have implemented a negative income tax for households with working parents. He makes the case that Nixon was in many ways a liberal — indeed the last liberal Republican president — and that his social welfare program, if it had passed Congress, would have put the country on a different and better trajectory.  

John R. Price: This is key, I think, to my sense of Nixon: that there was somewhere at that curious, complicated man’s core a feeling that he wanted before he left the world to have done something remarkably good and memorable.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. I’m delighted to be joined today by my friend John R. Price, who has just written a brilliant memoir and history entitled The Last Liberal Republican: An Insider’s Perspective on Nixon’s Surprising Social Policy. John spent much of the 1960s as a moderate Republican activist before joining the Nixon administration after the 1968 election.
He worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the Urban Affairs Council, focusing on welfare reform and the creation of the Family Assistance Plan. And after Moynihan left the administration and returned to Harvard, John succeeded him as Special Assistant to the President for Urban Affairs and Executive Secretary to the Council on Urban Affairs, reporting directly to John Ehrlichman. So welcome back, John, and congratulations on your book.
John R. Price: Thank you, Geoffrey. I appreciate your support.
Geoff Kabaservice: You’re welcome. And my saying “welcome back” was actually a bit of a Freudian slip there, because unfortunately, as you know, you and I taped an entire podcast a few weeks ago that utterly failed to record. But John, your many stellar qualities include your vast supply of patience, so I hope you don’t mind a certain sense of déjà vu in repeating our conversation.
John R. Price: Not a bit. Let’s get on with it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Great. So as I was saying, one of the many intriguing aspects of your book is that you situate the Nixon presidency in the much longer history of factional warfare within the Republican Party. And I also like that you spent the first third or so of the book relating your own somewhat Forrest Gump-ish experiences in the 1960s, where you were personally involved with seemingly every significant Republican organization and leader. And then another valuable aspect of the book is your focus on the relationship between Nixon and Moynihan and the struggle to pass the Family Assistance Plan, which was a welfare program that aimed to implement a negative income tax for households with working parents.
And your approaching Nixon from these angles really reveals a rather different Nixon from the one who appears in most histories. So although maybe I’ve supplied some of the answer to my own question for you, can you tell me what inspired you to write this book?
John R. Price: Well, partly it was the fact that 50 years had gone by, and if I were going to write it I’d better get to it. But more importantly, I think that it was in a way a justification for my own life. And at one point Nixon said to a group of us staff in his office, he said, “Pat Moynihan, if we get Family Assistance (and we will),  will have done something with his life.” And I felt that Nixon was speaking almost for himself on that very point. This is key, I think, to my sense of the importance of writing the book and my sense of Nixon, that there was somewhere at that man’s, that curious, complicated man’s core a feeling that he wanted before he left the world to have done something remarkably good and memorable.
And so I write the book partly out of that sense of Nixon’s own personal quest, but also out of the fact that I had come from maybe an upbringing and certainly a college — Grinnell in Iowa — which had a very strong sense of the Social Gospel, as it was called, a hundred and more years ago. So it was a whole mix of reasons, both personal (as a sense of an amateur historian) and as desiring to give a glimpse of Nixon, as you just said, most people never had the opportunity to see.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I think you’ve succeeded wonderfully in this book. Maybe we can begin by you telling me something about your family background and early interest in Republican politics.
John R. Price: Thank you. My family was basically nonpartisan. I say that despite the fact that both my mother and father regularly pulled the Republican lever, but they weren’t feverish about it. There wasn’t rancor. There wasn’t a huge sense of great gulfs in American politics. My mother was from a dairy farm in Iowa, southern Iowa — Holstein cows — and my grandfather and my grandmother were a Republican and Democrat respectively. So when they went to vote on Election Day, they canceled each other out and then went home to a very satisfying, quiet, calm mid-day meal.
My father was out of the coal mining camps in West Virginia, having actually begun working in the mines at age twelve, and finally, later, more or less finished high school and then talked his way into college, of which he was the first family member ever to attend. But his politics were basically one of stability and practicality. He was not an ideologue in any way. And he greatly, greatly found disorder abhorrent, and the coal mining camps, at the time he was a young man and teaching school, were pretty wild with union organization and Pinkertons being brought in to put them down violently. Violence on both sides. So my folks were Republicans, but basically centrist and moderate in their temperament.
Geoff Kabaservice: And how did you get into your interest in Republican politics?
John R. Price: Well, the first intimation of it came when I was nine years old, when Governor Tom Dewey — someone to whom we will refer probably more than once in this conversation, Governor Tom Dewey of New York — was running for the second time for the presidency as the Republican standard-bearer in 1948. So I, at the tender age of nine, was dispatched or volunteered (I have no idea) to carry campaign posters and a hammer and tacks up and down my one-block-long street, affixing Tom Dewey’s picture and slogans to telephone poles and lightposts. That was the beginning.
And then I, four years later, saw Eisenhower in an open-car motorcade through my hometown on Long Island, New York. My dad and I watched it. And then as I got on and through high school, I began to be very interested in social studies and such, and at college in the late ‘60s I wound up being very interested in policy. And by that time, someone named Nelson Rockefeller had come on the scene and completely seduced me, as he did thousands of other centrist, somewhat more moderate and potentially liberal folks of my age.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course you would end up going to work for Rockefeller twice, as it happens.
John R. Price: Yes. And that was still a long time in the future at that point. But he had been sort of a comet in the sky in 1958, which was about halfway through my college years. And he became the sort of emerging figure of the more moderate wing of the party — or at least he thought he was, because Richard Nixon was still the vice president and was about to beat Nelson Rockefeller for the 1960 nomination, which he duly and handily did.
But nonetheless, Rockefeller emerged as a powerful northern Republican governor, of which there were many — more than a handful. And they were a very formidable force within the party. But at the same time, rising within the party and outside it was the Conservative Movement. It was a formidable force that had been suppressed during the Eisenhower presidency. The old Taft wing, the more conservative wing, which Eisenhower had beaten for his own nomination in 1952, had been sort of somnolent and under the surface, but came back with a vengeance after Nixon’s 1960 defeat. And it really set up a struggle between the conservatives and Nelson Rockefeller, in the first instance.
Geoff Kabaservice: You have written about this in your book, but generally speaking how was the Republican Party of 1960 different from the one we have today?
John R. Price: Well, it was a broad church still, very much so. And you had the Eisenhower administration drawing to an end. And as usual, especially after a couple of terms, they were running out of gas, and the members of the administration were aging and they’d shot their wads and they were back off to business or retirement or college presidencies or whatever. But you had that strong Eisenhower moderate wing. Don’t forget, Eisenhower had vastly expanded Social Security. He had made possible through the ESI, the Employer-Sponsored Insurance Program, a vast transformation of the landscape of health insurance in America, because employers began to offer it to their employees, and it really took hold.
And then you had the more conservative wing, which as I say had been sort of suppressed during much of Eisenhower but was beginning once again to feel its oats. Nixon was a centrist. Nixon was definitely the heir to Eisenhower. And frankly, in his campaign against Jack Kennedy, Nixon was probably more the centrist than even Jack Kennedy. So you had a broad church Republican Party in 1960, quite different to today.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, John, I know from past conversations that you have a story about Iowa Republican Congressman Fred Schwengel that dates to the summer of 1960, which kind of shows just on a personal level how different politics was in those days.
John R. Price: Well, it’s interesting… Schwengel was from the eastern Mississippi River side of Iowa, Quad Cities area, as it’s called. And he was a longtime Republican member there, traditional Midwestern Republican, which meant very pro-civil rights; economically he was more or less conservative — that is, fiscally prudent. But Schwengel was interested in history. He liked history. He liked facts. He later, in fact, went on to become the chairman or president of the National Capital Historical Society.
But that summer, he had a summer intern from my college, Grinnell College, and invited that young man and me over for a Sunday hamburger. And he grilled the hamburgers and hotdogs, and then he said, “If you’d be interested, come on down to our recreation room in the basement. I’ve got some recordings. If you’d be willing to hear them, I’d love to play them for you.” And what he played for us were campaign speeches of Adlai Ewing Stevenson, who had run against Dwight Eisenhower in ‘52 and again in 1956, but who was an eloquent, eloquent man.
And by that time, of course, the New Deal had itself burned out, and Stevenson had little or no chance against Eisenhower. But his rhetoric, his eloquence, his ability to turn into a fine phrase very important thoughts were really important to Schwengel himself. And he just wanted us to listen to this for entertainment and for exposure to a fine rhetorician.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s very rare I run across Republican politicians who are aficionados of the speeches of, let’s say Barack Obama, even though Obama was a rhetorician of a level of eloquence of Stevenson himself.
John R. Price: Yes, I’d agree.
Geoff Kabaservice: Interesting anecdote. So you graduated from Grinnell College, you went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and upon your return to the States you enrolled at the Harvard Law School. And you were present at the creation of the Ripon Society. For our listeners who may not know, what was the Ripon Society?
John R. Price: It was, starting in 1962, a sort of inchoate group of maybe 10 or a dozen, which grew slowly over the next year. Young men, many law students, but also grad students at Tufts and at MIT and elsewhere. And we felt vaguely Republican. We liked Eisenhower, though by that time we felt a little ashamed because of course the prevailing view of Eisenhower by the early 1960s was that he had been a tired old man who didn’t know what he was doing, and so on. That view is radically undergoing a transformation these days.
But the name Ripon was given to the group later. And the concept for the group was a transplant from across the Atlantic, from the British Conservative (or Tory) Party. And one of the key players in it, Emil Frankel, had been a Fulbright at Manchester, and he came back knowledgeable about this group called the Bow Group. The Bow Group was, like this group of ours in the Boston area, young people who really were interested in politics, but they were interested in policy and in ideas and their place in politics. And so the Bow Group became a bridge between policy and officeholders, policy and politicians.
So that was specifically the model that this young group, fledgling group, took for itself. And we experimented with names. American Bow Group… Nothing jelled until the assassination of Jack Kennedy in November of 1963. Within two months, the Ripon Society had formalized, declared a credo if you will, and embraced the name of Ripon. Ripon was the town in Wisconsin, and in the little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, the Republican Party was born. So we specifically determined that we were a Republican group, we were a policy-oriented group, we were a young group. And we meant to ensure that politics did not degenerate but had a high level of concern about policy and getting things done that helped people.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s interesting that you mentioned the growing conservative movement, which was also going on at that time. And the way you specifically put it was that the Eisenhower presidency had suppressed a lot of that conservative sentiment. You know, I often think about the roots of Trumpian populism. And while I don’t want to be presentist in the way that I’m thinking about Richard Nixon, I do consider his role on the one hand being Eisenhower’s conservative hatchet man, but on the other hand participating in that repression of the specifically isolationist element of America First that came out as the McCarthyite movement with Senator Joe McCarthy. And Robert Taft was always its standard bearer. And Eisenhower really did convert the Republican Party to internationalism and seemingly the cause of moderation. But of course, that did not last.
John R. Price: Absolutely. And you made a very important point — not central to my book or my career in politics or my arguments, which were focused on domestic and social policy — but the reason Eisenhower has often said that he finally decided to run for the presidency was because he had a private secret meeting with Robert Taft, senator of Ohio and a key leader in the Republicans in the Congress, Senate — he was the Republican leader specifically in the Senate. And Eisenhower asked him point blank… He said — NATO had just been formed in 1949 — and Eisenhower said to Taft, “Look, even Harry Truman has been asking me to run for president.” He said, “I wouldn’t run if I knew that you would embrace internationalism and embrace NATO specifically.” And Taft said, “In conscience, I can’t do that.” And that led to Eisenhower saying, “All right.” He didn’t say it to Taft at the time, but he made the decision to run against Taft for the nomination and for the presidency.
Geoff Kabaservice: When the Ripon Society had come up with its name, it made a pilgrimage to that schoolhouse in Wisconsin.
John R. Price: We did indeed. But there was a specific moment in time when that was done. And it was after the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in 1964, Barry Morris Goldwater of Arizona, had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And he had voted with, I think, four other Republican senators. 25 or 26 other Republicans, by a ratio of almost five to one, voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act. But Goldwater had opposed it, voting with Democrats like Strom Thurmond, who that autumn crossed the aisle to say he was a Republican.
And so we felt, the folks in Ripon felt, that this was blasphemy, if you will, within the context of a party which for a hundred years had stood for civil rights, for the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, for attempts at Reconstruction, for the Eisenhower Court and the Brown vs Board of Education decision — all of these things. And so we went to Ripon and issued a “Declaration of Conscience,” saying that the party could not in conscience nominate someone — Barry Goldwater — who stood so opposed to its historic lineage and purpose.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, it’s interesting that the conservative movement congealed around Goldwater and also opposed Nelson Rockefeller. I remember a quote from William Rusher, who was the publisher of National Review magazine, where he said that “Every movement needs an enemy. And for the conservative movement, Nelson Rockefeller was it.”
John R. Price: Yeah, he had a big bullseye… He had a big bullseye on him.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Rockefeller really was the most formidable challenger to Goldwater during that 1964 presidential primary and series of contests leading up to the Republican nomination. And since you worked for Rockefeller on two occasions, like I said, I’d be curious to hear your take on him. Why is it that people nowadays should esteem Nelson Rockefeller? And was there any truth to this notion of it was possible to be both a liberal and a Republican in those days?
John R. Price: Well, Nelson Rockefeller certainly stood for that. I mean, he would call himself a moderate. I don’t think he’d call himself a liberal. He kept saying he was “electable,” because he believed — in a way, like Richard Nixon did — that elections would be won in the center, in the middle of American politics. And he had a favorite phrase… He said, “Republicans and independents and  ‘discerning Democrats’ will be for me.” He was a man of immense ego but equally immense charm. He had, I think at age 31, become the family boss on the construction of Rockefeller Center — that could go to your head. The biggest construction project, probably, of the entire New Deal era. And then he helped to found the Museum of Modern Art with his mother. And then he was an assistant secretary of State under FDR, undersecretary of HEW under Eisenhower. So he had, by dint of wealth and charm and family connections, he had already had one heck of a start in public life.
He then was elected governor of New York, which was then — 60, 65 years ago — a formidable platform for a governor of either party. It was still the largest state, and the East was still predominant in media and so forth. So he had an enormous spot, if you will, from which to maneuver. And he was a man, as I say, of great ego, of great charm, of great energy. And he had a radiant charm, and he was also a builder. He liked to do things big. And so he was a spender, and he built a vast state university system, and he helped to inspire the building of the original World Trade Center and all these kinds of things. So Nelson was regarded as being a huge spender — a liberal in that sense — a big government man, and a man with an ego to match.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, I found that when I was researching Rockefeller, I came to think less highly of him than many people who had been in the Ripon Society and were around in politics at the time, precisely because he didn’t seem to be part of the Dwight Eisenhower tradition of moderate Republicanism that I was writing about and that seemed central to me. Since we’ve spoken last, I have been up to Albany, New York, and I have gone to the old capital and gazed upon what is now the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza. And as you said, he was a builder and a spender, and the plaza came in at something like twice its original planned budget at $2 billion.
John R. Price: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it’s this vast Brasilia-style space that’s kind of like a modernist ode to big government. It has no human scale at all. And I find it somewhat off-putting about Rockefeller that he was not a fiscal conservative.
John R. Price: Correct. And some of his best buddies were architects themselves of Olympian tastes and ambitions. And that’s partly why he was a very easy target. As we both agree, he was a big spender and didn’t have the same sense of a fiscal constraint that, say, Tom Dewey did, his predecessor as Republican governor. And so Rockefeller was easily portrayed by the conservatives as perhaps too rambunctious internationally — there still was that tinge of non-internationalism in the conservatives. And then that he was willing to spend — anything that he saw he’d throw money at.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. To be fair, Rockefellers had been key demons in the demonology of populism for a century at that point, along with East Coast bankers and railroads and Jews and immigrants and all the rest of it.
John R. Price: And the oil business. But the way in which the Rockefeller family were big spenders was a wonderful way. Because yes, the old man, the old Baptist from Cleveland who founded the dynasty, was a man whose reputation was deadly in many ways. His son created the Rockefeller Foundation and he created the blood bank, they created Colonial Williamsburg, they created the Rockefeller University which in turn generated all kinds of hybrid seeds, which allowed a revolution in agriculture and the feeding of millions of people. So the penance done by John D. Jr. was massive. And the other Rockefellers — and Nelson because he was the most visible — benefited from that somewhat now more benign reputation that the family had earned through the leadership of John D. Jr.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course the Rockefeller family also gave tremendous support to the Historically Black Colleges and Universities of the country.
John R. Price: Absolutely. Spellman College…
Geoff Kabaservice: And Nelson Rockefeller was an ardent supporter of both civil rights and civil liberties.
John R. Price: Yes, he was. But so was Tom Dewey, with more fiscal restraint.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I think even Robert Taft, though he was very conservative and isolationist, also was a supporter of civil rights. And that’s what differentiates to me the Barry Goldwater line of conservatives — the far right, if you will — from the old conservative tradition that was more Midwestern.
John R. Price: That is exactly right. I made the point earlier in passing, but the traditional Midwestern conservatives, both in the house and the Senate… Guys like McCulloch of Ohio, who was ranking Republican of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of that Civil Rights Act, was a real leader on it. And Lyndon Johnson, when he finally converted to being in favor of civil rights, having long played footsie with the Southern segregationist Democrats, Lyndon turned to the Republicans. He told Hubert Humphrey, his vice president, that they needed to go to the… or he wasn’t yet vice president… They needed to go to Everett McKinley Dirksen, who was the minority leader from Illinois who represented exactly that strain of Midwestern, traditional, pro-civil rights Republicans.
Dirksen, when he led the floor fight on cloture to keep the Democratic Southern segregationist filibuster from succeeding, Dirksen broke cloture with Republican votes, as I say, almost five-to-one as the Democrats did about two-and-a-half-to-one in favor of the Civil Rights bill. And Everett Dirksen, as he walked off the floor after the vote, turned to Barry Goldwater, who led five Republicans to oppose it, and he flicked his thumb on his teeth at Barry Goldwater.
Geoff Kabaservice: People tend to forget this, but Richard Nixon was considered to be the strongest supporter of civil rights inside the Eisenhower administration, or among the leaders who were in the top circle at any rate. Richard Nixon obviously was hated by the left for his anti-communism…
Geoff Kabaservice: …his red-baiting, as they saw it, in his elections and subsequently in the Congress. But he also did have that strain of support for civil rights pretty strongly within him in the ‘50s as well.
John R. Price: Yes, he did. And in fact, against the advice of many in his White House, when push came to shove within the first year that he was in the office as president, he had to respond to the Supreme Court case of Holmes vs. Alexander. This is not my special area, but it is important to note that was the case that finally — finally, after the Brown decision in 1954 — said, “Time’s up. You’ve got to do it now.” So Nixon had the hot potato. The Eisenhower Court, the Warren Court had made the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that they had to integrate the schools. But basically the phrase… I forget exactly what it was, but it was essentially, “with deliberate speed,” I think. And that was interpreted to mean in sort of Southern style: Let’s take our time about it. And White Citizens Councils formed in opposition. So Nixon had to face it when he had to either make sure that the decision was implemented or fall on his sword. And conservatives in the White House fought strenuously against his decision to really enforce that Supreme Court decision. But he did.
Geoff Kabaservice: Your book, John, is a very interesting counterpart to the series of Nixon memoirs written by Pat Buchanan. Of course, you served alongside Buchanan in Nixon’s White House. You and a number of other Ripon Society alumni were part of an identifiable moderate-to-liberal Republican group. Buchanan, of course, was trying to bring the conservative movement into the Nixon White House. And in Buchanan’s telling, the moderates come across as intolerant and unwilling to compromise. But what I think Buchanan overlooks is that the central issue animating the Ripon Society was its support for civil rights. And when you have a candidate like Barry Goldwater, who represents the conservative movement, who is voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that’s not an issue on which compromise is possible.
John R. Price: And as I say, we took our stand immediately prior to the convention in ‘64, at which Goldwater was finally nominated. And that convention was as angry, as bilious, as almost violent as the Democratic one later in ‘68. But it was very indicative of how these passions were right there on the surface. And we felt strongly. One reason Bill Scranton decided to seek that nomination against Barry Goldwater, despite the fact he knew it was a kamikaze mission, was because he had a sense of the historic role of the Republican Party, and he came from a longtime Republican-active family in Pennsylvania. And he stood up and tried to challenge Goldwater principally on that issue.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had come to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace as a member of Rockefeller’s staff. In the summer of 1964, you joined John Deardourff’s research operation in the Rockefeller campaign. He and Doug Bailey really formed the first campaign management outfit. And so you were there, seeing this unfold as Barry Goldwater is declaring that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” What was it like to be at that convention as a moderate Republican?
John R. Price: Well, going back a ways before that, which was the final moment of his acceptance speech… The moderates were a thin if not hardy band, and we were trying to figure out some way to stop the Goldwater nomination. The polling of Republicans in the party at large across the country indicated Goldwater was not their choice, not their first choice. Rather, what you’d had was this powerful, well thought-out guerilla movement led by William Rusher and Clifton White and others to nominate Goldwater from the ground up. And so the moderates were left at San Francisco with little to do except try to win over some of the swingables, some of the winnable among the delegates, by trying to propose platform planks which could try to peel them off from the hard right — which was really in control of the convention. And we failed abjectly.
Rockefeller himself, after a very, very vicious California primary only weeks before the convention, spoke to the convention. And he talked about one of the planks we had offered, about condemnation of extremism. And he stood up on the rostrum about 30 feet above where I was standing — I was literally right below him — and facing the new Goldwater delegation from California, which had just won when they beat Rockefeller three weeks earlier in the primary. And they were 20 feet away from me, with orange life jackets on and cowboy hats. And Rockefeller stood up there 25, 30 feet above me, crying out against extremism and saying this was not what the Republican Party was. And he then went on to talk about bomb threats to his campaign headquarters and to his person. And the delegates began to stir with anger and rage, and the Bronx cheers became louder. And finally he said, “You may not like to hear it, ladies and gentlemen, but it’s the truth.” And at that point, right in front of me, the front row of the Goldwater California delegates stood up on their chairs and spat at Rockefeller, which happened to be in my direction — and I was nearer. But it was a raw, very difficult, very angry place.
Geoff Kabaservice: Everyone in 1964 would’ve understood that a condemnation of extremism within the Republican Party really specifically referred to the role played by the John Birch Society.
John R. Price: Yes. Which was a group — initially, I think, in California — which had made an icon of some virtually unknown person who was elevated into a figure of heroism. And there were a lot of funding sources that supported it. And they really, really took after Eisenhower, accusing him of being a communist dupe. This is a man who had fought with Zhukov against the Nazis and also was the head of NATO’s alliance against the Communists. So that may have escaped them. But they did make a big point of Eisenhower being almost pro-communist in his sympathies, which was staggering. And then they, I must say, in ‘62, they took after Richard Nixon in the primary when he went back to California after his loss to Jack Kennedy and sought the governorship to try it again, probably. And he won the primary, but the loss of blood by the attacks from the Birchers and other right-wingers meant that he, in the general election, lost to the Democrat, Pat Brown.
Geoff Kabaservice: And from that episode — and probably others, at least, but certainly from that — Nixon distrusted the far right, did he not?
John R. Price: Very much. More than distrusted. He told John Whitaker, one of his longtime aides and a colleague of mine, who became a colleague of mine… He said, “You know, I think the right wing just don’t like people.” He literally said that. He said, “I don’t think they like people.” And he carried those wounds with him consistently. Pat Buchanan, whom you cited earlier, Pat has an interesting point in one of his books — and the two books are interesting. Pat Buchanan says Nixon, when he would talk with Buchanan — Buchanan being his emissary to the right wing, to the hard right — Pat Buchanan says Nixon never, ever used the word “we.” It was always “they.” He never identified himself with Buchanan as a hard conservative.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. Buchanan does point out that Nixon came of political age before the conservative movement got started in the mid-1950s. But what Buchanan puts less emphasis on is that the conservative movement got started in reaction to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, of which Richard Nixon was the vice president.
John R. Price: Yes. That’s a fairly important point. And also I will mention that Nixon was sort of the spear-carrier, as you referred earlier to him, while vice president for Eisenhower, who sought to and whose instinct was to remain above the fray, at least visibly above the fray. And he basically dispatched Richard Nixon to try to help get rid of McCarthy, Joe McCarthy, who was a darling of the right wing at that point — erratic and irresponsible, but they loved him. But he was a real problem for Eisenhower because he went around accusing everybody up to and including General George Catlett Marshall — who’d been Army chief of staff in World War II and Secretary of State —of, again, being some sort of a communist dupe. And Eisenhower was furious at questioning the patriotism of George Marshall. And so he had Nixon try to work on helping to cut McCarthy out, and Nixon was very much a part of that. And then Tom Dewey was too. Eisenhower turned to Tom Dewey to say, “What kind of a lawyer can I get to try and bring McCarthy down?” — in the Army-McCarthy hearings. And he turned to Joseph Nye Welch, who was himself a Grinnell College grad.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I would say that the Birch Society movement was strongest in California in the early 1960s compared to any other state. And what Nixon fatally underestimated in his contest for governor was that his candidacy presented an opportunity for the Birchers and other McCarthy loyalists to have revenge.
John R. Price: Yes, no question. No question. But it was not just a personal revenge. It was partly issues. For example, one thing I came across in my work trying to put the book together was the fact that Nixon had some pro-labor sympathies. And one of the issues which was beginning to germinate among the conservatives as early as ‘60-‘61 was an anti-union movement called the Right to Work laws, which were to be passed at state levels, and which were to inhibit the ability of unions to organize in those states and to prevent union shops and so on. Well, Nixon opposed Right to Work. So there was a policy issue and not just a vengeance issue with which the right was anxious to beat him up.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. In fact, the Right to Work issue was what had caused California to fall to the Democrats in the first place in that 1958 election. And union supporters, by and large, swamped Republican candidates in ’58, and Nixon had sort of been out there trying to drum up support in his role as vice president during that election. So he would’ve seen Right to Work as a foolish political hill to die on, put it that way.
John R. Price: Yes. Good way to put it.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. And Nixon’s psychology, at the time that you first got to know him, must have been affected on some level by the 1960 election, when he would’ve had a much better case than Donald Trump to argue that the election had really been legitimately won by himself and had been taken by the Democrats through underhanded means.
John R. Price: Yes. I never had a personal conversation with him about the 1960 election. But one of my friends was a man named John A. Wells, “Jack” Wells, who was a lawyer in a New York firm and long wheelhorse of the Republican Party. He’d worked for Willkie in 1940 at Tom Dewey’s behest. He then worked for Dewey in both of his campaigns. And Nixon dispatched Jack Wells in 1960, after the election, to Chicago, to Cook County. And he then probed, as a good forensic lawyer, the election returns. And he came back to Nixon and to the Republican National Committee and said, “There is more than adequate grounds for you to contest the election and a strong likelihood, based on what I’ve seen, that you probably could overturn Cook County, which in turn would probably mean Illinois falls into your column. And then there’s Texas… But this would go a long way toward you overturning the election.”
And Nixon… Here’s the contrast that you’re driving at. Nixon said no to Jack Wells and to the Republican National Committee, which was salivating to go after it. He said no. He said, “I remember the 1876 Tilden-Hayes presidential race,” which was so close that it was not finally resolved for three or four months after the election. And Nixon said to Jack Wells, “I cannot put the country through that.” Rather a different ethos or attitude about constitutional process.
Geoff Kabaservice: Rather. So you were director of delegate intelligence for the 1968 Rockefeller for President campaign. And of course, that fell short and Nixon got the nomination. When and how did you actually go to work for him?
John R. Price: Well, I actually had worked in ’63 for a summer job doing the original research on Barry Goldwater. Then, as you mentioned, I took two weeks off of a summer associate job at a law firm to go to San Francisco. But in ’68, what happened was… It was sort of stop-start, and Nelson Rockefeller was being coy and thinking that he had a better shot at being nominated if he appeared to have the party approach him instead of his going full tilt after the nomination. So things were poking along. And some of the key financial figures in the Republican Party approached me and said, “Look, let’s ask Nelson if he would take you on as head of delegate intelligence,” meaning trying to put the dossiers together on every one of the delegates: understanding what their interests were, how they might be appealed to, what civic organizations, church, alumni groups, what banks they banked at. How could we find ways to talk to them and bring them along?
And so we started late in the game, after Rockefeller had pulled out. And Spiro Agnew, in fury — Spiro having backed him thoroughly — turned elsewhere. So we had a long uphill struggle, because it was late. And also important to remember about Rockefeller… Rockefeller was more a policy person than he was a delegate hunter. And he really believed that if you studied an issue hard enough and long enough, and if you had enough experts writing about it, and if you then digested it and had a good speechwriter helping you, that you would win elections by policy alone, really. Richard Nixon was a little different. He was the man of the thousand chicken dinners at precinct committee meetings.
So Rockefeller’s degree of avidness, avidity for delegate hunting and cultivating county chairs and so on, just wasn’t there. It just wasn’t there. So it was the combination of a late start, of Nelson having disappointed people in the past so they just wouldn’t stick their necks out again for him, and of the fact that he just didn’t focus on the delegate side, even though I and my group and the delegate hunters with whom we worked were doing our best.
Geoff Kabaservice: So how did the Nixon offer come about?
John R. Price: The Nixon offer came about through two people who were very close to Richard Nixon. One was Walter Thayer, who was a mentor of mine and the president of the New York Herald-Tribune. And I called him the secretary general of the Eastern Republican Establishment. He worked with John Hay Whitney, who had owned the Tribune until he sold it because he couldn’t afford to carry it anymore. And Thayer called me — and he’d backed Rockefeller — and he said, “I hope you’d be willing to work for Richard Nixon.” And then Charlie McWhorter, a wonderful guy who was a chairman of the national Young Republicans years earlier and knew everybody in the party — he was a bachelor whose total energy was spent on Republican Party matters — he called me likewise and said, “I hope you’ll work for Nixon,” for whom Charlie had worked when Nixon was vice-president.
And I was weighing all this because I had not started out as a Nixon supporter. So what did I do? I went to see my boss, from whom I had taken a leave of absence in Brooklyn, in Bed-Stuy. I was working on a community development corporation. And I went to see him… We had breakfast at Junior’s on Flatbush Avenue — cheesecake for breakfast. And I said to him, “John, what should I do?”
Geoff Kabaservice: This is John Doar?
John R. Price: Well, I was going to get there — that was the punchline! But John Doar was a Republican from New Richmond, Wisconsin who, when Eisenhower and Herb Brownell formed the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, had come down as a staff lawyer and then stayed on after Kennedy won. And Bob Kennedy had recognized John Doar and promoted him to assistant attorney general for civil rights.
So John Doar was my boss now at Bed-Stuy. And I said, “What do I do?” And he said, “John, you’re a Republican, aren’t you?” And I said, “I am.” And he said, “Well, don’t be squeamish about it. Look at the other side. You’ve got John Connolly, Southern Democrat governor. You’ve got Dave Dubinsky, big labor union leader. And you’ve got Dick Daley, the mayor of a corrupt Chicago.” He said, “Of course you work for Richard Nixon.” This is the John Doar who led the 44-lawyers-strong impeachment team against Richard Nixon some years later for the House Judiciary Committee — on which, among others, was Hillary Rodham. He’s the guy who pushed me into working for Richard Nixon.
Geoff Kabaservice: Tell me about your position for which you were hired in 1968 and into 1969.
John R. Price: Yes. Well, first of all and most interestingly, Nixon had gotten intrigued by a Democrat named Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Pat was partisan, a partisan Democrat, and had worked for Bobby Kennedy against Nixon until Kennedy was killed. And he then worked for Hubert Humphrey against Nixon until the election, when Nixon won. But what attracted Nixon, what intrigued him, was something Moynihan had written a year and a half earlier. He wrote it and delivered a speech at the Americans for Democratic Action. In it, Moynihan was basically saying about a time not unlike our own, “Look, we are in a situation approaching anarchy. The confidence and trust in institutions, the necessary institutions holding together a society, is dwindling, drying up.” And he said, “Liberals and conservatives have to come together to try to address people’s real needs. Otherwise, this society is going to collapse. The social contract will go and we won’t have enough respect for institutions to keep going.”
That appealed to Nixon. And it was the original basis of their connection, their almost spiritual connection. It wasn’t so much about welfare reform or about urban development or housing. It was on that basic Burkean notion — Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish office holder and political philosopher and ethical philosopher — of society needing this glue to hold it together. And that’s what first brought them together.
So anyway, Nixon hires Moynihan, and I was on the transition staff for Len Garment. And I wound up having lunch with Pat Moynihan and he said, “Let’s do it together. I want you to come in and be my counsel and you’ll do what I’m doing. And I want you to help me with the machinery of this to-be-created cabinet-level body for the formulation of domestic policy, urban policy” — which means, as he said, cities, which means the race problem. So that’s how it began. I was working for Pat as his counsel and supporting the machinery of the domestic cabinet, which the President chaired, basically. That was what it was.
Geoff Kabaservice: Pat Buchanan, in his book The Greatest Comeback, had an interesting appraisal of Nixon. He said, “While his judgment on people was not infallible, when it came to talent he wanted the best. And he was not put off if the best had not wanted him.” And he gives as an example not only Moynihan, who was a lifelong Democrat, but also Henry Kissinger of Harvard, who had worked for Nelson Rockefeller, and also John Connolly, who was Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, who had delivered Texas for Humphrey in 1968. Buchanan continues on: “The selection of these men testifies to the truth that Nixon was no ideologue, no true believer. He had instincts one could call conservative, but reflexive reactions that were liberal.”
Geoff Kabaservice: And you, in your book, wrote at one point that “Nixon had to remind himself every morning that he was a Republican. He was a man of endless expedience. That made him a great politician.”
John R. Price: I think that that’s absolutely right. And expedience is what most everyone thinks of when they look at Richard Nixon in the rear-view mirror, and certainly at the time. But I think that he had within him something which had probably germinated from the time of his mother, who was a progressive Republican politically but who was a Quaker and a very observant one, and a very important figure in Nixon’s emotional life and his life generally. And I think that Pat Buchanan is absolutely right. Pat also elsewhere uses the word “eclectic.” He said Nixon was an eclectic. He would listen to every point of view. But Pat also says that he said — this is Buchanan talking: “I never could understand it. Here’s Richard Nixon, who’s absolutely brilliant, who’s had great achievements in his life, who’s a centrist with basically even liberal policies. And yet the establishment wouldn’t accept him. And he craved it. He longed for it.”
So there was part of that too. It was that he felt that the liberal policies might bring along more of the establishment and the Democrats. He said at one point, “The Democrats have to support the Family Assistance Plan. It’s logical for them.” But he understood Republican politics better than he did internal Democratic politics. But I think Nixon definitely had these instincts which were liberal. We can get more to specific policies if you wish.
Geoff Kabaservice: Tell me a little more about Nixon’s family history and how that may have influenced his views on social policies.
John R. Price: Yes. His father… I never studied the family. I’ve read the typical biographies. There’s a number of very good ones, a couple of more recent ones. And they suggest that Nixon’s father was erratic and not successful in the various things he undertook, from being a citrus farmer to running a gas station and a produce store. His mother was the central figure emotionally, I think, in Nixon’s life. As I mentioned, she was a progressive Republican in the politics of the time when Nixon was born and being raised, born in 1913. And she was also a very, very observant Quaker. The Quaker roots growing up through her family tree were very strong and very traditional in the sense of things like having been important on the Underground Railway and in the Civil Rights Movement.
Nixon himself was a member of the NAACP when he first ran for Congress in 1946. The roots and the trajectory of his mother’s belief system were there, I think. And I found a picture at the Hoover Presidential Library of him with Quaker relatives, including his grandmother, in West Branch, Iowa, Herbert Hoover’s hometown. And it just reinforced for me the fact that this was an ingredient which you cannot overlook in Nixon’s life. He didn’t wear it on his sleeve. And he was much more observant of it than was Herbert Hoover, according to archivists at the Hoover Museum, Hoover Library. So I think that was a very, very urgent part of his upbringing. It’s interesting to remember, Whittier College — to which he went because he couldn’t afford to go to Harvard where he’d been accepted — was in a Quaker town. The hotel at which he was first nominated for Congress was called the William Penn Hotel. This was a very Quaker community in which he was raised.
And I’ll go to the end of the story in a way… When I went to see Richard Nixon in exile on Elba, called San Clemente, after he had resigned from office… I was out there two years later and I wound up going in to see him. And in a very emotional moment — he was very emotionally needy — he took my hand in both of his and walked backwards with me, leading me with my hand cupped in his, across the room and sat me down, put his leg up on a hassock because he’d been threatened with a blood problem which was life-threatening and he was still being very cautious. And he turned to me and he smiled and said, “So, John,you were the house liberal then, weren’t you?” And when I told this story to his daughter, Trisha, she put her hand over mine and she said, “John, that was what was the bond between you and my father: the liberalism. And it was partly the Quaker ancestry, I’m convinced,” she said.
Geoff Kabaservice: So Nixon’s social policies, as proposed, included his guaranteed income for families with children proposal, the Family Assistance Plan that we’ve alluded to; his dramatic expansion of the food stamp and nutrition programs; and his call for a universal health insurance program, which of course, was not passed. And you wrote that the Moynihan-Nixon policies, if they had been enacted in full, “might have entirely changed the shape of domestic events over the next decades.” How so?
John R. Price: Well, I think, again, going back to that first glue that held Nixon and Moynihan together, namely confidence in institutions working. I think that though the unemployment level was not high back in ’69 when the Family Assistance Plan was proposed, despite that there were millions, millions of Americans living below the government’s stated poverty line. These people were struggling and they were in need, which was not being met. The welfare program was state- and locally-administered, so its impact was patchy. The eligibility standards varied from place to place, the benefits levels varied from state to state. And so my feeling is that had they been able to get that floor under the income — not just of working families but of everything — they would collapse the welfare system along with the working poor into a single national floor under income for families with children.
And I think what it would have done, in conjunction with a health insurance program, would have been to relieve anxiety, to have given you more of a sense of the efficacy of institutions, of the fact that the elite or the governing groups really did understand what was going on out there in Clay County, West Virginia, or in rural Oklahoma, or in upstate New York. And I think it would have — not in a dramatic or in a specific way — but I think it would have in an overall way improved the confidence Americans had in the institutions that were governing them.
Geoff Kabaservice: And something else you also mentioned is that kind of framework of economic security could have reduced the scale of economic divisions, which both play into racial antagonisms but also underlie the kind of grievances that eventually would surface in conservative populism.
John R. Price: Yes. And really, it’s the point I just made in a way, but carrying it further. And I think that the calls by the populists, Nixon could have preempted in some ways, and still done it within the construct of reason and rationality. As I said, he was a constitutionalist when it came to 1960. Nixon was very understanding of politics, was he not? And he understood how to speak to needs which people had and didn’t have satisfied. I think that if he’d gotten the programs he sought that the temperature would have turned down, that there would have been less drive for the later, more strident populism, and that the society as a whole would have been more stable. I’m just convinced of that.
But of course, that’s “What if?” That’s “What if?” And all I could really do… That was the punchline at the end of, what, 340 pages and ten years of thinking. But rather, the gritty of it, the details of it were in what he tried to do, looking at the policy alternatives, weighing the facts, weighing the arguments. It was not just a political, it was a policy discussion and decision.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you and I have talked on numerous occasions about the number of Ripon Society alumni who ended up in the Nixon Administration, people like Chris DeMuth, Lee Huebner, Bob Patricelli, Steve Kurzman… And in many ways, Ripon actually provided some of the framework, it seems, for Nixon’s August 8th, 1969 “New Federalism” address. That was a phrase that Lee Huebner had used in one of the Ripon Forum’s editorials. And similar in shape to the way Nixon developed it: using a money-based (not services-based) attack on poverty, and revenue sharing. So that also seems consonant with Moynihan’s ideas as well.
John R. Price: Oh, very much. In fact, I make the point that Moynihan, some three months before that, in a May 1969 memo he sent to Nixon, outlined virtually everything that wound up in the August 8th talk called “The New Federalism.” Moynihan talked, for example, about revenue sharing. And he said, “One thing that could do, since it’s totally flexible use by the recipient state and locality, is they could reduce the regressive sales tax so that the poor could be even more relieved in these high-tax jurisdictions.” He was seeing it always in the sense of, how do you address the questions of poverty and people struggling just to survive on inadequate income, whether it was a welfare check for Mississippi or whether it was a job at the minimum wage and you had five kids?
Geoff Kabaservice: Now, when we get to the Family Assistance Plan, you had actually planted the idea of a negative income tax in Nixon’s mind at a dinner you had with him at the Links Club in New York in January 1968. This had been a long-standing proposal from the Ripon Society.
John R. Price: Yes, it had.
Geoff Kabaservice: Although it did also have its genesis in Milton Friedman’s 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom. Can you tell me a little more about the ideas that led to the Family Assistance Plan?
John R. Price: Yes. You mentioned Republican sources… Actually, it was very bipartisan, because there had been a number of economists who’d been on Kennedy’s and Johnson’s Council of Economic Advisors who as well supported a negative income tax.
Geoff Kabaservice: James Tobin, for one.
John R. Price: And Pechman at Brookings, Joseph Pechman. So this had roots on both sides of the aisle. It also tracked or looked at a European model, which had been in place for decades, which was called the family allowance or the children’s allowance. And this was something Moynihan had been drawn to, in France and Holland and Great Britain. There were payments made to every family on account of the number of children they had or per capita payment. I tried to argue him out of it as soon as I was asked by him to do welfare with him. And I said, “Pat, this is just too expensive. If you give money to every single person, the sticker shock is going to be too much. Republicans can absolutely be written off, but even many Democrats couldn’t go along with it.”
And so finally, I tried at great length to bring Moynihan around to the negative income tax, which was an income-tested floor, the payments for which would reduce as the income grew of the recipient family with children. He was slow to come around. But finally, the ideas began percolating up through the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to Secretary Finch, a great close friend of Nixon’s, and George Schultz, who had been at the University of Chicago and was now Labor secretary, and a formidable man in public policy who just died this year at age 101, having served as secretary of State and head of the budget bureau and so forth.
So all of these came together in a proposal that Nixon finally embraced, which was the Family Assistance Plan. It was a uniform floor under the income of all families with children, and which was income-tested, meaning as your income went up, the payment declined. But it was meant to sustain families on welfare in those former low-payment (or almost no-payment) states where they’d been way below the poverty line in what they were paid. And even in the higher-payment states like New York, Wisconsin, New Jersey, what had happened was there was a little bit in the proposal that would give the big states some fiscal relief — not a lot, but some.
Geoff Kabaservice: So the negative income tax approach was different both from Moynihan’s preferred approach and also from Universal Basic Income, which is a policy that’s had a strong revival with the 2020 presidential campaign of Andrew Yang. What would you tell the present-day advocates of UBI?
John R. Price: Well, first of all, I’m not sure there’s all that much difference. I think it’s terminology, and that term covers a big circus tent area. I think I would tell them what I said to Moynihan, which is: Marshall your resources. Focus on the areas of greatest need. Focus on those who are truly poor and who are most needy. And that’s what Nixon finally did. McGovern, George McGovern from South Dakota, who ran against Nixon in 1972, paid the price for one version of that Universal Basic Income idea. Because he had what he called a “demo-grant”: $1,000 to every woman, man and child per whatever, per year or per month. And Nixon just nailed him on it — because, again, of the sticker price. It was the shock value. And so I would urge Yang and any others to be more careful in the cost issues.
As we see on this broader bill that’s now being considered, cost is really important to a few people. Republicans are for sure going to be there as well as opposing anything Biden does. But for fiscal reasons, and for effectiveness reasons, cost should be one issue. And one way to go about it is a negative income tax, income-tested approach. The other thing is — and this still is an issue, just as it was in Nixon’s time. There are other programs out there for the poor or the near-poor. Things like food stamps. Well, we looked at what do we do with food stamps? Do we cash them out? That is, do we raise the Family Assistance Plan by so much and no longer provide food stamps and say, “Okay, out of the cash you’re getting now, you will pay for the food that you were using food stamps for before”? Or what if you have an income subsidy on rent or something like that?
This was a place where we came a cropper. And I think that anything being looked at today — child tax credit and all these other services — you need to look at the total, if you will, income effect or purchasing power effect on a recipient family or individual, and make sure that you’re not creating for the poor or the near-poor a package of things which will add up to far more than a middle-income family could afford and will build huge resentment toward the recipients.
So there’s this trade-off of cost, of integration, of other related programs to address need, and of the resentment factor. Some people say, “Well, we should have it universal. That way there would be no resentment.” Well, fine. But are you going to spend $2 trillion a year on income maintenance? I don’t think so.
Geoff Kabaservice: So some historians have claimed that Nixon’s heart wasn’t really in the FAP, that he made a play for it…
John R. Price: Nonsense.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay.
John R. Price: And in fact, Gene McCarthy — a name that many of you will remember, United States senator… I bumped into Gene McCarthy at a cocktail party in London in November of ’73, which was two years after I’d left the White House and after McCarthy had led the liberals opposing Nixon’s FAP. And he said to me, “Well, of course they were duping you. The only guy there who wanted this was Pat Moynihan.” And I said, “It was actually also Richard Nixon.” And I cite for that a lot of conservative, flaring-nostril, rabidly opposed conservative opinion. And Human Events, one of the major publications of the conservative movement, was constantly editorializing and running news stories opposing the Family Assistance Plan. And finally, there were stories when Nixon finally dropped it, before the ’72 election. They were wiping their brows and saying, “Phew, glad that’s over.” There were editorials in Human Events saying, “Nixon fought for over two years — and not at all incompetently — for the Family Assistance Plan. He really believed in it.” And I rest my case. That was coming from Human Events.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. There actually were considerable conservative defections from the Nixon presidency due to his support for FAP as well as the opening to China, as well as his creation of OSHA and the EPA. One can question whether Nixon in totality was a liberal, but I think there’s no denying, as you write, that Nixon was the last liberal Republican president in the sense that he was the last Republican president to pursue an array of liberal policies.
John R. Price: I couldn’t agree more. That’s really the point of my book. What happened was that Reagan, who was the emerging hero of the conservative movement — as I put it, the Elisha who picked up the mantle of Goldwater’s Elijah — Reagan saw the Family Assistance Plan as a means by which he, Reagan, could begin to pull away the party from Nixon’s vision of a strong and active federal government on behalf of people’s needs and turn it into what it became — 50 years of what we’ve had as a Republican Party.
I was there when Nixon briefed Reagan at San Clemente on his welfare reform. It was clear to me that this was Reagan’s intention, and it was made even more clear by the memoirs of the people Reagan had working for him on welfare, in which they specifically said it was an anti-Nixon move that he did — anti-Nixon Republican as well as anti-Democratic. So Reagan saw it as a very valuable intra-party fight tool.
Geoff Kabaservice: Since you mentioned Human Events, I actually pulled up a letter from the editor of Human Events to Harry Dent, who was one of Nixon’s ambassadors to the conservatives. He wrote — this is 1969, December — “The last few weeks have been a disaster so far as the administration’s conservative image is concerned vis Finch’s actions on the Whitten Amendment” — which would have barred HEW from withholding funds to segregated school districts — “the doubling of money to the arts, the continuation of the poverty program, the furthering of trade with communist China, the drastic cuts in the military. Damn it, we can’t sell this nonsense to our readers.”
John R. Price: Oh yes. And as a result of things like that, Pat Buchanan asked many of us Ripon people to go out and shrive ourselves, to sackcloth and ashes out in front of the White House. He was really pounding away at us as an adversary saying, just this, “My God, the conservatives. Look, and you’ve got liberal Republican Ripon Society people working for you. So go out and shrive yourselves. Confess to sin.” It was going the wrong way, even after Lee Huebner had looked at votes in the Senate and House, which showed that liberal Republicans were voting with the administration far more often than were conservative Republicans.
The thing which finally put the cork back in the bottle was that Lee said to Haldeman and to the person actually handling this inquiry, this heresy inquiry… He said, “Well now look… Why don’t you ask Pat Buchanan and Tom Huston to go out and stand with us? And why don’t you tell them to call out the American Conservative Union and Human Events and the National Review on all their criticisms of Nixon?” Dead silence after that.
Geoff Kabaservice: Lee Huebner had told me that after he’d said that, he passed by Buchanan in the hallway, to which Buchanan said, “Touché!”
John R. Price: Right, exactly.
Geoff Kabaservice: So we’re getting here at the duality of Richard Nixon. It’s both the question of his good angels and his bad angels…
Geoff Kabaservice: …but also the ways in which he saw a Republican party that was balanced between opposing conservative and even progressive instincts and how he wanted to find the center of that party.
John R. Price: Yes. And he was coming from a trajectory, as I said, of Dewey and Eisenhower in his own instincts. And he was looking at a party which was transforming. Lyndon Johnson, when he shifted gears and embraced the Civil Rights Act, said to his people, “This means that the South has been lost by the Democrats for a generation.” Well, read maybe three generations so far and counting. And Nixon understood that. Buchanan and Nixon understood that. And I don’t think that either of them was a racist. I don’t believe that. But they also saw where the politics was going, and they tried through other means like an appeal on cultural issues to the South. So Nixon was… I wouldn’t call it schizophrenic about it. He just was enough of a master politician to understand where all these moving parts were.
Geoff Kabaservice: And Nixon in 1968 had seen the considerable appeal of George Wallace to Democratic voters in northern states, not just in the segregated South.
John R. Price: That’s exactly right. Wallace carried Dixie. He got, I think it was 46 Electoral College votes, carrying virtually all of Dixie, all of what Strom Thurmond had carried in the 1948 campaign against Harry Truman and Henry Wallace. And so Nixon surely saw that. But he saw just what you’re talking about, which is that, frankly, a lot of the Bob Kennedy, Robert Kennedy voters then went to Wallace. They went to Wallace in the autumn general election. They were Northern, urban, lunch-pail, Roman Catholic industrial workers, by and large, that went that way. But they went that way for similar reasons of resentment of the elites, of being disdained or talked down to. It was the “deplorables” issue. Let’s be honest. These people were condescended to — or felt they were. And that was part of it. It wasn’t just an economic or lunch-pail issue.
Geoff Kabaservice: Since you raised this issue… You had talked about how Eisenhower had repressed the isolationist Old Right, and that it eventually came back in the form of the Barry Goldwater candidacy. Would it be fair to say that, curiously, it was Ronald Reagan who suppressed the conservative populist instincts in the Republican Party that had surfaced in Nixon’s administration and that, in a sense, came back with a vengeance in the form of Donald Trump?
John R. Price: Maybe so. Maybe Reagan, apart from charm and a certain empathy that he had, maybe Reagan was able to effect things like major tax cuts and pivot more toward the well-to-do and so on. And he managed to hide that through, as I say, charm and good looks and personal warmth and connecting with voters, so that it wasn’t so much there. His rhetoric was fine, too. He was complaining about the things that a lot of these folks also felt and complained about.
Geoff Kabaservice: Of course, when one thinks about the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, it tends to overshadow much of what had come before. And yet, again, comparing Nixon to other former presidents, shall we say… When Barry Goldwater and other conservative leaders in the Senate came to tell him that he should go, he went. And he didn’t try to have a “stab in the back” narrative about how Republicans had had their government stolen from them by the Democrats.
John R. Price: No. Rather what he did was, over time — and not that much time — he reinvented himself and he became a statesman. And he focused on that which I think always had most attracted him and where he felt the most resonance in his real self, which was global affairs and peacemaking. Pat Buchanan, again, says, “You know, when Richard Nixon came into office in that January, he really, really believed in a Wilsonian/Judeo-Christian notion of beating swords into plowshares and swords into pruning hooks. And he believed he would be a peacemaker.” And I think that’s where he, again, found himself. He found his inner core and he went about it with formidable effect and accomplishment — and really, for many people, overcame the picture of Nixon as a (for some people) as a cringing, malevolent, dishonorable person. I think that he came back.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, John, thank you so much for talking to me. That’s a good note on which to end. I cannot recommend too highly your wonderful book, The Last Liberal Republican, about Richard Nixon and his social policies. Thank you so much for being with me, John.
John R. Price: My great pleasure, Geoffrey. Thank you too.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to The Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. If you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
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The post The Last Liberal Republican President, with John R. Price appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Sowell on Academic Standards By: David Henderson

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been reading and enjoying Jason Riley’s Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.

One particular passage about the weird nature of academia stood out. It fits so much of my experience. I’ll quote from the book and then tell my own similar story from early in my career.

Riley writes:

“I doubt seriously if I would have written Basic Economics if I were still part of an economics department,” Sowell told me. “People would have said, ‘What the hell is Sowell doing writing a book about things any decently trained economist already knows? He’s supposed to be advancing the frontiers of knowledge.’” Basic Economics has sold more copies than any other book he has written, but his fellow faculty members likely would have shrugged—or worse. “I remember at UCLA sitting among the senior faculty deciding the fate of a junior faculty member, reviewing contracts and granting tenure,” he said. “And I remember one fellow being considered, and someone said he’d written a couple of very good textbooks. And then one of my colleagues said, ‘I don’t regard that as evidence of scholarship. I regard it as negative evidence of scholarship.’”

I’m pretty sure I know who the junior faculty member was. The main reason is that the person I have in mind is the only assistant professor who wrote two textbooks during that era. Each was path-breaking in its own way, but especially the macro text. I learned a ton by TAing for this assistant professor in his very rigorous introduction to macro class. I’ve written him. He replied that if the event happened in academic year 1972-73, then yes, it was he. The person I have in mind is Chuck Baird, whom, coincidentally, I posted about earlier this year.

Now to my own story that’s similar to Tom Sowell’s. I was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester’s Graduate School of Management from 1975-79. The faculty really cared about hiring and junior faculty were listened to. We had each received a pile of CVs and were discussing how to winnow them down. One promising candidate had listed on his CV an op/ed he’d written for the New York Times. My sense, by the way, was that although many of the faculty on ideological grounds did not favor the NYT, what I’m about to tell you is not about ideology. I think the faculty member’s reaction would have been almost as strong if the job candidate had had an op/ed in the Wall Street Journal. Also, it wasn’t about content because no one at the meeting had actually read the op/ed.

Here’s the line I remember crystal clearly from one of my colleagues:

(Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,In the coming days, tens of millions of Americans and their children will participate in a silly, unhealthy annual ritual rooted in mysticism and superstition. And they’ll also celebrate Halloween.The silly ritual to which I’m referring, of course, is our semiannual tradition of changing the clocks to accommodate daylight saving time (DST)—an onerous state time mandate detrimental to public health and safety, manipulated by corporatists, supported by a handful of childless insomniac socialites, and based on so-called “science” debunked decades ago. Indeed, even the name “daylight saving time” is a lie: The ritual merely shifts time; it doesn’t save anything—except, perhaps, a few jobs on K Street and in the Florida leisure industry.And so, my friends, it’s time I provided a full-throated explanation of why DST should be eliminated, before it’s too late.(i.e., next Sunday.)DST: A Classic Case of Government FailurePerhaps the easiest and most obvious criticism of DST is that the policy has utterly failed to achieve its primary aim—energy conservation. Originally adopted in 1918 during World War I, reinstated during World War II, and finally made permanent under the Uniform Time Act in 1966, DST was intended to (somehow) save electricity by requiring less light in the evenings. However, real-world studies repeatedly have shown that DST not only doesn’t conserve energy, but may actually waste it. For example, a 2008 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that DST increased residential electricity demand in Indiana by about 1 percent, as reduced demand for lighting was more than offset by increased demand for heating and cooling, especially in cold-morning Octobers. The policy therefore cost Indiana households an extra $9 million per year, plus annual “social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million”—costs that the authors predict are likely even higher in other parts of the United States. Indeed, DST’s net energy drain is probably even bigger today, as it’s been extended into November (thus raising heating/cooling costs) while electricity savings from keeping the lights off have shrunk because today’s light bulbs are more efficient (and thus cheaper to keep on).A separate study from Australia made similar conclusions, finding that decreased lighting use in the evenings was offset by increased use in the mornings. And that’s just electricity. Other studies show that DST could increase other types of energy consumption. For example, a 1993 study found that DST causes both “a rise in evening traffic and … an increase in fuel consumption and hence a higher pollution level in the atmosphere,” as well as “a rise in secondary pollutants” due to shifted traffic patterns. Others have found the same. Overall, there’s no evidence that DST significantly decreases energy consumption.Despite this policy failure, DST not only persists but actually has been repeatedly expanded to cover more and more of our year, thanks—as Michael Downing, author of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, explains—to intense lobbying by the U.S. industries that benefit financially from lighter evenings. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, it wasn’t farmers who wanted DST—they actually opposed it because they “now had an hour less of morning light to milk their cows and get their goods ready for market, let alone for commuters or children waiting for school buses in the dark.” Instead, the original, post-war implementation of DST was driven by the oil and gas companies that enjoyed the additional gasoline consumption. The gas and fuel industries were then joined by the golf, home improvement, and barbecue/patio industries to lobby for the 1986 expansion of DST from six to seven months, because each industry gained hundreds of millions in additional sales revenue each year because of the extended evening daylight hours. Finally, the 2005 expansion of DST—from seven months to eight (second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November)—was driven by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) and U.S. candymakers, each of which wanted Halloween to occur during DST because it boosted candy and, again, gasoline sales. “It gave the children more time to trick or treat and eat more candy … and the NACS credits that extra month of daylight saving with a $1 billion increase in annual [gasoline] sales.” (Big Candy also supported the 1986 expansion but had to lobby for another two decades before achieving the Halloween breakthrough.)As we’ve discussed, political pressure has long kept many U.S. government programs afloat for decades after they’ve been proven to be “unqualified failures.” DST is no different.DST Is Anti-Health and ScienceThe policy also imperils Americans’ health and safety. For starters, the semiannual time change results in all sorts of maladies in the days thereafter: car crashes and pedestrian deaths; workplace injuries; heart attacks and strokes; depression; and “adverse medical events” because of “human error.” (Mental note: Don’t get hurt/sick on time-change weekends.) A switch to permanent DST, moreover, wouldn’t solve many of the policy’s current risks. For starters, dark mornings caused by DST in April and October endanger millions of children forced to wait for the school bus before sunrise. Indeed, “when temporary, year-round DST was adopted in response to an Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo, increased fatalities among school-aged children in the morning were noted between January and April. These findings may be due to darkness lasting longer in the morning when children are traveling to school, while other factors also may be at play.”Dead children. My God.DST also causes health problems for adults because it screws with our natural circadian rhythms. As the Wall Street Journal explains:The fall-winter clock, known as standard time, is closer to the sun’s natural rise and set, meaning it is more aligned with our internal clocks that tell us to sleep at night and wake at daylight. When clocks spring ahead in March and daylight lasts longer in the evening, the cues to go to sleep come later than our biological clocks are accustomed to, says Till Roenneberg, a sleep researcher and professor of chronobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.Put another way, timekeeping (and, thus, our clocks) evolved over centuries to have the sun peak overhead at noon in most places, but DST radically shifts the clock so that the sun peaks much “later” in the day—thus screwing with our internal clocks. As shown in the following chart, for example, DST causes the sun on June 21 (the longest day of the year) to reach its proper, noontime position at almost 3 p.m. in several parts of the country:Given how this disrupts our biological clocks, many health experts, chronobiologists, and medical organizations have called for DST’s elimination. In fact, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine—joined by dozens of other, very reputable medical organizations—last year published a detailed “position statement” in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine advocating a change to permanent standard time because it is “best aligned with human circadian biology and has the potential to produce beneficial effects for public health and safety.” They further cite the scientific research to back their position up:DST is less well-aligned with intrinsic human circadian physiology, and it disrupts the natural seasonal adjustment of the human clock due to the effect of late-evening light on the circadian rhythm. DST results in more darkness in the morning hours, and more light in the evening hours. Both early morning darkness and light in the evening have a similar effect on circadian phase, causing the endogenous rhythm to shift to later in the day. There is evidence that the body clock does not adjust to DST even after several months. Permanent DST could therefore result in permanent phase delay, a condition that can also lead to a perpetual discrepancy between the innate biological clock and the extrinsic environmental clock, as well as chronic sleep loss due to early morning social demands that truncate the opportunity to sleep. The chronic misalignment between the timing of demands of work, school, or other obligations against the innate circadian rhythm is called “social jet lag.” Studies show that social jet lag is associated with an increased risk of obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and depression.Real-world experiments with permanent DST confirm these harms, which outweigh any possible public safety benefits (benefits that a few more streetlamps could also achieve, by the way). Russia, for example, “tried to go on permanent summer time, but changed to permanent winter time in 2014 after the summer-time-in-winter change gave people stress and health problems when it stayed darker for longer during winter mornings.” But, hey, at least Big Candy is happy.

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By James Pethokoukis and Neil Chilson
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote of the “invisible hand” that directs free market operations. Today, economists speak of “emergent order” — order that emerges spontaneously without any central direction. But we’ve come a long way since Adam Smith. On this episode of the “Political Economy” podcast, Neil Chilson discusses emergent order and how it should guide policymakers in the complex world of the 21st century.
Neil is a senior research fellow for technology and innovation at the Charles Koch Institute and the author of Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World.

Pethokoukis: Your book is about emergent order, and that sounds like there’s no plan. If it’s not about planning and it’s not chaos, what is emergent order?
Chilson: You’re right, my book is not about creating a grand plan. In some ways it’s about pointing out how often grand plans fail. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t plan at all. We contribute to emergent order outcomes, where nobody controls the outcome and nobody really controls the system, but orderly, beneficial exchanges happen. We contribute to those in part by the plans that we make and how we try to execute them.
You in the economy have to act for order to emerge. And part of the message of my book is that we can’t just sit back and let the world happen to us. We don’t have control over the systems we interact with, but we can feed into the feedback loops of the institutions that we participate in. So it’s not that there is no point in planning. It’s more understanding and being humble about what we can actually achieve through planning and being ready to adapt our plans when the environment changes, which it inevitably will.
What is an example of a beautifully ordered system that emerges? And how does it get sent spinning out of control by planning?
One of my favorite examples is from James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State. The Germans back in the 1800s wanted to increase their lumber output from their forests. And so what they did is they essentially replanted the forest in very orderly, quite aesthetically pleasing rows of trees, of a very specific tree that was the favorite for lumber. It was very easy to go in and cut down trees when they were ready. But that complex ecosystem, which served many needs other than lumber, was completely upended by this.
The natural ecosystem was completely disrupted, to the point at which it was essentially a monoculture and very quickly was subject to disease. Although in the short run it jacked up the output of lumber, in the longer run, it was actually greatly reduced. And so that’s a good example from the natural ecosystem side of not only control disrupting the many uses of a complex system, but maybe even undermining the particular goal that the person trying to step into control is trying to achieve.
I had a conversation with the historian Margaret O’Mara about the rise of Silicon Valley. You had Stanford University and then the Defense Department started plowing money and boom. After the fact, it looks like, “Oh, it seems very logical that would happen.” But there was no plan.
I think sometimes people try to look at Silicon Valley and then they’re like, “Well, we’ll create the same conditions in our area and Silicon Valley will happen here, too.” And what we see is often, and this is true in complex systems, it’s more than just you put all the elements together and you hit a switch and it goes.
Kevin Kelly has a book called Out of Control. He talks about how you could put together a bunch of bees and you don’t get a hive. He also talks about how you could understand every single thing about the individual bee, but that doesn’t explain the behavior when they come together in a hive. And so complex systems are not like machines where you just assemble all the pieces and then you turn it on and it works. So that makes them very hard to design. And it also makes them pretty much impossible to control, even though there are lots of ways to influence them.
Is the world so complicated today that to let order emerge would be chaotic? Some people will say, “We tried letting order emerge. The outcome is plutocracy, vast inequality. Maybe we need to have less emergent order and a lot more directed order.” How do you respond?
I’ve actually seen that argument, which Mises tackled in the socialist calculation problem. There’s people who now argue, essentially: “We can collect enough data to solve that now, and we’ll just let a machine do it.” I’m really skeptical.
Often the same people who will say that about the economy will look at the environment and say, ” It’s this complex system that will have all these unintended consequences if we mess with nature.” And so they seem to understand and embrace the emergent order nature of nature, but don’t seem to see the parallel to economics. And often, people on the right are the flip of that.
If you see a problem in the economy or you see a problem in the environment, it’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to address those problems, but that we should be humble about what we can actually achieve when we do that. There’s a lot of knowledge captured in the system that is not expressed. And if we sweep away the system and try to put a designed system in place, the consequences of that is a system that’s less well-adapted to all of the people who are participating in it. Even if I accept the many of the problems that people point out in the economy, I continue to be skeptical of our ability to reshape everything from the top down.
What would be the cautionary note that you would give policymakers today?
Well, the book has six principles for emergent leadership. But the one I would mostly focus on for policymakers today is around humility. There are two principles, actually. One is deeply understanding what you actually can control and what you can’t, and focus on the things that you can. And second, being humble, even in that space, about what you’re likely to achieve. And I think those two principles are missing from a lot of the discussion in DC. But they should be much more widely embraced. And I think there are good reasons in my book for why people across the political spectrum would want to do that.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Neil is a senior research fellow for technology and innovation at the Charles Koch Institute.
Learn more: 5 questions for Azeem Azhar on the effects of future technology | 5 questions for Alex Edmans on how companies can ‘grow the pie’ | 5 questions for Mauro Guillén on how the world will change by 2030
The post 5 questions for Neil Chilson on ‘emergent order’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Gottlieb had previously contended that having vaccines become available for children is one of the keys to finally ending the current “pandemic phase.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has asserted that he has no issues with giving coronavirus vaccine doses to his children “as soon as they’re eligible.”

“My kids are becoming eligible for vaccination, and I’ll get them vaccinated as soon as they’re eligible. I have confidence in the vaccine,” Gottlieb, a physician who worked at the FDA under former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush and now serves on the board of COVID vaccine maker Pfizer, told CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday.

“I think it’s going to be liberating for their lives,” he continued.

Recent data from Pfizer have indicated that the two-shot vaccine regimen in smaller doses was found to be 90.7 percent effective in preventing symptomatic illness in children ages five to eleven. Last May, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the Pfizer vaccine for children ages twelve to fifteen.

School Mandates

But even with the expected eventual approval of the vaccine, Gottlieb noted that he doesn’t think widespread vaccine mandates at schools will become the norm.

“I just don’t see mandates being a prominent feature in how this vaccine is distributed for a long time,” he said.

However, “I think the fact that this is being distributed in pediatrician’s offices… is going to make a difference because you don’t want to bring a five- to eleven-year-old necessarily to a mass vaccine distribution center or pharmacy. You want to bring them to the comfort of the pediatrician’s office,” he added.

Children Still at Risk

Throughout the ongoing pandemic, coronavirus has been found to be less deadly in children and young adults, but the death toll for that age group is still elevated.

“We’ve seen six hundred ninety deaths in children under the age of eighteen and one hundred fifteen kids ages five to eleven” since the start of the pandemic, Gottlieb claimed.

“Just to put that into perspective, before we had a vaccine for chickenpox, we would lose about ninety kids a year,” he continued.

“On the back end of that, we’re going to have, hopefully, a vaccine available for children and, at some point before the end of the year, we probably will have the orally available drug from Merck if things go well and that undergoes a favorable review,” he said.

“I think those two things are going to be the bookend on the pandemic phase of this virus and we’re going to be entering the more endemic phase, when this becomes an omnipresent risk but don’t represent the extreme risk that it represents right now,” he added.

Citing inequality and the perception that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes, Joe Biden made two promises during his presidential campaign: he would not raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year in income, and he would ensure that the top 1.8 percent of the population, as well as corporations, pays up. Hence the administration’s infrastructure and social-spending legislation raised a significant portion of revenues from changes in tax rates for the wealthiest individuals—raising the top marginal tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, adding a surtax on capital gains for those making more than $1 million in income, and raising corporate tax rates from 21 percent to 28 percent. But after objections from Senator Kyrsten Sinema last week, these proposals ran aground.

Now a replacement proposal seems to be gaining traction: the billionaire tax, which appears to be targeted at the several hundred people who own more than $1 billion in assets or have had income of more than $100 million for three consecutive years. The intent is to tax unrealized gains on their assets each year.

Congress has an amazing capacity to write bad tax legislation, but this proposal sets a new standard. First, it’s micro-targeted. As a general rule, broad-based taxes—those affecting most people—are more likely to deliver predicted revenues than those that affect a narrow subset of the population. The billionaire tax is about as narrowly focused as tax law gets. One may have little sympathy for the 700 or so billionaires affected by these taxes, but one should also recognize that these individuals also have the most resources to minimize the effect of these laws. An army of tax lawyers, accountants, and investment vehicles is being created while the law is written, and that army may also be providing input on its actual form.

Next, the proposal seeks to tax capital gains and losses. The basis used for computing taxes can have implications for revenues from the tax code, ranging from sales (with value-added and sales taxes) and income to capital gains. Sales taxes will yield more predictable revenue for the government than income taxes, which will yield more stable revenues than capital-gains taxes. Capital gains come from stock-price changes, which are far more volatile than income earned by taxpayers. That income, in turn, changes more on a year-to-year basis than the value of the assets someone owns. California’s tax revenues, for instance, are significantly more volatile than Florida’s because the Golden State taxes capital gains as ordinary income.

The new feature of this law is its attempt to tax unrealized capital gains on assets. This raises two practical problems. First, liquidity: if the billionaire tax will apply to such assets as real estate and fine art and not just to stocks and bonds, it will be hard for the individuals being targeted to sell their holdings in the open market and get enough cash to pay, since these non-traded assets are often illiquid. Taxpayers owning non-traded assets will need appraisers to revalue these assets every year. That’s great for the appraisal business, but it’s almost guaranteed to create a hotbed of litigation around the appraised values. Second, despite a decade of rising stock and bond prices, assets can still stagnate or drop in value for extended periods. Some have talked airily of being allowed to claim unrealized losses as deductions, but how exactly would that work? And given legislators’ estimates that this tax will deliver about $200 billion in revenues, what are their assumptions about how the market will do over the next decade? Stocks and bonds have had a good run, but history suggests that extended bad times are inevitable. In the 2000s, stocks declined over the course of the decade; if that happens again, the billionaire tax may generate no revenue at all.

The proposal will also have side effects for other tax revenues. If paying the billionaire tax changes the tax basis for assets—as it should, since they are being marked to market and taxed—then when these stocks are ultimately sold, less in capital-gains taxes will be collected. If this proposal represents an attempt to circumvent the current inheritance step-up windfall, it does not fix the core problem. It would mean the billionaire tax merely moves forward the collection of taxes in time.

Ultimately, this is a wealth tax—albeit on incremental, not total, wealth. The administration’s effort to avoid using the words “wealth taxes” to describe this proposal is sophistry. Put simply, this proposal favors people with inherited wealth who are invested in non-traded assets and mature businesses and hurts people invested in publicly traded equities in growth companies, many of which they have started and shepherded to success. If that is the message that the tax law writers want to send, they should have the decency to be up front about it.

The history of tax law is a history of unintended consequences. The problem with this law is that the consequences are entirely predictable and mostly bad. You and I, though we are not in the billionaire’s club, will face them. If there is a billionaire tax on unrealized gains, some or even many of these billionaires will have to sell portions of their asset holdings to pay taxes due, pushing stock prices down. If you are an investor with a preference for founder-run companies because they have fewer conflicts of interest, you may see founders reducing their holdings sooner at these companies as a consequence of this law. I’m not sure how privately held businesses will be treated for computing the billionaire’s tax, but if the law contains a carve-out for these businesses or non-traded assets, some rich founders may well choose to take their companies private again.

For those who view the tax code as an instrument to deliver pain, the only consolation prize will be that punishment is being meted out to those who “deserve” it the most. That is a booby prize. Democratic lawmakers face a tough task, but good intentions about improving the safety net do not excuse the writing of tax laws that prove inefficient at collecting revenues, ineffective even in their punitive intent—and potentially dangerous for the rest of us.

Photo: Douglas Rissing/iStock

Some good news finally—finally—appears to be on the horizon for roughly 28 million of the United States’ youngest residents. On the heels of an advisory meeting convened yesterday, the FDA is likely on the cusp of green-lighting a kid-size dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for Americans ages 5 to 11, a move that’s been months in the making.After the agency’s expected emergency authorization, Pfizer’s formulation will need a recommendation from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who’s expected to weigh in next week, after her own advisory committee holds a vote. But the nation is ready: Already, 15 million pediatric doses of Pfizer’s vaccine—which will be administered at a third of the amount doled out to adults—have become available for states to order in advance.Yesterday’s discussions were tense, understandably so. These immunizations will protect both the kids who get them and the people they mingle with, and they represent one of the few big levers the government has left to pull in the fight against the coronavirus. But as age eligibility for COVID-19 vaccines continues to drop, the risk-benefit calculations get tougher, and more emotional. This age group has been much less likely than others to come down with serious cases of COVID-19. Stacked up alongside that relative resilience are two rare but serious vaccine side effects: myocarditis and pericarditis, or inflammation of the heart and its surrounding tissue, which have appeared more commonly in boys and young men who have received mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Most of the cases have been relatively minor—notedly less severe, for instance, than the heart inflammation that can follow a SARS-CoV-2 infection—but the phenomenon remains poorly understood.The FDA’s own analysis of the (somewhat limited) data on this age group, presented at yesterday’s meeting, came out in favor of giving pediatric shots the official okay. COVID, after all, is now one of the top 10 causes of death among children ages 5 to 11; the disease has also hit Black, Latino, and Native kids especially hard. But a side effect that’s “less risky than COVID” could still be cause for concern. Maybe the vaccine should be given only to a subset of kids, some committee members argued—those who have medical conditions that up their chances of getting seriously sick, for instance. Still, the panel gave a near-unanimous thumbs-up to the vaccine, with one member abstaining.[Read: Vaccine data for kids under 5 are coming “before the end of the year”]Now comes the hard part: actually getting inoculations into little arms, by no means a slam dunk. As shots become available, just in advance of the holidays, parents will have to opt their children in to receive them—two more jabs, on top of the recommended seasonal flu shot, that potentially come with side effects and may confer protection of debated durability. Adopting any new health intervention requires a gamble, but this one might feel especially fraught. There’s still a lot we don’t know about COVID-19 in the youngest among us, and the vaccines we’re using to shield them.To help make sense of what’s next, I caught up with Sallie Permar, the chair of pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and pediatrician in chief at New York–Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Our interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Katherine J. Wu: The FDA is probably on track to authorize this vaccine within the next couple of days—before the CDC’s advisory panel, ACIP, meets next week. What’s the greatest impact this could have on the pandemic overall, assuming we successfully convince parents to sign their kids up for shots?Sallie Permar: To me, the most important thing is that this vaccine takes three new diseases that we’re dealing with in children, and seeing consistently in our health systems, and makes them vaccine-preventable. The first is severe COVID-19, the respiratory disease that’s more rare in kids, but still happens, especially in our adolescent populations and those with high risk. The second is MIS-C, an [inflammatory] condition that happens in one in every 3,000 or so infections in children, [and is most common] in the 5-to-11-year age group. And the third is long COVID, which children continue to suffer for months after, due to persistent symptoms.The second biggest benefit would be about transmission. Children can be protected by masks, and they probably transmit less often [than adults]. But children can definitely be part of the transmission chain, especially when it comes to households, and even in settings where precautions are being used.Vaccinating our children will make it so we can recapture school as we once knew it, with kids picking who they want to sit [with] at their lunch table, or being able to face any direction in the classroom, and not a certain distance away from their neighbor—maybe even thinking about whether kids can safely go back to school without masks. Masks might still be a good idea when everybody’s indoors and has runny noses during the winter. But we’ll be able to walk back a lot of the restrictions that have been in place. We can’t even think about that until we get high [vaccine] coverage in our children.Wu: That sounds wonderful, but an authorized vaccine doesn’t guarantee an administered vaccine. You’re a practicing pediatrician—what’s been your sense of how parents will receive this news?Permar: I foresee a lot of my time in the next few weeks being devoted to [navigating] that. Parents want to make the best decision for their children. And they want to make a very careful decision, and they want to consider all of the information that’s available. It is scary to think about: If I choose a vaccination and my child is one that has a rare side effect, how am I going to feel about that? That’s definitely going through parents’ minds.The chance that your child will have a severe COVID infection is rare; the chance that your child will have MIS-C is also pretty rare. Not a lot of people know someone who’s had a child in the hospital with COVID. But what’s even more rare is the chance that there will be an ill effect from the vaccine. We have to educate about those numbers.Not vaccinating is still a risk, and it’s a higher risk than giving your child a vaccine. In fact, we don’t even know if myocarditis is going to be a concern [in 5-to-11-year-olds]. There were no cases in that age group in [Pfizer’s efficacy trial]. Myocarditis tends to be more common in older children. So taking what we know, in this younger age group, it’s postulated to be less of a concern. And let me just say, I am so thrilled that there has been all of this work that went into identifying an age-specific dose for this population. We want to achieve the immune response needed for protection, with the smallest dose to reduce side effects. That is what we should be doing for every new vaccine going forward.One question I get often is “I have an 11-year-old who’s turning 12 in three weeks. Should I wait? The higher dose seems better, right?” First of all, don’t wait for the bigger dose—you never know when COVID will enter your life or your child’s life. Secondly, I think I would actually prefer to get them the lower dose. Pediatric immune systems are more well set up to respond to low doses. They may even achieve a better response. We’ve been studying this in the HIV-vaccine world for several years now. A lower dose in a young age group can achieve a better immune response than even a higher dose. I wouldn’t be surprised if we go to an even lower dose with the youngest age groups.[Read: Why is it taking so long to get vaccines for kids?]Wu: That sounds really promising. At the same time, though, we don’t have certainty on side effects yet. Pfizer’s trial was small—too small to pick up a reliable signal of myocarditis, so we’ll need to wait to see what happens when the vaccine rolls out to a much larger group. How should parents weigh the risk of a rare side effect against the risk of COVID-19, which is less common among young kids? And should certain children be prioritized for the vaccine, and others advised to wait?Permar: If you were playing the numbers and reading the data, you would give your child the vaccine every time. [The alternative] would be taking an unknown risk, and making that the reason you’re not going to protect your child against a known risk that you know how to protect against.Severe infections have been unusual in children, which has been a blessing. But we have no idea what predicts who is going to have MIS-C. Hopefully, we’ll go forward and identify those things. We have some idea of who might be at risk for severe respiratory COVID—older adolescents, [kids with] obesity, diabetes. But there are also children where we don’t know what made them at risk for infection. We see this in flu, too. Totally healthy children just get a very severe illness. We see totally healthy children just get very sick, and you can’t put your finger on it.Wu: Will vaccinating kids feel less urgent if transmission rates plummet?Permar: One thing we know will happen is that there will be new variants of this virus. If the pattern holds true, they will be more transmissible. They may even be vaccine resistant. What drove a lot of parents of adolescents to finally get vaccines [this summer] was that the case numbers rose immensely with the more transmissible Delta variant. That’s great, but it was also too late. It takes five to six weeks [from the first dose] to get fully immune. So we have to anticipate there will be other variants that we will deal with. My hope is we get this last segment highly vaccinated, and that will maybe slow down the variants. But we should not count out a new variant, and we have to anticipate that.[Read: Delta is bad news for kids]Wu: Getting vaccines down to young kids took a very long time, and we still haven’t reached the under-5 crowd. What can we learn from this? Did it have to be this way?Permar: We’ve got to do this differently in the future. It is a travesty that we sent kids back to school without this vaccine available to them, while adults were benefiting from vaccine immunity, going to restaurants with our vaccine cards. We should not leave children to the very last. Maybe in the future, we can start testing age groups in parallel.

I must say, Mr Public, your fearlessly confident, no-nonsense style gets my admiration. It's not often we see someone possessed of the sheer moxie to make such a bold statement as this. To frame the release of classified documents, like these, as a matter of moral uprightness is certainly bold. Your unflinching candour In calling out amoral, spineless leadership as the primary cause of this unacceptable inaction is provocative. And your willingness to withhold direct accusations, in favour of levelling clear implications instead, is merciful. President Biden is the 5th successive chief executive of the United States, and leader of the free world, to fail in his moral duty to release the JFK files... So far. we appreciate your decency In not calling out his four predecessors by name.

Similarly, I find your restraint with regard to the remaining classified documents pertaining to the attacks of 9/11 to be commendable. It is a mark of decency That you should Declare president Biden To be morally spineless In his failure to release All of these documents while sparing us the even greater indignities reserved for his three predecessors. Considering that president Biden is the first, and only, president of the United States to have declassified and released any documents regarding the events of 9/11 (as he did this September), I can only imagine the level of disregard and disgust you must feel in relation to presidents Trump, Obama, and Bush 43. So thanks for that.

By the way, this Biden character seems to have done a real 180 when it comes to moral character. Here's a link I just found two videos of him speaking in the United States Senate some time ago. in it, he's really going after someone from another political party. see the anger and passion he summons in demanding the presidential administration in power at the time bring some action, exercise any influence, or withhold any status granted to the government of South Africa, as it continued to inflict the atrocities of apartheid without so much as a blush of embarrassment. However, the administration made it clear. There would be no action. The United States was officially disinterested. Apartheid was not our fault. And there was no possible tangible benefit, however remote, that could be worth the cost of any involvement on our part.

https://tinyurl.com/yz9c3r8t

frankly, Mr Public, is that personal values that might lead you to equate the complete lack of morality with something like failing to declassify some government document according to your schedule are of no interest to me. I don't give a pluck. but I do honestly have to say that I'm not looking forward to the day when faced with some new outrage so heinous that inaction in its face shows nothing less than a lack of moral backbone, we realise that we already gave away any appeal total lack of morality when we thought it would be OK to spend it on shaming the slow release of documents. How cheap. You've actually raised the bar at lowering the bar.

We often talk about the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of medical research, a basic understanding of which is necessary for any meaningful Science-Based Medicine assessment of medical claims. For example, in vitro research allows for highly controlled environments and interventions and can use human cells, but mostly looks at cells in isolation, and therefore misses many potential factors. Meanwhile, animal research allows scientists to examine whole-organism responses to different interventions, and also allows detailed examination of tissue after the fact. The primary limitation, however, is that non-human animals are not humans, and biological differences can affect outcomes. Human research allows for a determination of results in actual people, but has significant ethical and pragmatic limitations. This is why medical researchers use a range of research options, to combine the strengths of different approaches to get the most reliable answers.

In recent years an entirely new category of medical research has been added to the list, something that combines some of the strengths of all three main approaches outlined above – use of organoids. An organoid can be studied in vitro like a cell culture, and can use human cells, but also can include some of the structure and interactions of whole organs. Organoid research therefore lies somewhere between in vitro and in vivo human research.

This type of research has been made possible by advances in stem cell research. Typically researchers will start with adult-derived stem cells, like fibroblasts from skin, and then induce them to become pluripotent, which can become every cell type in the body. The only stem cells with more potential are totipotent, derived from early embryos, which can become every cell type in the body and also the placenta and extraembryonic cell types. Adult-derived induced pluripotent stem cells are almost as good as embryonic stem cells in research, and has allowed the field to significantly advance without the ethical and political controversy surrounding embryonic cells.

Starting with induced pluripotent stem cells, researchers have figured out how to grow organoids, which are mini-organs with some of the architecture and range of cell types found in mature organs. This allows for a type of in vitro (not in a full living organism) research but better than just a culture of cells. Organoid research can look at the interactions among different cell types in an organ, and also how those cells form organ structures. Organoids are not fully functioning organs, but they are part of the way there, and allow researchers to ask questions they could not otherwise research with just cell cultures or even human research. Technically they are three-dimensional cell cultures replicating some of the structures in a mature organ.

Beyond just being able to research human cells and organ structures, researchers can make organoids from healthy or diseased cells, in order to replicate disease states and look for differences with healthy organ development. They can even take a cell sample from an individual patient to study their organoids. In addition to studying disease states, organoids can be used as models for screening drugs to see if they alter disease progression.

One recent organoid research study shows the potential of this approach – Human ALS/FTD brain organoid slice cultures display distinct early astrocyte and targetable neuronal pathology. In this study the researchers made brain organoids from stem cells the most common mutation causing a neurodegenerative disease which combines motor neuron disease (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). ALS causes degeneration of motor neurons resulting in progressive weakness. Meanwhile cortical brain cells also degenerate, mostly in the frontal and temporal lobes, causing progressive cognitive decline and personality change. Understanding exactly how the mutation causes changes in the development, functioning, and aging of the human brain is critical to understanding the disease and designing potential treatment.

They found that differences in brain organoid development are apparent from the early stages, indicating that patients suffering from ALS/FTD may have the beginning of the disease even at birth. Both neurons and astrocytes (the two main cell types in the brain) develop DNA damage and start to accumulate abnormal proteins. Build up of protein debris is a known mechanism, or at least a strong marker, of many neurodegenerative diseases, so this is not surprising.

This study also features an advance in the basic technology of brain organoids. Rather that growing spheres of brain tissue, they grew flatter slices of brain tissue. This allowed for better nutrition of all the cells. Typically cells in the center of a brain organoid will die, limiting the total time that they can be maintained. This was a significant limitation on research, because scientists could only model short-term changes and effects. In the current study researchers were able to maintain their brain organoid slices for 240 days, and report (although not yet published) that their lab has maintained brain organoids for 340 days. This opens the door to much longer-term effects and responses to possible treatment interventions.

In fact, in this study the researchers also tested a potential drug (GSK2606414) on their organoid model. The drug reduced the accumulation of toxic proteins and some cell death. This highlights another potential feature of organoid research, that it can serve as a type of translational research – research designed to take basic science findings and test them clinically. While not fully translational, because it is not done in living humans, organoid research can take potential treatments discovered by cell-culture research and test them in disease organoid models.

Two decades ago, when stem cell hype was taking off, use of stem cells to create organoids for research was not even discussed. The first organoid was not made until 2013. But this may turn out to be an unanticipated, and yet the most impactful, use of stem cells (at least for now). Organoid research has opened up an entirely new middle ground of medical research and we are likely to hear a lot more about this type of research in the future.

(Photograph by Kena Betancur / VIEWpress / Corbis / Getty Images.)World leaders are heading to Glasgow to come up with yet another plan to tackle climate change. Joe Biden had hoped to have a stack of climate-related legislative accomplishments to brag about. But they’re being held up and threatened in the fight over the price tag of the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. The stakes, we’re constantly told, couldn’t be higher. If Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin and the Republicans succeed in stripping just the proposed Clean Energy Performance Program alone it will “destroy the world,” according to Gizmodo. Joe Biden doesn’t go that far. But recently, at a CNN town hall, he repeated his oft-cited claim that climate change poses an “existential threat to humanity.”Such rhetoric isn’t merely wrong – humanity can survive climate change—it’s also counterproductive. The fight against climate change will be long and messy, and implying otherwise will make it longer and messier. For 30 years, activists and politicians have said before these periodic climate confabs that this is our “last chance” to act or to save the planet. Normally, if you miss your last chance to do something—catch a flight, see a movie, etc.—you stop trying. If you think climate change should be the moral equivalent of war, then you should manage expectations like a wartime leader does. You don’t say, “We’ll lose the war if we lose this one battle”—unless it’s true. You also don’t refuse to use your most effective weapons, at least not in a fight for the survival of humanity, without a good reason. And in this case, the best weapon in our arsenal is nuclear power. As former NASA climatologist James Hansen and his colleagues have argued, there’s “no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”But to quote Greta Thunberg, the Joan of Arc of climate activism, the arguments against nuclear power boil down to it being “extremely dangerous, expensive” and “time-consuming.” Let’s start with dangerous. For reasons of human psychology, deep-seated fear of nuclear power is socially acceptable among those who claim to “follow the science.” But just as the COVID-19 vaccines—despite what anti-vaxxers claim—haven’t killed any Americans, neither has nuclear power. The Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the worst in American history, caused no deaths or detectable incidents of cancer. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant was very deadly, killing up to 18,000 people. But the number of radiation-related deaths or illnesses connected to the power plant meltdown have been in the low double digits. The first confirmed radiation-related death occurred in 2018. The U.N. reports that so far, the “most important health effect” hasn’t been a spike in cancer but the damage to “mental and social well-being” caused by the earthquake and tsunami. Indeed, if you include all factors, including industrial accidents, air pollution, etc., nuclear power is arguably the world’s safest form of energy production. Then there’s the cost. It’s true: Building nuclear plants, whether with existing or new technology, is expensive. But once nuclear plants are built, the energy they produce is cheap. That’s why Germany, which has been mothballing its nuclear plants in a largely failed decade-long experiment, has the most expensive electricity rates in the world. And Germany’s carbon emissions are 10 times greater than those of France, which gets 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Wherever nuclear plants have been closed, writes Ted Nordhaus, founder of the Breakthrough Institute, “clean electricity has been replaced with dirty power.”There’s also something weird about politicians who scoff at cost concerns to fight climate change (on their terms) and then raise the cost of building nuclear plants as prohibitive, when they can provide carbon-free electricity on a massive and reliable scale. Indeed, one reason it takes so long for nuclear plants to get built is that many of these politicians stand in the way of getting them built, by pandering to NIMBYism and supporting red tape. They’re all in for “decarbonizing” transportation while opposing technology that will keep electricity affordable. None of this is to say that nuclear power alone is a silver bullet, nor is it to deny that the question of how to deal with nuclear waste isn’t a thorny one (especially after President Obama rejected science in favor of politics to shut down the perfectly safe Yucca Mountain waste repository). Some old plants do need to be shut down, but they should be replaced with new, safer, and less expensive ones.But if Biden is serious about fighting climate change—and wants to show it—he should take nuclear power seriously. 

The internal conflicts in America are leading to its loss of influence and power in the World:

After studying this subject for decades, it is clear to me that the ‘Root Cause’ of America’s decline is the internal disunity/disintegration of American society due to conflicts of interest and power between US workers and neoliberal capitalist investors.

What we now have in the USA as a result is a dysfunctional Plutocracy evolved over 50 years of Neoliberalism.

I cannot conceive I will turn out to be wrong over the long term about this ‘Root Cause’ of the ‘Fall of America’ because the Plutocracy is so well entrenched in power under Federalism and the US Constitution that the fundamental conflicts within America cannot be resolved under the Constitution. To me that means we are on a path that cannot be altered through the democratic process.

Consequently, all we who follow this American debacle can do is to chronicle the events of the present and the future that follow the predetermined path to the abovementioned eventual negative outcome for America.

Disintegration of US Power is rapidly turning into US military losses in Africa and the Middle East:

The US is errantly backing democratic movements all over the Middle East and Africa, and a consortium of Authoritarian States (China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt) are rapidly assuming political, economic and military power over Africa and Asia as the democratic policies of the US are proved foolish, impractical and unrealistic.

Worldwide, no nation really believes the US is a democracy anymore, much less a dominating world power. Even European leaders are saying, “American leadership can’t even control their own country; how can they control the world?”

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In a new interview, Noam Chomsky argues that a livable future free of catastrophic climate change is possible — we just have to take on the billionaires standing in the way.

Linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky delivers a speech at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, 2014. (Uli Deck/ Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
 
This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before the century’s end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it’s too late.
For the past several decades, Noam Chomsky has been one of the most forceful and persuasive voices confronting injustice, inequity, and the threat posed by human-caused climate chaos to civilization and the Earth. I was eager to know Professor Chomsky’s views on the roots of our current dire predicament and on humanity’s prospects for emerging from this crisis into a livable future. He very graciously agreed to speak with me by way of a video chat. The text here is an abridged version of a conversation we had on October 1, 2021.
Professor Chomsky, now 92, is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. His critiques of power and advocacy on behalf of the political agency of the common person have inspired generations of activists and organizers. He was Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1976 until his retirement in 2002. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C. J. Polychroniou.

Stan Cox
Most of the nations that will be meeting in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference on October 31–November 12, 2021, have made emissions-reduction pledges. For the most part, those pledges are wholly inadequate. What principles do you think should guide the effort to prevent climate catastrophe?

Noam Chomsky
The initiators of the Paris Agreement intended to have a binding treaty, not voluntary agreements, but there was an impediment. It’s called the Republican Party. It was clear that the Republican Party would never accept any binding commitments. The Republican organization, which has lost any pretense of being a normal political party, is almost solely dedicated to the welfare of the superrich and the corporate sector, and cares absolutely nothing about the population or the future of the world. The Republican organization would never have accepted a treaty. In response, the organizers reduced their goal to a voluntary agreement, which has all the difficulties that you mentioned.
We’ve lost six years; four under the Trump administration, which was openly dedicated to maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that, to some extent, had limited their lethal effects. To some extent, these regulations protected sectors of the population from pollution, mostly the poor and people of color. But they’re the ones who, of course, face the main burden of pollution. It’s the poor people of the world who live in what Donald Trump called “shithole countries” that suffer the most; they have contributed the least to the disaster, and they suffer the worst.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As you write in your new book, The Path to a Livable Future, there is indeed a path to a livable future. There are ways to have responsible, sane, and racially just policies. It’s up to all of us to demand them, something young people around the world are already doing.
Other countries have their own things to answer for, but the United States has one of the worst records in the world. The United States blocked the Paris Agreement before Trump eventually got into office. But it was under Trump’s instructions that the United States pulled out of the agreement altogether.
If you look over at the saner Democrats, who are far from guiltless, there are people called moderates like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), the leading recipient of fossil fuel funding, whose position is that of the fossil fuel companies, which is, as he put it, no elimination, just innovation. That’s ExxonMobil’s view too: “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you,” they say. “We’re a soulful corporation. We’re investing in some futuristic ways to remove from the atmosphere the pollution that we’re pouring into it. Everything’s fine, just trust us.” No elimination, just innovation, which may or may not come, and if it does, it will probably be too late and too limited.
Take the IPCC report that just appeared. It was much more dire than previous ones and said we must eliminate fossil fuels step by step, every year, and be free of them completely within a few decades. A few days after the report was released, Joe Biden issued a plea to the OPEC oil cartel to increase production, which would lower gas prices in the United States and improve his position with the population. There was immediate euphoria in the petroleum journals. There’s lots of profit to be made, but at what expense? It was nice to have the human species for a couple of hundred thousand years, but evidently that’s long enough. After all, the average lifespan of a species on Earth is apparently around one hundred thousand years. So why should we break the record? Why organize for a just future for all when we can trash the planet helping rich corporations get richer?

Stan Cox
Ecological catastrophe is closing in on us largely because, as you once put it, “the entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained.” However, it seems that only state authority can implement the necessary changes in ways that are equitable, fair, and just. Given the emergency we face, do you think that the US government would be able to justify imposing national resource constraints like rules for resource allocation or fair-shares rationing, policies that would necessarily limit the freedom of local communities and individuals in their material lives?

Well, we have to face some realities. I would like to see a move toward a more free and just society — production for need rather than production for profit, working people able to control their own lives instead of subordinating themselves to masters for almost their entire waking life. The time required for succeeding at such efforts is simply too great for addressing this crisis. That means we need to solve this within the framework of existing institutions, which can be ameliorated.
The economic system of the last forty years has been particularly destructive. It’s inflicted a major assault on most of the population, resulting in a huge growth in inequality and attacks on democracy and the environment.
We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it’ll be.
A livable future is possible. We don’t have to live in a system in which the tax rules have been changed so that billionaires pay lower rates than working people. We don’t have to live in a form of state capitalism in which the lower 90 percent of income earners have been robbed of approximately $50 trillion for the benefit of a fraction of 1 percent. That’s the estimate of the RAND Corporation, a serious underestimate if we look at other devices that have been used. There are ways of reforming the existing system within basically the same framework of institutions. I think they ought to change, but it would have to be over a longer timescale.
The question is: Can we prevent climate catastrophe within the framework of less savage state capitalist institutions? I think there’s a reason to believe that we can, and there are very careful, detailed proposals as to how to do it, including ones in your new book, as well as the proposals of my friend and coauthor, economist Robert Pollin, who’s worked many of these things out in great detail. Jeffrey Sachs, another fine economist, using somewhat different models, has come to pretty much the same conclusions. These are pretty much along lines of proposals of the International Energy Agency, by no means a radical organization — one that grew out of the energy corporations. But they all have essentially the same picture.
There is, in fact, even a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, which outlines proposals that are pretty close to this. And I think it’s all within the range of feasibility. Their cost estimates of 2 percent to 3 percent of GDP, with feasible efforts, would not only address the crisis but would create a more livable future, one without pollution, without traffic jams, and with more constructive, productive work, better jobs. All of this is possible.
But there are serious barriers — the fossil fuel industries, the banks, the other major institutions, which are designed to maximize profit and not care about anything else. After all, that was the announced slogan of the neoliberal period — the economic guru Milton Friedman’s pronouncement that corporations have no responsibility to the public or to the workforce, that their total responsibility is to maximize profit for the few.
For public-relations reasons, fossil fuel corporations like ExxonMobil often portray themselves as soulful and benevolent, working day and night for the benefit of the common good. It’s called greenwashing.

Stan Cox
Some of the most widely discussed methods for capturing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would consume vast quantities of biomass produced on hundreds of millions or billions of acres, thereby threatening ecosystems and food production, largely in low-income, low-emissions nations. A group of ethicists and other scholars recently wrote that a “core principle” of climate justice is that “the urgent, basic needs of poor people and poor countries ought to be secured against the effects of climate change and of measures taken to limit” climate change. That would seem to clearly rule out these “emit carbon now, capture it later” plans, and there are other examples of what we might call “climate-mitigation imperialism.” Do you think that the world may be faced with more and more of this sort of exploitation as temperatures rise? And what do you think about these proposals for bioenergy and carbon capture?

It’s totally immoral, but it’s standard practice. Where does waste go? It doesn’t go in your backyard; it goes to places like Somalia that can’t protect themselves. The European Union, for example, has been dumping its atomic wastes and other pollution off the coast of Somalia, harming the fishing areas and local industries. It’s horrendous.
The latest IPCC report calls for an end to fossil fuels. The hope is that we can avert the worst and reach a sustainable economy within a couple of decades. If we don’t do that, we will reach irreversible tipping points and the people most vulnerable, those least responsible for the crisis, will suffer first and most severely from the consequences — people living in the plains of Bangladesh, for example, where powerful cyclones cause extraordinary damage; people living in India, where the temperature can go over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. Many may witness parts of the world becoming unlivable.
There were recent reports by Israeli geoscientists condemning its government for not taking account of the effect of the policies they are pursuing, including developing new gas fields in the Mediterranean. They developed an analysis that indicated that, within a couple of decades, over the summer, the Mediterranean would be reaching the heat of a Jacuzzi, and the low-lying plains would be inundated. People would still live in Jerusalem and Ramallah, but flooding would impact much of the population. Why not change course to prevent this?

Stan Cox
The neoclassical economics underlying these injustices lives on in economic climate models known as “integrated assessment models,” which come down to cost-benefit analyses based on the so-called social cost of carbon. With these projections, are economists seeking to gamble away the right of future generations to a decent life?

We have no right to gamble with the lives of the people in South Asia, in Africa, or people in vulnerable communities in the United States. You want to do analyses like that in your academic seminar? OK, go ahead. But don’t dare translate it into policy. Don’t dare to do that.
There’s a striking difference between physicists and economists. Physicists don’t say, Hey, let’s try an experiment that might destroy the world, because it would be interesting to see what would happen. But economists do that. On the basis of neoclassical theories, they instituted a major revolution in world affairs in the early 1980s that took off with Jimmy Carter and accelerated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Given the power of the United States compared with the rest of the world, the neoliberal assault, a major experiment in economic theory, had a devastating result. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Their motto has been “Government is the problem.”
That doesn’t mean you eliminate decisions; it just means you transfer them. Decisions still have to be made. If they’re not made by government, which is, in a limited way, under popular influence, they will be made by concentrations of private power, which have no accountability to the public. And, following the Friedman instructions, have no responsibility to the society that gave them the gift of incorporation. They have only the imperative of self-enrichment.
Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market. Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn’t bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others. They get together, they defend themselves, and so on. There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us. Most people have to face the ravages of the market. And, of course, the rich don’t. Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there’s some trouble. The rich have to have the powerful state — as well as its police powers — to be sure nobody gets in their way.

Stan Cox
Where do you see hope?

Young people. In September, there was an international climate strike; hundreds of thousands of young people came out to demand an end to environmental destruction. Greta Thunberg recently stood up at the Davos meeting of the great and powerful and gave them a sober talk on what they’re doing. “How dare you,” she said. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone’s consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.
We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it’ll be. If we’d come to terms with this ten years ago, the cost would have been much less. If the United States hadn’t been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been much easier. Well, the longer we wait, the more we’ll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don’t have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there’s plenty that we can do to get there before it’s too late.

Universe

9pm, BBC Two

If William Shatner’s short but oh-so-sweet ascent into space captured your imagination, Prof Brian Cox is here with his epic exploration of the cosmos in this new five-parter. We head to the stars in episode one, which travels back 13.7bn years, using cutting-edge VFX and thrilling orchestral music that compels you to sit up straight, watch agog and utter: “Beam me up, Coxy.” Hollie Richardson

Shetland

9pm, BBC One

DI Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall) continues to investigate the killing of a prominent local figure in this pensive crime drama. In this episode, the team look into a second (and possibly related) death on board a dive boat, while community tensions rise over developments around a historical murder. Henry Wong

Extraordinary Extensions

9pm, Channel 4

It was the career change that nobody predicted: rapper Tinie Tempah becoming a property expert thanks to his love of, er, extensions. But hey, he pulls it off. Tonight: an £11m basement in a building in Knightsbridge that was at various times home to the ballerina Margot Fonteyn and the former Panama embassy. HR

Al Murray: Why Do the Brits Win Every War?

9pm, Sky History

Another jocular look at an enduring national neurosis from the Pub Landlord. Al Murray has long probed this particular tender spot and, in this amusing, sporadically perceptive series, his interest in British military exceptionalism deepens. He is joined by the German comedian Henning Wehn to delve into second world war myths. Phil Harrison

Love Trap

10pm, Channel 4

Fall guy ... Joel Dommett, the presenter of Love Trap. Photograph: Glen Arkadieff/Channel 4

Because the modern dating landscape isn’t brutal enough, here is a bonkers format where a guy literally dumps rejected women through a trapdoor. This week, a spooning challenge and three late additions to the mansion. Romance is officially dead. HR

Outsiders

10pm, Dave

It looks more fun to do than it is to watch, but this comedians-in-a-forest challenge show is diverting enough. Better than the games (blindfold navigation, paintballing) are the times when the comics get to sit and riff, this week on the subject of a “camp deity”. No, not Christopher Biggins; a new god must be conceived for the host, David Mitchell, to worship. Jack Seale

Live sport

League Cup football: Preston North End v Liverpool Sky Sports Main Event, 7pm. Fourth-round match at Deepdale.

I was worried that Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, would be a shallow self-help book. The dust jacket tells us that the book will “empower you to live a better, wiser life.” Books that promise to “empower” you are rarely worth reading. Happily, however, Heying and Weinstein have produced one of those rare “empowering” books well worth reading, even if it also contains a strong dose of the spurious.

In it, they examine the problems of living in the twenty-first century using a deep evolutionary lens. They posit that civilisation is teetering on the precipice and that an evolutionary understanding of ourselves and the world is essential to bringing us back. The former part of this argument is somewhat overdone, but the latter part is an essential corrective to our short-termism.

Some of the blurb’s statements are questionable: are loneliness and illness really “skyrocketing?” Are we really “more listless, divided, and miserable than ever?” While modern society has its problems, this overstates things. See Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now for a more nuanced view. Are resource depletion and population growth really such apocalyptic threats? I recommend Toby Ord’s recent book on existential risk for an antidote to these particular concerns. When the book states unequivocally (and without providing any evidence) that “we are hurtling towards destruction,” then, the authors are doing themselves a disservice.

They are not completely wrong, though. There are individual and societal-level problems and there are great existential risks to humanity, and Heying and Weinstein do a good, if hyperbolic, job of reminding us of this. Most of the book is given over to more specific concerns, though: the authors deal with topics as varied as sleep and sex, childhood and consciousness, using their evolutionary training to illuminate the state of the world and to provide advice both for the individual and for society as a whole.

It helps that the book has been excellently written, deftly distilling complex ideas for the non-scientist, and at times it rises to a Dawkinsian level of prose-poetry. For example, in an extraordinary early chapter, the book provides a vivid account of life on Earth from its beginning 3.5 billion years ago. A sample:

We [humans] live in groups and have hierarchy. We engage in reciprocity—exchanging both gifts and blows. We cooperate to compete. We have law and leaders, ritual and religious practice. We admire hospitality and generosity. We admire beauty, in nature and in one another. We dance and sing. We play.

Our differences are fascinating, but our similarities make us human.

Earlier, discussing culture and consciousness, they write:

We humans are by far the most aware of one another’s thoughts of any species that has ever existed, because we alone can, if we so choose, hand over the cognitive goods explicitly and with spectacular precision. We can accurately pass a complex abstraction from one mind to another by simply vibrating the air between us. It is everyday magic that usually passes without our notice.

This encapsulates one of the authors’ main points: that the speciality of humans is in being generalists, niche-switchers, capable of pooling our knowledge and ideas and producing culture. By linking minds, we can bootstrap ourselves rapidly along a line of progression like no other thing in the known universe possibly can.

The book contains many excellent coinages. Hyper-novelty describes our world now: so complex and ever-shifting that our evolved bodies and minds are out of sync with much of it. Sucker’s folly describes our predilection for embracing short-term benefits despite long-term costs and risks. The fourth frontier describes the world we must aim for, one defined by a steady state rather than unsustainable growth.

Unfortunately, the tone is sometimes pompous, as when Heying and Weinstein quote a former student: “Walking into your classroom was like walking into an ancestral mode for which I was primed, but didn’t even know existed.” The authors tell us how much they “innovated” in the classroom and that they “forged new paths, and posited new explanations for patterns, both old and new.” One of the problems here is that Weinstein in particular has long evinced a desire to revolutionise evolutionary biology but has been unable to show that neo-Darwinism is in need of such an overhaul or to provide any new theoretical breakthroughs of his own (see Jerry Coyne’s takedown of Weinstein’s pretensions in this direction). Perhaps this is why some of the claims and language in the book are so overblown: Weinstein dreams of revolution but has so far failed to inspire one.

But the most valuable aspect of this book is that it takes evolution seriously. Unlike many other tomes on the state of civilisation, it places us in our deepest context: we are evolved beings and, in Leslie Orgel’s phrase, “evolution is cleverer than you are.”

In their discussion of sex and gender, for example, Heying and Weinstein point out the obvious: sex is binary (or at least bimodal), and has an evolutionary history stretching back hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of years. This does not mean that trans people don’t exist, or that sex determines how one’s life should be lived, but it does mean that there are some deep differences between the sexes at a population level and that it is impossible to literally or completely change sex (as opposed to gender).

The authors easily dismantle the misuse of intersex people (and clownfish) by those who believe that sex can be changed, and rightly tell us that it is silly to “pretend that sex equals gender, or that gender has no relationship to sex, or that either sex or gender is not wholly evolutionary.” They provide the evidence that there are significant behavioural and psychological differences between the sexes but are at pains to point out that this is a matter of population-level averages which tell us nothing about the individual and which should not be used to draw any conclusions about the individual capabilities of men and women. This sort of subtlety is a refreshing change from the hyperbole of blank-slate feminists, reactionaries and the advocates of radical trans ideology.

By bringing evolutionary thinking to bear, Heying and Weinstein are able to provide fresh insights on many topics. An evolutionary view is also defamiliarizing, as their discussion of schooling shows. Schooling is very recent in our history and teaching is quite rare in organisms as a whole. Most human learning is done by observation and experience rather than by sitting in regimented classrooms and regurgitating facts: this is to submit and obey rather than to learn.

On senescence, Heying and Weinstein argue that ageing is important for culture to progress. Elders provide child support and are repositories of wisdom (though their wisdom should not be taken unquestioningly). The current fad to prevent ageing is therefore a threat to something that makes us human in the first place, and that could have catastrophic effects on our cultural storehouse—and therefore our ability to navigate and adapt to the world. This reminded me of Martin Amis’s critique in Inside Story:

As on the question of earthly utopia, so with eternal life: literature is unanimous in regarding human perfection or indefinite perpetuation as essentially horrific … It is right, it is fitting, it is as it should be, that we die. ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see anything,’ wrote Saul Bellow. And without death there is no art, because without death there is no interest, or to be more precise there is no fascination.

There is much more such analysis in the book, on a wide variety of topics. But the book also has some serious weaknesses.

Some of the authors’ arguments smack of overreach. Dismissing Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme, they suggest the “Omega principle, which posits that expensive and long-lasting cultural traits … should be presumed to be adaptive, and that adaptive elements of culture are not independent of genes.” Dawkins has never dismissed gene–culture co-evolution (quite the contrary) and this doesn’t prove that cultural norms can’t evolve by themselves (or by human design). If you really want to prove this, you have to provide a much stronger refutation of all other types of cultural creation and transmission than is provided in this book.

In fairness, Heying and Weinstein do propose a test for whether something is adaptive or not: if a trait is complex, costly and persistent over evolutionary (or cultural) time, it is likely to be adaptive. This rough test, they say, can produce false negatives but not false positives, the sufficient but not necessary evidence of adaptation. But this suggests that almost any social phenomenon should be considered an adaptation. If, for example, someone were to apply these ideas to early modern Europe, the Catholic Church and feudalism could be argued to be adaptive and therefore things we should be wary of challenging. And, indeed, Heying and Weinstein almost justify the reactionary: we are not conservatives, they might be saying, but look how evolutionary thinking justifies traditionalism in, say, relationships! This ignores their own point, that humans are also extremely plastic and capable of forging new ways of thinking and being.

That they should come across as reactionary in this is odd, because sometimes they also seem naively hippyish. For example, they decry the practice of genetically modifying organisms because it involves tinkering with complex genomes built up over evolutionary time. But while there is certainly a debate to be had around GMOs, Weinstein and Heying ignore the enormous benefits they can bring, such as higher yields and infection-resistant crops. Try telling a poor and hungry village that GMOs are bad. And at the end of the book, they suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic could have been avoided had we all just spent more time outdoors, where the virus can’t easily transmit. Fortunately, this is their only mention of the pandemic, and they avoid the ivermectin/anti-vaccine rabbit hole that they have sadly become infamous for jumping down of late.

In attempting to provide a fully systematic evolutionary view of the world, Heying and Weinstein come dangerously close to ending up in the position of Icarus as the wax melted. It is better to explain some things in terms of memes, power, economics or ideology, than in Heying and Weinstein’s restrictive terms.

The authors do note that just because a cultural trait is adaptive does not mean that it is intrinsically good or relevant now, in different circumstances. They do suggest caution in changing things, from food to sleep to sociality. Their caveats suggest that they themselves are aware of the limitations of their reasoning.

Heying and Weinstein argue quite bewilderingly for the metaphorical truth of some wacky ideas. Astrology, they say, is nonsense in its modern form, but there is good evidence for correlations between birth months and health:

If—and this is a big if—you control for where a person was born, might not the time of year that they were born have effects on how they develop, and therefore who they become? And aren’t astrological signs just an ancient way of keeping track of the months, more or less? If we look at astrology this way, rather than as a modern indulgence that is too free of context and history to have meaning, it begins to look promising.

This, they say, “should be enough to make a thoughtful person rethink a wholesale rejection of careful astrological thinking.” This is special pleading. There are many things that could be championed in this way. Christian Science? Well, there is good evidence that family comfort, support and goodwill are good for health, so this must be literally false but metaphorically true (and adaptive) as well! Etcetera. This is also a favoured tactic of religious apologists: look at this verse in the Quran, it aligns vaguely with what modern science has found if we squint hard enough, therefore Islam predicted quantum physics!

If astrologers focus on birth months, and birth months have important effects on health, it doesn’t mean that astrology is valid but that it was right by accident, while the only path to discovering truth is rational analysis. Indeed, the more you validate woo that is right only occasionally, coincidentally and tangentially, the more susceptible to unreason you make society. The same goes for the wisdom of tribespeople: their skills and knowledge of the environment are a result not of the validity of woo but of an application of science broadly conceived.

If everything can be made to seem adaptive, then anything can be, whatever contortions must be pulled to show that it is. I am not saying that mythology and fiction are bad things. I agree that, in some sense, they reveal truth. But this is better understood in Salman Rushdie’s sense, whereby stories can be ways to understand the world and ourselves—but as stories, while literal belief in them is an obstacle to understanding and applying them properly. There is no reason to reify them as “adaptive” and to do so leads us down tortuous paths in the pursuit of justifying silliness.

On religion, too, Heying and Weinstein fall prey to such errors. Religion, they say, must be adaptive, otherwise it would not be so universal and persistent, and atheists would have displaced the religious by now. It is good for us, whatever the truth of it. But they don’t disprove other explanations for cultural persistence, such as memetic effectiveness, the allure of social control, and evolved human cognitive weaknesses (seeking agency where there is none, for example). The latter explanation for religion, incidentally, coheres nicely with Heying and Weinstein’s points about evolutionary mismatch: our agency-detection kit is also outdated, which leads to false beliefs about the universe, and thus the dismissal of religion is as possible within their framework as the justification of it.

Heying and Weinstein also ignore the fact that religion is correlated with unhealthy societies. As societies become richer and happier, religious belief decreases. This is even the case within different states of the US: the more devout a state is, the worse off it is. This doesn’t necessarily mean that religion equals bad societies, but it does show that religion is not necessarily adaptive or even necessary for the flourishing of individuals and societies. The most religious societies on Earth are utter hellholes, in these cases as a direct result of religious belief—look to Afghanistan or Iran or note the centuries-long battle against Christian dogmatism in Europe. One of the most notable and influential human activities in history has been the resistance to religion, without which there would have been no Enlightenment.

Heying and Weinstein also seem to think that religion is a human universal. This is to ignore the longstanding phenomenon of disbelief: Tim Whitmarsh’s research on ancient disbelief is a benchmark here, as is Ibn Warraq’s work on prehistoric and contemporary tribal non-belief (see his account of the Pirahãs of Brazil, whose brazen atheism made a Christian anthropologist lose his faith). And in any case, a significant chunk of Christianity at least is disintegrating, as even its votaries admit. Too bad for anyone who thinks we need religion, then: we shall just have to do without (the fate of Scandinavia should allay any trepidation on that front).

Most importantly, Heying and Weinstein’s insistence on the necessity of such metaphorically true but literally false beliefs fails to account for the most important feature of religion: that people believe it is literally true. It really does matter if people believe that God commands a certain political dispensation or morality for the rest of us.

I have many other disagreements with the book, but that is enough for now. Despite all this, Heying and Weinstein have produced a stimulating work that contains a lot of good advice for us benighted apes and is lucid as well as poetic. Most of all, they have done us a great service by taking evolution seriously in their approach to the world. Their book, therefore, is a great, if also greatly flawed, achievement.

Enright on Caplan on Immigration By: David Henderson

Sam Enright has written a good review of Bryan Caplan’s Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. I like it for two main reasons: (1) he takes Bryan completely seriously and doesn’t take cheap shots, and, related to that, (2) the tone is quite nice.

I do have a number of criticisms, but I’ve been thinking about one main one. Enright writes:

I’m also concerned about the animal suffering that would result from open borders. Globally, the production of meat, 90% of which comes from factory farms , creates an almost unimaginable level of suffering. There are two reasons why open borders would make this worse: the Western diet is more meat-heavy than diets from other rich parts of the world, and richer people, in general, consume more animal protein. People sometimes talk about the meat-eater problem : many interventions in global development look much less cost-effective if you give moral concern to animals, since, if the interventions save human lives or make people better off, they lead to greater meat consumption. Increased demand for meat may be unusually harmful now, because it further entrenches factory farming as the default way meat is produced.

At first I found this criticism somewhat persuasive. The recent discussion between Bryan and philosopher Michael Huemer has caused me to be uncomfortable with factory farming and I’m starting to explore ways of eating meat, which I love, without eating meat from factory farms. I don’t buy the idea of rights of animals, but I think it is wrong to raise in animals in circumstances where they suffer for their whole lives.

But as I thought about it, I realized that this is not a good argument at all. Let’s say we could reduce the demand for factory farming by imposing draconian regulations that reduce Americans’ per capita income by 80 percent. Would that justify those regulations? I think not. So then how, if we accept the other parts of Bryan’s argument, can we justify, based on reducing factory farming, draconian immigration restrictions to keep many people’s income 80 percent lower than otherwise. Even if you think regulation is justified to reduce factory farming, shouldn’t the regulation be aimed, not at keeping people poor, but at reducing or ending factory farming?

I’ll have more to say about other parts of the review. But that is my biggest criticism of Enright’s review.

Some cuckoos are born assassins. Within a day or two of hatching, the infant birds—still blind, pink, and featherless—will start to evict the other residents of their nest, hurling them over the edge and to their death.Technically, the evictions they carry out are from living quarters that aren’t even their own. The cuckoos are parasites, strategically placed by their mother into the abode of another species so they can mooch their way through adolescence. The more of their foster siblings they kill in cold blood, the more food and attention they can con out of their adoptive parents.The acts are ruthless, but also remarkable physical feats. Fresh out of their shells, the birds are jacked, capable of hoisting hefty eggs or chicks—including some that weigh about as much as they do—onto their back before throwing them out like trash. “It’s like a newborn baby lifting a bowling ball,” Stephanie McClelland, a biologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, told me. “It’s just crazy.”By peeping on cuckoo chicks during development, McClelland and her colleagues have homed in on one of the major strategies these birds, and several others like them, use to achieve their super-swole status at such a young age. In a new study, they describe how the animals exercise as embryos while they’re still incubating in the egg, a sort of prenatal CrossFit that preps them for the slaughterous rampage that follows. “It’s a home gym in the egg,” Mark Hauber, a biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who collaborated with McClelland on the study, told me. By the time these birds hatch, their foster siblings already don’t stand a chance.[Read: Why do mammals kill each other?]The notion that embryos can wriggle around in the womb or egg isn’t new. Human pregnancy is a prime example: Fetuses spend months executing a mix of twitches, stretches, and kicks that are thought to be an in utero trial run for the motions “they need to survive after birth,” Niamh Nowlan, a developmental-biomechanics expert at University College Dublin, told me. The situation isn’t all that different for birds, which start flexing their muscles just a few days after their egg is laid. These little full-body bootcamps are vital: Animals that skip their pre-birth workouts tend to emerge with bones and muscles that are weak and underdeveloped.McClelland and her graduate adviser, Steven Portugal, decided to check if embryos could push that trend in the other direction—adding on exercise to the standard regimen of squirming, perhaps as a way to ensure that they’re born extra buff. If any animals were good candidates for pumping prenatal iron, they figured, cuckoos and other nest-invading birds, formally known as brood parasites, might be among them, given what they get up to in infancy.Proving that, though, wouldn’t be easy. That’s because dozens of bird species are thought to engage in some form of brood parasitism, each with their own violent flair. Some, like the common cuckoo, are egg-tossing executioners; others, like the cowbirds that Hauber studies, let their host siblings survive, but still jostle them out of the way to beg, loudly and insistently, for food. Most macabre of all might be the lesser honeyguide, a fanged felon that will stab its nest-mates with the piercing-sharp hook that adorns the front of its beak or “shake them like a terrier” until they drop dead, Claire Spottiswoode, a biologist at the University of Cambridge and the University of Cape Town who studies honeyguides, told me. If McClelland wanted to find a connection between pre-hatch calisthenics and the shredded status of brood-parasite chicks, she’d need to spy on a whole lot of embryos while they were still in their shells.
A greater honeyguide nibbling on Stephanie McClelland’s finger. (Credit: Stephanie McClelland)
So McClelland enlisted Hauber, Spottiswoode, and several others to help her out. The researchers spent several years collecting the eggs of 14 bird species—some parasitic, some not—scattered across three continents. Using a device called an Egg Buddy, they beamed harmless lasers into their specimens, and tallied up how much the embryos were shifting around. The work was sometimes grueling, and not just because they were dealing with bloodthirsty birds: While gathering data in a rural region of Illinois, McClelland’s mobile laboratory, full of equipment and chemicals, was mistakenly flagged by locals as a meth lab.But the project yielded exactly the results McClelland and her colleagues were hoping to see. While inside their egg, most brood parasites tended to fidget about more often than the host birds they tormented, especially during later stages of incubation. They were also jigglier than closely related birds that were raised by their own parents. Brood parasitism is thought to have arisen independently at least seven times in the avian family tree; “to see a similar pattern” across species and continents makes the team’s results especially compelling, Iliana Medina Guzman, a brood-parasite expert at the University of Melbourne who wasn’t involved in the study, told me.[Read: The survival advantage of being a fancy baby coot]The results aren’t totally ironclad. Nowlan, who wasn’t involved in the study, pointed out that the researchers weren’t able to check how the chicks in each species actually turned out, making it hard to confirm whether in-egg gains actually did produce brawnier birds. And the movement gaps among species also weren’t huge—more the difference between two casual weight lifters than a bodybuilder and a couch potato. Still, “when you look at a small difference in embryo movement or muscle development, it compounds on itself,” says Facundo Fernandez-Duque, an avian biologist who is advised by Hauber but wasn’t involved in the study. For a weary cuckoo chick, a few extra strength-training sessions might make all the difference between booting its fourth and final nest-mate and having to share its chow.For Spottiswoode, the link feels intuitive, like confirmation of the years of work she’s done in the field, examining and handling murderous birds. Freshly hatched honeyguides even feel kind of toned. “They have an almost rubbery quality to them,” Spottiswoode said. That sinewy stuff is exactly what makes the baby birds’ bods so lethal. Even clutched in human hands, they’ll lunge and snap and fling their fangs about, “trying to find something, anything, to bite,” she said. Sometimes, survival of the fittest really does mean the fittest.

The Covid discussion is all about the high case rates in England, the phenomenally high rates in children and whether we should do anything about it. Last week the British Medical Association, the NHS Confederation, trade unions and the Labour Party all called for the government to move to its winter “Plan B,” which would mean reinstating mask mandates in indoor public spaces, recommending home working where possible and potentially introducing vaccine passports. Meanwhile, there were rumours that Plan B would come this week, “not today,” after COP26 in November or not at all as cases are set to plummet. Reported cases have fallen in the past few days, but so have tests (with the start of half term) and the proportion of people testing positive remains high. So what is going on? 
There is little doubt that we are entering winter in a much worse position than our western European neighbours. Cases, hospital admissions and deaths are all considerably lower in Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Italy, to name a few. This is largely due to England being the first among those to remove almost all restrictions. Other countries have pursued a “vaccine-plus” strategy, where high vaccination rates are combined with some or all of continued mask mandates, restrictions on the highest-risk venues (such as nightclubs), vaccine passports and efforts to improve ventilation, all of which seemed to help keep Delta under control as vaccinations progressed (85 per cent of Portugal’s entire population is vaccinated, compared to 67 per cent in England). 
While the 100,000 daily cases Health Secretary Sajid Javid warned about in July did not materialise, cases remained high all summer. Again unlike our European neighbours, we failed to vaccinate as many teenagers as we needed over those months and failed to put in place proper mitigations in schools, leading to rapid increases in cases among children over the first half of term. By the end of last week, we had 15,000 newly reported cases in children under 15 every day and almost 10 per cent of all 11-15 year olds had Covid. High cases in children have spread to not just their parents’ generation but also their grandparents’. The same number of people in England have tested positive for the first time since 1st June as did from 1st September 2020 to 31st March 2021—3.5m. 
These high case numbers have consequences: over 75,000 hospital admissions, 11,000 deaths and thousands more cases of Long Covid. We have also seen a new subtype of Delta emerge, called AY.4.2, that appears to be a little more transmissible than its parent. Its advantage is small enough that it is unlikely to change the game in the way that Delta did, but it will be enough to make things harder than they should have been. We are now heading into the months when people move indoors to socialise and Covid-19 thrives.
“By the end of last week, almost 10 per cent of all 11-15 year olds had Covid”
As well as the deliberate policy decisions to tolerate high case numbers, particularly in young people, England has also been a little unlucky. The greater vaccine resistance of Delta compared to previously dominant variants has meant that any waning of immunity after vaccination is more of a problem. Waning is gradual, but becomes a noticeable issue about four to five months after the second dose. While effectiveness in preventing severe illness and death has remained high, waning is more pronounced in older people or those with underlying conditions. We also used far more AstraZeneca than our European neighbours for over-40s which, while an excellent vaccine, is less effective than Pfizer against Delta. That means many of our most vulnerable people, now six months or more from their second dose, are at increasing risk of catching Covid and then developing more severe illness.
So where is there cause for optimism? Firstly, vaccines in people under 30 are extremely effective in preventing both infection and severe illness. After a dismally slow beginning, the teen vaccination programme in England is hopefully about to take off, with parents being able to access vaccines for 12-15-year-olds outside of school settings. If we can get doses into teens rapidly over the next two weeks, this will have a significant braking effect on transmission, as well as protecting children themselves from educational disruption, sickness and Long Covid. Half term will also act as a natural brake on transmission as children mix less with others, especially in areas that have two-week breaks.
The other good news is that boosters too are incredibly effective at preventing infection and severe illness in older and vulnerable people. We have already boosted over 50 per cent of the over-80s, but we need this to speed up significantly to keep pace with the numbers becoming eligible every day. Accelerating the programme will directly protect older people and reduce hospital admissions and deaths. 
We do have means at our disposal to complement high vaccine coverage: better case identification and isolation (including communicating the full range of symptoms and supporting people to isolate); reaching out to under-vaccinated populations; reinstating mask mandates in general and in secondary schools; investing in better ventilation; encouraging working from home; and considering the option of vaccine passports in higher-risk settings. None of these measures are anywhere near to lockdown measures—indeed, they make lockdown much less likely than if we continue to rely solely on vaccination and natural immunity, which appears to be the current plan.
While, in time, vaccines on their own are likely to be able to do almost all the heavy lifting of keeping cases very low, we are not there yet—and to have maximum impact we would need to offer teens their second dose, roll out vaccines (if approved) to 5-11 year olds and consider boosting all adults. 
If we can combine accelerated vaccination with additional measures as soon as possible, we will be in a far better position to bring cases down rapidly and keep them there. This will reduce some of the current extreme pressure on the NHS, lower the risk of even worse variants emerging and give us the best possible chance of a sociable Christmas. 
The post Why the UK was so vulnerable to another Covid outbreak appeared first on Prospect Magazine.

In economics, “emergent order” refers to systems of order that spontaneously emerge without any central direction or plan. It is the unplanned order of supply and demand that makes market economies work. But critics of a hands-off approach to policy contend that order is likely to devolve into chaos without rational, calculated planning. In this episode of “Political Economy,” Neil Chilson discusses the lessons of emergent order for policymakers and whether this concept still applies in the complex, data-rich world of the 21st century.

Pethokoukis: One of my favorite sayings is one which I stole from former Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, in which he said, “Plan beats no plan,” because without a plan, you have chaos. But your book is about emergent order, and that sounds like there’s no plan. If it’s not about planning and detail and it’s not chaos, what is emergent order?
Chilson: It’s a great quote and it’s actually pretty decent advice, I think. You’re right, my book is not about creating a grand plan. In some ways it’s about pointing out how often grand plans fail. And sometimes they can fail really miserably. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t plan at all. In fact, as participants in what I would call a complex dynamic system (this is what complexity scientists would call it), we contribute to emergent order outcomes, where nobody controls the outcome and nobody really controls the system, but orderly, beneficial exchanges happen. We contribute to those in part by the plans that we make and how we try to execute them.
So it’s not that there is no point in planning. We are planning creatures. We are tool-using creatures. It’s more understanding and being humble about what we can actually achieve through planning and being ready to adapt our plans when the environment changes, which it inevitably will.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative in Chicago, June 30, 2011. REUTERS/John Gress

Let me read a couple sentences, because listeners love it when I read: “Beautifully ordered systems can and regularly do emerge from the independent actions of molecules or cells or people, without anyone being in charge. And in fact, seemingly small interventions into a complex system could send it spinning out of control and even destroy it.” What are a couple examples of beautifully ordered systems that emerge? And how do they get sent spinning out of control?
Sure. A simple example from physics would be something like a whirlpool. You let the water out of your bathtub and this structure forms. It’s not static. It’s continuously moving. It’s a bunch of different elements, a bunch of different molecules, that are interacting with each other under these forces and it creates a structure. That structure is persistent, but can be easily disturbed. Your idea might be, “I want to try to shape this structure,” but it’s very easy to destroy it if you’re trying to shape it with your hand, for example. That’s a simple physics example. There’s lots of examples in economics of a bottom-up system that works very well, and then a controlling force tries to step in and control something about it for their purposes and spins it out of control.
One of my favorite examples is from James C. Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State. He talks about German forestry. The Germans back in the 1800s wanted to increase their lumber output from their forests. They were wild forests. They were not planned at all. And so what they did is they essentially replanted the forest in very orderly, quite aesthetically pleasing rows of trees, of a very specific tree that was the favorite for lumber. It was very easy to maintain the forest, in some ways. It was very easy to go in and cut down trees when they were ready. It was very easy to measure the metrics of the lumber output. But that complex ecosystem, which served many needs other than lumber, was completely upended by this. So peasants who gathered firewood from the forest could no longer do that in the same way.
The natural ecosystem was completely disrupted, to the point at which it was essentially a monoculture and very quickly was subject to disease. Although in the short run it jacked up the output of lumber, in the longer run, it was actually greatly reduced and required a whole bunch of follow-on interventions to try to save the project that the government had put into place. And so that’s a good example from the natural ecosystem side of not only control disrupting the many uses of a complex system, but maybe even undermining the particular goal that the person trying to step into control is trying to achieve.
You’re a smart guy. You operate at a very high level. I’m going to bring it down a level. And what this makes me think of — interventions into a complex system with unintended outcomes — is the film Jurassic Park, where the scientists thought they understood dinosaurs. It turns out they really didn’t. Before they knew it, they’re running for their lives. If I look at the Industrial Revolution or, as economist Deirdre McCloskey calls it, “the Great Enrichment” — how the world went from being super poor to not being so poor — through an emergent order lens, how did that happen?
Yeah. So I’m a huge fan of McCloskey’s work. I think I actually have a copy of Bourgeois Equality right here behind me, and I cite her quite a lot in the book. So economics is one of the fields that first identified emergent order concepts. Adam Smith talks about them. He doesn’t use that term. In fact, the more common term in economics is “spontaneous order.” But the way that it happens — and I think McCloskey’s telling is not only quite literate, but very compelling evidentiary-wise — is that people started following some simple, basic rules at the individual level around property rights. There was also a change in culture around, basically, the entrepreneur. The innovator became somebody to be admired rather than somebody to be feared.
And those cultural changes, along with some of the basic principles around property rights, allowed individual exchanges that were not designed top-down, but where one innovator would see a problem out there in the world and try to solve it and then subject it to a market test, where people voted, essentially, with their dollars about whether or not they supported it. And over time, of all these many, many experiments, some succeeded, many failed. And then people moved on to try to solve a new problem, and over time, that created the very widespread prosperity through the creation of new business models and new technologies.
So almost all of them, you cannot design from the top. In retrospect, they might look obvious, but in looking forward, it’s very hard to tell which of these experiments would’ve worked. But the collective result of these many, many, many experiments by individuals, or maybe even individual firms, sums together to be this great leap forward in technology and in widespread betterment for human society.
As you were mentioning that, I was thinking of a conversation I had with the historian Margaret O’Mara about the rise of Silicon Valley. And if you look at it after the fact, it seems very obvious. You had Stanford University and then we just had the Defense Department and they started plowing money and boom. And we had this tremendous innovation hub. There was a plan created — this was post New Deal, plans were very big. So this was like the latest plan coming out of that kind of ethos. I mean, she laughed. She goes, “No, there was no plan at all.” After the fact, it looks like, “Oh, it seems very logical that would happen.” But there was no plan.
Yeah. And I think sometimes people try to look at Silicon Valley and then they’re like, “Well, we’ll create the same conditions in our area and Silicon Valley will happen here, too.” And what we see is often, and this is true in complex systems, it’s more than just you put all the elements together and you hit a switch and it goes. Many emergent systems actually have a long startup time, essentially. All of the intelligence in the system is through the interconnections between the parts. And it takes time to make those interconnections, even if you have all the elements in the same place.
A Google logo is seen at its headquarters office in Mountain View, California.Photo by Yichuan Cao/Sipa USA
Kevin Kelly has a book that’s actually called Out of Control. So it was written in the ’80s and it takes a much more science/biology take on this. But he talks about how you could put together a bunch of bees and you don’t get a hive. He also talks about how you could understand every single thing about the individual bee, but that doesn’t explain the behavior when you put thousands of them together, or when they come together in a hive. And so complex systems are not like machines where you just assemble all the pieces and then you turn it on and it works. It’s more like some really complicated types of baking recipes, where you have to put the pieces together, but then it takes a long time for them to actually integrate, for the dough to rise, for example, so that you get a system that actually works. So that makes them very hard to design. And it also makes them pretty much impossible to control, even though there are lots of ways to influence them.
Is it appropriate to call the economy a machine? Sometimes I’ll use that word. I’ll call it a “jobs machine” or a “growth machine.” But what you’re describing doesn’t sound very machine-like. It sounds very biological. And it does not sound artificial. And if I start calling the economy a machine, have I already taken a step in the wrong direction?
Yeah. I think Hayek actually points this out. He says that often we have this mental model, and I think one of Russ Roberts’ videos on the Hayek versus Keynes thing has a really good set of lines around the economy not being a machine. The difference between a machine and something like an organism, even some of the simplest organisms, is exactly what I was talking about with the bees earlier. You can take an auto engine apart, and if you understand every single piece, it’s complicated. That’s the difference between complex and complicated. An auto engine is complicated. You can take it apart. And if you understand the function of every single piece, you’ll be able to sort of sum those functions together and understand how the whole engine works.
That’s not true for an organism, where if you took it apart into its different pieces, even if you understood those pieces, there’s something about the connectivity between those pieces, the knowledge exists in the relationships between those pieces in a way that can’t be reduced and summed.
And the economy is very much that way, because the interactions between individuals are so context-specific and because relationships are built over time, not just at the individual level, but between the supplier and the producer. And there are all these intangibles that can’t really be measured. And you can’t sum together all the pieces to get a really accurate picture of where the system is going. Often you have to paint with a very broad brush about what the future of the economy is going to be, and precise predictions are just off the table, because of the complexity of the system.
Adam Smith . . . that was a long time ago. Life was simpler then. It’s a complicated world. We need to make plans, despite our conversation about plans earlier. We just can’t let things kind of happen. It’s a world so complicated that to let order emerge would be chaotic. We have goals for our society. It’s not like we need a lot of good plans. And thanks to AI, we have more information than ever. We have big data, and then we’ll have bigger data. Maybe we can create our own order a lot better than we used to. Maybe one day the AI will do it for us.
Yeah. I’ve actually seen that argument, the sort of revival of the calculation problem that Mises tackled in the socialist calculation problem. There’s people who now argue, essentially: “We can collect enough data to solve that now, and we’ll just let a machine do it.” I’m really skeptical. There could be a sort of nihilistic take on emergent order, where you basically say, “Ah, it’s complicated. I don’t understand. I’m just going to sit back. If I’m meant to do something, great, I will. If good things are supposed to come to me, they will. I’m out of control here.”
But the whole point of emergent order is it actually requires people to act — you in the economy have to act for order to emerge. In an ant farm, the ants can’t just sit back and do nothing. They’re following the simple rules that they have. They’re following the inputs that they have, using the local knowledge that they have. And so they should try to be the most ant-like that they can. And that’s true also for humans, I think. And part of the message of my book is that we can’t just sit back and let the world happen to us.
This is one of the flaws, I think, of the Stoics, who said, “Don’t try to control things you can’t control. Your lot in life, in many ways, is out of your control.” And they’re not wrong about that. But I think they didn’t have a good model for how much influence we can have on the institutions and the systems that we interact with. We don’t have control over them, but we can feed into the feedback loops of the institutions that we participate in. And in many ways, our greatest work as humans is to improve the institutions that we participate in, even though we can’t control them.
And one of the messages in my book is: One of the best ways to help improve the institutions that you’re part of is to play your role within them as best as possible. And also to help them play the role that they’re supposed to serve, that they’re intended to serve, as best as possible. And this applies to institutions from Congress, to your family, to your local community group, and even groups of friends. I think these same principles of realizing that we cannot control a complex system, but we have the ability — and in many ways, the moral obligation — to influence the systems that we participate in, is one of the key reasons we should stop trying to be in control and focus on influence instead.
Some people are going to hear what you’ve said so far. They’re going to say, “Well, here’s what’s really going on. This is a bunch of fancy talk and it’s a defense of the neoliberal market, capitalist markets. That’s what he’s really talking about. And guess what? We tried that, and what is the outcome? I mean, we care about the outcome and the outcome has been bad. The outcome has been stagnation. The outcome is plutocracy, vast inequality. Maybe we need to have less emergent order and a lot more directed order and a directed purpose to our society.”
In the chapter where I talked about where emergent order came from, I intentionally paired economics and biology — which are the two major fields where emergent order concepts come from — to combat this a little bit. Often the same people who will say that about the economy will look at the environment and say, “Well, we shouldn’t try to design things in the environment. You’re messing with nature. It’s this complex system that will have all these unintended consequences if we mess with nature.” And so they seem to understand and embrace the emergent order nature of nature, but don’t seem to see the parallel to economics.
Activists march holding a banner during the march at Extinction Rebellion’s Nature Protest held in Central London. Photo by Loredana Sangiuliano / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)
And often, people on the right are the flip of that. They’ll often say, “I buy that markets are emergent and that we don’t control them and intervening and designing them doesn’t work very well, but there must be some grand design in nature.” And I don’t want to get into the creationist debate, because as a religious believer myself, I think emergent order is quite compatible with theology, in many ways. But, quite intentionally, I think people just don’t realize how emergent order, as a basic principle, is consistent both in biology and in economics in a way that should make us humble about how much we think we can design either of those systems. So if you see a problem in the economy or you see a problem in the environment, it’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to address those problems, but that we should be humble about what we can actually achieve when we do that.
The concept often is that we should just sweep away the past systems and redesign everything from the bottom up. But what we know from biology, what we know from history, and increasingly from psychology, is that there’s a lot of knowledge captured in the system that is not expressed. And if we sweep away the system and try to put a designed system in place, we might have something that is in some ways more aesthetically pleasing, but often it will be a sort of shallow solution that only addresses one set of problems instead of the whole big host of problems that are out there in the world. And the consequences of that is a system that’s less well-adapted to all of the people who are participating in it.
Even if I accept many of the problems that people point out in the economy, I continue to be as skeptical of our ability to reshape everything from the top down as I think many people would be if I said, “Well, we should just redesign nature so that we don’t have erosion and we don’t have species that kill each other.” I think that level of intervention in nature would make many people as nervous as I am about similarly drastic interventions in the economy.
Perhaps your book will create a moment of embrace of emergent order. We do not seem to be in that moment in Washington, where there’s a lot of very expensive plans that will affect all areas of the economy. What would be the cautionary note that you would give policymakers today?
My guest today has been Neil Chilson, author of Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World. Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thanks a lot. Great to be here.
Learn more: Can geothermal energy replace oil and gas? My long-read Q&A with Jamie Beard | The coming fusion revolution: My long-read Q&A with Arthur Turrell | Is the United States really meritocratic? My long-read Q&A with Adrian Wooldridge
The post Does America need more planning? My long-read Q&A with Neil Chilson appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg recently revived the debate over the need for a new, conservative political party, arguing in The Dispatch (the conservative but Trump-skeptical online publication  he co-founded) that it is a better alternative for Never Trump conservatives than voting for Democrats. Aroused, the anti-anti-Trumpers at National Review fired off three quick responses in opposition, while David French (The Dispatch’s senior editor) weighed in in support. However, Goldberg’s argument and the responses he provoked fail to reflect what is happening on the ground in real-time.The reality is that the center-right has already created a political movement, which very well may evolve into a third party.
Goldberg briefly refers to aNew York Times op-ed by Miles Taylor (the former chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration) and Christine Todd Whitman (the former Republican governor of New Jersey). They  argue that to defend democracy, anti-Trump Republicans need to vote for Democrats in 2022.  Goldberg argues that a better option is the creation of “a third party with a simple, Reaganite conservative platform combined with a serious plank to defend the soundness of elections.”  
Goldberg fails to place this seemingly simple choice – alliance with Democrats or a new party – in the broader context of what is actually happening.  Taylor and Whitman were not writing for themselves, but as leaders of the Renew America Movement (RAM). RAM is the political organization launched by hundreds of current and former Republican leaders, including myself. Taylor and Whitman made it clear that RAM will be supporting candidates of both parties:
[W]e will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races… and we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth.
Taylor and Whitman also indicated that RAM would support independent candidates who will not run as spoilers for the Democrats. Rather, RAM will take local circumstances into account in those cases where Democrats can be convinced that an independent is the most viable option to beat a Trump Republican. They cite Utah as an example, where Senator Mike Lee (a Republican who supported Trump’s refusal to concede defeat in the presidential election) almost certainly cannot be defeated by a Democratic challenger. But an independent might succeed – which is why former Republican Evan McMullin, a member of RAM, announced recently that he was entering the race.
In the short term — the 2022 and (most likely) the 2024 elections — RAM’s efforts will  focus not just on supporting Democrats  but on an “all-of-the-above” electoral strategy to help prevent Trump and his supporters from regaining power and destroying our democracy. But as Taylor and Whitman made clear in their editorial, the option of forming a third party remains on the table in the long term:
Starting a new center-right party may prove to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. We and our allies have debated the option of starting a new party for months and will continue to explore its viability in the long run.
Is this movement (and potential new party) the “conservative, Reaganite” alternative Goldberg is looking for? Well, we have chosen to use the term “center-right,” but the meaning of labels is in the eye of the beholder.  We are all current or former Republicans, and RAM’s first action was to adopt a set of guiding principles, “A Call for American Renewal,” that includes this arguably Reaganite statement on economic opportunity:
We recognize open, market-based economies as consistent with our natural liberty and the optimal means of ensuring economic mobility and the allocation of scarce resources. We support sensible and limited regulation, including to ensure equal opportunity, and affirm government’s vital role in assisting vulnerable citizens, while encouraging self-reliance without the impediments of cronyism and corruption.
The point is, we have moved beyond debating what should be done about Trump and his takeover of the GOP. We have moved on to doing the hard work of winning elections. We raise money, endorse candidates, gather allies, hire political professionals, and build a grassroots base. 
Today, almost five and a half years after the hashtag #NeverTrump began trending on Twitter, the center-right movement is composed of hundreds of prominent current and former Republican leaders, hundreds of thousands of donors large and small, and millions of social media followers. It includes intellectual leaders, media pundits, think tanks, political operatives, and a robust fundraising, organizational, and political infrastructure.  The ground is being laid for this movement to evolve into a party if events take us there.
The Republican Party has not exactly split – yet – but chunks of it are breaking off. This new center-right movement is a reality. But where does it go from here? And how long before it is capable of winning elections? This new movement is still far from reaching full development. But we were a factor in the 2020 election, and we are gearing up to make a difference in 2022. America needs this movement to succeed. Our democracy is still under threat, and we are likely to face a massive constitutional crisis in the next two elections. We can’t avoid this fight.  Instead, to win it, we need to build a broad, pro-democracy coalition that includes those of us who used to be loyal Republicans. The good news is that it’s happening.
Note: This post represents the author’s opinion and does not reflect the positioning of the Niskanen Center. 
Photo: Choness via iStock
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It’s happened too many times to be a coincidence. Some sort of policing incident will go viral—sometimes an abuse of power, sometimes a justified shooting that looks bad to the untrained eye—provoking intense protests or even riots. Cops will pull back from the discretionary, proactive police work proven to reduce violence. And shootings and homicides will go up. This oft-repeated sequence of events has sparked debate over how officers should be trained to use force, when officers should be prosecuted, and what the precise role of “de-policing” has been in the subsequent crime increases. But relatively little has been said about what we can do about de-policing when it happens. When police stop policing, how do you get them to start again?

In a new Manhattan Institute issue brief, I take up the question. By consulting the academic literature and by interviewing criminal-justice experts, police leaders, and working officers, I compiled suggestions on how to fight this problem. Provided that leaders have the will and the necessary political support, the actions available to them fall into three broad categories. Leaders can avoid making de-policing official policy, credibly assure officers that they will be treated fairly—not supported no matter what—in the event they need to use force, and take concrete steps to promote healthy, proactive policing.

The first point is the simplest. If policymakers want proactive policing, they shouldn’t deliberately make such policing harder. Throughout the country, numerous policy changes have intentionally discouraged active police work: Washington State made civilian stops and vehicle chases more difficult, Chicago limited foot chases, and a Baltimore consent decree discouraged proactive stops, for example.

In the more immediate context of de-policing after a specific viral incident, however, different considerations come into play. Aware of the possibility of backlash, officers want to avoid becoming the next viral video—a fear that lies outside the reach of public policy. But they also worry that even if they follow their training and use force appropriately, their superiors and public officials can’t be counted on to “have their backs.”

Sometimes these fears are justified. Examples abound of prominent politicians and local leaders who, responding to public pressure, denounced cops without proper consideration of the circumstances. In one recent case, the Washington, D.C., police chief quickly said that he was “embarrassed and ashamed” to see a video in which an officer punched a suspect numerous times, even though the suspect was illegally armed with a “ghost gun” and resisting arrest. It fell to the chairman of the police union to defend the officer in the pages of the Washington Post. And in a Columbus, Ohio, case, an officer shot a teenager who was in the process of attacking another girl with a knife—a textbook example of a justified, if tragic, shooting—but Ohio senator Sherrod Brown rushed to express his outrage, pointing out that it had occurred while the Derek Chauvin verdict was being read and insisting the teen “should be alive right now.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki used that same incident as a jumping-off point to talk about “police violence” that “disproportionately impacts black and Latino people,” and to discuss the Biden administration’s priorities of addressing “systemic racism and implicit bias” while putting “much-needed reforms into place at police departments around the country.”

The common-sense solution to this problem is for officials at all levels to adhere to fair processes in these matters—or, in the academic jargon, to maintain “organizational” and “procedural” justice. Numerous studies suggest that, when officers feel confident that their superiors will treat them fairly, they are less sensitive to de-policing pressures, more likely to obey their superiors, and generally more effective. This doesn’t mean letting cops do whatever they want without consequence; it means making the rules clear in advance, enforcing them fairly when something happens, and giving accused officers a chance to tell their side of the story before they’ve been thrown under the bus in public. It means defending cops when they did nothing wrong, and, if necessary, explaining to the public why police are trained the way they are.

But if police are public employees, why can officers simply stop doing an important part of their jobs, with immense ramifications for public safety, while escaping disciplinary consequence? (I briefly raised this issue in a National Review column earlier this year, provoking an explanation from the Graham Factor blog—and a call from my retired-cop dad.) Leaders can prod officers to keep up their discretionary activity, but only within certain limits. Going back decades, many states have banned outright quotas for police activity, on the belief that these policies encouraged dubious and illegal stops as cops rushed to hit their numbers before the deadline. Quotas certainly persist today in watered-down form. In a January 2017 Pew study, nearly 40 percent of cops said that they were subject to a quota. Though these were mostly informal targets, they remain controversial and unpopular. Anything that even vaguely resembles a formal quota, especially in a city on edge in the wake of a viral incident, is probably a non-starter.

But realistic options exist, especially once leaders have taken steps to assure officers of fair treatment. Police officials and mayors can communicate that they don’t want to see a decline in policing activity. Discretionary activity can play a role in promotions, performance reviews, and assignments to special units. Street-level police leaders, such as sergeants, can talk to and motivate individual officers whose work has dropped off. Even simply letting it be known that superiors are keeping close tabs on the quantity and quality of work that’s being done can have an effect.

If we can reduce de-policing on the margins, it’s worth doing—especially considering the number of lives being lost to rising crime in cities. But these solutions alone won’t resolve the issue. In a free country, citizens are rightly permitted to share videos and take part in protests. As long as our cultural climate remains broadly anti-police, the intense scrutiny and opprobrium directed at cops will likely continue to cause them to pull back.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Listen & subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google If there’s one thing we might regret at the end of life, it’s that we missed out on moments that mattered—not because we weren’t physically there, but because our mind wandered off to some unknown place.In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we explore why it’s uniquely challenging to “live in the moment,” how we limit our own curiosity by assuming that we know best, and why the illusion of stability pulls us from living every day fully, and in the moment. A conversation with the Harvard University psychology professor Dr. Ellen Langer helps us think through a daily struggle: How do I stay present?This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A. C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael.Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091.Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche de Luces”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”).This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Arthur C. Brooks: A big part of happiness is learning to live in the moment. What does that actually mean? And more importantly, how do we do it? It turns out that living in the moment, or at least being fully alive right now has two components: mindfulness and curiosity.You need to figure out a way to focus on the present, to be really experiencing your current time frame, as opposed to thinking about the past or thinking about the future. Now, there’s a reason that that’s hard to do. The human brain makes it possible for us to be in other time periods than in the current moment. I can imagine that I’m in the future, practicing future scenarios in my life. That’s called prospection. That’s about living in the future.Other people tend to think about the past a lot, and one of the things that we know from research on the elderly is they tend to be kind of retrospective, thinking about the past. The problem is, if you’re excessively prospective and/or retrospective, it can crowd out your ability to be alive right now.Dr. Ellen Langer: Lots of people confuse what I do with meditation, but meditation is a practice; mindfulness is the result of that practice. The mindfulness that we study is immediate. It’s simply noticing new things. And in the process of noticing new things, that puts you in the moment. You have all these people who say “be in the present,” and that’s great, but it’s an empty suggestion. And even simpler than this, if one deeply appreciates uncertainty—recognizing everything is always changing, everything looks different from different perspectives, so you can’t know. And when you recognize that you can’t know or you don’t know, you tune in. When you think you do know, you don’t pay any attention.Brooks: The big theme that I really want to talk about here is how to enjoy our lives more. One of the things that you emphasize in your work a lot is that we don’t enjoy our lives enough, because we’re not actually there. What does that mean?Dr. Langer: Over these 40-some-odd years, we find that mindlessness is pervasive. Most of us are not there, and they are not there to know they’re not there. You know, the only way some people realize they experience this is imagine you’re driving and you want to get off at exit 28, and all of a sudden, you see you’re at exit 36. So then you say, Wow, where was I? What I mean by “you’re not there” is that you are more or less behaving like a robot. Everybody has had that experience.You know, you are miserable, and somebody says, “Hi, how are you?” And you say, “Fine, thank you.” And you’re not aware of it, and you’re not trying to hide it. Most of what we do is done on, as it’s called, automatic pilot, but the mindlessness goes far beyond that.I wanted to write a book a long time ago, Arthur—I never wrote this one—that was called Is There Life Before Death?, because I found, you know, all these people worrying about life after death. Many people come alive, sadly, after they get some terrible diagnosis or they have a stroke or they find out they have cancer. When I speak to people who are miserable or whatever, I simply tell them that all you need to do is take care of the moment, just right this second. And if you keep doing that, then over the course of the day, you know, you’ve had a fine time.Brooks: Why is it that we’re so distracted from the present? What is distracting us from actually noticing things around us?Dr. Langer: Well, we have an illusion of stability. We think things are staying still. So if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it; you don’t need to keep paying attention to it. But there’s something I think that needs to be added, which will explain why people keep doing this. Many people pretend because they think they should know. They think, You know, so therefore, I don’t want you to know that I don’t know. And here’s the big secret for everybody: Nobody knows. You change from making a personal attribution for not knowing—I don’t know, but it’s knowable. Therefore, I’ll pretend; I’ll feel stupid, insecure—to a universal attribution: I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. Okay, so now let’s find out together and explore together. If you think you know something, there’s no reason to pay attention.Anything can be made exciting; anything can be made boring. I picked up these kids—this is back years ago, when it was okay to pick up hitchhikers. And I was in Italy, and they were wearing NYC T-shirts, so you knew they weren’t from New York.And so I picked them up, and I asked them, “How did you like New York?” And one of them answered right away and said, you know, he didn’t like it at all. It was boring. There was nothing to do. There are few places, to my mind, that are more exciting. And if you took me and you put me in the middle of a wheat field, I probably would look at it like, Well, it’s all the same, but not to a farmer.Brooks: Let’s go to the future. So, you know, one of the things that I talk an awful lot about with Marty Seligman is prospection, and Marty believes that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. We should be called Homo prospectus.One point, he had this dispute with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, where the Dalai Lama was talking about mindfulness, and he said, No, Your Holiness, it’s natural that we live in the future, especially people who are ambitious and go-getters. And it’s actually important because we have to practice future scenarios, et cetera. How can we live enough in the future to be successful but, at the same time, enjoy our lives? How do we get that balance right?Dr. Langer: I think that everything that you’re doing because of the future is based on a mistaken notion about predictability. Prediction is an illusion. Now, I know Marty doesn’t believe that. Let me convince your audience just quickly. I do this with my advanced decision-making class, and I say to them, “I’ve been teaching a version of this class for the last 40 years. I’ve never missed a class. What is the likelihood I’m going to be here next week?”It’s a small class; we go around the room. These are Harvard kids, so they don’t say 100 percent. They say ridiculous things like 97 percent, as if there’s some calculation, but essentially they’re all saying I’ll be there. Now I say, “Okay, I want each of you to give me a good reason why I won’t be there.” The first one always says, “Well, you’ve been doing it for 40 years; you’ve been there. You deserve the time off.” The next one says, “Your dog has to go to the vet.” The next one says, “You’ve got a flat tire.” And they easily come up with things.Then I say to them, “Okay, what is the likelihood I’m going to be here next week?” And it drops to 50 percent. And when you fully realize that we don’t know, that you can plan all you want for some future event and then something else will happen that pulls you away. But if the planning for the future is giving you a happy present, that’s fine; there’s nothing lost by it. When you stick to your predictions, you’re limiting yourself rather than expanding your universe of possibilities.Brooks: From your perspective, goal setting is valuable to the extent that it enhances the quality of your life right now.Dr. Langer: At the moment, yes. And I think that what we want to do, and the way I describe being mindful, is to be rule, routine, and goal guided. Most of us are mindless, so we’re rule, routine, and goal governed. You don’t want to have a rule that says you do something at time one—that’s when you’re committing to that rule—when at time two, it’s totally irrelevant. Recognize that outcomes are in our heads. They’re not in events.A simple example, you know, if you and I go to lunch and the food is good, that’s great. You and I go to lunch and the food is awful. That’s great. Presumably, I’ll eat less, and that’ll be better for my waistline. If I take the view that the event is good or bad, then I’m in this position where I do everything I can to get the good, and I run away as fast as I can from anything bad. And once I recognize that the good/bad is in my head, I can be still and just enjoy whatever happens.Brooks: So you and I are going back to the classroom in person for the first time in a super long time, and let’s say that your fall class, weirdly unexpectedly, goes really, really poorly. What’s your strategy then, because you’re not going to get stressed?Dr. Langer: I have a one-liner that friends of mine put on their refrigerators, which is “Ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience?” Too often we respond to things. You know, if the class didn’t go well, Oh my God, my life’s going to be—no, of course not. Let’s say you and I are going out and we have a bad conversation and it’s Oh my God, that’s going to destroy the relationship! No. No relationship is going to be made or fall apart based on one situation. No life is going to depend on failing one test or giving one bad class.Brooks: Ellen Langer. What a joy. What a gift that you’ve given to our audience today, and what a gift that you’ve given me. So thank you very much.Dr. Langer: It’s my pleasure, Arthur. Stay well.Brooks: Each week on the show, we like to pay homage to our listeners and their unique insights on happiness. We put out a call to action for listeners to answer this question: When is the last time you remember being truly happy?Listener submission: Hey there! My name is Ben; I live in Washington, D.C. Well, what is happiness? I’ve found bliss and peace while doing kind of really engrossing sports like skiing or kiteboarding. I’ve found joy and elation on the peaks of mountains after hiking them, and the kind of runner’s high that comes after exercise and accomplishment. Happiness is a longer struggle, though. Happiness is a couple good days with friends, appreciation from people who it matters to be appreciated by. It’s things going right when you weren’t sure if they would or not. It’s a clean apartment. It’s balance in your life, both physically and mentally, and in terms of your expectations. I don’t know if there is any one time when I would say that I’m truly happy. Happiness is when I am where I need to be and balanced and lifted up by the foundations that facilitate that happiness. Brooks: Today’s exercise is called intention without attachment. Now, you’ve been hearing from Dr. Langer that mindfulness is critically important for living a good and balanced life, and it’s also incredibly important for happiness, in no small part because when you’re not mindful, you’re missing your life.Mindfulness, according to Dr. Ellen Langer, is not an exotic thing. She defined it as simply noticing new things—being fully present and noticing things that are happening around us. You want to be mindful on the train, put down your phone. Stop thinking about the future. Put your hands in your lap. Look out the window and say, Huh, trees. Now, you can get into much more sort of transcendental or meditative understandings of mindfulness, but that’s a good way to remember it.There’s a problem, however, if mindfulness is your only goal. Happiness also relies on prospection. It is the living in the future that’s connected to a lot of other psychologists’ research, and when you’re optimistic about the future, that prospection is really important to happiness as well. These two ideas, they seem kind of in tension, don’t they? You want to be mindful, but you want to be prospective at the same time. So I ask myself, Can I be both a goal-oriented person and a mindful person? Or do I have to choose? Or is there some way that I can get both? Well, the answer is that you can get both.No. 1, use learned optimism to dream up and set long-term goals. So say to yourself, for example, “Ten years from today, here’s what I want my life to look like.” What does it look like? Make it really clear in your mind; write them down. Learned optimism to set long-term goals.Here’s step two: Now break those goals into sub-steps to get to that 10-year goal. Or maybe it’s a five-year goal. You decide what your time frame is, but to get to it, Where do I need to be one year from now? Where do I need to be in one month to get to one year? Where do I need to be in one week to get to one month? Break your big goal into a bunch of little goals with respect to time.Now here’s step three. Here’s where the mindfulness comes back: Live in day-tight compartments—that sets a goal for being fully alive over the next 24 hours. By the way, I didn’t make up this term “day-tight compartments.” That was made up by a self-improvement author from the ’30s named Dale Carnegie. And this was one of his pieces of advice, to live in day-tight compartments. If you want to be happy, you have to be alive. If you’re going to be alive, you have to notice what’s going on. And to do that, you can’t always be living in the future.

Having grown up in Germany, I am skeptical of the popular notion that life is so much more rational and efficient in the country than it is anywhere else. Those who believe that Germans are incapable of irrationality should suggest imposing a speed limit on the country’s highways. And those who believe that Germans are incapable of inefficiency should learn how much time and money were spent to build Berlin’s new airport.And yet I have, since returning to Germany about a month ago, been struck by how much more rational, efficient, and pragmatic the country’s handling of the late stages of the coronavirus pandemic has been. While the American response to COVID-19 has barely gone beyond the measures that were first adopted in the spring of 2020, Germany has phased in a series of additional policies over the past 18 months. None of them adds serious disruptions to daily life, and yet they collectively put the country in a much better position to contain the virus.Partly as a result of these measures, the latest wave of the pandemic, brought on by the Delta variant, was much less severe in Germany than in the United States. And though the number of cases per capita has, of late, started to creep up—as adherence to these policies has, even in famously rule-following Germany, gotten more lax—the seven-day average remains significantly lower than in the United States, and deaths remain far lower. Germany’s response to the pandemic puts America’s ongoing failure into stark relief. But it also points to a big opportunity.[Read: Six rules that will define our second pandemic winter]At the moment, much of America’s acrimonious debate about COVID centers on the most difficult trade-offs that the country faces as it grapples with the drawn-out and still-deadly twilight of the pandemic. Should children in schools be required to wear masks? Should employees be fired if they refuse to get vaccinated? How do the benefits of vaccinating the young stack up against the risks?There may not be a way around those important questions. But instead of focusing exclusively on the most contentious restrictions, which have serious drawbacks as well as significant benefits, the country’s political officials and health authorities should adopt four measures that can slow the spread of the virus—and reduce the risk of yet another winter wave—without much of a downside.1. Ensure That Mass Events Don’t Facilitate Mass TransmissionI recently enjoyed the latest James Bond movie in a packed theater. I am writing these lines in a crowded coffee shop. Over the course of the next few weeks, I have plans to go to the opera and a soccer game.Life in Germany has mostly gone back to normal. But though the regulations governing public gatherings vary in their details from state to state, the same basic rule applies practically everywhere: Anybody who wants to dine indoors, go to the theater, or attend a large sporting event has to be vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 within the past six months. Those who don’t have such immunity can also participate—but only if they’ve tested negative for the disease within the past 24 hours.The goal of the rule is to allow normal life to resume as much as possible without increasing the number of infections. And by and large, it is working.In the United States, by contrast, the organizers of mass events aren’t required to ensure that attendees have little risk of spreading COVID. Many restaurateurs and sports teams are voluntarily asking their patrons to prove that they are vaccinated. And some municipalities do require that businesses adopt such policies to stay open. But many others don’t.2. Make Testing Cheap and EasyGermany usually makes it very hard for people to start a new business or change the use of a commercial building. So I have, over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, been astounded by how many brand-new testing centers have sprung up in unusual locations. Berliners can get themselves tested for COVID-19 in a Greek restaurant, in a historic church, and in the foyer of an opera house.As a result, the majority of people in German cities now live within walking distance of a testing center. They don’t need an appointment, and they get their results by email in less than 15 minutes. Until recently, they did not pay a cent for these “citizens’ tests.” (With most Germans fully vaccinated, eligibility for free tests has been rolled back over the past few weeks—which might be contributing to the recent uptick in cases.)There’s more. Because German medical authorities have authorized a wide variety of different tests, cheap at-home kits have been readily available for months. So even if somebody is unable to get to an official testing center, they can ensure that they are not contagious from the comfort of their own home.Cheap and easy testing not only helps prevent transmission of the virus and makes people feel safe mixing in public. It is also one of the reasons that a great majority of Germans accept the requirement to prove they are not at risk of transmitting COVID-19 to others.[Read: The wrong way to test yourself for coronavirus]In the United States, testing continues to be comparatively expensive and inaccessible. The CDC has long prioritized slow and costly PCR tests over quick and cheap antigen tests. It has been very slow to authorize at-home tests, green-lighting many antigen tests months after they were already in wide use in Europe. And though some municipalities and health providers are offering free tests, others are sending sky-high bills to unsuspecting patients.3. Throw Out Those Cloth MasksWhen I boarded my Lufthansa flight to Germany in September, I was sporting a stylish cloth mask embroidered with the logo of one of my favorite organizations. As I entered the plane, a flight attendant politely stopped me. Handing me a surgical FFP2 mask (which is similar to those marketed as a KN95 in the United States), she told me that cloth masks were not approved for use aboard the airplane. The same rule, it turns out, applies to most public spaces in Germany.[Read: Why are Americans still wearing cloth masks?]At the beginning of the pandemic, every country in the world faced a desperate shortage of high-quality masks. With doctors’ offices and hospitals running short on personal protective equipment, improvised cloth masks helped keep millions of people safe. Their rapid adoption was a great feat of human ingenuity.But studies soon suggested that cloth masks are less effective than surgical masks at stopping the spread of COVID-19. And so once FFP2 masks became widely available, Germany encouraged its citizens to wear them instead. They are now so ubiquitous that I don’t recall having seen a single cloth mask since arriving in the country a month ago.In the United States, meanwhile, use of KN95s and other surgical masks continues to be rare. Outside of hospitals and doctors’ offices, a lot of people—including many who evangelize the importance of masking—wear pieces of porous fabric that do comparatively little to prevent the transmission of COVID-19.4. Figure Out Contact TracingAt the beginning of October, Berlin’s most storied club, Berghain, reopened its doors. Despite precautions, the first night of clubbing at Berghain seems to have resulted in 19 transmissions of the virus. The German press is treating the event as a serious failure of the country’s health policies.But effective contact tracing is likely to reduce the impact of that failure. Because visitors needed to provide their contact details to enter the club—as patrons do when they visit restaurants, cinemas, and other indoor spaces—health authorities have been able to identify those who might have been exposed. All in all, they’ve contacted more than 2,500 people in connection with the event.This makes it far less likely that this one night will generate a long chain of transmissions. And, with the consequences of failure less severe than they might have been without contact tracing, Berghain has been able to keep its doors open.The United States, by contrast, has completely given up on any serious attempt at contact tracing. Although every pandemic playbook written by the CDC and the White House over the past decades has called for tracing the contacts of anyone who may have been exposed to a dangerous pathogen, health authorities abandoned this ambition a few weeks into the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. And though health authorities at the federal, state, and municipal levels have, by now, had more than a year and a half to put such a system into place, virtually none of them has made a real effort to do so.To escape the winter in the northeastern U.S., I spent January and February of this year in a small pandemic bubble in Jacksonville, Florida. My friends and I were very careful to avoid exposure to COVID. But when we would go out for lunch, about once a week, eating outside in the mild sunshine and overlooking a lovely canal, we were stunned to see dozens of people in their 70s and 80s crowding the restaurant’s interior. Perhaps, we wondered, the weather was just too cold for elderly Floridians to sit outside?A month later, the weather had warmed up. The temperature was now about 10 degrees higher, in the mid-70s. But the local septuagenarians and octogenarians were still crowding the inside of our favorite restaurant. Perhaps, we wondered, the weather had gotten too hot for elderly Floridians?By the summer, much had changed. I returned to the Northeast. Most people were now vaccinated. With the Delta variant not yet as prevalent, cases of COVID-19 were relatively rare. I went to see my niece play soccer in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where I had a similar experience to the one I’d had in Florida—but in reverse.A few months earlier, in Jacksonville, I had been stunned by the cavalier attitude of so many people. Now, in Philadelphia, I was taken aback by the extreme precautions people were taking. Though the families of the kids playing soccer were sitting far away from one another in the open air, a lot of people—including young children—were wearing masks.Spending time in Germany, where most people wear masks indoors and virtually nobody wears them outside, has driven home to me just how strongly political polarization is now shaping the actions of many Americans. In red Florida, some were risking their lives to prove their devotion to their political tribe. In blue Pennsylvania, others were taking precaution to an extreme to prove their devotion to the opposite political tribe.[Read: Germany’s anti-vaccination history is riddled with anti-Semitism]This politicization of everyday behavior helps explain many of the ways in which America’s response to the pandemic has been even worse than that of other Western democracies. And it makes me skeptical that the United States will ever manage to implement the simple measures that are enabling other countries to get through yet another pandemic winter. There’s no silver bullet for the coronavirus, as the recent rise in cases across the European continent indicates. But that only makes it all the more infuriating that America is prolonging the pandemic by refusing to take simple precautions like stepping up testing or upgrading to better masks.Still, we should never allow pessimism to turn into fatalism. The fundamental fact is that America still has time to put in place additional policies that would help the country deal with COVID-19 without serious drawbacks. And after nearly two years of this grueling pandemic, we all could really do with a few easy wins.

Around November each year, we at GPF begin our forecasting process for the coming year. In a real sense, we are always forecasting, as our analysis may be about current realities but always with an eye on what these events portend for the future. However, on Nov. 1, each analyst is required to state in a few lines what they believe will happen in the next year.

The brevity is what differentiates our method from others. Most geopolitical forecasts include so many caveats that success is guaranteed. Given that we have already analyzed virtually every notable event this year, on Nov. 1, we move to using declarative sentences and taking risks.

There is always the danger of the banal. History is a continuum, and in many cases the only thing we can say is that next year will be pretty much like last year and the year before. That’s also worth discussing. Sometimes we have to speak to ongoing and well-established crises, and see what turn they will take. Other times we must identify a major event in a place that had been stable. That’s what we love to do, but believing we see something that really isn’t there is the bane of our profession, as is the desire to crouch in safety by saying nothing. It’s our profession, and it beats working the loading docks.

You can find our 2021 forecast here. This is where we begin our work; arguing over whether we were correct in 2021 is the necessary preface to developing a forecast for 2022. We are reasonably satisfied with our work for this year, and with some adjustments, we have the foundation with which to build a forecast. The first step was to consider the important questions, in terms of both place and significance to the world, coming out of 2021. These were analyzed last week, and the next step is to consider the questions that need to be answered for 2022. Obviously, our list of questions indicates what we think is important and, by exclusion of certain topics, what is less important.

COVID-19

This is the biggest global topic for 2022 affecting all nations in different ways. The first major socio-economic impact of the pandemic was the effect of the cure on society and business. That has graduated now to major economic dysfunction, including an array of shortages ranging from labor to coal. The origin of each of these shortages is fairly clear. The reason for the confluence of shortages is less clear. Three questions arise: Will the medical constraints imposed in 2020 be suspended in 2022? How long will it take to deal with the shortages? What will be the global and national effects of these questions?

China

China is undergoing a major economic crisis. Solving a crisis such as this has a price, and we have to figure out not so much what the costs will be but what the social and political consequences will be. Other nations at this phase of aggressive development based on exports have had to deal with major, unexpected shifts in how they work. Is China at this stage, and can it absorb economic dysfunction without destabilizing? Our forecast was that China would not launch a war this year. With economic dysfunction, doing so could become either less likely (because the cost of defeat goes up) or more likely (because victory would make up for the economic and social stress). Obviously, China is claiming to have great confidence in everything, but what does it really think, and is it in touch with reality?

Russia

Russia in 2021 continued using soft power (economic, political and covert) rather than military power to regain strategic depth. We saw this in Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The key for Russia, however, is Ukraine. Given energy shortages, rising energy prices and European disinclination to get involved in this conflict, will Moscow see 2022 as the year when the advantages for it accumulate and it must attack before they dissipate? If not, why not? If so, what methods and countries will it use? Is this the year of Ukraine for Russia?

Europe

The Europeans appear simultaneously committed to the European Union’s current structure and unable to deal with fundamental problems. Northern Europe is trying to stabilize its economy by attempting to limit inflation, while Italy is trying to deal with inflation through a loose money strategy. European institutions cannot handle dual strategies with the euro. The EU manages its system by providing economic incentives to poorer member countries. Will the economics shift on this policy for both grantors and recipients? Is this the year when the EU will emerge from the crisis as a very different place? Will its handling of the economic fallout of COVID-19 be a breaking point?

Middle East

The Middle East seems to be a secondary region at the moment. The main question here is: What will the Abraham Accords mean for the region? The amazement over their signing is over, and we need to figure out what the substance is. More important is what Turkey, a major regional power, will do to improve its economy and build regional power. There is an assumption that nothing will happen until President Recep Tayyip Erdogan retires. Assuming that the fate of one man determines the fate of a nation runs counter to geopolitics. Ignoring the personnel issue, what might Turkey do in 2022 to reverse its fortunes?

United States

As with other countries in the world, the United States’ primary geopolitical issue is whether and when the range of shortages can be resolved, and how much damage they will do to the American economy and social stability. The U.S. is in a cyclical period of social instability and economic fragility, and the effect of these shortages could generate a major failure in 2022, depending on the damage done and when they can be resolved. Intensified unrest might change or speed up China’s or Russia’s military activities. Easing shortages of all sorts and doing so as early as possible, therefore, can affect the global balance.

Caribbean

The Caribbean is destabilizing from the northern edge of South America through the islands. The region is normally a secondary issue, but it has the possibility of becoming a primary issue if an outside power decided to challenge U.S. security by creating a foothold there. We have speculated on whether China or Russia would play that role. What is the possibility that one or both of these countries might be turned into an asset for a hostile or less-than-friendly country?

There are other secondary and tertiary issues we will not deal with. And some of the questions asked here will turn out to be the wrong ones. But this is where we begin our process for the 2022 forecast.

You already know that State of Terror, Hillary Clinton’s new novel, written in collaboration with the best-selling author Louise Penny, is going to be awful. You want to know why. If the novel is a corpse then let this critic be the coroner.
To be fair, State of Terror offers as much literary competence as you would expect from the sort of weighty thriller you’d pick up in a train station if you’d forgotten your charger. Penny is a pro. The pacing is respectable. The characters are numerous enough that you forget that none of them are especially well-developed. There are stylistic howlers — a Russian dictator has “a coldness that would have given Siberia a chill,” which makes no sense at all — but what do you expect?
What makes this book entertaining are its politics. You can no more separate art from ideology in the case of State of Terror than you can a man from his vital organs. It involves a smart, plucky and perpetually underrated female secretary of state (I wonder who helped inspire that?), a dim thug of an outgoing president (again, who knows?) and a conspiracy to topple the US government led by sinister right-wingers in league with swarthy terrorists and a cold, calculating Russian strongman who is “much smaller” than the main character expects (your guess is as good as mine).
Anyone expecting deep political insights from the worlds of Washington and international politics will be disappointed. This novel was written with a level of political naivete that makes you wonder how much Clinton was actually involved. We learn, for example:
“Five Eyes was the name for an alliance of intelligence agencies from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the US. Ellen had not heard of this organization of English-speaking allies until she’d become secretary of state.”
The Five Eyes is such an obscure and secretive organization that even a boneheaded reviewer like me has heard of it. Had Ellen Adams, who had spent decades “building and running an international media empire that now spread across television networks, an all-news channel, websites, and newspapers”, never seen reports on the alliance in such marginal outlets as the New York Times? You almost await the revelation that there exists a mysterious, little-known body named the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Then again, Adams — or the authors — has no wish to focus on the shadier sides of American statecraft. The US, that “broken beacon”, was in this novel governed with decency and openness until the awful President Tru—, er, whatever his name was messed everything up. Savor this:
“Secretary Adams, on entering as SecState, had quickly realized there was no such thing as the Deep State. There was nothing ‘deep’ about it. Nothing hidden. Career employees and political appointees wandered the halls and in meetings and shared bathrooms and tables in the cafeterias.”
How can a “deep state” exist when people on different levels of government share bathrooms? In this novel, there was, for example, no decade-long attempt to obscure the tragic facts of the war in Afghanistan. There was just the inexplicable lust for destruction held by President Tronald Dump and his scheming ideological compadres.
The book ends up being a kind of fever dream of the sort of people who considered themselves part of the “Resistance.” The Russian leader — Padimir Vlutin or whatever he was called — is finally reduced to a quivering wreck by charges of pedophilia. (As far as I can tell, once evidence of these charges extracts the information Adams needs, she fails to pursue them — a genuinely interesting example of diplomatic amorality.)
Female genius is forever being overlooked. A British politician states a banal fact about Israeli intelligence operations and seems to have “forgotten that Ellen had said exactly that just a few minutes earlier.” This sort of social critique might be more compelling if it was not penned by a woman who obtained top jobs in politics time and again — or, indeed, if was not centered around a media mogul who was made secretary of state for no obvious reason.
At the end of her acknowledgements, Clinton writes:
“This is a work of fiction but the story it tells is all too timely. It’s up to us to make sure its plot stays fictional.”

Let us be fair to our liberal friends and acknowledge that their fears are not entirely without foundation. Donald Trump is a man with an ample enough ego but if he could mount a coup he might soon be declaring it the biggest, best and most beautiful coup in the world. But the paranoia, real or opportunistic, that leads Clinton to frame a right-wing dirty bomb attack on US soil in prophetic terms, combined with the pettiness that leads her to grouse about alleged diplomatic slights, are unique to establishment liberalism in its senescence.
The authors discuss friends and family members they lost around the time of writing the book, who helped to inspire its characters. I have no cause to doubt their sincere intentions. Still, Stacey Abrams’s surprisingly able thriller While Justice Sleeps apparently took her twelve years to create. Given that the idea to write a book together was apparently pitched to Clinton and Penny in spring 2020, we can assume it took them less than one — throughout which Clinton also ran a podcast and became chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast. Perhaps if there is a sequel, they should spent a bit more time developing the story. I’d never discourage former politicians from devoting themselves to their pastimes.
The post Hillary Clinton’s thriller is a #Resistance fever dream appeared first on The Spectator World.

This week, Democrats either reach an agreement on Biden’s social and climate agenda or the agenda may shrink into meaninglessness. The climate measures in particular need to be settled before Biden heads to Scotland for the UN climate summit this weekend, so other nations will see our commitment to reduce carbon emissions.

On Sunday, Biden met with key Democrats to work out spending and tax provisions. Yet every senate Republican and at least two senate Democrats continue to assert that Biden’s agenda is too costly.

Too costly? Really? Compare the Biden’s social and climate package’s current compromise tab of $2tn (spread out over the next 10 years) with:

The $1.9 trillion Trump Republican tax cut that went mostly to the wealthy and large corporations.

Americans were promised that its benefits would “trickle down” to average workers. They didn’t. Corporations used them to finance more stock buybacks. The wealthy used them to buy more shares of stock (and shares of private-equity and hedge funds).

The Trump Republican tax cut should be repealed to pay for Biden’s social and climate package. There is no good reason to retain it. But no senate Republican will vote for its repeal, nor will Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – making it a political non-starter in a chamber where Democrats have just half the votes.

The $2.1 trillion that America’s 750 billionaires have raked in just since the start of the pandemic.

You might think that at least a portion of this windfall should help pay for Biden’s agenda since much of it has been the result of monopoly power (for example, Amazon’s dominance over e-commerce during the pandemic).

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is proposing a “Billionaires Income Tax,” to be paid by the roughly 750 Americans with $1bn in assets or $100m in income for three consecutive years. It would be a yearly tax on the increasing value of their assets – such as stocks and bonds – regardless of when they sell. They could still write off losses every year. Interestingly, neither Sinema nor West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the other holdout, has voiced opposition to Wyden’s proposal.

The nearly $8 trillion we’ll be spending on the military over the next 10 years.

The United States already spends more on our military than the next 10 biggest military spenders in the world combined.

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee unveiled a nearly $726bn budget for the Defense Department in 2022. That was about $20bn more than Biden requested. Some $14bn in other funds are set aside for the Pentagon in separate military construction and energy appropriations bills, bringing the total budget to about $740 billion. Over ten years, that comes close to $8tn.

Talk about bloat and waste: That military budget includes 85 F-35 fighters costing a total of $1.5tn. The F-35 is so plagued with problems that the current chairman of House Armed Service Committee calls it a “rathole,” and the Pentagon’s own official who’s responsible for the acquisition of weapons systems says spending more on it is “acquisition malpractice.”

But you don’t hear about this in the media because Democrats routinely join Republicans to vote for the military budget – it’s truly bipartisan bloat -- and the media tends to report only on controversies.

Considering these three gigantic pots of money, how is it possible for anyone to argue that America cannot afford to spend what’s needed for childcare, education, paid leave, or to reduce climate change?

The short answer: it’s not possible. Biden’s plan is easily affordable by the richest nation in the world.

I also suspect I am hardly alone, when hearing the term “systemic racism,” in quietly wondering how useful it is to use the same word, racism, for both explicit bigotry and inequality, even if the latter is according to race. In his similarly best-selling “How to Be an Antiracist,” the Boston University professor Ibram Kendi begins by defining a “racist” as “one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” He then defines an “antiracist” as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.”

His simplistic definitions declare a dichotomy between racism and antiracism with naught in between — quite a blunt instrument to apply to something as complex as the sociology and history of race in our nation. The looming implication that a system, a society, can be racist is not accidental: It tempts, in anthropomorphizing the complexities of race-based inequalities, how they emerge, and what to do about them.

A symptom of these less-reflective, too-reflexive approaches is the zeal for banishing apostates so common today, when it is accepted as appropriate and cutting-edge to tell those who dissent from the woke take on race to hit the road. Abbot was but one example, prevented from speaking to a broad audience at a university on a topic that has nothing to do with racial preferences, as if his opinions about racial preferences irrevocably taint his climate science work. As if his views on racial preferences themselves are unworthy of reasoned discussion.

Consider, also, cases in which some obviously non-malicious breach of woke liturgy results in some degree of shunning: The week before last, you’ll recall, I wrote about the University of Michigan professor Bright Sheng. We are back to the age of Galileo’s inquisitors.

This treatment of different opinions and approaches as heresies is one of many signs that a new religion is afoot. I’m not kidding. The Emory University philosophy professor Robert McCauley, for example, teaches that religion tends to anthropomorphize. He sees a major difference between religious belief and science as the tendency for the former to attribute agency and intentionality to things we may not be able to explain. I’m thinking of how one might say that a guardian angel facilitated good fortune, or even how a natural disaster may be seen as an “act of God.” In the new woke religion, society is described as “racist,” a term originally applied to people.

Note also the eerie parallel between the conceptions of original sin and white privilege as unremovable stains about which one is to maintain a lifelong concern and guilt. Religions don’t always have gods, but they usually need sins, which in the new religion is the whiteness that supposedly bestrides everything in our lives.

There is a pitchfork aspect to how this way of thinking is penetrating our institutions of enlightenment. With an unreachable pitilessness, a catechism couched in an elaborate jargon is being imposed almost as if sacred: privilege, decentering, hegemony, antiracism. Nonbelievers, sometimes even agnostics, are cast out, leaving a cowed polity pretending to agree. This is a regrettable kind of religion, aiming to run the state. That’s not how this American experiment was supposed to go.

Africa is experiencing the world’s worst vaccine deficit. Only a minority of countries—mostly those where vaccines are manufactured—are approaching adequate levels of vaccination. But Africa is averaging even lower rates than other less affluent continents—less than one-tenth the percentage of South America and one-eighth that of Asia. Most African countries missed a recent goal of vaccinating ten percent of their populations. Overall, less than five percent of Africans are fully vaccinated.

This is a colossal global health failure. Considering the vaccine surplus found in developed economies, especially the United States, it is also a moral crisis. The United States has purchased 1.2 billion vaccine doses, enough to inoculate its entire population twice over, and may have as many as 500 million excess doses by the end of October and possibly one billion by December. Extra vaccines are beginning to accumulate so rapidly that growing numbers of doses are being destroyed.

COVAX—the global COVID vaccination partnership established by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the GAVI Vaccine Alliance—was supposed to prevent such gross vaccine inequities. High- and low-income countries were encouraged to join, and each was supposed to receive dose shares based on population size, not wealth. But the world’s richest states sidestepped COVAX to secure priority access to more vaccines than they can use, putting themselves ahead of other countries in the manufacturing pipeline. India, the planet’s largest producer of vaccines and COVAX’s primary supplier, banned vaccine exports for five months as it weathered a devastating third wave of infections. China has largely shared its vaccines directly with other nations, sending very few through COVAX.

COVAX has still managed to ensure that no state got left entirely behind, and the United States and other high-income countries should continue to work with the initiative. But COVAX has struggled mightily, falling far short of its goals. Solving vaccine inequality and successfully inoculating the entire world is essential to ending the pandemic, and that means taking a new and different approach, with more targeted and impactful partnerships. In Africa, that means working with one organization in particular: the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Founded in the wake of the 2014 Ebola epidemic, the Africa CDC has a strong record of combating diseases. During the 2018–20 Ebola outbreak, for example, the organization supported contact tracing and laboratories that tested tens of thousands of samples, and it trained thousands of health-care workers. It has established effective new systems to share resources, such as the Africa Medical Supplies Platform; amplified best practices, including testing regimens; and responded to regional disease dynamics through Regional Collaborating Centers.

Until recently, vaccines bottled in Africa were going to Europe.

There are many reasons to partner with the Africa CDC in addition to COVAX. The smaller domain of the Africa CDC makes the organization more effective logistically than COVAX, which has struggled to keep up with the communications and mechanics of working with so many countries around the world. The Africa CDC directly engages heads of state, whereas COVAX deals primarily with health ministries, which often lack the staff and support needed to get vaccines distributed. And vaccine donations to COVAX are spread across the entire globe, whereas doses distributed by the Africa CDC target the countries with the most acute need. To promote global health equity, prevent the rise of dangerous new variants, and stop more of its doses from going to waste, the United States should give large shares of its surplus vaccines to this powerful institution. It is the organization best able to help Africa reach and, it is hoped, accelerate its ambitious goal of vaccinating 25 to 30 percent of residents by the end of 2021 and 60 percent as soon as possible.

THE RIGHT PARTNER

Africa was never well positioned to inoculate its population without strong partners. Home to 17.8 percent of the world’s population, the continent houses less than 0.1 percent of global vaccine manufacturing, according to a WHO estimate. It is working to develop new capacity, but it will be many months before more factories come online. Reports indicate that a new facility in Senegal, for example, will likely not produce doses until the second half of 2022. As a result, the continent has been forced to rely almost entirely on overseas manufacturing. In fact, until recently, the relatively few doses bottled in Africa were being purchased by and exported to Europe, a misallocation of resources that is both unconscionable and epidemiologically unsound.

But despite these challenges, the Africa CDC has taken major steps to procure vaccines for the continent. The organization’s African Vaccine Acquisition Trust has contracted 400 million Johnson & Johnson doses, enough to partially inoculate roughly a third of the continent’s population. Yet the delivery of these doses to the trust has ramped up slowly and is expected to reach only 20 million per month in January. It is time for the United States and other wealthy nations to get out of the way. Rather than demanding that vaccine manufacturers complete their outstanding orders first, rich countries should heed the Africa CDC director John Nkengasong’s request to deprioritize their own contracts in favor of the Africa CDC’s purchases—an approach favored by the White House in leaked documents. States would still receive their doses, but the delay in delivery would fall on countries already benefiting from substantial vaccine coverage.

Vaccine-rich nations should also share their stockpiles and future commitments with Africa, and contributing through the Africa CDC has many advantages. Pandemics are driven by regional dynamics, and the Africa CDC has a strong understanding of the continent’s needs. Cross-border travel, seasonality, socioeconomic characteristics, and other factors mean that viruses have no respect for borders, and the intensive logistical investments required to vaccinate less populated areas would benefit from a regional approach that allows doses to be safely stored until they can be delivered. With its ongoing, direct engagement with heads of state, the Africa CDC has excellent visibility into epidemiologic trends and into national public health resources, making it well positioned to quarterback distribution. (In contrast, many national leaders have struggled to communicate with COVAX.) Gifting vaccines through the Africa CDC will also help limit the diplomatic fallout and national political clashes over vaccine allocation and management that would likely bedevil U.S. bilateral donations.

The Africa CDC has taken major steps to get vaccines for the continent.

As a trusted and authoritative health entity, the Africa CDC can help resolve thorny questions for the continent’s countries around such issues as delaying second doses or mixing different types of vaccines. In countries where national leaders have downplayed the pandemic or propagated vaccine misinformation, the Africa CDC can play a crucial certification role, confirming the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. The organization can address concerns from pharmaceutical companies around liability for vaccine-related injuries by helping draft a no-fault compensation agreement modeled after the one already used by COVAX, indemnifying manufacturers and administering a compensation fund that the United States should help endow.

Asking strained national public health systems to administer millions of vaccine doses will present extraordinary challenges, but African countries have demonstrated their ability to meet them. Rwanda administered nearly 350,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in three weeks, and Ethiopia vaccinated 15 million children against measles despite the pandemic and a brutal civil war. The Africa CDC can help by using its granular data on the logistical capacity of the continent’s countries and its demonstrated ability to support supply chains during the pandemic through vehicles such as the Africa Medical Supplies Platform.

AN ALLIANCE FOR THE FUTURE

The Biden administration appears to understand the need to share vaccines with Africa, recently committing to delivering 17 million more Johnson & Johnson doses to the African Union (although this is not nearly enough). It is also beginning to understand how valuable the Africa CDC can be. In addition to backing the Africa CDC’s call for manufacturers to move the organization’s contracts to the front of the line, Biden recently announced plans to nominate Nkengasong to lead the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Biden clearly has faith in the group’s management.

Nkengasong’s appointment has been met with somewhat mixed feelings by those who worry that his departure could undermine the work of a critical organization at a key moment in the pandemic. But in addition to being an excellent choice to lead the flagship U.S. global health intervention, the move may ultimately make the Africa CDC even more effective. PEPFAR is itself a pandemic response body, with expertise and experience in disease surveillance, public health communications, and clinical interventions, and one whose work has been primarily in Africa. PEPFAR could use its infrastructure—including its existing relationships with governments, nongovernmental organizations, and community organizations, as well as with clinics and public health staff—to support the Africa CDC in its fight against COVID-19. PEPFAR is already immensely successful and has been well received on the continent. Helping the Africa CDC fight the pandemic would build on its political legacy.

This could also be just the start of an even bigger partnership between the United States and the Africa CDC. The United States could and should help the organization become more self-sufficient by increasing vaccine manufacturing in Africa as quickly as possible. This is the only way that the continent will be able to fully fight not just COVID-19 but also the next pandemic. Vaccine manufacturing capacity on the continent would also be a game changer in Africa’s fight against diseases that have plagued the world for generations, such as malaria, for which the WHO just approved a vaccine.

Strengthening the Africa CDC won’t just benefit Africans. Multiple analyses indicate that effective global vaccination campaigns, both for COVID-19 and other illnesses, have immense economic returns that rebound across the planet. In the years to come, the strength of the Africa CDC will also be essential to responding to future pandemics and managing the effects of climate change by tracking alterations in disease prevalence and geography, coordinating regional responses, and mitigating the health impacts of displacement. In doing so, the organization will be critical to keeping the entire world safe. But building the Africa CDC’s capacity must start right now by helping it vaccinate the continent and end the pandemic, and that depends on a timely and robust partnership with the United States.

Facebook is having a rough go of it these days, so you might expect the company to be in trouble. For instance, at one Senate judiciary hearing, the Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana let Facebook’s Colin Stretch have it.

Kennedy confronted Stretch, the company’s former general counsel, with a report that Facebook can micro-target emotionally vulnerable teens, asking: “Was that reporting wrong?” Stretch responded with a standard Facebook line: “That reporting relied on an internal document that was overstated.” It didn’t satisfy Kennedy. “Your power sometimes scares me,” he said. Another day, another PR black eye for Facebook.

Yet if you don’t recognize this particularly exchange, it’s because it happened more than three years ago, before the whistleblower du jour, Frances Haugen, even joined Facebook. And in the time since that hearing, the company’s stock has doubled.

Indeed, Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. There were scandals before this hearing, such as violations of privacy that led to a Federal Trade Commission consent decree in 2012. There were scandals after this hearing, such as Facebook being exposed as facilitating a genocide in Myanmar. In 2019, the US government fined Facebook $5bn for violating its commitment to the government to stop deceiving its users over their ability to control the privacy of their personal information. In 2020, the House antitrust subcommittee revealed documents showing Mark Zuckerberg as explicitly predatory in his business methods, which were supplemented by the Federal Trade Commission complaint filed earlier this year. And yet, we see almost no action of consequence.

Despite all the light and heat, Facebook is still a globe-straddling monopoly over our information commons

So forgive me, as a longtime critic of Facebook, for not seeing this latest round of bad press – which reveals nothing we don’t already know – as not getting to the heart of the problem.

That problem is simple. Lawlessness pays. We’ve known that Facebook is lawless and reckless for years. And yet despite all the light and heat, Facebook is still a globe-straddling monopoly over our information commons. One man is still in charge of it, making all key policy decisions, and he is worth $100bn and considered an important leader and philanthropist. To put it differently, when a bank robber robs a bank, blame the bank robber. When a bank robber robs 20 banks, and announces where he’s going to steal from next, and does it in broad daylight, repeatedly, and no one stops him, we should be blaming the cops. And that’s where we are with Facebook.

Haugen, while providing useful documents showing that Facebook knows what we all know – that Instagram is bad for teenage girls and that Zuckerberg is not a paragon of virtue – has added momentum to the call to do “something”. And there’s a feeding frenzy of media outlets and political leaders who laud the heroism of a wealthy Silicon Valley insider telling us what we already know. One Scottish lawmaker asked Haugen point blank: “Is Facebook evil?”

But all of this focus on Facebook and the personalities involved misses the point. If we set up a policy system that offers a reward for destroying our social fabric in the neighborhood of $100bn and unlimited power, then this is what we’ll get. The problem is not Facebook, it’s a policy regime that creates an incentive for monopolization, securities fraud and surveillance advertising.

The more important question is what policymakers are going to do about the problems that Facebook presents. There are two basic issues. First, Facebook has immense market power, and antitrust law has been weakened by courts and economists over decades. Despite all the scandals over Facebook, a judge recently dismissed the Federal Trade Commission suit against the company because, he said, the government hadn’t proved Facebook was a monopoly. The suit has since been refiled, but even if it does go forward, it will go to trial in 2023, with a remedy phase stretching into 2025. That’s ridiculous. The standards for proving harm have to be lower, and the courts must move faster.

Second, Facebook and all social media and internet advertising firms get to use detailed dossiers to target us with ads wherever we go online. That’s a conflict of interest, because it encourages a business model in which communications facilities try to addict us so they can sell us more ads. Unlike a phone network, which is not financed by ads, social media companies pick and choose incendiary content to promote. This both creates filter bubbles of conspiracy theory-minded communities and redirects advertising from legitimate publishers, such as local newspapers, towards ad monopolists such as Facebook. This policy failure also has policy roots: for decades, libertarian judges and policymakers have fought, successfully, against rules that prohibit such conflicts of interest in business and made sure that rules on data or privacy have been voluntary or poorly enforced.

In order to address the problem, we the people would have to empower our government to govern

And this brings us to the reason we haven’t done anything about Facebook. In order to actually address the problem of dominant market power and conflicts of interest, we the people would have to empower our government to govern. We’d have to pass laws strengthening antitrust enforcement, we’d have to bar corporate conflicts of interest such as a communications firm vertically integrated into an advertising network, and we’d have to restore the rule of law against the powerful when they commit crimes.

Doing so is necessary, and long overdue. And policymakers are moving in that direction. In New York, for instance, state lawmakers are debating an abuse-of-dominance bill that would ramp up antitrust enforcement. At the FTC, enforcers are considering using new regulatory tools to address unfair methods of competition. In Ohio, the attorney general is using public utility law to take on big tech. At some point, hopefully, enforcers will even use criminal law and put handcuffs on powerful lawbreakers.

Congress itself is taking action. Lawmakers are musing on antitrust bills that would break up big tech, though in all likelihood the only bill that will pass is a bill to ban self-preferencing that would have little impact on Facebook. The legislature is also considering changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which lets big tech firms escape liability for their products.

Ultimately, any change to address Facebook will affect far more than the social media giant, because Facebook is merely the pacesetter of an economy full of concentrated corporate actors who use similar tactics. We’d have to stop the rampant bank robbery not just of Mark Zuckerberg, but of everyone doing it. That would be a glorious thing to do, to restructure our economy so that predatory behavior is actually penalized, instead of rewarded.

So let’s get to it. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another story about that nefarious bank robber, unless there’s a recognition that Facebook’s problems are downstream from the failure of our democratic institutions to fix them.

Borrowing a term from the author Joseph Bottum, McWhorter refers to the prophets of the Third Wave as “the Elect.” They see themselves as “bearers of a Good News that, if all people would simply open up and see it, would create a perfect world.”

McWhorter says that the Elect’s unshakable convictions have led them to persecute people with unfair accusations of racism. He cites cases like that of David Shor, a young white progressive analyst who was fired from his consulting firm for tweeting a study showing how violent protests can backfire. Many of these inquisitions have been led not by people from minority groups but from the white Elects themselves, who are described as carrying a sort of “self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do.”

It’s easy, however, to mock the lengths to which white liberals will go to be seen as antiracist. McWhorter is more interesting when he discusses why some African Americans have chosen to join the ranks of the Elect. “Humans seek pride where they can get it,” he writes, noting that “to be a Black Elect is to have a sense of belonging.” It allows African Americans to “adopt an identity as a beleaguered Black person, where you are united with all Black people, regardless of social class or educational level, by the common experience of suffering discrimination.”

As in his previous books, McWhorter views it as a mistake to forge one’s identity around victimhood. He characterizes the woke racial worldview as harmful not for normalizing antiwhite prejudices or treating the social categories of race as something concrete, but because it deprives Black people of their humanity by infantilizing them. He objects to lowering standards for minorities, as when certain members of the Elect claim that “objectivity, being on time and the written word are ‘white’ things.” (The Smithsonian Institution of all places posted a graphic promoting these ideas.)

Where McWhorter is less effective is in his critique of some of the Third Wave’s high priests. Although he takes aim at writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and The New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, he only briefly quotes their writing. A more compelling pushback would have involved a thorough analysis of their arguments (he has reviewed Kendi and DiAngelo elsewhere).

Editor's note:Former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently testified before US Congress in what has been described as the biggest expose in Facebook's history. Central to Haugen's testimony has been the assertion that Facebook knows about the social, psychological, and political harms that its platform creates, yet fails to adequately mitigate these harms by adjusting its business model. Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Commerce CommitteeFacebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Commerce Committee https://www.c-span.org/video/?515042-1/facebook-whistleblower-testifies-prot...YouTubeQuillette recently hosted Jonathan Haidt on the podcast, who discussed social media's potential to harm vulnerable teenagers, claims which were echoed in an article written by Claire Lehmann.  Yet other science journalists, such as Stuart Ritchie at Unherd, and John Tierney at City Journal, have argued that the case against social media, and Instagram in particular, is built on hype not science. To dig further into the nuances of the issue, Quillette decided to survey a range of experts working in the areas of psychology, psychiatry, and mental health on their perceptions of Facebook's influence, and their interpretation of the data. What follows is intended to be a starting point for a longer discussion, as Quillette believes that the impact of social media may be one of the most important issues of the century. The New McDonald'sTanveer Ahmed - Psychiatrist and author of Fragile NationFacebook is both the new smoking and the new McDonald's. All rely on cheap dopamine hits and incite moral panic. Be it fatty food, nicotine or garnering likes, they represent a continuum of consumer products perfecting the co-opting of our biological vulnerabilities. In mental health it is especially problematic for teenagers.Only this month, before the whistleblower Frances Haugen spoke against Facebook, it emerged that Instagram was well aware of its propensity to magnify body image concerns among girls. The company opted against making their findings public or modifying their algorithms. Much like Big Tobacco and Big Pharma at their worst, social media companies appear to sweep any internal negative findings under a corporate carpet.In my daily practice, it is clear that social media tends to be a magnifier of pre-existing personality traits. The extroverts post more and are comfortable in projecting their best selves. They are also more adept at communicating with others and organising physical meetings.Meanwhile the socially anxious may have an account and will scroll through their feed, but will rarely post in fear of inviting negative scrutiny. They are also most prone to experiencing negative social comparison.This is all heightened in adolescence when we most desire belonging and peer approval. The relational aggression favoured by girls can ratchet up a notch, not to mention have negative behaviours like self harm normalised on some sites and chat groups.Bullying can feel well beyond one or two people that might occur in a physical playground, to tens or hundreds on a social media site, a stain that can then be marked permanently. This was a critical factor in the suicide of Australian teenager Dolly Everett in 2018, one that sent shockwaves through my country.Michael Dougherty wrote in a 2019 National Review article titled “The Social-Media Decade” that: “Social media’s birth and gestation in colleges and high schools seems in some way to have given it a quality that remakes the whole world as a giant school.”Much like those playgrounds from our youth the most minor social transgressions can erupt into one’s humiliation and exile. The pandemic has accelerated all those trends that teens already live with; a principally digital existence, Big Data algorithms, and a perception of constant surveillance. But it is impossible to go back.Social media’s capacity to connect and democratise cannot be underestimated. While the fiercest debates about its negatives are occurring in Western countries, sites like Facebook are an outlet for free expression in much of the developing world. My relatives in Bangladesh speak much more freely online and consider seeing slices of my Australian life as a godsend.It allows for the swift spread of information, bypassing government censors and bringing together otherwise disparate people around a cause. This is also why authoritarian leaders such as those in China or the Middle East opt to ban some outlets altogether, or at least become more adept at manipulating their content.Let’s not overreach. Much like Big Macs, the platforms are overwhelmingly enjoyable used in moderation. But the tide has clearly turned. When life’s purpose has become primarily about emotional fulfillment, social media sites prey on the most psychologically vulnerable. Both at a personal and political level, there is a momentum to regulate.A Media Moral PanicChristopher Ferguson - Research Psychologist and author of How Madness Shaped HistoryThe world was stunned in September when the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) revealed that internal Facebook (FB) studies linked Instagram (which they own) to negative mental health outcomes, particularly for teen girls. Most of this came from PowerPoint slides that had been leaked to the WSJ and which the WSJ subsequently made public. The headlines all but wrote themselves. People already loathed FB and other social media, even as we consumed it in copious amounts, and this episode smacked of the cigarette industry’s internal studies linking smoking to death.Only the cigarette industry had conducted real studies, whereas FB had not. Quickly, scholars such as Stuart Ritchie, Candice Odgers, Vicky Rideout and myself, noted that the research in question was not sufficient to support the larger narrative of Instagram causing suicide or depression in girls. Most of the FB studies were small and even the larger ones used crude, leading questions such as asking respondents if they thought Instagram made them feel bad. However, people misattribute the cause of their own problems on a regular basis. And the negative answers may have been provoked not only by the leading questions but by past negative news coverage on social media, with respondents remembering past headlines blaming social media for poor mental health. Yes, that means news media are unwittingly creating their own headline treadmill.I was recently involved with a big meta-analytic review of research in this area, which included members of the media psychology divisions of the American Psychological Association, Psychological Society of Ireland and British Psychological Society. Much of the evidence even from published studies is of mediocre quality but, we concluded, overall the evidence cannot support links between social media and negative mental health outcomes.So why do politicians and the general public fall all over themselves to believe a few junk FB studies (which, to be fair, was a self-inflicted wound) and ignore the larger data? This is, of course, a classic moral panic. People are worried about teen suicide as, in the US, teen suicide particularly among girls, has been increasing. That’s not the case in many other high-tech countries, but if it’s not US data, who cares, right?Suicide is, of course, a legitimate problem, but we have a curious case of the parable of the blind men each touching a part of the elephant. After all, according to the same US data both the absolute numbers of suicides and the raw increase in suicides is much higher among lower tech using middle-aged adults than teens (specifically, white middle aged men and young Native American men have the highest per capita suicide rates). By looking at one aspect of suicide (teen girls) and ignoring other aspects of suicide (middle aged adults), even some scholars have misdiagnosed the problem.Some scholars have specifically pointed to increased teen suicide as an indicator of the problem with social media. However, this is a classic ecological fallacy. It is reminiscent of earlier efforts to link media violence to violent crime waves which subsequently fell apart when those crime waves vanished even as media violence soared. Given issues like suicide tend to be cyclical, I suspect teen girl suicides will eventually fall again, even with increased screen use, and scholars referencing it now will be in an awkward position. One can’t reference data when it’s convenient, then ignore it when it is not.There’s plenty not to like about big social media companies … discourse on their platforms is often toxic, and there are real concerns with both privacy and the potential for de facto censorship originating from such powerful companies. But this moral panic over suicide is the wrong issue and merely distracting us from other issues that do matter.The Multiple Audience ProblemBill Von Hippel - Social Psychologist and author of The Social LeapIn face-to-face conversations, people adjust their tone and word choice to match the knowledge and attitudes of their listener. Even when the content remains the same, we naturally speak differently to our children, friends, and rivals. Tailoring the message to the audience becomes difficult when there are more than two people in a conversation, particularly if some of them hold diametrically opposed views. This “multiple-audience problem” poses a challenge to speakers if they wish to communicate different things to different audiences. By way of example, when soldiers are captured and forced to publicly renounce their country, they typically read prepared scripts in a wooden manner, often including grammatical errors that were introduced by their captors but would never be made by native speakers. Through such a strategy, captured soldiers communicate to their compatriots back home that they don’t endorse what they are saying while simultaneously appearing to pass on the message demanded by their captors.Social media suffers from the captured-soldier problem. One of the reasons that tribalism triumphs over nuance on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is that communication on these platforms nearly always involves multiple audiences. If I get into an ideological argument with you over coffee, my communication is focused on you and my persuasive goal is usually best achieved by adopting a more moderate stance, pointing out where our views overlap, and expressing empathy and understanding for your perspective. If we get into the same argument on social media, my goal to persuade you takes a back seat to my need to demonstrate my bona fides to other members of my ideological camp. The last thing I want to do on Twitter is express empathy and understanding for an opposing ideological viewpoint. Such actions would only brand me as a traitor to the cause.We derisively refer to gratuitous expressions of group loyalty as “virtue signalling,” but virtue signalling evolved for good reason. There was no one more important to our ancestors than other members of their group, as it was our capacity for group coordination that brought us to the top of the food chain despite our lack of biological weaponry (such as huge muscles, claws, and fangs). Because other groups of humans are the only entities as lethal as we are, by the time we evolved into Homo sapiens the great predators on the savannah were no longer the primary threat to our survival—rather, other groups of humans were. Virtue signalling was one of the ways we retained the trust and support of our fellow group members in the face of frequent and deadly inter-group competition.Does that mean we’re doomed to live in a world of social media divided into us and them, dominated by trolls with their caps lock on? Possibly, but not necessarily. In today’s world, groups can also compete to be regarded as the most reasonable, the most openminded, or the most rational. By way of example, I’m a member of two methodology groups on Facebook. In one of them (Psychological Methods Discussion Group, with 40,000 members), anything goes and people can be very biting in their criticisms. The other (PsychMAP, with 11,000 members) is akin to a safe space for stats nerds—calling someone a methodological terrorist will get you tossed out on your ear. The difference in membership numbers suggests that people prefer free speech, but that doesn’t alter the fact that 11,000 people have joined a group dedicated solely to chatting nicely about psychological methods; a clear proof of concept that group norms can create social media platforms supporting constructive engagement.Projection and Dehumanization Lisa Marchiano - Psychotherapist and author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding YourselfIn the Black Mirror episode “Men Against Fire,” soldiers are given an implant that alters their perception of reality, causing them to see their enemies not as people, but as dirty, sharp-toothed monsters called roaches. When we don’t see our enemies as human, it is much easier to kill them. The science fiction implant of the episode is an astute analogy for our innate ability to dehumanize one another through psychological projection. Through projection, we see the least likable parts of ourselves as belonging to someone else. This process can feed an “us versus them” view of the world, in which those who oppose us seem all bad, and those on our side appear to embody all goodness.The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung used the term “shadow” to refer to those aspects of our personality that are deemed unacceptable. We all have a shadow. Greed, arrogance, aggression, selfishness, and pettiness are just some examples of traits that we all possess by virtue of being human, but which we might not want to admit are part of us. We tend to disavow awareness of these traits in ourselves and project them onto others who, for one reason or another, give us a “hook” on which to hang the projection. Social media creates abundant opportunities for projection.In social media debates, our opposing interlocutors are often anonymous and almost always unknown to us personally. Like angry drivers in a massive traffic tangle, we can make a faceless other the target of our digital road rage. Those with whom we disagree are dehumanized. We ourselves feel a license to say things we would likely never say to someone with whom we were connected in real life because we can hide behind an anonymous profile, or at least take refuge in the impersonal nature of social media exchanges.Jung stressed that projection is normal. It’s often the first way that we encounter parts of ourselves of which we hadn’t before been conscious. When we have an outsized negative reaction to someone, it is usually the case that we are projecting some part of ourself we don’t want to know about. Becoming curious about this can lead to greater self-understanding, a deepened capacity for empathy, and an ability to hold the tension of the opposites. Unfortunately, this can be a painful and humbling process. It is much easier to see all of the badness “out there.” Doing so allows us to occupy the smug terrain of moral outrage, helping us to feel superior.This ability to dehumanize individuals and groups by projecting our own worst qualities onto them is a prerequisite for tribalism, racism, and war. Though shadow projection is a fundamental human predisposition, social media may be amplifying this tendency, making it more difficult for us to hear or attend to the viewpoints—or humanity—of others. Becoming more curious about our tendency to get inflamed with righteous indignation when interacting on social media may be vital if we are to restore the ability to engage in constructive discourse needed to solve the complex problems we face. As Jung said, “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.”Teen Mental Health Is In CrisisJean Twenge - Research Psychologist and author of iGenTwice as many American teens were depressed in 2019 than in 2011, and rates of self-harm, suicide attempts, and suicide rose as well. More teens said they were unhappy, and more experienced loneliness. These increases were the most acute among young adolescent girls and appeared in objectively measured behaviors, not just in symptoms (see Figure 1).Figure 1: Rates of self-harm and suicide attempts by self-poisoning (out of 1,000) and rate of suicide (out of 100,000) among young adolescent girls, US, 2001-2019 Sources: Spiller et al (2019); WISQARS nonfatal injuries and fatal injuries databases, Centers for Disease ControlNOTE: The rate for self-harm and self-poisonings is out of 1,000 population; the rate for suicide is out of 100,000 population, so self-harm and self-poisoning are 100 times more common than suicide in this group. Self-poisonings are among 13- to 15-year-old girls; self-harm and suicide is among 12- to 14-year-old girls. The rate for self-harm only includes injuries serious enough to be treated in a hospital emergency department. The rate for suicide attempts for self-poisoning includes only those reported to regional Poison Control Centers.These increases occurred alongside a wholescale change in how teens socialized and communicated with each other; getting together in person declined and communicating using digital media increased.The breakdown in teen mental health is not limited to the US. In a recent paper, Jon Haidt and I analyzed data from the more than one million teens around the world who participated in the PISA survey between 2000 and 2018. In 36 out of 37 countries, teen loneliness increased, particularly after 2012. That included increases in Australia, Brazil, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Thailand, and the UK. The increase in teen loneliness was unrelated to unemployment rates, income inequality, or total fertility rates—but occurred in lockstep with smartphone access and internet use.It is disingenuous to suggest, as Chris Ferguson does, that we should dismiss the increases in suicide among teen girls because their overall number of suicide deaths is lower than that of white middle-aged men. More middle-aged men than teen girls have always engaged in suicide, due to factors such as financial issues, divorce, aging, and illness. But social media and smartphones have only surged in popularity in the last decade. Thus, it’s more relevant to consider how suicide rates have changed over this time.There, it’s no contest: Between 2012 and 2019, the suicide rate for white middle-aged men in the US increased three percent. For girls 12 to 14, it increased 138 percent.The smaller absolute numbers for suicide among teen girls also conceal a much larger number of suicide attempts. Among 13- to 15-year-old girls, suicide attempts via just one method—self-poisoning—increased from 12,534 in 2011 to 27,498 in 2018. That is both a high absolute number (14,694 more self-poisonings) and a high rate of change (119 percent, more than doubling).And will this argument fall apart if teen suicide and self-harm stops increasing? No, because that depends on trends in social media use (which could flatten or go down) and other cultural changes—including the effect of the pandemic, which is going to make determining causes for mental health trends after 2020 much more difficult. But we already know that teen suicide increased in lockstep with social media and internet use between 2011 and 2019.That’s not just due to the individual impact of social media on emotions and body image that Facebook documented in its own studies. It’s also due to the effect on the group: Social media changes the way people relate to each other whether they use it or not, and whether they use it sparingly or heavily. A teen girl who uses social media heavily may experience depression and body image issues, but a teen girl who eschews social media often feels left out. The result: More loneliness and depression for everyone.That said, it’s still important to know whether social media use and depression are related among individuals. Unlike in the Facebook research, many studies have asked teens separate questions about how much time they spend on social media and their mental health symptoms. The best data in this area comes from large studies with validated measures of mental health symptoms and social media use measured in hours per day. Here are the results of such a study, based on more than 10,000 adolescents in the UK (see Figure 2). Girls who used social media five hours a day were three times more likely to be depressed than girls who did not use social media, with a similar though less pronounced association for boys.Figure 2: Percent of UK adolescents with clinically significant symptoms of depression by levels of social media use, by gender. Source: Kelly et al (2019) Lancet eClinical MedicineIt’s common for researchers to dismiss effects in this area as “small.” Does a doubling or tripling in depression from no use to heavy use seem small to you? I doubt it. When effects are described as “small,” researchers are almost always citing studies that examined screen time overall (including TV), not social media or internet use specifically, or they cite studies with poor measures of social media use (such as whether a teen uses social media every day—which nearly all teens now do). In addition, few of these other studies examine boys and girls separately, yet both the increase in depression rates and the link between social media use and depression is larger among girls.The Facebook research probed a different question: Why did Instagram sometimes lead to negative feelings? The internal Facebook documents include a study of more than 50,000 people from 10 countries finding that one-third of all respondents, and half of teen girls, compare their appearance to others’ on Instagram—consistent with many outside academic studies. Those appearance-based comparisons, the study found, peaked when users were 13 to 18 and then declined. That’s consistent with the academic research finding that the links to depression are stronger among girls.Even the best-designed correlational studies cannot tell us if social media causes depression or depression causes social media. Longitudinal and experimental studies suggest at least part of the causal arrow goes from social media to depression. However, it’s equally important to consider how social media influences people at the group level—why teen depression increased so sharply as social media and smartphones became popular. To explain the group effects by depression causing technology use, you’d have to argue that some completely unknown factor increased depression among teens, and that led them to buy smartphones and spend more time on social media. It’s not a very plausible argument.It’s now been more than four years since I argued in my book, iGen, that social media and smartphones might have something to do with the rise in teen depression, given the large impact these technologies had on how teens lived their lives. It is difficult to think of another factor that had such a substantial influence on teens’ everyday lives during this time period. Some of the effects of technology may have been good, but the extremely troubling trends in teen mental health strongly suggest the negative has outweighed the positive.You Are Infinitely ReplaceableDiana Fleischman - Evolutionary PsychologistAs others here have pointed out, the evidence for the harm of social media on adolescents and young people is mixed. There are also many benefits to social media that we must evaluate in order to figure out what kinds of trade-offs can and should be made to mitigate potential harm. One neglected piece of the larger picture about the impact of social media is how it interacts with our evolved social psychology.Evolutionary mismatch is the idea that the current environment differs in many important and fundamental ways relative to the environment in which we evolved. Many of these differences, like antibiotics, education, and food abundance are responsible for greater human health and well-being in many domains compared to our ancestors. But, mismatch refers to the differences that can cause disorder, dysfunction, and disease. For example, the difference between the environment in which we evolved where calorie dense foods were difficult to acquire and our current environment where they are easily available results in a mismatch where obesity and diabetes are more common now than ever before in human history. Most fast food companies make money by exploiting a psychology that evolved in an environment of relative scarcity, providing the fat and sugar that we most crave and enjoy.Like fast food, social media is designed to optimally exploit our evolved social psychology—monopolizing our attention by providing social information, cues, and opportunities that were relatively scarce at previous points in history. We evolved in relatively small face to face societies for about 99 percent of our human evolutionary history. Social media especially exploits our sensitivity to our relative status, inclusion, replaceability, attractiveness, and our ability to present ourselves in the most flattering possible light.Compared to the small-scale societies in which we evolved, there are much bigger disparities in relative status and wealth than at most previous points in history. Even monkeys are willing to “pay” to view pictures of other monkeys who are high in status. Attention towards high status others drives traffic on all social media. But compared to our evolutionary history, there are thousands of people higher in status than you who are curating their social media presence to seem as high in status as possible. This can create positive aspirational and ambitious motivations, but it can also cause envy and resentment. This may be one reason that China has banned people from flaunting wealth on their TikTok platform, Douyin.One of the main ways to become a valuable social partner in small scale societies is to have skills, traits, or strengths that make you irreplaceable, or otherwise valuable to a group. Up until very recently, in any group, you were probably the best at doing something. Social media continually gives us clues that we are replaceable, because there are hundreds of other people who are better at what we do well, or have more of our very best characteristics.Imagine you met yourself in an alternate reality. This alternate reality self is more beautiful than you, more competent than you, has better relationships than you, and is always happier than you. This is a person you probably already know. It is the person that—through filters, and curation—you present on social media. This person doesn’t just fill your social niche, they do everything you do better than you can do. This is the uneasy relationship we have with the self that we present online. This can lead to a pervasive form of social anxiety akin to imposter syndrome. Social media results in a toxic mix of the pleasure of curating and seeing the best version of ourselves and discovering that these best versions of ourselves have a merely mediocre rank in the largest social hierarchy on Earth.Adolescents may be especially prone to these social comparison effects. More than older adults they are trying to find their social niche and trying to figure out how best to compete for status. The hours that young people are spending on social media are likely displacing developing real-world skills and relationships, that are likely, in the long term, to be more fulfilling.When we strive for an unreachable goal, the motivation to disengage is adaptive. It reroutes our energy towards something more achievable. Social media both gives us valuable social information that we compulsively consume, and gives us cues that we are in an unwinnable social contest. Perpetually unachievable goals often spiral into depression. And, what we may be forgetting in this larger conversation is that many adults are just as prone to the negative effects of social media as adolescents.I’m glad that the possible negative mental health ramifications of social media use, and the characteristics of the people who are most vulnerable, are being further explored. Personally, I use apps like RescueTime and Freedom to limit the negative effects of social media on my life. But, I’m skeptical of top down social media regulation. It’s far too easy for the beneficial free exchange of ideas to be encumbered by calls to end discrimination, improve mental health, or stop cyberbullying. Top down regulation also might limit the proliferation of other social media platforms. Perhaps there is a way to use social media in our future that optimizes for well-being, connection, and education rather than the wholesale exploitation of our evolved psychology.If you would like to contribute to our discussion on social media, please send your contributions to pitch@quillette.com. You can also continue the discussion in the Quillette Circle.For more:The Exhibitionist EconomyWhen former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen leaked thousands of internal company documents to the Wall Street Journal in September, it led to another cycle of acrimonious allegations of corporate irresponsibility. “I’ve seen a bunch of social networks,” Haugen told 60 Minutes in an interview…QuilletteAri David BlaffPodcast #168: Jonathan Haidt on Instagram’s Mental Health EmergencyQuillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with NYU professor and Coddling of the American Mind Co-Author Jonathan Haidt about the emotionally destructive effect of social media on many young users.QuilletteQuilletteInstagram’s Mental Health EmergencyFacebook has recently paused the development of their “Instagram Kids” project after a whistleblower leaked internal documents showing that Facebook’s own research finds a link between poor mental health and Instagram use. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide i…QuilletteClaire Lehmann

For many liberals, this was the year that Kyrsten Sinema became the most infuriating politician in the United States. The first-term Arizona senator is, along with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, obstructing the passage of Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion social services and climate change package. The reasons for Manchin’s stubbornness are well known.
But Sinema is more enigmatic. It was said that she demanded $100 billion in cuts to proposed climate programmes, though this was denied by her office. The package was trimmed to $2 trillion, but she still refused to support it. She was accused of being bent on the “destruction” of the Biden Presidency. She had, one commentator wrote, a “death grip” on the Democratic Party.
In public, Sinema was taciturn, even as she was trailed and harried by progressive activists, who followed her into public restrooms, or tried to confront her at a marathon. Nobody on the Left understands her thinking; to the Washington Post she is simply “inscrutable“. So fury, and theorising, is their response. (Hers was to tell them, somewhat cryptically on Instagram, to “fuck off”.)

Biden’s bill has been maimed by Sinema, regardless of what happens in the weeks ahead. Eventually, interest in her may begin to fade, or she might face a primary challenge that ends her career as a senator. But there is another way to look at Sinema, one with wider and much longer-lasting implications for politics and political theory than her obstructionism in the Senate.
In recent years there have been two major shifts in the relationship between politics and political theory. On the one hand, a number of important modern political thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, once perceived in American academic and activists circles as useful, even necessary, for ostensibly radical and critical Leftist politics, have begun to appeal to the Right, which long rejected them. On the other hand, adherence to a capitalism-friendly version of academics and activists’ politics, especially on matters of culture, race and sexuality, became a condition of membership in nearly every important institution in the United States. Ideas that once generated a thrilling frisson of subversion in college seminars among students and teachers, who at the time could see themselves as joined in a common project of Leftist critique, have now become the ever-more explicit moral centre of our regime — or are being taken up by its opponents on the Right.
More from this authorConservatives need multiculturalismBy Blake Smith
Such changes can perhaps be traced more easily through the writings of thinkers whose minds, because of their mediocrity, reflect rather than resist larger trends. One such thinker — a former activist and, technically, a scholar — is Sinema, who holds a PhD in “Justice Studies” from Arizona State University. Her 2012 dissertation Who Must Die: the State of Exception in Rwanda’s Genocide, and her 2015 book of almost the same title, are representative moments in the double shift by which Leftists once enamoured of certain strands of radical political theory repurposed it towards the consolidation of a new hegemonic political morality, discarding its subversive dimension — and making it available to the Right.
In her work on Rwanda, Sinema purports, through a handful of incompletely understood concepts drawn chiefly from the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, to discover in the genocide committed in 1994 a generalisable lesson about the importance of the rule of law. In its absence, she argues, the worst sorts of barbarities are possible, and indeed likely.
Sinema’s work has no original insights, and hardly any grasp on the theory that supposedly informs it. It is, however, a useful document. It sheds, in the first place, some light on Sinema herself, a former anti-war radical who is now perhaps the most notorious centrist in Congress and who prides herself on upbeat bipartisanship (expounded in her 2009 book, Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions that Win and Last). For those who would rather dim the lights on Sinema, an already highly-visible political personage, her invocation of Schmitt and Agamben offers an opportunity to consider the strange transformation that these theorists’ work has undergone.
Schmitt and Agamben, in principle, should have been uncomfortable reading for Sinema. The former was an early 20th-century German legal theorist who attacked liberal democracy and supplied theoretical justification for the Nazi regime; the latter is a still-living Italian philosopher who used Schmitt’s ideas for his own critique of liberalism, launched from the radical Left rather than the far Right. But, given Sinema’s political and intellectual origins on the anti-war Left of the early 2000s, her choice is less surprising. The two thinkers were critical references for activist and academic critics of American power throughout the War on Terror.
Since the Eighties and Nineties, Schmitt had become first acceptable, and then compulsory reading, for American political theorists, who were taken with what seemed to be his insights into the deficiencies of liberal democracy’s emphasis on the rule of law and the formal aspects of democratic procedure. Some thinkers on the Left, such as Chantal Mouffe, used his ideas to advocate for a reinvigorated form of political democracy that valued frankly acknowledged conflicts over neutral rules and norms. This so-called “agonism” once inspired populist Leftist movements in Europe, but seems to appeal to few American academics after the rise, since the first Trump campaign, of Right-wing populism at home. Norms — such as Nato and Nafta — suddenly appealed to Leftists who had long critiqued them.
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While some tried to use Schmitt to attack liberalism from the Left, others, drawing on Agamben’s interpretation of Schmitt, argued that the United States was becoming or had become a dangerously illiberal country. Schmitt had argued, infamously, that states inevitably find themselves confronted with “states of exception” — situations where legal norms can no longer be applied. In such instances, some agent must decide what is to be done so that order can be restored and the normal rules can function again. Schmitt saw this power to make decisions in exceptional circumstances as the essence of sovereignty. He argued that liberal democracies — oriented towards preserving the rule of law, which their leaders and ideologues imagine needs no supplement of sovereign decision-making — ignore this fact to their peril.
Agamben, however, countered that supposedly liberal states are in fact constantly dealing with “states of exception”. Liberals do not, in his view, periodically confront normless states of exception in crises; rather they constantly create these conditions. In a series of works including his 1995 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben drew on Schmitt and Foucault to warn that what he saw as the paradigmatic instances of the Nazis’ systematic illegality and inhumanity — the concentration camp and the lethal power of doctors over “life unworthy of life” (the disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) — were also present, at least potentially, in democratic states, which create their own zones in which law and rights are suspended.
After 9/11, these arguments took on great cogency for many thinkers on the American Left. The US Government appeared to them to be suspending fundamental rights of its citizens through the Patriot Act, which suspended long-standing norms about the limits of state surveillance. Meanwhile, in Guantanamo Bay, the Government seemed to consign individuals to a site-specific state of exception in which the norms governing neither the treatment of prisoners of war, nor criminals applied. Agamben’s theories did not offer much clear direction on what critics of the apparently norm-less War on Terror might do to oppose the “sovereign” power of the United States, but they did give a moral and philosophical weight to critics’ sense that the country was on a dangerous slide towards reenacting the worst horrors of the 20th century.
Suggested readingThe War on Terror returns homeBy Will Lloyd
Rather than argue, as Schmitt and Agamben did, that states of exception necessarily appear, or that liberal states continually create them, Sinema insisted that such situations could be avoided by protecting the rule of law. This revealed a basic misunderstanding of her chosen interlocutors’ arguments. Schmitt posited that the rule of law is never adequate, since states of exception requiring the exercise of sovereignty necessarily appear; Agamben likewise argued, following Foucault, that liberal states are inherently unable to live up to their own constitutional norms and in their routine exercise of power, place certain spaces and persons outside them. Sinema, either with naïveté or the cunning of stupidity, simply wishes the problem away and urges us to follow the rules. But, while her intellectual inadequacies are her own, the lameness of her conclusion reflects a change in the political valence of theory.
By the mid-2010s, as Sinema was writing, Leftist opposition to the imperial and illiberal dimensions of American security policy was melting away — or moving to the Right. In the following years, fears about terrorism targeted the latter, painting American conservatives, and the spectre of white supremacy, as security threats in much the same rhetoric that had been used to describe Islamic terrorist networks.
Since the spring of 2020, as Agamben has repeatedly observed, Covid policy has imitated the War on Terror in its suspensions of rights — and intimated the handing over of political power to medical officials in ways anticipated in Homo Sacer. Thus, if Schmitt and Agamben remain relevant for understanding our politics, it is in ways that are uncomfortable for the cultural Left, which now finds itself increasingly running, rather than critiquing, the machinery of American power.
Suggested readingThe triumph of America's ruling classBy Jacob Siegel 
In our present-day sequels to the War on Terror — the campaigns against racism and Covid — hegemonic institutions pursue enemies and suspend liberal norms in the name of our psychological and physical wellbeing. Now in possession of what we might call the commanding heights of the moral economy, from which it produces elites’ and would-be elites’ worldview, this Left no longer needs to perform radicalness.
It can assume instead the position of a centre ringed about by benighted, ignorant, but nevertheless dangerous enemies: conservatives. The latter are not credited with having specific, comprehensible or legitimate objections to the dominant policies and values. They are instead imagined as hateful, prejudiced enemies of legality, science, and moral decency — that is, they are seen not as political foes, but as cognitive and moral degenerates — in a manner that recalls the way Islamic terrorists during the Bush era were said to hate America “for our freedom” and to be full of irrational “Islamic rage”, rather than recognised as having a comprehensible set of objections to American policies in the Middle East.
We should not be surprised to hear pleas for the rule of law and deference for experts from those who once, drawing on radical theory, revealed the subterfuges and hypocrisies behind liberal norms of legality and objectivity. Critique, like terrorism, is a weapon of the weak. The powerful claim to defend security, reason and morality, while those out of power, grown clever and cynical from their experience of marginality, contest these claims and question whether such things even exist to be defended. With the cultural Left in the ascendancy, the political theory by which it climbed has become a ladder to be thrown away — and available to be taken up by the Right.
Long after the furore around Sinema is forgotten, her academic work will glint as one ironic point of light in this vast change in the way liberals and conservatives in America think about themselves and their country.

A family member went to get his booster jab the other day, at a drop-in centre. It involved queuing for two and a half hours, outdoors, in a car park. The other people in the queue were mainly in their eighties; several gave up and went home.
But after an autumn of absolutely pathetic numbers — for a while we were barely jabbing 40,000 a day, first and second doses combined, down from ten times that number and more in the spring and early summer — the programme does appear to have picked up a little. There were hundreds of thousands of booster jabs alone given over the weekend.
The Government has pinned its entire winter strategy on those boosters. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, has said Plan B, will not be introduced because of them. Plan B is a milquetoasty set of minor interventions, including greater use of vaccine passports, and legally requiring masks in some places. They may ask for people to work from home if things get worse. It’s not exactly Protect and Survive.
And we’re not going there. Yet.
But there is a problem, which is that Covid-19 in the UK has become really hard to predict. Last year, whatever you looked at — cases, hospitalisations, deaths — the numbers followed a simple pattern. They started going up slowly, then they went up quicker, then quicker, then quicker. Then the Government imposed a lockdown, and, a little while and a few thousand more dead people later, the numbers crashed back down again.

But this year, the pandemic is no longer doing nice straightforward exponential curves. If you look at hospitalisations over the last six months or so, you’ll see that they started a familiar-looking rise in about June, and they clambered up to about 1,000 a day in late July and then – they just stopped, and went back down a bit. Then they rose again, and back down. Now they’ve started going up again, but … will that carry on? Will the curve fizzle out again? Unlike last year, it’s not easy to tell what will happen next.
Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist, explained why winter 2021/22 is trickier to model than 20/21. First, he says, in any epidemic, “When R is near 1, it’s a headache.” R is the number of people that each infected person goes on to infect, on average. So if your initial 100 cases lead to 200 subsidiary cases, then your R is 2. If R is above 1, your epidemic is growing exponentially; if it’s below 1, it’s dying away.
When R is well above 1, it’s fairly easy to predict what will happen: cases will go up, faster and faster, until it runs out of susceptible people or until policies and behaviours change so that R goes below 1 and the epidemic declines again. That’s how it was last year.
But now, thanks to vaccines and natural immunity, the number of susceptible people around is lower — we’re close to herd immunity — so even with essentially no restrictions, R is close to 1. And when it’s close to 1, smaller things can affect the course of the epidemic much more. “It bounces around,” says Kucharski. “Schools reopening, or closing for half term. The vaccine rollout and boosters. If the epidemic is increasing or decreasing, some small change can knock it the other way.”
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One way to think of it is that if your R is 2.5, and, for instance, schools close for half term, then your R might go down to 2.3. It’s the difference between an epidemic that’s spreading quickly, and one that’s spreading not quite so quickly. But if R is 1.1 and you knock it down to 0.9, then it’s the difference between a pandemic that’s growing and one that’s shrinking.
It also means that individual behaviour becomes important. Around our way, it recently became very obvious that lots of schoolchildren (and their parents) were getting the disease. So when ours got the sniffles we were quicker to take them out of school, and more wary of going to shops. Presumably millions of people have behaved in similar ways. It wouldn’t have made much difference last year — the disease was spreading so rapidly — but it could be enough now to change things from an up-arrow to a down-arrow.
There’s a more interesting dynamic at play as well, says Kucharski. Imagine the first two waves of the pandemic as a forest fire in a virgin forest. Once a tree starts burning, it easily spreads to the trees around it, and, left to its own devices, the fire will carry on until the forest has burnt away. An immunologically naive population is the same. “When you have a fully susceptible population,” says Kucharski, “the simple exponential curve models will give you something sensible.”
But we no longer live in a virgin forest. Vaccinations and acquired immunity means that the large bulk of the population is less susceptible to infection. In our analogy, you could imagine that it’s a far sparser forest, with occasional clumps here and there representing groups with lower vaccination uptake. Now, if a tree catches fire, it might not spread to any others. Or it might be in a clump, and spread around that clump quickly, and then burn out. Or a spark might make it from the clump to a nearby clump. It’s much more dependent on luck and randomness.
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“You have a much patchier network for the virus to spread in,” says Kucharski. “A lot more dead ends, and surges in younger groups and places with lower vaccination cover; you get pockets of susceptibility, and you get large outbreaks, but it has to work its way from one pocket to another. When you’ve got lots of these happening in parallel, you have a much bumpier dynamic, more conducive to a bobbling-along plateau than one that has clear growth or decline.”
All of which makes the epidemic much harder to predict. But there’s another layer of difficulty on top of that, which is that you’re not just predicting an epidemic: you’re predicting human behaviour. More specifically, you’re predicting the behaviour of the current government and parliament. There is not an algorithm which says “At 1,500 hospitalisations a day, we re-enter lockdown” or anything.
Other countries do have something like that — in Taiwan, for instance, there are four levels of restrictions, which are imposed on a specified set of conditions. Level 1 is imposed if there are cases imported from overseas that result in “isolated community transmission”; Level 2 is imposed if there are “domestically transmitted cases from unknown sources”, etc. If you could predict the behaviour of the epidemic in Taiwan, you’d have a pretty good basis for predicting the policy response to it.
But not in the UK. Plan B, or any further restrictions, will be imposed if the Government decides to impose them. I think that’s a bad system, and the Taiwanese method of removing the decision as far as possible from political pressure would be better. But that’s the system we have. So as well as predicting what the virus will do, we have to predict how 361 Tory MPs will respond to the virus, and how Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid will respond to them. So predicting whether we’ll end up in a lockdown is hard.
But perhaps there’s a more interesting question, which is: should we act as though we might have to, and start doing something about it now? Should we impose Plan B?
For all the current doom and gloom, we are in a better place than even the most optimistic of the government’s SPI-M-O models projections from early September. And those models now tend to forecast a decline in cases from later this month, even if we don’t impose Plan B. We’re not facing an immediate crisis.
Oliver Johnson, a mathematician at Bristol, says an autumn decline is plausible: “The key thing is it has been so crazy in schools, with 7% or 8% of schoolkids infected at any one time,” he says. “You can’t have that forever: you’ll run out of people. So it’s a case of working out when you’ll run out of people.” The little clumps of forest will burn down eventually.
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The pandemic, though, has been consistently hard to predict and the great failings of the British Covid response have been trying to be too clever, doing things too late, and not thinking about risk-benefit calculations or worst-case scenarios.
This feels very much like one of those situations. It’s true that, probably, if we leave it and do nothing, things won’t get that much worse, and may soon get better. But there’s a non-trivial chance that they will get worse. Given that the costs of imposing Plan B restrictions are minor, why not take simple, low-cost steps now to avoid the unlikely, but plausible and very bad, future shit show.
We have a suite of tools available to us – not just Plan B, but also things like increased rapid testing – that can avoid future disruption. But, also, if we impose them now, we can undo them later easily if they’re unnecessary, or tweak them if they’re not quite right. And we should be able to avoid stringent restrictions being imposed again, and another catastrophic Christmas lockdown. “Given the tools we now have available,” says Kucharski, “it would be completely absurd if we got to that point.”
I agree. We absolutely should not need to consider a Plan C, one in which we shut stuff down, stop people seeing their loved ones, close the pubs, ruin Christmas. And we can make it all but certain that we don’t have to do that if we take small, sensible precautions now. Hopefully enough elderly people will stand in cold car parks to get their boosters; but let’s not rely on it entirely.

It is 2am, and the baby is screaming and crying in the other room. Alone in his crib, he is inconsolable. There have been months of nights like this. The new parents have the best intentions, but they are at their wits’ end. Yanked out of a sleep only recently obtained, the baby’s father pulls himself from bed, thaws and warms some of the mother’s milk, and offers it to his son. The baby takes it eagerly, and is satisfied — but also now very much awake. If left, he will cry.
And so the father rocks his son back and forth, holding him safely with one hand. Now fully awake himself, he pulls out his phone, and falls into the abyss. His complete attention is on the screen, its blue light seeming like a balm but acting like a bomb, destroying any natural tiredness. The baby, unable to find his father’s gaze, reaches for the phone. The father, jarred into consciousness, pulls up an animated show created for infants. He puts it in his child’s view. The baby looks. He laughs. The characters on the screen do not respond. The baby frowns. He has no friends here. It is a long time before he falls back asleep.

For all its conveniences, the modern age has not removed the challenges of parenting: the exhaustion, the constant demands, the necessary subordination of one’s needs. In fact, in many ways it has intensified them. Parents’ lives are busier — both with necessary things, like work, and tempting distractions, like Instagram. And so to get through the night, we turn to technological solutions like breast pumps, or the expensive advice of sleep trainers. Meanwhile, we spend our days in front of screens, eating food so processed it barely resembles food anymore, and so brings less nutrition and more risk into our lives.
In our new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Bret Weinstein and I argue that humans are the ultimate generalists, with such incredible capacity to create new niches for ourselves that we have created a rate of change even we cannot keep up with. And so our brains and bodies are out of step with the 21st century. This mismatch has given rise to all sorts of conditions and diseases that would have been unknown in antiquity — from the widespread need for orthodontia to obesity. A lot of these disorders have their roots in our earliest years.
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As a species, we are social and long-lived, with generational overlap and long childhoods. Some other animals are similar to us in these regards — elephants and orcas, parrots and crows — but humans seem to do everything more. We live in larger groups, with the longest post-reproductive lives, and have the longest childhoods.
If a foal can gallop within a day of its birth, why does it take a human baby months just to learn how to roll over? Childhood is not an error, or a waste of time. It is when we learn to be human. Our giant brains, and our ability and need to connect with other human beings, take years to mature. Very early, we need to be assured of our safety. Soon after, we need to be tested, stretched to our limits.
But the baby introduced earlier may rarely be taken outside, never feeling the sun on his face, or experiencing the minor discomfort of being momentarily cold. That experience can offer not just valuable evidence that discomfort can be recovered from, but also enables the reassuring embrace of his mother as she holds him close, warming him, protecting him. As the baby grows, he learns to self-soothe, to a point. But on a path that is cleared of all challenges, he will not learn what real risk is. Nor can he know the true depth of his parents’ love. They have so successfully cocooned him, including from their own selves.
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Imagine a baby from 15,000 years ago, or 150,000. Before the advent of farming, but after we were fully modern at the anatomical and physiological level. We had language and fire and tools, were cooking our food, living in community, exploring ideas around campfires. Sometime late in that time span we began to make art, to hold funerals, to have rites of passage.
Such a baby would have been snuggled close in the embrace of family and friends, never alone, never isolated. A baby alone in that environment was at high risk; he would have been in actual contact with his mother, or another caregiver, for most of his early life. But as he grew, he would have been allowed more and more freedoms. He would have watched the older children, and played around the fire, and handled sharp tools. He would not have been completely protected from harm, but he also would not have been completely protected from exploration. When his body achieved adulthood, his mind would too: he would be anti-fragile, unlike today’s 18-year-olds.
In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide, we argue that though modernity has made us healthier in many ways — and expanded our minds — there are exceptions. We do not argue for a return to a simpler time — such a prescription has many problems, but it’s also impossible to fulfil. But we do argue for some caution in adopting all the modern advances, as many of them bring hidden costs, which become visible with an evolutionary lens.
Do not expect tiny babies to sleep alone. It sends a confusing and terrifying message: nobody has your back. If you provide utter reassurance, while they are tiny, that you are there for them, then — far earlier than their coddled counterparts — they will be confident enough to explore on their own, to take and manage risks. They also sleep better — which means you will, too.
Do share parenting as much as possible; early on, this may mean pumping breast milk to save for later. This tool of modernity is so freeing for many women. A mother’s milk is best for nutritional, immunological, and bonding reasons, but the pressure to provide it at all hours can be a burden; sometimes allowing a baby’s father, or another caretaker, to provide it is a gift.
Suggested readingOur modern parenting is making monstersBy Giles Fraser
But here is an example of where moving away from our ancient ways may have hidden costs. What else besides nutrition is stored in that milk? There’s some evidence that breast milk contains circadian cues. If true, then milk delivered at 2 am, straight from the breast, would not only satiate the baby, but also send the signal that it is now time to sleep. Milk expressed at noon, in contrast, would send the opposite signal. When feeding the baby at night, then, it’s best to provide nighttime milk. It won’t hurt, and may very well help.
Do not put screens in front of children, especially screens that have animate objects on them. As Bret and I posit in our book, babies and young children who are entertained by screens will learn to flatten their emotional range; they do not expect humanoid forms to respond to them.
Do eradicate all blue light from the space where you and your baby sleep. Early morning sunlight is so very blue, and those who are regularly exposed to bright outdoor light early in the day are more productive, and more fit, than those who are not. But expose yourself to blue light late at night, when our ancestors would have been gathered around a campfire — or navigating by the pale light of the moon — and find yourself struggling with sleep, and therefore with productivity, creativity, and health.
Do feed your children real food, tempting though it is to lean on processed meals. A healthy person has an incredible diversity of gut flora, obtained from the consumption of whole foods, with as short a supply chain as possible. An unhealthy person ingests shelf-stable products containing multi-syllabic ingredients synthesised in a lab. In house sparrows, eating a diet that is out of whack makes the birds slower to learn, quicker to anger, and generally more stressed. What are the chances that humans are completely unlike house sparrows in this regard?
Do move your body, and encourage your children to move theirs. We are embodied beings. Our screens may compel us to believe that we are mere brains in jars that can manage to type sarcasm and anger and emojis — but we are in fact more, and far better, than that. And it is during our long, lovely childhoods that we find out how connected and creative we can be.

How should a society allocate its most important, lucrative, and prestigious positions? In most places, for most of history, the question had a simple answer: by heredity. Monarchs and aristocrats held almost all the society’s power and wealth and passed their positions on to their offspring. Over the last two hundred years a different system came to supplant hereditary privilege. The new system distributes positions through evidence of cognitive and intellectual skills as measured by performance on competitive, standardized examinations. It is called meritocracy.The first appearance of such a system came a millennium ago in China. Beginning in the 10th century and lasting until the beginning of the 20th, officials in the provinces and at the imperial court were chosen by a protracted and rigorous series of nationwide written examinations. Candidates had to demonstrate, inter alia, their mastery of classic Chinese texts, which was perhaps useful for managing a large land-based Asian empire before the modern era but is of dubious relevance to a contemporary industrial society.Meritocracy came later to the West. It became established for the first time with the French Revolution, one of whose slogans—“a career open to talents”—captures its essence. The sixth article of the Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, issued in 1789, concisely defined the concept: “All citizens … are equally admissible to all public offices, positions, and employments, according to their capacity and without any other distinction than that of virtues and talents.”Since offices, positions, and employments had previously been apportioned not according to an individual’s talents and virtues but rather by his (in the traditional world careers were open only to men) birth, this was a truly revolutionary development. In the 19th and 20th centuries it spread, at an uneven pace, throughout the Western world and beyond. Competitive national examinations became important rites of passage in Great Britain, France, and the United States through the 11-plus, the baccalaureate, and the Scholastic Aptitude Test, respectively, channeling young people to schools and then onward to prestigious careers.Although its social, economic, and political consequences have had a major impact on the modern world, the theory and practice of meritocracy has lacked a good history—until now. The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge fills that gap. The author is an editor and columnist at The Economist, the influential London-based weekly magazine that calls itself a newspaper, and the co-author of a number of well-regarded books, most recently Capitalism in America, written with the former chairman of the American Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan. Wooldridge’s wide-ranging, informative, and often provocative book depicts the traditional world in which personal background and connections counted for everything, the traces and harbingers of the meritocratic idea that appeared before the French Revolution, and its progress thereafter.The traditional way of distributing rewards based on birth, which meritocracy largely replaced, has been more or less discredited in recent times; the proponents of a permanent, hereditary, dominant aristocracy are scarce and the most visible remnants of the hereditary principle in the West, monarchs, have lost the political power their ancestors once wielded. Still, meritocracy has not lacked for opposition of various kinds.The most violent episodes of opposition to it occurred where it began, in China. In the 19th century a failed examination taker, proclaiming that he was “God’s Chinese Son,” led an insurrection that took control of a large part of the country. The Taiping Rebellion, as it was called, lasted from 1850 to 1864 and claimed twenty million lives, the bloodiest conflict ever fought anywhere up to that time. In the mid-1960s the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong unleashed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in which millions of students attacked people in authority, especially teachers. Schools and universities closed and examinations were suspended. Mao declared that China should rely on people who were “red”—that is ideologically fervent—rather than “experts” whom meritocratic procedures had selected. The Cultural Revolution turned the country upside down. By some estimates several million people died and millions more had their lives disrupted or ruined.The West faces its own serious challenges to meritocracy, although they are not remotely as violent as those in China. Wooldridge devotes the last section of his book to these Western challenges. Three in particular are worth noting.First, throughout the West the meritocratic system has displayed a tendency to become sclerotic, entrenching elites rather than refreshing them. People who rise to the top have found ways to use their positions to assure success for their offspring, for example sending them to rigorous preparatory schools too costly for most parents to afford and not numerous enough to serve the entire population. At the same time, climbing up the meritocratic ladder has become more difficult. In this way, meritocracy is not functioning as it is designed to do.Second, meritocracy has increasingly become associated with economic inequality. Meritocratic systems are not, and are not designed to be, egalitarian in every way. While they do provide equal opportunity, unequal outcomes invariably result because people have different talents and abilities. Some will do better than others, but the winners will earn their success through their own efforts and that success, at least in theory, will benefit society as a whole since the best-qualified people will fill the most important positions.Over the last four decades in the West the system has worked more or less as intended in that the most proficient exam takers have obtained the most remunerative positions. Because of the way both national economies and the global economy have evolved, however, the gap between the most affluent segment of society and all the rest has widened sharply.Economic inequality has reached levels unseen for more than a hundred years. This has generated popular resentment at the economically successful and therefore at the social practices to which they owe their success. Wooldridge considers that resentment, in combination with the calcification of the meritocratic process and other developments, to be responsible for the upsurge of populism in the Western world over the past decade that brought Donald Trump and other previously unlikely figures to power and caused Great Britain to leave the European Union.

Finally, especially in the United States but in other countries as well, meritocracy faces opposition on the grounds that it is unrepresentative in that the pool of winners it yields does not contain the numbers of people from some groups that is proportional to these groups’ share of the total population. It follows, according to this criticism, that “offices, positions, and employments” should be allocated according to ethnic and racial group membership rather than by individual merit as measured by tests. This proposition has for several decades influenced the admissions policies of America’s selective institutions of higher education; it has spread to the wider society; and it plays an increasing role in the public policies of the Democratic Party. It brings with it three considerable drawbacks.First, it relinquishes one of the achievements that meritocracy at its best confers: economic efficiency and material progress. There is something to be said for a police force having at least some members from the racial and ethnic groups for which it has responsibility regardless of test scores. There is far less to be said for selecting neurosurgeons or virologists on the basis of their race or ethnicity. Indeed, a society that does so consistently has every chance of degrading its neurophysiological health and retarding the development of therapies for diseases such as the coronavirus. It is no accident that China built the second-largest economy in the world, to the benefit of hundreds of millions of poor Chinese, and placed itself on the cutting edge of technological innovation only when it abandoned the Maoist system of allocating positions and embraced—again—meritocracy.In addition, since, as Wooldridge notes, meritocracy is associated with rapid economic growth, abandoning it is likely to make societies that do so less wealthy; and because East Asian countries have become the most enthusiastic practitioners of selection by merit, they will become not only wealthier but also, in the case of China, more powerful than the West.The flight from meritocracy also has the perverse and ironic consequence of restoring the system of allocating positions that, over the decades, meritocracy supplanted. Apportionment by group membership gives pride of place once again to heredity—albeit ethnic and racial—rather than achievement. The anti-meritocratic policies of recent years in fact restore to a prominent social role the hereditary principle that dominated traditional Europe, the overthrow of which was regarded in the West as a powerful and welcome sign of progress. They also violate one of the central precepts of Western public life, namely, that people should be judged and treated as individuals. In the name of what its advocates call social justice, therefore, racial and ethnic quotas reinstate a practice that Western societies, over the course of several centuries, had come virtually unanimously to consider unjust.Finally, a policy of allocating positions and opportunities by group membership threatens to turn the societies and economies of the countries that adopt it into racial and ethnic spoils systems, with each constituent group striving to elbow aside all the others. This is a recipe for the kind of bitter conflict based on tribalism that plagues much of the world but which Western societies have managed for the most part to avoid since World War II.To be sure, the practice of merit-based selection does not work perfectly in Western countries, and at the end of his book the author offers some useful suggestions for improving it, in particular to make it fairer. His principal conclusion, however, is that “the best way forward lies … in treating people as individuals rather than as members of groups [and] in distributing opportunities and jobs on the basis of ability and achievement.”The evidence that Wooldridge assembles in his book supports that conclusion. The Aristocracy of Talent makes a persuasive case that, as a way of allocating positions and opportunities, meritocracy deserves the assessment that Winston Churchill made of democracy: the worst system except for all the others that have been tried.Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a member of the editorial board of American Purpose, and author of The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (2019).Image: by Albeiro Rodas, public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3474875

Are you an accomplished pediatrics researcher, well-established in her or his career, who has considerable experience leading researchers and research teams and executing programmatic initiatives? Do you have a commitment to policy-relevant research, and are you energized by the possibilities of cultivating and sustaining productive relationships with faculty and staff, external research collaborators, funders, operational partners, and other key stakeholders? Do you have an interest in pediatric health services, informatics, patient-centered outcomes research, comparative effectiveness research, and translational research, including organizing and financing of care, clinical evaluation and outcomes research, monitoring and accountability, clinical decision making, populations and communities, artificial intelligence, data science and analytics and provider and consumer behavior?
Would you like the best job in the world?
Ok, clearly, I’m biased, but here in the Department of Pediatrics, at Indiana University School of Medicine, we’re looking for someone with vision, thought leadership, intellectual curiosity, integrity, excellence, and research expertise to start as the Associate Director for two key divisions – Children’s Health Services Research and the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Comparative Effectiveness Research – help merge them, and then take over as Director.
My first job was in CHSR, and I later founded and became Director of PACER. The current director of CHSR (Sarah Wiehe) and I want to do a planned transition/merger of these very successful groups, helping to hand over leadership to the new AD->D while we step back and focus on new roles (Sarah co-runs our CTSI, and in addition to other jobs, I’m now Chief Health Officer for IU).
I can’t stress enough that you’d be taking over two groups that are extremely successful in their own rights. The merged group will be a powerhouse. The Department of Pediatrics couldn’t be in better shape. This position, and the center, would be extremely well resourced and set up for success.
Here is the official job posting. We are looking for someone in the Associate/Full Professor range, and although it should go without saying, I’ll say it anyway:
As the nation’s largest medical school, IUSM is committed to being an institution that not only reflects the diversity of the learners we teach and the patient populations we serve, but also pursues the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion that inform academic excellence. We desire candidates who enhance our representational diversity, as well as those whose work contributes to equitable and inclusive learning and working environments for our students, staff, and faculty. IUSM strives to take an anti-racist stance, regularly evaluating and updating its policies, procedures, and practices to confer equitable opportunities for contribution and advancement for all members of our community. We invite individuals who will join us in our mission to advance racial equity to transform health and wellbeing for all throughout the state of Indiana.
When I moved to Indiana 18 years ago, I had never lived in the midwest. I thought I’d be here five years and leave. I’m still here – many years later – largely because this is just the absolute best place to work. This job will be one of the best there. You’d be foolish not to consider it!
Questions? Email or DM me!
@aaronecarrollThe post Do you want one of the best jobs in the world? first appeared on The Incidental Economist.

suppressing fossil fuel production, which is part and parcel of so called decarbonization will strengthen populism which can smoothly transition into fascism with nukes. Populism emerged in developed countries because of a strong downward pressure on living standards that cannot be fixed by playing with money. You can't eat money.

The numbers are pretty clear and stark. If one wants to extend North American oil consumption per capita to 8 billion people, oil production has to go up by ~600%. To the EU level, by ~300%. This is the scale of the problem and it will get worse before it gets better.

In some ways you can have your cake and eat it too. I am in favor of subsidizing alternatives to fossil fuels to give them the market push, while at the same time making sure that there is enough energy to go around ,which requires continuing investment in fossil fuels by the private sector. For this to happen we have to stop demonizing carbon dioxide and squash the hyperventilating catastrophism that has nothing to do with reality. No catastrophe is happening ,just predictions of the catastrophe that have been around ever since I can remember, I am old, so I went through quite a few tipping points, including when we were surely sliding into an ice age in the 1970-ies.

As far as the population growth is concerned. The growth occurred mostly in the developing world because of culturally sudden reduction in the mortality of the young. The only country that moderated this growth was China, using pretty drastic measures. You can't stop it, really, it has to run its course. Nonetheless, there are consequences of this growth that one needs to be aware of. I mentioned these consequences in the previous post.

World elites appear to be living in a bubble which is increasingly disconnected from reality. The "Humanity" needs to focus on overcoming the consequences of XXth century population growth, not on chimeras of climate change. As I said, the time remaining is short and there are plenty of nukes to go around if this all deteriorates into social implosions followed by wars, as in 1930-ies.

And finally, we need to return environmentalism to its proper function, protecting the environment, not playing fashionable politics. The developing world will face environmental devastation due to overpopulation, which can be stopped only by pulling people out of poverty, which requires energy. Meanwhile, the developed world will face intensifying migration pressures, not because of climate, but because of the interaction between climate fluctuations and overpopulation. Old fashioned fluctuations, like periodic droughts.

At a time when people around the world are suffering from shortages due to supply chain bottlenecks, megalomanic capitalists are organizing space flights with B-list celebrities — further proof of the urgency of separating the billionaires from their billions.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin crew in Van Horn, Texas after its successful flight into space. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
 
As a big fan of the original Star Trek, I have to confess that it was kind of neat to see Captain Kirk actually go into space. But there is a real issue here about the silly games of the superrich that is worth some thought.
There have been numerous stories and papers about the huge increase in the wealth of the superrich since the pandemic began. Virtually all of this is due to the run-up in the stock market during this period. Part of that is bounce back, the S&P 500 lost almost a third of its value between its pre-pandemic peak in February of 2020 and its pandemic trough a month later. If we want to tell a really dramatic story we can start at the pandemic trough and take the rise in the stock market from March 20.
But even if we are being serious, there has been an extraordinary run-up in the stock market in the last twenty months. The S&P 500 is more than a third higher than its pre-pandemic peak.
There are several different explanations for this increase. One is simply that low interest rates generally boost stock prices. Interest rates did plummet during the pandemic shutdown, with the ten-year Treasury rate falling from a bit over 1.8 percent in February of 2020 to lows of under 0.6 percent last summer. As a general rule, lower interest rates will mean higher stock prices.
But this explanation will not go too far: the interest rate on ten-year Treasury bonds is currently over 1.6 percent. The gap between a 1.8 percent pre-pandemic Treasury yield and the current 1.6 percent yield could only explain a small portion of the rise in the stock market.
A second possibility is that stock investors are genuinely optimistic about the outlook for future profits. People are often confused about what the stock market is supposed to measure. Stock investors don’t give a damn about the future of the economy, they are asking about the future profits of Amazon, Facebook, and other stocks that they hold. If they think that their profit picture looks good, then they are willing to pay more for their shares.
This could be because they think that the economy will do well and that all the doomsayers in the media don’t have a clue. If the economy has strong growth in 2022 and 2023, and corporations get their share in higher profits, then high stock prices might be justified.
An alternative story would be that they expect the recent shift from wages to profits to continue. In this case, profit growth could be strong even if economic growth is not. This would again mean that all the people whining in the media, about companies being squeezed by rising labor costs, are clueless. But, what else is new?
And, there is the third possibility that we are just seeing another case of irrational exuberance. The possibility that there is no rational basis for stock prices should not seem strange to anyone who saw the collapse of the stock bubble at the end of the 1990s and the collapse of the housing bubble from 2007 to 2009. Investors are often ignorant of economic fundamentals, so it is certainly possible that there was no economic basis for the run-up in stock prices over the last twenty months.
But, whatever the rationale, there is no disputing that the run-up in stock prices has made the superrich much wealthier. The question is how much should we worry about this.
I have always said that I am not very concerned about wealth inequality. It is poorly measured and highly volatile. I am far more concerned about income inequality.
I recognize the political power that is associated with extreme wealth, but I don’t believe the people who make this argument have given it serious thought. Suppose we cut the wealth of the superrich by 50 percent or even 75 percent. Will Jeff Bezos lack the resources to push his political agenda if he only had $50 billion at his disposal? If we want to address the enormous gap in political power created by extremes of wealth, we have to look for ways to build the power of those at the middle and bottom. The idea that we will do it by reducing the wealth of those at the top is hardly plausible.

What About Space?
Okay, so what does all this have to with Captain Kirk going into space? If we think about how the extremes of wealth can hurt the rest of us, it gets back to their command over resources in the economy. This is the story of the clogged supply chain and overloaded ports. We are demanding more goods and services than the economy can deliver just now.
The space flights being promoted by Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and presumably Elon Musk, involve an enormous use of resources. It takes large numbers of often highly skilled people to plan and monitor these space flights. With the enormous amount of free advertising the media has given these ventures, we can expect that many more very rich people will be getting in line to take their trips into space. (I’ll skip the obvious joke that the problem isn’t sending rich people into space, it is bringing them back.)
This will mean pulling many workers away from areas where they could be doing more productive work, like designing better solar and wind energy systems, better batteries for storing energy, and better ways to produce vaccines and drugs. This will be a real cost to the economy.
The frivolous use of large amounts of resources by the very rich is a problem for the economy and society. This is distinct from their wealth as a bookkeeping entry. For example, Warren Buffet is one of the richest people in the world, but by all accounts, he lives a very modest lifestyle. If his wealth doubled it is hard to see why it would create any major economic issues. On the other hand, if the billionaire gang manage to make space travel a major form of recreation for the very rich, this is a real problem.
I don’t have any great plans for stopping the latest space race. I have always argued that the best way to prevent extreme inequality is to stop structuring the market in ways that generate extreme inequality. This means less reliance on patents and copyrights as mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work. It means downsizing the financial sector by structuring it in ways that promote efficiency, not extreme wealth for the few. And, having a corporate governance structure that doesn’t make it so easy for CEOs and top management to rip off the companies they work for.
These, and other issues, are addressed in Rigged, but the main point here is that we should try to keep our eyes on the ball. Wealth as a bookkeeping entry should be largely a matter of indifference to the rest of us. When the superrich pull away large amounts of resources for their fun and games, that is a big problem.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of a recent discussion featuring Alan Cole, Karl Smith, Logan Mohtashami, and the Mercatus Center’s Kevin Erdmann. Click here to listen to the discussion, which begins at the 5:00 minute mark of the recording.

Kevin Erdmann: All right. Thanks, everybody, for coming. I think we've got everybody here. Welcome. We're going to have about an hour-long discussion about lending standards. How it's affecting the housing market. We've got two co-hosts here or moderators, Alan Cole and Karl Smith. Logan Mohtashami from HousingWire's also here. I'm going to hand things off to Alan to get us started and we'll go from there.

Alan Cole: All right. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to have a conversation with Karl and Kevin and Logan. I've been a fan of three of them for quite some time. Particularly, what I like about them is their evidence base on what's going on with housing. I thought maybe we'd start a little bit with some things where I think Kevin, Logan, definitely agree. One of those is, there are a lot of people who are bearish on housing.

I mean that in the sense that they think there are housing bubbles. They think that housing prices are going to go down. In practice, that hasn't happened and hasn't happened for a very long time. Well, let's start a little bit with talk about some, let's say, why do people bid up the price of houses? Kevin, I'll start with you.

Kevin: My main thesis, I have one book that's already out called Shut Out, and another book coming out in January called Building from the Ground Up. They basically build on the thesis that our problem, which is widely recognized, I think, and more so all the time that we have especially in certain urban centers: We have a real lack of very inelastic supply, a real lack of adequate housing in places where people are especially motivated to live.

I think that, as I said, is becoming more widely appreciated. I would say that was actually the main factor pushing up home prices before the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. We mistook a lot of what was happening as a credit boom. There was a credit boom that happened at the same time that I think gets a lot of the blame for high prices that were really just … at most, credit at the time was accelerating the segregation of households into and out of those cities where they bid up the price of those houses because their rents are going up because the cities are in high demand.

The financial crisis was really a result of us solving the wrong problem by trying to bring prices down by tamping down credit. We've been doing that for a decade and a half. Now I would say that prices are going up because rents are going up everywhere. In the end, by tamping down on credit, we actually ended up tamping down on the supply of new entry-level homes. The families that would be buying those homes can't get the mortgage to fund to push prices up to a level that the builders can profitably build those neighborhoods.

We've cut out in the middle of the market. We're tapping out a supply at the top end with people that can still get mortgages for owner-occupied houses. Builders building multiunit houses are building as much as they can with their regulatory limitations. This middle part of the market is, in the end, actually making prices go up because rents are going up. The people that would make marginal financial decisions in those markets can't make those decisions because there are obstacles in place to prevent them from getting funding.

Alan: Thank you, Kevin. Logan, I'm going to kick this over to you. You've taken on the label of the bear crusher, which I think is a great name. Certainly, the bears on housing have been crushed over the last 10 years. I think you bring a different perspective than Kevin. I'd like to hear where you agree and where you disagree?

Logan Mohtashami: Hello everyone. Logan Mohtashami, lead analyst for HousingWire. Just a brief background on me: I started my financial blog in 2010. I've been writing about housing, but before that, I had been in the financial lending industry since 1996. Our family has been in the mortgage business since 1987. In general, our family has been in lending since the late 1950s. My different take from 1996 to 2005 is that jobs have been growing. Mortgage rates have been falling. If you actually look at housing data post-1996, as mortgage rates made another push lower, home prices started to deviate from historical norms. We had a lot of demand. Prices went out.

However, where I disagree with Kevin is that from 2002 to 2005, we had a four-year period where credit just expanded and the debt structures, and that's been my work really for 10 years. The debt structures … were not designed for fixed low debt costs versus rising wages or what we call Band-Aid loans. There were loans that were just created for a very short amount of term. That then created home prices to go above per capita income. Real home prices took off. Home sales took off. Housing stats took off. New home sales took off. The sales levels were not sustainable because the credit was not sustainable.

Then in 2005, that was the peak of housing. 2006, foreclosures and bankruptcy started to happen. 2007, more foreclosures and bankruptcy started to happen. Then in 2008, the great financial recession happened. You had a perfect wave of credit creating a very short-term, which all bubbles are usually from leverage in credit. Then we had 2008 to 2019, people who know my work for years, I've always said it would be the weakest housing recovery ever. It wasn't the fact that we had an 82% crash in new home sales; it was the fact that we had the weakest new home sales cycle ever recorded in history.

We had missed sales in 2013 and 2014 and in 2015. What happened was everybody says the same things. I think we all hear this every day: "We have to build more homes." The builders do not operate that way. The builders are going to protect their margins at all costs. In 2018, their stocks were down over 30% and in total as a group. Why? Because mortgage rates started to perk up a little bit. Monthly supply for new homes went above 6.5 months. That's my red line in the sand. One of the builders in the fourth quarter of 2018 said it was the worst quarter since the great financial crisis.

Now, I argued back then that, "Hey, it's new home sales are too low. Housing starts are too low to call for a peak, even though on paper it looked like a peak." Because credit is stable, we're about to hand it off into an unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime, five-year period in U.S. history that has the best housing demographics ever recorded in history ages. Currently, 27 to 33 are the biggest in history. Then you add move-up buyers, move-down buyers, cash buyers, investors, you put it all together with the lowest mortgage rates ever recorded.

You see the market we have right now, sales are rising in 2020 and 2021. 2021 sales are higher than what we saw in 2008 to 2019. That looks normal, but we have a supply crunch right now. Because that's a supply crunch, it's what we call forced bidding. That is creating almost a vertical pricing and housing because Americans always buy homes. Post-1996 it’s actually really rare in the U.S. to have under 4 million home sales.

Now we have this big demographic patch on both the middle, high, and lower end, and mortgage rates are really low. This is a very unique structural period that is still going to be good because everybody thought that forbearance was going to be the next wave of foreclosures and home prices going down. That's not how housing works. Housing demand is stable. You don't have crashes when demand is stable. The housing bubble boards or what I termed them last year, the forbearance crash bros, were not going to be correct.

Where I disagree with Kevin entirely is that credit is very liberal, but it's not psychotic. Anybody in America with a 3.5% down payment, 625 FICO scores, in theory, can get a loan. As you saw last year, originations were very high. It's just that when you lend to the capacity to own a debt 30-year fixed product, very low FICO scores do not simply apply. We see it in the origination scores.

This is something that I took on the Urban Institute in 2014 and said that "How lending standards are now, they're never going to see a rebound in a lower FICO-score Americans." There are many years that I've used this presentation to actually prove this point. Toward the end of this discussion, I will take my two ace cards and put them on there. Hopefully, I could explain to you why tight lending was going to be one of the biggest false narrative discussions we have in American economics today.

Alan: Thank you, Logan. I have a quick follow on one of the things you mentioned. You mentioned that the builders want to protect their margins. Traditionally, it's hard for a dispersed industry with a lot of different firms to protect margins by limiting supply. I was wondering how you think that happens.

Logan: If you look at new, home sales data, and what I've always tried to get people to focus, look at monthly supply of new homes. If you see it from 2008 to 2019, it's always been above 4.3 months. Demand simply wasn't good enough to bring it down like what we saw from that 1996 to 2000 rise. The builders just basically build off their own demand curve. They don't in a sense; listen to a columnist or people that say you have to oversupply a market. It's a very sensitive market to mortgage rates as well. 5% mortgage rates created that industry to have a mini slowdown.

Even this year, currently, the builders had lumber prices to deal with. They didn't care. They passed it on to the consumer. They pushed it up. Their margins are great, but they've paused a little bit too. I understand what they're seeing. Currently, right now monthly supply is over six months. It's not the existing home sales market. For me, trying to explain this bigger theory, the builders are going against this massive existing home sales market that has millions of more homes, cheaper inventory. They have to be mindful. This is why they're not very gung-ho.

In the previous expansion, people said, "Why aren't the builders building more?" I said, "Listen, they're only going to build on what they think they can sell, and it's not cheap." What is the one sector in the economy that has terrible productivity? It's construction. It's the worst sector we have. We still build homes primarily in ways that we used to build homes in the '50s and '60s. The builders are at a disadvantage. No matter how many times we keep on saying they should build more, they will only build on what they can sell because that's how they make their money. I think it's easy for us, actually to say that they should be building more, but they've never proven it.

I encourage everyone, just post-1996; you will want to look at housing data pre-1996, with a grain of salt. You look at new home sales. You look at housing stats. You put them together on a FRED chart; they're in perfect symmetry. They will only build what they think they could sell them in the current pause right now is because they don't want to push the limits on the new home sale market.

Alan: Thank you, Logan. That was informative. Kevin, I'd like you to respond to the idea that, at least in theory, people with credit scores as low as 600 or 625 should be getting loans. You contend that they aren't, and if not why is that?

Kevin: I would say Logan has a point that builders only build to the demand. I don't think anybody's asking them to initiate a bunch of starts that they don't expect to sell. I think where I would tweak that is that their demand has been artificially low because tenants who on the margin would like to be new home buyers are prevented from making that marginal financial decision. You can really go on Zillow across the country and find houses that would have traditionally been owner-occupied neighborhoods that the rent is far above what the monthly mortgage payment would be.

Those households just can't jump through the hoops that they have FHA and the CFPB have put in front of them to be qualified for a mortgage. I think what I'd like to hear Logan respond to is … potential 620 FICO score borrowers. I think there's an old Yogi Berra saw that he says … "In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they're different." I think that's the case today with lending standards that the tightening has really pushed far up into what would have normally been considered conventional or prime borrowing.

One of the indicators we can look at is the New York Federal Reserve Household Credits Report, which tracks credit scores of borrowers on new mortgages each quarter. If you go back to the pre-financial crisis housing boom, a lot of these indicators, again, I think Logan and I would probably come to some agreement that in a lot of cases it was the terms of those loans that became disruptive. A lot of these indicators don't really show that much of a shift in borrower quality. That's what you see in the New York Federal Reserve numbers is that the proportion of loans back then going to sub-720 or sub-760 or even sub-700 borrowers was about the same in 2004 or 2005 as it had been in say 1999.

If you look at borrowers back then with 760 scores and above, they were borrowing about $250 billion worth of mortgages a quarter. You could call those the pristine borrowers--the ones with credit scores above 760. They never actually had a downturn in borrowing activity. They pretty much from 2003 or 2004 to 2018, on average, were borrowing about $250 billion worth of new mortgages a quarter. The 720 to 760 borrowers which would be above-average borrowers, were borrowing about 300 billion a quarter back then, which again wasn't really any higher proportion than it had been a few years earlier.

By the time we get to the post-financial crisis period, there's been periods of time where they're down below $100 billion a quarter. They're down two-thirds from what had been their boom period borrowing. Now we've seen, and this is all in 2021 dollars. Now we've seen an uptick in borrowing. It's a very strong borrowing market now because of low-interest rates having to do with the COVID pandemic. This new borrowing is still very heavily sensitive to credit scores in a way that it never had been before the crisis. Now those pristine borrowers are borrowing more than $800 billion worth of mortgages a quarter.

They've more than tripled the amount of borrowing that they're doing compared to the pre-boom or the pre-crisis period. There's been an uptick in the above-average borrowers, but they're still under 200 billion a quarter. They're still down say, a third compared to their pre-crisis levels. Pristine borrowers have quadrupled the relative activity of above-average borrowers. I just don't see how we could have that divergence in activity without one of the main explanations being a tight lending standard that is reaching well into what would have traditionally been considered prime borrowers.

Alan: Thank you, Kevin. Karl, how are you? Good to have you. Karl was one of my favorite Bloomberg columnists, actually, my favorite. I'm glad to have him as a co-host. I want to give him some time to introduce himself and ask some questions.

Karl Smith: I'm Karl Smith, a columnist at Bloomberg. I was a professor at UNC. I was a vice-president at the Tax Foundation. Now I'm a full-time journalist. When I was actually at UNC, one of the theories that I pushed was that what we were seeing in the housing market wasn't psychotic as Logan was saying. We were seeing liquefaction. I didn't quite appreciate the long-term housing crunch that was coming. I understood there were jobs on the coast. There's water on the coast and so people can't go. So far, I didn't fully appreciate how much zoning would affect it. What did seem to me to be the case is that credit was making houses more liquid, easier to sell.

A phenomenon that's called liquefaction basically just means that the exact same asset is really worth more if it's easy to sell than if it's hard to sell. When we saw credit in the housing market comes such that a transaction could occur within days, buyers could go into a house live for six months and come out of the house, that's the kind of thing where you would expect the baseline price of every single house to double. You would see that when companies go public. The value of the company is expected to double. Because now it's traded on the stock exchange, it's a liquid asset instead of a granule asset.

That's my basic thing. With that, I would push back against what Logan is saying in saying, "What you saw in say 2004, or when the housing bubble was started up was something more akin to what you saw in dotcom, which was there was a new radically important asset part of the economy." That was urban housing on the coast. People didn't really understand what the factors were, but they did see that this thing was going to be rising for a long time. Banks didn't really know how to finance it. Logan's right, they used products that they had for other purposes, but they were fundamentally irrational. The same way that dotcom crashed, it came back.

If you said, "Well, what we need is never to have a rapid investment in tech after that,” … that would be really foolish. I think the same thing is true of housing. It was awkward and it was cumbersome because investors didn't really understand what was happening, but the phenomenon they saw was real. It was not fake. It was not just generated by credit. I think that turns Logan's thesis on its whole head because saying that "Yes, things are tight relative to the 2004 period," but that's insane. That's no real comparison. Logan, maybe you could respond to that.

Logan: Here's going to be one of my ace cards that I throw out here. I'll explain this in totality. Kevin and Karl, and a lot of people over the years have talked about housing. One of the things that I've dealt with is that people that talk about credit and lending actually don't have a background in residential lending or in banking. What I'm going to explain to you here is a ton of data, but the core product is that debt structures were created to fail in 2002 to 2005. They were around, but since the credit boom leveraged debt on debt, and not a lot of people know this, the cash-out refinance boom actually created more loan delinquencies than the purchase market.

About 32% to 35% of the loans back then during 2002 to 2005 were ARM loans, which were exotic loan debt structures that typically went to lower FICO score households. Those loans would have never been made today or post-2010 because the structures behind them were not solid. One of the things that happen is people want to say, “Why are low FICO score Americans not buying homes?” We go to the original question: Why does somebody have a low FICO score? Number one, they typically have a missed payment history. Number two, they have too much credit card balance compared to their available credit limit.

Number three, they don't have a lot of liquid assets to make their payments on time or push down their credit card balances. How do I know this? Because being part of a family that's been in banking since the late 1950s, we've seen credit profiles over and over and over again. The same three factors always come up with low FICO score households. These are not authentically home buyers, especially when you lend to the capacity to own a debt. Why would somebody buy a house if they can't even make their credit card payments?

Third and most importantly is that when we look at the 1996 to 2005 period, about 20% of all credit was through what we call subprime or a lower quality credit factor. When we go past 2010, this information came from Sam Khater, who is right now the economist for Freddie Mac, but he was working for CoreLogic. Less than 3% of people with 640 or 620 FICO scores even applied for mortgages. This was my argument against Laurie Goodman and the Urban Institute: They're not coming back because they already have household issues to deal with already.

People who miss credit cards, people who have a hard time keeping their balance low, do not apply for loans. The data from 2010 to 2018 shows they weren't even applying. You can't have, "Well, why aren't low FICO score Americans buying? Because the banks are tight." No, they're not even applying because all of us would be in the same position. If we can't make our credit card payments, if we don't have enough liquid assets to even push down the credit card balances, how are we going to have 3.5% or 3% or 5% down with closing cost to be paid in?

Every lower FICO score, a household has to pay a higher mortgage rate. That's the credit risk premium out there. In that context, it's also more expensive as well because typically, you don't have a big down payment. You're borrowing more. You have mortgage insurance. You have all those factors that people who work in residential lending would know. That's one of my ace cards. I have another one later on, but I'll let everyone else reply.

Karl: Logan, real quick, I want to use one example you brought up to push back. You said that the adjustable-rate mortgages were an exotic product that never should have been used. We can go through that, but I heard that criticism at the time. Actually, people did get caught on adjustable-rate mortgages in 2006, 2007, but they did because the Fed raised rates. We think, Alan thinks we can go through this, that the Fed did that prematurely. They should not have done that. You can see that by the fact that what they were afraid of was excess inflation and we haven't had that. We've had inflation that was too low. They were too tight.

In fact, interest rates have gone consistently down. If people had had adjustable-rate mortgages, they would have seen the safest period for adjustable-rate mortgages in history. That comes again to the fact that in 2000, something was happening and people could see this. Interest rates were persistently going down. Inflation was persistently going down. Hard assets are persistently going up. There's just ever-increasing demand for people to live in the city.

They were grasping for some way to invest in that. People make mistakes. They do that. I think the kind of vehicles that people used during dotcom, in some cases, weren't smart. Nonetheless, what they were going after was--and I'm not sure that we can make the claim that these vehicles were--some vehicle like that is completely irrational. What it did was to create a situation where you could roll in some of the cost that you had, that you're talking about, they're standing in people's way now. That produced a really liquid market which is, in fact, even safer for those borrowers because if they get into trouble, they can sell. If you had a liquid market, that's always your way out.

The credit of the individual borrower is not so important. What's important is that houses trade in a liquid manner because not being able to afford your mortgage anymore just means you have to sell to somebody else who can. That's a very different paradigm. I think if we build products, or we build an industry that can live in that paradigm, it's actually a much better one in general. Getting deep liquid markets is a principal goal in expanding the availability of capital in any industry. If that can happen in housing, again, you saw what builders did when it happened, they built more houses. That's precisely what we need now. With that, I'll stop.

Logan: You set it up perfectly for me. Alan, I thank you for that. One of the things that people, if you go back to the credit profiles--especially with the New York Federal Reserve--people started to file for bankruptcy and foreclosures in 2005. Why? Because the fixed debt structures of option ARM loans or 80/20 loans were not sustainable, that the total payment levels, even if two people were working full-time, would cause that foreclosure and bankruptcy to happen.

Not only was the debt structure unsustainable, you could have people not even have an economic impact by their jobs. Historically what happens in housing is that a job-loss recession happens, we call this late-cycle lending. [inaudible 00:34:56] except in 2002 to 2005, the debt structures, I call it EWOM, an Economic Weapon of Mass Destruction. The loans were just trigger bombs. Once the recast rate was done, the total payment levels were too high.

Now, why were people falling for foreclosures a bankruptcy? Because inventory started to creep up in late 2005 and 2006. Home prices weren't going as fast. The amount of debt that was being leveraged up in the system in 2002 to 2005, especially on cash-out loans, meant there wasn't a lot of equity being built in. Then it was 2006, more people were foreclosing on their homes. More people are filing for bankruptcy. How is this happening? Because the loan itself, the structure of the debt was a ticking time bomb. Then we go to 2007. Now we're in year three of this and more people are filing for foreclosures, and more people are filing for bankruptcies. We’ve all seen the data. I use this chart all the time.

There's no job loss recession in 2005, 2006, or 2007. How are these people starting to foreclose on their homes and filing for bankruptcies? Because of the structure of the debt. This is why if you're in the residential lending business or if you understand how the debt is even structured for recast payment, especially option ARMs, 80/20 loans, you can see that the total payment levels. This is the adjustment we made in America after 2010. We basically made sure that in any ARM, and by the way, ARMs are not even any kind of big part of the market. They're less than 5%. Now, everybody gets 30-year fixed loans right now.

We make sure that people are qualified based on the ARM payment after the recast. Before 2002, none of that was happening but the credit leverage and I--if everybody goes back to the Federal Reserve debt products, if you look at debt inflation-adjusted, the boom in 2002 to 2005 is historic so much that even today, inflation-adjusted mortgage is still negative to the peak that we saw in 2005 and '06. That's the kind of credit boom it was because it's also speculative. A lot of these loans needed home prices to go up 10% to 15% to either sell out of it or refinance out of it. This is why we call them Band-Aid loans. They are not designed for people to stay in their house.

They're just designed as vehicles, very short-term. All those products are gone. They're never coming back. The borrowers in that sense--and I'm not just talking about purchase but cash-out loans as well. Not lot of people still to this day know this. The cash-out loans were the biggest delinquencies. It wasn't even the purchase loans because you had multiple refinance or we call serial cash out households that kept on refinancing. They spent everything on their credit cards. They did it again and did it again. Once home prices started to fall, they didn't have the ability to sell.

Where people might think it was the Federal Reserve hiking rates. We all know Richard Fisher and all those guys did. There was no real big inflation boom or anything like that happening. The problem already started in 2005, 2006, 2007. 2008 was the job loss recession. If the credit was stable like it is now--now it's just very vanilla. It's 30-year fixed products. Every time rates go down, people refinance. What do we have today? We have the most pristine balance sheets ever recorded in history of mortgage payments as a percentage of disposable income all-time lows, household debt payments as a percentage of income all-time lows. Why? Because we lend to the capacity to own the debt.

There is zero, absolutely no exotic loan debt structures. Now, there are very liberal lending standards, FHAS. Liberal VA loans are very liberal. You could get zero-down loans even from VA. They're all based on the fixed low debt products. You have to qualify for them. Third, this is the other ace card. If you look back, and I encourage everyone to do this, you go back to 2000 to 2005. We had a lot more bankruptcies back then. 2005 it stopped because of the bankruptcy laws that were changed.

In general, Americans' FICO scores are much better because of the bankruptcy laws. If you guys can see the data, we never even got to the peak of bankruptcies even during the housing crisis as we did back then. Everybody's a little bit better with credit now. The FICO scores are much better. Just in general, everyone's scores are better because everyone's cash flow is so much better. You don't even have the pool of homebuyers applying. That goes back to the Freddie Mac economist, Sam Khater.

They're not even applying for loans because what is left in the low FICO score household are stressed cash flow American households that have a problem making their credit card payments or, let's say, they have a student loan debt that they're behind in or an installment loan. Again, it goes to the liquid assets. They don't have enough liquid reserves to bring down their credit card balances or make sure they can make their payments on time. These are not households that typically buy homes. Of course, with home prices, breaking out again, it just means that this group which is already stressed has to put more down, has to make sure to get the closing costs.

They're never coming back. This is the same thing I told the Urban Institute in 2014. We're going to go through this very long expansion. They're not coming back. 10 years from now, we could have this discussion. They're not coming back unless you create an exotic loan debt products, which the CFPB has banned and no bank is going to risk their capital or their name on this again. Time proved me right from 2010 to 2021, and from 2021 to 2031, it'll prove me right again. Households that are distressed already will not be buying homes ever. You'll get some marginal 620, 640, but in general, the whole country has better FICO scores, and we lend to the capacity to [crosstalk]

Karl: Logan, I want to jump in, and then let everybody else say something. Just because you gave that timeline or whatever, and that's so perfect because you're like, "We started in 2005." We didn't even have a recession. The fed started to raise rates in June of 2004 with the intention of extracting liquidity from the market. You were saying people had these teaser loans and they could pay the teaser, but they couldn't pay when it reset. If you're thinking in terms of a liquid housing market, the question is, why could they not A, get another loan with a low teaser or B, sell the house rather than going bankrupt to someone else who can?

Well, the reason they couldn't do that is because the Fed was extracting liquidity from the market. It was de-liquidfying houses. They were returning back to the granular asset that they were before. You're saying these people never qualified before, I think because that was under a different paradigm. That was under a paradigm when effectively a homeowner is like a small businessman. They need to be able to think about their long-term cash flows are going to be, how they're going to pay for this, how they're going to keep up with this, rather than an investor in a liquid asset who doesn't need to know any of that.

The reason the mortgage is secure has very little to do with the borrower unless the borrower really falls on the hard times rapidly or has divorced or emotional problems that they can't just address their house. If they don't have enough money, they can sell their house in a liquid market. That's I think ultimately, a good thing. You talked about how pristine balance sheets were, how low everything was, but to me, that's a slight sign of dysfunction. I know people who are upset in this view, but I'll bring back. Larry Summers said, "If you never miss your plane, you're going to the airport too soon."

In a capital market, which is expanding and taking risk, you should not see those type of pristine balance sheet. That is a sign of a barrier to entry. That is a sign that risk-takers, that people who will be pushing for more supplies, people who will be pushing for more production are not able to make it into the market. It's been gated off into like a rent-seeking group of people who have the right characteristics to be allowed in. Now I'll shut up for a while.

Logan: I will always refer back to the data that shows that people with sub 640 FICO scores aren't even applying for loans. You can't even have a debate if people aren't even applying. It goes back to the debt structure well before the Federal Reserve started raising rates. I think what? 2004. We still had below 3% Fed fund rates. The product was not designed for sustainability. Even if the Fed didn't raise rates, the recast payment was never going to work for any of those loans. That's why they call them Band-Aid loans. You can't have a lending system based on the fact that this loan is going to fail within two years. Now what had happened is home prices kept rising and rising.

People were able to refinance out of them and create another two-year period. Those days are over. They're never coming back. 10 years from now, we could have this same discussion. It's just that when you lend to the capacity on a debt, you have to look at the credit profiles. The credit profiles are positive cash flow Americans, which a lot of FICO scores are fine now compared to what it used to be, especially pre 2005 are much better. The people that are still struggling, which is a smaller pool of the households out there, are not even applying for loans.

It makes complete sense because you're asking people who are struggling, their credit cards or their installment loans, or don't have enough liquid assets to push any of those credit card balances down to buy a house. They're not, and they haven't applied for that previous decade. Their CoreLogic's data actually shows this. What happened from 2002 to 2011 is completely different from what is happening from 2012 to 2021. You cannot get two different economic housing cycles as we saw.

One was fueled by leverage credit based on exotic long debt structures, and the other one is based on simply fixed low debt cost. Over time, every year wages rise, the household looks great, we made American lending great again. This is the main reason why forbearance has dropped over 3 million. The only housing crash data we have in America right now is forbearance, near 5 million at the peak of the COVID crisis.

We're well under 1.6 million. We're going to be under 1 million because all of these homeowners were legit. They had good cash flows. Even the ones that were at 640, 660, they still had ability to own a debt once they got their jobs back, their incomes, they got off forbearance. We should never change this because this really kicked in better for American households. 10 years from now, we'll have the same discussion, and we'll have the same debates on this time after time after time.

Alan: I'd like to bring in Kevin for a moment, and then also bring in Adam Ozimek, who is the chief economist at Upwork and known mostly for labor economics, but actually wrote his dissertation on housing stuff. If I remember right. To Kevin, I would say, Mercatus, the think tank with which you're affiliated, has often argued that nominal GDP, people's incomes expressed in dollar terms, was deeply below its pre-recession trend all throughout the 2010s.

This had bad effects on household balance sheets, household incomes. Arguably, that hit the lower and lower-middle-income households the worst, and they were only really able to start repairing towards the end of it. Do you think that it's possible that the tight lending standards that you're really seeing in the housing market don't come from mortgage lenders themselves, but really come more from macroeconomic policy? The lending standards of the Fed as it were and fiscal policy.

Kevin: I would say that that framework, the nominal GDP growth framework, I think, has a lot to teach us about what led up to the crisis. If we're looking at, say a 5% or 6% target for nominal GDP or a 2%-ish target for inflation, since 2010 or 11 that the Fed may have been slightly missing their targets or are slightly under trend. I'm not sure. I think once we got to 2009 and 10, it was actually the tight lending that was making it harder for nominal growth to continue growing. I think one side of that is one of the things that I don't think I've heard Logan respond to which is we're just in the market today.

If it was a matter of incomes and balance sheets and all that, as I admitted earlier, we're in a market today where you can click on Zillow in the middle of the market, in any typical city, from Phoenix to Omaha to Dallas. You can find houses that would typically be owned by their tenants that have a rental value of say $2,000 a month and conventional mortgage payment that would be $12 or $1,300 or something. If those families were hurting for income, they wouldn't be able to afford the $2,000 a month rent. I think that actually a big headwind for the last decade of just general economic growth, this keeps construction employment from growing. It makes real incomes lower because a higher portion of their incomes are going to rent. That's actual cash going out the door if they're renting a place. The CPI is measuring it as rent going out the door, even if they own their house.

These lending standards, at least until recently, were keeping their home values low. They couldn't cash out the value of that higher rental value, even if they owned the house, if they were in a low-tier part of a market in their city. I would put the NGDP, I think that's a very important aspect of it, but it's much more important for the 2006 to '08 period than for the periods since.

Alan: Thank you, Kevin. Do we have Adam Ozimek here?

Adam Ozimek: Hi, Alan. I'll be quick. I don't want to take up time here. A question for Karl and Kevin, I think one of the issues about the sustainability of the bubble era, you can look today and say, "Well, look, the price to income ratio back then wasn't that crazy." We're back there now, but what about the expectations of home buyers back then at the peak of the bubble? The house prices are still going to continue growing at 10%, 12%, 15%. That just wasn't sustainable. They were making purchases based on the assumption that it was. Wasn't that doomed to come crashing down? You can say price to income ratios were going to stay high, but were they going to keep growing and growing?

Karl: I think people say that, and of course, there were speculators in the market. There are always speculators in the market, but you didn't need to think that housing prices were going to grow at those rates forever to justify what was happening. You did need to think that they were going to move up to a new range, but if they're moving up to that new range because of liquid faction, you don't need to think that it's going to keep going forever. Because the underlying mechanisms of how the housing and housing finance markets work should also change.

I think what I hear Logan saying is he doesn't want it to change, he doesn't want it to go back. To me, I hear that is the voice of stagnation and that is why people can't afford to buy a house that rents for more than the mortgage is because people are pushing to like squeeze out any effort to find a product that will work for these people, find a mortgage product that works for these people.

I agree the types of products that they used that had teaser and then reset were not designed correctly for that because they had been created in a world that was not liquid. The reason brokers were giving them is because they had this idea that you can sell a refinance. You can sell a refinance, this is a liquid market, when you really wanted to structure the product so it works in a liquid market.

You might even structure the product that if illiquidity happens, things tighten for some reason just to bank, automatically took back the house and became the landlord, or something like that. You can think of ways to design this product, but we can't think of ways to design these products now because they basically pushed out in the band. Because DAG bringing other rules have come in and said, "All of the stuff you guys were doing in financial innovation was bad."

I just don't think that's true. I think that they were pushing forward in a market where it was clear that things were fundamentally changing. They were trying to use the tools that they had previously, and then the rug was pulled out for one reason pushed by the Fed raising rates and then causing some of the armed products to go up.

When, in fact, if you look at the economic fundamentals, the broker is right--this arm should never go up. If you look out 10 years, it should be this low. Again, rates are this low. That was a correct assumption about the world or people who said, "The market has a long way to run. The costs are going to be twice as expensive, three times as expensive, therefore making a little right. I think we blamed them at the time, but their expectations were not irrational.

It was confusing. There was a lot of uncertainty that happens when you open up a new market, people stumble, but there wasn't, I think, a deep irrationality going on there. That's my thesis and I understand that's a radical thesis and was just, basically, people didn't know what to say, as you were saying, man, 2010, 2011. Kevin and some other people I think are pushing or that looking back, well, maybe that is true.

Logan: Just one thing about credit expansion. You have to remember, a lot of these loans were qualified on no income documentation. When people like to use price to rent or real adjusted home prices versus real media incomes, there were a lot of loans where there was no income added into the equation. You couldn't even get a verified 4506T printed by the IRS to even verify the person was even getting a partial of that income.

Some of these data lines that you look back in 2002 to 2005 are going to look completely out of whack because the loans were so horrible. The debt structures were so bad. I could point out one thing, if you look at home prices and per capita income, I love this chart. I've used it for many years. The only time in recent history, where home prices exploded above per capital income was 2002 to 2005.

The only time where credit inflation-adjusted credit expanded from 2002 to 2005. The only time where home sales really deviated from a recent trend was 2002 to 2005. Housing stats, new home sales. Everything was there. Bring lending back to just a simple, boring, vanilla-fixed product, none of that is happening. Existing home sales peaked out at 7.26 million in 2005, got as low as 3.45 million in 2008.

The problems already started even before the fed was really getting aggressive into the rate because in 2005, those arms that were 2002, 2003, were already recasting. Logan, those things aren't coming. They're not coming back. The debt structures of those. If I had all of you in a classroom that had a chalkboard, I could actually draw exactly how the debt structures were and what the payment levels were. This is never returning.

Now, if you want to use nominal GDP, everything, remember the prime-age labor force was growing from 1979 to 2007. It declined. We had a very slow recovery. That was going to be the case because demographics weren't there. Housing, part of my work, a lot of my work, was that 2008 to 2019, housing was never going to be strong. Millions and millions of people buy homes, but we're never going to have that demand curve except when years 2020 to 2024, that household formation kicks in and right on queue, February 2020 housing data broke out, looks pretty normal to me.

That 2002 to 2005 period, go back to all the charts, you can see it. There was a clear credit leverage bubble that facilitated home prices to go way above and people needed 10 to 15% home price appreciation to do the cash outs. Because the cash out loans were the real bad ones as well. People forget that. People think it's all purchases. No. The cash out loans had the higher delinquency rates. That's gone.

None of that. The cash out loans now are so much better. On paper, they look great. We aren't going back there again. It's never going to happen. Don't expect struggling cash flow. When we like to use cities, you got to remember like for example, Los Angeles, 50% of the working population are dual renters in one household. It isn't like a single household is actually renting that property in Los Angeles.

Right now we have what we call DICE, Double Income College Educated households. Remember household formation, economics, demographics, dual household incomes facilitates home sales. It's not the case for renters. There's a reason. One, a barbell economy, a lot of income on one side, a lot of income on the other side. Renters that have low FICO scores are struggling cash flows.

Our liability to income ratios, if you actually look at them, are at 60% to 70%, where a household buying a home is probably running out 25 to 31% debt to income ratio. These things matter when we talk about why can't people with struggling cash flow homes buy houses, it's not an apples to apples argument. This is why I guarantee, 10 years from now we'll have this same conversation just like I did seven, eight years ago, nothing's really going to change because lending is back to boring, and boring is very sexy.

Karl: This is actually a good point. What I would argue is that in a deep liquid housing market with guardrails, but without the impositions that we have now through regulation, every loan should be no dire. Every loan should be made on credit score only. Every loan should probably be an ARM. That is an efficient, deep liquid capital market in the strongest economy in the world, in a sector as important to economic growth moving forward as housing would look like. The reason is, is because safety of that loan is not based on the ability of the borrower to pay. The safety, that loan is based on the liquidity of the market for housing. The reason the credit score matters is you need the homeowner to be responsible enough to get their stuff together to actually sell the house if they're in trouble. Your credit score tells you that. You don't need to do anything about the individual borrower because that's what liquidity gives you.

It gives you an atomized system where assets can switch from one owner to another owner and it doesn't matter, right. That's deeply foreign, I think, to the world that you're talking about, but my point is that we're moving to a new economy. We're moving to an economy where location is so important, we're moving to an economy where glomeration effects are so important.

That is exactly where you would want your deep liberal capital markets to be in housing, be facilitating those levels of transactions, be allowing builders to just build as much as they could profitably assemble the factors of production. That's the economy that we want. You're right, it's not coming back and that's what we mean when we say that credit is too tight, regulations are too high. You're strangling this mark, you're strangling this part of the American economy, which I think in the freest sense, we will see all kinds of innovation, right.

We would see quadplexes owned by four people being traded out, people would move in, they take it, they move out, the loan is gone in eight months. We see all kinds of innovations, all kinds of new ways that people being able to fluidly come into a house, come into a neighborhood, a builder to be able to easily see the need for extra supply and supply it. That is what a fully realized housing market would look like.

We cannot have that with the regulatory structure. I know we cannot have that with the financial policy we have now, and that is why in America and throughout the Anglophone world, you're seeing this barbell effect. If you see that in the data going back through history, you're looking at some sort of classic sort of rent seeking mechanism that is cutting out people from an expanding market.

That's exactly what you see here, just people who are on one side of the gate, and people who are on the other side of the gate. That will continue so long as you have intense in positions into the market that is attempting to solve that barbell.

Logan: I go back to ace card number one: They're not even applying for loans, and that's the thing. If you had the same propensity in the data for people with sub 645 FICO scores applying for the loans, then you can make the argument that … these loans were being denied by the bank. Because in essence, all lending, everyone is a loan processor for the government. It's really the government agencies. Freddie, Fannie, Jeannie, FHA, BA, everyone's just working on them.

Remember, originations [were] really good last year. Anybody who's buying right online, they're buying a home, they're refinancing, it is a very fluid efficient safe capital market. Housing let us out of the crisis because demographics is economics. The capital markets are, we all remember what the SEC did in 2004. Because we wanted to have more capital, they went from 10 to 1 leverage ratio to 20, or excuse me, to 40 to 1, which basically was a doomsday time machine for Bear Stearns.

Innovation sometimes is not the best thing. Sometimes just being boring works. Here, 30 years you can make your payments right now, but every year that goes by because of housing tenure, this is another thing that is really big in the United States housing market. From 1985 to 2007, housing tenure was five years. From 2008 to 2021, it's actually gone 10, some even argue it's 13 years.

People just want to buy a home, stay there, and live. The days of moving around or anything are done. Boring works, boring is what saved us, right? Because everything is household debt, household debt. Expansion is, basically, mortgages. That data line looks better than ever.

Why ruin anything that will take away from our best financial profiles? And they won't happen, unless the CFPB comes and changes some kind of exotic loan disrupts. We have bank statement loans, you have one year tax. We have all these loans out there, non-QM loans to facilitate any of those trouble basis, and still they're not applying and they won't apply.

Because right now, generally, FICO scores are better for Americans, so the pool of the sub-64, our homebuyer is even smaller than it was from 1996 to 2005. 10 years from now, we could all come back here or whatever, Twitter will be back then and we could have the same discussion, I promise you. Just like I told the Urban Institute seven, eight years ago, they're not coming back and the data shows they're not even applying.

Kevin: I'll jump in here. We've got a couple of minutes. There's a lot that I would push back against Logan on in terms of the time frame of the cash-out loans happened. Those were happening. The ones that defaulted were happening in places like Arizona and Florida, in 2006, '07, when those markets were well into not only collapsing local NGDP growth, but collapsing building markets construct.

By the time we really hit mid to late 2007, those places’ building rates are half of what they had been in 2005, and not because they were oversupplied, because people stopped moving there because of lack of liquidity. All those things were happening much later in the cycle and have very little to do with a bubble. There's a lot I would push back on that.

One thing I'll throw out there that I go into in the book coming out in January is that, well before we had any foreclosure or default increases, the home builders by 2006 were experiencing really high cancellation rates. Now, these are qualified buyers. In fact, the builders at the time had been really working hard to sort of try to keep out speculators because speculators are going to tend to leave the lead the home with the builder.

Builders back then had pretty lenient terms and in terms of canceling orders. Cancellations even by mid-2006, went from what would normally be in the teens to the high 30s and 40s. Well before you see significant upticks in defaults and foreclosures, you see this turning from the market, which goes back to what Karl is talking about, that the Fed really did try to contract the market and they succeeded better than they should have.

The seeds of this collapse were slowly being set into place, and all these things, the defaults and everything else, tended to be happening, even the synthetic CDO boom and all that, all that was happening during the Alany points of the collapse, really had very little to do with rising prices or with bubbles and rising activity and building.

One thing I want to throw out there that is probably a data point that listeners will not have seen, because I dug this myself out of Fannie Mae SEC filings, is as a sign of talking about how normal credit markets really actually were up through the boom, and how much that turned as we entered into the recession. Fannie Mae publishes the average FICO score, the average credit score of their borrowers that they're making originations on.

As with the New York Fed data that I described, their average credit score from 2000 to 2007, was pretty level. It was in the 710 range, give or take a few points throughout that entire period. Some of its following along the similar pattern to the broader market that the New York Fed is measuring, and then it jumped 40 or 50 points from 2007 to 2009, again, in sympathy with the New York Fed market. We're not seeing much of a compositional shift that the credit score of the average borrower at Fannie Mae is moving up along in a very extreme fashion, a multi sigma change in the market, very quickly along with the rest of the market.

Now, what's interesting is you can also infer market values from the Fannie Mae filings and you can go back. If you go back to 1996, the typical house that in the past had received a Fannie Mae mortgage in 1996 had a market value of about $130,000. The average house that got a new Fannie Mae mortgage in 1996 had a market value of about $130,000. Houses across the country were increasing in value over that time, but those two numbers move in lockstep through those years. By the time we get to 2006, the typical house that has in the past received a Fannie Mae mortgage is up to about $250,000. The average house that Fannie Mae made a loan for in 2006 is about $250,000. In other words, if you look at the credit scores and you look at the houses, Fannie Mae is serving the same borrowers in the same homes that they've been serving for at least a decade.

Now, those homes are going up in value and whether you think some of those values were right or wrong or whatever, they were still the same houses with the same borrowers that they had been serving for years. Now, suddenly there's a break. There's a divergence in these measures that coincides with the break in credit scores. By 2009, from 2006 to 2009 across the country, homes were losing value.

Regardless of what measure you say, say the Zillow median home or figures from the federal reserve, home prices from 2006 to 2009 on average went down about 16%, 17% on average. The book of homes that Fannie Mae had made mortgages by 2006, followed that same track. The typical house on Fannie Mae's books lost about 17% of its value between 2006 and 2009. New originations in 2009 from Fannie Mae, the average home value of those houses was up 29% from 2006, it was $327,000.

Between 2006 and 2009, Fannie Mae changed the borrowers and the houses they were serving to an extreme. That's a difference of almost 50% in relative value. The homes they were servicing in 2009 compared to what they had serviced for years before then. That treated the credit scores have remained pretty close to where they shot up to in 2009 and '10. We've seen a little bit of a convergence between originated mortgages at Fannie Mae and prices of typical homes, but there's still a wide divergence.

Again, going back to 2006, from 2006 to 2019, the typical home across the country had gained about 15% in value. From 2006 to 2019, the typical home that Fannie Mae was giving a new mortgage to in 2019, was 35% higher than the typical home it gave a mortgage to in 2006. Even in 2019, Fannie Mae is serving a market that is 20% higher in the price distribution than they had at any time before 2007.

Comparing their credit scores to the New York federal reserves credit scores that's for the broader market, doesn't really show any compositional change there. They're following the same pattern. The market as a whole has stopped serving large sections of the lower part of the market, the entry level parts of the market that had been served in a stable fashion for years before the financial crisis.

Logan: Kevin, I know we're working out time here, but Kevin just made a great point for me. I'm going to explain why Freddy and Fannie were only into Alt-A products in 2006. They didn't provide any liquidity or anything in that nature to the loans that were given in 2002 to 2005. That was Wall Street. If we want to talk about liquidity markets, let's list off all the companies that went under. Washington Mutual, dead, Countrywide, dead, Downey Savings, dead. All those were the loans that had exotic loan debt structures.

Freddy and Fannie, while they were over leveraged, were not providing those loans. They only got into the Alt-A section in 2006. The bankruptcies and foreclosures already started in 2005, because the loan quality from 2002 to 2005, those four years, were done by Wall Street firms. Everyone likes to blame Freddy and Fannie, but in essence, they're in conservatorship, they wouldn't have had a liquidity problem, but those loans were the exotic loans.

They tend to have lower FICO Scores. They tend to be the more aggressive cash out loans, but also it's the debt structure. We always talk about FICO Scores. You can have a 780 FICO Score and still have a terrible loan going back to the debt structure. Now, I visually can't show you it here, but if I had a chalkboard, I could show you exactly what it means.

Freddy and Fannie to me are not big parts for the housing bubble, it was the exotic loan debt structures that Wall Street created, those aren't coming back, which means that the pool of sub 640 FICO Score bars aren't coming back. The data from 2010 to 2018 shows this as they haven't been applying for loans.

Karl: The reason they're not applying for loans is not simply that they're going to get denied at the loan offer. They're not applying for loans because there's not a liquid market in their income band. The Wall Street firms are not there. The houses are not trading as easily as houses for upper income people. I think crucially, Kevin reminded me this point, home builders aren't building low income houses because liquidity has been taken away from that part of the market.

I think that's why you're seeing this effect. I know you feel like that's a really good thing, but how you can see that's perverse is exactly the examples that Kevin brought up where people are paying more rent than their landlord--significant rent than their landlord is paying in the mortgage on the property.

Well, why couldn't they be paying that? Well, they can't be paying that because they can't access liquidity. The liquidity doesn't exist for them, and even the landlord is probably operating out of cash. Which is precisely why he's earning an above market return because he had to give up liquidity to get into this lower income house. That's showing you that what capital markets are supposed to do, which is facilitate beneficial transactions, is not happening. I think you're right and that isn't coming, but that's not a good thing, that's a bad thing. I think that's it.

Logan: This is where not having a residential background hurts, because FHA took over a big market share. This is the third ace card I'm using. Okay. They allowed low FICO Score Americans to buy homes from 2008 to 2011. Those DBA down payment assistant loans were--guess what? Because they lent into a job-loss recession, those loans didn't work out well. There is liquidity there because FHA had a 33 to 1 leverage ratio that was allowed to occur.

Again, going back to, well, they only have 3.5% down. They could upfront mortgage insurance onto the loan balance, but they're borrowing almost, basically, 97% plus of the house and they have mortgage insurance. We're looking at a household that already has a stressed balance sheet, having to borrow almost a 100% of financing, having to put a mortgage insurance on top of that.

Since 2008, anybody could have with a 620 FICO Score, 3.5% down, 43% debt to income ratio, some of them could go even to 50%, they can buy, just aren't applying. FHA was there primarily for that. Their market share went from 5% to 40%. Then one spread in Fannie, 5% loans down, their market share had gone down, but they had been here 2008 all the way to 2021. Still today, low FICO Score Americans aren't applying like they did from 1996 to 2005 because the debt structure's not there to facilitate that loan and also the cash is a struggle, so they're not applying.

Karl: Couldn't the cashflow also be a struggle for rent? That's my point. They're not applying. They don't have products that work for them, but if the--

Logan: Rent wouldn't go on to your credit profile. Usually, it's a credit card balance, a credit card missed payment, an auto loan or installment loan that's missed payment, or--this is the big thing is that when we're seeing--low FICO Score credit reports, the credit card balances to the limit that they can have are very high. That's a big reason why the FICO Scores are low. Typically that means your cash flow is bad, you're borrowing too much. You're putting some of your costs, your traditional normal costs on your credit card. You don't have enough liquid assets to pay down that. What does a home buyer typically have? They typically have good cash points-- [crosstalk]

Karl: Look, my point is that, in fact, they are sending money out the door for housing that is in excess of what the mortgage payment would be. I understand that from your criteria, you think that they're a bad borrower, but they are supporting the mortgage on this home through their landlord by their income. They have to use that method of getting a house because there's no product that is available for them, and because the market isn't liquid enough to facilitate fast transactions, which you're right, they don't have excess cash to be able to hold a house for eight months and not sell, they don't have that. In a liquid market-- [crosstalk]

Logan: In 2002 and 2005, some of them bought in. Why? Because the debt structure that they created for these households was a ticking time bomb, which led to the great financial crisis, which led to home sales from 2005 to 2008. The great recession was a secondary impact onto housing. The party was over really by 2004, but by 2005, sales peaked, home prices, rate of growth was going to peak because inventory was building up because people were foreclosing and filing for bankruptcy, in 2005, ‘06 and ‘07, then 2008 came.

Go back to the 2000 period, once the bankruptcy laws were changed, we had much higher bankruptcy numbers back then, but now it's different. People's cash flows are better now, and the pool of sub 64 home buyers aren't even there. The whole nation has gotten better, one, from the 2005 bankruptcy laws and, two, post-2008 there's no exotic loan debt. This is a wonderful thing for the United States of America. It's one of the reasons why we have the longest experiments in history, cash flow budget.

Adam: You're basically making a NIMBY argument--everyone in this neighborhood is really rich. The loans are great and that is the best neighborhood we could possibly have, why would you want to go back to letting poor people in here? That's essentially the argument that you're making.

Logan: Because FHA was here to create for any kind of loan for sub 64 and they're applying. Not everyone has the cashflow to buy a house.

Karl: [crosstalk] sell a house in days.

Logan: Not everyone has the cash flow to buy a house, especially service sector workers in big cities.

Karl: I think we're going round in circles. I don't know, Alan, what do you want to do?

Logan: I think time's up. They wanted this to be an hour, so we're going over really long.

Alan: We've gone over, that happens when people have a lot of data and strong opinions. I'd say, let's do a one sentence wrap up from each of you, then call it a night. I'll start with Kevin.

Kevin: I would just say that, really what I've been trying to talk about tonight is above-average borrowers with above-average credit scores, trying to get conventional mortgages, the same sort of people in the mid-'90s, the late-'90s, that would have been getting mortgages that weren't part of the housing bubble. The data seems pretty clear to me that--and experiences, I'm sure many of the listeners have experienced the way the mortgage markets are today--those mortgages aren't happening.

I don't think we really need to talk about 640 FICO scores with option arms or whatever. I think there's a lot of room that can be for improvement for loosening up in the markets with above-average borrowers in normal houses that they've been buying for decades with conventional lending.

Alan: Thank you, Kevin. Logan, one or two sentence wrap up from you too please. Thank you.

Logan: American economics is demographics, productivity. Housing is demographics, mortgage rates. Originations had one of the best years ever last year because we made lending great, fixed low debt costs, rising wages, households fine, because lending is boring. Boring is a good thing. Appreciate it and realize that the next 10 or 20, 30 years, nothing's going to change on this side. They will not revert back to sub FHA financing--those days are over, those banks are finished. The capital leverage ratio rules of 40 are not coming back, so the marketplace will not even exist for this.

Alan: Karl, I'll leave it to you to wrap up. Thank you.

Karl: I guess, I was going to be back on this, but I was going to say, I think ultimately, at least my view and Logan's view are completely compatible, but it's just a different framing on it. I think a gated, boring housing finance market is good and great for America and I was seeing that, yes, it produces all those effects, but it cuts a lot of people out.

It prevents innovation and it also prevents messy innovation, and it also prevents people from making the kind of mistakes they made when they were first trying to figure this out. How do we do this new thing? As long as it stands, you're going to have the same sort of effects you have with NIMBY zoning in a not-quite NIMBY, but gated, housing finance sector.

I think Kevin's point underscores that … the fact that liquidity has been rushed out of the small market borrowers. Even for people who were in the middle, they have to go through harder hoops in order to qualify for loans or to make these loans and the traditional loan organization of America are increasingly serving higher income borrowers, higher credit score borrowers. It's strengthening that barbell effect. It looks pristine, but it looks pristine because you've cut out all of the messy people. Sorry, I don't know if you really want to wrap up, Alan.

Alan: Thank you, everyone. Thank you to Kevin Erdmann of Mercatus, thank you to Logan Mohtashami of HousingWire, and thank you to Karl Smith of Bloomberg. Thank you also to the audience. Good to have you all here. Good night, everyone.

Kevin: Thanks, everybody.

Photo credit: Busà Photography/Getty Images.

0:37 Intro. [Recording date: October 4, 2021.] Russ Roberts: Today is October 4th 2021, and my guest is Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology, formerly of Yale University, now at the University of Toronto. This is Paul's third appearance on the program. He was last here in September of 2018 talking about cruelty, and he's back to talk about suffering and his new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. Paul, welcome back to EconTalk. Paul Bloom: Thanks so much for having me back.

1:06 Russ Roberts: What is the role of suffering in making us happy? It seems a little bit like an oxymoron, perhaps. Paul Bloom: It does, and that's why I got interested in the topic. I think there's two very different roles that suffering has as part of a good life. The first was what motivated me to write the book, which was: I was very interested in kind of paradoxical pleasures we have, like when we eat spicy foods or lie in a hot bath, or some of us go for a long run, do crossword puzzles, see scary movies, just do things which involve work and effort and struggle and a bit of pain. And, it's such a puzzle why, if we're such hedonists as so many people say, we do such things. So, I was really interested and so I thought I was going to write a book all about it. And then in the course of it, I started to realize that there's a lot of chosen suffering that doesn't fit in to that more-pleasure paradigm. Thinking about things like having children, taking on a difficult job, relationships, long-term projects, going to war. We do these things too willingly and we know that they're going to bring suffering and they don't bring pleasure in any simple sense, but we see them as part of a full life. So, this second part of the book is sort of saying suffering does another thing too, which is: it's part of what we think of not as a pleasurable life, but a meaning and fulfilling life. And, to the extent I could wrap the book all together with one moral, it's to claim that we're pluralists. We're motivational pluralists. We don't just want one thing. We want to be happy, we want to scratch where it itches. A nice cool drink on a hot day, nobody would argue against it. But we also have other goals. As I'm saying this to you, I realize whatever else we will disagree on, I think we're pretty much in sync on this. Russ Roberts: Yeah, for sure. Paul, you confessed before we started recording that you occasionally listen to EconTalk, so you know only too well that I am sympathetic to your viewpoint, but of course will give you a hard time within the bounds of civility. You write early in the book that you started off very skeptical about research into happiness. I too am skeptical. But, you changed your mind. So, I want to give you a shot at changing mine, so take a crack at that. What do you think of that field now? Paul Bloom: You stayed skeptical. We both started in the same place and you stayed skeptical. So, a lot of positive psychology over the last ten, twenty years--I say this with respect to my friends in the field, I've been to conferences, I've given talks--and a lot of this is flimflam. A lot of it is oversold hokum, bunkum, whatever 1950s' phrase I can think of right now. It's that. It is quick fixes based on shoddily done studies designed to get people to publish best-selling books and get TED (technology, entertainment, design) Talks and so on. But, it's not grounded in science and, maybe worse than that, it has a limited and sort of parched philosophy behind it. Often a sort of simple-minded hedonism. So, there: now I'm even harsher than you've ever been. Now here's where we can talk. There are some wonderful researchers in that area. There are some, I think, brilliant scholars. I think the field has improved. I think now there is a lot of work that is actually very careful to distinguish things like happiness and well-being and morality and some way of fulfillment. I think there are some very good studies. Some done by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, some who have followed in his footsteps, that really have told us interesting things. I'm more sympathetic than you are, I think, to some of the research that's done including large-scale polling studies. I think these things tell us--they do well enough at telling us what's sort of common sense that when they give us results that diverge from common sense, we can say, 'Huh. Maybe we should take you seriously, too.'

5:37 Russ Roberts: One of the problems I have, of course--we've talked about this on the program--something like, you mentioned having children, which I think may have puzzled some listeners. I think most people assume, with or without children, that it must be a somewhat pleasant experience because people have them. But, as you point out, it leads to a lot of heartbreak and can be incredibly reducing of your well-being on any one day. And yet many people who have children are glad they have them even if they would concede, as I just did, that not every day is a walk in the park, even when you are taking a walk in the park with one of your kids. And, yet when we ask people about whether they're glad they had children, we get a lot of different results; and I'm not sure there is anything scientific about that. They're very sensitive to issues like, how is the question worded, as you pointed out. Is it about[?] happiness, satisfaction, well-being, meaning and so on. Some of it is just carelessness in terms of building a survey. Some of it may be that we lie to ourselves. I worry about all these factors. Defend it in this particular kind of very complex example. Paul Bloom: It is a complex example. It is a very important one. It is one a lot of people are interested in, of course--a lot of research on it. A lot of good philosophy on it. My very good friend, Laurie Paul, has talked to you about this and she has a wonderful book, an article and then later a book called, What You Can't Expect When You Are Expecting, where she says that it's not clear that, and we--she and I--have long arguments about this, where it's not clear that science or social science can actually tell you whether or not it is a good idea to have a kid. But, I would say this, in some way I think maybe it's true for the case of children, just because that's such a difficult on-the-edge case. So, if we had a simpler question like, 'Should I become addicted to heroin?' or 'Should I take an umbrella when it's raining?' Well, the data is pretty clear on that. We could ask people and it's kind of obvious. The first is bad; the second is good. Children are right in the middle. And so, this is a case where I don't think it's a case of inadequacy of our data. It's just because it is sort of a 50/50 proposition. And, also because it is complicated. So, I think both common sense and empirical date say that having kids, particularly young kids, is rough. It takes away your sleep, it increases marital arguments, it tires you out, and so on. And it's sort of rougher than not having kids at the time, holding everything equal. Maybe this is just common sense but there is also data--data on marital satisfaction, data on day-to-day happiness. But, I think there is something else which holds true. Which is: people find children, typically, they find them very satisfying. They find them very important. If you had to ask me to identify what I am, at a different time in my life I might have said a man. I might have said a professor. But, my kids are now in their 20s, my two sons, and I might answer: first of all I'm a father. And, it is so important to me; it is the most important thing in my life and I don't have a scintilla of regret. But, when I say that, I don't necessarily mean I had more hedons, as a parent, more joys, more utils than if I stayed single. I mean something else--and there is survey data suggesting this--I mean they gave my life meaning and purpose and I-- Russ Roberts: So, I'm going to segue to another observation of the book, using this, because I'm surprised that the claim that when our children are smallest, those are the toughest years. I think those are fabulous years. Not for every parent, not for every child-raising situation. But, whether that's true or not--whether it's true for most people, almost all, or some--I think the pleasure I get from my young children now is spectacular. Looking at old photos of them on the digital frame that we have produces a bitter sweetness. Which is part of the point of your book, right, the sorrow part? I think it's Shakespeare, 'Parting is such sweet sorrow,' I think it's Romeo and Juliet. We've parted from that part of our lives, from that part of our parenting experience. It fills me with a great deal of satisfaction and meaning to think about what they have become; and it is much more complicated, what they've become, than what they were then. But, what are your thoughts on that? Paul Bloom: I think there's a wise point there, which is: one of the--it may be the major theme of my book--is about the importance of chosen suffering. I have a very different opinion about unchosen suffering, we can talk about that. The importance of chosen suffering is part of a good life, which is, I think the projects that make life worth giving[?] involve suffering. We often know this ahead of time. And, having kids is such an example. For one thing in having kids, at least for me--maybe I'm prone towards anxiety--is really an experiment in feeling mild dread for the rest of my life. Loving such fragile creatures--and they remain fragile even into their 1920s--it is like there is a hangman's noose sitting around your neck all the time. And then they will separate from you. If you do it right, if you are lucky and if you'll do it right, these creatures that you love and devoted your life to, will leave you. And, actually, if you do it right they will think a lot less about you than you will think about them. Because[?] they're into their own lives. It's such a perverse project. And I think it's a very human one. Russ Roberts: Yeah. I agree with that, obviously. What you said reminds me of a quote I heard from Elizabeth Stone. It's the following: 'Making the decision to have a child--it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.' I thought that captured that kind of anxiety you're talking about there.

12:16 Russ Roberts: But, I meant to bring it back to another theme of the book, which I loved, which is that the order of the suffering and the joy is not just important but essential. So, if you finished a marathon and then suffered and spent four hours in deep pain, it's not as satisfying as doing the pain first and then getting the thrill of finishing the marathon. And, I think children is not unrelated to that. A lot of the pleasures come--there's a lot of investment in the beginning, especially for the mother--but it gets better and easier. And, if it was the reverse I think it would be much harder. But, talk about that--if you want, we can talk about that part with respect to childbearing. But, I think in fiction and in so many things the sequence of the suffering--climbing Mt. Everest--is everything. And I've never heard that point before. I think it's a fabulous point. Paul Bloom: It's a more general point which applies at the specific level of day-to-day pleasures and also at the broader level of life. We seem to want to get the bad stuff over with, aometimes because we want to free ourselves to experience the good stuff but sometimes because it makes the good stuff so much better. So, this is a very low-level explanation for why we do things like eat spicy foods or dip into hot baths. Which is: there is pain; but then you have the yogurt or a beer and it cools down your mouth, and the water cools and relaxes you. It is an explanation for why stories almost inevitably--dramas, particularly--have, on the whole, a bad-then-good arc. There is an obstacle that must be surmounted, and that's bad. That's hard. Without the hardness, it's boring. And then we surmount it. But, I think it's also more general. I think talking about children is another way of thinking about it. Which is: there is a line from Cicero which I might want to try to quote, but I'm going to mess it up. But the idea is that we choose to have suffering and pain right now so that later on in our lives we can look back upon it and from a distance, while it's in the past, it becomes so sweet. When I wrote an article in The New Yorker on a similar set of topics, my editor gave me an example of the Shawshank Redemption. It's a wonderful movie. And, not to give spoilers, but the arc of the movie is: this man is falsely accused of a terrible crime. Spends 20 years or so in a horrible prison-- Russ Roberts: And, he never gets out and dies in a terrible tragedy. It's a fabulous--no, that isn't how it ends, strangely enough--but again, spoiler alert you want to skip ahead about 15 seconds here-- Paul Bloom: Spoiler alert--he ends up living the rest of his life with his good friend on a lovely Mexican beach. And, better pointed out, what kind of a movie would it be if it was flipped? He was enjoying his paradise life on a beach and then spent the rest of it in a squalid prison. That would be no story at all. So he had--we are temporal creatures, and our suffering and our pleasure and our pain, we like them best in a certain order. Russ Roberts: When the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 after a slight gap between the previous one, which I think was in 1918, I felt bad for some Cubs fans who had not won a World Series since 1945--or maybe not even been in one, I'm not even sure. I apologize to Cubs fans for not knowing that off the top of my head. But, one of the things I would tell them when they would get angry at me and resentful that we had finally broken our curse, I said, 'Yours is going to be all the sweeter for the suffering that you are going through now.' And, of course, it's true--unless you die before you get to see it, which case it's a terrible way things turn out. But, assuming you live to see it, there is something, the delayed gratification makes the gratification that much more pleasurable. Paul Bloom: There is an amazing study by George Loewenstein--he asked people about pleasurable things. And, one thing he asked them is, imagine you could kiss your favorite movie star-- Russ Roberts: I love this--this is a fabulous part of the book-- Paul Bloom: And, whenever you want, consensual, it's a kiss and it's very nice. And, then they ask people, when do you want to do it? Well, Psychology 101 says you want to do it now because you want to satisfy an urge and delayed gratification is difficult. And--you can correct me--but, Economics 101 says you want to do it now. And people say, 'I want to wait two days.' What, you need two days? Come on, do you need to get a breath mint, comb your hair? But, really? Because they want to savor the anticipation. And that's just fascinating. Russ Roberts: And, I think very true. But, I want to challenge your claim about that arc, at least a piece of it. I think I'm right--I might be wrong--but I think that ancient art is overwhelmingly bleak. La Boheme, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet--it doesn't end well. It doesn't end with the triumphant overcoming of obstacles. It's just one last obstacle and it's often death. And, yet in modern art--and occasionally you will get a piece of modern art, the more bleak the ending the more modern and avant garde it is--but popular art doesn't work that way. Popular art, there is always the happy ending. Scrooge is the perfect example--somewhat not modern but perfect example of this again: he overcomes the obstacles, realizes he is a bad person, redeems himself, and so on. Do you have any explanation for why so much ancient art at least is so unrelentingly bleak? Now, you could argue it sounds so popular; you could argue life was bleak. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? Paul Bloom: I don't know. I , surprisingly, most art is bleak. If you just add it up, most art has a lot of suffering, pain, and struggles. It would be very interesting if it turns out that we have more happy endings now than we used to. I'm not sure. I mean, even Rocky lost at the last fight. Russ Roberts: You ruined Shawshank Redemption, and you're ruining the greatest boxing--oh, come on, Paul. Paul Bloom: The thing about the Sixth Sense, I have to add. No, I'm going to stop. You should just beep out all the things. But, a lot of wonderful movies--and not so wonderful movies, like horrible torture porn and very violent movies--end on a dark note. And I'm not actually sure that these bleak endings exist because this is what people want, as opposed to it is sort of a cheap way to make your film look artistic. Now? I think it may make it look sophisticated. You're not doing one of these ones, like It's a Wonderful Life, with a pat ending. 'Look: the person is going to die at the end.' 'Take that.' But what this raises is, I think there is a lot of reasons why we like dark, unpleasant, sad art; and only one of them is the arc. Only one reason is that we want to have suffering because of the great payoff at the end. So, this paradigm works great for revenge films--where horrible things are being done to somebody, to John Wick or whatever, and at the end there is payback. And, the payback is oh so satisfying but you couldn't get the payback if you hadn't had to sit through the rough stuff at the beginning. That's a paradigm. But, there's so many other attractions to bleak art. One simple one is that it captures our attention. We have what psychologists call a negativity bias. Which is: sometimes the ugly and the shocking and the painful draw us in. But I think another reason, which I explore in my book and it's not original to me, is that we like to seek out negative futures--to bring our imagination to dark places. Some people see this as a form of play. Some people think of play as a cooperative, friendly, cheerful thing; but a lot of play is play fighting and play aggression. And one way to see this--and not just humans do this, dogs do this, too--is, it's a way of practicing, in a safe way, difficult skills for bad times. And it could be that a lot of the negative fictions we see--I find myself drawn to movies that show things that I would not want to happen to me. The break up of a relationship, the death of a child, the destruction of the planet, the loss of authority and attack of some invading group. But, I'm drawn to it. And I think one reason why I am drawn to it, whether I know it or not at a conscious level, is: I'm drawn to bad stuff because it's good for the mind to be drawn to bad stuff. And, one bit of support for this is: it is true for daydreams, too. Most daydreams--and most dreams, actually--are negative. We are drawn to the negative.

21:52 Russ Roberts: I was going to ask you to put that in context of your parenting anxiety, which I think every parent has some level of it, and some have a lot more than others. And I think within a couple, the husband and wife have different levels of it, inevitably. But, presumably, we worry about the future as a form of protection: It's good to be prepared. Imagine the worst, so you can be prepared for it. And, yet it is a tormenting gift. It is not the gift that keeps on giving: it's the gift that keeps on taking. It can take away a lot of the pleasure, especially in the moment that you have with your children, or in other situations we could imagine. What are your thoughts on that? Paul Bloom: I think you're right. Like all of these things, you can do it too much. I worry too much. My partner makes fun of me for this. I am the sort of person who on a whim buys a lottery ticket and then worries that I'll win the money and it will wreck my relationships. And then where will I be? And, when you tell people these worries, they laugh. But, in general, there's a reason why we worry. Which is: Worry is a way of focusing us on negative possibilities and then making us prepare. If I worry that I am going to drop my baby--a very common worry--I hold my baby tighter. If I worry that one day I am going to leave the house and I've left something on and the house will burn down, I check stuff before I leave the house. Worry is very motivating. It's aversive. It's aversive because it's supposed to be aversive. If we liked it we wouldn't be motivated to make it go away. In some way, worry is akin in this way, I think, to grief--which has an evolutionary account, which is: the horrible pain of losing somebody you love makes you work hard not to get that pain. To take care of them. Now, like everything of the sort sometimes it is going to come to you and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Sometimes we worry about things we've done already. Sometimes we feel grief for deaths that there was nothing we could do to stop. I think the system works in general because it forces us to think about things that, however unpleasant, are good for us to think about. Russ Roberts: But, of course, if you worry about heartbreak all the time, either from grief or being jilted or abandoned, the other response is to not give your heart away. So, there's a flip side to this which is very dark--dehumanizing, degrading. There is also the fact that it is hard to enjoy even the good times because you know they are going to end. I think it's an interesting question whether you'd like to have less anxiety in your mental makeup. I think I would. I see it mostly as the lack of control. If I'm holding the baby and I worry about dropping the baby, for sure; and I'm more careful, and that's good. But there are too many things that happen to my kids out in the world that I have nothing to do with, that I worry about all the time. That's too strong; but I've worried about it various times, and I think that's a shame. It's not unrelated to regret, right? It's not unrelated to the fear of being too cautious and ending up with many regrets because that way at least you will have avoided risk and bad things. Paul Bloom: I totally agree. There have been times myself where I have said, 'Wow, that's over,' and I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I wasn't so anxious about it. I would have actually took pleasure in it. So, my book is titled The Sweet Spot and I have vowed not to try to insert the phrase, 'the sweet spot,' into every conversation I fall into, because it becomes very tempting. Russ Roberts: But, it's such a good phrase. Paul Bloom: But, I'll do this here, which is: regarding these negative thoughts, these worries and everything, there is a sweet spot. Imagine a dial in your head--and I think a lot of you would say, 'I'll turn that dial down.' But, there is a psychiatrist, Nesse, an evolutionary psychiatrist, who points out that a lot of people go to psychiatrists and psychologists to turn their anxiety down. They take pills to turn their anxiety down. But then there are individuals whose anxiety is too far or low down. Where do we find them? Not in a psychiatrist's office: we find them in morgues. We find them in morgues and we find them in prisons, and so on. If you're too cool, then you say, 'Yeah, I'll drive my motorcycle in the rain. I'm not worried at all.' They never see it, they're feeling fine. But, they constantly expose themselves to more risk for themselves and for others. And, in its own way it could be just as terrible. So, it's a curse to have too much anxiety, but it's also a curse to have too little. Russ Roberts: You're liberating your inner economist, right? There are trade-offs here, is really what you are saying and I think you are 100% right. You mention grief. We've talked about, on the program, before that this modern idea that 'Grief is terrible; you're not happy so get over it. Here, take some drugs, whatever you need to get back to life.' And, you mention a case in the book of someone who lost a spouse to cancer, I think it was, and how this person was depressed. And yeah, they were depressed. And, that was what they were feeling as part of this life experience of losing a loved one. That's part of life. It's not to be avoided, shunned, tricked through chemicals, maybe. People have different perspectives on it but I think there's a, quote, "optimal" amount of grief. You don't want to have it ruin your life, never live again because you've lost a loved one. But, you also don't want to pretend it was no big deal. So, some kind of, if I may, sweet spot. Paul Bloom: And, you can talk about it as I have, in economists' terms, which is: What's the right amount of grief or anxiety to make it through your life? You can also talk about it in moral terms--which I think you are alluding to--and the person whose spouse died of cancer thought of it that way. It wasn't just that, 'Well, the decline in efficiency for me suffering from grief is worth it.' It's rather--there's a wonderful quote from Zadie Smith--who herself quoting something else--and it was in response to somebody who was grieving to death for somebody they had loved. And, it's a wonderful line; the line was, 'It hurts as much as it's worth.' And, it goes both ways. For me to lose somebody I love and not feel grief would be acknowledging to myself and to others that it didn't matter that much. And so, I think suffering in some way--your child dies, you should be ripped apart. It's what the relationship, what the person deserves. So, in some way--I said earlier that I'm very skeptical about unchosen suffering; but I think there are exceptions to this. I think some sort of suffering that you did not choose--that just comes upon you--you have to acknowledge and you have to acknowledge its value and its importance. Russ Roberts: It's part of the human experience. When you mentioned 'deserving,' you meant the person that died, not the one who is left behind. Paul Bloom: That's right.

29:22 Russ Roberts: Talk for a minute about children's literature and horror films. I am not into horror films; I don't like them. Children's literature is very dark. It usually involves the death of parents. There is an extraordinary number of great children's books that involve an orphan. Why do you think that is? We've become very protective of our children in modern times so we don't want to expose them to traumatic things. In the old days they didn't feel that way. It was like, 'Let's traumatize them. Let's get them used to life. Let's get them started early.' What do you think about those issues? Paul Bloom: Children's books are fascinating. My day job is a Developmental Psychologist; I'm very interested in minds of children. I think--certainly, children are in many, many ways more vulnerable than adults. I think they are less capable--I know they are less capable--of shielding the fictional from the real. You could see this most horrible thing and it could shock you, but you just know it's a movie. And it might bother your dreams or occupy your thoughts but you could just say, 'This isn't real.' A young enough child has some problems segmenting all of this. But, children are dark creatures, and they, like the rest of us, are fascinated by terrible things. They're fascinated by cruelty. No one's ever done an experiment, but I have no reason to doubt that a children's book with a very unhappy ending could still become a very popular children's book. Now, the orphans is actually something which fascinates me. It's a little bit different. So, this is sort of a double whammy. There is this sort of morbid fascination of a kid for losing his parents--which is the worst thing you can imagine as a kid, perhaps. But, also these stories always have a sort of wish fulfillment. Which is: 'I'm a kid. I'm a normal schmo, growing up in a suburb of Lavelle; I guess my mom and dad are fine, whatever. But, to actually be a prince, maybe I am actually a prince. Maybe I'm actually the person who's going to save the world. Maybe my billionaire family is going to whisk me away.' So, how can I have a story when indulging that fantasy? Goodbye Mom, goodbye Dad; that's real sad news. But, now I get to have my fantasy. Russ Roberts: That's a fantastic observation, and it comes back to the point about overcoming things, right? You've got the plucky--it's always a plucky hero after the death of the parents, who is stuck in the orphanage, stuck in the hands of the cruel guardian and has to rise above it to become the hero they want to see themselves. I never thought about that. It's a little bit depressing but I think you're right. Paul Bloom: What child wouldn't want to be Harry Potter? Russ Roberts: Right. So, true.

32:27 Russ Roberts: Let's talk about Robert Nozick and Alan Watts, who both posed some interesting thought experiments. The Nozick one we've talked about before, but let's talk about it again. And, then the Alan Watts one is very interesting. Start with Nozick and why you think that is of interest to your exploration. Paul Bloom: So, Nozick proposed a classic experiment, a thought experiment, called Experience Machine. It's not incredibly far away from what we can imagine neuroscientists doing. And it is a common enough theme. But, here it goes, very simple: You can decide to put yourself in the experience machine. This will sort of stimulate your brain in a certain way. And, for the rest of your natural life that your body will last, you will experience a life of wonder. Of satisfaction, of victory, of great love, great triumph--the best life you could really imagine. You will not be doing a thing, of course: you would be lying inert on a table. You won't actually be having experiences or you think you will be having them. Now, Nozick says people wouldn't want to be put into this machine. He viewed this as a refutation of a simple hedonism: If all I want is pleasure then I would jump into the machine, push everybody aside, get me in that machine. And remember, once you are in the machine you no longer remember that you signed up for the machine. So, you believe your life. If your life is good right now, maybe you are in an Experience Machine. But, Nozick says we do not want such a thing. We don't want to think we climbed Mt. Everest: we want to climb Mt. Everest. We don't want to think people love us: we want people to love us. The experiences only get value because they reflect realities. Now, if you ask people, 'Would you go into an experience machine?' it actually gets a little bit messy. I think Nozick often wrote, from his stance in life, that, 'Oh, nobody would want to do that.' But, many people say, 'Yeah, that sounds really good.' Russ Roberts: He's no longer with us; and in 2021 his claim seems a little bolder than it did when he wrote it. Paul Bloom: Yes. And, keep in mind a lot of people block themselves out with drugs like heroin. That's an experience machine, too, just not as efficient or clean. And, so, I like the thought experiment; I think it is very telling. I think the fact that many people, including me and I would bet including you, would not take that machine. Russ Roberts: Correct. Paul Bloom: Suggests we don't just want pleasure. We want accomplishment, we want satisfaction, we want to do good in the world. But the fact that many people would go into the machine forces me to sort of respect, well, the moral pluralism part where we have many motivations. Where some people would rank pleasure and satisfaction more than other things. And, then, of course, there is also the context. So, I'm living a life which I am very satisfied with. If I was in a maximum security prison for the rest of my life, I would give everything I have to retreat into the machine. So, if your life is misery the machine is very tempting. Russ Roberts: I want to add two things to the Nozick from your book, for you to talk about. One is, I want you to talk about Alan Watts first. So, Alan Watts has another thought experiment which I had never heard. It's quite provocative. Paul Bloom: So, when you're writing a book like this you kind of have your eyes out for everything. And, I was with my partner waiting to watch the last Avengers movie, Avengers: EndGame, at a large cinema. And they have these commercials before. And, they have a commercial of these couples walking down the beach, and then there's a voice. And, the voice says, 'Imagine you could dream.' And, I'm thinking, and I'm listening, and I say, 'What in the world is this?' Because, it's kind of beautiful. I'm listening to the whole thing, transfixed. It turns out to be a commercial for Scotiabank or something, a hedge fund or something like that. But, I go home, I remembered enough keywords to go home and it turns out this is something from Alan Watts, one of the great people that brought Buddhism to the West. And the story goes like this. He says: Imagine you could have a dream--he didn't use the word--but a lucid dream, where you find you could live whatever life you want. And then he basically said: you would choose pleasures. All sorts of sensory and sensual pleasures and have this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful time and live 80 years like that. You wake up the next day; and then you have another night--you fall asleep, and you have the same opportunity. What he said is: Sooner or later you would get bored, and what you would do is you would throw obstacles in front of yourself. You would have your dream that you would try something but you might fail. You might be disappointed, you might be hurt, you might work at something to no end. But, ultimately you would choose a life of difficulty and struggle. And then, the punchline is, and then he says: Maybe, perhaps, that is the life you are now living. And, it struck me as very wise. It struck me as even on a hedonist's own terms--'I want to have the best time I can have'--you would quickly get bored with simple pleasures, and you would want a life of difficulty and struggle and pain. That could be your best life.

38:10 Russ Roberts: Now, an economist would answer that, I think, rather facilely--but we would answer easily: 'Well, sure, you would take some suffering and pain, some obstacles. But, that's so you can enjoy, get even more utils, more utility, more pleasure when the later thing comes. So, it's all about pleasure.' Do you agree? I know you don't. I don't either anymore. I used to but I don't anymore. Paul Bloom: So, of course, writing this book thinking about[?] these issues, you encounter hedonists and people who want to defend--'we were always after the utils'-business. I'll name him because he has been such a good help for me to write the book: Dan Gilbert is a social psychology professor at Harvard. And he thinks I'm totally wrong about everything in my book. Russ Roberts: And, that's my third example, I was going to ask you to add into the Nozick, is his story. So, you can get there eventually or you can--whatever. Go ahead. Paul Bloom: So, Dan, basically he says, 'This is just an illusion. Whenever we say we're doing something for meaning or for morality or for purpose, all we basically mean is: it gives us more pleasure to do it than not to do it.' And so, if I leave my scrumptious dinner to help this old lady across the street, and I say, 'Look, it's not just pleasure, I am trying to do good,' Dan would laugh at me and say, 'No, you just like helping a person across the street more than you like your dinner.' So, put that in that broad way. One problem with this is that it is so vague as to be in some way uninteresting. Whenever somebody has this sort of argument where they can use no matter what you say, you wonder, 'Are you saying anything interesting?' And even then, I think, would agree we have multiple motivations. Morality, meaning, pleasure. He just thinks they all sort of have a common currency. He's not entirely wrong. If you choose to do a favor for a friend rather than to have an enjoyable swim in your swimming pool, that means that somewhere in your head you put value upon those two options, and the favor to the friend outweighed the pool. There has to be a common currency. I don't think I would call it 'pleasure' but it does suggest that pleasure and morality and purpose, the relationships between them, they can't be as distinct as somebody like me would say. There has to be something that they have in common. Russ Roberts: Jerry Bentham--I was going to call him Jerry Bentham; it was a misquote--but Jeremy is actually his name. I doubt that anybody called him Jerry. He's kind of a serious, intense kind of guy. Paul Bloom: I wouldn't think he is a Jerry or Jer. Russ Roberts: Jeremy Bentham would agree with that and he spent his life trying to find that common currency. He tried money for a while. Economists adopted that common currency--not in the sense that people want money but the idea that you could put a dollar value on different pleasures and thereby weigh them accordingly. Or you could ask what would people be willing to pay for something even though it wasn't a monetary pleasure or related to work or commerce. You could ask what they would be willing to pay to go help the old lady; and what they would pay in helping the lady is they gave up the dinner--the opportunity cost which you write about in the book. And, therefore, we know that they value helping the old lady more than the dinner. I think that's wrong. It's not a--listeners have heard me talk about this before; I'm going to leave it alone for now. I just think it's wrong. It's also depressing: It's a bleak view of human nature as automaton, as utility maximizer, as this machine to rack up the utils. It's not how we behave. It's not how we think. And, in fact, if you're having that dinner with a beautiful person that you're romantically interested in and you give up that opportunity to go help the person cross the street, or it's an incredibly important job interview--I think it's a little more complicated than saying, 'Well, it was worth it.' I think there is angst; there are worries about the right thing; there's a lot more going on than just, 'Well, I put it on the scale and I picked the one that was the highest.' I've become a skeptic of my own profession in that area. But, talk about--you can react to that, but I also want you to talk about Dan Gilbert's thought experiment which I found repugnant to be honest, but go ahead. Paul Bloom: So, Dan--this is actually from email correspondences I have had with him. Plus he has an unpublished manuscript and he was very generous both to comment on my book and let me include-- Russ Roberts: He's a fine human being, even if he is totally wrong. It's okay. And, Dan, I'm just teasing. If you want to come on the program I'd love to talk to you about happiness. Go ahead, Paul. Paul Bloom: Dan would be a wonderful guy for you; you would have so much to disagree about. He says: Look, there are psychologists like Danny Kahneman, that talk about two kinds of judgements we make; and one is day to day pleasure. Imagine you're in the swimming pool and it's the nicest pool in the world and it's a cool pool, hot day, your belly is full, you have friends waiting for you, you're having a good time and everything is so nice. You spend 90% of the day like that, 95%. But, 5% of the day you leave your pool, you dry yourself off, you're sitting before you fall asleep and think, 'My life is a failure. This is a terrible way to live a life.' And, one traditional answer which is common and for many reasons[?], which is[?] mine actually, say, 'Well, change your life. You're messing it up.' But, Dan's response is: That's so unfair. You're taking two individuals, one of them, call it the pig, which just likes pleasure. One of them, call Socrates, which likes wisdom and value and everything like that. You're letting Socrates have a say but you're dismissing the pig for no fair reason. It is just unfair to sort of let the rational, deliberate complaining part of your life hold sway over the majority part of life. And, there's kind of a trick, which is whenever you think about it--Gilbert points out--Socrates pops into mind. Like, I say, 'I wonder if I'm happy,' and now I am sort of contemplative-philosopher-Paul and I say, 'No, I'm not I'm not maxing out on these goals I want to and everything.' But, most of the time, when I am happy--but it's like the illusion that the refrigerator light is always on because whenever you open it up, it lights up. The subjective feeling that, when we ask ourselves if we're happy, we then trigger a self that is very different from our everyday self. And, to rely on that is simply unfair. It is simply we are spoiling ourselves out of our own life. Now, to make the point, Gilbert makes an argument, which for me backfires. He says, forget about yourself. Imagine your son--[?] think of one of my sons--was living that life, 95% pure pleasure and 5% doubt is he living a good life, and so on. Would I want him to do that or would I want him to flip it, where he is 5% sort of thinking I'm living the right life and 95% in physical misery? The answer is I would not want to flip it. But, I also actually don't want to have a son who is, in a philosophical sense, a pig. If one of my sons was saying, 'I am so happy 95% of the time because I lie on the sofa and I watch Netflix and I smoke a joint. I am as happy as can be.' I would say, 'Get a job.' And my complaint here is, I think, moral. It's a bad way to live a life. You're not helping other people, you're not making a difference, you're not engaged in longterm projects. I think it was John Stuart Mill who called the hedonic self 'the pig.' You're being a non-human animal because you are not aspiring to any good things. I'm not sure how convincing that is to somebody who doesn't already believe some of these premises, but I think a lot of the argument about the life we should live isn't going to be settled through psychological research and survey studies. It's going to be in some way, developed or settled through moral arguments. Russ Roberts: Well, I think it matters. And, I'm thinking about Laurie Paul and the vampire problem: The idea that, befor your are a vampire it looks disgusting; but when you're a vampire it's great, and you look back on the poor mortals who are out in the daytime and they don't realize how bad their life is. So, the pig looks at Socrates, and says, 'Boy is he missing out on the fun.' And, Socrates looks at the pig and says, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I don't think anyone wants their offspring to be wastrels. They don't want their kids to be, quote, "unhappy." But, meaning matters, I think, for most of us. There's a--we've talked about this movie before--I think it's okay to put a Spoiler Alert on this one; it's okay to spoil it, it's not in the same class as some of the others. But, the movie Sabrina--in the original version, William Holden is the playboy, having a good time, no responsibilities. And he has a blast. He is happy as a clam or a pig. And, Humphrey Bogart puts his shoulder to the grindstone--whatever it is, his nose to the grindstone--and he keeps this business going that he thinks is important and seems rather focused on the achievements of the business rather than the money. He doesn't enjoy much of the money, doesn't have much of the pig in him. Now one way to look at it is to say, 'Well, they're just two different people, different things float their boat. We should just be agnostic about it: they're both fine, it's just whatever you feel like.' I don't know. I don't find that very appealing. And, much of Western culture, you could argue, at least through most of its history, was to try to remind people that there is more to life than being a pig. I don't know. Paul Bloom: And, there's some weak empirical support for this way of talking. I'll lay out the experiment; you tell me what you think of it. You ask people how happy you are and how much meaning you have in your life. And these correlate. It's really good news, you could be high in one and high in both. But they also separate. So, there is a population of people who say, 'I am very, very happy but my life has no meaning,' and then the converse. And, it turns out there are different kinds of people. Happy people have, as you'd expect, pretty low anxiety--low worry, low conflict. People with meaningful lives have a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, and a lot of conflict. But, the key difference here is that happy people focus more on themselves. They don't try to make the world a better place, while people who say their lives have meaning, it's often outer-directed. You look at the jobs that are most meaningful, that people say they get the most meaning from, it's jobs like being in the clergy, being a social worker, being a physician. They're not-- Russ Roberts: Teacher-- Paul Bloom: Teacher? Yes, teacher. And it cuts across different kinds of teachers. A post-secondary teacher actually is pretty high. These jobs are not necessarily high status. They don't necessarily pay well; and they're hard. But, they leave the people doing them with the feeling that they are making a difference; and I think we could step back and say, that's a good way to live your life. You should want to make a positive difference to other people. The world is better off with people leading lives of meaning than lives of happiness, if they had to choose one or the other. Russ Roberts: But: 'You shouldn't be a sucker and give up the chance to sit in that pool all day, working for other people. Come on, get in the pool.' Right? It's a problem. I think most of, certainly, religion to a large extent and until recently culture was trying to push people in the direction of getting out of the pool now and then to make those sacrifices. Of course, you could argue part of what religion does and part of what culture does is try to make you feel good about making those sacrifices so they do become self-interested. A point that Dan Klein made on this program in his conversation about Adam Smith. And I think it's a deep insight. It may be the case that now many of us do things that we think are so-called altruistic out of self-interested, feel-good self-satisfaction, so on. But, it wasn't always this way and I don't think it comes so naturally to us. Paul Bloom: The religion point is a good one. A lot of what religion wants you to do for different reasons is get you out of the pool. Sometimes they try to get you out of the pool by saying, ' Look, yeah, you're going to give up on a little bit of pleasure now but, man, the pleasure you're going to get at the end of it is going to be amazing.' Religion also at its best, reminds you that there are other virtues than happiness and tries to nurture these within you.

52:03 Russ Roberts: I want to ask you another question about morality and culture. I think a lot of your book is talking about the evolutionary value of various things that we are interested in. Sometimes it's suffering, sometimes it's pleasure. Obviously that's not an easy circle to square, square to circle, but you do it pretty well. But, you don't give much credence to culture. I want to go back to the example about horror movies. There's a mini-series on TV I watched for a while called Daredevil. It was a Marvel character I loved as a boy and it was fun to see Daredevil brought to life; and it's a very clever, clever script. The dialogue is fantastic; it's just really well done. The violence was so creepy in it for me, after a while, that I just stopped watching it because I found myself, like, after watching it, in a bad mood. 'Why would I?--Oh yeah, I just watched that show.' Another example would be The Americans, which I watched from start to finish. I stopped watching Daredevil, but The Americans is a pretty gruesome mini-series. And, it's so spectacularly great in terms of dialogue and character and moral dilemmas; and I loved that show. But, I wondered if it was somewhat degrading. There's a lot of really bad death in that show. I worried that it was not, quote, "good for me." That's a very 19th-century attitude of mine. I think most people would say, like, 'It's fun.' You write about it in the book: We need it, we like it, we crave it, we like watching violence. You want to talk about that? I find that interesting. I think we do like to be scared. But, isn't there a possibility it's not so healthy? Or do you want to be agnostic on that? Paul Bloom: Not agnostic but conflicted. This is far less interesting than the question you raise, but you probably know there's long been a debate over whether video games and violent movies make kids more violent. And the results seem to be a wash. There's some short term effects, but it doesn't seem to have a big effect. But, that's not really what you are talking about. You're not talking about whether if you see The Americans you are more likely to dismember a body and put them in four suitcases--you saw that scene. It's more like it just may be bad for you. And, I can't deny that that is true. If we are going to argue--and I would argue--that some of these can be good for you; that, some TV shows that I watch and love I think make me better by putting me in a mindset in morality which is different from my own in a superior way--then, you've got to say that there are moral risks watching The Americans or a Sopranos or a Secession--all shows that I love. But, all shows that have--not only do they have odious characters, but they put you in a moral view where bad behavior is good behavior. Here's a very mundane, schoolmarmish example, which is: There's a lot of sitcoms I used to watch when I was a kid where there would always be a smart aleck kid who would, like, insult his parents; and then the laugh track would roar and it would be treated with affection. So, you watch this as a kid and you think this is plainly the right thing to do. You should make fun of your parents because your dad is fat and your mom is slow and everything. And it's funny; and they like it. And it gives you a moral view. So, it's not really the fact of the Sopranos is that you are going to leave thinking that you can whack your academic enemies. But, you watch the Sopranos and it carries a certain attitude for how you should treat your friends, and how you should treat women. And, how to carry yourself as a person. And, it's impossible not to absorb that. I just watched, with my partner, a very short-lived TV series called Clickbait. And, Clickbait revolves around a murder and accusations of infidelity. In Clickbait, infidelity is seen as the worst thing in the world. It destroys families, it leads to death, it is--and they show the pain of it and everything like that. And, that's a moral view. I have seen other shows where infidelity is seen as a laugh. And: No big deal, our main character does it; but he's a great guy, and so on. Shows carry moral views. The moral views we're exposed to shape how we see the world. It can't help but have an effect, either good or bad.

57:11 Russ Roberts: Well, you write at one point about anti-heroes and I've often thought about what a modern phenomenon the anti-hero is. The person, whether it's the cad--to use a very old fashioned word--the rogue--to use another--these used to be villains. Now they're kind of heroes. We call them anti-heroes, but they are heroes with different moral values than the heroes of the past. And I don't know why--you know, I'm living in Israel now, and Israel is a very different place culturally. You may have seen the show Shtisel, which is the story of an ultra-orthodox Jewish family and a neighborhood of Jerusalem called Mea She'arim. It's got worldwide interest. It's not just watched by Jews. I'm not sure ultra orthodox Jews like it at all. But, a lot of people are interested in it who aren't Jewish, who aren't religious. And, one of the charms of the show is that everybody in the show has the same problems everybody has who isn't religious. They worry about are their kids going to get married, they worry about making money and putting food on the table. They're human beings; and so there's a charm to the show like that. But, I think the other charm of the show is that the people in the show--and they have many flaws--but, they don't have the flaw of irony. They're very innocent: they're almost naive. And, it's such a breath of fresh air for a modern viewer to have heroes who are innocent and naive. They're not pure, they're not good, many of them are flawed. They do bad things, they do selfish things, they make mistakes. But, they are different from the sort of person we've come to find charming in, say, The Americans or Breaking Bad or the Sopranos. There's nothing like that. There's nothing like that at all. And, I just wonder--first of all, I am fascinated by why anti-heroes have become the cultural norm, and I wonder whether it matters. You're suggesting it does matter. It affects us in some way. What are your thoughts on that? Paul Bloom: I'm suggesting it does. I mean, just taking it further, I think there is some wisdom that you become like the people you hang out with. And, I spend a lot of my time hanging out with people on TV and in the movies. The anti-heroes thing is very interesting. In some way, you could simply see it as a mark of sophistication. So, simple comic books have good guys and bad guys. They describe themselves as good guys and bad guys. There is a brotherhood of evil mutants, they are evil so they name themselves as evil, and they just want to do evil. And, that's a terribly simplified view of morality. And, so, the sort of creation of the anti-hero is in some way a mark of better TV, better literature which is: to recognize that somebody could be roughly good but also have bad parts in them. And, that somebody who is evil could have families they love and don't think of themselves as evil, and so on. So, in some way I think it's good. But, I think it gets taken to an extreme. And, I'm so glad we're discussing television, because it's my favorite thing. Tony Soprano is a wonderful example. So, Emily Nussbaum coined the term 'bad fans.' And the bad fans of Tony Soprano--who was a mobster, violent mobster--where, the people who didn't see him as an interesting, complex character who does bad things but rooted for him, decided he was not--anti-hero though he was, for them he was pure hero. And they would root for him. And it was exactly the same problem with Walter White in Breaking Bad. There were certain scenes where Walter White would interact with the woman playing his wife, Schuyler, and she would basically say, 'You should stop killing so many people.' And, he would say, 'You're such a drag. I'm Walter White. I want to kill a lot of people.' And, then, the actress who played Schuyler White would get hate mail from people furious at her for wanting to stop their hero character from doing what they want. And, I think what people have done there is they bought into a skewed moral vision. And, I think also part of the thing--I never thought I would mention this twice in one conversation but we talked about Harry Potter--this is a different sort of wish-fulfillment. Which is: I am, I think, a reasonably civilized, nice person and I say please and thank you, and I answer my emails promptly, and everything. And, what a kick would it be to be somebody to inspire fear? who had the power of life and death over people? Who was a real menace. You know: Walter White, Tony Soprano, Hannibal Lecter even. And so, I think there is a fantasy in that, too.

1:02:17 Russ Roberts: I think that's a deep insight. I think it's also a deep insight--although I don't know if it's true--which is that certainly we tend to be like the people we hang around with. A lot of your book--we haven't gotten to this part yet and we probably won't given the time--but you write a lot about imagination. We talked a little bit about it earlier. Living vicariously through--you know, Walter Mitty, James Thurber stories--is an early example of this. But, imagining yourself as Tony Soprano has got to be part of the appeal of these shows. I like to say the veneer of civilization is thin. That underneath, most of us--scratch a little below the surface--there's a very dark side of us that wants revenge. That wants to crusade. Not just for good things, but sometimes for just the point of crusading. These shows tap in to that in a way I have never thought about. But, this idea that by hanging around with them--and we hang around with them quite a bit. It's one thing to watch a two-hour program. I spent, I guess, I want to say The Americans, it's seven seasons? It's dozens of hours. And, forget the fact that I'm a religious Jew. I hang out with Shtisel; I think this family is probably a little better for me. The other thing I love about that show, by the way, is it does not romanticize religion. There is almost no religion in the show. There's no glorification of the religious observance of the characters, or romanticization of, what say, Shabbat, is like for them, or the Sabbath. And I think that's part of the other reason it's a charming show. But, the idea that--that, even though it's fake and it's fiction, by immersing in those worlds as we do when we binge-watch especially, it somehow colors us. Is that plausible? Do you want to defend that? I don't know if it's true. I'm worried about it. Paul Bloom: It is plausible I think, in a subtle way. Again, I don't think you're going to be able to see how often people watch a show and whether they're willing to commit a crime or whatever. But, there are subtle ways. I often find that, when I am watching a show it affects my speech patterns. It affects how I talk. It affects what I find funny. The characters live with me for a while. And, again, this could be for the best. I think that TV and movies are very, very moral: Regardless of their intentions, they present moral views where some things are right and some things are wrong. Every TV program, every detective show, for instance, which shows the good detective beating up somebody to get a clue to save somebody's life is transforming the moral message that this is okay. Every detective show which has the main character being rude to a woman or not paying child support says, 'This is okay.' And, you know, artists should be able to do what they want. Maybe they think it's okay. Maybe--and--conversely, every movie or TV show which has the evil character or the rapist smoke a cigarette is saying, 'It's [?] cigarette smoking that's bad.' One day we are going to have this evil character who is a serial killer and he is not--he's going to refuse to use people's preferred pronouns. And, that will tell us a message. And this happens all the time. I think it's foolish to say we are immune to these messages. Russ Roberts: It's an interesting question, right? It works on us in ways we certainly are not always aware of. I'm sure a lot of people have more Yiddish in their vocabulary now because of Shtisel and they use it unthinkingly.

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about Mike Adams and his medical misinformation website Natural News, both here at SBM and elsewhere. Regular readers know that Mike Adams has long been one of the most prolific promoters of medical pseudoscience, misinformation, and conspiracy theories dating back nearly two decades. Over the last couple of weeks, Adams, who only occasionally makes the news, has found himself in the spotlight as a result of a story published earlier this month at Ars Technica by Ax Sharma entitled “Hacker X”—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself. Basically, it’s the story of “Hacker X,” whose real name is Robert Willis, coming forward to describe how he had become the mastermind of one of the biggest fake news systems in the world but had decided to “come clean” and describe how he had used his skills to promote all manner of conspiracy theories and build a pro-Trump network of websites and social media.

Ironically, when the first story about Willis was published, some readers sent it to me and told me that it was almost certainly about Mike Adams, I at first doubted that it was and publicly said so. My reasons at the time were that I doubted that Adams would have really needed someone like Willis because by 2015 (when Willis was hired) he had already had built up an empire of medical and political disinformation, having had long experience himself as the founder of a company that sold email software designed to get around spam filters and building a network of server farms designed to artificially boost the Google rankings of his main website and affiliated websites. So, after Ars Technica published a follow-up story last week based on a blog post by Willis naming Mike Adams as his employer, I ended up being forced to admit my error:

Hmmm. So I was wrong. I thought it didn't sound like Mikey because by 2016 Mikey had already built quite the disinformation, black hat SEO, server farm empire and wouldn't need a guy like that. — David Gorski, MD, PhD (@gorskon) October 18, 2021

Mea culpa. Nobody’s perfect.

So now that we know for sure that Willis did work for Mike Adams, I think that it’s worthwhile to write about his role in promoting medical misinformation and his contribution to how we got where we are today in terms of the fusion of right wing conspiracy theories and anti-public health misinformation, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, Mike Adams’ role has loomed large in this evolution, and I think that Willis is trying to whitewash his history working for Mike Adams.

Mike Adams: A brief history of a health scamster turned political scamster

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Adams’ history. I’ve referred to Mike Adams as the ultimate example of how to monetize quackery through social media, but, as regular readers know, Adams is nothing if not a multitalented con man. Health misinformation was just the grift to which he turned after the turn of the century after having peddled Y2K scams that had become useless as the year 1999 turned into 2000 without much in the way of major disruptions of computer networks. My knowledge of his history, in fact, was why I doubted that Adams had been Willis’ mysterious employer; basically, Adams had a long history of mastering the dark arts of spamming and black hat SEO and had already achieved this before Willis came to work for him:

According to the service comScore, Natural News hosted over 2 million unique visitors in the month of December 2014. The website’s Google PageRank is a respectable six, the same number enjoyed by other, more mainstream preachers of the “natural” space. The CEO of Whole Foods John Mackey’s blog also receives a six, as do the landing pages for Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra. Adams claims that he has, “personally authored over 2,000 articles, including investigative articles, satire and op-ed,” and that “his writings have been collectively read by over 100 million people over the past decade.” Every time Adams publishes a story with a headline such as, “Medical mafia calling for gunpoint quarantines of citizens who refuse vaccinations”, it’s pushed out to the newsfeeds of the nearly 1.5 million Facebook accounts who “like” Natural News. This number far surpasses that of The Atlantic , and falls just short of the Los Angeles Times . Adams further amplified his media attention when he appeared on the Dr. Oz Show this past May, where he was fêted before a national audience as, “a whistleblower who has made an alarming discovery.” The Dr.’s 12- minute segment with the Health Ranger was concerned with Adams’ research into the levels of heavy metals contained in a variety of supposedly organic food products.

Indeed, one of the reasons (among many) that I’ve been long castigating Dr. Mehmet Oz as “America’s quack” has been his willingness to have quacks, scammers, and con artists like Mike Adams on his show. In this case, Adams appeared on The Dr. Oz Show to tout his “experiments” finding heavy metal contamination of various supplements, all of which happened to be sold by his competitors, with his supplements—of course!—being free of such contamination. In essence, Adams’ appearance on Dr. Oz’s show was an infomercial for supplements sold on Natural News and Adams’ other websites.

Be that as it may, I was curious as I wrote this: When was the first time I ever took notice of Mike Adams? It appears to have been in 2006, when he was ranting about the “forced poisoning” of a child with cancer who was refusing chemotherapy. Here on SBM , the first time I wrote about him was in 2008, when he had hosted an article claiming that Patrick Swayze died of his pancreatic cancer because chemotherapy killed him, an apparent attack based on Swayze’s having castigated cancer quacks during an interview with Barbara Walters done before his death.

Since then, I and others have written a number of articles about Adams, including most recently his entirely expected pivot to spreading COVID-19 misinformation, such as claims that COVID-19 vaccines are leading to a “holocaust“, causing cancer, and promoting a “depopulation agenda“.

This was all before COVID-19 and mostly before Adams hired Willis. So let’s look at the new stories.

Robert Willis and “Koala Media”

Reading the Ars Technica article, I must say that I immediately got the impression of self-aggrandizement from Willis’s account:

This is the story of the mastermind behind one of the largest “fake news” operations in the US. For two years, he ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Under him was a dedicated team of writers and editors paid to produce deceptive content—from outright hoaxes to political propaganda—with the supreme goal of tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump. Through extensive efforts, he built a secret network of self-reinforcing sites from the ground up. He devised a strategy that got prominent personalities—including Trump—to retweet misleading claims to their followers. And he fooled unwary American citizens, including the hacker’s own father, into regarding fake news sources more highly than the mainstream media. Pundits and governments just might have given Russia too much credit, he says, when a whole system of manipulating people’s perception and psychology was engineered and operated from within the US. “Russia played such a minor role that they weren’t even a blip on the radar,” the hacker told me recently. “This was normal for politicians, though… if you say a lie enough times, everyone will believe it.”

First of all, there was plenty of evidence that Russia played a large role in spreading disinformation during the 2016 election cycle. But let’s for the moment assume that some of these reports went beyond what the actual evidence shows. One thing that I can say about Mike Adams and Natural News is that that Adams had already built considerable infrastructure in terms of interlocking websites, social media accounts, and big business selling supplements, quackery, and survivalist prepper equipment by 2015. Willis makes it sound as though he were the mastermind who walked in and created a disinformation machine from virtually nothing. That being said, the story does support Willis’ having “added value” to the grift, so to speak, by adding a pro-Trump political angle to the previous grift, which had been mostly based on attacking mainstream medicine and promoting “natural health” scams.

The story Willis relates is of a secretive company that had invited him for an interview, described in the article as him being “just another hacker looking for an IT job” who had “already received one job offer—but still had an interview scheduled at one final company”. The article then describes Willis’ skillset:

Even before his ethical hacking days at Sakura Samurai, Willis had gained an extensive technical skill set in networking, web applications, hacking, security, search engine optimization (SEO), graphic design, entrepreneurship, and management. He knew how to take advantage of search engine algorithms, once, he said, getting a random phrase to the No. 1 spot on one engine within 24 hours. “Many will say this is/was impossible, but I have the receipts,” he said, “and so do other credible people.” At the interview site, a man came down to get him, and they rode the elevator to a floor with a nearly empty office. Inside waited a woman beside three chairs. They all sat. His hosts finally revealed the name of their company: Koala Media. The moment felt like an orchestrated Big Reveal.

It was at this point that I should have realized that this was Natural News, but, truth be told, I was not familiar enough to have recognized this sign immediately. Now here’s the part that I find very, very hard to believe, which is why I think this whole story is largely a whitewash, the later additions claiming otherwise notwithstanding:

Should he get the job, his primary role would be to rapidly expand a single, popular website already owned by Koala Media. For this, they needed someone with Willis’ diverse skill set. Then the interview took a political turn. “They told me that they were against big companies and big government because they are basically the same thing,” Willis said. They said they had readers on the right and the left. They said they were about “freedom.” That sounded OK to Willis, who describes himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative—”very punk rock, borderline anarchist.” Then the interviewers told him, “If you work for us, you can help stop Hillary Clinton.” “I hated the establishment, Republicans, and Democrats, and Hillary was the target because she was as establishment as it got and was the only candidate that was all but guaranteed to be running on the main ticket in the future 2016 cycle,” said Willis. “If I were to choose a lesser evil at the time, it would have, without a doubt, been the Republican Party, since I had moved to the new city due to the Democrats literally destroying my previous home state. It felt like good revenge.” Willis says he had no indication that the company that was about to recruit him was extreme or would become so in the future. In his perception, the company was just “investigative” with regard to its journalism. When Koala offered him the job, he took it.

Elsewhere in the story, Willis is described as being neither Democrat nor Republican, but mainly “antiestablishment,” consistent with the quote above, with his self-proclaimed title being the “original punk rock right-wing millennial”.

Remember, Natural News was already a huge website in 2015, with over 2 million unique visits a month and a massive presence on the web in the realm of “natural health.” So rapidly expanding the site would have been a massive undertaking because, contrary to the way the Ars Technica story frames it, Natural News was already quite big. Expanding the political content, of course, was a not-unreasonable strategy to try to “grow the site,” but, again, this was not building a presence “from the ground up.” Even so, Willis was astoundingly successful growing an already large web presence to many times larger, with some of his pro-Trump and anti-Clinton articles having reached 30 million views/week.

Be that as it may, Willis was either all-in and is trying to backtrack and justify his previous involvement, representing himself as a bit of a naïf who finally realized what he had gotten himself into and did the right thing. I don’t buy this line for a moment. Here’s part of the reason why:

But as Willis came on board, Koala’s stories got more controversial. A former Koala Media writer who has worked with Willis told Ars, “In the beginning, the job was fine, writing regular AP-style news articles. Then, it went toward goofy stuff, like ‘lemon curing cancer.’ And eventually, it went to super-inaccurate stuff.” That is when the writer knew it was time to call it quits. But Willis stayed on, even as one of the site owners personally contributed content that made him uncomfortable.

Here’s the thing. Natural News publishing “goofy stuff like lemon curing cancer” was nothing new in 2015. Anyone who worked for Adams from 2015-2017 and now claims that it started out as “AP-style news articles” before expressing surprise at having been asked to write about quackery like “lemon curing cancer” is either lying or trying to retroactively justify their complicity in Adams’ scam and assuage their conscience.

That’s why I laughed out loud when I read this part of the report:

“That was the problem,” Willis told me. “We were trying to build a more legitimate network and were reaching more and more millions weekly, but then the owner—who contributed a story once a day, during the best time for reach—would write crazy stuff.

That would be Mike Adams.

Then:

“What saved me was a couple [of Koala Media] employees,” he added. “One came into my office and closed the door and looked at me and said, ‘You don’t actually believe this stuff, do you?’ and I let out a sigh of relief when I said, ‘God, no’—and laughed. It became an ongoing joke.”

So they all knew, including “Hacker X” that they were promoting quackery and antivaccine nonsense but continued to do it anyway, justifying it to themselves thusly:

From that moment onward, the hacker and office staff would joke about the stuff they were being assigned to write—like a conspiracy-laden writeup on “chemtrails” or a piece on “lemons curing cancer”—thinking that only a small “ultracrazy” percentage of readers actually believed what was being written.

That appears to be what Hacker X and crew are telling themselves now to assuage their consciences, because they knew very well the sort of nonsense that they were publishing then.

Indeed, a quick perusal of NaturalNews.com would show that Adams had been publishing similar material for at least a decade before that. Just here and on my not-so-secret other blog I myself had by 2016 or so documented how Adams has been promoting pseudoscience, quackery, conspiracy theories, and character assassination for at least a decade. To give you an idea of what sort of man he is, one of his favorite “go-to” has long involved abusing the memory of celebrities who die of cancer after having been treated with conventional therapy, such when former White House Press Secretary under President George W. Bush Tony Snow died of metastatic colon cancer, when Farrah Fawcett died of anal cancer, Patrick Swayze died of pancreatic cancer (apparently as payback for an interview Swayze gave before his death telling people to avoid quacks), and Steve Jobs, among many others. Basically, he blames chemotherapy, surgery, and other conventional therapy for having “killed” them, and then, with an air of faux sorrow, laments how they could have lived if only they had embraced “natural healing”. Variations on this theme include, for instance, lamenting how Christina Applegate had been “maimed” unnecessarily when she underwent bilateral mastectomy for her breast cancer and to blame Beau Biden’s death from brain cancer on glyphosate and chemotherapy. In January 2016, he did the same thing after David Bowie died of liver cancer and Alan Rickman died of pancreatic cancer. I could go on and on and on, having written about Adams’ vile nonsense going back to 2006, but you get the idea. None of the examples I just cited includes a lot of the other quackery he’s promoted over the years, particularly antivaccine quackery.

None of this was the least bit subtle or hidden. It was right there, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, on the front page of NaturalNews.com, with the “craziest” articles often attributed to Mike Adams himself, and Willis participated in creating not just the political disinformation but health and political conspiracy disinformation:

Toward the end of 2015, more and more pro-Trump stories started emerging on Koala. But after Trump won the Republican primary in 2016, the focus shifted heavily toward anti-Clinton stories. During this time, Koala’s already-loose editorial standards relaxed even further. Stories became increasingly bizarre or opinionated. Citations that did exist were often placed in a misleading manner, misconstruing the linked stories or pointing to existing stories in the Koala webring, making it hard for readers to fact-check the material. The “search bar” on these news sites even took users to a search engine created by Koala; it showed stories from “independent media,” i.e., sites from the webring. Pieces that ran during this crucial period claimed, among other things, that Clinton had plans to “criminalize” gun owners, to kill the free press, to forcefully “drug” conservatives, to vaccinate people against their wills, to euthanize some adults, and to ban the US flag.

Remember, this was four years before the COVID-19 pandemic that this message was being actively promoted. It also corresponds with the period right after SB 277 had been passed in California in the wake of the Disneyland measles outbreak. As you might recall, that particular law banned nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, which prior to that had been very easy to obtain and often abused. In the battle over the bill before it passed into law, antivaxxers had built on a history of increasingly co-opting conservative/libertarian/anti-regulation arguments to craft a message about “government overreach” that appealed to small government conservatives. As a result, by the second Republican primary debate of the 2016 election cycle, it wasn’t just Donald Trump (who by then had a long history of antivaccine utterances) who was speaking out against vaccine mandates as government overreach. It was, seemingly, half the candidates at the debate, including at least a couple (for example, Ben Carson) who had previously been quite supportive of them. By 2017, I was lamenting how school vaccine mandates had become hopelessly politicized and decrying efforts by Republican politicians to “make measles great again”—in my own state through the efforts of my state Senator and Representative, yet!—by weakening school vaccine mandates. What I didn’t know at the time is how Willis had contributed to that politicization, which has led to what Jonathan Howard described just last Friday, with public health interventions such as mask and vaccine mandates being likened to fascism.

And NaturalNews had been laying the groundwork before Willis ever walked into that office building for an interview with a carefully planned approach:

After carefully studying the Facebook pages maintained by Koala staff, which were reaching about 3 million people weekly, Willis began using information-warfare tactics, some inspired by young Macedonians. Willis studied the connection between Koala headlines and the emotions they triggered among readers. The next time Koala Media’s owners came into the office, Willis showed them a carefully outlined posting schedule. “I surprised them by holding up a large poster board with what became the schedule and deep explanations from a psychological standpoint on what articles to put at what times,” he said. “Early morning was positive articles—people will interact with positive things when they first wake up, they had the big story of the day at 11 am already, which they previously noticed was the most powerful slot of the day, afternoon prior to 2 pm was articles to really push hard, late night (11 pm to the early morning) was fringe content.”

Again, for Willis to discount the quackery and bizarre fake stories published by Mike Adams’ empire just does not pass the smell test, as described here by Rebecca Watson noting that publishing articles on chemtrails was far from the worst thing that showed up on Natural News:

That’s hardly the worst thing Adams has done, though. That award probably goes to the time back in 2014 when he published a “kill list” of scientists and journalists who he compared to Nazi collaborators because they supported the manufacture and sale of genetically modified organisms. It started with a bonkers blog post on Natural News in which he called for a new “Nuremberg trial” to prosecute people in the “new Nazi science” of biotechnology, writing “it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.” That screed was almost immediately followed up with the establishment of an entire website called Monsantocollaborators.org, which featured the subheading “agricultural holocaust” and a giant swastika above a list of “collaborators.” The site claims that “Every 30 minutes, a farmer commits suicide due to GMO crop failures. The responsibility for these deaths falls upon those individuals and organizations shown on this site. Until this global Agricultural Holocaust is stopped, these deaths will continue.”

I wrote about this whole incident in great detail as well right here on this very blog…in 2014. It’s not as though Mike Adams hasn’t been consistent, either. Just a few months ago, he was forced to walk back a call to execute public health officials and social media science communicators promoting vaccination against COVID-19. In 2017, Adams was calling for the doxxing of journalists in order to bring harassment on them.

Then, Watson also points out:

But Willis describes himself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative—”very punk rock, borderline anarchist.” Which, if you have two working eyeballs in the year of our lord 2021 you can see is an entire field of red flags. And according to his Wikipedia page, prior to joining the Natural News team he headed the 4th Congressional campaign for the Connecticut Tea Party in 2009 and according to a press release he was “a member of the Fairfield Republican Town Committee and volunteered for many Republican campaigns across Fairfield County” before running as a Republican for the Connecticut state congress in 2014.

Indeed. Watson has a point about the lack of believability of several of Hacker X’s excuses for his involvement with Natural News.

I further note that one other part of the Ars Technica story caught my eye and let my skeptical antennae to start twitching:

Sources also told Ars that Koala Media owners realized the massive potential for financial gain in pushing out the pro-Trump and anti-Clinton rhetoric after analyzing Trump’s voter base and their emotional reactions to the fake news articles all adding to traffic. Had Clinton’s voter base earned them more money, the pro-Clinton narrative might have been their focus, claim the sources. Was Willis the same way? Did he do it for the money?

The overall narrative I’m getting is that Willis probably did it because he believed in the politics behind the fake news and disinformation, and I really have a hard time believing the anonymous sources cited who claim that Natural News would have gone all-in for Hillary Clinton if they had perceived that doing so would have earned “Koala Media” more money. I suppose it’s possible. Grifters gonna grift, after all, and go after the most lucrative grift (usually at least). I just don’t find this explanation very likely, based on what I know.

A change of heart?

In fairness, let’s accept that maybe, just maybe, in 2017, Hacker X had a real “change of heart,” which is why he finally left Natural News:

By 2017, after being with the fake news farm for nearly two years, Willis couldn’t take it anymore. “I had a soul-searching moment and money in the bank and decided what I liked doing most was hacking, and I wanted to get back to it. So I decided to get a job in the security industry as a hacker,” he said. He knew he should talk about the system he had helped to build. “I helped contribute to the monster of fake news,” he said. “I knew I had a responsibility to be a whistleblower on what exactly went down—even though the network I helped build looks like a shell of its former self, especially after they’ve been banned from basically every platform, along with other ‘alternative’ news outlets.” But back then, Willis wasn’t yet ready to be named. He confessed to a trusted friend, podcast producer Matt Stephenson, what he had done.

Odd, then, that it took him a couple of years to do it. On the other hand, I can sort of understand why it took a long time. It’s hard to engage in self-examination sufficient to come to admit that you’ve done something very bad. I can also understand this motivation, as described in an earlier Hacker X blog post, published before the Ars Technica story:

COVID has shown me the deadly side of fake news and anti-vaccination people. After multiple conversations with my father, who refuses to wear a mask or get vaccinated, I was getting very concerned. I asked him what sites he would read the conspiracy-based things on, and he mentioned the website that ran the network I had built the machine on. I told him that I worked for the company previously and literally chose the stories and wrote the headlines and not to trust it. He wouldn’t listen to me. He has been too manipulated. I decided to come forward with my identity after this. I was never involved in QAnon or these COVID conspiracies, and I fully support those who are in active campaigns against them, but they are from the seeds of what I created. I believed in anarchy, was paid to build a manipulation machine, and I ran it like a video game while not thinking about the humans that were actually believing in the articles.

If that was Willis’ “come to Jesus” moment, I can accept that. A lot of people don’t realize the harm that they’re doing until it affects them or their loved ones personally, and, sadly, there are a lot of people out there with stories about their parents very similar to this one. Indeed, it is a cruel irony that Willis’ father would be one of these parents and that his father wouldn’t even believe his own son when he tried to explain that he had been the man who had built the network that had led him down the rabbit hole of COVID-19 antimask antivaccine conspiracy theories and misinformation. On the other hand, this happened nearly four years after Willis had left Natural News and not done a lot to expose the network that he had taken from being powerful and popular to becoming a veritable juggernaut of political and health disinformation.

There’s another problem, too. Even after his heartfelt revelation about how much his father believed the disinformation created by the machine that Willis himself had created, Willis continues to make excuses on his blog that are rather cringeworthy:

When I looked up his site later, I noticed things on GMOs, which I had heard about and didn’t seem fringe as far as I knew. The company’s articles were being pushed through Yahoo News not too far before. I saw lots of natural health articles. My takeaway was that he was an internet natural health guru looking to use his current viewership to explore other topics outside of natural health — which included stopping Hillary Clinton. There were already random things like ‘chemtrails’ but like I said, I thought it was entertainment. His explanation of natural medicine didn’t include that ‘lemons cured cancer’ at that time that I knew of.

“That I knew of”? That statement rates one of these right here:

All I can do is to reinforce Watson’s observations by retorting that Willis really must not have been looking very hard if he thought there weren’t stories promoting quackery as bizarre as the “lemons cure cancer” variety. I’ve been documenting the quackery promoted by Mike Adams going back to 2006. Again, it’s never been subtle, and it’s never been anything less than utterly bonkers. That’s been Adams’ entire brand for two decades! Moreover, the message that the government is evil and forcing chemotherapy, vaccines, and the like on people while banning “natural treatments” has been part of Adams’ brand all along. Again, none of this was the least bit secret to anyone who bothered to take a few minutes to peruse his website, even back in 2015.

Here’s where a bit of justification that I can actually sort of believe comes in, and that’s Willis’ compartmentalization. First, he repeatedly states that he didn’t actually believe that Trump could win and was shocked when he did win. That, of course, was the common belief at the time among almost everyone other than die-hard Trump supporters (to the point where Saturday Night Live did a devastating sketch about it the Saturday after the 2016 election) and so is believable (at least to me), even coming from someone who spent two years expanding a quackery empire into a pro-Trump fake news empire. It’s his second bit of justification that, to me at least, undermines his claim that he wasn’t aware of the really bizarre quackery being promoted by Mike Adams at the time he agreed to work for Natural News:

Fake news wasn’t a known thing at that point in time to me. I saw some articles as ‘entertainment’ and didn’t believe people took them seriously, as I have stated; Individuals that were a part of the organization were vetted backing me up on this. The editorial process included citations required to back up what other sites were saying. There was even a writer going through, what, to my knowledge, were credible scientific papers to write from. I don’t know anything about health science papers, but that’s what I was told. I thought they were not trying to put out fake stories, and that people knew the difference between this and their entertainment articles. The only fake news I knew of at the time was like the national enquirer, weekly world news. Most of the writers were only writing their own articles and only checking the site for their own work’s share count to see how they were doing. The crazy was hidden in plain sight for many writers and employees.

And:

I did not believe many of the crazy things being put out were being believed by people and did not think of it as an issue at the time. I think people are misunderstanding what I am saying: I am talking about known hoaxes, not every piece of news that involved Trump. It wasn’t until I started to see that people were believing in everything that I wanted to wake up the public because things got crazier over time. I tried to put out a call to everyone, “hey, look at what went down, look at what was built, this is going to be a problem”.

Got it? The really bizarre stuff was “entertainment,” and everyone knows that it was not true, just like Weekly World News . (Remember WWN and “Bat Boy“? And all the alien baby stories?) The comparison might seem somewhat apt initially, it doesn’t take much to figure out that the Bat Boy stories were totally fake, as were the alien stories. There was always an intentional and obvious “wink and a nod” embedded in WWN stories that immediately let the reader know they were a big put-on (that, coupled with the pre-Photoshop era photo manipulations).

Here are a few examples, if you don’t remember or believe me:

OK, I might have gone overboard with the WWN blasts from the past, but I guess I was always a bit of a connoisseur of bizarre fake stories in that particular tabloid. In any event, I’ll just reiterate: There’s no way that the average reader would consider any of these stories to be true, with the possible exception of the Y2K story given the hysteria of the time. They were intentionally outlandish and included obvious indications that they were fiction. The same was never true of Natural News, as Adams always made it quite clear that he meant this stuff, using the material published to sell his products.

Disinformation kills

After reading the stories about Hacker X, his activities at Natural News from 2015-2017, and his current excuses, I’m struck by one thing, and it’s an observation I’ve made about a number of my fellow physicians, plus other highly intelligent individuals. That observation is just how much people, especially highly educated professionals, downplay the effects of misinformation, often expressing a combination of two sentiments. First, they can’t believe that anyone would take misinformation of the sort peddled by Mike Adams and his fellow quacks seriously enough to act on it. The second is that it is so easy to refute such misinformation that it’s like LeBron James “dunking on a 7′ hoop” and therefore not worth our time, other topics being so very, very much more “important“. We now see this very idea being used as an excuse by Robert Willis, who basically says that he had assumed that almost everyone could identify the medical misinformation being peddled by Mike Adams as ridiculous (even as he also claims that it wasn’t ridiculous enough at the time to worry him) and therefore viewed it as “entertainment” akin to Weekly World News .

The problem is that misinformation, pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and conspiracy theories tend to be mutually reinforcing and are, either intentionally or unintentionally, designed to sound plausible. It is not at all surprising, then, that the same people who believed the conspiracy theories that Mike Adams had been peddling for over a decade by 2015 were primed to believe the new political fake news and conspiracy theories that he started to promote, with Willis’ unfortunately very able assistance. We are now paying the consequences of our lack of attention to how the medical and political misinformation feed each other in a continuous feedback loop that leads to distrust in government and medicine, leading to distrust in public health authorities. Because health and political disinformation are so intertwined we can’t separate them anymore. The result is what we see now: Widespread resistance to vaccines and other public health interventions in the middle of a pandemic plus belief in unproven “miracle” cures for COVID-19 like ivermectin. The question is: Now that Willis has admitted his large role in creating a huge source of the misinformation that has gotten us to this point, what will he do to try to reverse the damage he has caused?

This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before this century's end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far, the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration's climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it's too late.

For the past several decades, Noam Chomsky has been one of the most forceful and persuasive voices confronting injustice, inequity, and the threat posed by human-caused climate chaos to civilization and the Earth. I was eager to know Professor Chomsky's views on the roots of our current dire predicament and on humanity's prospects for emerging from this crisis into a livable future. He very graciously agreed to speak with me by way of a video chat. The text here is an abridged version of a conversation we had on October 1, 2021.

Professor Chomsky, now 92, is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. His critiques of power and advocacy on behalf of the political agency of the common person have inspired generations of activists and organizers. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.

--Stan Cox

Stan Cox: Most of the nations that will be meeting in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference on October 31-November 12, 2021, have made emissions-reduction pledges. For the most part, those pledges are wholly inadequate. What principles do you think should guide the effort to prevent climate catastrophe?

Noam Chomsky: The initiators of the Paris Agreement intended to have a binding treaty, not voluntary agreements, but there was an impediment. It's called the Republican Party. It was clear that the Republican Party would never accept any binding commitments. The Republican organization, which has lost any pretense of being a normal political party, is almost solely dedicated to the welfare of the super-rich and the corporate sector, and cares absolutely nothing about the population or the future of the world. The Republican organization would never have accepted a treaty. In response, the organizers reduced their goal to a voluntary agreement, which has all the difficulties that you mentioned.

We've lost six years, four under the Trump administration which was openly dedicated to maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that, to some extent, had limited their lethal effects. To some extent, these regulations protected sectors of the population from pollution, mostly the poor and people of color. But they're the ones who, of course, face the main burden of pollution. It's the poor people of the world who live in what Trump called "shithole countries" that suffer the most; they have contributed the least to the disaster, and they suffer the worst.

It doesn't have to be this way. As you write in your new book, The Path to a Liveable Future, there is indeed a path to a livable future. There are ways to have responsible, sane, and racially just policies. It's up to all of us to demand them, something young people around the world are already doing.

Other countries have their own things to answer for, but the United States has one of the worst records in the world. The United States blocked the Paris Agreement before Trump eventually got into office. But it was under Trump's instructions that the United States pulled out of the agreement altogether.

If you look over at the more sane Democrats, who are far from guiltless, there are people called moderates like Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), the leading recipient of fossil-fuel funding, whose position is that of the fossil-fuel companies, which is, as he put it, no elimination, just innovation. That's Exxon Mobil's view, too: "Don't worry, we'll take care of you," they say. "We're a soulful corporation. We're investing in some futuristic ways to remove from the atmosphere the pollution that we're pouring into it. Everything's fine, just trust us." No elimination, just innovation, which may or may not come and if it does, it will probably be too late and too limited.

Take the IPCC report that just appeared. It was much more dire than previous ones and said we must eliminate fossil fuels step by step, every year, and be free of them completely within a few decades. A few days after the report was released, Joe Biden issued a plea to the OPEC oil cartel to increase production, which would lower gas prices in the United States and improve his position with the population. There was immediate euphoria in the petroleum journals. There's lots of profit to be made, but at what expense? It was nice to have the human species for a couple of hundred thousand years, but evidently that's long enough. After all, the average lifespan of a species on Earth is apparently around 100,000 years. So why should we break the record? Why organize for a just future for all when we can trash the planet helping rich corporations get richer?

SC: Ecological catastrophe is closing in on us largely because, as you once put it, "the entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained." However, it seems that only state authority can implement the necessary changes in ways that are equitable, fair, and just. Given the emergency we face, do you think that the U.S. government would be able to justify imposing national-resource constraints like rules for resource allocation or fair-shares rationing, policies that would necessarily limit the freedom of local communities and individuals in their material lives?

NC: Well, we have to face some realities. I would like to see a move towards a more free and just society--production for need rather than production for profit, working people able to control their own lives instead of subordinating themselves to masters for almost their entire waking life. The time required for succeeding at such efforts is simply too great for addressing this crisis. That means we need to solve this within the framework of existing institutions, which can be ameliorated.

The economic system of the last 40 years has been particularly destructive. It's inflicted a major assault on most of the population, resulting in a huge growth in inequality and attacks on democracy and the environment.

A livable future is possible. We don't have to live in a system in which the tax rules have been changed so that billionaires pay lower rates than working people. We don't have to live in a form of state capitalism in which the lower 90% of income earners have been robbed of approximately $50 trillion, for the benefit of a fraction of 1%. That's the estimate of the RAND Corporation, a serious underestimate if we look at other devices that have been used. There are ways of reforming the existing system within basically the same framework of institutions. I think they ought to change, but it would have to be over a longer timescale.

The question is: Can we prevent climate catastrophe within the framework of less savage state capitalist institutions? I think there's a reason to believe that we can, and there are very careful, detailed proposals as to how to do it, including ones in your new book, as well as the proposals of my friend and co-author, economist Robert Pollin, who's worked many of these things out in great detail. Jeffrey Sachs, another fine economist, using somewhat different models, has come to pretty much the same conclusions. These are pretty much along lines of proposals of the International Energy Association, by no means a radical organization, one that grew out of the energy corporations. But they all have essentially the same picture.

There's, in fact, even a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey which outlines proposals that are pretty close to this. And I think it's all within the range of feasibility. Their cost estimates of 2% to 3% of GDP, with feasible efforts, would not only address the crisis, but would create a more livable future, one without pollution, without traffic jams, and with more constructive, productive work, better jobs. All of this is possible.

But there are serious barriers--the fossil-fuel industries, the banks, the other major institutions, which are designed to maximize profit and not care about anything else. After all, that was the announced slogan of the neoliberal period--the economic guru Milton Friedman's pronouncement that corporations have no responsibility to the public or to the workforce, that their total responsibility is to maximize profit for the few.

For public-relations reasons, fossil-fuel corporations like ExxonMobil often portray themselves as soulful and benevolent, working day and night for the benefit of the common good. It's called greenwashing.

SC: Some of the most widely discussed methods for capturing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would consume vast quantities of biomass produced on hundreds of millions or billions of acres, thereby threatening ecosystems and food production, largely in low-income, low-emissions nations. A group of ethicists and other scholars recently wrote that a "core principle" of climate justice is that "the urgent, basic needs of poor people and poor countries ought to be secured against the effects of climate change and of measures taken to limit" climate change. That would seem to clearly rule out these "emit carbon now, capture it later" plans, and there are other examples of what we might call "climate-mitigation imperialism." Do you think that the world may be faced with more and more of this sort of exploitation as temperatures rise? And what do you think about these proposals for bioenergy and carbon capture?

NC: It's totally immoral, but it's standard practice. Where does waste go? It doesn't go in your backyard, it goes to places like Somalia that can't protect themselves. The European Union, for example, has been dumping its atomic wastes and other pollution off the coast of Somalia, harming the fishing areas and local industries. It's horrendous.

The latest IPCC report calls for an end to fossil fuels. The hope is that we can avert the worst and reach a sustainable economy within a couple of decades. If we don't do that, we will reach irreversible tipping points and the people most vulnerable--those least responsible for the crisis--will suffer first and most severely from the consequences. People living in the plains of Bangladesh, for example, where powerful cyclones cause extraordinary damage. People living in India, where the temperature can go over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. Many may witness parts of the world becoming unlivable.

SC: The neoclassical economics underlying these injustices lives on in economic climate models known as "integrated assessment models," which come down to cost-benefit analyses based on the so-called social cost of carbon. With these projections, are economists seeking to gamble away the right of future generations to a decent life?

NC: We have no right to gamble with the lives of the people in South Asia, in Africa, or people in vulnerable communities in the United States. You want to do analyses like that in your academic seminar? OK, go ahead. But don't dare translate it into policy. Don't dare to do that.

There's a striking difference between physicists and economists. Physicists don't say, hey, let's try an experiment that might destroy the world, because it would be interesting to see what would happen. But economists do that. On the basis of neoclassical theories, they instituted a major revolution in world affairs in the early 1980s that took off with Carter, and accelerated with Reagan and Thatcher. Given the power of the United States compared with the rest of the world, the neoliberal assault, a major experiment in economic theory, had a devastating result. It didn't take a genius to figure it out. Their motto has been, "Government is the problem."

That doesn't mean you eliminate decisions; it just means you transfer them. Decisions still have to be made. If they're not made by government, which is, in a limited way, under popular influence, they will be made by concentrations of private power, which have no accountability to the public. And following the Friedman instructions, have no responsibility to the society that gave them the gift of incorporation. They have only the imperative of self-enrichment.

Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market. Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn't bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others. They get together, they defend themselves, and so on. There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us. Most people have to face the ravages of the market. And, of course, the rich don't. Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there's some trouble. The rich have to have the powerful state--as well as its police powers--to be sure nobody gets in their way.

SC: Where do you see hope?

NC: Young people. In September, there was an international climate strike; hundreds of thousands of young people came out to demand an end to environmental destruction. Greta Thunberg recently stood up at the Davos meeting of the great and powerful and gave them a sober talk on what they're doing. "How dare you," she said, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words." You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone's consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.

We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it's delayed, the more difficult it'll be. If we'd come to terms with this ten years ago, the cost would have been much less. If the U.S. hadn't been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been much easier. Well, the longer we wait, the more we'll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don't have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there's plenty that we can do to get there before it's too late.

I’ve been trying to figure out who, based on the defining factors that shaped Professor Brian Cox’s keyboardist-to-astrophysicist career pivot, might be our next Professor Brian Cox. We all know his origin story by now: Cox was a roving member of the English-Irish pop-rock band D:Ream, who are only now remembered for the adopted New Labour anthem Things Can Only Get Better. TCOGB was first released in 1993; Cox’s broadcasting career hit its stride in 2010, a gap of roughly 17 years. This means our ideal candidate will have released a single – which did well, but did not lead to a sustained top-tier music career – somewhere between January 2003 and December 2004.

Fame Academy’s David Sneddon is an early frontrunner, with his January 2003 chart-topper Stop Living the Lie. Justin from the Darkness and Paul from S Club 7 (who had left the band by the qualifying January 2003 period – this, to me, is very Coxian) are both in with a shout, as is Daniel Bedingfield. One of my personal preferences is Charlie from Busted, who in 2003 was ascendant, in 2004 was huge, and by 2005 had left to form Fightstar – a perfect microcosmic music career within our parameters. But looking at it realistically the only candidate is former Pop Idol winner Will Young, who has a nice soft voice, is very BBC Two-friendly (he’s already been on Gardeners’ World twice), and has a 2:2 in a boring subject (politics). If we can fast-track Will Young a PhD then we’re good to go.

‘Where there is light, there is darkness’ ... Universe. Photograph: Lola Post Production/BBC

Until then we’ve got Universe (Wednesday, 9pm, BBC Two), a new four-part series in which Cox looks at the sky a lot and says “wow”. You know Cox’s shtick by now – a pure sense of wonder rarely expressed on terrestrial television! Intellectual content made for people who can’t stand to watch another competitive dancing show! Talking … really … slowly! Although I can see the appeal, to me, personally, it grates. Maybe I’m just too dumb to have stars explained to me by someone dressed like the main character on a PS2-era action-adventure game. Maybe it’s because it feels like 17 minutes of curiosity stretched across an achingly long 58-minute show. Maybe, at the bone-deep level, I just want to watch someone from Made in Chelsea do the cha-cha. But Universe does not feel as if it’s going to do for space what Attenborough did for insects, though you can see from the production value that they really want it to.

The problem with space, of course, is it is far away and costs billions of dollars to document. Even when Nasa manage it, photos of solar flares always come back looking as if they’ve been done on high street CCTV just before a really good chip shop fight. Universe gets round this by lavishly computer-generating a lot of what we see on screen. Tendrils bloom through a murky abyss as Cox explains the “cosmic web” that pre-dates the stars; a rendering of a red dwarf burns in the darkness as Cox goes on about mass and gravity. But that workaround can lead to the same hollow feeling you get when you watch an overly CGI’d blockbuster: yes, the Avengers might have defeated the monster destroying New York, but how much of it was actually there? Although Universe is spliced with gorgeous drone shots of a planet you might be familiar with – hint-hint, you’re on it right now – a lot of it is just voiceover and an informed imagining of what space looks like. Your personal mileage is going to vary with how claustrophobic that makes you feel.

It doesn’t help that Cox’s voiceover keeps veering into “an impromptu performance of a poem derails the entire university house party” territory. Sometimes Cox talks about the sun as if he’s trying to lure you to sell your home and donate your proceeds to living on a farm with him, worshipping it. “But even gods are not immortal,” he says, really slowly, about 40 minutes into the first episode, and though I do admit I was looking at a text notification I’d just got at the time, I didn’t really know what he was on about. “Where there is light, there is darkness.” I know, I know: it is good TV channels are still making shows for people who have a vague idea what a trillion is, or how infinitesimally unlikely life on Earth even is. But I am clearly not one of them. Call me when Will Young has finished his Masters.

For the first time in years, American workers have enough bargaining leverage to demand better working conditions and higher wages--and are refusing to work until they get them.

Here's where that leverage comes from. After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services. But employers are finding it hard to fill positions to meet that demand.

The reluctance of people to work doesn't have anything to do with unemployment benefits. It has everything to do with workers being fed up.

The most recent jobs report showed the number of job openings at a record high. The share of people working or looking for work has dropped to a near-record low 61.6 percent. In August, 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs, the highest quit rate since 2000.

Republicans have been claiming for months that people aren't getting back to work because of federal unemployment benefits. Rubbish.

The number of people working or looking for work dropped in September--after the extra benefits ran out on Labor Day.

Some have retired early. Others have found ways to make ends meet other than a job they hate. Many just don't want to return to backbreaking or mind-numbing low-wage jobs.

In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death, peoples' priorities have shifted.

The media and most economists measure the economy's success by the number of jobs it creates, while ignoring the quality of those jobs. Just look at the media coverage of the September jobs report: The New York Times emphasized "weak" job growth. For CNN, it was "another disappointment."

But when I was Secretary of Labor, I met with working people all over the country who complained that their jobs paid too little and had few benefits, or were unsafe, or required unwieldy hours. Many said their employers treated them badly.

With the pandemic, it's even worse. That's why, in addition to all the people who aren't returning to work, we're also seeing dozens of organized strikes around the country--10,000 John Deere workers, 1,400 Kellogg workers, over 1,000 Alabama coal miners, and thousands of others.

Not to mention the unauthorized strikes and walkouts since the pandemic began, like the mostly Black sanitation workers in Pittsburgh or the Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island.

In order to lure workers back, employers are now raising wages and offering other incentives. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour over the last year. But clearly, that's not enough to get workers back.

Corporate America is trying to frame this as a "labor shortage."

But what's really happening is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a health care shortage.

Unless these shortages are rectified, this unofficial general strike will continue. I say it's about time.

The Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago in part because its government-run economy was incapable of producing the blue jeans, cigarettes, and automobiles that its citizens wanted.
What it was great at was producing champion chess players.
From the end of World War II until the Evil Empire dissolved in 1991, all but one world champion—the American Bobby Fischer—represented the USSR.
None was better than Garry Kasparov, who became world champion in 1985 at the record-setting age of 22. Widely considered the greatest chess player in modern history, he held that title for 15 years.
As a chess prodigy, he traveled abroad for competitions and describes youthful trips to France and Germany as nothing short of revelatory. The casual "abundance" of what used to be called "the free world" "just felt different," he says. Beyond the Iron Curtain, he encountered the anti-communist works of George Orwell and was able to read exiled dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's suppressed indictments of totalitarianism.
As the '80s progressed, he publicly questioned the Soviet system. In 1990, he joined the Democratic Party of Russia and became increasingly outspoken in favor of human rights, representative democracy, and limited government. 
In post-Soviet Russia, he used his celebrity and influence to spearhead attempts to build civil society and conduct fair elections, emerging as a critic of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. By the early 2010s, he had been arrested for participating in unauthorized anti-government demonstrations and was widely believed to be the author of a popular petition demanding Putin's resignation.
As chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, Kasparov continues to lobby for freedom in the former Soviet Union and beyond. In September, Reason spoke with the chess grandmaster in New York about what it was like to be the beneficiary of a catastrophically failed system and what lessons the world—especially American democratic socialists—should remember three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Interview by Nick Gillespie. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander. Edited by Ian Keyser. Intro and Graphics by Isaac Reese. Production assistance by Regan Taylor.
Music Credit: "Elevation" by Stanley Gurvich via Artlist
Photo Credits: Julian Dufort; Design Pics/Newscom; Sovfoto Universal Images Group/Newscom; TASS/ZUMA Press/Newscom; KPA/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; KEYSTONE Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Karpov Sergei/Itar-Tass/ABACA/Newscom; Karpov Sergei/Itar-Tass/ABACA/Newscom; Novoderezhkin Anton/Itar-Tass/ABACA/Newscom; Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMA Press/Newscom; SERGEI KARPUKHIN/REUTERS/Newscom; STRINGER/RUSSIA/REUTERS/Newscom; Photoshot/Newscom; STAFF/REUTERS/Newscom; TASS/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Cornelia Gus/picture-alliance / dpa/Newscom; Mirrorpix/Newscom; Siegfried Pilz/United Archives/Roba/Newscom; United Archives / Schweigmann/United Archives/Roba/Newscom; Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; akg-images/Newscom; akg-images/Newscom; Fine Art Images / Heritage Images/Newscom; Arnie Sachs—CNP / MEGA / Newscom/RSSIL/Newscom; Bert Verhoff/Pictures From History/Newscom; Antonello Nusca/Polaris/Newscom; Antonello Nusca/Polaris/Newscom; Antonello Nusca/Polaris/Newscom; Alexander Demianchuk/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; Rob Croes/Anefo; www.kremlin.ru; David Shankbone / Wikimedia Commons; Gerhard Hund / Wikimedia Commons; GFHund / Wikimedia Commons; Owen Williams / Wikimedia Commons; Petar Milošević / Wikimedia Commons; Rob Croes / Anefo / Wikimedia Commons; Ivan Simochkin / Wikimedia Commons

I live in the Bay Area, in a county where the vaccination rate is in the mid-80s. In late July, I was dropping my younger daughter off for a soccer day camp each morning. It was 10 kids running around an open field. They wore masks for six hours each day, and it was about 85° that week. Telling my fully vaccinated daughter to put that thing on, I felt compromised for participating in the charade. The old Scots Irish belligerence started welling up.
Rules are meant to codify some bit of rational truth and make it effective. These days, we find ourselves in situations where to do the genuinely rational thing might require breaking the rules of some institution. But to do so is to invite confrontation. You may go through an internal struggle, deciding how much resistance to put up. To insist on reasons is to be ornery, and you want to be sociable. You tell yourself, there is no point in being confrontational with staff at the YMCA who are themselves simply carrying out orders. There is nobody visible to whom you can address your reasons, nobody of whom you can demand an account.
After a year and a half of this, going along with it starts to become habitual. If you defy the mask order, and are challenged by somebody doing their job as instructed, chances are you’re going to back down and comply, which is worse than if you had complied to begin with. Even if you strongly suspect fear of the virus has been stoked out of proportion to serve bureaucratic and political interests, or as an artefact of the scaremongering business model of media, you may subtly adjust your view of the reality of Covid to bring it more into line with your actual behaviour. You can reduce the dissonance­ that way. The alternative is to be confronted every day with fresh examples of your own slavishness.

In the Hobbesian formula, the Leviathan relies upon fear to suppress pride. It is pride that makes men difficult to govern. It may be illuminating to view our Covid moment through this lens and consider how small moments of humiliation may be put in the service of a long-standing political project, or find their meaning and normative force in it.
Specifically, to play one’s part in Covid theatre, as in security theatre at the airport, is to suffer the unique humiliation of a rational being who submits to moments of social control that he knows to be founded upon untruths. That these are expressed in the language of science is especially grating.
We need to consider the good faith intellectual positions that greased the skids for our slide into an illiberal form of governance. For, in addition to the political opportunism surrounding Covid, there were also well-meaning efforts to control the pandemic by altering people’s behaviour. The question is: what were the means employed for doing this, and what was the view of human beings that made such means attractive? What we got, in the end, without anyone really intending it, may fairly be called a propaganda state that seeks to manipulate without persuading.
Here, “science” may be plainly anti-scientific, according to the circumstances. The word does not name a mode of inquiry, rather it is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such transfers from the realm of political contest. Can this be squared with the idea of representative government?
The Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger writes about the administrative state. It consists of a vast array of executive agencies that empower themselves to place people under binding obligations without recourse to legislation, sidestepping the Constitution’s separation of powers. In theory, only Congress can make laws. Its members are subject to the democratic process, so they must persuade their constituents, and one another. But as the administrative state has metastasised, supplanting the lawmaking power of the legislature, unelected bureaucrats increasingly set the contours of modern life with little accountability. They stake their legitimacy on claims of expertise rather than alignment with popular preferences. This trajectory began a century ago in the Progressive era, and took large strides forward during the New Deal and Great Society.
More from this authorHow race politics liberated the elitesBy Matthew Crawford
Hamburger puts this in historical context with other forms of unaccountable power, such as the notorious Star chamber of James I: “Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms.”
The “restless desire to escape” the inconvenience of law is one that progressives are especially prone to in their aspiration to transform society: merely extant majorities of opinion, and the legislative possibilities that are circumscribed by them, typically inspire not deference but impatience.
It is as beings capable of reason that the legislature is supposed to “represent” us. The judicial branch regards us in the same light. When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and principles that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is politically legitimate under the premises of republican government, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It constitutes the difference between simple power and authority.
The Nineties saw the rise of new currents in the social sciences that emphasised the cognitive incompetence of human beings. The “rational actor” model of human behaviour (a simplistic premise that had underwritten the party of the market for the previous half century) was deposed by the more psychologically informed school of behavioural economics, which teaches that our actions are largely guided by pre-reflective cognitive biases and heuristics. These biases tend to be functional, both in the sense that they reflect general patterns of reality, and because they offer “fast and frugal” substitutes for deliberation, which is a slow and costly activity. An adjacent thought can be found in phenomenological writers such as Merleau-Ponty and Hubert Dreyfus: the kind of thinking that consists of chains of propositional statements and logical inferences is a special case, not typical of animals with bodies. We are one such animal, and our everyday coping with the world must have a certain fluency to it, if we are not to be paralysed.
The developments in psychology that gave rise to behavioural economics provided a necessary revision to our under­standing of the human person, in the direction of realism. For the narrowly economistic “rational market actor” anthropology of the choosing self was indeed inadequate.
In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point out that individual choices don’t usually happen in a vacuum. They are often sculpted by a “choice architecture” that may be more or less deliberate in its design, but generally operates beneath the threshold of awareness, as a kind of background cognitive scaffolding. A classic example is the placement of items on grocery store shelves. High margin items tend to be placed at eye level, while impulse purchases are placed in the slow-moving checkout line. Sugary cereals are placed at a child’s eye level, so the kid will nag his mother for some Lucky Charms.
Suggested reading Richard H. Thaler: on vaccines, 'nudge' isn't enoughBy Freddie Sayers
Why not exploit the power of choice architecture for the public good, and replace the Lucky charms with Brussels sprouts? Doing so has an obvious appeal. It is a non-coercive way to improve people’s behaviour without having to persuade them of anything. This offered obvious encouragement to the paternalistic tendencies of the administrative state. Following the publication of Nudge in 2009, both the Obama White House and the government of David Cameron in the UK established “nudge” units to operationalise the insights of behavioral economics. The examples that the nudgers like to offer by way of illustrating their techniques are uncontroversial – things like increasing the savings rate, or getting people to stop smoking.
As Thaler and Sunstein like to point out when they are on the defensive, they didn’t invent nudging, they merely gave it a name and articulated its principals in the language of social science. But this articulation has been highly consequential. When something banal is presented as a scientific finding, it becomes available to institutions, part of their toolkit for “evidence based interventions.”
More from this authorThe danger of safetyismBy Matthew Crawford
“Behavioral insight” teams inspired by Nudge are currently operating in the European Commission, the United Nations, the WHO and, by Thaler’s reckoning, about 400 other entities in government and the NGO world, as well as in countless private corporations. It would be hard to overstate the degree to which this approach has been institutionalised.
In a recent interview with UnHerd, Thaler insisted that the nudge is simply a tool, one that can be used for good or ill. But, as with so many technological innovations, the availability of the tool alters the range of possibilities. Indeed, it alters the way objects in the world show up for the one who holds the tool. The innovation achieved here, at scale, is in the way government conceives its subjects: not as citizens whose considered consent must be secured, but as particles to be steered through a science of behavior management that relies on our pre-reflective biases.
One example that Thaler and Sunstein call attention to, in their advice to administrators, is the “emerging norm” bias. Norms of various descriptions have more or less purchase on us, for reasons one can speculate on endlessly. But if you tell people that some new norm is emerging, they are more likely to identify with it. It seems most people don’t want to be on the Wrong Side of History. So announcing the emergence of some new norm can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a means of steering the herd. This holds obvious attraction for the vanguardist. It seems to promise that one can mark out the direction of history, and thereby make it so.
Such vanguardists may be ideologues, or they may simply be institutional players who have internalised the expansionary logic of the bureaucracies who employ them. The hygiene state propagandises a “new normal” of social distancing and face covering. Here is an outlandish medical morality of social atomisation, presented as something inevitable.
While economics was getting psychologised in the 1990s, a parallel development was happening in political science. Before getting into this, consider the larger frame. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. This placed “liberal – democracy” in a new situation, or rather returned it to a situation that had obtained in the mid-19th century.
Liberalism and democracy are two distinct things, not entirely at ease with one another. Their differences were submerged during the Cold War when they had a common enemy in Soviet communism, just as they had been submerged previously when they had a common enemy in monarchy.
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When monarchy was finally eliminated as a rival to democracy in the revolutions of 1848, the alliance of convenience between liberalism and democracy threatened to break down. By 1861, John Stuart Mill was terrified that democratic majorities would constrain a liberalism consisting of “experiments in living.” The freedom of educated elites to explore new cultural terrain and projects of self-cultivation would require jettisoning religious interdictions, as well as the parochial affections and commitments by which the masses took their bearings. The basic problem was that such a liberatory project gets its political legitimacy by allying itself with democracy — first against monarchy, and then against communism.
As Adrian Vermeule puts it, liberalism fears that its dependence on and fundamental difference from democracy will be exposed if a sustained course of non-liberal popular opinion comes to light. The solution is to offer an idealised concept of democracy, sharply distinguished from “mere majoritarianism.” By this device, the liberal may get to preserve his self-understanding as a democrat. This can become quite strained, as in the reflex to call the popularly elected governments of Poland and Hungary “antidemocratic”. When Pew did opinion polling in Afghanistan a decade ago and found that something like 95% of respondents expressed a preference that sharia law should be the law of the land, this was not allowed to interrupt the conviction that making Afghanistan “democratic” would require a feminist social transformation. That is, an explicitly anti-majoritarian revolution.
Back to the Nineties. The hot career track for my cohort of Ph.D students in the political science department was to build up a theoretical edifice to strengthen the hyphen in “liberal-democracy”, kind of like Ptolemy’s addition of epicycles and other intricacies to the geocentric model of the solar system in an effort to save it from an accumulating body of observation. The political theorists of my generation did this under a rubric they called “deliberative democracy.” There was a quarrel at the time between Habermas and Rawls, and it was Rawls who insisted on this crucial point: if you could just establish the right framing conditions for deliberation, the demos would arrive at acceptably liberal positions. We should be able to formalise these conditions, it was thought. And conversely, wherever the opinions of the demos depart from an axis running roughly from the editorial page of the New York Times to that of the Wall Street Journal, it was taken to be prima facie evidence that there was some distorting influ­ence in the discursive conditions under which people were conducting their thought processes, or their conversations among themselves. The result was opinion that was not authentically democratic (i.e., not liberal).
Obviously, the prospect of populism was already causing some anxiety. Propping up “liberal-democracy” as a conceptual unity would require a cadre of subtle dia­lecticians working at a meta-level on the formal conditions of thought, nudging the populace through a cognitive framing operation to be conducted beneath the threshold of explicit argument. I remember there was one grad student in my department who was running experiments on focus groups, seeing if he could get them to think the right thoughts.
To my unsympathetic eye, this looked like an exercise in self-delusion by aspiring apparatchiks for whom a frankly elitist posture would have been psychologically untenable. I don’t know if that grad student got his subjects to think the right thoughts. But I have little doubt he got them to say the right thoughts, and thereby lend those thoughts the demotic imprimatur he was looking for. Maybe that was good enough. Political correctness might be understood as a device that became necessary for liberalism to continue to claim the mantle of democracy, even as prosecution of its program would require increasingly antidemocratic measures.
As it turns out, the best way to secure the discursive conditions for “deliberative democracy”, and install a proper choice architecture that will nudge the demos in the right direction, is to curate information. Soon, the Internet would both enable and undermine these aspirations.
Of all the platform firms, Google is singular. Its near-monopoly on search (around 90%) puts it in a position to steer thought. And increasingly, it avows the steering of thought as its unique responsibility. In an important article titled “Google.gov”, law professor Adam J. White details both the personnel flows and deep intellectual affini­ties between Google and the Obama White House. Hundreds of people switched jobs back and forth, some of them multiple times, between this one firm and the administration over eight years – an unprecedented alignment of corporate power and the executive branch. White writes that both aspired to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.”
One of the central tenets of progressives’ self-understanding is that they are pro-fact and pro-science, while their opponents (often the majority) are said to have an unaccountable aversion to these good things: they cling to fond illusions and irrational anxieties. It follows that good governance means giving people informed choices. This is not the same as giving people what they think they want, according to their untutored preferences. Informed choices are the ones that make sense within a well-curated informational context.
There is a distinct epistemic style that progressive politics took on during the mutual infatuation of Google and Obama. Here the idea of neutrality or objectivity is deployed to assert an identity between what liberals want to do and the interests of demos. This identity reveals itself once distortions of objective reality are cleared away.
Speaking at Google’s headquarters in 2007, Obama said he would use “the bully pulpit to give them good information.” The bully pulpit has previously been understood as a perch from which to attempt persuasion. Persuasion is what you do if you are engaged in democratic politics. Curating information, on the other hand, is what you do if you believe dissent from your outlook can only be due to a failure to properly process the relevant information. A cognitive failure, that is.
In the Founders Letter that accompanied Google’s 2004 initial public offering, Larry Page and Sergey Brin said their goal is “getting you exactly what you want, even when you aren’t sure what you need.” The perfect search engine would do this “with almost no effort” on the part of the user. In a 2013 update to the Founders Letter, Page said that “the search engine of my dreams provides information without you even having to ask.” Minimizing the user’s active input, Google will answer, not the question you might have posed yourself, but the question you should have asked. As Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal, “[O]ne idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you having to type. . . . I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.
But this effort has more or less failed, due to the proliferation of unauthorised voices on the Internet. The pandemic prompted clumsy efforts to regain control, and these have often backfired.
Suggested readingThe danger of safetyismBy Matthew Crawford
If we credit “public health” with any purposeful coherence, we might suppose the confusion it sowed was an unintended effect of approaching behavior modification as a game theoretical problem. In game theory, one assumes that people are self-interested maximizers of their own utility and tries to manipulate them based on this premise, which is sometimes best accomplished by sending deceptive signals. For example, early in the pandemic we were told masks don’t work, because the priority was to preserve a scarce supply of masks for health workers. More recently, the relative risks of the virus versus the vaccine for different demographics has been dismissed as irrelevant, for the sake of combatting vaccine hesitancy. But such deceptions, however well-intended, can succeed only if you have control over the flow of information. So once you go down this road of departing from the truth, you’re committed to censorship and rigorous narrative enforcement, which is very difficult to do in the Internet era.
The absurdities of COVID theatre could be taken as a tacit recognition of this state of affairs, much as security theater pointed to a new political accommodation after 9/11. In this accommodation, we have accepted the impossibility of grounding our practices in reality. We submit to ossified bureaucracies such as the TSA that have become self-protective interest groups. They can expand but never contract, and we must pretend reality is such as to justify their existence. Covid is likely to do for public health what 9/11 did for the security state. Going through an airport, we still take off our shoes – because twenty years ago, some clown tried to light his shoe on fire. We submit to being irradiated and groped, often as not. One tries to put out of mind facts such as this: in independent audits of airport security, about 80-90% of weapons pass through undetected. The microwave machine presents an imposing image of science that helps us bury such knowledge. We have a duty to carry out an ascetic introspection, searching out any remaining tendencies toward rational pride and regard for the truth, submitting them to analysis. Similarly, the irrationality of the Covid rules we comply with has perhaps become their main point. In complying, we enact the new terms of citizenship.
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J.D. Vance in 2018. Getty Images/Steve Jennings.I’m going to try an experiment. I’m hoping to start a weekly (or so) “ask me anything” session with Dispatch members. I’ll be on Zoom, and you can ask me about my newsletters, my podcasts, or how I cultivated my remarkable taste in movies. The catch is that it will be for Dispatch members only, so if there’s something I write below that you love (or hate!), join now and let me know when we chat this week. Now, on to the newsletter. If you missed the headlines last week, in a tragic on-set accident Alec Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a cinematographer named Halyna Hutchins and wounded a director named Joel Souza with a prop firearm. We’re still learning about the facts of the terrible incident, but there is thus far zero evidence that Baldwin intended to kill anyone. Our hearts break for the victims, and our hearts break for him. Can you imagine carrying the weight of an accidental killing on your heart? I write those words with the full knowledge that Alec Baldwin is a man with very sharp rhetorical elbows and a troubled past. But in the absence of any evidence that he intended harm, that past is irrelevant to how we treat him today.But then there was this, from Ohio Senate Candidate J.D. Vance, one of the more prominent Christian intellectuals and politicians in the United States:J.D. Vance @JDVance1Dear @jack let Trump back on. We need Alec Baldwin tweets.October 22nd 20211,169 Retweets9,239 LikesWe all know what this means. Vance wants to see Baldwin publicly and relentlessly mocked by the once-most powerful man in the world. This is not right. There’s no legitimate defense for cruelty like this. No, it’s not “nutpicking” (the practice of amplifying the voices of fringe figures and holding them out as representative of your political opponents) to critique Vance’s words. He’s the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a massive bestseller that purported to explain the culture and experience of the white working class in the years before Trump. The book became a movie directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.(Vance’s story is incredibly compelling, and I thought the movie was profoundly moving. I interviewed both Howard and Vance for The Dispatch.)And now Vance is running for Senate in the state of Ohio, and he is surging in the polls. It’s entirely possible that he’ll be the junior senator from Ohio and immediately one of the most prominent members of the chamber. And yes, he is very publicly Christian. His conversion to Catholicism made national news. I’m highlighting Vance’s comment not because it is exceptional, but rather because it is all too typical of a kind of Christian public engagement in the age of Trump. To a degree that non-political Christians do not see or experience, the Christian public square is increasingly consumed with a kind of resentful, vengeful fury that’s extraordinarily difficult to square with the words and example of Jesus Christ. Before we go any further, I want to introduce you to a new term, one I learned from Josh Strahan, a New Testament professor at my alma mater, Lipscomb University. That term is “orthocardia.” Essentially it means “having a right heart.” And when I learned that term, it started to transform the way I understood our times.You’re not going to find much literature about orthocardia. But the concept is both simple and profound. As explained by Methodist Pastor Jason Valendy, it’s distinct from and essentially precedes two terms that are familiar to Christians, orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice.)Both of these terms are extremely valuable, yet incomplete. As one seeks to imitate Christ, you learn quickly that the fullness of the Christian life lies beyond both beliefs and behavior. Let’s first discuss orthodoxy. Knowledge and understanding of the finer points of Christian theology is important, but this knowledge about God is distinct from faith in God. For example, one of the most famous passages in the Bible declares, “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” When we move from belief to practice, there are even more words from scripture that are profoundly sobering. The Apostle Paul famously wrote, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”These are extraordinary words, and they indicate that I can know the right things and even do many great things and yet there is something missing. The beliefs and practices must flow from a heart that is oriented towards God. Or, as Jesus said, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (Emphasis added.)Let’s make this more concrete. Earlier this month, I joined my friend Russell Moore on his podcast, and we reflected back on two years of debates about “David Frenchism.” For those who don’t know what that is, in 2019 New York Post editorial page editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote an essay in First Things called “Against David Frenchism.” His critique of me was multilayered, but it contained two essential components—first, a critique of classical liberalism itself, and second, a critique of my (highly imperfect!) commitment to civility and decency as a mode of political discourse.As I wrote at the time, Ahmari used me as a “proxy for two competing visions of American life”:Ahmari’s desire, he says, is “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” By contrast, he says, I believe “that the institutions of a technocratic market society are neutral zones that should, in theory, accommodate both traditional Christianity and the libertine ways and paganized ideology of the other side.” Thus, he constructs a dichotomy between people like him, who understand “politics as war and enmity,” and people like me, who possess an “earnest and insistently polite quality” that is “unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives.”To say the fight went viral is a bit of an understatement. It spawned countless essays, a New Yorker profile of both of us, and it culminated in a rather contentious debate before a packed house at Catholic University in Washington D.C. Over the last two years, I’ve been asked repeatedly why the debate achieved the prominence it did within conservative and Christian circles. I don’t think it’s because of Ahmari’s particular ideology. He’s broadly an adherent to Catholic integralism, a belief system that seeks to place the Catholic church at the center of American faith and politics and to integrate religious and political power in a way that utterly contradicts the current American constitutional order. There is no meaningful political constituency for such a belief. But I think his essay had a different kind of power, and it’s expressed in these sentences:Progressives understand that culture war means discrediting their opponents and weakening or destroying their institutions. Conservatives should approach the culture war with a similar realism. Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty. (Emphasis added.)These words provided a theological and intellectual rationalization for a particular kind of public aggression, the same kind of aggression we saw from J.D. Vance above. Moreover, they provided a theological and intellectual rationalization that allowed angry Christians to connect with the very particular spirit of the Trumpist age. They provided a sacred frame that allowed and even encouraged Christians to conform their words to the words of the most publicly cruel man to ever occupy the Oval Office.My wife and I are currently watching Impeachment: American Crime Story. It’s a remarkable walk down memory lane, and it’s a reminder of a previous cruel age in American politics. The story focuses around Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It does not whitewash Clinton’s conduct at all. In fact, when you watch the events unfold through the prism of a post #MeToo culture, it’s remarkable how sinister it all feels. We’ve just reached the episode where the affair is discovered, and it features footage from the countless celebrities who viciously mocked Monica. A young woman was sexually exploited by the president of the United States and then encouraged to lie under oath by that same president, yet her appearance, her sexual history, and her family were devoured by the cultural wolves, day after day and night after night. It was and remains one of the grossest moments in modern American cultural life.Is it any wonder then that the Southern Baptist Convention in 1998 felt compelled to pass a resolution on the moral character of public officials? It contained these memorable words: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”These words proved true, but not in the way many Christians predicted. The legacy of the Clinton years was less a loosening of sexual morality (indeed, by many measures Americans have grown more sexually conservative since the Clinton years) than a burning sense of grievance and an understanding that the ends justify the means. The latest episode of the show ends with the famous moment when Clinton met with Dick Morris, looked at grim polling numbers indicating that his public support might collapse if they learned the truth about his lies, and allegedly said, “Well, we just have to win then.”And win he did. It was one of the moments (and hardly the only one) where our politicians broke our political culture. “We just have to win” became a dominant ethos in American political life, including in Christian political life. In hindsight, however, the Christian warning to “them” about the moral character of public officials should also have been read as a warning to us. Let’s turn back to J.D. Vance. In large part because of his prominence and his shift to pugilism, his campaign has become arguably the most-watched Senate race in America. In August, the American Conservative published a fascinating profile of Vance. With great nuance and insight, it described the escalating American culture wars, and the sense that many Americans felt that they were fighting for their beliefs and their very way of life. But the last paragraph contained these ominous words, especially coming from a Christian politician: “I think our people hate the right people,” Vance said. With those words, I believe Vance reflected one of the most prevalent spirits of the times. Do we wonder why animosity dominates our discourse? Do we wonder why so many people were ready and willing to receive a message that declared even decency itself a “secondary value”? The real crisis in American Christian political engagement isn’t truly over Christian positions. Opposition to abortion, to take one example, is vital and just. And there is ample room for good-faith Chrsitian disagreement over the proper response to American challenges ranging from race to economics to immigration to sexuality and to the pandemic. The real crisis is instead a crisis of the heart. Our orthodoxy is undermined by our actions, and our actions spring forth from the deepest parts of our being. At a time of rising antipathy, a Christian political community should blaze forth with a radiant countercultural embrace of kindness and grace. Instead, all too many of us have forgotten a fundamental truth. There are no “right people” to hate. One last thing …I’m going to break a bit with Sunday tradition and end with a news report instead of a song. Please watch it all. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen all year. In a time of seemingly relentless gloom, there are genuine, glorious points of light:CBS Evening News @CBSEveningNewsDADS ON DUTY: After a violent week of fighting at a Louisiana high school, parents knew something had to change. So, a group of dads decided to show up not just for their kids - but for the whole student body - to help maintain a positive environment. @SteveHartmanCBS has more. October 22nd 202134,156 Retweets121,205 Likes

The Democrats’ “Build Back Better” proposals for childcare represent a disastrous step in the ongoing government takeover of the sector – raising care costs, creating dependence, and instilling incentives against work and earning more income along the way.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently heralded an ascendant “supply-side progressivism.” Modern leftists want a bigger welfare state, he claimed, but they increasingly understand that “if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing.” Scant evidence of such an enlightened view is observed within the childcare sections of the Democrats’ House bill. This is the classic recipe of government policy constraining supply and then subsidizing demand.

Despite a stated goal of making childcare more affordable, the legislation would make it more expensive:

-eligible providers would have to pay “living wages” to all staff, with child-focused care workers paid commensurate salaries to their state’s elementary school teachers. These provisions would raise costs dramatically in a labor-intensive sector where staff costs can average around 60-70 percent of the total. The average childcare worker nationally is currently paid $25,460, against $60,660 for the average elementary school teacher (in other words, the latter earns 138 percent more).

-to qualify for federal grants, states must also develop licensing regimes “appropriate for childcare providers in a variety of settings.” Past research on childcare licensure, including educational requirements, has found that these also raise costs by restricting the supply of would-be carers, without improving child outcomes.

-state program plans would have to place providers into “quality” tiers, providing resources to achieve “high quality” care for all. In childcare speak, “quality” isn’t about what parents actually want, but criteria defined by government officials, usually meaning low child to staff ratios, extensive educational requirements for staff, and other regulations, all of which tend to raise costs and reduce the availability of care in poor areas (again, without much evidence they improve outcomes for kids or parents).

This bill then doesn’t make childcare cheaper, but more expensive. The main thing that it changes is who pays for it, with taxpayers on the hook for extensive demand-side subsidies through an income means-tested copayment system with a “sliding fee scale.”

If you earn less than 75 percent of your state’s median income for a family of your size, your childcare costs are wholly paid by taxpayers. As you move from 75 percent to 100 percent of your state’s median income, your out-of-pocket copay would rise to a cap of 2 percent of your income. By 125 percent of state median income, that would slide up again to 4 percent. It then increases further, such that above 150 percent of state median income, out-of-pocket childcare costs would settle at a copay of 7 percent of income.

These would be substantial subsidies. According to ChildCare Aware of America data, in 2018 the annual price of full-time infant center care was more than 7 percent of median married couple income in all states, ranging from a high of 17.5 percent in California ($16,450), down to 7.6 percent in Mississippi ($5,760). So this would be a very generous new entitlement that would essentially make the government the major purchaser of childcare.

What sort of perverse incentives would this create?

On the provider side, it would surely crowd out many alternatives to center-based care. So large are the subsidies that demand for other, non-formal childcare options would fall away, especially given the regulatory hurdles necessary to eventually reach “high quality” status. Democrats might see this as a feature, rather than a bug. But every child and families’ needs are different. This approach would stifle a pluralistic market that serves different households’ needs.

The bill also mandates that centers cannot charge more than the combination of the determined state subsidy plus any copay. This is to prevent people who’ve hit their copay cap from loading up on limousine care. But mandating prices that providers can charge according to government officials’ cost estimates over broad areas creates a de facto price control that history suggests might create shortages of provision in places where certain costs (such as building rents) might be unusually high.

For households, the program creates big disincentives to work or earn more income.

Suppose median household income in a state is $55,000 and full-time infant center care for one child costs $10,000 (not untypical figures). Under this program:

-a family with an infant earning up to $41,250 would have childcare fully paid for by taxpayers.

-families with incomes rising from $41,250 to $55,000 would see their contribution slide up from $0 to $1,100 (equivalent to an implicit additional marginal tax rate of 8 percent over this income range).

-families with incomes rising from $55,000 to $68,750 would see childcare costs increase from $1,100 to $2,750 (equivalent to an additional marginal tax rate of 12 percent).

-families with incomes rising from $68,750 to 150 percent of the state median ($82,500) would go from paying $2,750 in childcare per year to $5,755 (an additional marginal tax rate of almost 22 percent).

-above incomes of $82,500, families would face an additional 7 percent marginal tax rate on new income until the household covered the full costs of their childcare out-of-pocket (in this example, at around $143,000).

Across a wide income range, then, this program would add serious disincentives to earning more income, by raising the effective marginal income tax rate households face. That’s based on the sorts of prices families face for childcare now. For all the reasons outlined above, prices would likely be much higher under the new regulatory environment. As a consequence, taxpayer subsidies would both be larger still and the damaging marginal tax rate hikes would ripple much further up the income scale.

Former CEA chief economist Casey Mulligan has calculated that for a family with two children under 5, the marginal tax rate uplifts described above could extend to much higher levels of household income again. Why? Because the legislation says the copayments count “toward such cost for all such children.” So, in our above example, if the family instead had two young children in full-time care, meaning $20,000 of annual care costs, then the elevated effective marginal tax rate would run right up to a household income of $285,000.

Childcare costs per child are much higher than this in many parts of the country. At $14,000 per child per year and $28,000 in total in some states, the copayment cap of 7 percent of income wouldn’t cover the full childcare cost for a family with two young children in care unless they earned $400,000. So the subsidies and implicit marginal tax rates would push up to very, very high levels of income. That’s not to mention that for any given family with a fixed level of income, this policy would encourage them having more children by dramatically lowering the marginal cost of childcare.

If all that wasn’t troublesome enough, Matt Bruenig, a supporter of childcare subsidies, has shown that the way the program would be phased in over three years would create even more egregious work incentives in the near-term:

But in the first 3 years of the program, families with incomes that are just $1 over 100% of the median income (year one), 115% of the median income (year two), or 130% of the median income (year three) will be eligible for zero subsidies, meaning that they will be on the hook for the entire unsubsidized price, which as discussed above will now be at least $13,000 per year higher than before… [note: due to the higher wages to carers the legislation demands providers pay]. …the median household income last year in the country was $67,521. If this was your state’s median income, then having a family income just $1 higher than that would result in you being ineligible for childcare subsidies in 2022 even as the unsubsidized price of child care skyrockets due to the wage and other mandates in the Democratic proposal…. Under this scenario, there will be many dual-earning couples who cannot afford child care if both of them continue to work, but could afford child care if one of them quit their job and thereby brought their family income below the eligibility cutoff. Normally people who quit jobs to take care of their kids do so in order to save the money they’d have to spend on child care. Under this plan, they have to quit their job in order to afford child care!

I’ve written before that Western governments are tangling themselves up in contradictions as the state has gotten more heavily involved with childcare. Politicians can’t decide whether the problem they want to solve is childcare being too expensive, not enough parents entering the formal labor force, or supposed “poor quality” care hindering child development.

Targeting any one of these goals brings obvious trade-offs with the other objectives, but an unwillingness to confront these contradictions has seen a policy devised that would:

-make childcare more expensive;

-push parents towards using more formal care that might not best suit their needs or wants;

-and create new disincentives against working.

The libertarian view is that parents should be free to decide how to care for their own children, including what cost-quality bundle to opt for. This might be through markets, family, or civil society institutions. Governments should unpick cost-raising regulations or requirements that price people out from obtaining the care they want. A proper “supply-side” agenda for childcare would therefore entail examining how federal and state regulatory, zoning, and migration policies all make care more expensive than it needs to be, resulting in fewer options for families.

The “Build Back Better” proposals do the opposite: offering subsidies with the quid pro quo of choking supply through all sorts of ongoing restrictions to shape the market in a particular image. And because of the unwillingness to address the contradictions in aims, I suspect implementing this program would be a one-way street to, in time, an even fuller government takeover of this important economic and social area of life.

Ryan Bourne occupies the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato. He has written on a number of economic issues, including fiscal policy, inequality, minimum wages, infrastructure spending, and rent control.

The idea of global free trade as an end in itself is obsolete in a multipolar world of several great powers and shifting coalitions, in which today’s friendly trading partner may be tomorrow’s enemy determined to cut off essential supplies.

THE RISE of China as a great power in all dimensions—military, economic, and diplomatic—has ended the unipolar era that followed the Cold War—if such an era ever truly existed. Instead of producing a bipolar world order, China’s rise is creating a multipolar world order, by enabling second-tier powers like Russia and Turkey and others to maneuver between Washington and Beijing.

The return of a multipolar world of great power rivalries is forcing American strategists to rethink the relationship between military, security, and diplomatic influence, on the one hand, and industry and trade, on the other. During the Cold War, these were habitually treated as separate subjects. The Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, Communist China were military and ideological rivals, but not commercial adversaries. Japan and West Germany were commercial adversaries, but not military and ideological rivals. In contemporary China, however, the United States, for the first time since the defeat and dismemberment of Germany in 1945, faces a rival on all fronts simultaneously. It is as though in the 1950s the United States had not only competed with the Soviet Union in arms races and bids for influence in post-colonial countries but had also competed with the Soviets for global market share in aviation while defending the U.S. home market against subsidized Soviet automobile imports.

Although in 1990, Edward Luttwak defined “geoeconomics” in terms of the “logic of conflict” combined with the “grammar of commerce,” there is no precedent in living memory for the kind of full-spectrum great-power competition embodied in the Sino-American rivalry. Today’s members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment grew up in a rapidly vanishing world in which the national security adviser supervised defense, defined in terms of war and terrorism, while international trade was handled by the U.S. trade representative. In the split-brain of America’s foreign policy elite, one hemisphere was programmed by international relations theory, which paid next to no attention to trade and investment, while the other half of the brain was programmed with free-market economics that assumed a world of perpetual peace.

Realist thinkers might have been expected to contest this separation of trade and statecraft. After all, the history of the modern world before 1945 is largely a history of attempts by European great powers, and later the United States and Japan, to use military power and diplomacy to control foreign resources and labor and secure foreign markets for their domestic manufacturers and investors. But while “classical realists” took such factors into account, late-twentieth-century American academic “neorealism” focused excessively on national security (narrowly defined) and got side-tracked into abstruse models of polarity and seduced by the dream of pseudoscientific rigor. If national security thinkers had dared to stray into subjects of international trade and industrial structure which academic economists claimed as their own preserve, they would have been subject to attack by the Capitoline geese who guarded the free-trade/free-market Washington Consensus from the barbarians, like the economist and pundit Paul Krugman.

As a result, American strategists are wholly unprepared at the intellectual level to deal with the emerging world order, in which national security and national economic policy can no longer be separated.

IN ORDER to think clearly about national strategy, it is necessary to distinguish power from security, and wealth from prosperity. To use the jargon of game theory, power and wealth are “zero-sum” games, and security and prosperity are “non-zero-sum” games.

Power and wealth are relative. A country can be more powerful or wealthier only in comparison to other countries.

Security and prosperity, in contrast, are absolute concepts. All countries can become more secure or more prosperous at the same time, even if some countries become relatively more powerful and relatively wealthier than others.

To simplify somewhat, the dream of a certain idealistic strand of liberalism for generations has been to replace a world of zero-sum rivalries for relative power and relative wealth with a world of non-zero-sum mutual cooperation among all countries in promoting absolute security and absolute prosperity. Realists argue that this is neither possible nor prudent in a world of independent states without a single global sovereign.

In the military realm, the different objectives of absolute security and relative power are reflected in different methods: arms control and disarmament. The policy of arms control implicitly takes for granted the continuing existence of competition for relative power among great powers (if not minor states) for relative military advantage. The purpose of arms control is not to eliminate national militaries, or even to eliminate arms races, but to reduce the danger and cost of particular arms races to both sides in a geopolitical contest.

In contrast, the goal of advocates of disarmament is absolute and universal human security by means of the eventual abolition of national militaries and weapons of war everywhere. All countries could become more secure from threats of invasion, for example, if all armed forces that could be used offensively to project power across borders were eliminated.

The problem with disarmament, realists would object, is that if one country became aggressive and chose to rearm later, its neighbors might be forced to hastily rearm to deter invasion or intimidation. If they failed to do so in time, they might sacrifice vital interests or even lose their independence. Far better for all nations to maintain minimally adequate militaries that can be expanded in response to threats, rather than risk disarmament—even if, temporarily, all countries were to disarm at once.

The difficulty with U.S. strategy since 1945 is that it has been informed by the zero-sum logic of arms control in the military realm and by the non-zero-sum logic of disarmament in the economic realm. In the military arena, the United States in the Cold War engaged in arms races, not to build a war machine enabling it to invade the Soviet Union and its client states, but to achieve a position of strength from which to negotiate arms control treaties that benefited the United States and its allies. In the economic realm, however, U.S. trade policy in the same period was engaged in economic disarmament. The purpose of multiple rounds under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the creation of the World Trade Organization, and regional free trade agreements like NAFTA/USMCA, has been to strip countries, including the United States, of various tools traditionally used to protect and promote their own industries, like tariffs and subsidies and local content requirements and procurement preferences.

Why would an industrial great power like the United States promote a global trade regime that makes it illegal to engage in industrial policy for the benefit of American producers and workers? On the face of it, given the dependence of military power on national industrial capacity, this policy seems irrational—particularly because the United States during and since the Cold War has tended to turn a blind eye to violations of free-market ideals by allies like Japan and rivals like China alike.

U.S. SUPPORT for a rule-governed international economic order that binds the United States itself is not as peculiar as it seems. Under conditions that existed for a time, both multilateral and unilateral economic disarmament may have made sense in realist terms.

According to the tradition of economic nationalism informed by Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List, Alexander Gerschenkron, Raul Prebisch, and others, the foreign trade strategy of a country should depend on its stage of industrialization. (I will limit the discussion to the small number of populous, major military and industrial powers, two categories that tend to overlap. Small and weak countries—the majority in the world—have far fewer choices and little bargaining power and must seek the protection of greater powers and access to markets of populous nations on whatever terms they can get.)

An agrarian country attempting to industrialize should engage for a time in protectionism or import substitution industrialization. Tariffs, non-tariff barriers, local content requirements, or other measures can exclude imports from more advanced, already-industrialized countries and reserve the national market for its own national “infant industry” firms, which, though inferior to the firms of the advanced countries, must learn by doing over time. The infant-industry firms need not be national; they can be local affiliates of foreign firms, as long as they build up national industry and transfer technology to national capitalists and skills to national workers.

Once a country has industrialized, its trade strategy should change. Its industries are now equal in quality to those of other countries, so it no longer needs the “training wheels” of infant industry protectionism. The emphasis should shift from protecting its own market to gaining access to foreign markets—without, however, sacrificing its home market completely to foreign firms.

The trade strategy that the nation pursues in this second era depends on its own relationship with other powerful industrialized nations. If the newly-industrialized country is only one of several great powers, then it can benefit from access to affluent consumer markets, most of which are found within the other great military-industrial powers at a similar level of development. At the same time, in a multipolar system the country should be wary of becoming overly integrated with and dependent on other great powers that might turn against it in the future. In a multipolar system, the wisest course for great powers is to increase their access to foreign markets or foreign investment by means of reciprocal trade liberalization agreements—while limiting their trading partners to military allies or neutrals and protecting their national firms in their strategic industries from competition even with the firms of friendly allies in some cases.

Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug, and a very good one. If you are infected with the roundworms that cause river blindness or the parasitic mites that cause scabies, it is wonderfully effective. It is cheap; it is accessible; and its discoverers won the Nobel Prize in 2015. It has also been widely promoted as a coronavirus prophylactic and treatment.This promotion has been broadly criticized as a fever dream conceived in the memetic bowels of the internet and as a convenient buttress for bad arguments against vaccination. This is not entirely fair. Perhaps 70 to 100 studies have been conducted on the use of ivermectin for treating or preventing COVID-19; several dozen of them support the hypothesis that the drug is a plague mitigant. Two meta-analyses, which looked at data aggregated across subsets of these studies, concluded that the drug has value in the fight against the pandemic.So if you’re the sort of person who “follows the science,” it might seem perfectly rational to join the fervent supporters of ivermectin. It might even strike you as reasonable to suggest, as one physician and congressional witness did recently, that “people are dying because they don’t know about this medicine.”The problem is, not all science is worth following.I work on a small team of researchers who do what one might call “forensic peer review.” In the standard process for scientific publishing, peer reviewers take a manuscript mostly at face value: They ensure that the study makes sense as it’s described. We do something else: We check everything, and try to ferret out any potential biases in reported patterns of digits, statistical impossibilities, inconsistencies between what researchers said they’d do and what they actually did, and plagiarized sentences or paragraphs. And we often find fatal flaws hidden behind a veil of two-dollar words and statistical jargon.The ivermectin literature has been no exception. Over the past six months, we’ve examined about 30 studies of the drug’s use for treating or preventing COVID-19, focusing on randomized studies, or nonrandomized ones that have been influential, with at least 100 participants. We’ve reached out directly to the authors of these studies to discuss our findings, sometimes engaging in lengthy back-and-forths; when appropriate, we’ve sent messages to the journals in which studies have been published. In our opinion, a bare minimum of five ivermectin papers are either misconceived, inaccurate, or otherwise based on studies that cannot exist as described. One study has already been withdrawn on the basis of our work; the other four very much should be.[Read: Scientific publishing is a joke]In the withdrawn study, a team in Egypt compared outcomes among COVID-19 patients who did and did not receive ivermectin—but, for the latter group, they included deaths that had occurred before the study began. (According to the journal Nature, the lead author “defended the paper” in an email, and claimed that the withdrawal took place without his knowledge. He did not respond to an inquiry from The Atlantic.) Other papers also have egregious flaws. Researchers in Argentina said they recruited participants from hospitals that had no record of having participated in the research, and then blamed mistakes on a statistician who claimed never to have been consulted. A few studies show clear evidence of severe data irregularities. In one from Lebanon, for example, the same section of patient records repeats over and over again in the data set, as if it had been copied and pasted. (An author on that paper conceded that the data were flawed, and claimed to have requested a retraction.)All of the above may not sound that bad. If five out of 30 trials have serious problems, perhaps that means the other 25 are up to snuff. That’s 83 percent! You might be tempted to think of these papers as being like cheaply made light bulbs: Once we’ve discarded the duds with broken filaments, we can just use the “good” ones.That’s not how any of this works. We can locate obvious errors in a research paper only by reanalyzing the numbers on which the paper is based, so it’s likely that we’ve missed some other, more abstract problems. Also, we have only so much time in the day, and forensic peer review can take weeks or months per paper. We don’t pick papers to examine at random, so it’s possible that the data from the 30 papers we chose are somewhat more reliable, on average, than the rest. A better analogy would be to think of the papers as new cars: If five out of 30 were guaranteed to explode as soon as they entered a freeway on-ramp, you would prefer to take the bus.Most problematic, the studies we are certain are unreliable happen to be the same ones that show ivermectin as most effective. In general, we’ve found that many of the inconclusive trials appear to have been adequately conducted. Those of reasonable size with spectacular results, implying the miraculous effects that have garnered so much public attention and digital notoriety, have not.Given all the care that goes into maintaining scientific literature, how did this house of cards acquire planning permission? The answer is that the pandemic has created a very difficult environment for scientific publishing. In early 2020, a hunger for high-quality information arose immediately. How scared of the coronavirus should we be, and how should we behave? How does the virus spread? How dangerous is it? What decisions should governments make? To answer those questions, scientific studies were produced at record pace, peer-reviewed almost immediately after they were submitted or else put into the public domain via preprint as soon as they had been completed. Publishing science is slow; highly contagious diseases are fast.It’s not that, under such conditions, a few bad studies were bound to slip through the net. Rather, there is no net. Peer review, especially when conducted at pandemic speed, does not exert the rather boring scientific scrutiny needed to identify the problems described above. Forensic work like ours is not organized by scientific journals. We do not get paid. We are not employed by universities, hired by governments, or supported by private money to do this. We do it because we feel it should be done.[Read: A credibility crisis in food science]As volunteers, we have no inherent authority. When we ask a research group for access to its original data, in accordance with a long-held standard for maintaining scientific integrity, our requests are commonly refused or ignored. And when we do find what we think are serious anomalies in a given paper, getting the authors, the institutions they work for, or their publication outlets to return our emails tends to be somewhere between challenging and impossible. When we looked at an ivermectin study published over the summer in the Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Medicine, for example, we found a highly unusual pattern of numbers that implied a failure of randomization. We reported this issue to the journal more than three months ago and have heard nothing substantive back. One of the journal’s executive editors in chief, Bo Cui, told The Atlantic that the study “represents the best available evidence at the time of publication and has undergone scientific peer review and editor review before its publication”; he also said that the journal has asked the authors to address “the randomization issue” and that any eventual retraction would come only after “due process, free from coercion or pressure.” The study’s lead author, Morteza Niaee, told The Atlantic via email that the randomization procedure was “completely acceptable and well-performed.”This is a consistent theme in our work. We contact the authors of each paper, along with the journal or preprint service where their work is published, long before these issues are discussed in public. Sometimes, the authors or journals even reply, although these communications rarely result in any kind of investigation, let alone a serious consideration of the issues raised.In this environment, no sinister conspiracy is needed to allow for the construction of an irreparably flawed body of literature. In fact, the suspect quality of the ivermectin/COVID-19 literature may be alarmingly commonplace. Remember, our low estimate is that about 17 percent of the major ivermectin trials are unreliable. John Carlisle, famous in metascientific circles for identifying the most prolific research fraud in the history of medical research—the case of Yoshitaka Fujii, an anesthesiologist who managed to garner an astonishing 183 retractions—reviewed more than 500 trials submitted to the journal Anaesthesia in the three years leading up the pandemic and concluded that 14 percent of them contained false data. A 2012 survey of researchers at five academic medical centers in Belgium reported that 1 percent admitted to having fabricated data in the prior three years, though 24 percent said they had observed a colleague doing so. A meta-analysis on the same topic concluded, similarly, that 2 percent of researchers admit to having engaged in serious misconduct while 14 percent say they have observed it in a colleague.Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, suggested in July that the scientific community is long past due for a reckoning on the prevalence of false data in the literature. “We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary,” he wrote. This is less hostile than it sounds. Smith isn’t saying that everything is fraudulent, but rather that everything should be evaluated starting from a baseline of “I don’t believe you” until we definitely see otherwise. Think of the airport-security workers who assume that you may be carrying contraband or weapons until you prove that you aren’t. The point is not that everyone is armed but that everybody has to go through the machine.Yet it has not yet sunk in to the public consciousness that our system for building biomedical knowledge largely ignores any evidence of widespread misconduct. In other words, the literature on ivermectin may be quite bad—and in being so, it may also be quite unremarkable.If this is the case, how does medical science manage to navigate all the bad research? How have we not returned to the ages of leeches and bloodletting?The secret, again, is simple: Much research is simply ignored by other scientists because it either looks “off” or is published in the wrong place. A huge gray literature exists in parallel to reliable clinical research, including work published in low-quality or outright predatory journals that will publish almost anything for money. Likewise, the authors of fabricated or heavily distorted papers tend to have modest ambitions: The point is to get their work in print and added to their CV, not to make waves. We often say these studies are designed to be “written but not read.”Although some of the papers we examined may claim, for instance, that ivermectin is a perfect COVID-19 prophylactic, they do so based on a smallish study of a few hundred people—and the work is published in journals that during pre-pandemic times would have been deeply obscure. When a group claims to have reviewed, say, 100,000 patient records—and then publishes its dubious results in a high-profile journal—the risks are significant.In a pandemic, when the stakes are highest, the somewhat porous boundary between these publication worlds has all but disappeared. There is no gray literature now: Everything is a magnet for immediate attention and misunderstanding. An unbelievable, inaccurate study no longer has to linger in obscurity; it may bubble over into the public consciousness as soon as it appears online, and get passed around the internet like a lost kitten in a preschool. An instantly forgettable preprint, which would once have been read by only a few pedantic experts, can now be widely shared among hundreds of thousands on social media.And our work will begin all over again.The fact that there is no true institutional vigilance around a research literature that affects the health of nations, that it is necessary for us to do this, is obscene. It is a testament to how badly the scientific commons are managed that their products are fact-checked for the first time by a group of weary volunteers.

There was a time, at the start of the 20th century, when the field of public health was stronger and more ambitious. A mixed group of physicians, scientists, industrialists, and social activists all saw themselves “as part of this giant social-reform effort that was going to transform the health of the nation,” David Rosner, a public-health historian at Columbia University, told me. They were united by a simple yet radical notion: that some people were more susceptible to disease because of social problems. And they worked to address those foundational ills—dilapidated neighborhoods, crowded housing, unsafe working conditions, poor sanitation—with a “moral certainty regarding the need to act,” Rosner and his colleagues wrote in a 2010 paper.A century and a half later, public health has succeeded marvelously by some measures, lengthening life spans and bringing many diseases to heel. But when the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States, it found a public-health system in disrepair. That system, with its overstretched staff, meager budgets, crumbling buildings, and archaic equipment, could barely cope with sickness as usual, let alone with a new, fast-spreading virus.By one telling, public health was a victim of its own success, its value shrouded by the complacency of good health. By a different account, the competing field of medicine actively suppressed public health, which threatened the financial model of treating illness in (insured) individuals. But these underdog narratives don’t capture the full story of how public health’s strength faded. In fact, “public health has actively participated in its own marginalization,” Daniel Goldberg, a historian of medicine at the University of Colorado, told me. As the 20th century progressed, the field moved away from the idea that social reforms were a necessary part of preventing disease and willingly silenced its own political voice. By swimming along with the changing currents of American ideology, it drowned many of the qualities that made it most effective.Public health’s turning point, according to several historical accounts, came after the discovery that infectious illnesses are the work of microbes. Germ theory offered a seductive new vision for defeating disease: Although the old public health “sought the sources of infectious disease in the surroundings of man; the new finds them in man himself,” wrote Hibbert Hill in The New Public Health in 1913. Or, as William Thompson Sedgwick, a bacteriologist and a former president of the American Public Health Association (APHA), put it, “Before 1880 we knew nothing; after 1890 we knew it all.”This revolution in thinking gave public health license to be less revolutionary. Many practitioners no longer felt compelled to deal with sticky, sweeping problems such as poverty, inequity, and racial segregation (or to consider their own role in maintaining the status quo). “They didn’t have to think of themselves as activists,” Rosner said. “It was so much easier to identify individual victims of disease and cure them than it was to rebuild a city.” Public-health leaders even mocked their predecessors’ efforts at social reform, which they saw as inefficient and misguided. Some dismissively billed the impressive work of the sanitarian movement, which had essentially plumbed entire cities, as “a matter of pipes.”As public health moved into the laboratory, a narrow set of professionals associated with new academic schools began to dominate the once-broad field. “It was a way of consolidating power: If you don’t have a degree in public health, you’re not public health,” Amy Fairchild, a historian and the dean of the College of Public Health at Ohio State University, told me. Mastering the new science of bacteriology “became an ideological marker,” sharply differentiating an old generation of amateurs from a new one of scientifically minded professionals, wrote the historian Elizabeth Fee.Hospitals, meanwhile, were becoming the centerpieces of American health care, and medicine was quickly amassing money and prestige by reorienting toward biomedical research. Public-health practitioners thought that by cleaving to the same paradigm, “they could solidify and extend their authority and bring public health up to the same level of esteem and power that medicine was beginning to enjoy,” Fairchild told me.Public health began to self-identify as a field of objective, outside observers of society instead of agents of social change. It assumed a narrower set of responsibilities that included data collection, diagnostic services for clinicians, disease tracing, and health education. Assuming that its science could speak for itself, the field pulled away from allies such as labor unions, housing reformers, and social-welfare organizations that had supported city-scale sanitation projects, workplace reforms, and other ambitious public-health projects. That left public health in a precarious position—still in medicine’s shadow, but without the political base “that had been the source of its power,” Fairchild told me.After World War II, biomedicine lived up to its promise, and American ideology turned strongly toward individualism. Anti-communist sentiment made advocating for social reforms hard—even dangerous—while consumerism fostered the belief that everyone had access to the good life. Seeing poor health as a matter of personal irresponsibility rather than of societal rot became natural.Even public health began to treat people as if they lived in a social vacuum. Epidemiologists now searched for “risk factors,” such as inactivity and alcohol consumption, that made individuals more vulnerable to disease and designed health-promotion campaigns that exhorted people to change their behaviors, tying health to willpower in a way that persists today.This approach appealed, too, to powerful industries with an interest in highlighting individual failings rather than the dangers of their products. Tobacco companies donated to public-health schools at Duke University and other institutions. The lead industry funded lead research at Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities. In this era, Rosner said, “epidemiology isn’t a field of activists saying, ‘God, asbestos is terrible,’ but of scientists calculating the statistical probability of someone’s death being due to this exposure or that one.”In the late 20th century, some public-health leaders began calling for a change. In 1971, Paul Cornely, then the president of the APHA and the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. in public health, said that “if the health organizations of this country have any concern about the quality of life of its citizens, they would come out of their sterile and scientific atmosphere and jump in the polluted waters of the real world where action is the basis for survival.” Some of that change happened: AIDS activists forced the field to regain part of its crusading spirit, while a new wave of “social epidemiologists” once again turned their attention to racism, poverty, and other structural problems.But, as COVID has revealed, the legacy of the past century has yet to release its hold on public health. The biomedical view of health still dominates, as evidenced by the Biden administration’s focus on vaccines at the expense of masks, rapid tests, and other “nonpharmaceutical interventions.” Public health has often been represented by leaders with backgrounds primarily in clinical medicine, who have repeatedly cast the pandemic in individualist terms: “Your health is in your own hands,” said the CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, in May, after announcing that the vaccinated could abandon indoor masking. “Human behavior in this pandemic hasn’t served us very well,” she said this month.If anything, the pandemic has proved what public health’s practitioners understood well in the late 19th and early 20th century: how important the social side of health is. People can’t isolate themselves if they work low-income jobs with no paid sick leave, or if they live in crowded housing or prisons. They can’t access vaccines if they have no nearby pharmacies, no public transportation, or no relationships with primary-care providers. They can’t benefit from effective new drugs if they have no insurance. In earlier incarnations, public health might have been in the thick of these problems, but in its current state, it lacks the resources, mandate, and sometimes even willingness to address them.Public health is now trapped in an unenviable bind. “If it conceives of itself too narrowly, it will be accused of lacking vision … If it conceives of itself too expansively, it will be accused of overreaching,” wrote Lawrence Gostin, of Georgetown University, in 2008. “Public health gains credibility from its adherence to science, and if it strays too far into political advocacy, it may lose the appearance of objectivity,” he argued.But others assert that public health’s attempts at being apolitical push it further toward irrelevance. In truth, public health is inescapably political, not least because it “has to make decisions in the face of rapidly evolving and contested evidence,” Fairchild told me. That evidence almost never speaks for itself, which means the decisions that arise from it must be grounded in values. Those values, Fairchild said, should include equity and the prevention of harm to others, “but in our history, we lost the ability to claim these ethical principles.”This tension has come up over and over again in my reporting. Although the medical establishment has remained an eager and influential participant in policy, public health has become easier than ever to silence. It need not continue in that vein. “Sick-leave policies, health-insurance coverage, the importance of housing … these things are outside the ability of public health to implement, but we should raise our voices about them,” said Mary Bassett, of Harvard, who was recently appointed as New York’s health commissioner. “I think we can get explicit.”Public-health professionals sometimes contend that grand societal problems are beyond the remit of their field. Housing is an urban-planning issue. Poverty is a human-rights issue. The argument goes that “it’s not the job of public health to be leading the revolution,” Goldberg said. But he and others disagree. That attitude emerged because public health moved away from advocacy, and because the professionalization of higher education splintered it off from social work, sociology, and other disciplines. These fragmented fields can more easily treat everyone’s problems as someone else’s problem.The future might lie in reviving the past, and reopening the umbrella of public health to encompass people without a formal degree or a job at a health department. Chronically overstretched workers who can barely deal with STDs or opioid addiction can’t be expected to tackle poverty and racism—but they don’t have to. What if, instead, we thought of the Black Lives Matter movement as a public-health movement, the American Rescue Plan as a public-health bill, or decarceration, as the APHA recently stated, as a public-health goal? In this way of thinking, too, employers who institute policies that protect the health of their workers are themselves public-health advocates.“We need to re-create alliances with others and help them to understand that what they are doing is public health,” Fairchild said. The field in the late 19th century was not a narrow scientific endeavor but one that stretched across much of society. Those same broad networks and wide ambitions are necessary now to deal with the problems that truly define the public’s health.

Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times, has long advocated for a brand of reform conservatism that stands in stark contrast to Trumpism. His latest book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, chronicles his long struggle with Lyme disease.In this week’s conversation, Ross Douthat and Yascha Mounk discuss why the expert consensus sometimes fails, when to listen to outsiders, and whether the failures of the establishment help to explain the rise of populism.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You've just written a book which astounded me, because it shared the fact that you have been very sick for a number of years, and I, as a regular reader of your column, had absolutely no inkling. One of the interesting things about this was your slow discovery of the limits of an establishment consensus, and finding yourself having to rethink what the consensus view is.Ross Douthat: It’s a very interesting thing, in my case, what a painful education you can get in the dynamics of consensus and expertise from having a mysterious chronic illness that nobody knows how to treat. It’s a zone of human experience that is less political than most of the things that you and I write about.Basically, about six years ago, in the spring, my family and I were moving from Washington, DC, to a house in the countryside of Connecticut. And while we were in the process of making the move, I became very, very sick. That was extremely mysterious. I was having terrible body pain, phantom heart attacks, crippling insomnia, this whole extraordinary range of symptoms all around my body. And there was nothing showing up on any kind of blood test to say what was actually wrong with me. After months and months of this—and after we had finally made the move to Connecticut, somehow—I basically figured out that I had what a lot of people in the northeast of the United States know well, which is this condition called Lyme disease. But it's a devastating illness and also an incredibly controversial one, because most people who get sick with it take four to six weeks of antibiotics and feel much better. And then some contested percentage—anywhere from 5 to 25%—doesn't get better. Officially, at that point, the American medical establishment has very little to offer them. Mounk: Does it have little to offer them because it doubts that it’s the bacterium that caused the illness? There's a prevailing consensus, or at least a widespread belief, that this is psychosomatic in some kind of way?Douthat: Right. There are a bunch of different competing theories of what is going on. There is a more scientifically-grounded theory that says that it's not an infection itself—it's just your over-triggered immune system that has cleared the infection, but which can't stop freaking out. In that sense, chronic Lyme disease would be seen as an autoimmune disease. But then there's also, I think, the more casual and widespread view that it’s psychosomatic, that people have talked themselves into the idea that they have an illness that they don't really have. And as you move through the medical system, you get all kinds of different responses from different doctors, but also this sort of confidence in a medical consensus that, in both my research, but also just my personal experiences of being treated, is just wrong, basically.There is, in fact, lots of solid scientific evidence that Lyme disease, like other infections, can persist in the human body, and can be suppressed and flare up and so on. The reality is that there isn't a clear-cut way to treat that kind of condition. But the doctors who do treat chronic Lyme disease essentially use a mixture of antibiotics and other things over extremely long periods of time. They treat for months, or even years. And this is what I ended up doing. Over this very long period of time I was largely incapacitated—except, as you very kindly pointed out, my mind still worked well enough that I continued to write newspaper columns, for better or worse.Mounk: That's a pretty big caveat.Douthat: Yes, right. One of the many strange things was that there was a very long period of time where I was being simultaneously told that my body was fine and my mind was causing my illness, when it was perfectly clear to me that my body was not fine, and that my mind was the only part of me that still worked. Of course, that's not incompatible with certain psychosomatic theories of disease. You can imagine someone who is capable of writing newspaper columns, even as their mind is causing them problems in other ways. But in practice, the experience was a very convincing lesson in the fact that there are situations where something happens in life and you very quickly reach the edge of expert knowledge, the edge of medical consensus. You're dealing with a disease that is literally destroying your life, day by day, and you just have to go beyond that consensus in order to figure out what to do and how to get better.Mounk: I think your experience of Lyme is a really interesting window into these larger dynamics. What do you think explains why the medical establishment ended up holding onto a set of views that you believe were wrong?Douthat: I've thought about that a lot, and I think there are a few dynamics at work. One is essentially that, once you've established any kind of “establishment versus outsider” narrative, it tends to be self-reinforcing. And then, because medical science is bureaucratized, that has downstream consequences. If you narrow the range of things that you're saying count as a particular disease, then you narrow the range of grants that people have, the things that people apply for to study this disease, cases that insurance companies are willing to cover. There are all these feedback loops between the decisions the CDC makes, the decisions that individual doctors make, the decisions that insurance companies make—and they tend to ratify each other in a sort of enclosed circle of accepted knowledge. There are these generational dynamics, which you also see in politics, where there's a set of doctors who treat Lyme disease, and who settled on this initial consensus that you should only treat it for four to six weeks. They became influential figures. A lot of people who I know and talk to who want to change the way Lyme disease is treated assume that it basically changes with generational turnover.Mounk: What about the institutions? There’s this motto, “First, do no harm.” And it seems to me, when I look at our response to the COVID pandemic, that this did a lot of damage. It's still striking to me how long it took us to do human challenge trials [in which healthy volunteers are exposed to a pathogen to learn more about the disease] early in 2021. In the end, we were quite lucky with our vaccines, and we managed to develop them reasonably quickly. But that could have cost months and months of time and tens or hundreds or thousands of lives.Douthat: It's a strange dynamic with the vaccination debate, because on the one hand, we gained the vaccine incredibly quickly... relative to what? Well, the conventional wisdom a few months into the pandemic was that, in part, you have to stress just how fortunate and lucky we were and how well parts of institutional science worked in terms of actually getting them. That being said, the vaccine itself was literally developed—it didn't take a year, it took weeks, right, for the first mRNA vaccines to be developed in some form. You can imagine both things like human challenge trials, and also, in the last few weeks before the vaccines were approved, expedited FDA procedures that could have delivered us vaccination two months early. That could have headed off not just last winter's wave, but part of the Delta wave as well. And that very clearly reflected safety-oriented, bureaucratic healthcare procedures.Mounk: I've been thinking a lot about the usefulness and the limitations of utilitarian—or more broadly, consequentialist—political thought. I wonder whether this sort of deontological principle of “don't do any harm, first of all”, of “safety first”, creates the danger of losing sight of more straightforward, consequentialist considerations. For example: “A human challenge trial might kill some people who voluntarily agreed to take part who otherwise would not have been harmed. But if predictably it will save the lives of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, then we should be able to do that.” Now, I think some of what you've been saying seems sympathetic to that point of view. But I also take you to be somebody who, in general, is not especially consequentialist.Douthat: I'm definitely not a hard utilitarian. At the same time, I think there's a way in which a kind of soft utilitarianism is just an inevitable part of political decision-making. You can't avoid asking “how many people does this help?” versus “how many people does it hurt?” in politics.When I read the bioethical objections to challenge trials, I can understand where they're coming from. The idea of the government paying people to potentially harm themselves is obviously morally questionable. At the same time, the same people who hold those views tend to be extremely supportive of all kinds of COVID-era interventions that severely limit the liberties of other people, and do potential damage of various kinds to people who don't have any say in the matter. It seems to me intuitively implausible that it is wrong to pay a healthy person to try a vaccine in the context of a global pandemic, but that it is fine to, for instance, close my childrens’ school for nine months, with all the potential damage that that inflicts on many people's lives for the same general goal of reducing overall death rates.Mounk: We do seem to be in an era in which the belief in consensus and science, and in the political establishment, is becoming increasingly polarized. We seem to have a tribe of people who say we must always trust the prevailing consensus in a way that actually can itself be unscientific. I have become, I think, more attuned to some of the failings of institutions and expert consensus over the course of the pandemic. But I'm also aware of this as a huge danger—everybody starting to freelance epistemically, making up their own views on the basis of much more limited evidence and much less time investment than the experts possess.Douthat: It's a really, really hard problem. And I feel like we witness the challenge of resolving it every day on the internet. I'm not going to claim to have a perfect solution. Here are a couple of ideas, though. One idea: you want there to be a distinction that people bear in mind between theoretical and practical knowledge. Maybe those are the wrong terms, but let me try and draw out the distinction. Take something like the COVID lab-leak hypothesis, which for a long time was considered a bizarre conspiracy theory that social media networks were supposed to censor if anyone brought it up. And then, suddenly, it became an acceptable part of the discourse. There is a form of expertise about the nature of viruses, and what a virus looks like if it might have been engineered in a laboratory, versus what kind of virus looks like it was just transmitted from a bat to a human being—I, as a decently-educated generalist, am never going to have that expertise unless I shift all of my focus to just trying to understand that particular issue. You have to defer to some kind of expertise. When experts disagree, you may not necessarily be able to choose between them. But there’s the question of whether the pattern by which COVID-19 entered the world in Wuhan, and spread from Wuhan to China and the rest of the world, looks kind of suspicious—that's not a question that you need a degree in molecular biology to assess. The fact that this outbreak happens next door to a research facility that is conducting research on these kinds of diseases, and also a long way away from the places where the most likely animal-to-human transmission would have happened; and the fact that the Chinese government has behaved really suspiciously around it—all of this is knowledge that is readily available to a reasonably thoughtful layperson looking at the world. I do not write columns claiming to be an expert in exactly the way that an infectious disease spreads. But as a generalist and a citizen, I still have the right to opinions about how you strike the balance between liberty and safety and those kinds of things.It may seem like people who step outside the expert consensus and become anti-establishment are just rejecting the idea of authority. But in many cases, they just seem to be searching for an alternative authority. And what often seems to happen is that you have an expert consensus—that consensus suddenly changes or gets something wrong, or it swings wildly from saying “don't use masks” to “always use masks.” Some people say, “Alright, this authority’s discredited, now I'm going to go in search of a different authority”—but then they end up subjecting themselves to an outsider authority or an outsider consensus that gets all kinds of things wrong, itself. It requires a certain kind of work to situate yourself outside of, or between, circles of authority.Mounk: Do you think that skepticism of experts has played into things like the Brexit vote in Britain, and the rise of Donald Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil, or Modi in India? There are two versions of the story. In one, the experts did get a lot of important things wrong, and that's what gave an opening to those trying to rebel against the status quo. And then there's a slightly different way of thinking about this, which rejects that there is any amount of serious establishment failure that helps to explain the strange political convulsions we've gone through in the last decade.Douthat: I'm very much in the first camp. In the second camp, you get different versions of the argument ranging from figures like Tom Nichols to Anne Applebaum, who tend to stress that there's a kind of resentment of meritocracy, resentment of intelligence, resentment of experts—that this is an ineradicable part of human nature, which just happened to leverage some contingent events in order to gain power in places from Hungary to Washington, DC. I agree that even in a perfectly run technocracy there will be resentment of experts which will feed into politics in some way and create the possibility for convulsions. But the truth of the matter is that I went to college in the late 1990s and came of age in a post-Cold War era of peak expert confidence. You went to college and you had the sense that you didn't even have to take an economics class because Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan had figured out how to manage the global economy. There was this unipolar moment where the world was gradually democratizing and getting richer, and American military power could help push countries along that path when necessary. The US economy was doing really well. US military interventions under Bill Clinton had seemed to go reasonably well.The next fifteen years of my adulthood featured a disastrous response to 9/11. Then you had the global financial crisis—there were some experts who saw it coming, but not very many. You had the Eurozone convulsions that followed the financial crisis, where the expert consensus about fiscal and monetary policy seemed to be disproven by events. And then lurking behind them you had this expert-blessed opening to China that was supposed to deliver liberalization to China and greater prosperity for both the US and East Asia. Yet it delivered increased geopolitical power without liberalization. And in the US, it turned out that while there were winners and losers from the opening to China, the losers were more numerous than a lot of economists had perceived. I could go on, but that's a fair catalog of the major problems and crises of the last fifteen years where the expert consensus was not a reliable guide to what was going to happen and what could go wrong. And I think it's not surprising that out of that, you would get a populist reaction.Mounk: How do you hold experts, established institutions, and politicians to account without jumping to the opposite conclusion, which is that all of these people are corrupt and in it for themselves?Douthat: I'm not particularly optimistic about this. I think that we are in part living through a dynamic that was very accurately predicted by the British writer Michael Young, who coined the term “meritocracy.” He wrote this somewhat satirical book called The Rise of the Meritocracy that imagined a future where you have politics polarized between a very intelligent but out of touch technocratic elite, and this populist alternative that had legitimate grievances, but couldn't find the leadership to express itself effectively, let alone to govern the country. I think that really is the dynamic of Western politics.In some cases, very literally, you have these movements like the gilets jaunes in France that have no leaders at all, and who have this array of grievances that span the political spectrum, many of which are reasonable, but which don't condense into a governing program. Or you have figures like Trump and other populist leaders who sometimes manage to take power but are fundamentally grifters, rather than figures trying to translate populist grievance into governance. But I think right now, you would have to say that Boris Johnson has been the most effective Western politician in terms of channeling populism without being consumed by it. It's hard to see figures who embody a populist alternative, while also channeling that back towards effective governance. One reason that conservatives like Viktor Orbán in Hungary so much is that he seems really ruthlessly effective, in a way that other populist leaders aren't. The problem is he's also, as far as I can tell, terribly corrupt. So where is the non-corrupt, highly competent, civic-minded, populist leader in the Western world? I don't have an answer for you.Mounk: How do you assess the American political situation now, and how dangerous do you think Donald Trump is to democracy at this point?Douthat: Trump is dangerous, but not as dangerous as you think. The way that Trump's narrative of voter fraud has played out and taken hold means that, in spite of having lost the election to Joe Biden, he is clearly the front-runner for the Republican nomination next time. And the biggest danger with Trump is a more extreme version of what we saw play out in the last electoral interregnum in the US—where he loses the next election very, very closely, and he or the Republicans who support him find a way to basically pitch the country into a constitutional crisis, where a state refuses to report its electors, or sends dueling slates of electors to Congress. I don't think that's at all the most likely scenario for 2024. I think it's more likely that the Democrats win easily enough that this isn't an issue, or Trump runs again and wins, or someone else is the Republican nominee. What I struggle with are the arguments that American democracy will collapse and Trump will become an Orbán or Erdoğan-style figure—if not worse, a dictator—and America will become a fascist country. Those scenarios still strike me as very, very remote. Trump is a fascinating but weak figure relative to other populist strongmen who have taken power, and I think that liberals tend to underestimate their own power.Mounk: What would a second Trump term in office actually look like?Douthat: My maximally provocative view is that Trump would be more dangerous to American democracy by losing the election incredibly narrowly in 2024 than he would be by winning it. That is to say, I find the constitutional crisis scenario, in some ways, more worrisome than another four Trump years, which may be totally naive and foolish of me. As president, Trump didn't really have a program that he wanted to pursue—yes, he had certain ideas on trade, immigration, and so on that he would reach for, but Trump mostly wanted to be president: to just exist and occupy the presidency and dominate the media conversation. Don't get me wrong, if he is elected again, there will be a kind of cultural meltdown in America that would be very dangerous, and I definitely don't want to live through it. But in terms of consolidating power in an illiberal manner, I'm just really skeptical. Trump was already president during the greatest opportunity for consolidating illiberal presidential power that anyone's had since 9/11, which was a global pandemic that started in China—Trump's alleged great enemy. And instead, he just followed the libertarian wing of his party, and basically just downplayed it and tried not to take emergency measures. It doesn't seem to me that an aging, instant lame duck Trump—who would undoubtedly lose the House and the Senate in the next midterm election—would have this appetite for consolidating power that he did not successfully manifest during his first four years. You would have to tell me more about who his vice president is, who his key advisors are in that scenario. Could there be illiberal-leaning Republicans who use a second Trump term to consolidate their own position as leaders of the party? That, I think, would be the more important place to focus, rather than Trump. Trump is not going to pass a constitutional amendment to allow himself to run for a third term. There are things that are just not going to happen in a second Trump term that could happen in a different country. I'm sure I haven't persuaded you not to worry. But I hope that's a provocative place to end.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: https://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Born in Israel, Harari, 45, gained his PhD at the University of Oxford. His bestselling books are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow; 21 Lessons for the 21st Century; and Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 1. Next week he publishes Sapiens: A Graphic History Volume 2 – The Pillars of Civilization. He lives with his husband near Tel Aviv, and lectures in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Now. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations to reality better than when I was 20 or 10.

What is your greatest fear?

That we will destroy our humanity without even realising what we’ve lost.

What is your earliest memory?

My earliest historical memories are from the first Lebanon war and from the Falklands war when I was six. I remember watching the sinking of the ship HMS Sheffield on the TV. It left a very deep impression.

Which living person do you most admire and why?

On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Every trait has positive and negative potential. The key is to learn how to use it. For example, anger and justice are the same trait – you become angry or you seek justice.

What is your most treasured possession?

My body.

Describe yourself in three words

I don’t think that anybody can be described in three words.

What would your superpower be?

Being able to observe things as they really are.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

It’s difficult for me to smile, especially on command. In almost all my photos I look a bit grumpy.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

I would save the coral reef – it’s not extinct but it’s on the way.

What is your most unappealing habit?

I am not very good at thanking people around me. I will take it for granted that they know I appreciate them.

What scares you about getting older?

Losing my mental abilities.

Which book are you ashamed not to have read?

None. I don’t think any book is a must-read.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Loved.

What is the worst thing anyone’s ever said to you?

I’ve spent years in meditation letting go of these things and I think I’ve succeeded.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

I don’t feel guilty about pleasure.

What do you owe your parents?

A lot of gratitude. They were always there for me. Sometimes they didn’t know how to help or what to do, but they always did their best, even when I was young and threw a lot of shit in their direction.

What or who is the greatest love of your life?

My husband, Itzik. Even though we come from the same small town in Israel, we met on one of the first dating apps 20 years ago. We married in Toronto in 2010

What is the worst job you’ve ever done?

When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.

What has been your biggest disappointment?

That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.

When did you last cry, and why?

When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.

When’s the last time you changed your mind about something significant?

This year, with Covid. I am a big believer in the need for global cooperation on major problems, and watching the world over the past year made me realise it’s going to be much, much harder than I thought, and maybe even impossible.

What is the closest you’ve ever come to death?

I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

That everything changes, people are never satisfied and all identities are fiction.

What happens when we die?

I have written about it quite a lot. I think that consciousness is not an enduring entity but we have the feeling that it is: that consciousness now is the same as it was a minute ago, or a day ago and a year ago, but in truth it is not at all clear what really links the consciousness of one moment to the consciousness of the next. If we could understand that, we would also understand what happens when we die. I certainly don’t understand it, so I don’t know.

Tell us a secret

The people who run the world don’t understand it.

But after I fist-pumped and we embraced, after I went out into the rain to take our daughters to their nursery school, my mind and fingers kept circling back to the discomfort in my neck. So I went to a walk-in clinic in the heart of Capitol Hill and let a young internist take a look.

“It’s just a boil,” he said after a cursory inspection. “Nothing to worry about.”

Nothing to worry about was exactly what I wanted to hear, but the next two weeks were less soothing. My neck began to feel intermittently stiff and painful and I developed what felt like a … vibration in my head. On the afternoon before I was supposed to take a trip to Europe, there was a stabbing sensation around my teeth and discomfort sharp enough to call a headache. My mother-in-law arrived that evening, to help with the kids while I was gone. While she and my wife went out to eat, I put my daughters to bed and made dinner for myself. It was my last ordinary meal.

By the time my wife and her mother got home, my whole body had gone haywire somehow, as though someone had twisted dials randomly in all my systems. I had pain all over my chest and bowels, a gagging feeling in my throat, a vibratory sensation everywhere. I searched online for “heart attack” and “stroke” and “panic attack,” but nothing seemed to fit. I tried to sleep, but I felt like a tuning fork on the mattress. Finally at 5 a.m. I went to the emergency room.

While I was there the wave receded. The blood tests came back normal, the doctors murmured about stress, and around noontime I went home again, canceling my trip but hoping that it was just a mysterious episode that would quickly pass.

The next day I felt the way you feel in the last days of a lingering fever — dizzy and disoriented, my body slightly disassociated from itself. Except this feeling persisted no matter what I did. The pain that had started in my neck was jumping around — now stabbing sensations in my spine, now prickling and tingling in my extremities. And beneath it was a feeling of invasion, of something inside my veins and muscles that wasn’t supposed to be there.

By James Pethokoukis and Jamie Beard
Is the future of clean energy right beneath our feet? By tapping into the infrastructure and expertise of the oil and gas industry, geothermal energy could deliver a scalable fossil fuel alternative. On a recent episode of “Political Economy,” Jamie Beard discussed the exciting future of geothermal, its environmental implications, and the role government can play in furthering this technology.
Jamie is the founder and executive director of the Geothermal
Entrepreneurship Organization at the University of Texas at Austin.
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You
can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.
Pethokoukis: Could
you describe the suite of technologies
we are talking about with geothermal?
A lot of geothermal in the world that exists today is where
geothermal resources are close to the surface and have surface manifestations.
That’s typically called “hydrothermal geothermal,” and it’s been
around for well more than 100 years. But that’s not the only option for
geothermal anymore. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve had some pretty
significant technological leaps: the shale boom and the directional drilling
technologies and fracking technologies that came out of that, but also offshore
exploration and development.
So if you take those technologies and you leverage them and
you apply them to geothermal, we can actually enable all kinds of geothermal
concepts now. We’re engineering the subsurface to mimic Iceland, for instance, with
the goal of being able to do that anywhere in the world that we need energy. And
then we’ve got advanced geothermal systems — or closed loop systems —where fracturing is not used. Directional drilling technologies are
used instead. You’re essentially drilling radiators into rock and harvesting
heat that way. There are a lot of ways these two types of things are combined
to create different systems, as well, so a lot of innovation is happening in
this space.
A view of the power lines from Nastaveni geothermal power station near Reykjavik, Iceland.REUTERS/Ints Kalnins
What are the particular advantages of this technology
over both what we already have and the next generation of nuclear? 
For one, geothermal is baseload. It’s 24/7. You don’t need
energy storage for geothermal. That is a big deal. Having a clean baseload
source of energy in the very near term is an exciting prospect. Geothermal also
has a tiny footprint compared to other renewables. If you look at sources of
clean energy, the geothermal footprint, comparatively megawatt to megawatt, is
about 1 percent of that of solar and wind. Geothermal per megawatt also creates
three or four times more jobs than other renewables do.
Next-gen nuclear is exciting, but here’s the deal: It’s
really expensive. Just to get it ready, we’re talking about just massive
investments of billions of dollars. For geothermal to be ready for prime time —
meaning we’re getting teams into the field, getting technologies demonstrated,
full-scale, get oil and gas engaged and start scaling this thing — it’s a drop
in a bucket comparatively in terms of what’s needed for investments. About
maybe a half a billion dollars worth of field deployments might get us to a
place for geothermal where we could have a scalable concept ready to go, and
we’d be off on another shale boom, but this time for clean energy.
What do you tell people who are concerned about the
climate, but they’re also worried about the environmental impact of geothermal?
I think we need to have eyes wide open when it comes to the
supply chains that we’re leaning on for renewable energy investment and
development. In particular, when it comes to lithium mining and energy storage,
I don’t think that the world understands the impact and what that’s going to
mean if we mine much as we need to mine over the next two decades to meet
current climate goals, just in terms of energy storage, not to mention
rare-Earths that are needed to develop solar and wind.
Seismicity is something that we need to pay a lot of
attention to as geothermal development scales and goes global, because we don’t
want to be producing man-made earthquakes with our power plants. So I think
this is an “eyes wide open” moment in terms of translating oil and gas
knowledge from fracking into geothermal. When I step back and look at our
choices, in terms of clean energy technologies, would I rather risk-mitigate
seismicity and do that in a measured, standardized way, than mine a ton of
lithium and rare earth? Yeah. I would rather do that because I think it’s a
manageable risk that has less impact on the environment.
Does this sector need more government research? Does it
need deregulation?
I think there are two major opportunities. Most of the low-hanging fruit, at least in the United States, for geothermal development is on federal land, and it’s currently harder to develop a geothermal project on federal land than it is an oil and gas project. Geothermal development is subject to NEPA and it does not have a categorical exclusion like oil and gas development does.
Should the government invest more money in geothermal? Of
course. Geothermal has been under-resourced forever. It has never enjoyed the
subsidies or appropriations that any other energy source has gotten,
specifically in renewables, by orders of magnitude. I’m not sure we should be
dumping a lot of dollars right now into lab based research. It would be helpful
to do some, but the high impact stuff right now for geothermal is funding teams
into the field. We need demonstrations.
If we brought you back 15 years from now, what will have
gone wrong, if none of this has happened?
In my view, I think we have a narrow window to get oil and gas excited about doing this. If we miss that window, and oil and gas decides to pivot into solar and wind and hydrogen and doesn’t really pay much attention to geothermal, geothermal is never going to scale fast enough to be competitive with solar and wind. It will always be behind. So it will be irrelevant, eventually. In my view, the only way to catch up and scale this fast enough is getting the oil and gas industry engaged and excited. If that doesn’t happen soon, it doesn’t matter if it ever happens — it’ll never happen. My urgency is to not only engage with oil and gas about it, but also try to get them into the field doing projects so they can get excited internally about doing it. Not just invest in startups on the side and watch, but actually get into the field and get some learning. I view failure as failure to attract the perfect suitor to scale this industry in time to make it happen.
Learn more: 5 questions for Arthur Turrell on fusion energy | 5 questions for Ramez Naam on the viability of solar and wind energy to power the future | 5 questions for Nate Morris on entrepreneurship, innovation, and environmentalism
The post 5 questions for Jamie Beard on the potential of geothermal energy appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

During the Arab Spring, I would come back to the United States and share my impressions with American audiences. The Middle East was confusing, after all, even to those who lived there. I wanted to draw a contrast, because the contrast—at least then—seemed quite real.

Living in the Middle East, I was struck by something that felt, quite literally, foreign. (Perhaps that made sense. I was ultimately an outsider, as my Egyptian relatives often reminded me). A new, democratic politics had emerged in a number of Arab countries, but the divisions seemed raw and existential in a way that intrigued as well as frightened me. A lot was at stake, and in retrospect we now know that too much at stake.

This had not been my experience with American politics, which was reassuring in its smallness. Americans had their differences, to be sure, but they appeared to agree on the fundamentals. There was both a founding moment and myth. There was a constitution, not quite sacred but close to it. Drawing on that shared history, we could pay tribute to a set of distinctly American ideals and ideas, even as we disagreed on their precise application. Because the country’s foundations weren’t in question, citizens were freed to debate policy—whether taxes, healthcare, or the deficit. It was possible to care deeply about things that weren’t existential, and most things weren’t.

Those times seemed quaint, and it's remarkable just how quickly the picture I describe above changed. I was reminded of this speed while reading the late Roger Scruton's 2006 essay "Limits to Democracy" the other day. 2006 really was a different era. George W. Bush had propelled the question of democracy to the center of public debate, but this time it wasn't our democracy but theirs that we were debating.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases an annual report every year on the “Highlights of Women’s Earnings.” Since the BLS report actually analyzes both men’s and women’s earnings, one might ask why the report isn’t simply titled more accurately “Highlights of Earnings in America”? Here’s the opening paragraph from the most recent BLS report “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2020” that was released last month (September 2021):

In 2020, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings that were 82.3 percent of those of male full-time wage and salary workers. In 1979, the first year for which comparable earnings data are available, women’s earnings were 62 percent of men’s. Most of the growth in women’s earnings relative to men’s occurred in the 1980s (when the women’s-to-men’s ratio went from 64 percent to 70 percent) and in the 1990s (when the ratio went from 72 percent to 77 percent). Since 2004, the women’s-to-men’s earnings ratio has remained in the 80 to 83 percent range.

How do we explain the fact that women working full-time last year earned 82.3 cents for every dollar men earned according to the BLS? Here’s how the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) explains it:

The wage gap exists, in part, because many women and people of color are still segregated into a few low-paying occupations. Part of the wage gap results from differences in education, experience, or time in the workforce. But a significant portion cannot be explained by any of those factors; it is attributable to discrimination. In other words, certain jobs pay less because they are held by women and people of color.

Let’s investigate the claim that the gender pay gap is a result of discrimination by looking at some of the data on wages and hours worked by gender and by marital status and age in the BLS report for 2020:
1. Among full-time workers (those working 35 hours or more per week), men were more likely than women to work a greater number of hours (see Table 5).
a. For example, 19.6% of men working full-time worked 41 or more hours per week in 2020, compared to only 10.2% of women who worked those hours, meaning that men working full-time last year were nearly twice as likely as women to work 41 hours per work or more. 
b. Further, men working full-time were also 2.3 times more likely than women to work 60+ hour weeks: 4.3% of men worked 60 hours per week or more in 2020 compared to only 1.9% of women who worked those hours.
c. Also, women working full-time were more than twice as likely as men to work shorter workweeks of 35 to 39 hours per week: 7.7% of full-time women worked those hours in 2020, compared to only 3.6% of men who did so.
What’s especially interesting is that men working 35-39 hours per week last year earned only 92.4% of what women earned working those same hours ($600 median weekly earnings for men vs. $649 for women), i.e., there was a 7.6% gender earnings gap in favor of female workers for that cohort. Using the standard political and gender rhetoric of groups like the National Committee on Pay Equity, couldn’t that earnings premium for women be mostly explained by gender discrimination against men in the labor market for employees working 35-39 hours per week? That is, to be consistent shouldn’t the claim here be that “certain jobs pay less because they are held by men”?
2. Another way to adjust for the significant gender difference in average hours worked is to compare the “median hourly earnings of wage and salary workers paid hourly rates” instead of the “median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers.” In 2020, the median hourly earnings of women ($15.22) were 85.7% of the median hourly earnings of men ($17.75), representing a gender hourly earnings gap of 14.3%. Therefore, nearly 20% (3.4 percentage points) of the 17.7% gender weekly earnings gap disappears just by comparing median hourly earnings instead of median weekly earnings.  
3. Although not reported by the BLS, I can estimate using its data that the average workweek for full-time workers last year was 41.3 hours for women and 42.8 hours for men. Therefore, the average man employed full-time worked 1.50 more hours per week in 2020 compared to the average woman, which totals to an average of an additional 75 male work hours per year compared to the average full-time female worker.
Comment: Because men work more hours on average than women, some of the raw earnings gap naturally disappears just by simply controlling for the number of hours worked per week, an important factor not even mentioned by groups like the National Committee on Pay Equity. For example, women earned 82.3% of median male earnings for all workers working 35 hours per week or more in 2020, for a raw, unadjusted pay gap of 17.7% for all full-time workers. But for those workers with a 40-hour workweek (more than three-quarters of all full-time female workers), women earned 87.4% of median male earnings, for a smaller pay gap of only 12.6% (see chart and Table 1). Therefore, once we control only for one variable – hours worked – and compare men and women both working 40-hours per week in 2020, almost one-third (5.1 percentage points) of the raw 17.7% pay gap reported by the BLS for full-time workers disappears.
4. The BLS also reports in Table 1 that for young workers ages 16-24 years, women earned 94.7% of the median earnings of their male counterparts working full-time reflecting a 5.3% gender earnings gap for that age cohort last year. Once again, controlling for just a single important variable – age – we find that more than two-thirds (12.4 percentage points) of the overall 17.7% unadjusted raw earnings gap for all workers disappears for young workers.
5. The BLS reports that for full-time single workers who have never married, women earned 94.0% of men’s earnings in 2020, which is a gender earnings gap of only 6% (see Table 1 and chart above), compared to an overall unadjusted pay gap of 17.7% for all workers in that group. When controlling for marital status and comparing the earnings of unmarried men and unmarried women, two-thirds (11.7 percentage points) of the raw 17.7% earnings gap is explained by just one variable (among many): marital status.
6. In Table 7, the BLS reports that for full-time single workers with no children under 18 years old at home (includes never married, divorced, separated, and widowed), women’s median weekly earnings of $819 were 93.7% of the weekly earnings of $874 for their male counterparts in that cohort (see chart above). For this group, once you control for marital status and children at home, we can explain nearly two-thirds (11.4 percentage points) of the unadjusted 17.7% gender earnings gap.
7. From Table 1 in the BLS report, we find that for married workers with a spouse present, women working full-time earned only 78.5% of what married men with a spouse present earned working full-time in 2020 (see chart). In contrast, female workers who have never been married earned only 6% less on average than their male counterparts, which is only one-third of the 17.7% unadjusted gender earnings gap. Therefore, BLS data show that marriage has a significant and negative effect on women’s earnings relative to men’s, but we can realistically assume that marriage is a voluntary lifestyle choice, and it’s that personal decision, not necessarily labor market discrimination, that contributes to at least some of the gender earnings gap for married full-time workers with a spouse present.
8. Also from Table 7, married women (with spouse present) working full-time with children under 18 years at home earned 78.5% of what married men (spouse present) earned working full-time with children under 18 years (see chart). Once again, we find that marriage and motherhood have a significantly negative effect on women’s earnings; but those lower earnings don’t necessarily result from labor market discrimination, they more likely result from personal family choices about careers, family-friendly and flexible workplaces, commute time, child care, and the number of hours worked.
Bottom Line: When the BLS reports that women working full-time in 2020 earned 82.3% of what men earned working full-time, that is very much different from saying that women earned 82.3% of what men earned for doing exactly the same work while working the exact same number of hours in the same occupation, with exactly the same educational background and exactly the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and with exactly the same marital and family (e.g., number of children) status. As shown above, once we start controlling individually for the many relevant factors that affect earnings, e.g., hours worked, age, marital status, and having children, most of the raw earnings differential disappears. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for all of the relevant variables simultaneously, we would likely find that those variables would account for nearly 100% of the unadjusted, raw earnings differential of 17.7% for women’s earnings compared to men as reported by the BLS. Discrimination, to the extent that it does exist, would likely account for a very small portion of the raw 17.7% gender earnings gap.
For example, a comprehensive 2009 study from the Department of Labor (“An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women”) came to the following conclusion (emphasis added):

This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

Final thought: Consider these definitions:
Wage: A payment of money for labor or services usually according to contract and paid on an hourly, daily, or piecework basis.
Earnings: Money obtained in return for labor or services.
Using the definition of “wage” above, the claim of a “gender wage gap” implies for many (like the NCPE) that women are paid lower hourly or daily wages than men when they are working side-by-side for the same company doing the exact same job with the same educational and work backgrounds.
Language and words are important. And that’s why I think it’s important and more accurate to refer to a “gender earnings gap” rather than a “gender pay gap” or “gender wage gap.” Note that the NCPE uses the terms “gender wage gap” and “wage gap” 12 times on just the Q&A page of its website and more than 20 times on its main website. The Department of Labor study also used the term “raw wage gap.” The underlying assumption with that language (“gender wage gap”) is that there is one hourly (or weekly or monthly) wage paid to men and a lower hourly (or weekly or monthly) wage paid to women working side-by-side their male counterparts doing the exact same job when both have the exact same educational and work backgrounds, etc.
Switching to using the term “gender earnings gap” broadens the concept of earnings differentials by gender, and more accurately allows for the reality that women are usually making the same hourly (or weekly) wage as men doing the exact same job. But men often “earn” more on average than women because men are working longer hours on average, performing different jobs than women, working in jobs that are physically more rigorous (construction), working in jobs that are more dangerous (logging) and in more hostile work environments (oil rigs workers), involve longer commute times and may be less flexible and less family friendly. So I think it’s time to completely scrap the term “gender wage gap” and replace it with the more accurate “gender earnings gap.” Unfortunately, a Google search reveals that there are 30 times more results for the term “gender wage gap” (more than 2 million results) than for “gender earnings gap” (62,000).
 
The post Details in BLS report suggest that the ‘gender earnings gap’ can be explained by age, marital status, children, hours worked, etc. appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

OnlySubs Episode 66: Toxic Femininity and Wokeness as a Filtering Mechanism is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
Locals
Patreon
ThinkSpot
Though it’s risky enough to say so, it’s beyond obvious to most who aren’t fettered by political correctness that the Woke movement operates on toxically feminine energy; that is, mean girls stuff. The question people have is why. One reason is that it’s obviously attractive to young women for some set of reasons, but this only moves the question one step further back. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I explore the idea that the Woke ideology provides young women in a deregulated sexual market with a powerful tool for erecting a filtering mechanism and is therefore attractive to (some of) them, whom it advantages. This observation follows from a fairly well-established belief in the (evolutionary) psychology of dating and human courtship that suggests that males tend to be evaluated for mate-worthiness in terms of their “approach mechanism” while females are evaluated according to their “filtering mechanism.” Being a Wokescold is a very powerful filtering mechanism that even allows for creating a whole new pecking order of female dominance through social and psychological manipulation. Join me for this controversial little exploration.
Previous episodes of OnlySubs can be found here.
The post OnlySubs: Toxic Femininity and Wokeness as a Filtering Mechanism appeared first on New Discourses.

Mixing and matching vaccine brands is officially on the table in the United States. But that option might soon be billed as the B-list choice.Last night, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky gave the green light for Moderna and Johnson & Johnson booster shots, the long-awaited follow-up to a similar recommendation given to the Pfizer formulation last month. As the endorsement stands, all who are eligible for an additional jab—which now includes tens of millions more Americans—should be able to pick whatever booster brand they like. But discussions among a panel of experts who advised Walensky hinted at a catch: The agency has yet to issue its final clinical guidance on who, specifically, might want to boost with what—and an early draft of the recommendations suggests that Americans “should” stick with the same brand they got in their first go-round.Switching to a different shot would be allowed, as was authorized by the FDA on Wednesday; per the draft CDC guidance, people may opt to mix and match based on availability or preference, after assessing their individual risks and benefits. (As a reminder, the FDA’s authorizations tell Americans what vaccines they’re allowed to get. The CDC follows that up with advice on what folks should do with those options.)The CDC’s stance on mixing and matching, then, could end up being a relatively soft one, neither extolment nor excoriation. That might also be the most practical course of action for the agency, given the variables involved and the lack of clear-cut evidence that could untangle them. But the wishy-washiness of Pick whatever is confusing as hell.Consider, first, the sheer number of choices now available to booster-eligible Americans (a limited set of mRNA recipients, and all folks who got J&J). With three approved or authorized vaccines, the simplest mix-and-match matrix has nine possible combos. But that’s an underestimate of the absolutely unmanageable number of variations therein. Moderna’s third shots, for instance, come in full doses for immunocompromised people and half doses for everyone else. The timing of additional shots might matter, too: People who get a second injection of J&J half a year after their first seem to churn out more antibodies than people who wait just two months. Clearly, inoculation isn’t just about which vaccines you’re getting. It’s about which vaccines, when, how much, how often, in what order, on and on and on—an absolute multiverse of choices. Add to that the inevitable differences among individual immune systems, and just start to imagine the terror of the resulting flow chart. Against that chaotic-evil backdrop, the CDC’s interim preference for homogeneity has a certain appeal—even if it sets up a slightly judgy juxtaposition between what’s by the book and, essentially, what the mavericks might do, if they feel like it.[Read: Should you mix and match your booster shot?]Then again, maybe what the CDC says is, at this point, kind of moot. Millions of people have already boosted, some of them ahead of eligibility. Now, with even more choices available, “people who care will vote with their feet,” Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician at Bellevue Hospital, in New York, told me. That may in the CDC guidance is easy to grab and run with. For anyone who has made up their mind, in any direction, the agency’s relatively hands-off approach isn’t all that useful (or hard to ignore).Cross-vaccine boosting can certainly come with perks. People won’t have to stress about matching brands across doses; individuals in at-risk groups might have the flexibility to avoid rare, shot-specific side effects. The strategy might even be more protective. None of that, though, makes actually selecting a booster any easier. As things stand, the decision requires a small leap of faith, or at least some immunological inference. Data on mixing and matching are still relatively scant, though the early evidence looks promising. A recent National Institutes of Health study found that switching shots seems to juice out antibodies at least as well as, and in some cases quite a bit better than, staying the course with one brand. That seems especially true for the OG J&J crowd: mRNA boosters sent antibody levels soaring, compared with a second helping of J&J. (A caveat: The study boosted with the full Moderna dose, not the half dose that the FDA authorized for non-immunocompromised people.) If that pattern holds, J&J, already the least popular vaccine in the U.S., might become even more of an underdog.That’s not for sure. Gounder is advising caution: The NIH study was small, tracking an imperfect proxy for protection in fewer than 500 people for a very limited period of time. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious-disease physician and researcher at Emory University, in Atlanta, is a bit more optimistic, and told me that she finds the mix-and-match data compelling enough to offer the strategy. The trends in the NIH study, she pointed out, seem well in line with the months of data that have come out of places such as the United Kingdom, which adopted a hybrid approach early on, albeit for original doses and with a different set of brands (Pfizer and AstraZeneca).Ideally, mixing and matching could blur the brand boundaries between vaccinated Americans, effectively collapsing more of us into the same pretty-well-protected pool. (Did you get Pfizer or Moderna? J&J? Who cares?) Or, it could splinter us into infinite subgroups that become ever more difficult to compare.Collecting good data on vaccine responses is getting harder as inoculation becomes more bespoke. With so many Americans now poised to choose their own vaccine adventure—you know, as they may—the differences among regimens might get tougher to pin down. We need that data: What we learn now will—hopefully—help us design better, safer, more efficient vaccine regimens for future generations. But if fewer people embark on similar trajectories, they could get more difficult to group together. Studies might have to be more limited in scope, or work harder to combine data from different parts of the country. That’s not impossible, Saad Omer, a vaccine expert and epidemiologist at Yale, told me. But it does make things “more challenging.”Some of this beta-testing vibe harkens back to last winter, when experts heatedly debated the merits of skipping or delaying second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Certain countries, including the U.K., spaced out the shots; the U.S. and others stuck to the very trim gaps prescribed by trials. The delay was a gamble, since it left people partially protected for longer and sent mixed messages to a frustrated public. But now it looks beneficial. Really, we were all guinea pigs—and this mass round of boosting is slating us for a discombobulation redux.We won’t all be winners; someone always has to be in the group that fares worse. Then again, “worse” is always relative. Anyone who’s playing the booster game is already, technically, fully vaccinated, putting them ahead of the billions around the globe who still are not. Titanji pointed out that more Americans have gotten boosters than people have received first doses in Nigeria, a country with some 200 million residents.​​Even in the U.S., getting more first shots to people remains the bigger priority—that’s how we collectively contain the coronavirus. But the hyper-individualistic American approach to the pandemic is once again nudging each of us to chart our own course. The government has kind of shrugged about mix-and-match boosting, and punted the decision to us: Choose whichever path seems right to you; turn to page 7; hope for the best. Here’s the trick, though—no one’s sure where this chapter ends. Good luck, I guess.

Although most of the discussion surrounding current U.S. port and supply chain bottlenecks has focused on the economy and Americans’ holiday shopping plans, some are using the situation to sell the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package now before Congress. That bill directs nearly $12 billion in taxpayer funding to U.S. seaport infrastructure and billions more in general infrastructure grants for which ports are eligible.*

Given that American ports lag their global peers in terms of both efficiency and size, such advocacy makes some superficial sense. Dig a little deeper, however, and you see that, while U.S. port automation and expansion would surely be worthwhile, the infrastructure bill is not the way to do it – and might actually make things worse.

First, there is little to indicate that the ports need federal (U.S. taxpayer) money. American seaports are not operated by the federal government but are instead owned and managed by state or local boards and authorities. These authorities levy user fees on ships, in addition to receiving state funding, to help support their activities, which often include maintenance and infrastructure projects. As our colleague Chris Edwards has noted, state and local governments have been swimming (pun intended!) in tax revenues in 2021 and have already received tens of billions of dollars in federal pandemic‐​related funds that they didn’t need. State governments and port authorities are thus already more than capable of funding new port infrastructure, and many port authorities are, in fact, doing just this: railroad expansion at the Port of Charleston, for example, has already received over $200 million in funding from the State of South Carolina.

Furthermore, federal support for port infrastructure, usually undertaken by the Army Corps of Engineers, is already funded through Harbor Maintenance Fees (HMFs) on incoming ships. The fees finance dredging and certain maintenance projects on the waterside of the port, with states also contributing a certain percentage of the funds. While the bulk of the infrastructure bill’s proposed port subsidies are allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers, including $4 billion for dredging projects, a September 2020 report from the Congressional Research Service noted that the HMF Trust Fund already has a surplus of over $9 billion. Moreover, recent legislative changes in both the CARES Act and Water Resources Development Act of 2020 have made it easier to disburse funding from the Trust Fund, and altered the distribution formula to distribute more funds to projects at the largest and busiest ports, such as those in backlogged Los Angeles and New York. Even more federal funding for the Army Corps of Engineers is therefore unnecessary (at best), and – even if it were necessary – could be achieved by simply increasing HMFs.

Second, the proposed federal infrastructure spending comes with conditions that have been repeatedly shown to raise costs, lower the quality of work, and delay projects for months or even years. For example—

– The infrastructure bill’s “Buy America” provisions require that most materials used in U.S. transportation projects be produced in the United States. As scholars at Cato have consistently shown, these protectionist restrictions can increase the costs and timing of U.S. infrastructure projects (if not canceling them outright), reduce the quality of inputs or finished projects, and decrease innovation among U.S. firms. Indeed, as our colleague Colin Grabow just noted, the recent Washington, D.C. Metro railcar debacle provides the latest example of Buy American’s many costs and risks.

– Most projects subsidized by the new infrastructure bill also must abide by the Davis‐​Bacon Act (Public‐​Private Partnerships would be exempt), which requires workers on federally funded infrastructure projects to be paid the “prevailing wage” (i.e. union wage) in the area, rather than the market wage. This requirement effectively excludes non‐​union construction workers and firms from working on federal infrastructure projects, despite the fact that only 12.8% of construction workers are unionized. It therefore reduces competition and labor supply, leading to higher costs and potentially lower quality. Indeed, because the “prevailing wage” is often significantly higher than comparable market wages, the Davis‐​Bacon Act can increase the costs of infrastructure projects by as much as 20 percent. No wonder, then, that an August 2021 report from the Congressional Budget Office estimates that repealing the law could save taxpayers $1 billion a year.

– Federal infrastructure projects are further bogged down by National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, which are mandated when federal actions could “significantly affect” the environment – as most port projects surely would. In 2018, NEPA‐​required Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) took an average of 4.5 years to complete, significantly increasing both the cost and time needed to complete infrastructure projects. The Senate infrastructure bill, to its credit, includes reforms aiming to speed up the NEPA process for the most expensive projects (projected to cost over $200 million), but they are mainly aspirational, not mandatory, and haven’t worked in the past.

– Third, all port expansion projects – not merely those funded by federal government – are severely burdened by the Jones Act and the Foreign Dredge Act, which collectively require that any dredging in U.S. waters be undertaken by American‐​built, -owned, -crewed, and -flagged ships. As Grabow explained in May, these restrictions, which many countries don’t have, dramatically limit the ships and workers available to dredge (and thus expand) U.S. ports, thus resulting in “high costs and unnecessarily lengthy timelines for the completion of urgently needed projects.” Eliminating these mandates would therefore speed port expansion projects and further reduce any need for taxpayer‐​funded dredging.

The current supply chain situation certainly merits public attention and government action. However, that action shouldn’t involve throwing even more taxpayer money (with strings attached) at the problem but instead reforming or repealing the many federal policies that burden our port and inland infrastructure systems and make the current situation far worse than it ever needed to be.

*Over $9 billion is allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers for dredging, port expansion, and other infrastructure priorities, with an additional $2.25 billion for the Port Infrastructure Development Program, which provides grants to port authorities, and $25 million for the Marine Highways Program.

Scott Lincicome is a senior fellow in economic studies at CATO. He writes on international and domestic economic issues, including international trade; subsidies and industrial policy; manufacturing and global supply chains; and economic dynamism. Ilana Blumsack is an economics studies researcher at CATO.

There’s a technological revolution taking place in the sky above us. Most people’s experience of drones will be as a fun way to take aerial photographs, or even just a toy to fly about in their gardens, but they are capable of so much more.
Indeed, drones are already being used for inspections of buildings, roads, railways, power lines and even planes in airports, saving the time and money involved in sending people to great heights or across great distances. With the help of drones, potential problems are being identified and resolved sooner rather than later, making our infrastructure cheaper to maintain and repair.
And this is only the start. In some countries, drones are helping to save lives through emergency medical deliveries of organs and medicines. Their commercial potential is also enormous, with trials of door-to-door deliveries beginning in the US and Ireland. Drone deliveries of mail, packages and food promise to bring access to big city amenities much farther into the suburbs and even the countryside.
The fact drones can take off and land vertically, without the need for a long runway, may even one day be applied to passenger transportation. They may provide a faster and cheaper alternative to getting to areas currently only served by roads, without having to go through the major costs and delays of trying to lay new tram or railway lines. As with home deliveries, a drone revolution in passenger transportation will make it much easier for people to live further away from the big cities, while still being able to enjoy the perks of a city lifestyle.
With ever-cheaper and lighter batteries, and ever more sophisticated navigation systems, inventors and entrepreneurs are rapidly solving the technical barriers that stand in the way. The key obstacles now are political.
Trials of drone services have already been taking place under the auspices of the Civil Aviation Authority, and although the regulator has to take a safety-first approach, they have been remarkably forward-thinking in this area. The big challenge for the UK is finding a way to safely integrate drones into one of the busiest airspaces in the world. It is one thing to set aside some airspace temporarily for a trial, but quite another to have drones continually making deliveries above and around London.
To actually achieve the potential of drones, they will have to be integrated into the area below 10,000 feet, traditionally the near-uncontested domain of recreational flyers. As it stands, recreational flyers can fly when and where they like, subject to very simple rules, and with pilots taking full responsibility for their own safety. Pilots flying in this airspace do not even have to emit electronic signals from their aircraft. Drones threaten to change all that.

If drones are to be integrated into our skies, the less regulated parts of our skies will need a new set of rules. And although the technology already exists to make this possible without needing traditional air-traffic control systems, it will require all recreational flyers to emit electronic signals so that they become visible, in effect, to drones.
At the moment, recreational flyers are being asked to pay for much of the cost of becoming electronically conspicuous themselves. But a new report by The Entrepreneurs Network, ‘Digitise the Skies’, makes the case that the Government should bear the entire one-off cost of all existing aircraft installing these electronic signal emitters, which will likely be less than £10m. That’s small change compared to the £42bn estimated to be added to the country’s economy thanks to drones by 2030, and a simple solution that should satisfy recreational flyers, helping them to make the transition to much busier and more regulated skies.

The post The drone revolution is already here – but we need the right rules to take full advantage appeared first on CapX.

On October 18, the New York City Public Design Commission was poised to approve the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the city council chamber at City Hall and put it on indefinite loan to a private institution, the New-York Historical Society. Supporters of the action denounced Jefferson as—in the words of a former council member who first proposed the removal twenty years ago—a “slave-owning pedophile” whose symbolic presence was a glaring injustice and a nauseating offense, especially to the city’s black, Hispanic, and other non-white citizens.After a white supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio had authorized a review of numerous supposed “hate” symbols in public view around the city. The drive to remove Jefferson gained new life in the wake of controversies elsewhere over removing Confederate statues, and was made all the more fraught by the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Members of the city council advanced to the stage where they needed only a say-so from the Public Design Commission, a majority of whose members are appointed by the mayor. The deal, evidently, was already done. Even before an official decision had been made, a packing crate was at the ready to cart Jefferson’s likeness uptown to the Historical Society.Despite being a native New Yorker with an abiding interest in the city and its history, I only learned of what was going on a couple of days before the Public Design Commission’s scheduled hearing. An enterprising student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Todd Fine, was helping to gather signatures for a letter petitioning for a compromise: The statue would stay in City Hall but would be moved to the governor’s room, where it was originally placed in 1834 and stood for decades thereafter. After getting the whole story, I happily signed the letter and prepared a statement to be read at the official commission hearing.Efforts to repudiate Jefferson are, by now, familiar enough. The reassessment of historical figures traditionally celebrated for their contributions to American equality is nothing new, as in Lerone Bennett Jr.’s much-criticized but widely-read vilification of Abraham Lincoln as a white supremacist. Jefferson has become a particularly fraught case, due in large part to his slaveholding and his ugly remarks about Africans in his book Notes on the State of Virginia. Additionally, historians have affirmed longstanding speculations that he had sexual relations and conceived several children with one of his young slaves, Sally Hemings, who also happened to be, almost certainly, his late wife’s half-sister.The most authoritative interpreter of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, Annette Gordon-Reed, has described it as a fundamentally absurd and unequal but ultimately respectful long-term bond. Contrary to Gordon-Reed’s historical evidence, however, Jefferson gained a reputation as a rapist, a systematic abuser of black women, and a sadistic slave owner. Blend enough sensational falsehood into his biography and it’s easy enough to invent a Thomas Jefferson who was a perfect monster, unfit for celebration of any kind, let alone in New York’s City Hall.One need not accept portrayals of Jefferson as a moral monster to see that he had flaws from which any fair-minded twenty first century observer recoils. But study him awhile and he appears to have been a man of contradictions. Notes on the State of Virginia indeed contains hair-raising comments about black people, closer than not to the common view among his fellow white Virginians. It also contains an indictment of racial slavery as an offense to heaven—an uncommon view in Virginia, especially among slaveholders. (“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Jefferson wrote, a remark that impressed his antislavery Massachusetts friend John Adams as “worth diamonds.”) There is the early Jefferson who took firm antislavery stances, to the point of heading a committee of the Confederation Congress in 1784 that sought to ban the introduction of slavery into any American territory. About two decades later, as president, he completed the abolition of U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade. Then there is also the later Jefferson, who backed off from any public expressions of antislavery opinion, to the point, in 1820, of supporting the introduction of slavery into Missouri Territory over the intense objection of antislavery northerners.Above all, there is Jefferson’s greatest contribution to America, indeed, to humankind, in the Declaration of Independence’s simple assertion that all men are created equal. The declaration’s universalist claim was a deeply radical statement then, and remains radical today. It expressed an idea that swept beyond Jefferson’s own time to inspire future abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and every variety of champion for human rights. Although there were radical egalitarians before Jefferson, there had never been anything quite like the declaration, which became the basis of a democratic political order that rejected monarchs, hereditary aristocrats, and theocrats. Furthermore, had Jefferson prevailed over the objections of delegates from the Lower South, the declaration would have included a denunciation of slavery and the slave trade as violations of human nature’s “most sacred rights of life and liberty.”Even when Jefferson lived, there were some who claimed that he didn’t really mean what he wrote in the declaration, that he really meant to say that only white men were created equal. Yet never, either in public or in private, did Jefferson seek to amend or modify the wording of his greatest contribution. His failure to do so made him and his declaration deeply suspicious to later generations of pro-slavery advocates and their allies, who denounced the declaration as a pack of “self-evident lies,” a farrago of “glittering generalities”—that is, as a standing rebuke to their barbaric cause. Indeed, it was Jefferson, more than any other American, who set the standard by which we find him so lacking, the universal standard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked when he quoted Jefferson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln, meanwhile, warned that those who would forsake Jefferson were “the vanguard—the miners and sappers—of returning despotism.”The statue in City Hall, created by the great French sculptor David d’Angers, specifically honors Jefferson for the declaration, as well as his work to secure religious liberty. Thinking back on Lincoln’s observation, it thus struck me as especially bizarre to repudiate Jefferson and his declaration at the very moment when authoritarianism and despotism are on the rise. Now, more than ever, the most vulnerable among us depend on Jefferson’s egalitarian standard against the true miners and sappers.In drafting my statement for the hearing, I also recalled my late father Elias Wilentz. Back in the mid-1970s, he served on the New York Art Commission, the predecessor of the current Public Design Commission. Eli took very seriously the charge as a steward of the city’s public art. What would it mean to, in effect, decommission a piece of public art for indefinite relocation to a private institution that charged a fee for admission? I didn’t have to wonder too hard what Eli would have thought: He’d have been appalled, and he would have been right. And while the New-York Historical Society would certainly do an excellent job presenting the statue to its guests, the point of originally placing the statue in City Hall was to give it a symbolic stature, one that it could never possess if placed almost anywhere else.The commission, as expected, voted unanimously to remove the statue from the council chamber. The packing crate, however, would not be filled just yet. The Public Design Commission president, Signe Nielsen, weighed in with an observation that the commission needed to be careful before handing off a piece of city-owned public art to a private institution. The group decided to lay aside sending the statue to the Historical Society and think through other solutions.The ultimate outcome remains in doubt. It was suggested at the meeting that the 7-foot-tall statue might be placed at the New York Public Library, near a display of the library’s “fair copy” of the declaration. I’d prefer it stay somewhere in City Hall, where it’s stood for nearly two hundred years, as a symbol of the democratic values that New Yorkers hold dear. Although it is impossible to honor Jefferson without serious qualification, perhaps the current grappling will at least remind everyone of why there is no dishonor in doing so.Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University.

Review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Allen Lane, 2021)

Origin myths the world over have a basic psychological effect: regardless of their scientific validity, they have the sly power of justifying existing states of affairs, while simultaneously contouring one’s sense of what the world might look like in the future. Modern capitalist society has built itself upon two variants of one such myth. As one story goes, life as primitive hunter-gatherers was “nasty, brutish and short” until the invention of the state allowed us to flourish. The other story says that in a childlike state of nature, humans were happy and free, and that it was only with the advent of civilization that “they all ran headlong to their chains.” These are two variants of the same myth because they both assume an unilinear historical trajectory, one that begins from simple egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and ends with increasing social complexity and hierarchy. They also nurture a similar fatalistic perspective on the future: whether we go with Hobbes (the first) or Rousseau (the second), we are left with the idea that the most we can do to change our current predicament is, at best, a bit of modest political tinkering. Hierarchy and inequality are the inevitable price to pay for having truly come of age. Both versions of the myth picture the human past as a primordial soup of small bands of hunter-gatherers, lacking in vision and critical thought, and where nothing much happened until we embarked on the process that, with the advent of agriculture and the birth of cities, culminated in the modern Enlightenment. What makes David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything an instant classic is its comprehensive scientific demolition of this myth — what they call “the Myth of the Stupid Savage.” Not a shred of archaeological evidence tells us that the picture of the human past is remotely close to what the foundational myth suggests. Rather than asking ‘Why did inequality arise?’, the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’ Instead, what the available evidence shows is that the trajectory of human history has been a good deal more diverse and exciting and less boring than we tend to assume because, in an important sense, it has never been a trajectory. We never permanently lived in tiny hunter-gatherer bands. We also were never permanently egalitarian. If there is a defining trait of our prehistorical condition it is its bewildering capacity of shifting, almost constantly, across a diverse array of social systems of all kinds of political, economic, and religious nature. Graeber and Wengrow’s suggestion is that the only way to explain this kaleidoscopic variety of social forms is to posit that our ancestors were not actually that stupid, but were instead self-conscious political actors, capable of fashioning their own social arrangements depending on circumstances. More often than not, people would choose to switch seasonally between sociopolitical identities as to avoid the perils of lasting authoritarian power. And so, rather than asking “Why did inequality arise?”, the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes “Why did we get stuck with it?” This is only one of many kindred claims advanced in this astounding new book.

Upending the Narrative The book draws much of its value from its eclectic approach. Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at University College London. He is well-known for his work on early cultural and political transformations in Africa and Eurasia. Graeber, who died suddenly in September 2020, was a professor of anthropology at London School of Economics, widely regarded as the most brilliant of his generation. Together, they explore a suite of recent archaeological findings that prove anomalous to the standard narrative (for instance, the existence of ancient large-scale egalitarian cities), but that, until now, had only been privy to a handful of experts who never quite unravelled the implications. Archaeological discoveries are therein appraised from anthropological eyes. The result is a sweeping tour into the past that hops from continent to continent, and from one social sphere to another to tell stories that, depending on the reader’s familiarity with the archaeological record, might come as revelations. We learn, for instance, that the uniformity in material culture across Eurasia in the Upper Palaeolithic meant that people lived in a large-scale imagined community spanning continents, putting to rest the idea that “primitives” only spent their time in isolated bands. Counterintuitively, the scale of single societies decreased over the course of human history as populations grew larger. From monumental sites such as Göbekli Tepe in Turkey or Hopewell in Ohio, we learn that people would seasonally come together from distant lands in what appear to have been large centers of cultural interactions for recreation and the exchange of knowledge. Journeying great distances while expecting to be welcomed into an extended community was a typical feature of our ancestors’ lives. The book then pivots to agriculture. The received view has it that the birth of agriculture meant the more or less automatic emergence of stratified societies. Yet, this assumption runs into problems once we consider a phenomenon like “play farming” across Amazonia, where acephalous societies like the Nambikwara, though familiar with techniques of plant domestication, consciously decided not to make agriculture the basis for their economy and to opt for a more relaxed approach that switched flexibly between foraging and cultivation. (Agriculture generally emerged in the absence of easier alternatives.) Further, we learn that some of the first agricultural societies of the Middle East formed themselves as egalitarian and peaceful responses to the predatory foragers of the surrounding hills. It was mostly women, here, that propelled the growth of agricultural science. We also learn that complex works of irrigation in some such places were executed communally without chiefs, and even where structures of hierarchy existed, these works were accomplished despite authority, not because of it. The gradual spread of agriculture across the globe was far less unilinear than anyone had previously guessed. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable. In what’s perhaps the best chapter of the book, the authors move on to examine cities. Nowadays, large-scale egalitarian cities, the mere idea of it, smacks of utopianism; but Graeber and Wengrow argue that it shouldn’t when we start thinking of cities as the coalescence, in a single physical space, of already existing extended imagined communities with their own egalitarian ethos and norms — first happening seasonally, then more stationarily, as conscious experiments in urban form. Sites like Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia and many others offer incontrovertible evidence of the past existence of such cities, where no sign of authoritarian rule can be found. (Generally, when these are found, they stand out in the form of palaces, temples, fortification, etc.) Other ancient cities like Cahokia in Mississippi or Shimao in China exhibit evidence of a temporal succession of different political orders, sometimes moving from authoritarian to egalitarian, which leaves the possibility of urban revolutions as a likely explanation for the change. The final chapters focus on the “state” — or better, on how misleading it is to define societies like the Inka or the Aztecs as “incipient states” because these were far more diverse than what this straitjacket term would make us think. From the Olmec and the Chavin societies in Mesoamerica to the Shilluk of South Sudan, The Dawn of Everything gives us a taste of the variety of authoritarian structures throughout history. By the end of the book, we encounter the archaeological gem that is Minoan Crete — a “beautiful irritant for archaeology” — where all evidence points to the existence of an ancient system of female political rule, most likely a theocracy run by a college of priestesses. There is much more. The leitmotif running through the chapters is that if we want to make sense of all these phenomena, we are obliged to put human collective intentionality back into the picture of human history, as a genuine explanatory variable — to assume, that is, that our ancestors were imaginative beings who were eminently capable of self-consciously creating their social arrangements. The authors by no means discount the importance of ecological determinants. Rather, they see their effort as moving the dial to a more sensible position within the agency — determinism continuum, which usually only takes one extreme. The key upshot is that this newfound view of our past equips us with an expanded sense of possibilities as to what we might do with ourselves in the future. Fatalistic sentiments about human nature melt away upon turning the pages.

In Frankfurt, Germany, you can’t simply grab a burger inside a restaurant, go to an indoor pool or have a drink in an indoor bar. Before doing so, you have to present either certification of full vaccination, or a negative test result from the last 24 hours. To make this work, testing centres are literally at every corner (often in converted barber shops), with results available within 10-15 minutes (you can either wait for the result, or have it emailed to you). Testing is free for children under 12 (who cannot be vaccinated yet) and for those who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons.

And these aren’t the only precautions. When in shops and on public transport, masks are required – and not cloth masks. Only surgical or FFP2 medical grade masks are permitted. And Oktoberfest, the largest beer festival in the world, was cancelled this year owing to limits on mass gatherings and international travel.

It’s not surprising, then, that Germany is managing to control its Covid epidemic and bring down the numbers of cases and deaths. England (and the UK) by contrast is seeing a sharp rise in cases. Deaths are now on the increase too: this week’s daily reported toll was the highest since March. While the UK government continues to ask people to be vigilant and keep calm and carry on, the clock is ticking. Time is running out to put in some basic measures to prevent a further spike in cases, the NHS becoming overwhelmed, and very possibly another lockdown. Germany, meanwhile, is keeping its economy and society running, and looks in a strong position heading into the bumpy winter months.

While we debate whether “plan B” is necessary – the health secretary, Sajid Javid, said on Wednesday he had no plans to implement further restrictions – we risk being pushed further and further towards a “plan C” (even harsher restrictions, such as bans on household mixing) to avert a winter crisis. Waiting and watching just doesn’t work with Covid, as we have learned repeatedly over the past 22 months.

No one is talking about a “stay at home” lockdown, or a shutdown of certain sectors, as happened in 2020 and early 2021. Instead, the measures that doctors and health chiefs are now urging are minimally restrictive and aimed at keeping maximum economic and social activity while limiting the spread of the virus.

The simplest step is to make masks compulsory again in shops and on public transport in England (masks are still mandatory in these settings in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). When this is left to individual discretion, many assume masks aren’t necessary (otherwise the government would be enforcing them) and stop wearing them. This puts other citizens, even mask-wearers, at risk.

It’s analogous to the ban on indoor smoking, or on drink-driving. We regulate these actions in order to protect the health of others. Likewise, I wear a mask to protect you, and you wear a mask to protect me.

We now know that outdoor Covid transmission is minimal, while indoor settings such as pubs, gyms, restaurants and nightclubs are the riskiest. This is because they are places where masks can’t be used, and where there is minimal social distancing and a lot of loud talking, and little ventilation. Now that Britain has ample testing and vaccination, we can keep these settings open. But they should require vaccine certification, or a negative recent test result before the public are allowed to enter (France and New York City have already done this). This would mean that those going to these settings to enjoy themselves, and those working there, were far better protected and could feel safer.

And while Britain had an early vaccination campaign, other countries are now surpassing us in terms of fully vaccinated people over the age of 12. This is because of a late rollout of jabs to teenagers (months behind the US, Spain and Germany) as well as lower take-up in young people. Compare this with Portugal, where over 98% of over-12s have been jabbed, or even Australia, which is slowly increasing its coverage. The tale of the tortoise and the hare comes to mind.

Ultimately, we are social beings who want to work and enjoy life and not be locked in our homes. We routinely take risks every day. But the aim of public policy for decades has been to minimise these risks so that we can protect life and community wellbeing, and have a functional society. Think of speed limits on roads, seatbelts in cars or alcohol licences. While vaccines and testing can now do much to control Covid, they can’t do it all, which is why further restrictions are so necessary.

We need the UK government to step up now – and for England to align with the measures other countries are taking to make Covid a manageable problem. On top of this, a major climate conference in Glasgow starts next week, which will bring thousands of people to the country and is likely to result in a spike. The writing is on the wall: if the government doesn’t move immediately towards plan B (ie masks and vaccine certification), infections and hospitalisations could escalate, and we will be pushed into a plan C this winter that will look a lot like lockdown.

We have learned now that the best way to have our freedoms and keep a strong economy is by minimising Covid infections. It’s time to start acting on that now.

At the start of their Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything, the authors confess the title is a fraud, pointing to the tiny asterisk and the word “abridged” that appears in the printed version. But if scientist Adam Rutherford and mathematician Hannah Fry’s latest work turns out to be less than comprehensive, it is at least interested in the concept of comprehensiveness.

In a chapter entitled Endless Possibilities, they discuss the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel, in which every word ever written, spoken or thought has been committed to paper. In 2015, Jonathan Basile built his own Library of Babel in digital form using an algorithm. But how in this library of all knowledge, asks Fry, do you find anything? And how would you know what you read was true? All you will find in Basile’s library “are random letters of incomprehensible twaddle … A library containing all possible knowledge may as well contain no knowledge at all.”

Quick Guide Saturday magazine Show This article comes from Saturday, the new print magazine from the Guardian which combines the best features, culture, lifestyle and travel writing in one beautiful package. Available now in the UK and ROI. Photograph: GNM Was this helpful? Thank you for your feedback.

Many listeners will know the authors from the Radio 4 series The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, and it’s no surprise that their narration comes with the same easy chemistry and cheerful tone. This is, they reveal, down to their writing process, which involves reading their contributions out loud to each other “to see what makes the other person laugh or think or disagree or nod approvingly”. All the ideas here are rooted in science and maths and are designed to skewer long-held myths and preconceptions while remaining entirely accessible. Further boggling topics include: how nothing can be truly round, why dogs love us and the origins of time.

Rutherford and Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything is available on Penguin Audio, 7hr 2 min.

The best of the rest

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano, Hodder & Stoughton, 7hr 29min

Originally published in 1789, this re-recorded version of Equiano’s memoir of life as a slave is read by the actor and rapper Ben Bailey Smith and features a foreword written and narrated by David Olusoga.

The Women of Troy

Pat Barker, Penguin Audio, 12hr 18min

The unflinching story of the aftermath of the siege of Troy, told from the point of view of Achilles’s slave Briseis, is narrated by Kristin Atherton, who also read Barker’s The Silence of the Girls.

I seem to have wandered into more, as Daffy Duck once had it, “pronoun trouble.”

This time it wasn’t about they, but me. Or I. In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote this phrase: “Were me and my students missing something?” A lot of people didn’t like that, insisting that the proper rendition would have been: “Were my students and I missing something?” And to think that I’m a linguist, to boot — o tempora, o mores!

I’m aware of this “rule.” However, my being a linguist is much of why I often flout it. The idea that pronouns must be in what is termed their subject form whenever they are used as subjects seems so obvious, and yet it is just something some people made up not too long ago. It isn’t how English works from a scientific perspective.

Here’s why: If I say “You and me know,” I will be told that I should have said “You and I know” because I is the subject form. OK, but why does it feel so clumsy to say “I and you know”? After all, I is the subject here, too. You might say that it’s rude to put yourself, the I, first. But think about it: “I and you know” doesn’t feel just impolite; it feels just plain off, as if you were newish to the language. This is evidence that matters are not as simple as I being what one always must use as the subject.

There’s more evidence: You do something, and someone asks who did it. You raise your hand and say “Me.” But if what you mean is “I did it,” where I would be the subject, then why don’t you raise your hand and say “I”? Or if others did it, why wouldn’t you point at them and say “They!” instead of “Them!”?

After two gunmen opened fire at a stream of passing cars on a Tennessee highway in 2003, killing one person and badly wounding another, it didn’t take long for the police to find the culprits. Lurking in the bushes nearby were two teenage stepbrothers, who quickly confessed to the crime. But it wasn’t their fault, they explained. They hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. They were simply copying their favourite videogame: Grand Theft Auto III.
Once they were put trial, this claim was taken at face-value by the victim’s family’s lawyers, who launched a $246 million lawsuit against the game’s developers, Sony Computer Entertainment America and Rockstar Games. The case, however, was eventually dismissed. Exactly twenty years after GTA III was released, the debate over violent video games can seem like yesterday’s controversy.

But it’s a theme that keeps reappearing: it was referenced last week by Ted Sarandos, the Co-CEO of Netflix, after criticism of the new Dave Chappelle comedy special. Netflix as a company, Sarandos wrote in an email to staff last week, “ha[s] a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm”. He continued:
“The strongest evidence to support this is that violence on screens has grown hugely over the last thirty years, especially with [first-person] shooter games, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly in many countries. Adults can watch violence, assault and abuse — or enjoy shocking stand-up comedy — without it causing them to harm others”.
Sarandos has now distanced himself from his remarks, saying they should’ve been made with “a lot more humanity”. But was he right right that videogame violence was a useful analogy? Is it really the case that there’s no translation from virtual to real-world violence? What have we learned in the 20 years since GTA III?
More from this authorThe dangers of the Nobel PrizeBy Stuart Ritchie
The evidence is certainly confusing. The American Psychological Association published a review of videogame violence in 2015 (updated a little in 2019), which concluded that playing violent videogames does indeed make children, adolescents and young adults more aggressive. But the APA also concluded that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to say whether this translated to real-world criminal violence or delinquency.
In 2020, another set of researchers added an extra dose of ambiguity: they pointed to a number of holes in the APA’s analysis, uncovered lots of studies that had been missed, and noticed on a closer look that many of the studies cited had been very poor-quality. They concluded that the APA had “greatly overestimated” the consistency of the evidence linking videogames to aggression. Although stated with quite some uncertainty, the association between videogames and aggressive behaviour in their new analysis appeared “negligible”. Higher-quality studies since then tend to support that case.
Even worse for the case against videogames, some of the studies that were often cited as evidence for their effects on aggression and violence have come under intense suspicion in recent years. For example, one study that had claimed to show how first-person shooter games “influenced people to aim for the head” when shooting a real gun was retracted after data irregularities were discovered. Several other articles on this topic by one particular academic — Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in China — have also either been retracted or seriously questioned after an investigation by the data sleuth Joe Hilgard.
Not only that, but at least some evidence points in the opposite direction: a number of studies even claim that, after the release of a very popular videogame, crime actually goes down, presumably due to the potential perpetrators — and their victims — being incapacitated, or perhaps self-incapacitated, by the game. That is, people are safely staying inside, committing virtual slayings and virtual bank robberies instead of getting mixed up in real-world crime. One such study specifically pointed to the most recent Grand Theft Auto instalment, 2013’s GTA V, as having these crime-dampening effects.
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Such evidence — showing that violent video games actually reduce real-world violence, rather than just being unrelated to it — seem almost too good to be true, if you’re on the pro-videogames side of the debate. Of course, the data they use is just an overview: we can’t be sure that the specific people who avoided crime did so because they were staying at home playing GTA; we don’t have individual-level data and they might have been doing something else entirely. But a few studies have now found similar results, and the self-incapacitation effect does seem intuitively plausible — perhaps more plausible than the idea that after an intense session of GTA, players would feel the urge to put down the controller and go to seek out a real-life scrap.
The results seem particularly convincing for games from the Grand Theft Auto series, simply because they’re so astonishingly popular. GTA V alone has sold more than 150 million copies — and with a game that’s by all accounts extremely absorbing and addictive, that’s a lot of potential people off the streets. To return to the point made by Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, the immense and increasing popularity of such violent games while crime rates have either dropped or flattened out should at least give pause to anyone who wants to draw a causal link between the two. After all, an awful lot of people are playing these games, however much non-gamers might find the whole thing baffling.
And that’s perhaps the distinction we should draw: between the quality of a piece of art or media, and its effects. These aren’t the same thing: our sense of disgust or moral disapproval doesn’t necessarily pinpoint the things that are really toxic in our environment. Bad quality and bad effects surely overlap sometimes, but it’s too common to see them conflated — to see a “this is in bad taste” argument masquerading as a “this has bad effects” argument.
In fact, what we might need is to rehabilitate the act of criticism, or even the idea of aesthetics itself. Thoughtful criticism of our cultural objects — including videogames — is a good thing in itself, and needn’t rely on whether they have good or bad effects in the real world. The full picture of what makes something beautiful, or what gives it artistic value, can of course include its real-world consequences (if any). But those are among the most difficult things to pin down. Critics shouldn’t play at being scientists when their aesthetic criticism is valuable regardless.
Likewise, scientists should avoid playing at being critics, and not let their sense of aesthetic distaste or moral offence interfere with the sober, disinterested gathering of data that solid research requires. It’s surely not going too far to argue that a sense of distaste about videogames was what led the scientists mentioned above to overlook the bad — perhaps fraudulent — studies that pointed to their bad effects.
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Is Grand Theft Auto III a good piece of art? Not really. It did represent a watershed moment in game design — the subsequent 20 years have been stuffed full of games that built on, or ripped off, its general setup. And whereas it did allow players to wander around a city with a sniper rifle blowing the heads off randomly-chosen pedestrians, it also had a relatively sophisticated gangster-movie-like plotline, with a wickedly ironic and satirical view on society — something which many critics (and, to be fair, players) missed. But it wasn’t much of a step forward for videogames in the “artistic value” stakes (for that, take a look at Wikipedia’s list of “games considered artistic”, on which the later GTA V, with its wider cinematic scope, does appear).
Did Grand Theft Auto III cause real-world violence? The evidence would suggest otherwise. The sheer complexity of arriving at an answer to that question, though, should make us substantially more cautious about advancing our pet theory of how this or that medium has massive impacts on our psychology.
Videogame researchers have recently begun to highlight the sheer uncertainty of many of the effects in their field. Perhaps believers in the effects of other media — whether newspapers, books, movies, Instagram or even Netflix comedy specials — should show the same kind of intellectual humility.

Andrew Yang, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has never held elected office, became a household name when he ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 Presidential election. After dropping out of the race in February, 2020, he set his sights on the mayoralty of New York City, and briefly led the Democratic primary polls before losing the nomination to Eric Adams. This month, Yang declared his next pivot. As he published a new book, called “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy,” he announced that he is starting the Forward Party, which he hopes will break the “duopoly” dominating American politics.

“Forward” is both an account of Yang’s campaigns and a manifesto for his new party, which he believes should focus on advancing structural changes to the political system, such as open primaries and ranked-choice voting, and on lessening extreme partisanship. “Energy and passion won’t accomplish anything if all efforts are pitted in opposition to each other and the political system is designed to reward inertia,” Yang writes. “It’s the system itself that needs to be amended.” He also assures voters that they can maintain their current affiliations while joining his new party: “There will be Forward Democrats and progressives, Forward Republicans and conservatives, Forward independents and unaligned, and so on.”

I recently spoke with Yang by phone about his new book and his plans for the Forward Party. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed what he learned from running for office, how you can be a Democrat or a Republican and a member of his new party, and whether a third party can help American democracy.

You write about what being a politician does to your head. Can you talk more about that?

I started running for President as a relatively anonymous civilian, and that had some struggles attendant to it. I would say, “Hey, I’m running for President,” and people would say, “Of what?” or something similarly dubious. Then we gained steam and momentum, and the entire organization sprang up around me. In that environment, you wind up being something of an instrument, where people will say, “Hey, now you’re going to do this interview. Now we’re doing this event. Now call this person.” It’s a massive adjustment for, I would say, just about anyone.

I tried to say in the book that these experiences are probably not conducive to the development of a lot of the qualities that we want in leaders. I think most people would agree that the level of scrutiny that attends this process is probably discouraging a lot of excellent people from running. I think it’s more likely to impact certain groups that are probably going to be subject to even more scrutiny—women come to mind for me.

I also thought you were hinting in the book that it does things to your ego and makes you think of yourself in a certain way.

What I was hinting at is that it would make you a much worse manager. Your function is to get in front of a TV camera all the time. You’re probably not being super attentive to the needs of your team or figuring out what the interpersonal dynamics are. When I ran an organization, I spent a lot of time, for example, interviewing every hire. When you’re a candidate, people get hired in various locations and you meet them after the fact. I think that the process of running will end up eroding both management skills and empathy, and turn people more into avatars where they’re serving their new marketplace, and the new marketplace is going to be a set of TV cameras.

When you look back on your run for mayor of New York, what do you think your campaign got right and what do you think it got wrong?

I think, early on, we got right that a lot of New Yorkers wanted to be able to enjoy our city and wanted a degree of positivity in reopening. Then, as the campaign progressed, the focus turned much more to public safety, which wasn’t something that people associated with me. We’re very proud of the fact that we got more individual donors than any other candidate in history.

The book puts forward a lot of ideas, like ending the revolving door in Washington, and introducing an “American Scorecard” that would measure “societal health” in ways that go beyond economic indicators. More broadly, what is it that the Forward Party would accomplish?

The Forward Party is trying to realign our representatives’ incentives to line up more with ours, the general public, rather than the most extreme and activated partisans, who right now have disproportionate influence on whether someone is going to come back to office. One senator said to me something that I think maybe we’ve sensed, which is that issues are sometimes more valuable to a political party if they’re unresolved than if they’re resolved. What she meant by this is that if you have an unresolved issue, then you can get people very angry or excited about it. You can get people to donate to fight the other side. If you were to resolve it, then those catalysts go away. In this environment, because extremity is so disproportionate, you’ll actually probably pay a price if you compromise. Those are the incentives as they currently exist, and they’re driving us crazy.

You use the word “duopoly” in the book. When I hear that word, I associate it with Ralph Nader, who used it to say that the two parties were too close together ideologically. Are you saying that they’re too close together ideologically?

I think that there are different issues attendant to each party. It is a little bit overly simplistic to just say, “Hey, the extreme dominates,” because it makes it seem like it’s symmetrical, and it’s not precisely symmetrical.

Not precisely.

I do have a different critique, which I think is suggesting that corporations have undue influence over both parties. When I talk about the duopoly, in many ways I’m talking about the structural fragility of the system that we have. If you wanted to make a system that was resistant to authoritarianism, you would have more than two parties, definitively. Our Founding Fathers were anti-partisan. John Adams expressly feared two great parties that would just clash and clash. If you do have only two parties and one of them succumbs to authoritarian leadership, then there are very, very few safeguards, because the incentives are for everyone in that party to fall in line. If you wanted a more resilient system, you would have five political parties, or seven political parties. Then, if one party succumbed to terrible leadership, it’s a problem, but it’s not an existential problem the way it could be here in the U.S.

If, as you say, one party were to succumb to authoritarianism—and we do have a two-party system, which, at least for the moment, is not capable of being changed—would there be some danger of weakening support for the non-authoritarian party?

I think that there are these two tracks one could be pursuing. One would be electoral success, in the way that we currently look at it, and then the other would be institutional improvements and a strengthening of the system to make it more resilient, sustainable, and genuinely lowercase-“d” democratic.

Ancient military innovations – like the bit and bridle that enabled mounted horseback riding – changed the course of history. Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/British Museum via WikimediaCommons , CC BY-NCStarting around 3,000 years ago, a wave of innovation began to sweep through human societies around the globe. For the next millennium the continued emergence of new technologies had a dramatic effect on the course of human history. 
This era saw the advancement of the ability to control horses with bit and bridle, the spread of iron-working techniques through Eurasia that led to hardier and cheaper weapons and armor and new ways of killing from a distance, such as with crossbows and catapults. On the whole, warfare became much more deadly. 
During this era, many societies were consumed by the crucible of war. A few, though – the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the Roman Empire and Han China – not only survived, but thrived, becoming megaempires encompassing tens of millions of people and controlling territories of millions of square miles.
So what drove this cascade of technological innovation that literally changed the course of history? 
We are a complexity scientist, Peter Turchin, and a historian, Dan Hoyer, who have been working since 2011 with a multidisciplinary team to build and analyze a large database of past societies. In a new paper published in PLOS One on Oct. 20, 2021, we describe the main societal drivers of ancient military innovation and how these new technologies changed empires.

In the year A.D. 1, many areas of the world were dominated by massive empires each encompassing millions of people.
Javierfv1212/WikimediaCommons

A database for human history
The store of knowledge about the past is truly enormous. The trick is to translate that knowledge into data that can be analyzed. This is where Seshat comes in.
The Seshat Databank is named after Seshat, an ancient Egyptian goddess of wisdom, knowledge and writing. Founded in 2011 as a collaboration among the Evolution Institute, the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, the University of Oxford and many others, Seshat aimed to first systematically gather as much knowledge about humanity’s shared past as possible. Then our team formatted that information in a way that allows researchers to use big-data analytics to look for recurrent patterns in history and test the many theories aiming to explain such patterns.
The first step in this process was to develop a conceptual scheme for coding historical information ranging from military technology to the size and shape of states to the nature of ritual and religion. The database includes over 400 societies across all world regions and ranges in time from roughly 10,000 B.C. to A.D. 1800.
In order to trace the evolution of military technologies, we first broke them down into six key dimensions: hand-held weapons, projectiles, armor, fortifications, transport animals and metallurgical advances. Each of these dimensions was then further divided into more specific categories. Altogether we identified 46 such variables among the six technological dimensions. 
For example, we distinguish types of projectile weapons into slings, simple bows, compound bows, crossbows and so on. We then coded whether or not each historical society in the Seshat sample wielded these technologies. For example, the earliest appearance of crossbows in our database is around 400 B.C. in China. 
Of course, humanity’s knowledge of the past is imprecise. Historians may not know the exact year crossbows first appeared in a particular region. But imprecision in a few cases is not a serious problem given the staggering amount of information in the database and when the goal is to discover macrolevel patterns across thousands of years of history.

The Seshat Databank places technological innovation in specific societies at specific times, as seen in this map showing the spread of mounted cavalry through time from its origins in the Eurasian steppes.
Peter Turchin and Daniel Hoyer, CC BY-ND

Competition and exchange drive innovation
In our new paper, we wanted to find out what drove the invention and adoption of increasingly advanced military technologies around the globe during the era of ancient megaempires.
Utilizing the massive amount of historical information collected by the Seshat team, we ran a suite of statistical analyses to trace how, where and when these technologies evolved and what factors seemed to have had the largest influence in these processes.
We found that the major drivers of technological innovation did not have to do with attributes of states themselves, like population size or the sophistication of a governance. Rather, the biggest drivers of innovation appear to be the overall world population at any given time, increasing connectivity among large states – along with the competition that such connections brought – and a few fundamental technological advances that set off a cascade of subsequent innovations. 

The invention of horse bits and other bridle parts – like this one from 7th- to 8th-century B.C. Italy – gave people more effective control of horses, which had knock-on effects for the development of mounted warfare.
Walter C. Baker/New York Metropolitan Museum of Art

Let’s illustrate these dynamics with a specific example. Around 1000 B.C., nomadic herders in the steppes north of the Black Sea invented the bit and bridle to better control horses when riding them. They combined this technology with a powerful recurved bow and iron arrowheads to deadly effect. Horse archers became the weapon of mass destruction of the ancient world. Shortly after 1000 B.C., thousands of metal bits suddenly appeared and spread within the Eurasian steppes.
Competition and connection then grew between the nomadic people and the larger settled states. Because it was hard for farming societies to resist these mounted warriors, they were forced to develop new armor and weapons like the crossbow. These states also had to build large infantry armies and mobilize more of their populations toward such collective efforts as maintaining defenses and producing and distributing enough goods to keep everyone fed. This spurred the development of increasingly complex administrative systems to manage all these moving parts. Ideological innovations – such as the major world religions of today – were also developed as they helped to unite larger and more disparate populations toward common purpose. 
Within this cascade of innovation we see the origins of the world’s first megaempires as well as the rise and spread of world religions practiced by billions of people today. In a way, these critical developments can all be traced back to the development of the bit and bridle, which allowed riders better control of horses. Each step in this line has been long understood, but by employing the full range of cross-cultural information stored in the Seshat databank, our team was able to trace the dynamic sequence tying all these different developments together. 
Of course, this account gives a greatly simplified explanation of very complex historical dynamics. But our research exposes the key role played by the intersocietal competition and exchange in the evolution both of technology and of complex societies. Although the focus of this research was on the ancient and medieval periods, the gunpowder-triggered military revolution had analogous effects in the modern era.
Perhaps most importantly, our research shows that history is not “just one damn thing after another” – there are indeed discernible causal patterns and empirical regularities through the course of history. And with Seshat, researchers can use the knowledge amassed by historians to separate theories that are supported by data from those that are not.
This story was co-authored by Daniel Hoyer, a researcher and project manager at the Evolution Institute and a part-time professor at George Brown College.
Peter Turchin receives funding from the program “Complexity Science,” which is supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG under grant #873927. 

Remember when “Free Tibet” was a mainstay of the cool, hippie subculture that dominated the Nineties? Back when Hollywood cared about the fate of Buddhism’s Holy Land?
Few will even remember that Disney — yes, the same Disney that recently filmed parts of the live-action Mulan in Xinjiang — produced a film, Kundun, about the early life of the Dalai Lama. China then retaliated by banning Disney films, causing the company to backtrack and attempt to bury the Scorsese-directed biopic. Disney’s then-CEO even traveled to China to apologize.
This series of events should sound familiar by now in the age of Western capitulation to China. Less commonplace these days is the sight of a celebrity sporting imagery of the Dalai Lama and any quaint talk of “freeing Tibet.”
That’s why it was stupefying to see the Boston Celtics center, Enes Kanter, denounce President Xi Jinping as a “brutal dictator” with an image of Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader emblazoned across his T-shirt. This came in a video that was posted to social media right before the New York Knicks were slated to play the Celtics in the opening home game of the NBA season.
With somber conviction, Kanter looked into the camera and criticized China’s denial of basic rights and freedoms to the Tibetan people and its ongoing cultural genocide, avowing that he could no longer “stay silent.”
His activism did not end there. As Kanter stepped out into the Madison Square Garden arena, all eyes were on his brightly hued sneakers that bore unmistakable visual references to the Tibetan flag, which Chinese authorities consider a symbol of separatism. Custom-made and hand-painted by the Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, the shoes were bathed in blue and swirls of orange flames that represented the 150 Tibetans who, as Enes referenced in his video, self-immolated in protest of Beijing’s rule. The words “Free Tibet” were inscribed on one side of the shoe in bold.
Enes Kanter’s ‘Free Tibet’ shoes (Getty)
It was clear that the firestorm set off by KanterGate would render the fallout from MoreyGate tame by comparison. In 2019, former Houston Rockets manager Daryl Morey posted a tweet supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Cringe-inducing concessions to the Chinese followed (Morey and the NBA both apologized), but the backlash was substantial. Merchandising sales fell through and TV contracts were revoked, resulting in a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Sure enough, shortly after Enes Kanter’s stunt, internet giant Tencent Holdings, the NBA’s streaming partner in the country, canceled the live broadcast and pulled all future Celtics games, while Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, immediately banned any searches for Kanter’s name on the platform. Kanter even drew the ire of Chinese state media on Twitter.
Despite having played an average of 12 minutes in the pre-season games under his new coach Ime Udoka, Kanter did not spend a single second out of his tracksuit and on the court, curious considering that the game went into double overtime and saw the Celtics eventually succumb to the Knicks 134-138.
We can’t be sure if the decision to bench Kanter was political, but we were all thinking it. The NBA’s track record has been to cave to the CCP’s ideological orthodoxy and silence any deviants. Right around the time Kanter began speaking out against China, his income dropped substantially. Indeed, after having one of the most productive seasons of his entire NBA career with the Portland Trailblazers last season, averaging career highs in multiple areas, he was only able to secure a one-year contract with the Celtics for the current 2022 season.
Of course, when it comes to domestic activism, the NBA is very much supportive of its players and coaches. After the pandemic forced the league to play all remaining games in the Disney bubble in Orlando, “Black Lives Matter” was painted prominently on the courts and players wore slogans on their jerseys in lieu of last names: “I can’t breathe,” “Anti-racist,” “Justice.” But when it comes to “Stand with Hong Kong” or “Free Tibet,” it sure looks like team owners and league officials are not only far less supportive but actively try to undermine the statements and campaigns.
Why does the NBA permit moral grandstanding and outrage over domestic issues but not international ones? The most charitable answer is that due to limited bandwidth, no one can get really bogged down in every minutia of every single case of human rights violations around the globe. But this ignores the fact that the NBA and related companies already have their tentacles deep in Chinese markets, more than a billion-dollar enterprise — and growing. In fact, the league even established training camps to discover home-grown stars in Xinjiang, the region where atrocities are regularly carried out against the Uighur Muslims.

Nothing better exposes the woke edifice projected by the NBA than international human rights. When cold hard financial realities of losing business or market access come into conflict with all that pesky activism, why support it?
Which is why Enes Kanter’s latest #FreeTibet campaign is so brilliant. It forces the NBA to finally take one of two positions: either they condone his anti-CCP activism and risk losing billions of dollars and creating a diplomatic incident, or they punish him for going off-script on their financial overlords and reveal themselves for the faux woke authority that they are.
Buckle up. We’re in for a long, interesting ride.
The post The player exposing the NBA’s hypocrisy on China appeared first on The Spectator World.

Shane Campbell-Staton never planned on traveling to Mozambique in search of tuskless elephants, but weird things can happen when you stay up ’til 3 a.m. binge-watching YouTube videos. (“Sometimes, a brother can’t get to sleep, Ed,” he told me.)Battling insomnia, Campbell-Staton watched a video about Gorongosa National Park. The park was once Edenic, but during Mozambique’s civil war, from 1977 to 1992, much of its wildlife was exterminated. Government troops and resistance fighters slaughtered 90 percent of Gorongosa’s elephants, selling their ivory to buy arms and supplies. Naturally tuskless females, which are normally rare, were more likely to survive the culls; after the war, their unusual trait was noticeably common.Campbell-Staton, a biologist at Princeton who studies rapid evolution, had questions. Was this a dramatic example of natural selection in action? Why only the females? Which genes were involved? He idly emailed his questions to a colleague who studies elephants, inadvertently setting off a chain of emails that recast his casual curiosity as serious intent, and soon found himself being introduced to a large group of Gorongosa researchers as “a guy who wants to study the genetic basis of tusklessness in elephants,” he told me. In response to which he thought: Wait a minute, I didn’t say that! I didn’t mean for this to be a whole thing. He had only ever worked with small anole lizards, but even so, when one of those researchers invited him to Gorongosa, he said yes.[Read: How a civil war among humans made animals braver]Once there, Campbell-Staton met Joyce Poole, a veteran elephant researcher and a co-founder of the conservation nonprofit ElephantVoices. Using historical video footage and modern sighting records, Poole estimated that the proportion of tuskless females had risen from 19 percent before the war to 51 percent after it. The team confirmed that this was an evolutionary response: During the years of intense ivory-poaching, females without tusks were five times more likely to survive than those with them. The elephants then passed on the genes behind that trait to their descendants: About 33 percent of the females born after the war were tuskless.To identify those genes, Campbell-Staton and his colleague Brian Arnold sequenced the genomes of 18 Gorongosa elephants and looked for stretches of DNA that differed between tusked and tuskless individuals. One region stood out—a small slice of the X chromosome that includes a gene called AMELX. In mammals, this gene influences the production of enamel and the growth of teeth. When it’s disrupted, teeth become abnormal and brittle. It made sense that some fault in AMELX might stop elephants from growing tusks (which, however distinctive, are just very big teeth).This discovery also explained why only female African elephants are tuskless. AMELX is a bit player rolling with A-listers: Its immediate neighbors include essential genes that animals can’t survive without. But all of these genes are so tightly packed that “it’s hard to mess with one and not the other,” Campbell-Staton told me. A mutation that affects teeth by disabling AMELX could potentially bring down the entire animal if the neighboring genes are affected. Female elephants can tolerate such risk because they have two X chromosomes: If genes are disrupted in one copy, they have a backup. Males have no such luxury: With just one X chromosome, they suffer the full fatal brunt of any change that disrupts AMELX and the genes around it. That’s why tuskless males have never been recorded (at least in Gorongosa). They just don’t survive.Other genes might also be partly involved in tusklessness, and the team isn’t clear on exactly what changes to AMELX have led to the trait. But evidence from humans suggests that they’re on the right track. In 2009, a team studied an 18-year-old woman who was missing the entire AMELX gene and parts of its essential neighbors. Among several developmental problems, the woman was missing one of her upper lateral incisors, while the other was extremely small. These are the exact same teeth that, in elephants, grow into tusks.[Read: Gold teeth are beautiful on their own terms]Campbell-Staton’s team has “done a convincing job showing that the Gorongosa elephants have evolved in response to poaching,” Kiyoko Gotanda, an evolutionary biologist at Brock University, told me. Usually, evolution is a slow process, but it can proceed with blinding speed. Hawaiian crickets went from noisy to silent in just 20 generations to avoid a lethal parasitic fly that was eavesdropping on their calls. The anole lizards that Campbell-Staton usually studies ended up with bigger toes and a tighter grip after hurricanes Irma and Maria battered the Caribbean, and better tolerance for cold after a polar vortex hit Texas. But almost all of these examples involved small creatures that breed quickly. To see tusklessness evolving after just 15 years of war, in a “long-lived, slow-reproducing species like the elephant, is incredible,” John Poulsen, a tropical ecologist at Duke University, told me.Other countries have seen similar patterns. In Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, the proportion of tuskless females rose from 10 to 38 percent from 1969 to 1989. In South Africa’s Addo National Park, 98 percent of females are now tuskless. These trends suggest that even big, slow-breeding creatures could rapidly adapt to the exceptional pressures exerted by humans, who have been billed as the “greatest evolutionary force” currently operating. But there’s a catch: The elephant’s chromosomal quirk stops males from easily reaching full tusklessness (although their tusks can shrink). And “ironically, fewer tusked females could focus poaching efforts on males even more than it already is, potentially nearly stopping reproduction,” Poulsen said.Even if the evolution of tusklessness somehow saved elephants from poaching, the loss of their mighty teeth could lead to other losses. Tusks aren’t there just for show. Elephants use them as tools to strip bark from trees and excavate minerals from soil. Rob Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton and one of Campbell-Staton’s colleagues, has shown that these behaviors sculpt the savannah. In damaging trees, elephants create homes for lizards; in toppling other trees, they open up spaces for understory plants. A population of tuskless elephants is better than having no elephants at all, but it’s not functionally the same as a population of tusked ones. They’d be changed, and so probably would the world around them, and “all because we want their teeth, which sounds just absurd when you say it,” Campbell-Staton told me.He and his team are now planning to study the consequences of tusklessness—and whether its rise has changed the elephants’ diet, the way they move nutrients across the land, and the other plants and animals in their environment. In doing so, they hope to complete the full story of Gorongosa’s tuskless elephants—a tale in which the economic forces that dictate the price of ivory and the political history that drives a country to war collide upon a handful of genes in a single charismatic species, in a way that could reshape an entire ecosystem in the space of a few decades.

On Oct. 19, Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia did something we have not seen in many a year: He granted a Guantanamo detainee’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, ordering the man’s release.

The man in question is Asadullah Haroon Gul (aka Haroon al-Afghani), an Afghan citizen who was captured alongside six other men in an operation by Afghan government forces in early 2007. All the men, it appears, were members of the armed group known as Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commanded by former Afghan Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Though not formally part of the Taliban, Hekmatyar’s political movement and its armed expression, HIG, were aligned theologically and politically with the Taliban. And after the fall of the Taliban, HIG became one of the armed groups fighting against the new Afghan government, U.S. forces and other allied forces. In short, HIG for many years was a paradigm example of an “associated force” engaged in hostilities against the United States in connection with the larger conflict with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Indeed, in 2011, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit opinion authored by now-Attorney General Merrick Garland expressly affirmed as much in Khan v. Obama.

But here’s the thing about military detention authority: The scope of that authority will grow or shrink in accordance with the scope of the underlying armed conflict on which the claim of military detention authority is based. And thus it mattered a great deal when, in fall 2016, the then-government of Afghanistan reached a peace agreement with HIG. Thus, even without the eventual U.S. decision to withdraw from Afghanistan and end the fight against the Taliban too, the legal foundation for military detention in cases predicated solely on membership in HIG appeared to be going or already gone by late 2016.

As it happens, 2016 was also the year that Asadullah Haroon Gul filed a habeas petition challenging the factual basis for the U.S. government’s claims against him. Later, after the peace deal with Afghanistan, Gul amended his argument to raise the additional argument that he could no longer be held on grounds of HIG membership even if it were true that he had been a HIG commander as the U.S. government alleged. In 2018, the Justice Department responded by abandoning its claim of authority to detain based on HIG membership alone. It argued that Gul still could be held, however, based on the distinct claim that Gul separately had been involved with al-Qaeda itself. (See this 2018 Lawfare post from Harry Graver for those details and relevant links.) Gul denies that argument on factual grounds, and for a time that was the central issue in the case. Then, with the recent full withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan, Gul appears to have expanded his argument to include a much broader claim about the expiration of the legal grounds for detention. That claim, if accepted by the court, could have sweeping implications for other Guantanamo detainees.

Meanwhile, as the slow wheels of the habeas process continued to turn, a separate process was underway: the periodic review board (PRB) system whereby an interagency team recurringly considers whether a detainee might safely be released from Guantanamo, quite apart from whether the government still has legal grounds to hold that person. And as it happens, just a few weeks ago a PRB concluded that Gul could, indeed, be released.

And that brings us at last to Mehta’s Oct. 19 ruling in the long-running habeas case. Though the grounds for his decision are not yet available to the public (it appears there are two opinions, in fact, but both are classified and it will take time before unclassified versions are released), it is clear from media reports that he did rule for Gul and has ordered Gul’s release. The big question is this: Is the ruling based merely on a determination that the government failed to carry its burden of proof (preponderance of the evidence) to show Gul had sufficient ties to al-Qaeda to warrant detention on that basis? Or is the ruling instead predicated on a legal determination that the armed conflict with al-Qaeda has expired? According to Carol Rosenberg at the New York Times, the answer is the former. Rosenberg writes that Mehta “rejected the argument … that hostilities had ended in Afghanistan” but concluded that Gul “did not qualify as a member of Al Qaeda or an associated force” thereof.

With the cost declines of solar and wind, climate activists hope renewables can upend the oil and gas industry, powering the world without contributing to climate change. But geothermal advocates say we can use the drilling practices of today’s energy giants to access the immense heat beneath the Earth’s crust. Today, we’ll be discussing whether geothermal could be the clean energy source of the future. To answer that question and more, I’ve brought on Jamie Beard.
Jamie is the founder and executive director of the Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization at the University of Texas at Austin.

Pethokoukis: Now I’ll admit that when I bring geothermal technology up to people — maybe because they’ve watched too many History Channel shows — they’ll say, “Are you talking about drilling into super volcanoes? Because that sounds super dangerous.” I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. I wonder if we could just start off by describing the suite of technologies we are talking about when you’re talking about geothermal.
A lot of geothermal in the world that exists today is in fact near volcanoes. So people are used to that idea, particularly in places like Iceland, but there’s also a lot of geothermal development in the United States, where geothermal resources are close to the surface and have surface manifestations, like in California. That’s typically called “hydrothermal geothermal,” and it’s been around for well more than 100 years in terms of producing energy and heat for humans to use. But that’s not the only option for geothermal anymore. Hydrothermal resources are limited by their natural occurrence. That’s in limited places in the world.
Over the past couple of decades, we’ve had some pretty significant technological leaps. In particular, in the oil and gas industry, with the shale boom being one, and the directional drilling technologies and fracking technologies that came out of that, but also in offshore exploration and development.
So if you take those technologies and you leverage them and you apply them to geothermal, we can actually enable all kinds of geothermal concepts now, and they go from engineered geothermal systems where you drill and you fracture rock to produce these underground reservoirs. So these are essentially engineered systems where we are mimicking conditions like Iceland, for instance.

We don’t have to just rely on what mother nature has given us.
Exactly, we’re engineering the subsurface to mimic that with the goal of being able to do that anywhere in the world that we need energy. So we’ve got the engineered systems that use fracturing technologies. And then we’ve got these newer concepts, advanced geothermal systems — or closed loop systems, as some call them — where fracturing is not used. Directional drilling technologies are used instead. You’re essentially drilling radiators into rock and harvesting heat that way. And then there are all sorts of hybrids. There are a lot of ways these two types of things are combined to create different systems, as well, so a lot of innovation is happening in this space and there’s a lot new in the past couple of decades that have enabled some step changes forward.
That’s super interesting because I think if we were to ask most people about the big innovation in this country over the past generation, I think almost every single person might say the internet. We tend to forget about oil and gas as far as the shale revolution, and how those technologies are now being used to create something that, frankly, some people have been talking about for decades. If you go back and read what the tech optimists from a half century ago said, they would talk about nuclear fusion and things, but they’d also talk about tapping the very heat of the Earth itself. Now we can kind of do that.
Right. The oil and gas industry even has looked at geothermal over the years a lot. This is not a new thing, but what is new is that it used to be a moonshot, before directional drilling and before fracturing technologies and before high pressure and temperature technologies in oil and gas were developed. And again, all of these are pretty new. They’ve happened in the early 2000s and over the last decade. Before those technologies existed, the idea that we could drill deep enough and somehow engineer rock to harvest geothermal anywhere in the world was sci-fi. It was a moonshot to say the least, and oil and gas consistently kind of punted. So it was like, “Well, that’s just crazy.” When it comes to hydrothermal, it was just too niche for an industry like oil and gas that really only gets interested when there’s scalability, when there’s the ability to do something globally or in a really big way. That’s what’s really exciting about this: These new capabilities are actually enabled by technology leaps that have happened in oil and gas.
What are the particular advantages of this technology over both what we already have and the next generation of nuclear? There’s been a lot in the papers lately about nuclear fusion. We’ve all seen this big drop in prices for solar. What is the compelling case for geothermal?
Oh my gosh. Let’s start. For one, geothermal is baseload. It’s 24/7. You don’t need energy storage for geothermal. That is a big deal. When you talk with utilities struggling right now with increasing intermittence on the grid, and you look at where energy storage is in terms of scalability, for grid scale energy storage, having a clean baseload source of energy in the very near term is an exciting prospect. Geothermal also has a tiny footprint compared to other renewables. If you look at sources of clean energy, like solar and wind, the geothermal footprint, comparatively megawatt to megawatt, is about 1 percent of that of solar and wind. That’s a big deal in a space-constrained world, particularly if you’re wanting to put power plants near population centers, where there are people and you don’t have a lot of land. That’s another really exciting thing. Job creation: Geothermal per megawatt creates three or four times more jobs than other renewables do. I think that’s a really interesting concept. And what I’ve really grabbed on to, and you mentioned nuclear, are next-gen nuclear concepts coming down the pike.
We just did a podcast on Nuclear Fusion.
No doubt, no doubt.
It’s exciting.
It’s exciting, but here’s the deal: It’s really expensive. Just to get it ready, we’re talking about just massive investments of billions of dollars. For geothermal to be ready for prime time — meaning we’re getting teams into the field, getting technologies demonstrated, full-scale, get oil and gas engaged and start scaling this thing — it’s a drop in a bucket comparatively in terms of what’s needed for investments. About maybe a half a billion dollars worth of field deployments might get us to a place for geothermal where we could have a scalable concept ready to go, and we’d be off on another shale boom, but this time for clean energy. I think that’s really an interesting thing to think about. What’s it going to take to get massive scale in terms of the dollars invested? And that’s where geothermal, I think, really bests nuclear. But the thing that I’m really excited about, of course, and this is what my focus is right now, is the fact that we have an existing, globally present industry with millions of highly trained individuals in the workforce that are perfectly suited to take geothermal to scale really fast.
An oil derrick stands above the plains north of Amarillo, Texas.REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
Of course, I’m talking about the oil and gas industry. In leveraging that workforce to do this, we actually avoid a lot of the job losses and disruption that’s forecasted for the industry. We don’t have to retrain geophysicists to install solar panels. We can let geophysicists do what geophysicists do best, but for geothermal instead of hydrocarbons. That’s what gets me really excited about geothermal: We have such assets on the table here. There’s a Ferrari in the driveway. It’s just a matter of hopping in and pressing the gas.
Are there some technologies that could only be used in certain places while other technologies could be used anywhere? Perhaps even in places where there are currently facilities? There has been so much talk about the decline of the coal region. Since they already have coal plants there, could you just put them there? How do different technologies intersect with geography and where you would locate power plants?
Yeah, that’s an awesome question. I think the low-hanging fruit really is to figure out geothermal gradients within a 100 mile radius of all the world’s population centers and really make it a goal to put geothermal developments near where we need the electricity, so we’re not building massive grid infrastructure projects into the middle of nowhere. That’s a low-hanging fruit for geothermal. There are geothermal concepts, some of them utilize fracking technology, some of them do not. There are going to be places in the world that aren’t going to like the frack-based concepts like EGS, because they have frack bans in place. They have some very significant public relations issues with even the word “fracking.” It doesn’t matter if it’s for oil and gas or geothermal — it’s fracking, and fracking is bad.
A lot of this is an educational challenge. A lot of this is a political challenge. But the reality of it is: Are places that have significant opposition to fracking going to be the first to institute these engineered geothermal systems? No, they won’t be. So there are going to be some places where there’s going to need to be some political and educational strides before geothermal development of certain types will take off. That said, there are others, like advanced geothermal or closed-loop systems, that don’t utilize fractures. They may be more realistic for places in the world that have that type of opposition. You mentioned coal plants. It’s an interesting concept. It’s one that is gaining traction in places where coal plants are located in areas with high geothermal gradients, meaning that you don’t have to drill super far to get really hot temperatures.
We may not be able to redevelop coal plants, megawatt for megawatt or gigawatt for gigawatt. In other words, if we redeveloped a coal plant into a geothermal plant, which would essentially mean that we would drill a series of wells on the site of the coal plant. They’re big. I mean, you’re storing coal there. You’ve got massive fly ash ponds. They’re huge pieces of property. So we would repurpose the property, drill a series of wells there, and essentially use geothermal steam to drive the turbines just as we use steam from burning coal to drive the turbine. So it’s the same, but the question becomes, can you do that megawatt for megawatt? Would the plant still be exactly the same output with a geothermal angle, as it would for coal? And that’s an area of inquiry right now.
It’s really a matter of how economically, and whether we can drill to the depths we need to get the amount of heat we’d need. In some places, it’s more likely than others. It would be more likely in the West of the United States, that it would be a possibility. In Texas, in some places, there are coal plants located on really awesome, shallow geothermal resources. For instance, in the Northeast, where geothermal resources are deeper and therefore the drilling would be much more expensive, the prospect of doing that in the short term is lower. Just like everything, the coal plant conversion is going to be an incremental approach, where you pick the plant that’s sitting on the shallowest, hottest resources we can find and see what happens. Let’s try it first and go from there. I think that’s a really cool concept. It’s one that’s not super close in time in terms of execution, but I think it’s coming. It’s coming within this decade, I think.
When it comes to fracking bans, are the activists worried about making climate change worse? Are they worried about groundwater contamination or earthquakes? What’s their concern?
Yeah. Depending on where you are in the world, or which state in the United States, there’s a different reason. There are some regulations in place that actually do make an exception for geothermal projects. It depends on where you are and what the concern is. In Europe, seismicity is certainly on the public’s mind, and seismicity is something in geothermal that we have to be very careful about.
Are those earthquakes? Is that what that means?
Induced seismicity: man-made earthquakes, essentially. That’s another area, though, where the oil and gas industry could bring just an amazing wealth of knowledge and standardization, because the oil and gas industry has been through this with their learnings in hydraulic fracturing and wastewater injection in Texas and Oklahoma. Typically, in this context, and the oil and gas context, the seismicity that is resulting from fracturing operations or wastewater disposal is actually not enough for humans to notice it. It’s not something that we would feel necessarily, though sometimes it is. The oil and gas industry monitors it nonetheless. It’s something that we need to pay a lot of attention to as geothermal development scales and goes global, because we don’t want to be producing man-made earthquakes with our power plants.
Protesters take part in a rally against US fracked gas exports at the National Mall.REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
So I think this is an “eyes wide open” moment in terms of translating oil and gas knowledge from fracking into geothermal to make sure that we’re not having events like that. Certainly in Europe, they have had some. That’s why it’s in the public consciousness. They’ve had some man-made earthquakes that were caused by geothermal projects that have caused property damage. It’s not just Europe. It’s also Asia as well. It’s happened in South Korea as well.
What do you tell people who are also concerned about the climate, but they’re worried about earthquakes and other things? There’s no perfect technology. What are you more concerned about? How do you begin to make that case?
I think my personal views on this actually offend many of my climate activist friends, because I don’t like hypocrisy. And I think we need to have eyes wide open when it comes to the supply chains that we’re leaning on for renewable energy investment and development. In particular, when it comes to lithium mining and energy storage, I don’t think that the world understands the impact and what that’s going to mean if we mine much as we need to mine over the next two decades to meet current climate goals, just in terms of energy storage, not to mention rare-Earths that are needed to develop solar and wind.
Eyes wide open on supply chains. When I step back and look at our choices, in terms of clean energy technologies, would I rather risk-mitigate seismicity and do that in a measured, standardized way, than mine a ton of lithium and rare earth? Yeah. I would rather do that because I think it’s a manageable risk that has less impact on the environment. I think it’s really worth thinking about those things as we make investments, and having eyes wide open on what the real impacts are of the various energy sources that we’re investing in.
Speaking of energy, where is the private sector energy coming from? Is it from big established oil players whose names we’ve all heard of? Is it scrappy startups? Who’s doing this right now?
Right now it’s startups that are making a lot of noise. The interesting thing about that is many of the startups that are out there doing projects are led by oil and gas industry veterans: folks that have left industry or had retired from industry, but then got excited about this and jumped in and started companies. So you’ve got former chief scientists of Shell and executives from BP. You name it. Every oil and gas entity is now represented by a veteran that started a geothermal company. I think that’s really cool. That’s something that I think really says something about this movement. Of course those teams have really hit the ground running because they’ve spent their entire lives exploring for, drilling for, and producing subsurface energy. It just happened to be hydrocarbons and not geothermal.
So they know what they’re doing. They get on the ground and they go drill. That’s really great, but it’s not just startups. Now major multinational oil and gas companies are engaging, but they’re all doing it in different ways. Some are more slow than others. Certainly the oil service sector has hit the ground running on this because they have a lot to gain. These are the guys that go out and drill the projects and that have a lot of workforce and assets and technologies that will apply here. Over the past maybe 18 months, several of them have done full-sweep, internal investigations of where their strengths are here, and they’ve hung up geothermal shingles. You go to the Baker Hughes website now, and they’ve got a geothermal program — they’ve hung a geothermal shingle.
I think it’s new and it’s cool. Most oil and gas entities now have titled geothermal people, teams, leaders, management, executives — that’s new. That’s exciting. There are also oil and gas teams, meaning oil and gas entities — one in particular self-funded a field trial and just had a breakthrough outcome. That is not yet public, but soon will be. In a six month turnaround, they designed the tool, got it into the field, self-funded a field trial, and knocked it out of the park, like world-record in terms of hard rock geothermal drilling, in six months. I think that is a beautiful illustration of what happens when oil and gas brains and oil and gas entities start engaging in this problem set. The problems just get solved. It’s pretty awesome. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that over the next couple of years.
But what are they waiting to see? Are they just waiting to see what happens with these startups and they’ll swoop in and they’ll buy all of them? What does “all in” look like, and what are we waiting on for that to happen?
So some of them have taken the approach that they’re going to invest in a couple of startups that they like and see what happens. I think from the big oil perspective — like the operator perspective, Chevron, Shell, Patel, Exxon, etc., BP — these entities do not typically go out and pioneer things like this. They instead make investments and wait to see what happens. An employee from one of the big international oil companies recently at a conference said, “We’re waiting for our geothermal George Mitchell.” As soon as that entity proves a scalable concept in the field, there will be a pile on. I think that is definitely true.
Logos of five of the largest publicly traded oil companies: BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total. Via REUTERS
For the listeners, who’s George Mitchell?
George Mitchell is the wildcatter that got out into the field and figured out fracking and kicked off the shale boom. There are a lot of parallels between that kind of wildcatter culture and geothermal. We’re seeing that now with these startups that are oil and gas veterans that are out there trying these new concepts and seeing how to best harvest heat. It really does have a lot of parallels with how the shale boom kicked off. We could very easily get on that exponential growth curve that Shell did, which took the entire world by surprise. Within the next two years, we could very easily get on that curve and have a pile on, just like we did with shale, when the geothermal George Mitchell shows up.
It’s my gut that the geothermal George Mitchell is already in the field, but it’s just a matter of waiting for data at this point. It’s really exciting. Some companies have made some bets in startups and they’re waiting to see what pans out. I would say, in my ideal world, I kind of wish big oil would work from the top down, because geothermal interest has been really grassroots in big operators. I wish there was a more top-down approach where — because they have everything they need to figure this out and do this internally — there was a CEO or two out there that said, “Hey troops, I want to hear from you about how we make this happen. Failure’s not an option. I want to see something deployed in the next 18 months. I want the best ideas, go.” If that happened — a top-down approach in some of the biggest oil companies in the world — it’s my guess that most of your geothermal challenges would be nipped in very short order.
What do you think is a reasonable forecast for the kind of role this could play over the next — I’ll let you give me a number — of years? What kind of role can geothermal play, given the technologies people are working on right now?
I am the outlier in this, pretty much globally. I think at this point I’m willing to go all in because I think it’s worth it. I’ve listened to enough people, particularly in oil and gas, to say that if we did do geothermal at oil and gas scale, it would solve energy and meet world energy demand by 2050. I’ll hard stop on that. Are there people willing to lockstep me on that yet? Nope. Not yet; not publicly. But in a couple of years, will there be? Yep. I’m pretty sure there will. I do agree that we need a mix. Yes, all of that stuff. But geothermal has been this vastly underestimated resource that has a very well-suited industry to scale it quickly. We’re in a really unique position there where things could get really big, really fast.
Does this sector need more government research? Does it need deregulation, if you’re going to be drilling on public land? Have you ever heard those kinds of issues raised? Are they ready to go? They have what they need, the research has been done, we just need to sort of keep developing these technologies in the private sector? Does government need to do anything here that you’ve been made aware of or that people talk about?
Yeah. I think there are two major opportunities. Policy is one, and policy makes my skin crawl because I’m trying to get teams funded and into the field. We need demonstrations. When you start talking about policy and regulatory barriers, funders literally leave the room. They don’t want to hear about it. It’s slow. Forget it. This is not now.
Because most of the low-hanging fruit, at least in the United States, for geothermal development is on federal land, and it’s currently harder to develop a geothermal project on federal land than it is an oil and gas project. So we have some serious issues on federal land for geothermal development. One of them is that geothermal development is subject to NEPA and it does not have a categorical exclusion like oil and gas development does.
That is a direct result of the geothermal industry not having a lobby. It’s just a ridiculous situation in terms of the ability to develop projects on federal land. Let’s fix that. That’s ridiculous. We’ve got to fix that, but a way around that is to aim for private and state land for now. Let’s just build enough momentum here and have enough success that the federal piece will move eventually, but let’s not wait for it. We can be doing things now. That’s why, quite frankly, there’s a lot of ongoing demonstrations and interest in geothermal in Texas, because you’ve got a lot of private and state land there where development can happen quickly. That’s one thing, making some policy adjustments that would really unleash a lot of development that are just frankly silly, but also slow.
What we really need is for the oil and gas industry to start lobbying for geothermal. I’ll just say it. If the oil and gas industry did that, many of these problems would be near instantly solved. That’s one thing. Another thing when it comes to investment: Should the government invest more money in geothermal? Of course. Geothermal has been under-resourced forever. It has never enjoyed the subsidies or appropriations that any other energy source has gotten, specifically in renewables, by orders of magnitude. 
A geothermal powerplant owned by EnergySource LLC is seen atop the San Andreas Fault in Calipatria, California. REUTERS/Ernest Scheyder
Considering the fact that it really doesn’t need very much to get it off the ground. I don’t mean research — I’m not sure we should be dumping a lot of dollars right now into lab based research. It would be helpful to do some, but the high impact stuff right now for geothermal is funding teams into the field. We need demonstrations. We need to stop tweeting about it. We need to stop talking about it. We need to start doing it.
Didn’t we see that with fracking demonstration projects?
Yes, look, George Mitchell didn’t figure fracking out in the lab. You know, that’s not how that happened. It’s not how breakthroughs happen. You get out in the field and you get on a learning curve. Will the first couple of projects be perfectly successful? Probably not. But they’ll be iterated. This is also another way that the oil and gas industry could be immediately engaged, to build teams and deploy them into the field to build projects. I think that’s the area where there could be really high impact in terms of dollars, not necessarily in the lab, but in the field.
If we brought you back 10 years from now, 15 years from now, the title of the podcast could be “Geothermal: The Lost Dream.” What will have gone wrong, if none of this happened? Would it be that you were quashed by regulations? The technology didn’t work? What would have gone wrong?
My guest today has been Jamie Beard. Jamie, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thanks very much for having me, Jim. It’s been fun.
Learn more: The coming fusion revolution: My long-read Q&A with Arthur Turrell | Is the United States really meritocratic? My long-read Q&A with Adrian Wooldridge | The legacy of the Moon landing: My long-read Q&A with Charles Fishman
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If years could be assigned a dominant feeling (1929: despair; 2008: hope), 2021’s might be exhaustion. As the coronavirus pandemic rumbles through its 20th month, many of us feel like we are running a race we didn’t sign up for, and it’s getting longer every mile we run.With this slog has come a renewed focus on mental health. During the pandemic, universities have poured money into psychological resources. Corporations have hired chief health officers and invested in wellness services. In 2020, the mindfulness app Headspace saw a 500 percent increase in corporate-subscription requests. Alongside these efforts, a worldwide conversation has grown around “self-care:” anything pursued for the sake of one’s own wellness, including practicing goat yoga, bingeing Ted Lasso, and old-fashioned napping. Self-care has been popular for decades, but during the pandemic it has gained new cachet. Google searches for the term more than doubled from March to April 2020. Countless organizations, including mine, implemented “COVID days”—time off meant for employees to center their own needs.But self-care alone won’t fulfill people’s psychological needs as we rebound from the pandemic. After many months in relative isolation, we must reclaim connection and meaning. That comes not just from caring for ourselves but also from caring for one another.Self-care is vital, but its efficacy is specific: It is especially good at softening intense stress and anxiety, for instance among nurses and therapists. Profound distress saturated people’s lives in the spring of 2020, and self-care might have protected against it. However, that distress was surprisingly short-lived: As a task force to which I belong reported, acute mental-health problems peaked early in the pandemic and then quickly subsided.That doesn’t mean people are doing well. For many, the pandemic’s long tail has replaced intense distress with a duller struggle: languishing, or a loss of meaning amid the Groundhog Day that is pandemic living. Languishing has many sources, but right now I suspect isolation is its driving force. When people reflect on what matters to them most in life, social connections perennially top their list. Even as we emerge from social-distancing practices, it’s easy to miss those connections. People are still adapting to reentry and rebuilding atrophied social muscles. And though self-care soothes, it can be too individualistic to help with loneliness. “Me time” is great, truly, but human flourishing is typically out there with everyone else.[Read: Late-stage pandemic is messing with your brain]Languishing might subside on its own as socializing and travel become safe again. But another approach—one that has been shown in years of research to bolster people’s sense of self—is to show up for others. In one of many studies like it, people were randomly assigned to spend money on either themselves or someone else and then were asked how much they agreed with statements such as “My life has a clear sense of purpose.” Those who spent their money on others reported feeling greater meaning, self-worth, and connection. The effects in these studies were small; buying someone coffee probably won’t be your road-to-Damascus moment. But over time, the effects of many small actions can accrue.This is even truer during trying times. Despite headlines that blare about looting and other crimes, disasters usually bring out the best in people intensifying charitable donations, volunteering, and cooperation. Kindness has continued through the pandemic, and its benefits have too. In one recent study, hundreds of people were randomly assigned to buy personal protective equipment for themselves or as a gift for a stranger. Spending on others again boosted people’s sense of meaning and connection.The punch line is simple: Giving boosts meaning in good times, and might be a salve against languishing in tough ones. Here’s the problem: Many people don’t seem to get this. Individuals wrongly predict that spending time, money, and energy on themselves will make them more fulfilled than spending those resources on others. When they act on these illusions, ironically they can deepen languishing and loneliness. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior can intensify when people most need human connection. For instance, individuals who feel lonely or depressed tend to turn inward, focusing less on others, which leaves them even more disconnected over time.Some people might bristle at the suggestion that they need to devote more time to others. So many of us—parents of young children, children of immunocompromised parents, teachers, health-care workers—have been worn to a nub by helping. Other-care has caused our burnout; how could it possibly be a cure?The surprising answer is that the very same act of helping can deplete or fulfill us, depending on how we think about it. Imagine helping someone move to a new apartment. To you, this could be an expression of appreciation to a close friend or an irritating obligation you were guilted into. These inner judgments can determine, in part, how doing this favor will affect you.Researchers have identified psychological ingredients that make helping beneficial to helpers, including autonomy and empathy. In studies run by my own lab and others, researchers checked in with participants at the end of each day, asking whether they had helped someone else that day, how they experienced their act of kindness, and how they were feeling. People reported being more fulfilled on days they helped others, but only when they felt connected to why they were doing what they were doing, and to the person they were helping.For these reasons, I think we need a complement to self-care days: “other-care” days, earmarked to zero in on positive effects we can have on someone else. Schools and companies can clear time for people not to soothe themselves but to be helpers instead. Among corporations, organized kindness was popular early in the pandemic, for instance when Anheuser-Busch brewed hand sanitizer and Gap pivoted to manufacturing clothing for health-care workers.[Morgan Ome and Christian Paz: Why are people nostalgic for early-pandemic life?]Other-care days would build on this spirit, but in different ways. They would shift from grand collective gestures to personal habits of helping, and give individuals leeway to help whomever and however they like, turning kindness into an act of self-expression. This could be integrated with the kinds of care many of us do already, such as parenting. On other-care days, instead of trudging between video meetings and preschool tantrums, a parent could take her kids to volunteer or visit an elderly neighbor. By making space for intention and compassion, other-care days could transform our everyday helping and recuperate its meaning.Ultimately, the line between self-care and other-care is blurrier than we might realize. People are psychologically intertwined, such that helping others is a kindness to ourselves and watching over ourselves supports others. This idea was embedded in early conversations about self-care. Following its more mundane roots in medicine—when self-care more or less meant heeding doctors’ orders—activists took this idea in a revolutionary direction. In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party launched Survival Programs, mutual-aid efforts designed to encourage preventive medicine, nutrition, and exercise in response to the lack of high-quality health-care access many Black Americans face.Activists such as Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins broadened this approach to include practices such as mindfulness and yoga, more along the lines of what we now understand as self-care. But their version was still firmly grounded in community. As they saw it, self-care among Black people—especially Black women—was a radical act, denying the oppression that would reduce them. It was also a way to continue pushing against that oppression and toward justice. “Anyone who is interested in making change in the world,” Davis once said, also “has to learn to take care of herself.”As with so many revolutionary ideas, the narrative around self-care has now been wrapped in marketing; the industry has soared past $10 billion a year in the United States alone. The millions of people who Googled self-care as the pandemic began likely didn’t find information on its community-based roots. They found instead an atomized, hyperpersonal world of tips, products, and services—calming, sometimes expensive tools for being alone in nicer ways—that can help sometimes, and that might strand us at other times.By integrating other-care into our plans, we can go back to self-care’s broader, more connected origins and rebuild meaning at a time when so many of us desperately need it.

The past several years have seen much discussion over the “Ferguson Effect” and “de-policing.” This effect first came to national attention in 2014. A police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off protests and riots, and crime increased as police grew more hesitant to enforce the law. Subsequently, in the wake of “viral” use-of-force incidents, typically captured on cell-phone or body-camera video, cities often see police retreat from discretionary law-enforcement activity, with stops and arrests declining—and murders and shootings rising.

There has been a voluminous debate over the existence of this pattern and what police reforms might stop controversial use-of-force incidents from occurring. Some critics who want less policing have celebrated cops’ withdrawal.[1] There has also been criticism of the officers pulling back, as well as speculation as to their motives. In 2017, Washington Post columnist Radley Balko called the de-policing theory a “cynical, dangerous argument” that “not only aims to shame critics into silence” but “besmirches the integrity of conscientious police officers;”[2] this year on social media, he parodied it as “murders are surging because an entire profession would rather let people die than hold their colleagues accountable when they needlessly hurt and kill people.” [3]*

* The last sentence in this paragraph has been changed. The original version attributed a comment to Radley Balko in a Washington Post column that he had quoted from another source, and a comment on social media as a statement of his own views.

Less attention, however, has been paid to the question of what to do about de-policing when it happens. [4] Even as states pass new policing laws, viral incidents—ranging from truly horrifying abuses to justifiable uses of force that look excessive to the untrained eye—show no sign of stopping soon in a country with 330 million people, high and racially disparate rates of violent crime, and widespread cell phones and body cameras. Communities must be able to weather such controversies and protests and to dispense justice as appropriate, without descending into murder and chaos, just as they routinely handle even the most severe crimes not involving police.

By reviewing the relevant academic literature and interviewing several sources—including current and former police officers, law-enforcement officials, and criminal-justice experts—I compiled insights and suggestions as to why de-policing happens and what we might do to spur officers to keep working in an unwelcoming environment. [5] Several major themes emerged from these efforts.

Police today find themselves under intense scrutiny, both from the public and from government officials. Contrary to some of the more aggressive police critics, officers are fully aware that real abuses exist and must be dealt with. But they also know that legitimate uses of force sometimes “look bad on video,” which can lead to a public outcry and, in extreme cases, even civil unrest, putting pressure on mayors, police chiefs, and other government officials to “throw them under the bus.” One way for a cop to reduce the risk of this happening is simply to police less, keeping to nondiscretionary acts such as responding to calls and pulling over to help when flagged down.

To continue being proactive in such an environment, police want assurances that their departments and government officials, at least, will treat them fairly if they have to use force. Officials can credibly make such assurances even as they hold bad cops accountable—and they can encourage proactive police work in other ways as well, within certain limits. The big question is whether they want to and have the will and the necessary political support.

The Reality and Consequences of De-Policing

Time and again, American cities have experienced the same pattern, often dubbed the “Ferguson Effect”: there is a policing incident; the incident goes “viral” and is followed by a public outcry; officers pull back from discretionary activity, including stops and arrests; and shootings and homicides go up. Such patterns have occurred in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Riverside, California, [6] and, most recently, Minneapolis and Seattle. [7] In a much broader sense, de-policing has occurred across the country, with officers reporting in surveys that these nationally publicized incidents have made police less proactive. [8] In some ways, it’s a return to an older approach to policing from before the era of CompStat and data-driven proactivity—where officers were expected to answer calls but not to do much else to prevent crime.

One recent study, by Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer, analyzed investigations of police departments accused of having a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations. It found that such investigations can improve departments and reduce crime—but when the investigations were spurred by viral incidents, crime skyrocketed instead. The explanation that best fit the data, Devi and Fryer contended, was an “abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity,” including declines in police-civilian interactions that reached nearly 90% in Chicago and about half in Riverside and St. Louis. [9] Similarly, Cheng Cheng and Wei Long found that after a wave of highly publicized incidents beginning in late 2014, big cities with large black populations saw decreases in arrests and increases in homicides.[10] Another study, by Travis Campbell, finds that Black Lives Matter protests led to a reduction in local police shootings—but also a drop in clearance rates for property crime, reduced reporting of property crime to the police, and an increase in murders that outnumbered the decrease in police shootings, all findings basically consistent with the de-policing hypothesis. [11]

In theory, though, there is a way we could see such patterns even if de-policing didn’t cause crime: viral incidents and protests could cause de-policing directly as well as increase crime directly, with no separate process through which de-policing causes crime. For example, cops might back off under harsh criticism—after which crime might go up not because the police have backed off but because of the tension, stress, and loss of respectfor the rule of law that these incidents created. In that scenario, efforts to stop de-policing would have no effect on crime.

But this is unlikely to be a full explanation. Viral incidents may increase crime through multiple channels, but de-policing is almost certainly one of them.

Efforts to tie post-viral-incident crime increases to other effects of viral shootings—such as a decline in policing’s “legitimacy” with the public rather than a decline in concrete police activity—have generally produced weak results, as my Manhattan Institute colleague Charles Fain Lehman has explained in detail elsewhere. [12] Moreover, Devi and Fryer found that “geographic divisions within Chicago and St. Louis that witnessed the largest reductions in police activity, after the investigation, also witnessed the largest increases in crime after the investigation,” drawing an even closer correlation between changes to policing and crime. They also pointed out that both crime and policing seem less affected when a viral shooting is not coupled with an investigation of the department, perhaps because cops feel less under fire.

Speaking more broadly, the research is convincing that police presence reduces crime, both in general and when it comes to many types of proactive efforts. A 2020 study, for example, estimated that one homicide is averted for every 10 officers hired. [13] Other studies of policing levels—leveraging changes such as federal grants to support hiring police, [14] 9/11 terror alerts, [15] and the randomized assignment of foot patrols [16]—have also found that more cops mean less crime. In a recent survey of criminal-justice experts, about 60% agreed or strongly agreed that increasing police budgets would decrease crime, with only about 20% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing. [17] And regarding proactive policing, a 2018 review of the literature by the National Academies found strong evidence to support several strategies, especially “hot spots” policing and “focused deterrence” programs, which concentrate efforts on particularly high-risk places and individuals, respectively, though the evidence was mixed on many other strategies. [18]

The point is not that every single stop or arrest that any police officer could possibly make would yield benefits. There are diminishing returns as activity expands to cover increasingly marginal situations. Some of the most successful policing practices involve highly targeted strategies, [19] and one recent study suggests that more experienced officers reduce crime while making fewer arrests than their less experienced counterparts. [20] What is clear is that intense drops in overall police activity after viral incidents have the potential to increase crime and that, indeed, we have seen increases in shootings and murders to go along with cops’ withdrawal.

The Pressure to De-Police

De-policing is the result of numerous pressures; what follows is a description of these pressures as officers see them.

Officers interviewed cited fear of becoming “the next YouTube video” or a target of negative coverage in the media, a sentiment that Devi and Fryer also report hearing frequently in focus groups with police officers. This concern is beyond the reach of government action. But interviewees further reported pressures from government actors and even within the police department. In general, officers are keenly aware of the political forces that shape their jobs.

Mayors and governors are elected, giving them incentives to bow to public opinion, even if public opinion has been shaped by an unflattering video that does not show the whole situation. Police chiefs, meanwhile, serve at the pleasure of these elected officials. District attorneys are typically elected (or appointed by elected officials) as well. Officers have a strong sense that public outcry can translate to an officer being publicly denounced, fired, or even prosecuted—even if the officer follows his training—and that government higher-ups can’t be trusted to step up in such situations.

Numerous interviewees also cited official policy decisions that encouraged officers to be less proactive. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio ran on a platform of scaling back the city’s then aggressive “stop, question, and frisk” regime, for instance, while a new Washington State law increases the burden required for police to involuntarily stop someone for questioning (from “reasonable suspicion” to “probable cause”). [21] A consent decree has limited proactive policing in Baltimore, [22] and American Civil Liberties Union lawsuits have had similar effects on proactive-stop-based policing efforts in Chicago [23] and Milwaukee. [24] Chicago has also banned many foot pursuits, depending on the severity of the suspected crime. [25]

Scaling back other aspects of the justice system, such as lenient bail policies or otherwise releasing individuals whom police see as dangerous, can lead to a sense of futility as well. In the words of one officer, “What’s the point of locking someone up when they’re back on the street an hour later?” Additionally, while cities have lately rushed to increase funding for police, with the president’s blessing, several cut budgets in 2020 [26] amid the “defund the police” movement and an incredibly violent summer, sending an explicit message that what police do is not valued.

Some sources further lamented officials’ unwillingness to push back against the overall narrative of racially biased policing or to frankly discuss racial gaps in crime rates. This narrative, of course, lies at the heart of the current debate—in bars and salons across the country, as well as academic journals—and the repeated cycles of protests and violence since Ferguson.

These forces, when combined, add up to low morale, resulting in abrupt de-policing after viral incidents and contributing to police departments’ mounting personnel struggles. There is a long-running recruitment crisis, and many cops hired in the 1990s will be heading into retirement soon. [27] Since the summer of 2020, many officers have fled big-city departments. A study of one large department found a nearly fourfold increase in voluntary resignations following the George Floyd protests; [28] NYPD departures, including resignations and retirements, were up 75% in 2020. [29] Baltimore is hundreds of officers short of its staffing needs, which is making it hard for the department to comply with the terms of its consent decree. [30] Notably, though, many officers who quit city departments end up working in quieter suburbs, and the limits of currently available data make it unclear how staffing levels have changed nationwide in the past year. [31]

Low morale is seen in growing tensions among rank-and-file officers, their superiors, and public officials. Police in New York [32] and Chicago [33] have symbolically turned their backs on their respective mayors; there have been reports of “blue flu,” in which police protest what they see as unfair treatment of their fellow officers by calling in sick. [34]

The roots of these tensions run deep, and obviously, it would be unreasonable (and unrealistic, at any rate) to expect every government actor to base all his public statements and policy positions on how police would respond to them. What is clear is that police see themselves as increasingly embattled and under fire from the public and government officials and that this has consequences for public safety.

Fairly or not, to put it bluntly, the price we pay for alienating the police and reducing their morale is steep. Such consequences deserve consideration as officials debate broader issues of policing and criminal justice, especially when it comes to policies that directly encourage de-policing—and particularly after a viral incident. That’s when officials need to navigate a public outcry, respond appropriately to the actual case in front of them, respect the public’s need for information and transparency, and avoid another wave of violence.

What Cops Fear

Since the spread of cell-phone video and body cameras, viral incidents have run the gamut. Some involve shocking abuses, such as the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which has resulted in a murder conviction for former police officer Derek Chauvin, as well as the filing of state and federal charges against the other officers involved. Other incidents involve a public outcry following incidents where a police officer used force appropriately. A case in point occurred in Columbus, Ohio, in April—where an officer shot a teenage girl who was in the process of attacking another girl with a knife. Still other viral incidents were ambiguous or debatable, including cases where an officer had to make fast decisions and performed less than ideally, where an officer mistakenly but genuinely perceived a serious threat, or where a lack of video evidence makes it unclear what even happened.

Citizens and media outlets have every right to debate police officers’ conduct; government officials have no control over that, nor should they. What they can control is their own behavior in the wake of a viral policing incident and the way they manage police officers amid such turmoil. The message that cops get from their leaders during this process is a key factor in how they subsequently go about their jobs.

Police officers realize that bad cops exist and need to be dealt with. What they fear is a rush to judgment—being thrown under the bus by public officials—before they have a chance to defend themselves. Even as police officers rarely face outright criminal prosecution for using force, these fears are sometimes justified.

In the Columbus case, those jumping to express outrage included Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, [35] who said on social media that, “while the verdict was being read in the Derek Chauvin trial, Columbus police shot and killed a sixteen-year-old girl,” adding that “she should be alive right now.” In a less prominent Washington, DC, incident, three officers were grappling with a man illegally carrying a loaded “ghost gun,” and, in trying to bring the man under control, one of the officers struck the man numerous times. The incident—which, again, involved an armed suspect resisting arrest—was resolved without lethal force, but the video spread online, the police chief quickly said that he was “embarrassed, disturbed, disheartened, and ashamed” by the video, and the officers were placed on leave, pending disciplinary and criminal investigations. [36]

The Importance of Fair Treatment

Police officers are more willing to be proactive and engage with the community when they feel confident that they’ll be treated fairly if the situation escalates and they need to use force. This is clear from my qualitative interviews as well as from academic research.

In a series of studies in the wake of Ferguson, Justin Nix and Scott E. Wolfe surveyed law-enforcement actors, including sheriffs’ deputies and management-level officers. [37] These surveys asked numerous questions, such as whether negative publicity had affected motivation and proactivity, whether officers were willing to partner with the community to solve problems, and how the officers perceived the fairness of their departments and their own legitimacy. Nix and Wolfe ran statistical models to see how these variables related to one another. The overarching theme is that when police have a sense of fair treatment and legitimacy, the Ferguson Effect on their motivation is less pronounced.

In a 2016 study, [38] Nix and Wolfe surveyed more than 500 deputies at a southeastern sheriff ’s department, with an impressively high response rate (85%). The key finding was that deputies who thought that their organizations and command staff treated them fairly “were significantly less likely to report experiencing reduced motivation due to negative publicity surrounding law enforcement in the six months following Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson.” They were also less likely to say that their colleagues had become less motivated. Simply put, officers who think that their superiors are fair are less sensitive to the pressures laid out above.

In another study, [39] Wolfe and Nix concluded: “Deputies who reported being less motivated as a result of negative publicity surrounding law enforcement . . . indicated less willingness to partner with the community.” However, “officers who perceived fair treatment from their organization were more likely to engage in community partnerships,” and “confidence in one’s authority as a police officer appears to protect against the negativeeffects of media coverage of high-profile incidents like Ferguson.” Yet another study by Wolfe and several coauthors, relying on a survey of border patrol officers, found that a sense of fairness was especially important to job satisfaction when officers faced uncertainty, including uncertainty from negative publicity. [40]

These studies are part of a much broader literature on “organizational justice,” which boils down to whether employees believe that their organizations treat them fairly—including beliefs that promotions and other perks are distributed fairly, that superiors adhere to legitimate processes and allow employees a voice, and that superiors are generally respectful of their subordinates. This research tends to find that employees perform better when they hold such beliefs, including workers in criminal-justice fields, specifically, as Wolfe showed in a meta-analysis (coauthored with Spencer Lawson) of more than 100 studies. [41]

A closely related concept is “procedural justice,” which applies not only within police departments but also to the ways that law enforcement interacts with the public. This refers to the principles of fair processes, transparency, voice, and impartiality. As the Obama administration’s 2015 policing task force noted, “Research on internal procedural justice tells us that officers who feel respected by their supervisors and peers are more likely to accept departmental policies, understand decisions, and comply with them voluntarily.” [42] This was evident, for instance, in a survey of Buenos Aires police officers. [43] A 2016 study based on a survey of a large urban force in the U.S. similarly found that “when officers were in a procedurally fair department, they were more likely to trust and feel obligated to obey their supervisors, less likely to be psychologically and emotionally distressed, and less likely to be cynical and mistrustful about the world in general and the communities they police in particular,” as well as more likely to endorse “democratic,” community-focused policing. [44]

In a 2017 Pew survey, however, only 45% of officers said that they thought their departments’ disciplinary processes were fair, and only 27% believed that low-performing officers were held to account. [45] Police discipline is often seen as arbitrary, [46] a “jackpot,” [47] with good cops hamstrung while bad cops escape, thanks to extensive appeal options. [48]

How to Manage Cops amid Turmoil?

Deep fixes to police discipline could take up an entire article on their own, [49] as could the questions of how officers should be trained and when they should be prosecuted. [50] But in the more immediate context of viral incidents, organizational and procedural justice means a fair, careful application of the procedures and laws that exist. This is largely common sense; but in my interviews, I had sources outline more specifically how officials should respond when faced with this phenomenon. What follows is my synthesis of their ideas, mixed with some insights from other sources.

Clear communication between police officials and line-level officers is a must, both before and after these incidents occur. Officers should obviously know what is expected of them and be properly trained to perform their duties. They should know what they are not allowed to do and what consequences they face otherwise. They should further understand how the process works for investigating and resolving complaints and allegations, so that they do not feel blind-sided if they or another officer face one.

After an incident occurs, it is crucial for higher-level police officials to be transparent about what is happening with the accused officer and why, to convey that officers who do their jobs properly will have the support of the agency, and to impress on officers that this is a time when the city needs a strong, professional police presence the most. Officials should also make themselves available to hear the concerns of their officers. During these times, officers feel under attack by the public and media, and a sense that their employer, at least, will “have their back” is crucial.

In cases where the accused officer did nothing wrong, officials should defend the officer as soon as it is appropriate to do so and explain to the public why police are trained to use force the way the officer did. Police officers and civilians often see the same video very differently for a host of reasons, including officers’ training. For example, officers are more attuned to the split-second nature of many of these decisions and are also aware of what police are generally trained not to do, such as shoot a suspect in the leg.

The timely release of body-camera footage can be especially helpful. Since use-of-force situations are often hectic and confusing on video, some departments have taken to releasing not only raw footage but also detailed breakdowns of these incidents where key moments are annotated, slowed down, or paused. While there is always some concern about such efforts, particularly when PR firms are involved, [51] they can be key to getting the public to understand what happened and why.

In cases where the officer was wrong, officials should emphasize to other officers and the public that such misbehavior is not tolerated—and does not taint the vast majority of officers who do their jobs in good faith. Where possible, officials should spell out to the public how officers are trained so that it is clear that the officer was acting outside what he or she was taught. (Proactively educating the public about normal training, the reasons for it, and the limits of police force would be welcome, as well.)

It’s worth pointing out that, in dealing with a specific officer at the center of a controversial incident, hasty disciplinary measures can be ineffective, given that public employment comes with a variety of statutory, [52] constitutional, [53] and often union-won contractual protections. For example, the Atlanta Police Department fired the officer who killed Rayshard Brooks last year the day after the incident, but the officer was reinstated in May of this year because the department had not followed the process laid out in the law, which included written notice 10 working days in advance. [54] (The officer’s criminal prosecution for the shooting is ongoing.)

These protections are policy variables in themselves, of course, and reforming them in certain ways could be a worthy endeavor, so long as accused officers retain the ability to mount a vigorous defense. [55] Nonetheless, carefully adhering to due process not only assures good cops that they’ll be treated fairly but also can be a prerequisite to punishing bad cops.

Encourage Healthy, Proactive Police Activity

We know about de-policing because departments across the country track their officers’ activity. In principle, it would be easy to use those very same data to fight the problem, simply by imposing consequences on officers whose activity dropped in a clearly deliberate way.

Yet such efforts are difficult to undertake in practice and can backfire if poorly implemented. Hardly any management practice is less popular among cops themselves, the public, and politicians than “quotas.” Going back to the 1970s, numerous states have passed laws banning quotas, amid complaints that such practices force cops to make dubious or even illegal stops to meet their numbers. [56] On the other side of the spectrum, several officers told me that the quotas they’ve faced have always been trivial to meet, and thus ineffective for their weakness rather than troubling for their strength. Any official seeking to increase discretionary activity must consider the potential for such pushback, unintended consequences, and inefficacy

Given that proactive policing is a big part of a police officer’s job, it is almost inevitable that objective measures of these activities will play some role in police management. In one Pew survey, about 40% of officers reported that they were subject to some sort of quota, though these were almost always informal targets rather than official requirements. [57] Further, laws banning quotas typically apply to explicit numerical requirements and do not prohibit the more general use of objective activity measures to manage police. [58]

So when police activity falls in the wake of a viral incident, what can officers’ superiors do?

Officers, leaders, and experts I spoke with outlined numerous ways that superiors can prod officers to keep their activity up. Such activity can play a role in promotions, performance reviews, and assignments to special units. More generally, police officials and mayors can communicate that they don’t want to see a decline in activity at a time when the city needs protection the most, especially if these leaders have taken the steps outlined above to assure officers that they will be treated fairly if they need to use force.

Street-level police leaders, such as sergeants, can talk to individual officers whose work has dropped off. Even simply letting it be known that superiors are keeping close tabs on the quantity and quality of the work that is being done can have an effect. Further, departments can publicly highlight acts of good policing, as, for example, the NYPD frequently does on social media; this both praises the best officers and illustrates the benefits of policing for the public.

A somewhat out-of-the-box idea is to train officers in tactics that, among other advantages, look less violent on video. Some departments, for instance, have offered training in Brazilian jujitsu, a martial art focused on grappling rather than strikes. Early data from the Marietta, Georgia, police department suggest that officers trained this way are less likely to resort to Tasers and less likely to be injured themselves. [59] Further study of this technique in other departments, ideally with random assignment, is worth pursuing.

Meanwhile, a seemingly obvious solution to de-policing—disciplining officers who pull back—is rare outside of extenuating circumstances. It’s simply hard to punish a police officer for not doing the discretionary aspects of his job, so long as the officer has the “plausible deniability” to claim that he didn’t see anything that needed addressing. The general sense within law enforcement is that if a police officer doesn’t want to be proactive and isn’t motivated by carrots such as special-unit assignments, there’s no way to truly force the issue.

One can certainly imagine some sort of punishment for officers who deliberately cut back their activity, but the pitfalls are many. Like quotas, this punishment would face objections from police, unions, and much of the public because of its potential for encouraging dubious stops, especially when enforced in a city on edge and distrustful of the police, thanks to a viral video. It could also prove hard to enforce in a fair way, given the broader issues with police disciplinary processes noted above, not to mention the difficulty of proving a deliberate cutback by a specific officer.

Police are public employees with superiors, and it is not unreasonable to ask those superiors to step in when officers stop doing a major part of their jobs, with disastrous consequences for public safety. But the realistic options are limited.

The process of de-policing is a series of cost-benefit scenarios managed by various actors. Elected officials facing a public outcry weigh the political advantages of joining in, as well as their own convictions regarding the incident at hand and police use of force in general, against the risks of alienating police and increasing crime. Police chiefs weigh the advantages of supporting their officers against the risks of angering their elected bosses. Down the chain of command, officers weigh the benefits of being proactive and stopping crime—a reason many became cops, to begin with—against the risk that they could be the next viral video.

There is no easy solution to the problem of de-policing, but there are ways to minimize it, at least when the will to minimize it exists. Officials can avoid turning de-policing into official policy by, for example, making it harder for police to effect stops. They can work to cultivate a sense of organizational justice, in which police feel that they will be treated fairly if they need to use force. And to a limited extent, higher-ups can encourage police to keep their activity up, even when tensions run high and the temptation to de-police grows.

Endnotes

Please see Endotes in PDF

Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute where he provides policy research, writes for City Journal, and contributes to special projects and initiatives in the President’s office. Having held roles as Deputy Managing Editor of National Review, Managing Editor of The American Conservative, Editor at RealClearPolicy, and Assistant Book Editor at The Washington Times, VerBruggen writes on a wide array of issues including economic policy, public finance, health care, education, family policy, cancel culture, and public safety. VerBruggen was a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow in 2009 and a 2005 winner of the Chicago Headline Club Peter Lisagor Award. He holds a B.A. in journalism and political science from Northwestern University.

“It seems to me that this plan could easily be mad,” Marc Warner, CEO of the AI consultancy Faculty, told Dominic Cummings, according to the former Downing Street adviser’s parliamentary testimony. The plan, to pursue herd immunity and avoid locking down, “could be incredibly destructive. Has this really been tested? Have you really thought it all through? Should I and some others start thinking about a plan B?”
Less than a fortnight later, after consulting Demis Hassabis, CEO of the AI start-up DeepMind, and the mathematician Timothy Gowers, Cummings invited Warner, Warner’s brother Ben (a Downing Street data scientist), and the Prime Minister’s private secretary for health into Boris Johnson’s study to discuss an alternative pandemic approach. Together, the foursome sketched out plan B on a whiteboard.
Ben Warner and Cummings met Johnson the next morning. “We showed him this graph. It has here ‘no mitigation’, ‘our plan’. This is all the NHS broken,” said Cummings, gesturing to the original plan. “And here is an actual plan, which is lockdown.”
Nine days later, on 23 March, the government announced the country’s first lockdown. “It was a totally, totally crazy time,” Marc Warner tells me when we speak via video call in July. “It’s seven days a week, incredible hours, but everyone really working together trying to get this stuff sorted. And so we could look at the data and see where things were going.”
In his select committee appearance in May, Cummings described Warner as “one of the smartest and most ethical people I have ever met in my life”. He said that if he, Cummings, had been prime minister, he would have placed Warner “in charge of this whole thing”. In Cummings’s world, Warner would have had “as close to kingly authority as the state has legally to do stuff, and pushing the barriers of legality”. He would have been “in charge of everyone, and he can fire anybody, he can move anybody, and he can jiggle the whole thing around”.
Warner rolls his eyes as I remind him of this. “Again, we just try and do our best. There’s not really much to it. The customer has a problem. We try and help them fix it to the best of our ability. I don’t think there’s much more to it than that.”
Nevertheless, Cummings was unambiguous about Warner’s role in averting an even larger disaster than the UK ultimately endured. “Without him, thousands of people would be dead,” he told MPs, “and I know that his involvement in it has come at a lot of personal cost for himself and for his company.”
Raised in Bedford, Warner, 36, had what he calls a “very gentle childhood”. He went on holiday to seaside resorts such as Poole and Southwold and attended three schools each less than three miles from his family home. Warner’s mother was a PE teacher and his dad an accountant, but it was his grandparents who inspired his passion for science: his grandmother taught chemistry and his grandfather taught physics.
“They definitely encouraged my interest in science in general and I remember doing some night experiments with pH as a kid. I don’t know how much I understood it, but I certainly liked that different liquids could change the colour of the paper.”
[See also: Join New Statesman and Tech Monitor to hear leading public sector IT professionals discuss digital transformation themes across central government, local administration and healthcare bodies in the UK]
Warner says it wasn’t that he “knew young that I wanted to be a physicist”, but that he had “a physics teacher who can help you out with a bunch of things at home so you do better in it, and so I suppose it’s a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy”.
Warner moved to London at 18 to study physics at Imperial College London. After graduating, he specialised in quantum computing, completing a PhD at the London Centre for Nanotechnology before taking up a research fellowship at Harvard.
It was there, in the early 2010s, that Warner began to research artificial intelligence. “I started to get interested in AI through the kind of AI safety angle, and people like Nick Bostrom, who were writing very, very early – before he wrote his book Super Intelligence.
“I thought that was interesting and important, and understudied, but I thought AI was magical. I had a PhD in physics but my assumption was AI was going to be too hard, and the maths would be too complicated,” he says.
“It was only when I actually sat down with a textbook, when I was doing my research fellowship at Harvard, and started looking through it and I thought, although it sounds magical, actually it’s similar to the maths we do in physics. In some sense it’s actually easier to master.”
In 2014 Warner faced a decision: continue pursuing quantum computing research or move into the AI sector. “I stumbled across these programmes in the US that helped academic PhDs become commercial data scientists. I thought that that has got to be a good thing for the world. We should just set that up while I’m thinking about these bigger picture things.
“And then basically, the truth is, I just enjoyed working with my friends,” says Warner. He met Andrew Brookes, now Faculty’s chief technology officer, at secondary school and Angie Ma, its chief people officer, while studying for his PhD. “When I was originally thinking, well, we’ll set this up and then I’ll make a big decision, it basically came down to loyalty to friends.”
In August 2015, Warner, Ma and Brookes launched ASI Data Science, Faculty’s original moniker. The company developed a fellowship programme for recent PhD graduates to carry out data science secondments with Faculty’s clients, using advanced modelling to solve complex business problems. The company has built a terrorism propaganda detection tool for the Home Office and analysis to help the UK coastguard distribute resources more effectively.
With 5 to 10 per cent of UK-based maths, physics and engineering PhD students applying to take part each year, places on the programme are now fiercely contested; just one in ten applicants are accepted. The programme has thereby given Faculty the opportunity to select the very brightest data scientists and then employ them in-house.
“The Faculty engineers and data scientists were really amongst the best we’ve ever worked with,” said one source who worked with Warner and his team at the start of the pandemic. “I’d say the most impressive thing… is the quality of the talent that they’ve managed to recruit.”
Not only are they “very, very brilliant engineers and data scientists, but they have a kind of grit that a lot of people who are very talented in that way [lack]. Faculty has somehow kind of creamed off the people who combine those two things.”
[See also: Timothy Gowers: The man who changed Dominic Cummings’s mind on Covid-19]
Warner possesses these qualities too, the source said. “He’s incredibly bright, he’s got a fantastic temperament, he’s a very level-headed, laid-back person, who’s got that ability to talk to CEOs and someone who’s totally operational as if they were the same ranking individual. He’s the same person with everyone.”
It was Warner’s temperament that appears to have converted Cummings into one of his most committed acolytes. “One is definitely a fan of the other; there is some form of friendship,” said the source. “But I don’t know how close they really are, or where that dates from. With Dom Cummings you never really know because he admires people like Marc in just such a sort of demented way.”
Reflecting on Cummings’s claim that Warner was one of the most ethical people he’d ever met, the source added: “Cummings really is big on his superlatives, I mean people are the most ethical people in the world or they’re the most fucking hopeless or they’re the most corrupt. There are very few shades of grey.”
Last March, Faculty was enlisted by Downing Street to build a Covid-19 data dashboard for the NHS and government officials. Developed in partnership with Peter Thiel’s data engineering firm Palantir, the dashboard analysed how much stress Covid-19 was placing on hospitals across the country. Over time, it also predicted demand on NHS services, allowing managers to distribute resources such as PPE, ventilators and beds accordingly.
A number of the world’s largest consultancy firms, including McKinsey and Accenture, have also built models for the government during the pandemic. But the source said Faculty’s were the most useful: “The so-called early warning system that [Faculty] developed for NHS England was a tremendous, phenomenal bit of work.”
However, despite the utility of Faculty’s work, the company’s links to Cummings have attracted much scrutiny from campaigners. Cummings’s private consultancy company paid Faculty £260,000 over the course of two years in exchange for work that has not been explained. Faculty’s data scientists had previously worked to build political models for Vote Leave and were praised in one of Cummings’s blogs. 
“Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields,” the adviser wrote, “but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people.”
Since 2018, Faculty has won more than a dozen government contracts, but Warner denies that his links to Cummings have led to preferential treatment. “We’ve worked with government long, long before Johnson was PM. I was appointed to the AI council on AI under Theresa May. We think it’s critically important that companies like ours work with government to make services better.
“From our perspective, the work of the government is just totally mission driven. In many ways, the private sector is more lucrative, and there’s less scrutiny. But as citizens of our country, we just don’t feel like we can step away from some of the important problems that the country faces. Ultimately, the government has to get better.
“The NHS has to be better and cheaper, especially with all the spending that’s gone out over the last 18 months. Realistically, one of the important ways of doing that is going to be technology companies working to help governments get better and cheaper.”
Warner has a gentle manner and is softly spoken, but becomes frustrated as he reflects on the criticism his company’s work has received. “Ultimately fair scrutiny is just totally critical to the good functioning of democracy and a government,” he says. “But it’s important to make sure that the people doing that scrutiny are honest with the public and themselves about the separation between facts and opinions.”
Many working in healthcare and government feel disappointed that AI – a field of technology that Silicon Valley executives describe as more important than fire or electricity – has failed to help combat the pandemic. While hundreds of AI tools have been built, few have played a significant role in managing the pandemic. Warner’s work is an exception to this rule, but even Faculty relies on large numbers of highly educated engineers to deliver its products. And the company’s most important contribution to Britain’s pandemic response was arguably Warner’s criticism of the herd immunity strategy, which stemmed from his own analysis, rather than any modelling Faculty had produced.
[See also: How one of America’s most controversial billionaires cracked the NHS]
The extent to which AI reshapes businesses, governments and economies in the coming years will determine Faculty’s growth potential. “Faculty, I think, has a chance of being a very important company, because we can actually ensure that organisations get the value from AI,” Warner says. “Everyone knows that AI is a big deal. The fact is, quite a lot of people know it’s going to be a huge deal and a massive trend, but a lot of them experimented with AI, and found that although in principle it should have been really useful, in practice it didn’t really create the value.
“That’s because there’s a whole bunch of things you need to get right, and you need to apply [AI] to the right problem. You need to build good models. You need to scale those models effectively. You need to embed it in the organisation. You need to connect things across the organisation. Unless you get all of that right, you won’t actually see the value.”

Market monopoly is challenging the FED with its hesitant to raise interest rate, recession is not a proper alternate even for tapering. They want to prove money makes money even with no products to consume, just improvise the accounting process to make the supply side economy growth because money grow at no cost, long as the demand pays even after inflation. The Modern Monetary Theory has been becoming the ransomware that maintains the data to blackmail the FED and the public. Should they know why LA is selling $8 a gallon for gas, or the supply chains disruption causes inflation?

“While financial markets are often concerned about whether inflation in a given year is 1.7 or 2.3 per cent, most people in the real economy rightly don’t focus too much on this,” Dr Lowe said.

“Whether the spike turns into a permanent lift is going to depend on what happens in the labour market. I don’t think we’re going to have sustainably higher inflation unless we have sustainably higher wages growth.

It is how progressive we have in our political system? Billions to fastest train from LA to SF, all money dispersed to real estate purchase, rails ended. They save auto and oil industry. 7/24 operation to port after the supply chains got bottleneck, hundred tankers floating undocked, port opens with extended hours cost more to operate? Crane-operators made $250,000 a year, why? Thus, problem will be resolved by 2022. Of course, depression certainly dissolves the supply chain bottle-neck issue. We have no skilled workers, and the Crane-operators and bankers would burn out after the million he made. Nonetheless, we just simply do not have prepared for the current trend of economic development

I sympathized Powell of the FED how hard he tried to maintain his sensitive estimate on the job market and the repo, but what if the progressive growth had broken the glass ceiling above. Waged Salary cannot balance on 17% growth on housing or the $8 a gallon of gas, supply side can be indifferent on what demand need to complete. Xi on how he shot down the helicopter money and put his ‘Common Prosperity” to work Powell should learn from Xi before they put up another Evergrande in our repo and push on another Lehman's Brothers solution leaving us billions of debts to pay. I have not heard anything in the Commercial real estate yet. Did they pay on time with their gains instead, do they claim their debts as loss? Would you question Housing and banking that made billionaires by its progressive enterprising, and we are still cannot afford a home? I think Powell should carry tapering assets buying and raising interest rate to shoot the helicopter down with his double-barrels shotgun before he turns into a comfort woman in giving resole to our dollar because there is no good answer in the future if it continues.

Even Greenspan would agree that enterprising is playing a dangerous game to inflation, even though the Chinese suppliers would raising its price to 20% on the next order if the supply chains bottle-neck persists. Dollar would shift indefinitely. Stagflation will stay. I hope Powell may not feel embarrassed in prediction of the interest unchanged till 2023, it is how they felt they can catch on, but the game must stop now. Seriously, the market would collapse before we can call it recession, or we are all depressed.

The wonderful thing about woke narratives is that you only have to wait a while until they collapse. The core of Donald Trump’s appeal in 2016, we were told by the media, was that white supremacists and various rubes saw a chance to reverse racial progress. The results of 2020 showed that, in fact, black and Latino support for Trump had increased over those four years, while Biden won by increasing his white male vote. The “racial reckoning” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder was proof, we were told, that we needed to “defund the police”. Only months later, the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayoral election was won by a black former cop, Eric Adams, who promised to increase police funding and had more support among African Americans and Latinos than upscale whites.
Last year every major media organization ran story after story about how white supremacists, inspired by Trump’s rhetoric on the “China virus”, were inflicting random violence against Asian Americans. As video after video and local news story after local news story showed that the attacks were largely by young black men or deranged homeless people, the establishment media started to run articles about “multiracial whiteness” to cover their posteriors. While racial justice figures insisted critical race theory was only being taught in a few law schools, teachers leaked high and even elementary school curricula showing precisely the concepts of CRT in action. The CRT scholars moved seamlessly to the argument that, sure, it’s there — and should be taught.
Unlike in Britain, where there is a strong debate about trans questions, especially the treatment of children with gender dysphoria, the woke media in the US will not print a word about it, and when they do, describe it as function of hateful transphobia and nothing else. But last week we found out, in fact, that medical treatment of gender dysphoric kids was “sloppy, sloppy healthcare”, without sufficient attention to kids’ overall mental health, and that many children who have been put on puberty blockers, followed by cross sex hormones, will never experience an orgasm as an adult. Who told us this? Two transgender surgeons who are pre-eminent practitioners of trans surgery — on the board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — no less.
We were also told it was an absurd idea that some people might abuse trans-inclusive provisions that allow trans women with male genitalia to be in intimate spaces with other women. And then a sex offender showed up in a spa in Los Angeles. First the media argued that nothing had happened, and that transphobes were making it up. Then they ran defensive pieces reluctantly copping to the truth. A second case is unfolding in Virginia, with a rape in a school girls’ toilet. We don’t know all the facts yet, but it has a similar dynamic.
Has any movement ever crashed and burned more quickly than the social justice revolution? Yet it powers on strong, sustained by the unfalsifiable, its increasing passion commensurate to the debunking that happens every day.

I know there are plenty of other things to worry about, but the increasing frequency of people playing their own music in public is beginning to get to me. People go to the beach or get a spot in a park, whip out their boombox — often now a small hi-tech gadget — and blast their noise so everyone else has to hear it as well. On their bikes, they play throbbing club music as they pass you in the street. Cars vibrating with the beat blasting from their stereos instantly force every passer-by to pay attention. I understand the need to brighten up your day and chores and work and even downtime with your favorite tunes. I do it all the time. But there are these things called earphones or AirPods or a million other headsets you might have heard of. They allow you to listen to a better quality sound, at any volume, without imposing your tastes on everyone else in your vicinity. It’s win-win! I used to be a total Karen about this, going up to these noise-machines and asking them to turn it down or off. Now, I just sigh, lick my wounds and walk on. It’s a strange time, isn’t it? At the same time that codes of speech and behavior are increasingly enforced with discipline in workplaces, on the street, anything goes. Is that what happens when civilizations die?
The post Why won’t the mainstream media talk about trans issues? appeared first on The Spectator World.

As a big fan of the original Star Trek, I have to confess that it was kind of neat to see Captain Kirk actually go into space. But there is a real issue here about the silly games of the super-rich that is worth some thought.

There have been numerous stories and papers about the huge increase in the wealth of the super-rich since the pandemic began. Virtually all of this is due to the run-up in the stock market during this period. Part of that is bounce back, the S&P 500 lost almost one-third of its value between its pre-pandemic peak in February of 2020 and its pandemic trough a month later. If we want to tell a really dramatic story we can start at the pandemic trough and take the rise in the stock market from March 20th.

If we want to address the enormous gap in political power created by extremes of wealth, we have to look for ways to build the power of those at the middle and bottom.

But even if we are being serious, there has been an extraordinary runup in the stock market in the last twenty months. The S&P 500 is more than one-third higher than its pre-pandemic peak.

There are several different explanations for this increase. One is simply that low-interest rates generally boost stock prices. Interest rates did plummet during the pandemic shutdown, with the 10-year Treasury rate falling from a bit over 1.8 percent in February of 2020 to lows of under 0.6 percent last summer. As a general rule, lower interest rates will mean higher stock prices.

But this explanation will not go too far: the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is currently over 1.6 percent. The gap between a 1.8 percent pre-pandemic Treasury yield and the current 1.6 percent yield could only explain a small portion of the rise in the stock market.

A second possibility is that stock investors are genuinely optimistic about the outlook for future profits. People are often confused about what the stock market is supposed to measure. Stock investors don't give a damn about the future of the economy, they are asking about the future profits of Amazon, Facebook, and other stocks that they hold. If they think that their profit picture looks good, then they are willing to pay more for their shares.

This could be because they think that the economy will do well and that all the doomsayers in the media don't have a clue. If the economy has strong growth in 2022 and 2023 and corporations get their share in higher profits, then high stock prices might be justified.

An alternative story would be that they expect the recent shift from wages to profits to continue. In this case, profit growth could be strong even if economic growth is not. This would again mean that all the people whining in the media, about companies being squeezed by rising labor costs, are clueless. But, what else is new?

And, there is the third possibility that we are just seeing another case of irrational exuberance. The possibility that there is no rational basis for stock prices should not seem strange to anyone who saw the collapse of the stock bubble at the end of the 1990s and the collapse of the housing bubble from 2007 to 2009. Investors are often ignorant of economic fundamentals, so it is certainly possible that there was no economic basis for the run-up in stock prices over the last 20 months.

But, whatever the rationale, there is no dispute that the run-up in stock prices has made the super-rich much wealthier. The question is how much should we worry about this.

I have always said that I am not very concerned about wealth inequality. It is poorly measured and highly volatile. I am far more concerned about income inequality.

I recognize the political power that is associated with extreme wealth, but I don't believe the people who make this argument have given it serious thought. Suppose we cut the wealth of the super-rich by 50 percent or even 75 percent. Will Jeff Bezos lack the resources to push his political agenda if he only had $50 billion at his disposal? If we want to address the enormous gap in political power created by extremes of wealth, we have to look for ways to build the power of those at the middle and bottom. The idea that we will do it by reducing the wealth of those at the top is hardly plausible.

If the billionaire gang manage to make space travel a major form of recreation for the very rich, this is a real problem.

The space flights being promoted by Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and presumably Elon Musk, involve an enormous use of resources. It takes large numbers of often highly skilled people to plan and monitor these space flights. With the enormous amount of free advertising the media has given these ventures, we can expect that many more very rich people will be getting in line to take their trips into space.[1]

I don't have any great plans for stopping the latest space race. I have always argued that the best way to prevent extreme inequality is to stop structuring the market in ways that generate extreme inequality. This means less reliance on patents and copyrights as mechanisms for financing innovation and creative work. It means downsizing the financial sector by structuring it in ways that promote efficiency, not extreme wealth for the few. And, having a corporate governance structure that doesn't make it so easy for CEOs and top management to rip off the companies they work for.

These, and other issues, are addressed in Rigged, but the main point here is that we should try to keep our eyes on the ball. Wealth as a bookkeeping entry should be largely a matter of indifference to the rest of us. When the super-rich pull away large amounts of resources for their fun and games, that is a big problem.

[1] I'll skip the obvious joke that the problem isn't sending rich people into space, it is bringing them back.

In early March, Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, celebrated a milestone: hitting the point of full vaccination, two weeks after getting his second Pfizer shot. Since then, he’s been watching the number of coronavirus antibodies in his blood slowly but surely decline.The drop hasn’t been precipitous, but it’s definitely happening—regular checkups have shown his antibody levels, also known as titers, ticking down, down, down, from spring through summer, now into fall. The slump fits the narrative that countless reports have been sounding the alarm on for a while now: In the months after vaccination, our antibodies peace out, a trend that’s often been described as a “waning” of immunity, and evidence that we’re all in dire need of boosters to shore our defenses back up.It all sounds, quite frankly, like a tragedy. But as Bhattacharya and others assured me, it’s really, really not. “All we hear about is titers,” says Stephanie Langel, an immunologist at Duke University. That fixation “misses an entire nuance.” Antibodies are supposed to peter out; that’s why they always do. Still, even as our antibodies are dwindling in absolute quantity, these scrappy molecules are enhancing their quality, continuing to replace themselves with new versions that keep improving their ability to bring the virus to heel. Months after vaccination, the average antibody found in the blood simply has higher defensive oomph. “That’s why I hate the word waning,” Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto, told me. “Antibody levels are declining, but something good is happening too: The immune response is evolving.”The focus on antibody counts alone actually does a disservice to our understanding of immunity, experts told me. Like a block of wood being hewn into a sharper blade, vaccinated immune systems can hone their skills over time. Part of waning certainly does mean fewer. But it can also mean better.[Read: What we actually know about waning immunity.]A couple weeks after vaccination, a group of immune defenders called B cells starts to pump out antibodies en masse. But many of these early antibodies are, as Bhattacharya told me, “really crappy” at their jobs. Their raison d’être is to be clingy—the Y-shaped molecules hook their tips onto a specific hunk of SARS-CoV-2’s anatomy, and hang on for dear life. The better they are at glomming on, the better chance they have of waylaying the threat. Sometimes it’s a solo act: Antibodies alone can grab on so firmly that they block the virus from hacking into a cell, a process called neutralization. Or they’ll use the stems of their Ys to flag down other members of the immune system in a destructive assist.But that’s the best-case scenario. Most of our B cells, or the antibodies they produce, won’t actually react at all to SARS-CoV-2, or a vaccine that resembles it. That’s because our bodies are always churning out B cells at random, repeatedly futzing with their genetics so that they’ll make a diverse array of antibodies—billions or trillions in total—that can collectively recognize just about any microbe they might ever see. This process is haphazard and imprecise, though: When B cells are born, “they don’t have any particular pathogen in mind,” Gabriel Victora, an immunologist at Rockefeller University, told me. Instead of gripping firmly onto the virus’s surface, many antibodies might just “bounce on and off,” giving the pathogen ample time to wrest itself free, Bhattacharya said. It’s the best defense the body can slap together on short notice, having never met the bug before. Early antibodies are sort of the immune system’s best guesses at defense—the immunological equivalent of throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks—which usually means we need a lot of them to truly pen the pathogen in place. They’re also fragile. Most antibodies don’t hang around for more than a few weeks before they degrade.Such flimsy fighters aren’t terribly good investments for the long term. So while the subpar antibodies are duking it out on the front lines, the immune system will shuttle a contingent of young B cells into a boot camp, called a germinal center, where they can study up on the coronavirus. What happens inside these training camps is a battle royal in miniature: The cells crowd together and desperately vie for access to the resources they need to survive. Their weapons are their antibodies, which they wave frantically about, trying to latch on to chunks of dead coronavirus, while a panel of other immune cells judges them from afar. Only the most battle-ready among them—the ones whose antibodies grip most tightly onto the coronavirus—move on to the next round, and the losers perish in defeat. As Gommerman put it, “If they suck, they die.”The harrowing cycle repeats itself over and over, and only gets more grim. Survivor B cells will xerox themselves, deliberately introducing errors into their genetic codes in the hopes that some of the mutations will enhance their antibodies’ chances of gluing themselves to the virus. The entire process is downright “Darwinian,” like a super-sped-up form of natural selection, Victora said. The weaklings are weeded out, leaving just the sharpest and strongest behind. It’s also very prolonged. Researchers such as Ali Ellebedy, of Washington University in St. Louis, have found that these tournaments of culling continue for at least 12 to 15 weeks after people receive their COVID-19 vaccines, perhaps longer.If all of this is getting a little too Squid Game, consider the much rosier upshot: At the end of this process, our bodies are left with some truly primo antibodies, well poised to take up the mantle of protection as the first waves of mediocre defenders start to fall away. This is what is happening in the immune system of those who got vaccinated months ago: An initial burst of antibody activity, followed by a gentle tapering off, as the body goes back to baseline. “Immune responses can’t just stay in your blood forever,” Langel told me. If they didn’t abate, we’d have no room or resources for the body to mount a different defense, against another threat—and our blood would be nothing more than a useless antibody sludge.There’s another way to think about the post-vaccination dip in antibodies: taking out the trash. Early-acting B cells are, in some cases, so crummy that they’re not all that worth keeping around. Evolution, too, has clued into the perks of this pattern, which might be why the B-cell victors aren’t just higher quality, but also much longer-lived. Whereas the first B cells that rally after vaccination might live just a few days, the cohort that trounced their peers in training can post up in the bone marrow or the blood for months or years. Some will continue to squeeze out antibodies for the long term, while others drift about in quietude, ready to resume their defensive duties when they’re called upon again. “What is seen as a ‘loss’ in antibodies is actually the slow waning of the less-good, short-lived response,” Victora told me. And when antibodies are needed—say, when the actual virus infects us—veteran B cells will produce them again, in gargantuan quantities. Antibodies themselves don’t always linger. But the capacity to create them usually does.There’s definitely a limit to how much quality can compensate for quantity—one antibody, no matter how badass, can’t do the work of hundreds. Experts don’t yet know how many antibodies (good, meh, or “crappy”) people need to have in tow to be considered well-guarded from COVID. Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that his work has shown that, six months out from vaccination, the number of neutralizing antibodies found in people’s blood tends to drop noticeably from its peak. But he and others have also found that there’s little difference in how much neutralization the body is capable of—a strong hint that superior antibodies have since stepped up to the plate. Again, antibody levels always drop. That doesn’t mean that immune protection (which, by the way, is about more than just antibodies) disappears.[Read: You might want to wait to get a booster shot]The slow trudge toward self-improvement might also be one reason to not rush into nabbing a booster shot. Boosting reminds the immune system of a threat it’s seen before. But offering up that refresher too often or too soon could be pointless, even slightly counterproductive, if active germinal centers are still doing their thing. Waiting a bit longer might help ensure that the best possible B cells are reawakened into action, to manufacture antibodies anew. Immunity, then, is much less about what’s around now, and more about what’s around when it’s needed; it’s no big deal if those defenses aren’t always visible, as long as they kick back into gear when they’re called to the fore.All this means that a slowdown in antibody production could, in a way, be seen as comforting. It’s a sign of an immune system that’s allocating its resources wisely, rather than working itself into a constant panic. Bhattacharya, for one, hasn’t been at all fazed by what’s happening to his antibodies, which, nearly eight months out, still look pretty freaking good, despite the numerical drops—because they still seem to be walloping the virus when he tests them in his lab. Langel says that’s standard. When she sees antibodies “waning,” she shrugs. “I say, ‘Look,’” she told me, “‘that’s the immune system, doing what it does.’”

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 51
You may have noticed that times are turbulent and that something very nefarious seems to be afoot. You’re not wrong, of course. That’s exactly what’s happening, and it presents a dangerous time for humanity. The question is why it’s happening because the answer to that question informs us significantly on our prospects going forward. On the one hand, and this is correct, a global push for a kind of communo-fascism is underway: a power grab of the grandest proportions in human history. This is consistent with Communist visions stretching back over a century and must be recognized and resisted. On the other hand, it’s happening now instead of at some other time. Is that merely because the technological tools to make this attempt finally exist, with digital technology and social media enabling new forms of propaganda and social credit systems for unprecedented social control? Partly, yes, but merely, no. The internet, like its nearest conceptual predecessor, the printing press, has changed everything. Understanding the nature of that change sheds useful light on the world we now inhabit along with how we should address this new threat and what we have to look forward to if (or when) we succeed.

In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay walks us through a view that breaks out of our limited historical parallax and considers the question of what’s going on around us in a broader frame. What he sees is the dawn of the Second Enlightenment, which will change the world in unbelievable ways for the better if it can set the world ablaze and spread its light. Drawing on lessons from the previous Enlightenment, which unfolded from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Lindsay makes a case that for all it did accomplish, it didn’t do the one thing that most educated liberals believe it did. The First Enlightenment did not create a Marketplace of Ideas. It created an aristocracy of ideas, which was a huge step in the right direction away from the magisteria of the Darker Age that preceded it. Now, with the advent of the internet and the ability for the average person to hold “information property” by the fruits of his own research, the Marketplace of Ideas is finally emerging. It’s also threatening the power of the “information aristocrats” in the Expert Caste, including its worst offenders, the technocrats. These are doing everything in their power to re-establish a technocratic information aristocracy in the form of a new administered information economy: an information socialism totally under oligarchical technocratic control. Join James for this eye-opening discussion here on the New Discourses Podcast.
The post Welcome to the Second Enlightenment appeared first on New Discourses.

Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault are rarely read side by side. Yet the two thinkers praised each other’s work, recognizing themselves as involved in a common project. Both assessed, on the one hand, the ways elites use networks of expertise and injunctions to moral “liberation” to strengthen their domination—and, on the other, the ways that modern people have come to look for knowledge of themselves from such experts. They shared a sense that beneath progressive policies for public welfare, demands for sexual freedom and identity-based affirmation, and therapeutic practices of self-discovery lies a dangerous potential for authoritarianism and alienation.

Many American readers of the 1970s got their first introduction to Foucault from Lasch, who reviewed the English translation of Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963) for the New York Times in 1976, and his History of Sexuality Part One (1976) in Psychology Today two years later. Lasch brilliantly summarized Foucault’s argument that the movement for sexual liberation had misrepresented the past as purely repressive, while establishing a new sort of power over sexuality and the secrets of intimate life, vested now in “medical jurisdiction” and “therapeutic authority.” Their approaches nevertheless had important differences, with Lasch tending to criticize feminism and to express nostalgia for a vanished moral sense that he described as populist—concerns that Foucault, more oriented toward individual freedom, approached only in such rare moments as his early support for the Iranian Revolution.

The culmination of Lasch and Foucault’s relationship came at the University of Vermont in 1982, by which time Foucault, with an appointment at UC Berkeley, had become a star in American academia. Lasch was one of several scholars invited to comment on Foucault’s work during a three-week period in which Foucault himself gave a series of lectures, “Technologies of the Self.” Foucault attributed their inspiration to Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979), in which Lasch had argued that anxious individuals, deprived of economic security and cultural bonds, were investing their self-image, and therapeutic projects of self-discovery, with unprecedented importance.

Foucault perhaps was flattering his hosts, but his intellectual trajectory had indeed taken a parallel turn with that of Lasch. In his final lecture, Foucault noted that while his early work tracked how institutions like asylums, hospitals, and prisons—and bodies of knowledge like psychiatry, medicine, and criminology—define “who we are” by excluding the abnormal, his work following History of Sexuality focused on how individuals come to understand themselves in consultation with a range of supposed experts of self-knowledge. Foucault worked from a broad perspective—tracking such expertise from the philosophers of classical Athens to priests in late antiquity to psychiatrists today—and avoided Lasch’s more personal focus on how modern narcissism makes us miserable. But the two had a common sense of the problem.

By 1991, however, seven years after Foucault’s death, and three years before his own, Lasch dismissed the French thinker, whose influence he had spread and whom he in turn had influenced. In an article for Salmagundi, to which he often contributed, titled “Academic Pseudo-Radicalism: the Charade of Subversion,” Lasch attributed to Foucault the claim that “knowledge of any kind is purely a function of power.” In thus crediting to Foucault a position so obviously self-defeating that it is hard to imagine any thinker holding it, Lasch failed to notice a convergence between the work of his late period and that of Foucault’s a decade earlier.

Toward the end of their lives, both men turned to the theme of religion, arguing that it provided critical cultural and psychological resources necessary for individuals to become meaningfully autonomous. They moved toward an understanding that, in order to become the sort of independent selves on whom liberal democracy depends, we need what Foucault called “discipline” or “ascesis”—the ability to bind ourselves to other people who help us both to keep our commitments and to remake ourselves. In his final book, Revolt of the Elites (1994), Lasch offered a similar perspective on the value of religion without demonstrating an awareness that he was traveling the same road as Foucault.

In Foucault’s home country of France, Lasch has been taken up today in certain corners of the radical Left unafraid of sounding at times like conservative moralists. Jean-Claude Michéa, the heterodox Marxist, has written prefaces to recent French editions of Culture of Narcissism and Revolt of the Elites that highlight Lasch’s critiques of globalization and the capitalist culture of self-fascination. Lasch also can be heard in the French collective Tiqqun’s Raw Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999), a scornful attack on consumerism, spectacle, and narcissism, seen as embodied in the modern sexually liberated woman.

In the United States, meantime, some of Lasch’s contemporary interpreters, such as Geoff Shullenberger, are also seeing Foucault afresh. From Shullenberger’s perspective (in dialogue with my own work on Foucault), it is possible to see how Lasch and Foucault came to criticize both traditional Marxism and the new identity-based radicalisms that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Conservatives often try to make sense of their cultural adversaries through the genealogy of their ideas, tracing “wokeness” back to such supposed intellectual forbears as, ironically, Foucault. Others reach back, still more unhelpfully, to Marx and Hegel, or analyze wokeness as a new religion. Part of the value of Lasch and Foucault is that they can redirect our attention away from such wrong paths in intellectual history toward the systems of knowledge, institutions, and practices by which Americans have become so fixated on questions of identity in the first place.

Photo: On left, book cover design by Arnold Skolnick for The Agony of the American Left by Christopher Lasch (Crossett Library Bennington College is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) / On right, Michel Foucault (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Updated at 4:50 p.m ET on October 20, 2021. Have you ever wondered what deans of diversity do behind closed doors? Until last week, the public had little visibility into their methods. Then covertly recorded audio emerged of Yaseen Eldik, Yale Law School’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and Ellen Cosgrove, an associate dean, pressuring a student to issue a written apology for emailing out a party invitation that offended some of his classmates.The Yale Law student in question, Trent Colbert, belongs to two student groups, the Native American Law Students Association, or NALSA, and the conservative Federalist Society. He emailed members of the former group that “we will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House … by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc,” adding that refreshments would include “Popeye’s chicken, basic-bitch-American-themed snacks (like apple pie, etc.),” and various beverages. That is what offended some of Colbert’s peers, including the president of the Black Law Students Association, who reportedly likened Colbert’s references to “Trap House” and Popeyes to blackface.[Read: Yearbooks aren’t the only place to find blackface on campus]A dispute over a party invitation—even an arguably offensive one—may sound more like a matter for a high-school vice principal than one for Ivy League deans. Nevertheless, the diversity administrators spent many hours on this low-stakes drama among high-IQ adults, affording outsiders an unusual peek at their methods and a related series of crucial mistakes, most stemming from an inability or unwillingness to see how the interests of students diverge from the interests and incentives of their office. Irrespective of whether the invitation was racially offensive, the behavior of Yale Law’s diversity bureaucrats was unethical, discreditable, and clearly incompatible with key values that the elite law school purports to uphold.Similar diversity offices are now operating at institutions around the country, but their inner workings remain mysterious to many faculty members and students. The Yale Law controversy raises the underexamined question of what it actually means for diversity offices to ethically fulfill their mission, and whether choices made behind closed doors would retain support if exposed to sunlight.When the law school’s diversity office summoned Colbert for a meeting the day after the invitation went out, he was confused about the reaction to his words. As he later explained to the legal commentator David Lat, “I was never aware of the word ‘trap house’ having any racial connotations. I thought of a ‘trap house’ as like a frat house, just without the frat ... I had been calling it that in messages with other NALSA board members for months, and nobody had said anything to me about it.” He also said that the mention of Popeyes was not intended as a racist allusion and that someone else in the organization had chosen the food.[Elizabeth Bruenig: The new moral code of America’s elite]Colbert related his confusion to Yale’s diversity officials when they met––and they purported to believe his claim that he was ignorant of any racial connotations. Still, they went on to repeatedly pressure Colbert to apologize for the email, which they referred to as “triggering,” even though no evidence suggests that anyone experienced a bout of PTSD. As Aaron Sibarium of The Washington Free Beacon reported when he broke the story, the administrators also told Colbert that both his ideological affiliation and his race were affecting the amount of scrutiny he was getting—more scrutiny because he belongs to a conservative organization, less because he is not white. They also counseled him to apologize in part because a failure to do so might someday sow doubts with bar associations, which typically mandate that newly minted lawyers have good character to be licensed.Skeptics questioned the veracity of the Free Beacon’s reporting. But the publication posted corroborating audio that Colbert had recorded during his meetings with administrators, prompting an ideologically diverse backlash against Yale Law. Republican Senator Tom Cotton called the incident “insanity,” while the progressive Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern lamented that Yale’s approach was wrong on the merits and “folly,” as “it provides grist for the grievance-industrial complex that drives the conservative legal movement.” In The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus objected to “a grievance culture in which every slight, real or perceived, is greeted with outsize demands for disciplinary consequences.”Not everyone was so critical.After listening to the audio, the Yale Law professor Monica C. Bell wrote on Twitter that a mostly white group of commentators had put themselves in “the odd position of dictating to Black students what they should find offensive.” She also noted that, especially on racial matters, the public conversation about what counts as outrageous changes over time, and “people like those commentators, or even myself, might not be the right ones to sit from on high and drive it.”[Read: The cost of balancing academia and racism]Bell is right about the need for epistemic humility. We should all be cautious about pronouncing—across generations and cultures—what should or shouldn’t offend other people. That question is inherently subjective. So is the question of how much one person should be expected to know about how people of other generations or cultures interpret a given term—especially a relatively obscure one whose meaning is evolving. Of course, the offended Yale students themselves made presumptions about how their Indigenous Gen Z classmate understood trap house, failed to inquire as to what cultural contexts had informed his usage, and urged their elders to pronounce from on high. The diversity bureaucrats ultimately weighed in on the offended students’ side, condemning the invitation.The audio in this controversy affords a rare opportunity to examine how administrators involved themselves behind the scenes and clarify why some observers are appalled by those actions. While trying to placate students aggrieved by Colbert’s message, Yale diversity officials made five major errors:1. They failed to share important context with the community. In their first meeting with Colbert, the administrators listened to him explain at length that he had no idea trap house had racial connotations. Eldik then told him, “Having met with you and spoken with you, you’re an honest person; you’re someone who clearly has integrity; you’re a good person, and I want that to be what people see from you. And I would hate to have to spend however much longer in this vortex of people making claims about who you are without even having met you once. So I’m very protective over you.”

Later, when those same diversity bureaucrats put out a public statement about the matter, they did not include the temperature-lowering fact that Colbert had said he didn’t know that trap house had any racial connotations, or that they judged him to be honest, or that he “clearly has integrity,” or that his classmates should not make claims about him without knowing him. Instead, they emailed the law students, “We understand that an invitation was recently circulated containing pejorative and racist language. We condemn this in the strongest possible terms. As the Law School’s Discrimination and Harassment Coordinators, we are working on addressing this. If anyone has concerns they would like to discuss further, please reach out to us.” That was two-faced behavior, and most people subjected to it would feel betrayed.2. The diversity officers exploited the complexity of Yale’s rules and procedures to pressure Colbert. The American legal system that Yale Law students will enter after graduation is typically at its most abusive when authority figures in government or corporations exploit their own superior knowledge of its intricacies to mislead and manipulate the inexperienced. The law school ought to be teaching students to eschew and oppose such abuses.

In this matter, Eldik and Cosgrove used their private meeting with Colbert to urge the outcome they wanted: a written apology from him to his classmates. While pushing for that outcome, they could have told Colbert what Yale later clarified in a public statement: “Yale University and Yale Law School have strong free speech protections, and no student is investigated or sanctioned for protected speech.”

But the administrators would’ve had less leverage over Colbert if he had understood that the speech at issue was protected and that he would not be officially investigated or sanctioned for it. So they kept Colbert guessing as to whether or how he was being investigated or disciplined, and whether Yale administrators might report him to the bar, making vague insinuations and maintaining strategic ambiguity—even as Colbert explicitly, repeatedly, asked for clarity. They modeled abuse of authority of a kind Yale Law graduates denounce furiously when their clients are subjected to it, and gave all students and faculty reason to distrust the forthrightness of Yale diversity administrators.3. Yale diversity officials acted like a crisis-PR team. At multiple points in the recording, Eldik and Cosgrove talk of wanting the matter to go away as soon as possible (a goal Colbert himself suggested that he shared), rather than wanting it to play out in the way that is most just, procedurally sound, and educationally rich. When Colbert expressed his willingness to converse one-on-one with upset peers—interactions that would have value for all involved—the diversity bureaucrats discouraged him. As Eldik put it, “I don’t want to put the onus on Black students to reach out to you to talk more.” The administrators also said that “nipping this in the bud,” as Cosgrove put it, would be best. Eldik went so far as to explain that they needed to make sure their office looked good. As he put it: “I also don’t want to make our office look like an ineffective source of resolution because we’re just writing to students and telling them, ‘He’s so sorry; accept our expression of his apology’ on your behalf, so it looks almost as if, like, we’ve all just sort of folded into each other. And it erases your individuality and your agency in this.”

But any concern for Colbert’s individuality and agency was called into question soon after, when—according to the Free Beacon’s account and other outlets’ subsequent interviews with Colbert—Yale's diversity administrators composed a draft apology for Colbert, apparently preferring the PR value of a quick letter of contrition over the educational benefits of letting a student reflect and write to his peers in his own words. What kind of educators interject themselves as ghostwriters for students? Colbert declined to sign the letter. (He did implement a review process for future NALSA emails and post a conciliatory message in an online forum offering to discuss the matter with anyone who wanted.) But if he had put out their statement as if he had written it himself, he arguably would have been violating Yale Law’s code of conduct. One wonders if bygone apologies at Yale were actually drafted by diversity officers. I emailed Eldik, Cosgrove, and Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken to clarify, among other things, how often the school writes apologies for others and whether doing so is standard procedure, but the officials didn’t respond to specific questions.4. The officials failed to acknowledge their own conflicts of interest. Students can learn from writing their own apologies, insofar as apologies are warranted, and more generally from working out problems among themselves. But that process can include conflict that makes administrators nervous, and if students succeed in working out their problems on their own, then the diversity bureaucracies will look less necessary.[Read: Whose interests do college diversity officers serve?]When he recorded parts of his meetings, Colbert correctly sensed that, in his case, his interests and those of the diversity office were divergent. Yet in the recordings, Eldik and Cosgrove repeatedly talk as if all of their interests are aligned, even as they say and prepare to do things that illustrate the divergences. Colbert worried that the written apology they sought would afford antagonists an opportunity to pick apart whatever he wrote, extending the controversy and leaving him worse off than if he did nothing. Eldik acknowledged that an apology would be scrutinized but minimized that concern, assuring Colbert, “I can’t imagine that that would do anything other than make you a thoughtful, reasonable, kind person, and that is more likely to have this go away, which is clearly what you want, than, I think, any other alternative.”A better-informed and more transparent adviser would have directed him to the academic literature on apologies—including the strongest case for and against making one. As the USC Marshall School of Business scholar Peter Kim once explained to me, ​​if a transgression is seen as intentional––as was true in Colbert’s case––“an apology can be quite harmful.” Rather than finding an apology appropriate, it is typically seen in these circumstances as confirmation of the belief that someone has done wrong and has character flaws. Deans are not obligated to give any PR advice to a student. But if they do, they shouldn’t omit all information that cuts against their desired outcome. A law school, of all places, should be especially attentive to the ethical obligations that go along with representing oneself as someone’s mentor and advocate.5. The university failed to safeguard student expression. In Yale’s telling, the university does not investigate or punish protected speech. Administrators may not technically violate that standard by asking you probing questions in multiple meetings and condemning your actions in an all-student email. But “the university’s excuse that no formal investigation occurred is woefully inadequate,” the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonpartisan organization that works to protect free expression and due process for faculty and students, declared in a statement, because Eldik and Cosgrove were “at best, exceedingly vague about the process the student was undergoing and what consequences he might face if he failed to cooperate,” and, “to the ears of any reasonable student, some of these remarks were at best negligent, and at worst veiled threats.” The foundation is right: “If administrators want to invite a student to participate in an informal and optional conflict resolution process, the burden is on administrators to make crystal clear to the student that participation is wholly voluntary and that the student will in no circumstances face any punitive consequences for declining the invitation.”The most significant question that remains unanswered at Yale Law School: Was this case unusual, or do the diversity bureaucrats at Yale treat lots of people this way behind closed doors? Cosgrove and Gerken, the law school’s dean, figured prominently in my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig’s report on a bizarre controversy that erupted around Amy Chua, a prominent Yale Law professor whom administrators apparently punished in the spring. Some students had made murky complaints that Chua had entertained other students at her home—and that this was evidence of a threat to students’ safety. Bruenig attributed the dispute to “the culture of elite institutions, where putatively righteous ends justify an array of troubling means, and noble public virtues like fairness and safety cloak more prosaic motives.”The school’s faculty have a collective responsibility to probe what’s being done in their name.In a statement Monday, Gerken said that ensuring that Yale Law lives up to its values is her responsibility, “and I stand ready to take any steps necessary to do so.” She added, “I will not, however, act on the basis of partial facts reported out in a charged media environment, as that would be a disservice both to members of our community and to the norms of our profession.”Ian Ayres, the law school’s deputy dean, will lead a review of the incident. If the assessment is to prove useful, it should ask how deeply Yale Law truly believes something else that Gerken wrote in her message:
The vigorous exchange of ideas is the lifeblood of this Law School. Protecting free speech is a core value of any academic institution; so too is cultivating an environment of respect and inclusion. These two values are mutually reinforcing and sit at the heart of an intellectual community like ours. There are times when it can be a challenge to balance these twin values.
Failing to adequately protect free speech was just the beginning of what Yale Law's diversity administrators got wrong in Colbert’s case. Never mind the office’s question-begging name. Withholding important context from the community, exploiting asymmetries of information to pressure a student, pretending to be acting on his behalf, obscuring clear conflicts of interest, and ghostwriting apologies in an academic setting are all ethical failures that—contrary to Gerken’s wishes for her institution—cultivate neither respect nor inclusion.*This article previously described the structure of Yale Law's administration incorrectly. The school has a director of diversity, equity, and inclusion but not a separate Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

In January 1961, as Dwight Eisenhower was about to leave office as US president, he issued a stark and unexpected warning: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Those were the days when Republicans with distinguished military records wanted to restrain defence spending. Eisenhower had spent the final years of his presidency resisting pressure to authorise costly projects in response to exaggerated threats.
According to Andrew Cockburn in The Spoils of War, this warning had little effect. The “misplaced power” led not only to a bloated Pentagon budget but also to the wars that provided it with a rationale. Waste, mismanagement and corruption became the norm. Weapons programmes took years to complete, if at all, supported by contracts that encouraged gold-plating, with unnecessarily high specifications and no incentives to keep costs under control. Generals and admirals went along with this because the contractors promised lucrative retirement jobs. Congress relaxed its oversight as orders and military bases were strategically directed to the districts and states of influential House members. Even once the nation was at war, instead of providing decent boots for soldiers, money went into esoteric weapons systems that failed to deliver.
Cockburn, the Washington, DC editor of Harper’s Magazine, comes from a family of radical journalists who have made it their business to challenge official accounts and expose scandals. He has long been unearthing awkward facts about the practices and policies of the US national security establishment. During the 1980s, he produced a counter to the Pentagon’s glossy booklets about the Soviet Union’s military power, pointing instead to its weaknesses and dysfunctions, an analysis he could claim was vindicated after the end of the Cold War. In this collection of   more recent articles, he picks out choice examples to support his core themes, taking advantage of the “target-rich” environment of this century to show that little has changed.
He is not opposed to all weapons systems. In the opening piece he describes how the A-10 “Warthog” was effective in providing close air support for troops on the ground in Afghanistan. The US Air Force, however, wanted to use the fantastically expensive B-1 bomber – designed for nuclear missions against the Soviet Union and quite unsuitable for the Afghanistan role – which resulted in the deaths of many innocent civilians.
Elsewhere, he tells the story of “Fat Leonard”, a naval contractor who serviced port visits for the Seventh Fleet, bribing senior officers with cash and lascivious parties to ensure that their ships visited his facilities. Cockburn’s indictment does not stop at showing how defence contractors and their allies extract what they can from the system while giving little of value in return. He also blames them for promoting the arms race and encouraging wars. This has been achieved by pushing for military action and sidelining diplomacy, while demonising potential enemies. He challenges portrayals both of American foes and its friends: the Saudis, for instance, come in for a rough time because of their connections to the 9/11 attacks and the war in Yemen.
[see also: How the Second World War was won]
This is robust, old-fashioned progressive, polemical journalism. Not all the targets are hit with precision, but Cockburn describes some shocking practices, and provides valuable critiques – for example, of the over-reliance on sanctions as a coercive instrument. He picks up on issues that have been around since weapons manufacturers and their critics discovered war could be profitable. He argues that “the military are not generally interested in war, save as a means to budget enhancement”. Considerations of “foreign policy” and “strategy” are deceptive, hiding the real driving force. The most important question is always cui bono? Who benefits?
As someone who spends his time studying foreign policy and strategy, have I been missing the point? Cockburn is, of course, right that the Pentagon’s enormous budget provides opportunities for schemers and grifters – some in charge of large corporations – and that the institutional interests of the armed services lead to distorted defence priorities. Greater awareness of these issues helps civilians push back against this “misplaced power”– as they often do. When I started work in this area in the early 1970s, I was attracted by theories of the malign influence of the military-industrial complex, which then acquired added credibility as explanations were sought for the calamitous Vietnam War. Yet I soon discovered it explained less than expected.
For example, Cockburn attributes the “missile gap” scare of 1960 as a pre-emptive response (“on cue”) to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech. The claim, however, that the Soviet Union was outproducing the US in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) was in part the result of the Soviet Union testing an ICBM before the US, and then launching the world’s first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik 1) in 1957. These events were followed by Nikita Khrushchev’s boast that Soviet rockets were coming off production lines like “sausages”. Eisenhower, and the CIA, doubted the exaggerated Air Force projections about how far the Soviet Union was ahead with missile development. This was confirmed when US satellites provided evidence that the Americans were, in fact, ahead. It’s not clear how satellites fit in with Cockburn’s thesis, as in this, and other areas such as arms control verification, they were a source of reassuring evidence.
Another example is Nato’s expansion during the 1990s. It is true, as Cockburn notes, that drawing former members of the Warsaw Pact into the alliance was good domestic politics for Bill Clinton. It may have opened up new markets for defence contractors, although they were already opening. But the issue cannot be understood without appreciating the anxieties of those central and eastern European countries which had been let down badly by the Western democracies before and now wanted stronger security guarantees.
The debates about foreign policy and strategy should, therefore, not be dismissed too lightly. In Humane, Samuel Moyn, a professor of both history and jurisprudence at Yale University, asks what has gone wrong with US defence policy this century, and he does not mention defence contractors. Instead, he explores a dilemma that has long dogged anti-war campaigners: war is horrible, so we must find ways to alleviate the suffering; but if this results in war becoming less horrible, then it is a more tempting option.
This was a sharp debate in the late 19th century as the first efforts were taken to make war less miserable, such as the formation of the Red Cross; attempts to codify the laws of war so the injured and prisoners could be treated properly; prohibitions on particularly obnoxious weapons; and the first Hague conferences on disarmament. These could be presented as steps towards the abolition of war, but the likely outcome was to sustain war as an acceptable instrument of statecraft. The steps were dismissed accordingly by critics, such as Leo Tolstoy and the Austrian anti-war campaigner Bertha von Suttner.
It was not, however, the possibility of a humane war that led the rush into the First World War, but the prize of an early victory for the side that mobilised first. Once there was no quick victory and the fighting took hold, the war became attritional and – with poisoned gas, air raids and attacks on merchant shipping – ever more deadly. After it was all over, efforts to abolish war were taken up again with renewed vigour, strengthening both global organisations and international law. To no avail. Another, even more brutal world war followed the first, this time with organised mass murder.
The Korean War confirmed that nuclear weapons had created an incentive to limit conflicts, although for the Korean people the fighting was as deadly as anything that had gone before. The conduct of the Vietnam War led to more soul-searching, especially after the revelations about the atrocity at My Lai in 1968. Moyn skilfully takes us through the debates prompted by Vietnam about international law and how it should be adapted and enforced. Out of this came a determination to find a more humane way to fight such wars.
From the early 1970s, highly accurate weapons were introduced into the US arsenal that made it possible to avoid large-scale civilian casualties. Now drones can loiter above possible targets before launching missiles. Lawyers can be brought in to check whether the targets are appropriate before they are hit. For the lawyerly Barack Obama – looking for a way to deal with US enemies without getting entangled in more occupations of unfriendly territory – these were the perfect weapons, although his enthusiasm gradually waned as he became more troubled by their legal and ethical implications.
Moyn is also torn between the obvious advantages – if war is going to be fought – of doing so in a way that reduces its human cost, and the concern that if we get too comfortable with “humane wars”, then we will forget about the need to ban them altogether. Despite his claim that the US has “reinvented war”, his focus is too narrow for this to work. Drone warfare is only one part of contemporary military practice. It might provide a means of assassinating terrorists and other hostile figures, but it provides no means of controlling territory, which is what most wars are about. The vicious urban battles fought in Iraq and Syria, and the persistent militia campaigns mixed with gangsterism in Ukraine and in Sub-Saharan Africa, also describe modern warfare. In these cases, civilian suffering is as great as ever. Moyn also fails to address the current US preoccupation with China (also oddly ignored by Cockburn) and what a war over Taiwan might look like.
If the institution of war survives, it will not be because of the lobbying efforts of the military-industrial complex or the promise of combat without tears, but rather because people and states keep finding things to fight about.
Lawrence Freedman is emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and the author of “The Future of War: A History” (Penguin)
[see also: The new age of American power]The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine Andrew Cockburn Verso, 288pp, £17.99
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War Samuel Moyn Verso, 416pp, £20

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the United States should take steps now to be better prepared to stop future pandemics in their tracks.

New data are finally indicating that coronavirus-related hospitalizations and deaths are on the decline and that the worst of the Delta variant surge is seemingly over.

However, according to Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the United States should take steps now to be better prepared to stop future pandemics in their tracks.

Gottlieb, a physician who worked at the FDA under former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush and now serves on the board of coronavirus vaccine maker Pfizer, looks back at the nation’s early response to the pandemic and presents ideas on how to stop the next one in his new book, Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic.

Testing Debacle

In a recent interview on Public Radio Tulsa, Gottlieb tried to explain why the United States wasn’t successful in quickly implementing widespread coronavirus testing and mitigating the fallout afterward.

“A big problem was we were playing off of our standard approach to rolling out a diagnostic test in a public health emergency, without recognizing that we were in a fast-moving epidemic where diagnostic testing was going to be essential. …Once the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and prevention) finally had a test designed, we got behind the eight ball early by not having enough testing in place to diagnose the early cases. And by the time we had testing in place, it was too late. The virus was everywhere, and we weren’t going to be able to use testing as a tool to try to contain the spread,” he said.

“Part of the problem is that our pandemic playbook always envisioned that a pandemic would be caused by influenza. And in the setting of influenza, having a diagnostic test widely deployed isn’t as important for one reason—because the incubation period for flu is shorter. Patients come into contact with flu and get sick in a much shorter period of time, and they’re usually not contagious until they’re infectious. So, diagnosing people when they’re asymptomatic and carrying the infection isn’t as important in the setting of controlling a flu as it is for a coronavirus,” he continued.

Utilizing Strategic Data

Gottlieb also touched on the need for a forecasting service that is akin to the National Weather Service, which has the ability to tap into strategic data that could offer early warnings regarding future pandemics.

“The book is my attempt to start to stimulate a discussion about what we need to do to be better prepared and hardened against these contingencies in the future. I think that there’s going to be a more fundamental debate that needs to precede the debate around how we prepare for the next pandemic, and that is the debate around what is the role of public health. I think that in order to be properly prepared for the next pandemic, we’re going to need to empower public health agencies. We’re going to need to build new capacities at CDC and empower them to act in a public health crisis of this magnitude in the future,” he said.

“I think that there’s skepticism of public health right now. And this isn’t just sort of a right-left debate, conservative vs. liberal. I think it’s more pervasive than that. And so, we need to have a fundamental discussion about what the role of public health is,” he concluded.

On Saturday 16 October nearly one hundred people took over an open day at the University of Sussex to protest the employment of Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy. “Stock out!” “Get Kathleen off our campus!” “No Terfs here!” rang the chants. “Don’t come to Sussex!” they warned visitors.
But of what were they warning them? A leaflet handed out by the protesters laid out their views. “Stock is one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes,” it said. The letter’s vituperative tone at times overwhelmed its author’s accuracy (“consencus”, “nessecity”). “Fire Kathleen Stock,” it concluded. “Until then, you’ll see us around.”
When I visited Stock recently, she spoke haltingly of the slow burn of her social isolation at Sussex, punctured as it has been by the discovery of new online attacks and internal emails undermining her in the wake of any publicity she attracts.
Stock – who believes that biological sex is immutable and occasionally takes precedence over someone’s gender identity – told me that a campaign has been waged against her since she raised concerns in 2018 over a shift away from sex-based rights to a world where any male could identify as a woman through self-declaration alone (a process known as “self-ID”). “This month is just the endgame. Some of my colleagues have been spinning a line against me for a long time,” she told me.
I asked Nehaal Bajwa, the diversity officer at Sussex Students’ Union, how Stock was contributing to the “dire state of unsafety for trans people in this colonial shit-hole”, as the leaflet put it. Stock’s views created “an unsafe atmosphere” for trans students, Bajwa said. As protesters overtook the campus square, setting off pink and blue flares, Stock cancelled her courses and followed police advice to stay off campus and secure her home. I asked a protester whether the demo was designed to be intimidating. “We’re standing still,” they said. “Her presence to us is intimidating.”
[see also: Kathleen Stock, trans rights and a crisis of free speech in British universities]
The conflict dates back to May 2018, when Stock published a blog post that calmly raised concerns over the shift to self-ID. “Some have pointed out,” she wrote, that “this change in the law will allow some duplicitous or badly motivated males to ‘change gender’ fairly easily,” putting women at risk not from those who are trans but from predatory men.
Women were being redefined, Stock added. “The category of women has historically been defined…” she noted, “in virtue of oppression on the basis of biological and reproductive characteristics.” Given that trans women did not share these characteristics, their lived experience differed materially from females, she said. It would be inaccurate, Stock suggested, not to distinguish between these sets of experiences.
These views have led to Stock being denigrated by some of her fellow academics at Sussex University. “Certain people seem to be emboldened to behave badly,” a supportive colleague of Stock’s told me. “The fact there is a police investigation surely means something really bad has happened.”
Stock, the child of a philosophy lecturer and a newspaper proof-reader, has been teaching at Sussex for nearly two decades. This year has been among the most notable in her career: she was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours (prompting more than 600 academics to sign an open letter in criticism of the decision) and her book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, was published.
Many of her supporters believe that Stock’s academic freedom is at risk. After her blog post in May and a follow-up interview in the Brighton Argus, her office was defaced with stickers stating: “If your feminism doesn’t include ALL women it’s NOT FEMINISM. Terfs Not Welcome Here.”
In 2018 the Argus ran pieces in which interviewees accused Stock of “putting students at physical and mental risk”, and warned “anti-trans groups” not to “hijack Pride” (Stock, who is gay, was quoted and pictured). The Sussex Students’ Union accused Stock of transphobia on Facebook, and a spyhole was put in Stock’s office door by campus security. In 2019 she was shown the quickest routes off stage at a graduation.
But the university did not act to address this culture of harassment, despite one fellow professor regularly hounding Stock online in all but name, and another academic openly tweeting “shame” on Stock and her “fellow transphobic ilk”. Instead, administrators gave Stock’s critics access to the internal email system to send school-wide messages without offering Stock a right of reply. And those in managerial roles supported her critics rather than remaining neutral. Stock became ever more socially isolated.
Three of Stock’s four fellow professors of philosophy at Sussex told me that they supported her academic freedom, but none would say so publicly, despite more than 200 UK academic philosophers signing an open letter supporting Stock’s and others’ “right to raise concerns on this matter”. The Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash tweeted: “Whatever your views on her views on gender and sexual identity, every civilised person must condemn this harassment [and] intimidation of a woman on campus. It’s discrimination in the name of anti-discrimination, harassment in the name of anti-harassment.”
The outgoing Sussex vice-chancellor, Adam Tickell, declined to speak to me. In a statement, the university said it had spoken out “against bullying and harassment”. Tickell recently made a clear statement in support of Stock on BBC radio. Yet he and his team are acting late, having left the accusation that one of their professors is “transphobic” unaddressed for years. Stock is now likely to leave her post.[see also: “Women are in a bigger fight than the suffragettes”: Helen Joyce on the trans debate]

One of the manifestations of the new political and social world we are living in is the so-called “death of expertise“. This refers not to the loss of actual expertise, but rather the loss of a baseline of public respect for the concept of expertise and for experts themselves. A recent Nature survey highlights a disturbing marker of this trend – experts (in this case mostly doctors) facing threats of physical harm for expressing their opinions about COVID-19 in public. This is completely predictable, for anyone paying attention, but it’s worth reviewing how we got here.

It’s easy, even fashionable, to blame all such trends on social media. While social media certainly greatly facilitated our “post truth” world, the trends all started long before the internet. In the US in particular, there has long been a cultural undercurrent of anti-intellectualism, rooted in a distrust of authority and an attraction towards conspiracy theories. But this occurred alongside a general respect for excellence and ability. Scientists, especially medical scientists, rank among the most respected professions, at levels in the 80s, and stable over decades of surveys.

These apparently contradictory attitudes can exist at the same time because people generally can compartmentalize their beliefs, but something else is going on as well. In the abstract many people still respect experts and scientists, but now they can choose which experts and scientists to believe. This is the new reality – it’s not the absence of facts, but the existence of “alternative facts”. The problem is not as much ignorance as the false illusion of knowledge.

This is where social media comes in. Ready access to information on demand creates a powerful illusion of knowledge, and even the sense that we all can “do our own research” and come to a reliable conclusion, even about complex technical topics we do not really understand. You don’t have to look beyond the comments section of SBM to witness non-experts arguing over technical details in the scientific literature in areas where they lack any formal background. Even for those not trying to substitute their own opinions for those of experts, they can easily fall prey to believing the “wrong experts”. Who are the “wrong experts” and how does that happen?

People generally grossly underestimate a few things: First they underestimate how much information is out there, and specifically that you can find facts and opinions to support pretty much any belief you want. They further underestimate (or are simply unaware of) the power of confirmation bias. It is a well-established psychological phenomenon that we tend to seek out, notice, accept and remember information that supports what we believe or want to believe, while simultaneously ignoring, forgetting, or explaining away information that contradicts our beliefs. When you combine these two factors, it can create the powerful illusion that the facts support our beliefs, whether they do or not.

Further still, social media often uses algorithms that automate the process of confirmation bias. Therefore, confirmation bias is no longer just a passive process, but an active one – we are being fed information that supports what we already believe. Social media platforms do this to maximize clicks, and don’t seem to care about the beliefs themselves. This process also causes the existence of networks of people with similar beliefs in so-called “echochambers” that further reinforce the beliefs and add an element of community identity to them.

But many people and organizations using social media do care what those beliefs are. This creates another factor, perhaps the most insidious – other people are curating information for you designed to manufacture specific illusions of knowledge. Both these factors (a media just wanting to maximize engagement for profits and ideologues selling specific beliefs) play off each other, as the media is all-too-happy to give oxygen to radical beliefs because it’s good for their bottom line.

Finally, the information we are being fed is not in isolated facts, but is woven together into a compelling narrative. Those narratives then take on a life of their own, as they organize our knowledge and beliefs and serve as filters for the further acquisition of curated “facts”. Our place in society is now largely determined by which narratives we identity with, and these narratives are largely isolated from each other, without any common ground to resolve differences.

This is where “alternative experts” comes in. Social media also makes it easy to select and elevate those voices in the noise that support our narrative. It also makes it easy to create the illusion of an established institution, of journalism, experts, or even scientists. People who previously would have faded to the fringe because their ideas were fatally flawed or unconvincing, can now be brought back to the center of the conversation because they support a particular narrative.

With this view of our current situation, it is not at all surprising that attacks on public experts have been increasing. Nature surveyed more than 300 scientists who made media appearances to talk about some aspect of COVID-19. Of those surveyed 70% reported that as a result they had experienced some kind of threats or attacks – 59% attacks on their credibility, 30% reputational damage, 22% threats of sexual assault, and 15% received death threats.

It should now be easy to understand how this can happen. An expert appearing in the mainstream media simply to talk about the results of a research study, or synthesize the evidence for or against some treatment, is (whether they know it or not) either supporting or refuting some narrative. If they are refuting a narrative that you have been led to believe through the above processes, you might think the experts are therefore lying, and part of some vast conspiracy. You are not just disagreeing with their facts, you are defending civilization. This is what radicalization looks like.

Scientists are largely not prepared for this new reality. Just as climate scientists, previously working in anonymity without much media attention, were suddenly thrust into the middle of a political cage match, health experts are experiencing the same thing with respect to COVID.

By Hugo DrochonConspiracy theories seem to be everywhere: Covid-19 was deliberately engineered in the Wuhan lab and leaked into the world? Check. 5G telephone masts help it spread? Check. The vaccine is a ploy by Bill Gates to implant microchips into our brains and control the world population? Check. In fact, 15% of Americans, according to a widely-publicized poll, believe in one of the most troubling new conspiracy theories, QAnon. In case you missed it, QAnon alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping, child-trafficking pedophiles was conspiring against Donald Trump during his term of office. The cabal includes Hollywood actors and senior Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who were preparing a coup from which Trump was meant to liberate America during the “Storm.” And it’s not just in the US: QAnon has spread to places like France, where it has merged with the anti-health pass protests.It’s not surprising that the narrative we’ve heard a lot lately is that such theories exploded over the past 18 months. It’s common to see headlines asking why conspiracies are “thriving in the pandemic,” or declaring that we’re “Living in the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories.”But this is not the whole story. True, we’re hearing a lot about Covid-19 and QAnon-related conspiracies. But just because they are more visible does not mean that belief in them has gone up.I’ve been doing work with Joseph Uscinski of the University of Miami—the leading specialist studying conspiracies theories—and we’ve carried out a number of studies, assessing whether Covid-19 conspiracy theories have proliferated over the course of the pandemic and whether we’ve seen a general increase in belief in conspiracy theories in the last fifty years. Our paper is currently under review, but our findings may surprise you: Belief in conspiracy theories has, if anything, decreased over the pandemic.Take Covid-19 theories. According to our polling, in March 2020 31% of Americans agreed Covid-19 was “purposely created and released by powerful people as part of a conspiracy.” But by May 2021 that had gone down to 29%. Those believing that 5G spreads the virus went from 11% in June 2020 to 7% in May 2021. Those believing that we are being implanted with microchips decreased from 18% to 12%, and those who believe Bill Gates is somehow “behind” the pandemic fell from 13% to 10%. Thankfully, the view that “Putting disinfectant into your body can prevent or cure Covid-19,” promoted by Trump, has halved from 12% to 6%.We’ve seen a similar pattern with other theories over time. Comparing data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion with our own, we found that in 1976 81% of Americans believed more than one person was involved in the assassination of JFK. This is down to 56% today (admittedly, still a remarkable figure). Likewise, various polls show that belief 9/11 was an “inside job” has been gradually decreasing, and the view that “climate change is a hoax” has fallen from 37% in 2013 to 19% today.Some long-popular theories buck the trend: More Americans believe today that the moon landing was faked compared with 1995. But the preponderance of evidence is clear: We are not living in a new conspiracy theory age.QAnon, for example, is roundly rejected by most Americans. Recently-polled Floridians only support it slightly more than they do Fidel Castro, hardly an endorsement! Asked to agree or disagree with the statement “I believe in QAnon,” only 6.8% of Americans agreed, on par with the view that we are ruled by lizards, and a far cry from 15%.This discrepancy is partly explained by the fact that polls directly asking “Are you a believer in QAnon?” return much lower levels of belief than those who ask a more generic question about Satan-worshiping cabals. According to Uscinski and his colleague Adam Enders, “support for QAnon is quite low and stable over time. At the same time, wild-eyed beliefs about child trafficking and the involvement of government and Hollywood elites ... appear to be quite prevalent among Americans.” Importantly, however, such views predate the 2017 emergence of QAnon.What we have, then, is a form of a conspiracy theory bubble: They aren’t on the rise, but they feel more prevalent than ever. What can explain this?Conspiracy theories of various sorts are as old as humanity itself. Before social media, theorists offered their speculations in dedicated fanzines, and wrote letters to the editor—the infamous “green-inkers”. Back then, journalists served as gatekeepers to these types of views, keeping them off the pages of newspapers and out of public view.But on social media these filters are now vanishing, and conspiracy theorists are having a field day. QAnon emerged in October 2017 on the controversial chat-forum 4chan, when an anonymous poster going by the name of “Q” claimed to have access to highly-classified information concerning the Trump administration. The identity of “Q” has never been revealed, and in reality is most likely to be a group of people posting under the same name. There is little reason to believe that these people, whoever they are, have access to classified information.The pandemic has been an ideal breeding ground for such groups, at least in terms of gaining exposure. During the lockdowns people moved online to gain information and stay in touch with loved ones. Social media has a propensity to promote conspiracy theories and stories covering them due to the “attention economy” that drives platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok to compete for the attention of their users and sell advertisement space.Conspiracy theories suit this competition for attention—we all respond more strongly to emotive content, whether it is violence, salacious gossip surrounding the sex-lives of celebs, or theories about a secret group of powerful people running the world. Studies show that false news content can reach up to one hundred times more people than true news.Simultaneously, journalists report on conspiracy theories in large part as an attempt to make sense of the Trump presidency that helped fuel them: Trump launched his political career with the “Birther” movement that questioned whether Obama was born in the US. But even that quickly receded: a Harris Poll in March 2010 recorded that 25% of Americans doubted Obama’s US birth, but a year later—in May 2011, after Obama released the long form of his birth certificate—a Gallup poll found that that percentage had fallen to 13%.Of course, the biggest conspiracy theory going around right now goes under the banner of “Stop the Steal”—the view that the Democrats committed electoral fraud to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. This view is apparently held by just over a quarter of all Americans (including over half of Republicans).Yet the accusation of voter fraud has a long history, and not just from the Republican side. We’ve polled the question “Republicans won the presidential elections in 2016, 2004, and 2000 by stealing them.” In March 2020 27% of respondents agreed with the statement, but this had dropped to 15% a year later. There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories surrounding “stealing the election,” and our polling reveals that beyond the politically charged moment, this also tends to die down over time.In short, there is much evidence to suggest the existence of a conspiracy theory media bubble: Conspiracy theories are more visible online, and journalists feel they need to report on them to help make sense of what is going on. But that doesn’t mean there are more of them, or that belief in them has necessarily increased.Bubbles tend to pop of their own accord over time. Already many social media platforms have changed their algorithms to warn against conspiracy theories, if they haven’t completely de-platformed theorists altogether. Conspiracy theories, dangerous as they are, are an important subject to report on. But we should be cautious in the language we use, lest we give them air time they don’t deserve. Maybe it’s time to burst the media’s bubble.Hugo Drochon is Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Nottingham, with interests in Nietzsche's politics, democratic theory, liberalism and conspiracy theories.

The coronavirus pandemic has engendered lots of altruism. This is welcome but also unsurprising, since a group of people facing a threat typically relies on collective action to keep self-interest in check. Cooperation and generosity are part of our evolutionary heritage, and they usually require only light pressure to foster. Most people are happy to wear a mask in a hospital or on an airplane, for example, because they want to be seen as neighborly.This winter, COVID-19 will continue to demand our attention, and we’ve unfortunately exhausted our store of soft-touch options to rouse those inner angels. More will be required if we are to leverage one of our greatest natural advantages as a species: the impulse to help others.From the start of the pandemic, we have seen a mix of selfless and abhorrent behaviors. A puzzling feature of human nature is that they exist in a delicate balance.[Annie Lowrey: The Americans who knitted their own safety net]On the one hand, Americans have donated their time to sew cloth masks, staff food banks, and comfort those struggling with loneliness. A group in Minnesota matched hundreds of volunteers with people who needed child care. Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn who had recovered from COVID-19 broke their Sabbath to drive through the night to Pennsylvania hospitals in order to donate their serum. Many employers continued to pay their employees even though they were not at work. And despite the financial stress of the pandemic, recent statistics show that charitable giving actually rose 2 percent in 2020, compared with 2019.Doctors and nurses—as well as members of less heralded professions, such as custodians, grocery-store clerks, and home health aides—have assumed personal risk of infection and death. And the extraordinarily rapid development of vaccines and medicines to treat COVID-19 has reflected an extensive and generous sharing of knowledge by scientists around the world, as well as the volunteerism of study participants.On the other hand, we’ve also seen that a serious pandemic can inflame ignoble tendencies. In the United States, the coronavirus pandemic has unleashed all sorts of antisocial behaviors, including people coughing and spitting on masked shoppers and politicians targeting Asian Americans or Latin American immigrants. We’ve seen fistfights break out in grocery stores, during school-board meetings, and on planes over infection-control regulations. And from those who are unwilling to get vaccinated, we’ve seen steady resistance to helping their more vulnerable neighbors.Some people are clearly more altruistic than others. But even these super-cooperators can’t do all the heavy lifting alone. Haphazard or individual-level efforts to be helpful are rarely sufficient to keep cooperation going in a larger population. For one thing, a cooperator surrounded by noncooperators will usually stop being helpful—for who wants to be a chump? Yet devolving to an “every man for himself” dynamic is injurious to all. That’s no way to fight a plague.And so the survival of our species has depended on the evolution of innate responses to keep these so-called free riders mostly in check, to make sure that there are enough people willing to run into burning buildings to save lives and a lot fewer who light fires. Evolution has equipped us with tools to help tip the balance toward cooperation. And we need to use all of those tools in our current predicament.What are these responses shaped by our evolution? The first is that cooperation is more likely when a group faces a shared enemy. That we already have, in the form of this nasty virus.Another is that people are more likely to cooperate if they anticipate future interactions with the same people. This is one reason people are likely to wear a mask at work with familiar colleagues but skip it when they shop in a grocery store.Repeated interactions also tend to foster the reciprocation of kindness, and hence encourage more and more altruistic behavior. Vaccine and mask mandates by companies, schools, and other places where people see one another repeatedly are sound practices not only because they indicate respect for customers and employees, but also because they promote the reciprocal altruism that leads to optimal public-health practice more generally.Furthermore, people are typically more willing to follow rules regarding physical distancing or masking if they understand them primarily as a way to help others. Our ongoing public-health messaging can exploit this quality. One study evaluated whether it was more effective to tell people, “Follow these steps to avoid getting the coronavirus,” or to tell them, “Follow these steps to avoid spreading the coronavirus.” It turns out that the emphasis on the public threat of the virus is at least as effective as, and sometimes more effective than, the emphasis on the personal threat—though perhaps not as much for the minority of selfish holdouts.But what if individual motivations and gentle forces are not enough? Here, the interpersonal nature of contagious disease—namely that individual actions that increase or reduce one’s personal risk at the same time increase or reduce the risks one imposes on others—creates the collective-action problem in the first place and justifies more forceful, even coercive, measures by schools, work sites, and the government. Because we have not yet been able to respond as effectively to the pandemic as we must, we may need to deploy them.One evolutionary feature that fosters cooperative behavior is the human inclination toward what I call “mild hierarchy,” a kind of social order that is neither too unequal nor too egalitarian, neither too punitive nor too permissive. To assure that if person A is kind to person B (e.g., by wearing a mask, staying home when sick, or getting vaccinated), then person B will reciprocate, we have evolved the capacity and desire for centralized enforcement—precisely so as to tamp down on selfishness and abuse. We tolerate policing by our leaders (up to a point) because it’s a more efficient way of encouraging collective action than a pitchfork at a neighbor’s door or one-on-one attempts to enforce reciprocity.[Read: Six rules that will define our second pandemic winter]We also practice punishment and ostracism, both of which can, in the right circumstances, foster cooperation. Shunning transgressors comes naturally to us precisely because, in our ancestral past, it was useful for our collective survival. Research studies in labs around the world, including my own, have shown the necessity of such pressures to avoid a tragedy of the commons, where all suffer because of free riding. For instance, in one study in my lab involving hundreds of people arranged into dozens of groups, the ability of people to shun those who did not act altruistically helped reinforce good behavior in everyone.Of course, peer pressure or the fear of ostracism can also compel people to take actions that injure themselves or their own communities. There has been a spate of sad cases recently of conservative media figures dying from COVID-19 after denouncing the vaccines or other public-health measures in order to signal membership in their political group. People working together must still be aiming at healthy objectives. This is another way in which leadership is crucial: to set worthy goals.A broad collective effort will be required to avoid yet more deaths and virus-induced shutdowns this winter. Given that the actions of some people can put the health of others at risk, we must be willing to leverage the full range of our evolutionary impulses toward cooperation. Some of these less appealing evolutionary capacities for enforcing cooperation—which sounds oxymoronic—may be required.Indeed, President Joe Biden announced a broad series of interventions last month, including requiring all employers with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination and doing the same for federal workers and others. “We’re in a tough stretch, and it could last for a while,” Biden said in an address from the White House. “What makes it incredibly more frustrating is we have the tools to combat COVID-19, and a distinct minority of Americans, supported by a distinct minority of elected officials, are keeping us from turning the corner.”From the viewpoint of our innate capacities for cooperation, both Biden’s practical responses and his emotional framing are to be expected. We do not need to see these actions in a negative or even authoritarian light. They are not simply the workings of our political system. They are rooted in our ancient past, helping us survive.Seen from an evolutionary perspective, putting our thumb on the scale of the COVID-19 response allows our natural impulse toward goodness to flourish. And such efforts are in keeping with our fundamental instincts to be altruistic and cooperative in the first place. As Albert Camus argued in his novel The Plague, “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men and women to rise above themselves.”

. (Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.)Here is a very basic fact: People tend to like getting stuff for free. Ask most people, “Do you want a fancy new Mercedes?” and they’ll likely respond, “Yes.” But ask them to pay full price for it and demand drops dramatically.Hold that thought.Sen. Bernie Sanders is very upset that the Democrats’ “Build Back Better” package is stalled. “Poll after poll shows overwhelming support for the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better legislation,” Sanders said in a statement, “and the need to lower prescription drug costs, expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision …” and so on.But as National Review’s Charles Cooke wrote, Sanders’ statement refutes itself. In the next paragraph, the Vermont senator says, “polling also shows that despite President Biden having introduced this proposal five months ago, a majority of Americans have very little knowledge as to what is in this bill.” Sanders adds, “It is hard to ask people to have faith in their government when they have little understanding of what their government is trying to do.”As Cooke rightly notes, it’s odd to simultaneously claim a bill is overwhelmingly popular and that a majority of Americans have no idea what’s in it.But Sanders thinks that’s proof the mainstream media is failing to educate the public. Individual elements of the bill poll well, hence the claim it’s popular. “The foundations of American democracy are threatened not only by extremism, but by ignorance and lack of knowledge,” he exclaims.I’m all for dispelling ignorance, but Sanders is perpetuating a myth that harms democracy, too—specifically, that massive social welfare spending is wildly popular with American voters.In 2016, Vox polled Bernie Sanders’ proposals for nationalized health care and free college tuition. They didn’t poll the general public; they polled Bernie Sanders’ own supporters. Not surprisingly, respondents favored single-payer health care. But when asked if they’d be willing to personally pay more for it, support dropped. Two-thirds said the most they’d be willing to pay in additional taxes for “free” health care was $1,000 per year, about $83 per month. This number includes the 8 percent of Sanders supporters who said they wouldn’t be willing to pay anything for universal health care.Cheap socialists aren’t the story here. Americans in general don’t want to pay much of anything—out of their own pocket—for the stuff progressives constantly say America is demanding.A Washington Post poll in 2019 found that 68 percent of Americans supported taxing “wealthy families” to pay for fighting climate change. But when asked if they would agree to pay an extra $2 a month on their electric bills, support fell to less than 47 percent. That same year, an AP-NORC poll asked people if they’d be willing to spend $10 more a month on their energy bills to fight climate change. Some 68 percent of respondents said nope.This is where the truly dangerous ignorance begins. For years now, voters have been told that the rich as well as greedy corporations are an untapped renewable resource that can pay for everything and anything. That’s false. You could confiscate all of the wealth of the top 1 percent and it wouldn’t come close to covering the bill for, say, the Green New Deal or Medicare for All. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may turn heads by scrawling “tax the rich” on her ball gowns, but the truth is we already do—at a remarkably progressive rate.There’s no room here to explain why I think Biden’s promise that his $3.5 trillion package won’t be “free” for everyone making less than $400,000 per year. So, let’s just pretend it’s true. In the market, popularity is determined by what people are willing to pay for with their own money. However, in progressive politics—and in much of the mainstream media—popularity is determined by what people are willing to have other people pay for. Defining public support this way is misleading.But even if the rich could pay for it all, democracy isn’t enriched when voters think one very small class of people is greedily standing in the way of economic salvation.When populist politicians promise it would be easy to deliver that salvation but then fail to do it, voters feel betrayed and the politicians shift blame to sinister and corrupt forces (the “one percent,” special interests, evil corporations) or allegedly outdated obstacles to progress like the filibuster or even the Constitution itself.That sense of betrayal doesn’t foster healthy politics. It leads to “extreme” demagogues promising to deliver what they claim the corrupt establishment could not.

Excuse me but I have to vent.

Three House Democrats and one Democratic senator are now blocking a proposal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Medicare is such a big purchaser of drugs that it has the bargaining leverage to cut drug prices for everyone--if allowed to do so. This would save at least $450 billion over the next 10 years and significantly lower prescription drug prices.

But four Democrats are standing in the way.

The grand total of Big Pharma cash going to these four lawmakers: over $2 million.

Before I get to why they're doing this, let me identify them. In the House: Scott Peters (whose district includes San Diego), Kurt Schrader (Oregon's central coast), and Kathleen Rice (central and southern Nassau County on Long Island).

And in the Senate: Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona).

Okay, so why are these four Democrats blocking this measure?

Not because this policy is unpopular with the public. To the contrary, 88 percent of voters favor allowing the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices, including 77 percent of Republicans.

In fact, at least 90 percent of these four lawmakers' own constituents support allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Get this: The idea is so popular that both Kathleen Rice and Kyrsten Sinema actively campaigned on it.

And not because the pharmaceutical industry needs extra money in order to continue to generate new drugs. Taxpayers already fund much of its basic research through the National Institutes of Health. Also bear in mind that a big portion of the costs of bringing a drug to market goes into advertising and marketing--which shouldn't even be allowed for prescription drugs (and isn't in most other rich countries, and wasn't in the US until Big Pharma lobbied for the law to change).

Oh, and pharmaceutical firms have been overflowing with so much cash they've been buying back their own shares of stock.

In other words, allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices should be a no-brainer.

So what gives? The question should be who gives. Follow the money.

From 2019 to 2020, Kyrsten Sinema received over $120,000 in Big Pharma contributions, even though she's not up for re-election until 2024. Throughout her political career, she's taken over half a million dollars from Pharma PACs and executives. Just before Sinema officially came out publicly against allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, a group bankrolled by Big Pharma began running TV and digital ads and sending mailers praising her for "fighting as an independent voice."

If you think this was a coincidence, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Scott Peters, meanwhile, happens to be the House's single biggest recipient of Big Pharma campaign cash in the 2022 election cycle so far. Since being elected in 2012, Peters has socked away over $860,000 from Big Pharma. The day after his letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing using Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices was published in May 2021, Peters began receiving thousands of donations from executives at pharmaceutical companies and the industry's powerful lobbying group.

Another coincidence? P-l-e-a-s-e.

Kurt Schrader has raked in nearly $615,000 from Big Pharma since taking office in 2008. This election cycle he's already got $24,500 from Pharma PACS, the second most of any industry donating to him. One of former his top aides left his office earlier this year and is now lobbying for Big Pharma. According to ethics disclosures, the former aide's lobbying efforts focus on ... guess what? Drug pricing.

The third House Democrat, Kathleen Rice, has received over $84,000 from Big Pharma.

The grand total of Big Pharma cash going to these four lawmakers: over $2 million. When you consider the billions that Big Pharma will rake in for keeping drug prices high, this is a small potatoes for them. You might even call it a great investment.

But it's a huge cost for the rest of us.

The measure isn't being blocked solely because these four Democrats oppose it. No Republican members of Congress are in support.

But it does seem odd that Democrats would stand in the way of this sort of reform, rebuffing their own president and party--and rejecting the overwhelming preference of voters, including their own constituents--to tank a policy that they themselves campaigned on. I mean, what's the Democratic Party for if it won't reduce drug prices for average people? Why were these four Democrats elected in the first place?

Sometimes I worry that pointing out this sort of corruption (and it is a form of corruption) will make people even more cynical than they already are about American politics, resulting in a kind of fatalism or resignation that causes many to give up--and thereby cede the entirety of our democracy to the moneyed interests. My hope is just the opposite: that when people hear about this sort of thing, they're outraged enough to become even more politically active.

In my experience spanning fifty years of American politics--from interning for Senator Bobby Kennedy in 1967 to serving as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration to advising President Obama--most of the elected lawmakers I've dealt with sincerely want to do the right thing. Some don't feel they can do the right thing if they want to be reelected, and confuse means and ends. A very few are on the take.

By which I mean to say that the situation is hardly hopeless. I refuse to give up on democracy. And I won't give up on the Democratic Party. But I'm only going to fight for candidates from the Democratic side of the Democratic Party.

What can you do? For one thing, contact your members of Congress and tell them that the first step in getting big money out of politics is to support the Freedom to Vote Act. (You might put in an extra call to Joe Manchin's office and say you expect him to deliver 10 Republican senators' votes for this bill--which he helped author--or else agree to reform the filibuster to let voting rights bills be enacted with a bare majority.)

Here's something else you can do: If you happen to be a constituent of one of these four Democrats, don't vote for them when they're up for reelection. Make sure they're primaried, and then vote in the Democratic primaries for true public servants--who care more about advancing the public good than protecting private profits.

But I can also imagine other scenarios. Last week the virologist and prolific pandemic-era tweeter Trevor Bedford speculated that the United States could see 40,000 to 100,000 deaths annually from endemic Covid. That range is vastly lower than the pandemic death rate, but it’s moderately higher than estimates for the seasonal flu and probably high enough to keep case and fatality numbers in the headlines in 2022 and beyond.

As we saw after Sept. 11, certain forms of security theater, once established, become extremely difficult to dislodge as long as there is still any arguable threat. So as long as Covid stays in the news, it’s not hard to envision masking requirements for airplanes and trains persisting far into the future, much as we still try to foil Al Qaeda by taking off our shoes for airport security lines. It’s also possible to imagine a future in which the weird emergent norm of “masks for the help but not the V.I.P.s” — visible everywhere from the Met Gala to political fund-raisers to posh hotels — becomes an expected feature of life among the blue-state upper class (as well as a potent symbol for its critics).

Then there are blue-state elementary schools, where some of the constituencies that support mask requirements may not be assuaged even after vaccines are available for younger kids. At that point, according to both polls and personal experience, there will still be lots of vaccine hesitancy among even liberal parents — and you could imagine a coalition of more Covid-fearing parents and teachers’ unions demanding masking requirements until a school hits a vaccination threshold that remains perpetually out of reach.

Already on certain college campuses you can see a version of this permanent-seeming abnormalcy. Even with vaccine requirements for the faculty and students, some schools have tried to layer on miniature medical surveillance states, with constant testing and exacting masking rules. (At the University of Southern California, The Wall Street Journal reported recently, “students must leave classrooms to take a sip of water, rather than just sliding their masks down.”) Students and their parents have successfully pushed back against some of the creepier measures — a wearable “bio button” to monitor heart rates and other health indicators at one university, a location-tracking app at another. But the spirit of bio-surveillance fits in nicely with the larger trend toward a kind of supervisory progressivism in campus life, with the attempted bureaucratic regulation of speech and sex, the tech-enabled monitoring of on-campus movement and communication. And if Covid is endemic, if the risk of outbreaks persists indefinitely, it’s not clear that these biopolitical experiments will automatically fade away.

Especially since the culture of deep-blue America is caught up in the same toxic feedback loops of polarization as deep-red America. If certain forms of Republican insouciance about Covid are forged in the fires of cultural resentment, in which you reject Faucian micromanagement by ditching masks and refusing the vaccine, certain forms of liberal overregulation seem forged in fear of red American contagion — in which we just have to mask our kids indefinitely, even though many other developed countries aren’t doing it, because we need to set an example of seriousness to shame all those red-state anti-maskers.

This week, progressive British activist Jo Maugham warned his 300,000-plus Twitter followers of “yet another vast, and vastly expensive, piece of anti-trans infrastructure” that had been erected “virtually overnight, with zero transparency.” The tweet went viral, even though, as many commenters noted, it was unclear what supposed anti-trans leviathan Maugham was describing. A day later, the otherwise prolix Maugham still wouldn’t provide that information, but instead directed followers to (unspecified) “UN and EU reports” that supposedly detail “billions being channeled [to anti-trans activists], often from the U.S. Christian right.”I see yet another vast, and vastly expensive, piece of anti-trans infrastructure has sprung up virtually overnight with zero transparency as to where the money came from.— Jo Maugham (@JolyonMaugham) October 16, 2021
One reason why it’s difficult to decode this kind of conspiracism is that terms such as “anti-trans” have effectively become meaningless. You can now be accused of transphobia, for instance, if you decline to date a trans person whose biology doesn’t match your sexual orientation, if you object to your child being exposed to a naked adult male (including a sex offender) in a spa, or if you complain publicly about an alleged rape perpetrated in a school bathroom by someone who self-describes as “gender-fluid.”Even mainstream feminism is apparently now transphobic: As it turns out, the likely subject of the tweet that Maugham put out on October 16th was a conference being run that same day by FiLiA, a grassroots feminist organization which supports the right of women to maintain safe, sex-segregated spaces. While these women met in Portsmouth, protestors demanding “trans inclusivity” held up signs with slogans such as “Suck My Dick, You Transphobic Cunts.” And as Julie Bindel reports, it is these misogynists—not the female campaigners at FiLiA who have spent their careers protecting women from rape, domestic assault, and female genital mutilation—who have the ear of progressive politicians and activists such as Maugham. One Portsmouth-area MP, Bindel notes, has shunned representatives of FiLiA, even while meeting with a local artist who seems to believe that ideologically non-compliant “TERFs” (a slur indicating “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists”) should be threatened with baseball bats. Given how difficult it is to justify the full-on misogynistic hate that now animates the extreme fringes of the trans-rights movement, it’s easy to see why Maugham would prefer to distract critics with the fiction that FiLiA’s gender-critical feminism is just a smokescreen for a sinister Christian conspiracy hatched overseas.I don’t think I’ve ever seen TRAs more perfectly represented. pic.twitter.com/RkPesbmYpo— Rhymes With Orange 🍊🦕 (@with_rhymes) October 16, 2021
To be fair: It is absolutely true that many prominent American conservatives do oppose the campaign to replace biological sex with gender identity as the basis for admission to women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, prisons, sports leagues, and rape-crisis centers. And in some cases, these right-wing figures have championed laws that suppress the legitimate rights of transgender individuals to be treated with dignity and compassion. But outside the United States, the intellectual pushback against gender extremism is led mostly by academics, authors, activists, journalists, and even comedians who are the furthest thing from Republican Bible-thumpers.In Canada, this movement has included Meghan Murphy, who first made a name for herself as a Vancouver-area feminist activist; sex researchers Debra Soh and James Cantor; former Canadian track champion Linda Blade; and writer April Halley, who has noted that the risk posed by putting male bodies in women’s prisons is disproportionately borne by Indigenous and black women. In the UK, the gender-critical side has been led by the aforementioned Bindel (a lifelong leftist), Economist journalist Helen Joyce, University of Sussex philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, children’s author J.K. Rowling, comedian Ricky Gervais, and heterodox trans activist Debbie Hayton. In New Zealand, it’s included the feminist likes of Speak Up For Women. In Australia, it’s been mild-mannered journalist and researcher Bernard Lane.Even in the United States, the most influential gender-critical figures in the cultural (as opposed to political) sphere aren’t conservative lawmakers, but rather current or former contributors to such centrist publications as the New York Times (Bari Weiss), Atlantic magazine (Jesse Singal), and the Wall Street Journal (Abigail Shrier). Then there’s comedian Dave Chappelle and comedian-manqueé-turned-podcaster Katie Herzog. If Jo Maugham would like to tell us which one of these people is directing the flow of all those Christian “billions” earmarked for spreading transphobia, I’m all ears.Indeed, one reason why the campaign to roll back gender extremism has been slow to gain momentum is precisely because many of these “gender crits” are otherwise progressive in their politics and peer groups—which means that they tend to be affected by the taboos and informal speech codes that govern the gender debate in these spheres. Specifically, they are pressured to begin any discussion from the proposition that “trans women are women,” a circular notion that pre-emptively stigmatizes discussion of real-life human sexual biology. As many gender-critical feminists have noted, in fact, the word “woman” now lacks any real definition in orthodox progressive circles except to such extent that a woman is imagined to be (literally) any human adult who self-declares as a woman. Moreover, even those who are willing to navigate these Alice-in-Wonderland rules of engagement risk being checkmated by the failsafe argument that debate itself represents a form of transphobic “violence” that “erases” the existence of trans people and even drives them to suicide. By these rhetoric maneuvers, even the mildest critique of gender orthodoxy can be demonized as hate speech, which in turn can serve to inspire mobbings of gender heretics that (as the case of Jesse Singal showed with particular vividness) quickly spiral into lurid social panic.Consider the case of the aforementioned Kathleen Stock, who’s been vilified by activists for stating the common-sense proposition that trans women need not be treated as “literal women” in regard to certain intimate, sex-segregated spaces where many females experience reasonable apprehensions in the presence of male bodies. Incensed that anyone would defend an academic’s right to say such things, a British lecturer named Ellie Gore has tried to link Stock to Nazis. And a University of Sussex student union officer denounced Stock on the BBC as a dangerous bigot who sought to “eliminate trans people in law” (a distortion of Stock’s views so flagrantly dishonest that a BBC newscaster was later required to read out a public apology). Yet gender-critical feminists face this kind of calumny every day—or worse: Stock has been advised to hire bodyguards and install CCTV cameras outside her home. And the University of Sussex administration is now urging her to stay away from campus for her own protection. The whole ordeal offers a case study in how tiny cadres of highly motivated ideologues can intimidate others; and most academics, not unreasonably, would prefer to simply keep their heads down, mumble their pronouns, and get on with their daily work.And yet, even amidst such scenes, there are signs that the tide is turning. It is notable, for instance, that not only did University of Sussex administrators publicly defend Stock’s right to say and write what she believes, but so have hundreds of British philosophers who put their name to an open letter. As for Jesse Singal, his career not only survived the campaign of lies against him, but—somewhat astonishingly—he was even commissioned by the New York Times to review Helen Joyce’s newly published gender-critical book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. When tear-drenched Penguin Random House staff in Toronto recently tried to “confront” their bosses about the company’s publication of a new book by alleged transphobe Jordan Peterson, the stunt backfired badly. Hachette UK likewise rebuffed a similar in-house campaign against its own star gender crit, J.K. Rowling. And this month, Netflix executives offered no apologies for streaming a comedy special by Dave Chappelle that many activists decried because it poked fun at gender pieties.In response to issues on our campus, our VC Adam Tickell has said: We are investigating activity on our campus which appears to have been designed to attack Professor Kathleen Stock for exercising her academic freedoms. [1/3]— University of Sussex (@SussexUni) October 7, 2021
Even within the LGBT world, there is mounting opposition to a form of gender ideology that, as Allan Stratton has explained to Quillette readers, paradoxically carries a strong whiff of homophobia, since “by definition, gays and lesbians are attracted to same sexed bodies. It’s why we’ve been beaten, murdered, and legally and socially persecuted throughout history. The outlandish, if fashionable, claim that we’re attracted to someone else’s gender ID gaslights the truth of our lives.” In Boston, outgoing Pride officials actually shut down their organization this year, rather than let it lapse into the hands of activists who seem intent on turning it into a Black Lives Matter-run cadre of trans activists. And in the UK, many lesbians and gay men have become so disgusted by the political orientation of their traditional organizations that they’ve created a new group called LGB Alliance (which, I need scarcely mention, Jo Maugham has stridently denounced).If it strikes you that I’ve gone out of my way to name-check an abundance of prominent gender crits in the paragraphs above, your impression is correct. In part, this inventory process is intended to give credit where it’s due: As the campaign against militant gender ideology picks up steam, there will no doubt be many a late joiner eager to insist that their hearts were (secretly!) with the gender-critical camp all along. “Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” as the expression goes. And so before this bandwagon gets too crowded, it’s worth naming the much-maligned “TERFs” who put their careers on the line well before celebrities such as Chappelle, Rowling, and Bethany Frankel entered the fray.But my principal motivation is to disabuse readers of the idea that this is a simple left-right culture-war battle (such as the one once fought over gay marriage). Almost all of the figures I’ve listed are progressive or centrist. Most are female. Several are gay. None, to my knowledge, are Christian transphobes of the type who populate Jo Maugham’s fever dreams. Having personally interviewed (or been interviewed by) most of these people, in fact, I’d say their only obvious commonalities are intellectual self-confidence and a suspicion of ideological cultism.Perhaps the most important figure in this movement (even if she doesn’t self-identify as an adherent) is Lisa Littman, the former Brown University School of Public Health professor who authored the first peer-reviewed study of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD. This marked the first time that any academic had produced an authoritative description of the phenomenon by which natal female girls and teenagers suddenly announce a desire to transition to a masculine identity—typically after becoming immersed in online forums or social milieus in which popular or admired trans-identified peer-group members encourage others to pursue transition as a means to address their anxieties. Following publication of her study in 2018, Littman predictably endured months of abuse, and her own university retracted a press release promoting her work. The journal in which she’d published, PLOS ONE, also came under heavy fire, and subsequently published “additional clarifications and context” in an (unsuccessful) bid to appease activists who’d insisted that Littman was a bigot blowing “transphobic dogwhistles.”Having met Littman in person and interviewed her for Quillette, I can attest that she’s exactly what you’d expect of an award-winning Ivy League expert who’s spent her career researching preventive medicine, public health, gynecology, and the psychology of adolescent girls. Before becoming famous for her work on ROGD, she made a name for herself in academic circles with published articles such as 'Learning from Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Experiences with Early Discontinuation of the Contraceptive Implant' and 'Connecting Knowledge about Abortion and Sexual and Reproductive Health to Belief about Abortion Restrictions.' And the effort to denounce her (or Stock, or Singal, or any of the other figures I’ve named) as hate-addled bigots was always ludicrous. Yet this type of calumny is indispensable to the gender extremists’ cause, as it supports the conceit that any opposition to their orthodoxy can never emerge from good-faith research, but rather betrays an inherently malignant character. Amazingly, New York Times writer Jennifer Finney Boylan actually made this argument explicitly earlier this month, when she denounced gender critical feminists as “people whose hearts—like the Grinch’s—are two sizes too small.”Littman’s naysayers denounced her 2018 study for all sorts of nominal reasons. But what their critique always really boiled down to was, as one published critic claimed, that she’d used “a pathologizing framework and language of pathology to conceive, describe, and theorize the phenomenon [of ROGD] as tantamount to both an infectious disease (‘cluster outbreaks of gender dysphoria’) and a disorder (e.g., ‘eating disorders and anorexia nervosa’).” This is a heavily torqued way of saying that Littman seeks to understand the dysphoria experienced by girls in the larger context of their personal histories, autism, trauma, and social influences—a mode of scientific inquiry that contradicts the preferred, quasi-mystical understanding of gender identity as an unfalsifiable life force that cannot be understood except by uncritical acceptance of acts of self-identification.Littman is hardly the only researcher who’s conducted a proper, scientifically informed inquiry into the many factors that can contribute to gender dysphoria. In Toronto, for instance, Dr. Kenneth Zucker has been using a holistic counselling approach with trans-identified children for years. And sexologist Ray Blanchard has been studying the typology of trans men since the late 1980s. These men, too, have been denounced for challenging the idea of gender identity as a secular form of sacred soul-spirit. But Littman broke new ground with her focus on the recently observed surge in dysphoria among girls suddenly seeking to transition, often in a great flourish of politicized rhetoric and oppositional postures directed at their own family members.As Helen Joyce writes in Trans, gender dysphoria was, until recently, primarily a (natal) male phenomenon. It was only with the rise of social media, and the anxiety such media encourages, that girls and young women began dominating the intake rosters at gender clinics. To demand that the global medical and research establishment ignore this development for ideological reasons is, of course, unconscionable. Yet that is exactly the demand that Littman’s critics have effectively put forward. They realized early on that if Littman could get away with addressing gender dysphoria in a rigorous and scholarly way, an important ideological taboo would be smashed. And in this regard, I am happy to report, they were entirely correct.Since Littman’s 2018 paper was published, events have vindicated her approach. In particular, “detransitioners” (girls who once asserted they were trans but subsequently took steps to revert to a gender identity consistent with their biological sex) are increasingly vocal and well-organized (much to the chagrin of activists who’d insisted that the very idea of trans desistance is “irrelevant,” “pseudoscientific,” and “debunked”). And many of them have personal tales that are consistent with the ROGD pattern that Littman outlined.Last year, the detransition movement got a prominent human face thanks to litigation initiated by Keira Bell against the London-based centre that runs Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service (which, even before Bell entered the public eye, had been embroiled in scandal). It goes without saying that Bell has become a hated Judas figure to many gender extremists, as they (correctly) see her example as an unusually compelling rebuke to the sweeping claim that children as young as three years old “just know” if they were “born in the wrong body.” Indeed, the details of Bell’s story show how the ideologically-approved method of blithely “affirming” a patient’s asserted gender identity can produce tragic results:By the time I was 14, I was severely depressed and had given up: I stopped going to school; I stopped going outside. I just stayed in my room, avoiding my mother, playing video games, getting lost in my favorite music, and surfing the internet. Something else was happening: I became attracted to girls. I had never had a positive association with the term “lesbian” or the idea that two girls could be in a relationship. This made me wonder if there was something inherently wrong with me. Around this time, out of the blue, my mother asked if I wanted to be a boy, something that hadn’t even crossed my mind. I then found some websites about females transitioning to male. Shortly after, I moved in with my father and his then-partner. She asked me the same question my mother had. I told her that I thought I was a boy and that I wanted to become one. As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men. I began seeing a psychologist through the National Health Service, or NHS. When I was 15—because I kept insisting that I wanted to be a boy—I was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, at the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London. There, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress because of a mismatch between your biological sex and your perceived gender identity. By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation. After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy.This week, the peer-reviewed Archives of Sexual Behavior published a new article by Littman, titled “Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners.” As in 2018, Littman is exploring an area that is scandalously under-researched. (The 2015 US Transgender Survey, on which many prominent trans advocates have relied for their published research, was formulated in a way that generally excluded detransitioners, as it restricted participation to those individuals “currently residing in a US state of territory” who “identif[y] as transgender, trans, genderqueer, non-binary, and other identities on the transgender identity spectrum.”)In Littman’s study, participants were asked why they’d originally set about the process of transition. More than 70 percent of (natal) female respondents selected both “I thought transitioning was my only option to feel better” and “it made me uncomfortable to be perceived romantically/sexually as a [female].” Interestingly, only 13 percent of natal females—but fully 39 percent of natal males—agreed with the statement “I had erotic reasons for wanting to transition.” It has long been a tenet of gender orthodoxy that gender identity and sexual orientation are to be regarded as completely separate characteristics. The fact that some biologically male trans women are autogynephiles (individuals who become sexually aroused at the thought of themselves as a woman) is seen as particularly radioactive—even though the phenomenon has been studied for decades, and some trans individuals discuss their own autogynophilia candidly. And so it will be interesting to see whether Littman’s critics attack her with special ferocity on this point.In describing survey results published by German researcher Elie Vandenbussche in April, Littman noted that respondents’ expressed reasons for detransition included: realizing that their gender dysphoria was related to other issues (70%); health concerns (62%); observing that transition did not help their dysphoria (50%); and that they found alternatives to deal with their dysphoria (45%) … External factors such as lack of support, financial concerns, and discrimination were less common (13%, 12%, and 10%, respectively). Many in the sample described that when they detransitioned they lost support or were ostracized from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities.Yet it’s also important to acknowledge that the available data does not invalidate the idea that transphobia is a real problem in our society. Fully 17 percent of female detransitioners studied by Littman, and 36 percent of natal males, cited discrimination as one of their reasons for detransition. But overall, the more common responses included “I discovered that my gender dysphoria was caused by something specific (ex, trauma, abuse, mental-health conditions),” “my mental health did not improve while transitioning,” and “my mental health was worse while transitioning.” This is not surprising given that almost 40 percent of female participants reported being depressed prior to the onset of dysphoria. More than a quarter engaged in non-suicidal self-injury. Almost half (48 percent) reported that they’d experienced a trauma in the year before they’d begun experiencing dysphoria. In many cases, caregivers presented transition as a solution to all these woes. “My gender therapist acted like [transition] was a panacea for everything,” wrote one respondent. Another wrote that the doctor “pushed drugs and surgery at every visit.” One particularly sad entry reads, “I was dating a trans woman and she framed our relationship in a way that was contingent on my being trans.”For those who believe that this kind of research hurts the LGBT community, I will end with two more facts plucked from Littman’s study: (1) A full 52 percent of participants agreed that the process of transitioning delayed or prevented their dealing with the underlying trauma or mental health condition that lay behind their dysphoria (with one participant having “becom[e] critical of transition because I felt that many people were doing it out of self-hatred and started to realize that applied to me as well”); and (2) nearly a quarter of participants said that transition emerged from some form of internalized homophobia: By imagining that they were actually a member of the opposite sex, they could also imagine away their homosexuality.I suppose it is possible for a true believer to read a study like this and still cling to the idea that Littman is some sort of transphobic hatemonger, instead of a thoughtful and humane researcher seeking a better understanding of gender dysphoria. Or maybe she’s a secret Christian fundamentalist, on the payroll of that “vastly expensive ... anti-trans infrastructure” that Jo Maugham is banging on about. Sadly, neither of these claims would represent the most far-fetched smears that gender ideologues have concocted as a means to demonize women who tell inconvenient truths. But I comfort myself with the knowledge that, in the long run, a system of thought built on fantasy and self-deception can never persist indefinitely, no matter how ruthless its enforcers. While many of us are lazy and gullible in our ideological commitments, pledging allegiance to faddish notions so that we may be seen as enlightened, such vanities tend to fall away once we see evidence that proves we’ve been duped. Thank you to Lisa Littman—and to all the others I’ve named here—for putting that kind of evidence on full public display. 

My heart sank twice last week: first when I heard about the brutal murder of Sir David Amess; and again when I started to read some of the disturbing commentary about the 25-year-old arrested on suspicion of carrying out the attack.
For many, the ethnicity and heritage of Ali Harbi Ali were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.
As someone who was born in Somalia, I find this absurd. Of course a suspect is not a murderer because he has a Somali background. But denouncing facts as racist — especially when the person in question was referred to Prevent, and police and security services believe he may have been inspired by al-Shabaab in Somalia — forces a dangerous ignorance on the public.

Yet it is just one of a number of fallacies that continue to dominate almost every discussion about Islamist-driven terrorism — fallacies that are promoted by both the media and British authorities. Indeed, it strikes me that our efforts to counter Islamist attacks are hindered by at least three other misconceptions: our insistence on describing a perpetrator as a “lone wolf”, our obsession with online self-radicalisation, and the idea that “all extremisms are created equal”.
Take that first fallacy. As unpleasant as it may be to acknowledge, I suspect Sir David might be alive today, along with numerous other victims of Islamist extremists, if those in charge of preventing terrorism recognised that Islamist extremists are anything but lone wolves.
In a liberal society, it is appealing to think of suspects of Islamist terror as solitary actors. As a matter of principle, we uphold the importance of individual freedoms, rights, and responsibilities, while our judicial system assumes that individuals are responsible for their actions. We also recognise the importance of not maligning an entire community because of the extremist views of a few of their fellow believers. This is particularly crucial when the historical relationship between a particular minority and their new country is fraught with memories of colonialism.
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But while individuals such as Amess’s murderer may conduct their attacks alone, they still emerge out of communities or networks of like-minded individuals, whether in-person or online. They learn from teachers, imams or instructors the radical ideas that inspire their violence. This is not to say that their entire family or community is extremist — only that these individuals find and are exposed to people who are. Little is known about the background of Ali, but we can be certain that he did not plunge a knife into a total stranger, possibly picked at random, wholly of his own accord. Someone or some group inspired these actions.
Since last Friday, we’ve heard from a number of people who reportedly knew Ali, all of whom have expressed shock at his alleged crime. Yet it seems hugely unlikely that no one in his immediate circle picked up on his extremist tendencies. After all, the Somalian communities are very social. Unlike in traditional Western families, where individuals live an atomised life within an atomised society, a Somali family typically lives together in one household, where everyone is involved in everyone else’s business.
Gossip is a way of life. Solitude is not an option, even more so during the pandemic when families not only lived together but were home more often. It is likely, therefore, that key signs of radicalisation — a shift in language, withdrawal from society, increased frequency of praying and attending mosque — would be noticed by various family members.
When that does happen, you might expect a person’s family to become more involved, to pull them back into their community. But that isn’t always the case. Imagine, for example, that you are a family member of a potentially radicalised individual from a highly tight-knit community. You notice something of concern — but might it be best to keep quiet? Are you a sinner if you report your brother to a programme led by non-Muslims? What does it mean for your relationship with God and the afterlife? What kind of traitor would report their own blood to the authorities?
Or perhaps you are just a non-Muslim colleague or friend of the individual. You may notice a change in behaviour, but are you really going to go forward and report them, with the possibility of being labelled a racist or an Islamophobe? Who would report a potentially innocent person, just for observing their religion?
Lone wolves, then, do not come out of nowhere. They are inspired by other radicals and they are noticed by their community. The problem is that the community then keeps quiet.
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A similar fallacy looms over our understanding of online radicalisation, which does not occur in a silo, between the individual and their computer screen. The individual has to be susceptible, in a place of vulnerability, where Islamic radicalism can easily set in.
Though there is much about Ali that we are yet to learn, we do know that his father was Harbi Ali Kullane, a former government official in Somalia. Since the attack, reports have presented Kullane’s Twitter profile as a testament to assimilation, displaying his support for Captain Tom and the England football team. It has also been reported that, while working in Somalia, he faced threats from al-Shabaab.
And yet I suspect his attitude to his new country is more nuanced than has been presented. It is striking, for example, that not a single news outlet has flagged a tweet by Kullane from 2017, in which he suggests: “the 5-pointed star [on the Somali flag] represents the aspiration of a nation and the misery inflicted by British colonialism. Let’s not sugar coat this #Somalia.” Given that Kullane moved to the UK in the Nineties, his comment suggests an antipathy to Britain that has so far been ignored.
The last fallacy that must be confronted is the belief that all forms of extremism are created equal and should be treated as such. Under the British counter-terrorism Prevent programme, Islamism is lumped together with other forms of extremism, such as far-Right extremism, and handled with a similar approach. But while Right-wing extremism is a threat that should not be downplayed, its causes and motivations are totally unrelated to radical Islamists. They should be distinct and handled separately.
The only way to prevent Islamist terrorist attacks is to understand the lexicon of the Islamists. It is vital to understand the historic heroes that inspire them, the hadiths that speak to them, the myths and legends that motivate them, and the materials that are put into their hands. It is important to know not just the history of Islam, but also the history of the nation that is connected to the radicalised individual.
This kind of specialisation is not possible when so many in the UK cry Islamophobia at every turn. The only way to ask family and community members to come forward and report potentially radicalised individuals is to win their confidence. Individuals have to feel that they can safely approach the authorities without repercussion. They also deserve to know that the situation will be handled by someone who deeply understands the issues at hand. As Nik Adams, a counter-terrorism police officer, explained brilliantly, we need people who can recognise “how significant the seemingly insignificant might be”.
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Given the ineffectiveness of Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, and the blinkered approach to reporting since Sir David’s murder, that will be an uphill struggle. But it is not impossible: Prevent is undergoing an independent review, led by the capable William Shawcross, that will report in December and produce suggestions on how it can be improved.
More importantly, I believe that, by and large, the Islamic terrorist narrative is waning. al-Qaeda is a skeleton of what it was two decades ago, while the spectre of ISIS continues to serve as a real-life deterrent to what living under a caliphate requires. Even the Muslim Brotherhood narrative is stale and petering out. Yes, the Taliban may have taken control of Afghanistan, and the threat of Islamism in Africa remains deeply concerning and often ignored. But taken in its entirety, radical Islam does not have the same potency it once did.
So even with the tragic death of Sir David, the defeat of radical Islam in Britain is still attainable. But achieving that requires us to bin the fallacies regurgitated after every attack. If we don’t, the pattern of seemingly random terrorist violence will persist.

At the close of his new book Rationality, after 30 pages of references, the psychologist, psycholinguist and champion of Enlightenment liberalism Steven Pinker offers an alphabetical check-list of the “biases and fallacies” he has spent 10 chapters dissecting and despatching. More than 90 items long, this rogues’ gallery of conceptual crooks ranges from familiar rascals like the “ad hominem fallacy” to our ubiquitous social-media chum “tu quoque” — who now goes by the trendier name of “whataboutery”. 
Along the way his identity parade (all guilty, m’lud) takes in hardened malefactors such as “false dichotomy”, “guilt by association” and “straw man”, in addition to more exotic wrong’uns like the “motte-and-bailey tactic” (a kind of medieval cousin to that old lag “moving the goalposts”) and — a new favourite of mine — the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy”. First you fire a bullet into the barn door. Then you paint a bull’s-eye neatly round the hole. Ta-da! Much investment “advice” comes right out of that Texan barn.
Almost any arena of opinion and argument offers the prospect of a full card at Pinker Bingo. Political knockabout of the sort you hear weekly either in Westminster or on Question Time gives you the chance to shout “House!” within minutes. Even public debate that should bow readily to evidence-based reasoning, such as the international response to climate change, will throw up fogs of rhetorical pollution. Look at the preliminary positions, from both drastic-action radicals and kick-the-can gradualists, staked out in advance of the imminent COP 26 conference in Glasgow. With the planet’s future at stake, advocacy groups still tend to smother the clear light of reason in a dense cloud of confirmation bias, special pleading, guilt-by-association — and so on. You could argue that the comforting litany of targets and initiatives intoned by governments and agencies also deepen the sleep of reason. 

Trust in technocratic fixes may also function as a kind of mind-numbing cult. A century ago, the pioneering sociologist Max Weber — whom Pinker cites much less than he should — saw that the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationality that defined modern life would become an official religion, prone to heretical pushbacks in the form of mystic, charismatic or ecstatic movements. The stand-off between top-down climate-change bureaucracy and the gestural militancy of the radicals proves him correct.
As in eco-politics, so in media, education, culture and even (arguably) the social superstructures of science itself. Within modern institutions, and modern selves, the sphere of rationality Pinker toils to expand cohabits with what he calls the “mythology mindset”, immune to reason’s charms and claims. Behind the Pinker project lies a teleology of his own, the a priori conviction he permits himself. That is the belief in long-term human progress — measured in indices such as declining violence, improving health and longevity, expanding empathy and solidarity — set out in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and reinforced by Enlightenment Now (2018). 
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Critics dismiss this principle of incremental betterment as groundless optimism. He treats it as simple historical factuality. “Progressives don’t like progress,” he has quipped about his radical detractors. “Our picture of the future,” he insists in Rationality, “need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends towards rationality.” 
Pinker’s steadily advancing reason is no alien, Mr Spock-like logic machine or unfeeling calculus of personal advantage. He often cites David Hume, who claimed in his Treatise on Human Nature that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Take “slave” here to mean something like “operating system” and you approach the Pinker ambition to subject our goals and drives — some selfish, many others not — to a more reflective scrutiny of the mental processes that underlie our choices.
Pinker’s wide appeal rests partly on the self-help, how-to character of his arguments. Wherever your will and desire (those driving passions) make you want to travel, rationality’s toolkit will help you reach your destination. Thus rational-choice theory, which he expounds in the new book with typical brio and lucidity, may serve idealistic as much as self-interested ends even though it sounds “about as lovable as Ebenezer Scrooge”. It powers, for instance, the results-oriented philanthropy of the “effective altruism” movement ­— to the dismay of puritans who expect guilt and lamentation, sackcloth-and-ashes, from would-be social reformers . 
Pinker, though, also wants to uphold truth and morality according to his own liberal-secular lights. So he inflects his value-neutral account of the pitfalls on the road to reason with warnings against the dangers of populist irrationality in power. Enjoyably, he does point out the logical flaw in saying that “we’re living in a post-truth era” (if it’s true, it’s false, like that ancient Cretan liar). Still, the Trump years and their perceived assaults on reason have shaped this new work and — together with glancing allusions to the pandemic — given it a topical edge. He deplores the “myside bias” and skewed “motivated reasoning” of a polarised, them-against-us culture. And he rightly dislikes most forms of binary reasoning. 
In the end, however, Pinker himself reverts to a simple dualism between the “reality mindset” he endorses and the “mythology mindset” that underpins supernatural faith, elects frauds who tell 30,000 lies to the US presidency and — most recently — has killed thousands of conspiracy-prone anti-vaxxers. Near the end of Rationality, he reinvents the oldest wheel on the cart of sociology and anthropology when he states: “The function of these [mythological] beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose.” Of course, but what then? How should we try to connect myth and reality? 
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The pandemic has shown us that, even in the best-informed societies, the spread of evidence-free “mythological” beliefs and the willingness of millions to act on them can cost lives on a battlefield scale. The task of building bridges between the magical thinker and the reasoning creature — both of whom coexist in every human mind — feels more urgent than ever. Can Pinker’s mental toolkit span the gap?  
Pinker has little sense of dialectic. His clean-cut antithesis between “reality” and “mythology” in human thinking belongs in the lab, or the lecture-room, rather than in the messier interpersonal spaces where we live most of the time. Even Nietzsche — whom, again, he could have profitably consulted more than he does — saw the eternal wrangle between the reason, order and control of Apollo and the frenzy, fury and bliss of Dionysus as a perpetual to-and fro rather than a winner-takes-all struggle. With Pinker, the cause of reason tends to look like a zero-sum game: the light advances and the darkness diminishes, or vice versa.
Pinker is above all a teacher — a professor of psychology at Harvard since 2003. And teachers — unless, perhaps, they teach literature, philosophy or even quantum physics – need truth to vanquish falsity. His career-defining mission to advocate and communicate the tools of reason draws its strength from a pedagogic model rooted in his home-ground disciplines of experimental psychology and psycholinguistics. He may have written an entire book to disprove the tabula rasa picture of the human mind — The Blank Slate in 2002 — but he does believe that sustained effort can help rewrite our pre-existing scripts.
Like any caring teacher, Pinker sometimes has to make us suffer — but it’s all for our own good. “Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence,” he warns, “is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.”  
It’s not all pain in the Pinker classroom, though. Much of the fun of Rationality comes in the counter-intuitive exercises that our keep-fit instructor sets his cerebrally flabby pupils. If these don’t make your brain (pleasurably) ache as dormant muscles flex into action, then they should. Few readers will forget in a hurry his probability work-outs, especially this one: “Suppose that the prevalence of breast cancer in the population of women is 1%.” A breast-cancer diagnostic test has a true-positive rate of 90% and a false-positive rate of 9%. A woman takes it and tests positive. What are the percentage chances she has the disease? Between 80 and 90%, a sample of doctors estimated. The correct answer is around 9%.
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“Bayesian reasoning” — a key component of Pinker’s procedure in Rationality — will direct our attention to the “base rate” of any phenomenon (that 1% prevalence) and avoid distraction by the surface noise of the foreground figures. Base-rate neglect, as he demonstrates, plagues much policy-making, as does the cognate vice of the “availability heuristic”. Rare plane crashes sway behaviour more than frequent car crashes, a blue-moon terror outrage outranks the long-haul attrition of air pollution, and so on. Our judgments, individual and collective, repeatedly succumb to “psychological amplifiers such as recency, vividness, or emotional poignancy”. Hard, or lurid, cases make bad laws — and bad decisions. 
And so on, as the skittles of error fall to reason’s conquering ball. Pinker disentangles our confusions of correlation and causation. He guides us through the moves of formal logic that let us unpick the assertions of advertisers and pundits (some of them deeply intuitive, as when we sceptically say “that’s a big if…”). He outlines game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma that asks us to choose between potential gains, or losses, with no knowledge of the other players’ actions.
As a primer for cognitive hygiene, and a booster pack for your powers of critical reflection, Rationality does what it says on the box — and lots more. Yet in Pinker’s pay-off chapter, cheekily titled “What’s wrong with people?”, his grasp falters. His recommendations for improving rationality in public affairs sound either self-evident or anodyne: those rule-governed contracts; scientific peer review; media fact-checking; “statistical and critical thinking” in education; “evidence-based evaluation” in health and social policy. Lamely, he suggests that “It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs”, or “questioning the dogmas of their political sect”. And who would bestow those coveted points on repentant zealots? Party activists rewarded for loyalty? Social-media corporations that profit from traffic-driving division? Although he throws harsh words against the blowhard simplifications of media commentators, Pinker’s own nostrums often hover around the op-ed level. The “mythology mindset” that flourishes both in party politics and social activism would find little advantage in his forms of deliberative doubt. Just now, polarisation pays.
A teacher to the last, Pinker knows, supremely well, how to lead willing students towards a greater light. What’s missing is a robust model of the “impartial” agencies – communal and political – that might enable people to learn, cherish and deploy the tools of rationality as citizens, not just as pupils or professionals. Correctly, Pinker regrets “the decline of class-crossing civil-society organisations”, like churches and clubs, where people meet for a shared, connective purpose – rather than gather virtually in “sociocultural tribes” made up of uniform but atomised opinion-consumers. But he can’t say much about how super-charged rationality alone would heal the rifts between “myside” and your side.
Curiously, just across the Harvard campus, a solution of sorts might await. The great Bengali-born philosopher-economist Amartya Sen fails to rate a single mention in Rationality. Yet Sen – a Harvard professor since 2004 – began his career as an analyst of “social choice theory”. He has devoted more than half a century of original work to the role of public reasoning in entrenching and enhancing democratic norms.
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Sen grew up in Rabindranath Tagore’s utopian community at Santiniketan: the Bengali polymath’s visionary scheme to ground practical reasoning in peaceful and productive daily life. From famine prevention to women’s empowerment and the codification of the UN’s human development index (which he co-created), Sen has argued that the collective pursuit of rationality can serve common goods and deepen the bonds of belonging and community. 
Sen, an admirer of the Adam Smith, believes that strong institutions of collective reasoning can mitigate self-seeking and that “It is the power of reason that allows us to consider our obligations and ideals as well as our interests and advantages” (Development as Freedom). From village councils in India to the building (however incomplete) of accountable global agencies, he has done a lifetime’s best to make democratic rationality work in the public square. Think of it as a project to make Pinker’s “reality mindset” yield the same sort of collective pleasures and rewards as his “mythology mindset”. 
Pinker notes that, on a private level, people to tend to make pretty good sense, and good choices, about their lives. Sen asks how co-operative politics may do that too. For now, Pinker’s Rationality can tell us with forensic verve and agility how to catch out those faith-driven diehards as they blunder through their faulty premises, false syllogisms, illusory correlations and so on. So far, he can’t show convincingly how — or why — they should play a better game.  
Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, £25)

On November 2, New Yorkers will vote on five proposed changes to the state constitution. One of these, Proposition 2, would amend the constitution to include these seemingly innocuous words: “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

Most voters will hear about the proposed amendment for the first time in the polling booth. Though the measure has been working its way through the legislature for several years, the so-called Green Amendment has received surprisingly little publicity or public pushback—and that’s a problem.

On its face, the proposal seems straightforward and appealing. Who could be against clean air and water? With backing from a host of environmental organizations, including the Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as putative good-government groups such as the League of Women Voters, the amendment is expected to pass decisively. But beneath its innocent veneer, the amendment could upend environmental law in the state.

“It’s a real wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Tom Stebbins, executive director of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York (LRANY) told me. As written, the amendment appears to give individuals and activist groups undefined—potentially unlimited—rights to sue both the state government and private parties over perceived environmental wrongs. In other words, Stebbins says, the measure takes environmental enforcement “out of the hands of accountable elected officials and puts it in the hands of private attorneys. That’s not the way to govern.” Philip K. Howard, a longtime advocate of nonpartisan legal and regulatory reform, told me he believes the provision “will open a Pandora’s box of litigation.”

New York’s Green Amendment is the product of a long-term progressive project. For decades, activists have worked to redefine laudable goals—such as providing health care or housing—as “rights” on a par with those enumerated in the Constitution. (“The right to clean water, air and a healthful environment should be as fundamental as a person’s right to free speech and assembly,” one group maintains.) That effort has dovetailed with the rise of the “environmental justice” movement, which reframes environmental problems as examples of racial or class discrimination. A letter to state legislators in support of the measure signed by some 70 advocacy groups states that the “Green Amendment is a powerful and important tool for combating environmental racism.” According to the New York League of Conservation Voters, which backs the proposal, the amendment would mandate “that all people must have the same degree of protection from environmental health hazards.”

A handful of other states, including Pennsylvania, Montana, and Massachusetts, spell out a version of “environmental rights” in their constitutions. In 2013, activists in Pennsylvania relied on that state’s environmental rights amendment in a lawsuit to block a law reducing restrictions on fracking. The state’s supreme court ultimately struck down the fracking law, ruling that the amendment is “first and foremost a limitation on government authority.”

To date, few environmental-rights amendments have led to extensive litigation, but legal experts note that such amendments in Pennsylvania and other states are more narrowly focused than the one proposed for New York. An analysis published by the Nixon Peabody law firm observes that amendments in other states include specific details regarding enforcement and definitions. In contrast, “New York’s proposed amendment uses the most general wording feasible, giving great flexibility to the courts in New York to interpret and apply.”

The National Law Review calls the proposed amendment “simple, yet vague.” The amendment doesn’t define terms, such as “clean” and “healthful.” Nor does it spell out enforcement mechanisms, penalties for violations, or roles for existing state agencies. That vagueness wasn’t an oversight on the part of the measure’s authors. Green Amendment supporters know that the simple language will sound benign and appealing to voters, while the amendment’s lack of specificity will ensure maximum latitude for legal activists and law firms seeking to challenge both state regulations and private industry.

New York’s legislature is notoriously cozy with the state’s personal-injury trial bar, Stebbins says. So it isn’t a shock that the Green Amendment’s broad language will open up a lucrative new arena for litigation. The National Law Review notes that the text describing this “right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment” is an “outlier in terms of its brevity” compared with similar measures in other jurisdictions: “Unlike other states, the New York proposal—on purpose—does not rely on the New York legislature or state agencies to define or limit the right.”

The amendment’s seemingly limitless scope raises many questions. In particular, to what extent does it give private citizens standing to bring lawsuits against the government or against businesses and other parties? In legal terminology, that’s known as a direct right of action. It’s a feature of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other laws. In theory, such provisions empower private citizens to help improve enforcement of a worthwhile law by spotting infractions and filing suits against lawbreakers. In practice, these rules (which often include financial rewards for plaintiffs) can turn into abusive free-for-alls. Some ADA plaintiffs file hundreds of suits a year. Legal experts say that the Green Amendment could give environmental plaintiffs similarly broad rights. “The proposal does not address enforcement,” the National Law Review observes, “but it is certain that private parties will attempt to use this new constitutional provision as a basis for a direct right of action to enforce state environmental laws against other private parties in state court.”

In apparently establishing a direct right of action against any party, New York’s Green Amendment is radically more expansive than similar amendments in other states. The Pennsylvania amendment, for example, specifies “the Commonwealth” as the “trustee of these resources.” Pennsylvania courts have ruled that while the amendment obligates the state to protect natural resources, it does not give citizens the right to file civil suits against private businesses or other parties. By opening the door to such civil suits—and by failing to define its terms—New York’s Green Amendment threatens to create a toxic legal climate. “Just think of all the claims demanding a ‘healthful environment,’” Howard says. “It would start an arms race among environmental groups and social justice groups for who can concoct the most dramatic theories.”

Without guidance from the state legislature, the National Law Journal says, it will be up to the courts to decide “how to operationalize this new fundamental right in the real world.” That could mean years of legal chaos as New York courts work out the rules of the road on a case-by-case basis—and as the inevitable appeals work their way (slowly) through higher courts. Over time, the courts might choose to place reasonable guardrails around how citizens can exercise their new environmental rights. Or they could lock in a maximalist interpretation of the amendment’s language. Either way, sorting this out might take decades.

This uncertain legal climate could be devastating for private industry in New York State. Businesses can cope with clear and consistently enforced regulations, but it’s hard to plan or raise capital in a capricious regulatory environment. Would a New York business be held liable for emissions levels that are currently legal under state law? Will development projects be subject to last-minute Green Amendment lawsuits even after passing environmental and zoning reviews? Even unsuccessful lawsuits can cost companies millions and delay projects for years.

Government agencies will also face uncertainty. New York has some of the strictest environmental laws in the nation, along with a robust state bureaucracy to enforce them. But the Green Amendment threatens to sideline those agencies, vesting the ultimate power to set environmental standards in the courts. Under a maximalist interpretation, the amendment would empower individual plaintiffs, activist groups, and the state’s endlessly innovative trial bar to dominate the environmental agenda. Ideally, federal and state environmental regulations are developed by politically accountable legislators and enforced by regulators with appropriate expertise. We expect legislators and regulators to weigh costs and benefits and hammer out policy compromises. The system is far from perfect, but it is reasonably democratic, transparent, and consistently applied.

Imagine instead a climate in which a willy-nilly barrage of lawsuits sets environmental standards. The result would be what one LRANY analyst calls “vigilante regulation through litigation.” Judges don’t have the expertise to determine whether, say, 49 parts per million of a particular pollutant constitutes a “healthy environment,” but 50 ppm does not. And the court system isn’t equipped to weigh the budgetary or economic costs of environmental rulings. Moreover, lawsuits are likely to favor localized concerns over statewide benefits. For example, I live close to a Metro North train line. That means that I’m subjected to more pollution from Metro North’s diesel locomotives than the average New Yorker. Will the Green Amendment give me standing to sue Metro North and demand that it stop using diesel trains? Should a single judge determine whether the broad benefits of mass transit outweigh the localized impact of diesel smoke? A courtroom is a terrible venue to grapple with such complex, society-wide questions. “The provision would empower courts to make critical policy choices with huge budgetary implications,” reform advocate Howard says. “It is profoundly anti-democratic.”

Defenders of the Green Amendment have little patience for these concerns. “If you’re not polluting the air or making water dangerous to drink, then you should not have any problems with this amendment,” Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York told The City. But the idea that the Green Amendment will only harm polluters is simplistic. As currently written, it threatens to create delays and raise legal costs both for private industry and for public agencies such as the MTA. New York already leads the nation in civil litigation. LRANY estimates that litigation costs already add up to over $6,000 per household. The amendment would add to that burden.

Ironically, the Green Amendment might prove to be most troublesome for New York’s environmental agenda. A program launched by Governor Cuomo commits the state to eliminating carbon emissions from the electrical grid by 2040. That plan calls for rapidly building a huge number of solar and wind farms, and the construction of hundreds of miles of new power lines. Such clean-energy infrastructure projects—which involve heavy equipment, dust, and noise—invariably face resistance from nearby property owners. LRANY’s Stebbins has seen this issue first-hand, from his time working for a large wind-power firm. NIMBY lawsuits were a constant obstacle to getting wind projects approved and built. He believes the Green Amendment will dramatically increase such suits, making it harder for the state to achieve its decarbonization goals. “Even though the net environmental impact of a wind farm is overwhelmingly positive, individuals might be able to block it over very small and local concerns.”

Worse still, New York’s Green Amendment is part of a national trend. Environmental-rights amendments are moving through the legislatures of at least ten other states, including New Jersey, Maine, Washington, and Oregon. One of the leading groups backing such measures, Green Rights for the Generations, says it hopes to someday see a green amendment added to the U.S. Constitution. Before the environmental-rights juggernaut gets that far, let’s hope voters and policy experts take a more skeptical look at this dangerously seductive idea.

Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images

The Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan originally included four major family policies, but moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin won’t vote for the bill unless those policies are trimmed back to reduce the price tag. So Democrats are thinking about eliminating some policies, or aggressively means-testing them, or perhaps cutting off the funding earlier than planned—a budget gimmick premised on the idea that a future Congress will just extend the programs anyway. This weekend, Manchin reportedly laid out some “red lines” as to what these cuts should look like, though negotiations continue.

Spending more on families can be beneficial in some ways. Even many conservatives have urged a greater role for the government in making it more affordable to raise children. Yet the Democrats’ internal debate isn’t just about how much to spend. It’s also about the incentives that families should face as they make personal choices about work and child care. Each of the four major options has the potential to shape behavior in controversial ways.

First is extending the “child allowance”—currently in effect, but only for a year, through the American Rescue Plan—that gives parents $3,000 per child plus an extra $600 for kids younger than six and phases out at higher incomes. Second are massive child-care subsidies that would cap costs at 7 percent of middle-class families’ income and provide care for less cost (or even no cost) for poorer families. Third is universal preschool for three- and four-year-olds. And fourth: 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, so that new parents can take three months off at government expense.

Extending the “child allowance” is, in one sense, the most neutral option. The government simply pays the allowance to all parents (until it phases out at higher incomes), without regard to whether the parents work or watch their own kids. Thus, the money is not conditioned on parents acting in a certain way that the government wants them to. Yet this in itself is a big departure from the pre-Covid status quo, in which the $2,000 child tax credit was limited to families with income- or payroll-tax liability to offset—thereby serving as a de facto requirement that at least one parent work in order to receive aid.

The Democrats’ credit, by contrast, is no-strings-attached cash to families, including those in which nobody works. And where some conservative proposals have paired such policies with cuts elsewhere in the safety net, the Democrats’ allowance does not. Some worry that this could recreate the welfare system as it existed before the 1996 reform, with some of the poorest families supporting themselves on a mix of benefits and off-the-books income rather than climbing the ladder of the official labor market. One recent study, predicting the effects of the child allowance based on results from earlier research, claims that the policy could “lead 1.5 million workers (constituting 2.6 percent of all working parents) to exit the labor force,” with most of this behavioral response coming from single-worker families. Manchin has reportedly insisted on a work requirement for the new credit.

Meantime, huge child-care subsidies and universal pre-K share a significant feature: under these policies, the government pays for someone to watch kids while parents work. Notably, these benefits don’t just require that someone in the household works. They are useful only to those who need child care—which is to say, they exclude couples where one parent works while the other watches the kids.

Economically, such subsidies discourage parents from staying home with their children to begin with, by destroying the financial savings that stay-at-home parenting normally brings. One of the natural consequences of staying home, after all, is that your kids no longer need daycare, an expensive service. To the extent the government picks up the daycare tab for working parents, stay-at-home parents pass up those subsidies rather than actually benefiting financially from the work they do.

Make no mistake: this is the government putting its finger on the scale, fundamentally altering the tradeoffs associated with the decision to stay home, even as many parents say in surveys that they want to stay home or to work only part-time. Many of the policies’ advocates essentially admit this, though they couch it in friendlier terms, with a dose of anti-sexism. They see themselves as “helping” or “enabling” women to work, thus furthering “gender equality” and improving moms’ “earning potential” (buzzwords courtesy of a recent New York Times piece).

Daycare and pre-K also have uncertain and oft-debated effects on kids. As Max Eden explained in a recent Manhattan Institute report, “Expanded child care likely benefits deeply disadvantaged students. For other students, these programs may have no impact, or have a negative effect on cognitive or noncognitive measures. . . . Studies suggest that many children exhibit higher levels of stress hormones—colloquially termed ‘toxic stress’—in child-care environments than they do at home, which could leave a lasting physical impact on their brain architecture.”

Expanding pre-K can greatly damage daycare. Many daycares operate by “cross-subsidizing” the care of younger kids with revenue from older kids. The youngest kids need the most care and the highest staffing ratios, and while most child-care centers do charge a bit less as children get older, this gradient is nowhere near steep enough to reflect fully the difference in costs. When the government yanks the oldest and most profitable kids into universal preschool, other child-care facilities have to charge much more for younger children, and some slots disappear entirely.

Last is the option of funding parental leave. This is probably the least drastic of the proposals, though even it favors some parents over others. If you don’t want to take that much leave—because you’re a workaholic, say, or you’re in a high-pressure job and can’t afford to lose ground, or your stay-at-home spouse has things covered—you miss out on funding available to people who stay on the path that the government has chosen: taking a specified amount of time off and then returning to work. (Incidentally, whether this type of benefit actually does keep moms from leaving the work force entirely is far from clear.)

Democrats are scrambling to cut the price tags of their family policies, but the debate isn’t just about how much to spend—it’s also about how government should shape the decisions that families make.

Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google In the social-media age, we curate images of our lives on a screen—making it especially easy to translate images of perfection as the image of oneself. But the pressure to pretend we are perfect is exactly the thing holding us back from experiencing the happiness we seek—and limiting our ability to be our whole, authentic selves.In this week’s episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we’ll define what we mean by “authenticity” and explore the psychological underpinnings of our ego-driven identities. A conversation with the clinical psychologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Shefali helps us work through one of the most challenging questions of all: Who am I?Try this week’s live interactive exercise, “The Chipping-Away Exercise,” and apply these lessons to your own life. Tag us on social media with #thechippingawayexercise, and listen to other full-length episodes of How to Build a Happy Life at theatlantic.com/podcasts/how-to-build-a-happy-life. (Your entries are private, unless you share on social media.)Click here to listen to other full-length episodes in this series.This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur C. Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael.Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091.Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche De Luces”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”).This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Arthur C. Brooks: People often ask this question: How do I find myself? And for a long time, I didn’t really understand the nature of that question, because, I mean, find yourself? Look in the mirror! But then I realized that people tend to be deeply alienated from who they consider themselves actually to be.And the reason is because of something that is defined in the psychological literature as self-objectification. Self-objectification is just another form of objectifying a person; it’s just that the objectifier and the objectify-ee are the same person.If you ask “How do I find myself?,” you’re basically saying “I don’t know who I am,” and the reason you don’t know who you are probably is because you have reduced yourself to one characteristic, to one trait, to one quality that you want to be more than anything else. You objectified yourself.You might ask yourself: What does self-objectification typically look like? Well, it looks like you thinking of yourself only in one dimension. Maybe you’re an especially attractive person physically, and people reward you for that. They give you attention and that attention feels good. That’s pure self-objectification, and that’s really a lesser version of you. You’re getting the reward, which is the attention of others, but you’re desecrating the nature of your true self.Dr. Shefali: Watching hundreds of clients go through the process of transforming pain into power, and then seeing my own transformation from pain to power, really was the underpinning of this book.In my own personal life, I was in a marriage for over two decades and found that as I began to become more and more authentic, the container of the relationship needed to morph. And in some relationships it can, and in some relationships it simply cannot. In my relationship, the container could not morph to allow the emergence of my new self. And then I was in a deep conflict, and I believe many people go through this conflict where the authentic self arises but the past doesn’t support the present.And so I had to make very tough, torturous choices as a woman, especially as a mother. Do I stay or do I leave? And I went through a tremendous shedding of old belief systems, especially as an Indian woman—I was raised in India—but also as just a woman in this current culture where we are given or we invite or we ingest a lot of guilt and shame around being the quote-unquote “home-wrecker.”So I went through a very torturous inner process of shedding what that means and how culture has overlaid so much shame around us for speaking our voice, for holding our own, for taking space, because those were the things I was doing that my old container couldn’t allow anymore. So I not only went through this myself, but this is what I usher most of my clients through, is how do you discover your authentic voice.Brooks: So when you’re talking to somebody, giving them advice about finding their authentic self, what does that mean? What is the inauthentic self, and then what is the authentic self?Dr. Shefali: As I see it as a therapist, when we are children, we are closest to who it is we are meant to be—as close to being unconditioned as possible. And as we are in the womb itself and as we emerge into the world, we are immediately bombarded with the conditionings of our immediate parents and then our immediate culture. Conditioning literally starts from day one.Already you are born into a family; already you are born into a tradition. With that comes its politics. With that comes its religion. With that comes its ideas of good and bad, heaven and hell, God or no God, achievement, success, happiness, beauty. Everything is an imprint that we now need to plug in to. In that process of being kind of forced to absorb the conditioning, we have no choice. We lose our connection to who we could be or were meant to be. It’s just natural.And we realize quickly that in order to receive validation, love, and worth, we better get whipping into this system. And in order to do that, there’s a psychological process that occurs, which I describe as the development of the ego, the false self. The chicken needs the shell of the egg to develop, but it cannot survive if the egg stays intact.This is kind of what I describe the ego as. We develop a shell of the false self to get love and worth in this conditioning, in this system that really befuddles us. And I talk about how rock bottom that pain is when the false self simply cannot make it in the world anymore. It’s like, I give up. I have tried so hard, but dammit, I can’t find happiness on the outside and I’m exhausted and I give up. And that is the beginning portal for awakening. But it is the most painful point in time.Brooks: Let’s take a case study so people can really make this concrete in their minds. So somebody walks into your office and is having a first consultation with you. And this is somebody who’s a full-on self-objectifier. What are you most likely to see?Dr. Shefali: You will see a lot of “I” statements, a lot of anxiety, a lot of anger, control, a lot of bluster because things are not going well in their life. So with people like this, which is most people, they typically come when expectations haven’t met reality or the other way around. And they are deeply injured by this fact. It’s because they feel entitled to expectations and reality being one.Typically, I see it with parents. The children bring you to your knees because you are like, By golly, I have wasted so much of my money and energy and given my body up for this creature. How dare this little one not bend to my will? That’s why my first books were all on parenting, because I was like, let me go for the obvious prey, which is the parent.And I gently help them deconstruct who they think they are and show them how they have enslaved themselves to this relationship or to this identity. And if they want to live a different life, they’re going to have to loosen that hold this identity has on them. And they begin to see suffering, suffering, suffering. This has caused me pain, pain, pain. And when I show them in real time, Ah, see hell, see suffering. So is this identity working for you? Is this belief system good for you? Or can we look at another way of envisioning this?So it’s a slow process of deconstruction, and people cling, even though they know it’s dysfunctional. They are deeply attached to the dysfunction because the dysfunction now becomes your addiction. Suffering becomes your reality. You’re like, No. Who will I be if I don’t suffer; who will I be without the anxiety? So now the very symptoms become the identity.Brooks: I had this really crazy experience some years ago. I overheard a man on the plane behind me. It was at night and so I couldn’t see, but I heard a man confessing to his wife that he wished he were dead. And I could tell he was old by his voice, and the woman, I figured she was his wife, she’s saying, “Oh, don’t say it would be better if you were dead.” This went on like this for, like, 20 minutes and the lights came on.We landed in Washington Dulles Airport and everybody stood up and I turned around and it was one of the most famous men in the world. And I was walking up the aisle with him behind me. This is blowing my mind. So I’m a social scientist, and so I had it all wrong. I’m like, Oh, this guy’s probably disappointed in his life. He never did anything right. And we’re going past the cockpit and the pilot looks through me like a pane of glass right at the guy behind me. And he says, “Sir, I want you to know that you’ve been my hero since I was a little boy.” And I turned around and he was beaming!And I thought to myself, Okay, so which is the real hero? Is it now or is it 20 minutes ago? And it sent me on this vision quest to figure out how all of us can stay off that branch in the tree. Because he was, I mean, look, I know why he was miserable. He was still trying to be the symbol of himself. He was really old and it was not possible. And so a lot of guys that I work with, they’re like ultra, über successful, but they’re prisoners of that success because you can’t keep it going. And when nature says it’s done and you’re not ready, you’re screwed. You might as well escape by yourself and get to a better life on your own, right?Dr. Shefali: Right. But very few have that awareness because it’s so alluring, you see. Especially for über-successful people. The ego gratification is too much of a trap. It’s too seductive. You have to really watch that ego and watch that adulation and your attachment to it.Brooks: When you’re working with somebody, what’s the first thing tangibly you tell them to do?Dr. Shefali: I become their mirror to show them what their own life is reflecting and that they are unhappy. And that’s the first thing I need them to buy into, because if they’re not going to own that they’re not happy, we cannot get anywhere. So until I get that, like I’m an addict, right? That’s why AA is amazing in so many ways. Unless you’re willing to say, “Hello, I’m Stanley. I’m an addict”—if you’re not willing to say that, we cannot go to the next step; you have to leave the meeting. So that’s where I go.And of course I’m not, you know, rude like that. But I know that until I get the person to realize and accept and own, you know, their own inner incongruities, their own inner dissatisfaction—well, are you happy that your kid is blaming you and you’re blaming your kid? Is that making you feel good? Until they can say, “No,” I cannot go forward, and I tell them that. So I say, “We still have more work to do for you to arrive at your own ownership of your inauthenticity. We don’t want to own that we’re not okay.”Brooks: You know, we are taught that if we’re good people, we will feel other people’s pain. So it seems to me that you’ve moved beyond empathy to real compassion. You know, empathy is feeling other people’s pain. And the worst parents that you and I’ve ever met are the most empathetic parents, just like, I’ll feel your pain and don’t do the hard things that make you not your kid’s buddy.I have three adult kids, and they were not my [fans] a lot. It sounds to me that this is at the root of what you’re talking about here: To stop being empathetic with yourself and start being compassionate, start giving yourself the tough love that you actually need. Is that fair?Dr. Shefali: Yeah. It’s about acceptance that pain is inevitable, as that saying goes. So pain is the portal for transformation. So I don’t take away people’s pain. I invite it in and then we’re going to sit in it. So I’m doing the opposite of what culture says, which is Oh, pain is bad or She needs to be appeased or empathized with. I mean, empathy is a lovely thing, but it’s not the answer. The answer is, okay, feel it fully, recognize your participation and co-creation in it so that then you can liberate yourself from it. So unless we fully are in it and conscious of it, we’re going to keep running away from it.Brooks: Sometimes people ask me why I study happiness, why I write about happiness for The Atlantic, and why I do this podcast. What makes me so interested in happiness? And the answer is, well, it is fascinating, and I love sharing these ideas and lifting people up. But the biggest reason is because I want to be happier, just like you. Just like everybody. It doesn’t come super natural to me all the time.As you’ve heard in past episodes in the series, this is the part where we share a mini audio snippet from our listeners who courageously agreed to answer this question: When’s the last time you remember being truly happy?Listener submission: My name is Joan; I live in New York City. I stay in my grateful mode, what I call my grateful mode, for good health, a loving family, still affording my monthly rent. But the last time being truly happy, I cannot remember. In fact, my usual sense of pride, of not knowing depression, and my sense of panic feeling I was depressed for the first time, I can remember, has me terrified. A series of recent events—my brother’s death shook me to the core, COVID, the depressing state of our politics, facing my 80s—accompanied with a dwindling lack of a sense of purpose, I fight this mindset every single day and concentrate on the fact that if I can’t find a way out of this, my three daughters and my three grandchildren would not only be devastated, but what model for living life would I leave them? The thought of failing to maintain a sense of purpose keeps me working on this as if working for my Ph.D. Truly happy—I look forward to the day. Thank you.Brooks: Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the conversation that I had with Dr. Shefali. I want to give you one of my favorite exercises that can help you in your journey to stop objectifying yourself. This is called the chipping-away exercise.Step one: Make a list of all the ways that you wish you were different. Think about it and be honest. You wish you were thinner or richer or funnier or more successful or cooler or more admired. Make a list of all the ways that you think you’d be better off if you were different.Now here’s step two. Look at each item on the list and ask yourself two questions: Why do you want each one of these things? For example, you want to be thinner. Why? So you can be more attractive? So you can find a partner? So that other people might love you more? Why do you want to be more successful? More successful than what? Well, obviously, more successful than others. Why do you want to make other people feel envious? Is the jealousy of others something you’re looking for? Be honest. Why do you want each one of these things? Then ask yourself: Do you like these motives? Are you proud of these motives?Okay, here’s step three. Imagine you had all these things on your list. How would they really be changing your life? Be completely honest. How much happier would you be if you were richer, if you were funnier, if you were cooler? How much happier would you actually be? This requires that you connect it to what you assume would bring you happiness. So, for example, if you wanted to be more handsome or prettier or just generally more attractive or whatever it was because you thought that somebody might love you more, is that true? And does that mean that you would be happier?Okay, now here’s step four. You know perfectly that all the things on your list that you’d like to change about yourself would require resources, would require effort and time and money and energy, and it would probably mean changing your relationships and all kinds of stuff like that. So ask yourself this: What would you be willing to give up to get these things from your life? For example, would you be willing to give up relationships with loved ones in order to do the work that you need to do to make a lot more money? Is it worth it?Here’s step five. Think about who you really are. Think of the person you are. Is time spent comparing yourself with others or acting like something you’re not, trying to think about adding these things on to yourself, is it worth it?Here’s step six. Think about chipping away these added parts, these inauthentic parts of yourself. How would you want to be different than you? Well, that’s how you’re not you, isn’t it? Simply chip away the attachments to the desires of the things that would make you a little bit different than yourself because you’re uncomfortable with who you are.Now think about that list. Think about the list of the money and the stuff and the image and all that you wanted to make other people jealous with, with those motives you didn’t quite like. And one by one by one, look at that list and declare your independence from each one of those things.Here’s step seven. Do this every day for a week and keep track of how it makes you feel right after you do it and how it makes you act the next day. This is going to change you. This is going to make you more authentic, and I daresay it’s going to make you happier.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’m writing about supply chains again. Ekaterina Zolotova and Phillip Orchard can explain why Russian-Chinese maneuvers are insignificant. Antonia Colibasanu and Francesco Casarotto can try to explain Europe. Hilal Khashan can talk about why Lebanon will totally collapse for real this time. And Allison Fedirka can explain the latest weirdness in Venezuela. But I’m not ready to leave the global crisis just yet.

First, I’d like to respond to many of the letters I received on my article published last Friday. I do believe intellectually that we will survive the current situation. Think of parachuting out of an aircraft. Before you jump, you are certain that you will survive. After the chute opens, you are at peace. But between the jump and the chute opening you know in your heart, if not in your head, that you are destined to be a dirt dart. Your mind knows that that is improbable. Your heart knows that the idea of your life depending on a piece of cloth violates the rules of nature. In the same way, my mind knows this is a soluble problem.

Even so, my mind has moved to two things: food and medicine. So far, we have been talking about relatively trivial things, like the possibility that our Christmas presents won’t arrive on time. The various spot shortages in U.S. markets and the various global disruptions have not threatened our well-being. But in looking at the crisis until now, two things appear true. The first is that experts underestimated the length of time that the crisis would impact how we live. The second is that they underestimated the pyramiding of consequences.

The normal explanation for why the pandemic has lasted as long as it has is the unwillingness of Americans to be vaccinated. If that’s true, then it was entirely predictable. Distrust of vaccines is an old story in the United States. More, there is deep distrust of the honesty and competence of the federal government. This is an old sentiment too. The failure to take into account social values caused a failure of expectations. If Apple had offered the vaccine and not Dr. Anthony Fauci, things might have been different. Browbeating Americans on the left or the right does not often work. President Donald Trump was the one who ordered Operation Warp Speed, which expedited the vaccine’s development. President Joe Biden is the one pressing compliance and facing substantial opposition.

The latest that I have read is that the supply chain problem should be over by early 2022. That may be correct, but I doubt very much anyone can be certain. The supply chain crisis intersects with labor shortages, energy prices and transport disruptions. Transport might be straightened out in a few months, but energy and labor seem to be longer-lasting problems. As we have seen with many issues (including COVID-19), large problems create peripheral problems that in turn create more unexpected problems. Human activities are complex, and complexity makes it difficult to anticipate how far the ripples go.

The transportation issue opens the door to more severe shortages in food and medicine. So far, it has had a significant impact on individual businesses, particularly those that require manufactured goods as components of things they produce or end products they sell. But one of the most important products shipped internationally is medicine or ingredients needed to produce medicine. Many of these components are produced in China, India and other countries, a fact that was discovered in the first wave of COVID-19. And it goes both ways. China must import materials to fabricate medicine and must ship it globally for packaging and final shipping.

There are many steps in the process, including procuring raw materials and production equipment, and each step appears to be fragile. It is said that the massive number of ships waiting at Long Beach to be unloaded in the United States will be cleared up in due course. Perhaps – although I wonder how owners of ships that must be kept moving allowed their vessels to be trapped offshore. However this turns out, it is but one port and one country. Virtually every country in the world receives shipments of medicine.

I’m focusing on medicine because, in this case, a collapse of the supply chain can be a matter of life and death. There are heart patients and cancer patients and many others who will die without needed medication. And the argument that these should never have been produced abroad assumes that countries like the United States have the trained personnel and vast facilities that would be needed to replace the imports. The imports may be cheaper, which for many consumers is critical, but never at higher risk. The production of all elements of all medications needed globally cannot be achieved in single countries without disrupting the rest of the economy.

Medicine is a parachute moment. We were confident that our medicine would arrive at the port or at the airport if shipped by air. I believe in the end an emergency can be solved. But if the parachute does not open, the consequences could rival COVID-19 in terms of casualties.

There are already shortages of medicines. A good list of them can be found here. I don’t know whether such shortages are normal, and I’m not in a position to figure out which medicines are life-saving and which are not. But I do know that the longer a shortage goes on, the harder it is to recover inventory, and the more the links of the supply chain deteriorate.

I am not trying to be alarmist, and clearly I am far from an expert on this subject. But a global shortage in shipping and the limits of air transport, along with some evidence of a shortage of medicine, indicates a potentially deadly problem.

Moreover, there have been occasional items missing from the supermarket at various times. But given the international production and shipping of some of these items, this poses another real concern for us. Like medicine, food isn’t something that permits a delay. A medicine shortage can kill. So can food shortages. And both can cause riots.

Early in the COVID-19 crisis, I argued that protecting against the disease might have unexpected and dangerous consequences. This was not an argument for ignoring COVID-19 but an argument for remembering that there are things as deadly as the disease. I don’t think we will get there because there are steps that can be taken to remedy the problem. But the global supply chain crisis is not about receiving Christmas gifts; it’s about whether medicine and food will be stocked in time. This may just be a first step toward something worse. There have to be no further steps, which is easy for me to say but may be harder to do.

Ever since I entered what can generously be called my “mid-30s,” doctors have asked about my pregnancy plans at every appointment. Because I’m career-minded and generally indecisive, I’ve always had a way of punting on this question, both in the doctor’s office and elsewhere. Well, we can always adopt, I’ll think, or say out loud to my similarly childless and wishy-washy friends. Adoption, after all, doesn’t depend on your oocyte quality. And, as we’ve heard a million times, there are so many babies out there who need a good home.But that is not actually true. Adopting a baby or toddler is much more difficult than it was a few decades ago. Of the nearly 4 million American children who are born each year, only about 18,000 are voluntarily relinquished for adoption. Though the statistics are unreliable, some estimates suggest that dozens of couples are now waiting to adopt each available baby. Since the mid-1970s—the end of the so-called baby-scoop era, when large numbers of unmarried women placed their children for adoption—the percentage of never-married women who relinquish their infants has declined from nearly 9 percent to less than 1 percent.In 2010, Bethany Christian Services, the largest Protestant adoption agency in the U.S., placed more than 700 infants in private adoptions. Last year, it placed fewer than 300. International adoptions have not closed the gap. The number of children American parents adopt each year from abroad has declined rapidly too, from 23,000 in 2004 (an all-time high) to about 3,000 in 2019.Plenty of children who aren’t babies need families, of course. More than 100,000 children are available for adoption from foster care. But adoptive parents tend to prefer children who are what some in the adoption world call “AYAP”—as young as possible. When I recently searched AdoptUSKids, the nationwide, government-funded website for foster-care adoptions, only about 40 kids under age 5, out of the 4,000 registered, appeared in my search. Many of those 40 had extensive medical needs or were part of a sibling group—a sign that the child is in even greater need of a stable family, but also a more challenging experience for their adoptive parents.At a glance, this shortage of adoptable babies may seem like a problem, and certainly for people who desperately want to adopt a baby, it feels like one. But this trend reflects a number of changing social and geopolitical attitudes that have combined to shrink the number of babies or very young children available for adoption. Over the past few decades, many people—including those with strong commitments to the idea of infant adoption—have reconsidered its value to children. Though in the short term this may be painful for parents who wish to adopt infants, in the long term, it might be better for some children and their birth families. Many babies in the developing world who once would have been brought to America will now be raised in their home country instead. And Americans who were planning to adopt may have to refocus their energies on older, vulnerable foster children—or change their plans entirely. Infant adoption was once seen as a heartwarming win-win for children and their adoptive parents. It’s not that simple.For much of American history, placing a child for adoption was an obligation, not a choice, for poor, single women. In the decades after World War II, more than 3 million young pregnant women were “funneled into an often-coercive system they could neither understand nor resist,” Gabrielle Glaser wrote in her recent book, American Baby. They lived with strangers as servants or were hidden away in maternity homes until they gave birth, at which time they were pressured into closed adoptions, in which birth mothers and their babies have no contact.Data on adoption are and have always been fuzzy and incomplete; for decades, no one tracked many of the adoptions that were happening in the U.S., and not all states reported their adoption figures. “There are no valid numbers from the ’40s and ’50s” because “just about all of these transfers existed in a realm of secrecy and shame, all around,” the historian Rickie Solinger told me. Still, adoption researchers generally agree that adoptions of children by people who aren’t their relatives increased gradually from about 34,000 in 1951 to their peak of 89,000 in 1970, before declining to about 69,000 in 2014—a number that includes international adoptions and foster-care adoptions. Given population growth, the decline from 1970 indicates a 50 percent per capita decrease.What happened? Starting in the ’70s, single white women became much less likely to relinquish their babies at birth: Nearly a fifth of them did so before 1973; by 1988, just 3 percent did. (Single Black women were always very unlikely to place their children for adoption, because many maternity homes excluded Black women.) In 1986, an adoption director at the New York Foundling Hospital told The New York Times that though “there was a time, about 20 years ago, when New York Foundling had many, many white infants,” the number of white infants had “been very scarce for a number of years.”Still, throughout this era, American families adopted thousands of infants and toddlers from foreign countries. In the ’50s, a mission to rescue Korean War orphans sparked a trend of international adoptions by Americans. Over the years, international adoptions increased, and Americans went on to adopt more than 100,000 kids from South Korea, Romania, and elsewhere from 1953 to 1991. In 1992, China opened its orphanages to Americans and allowed them to take in thousands of girls abandoned because of the country’s one-child policy.But to many American evangelical Christians, these numbers were still too low to combat what they considered to be a global orphan crisis. During the ’90s, evangelicals in particular kindled a new foreign- and domestic-adoption boom, as the journalist Kathryn Joyce detailed in her 2013 book, The Child Catchers, which was critical of the trend. In the late 1990s, Joyce reported, representatives from Bethany Christian Services and other adoption agencies occasionally pressured single women to relinquish their babies, gave them false impressions about the nature of adoption, and threatened them when they changed their mind. (Bethany cannot verify the negative accounts of its practices that appear in Joyce’s book, Nathan Bult, the group’s senior vice president of public and government affairs, told me. In an interview, Joyce stood by her reporting.) A major 2007 meeting of Christian groups led to a “campaign to enroll more Christians as adoptive and foster parents,” the Los Angeles Times’ Stephanie Simon reported that year. The practice of adoption was seen as parallel to evangelical Christians’ “adoption by God” when they are born again. American Christians went on to adopt tens of thousands of children from other countries. “Early on, there was a strong belief that adoption could often be the best outcome for a child whose mom may have felt unable to parent,” Kris Faasse, who ran several of Bethany’s programs from 2000 to 2019, told me.In recent years, though, international adoption has slowed to a trickle because of changes abroad and within American adoption agencies. During the foreign-adoption boom, most of the children adopted from abroad found happy homes in the U.S. Some, however, turned out to not really be orphans, but instead children placed in orphanages temporarily by their impoverished parents. This sparked reforms and had a chilling effect on their home countries’ policies. Some of the most popular source countries for adoptable children—including Russia, Guatemala, and Ethiopia—shut down their adoption programs years ago because of corruption scandals or tensions with the U.S. government. China expanded its domestic-adoption program and reversed its one-child policy in 2015, dramatically reducing the number of girls who were relinquished for adoption.Then, last year, Bethany closed its international-adoption program, instead focusing on its in-country foster-care and adoption programs. (In other words, Ethiopians, not Americans, will adopt Ethiopian children.) The Christian Alliance for Orphans, which helped launch the American Christian adoption boom 14 years ago, now says that the priority in international adoption should be keeping a child with her family or, failing that, placing her with a stranger in her home country, and taking the child abroad only if the first two options aren’t available. “And always, always, in that order,” Jedd Medefind, the president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, told me recently.Even Joyce, the Child Catchers author and a critic of the evangelical adoption movement, says the groups have changed. About four years ago, Joyce appeared on a Christian Alliance for Orphans panel, and even then she noticed more talk of family preservation. The adoption movement had seemingly grappled with the criticism, she told me. Plus, there are now so few international adoptions that, “on a practical level, it probably just doesn’t make as much sense to have a movement that is advocating for that so hard.”As international adoptions have declined, parallel cultural changes have led to a reduction in American babies who would, in an earlier era, likely have been relinquished. The American birth rate is at an all-time low. Teens, who are less likely to be ready to raise children than older women, are getting pregnant at the lowest rates ever. Single motherhood is less taboo, so although unwed women, who were once more likely than married people to place their children for adoption, are now having 40 percent of all babies, for the most part they are choosing to raise their children themselves.Some imagine that outlawing abortion might create a rise in adoptions, but that’s unlikely. In one study, only 9 percent of the women who were denied an abortion chose adoption. Even as single parenthood has become less stigmatized, placing a child for adoption has become more so. Adoption is “an extremely rare pregnancy decision,” Gretchen Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco, told me.And in addition to rethinking international adoption, some groups are also reconsidering whether single, poor American women should be encouraged to place their babies for adoption. They seemed to have absorbed the growing concern that people of color are surrendering their children to white adoptive parents, the bad press about families who weren’t equipped to raise their newly adopted children, and the idea that “families belong together” should apply to poor people too. Over the past 20 years, “there was a shift,” Faasse, the former Bethany staffer, told me, “toward ensuring that mom was fully informed of her options ... ‘Let’s not just look at what your decision is today, but what will it look like in the future?’”Bethany is now trying to help struggling American birth mothers parent their own children, as growing numbers of single women aim to do. In 2019, the group created a special program for drug-addicted birth moms intended to help them stay with their babies. Another program connects struggling birth parents with supportive families, with the aim of preventing the removal of the birth parents’ children. “At Bethany, we want to do all we can do, first and foremost, to keep kids with their birth families when it is safe and possible to do so,” Cheri Williams, Bethany’s senior vice president of domestic programs, told me. The next best choice after that, she said, isn’t adoption by strangers, but rather by the child’s relatives.These changes won’t eliminate abuses within the adoption industry. A process that involves people surrendering their biological children is bound to be fraught. Still, a single, pregnant woman is likely to have a different experience with an organization like Bethany today than she would have decades ago. “Expanding the numbers of children who are adopted domestically, for the sake of expanding the numbers of children who are adopted domestically, is not something that we want to be doing,” Bult, at Bethany, told me. “An expectant mom should never be coerced into making an adoption plan for her child,” he added.To adoption reformers, the practice is now largely seen as a way to provide families for older, special-needs children rather than a way to provide healthy babies to people who want to parent. The result is often a difficult, expensive process for couples who want to adopt a baby or toddler. Adopting a newborn can cost $45,000 or more. “There is increasingly an advertising bid war to find birth parents,” Daniel Nehrbass, the president of Nightlight Christian Adoptions, told me. A cottage industry of adoption “facilitators” has sprung up that “may charge $25,000, which is basically an advertising fee to the family in order to find the birth mom.”Though adoption experts told me that most people who pursue infant adoption are ultimately successful, some spend their savings to do it or wait years to adopt: One survey found that 37 percent of adoptive families wait longer than a year. Others encounter scams or birth mothers who change their mind. The journalist Erika Celeste had been trying to adopt a baby girl for years when she was tricked by Gabby Watson, a notorious adoption scammer who posed as a pregnant woman and strung along hundreds of hopeful families. Nearly every adoptive parent I interviewed for this story said that the grueling process was worth it in the end—even though “the end” invariably came after an emotional spin cycle.But aspiring adoptive parents who are disappointed by a difficult system might not get the chance to see the other side of these changes—the one in which poor, single women get to parent their own babies, even if they never thought they could. Bult introduced me to Brijon Ellis, a 24-year-old in Ypsilanti, Michigan, who exemplifies this shift. When Ellis got pregnant at 15, she told me, a family member pressured her into placing her daughter into a closed adoption through Bethany. After signing the adoption paperwork, Ellis remembers crying so hard in the hospital that her face swelled.Three years later, at 18, Ellis got pregnant again, this time with twins. Ellis called Dawn, the same Bethany social worker who had arranged her daughter’s adoption, to learn about her options. But this time, whenever Dawn mentioned adoption, Ellis grew teary-eyed and equivocal. Dawn picked up on her reluctance, Ellis said.Instead, Dawn told her about Safe Families, a Bethany program that gives struggling birth parents clothes, food, child care, and other support. Ellis carried her twin boys to term, and they are now 5 years old and living with her. “As soon as I figured out and made a decision that I was going to have these boys, my mindset changed,” Ellis told me. “I became more wise. I had this wisdom just fall over me.” She seemed pleasantly surprised at her own ability to be a mother, once she finally got the chance.

This week in Say More, PS talks with Jan-Werner Mueller , a professor of politics at Princeton University and a fellow at The New Institute, Hamburg.

Project Syndicate: After Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 US presidential election, you warned that, “Just as populists tend to learn from one another’s successes, so will they heed others’ mistakes.” More recently, you noted that the most Trump-adjacent party in Germany’s federal election last month, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), suffered losses but nonetheless proved itself to be a “lasting feature on the German political landscape.” What lessons might the AfD’s performance in Germany’s election provide to the party and to far-right movements elsewhere?

Jan-Werner Mueller: Right-wing authoritarian populists in power can copy pages from one another’s repression playbooks; that is one reason why their governance styles often have distinct similarities. But that does not mean that their initial success is driven by the same factors. At the risk of sounding very pedantic, I will point out that national contexts matter a great deal on this front, as different countries obviously have their historical legacies and “political opportunity structures” (in the language of the social sciences). The AfD has rooted itself firmly in a number of regions. But, nationally, it is still far weaker than Austria’s Freedom Party or Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France.

There are, however, potential lessons in terms of strategy. The Rassemblement National has tried to distance itself from the legacy of fascism. But what Le Pen calls “de-diabolization” carries political risks, as Éric Zemmour’s recent rise as a potential rival to Le Pen shows. But the AfD’s trajectory highlights the potential advantages of Le Pen’s approach. While AfD’s increasingly pronounced racism and historical revisionism appeal to some, they severely limit the voting pool. Those who merely want to cast a protest vote may well want to avoid anything resembling neo-fascism.

Most economists and central bankers would have us believe that longterm inflation is a technocratic problem that has long been solved. Indeed, today’s millennials and Gen Z have experienced more grade inflation than price inflation, and don’t really understand what all the fuss is about. Markets, which are never terribly good predictors of major turning points in the economy, don’t seem at all worried, either, as measured by the levels of expected inflation implicit in inflation-indexed Treasury bonds. What might everyone be missing?

The problem is that controlling long-run inflation is fundamentally a political-economy challenge, not a technocratic one. There is rarely a moment where governments find it convenient to pay higher interest rates on their debts, or where stock markets clamor for tighter monetary policy to keep prices from getting too frothy. People forget that back in the 1970s, before the advent of modern independent central banks, inflation in the United States reached 13 percent. In the United Kingdom and Japan, it exceeded 20 percent.

Yes, there were some screwups, most notably when the chair of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, slavishly pump-primed money growth to facilitate Richard Nixon’s successful 1972 reelection bid. Burns’s actions, along with the soaring costs of the Vietnam war and the Great Society, helped nail the lid on the coffin of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Upward pressures on the general price level, in turn, helped spark the oil crisis which made inflation even worse.

In 1980, when I arrived as a junior economist at the Fed, very few central banks in the world had any meaningful insulation from politics. The Fed, in fact, had more independence than most, with only the German Bundesbank having more. (Only in 1997 did the Bank of England achieve the fundamental independence of being able to set interest rate policy.) When I started publishing academic research papers about the benefits of central bank independence, I had to be wary that they might be censored by the Fed’s public relations department, since back then the notion of central bank independence was too radical. Fortunately, the papers used enough mathematics to deflect unwanted attention from journalists.

In the early 1980s, independence was a relatively new thing even for the Fed. After the massive US debt buildup in World War Two, the Federal Reserve took it upon itself to cap long-term Treasury bond rates to keep government borrowing costs down. Major central banks around the world did the same thing, exercising the level of financial repression we nowadays associate with China and (to a lesser extent) India.

It was only after inflation got completely out of hand during the mid- to late-1970s that President Carter turned to Paul Volcker to crush it. Volcker met with enormous resistance. Builders and car dealers, among others, marched on the Fed; farmers brought an armada of tractors. Yet it worked: inflation came down and the politicians in Washington were thrilled, as if a pandemic had been stopped.

The Fed’s experience, along with the success of Germany and the Thatcher government in the UK, inspired many other countries to follow suit and create institutional frameworks that could insulate monetary policy from short-term political pressures. Arguably, the advent of independent central banks is the most important macroeconomic policy innovation of the postwar period.

Today, the paradigm of the independent central bank is under enormous pressure, especially from those who see the independent Fed as a place to achieve policies that cannot get through Congress. True, President Trump took to bashing the Fed along with everyone else. But in the end, he huffed and puffed and left it alone, albeit only after installing his own choice, Jay Powell, as chair in place of Janet Yellen.

The progressives are looking for much more. One idea, so-called Modern Monetary Theory would have the Fed commit to buying up government debt as needed to fund worthy new social programs and climate initiatives. That has been happening after a fashion during this period of freakishly low interest rates, but MMT would have the current quantitative-easing regime made semipermanent, even after interest rates rise. Proponents of MMT claim that governments that issue debt in their own currency need never worry about default. That may be true for the United States, though it is quite a stretch for most.

In countries whose governments borrow mostly in their own currencies, private corporations are likely to borrow in dollars — and when their governments need to bail them out in a crisis, they have to come up with dollars. Even in the United States, the ability to issue debt in dollars may preclude legal default, but it doesn’t stop inflation. To prevent inflation as an unintended consequence of MMT, a good part of those worthy social and environmental programs must be paid for with new taxes, a fact that can be glossed over so long as the policy interest rate stays around zero, but will come sharply into focus if and when rates rise.

Modern Monetary Theory is naive, but at least it is transparent. Far less so are the pressures on central banks to achieve goals far beyond their normal remit, including reducing inequality and combating climate change. Unfortunately, the central bank does not have the instruments or the expertise to take a lead role in these issues. If the Fed commits to achieving specific policy outcomes in areas where it is at best a very junior player, it risks undermining its independence in its core competency, interest rate policy and inflation. Of course, if climate change is a political priority, as it has long been in Europe, it is fine for the central bank to use its regulatory powers to pressure banks. But this is very tricky business given that the central bank has only extremely limited expertise: the Fed is not the Environmental Protection Agency.

The case for having the Fed pay more attention to inequality seems superficially stronger. After all, hasn’t its policy of setting ultra-low interest rates been a major factor behind the rise in the stock market? Well, not as much as it seems, since even the US Fed does not have the power to set global real interest rates, which have plummeted first after the financial crisis of 2007-08 and now in the pandemic. If the Fed were setting rates too low, there would already be inflation. But there isn’t.

Why is there so much pressure to have the Federal Reserve take a lead role in areas far beyond its remit? Perhaps it is a way of trying to push through policies that would not be politically sustainable in Congress, much as both the left and right want to use the Supreme Court. Unfortunately the Federal Reserve’s independence is not etched into the Constitution like the Supreme Court’s is: the Fed was created by Congress in 1913, and its role can be changed.

Can sustained inflation come back? Of course it can. It is curious that the modern era of central bank independence has coincided with a period where government debt in advanced economies reached postwar lows, having been massively devalued in real, purchasing-power terms during the high-inflation 1970s. Today, with both public and private debt levels hitting all-time highs across the advanced world, it is a very different story. Given the fragile state of the pandemic economy, massive populist pressures on deficits and very low productivity growth, it would take a bold central banker to tighten monetary policy in the face of slowly rising inflation.

It is important to emphasize that inflation seldom explodes overnight: it builds up gradually. So if progressives succeed in substantially expanding the government’s footprint, as well they might, the effects on inflation are likely to be very gradual, over years. The United States is not going to jump to hyperinflation. The problem is that once things go wrong, it is not always so easy to turn them around. Right now, even if politicians do not turn the screws, inflation could easily reach 3 to 4 percent. Unfortunately, as we learned in the 1970s, things can get a lot worse from there.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 2021 World edition.

But this requires, again, doing the work. The story, based on the best-selling memoir of my New York Times colleague, the columnist Charles Blow, is indeed “arresting.” The fraternity step-show sequence is as electrifying as the word around town has noted. But even though Blanchard infuses the music with aspects of blues and jazz in spots, overall, the music is not only unparallel to how actual people express themselves — as in all opera — but is written in a modern classical language that requires the ear to reach even further than, say, “Don Giovanni” does.

We are asked, then, to process working-class Black people expressing themselves in a musical language most of which a composer such as Paul Hindemith would have found familiar. The dissociation reminds me of a moment in “Emperor Norton,” a modern opera I saw in which a character describes the power of the railroad in musical language that mimics trains not at all and sounds more like someone saying he’s dizzy and needs to lie down. I took this as a challenge but was glad I had had a lot of coffee before the performance.

In a sense, both “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “Highway 1, U.S.A.” can be seen as cultural appropriation of music typically thought of as white — a good thing in itself.

However, the tradition being appropriated here is based on a philosophy of composition and audience reception hardly inevitable. Only in the late 19th century did the custom settle in, as ordinary among Western music patrons, that one sit politely through pieces of considerable length that didn’t occasionally, and deliberately, dazzle audiences with virtuoso feats.

As such, “Highway 1” and “Fire” are, like most modern classical music works, best appreciated via multiple viewings or listenings. If memory serves, one of the Black chorus members in Virgil Thomson’s 1928 “Four Saints in Three Acts” recalled later in life that the elliptical lyrics Gertrude Stein wrote for that opera started to make a kind of sense after you sang them night after night. But suppose you get to see the piece only once? That is the kind of challenge that pieces like these two operas present: I have already bought a recording of “Highway 1” to listen to while I cook and to allow the music, over time, to get under my skin. But I worry most people who saw this piece recently are unlikely to do that. A part of me wishes it had been easier to “get” more on first viewing.

Music professor Bright Sheng showed his class at the University of Michigan the 1965 film of William Shakespeare's Othello in which Laurence Olivier plays the Moor in dark make-up. Students objected. A colleague denounced showing the film as a "racist act." A dean declared that showing the film was contrary to the school's anti-racist commitments. Sheng was removed from the classroom until he "agreed" to step away from the class entirely. Meanwhile, he remains under threat of investigation and discipline for his offenses.
The Academic Freedom Alliance has released a public letter calling on the University of Michigan to immediately allow Professor Sheng to fully return to his teaching duties, to drop all investigations of him and threats to him arising from this incident, and to reaffirm that faculty at the university have the freedom to assign pedagogically relevant materials in their classes even when those materials are controversial or might cause offense.
As I note in the AFA letter:
Unfortunately, efforts to suppress classroom materials and censor classroom instruction because they might be divisive are all too familiar. The cornerstone of recent state legislative efforts, including those in Michigan, to outlaw "divisive concepts" like critical race theory or "racist theories" from the classroom is precisely the belief that instructors should not be allowed to expose students to materials or ideas that they might find disturbing or racist. Universities are in no position to resist such efforts if they are themselves willing to punish their professors on that self-same basis. If Dean Gier imagines that exposing students to racist materials is outside the scope of academic freedom, he is quite mistaken. If such an assertion of power by a dean were accepted, it would carve a large and perilous hole in academic freedom protections that will loom over faculty at the university for years to come. Faculty, quite rightly, will worry whether they might be accused by university administrators of having engaged in a racist act that could subject them to discipline and sanction for assigning students materials ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Mark Twain to Ibram Kendi.
UPDATE: Professor Sheng has been informed that the University of Michigan will not pursue any further investigation arising from his class assignment. It is not enough for university's to quietly drop these cases and move on as if nothing has happened. The university needs to publicly affirm that it will respect its faculty's academic freedom and take steps to insure that such groundless investigations against faculty are not undertaken in the future.

Maybe, maybe not. You and your co-workers have lots more evidence about what kind of person she is, and you might have reason to think she’s basically honest, with this one exception. Honesty has many different dimensions; a body of research in social psychology suggests that we go wrong when we imagine it to be a “global character trait.” The scrupulous accountant might be lying to his wife about his philandering; the student who cheats on exams may be utterly upfront with his friends; and so on.

And I’ll give your boss one thing. The very fact that you’re thinking about telling her to change her ways says something positive about the workplace that she has created. It may not be ruled by absolute honesty, but — in ways not to be taken for granted — it plainly isn’t ruled by fear either.

More than a year ago, I moved 300 miles from home to care for my elderly, bedbound father until his death. (My mother predeceased him.) I have handled my parents’ finances, legal and medical needs and managed their homes since my father started having health problems three years ago. The past year was an incredibly difficult time. I did not see my husband or my two college-age children for much of the last year because Covid made visits too risky. One of my sisters has not even visited my parents for 15 years. My other sister shared some of the responsibility and also came to live with him last summer while her salon was closed, but, during his six final months, she canceled visits many times and came to see him for one five-day stay. The other sister made many excuses and then stopped speaking to me. I am so angry at them for failing to visit him, in his confusion and sadness, and for leaving me alone for six months to watch him die.

Here’s my dilemma: When his lawyer asked me to check accounts for beneficiaries, I discovered that all the accounts are divided equally among the three of us — except for one, which lists only me as the primary beneficiary. This account probably amounts to one third of the estate, excluding the real estate. It’s possible he set this account up a long time ago, and because I’m the oldest, it may have just been an oversight that he didn’t change it to all three of us. If my sisters had helped out, I wouldn’t hesitate to split this account with them. But my anger screams, “Karma!” None of us are struggling financially. Am I being unethical if I don’t share the account with them? Name Withheld

What really matters here isn’t what you want or what your sisters want. It’s what your father would have wanted. If you’re sure that he would have wanted an equal division, you should aim for that. If you’re sure that he would have been happy to see you take your full allotment, I see no problem in accepting it. But if you don’t know what he would have wanted? Then you’re also entitled to keep this sum, given that you took on the onus of care. Bear in mind, however, that the red mist of anger has a peculiar way of magnifying the past while blotting out the future. You might take time to consider how what you do today will affect your sororal relationships five or 10 years from now. Finally, because this isn’t money you need, you might take the opportunity to do some philanthropy in your father’s memory. Though you might want to keep some of the money for lawyer’s fees in case your siblings sue.

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at N.Y.U. His books include “Cosmopolitanism,” “The Honor Code” and “The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.” To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com; or send mail to The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. (Include a daytime phone number.)

In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.

Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a “mitochondrial Eve”, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor, but DNA sequencing demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the Great Rift Valley in east Africa seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savanna-womb that gave life to us all.

Many of us probably still have something resembling this picture of human origins in our mind. More recent research, though, has shown it couldn’t possibly be accurate. In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannas, as previously thought. Instead, our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape of Good Hope. Some of those populations remained isolated from one another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed, so that early human populations appear to have been far more physically diverse than modern humans. If we could travel back in time, this remote past would probably strike us as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past.

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Ancestral humans were not only quite different from one another; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea. There’s only so much you can reconstruct from cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint – which is basically all we have.

What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can only still guess at. It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that modern humans first appeared in Africa. When they began expanding out of Africa into Eurasia, they encountered other populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans – less different, but still different – and these various groups interbred. Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human “us” inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us – and this would have been true at least down to about 40,000BC. In other words, there is no “original” form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making.

Over recent decades, archeological evidence has emerged that seems to completely defy our image of what scholars call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000BC). For a long time, it had been assumed that this was a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. But the discovery of evidence of “princely” burials and grand communal buildings has undermined that image.

Rich hunter-gatherer burials have been found across much of western Eurasia, from the Dordogne to the Don. They include discoveries in rock shelters and open-air settlements. Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir in northern Russia and Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian basin, and date from between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago.

What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments. In the case of Sunghir that meant many thousands of beads, laboriously worked from mammoth ivory and fox teeth. Some of the most lavish costumes are from the conjoined burials of two boys, flanked by great lances made from straightened mammoth tusks.

Of similar antiquity is a group of cave burials unearthed on the coast of Liguria, near the border between Italy and France. Complete bodies of young or adult men, including one especially lavish interment known to archaeologists as Il Principe (“the Prince”), were laid out in striking poses and suffused with jewellery. Il Principe bears that name because he’s also buried with what looks to the modern eye like regalia: a flint sceptre, elk antler batons and an ornate headdress lovingly fashioned from perforated shells and deer teeth.

Another unexpected result of recent archaeological research, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is the appearance of monumental architecture. In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus mountains, overlooking the Harran plain in south-east Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe. What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of 20 megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000BC, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries.

A megalithic enclosure at Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over 5 metres high and weighing up to 8 tonnes, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

The creation of these remarkable buildings implies strictly coordinated activity on a really large scale. Who made them? While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not. Yes, they harvested and processed wild cereals and other plants in season, but there is no compelling reason to see them as “proto-farmers”, or to suggest they had any interest in orienting their livelihoods around the domestication of crops. Indeed, there was no particular reason why they should, given the availability of fruits, berries, nuts and edible wild fauna in their vicinity.

And while Göbekli Tepe has often been presented as an anomaly, there is in fact a great deal of evidence for monumental construction of different sorts among hunter-gatherers in earlier periods, extending back into the ice age.

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago, public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kyiv. Research at the Russian site of Yudinovo suggests that “mammoth houses”, as they are often called, were not in fact dwellings at all, but monuments in the strict sense: carefully planned and constructed to commemorate the completion of a great mammoth hunt, using whatever durable parts remained once carcasses had been processed for their meat and hides. We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months. Open-air settlements like Yudinovo, Mezhirich and Kostenki, where such mammoth monuments were erected, often became central places whose inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances.

So what are we to make of all this evidence for princely burials, stone temples, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the ice age? What are they doing there, in a Palaeolithic world where – at least on some accounts – nothing much is ever supposed to have happened, and human societies can best be understood by analogy with troops of chimps or bonobos? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian golden age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandisement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution. But this doesn’t really work either.

Evidence of institutional inequality in ice age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place. After all, if any of these ice age “princes” had behaved like, say, bronze age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralised power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling “states”.

To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about “primitive” mentalities.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many in Europe and North America believed that “primitive” folk were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. They argued that anyone classified as a “primitive” or “savage” operated with a “pre-logical mentality”, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

Nowadays, no reputable scholar would make such claims: everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as “egalitarian”, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different “bands” being different from one another – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness among such people is seen as impossible.

And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in “bands” at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from “simple” to “complex” hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilisation. But they are still caught in the same evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not. Certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.

Now, admittedly, this isn’t true of all scholars. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the Brazilian Amazon, c1936. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images

One of the few mid-20th-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who argued that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of “neolithic science” as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.

In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savanna in north-west Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations.

For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition, they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose “some basic functions” of political life that “remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government”. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who “unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward”.

Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much, because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which existed at different times of year. During the rainy season, the Nambikwara occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the “nomadic adventures” of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner. Then, in the rainy season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. They cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.

How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants; and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. And in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters-gatherers to farmers and back again.

Nambikwara chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors, shifting between two different social systems with calm sophistication, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. What’s more, their flexibility and adaptability enabled them to take a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.

Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of “inequality”, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings. The adolescent boys in Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice had pronounced congenital disfigurements; other ancient burial sites have contained bodies that were unusually short or extremely tall.

It would be extremely surprising if this were a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. We can’t know much about the day-to-day lives of Palaeolithic individuals buried with rich grave goods, other than that they seem to have been as well fed and cared for as anybody else; but we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be.

A reconstruction of an Upper Paleolithic mammoth hunter settlement at Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic. Photograph: Album/Alamy

This suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems very unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarves. Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)

The corpse in its complete and articulated form – and the clothed corpse even more so – was clearly something unusual and, one would presume, inherently strange. In many such cases, an effort was made to contain the bodies of the Upper Palaeolithic dead by covering them with heavy objects: mammoth scapulae, wooden planks, stones or tight bindings. Perhaps saturating them with such objects was an extension of these concerns about strangeness, celebrating but also containing something dangerous. This too makes sense. The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.

Much here is speculation. There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. Those interred were extraordinary, “extreme” individuals. The way their corpses were decorated, displayed and buried marked them out as equally extraordinary in death. Anomalous in almost every respect, such burials can hardly be interpreted as proxies for social structure among the living. On the other hand, they clearly have something to do with all the contemporary evidence for music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture. What is one to make of them?

This is where seasonality comes into the picture. Almost all the ice age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice, where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs. In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.

Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran plain. At such times, people also gathered at the site to process massive quantities of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making these into festive foods, which presumably fuelled the work of construction. There is some evidence to suggest that each of these great structures had a relatively short lifespan, culminating in an enormous feast, after which its walls were rapidly filled in with leftovers and other refuse: hierarchies raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again. Ongoing research is likely to complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.

Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. They may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function (among other things) as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these monuments. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.

Children of the Nambikwara Sarare tribe in Mato Grosso state, Brazil. Photograph: André Penner/AP

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: they abandoned the cultivation of cereals and returned, from around 3300BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer.

All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. We’ll never know how such a decision was made, but Stonehenge itself provides something of a hint since it is built of extremely large stones, some of which (the “bluestones”) were transported from as far away as Wales, while many of the cattle and pigs consumed at Durrington Walls were laboriously herded there from other distant locations.

In other words, and remarkable as it may seem, even in the third millennium BC coordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan – as some archaeologists now argue – it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events. On the other hand, patterns of seasonal aggregation and dispersal raise another question: if there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labour, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to do so?

Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply “given”, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.

The political implications of this are important, as Lévi-Strauss noted. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.

It’s easy to see why scholars in the 1950s and 60s arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organisation – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – did not know what to do with Lévi-Strauss’s observations. They held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilisation. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. Other groups would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. In other words, they threw everything askew.

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either “simple” or “complex” types of social organisation, since what have been identified as the features of “complexity” – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognise that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgment has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.

Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last ice age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like Nambikwara. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the “princes” and “princesses” of the last ice age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairytale or costume drama. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, perhaps the question we should ask is: how did we get stuck? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

In truth, this flexibility, and potential for political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter “holiday season” in which values and forms of organisation do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive.

Among societies like the Inuit or the Kwakiutl of Canada’s Northwest Coast, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes, these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers. In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety. In the European middle ages, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest, and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at “turning the world upside down”. In carnival, women might rule over men and children be put in charge of government. Servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, “carnival kings” could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of bacchanalian chaos.

What’s important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasise about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at “turning the world upside down” would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.

Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility.

Adapted from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy, go to Guardian Bookshop

Is the world entering a new cold war? Our answer is yes and no. Yes if we mean a protracted international rivalry, for cold wars in this sense are as old as history itself. Some became hot, some didn’t: no law guarantees either outcome. No if we mean the Cold War, which we capitalize because it originated and popularized the term. That struggle took place at a particular time (from 1945–47 to 1989–91), among particular adversaries (the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies), and over particular issues (post–World War II power balances, ideological clashes, arms races). None of those issues looms as large now, and where parallels do exist—growing bipolarity, intensifying polemics, sharpening distinctions between autocracies and democracies—the context is quite different.

It’s no longer debatable that the United States and China, tacit allies during the last half of the last Cold War, are entering their own new cold war: Chinese President Xi Jinping has declared it, and a rare bipartisan consensus in the United States has accepted the challenge. What, then, might previous contests—the one and only Cold War and the many earlier cold wars—suggest about this one?

The future is, of course, less knowable than the past, but it’s not in all respects unknowable. Time will continue to pass, the law of gravity will still apply, and none of us will outlive our physiological term limits. Are similarly reliable knowns shaping the emerging cold war? If so, what unknowns lurk within them? Thucydides had such predictabilities and surprises in mind when he cautioned, 24 centuries ago, that the future would resemble the past but not in all respects reflect it—even as he also argued that the greatest single war of his time revealed timeless truths about all wars to come.

Our purpose here, then, is to show how the greatest unfought war of our time—the Soviet-American Cold War—as well as other prior struggles, might expand experience and enhance resilience in a Sino-American rivalry whose future, hot or cold, remains unclear. That history provides a framework within which to survive uncertainty, and possibly even thrive within it, whatever the rest of the twenty-first century throws our way.

The benefits of boundaries

Our first known is geography, which continental drift will in time alter, but not in our time. China will remain chiefly a land power, beset by an ancient dilemma. If, in search of strategic depth, it tries to expand its perimeters, it is likely to overstretch its capabilities and provoke resistance from anxious neighbors. If, to regain solvency, it contracts its perimeters, it risks inviting in enemies. Even behind great walls, uneasy lie the heads of those whose boundaries remain unfixed.

The United States, in contrast, benefits from boundaries that geography has determined. That’s why the United Kingdom, after 1815, chose not to contest its offspring’s primacy in North America: sustaining armies across 3,000 miles of ocean would have been too costly even for the world’s greatest naval power. Geography gave the Americans hybrid hegemony: control of a continent and unimpeded access to two vast oceans, which they quickly connected with a transcontinental railroad. That allowed them to develop the military-industrial means with which to rescue Europeans in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War from the attempted continental consolidations they confronted.

Why, though, from so safe a perch, did the Americans undertake such daunting commitments? Perhaps they looked in the mirror and feared what they saw: their own example of a country dominating a continent and its oceanic approaches. The trigger warning was Russia’s completion of its trans-Siberian railroad in 1904, a slapdash project soon overtaken by war and revolution—but not before eliciting the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder’s portentous warning that “heartland” control of Eurasian “rimlands” could empower new and globally ambitious forms of hybrid hegemony. President Woodrow Wilson had that prospect in mind when he declared war on imperial Germany in 1917, and President Franklin Roosevelt took the argument one step further in 1940–41, insisting—correctly, historians have now confirmed—that Adolf Hitler’s ultimate target was the United States itself. So when the American diplomat George Kennan, in 1947, called for “containing” an emboldened World War II ally, the Soviet Union, he had long legacies on which to draw.

Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) evokes similar concerns. The “belt” is to be a network of rail and road corridors across Eurasia. The “road” will be sea routes in the Indo-Pacific and, if global warming permits, also in the Arctic, sustained by bases and ports in states made friendly by the BRI's “benefits.” Nothing Germans or Russians ever attempted combined such ambition with such specificity: China seeks hybrid hegemony on an unprecedented scale. Which brings us to our first unknown: What might that imply for Eurasia and the world beyond?

Xi’s world order

There’s a remarkable record, over the past three centuries, of offshore balancers thwarting aspirants to onshore domination: first Great Britain against France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then an Anglo-American coalition against Germany twice during the first half of the twentieth century, followed by a U.S.-led coalition against the Soviet Union in the second half. It’s too easy to claim that maritime states project power without generating resistance, for if that were the case, colonialism would still thrive. But the relationship between geography and governance is clear enough to be our second known.

Continents—North America excepted—tend to nurture authoritarians: where geography fails to fix boundaries, harsh hands claim the right and duty to do so, whether as protection from external dangers or to preserve internal order. Liberty, in these situations, is decreed from the top down, not evolved from the bottom up. But that holds such regimes responsible for what happens. They can’t, as democracies regularly do, spread the blame. Autocracies that fall short—such as the Soviet Union—risk hollowing themselves out from within.

China’s post–Cold War leaders, having compulsively studied the Soviet example, sought to avoid repeating it by transforming Marxism into consumer capitalism without at the same time allowing democracy. They thereby flipped what they saw as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s greatest error: permitting democracy without ensuring prosperity. This latest “rectification of names”—the ancient Chinese procedure of conforming names to shifting realities—seemed until recently to have succeeded. The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s post-Mao pro-market reforms solidified support for the regime and made China a model for much of the rest of the world. Xi, on taking power, was widely expected to continue along that path.

The study of history is the best compass we have in navigating the future.

But he hasn’t. Instead, Xi is cutting off access to the outside world, defying international legal norms, and encouraging “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, none of which seems calculated to win or retain allies. At home, he is enforcing orthodoxy, whitewashing history, and oppressing minorities in ways defunct Russian and Chinese emperors might have applauded. Most significant, he has sought to secure these reversals by abolishing his own term limits.

Hence our second unknown: Why is Xi undoing the reforms, while abandoning the diplomatic subtlety, that allowed China’s rise in the first place? Perhaps he fears the risks of his own retirement, even though these mount with each rival he imprisons or purges. Perhaps he has realized that innovation requires but may also inspire spontaneity within his country. Perhaps he worries that increasingly hostile international rivals won’t allow him unlimited time to achieve his aims. Perhaps he sees the prevailing concept of world order itself as at odds with a mandate from Heaven, Marx, or Mao.

Or it could be that Xi envisions a world order with authoritarianism at its core and with China at its center. Technology, he may expect, will make human consciousness as transparent as satellites made the earth’s surface during the Cold War. China, he may assume, will never alienate its foreign friends. Expectations within China, he may suppose, will never find reasons not to rise. And Xi, as he ages, will gain in the wisdom, energy, and attentiveness to detail that only he, as supreme leader, can trust himself to provide.

But if Xi really believes all of this, then he’s already losing sight of the gaps between promises and performance that have long been Catch-22s for authoritarian regimes. For if, like Gorbachev’s predecessors did, you ignore such fissures, they’ll only worsen. But if, like Gorbachev himself, you acknowledge them, you’ll undermine the claim to infallibility on which legitimacy in an autocracy must rest. That is why graceful exits by authoritarians have been so rare.

the roots of resilience

Democracy in America has its own gaps between promises and performance, so much so that it seems at times to suffer from Brezhnev-like paralysis. The United States differs from China, though, in that distrust of authority is constitutionally mandated. The separation of powers secures a center of gravity to which the nation can return after whatever bursts of activity crises may have demanded. The result is what evolutionary biologists call “punctuated equilibrium”: a resilience rooted in rapid recovery from unforeseen circumstances. China has it the other way around. Respect for authority permeates its culture, but stability is punctuated by protracted upheavals when authority fails. Recovery, in the absence of gravity, can require decades. Autocracies often win sprints, but smart investors put their marathon money on democracies. Our third known, then, is sharply different roots of resilience.

The pattern emerges clearly from the two costliest civil wars of the nineteenth century. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 took some 20 million Chinese lives, about five percent of the population. The American Civil War of 1861–65 killed 750,000 combatants, 2.5 percent of a much less crowded country. And yet by the testimony of its current leaders, China after the Taiping Rebellion underwent decades of turmoil from which it emerged only with Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949. The United States, by that same account, recovered quickly enough to join the European predators victimizing China at the end of the nineteenth century and has continued doing so ever since. Leave aside issues of accuracy in this view of history. Our point is that Xi’s growing reliance on this narrative and the nationalism it stokes implies an inflammability in Chinese culture that is currently useful to the regime—but that might not be easily extinguished.

Autocracies often win sprints, but smart investors put their marathon money on democracies.

Hence our third unknown: Can Xi turn internal outrage on and off, as Mao did repeatedly during his years in power? Or is Xi locking himself into the same dependence on external hostility without which Joseph Stalin, as Kennan put it in 1946, did not know how to rule? Because nothing could reassure such a regime, Kennan insisted, only cumulative frustrations would convince Stalin or, more likely, his successors that it was in their best interests to alter their system’s worst aspects. That strategy depended, however, on neither side setting deadlines: Kennan carefully pointed out that it would never have worked with Hitler, who had a fixed timetable, dictated by his own mortality, for achieving his aims.

Mao, craftily, gave his regime 100 years to recover Taiwan. Xi has ruled out passing that problem from generation to generation, although he has not yet set a date for resolving it. Nonetheless, his increasingly aggressive rhetoric adds to the risk that the Taiwan issue could cause a Sino-American cold war to become hot, for the United States has deliberately left its own Taiwan policy unclear. All of which eerily evokes how Europe went to war in 1914: an ambiguity of great-power commitments combined with the absence of an escalation off switch.

ANOTHER LONG PEACE?

Except that we have, in the Cold War, an intervening known to draw on: how that conflict transformed itself into a “long peace.” The first half of the twentieth century offered no support for the idea that great-power rivalries could be resolved peacefully. “A future war with Soviet Russia,” the American diplomat Joseph Grew predicted in 1945, “is as certain as anything in the world can be certain.” What allowed the Cold War superpowers to escape that prospect, and how relevant are those circumstances today?

One answer is that history itself during those years became prophecy. Given what most leaders had experienced in a second world war, few anywhere were eager to risk a third. It helped also that those in Washington and Moscow, if for different reasons, saw time as an ally: the Americans because the strategy of containment relied on time to thwart Soviet ambitions, Stalin because he expected time to produce fratricidal capitalist wars that would ensure proletarian revolutionary triumphs. Once Stalin’s successors realized the extent of his miscalculations, it was too late to reverse their effects. The Soviet Union spent the rest of the Cold War failing to catch up.

But what if determinations to avoid the next war fade with the memories of the last one? That’s how some historians have explained World War I: a century had passed without a European great war. Does it matter that three-quarters of a century now separate American and Chinese leaders from the great wars of their predecessors? Americans have had some combat experience in the “limited” and “low-intensity” conflicts in which they have been involved—with decidedly mixed results—but the Chinese, except for their brief invasion of Vietnam in 1979, haven’t fought any significant wars for more than half a century. That may be why Xi, with his “heads bashed bloody” rhetoric, seems to celebrate bellicosity: he may not know what its costs can be.

Taiwanese military exercises near Pingtung, Taiwan, April 2010 Nicky Loh / Reuters

A second way in which historians have explained the “long peace” is that nuclear weapons suppressed optimism about how wars might end. There’s no way to know for sure what deterrence in the Cold War deterred: that’s a history that didn’t happen. But this in itself suggests a balanced lack of resolve, for whatever Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy may have said publicly, neither wanted to die for Berlin. Instead, they accepted a walled city inside a partitioned country in the middle of a divided continent. No grand design could have produced such an oddity, and yet it held up until the Cold War evolved its own peaceful, if equally unexpected, end. None of this could have happened without nuclear capabilities, for only they could put lives on the line simultaneously in Washington and Moscow.

So what about Washington and Beijing? Even with recent enhancements, the Chinese deploy less than ten percent of the number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia retain, and that number is only 15 percent of what the two superpowers had at the height of the Cold War. Does this matter? We doubt it, given what Khrushchev achieved in 1962: despite a nine-to-one disadvantage in nuclear weapons, he deterred the post–Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that Kennedy had been planning. The United States has lived ever since with its own adjacent anomaly: a communist island in the middle of its self-proclaimed Caribbean sea of influence.

It’s even less plausible today that the United States would use nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan, for that island is more important to Beijing than Cuba or Berlin ever was to Moscow. Yet that implausibility could lead Xi to believe that he can invade Taiwan without risking a U.S. nuclear response. China’s growing cyber- and antisatellite capabilities may also encourage him, for they bring back possibilities of surprise attacks that the Cold War’s reconnaissance revolution seemed, for decades, to have diminished.

What would Xi do with Taiwan if he captured it?

But then what? What would Xi do with Taiwan if he captured it? The island is not Hong Kong, an easily controlled city. Nor is it Crimea, with a largely acquiescent population. Nor are other big islands in the region—Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand—teetering dominoes. Nor would the United States, with its unmatched power-projection capabilities, be likely to “sit idly by,” as the Chinese might put it: “ambiguity” means keeping options open, not ruling out any response at all.

One such response might be to exploit the overstretch that comes from China’s forcefully expanding its perimeters, the self-created problem that once plagued Moscow. Suppressing the “Prague Spring” was simple enough for the Soviet Union in 1968, until military morale plummeted when the Czechs made it clear to their occupiers that they didn’t feel “liberated.” The Brezhnev Doctrine—the commitment to act similarly wherever else “socialism” might be at risk—alarmed more than it reassured the leaders of other such states, notably Mao, who secretly began planning his 1971 “opening” to Washington. By the time the Soviet Union invoked the doctrine again, in Afghanistan in 1979, it had few allies left anywhere and none on whose reliability it could count.

Xi’s threats to Taiwan could have a similar effect in states surrounding China, which may in turn look for their own “openings” to Washington. Extravagant Chinese claims in the South China Sea have already increased anxieties in that region: witness Australia’s unexpected alignment with the Americans and the British on nuclear submarines, as well as India’s expanded cooperation with Indo-Pacific allies. Central Asians may not indefinitely ignore repressions of Tibetans and Uyghurs. Debt traps, environmental degradation, and onerous repayment terms are souring recipients on the BRI’s benefits. And Russia, the original source of early-twentieth-century concerns about the “heartland,” could now find itself surrounded by Chinese “rimlands” in Asia, eastern and southeastern Europe, and even the Arctic.

All of which raises the possibility that American unipolarity may end not with a precarious Sino-American bipolarity but with a multipolarity that restrains Beijing by making assertiveness self-defeating. Metternich and Bismarck would have approved. So would a crafty American Cold Warrior who, following their example, hoped to deploy a similar strategy. “I think it will be a safer world and a better world,” President Richard Nixon told Time magazine in 1972, “if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other.”

varieties of surprise

Our final known is the inescapability of surprises. International systems are anarchic, theorists tell us, in that no component within them is fully in control. Strategy may reduce uncertainty but will never eliminate it: humans are fallible, and artificial intelligences will surely be also. There are, though, patterns of competition across time and space. It may be possible to derive from these—especially from the Soviet-American Cold War—categories of surprises likely to occur in the Sino-American cold war.

Existential surprises are shifts in the arenas within which great powers compete, for which neither is responsible but that endanger them both. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had this in mind when he surprised Gorbachev at their first meeting, in 1985, with the claim that a Martian invasion would force the United States and the Soviet Union to settle their differences overnight: Weren’t nuclear weapons at least as dangerous? Martians haven’t yet arrived, but we do face two new existential threats: the accelerating rate of climate change and the almost overnight outbreak, in 2020, of a global pandemic.

Neither is unprecedented. Climates have always fluctuated, which is why it used to be possible to walk from Siberia to Alaska. Thucydides described the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC. What is new is the extent to which globalization has accelerated these phenomena, raising the question of whether geopolitical rivals can collaboratively address the deep histories that are increasingly altering their own.

International systems are anarchic and no component within them is fully in control.

The Soviet-American Cold War showed that cooperation to avoid catastrophe need not be explicit: no treaty specified that nuclear weapons, after 1945, would not again be used in war. Instead, existential dangers produced tacit cooperation where negotiated formalities almost surely would have failed. Climate change may present similar opportunities in the Sino-American cold war, even if COVID-19 has so far spurred only Chinese abrasiveness. The point should be to keep landing sites for Martian equivalents open—not to welcome existential problems but to explore whether collaborative outcomes can result from them.

Intentional surprises originate in efforts by single competitors to startle, confuse, or dismay their adversaries. Surprise attacks, as on Pearl Harbor, fit this category, and intelligence failures can never be ruled out. The Cold War’s greatest surprises, however, arose from reversals of polarity, of which Mao was a master. When he leaned east, in 1949–50, he blindsided the Truman administration and opened the way for the Korean War and a communist offensive in Asia. When he leaned west, in 1970–71, he made the United States an ally while rendering the Soviet Union vulnerable on two fronts, a disadvantage from which it never recovered.

That’s why an American “opening” to Moscow might someday turn it against Beijing. The original Sino-Soviet split took two decades to develop, with the Eisenhower administration seeking to speed the process by driving Mao into a mutually repulsive relationship with Khrushchev. Xi’s BRI may be accomplishing this on its own with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has long complained about U.S. “containment” of Russia. Chinese “containment,” from the Kremlin’s perspective, may ultimately become the greater danger.

A wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, May 2015 Sputnik Photo Agency / Reuters

One other form of intentional surprise comes from supposed subordinates who turn out not to be. Neither Washington nor Moscow wanted the offshore island crises of 1954–55 and 1958: Chiang Kai-shek, in Taipei, and Mao, in Beijing, made them happen. The communist leader Walter Ulbricht’s warnings of an imminent East German collapse forced Khrushchev to provoke the Berlin crises of 1958–59 and 1961. Smaller powers pursuing their own agendas derailed Soviet-American détente in the 1970s: Egypt by attacking Israel in 1973; Cuba by intervening in Africa in 1975–77; and Hafizullah Amin in Afghanistan, whose reported contacts with U.S. officials triggered a self-defeating Soviet invasion in 1979. None of this, though, was unprecedented: Thucydides showed Corinth and Corcyra doing something similar to the Spartans and the Athenians 24 centuries earlier.

The potential for tails wagging dogs in the Sino-American cold war is already evident: rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait have resulted as much from changes in Taiwanese politics in recent years as from deliberate decisions in Washington or Beijing. And while China is trying, through the BRI, to create a system that maximizes its power, it may end up building, through its relationships with insecure and unstable regimes, just the sort of inverse dependency that vexed the Cold War superpowers. That can be a formula for volatility: history is full of instances in which local actors embroiled larger powers.

Finally, there are systemic surprises. The Cold War ended in a way no one at the time had expected: with the sudden collapse of a superpower and its accompanying ideology. Two visionaries who had foreseen such a possibility, however, were that doctrine’s mid-nineteenth-century founders, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Capitalism, they were sure, would eventually destroy itself by creating too great a gap between the means of production and the benefits it distributed. Kennan, a century later, turned Marx and Engels upside down. The gap between productive means and distributed benefits would instead, he insisted in 1946–47, bring about the collapse of communism within the Soviet Union and its post–World War II satellite states. Kennan didn’t welcome what finally happened in 1990–91: the implosion of the Soviet Union itself was too great a disruption in the balance of power even for him. But he did understand how stresses within societies can themselves greatly surprise.

No one can predict when some new geopolitical earthquake might occur: geological earthquakes are difficult enough to anticipate. Geologists do know, however, where to expect them: that is why California gets earthquake warnings but Connecticut does not. Does the very brittleness of authoritarian regimes—their strange belief in the immortality of top-down command structures—leave them similarly vulnerable? Or does the entrenched recalcitrance of democracies—their resistance to being commanded—pose even greater dangers to them? Only time will tell, probably sooner than we expect.

strategy and uncertainty

This aggregation of knowns, unknowns, and surprises leaves us with the historical equivalent of a three-body problem: given the coexistence of predictability and its opposite, we’ll know the outcome only when we’ve seen it. Strategy, however, doesn’t have that luxury. Its success requires living with uncertainties, of which the future will not be in short supply. The strategy of containment, although imperfect in its accomplishments and at times tragic in its failures, did successfully manage its own contradictions while buying the time necessary for those within the Soviet system to become obvious, even, in the end, to its own leaders.

It did this chiefly by combining simplicity of conception with flexibility in application, for even the clearest of destinations may not always, or even often, reveal the paths by which to reach them. It may be necessary, for example, to cooperate with Stalin to defeat Hitler, or with Tito to resist Stalin, or with Mao to confound Brezhnev: not all evils are equally so at all times. Nor are arms buildups always bad or negotiations always good: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan employed both to begin transformations of the adversaries confronting them. Kennan distrusted such elasticities in the pursuit of containment, but it was precisely this maneuverability that ensured the strategy’s safe arrival at its intended destination.

A second way in which containment succeeded was by treating spontaneity as a strength. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was as much a European as an American creation, in striking contrast to its Moscow-dominated rival, the Warsaw Pact. Nor, outside of Europe, did the United States insist on ideological uniformity among its friends. The objective instead was to make diversity a weapon against a rival bent on suppressing it: to use the resistance to uniformity embedded within distinctive histories, cultures, and faiths as a barrier against the homogenizing ambitions of would-be hegemons.

A third asset, although it didn’t always seem so at the time, was the American election cycle. Quadrennial stress tests for containment unnerved its architects, upset sympathetic pundits, and alarmed overseas allies, but they were at least safeguards against ossification. No long-term strategy can succeed if it allows aspirations to outrun its capabilities or capabilities to corrupt its aspirations. How, though, do strategists develop the self-awareness—and the self-confidence—to acknowledge that their strategies are not working? Elections are, for sure, blunt instruments. They are better, though, than having no means of reconsideration apart from the demise of aged autocrats, the timing of whose departure from this world is not given to their followers to know.

There are thus, in the United States, no exclusively foreign affairs. Because Americans proclaim their ideals so explicitly, they illustrate departures from them all the more vividly. Domestic failures such as economic inequality, racial segregation, sexual discrimination, environmental degradation, and top-level extraconstitutional excesses all go on display for the world to see. As Kennan pointed out in the most quoted article ever published in these pages, “Exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country” can “have an exhilarating effect” on external enemies. To defend its external interests, then, “the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

Easily said, not easily done, and therein lies the ultimate test for the United States in its contest with China: the patient management of internal threats to our democracy, as well as tolerance of the moral and geopolitical contradictions through which global diversity can most feasibly be defended. The study of history is the best compass we have in navigating this future—even if it turns out to be not what we’d expected and not in most respects what we’ve experienced before.

There was a feeling of inevitability surrounding reports that Ali Harbi Ali, the man alleged to have murdered Sir David Amess MP, was referred to the Prevent programme some years ago.
Prevent is a much-mocked government counter-terrorism strategy, which looks out for warning signs that someone is at risk of being radicalised into some form of violent extremism. About 6,000 people are referred to it each year. 
Every high-profile murder or act of terrorism appears to be followed by a story like this. The Manchester Arena suicide bomber was known to the security services. Lee Rigby’s killers were known to the security services. At least one of the London Bridge attackers was known to the security services. It’s not just in cases of terrorism: the murderer of Alice Gross had a criminal record for sexual assault. Sarah Everard’s killer had a history of indecent exposure.

There is a further sense of inevitability over the fact that, three days after Sir David’s murder, Priti Patel, the home secretary, declared that Prevent is “under review” to ensure that it is “fit for purpose”. This is, in fact, an ongoing review that was launched in 2019 and due to report in December, rather than a response to the atrocity. Yet the announcement was clearly intended to suggest that the murder represented a failure on the part of the surveillance and deradicalisation system.
But is it? The sense of inevitability is real: these stories crop up a lot. But the truth is they will continue to keep cropping up, almost every time there is a terror attack, and almost no matter what we do with Prevent or whatever its successor is. Prevent may be failing — though I’ll happily defer judgment until the publication of the review — but even if it were successful, when terrorist attacks happen, it is likely that the perpetrators would be on its books, or known to the security services.
And more than that: as callous as it sounds, that may be for the best. To give a sense of why that is, it’s helpful to look at another system for spotting future risks: cancer screening.
You screen for prostate cancer with a blood test, which looks for levels of something called “prostate-specific antigen”, or PSA. If you’re between 50 and 69 years old, the “normal” level of PSA is given as below three nanograms per millilitre (ng/ml). If your test comes back higher than that, you are flagged as at risk of having prostate cancer.
But according to the NHS, about 15% of men who do have prostate cancer actually have “normal” levels of PSA: that is, below 3ng/ml. If you run a screening test like this, you’ll falsely reassure about one cancer sufferer in six that they are cancer-free.
There’s a straightforward solution to that, of course. Instead of putting your cut-off at 3ng/ml, you could make it 2.5ng/ml. Then you’d miss fewer cancers.
You can probably guess the outcome, though. If you move the cut-off lower, you’ll miss fewer real cancers, but you’ll scare more men unnecessarily. If you move the cut-off higher, you’ll get fewer false positives — you won’t tell as many men that they have cancer when they don’t — but you’ll get more false negatives: you’ll miss more real cancers.
You might think that it’s a pretty straightforward decision. Telling people that they have cancer when they don’t is inconvenient and alarming; telling people that they don’t have cancer when they do might kill them. So you err on the side of caution.
But that’s not how it works. False positives on cancer screenings can literally kill. People can end up having unnecessary surgeries, X-rays, chemo or radiotherapy. Complications are sufficiently common that the NHS says that the benefits of prostate cancer screening do not outweigh the risks.
The cost of getting it wrong is real with terrorism, too. The process is somewhat different, though. When it comes to the risk of someone being radicalised, unlike a blood test, there isn’t a number that you can read off. That doesn’t mean there can’t be one: it could be that the people who are passed on to Prevent are given a quasi-objective score. We do exactly that for, say, suicidality risk or autism or happiness, or any one of a thousand psychological functions. You tick boxes on a questionnaire about someone’s isolation, their anger, their ideologies, and if the score on the questionnaire adds up to more than 40 or whatever you declare them a terrorism risk. That is precisely what goes on, in a less obvious and open way, with things like AI parole decisions. 
Suggested readingThe making of Essex ManBy Simon Heffer
But as it happens, there isn’t an explicit number. The Prevent guidance says: “There is no fixed profile of a terrorist, so there is no defined threshold to determine whether an individual is at risk of being drawn into terrorism.” So there’s no nice straightforward “Terrorism risk: 13.6” readout.
Nonetheless, the same process is going on. A person comes into contact with the counterterrorism services. Of the 6,000 or so who are referred to Prevent each year, about 500 or so are deemed “vulnerable” to radicalisation and are passed on to a subgroup called “Channel”. 
Since referral to Channel is not based on an objective score, it’s based on a subjective feeling (or “expert judgment”): people will be flagged up if the panel judging them feels sufficiently strongly that they’re a risk. They might not explicitly say “Terrorism risk: 13.6”, but still, there is a threshold of risk, over which someone is considered a threat.
And just like the PSA levels in the blood, that assessment will be imperfect. If you read some young man saying something disturbing online, is it harmless anger and braggadocio, or are they a terrorist? You can raise your implicit threshold and avoid harassing innocent people, at the cost of an increased risk of missing a genuine terrorist, or you can lower it and correctly identify more terrorists, but at the cost of labelling a lot of harmless people as potential terrorists.
It might seem, like the cancer test in reverse, that there’s an asymmetry here: a false positive annoys people; a false negative kills people. But also like the cancer test, it’s not as simple as that. The false positives will be a lot more common than the false negatives — simply put, there are more mouthy non-terrorists than actual terrorists in the world. There were 6,000 people referred to Prevent every year, and 500 or so were judged to be of sufficiently high risk to be passed on to Channel. But there have been only four actual terror attacks in the last two years. 
If you lower your threshold, raise the alarm on more borderline cases, then you will waste more police time, put more innocent people under needless scrutiny and stigmatise more communities. (It seems inevitable that a lowered threshold will mean more young Muslim men, in particular, being picked up by the security services.) That may be a price worth paying — but, let’s be clear, it will be a price that you pay. If you take in everybody suspicious for questioning — every misogynist loser on incel subreddits, every angry racist or radical Islamist on dark-web chatrooms — you may prevent one or two more attacks, but you will undoubtedly fill up your jails and enrage the populace.
Suggested readingWe are in danger of losing our humanityBy Miriam Cates
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. Moving your threshold is zero-sum. But you can change your test: if instead of testing for PSA you looked for some other marker, you might be able to tell whether someone had cancer with more accuracy. In the case of counter-terrorism, you could do things like increasing police funding for surveillance, rather than simply being more strict about your criteria — although of course that would mean less money elsewhere.
An alternative suggestion might be to abandon “expert judgment” and introduce something like I talked about above, an explicit algorithm: human judgment is famously terrible at predicting complex things like the likelihood of a criminal to reoffend, and algorithms consistently outperform us, as the psychologist Paul Meehl demonstrated way back in 1954. They beat humans at predicting the price of wine, how long a cancer patient will live, who will win a football match, how likely a business is to succeed and dozens of other subjects. It is likely that some fairly simple algorithm could do significantly better than the best experts at predicting who is a terror risk, as well.
But it could only ever be a partial improvement. Humans are stubbornly hard to predict. Part of the reason why algorithms can outperform human judgment in those fields is because human judgment is consistently terrible: we are very often wrong about who will reoffend, who will live and die, who will win a football match. It is not that algorithmic prediction is great; the future is still hard to know. However good we make our systems for detecting terrorists, they will never be very good. So terrible things will always happen, and when they do, we will assume our systems are too lax and need to be tightened.
It is tempting to think like that in the wake of an atrocity such as David Amess’s murder: to think that we ought to lower our thresholds of what counts as a risk. Perhaps it’s even true. But just as it is an unavoidable fact of reality that reducing false alarms means missing more real ones, a world in which Sir David’s murderer was caught ahead of time could be grimly authoritarian.

Nothing about The Body Keeps the Score screams “best seller.” Written by the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, the book is a graphic account of his decades-long career treating survivors of traumatic experiences such as rape, incest, and war. Page after page, readers are asked to wrestle with van der Kolk’s theory that trauma can sever the connection between the mind, which wants to forget what happened, and the body, which can’t. The book isn’t academic, exactly, but it’s dense and difficult material written with psychology students in mind. Here’s one line: “The elementary self system in the brainstem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal.”And yet, since its debut in 2014, The Body Keeps the Score has spent 150 weeks—nearly three years—and counting at the top of the New York Times best-seller list and has sold almost 2 million copies globally. During the pandemic, it seems more in demand than ever: This year, van der Kolk has appeared as a guest on The Ezra Klein Show, been profiled in The Guardian, and watched his book become a meme. (“Kindly asking my body to stop keeping the score,” goes one viral tweet.)After all the anxiety and social isolation of pandemic life, and now the lingering uncertainty about what comes next, many people are turning to a growing genre of trauma self-help books for relief. The Body Keeps the Score is now joined on the best-seller list by What Happened to You?, a compilation of letters and dialogue between Oprah Winfrey and the psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry. Barnes & Noble, meanwhile, sells about 1,350 other books under the “Anxiety, Stress & Trauma-Related Disorders” tab, including clinical workbooks and mainstream releases. Sometimes, new installments in the genre seem to position themselves as a cheat code to a better life: Fill out the test at the back of the book; try these exercises; narrativize your life. One blurb I read, on the cover of James S. Gordon’s Transforming Trauma, basically said as much: “This book could give you back your life in unimaginable ways, whether you think of yourself as a trauma victim or not.”“You can kind of understand why the sales of these books are going up in this stressful, pressurized situation,” Edgar Jones, a historian of medicine and psychiatry at King’s College London, told me. In a moment of personal and collective crisis, the siren song of a self-help book is strong.There’s just one problem. In spite of their popularity, trauma books may not be all that helpful for the type of suffering that most people are experiencing right now. “The word trauma is very popular these days,” van der Kolk told me. It’s also uselessly vague—a swirl of psychiatric diagnoses, folk wisdom, and popular misconceptions. The pandemic has led to very real suffering, but while these books have one idea of trauma in mind, most readers may have another.[What happens when Americans can finally exhale]The Greek term for “wound,” trauma was initially used to refer to physical wounds. Although today’s best sellers seem to provide all the answers, psychiatrists began to widely embrace the notion of purely psychological trauma only around World War I. But the disorder has evolved since the days of shell shock. The current diagnosis of PTSD dates back to only 1980, applied to the flashbacks experienced by some soldiers who had served in the Vietnam War.In the decades since, trauma has come to signify a range of injuries so broad that the term verges on meaningless. The American Psychological Association, for example, describes trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster”—like, but not only. “Like weeds that spread through a space and invasively take over semantic territory from others,” trauma can be used to describe any misfortune, big or small, Nicholas Haslam, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, told me. That concept creep is evident on TikTok, where creators use “trauma response” to explain away all kinds of behavior, including doomscrolling and perfectionist tendencies.In the pandemic, trauma has become a catchall in the U.S. for many varied, and even competing, realities. Some people certainly are experiencing PTSD, especially health-care workers who have dealt with the carnage firsthand. For most people, however, a better description of the past 19 months might be “chronic stressor,” or even “extreme adversity,” experts told me—in other words, a source of immense distress, but not necessarily with severe long-term consequences. The whole of human suffering is a lot of ground for one word to cover, and for trauma best sellers to heal.[Read: On top of everything else, the pandemic messed with our morals]Today, a comprehensive shelf of trauma self-help includes the biophysicist Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger, which argues that a lack of trauma in wild animals can offer insight into how humans might overcome their seemingly unique susceptibility to it; The Deepest Well, by the surgeon general of California, Nadine Burke Harris, who uses personal experience to draw a direct line from childhood stress to a host of physical and social ills; and It Didn’t Start With You, in which the author, Mark Wolynn, makes the controversial claim that trauma can be inherited from distant ancestors.These books tend to follow a reliable arc, using the stories of trauma survivors to advance a central thesis, and then concluding with a few chapters of actionable advice for individual readers. In The Body Keeps the Score, van der Kolk writes about people he refers to as Sherry, a woman who was neglected in childhood and kidnapped and repeatedly raped for five days in college, and Tom, a heavy drinker whose goal was to become “a living memorial” to his friends who had died in Vietnam. For patients like these, van der Kolk eventually turned to yoga, massage therapy, and an intervention called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, which specifically treats the traumatic memories that pull people with PTSD back into the past.Those experiences are remarkably different from what most Americans have endured in the pandemic. Although almost everyone has struggled with the risk of contracting a deadly virus and the resulting isolation and potential loneliness, a remote worker’s depressive episode, or an unemployed restaurant worker’s inability to pay their bills, has little in common with stories like Tom’s and Sherry’s. They are no less important—no less deserving of attention—but we need better words to describe them, and other remedies to treat them.Even van der Kolk himself is wary of some of the ways in which trauma is used today. When I asked him whether he thinks The Body Keeps the Score is useful for all the readers turning to it during the pandemic, he objected to the premise of my question: The readers he hears from most, he said, are those who grew up in abusive households, not those who feel traumatized by COVID-19. “When people say the pandemic has been a collective trauma,” van der Kolk said, “I say, absolutely not.”[Read: When PTSD is contagious]Still, the trauma books keep selling. Some lessons they contain are universally applicable, if a little trite. In What Happened to You? Oprah and her co-author dedicate a chapter to their spin on the idea of “post-traumatic growth,” a concept popular again in the pandemic, as people search for a silver lining to what they’ve been through. But sometimes, there is no wisdom to glean or personal growth to uncover—what happened happened, and people move forward anyway. Other recommendations, as with van der Kolk’s emphasis on EMDR, are specific to people with more typical symptoms of PTSD. Most people just don’t need those kinds of interventions, says George Bonanno, a clinical-psychology professor at Columbia University and the author of The End of Trauma. In the aftermath of disasters such as 9/11, Bonanno has found remarkable resilience, despite the odds. Yet people “don’t seem to want to let go of the idea that everybody’s traumatized,” he told me.Surely some people find solace in these books, whatever their reason for reading. And not all trauma books have these pitfalls. In My Grandmother’s Hands, the therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the physical and emotional toll of racism and white supremacy, and his advice charts a different course. When people feel they have experienced a collective trauma, Menakem writes, “our approaches for mending must be collective and communal as well.” When it comes to the challenges Americans now face—as varied as responding to the pandemic and acting on climate change—that’s advice worth taking.Ultimately, talking about trauma isn’t just a semantic matter. “Having a tight, limited idea of what mental illness looks like is a recipe for stigma; it’s a recipe for not seeking help for oneself [and for] not offering help to others,” Haslam said. The desire to validate other people’s suffering “is a good corrective,” he added. “It just happens to be a pretty blunt object in this concept of trauma.” And that is the major lesson you’ll learn if you can make it to the end of this grueling syllabus: We still have so much to understand about trauma. If we want a shot at addressing the real consequences of the pandemic, we will need not only more research but a new language—one that expresses terrible experiences that aren’t strictly traumatic and leads to solutions that are bigger than any one of us in isolation. Until then, trauma books will just keep flying off the shelves.

By James Pethokoukis
How rich are the richest Americans? It’s a question — one pretty relevant to modern American political debate — that is the subject of the new NBER working paper “Top Wealth in America: New Estimates and Implications for Taxing the Rich” by Matthew Smith, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick.
But before I dig into it, though, let me ask a different question: What if there were an economic policy that would by itself sharply reduce wealth concentration without any downside to capital formation or entrepreneurial risk-taking? Let’s say Policy X would lower the share of national wealth held by the top 0.1 percent to 15 percent from 20 percent. I would guess that most inequality worriers — with the possible exception of the “all billionaires are a policy error” folks — would see such a policy as an unqualified success. 
Well, some good news then: The research from Smith, Zidar, and Zwick (SZZ) finds that “the top 0.1% wealth share in 2016 is 15% under our approach,“ much less than many other estimates such as the well known ones from Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman (PSZ), which put the figure at around 20 percent. The SZZ team builds up on the work of others, including PSZ, while assembling data from a variety of new sources. The new research also shows as a dramatic increase in wealth concentration in recent decades: “From 1989 to 2016, the top 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01% wealth shares increased by 7.6, 5.1, and 3.0 percentage points, respectively, to 31.5%, 15.0%, and 7.0%.” 

To be sure, I am not saying this is the final word on the issue. Creating these estimates is devilishly tricky and incorporates a host of assumptions other economists might challenge. But, for the moment, let’s assume the SZZ effort moves us closer to the reality of the US wealth concentration (which, by the way, the economists still describe as “highly concentrated”). What are the policy implications? One concerns the revenue-raising potential and administrative difficulty of wealth taxes. From the paper:
Given prominent wealth tax proposals focus on the extreme tail of the wealth distribution, our estimates would reduce mechanical wealth tax revenue estimates. We find a larger role for illiquid wealth categories where valuations are more contentious, which could imply higher administrative burdens for a wealth tax or proposals to tax unrealized capital gains.
Learn more: So Big Tech massively investing in itself is worrisome now? | Why the new Forbes 400 list says something good about America | The real ‘tax gap’ is the one between progressive spending dreams and economic reality
The post A new look at wealth concentration in America appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Every so often, a citizen emerges to challenge the political establishment. Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential run drew on a public hunger for a new approach; he received 20 percent of the vote. In 2016 Donald Trump steamrolled traditional Republican candidates and changed the party’s face to his own. Andrew Yang is more a firecracker than a depth charge, but he has captured the public imagination with his refreshing candor and fearlessness.Unlike Perot or Trump, Yang came from nowhere—no public reputation, no big money, no access to any part of the establishment. Yet, by force of his personality, Yang now has a pedestal in the political landscape. In his new book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, Yang plants the flag of a new political party. He argues that, though Americans are not as polarized as polls suggest, neither existing party will address the legitimate needs of the other side. He also says that the two parties are comfortable with their duopoly of failure—first you fail, then I fail—and therefore will not support disruptive electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting.Yang is not the first to suggest that our two political parties no longer represent most Americans. Frank DiStefano, in his recent essay in these pages, argued that the parties are on “a locked-in path to destruction and decline.” In my 2019 book, Try Common Sense, which Yang cites, I said that each party’s outmoded ideology precludes the overhauls needed to respond to public frustration.It is no surprise that a plurality of voters now identifies as “independent” or as a member of a third party. But the electoral machinery makes it difficult for a would-be candidate to operate outside the two parties; and the primary system promotes extremists, not problem solvers.Yang’s idea of a party is, initially, not one with its own candidates but a centrist movement that exercises influence on candidates from both parties. As DiStefano elaborates it, a movement that captures public imagination can eventually take over or supplant one of the parties. The challenge is to galvanize public support for this type of new overhaul movement in a political environment like today’s, which breeds deadlock, not solutions. While many Americans might be receptive to a new party, the current political shouting match has left them exhausted and cynical. There is a huge gulf today between wanting change and rolling up your sleeves to force change.So, what does it take to engender the excitement needed for a new movement? Yang proposes a six-point platform for his Forward Party:1. Ranked-choice voting, with open primaries: These arrangements would reduce the stranglehold of the two parties and defang the extremists.2. Fact-based governing: The idea here is to evaluate programs objectively.3. Human-centered capitalism: Yang wants to re-center business around employees and communities, not just owners.4. Effective and modern government: Here Yang embraces the need to “fix the plumbing” of paralyzed government.5. Universal Basic Income: Giving Americans $1,000 per month was Yang’s signature proposal in his presidential campaign—a proposal that was validated, he argues, by the Covid relief payments.6. Grace and tolerance: Yang urges Americans to be more accepting of each other, not stay locked in a battle of identity politics.By opening the door to a new party, Yang once again reveals solid leadership instincts. But a new movement requires a tougher, more focused platform. A list of centrist do-good reforms is unlikely to elicit the public passion needed to dislodge the current parties. Yang himself is a bold and disarming figure; his party must be as well. A new party needs a clarion call that can galvanize popular support—as the Progressive Movement did, for example, with its vision of public oversight of food and fair practices, or the New Deal with its idea of social safety nets. Successful movements also energize public passion by fingering villains, as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street did.To get Americans out of their easy chairs, the new party must light a bonfire. Yet Yang’s platform is soporific, with no inspirational theme or evil targets. What’s the vision? Who are the enemies? Here is the way I would reframe Yang’s proposed Forward Party.First, the clarion call for a new way of governing: Responsibility for America. Americans have lost their sense of self-determination. We should be re-empowered to make a difference. Revive individual responsibility at all levels of society. Replace mindless bureaucracy with accountability for results. Teachers should be free to do their best, with authority to maintain classroom discipline. Principals should be free to hold teachers accountable, and the same should hold true all the way up the chain of responsibility. Officials must be free to authorize action within a reasonable timeframe; and they, too, must be accountable up the chain of responsibility. Mayors and police chiefs should have authority to manage the police force and other departments, including authority to promote public employees who do their jobs and fire those who don’t.

Reviving human responsibility requires overhauling government’s operating systems, replacing thick rule books with simpler goals and principles managed by people who take responsibility for themselves and are accountable to others. This is not so hard: It is far easier to agree on goals than to bicker over endless details of implementation. Modern American government has become basically a bad form of central planning, tying Americans into knots of red tape. Ask any teacher or doctor. Restoring responsibility would empower officials and citizens to govern better and adapt to local needs.Second, identify enemies and attack them. Powerful forces will resist a movement to revive responsibility. I see two main villains: public unions, which exist to block all accountability, and the political parties themselves, which have become organs of identity politics and special interests. It is impossible to fix broken government or revive a shared sense of national purpose without defeating these villains.Public unions have made government unmanageable and must be outlawed. Public unions have preempted democratic governance. Citizens elect leaders to run the police force and schools, but these leaders have no authority to fulfill this responsibility. The Minneapolis mayor appointed the police chief; but under the police union’s collective bargaining agreement, the mayor lacked authority to fire the rogue cop who killed George Floyd—or even to reassign the officer. Unlike private unions, which are dependent on the success of a private enterprise, public unions retain power even where they cause government to fail miserably.Democracy is supposed to be a process of giving officials responsibility and holding them accountable. But public unions have broken the links: Today, there is zero accountability in the daily operations of American government. Without accountability, rote compliance with the thick rule books replaces individual responsibility for results. The bottom line today is a government bogged down in a bureaucratic jungle of dictates and entitlements. Nothing much works sensibly or fairly because no one is empowered to make things work.As for political parties, they compete through failure, not achievement. Party leaders have basically given up on reforming government. Instead, they take turns in power pointing to the failures of the incumbent. In 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump tapped into broad public frustrations with Washington. Trump’s erratic leadership opened a door through which Joe Biden entered, offering sanity. But Biden’s failures of execution in Afghanistan and on the Mexican border now empower Republicans to go on the attack and prepare for their own return.This spiral of negative democratic competition is accelerated by the rise of extremism: Each side stokes fear of the extremists on the other (“Defund the police!” “Stop the steal!”). Actually fixing government is no longer the way the parties compete.Each party will aggressively resist reforms that would revive responsibility. Public unions have a stranglehold on the Democratic Party. Identity groups on the left will resist any accommodation of other points of view, or what Andrew Yang calls “grace and tolerance.” Republicans have become a party of nihilism and offer no discernible governing vision. They will rail against any reform that empowers public officials, opens elections to moderate candidates, or imposes taxes for public projects.The existing political parties are the problem, not the path to a solution. The new party envisioned by Yang must ultimately supplant one of them. The new party must ask its supporters to defeat the defenders of the status quo: They are not the agents but the enemies of a successful future. Generating public enthusiasm will require not a laundry basket of reforms but a spear with a sharp point. No matter which party is in charge, focus on its virtually unblemished recent record of failure.America needs a new party. Its vision must be condensed into a new governing principle that resonates with American values and represents a clean break from bureaucratic paralysis—a principle like human responsibility, which can guide an overhaul of all levels of government.The current state of American politics has squeezed all energy and hope out of our democracy. There’s no oxygen to serve as fuel for anyone who wants to do what is needed. Yang has cracked open a door, but we need a new vision to open it wide and attract a public enervated by decades of failure.Philip K. Howard is founder of Common Good and author, most recently, of Try Common Sense: Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left (2019).Image: Collision conference from Toronto, Canada, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Roger Scruton finally makes his mark on Oxford

Niall Ferguson opens Roger Scruton memorial lecture series

Oxford’s Sheldonian theatre is expecting a near capacity audience this Monday evening for the first annual Roger Scruton Memorial Lecture. The lecture series, which commemorates the life and thought of Britain’s leading modern conservative philosopher, will commence with a lecture by the historian, Professor Niall Ferguson, on the future of the Anglosphere. He will be introduced by the housing and communities secretary, Michael Gove, who will moderate the event.

By Monday morning, well over 600 tickets had been booked for Ferguson’s lecture, the first of four to be delivered at the Sheldonian this October on the overarching theme of “nation and civilisation.” The other three lectures in this year’s series — for which there is similarly high demand for tickets — will be delivered by the historian, Tom Holland, whose books include Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind on the theme of puritanism and iconoclasm (20 October; moderated by Professor Nigel Biggar), the Syrian architect and writer, Marwa Al-Sabouni, on beauty and home (25 October; moderated by Douglas Murray) and concluding on 27 October with the historian and former member of the supreme court, Jonathan Sumption, who will lecture on democracy (moderated by Charles Moore).

Orr is hopeful that the memorial lectures will help sustain Scruton’s memory

For many years a lecturer and professor in aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, before taking up a succession of visiting academic positions, Roger Scruton, who died age 75 in January 2020, was a philosopher whose wide range encompassed books on the meaning of conservatism, beauty, sexual ethics, human and animal rights, religion, music and wine. He had also been an outspoken champion of freedom from communist censorship and persecution in Eastern Europe when this was a brave and unpopular position to take.

The idea that his legacy should live on in an annual memorial lecture series was proposed by James Orr, a friend and lecturer in the philosophy of religion at Cambridge University. “We’ve got to do something” Orr suggested to a group of Scruton’s friends and admirers which included Toby Young, Dr Patrick Nash and Professor Nigel Biggar. “There was a sense of shock and mourning. We went to his funeral and pretty soon after that we had our first meeting.” Originally envisaged for the autumn of 2020, Covid forced a postponement until this October.

“The aim is to showcase the best of conservative thought” says Dr Orr, adding, “very much small “c” conservatism because Roger was not a party man.”

Although the lectures are being organised entirely independently from Oxford University, the choice of Oxford as their venue was deliberate. “We felt we it was appropriate to commemorate him permanently in some way that reflected his calibre as an intellectual and his prestige by having it in the most iconic lecture theatre in the land and embedded at the beginning of the Oxford academic calendar and to do it in a place that had not honoured him in his life as much as it should have done.” Despite international recognition as the pre-eminent conservative philosopher of his generation, the small Dominican institution of Blackfriars Hall was the only Oxford or Cambridge college to confer an honorary fellowship upon him. Scruton had graduated with a double first from Cambridge in 1965 and completed his PhD there.

Orr is hopeful that the memorial lectures will help sustain Scruton’s memory and introduce his philosophical legacy to future generations. “The lectures are going to catalyse all sorts of little coalitions within the university and beyond. We’ve got lots of diplomats, high ranking politicians and journalists coming. There is a sense of excitement.” Orr adds that the lecture series “is also coming at a time of intense national reflection and debate on the crisis of ideological group think within universities. It’s a time when parliamentarians are for the first time in decades advancing legislation that is going to have a direct impact on the intellectual climate in universities.”

With funding in place for the next two years, there is the hope that a permanent endowment can be created to see the lectures continue thereafter. “It should be welcomed by all sides,” concludes Orr, “because Scruton is a thinker who has as much to offer Red Wall Tories as left-leaning intelligentsia who appreciate our culture and history.”

Admission to the lectures is free but seats can be reserved via the Eventbrite or Sheldonian websites

Illustration by Rodrigo Corral. Sources: Hugh Sitton / Getty; Been There YB / Shutterstock
Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius. There’s a qualitative difference. The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension. I had never experienced anything like it before. I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.That person was David Graeber. In the 20 years after our lunch, he published two books; was let go by Yale despite a stellar record (a move universally attributed to his radical politics); published two more books; got a job at Goldsmiths, University of London; published four more books, including Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a magisterial revisionary history of human society from Sumer to the present; got a job at the London School of Economics; published two more books and co-wrote a third; and established himself not only as among the foremost social thinkers of our time—blazingly original, stunningly wide-ranging, impossibly well read—but also as an organizer and intellectual leader of the activist left on both sides of the Atlantic, credited, among other things, with helping launch the Occupy movement and coin its slogan, “We are the 99 percent.”On September 2, 2020, at the age of 59, David Graeber died of necrotizing pancreatitis while on vacation in Venice. The news hit me like a blow. How many books have we lost, I thought, that will never get written now? How many insights, how much wisdom, will remain forever unexpressed? The appearance of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is thus bittersweet, at once a final, unexpected gift and a reminder of what might have been. In his foreword, Graeber’s co-author, David Wengrow, an archaeologist at University College London, mentions that the two had planned no fewer than three sequels.And what a gift it is, no less ambitious a project than its subtitle claims. The Dawn of Everything is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau; elaborated by subsequent thinkers; popularized today by the likes of Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker; and accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong. Drawing on a wealth of recent archaeological discoveries that span the globe, as well as deep reading in often neglected historical sources (their bibliography runs to 63 pages), the two dismantle not only every element of the received account but also the assumptions that it rests on. Yes, we’ve had bands, tribes, cities, and states; agriculture, inequality, and bureaucracy, but what each of these were, how they developed, and how we got from one to the next—all this and more, the authors comprehensively rewrite. More important, they demolish the idea that human beings are passive objects of material forces, moving helplessly along a technological conveyor belt that takes us from the Serengeti to the DMV. We’ve had choices, they show, and we’ve made them. Graeber and Wengrow offer a history of the past 30,000 years that is not only wildly different from anything we’re used to, but also far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring.The bulk of the book (which weighs in at more than 500 pages) takes us from the Ice Age to the early states (Egypt, China, Mexico, Peru). In fact, it starts by glancing back before the Ice Age to the dawn of the species. Homo sapiens developed in Africa, but it did so across the continent, from Morocco to the Cape, not just in the eastern savannas, and in a great variety of regional forms that only later coalesced into modern humans. There was no anthropological Garden of Eden, in other words—no Tanzanian plain inhabited by “mitochondrial Eve” and her offspring. As for the apparent delay between our biological emergence, and therefore the emergence of our cognitive capacity for culture, and the actual development of culture—a gap of many tens of thousands of years—that, the authors tell us, is an illusion. The more we look, especially in Africa (rather than mainly in Europe, where humans showed up relatively late), the older the evidence we find of complex symbolic behavior.That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.” They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.The authors carry this perspective forward to the ages that saw the emergence of farming, of cities, and of kings. In the locations where it first developed, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture did not take over all at once, uniformly and inexorably. (It also didn’t start in only a handful of centers—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, Peru, the same places where empires would first appear—but more like 15 or 20.) Early farming was typically flood-retreat farming, conducted seasonally in river valleys and wetlands, a process that is much less labor-intensive than the more familiar kind and does not conduce to the development of private property. It was also what the authors call “play farming”: farming as merely one element within a mix of food-producing activities that might include hunting, herding, foraging, and horticulture.Settlements, in other words, preceded agriculture—not, as we’ve thought, the reverse. What’s more, it took some 3,000 years for the Fertile Crescent to go from the first cultivation of wild grains to the completion of the domestication process—about 10 times as long as necessary, recent analyses have shown, had biological considerations been the only ones. Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.[From the December 2020 issue: The next decade could be even worse]The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.If anything, aristocracy emerged in smaller settlements, the warrior societies that flourished in the highlands of the Levant and elsewhere, and that are known to us from epic poetry—a form of existence that remained in tension with agricultural states throughout the history of Eurasia, from Homer to the Mongols and beyond. But the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”And so we arrive at the state, with its structures of central authority, exemplified variously by large-scale kingdoms, by empires, by modern republics—supposedly the climax form, to borrow a term from ecology, of human social organization. What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”Is “civilization” worth it, the authors want to know, if civilization—ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violence—means the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?These are questions that Graeber, a committed anarchist—an exponent not of anarchy but of anarchism, the idea that people can get along perfectly well without governments—asked throughout his career. The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.The Dawn of Everything is not a brief for anarchism, though anarchist values—antiauthoritarianism, participatory democracy, small-c communism—are everywhere implicit in it. Above all, it is a brief for possibility, which was, for Graeber, perhaps the highest value of all. The book is something of a glorious mess, full of fascinating digressions, open questions, and missing pieces. It aims to replace the dominant grand narrative of history not with another of its own devising, but with the outline of a picture, only just becoming visible, of a human past replete with political experiment and creativity.“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.This article appears in the November 2021 print edition with the headline “It Didn’t Have to Be This Way.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

What we talk about when we want to do nothing

The problematic discourse is disingenuous opportunism

There is something about Twitter that makes it almost impossible to resist not only making but publicising snap judgements. As soon as news broke that Sir David Amess MP had been stabbed, online commentators were drawing conclusions. Some blamed incendiary verbiage from the left, such as Angela Rayner MP calling Conservatives “scum”. Others blamed the government, with former PCC Arfon Jones, saying “this is what happens” when you have a government that “sows hate”. No one, to be clear, knew what had happened.

Evidence that has emerged since, following Sir David’s tragic death, has not been kind to the “civility in politics” narrative. The killer is reported to have been Ali Harbi Ali, apparently the 25-year-old son of a former media spokesman for the Prime Minister of Somalia. The suspect had reportedly been referred to the government’s anti-radicalisation scheme Prevent and has been detained under terrorism legislation. This makes it unlikely, though not impossible, that he was radicalised by watching people argue about Brexit or lockdowns.

Somehow, journalists and politicians have maintained their initial narrative. It is as if they are living in a parallel universe where none of this news has been reported. Their discourse flows on, river-like, and nothing one hurls into it can make a difference.

So, we learn that Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, has not ruled out an end to online anonymity. Where does one begin? There is no evidence that the suspect posted anonymously or was influenced by anonymous posters. Moreover, such legislation — as well as being comically unenforceable — would effectively be directed towards excluding unpopular and otherwise unconventional opinions. Perhaps that is one reason why journalists and politicians often seem to like it. It appears in discourse with the baffling and exasperating regularity of your drunk friend’s ex-wife.

In case I have not emphasised it enough, I am not sure what was going through the killer’s head

According to Rosamund Urwin of the Sunday Times, a “senior Tory” said, “I can’t believe David has lost his life to this endless madness. But in a week’s time, people will move on and continue doing the things that cause these problems.” That MPs are receiving murder and rape threats, as Urwin reports, is unconscionable. It is worth talking about. But is it worth talking about now when, as I have said, there is no evidence that the suspect was engaged in or influenced by such behaviour? Such evidence might exist. But we have seen none of it.

MPs can be excused for not thinking entirely clearly at a time like this. One of their colleagues has just been murdered after all. The most shameless example of opportunism appears in an editorial in the Observer. Noting reports that the suspect was potentially influenced by Islamic extremism, the editorialist claims:

There will be those who seek to deploy these scant details in service of their political agendas; to politicise this tragedy in such a way is abhorrent.

Scant details! Politicising! Abhorrent! Read on a little further, though, and we are told:

…social media companies have a duty to reconfigure their platforms so they do not incentivise spiteful speech and hateful sentiment.

No details! Just common sense! Very good! I hope the absurdity of this need not be dwelled on.

Debates about civility and social media are comfortable, familiar terrain. Again, it would be foolish to suggest that there is nothing to them. Online abuse can be nasty and threats of violence are reprehensible. But one cannot help suspecting that the media and politicians prefer to hold forth on this well-trodden ground than to consider what seems to be the more probable motivation behind Sir David’s killing.

Who knows? Perhaps the murderer had some eccentric individual grievance. Perhaps he was insane. It is too early for definitive conclusions. But if he was inspired by jihadist ideology, as is suspected, it would not be the first time an MP has been attacked by an Islamic extremist. Stephen Timms MP was stabbed by an Al Qaeda sympathiser in similar circumstances in 2010, though he made a merciful recovery. In 2017, Keith Palmer, a gallant unarmed police officer, was stabbed to death by a jihadi who was trying to break into the Palace of Westminster after running down four people as he drove along the pavement on Westminster Bridge.

We have a political culture that conflates speech with action until no one sees the difference

Incidents such as the stabbing of a Christian evangelist at Speakers Corner in July, or the murder of five people by a Muslim convert in Norway last week, have demonstrated the ongoing threat of militant theocratic ideology in Europe. But this is a lot more difficult to speak about than, say, civility in politics. We run the risk of offending Observer editorialists and, besides, there are no ideas for ameliorating the problem that are as palatable as kicking those foul-mouthed and uncouth anons offline. Trolls are easier to discuss than terrorists.

In case I have not emphasised it enough, I am not sure what was going through the killer’s head. I have, alas, no capacity for mind reading, and it seems pointless to speculate in any rich detail when more evidence should be released within the coming days. One might as well leave one’s firmer judgements until then.

But the spinning of a web of discourse that bears no perceptible relation to the event that brought it into being is a morbidly fascinating phenomenon. It speaks unflatteringly of a political culture that conflates speech with action until no one sees the difference — and a media culture where a narrative can take hold and sustain itself on prejudices and emotional investment even as it looks increasingly implausible.

Yet perhaps the murderer will turn out to have had a Twitter account where he poured out a stream of anonymous invective against MPs for doing too much, or too little, in relation to COVID-19. It might seem unlikely but our world is full of odd surprises.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, an unfortunately all-too-common topic for me was the proliferation of dubious acupuncture studies from practitioners of what I like to refer to as quackademic medicine. These studies ranged from basic science studies using animal models to clinical trials that were not even really designed to test whether acupuncture works but instead were practically designed to produce a “positive” result, even when the result was negative, while still other studies rebrand “electroacupuncture” as “acupuncture.”

Unfortunately, the fascination with acupuncture in quackademic medicine has been so intense over the last three decades that a disturbing number of doctors appear to believe that acupuncture works (or is at least “worth a shot”). Nearly all of them are unaware of how the history of this “ancient Chinese” treatment (which was, in reality, merely the Asian version of European bloodletting) was retconned by Mao Zedong, producing a narrative that this “ancient treatment” demonstrates a near-miraculous efficacy for, well, just about everything. Never mind that the filiform needles associated with modern acupuncture didn’t exist until around 1930, when a Chinese pediatrician named Cheng Dan’an proposed that needling therapy be resurrected because its actions could be explained through neurology and replaced the previously-used coarse lancet-like needles with the fine needles in use today. Unfortunately, belief in acupuncture has gotten to the point where not only is the director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health ( NCCIH ) a “true believer” in acupuncture, but other health regulatory authorities, including in the VA hospital system, in their desperation over the opioid epidemic, have embraced it and other quackery as “nonpharmacological treatments for pain” even though it is no more than a theatrical placebo. You can even find credulous discussions of acupuncture in The New England Journal of Medicine and at the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Last week, I was reminded that even a global pandemic can’t stop dubious acupuncture studies from being published. However, even I was surprised at where the study that I chose as the topic of this week’s post was published: Nature . As most of you know, Nature is considered one of the premier general science journals in the world, publishing papers on everything from medicine, to biology, to geology, to astronomy, to just about every science under the sun. Unfortunately, as I’ve documented in the past, Nature has also demonstrated enough credulity about acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine to have published a large advertising edition promoting them in 2011 and then, in 2015, a full-throated defense of acupuncture and related quackery.

This time around, my Google alerts (and some readers) picked up a news item and a podcast hawking a study in Nature . The titles were quite—shall we say?—promotional, with the podcast being titled “How electric acupuncture zaps inflammation in mice” and the news article “Electroacupuncture activates neurons to switch off inflammation“. The article itself, from investigators at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and from two institutions in China that included the Institute of Acupuncture and Moxibustion, Department of Integrative Medicine and Neurobiology, and Institutes of Brain Science at Fudan University in Shanghai, as well as the Meridians Research Center, Institute of Acupuncture and Moxibustion, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing, is the less promotional but still misleading “A neuroanatomical basis for electroacupuncture to drive the vagal–adrenal axis“.

The first thing I noticed, as I have for so many other papers like this, was that this is not an acupuncture paper at all! After all, electricity, its properties, and how to generate and use it were not known to the Chinese “millennia ago”, nor did the technology exist to produce the fine filiform needles currently used in acupuncture. Moreover, acupuncture “meridians,” the lines along the body through which the mysterious life force (a.k.a., “qi”) supposedly flows, the blockage of which sticking needles into them supposedly corrects, were never based on known human anatomic structures, much less those of mice, which were used in the study by Liu et al. I’ve characterized this sort of thing as a “bait and switch” going back many years. Basically, therapy is described as acupuncture (the “bait”) but is in reality nothing more than transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) clumsily grafted onto acupuncture (the “switch”) because acupuncture itself doesn’t work.

One might not-unreasonably expect that electrical stimulation of certain nerves could produce physiological effects. That’s a no-brainer that has nothing to do with whether acupuncture works or not. For instance, anyone who’s ever undergone a nerve conduction study, as I once did a couple of decades ago when I had the misfortune to develop carpal tunnel syndrome, knows this. (It’s a study that could easily be used as torture, let me tell you.) The very basis of nerve conduction is electrochemical, and it can be influenced by electrical currents. That doesn’t make it acupuncture just because you hook electrodes up to acupuncture needles stuck into “acupoints”. Worse, the insistence of using acupuncture points, instead of nerves that might actually have physiological relevance, only muddies the waters, making it less likely that an actual, useful therapy might be derived from the mix of electricity and the vitalism of traditional Chinese medicine that is “electroacupuncture”.

Basically, “electroacupuncture” is nothing more than a “rebranding” of acupuncture (which doesn’t work) that disguises it using something that might work (electrical nerve stimulation), labeling that something that might work as somehow being acupuncture too. After all, the Chinese people of hundreds (or thousands) of years ago who supposedly invented acupuncture did not have knowledge of electricity, nor did they have the technology to construct batteries or generators to run electricity through anything. Reviewers should not let authors of manuscripts submitted to journals get away with calling electroacupuncture “acupuncture,” because it’s not. The editors of Nature should know that, but apparently do not.

Another thing about this article that really disturbed me. Let’s take a look at the abstract and then compare it to actual experimental models used to see. First, here’s the abstract:

Somatosensory autonomic reflexes allow electroacupuncture stimulation (ES) to modulate body physiology at distant sites1,2,3,4,5,6 (for example, suppressing severe systemic inflammation6,7,8,9). Since the 1970s, an emerging organizational rule about these reflexes has been the presence of body-region specificity1,2,3,4,5,6. For example, ES at the hindlimb ST36 acupoint but not the abdominal ST25 acupoint can drive the vagal–adrenal anti-inflammatory axis in mice10,11. The neuroanatomical basis of this somatotopic organization is, however, unknown. Here we show that PROKR2Cre-marked sensory neurons, which innervate the deep hindlimb fascia (for example, the periosteum) but not abdominal fascia (for example, the peritoneum), are crucial for driving the vagal–adrenal axis. Low-intensity ES at the ST36 site in mice with ablated PROKR2Cre-marked sensory neurons failed to activate hindbrain vagal efferent neurons or to drive catecholamine release from adrenal glands. As a result, ES no longer suppressed systemic inflammation induced by bacterial endotoxins. By contrast, spinal sympathetic reflexes evoked by high-intensity ES at both ST25 and ST36 sites were unaffected. We also show that optogenetic stimulation of PROKR2Cre-marked nerve terminals through the ST36 site is sufficient to drive the vagal–adrenal axis but not sympathetic reflexes. Furthermore, the distribution patterns of PROKR2Cre nerve fibres can retrospectively predict body regions at which low-intensity ES will or will not effectively produce anti-inflammatory effects. Our studies provide a neuroanatomical basis for the selectivity and specificity of acupoints in driving specific autonomic pathways.

This sounds pretty benign, doesn’t it? Now let’s look at how inflammation was induced in these mice:

Activation of the vagal–adrenal axis can suppress systemic inflammation induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a bacterial endotoxin10,11,20. Without LPS treatment, proinflammatory cytokines, including tumour necrosis factor (TNF) and interleukin-6 (IL-6), were barely detected in serum (Extended Data Fig. 6a).

As a news report on this study notes:

Neuronal networks have evolved to control organ functions. A technique called electroacupuncture, in which specific points on the body called acupoints are stimulated electrically, has long been used to activate these networks and thereby modulate the functions of certain organs to treat various disorders. It is a key part of an emerging medical field known as bioelectronic medicine1,2. However, little is known about the neuronal networks that mediate the effects of electroacupuncture at specific acupoints1,3. Writing in Nature , Liu et al.4 show in mice that a set of neurons expressing the protein Prokr2 are needed for electrical stimulation of a hindlimb acupoint to rein in the unbridled inflammatory responses that characterize lethal sepsis.

That’s right. The model used in the experiments involved using electroacupuncture in a mouse model of the inflammatory effects of sepsis. Basically, the authors tortured mice in the name of rebranding electricity as a form of acupuncture by injecting one of the main mediators of bacterial sepsis, lipopolysaccharide (LPS, a bacterial endotoxin), applied electroacupuncture to the mice at the leg Zusanli (ST36) acupoint, located about 2 cm below the knee in humans. If you’ve been reading SBM for a long time, you have, whether you remember it or not, encountered discussions of studies using this acupoint before, for example, once in a study published in Nature Neuroscience that Steve Novella deconstructed, another in two studies that were misinterpreted and claimed that adenosine was the common mediator of acupuncture effects, and another in which the levels of various cytokines were measured after applying differing voltages of “electroacupuncture” to this acupoint. As former contributor Mark Crislip put it in his own inimitable way about this last study:

So they stuck a needle in the ST36 Zusanli point of mice. Which is in the leg, below the knee. Who knew that mice and humans had the same meridians and acupoints? Then they cranked in some voltage and measured various cytokines and other inflammatory mediators under various conditions to see what happens.

The ever-inimitable Dr. Crislip then wrote:

They did not use a random peripheral site to apply the voltage or another acupuncture point as a control. As best I can tell, the study actually had nothing to do with acupuncture. What they demonstrated was electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves or the vagus nerve had anti-inflammatory effects. The use of the specific acupuncture point was, well, pointless. This is the kind of study that drives me nuts. You could remove all the references to acupuncture and the results would be just as applicable. I suppose it would then lack the sexiness that acupuncture adds. Without acupuncture as a hook, I wonder if it would have been published in Nature Medicine or get the notice it did.

He’s right, the rebranding sells the study, as none of this has anything to do with the prescientific vitalistic quackery that is acupuncture. It’s somewhat interesting neuroscience, but could easily get lost in a whole lot of other somewhat interesting neuroscience, hence the acupuncture hook.

Basically, the Zusanli acupoint seems to be one of the favorite go-to acupoints on one of the magical meridians that acupuncture believers like to study. In any event, it should never be forgotten that inducing the physiological effects of sepsis is in mice is never something that should be undertaken lightly, and doing it in the name of trying to make acupuncture seem to have a scientific basis is incredibly unethical, in my book. I can see why work like this could be done in China, but where was Dana-Farber’s IACUC to protect the interests of the experimental animals and minimize their suffering, given that the Methods section leads me to believe that most of the animal experiments were done at Dana-Farber? Moreover, even the Nature podcast seems to acknowledge the bait-and-switch, albeit unknowingly, by characterizing electroacupuncture as delivering electrical current to nerves (at around 2:45), which has nothing to do with acupuncture, meridians, or qi. The announcer even says:

Although the evidence supporting conventional acupuncture is controversial, electroacupuncture has been shown in several studies to decrease inflammation in mice, if the mouse body is stimulated in just the right way.

I will admit that the current study is definitely more sophisticated than that study from several years ago to which Mark Crislip applied his inimitable description, but all that sophistication went to support a narrative that seeks to demonstrate that acupuncture works. An example of this more sophisticated approach, the authors produced transgenic mice (mice genetically manipulated to make specific proteins in specific neurons and the nerve tracts associated with them) to test electroacupuncture applied to the Zusanli acupoint:

For this study, the goal was to investigate why ES can drive the recently reported vagal–adrenal axis from the hindlimb Zusanli (ST36) acupoint but not from the abdominal Tianshu (ST25) acupoint, at which ES instead drives spinal sympathetic reflexes10,11 (Fig. 1a). We postulated that somato–vagal–adrenal reflexes are driven by sensory pathways that innervate tissues unique to the hindlimbs compared to the abdomen, such as joints, bones and skeletal muscles. One candidate pathway includes DRG neurons marked by PROKR2Cre (in which with Cre-mediated recombination marks neurons with persistent or transient expression of prokineticin receptor 213). These neurons innervate deep limb tissues but not skin epidermis13.

So, for some reason, electricity to the hindlimb can stimulate the nerve pathways that lead to stimulation of the vagus nerve, which inhibits the release of inflammatory molecules from the adrenal glans and thereby decrease inflammation, but stimulation of other mouse acupoints doesn’t. To study this, the authors did this with dorsal root ganglia (DRG) neurons (don’t worry, I’ll explain):

To characterize PROKR2Cre neurons, we generated Prokr2Adv-tdTomato mice, in which the tdTomato reporter was restricted to DRG neurons defined by the developmental co-expression of PROKR2Cre (ref. 13) and AdvillinFlpo (ref. 14)

And:

To study the functions of PROKR2ADV neurons, we generated Prokr2Adv-DTR mice, in which the expression of the diphtheria toxin (DTX) receptor (DTR) was restricted to PROKR2ADVDRG neurons (Extended Data Fig. 5a, b). Four weeks after DTX injections, 98.0 ± 0.5% of PROKR2Cre-marked DRG neurons were ablated (Extended Data Fig. 5c), which led to 44.5 ± 7.0% and 72.4 ± 5.7% reductions in TUBB3+ and NEFH+ fibre densities, respectively, in the periosteum (Extended Data Fig. 5d). Notably, no ablation was observed in the spinal cord or brain (Extended Data Fig. 5e). We refer to these mice as PROKR2ADV-Abl.

I’ll sum it up. The authors used the a method known as cre-lox to introduce the gene for the diphtheria toxin specifically in specific neurons using DNA sequences that drive the expression of two genes specifically restricted to the DRG. In doing so, they noticed that DRG neurons expressing this tdTomato reporter had a higher representation at limb levels than at thoracic levels and did not overlap with neurons that innervate skin epidermis (the outermost layer of the skin). Next, they used mice in which the diphtheria toxin receptor introduced into the mouse embryos in order to similarly restrict its being made to these neurons. They then eliminated these neurons and nerve fibers by treating the mice with diphtheria toxin, which only destroys the cells that make the receptor for the toxin, to observe the effect of lack of these fibers on electroacupuncture through the Zusanli acupoint. The authors observed that eliminating these neurons also eliminated the observed inhibitory effects due to electroacupuncture in decreasing inflammation and concluded that these neurons have a “role in activation of the vagal–adrenal axis by low-intensity ES,” the vagal-adrenal axis being a neurologic pathway and ES being electroacupuncture stimulation.

Using this model, the authors reported:

In LPS-treated control littermates, 0.5-mA ES at the ST36 site caused a 50% reduction in TNF and IL-6 induction and a 40% increase in survival rates compared with sham ES, and these effects were abolished in PROKR2ADV-Abl mice (Fig. 2d–g). We have previously reported11 that 0.5-mA ES of the abdominal ST25 acupoint does not drive vagal or sympathetic reflexes and is unable to suppress systemic inflammation. High-intensity ES of the ST25 site can drive sympathetic reflexes and produce weak (through 1.0-mA ES) or strong (through 3.0-mA ES) anti-inflammatory effects independent of vagal efferents11. These effects were unchanged in PROKR2ADV-Abl mice (Extended Data Fig. 6b–j). High-intensity (3.0-mA) ES of the hindlimb ST36 acupoint also drove spinal sympathetic reflexes and produced anti-inflammatory effects independent of PROKR2ADV neurons (Extended Data Fig. 7a, b). Thus, PROKR2ADVneurons are uniquely required for low-intensity ES to drive the vagal–adrenal anti-inflammatory axis from the hindlimb ST36 acupoint.

Yes, you read that. Stimulation of the Zusanli acupoint led to a 40% increase in survival after systemic inflammation induced with LPS, an effect abolished in the mice in which this neurological pathway had been ablated. In terms of absolute numbers, only 20-40% of the mice in the control groups survived. Again, from my perspective, one might justify an experiment like this for a purpose that isn’t delusional or self-deceptive, such as studying what happens after a certain nerve is stimulated with electricity and determining the mechanism for these effects. While that is sort of what these experiments do, everything is overlaid with the language and pseudoscience of acupuncture, even though what this study shows is nothing more than that there is a nerve pathway in mice that, when stimulated with electricity, can lead to a decrease in systemic inflammation. That’s it.

A number of other experiments were performed. One set of experiments showed that stimulation of PROKR2ADV fibers activates an anti-inflammatory axis controlled by the vagus nerve. Those with some knowledge of neuroscience will recognize that the vagus nerve is important in the parasympathetic nervous system, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system. In general, stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system results in the “fight-or-flight” reflex and tends to be pro-inflammatory, while the parasympathetic nervous system counters that stimulation and tends to be anti-inflammatory. This is a simple (but hopefully not simplistic) way of describing the systems that boils it down to its essence for a lay presentation will allow you to understand the importance of the vagus nerve.

In another set of experiments, the authors cut the peroneal nerve (a nerve in the leg that contains fibers that innervate the deep fascia) and showed that doing so eliminated the anti-inflammatory effect that they had observed due to stimulating the Zusanli acupuncture point, while they noted that cutting the lateral cutaneous nerve, which innervates the skin, had no effect. There are a number of other experiments that were done for various controls and to rule out other possibilities, but I won’t go into them here. Let’s for the moment, take the findings at face value, with one exception. This is not acupuncture, contrary to how Nature’s accompanying news article and podcast characterize its findings with passages like:

Liu and colleagues’ findings reveal the cellular route by which ST36 ES activates the vagal–adrenal network. The cell bodies of the sensory neurons that express Prokr2 are located in structures called dorsal root ganglia in the lower spinal cord, and have long processes in the sciatic (hindlimb) nerve that innervate the ST36 acupoint.

And:

The ST36 acupoint is situated at the point at which the sciatic nerve splits into the sural, tibial and peroneal nerves that extend down the calf, and it was not known which of these nerves is most effective for stimulation with acupuncture7,11. The location of Prokr2-expressing neurons in the deep tissues below ST36 predicts that the anti-inflammatory effects of low-intensity ST36 ES depend on the deep innervations of the common peroneal nerve, rather than on the more-superficial skin innervations of the cutaneous sural nerves. Indeed, the authors confirmed that cutting the peroneal nerve, but not the tibial or sural nerves, blocks the anti-inflammatory effects of ST36 stimulation.

Personally, I like to think of it more like this. Somehow, one point in one acupuncture meridian as described by acupuncturists who use one system (of several) of acupuncture, by coincidence, appears to correspond to a location (on the mouse, at least), where the application of electrical current can stimulate one nerve that produces a signal along a neurologic pathway that leads to stimulation of the vagus nerve and inhibition of the release of pro-inflammatory molecules by the adrenal glands. After decades of searching, some acupuncture believers, having failed to find an effect on much of anything from just acupuncture, figured out that the electrical stimulation of a handful of acupuncture points (which were never based on physiology or any anatomic structure) could lead to physiological effects, which, as a general concept, should not be a surprise at all given that the entire nervous system works through electrochemical signaling and it would be expected that the application of electricity to certain nerves can affect physiology somehow.

In that vein, let me rephrase the concluding paragraph of the Nature news story about this study, to describe what was really found, and it takes just one relatively minor change in verbiage, which I’ll denote by crossing out one word of the original and inserting a very brief bold italicized phrase:

If electroacupuncture targeted electrical stimulation of a nerve can selectively activate specific neuronal networks, it might be feasible to design ES treatments to induce local effects, similar to pacemakers (electronic devices implanted into the chest to control the heartbeat). Thus, it might eventually be possible to use ES to evoke local anti-inflammatory mechanisms in certain parts of the body — such as an arthritic knee or specific sections of the digestive tract in individuals with chronic inflammatory bowel disorders — without suppressing the whole immune system, increasing the risk of infection or leading to side effects elsewhere in the body.

Notice how little I changed the text. The findings of this study, in fact, have even less to do with acupuncture than the adenosine studies that I wrote about a decade ago. Unlike this new study, those studies, at least, didn’t use electroacupuncture—or even electricity of any kind.

Is the neuroscience interesting? Sure. Nature -level interesting? That’s an interesting thought, which brings me back to Mark Crislip’s question that I quoted above and will rephrase for this study: Without acupuncture as a hook to make it “sexy,” I wonder if this study would have been published in as high profile a journal as Nature or get the notice it did.

Genes and Destiny

I read with interest Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s Profile of the behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden (“Force of Nature,” September 13th). My academic research relates to Harden’s concerns regarding attention paid to the political connotations of who does, and does not, perceive genomics as having a significant influence on human traits and behaviors. In my book “Genomic Politics,” I conclude that, with few exceptions, beliefs about the validity and the impact of genomics are not related to partisan identity or to political ideology. I found that disagreements about whether genomic science will, on balance, benefit or harm society do exist among the American public and among experts—but not along liberal and conservative lines. Whether left-leaning people can embrace genetics is probably the wrong question to ask. Research shows that some progressives and some conservatives can be convinced of the utility of genomics, even if others cannot. Politics does matter in scientific debates, but not all disputes should be cast as ideological or partisan.

Jennifer Hochschild

Jayne Professor of Government

Cambridge, Mass.

Lewis-Kraus notes that an observational study promoted by Harden was “carefully controlled for childhood socioeconomic status.” As an associate professor at the University of Colorado’s medical school and an emergency-room doctor, I contemplated the use of the phrase “carefully controlled.” I caution my students and residents about the limitations of observational studies, which make up much of the genetic research cited in the piece. It’s not that observational research is inferior to randomized controlled trials; rather, it resides in a category that by itself can never establish causation. I worry that people might misunderstand “carefully controlled” as implying that all confounding variables were fully measured. If these variables were represented by a deck of fallen playing cards, then we could be confident that in “carefully” gathering them we would retrieve all fifty-two cards. But in observational research this certainty is never possible: researchers cannot know if they’ve left a few cards, or nearly the entire deck, on the floor.

In the emergency room, we see how the genetic factors in a patient’s case are often dwarfed by poverty, racism, climate change, and violence. Could a better understanding of genetics help me with my patients? Of course. But I fear that this observational research could be used as an excuse to avoid addressing the environmental inequities that hurt my patients daily.

Bradley Shy

Aurora, Colo.

Remembering Derrick Bell

As a longtime friend and colleague of Derrick Bell’s—Thurgood Marshall had us share a closet-size office while working at the Legal Defense Fund in the nineteen-sixties—I was moved by Jelani Cobb’s vivid portrait of Bell (“The Limits of Liberalism,” September 20th). Derrick never lost his ironic sense of humor or his willingness to mix personal commitment with a tolerance for disagreement. Though Derrick’s pessimism was perhaps bolstered by the judicial regressions that followed the few years of progress after Brown v. Board of Education, he once acknowledged to me that the Supreme Court had opened the door to a world of changes for Black people—just far too few to vanquish white supremacy.

Michael Meltsner

Professor of Law

Northeastern University

•

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

In the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, that backwater of history – prehistory – has been infused by a surge of popular interest. It’s also proved an area of fertile promise for those who find the established narratives of modernity either constricting or based on false premises or both.

The last point is particularly relevant for the egalitarian-minded. After the catastrophic failure of the Soviet experiment, there were few places left to turn in support of the belief that humanity is at heart cooperative rather than competitive. The notable exception was the pre-agricultural era, those tens of thousands of years in which humans were thought to live in a state of… well, what exactly?

Since the Enlightenment, there have been two conflicting visions of humanity stripped of its civilised trappings. On the one hand, there is Hobbes’s notion of us as predisposed to violence – waging war against each other in a “nasty, brutish and short” existence. On the other, Rousseau’s idyll of prelapsarian innocence, in which humanity led a life of Edenic bliss before being destroyed by the corruptions of society.

Both these understandings of humanity’s roots are manifestly wrong, contend the late anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow in their new and richly provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As the title suggests, this is a boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages.

Of course, few modern scholars accept either Hobbes’s bleak caricature or Rousseau’s romantic musings. Nonetheless, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these antithetical conceptions of human nature feed into the consensus that has been popularised by figures such as Diamond and Harari.

That is to say that for most of human history our ancestors lived an egalitarian and leisure-filled life in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Then, as Diamond put it, we made the “worst mistake in human history”, which was to increase population numbers through agricultural production. This, so the story goes, led to hierarchies, subordination, wars, disease, famines and just about every other social ill – thus did we plunge from Rousseau’s heaven into Hobbes’s hell.

According to Graeber and Wengrow’s reading of up-to-date archeological and anthropological research, that story, too, is nonsense. Humanity was not restricted to small bands of hunter-gatherers, agriculture did not lead inexorably to hierarchies and conflicts and there was not one mode of social organisation that prevailed, at least until thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture.

On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year.

The strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions

The author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber, it’s worth bearing in mind, was a committed anarchist who was instrumental in setting up the Occupy Wall Street protest. Another factor that bears consideration is that both archaeology and anthropology are disciplines that are notoriously vulnerable to subjective interpretation.

Such “distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies”, the authors caution, but then do not entirely heed their own warning. While readily acknowledging the limitations of verifiable evidence, they nonetheless engage in creative speculation, albeit with a host of covering “most likelys”.

The histories they weave are fascinating, bringing to light extraordinary illustrative characters such as Kandiaronk, the brilliant Native American Huron-Wendat chief who confounded French Jesuits with his powerful debating skills.

‘Attack received wisdoms’: David Wengrow, left, and David Graeber. Photograph: Kalpesh Lathigra

Yet there is a distinct sense of cherrypicking, of stringing together examples that fit the broad sweep of their argument, and dismissing the rest. One historian has accused them of making at least one “ballistically false” claim (that captured settlers in America preferred to remain with their native captors).

All the same, the strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions. It isn’t, say the authors, that earlier humans were egalitarian, for there were often differences in material wealth. Rather, they enjoyed an equality of social – and therefore political – participation and, moreover, a shared sense of freedom: of movement, to disobey command and to “shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones”.

Most significantly, the authors replace the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live. Our distant forebears were not hopeless puppets of historical inevitability but masters of their own trajectory.

Still, the question the authors repeatedly ask, but never quite get round to answering is, how then did we become “stuck” in a system of hierarchies and conspicuous inequalities of power and consumption? Despite inferring and speculating at almost every turn, the two Davids become suddenly circumspect when confronting this central mystery that haunts their book.

They write that “for now the material at our disposal, especially for the early phases of the process, is still too sparse and ambiguous to provide definitive answers”. In truth, that proviso could be employed for almost everything under discussion in this book, but then it would not have been nearly as entertaining and thought-provoking.

It is, in the end, an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature.

University of Chicago professor Dorian Abbot was to deliver the Tenth Annual John Carlson Lecture at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on October 21. As a result of a pressure campaign, he was disinvited from delivering that lecture because of his views on diversity and inclusion initiatives in American higher education. He will instead be delivering his remarks virtually (on planetary climate and the prospects of life on exoplanets) on October 21 at the James Madison Program at Princeton University. The Academic Freedom Alliance issued a public letter rebuking MIT for caving in to such pressure.
The provost at MIT has subsequently publicly released an email he sent to the faculty about the incident and minimizing the damage that had been done by the disinvitation. The Academic Freedom Alliance has now released a second public letter, this one directed to the provost at MIT and responding to the points raised in his email.
As I note in that letter:
You note in your letter that the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences "had to make a difficult decision" when an organized petition campaign was launched to pressure the Institute to disinvite Professor Abbot. It is true that universities are sometimes put in the difficult position of upholding their values of academic freedom and open inquiry when particular instances of speech become controversial and universities are being pressured to suppress speech. Identifying the correct principle and the university's proper responsibilities in such circumstances is not difficult, however.
The university's duty is clear – once a university has extended an invitation to a speaker to speak to members of the campus community, the university must not rescind that invitation because some object that the speaker or ideas that the speaker has expressed are unacceptable. The Institute seems to have lost sight of that very basic principle in this case, and in doing so has subverted its own institutional mission to foster the free exchange of ideas.

I should add that the MIT president has now posted a public letter to the campus community about the incident here.

Has any major political movement been as thoroughly expunged from popular memory as the anti-globalisation movement? Two decades ago, the dominant opinion on the Left was that globalisation was a destructive and exploitative innovation of international capitalism to be fought. In Seattle in 1999, and in Genoa in 2001, thousands of protestors from across the world gathered to protest against the signing of the transnational trade treaties that accelerated the spread of globalisation, cheered on by the organs of Left opinion.
A BBC article from 2001 notes that opponents of globalisation believe “it leads to exploitation of the world’s poor, workers, and the environment; “makes it easier for rich companies to act with less accountability: and “that countries’ individual cultures are becoming overpowered by Americanisation.” On the other hand, “those in favour of globalisation claim it “should make everyone richer… [while] trade links can encourage countries to respect human rights”.
Twenty years on, it is clear that the opponents of globalisation were entirely correct, and the supporters were utterly wrong. And yet, their brains broken by Brexit, Britain’s liberal commentariat continue to advocate globalised food supply chains purely as a result of Remainer tribalism.

The BBC’s neutral tone at the turn of the millennium is almost unimaginable in today’s hysterical discourse, where opposition to globalisation has been re-coded as a political signifier, entirely randomly, from a reasoned Left-wing argument to an irrational prejudice of reactionary and probably racist deplorables. Likewise, the Left has seemingly abandoned its commitment to localisation and the preservation of unionised, national labour in favour of cosmopolitan dreams of unfettered globalisation.
In Britain this bizarre polar inversion is manifest in the political discourse over the current supply chain crisis. The fundamental problem causing empty shelves in Britain today is not Brexit itself, but the over-complexity of supply chains maximised for efficiency in good times, but which are dangerously fragile whenever the system meets a shock. By over attenuating supply chains on a global scale, and centralising food production for the benefit of the supermarkets, the system was unable to cope with the pandemic’s cascading aftershocks, from energy crises to labour shortages, still working themselves through the global economy. 
Suggested readingIs Boris taking us back to the Seventies?By Dominic Sandbrook
This is a global supply chain crisis caused by a worldwide slow-motion, but accelerating collapse of globalisation. As the American economist Matt Stoller underlines, globalisation “has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.” Now, we’re beginning to see what it looks like when it doesn’t. 
Take meat processing as an example. For decades, in search of efficiency, supermarkets have centralised the processing of meat in gigantic mega-abattoirs, forcing small regional abattoirs to close and crowding out local farmers. The working environment in these places is so appalling and exploitative, and the pay so low, that they can only be staffed by immigrants from poorer regions of the world. As a result, more than two thirds of Britain’s meat processing labour force is made up of migrants, making the nation’s food supply dependent on the free flow of foreign labour, and on the nationwide distribution of live animals and processed meat to a tiny number of centralised hubs. 
This is an entirely unsustainable as well as immoral state of affairs. As the commentator Richard North, an expert on the meat industry, observes, the number of abattoirs in Britain has shrunk “from 3,326 units in the 1960s to a mere 156 in 2020”, with the result that “the meat industry structure in the UK is already so concentrated as to be unsustainable”. As soon as the system meets a shock, as it has now, it is unable to cope..
Yet even before the current shock, the centralisation of meat production was eroding the resilience of Britain’s food supply. In 2018, 34 separate organisations, from the National Trust to the Women’s Institute and the RSPCA, lobbied the Government to halt the collapse of Britain’s network of small regional abattoirs, “a huge national asset” closing “at an alarming rate”. As Christopher Price of the Rare Breed Survival Trust observes has noted, “large scale abattoirs require workers to carry out highly specific, often highly mechanised, procedures as part of the slaughtering process and employ relatively large numbers of narrower skilled, lower paid people in one location”. Instead, the Government should support the creation of more local and smaller abattoirs, “where each worker is required to be more highly and multi-skilled, with the flexibility for part-time work”. This would benefit rural areas where local employment is rare and “facilitate the creation of new premium markets for distinctive meat products from local breeds and the expansion of related businesses such as butchers and farm shops”.
But instead, this vital opportunity to reform the sector into one dependent on high-skilled, high-paid labour working in significantly better conditions is being squandered. Instead, cheered on by their useful idiots in Britain’s commentator class, the corporate food lobby has leaned on the Government to re-open the floodgates to low-paid migrant labour, keeping a broken and exploitative system on artificial life support. 
The current system is simply unsustainable and exploitative to agricultural workers. As the radical Left farming union the Landworkers’ Alliance noted in their 2016 manifesto, “the rural economy… is vulnerable to competition from global markets and to aggressive price bargaining from cartels of processors and distributors (supermarkets)” with the result that “less than ten per cent of earnings from the UK food industry go to UK farmers and fishermen”. 
Suggested readingDon't blame Brexit for shortagesBy Philip Pilkington
Already, the labour shortage is allowing farm workers to demand higher wages, a process which should be allowed to continue, not just because it’s fair but also because it builds resilience into the system. A Britain where the farming sector is forced into decline by global competition is a Britain highly vulnerable to global shocks of the kind we are experiencing now. And yet, as the Landworkers’ Alliance warned back in 2017, the corporate farming lobby is addicted to the current system, with organisations that have the Governments’ ear like the National Farmers Union “more focussed on developing super-efficient mega-farms capable of competing in a cut-throat global market, than in producing the bulk of the UK’s food supply through a network of secure family farms”. 
The globalisation of supply lines according to the logic of the free market is also a disaster for the environment. As a Greenpeace investigation revealed last week, the growing consolidation of Britain’s dairy industry into a handful of American-style megadairies is allowing global food corporations to feed cows soybeans sourced from Brazil’s endangered Cerrado ecoregion. The impact has been profound: it has accelerated deforestation and global warming, forced cows to live in miserable and unnatural indoors conditions in giant sheds and driven small dairy farmers here in Britain out of business. 
Yet aside from moral questions, the supply chain of soybeans is also extremely liable to disruption in times of crisis, such as the drought — the worst in over a century — currently devastating Brazil’s farming sector. Shortages of soybeans caused by environmental collapse in Brazil or by blockages in the global shipping system will mean future shortages of milk and cheese, an absurd situation in a country like Britain blessed with abundant rainfall and lush grass. 
Such built-in vulnerabilities are dangerous as we head into an era of permanent crisis. Indeed, as the Left-wing economist James Meadway warns, though Brexit has exacerbated Britain’s exposure to supply chain disruption, “it is a parochial mistake to single out Britain’s leaving the EU as the primary cause of the crisis”. Rather, what we are experiencing “is the first tremors of the generalised environmental collapse of this century. Gas prices are not going to come down any time soon, and the supply chain crisis will not be resolved this year — or even next.” 
Crisis is the new normal: and to sustain the very basic good of food security, Britain will have to become more self-reliant, decentralising supply chains in pursuit of resilience rather than efficiency and reshoring food production as far as is possible. This isn’t a leap back to the Middle Ages, as online critics howl: Britain was 78% self-sufficient in food as late as the 1980s, and returning to localised production and supply chains should be considered a vital strategic goal.
And yet, in a stunning example of cognitive dissonance, we see liberal commentators who warn of the looming catastrophe of climate collapse simultaneously arguing that fragile globalised supply chains are somehow both desirable and permanent. Like the famous quote that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it seems it’s easier for these people to imagine total civilisational collapse than not being able to eat Kenyan strawberries in midwinter. 
The Left-wing anti-globalisation protestors of twenty years ago were right then, and their newly localist conservative successors are right now. Instead of mocking the Government’s tentative steps towards re-localisation of the nation’s food supply as the backwards fantasies of nostalgic Brexiteers, our stubbornly parochial Remainer comment class should for once step back and observe the changing world around them. 
The global supply chain crisis is forcing the Conservatives to abandon their free-trading dreams as neoliberal ideology gets crushed by stark reality. This is an unalloyed good, and should be supported and encouraged as far as possible. The Government is correct to say that today’s supply chain meltdown is “a failure of the free market and not of the state” and that businesses “have become drunk on cheap labour”. The current crisis is an opportunity to rebalance Britain’s food system into a fairer and more resilient model, and the Government, finally being forced towards good policy by events outside its control, needs to hold its nerve. 

(Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images.)Let’s start with a story. It began in 2011 when Vanderbilt University issued an ultimatum to religious student groups—affirm the school’s nondiscrimination policy or face expulsion from campus. While the groups universally condemned invidious discrimination (“invidious” is a legal term that means “arbitrary, irrational and not reasonably related to a legitimate purpose”), they did engage in creedal discrimination. In other words, they required their leaders to share the religious beliefs and values of the religious organization.The university, by contrast, demanded that religious groups open membership and leadership to all-comers, regardless of religious beliefs. Not only was the policy inconsistently applied (fraternities and sororities didn’t have to open their doors to women and men, respectively), it was nonsensical. Let’s remove the religious dimension for a moment. Should College Republicans be open to Democratic leadership? Should gun control activists be open to leadership by gun enthusiasts? The very notion is absurd. At the time, I was a full-time religious liberties litigator, but in this instance my role was to advise the ministries, not sue the university. Vanderbilt is a private university, and so we knew that litigation was not only certain to fail, it was a bad idea. Private institutions should be free to fashion policies that comport with their values. If those were the values Vanderbilt wanted to uphold, then it had the right. Our goal was persuade Vanderbilt to respect freedom of association and religious freedom.That effort was led by a remarkable advocate, a campus minister named Tish Harrison Warren who is one of the kindest and most intelligent Christians I know. We were profoundly different in many ways, I was a Christian conservative lawyer, Reaganite in my outlook, and neck-deep in Republican politics. Tish was far more progressive. I was an Iraq War veteran. She was a pacifist. As she wrote, years later:I thought I was an acceptable kind of evangelical. I'm not a fundamentalist. My friends and I enjoy art, alcohol, and cultural engagement. We avoid spiritual clichés and buzzwords. We value authenticity, study, racial reconciliation, and social and environmental justice.So she hoped, when she approached the administration, that she was the “right kind of Christian,” the kind of person the administration would accept. I was the wrong messenger, but she was the right messenger. We thought she had a chance to persuade. We were wrong. She was wrong. In 2014 she told the story in a viral article in Christianity Today.  Here’s the key excerpt:But as I met with other administrators, the tone began to change. The word discrimination began to be used—a lot—specifically in regard to creedal requirements. It was lobbed like a grenade to end all argument. Administrators compared Christian students to 1960s segregationists. I once mustered courage to ask them if they truly thought it was fair to equate racial prejudice with asking Bible study leaders to affirm the Resurrection. The vice chancellor replied, “Creedal discrimination is still discrimination.”Feeling battered, I talked with my InterVarsity supervisor. He responded with a wry smile, “But we’re moderates!” We thought we were nuanced and reasonable. The university seemed to think of us as a threat.For me, it was revolutionary, a reorientation of my place in the university and in culture.I began to realize that inside the church, the territory between Augustine of Hippo and Jerry Falwell seems vast, and miles lie between Ron Sider and Pat Robertson. But in the eyes of the university (and much of the press), subscribers to broad Christian orthodoxy occupy the same square foot of cultural space.The line between good and evil was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.As we fought to keep a Christian foothold on campus (Vanderbilt held firm, but creative workarounds helped ministries maintain a presence), we were constantly reminded of a plain and simple fact: It doesn’t matter how winsome or humble you are, if you seek to hold biblical truth, you will face direct opposition, and not all of it will be kind or just. Christians, after all, are in the world, but we are not of the world. As Jesus said in John 15, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”What is Tish doing now? Here’s the twist. She’s the same kind, orthdox Christian I’ve always known. She’s also a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and a writer for the New York Times, where she publishes a weekly faith-based newsletter that’s one of my favorite reads. Me? Well, I hung up my litigation spurs after 21 years of courtroom fights and now I’m here at The Dispatch, and a columnist for Time. I’ve had the privilege of writing for all the publications I grew up reading and admiring from afar—including The Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. What happened to us? I guess we sold out. We craved the applause of the elite just too darn much. Or, just maybe, something else is going on. I wrote that long intro because the Evangelical intellectual world is in the midst of a days-long fight over the new world we live in. It’s a fight that looks like it’s over one thing—the convictions or accommodations of a slice of the Evangelical elite—but it’s really over another, the fundamental disruption and transformation of the American culture war. A bit of background is in order. Last weekend, the Evangelical internet erupted with a biting critique from a surprising source. Mark Galli, the formerly Evangelical (he’s now Catholic) former editor of Christianity Today, arguably the most “elite” journal in American Evangelicalism, wrote an essay condemning “elite Evangelicalism.” The essay referenced various named “elite” Evangelical institutions (including Christianity Today) and prominent former Southern Baptists Russell Moore and Beth Moore, and me. According to Galli, we represent “a form of cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion.”“These evangelicals,” he says, “want to appear respectable to the elite of American culture.” Galli continues:[N]ow the mark of a successful evangelical writer is to get published regularly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s interesting about such pieces is that (a) such writers make a point that affirms the view of the secular publication (on topics like environmental care, racial injustice, sexual abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evangelicals should take the same point of view. However, their writing doesn’t reach the masses of evangelicals who take a contrary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writers are really interested in getting those evangelicals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the mainstream press. Better to try to get such a column published in the most popular Pentecostal outlet, Charisma. Ah, but that would do nothing to enhance the prestige of evangelicals among the culture’s elite.Writing in First Things, respected scholar and author Carl Trueman mounted much the same critique:Within Christian circles, particularly those of the leadership class and its associated institutions, the desire to appease religion’s cultured despisers has become a powerful force. Like Schleiermacher, those who hold to this vision think that a winning strategy involves standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the despisers. This no longer means conformity to the canons of academic discourse, the well-­considered position advanced by Noll and Marsden. It means echoing woke outrage. And, where possible, it means laying the blame for Christianity’s failure to meet elite standards on other Christians, typically on those who stand to the right of the “good Christians” politically and beneath them economically and socially.He continued with rather biting mockery of people who’ve faced in some cases an avalanche of hatred and threats to their lives and the lives of their families, sneering at how “leading #NeverTrumpers suffered like Shakespearean tragic heroes at the hands of Trumpite Twitter mobs.” These attacks represent little more than a variation of the “D.C. cocktail party” critique that’s been thrown in the face of conservative critics of Trump since day one. We allegedly don’t have convictions. Instead, we’re auditioning for membership in an exclusive club. In fact, Trueman calls the “militant” Evangelical support for Trump “a gift to evangelical elites.” It didn’t feel much like a “gift” to me. Moreover, the attribution of motives is even more mystifying given the actual body of work of most “elite Evangelicals” who write for “mainstream” or “elite” media publications. Yes, I’ve certainly critiqued Donald Trump and Trumpist evangelicalism in mainstream media outlets, but I’ve also done that in conservative media as well (reaching exactly the audience that may not care about the Times but does care about National Review). No one can credibly accuse me of speaking only to audiences who want to read or hear what I write or say.In “mainstream media” and anywhere and everywhere else I write, I occupy the same positions. Just to take a few examples, I’ve argued that the DOJ should have charged Hillary Clinton, defended gun rights, defended Trump’s strike against Qasem Suleimani, argued in favor of civil rights litigation to combat toxic wokeness, and critiqued Facebook’s reliance on vague “hate speech” codes to regulate public discourse. If we want to dive into the most hot-button of culture war issues, I’ve also sharply critiqued Roe v. Wade, judicial supremacy, and the excesses of the Equality Act. I’ve written more defenses of life, religious liberty and free speech than I can count. But my little defensive screed is just an introduction to my real point. The Galli and Trueman critiques miss the extent to which the era of Trump created a disruption that is realigning parts of the right and parts of the left. Why would people like me write differently about race than we did in years past? Perhaps because we were exposed to shocking and shattering things that we’d never thought we’d see. We began writing differently about race not because we saw a market opportunity but because we perceived a desperate need. And, if you’re like me, you’re more than a little ashamed that we didn’t see earlier things we plainly should have perceived. The deeper reality is that both left and right are changing in important ways. At the same time that parts of the left are becoming more militant and intolerant, another part is becoming more curious and open. The same thing is true on the right. Writing on his Substack, Freddie deBoer powerfully described the dynamic on the left. “There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared.” That dynamic also exists on the right. And slowly but surely, as right-wing and left-wing intolerance persists and metastasizes, the different islands of misfit toys—the consistent critics of illiberalism—are finding each other. To put it more plainly, the older culture war categories are being supplemented and sometimes supplanted by a new confrontation between liberalism and illiberalism. While illiberal right and illiberal left snarl at anyone not in their tribes, the liberal right and the liberal left are forming new relationships and new alliances.I can’t speak for every member of my segment of the so-called “Evangelical elite” (truth be told, everyone in this fight is part of the “elite”) but much of my writing and much of my work these past five years has been dedicated to helping nurture these alliances. And the relationship is mutual. There are people of good will on the left who want to hear dissenting opinions and who want to know what conservatives think. We want to hear from each other.As a matter of principle, these alliances are dedicated to the rule of law, racial equality, the marketplace of ideas, and the fundamental integrity of our constitutional republic. As a matter of policy, we still have profound disagreements (most importantly over Roe) but also recognize important areas where we can make common cause.And one area of common cause is, of course, race. In his piece, Trueman writes this:Let me put it bluntly: Talking in an outraged voice about racism within the boundaries set by the woke culture is an excellent way of not talking about the pressing moral issues on which ­Christianity and the culture are opposed to each other: LGBTQ+ rights and abortion.Let me respond bluntly: If you’re not seeing how reactionary politics and intolerant “anti-woke” militancy are manifesting themselves on the right, then you’re not seeing how Christianity and large segments of the new right are opposed to each other. A godless and hateful movement is taking root in all too many American pews, often (and perversely) spread in the name of Christ. Tish went from leading a ministry tossed out of Vanderbilt to the pages of the Times without altering her fundamental faith convictions. I can say that of any number of elite Evangelicals who are frequent targets of the Trump right. I’m still pro-life, as anyone knows anything about my writing or my podcasts can immediately attest. I’ve written recently and repeatedly that the Supreme Court should overturn Roe. I’m a longtime supporter of religious liberty (and all civil liberties). By the time I joined National Review full-time in 2015, there were few (if any) attorneys in the entire United States who’d successfully sued more universities than me. I haven’t backed away one inch from the First Amendment. But I think it’s a tremendous mistake for Evangelicals, including elite Evangelicals, to define their public and political engagement primarily through those issues. This is especially true when a disproportionate number of Evangelical Trumpists are actively harming their communities and neighbors by embracing authoritarianism, conspiracies, and anti-vaccine activism. The message that’s sent (and received) in these communities is that their Christian duty is being discharged by their orthodox stances on sex, gender, and abortion. In other areas and in other ways, the Evangelical id runs wild, and so long so long as Christians stay strong on sex, how elitist of you to suggest broader concerns. But for all their bluster about the courage to confront the culture on sex, there are Evangelicals who have much to explain.Last week Albert Mohler, the influential president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, tweeted this:Albert Mohler @albertmohlerFrom a recent edition of #TheBriefing. Listen at the link: bit.ly/3lBkj7Y October 14th 20219 Retweets34 LikesWhat a remarkable statement. First, there are millions of members of “the left,” including believers and nonbelievers, who exhibit extraordinary virtues and reject all the vices above. In fact, wasn’t the #MeToo movement itself a decisive rejection of unrestrained eros, impulses, and power? And second, in 2020 Al Mohler urged Christians to vote for a man who paid hush money to porn stars, bragged about groping women, and once appeared in a movie called Playboy Video Centerfold: Playmate 2000 Bernaola Twins. Trump exhibited and personified each of the sins Mohler attributes to “the left.” His unbridled ambition and lust for power would have broken our republic had his plan for January 6 been fulfilled.It’s not 2011 any longer. Ancient religious orthodoxies are still true, but old culture war categories are crumbling. One set of Christian elites is in conflict with another. Absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we should treat these differences as matters of conviction, not accommodation, and those of us who see the challenges of systemic racism, metastasizing cruelty, and reactionary authoritarianism right alongside threats to unborn life and religious liberty are saying what we believe, not merely seeking the applause of the progressive crowd. One last thing …I’ve spent this weekend at a cabin in Tennessee catching up with the friends I served with in Iraq. They’re great men who’ve done remarkable things for this country. Our conversations took us all back to one of the hardest years of our lives. During my deployment there was one hymn that comforted me above all others. It’s called “In Christ Alone,” and this stanza in particular comforted me at a time when life itself seemed so uncertain, and the power of hell felt never closer nor more strong. No guilt in life, no fear in deathThis is the power of Christ in meFrom life's first cry to final breathJesus commands my destinyNo power of hell, no scheme of manCan ever pluck me from His handTill He returns or calls me homeHere in the power of Christ I'll standHere’s one of my favorite renditions, by Shane & Shane. I hope it blesses you half as much as it blessed me:

In 1640, in The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic, Thomas Hobbes mischievously observed that "a democracy, in effect, is no more than an aristocracy of orators." From silver-tongued statesmen to clever sophists and crude demagogues, the best talkers, Hobbes suggested, subvert democratic equality by stirring the people's passions, shaping the public's agenda, and commandeering the majority's will. Two millennia earlier, Aristotle illuminated a deeper obstacle to democracy's egalitarian aims: Even where all are committed to democratic deliberation, some few are bound to stand out—winning praise, acquiring status and renown, and exciting jealousy and resentment—for their rare dedication to, and their singular labors to achieve, the common good. The aspiration to excel and the striving to distinguish oneself from the crowd, apparently, are woven into the fabric of human nature and set limits on equality's reach and the just claims of community and the common good.
Harvard professor Michael Sandel has a talent for talking about equality—and gesturing at community, invoking the common good, and appealing to justice—that has lifted him to the top of his profession and brought him fame and fortune. Although his velvety prose and adroit equivocations tend to obscure the premises and implications of his reasoning, he has consistently maintained over the course of a long career that the greatest threat to equality, community, the common good, and justice in America is freedom in America.
In The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?, which was published to national and international acclaim last year and issued this year in paperback with a new prologue, the distinguished Harvard professor argues that the antagonism in America between equality, community, the common good, and justice, on the one side, and freedom on the other has reached catastrophic proportions. Amid the bitter divide in the United States between progressive elites and conservative-leaning middle-class and working-class voters, Sandel elaborates the sensational claim that it is meritocracy—the view, central to the modern tradition of freedom, that a "just society" provides all individuals "an equal chance to rise as far as their talent and hard work will take them"—that is tearing the United States apart. It turns out, however, that Sandel is not opposed to the rule of every form of merit. The thrust of his argument indicates that he wishes to replace the allegedly despotic rule of technocrats, economists, and financiers with the ostensibly refined and compassionate rule of experts in moral reasoning capable of leading national conversations about a common good in America that, in his telling, has been and remains elusive.
The oddities and incongruities of Sandel's mature views already appear in his earliest successes in the 1980s as a young professor in Harvard University's Department of Government (I taught there in the 1990s). As he has accumulated accolades over his 40 years in residence on the banks of the Charles River, the tensions have intensified between the equality and community that he preaches and the exclusive personal brand that he has assiduously burnished and globally marketed.
His first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, was published in 1982 and made his name. In the fashion of the day, the highly theoretical work lazily assumed that the modern tradition of freedom culminated in Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls's 1971 magnum opus, A Theory of Justice. Sandel's critique of Rawls, and by implication of the modern tradition of freedom—reaching back to John Locke and including Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek—revolves around an invidious contrast between a rights-based politics that protects the freedom of the individual and a properly democratic and just politics grounded in community and dedicated to the common good. The book led astray generations of graduate students—who carried their confusion into their scholarship and teaching and disseminated it far and wide—by suggesting that to affirm that individuals are by nature free and equal is to cast off moral constraint, deny the social side of our humanity, and disregard or disparage the goods people can enjoy only in common. Sandel's subsequent books—on democracy, bioethics, the limits of the market, and justice—never wander far from the accusation that the root cause of injustice in America is the attachment to individual freedom.
In the 1980s, Sandel launched a Harvard class called "Justice" that quickly surpassed the competition in popularity. In the spirit of his writings, the course has tended to cast aspersions on individual freedom in the name of equality, community, justice, and the common good. At the same time, the class has elevated the professor's status and boosted demand for his services. In the 1980s, the course served as a star vehicle for Sandel within Harvard. In the internet age, Harvard made the course available online, turning him into an international intellectual celebrity, not least in the People's Republic of China.
The Harvard course typically features Sandel holding forth alone on a grand stage in an ornate theater, on occasion in front of more than 1,000 students. Orchestrating the examination of select opinions about morality and politics and their application to a carefully chosen set of public policy issues, the professor poses questions to the massive audience and plays off the responses offered by the small number of students who have the chance to participate. In the guise of facilitating conversation, Sandel dons the persona of the consummate high-brow talk-show host and draws attention to himself as the master of ceremonies. Within the framework of a course touted as preparation for the assumption of civic responsibilities, Sandel reinforces the conceit that the apex of civic life consists in demonstrating publicly one's capacity to reason abstractly about morality.
The Tyranny of Merit refines, extends, and updates Sandel's career-long effort to expose the oppressiveness and delusions of individual freedom. America's "market-driven, meritocratic ethic" replaces his first book's culprit—"the unencumbered self"—as the principal adversary. Rooted in the commonsense American conviction that individuals should be free to develop their talents, advance their interests, and enjoy what they earn and acquire, the meritocratic ethic, according to Sandel, has been embraced and purified over the last four decades by the left as well as the right, and, thanks to the support of both parties, has achieved ascendancy within American politics.
The cost has been staggering, contends Sandel. Meritocracy "fueled resentment and prompted the backlash" that in 2016 resulted in Donald Trump's election as president of the United States. Left unfettered, Sandel counsels, the meritocratic ethic will further fray "our social bonds and respect for one another" and intensify citizens' estrangement from "a politics of the common good."
The contest for admissions to elite colleges and universities, according to the longtime Harvard professor, epitomizes the tyranny of merit. By basing admissions on students' ability and talent, higher education sends a toxic message: The admitted are winners who have earned the social status and remunerative and prestigious jobs conferred by a degree from a top institution of higher education while the rejected are losers who deserve an inferior social rank and lower incomes.
Sandel has a point—about the elites. Harvard does exude a sense of superiority. And the propensity to equate success in one endeavor—say graduation from, or a perch on the faculty at, an elite university—with excellence in many domains and the entitlement to status, wealth, and power is a common human failing.
But Sandel's depiction of the balance of power in higher education bears little relation to elite campuses. At Harvard and elsewhere, an expanding dictatorship of grievance increasingly enfeebles the commitment to merit, at least insofar as merit is understood in the spirit of liberal education—that is, acquiring knowledge, pursuing the truth, thinking independently, and maintaining a community devoted to free and open inquiry.
Consistent with familiar progressive concerns, Sandel himself calls attention to the longstanding practice at Harvard and elsewhere of relaxing standards to admit the children of wealthy alumni. He does not so much as mention, however, the multiplicity of assaults on merit at our best universities spearheaded by progressives to promote intellectual homogeneity.
These include the attacks on free speech—from the policing of microaggressions to the harassment and disinviting of outside speakers; the gutting of due process; the hollowing and politicization of the curriculum; the disparate evaluation of highly qualified Asian candidates in the apparent effort to meet affirmative-action targets; the inflating of grades; and the allocation of substantial resources to build diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies the purpose of which is to achieve proportional representation of races by discriminating based on skin color. A modicum of attention to his own university would have revealed to Sandel that far from exercising tyranny, merit—grounded in talent and drive—is in danger of subjugation by the forces of social justice, progressively understood.
With the assistance of a brief, eccentric history of merit—which dwells on the Bible while neglecting Plato and Aristotle and relies heavily on the German sociologist Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism while mostly ignoring the progressive and conservative traditions in America—Sandel himself shows that recognition of the claims of merit is nothing new. Yet he insists that something important has changed: "Over the past four decades, the language of merit and deservingness has become central to public discourse."
Sandel points the finger at two market-friendly conservatives: President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. By embracing technocracy—"the belief that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good"—and globalization, Reagan and Thatcher established merit's tyranny, according to Sandel. Their market-friendly progressive successors, President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair, carried forward the replacement of moral reflection and political judgment in public affairs with economic efficiency. While spurring prodigious economic growth, technocracy and globalization also produced, Sandel emphasizes, vast inequalities and stagnant wages that exacerbated pride among the elites while inflaming resentment among those left behind.
Sandel's assertion—central to his case against meritocracy—that political elites have been enthralled by economic efficiency to the exclusion of other considerations cannot be squared with reality. Take, for example, President Clinton's failed 1993-1994 attempt to reform health care, the successful 1996 compromise welfare-reform bill negotiated with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and the 1999 Kosovo intervention. These enterprises were followed by President George W. Bush’s Faith-Based & Community Initiative and No Child Left Behind Act along with the global war on terror. Then there was President Barack Obama's nearly trillion-dollar 2009 stimulus package, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the 2015 Iran deal (JCPOA). President Donald Trump reimposed control over America's southern border, renegotiated—particularly with China—trade deals, and, in 2018, abrogated the Iran deal. And now President Joe Biden has opened the southern border; advanced a massive, entitlement-laden spending package; proceeded with a national vaccine mandate; and promulgated throughout the federal bureaucracy guidelines for evaluating employees that emphasize the identity group to which they belong and their contribution to the achievement of proportional representation of races in the workforce. He also pursued reentry to the JCPOA, precipitously withdrew from Afghanistan, and, with the appointment of John Kerry as special presidential envoy, has been pushing for a climate-change deal with China.
Say what you will for or against these major undertakings stretching across five presidencies and almost 30 years; none can be explained exclusively or even primarily as aimed at "satisfying consumer preferences as measured by the gross domestic product."
To his credit, Sandel calls out his fellow credentialed elites for their bias against less-educated people, which he aptly refers to as "the last acceptable prejudice." He laments the "[e]lite disparagement of the working class" as evinced in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s ugly description in 2016 of Trump voters as "deplorables," and then-candidate Barack Obama’s grim and condescending characterization in 2008 of small-town Pennsylvanians as clinging bitterly to guns, religion, bigotry, and anti-immigration and anti-trade sentiment. He urges the affluent and influential to recognize that by creating a society open to effort and ability, meritocracy in the United States "encourages the winners to consider their success their own doing, a measure of their virtue—and to look down on those less fortunate than themselves" while disposing elites "to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way." He warns that it is a mistake to interpret the populist wave that Trump rode into the White House "mainly in economic terms, as a protest against job losses brought about by global trade and new technologies." Populist discontent, Sandel stresses, reflects justified resentment of a new "hereditary aristocracy" whose wealth, status, and power enable them to pass on to their children the training and skills to win admissions to the finest universities and thus retain for their families and their class the most prestigious and powerful jobs.
Try as he might, though, Sandel cannot escape the prejudices of the progressive elite in which he holds a high rank. For example, while criticizing the tendency to "denounce the upsurge of populist nationalism as little more than a racist, xenophobic reaction against immigrants and multiculturalism," he encourages the belief among fellow progressives that the bigotry on the other side of the aisle is, while not the whole story, real and consequential. In his account, moreover, middle-class and working-class Americans, especially those lacking a college degree, suffer from "nagging self-doubt: perhaps the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor; maybe the losers are complicit in their misfortune after all." Such skewed assessments, the result of attempting empathy from a distance rather than talking and listening to Trump voters, fosters the elite conviction that ordinary people are right to believe that society has stuck them with the short end of the stick.
Many members of the middle class and working class, however, see things differently. They do not believe that life outside the tony precincts of blue America is a cause for regret or a mark of shame.
Sandel generally overlooks that many Americans are more likely to disdain Harvard for its haughtiness and for the pretensions of its faculty and graduates to impose their progressive views and preferences on the entire nation than to aspire to send their children there. He fails to consider that substantial numbers of Americans are proud of their local way of life, have no yearning to live in Manhattan or Silicon Valley, and mostly want progressive elites to mind their own business. And for the most part he ignores the abundant evidence that the anger and the resentment of the people who live beyond urban centers and the wealthy suburbs that surround them stem from the political class's faulty conduct: Many members of communities in red America believe that elites have recklessly opened the southern border and suspended immigration laws; promiscuously spent taxpayer dollars with little concern for the long-term effects on the nation's fiscal health; tarnished America's good name by bungling wars and diplomacy; converted much of the mainstream media into a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party; mobilized powerful government agencies—the IRS, the FBI, and the Department of Justice—against the conservative grassroots as well as its democratically chosen standard-bearer; and, not least, transformed the educational system—from kindergarten through graduate and professional education—into an assembly line for the reproduction of leftist ideology.
Despite the many causes for concern, including a few vague doubts that he himself raises, Sandel rejects the possibility that the primary problem with meritocracy in America is the failure of many members of our intellectual and political elites to perform their jobs well. Instead, he sets out to discredit the very idea that human beings deserve the fruits of their labor.
Sandel directs—against meritocracy and in favor of government regulation and redistribution—an argument that 40 years ago he faulted John Rawls for employing in favor of government regulation and redistribution. In his first book, Sandel observed that Rawls' contention that our "assets and attributes" are "arbitrary from a moral point of view" undercuts moral judgment and the ascription of responsibility: "the self is left bare," wrote Sandel, "of any substantive feature or characteristic that could qualify as a desert base." The veteran Sandel, however, relies on the flawed argument exposed by the young Sandel, the better to discredit meritocracy. Or, rather, a strawman version of meritocracy.
On the ridiculous assumption that defenders of merit typically subscribe to the extreme view that "we are, as individuals, wholly responsible for our fate," Sandel maintains that our talents and character are not of our own making but rather a result of external causes—whether favorable genetic inheritances, divine providence, nurturing environments, or the good fortune to live in a society that rewards our specific talents, including the talent for effort. He tendentiously and without argument classifies all that as luck. Since "we do not merit or deserve the benefits (or burdens) that derive from luck," Sandel reasons, we cannot reasonably claim responsibility for our actions and the results they produce. So, for example, fathers and mothers who relentlessly drive their children to set aside all else in the competition to gain acceptance to the best colleges can't be held accountable for the anxiety and fragility they induce in their offspring, because the parents' disposition to equate happiness with an Ivy League degree is itself—like all passions, thoughts, and deeds—a result of the luck of the draw.
In passing, Sandel recognizes what is at stake: "The meritocratic argument," he writes, "is above all a claim about human agency and freedom."
It is pertinent to add that the anti-meritocratic argument that he employs for tactical advantage—that individuals deserve no credit for their virtues and, it follows, no blame for their vices—represents a radical break with the American constitutional tradition and the moral and intellectual sources that sustain it. Sandel's reduction of character to the remorseless laws of cause and effect or to arbitrary chance assumes the falsity of biblical faith's teaching that human beings are made in the image of God and classical political philosophy's account of natural right. It cannot be reconciled with the belief in the rights shared equally by all on which America is founded. It flies in the face of James Madison's observation in Federalist 10—reflecting the Constitution's moral and political premises—that "the first object of government" is "the protection" of human beings' diverse capabilities and qualities, and the equal protection of the unequal attainments that inevitably result. And it opens the door to authoritarian schemes of centralized social and economic control and radical redistribution.
Having gone to philosophical extremes—and thereby legitimating political extremes—to combat the tyranny of merit, Sandel offers tepid proposals to rescue America from the crisis that he insists engulfs the nation. His principal education initiative involves establishing for the fewer-than-2,000 places in each Harvard entering class a "lottery of the qualified" among the tens of thousands of applicants who each year meet a high threshold of achievement. This, he suggests, would contain the pride of those admitted and soften the envy and resentment of those denied admission. His main recommendations concerning the economy include wage subsidies for low-income workers; tighter federal regulation of trade, outsourcing, and immigration; and "shifting the tax burden from work to consumption and speculation."
If this is the best Sandel has to offer in the face of a tyranny that he believes is wrecking the body politic and ravaging citizens' ability to contemplate a common good, then it is hard to resist the conclusion that he is, from his own point of view, a quisling or a fabulist. If he believes that the United States embodies a cruel and grievously unjust meritocracy, his modest reforms—which call for little sacrifice from himself and his colleagues while empowering his class by expanding government’s power—render him a collaborator with, and a profiteer from, a soul-destroying regime. If he believes that his underwhelming measures are proportional to the problem, then his sustained resort to the language of tyranny makes him a fabulist, concocting a scandalous accusation against freedom in the United States that could hardly have been better calculated to keep the author’s rewards rolling in from fellow elites at home and overseas, who take pride in denouncing America.
Numerous minor flaws in Sandel’s book betray the sheltered progressive sphere in which he operates. For example, the disgraceful criminal trespass at the U.S. Capitol and interference with vital government functions by Trump supporters on January 6 was not, as Sandel writes, "a violent siege," which implies a military operation. Sandel omits mention of the many—right and left—who preceded him in illuminating the destabilizing divide between credentialed technocratic elites in America and the people, including James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (1941), Mickey Kaus in The End of Equality (1992), Charles Murray in Coming Apart (2012), and David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere (2017). Sandel belittles Trump voters' nationalism as "intolerant" and "vengeful" though for the most part they want to preserve tolerant local communities from imperious federal regulation and to put America's vital interests at the center of American foreign policy. He asserts that classical liberal Friedrich Hayek "viewed the welfare state as antithetical to freedom" despite Hayek's explicit affirmation in The Road to Serfdom, his most influential work, that the preservation of freedom is consistent with a genuine social-safety net. And, absurdly, Sandel asserts that while receding in the United States, the American dream is "flourishing" in China—where the Chinese Communist Party confines approximately one million Uyghurs in concentration camps; deprives Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians, and Christians of religious liberty; subjects the entire nation to dissent-crushing, high-tech surveillance; terminated Hong Kong's freedom last year in flagrant violation of China's international obligations and stepped up its threats to do the same to Taiwan; and, in every region of the world, is at work fashioning an international order more congenial to authoritarian government.
The fundamental flaw in Sandel's book is the organizing conviction that the principal source of America's political pathologies is the "exhilarating promise of individual freedom," which spawns a "harsh ethic of success" that weakens democracy, generates injustice, and obscures the common good. The instances of meritocratic excess that Sandel reasonably criticizes reflect not a working out of the premises of individual freedom but rather the failure of progressive elites to understand freedom's promise and to cultivate the virtues, associations, and institutions that enable citizens to honor it. That failure stems in no small measure from an educational system—especially higher education, which trains K-12 teachers—that neglects the principles of freedom when it doesn't inculcate scorn for them. Sandel's abiding antipathy for freedom and persisting puzzlement over the common good are symptoms of the problem.
Although it has eluded Sandel for 40 years and counting, the common good in the United States is neither hidden nor mysterious. It is proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, institutionalized in the Constitution, and woven into the fabric of American history. It consists in securing, and exercising responsibly, the rights shared equally by all. America's common good is suited to a people of diverse religious beliefs and a multiplicity of views about how to live a decent and fulfilling life. It is achieved through the establishment of a limited government that focuses on protecting individual rights rather than dictating matters of conscience and legislating morality.
The Constitution provides abundant mechanisms, not least its ultimate reliance on the people, for adjusting course and promoting justice. And it offers citizens remarkable opportunities to practice their faith or do without faith; enjoy and care for their families; study, work, and acquire property; join together in an endless variety of voluntary associations; maintain, exit, and enter communities; debate public affairs, vote for the candidates most likely to effectively represent their views and interests, and, when the spirit moves, run for office; and pursue happiness as they understand it consistent with the toleration of the like pursuit of happiness by others.
Liberal democracy in America can never have too many citizens gifted in, and excelling at, preserving and improving our nation’s constitutional heritage.
The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Picador Paper, 288 pp., $18
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on Twitter @BerkowitzPeter.
The post Michael Sandel’s Vain Quest for the Common Good appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

San Francisco has a poop problem. Between 2011 and 2019, reports of human feces on public sidewalks quintupled, rising from roughly 5,500 to more than 30,000. Incidents have been on the decline since the COVID pandemic began, but residents still reported an average of 76 turds per day in the first half of 2021.
The Golden Gate city’s intestinal troubles are not news—conservative commentators have made a joke, and a talking point, out of them for ages. But they are metonymic for a dysfunction increasingly apparent in America's big cities, from the West Coast to the East. Many major municipalities are marred by violent crime, homelessness, uncontrolled mental illness, and general disorder. This all in spite of an ever-advancing cadre of progressive leaders, who promise their latest tax hike will finally target the "root causes" of the breakdown.
Why are these big, blue cities breaking down? Climate scientist and Berkeley, Calif., resident Michael Shellenberger tackles the question in his latest book, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.
At core, Shellenberger’s answer is political. Though he takes pains to assure the reader of his liberal bona fides, Shellenberger insists that big cities, particularly San Francisco, have been captured by a too-progressive ideology. City leaders have begrudgingly embraced the priorities of the activist class that staffs the various NGOs providing key services, including support for the homeless, the mentally ill, and the drug addicted.
The result is urban disaster. Shellenberger covers the vogue for "housing first" policy, which emphasizes placing homeless people in housing without sobriety or medication requirements, and which he argues does not consistently reduce the pathologies that lead to homelessness. He discusses the "harm reduction" approach to drug policy, which can mean providing users with the materials to use without "coercing" them into treatment. And he outlines the rising skepticism of policing and public safety, alongside decarceral reforms, which have created an atmosphere supportive of criminal offending.
Of course, disentangling cause and effect in policymaking is hard. But California is one of just a handful of states to see dramatic increases in its homeless population over the past decade, and the state’s deliberate reduction in the punishment for minor property offending is associated with a spike in shoplifting. And the Golden State is proudly progressive—a progressivism doubtless even more common among the people who staff the NGOs that actually manage its big cities' streets.
As far as a liberal's case to liberals against the excesses of liberalism goes, San Fransicko is a useful contribution to the genre. It suffers from some of the usual flaws of popular nonfiction: Some chapters seem unnecessary, and one suspects the whole thing could have been slashed down to a 10,000-word essay. But the book does well the thing it is meant to do: set out the key contradictions in contemporary liberalism, as underscored by the governance failures of the places it is most common.
One of the peculiar features of American liberalism is the selectiveness of its paternalism. Liberals are happy to embrace coercive policies that affect the average citizen—vaccine mandates, say, or soda taxes. But when it comes to the least of us—the drug addicted, the mentally ill, the chronically homeless, the repeated victims of crime—it adopts an inexplicably laissez faire stance. This approach, sociologist Neil Gong has argued, is dramatically at odds with how those with means ask to be treated. While the mentally ill rich seek maximum paternalism, the mentally ill poor are afforded the freedom to be mad.
This tendency runs in apparent contradiction to the left's usual statist bent. The anti-psychiatry movement, the push to deinstitutionalize and ban compulsory drug treatment, and of course the movement to defund the police, are all basically libertarian, inasmuch as they work to reduce the capacity of the state to regulate certain kinds of antisocial conduct. These regulations are considered per se illegitimate, because they fail to target the "root causes" of this behavior—racism, sexism, capitalism, etc.
Such "root causes" thinking is, of course, fallacious: Nothing about a cause’s proximity to an effect makes it more or less suited to policy intervention. But more important, it confuses the question of whom it is fair to manage—average citizens are fair game, whereas the oppressed are oppressed enough as is—with whom it benefits society to manage. The public dispute becomes over how to be compassionate to the schizophrenic (where compassion is always synonymous with license), wholly obviating discussion of the harms done to society by his camping out on the sidewalk, harms for which we increasingly lack moral language.
The sort of policies Shellenberger endorses at the end of the book—a statewide psych authority, expanded conservatorship, a more carrot-and-stick approach to mental health and drug abuse treatment—would probably benefit their objects. But they would also benefit the other members of society, who are entitled to be free of antisocial behavior. That entitlement, of the average American, has fallen out of fashion. But it is the entitlement at the core of the social contract, and governments of all sizes forget it at their peril.
San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Harper, 416 pp., $28.99
Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. He was previously a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon.
The post REVIEW: ‘San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 416 pp. $30.00.

IT IS a hoary military cliché that at any given time generals are always prepared to fight and win the most recent of their countries’ past wars. But it comes as something of a shock when, in his new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn, a historian and a professor of law at Yale who is one of America’s most distinguished thinkers on human rights, the laws of war, and more generally on international justice, in many ways seems to perpetrate the very same mistake. Moyn argues that for most of its history the American tradition of warfare has been a particularly cruel one (the stark title of part one of Humane is “Brutality”). But then, he goes on to argue, in the 1970s there was a great leap forward (Moyn actually used the expression in an exchange about Humane with his Yale colleague John Fabian Witt) in the legal regulation of combat itself. It was the United States, Moyn insists (rightly in my view), that drove the movement for this virtually unprecedented humanization of the laws of war.

For Moyn, this began with the reconsideration that took place in the later part of the 1970s of how America had fought the Vietnam War, and not just by the war’s opponents but within government and perhaps most importantly within the U.S. military itself. This led to brutality beginning to give way to a new and, at least in its self-conception, a far more humane doctrine of war and warfighting. As Moyn puts it, “from the ashes of Hanoi and the darkness of My Lai, the possibility of humane war would come into view.” On the face of things, that would seem to be very good news both for the United States and for the world. On one level, Moyn does not disagree. To the contrary, he is at pains to concede that when compared with Vietnam or Korea, let alone the genocidal wars against the native peoples of the American continent, or the United States’ imperial wars in the Philippines and Central America, the U.S. military’s decision to shift to a less sanguinary war-fighting doctrine, one codified in U.S. military and civilian law but also in international law accepted by the United States, has been an improvement. At the same time, he rejects the view that this humanization of war should give rise to even the most guarded degree of optimism. “Humane war,” Moyn warns at the very end of the book, “is another version of the slavery of our times.” And far from being a “utopia,” “humane war” may turn out to be no more than “dystopian in a new fashion.”

On one level, Moyn’s argument will surprise no one who has read his work over the past twenty years, during which he has become a major intellectual figure on the American Left, at a time of the Left’s resurgence in mainstream U.S. politics. His most important books have been in the service of debunking various contemporary utopias. In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, published in 2010 to great controversy but even greater critical acclaim, Moyn pushed back hard against the conventional wisdom (at least in the Global North and Latin America) that the contemporary human rights movement was the culmination of centuries of progress in the making of a more humane world. This line of filiation goes at least as far back as the anti-slavery movement in late eighteenth-century Britain, through the creation of the Red Cross movement, and the first radical limitations on what armies were allowed to do, and more proximately in the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent promulgation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Moyn’s account, partisans of this new human rights utopia—one of his bolder arguments is his dating its rise back only to the 1970s in the United States—assumed that they could usher in a world in which it would finally be possible to do away with some of the most commonly-held assumptions about international relations. The most important of these, conventionally described as the Westphalian Order, holds that states have the right to do more or less as they like within their own borders. But through both activism and law, the belief within the human rights movement that it was being replaced by a developing body of international human rights law that would, in extremis, supersede national law and bring rulers to account for how they treated their own citizens, not just how they acted internationally.

MOYN WAS more than skeptical. His overarching claim in The Last Utopia was that the human rights movement had arisen largely because of the moral vacuum that had been created by the failure of socialism, the disappointments of decolonization, and the hollowness of the early promise of a new and more just world order that in 1945 many expected could be anchored in the United Nations system. Socialism, decolonization, the UN: these, Moyn insisted, had been collective aspirations for a better future for the world, promising “emancipation from capital and empire.” Human rights, on the other hand, were “minimal, individual and fundamentally moral.” In short, human rights was an ideal doctrine for a liberal capitalist world and since its inception in the 1970s had come to serve as capitalism’s moral warrant. By implication, Moyn seemed to be calling for the restoration of these collectivist visions and promises, though in The Last Utopia he did not quite come out and say so. But in his subsequent book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, published in 2018, he had either moved quite a bit further to the left or simply thought it necessary to be more explicit about his political radicalism. “Human Rights,” he wrote, were “both a breakthrough of conscience and an immense reversal.” However good its intentions had been, the human rights movement’s Faustian bargain with neo-liberalism had “left the world more humane but enduringly unequal...”

Thus, it turned out that Moyn was not, in fact, a critic of utopias in general, only of neoliberal ones. For his call in Not Enough was for those concerned with human rights and justice to end “the accommodating relationship they have had with market fundamentalism and unequal outcomes,” and return to an earlier utopia. “It is time,” he wrote, echoing the celebrated rallying cry of Rosa Luxemburg, “…to relearn the older and grander choice between socialism and barbarism, and time to elevate to the global project it has rarely been but must become.”

In Humane, Moyn sets out in a direction that is both congruent with what he set out in those earlier books, but that at the same time appears to me to be in important ways incompatible with them. “Jacobin Legacy” is the title of the first chapter of Not Enough, and Moyn still seems at least partly inspired by what could be called his Neo-Jacobinism. Nor has he jettisoned his most original and powerful claim, which has been that while various reforms—human rights, philanthropy—may seem like progress, either they aren’t advances at all, or else they are woefully insufficient ones both in moral and in political terms. In Moyn’s new book, he applies the same lens to efforts undertaken both by governments—above all, the United States—and national militaries to radically reduce both the human toll and the physical destructiveness of warfighting through transformations in tactics, technology, and the role of both international and military law. For Moyn, these developments now are a huge obstacle to getting closer to what is for him the only morally acceptable outcome: all but abolishing war.

Moyn avers that he is not a complete pacifist, and in Humane he clearly wanted to leave open a very narrow exception to his general demand that war be abolished. But even his neopacifism seems at odds with his earlier Neo-Jacobinism. After all, historically neither socialism nor decolonization were exactly nonviolent affairs, nor was revolutionary violence the rare exception to a nonviolent norm. And since Moyn obviously knows this, one can only wonder whether he did not want to address such inconvenient historical facts in Humane or whether he really has come to believe that virtually all the morally licit wars have already been fought and that thus, presumably, for the first time in human history, in the words of the great Gospel song “Down By the Riverside,” “We ain’t gonna study war no more.”

Obviously, there is no great Jacobin, Socialist, or anti-colonial hero whom Moyn could appeal to as the moral model for how to think about war. After all, all of them, from St. Just to Luxemburg, from Denmark Vesey to the Algerian FLN, believed revolutionary violence to be both unavoidable and necessary. In theory, Moyn might have turned to Mahatma Gandhi as a model but perhaps that did not sit well with Moyn’s socialism. But the figure Moyn does turn to in Humane seems like a far more perverse choice. He takes as his model for how to think morally about the nature of war none other than great nineteenth-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, to whom the first chapter of Humane is devoted. Moyn does acknowledge that his moral role model “went too far, and like many prophets spoke too soon.” By this, he presumably is referring to Tolstoy’s insistence on the inseparability of his pacifism from his very un-Jacobian anarchism and his Christian faith. Nonetheless, Moyn describes Tolstoy as having offered the “most eloquent and thought-provoking reservations ever leveled against the attempt to ‘humanize’ war, highlighting the moral risk of failing to combine the desire for less brutal war with skepticism toward war itself.” Again, Moyn himself is not quite prepared to endorse Tolstoy’s absolutist insistence that “war is never for a good cause,” but he comes very close when he writes that “it almost always isn’t.”

(Photo by Gage Skidmore/WikiMedia Commons.)For almost 40 years, Robert P. George has been encouraging students to pursue the life of the mind as a member of the faculty of Princeton University. Armed with a Ph.D. in legal philosophy from the University of Oxford, he stands among the conservative movement’s most eminent public intellectuals, famed both for his dignified manner and deep erudition. But when he enrolled at Swarthmore College in 1973 and first became exposed to the nuances of philosophy, George never imagined that he would ascend to such enviable heights.   “When I arrived at Swarthmore as a first semester freshman, I very quickly came to realize how poorly prepared I had been by my high school education,” George told me in a Zoom interview. “The prudent gambler would have bet that I’d be gone, if not by the end of the semester, then by the end of the year. I had done well in high school, I had gotten good grades, but I did not receive a good education either religiously or in terms of secular subjects. From my very first week of [college], I could see that the other students knew a lot of things I didn’t know. They had certain skills that I had not been taught. They were prepared to do things that I had not been prepared to do. I found myself utterly unprepared for the intellectual work expected of a first-year student.”It was George’s humble background that made Swarthmore so overwhelming. Growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, he enjoyed a boyhood seemingly plucked from the pages of Huckleberry Finn. The eldest of five brothers, he spent his childhood days hunting, fishing, and bonding with members of his local community. “We knew people who made moonshine and who knew the best recipes for preparing raccoon and possum,” he told me. “It was the real thing!” He was also a gifted banjo player with a fondness for folk and bluegrass music. “I became a bluegrass musician when I was 12 or 13 years old, and that meant I could earn $20 on a Saturday night or a Friday night playing at a square dance, or at a fire hall, or a rod and gun club. And I would play in bands with really good musicians in them, mountain-style musicians whose day jobs were in the mines.”George was the grandson of immigrant coal miners. “In our town, there were two major things,” he recalled. “One was the state university, West Virginia University. The other was the coal mines, and all the businesses that thrived when the coal mines were working and didn’t thrive when the coal mines weren’t working. Although my father was not a coal miner, he undoubtedly would have been but for World War II. He turned 18 in 1944 and was drafted right out of high school.” During the conflict, George’s father fought in the Normandy campaign and survived the sinking of the SS Léopoldville. He returned to a changed world where opportunities for young men extended beyond working in the mines, and he became a liquor broker. Though neither of George’s parents attended college, they instilled in their children an appreciation for the value of education and a profound religiosity that shaped his early perception of ethics.“My own family was a little unusual,” George said, “because we were what was called ‘ethnic.’ Most of the people with whom I grew up were the descendants of the Scotch-Irish settlers in central Appalachia. Their families had been there for many generations. They were Protestants, what we would today call Evangelicals. And my people were from Syria on my father’s side and from Italy on my mother’s side. We were Antiochian Orthodox on one side and Catholic on the other.” Thankfully, George’s family experienced discrimination only on rare occasions and regarded ethnic prejudice within the community as aberrational. “My dad’s family had an incident where the local Ku Klux Klan, the sort of Marx Brothers version in their white robes and hoods, came and burned a cross in front of their house,” George continued. “But these were a few idiots who didn’t understand the Christian and American ideal of equality, and my grandparents didn’t ascribe group responsibility to the country or their neighbors. They held the people who actually came and burned the cross responsible for their actions.” George maintains a firm respect for the residents of Morgantown and the values they championed. “I never looked down on people who would now, I suppose, be known as ‘the deplorables,’” he told me. “Because they were my people. I understand and appreciate them. They’re not perfect, but they have a lot of virtues. And a lot of the prejudices that elites have against them are just prejudices. They don’t know them and they don’t understand them. They’re not racist, they’re not bigots, they’re not ignoramuses. They were fair, decent, honest, hardworking people. They loved their families, their communities. Their patriotism was genuine and unaffected. And they pitched in to help people who were in need.” Piousness was the norm within the community. The majority attended church, and most of those who did not expressed a strong faith in God. “The majority were the Jacksonians whose families had been there for many, many generations,” he recalled. “And they were Protestants. We had Baptists and Presbyterians and Methodists.” George himself was raised Catholic, but was taught by his father to respect broader Christian belief. A series of numinous experiences in his boyhood kept him from being enticed by atheism, one of which he now remembers as uniquely affecting.  “One of the most memorable religious events of my boyhood was attending the funeral of one of my great aunts on my father’s side, who had the good fortune to die at Easter time,” he said. “The funeral liturgy included Easter singing in the Syrian Orthodox tradition. And it was so hauntingly beautiful that to this day, I doubt that anyone who actually attended such a thing—witnessed it, experienced it—could be or remain an atheist. It was such an overpoweringly deep spiritual experience.” His spiritual confidence has compelled him to explore religions beyond Catholicism; Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam among them. Politically, however, he was a staunch Democrat as a young man, and began to embrace conservative politicians only after years of personal deliberation. In Morgantown, a particular kind of politics was fundamental to community life. “It was the politics of the Democratic Party, the United Mine Workers of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” George told me. “These were our institutions and our people and our heroes; in a certain sense our saints. They were for the worker, or at least that’s how they presented themselves. Not only did we not like Republicans, we didn’t know any. There just weren’t any around. They were the people who lived out of state and were rich and owned the mines.”The mining companies were certainly more concerned with profit than the welfare of the workers in many cases. But in the late 1960s, corruption within the union revealed that it, too, was designed principally to serve the interests of its bosses. “There was a terrible moment when the union president, Tony Boyle, was challenged by a reform element that ran a slate of candidates against him, including a man named Jack Jablonski,” George said. “In the course of the campaign, Jablonski was assassinated. And before long, they were able to trace the hit to Tony Boyle and the union leadership. Suddenly, people began to see that this was not some saintly organization; this was a corrupt bunch of thugs. It was quite a shock for us.”Nonetheless, the values espoused by Democratic politicians continued to resonate with George and his family. “We thought of ourselves as liberals, but liberal in those days didn’t mean pro-abortion or any of this cultural left stuff that later came to be identified with the Democratic Party,” he observed. “That all began to happen in 1972.” George’s liberalism was rooted in support for civil rights and government programs designed to elevate the poor. In high school, he was twice elected governor of the West Virginia Democratic Youth Conference. At Swarthmore, he remained active in party politics, and ran to be a delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention, where he intended to vote for Jimmy Carter. Though he was not elected, he performed well across the state.He might never have pursued his political ambitions had he indulged his temptation to abandon Swarthmore because he felt unprepared. When he arrived at Swarthmore, George had never written an essay, and his analytical abilities were unrefined. The intervention of two professors who recognized and nurtured his talents prevented him returning home to attend West Virginia University with his old friends.“The experience that saved me was when I handed in my first paper in the introductory political science course I was taking,” George said of his adjustment to college. “My professor, James Kurth, was very exciting and charismatic. He gave us our first written assignment, and then a week or so later, at the end of class, he handed back the papers. He called out people’s names—Aberdeen, Biggs, Jones, Smith—but he skipped mine, and everybody else got their paper. And then he simply said, ‘Mr. George, I’d like you to come and see me in my office hours.’”Fearing that he had either accidentally committed plagiarism or written something disastrous, George approached the meeting with trepidation. Kurth told him that the essay was poor, but was more puzzled than concerned given George’s diligence with assigned readings and incisive contributions to class discussions. George explained his situation, and Kurth permitted another attempt at the paper, this time after offering advice on its style and structure. “I went off and wrote another paper and handed it back to him,” George said. “And if I recall correctly, he gave me a B+. So that was very encouraging; it showed me that I could do it. That got me going, and from there it was straight up.”George maintained high grades consistently, but at this point, he was entirely ignorant of philosophy, and his intellectual interests were limited to 20th century American history and politics. An introductory course in political theory taught by Kenneth Sharpe, in which he was assigned Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, would alter the course of his life. Reading Gorgias compelled George to reconsider his basic desire to become educated. “Like lots of children or grandchildren of immigrants, I thought, ‘Well, by getting a prestigious degree, I’ll be able to do better than my parents did,’” George told me. “What Plato taught me is that much more important than the instrumental value of education is its intrinsic value. And that’s what Gorgias puts on the table. Why do we debate? Why do we engage in discussion? Why do we seek the truth? Well, knowledge and understanding can have many instrumental benefits, but those are secondary to the intrinsic value of knowledge, its inherent enrichments of the human spirit. We should want knowledge more fundamentally for its own sake than for any instrumental purpose.”That realization would lead George to dedicate his professional life to the pursuit of truth. The dialogue granted him an appetite for philosophy, which he began to explore thoroughly under the tutelage of professor Linwood Urban. Through studying thinkers such as Bentham and Aquinas in Urban’s classes, George became fascinated by ethics and jurisprudence. He was particularly intrigued both by the relationship between law and morality and the question of whether moral values can be considered universal by any objective standard.As a Catholic, George had been raised with a clear understanding of ethical absolutes. But despite gravitating instinctively toward Aquinas’ position, he found the arguments for ethical subjectivism advanced by Hume and Hobbes to be equally coherent. Searching for a conclusive argument on either side, he discovered the work of John Finnis, whose interpretation of Aristotle convinced him to embrace natural law theory.“I realized, ‘This is it,’” George recalled, “Here’s a positive account of the objectivity of practical reason and morality that does not fall to the Humean critique. And that’s what I believe. Our knowledge of [objective values and human goods] is achieved through non-inferential acts of understanding, in which we grasp the point of some activity—friendship, knowledge, appreciation of beauty—not as a mere means to another end, but as an end in itself, something worth having for its own sake.” “The human good is what it is because human nature is as it is,” he continued. “But I don’t believe that we first understand human nature and then decide as a matter of practical reason to do what conforms to our nature. We grasp what’s worth doing by understanding it as fulfilling for us. My grandmother, who had less than a fifth grade education, understood perfectly well that friendship was good not merely for instrumental purposes, but was intrinsically valuable. She valued friendship for the sake of friendship, not because it got you invited to the best parties. She knew that friendship was something worth pursuing not because she’d done an anthropological study of human nature, but because she grasped the value of it in her own experience of friendship, presumably from when she first entered into friendships as a little girl. That’s how it works.”George graduated from Swarthmore at the top of his class in 1977, and he proceeded to enroll at Harvard Law School and Harvard Divinity School. Although he did not yet aspire to become a professor, he had become intoxicated by philosophy, and knew that he wished to continue expanding his knowledge of law and ethics. The breadth of Harvard’s course offerings enabled him to tailor his degree to emphasize legal theory rather than contracts and secure transaction costs, and he seized every wider opportunity to study legal philosophy that presented itself. “I came up with a way to study even more of it by getting permission to take courses for law school credit outside the law school in the faculty of arts and sciences,” George said. “So I took a course by Ronald Dworkin, who was then a visiting professor in the philosophy department. I talked the law school into allowing me to do a couple of directed readings in philosophy of law and count them as courses toward my law school requirement. I probably studied less black letter law and more philosophy of law than anybody in the history of Harvard Law School.” George’s fervor for study had grown so intense that he could not resist pursuing an academic career despite the challenging state of the job market. Seeking to learn from the most esteemed instructors in his field, he applied for a Ph.D. at Oxford. At that time, H.L.A. Hart, the 20th century’s most consequential legal philosopher, was a member of its faculty. His similarly influential students, including Dworkin, Finnis, and Joseph Raz, were also present. George was admitted, and he swiftly began working on his doctoral dissertation under Raz and Finnis’ supervision. “At that point,” he recalled, “I was on my way.” George’s thesis, titled Law, Liberty, and Morality in Some Recent Natural Law Theories, examined whether law should be informed by morality and designed to enforce moral obligations. Writing it proved an equally gratifying and demanding undertaking. “You don’t get any bad arguments past [Finnis and Raz],” George said. “All my papers would come back covered with red ink. They’re so meticulous, so analytically tight, and put such a premium on logical rigor and analytical precision. British professors tend to be understated when it comes to praise and encouragement. So you might hand in what an American professor would call a brilliant paper, and the response from the British professor—although neither Raz nor Finnis is actually British, but they’ve both been thoroughly anglicized—is, ‘Well, that’s okay.’” Though praise was unusual, George regarded both tutors with awe and remains grateful for their instruction. “They’re dedicated truth seekers, just exemplary role models. And while they have some things in common, they also have a lot of differences in terms of their substantive philosophies. It was good to have both perspectives.” While at Oxford, he also became a lecturer, and began teaching classes within the law faculty. Initially so overcome by nervousness that he carefully scripted his lectures in advance, his confidence grew with practice, and he steadily moved toward working without any prepared notes.“When I started, one thing that struck me was that I wasn’t very much older than my students,” George said. “And I kept wondering if I really had anything to teach them. My idea of a professor was James Kurth, or Linwood Urban, or Joseph Raz. They were wise, they’d read everything, they were experienced. And I was just a kid. And I know these are just kids sitting in this seminar room or in this classroom, but what do I have to teach them? So I felt to some extent like I was bluffing. But as you get older, and the distance in age between you and your students increases, that goes away.”After graduating from Oxford, George joined Princeton as an instructor in 1985, where he soon rose to become a tenured professor. By this time, he considered himself a conservative and had abandoned the Democratic Party, but still could not bring himself to join the GOP. Regardless, he recalls being the “only out of the closet conservative professor. There were a couple of Republicans, but they would go out of their way to tell you, ‘I’m not really a conservative Republican.’ ‘I’m a Vermont Republican,’ my late colleague Robert Gilpin used to say.” George did not conceal his views while applying for the position, and Princeton was happy to support his work. Indeed, the university has since showered him with awards and recognitions, and has even allowed him to build the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions on campus despite his subsequent embrace of Republican politicians. “I’ve not suffered any prejudice from the administration or from my colleagues,” George said. “Never have I been told what I can and can’t say. I can only say thank you to Princeton University for the honorable and generous treatment I’ve been given. I’ve been really blessed.”But for academics at other institutions who hold beliefs that dissent from prevailing orthodoxy, expressing such opinions can result in cancellation. Recently, Professor Dorian Abbott, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, was invited to deliver MIT’s prestigious Carlson Lecture on climate and the potential for life on other planets. He had previously written an op-ed in Newsweek arguing that diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on university campuses undermine free expression and fundamental standards of equal treatment. In response, opponents of Abbott’s views mounted a Twitter campaign to prevent him from delivering the speech. Although the lecture was both honorific and entirely unrelated to the article, MIT yielded to their demands.    Abbott’s cancelation is the latest example of a disturbing trend in American universities. When I raised the subject with George, he observed that, curiously, students on campus have abandoned moral relativism and an excessive concern for toleration of diverse viewpoints with a fundamentalist desire to silence those who oppose certain absolutes. “The problem is not that they think there is no moral truth,” he told me, “it’s that they think the moral truth is obvious, they know it, they don’t have to defend it, and anyone who disagrees with them is a fool or a bigot. If you don’t agree, it’s your job to fall in line with our groupthink. It’s a militant fundamentalist kind of pseudo-religion; an unwillingness to consider the possibility that you might be wrong in your moral beliefs.”A pertinent question, then, is how those concerned with our trend toward censorious fundamentalism can reverse it. George believes the answer is simple. “What did your dad tell you to do if you’re confronted by a bully in the schoolyard? Stand up to him. Don’t yield. Wokeism works by intimidation; it’s the one and only method it’s got for whipping people into line. There’s no shortcut here, there’s no formula: You have to stand up. It’s going to take people setting an example of courageous defiance; standing up for their rights and the rights of everyone to think for themselves, to challenge these sacred dogmas, to refuse to get in line with the groupthink.” George believes that, although many will be initially reluctant to resist the mob for fear of jeopardizing their livelihoods, courage is contagious in the face of oppressive ideology. “There are going to have to be some people, probably a relatively small number to begin with, who take the risks of standing up to the mob. How do I put courage in you? By exemplifying it myself. Then maybe you might be the next person to exemplify that courage, and then in turn, your example might inspire someone else who was cowering in the corner a moment ago to step forward and speak.” In recent months, George has attempted to promote this attitude throughout academia. His mission is to uphold intellectual freedom against aggressive mobs while holding to account institutions that buckle under their campaigns. Achieving such a goal may seem daunting to some, but with all that George has achieved in the past, how difficult can it be?

(Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (including whoever put the lime in the coconut and shook it all up),As Jerome Powell whispered, don’t worry, baby, this will be transitory.What I mean is that this Friday “news”letter marks the end of third party week. And I’m really not going to jump back into the weeds on that subject anyway. (By the way, I’ve opened up the Wednesday G-File to the masses in case you want to get in on the action.)  I don’t really mind people thinking I’m wrong about the tactical and strategic stuff. One of the ways you figure out what’s right is by kicking the tires on what’s wrong. I don’t mind people thinking I’m wrong about the philosophical stuff, either. I’m just more willing to stand my ground on principles than I am on prudential questions like, “Will it work?” If it wouldn’t work, why would I want to do it in the first place?Think of it this way: Say my kid is suddenly really ill and I think it’s appendicitis. I say to the E.R. doctor, “You gotta operate right now!” If the doctor responds, “Um, it’s food poisoning. You don’t cut people open for that,” I’m not going to get all huffy and insist he bust out the scalpel, because doctors know more about the icky stuff inside of people than I do. But if the doctor says, “Let her suffer. Suffering is good for the soul. Besides, it’s my lunch break.” Well—as I’d probably have to explain to the cops and maybe the jury—I’m going to have a more forceful response.In other words, if you disagree with me about my proposed solution to the problem, that’s cool; let’s talk it through. But if you disagree with me on whether or not there is a problem in the first place, we’re gonna have a very different conversation.So here’s the funny thing: Nobody wants to have that conversation (although I’m sure some MAGA types are going full Gorka on me—never go full Gorka). But among people worth listening to, there’s a lot of agreement on the diagnosis and a lot of disagreement on the treatment. I particularly like the rich cocktail of stoicism, cynicism, and hopefulness in Erick Erickson’s take. It’s like getting a motivational greeting card from Werner Herzog. He writes:It’s all gross and unseemly, but I think what is happening now is a passing fad. A large group of people came into politics inspired by Trump. They don’t really know what they’re doing in politics or how it all works. Now the billionaires who want in on the action are throwing money around and they’re getting played by the grifters and bled dry. The island of misfit toys is trying to lead them all. The professional establishment operators are experts at playing all sides and the odds are in their favor. They’re not conservatives. But they aren’t really crazy either.But note that the Calvin Coolidge-esque resignation about the problem isn’t a denial of the problem’s existence. Remember one of my favorite quotes from Coolidge: “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.” Erick’s position seems to be that the problem I identify is likely to be one of the nine that goes into a ditch on its own.I sincerely hope he’s right. But I still disagree with Eric on a few things. For instance, I’m still not fully convinced my idea wouldn’t work. I worry more about the role of small donors than I do about the really big ones. J.D. Vance may be attached to Peter Thiel like a sucker fish, but unless the fat cats are laundering money through a bunch of dummy accounts, buffoons like Marjorie Taylor Greene and political appetites in a skin suit (looking at you, Josh Hawley) are raising a ton of money through small donations.Donald Trump, third party of one.But you know what does give me hope? Donald Trump. The other day, he issued a fantastic statement:If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do.I love this statement so much it makes me want to take off my wedding ring, suck in my stomach, and ask it to go to Bermuda with me.All week I’ve been hearing from people—smart people, dumb people, sincere people, performative Twitter jackass people—that it’s bad, wrong, traitorous, stupid, misguided, or insane for me to actively try to hurt the GOP because of my personal obsessions. “Don’t you understand,” friends and foes alike ask, “that you’ll single-handedly give total power to the Democrats and they’ll print a whole roll of trillion-dollar coins, invoke prima nocta in red states, mandate that face masks be surgically sewn into our faces (causing the starvation of millions), make skim almond milk the only legal form of dairy, and give nuclear weapons to the Taliban? Is that what you want you RINO cuck TDS-besotted jackass? Is it?” Okay, I’m paraphrasing and exaggerating just a bit for effect, but you get the point. In all of this, I’m the one who needs to compromise with the “freedom flu” crowd for the greater good; I’m the one who needs to stop relitigating the past; I’m the one putting my concerns ahead of the real issues that affect real Americans; I’m the one who needs to be a sober-eyed grown-up about politics.And then in comes Trump, making waves like a stumbling drunk who didn’t see the hot tub until too late, literally saying that Democrats should win every election uncontested unless everyone “solves” the object of his batshit bullshittery. The single most important thing for Republicans to address isn’t critical race theory, vaccine mandates, the border, the supply chain cock-up, inflation, or anything having to do with foreign policy. It’s their commitment to a claim that was shot down by every court that looked at it, not to mention Trump’s own attorney general(s).At least my solutions are aimed at the future and grounded in real policy stuff. I’m trying to figure out how to make the GOP better, more successful, and conservative in the long run. Meanwhile, Trump’s stolen election fantasy is simply and entirely about his own selfish id, his unrestrained narcissism, and his complete lack of concern with anything approaching real issues. He might as well be venting about how the time travel in Back to the Future really didn’t make much sense, given how little this stolen election nonsense has to do with not only reality, but stuff that might be helpful for the GOP. In other words, my alleged “Trump obsession” isn’t the issue or even a problem. But Trump’s very real and deranged Trump obsession is.It already cost the GOP control of the Senate by losing Georgia. Now Trump proposes losing the whole country if his ego isn’t stroked. But damn you, Goldberg, be a team player!By the way, what in the name of Thor does Trump mean by “solve” anyway? Does it mean “make him president again before the midterms”? Does it mean a do-over of the election? Does it mean a 500-foot-tall carnivorous purple bunny that craps cold fusion reactors that smell like chocolate?  Because that makes as much sense.Look, even if a joint investigation of the Claremont Review of Books, Gateway Pundit, One America News, and the MyPillow coupon sampler could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the election was “stolen,” you know what happens next under the Constitution? Nothing. Biden would still be president. Unless of course you think that such fraud should be punished by impeachment and removal. Fair enough. Have fun getting those 67 votes in the Senate. But let’s say you do. Know what happens then? Kamala Harris becomes president. Well, she was obviously in on it, too, so she has to go. Okay, then Nancy Pelosi becomes president. Maybe you should stop there, because next in line is Pat Leahy. And after that, John frick’n Kerry. But you know who isn’t on even the extended list of those next in line to become president? Donald Trump. (It’s amazing how many people who have “constitutional conservative” in their Twitter bio don’t understand this.)In other words, who needs a third party to punish the GOP when you have Donald Trump running around punching every team player in the groin with a spikey iron gauntlet? Charlie Cooke and my other friends at National Review who disagreed with my call for a third party are right that if the Sanity Caucus within conservatism cost the GOP control of Congress or the White House, they’d get blamed. And that would ultimately hurt the causes I care about. So just letting the cultists play out their auto-erotic masochism, as Erick suggests, makes sense.  My only objection to this scenario is that it hasn’t worked. Trump cost the GOP Georgia’s two Senate seats. Trump lost the presidency and both houses of Congress. He swapped many of the most reliable and valuable voters in the GOP coalition for the least reliable and valuable ones.  (Before a bunch of eggheads who pretend to be the authentic voice of the working class when they’re not talking about post-liberal integralism get all worked up about this claim, let me make clear I’m not talking about the value of these groups as human beings, but as voters. College educated suburbanites turned out reliably for the GOP in places where their votes were decisive. Rural voters and voters without college degrees—many of whom are already in red states—turn out less and less reliably, particularly when Trump isn’t on the ticket.)Anyway, sorry for the long parenthetical. Where were we? Oh, right: Trump has hurt the GOP and continues to hurt the GOP in tangible ways. Yet where are the grown-ups saying, “Okay, it’s time to learn our lesson”? Normally, the faction responsible for wrecking the party hands over the car keys to the faction that gets to say, “I told you so.” Some Republicans did say it, finally, after the January 6 riot.Such Republicans can be divided into two groups. Group A—the House and Senate members who voted for impeachment—is on defense. The House members are being purged. The senators are keeping a low profile. None of them have the whip hand in restoring the GOP to sanity. Group B? Well, that’s pretty much everyone else. Nearly all of them have backtracked or apologized in word or deed. Lindsey Graham said he was done with Trump nine months ago. Now he wants to draft Donald Trump for president. Heck, Trump unleashed a mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” on a vice president who was so loyal for four years he made a Stepford wife look like a randy swinger. We use the term “lynch mob” figuratively a lot in politics. But Trump sicced a literal lynch mob on Pence. And now Pence is attacking [checks notes] the media for making such a big deal about all this.So again, I’m hoping that Erick is right and this will all fix itself in due course. I’m just skeptical, because for five years I’ve been told, “This can’t last,” “The grown-ups will fix it,” “Trump wouldn’t dare,” “The rank-and-file GOP would never tolerate that,” and “You’re making way too big a deal about this stuff,” etc.All of those claims were wrong. And the wrongness only seems to be intensifying.Canine update: Lots of people want to know about Pippa’s medical travails, so here’s the latest. One surgeon told us if her ankle got worse, she’d need surgery to pretty much fuse the joint. She’d still have a limp, but it wouldn’t be painful anymore. We decided it was time and brought her in for a consultation with a different surgeon (the first one is on leave). He’s skeptical that surgery is needed. This might be great news, or it might not. He thinks she might have Lyme disease or some other tick-borne illness, because she seems to have joint pain elsewhere as well. Maybe it’s all treatable with medicine and no surgery (which would be great). Or maybe it’s not (which would be terrible). We’re doing the tests, hemorrhaging the money, etc. We love the sweet, crazy girl. I promise to let you know the outcome.Meanwhile, I’m on a plane to visit my daughter and I’m pretty giddy about it (the daughter-seeing, not the flying). The dogs are having a sleepover at “Aunt” Kirsten’s house. They love it there. Meanwhile, Gracie is staying home with a personal attendant who will also keep an eye on the house. I’ll be back on Tuesday, but the Fair Jessica will be on a business trip for a while (she’s an assassin), which means it’ll just be me and the quadrupeds for like 10 days.ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileSteve Hayes and I celebrate two years of The DispatchSetting the record straight on my alleged fondness for Ayn RandAn ultra-wonky Remnant with Brian RiedlI wrote it and I stand by itThe midweek “news”letterGoing off the rails on The Dispatch PodcastDiscussing my third party proposal with the notorious MBDAnd now, the weird stuffCrazy… but that’s how it goesFishy dealsAmericanizationForbidden donutsCosmic justiceFeel the Bern

Our conversation this week with Fiona Hill got me thinking more about the ugly, reinforcing dynamics pushing our society to the breaking point. Indeed, even though the initial conversation tended towards the optimistic, since we’ve had it I have been filled with a growing sense of dread. Let me try to outline these worries here in somewhat scattershot fashion. Hopefully, dear readers, you can tell me that I’m fretting too much.

Fiona’s new book takes as its point of departure her own background growing up poor in County Durham in Northern England. She escapes her fate to ascend to the heights of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and witnesses first-hand, from inside the Trump White House, how political polarization is ripping apart the country. To be fair, she recognizes the depths of the problem. Her own hometown, once a Labour stronghold, is all-in for Brexit, which itself is a stand-in for all sorts of grievances. And all this is happening even though efforts to economically revitalize the region have born some fruit. Nevertheless, her proposed solutions are primarily technocratic in nature. We need to increase opportunity for these communities to reduce social alienation, she argues in her book.

On the podcast, Fiona admits that technocratic solutions alone cannot provide the whole answer. And I, myself, should admit that my own predilection to criticize technocratic solutions shouldn’t imply that addressing questions of prosperity and opportunity are somehow unimportant. Indeed, they are vital. Still, I feel like focusing on them is preventing us from seeing nearer, bigger dangers.

Regular visitors to Carpe Diem know that for the last several years I have been on a one-man mission to challenge the frequent and brazen violations in higher education of Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination and Title VI’s prohibition of discrimination based on race and skin color. As Professor Philip Carl Salzman pointed out last year universities regularly engage in a hypocritical, double standard — “inclusion and equity for females, people of color, LGBTQ++ and Muslims; exclusion and inequity for males, whites, heterosexuals, Christians, Jews, and East Asians.” In the Orwellian tradition that is a central tenet of campus wokeness, some campus groups are “more equal” than others, and Title IX and Title VI have historically been enforced only for the preferred groups but not for the unpreferred groups. It’s the numerous routine violations of federal civil rights laws and the double-standard for enforcement of those laws that have motivated me to file nearly 400 Title IX and Title VI complaints against US universities for illegally violating the civil rights of unpreferred groups. 
Here’s a summary of my civil rights advocacy this year, sorry for the length but there’s a lot to report. 
1. Complaints.
So far this year, I have filed 100 Title IX and Title VI complaints with the Office
for Civil Rights for more than 300 violations of Title IX and Title VI at US colleges
and universities. Of those 100 complaints, 30 are for Title VI violations, 52
are for Title IX violations, and 18 are for violations of both Title IX and
Title VI. That brings the total number of civil rights complaints filed to 371 (for
nearly 1,500 violations) since the fall of 2018, which I am sure is the
greatest number of Title IX/VI complaints ever filed by an individual. It’s
especially troubling that universities and colleges regularly certify to the
Department of Education that they are strictly enforcing Title IX and Title as
a legal condition of continuing to receive taxpayer dollars. Despite those
regular and frequently false certifications, most universities routinely
violate Titles IX and VI, and that is what has motivated me to file nearly 400
federal civil rights complaints. 
2. Investigations.
In 2021, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has so far opened federal civil
rights investigations based on my complaints at 43 universities mostly for female-only
(and some women of color only) scholarships, faculty and student awards, fellowships,
STEM camps, leadership programs, and STEM programs including Harvard (2), New
York University, William and Mary (4), Carnegie-Mellon, Ithaca College, Seton
Hall, Villanova, Lehigh (5), Cal Tech, Maryland (7), UC-Diego, Cal Tech and Pennsylvania
(2). That brings the total number of federal OCR investigations based on my
Title IX complaints to 164 since January 2019. 
3. Resolutions. It’s been encouraging that more than 40 colleges and universities, as a result of my complaints, have corrected their Title IX violations this year, either pre-emptively once a federal civil rights investigation was opened or as a result of a Resolution Agreement with the Office for Civil Rights at the conclusion of an investigation, including the following (you can view the entire list here):
Wake Forest University’s School of Medicine’s Girls in STEM program was converted to a coeducational programThe University of Minnesota terminated its women-only gym hoursUniversity of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Girls STEM Day Conference was canceledWayne State University is no longer hosting Black Girls Code programs UC-San Diego terminated its Women in Negotiation programBrown University’s GirlsGetMath program is now coeducationalThe University of Pennsylvania’s female-only Penn Academy for Reproductive Sciences is now open to all genders
Overall, it’s
been a great year so far with corrections of Title IX violations at more than
40 institutions to date in 2021, which is more than twice the number for successful
resolutions in all of 2020. I would be hopeful for continued success and more
corrections, except for some recent troubling developments that I describe in below.
  
4. New Troubles with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Both President Biden and the Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona have made public statements this year that would seem to support my work advancing civil rights for all students and faculty in higher education. In March of this year, Biden issued an “Executive Order on Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity,” where he said:
It is the policy of my Administration that all students should be guaranteed an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex. For students attending schools and other educational institutions that receive Federal financial assistance, this guarantee is codified, in part, in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. 1681 et seq., which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs or activities receiving Federal financial assistance. 
In June, Secretary Cardona issued the statement “Title IX the ‘Strongest Tool’ in Protecting Educational Opportunities Free from Sex Discrimination:”
Today marks 49 years since the passage of Title IX, the strongest tool we have to protect every student’s right to equal access to educational opportunities free from sex discrimination. Because of this landmark rule, our nation has made important progress toward realizing our self-concept as a land of opportunity for all… to protecting students from sex discrimination. I’m proud of the actions the Biden-Harris Administration has taken so far in ensuring that Title IX protects the civil rights of all students….  As Secretary of Education, I am committed to ensuring Title IX works for all students and provides equal access to opportunities that will enrich students’ educational experiences and their futures. 
Despite Biden
and Cardona’s supposed guarantee of “an educational environment free from
discrimination on the basis of sex” and “ensuring that Title IX protects the
civil rights of all students,” there have been some troubling signs that the
Office for Civil Rights under Biden and Cardona is actually now actively and
deliberately enabling universities to violate Title IX and continue their
discriminatory practices. The guarantee of a discrimination-free educational
experience and protection of civil rights now apparently only applies to
“preferred” groups (women) but not to “unpreferred” groups (men), even though
men have statistically been an “underrepresented minority (URM)” in higher
education for 40 years. 
The OCR’s new
enabling of higher education’s illegal sex discrimination that is in direct
contradiction to the discrimination-free guarantees of Biden and Cardona has
taken place with several new troubling developments. In a significant departure
from past practices, the OCR is now frequently requiring complainants to
provide (a) identities of actual victims and specific instances of sex
discrimination and (b) direct public statements by university officials that
essentially admit their university is violating Title IX. 
Here is a recent example of a request for additional information that I received from the Denver Office for Civil Rights regarding a discriminatory program that clearly operates exclusively for women at the University of New Mexico – the Women in STEM faculty awards (doesn’t the name alone tell you everything you need to know?). You can read my original complaint here from May 13, 2020, where I provide numerous gender-specific female references from University websites that along with the program name and documentation that only female faculty have ever received this award provide overwhelming evidence that this is a female-only program. In fact, the stated eligibility requirement for this award is clearly restricted to “tenure-track, tenured and research women faculty members at UNM.” 
Please provide instances when a male applied for the “Women in STEM
Award” and was denied because of his sex.Please provide statements by program officials indicating that the
“Women in STEM Awards” are exclusively for women, or that men are excluded from
applying or receiving an award or grant under the program.
Of course, there would be no instances of a male faculty at UNM who ever purposefully applied for an award for which he is clearly ineligible based on the clearly stated female-only eligibility requirement. To apply for UNM’s Women in STEM awards is quite time-consuming and requires many, many pages of documentation including a cover page, summary, project description, “budget with justification,” curriculum vitae, signed statement agreeing to Award Conditions, and a statement of current and pending support including all external funding. It should be totally obvious (even to a government bureaucrat) that no male UNM faculty member has ever devoted the many hours required to apply for the Women in STEM award when it would be so obviously an unproductive exercise in futility. Asking for names of actual victims that don’t exist is apparently a new OCR tactic that will now be used as an excuse for dismissing a valid Title IX complaint about a valid Title IX violation that will enable a university like UNM to continue to engage in illegal discrimination to benefit one of the “preferred groups” mentioned above.  
It should be
noted that OCR regulations do not require “legal standing” and do not require
that a complainant identify a specific individual who has suffered an
individualized injury before curing facial discrimination and per se facial violations of Title IX’s
prohibition of sex discrimination. As outlined above, the OCR has resolved more
than 40 complaints just so far this year that required universities to correct
Title IX violations without ever asking for names of actual victims. The fact
that this is now happening under Biden signifies a major departure from past
practices of OCR and a departure from OCR regulations and policies. If the
situation were reversed and a complaint was filed for a “Men in STEM” award or
a “White Men in STEM” award, it seems obvious that the OCR would not be asking
for examples of women or blacks who applied to those programs and were denied
because of sex or race as part of a federal civil rights investigation.        
Secondly, it
should be equally obvious that UNM officials would not make any explicit statements
publicly that men are excluded from applying for the Women in STEM awards
because it would be publicly admitting that it is violating the civil rights of
male faculty and engaging in illegal discrimination. However, there are dozens
of public statements by UNM that do communicate to the public that the awards
are exclusively and preferentially available only to women, which violates
Title IX, and I provided 15 such statements to the Denver OCR, here are ten:
An anonymous gift has been made to UNM to support research by, and professorships for women faculty in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Income from investment of this gift will be used to assist UNM women tenure-track and tenured assistant and associate STEM professors with establishing new research areas and developing research collaborations.Eligibility: Tenure-track, tenured, and research women faculty members at UNM who hold the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor and are pursuing research in areas supported by NSF, NIH (non-clinical), or DOE are eligible to apply.  Priority will be given to proposals that assist women Assistant and Associate STEM Professors with establishing new research areas and developing research collaborations.$15K for seed funding for new research if two women STEM faculty at UNM collaborate on a proposalThe awards are supported by an anonymous gift made in 2015 to UNM to support research by and professorships for women faculty in STEM.  UNM Provost James Holloway applauded the awards, which foster the ongoing success of women scientists.Since 2016, 39 women in a variety of STEM fields across UNM have been named as recipients of the award. The call is open for women faculty in The University of New Mexico’s STEM fields to apply for a variety of grants as part of the 2021 Women In STEM awards. The call is being released earlier than in past years to encourage more women to apply. UNM Provost James Holloway said the awards aim to acknowledge the variety and depth of work done by women faculty members at the university. “The contributions of our female faculty in creating new knowledge, in educating our students, and in serving our state are astounding. I am pleased that we are able to express our gratitude by rewarding them with the 2021 Women in STEM awards.”
In what I’ll
call a “dirty dismissal,” the Denver OCR issued a dismissal letter last month
stating that “OCR cannot infer that discrimination may have occurred or may be
occurring” at UNM for its female-only Women in STEM awards. Additionally, the
OCR’s dismissal stated that “While the materials encourage women faculty to
apply, there is no evidence of an express statement that the award program is
awarded on the basis of sex. Further, the program’s promotional materials do
not include a restriction or preference based on sex.” 
What?!!! The university clearly states that eligibility is restricted to “tenure-track, tenured and research women faculty members,” it has given the award exclusively to 39 female faculty over the last six years (and 0 males), and it makes dozens of statements confirming conclusively that there is not just a preference based on sex, but an actual strict eligibility requirement based on sex for this female-only award. 
Further, the
OCR cited my lack of identifying actual victims in its dismissal by writing
“OCR asked whether you were aware of any individuals who were denied the
opportunity to participate in the award program because of their sex. You
responded, but did not identify any individuals who were denied participation
because of their sex.” Well of course I couldn’t identify any specific victims
of sex discrimination, because it’s obvious that no male faculty at UNM has
ever spent the time to apply for an award for which he is clearly ineligible
and there would be no paper trail or instances of such discrimination! 
Finally, the
OCR stated that it is “dismissing the complaint because OCR lacks sufficient factual
detail to infer that the University’s Women in STEM award program violates
Title IX.” How about just the discriminatory name of the program – that alone
suggests a Title IX violation without the additional mountain of evidence
presented in detail. After all, it’s not the UNM Faculty STEM award or the
Women and Men STEM award, but the WOMEN [ONLY] IN STEM award!!  
Although this is perhaps the most egregious case to date of OCR’s disregard of past practices and a direct contradiction of Biden and Cardona’s discrimination-free guarantee (and I’ve filed an appeal), it reflects what is apparently the new “OCR playbook” that will increasingly be used to dismiss valid complaints of Title IX violations: Give us instances and the names of actual victims of sex discrimination and provide us with specific statements from universities stating that men are excluded from participating in female-only programs. If you can’t provide any actual victims and any incriminating statements from university officials, we’ll dismiss your valid complaint and allow the university to continue to discriminate, but of course only when the discrimination benefits “preferred groups.” 
Universities
for decades have been guilty of both violating Title IX and enforcing federal civil
rights laws selectively, and have done so with impunity because nobody
complained. Now that more than 500 Title IX complaints have been filed by
myself and others to hold universities accountable for many thousands of
violations, it’s the legal obligation of the OCR to investigate those
violations and enforce Title IX uniformly. But the recent actions of the OCR
under Biden suggest that at least some regional OCR offices are willing to
abrogate their legal responsibility to uphold the law and are instead enabling,
sanctioning, and endorsing sex discrimination at universities like the
University of New Mexico. Welcome to the new Orwellian world of Biden’s OCR,
where all students and faculty are guaranteed a discrimination-free experience
in theory, but where only some preferred groups will actually have that
experience, while other unpreferred groups will continue to be the victims of
blatant, illegal discrimination. 
Although I’m
discouraged to now have to fight both universities violating Title IX and the
OCR’s new resistance to enforcing Title IX, I’ll continue to fight……    
The post An update on my efforts to challenge Title VI and Title IX violations in higher education despite new resistance from Biden’s Office for Civil Rights appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

By James Pethokoukis and Arthur Turrell
Fusion energy has been the promise of physicists for decades, but is it finally arriving? As we face a warming climate and increasing energy needs, fusion power may hold the potential to deliver an abundant, clean energy future. On a recent episode of “Political Economy,” Arthur Turrell discussed whether nuclear fusion will be powering our homes any time soon, what government can do to push this technology forward, and if renewables are making fusion obsolete before it can get off the ground.
Arthur is Deputy Director at the Data Science Campus of the Office for National Statistics in the UK and the author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet.
Pethokoukis: A skeptic might say that nuclear fusion is the future of energy . . . and always will be. Yet over the past year, it seems to me that there’s been a lot of activity. So what’s going on?
Turrell: The investment and the human ingenuity that’s been put into fusion is starting to demonstrate some really interesting breakthroughs recently. The biggest of those has been the emergence of a private sector in fusion, which suggests that there’s some market confidence. Investors must think that they’re able to get some return, whether from fusion energy or from technologies related to fusion.
Scientists work on the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak magnetic fusion device for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Via REUTERS
The other thing is there have been a number of technological breakthroughs, things like superconductors, which allow for new types of experimental fusion reactor design. For instance, there’s been an enormous result at the National Ignition Facility — which is trying to do a type of fusion called laser fusion — recently, where they’ve demonstrated a world-record beating net energy gain from fusion. So the breakthroughs have really given the whole field a sense of optimism.
Physicists can produce fusion reactions, but they aren’t generating electricity yet. What are the upcoming milestones for fusion energy?
We have to be really careful about what we mean by nuclear fusion, and the first thing that sometimes people mean is just doing some fusion reactions. But that’s easy and experiments can do it all the time. The next phase is to demonstrate scientific net energy gain. And that’s about creating an experiment where you put in a certain amount of energy and you get at least as much energy back out. The reason why that’s such an important benchmark or milestone is because an energy source that you can’t get more energy out of than you put in is no good, obviously.
There are milestones beyond that, and the next one beyond that is wall-plug energy gain. It’s the energy to charge up the capacitor banks. It’s the energy to keep the diagnostics running. It’s the energy to keep the lights on. It’s all of that peripheral machinery that you need to do a fusion experiment, and that requires a gain, not of 100 percent — so one unit of energy out for energy in — but a gain that’s appreciably more than that. It depends on the reactor, but I think what people would really like to achieve is at least 30 times energy out for energy in.
Why do we need star machines? If it’s for climate change, aren’t renewables the road forward? If it’s not for that, then do we really need them at all for any other reason?
All of the star builders I spoke to are absolutely convinced that renewables are going to be a key part of our energy supply. But I think in almost anything that you do in life, it’s useful to have a portfolio of things with different strengths and weaknesses that you can draw upon. If I think about the advantages of renewables, they work right now and they’re very cheap, but on the disadvantages side, the energy that they tap into is very diffuse. It’s spread out over large areas, and that means that they need vast areas to work. And sometimes you want types of power that aren’t so reliant on the weather to provide that baseload energy.
Some of the star builders I spoke to were skeptical about batteries ever scaling up to cover the whole year, but I think the other point here is that fusion could potentially provide energy at very large scales, too, and without using up lots of area. Another reason in the long run why we might want fusion energy — and excuse me if this sounds rather futuristic — is that we are not going to explore the solar system as a species using a coal-fired spaceship.
Fission power has always been surrounded by a lot of worries about radiation and environmental impact. Do those same concerns apply to fusion?
My sense is that the mood is changing a little bit on fission because there’s a trade off there. Is the biggest problem long-lived radioactive waste, of which there isn’t very much generated, or is it climate change? And right now climate change to me certainly seems like the bigger challenge that we face on planet Earth. The radioactive waste that we think will be produced by fusion is what’s at the end of a plant’s life, when you need to decommission the reactor chamber. And the best guesses suggest that that will be dangerous for a much shorter period of time compared to the waste that’s produced as a part of ongoing processes in fission.
There’s another concern as well, which is about nuclear proliferation. If you are worried about rogue states using the materials involved in fission to construct nuclear weapons, those materials can be generated in relatively short time, or a peaceful fission program can be used as a cover for the production of the materials you need for nuclear weapons. The great thing about nuclear fusion in this respect is that there’s no reason for it to involve any fissile material whatsoever. You only need the ingredients for fusion, which are kind of useless on their own for nuclear weapons.
Is fusion technology at a state that there is a clean handoff to the private sector or are there still more basic research kinds of things that government needs to do?
I think that the quickest path to fusion is going to be a partnership between the public and private players. The public sector does some things really well and some things not so well, and the private sector does some things really well and some things not well. Part of fusion is this big laboratory scientific exploration, understanding the physics behind plasma and really breaking through the frontier scientifically, and some of it is about: How do we do this on a scale that’s relevant for power generation repeatably, reliably, resiliently? How do we make it modular so that we can improve the learning rate with construction? How do we bring down the capital costs? And that’s the thing where the private sector can really contribute. I think the Department of Energy has recognized this with their milestone-based programs, where they’re making some of the public money available to private firms who can reach certain goals that are going to need to be reached to get to a future where fusion can actually deliver energy.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Arthur Turrell is Deputy Director at the Data Science Campus of the Office for National Statistics in the UK and the author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet.
Learn more: 5 questions for Ramez Naam on the viability of solar and wind energy to power the future | 5 questions for Elizabeth Kolbert on geoengineering, CRISPR, and modern environmentalism | 5 questions for Nate Morris on entrepreneurship, innovation, and environmentalism
The post 5 questions for Arthur Turrell on fusion energy appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

 Jacob Lund/ShutterstockThe benefits of breastfeeding are wide-ranging and life-changing. Breast milk contains antibodies that reduce the risk of asthma, allergies, diarrhoea and ear infections. Breastfed infants are hospitalised less frequently than infants who are not. In later life, breastfed children and less likely to be overweight and have higher IQs. And women who have breastfed are at reduced risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
What’s more, these benefits increase with the duration of breastfeeding. Breastfeeding over the first week of life is beneficial, but breastfeeding over the first year is far better.
It’s sensible then that Public Health England has made it a priority to support breastfeeding and that the Scottish government has committed to a goal of increasing breastfeeding duration.
In a recent pilot study, myself and MSc student Tracy McGillivray gave planning/advice cards to some women in the closing stages of their pregnancy to help them manage the transition to breastfeeding. We discovered women who received the cards were four times less likely to quit breastfeeding than women who had not received them.
Myths and misconceptions
Breastfeeding is tough. It is physically gruelling. A majority of the women who answered the large-scale Infant Feeding Survey in 2010 reported that they experienced breast or nipple pain at some point when breastfeeding.
Even these days, it can be socially bruising. Recently I have seen two news stories about women being berated for breastfeeding – in one case the breastfeeding mother was being told to leave her own garden.
And there continue to be misconceptions about breastfeeding. Some of these misconceptions are cultivated by industry. A study published recently found that manufacturers of infant feeding formula gave a skewed impression of the relative merits of formula versus breastfeeding. The manufacturers’ websites underplayed the benefits of breastfeeding and overstated its challenges. 
But some of the misconceptions are unfortunate accidents. For example, advocates often claim that breastfeeding is “the most natural thing in the world”. This phrase neglects the fact that for new mothers breastfeeding is a new behaviour that, like all new behaviours, takes some getting used to.

Indications of how tough breastfeeding is are revealed in the Infant Feeding Survey. In Scotland, one in five mothers who started breastfeeding stopped just two weeks after birth. Drop-off in those first two weeks is even higher in Wales and in Northern Ireland. Crucially, 86% of mothers who dropped breastfeeding in those first two weeks report that they would have liked to have breastfed for longer.
These statistics – far higher rates of drop-off than women would have wished for themselves – imply that a supportive way of helping women breastfeed more successfully is needed. Tracy McGillivray, an MSc student on our behavioural science course who also works as as a child nutrition specialist with NHS Lothian, came up with one such idea – and now we know it works.
She identified the gap between intention and reality described in the previous paragraph and worked with me on designing a breastfeeding planning card. She recruited 81 women at antenatal classes around Edinburgh and randomly assigned some mothers to serve as a control group who did not receive a card, and others to receive one of two planning cards we designed. 
What did the cards say?
One goal for the planning card was to help women anticipate some of the challenges they would face in those early days after birth when establishing a breastfeeding routine. We also wanted to reassure women that it is normal to experience difficulty breastfeeding. So we listed on one side of the card four obstacles to breastfeeding commonly cited by women.

Author provided

A second goal for the card was that it would help women plan to meet those challenges. The card was given to women in the closing stages of their pregnancy – at a moment when the reality of becoming a mother was imminent but when there remained time to take action to prepare for breastfeeding. We provided alongside the list of obstacles a list of related tips taken from the Infant Feeding Survey and peer-reviewed literature. We called the resulting card the Obstacles/Tips card, or O/T card in the graph below.
In addition, some cards featured on their reverse side a prompt that read: “When I have my baby, I intend breastfeeding for …” We added this because research on dieting and exercising shows that deliberately articulating a specific intention helps people achieve their health goals. In the graph we call these the “Enhanced O/T card”.

Breastfeeding continued to drop off in the control group but not among women who received an ‘Obstacles/Tips’ card.
David Comerford, Author provided

The graph above shows what happened. The green lines depict the control group of women who received no card. All had expressed an intention to breastfeed. On discharge from hospital, 80% of them were actually breastfeeding. When we contacted them 10-14 days after their due date, just 64% were still giving their baby any breast milk. The negative trend also occurs among this control group if we focus on exclusive breastfeeding, meaning no topping up with formula milk. This result is important because babies who are exclusively fed breastmilk enjoy particular health benefits.
Contrast those downward trends in breastfeeding and exclusive breastfeeding with the two card groups. The vast majority of mothers who were breastfeeding on discharge from hospital in both the O/T card and the Enhanced O/T card groups were still breastfeeding 10-14 days later.
The difference in slope over the discharge to follow up period – a downward drop for the control group versus a near horizontal line for the card groups – is striking. Given the substantial benefits of breastfeeding, we hope these results encourage others to adopt and adapt our card to promote breastfeeding.
David Comerford receives funding from UKRI on research around Covid-19. 

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observed Wednesday that with employees in industries across the spectrum set to strike in the coming days following corporate leaders’ failure to meet their demands for fair pay and working conditions, the U.S. is closer than it has been in decades to experiencing a general strike.
“You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions,” wrote Reich in The Guardian. “No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it’s related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land — Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo.”

Labor advocates are calling the nationwide show of union power and worker solidarity “Striketober,” as work stoppages across numerous industries are expected in the coming hours and days if unions’ demands aren’t met.
About 10,000 workers at farm equipment manufacturer John Deere are walked out Thursday after the company failed to negotiate a contract that satisfies the demands of the United Auto Workers (UAW) members by 11:59 pm on Wednesday.
With 90% of members voting on Sunday, 90% voted down a tentative agreement over pension plan changes and what they viewed as inadequate pay raises — boosting compensation by 5 to 6% — considering the company’s skyrocketing profits this year, with a net income between $5.7 and 5.9 billion.
“We aren’t asking to be millionaires, we are asking for fair wages, a pension, and post-retirement healthcare,” one employee told WQAD, an ABC affiliate in Moline, Illinois. “After 30 years or more of giving your body to a company moving 1,000 pound castings around or assembling tractors, it rips your body apart. It’s not unreasonable to not want to have that worry in life of ‘what if?'”
More than 24,000 nurses and other healthcare workers in California and Oregon also voted on Monday to authorize a strike after contract negotiations with their employer, Kaiser Permanente, stalled. The workers are demanding relief from pandemic-related burnout, 4% annual raises, and increased hiring.
 After voting to authorize a strike earlier this month, 60,000 film and TV crew workers could go on strike on Monday if the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents hundreds of production companies, fails to offer a contract that allows employees sufficient time off. 
Workers frequently work 12-hour days — often without meal breaks — and get only 10 hours off in between workdays, while the lowest-paid crew members earn less than a living wage, according to the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).
“Striketober is a function of greedy bosses trying to recoup the un-recoupable,” tweeted Jonas Loeb, communications director for IATSE.

#Striketober is a function of greedy bosses trying to recoup the un-recoupable.
Workers across every sector in our economy are being pushed to the brink to make up for the lost time during the pandemic shutdown.
Every strike is management’s fault.
— Jonas Loeb (@jonasloeb) October 7, 2021

The recent strike authorizations and impending possible work stoppages come as thousands of people are already striking for fair working conditions and pay, including 1,400 Kellogg plant workers in several states; 1,100 miners at Warrior Met Coal, who have been fighting for a fair contract since April; and 2,000 hospital workers in New York.
The nationwide wave of worker solidarity involves “the kind of numbers you don’t see anymore,” tweeted HuffPost labor reporter Dave Jamieson.

So what is #Striketober?
We now have strike authorizations at John Deere (strike deadline tonight), IATSE/Hollywood (deadline Oct. 18) and Kaiser Permanente (deadline TBD).
That’s around *90,000 workers* right there. Those are the kind of numbers you don’t see anymore.
— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) October 13, 2021

Reich wrote that with frontline workers across the country putting their health at risk over the last 18 months by going to work at companies that have raked in historic profits, “workers are reluctant to return to or remain in their old jobs mostly because they’re burned out”:

Years ago, when I was secretary of labor, I kept meeting working people all over the country who had full-time work but complained that their jobs paid too little and had few benefits, or were unsafe, or required lengthy or unpredictable hours. Many said their employers treated them badly, harassed them, and did not respect them.
Since then, these complaints have only grown louder, according to polls. For many, the pandemic was the last straw. Workers are fed up, wiped out, done-in, and run down. In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.

“Corporate America wants to frame this as a ‘labor shortage,'” wrote Reich. “Wrong. What’s really going on is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a healthcare shortage. Unless these shortages are rectified, many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon.”
As IATSE members’ potential strike drew near, the union pointed out that some of its members — stagehands and theater tech workers at North Shore Music Theater (NSMT) in Beverly, Massachusetts — secured livable wages after striking for just one day this month.

BREAKING: After striking for just one day, North Shore Music Theatre stagehands prevailed in their fight for livable wages. #Striketober 
“I’m thrilled to go back to work tonight to the job that I love, knowing my expertise is recognized and respected,” said one worker. https://t.co/xPlQeRJVHt
— IATSE // #IASolidarity (@IATSE) October 7, 2021

“NSMT crew were previously paid 60% less than the industry area average but will now be receiving wages starting at $18 per hour,” said the union last week.
AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler told The Hill that the Striketober movement shows that with economic inequality “getting worse and worse… unions are the solution.”
“This is the capitalist system that has driven us to the brink,” Shuler said.
Unite Here, which represents 300,000 hospitality employees, expressed solidarity with the workers taking part in Striketober and urged them to see themselves as in a position of power.
“It is clear that we are in a significant moment for union organizing,” said the union. “What we cannot do is lose this moment. The so-called ‘labor shortage’ — which we know is really just a shortage of jobs that pay us enough to live on — is a powerful bit of leverage workers have over employers right now.”
“You know what scares bosses?” added Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants. “Worker solidarity. Striketober is terrifying the bosses.”

Science is about rational disagreement, the questioning and testing of orthodoxy and the constant search for truth. With something like lockdown — an untested policy that affects millions — rigorous debate and the basics of verification/falsification are more important than ever. Academics backing lockdown (or any major theory) ought to welcome challenges, knowing — as scientists do — that robust challenge is the way to identify error, improve policy and save lives.
But with lockdown, science is in danger of being suppressed by politics. Lockdown moved instantly from untested theory to unchallengeable orthodoxy: where dissenters face personal attack. Understandable on social media perhaps, but it has now crept into the British Medical Journal in a recent article about the Great Barrington Declaration.
The GBD, which I wrote, together with Dr Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford and Dr Sunetra Gupta at Oxford, argues for focused protection. Rather than a blanket lockdown which inflicts so much harm on society, we wanted better protection of those most at risk – mindful that COVID typically poses only a mild risk to the young. For saying so, we are smeared as ‘the new merchants of doubt’ — as if skepticism and challenge is regarded by the BMJ as something to be condemned.
The error-strewn attacks in BMJ demonstrate what awaits academics who do challenge prevailing views.
The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:

My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb COVID-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 — specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary COVID deaths
We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favor of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimize morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end
It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for COVID and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal
The GBD is referred to as a ‘sophisticated science denialism’. Note here how something that challenges an orthodoxy is described as anti-science — a label that presumably could have been applied to any scientific innovator who ever questioned a failed orthodoxy. Collateral public health damage from COVID restrictions are real and enormous on cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, backsliding childhood vaccinations, starvation and mental health, just to name a few. It is not the GBD, but those who downplay lockdown harms who should be equated with those who question the harms of tobacco or climate change
The GBD was not ‘sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) — and I’m pleased to see that the BMJ has at least retracted this claim. We were there for media interviews, with no sponsorship. How did such a blunder end up in print in the first place? The AIER staff did not even know about the Declaration until the day before it was signed, and the AIER president and board did not know about it until after publication. If we had written the Declaration at say, Starbucks, would the BMJ have claimed that it was sponsored by the coffee shop?
The BMJ article mentions ‘AIER contributor Scott Atlas’, but Dr Atlas has never been affiliated with nor written for AIER. Neither have we — unless the BMJ also views us as affiliated with hundreds of universities and organizations that we have visited during our careers or that have reprinted some of our articles. Dr Atlas was not even aware that AIER had reprinted one of his articles until the BMJ linked to it. Several AIER employees have gracefully supported the GBD, just like countless other people around the world, but we have never received any money from the AIER. This basic error again exposes how normal checks did not appear to have been applied by the BMJ
The BMJ article ends by saying that my colleagues and I are peddling a ‘well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests’. Nobody has paid us money for our work on the GBD, or for advocating focused protection. None of us would have undertaken this project for professional gain: it is far easier to stay silent than put your head above the parapet. As a vaccine developer, Dr Gupta has connections with a pharmaceutical start-up, but Dr Bhattacharya and I are among the few drug/vaccine scientists who purposely avoid pharmaceutical company funding to be free from conflicts of interests

The BMJ attempt to link us to the Koch brothers is an ad hominem attack of the highest order, but failed to mention much closer connections. We all work for universities that have received donations from Koch Foundations, although unrelated to any of our own work. While the AIER has received only a single $68,000 Koch donation a few years ago, many universities have received multiple, much larger Koch donations, including million dollar gifts to Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Since university staff frequently publish in the BMJ, the journal is arguably more closely connected to a ‘network of organizations funded by Charles Koch’ than the AIER.
Many scientists receive research funding from private foundations, for which we as scientists should be grateful. It is hypocritical and discriminatory for the BMJ to single out Dr Gupta because her lab received limited funds from the Opel Foundation. As one among many examples, Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College were awarded a prize by the Koch-affiliated Mercatus Center’s ‘Emergent Ventures’ program.
During a pandemic, it is the duty of public health scientists to engage with government officials: to use their expertise to confront what right now is perhaps the biggest single problem facing humanity. It is hard to understand why anyone would criticize that.
If we are to be faulted for anything, it is that we failed to convince governments to implement focused protection instead of damaging lockdowns. One place where we had some success was Florida, where the cumulative age-adjusted COVID mortality is lower than the US national average with less collateral damage. If we are wrong, then as scientists we would welcome a scientific discussion on how and where we are wrong.

The BMJ article urges people to use ‘political and legal strategies’ rather than scientific argument to counter our views on the pandemic. It also calls for people to adhere to the ‘scientific consensus’ as represented by a Memorandum published by the Lancet, a document that questions natural immunity after Covid disease, despite a recent Israeli study suggesting it could be stronger than vaccine protection.
What is there to say? Because of political strategies using slander and ad hominem attacks, many physicians and scientists have been reluctant to speak out despite their reservations about pandemic policies. The error-strewn attacks in BMJ demonstrate what awaits academics who do challenge prevailing views.
That such an article was published exemplifies the decay in standards of scientific journals. Open and honest discourse is critical for science and public health. As scientists, we must now tragically acknowledge that 400 years of scientific enlightenment may be coming to an end. It started with Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and René Descartes. It would be tragic if it would end up as one of the many casualties of this pandemic.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
The post COVID, lockdown and the retreat of scientific debate appeared first on The Spectator World.

The biggest mystery concerning the history of our universe is what happened before the big bang. Where did our universe come from? Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein searched for steady-state alternatives to the big bang model because a beginning in time was not philosophically satisfying in his mind.

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen ... an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

This possible origin story unifies the religious notion of a creator with the secular notion of quantum gravity. We do not possess a predictive theory that combines the two pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and gravity. But a more advanced civilization might have accomplished this feat and mastered the technology of creating baby universes. If that happened, then not only could it account for the origin of our universe but it would also suggest that a universe like our own—which in this picture hosts an advanced technological civilization that gives birth to a new flat universe—is like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations.

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence. One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

With this perspective, the technological level of civilizations should not be gauged by how much power they tap, as suggested by the scale envisioned in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev. Instead, it should be measured by the ability of a civilization to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to its existence.

As of now, we are a low-level technological civilization, graded class C on the cosmic scale, since we are unable to recreate even the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. Even worse, we may be labeled class D since we are carelessly destroying the natural habitat on Earth through climate change, driven by our technologies. A class B civilization could adjust the conditions in its immediate environment to be independent of its host star. A civilization ranked class A could recreate the cosmic conditions that gave rise to its existence, namely produce a baby universe in a laboratory.

Achieving the distinction of class A civilization is nontrivial by the measures of physics as we know it. The related challenges, such as producing a large enough density of dark energy within a small region, already have been discussed in the scientific literature.

Since a self-replicating universe only needs to possess a single class A civilization, and having many more is much less likely, the most common universe would be the one that just barely makes class A civilizations. Anything better than this minimum requirement is much less likely to occur because it requires additional rare circumstances and does not provide a greater evolutionary benefit for the Darwinian selection process of baby universes.

The possibility that our civilization is not a particularly smart one should not take us by surprise. When I tell students at Harvard University that half of them are below the median of their class, they get upset. The stubborn reality might well be that we are statistically at the center of the bell-shaped probability distribution of our class of intelligent life-forms in the cosmos, even when taking into account our celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider.

We must allow ourselves to look humbly through new telescopes, as envisioned by the recently announced Galileo Project, and search for smarter kids on our cosmic block. Otherwise, our ego trip may not end well, similarly to the experience of the dinosaurs, which dominated Earth until an object from space tarnished their illusion.

       America's broken supply chain   Scott Lincicome   October 14, 11:00 PM October 14, 11:00 PM  Supply chain woes are threatening American companies’ bottom lines, causing higher prices and broader inflationary pressures, and making holiday shoppers increasingly nervous. Shipping containers are piling up at ports across the country, which has led to long delays for idling ships and higher shipping costs, with some companies unwilling or unable to obtain the goods (or even the containers) they need. Importers and retailers are especially reeling.  Home Depot, Costco, and others have chartered their own ships, while the Columbia Sportswear Company, Whirlpool, Peloton, and Apple have warned about rising prices and potential shortages. Worse, many import-reliant small businesses that lack the big players’ financial resources have been forced to choose between folding up shop or paying many times the typical shipping rate for things that might arrive in months, not weeks. The disruption is so bad that the American Apparel and Footwear Association urged consumers to start Christmas shopping in the summer. The White House has established a “task force” and “bottleneck czar” to address the situation, while still warning the public of not only higher prices but also holiday “things that people can’t get” at any price.  Logistics and supply chain management problems have gone from an esoteric, niche field to front-page news and federal government priority, and for good reason. Automobile and other manufacturers have idled plants waiting for key parts such as semiconductors; prices of energy and other basic necessities have climbed, pressuring not only family budgets but also inflation-spooked politicians (and thus President Joe Biden’s economic agenda); and major brands are now warning that the smartphones, video games, bicycles, and other goodies we expected to see on holiday shelves just might not be there. Such problems were mostly acceptable in mid-2020, but now, we’re told they could last well into next year.  There are some signs that the worst of the crisis is behind us: Ocean shipping rates, for example, have declined from September peaks. But most experts believe that troubles will persist until at least early 2022, stemming from a cascading confluence of near- and long-term problems — few of which, unfortunately, are quickly or easily solved.  Most obviously, the pandemic has scrambled the typically predictable global supply-and-demand patterns on which complex production and logistics networks have long been based. As the United States reopened this summer, for example, demand for imported industrial inputs and consumer goods skyrocketed, but many major exporting countries, especially in Asia, were still mostly closed-down. Muted consumer demand from these same countries also dented their typical purchases of U.S. products, such as farm goods. The result was a major imbalance in the usual shipping container flows to and from the U.S. This was then amplified by temporary closures at specific ports and factories because of isolated COVID-19 outbreaks.  Another serious mismatch has arisen between total available shipping capacity and abnormally high worldwide demand. Some of that demand is the natural result of the post-COVID reopenings, as vaccinated consumers make up lost time and companies restock depleted inventories, aided by Americans’ increasing comfort with e-commerce. However, some of the mismatch is likely owed to psychology: Just as consumer hoarding of toilet paper and other essentials emptied store shelves last year, now, economic uncertainty and a fear of running out have pushed retailers and other large importers into stockpiling and panic-buying.  This has created a self-fulfilling “bullwhip effect” that has pushed others to do the same. Lean, “just-in-time” inventory management has been replaced by a “just-in-case” approach that’s seen some buyers, especially in the U.S., double or even triple their inventory levels. Shipping capacity just can’t keep up: Logistics firm Flexport estimates, for example, that global demand for ocean cargo space is 20 to 30 percentage points higher than available capacity, even though ocean carriers have deployed every ship they have, including ones “not even designed to carry containers.”  The pandemic’s supply-demand imbalances then spilled into the United States's logistics infrastructure, creating bottlenecks that have exacerbated the original problem. This starts with the ports: As Flexport noted in June, effective ocean freight capacity was 25% lower than what was technically deployed “because so many vessels are caught up in record bottlenecks at ports.” The situation deteriorated further over the summer, with record numbers of waiting ships at the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach, Oakland, New York/New Jersey, Savannah, and Charleston. The worst of it, however, has been reserved for the LA/Long Beach port complex, which is the busiest port in the U.S., handling around 40% of total cargo volumes each year. Yet now, ships there have been forced to take the unprecedented step of just drifting offshore because all port space and contingency anchorages were filled. Many speculate that these ships’ anchors caused the recent oil spill off the California coast.  Other chokepoints and simple coordination problems have added to U.S. port woes. Shipping containers, for example, have been stacked up at port, thus preventing additional boxes from being quickly unloaded. This is because there is insufficient truck and freight rail service available to pick them all up. Those backlogs, in turn, are reportedly due to a shortage of intermodal chassis — what shipping containers sit on when trucks move them across the country — and warehouse space. Without a nearby place to put their orders, U.S. importers have left their containers at the ports, using them as de facto warehouses (and paying high “demurrage” fees to do so). Truckers also report that preexisting port rules on hours of service, appointment times, and “dual transactions,” which require trucks to drop empty containers in order to pick up full ones, have limited their ability to clear port backlogs. And nobody, it seems, can find enough workers.  Regardless of which link in the chain really is the weakest, these strains are having a collectively big effect. West Coast backlogs have also pushed shippers to use East Coast ports (via the Suez Canal), adding to their backlogs. Thousands and thousands of containers full of items Americans have ordered are effectively out of use while they wait days, even weeks in California, for a spot at U.S. ports. They then spend several more days awaiting pickup. It’s worth reiterating: Fewer containers in use means higher shipping prices and more stress on the domestic and international supply chain systems. And all of this eventually redounds to U.S. companies and consumers.  Unfortunately, there’s no White House “task force” or “bottleneck czar” that can fix this situation. Ports plan to expand, retailers plan to build more warehouse space, and shipping companies plan to boost capacity. But you can’t just build more ships or add more port or warehouse space overnight. These and other domestic constraints, combined with a general national shortage of labor, have limited the efficacy of any quick fixes, such as the extended hours at LA/Long Beach gates pushed by the Biden administration. Resolving these problems will take time.  Furthermore, some of them may not be fixable at all — at least not without far more political will than has been on display. The U.S. system has been warped by long-standing policies that have decreased port efficiency and unnecessarily stressed our inland supply chain infrastructure. Most notably, longshoreman unions have leveraged their ability to shut down U.S. ports (and thus much of the economy) during contentious labor negotiations to win contracts that decrease port productivity. This includes provisions and practices that inflate salaries, limit work hours and job flexibility, and prohibit efficiency-enhancing (but union job-threatening) automation. Unions have also fought ports’ efforts to supplement their union workforce with nonunion workers, even ones employed by the state.  As a result of these and other efforts, unionized port workers can make upward of $200,000 per year, while U.S. ports rank among some of the least efficient in the world. The recent experience of one of the most automated (though still not fully) ports in the country, the Port of Virginia, shows just how much this all matters for the current shipping crisis: That semi‐automated marine terminal was one of the few in the country free of major backlogs, despite record volumes.  Another long-term, structural problem is legislative. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (aka the “Jones Act”), which requires U.S.-built, -crewed, and -flagged ships to move all freight between U.S. ports, has made coastwise shipping prohibitively costly and therefore put additional pressure on alternative inland transit such as trucks and trains. In practice, this means badly needed rigs that could be servicing U.S. ports currently are instead stuck on I-95 ferrying oranges from Florida to New York. Perhaps even worse, the combination of the Jones Act and the Foreign Dredge Act, which requires barges transporting dredged material to be Jones Act‐compliant, has significantly inflated the cost of dredging U.S. ports, deterring expansions that could accommodate more and bigger ships. It’s no surprise, then, that major U.S. ports handle a fraction of the ships that their foreign counterparts do, and that there’s been only one significant U.S. container terminal expansion, in Charleston, since 2009.  Finally, there’s U.S. trade policy. In particular, the United States just imposed 221% “trade remedy” duties on imports of intermodal chassis from China, which is by far the largest producer of such products. With chassis supplies exhausted at ports and rail terminals across the country, and with insufficient non‐China chassis production to meet current demand, the new U.S. duties are discouraging importers and freighters from bringing new capacity online and further raising shipping costs. And the laws authorizing these taxes — which are widely supported in Congress, by the way — expressly prohibit administering agencies from reducing, delaying, or terminating the duties due to consumer or other economic harms. Thus, we get chassis tariffs enacted in the middle of a national shipping crisis caused, in part, by a chassis shortage — tariffs that the White House itself can’t remove, even though port directors are begging them to do so.  These factors, along with the practical impediments, make quick fixes to the U.S. logistics crunch all but impossible. Sclerotic American ports can, for example, join their Asian and European peers and move to 24/7 operations, but that won’t do much good if they’re still not expanded or automated, if longshoreman contracts remain inflexible and costly, or if downstream trucking, rail, and warehouse systems aren’t set up to work the new hours (or are busy handling “Jones Act” freight). The system evolved over decades to reflect not only stable supply and demand patterns and lean inventory management practices, but also U.S. labor and trade policies that decrease the systemwide efficiency and flexibility that’s now so needed.  It will take months, maybe years, for the system to evolve. And that’s if Washington will even let it.  Scott Lincicome is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Cato Institute and a senior visiting lecturer at Duke University Law School.      © 2021 Washington Examiner    

Is blackface being shown as part of a collegiate-level discussion, as in the Michigan case? College students shouldn’t need protection from an old film used to help them think about and debate the conversion of a classic over time. Sheng was using the film to stir and inform artistic consciousness. To read that situation otherwise is deeply anti-intellectual.

Is blackface being deployed comedically not to make fun of Black people but to lampoon the absurdity of racism? For example, in one episode of the sitcom “30 Rock,” Jane Krakowski’s character is made up in blackface and wears men’s clothing; Tracy Morgan’s character is made up in whiteface, a blond wig and wears women’s clothing in a “social experiment” to see who has it harder in America — white women or Black men. In another episode, Krakowski is made up in blackface and dresses as the Pittsburgh Steelers great Lynn Swann, who’s not derided in any way, the bit being a clever play on the movie title “Black Swan.”

Last year, not long after George Floyd was murdered, three “30 Rock” episodes that involved blackface, including those two, were taken out of syndication. The show’s producers, including its star, Tina Fey, may have concluded they had no choice. But we might ask why the sheer matter of the makeup was an insult to Black people. It’s not self-evident that pulling those episodes was morally necessary in 2020 because of careers like Jolson’s. The shows’ flashes of wit didn’t set Black people back in any way. It’s hard to see how a lighthearted plotline about racism and sexism, even with blackface, harms Black people — or how taking it off the air helps us. My horse sense tells me that the vast majority of us get that a joke can be a joke.

These are my own observations. They are up for debate. But those condemning Sheng seem to consider their ideas not just opinions but truths — the predicate for an inquisition. Yet the view that blackface makeup is so uniquely revolting that a professor should be hounded from his class for showing, in a scholarly setting, decades-old scenes of an actor wearing it is a point that many find extreme. It is a position that requires some serious lifting and a vast transformation in common modes of thought, even among people with good-faith concerns about race relations, and would look odd to time travelers from just a few decades ago. A position like that is not simply antiracist but radical.

This radical proposition, like so many on race of late, is being put forth as if it were scripture that no moral actor could question. It misses the point, then, to dismiss the students as fragile. Their claim entails that people were injured by such uses of blackface before and therefore must still be now and that we should redefine the bounds of permissibility to bar such images from general experience. They think their recoil from the very sight of decades-old racist imagery is uniquely enlightened, a resistance to abuse endemic to our society’s past, present and future. To them, their response isn’t only appropriate; it’s mandatory.

Many in the media are very upset that workers at the bottom end of the pay scale feel secure enough to demand higher pay and better working conditions. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of watching a television anchor, who earns $6 million a year, complain that 3 percent of the workforce quit their job in August. They seemed to find the idea of workers quitting unsatisfactory jobs appalling.

After decades of wage stagnation for those at the middle and the bottom of the wage ladder, it's good to see some real progress for at least some low-paid workers.

For those of us who think that all workers should be able to get decent pay, have decent working conditions, and be treated with respect on the job, the idea that large numbers of workers now feel they can quit jobs they don't like is really great news. And, the increased labor market power for those at the bottom of the ladder is showing up in higher pay.

Here's the story for production and non-supervisory workers in six of the lowest-paying industries. Note, these numbers are adjusted for inflation, so they take account of the extent to which higher prices have reduced purchasing power since the start of the pandemic.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author's calculations.

The biggest gains were for workers in hotels and convenience stores who have seen their inflation-adjusted hourly wage increase by 9.0 percent and 8.6 percent, respectively, since the pandemic began. Workers in restaurants have seen their hourly pay rise by 5.6 percent, while workers in nursing homes have seen their pay rise by 4.6 percent. Child care and home health care workers have seen much more limited inflation-adjusted wage gains, getting increases of 1.9 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively.

It is important to remember that these gains are over just a one-and-a-half-year period. These workers have a long way to go before they have anything resembling a livable wage, but this is impressive progress in at least some of these low-paying industries.

There has been a sharp drop in employment in both home health care and child care since the start of the pandemic. These sectors will have a hard time getting back workers unless they can offer better pay and conditions. That will be difficult for them to do without more government support, pointing again to the importance of Biden's Build Back Better agenda.

In any case, after decades of wage stagnation for those at the middle and the bottom of the wage ladder, it's good to see some real progress for at least some low-paid workers. The folks who have rigged the economy in their favor so they can get big bucks may not like the fact that it's harder to get good help, but them's the breaks.

Unfortunately, this essay needs to be written because so many people seem to be fatally confused about the concept of academic freedom, freedom of belief and speech more broadly and the value of viewpoint diversity and robust debate. That is, they fail to see the difference between someone making an argument that other people might find personally upsetting but which they do not have to read or listen to and targeted harassment, intimidation and dishonest character assassination intended to terrify people into silence. This is a very alarming development and it has never been more evident than in the current situation surrounding Professor Kathleen Stock.
Kathleen Stock is a feminist academic who has been critical of some forms of trans activism and queer theory that prioritise a personal perception of gender identity over the existence of biological sex in ways that impact on women’s rights, spaces and sports. While defending the rights of trans people to be free from harassment and discrimination and honouring their pronouns, Stock believes that recognizing the material reality of biological sex is important. In Material Girls she rejects the idea that only trans people have a right to an opinion on the subject of gender and argues that everyone does and that she as a lesbian sex-nonconforming woman has skin in the game too. She believes that women’s rights and trans people’s rights can both be recognized as important and rejects the idea that there is no debate to be had about this.
In the past week, Stock has been on the receiving end of what can only reasonably be described as a campaign of intimidation and an attempt at cancellation in the form of having her fired from her position at the University of Sussex. This included an Instagram account set up to demand her firing, posters stuck around her office calling for her firing and referring to her as transphobic and banners targeting her personally accompanied by the use of flares. In addition to this student activists issued explicit threats to continue the aggressive targeted harassment until Stock is fired and incited to others to behave intimidatingly until she is gone. The Instagram account said
‘If you care for our community like we do, spread the word, get people angry, angry enough to do something about it,’
And ‘Our demand is simple: Fire Kathleen Stock. Until then, you’ll see us around.’
Given all of this and the fact that police have needed to be consulted regarding Prof. Stocks’ physical safety is it any wonder that she has experienced panic attacks and been described as hyperventilating and crying? This was a targeted, personal attack on an individual of a physically threatening nature simply because she wrote a book, made some arguments and organized with feminist and gay and lesbian groups to argue for the need to consider biological sex a relevant factor.
Incredibly, there are people who see Prof. Stock making arguments which target no individual and which people can choose to read or not and which repeatedly stress the importance of trans people’s rights not to be intimidated or discriminated against as equivalent or even worse than the campaign of intimidation against her as an individual. Nowhere is this more evident than on Twitter. Twitter should not be mistaken for a representation of broader society but neither should its power and influence be underestimated.

This is blatantly untrue as well as being ridiculously hyperbolic. Would it be reasonable to accuse Judith Butler of making gender-conforming (or as Stock would prefer “sex-conforming”) people unsafe and wanting them dead because she has written and spoken about the importance of understanding gender as a performance? Would it be reasonable for students who disagreed with Butler’s theories of gender to worry that she wanted them dead or ethical for them to aggressively hound her, demand her firing and incite students to behave aggressively towards to her? Of course it would not. Butler is to be understood as having written arguments which people, including Kathleen Stock, have responded to appropriately with arguments. If activists targetted Butler in this way or any other queer theorist or trans activist in this way (which of course happens) it would almost certainly be clear to the activists hounding Stock that this was harassing and threatening behaviour. It would also be clear to Kathleen Stock who condemns any such behaviour very explicitly.
Many activists do not see this in this case because of their belief that arguments about sex and gender which do not comport with their gender ideology are literally dangerous to trans people. It is argued that any differing views on how sex and gender work can lead trans people to commit suicide. “Pretend to believe what I do or I’ll kill myself” is an emotionally manipulative demand and cannot be used ethically to prevent people expressing a range of views on an issue that really needs to be discussed. People who are suicidal require psychological support not the censorship of all other viewpoints. Similarly, it is argued that the existence of gender critical feminist arguments encourages violence against trans people although there is no evidence of anyone having committed violence influenced by gender critical feminism. Nevertheless, the belief that disagreement with a certain gender ideology held by (what is almost certainly) a minority of trans people is literally dangerous to trans people persists. If you believe this, it seems perfectly reasonable to respond to such arguments not with counterarguments but with aggressive retaliation. People with this mindset do not see Stock as a philosopher having an opinion which could be upsetting to some people but as a hatemonger causing real, genuine harm. The exchange below demonstrates this well.

Bizarrely, this has led some people to accuse those defending Stock or opposing the bullying and harassment of being “snowflakes.” They even regard the intimidating behaviour as “criticism” seeming not to comprehend that criticism is the production of a verbal or written critique, not an attempt to get someone fired or make them too afraid to enter their place of work.

This use of the term “snowflake” is an attempt to turn a term coined to describe people who feel harmed by viewpoints they find upsetting back onto those who object to physical harassment and intimidation of an individual. This does not work. It therefore seems necessary to discuss what phenomenon the word “snowflake” is meant to describe and why it does not apply to people preferring not to become the victims of campaigns of targeted harassment.
I am not a fan of the term “snowflake.” It tends to be used in a derogatory fashion to indicate contempt for an individual’s lack of psychological resilience. This usually occurs in the response to some dramatic statement about the harmfulness of speech. It is often said in response to things like “Your beliefs about sex and gender deny trans people’s right to exist,” “Your words erase women of color,” ‘advocating for hearing aids is advocating Deaf genocide.” While such statements are hyperbolic, it is not particularly useful to just dismiss the individual expressing them as a snowflake. This fails to recognize that the distress felt is probably completely genuine. If it is, some compassion and also a practical solution is required if we wish to be able to keep discussing different ideas. We need to look at the cause of people feeling deeply and personally harmed by somebody else expressing a viewpoint. This could be caused by an individual having suffered trauma that has left them feeling genuinely endangered by certain trigger words and who needs to be treated with therapy. It could also be caused by a cultural shift in our attitudes towards language and concepts of emotional safety which is teaching young people to genuinely feel such intense distress at words. This is more likely the explanation in the case of activist groups and it needs to be addressed on a cultural level. This is particularly important as these groups are so often found in universities which will turn out the next generation of leaders of various industries and institutions and we need them to be able to cope with a full range of words and ideas.
On that cultural level what is disparagingly known as “snowflakery” is more seriously and empathetically expressed by concern about an increasing lack of psychological resilience. It indicates alarm that an increasing number of young people and particularly those deeply steeped in theories of Critical Social Justice behave as though words that convey ideas they find upsetting could psychologically melt them. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt looks at precisely this phenomenon in a compassionate way that accepts the phenomenon as real and dangerous. It points out that we should not just dismiss people feeling this way as snowflakes as though it is their choice and preference to feel this way. The evidence that this phenomenon is accompanied by an increase in mental illness and suicide suggests it is not something young people are taking on because they enjoy it.
This phenomenon is very real and it needs addressing robustly by re-establishing a cultural norm that exposes young people to a wide range of ideas and teaches them to respond to speech they find abhorrent and unethical with counterspeech rather than with mass hysteria, violence, intimidation and attempts to get people fired. Of course, not all young people feel or behave this way and many of the people opposing this kind of mentality are themselves members of Generation Z. They are our best hope for a more resilient, tolerant and genuinely progressive future.
The phenomenon of snowflakery or what could be more compassionately referred to as “a pathological oversensitivity to words that causes people to be less able to function in the ideologically diverse world in which we live” is very different to an ethical objection to bullying, harassment, intimidation and cancellation. It is absolutely essential that we do not lose sight of some very key distinctions.

The difference between distress and physical harm.

If somebody makes an argument that women are mentally inferior and should stay at home doing only domestic chores, this idea could make me feel emotionally hurt or angry or that my full humanity was not being recognized. It does not physically harm me as I remain free to do precisely what I want and I can choose not to read the argument or criticize the argument. I can make my own argument for why women should be able to access all the opportunities men have. In fact, this happened and equal rights for women won. I won’t say the subject is not up for debate but I am confident that the arguments for equal rights for women are strong enough to keep winning.
The issue of whether or not women’s rights are affected by self-identified gender identity being accepted as the definition of womanhood in all circumstances has not been settled and it really needs to be. This requires allowing people like Kathleen Stock and theorists and activists who have opposing views to make those arguments and have those discussions. They will not be easy for everyone and could cause significant distress to individuals but it will not cause them physical harm. Physical harm is much more likely to be caused by continuing not to allow this to “be up for debate.” Gender critical feminists and trans people already face much hostility and occasionally violence. Discussion is the only thing that will prevent this and enable a resolution to be found where natal women’s rights and trans people’s rights do not conflict and disadvantage either party.

The difference between making arguments and targeting individuals for harassment.

If somebody writes a book arguing that sex and gender both exist on a spectrum and that there are infinite numbers of gender identities and that these should be prioritized over understanding biological sex as binary with very little variation, they are making an argument. If somebody else writes a book arguing that biological sex is almost entirely binary and that it is important to recognize that and that gender identity cannot take priority over biological sex in every situation without affecting women’s safety and ability to compete fairly in sports, they are also making an argument. People are likely to have strong feelings about both books but they can express these with arguments.
If political activists become enraged with the author of either of these books and plaster their workplace with posters calling them hateful names, set off flares, set up Instagram pages to incite acts of intimidation and frighten them out of speaking or writing or going to work, this is not an argument. These are targeted acts of harassment, bullying and intimidation against an individual. They are intended to circumvent the need for argument or dialogue and instead impose one viewpoint on others by intimidation. At the moment, it is the people making arguments for recognition of biological sex that activists feel most justified in trying to bully into silence but this could change. If you recognize that this would be bullying and harassment if done to somebody writing a book supporting a position you hold, recognize that it still so when done to someone writing one supporting a position you don’t.

The difference between criticism of ideas and punishment for them.

If somebody strongly dislikes an idea set forth by someone else, they must be able to criticize it. A criticism is when someone makes a critical analysis of an argument and attempts to show, possibly in strong terms, why that idea is factually wrong or morally abhorrent. This is done in words just as the original idea was set out in words. If the criticism is strong enough, the other person’s reputation could be damaged and they could lose esteem in the eyes of the public. This is a natural consequence of having one’s ideas critiqued and is acceptable in a liberal society. It does not constitute a punishment although it could be considered a consequence. Nevertheless, it is an acceptable consequence that we all sign up for when putting our ideas out into the public sphere.
If someone strongly dislikes an idea set forth by someone else and they then try to get that person deplatformed, fired or intimidated into silence, this is not a criticism. There has been no critical analysis. It has not been shown why the idea is factually wrong or morally abhorrent. The person taking these steps is not seeking to criticize ideas and convince others in a legitimate way that the individual expressing the idea is not putting forth anything of worth and should not be held in high esteem. They are going straight to punishment. This is not a natural consequence but one enabled by being in a position of power that enables one to essentially ban ideas and intimidate anyone else who might be thinking of expressing them. This is not an acceptable consequence for expressing ideas in a liberal society and it is not something anyone should have to accept they are signing up for when expressing their ideas in the public sphere. If we have a society where that is the case, we have a society in which totalitarianism is being allowed to win out over liberalism and that must be fought by everybody who wishes to be able to speak freely whether they agree with the current ideas or not.
 
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Lee McIntyre is a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, and instructor of ethics at Harvard Extension School. He is the author of a number of books, including The Scientific Attitude, Post-Truth, Respecting Truth, and most recently, How to Talk to a Science Denier. His new book looks at practical strategies for engaging with those who hold delusional anti-scientific beliefs, and the common strategies they use to present error and fraud as hidden truths. He not only analyzes the scholarly literature on persuasion but recounts his own experiences trying to change minds at a meeting of the Flat Earth International convention. He recently joined Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson for a discussion on the Current Affairs podcast. The transcript has been edited for grammar and clarity. 
Robinson  
I’m so excited to talk to you about How to Talk to a Science Denier because it is a very practical book. And it is also a fun book, especially at the beginning, because we’re going to start by asking you about this Flat Earth Convention that you went to. But this book is about the very, very difficult question of what we actually do in response to science denial. We know that, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic, and with climate change, there is a lot of misinformation, a lot of lies out there. And a lot of people lament this a lot; we talk about the epidemic of post-truth, the fake news. But you’ve really tried in this book to deal with the question of: How do we talk? Is there a way to fight these things? What do we know works? What do we know doesn’t work? You start this book by going to the heart of science denial, by going boldly where no philosopher of science has gone before, which is to a convention of the Flat Earth Society. And you found a number of interesting things at the meeting of the Flat Earth Society. And I think they might surprise people. Flat-Earthers are very, very sincerely committed to their belief in the flat Earth.
McIntyre
They are.
Robinson
They also believe that they believe in science. Theyâre not necessarily ignorant people who entirely reject science. So what are some of the counterintuitive things that people might not know about flat-Earthers?
McIntyre  
First thing I need to say is to draw the immediate distinction between the Flat Earth International Conference, where I went, and the Flat Earth Society. 
Robinson
Oh, Iâm so sorry.
McIntyre
They are different things. Because they hate each other. No, seriously, if you’ve ever seen [Monty Pythonâs] Life of Brian, you know the enmity between the Judean Peopleâs Front and the People’s Front of Judea. Thatâs what itâs like.
Robinson  
I apologize sincerely.
McIntyre  
We donât want to insult them right off the bat. Itâs funny. When I learned this myself, I couldn’t laugh. But some of the things that I learned are completely serious. And the reason that they’re completely serious is because although they’ll tell you that their beliefs are based on evidence, they’re actually based on distrust. They’re based on an identity of not believing that the scientists are telling you the truth. Thatâs their point of view. For everybody who’s tempted to say, how could they possibly believe this? Look at the evidence, look at the evidence, imagine that you lived in a world not unlike The Matrix, where everybody else was asleep. And the truth was out there, but very few people realized it. How would you handle that? Thatâs the way that they think of flat Earth. It’s this gigantic conspiracy theory. They have to be at the top of their wits in order to figure out all the clues, and they’re the ones who are there to wake up the rest of us.
Robinson  
Hmm. Well, I conducted my own version of this experiment. I didn’t go as deep as you did, but I picked up some QAnon books to write an article about QAnon. I found some of the same things that you did. It was interesting to me that in the QAnon books, there’s the rhetoric of reason and the scrutiny of evidence, and they believe that what they believe is scientific truth. And in the case of QAnon, they even say, well, do your own research and look for yourself. âI started out a skeptic, but then I was persuaded because I couldn’t refute it.â And so they ostensibly affirm that evidence has to be presented, that things can be refuted. So it’s weird. It is literally pseudo-science.
McIntyre  
It is, and that’s a very important thing to remember in speaking with them. They’re not self identifying as deniers. They’re not anti-science; Flat-Earthers regard themselves as being more scientific than the scientists. In some ways, they understand skepticism in a way that nobody else really understands skepticism. And in that way, it might give you a bit of heart because you think, “Okay, so there is at least some way that I can communicate with them, because they at least understand the relationship between evidence and belief.” And they’ll tell you that their beliefs are not based on faith, they’re based on evidence. But, of course, they’re reasoning about the evidence in the wrong way. And they have this misunderstanding of how science works. They have this misunderstanding of what it means to have sufficient evidence to believe that something is probably true. And because they’re conspiracy theorists, you’d think that that would make them the most skeptical people in the world. What it actually does is also make them the most gullible people in the world, because they are skeptical about the things that they don’t want to believe, but completely gullible about the things that they do want to believe. That is not a position that a scientist would want to be in, right? A scientist is supposed to be open-mindedâskeptical but also open-minded enough to gather new evidence, but then change their mind on the basis of new evidence. Science deniers in general have this curious mix of complete respectâand, in some ways, awe of scienceâand complete misunderstanding of what science is about.
Robinson  
Thereâs a guy in your book who you say was like, âI’ve got a white lab coat.” So I am a scientist. “I might not have credentials, but I have this white lab coat.” And that really kind of shows it, right? Itâs the appearance. Theyâll show you a ton of studies, right? If there are several studies that support their position. But it’s all motivated reasoning. You point out the five tendencies that commonly occur, and one of them is cherry picking. You find every single thing that supports your belief, and you discard every single thing that contradicts it.
McIntyre  
Well, that’s right. Thatâs a wired-in tendency; we all have that cognitive bias. Read chapter and verse and Kahneman and Tverskyâs work. The problem is that when you point out that that’s cherry picking, they’ll often think, “No, you’re the one who’s cherry picking.” Are they just being ironic? Are they just trolling in a way when they do that? No, I think they actually believe it. Again, it comes back to the question of trust, right? If you donât trust NASA, then any picture that I show you of the Earth from space is automatically going to be suspect, right? Why do they think that all those pictures are faked? On one level, because it’s convenient for them to believe that. On the other hand, I think they genuinely believe that because they don’t trust the NASA scientists. So it’s like QAnon, which is a massive conspiracy theory. It’s this perversion or this toxic form of reasoning thatâs not scientific even though it uses some of the same ideas and some of the same vocabulary.

Robinson  
Well, one of the ironies is that, actually, the skepticism of belief on the basis of authority is a good thing, right? I mean, believing something because someone works for NASA and believes it is not necessarily rational, right? They do emphasize that they want first person proof. And it’s true that a lot of our beliefs, even our beliefs in things that are empirically correct, are often based on trust and authority. George Orwell has this wonderful essay where he talks about his belief that the Earth is round. He says, “my belief that the Earth round is based on rather precarious reasoning” He says, you know, I believe many things that I think are scientifically true, but not because I have seen them satisfactorily proved before my own eyes, but because I was taught them by people that I trust. And he says that so much of our knowledge is not based on reasoning or experiment, but on authority, and “How can it be otherwise, when the range of knowledge is so vast that the expert himself is an ignoramus as soon as he strays away from his own specialty?” So I feel like we can’t avoid the fact that so much of our knowledge is necessarily based on trust.
McIntyre  
I love what you just said. You’ve put your finger on such an important point. And it’s this idea that even the people who love science, even the people who are allies of science, often don’t understand it. Or they just trust it. Do I know how my TV works? Do I know how Zencastr works? Do I know how wireless headphones work? No, but I trust that they’re going to work because I trust the people who made them. Now why do I trust them? Youâre picking up on exactly the right point. But hereâs the problem. Why are science deniers cafeteria skeptics? Why aren’t they just skeptics? Why are they skeptics only about the particular things that happen to step on the ideology that they care about? Because I mean, if they were just skeptics about everything, you know, it has to be first person evidence in front of my face right now or I won’t believe itâwell, they could be Cartesian skeptics and be very happy about it. Flat-Earthersâwho think, by the way, that every airline pilot is in on the conspiracyâflew in to the Flat Earth Convention in Denver on airplanes. Now, they didn’t trust the pilots, I guess. But they trusted that they knew how to fly, or they were on Twitter, on their phones. Did they understand how the phones work? Did they understand that there was satellite traffic from those phones? But they trusted the people who made the phones. 
So it’s this inconsistency. It’s the illogic of saying, you know, I trust science to save my life. Look, we see it today with the pandemic. If I go to the hospital with COVID, I’m going to make sure I get monoclonal antibodies, I’m going to make sure that they do everything that they can when I need to be intubated, etc. Those doctors, I’m gonna beg them to save my life with the latest scientific techniques. But I didn’t trust them enough to take the vaccine. Why? Why is there that distinction?
Robinson  
We can lament the fact that people are irrational and inconsistent in this way. That they have complete double standards, that there’s a lot of motivated reasoning, a lot of ideologically informed reasoning. But what you’re doing in the book is trying to get past just saying the thing that we know that we can observe, which is that there is an awful lot of very, very frustrating irrationality in the world. You try to think about what the roots of that irrationality are, where that kind of mistrust comes from, and then what the potential openings are in having conversations with people about these things on which they are going wrong.
McIntyre  
Yes, because otherwise, all we’re doing is cursing the darkness. And I wanted to light a little candle, and everybody else join me and light their candles, because we can all do something about this. In order to do something, you need to understand where science denial comes from. You need to understand that it’s not just based on facts and evidence. How could it be? It’s based on identity. You’ve got to understand that it’s not just based on doubt. It’s based on distrust. I spend some of the early part of the book after the chapter on flat Earth, trying to ask and answer the question, what is science denial? How can we understand it? I then talk about how I think that we can try to mitigate it. But it’s not exactly what we thought it was. And, you know, you’re right. It could have been a book about how irrational people are. I mean, Jonathan Swift said, âYou can’t reason somebody out of something they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place.â That could have been the theme for the whole book. But I didn’t want it to be that book. I wanted it to be a book where once you understood what science denial really was, you would realize that we all had a part to play in trying to overcome it.
Robinson  
Well, that’s an interesting quote, because one of the conclusions that you appear to come to in the book, is that actually, it’s true. You can’t reason with someone. But you don’t purely reason someone out of this thing. At the Flat Earth Convention, you have this discussion with this guy, where you ask a very effective question, which is: what evidence would you need to see to think that the Earth is flat? And then you go on to devise an experiment with him, but then he backs out because there’s always some way that they can wriggle out of it. But then you start thinking, “Okay, just presenting pure facts and reason is insufficient if we are going to move people’s beliefs.”
McIntyre  
That’s right. I don’t want anybody to misunderstand. I’m not saying that facts and evidence don’t count, even for a science denier. I’m saying that they don’t count until that person trusts you. So your first job in talking to a science denier is to try to build trust, and to realize that their beliefs are not based on facts and evidence, or very good facts and evidence, I should say. So, you can’t just go in there with what’s called the information deficit model, tell them the facts, and they’ll say, oh, what a fool I was, and give up their beliefs. What you have to do is recognize that when you challenge their beliefs, you’re challenging who they are as a person. This is not just what they believe. This is who they are. This is their community. If you go in with that idea, and you are calm, and patient, and respectful, and you listen to them, a magical thing happens in face-to-face conversation. You begin to build trust. And with trust comes listening–not always immediately converting them, convincing them. I didn’t convince any flat-Earthers on the spot. But I did get them to listen. And I felt that that was something of a breakthrough, even just being able to talk to someone whose views are so different was progress.
Robinson  
Yeah, the fact that these beliefs are so tied to people’s identity, their sense of who they are, seems very important. When I was reading all this QAnon stuff, one of the first things that I noticed was that the actual arguments in favor of the QAnon conspiracy were almost nonexistent, right? In terms of the actual proof that there was a guy inside the administration who had access to secret information that he was dropping, that could predict the future. None of the predictions came true. But what I noticed was that he offered you this wonderful sense of secret knowledge.
McIntyre
Yes. Very important.
Robinson
Itâs a confusing world out there. The world is a very baffling place, and everyone’s uncertain of themselves. And so when someone comes along and says, “Well, I have an explanation for everything, it explains all of the things that are going wrong in your life. And you can listen to me, and I will show you the secrets that will make sense, they’ll make sense of everything. And not only will they make sense of everything, but you will be one of the only ones who understands what is actually going on.” You can see how that’s powerful.
McIntyre  
Oh, absolutely. And especially to somebody who might, prior to that conversation, have felt alienated, marginalized, ridiculed, put on the outside by the elites, the scientists, the teachers, the astronauts, the pilots, you know, anybody that you’re thinking of. There is a very profound sense in which science denial comes from that break with the larger culture, and this search for community. By the way, there’s a social aspect for belief for all of us. But what happens now, these days, is whatever it is that you believe, you can find a community of people who believe it with you, and you can get together on chat rooms and you can maybe even get together in person. And then that’s what really radicalizes them. That’s what can turn somebody who just has questions into an actual denier, because then all of a sudden, they form an identityâthey form a bondâwith the other people.
Robinson  
Yeah. I’ve sometimes thought that one of the problems is a disconnection from the culture. Since academia is an ivory tower, a lot of people don’t really know what scientists do. They don’t see the inside of institutions. It’s very easy to paint somewhere like NASA or somewhere like the universitiesâconservatives are talking about the universities as these mysterious and conspiratorial places because people are disconnected from them. When we’re trying to persuade people of the science of climate change, we say, well, â97% of climate scientists,â but most people probably have never even met a climate scientist. So itâs this group of experts that you’re supposed to listen to that you are completely disconnected from. Academic journals are all behind paywalls. And the way you get information is often from people you trust, people on your social media feed. And you’re more inclined to listen to people in your life than you are to this distant, far away group of people who know more than you do.
McIntyre  
It’s true. And when you don’t know someone, you’re more likely to distrust them. And in the right political circumstance, to hate them. It can become us against them when you’re polarized. One of my favorite stories along these lines is Jim Bridenstine, who was a U.S. Congressman a few years back, who is a rock-ribbed conservative. On the floor of the US House, he gave a speech against climate change, saying all the things that climate change deniers say. And, of course, Trump appointed him to be the head of NASA, because what else would you do with somebody who is a climate change denier? Well, an interesting thing happened to Jim Bridenstine. About a month or two into his new job as head of NASA, he changed his mind publicly, came forward and said, I was wrong. Climate change is real, and human beings are causing it. I thought, what in the world is going on here? I mean, when’s the last time you heard a politician say his team was wrong, let alone publicly, about something like that? You put your finger on it: he met the scientists. They were not the other anymore. He was not alienated from them. He was their boss. And all of a sudden, they were warm and trustworthy people and the evidence and facts that they were presenting were not just things that he didn’t understand, from a journal that he couldn’t reach. They were somebody down the hall, people he actually knew personally,
Robinson  
I want to read a quote from you. You write, 
âIn virtually every account I’ve read of anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, or other ideologues who have changed their minds, they have done so on the basis of face to face encounters, where evidence was presented by someone with whom they had a trusting relationship. Kindness, empathy, and listening work. And people acquire knowledge by consulting those they trust and understand. It takes hard work, face-to-face, and over time engagement. Trust, relationships, and values are the key to real belief change.â 
Thatâs very interesting because this is a book about science. You might be expected to say, here’s a list of logical fallacies, and point out people’s logical fallacies. But you really do emphasize the relationship-based aspects of communicating with people.
McIntyre  
There are plenty of books that diagnose the fallacies in this type of reasoning. But thatâs not going to solve the problem. Number two, those books are not read by science deniers, right? They’re probably not reading my book, either. But what I’m trying to do is to empower people–regular everyday people, not just the scientistsâto understand that we, too, can get out and talk to science deniers. There was an interesting study two years ago in the journal Nature Human Behavior, which provided the first empirical evidence to show that we could do this through something called technique rebuttal to talk to science deniers about the way that they were reasoning, not about the facts and evidence, but about how they were reading about the facts and evidence. And it worked. It was a statistically significant result and anyone can do it, which means that all those people who were saying, well, I wouldn’t know what to say or, you know, I would just make the problem worse or I couldnât do any good, they’re wrong.
Robinson  
You mentioned technique rebuttal as distinct from rebutting the particular facts.Â 
McIntyre
That’s right. Content rebuttal.
Robinson
Content rebuttal. Could you give us an example of what that is?
McIntyre  
Content rebuttal works. It worked in the study on a particular audience in particular circumstances. And content rebuttal is the idea that if you’re a scientific expert on climate change, and you’re having an argument with somebody about their beliefs on climate change, in the right circumstances, you mightâand sometimes it doesn’t always workâyou might be able to convince them to give up their point of view. Contrast that with technique rebuttal. Technique rebuttal is based on some prior work by some cognitive scientists who discovered that the blueprint for science-denial reasoning was the same. Evolution denial, COVID denial, climate denial, flat Earthâall the same. And it was that they cherry-pick evidence. They believe in conspiracy theories. They engage in illogical reasoning. They rely on fake experts, and they believe that science has to be perfect. And the beauty is that once you understand those five pointsâthe article is by Cornelia Betsch and Philipp Schmidâthey give some little scripts of what they said that worked. And once you understand those, the five tropes, then you can engage in technique rebuttal. I don’t want to oversell the result to say that it always works. Because that was what I went out on the road to try to check. Will it work with hardcore science deniers? Will it work face to face? They did this in a lab setting with people who are fairly naive to scientific disinformation. And it was online. So, of course, as a philosopher, I had to push it and say, aha, what if I went to a Flat Earth convention and tried it?
Robinson  
I do want to get more precise on this technique. If I went to a QAnon person, and I said, “Well, how, how are you deciding whether this guy’s prophecies are accurate?” Or if I went to a climate change denier, and I said, “Well, how do you decide which person to listen to?” Is it like when you talk to the flat-Earth guy, where you’re basically just trying to get them to interrogate their own methods? Rather thanâ
McIntyre
Yes. So that’s a great example. At Flat Earth, the first day I kind of kept my mouth shut, listening to them, which was very helpful, because you learn that they have a pattern that they go through, and it’s very wide, but not very deep. And once you’ve heard the same thing several times, you know you didn’t hear them answer this question or that. A demographic fact about them is that about 70% were evangelical Christians. But even the evangelical Christians didn’t claim that their views were based on faith. They said that they were based on scientific evidence. So in a new conversation, I would often say something like, you know, I understand that a number of you here are Christians. Youâre believers. That’s right. But your belief in flat Earth doesn’t seem to be based on faith. Is that correct? No, no, it’s not based on faith. So it’s based on evidence. That’s right. And I’ve been sitting here for the past 24 hours hearing all your seminars about the evidence for flat Earth. That’s right. But I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to talk about that. Because you’re not going to listen to my evidence from Galileo and Newton, and I don’t quite trust your evidence. But let’s talk about how you’re reasoning about your evidence. And then they say, ok. And Iâve gotten them through their little Socratic dialogue there. I’ve got them on ground where they don’t have any talking points. And then I would drop that question that you mentioned earlier, the Karl Popper question. So tell me, if your view is based on evidence, what evidence if I had it in my back pocket could convince you to give up your views? And then I let them sit with the discomfort that they could not answer that question. I planted the seed of doubt. Now, they didn’t say, you know, what a fool I’ve been, and give up. But I did make them uncomfortable. And that’s the point of technique rebuttal. It’s to get them to the point where they cannot answer the question. And they recognize that they should be able to answer the question, and then they begin to doubt their own reasoning.
Robinson  
I get a little frustrated when people on my side, people I agree with, appeal to the authority of experts, because we know the authority of experts is virtually meaningless to the people you’re trying to convince.Â 
McIntyre
Robinson
They don’t care, right? You could have all the credentials in the world, saying, â100 Nobel Prize winners…â and they donât care.
McIntyre  
Youâre in league with the devil, why should they trust you?
Robinson  
Take someone who, for example, believes masks don’t work. If we say “Okay, why don’t we adopt the posture of skepticism? Let’s say, I will agree with you for right now that we have no idea.” Let’s then ask, “How would we decide whether it was rational to believe if masks worked? What would we do? What would we look at? How would we adjudicate among different kinds of evidence? What would we look at from an expert to know whether we could trust them?” If you start to have that kind of conversationâsay with climate changeâand you say, “Well, let’s assume we don’t know whether the Earth is warming, that we are genuine skeptics. How are we going to figure out the answer to that question together?” And I think nobody wants to admit that their conclusion is so firm that it couldn’t be dislodged by any method. I feel like that is the point at which you will start to unsettle people, because you already opened them up to real skepticism.
McIntyre  
Isn’t that the beautiful moment in the conversation, though, when you take someone who’s a self-professed skeptic, and you get them to question their own views, or you reveal them to be a hypocrite? I mean, the point is not to be rude, not to be insulting, but to take them so seriously that you flatter them by asking a hard question. You’re not saying, “Oh, you’re a fool, and I’m going to go see the sights of Denver for the next day and a half, because it’s not worth conversing with you.” But instead to say, “Look, I’m gonna ask you a hard question now, because I take your views so seriously, and then give them that tough question.” That’s beautiful.

Robinson  
Well, there’s a kind of respect for them in being willing to take the views seriously. Another important point that comes out of your book is the necessity of science and scientists being humble. There’s this humility to it. What I was just describing was a posture where you say, “Okay, because I am interested in scientific truth, I am actually open to the flat Earth, I am open to QAnon, I am open to the anti-vax thing. But you need to convince me. We need to have a conversation. Letâs both agree to be open to figuring out the truth on this.” And so when I was studying QAnon, I thought, “Well, okay, I’ll open my mind to it.” Because I don’t want to be the very thing I’m condemning where I have already discarded the flat Earth before looking at their arguments. Let’s say there was secret knowledge that I didn’t know about. Itâs happened before. As you point out in your book, there are sometimes things that happen that small groups of elites have planned, so we have to be open-minded.
McIntyre  
You’re right in that attitude. That attitude of humility, and curiosity, can be very effective, right? Because then the person doesn’t feel disrespected. And then you’re also building the trust that you’re mutually embarking on this journey to find the truth. And I think that when you’re doing that, sometimes they’ll discover that they really don’t have a lot to convince you. Sometimes that works, in fact, just to say “Convince me,” because it can be frustrating for them to realize that they really can’t convince you because you’re actually a skeptic. And you’re not believing. Imagine somebody who said that they thought that they had reason to be skeptical of whether the Pfizer vaccine was safeânot just whether it was effective, but whether it was safe. And then they’re taking ivermectin. Couldn’t you use the exact same reasoning with them? And how could they answer that? 
Look, here’s the crying shame. People recognize this. And then they turn the page and they say, isn’t it a pity? They don’t pursue the conversation. When you pursue the conversation, it may not work, but you’re at least holding out the hope that there’s something in the other person’s brain that will make them uncomfortable, the cognitive dissonance that you’re an intelligent, respectful person who took them seriously. And they couldn’t convince you because they didn’t have the evidence.
Robinson  
This is what Socrates did. Go around and ask people hard questions they couldn’t answer. 
McIntyre
Look what happened to him.
Robinson
It was so annoying that they murdered him.
McIntyre  
Yeah.
Robinson  
I think there is this tendency to say, oh, well, you know, you can’t talk to those people, you can’t reason with those people. They are beyond hope. It’s justâgive up. And one of the things you point out is that it is an extremely dangerous attitude. And it’s especially dangerous because, in the cases of climate change, and COVID-19, human lives are at stake based on what people believe. And when policymakers are captured by these incredibly irrational beliefs, people die as a result. So it’s very, very important for us to come up with an alternative to “Oh, there’s no reasoning with these people.” And you point out that the worst thing you can do is actually to leave misinformation entirely unanswered.
McIntyre  
That’s exactly right. And, by the way, that’s been empirically shown. That was in the Betsch and Schmid study from 2019. That’s the worst thing that you can do, because then only the liar has the microphone. And the other motivating thing here for me is to recognize that this is not all just based on a mistake or an accident. This is not misinformation. It’s disinformation; someone is pumping this stuff out there for a naive audience to believe. And so, it’s not as if, well, if you just don’t attend to the problem, it’s going to go away. No, this is information warfare. This is propaganda. And we all know what happens if you don’t fight back against it. I mean, in some senseâalthough this is a pretty strong claimâyou can be a denier. You can be a denier about whether it’s possible to fight back against science denial. Understand that there’s solid scientific work that shows that all of us can play a role in convincing deniers to give up their views. And then we say, “Oh, no, I’m just gonna stay home.” Are we being deniers? Are we shirking our civic responsibility to do something?
Robinson  
That’s another crucial point because, as you say, anyone can lapse into these things. And one danger is, of course, thinking, those are the science deniers, and I am the rational person who believes in the facts and the truth.Â 
McIntyre
Thatâs right.
Robinson
But you can yourself fall into scientism, or a fake rationalism, where you become so convinced that you don’t scrutinize your own beliefs. And that’s why I think it’s so important to emphasize that the foundation of scientific thinking is, in fact, humility, which begins with self-scrutiny.Â Because the people who are the deniers never know they’re the deniers. So in order to check that you’re not one, you better be examining your own beliefs all the time.
McIntyre  
You have to embrace a flexibility of mind to be able to answer that question: if you could show me x, then I would change my views. And if you can’t do that, then that should be a warning signal.
Robinson  
Hey, if the flat Earth is true, I want to know. Don’t you want to know?
McIntyre  
A fascinating thing happened to me after I got back from Flat Earth. There was a moment at the convention before they knew who I was, where I was just in this group of people that were talking and they were laughing, that there was a rumor, I don’t know if it was true, that there was a conference of physicists down the street, but that they didn’t dare show up to the Flat Earth convention, because they were afraid because they knew that they couldn’t refute them. And, you know, it was all I could do to keep my mouth shut at that point. But when I got back, I wrote an article for the American Journal of Physics called âCalling All Physicistsâ to try to get physicists to join me. And one fellow memorably wrote me backâa very prominent fellowâand was fascinated with this question. So much so that he built a model, a computer model, based completely on flat-Earth assumptions. I mean, it wasn’t anything from Newton, it was what they said that they believed. He built it, and then showed it to me. And the amazing thing is, when you walk into this model, and you look up, you don’t see what the flat-Earthers say you should see. So by their own logic, they refute themselves. Now that’s compelling. And we had agreed that he’s going to come with me the next time, when there’s no COVID. And there’s, you know, there’s a flat Earth convention, and we’re going to get people to look at this model and see what they say.
Robinson  
I would be interested in knowing what the reaction to that is because on the one hand, you really clearly demonstrate a contradiction that they can’t explain away, which makes people uncomfortable. On the other hand, so much of this is about trust and relationships, and people find a way to find a way to explain it away. And it might be the example ofâ
McIntyre  
Here’s the really fascinating thing, though. They find a way to explain it away until they don’t. And then when that conversion happens, it can be immediate.
Robinson
Yeah. 
McIntyre
Deny, deny, deny, change my mind. And there are anecdotal cases. In the literature, to my knowledge, this hasn’t been studied empirically. But there are anecdotal cases in support of that quotation of mine you read earlier about how it always happens in the same way to people who are rabid anti-vaxxers, or climate deniers, who suddenly changed their mind. So you never really know what effect you might be having, right? And this is why it’s important not to just have the conversation be a one-off. You have to come back and try again and again, because you’re building that trust with the person. And you just may enlarge their sense of community. You may be planting enough doubts that they’ll give it up.
Robinson  
Yeah. There was a QAnoner whose testimony I read who said that, basically, all it took was one thing that the QAnoners believed that turned out to be false, and that he couldn’t explain, and the whole belief system collapsed. Q predicted Trump would say a thing, but he’d actually said the thing before the guy predicted it. And he said, well, then the whole thing crumbled before my eyes. You never quite know whether it’s going to take years or whether itâll just be a thing that lodges in someone’s mind that because they can’t explain it, they get really, really stuck.
McIntyre  
Thatâs fascinating, what you just described to me. I wonder, how did he get that information? Did he do it on his own through study? Or did somebody present it to him?Â In the anecdotal accounts that I’ve read, things like that get shared by someone they trust, and then it makes a difference. The rare person will make that discovery on their own, and then change their mind, which is really a great form of intellectual honesty. They’ll pull themselves out of it. But it is rare.
Robinson  
This guy saw a YouTube video that refuted it.
McIntyre  
Wow, incredible.
Robinson  
What do you think needs to change in scientific communication, then? You do say at one point that you think some responsibilityânot fault necessarilyâlies with the public communicators of scientific evidence, who need to think about how to communicate effectively. I’ve always thought about climate change skepticism that I just wish there was a tour of climate scientists that went around to every city in America and they said, “Ask me anything, come get to know us.” That way itâs not coming from this mysterious place. What do you think needs to happen in science communication?
McIntyre  
What you just described sounds good to me. I think that if more people met scientists, more people would trust scientists. I think that there’s a unique role that scientists can play. Have business cards made up. Hand them out at the local PTA meeting. Find opportunities to speak with people with all of the humility that they have when they’re talking with one anotherânot the know-it-all, this has been proven way. Really engage with the audience and communicate with them directly. I think that might just work. I’m a big advocate of scientists doing more, and I understand that theyâre already quite busy. But I think that scientists really are quite trustworthy people if you actually meet them. If they’ll get out there and meet other folks, these people can then say, yeah, I know a scientist. Think of Jim Bridenstine. Think of what happened to him. All of a sudden, he knew all these scientists, and he changed his mind.
Robinson  
One of the saddest things in the COVID-19 pandemic is all of these testimonies from doctors and nurses who are reporting from the frontlines of hospitals. They, of course, don’t have time to leave the hospital to go out and do public communication. People realize when they get in there with COVID what the actual truth is, and healthcare providers know and theyâd like to tell people, but unfortunately, the truth is in the hospital, and you will realize the truth at the moment when you find yourself entering that institution and being confronted with it directly, and there is a real challenge in how you bring those truths out.
McIntyre  
I can’t lay any of that at the feet of the first responders. 
Robinson
No, of course not. 
McIntyre
I have to think that for anybody who’s reasonably paying attention, the truth is out there. The problem with COVID is that it has been so politically polarized. People are now sneaking in disguise to get their COVID vaccines, because they’re so afraidâthey’re a member of a community that doesnât get COVID vaccines. You hear about entire churches where nobody has been vaccinated because they see it as a form of bonding within the group. Again, itâs about trust. And so, in the face of that sort of polarization, I don’t think itâs really a question of getting the facts. Itâs very tough.
RobinsonÂ Â 
Well, that’s the identity thing, right? 
McIntyre
It is.
Robinson
Once you come to conceive of the idea that vaccination is for liberals, then the facts don’t really matter. Itâs like, if Joe Biden wants me to be vaccinated, therefore, I don’t want to be vaccinated.
McIntyre  
In our own lives we probably have people that we know who love and trust us, that we could communicate with. I encourage people to start there. Now, for me, I not only have people in my immediate family, but I also get mail. I get mail from people asking for advice about family members, but also for themselves. And sometimes after the initial first paragraph of insults, there’s actually a question there. And if the insults aren’t too bad, I’ll answer the question. And then we go back and forth. And it can get quite interesting, sometimes, the misconceptions people have. To meet an insult with respect, you can take the temperature down a little bit.
Robinson  
One of the points you raise is that in order to communicate effectively, we have toâand the flat-Earthers often doâwe have to remain calm. And it’s very easy to let your emotions get out of control, and to not listen and to get frustrated. And it doesn’t work. And oftentimes, the scary thing, of course, is that the other side uses the communication techniques that you’re talking about. You did point out in your book that the flat-Earthers are actually evangelical. They want to figure out how to lure people to the flat Earth movement.
McIntyre
They are. Oh, yes. They have taken the red pill, and there are not that many of them. But theyâre growing. And their goal is to wake up the rest of the world. They love the movie The Matrix, and they see themselves as the people to wake up the rest.
Robinson  
They may seem harmless, but theyâre not. Not really.
McIntyre
Theyâre not.
Robinson
With flat Earth thereâs not powerful economic interests behind it. But in other cases, such as climate change, it’s all the more important because oftentimes there’s a lot of money behind misinformation so it takes even more effort to fight it.
McIntyre  
For each area of science denial it can be different. Tobacco causes lung cancer, that was economic. Climate change, economic. Anti-vax is more ideological, more political, especially now with COVID. Evolution denial, more ideological; itâs religiously motivated. So it depends. I didn’t see anybody making any money off of flat Earth. That’s the one that’s always mystified me. Whatâs the interest at stake? I don’t know.
Robinson  
Itâs an enduring mystery. I just want to read a little quick paragraph from your conclusion because I think it’s important and inspiring. You write, 
âWe should try to educate the next generation. We’re running out of time. Our kids will inherit the problem of climate change. Maybe they can solve it, but they aren’t in charge yet. Too many of the people in charge today are science deniers, and they hold an unreasonable amount of power over our future. So the problem of how to deal with science deniers falls to all of us right now. You cannot change someone’s beliefs against their will. Nor can you usually get them to admit that there is something they don’t already know. Harder, still, might be to get them to change their values or identity. But there is no easier path to take when dealing with science deniers. We must try to make them understand. We must try to get them to care. But first we have to go out there face to face and to begin to talk to them.â 
And I think that’s the central lesson here.
McIntyre  
That’s the entire nugget. That’s the entire point of the book. We can light the candle, not curse the darkness. Light the candle and get out there and do what you can.

You can listen to this conversation in full on the Current Affairs podcast. Lee’s book How To Talk To a Science Denier is available from MIT Press. 

In his bestselling books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, the Harvard linguist Steven Pinker made the surprisingly controversial case that humanity has been getting richer and less violent over the past two centuries.
In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, and Why It Matters, he argues that our ability to reason and think critically is central to human flourishing and undergirds our phenomenal material and moral progress since the Enlightenment. Pinker explains how cognitive defects such as the sunk-cost fallacy and myside bias cloud our thinking and contribute to intensely polarized, tribalistic worldviews, resulting in such phenomena as QAnon and what he calls "universities' suffocating left-wing monoculture." 
Not afraid to shy away from controversy, Pinker insists that public policy should be largely driven by facts, not emotion, even in heart-wrenching cases such as the police killing of George Floyd. He tells Reason's Nick Gillespie that if the goal is to save the largest number of lives, including black lives, then basing policy on "a viral video is probably not the way to go." A more effective approach, he argues, "is to look at how many people are killed by police and compare it to how many people are killed from gang warfare and street crime. If you hobbled the police, you might actually increase the number of people of all races who were killed, which is in fact exactly what happened."
Reason talked with Pinker about Rationality, social progress, and why, despite the negativity, fear, and anger in the world, he's optimistic about the future.

The failure of the United States to vaccinate more people stands out, especially since we had every seeming advantage to get it done. As early as the end of April of this year, when vaccines were in dire short supply globally, almost every adult who wanted to get vaccinated against Covid-19 in the United States could do so, free of charge. By June, about 43 percent of the U.S. population had received two doses while that number was only about 6 percent in Canada and 3 percent in Japan.

Now, just a few months later, these countries, along with 44 others, have surpassed U.S. vaccination rates. And our failure shows: America continues to have among the highest deaths per capita from Covid.

Science’s ability to understand our cells and airways cannot save us if we don’t also understand our society and how we can be led astray.

There is a clear partisan divide over vaccination — Republicans are more likely to tell pollsters that they will not get vaccinated. Some Republican politicians and Fox News hosts have been pumping out anti-vaccine propaganda. The loud, ideological anti-vaxxers exist, and it’s not hard to understand the anger directed at them. All this may make it seem as if almost all the holdouts are conspiracy theorists and anti-science die-hards who think that Covid is a hoax, or that there is nothing we can do to reach more people.

Real-life evidence, what there is, demonstrates that there’s much more to it.

Almost 95 percent of those over 65 in the United States have received at least one dose. This is a remarkable number, given that polling has shown that this age group is prone to online misinformation, is heavily represented among Fox News viewers and is more likely to vote Republican. Clearly, misinformation is not destiny.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, the remote
workforce skyrocketed almost overnight from only 7 percent of the working
population to nearly 40 percent at the height of the pandemic. Today, the
pandemic is winding down, but remote work is likely here to stay for many
workers.
My research at the American Enterprise Institute this year has explored the impacts of remote work on the American workforce. Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and compare notes with Dr. Nicholas Bloom, a professor at Stanford University and an expert on remote work. We discussed different work arrangements, worker-employer bargaining over work from home, and the future of remote work. Below are Q&A highlights from our discussion that have been edited for length and clarity. You can find the full transcript here and listen to the audio podcast on Hardly Working.
Orrell: Talk about your own kind of vocational pathway. How did you wind up as a professor of labor economics?
Bloom: It’s a bit of a weird path. I never honestly intended to be an academic. After I did a Master’s in Oxford in Economics, I got a job [with] the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research think tank in London. When I was there, I realized that a lot of the people doing policy research are trying to use economics to make the world a better place. So I thought, I could get a PhD. And at that point, the IFS had a great deal with UCL, University College London. You could do a PhD while continuing to work. So I basically had a day a week, which I wasn’t paid for, and used that to work on a PhD. And so, at the end, I ended up as a PhD, and ended up in Stanford in 2005 almost by accident.
Your 2015 paper on remote work in China has really been key to a lot of people’s thinking over the last year and a half. Can you talk a little bit about that paper?
So we hatched a plan to set up what’s called a randomized control trial. We took two divisions in an [online travel company] headquarters in Shanghai and asked them who wants to work from home four days a week. The evens got work from home and the odds stayed in the office. We had 125 in the treatment group [working from home], and 125 people that were in the control group [coming to the office]. These people are making telephone calls, taking bookings. We tracked their performance, minute by minute, for the next 21 months and collected a lot of other [data] on who quit, who got promoted, who did well, who made bonuses, etc.
Contrary to expectation, astoundingly, the working-from-home
employees were 13 percent more productive than the folks in the office [which
amounts to] almost a day a week extra. And when we drilled down into it, about
4 percent [out of the 13 percent] was because they were more productive per
minute. And when we interviewed them, they said, “Look, it’s quieter. At home,
we can just work better.”
The rest of the increase in productivity (9 percent) was due to the
fact that folks at home just worked more. Their quit rates were almost half
because they were a lot happier. But see, the one big sting in the tail is
their promotion rates were almost half of the ones at the office. So, you know,
it’s a bit of a mixed blessing. For the firm, on average, it was net good
because they were more productive, and they saved on office space. If you are
working from home in teams, when most other people around you are not, there’s
definitely a hit to a promotion.
What new remote work research is underway on the experience of the last 18 months?
Certainly you can expect a lot of papers. In terms of the performance impact, there’s a couple of ways to look at it. One, at just a very, very macro level: GDP right now is now above its pre-pandemic level. But we’re still 5 million short of unemployment. So we have 5 million fewer people working now than they were two years ago, but we actually produce more. So if you look at productivity, we’re actually significantly up. We’re about 5 percent up, which suggests that given half of Americans are currently working from home, it probably can’t be that bad, particularly because the pandemic has been negative for productivity.
We’ve been surveying 5,000 Americans a month. Since the pandemic
began, we calculate, productivity is probably about 3 percent to 5 percent
higher and certainly will be long run from working from home. If we maintain a
largely hybrid model — three days in, two days out — that’s likely to increase
productivity by 3 percent to 5 percent. A large share of that increased
productivity comes from saved commuting time. Saving on commute is an enormous
benefit, not just to productivity, but to us individually because we just get
more free time.
What do you think the employer’s perspective is on this now? Do you think that the message has gotten through to the leadership that having flexible work arrangements is actually in their business interest?
Yes, completely. I’ve probably talked to 500 managers by now. Corporate America now understands that hybrid working — which is something like three in the office, two at home post-pandemic — improves productivity and is the correct business decision. In terms of profit, the reason this is such a big deal is that it’s really valuable to employees. Employees report it’s worth something like 7 percent to 8 percent increase in salary in order to get to work from home for 2 days a week. If you try and force all your employees back 5 days a week, we know from the survey data, you’re going to find 30 percent, 40 percent of them pretty actively start looking for another job.
Are there any other factors that you think play into this other than worker happiness and productivity? Are there other savings or gains that are made from flexible working arrangements?
It’s very clear that we are going to have some long-run residual fear of density. In particular. I think it’s 76 percent of people say they will be nervous post-pandemic — even vaccinated people — of getting into crowded elevators, packed subway trains. I think I might put myself in that. I’m not sure, you know, I would feel totally comfortable getting in a jammed elevator with 50 people.
One of our scholars, Scott Gottlieb, has talked about changing work norms. If you have a cold or the flu, don’t come into the office.
I totally agree with Scott’s take on this, and working from home helps this a lot. Because imagine you’re in a hybrid mode, you’re working, you know, three days a week in the office, two days a week at home. You, of course, have the ability to work from home, well set up and it’s normed. And so, if you’re not feeling great, you just take a home day.
So, you put out a paper in May that was entitled, “Don’t let employees pick their work from home days.” I’d just like you to give a summary of that and why you think it’s important that employers set the ground rules for remote work.
One is the problems of mixed-mode, with some working at home and some in person. It turns out, it doesn’t work very well to have some people in the office and some at home. So you imagine initially that those in the office will crowd into the conference room, but they’re on one small screen on Zoom, there’s whispering, and you can’t really see what goes on. Most companies have a rule now whereby if there’s one person or more at home on Zoom, everyone in the office should also join independently on their Zoom or Teams, whatever it is. Second issue, if you look at the survey data we’ve been collecting, you know, the thousands of people every month, you ask them, Which two days would you like to work from home?” Brent, which two days would you guess?
I’m guessing Friday and Monday . . .
Yep, exactly. Everyone basically says Friday and Monday. So, the second problem with choice is if you want to use your office space efficiently — or you want to hold your office space as it is, but reduce density — then you probably don’t want to allow complete choice. And then the final issue that is the hardest to explain, but it’s potentially the most problematic in the long run. You need to think of two things. So, one is, who wants to work from home is not random. In the survey data, disabled people report on much higher preference than non-disabled. You see amongst college educated employees with kids under the age of 12, women report a significantly higher preference than men. We see that varies by race. So black and Asian workers report significantly higher preferences than white and Latinx workers. People living further from the office have a higher preference to work from home than those living nearby, and they’re typically lower income. The problem is it collides with the second fact, which is, if you are working from home, in a team where other people are coming in more days than you, you’re likely to suffer in promotions. Folks randomized into working from home after 21 months had 50 percent lower rate of promotion.
My advice has been to try and limit it in both directions. So, you
want to make sure people are in the office two days a week, let’s say, because
it is important to come in, but you also want to make sure people work from
home for two days a week because this is the classic prisoner’s dilemma.
Central business districts have taken a huge hit and not just the people who own the buildings and rental space, but all the businesses that go into supporting the commuters food, and clothing, and bars, and restaurants. Have you looked at that?
Yeah, I mean with Jose Barrero and Steve Davis, we did look. I would say, it’s definitely substantial. We estimate New York, San Francisco, such city centers may lose something like, long run, 5 percent to 10 percent of spending. I have another paper with Arjun Ramani, where we’ve actually pulled US Postal Service change of address dates, and you can break it out for residential and businesses. There has been about a 15 percent drop in a number of people and businesses and city centers over the pandemic. From a commuter standpoint, cities have emptied out and haven’t yet recovered.
Learn more: 5 questions for Nicholas Bloom on innovation and work from home | The remote work tug-of-war | Remote work: Will country roads really take you home?
The post The future of remote work: Highlights from my conversation with Nicholas Bloom appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Our sedentary tendencies may be robbing us of a key benefit of physical activity: the myriad repair mechanisms that heal the minor dings and tears of hunter-gatherer and farming lifestyles, a deficit that may be particularly damaging as we age.
Daniel Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and an expert in the evolution of physical activity and exercise, says that the difference in activity levels between Western adults and hunter-gatherers is significant throughout the lifespan, but grows particularly glaring as we age. Western adults slow down with age while elders of today’s hunter-gatherer tribes — whose daily exercise is already significantly higher — chalk up six to 10 times more activity than their Western counterparts.
“We evolved to be very physically active as we age,” Lieberman said. “There’s no such thing as retirement if you’re a hunter-gatherer. You work until the end of your life. There are no weekends, no bank holidays, no retirement.”
Grandmothers actually increase foraging after their child-rearing days, spending more time engaged in the activity than mothers who are juggling childcare responsibilities: four to eight hours per day compared with two to five for mothers. All that exercise, Lieberman said, stresses the body and requires it to spend significant resources on repair after each session, patching tears in muscle fibers, repairing cartilage damage, and healing microfractures. Exercise-related antioxidants, anti-inflammatories, increased blood flow, cellular and DNA repair processes have been shown to lower the risk of diabetes, obesity, cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and depression. Exercise has even been shown to protect against COVID-19, Lieberman said, with 150 minutes per week resulting in a 2½ times lower risk for contracting the illness.

“We evolved to be very physically active as we age. There’s no such thing as retirement if you’re a hunter-gatherer,” said Daniel Lieberman in a virtual event with Brenda Tindal, executive director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture.
Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

“We evolved to stay physically active as we age in order to turn on these repair and maintenance mechanisms, which help to counter senescence and our vulnerability to disease,” he said. “We never evolved not to be physically active, so we don’t turn these mechanisms on to the same extent if we’re just sitting around.”
Lieberman, who spoke Wednesday at a virtual lecture sponsored by the Harvard Museum of Natural History, said he began thinking about the rise of the modern exercise culture while conducting research among native peoples who, though often more fit than Westerners, also often expressed surprise at his questions about exercise and training. He once asked a member of a tribe known for its running prowess about his training regimen, and instead of hearing about intervals and splits, Lieberman was asked in return why anyone would run if they didn’t have to. The scientist had to admit the tribal runner was on to something, and Americans seem to agree. Just 20 percent get the recommended 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise.
“Training is a bizarre, modern, Western idea,” Lieberman said. “Their training is just their lives. They’re physically active people because they have to climb up and down these mountains all the time — these canyons — and they’re farmers. Nobody goes for five-mile runs in this part of the world, even though they’re very famous for their running.”
Lieberman, who published his latest book, “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding,” in January, realized that what he believed to be a modern concept of exercise was really a Western, wealthy, industrialized concept of exercise. For most of the world and for most of human history, people exercised because they had to or because it was rewarding for them, as in the case of dancing.
Lieberman said hunter-gatherers who avoid accident and disease tend to live nearly as long as their counterparts in Western industrialized societies. The difference, he said, is that “healthspan” among this group — the number of healthy years of life — nearly matches their lifespan. By contrast, it is a common fear in modern industrialized societies that one will spend years incapacitated by disease before dying.
Research on the rewards of exercise, including findings on how it protects mental health and helps us burn calories and maintain strength, is prodigious. These benefits, Lieberman said, grow more important as we age. He cited a long-running study of 21,000 Harvard graduates that showed that regular moderate to vigorous exercise — burning 2,000 or more calories per week — lowered death rates 21 percent among those age 25 to 49, 36 percent among those 50 to 59, and 50 percent among those 70 to 84.
“That’s an enormous effect,” Lieberman said. “People are dying at faster rates as they get older, but as they get older, exercise has an even greater benefit.”

The Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) released its annual report today on US graduate school enrollment and degrees for 2020 and this is an update of my annual post are the striking gender differences in graduate school enrollment and degrees. 

1. For the 12th year in a row, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities in 2020. Of the 76,111 doctoral degrees awarded in 2020 (Table B.25), women earned 40,037 of those degrees and 53.1% of the total, compared to 35,368 degrees awarded to men who earned 46.9% of the total (see top chart above). For every 100 men earning a doctoral degree last year, there were more than 113 female graduates. Women have now earned a majority of doctoral degrees in each academic year since 2008-2009, and the 53.1% female share last year is a new record-high. Previously, women started earning a majority of associate’s degrees for the first time in 1978, a majority of master’s degrees in 1981, and a majority of bachelor’s degrees in 1982 according to the Department of Education. Therefore, 2009 marked the year when men officially became the “second sex” in higher education by earning a minority of college degrees at all college levels from associate’s degrees to doctoral degrees. By overall enrollment in higher education men have been an underrepresented minority for more than 40 years since the late 1970s.
2. By field of study, women earning doctoral degrees in 2020 outnumbered men in 7 of the 11 graduate fields tracked by the CGS (see top chart above): Arts and Humanities (51.8% female), Biology (a new record-high 53.8% share in one of the main STEM fields, despite the frequent narrative that females are significantly under-represented in STEM), Education (67.8%), Health and Medical Sciences (71.4%, isn’t that another STEM field?), Public Administration (76.2%), Social and Behavioral Studies (61.3%) and Other Fields (53.2%). Men still earned a majority of 2020 doctoral degrees in the four fields of Business (53.3% male), Engineering (75.1%), Math and Computer Science (74.2%), and Physical and Earth Sciences (65.0%).
3. The middle chart above shows the gender breakdown for master’s degrees awarded in 2020 (from Table B.24) and the gender disparity in favor of females is significant – women earned more than 60% of all master’s degrees in 2020 setting a new record high female share, which would also mean that women earned almost 151 master’s degrees last year for every 100 degrees earned by men. Like for doctoral degrees, women outnumbered men in the same 7 out of the 11 fields of graduate study and in some of those fields, the gender disparity was huge. For example, women earned 421 master’s degrees in health and medical sciences for every 100 men, 408 master’s degrees in public administration for every 100 men, and 350 master’s degrees in education for every 100 men.
4. The bottom chart above displays total graduate enrollment in fall 2020 by gender and field for all graduate school programs in the US (certificate, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Table B.13), showing that there is a significant gender gap in favor of women for students attending US graduate schools. Women represent nearly 60% of all graduate students in the US (up from 58.5% in 2019), meaning that there are now 148 women enrolled in graduate school for every 100 men. In certain fields like Education (76.2% female), Health and Medical Sciences (78.4% female), and Public Administration (79.0% female), women outnumber men by a factor of three or more. By field of study, women enrolled in graduate school outnumber men in the same 7 out of the 11 graduate fields of study noted above, with females being a minority share of graduate students in only Business (46.5% female), Engineering (27.7% female), Math and Computer Science (32% female), and Physical and Earth Sciences (39.7% female).
MP: Here’s my prediction – the facts that: a) men are underrepresented in graduate school enrollment overall (only 100 men were enrolled in 2020 for every 148 women), b) men received fewer master’s (less than a 40% share of the total) and doctoral degrees (47% of the total) than women in 2020 and c) men were underrepresented in 7 out of 11 graduate fields of study at both the master’s and doctoral levels last year for both degrees and enrollment will get almost no attention at all from feminists, gender activists, women’s centers, the media, universities, or anybody else in the higher education industry.
Additionally, there will be no calls for taxpayer-funded studies or increased taxpayer funding to address the significant gender disparities favoring women in graduate schools, and nobody will refer to the gender graduate school enrollment and degree gaps favoring women as a problem or a national “crisis.” Further, despite their stated commitment to “gender equity,” the hundreds of university women’s centers around the country are unlikely to show any concern about the significant gender inequities in graduate school enrollment and degrees, and universities will not be allocating funding to set up men’s centers or men’s commissions on college campuses or providing funding for graduate scholarships for men to address male significant male under-representation.
Bottom Line: If there is any attention about gender differences in the CGS annual report, it will likely focus on the fact that women are a minority in 4 of the 11 fields of graduate study including engineering and computer science (a gender gap that some consider to be a “national crisis”), with calls for greater awareness of female under-representation in STEM graduate fields of study and careers (except for the two STEM fields of a) biology and b) health and medical sciences, where women have actually been over-represented for decades). But don’t expect any concern about the fact that men have increasingly become the second sex in higher education. The concern about gender imbalances will remain extremely selective, and will only focus on acadmic fields where women, not men, are underrepresented.
Exhibit A: In the CGS report the coverage of gender imbalances was mostly lamenting the underrepresentation of women in STEM, for example (note the tone and bias):

a. Institutions responding to the survey also reported that while women constitute more than three quarters of first-time graduate enrollment in fields of public administration and services (79.5%), health sciences (79.3%), and education (76.8%) in Fall 2020, they comprised much smaller portions of first-time enrollment in the fields of engineering (29.3%), mathematics and computer sciences (33.6%), and physical and earth sciences (44.3%). 
b. In Fall 2020, women comprised a larger share of first-time enrollees at the master’s and graduate certificate level (61.4%) than at the doctoral level (57.0%). Although women comprise the majority of  first-time graduate students overall, they were underrepresented at the master’s level in engineering (28.7%), mathematics and computer sciences (33.8%), and business (46.9%). Moreover, men comprised a majority of doctoral first-time enrollees in engineering (68.7%), mathematics and computer sciences (69.5%), and physical and earth sciences (60.5%).
c. The majority of graduate degrees and certificates awarded to women were in education, health sciences, public administration and services, and social and behavioral sciences. However, in many STEM fields, men still earned the majority of graduate degrees and certificates. Men earned about three-fourths of master’s degrees (72.2%) and doctoral degrees (75.1%) in engineering. Similarly, 64.5% of master’s degrees and 74.2% of doctoral degrees in mathematics and computer sciences were earned by men.  

To conclude, let me pose a few questions, paraphrasing George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams: If America’s diversity worshipers see any female under-representation as a problem and possibly even as proof of gender discrimination, what do they propose should be done about female over-representation in higher education at every level and in 7 out of 11 graduate fields at the master’s and doctoral degrees? After all, to be logically consistent, aren’t female over-representation and female under-representation simply different sides of gender injustice? I’m sure the armies of diversicrats in higher education who profess to be so committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion won’t see it that way and will continue in their highly selective, inequitable, and one-sided concern about gender disparities favorin men in higher education that are limited to only certain STEM fields.

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When Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp collectively experienced outages last Monday and then Friday, the proponents of trustbusting and regulating Mark Zuckerberg’s company were quick to capitalize.

One news headline dubbed Monday as “The day Facebook went dark”—as if the outage was an end‐​of‐​the‐​world doomsday scenario rather than a six‐​hour pause on scrolling. Some pundits argued that the disruption from the outage was “proof” that the company has monopoly power and should be broken up. Others claimed the incident highlighted how Facebook’s services have become “critical infrastructure”—akin to public utilities—and ought to be regulated as such.

Of course, millions of businesses do derive revenues through Facebook advertising, and billions of people use Facebook’s services for cheap communication (especially in the developing world). Facebook itself will primarily bear the costs of the outage, with users and advertisers updating their priors about how much they value the product given that experience.

But if the outage proved anything, it was surely both the weakness of the FTC’s current case against Facebook and the lack of context deployed by those calling the company’s services “critical infrastructure.”

A monopoly that must be broken up?

“If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up,” wrote House Representative Alexandria Ocasio‐​Cortez on Twitter last Monday.

We’ve noted before the irony of using Twitter to launch allegations of monopoly power toward Facebook. But remember: the FTC’s case against Facebook hinges on the idea that the company operates in the very siloed “Personal Social Networking (PSN) services in the United States” market. The claim from the FTC is that users access Facebook to “maintain personal relationships and share experiences with friends, family, and other personal connections in a shared social space,” and that these characteristics make it very distinct from other social networks, communications apps, and video apps, from Twitter to TikTok. This very narrow market definition, in fact, is the basis of the FTC’s allegation that Facebook has monopoly power.

The sheer number of users who overcame the outage by simply switching to other apps belies this claim. Snapchat and Twitter, for example, saw global usage surges of 23 percent and 11 percent, respectively, with traffic going so high as to prompt a brief pause of some of Twitter’s messaging services. Telegram and Signal, privacy‐​oriented alternatives to WhatsApp, saw enormous growth too. Telegram gained over 70 million users to its half billion‐​user base in a single day, growing by 16 percent, while Signal grew by 11 percent. Others messaged their work colleagues on Slack, perused TikTok and YouTube, or simply turned to old‐​school SMS texting in place of Facebook’s services.

This substitution within a few hours suggests that Facebook’s main product operates in the broader market for user attention, which in turn facilitates its digital advertising revenue, while Facebook’s WhatsApp competes as a communication service. That billions of people use them ordinarily may in part reflect “network effects” – the truth that users benefit when an app has a larger pool of active users. But if that’s the case, then the “breaking up” of Facebook is clearly bad for consumers, not beneficial. If lots of people use a product because it is convenient to access contacts or connect with friends, a more disparate market is welfare‐​reducing.

The fact that millions and millions of users can so easily open a different communication app or social media service, or actively multi‐​home across platforms, shows that this is a competitive market that is much broader than the FTC implies. That people choose to use Facebook’s products before outages is a reflection of the value they attach to them, not unfair monopolization.

Critical infrastructure that should be regulated as a public utility?

“The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary‐​scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life…They are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns, responding to emergencies and much, much more,” wrote Raymond Zhong and Adam Satariano in the New York Times..

A small, though vocal, minority has therefore claimed that Facebook’s alleged “critical infrastructure” status necessitates its regulation akin to other vital public utilities such as water, energy and broadband.

Let’s put aside that competition outlined above undermines this “critical infrastructure” claim. It’s not clear why public utilities regulation would ameliorate Facebook’s outages and prevent future service disruptions from happening. Current public utilities that have been heavily regulated for decades, after all, consistently show track records of poor reliability:

In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) most recent report card on United States infrastructure, 3,526 power outages affected 36.7 million people in 2017 alone.

The ASCE’s report card on drinking water reported a 27 percent increase in main water breaks between 2012 and 2018, with 250,000 to 300,000 breaks per year. This results in over 6 billion gallons of lost treated drinking water each day.

The Environmental Protection Agency reports at least 23,000 to 75,000 sanitary sewer overflows each year, in which raw sewage can leak and contaminate groundwater and drinking water.

Based on pre‐​pandemic data of railway accidents in the US, there were 11,714 accidents, 7,958 injuries, and 878 fatalities in 2019—an annual number that’s remained virtually constant since 2013.

Internet broadband in the US saw 484 network outage events and 367 ISP outages in the month of August alone.

So what evidence is there that further government intervention into the tech industry would yield any kind of reliability improvement? In the past twelve months, WhatsApp has experienced only nine outages, and Facebook 71. In total, the whole of Facebook Group has seen 196 service interruptions since the beginning of 2021 in the United States, with most being relatively brief, localized, and nearly unnoticeable.

As Sam Bowman has noted, one could presumably argue that outages, accidents, and delays might be even greater in some utilities absent regulation, but that seems a stretch. The evidence instead seems to suggest that private, investor‐​owned utilities are less susceptible to outages and service reductions after severe weather events than municipal utilities, after all. And if history has shown us anything, it’s that using blunt policy tools to regulate Facebook and its subsidiaries like a utility under the guise of “critical infrastructure security” could end up giving the company more market power, all the while limiting the emergence of more viable alternatives that would ultimately benefit consumers.

From assumptions about drug traffickers and police and elected officials’ corruption to Mexicans’ economic incentives for selling drugs, the Mexican drug trade has been drenched in sensationalist and inaccurate mythology. We need to totally upend our understanding of it.

A Mexican soldier stands in a poppy field in Guerrero state, Mexico, 2013. (Pedro Pardo / AFP via Getty Images)
 
Mexico’s drug war has officially claimed over three hundred thousand lives since it was launched by then president Felipe Calderon in 2006, along with over thirty thousand unidentified bodies and over ninety thousand missing persons. Despite this cascade of death, billions of dollars spent, and the fall of numerous arch-villains from Pablo Escobar to El Chapo, drugs have probably never been as widely available, varied, and as affordable in the United States and beyond, from Manhattan clubs to South African townships.
Last year more than ninety-three thousand Americans died from drug overdoses in the United States. This is a new record and a rise of over 30 percent from 2019, driven by the new prevalence of the powerful synthetic opiate fentanyl along with pandemic-related spurs to drug abuse and the ever-precarious access to health care in America. This begs the question: What was all the carnage unleashed, millions imprisoned, and chaos spread across the world in the name of the war against drugs for?
The drug trade is a major part of the international economy, worth between $426 billion to $652 billion per year. Americans spent nearly $150 billion on drugs in 2016, according to the Rand Corporation. This is a huge industry; its profits flow back into the licit economy through banks, real estate, and other investments.
Most of the drugs used in the United States either originate in or pass through Mexico on their way to consumers across the country. Xenophobic politicians and media in the United States routinely transfer blame to Mexico for the flow of drugs into the country to the exotic, bloodthirsty narco. But the Mexican drug trade has a long history dating back to the nineteenth century. This history is connected to state formation in Mexico and is a crucial part of the history of policing, politics, and moral panics, from reefer madness to “crack babies” in the United States.
Historian Benjamin T. Smith has written a remarkable book, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, tracing the history of the drug trade in Mexico. The book calls into question several of the basic assumptions about the trade, challenging popular narratives by revealing a story that breaks down the supposed barrier between good guys and bad guys, bandits and cops, drug cartels and the state. Jacobin contributing editor Benjamin Fogel spoke to Smith about his new book and the history of the drug trade in Mexico.

Benjamin Fogel
This book seeks to change our understanding about drug wars and the drug trade. Could you give us an idea of what you think the official narrative or mythology about the trade looks like in the popular imagination?

Benjamin T. Smith
When I talk about the official narrative or mythology of the drug war, I am talking about that simple moral binary which shapes most discussions of the trade. In this narrative, the traffickers are brutal, evil men with a proclivity for outrageous displays of violence. The authorities like the cops and drug agents, on the other hand, are good, honorable men; their use of violence is reactive rather than proactive.
When discussing the Mexican drug trade, there is a strong racial element to this. Traffickers tend to be poor, brown, and Mexican. Drug agents tends to be white Americans — modern day Wyatt Earps. It’s a simple narrative that has shaped the crime news and the serious broadsheets, pulp detective novels, and Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction, the overt silliness of Get the Gringo and the portentous nonsense of Sicario.
It is there, for example, in the term “cartel.” American drug agents started to use the term cartel in the late 1980s to describe Mexican traffickers. The term “cartel” immediately brought to mind OPEC, price controls, and the perversion of good old, fair-minded, Anglo-run capitalism. And it promised victory. Destroy the cartel, and you destroy the drug trade.
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán arrives in New York, 2017. (Charles Reed / US Immigration and Customs Enforcement via Getty Images)
Yet the DEA knew that the traffickers didn’t operate as a cartel at all. These were networks of intermarried families and friends, which all played small roles in creating this market ecosystem.
It is a model which I think after a century of propaganda is almost hardwired into our subconscious. And it is one which I think still shapes most discussions of the drug trade and the war against it. I suppose I fear that some people will read this book and jettison its arguments out of hand, because I start by basically stating my opposition to this predominant narrative.

One of the major contributions of your book concerns the relationship between the state and drug traffickers. You argue that the best way of understanding the trade is as a protection racket which historically has been run by various factions within the Mexican state. Can you explain how this works and how we should conceptualize what is usually just referred to as “corruption”?

The term “corruption” is often bandied around to describe the relationship between the Mexican authorities and the Mexican traffickers. It forms a crucial part of that same drug war narrative. Why don’t counter-narcotics policies work? Corruption. Why can’t Mexico control its cartels? Corruption.
But corruption is an imprecise and not very useful term. No doubt many Mexican politicians and policemen partially fulflil the orthodox political science definition of corruption. They use their position to line their own pockets. (Although contrary to the classic definition, it is worth saying that they are not using public monies to do this — they are simply shaking down criminals).
What I found surprising was that there is another dynamic also going on. For over a century, Mexican politicians and policemen have also exchanged money from drug traffickers (and other merchants of illicit goods from booze to imported US products to untaxed coffee) for protection from prosecution. Some of this money they have pocketed, no doubt. But they have used a surprising amount to build the state.
During the first half of the twentieth century, while Mexico still had pretensions about being a social democracy, these state-building operations involved constructing schools and laying roads. But by the 1970s, as the Cold War heated up, it gradually became more trained on paying for garrisons and arming hit squads.
Rather than terming it corruption, a better phrase for what the state was doing was running a protection racket — a strategy located somewhere between an orthodox state and a mafia operation.
Is this corruption? It might not be terribly palatable, but it’s a basic part of what states do. They extract money in return for protection. They do this to companies by charging them tax in return for guaranteeing property rights. All they are doing here is charging traffickers similar types of tax for not imposing the law.
Rather than terming it corruption, I thought that a better phrase for what the state was doing was running a protection racket. It is a strategy located somewhere between an orthodox state and a mafia operation.

Can you briefly sketch out the political economy that drives the drug trade from Mexico to the United States and the economic incentives behind it?

I don’t think it is news to anybody that it is American demand that drives the Mexican drug trade. In the 1960s, 40 percent of high schoolers were smoking weed and in the 1990s, Americans were taking 70 percent of the world’s cocaine. Last year around a hundred thousand Americans died from drug overdoses.
In comparison, Mexico has never really had a drug market. A few soldiers and bohemians smoked weed after the Revolution, but at least up to the early 2000s, the market for weed, cocaine, and especially heroin was miniscule. In the 1970s, when Mexico was providing 95 percent of America’s heroin, survey takers were unable to find a single Mexican heroin addict in the country.
This ceaseless US demand has merged with the persistent poverty of the average Mexican. You can earn the average annual Mexican wage by working for fifteen days in the United States.
This combination of high demand and low wages has generated enormous incentives to produce and traffic drugs. There is no established way to assess these incentives, so I came up with my own: an estimate of the quantities of various narcotics a Mexican would have to sell wholesale in the United States to earn the average annual Mexican wage.
This calculation is not meant to mirror real life. Few individual Mexicans have had the wherewithal to sell the drugs that they grew on their own land directly to American users. (Though some have. As journalist Sam Quinones discovered, in the early 2000s, a handful of enterprising Mexican poppy farmers started to sell their homemade black tar heroin directly to US OxyContin addicts.) The figure does not take into account the (comparatively minimal) costs of drug production and processing or the (less minimal) costs of networking and bribery. Instead, what it does is suggest why the drug trade has been so attractive to so many Mexicans.
The results are telling. Over the past fifty years, to earn the median wage, a Mexican has had to sell an average of seven hundred grams of marijuana, eighteen grams of heroin, or sixty-six grams of cocaine on the US streets. It amounts to weed weighing two cans of soup, coke weighing a tennis ball, or smack weighing just three US quarters. And this is only the average. During the economic collapse of the mid-1980s, it took only two hundred eighty grams of marijuana and 4.8 grams of heroin to make the annual wage. In Mexico, you could earn as much growing a single marijuana plant or a window box of poppies as driving a cab for a year.
And it’s this — not some kind of innate moral failing that somehow only affects those south of the Rio Bravo — that has located the drug trade so firmly south of the US border.

In your book, you tell the story of the development of the Mexican drug trade through changes in the political regime or forces that run these protection rackets from local governors to different branches of the Mexican security forces. Can you briefly sketch this narrative and explain how it works?

At first, in the 1920s and 1930s, while Mexico was in the process of rebuilding itself after the Revolution, it was mostly local mayors and local military commanders who protected the traffickers and smugglers from prosecution. Most of these were based at various towns along the US-Mexican border. A few were based where the morphine and heroin came in at the port of Veracruz and a few at the various train stops up from Veracruz to the border.
During the 1940s, however, Mexico began in earnest to grow opium poppies and convert them into morphine and heroin for the US market. Again, it was a question of demand. World War II cut off the United States from its traditional drug suppliers in Europe and Asia, so Mexico almost immediately pulled in the slack.
This was a much more geographically diffuse industry that spanned the mountains of western Mexico. So state governors started to take over protecting the drug growers and the drug traffickers from prosecution. They used state police forces to do this. State cops collected money from the traffickers and handed it — often explicitly — to state tax collectors. It kept states like Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua afloat.

By the 1970s, however, these protection rackets changed hands again. The United States was breathing down Mexico’s neck and attempting to force a crackdown on the burgeoning marijuana and heroin businesses. At the same time, some state governors were managing to use drug protection money to build up a fair amount of independence from the federal Mexican authorities. Finally, the Mexican federal authorities were facing an increasingly embarrassing array of guerrilla insurgencies both in the mountains of southern Mexico and the cities of the north.
The Mexican authorities came up with a solution. They — and particularly the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) took over the protection of drug traffickers from the state cops. This was a brutal and bloody business which involved killing off the competition in the state police, and torturing and cowing the traffickers and forcing them to pay.
But, at least according to their own logic, the plan worked. The Americans were placated, the state governors saw their independence curtailed, and the federal authorities could use this new source of cash to fight the dirty war.

It seems that one of the biggest misconceptions about the trade is that corruption only starts south of the Rio Grande. Can you comment on US attempts to crack down on the drug trade, from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) to the Mexican anti-drug campaign Operation Condor and most recently the Mérida Initiative? What drives these counter-narcotic responses, and what is the strategic logic behind them?

Again this is part of the drug war narrative. Mexican protection of the drug trade is evidence of endemic or institutional corruption. Any cases of US authorities protecting drug traffickers is just a few bad apples. But corruption extends north of the border. I found multiple accounts of it during the 1970s and 1980s among local sheriffs, local customs officers drug agents, and even US senators.
In fact, the first American drug agency, the FBN, was disbanded in 1968 in the wake of a huge corruption scandal. Investigators estimated that around a third of the agents were on the take. The next drug agency, the BNDD [Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs], was also closed down just five years later amid similar accusations of corruption and incompetence.
I would hazard a guess that during the counterculture drug boom, there was just as much corruption north as south of the border. It was the reason that so many narcotics got through. It wasn’t the five hundred–odd Mexican PJF agents on the take but the thousands of DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], customs, and local police officers doing the same in the United States.
Why do we know more about the Mexican corruption than the American? This is not a terribly popular opinion, but I think the US and Mexico differed in two ways.
First, Mexico has declassified a lot of its secret service and judicial documents, so we have a lot more evidence of this corruption; in contrast, US Grand Jury transcripts and spy files remain classified to this day. The only way that I could get at corruption on the US side was through unofficial leaks and this extraordinary investigation into Arizona corruption performed by journalists in the wake of the mafia killing one of their number.
Second, Mexico had — and still has in some regions — a much more gung-ho, aggressive local news network than the United States. Mexico journalists were — and still are — prepared to point the finger at corrupt officials.
What has changed in the last three or so decades is that US police forces — unlike Mexican ones — have been given the mandate to effectively shake down drug dealers legally. When they arrest traffickers north of the border, they can impound their houses, cars, and other properties, and use them to float their own police forces.
There is now no need for the kind of covert protection rackets that are still running south of the border. This is similar to something that came out during the investigations of the Ferguson racial justice protests a few years ago. The Ferguson police force wasn’t simply racist — it was systematically shaking down the local population for cash.
The second question about what drives US anti-narcotics initiatives south of the border is a trickier one. It depends on the timing and the policy. But in general, it’s been a question of institution-building. Time and time again, American drug authorities have pushed initiatives in Mexico to generate bigger budgets or maintain their relevance to cover up for failings at home.
Why did Harry Anslinger and the FBN stop Mexico’s experiment with drug legalization in 1940? Because he was attempting to challenge rivals in the Customs Department and extend his department’s remit to foreign policy.
Why did the DEA push Operation Condor, Mexico’s huge militarized anti-drug campaign, in 1975? Because successive scandals and escalating heroin use generated the need for easy scapegoats.

You argue that violence in the drug trade is driven by state attempts to restructure or change the way protection rackets are run. Can you explain how this drives violence? And could you also comment on the open confrontations between different branches of the Mexican security forces fighting over control of these rackets?

Most commentators argue that the narcotics business inevitably generates violence; it is “in the DNA of the trade.” They give many reasons for the inevitability of violence. The stakes are high. The trade attracts criminals and sociopaths, and without official regulation, disputes are decided by force. Over the past fifteen years, at least in Mexico, this has not been a difficult claim to make. Yet it is important not to let contemporary horrors obscure both the history of the trade and the origins of the violence.
Up to the 1970s, violence was rarely employed to sort out disputes between drug traffickers. The trade was relatively peaceful. Cooperation was the rule.
Up to the 1970s, violence was rarely employed to sort out disputes between drug traffickers. The trade was relatively peaceful. Cooperation was the rule. Deep ties of blood, marriage, friendship, and neighborhood, which linked many of the traffickers, prevented the frequent use of force. In general, so did the local protection rackets. Both state governors and state cops were keen to avoid conflicts that risked exposing their own ties to the traffickers.
But occasionally, new state authorities attempted to overturn the old protection rackets and institute their own. To do so, they frequently tracked down powerful traffickers and arrested or killed them. They then placed their own compliant traffickers in their place. New state authorities could claim to the US and Mexican federal authorities that they were taking serious action on counternarcotics while also capturing the protection racket for themselves. Yet the strategy was high-risk. If the new authorities failed to control or eliminate the powerful traffickers, the attempted takeover could develop into a bloody conflict.
Such conflicts over drug protection rackets dot the early years of the trade. There were outbreaks of violence in Ciudad Juárez in the early 1930s, in Sinaloa in the 1940s, and again in Sinaloa in the late 1960s. Yet such conflicts have become more frequent. Over the past forty years, increasing numbers of groups have vied for control of the drug protection rackets. They no longer comprise just warring local politicians, but also federal cops, secret service agents, and the drug traffickers themselves. What is described as a conflict over the drug trade is often a conflict over the control of the protection racket.

One aspect that stood out about the history of the Mexican drug trade, one which has commonalities in terms of other mafias in Italy and Colombia, is how anti-left violence and right-wing thuggery were deeply connected to the drug trade. Can you explain the relationship between the Mexican drug trade and anti-left-wing violence?

This is something that historians like Sergio Aguayo, Alex Aviña, and Adela Cedillo have written extensively about. They make it very clear that particularly in regions such as Guadalajara or southern Guerrero or the indigenous regions of the Chihuahua Sierra, the federal authorities linked up with traffickers in order to take out left-wing groups. They have each fashioned rich and detailed analyses of how this happened.
I suppose, where I differ, or perhaps where I extend this analysis is to see these links between the state, drug traffickers, and anti-left violence as something baked into the history of state formation in Mexico. Drugs and the drug trade always undergirded parts of the Mexican state. But during the 1970s, the section that demanded the funding was involved in a brutal war against left-wing insurgents.

To turn the story toward the current violence in Mexico, what changed in terms of the relationship between traffickers and the state in the ’90s and how did this change the drug trade and the level of violence used to control protection rackets, in your words how did the “drug trade” transform into the “drug war”?

In essence, the changes were twofold. First, the amount of money increased. Colombian traffickers moved from paying Mexican smugglers a set fee to cross every kilo of cocaine to paying them a kilo of the drug for every kilo moved. This effectively put a zero on Mexican traffickers’ immediate earnings.
Second, the federal authorities that had controlled the protection of the trade started to splinter. The ruling party started to divide into different warring factions, and rival political parties started to win elections in key trafficking zones like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, and key growing zones like Michoacán.
Together, these two shifts resulted in the traffickers themselves taking over the protection rackets. They, just like the state before them, now provided drug smugglers with protection for a cut of the profits. And they created small, regional armies in order to do so. This probably started in Tijuana under the Arellano Felix brothers, but it soon extended to other border cities like Juárez and Matamoros and then to other growing and production zones like Michoacán and Jalisco.
Trafficking organizations — which had previously concerned themselves with moving products — now got interested in controlling space.
Running a protection racket, unlike running a trafficking network, needs a monopoly. To function, it needs to be the only game in town. If not, the protection doesn’t work. Smugglers won’t pay you for protection if they also have to pay the army or the local police or another gang of heavies. Soon, these private protection rackets soon came into conflict as different groups sought a monopoly of certain zones. Trafficking organizations — which had previously concerned themselves with moving products — now got interested in controlling space. And they fought other organizations to do so.
The drug trade became the drug war — or, more precisely, a conflict between drug trafficking organizations to control distinct, geographically delimited protection rackets.

It seems that what is termed a “drug war” or “drug cartels” no longer only concern themselves just with trafficking drugs. Instead, they control all sorts of rackets and extortion schemes, from growing avocados to oil theft. How has the political economy of organized (or badly organized) crime changed in Mexico since Felipe Calderon launched a “war on drugs” in 2006?

To be fair to Calderon, drug trafficking organizations had started attempting to control other illicit and licit industries in zones under their control since the early 2000s. A group of former soldiers called the Zetas probably initiated this shift. As early as 2004, they were shaking down bars, brothels, and DVD pirates in Michoacán and Tamaulipas. But soon other groups adopted these same strategies.
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador walks during the ceremony of deployment of the new Mexican security force, the National Guard, at Campo Marte on June 30, 2019 in Mexico City, Mexico. (Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images)
In doing so, they not only confronted the groups they were trying to extort (like the petty criminals, the kidnappers, and the fuel thieves), they also came into conflict with rival cartel protection schemes, and state institutions, like the municipal police, which themselves had shaken down these industries for decades.

Given the horrific scale of violence associated with the drug war in Mexico, do you think there are any solutions or lessons we can learn in terms of how to reduce violence? What do you think of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO)’s approach of “hugs not bullets”?

I think many of AMLO’s instincts are broadly correct. He has focused on the problem of the US arms trade, which has radically increased the Mexican homicides over the past fifteen years. He has attempted to undercut the criminal gangs by offering young men better opportunities and better earnings than those offered by preceding governments. And he has refused to follow the US-inspired kingpin strategy, which simply fragmented organized crime groups and caused increased bloodshed.
He, or at least those around him, have also — I suspect — set about attempting to renegotiate pacts with various criminal groups, in the manner of the federal authorities of the 1970s and 1980s. They have attempted to persuade them to move back to trafficking drugs rather than selling them inside Mexico and indulging in other more socially damaging forms of crime.
On the downside, I think that his attempts to offer greater opportunities for young men has been undermined by Mexico’s struggling economy and then by COVID. And his soto voce deals with drug traffickers were only possible because the US government under Trump was more interested in chasing down poor, vulnerable Central American migrants than eliminating drug traffickers. Whether he will be able to do this under Biden, we will have to see.
Over the past two years, he has become increasingly beholden to Mexico’s armed forces. His promise to send the soldiers back to the barracks has been completely shelved. The soldiers remain at the front line of Mexico’s security and policing strategy, with all the attendant problems of lack of transparency, human rights infringements, and its cannibalization by certain organized crime groups.
Finally, AMLO’s administration — like those before him — has refused to come to terms with the rising problem of drug addiction in Mexico. Just like in the United States, there is insufficient money spent on treatment and rehabilitation programs. It is the small-scale warfare over drug selling territory, over what in the United States would be called “the corners,” that has caused much of the recent bloodshed in cities with big addict populations like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.
At the moment, Mexico’s escalating murder rate seems to suggest that despite the good intentions, these residual problems are still undercutting these more promising policies.

Walmart Inc. has launched a critical race theory training program that denounces the United States as a “white supremacy system” and teaches white, hourly wage employees that they are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority.”

According to a cache of internal documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, Walmart launched the program in 2018 in partnership with the Racial Equity Institute, a Greensboro, North Carolina, consulting firm that has worked extensively with universities, government agencies, and private corporations. The program is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “internalized racial oppression,” “internalized racial inferiority,” and “white anti-racist development.” Since the program’s launch, Walmart has trained more than 1,000 employees and made the program mandatory for executives and recommended for hourly wage workers in Walmart stores. When reached for comment, Walmart confirmed that the company has “engaged REI for a number of training sessions since 2018” and has “found these sessions to be thought provoking and constructive.”

The program begins with the claim that the United States is a “white supremacy system,” designed by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege.” American history is presented as a long sequence of oppressions, from the “construction of a ‘white race’” by colonists in 1680 to President Obama’s stimulus legislation in 2009, “another race neutral act that has disproportionately benefited white people.” Consequently, the Walmart program argues, white Americans have been subjected to “racist conditioning” that indoctrinates them into “white supremacy,” or the view “that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.”

Following the principle that “diagnosis determines treatment,” the Walmart program seeks to create a psychological profile of whiteness that can then be treated through “white anti-racist development.” Whites, according to the trainers, are inherently guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority,” the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. Walmart’s program argues that this oppressive “white supremacy culture” can be summarized in a list of qualities including “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort, “and “worship of the written word”—which all “promote white supremacy thinking” and “are damaging to both people of color and to white people.”

The training program recommends that “discussions about racist conditioning” should be conducted in racially segregated “affinity groups,” because “people of color and white people have their own work to do in understanding and addressing racism.” Walmart employees who are racial minorities, in the framework of the training program, suffer from “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority.” Their internal psychology is considered shattered and broken, dominated by internal messages such as “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.” Minorities thus begin to believe the “myths promoted by the racist system,” develop feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” in order to secure basic survival.

The solution, according to Walmart’s program, is to encourage whites to participate in “white anti-racist development”—a psychological conditioning program that reorients white consciousness toward “anti-racism.” The training program teaches white employees that ideas such as “I’m normal,” “we’re all the same,” and “I am not the problem” are racist constructs, driven by internalized racial superiority. The program encourages whites to accept their “guilt and shame,” adopt the idea that “white is not right,” acknowledge their complicity in racism, and, finally, move toward “collective action” whereby “white can do right.” The goal is for whites to climb the “ladder of empowerment for white people” and recreate themselves with a new “anti-racist identity.”

Walmart’s training program seems a study in opportunism. For years, activists have attacked the company’s business practices; the critical race theory program helps the giant retailer shift blame to forces beyond its control. As the company denounces “white supremacy culture”—with components including “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “hoarding”—its entire nine-member top executive leadership, except technology chief Suresh Kumar, is white, and its top six leaders made a combined $112 million in salary in 2019. Chief executive officer Doug McMillon, whom the whistleblower described as a “true believer” in critical race theory, hopes to export woke ideology to every Fortune 100 company through his role as chairman of the Business Roundtable.

The formula is clear: American executives, among the most successful people on the planet, can collect accolades and social status by promoting fashionable left-wing ideologies. Meantime, their hourly workers, making between $25,000 and $30,000 yearly, are asked to undergo dishonest and humiliating rituals to confront their “white privilege” and “white supremacy thinking.” McMillon gets the social justice credit; his workers pay the price.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

From the debacle in Afghanistan to the ongoing devastation of COVID-19 to the unhinged cruelty of the Republican Party, Noam Chomsky notes, there is plenty of room for despair in America right now. But he insists that, despite it all, we have ample reason for hope.

Noam Chomsky in October 2016. (Nuclear Age Peace Foundation)
 
Noam Chomsky needs no introduction. One of the most famous public intellectuals in the world, his bibliography is enormous and his contributions to the fight for a better world endless. In a recent conversation, Chomsky talks about the state of the Republican Party, the ongoing debacle of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the absurdities of American exceptionalism, and the hope he has in organizing to win desperately needed measures like a Green New Deal.
Chomsky spoke with David Barsamian for Alternative Radio. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

David Barsamian
In the United States, COVID-19 has resulted in more than seven hundred thousand dead. Globally, the death toll is in the millions. Vaccines have been effective, yet there’s a significant resistance to getting vaccinated, particularly in the United States. Why? What makes some people susceptible to conspiracy theories about getting vaccinated?

We should look at exactly what’s happening. If you look at global maps, like the kind that the New York Times posts every day, the United States stands out. It’s the main global hot spot outside of Mongolia and a couple of others. If you look closely, it’s not the United States. It’s selected parts of the United States. Overwhelmingly, it’s the old Confederacy and a couple of outliers like Idaho and Wyoming, which are rock-ribbed Republican states. There’s even been analysis by counties by now, and it turns out that there’s a quite sharp difference between counties that voted for Joe Biden and counties that voted for Donald Trump. So, to a very substantial extent, it’s a partisan issue.
Parts of the Left have bought into this, too. They’re not statistically significant as compared with the mass refusal on the part of Republicans. And, in fact, the last poll I saw showed that over 50 percent of Republicans said they were not going to get vaccinated. So it’s not just that the country is refusing — very substantially, it’s a Republican issue.
It’s very serious. The hospitals in Republican areas like Idaho and Alabama are being crushed by COVID cases. Some states have had to stop providing regular services in hospitals because they have no beds. (Actually, in a minor way, that happened to me, too: I couldn’t get to a hospital that I needed to because they had no beds. It wasn’t terrible. I survived.)
Apart from the social cost, which is huge, they’re endangering people. The unvaccinated are endangering others. They’re severely endangering children who can’t get vaccinated yet. They have no protection. They’re even endangering the vaccinated. I mean, the vaccine is very effective, but not 100 percent. So they’re endangering the vaccinated, too. And on top of that, they’re creating a pool in which the virus can mutate freely, maybe leading to variants that might not even be treatable. It could be a raging, untreatable pandemic.
Why is this done? Liberty? There’s no such liberty. There’s no liberty that allows you to drive through a red light because you feel like it and you don’t want to be inhibited. Nobody’s ever claimed such a liberty. It’s outlandish. You want to hurt people? Okay. Go find a plot of land somewhere, sit on it, don’t take any benefits from the government, and don’t take any responsibilities. The whole libertarian thing is pure nonsense.
In other words, you want to harm the employees in a restaurant? Feel free to do it. It’s your right to harm them. That’s the Republican Party.
Furthermore, we’ve had vaccine mandates — strict ones. Much stricter than now, for years. You can’t send your kid to school without a vaccine, and rightly. Why should you be able to endanger other children? That’s been in place for a long time. There are no real mandates now. What’s called “mandates” have an alternative: you can agree to get tested every week or two. This is, I think, a symptom of severe social disorder — social collapse of a party that has simply gone rogue.
That’s not just my opinion. Recently, the Financial Times — the major business newspaper in the world, sober, conservative — their leading correspondent, Martin Wolf, a highly respected conservative analyst, wrote a column in which he said it’s just indescribable. He said the Republican Party has become a group of crazed radicals dedicated to reactionary policies.
The Republicans have been holding the country hostage by refusing to agree to the perfectly normal procedure of raising the debt ceiling to account for things that have already been done. When Trump was in office, he made a huge increase in the deficit with his lavish gifts to the rich; the Democrats went along with it, raised the debt ceiling every time it was necessary. Republicans won’t do it. In fact, they finally just now agreed, as long as conditions were imposed to block any form of mandate for small and medium-size businesses.
In other words, you want to harm the employees in a restaurant? Feel free to do it. It’s your right to harm them. That’s the Republican Party. They also tried to cut off funding for Afghan refugees. I mean, the political leadership is just a gang of sadists. And the shamelessness is indescribable. Take the hearing for Milley.

General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He went through denunciations by a series of Republicans, Josh Hawley and a bunch of other frauds, condemning him for the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Take a look at the record. Until about a month ago, the Republican Party national website hailed the great genius Trump for arranging a much worse withdrawal. In February 2020, Trump simply gave away the store. He, of course, didn’t inform the Afghan government, obviously not the Afghan people. Why should he care about them? He made an arrangement with the Taliban for US forces to withdraw in May 2021. Worst possible time — beginning of the fighting season. Essentially no conditions. Do whatever you like. The only condition is, don’t fire at American troops, it won’t look good for me.
Biden came along and somewhat improved the awful Trump arrangements; he put it off a couple of months, a little bit of minimal time to accommodate, and added a few conditions that Trump hadn’t put in place. The Republican Party was lauding Trump for his historic achievement until the moment when it began to collapse. Then they turned on a dime, all of them berating Milley and others for carrying out an improved version of the policy that they had been lauding as a historic achievement when the hero that they worship was proposing it. The word “shameless” doesn’t cover this. There are no words.
The United States has gone so far to the right that even policies that are normal in most of the rest of the world are considered radical.
It’s not just this. That’s why large parts of the Republican Party are denying global warming. If you tune in to Fox News and Breitbart, you’re listening to the leadership of the Republican Party. That’s all you hear. Maybe the virus is a bioweapon created by the Chinese to attack Americans. That’s about 35 percent of Republicans. Maybe Bill Gates is trying to put a chip in your head so he can control you. Maybe the government is run by an elite group of sadistic pedophiles who are trying to torture children. That’s about 25 percent of Republicans. If you’re stuck in that bubble, and that’s what you’re hearing from a political leadership that has lost even minimal commitment to the functioning of democracy, these are the results you get.
And it’s very straightforward; there’s nothing hidden. Mitch McConnell came right out and said, again, as he did when Barack Obama was elected: our responsibility is to make the country ungovernable, to make sure that nothing can be done that would benefit the American people.
Sensible strategy. If the population is harmed sufficiently, they can then come along and blame it on the Democrats, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity will echo it, and then maybe they can come back to power.
If you’ve lost any commitment to the country and to its people and to some form of democracy, and you’re solely committed to your own power and to the economic powers that you serve slavishly — concentrated wealth, ultra wealth, corporate power — if that’s who you are, then this is a sensible way to behave. Of course, it will ruin the country, but who cares?

I can hear your critics saying, “It sounds like Chomsky is becoming an advocate for the Democratic Party.

Not in the least. Their policies are terrible. And most of what I write is criticism of the Democratic Party. Take a look at the Democrats, what I have actually been writing and speaking.
Let’s start with August 9. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its latest report, very dire. It said, far more clearly than before, that we’re at a critical moment. We have to start reducing fossil fuels steadily right now, continuing until we’re free of them by essentially mid-century. That was August 9. What happened on August 10? Joe Biden issued an appeal to OPEC, the oil cartel, to increase oil production so as to reduce gas prices in the United States, which will help his electoral prospects. Is that the party we’re supposed to be lauding?
There’s plenty to condemn about the Democrats. They’re a political party that does plenty of wrong things. They’re not a rogue insurgency that is committed to serving a narrow constituency of extreme wealth and doesn’t give a damn how much they harm the country and the world. That’s not a political party anymore. It’s off the spectrum. You can rank [the Republicans] among the ultraright parties in Europe with neo-fascist origins.

The IPCC report, which was three thousand pages and the work of over two hundred scientists, warned of the extreme dangers the planet is facing. Nevertheless — take our great neighbor to the north, Canada — just recently, Enbridge, a major Canadian corporation, announced its extension of a pipeline from the tar sands in Alberta to Wisconsin (tar sands being the dirtiest oil on the planet). This is happening despite years of opposition from environmentalists and indigenous groups.

Take a look at the business press, especially the petroleum journals. The major oil companies are absolutely euphoric. They’re beside themselves. They’re finding new areas to explore. The current budget for the US government continues to provide subsidies to fossil fuel companies. Republicans wouldn’t tolerate anything else. Canada’s bad enough, and other countries aren’t doing that wonderfully. But the United States is indescribable.
Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)
A former political organization now calling itself the Republican Party is dedicated to accelerating the race to catastrophe. Take a look at the Republican states. Republican legislators aren’t even trying to hide it. They’ve got to race to catastrophe to enrich the energy corporations as much as possible before we reach apocalypse. That’s one part of the fading American democracy. Take a look at the one party that’s still functioning, the Democratic Party. There’s a major split within it that offers the opportunity, at least, to push forward on the programs that are well-known, feasible — to not only mitigate the crisis but lead to a much better world. They are on the table.
There’s a Green New Deal resolution by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ed Markey, senior senator from Massachusetts. It gives a detailed outline of quite feasible proposals, well within cost range, that could solve the crisis and lead the way to a much better society. It’s a resolution. That’s a step forward.
It got that far because of extensive popular activism — mostly among young people, the Sunrise Movement and others. The resolution’s details are approximately the same as what was produced by the International Energy Agency, originally a producer-based group, which recognized that we have to do something about this. It’s very similar to the quite detailed extensive proposals of my coauthor, Robert Pollin, a leading economist who’s worked hard on this, as has Jeffrey Sachs, another important economist whose somewhat different model comes out with pretty much the same conclusions. It’s all within range and can be done. It’s on paper. The Republicans are going to kill it. That’s a given. They don’t care what happens to the planet; they don’t give a damn. They have other commitments: their own power and the superrich.
In fact, if you look at their commitment, it is unbelievable. Take a look at the negotiations that have been going on in Congress. The Republicans established an absolute red line: no increase in taxes for the superrich and the corporate sector. You cannot touch Trump’s one legislative achievement, a tax scam that stabbed the country in the back, including the working classes and the middle classes, in order to enrich the very rich. That’s a red line. Furthermore, another part of the red line is that you can’t fund the IRS to enable it to catch tax cheaters — rich people and corporations with huge numbers of corporate lawyers who figure out how to rob the population of trillions of dollars. You can’t fund the IRS to investigate them. That’s the former Republican Party. We’re looking at a group of radical sadists.
Turn to the Democrats. They’re split. The Clintonite-Obama type, neoliberal, Wall Street–oriented Democrats who pretty much run the party apparatus — they’re reluctant. They’re not going to push. And some of the right-wing Democrats, mislabeled moderate, like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, look like total cynics flush with corporate money — they are holding back on even minimal things. Sinema, for example, won’t even say what she would agree to in the reconciliation bill. She just won’t agree. “What would you agree to?” “Sorry, can’t say.”
The Democratic Party is split between these groups, on the one hand, and progressive, mostly young people, who are pressuring them to try to save us from destruction on the climate, on the pandemic, on the breakdown of society. The reconciliation bill moves to give the population some respite from the neoliberal assault of the last forty years, to give some chance to respond to the major attack on the general population. There’s nothing radical in it.
In fact, one of the editors of the Financial Times, in a semi-joke, said that if Bernie Sanders was in Germany, he could be running on the conservative party ticket, the Christian Democrats. It’s true. His major proposals — universal health care, free higher education — in Germany, that’s the right-wing party. The United States has gone so far to the right that even policies that are normal in most of the rest of the world are considered radical.

Someone who’s not mincing words is the UN secretary-general, António Guterres. He said, “We continue to destroy the things on which we depend for life on Earth. Ice caps and glaciers continue to melt, sea-level rise is accelerating, the ocean is dying, and biodiversity is collapsing. . . . We really are out of time. We must act now to prevent further irreversible damage.”
We keep hearing these calls, which invariably include the words “tipping points.” How many tipping points is it going to take before we tip over and into the abyss?

We can’t predict precisely, but we are moving toward irreversible tipping points. Every month we wait, the problem gets harder to deal with. If we had dealt with it ten years ago, it would be much less dire today. If we had dealt with it thirty years ago, when it was perfectly clear where we were heading, then [it would have been] far easier.
You recall that the first Bush administration refused even to join the Kyoto Protocol. We have to keep to the high priorities: enrich the very rich and maintain massive profits for the corporate sector. What happens to the country and the world is secondary.
(Gerry Machen / Flickr)
We don’t know exactly when the tipping points will come. But they’ll come. In fact, some of them may have come already. If not, we’ll reach them pretty soon. We’ll get to an irreversible tipping point, a series of them. It doesn’t mean that everybody dies tomorrow. The country will survive, other countries will survive. But we’re on a course toward total apocalypse. Meanwhile, we are incidentally destroying other species at an incredible rate that hasn’t been seen for sixty-five million years. All of this is known.
There are, more importantly, clear measures to deal with it — and, in fact, some positive steps. Take West Virginia, where their own senator, Joe Manchin, is working very hard to harm the people as much as he can in service to his corporate masters. But the population of West Virginia is beginning to see the light.
It’s a coal state. The United Mine Workers of America recently agreed to a transition program, in which there would be a transition from a coal-based economy for West Virginia — which has to disappear, otherwise we won’t be around — to a renewable energy economy. They have the capacity to do it. The transition proposal took into account the needs of the working people who will be affected by loss of jobs. New kinds of jobs, training, and better jobs are all part of the transition plan.
Bob Pollin has been quite active in working with labor unions in West Virginia, Ohio, and California. Many of them are moving in this direction — so it is possible. We might remember that, if we go back fifty years, the leaders of the environmental movement were the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union — Tony Mazzocchi‘s union. They were the ones pressuring people to deal seriously with the environment. And in fact, they were the ones who suffered immediately from the effects of pollution.
It’s not a lost cause. But it’s going to take serious, committed work, with sympathy, understanding, and dedication.
That can happen again. There are possible forces that can work on it. And activists can do something — they must, in fact. It’s the only hope.
The Republican Party is almost a lost cause. I say “almost” because, if you look closely, younger Republicans are not as insane and despicable as the party’s leadership. They are more open to concern about these issues. That’s a place for hope, too. They’re not Susan Collins and Josh Hawley, so you can have some hope there — and that should be pressed. Among the general population, including Republicans, they’re reachable. They’re stuck in a Fox News and Republican leadership bubble, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be moved. It’ll take effort and work, but they’re human beings. They care about their children. They care about the environment. And they can be reached.
In fact, among them are many committed environmentalists. It’s very interesting to read the detailed studies, like Arlie Hochschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land, which came out a couple years ago, about the Louisiana Bayou. She was working for years in an area that is bright red, solid Republican. The ultraright representative wants to destroy everything. The area is called “Cancer Alley.” People are dying from cancer from the pollution from the chemical plants. They know it. They don’t like it. She was working with people who are dedicated environmentalists, working hard to try to clean the place up, turn away from the polluting industries — and who vote for the far-right Republican who is at the extreme of trying to destroy the environment.
When she looked into it, she got rational answers — people said, yes, they’re in favor of saving the environment. So what are they to do? A guy in a suit from Washington comes down here and tells them, “You can’t fish because the Bayou is polluted.” Does he do anything about the polluting industries? No. So why should they listen to him?
Is that an irrational answer? No, I don’t think so. Those are people that can be reached. It’s not a lost cause. But it’s going to take serious, committed work, with sympathy, understanding, and dedication. We don’t have to cover up what’s going on among the major criminals. But there are possibilities to move forward.

Edward Said, in the twenty-fifth anniversary preface of his classic book Orientalism, wrote, “Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission).”
Did the United States, in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, replicate what Said wrote?

He’s absolutely right. What’s called “American exceptionalism” is mistaken in two respects. For one thing, the claims about what makes us exceptional are easily disproven. For another, there’s nothing exceptional about it. It was the same with every other major power.
While France was officially committed to “exterminating” the Algerians, French intellectuals were praising the civilizing mission of France. While Britain was carrying out some of its worst atrocities in India, John Stuart Mill — a respectable intellectual, if anybody was — was writing about it. He knew all about it. He was an official of the East India Company while this was going on: huge massacres repressing an Indian uprising, moves to invade and conquer more of India so that Britain could extend its monopoly of the opium trade. The opium trade was the biggest narcotrafficking racket in history, a source of a lot of British wealth, [carried out] in order to break into China by force and destroy it. While that was going on, John Stuart Mill wrote an essay on intervention, which is read in law schools as if it was an opposition to intervention.
But when you read it, it turns out that what he was saying was, Britain is such an angelic power that others can’t understand us. They heap obloquy upon us. They think we’re working for cross ends, because we are so much above the human race that they cannot perceive our dedication to the highest goals. That includes bringing civilization to India, to barbaric India. And it’s our responsibility to do it by smashing them in the face, murdering them, and conquering them to extend our opium monopoly so we can break into China. He didn’t add that part, I added it. But that’s what he knew was happening. Well, that’s John Stuart Mill — not a right-winger, the peak of human enlightenment.
We can go on. If we had records from Attila the Hun, we’d probably find the same thing. You have to try hard to find an exception in human history. And the role of the intellectual is to praise it, to say how wonderful we are. Oh, maybe we make mistakes. After all, anybody can make mistakes. But we’re basically dedicated to the highest good.
Take one example: the end of the Vietnam War, 1975. Every big name had to write an article about it. I reviewed them. They’re quite interesting. They range from the hawks to the doves. The hawks were saying, “We were stabbed in the back. The peace movement killed us. If we’d been able to fight harder, we could have won.” That’s on the right — that’s not interesting. What’s interesting is the so-called left. You get people like Anthony Lewis, about as strong an antiwar voice as you could find anywhere in the mainstream. He wrote an article in the New York Times in which he said the war began with “blundering efforts to do good.” Evidence that these were efforts to do good? No, that’s an axiom. They were “efforts to do good” because we did them. Blundering? Well, it didn’t work. So it started with blundering efforts to do good by definition.
Vietnam War protestors march at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on October 21, 1967. (Frank Wolfe / Lyndon B. Johnson Library)
But by 1969, it was clearly a disaster. We couldn’t bring democracy to the people of South Vietnam at a cost that was acceptable to ourselves. That’s the extreme criticism on the Left. Were we trying to bring democracy? You don’t have to argue that that’s true by definition again. Was it an effort to do good? By definition, it was, because we’re so magnificent. Is the only issue that the cost was too high? Well, you could think of some other issues. Could it possibly have been the worst crime of aggression since World War II, of the kind for which German war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg? Well, it couldn’t have been that, even though it was.
At the same time, US public opinion was being sampled. The main intensive studies were the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which does extensive regular studies of public opinion on foreign affairs. In 1975, they asked a lot of questions. One was, “What do you think about the war in Vietnam?” It turned out that 70 percent of the unwashed masses said the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. A mere 70 percent.
They continued asking that question for about fifteen years and got pretty much the same answer. Finally, the director of research, a good liberal political scientist, asked himself the obvious question: “Why are they giving this answer?” And he gave the response: “They’re saying this because too many Americans died.” Maybe. But maybe they were saying it because they thought the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral. There would have been a way to find that out by asking the question, but you can’t do that — because it’s axiomatic that they must be like the liberal doves, only concerned with the cost to us. It’s got to be. What else could it be? Well, we don’t know. I have a suspicion that a lot of them thought it was fundamentally wrong and immoral, but that couldn’t enter the discussion.
If you said anything like that, you are like what McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote in Foreign Affairs. Yes, we made some mistakes, some things went wrong, and it’s worth discussing them. Then he said there are “the wild men in the wings,” people like you and me. The wild men in the wings who say it wasn’t just mistaken tactics, there was something worse: a crime. Such people are obviously so crazy that we can’t even talk to them. They’re the wild men in the wings. That’s the answer to the question.
Every other great society has done pretty much the same thing. There is no American exceptionalism. It’s a repeat of other great powers and their violence and terror. People talk about “endless wars” — the endless wars for the United States began in 1783 and have not stopped since.
There is no American exceptionalism. It’s a repeat of other great powers and their violence and terror.
As soon as the British yoke was lifted, the colonists set forth on their mission. One of the leading diplomatic histories of the United States, by Thomas Bailey, says that the colonists were free to set forth on their mission “of felling trees and Indians” and extending to the natural borders. It’s pretty honest. We had to turn to felling trees and Indians and extending the natural borders. That means invading and attacking the Indian nations, exterminating them, smashing them to pieces, breaking treaties, and genocidal attacks, right to the end of the century. Meanwhile, they picked up half of Mexico, in what President Ulysses S. Grant called one of the most “wicked wars” in history. Accurately, it was a war of aggression. Arizona, where I’m living right now; California; stealing Hawaii from its inhabitants by force and guile; moving on to invade the Philippines, killing a couple of hundred thousand people, then on to intervention, violence, terror, aggression. That’s American exceptionalism. And it’s not exceptional.
Other great imperial powers have acted similarly or worse. Now take our predecessor, Britain. Where did British wealth come from? Piracy. During the Elizabethan era, British pirates were robbing Spanish ships on the high seas to steal bullion. That was punishable by death. That was Sir Francis Drake, a great hero. That’s a large part of British capital. Then it switched to slavery, the worst slavery in human history. Cotton was the oil of the early Industrial Revolution. The British got it from their colonies, along with sugar, tea, and tobacco, then cotton from the American South. One of the reasons for their conquering Egypt was to get more cotton. After slavery came narcotrafficking. Opium was one of the main commodities in international trade in the nineteenth century, for the reasons I mentioned. That’s British wealth.
Look at France. An estimated 20 percent of French wealth came from vicious, murderous slavery in Haiti. When the Haitians finally won their freedom, France thanked them, of course, by indemnifying the people who lost their property. You’ve got to pay them off, by imposing a debt burden on Haiti to pay the French for daring to become free — a debt that was not paid off until the 1940s. There was recently a French commission, headed, I think, by Régis Debray, a leftist, that discussed whether France ought to do something about it. They concluded, “No, we have no responsibility.” That’s the civilizing mission.
Look at Germany. Some of the first genocides of the twentieth century in Africa, in Namibia. Look at Italy. Genocide in Libya in the early part of the century, and another one in the late 1920s in Libya. The invasion of Ethiopia. They compensate for that by forcing people fleeing from Libya either back to misery where they’re fleeing from or to death in the Mediterranean. That’s the way they deal with their legacy.

You mentioned exterminating. In the book that you did a decade ago called Gaza in Crisis, with the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, you have a chapter entitled “Exterminate All the Brutes,” which are the exact words of the deranged Kurtz character in Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness.

Actually, I was borrowing the word “exterminate” from a more directly relevant source, John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state and president, the intellectual father of manifest destiny. He was responsible for some of the major atrocities [of the era], the Seminole War in Florida and others. In his later years, reflecting on what happened, he lamented the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty.” That was before the worst of the atrocities, which were in California later. That’s the father of Manifest Destiny.
He was right. He was not the first to use it. The secretary of war under Washington, Henry Knox, said something similar: We’re exterminating the natives in ways that are worse than those of the conquistadors in South America. They knew what they were doing.
George Washington said, the Indians are like wolves, savages in human form, “beasts” that have to be driven into the wilderness. That was George Washington. He was known by the Iroquois as the “town destroyer” — because even before the Revolutionary War was over, he launched a major campaign of destruction among the Iroquois nations. There were exceptions, of course. But that was the overwhelming pattern.
That’s the mainstream. You always have wild men in the wings, who are usually treated pretty badly, depending on the nature of the society, but this goes all through history. Go back to classical Greece. The guy who had to commit suicide by taking the hemlock was the man who was guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens by asking too many questions. We don’t want that kind of wild man in the wings. It’s pretty much standard throughout history. The kind of treatment they get depends on the society and who they are.
So, in the United States, if you’re a privileged person like Edward Said or me, punishments are not too bad. Maybe vilification, denunciation. Said had to have police protection. He had a buzzer in his apartment so he could call the police in case he was attacked. If you’re Fred Hampton, a Black Panther organizer, you can be assassinated by the national political police. It depends on who you are.

Let’s now move on to Afghanistan and what happened there, and the comparisons that the armchair pundits have been making to Saigon in 1975. In an interview I did with him in early September, Tariq Ali called what happened in Afghanistan “a huge blow to the American empire,” and he said that “No amount of spin can cover up this debacle.” Is it a bit early to be writing the obituary of the American empire?

As far as the American empire is concerned, it’s a blip. Literally a blip. From the point of view of the American empire, the invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake. George W. Bush and his surrounding courtiers — Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney — decided to invade Afghanistan without any strategic objective.
The best description of what they were doing was given by the most respected figure of the anti-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan, Abdul Haq. In October 2001, he had an important interview with Anatol Lieven, who’s a specialist on Central Asia. Lieven asked him, Why do you think the Americans are invading? Haq said, They know they’re going to kill plenty of Afghans. They’re going to undermine our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which Haq outlined, which were feasible. But they don’t care, he said. They want to show their muscle and intimidate everyone. So they’re invading.
That’s pretty much what Donald Rumsfeld was saying. We now know what he was saying. At the time, the Taliban offered to surrender, totally — which, of course, meant giving up any remnants of al-Qaeda that were there. Rumsfeld’s answer was, “We do not negotiate surrenders. We want to smash you to pieces.” He didn’t say this — I’m adding what was in his head. We want to smash you to pieces to show our muscle, intimidate everyone, then go on to our real targets. We don’t care about Afghanistan. We want to go on to Iraq, then on to the rest of the Middle East. All that actually was publicized. I’m not making that up. So they invaded Afghanistan.
As far as the American empire is concerned, it’s a blip. Literally a blip.
But they didn’t know that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. In fact, eight months after 9/11, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, gave his first major press conference, in which he was asked, of course, what have you found out about 9/11? And he said — this is after probably the greatest investigation in history — “We assume that it was probably al-Qaeda, but we haven’t been able to prove it.”
That’s eight months after the United States invaded to show its muscle and intimidate everyone. Of course, that’s not the story you read. But it’s the fact.
If they wanted to capture al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and others, a small police operation would have sufficed — probably with the cooperation of the Taliban, who at that point were quite eager to get rid of this burden. They couldn’t just give him over to foreigners. That would be a horrible violation of the tribal code. But they probably would have cooperated. In fact, they made various offers about extradition.
But nothing. “We do not negotiate surrender.” Bush, the decider, was asked later, “What do you think about al-Qaeda?” He said, “We don’t really care, we’re not interested in them. We don’t know where they are. We’re interested in the bigger game.”
By then, they were on to Iraq, the real prize. We can smash up and destroy Iraq, get control of its oil — that’s something real. Then we can use that as a springboard. Who cares about Afghanistan?
Pulling out of Afghanistan was, in fact, withdrawing from a mistake for once. It didn’t have the kind of strategic objectives that the Vietnam War did — which were incidentally, partially achieved. The Vietnam War was partially a success. If you look back at the original motivations, back in the early 1950s, they were largely achieved. In Afghanistan, nothing was achieved. It was a mistake. It’s a disaster for Afghans, but it’s not our business.
A paratrooper watches as an aircraft flies overhead while dropping supplies in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, on November 9, 2007. (US Army / Spc. Micah E. Clare)
Now, the question is, can we do something for compensation? Can we help them in some way? Well, what we ought to be doing is joining with the regional powers — China, Central Asian governments, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Russia — to try to offer whatever assistance we can to the Afghans, so they can somehow overcome the crisis of forty years of war, which we were involved in all along. They’re desperate, they’re starving, they don’t have food. We can help with that.
What we’re actually doing is holding on to their funds, which happen to be in the New York banks, holding on to them and not giving them back. Pressuring the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank not to give loans. We actually are joining with India, your favorite country [editor’s note: Barsamian has been banned from India since 2011], to undermine the efforts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to take steps to assist the Afghans. The United States is not a member — they don’t accept the United States. But joining with its US master to undercut the efforts of the regional powers to do something to reduce the terror and violence that the Afghans are suffering by offering them some aid, trying to work with them, trying to integrate them into the region somehow — India and the United States are blocking it. Well, it doesn’t have to happen.
So that’s what we can do now. As well as, of course, providing ample assistance to the Afghan refugees. That’s our first responsibility. Unfortunately, we have a sadistic organization that controls half the government and just tried to cut aid to Afghans from the agreement to raise the debt ceiling. Fortunately, that didn’t work. That’s the country we’re in.

In your book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, you say, “I was involved in civil disobedience for many years, during some periods intensely, and think it’s a reasonable tactic — sometimes.” Why “sometimes”?

Sometimes it’s counterproductive.

In what way?

Because it brings a backlash that is worse than the action itself, because people aren’t prepared to understand it. Civil disobedience, to be an effective tactic, has to follow educational programs, which bring the target audience to understand what you’re doing. I have good friends who I greatly respect and who are marvelous people, who don’t understand this. Quaker activists, Catholic activists who go into the submarine base in Connecticut and smash the hulls of nuclear submarines without any preparation for it. The workforce is infuriated. Why are you taking our jobs? What the hell are you doing? A bunch of crazies. The general community doesn’t understand what’s going on.
They go to trial. They get to stand up and say, “God told me to do it,” or whatever it is. A lot of movement resources are devoted to defending them at the trial; you go down and testify. What’s the achievement? It’s negative. That’s civil disobedience from really marvelous people who just aren’t thinking that civil disobedience is a tactic. It’s not a principle. It’s a tactic undertaken to try to protect victims. That’s when you undertake it. Otherwise, no.

Joe Biden is starting to panic — and not just because of his dwindling approval ratings. More than 18 months since Covid struck, the shocking dependence of the United States on fragile global supply chains — and the corresponding absence of a functional manufacturing system — has been exposed.
The White House has responded with talk of creating more “robust” supply chains and reviving American manufacturing with its “Build Back Better” agenda. But if Biden is serious about addressing these issues, he needs to understand that this is a decades-long process, unlikely to be fully fixed during his presidency.
Even then, victory isn’t guaranteed. At every step there will be efforts to undermine his attempts by a slew of powerful interests, particularly those US corporations who have based their decisions to outsource manufacturing on narrow short-term profitability concerns, at the expense of acknowledging the strategic value of basing factories at home. And now America is paying the price.

Yet many of the same executives who now bemoan the lack of skilled labour in the US are themselves the architects of this very problem. Unlike their Japanese and German competitors, American firms have repeatedly underestimated the value of integrating their product-design and manufacturing processes. This poses a major barrier for newcomers, particularly in high-end industries such as semiconductors and biotech, as moving part of the the production overseas not only degrades the quality of the product (see Intel as an example), but also enhances the possibility of intellectual property theft.
At home, the impact of decades of offshoring and outsourcing jobs is impossible to ignore: manufacturing plants have been shuttered or scaled back, while many former employees have moved on to other jobs or simply retired. Young people, too, are opting for other careers, while, starved of students, many community colleges and vocational schools have scaled back their technical programmes.
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Many business leaders, including the US Chamber of Commerce, have issued calls for increased immigration to solve the skills gap. But what kind of immigration? Right now in the US, we have an increasingly odd alliance defending today’s dysfunctional status quo. Both the libertarian Right and, increasingly, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party decry restrictions on immigration — the former because it shuts off an increasing source of cheap serf labour, the latter because they view such immigration restrictions as motivated by xenophobia (and also see the new immigrants as a source of long-term political support for their party). Meanwhile, political gridlock has precluded the shift toward a more coherent skills-based immigration policy, as opposed to the plethora of unskilled migrants now flooding the southern border.
The result is the worst of both worlds: relatively uncontrolled immigration of unskilled workers, which in turn inhibits wage growth among lower-income Americans, at a time when US manufacturing is undergoing an exodus. All of which means that high-quality American employment (as measured by the Job Quality Index) diminishes, and wages stagnate for the rest.
Advocates of globalisation argue that the resultant increase in profits to American companies spurs reinvestment, which in turn creates employment. But in many instances, profits are not directed toward domestic re-investment (and, as a result, more jobs), but to increasing investment abroad.
Consider the case of General Motors, which closed five profitable plants in North America — despite being a significant recipient of US and Canadian bailout funds after the 2008 crisis — in order to increase investment in the domestic Chinese market. That is, of course, when they are not using corporate cash to buy back stock and inflate share prices and CEO executive compensation. (By contrast, Toyota relies on suppliers clustered close to its base in Japan, making the company less susceptible to supply shocks or labour shortages.)
As far as redomiciling manufacturing goes, the Biden Administration has advocated a variety of economic measures for companies, such as tax incentives for insourcing. But on its own, this measure is unlikely to induce the requisite shift, as these rewards can easily be matched by the recipient investment country’s government. Hence, the state can and must drive this re-domiciling process in other ways: either via higher government-funded R&D expenditures or  local content requirements (LCRs).
This may run counter to 40 years of free market orthodoxy in the US; it posits a much more activist role for government in the formulation of national developmentalist goals. But it must happen. Even presidents said to be champions of the free market, such as Ronald Reagan, resorted to managed trade measures in order to safeguard US manufacturing interests and counter foreign mercantilism. More recently, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has acknowledged: “economic thinking has privileged efficiency over resilience, and it has been insufficiently concerned with the big downsides of efficiency… More broadly our economic strategy will need to put less emphasis on short-term commercial advantage and pay more attention to long-run strategic advantage.”
For whether America likes it or not, the world — particularly in terms of national security — has changed in the 21st century. For most of the post-WW2 period, the United States was the dominant political power. Sustaining that position often meant that trade concerns were subsumed by broader Cold War considerations. The American domestic market was used as a carrot to sustain US political dominance in other regions, notably by creating Asian export dependency on the large American domestic consumer market, often without fully considering the longer impact on US industry.
That strategy succeeded and advanced American geopolitical interests for decades. It was a significant force multiplier — until it wasn’t. All of a sudden it became clear that the United States had failed to use trade to enhance its economy; if anything, it consistently sacrificed domestic economic interests in the service of foreign policy, keeping allies close and prosperous and pressuring adversaries. Today, however, it no longer makes sense for America to sacrifice manufactur­ing to its Asian economic rivals, many of whom are increasingly turning to China as their economic locus.
Absent a coherent policy that emphasises domestic manufacturing, then, American fiscal policy risks becoming a public works programme for the rest of the world. That’s undoubtedly wonderful for workers in China, Germany or Mexico, but hardly does much for the steadily rising casualties of globalisation in the US economy — the country’s blue-collar workers — who have continued to be dismissed as a rounding error.
Neoclassical economics has always recognised that there would be losers from free trade. But in theory, the net welfare gains — the increase in gross domestic product — would be large enough that it could be redistributed so that no one was worse off. In theory, it makes sense. But it is not always true in practice.
The opposite has happened. The gains have not been distributed equally — and American production capabilities and skills have deteriorated as a result.
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It is true that in macroeconomic terms, imports are a benefit and exports a cost (as it means that the exporting country is unable to consume the fruits of its own labour force). But when such trade creates a deficit with a strategic competitor, such as China, it extracts a significant economic cost, as the resultant deficit can ultimately degrade other nations’ industrial capacity and create huge economic vulnerability as a result.
Take the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which has emerged over the past several years as the world’s most important semiconductor company. As the high-tech analyst Jon Stokes has argued, were China to invade Taiwan and seize TSMC, the resultant collapse in semiconductor production could well cause the US economy to crash. The lack of national resilience is precisely the kind of “inefficiency” that globalisation proselytisers seldom consider.
So if the US is truly committed to a policy of building back better, it will require years of industrial reconfiguration and hundreds of billions of dollars — money that is now being deployed wastefully in America’s bloated defence budgets (which both Democrats and Republicans remain determined to feed).
Yes, higher wages and re-domiciling may well lead to higher business costs and possibly higher prices in the short term. But they would also lead to the creation of more disposable income and an invigorated market capitalism, as well as a more socially stable polity as the economic gains would be more equitably distributed. A virtuous cycle would be created: workers would be paid more, competent managers will compensate for higher wages by using more and better machinery, and by improving the way work is organised. This will bring better products, higher productivity and increased profits, which in turn can lead to higher wages.
It won’t be easy. But Biden has little choice. The present is not sustainable: a world of shortages, fragile supply chain links and a degradation of national security interests. If America continues down this path, it will soon face the ultimate inefficiency that economists seldom address: dangerous international confrontations and, ultimately, war.

Imagine a world much like this one where the most valuable companies were in the technology sector. And like this one, these companies were pretty dominant in their respective business areas. The search engine company captured 80–90 percent of all queries. The social media giant ran three of the four largest social platforms. The online retailer accounted for 40 percent of all online sales. The supercool smartphone company had half of the US market.
Now also imagine that these companies had such control over their markets, and their executives felt so confident about the future, that little was spent on new investment or R&D. Surely such a damning data point would be one of the main things mentioned by their critics as a reason for government to break up fat-and-happy Big Tech. Some might also accuse them of “short-termism,” focusing more on quarterly profits, dividends, and buybacks rather than making long-term investments.
Apple CEO Tim Cook greets customers at the new Apple Store in Los Angeles.REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
Of course, the level of Big Tech spending on new investment and R&D is where my imaginary world and our real one part ways. Here’s Shira Ovide from the New York Times:
I have watched, mouth agape, as America’s five biggest tech superstars — Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook — have splurged on big-ticket investments in their businesses. That includes specialized equipment to assemble iPhones, hulking computer hubs and undersea internet cables that zip YouTube videos to your phone, and the warehouses for Amazon workers to assemble and ship orders. What the companies spend on physical assets that last for years — capital expenditures, for you wonks — is one of the best glimpses at how Big Tech leverages success into even more success. The combined profits of these five companies climbed more than 25 percent in the most recent year, according to financial statements. The tech giants have the cash and the permission from their investors to spend almost whatever it takes to stay on top. It’s an advantage that few companies can match.
Wait, so if these super-valuable companies didn’t massively invest in their businesses, their critics would express alarm. But they do invest massively in their businesses — yet I guess that’s supposed to be alarming, too? One can’t help but be reminded of — and see the wisdom in — the philosophical underpinning of American competition law: Antitrust exists to protect competition, not competitors — even if those competitors are feisty upstarts or merely entrepreneurs with big dreams. As antitrust experts John W. Mayo and Mark Whitener explained in The Washington Post last year:
[Antitrust] recognizes that the potential for economic rewards is what incentivizes investment and risk-taking. The resulting competition for marketplace supremacy can be fierce, and weaker firms often fail along the way. Those left standing should not be punished for their success — even if only one survives. As the Supreme Court said more than 50 years ago, monopolies should be targets of antitrust enforcement only when there is “the willful acquisition or maintenance of [monopoly] power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident.” Antitrust doesn’t condemn a firm for developing a universally popular search engine, ketchup or pharmaceutical drug, even if that success leads to market dominance. It’s how a monopoly is obtained or preserved that matters — not its mere existence.
And given the current hostility to Big Tech in Washington, it’s pretty obvious that the dominance is being maintained more by providing value to consumers rather than by exploiting America’s political system like a bunch of crony capitalists. Wall Street banks frequently release reports highlighting the very real antitrust and regulatory risks to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. But I would note that those companies frequently occupy the top spots in lists of the most innovative firms in America and the world. (For example: here, here, and here.) Same with R&D spending. They seem to be staying on top by mostly doing things the right way. And if you have a problem with that, too, then you really have slipped into “big is bad because big is bad” territory.
Learn more: Are the deep fundamentals of the US economy actually pretty strong? | Innovation is important, even more than you think | News from the End of Capitalism: Strong wage growth at the bottom, corporate concentration not a crisis
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After 40 years of neoliberal rule, in which the state actively sought to eradicate the boundary between market, civil society and governance by making economic rationality the cornerstone of every human activity, advanced capitalism appears to be at a crossroads on account of the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. So-called “big government” has staged a dramatic comeback, and even conservative leaders have broken with some of the basic orthodoxies of neoliberalism.
Are we in the midst of fundamental and permanent changes with regard to the relation between the state and markets? Are we witnessing the demise of neoliberalism? Has the pandemic led to the emergence of a new variant of capitalism?
In this interview, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, along with two preeminent economists of the left — Costas Lapavitsas from the University of London and Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts Amherst — share their thoughts and insights about economics and capitalism in the age of the pandemic and beyond.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the neoliberal era of the last 40 years has been defined to a large extent by growing inequalities, slow growth and environmental degradation. Indeed, even the International Monetary Fund admitted some years ago that neoliberalism had failed. Yet, it took the outbreak of a pandemic for a consensus to emerge regarding the failures of neoliberalism. Why did neoliberalism triumph and endure in the first place, and is it actually dead?
Noam Chomsky: My feeling is that a version of neoliberalism has triumphed because it has been highly successful — for the designers, whose power has been considerably enhanced by such predictable consequences as radical inequality, restricting democracy, destruction of unions and atomization of the population so that there is limited defense against the version of neoliberalism that has been pursued with impressive dedication in this latest phase of class war. I say a “version” because the state-corporate managers of the system insist upon a very powerful state that can protect their interests internationally and provide them with massive bailouts and subsidies when their programs collapse, as they do regularly.
For similar reasons, I don’t think that this version is dead, though it is being re-adjusted in response to growing popular anger and resentment, much fueled by the successes of the neoliberal assault on the population.
Bob, the pandemic has shown us that neoliberal capitalism is more than inadequate in addressing large-scale economic and public health crises. Are the resources mobilized by national states during the pandemic crisis a simple case of emergency Keynesianism, or do they represent a fundamental shift in the traditional role of government, which is to maximize society’s welfare? Moreover, are the policies we have seen implemented so far at all levels of government sufficient to provide the basis for a progressive economic agenda in the post-pandemic era? 
Robert Pollin: Neoliberalism is a variant of capitalism in which economic policies are weighted heavily in favor of supporting the privileges of big corporations, Wall Street and the rich. Neoliberalism became dominant globally around 1980, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. The top priorities under neoliberalism, as practiced throughout the world, have included: cutting both taxes on the rich along with public spending on the non-rich; weakening protections for both working people and the environment and any semblance of a commitment to full and decent employment; and enabling financial speculation to run rampant while bailing out the speculators when the markets proceed, inevitably, into crises. 
Neoliberalism represented a counterrevolution against social democratic/New Deal/developmental state variants capitalism, which emerged primarily as a result of successful political struggles by progressive political parties, labor unions and allied social movements, out of the 1930s Depression and continuing through the early 1970s. Of course, social democratic/New Deal/developmental state capitalism was still capitalism. Disparities of income, wealth and opportunity remained intolerably high, along with the malignancies of racism, sexism and imperialism. Nevertheless, the broadly social democratic models produced dramatically more egalitarian versions of capitalism than the neoliberal regime that supplanted these models. The neoliberal model, in turn, has been highly successful in achieving its most basic aim, which is to shower ever-greater advantages on the already over-privileged. For example, under neoliberalism in the United States between 1978 and 2019, the average pay for big corporate CEOs has risen tenfold relative to the average non-supervisory worker.
The neoliberal model has been highly successful in achieving its most basic aim, which is to shower ever-greater advantages on the already over-privileged.
With the onset of the COVID pandemic in March 2020, government policies in the high-income countries did pursue measures to prevent a total, 1930s-level economic collapse. Depending on the country, these measures included direct cash support for lower- and middle-income people, significant increases in unemployment insurance and large payroll subsidy programs to prevent layoffs. But by far, the most aggressive policy interventions were the bailouts provided for big corporations and Wall Street.
In the U.S., for example, nearly 50 percent of the entire labor force filed for unemployment benefits between March 2020 and February 2021. However, over this same period, Wall Street stock prices rose by 46 percent, one of the sharpest one-year increases on record. The same pattern prevailed globally. The International Labour Organization reported that, “There were unprecedented global employment losses in 2020 of 114 million jobs relative to 2019.” At the same time, global stock markets rose sharply — by 45 percent throughout Europe, 56 percent in China, 58 percent in the U.K., and 80 percent in Japan, and with Standard & Poor’s Global 1200 index rising by 67 percent.
So while there was a desperately needed expansion of social welfare programs helping people to survive under COVID, these measures were enacted within the framework of still larger efforts to prop up the still prevailing neoliberal order.
Of course, the severity of the climate crisis has continued to deepen during the pandemic. In February, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, “2021 is a make-or-break year to confront the global climate emergency…. Governments are nowhere close to the level of ambition needed to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The major emitters must step up with much more ambitious emissions reductions targets for 2030 … well before the November UN Climate Conference in Glasgow.” 
We are now into October in the “make or break year” and yet, little has been accomplished since Guterres spoke in February. It is true that, throughout the high-income countries, social movements and climate activists are fighting to advance programs that combine climate stabilization and an egalitarian social agenda, under the rubric of a global Green New Deal. The extent to which they succeed will determine whether we will have established a basis for a progressive economic agenda and effective climate policies in the post-pandemic era. We do not yet know how successful these efforts will be. As we discussed at some length recently, the social infrastructure and climate proposal being debated right now in the U.S. Congress is itself not ambitious enough to be truly transformative. But if it is enacted, it will still represent a significant break from neoliberal dominance that has prevailed since Thatcher and Reagan.
When COVID-19 struck, it became crystal clear that contemporary capitalism is entirely dependent on massive state intervention.
Costas, the COVID pandemic has exposed numerous structural flaws of capitalism, and the neoliberal order may be indeed on the verge of collapse. Still, can we speak of a “crisis of capitalism” given that we do not see large-scale opposition to the current system? 
Costas Lapavitsas: There is no question that the pandemic shock represents a tremendous crisis of global capitalism, but I would urge strong caution regarding the collapse of neoliberalism. The period since the Great Crisis of 2007-2009 looks more like an interregnum (a term offered in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci) when the old is refusing to die and the new cannot be born. And like all such periods, it is prone to monsters, including fascism.
The Great Crisis of 2007-2009 was overcome by the state deploying its massive strength to defend financialized capitalism and globalization. But what followed was a decade of low growth, poor investment, weak productivity growth, sustained inequality and partially revived profits. Economic performance was poor in core countries, providing further evidence of the failure of neoliberalism. The Golden Era of financialization is well and truly over, despite the sustained rise of stock markets in the previous decade. Yet, economic performance was also mediocre in China, reflecting an underlying weakness of productive accumulation across the world.
When COVID-19 struck, it became crystal clear that contemporary capitalism is entirely dependent on massive state intervention. Core Western states were able to intervene on an unprecedented scale mostly because of monopoly command by central banks over fiat money. Unlike 2007-2009, however, the state also deployed fiat money to relax austerity, thus engaging in the unspoken nationalization of the wage bill and the income statements of thousands of enterprises.
It is a misunderstanding that neoliberalism necessarily means marginalizing the state and imposing austerity. Rather, it is about using the state selectively to defend the interests of a small elite, an oligarchy, associated with big business and the financial sector. Fundamentally, it stands for shifting the balance of power in favor of capital by removing controls on its activities. When the pandemic shock threatened the foundations of class rule, austerity and forbearing from direct economic intervention were abandoned in the blink of an eye. The neoliberal ideologists rapidly adapted to the new reality, though it is always possible that austerity will return. What has not taken place is an institutional shift in favor of workers’ interests that would limit the freedom of capital. It is primarily in this sense that the old is refusing to die.
The pandemic also made it clear that there is great variety in the relationship between powerful states and domestic capitalist accumulation. Core Western states, in the grip of neoliberal ideology, derive their strength primarily from command over fiat money. In contrast, the Chinese state remains directly involved in both productive accumulation and finance as well as having possession over vast resources. Their respective responses to the pandemic differed greatly.
Inevitably there has been a tremendous escalation in the contest for global hegemony, including in the military field. For the first time since 1914, moreover, the hegemonic contest is also immediately economic. The Soviet Union was exclusively a political and military contestant to the U.S. — the Lada could never compete with Chrysler. But China can outcompete the U.S. economically, making the struggle considerably deeper and removing any obvious point of equilibrium. The U.S. ruling bloc realizes that is has made a strategic miscalculation, and this accounts for its current unrelenting aggressiveness. Conditions in the international arena are exceedingly dangerous.
Still, the global hegemonic struggle lacks entirely in ideological content. Western neoliberal democracies are exhausted, failed and bereft of new ideas. The attempts of the U.S. ruling bloc to present its aggressiveness as a defense of democracy are hollow and ludicrous. On the other hand, Chinese (and Russian) authoritarianism has considerable domestic support but no capacity to offer a globally appealing social and political perspective.
The characteristic feature of the interregnum since 2007-2009 is an ideological impasse. There is tremendous discontent with capitalism, particularly as the degradation of the environment and the warming of the planet have raised great concern among the young. But that concern has not translated into a broad-based mobilization behind fresh socialist ideas and politics. This is the challenge ahead, particularly as the far right is already taking advantage. 
There’s reason to be hopeful that what must be done can be done.
Postcapitalism (defined broadly as a social system in which the power of markets is restricted, productive activity is premised on automation, work is delinked from wages, and the state provides universal basic services and a basic income) is possible because of changes in information technology, according to some pundits. Should the left spend political capital by envisioning a postcapitalist future?
Lapavitsas: During the pandemic crisis, the domestic actions of nation states displaced the precepts and prescriptions of neoliberal capitalism, foisted invasive measures on social and personal life centering on public health and hygiene, and imposed severe restrictions on civil liberties and economic activity. The state inflamed political tensions, heightened social polarization and restricted freedoms. 
Workers paid the greatest price through income loss, rising unemployment and worsening public provision. But the middle strata were also left out in the cold, thus delivering a major blow to the class alliances that supported the neoliberal project. Giant oligopolies in new technology emerged as the main beneficiaries — Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the rest. Their actions are steadily eclipsing the figure of the citizen as personal identities are increasingly organized around market links to the oligopolies. At the same time, the extreme right was strengthened, a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated through the agency of powerful oligarchies.
There has been no shortage of grassroots reactions to these developments. Heavy-handed state actions, official cultivation of fear, suspension of rights and liberties, the danger of permanent repression, and the crushing of workers and the middle strata during the lockdowns spurred various responses often in a libertarian direction.
Bear in mind that maintaining capitalist accumulation in the years to come will be exceedingly difficult across the world. The underlying weakness of accumulation is far from easy to confront. It is also clear that state intervention in the pandemic has created major difficulties with the disruption of supply chains, the rise of inflation eating into workers’ incomes and the tremendous escalation of public debt. And all that is without even mentioning the broader issues of environment and climate.
It is hardly possible that economic growth could be sustained without large-scale state intervention on the supply side through public investment that also involves profound distributional changes in income that benefit workers. It seems even less likely that this would happen without a major shift in property rights, redistributing wealth and productive resources in favor of workers and the poor.
Technology alone is never the answer for complex social problems. Indeed, one aspect of the technological revolution of the last four decades is its inability even to improve the economic conditions of accumulation since its effect on the average productivity of labor is modest. I see no reason at this stage to expect that artificial intelligence would prove dramatically different. Perhaps it will, but there are no guarantees.
Western neoliberal democracies are ideologically exhausted, and their capitalist economies are beset with problems. In this context, it is imperative for socialists and progressives to think of a postcapitalist future and ascertain its broad parameters. We need to think about the use of digital technologies, the greening of production and the protection of the environment. But all that should take place in social conditions that favor working people and not capitalists, with a new sociality, collective action and individual fulfilment through communal association. The rejuvenation of the socialist promise is the paramount need of the times.
Bob, during the neoliberal era, mainstream economics shaded easily into ideology. Indeed, it is rather easy to show that mainstream economic policy is full of misrepresentation of reality. The question is: How does an alleged science become ideology? And how likely it is that the coronavirus pandemic, in conjunction with the flaws of neoliberalism and the urgency of the climate crisis, will lead to an intellectual paradigm shift in “dismal science”?
Pollin: Let’s recognize that all varieties of economists are heavily influenced by ideology, or what the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter more judiciously termed their “pre-analytic vision.” Leftist economists, myself included, are as guilty as anyone else. Our ideology influences the questions that we decide are most important to ask. Ideology also provides us with some initial guesses as to what the answers to these questions are likely to be. Still, if we are also attempting to be the least bit scientific, or even minimally honest, as economic researchers, we will put our hunches and our preferred answers to the test of evidence and be open to challenges.
I think it is fair to say that, not all, but a high percentage of mainstream economists have not been committed to these minimally objective scientific standards. They rather have been so fully immersed in their ideological biases that they are unable to even think about how they might ask questions differently. Their biases have been reinforced by the fact that these prejudices provide succor to policy regimes that, as noted above, shower benefits on the already overprivileged.
Joan Robinson, the renowned Cambridge University economist of the Great Depression and post-World War II era, beautifully captured this allure of orthodox economics as follows: “One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was … a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.” 
At the same time, there has been no shortage of progressive economists over the neoliberal era who have stood up to mainstream orthodoxy, as represented, for example, by the 24 people you interviewed in the new book, Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists. In my view, how much influence economists such as these will have will depend primarily on how successful are the progressive movements in advancing the Green New Deal and related programs in the coming months and years. 
There are hopeful signs. Just late last month, the Federal Reserve released a paper by Jeremy Rudd, a senior member of its own staff, which begins with the observation that “mainstream economics is replete with ideas that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.”
Rudd also notes on page one that he is leaving aside in this paper “the deeper concern that the primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order.” There may well be more Jeremy Rudds out there, poised to spring from the shadows of the professional mainstream. This would be a most positive development. But I would also say that it’s about time. 
Noam, it’s been said by far too many that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Given that capitalism is actually destroying the Earth, how, firstly, would you respond to the above statement, and, secondly, how do you envision economy and society after capitalism? 
Chomsky: I’d prefer to rephrase the question to refer to state capitalism. Those whom Adam Smith called “the masters of mankind,” the dominant business classes, would never tolerate capitalism, which would expose them to the ravages of the market. That’s for the victims. For the masters, a powerful state is required — insofar as they can control it and reduce the “underlying population” (Thorstein Veblen’s ironic term) to subordination and passivity.
It does not seem to me too difficult to imagine at least a serious mitigation of the destructive and repressive elements of this system, and its eventual transformation to a far more fair and just society. In fact, we must not only imagine but proceed to implement such programs, or we’ll all be finished — the masters too. 
It’s even quite realistic to imagine — and implement — the overthrow of the basic state capitalist principle: renting oneself to a master (in a more anodyne formulation, having a job). After all, for millennia it’s been recognized — in principle at least — that being subjected to the will of a master is an intolerable attack on human dignity and rights. The concept is not far back in our own history. In late 19th-century America, radical farmers and industrial workers were seeking to create a “cooperative commonwealth” in which they would be free of domination by illegitimate bosses robbing their labor and of northeast bankers and market managers. These powerful movements were so effectively crushed by state-corporate force that today even the highly popular ideas sound exotic. But they are not far below the surface and are even being revived in many important ways.
In short, there’s reason to be hopeful that what must be done can be done.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

As an Austrian, after studying European culture I have to slightly disagree. Yes Kurz has been accused of embezzlement and manipulating the press, but if you really want to understand what’s going on, you have to dig deeper. To argue that politicians like Kurz are dangerous for democracy is looking at the world upside down. Merkel was elected as a liberal politician, yet ran German politics ever more left-leaning, pandering more and more to the socialists for their desperately needed votes. Likewise Kurz, arguably one of the most intelligent politicians worldwide, had little choice but to switch from liberal to hardliner in order to gain enough votes simply to stay in power, because many Austrians had become disillusioned and enraged by Merkel‘s EU-policies on asylum seekers.

So what about the corruption allegations? Kurz grew up in a country that according to „Access Info Europe“ currently has the ‚weakest transparency regime in the world‘ worse than Russia or China (where many are now ending up in jail for corruption). Germany doesn’t score much better. Politicians in Austria from both sides, have voted consistently against any internationally acceptable Freedom of Information law, and it currently does not even meet the EU human rights convention. Fact is corruption is the norm in Austria, it’s pervasive, it’s everywhere, it’s the culture and seems to benefit many people, and no political party will be able to change that. Replace one politician with another, nothing much will change. Get rid of highly intelligent Kurz for trying to influence the media? You would have to get rid of most politicians in the world. How exactly the billions of euros of taxpayers money that’s spent every year in Austria by the union dominated ÖBB or for government subsidized housing is distributed among the cronies, is something the general public will never find out about, not with Austria’s Freedom of Information Act being consistently blocked by both left and right-wing politicians.

And it all starts with the brainwashing. It’s been argued that for decades the Media in Austria has been controlled by the very dominant and influential government-owned ORF, which in turn has been controlled, it’s said, by the socialist Left, that had a majority government for decades, until people got fed up with the scandals and mismanagement (with healthcare and pensions ending up nothing like what was promised). The ORF has been bombarding the public since the 70s with feel-good prime-time shows about Austria, which may explain why most Austrians believe, when it comes to corruption Austria is no exception, it’s the same in every country, it’s just normal. There is almost no investigative journalism in Austria (or Europe for that matter) and the few critical or negative reports are usually only aired late at night, not around 7.30pm as in America or Australia. Kurz is the kind of rare politician that every country needs but rarely finds. Austria cannot afford to lose him. America and the UK attacking Irak, because of alleged weapons of mass destruction,….. now that’s what I call a scandal. Did any politician end up in jail for that?

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (pictured above) was born on this day (October 13) in 1925 and today would have been her 96th birthday. Unfortunately, she died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87. To honor Baroness Thatcher on her 96th birthday here is my annual tribute to the “Iron Lady” in recognition of her significant contributions during her political career including serving as the prime minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990. Below are some videos, quotations, and related articles to celebrate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s birthday and her rich legacy defending liberty and freedom and fighting socialism. 

1. The video above features Margaret Thatcher’s address to the Conservative Party conference in 1983 when she said:
Let us never forget this fundamental truth. The state has no source of money other than the money people earn themselves. If the state wishes to spend more, it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. There is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers’ money.
It is a very fundamental truth that is frequently forgotten. Any time you see or hear the terms “public funding,” “public funds,”  “government funding,” or “government funds” be sure to substitute “taxpayer funding” and “taxpayer funds.”
 2. Here are the “Top Five Reasons Margaret Thatcher is Still an Inspiration to Women Today,” via the Independent Women’s Forum on Margaret Thatcher’s birthday in 2017 summarized here:

She didn’t use her sex to influence her career.
She was principled.
She challenged the status quo.
She had to work for her success.
She was a modern feminist.

===========================================

 3. The video above is Margaret Thatcher’s last House of Commons Speech on November 22, 1990, which is known as “Thatcher’s Last Stand Against Socialism.” Here’s the full transcript, and here’s a quote:
I think that the hon. Gentleman knows that I have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of east Europe, who have experienced them, have for theirs. I think that I must have hit the right nail on the head when I pointed out that the logic of those policies is that they would rather the poor were poorer. Once they start to talk about the gap, they would rather that the gap were that—[indicating[—down here, not this—[indicating[—but—[indicating.] So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. One does not create wealth and opportunity that way. One does not create a property-owning democracy that way. 
4. Here are 10 great Margaret Thatcher quotes, which are just as relevant and timely for America today, if not more so than they were for the UK more than a quarter-century ago. Listen up Karla Marx (AOC)! Thanks to Larry Reed for some of these quotes.
1. The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.2. Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas?3. I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbor. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.4. No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.5. The philosophical reason for which we are against nationalization and for private enterprise is because we believe that economic progress comes from the inventiveness, ability, determination and the pioneering spirit of extraordinary men and women. If they cannot exercise that spirit here, they will go away to another free enterprise country which will then make more economic progress than we do. We ought, in fact, to be encouraging small firms and small companies, because the extent to which innovation comes through these companies is tremendous.6. Our challenge is to create the kind of economic background which enables private initiative and private enterprise to flourish for the benefit of the consumer, employee, the pensioner, and society as a whole…I believe we should judge people on merit and not on background. I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax. That we should back the workers and not the shirkers: that it is not only permissible but praiseworthy to want to benefit your own family by your own efforts.7. I place a profound belief—indeed a fervent faith—in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence. On these is founded the whole case for the free society, for the assertion that human progress is best achieved by offering the freest possible scope for the development of individual talents, qualified only by a respect for the qualities and the freedom of others…For many years there has been a subtle erosion of the essential virtues of the free society. Self-reliance has been sneered at as if it were an absurd suburban pretention. Thrift has been denigrated as if it were greed. The desire of parents to choose and to struggle for what they themselves regarded as the best possible education for their children has been scorned.8. What are the lessons then that we’ve learned from the last thirty years? First, that the pursuit of equality itself is a mirage. What’s more desirable and more practicable than the pursuit of equality is the pursuit of equality of opportunity. And opportunity means nothing unless it includes the right to be unequal and the freedom to be different. One of the reasons that we value individuals is not because they’re all the same, but because they’re all different. I believe you have a saying in the Middle West: ‘Don’t cut down the tall poppies. Let them rather grow tall.’ I would say, let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so. Because we must build a society in which each citizen can develop his full potential, both for his own benefit and for the community as a whole, a society in which originality, skill, energy and thrift are rewarded, in which we encourage rather than restrict the variety and richness of human nature.9. Some socialists seem to believe that people should be numbers in a State computer. We believe they should be individuals. We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else, however much the socialists may pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.10. There is no such thing as ‘safe’ socialism. If it’s safe, it’s not socialism. And if it’s socialism, it’s not safe. The signposts of socialism point downhill to less freedom, less prosperity, downhill to more muddle, more failure. If we follow them to their destination, they will lead this nation into bankruptcy.
Happy 96th Birthday Margaret Thatcher! 
The post Happy 96th Birthday Margaret Thatcher appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

At a time when belief in science appears to be waning, conspiracy theories seem to be on the rise, and many Americans cannot agree on basic facts, Steven Pinker argues for a return to rational thought and public discourse in his latest book, “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.” Pinker, Harvard’s Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, and author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” and “Enlightenment Now,” thinks “we will always need to push back against our own irrationality,” and that education, democracy, science, and journalism, along with an awareness of our own biases, can help us embrace a more rational approach to everyday issues. The interview was edited for clarity and length.
Q&A
GAZETTE: Can you define rationality in a sentence?
PINKER: I define it as the use of knowledge to attain a goal, where “knowledge,” according to the standard philosopher’s definition, is “justified true belief.”
GAZETTE: We see examples of seemingly irrational beliefs and behaviors every day, but you argue that people are fully capable of being rational. How do you explain that disconnect?
PINKER: First, rationality is always in pursuit of a goal. Sometimes that goal is rational for each of us as individuals but irrational for us as a society — a tragedy of the rationality commons, as when it makes sense for every shepherd to graze his sheep on the town commons, but when everyone does it, the commons gets denuded and they’re all worse off. In this case, if everyone is ingenious in gaining prestige within their political sect by glorifying its sacred beliefs and demonizing rival sects, that may work to everyone’s individual advantage, but not to the advantage of the whole society in its interest in the truth and the best policies.
Another part of the answer is that we are born with primitive intuitions that served us well in traditional societies but have become obsolete in a scientifically sophisticated one. For example, we have the intuition that living things harbor an essence, an inner stuff that makes them function and gives them their powers, and that disease comes from external contaminants that pollute it. That leads us to quack remedies like bloodletting, purging, cupping, and homeopathy, and opposition to genetically modified foods. Likewise, the intuition of dualism, that people have minds as well as bodies, leads naturally to a belief in minds without bodies, so we have ghosts and ESP and communicating with the dead. The intuition of design in our plans and artifacts leads to creationism and the superstition that “everything happens for a reason.”
Now most of us unlearn these intuitions when we buy into the consensus of the scientific establishment — it’s not as if we understand the physiology or neuroscience or cosmology ourselves. But many people don’t trust the scientific establishment, so they fall back on those intuitions.
Finally, the conviction that all our beliefs should be grounded in evidence is psychologically unnatural. I quote Bertrand Russell, “It’s undesirable to believe a proposition when there’s no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” But that’s not a truism: it’s a radical manifesto. Most of us insist on reality when it comes to our immediate surroundings and our everyday lives. We have no choice: It’s the only way to get the kids clothed and fed, to keep gas in the car and food in the fridge. But we may not care about literal factuality when it comes to distant and cosmic questions like: How did life arise? What happens in remote halls of power? What’s the ultimate cause of disease? Until there was modern science and record-keeping and journalism, we had no way of finding out the answers anyway. Mythology was the best we could do, and the criteria were uplift and solidarity and entertainment, not literal truth.

“It’s too easy to blame social media for certain developments, like the rise of know-nothing populism, that might be more attributable to cable news and AM talk radio,” said Steven Pinker.
Photo by Rebecca Goldstein 

GAZETTE: Can you apply that directly to the opposition to vaccines and masks? Doctors and scientists would say that those beliefs are pretty irrational, but millions of people share them, despite scientific studies that prove they save lives.
PINKER: Opposition to vaccination goes back to the origin of vaccination itself, because it’s intuitively unnatural, indeed repugnant, to inject a disease organism into your body. The people who do resist that intuition are those who trust the scientific establishment: “Whatever the people in white coats say is good enough for me.” But people who are alienated from the political and scientific mainstream have no reason to doubt their intuitions.
Another contributor is the Myside bias, probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe. It’s somewhat arbitrary which positions get attached to which coalitions, but with Trumpian populism, opposition to vaccines became a rallying point of the political right. It wasn’t always this way. It used to be the tree-hugging Mr. and Ms. Naturals who were suspicious of vaccines — a romantic opposition to science and tech made vaccine resistance a leftish cause. But now it’s more attached to the right. In either case, people are more adamant about protecting the sacred beliefs of their political tribe than looking at the best evidence.
GAZETTE: Do you think that people are more or less prone to rational or rational or irrational beliefs and actions today than in the past?
PINKER: I’m always suspicious of the leap from “Things are bad today” to “Things were better yesterday.” That’s been a theme of my books “The Better Angels of our Nature” and “Enlightenment Now,” where I explain how people mistakenly think, for example, that war and poverty have increased, when the data show otherwise. As Franklin Pierce Adams said, “The best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory.” In the case of irrationality, conspiracy theorizing is probably as old as language. In past centuries, for example, we had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Illuminati. One longitudinal study of letters to the editor found no change in the prevalence of conspiratorial ideas in more than a century.
Likewise with belief in the paranormal: Many religions are based on miracles and other paranormal phenomena, and the scriptures reporting them were the original fake news. Before we had social media, we had supermarket tabloids, with sightings of Elvis and babies born talking, and we had urban legends, like the hippie babysitter and alligators in the sewers. Whether there’s been an uptick in recent years with the rise of social media is harder to tell.
There certainly has been an increase in rationality inequality. At the top end, we’ve never been more rational, with developments like effective altruism, evidence-based medicine, data-driven policing, Moneyball in sports. But at the bottom end, there has been a proliferation of nonsense, easily transmitted through social media.
GAZETTE: I am curious about social media, which have been the source of misinformation, as have certain news outlets. How can we use technology to instead help us think or act more rationally?
PINKER: We don’t yet know the answer because social media are so new. It’s too easy to blame social media for certain developments, like the rise of know-nothing populism, that might be more attributable to cable news and AM talk radio. And some features of social media like fake news don’t seem to be major factors in our politics: The studies suggest that it titillates partisans rather than persuading the undecided.
Some developments, to be sure, are almost certainly attributable to social media. Hyperpolarization in politics may be one. Another may be the intimidation of debate and the rise of cancel culture in academia, thanks to the ease of instant demonization and of amassing a shaming mob, as opposed to the slower and more deliberative mechanisms that push back against our irrationality, such as peer review, fact checking, editing, and a reputation for accuracy rather than shareable snark. The friction and slowness in proliferating ideas in the past meant that there were filters and ways of vetting claims for their accuracy rather than proliferating them instantaneously.
GAZETTE: So how can we balance the emotional with the rational in our lives?
PINKER: Emotional reactions like love, rewarding relationships, and an appreciation of beauty are not in opposition to rationality, because rationality is always in pursuit of a goal, and those are clearly worthy goals. When we speak of a tension between rationality and emotion, often what we are referring to is a contrast between immediate and longer-term well-being, like surrendering to impulse or doing what feels good now but knowing it will make you worse off in the long term. There are just goals in different time frames, what economists call discounting the future. Another real tension comes from conflicts between the goals of different people: What’s good for me may not be good for the people I work and deal and live with. There too, we ought to apply our rational faculties to reconcile conflicts among people. That’s what we mean by ethics and politics.
GAZETTE: You dedicated the book to your mother. Why?
PINKER: A lot of academics use “my mother” as a condescending term for “unsophisticated reader” when aiming to attract a broad audience. They’ll say, “Make it simple enough that your mother can understand it.” In my case, my 87-year-old mother, Roslyn Pinker, is not an unsophisticated reader; she’s rational and literate and intellectually sophisticated; she’s just not an academic. I showed her a draft and got her feedback. Making sure she could follow my arguments and understand the explanations was a test of whether my writing was clear and coherent.
There’s also a personal circumstance. When the pandemic began and she was confined to her home, as we all were, it intensified our long-distance interactions, and I think we grew closer while I was working on the book.

Don’t get your health advice from TikTok. That is the somewhat obvious conclusion of a recent study looking at a new social media fad called “dry scooping”. The phenomenon is also not an isolated case, but typical of several troubling trends – the overall poor regulation of supplements, a relatively low level of scientific literacy among the public, exploitation by clueless “wellness gurus”, and the rise of social media as a significant source of factual information.

The study looked at TikTok for videos with the hashtag “#preworkout” and analyzed the results. The author was interested in videos about taking creatine powder prior to workouts. For background, creatine is an amino acid found mostly in muscle tissue and the brain. It has become popular as a supplement for athletes and body-builders, because it can enhance the production of ATP (the energy carrying molecule in cells) and therefore increasing exercise endurance and muscle building. There actually is a reasonable body of evidence that regular supplementation with creatine can provide these benefits (although modest in magnitude), and is largely safe when used correctly.

That last bit (when used properly) is the focus of the recent study. The author found 100 videos on TikTok about using creatine supplements as a pre-workout regimen, with a cumulative number of likes over 259 million. Only 8% of the videos depicted creatine supplements being used correctly (according to the manufacturers’ recommendations). The study did not address the fact that even when used as directed, the products themselves may not follow the evidence.

The idea of using creatine supplements as a pre-workout itself is dubious. The idea is to load up on creatine right before an intense workout or athletic event. Studies with creatine, however, show benefit from regular daily low dose supplementation, allowing time for creatine levels to build up in the muscles. Taking a large dose right before a workout is likely of no specific benefit. There may also be no benefit for moderate exercise, as the benefits are likely largely dependent on pushing exercise performance to one’s limits (by extending those limits slightly).

Therefore, the very idea of a preworkout creatine supplement is scientifically dubious. Therefore, users may not see a benefit from this specific practice, although they may perceive a placebo effect. Creatine powders, however, contain more than creatine. They also contain vitamins, which are likely worthless in most cases, if overall diet is adequate. But most importantly, they typically contain a very large dose of caffeine, from 100-400mg per scoop (the equivalent of 1-3 cups of coffee). Those taking more than the recommended dose, or larger athletes dosing by body mass may get the equivalent caffeine of 5 or more cups of coffee in their supplement. That is a large enough dose that there can be safety issues in terms of blood pressure and heart health, especially in the context of pushing oneself to the limits of physical performance.

The questionable benefits and safety of using creatine supplement formulations as a large pre workout dose (rather than a small daily dose) are exacerbated by the fact that many people are additionally using it not in accordance to product recommendations. The most common incorrect method for taking the supplement was “dry scooping”, which is a recent social media fad. The powders are meant to be dissolved in water and then taken as a liquid. This further aids in hydration and kidney function. Dry scooping is the practice of just eating the powder straight, perhaps with a few sips of water to help get it down. This can be very dangerous. Further, powders meant to be dissolved in water are often finely ground, which means they are an inhalation risk.

The videos also depicted individuals taking multiple doses or diluting the powder in either energy drinks, coffee, or alcohol. Taking creatine powder, with its high dose of caffeine, with an energy drink, which also contains a high dose of caffeine, significantly increases the risks.

The popularity of using creatine supplement incorrectly and unsafely is partly due to the high levels of scientific illiteracy in the public, specifically regarding health science. The public has been largely influenced by marketing campaigns to make them responsive to the supplement industry and snake oil in general. Products are sold as “natural” without any specific meaning, and used as a health halo to imply safety and efficacy often in the absence of scientific evidence or even a plausible rationale.

Another popular fallacy is that if some is good, more must be better. This is essentially the entire rationale behind most supplementation. The reality is that biological systems mostly follow the principle of complex dynamic homeostasis, where there is an optimal range and balance of nutrients, electrolytes, etc., and simply taking more of something is unlikely to improve the functioning of the system. Taking a small daily dose of creatine may help elite athletes push the limits of their performance, but likely has no benefit for everyday exercise or moderate activity. There is also no reason to think that loading, taking high doses, or dosing just prior to a workout should be of any benefit.

The other major factor in this harmful trend is the shifting of information and advice from edited, professional, trusted sources to “some guy on the internet”. This is a deeper problem beyond the scope of this article. But it means that doctors and other professionals need to be paying attention to the broader culture, not just their professional journals, to see what people are hearing and doing, and get involved in the conversation.

Last semester, I developed a new class at the University of Michigan called Regulating Contagion: Pandemics and Disease in U.S. Legal History (syllabus here). Drawing partly on a seminar I co-taught back in 2015, and partly on work as special counsel to Governor Whitmer on her COVID-19 response, the class advanced three big ideas.
First: COVID-19 is not an anomaly. Contagion has shaped American history and law from the moment of first contact, when smallpox and other novel diseases ravaged Native American tribes and cleared the way for their dispossession. The relative vulnerabilities of American and British troops to malaria and smallpox were strategically crucial in the Revolutionary War; yellow fever paved the way both for the Louisiana Purchase and aggressive exercises of maritime quarantine; and the threat of cholera led to the creation of the country’s first modern public health agency in New York City. Plague, variola minor, typhoid, flu (both the Spanish flu and the 1976 swine flu), malaria, AIDS, and SARS all left indelible marks in American law. And all of the debates we’re having over COVID-19—about the tension between individual liberty and collective responsibility, the allocation of authority between state and federal governments, and the harms that disease disproportionately visits on marginalized groups—have historical antecedents.
Second: A study of contagious disease in the United States challenges the pervasive narrative that the nineteenth-century state was weak and that Americans have always been—and will always be—suspicious of state authority. Confronted with extraordinary threats to life, Americans time and again moved aggressively to restrict travel, quarantine vessels, compel vaccinations, isolate the sick, tear down infected buildings, and curtail social interactions. We tend to overlook those measures, both because historical memory is short and because public health law first took shape in states and municipalities, which receive much less attention from legal scholars than the federal government. But we are the heirs of an interventionist state, not a recessive one.
Third: Contagious disease offers an unusually good vantage point from which to study American legal development and in particular the evolution of public health law. From an initial focus on coercive measures designed to prevent person-to-person spread, the nineteenth century witnessed a shift toward sanitary interventions that aimed to create better conditions for health. Contrary to popular imagination, the courts have generally upheld aggressive public health actions, including those that have severe and sometimes troubling implications for personal liberty. Over time, the federal government has gradually accrued more authority to control disease, especially in connection with travel and with the approval of drugs and vaccines, while leaving most day-to-day responsibility with the states. Etc.
The class was immense fun to teach and I think/hope the students got a lot out of it. Somewhat unexpectedly, I came around to the view that it was a valuable addition to the law school curriculum and would be worth teaching even if we were not in the midst of a global pandemic.
In case anyone else is hoping to teach a similar course, the syllabus is here, with many thanks to the historians, lawyers, and science journalists—including Bill Novak, John Witt, Howard Markel, Elizabeth Fenn, Polly Price, Charles Mann, and David Quammen—whose work helped the students and me to wrap our hands around the topic. Please drop me a line, too, if you’d like class notes or slides or just to talk the class through.
@nicholas_bagleyThe post Regulating Contagion first appeared on The Incidental Economist.

(Photo by Scott Olson / Getty Images.)In 2020, many on the right had modest hopes for President Biden.The hope hinged on the not-implausible theory that he would govern as a centrist because that’s how he campaigned. Biden did markedly better than Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance with Republican-friendly constituencies. Indeed, 7 percent of 2016 Republican Trump voters defected to Biden in 2020. Even Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, caught on hidden camera, admitted that Trump-hostile Republicans delivered Wisconsin to Biden, even as they voted for other Republicans on the ballot.After Biden won, the evenly split Senate and a House with a very small Democratic margin—combined with widespread disgust with Trump’s post-election schemes—raised hopes for Biden’s centrism. Some even argued that disaffected Republicans should essentially join the Democratic Party. “Why shouldn’t anti-Trump Republicans at least consider becoming a kind-of-Old-Republican wing of Joe Biden’s Democratic party?” asked Bill Kristol, a proudly anti-Trump conservative.Fast forward several months. Biden has not governed from the center. If you think he has, great. We can argue about that another time. But going by the polls and focus groups, a lot of right-of-center voters don’t see it that way. Which is why Democrats are facing a midterm bloodbath.Moreover, the rift caused by Trump’s Capitol riot has largely closed in Trump’s favor. Most elected Republicans no longer denounce his election lies and refuse to tell the truth about Biden’s victory. Worse yet, the GOP establishment is turning a blind eye to state-level efforts to pave the way for Trump to circumvent the popular vote should he run in 2024.In response to all this, many anti-Trump Republicans want to double down on the vote-for-Democrats gambit. Liberal Republican Christine Todd Whitman and Miles Taylor (the “Anonymous” former Trump administration critic) argue in the New York Times that “Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war. And the only near-term way to battle pro-Trump extremists is for all of us to team up on key races and overarching political goals with our longtime political opponents: the Democratic Party.”The only problem: It won’t work. Asking right-of-center voters to vote for Democratic senators and representatives who take the opposite positions on abortion, guns, foreign policy, and tax-and-spending issues for “democracy’s sake” is a heavy lift, even if you can convince them that democracy is really at stake. Biden has made that lift far heavier by making it clear that he wants right-of-center voters to compromise on everything, while he compromises on little or nothing.Perhaps there’s another way. The primary system is the GOP’s Achilles’ heel because it makes a mere plurality of the vote a de facto majority of the vote. A recent Pew survey found that 44 percent of Republicans want Trump to run again. As 2016 showed, that’s more than enough to win the nomination in a crowded field. The same dynamic explains why Republican congressional candidates kowtow to Trump—they’re afraid of his primary voters. And right now, there is no countervailing pressure within the party.So why not create pressure outside of it? Specifically, a third party with a simple, Reaganite conservative platform combined with a serious plank to defend the soundness of elections? For simplicity’s sake, think of it as a GOP minus the Trump personality cult.If a Republican candidate met its requirements, a new party of the right could endorse the Republican, the way New York’s Conservative Party does. If not, a non-Trumpy candidate could play the role of spoiler by garnering enough conservative votes in the general election to throw the election to the Democrat.I have always been—and remain—a skeptic of third parties, because they punish the party they have the most in common with. The historian Richard Hofstadter famously quipped, “Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.”But in this scenario, that’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to cause the GOP some pain for its descent into asininity. Giving conservatives turned off by both the Democrats and the Trumpified GOP a way to vote their conscience in the general election would put political pressure on Republican candidates to curtail their Trump sycophancy. It would also serve to remind the GOP that if you abandon conservative principles, conservatives might abandon you.

One of the best possible things we could do in the world would be solving malaria. The disease – which isn’t caused by a virus or a bacterium but by a family of microscopic parasites known as plasmodia, borne by a particular genus of mosquito – has a uniquely devastating toll in some of the world’s poorest countries, and seems to have been with us since ancient times.
That’s why the news last week (7 October) that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has given its approval to a malaria vaccine was so exciting. Or, at least, sort of.
The vaccine’s approval is both news and not news at the same time, as I’ll explain. First, though, let’s just be clear how grim the challenge of malaria is. It’s not that a very high proportion of people who catch the disease die – it’s just that an awful lot of people catch it: 229 million in 2019 (the last year for which we have data). So even with a low-seeming fatality rate – around 0.2 per cent – it translates to a truly tragic number of deaths: 409,000 that same year, of which two-thirds (274,000) were of children under five.
Even leaving aside deaths, the disease and its flu-like symptoms have dreadful effects: an estimated 822,000 babies in 2019 were born with low birthweight due to their mothers being infected with malaria while pregnant, and already fragile economies in sub-Saharan Africa are further held back by its effects on people’s ability to work – to the tune of something like $12bn per year.
There has been significant progress against this devastating disease in recent years. The death rate from malaria is substantially lower than it was at the turn of the century. If the mortality rate had stayed the same as it was in 2000, the WHO calculates that there would have been an additional 7.6 million deaths in the subsequent 19 years.
One reason for the declining death rate is that we’re now much better at malaria prevention. Insecticide-soaked bed nets, which protect people from the mosquito bites, have become far more widely used over time. In 2000, essentially zero homes in sub-Saharan Africa had such a bed net. Now, something like 70 per cent have at least one. Much of this is due to the heroic work of groups like the Against Malaria Foundation, which is among the most effective charities in the world in terms of lives saved per pound spent.
But even with more bed nets, and better malaria-preventing drugs, we still have the hellish figures I quoted above. That’s where the vaccine comes in.
There are a whole host of candidate vaccines for malaria, which are at various stages of testing. Some focus on the parasites in the bloodstream, some on stopping transmission (not from person to person but from person to mosquito, and thus from mosquito to person again), and some are aimed at stopping infection in the first place. The vaccine that has just been approved, known as RTS,S (or by its brand name Mosquirix), is one of the latter kind: it blocks the parasite from invading the liver, where it changes and multiplies before entering the blood.
The sense in which this isn’t really news is that the vaccine has been around since the 1980s, and we’ve had the data from a phase III clinical trial – where its efficacy was tested in large numbers of people – since 2015. The WHO has approved it now because of pilot trials in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, which demonstrated that giving four doses to children was feasible and cost-effective.
The phase III trial showed that the vaccine reduced malaria infection by 46 per cent in children and 27 per cent in infants. This might seem a bit limp, especially when we’re used to hearing about prevention rates from mRNA Covid vaccines in the 90 per cent range – and also compared with other childhood vaccines, like the MMR, which is 97 per cent effective against measles. But a modelling study from last year still estimated that, given some assumptions about the rollout of the jabs, the RTS,S vaccine could prevent up to 4.3 million malaria cases in infants, and 22,000 deaths, each year.
The WHO’s own target is to have a vaccine with over 75 per cent efficacy against malaria by 2030 – and clearly RTS,S falls far short. Don’t despair though: while we’re rolling out RTS,S in sub-Saharan Africa, other vaccines are on the way. This April, Oxford University announced that its malaria vaccine, called R21, showed a far more promising 77 per cent efficacy in children in a phase II trial (a smaller, more preliminary study).
So, despite the fanfare, and although it does represent genuine and exciting progress against malaria, the approved RTS,S vaccine is likely only a stopgap in our ultimate goal of eradicating the disease altogether. It’s now our responsibility to make sure that other, more effective vaccines get over the regulatory hurdles as quickly as possible – and maybe even get emergency approval, like the Covid vaccines. The pandemic has shown us that it’s possible to cut down the usual frustratingly long process of drug approval if the situation is really urgent. If a quarter of a million dead children every year isn’t an emergency, then what exactly is?
[See also: How bad is the winter flu and will it cause a winter lockdown?]
The post We should be optimistic about the malaria vaccine – but not necessarily for the reason you think appeared first on New Statesman.

Goldin neglects the possibility that men and women might simply be different, on average, in ways related to these preferences—which could partly explain why the two sexes, even today, do not make the same tradeoffs between career and family.

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity, the latest work from the celebrated economic historian Claudia Goldin, documents women’s advance in the work force—with a focus on college graduates. It’s a must-read for those who care about gender gaps, though some readers will disagree with Goldin’s recommendations for further change.

Most of the book is spent chronicling the 20th-century progress of college-graduate women. This demographic has evolved greatly as social mores and technology have shifted, and as college attendance itself has become far more common. Goldin divides these women into five capital-G “Groups” and describes in detail how they fared in both family and career life.

Group 1, which graduated college in the first two decades of the 20th century, tended to have either a career or a family, but few managed to have both. The women of Group 2, who graduated from about 1920 through 1945, tended to have jobs (not necessarily careers) that they then left to start families. Group 3, with graduation dates through the mid-1960s, started families soon after college but then got jobs after the kids got old enough. Group 4 got their careers established before starting families, while Group 5, those who graduated in the last two decades of the 20th century, have tried to manage careers and families simultaneously.

Obviously, these are very broad generalizations with countless exceptions, and on some level it’s hard to compare a female college grad from 1910 with one from 1990 at all. But Goldin does a compelling job of running through the historical data, providing the surrounding cultural context, and explaining how technological and legal changes affected women over the years. Readers learn about how many jobs once excluded married women, about how equal-pay statutes and discrimination lawsuits won the day, and about how the Pill and household-labor-saving technologies revolutionized domestic life.

Of course, many readers will be most concerned not about the past, but about the present and future, which Goldin addresses in the book’s earliest and latest chapters. There remain big differences between the work outcomes of men and women, even among college grads. The question is where the differences come from and what, if anything, we should do about them.

As Goldin lays out, the explanations probably aren’t what you think. There is some sexist discrimination from employers, but it doesn’t seem to drive the overall statistical patterns very much. Women do tend to cluster somewhat in lower-paid occupations, but even this explains only about a third of the difference.

The big culprit is kids. Men and women fresh out of school tend to earn pretty similar amounts, but as kids arrive, women are more likely to scale back their hours, switch into more flexible but lower-paid roles, or leave the work force entirely, while men keep working and climbing the ladder.

An important contributor to this pattern—especially among the higher-educated folks who are Goldin’s focus—are “greedy” jobs that pay a lot but make extreme demands on employees’ time: lawyer, surgeon, consultant, etc. In these areas, employers often value one employee working 70 hours a week a lot more than two employees working 35. The former person will always be available to meet with a client, will have attended all the meetings about the big project, and so on and so forth.

Further, in these fields, the competition between kids and work can be especially brutal if, say, making partner or getting tenure happens around the same time that women’s fertility declines. And these jobs heavily penalize those who take extended absences from work.

Thus, many couples will find that they can make more by having one person work a highly demanding job like this while the other opts for flexibility. The member of the couple who ends up in the more flexible but lower-paid position, of course, is more likely to be the woman.

Not all fields force such tradeoffs, however. Veterinarians and pharmacists are important exceptions that Goldin discusses in depth. You don’t go to the pharmacy expecting a specific person to put your pills in the bottle, and while you might like your vet, you accept that you’ll have to work around their schedule and deal with someone else in an off-hours emergency. If a pharmacist or vet works twice as many hours, he or she will earn twice as much money, but not drastically more than twice as much.

These occupations are heavily female, with small male/female gaps in hourly pay, because they allow workers to put their skills to use for a reasonable number of hours without losing a big pay bump that’s reserved to workaholics. And if both members of a couple work in one of these occupations, they can both scale back their work somewhat to spend more time with the kids, rather than one person stepping back while the other surges ahead.

There are numerous ways to look at the current situation. Given that legal barriers and even private discrimination seem mostly behind us, one might simply shrug—especially as it pertains to college graduates, who obviously have relatively comfortable lives, on average, no matter what jobs they choose.

Some employers want employees to work long hours, and they pay enough to attract employees willing to do that; other jobs attract workers through flexibility. Each couple decides for itself which of the available jobs to take and how to divide labor within the household. As preferences change and couples sort out which divisions of labor they find acceptable, companies will naturally be forced to adjust. Goldin documents how, in some fields, companies are already offering more flexible arrangements as dads want to spend more time at home.

Supply, meet demand. Just let the free market do its thing, and if different people make different decisions, so what?

Goldin, though, has a goal of creating “equity” in work arrangements—and she doesn’t mean an equitable division of labor where, depending on the situation, one partner might work more at home while the other puts in longer hours at a paid job. Rather, she envisions men and women doing comparable amounts of both paid and household work. As she notes, this is unlikely to happen at the aggregate level unless it happens at the level of individual couples too, because when couples find it valuable to have one workaholic and one parent more focused on the kids, men and women disproportionately fall into those roles (respectively).

How do we get what Goldin calls “couple equity”? Goldin endorses some of the usual suspects here, writing fondly about the more enlightened countries that “greatly subsidize childcare.” More interestingly, she wants to “change how work is structured” so that it’s more flexible and pharmacist-like for everyone, with employees better able to substitute for each other so no one has to work 24/7—though she’s cagey as to whether this must continue to happen organically and voluntarily (in which case hardly anyone could object) or instead should be spurred by government policy.

Of course, government efforts to promote gender equity are hardly controversial among left-of-center, college-educated Americans. Yet there are some troubling implications of Goldin’s analysis that she does not flesh out.

To insist on “couple equity” is to rule out stay-at-home parenting and to disregard the actual preferences of American women and men. Lots of women want to be stay-at-home moms or to work part-time—and some dads do, too. (For the record, I recently spent more than a year and a half at home full-time with my three kids and working on the side, while my wife continued full-time work.) There is absolutely nothing wrong with a couple that specializes, with each partner taking on different responsibilities so that the household can run in a more efficient way.

Goldin also neglects the possibility that men and women might simply be different, on average, in ways related to these preferences—which could partly explain why the two sexes, even today, do not make the same tradeoffs between career and family. To the contrary, Goldin flatly asserts that “gender norms are at the root of why women take the more flexible and predictable jobs,” and she seems to take it as a given that we should want to eliminate or at least reduce this gap. (Interestingly, she doesn't have this blind spot when it comes to boys lagging in school: "It may have to do with what’s going on in your cells and this difference between this Y and this double X," she mused to Tyler Cowen last week.)

To be absolutely clear, gender roles can change: this book documents how they have changed, in big ways. But perhaps they are not infinitely malleable, given the sex differences in parenting behaviors we see in various species throughout nature and in every human society (yes, even the Nordics). I know we’re all scared to death of being James Damore-d, but it’s odd for an entire book about sex differences in childrearing to avoid questions of biology so studiously.

Goldin’s fondness for child-care subsidies creates underexplored issues as well. Like her insistence on “couple equity,” it shortchanges stay-at-home parents: Child-care subsidies not only neglect such parents, but discourage their very existence. A natural benefit of staying home is that you don’t have to pay someone else to watch your kids, but when the government stands ready to pay for child care, this benefit disappears. Instead of saving money by doing the work yourself, you give up big subsidies and still do the work.

Goldin also notes, in an apparent celebration of the triumph of modern mores, that Americans’ belief that preschool kids “suffer” if their moms work has declined across generations, (according to her analysis of the General Social Survey). Putting aside the sexism of the question being about mothers specifically, the problem is that there is actually a lively, ongoing academic debate over whether day care is bad for kids. I was rather surprised by Goldin’s neglect of this research. In this book, a desire to keep kids out of day care is simply an obstacle to gender equity, not a genuine preference that deserves respect and even has some empirical support.

In Career and Family, Goldin expertly lays out the history of college-grad women’s advances in the work force, and she carefully dissects where the remaining gender gap originates. Her policy recommendations, though, deserve some healthy scrutiny and pushback.

Robert VerBruggen is an IFS research fellow and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.

For a generation, the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors in California handled more than 40 percent of all container cargo headed into the US and epitomized the power of a globalizing economy. Today, the ships—mostly from Asia—still dock, but they must wait in a seemingly endless conga line of as many as 60 vessels, sometimes for as long as three weeks. These are the worst delays in modern history, and the price per container has risen to as much as 10 times its cost before the pandemic. The shipping crisis is now projected to last through 2023.A pandemic-driven shortage of parts and labor has combined with a congested transport system to create an inflationary spike, with shipping rates doubling on some routes. Prices for everything from soybeans to natural gas have soared as supplies take longer to produce and arrive, and this high inflation is wiping out wage gains in the US, the UK, and Germany. The chaos on the ground may not disturb the lifestyles of the tech and financial elites, but it is hurting the middle and working classes, the groups most threatened by surging inflation.The supply chain disaster has also revealed the existence of crippling economic dependence, particularly on China, in high-income countries. Today, whole industries in the West—from medical equipment to chip and car makers to food—rely on China for finished products and key components. When China cannot (or decides not to) supply these parts, whole industries suffer debilitating supply chain shortages. The notion of a rational, self-regulating market system is unraveling and may yet presage the demise of the prevailing neoliberal era.Walking away from productionFor generations, business consultants have persuaded businesses large and small to move their production to China in search of cheaper costs. This has had a devastating effect, particularly in the United States, where between 2004 and 2017, the share of world manufacturing shrank from 15 to 10 percent while reliance on Chinese inputs doubled. The trade deficit with China, according to the Economic Policy Institute, has cost as many as 3.7 million jobs since 2000. The consequences have also been severe in the UK, which suffered 1.5 million job losses in manufacturing between 1997 and 2009, in part due to climate policies that threaten the last vestiges of heavy industry in the country that invented it.In the face of these trends, the general response of the Western elites has been “Why worry?” Reflecting the ideological leanings of the American establishment, Christina D. Romer, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration, dismissed concerns about manufacturing policy as nostalgic “sentiment,” declaring, “American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.”But unlike the local hair salon, the market for washing machines is national and global and these goods have to be transported, often over great distances. A factory that makes parts for washing machines in a city, state, or region draws money to the local community. Moreover, manufacturing has one of the highest multiplier effects of any sector—one manufacturing job in a community is likely to generate numerous other direct, indirect, and induced jobs, both locally and elsewhere.Pandemic lessonsIn the midst of the pandemic, even the world’s richest regions—the European Union, the United Kingdom, North America—found themselves without basic medical equipment like masks, and even the compounds needed to make critical chemical treatments. In the early critical months, “China's decision to block exports of these goods led to widespread shortages,” observes Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There is also the concern that an increasingly assertive China might seek to exploit the world's dependence on it for political purposes.”This disaster, now playing out across the industrial landscape, reflects the fracturing of supply chains over several decades. A generation of politicians, economists, and pundits, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries like Australia, have paid little attention to nurturing the “industrial commons,” which encompass production, research and development, supply chains, embedded process development, and engineering capacity.This pattern affects industries besides medical equipment. This year, auto production was curtailed due to a worldwide shortage of semiconductors tied to a recent drought in Taiwan. America’s push into renewables threatens to further bolster China’s dominance of the solar panel industry and production of the essential metals needed to produce “clean” energy and electric cars. The West’s trade deficit now extends even to high-tech products. When companies move production abroad, they often shift research and development as well. Remarkably, this has also included sources of critical components for military goods, many of which are now produced in China.Reshoring: A possible answerCamille Farhat—a former top executive at General Electric, Baxter, and Medtronic, and now CEO of Michigan-based manufacturer RTI Surgical—told me that many products, including medical supplies, can be produced domestically. Farhat hopes the pandemic will convince other business leaders to stop “destroying the supply ecosystem” that makes production possible. “To stay safe, you have to do contingency planning—you have to restore the network and maintain surplus production capacity. Hopefully, we are learning that lesson.” There are signs that some are heeding Farhat’s advice. Japan, France, the UK, and the European Union all recognize that dependence on China carries enormous political and economic risks. Japan is even offering loans to lure companies back home from China.There are signs of some change in the corporate suite as well, even predating the current crisis. McKinsey and Company surveyed supply chain executives last year and found that nearly all respondents believe their supply chains are too vulnerable. According to March 2020’s Thomas Industrial Survey, COVID-19 supply chain disruptions aggravated an appetite for locally sourced materials and services—up to 70 percent of firms surveyed said they were “likely” or “extremely likely” to re-shore in the coming years. Similarly, a UBS study revealed that as many as 50 or 60 percent of firms now producing in China have moved or are planning to move.This shift includes some major companies, like Black and Decker, who have moved production to a new facility in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of its reshoring strategy. Appliance giant Whirlpool reshored 400 jobs, along with General Electric, Apple, Caterpillar, Goodyear, General Motors, and Polaris. Little Tikes, a major American toy maker, has started shifting production out of China and back to Ohio. When Little Tikes started out more than 40 years ago, everything was made in the United States, but most production moved to China in the 1980s and ‘90s, when the Chinese manufacturing sector began to take off. Now, “the wheel is kind of coming full circle,” Executive vice president and worldwide general manager Thomas Richmond told me.Of course, such moves will be resisted by companies that have grown hopelessly dependent on far-flung supply chains and no longer possess the skills to make their own products. Some analysts suggest that large-scale reshoring to North America will require strong government action. Yet there are reasons for optimism. President Trump's tariffs may not have done much to revive US manufacturing, but the Reshoring Initiative’s Harry Moser told me that the annual number of jobs returning from offshore has increased from 6,000 in 2010 to over 400,000 in 2019. Cumulative jobs brought back represent about five percent of the United States’ total industrial employment. In 2019, for the first time in a decade, the percentage of manufacturing goods imported to the US dropped, notes a recent Kearny study, with much of the shift coming from east Asia.The China challengeThe supply chain crisis has made plain the grave threat posed by China’s rise. In the early stages of China's embrace of capitalism, the country’s industrial push was widely welcomed as a triumph of liberal globalization. China, it was believed, simply wanted to succeed, and would do so in a manner at least somewhat congruent with Western values. Its trajectory was expected to follow that of Japan, Singapore, or South Korea, all of which lack China’s military power, both in population and resources.But under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has nurtured an economy that works in a profoundly different way to those of capitalist countries. In the West, profits and individual wealth accumulation drive economic progress. Although Chinese people may also want to get rich, the primary goal of the CCP is to bolster the Middle Kingdom’s global power and influence. In China, the regime employs its power to restrain and even imprison the country’s entrepreneurs if they defy its authority. Social media is used as a political tool to promote China’s ascendency, even on ostensibly frivolous sites like Tik Tok.China’s agenda has stretched beyond consolidating its hold on existing industries. Now it seeks to dominate such fields as artificial intelligence, bio-medicine, and the dominance of space that will likely shape the future economy. Economist Yi-Zheng Lian argues that stealing technology is now encouraged as China becomes a “nation of patriotic thieves.” The basic rules that underpin capitalist economies simply do not much matter, big time investors now lament.China is also determined to promote its alternative authoritarian model of governance, particularly in developing countries. This drive could accelerate with China’s military expansion, and may yet include the conquest of Taiwan, which is now the world’s leader in semiconductor technology. The feisty island nation is now subject to aerial incursions from the mainland and could be blockaded. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s decision to build a $12 billion new plant in Arizona could be critical to assuring secure supplies for America’s manufacturers.Needed: A policy and political responseRevitalizing our “industrial commons” requires bold new initiatives and measures from our economic past, which saw some very successful efforts to spark industrial growth during World War Two and the Cold War. Indeed, as two Harvard researchers have suggested, “Believing in the power of markets does not preclude the judicious use of appropriate government policies.”While rejecting Trump’s crude unilateral approach, the Biden administration has continued to pursue many of its predecessor’s themes, including proposals to boost the domestic semiconductor and steel industries. The Biden plan would spend $300 billion on R&D to revitalize American industrial competitiveness and invest in alternatives to four-year colleges, trade schools, apprenticeships, and community colleges. A more ambitious part of the plan involves the use of taxes, subsidies, and public-private partnerships to encourage companies to retain the capacity to make critical supplies during a national emergency.Reshoring will require tariffs and bans, but also incentives, including tax policies that encourage industrial investments, loans and loan guarantees, grants, public-private partnerships, and supportive educational and physical infrastructure. Additionally, steps could be taken to promote the development of critical rare metals outside of China.Western countries could also justify shifts away from China on environmental grounds. For businesses and consumers, attempts to move out of China could cost as much as $1 trillion, but would detach firms from the country’s notoriously high carbon supply chains, which emit more greenhouse gasses than the United States and the European Union combined. Indeed, according to one recent study, China is home to 23 of the 25 largest cities in terms of GHG emissions.A post-globalist politics?Addressing our supply chain vulnerabilities is not just good policy but also good politics. Robust efforts to counter China’s mounting challenge in science and technology, such as the US Innovation and Competitiveness Act, passed the Senate by a wide margin. A recent survey by the left-leaning Center for American Progress found that far more Americans prioritize protecting US jobs and reducing illegal immigration than progressive goals like combatting climate change and improving relations with allies.New public opinion poll. Insights into what Americans want US foreign policy objectives to be. Promoting democracy and freedoms comes in dead last. pic.twitter.com/RnD7GdLOYm— Bonnie Glaser / 葛來儀 (@BonnieGlaser) June 3, 2021
Despite the much-ballyhooed consumer benefits of low-cost imports, the vast majority of Americans seem to be willing to pay higher prices that would come from moving production out of China—a fact that has encouraged retailers such as Walmart to seek out more domestic suppliers. The current supply chain crisis can only reinforce these trends. Economic boycotts of Chinese goods and firms—a successful example of which is the US attempt to thwart telecommunications giant Huawei—may be a harbinger of things to come, at least in strategically critical areas.Some may see such an effort as doomed, particularly on Wall Street, a bastion of pro-China sentiment. But the Middle Kingdom may be far more vulnerable than widely thought. China’s financial system is only now feeling the impact of massive but unwise investments in high-rise offices and residential towers, epitomized by the Evergrande’s pending bankruptcy. A rapid decline in the workforce by over 200 million by 2050, a stubbornly low birth rate, and growing class conflict could also pose challenges and provide opportunities for competitors. More critically, Chinese regime controls could derail innovation. Certainly, blocking data and analysis from the rest of the world is not the route to information-era dominance. Handing the industrial and technological future to authoritarian states is a recipe for undermining our own democracy. Of course, free countries will still trade with autocracies, which seem to be ascendant. But the focus needs to be on maintaining primary supply chains with partners who essentially conform to the rule of law and are not seeking to establish a global hegemony. What’s needed is a series of alliances with likeminded countries that generally follow liberal capitalist values and legal norms. This can be seen in the new defense pact between the US, the UK, and Australia, with potential growing ties to Japan, South Korea, and India.In the long run, capitalist order can only be maintained by a common belief in basic principles of fairness and legality. The ships stalled at sea and empty supermarket shelves and relentlessly higher prices represent warning signs of a new and dangerous economic reality. We can either accept dependency as “the new normal” or we can address it directly, abandoning dreams in favor of approaches based on reality and greater self-reliance.

Out on a Limb:

Selected Writing, 1989-2021

by andrew sullivan

simon and schuster, 576 pages, $35

Andrew Sullivan met his hero in the nick of time. Just thirteen months before Michael Oakeshott’s death, Sullivan visited the British political theorist for a long conversation over lunch. Their exchange—which Sullivan describes in a brief essay included in his new collection Out on a Limb—soon turned to faith. Oakeshott firmly believed that flawed people were more interesting, and that true love—though ultimately impossible for anyone, even God—begins with affirmation of the way people are, not what they could be. “After all,” he asked Sullivan, “who would want to be saved?”

That, above all, was what Sullivan learned from Oakeshott: that to be a conservative is to affirm what is. For more than 30 years, and throughout the writing now collected in Out on a Limb, Sullivan has championed an “empirical” conservatism that prizes “facts” over “ideology,” “doubt” over “certainty.” But this is more than the utopia-exhaustion of Cold War-era liberals, or a libertarian insistence on government passivity. This is making a high virtue of “affirmation,” “acceptance,” and “recognition”—words that pop up throughout Out on a Limb, almost no matter the topic—for individuals and for governments alike.

This “conservative sensibility” underlies Sullivan’s influential argument for same-sex marriage (or, as he called it in 1989, “old-style marriage for gays”). First, accept the fact that the definition of marriage as “inherently procreative . . . has long been abandoned in civil society.” Acknowledge instead that marriage is “the highest public recognition of our personal integrity” (emphasis added), a token that society bestows to acknowledge couples who have attained “personal responsibility.” Affirm that gay people are sufficiently bourgeois and responsible to have earned that token. Ergo, for Sullivan, legalizing gay marriage is a conservative move, an acceptance of existing facts.

The most compelling journalism in Out on a Limb exemplifies Sullivan’s own gift for recognizing reality. His vibrant and moving coverage of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s reveals an intense interest in people and their struggles, drawing together a wide range of perspectives among gay men in different social settings and facing every stage of health and death. Later, as Sullivan moved from reportage to political commentary, his role as recognizer-of-what-is made him a reliable mirror of his times, a barometer of the American zeitgeist. He penned brash and at times vicious arguments for invading Iraq (omitted from Out on a Limb) and withdrew his support earlier than most. He adopted blogging early on, helping to set the direction of internet political discourse, then later recoiled from it in recognition of what the internet was doing to his attention span. Early in the 2008 race, he threw his support behind Barack Obama, seeing in the young senator a promise that America could finally move past the political divisions and culture wars of the 1960s (an ill-placed hope, perhaps, but one that many would come to share). And of course, his argument for gay marriage was reproduced point for point in Anthony Kennedy’s Obergefell v. Hodges opinion.

But reflecting the world, however accurately, can risk falling into a dull positivism—severing the “is” from the “ought” and never giving the latter its due. One 2000 essay discusses recent scientific findings about the effects of testosterone—“the he hormone” that researchers have associated with risk-taking, aggression, and increased libido. At the end, Sullivan moves from pop science to philosophy: “After a feminist century, we may be in need of a new understanding of masculinity. . . . What our increasing knowledge of testosterone suggests is a core understanding of what it is to be a man, for better and worse.” But is manhood reducible to the physical and psychological effects of a chemical? What is manhood for? Can men aspire to be anything more than the effects of testosterone? How ought men to conceive of themselves and relate to women? We don’t get the answers, and never could, from scientific studies about a hormone.

That, of course, is the downside of Sullivan’s insistence on “empiricism.” Knowing facts isn’t the same as knowing what to do with them, or how to live a life. Sometimes, one must choose between one thing that is and another thing that is. It’s simply not possible for an individual, much less a political community, to make such choices without reference to something more than facts and data. What are we, as individuals or as communities, for? What do we aspire to? What do we love? All of these inevitably have bearing on politics. We may not be “certain” of all the facts of a given issue, but certainty about what we value can (and does) justifiably lead us to offer ourselves in marriage, assent to religious doctrine, or take political action.

Recognition without love, affirmation without ideals—the Oakeshottian ethos—is insufficient for the needs of life or politics. One can list all the facts one likes about a given topic of public interest, but without making reference to common ideals—to higher loves—the most a fact-finder can ever do with his data is to kick the can down the road, say that the issue at hand is “complicated” and that any question of praxis must be the subject of “prudential decision-making” and “political conversations” to be hashed out later, by someone else. (More than a few essays in Out on a Limb conclude this way.)

Indeed, certainty about values is inescapable, even for Sullivan. He dips into the well of “certainty” himself on the topic of torture—as, of course, one should. Among the collection’s finest moments is a 2005 essay titled “The Abolition of Torture,” answering Charles Krauthammer’s defense of the use of “enhanced interrogation” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. Sullivan argues that torture is such a moral horror that even the unlikely scenarios Krauthammer concocts, in which torture might be both reliable and beneficial to national security, should not preclude its illegality. Sullivan “insist[s] on the humanity of terrorists,” which no horrible act can take away—and is the standard by which we may judge terrorists’ culpability for those acts in the first place. Torture denies that humanity by alienating the victim from his own body; “it is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach.” These are great arguments, bearing implications for any number of issues—from abortion to policing to drug use—that Sullivan’s other essays leave in the hands of “doubt” rather than “certainty.”

And, of course, there are times when Sullivan has to choose between facts, and can (like the rest of us) only do so with reference to what St. Augustine called “ordered loves.” Take the facts about Catholic teaching, and the facts about Sullivan’s own sexual orientation and activity, for instance. His 1994 essay on this conflict attempts a death-by-thousand-papercuts approach to arguing against the Church’s position. The essay reads every Vatican statement on the dignity of homosexual persons as somehow contradictory with Catholic teaching about sex. It repeats now-familiar, and easily answerable, claims that the Bible categorizes homosexuality with eating pork. Perhaps most frustrating of all, it frequently conflates “natural” with “extant” (a big no-no in dealing with any tradition influenced even remotely by Aristotle) to imply that natural law demands affirmation of any act that exists among human beings, by merit of its mere existence. Any one of these claims and quibbles is easily answerable on the level of rational argumentation. That does not matter, however, because nitpicking Ratzinger letters clearly isn’t the real reason Sullivan arrives at the conclusion he does. Prior to any of that, he makes clear how he orders his loves; at issue, he says, is that the Church pits itself against “the core longings that could make one emotionally whole.” Sexual longings thus defined, the deck is stacked.

For the most part, however, the big villains of Sullivan’s essays from the ’90s and 2000s are those who believe higher loves should order the world: “fundamentalists” both in politics (conservative writers arguing for the importance of public virtue amid the Clinton impeachment, for instance) and in religion (John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and anti-Western “Islamo-bullies”) who advance a dangerous “conservatism of faith” that “threatens Western freedom” by refusing to recognize “complexity.” They also appear in left-leaning varieties, as those, from Al Sharpton to Colin Kaepernick, who believe calling out systemic racism and criminalizing “hate” (rather than, as Sullivan recommends in one 1999 essay, cultivating “indifference to it”) can bring about a more equal America. Sullivan on occasion registers his appreciation of these true believers, whom he takes as a sign that Americans are not as apathetic about existential questions as are Brits and Europeans. But these believers, he suggests, need to be balanced out, if not opposed outright. Public life—not just politics, but intellectual and even spiritual life as well—is, for the Sullivan of the ’90s and 2000s, not a matter of striving to achieve any great aspirations, or to hold ourselves and one another to values any higher than mere recognition.

“Fundamentalism” is the enemy, until something worse comes along: nihilism. When Donald Trump and identity politics appear on the scene, Sullivan begins to note the real social benefits of belief and “myth”—and even “fundamentalist” religion, which gave downtrodden people assurance of ultimate justice against the corrupt, and a standard by which to judge their would-be social betters. Sullivan has begun, in other words, to see something (or, rather, someone) that Oakeshott did not. Perhaps these are the people “who would want to be saved.”

And perhaps decades of telling people that the worst thing they can do is believe too strongly in something higher leaves nothing but private appetites and the will to power to define our politics, economics, and culture. If we can’t be saved, then the stakes are all here, in meaningless tooth-and-nail competition with no possibility of transcendent—and therefore, potentially, commonly held—reality and values. In later essays, such as 2018’s “America’s New Religions,” Sullivan admits the insufficiency of “scientism” and “materialism” to ground common life but remains resistant to the possibility of religion ever influencing politics.

From its very first pages, Out on a Limb presents its author as independent from the believing right and the illiberal left. Sullivan takes the opposition he’s received from both sides as a sign of his objectivity, proof that his thought confounds the dichotomy. But right-versus-left may not be the proper dichotomy here. A better one might be between those who feel (or reasonably expect) themselves to be affirmed, accepted, and recognized by the bourgeois American mainstream and its institutions; and those who—even if they manage to win an election or otherwise manage to temporarily capture an institution—do not.

To the extent that the former describes you, you’ll enjoy Out on a Limb. To the extent that the latter does, you will find it frustrating. Either way, Sullivan does what he sets out to do—reflect accurately the America of his time. Even in dissent from the status quo, his is the voice of that line of anti-radical laissez-faire liberalism that—however many self-reinventions the right has undergone, however many times the illiberal left has flared up to challenge the mainstream—seems to keep winning out despite perpetually feeling “out on a limb.” This is Andrew Sullivan’s America; we’re just living in it.

Philip Jeffery is a deputy opinion editor at Newsweek.

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Once the agency authorized a booster from Pfizer-BioNTech last month, “the die was cast,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are by far the most used in the United States, with more than 170 million people in the United States fully immunized with either one or the other vaccine. When Johnson & Johnson’s was authorized in February, public health experts were eager to deploy the “one-and-done” option, particularly in communities with poor access to health care. But the shot’s popularity plummeted when the F.D.A. later paused its use to investigate rare blood clotting cases.

For those who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the timing of a booster authorization — of any brand — is still uncertain. The F.D.A. panel is set to vote Friday only on whether the agency should permit a second dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, a scenario the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own vaccine advisory committee will discuss next week. If both agencies believe an additional dose should be offered, people could seek them out as early as next week.

Whether the F.D.A. might authorize the mix-and-match approach, and how, is unclear. The strategy will be discussed at the agency panel’s meeting on Friday, but no vote will be taken. If regulators eventually believe there is enough scientific support for the approach, they would likely need to update the authorization language of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to allow for their use in people who initially received Johnson & Johnson’s.

In a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health, researchers organized nine groups of roughly 50 people each. Each group received one of the three authorized vaccines, followed by a booster. In three groups, volunteers received the same vaccine for a boost. In the other six, they switched to a different brand.

The root problem in American life and politics is the same problem with the two-party system: namely, that too few people control too much money, while too many people suffer as a result. Those who are clear-eyed about this have every reason to harbor disdain for the Democratic Party, even as they disagree on solutions.

One way of thinking about the insurgent progressive electoral movement is as a project to reduce or eliminate the power of the ultrarich within the Democratic Party’s coalition, thereby remaking it into a more ideological apparatus to mirror the GOP. For leftists who see the limitations of that idea and are skeptical that capital’s veto within the Democratic Party can ever be overcome, there are a few basic options: They could reject electoral politics altogether and advance their political goals in other settings, such as workplaces. Or they could build a powerful flank within the Democratic Party for the time being, until it’s strong enough to split off on its own (the so-called “dirty break” strategy coined by organizer and author Eric Blanc).

Or progressives could build the infrastructure for a third party before it successfully cultivates a base of voters for that project, thereby wasting a lot of valuable energy and resources in a never-ending struggle to gain ballot access for voters who’ve not yet bought in to the project—an effort that typically amounts to little more than a futile political exercise for cranks. (This has long been the strategy of the Green Party, which, to its credit, has taught us that If You Build It and Build It and Build It and Then Do Nothing Else, They Won’t Come.)

I have a distinct memory of watching the first of the pandemic press conferences; the first time Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Boris Johnson stood up behind those podiums in the wood-lined room and told us what was going to happen. It was March 3, 2020. They unveiled the “flatten the curve” plan — to slow rather than stop the virus’s spread, so that we would slowly build up population immunity while preventing the NHS being overwhelmed.
It seemed reassuring. I know this because I messaged something like “It seems like they might know what they’re doing!”  in a science-nerdy chat group that I’m part of. But my optimism was not echoed. “It seems like they’ve just killed all our grannies,” responded someone.
I recall this to make two points. Firstly, I can’t claim any sort of foresight. I didn’t see then, though perhaps I should have done, that the early response of the British government to Covid was disastrous and wrongheaded. Instead, I was falsely reassured by the confidence of the scientific advisers, Whitty and Vallance. 

But secondly, other people did see it. The failings were predicted. And not just by my friend: a large number of smart, numerate generalists outperformed public health experts repeatedly in predicting the course of the pandemic in those early months.
On Monday night, two House of Commons select committees released the findings of their report into England’s Covid response. The headlines yesterday were stark: the “worst public health failure ever”, “big mistakes”, “damning”. 
The individual mistakes — failure to protect care homes; failure to move quickly enough on lockdowns; failure to build testing infrastructure and more — are certainly worthy of criticism. But having read the report, I want to talk about what strikes me as the overarching theme: being too bloody clever by half.
Let’s return to early March 2020, when I was falsely reassured by the Whitty/Vallance/Johnson press conference. The “flatten the curve” strategy that the three men introduced involved slowly introducing public health measures one by one. The idea was to carefully control the R value – the number of people that each infected person would, on average, give the disease to. The idea was to keep it at just above one, so that the disease would slowly spread through the population rather than either burning through it or dwindling down.
More from this authorAre we heading for another winter lockdown?By Tom Chivers
In paragraph 87 of the report, the committee writes: “It is striking, looking back, that it was accepted that the level of Covid-19 infection in the UK could be controlled by turning on particular non-pharmaceutical interventions at particular times.” 
“Striking” is certainly one word for it. This was a novel disease. We knew almost nothing about its behaviour. On March 6 2020, I went to a gig at Alexandra Palace. Looking back now, it should not have been allowed to go ahead — but because the consensus at the time was that the disease was spread by fomites, by touching surfaces, the only advice was to keep washing our hands. In fact, it is spread largely through the air. 
So we had a completely wrong idea how the virus behaved, but we nevertheless had a confident plan to control it very precisely by now banning large gatherings, then closing schools, then encouraging working from home. We were trying to thread a needle blindfolded.
This sort of overconfidence in highly uncertain science crops up over and over again. As well as flattening the curve, the phased introduction of distancing measures had another purpose: it was not believed that the public would accept long-term restrictions on their freedom. “There is a risk,” Whitty told the public in one of the early press conferences, “that if we go too early, people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.” 
More from this authorHave we seen the end of Covid?By Tom Chivers
This was also the official Sage position: “Sage agreed that a balance needs to be struck between interventions that theoretically have significant impacts and interventions which the public can feasibly and safely adopt in sufficient numbers over long periods.”
It’s not clear what this claim was based on. Other behavioural scientists questioned it, with 200 of them signing an open letter to the Government asking for the evidence. But what evidence were they hoping to receive? What comparable situation have we ever faced? A few small-scale experiments about people obeying instructions under laboratory conditions probably can’t tell us anything at all about what people would be willing to do in order to save hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens, very possibly including their own elderly relatives. Nonetheless, we based highly counterintuitive policy decisions — not imposing strict lockdowns even as the disease was spreading and killing, despite seeing it being successful elsewhere — on this apparently unevidenced belief.
And let’s be clear: the coming hundreds of thousands of deaths were very much known about. The report rightly says that we over-relied on a plan for pandemic flu. That was a huge mistake, and it led us to strange things like moving to “delay” the virus rather than “contain” it, and stopping community testing. 
That meant that we had no idea how widespread the virus was. “The UK was reduced to understanding the spread of Covid-19 by waiting for people to be so sick that they needed to be admitted to hospital,” says the report. “For a country with a world-class expertise in data analysis, to face the biggest health crisis in a hundred years with virtually no data to analyse was an almost unimaginable setback.”
More from this authorDid anyone predict coronavirus?By Tom Chivers
So, yes, sticking to the flu plan was a disaster. But if you read the flu plan, it wouldn’t have worked any better for flu. The disaster that arrived was completely foreseen, yet it confidently said we couldn’t do anything about it, so we shouldn’t try. It said that planners should “aim to cope with a population mortality rate of up to 210,000–315,000 additional deaths” within 15 weeks of a virus arriving, and should “plan for a situation in which up to 2.5% of those with symptoms die”. 
The lowest number there, 210,000 over 15 weeks, works out at 2,000 deaths a day. At the peak of the second wave, the seven-day rolling average of deaths briefly – for nine days, in fact — broke 1,200 a day. 
That period was horrifying, but the pandemic flu plan was to “cope” with at least 2,000 deaths a day for 15 weeks. That appears to have been based on the idea that we, the British public, were so profoundly wedded to liberty that we would rather let the equivalent of the entire population of Norwich die in three months than have the nightclubs closed. 
More than that, in fact, it was important to keep them open so that people didn’t get depressed: “Large public gatherings or crowded events where people may be in close proximity are an important indicator of ‘normality’ and may help maintain public morale during a pandemic.” The possibility that people might not want to attend large public gatherings if it might kill them or their family, or might value the lives of their elderly relatives highly enough to stay home for a few weeks rather than watch them die in their thousands, was not considered..
Over and over again, the British response was one of unwarranted confidence in highly uncertain outcomes. We were, of course, dealing with a largely unprecedented situation. But that meant that the evidence was necessarily weak. 
So statements such as “There is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission” (from the pandemic flu plan) were on the one hand true, but also basically meaningless. There’s very limited evidence either way. 
But the common sense attitude would be that being in a large group of people probably helps the virus to spread. And given that the alternative, which the plan explicitly endorses, is at least 210,000 people dying in 15 weeks, it seems incredible that the approach was “well, there’s no evidence that it works, so we might as well not try”.
There are other areas where this overconfident, clever-clever approach backfired. For instance, Matt Hancock told the committee that in the early months, they were advised that “testing people asymptomatically might lead to false negatives” so you shouldn’t do it. Of course, it would also lead to lots of true positives. But the fear of a hypothetical second-order effect — like Jenny Harries’s claim last March that wearing masks could increase the risk of infection, because it would make people more confident — overshadowed the very obvious and real risk of disease. It’s like the plan was based around not wanting to be obvious, but always being clever and counterintuitive.
And the reliance on the pandemic flu “flatten the curve” plan meant that there was no modelling of the impacts of a lockdown. Dominic Cummings told the committee: “You are going to have to lock down, but there is no lockdown plan. It doesn’t exist. Sage haven’t modelled it.”
Often, simply plotting an exponential curve on a graph might have done better than the more complex forecasts the Government used. Vallance told a press conference that we were “four weeks” behind Italy, when simply looking at the number of deaths showed that we were 14 days behind. And when other countries locked down, with some success, we didn’t learn from their example, because we had a plan, and we were confident in it.
Suggested readingBritain's absurd quarantine failuresBy Stuart Ritchie
And, of course, border closures. Naively, you’d think that stopping people coming into the country would reduce the likelihood of the disease coming here. But overconfident modelling told scientific advisers that it wouldn’t, so they trusted that, rather than thinking “OK, but if the model is wrong then we’ve completely messed up.”
This isn’t to place all of the blame on Whitty, Vallance and Sage — or to exonerate the politicians. There was plenty of cowardice and dithering on the part of the Government, not least (as the report shows) when they ignored scientific advice to impose a short “circuit breaker” lockdown in autumn 2020, presumably because they feared being unpopular. 
But the valuable lesson, I think, is not “we should have done X” or “we should have done Y” specifically, but that we should be less confident in our ability to predict highly complex situations. And more than that: we should look at the possible results of being wrong in our attempts to predict those highly complex outcomes. If you’re 60% sure that lockdowns won’t work, then that implies there’s a 40% chance they will, and that implies that you think there’s a 40% chance of saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, it seems like the whole way through, the thinking was “it probably won’t work so let’s not try”.
I didn’t foresee any of this. I should have: it was all there in the pandemic flu plan. Others, smarter and more conscientious than me, did, or at least foresaw that disaster was a realistic probability. But the takeaway should be not “in the next pandemic, we need to protect care homes” — although we should — but “in the next pandemic, we should stop trying to be so damn clever”.

Recent headlines suggest fusion power is on its way, with researchers making breakthrough discoveries poised to revolutionize the energy industry. But will fusion be held back by the same fears and regulatory obstacles that hamper fission power today? And with the arrival of cheap solar and wind, do we even need fusion energy? In this episode of “Political Economy,” I’m joined by Arthur Turrell to discuss these questions and more.

Pethokoukis: A skeptic might say — in fact, I’m guessing some skeptics have said in the past — that nuclear fusion is the future of energy and always will be. Yet over the past year, it seems to me — as someone who previously did not follow fusion and the developments very closely — that there’s been a lot of activity. These are just a few headlines from The New York Times: “Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work’ Studies Suggest.” And these two headlines are from over the past month or so: “Massachusetts Start-Up Hopes to Move a Step Closer to Commercial Fusion.” Another one: “Laser Fusion Experiment Unleashes an Energetic Burst of Optimism.” The New York Times has given fusion more coverage over the past year than is really typical over a number of years. So what’s going on?
Turrell: It’s a great question and it’s a really exciting question. I just want to remind listeners that I’m speaking in a personal capacity today, having recently written a book about nuclear fusion called The Star Builders. So I think that cliché joke, I think we can throw that away now. The reason I say that is because progress has always been dependent not on how long something takes, but on the level of investment and human ingenuity that is being put into something, and the investment and the human ingenuity that’s been put into fusion is starting to demonstrate some really interesting breakthroughs recently. The biggest of those — probably the biggest in the last five years — has been the emergence of a private sector in fusion, which suggests that there’s some market confidence. Investors must think that they’re able to get some return, whether from fusion energy or from technologies related to fusion.
So that is changing the game and it’s also increasing the pace of progress because, I think, it’s encouraging private and public alike to up their game. So that’s one thing that’s going on. The other thing is that some of those improvements and developments in public laboratories are starting to kind of emerge from the drawing board into practical application. So there have been a number of technological breakthroughs, things like superconductors, which allow for new types of experimental fusion reactor design, and there have just been some experimental breakthroughs as well. So for instance there’s been an enormous result at the National Ignition Facility — which is trying to do a type of fusion called laser fusion, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — recently, where they’ve demonstrated a world-record beating net energy gain from fusion. So the breakthroughs, the experimental results — not just in laser fusion, but actually in the other approach to fusion called magnetic confinement fusion, too — have really given the whole field a sense of optimism.
I would say it’s the most exciting time in fusion definitely for decades, but probably ever actually. Even though I’m saying a lot of things have happened recently, if I look at it in kind of a Moore’s law style, we are just carrying on the path that was established a long time ago. It’s just that that path is now taking us close to a point where the problem ceases to be, “Can we get more energy out than we put in?” And it starts to become, “How can we start to turn this into an energy source instead of a scientific experiment?”

My very basic understanding is, and please correct me, that there are two main approaches, both of which you mentioned: There’s the laser ignition approach and the magnetic confinement approach. Could you briefly explain what each of those is trying to do?
There’s actually a third one which you can see if you go outside right now, which is gravitational confinement, and that is how the sun does nuclear fusion. Of course we can’t do that on Earth, and it would be a very bad idea for us to try. For practical fusion on Earth, we need to find a way to contain material or fusion fuel that is at least tens of millions of degrees. 60 million degrees is the absolute minimum. That’s four times hotter than the core of the sun. So you can’t put this stuff in a container, because it would melt the container; it would dump its energy, and the fusion reactions would stop. So fusion is hard to start and easy to stop, which is one reason why it’s very safe as well. So you need something invisible that doesn’t touch the fusion fuel to confine it so that the energy stays inside and further reactions can go once they’ve been kicked off or ignited.
And the two main ways that people are trying to do this are magnetic confinement fusion and what is sometimes called laser fusion, but it actually belongs to a large group called inertial confinement fusion. Now, in the magnetic confinement fusion case, the stuff that you get in fusion fuel, the stuff that the sun is made out of, is the fourth state of matter. After solids, liquids, and gases, you get this stuff called plasma, and it’s made up of what you get when atoms get ripped apart (because there’s so much energy around) into their constituent parts of positively charged nuclei and negatively charged electrons. The thing about charged particles is they interact with magnetic fields, and in magnetic confinement fusion essentially what’s created is a magnetic trap of fields that these charged particles get stuck on, and so when they’re doing fusion, they stick around rather than flinging off away into the walls of the experiment, at least in principle.
Technicians at the Megajoule Laser project will be able to simulate nuclear tests using amplified energy from 176 lasers which is directed at a target located inside the sphere.REUTERS/Regis Duvignau
Inertial confinement fusion takes a very different approach, and in fusion you’re always looking for temperature, density (so particles that are close together), and confinement. And if you reduce one of those, then you have to up the other two. What inertial confinement fusion says is, we won’t bother trying to confine it at all. We’re just going to bring together something at the perfect conditions for fusion, temperature and density, for a brief moment, and just let it rip. A brief moment is the time it takes a sound wave to cross the fuel once it’s been assembled, but a brief moment is a very long time in nuclear physics, and it’s long enough for a billion reactions to happen. In terms of bringing this fuel together at the right temperature and density for just that brief moment, you’ve got various different options and one of them is to use laser energy because you can squeeze a lot of energy into a small amount of space and a very short period of time with a pulse of light and create those conditions.
I think you used the phrase “net energy gain” — so what does that tell you different from something called the “wall-plug energy ratio”?
Yeah, so I’m really glad you asked this question. It is so important to make this distinction. I think where most people start from is, they might see a headline saying nuclear fusion is close. We have to be really careful about what we mean by nuclear fusion, and the first thing that sometimes people mean is just doing some fusion reactions. But that’s easy and experiments can do it all the time. People have even done it in their backyards or in their garages, which I don’t recommend, but it’s possible. The next phase, and the thing that lots of scientists around the world — in fact there’s over 100 experimental fusion reactors operational or being constructed right now — are trying to do, is to demonstrate scientific net energy gain. And that’s about creating an experiment where you put in a certain amount of energy and you get at least as much energy back out.
And the reason why that’s such an important benchmark or milestone is because an energy source that you can’t get more energy out of than you put in is no good, obviously, and people are interested in fusion on Earth as a clean energy source. So scientific gain has been the next milestone for many decades now, but experiments are pretty close to that. But there are milestones beyond that, and the next one beyond that is something that you called wall-plug energy gain, and sometimes I call it the energy it takes to keep the lights on in the facility. So if you’ve got this experimental reactor, it’s the energy to charge up the capacitor banks, a type of battery. It’s the energy to keep the diagnostics running. It’s the energy to keep the lights on. It’s all of that peripheral machinery that you need to do a fusion experiment that isn’t just about the reactor, the experiment, the scientific bit itself, and that requires the gain, not of a hundred percent — so one unit of energy out for energy in — but a gain that’s appreciably more than that. It depends on the reactor, but I think what people would really like to achieve is at least 30 times energy out for energy in. Now, that sounds like a long way away.
Yeah, that does sound like a long way away.
Yeah. But you know, the nature of fusion is that it is a process that scales quite incredibly and to give you a sense of that, I’ll just say that in 2018 laser fusion on the National Ignition Facility, the record that they’d hit was 3 percent of net energy gain. That’s 3 percent where they’re trying to get to a hundred percent. But between 2018 and the latest results, which came out just last month in fact, they went from 3 percent to 70 percent. So they got a massive increase. It wasn’t going from 3 percent to 4 percent. It was going from 3 percent to 70 percent, and that’s because very small changes in initial conditions can produce very much bigger outcomes, and so when they’re making improvements, they’re getting factors of three or six or even 20 out in terms of energy gain. So when you think about it like that, they’re not actually very far away from a wall-plug gain potentially.
Is the private sector favoring one approach over the other? Again, we don’t know who’s going to “win,” but does there seem to be more innovation momentum on one particular approach or technology than the other?
That’s a really good question. I think it’s so early days that from a kind of societal point of view, it’s really great that people are exploring lots of different options, because we just don’t know which one is going to (a) work first, at least on the scale for a power plant or (b) which is the most commercially viable, which is incredibly important too. So it’s great that they’re pursuing different options. I’d say there are slightly more private sector fusion firms I’m aware of that are pursuing magnetic confinement fusion, but that technology has been around longer, and it’s been out in the open a lot longer as well. So more details of it are public as compared to inertial confinement fusion, but there are a non-zero number of private sector fusion firms pursuing the inertial approach, too, and in terms of the recent breakthrough at NIFT, that was an inertial fusion machine. But both are really promising, and I think it’s great that people are trying out every kind of option here.
Certainly one way to look at this is that government scientists have been working on this for a while and that didn’t work, so now the private sector has swooped in and they’re making great gains. But obviously, it’s really a case much like the private space industry in that the private sector is building on all kinds of research that’s gone before. Is technology at a state that there is a clean handoff to the private sector? Or are there still more basic research kinds of things that government needs to do?
I think that the quickest path to fusion is going to be a partnership between the public and private players. The public sector does some things really well and some things not so well, and the private sector does some things really well and some things not well. Part of fusion is this big laboratory scientific exploration, understanding the physics behind this state of matter, plasma, that’s incredibly badly behaved and not always that well understood, and really breaking through the frontier scientifically, and some of it is about: How do we do this on a scale that’s relevant for power generation repeatably, reliably, resiliently? How do we make it modular so that we can improve the learning rate with construction? How do we bring down the capital costs? And that’s the thing where the private sector can really contribute. I think the Department of Energy has recognized this with their milestone-based programs, where they’re making some of the public money available to private firms who can reach certain goals that are going to need to be reached to get to a future where fusion can actually deliver energy.
Model of an experimental nuclear fusion reactor in Cadarache, north of Marseille.Via REUTERS
Has that basic science sort of been done and that’s understood, and now we’re moving on?
I wouldn’t say so. No. But I wouldn’t say that the science is just the preserve of the public laboratories, either. I think the private sector can get involved in that. Where I’d say we are, is that it’s pretty clear how to get scientific net energy gain now, but I think what we don’t understand is necessarily all the ins and outs of that. So we’ve got very close with 70 percent once, and magnetic confinement fusion came also quite close. That was actually back in the ‘90s. So we kind of got there a little bit, but I think we can understand how to really reliably do that on these big government machines, which have after all gotten closer than the private sector machines have to date. Where I think the public sector fusion efforts might go next is on working on some of the other big challenges of turning fusion into an energy source.
And that’s about being self-sufficient in the fuel for fusion, which involves some complicated physics on the material science of how we build reactor walls that can withstand this kind of energy release — which is not because necessarily it’s a lot of energy, although it is, but because it comes in a particular type in the form of high energy particles — and how we get the heat out of fusion reactions and ultimately do something that’s actually quite boring, which is use it to turn water into steam, to drive turbines, which we’ve done many times before. But that first step of getting heat energy out of the fusion reactor is something that people need to work on, too, and I think on all of those things the public or private sector could make progress, but right now there are public sector facilities around the world gearing up to try to tackle some of those challenges, particularly in the UK and Japan.
Why do we need star machines? If we need them for clean energy, isn’t that handled or will be handled by existing technologies? As you’ve written in the book, we’ve seen a big decline in solar costs and people seem very excited about renewables. So if it’s for climate change, aren’t these well-understood technologies the road forward rather than things like the star machines, which you just conceded still need a lot of research. If it’s not for that, then do we really need them at all for any other reason?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Look, all of the star builders I spoke to — all of the engineers, physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, entrepreneurs who are working on nuclear fusion energy that I spoke to — are absolutely convinced that renewables are going to be a key part of our energy supply. That’s a given, and they’re all convinced that climate change is a problem and that fossil fuels are on the way out. So I think everyone agrees on that. Why do we need fusion, then, if we’re going to get lots of energy from renewables? Well, I think they’re already going to be a big part of reaching that zero and beyond, absolutely. Renewables are already the cheapest form of power — except keeping existing nuclear fission plants open. But I think in almost anything that you do in life, it’s useful to have a portfolio of things with different strengths and weaknesses that you can draw upon.
So for instance, if I think about the advantages of renewables, they work right now and they’re very cheap, but on the disadvantages side, the energy that they tap into is very diffuse. It’s spread out over large areas, and that means that they need vast areas to work. So for example, to power the UK solely using onshore wind turbines would mean covering 17 percent of the country with turbines, which is a huge amount. It’s absolutely enormous, and as we’ve found this summer in the UK, the energy from renewables is not always reliable. So we’ve had a very un-windy summer in the UK here. Sadly, it hasn’t been that sunny either, but sometimes you want types of power that aren’t so reliant on the weather to provide that baseload energy. 
Now, it’s true that batteries are going to play a large role in this as well and help us turn day into night when it comes to renewables. Some of the star builders I spoke to were skeptical about batteries ever scaling up to cover the whole year, but I think the other point here is that fusion could potentially provide energy at very large scales, too, and without using up lots of area. Even if we don’t get fusion energy until after net zero, we can start to suck down that carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere and instead of just level off the curve of CO2 that we’ve submitted — start to actually reverse it and hopefully reverse some of the harms too.
So that’s one reason. Another reason in the long run why we might want fusion energy — and excuse me if this sounds rather futuristic — is that we are not going to explore the solar system as a species using a coal-fired spaceship. And in fact, if you look at what realistic trips outside of our kind of solar system’s backyard would have to be powered by — or even the Earth’s backyard, I should say — fusion is one of the best candidates for that because it packs a lot of energy into a very small amount of space. In fact, it’s 10 million times higher in energy density than coal.
So with a fusion-driven spacecraft, how does that change the calculus as far as traveling to the Moon, to Mars, the inner planets or the outer planets or beyond?
Great question. I don’t have figures at hand, but my understanding is that the time to get to Mars and back is cut substantially to something that is feasible. If you can use a fusion rocket instead of a conventional rocket, it’s all about the fact that you don’t have to carry as much fusion fuel with you because it contains a lot of energy.
When we talk about clean fusion energy, what is the scale we’re talking about? Will fusion reactors produce enough energy that we’ll need fewer fusion plants compared to coal plants?
So this is all of course assuming that fusion energy from power plants gets there and is commercially viable. So we have to bear that in mind, and there are big challenges on the way to that. But assuming that gets solved, then I think fusion energy would be broadly similar to what you can do with nuclear fission today — so in terms of land area, orders of magnitude more efficient than say, wind farms. We’re talking about a few square kilometers to power several million homes, which for a wind farm would probably take something equivalent to the land area of Washington DC for about three million homes.
So it’s much more space efficient. I think nuclear fission is great, and I’m really a fan of it as an energy source, but in terms of safety as well, nuclear fusion would likely offer an advantage, relative probably to all other forms of power. It would certainly be safer than some types of renewables and it would almost certainly be safer than nuclear fission as well — which, by the way, in the round is one of the most safe forms of energy.
Are both the safety issue as well as the nuclear waste issue the key advantages of fusion over fission, or are there other ones?
There’s another one as well, which is about nuclear proliferation. So if you are worried about rogue states using the materials involved in fission to construct nuclear weapons, those materials can be generated in relatively short time, or a peaceful fission program can be used as a cover for the production of the materials you need for nuclear weapons. The most extreme type of nuclear weapon is the hydrogen bomb, that makes use of both fission and fusion reactions, but the fusion reactions have to be triggered by fission reactions, and for that you need the fissile material. The great thing about nuclear fusion in this respect is that there’s no reason for it to involve any fissile material whatsoever. You only need the ingredients for fusion, which are kind of useless on their own for nuclear weapons.
A lot of environmentalists don’t like fission very much — maybe that’s changing. Do they like fusion, especially since it doesn’t have that nuclear waste issue?
Yeah. So I think you’d have to ask some environmentalists. My sense is that the mood is changing a little bit on fission because there’s a trade off there. What do we think is the biggest problem here? Is it the really long-lived radioactive waste, of which there isn’t very much generated, or is it climate change? And right now climate change to me certainly seems like the bigger challenge that we face on planet Earth. But I think there are reasons why environmentalists would generally prefer fusion, and there’s obviously a reason why people sometimes talk about fusion as the holy grail of energy production even if all energy production forms have pros and cons. As you say, fusion doesn’t produce zero radioactive waste, but it doesn’t produce it as an output of the fusion reactions itself. The radioactive waste that we think will be produced is from the chamber being activated over the period of its lifetime. So rather than radioactive waste coming out all the time, what you end up with is what’s at the end of a plant’s life, when you need to decommission the reactor chamber. And the best guesses suggest that that will be dangerous for a much shorter period of time — on the order of a hundred years as compared to the waste that’s produced as a part of ongoing processes in fission, which although small in volume, is dangerous for a lot, lot longer than that.
Containers are seen at a plant for processing liquid radioactive waste at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
I’ve talked to a lot of entrepreneurs about different technologies they’re working on, such as autonomous cars. You talk to those guys and you walk out of that and you think, “This thing is going to happen. It’s going to happen soon.” It’s very exciting. I’m sure you felt that excitement, and you have to sort of temper yourself. Now that you’ve written this book and you’ve had a chance to breathe a little bit, what is the reasonably optimistic take on when I’m going to be able to flip on a light switch and that’s going to be fusion-supplied electricity to my light bulb?
So let’s start with the big picture here. Fusion is the most ubiquitous energy source in the universe. It powers stars, it was around in the Big Bang, it’s around in supernovae. It’s kind of embarrassing that we haven’t managed to do it on Earth in a way. So I think humanity will get there. It’s the most energy-rich source of fuel that we can lay our hands on, reasonably, in the solar system or in the known universe. So I think we’ll want to do it at some point for those reasons I said about exploring the universe as well. I’m really optimistic that we’re going to do this at some point. There are extra reasons to do it in the short run, and I completely hear what you’re saying about people being over-optimistic, and, in fact, fusion has been terribly guilty of that in its history. People working on fusion have said, “Oh, it’s about to work. We’re going to deliver fusion energy.” And they haven’t really defined what they mean by that (which is why I was really keen to get that in earlier), and it’s incredibly difficult. You know, fusion is probably the greatest scientific and technical challenge that we as a species have ever taken on. So it’s very difficult to do at the small scales that we want to do it here on Earth compared to how it works in the sun, but just because a feat is difficult to achieve doesn’t mean we should rule it out. I think you can never underestimate what human ingenuity can achieve, and it might seem wild and fanciful to get this thing that powers stars and happens in supernovae working on Earth, but if you look at human history, so many wild ideas have unexpectedly come to fruition.
And I take a recent example here, which is Katalin Karikó’s research on mRNA to fight diseases, which seemed such a long shot that she couldn’t even get it funded. She got demoted, but we’re really lucky today, where we sit here in 2021, that her and her collaborators persevered because some of the most successful COVID vaccines — and a vaccine for malaria as well — are based on that technology, and the vaccines were developed in record time. And that’s partly about people dreaming big and persevering, but it’s partly, and this comes to a more practical point, that society said, “Yes, we are going to put our weight behind this. We’re going to invest a lot in it and we’re just going to make it happen.” And that’s what made the difference from this being a technology in principle to a technology in practice that is out there saving lives every day. So I think whether we’re going to see fusion energy really depends on if we, as a society, decide to pursue it and whether we give it the investment we want, but there’s lots of evidence from the rest of the universe and from the experiments that have been done that we could get there if we wanted to.
If you could just name a few of the private sector companies that you’ve talked to, whose work you’ve reviewed, to just give a sense of like who’s out there doing what.
Yeah. So on the inertial confinement fusion side, there’s a firm called First Light Fusion who are interesting. Instead of using lasers, they’re using projectiles to ignite those fusion reactions. There’s another firm who I went to speak to and visit called Tokamak Energy. So they are using a type of technology called a spherical tokamak. These tokamaks are basically these magnetic traps I mentioned, but the point about making it spherical is you can make it more compact and that has some real benefits from a commercial point of view and making things more modular.
The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed “artificial sun”, is tested at the Institute of Plasma Physics. REUTERS/Jianan Yu
Over in the US, one of the firms that I think is really interesting to watch is Commonwealth Fusion Systems because they’ve been born out of a really well respected set of researchers and a fusion program at MIT. They’re also using some more compact superconducting tokamak-type technologies. There are a bunch of others around, some are more plausible than others, but because they’re private sector firms, we don’t know all of the details of them. So it can sometimes be hard to compare and get a good sense of who’s ahead with the technologies.
My guest today has been Arthur Turrell, author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and The Race to Power The Planet. Arthur, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Jim.
 Learn more: Is the United States really meritocratic? My long-read Q&A with Adrian Wooldridge | The legacy of the Moon landing: My long-read Q&A with Charles Fishman | Will accelerating technology end the great stagnation? My long-read Q&A with Azeem Azhar
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OnlySubs Episode 65: Forever Oppression for Historically Oppressed Groups is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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The “Woke” movement moves through linguistic manipulations. One of the most common types of manipulation is the application of a specific but seemingly benign term that will be worked into policy and then be made actionable with a specialized meaning once it’s too late to easily change it. Charles Pincourt refers to this approach as the “reverse motte-and-bailey Trojan Horse” rhetorical maneuver, in fact, in his admirable forthcoming volume Counter-Wokecraft. A term that fits the activist bill for the agenda of the Identity Marxism movement we’re currently being attacked by is “historically marginalized” or “historically oppressed” group. In fact, this term is very insidious for a very simple reason: historical status is permanent. It does not change. Even if some historically oppressed group becomes absolutely and tyrannically dominant in society, it is still historically oppressed. Therefore, absolutely no policy that provides special treatment or that erects double standards should include the nice-sounding euphemistic phrasing “historically oppressed” or “historically marginalized” groups. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I try to shed some light on this specific manipulation in the hopes that people will become more aware and able to identify and resist these manipulations when and where they arise.
The post OnlySubs: Forever Oppression for Historically Oppressed Groups appeared first on New Discourses.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google PodcastsThe irony in loneliness is that we all share in the experience of it. In this episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we sit down to discuss isolated living and Americans’ collective struggle to create a relationship-centric life. As we continue along our journey to happiness, we ask: How can I build my life around people?This episode features Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general.This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A. C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael.Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091.Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche De Luces”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”).This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Dr. Vivek H. Murthy: Loneliness is a subjective feeling that the human connections we need in our life are greater than the human connections we have. And that subjective element is really important because what loneliness is not is something that’s determined by the number of people around you. You could be surrounded by just one or two people and feel perfectly content if you have strong relationships with them. But you could also be, like many college students are, on a campus that has thousands of people—or you could be in a workplace surrounded by hundreds of people—but feel profoundly alone, which is sadly the experience that many people have today.Arthur Brooks: And so it’s subjective, depending on both your needs and your particular circumstances. So I can’t just look at somebody’s life, look in on it, and say, “Boy, that person must be really lonely.” A farmer who is in a combine 16 hours a day and barely sees anybody over the course of the day—that seems really, really lonely. Meanwhile, No. 1 in lonely professions is physicians. And they’re with people all day long. And that makes your point, right?Dr. Murthy: That’s exactly right. We have this stereotype, Arthur, of the lonely person as being the guy or the gal who’s in a corner at a party all by themselves, not talking to anyone. And sometimes loneliness looks like that. But loneliness can masquerade like lots of different things. In men, anger and short-temperedness is a common way that loneliness manifests. For other people, it might look like them being quiet or reticent or withdrawn. But you’d be surprised at how often, because of this stigma around loneliness, people will seek to compensate by seeming like they’re having a great time or they’re super connected or talking about all the people that they’re going to hang out with. But again, it’s the quality of the connections that matter— they may be profoundly alone. I’ve been often quite surprised that the people I thought were perfectly content, and seemed to be out at parties all the time and have a vibrant social life, were actually often quite alone. But they didn’t feel comfortable saying that, because in the United States of America—in Western society in the modern age—to say you’re lonely, feels like saying you’re a loser, so we don’t talk about this even though millions and millions of people are struggling with loneliness.Brooks: So, loneliness can be a hidden phenomenon like many other areas of psychological difficulty or even mental illness—you can’t tell. Sometimes you can’t tell who is struggling with alcohol abuse, for example. You can’t tell somebody who’s depressed and you can’t tell somebody who’s lonely. And so it’s hard to help them, right?Dr. Murthy: That’s exactly right. If you look at the numbers around loneliness and you realize that you’ve got more people who are struggling with loneliness than have diabetes in this country—it made me realize I should probably change my default a little bit in terms of how I approach other people. Rather than assuming that people are connected and great and fine. I should probably recognize there’s a very real chance that the person in front of me might be struggling with loneliness, and what that means is that I try to remind myself to go the extra mile a little bit, ask how they’re doing.Brooks: There’s a very famous study at the University of Rochester where students were asked about what their goals in life were, and then it followed up a year later to see whether or not they hit their goals after graduation and to see how happy they were. And those who had extrinsic goals, which is money, power and fame—they wanted to get ahead; they wanted to do really well; they wanted to make more money—they got those things. They were doing better than average. But they were a lot less happy than those who had intrinsic goals. And those intrinsic goals were all about love and relationships.Dr. Murthy: When we give love, when we receive love, we feel replenished, we feel empowered and we’re able to do more, to be more, for those around us. That is a consistent theme in the history of humanity and borne out often by our own life experiences. And, Arthur, I actually think we know that when we’re born. If you watch small children interact, they don’t really care how famous they are. They don’t care how much money they have, or possessions. They can be happy in a small house or a big house. But, they derive so much in those moments of love they have with their parents, their siblings, with other family members and friends. They hone in to what really matters.But over time, society and people around us teach us different things, right? We think about love as something that’s squishy. That’s something that maybe makes you weak. And we gravitate toward these other measures of success, but they don’t really drive happiness. And so, ultimately, the question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we really want out of life? What will determine whether a life is truly a life well spent? What I can tell you, Arthur, is about the conversations I’ve had with many patients at the end of their life, and what is remarkably consistent about those conversations. And I’m talking about those last moments in someone’s life, those last hours, last days when I’ve been privileged to sit by their bedside and hold their hands and look into their eyes and just hear their final reflections on their wonderful life. What people talk about in those final moments, Arthur, is not how big their office was or the promotion they got or the prestigious job or how big their bank account was. What people talk about are relationships. They talk about the people they loved, the people who broke their hearts, the people who they wish they had spent more time with.Brooks: You’re a super successful guy that knows tons of people. You have a job where you’re around people pretty much 24 hours a day. You have a huge staff. How could the surgeon general of the United States be experiencing loneliness? Because there are a lot of people listening to us who feel like, No, of course I’m not lonely. Maybe they are. Were you lonely without knowing it? And how did you find out and how did it feel?Dr. Murthy: I think I was lonely at many points in my life without really knowing it. As a child, I certainly didn't quite know how to think about it, but I remember feeling a sense of anxiety when my parents dropped me off to school, not because I was worried about tests, but because I was worried about being left out and being lonely. And the scariest part of the day, I should say, for me in school was lunchtime—walking into that cafeteria and not knowing if there would be anyone to sit next to. But as an adult, Arthur, I don’t think I really fully understood that at times—like the moments where I felt withdrawn or my mood felt off, almost like I was depressed, or when I was just feeling unsettled and unhappy that what I was craving was human connection.Brooks: People are asking you this a lot about the post-pandemic environment: What’s your view on the decision that a lot of people are considering about keeping remote work forever? Do you believe that people should go back to work maybe more than they even want to, given the inertia involved?Dr. Murthy: Well, it’s a really important question, Arthur. And here’s actually what I think. I do think that having in-person time at work, with some cadence to be determined, is actually very helpful because people do build strong relationships there and there’s nothing like in-person time. I think what’s really important, though, for many people in the workplace is some flexibility now, because for many people who have realized, during this pandemic, that they enjoy that flexible time at home, working from home, what they’ve done with that time is spend some of it with their family. They’ve used a few minutes in between meetings to check and see how their kids are doing. I think we can be much more deliberate and intentional about how we design that in-person interaction. And that is a choice that we have to make.If we, for example, decide to design a society that supports relationships, we may invest more in social-emotional learning programs in schools. We may invest more in designing workplaces that strengthen connections between colleagues and also give them opportunities to serve in communities. We may measure things differently—we may measure success in part by the strength of the relationships that we create. We would live and look at life very differently if we truly built our life around people.Brooks: As a happiness researcher, I’m curious to find out how people define happiness for themselves. A few weeks ago, we asked people to submit their thoughts on this question: When is the last time you remember being truly happy?Listener Submission: Hi, my name is Alexandra and I live in Portland, Oregon. The last time I was, I think, truly happy was actually in the beginning of the pandemic. And it was when the world first shut down and I had this freedom that I’ve never known before. And I have a daughter. And I felt prior to the pandemic that I was pulled in about a million different directions with an intense career. And suddenly I was given this whole path to just be a mom, and go to the park every day and cook long dinners that I hadn’t cooked in two years and just lay in the grass and look at the clouds, and life seemed to slow down in this way that I’ve never experienced before, because the world was on a collective pause. And that has kind of since faded as, you know, I’m back at work and things have changed, but I just so fondly look back to that time and recall the roads being empty and the world taking this breath. And I know it wasn’t like that for everyone, but in my world, this feeling of [being] given a period of time in life to just really slow down in a way that I never have before was such a nice time. And it’s something I'll always cherish.
Brooks: I hope this conversation with Dr. Vivek Murthy has touched your soul a little bit. But what we need to do now is apply these concepts through practice. Today’s exercise is geared toward helping us migrate away from the extrinsic goals in our lives and toward the intrinsic goals. It’s an exercise that has three steps.Here’s step one: Imagine yourself in five years. So let’s say you’re 27 years old. Imagine the 32-year-old version of yourself. Imagine what you’re doing, what you’re thinking. The five-years-older version of yourself is happy. I don’t have to tell you what that means. You know what that means. You’re a happy person.Now comes step two. I want you to list five things that are actually making you happy five years from now. This might sound like it’s impossible, but it isn’t. You know perfectly well the kinds of forces that would bring you authentic happiness, don’t you? Think about the five things that are the reason that you’re the happy version of you in five years. Now I want you to put them in order: one, two, three, four or five, where one is the force on your life that’s bringing you the most joy five years from now. No. 5 is good, but it’s not No. 1. Okay now, what are they? The extrinsic stuff practically guaranteed is going to be Nos. 4 and 5; or Nos. 3, 4, and 5; or something like that. And Nos. 1 and 2 are going to be relationships, are going to be love. They’re going to be intrinsic.And this leads us to step three. You need to manage Nos. 1 and 2—are you right now? If you want to get to that, if you want to get to the top two things on your list five years from now, so you can be the happy version of you in five years, you better be actively managing Nos. 1 and 2 on your list. Are you? You might not be.The love that you want in your life, this spiritual journey that you’re yearning for in your life—it’s not going to make itself happen. It’s not going to manage itself; you need to manage it. Do this exercise once a week for a month and think about how it’s changing your priorities, and then do it for the rest of the year. I guarantee you your priorities are going to change, because you’re going to give more attention to the things that really matter. What you focus on more is what you will manage going forward, and you’ll become a more intrinsically motivated person reaping the happiness rewards.Subscribe and listen to full-length episodes on the How to Build a Happy Life homepage or wherever you get your podcasts.

Almost a year after the 2020 election, and nine months after the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, new information continues to emerge about former President Trump’s scheme to disrupt the democratic transition of power and illegitimately hold on to his office after electoral defeat. At this point, it’s easy to become inured to these stories; each new one may just seem like more press coverage of Trump raging ineffectively. After all, he failed to carry out his power grab, and President Biden is securely in office.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee’s new staff report released last week is a terrifying document. It describes in fresh detail Trump’s efforts to bully the Justice Department into overturning the election. And it shows just how aggressively Trump tried to hold on to power, how much help he had from some within the Justice Department, and how hard departmental leadership had to work in order to, just barely, hold the president back. The report closes with recommendations to respond to the crisis and avoid future abuses. But the bigger problem that allowed Trump’s delusion to flourish and come far too close to success—a lack of good faith and commitment to democracy within the White House and some quarters of the Justice Department—will be harder to solve.

The committee styles the report as an “interim” release midway through its ongoing investigation into “Trump’s reported efforts to enlist” the Justice Department in his plan to subvert the results of the 2020 election. By its own telling, the committee began investigating shortly after reporting surfaced in January that Trump had pushed to ask the Supreme Court to overturn the vote and replace the acting attorney general with an official enthusiastically encouraging Trump’s scheme. (The work undertaken here by the Senate Judiciary Committee is separate from the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack; while the House consolidated various investigations into the select committee, a range of Senate committees have continued their own probes.) According to the report, the Senate Judiciary Committee is still investigating the various misdeeds—but it chose to release a report in the meantime “given the gravity of the misconduct the Committee has uncovered to date … and in the interest of making a public record of Trump’s efforts to compromise DOJ’s independence.”

The report’s six key findings center around a scheme by Jeffrey Clark, then head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, to have the department send a letter to state legislatures suggesting they convene a special session and appoint new electors due to election irregularities. Clark’s prominence in the election subversion story was hardly predictable—he had held his position in the Civil Division only since September 2020; before that, he had been leading the Environment and Natural Resources Division. But in December 2020, weeks before the certification of the Electoral College vote, Trump asked Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen if he knew “some guy named Jeff Clark.”

In the ensuing days, Clark told Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue he had met with the president personally. Clark also requested an intelligence briefing about supposed election fraud and proposed that the Justice Department reach out to swing-state officials with a “Proof of Concept” document suggesting that state legislatures should “assemble and make a decision about elector appointment”—in other words, that lawmakers should convene to appoint electors who would vote for Trump rather than Biden.

Donoghue and Rosen immediately rejected the proposal. But Clark’s efforts didn’t stop there. On Jan. 3, Clark told Rosen that President Trump was planning on installing him as the acting attorney general and implied that Clark would decline to replace Rosen if the acting attorney general sent Clark’s letter to state legislatures. The situation came to a boil at a lengthy White House meeting with Trump that evening: Clark advocated for sending his proposed letter to state legislators and for the installment of himself as acting attorney general, while Donoghue explained that Justice Department leadership would resign en masse if Trump chose to appoint Clark. In Donoghue’s telling, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone referred to Clark’s proposal as a “murder-suicide pact.” Trump decided not to send the letter and not to install Clark. In the same meeting, Trump expressed his desire to have Donoghue fire the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Byung J. (Bjay) Pak, for not investigating alleged fraud, though Pak soon resigned instead. The overall picture is of a Justice Department upended by Trump’s overwhelming desire to hold on to power and Clark’s eagerness to help him, facts be damned.

As Clark had been pushing to send the “Proof of Concept” letter to Georgia, Rosen had also been bombarded by requests from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to investigate various unfounded claims of voter fraud. He was contacted several times by a private attorney, Kurt Olsen, who claimed to be in contact with the president and asked Rosen to file a complaint with the Supreme Court. Trump also asked Rosen to pursue the Supreme Court route but eventually accepted that doing so was not feasible.

All this gives the lie to attempts by Vice President Pence, among many others, to downplay the attempted insurrection as just “one day in January.” Instead, as the report shows, Jan. 6 was the culmination of a months-long effort by Trump and his allies to undermine faith in the results of the election and upend the result.

Since January, the Republican Party writ large has not disavowed this attempt to throw American democracy into crisis, instead either quietly tolerating it or embracing it outright. (Notably, the Republican minority staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with Ranking Member Sen. Chuck Grassley, released their own report arguing that “President Trump’s actions were consistent with his responsibilities as President to faithfully execute the law and oversee the Executive Branch.”) So far in 2021, 11 states have passed laws that limit the power of election officials and open the door for partisan interference in elections. Election law scholar Rick Hasen has described a variety of mechanisms by which unscrupulous politicians and activists could attempt to upend future elections, from officials manipulating vote tallies to attempts—along the lines of what Clark proposed to Trump—to organizing “a respectable bloodless coup dependent upon technical legal arguments overcoming valid election result.”

So the risk that a future president and Justice Department might attempt Trump and Clark’s gambit is, unfortunately, far from hypothetical. The Judiciary Committee report offers several procedural and statutory suggestions for addressing what investigators have uncovered regarding how “bad-faith actors can exploit DOJ policy and norms to provide a platform for election fraud claims even when the claims are not backed by any credible evidence and insert DOJ unnecessarily in political controversies.” These proposals are useful—but, in the end, insufficient.

The committee proposes strengthening and systematizing the Justice Department’s policies and norms against conduct that might influence elections, in order to prevent high-profile actions that could undermine public confidence in elections—such as then-Attorney General William Barr’s November 2020 memo instructing prosecutors that they could conduct preliminary inquiries into election-related matters before the election was certified, which caused the director of the Public Integrity Section’s Election Crimes Branch to resign and which the Judiciary Committee report excoriates.

Much of the report describes repeated violations of the Justice Department’s internal policy forbidding certain contacts with the White House, in order to minimize the risk of political interference in law enforcement—and so the committee recommends a “a stricter oversight regime” of White House-Justice Department contacts, including statutory requirements for the regular release of logs of such communications to the Justice Department inspector general, who could transmit matters of “urgent concern” to the House and Senate Judiciary committees. Likewise, it recommends that the inspector general’s purview be expanded to include misconduct by Justice Department attorneys. There is currently already legislation in Congress that would address some of these issues, including the Protecting Our Democracy Act.

The report also suggests that Congress should consider amending various statutes on obstruction of justice to clarify that Trump’s efforts to bully states into changing their vote counts would be legally prohibited. For example, 18 U.S.C. § 1512, prohibiting corruptly “obstruct[ing], influenc[ing], or imped[ing] any official proceeding,” and 18 U.S.C. § 1505—which prohibits “corruptly, or by threats or force, ... obstruct[ing] or imped[ing] or endeavor[ing] to influence, obstruct, or impede” the work of “any department or agency of the United States” or Congress or any of its committees—could be amended to apply to “state proceedings relating to federal elections.” These proposals echo the conversations that took place after the release of the Mueller report regarding the need to amend obstruction statutes to clarify that they apply to the president.

There’s much to be said for these recommendations as a response to the committee’s findings. And the committee also suggests that the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack follow up on the information provided in the report and notes, perhaps ominously, that “[b]ecause the Committee’s investigation is not yet complete and more documents and interviews are still being pursued, we have not made findings or recommendations concerning possible criminal liability.”

But even so, when measured up against the sheer scale of the problem, these proposals seem distinctly small-bore. The president is, after all, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, with broad constitutional prerogatives to direct the nation’s law enforcement activity. If a determined chief executive really wants to get in touch with Justice Department officials in order to strong-arm them into overturning an election, a speedier process for Congress to find out about that attempt—and even the threat of criminal sanctions—might not have much of an effect.

Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent the elevation of unscrupulous leaders other than refusing to elect them. When it comes to Justice Department lawyers, though, the country has more options. In particular, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s third suggestion—professional discipline of Jeffrey Clark—might help point the way.

The committee recommends further investigation of Clark’s behavior by the D.C. Bar, and writes that it has submitted a complaint to that effect—not the first bar complaint to be filed against Clark. Here, the report points to rule 8.4 of the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct, which prohibits “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” “conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice” and “stat[ing] or imply[ing] an ability to influence improperly a government agency or official.” It also suggests that Clark may have violated Rule 1.2(e), which provides that a “lawyer shall not counsel a client to engage, or assist a client, in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent.” As the report notes regarding Clark:

Clark should not be able to avoid discipline by asserting he subjectively assessed his claims to be factual or reasonable. Knowledge is ascertained by an objective standard, and the disciplinary authority may prove that Clark “knowingly” pushed DOJ to act on baseless grounds through circumstantial evidence, which, as demonstrated by this report, overwhelmingly shows Clark knew and should have known his claims were baseless.

The committee also points out that this would not be the first instance of using professional sanctions to discipline lawyers involved in election subversion: the law license of Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has been suspended, and the attorneys behind the “Kraken” litigation to overturn Michigan’s votes are now facing court sanctions and perhaps additional professional discipline.

But the fact that the Judiciary Committee has filed a complaint with the D.C. Bar disciplinary committee does not mean that anything will necessarily come of it. The disciplinary committee has a history of declining to take a stand when it comes to prominent public officials. The most recent example is its refusal to even initiate an ethics investigation in response to a complaint against Barr, stating—somewhat astonishingly—that “in general, this Office will not intervene in matters that are currently and publicly being discussed in the national political arena.”

It has not always avoided wading into politics, as in the cases of Paul Manafort and Scooter Libby, but those cases involved mandatory disbarment as a result of criminal convictions (and notably, the committee did not oppose Libby’s request to be reinstated at the end of the mandatory period). Likewise, Giuliani’s suspension in D.C. resulted from the decision of a D.C. court, which was based not on a recommendation from the D.C. Bar disciplinary committee but, rather, on a New York court’s decision to suspend Giuliani pending a disciplinary committee investigation in that state.

Nevertheless, Clark’s conduct falls squarely in the D.C. Bar disciplinary committee’s ambit. And unlike the complaint against Barr, which the committee dismissed as lacking “personal knowledge of the facts or allegations,” this referral comes from a congressional committee and attaches hundreds of pages of interview transcripts and primary source documents. It differs in other potentially important respects as well, at least from a practical perspective: Clark is no longer in public office, and he was not the nation’s highest law enforcement officer. In any event, the D.C. Bar should bear in mind the American Bar Association’s (ABA’s) admonition, in Rule 8.4(c), Comment 7, that “[l]awyers holding public office assume legal responsibilities going beyond those of other citizens. A lawyer’s abuse of public office can suggest an inability to fulfill the professional role of lawyers.”

That lawyers should not give their clients advice they know is wrong should be obvious. Perhaps Clark could argue that he really believed there was sufficiently credible evidence of voter fraud that it would be appropriate for the Department of Justice to encourage state legislatures to certify alternate slates of electors. But that’s hard to swallow given the fact that Clark eventually received an intelligence briefing that debunked his theories about election fraud and yet continued to press on with allegations about irregularities in Georgia. When Rosen then instructed Clark to call Bjay Pak, who had already looked into the bogus allegations, Clark refused and instead began interviewing his own witnesses. At almost every turn, Clark’s theories were debunked by his colleagues, but he refused to believe them.

Nevertheless, this question—what to do with claims of subjective good faith that are objectively unreasonable—is worth taking seriously. The answer is that subjective good faith isn’t good (enough) faith if it stems from partisan delusion. The human capacity for self-deception is boundless, and citizens rightly expect that people in positions of power care more about the truth than their own, or their party’s, interest.

A defense for Clark based on his subjective good faith has the same problem as Trump’s defense in his first impeachment trial. Trump’s defense team argued that because he believed that his reelection was in the public’s interest, his behavior—pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his political opponent—was by definition taken in good faith and thus unimpeachable. Yet far from showing that Trump acted in good faith, this argument proves the opposite: Trump had so deluded himself into thinking that his interests were indistinguishable from those of the nation that he was incapable of acting with the sort of good faith that the defense of the Constitution requires.

The same could be said of Clark—and, for that matter, of John Eastman, the conservative lawyer advising Trump after the election who drafted a memo sketching out how Vice President Pence could upend the certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6 to keep Trump in power. Eastman and Clark appear to have begun from the conclusion that the only way that the election could have been legitimate is if Trump had won, and went in search of evidence—no matter how flimsy—to support that conclusion. And armed with such “evidence,” they developed legal arguments that, to any even slightly disinterested observer, would have seemed utterly detached from reality. It is this inability to separate their legal judgment from their partisan desires that is the most troubling aspect of their conduct.

So what can be done? Professional sanction by one’s fellow lawyers can be effective even if it falls short of formal action by courts or the bar. Following the Saturday Night Massacre, ABA president Chesterfield Smith issued a scathing statement, published in the New York Times and adopted in full a few days later by the entire ABA, calling on the courts and Congress to “repel the attacks which are presently being made on the justice system and the rule of law as we have known it in this country.” The D.C. Bar—and the bar association in California, where Eastman is barred—could make similar statements, whether or not the state bars themselves take any formal disciplinary action. In its statement after the Saturday Night Massacre, the ABA also publicly praised those lawyers who refused to dismiss the Watergate special counsel, and professional organizations could do the same here with respect to Rosen and Donoghue.

Unofficial social sanction—banishment from polite society—can also play a role. After former attorney general Alberto Gonzales resigned after his involvement in the scandal over the politicized firing of U.S. attorneys—an event that seems almost comically trivial in comparison with the attempt to overturn the 2020 election—he was effectively unemployable for several years given his disgraced reputation. This sent a message to future administration lawyers that their actions would have professional and personal consequences that would follow them after their time in office.

In this light, it’s notable that Jeffrey Clark is currently employed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance—an organization that claims to “protect constitutional freedoms” and “restore Americans’ fundamental rights”— as its “chief of litigation and director of strategy.” For now, anyone is entitled to have Clark as their lawyer, but it is jarring, to say the least, that Clark is the chief lawyer for an organization that claims to “protect constitutional freedoms” and “restore Americans’ fundamental rights.” Eastman, for his part, remains a senior fellow of the conservative Claremont Institute and head of its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. On Oct. 11, the institute released a statement defending Eastman and his legal advice, writing, “[A]ttempts to limit the Claremont Institute’s and John Eastman’s ability to express their views mark a dangerous escalation in the censorship now threatening American democracy.”

The very core of a profession is that it regulates itself according to high standards. To fail to act on those standards, formally or informally, doesn’t merely undermine deterrence for future misbehavior, it is also deeply demoralizing for the rest of the profession: the more than a million other lawyers in this country who swear an oath to defend the Constitution. People can change, and reputations can be rehabilitated. But that starts with a reckoning and an apology, neither of which appears to be forthcoming from either Clark or Eastman.

At the end of the day, the real protection against the anti-democratic efforts described by the Judiciary Committee comes down to the good faith of the people who hold power—their commitment to maintaining democracy and to allowing themselves to be restrained by the rule of law. Trump lacked that good faith, or anything close to an understanding of why it would matter. Clark, arguably, lacked it too. The problem, of course, is that good faith is a great deal harder to enforce by legislation than anything the Judiciary Committee proposes here. Professional and social consequences can do some of this work, but not all. That’s what makes the committee’s report so alarming: The events from November 2020 through January 2021 make it clear that the implicit restraint of fidelity to the rule of law is no longer a requirement for elevation to high office.

Large swaths of America’s vaccinated masses—along with elites in the White House, boardrooms, public schools, hospitals, and the mainstream media—are feeling frustrated with their unvaccinated neighbors. And understandably so. COVID-19 vaccines offer stellar protection against hospitalization and death. I despair that many thousands more unvaccinated Americans will die needlessly, that overcrowded hospitals will keep struggling to treat people with other medical emergencies, and that continuing spread of the coronavirus puts vulnerable people such as my grandparents at greater risk of contracting a breakthrough infection.But I also worry about the enmity I see between vaccine proponents and vaccine skeptics, especially when it’s directed not within America’s red tribe or blue tribe but across the growing chasm that divides these polarized factions. Even before the pandemic, the right and the left were defining themselves far too much through negative partisanship—that is, their disdain for the other side. So this is a perilous moment to confront an urgent new dispute that implicates life, death, bodily autonomy, freedom of movement, and the ability to get or keep a job in many fields.Although vaccine hesitancy exists on both the left and the right, the partisan gulf is undeniable: Pew Research Center found last month that 86 percent of Democratic voters but just 60 percent of Republican voters had received at least one shot. As David Leonhardt of The New York Times observes, almost every blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every red state. And COVID-19 deaths—which, in the early days of the pandemic, occurred disproportionately in liberal metro areas—are now likelier in red counties. Put simply, blue America’s higher vaccination rates are saving lives on a mass scale, while red America’s vaccine skepticism is yielding preventable mass death. Despite the high stakes, neither side should lash out at the other, precisely because these differences roughly correspond with culture-war divides. Contempt makes members of out-groups less likely to change their mind while raising the odds of factional violence.What’s more, the differences between red and blue America on vaccines are easy to overstate, and not just because many members of both tribes are still unvaccinated. The vaccine divide is rooted in different habits of mind, different relationships to institutions and authority, and different approaches to truth-seeking and sense-making. And far from polarizing along each of those dimensions, the red tribe and the blue tribe are both internally split on all of them. By now, readers of mainstream news sources are familiar with anti-vaccine and anti-mask sentiment in red America, even among people whose age or health status puts them at high risk from the coronavirus. But we spend little time reflecting on how the two tribes think alike, and the side of the culture war that favors mass vaccination—as I do—should engage in introspection too.  Others have noticed that America’s pandemic politics is messier than is commonly acknowledged. In the essays “The Extremely Weird Politics of Covid” and “The Coronavirus and the Conservative Mind,” Ross Douthat of the Times astutely wrote that America’s rival culture-war factions repeatedly reacted to COVID-19 in ways that reversed the roles many observers expected.Before 2020, the idea of President Donald Trump running the executive branch during a global pandemic would have filled many Democrats—as well as me—with fears of authoritarian overreactions and excesses. During a 2014 Ebola outbreak that killed just two Americans, Trump posted scores of panicked tweets, urging the shutdown of flights from West Africa and calling for President Barack Obama to resign. “Something very important, and indeed society changing, may come out of the Ebola epidemic that will be a very good thing,” he wrote. “NO SHAKING HANDS!” What would the famous germophobe and his base of purity-focused, openly xenophobic supporters do if a foreign pathogen was killing hundreds or thousands in the United States?As it turned out, Trump was too slow to shut down travel, too careless to avoid hosting super-spreader events, and too quick to declare victory over the coronavirus, predicting the pandemic would end by Easter 2020. And as Douthat observed, “Liberals have swung against any acknowledgment of what until very recently seemed like a core left perspective—that stringent public health responses are inherently authoritarian and inevitably ratify various forms of inequality and social control.”There are many illustrations of these shifts. The ACLU argued during the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009 that forcing workers to choose between getting a jab or losing their job “is coercive, invasive and unjustifiably intrudes upon their fundamental rights,” but now supports COVID-19 vaccine mandates.When New Yorkers were first becoming concerned about the virus spreading in Wuhan, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his underlings urged city residents to visit Chinatown. “There is no reason to avoid public settings, including subways and—most of all—our city’s famous Chinese restaurants and small businesses,” NYC Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a city-hall press release. “While it is understandable for some New Yorkers to feel concerned about the novel coronavirus situation, we cannot stand for racist and stigmatizing rhetoric, or for myths and half-truths about the virus.” De Blasio wound up requiring vaccination for various indoor activities. Now he has mandated vaccines for teachers and is considering expanding the requirement to encompass the city’s police officers and firefighters.Changing your mind is sometimes prudent as new information emerges. But however the left came to accept travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, and mandates, Douthat posited, “the bare acknowledgment that this weird flip took place might help a little with our polarization—tempering the liberal sense that the right is just a pro-Covid death cult and the right’s sense that the left wants us all to mask up and eat Soylent in our disease-free habitats forever.”In that spirit, I want to focus on vaccination in particular. At its most self-congratulatory, the blue tribe’s self-conception on this issue is best summed up by a line from that iconic progressive lawn sign: In this house we believe … science is real. You may know the allusion to the lyrics of “Science Is Real” by the indie band They Might Be Giants:
A scientific theory
Isn’t just a hunch or guess
It’s more like a question
That’s been put through a lot of tests
And when a theory emerges
Consistent with the facts
The proof is with science
The truth is with science
Science is real
But what does it mean to invoke that slogan during this pandemic? Does it mean letting scientists dictate policy? If so, which scientists? Or perhaps it means listening to scientific authorities at agencies such as the FDA, the CDC, and the World Health Organization? Yet even as the pandemic rages, significant factions in public health, academia, media, and other institutions where most people lean to the left have urged fellow citizens to be skeptical of authority and to judge policy recommendations by political and philosophical yardsticks as well as just scientific ones.If the blue establishment had consistently touted deference to scientific institutions, then blue-tribe contempt for red America’s non-scientific anxieties and mistrust of authority would be consistent. Since December 2020, when the FDA granted its first emergency-use authorization for a COVID-19 vaccine, the blue establishment has indeed been close to unanimous in urging Americans to trust its recommendation, deferring to its expertise, professionalism, and processes.Just two months earlier, however, public-health experts at The New England Journal of Medicine editorialized as follows in a blistering October 2020 critique of public-health agencies under Trump:The Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized, appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the MSNBC host Joy Reid, and many other progressives expressed doubts about whether they would trust any vaccine approved by the FDA before the 2020 election. Biden’s victory didn’t change the data before the FDA, nor did it produce an immediate turnover in agency staff. Since then, no one has cast substantive doubt on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which have rolled out all over the world, or the FDA’s review of them, which was competent. But this contrast—between the early fearmongering and the blue establishment’s strongly pro-vaccine stance now—shows that questioning public-health authorities is not inherently contemptible.Even as many liberals take pride in championing the scientific method, other significant factions in blue America demand different approaches––for example, analyzing the world through the lens of identity or power differentials and judging pandemic policies based not only on their immediate effects on morbidity and mortality, but on whether they deem them “anti-racist.”After George Floyd’s death, more than 1,200 public-health workers signed a letter endorsing protests against racism and police violence but not protests against stay-at-home orders. At educational institutions and corporations, some of the suddenly ubiquitous training sessions that purport to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion teach, per the claims of the activist Tema Okun, that believing in objective decision making is a form of “white-supremacy culture.” “Assume,” she advises, “that everybody has a valid point.” The Urban Institute, a major Washington, D.C., think tank that touts itself as “the trusted source for unbiased, authoritative insights that inform consequential choices about the well-being of people and places,” recently published a staffer’s assertion that objectivity and rigor are “harmful research practices.” The writer added that researchers often define rigor as following protocol meticulously “instead of ensuring data are contextualized and grounded in community experience.”My point isn’t to wholly endorse or reject any particular orientation. I happen to agree with the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker that rationality is presently underrated, not overrated. I also believe Lisa Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease expert whom I interviewed late last year, when she describes how communicating with underserved communities is undervalued in public-health circles. Fitzpatrick is Black, and she has important insight into why racial representation in public-health agencies is vital.Many of blue America’s favored slogans—including both “Science is real” and “Listen to women of color”—tend to elide something that most people on the left and right grasp intuitively: No bromide can relieve us of the need to think critically, balance competing insights, and render prudent judgments. Some of what institutions say is trustworthy, and some of it is not. Some public-health experts are scrupulous truth tellers while others use the language of science to mask their racial bias or political agenda. What activists call “lived experiences” have a place in public discourse, but should not be elevated or amplified when contradicted by rigorous, objective data. The rapper Nicki Minaj recently spread an alarmist claim about a vaccine side effect that her cousin’s friend supposedly suffered. It was both uncorroborated and inconsistent with any reliable account of even rare vaccine side effects.The fight over vaccines is likely to rage on. The stakes are too high, pandemic emotions are too raw, and the issues of bodily autonomy are too sensitive for the issue to abate. But the fact that two people are on opposite sides of the vaccine divide does not necessarily or typically mean they are at odds about core values or even about the habits of mind that a responsible person ought to marshal. As MIT researchers discovered after a massive study of social-media users, people from opposite sides in the culture war are sometimes diligently probing the very same data and earnestly reaching different conclusions. Other times, when engaged in nonscientific thinking, someone in the blue tribe might be involved in alternative habits of mind that, in other circumstances, would typically be associated with the red tribe—or vice versa. These convergences don’t lower the stakes. But they should lower the temperature.

So many states have restricted access to abortion so severely that people in large swaths of the country feel they have no options if they want to terminate a pregnancy. But technically, those who want an abortion still have options. It’s just that few have heard of them.Pregnant people in Texas, or in any other U.S. state, can visit an array of websites that will mail them two pills—mifepristone and misoprostol—that will induce a miscarriage when used in the first trimester of pregnancy and possibly even later. The so-called self-managed abortion is therefore an option at least six weeks further into a pregnancy than the controversial new Texas law’s six-week “heartbeat” cutoff for an abortion at a clinic. Though people in other states have several websites to choose from, Texans can visit Aid Access, a website that provides the pills for $105 or less based on income.
The Atlantic / Leger
Only 5 percent of Americans have heard of Aid Access, though, and only 13 percent have heard of Plan C, a website that provides information on different mail-order-abortion services by state, according to a new Atlantic/Leger poll. Some people may vaguely know that medication abortions exist, but don’t know the names of the organizations that mail them. However, most poll respondents said that they weren’t aware of any backup options for abortion if a clinic is not accessible. The poll surveyed a representative sample of 1,001 adults across the country from September 24 to September 26, and its results mirror my experiences interviewing two dozen random young Texans recently: None had heard of Aid Access, and the few who had heard of Plan C were confusing it with Plan B, the morning-after pill.The results also jibe with the experiences of Plan C’s founders. Though they’ve seen a large increase in web traffic, particularly from Texas, since Texas’s abortion restrictions went into effect, “we know that the biggest challenge is to try to get this word out,” says Francine Coeytaux, one of the site’s co-founders. The doctor behind Aid Access, Rebecca Gomperts, told me that according to her own research, 60 percent of her clients did not know about abortion pills before they found her service.Nationwide, opponents of abortion rights appear to be winning. Though a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the new Texas “heartbeat” law, Texas appealed, and the law remains in effect—at least for now. Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed another bill that narrows the window for medication abortions from 10 weeks to seven weeks and bans the mailing of abortion-inducing medications. The Supreme Court is composed predominantly of abortion-rights opponents, and states have enacted 106 different restrictions on abortion this year, the most in one year since 1973, according to the pro-abortion-rights Guttmacher Institute.Many people in these states, upon getting pregnant, will simply track down a mail-order-abortion service through the internet. But the picture is more worrisome for those who lack internet access or proficiency. “Being in that state of desperation and feeling like you have no options” exacts a mental toll, says Abigail Aiken, a University of Texas professor who has researched self-managed abortion. Some number of those people might harm themselves in a misguided attempt to end the pregnancy. “It would be remiss of us to underestimate the lengths people will go to sometimes when they can’t access the care they really need,” Aiken says.Abortion pills work best in the first trimester of pregnancy, but it takes time to find the service and order the pills, and for them to arrive and make their way through customs. This is one reason Aid Access is now allowing people who aren’t pregnant to order the pills to have on hand and use later if they experience an unwanted pregnancy. The pills don’t expire for about two years.Aiken wants Texas schools to start teaching about abortion as part of health class. However, this is unlikely to happen in a state that still does not mandate any kind of sex education.Coeytaux, from Plan C, suggests that something darker is at work: that abortion clinics and funds are not sufficiently promoting self-managed abortion, either out of a lack of trust or because they fear it will quell the sense of emergency over the war on reproductive rights. Indeed, when I visited the website of one Texas abortion fund recently, it said, “We do not provide advice on self managed abortion care.” (The fund did not respond to a request for comment.) Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion clinic with sites in Texas, does have a page on self-managed abortion, but in an email, its CEO, Amy Hagstrom Miller, said that because Texas does not allow the dispensing of abortion pills by mail, medical professionals “cannot advise Texans how to obtain self-managed abortion medications in Texas.”The struggle for abortion rights has been about proving that restrictions are an “undue burden” for women—a burden that mail-order abortions arguably lessen. “The strategy of the lawyers and the providers and everybody who’s fighting for our rights … is ‘Oh my God, look what happened. In Texas, there are no options anymore,’” Coeytaux says. “If you come along and say, ‘Maybe your problems of access have just been solved, because you don’t have to travel, you don’t have to pay that much,’ that undermines the Oh my God, this is really terrible.”Of course, other factors might be discouraging people from pursuing self-managed abortions. The procedure involves severe cramping and heavy bleeding, and in the states that are most hostile to abortion rights, women who self-induce their own abortions must rely on hotlines and text support from faraway doctors if they get scared or experience complications. Aid Access is based in Austria, beyond the reach of Texas law enforcement and the new abortion-medication measure, but the site still inhabits a legal gray area: Five states have criminalized managing one’s own abortion, and about two dozen people have been prosecuted for self-managing an abortion since 2000. Mainstream medical research generally suggests that self-managed abortions are safe and effective, but anti-abortion-rights groups vehemently disagree and have published their own reports saying they are dangerous. Whatever the reason, far fewer women in the U.S. have medication abortions than in some other countries: Medication abortions accounted for 40 percent of all U.S. abortions in 2017, compared with more than 90 percent in Finland and more than 80 percent in Mexico City, according to the Guttmacher Institute.Sites like Aid Access are quickly becoming the sworn enemies of abortion opponents. “At a minimum, the FDA should warn women, as it has in the past, that it is not safe to use imported drugs bought off the internet that have not undergone agency scrutiny and evaluation as to purity, safety, and efficacy,” Randy O’Bannon, the director of research at National Right to Life, told me via email. “And those entities illegally importing and selling those unauthorized drugs should be prosecuted for those violations and they should certainly be held criminally and financially responsible for any injuries associated with their products.”Aiken and others, though, doubt American laws will affect Aid Access, because the organization already operates in countries where abortion is illegal. When I asked Gomperts if she feels like she’s under threat from the Texas laws, she said, “Aid Access is serving women who need access to safe abortions. It doesn’t matter where they live or what the legal situation is in that country.” Unfortunately, few Americans know that she’s available to serve them.

The current breakdown of the global supply chain threatens to change the future of the world. If this worsens, the fabric of the global economy will be torn – though I don’t know exactly how many months it would take – and reconstructing it will take longer than breaking it did.

Similar disruptions have been seen in wars when production facilities were destroyed and maritime trade was disrupted or suspended. In World War II, imposing economic disruption on the enemy while preventing the enemy from doing the same to you was if not the essence of the war then certainly critical. We are not seeing anywhere near those levels of disruption now, but the mechanics of what we are seeing have more in common with war than with ordinary economic events. Right now, it appears to be a major inconvenience. Over time, it could be much more.

In mid-2020, I wrote a piece about the course of the COVID-19 crisis. I argued (not very originally) that there were two courses the economic fallout of the pandemic could take: recession or depression. The possibility of robust growth was not in my mind an option. I defined recession as a financial event, painful but ultimately recoverable without substantial, long-term damage. I defined depression as the physical destruction of the economy, with companies and banks failing and ceasing to exist, massive unemployment, and so on. Depression might have a financial component, as the Great Depression in the United States did, or a military component, as it had in much of Europe after both world wars. A recession may take years to recover from. A depression takes a generation. I also said that in my mind, the pandemic would not cause a depression. My thinking was that in due course the pandemic would either subside on its own or give way to a medical solution. The key factor was how long the measures used to combat the disease would be in place. The longer the time, the greater chance of depression.

We are now seeing the physical degradation of the global economic system with shortages and disruptions that are not soluble by financial measures. We are seeing a phenomenon that appears to consist of many systems failing and interacting at the same time. Everyone has a different theory for the failures, but there is one that virtually everyone selects as a central cause, even if they disagree about its origins.

In the United States, there is a two-part thesis. The first is that overly generous unemployment and stimulus benefits reduce the willingness of many to work. People can make more money by staying at home. The problem with this claim is that someone who forgoes a salary for benefits wasn’t earning much to begin with. They would be relatively low-paid workers with little if any savings. It is hard to imagine they could not be coaxed back into the workforce. And it assumes the warehouse or restaurant the employee used to work at could outbid the benefit but either didn’t or wouldn’t. Certainly, I haven’t seen the balance sheets of these companies, but having relatively low-paying jobs left unfilled shouldn’t paralyze a business. In addition, in many sectors, job vacancies are at levels far above the point where they would be influenced by federal benefits. Benefits did not create massive labor shortages in the area of skilled labor, professional work, management and so on. Yet there are shortages there as well.

The second part of the thesis is the withdrawal of women from the workforce for home care. This is more persuasive than the first part of the theory but still flawed. U.S. labor statistics say some 1.8 million women remain out of work, but that doesn’t necessarily give us the full picture. Most of the schools that were initially closed have since been reopened. Some women have had babies during the pandemic and have thus recused themselves from the workforce, but others haven’t. About 40 percent of U.S. homes have children under the age of 18, and about 20 percent have children under the age of nine. Every household, I’m sure, has different standards for how young is too young for a child to be left alone, and different tolerances for how much money is acceptable to forego for child care. We must always remember that many of us work because we have to. The number of women who either do not need their paycheck or have no way to care for a school-age child seems insufficient to explain the magnitude of the loss in the labor force.

Importantly, many of these theories use the American model as the essential one, but what may explain shortages in the U.S. may not hold true for another country and vice versa. Some of these countries have vastly different cultures, job markets and so on. In China and Israel, for example, the shortage is in workers with technical expertise. Anecdotally, I know that in Italy, where it’s common for extended family members to live together, mothers may work while grandmothers care for the children.

What I think is clear is that we do not know why there has been a global reduction of labor, unless it took place only among those who don’t need to work (and those people have Zoom). That is not a good answer, but it has some value. This is what is most frightening about this development. Many agree that a labor shortage is a key driver of the supply chain problem. Yet the dominant theories of what happened, while not refuted, have many weaknesses. That means that there must at least be additional explanations. So, we are facing a depression, originating not in financial events but in the displacement of people, transport and other elements. Facing a system failure with a known cause is one thing. Facing one for which you have no model is another.

I lead a department within a medium-size company, where we’ve had a lot of discussions about making our hiring practices more inclusive. Although we do well on the gender front, we are about 85 percent white. Our motives for pursuing more diversity are somewhat altruistic — we pay very well, so hiring minorities makes a small contribution to evening out the wealth gap — but also business-related, as our client base is becoming increasingly diverse, and a more diverse work force might help us to better meet their needs.

We work in a niche industry, and our company has little name recognition outside it; very few minorities apply for open positions. When we hire, we encourage current employees to reach out to their social, professional and alumni networks and spread the word. The trouble is that our mostly white employees have mostly white networks. So we’ve begun to recruit at colleges and universities that historically have more minorities, and also via minority-focused organizations and networks. I’m attending several recruitment events via these organizations and will speak with potential candidates and collect résumés. I usually am allowed to bring one or two other people. When I asked one of the Black women who work for me to come along, she declined. She complained that I’d be parading her around as proof that we have minorities at the company (which felt insulting to her) and that it was dishonest to imply to potential candidates that we have more Black employees than we do.

Should I ask other minority colleagues to join me? I don’t mean to misrepresent our company, yet showing a more diverse group of people at these events could help us increase diversity. When I was graduating from college as a female engineer 25 years ago, many employers were represented only by men, and it was hard for me to see where a young woman fit in. The companies that sent female representatives instantly felt more welcoming to me. I was not surprised to learn that most of the companies were majority male. And though I didn’t make job decisions based simply on who was sent to recruit new hires, first impressions do count, and I’m sure they influenced my decisions about where to apply. Name Withheld

Your own experience as a job candidate is telling. Seeing a female engineer at the recruitment event didn’t mislead you about the makeup of the company. It did suggest that the company was making an effort — that there was thought given to the concerns a female prospect might have had about being a woman in a male-dominated profession. That’s why I don’t accept the imputation of dishonesty. In the course of conversation with a potential candidate of color, you and your colleague could say that you have fewer minority employees than you’d like and that the company wants to do something about that. You don’t want to give people the impression that their contribution to racial diversity is all you care about, of course. Yet many Black job prospects will find it helpful to have someone of their racial identity who’s able to discuss what it’s like at the workplace.

To speak our language these days with enlightenment is to harbor an ongoing sense that there are words and expressions that come to mind but that, upon reflection, we shouldn’t utter. I refer not only to terms like the N-word — an easy case for self-censorship — but also to an eternally morphing assemblage of locutions that pedants, our kids, human resources and the Twitter herd say we shouldn’t use anymore. Terms that are hardly egregious but maybe just aren’t the best look.

In these latter cases we might go easier on ourselves because we’re being urged to let lexicographic paranoia steamroll common sense and basic humanity for justifications that don’t stand up as well as we might suppose. The list of supposedly problematic expressions is getting so long as to seem almost willfully copious, almost as if we were actively searching for terms to ban as a kind of sport.

On the phraseological front, for instance, I am told that people’s tendency to pepper their speech with the preface “to be honest” is a no-no: redundant because we can assume that in the default case, all people are being honest when they speak.

But expressions that underscore one’s sincerity aren’t just verbal flourishes; they help make communication work. For one, they are no novel degression from some mythical past when people didn’t flag their honesty while speaking. I think of Edna Ferber’s well-loved, century-old Emma McChesney books about a flinty divorcée making her way in the America of the period as a single parent. Ferber’s characters do a lot of talking, and so reading their stories gives you a sense of what ordinary American English was like around 1915, with lines of dialogue such as “Honestly, Mrs. Buck, you know I’d try to sell pretzels in London if you asked me to.”

As of today, all of the 2021 Nobel Prizes have now been announced, and this post reviews the remarkable history of the Nobel Prize from 1901-2021 using maps, charts, and tables to help summarize my ten most interesting observations about the Nobel laureates by country, geographical region, gender, religion, research affiliation, and age. 
According to the official Nobel website, 947 laureates from 80 different countries and 28 organizations have been awarded Nobel Prizes between 1901 and 2021 for a grand total of 975 Nobel recipients (individuals and organizations). Four individuals (Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, and Frederick Sanger) and two organizations have been honored with Nobel prizes more than once (the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), which means that 943 unique individuals (885 men and 58 women) and 26 unique organizations have received the Nobel Prize in total. 
Looking back on the 121-year history of Nobel Prizes, here are my top ten most interesting observations about Nobel Prizes and the 943 individual Nobel laureates based on the maps above, and the underlying data for laureates by country, gender, religion, research affiliation, and age. 
1. Western Countries Dominate Nobel Awards. The top map above shows the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to laureates in eight geographical areas and one country (South Africa, since that one country represents most of the awards for Africa), based on this list of Nobel laureates by country. The list includes a total of 1,174 country affiliations for Nobel Prize recipients because many of the 943 individual Nobel laureates are listed for more than one country when the official Nobel website mentions multiple countries for recipients — usually the country of birth and the country where the laureate resides when the prize is awarded. For example, eight of the 13 Nobel laureates this year have dual-country affiliations: David Card for Economics (born in Canada, current affiliation is US), Joshua Angrist for Economics (born in the US, lived and taught in Isreal, current affiliation is the US), Guido Imbens for Economics (born in the Netherlands, current affiliation is the US), Maria Ressa for Peace (born in the Philippines, current affiliation is the US), David MacMillan for Chemistry (born in the US, current affiliation is the US), Syukuro Manabe for Physics (born in Japan, current affiliation is the US), Ardem Patapoutian for Medicine (born in Lebanon, current affiliation is the US), and Abdulrazak Gurnah for Literature (born in Tanzania, current affiliation is the UK). 
One of the most interesting observations about the map above is that it shows that just two areas of the world: a) the US and Canada (424 laureates) and b) Western Europe (507 laureates) together represent 931 and nearly 80% of the 1,174 country affiliations associated with Nobel laureates since 1901. When the 15 Nobel laureates from Australia and New Zealand are included, the share of Nobel Prizes awarded to laureates in Western countries (946) increases to 80.6%.
The second map above is redrawn to reflect the relative size of each of eight major geographic areas based on their shares of Nobel Prizes received. The proportional map helps to further illustrate graphically the dominance of US/Canada and Western Europe for Nobel laureates – those two areas represent about 80% of the world map.

2. Top Ten Nobel-winning Countries. The United States is by far the world’s leading country for receiving Nobel Prizes with an astonishing 398 laureates over the last 121 years (and 34% of all 1,174 laureates), which is almost three times more than the second-highest ranked country — the United Kingdom, with 136 awards (see table above). Following the UK is Germany at No. 3 (111 awards), No. 4 France (70), and Sweden at No. 5 tied with Russia/Soviet Union (32), followed by No. 6 Japan with 29 Nobel Prizes, Canada with 28 awards, Switzerland with 27, and No. 10 Netherlands and Austria tied with 22 awards. 
To put America’s dominance Nobel prize dominance in perspective, US laureates have received more Nobel awards (398) than the 381 prizes awarded to laureates in the next five countries combined (UK, Germany, France, Sweden, and Russia/Soviet Union). To put the dominance of the top two countries in perspective, laureates from the US and UK together have received 534 Nobel Prizes, which is almost half (45%) of all 1,174 laureates since 1901, and individuals in the top three countries (US, UK, and Germany) have together won 645 Nobel Prizes or nearly 55% of all awards. 
Here’s a list of Nobel Prizes per capita via Wikipedia. 
3. Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East together account for only 132 Nobel Prizes by country in total (11.2% of the 1,174 total), even though those areas together represent about 85% of the world’s population.
4. Asia. Laureates in Asia alone have received 65 Nobel prizes or 5.5% of the total prizes by country affiliation with nearly 55% of the world’s population. Nobel Prizes for Japanese laureates (29) represent slightly less than half of all Asian awards, followed by India (12) and China (8). Adjusted for the huge population of Asia (more than 4 billion), the number of Asian laureates per 100 million of 1.76 is actually slightly lower than the number of African laureates per 100 million of 1.83. In contrast, both the US/Canada and Western Europe have been awarded more than 100 Nobel Prizes per 100 million people, 
5. Middle East. Countries in the Middle East have received 24 Nobel Prizes, with slightly more than half (13) of the awards in that region going to Israeli laureates. Of the 24 Nobel laureates from the Middle East, half (12) received either the literature (3) or peace prize (9). For the remaining 12 Nobel Prizes from that region in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics, 9 of those laureates were Israeli, one was Egyptian (chemistry), one was Turkish (chemistry), and one was Lebanese (medicine). 
6. Africa is the region of the world with the fewest Nobel Prize recipients – only 22 in total, and only 11 outside of South Africa, even though Africa has a population of about 1 billion. compared to only 1.83 Nobel Prizes awarded per 100 million Africans. Within Africa, Eastern Africa has the fewest Nobel laureates at only 0.46 per 100 million. 
7. Jewish Nobel Laureates. Remarkably, Jews and people of Jewish descent represent less than 0.20% of the world’s population, but they represent 24.5% of all Nobel laureates (231 out of 944). This year there are five Jewish Nobel laureates: David Julius (medicine) and Joshua Angrist (economics). 
Here are the Jewish shares of the six individual Nobel Prizes:
a. Economics: 35 out of 89 or 39.3% (196.5 times the Jewish share of the population) b. Medicine: 57 out of 225, or 25.3% (126.5 times the Jewish share of the population) c. Physics: 59 out of 218 or 27.1% (135.3 times their share of the population) d. Chemistry: 35 out of 188 or 18.6% (93 times their share of the population) e. Literature: 15 out of 118 or 12.7% (64 times their share of the population) f. Peace: 9 out of 109 or 8.3% (41 times their share of the population)

8. Nobel Laureates by Gender. Since 1901 885 men have been awarded Nobel Prizes compared to only 58 female laureates (see chart above). Marie Curie was honored twice — she received the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics and the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — so 58 individual women have received a total of 59 Nobel prizes. By percentage, men have received 93.8% of all Nobel awards to individuals compared to a 6.2% share for women, which is a male-female Nobel Prize ratio of 15.1-to-1. By field, women have received Nobel Prizes as follows:
a. Physics: 4b. Chemistry: 7c. Medicine: 12d. Literature: 16e. Peace: 18f. Economics: 2
Note that 34 of the 58 female laureates received a Nobel Prize for either literature or peace, and those two categories together represent 58.6% of the total female Nobel laureates. This year, only one of the 13 laureates is female: Maria Ressa was awarded the Peace Prize. The record for the most Nobel prizes awarded to women in a single year was set in 2009 when there were five female laureates out of 13 total. 

9. Research Affiliations of Nobel Laureates. The table above shows the top ten research affiliations of Nobel laureates at the time of the announcement. 

10. Nobel Prizes by Age. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to laureates as young as 17-year old Malala Yousafzai (Peace prize in 2014) and as old as 97-year old John Goodenough, one of the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize for chemistry and one year older than the previous oldest laureate — Arthur Ashkin who shared the 2018 Nobel prize in physics at age 96. Based on the full list of laureates by age, the chart above shows the age distribution of the 943 Nobel laureates, whose median age was 60 years old when they received the Nobel award. By individual age, there are more laureates who received a Nobel Prize at age 61 or 63 years (33 individuals for each age) than any other age, followed by ages 56 years (32 laureates) and 60 years (31 laureates) and 64 years (30 laureates). The ages of this year’s 13 Nobel laureates are 53 (2), 54, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65, 66, 73 (2), 90 (2). 
Bottom Line: The United States along with Western Europe to a lesser extent have come under intense criticism in recent years, especially from the left, for a variety of supposed sins: white supremacy, colonialism, toxic masculinity, systemic racism, patriarchy, and the list goes on. What doesn’t get nearly as much attention, appreciation, or recognition are the scientific discoveries that disproportionately reflect the significant contributions of male scientists in America and Western Europe. All seven of the science-related Nobel laureates this year in Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry are males, four in the US, two from Germany, and one each from Italy and the UK. And that domination of male Nobel laureates from the US and Western Europe has been consistent throughout the 121-year history of the merit-based Nobel prizes in the sciences. 
It’s hard to know and measure exactly how much the ingenuity, genius, and innovative research of the hundreds of Nobel laureates have contributed to advancing our collective standards of living, but it’s likely significant. In an era that lacks any sense of gratitude, let me express my thanks to the contributions of Nobel scientists who were acknowledged for their talents in a merit-based competition that hasn’t yet been influenced by the growing woke mindset in the US obsessed with “equity” at the expense of merit. But it’s predictable that the Nobel Prizes in the sciences will eventually, if they aren’t already, be criticized for being “too male,” “too white,” and “too US-Euro centric,” with demands for greater “diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE).” If and when that happens, the integrity and tradition of Nobel Prizes in science will certainly DIE. 
The post Looking back at the remarkable history of the Nobel Prize from 1901-2021 using maps, charts, and tables appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

When even an inveterate social and economic liberal like Boris Johnson can give a speech at the Conservative party conference railing against big business and invoking a paternalist High Tory dirigisme as the governing ideology of the new era, it is a sign of a historic shift in the tectonic plates of politics. When the party’s neoliberal faction, whose decades-long hostile takeover of British conservatism had until now reigned unchallenged, is reduced to mourning its new political marginalisation, we can celebrate the end of a disastrous era, and the dawning of another. It’s as if post-liberalism has won the political argument: we are all post-liberals now. 
What was a few short years ago the preserve of marginal discontents is now the hegemonic discourse: it is the liberals who are on the back foot, dreaming up ever-more elaborate conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of their ideology.  
Yet Britain’s most prominent post-liberal theorists are not claiming victory, and are instead mourning their defeat. In a plaintive recent essay, Blue Labour’s Jonathan Rutherford has claimed that “we imagined Blue Labour was about renewal, but, in hindsight, it was already too late. One thinks of the Owl of Minerva taking flight ‘only with the falling of dusk.’” For Rutherford, “Labour no longer possesses the intellectual and philosophical resources for a political renaissance and it does not look beyond itself to acquire them”.

Instead of seizing this historic moment, the Labour Party has lost itself in the abstruse theological disputes of a liberalism increasingly unmoored from reality, and become ever more feverish in policing its ideological purity as its voter base vanishes into history.
To understand the sense of gloom pervading British post-liberalism, we must return to its diagnosis of the West’s political crisis. The argument is this: liberalism contains within its essential nature the seeds of its own destruction. By dividing communities, social and economic classes and nations into a constellation of individuals warring among each other in search of self-advantage, liberalism negates any possibility of collective action or solidarity. Essentially a northwest European secular heresy derived from the Protestant Reformation, liberalism seeks to remake the world in its own image, projecting its own ideal form onto utterly different societies in a mission as doomed to failure as America’s wars in the Islamic world. 
In its purest economic form, liberalism, the ideological nursemaid of capitalism, destroys its social and fiscal base in pursuit of an idealist model, with disastrous results. It is increasingly rejected by voters across most of the Western world. And yet it hangs on to tenuous political power through its capture of the economic elites. Aware of their slipping grasp on power, encircled by enemies, liberals have retreated into fundamentalist fervour, fighting a rearguard battle against democracy while enforcing purity within their own ranks. This is why we are mired in the culture wars; this is why we are trapped in an increasingly heated political interregnum; and this is why political crisis has become endemic across the West. The rulers have lost the consent of the ruled; even when the insurgents win elections, they have no control over the actually-existing levers of power.
More from this authorHow France conquered EuropeBy Aris Roussinos
It is in this context that the Blue Labour theorist Adrian Pabst has published Postliberal Politics: The Coming Era of Renewal, which functions as an excellent introductory guide to post-liberal thought for wavering liberals, and a warning to current post-liberals to shun the temptations of authoritarianism. 
For Pabst too, the Covid era transpired to be a “false dawn” for post-liberalism, as “the winners of the shutdown were tech oligarchs such as Amazon, Google or China’s Alibaba while family-owned businesses folded and inner-city shops were boarded up.” Instead of ushering in the post-liberal moment, then, “the ‘new normal’ is largely an intensification of the forces that dominated the old status quo: capitalism, nationalism and technocracy. Instead of resolving the interregnum, politics seems caught in an impasse.”
In setting out his stall, Pabst outlines the failings of a zombie liberalism still holding onto power, in which a dominant class “prefers a world of individual atomized exchange underwritten by an ideology of globalism”, and where  democracy and citizenship are “debased and become merely functional arrangements to advance the interests of a new cosmopolitan class”. 
Yet the most striking aspect of Pabst’s book is not his rejection of liberalism but rather his rejection of existing Rightist strands of post-liberalism, most notably their American incarnation. The dominant theme of Pabst’s book is one of preserving post-liberalism’s position as a strand of Left-wing thought which upholds the genuine achievements of liberalism, a socially conservative branch of socialism rather than an economically interventionist faction of conservatism. 
For Pabst, it is the Rightist “self-styled post-liberals” who are the enemy within: “behind their version of ‘Left on the economy’ and ‘Right on culture,”’ he argues, “lurk forms of statism and moralism that will do nothing to secure shared prosperity or plural societies.” Pabst warns that post-liberalism is too often “associated with a politics that is anti-liberal and anti-modern, animated by a reactionary desire to roll back the new rights of minorities and to return to social and political exclusion along the axes of race, sex or class”.
Taking aim at the idealised Mitteleuropa of prominent American conservative intellectuals, Pabst argues that while Hungary and Poland are superficially attractive for managing to “combine a protectionist state with pro-family welfare and education policies”, in reality they are largely reliant on fiscal dumping and deregulation to attract foreign capital while sliding into authoritarian nationalism that undermines constitutional freedoms.” 
“What may look post-liberal turns out to be mostly anti-liberal,” warns Pabst, arguing that “behind the simplistic slogan ‘left on the economy and right on culture’ lurks an admiration for a politics of state control and the rule of strongmen,” an “authoritarianism sliding into novel forms of fascism” in which “authoritarian systems extend state surveillance into all spheres of societal and personal life, co-opting any independent movement and persecuting non-conformist groups.” 
Suggested readingAll hail Good King BorisBy Maurice Glasman
Yet the obvious retort is, of course, that this system of surveillance and enforced conformity is a perfect description of actually-existing liberalism, at least in its deranged 21st-century incarnation. For the unfortunate reality for a viable Left-wing post-liberalism is that, as Rutherford laments, it is an entirely marginal force on the political Left. Even Blue Labour’s relatively anodyne platform of worker-led cooperatives, state support for family formation, reshoring vital industries and enforcing currently-existing immigration laws sees them consistently called fascists or even Nazis by their own party’s activist base. 
A wild and paranoid recent review of Pabst’s book illustrates the problem. “The truth is,” writes the reviewer, “that he has hitched his wagon to the post-liberal narrative of the national-populist right assiduously promoted by the UnHerd website,” whose “editors and contributors formed the core participants at the Windsor Castle symposium acknowledged in Pabst’s preface as the inspiration for his book.” 
I should probably add here that I attended this conference, and while membership of some secretive reactionary cabal under royal patronage would be a gratifying experience, it is as divorced from reality as the rest of the review, which is a classic example of the conspiratorial hysteria with which ageing liberals console themselves for the collapse of their ideological dreamworld.
Despite Pabst taking great pains to demarcate a Left-wing post-liberal space from that of the national populist right, the reviewer goes on — and on, and on — to claim that he “can’t resist the temptation to promote national-populist — and alt-right — conspiracy theories about ‘the fusion of woke capitalism with extreme identity politics’” that “Post-liberalism is a right-wing, nationalist project seeking to incorporate and hegemonise sections of the left by splitting it from its social liberal base.” 
If this is the Left among which Blue Labour aims to carve out a post-liberal movement, then the project surely has little chance of success. With Labour so internally divided, and further from power than they have been in decades, the chances of guiding the party towards a humane post-liberal ethos and then leading it to electoral victory seem impossibly remote. So why waste time on a failing political party whose activists hate you and everything you stand for? 
This is the essential conundrum of Blue Labour, and the reason for its perpetual marginalisation. Post-liberals should leave political tribalism to Americans: politics is simply the means to reshape the state in your image, and parties are merely useful vessels to do so. Logically, the conclusion is that the only current means of shaping British politics is as a faction within the ruling Conservative party, whose dominance of British politics is unchallenged; it is already making post-liberal noises to anchor its new hold on the post-industrial north, without any serious intellectual direction or engagement. 
Whether we like it or not, post-liberalism’s greatest opportunity to sway the course of politics is on the centre-right — and the road to doing so is through ideological capture of the state’s institutions, just as the neoliberals did forty years ago. 
Suggested readingA post-liberal reading listBy Giles Fraser
The key to victory is surely to utilise the power of the state through democratic means to break the anti-democratic liberal hold on the political system and advance post-liberalism from a matter of debate among a tiny handful of academics and writers to a functioning political programme. Yet Pabst, with a watchful eye on the authoritarian statism of China and Russia, and on the illiberal democracy of Hungary and Poland, views the untapped power of Leviathan with alarm. “Unmediated state sovereignty on the model of Machiavelli’s Prince or Hobbes’ Leviathan risks authoritarian control at home and anarchy abroad,” he warns,  so “the challenge before us is to turn the existing platforms into public utilities owned by the people, not the state, and to run them as mutuals – with private providers competing on the provision of services.” 
These are noble goals and a vast improvement on the alternatives, yet there is an avoidance of the practical path towards implementing them. How do you break the power of global corporations and the tech oligarchs? How do you unprise the grasp of what Pabst terms the “sham clerisy who dominate much of the media, education and the civil service” on the national institutions they have commandeered for themselves? 
Little platoons, however right and just their cause, can function only within a broader army structure to nurture and guide them. The only viable means to victory, then, is surely by employing the power of the state just as the neoliberals did, and the most realistic means of doing so is through centre-right. The managerial-technocratic Labour Party, which has junked the economic radicalism of the Corbyn manifesto while doubling down on liberal identity politics, certainly doesn’t intend to. 
If post-liberals do not do this, authoritarians will, as we see in China’s crackdown on oligarchs like Ali Baba’s Jack Ma and on tech platforms. Paradoxical though it may seem, the path to a radical localism surely lies through a resurgent state which must then give away the power it has reluctantly assumed to bring about necessary reform. It is as if post-liberals have adopted the teleological assumptions of liberals, that the arc of history will drop power into their laps, without also adopting their hunger for power, and their willingness to use the state to achieve it.
Pabst is correct to state that both the Conservative party and the Republicans remain beholden to capital, and superficially adopt post-liberal language to win popular support while continuing disastrous liberal policies. Yet there are reasons for hope. As the Marxist Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbado observes in his new book The Great Recoil, the new statism is a distinct phenomenon from the crude populisms of the decade’s first half and is still a malleable force, waiting to be shaped. 
The task of doing so can be taken up by either Right or Left, or by a post-liberal synthesis of the two. Younger conservatives in America, as defined in Park McDougald’s incisive survey of the New Millennial Right as the conservative analogue of “millennial socialism”, are “frustrated with the politics of their elders”, and want “a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal”. In time, they will capture the institutions of conservatism, just as in time the millennial socialists will capture those of the Democrats. 
Suggested readingThe Tories can save Blue LabourBy Giles Fraser
In Britain too, much of the energy on the younger Right is towards forging a confident, developmentalist conservative state that corrects the most harmful errors of liberalism, and spreads economic growth and social solidarity across every corner of the nation. Time may be on the post-liberals’ side, in the long term, but only if they do not waste today’s narrow window of opportunity on either preaching to the unconvertible or shrinking from their most viable path to power.
Throughout his book, Pabst diagnoses the problems with unerring accuracy yet avoids the obvious conclusion. There is a missing element, the how, by which post-liberalism triumphs. A war only ends when one side wins decisively: post-liberals are unwilling to deliver the final blow, instead mourning their ostracisation from a rump political left which despises them as existential enemies. 
Without a Constantine to convert, without the power of a Rome behind them, post-liberals will find themselves trapped in the political catacombs forever, meekly hiding from a savaging in the amphitheatre. They cannot convert the liberal clerisy from within: they will be forced to defeat them from without, before authoritarians do. The gap between conservative and socialist post-liberals has always been largely cosmetic: perhaps the future of Blue Labour now lies in shaping a dirigiste, paternalist and communitarian Red Toryism.

For a certain sort of American liberal, the former Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become an icon. That word is now grossly overused — everything is “iconic” today — but appropriate in its original sense (a symbol of devotion, to be venerated) for the secular worship of “RBG”. Images of Ginsburg can be bought on sweatshirts, mugs and other mundane items, usually showing her “trademark” lace collar.
Ginsburg-worship is just another way to proclaim your place on the political and cultural spectrum, but it might actually have changed American history. In 2013, just as RBG memes were becoming popular, Ginsburg was urged by some supporters to step down and allow President Barack Obama and a Democratic Senate to appoint a younger liberal replacement. Then aged 80 and suffering recurrent cancer, she refused. She died in office in 2020, allowing Donald Trump and Republican senators to tilt the court, and American life, away from her values. Did enjoyment of fame contribute to her decision? Never mind the dangers of judicial vanity: there are T-shirts to sell, and virtues to signal.

Some people clearly dream of turning Brenda Hale into Britain’s RBG, a pioneering feminist lawyer and cultural symbol. These are people who spend too much time online and have #FBPE in their Twitter bio. A couple of years ago, many of them added spider emojis, too, in tribute to Hale: she is best known for wearing a spider-shaped brooch while ruling, as president of the Supreme Court, that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament — a crude attempt to “get Brexit done” — was unlawful. In the days that followed, people seemed more interested in this “coded statement” — this “secret message” — than the unambiguous ruling, which marked the culmination of Hale’s stellar legal career. She retired not long afterwards and has now written a book that her publishers evidently hope will appeal to all those people who obsessed over her “power dressing”.
I suggest that this is her publishers’ hope because Hale doesn’t seem particularly keen on this attempt to turn her into a celebrity. Her book suggests an author somewhat resistant to the narratives that are being enthusiastically imputed to her.
Suggested readingWhy Remainers are the imperialist nostalgicsBy Mary Harrington
One of those narratives is of social mobility and possibly even class struggle: however did a girl from a little village outside Richmond in Yorkshire (not, she says early in the book, “the sort of place where you would expect a top judge to grow up”) reach the Supreme Court? Yet Hale’s origins are hardly humble. Born in 1945, she is the daughter and granddaughter of Oxbridge graduates. Her father is head of a boys’ grammar school. Her parents take the Telegraph, invite neighbours for sherry after church, and send the handyman to collect Hale and her sister from school at lunchtime so they don’t have to eat with the village kids.
Serious, diligent and ferociously bright, Hale progresses to Cambridge with neither difficulty nor trepidation. She rightly notes that this makes her part of a tiny minority: only 4% of school-leavers went to university at the time. She also says the transition to university didn’t faze her, because this was just what her family did: it was normal. So much for that class struggle, then.
Meanwhile, Hale pays only the most superficial attention to wider issues of access to the legal professions. She offers a rose-tinted view of today’s law school as places that mean people who would never have dreamed of becoming lawyers in the past can now do so. And yet, they undeniably remain bastions of privilege, much of it inherited. The sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Lauriston calculate that the children of lawyers are 17 times more likely than other kids to become lawyers. A 2020 study by Bridge Group and the University of York concluded that “the legal profession remains dominated by individuals from higher socioeconomic backgrounds with students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds half as likely to attend the top English law schools as other students”.
More from this authorThe war on social mobilityBy James Kirkup
Still, Hale seems better placed to discuss struggles not of class but of sex. Her success as a female lawyer in a male-dominated establishment is remarkable, and she deserves to be held up as a role model. But again, she seems reluctant to play the part. Her book has a striking opening, in which she writes frankly of suffering “imposter syndrome” at numerous points in her impressive career. But this candid author then quickly disappears behind a fairly dry account of her career progression. Having been set up to tell the story of a determined woman who rose to the top in the face of male chauvinism, Hale sometimes makes becoming a top judge sound almost easy.
In her telling, the closed male legal establishment actually looked after her rather well. She becomes the first ever female member of the Law Commission, despite not actually applying for the role — a more senior lawyer on the Commission nudges her into it. She becomes a judge after the traditional “tap on the shoulder” from a senior official. Further promotions sound smooth and painless. Occasionally she’s annoyed by anachronistic masculine judicial titles, silly remarks from colleagues and daft old dinner-table traditions that exclude women. But her book isn’t a tale of institutional sexism.
That’s not to say such bias doesn’t exist, and didn’t figure in Hale’s career. Rather, Hale isn’t giving us the whole story here; she often seems reluctant to talk about herself, her experiences and feelings. Her personal life is largely absent. The end of her first marriage, after 24 years, is mentioned only obliquely. Her daughter gets a handful of mentions, but there is no account of how she combined family life with a demanding job. The book is subtitled “A Life” but it would be better to say: “A Career”. Influential men, of course, when they write their memoirs, aren’t expected to explain who was looking after the kids while they were conquering the world — but given that so many women find their careers hindered by family responsibilities, Hale might be a more accessible role model if she’d addressed the subject.
That career has been driven by a truly formidable intellect — it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hale’s rise demonstrates the old adage that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to achieve the same. But her refusal to talk about herself blunts her ability to explore sexism in the legal establishment. She’s more comfortable talking about her cases and the law itself. This is generally done dispassionately, though she reflects intriguingly that her time as a family court judge was largely spent “oppressing” women.
Perhaps she’d rather not be defined by her sex, but it’s hard not to think, reading her memoir, that an entire book by Hale on how and where the law fails women would be fascinating — and powerful. But that book wouldn’t include the prorogation case, Brexit or that spider brooch — the things that made her properly famous, and therefore the things most likely to sell copies.
Suggested readingHow feminism ate itselfBy Kat Rosenfield
Focusing on them, though, is to forget that Hale was a public figure for decades. During that time, she figured occasionally in newspaper reports. Not all of them were positive, and this rankles — she recalls not just unfriendly Daily Mail headlines about her, but the page numbers and reporters’ bylines (“On 23 October 1995 there was a front-page article by Paul Harris”). In a rare display of emotion, she says such personalised coverage is “distressing”, but insists the greater worry is journalists’ failure to understand her legal thinking.
Was this memoir written as the last word, then? Somewhere behind the veil of judicial dispassion stands a human being with the same frailties as the rest of us — including vanity and inconsistency.
Both of these are displayed in Hale’s account of the prorogation case. To my mind, the Supreme Court’s ruling was a good one, re-establishing Parliament’s constitutional primacy, and deserving of ongoing attention. But how much do we need to know about the people who gave that ruling? How much do we gain from learning that Hale wrote her findings from her house in Yorkshire, and that one of her fellow judges did the same in Sicily?
Hale herself insists that the legal principles are what really matter here — and professes exasperation with public focus on her appearance in court. “What I was wearing that day is not important,” she declares, shortly after telling us what she was wearing that day, including the spider brooch and its history. Despite her exasperation, she appears rather pleased by the people who buy T-shirts with a spider logo or wear spider badges “to show their support”. And then there’s the title of her memoir, Spider Woman, which features the famous brooch on the front cover. Hale may not like that attention on her outfit and jewellery — something a male judge, surely, would never experience — but she’s content to use it to promote her book.
Is there a touch of vanity here? I suspect so, but I don’t say that as a criticism: we are all vain creatures, and there’s no shame in that. Even the most august and dispassionate of judges may succumb to the urge to show off a bit — fame has a terrible allure. To plug her book, Hale has been doing the media circuit of broadcast and print interviews, alongside authors, actors, and influencers. And even before the prorogation case, she heard the siren call: in 2018, she appeared as a judge on Masterchef. This is the age of celebrity, and everyone’s invited, even judges. Indeed, in her book, Hale make the case for diversity on the bench by arguing that judges must look like the society they serve. Perhaps they ought to be selling themselves, on Instagram or TikTok, to ensure that young people engage with the law and relate to those who uphold it.
Suggested readingWho created the self-made man?By Selina Todd
Then again judges are arguably the closest thing we now have to Plato’s Guardians, a group that comes from society but still sits apart from it, in order to make decisions in our best interest. We don’t really need to know what they think or — worse — how they feel while they dispense justice. And the more we know about them, the more likely we are to disagree with them. Familiarity breeds distrust. The story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be a cautionary tale to British judges, not an inspiration. For every American who adores “Notorious R.B.G.” there is one who distrusts liberals in the judiciary. It is better for public trust in our institutions if impartial public servants keep quiet than if they make themselves more “relatable” figures, a lesson that a certain former House of Commons Speaker has sadly ignored.
I’m wary of imputing thoughts to Brenda Hale, but I wonder if she, too, is in two minds about the wisdom of a senior judge courting celebrity. Perhaps that explains why her book is stuck somewhere in the quagmire between fully revealing autobiography and impersonal legal history.

       We must win the gender war   Abigail Shrier   October 11, 05:43 PM October 11, 05:43 PM  The Left is winning the war over gender ideology because it follows a simple precept: Don’t play the odds, play the man. And so, it plays conservatives. To a caffeinated Right, a high school student named Gavin Grimm provided irresistible distraction.  Indeed, no sooner had the ACLU filed its “transgender bathroom case” in 2015 than conservatives answered the call of duty. One leg into armor, conservatives lurched forth from the trench, pea shooter in hand, never clear what we were fighting for or whether anyone was behind us. It turned out, no one was: A flurry of bathroom bills sunk to the bottom of the ocean, except North Carolina’s, which died in repeal. All for what? To keep an unhappy biological girl with a five o'clock shadow out of the boys’ room?  In any case, conservatives lost — and not just politically. The Fourth Circuit recently decided that a separate, unisex bathroom provided to Grimm stigmatized the child, effectively punishing “transgender status” in violation of Title IX. The Supreme Court denied certiorari, refusing to revisit this mess.  Whatever your views on sex-based rights (and mine are probably as strong as anyone’s), it was hard to see this particular battle as anything other than picking on a child. Grimm had extended absences from school and seems to have suffered greatly through the embarrassing ordeal of public hand-wringing about where one transgender-identified teenager could use the bathroom. It isn’t hard to see that any child would have suffered in Grimm’s position.  Top lawyers for the ACLU argued the case, and while they held judges spellbound with the promise of another civil rights verdict, they sent Republicans into apoplexy. While Republicans ranted, the Left won conquest after conquest.  Here, specifically, is what the Left achieved in the intervening six years: 22 states enacted conversion therapy bans, making it impossible for therapists to offer trans-identified youth any alternative to transition; nearly every medical accrediting organization adopted “affirmative care,” solemnly promising to suspend all medical judgment and rubber-stamp transitions, even by minors; gender ideology wormed its way into public school, laid eggs, and hatched endless confusion; schools across the country, with the explicit approval of the Obama administration, began conspiring to conceal minors’ declared gender identities from their parents; and hundreds of pediatric gender clinics cropped up to meet a sudden demand, heedless of the dangers, peddling phony mental health benefits and dismissing international warnings.  In other words, while conservatives pounded lecterns over school bathrooms, they lost five winnable battles to a radical and unpopular ideology. They painted themselves once again into American Gothic, which might have made them sympathetic, had they not hired the portrait artist and grasped for a pitchfork.  Did anyone consider showing sympathy for Gavin Grimm? The school board created a separate bathroom for Grimm, which Grimm felt reluctant to use. Grimm claimed that the stress and the stigma associated with having to use a separate bathroom from the other students led to “holding it,” causing frequent urinary tract infections and suicidal thoughts.  I spoke to three doctors about Grimm’s urinary tract infections. Each physician admitted that urinary retention might cause such infections. But besides suffering embarrassment, Grimm began a course of testosterone that year. Both an endocrinologist and the pediatrician I spoke to said it was at least as likely, and probably more likely, that the testosterone had caused Grimm’s infections.  Testosterone can make a girl’s urethra “friable,” meaning the urethra begins to crumble or break down. And so, while Grimm and the ACLU blamed Republicans for Grimm’s pain, the actual source may have been the risky, experimental treatment provided by doctors too busy self-celebrating to take seriously these risks.  Conservatives might have said: Here is one more distraught American teenager, handed dangerous drugs in place of a solution. The long-term risks of testosterone to a woman’s body include infertility, sexual dysfunction, a cardiac event, endometrial cancer, vaginal and uterine atrophy, and, yes, frequent urinary tract infections. Republicans might have gone after Grimm’s reckless doctors and an activist medical system that has all but abandoned its Hippocratic oath when it comes to gender medicine.  Conservatives might have trained their sights on social media, which spreads self-harm like a flu, and the Big Tech firms that push this harmful drug on other people’s children. They might have opposed the schools that peddle gender confusion to preschoolers and help middle school children “transition” in secret. They might have fought those laws in several states that allow minors to begin transitioning treatment without parental consent. They are, at last, confronting the mass experiment on children in the form of puberty blockers, which place bone density, brain development, and sexual function at risk, and, for good measure, jeopardize fertility. Doctors who took a Hippocratic oath and promised only to heal began removing healthy breasts of girls as young as 13.  Here, then, is what winning might look like. Conservatives ought to spend the next decade championing one of the most aggrieved constituencies: America’s parents. We might fight for decent, evidence-based medicine or responsible therapeutic practices. We ought to show compassion for those children with gender dysphoria while taking note that the activists are exploiting them to advance a cynical, dangerous agenda. We ought to oppose gender ideology in the schools, which is both harmful and broadly unpopular. We ought to defend the rights of women and girls where they are threatened because an America that is no longer safe or fair for them is hardly worth saving at all.  And no, Gavin Grimm is not an example of the last issue. As a biological female, Grimm posed no threat to the boys in the bathroom. This is not standing on principle. This is turtling: Withdrawing into a shell to declare, Not in my bathroom. Batten down the hatches and wait for the floodwaters to wash away the wicked. Just don’t breach my threshold, my town, my state, my church.  It’s a defensive posture and a losing strategy. It strikes this deal with the broader culture: We will not attempt to alter or influence you, so long as you do not invade our space. The majority culture is now held hostage by illiberal social-justice warriors who care little about individual liberties. In the end, the authoritarians always liquidate the ghetto.  But there is something else, too: When you stop contributing to the broader culture, you forfeit all right to influence its direction. What then is our next move? Roll the dice on which way Chief Justice Roberts will vote? It’s little wonder he’s refused to hold the line. He calls this buckling upholding the “institutional integrity” of the court. But he might as well say: Fight your own damn battles.  Conservatives’ chief asset is also our chief liability: We are willing to fight unpopular battles because we’ve never been popular. We are less easily seduced by the good opinion of those who’ve always withheld it. But we often lack strategy for this reason, too. We seem to have no idea what would appeal to other humans. Putting conservatives in charge of political strategy is like putting the debate team in charge of prom; the only guarantee is that no one else will show up. Opposing a high school child, one who’s had to miss long stretches of school for mental health issues, offers no lasting victory.  In the battle against gender ideology, conservatives have already demonstrated both reluctance and ineptitude. They believe they raise barriers to the Left, but more often, their tight-lipped unlikability serves as a trampoline, propelling the Left to even greater heights.  Conservatives do not think of themselves as defenders of “women’s rights” and adopt that mantle clumsily. Conservatives prefer to fight for faith and babies, and defending women sounds too much like supporting abortion. Or, perhaps, conservatives have unwittingly swallowed the Left’s propaganda that unrestricted abortion and women’s rights are synonymous. And so, conservatives trip over their own feet, rushing to make abortion and religious liberty the point of every argument, making themselves the punchline of every joke.  But there is also good news: We cannot afford to lose. There is no more important battle. That ought to suffice to provide clarity of purpose.  At stake are the rights of parents to safeguard their children from the activists who have given them alarming powers to alter their own bodies. At stake are the rights of women, who spent generations fighting for a fair and safe America and now stand on the verge of losing both. We ought to fight unhesitatingly for lesbians, a sexual minority that simply wants to raise stable families, and instead finds its spaces invaded by biological men who demand to be treated as women. We might fight for the girls and women who are about to lose every prize, scholarship, title, and trophy once reserved for female athletes. We might show some self-respect and toss out of office allegedly conservative politicians who sell out our young women.  Biological sex matters because truth matters. Any society that abandons sex-based protections for women and girls plunges into demoralization and darkness. Young women’s bodies literally cradle our future. We cannot allow activists and their shoddy science to wreck them.  Female athletes make America proud. Our nation, so often maligned as a “patriarchy,” has for years invested in the development of female excellence and achievement. Don’t allow woke marauders to junk female achievement as if it were a Columbus statue.  Others may shirk the cause of female prisoners because they lack even a smidgen of political clout. Conservatives ought to take up their cause because allowing any trapped woman to be raped and beaten is cruel and unconscionable. Because any society that allows a male sex offender into a locked cell with a woman is as beastly and inhumane as the Left has for so long claimed.  If the chuckleheads who seem to guide strategy for most Republicans and conservatives continue to allow the looting of women’s rights, we ought to give up the cause of conservatism. The Left doesn’t require our help. And there are better uses of our time than serving as its clumsy foil.  Abigail Shrier is the author of Irreversible Damage, which the Economist named one of the best books of 2020. Read more of her work at her newsletter, The Truth Fairy, abigailshrier.substack.com.  © 2021 Washington Examiner    

In a welcome development, a unanimous en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit has called what we may hope is a permanent halt to a reckless campaign under which city governments have sought to mulct bank shareholders by way of a strained theory of fair‐​housing liability.

Following the housing bust of the late 2000s, some American cities signed up with contingency‐​fee plaintiff’s counsel to sue bank lenders on a highly ambitious legal theory: by extending too many risky loans to minority borrowers on dangerous terms (e.g., low‐​money‐​down loans with adjustable interest rates), the banks had foreseeably caused a later wave of delinquencies and foreclosures.

The banks should be made to pay damages to the city administrations, so the theory went, because the foreclosure wave had impaired municipal finances by lowering property tax collections and requiring the spending of more money on services such as fire and police in blighted neighborhoods. (All of these was strictly aside from lawsuits filed by or on behalf of the borrowers themselves.)

The U.S. Supreme Court gave an indirect boost to ideas like these when by a narrow majority it approved the use of “disparate impact” theories in housing discrimination law, whether or not intended to discriminate, in the otherwise unrelated 2015 case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc.

Then in the 2017 case of Bank of America v. City of Miami, the Court reached the municipal cases themselves. Once again Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the liberals, who prevailed 5–3 on the question whether Miami could pursue claims against the bank as an “aggrieved person.” At the same time, however, a unanimous Court led by Stephen Breyer declared that the Eleventh Circuit had been too liberal in its standard for allowing damages, which should be available only when a violation had directly caused a given injury, not along the infinitely rippling lines of possible later causation. (Cato filed amicus briefs with the high court at two separate stages of the Miami litigation, which eventually sputtered out as moot.)

There remained some doubt as to whether lower courts would take to heart Breyer’s language disallowing less‐​than‐​proximate damage theories, especially when the city of Oakland, California, managed to keep some of its claims going before a lower court. That is what makes the unanimous new en banc ruling, joined by judges spanning the ideological spectrum, so welcome.

The court ruled that both the claim for lost property taxes and the claim for increased expenditures depended on too remote a causal chain, one affected by the intermediate actions of many third parties. “These downstream ‘ripples of harm’ are too attenuated and travel too ‘far beyond’ Wells Fargo’s alleged misconduct to establish proximate cause.”

That’s the right result. As Cato argued in one of its Miami briefs, the “interpretive stretch” in the cities’ theories — seeking to bridge the “attenuated relationship between the alleged discriminatory actions and the harm” — was a cover for a disturbing power grab, one that

creates a deeply problematic relationship between the City and its citizens. In general, when a government wants more money to spend, it must go before its electorate and obtain the people’s consent through increases in taxes. If instead a city can simply pursue a claim against several big banks, it can dispense with the people’s consent and instead reach right for the cash.

Not in the Ninth Circuit it can’t.

American workers are engaged in "the equivalent of a general strike," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has argued, following unexpectedly low U.S. employment figures.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers released on Friday showed that U.S. employment increased 194,000 in September—about 300,000 shy of estimates.

Despite record level job openings and 7.7 million out of work, many employers still report difficulty filling positions.

Some have described the issues as a labor shortage. "But that's not what's really going on," Reich, who served as labor secretary from 1993 to 1997 during the Bill Clinton administration, wrote on progressive website Common Dreams on Sunday.

Read more Labor Secretary Marty Walsh Perplexed by Worker Shortage Labor Secretary Marty Walsh Perplexed by Worker Shortage

"In reality, there's a living wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a health care shortage – and American workers are demanding an end to all these shortages. Or they won't return to work."

Among other aggravating factors, BLS' report highlighted parents struggling to return to the workplace as a result of high childcare fees.

Reich added that since the COVID-19 pandemic, some workers retired, found other income or "simply don't want to return to backbreaking, low-wage s*** jobs."

In September, the unemployment rate slid to 4.8 percent, the lowest rate since the start of the pandemic; however, one factor that contributed to the drop was that 183,000 people weren't counted as jobless because they did not look for work.

The labor force participation rate dropped to 61.6 percent in September, below the 63 percent experienced pre-pandemic.

"In other words," Reich wrote, "many American workers are now engaged in the equivalent of a general strike."

Experts have struggled to explain why so many have dropped out of the labor force despite a surge in job creation.

Asked for his own assessment on Friday, current Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said more analysis would need to be done before conclusions were drawn.

"I think that one of the biggest reasons, and again no one's tested this or checked it, is work-life balance," he told Axios on HBO.

"We're living in a pandemic, obviously the 194,000 this month is not the best number but we saw 317,000 in the private sector. So we're seeing good growth in the private sector."

Generally speaking, vacant government roles appear to have been harder to fill than those in the private sector. In September, a 123,000 fall in government jobs was offset by a 317,000 increase in private sector jobs, down on a 332,000 rise in August.

The U.S. Department of Labor has been contacted for comment.

China's sabre rattling toward Taiwan is a warning to Taiwan's pro-independence party against inching toward independence. It's no secret that Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) wants Taiwan to be independent, and they are using their power to change the education, shut down opposition media, curbing exchanges with China, severing the traditional cultural bonds, and gradually make Taiwan a truly independent country. This goes against the consensus between China and Taiwan before DPP came to power, namely that there is only one China, and both Taiwan and the mainland belong to the same country. How Taiwan and the mainland should be reunited is left to the future. But this common understanding has been broken, which is the source of the rising tensions across the Taiwan straits. If Taiwan returns to the one China consensus, then the risk of China invading Taiwan becomes essentially zero, since the public in mainland China is also happy with the status quo and willing to postpone the question of reunification to the indefinite future. But Taiwan's DPP is breaking that status quo, and China is responding with threats of invasion if DPP continues along this path. The most pragmatic solution that eliminates the risk of war at little cost to all parties is for Taiwan to give up the ambition of becoming an independent country, which could happen by voting DPP out of power. But this solution is never talked about in Western media because Taiwan serve as a tool to drag down China. On the contrary, many commentators and policymakers in the West actively encourage Taiwan to seek de facto independence. What they have in mind is not Taiwan's well-being, but rather to contain China, and they are willing to sacrifice Taiwan for this objective. Same with the author.

I’ve long been saying that ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, so much so that I have to say now that ivermectin is no longer new, even as I speculate what new “miracle cure” for COVID-19 will become the “new ivermectin”. Readers might remember that, very early in the pandemic, hydroxychloroquine, a widely used antimalarial drug with mild immunosuppressive properties that make it also useful to treat some autoimmune diseases, was seized upon as the (then) only effective treatment for COVID-19 based on reported observations in Wuhan, China during the first major outbreak. There, a group of Chinese researchers reported that none of a group of their 80 patients with lupus erythematosus who were taking hydroxychloroquine went on to become infected with SARS-CoV-2. Based on that very thin gruel, hydroxychloroquine for a time became part of the de facto standard of care around the world, including in one of the hospitals that I practice at. The devotion to hydroxychloroquine spread, thanks to promotion by Dr. Oz, then-President Donald Trump, and a veritable rogues’ gallery of quacks, and it took a long time for the evidence to catch up and kill it. There was a reason why I called hydroxychloroquine the Black Knight of COVID-19 treatments, because no amount of evidence appeared able to kill it, until it did. Even so, a year later there remains a contingent of quacks who still promote it not just as a treatment but as a preventative.

At the time, at least early last year, I could understand why so many doctors latched onto hydroxychloroquine. After all, patients were getting deathly ill and dying in droves, and they didn’t know what to do beyond supportive care that tried to keep them from dying long enough to clear the infection. Under circumstances like those, it’s human nature to try something like hydroxychloroquine, nor was it unethical then, at least initially, to try it, at least until there was more evidence. These days, not so much. We know hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work, and there are vaccines and potential treatments.

Enter ivermectin, an anthelmintic drug commonly used around the world to treat diseases caused by parasitic roundworms in both animals and humans. Based on a recent BBC news report, “Ivermectin: How false science created a Covid ‘miracle’ drug“, it’s looking more and more as though the clinical trial base for the drug as a treatment for COVID-19 is almost all either fraudulent or so badly done that it might as well be fraudulent. Given the publication of that news report, now seems to be as good a time as any to revisit ivermectin and look at the massive fraud that’s fueled massive grift and many conspiracy theories.

Ivermectin: Bad science helps feed a craze

As Scott Gavura and I have written a number of times, these days ivermectin has supplanted hydroxychloroquine as the “drug of choice” of antivaxxers, quacks, grifters, and ideologues, and the propaganda and astroturf campaigns to promote it as a “miracle cure” or preventative as good or better than the vaccines. There have also been a number of clinical trials testing ivermectin, some with seemingly—if you’ll excuse the term—miraculous results, so much so that there have been meta-analyses.

Ivermectin suffers from two problems in terms of evidence. First, it was first touted based on studies from over a year ago that showed it to have activity against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in cell culture. Unfortunately, what made ivermectin’s prior plausibility low is the fact that the concentration required to achieve this antiviral activity in vitro is many times higher than what can be achieved in the bloodstream with normal dosing. Anyone who does drug development research—as I’ve done, and with a repurposed drug, yet!—knows that this is a huge problem for any drug that an investigator proposes to take to the clinic. Basically, for a drug to look promising to have a high probability that it works in animals (and then in humans) as well as it works in cell culture, its effective concentration can’t be so high that it can’t be achieved in the bloodstream with even high doses. There are occasional exceptions to this rule, such as when a drug’s mechanism in vivo turns out to be different than the mechanism observed in cell culture, but ivermectin isn’t one of those.

The most widely touted evidence for the efficacy of ivermectin against COVID-19 are meta-analyses by advocacy groups touting ivermectin as a way out of the pandemic, such as the BIRD Group in the UK and the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCCA) in the US, that supposedly show, based on an aggregation of existing clinical trials of COVID-19, that ivermectin is highly effective as a preventative after exposure and as a treatment that prevents progression of mild disease to severe disease. Unfortunately, these meta-analyses are highly dependent on a small number of highly “positive” trials, which, if removed, turn positive meta-analyses into negative meta-analyses. Seemingly not coincidentally, these very highly “positive” clinical trials are also the most dodgy, either very badly done at best or outright fraudulent at worst.

My piece links to the amazing investigative work of @stephaniemlee and the Buzzfeed team on this extremely dodgy study, you can read their full investigation here https://t.co/SJ4x4fuG7u — Health Nerd (@GidMK) September 2, 2021

The first mainstream news report about this came to us, courtesy of BuzzFeed News , about a month ago in the form of a story by Stephanie Lee and Ken Bensinger titled “A Prominent Study Said Ivermectin Prevents COVID, But The Data Is Suspect“, which built on the analyses of Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiology postdoc at the University of Wollongong in Australia whom we’ve met before on the topic of dodgy ivermectin studies, and Kyle Sheldrick, who has also been analyzing questionable COVID-19 studies. Oddly enough, I haven’t discussed this news report here on SBM , but it’s worth looking at because it sets the stage for the BBC report.

The BuzzFeed report focuses on a study done in Argentina and led by Dr. Hector Carvallo, which led to a lot of hype of this sort:

I know this is difficult to accept. The implications of it are both beautiful and horrifying: Ivermectin is a near-perfect COVID prophylactic. I'm sorry and you're welcome. I mean both, and I don't think they can be disentangled in this case. https://t.co/yNz0B9cfcA — Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) June 11, 2021

And, from BuzzFeed :

The fervor has grown ever since. “A near-perfect COVID prophylactic,” tweeted Bret Weinstein, a biologist who is best known for resigning from Evergreen State College in 2017 after he criticized an anti-racism education event. He has declared that the medication renders vaccines irrelevant. “If ivermectin, a drug out of patent, is safe and effective for treating and, more importantly, preventing COVID,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson this summer, “then there shouldn’t be vaccines that we’re administering.” Carvallo’s findings have been a powerful data point in this argument. The Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCCA), a group of physicians that formed in March 2020, cites Carvallo’s study, along with others, in recommending that ivermectin be “systematically and globally adopted” as both a cure and preventative against COVID-19. The head of the organization, pulmonologist Pierre Kory, talked up the study to Joe Rogan — the podcast star who said this week that he is now taking ivermectin, among other drugs, after testing positive for COVID. Kory also invoked it during a Senate committee hearing in December, when he asserted that ivermectin “basically obliterates transmission of this virus.”

And:

For anti-vaccine activists, the clinical trial results couldn’t have been better. The drug ivermectin, scientists in Argentina announced last year, prevented 100% of COVID-19 infections. That glowing finding helped spark a craze for the decades-old medication, which is normally used to delouse people and deworm livestock, and drive the perception that it is a silver bullet against the pandemic.

Let me just stop briefly right here. Any study that concludes that a drug is 100% effective is very suspect right off the bat. Why? Nothing in medicine is 100% effective, and a claim of 100% efficacy would be far higher than the known efficacy of treatments that have been demonstrated to be extremely efficacious for a large number of diseases. As I also like to say, in medicine the only thing that is 100% certain is death. Each and every one of us will die someday of something.

The BuzzFeed article and an article by Meyerowitz-Katz detail the numerous problems with this study, just beginning with:

The study in question is a perfect case in point — it is reportedly a prospective observational trial where medical staff working in one of several hospitals either took ivermectin and a nasal spray made from seaweed and used normal PPE or a control group with just normal PPE. Of those who took the nasal spray and ivermectin, none got Covid-19, while up to 90% of the medical staff who didn’t take these prophylactics contracted the dread disease. Now, even at face value this study is incredibly shoddy. As I pointed out on twitter, the study was “peer reviewed” in less than a week, the tables have incorrect numbers, the results contradict results the authors posted elsewhere online, the graphs were made, badly, in Excel using default settings, there are no descriptions of most pertinent details about the trial, and the journal the study is published in is about as predatory as journals get.

Also:

Once the paper started circulating, staffers at the Hospital Cuenca Alta, about an hour outside of Buenos Aires, grew alarmed. In December, its board of directors sent word to Argentina’s health ministry that it had no idea why it was listed as having participated. “Although the aforementioned article contains data referring to patients from this [hospital] as participants in the respective clinical trial, they are false since this hospital did not participate in the investigation carried out,” a letter shared with BuzzFeed News read. The hospital’s ethics committee also did not receive any request to conduct the study. Carvallo’s explanation is that the hospital wasn’t asked to participate as an institution. “It was not through ethics committees,” he said. Essentially, he claimed, staffers at local hospitals had heard about the pilot study’s promising results through word of mouth and individually wanted to participate at a time when no COVID vaccines were available.

I could go on and on (e.g., about one of the authors withdrawing her name from the paper when Carvallo couldn’t answer questions about it to her satisfaction), but I want to get on to the more recent findings of the BBC. Read the BuzzFeed report and Meyerowitz-Katz’s articles for the gory details of what looks to me like probable fraud. To me, the BBC report is even more damning because it strongly suggests a wider pattern of shoddy research mixed with outright fraud than previous reports, to the point where I’ve started to wonder if there is any legitimate, non-shoddy, non-fraudulent ivermectin trial that showed a positive result. (I’ve pointed out before how the better quality ivermectin studies showed no activity against COVID-19.)

Ivermectin: A false “miracle drug” for COVID-19

In their reporting on ivermectin for the BBC, reporters Rachel Schraer and Jack Goodman were aided by the aforementioned Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz and Dr. Kyle Sheldrick, along with two additional fraud hunters, Dr. James Heathers and Dr. Nick Brown. The findings are incredible. After repeating the unfortunate history of the drug as a COVID-19 treatment and mentioning how antivaxxers and antimaskers have wholeheartedly embraced it, we learn:

The BBC can reveal that more than a third of 26 major trials of the drug for use on Covid have serious errors or signs of potential fraud. None of the rest show convincing evidence of ivermectin’s effectiveness. Dr Kyle Sheldrick, one of the group investigating the studies, said they had not found “a single clinical trial” claiming to show that ivermectin prevented Covid deaths that did not contain “either obvious signs of fabrication or errors so critical they invalidate the study”. Major problems included: The same patient data being used multiple times for supposedly different people

Evidence that selection of patients for test groups was not random

Numbers unlikely to occur naturally

Percentages calculated incorrectly

Local health bodies unaware of the studies The scientists in the group – Dr Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, Dr James Heathers, Dr Nick Brown and Dr Sheldrick – each have a track record of exposing dodgy science. They’ve been working together remotely on an informal and voluntary basis during the pandemic.

And observational trials don’t get a pass either, given how they’ve been used as propaganda tools to promote ivermectin:

The team also looked at six particularly influential observational trials. This type of trial looks at what happens to people who are taking the drug anyway, so can be biased by the types of people who choose to take the treatment. Out of a total of 26 studies examined, there was evidence in five that the data may have been faked – for example they contained virtually impossible numbers or rows of identical patients copied and pasted. In a further five there were major red flags – for example, numbers didn’t add up, percentages were calculated incorrectly or local health bodies weren’t aware they had taken place. On top of these flawed trials, there were 14 authors of studies who failed to send data back. The independent scientists have flagged this as a possible indicator of fraud.

The BBC, of course, has to be circumspect, as do the intrepid team of ivermectin study investigators who uncovered these problems, but I don’t. This reeks to high heaven of fraud, particularly given that it was primarily the studies that found large positive effects against ivermectin due to the drug were the ones with the biggest problems. As the BBC reports, the worst problems were found “all in the studies making big claims for ivermectin—in fact, the bigger the claim in terms of lives saved or infections prevented, the greater the concerns suggesting it might be faked or invalid, the researchers discovered.” Sheldrick, for instance, concedes that it’s very difficult to rule out human error, but to me these errors are so bad that they are virtually indistinguishable from fraud. Moreover, if these were in fact human errors, then the investigators behind these trials have no business being anywhere near anything resembling clinical trials or human subjects research—or any medical research of any kind. I wouldn’t even want them in a position to experiment on mice.

It’s worth it to go to the horse’s mouth, so to speak, to see what’s wrong with many of these studies:

A recent study in Lebanon was found to have blocks of details of 11 patients that had been copied and pasted repeatedly – suggesting many of the trial’s apparent patients didn’t really exist. The study’s authors told the BBC that the “original set of data was rigged, sabotaged or mistakenly entered in the final file” and that they have submitted a retraction to the scientific journal which published it.

I like to use this particular brief clip whenever I hear a claim as ludicrous-sounding as this:

What I fear is that the authors might well try to resubmit the paper, only with more cleverly designed fraudulent patients. Yes, I said it. This is not the sort of clinical trial error that happens innocently.

Then, from Iran:

Another study from Iran seemed to show that ivermectin prevented people dying from Covid. But the scientists who investigated it found issues. The records of how much iron was in patients’ blood contained numbers in a sequence that was unlikely to come up naturally. And the patients given the placebo turned out to have had much lower levels of oxygen in their blood before the trial started than those given ivermectin. So they were already sicker and statistically more likely to die. But this pattern was repeated across a wide range of different measurements. The people with “bad” measurements ended up in the placebo group, the ones with “good” measurements in the ivermectin group. The likelihood of this happening randomly across all these different measurements was vanishingly small, Dr Sheldrick said.

It almost certainly didn’t happen randomly. Sure, it’s possible that it did, but the odds against it are so long that, for all intents and purposes, it is reasonable to assume that this was not random. Either that, or one must assume that the investigators were so incompetent at propensity score matching that, again, they should have no business being anywhere near clinical trials or human subjects research or, yes again, any scientific research. Again, take your pick.

As usual, Meyerowitz-Katz has summarized the problems on Medium:

Is ivermectin for Covid-19 based on fraudulent research? Part 5. This one has an ENORMOUS impact on the literaturehttps://t.co/suNR4FC203 — Health Nerd (@GidMK) October 8, 2021

Re: "But they must have recognized it after looking at the raw data, yet they repeatedly refused to give the raw data when people repeatedly asked." And for all the ivermectin fans who've displayed baseless paranoia about the BBC:https://t.co/wbFX4257Fi pic.twitter.com/tYkmOFdRAg — Atomsk's Sanakan (@AtomsksSanakan) October 8, 2021

I don’t think this was an honest mistake either, and, as the headline states, this study (Niaee et al) is the sole remaining randomized trial that shows a benefit from COVID-19 in treating COVID-19. Kyle Sheldrick has also written about it:

Dr Niaee and colleagues claim to have randomised 180 patients into six different treatment groups. I do not believe this claim is true. The six groups have 30 patients each. Two groups did not receive ivermectin (one received a placebo and one did not). Four groups received ivermectin at different doses and frequencies. Traditionally in table one of an RCT authors describe certain characteristics of patients in each group. Something immediately caught my eye. The number of participants in each arm who had not actually tested positive for the virus was wildly different: Control Group: 40%

Placebo Group: 53%

Ivermectin Group 1: 23%

Ivermectin Group 2: 23%

Ivermectin Group 3: 3%

Ivermectin Group 4: 30% The authors claim this had a p value of 0.421 from a Chi Square test. Just eyeballing this it seemed wildly off to me, and when calculating this I got a p value of about 8*10^-4. (The authors now accept that the actual p value should be <0.001 and state this was “a typographical error.”) I contacted the corresponding author on the address given in the journal article and requested raw data but received no response. I then attempted through an email address I found online on an earlier preprint and also received no response. I then attempted through his institutional contact details at his university and also received no response. At that point I gave up and posted a comment to pubpeer pointing out the very unexpected imbalance in baseline data and suggested the trial should not be included in meta-analyses unless IPD could be provided and reviewed.

And:

A few of the first things to jump out at me where: – All patients with missing baseline data (6 patients) occurred in a single arm. This is extremely unlikely with less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring if only random chance is at play. – While the averages from the summary data were similar between groups, the range of values between arms were wildly different. – Far fewer patients with low oxygen levels (<90) occurred in the ivermectin arms. – Hypotensive patients appear far more frequently in some arms than others. So I ran some statistical tests on how unlikely some of these mismatches were. The numbers below are slightly less extreme than those I presented in my first round of criticism to Dr Niaee. Dr Niaee objected to grouping arms into single-dose and multi-dose groups, and demanded I rerun the analysis with 6 independent groups of 30. I agreed. We already knew that the chi square for whether patients had actually tested positive to corona virus was 21 with a p value of 0.0008, this means the chance of a mismatch this extreme happening in genuinely randomised groups is less than 1 in 1,000.

There’s more, of course. Again, read Meyerowitz-Katz’s article (if you can) and Sheldrick’s article for the gory details. Suffice to say that Meyerowitz-Katz has concluded:

This is the fifth part in this ongoing saga, and honestly I’m unsure that there will be many more. At a certain point, you have to accept that the evidence-base is so corrupted that the message that has been pushed for months by eager promoters of the drug is very unlikely to be true. If ivermectin does have a benefit in the treatment of Covid-19, it is probably going to be small, and certainly not as impressive as people have been arguing for the last year. Moreover, there are serious concerns with the studies on prophylaxis too. While it is plausible that ivermectin has some use against Covid-19, the staggering scale of the fraud has made it almost impossible to say anything for certain, except that people rarely fake trials for effective drugs. Ultimately, we have to wait for larger randomized trials to really know whether ivermectin has a benefit from Covid-19. Unfortunately, it appears that the benefits spruiked for months are most likely based on seriously flawed, and in some cases potentially fraudulent, research.

This is one place where I now strongly disagree with Meyerowitz-Katz,even as I deeply admire his work exposing the incompetence and fraud behind existing ivermectin studies. Now, my position has evolved. We don’t need to wait for larger randomized trials to know if ivermectin works to treat or prevent COVID-19. The existing evidence base is quite clear. It almost certainly doesn’t; that is, if you take a Bayesian approach that looks at the prior probability based on preclinical basic science studies that show that the drug can’t reach a concentration in the bloodstream sufficient to show antiviral activity. As I like to say, very low to nonexistent prior probability based on basic science plus equivocal clinical trial evidence equals, “the drug almost certainly doesn’t work” (especially if you add the huge element of fraud). If you prefer, my conclusion can be phrased a bit more carefully and precisely as, “The odds that ivermectin has a meaningful clinical effect in preventing or treating COVID-19 are so low as to be, for all practical intents and purposes, indistinguishable from not working”.

In fact, I’m now ready to go one step further. It is now arguably no longer ethical to design and carry out new clinical trials of ivermectin against COVID-19. There is no good preliminary evidence that it works in humans to justify such trials, meaning that the only potential effect left is possible harm to clinical trial subjects. If you prefer, I can phrase this proposition more carefully and precisely and say that the chances that clinical trial subjects participating in a randomized trial of ivermectin against COVID-19 will be harmed are so much greater than the chances that any will be helped that it is unethical to do such a trial. I’d love to hear the counterargument, but I’m having a hard time not becoming less and less tentative in this conclusion the more I learn.

The pushback

I’ve often wondered why there has been such a flood of bad papers touting ivermectin as a “miracle cure” or “miracle preventative” for COVID-19 given that we didn’t see that for hydroxychloroquine last year. Don’t get me wrong. The evidence for hydroxychloroquine was not strong. Quite the opposite, it was incredibly weak. However, there didn’t appear to be any major fraud. There were plenty of small studies, bad studies, and the like, but no evidence of fraud except for, ironically enough, one study that linked hydroxychloroquine to dangerous and fatal cardiac arrhythmias, which briefly came close to fooling even me. (I expressed skepticism about the study but in retrospect not nearly enough and thereby learned a valuable lesson.)

Both drugs achieved a cult-like snake oil miracle cure status among antivaxxers, antimaskers, and ideologues, and for much the same reason: If there exists a miracle cure or preventative for COVID-19, then all the public health interventions that these activists hate (lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates) all become unnecessary. Business can go back to making money, and life can revert to near normal, all without pesky government interventions on behalf of public health or any collective action of any kind. The ideological motivation for promoting hydroxychloroquine (at least after the first wave of the pandemic had crested, while doctors still believed the Chinese experience and recommendations for the drug) has been the same for ivermectin. So it’s not surprising that ivermectin cranks are pushing back hard against the growing reports of fraud and incompetence behind the most commonly cited studies claiming that ivermectin is a potent treatment for COVID-19.

For instance, after the BuzzFeed report, one famous conspiracy site known for COVID-19 minimization, antimask and antivaccine propaganda, and conspiracy theories about the pandemic, defended Hector Carvallo and portrayed the BuzzFeed article and the work of Meyerowitz-Katz and Sheldrick as —you guessed it!—a conspiracy on the part of the “mainstream medical establishment” to “silence” the brave maverick doctors trying to cure COVID-19. Amusingly, Carvallo even quotes Arthur Schopenhauer:

He is confident that eventually, ivermectin will be widely used against COVID-19. “All truth passes through three phases,” he told BuzzFeed. “First it is ridiculed, then it is violently opposed, then it is accepted as self-evident. We are in phase two now.”

Yes, he’s quoting Arthur Schopenhauer. This is a quote that I laugh at, because those who quote it erroneously think that they have an unpopular “truth” that will go through these stages, forgetting that untruth or fraud will never make it past the second stage. In fact, here’s a variation of my retort:

All “fake medicine” truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed by the rationally inclined because it is ridiculous and based upon feelings, conspiracy theories, bad science, and pseudoscience instead of reality. Second, it is opposed by the rationally inclined. Third, the more complete the science and information that falsify it, the more vehemently it is embraced as “self-evident” by its non-rationally inclined believers.

I think we’re in the third stage now, given some of the other responses coming from ivermectin believers:

– Their suggestion that metanalyses consider patient-level data is silly, because it would mean we would have to throw away every meta-analysis ever written, because they would have "high risk of bias." (He is confused what that means) [2/] — bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣 (@thebadstats) October 9, 2021

And, of course, there is a fake “meta-analysis” that ivermectin frauds still cite:

BECAUSE of the work done by these researchers. No mention of the fact they haven't removed the other trials found to be fraudulent. And of course, no addressing the list of reasons why https://t.co/sR53wYvC1R is an abomination… [7/] — bad_stats 🕜💵🖨️🕣 (@thebadstats) October 9, 2021

I really should do a post on that website, but it so much resembles websites maintained for hydroxychloroquine back in the day (and, indeed, seems to be maintained by the same astroturf groups) that I’ve had a hard time motivating myself.

And this isn’t all:

I’m going to strongly disagree with Dr. Sheldrick here too, just as I did with Meyerowitz-Katz, even if I risk being too repetitive and say again that I admire the whole crew’s work digging out the inconsistencies and omissions that strongly suggest fraud in these studies. One last time, from a Bayesian perspective we can now reasonably conclude that the chances that ivermectin produces a clinically relevant benefit against COVID-19 in humans are so infinitesimally small that it really isn’t necessary—or even desirable—to do any more large clinical trials reach a reasonable scientific conclusion that, for all practical purposes, ivermectin doesn’t work. (That is a different statement.) It’s also arguably unethical to design new clinical trials, for the reasons I’ve discussed above, as well as a waste of resources, in particular, the most precious research resource of all, human subjects.

I also understand another argument that I sometimes hear in other quarters, namely that we need a couple of slam-dunk large randomized clinical trials for ivermectin as a treatment or preventative for COVID-19 to convince doctors that it really doesn’t work. (This has been the same argument for decades for the need to do yet another large epidemiological trial looking at whether vaccines are associated with an increased risk of autism.) Then I ask myself: Really? If they’re not convinced now, what makes anyone think that another one, two (or three or four or ten) large RCTs would convince them?

Sadly, the ideology behind the antimask, antivaccine, and COVID-19 minimizing movement is a powerful drug that will, as antivaccine beliefs have, stand up against any evidence that science can produce, and, even if that weren’t the case, there’s just way too much grifting potential there.

Whether you’re an impartial onlooker or active combatant in the culture wars, you may have come across the term “simp.” A lexical fixture in Twitch chatrooms and TikTok videos, simps are romantically-challenged men whose servile nature prevents them from earning the affection of their love interest. To be clear, a simp isn’t your stereotypical nice guy. Rather, his excessive geniality belies a focused desire for romantic attention.Nevertheless, simping isn’t merely a sexual strategy. More crucially, it is a trend born out of the challenges of an unbalanced sexual marketplace where romance has become increasingly sporadic, fleeting, and transactional. Simping reflects the cold reality of our modern sexual marketplace where a growing number of lonely young men search desperately for a romantic partner. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of simping reveals something about female mate preferences.Sneaky simpsThe etymology of the term “simp” dates back to the early 1900s where it began as an abbreviation of “simpleton.” However, as with many slang terms used by today’s youth, “simp” was popularized by hip-hop culture. Rappers in 1980s and 1990s used the term as an insult for a subservient man. This is not altogether different from its current use.According to Urban Dictionary, “simp is a slang insult for men who are seen as too attentive and submissive to women, especially out of a failed hope of winning some entitled sexual attention or activity from them.” In short, the simp is a transcendent nice guy whose sycophancy is strategically deployed to attain sex and/or affection from women. As such, the compliments he pays and gifts he gives are gestures tinged with Machiavellianism.Crucially, simping is akin to the “sneaky fucker” strategy. Coined by biologists, the “sneaky fucker” strategy refers to the adoption of deceptive practices by low-status males incapable of attracting females via traditional means of signalling dominance. The technical term for this phenomenon is kleptogamy (derived from the Greek klepto (“to steal”) and gamos (“marriage”)).Consider male gobies whose body size is positively correlated with their ability to mate. Smaller male gobies cannot compete with their larger counterparts as female gobies prefer males with large bodies. To solve their reproductive dilemma, small male gobies, passing themselves off as females due to their size, will hide in the periphery of the spawning ground of paired fish. Once a female releases her eggs, these fish will slyly fertilize them. While this strategy is dangerous, it is the best option available to small gobies in a hypergamic environment.Similar to gobies, simps must skirt convention, pursing a sexual strategy that is more tailored to their circumstances. Importantly, the decision to simp is perhaps driven by imbalances in the modern sexual marketplace.As one article maintains, “The modern sexual marketplace is predicated on a power law where a small number of highly successful men are desired by the majority of women.” As such, average and below average men who cannot compete with above average males in the traditional arenas of wealth, social status, and appearance must turn to simping to attract mates. This, however, is not to suggest that highly successful men cannot and do not engage in simping. While professional success might reduce the difficulty of courtship, it does not guarantee romantic success, nor does it insulate a man from simping.Nevertheless, the aforementioned power law imbalance in the sexual marketplace has created a demographic of lonely young men who yearn for the “girlfriend experience.”According to Pew Research, 51 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 29 are single compared to 32 percent of women in the same age group. Furthermore, the number of men aged 18 to 30 who report having no sex in the past year has tripled between 2008 and 2018. Consequently, this development has fuelled the meteoric rise of OnlyFans.The simp economyWhile OnlyFans was not created for the distribution of adult content, the site has morphed into a subscription-based adult site, catering to over 50 million registered users and 1.5 million content creators. The site’s gross merchandise value and net revenue are projected to be $12.5 billion and $2.5 billion in 2022, respectively. However, the site’s revenue model is defined by a power law distribution where the top 10 percent of content creators generate 73 percent of all revenue. The majority of accounts receive less than $145 per month.The popularity of OnlyFans raises a fascinating question: if internet porn is free, why do men pay for OnlyFans?OnlyFans offers something which porn does not: emotional connection. OnlyFans provides men that have withdrawn from the sexual marketplace with an opportunity to interact with women. Moreover, despite the near impossibility of establishing a romantic relationship with a content creator, the desire to be loved on the part of users spurs them to empty their bank account.Importantly, this perceived emotional connection comes without the sting of rejection. OnlyFans dilutes the challenge of courtship, eliminating flirtation, charm, and rejection. It is, moreover, clear from the empirical data that young men are petrified of rejection. According to Pew Research, a whopping 52 percent of single men reported the difficulty of approaching women as the primary reason for their relationship status—by far the most common reason given for why they are single.It thus makes intuitive sense why these men have turned to OnlyFans. For single men, romantic success is largely predicated on initiative and grit. One must have the fortitude to approach a woman as well as the resolve to move on and try again if rejected. For men, finding a partner rests on action and repetition.Importantly, OnlyFans’s financial metagame is not contingent on the profitability of its “power few” content creators but on simping. If a popular content creator were to leave the platform or discontinue the sale of content, would it stem users’ demand for the “girlfriend experience”? This is unlikely as users would simply migrate to another content creator to get their fix.The influx of single young men has created massive demand for the “girlfriend experience.” This has in turn created a simp economy where emotional connection can be acquired through economic transactions. Moreover, content creators can also tap into this market, harvesting simps for their own profit. In this sense, simping is comparable to a hard commodity like gold or silver as it is both currency and commodity within the simp economy.The dark gentlemanThe ineffectiveness of simping lies in its pedestalization of women in the absence of genuine intimacy. While the gentleman holds doors and pays for dinner, and engages a woman on an emotional level, the simp inundates a woman with extravagant gifts and superficial praise. The simp engages in romantic bribery, attempting to buy a woman’s love.A man who is too ingratiating is ultimately a man who is too desperate. His inability to tell a woman “no” is a direct reflection of his over-eagerness to please. Contrary to popular belief, telling a woman “no” in specific circumstances is an attractive quality as it signals that a man is not a pliant doormat.Importantly, simping contradicts women’s romantic preferences. Whereas men typically mate below and across dominance hierarchies, women typically mate above and across them.Neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine has shared research indicating that women, on average, prefer men who are at least four inches taller and three and a half years older. Other research by sociologist Rosemary L. Hopcroft indicates that men in the highest income category are 57 percent more likely to find spouses compared to men in the lowest income category. Moreover, men in the highest income category are 37 percent less likely to divorce compared to men in the lowest income category.Interestingly, a woman’s income is not positively correlated with her likelihood of marriage. In fact, higher-earning women are more likely to get divorced. Likewise, recent research by psychologist Gillian Parker reports that, “within couples, a shift toward women out earning their partners was associated with decreases in relationship satisfaction for both women and men ... women who win political elections are twice as likely to divorce than their counterparts who lose.”Taken together, the empirical evidence suggests that simping and its associated subservient qualities may be ineffective in attracting a romantic partner as self-devaluation reduces a man’s attractiveness.Nevertheless, the ineffectiveness of simping reveals much about what women find attractive. Importantly, what a woman finds attractive will often differ based on her age as the mild-mannered professional is generally less attractive to a woman in her early 20s compared to her early 30s.In contrast to the simp whose attention is abundant, the stereotypical jerk withholds his attention. This lack of interest often presses a woman to chase him. Moreover, the scarcity of bad boys as well as the inherent challenge of acquiring can increase their perceived value in the minds of (some) women. In some contexts, the more a woman seeks to qualify herself to a man, the greater his perceived value. We desire most that which we cannot have.Cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman defines a jerk as someone with “high extraversion, low neuroticism, low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, high openness to experience, and a bit of a dip into the dark triad traits.” Curiously, much is made about women’s attraction to men who possess the dark triad personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism (manipulativeness), and psychopathy (callousness, lying, thrill-seeking). This is corroborated by the scientific literature.Research indicates that the dark triad is associated with a preference for short-term relationships. To this extent, narcissism was positively correlated with a preference for one-night stands and friends-with-benefits, while psychopathy was positively correlated with booty calls. Both traits were negatively correlated with a preference for serious romantic relationships. Furthermore, researchers also found that the dark triad was associated with game-playing and cerebral mating strategies where individuals shirked long-term relationships by avoiding emotional connection. Furthermore, dark triad individuals tended to use more sexual words in naturalistic settings, enticing prospective mates.In another study, researchers had participants fill out personality questionnaires then participate in speed dating sessions. Following this, participants filled out score cards for each person they met, indicating the type of relationship they envisioned with each person and whether they’d like to see them again. Men who scored higher in narcissism were rated by women as more appealing for both short and long-term relationships. Crucially, male narcissists tended to score higher in extraversion, but were no more appealing than the other males once extraversion was factored out. I will return to this point.In general, genes linked to the dark triad are correlated with the genes associated with reproducing earlier in life and having more children. Of course, much of this can be explained by the impulsive, risk-taking nature of these individuals. Nevertheless, these traits facilitate attraction and reproduction. To this extent, researchers asked 128 women to rate the attractiveness of men who either represented the dark triad or a control personality. Even when controlling for physical appearance, the dark triad man was rated as significantly more attractive than the control.The allure of dark triad persons resides in their ability to cultivate an aura of self-importance. For example, researchers found that dark triad persons were often better dressed than their non-dark triad counterparts. As such, the additional attention garnered by their wardrobe served to increase their self-esteem. In addition, dark triad individuals were found to be more likeable, exuding greater confidence and attractive facial appearances. Indeed, confidence in a man is more alluring than modesty.Of course, it is one thing to appear important and another to be important. Research indicates that narcissistic tendencies were positively correlated with professional success and financial achievement while Machiavellianism was positively correlated with a leadership position. High-level resource acquisition and inexorable confidence are, by themselves, desirable qualities in a man. Put them together, however, and you get a man that is highly attractive to the opposite sex.While dark triad men are certainly attractive, I am not suggesting that a conniving psycho-Chad is a good long-term option. They’re not, by most empirical accounts. Nevertheless, perfect is boring and a man with questionable character who never texts is generally more desirable than a diffident simp who texts too often. It is not that women like bad qualities. Rather, it’s that bad boys possess a bevy of ancillary traits (e.g., charisma, humour, social dominance, etc.) which make them attractive.Dark triad personality traits reflect low agreeableness, high openness, and high extraversion, which are often alluring traits. For example, the behavioural scientist Daniel Nettle reported a significant negative correlation between agreeableness and number of sexual partners in a sample of 545 people. That is, disagreeable men tended to report having more sexual partners than average. Furthermore, men who scored one standard deviation below the mean on agreeableness earned 18.3 percent ($9,772) more than men who scored one standard deviation above the mean. Disagreeable behaviours are generally rewarded in environments where competitiveness and aggressiveness are valued. With regard to extraversion, research indicates that those high in this trait were perceived as more attractive. This is the same for openness where ornamental/aesthetic creativity was found to be sexually attractive.Based on the empirical evidence, female mate preferences might be described as conflicting. The ideal man is a figure who embodies contradiction as he is both the disagreeable bad boy and the caring family man. Such a man is capable of great violence yet is too self-disciplined to use it. He is proficient at attracting other women but is loyal to his own. He is hyper-masculine yet emotionally aware, roguish yet caring. In practical terms, the ideal man is capable of both short-term sexual gratification and long-term provisioning and parental investment. Such a man is a Rebis-like amalgam of the cad and the dad. He is the dark gentleman.Game over man, game overGame theory is a branch of economics that considers how players of a mathematically formalized game can optimize their decisions. It is a method of making predictions in a world that is simultaneously probabilistic and rules-based. Simping is game theoretic. It involves some form of strategic interdependence where the actions of either party affect the welfare of both. It is, moreover, governed by three logic parameters:It involves a set of players.Each player has a set of allowable moves.How each player feels about outcomes can be mathematically described by a payoff matrix or utility function.Here, I apply game theory to better understand the operable value of simping as a sexual strategy in the modern sexual marketplace.Figure 1 presents the payoff matrix for simping. I have designed the matrix such that one participant is female and the other is male. Moreover, males can pursue one of two strategies, “simp” or “don’t simp,” while women can either reciprocate or not. For the purposes of this model, simping involves expending resources during courtship to acquire affection from a female while reciprocation involves pursuing or committing to a romantic relationship with a male.The top-left quadrant represents an outcome where the male engages in simping and the female reciprocates. In this scenario, the male expends resources and receives affection but must continue to expend costly resources to maintain the relationship. In contrast, the woman receives resources but is saddled with a simp. This outcome is pareto inferior as there are other outcomes which would give both players higher payoffs. The top right quadrant represents the worse outcome for the male as he expends resources but does not receive affection in return. In contrast, this is the best outcome for the woman as she acquires resources from a simp but does not have to commit to him. As such, she can commit to another male while receiving resources from the simp. This particular outcome is common on OnlyFans.The bottom left quadrant represents a positive-sum outcome where the male does not expend resources but gets the girl while the female does not receive resources during courtship but is committed to a man that is not a simp. This outcome is pareto optimal as both parties stand to gain without making at least one party worse off. In economics, a pareto optimal outcome implies that resources are allocated in the most economically efficient manner. Finally, the bottom right quadrant represents a neutral outcome as neither individual gains or loses anything.Based on this payoff matrix, choosing not to simp is the most prudent decision a man can make as he does not lose resources during courtship regardless of whether the woman reciprocates. In contrast, the simp does not score a resounding victory in either scenario as he can either continue expending resources to remain in the relationship or gain nothing for his efforts. Nevertheless, both parties stand to gain when the male does not simp and the female reciprocates.Simping is a by-product of a deregulated sexual marketplace. This asymmetry has resulted in an influx of lonely young men. This is not merely a negative development, but a warning sign of a society teetering toward disaster.AcknowledgmentsThanks to Rob Henderson for his feedback on an earlier draft.

The Covid 19 pandemic is once again at an inflection point- with cases now falling sharply in most of the world. The current pandemic may be coming under control, but after millions of preventable deaths, this is very far from a success story and it is as good a time as any to take a hard look at our failings, especially with regard to our management of knowledge

Across the world, the number of Covid infections are declining: the United States numbers are finally falling after the Delta variant sent it soaring in the late summer; India-perhaps the hardest hit country in the world where cases peaked at more than 400,000 a day in early May, is now reporting just over 20,000 cases daily, the equivalent of 5,000 a day in the United States. Similar declines can be seen in countries around the world.

This drop worldwide is due to a combination of both the spread of vaccines and, perhaps more importantly, natural immunity arising out of many infections. According to a New York Times article, for example, the number of infections in India as of early May was likely close to 540 million, when the official count was just 27 million. Since the pandemic was still in full force in the country at the time, an extrapolation would imply 750 to 800 million infections, close to 60 percent of the country's population.

The pharmaceutical industry also claims that the developing world lacks the sophisticated manufacturing facilities needed to produce the Covid vaccines. This is not true.

While such widespread infections might help to contain the pandemic, it came with a horrible human cost. While the official number of deaths is around 450,000, researchers have estimated likely death tolls in the range of 1.6 million to almost 6 million in urban areas along according to one study. There is a similar story throughout the developing world, where the actual number of infections and deaths hugely exceed the already devastating official statistics.

That this death toll has occurred, even when the world is (rightly) celebrating the rapid development of effective vaccines, means that we have failed badly in getting these vaccines distributed widely around the world. Crucially, this has been a failure of political will, not the lack of capacity to produce and distribute vaccines.

A key feature has been our treatment of knowledge around the development and production of vaccines and medicines more generally. Given the continuing cost of the pandemic globally, enlightened policy should aim to maximize production and dissemination of vaccines and medicines. Instead, we have seen egregious attempts to limit dissemination.

A year ago, South Africa and India proposed a resolution at the World Trade Organization to suspend patents and other intellectual property claims for vaccines, tests, and treatments for the duration of the pandemic. Since that time, the rich countries have been engaged in a filibuster to block any action.

The pharmaceutical industry also claims that the developing world lacks the sophisticated manufacturing facilities needed to produce the Covid vaccines. This is not true, as India, Brazil, South Africa, and several other developing countries have modern facilities that can be used to produce vaccines.

Clearly, for some of the newer technologies (such as mRNA vaccines), such facilities were not immediately available, but getting such facilities up and running by now would almost certainly have been possible had action been taken quickly on the resolution last October. For some of the older technologies, which include highly effective non-mRNA vaccines, capacities exist, but patent protection and the need for licensing limits production even today

IP protections also pose problems beyond vaccines. As new technologies are developed that combat Covid (Merck's Molnupiravir antiviral is an example), our current system of patent protection will continue to limit access more than is necessary, even with potential licensing agreements. In such cases patents are the only thing standing in the way--the ability to make these life saving drugs already exists in many parts of the world and doing away with restrictions will make them available across the globe much more cheaply.

Patents though are only one part of the problem. Access to technology remains just as critical. The TRIPS provisions of the WTO were designed to limit the spread of technology to the developing world. The India-South Africa resolution was intended to get around these restrictions, but as was widely noted, much of the necessary technology was protected by industrial secrets, not patents. That would mean that suspending patents by itself, would be of little benefit in spreading production.

Trade secrets have an amorphous protection under law, and maximizing production and distribution requires taking this head on. South Korea back in July announced that they have the capacity to manufacture a billion mRNA vaccines almost immediately, but had not found a firm willing to share their manufacturing knowhow. As three researchers pointed out in August, however, the US could invoke its Defense Production Act (which it has already done in the pandemic) and compel the transfer of technology and knowhow. In addition, it could do so unilaterally.

An additional remedy would be to prevent non-disclosure agreements (NDA) at least in technologies largely funded by the public sector. NDAs protect industrial secrets by threatening any employee who discloses information with serious lawsuits. If NDAs are banned as an anti-competitive practice, the threats from companies against former employees, to protect their secrets, would be meaningless.

In general, and in a global health emergency in particular we should be looking to share technology as widely as possible, not locking it up behind patent monopolies and other protections. A worldwide pandemic should have been an occasion for the world's scientists, including those from China and Russia, to work collectively to confront a common problem.

The cost has not just been borne by the developing world. By allowing the pandemic to spread largely unchecked in the developing world, we gave it the opportunity to mutate into more vaccine resistant forms that will continue to reverberate in the months and years to come. The Delta variant developed in India last December.

We may never know if a more rapid rollout of vaccines and widespread testing could have contained it before it spread around the world, but the human and economic costs of this spread have been enormous. Also, the US and other wealthy countries continue to feel the economic impact of the spread in the developing world. Factory shutdowns in places like Vietnam and Malaysia have been a major factor in supply chain difficulties that are now macroeconomic concerns. Making knowledge available, much more easily deployable, and widely shared is not simply a moral imperative, but is in the overall self-interest of everyone, everywhere.

The original work by CEPR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Last weekend I attended the “Higher Education Summit,” an annual gathering sponsored by the Classical Learning Test (CLT) in (mask-free!) Annapolis, Maryland. For two days I mixed with the movers and shakers of the spreading movement for classical education among American K-12 schools and colleges. I heard talks from the likes of Robert George, Cornel West, Anika Prather, Spencer Klavan, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Jennifer Frey, and Elias Moo. It struck me how different this movement is from the classical education movement of the period I study, the Renaissance.

During the Renaissance the study of the classics always had an elitist edge. When Petrarch refounded classical education in the fourteenth century, his goal was to fight the tide of ignorance, violence, selfishness, political corruption, and religious indifference he saw rising all about him. The real problems of his time could not be solved by passing more laws or strengthening institutions. Laws were worthless if made by evil men; institutions could not accomplish their goals if the men (and some women) who ran them could not be trusted to do what was right. The character of Christendom’s elites would have to change if institutions human and divine were to be restored.

Petrarch’s solution was to found the humanities, a new cycle of studies that would not simply teach students pre-professional skills, but transform them morally and intellectually, restoring some of the greatness of character and intellect that Petrarch found in the ancients. His movement was amazingly successful by any measure: By the middle of the fifteenth century, Italian elites had accepted that classical education was a necessity. Modelling yourself on the noble Greeks and Romans had become a cultural imperative. The Parallel Lives of Plutarch had turned into a kind of humanist Bible.

Nevertheless, Petrarchan idealism wasn't the only thing driving Italian princes, nobles, and oligarchs to learn Latin and Greek and to study classical authors. The humanist schoolmasters and orators who spread the gospel of the humanities in the quattrocento also mixed in the idea that the humanities were a way to enoble yourself and to justify your rule over others. Acquiring moral legitimacy through education was an attractive idea: Jacob Burckhardt, the founder of Renaissance studies, already in 1860 pointed out that Renaissance elites in general had a legitimacy problem. The humanists told Renaissance elites they could acquire “true nobility” by studying the Greek and Latin classics. The idea gradually took root in Europe over the following centuries that classical education was the way that upper-class people should be educated. Classical education acquired snob value. In the plastic arts, in architecture, in literature, and even in manners and mores, classical styles imparted an aura of nobility.

The classical educators who gathered in Annapolis last weekend could be described as elite in the humanist sense. They take seriously the call to cultivate “true nobility,” that is, moral and intellectual excellence. But the type of education they are devoted to is no longer that of the social elite. It’s countercultural, even a touch populist. It’s an education fired by a sense of urgency to preserve precious things in danger of being destroyed. By contrast, the values embraced by (so-called) elite American prep schools and Ivy League universities are now utterly different from and incompatible with classical education. As those of us in education are all too aware, the “elite” schools are now determined to transform their students into political activists. Students are to learn what to think, not how to think. Being elite now means holding a particular set of ideas, not a set of virtues. Virtue is signaled, not acquired.

The classical authors—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and the like—on this view are all tainted with sexism, racism, and white supremacy. To read them uncatechized or uncensored might undermine the pure doctrine of Wokery. Censorship is hard work, and explaining why an author is morally defective only leads students to ask, “So why do we have to read this awful book?” Hence the growing trend among the wokerati to exclude such dangerous authors from the curriculum entirely. I suppose for political types with no love of literature for its own sake, one author is as good as another. Forget Shakespeare; kids are better off reading the works of Donna Gephart. A colleague of mine, recently arrived from Europe, decided against sending his daughter to the most elite (and expensive) private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he discovered that her English classes would assign no work written before the year 2000.

Above all, the urge the young have to distinguish themselves, to shine among their fellows, to win honor, is now being kept under strict control. If someone starts to stand out and show real merit, and an equal merit cannot be ascribed to all the minority children in the class, well, that means the school must be lacking in “equity.” It’s time to call in more consultants.

The meritocratic urge is hard to suppress, though. Another friend told me how his six-year-old boy outfoxed a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer at his grade school. The trainer had asked each child to identify one thing he was good at. The interrogation would then continue until the children acknowledged that their special ability was owing to “white privilege.” My friend’s little boy, however, blurted out, “I’m good at DEI!,” a response that left his trainer (temporarily) flummoxed.

One result of all this is that the new trend toward “classical education”—making great works of literature the center of K-12 education—is gaining strength among Christian and more traditionally-minded parents, especially among the rapidly expanding population of homeschoolers. According to Robert L. Jackson of Great Hearts Foundation, between homeschoolers and brick-and-mortar schools, 750,000 to a million students in America are now involved with some form of classical education. What I saw in Annapolis last weekend was a group of people with a deep understanding of the value that great literature has in sharpening intellects, forming character, and enhancing the power of expression—what the old humanists used to call eloquence. The theme of the conference suited this understanding: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

The question I’m left with now is how long elites can remain elite when their “elite” educational system is turning the next generation into ignoramuses, people who have never been allowed to think for themselves, androids who know only how to repeat the approved slogans and adopt approved attitudes. A decade from now, won’t the children who have been brought up on great literature, encouraged to think for themselves, taught how to argue and speak with eloquence, urged to develop their full humanity, children who know history and poetry and philosophy—won’t they become the new elite, the “true nobility”?

James Hankins is a professor of history at Harvard University.

By Cheng LiThe COVID-19 crisis has interrupted daily life and business routines across the world, caused a massive loss of millions of lives, and exacerbated economic disparities within and between countries. COVID-19 has also revealed fundamental challenges in the international order. As Kissinger has asserted, “the world will never be the same after the coronavirus.” One can reasonably expect that cynicism regarding regional and global integration, as well as radical populism, racism, ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, will likely continue to rise around the world.
At this critical juncture, it has become even more essential to examine the urgent challenges that the world confronts and to engage in global cooperation instead of devolving into constant contention and confrontation. One of the most urgent tasks for the international community is to overcome growing digital divides.
Digital divides in least developed countries (LDCs) have been particularly salient, as digitally disconnected populations have been left further behind during the pandemic. The U.S. and China, two superpowers in the digital era, should work in tandem with the international community to jointly combat digital divides and COVID-19.
The expansion of digital divides in LDCs
Despite the global growth of digital technologies, a 2021 United Nations report noted that nearly half of the world’s population, 3.7 billion people, lack internet access. Deficiency of digital connectivity is especially prevalent within LDCs, where more than 80% of the population are still offline. In comparison, the unconnected population in developed countries and developing countries stands at 13% and 53%, respectively.
LDCs account for about 14% of the world’s population, and they comprise more than half of the world’s extremely poor. Digital divides both reflect and reinforce socioeconomic disparities. The pandemic has aggravated existing inequalities, often resulting in a widening gap of digital skills.
As a result of COVID-19-induced economic difficulties, the population of extreme poor in LDCs expanded by 32 million, and the number of people in poverty in LDCs grew to 36% in 2020, 3% more than in prior years. More specifically, LDCs lag further behind in the following three areas.
Digital economy
In 2018, prior to the COVID-19 crisis, over 70% of the population in developed countries purchased goods and services online while only 2% in LDCs did the same. The digital divide deprives workers and consumers in LDCs of the opportunity to benefit from e-commerce on both the supply and demand ends.
Public health and vaccine distribution
People in LDCs have been unable to access essential health care information during the pandemic. Moreover, LDCs in Africa have particularly been disadvantaged in terms of obtaining vaccines. By mid-September 2021, of the nearly six billion doses of vaccines distributed globally, only 2% have been injected in Africans. According to a recent report released by the United Nations, Africa faces a shortage of 470 million doses of vaccine in 2021.
Online education
Approximately 1.6 billion students around the world faced disrupted education in 2020. While online education and digital learning filled the gap during the COVID-19 shutdown, more than half of the world’s young people are “on the wrong side of the digital divide”. About 826 million students do not have access to a computer at home. The difference is particularly stark in LDCs. In sub-Saharan Africa, 89% of learners lack access to computers at home, and 82% lack internet access.
These growing digital divides and economic disparities in the COVID-19 era highlight the fact that technological revolution on its own cannot bring inclusive economic growth or distributional justice. On the contrary, technology often enhances the tension and animosity between the haves and have-nots both locally and globally.
The urgent need for U.S.-China joint action to combat digital divides and Covid-19
The priorities and perspectives of major powers differ significantly when it comes to cyber issues. But this should not prevent the U.S., China, and others from addressing common challenges such as digital divides. Major countries have the convening power to establish and reinforce international rules, norms, standards, principles, and codes of conduct. They also have greater financial and human resources to make combating digital divides feasible at the global level.
According to the Digital Economy Report 2019 released by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. and China accounted for 90% of the market capitalization of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms. Europe’s share was 4% while the combined share of Africa and Latin America was only 1%. Seven “super platforms” in the U.S. and China — namely Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba — constitute two-thirds of total market value worldwide.
This may explain why there is so much resentment directed toward these “tech hegemons”. Probably for the same reason, about 50,000 Americans signed an online petition stating that Jeff Bezos should not return to earth after his space journey.
But unfortunately, we have hardly seen any significant joint efforts or “healthy competition” between the U.S. and China, on either the governmental or industrial fronts, to help combat digital divides in LDCs. Additionally, as the pandemic enters its third year, there has been a striking absence of governmental cooperation between the U.S. and China on COVID-19. Instead, some people in both countries have engaged in a blame game, fought propaganda wars, and promoted conspiracy theories.
Geopolitical fault lines are beginning to form, with technology being a central domain of competition and conflict. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and distinguished Chinese political scientist Yan Xuetong have respectively noted, there would be a “bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America”, and the U.S. and China would not provide “joint global leadership for the emerging digital world”. Instead, the two countries are shaping what Yan calls “a duopolistic digital world” with two separate and competing centers.
These zero-sum competitions are extremely dangerous at a time of unprecedented technological revolution, especially with the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. In the digital era, neither America nor China, Russia or the EU can prevent a catastrophic cyberattack, which may not come from a major power, but from a marginalized group, a radical extremist, or even a “machine”.
Feasibility of US-China cooperation
For now, international joint efforts to combat COVID-19 — particularly in LDCs — should be a top priority. Policy makers in both Washington and Beijing should focus on the future instead of dwelling in the past.
The U.S. (with generous contributions from the private sector, NGOs, civil society organizations, and individuals) has already donated $4 billion to COVAX for vaccine distribution in the neediest foreign countries. China, as President Xi Jinping committed in his recent U.N. Assembly speech, will provide 2 billion doses of vaccine to foreign countries this year. In an international conference recently held in China, Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He called for “overcoming digital divides to achieve inclusive growth”.
The U.S. and China can complement each other in this effort. The U.S. has an extensive network of global health programs — through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and other agencies — with a legacy of providing medical and public health support to the developing world. China has a strong capacity for manufacturing and logistics. Data-sharing and transparency remain imperative to fighting emerging variants and determining the efficacy and safety of vaccines and drug development, especially for those digitally disconnected countries.
It’s time for both countries to make common cause to ensure that the digital and increasingly interconnected world is built on a strong foundation of international dialogue, engagement, respect, distributional justice, humanitarianism and a sense of shared destiny.

Feminist activists participate in the 1979 ‘March on Times Square.’ (Photo by Barbara Alper / Getty Images.)Last month I read a story that gave me a surge of cultural hope. No, strike that. It gave me another surge of cultural hope. And it made me ask a key question that afflicts more homes and more hearts than virtually any political issue that dominates the news. Is America ready for a culture change on pornography? And that leads to a second question. Is America ready for a new alliance between feminists and Evangelicals, between left and right, to achieve that change? The story that gave me hope came last month from New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. It begins with two powerful paragraphs. Forgive me for quoting them in full:In her new book, “The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan, who is quickly becoming one of the most high-profile feminist thinkers in the English-speaking world, describes teaching Oxford students about second-wave anti-porn activism. She assumes her students, for whom porn is ubiquitous, will “find the anti-porn position prudish and passé.” They do not. Rather, they’re in complete agreement with assertions that could come straight from Andrea Dworkin.“Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real? I asked. Yes, they said,” writes Srinivasan. She continues, “Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.” (Emphasis added).Goldberg’s piece comes on the heels of a series of shattering reports that have exposed grotesque practices in the porn industry and grotesque recklessness from porn outlets. Back in October 2020, Vice published a report outlining how xHamster, one of the most visited websites in the world, failed to guard against child abuse and exploitation.Screening for images of children was “incomplete at best.” And that was hardly the only deficiency. “Images that appear to have been uploaded without the subject’s consent are also waved through,” wrote Vice. Its research also showed “how little xHamster seems to invest in protecting victims from digital exploitation, such as revenge porn. The moderators receive no money, no individual training and very little support from xHamster administrators.”Then, last December, the New York Times’s Nick Kristof wrote a piece that rocked the internet. Called, “The Children of Pornhub” it provided heartbreaking stories of how images of young girls are disseminated on the web, destroying their lives, while the corporate giants of porn profit from their exploitation and suffering. Kristof’s searing story reverberated in Washington and in corporate America. While a number of senators introduced bipartisan legislation designed to better protect women and girls from revenge porn or from commercial marketing of images of rape and sexual abuse, the more immeidate and effective response came from credit card companies. Mastercard and Visa cut ties with Porhhub almost immediately. In April, Mastercard announced that it would require “clear, unambiguous and documented consent” on all adult sites that use it for payment processing. And in August, the adult site OnlyFans briefly decided to block sexually explicit content. The reason? Once again, pressure from credit card companies.Why would OnlyFans feel the heat? Well, a comprehensive BBC report published in August “revealed the site was failing to prevent under-18s from selling and appearing in explicit videos.” Even worse, “leaked documents show accounts are not automatically shut down if they break the site's terms of service.” I want you to notice a few things from the reports above. First, they’re all from mainstream media outlets. The rising alarm at abuse and predation in the porn industry isn’t coming exclusively from conservative religious Americans. Second, the most effective remedies so far are coming from the “woke” corporations that so many conservatives love to hate. And third, the harms of porn outlined above aren’t just objective (involving concrete violations of legal rights), they’re also subjective, degrading and damaging the way in which women experience the world. So what now? It’s time to remember an old alliance, to learn from its mistakes, and to understand its possibilities.Let’s blow the dust off the history books, peer through the mists of time, and remember the ancient year of 1984. In that year, in one midwestern city, strange friendships were formed. On one side were social conservatives, members of the emerging Christian conservative foundation of American Republican power. On the other were radical second-wave feminists, people like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.Make no mistake—these two sides didn’t have much in common. Five minutes of conversation about, say, abortion or homosexuality could fracture the room. But they shared a loathing of pornography and a conviction that it was immoral, obscene, and discriminatory. It inherently exploited and victimized women.This conviction that pornography was discriminatory represented an important legal and conceptual innovation. Though the Supreme Court had long held that the First Amendment did not protect obscenity, the constitutional definition of obscenity was so narrow (and prosecution so difficult) that obscenity laws had proven useless at slowing porn’s relentless spread. But if pornography was deemed discriminatory, then that had immense legal implications. Nondiscrimination law was already a normal part of the fabric of American life, and the exhibition of pornography in certain circumstances could already constitute discriminatory harassment (for example, if a boss or supervisor displayed porn at work, that could be part of a hostile environment harassment claim under employment law).Prosecuting obscenity was almost impossible. Litigating discrimination? That happened every day. So in 1984, the conservative leaders of the city of Indianapolis joined with Dworkin and MacKinnon to pass an ordinance that declared pornography to be inherently discriminatory. A key provision declared:Pornography is a discriminatory practice based on sex because its effect is to deny women equal opportunities in society. Pornography is central in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination. Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women. The bigotry and contempt it promotes, with the acts of aggression it fosters, harm women’s opportunities for equality of rights in employment, education, access to and use of public accommodations, and acquisition of real property, and contribute significantly to restricting women in particular from full exercise of citizenship and participation in public life, including in neighborhoods.Creative? Yes. Constitutional? No. Not even close. The district court blocked enforcement, and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. Writing for the majority, Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote that pornography is protected speech in part because of its real-world power. “Pornography,” Easterbrook wrote, “affects how people see the world, their fellows, and social relations. If pornography is what pornography does, so is other speech.” To put Easterbrook’s argument in plain English, permitting bans on speech because of the negative effects of speech would eviscerate the First Amendment. “Religions affect socialization in the most pervasive way,” Easterbrook said. Do we wait to see if the socialization is positive or negative before permitting the speech to continue? Indianapolis appealed, and the Supreme Court’s response was quick and decisive. It summarily affirmed the decision without full briefing and without oral argument. The idea of banning porn died a quick death. Even the idea of a partial online ban died in 1997, when the Supreme Court struck down key provisions of the Communications Decency Act, a law that criminalized the “‘knowing' transmission of ‘obscene or indecent’ messages to any recipient under 18 years of age.”Our takeaway from these rulings shouldn’t be that the law can do nothing about pornography. Indeed, in the opinion striking down parts of the CDA, the Court raised the possibility that technology could one day render legally-mandated age-based restrictions to adult sites feasible and enforceable. Rather, they should remind us that when a free society encounters a social problem, its most effective response is often based in changing values, not in changing laws. Changed values have taught Visa and Mastercard that it should not tangibly financially empower the abuse and exploitation of women and girls. Changing values (and terrible experience) are transforming the ideas and attitudes of young feminists. For a long time arguments against porn have centered around the attempt to document certain specific, identifiable negative effects. Are rapists more likely to be porn addicts? What about abusers or sexual harassers? It’s as if one could only “prove” porn was harmful if you could tie its prevalence to specific unlawful acts.But the experience Michelle Goldberg describes is something else. It represents porn as degrading human intimacy in ways that are hard to measure, yet break human hearts. Let’s return to the class Michelle Goldberg described: “Porn, the students say, provides the script for their sex lives, one that leaves them insecure and alienated. A man in Srinivasan’s class was unsure if sex that was “loving and mutual” was even possible.” I’m reminded of a 2012 Terry Gross interview with Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO show Girls, where she described the show’s notoriously uncomfortable and obviously unsatisfying sexual relationships as a product of dating young men who’ve grown up with porn and act in a manner that in “no way” reflects their own “personal instinct.” And we can’t possibly discuss the harm porn does to women without discussing the harm it does to young men. It’s way too simplistic to say that porn makes men abusers. Millions upon millions of men consume porn without abusing anyone. But can porn harm men? Yes, absolutely.In 2016, Time published a lengthy story describing how long-term porn use was destroying the ability of young men to form relationships in the real-world. At the extremes, they said porn use had destroyed even their ability to have sexual intercourse. They were aroused only by images on a screen. Yet focusing on the negative effects on sexual relationships is only one piece of the puzzle. I’ve described porn use as often creating a reverse character formation for young men. In my 52 years on this earth I’ve encountered a multitude of parenting styles, but I’ve never encountered a parent—progressive or conservative, secular or religious—who wants their young son watching porn. No one hands their kid a smartphone and says, “Well, if you’re going to watch porn, I recommend Pornhub.”So what happens? Kids deceive their parents. They sneak around online. They find ways to conceal their behavior. And so it’s not just that the young boy watching porn is often harmed by what he sees, he’s damaged by his own deceptions. He learns how to lie well.Moreover porn (like many other vices) indulges and perpetuates a culture of both self-love and instant gratification. Yes, this has obvious consequences for sexual relationships, but it can fit all too easily into a larger lifestyle pattern, where a young man can grow frustrated when rewards aren’t immediate, when meaningful relationships are hard, and when they find that real love often requires giving more than you receive. One of the most fascinating developments of modern times has been the way in which American ideas and American conduct frequently contradict each other. The world of ideas mostly (though not exclusively) has moved left, quickly. Ideas move from progressive fringe to mainstream with stunning speed. To take an obvious example, there are folks in the heart of American political discourse who will actually react with hurt and anger if you use the term “pregnant woman” instead of “pregnant person.” That’s new.But in the world of conduct, something else is happening. Social conservative lifestyles are making a comeback. Divorce rates are down. Teen pregnancy is down. Abortion rates (abortions per 1,000 women) and ratios (abortions per 1,000 pregnancies) are way down. Single parenting has stabilized, and the percentage of children living with both parents is inching up.Why? One reason is that experience can be a harsh teacher. Is it a coincidence that the generations following the spike in divorce are more likely to stay together? Is it bizarre to think that latch-key kids could become helicopter parents (for good and ill)? And if it is true that American women don’t view abortion as a “desirable good” in their own lives that they’ll increasingly view their pregnancies as precious? Experience is teaching its harsh lessons once again. American men and women, including couples of all political and religious persuasions, are living in a world porn helped make, and countless millions don’t like the result. It’s a world that’s not just rife with outright exploitation and abuse, like countless other products, its consumption (especially at scale) harms the consumer. So now perhaps an old alliance can become new again—this time focused not on blanket bans that defy court precedent, won’t work, and can’t pass, but rather on technically feasible and reasonable age-access regulations and on concrete legal safeguards that protect women from exploitation, trafficking, and abuse. In addition, liberty has its own vital role to play. Culture-makers can use the power of their pulpits to turn the tide against porn, and critical corporations—like Visa and Mastercard—have the freedom to look at the porn industry and say, “No, you cannot use our resources to profit from your harm.”One more thing …Last week the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee acquiesced to the demands of its members, voting not just to commission a third-party investigation of sex abuse in the SBC, but also to waive attorney-client privilege in the interests of complete transparency. It was not easy. Here’s Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnut:It took three weeks of scheduled meetings, at least three law firms, dozens of statements, hours of closed-door briefings, and extensive back-and-forth debates across boardrooms, social media, and Zoom calls for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee (EC) to agree to the terms of a third-party investigation into its response to abuse. But on Tuesday, it did.The EC voted 44–31 in favor of waiving attorney-client privilege in the investigation, after a half dozen members resigned and several switched their position in favor of the waiver. For a moment, it felt like the conclusion of a long and heated process, though the decision is only the start of a long investigative process.EC chairman Rolland Slade, who oversaw the proceedings, expressed his relief after the tally was announced. Then he remarked, “I want to express sorrow over the conduct we have displayed as Southern Baptists.”A few points. First, it shouldn’t have been this hard. At their annual convention Southern Baptist messengers overwhelmingly demanded this exact result. The Executive Committee’s weeks of resistance were deeply disappointing and inflicted unnecessary anguish on sex abuse survivors who’ve bravely raised their voices to demand transparency and justice. Second, at the end of the day, the Executive Committee not only did the right thing, it took a dramatic step towards transparency. I’ve been a member of the bar for 27 years, and trust me when I say that waiving attorney-client privilege is rare. Ext. The committee took a hard step that renders the SBC far more financially vulnerable to potentially profound liabilities. But Christians should take hard steps to tell the truth and to act justly. Third, perhaps this can be the beginning of the end of lawyer-driven, defensive responses to sex abuse in the church. I’ve seen Christian institutions be just as aggressive and threatening to abuse survivors as secular corporations (I’ve even seen some Christian institutions be more aggressive), and those aggressive and threatening responses are almost always lawyer-driven. Too many pastors and leaders allow litigators to take the lead when they’re under fire. Lawyers have their place, to be sure, but the client is still in charge, and the Christian client’s ultimate objective is to serve and glorify God, not limit the liability of the church.One last thing …When you speak to men who’ve struggled with porn, especially when it has ruptured their relationships with their wives, you often hear an avalanche of shame and self-hatred. They are not the person they want to be. This song, and the poetic moment in the middle, is a tonic for the soul.

A former Facebook employee hailed by the media as a whistleblower testified this week on Capitol Hill about the social media giant's algorithm, and how it harms children and democracy. Frances Haugen told the the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Data Security that Facebook routinely chooses profit over safety, creating an addictive product that puts children—and American democracy—at risk by failing to adequately police its product.

But though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is no doubt embarrassed by the brouhaha, he and his fellow big tech founders ultimately may have very little to worry about. At the end of the day, Haugen's testimony was less an exposé and more a distraction from the far more urgent issue of big tech's expanding monopolistic reach, and its growing political and cultural power. The real question when it comes to big tech is not the one posed by Haugen's testimony—whether Facebook and the other tech platforms allow "misinformation" or "hate speech" on their platforms; her testimony instead conveniently missed the real problem: that a handful of mega-firms are now controlling content for much of the population.

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults now get their news through social media sites like Facebook or from Google.This is even more true among millennials, soon to be the nation's largest voting bloc. And tech oligarchs have further expanded their domain by purchasing much of what is left of the mainstream media, including the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the long-distressed Time Magazine .

And contrary to what Haugen and the Senate seem to believe, the biggest problem with having the flow of information so tightly concentrated in the hands of so few is not that it allows posts from hate groups or divisive political operatives or skinny teenagers. It's that a tiny handful of oligarchs are dictating what is knowable, or what views are valid.

Attempts to shape or control thought by the tech giants are proceeding with astonishing speed. Staffers at Google, Facebook and Twitter increasingly "curate" the content on their sites. Often this means eliminating conservative views, according to former employees; companies increasingly use algorithms intended to screen out "hate groups." But as reporting has shown, the e-programmers put in charge of this work often have trouble distinguishing between "hate groups" and those who might simply express dissenting if legitimate supported views.

If once we thought the IT revolution would foster a more democratic era in communications, what happened was the opposite: The media became more concentrated, with just a few companies controlling all the information pipelines.The steady erosion in anti-trust enforcement under both parties has left firms like Facebook and Google with almost unlimited power to acquire or crush competitors and ideological opponents. And these firms are near-absolute monopolies; they hold market shares that exceed eighty percent in key markets like search, social media, and book sales, as well as phone and PC operating systems.

And unlike for companies in a competitive economy, customer resistance and record low levels of trust mean very little to the profits of big tech firms. With their quasi- monopoly status, Facebook and Google don't have to worry about giving offense the way a conventional firm might.

In fact, attempts to "regulate" the tech oligopolies may just make them stronger. Mark Zuckerberg routinely agrees with the censure against him, and when the federal strictures do come down, there's every sign he will accept them, gaining even more allies in government and consolidating his monopoly and political influence.

Hearings like the one this week are just one step towards that inevitable end goal. (The whistleblower herself opposes breaking up Facebook!) Andas long as these platforms increase their sway, we can look forward to ever greater surveillance, following the model of China.

Already, Google and IBM as well as Apple are helping China systematically use digital technology to impose ever greater control over its citizens. And rather than erecting a bulwark against it, some in our academic establishment have argued that on the "debate over freedom or control" China "was largely correct and the U.S. was wrong."

But the tech oligarchy is not only a threat to American consumers. It's likey to have a radical impact on workers, too. The tech elite differ significantly from the old corporate hegemons who needed a domestic working class, which forced them them to deal with organized union workers. By contrast, tech workers have no unions; they are often foreign nationals on short term visas, and their bosses have and been repeatedly caught spying on their own employees.

And as Thomas Piketty has noted, as opposed to the grubby bosses of the past, tech oligarchs tend to see themselves as technically gifted, a conscious elite shaped by their educational and vocational background, constituting what Aldous Huxley called "a scientific caste system."

Tech oligarchs generally don't believe in the American Dream or economic mobility. The author Gregory Ferenstein interviewed 147 digital company founders. What he found is that most are convinced that an "increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will come to subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial 'gig work' and government aid."

In other words, oligarchical socialism: basic incomes provided for the reside of the fading middle class. (And for when the plan fails, some tech titans have emergency escape plans.)

Already, this dystopia exists in Silicon Valley, where the ultra-rich flourish, the middle-class wanes, and the poor live-in a poverty that has become unshakeable; according to a 2018 UC-Santa Cruz study, nine out of ten jobs in the Valley now pay less than twenty years ago, adjusted for inflation.Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley's residents rely on public or private financial assistance.

The technocratic future is already upon us. And it has little need for the labor of the lower classes—or the messiness of democracy. These same people have amassed the power to control and disseminate information far more subtly and efficiently than Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin.

Given their power and influence in both parties, the current congressional kabuki show will likely change nothing. The tech oligarchs may take a well-publicized slap on their wrists, but the political class seems unlikely to break up Facebook, confiscate Jeff Bezos' bank account, or seek to force the ideals of legitimate free speech on technocrats who rarely fret over such 18th Century concerns.

We now stand on the edge of becoming a society akin to China, where the central authority determines truth and what can be legitimately debated. The prospect of a duopoly of oligarchs and the federal apparat acting together present arguably the most profound challenge to the future of traditional democratic debate.

Don't let them distract you from the real questions. Our democracy depends on it.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter. You can follow him on Twitter: @joelkotkin.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.

Following a Twitter outcry, a scientist was stopped from giving a lecture at MIT for reasons that had nothing to do with the lecture itself.

Updated at 10:15 a.m. ET on October 11, 2021

Dorian Abbot is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. In recognition of his research on climate change, MIT invited him to deliver the John Carlson Lecture, which takes place every year at a large venue in the Boston area and is meant to “communicate exciting new results in climate science to the general public.”

Then the campaign to cancel Abbot’s lecture began. On Twitter, some students and professors called on the university to retract its invitation. And, sure enough, MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website evaporates the moment some loud voices on social media call for a speaker’s head.

But there is more to this story than meets the eye. For although most outlets have covered Abbot’s disinvitation as but the latest example of an illiberal culture on campus, it is qualitatively different from other recent instances in which invitations have been rescinded—and suggests that the scope of censorship is continuing to morph and expand.

Is Abbot a climate-change denier? Or has he committed some terrible crime? No, he simply expressed his views about the way universities should admit students and hire faculty in the pages of a national magazine.

Back in August, Abbot and a colleague criticized affirmative action and other ways to give candidates for admission or employment a leg up on the basis of their ethnic or racial identity in Newsweek. In their place, Abbot advocated what he calls a Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) framework in which applicants would be “treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.” This, Abbot emphasized, would also entail “an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants.”

There are rational grounds for criticizing Abbot. In the conclusion to his piece, for example, he made an ill-advised comparison with 1930s Germany:

Ninety years ago Germany had the best universities in the world. Then an ideological regime obsessed with race came to power and drove many of the best scholars out, gutting the faculties and leading to sustained decay that German universities never fully recovered from. We should view this as a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit, and correct our course before it is too late.

Abbot seemingly meant to highlight the dangers of thinking about individuals primarily in terms of their ethnic identity. But any comparison between today’s practices on American college campuses and the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime is facile and incendiary.

Even so, it is patently absurd to cancel a lecture on climate change because of Abbot’s article in Newsweek. If every cringeworthy analogy to the Third Reich were grounds for canceling talks, hundreds of professors—and thousands of op-ed columnists—would no longer be welcome on campus.

Meanwhile, Abbot’s beliefs about affirmative action, right or wrong, are similar to those held by the majority of the American population. According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, for example, 74 percent of Americans believe that, in making hiring decisions, companies and organizations should “only take qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity”; just 24 percent agreed that they should “also take race and ethnicity into account in order to increase diversity.” Similarly, in a 2020 referendum on affirmative action, 57 percent of voters in California—a very liberal state that also happens to be majority minority—voted to uphold a ban on the practice.

Campaigns to cancel public appearances by controversial figures are in many cases motivated by the expectation that they will express some of their offending views at the event. When violent protests stopped far-right polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at UC Berkeley in 2017, for example, the organizers had every reason to believe that he would repeat his most inflammatory claims.

Even when protesters oppose appearances by controversial public figures who are set to speak on topics that are not in themselves controversial, they normally object to them because there is some connection between a speaker’s controversial views and their general area of professional expertise. Those who oppose talks by Charles Murray about topics that are unrelated to race, for example, argue that his writings on the supposed differences in average IQ between racial groups call his expertise as a social scientist into doubt.

Even though I strongly disagree with Murray’s views on race and find Yiannopoulos to be a trollish provocateur, I have also disagreed with attempts to stop either of them from going through with their talks. As the Yale professor Nicholas Christakis succinctly put it, “There is no right to be invited to speak at a college. But, once a person is invited, a college should never yield to demands to withdraw an invitation.”

But Abbot’s case is far more shocking than that of either Murray or Yiannopoulos. That’s partly because his opinions are much less extreme. It is also because the views that provoked such controversy are completely unrelated to the subject on which he was invited to lecture. “Omg how did *anyone* in @eapsMIT think this was ok?” read one tweet calling for the cancellation of Abbot’s lecture, referring to MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “As an alum, I’m asking you to fix this—now. Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter and that EAPS isn’t serious about (and is actively hostile towards) DEI.”

MIT did not rescind its invitation to Abbot in the expectation that he would repeat his views about affirmative action. Rather, he was disinvited from one of the most important research universities in the world because it could not tolerate that a scientist be permitted to speak about his uncontroversial research after daring to express unrelated views that, although controversial, happen to be held by a majority of the American public.

In the end, a conservative professor invited Abbot to hold his lecture at a small academic center at Princeton on the same day. MIT, when it cancelled his lecture, invited him to give a scientific presentation to a much smaller audience of EAPS professors and graduate students. As is frequently the case with these kinds of controversies, any one instance can, viewed in isolation, come to look like a big storm in a small teacup.

And yet, the principle that MIT has effectively established is deeply worrying. For it would, if other institutions should follow the university’s example, amount to a severe restriction on the ability of Americans to disagree with a specific set of beliefs about how to remedy injustice without raising the risk that they might no longer be able to carry on their work, even if it is completely unrelated to politics. In effect, this would create a prohibition on controversial political speech for all academics—and eventually, perhaps, professionals in other highly visible domains.

MIT’s decision is not just another in a long series of campus controversies, then. It sets a precedent that will, unless it is forcefully resisted, pose a serious threat to the maintenance of a free society.

Key point: That blanket sentiment—that the absence of a clear jobs effect from some minimum wage rises shows that the “law of demand” just doesn’t ever apply in the low wage labor market—is empirically incorrect.

Some studies finding more modest effects of minimum wage hikes on employment have facilitated very strong claims among “Fight for $15” advocates. Question the wisdom of a minimum wage hike proposal today and an army of pro-minimum wage activists will swarm you, claiming defiantly that “there is no evidence minimum wage hikes kill jobs.”

That blanket sentiment—that the absence of a clear jobs effect from some minimum wage rises shows that the “law of demand” just doesn’t ever apply in the low wage labor market—is empirically incorrect. But there’s always been obvious theoretical problems with extrapolating from some studies to a more general rule about the effects of further minimum wage hikes, especially given the methodologies of the existing research.

First, it is theoretically possible that the impact of a minimum wage hike on jobs might take a good time to take effect, with an increase in hourly labor costs dampening future job creation for affected groups rather than leading to direct layoffs. Businesses face a host of short-term “frictions” that mean it is easier to initially cut costs in other ways, or simply re-adjust their future hiring decisions, rather than fire workers. It takes time to consider and invest in new machinery, for example, that might replace low-wage workers.

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the fact that a small minimum wage hike has small employment effects doesn’t mean that much larger future hikes would too.

To account for these possibilities, this contentious policy issue could therefore benefit from research with certain features. Ideally, we would want researchers to:

a) examine the impact of a minimum wage hike over long periods of time;

b) assess the extent to which larger minimum wage hikes have bigger effects on employment than small increases;

c) and, given the potential for researchers to cherry-pick samples, time periods, or control variables to get the results they want, have the researchers outline a pre-analysis plan, whereby they outline the data and methodology they will undertake in advance.

Those are exactly the features of a new working paper from UC San Diego academic Jeffrey Clemens and the AEI’s Michael Strain.

After the Great Recession, there was a pause in both state and federal efforts to increase minimum wages, creating a nice baseline for assessing the impacts of increasingly divergent state minimum wage policies since. After publishing some papers examining the very short-run effects of state minimum wage changes between 2011 and 2015, the pair pre-committed to using some tried-and-tested estimation and evaluation methods to assess the impact of minimum wage hikes through 2019 on young workers with low levels of education and on all 16–21-year-olds.

The pair split their sample into states that did not change their minimum wage from January 2013 to January 2019, those that kept it indexed to inflation, those that enacted relatively small minimum wage increases (which averaged around $2 from January 2013 to January 2019), and those that enacted relatively large minimum wage increases (which averaged just under $4 from January 2013 to January 2019).

Using a host of pre-announced control variables for the general economic performance of the state, they found that:

large minimum wage increases were, on average, associated with an employment decline of roughly 2.6 percentage points across all their estimations;

these impacts were greater for those 16-25-year-old workers with low levels of education than for the whole population of 16-21-year-olds;

smaller minimum wage hikes had variable impacts but centered around there being zero effect on employment.

The pair then buttressed their pre-committed analysis with more novel estimation methodologies, which show that “employment effects of relatively large minimum wage increases accumulate gradually over time.” In other words, the impact on jobs of raising the minimum wage today leads to a weaker employment performance years later.

This clever paper then can go a long way to providing compelling explanations for why some minimum wage hikes might have negative effects on employment, while others do not, and why short-term analyses can miss significant longer-term consequences. And the fact that the researchers told us what they were going to do in advance gives us confidence that this is not a case of cherry-picking time periods, control variables, or states to examine to give the pair the results they wanted.

Democrats in Congress and across the country continue to push for aggressive minimum wage hikes. In doing so, they love to draw on studies finding modest effects of raising the wage floor on jobs. But economic theory shows that, whatever your model of the labor market, you cannot keep raising minimum wages forever without the law of demand biting. This work, as with the Seattle studies before it, shows (again) that larger minimum wage hikes have negative employment consequences for those most affected—in this case the young and less-educated.

This article was first published by The Cato Institute.

Twelve years ago, during the International Year of Astronomy that marked the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of a telescope, I wrote "The Value of a Pale Blue Dot"--a reflection on how astronomy has revealed a vast universe filled with an unimaginable number of stars, thus shrinking the significance of our sun and our planet. The "pale blue dot" refers to how the Earth appears in a 1990 photograph taken by the Voyager spacecraft as it reached the outer limits of our solar system. The essay suggests that the knowledge gained from astronomy "forces us to acknowledge that our place in the universe is not particularly significant."

When taking steps to reduce the risk that we will become extinct, we should focus on means that also further the interests of present and near-future people.

A recent blog post by Holden Karnofsky has led me to reconsider that thought. Karnofsky is co-CEO of Open Philanthropy, a foundation that researches the best opportunities for philanthropic grant-making, and publishes the reasons for its decisions. Thinking about the long-term significance of today's philanthropic decisions is therefore part of Karnofsky's role. He is thinking very long term indeed.

Karnofsky points out that we could be living "at the very beginning of the tiny sliver of time during which the galaxy goes from nearly lifeless to largely populated." That "tiny sliver of time" began, we might say, with the first use of tools by our ancestors, around three million years ago. It will end when our descendants--who might be digital minds, rather than biological organisms--inhabit the entire galaxy, perhaps ushering in a civilization consisting of an enormous number of conscious beings that would last for tens of billions of years. There is a good chance, Karnofsky argues, that this process of populating the galaxy will begin during this century. By 2100, we could develop the technology to construct self-sufficient settlements on other planets.

This thought echoes one expressed in 2011 by the late philosopher Derek Parfit, who wrote, near the end of the second volume of On What Matters: "We live during the hinge of history." Like Karnofsky, Parfit was thinking of the arrival of technologies that, if used wisely, would enable our species to survive "its most dangerous and decisive period," and our descendants to spread through our galaxy. Parfit refers to "the next few centuries," rather than just this one, as the time it may take before humans can live independently on other planets, but even that will be only be a sliver of time compared to what is to come. Our most significant contribution to this development would be to ensure the survival of intelligent life on our planet.

Perhaps, though, the idea that we are essential to this process is merely the latest version of the self-important delusion that humans are the center of existence. Surely, in this vast universe, there must be other forms of intelligent life, and if we don't populate the Milky Way galaxy, someone else will.

Yet, as the physicist Enrico Fermi once asked fellow scientists over lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory, "Where is everybody?" He wasn't commenting on empty tables in the lab's dining room, but on the absence of any evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials. The thought behind that question is now known as the Fermi Paradox: if the universe is so stupendous, and has existed for 13.7 billion years, why haven't other intelligent forms of life made contact?

Karnofsky draws on a 2018 paper by researchers at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute to suggest that the most likely answer is that intelligent life is extremely rare. It is so rare that that we may be the only intelligent beings in our galaxy, and perhaps in the much larger Virgo supercluster to which our galaxy belongs.

This is what Karnofsky means when he says that the future of humanity is "wild." The idea that we, the inhabitants of this pale blue dot at this particular moment, are making choices that will determine whether billions of stars are populated, for billions of years, does seem wild. But it could be true. Granting that, however, what should we do about it?

Karnofsky does not draw any ethical conclusions from his speculations, other than advocating "seriousness about the enormous potential stakes." But, as Phil Torres has pointed out, viewing current problems--other than our species' extinction - through the lens of "longtermism" and "existential risk" can shrink those problems to almost nothing, while providing a rationale for doing almost anything to increase our odds of surviving long enough to spread beyond Earth. Marx's vision of communism as the goal of all human history provided Lenin and Stalin with a justification for their crimes, and the goal of a "Thousand-Year Reich" was, in the eyes of the Nazis, sufficient reason for exterminating or enslaving those deemed racially inferior.

I am not suggesting that any present exponents of the hinge of history idea would countenance atrocities. But then, Marx, too, never contemplated that a regime governing in his name would terrorize its people. When taking steps to reduce the risk that we will become extinct, we should focus on means that also further the interests of present and near-future people. If we are at the hinge of history, enabling people to escape poverty and get an education is as likely to move things in the right direction as almost anything else we might do; and if we are not at that critical point, it will have been a good thing to do anyway.

The U.S. added just 194,000 jobs in September, down from the 366,000 added in August and far below the million-plus in July (before the Delta variant took hold). This is being described in the media as a disappointment or a problem, but a closer look reveals something quite different.

We're still 5 million jobs below February 2020 levels, and 2.7 million people have been out of work for six months or more, the standard threshold for long-term unemployment. Many of these people are hurting, to be sure.

But the number of job openings is at a record high, and many employers report having a hard time filling positions. Why? Some workers have retired early or found other ways to make ends meet. Others simply don't want to return to backbreaking, low-wage shit jobs.

Note that the share of people who were working or looking for work last month (the labor force participation rate) dipped to 61.6 percent, down slightly from the prior month. Participation for people in their prime working years, defined as 25 to 54 years old, also ticked down.

In other words, many American workers are now engaged in the equivalent of a general strike.

As a result, employers are raising wages and offering other inducements to lure applicants. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour over the last year, after a series of strong monthly gains. Average hourly earnings have jumped by 4.6 percent over the last year.

Corporate America wants to frame all this as a "labor shortage." But that's not what's really going on. In reality, there's a living wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a health care shortage - and American workers are demanding an end to all these shortages. Or they won't return to work.

They deserve it.

Last month, The New Yorker published “The Matter of Black Lives,” an anthology of the magazine’s writings on race and the Black American experience. Drawing from decades of reporting, cultural criticism, profiles, and memoir, the collection ranges widely, spanning vivid dispatches from the civil-rights movement, detailed portraits of pivotal artists and thinkers, and powerful reflections on the troubled past and turbulent present. The contributors comprise a pantheon, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Calvin Trillin, Elizabeth Alexander, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more.

On Sunday, three of the writers featured in the book—Jelani Cobb, Jamaica Kincaid, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault—will gather virtually at The New Yorker Festival, the magazine’s weeklong celebration of politics and culture, to consider the state of race now and in the future. Cobb, a staff writer who wrote the foreword to “The Matter of Black Lives” and co-edited the volume with David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, will moderate the discussion. A professor at Columbia Journalism School, Cobb will share insights from his extensive reporting and commentary on Black life in America, which has included an analysis of the killing of George Floyd, a profile of Stacey Abrams, and a consideration of Africa as portrayed in the movie “Black Panther.” (In addition to his foreword, three of Cobb’s pieces for the magazine are featured in “The Matter of Black Lives.”)

Kincaid, a novelist and professor of African and African American studies at Harvard, has contributed to The New Yorker since 1974, beginning with a piece, co-written by George W. S. Trow, about the West Indian American Day Carnival, in Brooklyn, which traces its origins to the era of slavery in Trinidad. A prolific contributor of fiction and Talk of the Town pieces in particular, Kincaid appears in “The Matter of Black Lives” with a recollection of a formative period of her youth spent in New York.

Hunter-Gault published her first piece in The New Yorker in 1967, and in the intervening decades has written for the magazine about racial politics in South Africa and at home, including her meeting in Atlanta, as a young reporter, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Her contribution to “The Matter of Black Lives” recounts Columbia University’s belated recognition of Langston Hughes, who produced many of his poetic masterpieces in Harlem, just blocks from the school.

Those viewing the conversation live will be invited to submit questions, and a recording will be accessible for streaming until November 10th. Tickets are available to all, and discounted for those who subscribe.

Caitlin Flanagan, a staff writer at The Atlantic, is one of America's most incisive essayists. In her articles about a wide range of topics including modern motherhood, the politics of higher education, and the state of the abortion debate, she skewers consensus views with her trademark wit.In this week’s conversation, Caitlin Flanagan and Yascha Mounk discuss her coming-of-age in 1960s Berkeley, the evolution of freedom of speech, and whether America has a future.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: I didn't know that you grew up in Berkeley at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Tell us a little bit what that was like and how it informs how you see the world today.Caitlin Flanagan: I was born in Berkeley in 1961. I was there as a small child, and my father was at the university. My father, like most Berkeley professors at that time, wasn't from California. My parents came from other places because there was this huge expansion of American universities in the post-war years. And so my father had survived the war in the Pacific—and the war with Lionel Trilling—and he wrote his dissertation and got a job at Berkeley. And they were New York intellectual lefties. My mom was, strictly speaking, a housewife, but also a very well read and very interesting person. So my childhood, my infancy, everything, was just imbibing the revolution, and I didn't think about it as being abnormal. The city got occupied twice by troops. And Mario Savio gave this great speech on top of a car in the middle of Sproul Plaza, saying “There are times when the machine is so odious that you can't take part—you can't even passively take part—and you have to throw yourself upon the gears and levers of the machine and make it stop.” And that was a speech about stopping universities from preventing students from having free speech. Because, ironically, what started it all, were some kids in Sproul Plaza.In those days, you know, Berkeley was not a liberal city that became more liberal. It was a conservative city that became radical in about a year. The students had a Democratic Party Club, and they figured this was the time to talk to other students about being Democrats, but the university paternalistically said, “We don't allow you to do political speech on campus.” And the students said, “But this is a public university, and we're 18, so we're free. The constitution doesn't stop at the college gates and doesn't stop anywhere in America, and so we have the right to say what we want to say.” And it went from there—to Columbia and to Michigan—but Berkeley was where it really started. These were California kids who had grown up with the “California dream,” so to speak, and the beautiful suburbs and the beaches and all that. And they said, “We don't want that if we can't have free speech.”I hear all these kids now, who are much quieter than the loud kind of “social justice kids”—I don't know what I call them, but whatever the term is—backed by many professors. But there are so many kids saying, “This is terrible, I hate this, I disagree.” And it's going to take the courage of those kids to throw themselves upon the gears and levers of the machine and say, “I can't stand it anymore; the machine has become too odious.” And so there are a lot of kids now who are in the position—which I understand and would probably be doing myself—of just passively taking part. “I need to get my degree, and then I'll get out of here.” Mounk: I'm a little puzzled by how this transformation took place. I'd love to hear your view on why it is that the left today is anti-free speech, to such an extent, and what's missing?Flanagan: Well, there’s this whole idea of it being intolerable to hear other ideas. I always say about abortion—the reason that argument is pitched at a screaming level is that both sides know if you had to sit down and listen to the best argument of the other side, I don't think it would change anyone’s mind. I have a clear position on abortion. I don't think the other side's position, if articulated extremely well, would change my mind. But I have heard it articulated extremely well, and I can say that is a really strong position. When you're miserable, it means free speech is working. The American Nazi Party got a permit to march in Skokie, Illinois, when I was 12 or 13. And Skokie didn't just have a very large Jewish population—a huge number of families there had been Holocaust survivors, and had settled together there. And I was just outraged. I was outraged, as rightly you'd be outraged at everything the Nazi party would do, and I rushed home to tell my lefty Dad. “Can you believe this?” “Yes, Cait, I've heard of that,” he said. I said, “What do we do to stop it?” and he said, “Well, the ACLU is fighting to allow it to happen.” And I had in my mind as a child that the ACLU was a great organization. They're on the side of good people. How could the ACLU be on the side of these bad people? There were lot of Jewish people in the ACLU at that time—some of them founded it—and they were large enough in understanding this principle: that if the Nazis don't have the right to assemble and if they don't have the right to say their vile things, then other people won't have the right to talk about legal abortion, or have a pro-choice march in the same streets. The ACLU and leftist America had enough faith in the American people, that if the American people heard the arguments of Nazis, they would not be persuaded by them; they would be disgusted by them.Mounk: I was at a conference in France recently, and I have my criticisms of certain forms of French universalism, but I was struck by the fact that the French elite really still believes in the idea of a republic, and they are willing to risk things for those principles. They are willing to fight for them. And it struck me by contrast, that there's really nothing that the American elite seems to believe. The “woke” believe in something and they even may be willing to pay a price for fighting for it. But the reason why a relatively small number of people with sometimes quite extreme and sometimes, in my opinion, quite unconvincing views is able to hold such tremendous political and cultural influence is that they are the only ones who really believe anything. Flanagan: I think you're absolutely right. I'd never thought of America as anything except this all-powerful, invulnerable, monolithic thing that I just took completely for granted. But when 9/11 happened, and then everything else happened after it, I thought, “What am I going to do?” I was in Los Angeles with very small children. It was kind of like John F. Kennedy's speech actually meant something. What am I going to do for my country? What the hell can I do? I remembered that on July 4th that year, some real estate company put these little American flags on everyone's lawn—I guess to drum up business. They were a foot high little plastic flags. And I remember I stuck them in the garage, because I thought that maybe the kids would want to play with them in the sandbox or something. That's how much respect I had for the flag. And I remember going through the house and finding them and planting them in the front of my yard and for the only time in my entire life feeling like I'm an American, and I love this country, and I stand for this country. I just felt tears come when I did that. And it was, as I say, the only time in my life that I ever thought that this is a good place. Growing up the way I did, all I'd ever thought about was things like the School of the Americas teaching torture in Latin and Central America—all these terrible, terrible things America has done. When everybody always says, “You know, the history of America you got in school was wrong.” I say, “You know, the history of America I got in school was that we were just an imperialist, colonialist country,” which is true. But it's also true that when we fall apart in the next couple of decades, our descendants can at least say, “I came from the country that invented freedom as we know it.” And I think whoever went first would be the first to fall, because whoever went first in creating this thing of freedom and equality was historically bound to make huge, hideous mistakes. In America, slavery happened because they weren't coming out of the modern world; they were creating it. I think we're going to fall, and I think that the rest of the West needs to stand up. And America needs to be remembered as the place where it first happened.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: http://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

On today’s Ruminant, Jonah aims to set the record straight on a matter of international significance: Despite what the producers of American Crime Story would have you believe, he has never owned an oversized poster of Atlas Shrugged. Thankfully, this misunderstanding gives him an excuse to indulge in a nerdtastic exploration of the differences between objectivism and conservatism, the significance of religion to conservative belief, and the differences between conservatives and “men of the right.” There’s also a disquisition on social anxiety and Theodor Adorno’s idea of the “authoritarian personality,” as well as a rant on those who continue to minimize January 6. Plus, as a special treat for The Dispatch’s two-year anniversary, tune in to learn the intimate details of Jonah and Steve Hayes’ late night telephone conversations.Show Notes:-The Dispatch manifesto from two years ago-Today’s underwhelming job numbers-Whittaker Chambers’ review of Atlas Shrugged-The Remnant with George Will-George criticizes Whittaker Chambers-Al Felzenberg on George’s opposition to Spiro Agnew-Jonah ruminates on Richard Hofstadter-The Age of Reform, Hofstatder’s book on status anxiety-Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought-The (underrated) Tyranny of Clichés-Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality-Sally Satel: “The Experts Have Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left”-Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic-The Remnant with Joe Uscinski-Bring the villain forward-Jonah’s latest Special Report appearance-The January 6 subpoena saga-Dinesh D’Souza’s evil tweet-Jonah and Hugh Hewitt debate the alt-right in 2016-Jonah: “This Was Always the Plan”-Revelations from Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa-The Remnant with Scott Gottlieb

(Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Dear Reader (Especially those of you who’ve been there from the beginning), Let’s say I believe that Trump and his followers, apologists, and enablers are an ongoing threat to democracy. Does that mean I have to support Joe Biden?That’s the question of the moment for a bunch of people on the left and the right. It seems to be the view of my friend Bill Kristol and many in his circle. It’s also Jonathan Chait’s view. In New York magazine, Chait writes:The reason you can’t cordon off Trump from the rest of the party is that we now live in something functionally resembling a parliamentary system. Biden leads the governing party. Trump is the leader of the opposition. To oppose the one is to support the other.Now, as a broken record on this parliamentary system stuff, I obviously think Chait has a point. For instance, Bernie Sanders keeps saying that “two [senators] do not have the right to sabotage what 48 want and what the President of the United States wants.” That statement would make some sense in a parliamentary system, but it’s balderdash in our system. As Charlie Cooke notes, “First, it’s not ‘two people’ who are holding up the 48. It’s 52 people. And second, it doesn’t matter in the slightest ‘what the President of the United States wants,’ because the President of the United States does not get a vote in Congress.”In other words, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have every right to vote as they think best. They were elected to represent their states as they see fit—not the Democratic Party, not the president, and certainly not the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. Both were reelected in 2018, two years prior to Biden, so you can’t even argue that they ran on Biden’s agenda, never mind his coattails. And in Manchin’s West Virginia, Biden lost by 39 points. I can’t find much evidence that this created an obligation for Manchin to vote with Biden. But we’re not talking about elected officials—we’re talking about people like me and you (unless you’re one of the many elected officials who reads this “news”letter). Still, let’s leave you out of it for the moment and talk about people like me. Chait writes, “Anybody who supports the Republican party’s normal political operations—even the handful of remaining open Trump critics—is throwing lit matches around the kindling of Trump’s next Reichstag fire.”I think this is an interesting argument for a bunch of reasons. First, part of my larger argument about the baleful rise of a parliamentary system mentality ill-suited for our Constitutional order is that it has led a lot of journalists to become party activists by proxy. On the right and the left, many journalists—including a great many “objective” reporters—think it’s their job to help their preferred party make the best case for itself. Because Congress is dysfunctional and the parties are institutionally weak, large swaths of the media—as well as coalition-aligned institutions like, say, the NRA and Planned Parenthood—become de facto party organs when the perceived need arrives. Parties used to educate and organize voters. Now those jobs have been outsourced to allegedly non-partisan agents who are anything but non-partisan. This fact is central to my criticisms of the conservative movement in general these days (more on that in a moment). But if anything, the same dynamic has been truer of the left for far longer. The whole argument about liberal media bias, going back more than a half-century, has been predicated on the well-founded view that much of the mainstream media carries water for the Democrats and Democratic causes. The power of Republican “annoy the media (vote for me)” appeals is testament to this. Chait himself, at least when it’s convenient to his purposes, acknowledges that journalists shouldn’t be beholden to partisan considerations. For instance, earlier this week, Norman Ornstein wisely cautioned that the harassment and demonization of Sinema could backfire. Jonathan Chait @jonathanchaitThis is good advice for activists and politicians. As a journalist, I feel free to continue criticizing her. Norman Ornstein @NormOrnsteinA little advice on Sinema, which undoubtedly will not go down well, from someone who remembers Jim Jeffords. She has enabled the American Rescue Plan, a lot of judges and top executive appointees, kept the Ds in chairmanships and in charge of the agenda. Do not push too hardOctober 5th 20217 Retweets125 LikesChait is right that as a journalist, he should feel free to keep criticizing Sinema. But oddly, he doesn’t seem to see it the same way when it comes to Biden and his agenda. Criticizing Sinema is just good, honest, rock ‘em-sock ‘em opinion journalism (even though it might lead to Sinema handing the Senate to the GOP). Criticizing Biden is equivalent to lending aid and comfort to an authoritarian threat. Chait complains that  the New York Times’ Ross Douthat has minimized the Trump threat, and he goes on for hundreds of words before segueing into an indictment of “Republicans” as if he hasn’t changed categories. It’s almost as if Douthat, as a journalist, should adjust his truth-telling to fit larger political considerations—in this case by rallying to a pro-Biden popular front—but Chait shouldn’t be similarly constrained.This is not necessarily an impossible position to hold. But it does strike me as a hard one to explain. The only way to do so is to argue that the imperative to support Biden is so great that pecking at Sinema is justified for the greater good—and therefore journalists should retain the freedom to do so—but pecking at Biden (or not sufficiently pecking at Trump) is so contrary to the greater good that the journalistic exception no longer applies. I see the argument; I just don’t buy it. But again, let’s say that Chait is right about the threat from Trump and Trumpism and Douthat is wrong. Question: What burden does that place on Biden himself? I gather that Chait believes saving Biden’s agenda is essential not just because he happens to believe in Biden’s agena, but because if Biden fails, the odds of Trump coming back into power increase. Again, that’s not implausible. But if it’s the case, shouldn’t Biden have unveiled an agenda that made it harder for Republicans to take back power in the first place? I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb when I say that Biden has not done that. And I think that’s because Biden has a thumbless grasp on political reality. He didn’t expect to have control of the Senate. But then because of Trump’s ridiculous meddling, both Georgia seats went Democratic and suddenly Biden got spun up on a bigger-than-Obama, new New Deal agenda.It’s worth noting that this is not what Chait said would happen. Weeks before the Georgia special election, he insisted that a Democratic victory in the state would all but guarantee a moderate Biden agenda. “If Democrats win the Georgia runoffs and gain 50 Senate seats,” Chait wrote, “they will have the chance to govern in a centrist fashion. … Biden would not be implementing a ‘left-wing’ agenda even if he had won a landslide in both chambers.”“If Democrats win the Georgia runoff and have a majority,” Chait added, “they will have no votes to spare. Moderate Democratic senators will be very reluctant to pass party-line bills, all of which would require them to each be the decisive vote. Moderate Republicans would have enormous leverage to demand concessions to give them some bipartisan cover.”Now those Democratic moderates are the problem according to Chait, even though they are trying to do exactly what he predicted and hoped they would do. Shouldn’t he be hectoring Democrats to moderate, not hectoring moderate Democrats to radicalize?But what if Chait had been right and Biden had governed from the center? Wouldn’t we be better off? Wouldn’t the prospect of Trump’s return from his Mar-a-Lago Elba be less likely? As I’ve said many times, if Biden had simply declared victory after securing the bipartisan infrastructure deal, he would have been fine. But instead, he had to let the base of his party set the agenda. He had to buy into the logic that compromising with a Senate of 100 senators was folly, but steamrolling a Senate of 50 is governing.Of course, other factors are at play. As the devastating Quinnipiac poll demonstrates, Biden is also paying a steep price for botching the border and the withdrawal from Afghanistan (as Noah Rothman rightly notes, it turns out Americans don’t like losing wars, and weren’t as hungry to bug out of Afghanistan as Biden believed). But even these fiascos stem from the fact that Biden refused to govern in accordance with political reality—or was unable to. If you listen to Chait, as well as some of my friends on the Never Trumpier parts of the right, none of this matters, because we need to form a popular front against Trump and Trumpism. I think that’s wrong not because I don’t want to see Trump and Trumpism banished from public life (I certainly do) but because I think it’s my job to tell the truth as I see it. I could comfort myself and rationalize my position by noting my fervent belief that if Biden had governed the way I said he should, staking himself in the real center and picking fights with his left flank, the country—and Biden himself—would be better off and Trump would be more marginalized. But I think I should still tell the truth as I see it, even if that didn’t happen, because I want no part of any popular fronts. But who cares about my wants and desires? Certainly not the American voters,  not to mention the people picking the Powerball numbers. The fact is that journalists cannot direct politics toward their desired outcomes, at least not reliably or predictably. I’m not saying they should never try, but they shouldn’t let the ends dictate the means. That sort of thinking is partly how we got into this mess in the first place. The larger threat.“Trump’s not Hitler. Hitler could have repealed Obamacare.”It’s been my standard quip for years, and I still think it’s funny because it’s true. But I shouldn’t have to point out that someone can fall far short of “literally Hitler!” and still be bad. FDR’s internment of the Japanese was terrible. But it wasn’t the Holocaust, and saying so doesn’t diminish the crime of Japanese internment; it just recognizes certain moral and historical distinctions. What Trump did was objectively corrupt, dishonest, and immoral, as are the attempts to pretend otherwise. Those attempts, particularly by politicians who told the truth in the aftermath of January 6 but caved to the corrupting influence of Trumpism shortly thereafter, disgust me. As I’ve said before, I think Robert Kagan (and Jonathan Chait) is directionally right that the Trumpist forces haven’t given up their quest for power, regardless of the democratic intent of the voters. But like Douthat, I’m unconvinced by their confidence about how events will play out or how people should respond to their efforts. I have no principled objection to narrowly tailored election reforms that would prevent Trumpist secretaries of state and state legislatures from rejecting the legitimate vote count in service to some bogus conspiracy theory. Kagan is right that Republicans should support that. But shouldn’t Democrats also abandon their wishlists for other “reforms” in order to make it easier for Republicans to do that? Hectoring Republicans to deal with the threat at hand rings false if it doesn’t come with similar hectoring of Democrats to stop acting as if having 50 senators and a three seat margin in the House should give their party carte blanche to do whatever it wants. By all means ask Republicans to be grown-ups, but ask the same of Democrats. Ross Douthat has gotten a lot of grief for writing that Trump’s “threat to constitutional norms is one of many percolating dangers in the United States today, not a singular danger that should organize all other political choices and suspend all other disagreements.” But he’s right. One of these dangers is this parliamentary fiction and popular front mentality that dominates our politics. It causes presidential candidates to run on promises to do things on “day one” that a president simply cannot do. And when the overpromising demagoguery of Democrats and Republicans alike fails to deliver on these assurances, politicians don’t say, “We were wrong to promise you the moon.” Instead, they say that “billionaires,” “the deep state,” “special interests,” or the Constitution itself are to blame. Or they blame the failure of other “establishment” guys to “fight” hard enough. This rhetoric fuels conspiratorial thinking. After all, if Sanders or Trump are right that delivering socialized medicine or restoring manufacturing jobs is “so easy,” the reason for their failure must be explained by the sinister deeds of shadowy malefactors conspiring against “us.” That populist conspiratorial climate—thick on the left and right—is a profound threat to democracy wherever it materializes, as history demonstrates.On a practical level, it drives presidents to ram through major legislation on party line votes, or to simply use executive orders like monarchical decrees, in order to feed the hungry maw they helped create. And when the other party is swept to power, in large part thanks to the backlash against such partisan excess, they do the exact same thing. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Lost in the process is any appreciation of or appetite for following the constitutional and democratic norms that encourage Madisonian compromise and debate. But because the constitutional structure remains—for now, at least—despite the erasure of those norms, the impulse to tear down the structures that remain obstructions to partisan power intensifies. The Electoral College, the filibuster, the Supreme Court’s nine seats, even the rule of having senators represent states rather than the popular vote; these institutions and structures intended to foster deliberation and compromise are seen as illegitimate barriers to total victory. The features of the constitutional order become bugs in the eyes of the warring factions that crave zero-sum victories. This dynamic, as much as anything, gave us President Donald Trump in 2016—and almost gave us President Bernie Sanders. The way to fix this is by restoring our fundamental norms—good character, basic decency, epistemological and policy humility, democratic debate, etc. Because once those are gone, fidelity to the Constitution goes with them. And after that, the Constitution becomes a dead letter relic. The machine of our constitutional order depends on the ghosts of norms within it. Give up the ghost, and the machine grinds to a halt. Various & SundryCanine update: Yesterday I had to get to the AEI studio very early to record a podcast with Scott Gottlieb. As a result, I couldn’t give the girls their usual treats, and they were very upset. The girls are fundamentally Burkean in their fidelity to traditions and norms. I thought they had forgiven me, but around 2 a.m. last night I was woken from my slumber by a sudden rush of warm air. I opened my eyes to see a spaniel’s butt just inches from my face. I yelled, “Pippa! You farted.” She raised her head just enough to look at me, squinted in the darkness, and then gave me a “Yeah, what of it?” expression before dropping back down. The other excitement was when I saw Gracie in hunting mode on the back deck. Gracie in hunting mode is a bit like Delta Burke bolting from the sprinter’s blocks—a glorious mix of Rubenesque poetry in motion and improbability. She had cornered a chipmunk that had been trying for some bird feeder detritus. She thought she had it by a flower pot when, suddenly, the chipmunk climbed straight up the brickface of my house to the second floor window. Gracie, the mighty huntress, was furious. It was like the feeling of being cheated when you discover that your opponent in a boxcar race had outfitted a nitrous oxide tank for an extra kick at the end. She stared at the chipmunk on the windowsill in a way that made it deeply grateful that cats do not have the ability to shoot lasers out of their eyes. Happy anniversary! By now you’ve probably heard that today is the two- year anniversary of our first published post. It’s been an amazing, grueling, exciting, brutal, and wonderful two years. I want to thank everyone who made it possible. An enormous amount of work went on behind the scenes. But none of it would have come to anything without you, dear readers. Steve and I could have been the journalistic equivalent of the Fyre Festival dudes, yelling “let’s be legends” right before we face-planted. I can’t tell you how grateful we are to all of you and how excited we are about what’s coming next. Thank you. Really. All of you. ICYMITainted love, tainted justice, tainted GLoPIdiocy, past and presentLast weekend’s ranty RuminantGeorge Will’s long-awaited return to The RemnantYou still can’t spend money you don’t haveThe midweek “news”letterScott Gottlieb joins The Remnant, yogurt connoisseurs rejoiceThe Dispatch Podcast talks tensions in the Indo-PacificSteve Hayes and I celebrate The Dispatch’s second anniversary and discuss the future of the companyAnd now, the weird stuffOvernight challenges have gone too farPayback for the microchipsMonkeying aroundThe circle of life“Funny how?”

Are we living in a tragic age? One of the words most used about climate change — catastrophe — comes to us from the ancient Greek tragedy. It means a sudden crisis or turnabout, which is not a bad way of describing the melting of the polar icecaps. As for the virus, the ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about plague. It was by ridding his city of pestilence that Oedipus was appointed king. Perhaps the Queen should take over from Chris Whitty.
Tragedy recalls us to a sense of our fragility, but also of our value. We wouldn’t mourn for creatures we didn’t regard as precious. Not many of us are devastated by the death of a flea. A cynic is unlikely to lose sleep over Covid deaths in Indonesia.
If we are living through a tragedy, it is a collective one. The Greeks would have understood this too: the point of the Chorus, a bunch of ordinary citizens who sing and dance their way through the tragic drama, is to socialise the disaster, making it more than just the affair of a few patrician figures. Even so, you couldn’t have a cook or a cobbler as the hero, since their lives weren’t considered important enough. Those who fall from the greatest height make the biggest splash.
The death of Achilles or Agamemnon is a momentous event which sends shockwaves through the public realm, whereas the passing of a slave is private. It has no more significance than the killing of a flea. It doesn’t count as a historical event. Back then you couldn’t have a tragedy called Death of a Salesman, even if there had been salesman in ancient Athens. It would be as bizarre as calling your play The Fall of Troy: A Farce in Three Acts. 

None of this class distinction survived the emergence of mass democracy — a political idea which, ironically, was born in ancient Greece. In the 20th century, by far the bloodiest hundred years on record, tragedy became universal. Once you develop weapons like bombs, you globalise suffering and lamentation. As the tattered old cliché has it, we really are all in this together. You just have to take anyone from the street and push them to their limit. You can even have a tragedy about plumbing, as in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. 
One of the ancient Greeks’ deepest fears is of hubris — the pride or presumption which leads you to overreach yourself and bring yourself to nothing. When the citizens of Thebes or Athens observed such arrogance they trembled and looked fearfully to the skies, aware that it would have its comeuppance. A species which dominates and destroys its natural habitat in the name of power and acquisition is now reaping the fruits of its overreaching.
Those like King Lear who would be everything must be taught the lesson that humanity is nothing — frail, sickeningly vulnerable and driven by animal need. Kings must be reduced to vagrants, as Lear wanders the heath with fools and madmen. Once you acknowledge that you’re nothing, you have a chance of becoming something — but only, like Lear or Oedipus, by being hauled through hell. For Lear, this repentance comes too late to prevent his death. Whether this will prove true of humanity as a whole remains to be seen. It isn’t looking good.
The problem is that hubris is built into the human species. Because we live not just in a physical world but a world of meaning, we are able to overreach ourselves all the time. Our bodies can build themselves a prosthesis known as civilisation. Technology is an extension of our bodies, but one that can escape our mastery. Badgers and squirrels by contrast, can’t create weapons of mass destruction, unless they’re being very furtive about it. They can’t extend very far outside themselves. They aren’t universal creatures, unless squirrels in California are somehow in touch with squirrels in the Ukraine.
This inability to overreach themselves means that they can’t blow themselves up, but neither can they read Marcel Proust. This is because they don’t have language; but this lack of language or developed concepts is also what keeps them safe from unclear warfare. (One might make an exception here for dolphins, who after a few lessons might be able to write as well as Jacob Rees-Mogg).
 More from this authorThe emptiness of EvilBy Terry Eagleton
Being a linguistic animal is both a blessing and a curse. In fact, the ancient term “sacred” means both. Because human beings live in a richly developed conceptual world, they can create things which are in danger of slipping from their control and taking on a tyrannical life of their own. Yet having language also means that they can be closer to each other than mere physical contact. They can share their inner lives with each other. Love relationships consist mainly in talking, unless I’m missing out on something.
Civilisation, so Freud claims, is a product of Eros, meaning the creative drives as a whole. There is, however, a problem. Eros is not the only source of civilisation. In order to build bridges and cathedrals, you also need to harness the power of Eros’s old enemy, Thanatos, or the death drive. The death drive for Freud is turned outwards and used to subjugate Nature. Only in this way can cities and social orders be built. Thanatos, however, is a notoriously unreliable servant. It doesn’t want to subjugate things; it wants to tear them to pieces in an orgy of obscene enjoyment. So the very force which is intended to overcome chaos is secretly in love with it. Anarchy lies at the very heart of authority.
Tragic figures aren’t exactly guilty, but they aren’t exactly innocent either. If they were deep-dyed villains, they would forfeit our sympathy and we would be indifferent to their fate. Napoleon may have been a tragic figure, but Hitler wasn’t. Yet tragic heroes aren’t blameless, because the tragic crisis results from their own actions, however little they may intend it.
Oedipus, who has been described as a “guilty innocent”, doesn’t mean to kill his father and marry his mother, but he contributes without knowing it to a network of cause and effect which causes these things to occur. His own past actions return to plague him in alien form. “We are neither the innocent nor the wicked,” remarks the protagonist of William Golding’s novel Free Fall. “We are the guilty. We fall down. We crawl on hands and knees. We weep and tear each other.”
Suggested readingWho set Greece on fire?By Aris Roussinos 
It is just the same with climate change, which nobody ever intended but which is the consequence of billions of individual acts. Nobody ever turned the ignition key in their car or heaped a shovelful of coal on the fire with the idea of wiping out the human race. As Inspector Clouseau might say, no-one is guilty and everyone is guilty.
It’s the same with the Christian idea of original sin, which means that we are sinful but not responsible for it. In the tangled web of human actions and relationships, you can’t move without hurting someone somewhere. Our actions spin out of control and breed monstrous consequences which can come to dominate our own lives. The ancient Greeks knew all about Marx’s concept of alienation. It’s just that they gave it the name of Fate. We are weaving our own inescapable destiny all the time, and doing so through actions which are genuinely free.
The good news is that free action to avert total collapse is still possible for us, if only just. We can take heart from the fact that not all stage tragedies end badly. The first great piece of tragic art we have, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, ends on a positive note. The blind, beggarly Oedipus is finally gathered to the gods, while Shakespearian tragedy usually ends with the tentative emergence of new life. We come away from many a tragic drama remembering the dignity or defiance of those who go to their deaths, not just their agonies. A tragedy isn’t always a piece of theatre which ends in total ruin. It’s a situation in which you have to be broken and remade if you’re to have any chance of redemption, and even then there are no guarantees. As the poet W.B. Yeats writes, “Nothing can be whole or sole/That has not been rent.”
Suggested readingThe West has lost its virtueBy Paul Kingsnorth
We shall, for instance, weather Covid, but not reducing the planet to flood and desert is a different matter. To avoid that, we shall need to renounce the urge to power and possession which driven us so far, and learn instead to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. That means undoing an awfully long history, and history is what we mostly are made of.
It’s true that people will do extraordinary things if the only alternative is to die. Certainly nothing short of such an alternative will cause governments and the transnational corporations to abandon their death-dealing habits. But people will also do extraordinary things if they think they are going to die anyway, such as murder, rape, loot and hunt for vengeance.
We haven’t thought enough about what kind of existence we will have if doom becomes unavoidable. People who have nothing to lose are dangerous. I wouldn’t like to be a racist cop if those I’ve beaten and humiliated know they can hang me from a lamp post without being put away for twenty years because the world won’t last that long. One thing is for sure: being broken and remade rules out mere reformism. Reformism wouldn’t have kept Lear alive, and it won’t keep us alive either.
Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor in English at Lancaster University. 
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The United States economy added 194,000 jobs in September, slower than the pace of recovery earlier in the summer and a further slowdown from August. Accordingly, the US labor market remained 7 million jobs short of its pre-pandemic projections. The Delta variant likely hindered further progress, as cases and deaths remained high and increases in air travel and in-person dining occurred later in the month, largely after the period covered by the September employment report.

Despite the low headline job growth, there were also several positive signs of improvement. Both the official and realistic unemployment rate—adjusted to account for misclassification and the unusually large decline in the labor force participation rate—fell by 0.4 percentage points, the second-largest decline of any month of this year. The labor market also continues to behave as if it were very tight. There were around 12 million job openings and 8 million unemployed workers in September, just 0.7 workers per opening based on the official unemployment rate or 0.9 when calculated using the realistic rate.

There are still many jobs that should be relatively easy to recover given the large number of openings and continued economic growth. The last several million will be more difficult. Some people may have permanently left the labor force through early retirement, and changes in labor demand could mean some jobs never return. Time will tell.

This PIIE Chart is based on research in Jason Furman and Wilson Powell III's blog, September job growth was worse than expected but better than it looked.

Since I'm on the road today, I'm going to try something a little bit different—a more fractious accounting of what has been on my mind.

I love this country, but I am clear-eyed enough to know that it also kinda sucks. What do they say about families? Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When it comes to nations, even (relatively) happy countries are all unhappy in their own ways. We are exceptional in our exceptionalism.

In terms of pedigree, tribe, and history, I consider myself on and of the left, if not necessarily a leftist. I tend to think identity is sticky. I like my tribe, although I maintain my admiration for the left primarily by not having conversations with too many actual leftists.

Despite my idealism, there is a darkness that colors much of my writing, which emanates from my formative years in the Middle East. In a recent essay, I wrote: "Not all problems have solutions, and to think that they might may itself be the bigger issue." I thought this was a sufficiently compelling turn of phrase to include it in the piece. I also thought it was self-evident, only to be reminded that it wasn't—and that it may even bring with it a whiff of partisanship. To that specific quote about problems and solutions, the conservative author Tim Carney replied to me: "You are so conservative, man."

The part that may be confusing to some, perhaps even Damir, is that I'm a believer in democracy despite (or perhaps because of) its flaws—and that for democracy to work, it must accommodate the reality of citizens who disagree on foundational questions around religion, the state, and the common good. In other words, no common good exists, or at least we can't agree on what the common good is, which renders it uncommon.

One of the best and toughest parts of being a science writer is acting as a kind of jargon liaison. Weird, obscure, aggressively multisyllabic words appear in scientific discourse; I, wielding nothing but a Google Doc, a cellphone, and the Powers of the Internet™, wrest these terms from their academic hidey-holes and try to pin them down with some endearing yet accurate analogy. If I do my job well, sometimes readers never even need to see the original word, because there’s a more approachable way to describe it.In a lot of cases, that’s how these words move—from academic to journalist to reader. (Hi there.) But sometimes the words leapfrog me. And that’s when I panic.I have panicked a lot in this way during the pandemic. The coronavirus has prompted a huge shift in the ways we talk with one another, and about one another. That’s what people do in a crisis: We borrow, massage, and invent words to make sense of what’s happening around us.But this most recent go-round has involved a lot of linguistic “leakage,” the linguist Elena Semino told me last month. “All of a sudden, something for a professional community is being used for everyone.” We’ve had to assimilate a whole slew of terms from public health, immunology, and medicine, some of them totally foreign (cytokines, positive predictive value, R-naught), others more familiar but with colloquial and academic meanings that at least partially conflict (bubbles, breakthroughs, boosters). The transition doesn’t always go smoothly, and confusion and misunderstandings, much like contagion, are very hard to rein in once they’ve started to spread.By now a lot of our pandemic verbiage has been misconstrued. Last week, I asked experts, friends, family, and colleagues what field-hopping terms or phrases had been causing the biggest headaches this past year; the recommendations came pouring in. What follows is by no means comprehensive, and probably represents a futile exercise in refining and redefining: The horses have left the barn, the ships have sailed from the harbor, the words have already slipped through my fingers like so much semantic sand. But I suppose I will continue to grasp at them, until they have escaped me entirely.Let’s start with asymptomatic, which scientists use to denote infections that never make people feel sick. Seems simple enough. But many who start off their infection symptomless might not stay that way, and until someone is rid of the coronavirus, it’s impossible to say whether they’re asymptomatic or presymptomatic. The boundary between no symptoms and symptoms is also surprisingly fuzzy. COVID-19 symptoms vary enormously from person to person, and are somewhat subjective: A headache two days after a positive coronavirus test could be a COVID symptom or an ill-timed hangover.Truly silent cases, though, are detectable only through a test that hunts for bits of the coronavirus. These infections don’t count as COVID-19, a term that’s supposed to be reserved for a documentable, symptomatic disease that unspools from a subset of SARS-CoV-2 infections. The virus, SARS-CoV-2, is what actually infects us, what actually transmits, what tests actually detect. Not COVID. (I am screaming into a void here, but that also means there’s no such thing as a COVID test, and there’s no such thing as asymptomatic COVID.)Okay, fine. Say you do test positive for SARS-CoV-2, and you lose your sense of smell, and your nose is kind of running a bit—you have straight-up symptomatic COVID. Maybe the person you mingled with unmasked a few nights ago does too, but they’ve got chills, nausea, and a high fever that will wreck them for weeks. Surprise! Both of you have mild COVID-19, a euphemistic term that’s still commonly used to describe all cases too “inconsequential” to land someone in the hospital. (At that point, a case is “severe.”) Mild might be useful for collecting population-level data, but a lot of experts dislike the adjective because it elides the debilitating and sometimes very lengthy illnesses that can unfurl from a SARS-CoV-2 infection, including long COVID. From the beginning, it’s been clear that “there’s mild, moderate, and severe, even for outpatients,” Sri Edupuganti, an infectious-disease physician and vaccinologist at Emory University, told me.Whichever direction the pendulum swings, for the first few days after your symptoms start, you’re going to be in … quarantine, right? Sadly, no. Two years into our run with COVID, that’s still one of the terms we most commonly mess up. Correctly used, quarantine describes the period of time when people who think they’ve been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 are supposed to cloister themselves—a precaution in case an infection manifests. If you know you’re infected, thanks to, say, a positive test or legit COVID symptoms, you’re going into full-blown isolation. (Unless you’re in the United Kingdom, where they apparently play it pretty fast and loose with these terms and “use them interchangeably,” Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at George Mason University, told me. Woof.)To confuse matters further, we have also adopted quarantine as a catchall moniker for somewhat sheltered pandemic life, or lockdown-lite. (Just check Google for 8 trillion listicles on quarantine cats, quarantine TV shows, quarantine meals, quarantine quarantinis …) Part of this obsession is probably cultural baggage​​: If Americans heard quarantine before the pandemic, it was usually in foreboding contexts—outbreak-centric history texts, or the plot twists of Contagion-esque sci-fi thrillers. (We have, after all, been using the term for centuries, since at least the time when ships arriving from plague-stricken countries were cordoned off for 40 days before docking—hence the quar- prefix.) Isolation is a much more well-worn term, something we’ve all gotten at least a taste of; it lacks that only-in-crisis allure. Quarantine—quarantine!—sounds way worse.We’ve struggled with cheerier words, too. The prospect of being fully vaccinated, for instance, is pretty appealing. Our COVID shots substantially reduce the risk of getting infected or seriously sick with SARS-CoV-2, and slash the chances that the virus will be passed on to others.But oh boy, is fully vaccinated also a nightmare to define. For starters, being fully dosed isn’t the same as being fully immunized, because it takes a couple of weeks for immune cells to learn the contents of a shot and react. (Even the professionals use this one in a confusing way: The CDC counts people as fully vaccinated the day they receive their second dose of Moderna’s or Pfizer’s vaccine or their first of Johnson & Johnson’s, but says they aren’t “considered” fully vaccinated until two weeks after that.) The rise of third doses and booster shots has also made the concept of full vaccination quite a bit squishier. If these additional shots are meant to build iteratively on prior defenses, does that take us to … fuller vaccination? Super vaccination? Or did we at some point get less full? (For now, at least, you don’t need a third dose or a booster to be considered fully vaccinated.) Fully also implies completeness, even invulnerability, when no vaccine in existence can ever confer such a thing.

That vaccines aren’t impenetrable shields against infection isn’t bad news; it’s very much in keeping with how immunity works, waxing or waning as encounters with microbes or vaccines build it up or as time or pathogen evolution erode it away. This has been a point of confusion when discussing vaccine effectiveness, the formal term for how we measure a shot’s success; those numbers will always vary, depending on what we’re measuring effectiveness against. (This one, to be fair, isn’t widely misused so much as widely misunderstood.) Establishing any infection at all is the easiest feat for a virus to accomplish—the first step toward causing disease—and the hardest event for a vaccinated immune system to block. That’s always where protection will falter first.That sounds like a bummer, but SARS-CoV-2 infections among the vaccinated are entirely expected—especially because our shots were designed to help us stamp out disease, not eradicate all positive test results. It’s unfortunate, then, that we’ve spent months wringing our hands over breakthroughs of all severities. The term breakthrough has an established history in vaccinology—counting up these events is necessary to know how well inoculations are working in and out of trials. But because of our fuzzy understanding of vaccine effectiveness, the word’s use in pandemic times has become much more doom and gloom, with some reports even equating breakthroughs with vaccine failures. That’s absolutely not the case.Consider the CDC’s definition for a SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough: any test-based detection of the virus in someone who’s been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. This dumps an enormous range of postinoculation outcomes into the same category, everything from exceedingly rare hospitalizations and deaths to totally silent infections that would’ve gone unnoticed if not for that choicely timed test. Simply receiving a positive test result does not guarantee that a person will experience disease or spread the virus to someone else. For these reasons, a lot of experts have sworn off using the term breakthrough—and wince noticeably when it comes up in conversation. (Many prefer post-vaccination infection.)If the terminology of breakthroughs has been exaggerated toward the negative, the discourse around natural immunity might be its overhyped foil. Natural immunity is another foster-phrase; long before the pandemic started, scientists used it to describe the protection left behind after an infection by a bona fide pathogen. But in the age of COVID, the phrase has become weaponized into a false binary: If infection-induced immunity is natural, some have argued, immunity obtained through different means must be unnatural—artificial, undesirable, a dangerous hoax, or even, in some cases, a moral failure, the religious-studies expert Alan Levinovitz recently explained in The Washington Post.But that dichotomy is scientifically nonexistent. Inoculations are designed to mimic the microbes that cause infections, and often end up tickling pretty similar responses out of immune cells. The main difference is that vaccines deliver their defensive lessons safely, without risking disease. As a nod to this, the immunologist John Wherry and others prefer using terms such as infection-acquired and vaccine-acquired immunity. They’ve even started using another phrase—hybrid immunity—to refer to the heightened protection that’s afforded when people with a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection get vaccinated.If the worry truly is that vaccines are a technological unknown, there’s at least one other way to look at this. Vaccines, like many other human inventions, are body-inspired. They leverage and build on our inborn defenses, in much the same way that glasses can enhance vision and good running shoes can speed up a person’s pace. They’re not an indictment of the immune system and its numerous powers, but a tribute to them. In a pandemic, vaccines, in protecting both the people who receive them and the people those recipients interact with, really do accomplish what no other tool can—and that, if anything, is worth saying over and over and over again.

In July, the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack started its work with a headline-grabbing hearing, featuring testimony from law enforcement officers present at the Capitol during the attempted insurrection. Since then, the committee has yet to hold another hearing—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t getting things done behind the scenes. Over the past month, investigators have sent out a string of subpoenas to Trump advisers and allies, calls for documents from government agencies, and requests for telecommunications companies to preserve phone records. The committee announced in early September that it had already received “thousands of pages of documents”—and according to Chairman Bennie Thompson, at least some witnesses are cooperating so far, including former Department of Justice official Richard Donoghue, who was involved in pushing back against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The investigation, it seems, is moving forward.

But even as investigators build up momentum, some significant obstacles lie ahead. The committee has an enormous pile of information to dig into—some of it of potentially dubious value—and no end of questions to pursue about what happened on Jan. 6 and in the days, weeks, and years before. In doing so, it is likely to run into legal disputes over its ability to obtain information from recalcitrant witnesses close to former President Trump—along with information that Trump might object to releasing on the grounds of executive privilege. And Thompson has said he hopes to finish the investigation by the “early spring” of 2022. So the clock is ticking—and there’s a lot to get done.

Committee investigators have been busily seeking out information on a range of topics, with their strategy becoming clearer since Congress returned from its August recess. They began with a slate of requests to executive branch agencies from the Pentagon to the Department of the Interior, asking for material on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and government preparations—or lack thereof—for Jan. 6. These requests built on inquiries made to agencies by other committees earlier this year.

But the committee saved its widest request for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)—which preserves government records—seeking a vast swath of presidential documents on Trump administration communications regarding Jan. 6 and the 2020 election. Politico reports that the committee has begun receiving material from the executive branch, and NARA is working through the steps required to identify and transmit records to congressional investigators. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration “plans to err on the side of disclosure” in allowing the release of records potentially covered by executive privilege, “given the gravity of the events of Jan. 6”—though Trump has insisted that “[e]xecutive privilege will be defended.” It’s not clear to what extent Trump’s opinion on this matters, but he can certainly hold things up in court.

In some cases, the committee has jumped straight to subpoenas, demanding records and testimony from Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, longtime Trump administration official Kash Patel and outside Trump advisor Steve Bannon. It also subpoenaed a number of people involved in organizing Jan. 6 protests at the Ellipse, just outside the White House, and at the Capitol—including a current Republican House staffer. It’s asked that telecommunications companies preserve phone records from a range of Trump associates and family members and, notably, a number of Republican members of the House of Representatives. And it has sent requests to social media companies—mainstream platforms like Facebook and YouTube, and fringe right-wing sites such as Parler and Gab—for data on election misinformation and planning for the Jan. 6 rallies. Rep. Adam Schiff, who sits on the committee, announced recently that he and his fellow members will also seek to hear from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen on the platform’s role in the Capitol riot.

All this adds up to a fairly aggressive and wide-reaching approach by the committee. Congress typically asks for voluntary compliance from even unfriendly witnesses before sending out subpoenas, and the decision to skip straight to a subpoena speaks to a willingness to play hardball with Trump associates in order to move quickly—and publicly, rather than behind closed doors. Speaking to Politico, Schiff explained that the committee plans to “forgo some of the time-consuming steps” that have bogged down congressional investigations in the past. Likewise, the choice to seek information about Trump’s communications—and from his close associates—shows that the committee isn’t trying to tiptoe around the former president.

So far, the committee’s approach may be working in producing useful details. Thompson said recently that the committee is busy sorting through “so much information” that “there might not be a need for an immediate hearing” any time soon: “[W]e’re getting a lot of stuff that we didn’t know about.” Not only does this suggest that the committee is obtaining potentially useful information, but it illustrates one of the realities of congressional oversight: that televised hearings, while important for constructing a narrative and getting high-profile witnesses on the record, are often not the most effective tool for uncovering new facts.

The reported willingness by the White House to share with Congress at least some material potentially covered by executive privilege is also good news for the committee’s efforts. There was a risk that the committee would soft-pedal its work in a misguided attempt to appeal to pro-Trump Republicans in Congress or among the public, or that the Biden administration would block the release of all documents on the grounds of executive privilege. Luckily, neither Congress nor the executive seems to be taking these approaches.

However aggressively the committee pursues its work, though, the path forward will not be a smooth one. Difficulties are already starting to pop up—and the true determinants of the committee’s success will be in how it handles these problems.

First, there is the issue of executive privilege. Even though he’s no longer in office, Trump has the ability to cause a legal ruckus by invoking the privilege over documents held by NARA and the testimony of his former advisers. And even if he’s unable to ultimately prevent the release of information to Congress, he can still generate quite a delay. As Jonathan David Shaub explains in Lawfare, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services establishes that “a former president may also be heard to assert” executive privilege, though it remains murky what would happen if a former president seeks to assert the privilege over the disagreement of the current president, as would be the case here.

Trump, for his part, says he plans to raise objections to the committee’s investigation. In a statement released after the committee subpoenaed Meadows, Scavino, Patel, and Bannon, he declared, “We will fight the subpoenas on executive privilege and other grounds, for the good of our country. We wait to find out whether or not subpoenas will be sent out to antifa and BLM for the death and destruction they have caused in tearing apart our Democrat-run cities throughout America.” Politico reports that the four subpoena recipients plan to defy the committee’s orders on Trump’s request—though it’s hard to tell how Bannon would claim executive privilege, given that he last held a government position in 2017 and, at the time of the Jan. 6 riot, was hosting a podcast. (This is not the first time Trump has asserted executive privilege in relation to individuals outside of government, though it may be the first time he’s done so for a podcaster.)

This raises potential issues for both the committee’s outreach to the executive branch and its subpoenas and requests to individual witnesses, particularly those who would have reason to put up a fight. As Shaub writes, the specific contours of the problem will depend on what information Trump and his associates seek to block. The Presidential Records Act requires NARA to notify and consult Trump on which records it plans to release, but ultimately the statute leaves the decision of what to release to the current president. Requests to executive branch agencies, however, don’t require that consultation with the former president—so that might be an easier way for the committee to get a hold of records, at least if the Biden administration agrees to hand them over. Meanwhile, subpoenas to former Trump administration officials could get held up if the witnesses claim testimonial immunity—the doctrine, derived from the idea of executive privilege, that close presidential advisers need not comply with congressional requests for information.

If witnesses do refuse to comply, the committee will have to decide how to go about enforcing its subpoenas. Faced with similar recalcitrance during the Trump administration, the House of Representatives turned to civil enforcement, requesting help from the courts in forcing witnesses to testify. That strategy proved largely unsuccessful: Trump was able to run out the clock as his advisers, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, simply dragged out litigation past the end of his presidency through what felt like an endless cycle of appeals. And even if the Jan. 6 committee were to attempt civil enforcement, such efforts are on uncertain legal territory after the August 2020 panel decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, which held that the House lacked a cause of action to bring McGahn to court. While the en banc D.C. Circuit court vacated the August opinion after the case was ultimately settled earlier this year, McGahn left a number of issues unresolved that could bog down an effort to enforce subpoenas through civil litigation.

Perhaps for this reason, members of the committee have talked less about civil enforcement and more about the possibility of prosecuting stubborn witnesses for contempt of Congress. Under the criminal contempt statute, noncompliance with a subpoena from a congressional committee for testimony or documents is a misdemeanor carrying a penalty of a fine or up to a year in prison. Multiple members of the Jan. 6 committee, including Thompson, have said they would turn to this option if necessary: “[A]s a reminder,” Rep. Jamie Raskin tweeted about potential defiance by Bannon and his fellow subpoena recipients, “noncompliance with Congress invites criminal sanctions.”

Using the criminal contempt process to punish recalcitrant witnesses has, however, presented various challenges in the past. First among these is that doing so requires the assistance of the executive branch. Once one chamber of Congress approves a contempt citation, the next step is for a U.S. attorney from the Department of Justice to bring the case to a grand jury. Under practices outlined in a 1984 Office of Legal Counsel opinion, the executive branch has refused to pursue prosecution under the criminal contempt statute against individuals whose noncompliance is at the direction of the current president on the grounds of executive privilege or claims of testimonial immunity.

High-profile examples of the executive branch refusing to prosecute a criminal contempt citation by Congress have occurred when the president directing the behavior in question was still in office, such as when Congress held Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt over their refusal to turn over documents regarding the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census in 2019. If Bannon and his cohort refuse to comply with subpoenas at Trump’s direction, the Justice Department, now helmed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, may choose to prosecute any contempt citations referred to it. But before those prosecutions could begin, the full committee would need to report out the contempt citations and the full House would likely need to vote to refer them to the U.S. attorney.

All this will take time. Even if the Department of Justice is willing to prosecute recalcitrant witnesses who have been held by the House or Senate to be in contempt, and that prosecution proceeds without intervening interruption over issues of executive privilege or otherwise, there is no guarantee that doing so will produce the documents and testimony the committee is seeking. Cooperation after the House or Senate holds an individual in contempt does not automatically resolve the charges against him or her, potentially reducing the incentive to cooperate at all at that point. In other words, looming criminal contempt citations over uncooperative witnesses might make for better theater than actual leverage on the committee’s part. In the case of the Trump associates who have been issued subpoenas so far, being taken to court for noncompliance might be seen as a useful political project, at least in the short term. Whether the individuals in question would ultimately be willing to incur punishment to maintain their loyalty to Trump is a different question. But the chances of a drawn-out process to resolve criminal citations are high.

And even if the committee opts not to pursue civil enforcement, other speed bumps might lay ahead. Trump could also sue to prevent the National Archives from releasing material he argues is privileged, even if the Biden administration permits the Archives to pass the records to Congress. “Trump’s arguments would likely not succeed,” Shaub argues. “But such a suit could potentially tie the archivist’s hands and prevent the disclosure of information to the committee for a substantial period of time.”

And there may be additional hiccups when it comes to obtaining information from private entities. Some social media companies, like Facebook, may be only too happy to comply with the committee’s requests in order to build congressional goodwill in an otherwise inhospitable political environment for Silicon Valley. Other platforms, though, might be less eager to hand over data, for privacy reasons or otherwise. Likewise, if and when the committee asks telecommunications companies to transmit the phone records it has requested they preserve, it could potentially run into resistance either from the companies themselves or from the members of Congress and Trump associates whose data is at issue. It’s not hard to imagine, say, Rep. Jim Jordan or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suing AT&T to prevent their records from being transmitted to the committee.

Apart from these potential delays, the committee faces the problem of how to focus a sprawling investigation. The House authorization creating the select committee grants it a vast mandate—its purpose, among other things, is to “investigate and report upon the facts and causes” of the Jan. 6 attack, “including facts and causes relating to the preparedness and response of ... law enforcement in the National Capitol Region ... as well as the influencing factors that fomented such attack on American representative democracy while engaged in a constitutional process.” Given the sheer amount that remains unknown about what happened on Jan. 6 and the number of documents the committee has requested, there are many ways to structure such a probe, and many different rabbit holes that investigators could peer into.

Politico reports that “[t]he panel is attempting to piece together Trump’s pre-Jan. 6 efforts to overturn his election loss, his attempt to mobilize the Justice Department in support of that crusade and the thinking behind his effort to call supporters to Washington on the day Congress gathers to certify presidential election results.” That’s consistent with recent news that Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time of the insurrection, sat for an interview with the committee. And the committee seems to be interested in the role that social media platforms, most prominently Facebook, might have played in allowing rioters to organize.

But that’s not all. According to Politico, “Also on the panel's to-do list is exploring reforms to the Electoral Count Act”—the statute that governs Congress’s convening to certify the electoral vote, which the Jan. 6 rioters sought to break up in order to keep Trump in office. A number of experts have advocated reforming the Electoral Count Act to forestall future attempts to overturn elections. This might seem a bit far afield from the Jan. 6 committee’s core mission—but tying the investigators’ work to statutory reform could be a useful way to shore up the committee’s legal position in pursuing information. Courts have often deferred to committees in disputes over whether a subpoena has a valid “legislative purpose,” but the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Mazars suggests a heightened level of interest by the judiciary in interrogating whether congressional investigations meet this standard. After Mazars, Congress has reason to be more careful in crafting its requests for information so that they hold up in court. Though the case concerned only subpoenas for personal information of the president, it arguably left the door open to more sustained judicial inquiry into the purpose and constitutionality of congressional probes, and tying the Jan. 6 investigation to Electoral Count Act reform might help the committee protect itself against legal challenges on these grounds.

Another potential legislative hook, should the committee want it, would involve reforms to the Capitol Police and improvements to the security of the Capitol complex, both of which are issues that Congress can address through legislation. As we’ve written, the failure of the Capitol Police to protect Congress on Jan. 6—what happened, and what caused it—remains a major outstanding question. It’s not hard to imagine how the committee could link its investigation to the need to make the Capitol safer. A report from two Senate committees offered a set of proposed changes in June, and the select committee could review these ideas and offer others.

Yet the fact that so many questions remain unanswered about Jan. 6 means that the committee will have to leave some things out. Given that members haven’t played up the role of Capitol Police governance in their recent public comments, might that line of investigation fall by the wayside? There is also the matter of intelligence failures by agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, in the days and weeks before the riot, which the committee addressed in some of its early requests to the executive branch but hasn’t addressed recently in public remarks.

Under any circumstances, members would have to choose how to focus their efforts—including between investigating and proposing reforms. But focus is particularly crucial here, because the clock is ticking—and quickly. Thompson has said that he plans for the committee to wrap up its work in the spring of 2022, which leaves only a handful of months for investigators to resolve disputes with witnesses. And at an absolute maximum, the committee can only count on having time through the end of 2022. If the Republican Party regains control of the House, as seems likely, the new speaker would presumably be uninterested in continuing the committee’s work.

That means that Trump, his associates, and other potentially recalcitrant witnesses will have time on their side in any litigation: Once again, they may be able to simply run out the clock. For the same reason, the committee has an incentive to concentrate on specific, narrow areas of inquiry, on which it can pursue information aggressively in order to speed things up.

The House created a select committee to investigate Jan. 6 in order to focus investigations of the insurrection under one body responsible for telling the story of that day. That’s a laudable goal, and so far the committee’s members seem willing to push hard to accomplish it. At the same time, the compressed timeframe of their work, along with the sheer range of unresolved questions about what happened on Jan. 6 and why—and what Congress can and should do to prevent it from happening again—means that one committee can’t possibly do it all. The Jan. 6 committee’s work should be the beginning, not the end, of the legislature’s response to the insurrection. Congress needs to consider what to do about issues laid bare by Jan. 6, from the small—like nonreinforced windows at the Capitol that were easily smashed by rioters—to the large, such as racially motivated domestic violent extremism. A focused, effective committee investigation is necessary, but not sufficient.

The US labor markets continued to improve in September, but the improvement was much slower than the fast pace of recovery earlier in the summer and was a further slowdown from August. The employer survey, which is generally more reliable, showed that the US economy added 194,000 jobs in September, still slower than the 1,027,000 average pace in June and July and a further slowdown from an upwardly-revised gain of 366,000 jobs in August. The delta variant likely continued to affect employment data in September. Cases and deaths remained high and the recovery in in-person dining and air travel largely occurred later in the month. Unlike earlier waves, however, delta seems to be slowing but not reversing progress.

Much of the other data in the report was considerably more positive than the headline including: private sector jobs were up 317,000 with some indication that seasonal adjustment issues were behind the large fall in public education jobs, hours were up sharply, the unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point (the second largest decline of any month this year) and the Black unemployment rate fell by 0.9 percentage point, nominal wages were up 0.6 percent (even faster than the very fast pace in the first eight months of the year and continuing the fastest growth for production and nonsupervisory workers since the early 1980s), and the data showed positive revisions for previous months.

The economy is still 6.9 million jobs short of pre-pandemic projections as the employment-population ratio for prime-age workers (those 25-54) is down 2.4 percentage point from before the pandemic. But the labor market continued to behave as if it was very tight: There were about 12 million job openings and 8 million unemployed workers—the most favorable ratio of openings to unemployed ever recorded. This likely played a role in the continued rapid growth of nominal wages.

The Labor Market Remains Well Short of Normal

September 2021 Difference from pre-pandemic value/trend Nonfarm payroll employment (thousands) 194 -6,920 Unemployment rate 4.8% 1.3 pp Realistic unemployment rate 6.2% 2.7 pp Employment-population ratio 58.7% -2.0 pp Labor force participation rate 61.6% -1.2 pp Job openings rate 7.3% 3.0 pp Unemployed per job opening 0.66 -0.16 Average hourly earnings, total private 0.6% #N/A Average hourly earnings, private production and nonsupervisory 0.5% #N/A Note: September 2021 value is 1-month change for nonfarm payroll employment and average hourly earnings. Pre-pandemic trend based on CBO January 2020 forecast for nonfarm payroll employment. Pre-pandemic (February 2020) value for remaining measures. Difference from pre-pandemic value for employment-population ratio and labor force participation rate adjusted for changes in the age-sex composition of the population. Job openings are estimated based on growth in Indeed Hiring Lab job postings. Average hourly earnings growth is chain-weighted based on aggregate hours by industry sector.

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics via Macrobond; Indeed Hiring Lab; Congressional Budget Office; authors' calculations.

The gap between the labor market and normality continued to narrow in September, but the economy still remains 7 million jobs short of pre-pandemic projections as shown in figure 1.

The unemployment rate and the "realistic" unemployment rate, which adjusts for misclassification and the unusually large decline in the labor force participation rate, tell a similar story in September (figure 2). Both measures showed substantial improvement in September, with each falling by 0.4 percentage point, though they remain well above the pre-pandemic level of unemployment. In total 2.2 million fewer people are in the labor force than would be expected given the overall state of the economy. This is consistent both with the still depressed labor force participation rate and employment-population ratio, which are 1.2 and 2.0 percentage points below their respective pre-pandemic values (adjusted for demographic changes).

Prime-age Employment Rates Remain Depressed

Like overall employment, the prime-age (25-54) employment rate continued to be substantially depressed in the third quarter of 2021 due to a combination of high unemployment and low labor force participation. Overall, the prime-age employment rate is 2.4 percentage points lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019 as shown in figure 3. This is a somewhat larger decline than the 2.0 percentage point fall in the overall employment rate after adjusting for changing demographics. In the early part of the pandemic, employment fell sharply across the board. While declines were similar for men and women, prime-age Black and Hispanic workers experienced particularly severe declines, falling up to 11.0 and 12.1 percentage points respectively. These gaps have generally narrowed in recent quarters but remain sizable.

The Labor Market Continues to Look Very Tight

One sign of the tightness of labor markets is the fact that job openings and quits have remained elevated in recent months, showing both that jobs are plentiful and also that people have the confidence to quit their jobs knowing they will be able to find new ones. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and Indeed Hiring Lab shows that openings were likely around 11.7 million (corresponding to the highest rate of opening on record) at the end of September. This represents a marked increase from the end of June, even though 1.7 million jobs have been filled in the interim and the delta strain has spread rapidly.

Even though there continue to be a high number of unemployed workers, the large number of job openings means that at 0.7, the number of unemployed per job opening in September was likely the lowest on record. The number of openings likely exceeded the number of unemployed even accounting for the unusually large reduction in labor force participation, though this measure is still indicative of somewhat more slack than just prior to the recession.

The best measure of the tightness of labor markets is wages. The pandemic period has been unusual in that very high unemployment did not result in any slower nominal wage growth for the workers who kept their jobs—instead wage growth continued at a relatively fast rate with the fastest wage growth for the bottom quartile of workers. Nevertheless, nominal compensation growth has not kept pace with inflation, so real compensation has fallen since prior to the pandemic. Wage growth continued to be strong in September at 0.6 percent, up from 0.4 percent in August, above the pace of nominal wage growth in the first eight months of the year. In previous months, when relatively lower-wage sectors, like leisure and hospitality, were adding large amounts of jobs, the changing composition of employment meant that wage gains were likely understated. In September, with the slowdown in job growth, this was likely less of an issue.

September was a period of substantial change both from a public health perspective and economically. The latest wave of COVID cases and deaths appears to have peaked in September. While both remain at high levels, they are projected to decline further in the coming weeks. However, the data for the September employment report largely fall before this reduction in COVID. Higher frequency data in restaurant reservations and air travel suggest that much of the recovery didn't occur until later in the month, so employment effects may only show up with a lag as well.

The expiration of federal pandemic unemployment benefits in the remaining states at the beginning of September was a major change in the policy response to the pandemic. Between August and September, claims for unemployment fell by about two-thirds. While the magnitude of the effect from some states' early termination of these benefits is debated, to the extent that these benefits were affecting unemployed workers' incentives to look for work, their expiration may result in additional employment growth in coming months. But this expiration of support to unemployed workers and their families could also reduce demand if they reduce their spending. Again, the impact of this change is likely to be muted in September's data since the matching process between job seekers and employers does not happen overnight.

These factors will likely continue to play a role in coming months. More time should help with the recovery of millions of jobs, but it remains uncertain whether it will bring back all 7 million missing jobs or just a subset of them and how long this process will take.

The next many million jobs should be relatively easy to get back given the large number of openings and continued rapid economic growth. More difficult will be the last several million jobs. Jobs may end up short of pre-pandemic projections if people have left the labor force for good (e.g., due to early retirement) or if other changes have permanently reduced labor demand (e.g., employers hiring fewer workers who are higher skill and higher paid). The hope is that all the jobs can be regained, productivity could rise to support wage increases, and that continued high levels of demand could put the economy on a future path that is better than what was expected before the pandemic. Time will tell.

shutterstock Eric Crudup/ShutterstockIt is a little-known fact that humans have not one but two immune systems. The first, the biophysical immune system – the one we’ve all heard much about – responds to infections as they enter the body, detecting and eliminating intruders such as the coronavirus.
The second is the behavioural immune system, which adapts our behaviour to preemptively avoid potentially infectious people, places and things. The behavioural immune system is the first line of defence against infectious disease. It prompts people to socially conform with known traditions and to avoid foreign, dissimilar and potentially infectious groups. 
In a recently published study, my colleagues and I at the University of Cambridge examined the impact of the behavioural immune system on our attitudes towards obedience and authority. We found that high rates of infectious diseases – and the disease-avoidance they promote – may fundamentally shape political opinions and social institutions.
Infection drives authoritarianism
We collected data from over 250,000 people across 47 countries and looked at the relationship between the (pre-COVID) infection risk where they lived and their authoritarian attitudes – the degree to which they endorsed conformity and obedience to authority. 
We were curious as to whether high risk of infection would activate the behavioural immune system in ways that promoted authoritarian beliefs. We made sure to measure authoritarianism in a politically neutral way, to avoid our results reflecting people’s religious beliefs or commitments to certain political parties.
We found a clear relationship between people’s authoritarian attitudes and their region’s levels of infectious diseases: areas with a higher prevalence of infectious diseases had more authoritarian citizens. Additionally, areas with high infection rates tended to vote conservatively and were governed by more authoritarian laws – laws that are imposed on some members of society but not all.
Examples of authoritarian laws include legal restrictions surrounding LGBT civil liberties or extreme criminal punishment. Infection rates were specifically related to these “vertical” hierarchical laws, and not to “horizontal” laws that affect all citizens equally – suggesting rates of infectious disease uniquely affect people’s preferences for hierarchical power structures.

The link between infection rates and authoritarianism was found only for diseases spread by humans.
Zerbor/Shutterstock

Strikingly, the pattern of results was consistent when comparing the 47 countries as well as US states and US metropolitan regions and cities. These effects persisted even after accounting for regional demographic variables such as educational attainment, wealth and inequalities, suggesting direct and significant relationships between infectious diseases and authoritarian beliefs and behaviours.
We further discovered that the relationship between infection rates and authoritarianism was specific to infections that can be acquired from other humans, such as measles or cholera. The effect was absent for infectious diseases that can only be acquired from nonhuman species, such as rabies or Lyme disease.
These results support the idea that there is a social and behavioural mechanism connecting infection risk and authoritarianism. A high prevalence of human-to-human infections appears to lead to conformist and obedient social arrangements that potentially reduce the risk of people being infected by those who do not conform or resemble the majority. Social diseases like COVID-19 may therefore sculpt social ideologies and institutions.
How to overcome COVID’s influence
In the COVID-19 era, we have all been living with overactivated behavioural immune systems. We have changed how we socialise and relate to other people; who we allow to enter our countries; and how we calculate the balance between personal freedom and collective safety.
What does this mean for our political futures? Will the fear of COVID-19 push us towards living in more authoritarian societies? How do we restore a psychological balance – and a preference for political anti-authoritarianism – without endangering ourselves and others?
The first inevitable step is to decrease real infection risks. Without a reduction in real health risks through effective vaccination programmes and health policies, our all-too-human bodies will naturally tend towards defensiveness, conformity and an aversion to threat.
Indeed, COVID-19 has brought about a global wave of authoritarian policies that have justified the tightening of national borders and limitations of everyday rights. In our study, we found that even historical infection rates from decades earlier predict what citizens believe, who they vote for and how they are governed today. Pandemics may have long-lasting and profound ramifications for politics.
However, while our instincts to avoid infection are inbuilt – the behavioural immune system has been documented in species as varied as mice, frogs and chimpanzees – humans are endowed with magnificent mental capacities to overcome biases and flexibly adapt to change. If it is our highly evolved imagination that facilitates the behavioural immune system, then it is also our rich and compassionate imagination that can pull us out of its toxic side-effects.

Humans are far from the only animals that change how they interact in response to the threat of disease.
Ari Wid/Shutterstock

Safe contact with those who we are instructed to avoid – even imaginary, intellectual or virtual contact, through film or literature or news or friends – is a powerful antidote to the xenophobia that can emerge when we fear infection. These forms of nonphysical touch can remind us of all we have in common and all we can lose if we shun contact and care.
Perhaps the way forward lies in adopting anti-authoritarian stances that champion openness, inclusion and scientific reasoning rather than mythical, ideological or conspiratorial thinking. Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and the contagious divisions within our politics may thus be intertwined tasks. The health of society – the collective “body politic” – requires the health and resilience of our bodies and minds. Immunity is fundamentally political.
Leor Zmigrod does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Years ago, for a story and in an attempt to be more successful, I read a bunch of “how to be a woman at work” books. Because women face backlash for behaving assertively in the workplace, these books mostly advise pretending to be nicer while subtly trying to get what you want. (This being the innocent springtime of the pre-Trump era, “what you want” was typically imagined to be a promotion.)“Whenever possible, women should substitute ‘we’ for ‘I,’” Sheryl Sandberg writes in Lean In, the holy writ of this genre. “A woman’s request will be better received if she asserts ‘We had a great year,’ as opposed to ‘I had a great year.’” Even better if she can do so while smiling like a girlboss rodeo clown. The Girl’s Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being a Bitch) advises said girl, “Don’t let self-doubt creep into your tone.” Former CNN Vice President Gail Evans, in Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman, suggests that women try to sit more like men do, admitting, “It took me years to figure out how to inhabit my executive desk chair.” Years! Worrying about sitting!Now I feel like I can throw all these books in the garbage, because the only things that matter to my work success are the sentences I type into Google Docs and the sentences I type into Slack. I don’t have to smile, I don’t have to worry about my vocal tone, and no one cares how I’m sitting.Of course, I still want my colleagues to like me, so I still bend a knee to gender norms. I simply say what needs to be said in Slack, throw in an exclamation point and a nice emoji, and call it a day. It’s much easier to perform your gender with a dancing penguin than by “power posing” or whatever. And best of all, Slack breaks the double bind, in which women are disliked for being either too assertive or too nurturing. No one thinks the happy cowboy (🤠) is pushy. No one would damn the joy cat (😹) with the faint praise of being “likable enough.” All this Slacking appears to be working, because for the first time, the performance review that we had in the middle of the Slack-heavy pandemic called me “friendly.”In short, I love Slack! It’s a great tool for women who just want to get through the workday without worrying too much about how they’re “coming off.” A fellow female reporter once told me ruefully that if a woman behaved as “quirkily” as all the prominent “quirky” men in media, she’d get fired on the spot for being crazy. Now there’s no danger of that happening, because we can all keep our quirks to ourselves while typing “Interesting idea! 🙂”I ran my love of Slack by several women-at-work experts I know, and they said though few studies exist on gender and Slack, specifically, there might be something to this. “Women are expected to smile all the time, and men are not. It’s exhausting,” says Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of You Just Don’t Understand. But “it’s liberating when you don’t have to worry about your makeup and your hair and whether your head is tilted in a feminine way.”Because people tend to prefer managers with deeper voices, “women frequently tell me that they’re advised, when they ask for career advice, that they need to lower the pitch of their voice,” says Kim Elsesser, a psychologist who has studied gender dynamics at work. With Slack, “you don’t have to think about any of that.”Women are often punished for not behaving gently and communally. But on the internet, nobody knows you’re a bitch. “One thing that women need to do is not be as aggressive as men,” Elsesser told me. “So if you can use those same aggressive requests or whatever, and put a little smiley face next to them, and then all of a sudden, they don’t seem as aggressive.”Still, Elsesser thinks I like Slacking not because I’m a woman, but because I’m the kind of person who likes writing things down. “I mean, that’s what you do, right, you’re a writer?” she said. “So is that crazy, that your preferred medium of communication would be written?”As any woman who has used Twitter.com can tell you, women aren’t always welcome in digital spaces. When the audience is large and unregulated, women can feel shut down, harassed, or ignored, says Susan Herring, an Indiana University professor who researches gender and digital communication. But in situations where a teacher or a boss is reading what people say—like a classroom discussion group or a workplace Slack channel—people are more likely to be civil.Some women and members of marginalized groups have, of course, experienced setbacks from working only virtually. With so many people still working remotely, some women and people of color find that they are given more workplace “housework”—setting up meetings, taking notes—and fewer prestigious assignments, says Joan Williams, a gender and law expert at UC Hastings. “You can’t hear the plum assignments being given out in the hall and try to insinuate yourself to get part of the action anymore,” she told me. That’s on top of all the actual housework and care work that mothers are having to do as child-care options have disappeared during the pandemic. And, Tannen points out, many women who don’t use emojis and exclamation points in digital communications are still wrongly seen as bitchy.Certain benefits of Slack extend to people of all genders, though. Because of its asynchronous aspect, I find it to be an excellent tool for anger management. Work is frustrating sometimes, but part of what you get paid for is not taking your frustrations out on your colleagues. (They, too, are working.) The first thing that pops into my head when I’m frustrated is rarely the thing I want my colleagues to hear. Neither are the second through tenth things, usually. The 11th thing—the thing for which I have scraped together all the little dough scraps of my generosity into a nice little biscuit—is the one that is suitable for Slack.To buy time to bake up my generosity biscuit, I find it much easier to avoid Slacking for a few minutes than to avoid speaking for a few minutes. (It’s also much more obvious when you are stifling your anger in person than when you are typing and deleting draft Slack messages. I typically do this in an offline text file to avoid the ominous “Olga is typing.”) But the effect is that by writing “Sure thing!” in Slack while saying “What the fuck?” under my breath, I spare both my colleagues and myself some grief. I make everyone’s day a little better. I get a little time to figure out whether this is something I want to turn into a big deal—or “expend institutional capital on,” in girlboss parlance—or just brush aside. If a blogger has a meltdown and doesn’t Slack about it, did it even happen?Yes, Slack conversations are more scripted, but I don’t find these scripts particularly disingenuous, because the scripts we all follow at work are disingenuous anyway. Do you really care how that person’s weekend was? Is someone telling you that they’ll get you that PowerPoint soon actually “awesome”? Scripts save time and, were they followed more closely, could frankly also save a few people from committing fireable office faux pas. If we’re going to be following scripts, I’d prefer that they at least be copy-pastable.Some people say that they don’t like Slack, but I think these people are actually saying that they don’t like the way other people Slack. Unpleasant people abound, and some people are unpleasant digitally, just as some people are unpleasant in person. To me, getting terse edits in Google Docs is preferable to the time an old-fashioned editor sat me down, looked at my draft, looked at me, and said soberly, “Words matter.”I am not suggesting that anyone replace in-person conversations with Slack if they don’t want to. I understand that some people live for the few minutes of banter that take place after everyone’s filed into the conference room but before they’ve gotten the presentation to work: These chairs are so comfy. Oooh, where is that bagel from? I would never dream of taking this away. My view on Slack is similar to my view on the office: It should be there if you like it, and avoidable if you don’t. I am simply saying that in the frantic search for silver linings to This Whole Thing, I have found mine. Perhaps, girl, it is yours as well.

(Photo by Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/Denver Post/Getty Images.)Economists are attuned to our terms being bastardised by politicians. In the mouths of presidents and Congress, “investment” is widely used as a synonym for “spending.” “Infrastructure” today seemingly means any social policy Democrats think is worthy. A carbon tax was recently dubbed by White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki as a “corporate polluter fee.” And in the most shameless dictionary land-grab of all, President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Ron Klain, and Psaki have repeatedly tried to redefine what we understand by the “cost” of the reconciliation bill—claiming that a $3.5 trillion bill actually costs “zero” dollars because it is fully “paid for” by tax increases.Democrats are, in essence, saying that the “cost” of the overall package of spending and tax hikes is its net impact on the federal budget deficit. If a gross tax cut is $900 billion but there are offsetting provisions to raise revenue by $300 billions, we sometimes do say the net “cost” to the U.S. Treasury in forgone revenues is $600 billion. So, they contend, if there’s a $3.5 trillion spending package and $3.5 trillion raised in revenue to pay for it, isn’t the equivalent “net cost” of the package “zero dollars”?That framework, if not the numbers, has convinced many journalists. In a “fact check,” the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has questioned Biden’s assertions on what the deficit impact will be. Some modeling from Penn Wharton has suggested the combined spending and revenue package would result in $1.75 trillion in additional borrowing over 10 years, Kessler says. But while Kessler rightly queried whether the reconciliation bill was truly deficit neutral, he didn’t question the president on whether the deficit impact really represented the bill’s “cost.” Anyone who has ever bought anything knows that the “cost” of something is not the net effect on your debt balance. If you bought $85 worth of groceries and paid from your debit account, you wouldn’t claim the cost of the purchase was zero. If you spend $85 on groceries, that’s $85 less you have to invest, or to spend at the movies or in restaurants. Clearly, that out-of-pocket cost is real to you—it’s a reasonable proxy of the monetary value of what you give up to make the purchase.In the same way, the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill has a $3.5 trillion sticker cost to the private sector of the economy. Those funds have to be raised, either through taxation or borrowing, which in the long run is just taxation deferred. This “cost” will be even larger if some of the programs are extended permanently. So while the question of who bears the cost is complicated—potentially incorporating both current and future taxpayers—nobody should claim that this is a zero cost bill. It is going to have a vast cost to the market sector of the U.S. economy, in fact, because it significantly increases the government’s claim on private resources.The precise overall economic “cost” of the package to the private sector is a bit more complex to calculate and likely to differ from this “sticker cost.” That’s because the true cost is the “opportunity cost” of this government spending to the private sector—the best alternative use of the funds forgone as a result of this package of spending, redistribution, and tax increases to finance it. To assess this, we would need to work out the broader impact of the programs on economic output.When money is funneled into climate change investments, that uses up funds, workers, and machines that could have been put to use elsewhere, perhaps with higher returns given the evidence of past federal infrastructure boondoggles. And while spending on social programs transfers money from some taxpayers to other people—meaning no overall cost to the private sector—they require administrative outlays to run and create disincentives to work that, again, can lower output year after year.In fact, some of the revenue raisers included in the package, such as the corporate tax hike, are regarded as particularly damaging for economic output, due to their deleterious impact on investment. This is a clear example of how something can show up as a supposed mitigator of “cost” to the deficit, while actually imposing very real costs on the economy. Economists then might disagree on the precise overall economic “cost” of this agenda, given the uncertainties and disputes about the full impacts of the programs. They would agree, however, that the cost to the private sector is large and certainly not “zero.” When Psaki first used this “zero cost” line, in fact, I thought it so outrageous—such a flagrant misuse of widely understood terminology—that it would backfire and blow up on the administration. Professional economists would surely all rush to man the barricades to defend this basic economic concept (and, to be clear, some Democratic-leaning academics did). Yet the overall response was fairly muted. Biden’s framework seems to be sticking as a way of assessing the costs of the bill. This is dangerous to our broader policy debates, because the “cost of government” to us is not the annual deficit, but the overall claim on output that government spending has on the market sector.In truth, we are seeing all sorts of weird things happening in the reporting of this process. Last week, for example, the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein talked about how Joe Manchin’s steadfast opposition to such a large spending package had led to White House aides contemplating “grueling cuts” to the bill. Only in Washington could trimming a massive proposed increase in government expenditure that hasn’t actually been implemented yet be described as “grueling” or a “cut.”Here’s the bottom line. Models from the Tax Foundation and the Penn Wharton Budget model have suggested that the gross revenues raised to “pay for” this bill (counting new tax credits instead as “spending”) are likely to add $2.1 trillion to $2.4 trillion to the public coffers through the next decade, meaning (contra the administration) the deficit will likely worsen. When everything washes out, the Penn Wharton analysis suggests the package overall could add $1.75 trillion in debt, before interest costs. But the true “cost” of the package to the private sector is not the same as the effects on the deficit, and should reflect the overall lost output owing to a much bigger government. The Biden worldview would suggest that even an expansion of federal spending to, say, 80 percent of GDP from its current 26.3 percent would have “zero cost,” provided tax revenues rose concurrently to the same level. Nobody would believe that—for it is absurd. Yet, somehow, the president is passing off his expansion of government as costless, and a lot of smart people are going along with it.

Professor James' historical review of the possible purposes of personal, corporate and public debt scenarios are timely, and hugely relevant as all voters post-2020 consider their options, challenges and ethical dilemmas.

The Covid-19 Pandemic, according to an article by Rachael Nania, in the AARP.org, on April 1, 2021, left 95% of its American fatalities squarely among the population cohort aged 50+. In other words, with respect to generations, morals and financial benefits, the massive global debts incurred to defend an increasingly elderly population against Covid-19 health risks has been undertaken to prolong the lives of one cohort, the 50+, and the costs will be borne entirely by the world's young people.

Contrary to the inflationary data published by both the EU and the US financial authorities, the cost of basic services and goods have already exploded for the average wage earner, with housing, food and transportation costs leading. The negative interest rates mechanisms adopted by almost all the financial authorities have discouraged all forms of savings for prudent long-term management of households, and encouraged participation in speculative stocks and bonds markets.

The US federal Reserve, along with Japan's national monetary organization, et.al. have been purchasing fragile debt papers, and printed more money than the financial regulators did in historic Germany, or more recently in our South American republics.

Professor James uses a loaded debt term several times in his historical over: For example, "A Ponzi-like ballooning of government debt would destroy the instruments with which governments might hope to tackle the expensive task of carbon abatement. Preventing that devastation requires mapping out a viable course for public debt. Once again, we see how debt can both shackle us and offer us the means to salvation," and he cites Lord D’Abernon, with"averred that Hitler had faded into oblivion since his release from Landsberg prison. But with German society so deeply divided, it was impossible to get a majority in parliament, and every failure or controversy led to even greater polarization."

This, of course, is a terrifying scenario for some voters post 2020 when they look at the divided governmental legislative bodies in the US and other countries where extreme populist leaders have recently become popular.

Indeed, the younger voter generation, i.e. our children, may be excused for being suspicious about the projection of public debts that the global 50+ generation is loading them up with. They may already be losing their patience and compassion, for all of us, and our debts.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy charged the United States with going to the Moon by the end of the decade. Against all odds, the US surpassed the Soviets and Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. The Apollo missions continued until 1972, but since then no manned space mission has ventured past near-Earth orbit. Far from ushering in an era of Moon bases and manned missions to Mars, Apollo’s legacy has left space enthusiasts disappointed. Fifty years after the Moon landing, what do we have to show for it? To answer that question and more, I’m joined today by Charles Fishman.

Charles is a journalist and author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon as well as The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, among other works.

Pethokoukis: You write in One Giant Leap, and I’m going to quote you here, “Apollo was an unqualified success and it wasn’t — judged on its performance — a waste of money, nor was it a use of money that the United States simply couldn’t afford.” An unqualified success. Is that a contrarian judgment among people who are disappointed that Apollo did not lead to further exploration, did not lead to Moon colonies and humans on Mars? Or is that not a contrarian conclusion?

Fishman: I think it’s a contrarian conclusion that I am trying to shift into the mainstream, and here’s why. Very briefly, of course, we can say it was an unqualified success in that President John Kennedy charged America and NASA with landing people on the Moon by the end of the decade, returning them safely to home. And we did it.

We did it.

Yes. On May 25th, 1961, as I discovered in incredible, bemusing detail, when Kennedy said, “Let’s go to the Moon,” it was literally impossible. They didn’t have the rocket, the spaceship, the space food, the computer. They didn’t have a trajectory. They could not have plotted a course to the Moon. We didn’t know how to get there in a million different ways. It was impossible when he said, “Let’s do it.” And literally 100 months later, it was done. That’s stunning in and of itself. An incredible engineering achievement. An incredible scientific achievement. An incredible manufacturing achievement.

Often the incredible high-tech developments that the engineers and scientists came up with — there was no way to manufacture them. And so the interiors of the computers were woven by hand, by former textile workers hired from textile plants in Massachusetts. The spacesuits were sewn by hand on black Singer sewing machines. So the technology was advanced so far that we didn’t actually have the ability to make it. That was a stunning achievement. But the real achievement was that NASA and Apollo really ushered in the Digital Age that we all live in. [Apollo] was a stunning success in that it unleashed the world that we’ve become accustomed to and rely on every minute of every day. You can trace the quality and innovation and speed and robustness of your iPhone or your laptop computer, in terms of heritage, directly back to the computers that flew to the Moon.

NASA was the first organization of any kind to use integrated circuits, to use computer chips. NASA drove the price down 98 percent. And then having done that, it drove the price down 78 percent again. NASA bought almost all the computer chips in the world three or four years in a row for Apollo. And most important, those computer chips were so important to going to the Moon that NASA had this really elaborate acceptance procedure. When a batch of 1000 chips came in, there were 12 tests that every chip went through. Vibration, heat, cold — they immersed them in liquid nitrogen to make sure they were adequately sealed. If one of the 1000 chips failed one of the 12 tests, they stopped the test and sent the whole batch back to Fairchild or Texas Instruments. And they said, “These chips are no good. Send us good chips.”

And until that moment, computer chips weren’t particularly reliable. And the computer companies at that time said, “We had to set up separate manufacturing lines for NASA. NASA taught us to make chips, that when you press two plus two, you always get four. And when you ask for your phone app, you get the phone app and not the weather app.” And so NASA literally created the market and the understanding of computer chips in going to the Moon, and then we stepped up and adopted those computer chips for every function on Earth.

I think that story is really underappreciated, but space enthusiasts don’t see that as enough. We stopped the Apollo program and no one has gone beyond near-Earth orbit since. They view that as a failure of the last 50 years. Is that fair?

Right. So in 1972, the last time we went to the Moon, we flew 240,000 miles to the Moon. And literally since 1972, which is 49 years now, no human being has been further than about 240 miles from Earth. That’s where the space station orbits and where the Chinese now orbit. So if success means that Apollo opened the solar system to exploration and settlement by human beings — if that’s what you mean by success — then there is no question that Apollo didn’t accomplish that. You know the joke as well as I do, “What did we get from going to the Moon? We got Tang and Velcro. Just pure silliness.” No, we got the digital revolution that transformed the world.

We just have been looking in the wrong place. And when you look at the evidence, that’s unequivocal. We did not get “Star Trek.” We did not get “The Jetsons.” We did not get “Lost in Space.” We don’t all fly around with our robots and go where we want to go. I think we’re about to get it. You yourself are very interested in this and have explored it, and I think the key is economics. We went to space funded and motivated by a kind of national and global imperative. You can’t understand going to the Moon in the 1960s without understanding the geopolitics.

We would not have gone to the Moon without the Cold War. We were racing the Russians. And for five years, the Russians were beating the crap out of us. They did everything first. They appeared to have mastery of space in a way that we didn’t. They launched a person into orbit on their first effort to launch a person into space. And literally three weeks later, we launched a person in a pop fly. We couldn’t even match them coming later. We often did less well, two or three or four months after they had done something.

And so the problem with geopolitics as a motivator is, in 1972 when Richard Nixon looked out across the world, when the leaders of the Soviet Union looked out across the world, space wasn’t an important arena anymore. And it is expensive to go to space, and you need a clear mission, and you need a clear goal. And so if you’re a space person and you think Apollo failed because it didn’t pull us along, I guess what I would say is the economics weren’t there for companies and non-governmental organizations of all kinds to jump into space at that moment.

This is my sense of it: I’ve been a space reporter since 1986, and I don’t think the leadership of NASA was clear on where we should go next and how we should get there. And that muddle led to literally 30 or 40 years of compromises and poor missions — over promising and under delivering. I love the Space Shuttle. I love the Space Station. I don’t think they have been good custodians of our space money, to be honest. The robotic exploration missions have been brilliant and pioneering compared to what we’ve gotten from the human space flight program. But that’s not necessarily the fault of the frontline people at NASA. That’s a leadership failure.

Well, one bit of evidence that NASA and its leaders did not do a great job explaining the point of sending people into space after they landed on the Moon, is that now — when we seem to be in this new era of space exploration and thinking about a space economy and we have the billionaire space race — the criticisms of the 1960s Space Race are just being repeated today. These are 50-year-old critiques: How can we go to the space when we have inequality on Earth? That this is just about some vague sense of national prestige. Why are we really doing it? Those are the exact same criticisms we hear today. Apparently a lot of people feel like NASA never answered that. And it sounds like they really didn’t.

Solar energy comes to Earthlings in many ways. Ancient Persians used passive solar architecture. East Africans about the same time funneled cool ocean wind through tunnels to cool themselves.

Now at long last, solar energy is outpacing new fossil fuel and nuclear facilities on price, environmental safety, and speed of installation.

About 80 percent of Americans use dryers that gobble up more electricity in a household than other appliances (except for refrigerators).

One use of solar that has not received enough attention is drying clothes with clotheslines or clothes racks. Before global warming and our climate crisis became a public concern, some local governments banned backyard clotheslines as community eyesores. Fortunately, 20 states have passed "Right to Dry Laws" that allow people to use this simple low-tech and appropriate technology to reduce fuel consumption.

A big booster of hang-drying your laundry is environmentalist Joe Wachunas from Portland, Oregon. Twenty years ago, while traveling as an exchange student in Italy, he learned that only three percent of Italian households owned a dryer. Italians, he noticed, dried their clothes on clotheslines, high-rise balconies, or in open windows catching sun and cross breezes.

Wachunas has competed against dryers, taking only eight minutes longer to hang up a load of clothes than it takes to load a dryer, (not to mention a trip to and from a laundromat). Also, by line-drying, he estimates a savings of $600 a year per family, and your air-dried materials will last longer and shrink less.

As you might think, the great majority of people in the US use a clothes dryer. About 80 percent of Americans use dryers that gobble up more electricity in a household than other appliances (except for refrigerators). These folks will find moving to clean and green drying has many benefits.

Last March, Mary Marlowe Leverette wrote a piece on the Top 10 Reasons to Line Dry Laundry. You can save money, promote energy conservation, give your clothes more freshness, less wear and tear, increase your physical activity, help whiten and disinfect laundry, reduce fire risks (clothes dryer fires number around 15,000 structure fires, 15 deaths, and 400 injuries annually in the U.S. with property losses estimated at $99 million).

There is also the intangible value of peacefulness and harmony with nature when you spend some ten minutes to enjoy the weather. When the weather does not permit, indoor line drying increases humidity in a home during dry winter weather.

Finally, you feel you are making a small difference to protect the environment and set an example in your neighborhood or apartment building. Who knows what good things can spontaneously emerge while chatting with the neighbor or having backyard conversations, uninterrupted by iPhone distractions. The venerable clothesline makes common sense.

Also consider rejecting the crazy leaf blower (See: Shut off the leaf blowers and restore peace to suburbia, by Peter Bahouth) and the noisy gas powered lawn mower--two contributions to pollution and obesity in America. Maybe a gaze at a fluttering clothesline in the sun will persuade some users of these belching technologies on small lawns to pick up a rake and start using the old fuel-free push lawn mower. Such personal choices often lead people to become advocates for broader solar systems.

Rivulets, brooks, and streams make possible the mighty Mississippi River. Billions of people can do their part to usher in the use of more of the sun to help save the Earth from the man-made climate crisis/catastrophe.

Clothespins, anyone?

It depicts a troubled mind with the blues indeed. The song was published in the key of E flat but wends into an unexpected A flat. It conjures a mood less than fully resolved, as in someone who has lost her sense of purpose and center. (Spoiler alert: The character has just killed someone.)

A ballad like this could have come about only in a country where both white and Black people have lived and, inevitably, shared with and imitated each other. This kind of fusion is found in ragtime, which welded the white American march form to the Black American rhythmic technique of syncopation: playing the rhythm of a song’s melody against that of the accompaniment rather than matching it. It may be hard to imagine today, but at the turn of the 20th century, a tune like “Maple Leaf Rag” felt hot.

The Black violinist, composer and conductor Will Marion Cook brought this feel to Broadway around the same time with the musical “Clorindy,” with lyrics by the famed African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. That was a passing hit, but the Great White Way truly took up the sound only when white writers, including Irving Berlin, started using it in their musicals. Jazz reached Broadway in the same fashion: In 1921, Black composers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle lit up New York with their proto-jazz score for “Shuffle Along,” after which white Broadway incorporated the flavor of that score into what we now recognize as show tunes.

The result was a kind of song with memorable, as opposed to serviceable, melody often decorated with blue notes — unexpected minor notes replacing predictable major notes, rich harmony salted with hints of the chords central to jazz, and rhythm that often, as reviewers once said about ragtime, leaves you barely able to keep from moving your feet. Think: “Old Devil Moon,” “Put On a Happy Face” (yes, even that) and “How High the Moon.”

By the 1940s, this fusion was yielding work like “I Wonder What Became of Me,” in which the jazz component of the mix is prominent. This is where musical theater travels into Ellingtonesque places that leave the form’s enthusiasts bemused when laymen dismiss musicals as just love songs crooned on park benches. The artistry in “I Wonder What Became of Me” compares with that in the Schubert lied “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” — and with emotions more specific: not “He ghosted me” but “Is this what it all comes down to?”

Former presidential candidate and New York City mayoral contender Andrew Yang announced on Monday that he had left the Democratic Party to promote the “Forward Party,” an independent political movement.

In a blog post explaining his decision, Yang underlined that he had been a Democrat for most of his life, and had actively campaigned for Democratic candidates before and after the 2020 election. However, he criticized the two-party system for leading to extreme partisan polarization, committing his prospective movement to combat it through electoral reforms.

“My goal is to do as much as I can to advance our society,” Yang wrote. “There are phenomenal public servants doing great work every day—but our system is stuck [...] because polarization is getting worse than ever.”

“Now that I’m not a member of one party or another,” he continued, “I feel like I can be even more honest about both the system and the people in it.”

Yang highlighted open primaries and ranked-choice voting as two reforms that could encourage moderation and open discourse, arguing that closed primaries and single-vote systems encouraged candidates to be loyal to an extreme base that failed to represent most voters' preferences.

Reception to Yang’s announcement was largely mixed, however, with some commentators suggesting that blame for the country’s political crisis lay with the Republicans rather than the Democrats.

“[The] American experiment is under siege,” MSNBC host Malcolm Nance wrote in response to Yang’s announcement. “Liberal govs are falling globally to fascism. Racism abounds. World is literally burning. What’s your genius idea? Start #ForwardParty to peel votes off [from] the only party trying to SAVE IT ALL.”

Yang, an influential dark horse candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary, has been widely credited with introducing the concept of universal basic income, or UBI, to public discourse, and received attention during the race due to his unorthodox proposal to give all adult Americans $1,000 per month. However, after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, he suspended his campaign, endorsing and campaigning for eventual winner Joe Biden.

Following his presidential run, Yang initially accepted a position as a commentator on CNN, before running to succeed Bill de Blasio as Mayor of New York. Despite a commanding early lead, a number of gaffes in his campaign led to a fourth-place finish, behind Kathryn Garcia, Maya Wiley, and eventual nominee Eric Adams.

In a later op-ed for the New York Post, Yang addressed what he viewed as shortcomings within New York’s electoral system, including its practice of the two parties holding closed primary elections, which he noted meant that the Democratic candidate was chosen by only eleven percent of the city’s residents.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

OnlySubs Episode 64: Why Critical Theory Rejects Equality is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
Locals
Patreon
ThinkSpot
Critical Race Theory takes most of its aim on the idea of colorblind equality, which it hates. It views colorblind equality as a means by which existing inequities multiply themselves. That is, it believes that equality fools racial minorities into believing they have more freedom and opportunities than societal structures truly allow (to paraphrase Robin DiAngelo on the point). In the sad world of Critical Race Theory analysis, those who start out ahead in life will obviously get further ahead, while those who start out behind will only get further behind. This is why it hates equality and colorblindness. Obviously, it’s wrong about this. The underdog often can and does work hard in a free and equal society to catch up and pass those who started out ahead, and those who start out ahead often squander their advantage (in their privilege). In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I explore this idea and the psychological mentality that fuels it. The Critical Theory belief in structural and material determinism combined with its emphasis on an external locus of control and enabling dependency are at the bottom of it, and it’s completely the wrong way to think. Join me to learn more about this seemingly paradoxical view from the nightmare world of Critical Theory.
The post OnlySubs: Why Critical Theory Rejects Equality appeared first on New Discourses.

By James Pethokoukis and Adrian Wooldridge
Today, parents scramble to shuttle their kids to and from
extra-curriculars, provide them with SAT prep, and leverage their money
and connections — all to get their children admitted into elite schools. And
in recent years admissions scandals have further undermined confidence in elite
institutions. America purports to judge individuals on their merits, but are
the rich rigging our institutions? On a recent episode of “Political
Economy,” Adrian Wooldridge addressed that question and other criticisms of
meritocracy.
Adrian is the political editor and Bagehot columnist at The Economist. His latest book is The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.
Pethokoukis: Can you walk us through your thesis about
how meritocracy made the modern world? 
Wooldridge: Meritocracy essentially means judging people on
the basis of their innate abilities rather than on the basis of their polish or
their social connections or their social status or their birth. And I think it
also implies some sort of broader commitment to equality of opportunity, or at
least very significant educational opportunity provided by the state, because
it would be impossible for people reasonably to compete in a modern economy
unless they get access to these things.
Most societies throughout time have been based on principles
of being born into your social status or the principle of dynasty or the
principle of patronage, or indeed the principle buying and selling offices,
which before modern times was absolutely widespread. The modern world was
basically created by a succession of meritocratic revolutions against
aristocratic societies and societies of patronage. And it was the broadening of
meritocracy — bringing in women, ethnic minorities, working class people into
that framework of promotion on the basis of talent examinations, open
competition — that really created the modern world as we now see it.
What is the critique of meritocracy? Is it our failure to
achieve it? Or is it that the whole notion wrongheaded?
There are many people who say, “Meritocracy is great in
theory, but we don’t have it at the moment. We have something that’s a mockery
of meritocracy.” So that’s one critique: that we don’t have it. The other
critique would be, “Even if we could create a meritocracy and turn America into
a true meritocracy rather than the sham that it now is, it’s a very bad thing,
because meritocracy enshrines all sorts of things — such as competition, such
as constant sorting of people on the basis of ability — and those things are
wrong.”
Graduating students arrive at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The person who actually invented the term “meritocracy” was a man called Michael Young in 1958 in his brilliant book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. He thought meritocracy is a terrible thing because it smuggled the idea of competition into what should be a socialist vision of the future. And because it made everybody who succeeded intolerably smug and everybody who failed absolutely wretched, because they couldn’t blame anybody but themselves for their failure. So there are two very different critiques of meritocracy which actually get muddled up in lots of people’s minds.
Does the college entrance scam an example of how the US
just isn’t a meritocracy anymore, if it ever was?
I think that’s the most serious criticism that we have of
the meritocratic idea. And it’s indeed a criticism that to a very, very
significant degree I share. Now, clearly something like the college entrance
scam — where people were literally buying places — that’s illegal, and legal
action has been taken.
But what people who are saying that meritocracy is a sham
are really saying, is that the legal version of it is a sham, because people
who are born into privilege just spend so much more money on getting ahead. And
because they’re sort of congealing at the top of society — because
knowledgeable, educated people are transmitting their privilege to their
children — you are getting lower and lower levels of social mobility. And I
think that critique is true, but the question is: How do you deal with that
problem of the sort of calcification of society? The argument of my book is
that you need to have more meritocracy.
What steps can we take to become a more meritocratic
society?
Only somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of places at
Harvard are given away on the basis of pure academic performance. A huge number
of places are hooked to various things such as whether your parents went to
Harvard, privileges for donors, and affirmative action. So I would be in favor
of getting rid of that and giving 100 percent of the places on the basis of
pure academic merit.
We need to start helping people much earlier on in their
educational journey. However much you can game SATs or IQ tests, they’re less
class-biased than other forms of selection, of which the most absurd of course
is the sort of “what I did on my holidays,” “what I did in my
gap year,” and that sort of thing.
The more you get rid of examinations, the more you actually
do down poorer people and privilege already privileged people. You delay
selection later into life and it becomes an endurance race, and the people who
win the endurance race are those who’ve got parents who are capable of
supporting them for longer.
What would it look like if America were to give up on
meritocracy?
Well, I think that is in many ways not “what if?” but
“when?”, because America is engaged at the moment in a huge revolt against
meritocracy. If you do that, you get a society in which positions are given
either arbitrarily or on the basis of political power. So instead of a system
based on results in which people win prizes on the basis of effort and ability,
you have a system of spoils. It creates a constant system of agitation and
competition — not in the good sense of people all striving to learn things, but
in the bad sense of people all agitating for spoils.
And in China you have this “examination state”
back in a major way — with a huge education system, massive investment in
universities, massive investment in a very competitive mass educational system
— but also using meritocratic methods to select and promote civil servants, a
big growth in state capacity. Now, if we have a world in which China is
harnessing the meritocratic idea to reinforce the power of the Communist Party,
and America at the same time is dismantling meritocracy or softening
meritocracy, America loses.
Learn
more: 5 questions for Johan Norberg on the benefits of an open society | 5 questions for David Dollar on China’s economic and geopolitical ambitions | 5 questions for Korok Ray on the relationship between universities and innovation
The post 5 questions for Adrian Wooldridge on whether meritocracy should be preserved appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

When the detective Dirty Harry points his huge gun at a criminal, he states that there is some doubt about whether the chamber that is currently cocked is actually loaded. The policeman then utters the movie’s famous lines: “You’ve got to ask yourself a question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you punk?”
In a sense, this question captures the state of debate about climate change on the cusp of the COP26 global summit in Glasgow. Quantifying uncertainty is always a crucial part of science. In the Dirty Harry example, a thoughtful criminal will first infer a one in six chance of dying (assuming one loaded chamber in a six-chamber pistol) before deciding whether fleeing is worth the risk. 
Similarly, to decide whether recalcitrant governments at the forthcoming summit are unwisely pushing humanity’s luck, it’s best to focus on the well-established science whose uncertainties can be quantified. It’s reasonable to suspect the wilder speculations of doom, and it’s obviously reasonable, too, to doubt whether a particular detailed and specific prediction will be accurate. But it’s not reasonable to deny that we’re running some risks the existence of which has been well established. Gauging what can and cannot reasonably be doubted is indispensable to settling just how “lucky” we can feel. But it can be tough to glean what is sure and what is dubious in a “debate” that is mired in emotion, politics, money and sensationalism as much as it is in science. 
The lurch away from science is not hard to understand. Some socialists might welcome a wholesale reworking of the business model of modern industrial civilisation which they judge, rightly or wrongly, to be a happy requirement of dealing with the climate crisis. Hair-shirted puritans, meanwhile, may enthusiastically embrace the darkest scenarios almost because of the implied need for immediate dramatic restrictions on energy production, consumption and travel. For others, including libertarians in particular, this restriction of “personal freedom” is anathema: they will thus have an ideological reason to doubt apocalyptic predictions. In such ways, and even before we get to the potential of vested personal interests that distort one’s reading of science, a person’s immediate reaction to the issue of climate change tends to become deeply entangled with their political DNA.
The debate is now reaching a new level, with the release this summer of a dire new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its first major assessment of global climate change in eight years, warning of potential disastrous consequences if carbon emissions are not curtailed in the coming decade. The UN secretary general António Guterres labelled the report “a code red for humanity,” as the new administration in the United States looks set to use the coming summit as an attempt to return to a position of leadership on the climate issue. 
But just how much can Washington, or even the IPCC, be reasonably sure of? Developing sound public policy proposals in the current intellectual climate—never mind winning wide political approval for painful choices—will be challenging until we can agree on what it does, and does not, make sense to doubt.

Irreducible uncertainties
At one level, it might seem peculiar for any open-minded scientist to be talking about the limits of doubt. Because, in some respects, the scientific method is doubt: never take anything on trust, always interrogate whether you’re really sure, and stand ready to falsify and jettison anything if experiment disagrees with your predictions. And indeed, there is properly plenty of doubt, and all manner of uncertainties at the frontiers of climate science. It is one of the great hallmarks of good science that we not only acknowledge the existence of uncertainties, but also attempt to accurately quantify them. One way of thinking about climate policy is as an organised societal response to doubt. In theory, at least, governments and NGOs should be weighing various alternatives, attempting to predict what policies might produce the best outcomes, recognising that their current understanding may be incomplete, and that outcomes may differ from expectations. 
During the lead-up to decisions and summits like COP26, debate and discussion can usefully explore such issues as the economic and environmental utility (or lack thereof) of carbon taxes, carbon caps, subsidies for renewable energy and zero-carbon technologies, tariffs on coal, funding for carbon capture and so on. Acknowledged uncertainty should be integral to this discussion, with costs being weighed against a range of harmful possible outcomes, together with the likelihood of different potential impacts of variousproposed interventions. 
But we are unlikely to devote adequate time and resources to such potentially disruptive moves if fundamental doubt lingers about the main predicted consequences of climate change so that governments and citizens can rationalise a “wait and see” attitude. Campaigns that plant the seeds of this sort of sweeping doubt have been remarkably effective at forestalling an organised response in places like the United States. The all-important distinction to draw is between a candid admission of the existence of the sort of uncertainty that has to be grappled with in all areas of science including climate, and a cynically confected ultra-scepticism, which invites paralysis by falsely cowing us into believing we don’t know anything at all. 
Now it is true that no science is ever completely settled: even Newton’s classical law of gravity, which accurately predicts most of the physical phenomenon humans can directly observe, was supplanted by the theory of general relativity. General relativity may in turn be supplanted by something like string theory. Nevertheless, we need to counter our natural tendency to jump from the reality that we don’t know everything about the universe to the conclusion that we know almost nothing. The fact that we don’t have the slightest idea what is the fundamental gravitational cause of the accelerating expansion of our universe doesn’t thwart our ability to navigate the gravitational forces in our solar system accurately enough to drop a rover on Mars precisely where it was intended to land.
In the climate context, natural scepticism is only emboldened by just how much remains uncertain at the forefront. Detailed regional predictions require complex (and sometimes interactive) modelling of the atmosphere, oceans and landmasses, as well as amassing a large number of measurements around the globe. Moreover, data about past climate events is sometimes sparse, and the conclusions we draw based on paleoclimate data invariably get refined as new numbers come in. 
Take a couple of recent examples. Just as the new IPCC report was about to be unveiled, Science magazine reported that most climate models used in it projected implausibly fast warming rates. When projecting backwards to compare with paleoclimate data during the coldest point in the most recent ice age, about 20,000 years ago, the data suggested the Earth cooled by less than 6C while the models suggested almost twice as much cooling. Projecting into the future, estimates that use current data and trends suggest warming between 2.6C and 3.9C if CO2 in the atmosphere doubles compared to pre-industrial times, whereas many of the models considered by the IPCC predict warming in excess of 5C.
Similarly, a recent report from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Utrecht University suggests that sea level rise in the past was less significant than previously estimated, and another study out of Utrecht this year suggested that sea level rise in the coming century is likely to be 25 per cent less than previously predicted, due to slower global ocean warming than earlier estimates suggested.

Sure things
These are real, scientific concerns that cannot be wished away. If you hear a campaigner claim that all such uncertainties are over and it is now a settled fact that there are only 12 years left to save the world, ignore them. They, and you, would do better to switch attention to the real question: whether, in the face of the evolving and sometimes imprecise predictions, there is sufficient uncertainty regarding the fundamental nature, extent and impact of climate change to justify stepping back from concerted, and potentially costly, efforts to curb CO2 production?
The answer is no. The inevitable uncertainty at the cutting edge of atmospheric science does not undermine well-understood basic predictions. To return to another gravitational analogy, letting uncertainties at the forefront of science cause us to ignore fundamental well-understood science is like using the fact that uncertainties exist about quantum gravity to justify jumping out of a seventh-storey window, just in case you might fall up rather than down. 
Over the past decade Greenland’s ice sheet has melted at a mostly constant, and sometimes accelerating, rate. Photo: ©Mario Tama/Getty Images
The fundamental science that underlies climate change is now over 150 years old, and it works, having been tested by easily replicable experiments—as basic as showing how much glass bulbs filled with different gasses will heat—for over a century. Moreover, the general climate predictions based on this fundamental science agree with observations that have been made over the past 60 years. 
When one has an underlying, well-founded theory whose predictions accurately correlate with known causes and observed effects, it is a good bet that one is on the right track. One can never completely rule out some weird cosmic conspiracy that reproduces, by coincidence, the exact same effects as well-established theories would predict. But the right attitude to such freak possibilities is best expressed colloquially: if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. 
Here are the basic physical principles and observations that underlie the reality of human-induced climate change:
(a) If energy in equals energy out, the Earth’s overall temperature will remain constant: we can measure the total “energy in” when the Sun is directly overhead, and it is 1,361 Watts per square metre. Averaged over the Earth, accounting for nighttime and regions where the Sun is at a lower angle, this total average energy input is cut by three-quarters, to a value of 340 Watts per square metre. But whatever the number, the temperature will not rise if the same amount of energy bounces back out to space as is incident on Earth.
“One way of thinking about climate policy is as an organised societal response to doubt”
(b) If there were no atmosphere and the Earth radiated back into space 340 Watts per square metre, then our 175-year-old understanding of thermodynamics (which specifies that all bodies radiate an amount of energy that is proportional to the fourth power of their temperature) allows us to calculate that the average surface temperature of the Earth would be about 18 degrees below 0C.
(c) The actual average temperature of the Earth is roughly a positive 15C. This is because the Earth is blanketed by an atmosphere that traps much heat energy. About 30 per cent of solar energy impinging on Earth is directly reflected back into space from the top of the atmosphere. The rest is absorbed by the atmosphere and the Earth. The Earth’s surface then re-radiates its energy back out, as infrared radiation, but before this can make its way out into space it has to pass through the atmosphere. It is the proportion of energy absorbed here which determines how much warmer our world ends up than if there were no atmosphere—and that, in turn, depends on the mix of gasses there.
(d) Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes it less “transparent” to outgoing infrared radiation. Carbon dioxide absorbs heat energy, as does water. This was first measured in the 1860s by Irish scientist John Tyndall, who measured the amount of heat radiation that successfully transmitted through vials of different gases. En route to space, all the re-radiated energy has to pass through the upper atmosphere, where there is little water vapour, so it is substantially the CO2 there which determines how transparent it is to the outbound heat energy: more of it will mean less of the energy makes it out to space. And if less radiation is emitted outwards into space, while the amount of radiation coming in from the Sun remains the same, the equilibrium that would otherwise exist is disturbed (a departure from equilibrium called radiative forcing). There is extra heat energy which makes its way to the Earth’s surface, heating it up.
(e) The predicted “radiative forcing” due to the additional CO2 in the atmosphere is between 1.5-3 Watts per square metre over the Earth’s entire surface—and this is consistent with measurements. Eventually, even with more CO2 than before, so long as the new mix of gasses is stable, equilibrium would be restored: a hotter planet and hotter atmosphere will emit enough heat energy into space to balance the incoming radiation from the Sun. But, if CO2 continues to be pumped into the atmosphere, then additional “radiative forcing” will occur and equilibrium will not be achieved. Instead, the temperature of the Earth-atmosphere system will continue to rise.
No excuse for inaction: climate protesters in London in 2019. Photo: ©John Keeble/Getty Images
These are the well-tested bits of physics and chemistry underlying the current science of climate change. They are confirmed by a host of observations, including satellite- and ground-based measurements of upward and downward radiation, and CO2 and temperature measurements across the globe. And the basic prediction—that measured human production of greenhouse gases between 1900 and 2020 would increase the Earth’s temperature by about 1.2C—has been validated. 
The Earth’s surface is dominated by water, and the oceans govern the balance of heat across it. Here measurements are particularly telling. The world’s oceans had increased in average temperature in 2019 by 0.075C compared to the 30-year average temperature between 1980 and 2010. This may not seem like a lot, but it corresponds to the additional heat that would have been produced by setting off 3.6bn Hiroshima-level atom-bomb explosions in the ocean, about four every second, day and night, 365 days a year for the past 25 years.
It takes some time for the additional energy impinging on the Earth due to radiative forcing to be fully and uniformly distributed through the ocean’s depths. Even if greenhouse gas production stopped today, the radiative forcing that has already occurred up to now will result in an additional ocean temperature rise of almost 0.5C over the coming centuries. 

Slipping below the waterline
As we consider the likely impacts of climate change, amid many uncertainties, this additional heat in the oceans is telling. It has been known for millennia that water expands when heated and, when considering sea level rise, the basic change in ocean temperature this century will produce a sea level change of at least a quarter of a metre. 
And that is before we come on to sobering uncertainties regarding the melting of glaciers and icesheets. As I am writing this, it has been reported that it rained on Greenland’s snowy summit for the first time in recorded history. Over the past decade, the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet has persisted at a mostly constant, and sometimes accelerating, rate. Even conservative estimates of this melting, along with the melting of glaciers in western Antarctica, when combined with sea level rise due to increasing ocean temperatures imply a minimum total sea level rise of about 0.5 metres during this century, even if the world reduces carbon production in line with the promises made at the last important COP summit before Glasgow, at Paris in 2015.
“Doubt about the likelihood and timing is completely legitimate; doubt about the seriousness of what is at stake is not”
A half-metre may not strike you as much, but a lot depends on the eyes of the beholder. If someone is precariously holding a bowling ball 50 centimetres above your foot, it won’t seem trivial. 
A broken toe heals, however. Over 100m people live in coastal regions which will be below high-tide levels by the end of this century. Many of these people will face loss of property and livelihood without hope of recovery. 
Last year, I spent several weeks on the Mekong river, visiting a region where over 14m people depend directly on the health of that ecosystem, and where over 60m less directly depend on the rice produced in the flooded paddies, making it the most fertile rice-producing region in the world. If the South China Sea turns the flooded plains brackish, then rice paddies will make way for salty mangrove swamps, and a river system that today produces more fresh fish than the fish presently harvested in the US will be no longer. 
Code red for humanity: UN secretary general António Guterres has tried to mobilise nations to take climate change seriously. Photo: ©MÁRIO CRUZ/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
For the people of southern Vietnam—almost all of which is less than one metre above sea level—and many other places immediately threatened by rising seas, the current uncertainty about whether temperatures will rise by 2 or 4C, or whether sea levels will rise by more than one metre, is rather academic. It cannot be reasonably doubted that these communities will have to respond soon to the immediate ongoing effects of climate change, not due to future CO2 emissions, but the change already locked in by past emissions. 
In sum, it is now known with close to certainty that mediating the known effects of climate change in the near term will be required if we are to stave off some of the worst consequences for the world’s poorest populations living in equatorial regions. Ensuring access to modern agricultural methods in the face of increasing droughts, and to clean water and reliable power, will be important, as will building coastal infrastructure to deal with rising seas. 

Indubitable arithmetic 
Because the impacts of climate change elsewhere in the world may take many decades or centuries to manifest, some may still find it hard to muster much urgency to address current carbon production. But here too another basic bit of atmospheric chemistry, independent of current uncertainties in high-resolution climate modelling, is important—the firmly established reality that the additional CO2 concentration we add to the atmosphere will not dissipate for over 1,000 years. 
Humanity pumps about 10bn tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, roughly five billion of which will remain in the atmosphere for a millennium. The cumulative effect of this is measurably material: over the past 60 years, for example, we have already increased the abundance of this gas in the atmosphere by over 30 per cent. And if the current production rate continues, by 2050 the atmospheric abundance will have doubled compared to the pre-industrial concentration of 600bn tons. And almost all of this extra carbon will remain in the atmosphere for the foreseeable future—even if fossil fuel burning now stops or slows. 
If we set an ambitious goal of limiting the rise in the total CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to peak at less than twice the pre-industrial level—basically the goal of the Paris agreement—then every decade in which we continue to produce CO2 at current levels makes the required future reductions more severe, and so more disruptive for our society and economy. Had we begun to reduce carbon production in 2010, the required annual reductions would have been 3.7 per cent. Waiting until 2020 to begin already means that future reductions would need to have been 9.0 per cent per year. Waiting for another decade to take action would mean that hitting the same goal would require annual reductions that are likely impossible.
“The basic change in ocean temperature this century will produce a sea level change of at least a quarter of a metre”
Beyond this, there is the question of climate tipping points that might produce irreversible dramatic changes, due to feedback between various different effects—the possible complete disappearance of that Greenland ice sheet is a particularly disturbing example here. Should it vanish, as it has at times in the distant past, worldwide sea levels will increase by about seven metres, enough to flood almost all major coastal cities on Earth—an outcome that nobody could doubt would be ruinous. 
Models suggest that a mean temperature increase of 5 to 7C is guaranteed to irreversibly destabilise the ice sheet, which would then disappear over the course of several centuries to a millennium. Some models, though, suggest a temperature increase of as little as 2C could irreversibly, albeit more slowly, threaten its stability. While the timescale over which it would disappear is different in the two scenarios, the end result is the same. 
We cannot say with certainty when such a tipping point might occur. Feedbacks are inherently fiendish—the interaction of multiple processes. So even if we can see where they could occur, it is very difficult to predict exactly how far things can slip before they are triggered. Doubt about the likelihood and timing is completely legitimate; doubt about the seriousness of what is at stake is not. 
In the face of admitted uncertainty about the imminence of globally devastating effects, we could gamble on those models that suggest the sheet will survive until the warming reaches five-plus degrees. Or we could instead try to ensure temperatures do not rise as high as the lower value at which other projections suggest the trouble might start. Again it comes down to Dirty Harry’s question: are we feeling lucky?
With time, better models and more data, the uncertainties associated with climate predictions will decrease. But even today, when important residual uncertainties remain, they cannot erase the fundamental realities of climate change now. Nor can they be used as an excuse for inaction. As the former publisher of the New York Times once stressed, keeping an open mind is a good thing, but not so open that your brains fall out. 
The post Beyond reasonable doubt: climate science and the limits of appropriate scepticism appeared first on Prospect Magazine.

I n the late 1990s, I served as dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. As Canada’s most selective law school, the competition for admission was fierce. Applicants were always in search of anything they could do to secure an advantage in the application process. In my position as dean, it was not uncommon for alumni whose children were applying to the school to approach me and inquire what kind of admissions bump those children would receive by virtue of being a legacy. The answer I gave was always the same: none whatsoever.

One encounter stands out. A prominent and philanthropic alumnus whose child had been denied admission to the school contacted me in the hope that I would reconsider the application. After all, he reasoned, his relationship with the school must mean something. As I had done in many similar situations, I explained that there were clear guardrails in place that fettered my capacity to reverse this decision. I simply had no ability to admit his child. Before our phone call ended, he said something that has been etched in my memory ever since: “If you really want to stand shoulder to shoulder with the great Ivy League law schools in the United States, you better start acting like one.”

When I came to work in the United States, I saw firsthand how true these words were. For all of the progress that highly selective universities have started to make in recruiting low-income and historically underrepresented students, they continue to cling tenaciously to admissions policies that confer significant advantages on children of privilege. Legacy admissions, when coupled with the considerable advantages that many of these children already have — like stable families, engaged parents, high-quality K-12 schools, ample extracurricular opportunities for personal enrichment and development — set these applicants up to triumph over applicants from less-fortunate circumstances. Several years into my tenure as president of Johns Hopkins, we decided to strike at one particularly egregious instance of this system — we eliminated the use of legacy preferences in our admissions.

Legacy preference is immobility written as policy, preserving for children the same advantages enjoyed by their parents. It embodies in stark and indefensible terms inherited privilege in higher education and has compromised college and university admissions for decades. Moreover, it has drained the public trust in colleges and universities at a moment when the public is seething with rage at the seeming illusion of the meritocratic ideal and widening inequality. It is also a policy that is fully within the control of institutions to change at any moment.

The practice of giving admissions advantages to children of alumni is virtually alien to Canadian and European universities. Yet legacy preferences remain commonplace in the United States, where they constitute, in the words of the journalist Daniel Golden, an “almost exclusively American custom.” The majority of the 100 highest-ranked schools in the U.S. News & World Report still engage in some form of the practice. Remarkably, it has not yet buckled under the pressure of competition or rankings.

That such a naked form of hereditary advantage prevails in a country with a deeply ingrained commitment to the ideals of opportunity is striking. That it persists at institutions that otherwise exhibit such profound promise for socioeconomic mobility is tragic. My hope is that the competitive spirit — channeled, as it ought to be, toward accessibility and mobility — may yet end it.

L egacy preferences were first introduced at the Ivies in the 1920s. After a series of meritocratic admissions reforms had started to push out these schools’ traditional constituencies of prep schoolers and children of alumni in favor of public school students and, notably, Jewish students, anxious college administrators pivoted toward a holistic admissions process that frequently included some special provision for legacy students. This was a way to shore up alumni support and to reduce Jewish enrollment numbers while still preserving a sheen of meritocracy. At some institutions, the advantage given to legacy students became so pronounced that, by the 1960s, these applicants were virtually guaranteed admission to the country’s most elite colleges.

Today, legacy status is no longer the guaranteed entry into elite institutions it once was, but the advantage it confers is still substantial, and evidence suggests that it is growing. One 2004 study estimated that legacy status afforded applicants to highly selective universities an admissions boost equivalent to an added 160 points (out of 1600) on the SAT. A 2011 analysis of more than 200,000 applications to 30 highly selective institutions concluded that, controlling for other variables, legacy applicants were more than three times as likely to be admitted as their non-legacy peers. And over the past decade, admission rates for legacy students have stayed constant at many selective universities, even as legacy applications remained flat and overall admission rates have declined, which has put the advantage legacy students receive each year on an upward trajectory.

This boost does not even account for the leg up legacy applicants already receive simply by virtue of having been born to college-educated parents. These students are more likely to grow up in stable and supportive homes, attend the best schools, receive tutoring, and participate in extracurriculars. Legacy preferences guarantee that these students are doubly advantaged.

Chronicle illustration, Boston Globe via Getty Images

At most top-ranked U.S. universities with legacy preferences, legacy students comprise anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of incoming classes. With numbers like these, legacy students can significantly influence the racial and socioeconomic composition of a class. And we know that legacy students at the top-ranked universities in the country are not representative of American society. They are far more likely than their classmates to be wealthy and white, and so the existence of legacy preferences skews student bodies at elite institutions away from low-income students — sometimes with dramatic results. At Harvard, for instance, legacy students disproportionately have parents with incomes in excess of $500,000 per year (40 percent of legacies versus 15 percent of non-legacies). Similar stories could be told at elite institutions across the country.

The bottom line is this: selective college admissions is a zero-sum game. Every student who gets admitted to a highly selective institution is taking a seat away from another student. Legacy preferences ensure that more of those coveted spots go to the young people most likely to have had a head start in life: wealthier, whiter, and with college-educated parents. That means fewer seats for low-income applicants, for underrepresented minorities, and for those who would be the first in their families to go to college. None of this is to undermine the accomplishments or merits of legacy applicants themselves, many of whom are exceptional applicants. But affording such students a routine admissions advantage based solely on their parentage comes at a high cost.

In the past 60 years, there have been occasional swells of demand in and outside of academe to end legacy preferences, none of which has met with much success. In the 1960s, Yale’s idealistic dean of admissions, R. Inslee Clark, tried to eliminate legacy preferences at the university, only to be rebuffed by a chorus of furious alumni. Later, members of Congress took up the banner. In the 1990s, Republican Sen. Bob Dole said the time had arrived to “take the next logical step on the fairness front” and end “alumni perks [that] have absolutely nothing to do with an individual’s qualifications or merit.” In 2003, Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy floated a bill aimed at discouraging legacy preferences, and a year later, then-President George W. Bush, himself a beneficiary of legacy preferences, acknowledged that universities ought to give up the practice. Nothing happened.

D espite these thwarted efforts, legacy preferences are not inexorable. In the past half century, a handful of universities have demonstrated unequivocally that legacy preferences can be eliminated without any sacrifice in institutional quality or reputation. Oxford and Cambridge ended legacy preferences in the 1960s. The University of California at Berkeley eliminated them in the 1990s. And extraordinary institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Caltech never had them in the first place.

My own university, Johns Hopkins, offers a clear example of what can happen when a school eliminates legacy preference. Since 2014 — when we ended the practice — we have seen remarkable results. The decision has created space for high-achieving students from diverse socioeconomic, geographic, and racial backgrounds to gain admission to Hopkins. In 2009, the year I arrived, our university had more legacy students in its freshman class (12.5 percent) than students who were eligible for Pell Grants (9 percent). In 2020, those numbers were different: 4.2 percent of first-year students had a legacy connection to the university (none of whom were given any legacy-admissions preference), and 20.5 percent were Pell eligible. Over the same period, the percentage of first-generation students in our incoming classes has more than doubled from 7 percent in 2009 to 16 percent in 2020. And all of these shifts have occurred alongside steady growth in the academic achievement of our incoming classes. Extinguishing legacy preferences was a foundational step for these shifts.

Defenders of the practice like to say that legacy preferences exist to nurture a sense of institutional loyalty across generations and, by extension, to develop relationships with alumni that will foster greater financial support to the university. One often hears that this is critical in building a multigenerational community. Community is a truly venerable goal; a sense of connection to each other, and our shared institutions, is the lifeblood of a thriving society. But this support need not be conditional on the future admission of our children. And a true community — a true American community — is one that brings together people from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds rather than the inherently insular community of wealthy legacies. In truth, many alumni long for the institutions to which they feel so deeply connected to be embodiments of merit for all talented students.

This has certainly been MIT’s experience, and so far we have found it to be true at Hopkins, too. In 2012, Chris Peterson of MIT’s admissions office took to the internet to clear up once and for all the question of whether MIT practiced legacy preferences: It doesn’t. He wrote that if the school even entertained the possibility of introducing legacy admissions, it would “face an alumni revolt.” At Hopkins, alumni participation has steadily grown since we ended legacy preferences in 2014, and when we went public with our policy in 2019, we saw broad alumni support.

I do not pretend that ending legacy preferences is itself adequate to reverse the scourge of immobility or assuage the frustration and anger directed at universities. Although legacy preferences, in direct and often painful ways, affect thousands of high-achieving students who lose spots in favor of their better-connected peers, the policy still affects a relatively small number of students, at a relatively selective tier of universities.

Abolishing legacy preferences is a beginning, not an end, and it must be coupled with a broader reinvestment in poor and middle-class students and struggling universities. Even then, there are entrenched structural inequities across our nation that will prevent us from achieving the goal that every child, no matter their background or circumstance, will be equipped to attend a selective university, inequities to which universities must be part of the solution. But this is hardly reason for those colleges to leave an additional thumb on the scales in favor of the most privileged students.

This essay is adapted from the author’s recent book, What Universities Owe Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press).

What if there were a social media blackout for teens during certain hours of the night? NitaYuko/iStock via Getty ImagesRight at the time social media became popular, teen mental health began to falter. Between 2010 and 2019, rates of depression and loneliness doubled in the U.S. and globally, suicide rates soared for teens in the U.S. and emergency room admissions for self-harm tripled among U.S. 10- to 14-year-old girls. Social scientists like myself have been warning for years that the ubiquity of social media might be at the root of the growing mental health crisis for teens.
Yet when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked during a congressional hearing in March to acknowledge the connection between social media and these troubling mental health trends, he replied, “I don’t think that the research is conclusive on that.”
Just six months later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook had been doing its own research for years on the negative effects of Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing app popular with teens and young adults. Six internal documents summarizing the research, leaked by a whistle-blower, were posted in full on Sept. 29, 2021. 
The details in the 209 pages are revealing. They suggest not only that Facebook knew how Instagram could be harmful, but that the company also was aware of possible solutions to mitigate those harms. Facebook’s own research strongly suggests that social media should be subject to more stringent regulation and include more guardrails to protect the mental health of its users. 
There are two primary ways the company can do this: enforcing time limits and increasing the minimum age of users.
A ticking time bomb for mental health
Academic research shows that the more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely she or he is to be depressed or to self-harm. 
That’s important because many teens, especially girls, spend large amounts of time on social media. 
One study in the U.K. found that one-quarter of 15-year-old girls spent more than five hours a day using social media – and 38% of those girls were clinically depressed. Comparatively, among girls who used social media less than one hour a day, only 15% were depressed.
Although the internal Facebook research didn’t examine links between time on Instagram and mental health, they did ask teens about what were, in their view, the worst aspects of Instagram. One of the things teens disliked the most about the app was how much time they spent on it. 
Teens, the report said, had “an addict’s narrative about their use. … They wish they could spend less time caring about it but they can’t help themselves.” 
They knew they were spending too much time online, but had a hard time controlling how much time they spent. One-third of teens suggested Instagram should remind them to take a break or encourage them to get off the app. 
That would be a step in the right direction, but simple nudges might not be enough to get teens to close the app and keep it closed. And while parents can already set time limits using the parental controls included on most smartphones, many of them don’t know how to use these controls or are unaware how much time teens are spending on social media. 
So better regulations might need to put teeth into time limits, such as limiting the number of hours teens under 18 can spend on social media apps. A blackout period overnight might also be useful, as many teens use their smartphones at night when they should be sleeping. 
ID, please
One internal Facebook study of more than 50,000 people from 10 countries found that half of teen girls compare their appearance to others’ on Instagram. Those appearance-based comparisons, the study found, peaked when users were 13 to 18 and were much less common among adult women. 
This is key, as body image issues seem to be one of the biggest reasons why social media use is linked to depression among teen girls. It also dovetails with research I reported in my book, “iGen,” finding that social media use is more strongly linked to unhappiness among younger teens than older ones.
This suggests another avenue for regulation: age minimums. A 1998 law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule already sets the age minimum for social media accounts at 13. That limit is problematic for two reasons. First, 13 is a developmentally challenging time, right as boys and girls are going through puberty and bullying is at its peak. 
Second, the age minimum is not regularly enforced. Kids 12 and under can simply lie about their age to sign up for an account, and they’re rarely kicked off the platform for being underage. During a Facebook event with Instagram head Adam Mosseri, the young celebrity JoJo Siwa noted she had been using Instagram since she was 8 years old, forcing Mosseri to acknowledge that it’s easy to lie about your age.
The problem is how to enforce an age limit online for a population that is too young for IDs. Raising the minimum age to create a social media account to 16, 17 or 18 could solve two problems at once: It would prevent kids from signing up until they’re a bit more developed and mature, and it would be easier to enforce. For example, potential users might be asked to submit a photo of their state-issued ID, which most teens have by 16.
Verifying age would also make it easier to construct a safer app for younger users that might, say, hide follower counts or restrict access to celebrity accounts, both of which Facebook’s research found negatively impacted girls’ body images. 
Curtailing that fear of missing out
It’s tempting to think regulations like these would cause teens to riot in the streets – after all, they love keeping up with their friends on social media. But the teens interviewed by Facebook for its internal research were well aware of social media’s downsides.
“The reason why our generation is so messed up and has higher anxiety and depression than our parents’ is because we have to deal with social media. Everyone feels like they have to be perfect,” one teen girl told the researchers. Other teens have spoken publicly about the negative effects of social media. 
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More stringent regulation would help with another issue teens know all too well: the unwritten mandate to use social media or be left out.
“Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out,” Facebook’s internal research concluded. 
If age limits were enforced, the peer pressure of being on social media would vanish; no or few classmates would be there. Regulating time on the app could also help if teens knew their friends wouldn’t constantly be online.
Facebook’s research demonstrates something else: The company was aware of the issues with Instagram but chose not to set these limits itself. Congress is now considering taking action. 
Until they do, it will be up to parents and teens themselves to set limits. That won’t be easy, but teens will be safer for it.
Jean M. Twenge has received speaking honoraria and consulting fees for presenting research and receives royalties from books, most recently iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. 

Paul Shafer is an assistant professor of health law, policy, and management at the Boston University School of Public Health and tweets at @shaferpr. Alex Woodruff is a Health Science Specialist at the Boston VA Healthcare System and tweets at @aewoodru. Both are members of the evaluation team for the MISSION Act scribes pilot described in this article.
The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is the largest integrated health system in the United States serving over 9 million Veterans each year, though access to care is a persistent concern.
Electronic medical record systems were supposed to make health care more efficient and portable, but they have doctors spending a lot of time staring at screens—leading to burnout and less attention on patients. What happens when we give doctors more time to focus on their patients?
What are medical scribes and how can they help? 
According to a 2016 study, providers in ambulatory care spend about half on administrative tasks (49.2%), including more than one-third of their time in the exam room with patients (37.0%). A newer study from 2020 estimated that physicians spend an average of over 16 minutes in the EHR per patient visit.
Medical scribes join doctors, nurses, and other providers in patient visits to help ease administrative burdens on providers by documenting visits and entering orders, allowing the provider to spend more time focusing on the patient instead of the electronic health record.
By shifting some of that administrative time away from the provider, scribes ideally allow them to be more present with patients and potentially see more of them without compromising quality of care.
Scribes have not been used widely in the VHA before but have been deployed (and studied) in community hospitals and clinics, both in the United States and worldwide. A 2018 VHA policy brief highlighted promising associations found in scribe evaluations thus far (Figure 1), including increased productivity, reduced documentation time, and greater provider satisfaction with no effect on patient satisfaction.
However, a robust systematic review of the effect of medical scribes used in emergency departments, cardiology, and orthopedics, completed last year by VHA found relatively poor strength of methods and evidence in evaluating potential effects of clinic efficiency, productivity, and patient and/or provider satisfaction. None of the studies that either report cites took place in the VHA, which means those results may not be generalizable to the VHA even if the strength of evidence concerns were not a significant problem.

Source: Pearson, Frakt, and Pizer, 2018. Reprinted with permission.
What is VHA doing?
Section 507 of the MISSION Act of 2018 required VHA to “carry out a 2-year pilot program under which the Secretary shall increase the use of medical scribes”. The evaluation team, comprising multiple Centers and Offices at VHA, designed a cluster randomized trial around the requirements of the law to generate causal evidence of the effect of medical scribes. The pilot includes the hiring of 48 medical scribes across 12 facilities. These facilities include four urban, four rural and two underserved facilities that were randomly selected among a pool of interested VA Medical Centers.
Thirty percent of the scribes are allocated to emergency departments and seventy percent to the high wait time specialties of cardiology and orthopedics. Each medical facility is supposed to hire four scribes, two as VHA employees and two as contractors, with an eye towards how to scale this up if the results are promising.
As the study continues, the impact of medical scribes will be observed across a number of outcomes — evaluated quantitatively to see how scribes affect productivity, wait times, etc., but also qualitatively to provide needed context to what the data do and do not tell us. The goal is to see if deploying scribes can improve productivity and reduce wait times without compromising patients’ satisfaction with their care. This would provide a proof of concept in the VHA before any decision is made about a larger investment.
Early Implementation
The implementation of the MISSION 507 program has not been without turbulence. The official study launch, originally planned for March 2020, was delayed because of COVID-19, finally beginning in late June 2020. Scribes began to be hired well before the official pilot start date but despite the early start, hiring has fallen well short of its targets. Almost half of the scribe positions are vacant.
Hiring scribes as contractors has been much more successful than as employees to date, although their onboarding time is nearly 50% longer. These difficulties tell two important stories—1) with fewer scribes than expected, it may be more difficult to detect any real benefits (or harms) and 2) this raises concerns about the ability to scale the intervention, if the pilot proves to be successful.
What’s next?
Implementing a new wrinkle to health care delivery is never an easy task, even in a large integrated health care system. Expanding facilities and hiring more providers are easy solutions to point to, but harder to do. Scribes could be a lower cost way to expand access by preserving one of the most valuable resources that we have—face-to-face time between providers and their patients.
The MISSION 507 scribe pilot is approximately halfway done and to date, implementation challenges have been the most observable outcome. This trial holds a lot of promise for learning whether scribes really are a potential avenue for increasing access to care for veterans, time will tell if evidence supports that promise.The post Can medical scribes help increase access to care for veterans? first appeared on The Incidental Economist.

This article seems to assume that Populist (capital "P", not the modern knee-jerk pejorative, "populist") attacks are somehow invalid. As one who has spent years trying to explain to patriotic Americans that their Supreme Court is - and always has been - an essentially elitist anti-democratic institution, I am still left wondering why its very existence has NOT been challenged as an anachronism.

Why, for example, does the US Elite condemn Iran's "Council of Guardians" while defending its very own? What is the essential difference between the two institutions? They were both designed to keep the dangerous "ignorant masses" in their place. They both inevitably ended up becoming defenders of elite interests.

Most importantly, in both cases they were never popularly endorsed. The Constitutional Convention did consider the possibility of judicial veto (along the lines of France's modern Conseil Constitutionnel) but rejected it.

In terms of Game Theory, the Court's odd powers sprang into existence by accident (in Marbury vs Madison) and have been held there ever since by an extraordinarily stable Nash Equilibrium: all of the elite interest groups which could effectively change the Court's powers find it in their own best interests not to do so. They see their optimal strategy as being to CAPTURE the Court and use it for their own purposes, rather than to reform it.

How can the United States hope to be taken seriously as a defender of democratic values when it has at the heart of its government this elitist relic of a bygone era.

In the new Age of Populism - and dare I hope even Democracy - is it not time to address the constitution, powers, and procedures of the US Supreme Court?

For two decades, Russia has proposed a cyber treaty at the U.N., and the U.S. has resisted it as unverifiable, in part on the grounds that there is often no difference between a cyber weapon and a harmless program except the unknowable intent of the user. Instead, experts from 15-25 countries have been gathering at the U.N. since 2004 to sketch cyber norms that can enhance stability. But shortly after Russia signed off on the 2015 U.N. Group of Governmental Experts report, which recommended refraining from attacks on “critical infrastructure,” Moscow seemed to violate the spirit of the document by allegedly launching cyberattacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid (a charge Russia has denied).

With mistrust high between the U.S. and Russia, it is not clear that normative agreements can really enhance cyber stability, especially without enforcement and deterrence. But there is a positive interaction to keep in mind: Norms can enhance deterrence. All too often international relations are modeled as a game of prisoner’s dilemma where each side has overwhelming incentives to cheat in a particular instance. But as political scientists have shown in computer tournaments with repeated games of prisoner’s dilemma, tit-for-tat reciprocity turns out to be the best strategy for players in the long run. Moreover, in the tacit bargaining that is involved, norms are useful points of salience. As Thomas Schelling has pointed out, in tacit negotiation, the parties may search for common points visible to both sides even if they are not explicitly articulated. And some norms—like not interfering with the “public core” of the internet, proposed by the non-governmental Global Commission on Stability in Cyberspace (of which I was a member)—are in the interest of all countries.

Thus, even though a cyber treaty would be unverifiable, it may still be possible to set limits on certain types of behavior and to negotiate rough rules of the road by combining deterrence and norms and appealing to the self-interest of the states involved. For example, during the Cold War, informal norms that took shape between Washington and Moscow governed the treatment of each other’s spies, with expulsion rather than execution as the norm. Moreover, in 1972 the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated a preventing-incidents-at-sea agreement to limit naval behavior that might lead to escalation. The U.S. and Russia might negotiate limits to their behavior regarding the extent and type (not the existence) of their cyber espionage. Or they might agree to set limits on their interventions in each other’s domestic political processes. While precise treaty language is unlikely, the two sides could make unilateral statements about areas of self-restraint and establish a consultative process to contain conflict. Ideological differences would make a detailed agreement difficult, but even greater ideological differences did not prevent agreements to avoid escalation during the Cold War. Prudence can sometimes be more important than ideology.

At their Geneva summit in June 2021, President Joe Biden handed his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, a list of 16 areas of critical infrastructure—including energy, healthcare, IT, financial services, chemicals and communications—that “should be off limits to attack, period.” Biden disclosed that he asked Putin how he would feel if Russian pipelines were taken out by ransomware, and in a subsequent press conference said, “I pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability and he knows it. He does not know exactly what it is, but it is significant. And if in fact they violate these basic norms, we will respond with cyber. He knows.” But the 16 areas are very broad (and available on government websites) and the absence of strong replies to attacks originating in Russia suggests that the Biden administration has not established deterrence.

Some critics worried that specifying what needed to be protected might have implied that other areas were fair game. Besides, red lines must be enforced to be effective. But the focus of the warnings should be on the amount of damage done, not on precise lines or methods. An analogy is telling the hosts of a drunken party that if the noise gets too loud, you will call the police. The objective is not the impossible one of stopping the music, but the more practical one of lowering the volume to a more tolerable level.

When Russia or others cross such a line we will have to respond with targeted retaliation. This could involve public sanctions, but also cyber actions against politically connected actors, such as freezing bank accounts or releasing embarrassing information about oligarchs. The recent sanctioning of a crypto currency exchange based in Russia is a case in point. More generally, CYBERCOM’s practice of “defending forward” and “persistent engagement” can also be useful here, although it would best be accompanied by a process of quiet communication. This can be done in formal working groups, but can also be handled in intelligence channels.

Non-state actors often act as state proxies to varying degrees, but U.S.-Russian rules of the road could require their identification and limitation. Ransomware is a case in point. Here the U.S. and Russia might cooperate by treating criminals as a third party and forgo their use as proxies. In addition, as Dmitri Alperovitch has argued, we can use our offensive as well as regulatory capabilities to disrupt criminal ransomware networks and payments as we did with the ISIS terrorist network in 2015. And because the rules of the road will never be perfect, they must be accompanied by a consultative process that establishes a framework for warning and negotiation. Such a process, together with implementation of stronger deterrent threats, is unlikely to fully stop interference, but if it reduces the level, it could enhance stability in cyberspace.

The Biden administration has a plan that is estimated to cut child poverty in half. And it's already in place.

It's called the Child Tax Credit.

Here's how it works. Parents of children aged 6 and younger across the country are receiving direct payments of up to $300 per month per child, or $3,600 per year per child. The payments drop to $250 a month for children between the ages of 6 and 17, and phase out for families with higher incomes.

It bears repeating that if the credit is made permanent, and reaches everyone it should, it could cut child poverty in half.

It's an historic expansion of the original credit that's already helping millions of working families.

The direct payments are coming because the Child Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit. Normal, non-refundable tax credits simply cut your taxes. But a refundable tax credit, like the Child Tax Credit, helps you even if you don't earn enough for it to reduce your taxes--so it's a direct payment to you.

Say you owe $3,000 in taxes. A non-refundable tax credit of $3,600 won't be worth $3,600 to you. It would just reduce your taxes to zero. So you wouldn't get the full benefit. And if you don't owe any taxes to begin with, a non-refundable tax credit wouldn't do you any good at all since you can't reduce your taxes to less than zero dollars.

But a refundable tax credit would help you. You'd get the money no matter what, the full $3,600. That's why this expansion is such a big deal: it ensures that the money gets to lower-income families.

The early results show that this policy is a game-changer. Over 3 million more households with children now report having enough to eat after just the first two payments. More report being able to make rent, stay in their homes, and afford basic necessities. And 3 million children have been lifted out of poverty.

It's reduced racial disparities, as well. Hunger has fallen by one-third among Latinx families and by one-quarter among Black families.

Yet the Republican Party--the so-called "party of family values"--is dead set against it. That's because the program works.

Every single Republican in Congress voted against the American Rescue Plan, which contained the initial expansion of the Child Tax Credit. You can bet they're all going to vote against making that expansion permanent as part of the Democrats' $3.5 trillion budget plan. It's obvious: they do not care about helping working families.

Democrats must get this done, no matter how staunch the Republican opposition. In the richest country in the world, it is inexcusable that millions of our children are living in poverty.

For decades, almost all economic gains have gone to the top, leaving working families behind. This historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit is a crucial step towards righting this wrong.

Poverty is a policy choice. Congress must make the Child Tax Credit permanent.

Does “critical race theory” (CRT) really exist? Not according to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. CRT, he recently told The New York Times, “is a dog whistle that the Republicans are using to frighten people. What I’m interested in is equity.”
But rather than convince anyone about the non-existence of CRT, his comments merely confirmed something else: namely, CRT’s remarkable ability to shape-shift into whatever form its advocates choose. For Northam, CRT might not exist — but that’s only because it has undergone a rebranding.
Indeed, while many on the Right have obsessed over the rise of CRT in the past year, a different abbreviation has quickly become entrenched in America’s schools and colleges: “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI).

Part of its purpose appears to be to sow confusion among opponents of CRT. It has certainly riled the conservative Heritage Foundation. In its recent guide on “How to identify Critical Race Theory”, it warns of a “new tactic” deployed by the movement’s defenders: they “now deny that the curricula and training programs in question form part of CRT, insisting that the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’ programs of trainers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are distinct from the academic work of professors such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and other CRT architects”.
Certainly, regardless of which trendy three-letter term you prefer to describe the latest iteration of America’s obsession with race, the goal in each case is the same: to shift away from meritocracy in favour of an equality of outcome system.
But implementing a grievance model into our youth education curriculum will not fix the problems it purports to solve. There is, after all, a dearth of evidence suggesting that DEI programmes advance diversity, equity or inclusion. In fact, if DEI programmes in schools have similar results as DEI corporate training, they might be not only ineffective, but potentially harmful.
This shift is due to the clear failure of affirmative action policies. First introduced more than 50 years ago, they were intended to create equal opportunities for a black community said to be held back by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Suffice it to say that they failed. Today, only 26% of black American’s have a Bachelor’s degree, 10% lower than the national average. More than half of black households earn less than $50,000 annually, and the labour force participation rate for black men is 3.3% lower than for white men; it has actually shrunk by 11.6% since the early 1970’s. Only four CEOs from Fortune 500 companies are black.
Instead of providing opportunities for black students, affirmative action threw many students into the deep-end of schools where they lacked the educational foundation to succeed. Frequently, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr have observed, they were mismatched: “Large racial preferences backfire[d] against many, and perhaps, most recipients, to the point that they learn less… usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out.”
But rather than recognise the failure of this approach, its proponents have chosen to double down. Without analysing why affirmative action failed to produce equal opportunity for black students, and without trying to identify solutions that would be more impactful, those interested in CRT and DEI only wish to manipulate the system further.
Instead of focusing on ways to lift black students up as individuals with agency, ability and choice, they believe the system must reorient itself to produce the desired outcome, starting with kindergarten. It is dependent on the magnification of barriers and tension between racial groups — something which I suspect is psychologically damaging to both white and black students.
For white students, the blame of slavery and Jim Crow laws are laid at their feet. Bari Weiss recently revealed a number of shocking cases of how this manifests itself in schools, but one in particular caught my eye: “A Fieldston student says that students are often told ‘if you are white and male, you are second in line to speak.’ This is considered a normal and necessary redistribution of power.” But it is far from “normal” or “necessary”. Putting the atrocious sins of America’s past on the shoulders of children and teenagers is a form of child abuse.
Suggested readingThe fightback against Critical Race TheoryBy Douglas Murray
For black children, the situation is no better. Students are being taught that it is the system, not their own effort and abilities, that will determine their future in life. This discourages hard work, motivation, ambition and aspiration. It also breeds distrust and hostility towards white teachers, further truncating their abilities to learn and progress in school. As Ian Rowe points out, “the narrative that white people ‘hold the power’ conveys a wrongheaded notion of white superiority and creates an illusion of black dependency on white largesse”.
And in the schools themselves, this often leads to physical segregation. Paul Rossi, a former teacher at Grace Church High School in New York, recently described how “racially segregated sessions” were “commonplace” at his school. Down in Atlanta, meanwhile, last month a concerned mother filed a lawsuit alleging that black students at Mary Lin Elementary School were being assigned to only two of the six second-grade classes.
But “you can’t treat one group of students based on race differently than other groups”, as her attorney eloquently put it. After all, any ideology that separates people due to their immutable characteristics will not lift up minority students, but drag society down into neo-segregation. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that students today seem more anxious, scared and lacking in confidence than any previous generation for which we have data.
Nevertheless, the grievance model methods are spreading through American schools like wildfire. Take Ralph Northam’s state of Virginia, which is implementing the “Road Map to Equity”, which suggests that making equity is more important to education than academics. Perhaps that’s why Virginia legislators passed a bill this year that requires all educators to “complete instruction or training in cultural competency and with an endorsement in history and social sciences to complete instruction in African American history”.
Rather than push race to the foreground of education, anti-racists would do better to cultivate a learning environment for students where the focus is on being kind and respectful. Real diversity and inclusion are more likely to flourish when students are taught to help their fellow classmates — rather than view them through a crudely racialised prism.
Last week, I spoke to Katharine Birbalsingh, the Headmistress of the remarkable Michaela Community School, which serves families from disadvantaged backgrounds and achieves incredible results. When I asked Katharine what their secret was, she told me: “We’re very traditional. We believe in things like belonging. We believe in personal responsibility in a sense of duty to your family, to your community.”
Suggested readingWhat liberals get wrong about raceBy Eric Kauffman
And that is what it comes down to. All children and students want to belong. But demonising white students and re-segregating black students does the very opposite: it divides far more than it unites.
A focus on personal responsibility also goes a long way, both for students and for those looking to help. When watching some of the Virginia Department of Education webinars on equity earlier this week, I heard no mention of empowering or helping individual black children. The conversations revolved around “personal reflection” and “doing the work”, with little explanation of what this means in real life. There was no mention of tutoring, mentoring or guiding struggling students.
If we are going to have an honest conversation about elevating black students, we must throw out buzzwords such as “equity” and start talking about practical solutions. There is, after all, a genuine appetite for this: a recent Pew report found that 76% of Americans said that “racial and ethnic diversity is good for the country”.
And that will only be achieved by encouraging community service and involvement, and requiring teachers to focus on respect and academic rigour within their classrooms. What we must not do, however, is outsource education to a three-letter abbreviation, be it CRT or DEI. They are shallow, short-sighted and performative — and, most importantly, will do nothing to improve the futures of our children

This week, a small selection of scientists have been on tenterhooks, wondering if they’ll get a call from Sweden that’ll instantly change their lives. The most exciting time of year in the scientific community is upon us: it’s Nobel Prize season.
But this year’s winners would do well to consider what happened to many Nobellists after they accepted their prize. Take Kary Mullis, who won his Nobel as the inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR (a fundamental technique that’s now used not just in Covid tests but in essentially all laboratory genetics research): he spent the last part of his life strenuously denying that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Or Luc Montagnier, who won his Nobel for discovering that very HIV virus — and went on to publish research on what amounts to homeopathy.

More recently, Michael Levitt won the Nobel in 2013 for important computer-modelling work relating to protein structure (his Twitter name “@MLevitt_NP2013”, NP for “Nobel Prize”, helps you see just what a big part of his identity the award is). Throughout the Covid pandemic, he has been drastically wrong in his rosy predictions — and sometimes conspiratorial-sounding theories — about the spread of the disease. In July 2020, for instance, he stated that Covid in the US will be “done in 4 weeks”.
All these brilliant scientists lost their grip on reality after they won their Nobel (and there are many other examples; there’s even a name for the phenomenon: Nobel Disease). But at least, in all those cases, the Nobel itself was awarded for a genuine scientific breakthrough. There’s one case where the prize was given, and has never been rescinded, for a disastrously misconceived “discovery” — one that went on to blight thousands of lives.
In 1949 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the inventor of a disturbing procedure — an attempt to treat mental illness — where a surgeon either injected pure ethanol directly into the brain to kill a clump of neurons, or used a special instrument with a sharp wire to slice away the connections between parts of the brain’s frontal lobe. Oh, and before they did so, they had to first punch or drill a hole through the skull — usually somewhere near the eye.
The frontal lobotomy (or sometimes “leucotomy”) wasn’t the first ever attempt at “psychosurgery” — the treatment of mental disorders by operating on the brain. But its invention is most strongly associated with the Portuguese doctor, politician and general polymath Egas Moniz. Inspired at least in part by previous research on chimpanzees, who became notably less aggressive and more docile after their frontal lobes were chopped out, in 1937 Moniz reported a case series of 20 patients suffering from conditions like anxiety, depression and schizophrenia whom he’d had lobotomised.
According to Moniz, his “very audacious” and “always safe” procedure — which he couldn’t perform personally due to crippling gout in his hands — worked wonders: the patients were more placid, more rational — and easier to control. He declared some of them “cured”.
But was this evidence any good? As the psychologist Ann Jane Tierney put it on the 50th Anniversary of Moniz’s Nobel Prize:
“A contemporary scientist can find considerable fault in Moniz’s work, including the inadequate follow-up times, absence of control groups, and the superficial and subjective evaluations of patients performed by individuals least likely to be objective.”
That is, even setting aside the upsetting nature of the procedure — and we should set aside our “yuck” reactions, since there are many horrific-sounding medical procedures that are genuinely helpful — the evidence that Moniz put together to support the use of lobotomies was hopelessly unscientific and biased in favour of his desired conclusion that the technique was useful.
Suggested readingThe empty promise of pop psychologyBy Sarah Ditum
And yet the Nobel committee, some years later, decided to give him the award. By this time, the lobotomy had skyrocketed in popularity and was being used across the world. The best-known proponent was the US neurologist Walter Freeman, an almost unreal character who seems straight from a medical-themed horror movie. Across several decades he performed thousands of lobotomies for an ever-widening list of complaints — not just psychiatric conditions, but also things like “being a badly-behaved child” — and did so theatrically, in front of an audience, often making the initial hole in the skull using an ice pick.
But, also by the time the Nobel was awarded, the horrific downsides of lobotomy were well-known: the fact that there was no evidence of any long-term benefits in the majority of patients was a quibble in comparison to the most obvious problem: the lobotomised were often changed entirely. Many emerged from the operation with altered personalities or slower-running brains; others lost physical abilities. Still others died immediately due to bleeds on the brain (Freeman claimed a 3.6% fatality rate but other sources suggest it was far higher). Most infamously, John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, who had a learning disability, was lobotomised by Freeman and a colleague in 1941. The procedure, aimed at alleviating her seizures and aggression, was a disaster; it left her, permanently, with the mental capacity, independence, and continence of a small child. The story was hushed up, and Rosemary was kept in a psychiatric hospital and then a special school, far from prying eyes, until she died in 2005.
Even if he never intended for lobotomy to be used so terribly haphazardly, it does seem unlikely that Moniz deserved the world’s most prestigious scientific prize for inventing the technique. But there he is, on the official Nobel website among the other winners. We’re left with questions reminiscent of the ones being asked about statues of less-than-ideal historical figures: should we keep this reminder of a past that had very different values from our own? Should we somehow contextualise it? Or should we get rid of it altogether? Should we — more than 70 years after it was awarded — remove Moniz’s Nobel Prize?
Suggested readingThe disturbing history of statue-smashingBy Sean Thomas
It has been suggested before. There are still people alive today who were lobotomised early in life, often with tragic consequences, and it might be seen as a measure of justice for them and their families to remove the Nobel committee’s endorsement. It’s not unheard of in science: some journals have begun to remove or flag research papers, even very old ones, from scientists who are under serious suspicion of misconduct.
But Moniz’s research — while slapdash, especially by today’s standards — wasn’t deliberately fraudulent, at least as far as we know. If we were to go back and wipe out the historical science that now seems poor-quality to us, we’d have to disown huge swathes of the literature, and rescind any number of prizes awarded over the years. On top of that, context reveals that Moniz might technically have won the prize for lobotomies, but it’s at least plausible that the committee actually wanted to give it to him some years previously, for his work on cerebral angiography (a pre-computer technique, still used to this day, that allows doctors to X-ray the blood vessels in the brain).
Besides, it’s worth asking: what’s the point of rescinding a prize given to a long-dead scientist for a treatment that’s almost extinct? Everyone now knows how terrible a mistake the craze for lobotomies was; psychosurgery in general — almost entirely replaced by drug treatments during the latter half of the 20th Century — is nowadays vanishingly rare. Formally condemning it isn’t going to practically help any of its victims.
More from this authorYou're more biased than you thinkBy Stuart Ritchie
Perhaps the least the Nobel organisation could do is provide better context about Moniz’s award. At the moment, his page on their site notes, with some understatement, that the operation “could lead to serious personality changes”. The only other discussion I could find about him on their website is a bizarre essay from a psychiatrist in 1998 who defended Moniz in no uncertain terms:
“I see no reason for indignation at what was done in the 1940s as at that time there were no other alternatives!”
His phrasing isn’t exactly sensitive (the exclamation mark is in the original), but does he have a point? Lobotomy came before reliable psychiatric drugs or other treatments were developed; not all doctors who used it were as flamboyant or clumsy as Freeman. It’s among the worst dead ends in medical history, but shouldn’t we expect missteps and mistakes in our march towards scientific progress?
Maybe the real moral of the story — as well as those of all the Nobellists, who went off the rails — about the pitfalls of honouring scientists. The Nobel Prizes have been criticised as “absurd” in a world of collaborative, cumulative science that relies less and less on individuals. And maybe we shouldn’t expect there to be enough Earth-shattering discoveries for major awards to be given every single year.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t honour our best and most creative researchers; we just shouldn’t turn them into heroes with opinions that are somehow above criticism (a bit more criticism of our top scientists would’ve helped in the early stages of the pandemic, to give one obvious example). Perhaps having Moniz listed among the Nobellists is the greatest reminder possible that even the best scientists don’t comprise a pantheon of divine beings: they’re just humans, and some humans make terrible mistakes. Winning a Nobel doesn’t make someone infallible. It doesn’t even make their prize-winning discovery particularly “true”. The only thing that can do that — the only thing a scientist should really care about — is the evidence.

Two years into the pandemic, we’ve gotten a lot better at tackling the coronavirus at the extremes of infection. We have preventives—including masks, distancing, ventilation, and our MVP vaccines—that can be deployed in advance of a viral encounter. We have regimens of last resort: drugs, such as dexamethasone, that do their best, lifesaving work in hospitals with trained health-care workers, in patients whose disease has already turned severe. But in the chasm that sits in between—the hazy period after infection and before severe illness—decent tools that can derail COVID’s progression have been sparse.We now have a new candidate aiming to fill that crucial niche: the experimental antiviral molnupiravir, developed by Merck and Ridgeback, which comes in an easy-to-swallow pill. According to a company press release posted this past Friday, the drug can halve rates of hospitalization among people recently diagnosed with mild or moderate COVID-19. Molnupiravir hasn’t yet been given emergency clearance by the FDA, and won’t be available for at least a few months, but Merck and outside experts have said they expect a formal green light soon. With the Delta variant still ravaging the world’s unvaccinated, a pill such as this one could ease the burden on overtaxed health-care systems—which most other COVID treatments have struggled to do. “To have something to take by mouth the minute you’re diagnosed, that reduces your chances of getting severely sick … that’s kind of the dream,” Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of Boston University’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research, told me.But in that middling stretch of the COVID timeline, molnupiravir might be able to stake out only limited territory. The drug is meant to be taken within the first five or so days of illness, “the earlier, the better,” George Painter, a pharmacologist at Emory University and one of molnupiravir’s early developers, told me. That’s a punishingly tight window, especially in nations short on diagnostics to detect the virus—as well as access to health workers and infrastructure to prescribe and provide the drug. “Rolling out an oral medication is hugely important,” Erin McCreary, a clinical pharmacist and COVID-treatment expert at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. But a pill, she said, has to be “paired with access”—of which a drug itself is no guarantee.Despite its experimental status, molnupiravir is a pretty familiar face to the antiviral-research community. In the pre-COVID era, the drug generated some buzz when scientists found that it could stamp out a menagerie of viruses, including influenza. Its modus operandi is pretty similar to that of remdesivir, the only COVID-19 drug with full FDA approval. Both mimic building blocks of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code, allowing them to mess with the fastidious self-xeroxing process that the virus uses to generate copies of itself inside human cells.The two antivirals are slightly different agents of chaos, though. To make more of itself, SARS-CoV-2 deploys a scribe-like enzyme called a polymerase to scan and duplicate its genome letter by letter. When the polymerase spots a stray remdesivir molecule, it stumbles, as if flustered by a bad typo. Molnupiravir is more insidious still. It’s such a good mime of the letters in the viral alphabet that the polymerase often overlooks the interloper, making genome copies riddled with mistakes. “An analogy might be gross misspellings,” Painter said. The drug’s sabotage is so extensive that experts call it an “error catastrophe”: Dangerous viral particles have essentially no shot of emerging out the other end.Molnupiravir’s packaging might give it another leg up. Researchers have long known that a bad case of COVID-19 tends to unfurl in two stages—one dominated by the virus, and a second by the immune system’s overzealous reaction. The point of antivirals is to act early, and fast—to nip a growing virus population in the bud, before it can wreak havoc on our tissues, or trip too many of the body’s hypersensitive alarms. These drugs are largely useless once people have descended into the second phase. Remdesivir has to be delivered intravenously, over several days—usually in a hospital, after most patients are pretty sick. (This might explain why remdesivir studies in these settings have produced mixed or underwhelming results.) Molnupiravir, meanwhile, was designed as a pill so it could be “easily administered in the outpatient setting,” Daria Hazuda, Merck’s vice president of infectious-disease discovery, told me. The drug is easily shipped and stored, and can be taken pretty much anywhere.Merck’s recent trial, which has yet to be documented in a peer-reviewed scientific study, used the drug in people who had at least one risk factor for developing severe COVID-19 and had just begun to feel ill. Only 7 percent of them ended up getting hospitalized, compared with 14 percent in a placebo group, and none of them died. “That’s hugely clinically significant,” Ilan Schwartz, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Alberta, who wasn’t involved in the drug’s development, told me. The pill also, so far, appears to be playing nice with human cells, dealing its deathly blows only to viruses—no serious side effects have been reported yet, though Merck’s final data are expected to provide more details upon publication. And there’s been little sign that SARS-CoV-2 can evolve to skirt molnupiravir’s effects, which should make the drug relatively variant-proof. The trial’s results were so promising that an independent panel of experts evaluating the data decided to halt the study early so the company could move forward with its product.Realistically, molnupiravir might be better compared to monoclonal antibodies—the only treatments for COVID’s early-infection phase that have gotten emergency authorization from the FDA so far. Across trials, monoclonals have proved highly effective at stopping mild and moderate cases of COVID-19 from ballooning into serious ones; one formulation has even been okayed for use in people who have recently been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 but haven’t yet developed symptoms. But monoclonals have weaknesses, too: They still need to be infused or injected by professionals, viruses can adapt to resist them, and skyrocketing demand has seriously strained supply. Molnupiravir, if it pans out, could expand the therapeutic options for this stage of disease. In a best-case scenario, the people who take it would be able to stop themselves from getting seriously sick, while also shortening the length of time the virus lingers in their body—potentially making them less of an infectious threat. Treated people could end their disease earlier in the COVID timeline.Molnupiravir’s name, however tough to pronounce, has a story behind it. The drug’s been packing such a punch in trials, Emory’s Painter said, that it inspired him and his collaborators to name it after Mjölnir, the mythical hammer of the Norse god (and Marvel Avenger) Thor. “All we wanted was something that carried the idea of potency,” he told me, referencing Arthur C. Clarke’s The Hammer of God, a novel about a human mission to deflect an asteroid on course to collide with Earth. “That it can stop something.”The Mjölnir reference might work in another way too. Wielding a hammer effectively requires impeccable timing. A powerful tool still needs to hit its mark.Treatments are, by definition, reactive; a drug, no matter how early it’s dosed, can’t undo an infection, or a prior transmission event. It can only contain the fallout. The 50 percent reduction in hospitalizations noted in Merck’s press release is stellar, but some participants “still did get hospitalized,” Bhadelia pointed out, and without public data, outside researchers can’t yet identify who benefited most, or least, from the pills. Drugs such as this one might not block other outcomes, including long COVID. And Merck has yet to test the pill in pregnant people and kids. Experts also pointed out the paucity of data on the drug’s performance in vaccinated people, most of whom remain at very low risk of severe disease but could still benefit from early treatment, especially if they’re in high-risk groups. Molnupiravir won’t ever replace tools that can exert their effects before the virus even shows up. “I’m really hoping people don’t look at this as a reason to not get a vaccine,” Elizabeth Campbell, an expert in COVID antivirals at the Rockefeller University, told me.Also, Molnupiravir is going to be used by humans, not gods. Which means it’s going to be subject to some very human limitations. For the pill to work, people will need to realize they’re sick and confirm that with a test; they will need to seek care from a health-care provider and successfully nab a prescription; they will need to access the drug and have the means to obtain it. Then they will need to take the drug successfully, which, according to Merck, means swallowing four capsules twice a day for five days—a total of 40 pills.Molnupiravir’s been billed as a cheaper alternative to remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies, which can carry price tags of up to about $3,000 and $2,000, respectively, for the drugs alone. But at a projected $700 per course of treatment, molnupiravir still “isn’t very affordable,” Bhadelia said, especially in lower-income countries, where vaccination rates have been low and drugs like these are desperately needed. Merck has pledged to set up tiered pricing that could cut the pill’s cost abroad, and has partnered with several other manufacturers in other parts of the world to speed the timeline of availability “in maybe 100-plus countries,” Hazuda, of Merck, told me.Even if pills were free and abundant, their effects could still be constrained by a diagnostic bottleneck. Since the pandemic’s early days, access to timely, accurate testing has been woefully inadequate, an issue that’s been exacerbated by the structural barriers faced by communities of color, Utibe Essien, a health-equity researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. If a result comes too late, or a test seems out of reach, then the sick person can easily miss that crucial early-infection window—a big loss, considering that molnupiravir has essentially “no effect on patients once they’re in hospitals,” Campbell told me. “If treatment is contingent on diagnosis, we need to make sure testing is more readily available,” Essien said, or risk widening equity gaps. In this arena, in particular, molnupiravir might stand to be a bit less like its namesake: accessible only to those deemed worthy enough to wield it.

I have two reasons for choosing The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry to review this week. The first is that the news feels particularly bleak as the days grow darker and the prospect of spiralling energy prices and an NHS winter crisis looms, and we all need a little intellectual escapism. The geneticist Adam Rutherford and the mathematician Hannah Fry investigate everyday scientific mysteries in expert yet accessible detail that allows the over-anxious brain to switch off while still learning something. The second is that I have been accused of pro-cat bias for previous New Statesman articles, and balance is important in journalism. So this review is all about dogs.
The first episode of the new Curious Cases series begins with Hannah cooing at some puppies playing in a paddling pool. The duo want to find out how guide dogs know where they’re going, and start at the beginning. Humans have been using dogs to help us hunt for 10,000 years, Adam tells us, but how did the transition from wolves to dogs happen? “Wasn’t it just that one day there was a particularly nice wolf who was a bit less bitey than the other wolves, and then that nice wolf had nice baby wolves?” asks Hannah. This is the kind of content for which I pay my BBC licence fee.
Hannah visits a guide dog training centre. There’s an obstacle course where Very Good Dog Wilmott has to work out whether spaces are wide enough for his handler to walk through, and a terrifying exercise where Also Very Good Dog Wendy helps a blindfolded Hannah cross the road. We learn that, while dogs see mostly in black and white, thanks to advances in display technology they can now watch television. “My dog enjoys Wimbledon,” one trainer tells us.
By the end, I know far more about the unique relationship between guide dog and owner. I also feel more relaxed than I have all week. Adam compares dogs to the dæmon companions in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, calling them “an extension and a reflection of your own internal state”. It’s enough for me to acknowledge they might be almost as good as cats. 
The Curious Cases of Rutherford and FryBBC Radio 4,Aired 7 October,4pm; now on catch-up
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If you’re concerned that the American economy is becoming less dynamic — and the long-term trend in business formation, for instance, suggests it is  — here’s an encouraging data point: The best way to get super rich in America is to create something valuable for other Americans. And that’s more true than it used to be — although getting from the very bottom to the very top is still pretty tough.
At least that’s the obvious conclusion from the new Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. The magazine assigns a “self made” score to each individual on the list to show how the superrich got that way. As displayed in the below chart, the scoring system ranges from 1 to 10. Someone who inherited all their dough and is content to just live off it gets a 1. Example: “Alice Walton and Lukas Walton, the daughter and a grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, respectively.”
But someone born in poverty or the lower middle-class who overcomes substantial adversity gets a 10. Example: “Noubar Afeyan, chairman and cofounder of Covid vaccine-maker Moderna, is an example of this. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, to Armenian parents, he and his family fled the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.

From Forbes:
This year, only 118 people on The Forbes 400 scored a 1 through 5, which means that 70.5% of the list is self-made. It’s a significant shift from 1984, when less than half of the list was self-made. Still, much of the list—160 people—comprises people who scored an 8, indicating they are self-made, but came from a middle-class or upper-middle-class background. In other words, even many of the self-made members of The Forbes 400 grew up with at least some advantages in life. The four richest people in the U.S.—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates—all have 8s.
I would also note that nine of the top 10 all started and built companies. Indeed, generating this sort of “super-entrepreneur” is one of America’s superpowers:

But what should we think about the folks that score in the bottom half of the Forbes list based on the self-made metric, the 1–5 people? Back in 2019, I podcast chatted with AEI economist Michael Strain, during which I asked about wealth inequality and how he thought about inherited wealth. From that conversation:
Pethokoukis: You were talking about the outcomes that people find unjust. Wealth inequality, even more than income inequality, seems to be on the radar when it comes to that. Here are some stats that people throw my way when I talk about this: One study says that the 400 richest Americans — which is the top 0.00025 percent of the population — has tripled their share of the nation’s wealth since the 1980s. That led wealth concentration to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties. Another study finds that the wealthiest one percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, which has also increased markedly in recent decades. Do you have any moral discomfort with those two numbers?Strain: No, I don’t. I think that there’s no question that there are some really wealthy people in the United States. And if you add up all the wealth in the country, you know, those people hold a disproportionate share of it. That doesn’t strike me as socially unjust, or morally offensive in any way. What I think about is how they make their money. And that’s where I think that we should be looking when we think about whether this is a just outcome.The richest person in the United States is Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos has done enormous things for society and for the economy. Jeff Bezos is fabulously wealthy, but he has captured only a small, small share of the total value that he’s created for society. So that doesn’t strike me as unjust at all. You know, Bill Gates is incredibly wealthy, and he’s done amazing things.Right, these entrepreneurs have built companies that obviously provide goods, services, and products that people value. It’s not as if we had some state–owned company that was suddenly privatized, and because they knew people in government they somehow got shares of it. It wasn’t some sort of crony capitalism like you might find in Russia. These are people who built companies.Or they’re the heirs of people who built companies. And that’s fine too.Isn’t that different? Don’t we have to think differently about heirs than we do about people who actually made the companies? The children of Jeff Bezos will be fabulously wealthy. How does that help most families that they get to keep all of that wealth?When we’re thinking about whether or not the distribution of wealth is a socially just outcome, I think it certainly makes sense to think about inventors and entrepreneurs differently than their heirs. But when I think about their heirs, I’m quite comfortable with their heirs having inherited that money.I mean, what’s the alternative? Should billionaires spend as much money as possible while they’re alive so that they leave less inheritance? I don’t know why that’s better. The money’s not sitting under the mattress, right? If they’re not spending it, it becomes available for people to borrow and that helps people, and the economy. Should the government reach in and take it? I have problems with that type of punitive, confiscatory tax. And so if it’s not being used for consumption and it’s not being paid for in terms of tax revenue, then it has to be saved. And if it’s saved it has to be given to somebody. I think it’s quite laudable that some billionaires want to give their money to philanthropic causes, but it’s their money — they earned it. If they want to give it to their kids, that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Learn more: Let’s not have another lost decade of American entrepreneurship | Are the deep fundamentals of the US economy actually pretty strong? | First the Billionaire Space Race. Now maybe a Billionaire Longevity Race.
The post Why the new Forbes 400 list says something good about America appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Sitting on a shelf in my sunlit study are two massive works of history by the late, great scholar Zara Steiner, each dealing with the international politics of the 1920s and ’30s. The first volume is The Lights That Failed; the second is The Triumph of the Dark. They came particularly to mind when I learned of the latest poll results from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, in which about three-quarters of Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters say that representatives of the opposing party are “a clear and present danger to American democracy,” and that censorship should be introduced, the First Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding.Grim stuff, as the journalists David French and Robert Kagan both have argued in powerful essays that raise the specter of civil war and the collapse of American democracy. The available data tend to support their views, although arguably these essays underplay the resilience of the American political system. But there is enough going on in the United States and abroad to make one think of the interwar period, when, as Yeats wrote in his famous “Second Coming,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”What Steiner has to teach us is that the issue goes beyond the United States. All historical analogies are suspect, and the argument ad Hitlerum is, as has often been pointed out, a polemicist’s mark of desperation. Let us stipulate, therefore, that at the moment, no Hitlers or Stalins are on the prowl in the world. But that is not the point of analogizing the present to the interwar years. There are thuggish regimes and ruthless dictators, to be sure, and they are armed with tools of repression that the totalitarians of almost a century ago could only dream about. It is, however, the rot of democracies that is more troubling, and in this respect the interwar period still has its lessons.[Anne Applebaum: Liberal democracy is worth a fight]In that time, whose living memory has vanished with the passing of the older generation, cancel culture was real; George Orwell, among others, felt it. On one side, intellectuals infatuated with communism, or who were simply following the dictum that there are no enemies on one’s left, felt comfortable preventing critics from being able to publish or even getting jobs. On the other side, a minority, now somewhat forgotten but important at the time, became infatuated with toxic forms of nationalism, and not only among the future Axis powers.Internal, politically driven violence was rife; in France it culminated in a riot in Paris on February 6, 1934, launched by an array of right-wing groups. (Many of their leaders subsequently found a home in the collaborationist Vichy regime.) More insidious, however, was the spreading belief that parliamentary democracy could not handle the challenges of the fractured post–World War I landscape. James Burnham, later an American conservative, declared that “the managers” would and should take over, because representative governments could not manage their countries. Plenty of reasonable people agreed that democracy could not cope with the era’s economics; even Winston Churchill had some doubts.In a world racked by economic dislocation, demagogues flourished, and not just in Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt declared “the Kingfish,” Louisiana Governor Huey Long, the most dangerous man in America. The shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, globalization, and the proliferation of information technologies are not yet equal to the Great Depression in human impact. But they have destroyed many jobs and deprived others (truck drivers, for example) of autonomy, and with it a kind of worker’s dignity. They have, in their own way, contributed to the radical discontent that has fueled Trumpism in the United States and its equivalents elsewhere.In America, the 1930s were also the apogee of isolationism that had been born in part from disgust—excessive and ill-informed, but powerful nonetheless—over the conduct and outcome of the First World War. No surprise then that students at elite institutions such as Yale flocked to the original “America First” movement, vowing to keep the United States out of the Old World’s wars. Here, too, are echoes that we can yet hear today.These phenomena were all understandable, and all products of a disjointed but interconnected world. And yet it was not nearly as interconnected a world as ours is today, when a group of South Asia scholars in the United States who criticize the government of India and some manifestations of Hindu nationalism can suddenly find themselves receiving hate emails and death threats. Worse, as Freedom House has recently documented, authoritarian governments can and do reach across international borders to punish, coerce, or even kill opponents of their domestic policies. And more and more, they have done so with impunity.In short, liberal democracy feels as though it’s in a pretty bad way, and in many places, it is. No competing advanced ideologies as comprehensive and lethal as Nazism or communism are on offer, although that could conceivably change. What is certain is that dictators, whether Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, have at their disposal devastating weapons of precision repression and murder. The repeated and generally successful crushing of dissident individuals and movements in their countries and elsewhere is remarkable. Even a profoundly corrupt and incompetent regime, such as that of Nicolás Madero of Venezuela, can hang on despite multiple internal and external pressures, partly with the transnational assistance of governments and corporations eager to help.It could get worse. We have yet to see where new technologies—targeted biological weapons, ubiquitous surveillance, drones of every type and kind—will take us. We have yet to experience the full external shocks of climate change, and we have yet, for that matter, to see what will happen when someone again lights off a nuclear weapon in anger. It was not without reason that Churchill spoke of the possibility of the world sinking “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” It all could happen, and if the first half of the 20th century has anything to teach us, it is that calamitous misfortune and horrifying deeds can occur, a lesson viscerally absorbed by the statesmen who attempted to piece the world back together in the first decade after World War II.[Read: It could happen here]Perhaps the biggest difference between that era and this one, however, lies in the United States’ role. It is no coincidence that at one of the bleakest moments in 1940, when Britain looked as though it might very well succumb to Nazi invasion, Churchill could speak of “the New World, with all its power and might” stepping forth “to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”Churchill could pin his hopes on the world’s biggest economy and its liveliest (if turbulent) democracy, the United States. The problem today is that there is no United States behind the United States. If America succumbs to its internal divisions, to its preoccupation with partisan feuding and its desire to withdraw from international politics, the world order, such as it is, will crumble. The reverberations can already be felt: When the senior foreign-policy official of the United Arab Emirates, a close American ally, explains his country’s preliminary efforts to reach accommodations with an illiberal Turkey and an imperial Iran in terms of uncertainty about American purpose—“Afghanistan is definitely a test and to be honest it is a very worrying test”—there is reason for concern.The temptation for Americans today is to fight our internal fights and retreat, if not into isolation then into self-absorption. Many think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way an earlier generation thought about World War I, despite the differences in scale. And even more see in globalized trade and commerce only the current reality of fractured supply chains and lost manufacturing jobs. This is a danger not just for Americans but for a wider world, because without American muscle—financial, cultural, and military—politics defined by the rule of law, civil and religious liberty, and free and fair elections will come under strain. We know that freedom around the world, measured in various ways, has been in decline for a decade or more. What Roosevelt and his enlightened Republican opponents—including their 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie—understood is that American liberties would be profoundly less safe in an illiberal world. It is not clear that American politicians, or large swaths of the American public and its elites, grasp that today.Zara Steiner diagnosed a significant part of the tragedy of the 1930s in the atomization of the international system. States “began to follow their own independent trajectories as they struggled to find their place in a weakened international order,” she wrote. Her account is more bloodless, but also yields more insight than those that focus exclusively on the rise of the great tyrants of the 1930s. An America consumed by internal strife will be a difficult enough place. Should it lead to a world in which an internally divided America does not or cannot exert global influence and pressure to sustain basic norms of decent behavior and governance, our lot will be immeasurably worse.

Scientists don’t agree on whether approving COVID-19 boosters for certain non-elderly Americans, as the CDC did recently, was the right move. The president, the CDC, and the FDA have issued a series of conflicting statements on the issue. Some experts have indignantly resigned. Others have published frustrated op-eds.President Joe Biden, who got a booster shot this week and called on other eligible Americans to do the same, remains enthusiastic. The split between Biden-administration scientists, such as Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and other scientists over boosters might seem confusing. One possible explanation for it has largely escaped notice: Vaccinated Americans seem to really want boosters, which means that the shots could have benefits that go well beyond extra protection against COVID. Those benefits could be psychological and economic—and, for the president, political.The administration’s booster decision was not intended to inspire confidence or encourage economic activity, a White House official who was granted anonymity to discuss internal decision making told me. Biden was following the science and his experts’ recommendations, the official insisted. Every presidential administration claims that its decisions are the products of pure, high-minded policy debates. But like all political operations, Biden’s White House closely monitors public sentiment, and the president’s team is no doubt aware of how popular boosters are.
Atlantic/Leger
New data back up the idea that most vaccinated Americans are eager to get boosters. In a new Atlantic/Leger poll, 62 percent of vaccinated respondents said they are likely to get a booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Even the majority of respondents in their 30s and 40s—considered a less at-risk population—said they’re likely to get a booster. The poll of 1,001 Americans was conducted from September 24 to 26. Our results mirror past polls suggesting that among people who take COVID-19 seriously, boosters are extremely popular. In several late-August polls, about three-quarters of vaccinated adults said they’d get one, and concern about the Delta variant was the leading reason they cited.So far, boosters are less widely available in the U.S. than Biden had initially suggested they would be. In mid-August, the president said the government would “be ready to start this booster program during the week of September 20, in which time anyone [fully] vaccinated on or before January 20 will be eligible to get a booster shot.” The CDC has ultimately recommended boosters for a narrower group: People over 65 and nursing-home residents, as well as non-elderly frontline workers and those with underlying health conditions, starting this month. Perhaps to the chagrin of the Johnson & Johnson crowd, only Americans who received the Pfizer shot qualify for a booster right now.
Many scientists remain skeptical. There’s no evidence that vaccinated young and healthy people face an increased risk of hospitalization or death, even if their COVID-vaccine antibodies fade over time, says Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease expert at New York University. She was vaccinated eight months ago, but she doesn’t feel the need to get a booster. Non-elderly people with normal immune systems might never really need one, she told me. (In an interview with my colleague Ed Yong at The Atlantic Festival recently, Fauci disagreed, saying, “It is likely, for a real complete regimen, that you would need at least a third dose.”)To political strategists, though, Biden’s promise of boosters for all is a no-brainer. It’s the Oprah Winfrey school of politics: YOU get a booster, and YOU get a booster. The Delta wave of COVID-19 cases “has led to a resurgence in COVID concern, especially among people who are already vaccinated,” says Matt Grossmann, a political-science professor at Michigan State University. Boosters are “one thing that can be offered that doesn’t have an obvious downside,” unlike a mandate or a lockdown.Of course, launching a booster program right now might have less obvious costs. Administering boosters takes up the time and resources of health-care workers when they are already stretched. Billions more dollars will go to vaccine manufacturers at a time when many of Americans’ basic needs, such as food and shelter, aren’t being met. Some experts have argued that rather than boost Americans, the Biden administration should donate vaccine doses to poorer countries, some of which have administered so few doses that they won’t reach herd immunity until 2023. And, if further data support the need for boosters for all, future vaccination efforts could be hampered if the public sees boosters mainly as a political tool.But those critiques may not sway many voters. “The American people are not going to blame Joe Biden for being too aggressive in combatting the pandemic,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “If there’s a fire in your neighborhood, nobody complains that the fire department sprayed too much water.” That’s perhaps why some governors were promoting boosters weeks before the CDC’s official announcement.During times of heightened health anxiety, some people will do whatever they can to stay healthy, even if it’s premature or unnecessary. During the 1918 flu, some people died not of the virus but of overdoses of the aspirin they took to treat it. Even in modern times, some people have doubled up on the flu vaccine, says Steven Taylor, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. “People who are highly worried about their health tend to have greater medical knowledge than the average person,” Taylor told me. These people have not only heard about boosters; they’ve already read a bunch of articles about them and mapped out the nearest booster sites to their house. In our poll, the most common motivator for boosters, selected by 45 percent of respondents, was that though people believe their immunity to COVID-19 is fine, they want “extra” immunity. As Gounder put it, “You have people who think vaccines are great, and if they’re great, one is good, two is better, even more is even better.”
Boosters could also aid the economy. In mid-September, Fauci told Reuters that one motivation for boosters is to reduce the number of “breakthrough” infections among the fully vaccinated. Though two doses of the vaccine may protect against severe disease, boosters might keep more people from testing positive and having to quarantine. “What boosting does is that it increases your antibody levels,” says Larry Corey, a virologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “The risk perception of going to a restaurant, the risk perception of going to any indoor event or outdoor event will markedly go down because you're enhancing the vaccine efficacy.” Unlike Gounder, Corey would feel more comfortable going to a baseball game after getting a booster.He and others say this seems to have played a role in the administration’s thinking about boosters. “​​President Biden stated this. If you bring the pandemic to an end more quickly, you open up the economy more quickly,” Andy Slavitt, a former adviser to the White House’s COVID-19 response team, told MarketWatch.Boosters could help the economy even if they don’t immediately reduce breakthrough infections, simply by making some Americans get out more. A quarter of vaccinated respondents in our poll said that getting a booster would change their day-to-day behavior, making them feel more comfortable going on vacation, visiting friends and family, or doing indoor activities with others.“Boosters are going to be contributing to increased economic activity,” says Tina Dalton, a health-economics professor at Wake Forest University. “More people can go to work; there’s fewer days off of work; people feel more confident about being in the economy.”Unvaccinated people are driving COVID-19 hospitalizations, but getting people who already like vaccines to get even more vaccines is easier than getting people who refuse vaccines to accept them. Unvaccinated people are “a complicated policy question that is going to involve a lot more than just money to solve,” Dalton told me. “But an easy one is just to put boosters out there. Everyone feels very happy about getting their booster, and you feel like you’re moving the needle.”Experts will be arguing for months about whether the boosters are truly necessary for younger people, and what the global downsides of focusing extra doses on Americans might be. But they overlook a simple political reality: The boosters aren’t just boosting COVID-19 resistance—they’re boosting morale.

(Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images.)Confession time: I’m open to raising taxes. As a lifelong conservative, making this case comes as easily as arguing for a weak national defense, or more United Nations funding.So please bear with me as I walk through why I’m open to the idea.One of the most important lessons of the last two decades is that black swan events—game-changing surprises—aren’t nearly so rare as we’d like.In 2001, a terrorist attack resulted in two decades of military conflict. Adding up defense, health care for vets and other related costs, the price tag amounts to an estimated $5.8 trillion to $8 trillion.In 2007-08, a financial crisis almost wrecked the economy. The combined loss of tax revenue and increased expenditures put the cost around $2 trillion. A 2018 Federal Reserve Board study estimated the cost to each American at $70,000. The social and political costs are still unfolding. Historically, financial crises spark intense, and long-lasting, populist revolts. Normal recessions do not have the same effect. (This is something to keep in mind as a debt crisis becomes more likely.)Then there’s the pandemic. In November, economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimated the costs in lost growth, income, life expectancy, etc. to be more than $16 trillion, roughly 90 percent of U.S. annual gross domestic product. The federal government has spent nearly $6 trillion combating the pandemic.Much of that spending was necessary or defensible. Government is supposed to respond to extraordinary circumstances with extraordinary measures.Which brings me to the case for raising taxes.What happens when the next black swan touches down? Do we have the financial bandwidth to handle a new pandemic or financial crisis? How about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? A nuclear terror attack? And, remember, the current pandemic isn’t over yet.World War II was a noble and necessary expenditure of national resources. But it was expensive, driving national debt to 110 percent of GDP. Afterward, there was a broad consensus that we had to pay it down.Today, our debt level is even worse, but to say there is no similar consensus is an understatement on par with saying “America isn’t in a bipartisan mood.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) insists that progressives have already compromised by coming down from a desired $6 trillion in additional spending on a raft of new entitlements and social welfare programs. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is universally hailed—or demonized—as a “moderate” because he will “only” agree to a reconciliation package of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion on top of $1 trillion in traditional infrastructure spending. Even 10 years ago, favoring that much spending would have marked Manchin as a Bernie Sanders liberal.Some of this spending may be for desirable or worthy things. But none of it makes sense given the fact we’re broke, never mind facing the possible return of inflation. And the White House’s risible claims that it won’t cost anything only makes sense if you think raising taxes to pay for new entitlements is costless.Yes, Keynesians favor increased spending and lower taxes to get out of a recession by stimulating consumer demand (and yes, we are all Keynesians now). The thing is, we’re not in a recession and demand is not our problem.So, in theory, raising (some) taxes in order to pay for previous spending on previous black swans and thus prepare for the next one makes sense.The problem is we live in nonsensical times. There is zero appetite in Washington to deal with the debt. That’s in part because voters don’t care about it either—and that’s because they’ve figured out the politicians never really cared to begin with. Republicans squandered their remaining credibility on the issue under President Trump, and Democrats have simply rejected the premise that debt matters at all. Democrats want what they imagine to be a European-style welfare state but blanch at taxing the middle class at European levels to pay for it—which you’d have to do.One benefit of caring about debt is that it constrains the ambitions of politicians. This is how it works in our own lives.Even for those of us who don’t want to live in a European welfare state, raising taxes to pay for the government Americans may want has an upside: It should teach us to keep politicians on a short leash. If Americans thought they would pay for the $6 trillion they’ve already borrowed and spent on the pandemic, they’d be less likely to support spending trillions more. They might say, “Let’s save that for a rainy day—or a black swan.”I’m willing to talk about limited tax hikes, but not while people are talking about unlimited spending.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, Scott Alexander has been covering related issues.  Here is one excerpt:
I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through. Closer to home, there is no recently created neighborhood in my own Virginia, or nearby Maryland, that can compare to the older homes of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. The nicest residential neighborhoods of Washington, such as Georgetown, are typically quite old, predating World War II for most of their attractive structures and sometimes going as far back as the 18th century. Do I need to mention Prague, or the contrast between prewar and postwar German buildings?
A few caveats: The modern world has produced striking individual buildings, such as Guggenheim Bilbao or the Seattle Public Library, among many others. And there are neighborhoods that sell a kind of livability, such as the Kentlands in Maryland or Celebration, Fla., and it works well. It’s just not that beautiful or striking. In general, modern residential neighborhoods are not very aesthetically appealing.
This is not a purely subjective judgment (though it is my personal subjective judgment). If you ask the objective and measurable question of which neighborhoods tourists pay money to see, the answers are almost exclusively older neighborhoods, dating as far back as medieval times but pretty much never after 1940. Tysons Corner just isn’t as charming as Old Town Alexandria.
The decline of neighborhood beauty is all the more striking because of economic development. The world is not just two or three times wealthier now as it was in the 18th century, it is dozens of times wealthier. That is why the increasing cost of craftsmanship, while real, cannot account for the decline of neighborhood beauty. And note that when it comes to interior design, product design, cinema and many other areas, there are still plenty of notable and beautiful creations, fueled of course by greater wealth.

And:

One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.
Or consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre. The beauty of the University of California at Santa Barbara relies a lot on the surrounding scenery, not the architecture.

No need to put this point in the comments:
“Selection effects” are also often cited as an explanation for the decline of neighborhood beauty: The best neighborhoods from the past are (at least partially) preserved, conveying an overly glorified sense of the aesthetics of previous eras. It’s a good point, but it’s hard for me to name many recent neighborhoods that will go down in history as aesthetically admirable.
My solution to the puzzle?  I think we’ve given up on coordination and instead we devote our resources to making interiors much more pleasing, beautiful, and comfortable.  The modern world is not aesthetically bankrupt!  So:

These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.” Since they cannot hope for a latter-day Rothenberg ob der Tauber — namely, coordination around exterior excellence in a consistent style — they focus on the interior, and indeed interior design has made huge strides forward. The lovely and comfortable rooms of many modern houses, along with many other recent aesthetic creations, belie the common notion that the world is too depraved to express beauty.
In that equilibrium, the exteriors of houses often end up coordinated — around relatively inexpensive, highly functional, non-aesthetic features so common in suburbs. It doesn’t make sense to aim for a 19th-century-palace look if your neighbor is doing an Art Deco exterior.

We do end up with more beauty on net:
So outward appearances suffer as homeowners save the real beauty for private purchases. And when beauty is privatized, it makes more sense to spend your money on other things — such as a really nice case for your iPhone.
Ever try to sit on one of those older sofas?  Ouch!
Addendum: As a side note, wonderful neighborhoods are great for tourists, but perhaps they are slightly overrated?  There is one splendid neighborhood of modernist homes in Alexandria, and I could live there if I wanted to.  But it would not improve my life, so I am staying put.
The post Why are newer, nice neighborhoods so hard to find? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

The pandemic has cut a swath through our sense of normalcy, but as has been the case throughout history, a disastrous plague also brings opportunities to reshape and even improve society. COVID-19 provides the threat of greater economic concentration, but also a unique chance to recast our geography, expand the realm of the middle class, boost social equity, and develop better ways to create sustainable communities.

Driven partly by fear of infection, and by the liberating rise of remote work, Americans have been increasingly freed from locational constraints. Work continues apace in suburbs and particularly in sprawling exurbs that surround core cities, while the largest downtowns (central business districts, or CBDs) increasingly resemble ghost towns.

This shift has made it more practical for individuals and particularly families to migrate to locations where they can find more affordable rents, and perhaps even buy a house. But such a pattern may be countered by investors on Wall Street, who seem determined to turn the disruption to their own advantage by gearing up efforts to buy out increasingly expensive single-family homes, transforming potential homeowners into permanent rental serfs and much of the country into a latifundium dominated by large landlords.

We are in the midst of what the CEO of Zillow has called “the great reshuffling,” essentially an acceleration of an already entrenched trend of internal American migration toward suburbs, the sunbelt, and smaller cities. Between 2019 and 2021 alone, a preference for larger homes in less dense areas grew from 53% to 60%, according to Pew. As many as 14 million to 23 million workers may relocate as a consequence of the pandemic, according to a recent Upwork survey, half of whom say they are seeking more affordable places to live.

This suggests that the downtown cores of U.S. cities will continue to struggle. Since the pandemic began, tenants have given back around 200 million square feet of commercial real estate, according to Marcus & Millichap data, and the current office vacancy rate stands at 16.2%, matching the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. Between September 2019 and September 2020, the biggest job losses, according to the firm American Communities and based on federal data, have been in big cities (nearly a 10% drop in employment), followed by their close-in suburbs, while rural areas suffered only a 6% drop, and exurbs less than 5%. Today our biggest cities—Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago—account for three of the five highest unemployment rates among the 51 largest metropolitan areas.

The rise of remote work drives these trends. Today, perhaps 42% of the 165 million-strong U.S. labor force is working from home full time, up from 5.7% in 2019. When the pandemic ends, that number will probably drop, but one study, based on surveys of more than 30,000 employees, projects that 20% of the U.S. workforce will still work from home post-COVID.

Others predict a still more durable shift: A University of Chicago study suggests that a full one-third of the workforce could remain remote, and in Silicon Valley, the number could stabilize near 50%. Both executives and employees have been impressed by the surprising gains of remote work, and now many companies, banks, and leading tech firms—including Facebook, Salesforce, and Twitter—expect a large proportion of their workforces to continue to work remotely. Nine out of 10 organizations, according to a new McKinsey survey of 100 executives across industries and geographies, plan to keep at least a hybrid of remote and on-site work indefinitely.

The shift of work from the office to the home, or at least to less congested spaces, threatens the strict geographic hierarchy of many elite corporations. Some corporate executives, like JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, are determined to force employees back into Manhattan offices, like it or not. It’s now a common mantra among like-minded executives, especially those connected to downtown office development, that workers are “pining” to return to the office. Some have even threatened employees who do not come back in person with lower wages and decreased opportunities for promotion, while offering to reward those willing to take the personal hit of coming back on-site every day.

This frog march faces huge headwinds from employees, particularly those with children, the vast majority of whom want to work full time or part time from home. Apple’s Tim Cook has pronounced a hybrid model—returning to the office three days per week—but even this was deemed insufficient by Apple employees who wanted a more flexible approach.

In the past, companies would have been able to simply force employees to come back en masse, but this is a different workforce, whose biggest concerns include enhanced “life-work balance” and “job flexibility.” Today’s workers also clearly have more leverage, as evidenced by record-high “quit rates” at a time of a large labor shortage caused by lower birthrates (U.S. population growth for ages 16 to 64 has dropped from 20% in the 1980s to less than 5% in the past decade). As one CEO told The Wall Street Journal, many technical and engineering applicants now insist on being able to work from home at least part of the time: “It’s become really sort of a requirement if you’re looking for top talent.” Winning the right to work from home has become something of a signing bonus.

In the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, 44% of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, in which nonwhites make up between 20% and 60% of the population. Share →︎ Twitter Facebook Email Print Link Copied link

The big winners in the changing geography of work are the suburbs, and particularly exurbs of major metropolitan areas. These areas have seen job growth expand at 2.5 times the national rate, and have thus attracted the foreign born, younger families, and minority voters faster than the national average.

The pandemic has only supercharged this pattern. According to U.S. Postal Service records, exurbs recorded a 37% rise in net migration last year. Bloomberg City Lab found that 84% of movers from the top 50 cities stayed within the same metropolitan areas; the big metros are not dying so much as dispersing. Mostly located in counties within two hours commute time of a major urban core, exurbs are ideal for employees who work only one day per week or a few days per month in the office.

This marks a major turnaround from the period after the financial crisis, when exurbs were consigned to a future as “the next slums” and the “ruins of the American dream.” Today they are becoming the dream’s most important redoubt.

This shift has been so large, and the demand for property so great, that the viability of the exodus itself is under threat. Driven by new migration, prices have surged in once affordable metro areas throughout the South like Nashville and Austin, in Boise and Salt Lake City, and even in places like Billings, Montana. Increasingly these price rises are outpacing the financial capacity of many prospective homeowners, forcing them to remain apartment tenants paying ever higher rents.

Some enthusiasts see this development through the rose-tinted glasses of a new “rentership society,” which would see the concentration of ownership by the landlord class extend to the entire country. To further their profits, Wall Street firms like Blackstone are buying homes in hot markets and converting them into rentals. In the first quarter of 2021, roughly 1 out of every 7 homes was bought by an investor, according to Redfin, up from 1 in 10 in the previous three quarters.

At the same time, urban planners and radical environmentalists are exerting massive pressure to curtail all suburban expansion on environmental grounds. This future can already be seen in places like California, where—thanks to stronger land use regulation and regulatory fees—housing has become unaffordable for all but the very affluent. Some new developments that could help fill this demand have been delayed for decades by the state’s overly burdensome environmental regulations, one net effect of which has been to raise California’s cost adjusted poverty rate higher than any other state, including that of Mississippi.

None of this is necessary. Irvine, south of Los Angeles, has provided a model of what to do instead: a huge employment pool, short commutes, 270 parks, one-third of land dedicated to open space, and infrastructure to facilitate at-home work. New planned communities like the Woodlands and Cinco Ranch outside Houston, or Ontario Ranch east of Los Angeles, reflect updates to the Irvine approach, with a heavy emphasis on high-speed telecommunications, mass use of drone delivery systems, e-scooters, and even robot carriers to help people lug groceries back home without requiring the use of a car. Given the shortage of affordable starter homes, these types of planned communities should attract increasingly suburban-oriented millennials.

Some progressives assert that such peripheral suburban and exurban developments are intrinsically “racist.” This may have been true in the past, but it’s a ludicrous assertion today. In the 50 largest U.S. metro areas, 44% of residents live in racially and ethnically diverse suburbs, in which nonwhites make up between 20% and 60% of the population. Over the past decade, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than 4% of growth in suburbs and exurbs, while Latino Americans accounted for nearly half, with Asian Americans, African Americans, mixed raced, and other groups making up the rest.

The American Political Science Association (APSA) is the main professional organization for academics who work, teach, and research in the area of political science. It hosts an annual meeting that draws thousands of academics, students, journalists, editors, and authors. APSA is the umbrella organization of hundreds of smaller groups with a dizzying breadth of interests and subjects, which in turn organize the various panels, roundtables, and workshops that take place over the four full days of the annual meeting. In addition to serving as a locus for academics to exchange ideas and research, the annual meeting is the most important professional networking gathering of the profession. APSA’s annual meeting is the place where many young academics first meet the eminent faculty they admire, where aspiring faculty make connections that will help them gain a foothold in the profession, where aspiring authors pitch book ideas to editors in academic and trade presses, and where many interviews for academic jobs take place.

APSA claims to be a non-partisan organization whose main purpose is to advance the academic study of politics. Given the inherent contentiousness of its subject, for many decades it has been—for the most part—admirably open to the variety of approaches and perspectives that the study of politics inevitably attracts. However, in the wake of the Trump years and the rise of “cancel culture,” the organization recently made a decision that bodes ill for the integrity of the academic study of politics. Bowing to the demands of a small but vocal number of political scientists, APSA effectively banned the Claremont Institute—a right-liberal (by the light of the profession, “conservative”) organization, some of whose members had expressed support for Donald Trump—from hosting its section’s panels at the most recent APSA meeting, just concluded this past weekend in Seattle.

Several hundred political scientists signed an open letter that called for rescinding the Claremont Institute’s affiliated status with APSA. This demand was based on the membership and participation of Professor John Eastman, a former Chapman University law professor who serves on Claremont's Board of Directors. Eastman was slated to appear on two of the Claremont Institute’s panels at the meeting. The open letter called for his expulsion from APSA for his role in drafting “a memo to President Trump and Vice President Pence that ‘war gamed’ alternatives for installing Trump as President by invalidating the Electoral Count Act through Vice Presidential fiat.”

APSA’s subsequent actions suggest that the organization recognized the peril of banning Claremont on the one hand, and of letting its panels proceed on the other. If they rescinded Claremont’s status, they would open the door to demands to do the same to any affiliated group. Such a precedent would have been a direct threat to the integrity of the academic enterprise. But if APSA did not act, it would bring down anathemas from an overwhelmingly left-leaning professoriate, some of whom might indeed have engaged in protests, and would in turn encourage the media’s klieg lights to be turned on an institution that prefers to operate in the background. APSA would be accused of giving a platform to a fascist, a charge that would surely find its way to the content-hungry programmers at CNN and MSNBC.

APSA chose a cowardly course: In the name of safety, it moved all Claremont panels online, barring any of its panels or even its reception from taking place in person. In response to this decision, the Claremont Institute elected to cancel all of its panels rather than agree to effective banishment from the annual meeting.

According to the president of the Claremont Institute, APSA provided no substantiation of any threat to safety posed by an in-person gathering. If there was a credible threat, would it not have been important to share this information with those who were considering attending the meeting? At the very least, should not the organization have endeavored to arrange the necessary security to make possible the thing that APSA constantly claims is its raison d’etre—the opportunity for the exchange of vital and sometimes controversial ideas? If there was a threat of protest against a panel discussing BLM or feminism or LGBTQ issues, would APSA have required those participants to meet virtually in the name of safety? Or would it have done its utmost to ensure that those exchanges could have taken place in person, and proudly broadcast this courageous decision?

Of course, it’s obvious to everyone involved that there likely was no genuine threat aside from APSA’s fear of being tainted by association with a pro-Trump institution. Instead, it achieved the ends demanded by some of its members—banishment—by means of subterfuge. While I have no crystal ball, APSA’s decision will likely embolden the open letter’s signatories to seek the actual expulsion of what is arguably the largest remaining group of conservative academics from the profession’s main association.

To be clear, it was effective banishment. Most academics cannot afford the travel and lodging (not to mention the registration cost) associated with the annual meeting, and rely on their home academic institutions for conference support. However, most institutions will only provide such support when its faculty or students are officially listed for a presentation that meets in person at the event. While we have grown used to claims that Zoom presentations can be “just as good” as in-person events, none of the most important professional activities that occur at the APSA meeting—networking, pitching a book over a drink, greasing the wheels for a job or post-doc—can be replicated online.

APSA’s decision—egged on by some of its members—was a political purge. It used one of its unpopular members as the proximate cause for banning an entire organization, the overwhelming majority of whom are focused on their academic work and had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of January 6. APSA cleverly devised a means to submit to the baying of their loudest members without apparently taking a political stand. But the reason, and implications, of the decision should be clear: The professional organization was making a political choice, one designed to banish a political perspective that has been deemed unacceptable.

What are the consequences? Some are obvious: the further narrowing of perspectives within the academy and further damage to the professional prospects of non-progressive academics. The claims to political purity met the self-interest of other members in winnowing potential competitors from a shrinking profession.

Perhaps most alarming is the damage that has and will continue to be done to the study of politics. Academia is—or was—a unique space for the exploration of sometimes unfashionable ideas, ideas that often escape those who must toe whatever contemporary orthodoxy happens to reign. Those who successfully banished the Claremont Institute from APSA’s annual meeting did so in the name of “democracy” against “fascism.” Concepts that are inherently subject to intellectual examination and debate have now been given definitive content at the pain of ostracism. Will there be an academic who will raise a voice asking, by what measure are we a democracy? Aren’t those granted favor by multinational corporations, the corporate media, tech monopolies, the permanent bureaucracy, Hollywood, and the elite universities themselves better described as a kind of oligarchy? Might the control, surveillance, and power wielded by such institutions be something more akin to fascism than what passes for that name according to academics (who are supposed to be the champions of “critical thinking”)? Is there to be no space in academia for inquiry into these kinds of questions, since the answers are now defined by the main professional organization by means of expelling those who might disagree?

Most important, a fundamental question has been presumptively answered before really being discussed and debated: Is APSA and its membership required to support liberal democracy, as many members seem to have concluded is a self-evident proposition? Is our regime itself beyond challenge by those who claim to be its most serious students? Calls to bar Claremont were based upon claims that it posed a threat to liberal democracy. Does APSA henceforward require its members to support a particular political arrangement, and if so, doesn’t it necessarily preclude the genuine study of politics?

The study of politics is, at base, the study of regimes. While every age believes it has satisfactorily answered the question of the best regime (whether in theory or practice), the study of politics does not lend itself to exact or irrefutable answers. The Claremont Institute actually shares with APSA the presumption that there is a best regime—the theoretical project of the American founding (by its lights), a view with which I am known to disagree—but, to its credit, it is aware that it is making a theoretical claim against other potentially legitimate contenders. APSA and much of the academic profession of political science appears to have shut down any such inquiry. It operates under the presumption that we live at the end of history, with those most responsible for studying politics having rendered themselves incapable of asking the most important questions with which any genuine study of politics must begin.

This inquiry into the nature of the good regime within existing imperfect regimes is an inherently precarious undertaking, and has almost always taken place at the edges of society—a tradition dating back to Socrates’s challenges to democratic Athens. Today’s academics claim to be the heirs of Socrates, but far more resemble the mendacious Sophists who sought his imprisonment and death by claiming that his questions were too dangerous for the regime to permit. If one wishes to examine our deepest and most pressing political matters, don’t bother with APSA or much of what remains of academia. This past weekend, the discipline of political science declared itself to be a distinctly partisan arm of liberalism, not a genuine venue for political inquiry.

Patrick J. Deneen is Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

There haven’t been many crimes in recent years as appalling as the murder of Sarah Everard. The horrific details of the case were made public last week, during the trial of Wayne Couzens, the man who raped and killed her; and they are made all the more difficult to stomach by the fact that he was a serving police officer. It’s the abuse of a position of trust that makes this crime particularly chilling.
What’s even more appalling is that Couzens had apparently committed indecent exposure twice: once in 2015 and once three days before Everard’s murder.

Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, said in an unfortunate phrase a few months ago that there is the occasional “bad ‘un” in the service. She did go on to say that they are “intolerant” of violence and that they “​​work to identify and tackle and prevent any such behaviours”. But the impression was given that the occasional bad ‘un is an inevitable part of the institution.
It appears to be rather more than one, for the record. Apparently, 27 serving Metropolitan Police officers have been convicted of sex crimes since 2016. At least one is still on the force as an unpaid special constable, having joined the Met after his conviction for indecent exposure. (A simple criminal conviction does not automatically bar you from joining the police.) Another Met officer, who worked in the same unit as Couzens, is facing rape charges this week.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Metropolitan Police has been accused of institutional misogyny — and of needing drastic reform. In the wake of an awful story, there is an understandable, human need to want to make sure it never happens again. Specifically, we feel the police should, of all professions, be the one without a single “bad ‘un”.
But it’s also worth remembering that, in the coming years or decades, no matter how well we vet police officers, you’ll read some horrible story like this again. Hopefully we can reduce the likelihood; perhaps even reduce it a lot. But the numbers involved are just too large for it to be realistic that we can bring it to zero. So we need to have some idea – with this, and with every movement campaigning for some social good, from public health to racial justice – of what success looks like. And if we want to aim for zero, then we have to be honest about what the costs of that aim are.
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Here’s why I think it will be difficult to reach zero: the numbers. About 120,000 sexual offences were recorded in England and Wales in 2017, of which 40,000 were rapes. That’s a huge undercount of the actual figure committed (the Crime Survey of England and Wales estimates the true figure at four million), but let’s use it.
Presumably some of those 120,000 were committed by the same people — there probably weren’t 120,000 recorded perpetrators — but even if we half that number, we still end up at about 0.1% of the entire population of England and Wales recorded as committing a sex crime each year.
Let’s take that 0.1%, and pretend that the whole population is equally likely to commit sex crimes. There are about 160,000 police officers in the UK. That means that if police officers commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population, you would expect about 160 sex offences committed by police officers every year.
I sincerely hope that police officers don’t commit sex crimes at the same rate as the rest of the population. But even if they only do it 1% as often, you would still expect one or two every year; easily enough to fill newspapers with appalling stories. At those rates, you’d expect even rarer crimes such as rape and murder once every few years.
So let’s return to the question: what does success look like?
This is a difficult conversation for any reforming movement.Because there are costs that come with demanding too perfect a victory.
Suggested readingThe police have a woman problemBy Sarah Ditum
Take a topical example: Zero Covid. You can say what you like about the movement’s aims, but at least it was explicit about them: it called for the “elimination of the virus from the UK”. If there’s still a single case of Covid in your country, you have not achieved Zero Covid, and you keep trying until you have.
New Zealand was always the Zero Covid paragon, along with Australia and Hong Kong and a few other places. As recently as August, a single Auckland case that couldn’t be traced to a point of origin led to a several-week lockdown. But this week, the Wellington government formally abandoned its policy of eliminating Covid, and moved to a plan to live with the virus (albeit, no doubt, at a much lower level of the virus than we have to live with). The costs of maintaining Zero Covid in the face of the Delta variant — and the reduced threat of the virus itself, given the vaccines — led them to decide that going for absolute zero wasn’t the best policy anymore.
In the UK, we have decided that a certain mortality rate is acceptable. Professor Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, said recently that “living with the virus” will probably mean about 100 deaths a day, or more than 30,000 a year. It’s a grim thought, but we have to be clear-eyed and say that the elimination of risk is probably impossible, so we have to tolerate some level of it.
But when it comes to violence against women and girls, what is an acceptable number of murders every year? It’s an appalling question, but it’s one we have to ask, just as we had to with Covid. And it’s worth stopping at this point and asking whether you know how many women are murdered each year right now. Give a figure, in numbers per 100,000 per year. And then say how many you think is acceptable, again in numbers per 100,000 per year: 10 per 100,000, one in 100,000, 0.1 per 100,000?
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Here’s the real figure: according to the ONS, there has been an average of about 200 women and girls murdered each year in England and Wales for the last 10 years. Out of a population of about 31 million, that is a little under 0.7 women per 100,000 per year.
To be clear: I’m not saying that’s acceptable. But if you’d just said that you thought about one woman in every 100,000 was killed every year, and you wouldn’t rest until the murder rate was below one in 100,000, then we’re already below that.
If you said one in a million, then we’ve still got some way to go. But soon you’re going to start hitting up against some really hard limits. According to the World Bank, only two countries in the world recorded 0.1 murders per 100,000 female population (that is, one in a million) in their most recent data, and those two countries were Oman and the Palestinian territories, which makes me think that the data might not be entirely reliable.
Other countries manage 0.3 per 100,000: Singapore, Japan, Macao, Norway, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. But most of the countries we tend to think of as our peers — France, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Canada — have roughly similar numbers. Getting the numbers much below that seems to be very difficult.
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You could argue that it does no harm to aim for zero, even if you know you won’t get there. But it’s not as simple as that. Reducing some societal harm costs money and time, and at some point, you’re going to hit diminishing returns. You’ll have to spend ever more resources for smaller and smaller improvements.
Maybe you’d say that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s understandable. But the reality in which we all live puts a price on human lives for you, via opportunity costs. If you spend the money on street lighting, you can’t spend it on dialysis machines, or early years education, or renewable energy subsidies. At some stage, because of diminishing returns, you’ll reach a point where spending more money on reducing murder rates means that more people die (or more people are harmed) elsewhere.
Whatever social problem you’re talking about fixing — obesity, police brutality, inactivity, racist abuse — we need to be explicit about whether we’re aiming for zero, and facing up to all the costs that will come with, or admit that you’re really aiming for some more achievable (but more painful to accept) figure.
When it comes to police reforms, there are all sorts of trade-offs to consider. One obvious reform, for instance, might be to impose stricter rules on recruitment — such as that no one with any criminal record at all can be a police officer. But I imagine that would hinder the efforts to increase the number of non-white police recruits, since young men of colour are the most likely to have criminal records. How much it would hinder them I don’t know, and perhaps the trade-off would be worth it, but you need to start by acknowledging the trade-off.
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I’m really, really not saying there’s nothing that can be done. Couzens turned up to a police work party with a sex worker, and his colleagues “jokingly” called him “the Rapist”. There is something wrong with a culture that allows that, and there are clear failures on the part of the police in investigating his earlier offences.
Most importantly, we need better data on how many police officers do commit crimes, so that we can get a sense of whether they’re more or less than we would expect. Profoundly affecting though they are, policymakers can’t make these decisions on the back of high-profile anecdotes and shocking individual stories.
Any group made up of thousands of people, such as the police force, will include some number of dreadful individuals, however hard you try to keep them out. And every so often, a dreadful person will do something dreadful.

Meritocracy says people should be judged by their individual talents rather than their birth or connections. But this concept has become the object of criticism from both the left and the right. In this interview, Adrian Wooldridge discusses whether meritocracy is rigged against the rest by the already wealthy and privileged, as well as how America’s “aristocracy of talent” can be improved.

Pethokoukis: I think almost every word on the cover of your book will be triggering to some people: the word aristocracy, the word talent — of course, the word meritocracy — even the nice endorsement from Francis Fukuyama. But before we get into why people might find it triggering, I’ll just give you a couple minutes to walk us through your thesis about how meritocracy made the modern world. 
Wooldridge: Yeah, absolutely. Meritocracy essentially means judging people on the basis of their innate abilities rather than on the basis of their polish or their social connections or their social status or their birth. And I think it also implies some sort of broader commitment to equality of opportunity, or at least very significant educational opportunity provided by the state, because it would be impossible for people reasonably to compete in a modern economy unless they get access to these things. Now you might think, “Well, who could object to that? It’s sort of motherhood and apple pie.” But many, many people do object to that, and many people throughout history have objected to that. Most countries have not been meritocratic. Most societies throughout time have been based on principles of being born into your social status or the principle of dynasty or the principle of patronage, or indeed the principle buying and selling offices, which before modern times was absolutely widespread.
So I think that meritocracy is fundamental to the creation of the modern world. The modern world was basically created by a succession of meritocratic revolutions against aristocratic societies and societies of patronage. Obviously the American Revolution was very much a revolution made by people in favor of a natural aristocracy as against an artificial aristocracy. If you look at Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, they’re constantly talking about natural aristocrats and contrasting them with artificial aristocrats, by which they meant landed gentlemen. Or if you look at the French Revolution: that’s a revolution made on the basis of careers open to talent, replacing an inherited landed elite with people who deserved their position. And also the British liberal revolution in the 19th century: open competition, examinations for civil service positions. All of those are about meritocracy. And I think that was the principle that laid the foundations of the modern world. And it was the broadening of meritocracy — bringing in women, ethnic minorities, working class people into that framework of promotion on the basis of talent examinations, open competition — that really created the modern world as we now see it.

And you write that the surest sign a country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy or its debt-to-GDP ratio or something, but it’s really its commitment to meritocracy. I want you to flesh out that link a little bit more.
Absolutely. I mean, there’s been a significant range of thinkers, particularly in the 1990s who said that what really made society successful, dynamic, and economically prosperous was democracy, and that in order to become one of these dynamic societies, you had to introduce democracy. And that in some ways inspired the Bush Doctrine, inspired a lot of liberal interventionism. And I think that’s a false positive: It’s not that democracy is a bad thing, but I think that democracy is not the key to prosperity. The key to prosperity is, in fact, meritocracy. Modern societies can be prosperous without being democratic. Look at Singapore, which is only very vaguely meritocratic. Or look at China, which is an autocracy. They have succeeded, and they continue to succeed, by way of introducing meritocracy, open competition, examinations, performance-related promotions, and things like that. So that is the single differentia specifica of successful societies.
And I think companies that are public, that are openly traded, are much more successful than family companies. If you look more broadly at societies, societies that make a big attempt to be meritocratic, like Sweden, are much more successful than societies which are not meritocratic like Greece or Italy, which are still based on clientelism and nepotism. So I really think it’s meritocracy which is the essence of making societies successful economically. And the question is: Do we tie meritocracy to democratic societies, or do we tie meritocracy to authoritarian societies, as China is trying to do today? So democracy is great — but it needs an extra add-on, and that add-on is meritocracy, to make it economically prosperous.
I want to talk a bit more about China later, but as I said in my introduction, this notion is triggering, even offensive, to some people. So what is that argument exactly? Is it that a meritocracy is good, but that’s not what we have in the United States and some other rich countries? Or is it that the whole notion is wrong? So even if you create a meritocracy, it would be a bad idea. Is it our failure to achieve it? Or is the whole notion wrongheaded?
A great question, because both are the case. There are many people who say, “Meritocracy is great in theory, but we don’t have it at the moment. We have something that’s a mockery of meritocracy. And because people claim that it’s meritocracy, they’re sort of doubly lying. They’re claiming that their position is based on merit when it’s in fact based on inherited wealth or things like that.” So that’s one critique: that we don’t have it. The other critique would be, “Even if we could create a meritocracy and turn America into a true meritocracy rather than the sham that it now is, it’s a very bad thing, because meritocracy enshrines all sorts of things — such as competition, such as constant sorting of people on the basis of ability — and those things are wrong.”
The person who actually invented the term meritocracy was a man called Michael Young in 1958 in his brilliant book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. And that wasn’t meant to be a celebration of the meritocracy as many people have taken it to be. It was a condemnation of the meritocracy. He thought meritocracy is a terrible thing because it smuggled the idea of competition into what should be a socialist vision of the future. And because it made everybody who succeeded intolerably smug and everybody who failed absolutely wretched, because they couldn’t blame anybody but themselves for their failure. So there are two very different critiques of meritocracy which actually get muddled up in lots of people’s minds.
Let’s focus on that first critique: that it would be great to have one, but what we have now is a mockery, a sham meritocracy. I think some people will see things like the college entrance scam in the United States, where you had a bunch of rich people, Hollywood people, basically buying their way into good schools. And that’s a pretty key way to get into the elite, by going to a good school. And they’ll point to that as just one example of how the US just isn’t a meritocracy — if it ever was, but certainly not anymore.
 William “Rick” Singer leaves the federal courthouse after facing charges in a nationwide college admissions cheating scheme. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Yeah. I think that’s the most serious criticism that we have of the meritocratic idea. And it’s indeed a criticism that to a very, very significant degree I share. I think we are — America is, Britain is — a meritocracy in the broadest possible sense. The meritocratic revolution, which says everybody should be judged on the basis of their individual abilities, is very broadly accepted by people. Discrimination is outlawed. Most employers and education institutions make some sort of attempt to look for people’s promise and abilities and select them on that basis. They make an attempt — it may not be a very honest one. But what has happened in the last few years is a marriage between merit and money, between meritocracy and plutocracy, which is very, very corrupting. It means that people who are born into privilege can buy for themselves better education, and because they can buy for themselves better education, they have a higher chance of getting into the best universities and the best jobs.
Now, clearly something like the college entrance scam — where people were literally buying places — that’s illegal, and legal action has been taken. But what people who are saying that meritocracy is a sham are really saying, is that it’s the legal version of it that’s a sham, because people who are born into privilege just spend so much more money on getting ahead, getting their children educated, that they just have much bigger chances in life. And because they’re sort of congealing at the top of society — because knowledgeable, educated people are transmitting their privilege to their children — you are getting lower and lower levels of social mobility. Social mobility is low in America, and it has been low in Britain, and also low compared with much of mainland Europe.
And I think that critique is true, but the question is: How do you deal with that problem of the sort of calcification of society? Do you deal with it by reducing meritocracy, by having much less meritocracy? Or do you deal with it by putting your foot on the accelerator and having more meritocracy? And the argument of my book is that you need to have more meritocracy.
To have a meritocracy you also need to sort of focus on downward mobility. Right?
I mean, the easy part is saying, “Oh, we want to have more kids in college. Or maybe we’ll give them vouchers so they can take SAT prep classes.” But the other half is: Wealthy people are still going to devote considerable resources to their children. Do we prevent them from doing that? Ensuring more downward mobility seems like a much harder question.
Sure. Absolutely. I think the first thing that we need to do is to complete the meritocratic revolution in the formal sense. So if you look at Harvard University now, only somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of places are given away on the basis of pure academic performance. A huge number of places are reserved — or not reserved, are hooked to various things such as whether your parents went to Harvard, whether your parents teach at Harvard or are a member of the staff at the University, athletic scholarships, privileges for donors — all sorts of things will get you in. And plus, obviously, affirmative action and things like that. Because of the law cases brought by Asian students, we’ve seen lots of ways in which that university — and I think that it’s also true of many, many other universities — deliberately tips the scales in favor of already-privileged people.
Demonstrators hold a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court after a Harvard lawsuit asserted that Asian Americans have been particularly hurt by affirmative action programs in university admissions. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
So I would be in favor of getting rid of that and giving 100 percent of the places on the basis of pure academic merit. I think that’s one thing that we could do. And that in itself would be a revolution, but I think we need to go much further than that because we need to start helping people much earlier on in their educational journey, because by the time you’re 18, a lot of the damage of poor background and poor opportunities has been done. So I would be in favor of academically selective schools, such as the ones that flourish in New York and have flourished for over a century in New York, and of allocating places in those schools on the basis of objective tests — SATs, IQ tests, tests that try and read through your achievement and polish and look at your raw intellectual ability. And I think America is moving in exactly the wrong direction here.
The IQ test is already controversial, and there are schools trying to move away from the SAT because they feel like it is enshrining privilege because poor kids can’t take SAT prep classes.
Absolutely. But the question is: What is the alternative? And I think there’s a wealth of scientific literature which shows that however much you can game SATs or IQ tests, they’re less class-biased than other forms of selection, of which the most absurd of course is the sort of “what I did on my holidays,” “what I did in my gap year,” or teachers’ assessments, or personal statements and that sort of thing. But the earlier we take these tests and the earlier we have selection, the better. But what you’re doing in America at the moment — and I think this is profoundly misguided — is to get rid of things like Boston Latin School, get rid of things like the Lowell School in San Francisco. Instead of selecting, they’re replacing selection on the basis of academic attainment and examination performance with a lottery.
Now, I think that is taking schools which have a long tradition of providing opportunities for immigrant groups in particular — less wealthy people in general — and essentially destroying them as academic institutions. Now in Britain, I’m glad to say — and here I think we are much wiser than you are — we’re doing exactly the opposite. We have a bunch of schools in Britain called academies, which are able — at the sixth form level at least — to select people on the basis of academic ability, and their ability in particular subjects, and teach them very, very hard and very, very rigorously. So one of these schools, which is in the east end of London, now gets more children into Oxford and Cambridge every year than Eton does, despite having many pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds and many pupils who have free school meals, which is a measure of poverty. It’s called the Brampton Academy, the most successful of these, but there are several of these schools.
So there are many paradoxes here, but actually the more that you try to implement egalitarian policies at schools, the more you get rid of examinations, the more you actually do down poorer people and privilege already privileged people. So the classic example of this in Britain was comprehensive schools. We used to have a system of selection of education, grammar schools tested 11-plus [exams] to see whether you got into these grammar schools. These were abolished in the name of comprehensivization, and the result of that was levels of social mobility via education went down because instead of selecting people on the basis of academic performance or performance in the 11-plus examination, you just let middle class people go to middle class comprehensives, working class people go to working class comprehensives. You delayed selection later and later and later into life. And once you delay selection, it becomes an endurance race, and the people who win the endurance race are those who’ve got parents who are capable of supporting them and nurturing them for longer and longer in their careers.
What seems more likely to you? That Harvard reduces legacies and becomes more merit based? That’s scenario one. Scenario two: Harvard just gets a lot bigger where they start allowing more kids in, and therefore you can keep the legacies, but now you’ll have just a lot more students going to Harvard. (Some people said that school should be a lot bigger and other schools like it.) Or they don’t do anything and nothing changes?
C by far is the most likely outcome. These institutions are incredibly conservative. Part of their value to their pupils is rarity, scarcity. So they don’t want to increase the number of pupils. And you have to understand that this legacy system is utterly, utterly corrupt. I mean, it’s absolutely appalling. What you’re doing is systematically discriminating in favor of the most privileged people on the planet. But you have a system whereby the academics who are in charge of making these decisions are in on the game. They’re in on the corruption because they get their children into these institutions on the basis of favoritism, so they love perpetuating it. So you’ve got a whole bunch of people who say, for example, “Oh we must have diversity, we must have more people from minorities,” whilst at the same time making sure that their own children are given an easier ride and don’t suffer from the relative decline in the number of places.
So it is an utterly corrupt, and I think appalling, system. I would just get rid of all of these legacies, all of these preferences for the staff and the faculty, all of the athletic things. And of course get rid of the system whereby people can pay for buildings and get their children on some special list. Instead, do it purely on the basis of academic merit — by which I mean achievement, but I also mean people’s promise in the longer term. Have a purely meritocratic system. And I’m saying this, not just because I think it’s immoral to have a system that isn’t meritocratic, but also because America for the first time in its history faces a competitor which could be more powerful than it is. And I think it needs to strain every sinew in order to compete with China.
One way of looking at this is that we need to get the most possible out of our most talented people. And so far, we have pretty much discussed this in terms of universities and colleges. Are there other areas in society that could be more meritocratic than what they are?
Yeah. I mean, the reason we’ve fixated — or I’ve fixated, at least — on the colleges and, to some extent, the schools, is that academic qualifications are much more dispositive than they ever have been before. It used to be the case that if you were a talented business person, you could start at the bottom and rise to the top. Or of course you could found your own company. Carnegie didn’t go to university, or Rockefeller and the rest of them. Nowadays, your success in a company is pretty much determined by your educational qualifications — not all companies, not small companies, but certainly the big corporations. You can’t, as easily as you could in the past, move up from the shop floor to the boardroom. McDonald’s does that, but very, very few companies do.
So I think that educational institutions are now more powerful than they ever have been before, but also they’re much more narrowly based in terms of class than they have been for some decades. I would say there are lots of other things we need to do as well, and I think we’re in danger of having a system which is basically a system of selection by elimination: If you don’t succeed very well academically, there’s not very much else left for you. And I much prefer a system of selection by differentiation, whereby we have lots and lots of different sorts of educational institutions which can take care of you and which can bring out your abilities, because cognitive abilities are one of many sorts of abilities. Other abilities such as caring ability, technical ability, your ability to work with your hands, are all things that need to be recognized more than they are. Now, America used to do this. It used to have a very broad and catholic sense of what abilities were in the 19th century. It’s becoming more and more fixated on academic success as the English have always been. We’ve always had crappy vocational training and a poor system of apprenticeships. You’re just reaching our level of degeneracy.
So a lot of the debate is about cognitive skill. And I’ve had some people say to me, maybe in hushed tones, “Look, we’re not missing a bunch of Einsteins and Edisons that are being somehow excluded from our universities. The people who are wealthy in this society are people who do very well in an economy which is more about cognitive ability, it’s more knowledge based. And people are simply giving those abilities genetically to their children who then do very well in these schools. We have a cognitive, genetic aristocracy and all the SAT prep classes and gifted student classes aren’t going to matter and it is what it is.”
Absolutely. That is a very powerful argument presented by some people essentially that the United States — or indeed Britain or any advanced Western country — is already a meritocracy. It’s sifting its population fairly relentlessly for talent.
People just don’t like how it looks.
Yeah. And people don’t like how it looks. I think that’s profoundly wrong for two reasons: One is that we just haven’t reached any maximum of sifting the population. So there are huge numbers of, as it were, “Einsteins” being left behind, and the sheer numbers of people in the population in general, versus the number of people in the cognitive elite, in the 1 percent of people who go to the top universities. There are just too many people for the very top of societies to have captured. But secondly, and I think more importantly, it’s wrong in terms of the genetics. You have a system of regression to the mean. You have, as Mendel noted, a very arbitrary re-sorting of the population in each generation. The interesting thing is that for various reasons, Mendelian and statistical, children do not resemble their parents absolutely.
Children are quite often very different from their parents. They have different abilities, less abilities or more abilities, and this sort of genetic lottery means that you have to keep selecting in each generation. You have to keep moving people up or down in each generation in order to match ability with position. So I think it’s a misreading of genetics. And I think it’s quite interesting actually that environmentalists tend to be anti-meritocracy and hereditarists tend to be pro-meritocracy. But if you’re an environmentalist, you would tend to think that your children should be exactly like your parents. They should reflect the privilege of your parents. It’s the Mendelian genetics, which explains why there are all these huge differences between the abilities of fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and the rest of it. So genetics means, by its very essence, a perpetually mobile society.
I spent the last few minutes just talking about the folks who just don’t like the entire idea, who I’m sure view the book as a defense of the status quo (maybe a defense of white privilege), who think the whole concept of meritocracy needs to be shattered. So what is the problem people have with that? And who are these people?
Well, we’re living in a strange moment now, because we have critiques of meritocracy coming from every possible direction. You have critiques coming from the right: people who think that meritocracy is a sort of celebration of this awful cognitive elite which sneers at ordinary people. You have critiques coming from people like Markovits and Sandel, probably in the center, who have philosophical problems with it. But also, you have this huge critique coming from the left who think it’s sort of propaganda for plutocrats, almost — and particularly from Black Lives Matter, who regard it as a way of justifying the privileges of the elite, and particularly the white elite. And to that I would say, if you look at the history of the meritocratic idea, it’s been, by its essence, a revolutionary idea and a constantly self-correcting idea.
So if you look back at the American Revolution, the idea of merit was definitely something used by educated white men to criticize the rule of British aristocrats, essentially. But then you have the idea of merit constantly broadened. So you have women coming along and saying, “Wait a minute, if we believe in open competition examinations and all of these things, women should be allowed to sit these exams and to be judged by the same standards as men.” And, lo and behold, they were. Or if you look at ethnic minorities, a lot of members of ethnic minorities said exactly the same thing: “You need to judge us by the same standards that you are being judged by.” And so you have somebody like W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote a magnificent essay, a statement of his meritocratic beliefs, called “The Talented Tenth,” and became the first black African-American professor at Harvard. And he’s saying, “Judge us by the same standards, and we will prove that we can do just as well as you.” So I think, far from being a celebration of the status quo, meritocracy has always been a radical, discombobulating idea which shakes up every possible status quo.
So if meritocracy was critical to creating the modern world, what does it look like if we sort of give up on this and do something else? What does that society look like?
Well, I think that is in many ways not “what if?” but “when?”, because America is engaged at the moment in a huge revolt against meritocracy. You have SATs being got rid of for admission to lots of universities. You have, as I said, Lowell School and Boston Latin School getting rid of examinations and replacing them with lotteries of all things — essentially blind admission. There are lots of attempts to get rid of gifted education programs. So you have all of that going on. And I think what happens if you do that is you get a society in which positions are given either arbitrarily or on the basis of political power. So you have groups of people banding together on the basis of various identities and saying, “We as a group should be given these things because we are a powerful group, and we’ll make a lot of noise if we don’t get them.”
So instead of a system based on results in which people win prizes on the basis of effort and ability, you have a system of spoils in which people get public positions or educational positions on the basis of organizing as pressure groups. And I think that all of that’s bad, because it creates a constant system of agitation and competition — not in the good sense of people all striving to learn things, but in the bad sense of people all agitating for spoils. But the other thing is that America is not the only country in the world. America, as I say, is confronted for the first time ever by another superpower, i.e. China: a country that’s growing very fast (much faster than we ever thought it was), a country that is determined to use this idea of merit to advance its own interests. And China has lots and lots of stake in this.
China was, of course, the first country to create a mass examination system. It was a society which introduced exams far before the rest of the world had them: for century upon century. At the height of the Chinese Mandarin system about 10 percent of the population was sitting these exams, so they have a long experience with this. Those exams sort of degenerated because they failed to keep up with the times. They were all tests of Confucian thought. They ignored modern science. They ignored engineering, technology and the rest of it, and then they collapsed at the beginning of the 20th century. But now they’re back. And this time, the Chinese are not testing just for your knowledge of Confucius, but they’re testing for your knowledge of science and engineering, computers — all the things that make the modern world.
Students take part in an outdoor examination to thwart cheating.Via REUTERS
So you have this “examination state” back in a major way — with a huge education system, massive investment in universities, massive investment in a very competitive mass educational system — but also using meritocratic methods to select and promote civil servants, a big growth in state capacity. Now, if we have a world in which China is harnessing the meritocratic idea to reinforce the power of the Communist Party, the communist state, and America at the same time is dismantling meritocracy or softening meritocracy — as I say, this thing that can be demonstrated to be a key to prosperity — if you have these two things going on at the same time, America loses. China becomes a massive version of Singapore. America becomes, I don’t know, a version of Brazil or something like that, and you lose. They win.
My guest today has been Adrian Wooldridge, author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. Adrian, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you very much, indeed.
Learn more: The legacy of the Moon landing: My long-read Q&A with Charles Fishman | Will accelerating technology end the great stagnation? My long-read Q&A with Azeem Azhar | The future of the American city: My long-read Q&A with Ed Glaeser
The post Is the United States really meritocratic? My long-read Q&A with Adrian Wooldridge appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

 Shutterstock/24NovembersEnergy prices across the world have soared in recent weeks, hitting households and businesses hard. Combined with the costs of dealing with the pandemic, this may make political leaders think twice about making the case for expensive environmental policies that could further raise taxes or bills at next month’s COP26 global climate summit. 
But one way or another, climate change will eventually have to be paid for. Put simply, we can pay now by replacing our cars and gas boilers with greener alternatives; or we can pay later, by funding the replacement of flooded infrastructure and dealing with natural disasters. 
It’s a bit like saving for retirement. An employee knows that sooner or later they will have to pay to support themselves when they are no longer working. They can choose to pay that price sooner, by putting aside money for a pension or they can pay later, with a reduction in living standards when they stop working. 
For both climate change and retirement, the less costly option is to pay now. With retirement, interest on savings generates its own interest, with larger financial benefits than many people anticipate. For the climate, allowing damage to continue makes the problem worse. 
Yet despite this, people generally under-save for retirement and households under-invest in reducing energy consumption. For instance, they often end up spending more on powering inefficient appliances than it would cost to replace those machines with newer, more efficient models. 
Behavioural economists have made numerous contributions to understanding why people seem unwilling to save adequately for retirement. And some of their insights can helpfully be applied to climate change mitigation. 
One famous example is a pensions saving scheme designed by the economists Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler, which takes into account two commonly held attitudes: “loss aversion” and “present bias”.
Loss aversion refers to the fact that people tend to feel the pain of loss more acutely than they feel equivalent gains. For example, they are more upset by losing a £50 note than they are pleased to have found one. 
Present bias refers to the observation that people can be far less patient about immediate delays than they are about delays of the same duration that will postpone future events. To see if you are present biased, ask yourself the following questions: would you choose £10 today or £11 next week? And would you choose £10 in 52 weeks or £11 in 53 weeks?
If you chose £10 today and also chose £11 in 53 weeks then you are present-biased. You are more impatient about the here and now than you are about the future. 
Benartzi and Thaler recognised that people who display loss aversion and present bias would probably resent shelling out for a pension. The benefits feel far off and vague, while the pain of payment feels immediate, so saving for a pension feels like a bad deal. Since loss aversion and present bias are widespread, under-saving is the norm.
Saving (for) the future
With climate change, there may be a similar lack of motivation. Though the costs of climate change mitigation are experienced here and now, the benefits can seem distant and uncertain. 

Time is money.
Shutterstock/William Potter

To overcome the bias against pension saving induced by loss aversion and present bias, Thaler and Benartzi created a plan called “Save More Tomorrow”. The idea was for people to commit to paying into their pension when they next received a pay rise. 
With each subsequent pay rise, the proportion of income allocated to pension saving would increase. By paying for pension investment out of future pay increases, the scheme means people can accumulate pension wealth without having to sacrifice their current lifestyle.
Again, there is an analogy with climate change policy and current costs. Now that energy prices are unprecedentedly high, we can commit to paying the costs of mitigating climate change as soon as wholesale energy prices fall. 
Governments could make clear that the current energy prices are not a temporary blip, but are in fact the new normal. In this model, consumers would still have to pay the current high prices even when wholesale prices fall. The difference between wholesale price and the price consumers pay would be a carbon tax. 
This would not necessarily be easy or popular, but could also bring several benefits. For example, the certainty that carbon-intensive energy will be expensive for consumers will make energy-intensive products less attractive. That will encourage firms to develop the sort of greener technologies that consumers will demand. 
Consumers would be more likely to ditch wasteful habits and instead adopt more efficient lifestyles. Governments could use the tax revenues to support less well off households make changes to reduce their energy consumption.
A further advantage of linking carbon taxes to high wholesale energy prices is that it gets around an obstacle to government action. No government wants to make its voters feel like they are the only ones paying to deal with a global threat. But because energy prices are now high worldwide, this is a rare opportunity for global coordination.
The “Save More Tomorrow” scheme proved enormously successful when it was trialled in firms in the US. At the outset of the program, participants had been saving 3.5% of their income towards retirement. After 40 months, on average they were saving 13.6%. 
If the system worked for investing in pensions, it could work for investing in the environment. Save More Tomorrow started out as a plan to help workers – now is the perfect time to apply the same theory to secure the future of the planet.
David Comerford receives funding from UKRI for research on Covid-19. 

Reviewed here

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker
 Allen Lane

Steven Pinker has written a sensible book for our senseless times—a post-lockdown wake-up call whose overflowing optimism in the end rings hollow. His targets are what he calls the “cockamamies” and “doozies” of our era—a very mixed bag of conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters and people blind to the benefits of taking out a pension. It is they who have prompted this further addition to Pinker’s growing number of books celebrating the light of reason. (His last book was called Enlightenment Now.) His favourite arguments are reiterated: progress is real, wealth is a man-made miracle and, despite the irrationality we see around us, Enlightenment values always win in the end.
What’s new? This time we get a more detailed definition of rationality as “goal-oriented reasoning.” Like Socrates, Pinker notes that no one seeks to harm themselves willingly. Unlike Socrates, Pinker has solutions to avoid self-inflicted woes: do not take coincidences for necessary causes; refrain from being impressed by big numbers that are actually hiding the most important data; and, when making life choices, multiply your desired outcome by its probability and compare the result with your ultimate goal. Et voilà!
Philosophers play little role in Pinker’s book. His is the scientist’s world of calculation and quantified chances: simple maths gets the odds on your side. There is no room for conscience, ideals or empathy—those are mere covers for biases, group-signalling or self-indulgence, so he claims. Perhaps this is the most striking aspect of the book: its array of puzzles, thought experiments and bias-scouting quizzes is divorced from the ancient caution that the unexamined life is not worth living. It sometimes feels like Pinker would have voted to execute Socrates for the sake of common-sense progress.
Pinker allows us a margin of superiority over robots. But tellingly, he calls humans a “hybrid system”—a rather robotic phrase. His offer of membership to his “Rationalists’ Club” is not especially tempting. Groucho Marx—often quoted by Pinker—had a famous line about that: “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

The post Steven Pinker and the limits of reason appeared first on Prospect Magazine.

The word booster kicked off the pandemic benign and simple, a chipper concept most people linked to things such as morale and rockets. Then, at the start of 2021, the word began to undergo a renaissance. By summer’s end, booster was a common fixture of headlines and Twitter trends; it was suddenly tethered tightly to words such as shot, vaccine, and immunity online, as experts and nonexperts alike clamored for the more, more, more promise of extra protection against SARS-CoV-2. According to Elena Semino, a linguist at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, English-language news reports now deploy the word booster about 20 times more often than they did in pre-COVID times.The pandemic has, in effect, boosted boosters into the public sphere. And yet, we are still really bad at talking about them. In the top echelons of the CDC, in the back alleys of Twitter, no one can seem to agree on who needs boosters, or when or why, or what that term truly, technically means—even as additional shots that officials are calling boosters continue to enter arms. Some experts insist that boosters are necessary; others vehemently disagree; a few have insisted that we shouldn’t be using the B-word at all. Discussions among the rest of us have been no less chaotic. A September poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that more than a third of respondents find information on boosters to be confusing instead of helpful. Last week, my own mother, a retired medical technologist, asked me whether she should get a booster. “What do you think the booster is for?” I asked her. She paused. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know.”The battle over boosters is about more than semantic precision. Without properly defining what these additional injections are, and what they’re intended to accomplish, experts can’t demarcate success. Defining the goals of boosters now would help us figure out who needs them now, who might need them eventually, and even how often we’ll all need them in the future, if we need them at all. To fully capture what boosters can and should do, though, we may need to reframe what that word means to us—or, as some have argued, dispense with it entirely.Booster isn’t new to the vaccine lexicon; American adults, for instance, are asked to tangle with the term every 10 years or so to maintain their defenses against tetanus. But the word sprouted independent of immunization, as the linguist Ben Zimmer recently wrote. Its roots date back to 1801 at the latest, though it’s hard to pinpoint when, or from where, it actually arose. The term has since gained a pretty straightforward connotation—“upward movement.” A boost is a lift, a push, an increase, the ability to take us “to new heights, further than we could otherwise go,” Neil Lewis Jr., a communications and social-behavior expert at Cornell University, told me.We use boosters to raise up children sitting in cars, and to launch rockets into the beyond; boosters naturally evoke ideas of support or benefit, which makes them a PR windfall. By the 1940s or so, perhaps earlier, booster had entered the immunizer’s lexicon, and might have made additional doses of tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, and polio vaccines more palatable to the public. It almost certainly helped “put a positive spin on the need for extra shots” of the inactivated polio vaccine in the latter half of the 20th century, Elena Conis, a vaccine historian at UC Berkeley, told me.But this perky portrait of boosters might obscure why we need them at all. There’s more than one reason to administer an additional dose of the same vaccine. Many immunologists and vaccinologists draw a distinction between doses in the primary series, which create immune protection in a person who’s never been inoculated before, and boosters, which replace those defenses when they’ve started to fade. The primary series can comprise a single dose, or more commonly, multiple, as with two-dose MMR shots, or three-dose hepatitis B vaccines. The aim of a primary series is to reach and maintain a protective threshold, with each dose building iteratively on the quantity, quality, and durability of that defense, and a person can’t be considered fully vaccinated without finishing those initial shots. But once they do, they might never need another injection again. Primary-series doses, in other words, are generative.Boosters are the optional second chapter in this story. They’re not necessary for all vaccines —just the ones whose protection appears to ebb, usually over the course of years, à la the once-per-decade tetanus touch-up. Boosters are restorative, meant to put back something that was once there, but has since been at least partially lost. An added shot “gets you back up to some threshold we know is important,” Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. (Not every shot administered in regular intervals is a booster: The annual flu shot, whose ingredients change every year, is issued less because our bodies are forgetting a specific strain, and more because the many viruses we encounter change so rapidly.)[Read: We’re asking the impossible of vaccines]What we now refer to as boosters, then, might be better described as refresher, refill, or reminder shots—something that signals not just growth, but growth from a place of temporary loss. This mirrors the way several Romance languages describe booster shots: Spanish speakers say refuerzo, a term that signifies reinforcement, while Italians say richiamo, and the French say rappel—both words that signify recollection.For COVID-19 vaccines, booster is already a popular term, but it’s not obvious how restorative the additional shots are, in terms of guarding against the coronavirus. In one group, at least, third shots are generative: people who are moderately or severely immunocompromised, and may not have marshaled a sufficient immune response to their initial vaccine doses. “In this population, that’s really clear,” Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford University and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told me. (There is still, frustratingly, a huge paucity of data on the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, though several experts have told me in recent weeks that J&J’s regimen may become a two-shot primary series for everyone, based on the company’s recent findings.)When it comes to the rest of us, especially people who are younger and healthier, experts remain divided on how to categorize third shots. Anthony Fauci told me recently that he’s very much in the generative camp: “I bet you any amount of whatever that when we finally look back on it,” he said, three doses is going to be “the standard regimen for an mRNA vaccine.” (Still, even Fauci’s been blurring the semantic boundaries. In a recent interview with my colleague Ed Yong at The Atlantic Festival, he alternately described the shot as a “third dose,” a “third-shot booster,” and a “third booster shot” in a five-minute span.)If that turns out to be the case, experts would first need to show that what the first two doses gave us wasn’t good enough, opening up the opportunity for a third jab to make our defenses “more durable, and much more able to protect us” than they were with two shots alone, Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me. But so far, there’s really no clear evidence to suggest that a third shot elevates us into a new tier of protection, especially against the worst COVID-19 outcomes. The two-dose mRNA vaccines are still blocking hospitalizations and deaths to an extraordinary degree. “If the goal is to prevent serious illness, it does that,” said Offit, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. Data from Goel and others back this up on a molecular level. Even several months after getting their second primary doses, vaccinated people (with the possible exception of some folks who are older or not in great health) appear to retain massive legions of immune cells that remember SARS-CoV-2 well enough to thwart it. Some of these defensive populations even seem to be refining themselves into larger and more sophisticated pools of assassins over time, long after the vaccine itself is gone.[Read: You might want to wait to get a booster shot]So maybe these third injections are restorative, meant to replace a defense that has withered over time. The burden of proof for that would be twofold: identifying some sort of waning, as well as evidence that an extra shot reverses the ebb. Inklings of the former have, arguably, started to appear. Vaccines still reduce the chances of getting infected; experiencing nasty, lingering symptoms; and passing the virus on to others. But since the spring, mild-to-moderate sicknesses have become a bit more common among the inoculated. Though some of that’s definitely attributable to the rise of the super-contagious Delta variant, this trend also likely reflects the decline in antibody levels that happens after all vaccinations, as the body, freshly roused by the shot’s contents, starts to return to a peacetime state.That leaves the actual restoration bit. In recent presentations to expert committees that advise the FDA and CDC, Pfizer executives crowed about sky-high antibody levels appearing after vaccine recipients got a third shot—evidence, they said, that the injections were bringing the body’s frontline defenses back up to snuff. That could make it easier for people to fight off infections early, before they turn symptomatic, or spread to someone else.But again, antibody levels always drop. (If the body kept pumping out antibodies ad infinitum, it would drive itself into the ground—and rapidly thicken its own circulatory system into a protein-packed sludge.) That raises the possibility that post-booster bumps in protection, too, might be only temporary. “That’s where I get tripped up,” Stanford’s Lee told me. “If we’re boosting to boost antibodies, will we need another dose six months from now?” Some researchers (and Pfizer’s CEO) think we might need annual, even twice-annual, COVID shots for as long as the virus is with us. That prospect can feel demoralizing, and experts worry about the message it sends to the unvaccinated. “I hear the skepticism,” Lewis, of Cornell, said. “‘Well, if this stuff is just going to keep fading away, what’s the point?’”Another sector of the population doesn’t mind the threat of repetitive boosting—“the more protection, the better” has become a common refrain, as some seek out fourth, fifth, even sixth shots. Cloaked in this behavior is another downside of using booster as our linguistic crutch: its near-unilateral promise of more and more benefit, as if shots can be stockpiled like so many rolls of toilet paper. Some Americans have clearly been clamoring for spare shots since at least the spring, among them booster bandits who wriggled through loopholes to nab their jabs ahead of schedule. “With boosters, you’re getting more, and as consumers, we like more,” Stacy Wood, a marketing expert who studies public perception of vaccines at North Carolina State University, told me. It’s a natural response in times of crisis, she said, to “buffer against a lack of future supply.”[Read: Booster bandits are walking a fine line.]Vaccines, unfortunately, don’t work like that. Boosting too early and too often can be counterproductive, for the same reasons that cramming the night before a big exam is: Immune cells, being the students of microbiology that they are, can’t internalize all that information at once; there’s little point in foisting a second lesson on them when they’re still frantically trying to take notes on the first. Immune responses also have ceilings, and administering shot after shot after shot, even somewhat spaced out, could eventually drag the body toward the point of diminishing returns. “That’s a waste of a vaccine,” Lauren Rodda, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. After about half a dozen tetanus boosters, for example, “no matter how many more you give, you can’t get any higher antibody response,” Mark Slifka, a vaccinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, told me. We actually used to boost more often against tetanus. But countries loosened their requirements after realizing there was no point. Shots also come with side effects, including a small number that, though quite rare, can be dangerous, Slifka said. Data on the safety of third COVID-19 shots are still being gathered, and although the expectation is that they should be very well tolerated, all this is uncharted territory.Such complex calculus is tough to encapsulate with a term like booster. This, perhaps, is part of the fallout when technical, hyper-specific terms “leak into other communities,” Semino, the linguist, told me. “All of a sudden, something for a professional community is being used for everyone.” Pre-pandemic, most of us didn’t automatically tie boost to vaccines. Now we’re being asked to. And it’s very difficult to know how much our booster preconceptions are coloring our attitudes around extra shots—when to get them, how often to get them, when to stop.Calling them reminder shots—vaccines that offer a richiamo or rappel—skirts some of those issues, capturing dimensions of immunity that booster does not: that there is loss; that there is, sometimes, a replenishing; that protection is not linear, and can shift up or down over time. This framing could also be a more clear-eyed way to assess global equity. Boosters, by default, top off resources that have already been given. If the goal is truly to tamp down transmission, infection, and disease on a wide scale, generative shots—especially first doses—will go much further than restorative ones. “Public health is a collective phenomenon,” Martha Lincoln, a medical anthropologist at San Francisco State University, told me. “We can’t pass the buck to individual immune systems.”Boosting and primary-dosing aren’t mutually exclusive goals. But they draw resources from the same, finite pool. And Lee worries that our third-dose mania might be a bit myopic, especially with so many still unvaccinated here in the United States, and around the globe. “In a highly vaccinated population, boosters can really put you over the edge, and reduce overall circulation,” she told me. Eventually, that will be a priority—tailoring our vaccine rollouts to ensure that we’re cutting down on all kinds of infections, to the extent that we can. Right now, though, with Delta still erupting throughout unimmunized communities, and the health-care system unbearably overstretched in many parts of the country, “we’re not even close to where boosters are going to do anything [other] than provide some individual level benefit.” Our own bodies, after all, seem to be remembering SARS-CoV-2 just fine. It’s everyone else we can’t afford to forget.

Only when we admit we have a problem can we begin to find solutions. In the first episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we explore the neuroscience of emotional management, practices that help us befriend our inner monologue, and challenges to getting in touch with our feelings. Our journey to happier living starts with the question: How do I feel right now?This episode features Dan Harris, the former ABC News anchor, meditation expert, and founder of Ten Percent Happier.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Dan Harris: I quite famously or infamously had a panic attack on Good Morning America back in 2004. Backstory there: I had spent a lot of time in war zones as an ambitious young correspondent. I had gotten depressed, didn’t know I was depressed, very unwisely self-medicated with cocaine. I was not high on the air, but I had been using drugs enough for the preceding year that it was enough to change my brain chemistry, according to the shrink I subsequently consulted.That changed my brain chemistry, most likely made it more likely for me to have a panic attack. And that kind of set me off on this strange journey that included psychotherapy and then ultimately meditation. I had no, you know, preexisting interest in meditation. I actually had preexisting hostility. But then I saw the science that really strongly suggests that it can lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, [and] rewire key parts of your brain.Arthur C. Brooks: I really want to dig into what actually you were solving with meditation. I mean, clearly, you were self-medicating because your emotions were managing you in a way that you didn’t like. And so you fought back by trying to block out those emotions. That’s what people do when they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. They’re trying to not be managed by their emotions. And when you actually took control of your life, you did something so that you could manage your emotions. Is that fair?Harris: It’s very fair. In my case, the first application of it was exactly as you described. I was owned by my thoughts, urges, and emotions, which is very common. Most of us walk around completely unaware, at least consciously, of a thunderously obvious fact, which is that we have minds and are thinking. When you’re unaware of this nonstop conversation that you are having with yourself, which if we broadcast loud, you would be locked up. When you’re unaware of that nattering inner voice, it owns you!And so that every little, every thought your mind secretes becomes, as my meditation teacher likes to say, a little dictator. So, Okay, yeah, I should eat a sleeve of Oreos right now or I should say something that’s going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage, and then you just do it. What meditation does is kind of systematically wake you up to the tumult, the inner cacophony, so that you’re not so owned by it.Brooks: What does it feel like when you’re actually meditating? How does it feel like it has changed your life?Harris: The kind of meditation I’m talking about is called mindfulness meditation. It is the kind of meditation that’s been studied the most in the labs. When you hear about the science around meditation, most of that, if not all of it, is really mindfulness meditation. The beginning instruction for mindfulness meditation is to kind of sit quietly, spine reasonably straight, close your eyes.Second is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick one spot where it’s most prominent: your belly rising and falling; your chest rising and falling; air entering, exiting your nostrils. And the third step is the most important; as soon as you try to do this seemingly easy thing of just feeling your breath, your mind is going to go most likely into mutiny mode. You’ll have all sorts of random thoughts. What kind of bird was Big Bird? Who was Casper the Friendly Ghost before he died? Blah, blah, blah—just, like, random thoughts, powerful urges, powerful emotions. You’re just going to see very quickly how distractible you are.Many people have the experience of trying to do this, realizing how distractible they are and thinking that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy that precludes them and only them from doing this thing called meditation, but that’s a pernicious misconception: “Clearing your mind is impossible unless you’re enlightened or you’ve died.” The goal of meditation is not to stop all thoughts, but just to change your relationship to these thoughts.So every time you get hit by a random thought or urge or emotion, you just notice that it’s happened and start again and again and again. And every time you notice, you’ve wandered off, and you start again; that’s like a bicep curl for your brain. And that’s what shows up on the brain scans. And what this does—to get to the question you actually asked me—what this does is develop a skill called mindfulness, which you could just translate into “self-awareness.”Brooks: You said that you started out as kind of a cynic about meditation. I’ve heard you talk about this before, and, of course, I know about your journey and I love your book and your podcast. And you went from cynic about meditation to a skeptic about meditation. For the skeptical, make the case.Harris: Well, for me, what got me over the skepticism or the cynicism? Well, probably both, really, was the science. The science is particularly strong around anxiety and depression, both of which I’ve struggled with since I was a little kid. There’s the neuroscience, which is really the sort of “wow” stuff.And it shows how even short daily doses of meditation among people who’ve never done it before, it can change the way your brain looks. It can shrink your amygdala, the stress center. It can boost your prefrontal cortex, which is the home of our logical, rational thinking. It can really have a nice impact, it seems, on the area of the brain associated with attention, regulation, self-awareness, and compassion.Brooks: People who have had a lot of good things, a lot of things go right in their lives, you and me—it’s pretty easy to talk about loving-kindness meditation and just meditation in general when you’ve had a lot of privilege in your life. When people level this accusation—talking about meditation and managing your feelings is a privileged conversation—what do you say?Harris: I’ll speak for myself that, I mean, I had two loving parents, upper-middle-class household, white and male and straight. But happiness is something that every sentient being wants. Whether you have had the amount of luck that I’ve had or not, whether you’re a grasshopper or a human.There’s a reason why these practices are being taught in foster-care homes and juvenile halls and prisons and hospitals. And there’s a reason why it speaks to so many people, no matter their socioeconomic status … I like to use my platform to spread the word about this and to give a megaphone to folks who look different than I do, who can speak to communities that don’t want to hear from me.Brooks: Last but not least, when our listeners are next caught behind the most idiotic driver they’ve ever seen in their entire lives and they want to scream out the window or flip them off or get in front of them and cut them off, what do they do?Harris: … At some point, you may notice that you’re enraged. Try just repeating in your mind—you may have to grip the steering wheel while you do this, but: “May you be happy.” Try that, because what we’re doing here is, I use this phrase before, is like counterprogramming against the habitual storylines and narratives and thought patterns.Brooks: I know, and I don’t want our listeners to miss the truly radical thing that you said in that answer: Notice that you’re in a rage. That’s it, because reactivity starts with you not noticing it and acting. Notice that you’re in a rage. Say to yourself, I’m in a rage. You can’t say “May you be happy” until you notice something about yourself. And the moment that you notice your own feelings is the moment that it becomes something that you can manage. Thank you, Dan Harris.Brooks: As a social scientist, people are always my subject of choice. Each week, we’ll share little audio snippets from our listeners around the world. They answered this question: When is the last time you remember being truly happy?Listener submission: The last time that I experienced happiness was the other day when I took my children to play in the park. I wasn’t distracted by my phone. I wasn’t streaming something on the device. I wasn’t trying to read or debate or find out about something polemic or partisan in the media. I was in the moment with my children. Letting them chase me, chasing them. And that moment when we were running together in this big field at the park, I felt happiness. It was definitely one of those moments when I felt joy. I could tell that this was a moment that I did not want to forget anytime soon. Brooks: What I want to do now is to go back to the initial goal for this show: how to manage your feelings so they don’t manage you. Each day this coming week: Set aside 15 minutes in the evening after the end of your day, before you go to bed. Now think a little bit about the strongest negative basic emotion you had today. Was it anger? Were you sad? Did you feel disgusted? Were you afraid? Think about it; observe it as if it had happened to somebody else.State the emotion out loud and its context specifically. Let me give you an example: Let’s say you’re having kind of a health challenge—everybody does from time to time—and it’s giving you some fear, some anxiety about the future. You might say today after lunch, I felt kind of afraid because I thought about the medical tests that I have coming up with my doctor. I thought about it for about an hour, and I thought about really all the worst-case scenarios. I kind of ruminated on them. I even Googled my symptoms. Now, don’t judge yourself; don’t judge your feelings; don’t judge your actions; just observe them in this way and state them out loud. This is what happened. Now you can do so using Dan’s meditation techniques if you want, or just do it simply like I described it right here.Second, let’s analyze the feeling that you had, as if you were doing it for somebody else, a close friend. For example, say, Look, I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know what the outcomes might be. That uncertainty that I feel about this problem is the reason I thought about the worst-case scenarios. What was I doing? I was really trying to explore the possibilities so I could manage them emotionally. That’s what I was doing. But here’s the thing: I found it didn’t help at all, because I didn’t learn anything. In fact, I think it made me feel a little worse and I wasted a bunch of my time.Now move on to step three: Manage the feeling with a positive resolution. For example, say, you know a much better way for me to deal with this anxiety I have about these medical tests is to say to myself, I don’t know what these tests are going to reveal, but I’m going to know soon enough. Now, it’s on a long list of uncertain things in the world. There’s so many things that I don’t know. I’m going to choose to focus on what I do know, and what I do know is that I’m alive and well right now. And I do know that I will not waste the gift that is this moment. I will not waste my time after lunch tomorrow, which can be spent doing generative, creative things and maybe showing love to other people.Now, don’t forget to put the resolution into practice. One good way to do it is to write down your resolution—your resolution about how you’re going to deal with your feelings tomorrow. And then, put an alarm on your phone to remind you to actually think about your resolution proactively, so your mind doesn’t wander in this darker direction.Do this every day for a week, by which I mean: Every day after dinner, but before you go to bed, do this 15-minute activity. Sometimes it will be the same negative emotions. These are hard to get rid of. Don’t kid yourself; this is not a one-day deal. If you make this a routine, if you stick with this for three weeks to a month, I promise you you’re going to be amazed at the level of self-management you attain! Are you going to be perfect? No, of course not. And you will still have negative emotions, which you need to have. But at the same time, as time goes on, you’ll be more and more the one in charge, and your happiness will rise.This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez, Katherine Wells, and Gillian White. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael. Listen to full-length episodes on YouTube.We want to hear from you! Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091.Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche De Luces”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”).

Last week, a man called Malcolm Offord joined the Government as a minister in the Scottish Office. This was a surprising appointment. His electoral experience seems limited, although he did fail to win a Lothian region seat in the Holyrood vote earlier this year. He was also backer of a pro-Union group in the 2014 referendum.
But the financier’s real qualification for office seems to be the accruement of a fortune so great that it enabled him to donate £147,500 to the Tories. So now he has been given a lovely lifetime place in parliament to rule over us with a peerage, plus the added bonus of a ministerial job with all those nice perks of office and status.
Offord will find himself in good company in the House of Lords. The Financial Times last year worked out that the elevation of billionaire Tory benefactor Michael Spicer made him the 22nd former donor to be given a peerage in 13 years. Between them, they had given more than £50m to the three main parties.

Boris Johnson displays a special fondness for placing pals and party donors in the upper chamber; such folk comprise about one quarter of the people he has ennobled. The prime minister even overruled the appointments’ commission to force disgraced former party treasurer Peter Cruddas into the Lords. Lo and behold, the grateful new peer bunged another half a million into Tory coffers a few days after taking up his seat.
Yet Britons like to believe their country is not corrupt, preferring to lecture others on good governance. The harsh truth is the House of Lords, an archaic institution stuffed with people who bought seats or inherited titles, serves as a grotesque symbol of the blatant corruption that stains our nation. Instead of hiding the fact that well-connected people can buy power and influence, we hand them fancy titles, silly crests and scarlet robes.
Suggested readingWhy the elites have no shameBy Mary Harrington
Perhaps this is part of the same deluded exceptionalism that makes many Britons believe their empire was less brutal, damaging and greedy than others. Yet once again, we see how Britain is being built on foundations of stolen loot, led by the City of London as its accountants, bankers, estate agents, financiers and lawyers wash mountains of dirty cash for the planet’s dodgiest people. Another scandal has broken with the Pandora Papers, the latest massive cache of leaked papers, giving a glimpse into the hidden wealth, tax dodging and money laundering of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. And with sickening inevitably, we see once again how our nation sits at the epicentre of these tawdry activities.
Take the revelations about the Aliyevs, the ruling family of oil-rich Azerbaijan which is led by a friend of Prince Andrew and has been home to huge British investment. When I visited Baku in 2012, I met an astonishingly brave woman called Khadija Ismayilova, who has endured blackmail, been filmed on hidden cameras having sex in her home and been imprisoned on trumped-up charges to stop her exposing corruption.
Another activist told me why he always locked his car: “Not just to stop people taking things but to stop the police planting drugs or a weapon.” Now we learn that a network of offshore companies tied to this gruesome family and its close associates has traded almost £400m of UK property over the past 15 years — including flogging a £67m property to the Queen’s crown estate.
Yet this is an autocratic regime frequently condemned for its nefarious activities that include rigged elections. Ismayilova and other journalists risked their liberty to fight for the democratic values we claim to espouse, revealing how their first family benefitted from state contracts awarded through hidden shell companies — including the £177m showpiece Crystal Hall used for the Eurovision Song Contest, which gave me cover to enter the country as a journalist. The European Union and human rights groups have condemned the “widespread and pervasive” corruption that scars Azerbaijan. Yet the Aliyevs were not stopped from buying and selling many lucrative properties in Kensington, Knightsbridge and Mayfair. One purchase was even made through an offshore company owned by the ruler’s son when he was 11.
Again, these sleazy disclosures cut deep into the heart of the UK establishment. They include one Russian businessman whose companies have backed 34 Tory MPs and made millions from an allegedly corrupt Russian pipeline deal, while another prominent Tory donor who backed Johnson’s leadership campaign was reportedly involved in one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals. Only last month it emerged that George Osborne won business from a firm run by Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch close to Vladimir Putin and banned from the United States. It came through his friendship with the firm’s chairman Lord Barker, a former Tory minister in the coalition given a life peerage.
Suggested readingThe hypocrisy of David CameronBy Peter Franklin
Similarly, half of Russian money-laundering involves Britain while our lawyers earn fortunes from their oligarchs fighting legal battles in London’s courts. No wonder Putin sees the West as so weak. The Pandora Papers show how even Raffaele Amato — the mobster tied to a dozen murders who inspired the gangster TV show Gomorrah — was able to use a shell company registered in the UK to buy property.
Five years ago, David Cameron hosted a landmark anti-corruption summit in London that underlined the self-deception — just a few weeks before losing the Brexit ballot and going off to lobby for Lex Greensill. We pour vast sums in aid into combating corruption around the world, then ignore how much of it is stolen by repulsive regimes.
The current chancellor Rishi Sunak seems complacent, claiming Britain’s track record on tackling money laundering is “very strong” while promoting freeports, So is it any wonder the Government does so little to stem the flow of dirty money, let alone shut down the tax havens under our jurisdiction that do so much harm to the world? Looters and thieves need help to stash their stolen cash. And according to the Tax Justice Network, the three places that do most to support such practices are the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda — all of which come under our flag. An analysis of these latest documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found 956 companies in offshore havens tied to 336 leaders, politicians and senior officials — with more than two-thirds set up in the British Virgin Islands.
Westminster could stop providing cover for crooks, despots and dodgy oligarchs with ease, if it were not so complicit. The Government has repeatedly pledged to bring in a register of the owners of the 100,000 offshore-owned properties; instead, we discover former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie saved themselves £312,000 in stamp duty using such tactics. The National Crime Agency’s international corruption unit has an annual budget of about £4m — which one quarter of the sum spent by its target, Zamira Hajiyeva, wife of a fraudulent Azerbaijani banker, in Harrods on jewellery and designer clothes. Needless to say, her £15m Knightsbridge home was owned by a company based in the British Virgin Islands.
Meanwhile, governments encourage City advisory firms to spread like knotweed in the undergrowth of Whitehall, where they rake off big sums from taxpayers even as they advise plutocrats and multinationals how to avoid paying fair dues to the exchequer. The “Big Four” accountancy firms have been accused by parliament of using expertise from staff seconded to the Treasury to help clients avoid tax. But as the civil service was cut back, ministers increased use of these consultancies. The pandemic boosted their earnings again as normal rules on tendering were ditched. So we see a firm such as Mckinsey pay out fines over links to a destructive South African corruption scandal and its lethal role in the US opioid addiction crisis, yet its advisers are still hired on hefty daily rates by Whitehall.
More from this authorThe dictator who fooled usBy Ian Birrell
Britain needs to wake up. The mother of democracy has given birth to a system that aids kleptocrats and thieves. And as the famous saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. When appointing his latest minister, Johnson claimed he scoured the country for the best talent and gave Offord the job and peerage because he had “a huge amount to offer”. Few will be fooled.
The Prime Minister’s words drip with contempt for all those artists, carers, doctors, factory workers, retailers, teachers, scientists and soldiers who might contribute far more to the benefit of our nation in return for the £323 attendance allowance in the Lords — a tax-free daily sum roughly the same as the weekly minimum wage. Behind our facade of democracy, led by such a selfish and soiled elite, lies a country hideously stained with corruption.

Evolution is often portrayed as a straightforward process, by myself in addition to others. Add those three simple ingredients—variation, selection, and replication—and poof! Organisms become well-adapted to their environments.
In reality, evolution is often much more complex, to the point of not taking place at all or even resulting in maladaptive outcomes. One complication is when an adaptation consists of multiple traits that must evolve in coordination with each other. Another complication is when multiple traits are tied together by developmental processes and are difficult to decouple. Still another complication is when the environment varies, either arbitrarily or in a frequency-dependent fashion.
Two visual metaphors—adaptive landscapes from evolutionary theory and basins of attraction from complex systems theory, convey some of these complications. With adaptive landscapes, selection is envisioned as an upward force in a landscape with many peaks and valleys. Climbing up the slope of a hill is straightforward but getting from one peak to another is more difficult. With basins of attraction, gravity is envisioned as a downward force in a landscape that consists of multiple adjacent basins. Falling into a given basin is straightforward but moving between basins is more difficult. Even these metaphors fail to convey the complexity of real-world systems, such as non-equilibrium dynamics that do not settle into any basin and frequency-dependent processes that turn peaks into valleys.
All of these complications apply to cultural evolution in addition to genetic evolution. Take regenerative agriculture as an example. Past cultural evolution has resulted in means of food production that are highly adaptive by some criteria (e.g., corporate profits and efficiency of production) but highly maladaptive by other criteria (e.g., loss of biodiversity, crowding out small and middle-size farms, loss of soil, contributing to climate change and flooding, toxins in the environment). Regenerative agriculture is an alternative system of agriculture that is more systemic in its goals, including closing the carbon cycle, building up the soil, improving the water cycle, increasing biodiversity, and fostering thriving human communities.
Assume, for a moment, that a broad coalition came together to bring regenerative agriculture into being. How would they go about doing it? One step might be to develop a number of perennial crops that do not require tilling the soil on an annual basis. But how can a market be created for these crops and where is the supply chain to get them from farm to table? How can farmers be persuaded to take a gamble on transitioning, especially when it makes them different from their neighbors? How can the multiple objectives of regenerative agriculture be achieved when many of them are likely to trade off against each other? 
This thought experiment reveals that managing the cultural evolution of an entirely new system of agriculture will be a daunting challenge. But it isn’t a thought experiment. An initiative at the University of Minnesota called Forever Green, headed by Professor Nicholas R. Jordan, has actually assembled a broad coalition that includes Prosocial World (PW), the nonprofit organization that I preside over.
Not only will Forever Green be one of the most ambitious efforts to transition from conventional farming practices to regenerative agriculture, but it will be explicitly framed in terms of stewarded cultural evolution. This is due not only to the participation of myself and my PW colleagues, but also Jordan’s training in evolutionary biology, a long tradition of animal and plant breeding in agricultural science, and an equally long tradition of agricultural innovation studies.
David Sloan Wilson (DSW): Greetings, Nick! I’m looking forward to presenting the amazing project that you are spearheading to the world. Let’s begin with your own personal background and academic training. Why did you become interested in regenerative agriculture?  How did your training combine both basic evolutionary biology and animal and plant breeding?
Nicholas R. Jordan (NRJ): I had several rich experiences as a young teenager that shaped my life and interests.  First, my mother—then working as a pediatrician in a rural Massachusetts town—somehow correctly intuited that I would enjoy working on a vegetable farm for the summer (of 1968).  I was fascinated by the plants, by working with my fellow farmhands, and by the humanity and savoir-faire of Mr. Henderson, the farmer, and my employer.  I have a letter of recommendation from him on hand, ready for use someday.  Secondly, my mother brought home a copy of Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus, which opened my eyes to botany, natural history, ethnobotany, and the intertwining of plants and human cuisine and culture.  Suddenly, I was acutely aware that a) I knew the names of very few of the plants around me and b) I keenly wished to remedy this situation.  I set about learning about plants, observing their ecology, associated insects and etc. I had influential teachers in 8th-12th grades who reinforced all of these interests.  My high-school teachers had doctorates in ecology and evolution.  One of them would take us (half a dozen passionate students) on long excursions to warm climates during the school’s winter term, which encouraged study out-of-school.  I had the opportunity to sit around campfires for weeks every year of high school, interrogating my teacher about ecology and evolution.  And I read a fair bit of natural history, esp. about reptiles and amphibians, which had become another passion. And I kept on learning plants. I also started growing vegetables.  I then continued to focus on evolution and ecology at Harvard College and was influenced by Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist and faculty member who paid attention to agriculture, which was otherwise not much on the radar screen at Harvard.  I got a Ph.D. in botany and genetics at Duke, spent time with students and faculty at NC State, and at that point, my interest in agroecology and especially evolutionary processes in agroecosystems had come into focus.
DSW: Wow—that’s education as it should be! I also went through a Euell Gibbons phase. I still remember the Day Lily tubers that weren’t quite as delicious as he said they would be.  Now let’s define the basic concept of regenerative agriculture. What would you like to add to my brief description?
NRJ: Regenerative agriculture is a fairly recent term, and yet has acquired a range of meanings.  Most commonly, it refers to agricultural production methods that protect soil by minimizing disturbance, maintaining plant residue cover on soil, providing living and active roots in soil for as much of the annual cycle as possible, and diversifying agricultural plant communities. These methods, if practiced consistently, can increase “soil health”, by building soil organic matter and soil biological communities, which in turn enhance beneficial ecological processes often referred to as “soil services”, which include nutrient cycling that efficiently supports crop production with minimal export of nutrients beyond the agroecosystem, storage of rainwater, provision of habitat for beneficial biodiversity, and others. 
This is a somewhat narrow and reductive definition, however. Regenerative agriculture can also be understood as approaches to farming and agriculture that enhance other forms of health, including of ecosystems in agriculture landscapes, of water in these landscapes, and of human communities and economies.  The fundamental idea of regenerative agriculture is a notion of healing – on the premise that earlier and current forms of agriculture have broadly damaged the forms of health that I’ve mentioned. Broadly, regenerative agriculture aims to redress this legacy of damage.
DSW: Before we get to the main event, which is the coalition that you have assembled and the systemic effort that is about to take place, it’s important to note that current agricultural practices were brought about by a systemic effort involving federal and state governments, land grant universities, and agricultural corporations. Also, some of the most classic studies of the diffusion of innovations have been on agricultural innovations such as new corn varieties1. Does the extensive and conscious effort that led to the current system hold lessons for transitioning to a new system?
NRJ: I certainly think so, and it is very important to be conscious of and critically reflective on this history, as my friend and colleague Scott Peters has done throughout his work.
DSW: Indeed! My TVOL conversation and podcast with Scott nicely complements our conversation.
 NRJ: In brief, we now live in an era of awareness of the consequences of agricultural and food systems. In the past, this awareness was understandably less developed, and so the boundaries of concern were more narrow, focusing on the quantity of food production, with less concern about the impacts of production on the biophysical environment and on people—from workers in agriculture and food systems to food-related aspects of wellbeing, such as food-related illness and over-and-under-nutrition.
Now agricultural innovators are becoming more aware of tradeoffs associated with agricultural innovations – i.e., the mixture of beneficiaries and victims that result from the scaling of innovations.  It, therefore, behooves innovators to be more careful to perceive and anticipate such tradeoffs and potential impacts on beneficiaries and victims. It is also important to be more democratic, by engaging these groups in the governance of innovation and more responsive to democratic governance of innovation. These principles of anticipation, democracy, and inclusion are pillars of so-called “responsible innovation”, an emerging practice that is very relevant to the work of our project on regenerative agriculture.
DSW: I want to underscore the generality of the points you have just made. In my own writing, I distinguish two meanings of the term complex adaptive system: A complex system that is adaptive as a system (CAS1), and a complex system composed of agents following their respective adaptive strategies (CAS2)2. The main take-home message is that CAS2 systems do not robustly self-organize into CAS1 systems. Put another way, Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand, which magically permutes lower-level self-interest into the higher-order common good, is profoundly untrue except in the narrowest of contexts. For a complex system to become adaptive as a whole system, it must be selected as a whole system.
Applying these generalities to regenerative agriculture, the current agricultural system is a CAS2 system. Various agents within the system are pursuing separate adaptive strategies in ways that do not make the system adaptive as a whole. It is important to stress that the pathologies of CAS2 systems do not necessarily reflect bad intentions. A particular agent within the system might have the best of intentions (for example, feeding the world or operating under the assumptions of the shareholder value model), which are nevertheless subverted by unforeseen consequences. Once we grasp the fundamental insight that system-level adaptation requires system-level selection, we can become more effective at converting our current CAS2 system into a CAS1 system.
This is my own evolutionary interpretation of what you are trying to do. Tell us about the coalition you have assembled to transition to regenerative agriculture in the American Midwest.
NRJ: The Forever Green Partnership is a multi-sector partnership working to advance year-round productive living cover or “Continuous Living Cover” on farmland. The Partnership unites members from private, public, and advocacy sectors around a common interest in increasing Continuous Living Cover in agriculture to capitalize on its many economic and environmental benefits. We work to diversify and strengthen Midwestern agriculture by adding crops that can grow in fall and spring as well as summer and can thrive on slopes and other locations where row crops struggle.  Convened and hosted by the University of Minnesota, the Partnership seeks to be inclusive and enhance equity and diversity as it increases Continuous Living Cover.  The Forever Green Partnership has organized two major collaborative projects that engage public, private, and advocacy sectors to add value to the extensive research and development and commercialization work being done on Continuous Living Cover crops. The Steering Council brings thought and action leaders in public, private, and advocacy sectors together to resource, build and evaluate scalable Continuous Living Cover systems that will enhance economic, environmental, and social aspects of agriculture. The Learning and Experimentation Network brings people from a variety of on-the-ground projects together to learn from experience and share what works in efforts to commercialize and expand Continuous Living Cover agriculture.
As you know, the Partnership is exploring an explicitly evolutionary strategy for change, entailing intentional processes of concerted cultural evolution across the sectors and scales of activity encompassed by the Partnership. Specifically, we are approaching continuous-living-cover agriculture as a cultural phenomenon, integrating both biophysical dimensions (what we grow and how we grow it) and many social dimensions, including economy, knowledge, politics, among others.
DSW: Right! Thanks to your own evolutionary background and the involvement of PW, this project is framed explicitly as an effort to manage variation-selection-replication processes in multiple contexts and at multiple scales. Let’s focus on a major component of the project, which is the development of a novel perennial grain crop, intermediate wheatgrass, known commercially as Kernza®. This objective has both a genetic and cultural component. Developing intermediate wheatgrass is an exercise in genetic evolution, while commercialization and widespread adoption of Kernza® is an exercise in human cultural evolution. In both cases, evolution could be relatively straightforward, like climbing the slope of a single peak, but is likely to be more complex, like navigating a rugged adaptive landscape. So, let’s tell the same story twice; first for the development of the wheat variety (genetic evolution) and again for its adoption (cultural evolution).
NRJ:  This work is a de novo development of a grain crop.  Intermediate wheatgrass has been previously domesticated as a perennial grass for use as a forage crop and in managed grassland, but the seeds of this form of the species are small (about the size of lawngrass seed) and make for a very poor sort of grain!  Development of the species as a grain crop was begun about 30 years ago by the Rodale Research Institute.  That effort ran out of steam, but the baton was picked up by the Land Institute, core members of the Forever Green network.  The University of Minnesota began collaborating with the TLI on breeding, agronomy, and agroecology research ca. 2012, and in 2020 the Kernza CAP (collaborative agriculture project) was founded, funded by a $10 million, five-year grant from the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Systems (SAS) funding program.  I mention this grant because the SAS funding program explicitly (and admirably) calls for “transdisciplinary” projects that will develop novel systems by which agricultural sustainability goals can be advanced. The Kernza CAP addresses this call with a work plan that advances both the genetic development of Kernza and its commercialization and scaling. The latter is not explicitly framed as a project of intentional cultural evolution but the CAP’s work plan is clearly compatible with such a project.
In terms of the metaphor of “navigating a rugged adaptive landscape”, a certain amount of navigation has indeed been required in the genetic advancement of intermediate wheatgrass.  Initially, the goal was straightforward – improving seed size in the hope of producing a respectable grain.  Impressive progress in that regard has been made.  Now, other key traits have come into play in addition to grain size.  These include yield and its temporal duration – current levels of seed grain yield are only about 1/3 of those of annual wheat, per unit land area, and this yield begins to decline substantially after the third year of production.  Other traits become of potential interest, such as the viability of the crop as a forage crop for ca. 6-8 months after harvest and before flowering begins the next year. The crop might also be viable for the production of protein concentrates from biomass, as technologies for the production of such concentrates from juices expressed from harvested herbage of perennial grasses are rapidly maturing.  Of course, regional and local adaptation will become important goals as the geographic range of production expands.  More broadly, integrative breeding programs are now emerging globally as a means of advancing crops for diversified agroecosystems. These entail the integration of genomic and conventional methods with participatory breeding methods in which farmers and other actors in supply/value chains join as integral members of the breeding program. These strategies may offer important means to reduce the cost and time periods associated with breeding for diversification crops. Thus, we see a broad “complexification” of intermediate wheatgrass, in which new goals, methods, and actors are coming into play together. While this dynamic represents a major increase in the base of resources advancing IWG, this also moves IWG development towards a CAS2 situation, in terms of your typology above.
DSW: Thanks! Your account goes a long way toward describing the complexities of consciously directed genetic evolution, which inherently has a human cultural component. Now for more on consciously directed human cultural evolution! 
NRJ: When it comes to the commercialization and widespread adoption of Kernza® as an exercise in human cultural evolution,  a few twists and turns have occurred in this work as well. The initial development of a supply/value chain for Kernza was entrusted to a contracted firm, which proved unable to manage this.  At the same time (ca. 2018), General Mills stepped forward with a well-publicized project of initial commercialization, developing a breakfast cereal (Kernza Honey Crunch!).  It quickly became clear that there wasn’t nearly enough Kernza to allow the launch of a product; instead, a limited run of the Crunch occurred, with generally favorable “reviews” from informed observers of the effort.  At the same time, it was widely reported that “crop failure” was the basis of the perceived pulling-back of General Mills; in reality, the failure was to realistically project the available supply of Kernza grain; this was a failure of intermediation between farmers and General Mills, not a failure of the crop to grow and yield as anticipated.  However, this “bad PR” continues to reverberate, 2-3 years later.  In response, it became clear to the developers of intermediate wheatgrass—in terms of its genetics, agronomy, and agroecology—needed to take the reins of the commercialization of Kernza. Therefore TLI and UMN undertook a very closely collaborative commercialization and scaling project, supported by dedicated staff members at each organization, and now amplified and funded by the Kernza CAP. This effort has embraced concerted cultural evolution as a working strategy for commercialization and scaling and is now implementing that strategy. In practice, this means developing a set of pilot supply/value chain projects across a range of sites differing in biophysical and social factors, developing a capacity for these projects (which can be seen as units of cultural evolution) to be differentially rewarded with further investment on the basis of their success, and for key elements of these projects to “recombine” to further advance their success. Finally, the Kernza commercialization effort has affiliated with a broader project, as described above, to use concerted cultural evolution to accelerate the commercialization and scaling of a portfolio of novel crops and agroecosystems for Continuous Living Cover agriculture in the US Midwest.
DSW: Speaking for myself, it is humbling to have an opportunity to become involved in this project and then come face to face with its complexity. I want to learn more about the involvement of major corporations such as General Mills, federal agencies such as the USDA, and state-level organizations such as the University of Minnesota and its cooperative extension service. It is easy to classify them as the enemy responsible for the problems, but is there a sense in which they sincerely want to become involved in finding the solutions? To what extent are we dealing with a conflict of interest situation (e.g., based on profit motives in the case of corporations), as opposed to a “wicked common problem” situation?
NRJ: I have no doubt that the firms and institutions you mention are sincerely interested in contributing to systemic solutions to grand challenges facing agriculture and food systems. First, their customers and clients are increasingly demanding action on these challenges. Second, all recognize that they have other practical interests in responding to these challenges. For example, major food manufacturers have identified substantial climate-related risks to their operations. Finally, and critically, many persons working in these situations feel personally motivated, as conscientious members of society, to strive to respond to these challenges. Of course, all of these institutions and firms face tradeoffs between future-facing investments and the imperatives of present-day operations and clientele. And of course these tradeoffs constraint participation in cross-sector initiatives; however, I believe that institutions and firms increasingly recognize that they have a vital interest in managing these tradeoffs so as to balance the needs of the future with the needs of the present. That said, we see increasing investment in such initiatives by actors in these firms and institutions.  A particularly important manifestation of this investment is a willingness to engage in sustained efforts to determine how new crops and commodities from diversified agroecosystems can be integrated into the supply/value chains that are at the heart of these firms’ operations. Engagement in such efforts is now going well beyond staff focusing on sustainability programs, to engage core technical personnel whose expert judgment is needed to guide such integration, which is very complex and multifaceted.
DSW: That is very encouraging. Now let’s focus on your current and future efforts at consciously directed evolution. Who are the stakeholders and what are the resources that you have brought together?  What do you think that Prosocial World adds to the collective enterprise?
NRJ: Our working hypothesis is that conscious facilitation of all of the elements of intentional cultural evolution will accelerate the transformational changes in agricultural and food systems that we seek. Our premise is that while many components of such intentional evolution are commonplace elements of innovation and scaling efforts (e.g., facilitation of learning among members of a multi-sector collective action), it is very rare to manage a change initiative so that all necessary components of a cultural evolution process will function robustly.  Therefore, we are trying to manage our project in that way and to rigorously document the outcomes.  Specifically, we are trying to observe and assess relevant processes, such as identification of an explicit systemic goal for the regenerative agri-food systems we are constructing, differential provision of resources to more successful prototypes of such systems, development of new prototypes by intentional recombination of elements of such systems, and propagation and dissemination of more successful prototypes. We are also assessing the function of this intentional process of cultural evolution through the eyes of participants.  How does the process, as a strategy for accelerating transformative change, seem to them?  How does it compare to business-as-usual alternatives?  We have been able to amass funding to support this project and inquiry in a reasonably substantial way. The cast of characters is a complex and novel institution called the “Forever Green Partnership”.  We are building this institution as an intentionally constructed multi-level prosocial polycentric cooperative structure. Is that enough jargon for you, by the way?
By prosocial, we mean that the partnership is undergirded by the systematic application of Ostrom’s core design principles for effective cooperative groups3. By polycentric, we mean that the partnership brings together multiple governing/decision-making centers, which are partially autonomous, but also interdependent, and which function on a range of scales.  The partnership is functionally organized around three interactive levels of activity. There is an intermediating group, which we term the “Learning and Experimentation Network” (LEN). The LEN is integrated functionally with 1) a cross-sector Forever Green Steering Council that defines economic, environmental, and social sustainability criteria by which prototype regenerative systems are judged, and which provides supporting resources to prototype systems that best meet these criteria;  2) a set of place-based regenerative-agriculture prototype projects, spanning multiple locations and multiple crops. Thus, the LEN is a pivotal nexus, connecting levels in the Partnership, and mediating key processes of variation, selection, and transmission in an intentional process of cultural evolution. The Steering Council is composed of thought and action leaders from a wide range of organizations, firms, and governing bodies, spanning public, private, and NGO sectors. The LEN is composed of individuals who are organizing regenerative-agriculture prototype pilot efforts, and otherwise working to advance new crops and new agroecosystem and agricultural landscape designs needed to enable transformative change in agricultural and food systems. The place-based pilot projects engage a wide variety of place-based actors, and also actors working at scales beyond the particular localities of the pilots, such as NGOs working to develop national markets for ecosystem services. Therefore, we have the potential to enlist a very wide range of sectors, actors, and places in this project of intentional cultural evolution and are working actively to do so.
Of course, Prosocial World stands as a highly unique thought/action network and institution around the vital challenge of enhancing constructive collective action across sectors and scales.  Prosocial World is therefore an essential partner in this work, and in particular, provides vital coaching around the facilitation of processes of intentional cultural evolution, and in the evaluation of the Forever Green Partnership as a vehicle for intentional cultural evolution.
DSW: It should be obvious from our conversation that regenerative agriculture is hugely multifaceted, going beyond Kernza commercialization and even continuous living crop agriculture. In any particular locality or context, some facets will be more salient than others and also more evolvable than others, based on the presence and absence of constraining factors. How can stewarding the cultural evolution of whole systems take these contextual factors into account, while also focusing on a specific facet, such as Kernza commercialization?
NRJ: I think the key thing is to manage a duality – every element of our system for intentional cultural evolution (i.e., the Forever Green Partnership, as described above) has some degree of self-interest in playing their role in the system. For example, the Steering Council is providing resources to (i.e., selecting) certain regenerative agriculture prototypes because the interests of particular Steering Council members are advanced by those prototypes.  And also, a large collective interest in accelerating transformation via intentional cultural evolution is also advanced when Partnership members at all levels play their various roles. Partnership members are variously interested in and conscious of this duality, but we are attempting to engage in dialogue about the duality at every opportunity.  Thus, members have a self-interest in dealing with the contextual factors that you mention, while also having an interest in the function of the large whole.  Or at least that is our working hypothesis!
DSW: Finally, there is tremendous interest in regenerative agriculture—and more generally regenerative culture—around the world. How can your initiative be made maximally relevant to their initiatives?
NRJ:  The polycentric structure of the Forever Green Partnership is designed to attract the interest and participation of actors from many different sectors, on grounds of enhancing their power and agency by enlisting in a common project that can allow these actors to pursue their own particular interests by investing in a common cooperative structure that creates a collective agency to advance regenerative systems, including the cultural elements that you point to.  Or at least, again, that is our working hypothesis!
 DSW: I’m delighted to have had this conversation with you and to make it widely available, which takes a step toward connecting your initiative to worldwide interest in regenerative (agri)culture. I look forward to reporting on our progress at regular intervals.
NRJ: For my part, I’m deeply grateful for our partnership, David, and for the opportunity to tap into—and contribute to—the resources and the thought/action network of Prosocial World!
[1] Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). New York: Free Press.
[2] Wilson, D. S. (2016). Two meanings of complex adaptive systems. In Complexity and Evolution: A New Synthesis for Economics. MIT Press.
[3] For more on Elinor Ostrom and her Core Design Principles, go here: https://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/
The post Stewarding the Cultural Evolution of Complex Systems: The Case of Regenerative Agriculture appeared first on This View Of Life.

Facebook has recently paused the development of their “Instagram Kids” project after a whistleblower leaked internal documents showing that Facebook's own research finds a link between poor mental health and Instagram use. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said a slide in a presentation given to Facebook executives, “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another. Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal’s expose has led to a bipartisan backlash against Facebook, with law-makers, child advocates, psychologists, and users themselves describing the harmful effects of social media as the “public health issue of our time.”For years psychologists have been warning the public that social media, and Instagram in particular, were contributing to large increases in depression and anxiety in teenagers, especially girls. Jean Twenge, psychology professor at San Diego State University whose research looks at generational trends found in very large data sets, described in her 2017 book, “iGen,” sharp decreases in behaviours that prepare young people for adulthood such as driving, dating, socialising at parties, and working. American 12th grader experiences with driving, alcohol, dating and working from iGen by Jean Twenge.These trends have occurred in parallel with sharp increases in anxiety and depression, and general feelings of loneliness for this cohort. Twenge’s hypothesis in 2017 was that these trendlines corresponded with widespread changes in behaviour driven by smartphones, as well as the ubiquitous adoption of social media by teens. No other plausible hypothesis for these trends has emerged, and since 2017, they have become more pronounced. Now Facebook’s own research appears to confirm Twenge's hypothesis.Percentage of American teens (12-17 years) experiencing a major depressive episode in the past 12 months. Source: National Survey of Drug Use and HealthAppearing on this week's Quillette podcast to discuss Instagram and mental health, is New York University social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, who co-wrote The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff. Haidt has hypothesised that Instagram exacerbates the normal anxieties felt by teenage girls about their appearance, their status within their peer groups, as well as fuelling the subtle bullying that is done via gossip and social exclusion. On the podcast, Haidt explains why Instagram is different from other forms of social media, contrasting synchronous real-time social behaviour, like playing video games, and asynchronous post-and-comment social interactions. Rather than getting lost in a fantasy world with friends, like many teenage boys do with interactive, multiplayer video games, Instagram encourages users to post impressions of their lives and then wait for social approval, intensifying the normal self-consciousness that pervades adolescence.Podcast #168: Jonathan Haidt on Instagram’s Mental Health EmergencyQuillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with NYU professor and Coddling of the American Mind Co-Author Jonathan Haidt about the emotionally destructive effect of social media on many young users.QuilletteQuilletteBut the effects of Instagram go beyond the individual user. Haidt has warned that Instagram has an impact on girls even if they don’t use it very often, describing the systemic effects of the app as placing every girl into a “prestige economy based on her appearance.” The implication being that social prestige at school or university now frequently derives from a girl's Instagram followers, as status on the app is transferring into status in real life.Psychological stress arises from Instagram through the relentless social comparisons it induces, alongside its addictive design. Instagram, like Facebook and Twitter, doesn’t stop. Features such as “infinite scrolling” are designed to addict users to an endless newsfeed. The little red dots and circles hook us up to a drip feed of rewards—all we have to do is press or click, and our repetitive behaviour is reinforced.The first insights into reward-seeking behaviour came from a series of classic experiments in a lab at McGill University in the 1950s. Two scientists, James Olds and Peter Milner, found that if they hooked up electrodes to certain sections of a rat’s brain, the rat would voluntarily press a lever giving itself tiny jolts to stimulate itself.A rat performing electrical brain stimulation, Scientific American, 1956The scientists were interested in which parts of the brain the rats wanted to stimulate, and how far the rats would go in order to receive this stimulation. Disturbingly, Olds and Milner discovered that when the lateral hypothalamus was stimulated, the rats pressed the lever several thousand times per hour, for days, preferring to press the lever than to eat or drink. The rats even crossed electrified grids—scorching themselves—in order to get their hit. Observing this, Olds assumed the rats were in a state of bliss, describing his findings in Scientific American with an article titled "Pleasure Centres of the Brain." But this hypothesis was not quite right. Scientists now know that it is not the reward itself, but the anticipation of a reward that powerfully drives goal-directed behaviour. The rats were not in a state of bliss, they were in a state of desire.Dopamine, the feel-good hormone and neurotransmitter that is implicated in the reward circuitry of the human brain, rises in anticipation of a reward such as social approval, but not necessarily in response to a reward itself. Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology at Stanford, explains, “dopamine is not about pleasure, it’s about anticipation of pleasure, it’s about the pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself.” It also rises much higher in the anticipation of an uncertain or intermittent reward—a mechanism well known to the designers of poker machines.Every time we open our phones, and see a red dot which indicates that we have a new “like” or a new message on a social app, we experience feel-good chemicals in the anticipation of a reward. The intermittent nature of these rewards means that our behaviour is reinforced more strongly than if the rewards were consistent or certain. One day we may receive 30 likes on a post, the next day two. Intermittent reinforcement helps explain why we compulsively check these apps, even though they may make us feel bad about ourselves. In some cases, we may go back even though we are being bullied. Like a bleary eyed slot machine player, or a rat on the hook in a science lab, our brains keep telling us to press that lever.Prior to the discovery of Facebook’s own research linking Instagram to teenage depression and anxiety, evidence of its harms came from mostly correlational studies. One study, looking at 120,115 English adolescents found that light use of social media was associated with greater wellbeing than no use, but this dropped off when usage exceeded two hours, with heavy users (five hours or more) having lowest levels of wellbeing in the sample. Another study published in 2019 reported that:[H]eavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48 percent to 171 percent more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts. Heavy users (vs. light) were twice as likely to report having attempted suicide.Evidence from experiments where participants are randomly assigned to different groups suggests that these are not spurious correlations. In one experiment, students were randomly assigned to a group where they limited their social media to 10 minutes a day, in the other they were instructed to use social media as they normally would. The group which limited themselves to 10 minutes a day had significant decreases in feelings of loneliness, depression and anxiety when compared to the group that didn’t change their behaviour. Another experiment in which participants deactivated their Facebook accounts entirely found that those who deactivated had increased subjective wellbeing, socialised more with friends and family, and when they eventually returned to Facebook, spent much less time on the platform than they had done previously.However it is also important to note that some studies have found little harmful effect of social media use, and others have found that certain ways of using social media, such as passive use, is more predictive of suicidal ideation than use in general. Further analyses have found that when controlling for variables such as experience of online bullying, sleep, and seeing friends, the ill effects of social media use disappear entirely.Yet the impact of social media does not just occur at the individual level. Like the weather, our social world is a complex system, where even tiny changes in one variable can have cascading, systemic effects. And some behaviours predicting poor mental health may have a contagiousness to them. If mood disorders like anxiety and depression are on the rise, it is plausible that social media creates a feedback loop where young people are increasingly exposed to others who are depressed and anxious—making them more likely to be depressed and anxious themselves. Sociological studies of network effects do indeed show that depression can be contagious among adolescent social groups. Social contagion is also known to drive self harm and suicide. And the statistics showing an increase in self harm in teenage girls are stark. In Australia, the years between 2007 and 2008 the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) records that 359 per 100,000 girls were hospitalised for self harm. In the years 2016–2017, after Instagram had become the most popular social media platform for teens, this had doubled to 686 hospitalisations per 100,000. Rates of hospitalisation for self-harm have also doubled in the in the US, and have tripled in the UK over the same time frame.In Australia, these disturbing mental health trends have been compounded by prolonged lockdowns due to the COVID pandemic. In the first six months of 2021, the attempted suicide rate for Victorian teenagers reportedly sky rocketed by 184 percent. The Australian has reported that hospital admissions for acute mental health care increased by only two percent for the general population in 2021, but for children and young people, admissions have surged by 43 percent. But while lockdowns can be lifted, and sleep can be adjusted, many of the variables that impact mental health remain difficult to address both at the individual and societal levels. We know that genes affect our subjective wellbeing as well as the likelihood of developing depression and anxiety. We also know that poverty, family stability, childhood abuse, neglect, as well as trauma, all play a significant role in the development of mental illness.One reason why it is important to know that social media use is related to anxiety and depression is that it is comparatively easy to fix. It is not easy for us to fix our genes—or our family's socio-economic-status—if we happen to be born into disadvantage. We can, however, deactivate our social media accounts. And if the available evidence is any guide, this quick and easy intervention may have the potential to bring about significant increases in happiness to a large number of people.Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, has likened social media to the automobile industry. Cars, of course, create tremendous value by getting us from A to B, and making our lives easier. But cars also create accidents and road fatalities.Instagram boss likens social media to cars, says people will dieAdam Mosseri, head of Facebook-owned Instagram, made the unfortunate argument that social media is like cars and that casualties will be common.helios.webJack MorseSimilarly, social media shortens the distance between friends around the world, and helps us maintain connections we would easily lose through distance and the busyness of life. There is also no question that social media has made it easier for people to monetise their hobbies, something that is truly beneficial for those seeking unconventional career paths. And it is true that when used judiciously, and not as a substitute for real world interaction, social media can strengthen relationships and reduce isolation.The magazine in which this essay appears—Quillette—likely wouldn't exist without social media technologies, including Facebook. In the past, only corporations with vast capital could afford the distribution networks that would allow a publication to reach audiences around the globe. With the connectivity of the internet, and the ability of like minded people to find each other, these traditional barriers to entry have been broken down, allowing companies like ours to thrive.When criticism of Facebook has come from corporate media organisations, it is often dismissed as being motivated by professional resentment. It is often assumed that journalists working for legacy (pre-internet) media companies are threatened by the new (post-internet) media landscape, which has democratised journalism, allowing a thousand blossoms to bloom. This might be true in some cases. But journalists are also parents and citizens—as are the entrepreneurs who have built their businesses on the back of social media. Aside from having an interest in living in a healthy and functioning society, most content creators who use these platforms for their daily jobs, also have a commercial interest in social media companies exercising quality control. A professional singer, for example, might be grateful that she gets to sing in a bar where patrons provide lucrative tips. But she will become discouraged if the bar plies minors with alcohol and continually serves drunks more booze. Once these toxic externalities become too large for the wider community to bear, the bar will likely be shut down, making the singer worse off financially than she was before. Social media is no different. Platforms like Instagram create eco-systems where content creators can thrive. But if that eco-system becomes unmanageably toxic, its entire economy is at risk.The main ethical problem posed by Instagram is that young people are not mature enough to give informed consent in having their preferences harvested and fed back to them by a corporation that specialises in attention manipulation. It is one thing for adults to voluntarily consent to being dazzled by a newsfeed of glossy, unattainable images, but quite another for a 14 year old child. Mosseri’s car analogy has been harshly criticised, but in many ways it is accurate, and should be considered carefully. We do recognise cars as providing great value, but we also recognise them as lethal killing machines in certain contexts. Over the years, societies have developed regulations for cars ensuring their safety and roadworthiness including requirements for brake lights, indicators, headlights, fog lights, and seatbelts. We also require drivers to be licensed, to have number plates, to obey drink driving laws and follow the road rules. And, crucially, we don’t let kids drive. In Australia, it usually takes a 16 year old about 12 months and 100 hours of driving practice to get their full license, and even then, their license is only provisional. In contrast, an 11 year old can sign up to Instagram in just a couple of minutes, without any oversight and without any attempt on behalf of Facebook at age verification. In light of this, Mosseri’s automobile analogy should be taken seriously. If Instagram wants to be seen as analogous to the car industry, we should meet them halfway and legislate accordingly.Listen to Quillette's Jonathan Kay with NYU's Jonathan Haidt on Instagram’s Mental Health Emergency here:Podcast #168: Jonathan Haidt on Instagram’s Mental Health EmergencyQuillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with NYU professor and Coddling of the American Mind Co-Author Jonathan Haidt about the emotionally destructive effect of social media on many young users.QuilletteQuillette

Book Club with Steven Pinker: Join the Persuasion community on Tuesday, October 26, at 7 p.m. EDT for a talk with Steven Pinker about his new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Is Scarce, Why It Matters, moderated by Moisés Naím. Details and registration here.One realm that is sometimes excluded from the rational is the moral. Can we ever deduce what’s right or wrong? Can we confirm it with data? It’s not obvious how you could. Many people believe that “you can’t get an ought from an is.” The conclusion is sometimes attributed to the philosopher David Hume. “’Tis not contrary to reason,” he famously wrote, “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”Moral statements indeed must be distinguished from logical and empirical ones. Philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century took Hume’s argument seriously and struggled with what moral statements could possibly mean if they are not about logic or empirical fact. Some concluded that “X is evil” means little more than “X is against the rules” or “I dislike X” or even “X, boo!”But many people are not ready to reduce morality to convention or taste. When we say “The Holocaust is bad,” do our powers of reason leave us no way to differentiate that conviction from “I don’t like the Holocaust” or “My culture disapproves of the Holocaust”?Faced with this intolerable implication, some people hope to vest morality in a higher power. That’s what religion is for, they say—even many scientists. But Plato made short work of this argument 2,400 years ago in Euthyphro. Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command some things because they are moral? If the former is true, and God had no reason for his commandments, why should we take his whims seriously? If God commanded you to torture and kill a child, would that make it right? “He would never do that!” you might object. But that flicks us onto the second horn of the dilemma. If God does have good reasons for his commandments, why don’t we appeal to those reasons directly and skip the middleman?In fact, it is not hard to ground morality in reason.Hume may have been technically correct when he wrote that it’s not contrary to reason to prefer global genocide to a scratch on one’s pinkie. But his grounds were very, very narrow. As he noted, it is also not contrary to reason to prefer bad things happening to oneself over good things—say, pain, poverty, and loneliness over pleasure, prosperity, and good company. O-kay. But now let’s just say that we prefer good things to happen to ourselves over bad things. Let’s make a second wild and crazy assumption: that we are social animals who live with other people, rather than Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, so our well-being depends on what others do, like helping us when we are in need and not harming us for no good reason.This changes everything. As soon as we start insisting to others, “You must not hurt me, or let me starve, or let my children drown,” we cannot also maintain, “But I can hurt you, and let you starve, and let your children drown,” and hope they will take us seriously. That is because as soon as I engage you in a rational discussion, I cannot insist that only my interests count just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can insist that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe because I happen to be standing on it. The pronouns I, me, and mine have no logical heft—they flip with each turn in a conversation. And so any argument that privileges my well-being over yours or his or hers, all else being equal, is irrational.When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality—the interchangeability of perspectives—you get the core of morality. You get the Golden Rule, or the variants that take note of George Bernard Shaw’s advice: “Do not do unto others as you would have others do unto you; they may have different tastes.” This sets up Rabbi Hillel’s version, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”Versions of these rules have been independently discovered in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and other religions and moral codes. These include Spinoza’s observation, “Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of human-kind.” And Kant’s Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” For that matter the principle may be seen in the most fundamental statement of morality of all, the one we use to teach the concept to small children: “How would you like it if he did that to you?”None of these statements depends on taste, custom, or religion. And though self-interest and sociality are not, strictly speaking, rational, they’re hardly independent of rationality. How do rational agents come into existence in the first place? Unless you are talking about disembodied rational angels, they are products of evolution, with fragile, energy-hungry bodies and brains. To have remained alive long enough to enter into a rational discussion, they must have staved off injuries and starvation, goaded by pleasure and pain. Evolution, moreover, works on populations, not individuals, so a rational animal must be part of a community, with all the social ties that impel it to cooperate, protect itself, and mate. Reasoners in real life must be corporeal and communal, which means that self-interest and sociality are part of the package of rationality. And with self-interest and sociality comes the implication we call morality.Impartiality, the main ingredient of morality, is not just a logical nicety. Practically speaking, it also makes everyone, on average, better off. Life presents many opportunities to help someone, or to refrain from hurting them, at a small cost to oneself. So if everyone signs on to helping and not hurting, everyone wins. This does not, of course, mean that people are in fact perfectly moral, just that there’s a rational argument as to why they should be.Steven Pinker, a member of the Persuasion advisory board, is a cognitive scientist at Harvard University. [Excerpted from Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. Reprinted with permission from Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker.]

One of the most famous television game shows from the heyday of the genre from the 1950s to the 1980s was Let’s Make a Deal. Its host, Monty Hall, achieved a second kind of fame when a dilemma in probability theory, loosely based on the show, was named after him. A contestant is faced with three doors. Behind one of them is a sleek new car. Behind the other two are goats. The contestant picks a door, say Door 1. To build suspense, Monty opens one of the other two doors, say Door 3, revealing a goat. To build the suspense still further, he gives the contestant an opportunity either to stick with their original choice or to switch to the unopened door. You are the contestant. What should you do?

Almost everyone stays. They figure that since the car was placed behind one of the three doors at random, and Door 3 has been eliminated, there is now a fifty‑fifty chance each that the car will be behind Door 1 or Door 2. Though there’s no harm in switching, they think, there’s no benefit either. So they stick with their first choice out of inertia, pride, or anticipation that their regret after an unlucky switch would be more intense than their delight after a lucky one.
The Monty Hall dilemma became famous in 1990 when it was presented in the “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade, a magazine inserted in the Sunday edition of hundreds of American newspapers. The columnist was Marilyn vos Savant, known at the time as “the world’s smartest woman” because of her entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest score on an intelligence test. Vos Savant wrote that you should switch: the odds of the car being behind Door 2 are two in three, compared with one in three for Door 1. The column drew ten thousand letters, a thousand of them from PhDs, mainly in mathematics and statistics, most of whom said she was wrong. Here are some examples:
You blew it, and you blew it big! Since you seem to have difficulty grasping the basic principle at work here, I’ll explain. After the host reveals a goat, you now have a one‑in‑two chance of being correct. Whether you change your selection or not, the odds are the same. There is enough mathematical illiteracy in this country, and we don’t need the world’s highest IQ propagating more. Shame!—Scott Smith, PhD, University of Florida
I am sure you will receive many letters on this topic from high school and college students. Perhaps you should keep a few addresses for help with future columns.—W. Robert Smith, PhD, Georgia State University
Maybe women look at math problems differently than men.—Don Edwards, Sunriver, Oregon
Among the objectors was Paul Erdös (1913–1996), the renowned mathematician who was so prolific that many academics boast of their “Erdös number,” the length of the shortest chain of coauthorships linking them to the great theoretician.
But the mansplaining mathematicians were wrong and the world’s smartest woman was right. You should switch. It’s not that hard to see why. There are three possibilities for where the car could have been placed. Let’s consider each door and count up the number of times out of the three that you would win with each strategy. You picked Door 1, but of course that’s just a label; as long as Monty follows the rule “Open an unselected door with a goat; if both have goats, pick one at random,” the odds come out the same whichever door you picked.
Suppose your strategy is “Stay” (left column in the figure). If the car is behind Door 1 (top left), you win. (It doesn’t matter which of the other doors Monty opened, because you’re not switching to either.) If the car is behind Door 2 (middle left), you lose. If the car is behind Door 3 (bottom left), you lose. So the odds of winning with the “Stay” strategy are one in three.
Now suppose your strategy is “Switch” (right column). If the car is behind Door 1, you lose. If the car is behind Door 2, Monty would have opened Door 3, so you would switch to Door 2 and win. If the car is behind Door 3, he would have opened Door 2, so you would switch to Door 3 and win. The odds of winning with the “Switch” strategy are two in three, double the odds of staying.

It’s not rocket surgery. Even if you don’t work through the logical possibilities, you could play a few rounds yourself with cutouts and toys and tot up the outcomes, as Hall himself did to convince a skeptical journalist. (Nowadays, you can play it online.) Or you could pursue the intuition “Monty knows the answer and gave me a clue; it would be foolish not to act on it.” Why did the mathematicians, professors, and other bigshots get it so wrong?
Many people insist that each of the unknown alternatives (in this case, the unopened doors) must have an equal probability. That is true of symmetrical gambling toys like the faces of a coin or sides of a die, and it is a reasonable starting point when you know absolutely nothing about the alternatives. But it is not a law of nature.
Certainly there were failures of critical thinking coming from sexism, ad hominem biases, and professional jealousy. Vos Savant is an attractive and stylish woman with no initials after her name who wrote for a recipe‑ and gossip‑filled rag and bantered on late‑night talk shows. She defied the stereotype of a mathematician, and her celebrity and bragging rights from Guinness made her a big fat target for a takedown.
But part of the problem is the problem itself. Many people can’t swallow the correct explanation even when it’s pointed out to them. This included Erdös, who, violating the soul of a mathematician, was convinced only when he saw the game repeatedly simulated. Many persist even when they see it simulated and even when they repeatedly play for money. What’s the mismatch between our intuitions and the laws of chance?
A clue comes from the overconfident justifications that the know‑it‑alls offered for their blunders, sometimes thoughtlessly carried over from other probability puzzles. Many people insist that each of the unknown alternatives (in this case, the unopened doors) must have an equal probability. That is true of symmetrical gambling toys like the faces of a coin or sides of a die, and it is a reasonable starting point when you know absolutely nothing about the alternatives. But it is not a law of nature.
Many people can’t swallow the correct explanation even when it’s pointed out to them. This included Erdös, who, violating the soul of a mathematician, was convinced only when he saw the game repeatedly simulated.
Many visualize the causal chain. The car and goats were placed prior to the reveal, and opening a door can’t move them around after the fact. Pointing out the independence of causal mechanisms is a common way to debunk other illusions such as the gambler’s fallacy, in which people misguidedly think that after a run of reds the next spin of the roulette wheel will turn up black, when in fact the wheel has no memory, so every spin is independent. As one of vos Savant’s correspondents mansplained, “Picture a race with three horses, each having an equal chance of winning. If horse #3 drops dead 50 feet into the race, the chances for each of the remaining two horses are no longer one in three but rather are now one in two.” Clearly, he concluded, it would not make sense to switch one’s bet from horse #1 to horse #2. But this is not how the problem works. Imagine that after you place your bet on #1, God announces, “It’s not going to be horse #3.” He could have warned against horse #2 but didn’t. Switching your bet doesn’t sound so crazy. In Let’s Make a Deal, Monty Hall is God.
The godlike host reminds us how exotic the Monty Hall problem is. It requires an omniscient being who defies the usual goal of a conversation—to share what the hearer needs to know (in this case, which door hides the car)—and instead pursues the goal of enhancing suspense among third parties. And unlike the world, whose clues are indifferent to our sleuthing, Monty Almighty knows the truth and knows our choice and picks his revelation accordingly.
People’s insensitivity to this lucrative but esoteric information pinpoints the cognitive weakness at the heart of the puzzle: we confuse probability with propensity. A propensity is the disposition of an object to act in certain ways. Intuitions about propensities are a major part of our mental models of the world. People sense that bent branches tend to spring back, that kudu may tire easily, that porcupines usually leave tracks with two padprints. A propensity cannot be perceived directly (either the branch sprang back or it didn’t), but it can be inferred by scrutinizing the physical makeup of an object and working through the laws of cause and effect. A drier branch may snap, a kudu has more stamina in the rainy season, a porcupine has two proximal pads which leave padprints when the ground is soft but not necessarily when it is hard.
People’s insensitivity to this lucrative but esoteric information pinpoints the cognitive weakness at the heart of the puzzle: we confuse probability with propensity.
But probability is different; it is a conceptual tool invented in the seventeenth century. The word has several meanings, but the one that matters in making risky decisions is the strength of one’s belief in an unknown state of affairs. Any scrap of evidence that alters our confidence in an outcome will change its probability and the rational way to act upon it. The dependence of probability on ethereal knowledge rather than just physical makeup helps explain why people fail at the dilemma. They intuit the propensities for the car to have ended up behind the different doors, and they know that opening a door could not have changed those propensities. But probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability. If that sounds mystical or paradoxical, think about the probability that a coin I just flipped landed heads. For you, it’s .5. For me, it’s 1 (I peeked). Same event, different knowledge, different probability. In the Monty Hall dilemma, new information is provided by the all‑seeing host.
One implication is that when the reduction of ignorance granted by the host is more transparently connected to the physical circumstances, the solution to the problem becomes intuitive. Vos Savant invited her readers to imagine a variation of the game show with, say, a thousand doors. You pick one. Monty reveals a goat behind 998 of the others. Would you switch to the door he left closed? This time it seems clear that Monty’s choice conveys actionable information. One can visualize him scanning the doors for the car as he decides which one not to open, and the closed door is a sign of his having spotted the car and hence a spoor of the car itself.

Adapted from Rationality by Steven Pinker, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker.
The post Why You Should Always Switch: The Monty Hall Problem (Finally) Explained appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Out on the dusty prairie west of Houston, the construction crews have been busy. Gone are the rice fields, cattle ranches and pine forests that once dominated this part of the South. In their place sit new homes and communities. But they are not an eyesore; the homes are affordable and close to attractive town centres, large parks and lakes. These are communities rooted in the individual, the family and a belief in self-governance.
The new American Dream has its heart in the states of the old Confederacy. But its allure does not merely lie in a conservative embrace of lower taxes, less regulation and greater self-reliance, although these surely matter. More important are the opportunities that come from building businesses and owning new homes, not for the privileged few but for an increasingly diverse, and growing, populace.
As Marianne Pina, who came to Dallas as a young adult before founding a five-million-dollar business specialising in minority recruitment and job placement, told me: “The American Dream stereotype still exists here. If you work hard, you can make it. It’s still up to you as an individual.”

But lurking in the background, the South’s rebirth remains threatened by its historical demons: racism, white nationalism and overzealous religious fervour. This is partly because, as the political scientist V.O. Key noted, the South remains the only region of America that has been conquered and subjugated. It is, he wrote in 1949, a prisoner of its racial legacy in its politics and social structure; only when that problem has been addressed can the region ascend to its potential.1 Indeed, the economic consequences of slavery persisted well into the 1960s.2
Even today, despite its ascendance, the South still lags somewhat behind the nation both in income and education levels. It is still castigated by progressive academics (increasingly a redundant concept) for being wedded to “racial conservatism”. It was only in 2013 that liberal chief justice Steve Breyer compared the region’s racial climate to “a plant disease”.
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Anyone who has spent time outside academia knows this is increasingly no longer the case. Ever since the 1960s, business leaders in the South have worked overtime to embrace racial diversity, if not for moral reasons, but economic ones.3 Perhaps that explains why people from outside the region are pouring in: the Southern states account for six of the top ten gainers in interstate migration, led by Texas and Florida. In contrast, the biggest losers are the progressive strongholds of New York, Illinois, and California.
Significantly, while the African-American population has declined in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, it is expanding in cities such as Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), Atlanta, Houston, and Nashville. Immigrants, mostly from developing countries and Asia, are also moving in. According to research by demographer Wendell Cox, the fastest growth in a city’s foreign-born population over the past decade was in Nashville, where it exceeded 40%, while those in DFW, Houston and Austin increased by more than 25%. Once seen as a dominant immigrant melting pot, Los Angeles, by contrast, saw their foreign-born populations shrink.
“In the past, you would go to New York, but people have found life was very challenging there,” developer La Lou Davies, who moved to Houston from Nigeria, explains. “It’s hard to find a place to live. By the 1990s, people started going to places like Houston, which have lower entry costs for housing and better business environments. Getting that first apartment, or a lease for a business, is so much easier.”
And so it is economic opportunity, rather than reactionary politics, that has fuelled the South’s renewal. Most southern states — even Texas, which is suffering a contraction in its energy industry — have lower unemployment rates than California and those in the Northeast. Overall, southern states have also enjoyed far more robust job growth over the past decade than most of the country, accounting for six of the eleven fastest growing states.
Some progressives have dismissed this growth, suggesting that the South is where capital goes to “slum”, citing low wages, anti-union laws and housing costs. Paul Krugman, for example, ascribes Texas’s success to low wages and better weather, suggesting that he hasn’t visited the state during the impossibly miserable summers.
Certainly, the region’s growth in the post-war era rested largely on low-paying industries such as textile and food processing. Today, however, DFW is home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, ranking behind only New York and Chicago. Even NASDAQ is reportedly considering a move to Dallas-Fort Worth from the New York area.
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Tech employment has also been on the rise. Over the last five years, the South accounted for four of the top eleven tech growth regions: Austin, Orlando, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham all greatly outperformed the glamorous hubs of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Perhaps more important still, the South has become the epicentre for new job creation in professional and business services, the largest well-paying job classification. It also has held on to more manufacturing, and is now emerging as both the industrial, construction and energy capital of the country. For higher paying blue-collar jobs, southern regions account for a majority of the 15 strongest performers, while places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago continue to languish.
Of course, construction plays a huge role. The South — as is evident everywhere from west Houston and north Dallas to the exurbs of Charlotte, Nashville, and Atlanta — is building far more new houses than their counterparts on either coast. Texas, with one-quarter fewer residents than California, has permitted more than twice as many new housing units this year, and has no housing crisis. Tennessee, now one of the 10 most popular destinations for immigrants from California, last year issued half as many housing units as California, despite having about one-sixth the population.
This is one reason why housing costs, even in the South’s hottest markets, tend to be as low as one-third, when adjusted by income, of places such as coastal California. Indeed, it is the opportunity to own a home that has likely made the South — which accounted for 43% of all sales in July — the predominant place for young families.
Yet the resurgence of America’s South still remains vulnerable. Yes, companies continue to move from the Northeast and California to Texas, Tennessee and other Southern states. But a number of corporate executives, particularly in the tech sector, have responded with horror to their socially conservative legislation. Texas’s recent abortion ban, for example, generated a strong set of counter-measures among tech firms: they blacklisted anti-abortion websites and offered protections for their own employees, including Uber and Lyft drivers who might be liable for transporting women to clinics.
Simply put, laws such the abortion bill, with could be enforced by state-sanctioned vigilantes, are unlikely to be a pull-factor for many would-be Southerners. Recent polls have found the majority of Americans disapprove of the bill, while at least one survey found that tough abortion laws would lead a majority of college-educated workers to move elsewhere.
The future of the South, then, depends on how it negotiates the rise of progressive politics — and its success will depend on how it negotiates their rise. Bills passed to restrict transgender rights, regulate voting or abolish critical race theory may have broader support than restrictions on abortion, but they have still led to boycotts, costing state economies millions of dollars.
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The South’s biggest enemy, however, remains its own troubled historic legacy on race. All too often Southern conservatives allow racism to slip through the cracks. Just last year, for example, several Republican County Chairs in Texas tweeted openly racist memes; one of the offenders was from Harris County, where non-Hispanic whites make up less than one-third of the population. This behaviour, combined with draconian measures such as the abortion bill, could ultimately hand Texas to the Democrats — whose calls for a ban on fracking would, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, would cost more jobs than those lost in the Great Recession.
And then there’s Covid-19, which, given the region’s low vaccination rates, also presents a serious danger to the prosperity of the South. Southern conservatives such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis may be rightfully critical of extreme lockdowns and school closings, but opening up too quickly has had dire consequences in a region that suffers higher obesity and diabetes rates than the rest of the country.
For the South to thrive, then, it needs to find a programme that both respects its traditions and embraces a more pragmatic, economics-oriented focus. It needs to overcome the ghosts of its tragic past and avoid the pitfalls of progressivism. The South, in effect, faces a balancing act. And if it succeeds, it will be the states of the late Confederacy could shape the future of their one-time conquerors.

FOOTNOTES

O. Key, Southern Politics, (New York: Vintage,1949), pp.3-18; p.674-5
Gavin Wright, Old South, New South, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), pp.10-15, p.18,p. 25, p.80, p.240
Wright, p.265-268

There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen, as a quote dubiously attributed to Lenin states. Last week was one of those weeks. As it began, I argued that the most significant short term effect of the Aukus agreement would not be in the distant Pacific, but rather here on our home continent, by rapidly accelerating Macron’s quest for European strategic autonomy from Nato structures under French patronage. The announcement in the following days of France’s naval deal and defence pact with Greece is a dramatic illustration of these processes at work in Europe’s rapidly shifting security environment.
After years of back and forth negotiations, the Greek Ministry of Defence finally settled on France over the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the United States as the provider of the Hellenic Navy’s new frigates. It’s a vital upgrade given the deterioration of both the Mediterranean’s security environment and of Greek naval capacity following more than a decade of austerity. The FDI frigates chosen pack a powerful punch, tilting the scales back in Greece’s favour in its increasingly heated contest of primacy in the Aegean with Erdogan’s Turkey.

While the full complement of three ships will not be built until 2026, France has offered Greece three upgraded La Fayette-class frigates as a stopgap solution, and there is a strong likelihood of Greece also buying a number of Gowind-class corvettes from France as part of its rapid naval build-up. Coupled with Greece’s recent purchase of 24 Rafale fighter jets, France has emerged as the country’s most significant supplier of arms, at a time when the likelihood of open conflict with Turkey is greater than it has been in decades.
Yet as with Aukus, the true significance of the deal lies less in the hardware purchased, than in the alliance-building underpinning it. The “Strategic Partnership for Cooperation in Defence and Security” agreement unveiled in Paris contains a mutual defence assistance clause in the event that either country is attacked anywhere on its territory, using “all the means at their disposal, including, if needed, armed violence,” to fend off the aggressor.
In doing so, Macron stated, “we commit ourselves to protect [Greece] in the event of intrusion, attack or aggression. This is my idea of friendship and of the European independence and European territorial unity that we value,” and thus a direct French promise to defend Greece from an attack by its purported Nato ally Turkey. When the two countries came to the brink of war last year, it was France, alone among all EU and Nato countries, that supported Greece, both diplomatically and through its deployment of French warships and fighter jets to the eastern Mediterranean. Under Macron, France has become, simply, Greece’s strategic patron, an informal relationship the new agreement has now formalised.
As Macron stated at the signing ceremony, “Europeans must get over their naivety. When we’re under pressure from powers that are sometimes becoming harsher, to react and show that we too have the power and capacity to defend ourselves doesn’t mean giving in to escalation, it merely means ensuring we’re respected… we must, as Europeans, play our part in our own protection.”
For his part, Greece’s premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis observed that with this “very strong alliance, which essentially goes beyond each other’s obligations within the European Union and NATO”, France and Greece are “taking the first step towards a European strategic autonomy”. This is, in other words, the first tentative realisation of that bugbear of the perennially supine German security establishment, as well as of central and eastern European EU powers fearful of losing the American defence umbrella.
Yet significantly, Macron took great pains to change the frame of the tiresome strategic autonomy debate, emphasising that it is not a question of rejecting American military hegemony, but rather of responding to America’s strategic shift to the Pacific, which will mean a diminished involvement in European affairs. As he observed, “for just over 10 years now, the United States of America has been focusing a lot on itself and has strategic interests that are being redirected towards China and the Pacific”, and “it would also be naïve of us – or rather, we’d be making a terrible mistake – if we didn’t seek to learn lessons from it and act accordingly. And so it’s with the same pragmatism, the same clear-sightedness about our independence, that we must, as Europeans, play our part in our own protection.”
Instead of spurning the US defence umbrella, Macron stresses that strategic autonomy is not a replacement for Nato, but the enhancement of its European pole through self-sufficiency. By framing Europe’s strategic autonomy as a form of burden-sharing, allowing the United States to concentrate its attention and forces on the part of the world most important to its survival as global hegemon, Macron has, in effect, called Germany’s bluff. After all, the insistence with which Germany stresses the existential importance of the NATO alliance is matched only by its commitment to shirking any serious attempt at fielding a militarily capable force of their own within it, a long-standing complaint of American administrations.
But the time for German free-riding has passed. With the Americans girding up for an air and naval contest in the Pacific, and their appetite for military interventions in the Islamic world blunted by two decades of failure, Macron has seized the chance for Europe to take the dominant role in providing the continent’s security against its troubled near abroad.
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What is perhaps most noteworthy is that the agreement seems to have taken place with Biden’s blessing. While Northern European analysts tend not to bother themselves overmuch with tracking developments in Greece, it is significant that Mitsotakis had preceded the ceremony with a series of warm assurances to the United States that the country remains a “strong and reliable ally” within the Nato framework, and that “since 1952, Nato has been at the heart of Greece’s security and defence architecture.”
At the Athens meeting of Nato defence chiefs which immediately preceded the announcement, the Greek Chief of General Staff Konstantinos Floros pledged that Greece will honour all its commitments and obligations, and remain “a pillar of stability in the eastern Mediterranean with respect for international law, good neighbourly relations and cooperation”.
The unspoken contrast is of course with Nato’s problem child, Turkey, a constant source of security crises and aggressive interventions across the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, and already sanctioned by the United States for its purchase of Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles. Trump’s warm personal relationship with Erdogan — the origins of which are a matter of speculation — has been replaced by an atmosphere of chilly froideur on the American side, with no realistic prospect of improvement.
Indeed, just as the French and Greeks were inking their agreement, Turkey’s erratic strongman Erdogan was meeting Putin in Sochi, suggesting that he would buy even more S-400s, and pledging further defence cooperation with Russia in space, and in the joint development of warships, jet engines and submarines.
As the US defence relationship with Turkey becomes ever more strained, Greece, supported by the strong efforts of the American ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, has sought to supplant Turkey as America’s chosen partner in the region. Starting with the joint air and naval base in Crete’s Souda Bay — a strategically important deepwater harbour Churchill wanted Britain to possess as an “amphibian citadel” in World War Two — Greece has given the US basing rights across Thessaly in central Greece and usage of the port of Alexandroupoli in Thrace, an important logistics asset for any future operation in the Balkans — or indeed, as Turkish analysts relentlessly sound the alarm, in Turkey.
More from this authorThe walls are going up across EuropeBy Aris Roussinos
While Erdogan’s national security advisor Mesut Hakkı Caşın is doing the rounds of Turkish cable news networks threatening to invade Greece to throw the Americans out of Thrace and attack American troops in Syria, the Greeks are quietly soaking up American military largesse in the form of helicopters, upgraded fighter jets, joint training and equipment for Greek special forces and airborne units. Furthermore, the United States is offering strong background encouragement for Greece’s growing web of military and diplomatic alliances with the Middle Eastern powers Egypt, Israel, the UAE, Israel and Saudi Arabia, all American partners, and all united by their shared antipathy to Erdogan.
Given the strategic centrality to Greece of its deepening defence relationship with the US, it is simply impossible to imagine that Mitsotakis did not ask and receive the Biden administration’s blessing for the pact with France, which indicates America’s newfound acceptance of a European drift towards strategic autonomy. Indeed, the State Department’s only comment on the pact to Greek media was to note that “the US and Greece enjoy a robust defense relationship rooted in our shared values”, and to stress that “we strongly support Greece’s role in creating stability in the region and look forward to continuing to work closely with Greece to advance our shared goals for peace and prosperity in the region including through our robust relationship with the Hellenic Navy”.
Over the course of a few days, then, European strategic autonomy under Macron’s leadership has gone from being a source of existential anguish and circular debate among German thinktankers and derision among British analysts, to a matter of fact in the Eastern Mediterranean. By framing it as a means to strengthen Nato and to grant the United States cover to refocus itself on the Pacific, Macron has won Biden’s tacit blessing, outflanking his European critics.
Ahead of US Secretary of State Blinken’s trip to Paris this week, the State Department has already emphasised that it “will be looking at transatlantic security, and European security, and ways that we can support France’s efforts to strengthen European security and defense capacity,” as long as it is “in conformity with NATO,” stressing that “it is very much in our interest and Europe’s interest for those capacities to be strengthened. And having a more effective, capable European alliance is very much in our interest as well.”
The Biden administration has, therefore, essentially outsourced the role of containing Erdogan in the Eastern Mediterranean and generally upholding Europe’s security in the wider region to France. It is, from an American perspective, the European equivalent of AUKUS, and not its antithesis, formalising a small core of capable countries willing to uphold security in regions important to their strategic vision, and sidelining the rest.
Suggested readingWhy the French are revoltingBy Ed West
Indeed, we can interpret the Franco-Greek pact as a form of sub-Nato alliance, just like the new defence cooperation agreement between Sweden, Denmark and Norway, which may become the model for the organisation’s near future. To reassure Poland and the Baltic states, no doubt in future a similar agreement will provide them with an equivalent alliance to lessen their fears of Russian encroachment. Indeed, this may become a useful future role for Britain, if and when the Army, weakened by decades of underinvestment and mismanaged defence procurement, is capable of fielding a significant armoured force again.
The fact is, as the French analyst Benjamin Haddad noted recently, “the quicker we acknowledge something structural is changing in transatlantic relations, the better we can transform them in a way that serves the interests and security of both sides”. Europe isn’t pushing the Americans out; instead the Americans are disengaging of their own volition, keenly aware, as Haddad notes with an eye on Germany, that “pro-American sentiment can also conveniently be used to avoid increasing defence spending”.
The current Nato framework hobbles Europe’s military capacity rather than advancing it, and Haddad is correct in claiming that “European autonomy is not competing with the alliance”, but instead “could save the transatlantic relationship.” For now, both Macron and Biden win from the new arrangement; the formal assertions of continued fealty to Washington remain true, even as they set the scene for Nato’s obsolescence. Only the coming decades will tell whether or not history will assess the pact, as Macron claims, as “a contribution to Europe’s independence, to the strengthening of Europe’s sovereignty” in what is already becoming a post-Nato world.

It has been 30 years since the publication of Jared Diamond’s first book, The Third Chimpanzee, and it has survived the test of time well. It examines the evolutionary foundations of human behaviours, and, in particular, looks at the differing behaviours of the sexes. In passing, while considering how our behaviours have been shaped by evolution, Diamond considers the controversial fact that genetically diverse groups of humans have fared so differently in their outcomes throughout human history—some have expanded across the globe and amassed wealth, while others have, until recently, lived in universal poverty. Still others have been pushed to the point of extinction. He concludes that these enormous disparities in outcome are not caused by biological differences between the various branches of humanity, but by variations in the geography and environment of different parts of the world.Spurred perhaps by discussion and criticism of this conclusion, Diamond went on, six years later, to publish his best-known book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. It set out to explain in vivid detail, region by region, and era by era, how some branches of humanity came to dominate and even eradicate others. This was an ambitious undertaking, and one that would inevitably clash with established ideologies and political interests. Perhaps most significantly, it provided a scientific rebuttal of white supremacist beliefs—one that had previously been missing from the debate on race. In the introduction, Diamond writes of racist theories of history: “The objection to such explanations is not just that they are loathsome, but they are wrong.”On this basis alone, one might have expected the Left to have embraced the book; but in making its case, GGS steps on too many ideological toes. Where one encounters scepticism and hostility towards GGS or Diamond himself, it tends to come from people on the Left, rather than from white nationalists. By the time of the book’s publication, white nationalism had already retreated into the fringes. But it was not replaced by a new regard for scientific curiosity, but by dogmatic social science theories about “power” and “privilege,” built on a new set of mythologies, just as hostile to science as the old ones, and written from a thoroughly American perspective.GGS provides an account of the entirety of human history over the past 13,000 years, since humans began to transition from hunting and gathering lifestyles into food-producing ones. In terms of its sweeping scope, it might be compared to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (which has an even broader scope). But Diamond and Harari are very different kinds of writers. Harari is a historian who skips lightly from subject to subject with a “trust me, this happened” approach; Diamond is a scientist to his core. For this reason, Sapiens is a shorter and easier read than GGS, but (for me at least) a less satisfying one. Diamond’s writing style is quite different to Harari’s—a methodical and unhurried approach that builds arguments from the ground up, answers questions as they arise, takes care to anticipate and deal with potential objections, provides a wealth of data and examples to back his claims, and doesn’t shrink from brushing up against controversial issues.GGS opens by considering an apparently simple question that Diamond had been asked years earlier by Yali, a New Guinean politician: Why did Europeans have so much cargo (technologies and manufactured goods), while New Guineans had so little? To extend the question: Why are some societies so much more technologically and economically developed than others? It seems astonishing that such an obvious question about human history should still be either difficult or controversial to answer, but it is both.Diamond doesn’t try to deny that there may be marked genetic differences between different branches of humanity—indeed, early in the book, he makes a strong (possibly devil’s advocate) case as to why he believes New Guinean highlanders may have evolved to be more intelligent than Europeans. His wider argument is that such differences do not in any case explain the broad sweep of human history. He suggests that if the peoples of Europe and New Guinea could have somehow traded places in prehistoric times, the histories of Europe and of New Guinea would have remained broadly unchanged. The same applies if Europeans were switched with native Americans or sub-Saharan Africans.Diamond’s detractors attack his book on a number of levels. He is accused of geographical or environmental determinism; of diminishing the role of human agency in history; and of justifying colonialism. The first and second criticisms are somewhat fair. The third is not at all. But behind many of these attacks is a defensiveness of modern left-wing theology. The racial theories of the postwar Left were constructed to counter racist explanations for Eurasian dominance of the globe. If the racist Right believed that global disparities resulted from innate differences in ability, then the anti-racist Left would provide its own counter-explanation. The answer it found was systemic racism—the idea that white success and dominance resulted from oppression by whites of all other groups.Systemic racism can explain, at least partly, the significant economic gap between blacks and whites in the United States, and also in South Africa, but this idea applies in few other parts of the world. In the Jim Crow era of American history, racial segregation was enforced by the state, much to the detriment of black populations. The formal ending of this system, won by the civil rights movement, did not immediately result in obvious economic and political gains for black people, and so some activists theorised that the power structures were still embedded in the American consciousness. Over time, this analysis was re-applied internationally. From the early 1960s, a series of progressive theories emerged that sought to re-explain human history and political affairs in terms of racist dominance, subjugation, and exploitation. By the late ‘80s, sundry post-colonial, Third-Worldist, anti-Imperialist, anti-racist, and feminist doctrines had cohered into a general consensus that the West had enriched itself off the backs of the world’s poor.All of this had many logical and factual flaws. Not least among these was the fact that the whole theoretical edifice was firmly based on the history and mythology of the United States, and almost entirely ignored the diversity of experience in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, today’s fashionable explanation for why the native peoples of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas are all on average economically poorer than Europeans is that European colonisers invaded, slaughtered, enslaved, occupied, stole from, and enriched themselves at the expense of the other continents. These things did, of course, all take place. But as Diamond points out, the global era began with Eurasians possessing numerous advantages over the other continents. When the Old and New Worlds collided in the 15th century, both Europeans and the Chinese had ocean-going ships that had been funded with the help of monarchs who ruled over millions of people. They carried steel swords, shields, and guns, and wore steel armour that greatly outmatched any other weaponry on the planet. They were literate and skilled in the tactics of war. They rode horses, and they carried germs against which many populations had no immunity. Disparities in development had clearly existed long before European empires rose to prominence.The importance of farmingDiamond’s argument is that there is no point merely looking for proximate explanations for these imbalances between societies, but that one needs to go back to the dawn of food production around 13,000 years ago to find the answers. Before the first crop was harvested and the first domestic animal was milked or eaten (or later attached to a plough or cart), humans on every continent lived entirely from hunting and gathering, were almost entirely nomadic, and so owned no possessions other than those they could carry. The first two steps to becoming “civilised” were the domestication of crops and animals. In his characteristically methodical style, Diamond explains in detail the processes by which crops and animals came to be domesticated—a blind progression that took place over many generations, and of which the participants, possessing no more than an oral knowledge of their recent history, would have been unaware.Farmers can produce more food in a limited area than hunter-gatherers, and so early farming societies were more densely populated than the peoples around them. Farming also leads to a more sedentary lifestyle, and the building of villages, because farmers need to sow seeds, tend their crops, harvest them, and store them, over the span of at least several months. Farmers tend to create crop surpluses, meaning that not everybody in the community needs to be involved in food production, and so other skills and technologies—from pottery to writing, from weaponry to government—can begin to evolve.In the first great wave of colonisation, our species first spread across Africa, and then, perhaps 70,000–100,000 years ago, a few people—the ancestors of all non-Africans—left the continent and dispersed around the world. Along the way, they assimilated and eradicated other human species that had left Africa long before. Around 13,000 years ago, farming began the second wave of human colonisation.Of the countless diverse groups of people that must have occupied the continents 13,000 years ago, only six broad divisions of mankind survive today, and three of those are on the verge of extinction. Almost everyone alive is descended from just three groups, which expanded out from the Middle East, China, and West Africa respectively to colonise the rest of the world. These were not the only farming revolutions to take place—farming also began in other parts of Africa, in several parts of the Americas, and in New Guinea—but these were more limited in effect. So in order to answer Yali’s question, Diamond sets out to answer more questions: Why did farming appear in some places and not others? And of the peoples that first began farming, why did some and not others come to build large-scale civilisations and dominate their regions? The answer begins in three parts: plants, animals, and geography.Plants, animals, and geographyAnyone who believes the whimsical idea that nature is bountiful would be cured of this belief by reading GGS. The key reason that farming began in so few places is that suitable plants and animals simply did not exist in many parts of the world. For many cultures, hunting and gathering provided more nutrition than food production could, and so they retained their old lifestyles (sometimes with technological modifications, such as the creation of canals for fish capture by some native Australians). The chapters covering domestication are probably the driest in the book, but are packed with fascinating data, and are essential to the rest of the narrative. Diamond takes a geeky delight in exhaustively listing species of large-seeded cereals, or large mammals, region by region, which were candidates for domestication.By far the luckiest place on the planet in terms of suitable plants (wheat, barley, oats) and animals (pigs, goats, sheep, cows) was the Fertile Crescent spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. This was also the first place where wide-scale farming began. Armed with such a variety of foods, the people originating in this region—who Diamond loosely refers to as “whites”—expanded to dominate Europe, western, central, and south Asia, and north Africa, and eventually expanded into the Americas, Australia, and South Africa. China was the second place to begin farming, within a couple of thousand years of the Fertile Crescent, and was also blessed with raw materials, including rice. The people of this revolution came to dominate China and Mongolia, and then the rest of east and south-east Asia, before later expanding to lowland New Guinea, Polynesia, and eventually Madagascar. The majority of people in the world—and virtually all non-Africans—descend from these two farming revolutions.Besides the availability of plants and animals, the other fundamental factor driving the success of certain peoples was geography, and specifically the shape, alignment, and position of the continents. This helps explain why New Guineans, despite being among the first farmers, never expanded to colonise wider regions, and why black people from West Africa succeeded in colonising most of sub-Saharan Africa but nowhere else. It also helps to explain why American civilisations were largely destroyed when they came into contact with Eurasians.Eurasia (including north Africa) is mostly in the northern hemisphere, and spans thousands of miles east to west, covering a significant part of the world’s land area. This means that the crops and animals domesticated in the two first centres of food production—the Fertile Crescent and China—could spread rapidly to neighbouring regions with similar climates. Within about 5,000 years of the first crop domestication, farming was widespread across a vast expanse from East Asia to the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and Morocco, using crops domesticated across the whole continent. Although the Americas also span a huge distance, they are aligned from north to south. Crops domesticated in temperate North America would have to cross a narrow tropical region (where they would not grow due to differences in rainfall and daylight length) in order to be adopted in temperate South America—and vice versa. So it was that China and western Asia freely exchanged domesticates, and the entire expanse of Eurasia developed a large and diverse farming ecosystem. A different story unfolded in America, where three centres of civilisation came into existence in the Andes, Mexico, and the Mississippi valley, each with their own separate packages of crops and animals, and with very little exchange taking place between them.In sum, Eurasia conquered the Americas, rather than the other way around, because it began with the best selection of plants and animals, because it was large and lacking in major geographic obstacles, and because it was aligned east to west. The Eurasian invaders arrived armed with a package of plants and animals that would thrive in America, but to which native Americans had never previously had access. This was even more true in Australia, a land so lacking in useful plants that even modern farming techniques have only managed to domesticate one native crop: macadamia nuts. Without their ready-made crop and animal packages, which were well suited to Australia’s climate, European settlers would have no more been able to create a farming economy in Australia than the natives who had previously survived there for 40,000 years.GermsAnother vital advantage that ensured Eurasian dominance of the Americas was immunity to disease. The mass extinction of American megafauna in prehistoric times, probably at the hands of the first Americans (though some debate exists over this), is ironically one of the key reasons why native Americans were mostly wiped out after 1492 by European invaders. The Old World was rife with disease because the peoples of Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa had, for thousands of years, lived alongside their animals, and animal germs had, accordingly, evolved to exploit humans. The resulting waves of pandemic that swept Eurasia had allowed people to evolve resistance to a wide range of diseases. Native Americans, on the other hand, possessed no immunities to Eurasian germs. Europeans encountered three civilisations in the Americas—in the Andes, Mexico, and the Mississippi valley—all of which had developed food production and built large populations with a degree of political organisation. All of these societies were destroyed primarily by Old World germs.Lacking any large domestic animals (except the llama, which was restricted to the Andes), Americans had few germs of their own with which to repel foreign invaders. Estimates of the native American death toll from Eurasian germs range up to 95 percent of the population. Although sometimes accused of justifying colonialism, Diamond does not shy away from recounting atrocities committed by whites against surviving American (or Australian or African) natives. His point, though, is that the first great battle for the Americas was in large part won by germs.The rise of AfricaA visitor to Africa 5,000 years ago would have found the temperate northern region colonised by farmers and crops of Middle Eastern origin. Farmers from the north-east (of Middle Eastern origin) had also spread down the east coast as far as Tanzania (a fact revealed only recently by DNA evidence). The rest of the continent was sparsely populated by three distinct groups of hunter-gatherers of separate origins, each with their own separate language families. In tropical west Africa were the Bantu people (the people generally known in the Western world as “black”); across much of the tropical centre were Pygmies; and in the south and east were Khoisan people. The total population of all three groups was tiny in contrast to that of Eurasia. It would have seemed obvious to our observer that the people from the north would eventually spread south and colonise the whole continent, just as their close cousins had already occupied Europe, the Middle East, and much of west, central, and south Asia.Diamond’s case is made by the fact that this didn’t happen. Middle Eastern crops would not grow in the tropics, and so Eurasians didn’t cross the Sahara. Instead, the eventual winners in sub-Saharan Africa were black farmers from west Africa, who domesticated crops about 5,000 years ago, and proceeded to colonise tropical Africa from west to east, as well as much of the south, in a series of waves collectively known as the Bantu Expansion. The success of black people in taking over the continent was at the expense of Pygmies and Khoisan, both of which have endured thousands of years of encroachment into their territories by black farmers. Both groups now hover close to extinction—remaining Khoisan people are being integrated into black-majority societies across southern and eastern Africa, and Pygmies have faced countless waves of genocide and enslavement.The appalling plight of the Pygmies is as tragic as the genocides that have taken place in the Americas or Australasia, and it continues today. But it is largely unknown because African history is so widely ignored, even within the continent. Similarly ignored displacements of indigenous people have taken place as the Chinese expansion has progressed through south-east Asia into the Pacific region over the past few thousand years.European attempts, in the 19th and 20th centuries, to colonise most of sub-Saharan Africa were only short-lived. They were almost entirely repelled by growing black populations and tropical germs. European colonisers were only successful in the Cape, which Bantu farmers had not reached because their tropical crops would not grow there. Black people, who are generally seen by American leftists as marginalised and helpless, are in fact the third and final racial group after whites and Chinese to achieve significant global numbers. Black people are less numerous than Eurasians only because they were geographically constrained within a smaller continent. From west to east, tropical Africa provides a far smaller space to colonise than the huge expanse of Eurasia, from Ireland to Japan.A similar case against white superiority is made by the New Guinea highlanders, who by 9,000 years ago (long before agriculture had reached Europe) had developed one of the most sophisticated systems of agriculture on the planet. And yet highland society barely advanced from that time onward. Highland crops could not grow in the very different climate of the New Guinea lowlands, and so highland society could not expand to the New Guinea coast, let alone overseas. It remained, and still remains, constrained into a tiny space. As on the rest of the continents, it was its environment and geography that predicted the fate of New Guinea.The role of human decision-makingWhile Diamond’s global view of history is certainly deterministic, he does not deny the role of human agency and political or cultural decisions at the more local level, as is alleged by his critics. Indeed, perhaps stung by this criticism, he followed Guns, Germs, and Steel with the book Collapse, which focuses exactly on this issue, and contains case studies of societies that have failed due to their own mistakes rather than external intervention. He also points out that in each region, some groups have come to dominate others, often because they were more enthusiastic about adopting foreign technologies. Examples he gives include the Igbo of West Africa and the Navajo of north America.It is unsurprising but sad that the modern story of race has been written by North Americans; first by the racist whites who saw blacks and native Americans as essentially inferior, and now by academics and commentators who see racial history in terms of nothing but systemic oppression. Each argument is based on the same, US-centric viewpoint: namely that the story of the native Americans is shared by indigenous peoples worldwide (which is barely true) while black people are universally the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath (which is not true at all).In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior. It is not surprising in this context that postwar liberals set out to eliminate the concept of race from Western thinking. But in doing so, the Left has progressively painted itself into an ideological corner. Guns, Germs, and Steel advanced the discussion by providing a powerful explanation for disparities in outcome that relied neither on racial differences nor on a belief in invisible power structures, and on that basis deserves to be seen as an important contribution to the ongoing battle for equal rights.

After successfully teaching 15 different finance, accounting, and law classes at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management to tens of thousands of students for 40 years without any incidents or complaints, lecturer Gordon Klein got suspended, canceled, pilloried, and banned from campus in the summer of 2020. What was Gordon’s transgression that caused a campus uproar and motivated 20,000 students and their allies to sign a petition demanding that he be fired? Sexual assault or sexual harassment? Incompetence or bad teaching? Plagiarism or falsifying his credentials? Financial mismanagement of university funds? Nope, none of those. Gordon’s supposed misdeed was that he refused to change his standard race-neutral, non-discriminatory, color-blind grading policy at the request of one of his white students in June 2020 who requested racially preferential grading for black students in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis while in police custody (see Gordon’s email response here). 
At this point, it’s important to realize a few legalities. First, the state constitution in California prohibits race-based preferences in public education. Second, the University of California explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, and national origin. And as a recipient of federal funds, UCLA is legally required to enforce Title VI’s prohibition of racial discrimination on its campus that further prohibits UCLA from “treating an individual differently from others” on the basis of race or skin color in its educational programs. So by refusing to accommodate a student’s request to engage in blatant racial discrimination, Gordon had the law and university policy solidly on his side. Not to mention logic, common sense, and ethics.
But none of that mattered to Gordon’s dean at Anderson, Antonio Bernardo, who led the charge of the woke mob against Gordon’s job, his academic and professional reputation, and his livelihood external to UCLA. Taking matters into their own hands and without any formal review or due process, Dean Bernardo and other Anderson officials suspended Gordon, banned him from campus, started monitoring his outgoing emails, and started attacking his character on social media. 
As Gordon explained recently in his Common Sense with Bari Weiss Substack article “Why I Am Suing UCLA” common sense quickly prevailed because “Less than three weeks after this whole thing blew up, I was reinstated.” But as Gordon then explains “this story is not over.” And the reason it’s not over is because he is standing up and fighting back against UCLA’s (and higher education’s) “diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) industrial complex” and campus wokerati with a lawsuit that was filed on Monday with the Superior Court of California against dean Antonio Bernardo, the University of California Board of Regents and a host of unnamed “co-conspirators.” In his lawsuit, Klein is seeking compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney fees. 
Some further background is provided by a recent Washington Times article about Gordon: 
Mr. Bernardo allegedly sought permission to fire Mr. Klein, and, after higher-ups at UCLA quickly said no, the dean went ahead and suspended Mr. Klein while falsely characterizing his exchange with the student as hurtful, according to the lawsuit.Mr. Klein said he became a sacrificial lamb in UCLA Anderson School’s effort to paint itself as a model warrior against perceived racism. And the school has good reason to depict itself that way because the reality of its treatment of Black scholars belies that stance, according to the suit.“The UCLA Anderson School had substantial reasons to be concerned about its reputation,” a footnote in the lawsuit said. “Upon information and belief, out of approximately 200 faculty members, only one black professor has tenure and the School has not granted tenure to a black professor in over four decades.” 
And as Gordon concludes his Substack article:
This is not just about principle. It’s also about the United States’ ability to compete. Anderson, like elite business schools across the country, is supposed to be training the next generation of innovators. The people who will muster the imagination and fortitude to create life-changing technologies and lead groundbreaking multinationals. If we don’t maintain our standards — if we’re not allowed to push all of our students to do their very best — we will be disarming unilaterally. I refuse to do that, and I’m convinced, this recent episode notwithstanding, that most of my students and colleagues feel the same way. 
Kudos to Gordon Klein for standing up to the woke campus mob of cry-bully activism and higher education’s DIE-complex Uniformity-Exclusion-Inequity complex and fighting back with a lawsuit that names an individual dean as a defendant, along with all of the UC regents. To paraphrase Chairman Mao, “let a thousand such lawsuits bloom.” To paraphrase Walter E. Williams “Nothing opens the closed minds of college administrators better than lawsuits being filed and the sounds of pocketbooks snapping shut.” 
Here are some links to media reports of Gordon Klein’s lawsuit, which do not yet include higher education’s mainstream media outlets the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed (which published two stories on Gordon’s original troubles in June 2020 and his reinstatement in September 2020):
Newsweek: Professor Suspended for Not Giving Black Students Easier Final Exam Sues UCLA 
The College Fix: Professor who was suspended after refusing to grade black students more leniently sues UCLA 
Yahoo! News: Professor sues UCLA for suspension after allegedly not grading black students more leniently
Daily Mail: Professor sues UCLA for suspending him after he refused request to mark black students’ work more leniently than white students in wake of George Floyd’s murder triggering anti-Semitic death threats
FOX News: Professor sues UCLA after refusing to grade Black students more leniently than peers
Reason: UCLA Lecturer Gordon Klein Suing UCLA Over Controversy Related to E-Mail Rejecting Student Request for Exam “Leniency” for “Black Students”

The post UCLA lecturer Gordon Klein fights back against higher education’s ‘diversity-inclusion-equity (DIE) industrial complex’ and crybully activism appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

(Photo By Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.)On Thursday the University of Virginia released polling results that should shock exactly no one who closely follows American politics and culture. A majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agree that it’s “time to split the country.” Why would they even contemplate taking such a drastic step? Well, the poll provides the answers, and they’re not surprising. Competing partisans loathe each other and view the opposition as an existential threat. This also isn’t new. It’s been tracked in poll after poll for year after year. This one found that a “strong majority” of Trump supporters falsely believe there is no real difference between Democrats and socialists. A majority of Biden voters falsely see no real difference between Republicans and fascists.What this poll tracked better than many others is that the mutual loathing is based more on emotion than policy. In fact, the poll found that majorities of Trump voters expressed support for most elements of the Biden infrastructure and reconciliation plan. Even the least popular plank (supporting unions by banning state “right to work” laws) garnered 42 percent support from those who voted for Trump. Yet broad consensus on the most important legislation now pending in Washington didn’t stop 80 percent of Biden voters and 84 percent of Trump voters from viewing the opposing party as a “clear and present threat to American democracy.” We’ve seen it time and again. The combination of malice and misinformation is driving American polarization to a fever pitch. While there are real differences between the political parties, a fundamental reality of American politics is that voters hate or fear the opposing side in part because they have mistaken beliefs about their opponents. They think the divide is greater than it is.For example, other polls have found that Americans “substantially exaggerate the extent to which members of the other party dehumanize, dislike, and disagree with them.” In addition, “Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents as reality hold views they consider ‘extreme.’” Moreover, this “perception gap” gets worse with increased education and media consumption. Last week the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan published one of the most important essays of the year. Called “Our constitutional crisis is already here,” Kagan persuasively argued that America was set for an electoral confrontation (especially if Trump runs again) that could lead to the “greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.”He’s not wrong, and the reason he’s not wrong is hidden in an under-discussed paragraph deep in the essay. He understands what few people grasp—that American radicalism has now filtered down into the ranks of the “normal” folks, the solid citizens who are often the pillars of their communities. Here’s Kagan:The banal normalcy of the great majority of Trump’s supporters, including those who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, has befuddled many observers. Although private militia groups and white supremacists played a part in the attack, 90 percent of those arrested or charged had no ties to such groups. The majority were middle-class and middle-aged; 40 percent were business owners or white-collar workers. They came mostly from purple, not red, counties.He says, “Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities.” Yes, absolutely. In fact, it’s that normalcy in all other areas of their lives that blinds them to their increasingly dangerous and radical politics. They think, “I’m a completely normal person, a responsible citizen who never protests anything, and even I can see the existential threat of the left. You can’t? What’s wrong with you?”Moreover, they are absolutely, positively, pass-a-polygraph convinced that they’re saving democracy, not destroying it. All of the state election reforms? They’re motivated to make sure that no one can “steal” an election again. Even if they’re not convinced of the Kraken-style massive fraud theory, they’re convinced that the 2020 election was “rigged” by Big Tech and Democrats colluding to change the rules and then suppress Trumpist speech (never mind that virtually every act of Twitter censorship only worked to amplify the censored speech, making it a topic of endless conversation on right-wing media).The cycle works a bit like this. Malice and disdain makes a person vulnerable to misinformation. Misinformation then builds more malice and disdain and enhances the commercial demand for, you guessed it, more misinformation. Rinse and repeat until entire media empires exist to supply that demand. Moreover, there are different kinds of misinformation. There’s of course blunt, direct lying, which is rampant online. But there’s also deception by omission (a news diet that consistently feeds a person with news only of the excesses of the other side) and by exaggeration and hyperbole. I’ll give you a perfect example of the latter. Last week The Atlantic’s Emma Green published an interview of Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute, perhaps the leading intellectual home of Trumpism. Read this exchange:Green: Glenn Ellmers wrote an essay for The American Mind about why the Claremont Institute isn’t conservative. One of the things he writes is that some people residing in the United States—“certainly more than half”—are not Americans in any recognizable sense.What does it mean to declare that more than half of the people residing in the country are not truly American?Williams: Glenn was, of course, being provocative and polemical. But if Claremont thinks real Americanism is a belief in the principles of the American founding, we have to acknowledge that a good portion of our fellow citizens don’t agree with our principles and conclusions about what politics is for. If we differ on those fundamental things, we’re really two Americas.Even during the Civil War—I think we’re more divided now than we were then. As Lincoln said, we all prayed to the same God. We all believed in the same Constitution. We just differed over the question of slavery.We just differed over the question of slavery. The question of whether a person has the right to own another human being is a heckuva “just.” The eradication of human bondage is one of the most significant social, political, and cultural movements in all of history. But note the messaging. Two Americas. More fundamentally divided than before the Civil War. Exaggeration. Hyperbole. Indeed, this kind of language is in many ways more dangerous than outright lies. You can fact-check the Kraken lawsuits. How can you possibly “disprove” the statement of opinion above? Or the burning conviction that if only Twitter hadn’t suppressed those Hunter Biden emails then Donald Trump would have won? Once your eyes are open to hyperbole, you see it constantly. On Friday, for example, the left side of my Twitter feed burned up with retweets of Dinesh D’Souza. I can understand the argument that mainstream commentators have overestimated the severity of January 6, but I cannot understand this:Dinesh D'Souza @DineshDSouzaI wonder if history will view January 6, in retrospect, as America’s Tiananmen Square. Desperate protesters seeking to have their voices heard. Vicious government crackdown and prosecution. No dissent policy enforced across society via mass censorship and one-party mediaOctober 1st 20212,167 Retweets7,427 LikesThe right side of my feed, meanwhile, kept retweeting Rolling Stone. I can understand the argument that the Biden infrastructure plans are, on balance, better-designed to combat climate change than alternative plans or no plan at all, but I cannot understand this:Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman"Unless Manchin changes his position dramatically, he will be remembered as the man who, when the moment of decision came, chose to condemn virtually every living creature on Earth to a hellish future of suffering, hardship, and death." - @jeffgoodell Joe Manchin Just Cooked the PlanetThe senator won’t quit fossil fuels and is going to neuter the reconciliation bill — and we’re all going to pay the pricerollingstone.comOctober 1st 2021539 Retweets1,458 LikesAnd sins of media omission are often worse than sins of commission. Again, mistakes can be corrected, but a steady media diet of true negative stories about our opponents can build a sense of profound grievance. Stripped of any kind of balance, one can easily build a monstrous caricature of your political opposition.I’ve written about all of this before. I even wrote a book about it! Divided We Fall came out a year ago last week, and it presented a simple argument—that America’s strongest social, political, and cultural forces were driving America apart, and that if we did not arrest the trend and address the culture of grievance that animates our politics, the future unity of the nation could not be guaranteed.I think I released the book a year too soon. Now the trends are so abundantly clear that warnings about potential coups, rising hatred, and civil strife appear in virtually every major American publication. Secession talk has moved from the fringe to the mainstream with alarming speed. There’s something else that’s going on. With rising hatred, I’m seeing a rise in a purely destructive spirit, especially on the right. “The fight” becomes everything. The destruction of the “elite” is the object. There’s a famous French Revolution-era maxim that declares that one does not make an omelet without breaking eggs. That maxim has served as a shorthand warning against Utopianism ever since. But what if there’s not even an omelet? What if the movement is simply about breaking eggs? What if “fighting” isn’t a means to an end, but rather the end itself? In his excellent G-File on Friday, Jonah highlighted a perfect example of destruction as an ideology. GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance went on Tucker Carlson’s television show and said, “Why are we allowing the companies, the foundations that are destroying this country to receive tax preferences? Why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda?“ If we take Vance seriously, consider the sheer destruction of his proposal. To make it happen, you’d have to demolish the First Amendment, dramatically ramp up state power to seize private assets, and then enable distribution of those funds through pure patronage. There is no “common good” or “social justice” at the end of that process. It’s tribalism. Me and mine versus you and yours. And if we’re not supposed to take Vance seriously, then that presents a whole set of competing problems. It represents the continued descent of our political class into what Jonah calls the “parliament of pundits”—a collection of people who exist less to set policy than to whip up anger and rage online. It’s important to understand that there is no policy fix for malice and misinformation. There is no five-point plan for national harmony. Popular policies (like the Biden policies supported by Trump voters) don’t unite us, and there are always differences and failures to help renew our rage. Instead, we are dealing with a spiritual and moral sickness. Malice and disdain are conditions of the soul. Misinformation and deception are sinful symptoms of fearful and/or hateful hearts. One of the great tragedies of our time is that a nation oppressed by malice and misinformation should be ready to receive a Christian message of love and truth. It’s exactly now that a healthy church could be a beacon in the darkness. Yet is that truly the Christian presence in our political culture?Let’s take, for example, something as simple as the Ninth Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” That’s not just a command. It’s a way of living. The Westminster Larger Catechism states our obligations powerfully. Read this in light of our modern political discourse (emphasis added):The duties required in the ninth commandment are, the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own; appearing and standing for the truth; and from the heart, sincerely, freely, clearly, and fully, speaking the truth, and only the truth, in matters of judgment and justice, and in all other things whatsoever; a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for, and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them; discouraging talebearers, flatterers, and slanderers; love and care of our own good name, and defending it when need requireth; keeping of lawful promises; studying and practicing of whatsoever things are true, honest, lovely, and of good report.It’s hard for me to read those words and not hang my head in shame. I too often fail to achieve that standard. Yet vast numbers of the Christian political coalition do not even try. To them, there is a hidden politics exception to virtually every relevant command. I do not pretend for one moment that there aren’t significant differences between left and right. But our system was built from the ground up to channel political differences through a Constitution that is designed to protect the fundamental human rights of both winners and losers, majorities and minorities, including minorities of one. So long as those constitutional guarantees last, the stakes of our political disputes should never grow so high as to necessitate the rupture of our national union. And if we want social peace in a time when false accusations of “socialism” or “fascism” echo across the land, then telling the truth about our opponents is the most fundamental and necessary start. One more thing …Is it wrong to promote my book one year after release? I’ve returned to its themes in this essay, but there’s one aspect I wanted to single out. Just as we won’t make our way through the wilderness by exaggerating disagreement, we can’t minimize our differences either. The path forward isn’t through a “squishy” moderation that asks members of our political and religious communities to abandon or alter their fundamental beliefs as a condition of full participation in American society. A healthy pluralism allows Americans to bring their authentic selves into the public square. Here’s how I put it in the book:Our nation should be a nation that sustains and nurtures “an increased variety of parties.” It should protect a legal system and culture that in turn protect a “variety of sects dispersed over the entire face” of continental union. That does not mean for a moment that any citizen abandons their faith, their truth claims, or their quest to end injustice as they see it. It does mean, however, that this quest is to be accomplished—whenever possible—through persuasion and minimal necessary coercion. It means restraint in imposing unwanted systems on unwilling communities unless essential civil liberties are at stake. It means changing a narrative that is presently teaching each great American faction that every national political loss is a reason for existential despair. And perhaps most importantly, it requires an act of common citizenship—extending yourself to fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself.More:But to embrace pluralism is to surrender the dream of domination. To embrace pluralism is to acknowledge that even the quest for domination is dangerous. It understands that human beings will not yield that which is most precious to them, even at the point of a gun. Embracing pluralism means embracing the lessons of history and understanding that not even our great nation is immune to the forces that have fractured unions older than ours. Our nation’s angriest culture warriors need to know the cost of their conflict. As they seek to crush their political and cultural enemies, they may destroy the nation they seek to rule.Check out the whole thing. I’m very sad to say that the book’s warnings and predictions hold up even more now than they did one year ago. One last thing …I love this new song by Kristene DiMarco. She says on Instagram that she wrote it “in the heat of a summer full of people arguing … a summer where we were all right in our own eyes.” I love the opening line, which speaks so clearly to our idolization of politics and cultural power: “I’m done trusting in what’s sinking, these boats weren’t built for me.”

I was born in Canada, and my sense of national identity, like that of many Canadians, was formed in direct relation—perhaps in opposition—to the great colossus to the south. We were a country that aspired not to the lofty abstractions of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but to the more prosaic benefits of “peace, order, and good government.” I have always been proud of Canada’s basic values—but I have also envied the grandeur of the American experiment, even in the face of its shortcomings and contradictions.When I first came to the United States, in the mid-2000s, I expected, perhaps naively, that this country would be a bastion of civic learning. Surely the stewards of the world’s first modern democracy would understand the need to cultivate an understanding of both its majesty and its mechanics—the Enlightenment ideas that animate it and the institutions that make it work. But when my children enrolled in high school in Philadelphia, they received only a weak introduction to any of this. That modest exposure, however, was far more elaborate than what many other children across the country receive. Two years ago, during a seminar at Johns Hopkins University, I asked my students if any of them had learned about core democratic ideas and institutions in high school. Only a smattering of hands went up—and those few were at half-mast.
This post is adapted from Daniels’ forthcoming book.
The dearth of civic education is corrosive. According to an Associated Press–GfK survey, from 1984 to 2014, the share of American adults who said that staying informed about current affairs and public issues was “not an obligation that a citizen owes to the country” more than tripled, from 6 to 20 percent. Over roughly the same period, according to Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy, dissatisfaction with democracy among young people has risen precipitously, particularly in the United States.For decades, elementary and secondary schools have borne the responsibility of educating about citizenship. But in an era when funding is limited and partisans on all sides are quick to detect the merest whiff of agendas they dislike, civics and social-studies classes are among the first to shrivel. A majority of principals and other school leaders surveyed in 2018 by Education Week believed that students were not getting enough civics education. Often, there is little they can do.America’s colleges and universities must step into the breach. Almost 70 percent of recent high-school graduates enroll in college each year; they do so at a time in their lives when they are developing habits and convictions that will persist into adulthood. Yet American universities in recent years have shunned responsibility for an education in democracy almost entirely.[Read: Democracy is losing its race with disruption]There is no single reason for this. The structure of modern universities, which distributes decision making and authority across a host of specialized departments and other stakeholders, including administration, faculty, and governing boards, is surely one factor; this structure often impedes a generalized view of anything, much less education in civics. Debates among academics over how a shared vision of democracy should be taught—or indeed over whether any such vision exists, or could possibly exist, or ought to be taught—also tend to undermine civic efforts before they can even begin.For these reasons, among others, universities have remained, at best, bit players in the project of educating a democratic citizenry. In truth, they ought to be a bulwark, bolstering a system of self-governance that is more fissured and fragile than at any time in decades.The trajectory of civic education at American colleges and universities resembles a sine wave: periods of consensus and activity alternating with periods of apathy and distraction.The nation’s Founders recognized that indifference, ignorance, and prejudice could tear the republic apart. The United States in 1790 boasted fewer than a dozen colleges, and one popular idea shared by many of the Founders was to create a national university. No one believed more fiercely in this project than George Washington, who devoted a fifth of his inaugural State of the Union address to the idea. A national university never came to fruition in quite the way Washington had envisioned. But in the decades after his death, hundreds of colleges sprang up across the American landscape.Virtually all of them offered a standard curriculum that culminated in a moral philosophy course. Typically taught by the college’s president, that course was designed to give students an opportunity to exercise moral agency, personal autonomy, and debating skills—core capacities of democratic citizenship—by engaging with serious philosophical and political questions. At its best, the course became a conversation among equals, a dynamic captured perfectly by the description, attributed to President James A. Garfield, of the ideal college: Mark Hopkins, the famed president of Williams College, Garfield’s alma mater, “on one end of a log and a student on the other.”With the rise of research universities in the 1870s, schools turned away from moral philosophy and toward newly ascendant disciplines such as political science, economics, and sociology. Course catalogs swelled with new offerings in American government and history. Yet in this era of ever-multiplying fields and highly specialized courses, there was little guarantee that future chemists or engineers, or indeed any specialists, would reap the benefit of courses outside their chosen areas. Abraham Flexner, the prominent chronicler of higher education, noted pointedly that when it came to “civic and human relations,” colleges and universities left students at the mercy of “accident, habit, and prejudice.”Global catastrophe brought a response. In 1918, as the United States ramped up participation in the war effort, some 500 colleges and universities were transformed into de facto military-training centers. Enlisted students at these schools were required to take “War Issues,” a new course designed to survey the political, economic, and philosophical underpinnings of the conflict. World War I ended two months after the course was launched, but nearly 300 institutions continued offering it for the remainder of the academic year.That was the first stirring of what came to be called the general-education movement, which aimed to restore to college and university curricula a shared educational experience. Throughout the interwar years, university presidents across the country collaborated closely with faculty to design required courses focused on democratic citizenship. The most celebrated and enduring of these is surely the “Contemporary Civilization” sequence at Columbia University, which began in 1919 and continues to this day.[George Packer: Can civics save America?]The Second World War amplified this commitment. In 1945, a committee formed by Harvard’s president, James B. Conant, produced the surprise national best seller General Education in a Free Society, which sought to define a common set of understandings and capacities to equip students for citizenship in a democracy. A year later, a national commission on higher education that had been convened by President Harry S. Truman declared that the “first and most essential charge upon higher education is that at all levels and in all its fields of specialization, it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals, and process.” By 1950, nearly half of all colleges and universities in the country had adopted a general-education program, most with an explicit focus on democratic citizenship.That success was cut short by the Cold War’s race for scientific dominance, along with a university ecosystem that, more and more, prized path-breaking discovery and unfettered faculty autonomy. By 1960, general education was, according to the writer Alston Chase, “in full retreat.” Throughout the ’60s, the activism and social concern of the civil-rights era mostly found expression outside the classroom. Yet in the ’70s and into the ’80s, the watchword on campus was careerism, not idealism.By the mid-’80s, a rising chorus of voices sought to prove that colleges and universities could shake off civic apathy. In 1985, the presidents of Brown, Georgetown, Stanford, and other schools formed Campus Compact, a coalition of colleges and universities devoted to promoting community service. In time, that commitment evolved into “service learning,” which combines local community engagement with classroom study. Today, hundreds of institutes, centers, and offices of service learning operate at colleges and universities across the country. Campus Compact’s membership has grown from 102 institutions in 1986 to more than a thousand in 2019.The impact of service education has been unequivocally positive. Students who engage in service-learning opportunities in college are more likely to volunteer throughout their postcollegiate lives; to be more tolerant toward others; and to demonstrate leadership in their communities. But service learning, on its own, is not an education in democracy. It generally does not seek to explain why democratic values matter or to ask hard questions, such as why democracies have fallen short of the values they proclaim. It is not designed to nurture affinity for democracy as a system of popular governance. And it does not aim to provide students with the knowledge necessary to engage with or reshape democratic institutions. Service learning has, in this one respect, become a crutch: a way for university presidents to celebrate civic engagement without explicitly having to provide a civic education.I began my own career during the heyday of service learning. After the implosion of the communist world, beginning in 1989, when thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama were confidently declaring the historical inevitability of liberal democracy, focusing civic-learning efforts on community service made sense. Universities did an admirable job at helping train a generation of socially engaged citizens. Yet I and many others had blithely assumed that students had an adequate understanding of democratic citizenship. They did not. Our civic initiatives were built not on a bedrock of democratic knowledge but on sand.Inertia is a familiar aspect of academic life. For better or worse, colleges and universities are institutions that prize careful, prolonged deliberation. They resist change. They are innately skeptical of reform. This is true not only of consequential matters but of trivial ones—recall the description by Clark Kerr, who served more than half a century ago as the influential president of the University of California system, of the modern university as a collection of “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”But universities are capable of making bold and innovative changes when there is sufficient will. During my own career, I have had the privilege of seeing and participating in efforts to create significantly more opportunities for first-generation and low-income students; to pioneer cutting-edge research programs in fields such as artificial intelligence and vaccine development; and to forge deeper partnerships between universities and the communities of which they are a part. Each of these efforts had significant obstacles to surmount.Making education for democracy a core element of higher education’s mission will face its own obstacles, and maybe tougher ones. Chief among them will be the political and ideological divisions, often bitter and unyielding, that can turn any conversation about common values into a ferocious encounter. But we are at a rare moment when the left and the right seem to be aligned behind the idea that more civic education is crucial.[Read: America is divided by education]Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, who don’t agree on much, are both pressing the case. A bipartisan bill under consideration in Congress proposes a $1 billion investment in civic education. And colleges and universities in red and blue states alike have begun to take up the cause. Purdue University recently instituted a new civic-literacy requirement for graduation; state legislatures in Florida and Missouri have passed laws requiring something similar for public-university students. Stanford has launched a pilot course for first-year students called “Citizenship in the 21st Century” as part of a proposed new core curriculum. At my own school, Johns Hopkins, faculty across the university, with the support of the SNF Agora Institute, have started to seed democracy-themed courses throughout the curriculum. These efforts may be starting to pay off: The Annenberg Public Policy Center found that more Americans in 2021 reported having taken a course focused on the U.S. government and the Constitution during college than at any time in the past decade.As these examples illustrate, education for democracy can take many forms, and there is great value in that. No matter its form, the civic education we provide should be encompassing and evenhanded. Studying historical texts from the archives of democracy, for instance, is just as important as practicing the art of peaceful protest to enact change. Neither is inherently reactionary nor inherently radical—both are indisputably democratic. Likewise, civic education should incorporate a rigorous investigation of the ways in which the democratic experiment—in the United States and elsewhere—has fulfilled aspirations. But it should also recognize the ways in which democracy has fallen tragically short. Above all, it should provide students with the knowledge and tools to renew democracy’s promise.One thing we do know: Civic education works. Study after study has shown that civic education at all levels of schooling—including at the college level—instills a sense of political agency and compensates for what students may not always get at home. In 2019, the sociologists Andrew J. Perrin and Alanna Gillis showed empirically not only that college education is a strong predictor of future democratic participation but also that students who take a social-sciences class in particular are more likely to vote. There appears to be an analogous connection at the national level. Countries listed by the Varieties of Democracy project as the strongest democracies in the world (for instance, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia) are also among those in which young people possess the greatest civic knowledge, as assessed by the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study.Colleges and universities are indispensable to the democratic project. Besides educating citizens, they are among the institutions in our society with the greatest capacity to launch students from marginalized or under-resourced backgrounds up the social ladder. They are stewards of fact and curators of knowledge. They are seedbeds of pluralism, bringing together students and teachers from all parts of society. As institutions, they are interwoven with democracy’s ends and values.Renewing their obligation to democracy will require not only work but also risk and imagination. Presidents, deans, and faculty leaders across the country must champion the cause. It is worth the fight for a simple reason: Our democracy may depend on it.This post is adapted from Daniels’s forthcoming book, What Universities Owe Democracies.

If there were a modern day Voltaire, or a 21st century Bertrand Russell, Steven Pinker would be it. So it is a tremendous honour for me to bring you an excerpt of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, by the man himself, in this week's roundup. For more of Pinker's insights, you can also catch a terrific interview with Pinker by Richard Hanania, over on Substack, and Razib Khan's review on Unherd is also highly recommended. (And stay tuned for a Quillette podcast coming soon).For lovers of obscure and arthouse film, don't miss "A Peculiarly Australian Kind of Hell—Revisiting ‘Wake in Fright’" by Ryan Anderson published this week. The film—Wake in Fright—as well as Anderson's essay both capture unique aspects of the Australian experience that are rarely understood by outsiders, including the oppressiveness of the landscape, and the cultural conformity that arises from a geographically isolated population.Finally, thank you to all of those who have subscribed to Quillette in recent weeks. We have received many notes of gratitude from long-time readers, which has been both encouraging and touching. In these polarised times, it is easy to become demoralised when outrage and falsehood spread faster, and prove more profitable than measured analysis and objective fact-finding. So it is a terrific boost when readers such as yourselves express your support, and back us financially. We can't do our work without our readers—so for each and every one of you who have subscribed—thank you from the whole team!Best,ClairePhilosophyBe RationalRationality is uncool. 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Fellowship, community, shared patriotism—these essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. They come from a shared sense of individual independence and personal effort. They come from working together to build a country—that is the answer to the welfare crisis.
~Robert F. Kennedy, 1968
Throughout the Western world, power has come to be seen as something that should be restricted at all costs, because increasingly power is associated with coercion, fraud, ruthlessness, and violence. But matters are not so simple. As psychologist Dacher Keltner points out in his 2016 book The Power Paradox, power is not a uniform concept or something inherently negative. Rather, power can be used in many ways, including to do good. People in positions of power have often used their authority to increase human freedom, for example by abolishing slavery and apartheid, overthrowing dictators, and granting previously discriminated groups equal rights.More importantly, a one-sided view of power as coercion blinds us to how power permeates virtually every aspect of our daily lives. Power shapes our relationships with other people to the extent that we tend to grant more power and influence, voluntarily, to those who are able to make the decisions that are most beneficial for the group in the relevant context. The fact that we have come to pervasively dominate and shape the conditions in which we live is not the result of superior intelligence, but our exceptional ability to cooperate, transfer knowledge across generations, and create patterns of cultural behavior and norms acquired through upbringing and imitation.When power and authority in a workplace are distributed meritocratically, this is generally perceived as legitimate, fostering loyalty and ambition to obtain good results. In Keltner's words: “We gain power by acting in ways that improve the lives of other people in our social networks.” Thus, the term meritocratic is not used here in the now customary sense that power and influence are allocated according to formal merits, such as a degree from a highly ranked university or, more generally, based on highly specific academic or educational qualifications (credentialism). Rather, I use it in a broader sense: the allocation of power and authority within a group or an organization to persons who are perceived to be most capable of making judicious decisions regarding the use of available human, financial, and physical resources that are most beneficial for the performance of the group or organization. This entails empowering group members to advance the greater good, rather than the narrow self-interest of individual group members. Groups reward those people by affording them elevated status and esteem.Giving individual group members—such as employees in a firm, public-sector bureaucrats, or people engaged in non-profit civil society organizations—substantial discretion regarding how they carry out their duties and making them personally responsible for the result, is often a prerequisite for achieving high-quality results when tasks are complex, impossible to standardize, and fraught with uncertainty. However, I will show that the scope for assigning power and competencies accordingly is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s world. This is mainly due to the interaction of at least four diverse ideological and cultural currents that I discuss below. For us to maintain a good society, therefore, good power must be reinforced and defended.Good powerEffective collaboration to solve a task, grow a company, or build a society requires that individuals fit into a structure. But how does this process take place? Keltner maintains that group members voluntarily bestow influence and authority on those who have the greatest ability to contribute to the group’s success. In other words, power is something that others give us.Humans have an exceptional and inherent ability to see which person in a given context is the most competent and has the right character traits—sincerity, honesty, integrity, and perseverance—to be entrusted with more power than others in the group. For lack of a better term, let’s call this good power. Hence, we have a tendency to spontaneously create hierarchies in which we grant more influence (and prestige) to certain members of the group, often those who are more able and willing to transfer their knowledge to others, and who have many social contacts through which they can extend their influence by bestowing power on others.There are two possible routes available to people who have been given power and influence by others: to act with the best interests of others in mind, thus gaining long-term and lasting influence and a good reputation; or to be seduced by power and the opportunities it provides to benefit themselves and their loved ones at the expense of the group. This is Keltner’s “power paradox”:The seduction of power induces us to lose the very skills that enabled us to gain power in the first place. … By succumbing to the power paradox, we undermine our own power and cause others, on whom our own power so critically depends, to feel threatened and devalued.Thus, good power is constantly threatened because, to varying degrees, evolution has imprinted the power paradox on all of us. Moreover, the opportunities to exercise power based on “coercive force” increased dramatically as humans began to develop agriculture, keep livestock, and dwell in permanent settlements. Continuously increasing surpluses enabled specialization and ever-larger societies, which in turn increased the scope for the exercise of power based on coercion and arbitrariness.Contemporary suspicion of good powerRecent research by evolutionary biologists such as Martin Nowak and Edward O. Wilson provides evidence that humans have evolved both through selection at the individual level––which promotes selfishness and competition within the group––and at the group level––which promotes selflessness, generosity, and altruism.Today, the distribution of power and authority according to bottom-up meritocratic principles is also strongly threatened by at least four different ideological currents.The first is Marxism, with its focus on the distribution of wealth between owners and employees, superiors and subordinates, and the individual and the state in the form of taxation. Marxism takes the production of wealth for granted, and employees are expected never to be tempted to increase their performance without an immediate impact on their salary. This hits activities that depend on a strong, non-material, professional ethos particularly hard.The second current, working in a similar direction, is liberal individualism with its emphasis on individual accomplishment, for which the most important thing is to succeed. In practice, this also means that money, which is the lowest common denominator, tends to be the yardstick for everything. Today's individualism preaches that you should see yourself as a brand, one to build and exploit to your own advantage. It then becomes important to restrict the amount of knowledge you share with others and to take every opportunity to act in your own narrowly defined self-interest, even if your individual benefit comes at the expense of the group. Pushed to its limit, this idea almost inevitably leads to the problem of the power paradox; even if somebody was initially given power by his or her peers, that person is likely to gradually develop a sense of entitlement which results in the use of this power to benefit him personally at the expense of the group. Production and innovation based on trust and collaboration are thereby frustrated.The third current that undermines meritocracy and good power is postmodernism, which regards knowledge as something defined by the powerful to oppress others. In postmodernist thinking, there can be no objective measure of ability or competence, which makes it impossible to maintain a legitimate meritocratic system. This “hermeneutics of suspicion” also undermines the motivation to learn from knowledgeable role models, which is and always has been a crucial success factor in human development.The fourth and final current is the collectivist, identitarian thought of movements such as radical feminism and critical race theory. These should not be confused with liberal feminism and the anti-racism at the core of the 1960s civil rights movement, which demanded only equal opportunities and rights—that is, to become part of a meritocratic system that had largely been reserved for men from the majority population. Such collectivist movements tend to interpret the distribution of power and authority as a consequence of discrimination on the basis of sex and/or skin color. Their solution is that power and authority should be distributed “fairly” at the group level, rather than according to individual ability.At present, this final current is extremely virulent, but it would not have gained the necessary traction without being preceded by the exceptional success of postmodernist thinking in undermining the very idea that good power can exist and be perceived as legitimate among those subordinated. It has also been fueled by the fact that traditional Marxism, which pitted workers against capitalists, failed in practice. Likewise, this new collectivist variant gets its raison d’être from the claim that identifiable groups are oppressed by other identifiable groups. However, in contrast to Marxism, there is no eventual conflict resolution in sight. Instead, power must be redistributed from groups with too much power to other identifiable groups who are said to have too little power.Jointly, these four currents make it impossible to foster a shared sense of public morality and shared moral principles upon which a just society can be built and disputes resolved. Lacking shared moral principles, society ends up preaching moral neutrality, which bars value judgments and produces relativism. But as writers such as Philip K. Howard, Michael Sandel, and Jonathan Sacks assert, moral neutrality is incompatible with a free society. Essential elements of a shared morality include truthfulness, reciprocity, and understanding of the demands of group loyalty. Shared social values putting the common good ahead of selfish goals is the cement of a well-functioning society, and likely the most important condition for the success of political democracy. Relativism creates a power vacuum that will be filled by self-interested groups substituting their own values for the shared morality that puts the common good before narrow self-interest.Non-meritocratic distribution of power and authorityIn different ways, these four currents erode the legitimacy of the distribution of power and authority according to bottom-up meritocratic principles. Distribution must then take place according to top-down formulaic mechanisms such as quotas, affirmative action, and proportional representation.When a person is denied power and authority even though the group considers him or her to be the most appropriate candidate for receiving it, the productive mechanisms flowing from good power are disabled. Group member loyalty to the whole is weakened, and it becomes difficult to delegate responsibility and initiative.In complex operations where the tasks are difficult to standardize, a prerequisite for achieving high quality is often that individual workers are granted a great deal of autonomy and responsibility to carry out their tasks. This applies not least to education and health or social care. But as economist David C. Rose notes in The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior, increased specialization and complexity also give rise to more so-called “golden opportunities” to act opportunistically for one’s own gain and without being discovered by anyone else or where there is no identifiable harm or victim.When people are deprived of autonomy and responsibility to decide how a task is best performed, their work also becomes unsatisfying and even demoralizing, which leads to recruitment and retention difficulties for skilled personnel. Raising wages seldom helps—it will still be an unattractive job, even if it is better paid.When power and authority are distributed from below—that is, when good power dominates—a large share of compensation to those who hold higher positions in the hierarchy comes in the form of recognition and respect from other group members, as well as from society at large. All other things being equal, this means smaller wage differentials between the various levels in the hierarchy. Perhaps the clearest example of this is in the research world, where salaries are rarely particularly high and wage differences are small, while differences in reputation often vary greatly.The fact that humans are predisposed to be favorable to true meritocracy also provides a potent rebuttal of Michael Sandel’s claim that those who end up at the lower rungs of the hierarchy would be more content in an aristocracy than in a meritocracy. The alleged reason is that in an aristocracy you cannot be held responsible for your subordinate position and your master has not achieved his position through his superior capability, he has just been luckier than you. But, as David Goodhart has argued in Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, a truly meritocratic bottom-up allocation of power and influence is the only system that “helps to secure people’s consent to the inequalities that are the inevitable consequence of limited government.”Moreover, it creates a society that is dynamic and wealthy, and it does create opportunities for people who do not come from a privileged background. At any rate, even if Sandel were right—that winners do not deserve their remuneration—the problem for society in the long run is that a rigid aristocratic or bureaucratic culture does not create, innovate, or invent—that is, it does not resolve the “grand challenges” related to environmental sustainability, global health, and development.In areas that fail to establish a meritocratic system that is marked by stability and legitimacy, there are no opportunities for the most competent, conscientious, and ambitious to claim leadership positions where they can promote the broad public interest. Without a shared sense of morality, nobody who wants to do good can have the moral authority to convincingly, in the eye of their fellow humans, overcome selfishness. If it is not possible to serve a goal that is greater than one’s narrow self-interest, and to do so with credibility and legitimacy, all that remains is to serve one’s own family or group rather than pursue the common good broadly construed.The problem is greatest in the public sectorFor competitive activities taking place in a genuine market, it is costly to deviate to any great extent from meritocratic principles, which also make it easier to attract competent staff—talented people are drawn to meritocratic areas, such as computer game development or elite sports. Here, the skilled and dedicated are rewarded for their success with inner satisfaction, recognition, and often—but far from always—financial reward. Even skilled criminal gang leaders create meritocratic systems in which the most capable members are promoted and gain recognition.If, on the other hand, external competition is lacking, there is a greater tendency to deviate from meritocratic principles in the distribution of power and authority. The problems arising from such a distribution are therefore most obvious in the public sector. At the same time, activities such as primary education, justice administration, social care, and nursing depend upon professional pride that inspires personnel to do their job as best they can in each individual situation.This presupposes that the responsibility for the result lies with the individual employee. Paradoxically, public employees in many Western countries have been deprived of their personal responsibility through New Public Management measures and legislation. For instance, as early as in the 1970s, public servants in my own native country, Sweden, could no longer be prosecuted for misconduct. But if they could not be held accountable, they also could not be responsible, which means their jobs were largely emptied of their intrinsic meaning. Instead of performing their work in a dedicated and professional way, public sector workers were urged to adopt a diametrically opposite view of themselves and their activities, focusing instead on the struggle for rights and improved material conditions.Two examples from Sweden cogently illustrate the point. In the mid-1980s, Inger Olsson, the chairman of the Nurses Union, asserted that nurses should of course fulfil the duties that the trade union and the employer’s organization had agreed upon, “but passion, a sense of mission, or personal responsibility beyond what the agreement stipulated are shackles from a time we have left behind.” Sigvard Marjasin, then chairman of the extremely powerful Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union, asserted that the Lutheran work ethic was a slave morality and declared that “diligence, contentedness, and honesty are three positively laden words. … This kind of morality among the subjugated is useful. This is exactly the kind of morality the upper class likes others to have.” Personal moral responsibility among workers in these professions was thus viewed as an obstacle to political progress.The populations in Western democracies are guaranteed a number of rights by law such as good primary education, high-quality health and social care when the need arises, support from the police and the judiciary for victims of crime, and so on. However, in order for rights to be de facto and not only de jure; the fulfilment of your rights must be somebody else’s responsibility. In the end, that person is the doctor, assistant nurse, social worker, policeman, judge, or kindergarten teacher that has been assigned the task of delivering your rights. But if those persons have been stripped of their responsibility, and hence of the deeper meaning of their duties, these jobs are less likely to attract talented and motivated individuals. Or, even if they were initially highly motivated, the way the system is rigged it is likely to either gradually undermine that motivation or induce those persons to quit in search of a more morally sound and result-oriented setting.Worse still, the individuals employed to deliver your rights will be inclined to strive to extend their own rights also in their role as suppliers of your rights. This will undermine the quality of the delivered rights, and in an increasing number of instances the delivery is cancelled: the police refrain from investigating a crime committed against you, specialized health services become rationed resulting in inadequate care, schools are allowed to fail to prepare the young for adult life without being sanctioned, and so forth. And deep down, the employees, who have extended their own rights to the detriment of their own and their organization’s capacity to honor the rights of their fellow citizens, know that this has made their job less gratifying.For meritocracy to become a reality, the public sector must build and maintain competent organizations that offer attractive employment for talented people who are inspired to fulfill their public obligation to deliver these rights. Today, this is rarely the case—despite a non-existent risk of unemployment and often relatively low educational requirements, there are almost always staff shortages in these jobs. In fact, the vacancies that tend to be most difficult to fill are positions with the purpose of delivering the mandated rights. There are no rights without obligations—reciprocal altruism is a cornerstone of any welfare society. Without a shared morality of reciprocal altruism, the explosion of demanding rights on ever-increasing areas degenerates to demands for personal gain.Restoring true meritocracy and reaffirming good powerTo deal with current maladministration in the form of poorly functioning organizations, staff turnover, waste of resources, and faltering civil society organizations, good power must be restored so that authority is granted to those who are best at making decisions that are most favorable to organizations as a whole. The alternative to meritocracy is not compassion, even though it may seem to be so. The alternative lies in new and highly destructive forms of egoism.The problem extends far beyond sheer economics. A judicious allocation and exercise of power and authority is a cornerstone of a free society. No citizen is free if the police do not have the power necessary to protect us and the rule of law prevails. As soon as a society embarks on dismantling the concept of power, arbitrariness, and ruthlessness will step in to fill the void. The recent trend to defund the police in many American cities also shows that the effects are immediate with steep increases in violent rioting, looting, and homicide rates.Power has to be allocated. If this is done in a truly meritocratic fashion, it is not only accepted by those who become subordinated, but also met with their approval. The evidence suggests that we are genetically programmed to be at peace when we have a place in a group, when we have a role to play that suits us, and when we feel valued––not out of pity but because we actually help create real value.By contrast, rights decoupled from obligations cannot fill the soul and create meaning. People need genuine responsibility. A true sense of a life well-lived comes from being entrusted with genuine responsibility. In modern life, with its hyper-specialization, it becomes ever harder to see that what we do matters to anyone other than ourselves. This is a prescription for the paradox of despair amidst plenty.By noting that people’s self-esteem largely flows from their contribution to society, it is far from sufficient to just look at the ex post distribution of income irrespective of how that distribution has come about. Michael Sandel talks a great deal about “contributive justice”—every person should have the right to contribute to society based on his or her ability and skills.Sixty years have elapsed since the American psychologist and social activist John W. Gardner pointed out that it must be possible to find a purpose in striving for excellence irrespective of what goals one pursues. It must be possible to enjoy being appreciated as an excellent plumber, assistant nurse, or village schoolteacher and not just as a sublime musician, sports star, or business executive in the global village. A great society can neither be based on the premise that it is sufficient that everybody has a fair chance to enter “contests” that, by definition, turn most contestants into losers, nor on the premise that unless you are one of those winners, you should be compensated by drawing on mandated rights.At the same time, the truly creative are those who ultimately fuel human flourishing, but they need room to think and lead. They need good power. We need to make sure they are worthy of it and only rewarded for good use of it, but we must reveal to the world the bankruptcy of calls to eliminate it based on foolish arguments rooted in false premises. There is an enormous challenge and workload ahead of us to come to grips with this task.

Academics like me love to describe things as “problematic.” But what do we mean? We’re not saying that the thing in question is unsolvable or even difficult. We’re saying—or implying—that it is objectionable in some way, that it rests uneasily with our prior moral or political commitments.For instance, when I described applying Ancient Greek free-speech ideals to social media as “problematic” in a recent article, I wasn’t saying that Socrates’s audience was impossible to please. I was saying that these practices were premised on exclusion in a way that modern egalitarians won’t like. Or when my Oxford colleague Amia Srinivasan describes stand-up comedy in Los Angeles as “problematic,” she’s not saying that she struggled to understand the jokes. She’s saying that they relied on sexism in a way that she—and everyone—should find morally bad.In principle, every usage of the term problematic should be followed by an explanation. Is the situation or person in question unjust, immoral, or unfair? Racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted? Wrongheaded, perhaps, or just plain wrong? All too often, the explanation never comes.[Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture]Snark artists on Tumblr have parodied pretentious, pejorative uses of problematic for years. Yet today, they are as popular in mainstream publications as with professors. According to a recent article in Scientific American, JEDI is “problematic” as an acronym for “Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” initiatives because, among other issues, the Jedi protagonists in Star Wars employ “toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution.” Elsewhere, we’re told that the facial features of Bond villains are “problematic” because they cast aspersions on people with disfigurements, or that West Virginia’s long history with the coal industry is “problematic”—at least, according to members of the Rockefeller family.Which other academic buzzword can boast of going so decisively and pervasively mainstream? Conventionally, problematic just means “presenting a problem or difficulty,” a usage that The Oxford English Dictionary traces back to 1609. But this definition can’t explain the word’s current popularity.Like the verb problematize, the adjective problematic came into its own in the 1980s with the importation of French structuralism into American academia. The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault presented “problematization” as a process whereby something previously taken for granted comes to be understood as a problem to be addressed.We ultimately owe problematic, however, not to Foucault, but to his Marxist colleague Louis Althusser, for whom the phrase la problematique described a structured, theoretical system through which ideas are processed. Incidentally, Althusser also strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, to death in 1980. The fact that many who embrace his terminology today would now reflexively describe Althusser himself as “problematic”—instead of “misogynistic” or “violent”—illustrates how successfully the word has slipped the bonds of social theory to become an all-purpose term not of art but of opprobrium.Problematic may have escaped the academy, but scholars and teachers still bear a lot of responsibility for its current use. Like any casual Twitter user, academics use problematic as an innuendo, or better yet, an “insinuendo.” Rhetorically, this usage divides our audiences between those who know already what our commitments are—in many cases because, on a politically homogeneous campus, they share them—and so are presumptively in the know about what we find objectionable. To this audience, problematic indicates where the problem is; they do not need to be told what it is.Yet for those who, for whatever reason, don’t belong to this community of judgment, the effect is very different. Problematic implies that they, themselves, may present a problem. They are offside, and they better get onside, and quick—whether they understand the objection or not.In effect, problematic communicates that those who don’t share our commitments at the outset are not worth arguing with, let alone persuading. It relies on a subtle sort of bullying in place of mutual justification. It excludes, rather than explains.To say that problematic functions as an exclusionary rhetorical strategy implies intent, but I blame intellectual indolence more than malice. In my field of political philosophy, we like to do things with words; we are less attuned to the ways in which words do things with us. Academics are also human beings, often with imposter syndrome, and we come to rely on words such as problematic precisely because they are vague enough to preempt objection. Students, especially, would rather agree with us than admit that they don’t understand what we mean.In this way, problematic is highly efficient. But it is also disastrous for learning.This is why I find the word problematic to be, well, problematic. I object to its proliferation not simply because it encourages sloppy thinking and poor communication among scholars and students alike, but because it divides audiences into in-groups and out-groups based on unstated, but assumed, commitments. Moreover, by failing to express our own specific objections, we academics insulate ourselves from critique. We make ourselves unchallengeable as teachers and so fail our students and ourselves.[Read: I’m concerned about wokeness at my child’s school]Now here, someone might object that I’m being too hard on my fellow professors. Words such as problematic may be exclusionary, but they also allow us to share our provisional judgments or suspicions out loud without having to justify ourselves to others. One might argue that this freedom is valuable, especially for marginalized individuals, upon whom the burdens of justification fall disproportionately. If a society regularly inflicts injustices, large and small, on members of a given racial group, for example, that group’s members should be able to speak up without having to explain themselves with philosophical precision; let the people at fault figure out what they’ve done wrong, for once.I take this objection seriously. Still, I doubt that the benefits outweigh the harms, particularly in the classroom. One might rephrase the worry as follows: “The word problematic is valuable because it allows those of us committed to social justice or equity to exclude the right people in the right way.” But how can we know, for sure, who the right people to exclude are? Or who among our opponents today might not be on our side tomorrow?More pressing, I see it as my job to communicate effectively to all of my students, as well as to all of my readers, and to teach them how to reason morally and politically, whatever their commitments. Problematic may show our students and readers how to be—or rather how to sound—righteous. But it does not encourage learning or reflection on how to be right.So the next time anyone, including your professor, describes something as “problematic,” please let your next question be: How so?

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, the Ethicist columnist for the New York Times Magazine, and one of today's deepest thinkers about the nature of identity. His scholarly writing, journalism, and novels help us to envision a world in which our professed categories enrich rather than impoverish—or, in his terms, a world which reveres “universality plus difference.” In this week’s conversation, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Yascha Mounk discuss neutrality as a liberal ideal, the limits of identity politics, and the merits of race-abolitionism.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: Much of your deepest thinking in the last years and decades has been on various questions of identity. What is this weird concept that we didn't really talk about a century ago, but now seems to stand at the core of so much culture and political thought?Kwame Anthony Appiah: It's one of the most interesting and important facts about this concept of identity—which we now all bandy about and take for granted—that nobody talked this way before the Second World War. I've looked, and you just don't find this way of thinking. Now, of course, the things we call identities all existed, and people talked about them. But the new thought is that gender and race and sexual orientation and nationality and religion and class are all, in some sense, things of the same kind. And that's a surprising thought. Then you think as a philosopher, “Okay, so what do they have in common?” I think there are three things. [First,] all of them involve labeling kinds of people. So, I'm a nominalist about identities—I think that they're not just responses to some real thing out there. The process of naming plays a role in their genesis, I think. And that’s true of the ones that people think are, in some sense, natural, like gender. So the first thing they have in common is the labeling. The second thing is that once the labels are an operation, some people to whom the labels are applied think of themselves as men, as Catholics, as liberals, and they think of that as giving them reasons to think and to feel and to do things.The third thing is that they’re social—and that means it’s not just that you think of yourself as something or other, but that other people think of you as that. And again, they think that gives them reasons to treat you in various ways. They do things to you, they think about you, they respond to you in ways that depend upon them thinking of you as a “man” or as a “liberal” or as a “Catholic”.Mounk: Is the rise of the focus on gender and race, in part, a function of the success of the fight against class as a separate category?Appiah: Yes, because once you're beginning to conceive things in this new way, an analogy will suggest itself to you between class and gender, which is that they are sources of inequality, that they are sources of your sense of who you are, but also sources of other people's sense of who you are. That would be fine, if they didn't also come with forms of inequality that just don't seem to be defensible. Now, why should women earn 70 cents on the dollar of what men earn? Maybe there's an explanation, so we should look into it, we should try and figure out why it is. But if it's just because they're women, then that seems unfair in the way that discrimination against the working class seemed unfair. And the same, obviously, is true about race. There are big differences in all kinds of social statistics between blacks and whites and browns in United States and, again, there might be an explanation that's consistent with thinking that this is fair, but that was very hard to believe in the United States, where you had legal discrimination. And so there was a sort of pressure to do something about those things too. And then on the tail of feminism comes gay rights, because that's also about gender, and then trans rights.Tthese are all kind of in succession.However, one bad effect of this—and this is why some people on the left don't like what they call “identity politics”—is that we have stepped backwards on the class thing. The modern precariat in North Atlantic societies is in the kind of very bad position that the working class was in, in England, before the Second World War. It’s likely that some feature of our social arrangements is generating these inequalities, and if that is what's happening, we ought to change the social arrangements. People are thinking about race and gender, and they're worried that in pursuing those, we've lost the gains we made about class. And I think that's true, and so I'm all in favor of reminding us that we are still living in class societies, that social and financial and cultural capital are very unequally distributed, they make a huge difference in life chances, and we could do something about that if we wanted.Mounk: What attracted you to the race-abolitionist view?Appiah: Well, first of all, because the strong belief in race is associated with false beliefs about the proper biological classification of human beings. Most of the genetic variance in the human population is within the continent of Africa, or Asia, or Europe or North America, so these forms of racial differentiation don't correlate very much with lots of the things that matter about people. That’s very hard to keep track of if you keep the race concept central to how you think about the people around you.Given how little race tells you about biology—which is what people start thinking about, when you think about race—it might be better if we didn't store information about people under the labels “black,” “white,” “yellow,” or “brown,” because the information will be enormously misleading. A lot of race thinking is grounded in the thought that these are informative biological categories. They aren't.My students in the United States correctly see the point when I say to them, “Can you imagine me sitting on a plane having a conversation with a stranger in the United States, going home to my family and saying, ‘I just had a great conversation.’ And my husband's saying to me, ‘Well, was it a man or a woman? Was it a black person or white person?’ And my saying, ‘Oh, I didn't remember that. Why would that matter?’” That's not socially imaginable in the United States today.Mounk: There is also a more political element of this, right? African Americans for example—a group with a very strange and tragic history that has been forged through the imposition of injustices—were not in any meaningful sense a coherent cultural or ethnic group in Africa before coming here and being forced together. But I can see how it is now, in a meaningful sense, an American subculture, and that losing it would be a cultural loss and a loss to the identity of other members of the group.How do you balance the legitimate reasons for why groups might want to organize, and why might we even want to encourage that form of self identification? Appiah: I think, in the case of schooling, there is an important political argument to be had, and it's based on the recognition of an important piece of social psychology. This is an argument against segregating children at the age of eight or nine by anything, including class. I was sent at the age of eight to an English boarding school. You had to be pretty well-off to go there, and so I was class-formed from a very early age, not just by the experiences of class at home, but by the very strong class formation processes that go on in English schools. I was deprived of the experience of growing up and interacting daily with people of my own generation who had different class experiences from mine. And the same objection arises with respect to race and, I think, religion. Our school was an Anglican school, but we had a rabbi because there were Jewish students. I think it was good that we had a rabbi, but also good that the Jewish students were in school with the rest of us. It was actually a school that took people of any faith and took care that their religious lives were accounted for. So yes, I worry very much, for this reason, that there's a kind of cross-cutting social capital across identity. That is absolutely crucial in political life, because we have identities as citizens of places, and we sometimes need to be able to mobilize those in a way that transcends the identities that we’re divided into. Public schools that are run by the government, for everybody, are a very important site of that. And one of the bad things about the history of public education in the United States is that because of residential segregation by geography, they didn't turn out to be performing that function. And after Brown v. Board of Education, public education in many places, especially in the South, was reorganized in order to avoid the creation of this very valuable kind of cross-cutting social capital.And if we're liberal in that sort of Millian way, we should say there's a reason why we think you should be permitted to have religious schools, but we also think that your kids would be better off in a liberal society, they'd be better citizens, if you didn't do that. If you do, you [better make] some effort to find other spaces where they can create these cross-cutting links.Mounk: There is a kind of neutrality that is important to liberalism: the freedoms that the individual enjoys in a liberal regime should give the state a certain kind of respect for the individual’s moral autonomy, how they want to lead their lives. But then, as you're indicating, there's a way of taking it too far. Where does that line lie?Appiah: I think of the form of neutrality that I'm inclined to endorse as operating like this: If a group comes to us and says, “We think the state is disfavoring us in virtue of our being Sikh, gay, women, etc.,” the state has a responsibility to make sure that that isn't true. It has to think about issues like: “Shall we exempt Sikhs from requirements for wearing motorbikes to go helmets?” Because it's really hard to wear a motor bicycle helmet, and also wear the turban which is a deep element of Sikh identity for men. This is a matter of a kind of respectful negotiation. If you push people into a certain kind of identity politics, they're going to claim that it's a terrible imposition on them. They feel that's what it is to be engaged in politics: to be claiming things on the basis of identity, and that the way to win the argument is by saying, “This is super important to me, and who is the government to say it isn't simply important?”We do have models for dealing with this. One model is the model that developed in societies that had conscription, for conscientious objection. We didn't just allow people to declare that they had a conscientious objection. We asked them to show that they belong to a serious tradition in which they and other people together were committed seriously, say as Quakers. And they had to show that they were willing to take on the sort of risk that conscription imposes on people without being willing to fight. That's why Quakers filled the ambulance brigades in the First World War. They were conscripted like everybody else, but they were allowed to say, “My form of conscription isn't going to be one which involves me killing people. It's going to be saving people to the extent that I can.” And this is because the claim that this is a serious, conscientious matter is spotted. You can't just declare it out of the blue. Mounk: Which is to say that, as you're describing it, it is really important for a liberal state to be very mindful of not discriminating and listening very attentively to claims about injustices. But at the same time, you need to actually bring evidence of this that can be rationally assessed. It can't just be a claim without evidence or a claim in which the assertion of lived experience is proof enough.Appiah: And I think that's why I'm a little bit leery of all this talk of lived experience. Of course, there is such a thing as lived experience, but often, it's just an excuse for saying, “You don't get to question me about this: I declare, and you have to accept.” That’s just not how citizens in a liberal society ought to address one another. And I say that, aware that, of course, what I just said might lead some comfortable people in majorities not to take the demand that I just enunciated very seriously. That's true. But the fact that people will abuse a claim doesn't mean it's not correct. Take religious neutrality. What it means in a society is just going to depend on what the religious traditions happen to be in that society, the variety of them, and what matters to them. Very generally, what happens, at least in the United States, as people of different religions migrate in, is that their form of religious life actually gets Americanized. They may not recognize it. But roughly speaking, American Catholics are a good deal more Protestant than Irish and Italian Catholics. They've sort of adopted some of the assumptions about Christianity which are, historically speaking, Protestant assumptions. And this has happened to Judaism too. I remember going once on the High Holy Days to one of the big synagogues on Fifth Avenue and couldn't have felt more comfortable because it felt exactly like an Anglican Cathedral: The pews, the stained glass, organs. I knew where the preaching was going to come from, because there was a place for a preacher to stand. That's good, I think, because it means that it's easier to fit Jewish religious life into the United States, because it's adapted itself a little bit. I remember on the train from Washington back to New York once hearing a group of prosperous-looking, besuited South Asian Muslims talking. And they were talking about how, if in the United States Muslims were to be tolerated, then Muslims maybe had to accept that in the United States homosexuals would be tolerated. If you said that in Abu Dhabi, they would say you're crazy. But in American Islam, this is a developing thing, this kind of toleration. And it's not just in America—there's little things like this in Turkey and all sorts of places where Islam is important. We should push back sometimes a little bit because I think people can think of things as important, which turn out to be—if it's required for accommodation—a little bit less important than they were inclined originally to think. This is a very delicate process, in other words.Mounk: Which of these forms of identity should we—as private actors, as institutions—encourage, and what's the case for cosmopolitanism being a part of that answer?Appiah: It's a very good thing if people have a sense of human identity, a global identity, a sense that they are connected with all members of the species, combined with a recognition that that isn't because we're all the same. We're living different lives, both as individuals and as communities, and that's fine, within broad limits set by some moral constraints. You can encourage that by the things that we think of as cosmopolitan in many domains. You can encourage it by making sure that you raise children who've read some Chinese novels as well as some German novels and have seen movies from all over the place, and listen to music that isn't all from, you know, Bavaria, and so on. And I think we should encourage people to meet people who have come from other places, and that will create these kinds of links that are human links. Not because there won't be specific elements in them—any two humans have much more in common than their humanity—but because the project of making links with people who are unlike yourself is something that you value. I don't know that I can argue that this is morally compulsory, but it is extremely attractive and important. And in particular, in our world today, we'd better have a lot of people doing this, because there are lots of things that we are going to be able to manage better, together. We're not going to solve global warming unless we have a significant number of people who know how to care about what happens to people in China, who aren't Chinese. Maybe not everybody has to do that in order for this to work, but we need people like that. I am, in the technical sense, a partial cosmopolitan. That is, I think that that level of identification is perfectly consistent with having a strong sense of special responsibility to my fellow citizens, the people with whom I share a nationality. And of course, having a special responsibility to people with whom I share the republic, and the responsibility for running the state, is consistent with my having special concern for my children and my family. I mean, I sometimes think that people sort of forget this very elementary thing, when you start talking about global ideas. So, how can you combine global identity with national identity? Well, how can you combine New York identity with American identity? People do that all the time. I vote for the mayor of New York, the governor of New York State, and the President of the United States, and I vote for a member of the United States Congress. They're doing different things, so I think about different things when I vote for them. And I care about New York City more than I care about Albany, because it's my home. This is rooted cosmopolitanism. Of course, everybody matters. But my family matters to me, and it doesn't matter to you except as another human family. Partiality is a deep part of the structure of the moral world, and that's why I can sometimes say to myself, “I think my country's doing the wrong thing for the world, and the world matters enough to me that I'm going to vote against my country here. I'm going to say my country shouldn't be doing this thing. And I'm going to be proud of my country when it makes a useful contribution to the world's well-being in a way that I'm not proud of Sweden when it makes a useful contribution.” It's easy to think that equality is inconsistent with partiality. That's not true. Equality and impartiality are different ideals. I'm against impartiality.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: http://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

(Photographs by Getty Images.)Dear Reader (especially any of you who’ve figured out what Ozy Media is, or rather, was.)We have Karl Marx to thank for the modern term “proletariat.” He used it to describe the class of wage earners with little or no property who achieved class consciousness and would be the shock troops of revolutionary action. Marx, who had studied Roman law, derived the term from the proletarii—the class of free citizens who worked for wages but didn’t have the property or status to be involved in politics.It’s a shame Marx didn’t study the Greeks instead. The Greeks had a word for a class of free people who were disengaged from politics and civic life and had no desire to be part of it: idiots.Now, they didn’t mean morons. They meant people just a notch above barbarians who didn’t care about civility. The idiot, explained John Courtney Murray, “does not possess the public philosophy, the man who is not master of the knowledge and the skills that underlie the life of the civilized city. The idiot, to the Greek, was just one stage removed from the barbarian. He is the man who is ignorant of the meaning of the word ‘civility.’”How great would it have been if Marx had taken inspiration from the Greeks instead of the Romans? Playing “find-and-replace” in The Communist Manifesto yields some fun results.“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The idiots have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite! They have a world to win.”“But with the development of industry, the idiots not only increase in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more.”“This organization of the idiots into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”Alas, this is an unlikely “what if?” because the word “idiot” had already taken on its Madison Cawthornesque meaning by the 14th century. But it’s still fun to think about.      Marxiness.Anyway, I have Marco Rubio to thank for getting me thinking about Marx this morning.“The $3.5 trillion Biden plan isn’t socialism, it’s [M]arxism,” the Florida senator declared yesterday. Rubio spelled “Marxism” with a lowercase “M.” I know that sort of thing is allowed on Twitter. Indeed, trolling “elites” into correcting usage and grammar is now a time-honored tactic. “Haw, haw! You care about grammar!”Still, I’ll take the bait—“marxism” with a lowercase “m” isn’t a thing.More importantly, his use of Marxism—capitalization notwithstanding—isn’t really a thing either. I don’t think dictionaries are always dispositive on these kinds of questions (see my dad’s take on this in the Wall Street Journal), but this definition of Marxism from Dictionary.com is serviceable enough:The system of economic and political thought developed by Karl Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, especially the doctrine that the state throughout history has been a device for the exploitation of the masses by a dominant class, that class struggle has been the main agency of historical change, and that the capitalist system, containing from the first the seeds of its own decay, will inevitably, after the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, be superseded by a socialist order and a classless society.In fairness, I get how you could call the $3.5 trillion Biden plan “socialism.” It certainly has elements of social democracy in it. While Marx’s views on social democracy are more nuanced than you might think, broadly speaking, actual Marxists don’t like social democracy because Marxists place themselves within the “revolutionary tradition” and social democrats tend to be reformists. And, well, democrats.Regardless, I think Rubio’s trolling is a shame—and shameful—for a bunch of reasons. First, I’m just sick of politicians, on the left and right, thinking this sort of thing is a clever, legitimate or worthwhile use of their platforms. Second, there’s a problem with calling stuff you disagree with “socialism” or “Marxism.” And the problem isn’t just the lack of accuracy or honesty. Lots of stuff Democrats want to do is popular. If you tell people that, say, 12 weeks of paid parental leave is “socialism,” a lot of people will respond by saying, “More socialism, please.” If you think paid parental leave is bad—or good, but too expensive, or not the role of the federal government to mandate—it’s better to make the argument than to simply use a word to anathematize stuff without making the argument. Demonizing labels work only among people who already buy into your definition of the demonic.Finally, Rubio knows better. He is among the best critics of what he regularly dubs “the Marxist Cuban regime.” If he convinces people that the grab bag of entitlements and welfare state giveaways in the Biden plan is “Marxist,” he’s not only undermining his indictment of Cuba, he’s actually making in a roundabout way the left’s argument in defense of Cuba. For a lot of leftists, Cuba is just an enlightened regime that takes care of its people. They’re wrong. But Rubio does his cause no favors by blurring the distinctions between an actual Marxist regime and a bloated spending spree.Of course, Rubio is on a bit of a journey these days, scrambling around to craft a new “common good” conservatism that allows the new right to jettison free market or limited government principles whenever it’s politically convenient. Free markets for me, punishing the woke for thee.I mean, just a couple days before Rubio was warning about Biden’s Marxist plot, J.D. Vance was telling Tucker Carlson that he wants to “seize the assets” of private charitable institutions he doesn’t like. From Noah Rothman’s blistering critique:“We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-gotten, accumulated wealth,” Vance declared. “Why are we allowing the companies, the foundations that are destroying this country to receive tax preferences? Why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who’ve had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda?” Vance, who accused the institutions he wants to liquidate of being “the ultimate institutions of identity politics,” then rattled off a series of communities that should be the select beneficiaries of the largesse he would expropriate and redistribute.Rothman is right that this is “far left” asininity flying under a right-wing boob-bait flag. I used to do a ridiculous road show called “The Spitfire Tour.” I’d travel around with mid-tier left-wing celebrities as the token right-winger. On campus after campus, I’d listen to Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys rant about how the state should abolish tax exemptions for churches and seize their assets for the good of the masses. It’s the same idiocy, just aimed in a different direction.As David French says, when you hear “common good conservatism,” think “social justice for right-wingers.” All of this calls to mind another Marxist maxim—albeit from Groucho, not Karl: “Those are my principles, and if you don't like them ... well, I have others.”But I don’t want to write more about socialism or Marxism (I’ve done plenty of that). I want to talk about idiots.Idiocracy’s avant-garde.A month ago, I tweeted, “I am really struggling to think of a time when I despaired more for the country and had so much contempt not just for both parties, but the bases of both parties.”The backlash was no less remarkable for being predictable. One common complaint was that I was being “elitist.” Elitist is a word where dictionaries really do fall down on the job. It can mean everything from being arrogant or being a snob to believing society should be run by elites. Whether I’m guilty of arrogance or snobbishness from time to time, reasonable people can differ. But I proudly plead guilty to the charge of thinking that society should be run by elites.My only caveat is that “should” is a misleading word here. Water should roll downhill. Fire should be hot. Maybe bears shouldn’t use our national forests as toilets, but they do and I don’t have much say in that matter. And that’s the point. Every society is run by elites. This was obvious before Robert Michels coined the iron law of oligarchy. Every institution, from pizza joints to empires, has some people at the top making decisions. The only question is who gets to be a member of the elite—and, I suppose, why and how they get there.Authoritarian, totalitarian, monarchical, and even anarchical societies have elites. And so do democracies. Among the ranks of elites in America are these people called “senators.” Rubio is a member of this elite club. J.D. Vance is already a member of one faction of the elite—he’s a rich and famous former private equity guy and author. He wants to join Rubio’s club. But he goes around campaigning against elites and elitism while, in effect, arguing he should be promoted to a higher rung of the elite.What does this have to do with idiocy?Simply this: Our elites are actively cultivating idiocy, both in the Greek sense and in the modern moronic sense. The bases of both parties, each in their own ways, crave dumbed down “solutions” swathed in the gossamer of gobbledygook and rationalized by irrationalism. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is only figuratively talking out of her ass when she mumbles magic incantations inspired by the mumbo-jumbo of modern monetary theory. But she gets closer to literalism when she joins other elites at the Met Gala with “tax the rich” scrawled on her backside. I get that “tax the rich” is just a slogan—but it’s an idiotic one given that we do, in fact, tax the rich. But if you’re an idiot in the Greek sense, someone who doesn’t know much about politics or public finance, you might take that slogan literally and think we don’t.When conservatives say we shouldn’t add trillions to the national debt, progressives respond, “You didn’t care about the debt when you were in charge.” And they’re right! But this response is sophomoric: You were horribly irresponsible with the credit card, so now it’s our turn to be horribly irresponsible! The politicians—in both parties—who are the thirstiest for social media virality sound like Bart Simpson running for class president against Martin Prince. “He says there are no easy answers! I say he’s not looking hard enough!”Donald Trump said last night, “Nobody has done more for Christianity or for evangelicals or for religion itself than I have.” Spare me your “take him seriously, not literally” garbage. That’s the intellectual equivalent of buying indulgences—it gives you permission to take very stupid things seriously rather than denounce the stupidity on display.I honestly don’t think Trump or Ocasio-Cortez know better. But in a serious country we should want elites who do. And simply knowing the truth isn’t enough. Rubio knows that Biden isn’t pushing Marxism. Biden et al know that getting rid of drive-thru voting is not Jim Crow. J.D. Vance knows that most of his prattle is nonsense. I would like to think that Maxine Waters knows slavery was worse than a couple of border guys riding horses, but I’m not sure. (I’m also not sure which is more damning—ignorance or self-awareness.) Ron Johnson knows the election wasn’t stolen, and he says so when he thinks the cameras aren’t around. Good luck getting him to say it in public, though.Anybody can know the truth. What makes you a deserving member of the political elite is standing for it—and dealing with it. If a sizable number of your voters think the vaccine makes you magnetic or is tainted by Satan, the politician with integrity has a few choices. He can tell them they’re wrong. He can ignore their opinion. He can look for better voters. Or he can go back to the private sector.But for too many of them, if that’s what integrity requires, then integrity has got to go—because they are terrified of the voters and donors—large and small—who want idiocy. Conservatives used to mock campus “snowflakes” who would say stuff like, “I don’t want to debate, I want you to feel my pain.” Now, many of them want their idiocy ratified and celebrated because the truth hurts too much.“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement,” Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, famously said, “and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” He didn’t add, “unless I can own the libs.”Central to good judgement is realism—not foreign policy realism or anything like that, but simple, old fashioned fidelity to reality. Albert Jay Nock’s motto was, “See the world as it is.” This realism used to be the core of conservatism. I would argue it still is. “There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed. What he meant was that telling people with idealistic or utopian ideas that their ideas can’t work could come across as mean. This meanness can be regrettable, but meanness in the name of telling the truth is always at least partially defensible because telling the truth on issues of necessity is always its own justification.But populism is about feelings, passions, and rage. And conservatism has become a victim of identity theft by populism. This new false conservatism looked at Emerson’s meanness of fact and ditched the fact. Meanness has become a value unto itself.The bizarre irony is that for all its superficial toughness, this meanness is derived from a new touchy-feelyness. In just a few short years, we’ve gone from conservatives boldly saying, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” to, “My feelings don’t care about your facts.”But hey, just like expropriating wealth from the “undeserving,” at least it’s a bipartisan thing now. So congrats on that.Various & SundryCanine—and feline—update: The other night, Gracie came rolling into the living room like a star player strutting into the locker room after a big win. She had a mouse in her mouth. We don’t know where it came from—there’s no sign of an infestation in our house and our house is about as conducive an environment for mice as Kabul is for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus. Of course, the mouse wasn’t actually dead. Gracie clearly thought a quick death was too good for this vermin. She put it down for a moment, like a Spanish inquisitor turning to get his tools. The mouse wisely ran. The dogs at this point were gravely concerned. Zoë acted like a scab had entered the factory and taken her job. Pippa, meanwhile, was pleading, “Can’t we all just get along?” The mouse got away. It might have run out the front door or it may be in the house still. We just don’t know. We’ve conducted a hard target search but can’t find it. Gracie, still effulgent with self-satisfaction, has a new spring in her step. She goes into hunting mode a lot even when there’s no evidence she’s seen it. Zoë, out of pride, is pretending the whole thing never happened. Pippa, out of a Quaker-like love for social peace, is pretending likewise. It was all very exciting. Other than that, everyone is good, though the rivalry between Zoë and Gracie has only intensified.ICYMILast Friday’s “news”letterLast weekend’s drive-time Ruminant, which gave me terrifying flashbacksThe greatest crossover in podcast historyBiden still can’t read the roomAll eyes on Capitol HillOur politicians should rewatch Schoolhouse RockMother nature’s revengeAnd now, the weird stuffAt least it’s not turnip juiceFound him!FYIDon’t mess with FloridaAs smart as you’d expectLife imitating artPlease stand up

In its 15 months of publishing, Persuasion has given its readers extensive coverage of the democracy recession happening around the world, and of the threats to liberal democracy coming from within the United States. Some of those threats come from the far right and some from the far left. Within the category of threats from the far left, there are many reports about rapid change in specific professions. For example, we’ve read reports on The New York Times, the CDC, psychotherapy, medicine, documentary filmmaking, corporate America, Kindergarten teaching, elementary school teaching, math teaching, literature teaching, K-12 teaching, and the transformation of American universities as they have strayed from their previous telos—their ultimate purpose—of truth. In the last few years, I have had dozens of conversations with leaders of companies and nonprofit organizations about the illiberalism that is making their work so much harder. Or rather, I should say I’ve had one conversation—the same conversation—dozens of times, because the internal dynamics are so similar across organizations. I think I can explain what is now happening in nearly all of the industries that are creative or politically progressive by telling you about what happened to American universities in the mid-2010s. And I can best illustrate this change by recounting the weirdest week I ever had in my 26 years as a professor. In October 2018 I was on a book tour, speaking about The Coddling of the American Mind, a book I co-wrote with Greg Lukianoff. The publisher had packed five lectures at five colleges into five days. On Monday, I arrived at the first college and was surprised to see a statue of Sigmund Freud on a pedestal in front of the main gate. I gave my talk, took questions from the audience, and then met with a senior seminar class in psychology. In all of my interactions with students, I found that all they could talk about was sexuality. These students had somehow come to believe that everything people do is ultimately done to relieve repressed anxiety stemming from unresolved childhood sexual conflicts. I personally love reading Freud, and I agree with him that sexual motives sometimes drive seemingly non-sexual behavior, but I was saddened to see an entire cohort of students limiting their minds to a single analytical lens on our very complex world. On Tuesday, I arrived at the second college and saw a statue of B.F. Skinner in front of the main gate. I gave my talk, took questions from the audience, and then met with another psychology class. This time the students interpreted everything in terms of “reinforcement.” They had somehow come to believe that all you need to do to understand and predict people’s behavior is study their learning history—the set of all actions for which they had been rewarded or punished. Once again, I was saddened to see an entire cohort of students constricting their thinking to a single theoretical framework. On Wednesday, I arrived at the third college and found a statue of Charles Darwin in front of the main gate. The students at this university interpreted everything in terms of how our genes manipulate us to maximize their own success. These students had somehow come to believe that everything people do is ultimately done to leave behind the maximum number of surviving children (or twice that number of surviving nieces and nephews). On Thursday, I arrived at the fourth college, where a statue of Adam Smith stood in front of the main gate. The students at this school interpreted everything in terms of material self-interest. As a social psychologist who studies morality, I love Adam Smith, and I was stunned to find that the humane author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments had been transmogrified into the patron saint of greed based on a warped reading of The Wealth of Nations. On Friday, I arrived at the fifth college and was met by a statue of Michel Foucault in front of the main gate. At this school students interpreted everything in terms of power and power structures. Whatever I said, whatever I asked them about, the students insisted that everything that happens in our society happens because power is always and everywhere trying to maintain itself. Even our interaction in the classroom was reduced to power structures, although the students could not explain what power I—a visiting speaker—had over them.On Saturday, I returned to my home in New York City, deeply discouraged by what I had seen. I wanted to put the students from all five colleges together in a giant classroom and make them talk to each other until they could each write an essay using at least three of the five lenses to examine a complex social issue of their choosing. Of course, this week was pure fiction, except for Friday, which really happened, more or less. It was never a majority of the students who limited their worldview to power, but in many of the schools I have spoken at since 2015, there has been a subset of students who suffer from monomania, which is defined as an exaggerated and unhealthy obsession with one thing. Individual monomania is rarely a social problem. One person who is obsessed with butterflies or with a particular celebrity, or who sees everything in sexual, economic, or religious terms, is just an eccentric, although sometimes a tiresome one. The monomaniac may suffer a constricted range of emotions and experiences, but she usually imposes no costs on others (although there are cases of celebrity stalkers and lone-wolf terrorists). It is collective or group monomanias that are more worrisome for liberal societies because they create many negative externalities: They cause large numbers of people to behave in ways that are harmful and unjust to others. I’ll focus on two specific group-level effects of monomanias: making groups illiberal and making groups stupid. 1) Monomania makes groups illiberal.The word “liberal” is a shape-shifting term in political discourse, but if we free it from the idiosyncratically American idea that “liberal” means “left” and focus on its core link to liberty, then dictionary definitions line up with common sense. Oxford Languages defines the adjective “liberal” as:1. willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.2. relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.In theory, one could be a liberal monomaniac—obsessed with a celebrity or an intellectual paradigm but perfectly willing to let everyone else have their own obsessions, or no obsessions. But moral and political monomaniacs generally travel in self-policing groups, and these groups are rarely liberal according to either of the two Oxford definitions. If you and your friends believe that everything is about power, and that the world is divided into the powerful people (who oppress others) and the powerless (who are oppressed), then you have a moral obligation to do something about it—all the time.The “prestige economy” is the network of values and meanings within which people compete for status. In monomaniacal groups, the prestige economy rewards those who are most committed to the object of devotion, which has two major illiberal effects. The first is the “expansion imperative”—the pressure to apply the one true lens ever more widely. For example, one can gain points by interpreting glacier research and dog parks as manifestations of power structures. The insistence that the lens applies everywhere means that the preferred remedies must be implemented everywhere. This expansion imperative can explain the otherwise astonishing statement on page 18 of Ibram Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist”:There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.In other words, if a high school teaches chemistry without discussing race, it is not “nonracist,” it is racist. True believers exert pressure on the leadership of the school to bring race into every part of the curriculum, and anyone who expresses doubt or raises concerns risks being publicly shamed and possibly fired. Monomanics sometimes demand that their focal value be installed as the telos of every organization. This brings us to the second major illiberal effect: the incentivization of intimidation and cruelty. Within a group of people competing for prestige on adherence to a belief, one can often gain points by publicly attacking outsiders. This creates an incentive for individuals in the group to attack not just their enemies, who are often out of reach, but innocent people who happen to be nearby. This dynamic may account for the cruelty with which power monomaniacs turn on professors and administrators who try to help them, or who otherwise share their political views but not their monomania. The threat of job loss and reputational damage make everyone else walk on eggshells, and this fearful attitude is incompatible with the success of a liberal society.2) Monomania makes groups stupid.In a 2009 TEDx talk titled “Be suspicious of simple stories” the economist Tyler Cowen warned that stories impose a structure on events that distorts them and blinds us to the distortion. He was particularly concerned about moralistic stories that divide the world into good and evil. He proposed that “as a simple rule of thumb, just imagine that every time you’re telling a good versus evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.” As a social psychologist who studies moral judgment and motivated reasoning, I think Cowen is exactly right—for individuals. Binary thinking makes it hard for individuals to understand the nuance and complexity of most situations. For groups, I’d put the cost closer to 20 IQ points. Shared moralism creates a mutual policing effect that prevents the group from thinking well or changing its mind in response to new evidence. (Please note: I am not calling any person stupid. I am saying that smart people create stupid groups when they bind themselves together in a monomaniacal community.)In 1859, John Stuart Mill laid out the case that we need critics to make us smarter, and that we should have no confidence in our beliefs until we have exposed them to intense challenge and have considered alternative views:...the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it.On Mill’s account, monomaniacal groups are unwise. They react strongly and sometimes violently to those who ask questions or present alternate views, which are said to be “dangerous” and even “violent.” In 2014, a young Canadian queer activist wrote an essay titled “‘Everything Is Problematic’: My Journey Into the Centre of a Dark Political World, and How I Escaped.” The author described the operation of “sacred beliefs”:If someone does question those beliefs, they’re not just being stupid or even depraved, they’re actively doing violence. They might as well be kicking a puppy. When people hold sacred beliefs, there is no disagreement without animosity.By abolishing the right to question, a monomaniacal group condemns itself to holding beliefs that are never tested, verified, or improved. We might even say that monomaniacal groups are likely to be wrong on most of their factual beliefs and their diagnoses of the problems that concern them. And if they are wrong on basic facts and diagnoses, then whatever reforms they propose to an institution are more likely to backfire than to achieve the goals of the reformers. In the early 2010s, I believed that a major problem in the academy was that there were too few professors in the social sciences and humanities who were not on the political left. I still think that’s true, but that slow-growing trend can’t explain why things changed so suddenly around 2015. Now, I believe that the change in the academy—and many other professions—is the result of power monomania amplified by new technology. There has been a power monomania in some parts of the university since at least the 1990s, but there were disciplinary walls that kept the monomania contained. What happened in departments that emphasized activism had little effect on the physics department, or on the president of the university. But those walls collapsed around 2015. I have argued elsewhere that the collapse was brought about by changes to social media that began in 2009 and, by 2012, had created a universal outrage machine. This machine then dissolved the long-standing and essential walls around professions within which a sense of disciplinary standards and duties had, in prior decades and centuries, been formed and passed on. Without these professional boundaries, every place became like every other place, influenced by the anger expressed on Twitter and other platforms. This is why my conversations with leaders are so often the same: A politically progressive leader, knowing that I have written about the new dynamics on campus, bitterly recounts to me her bewilderment and frustration about how her younger employees made escalating demands backed by public accusations and a presumption of ill will, thereby damaging the organization’s reputation, culture, and ability to achieve its mission.I want to be clear that monomania is not just a problem on the far left. On the far right, we have seen communities becoming illiberal and stupid by following monomaniacs obsessed with communism, homosexuality, religion, immigration, and the national debt. But to return to the problem I encountered on my five-college book tour, I think that professors and leaders of educational institutions have a fiduciary duty toward their students that requires them to oppose monomania and lead students out of its stultifying embrace. A liberal arts education should expand minds and prepare students for citizenship in a liberal democracy, particularly in our era when the future of liberal democracy is so much less assured than it was just a decade ago.Jonathan Haidt, a member of the Persuasion advisory board, is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is a co-founder of Heterodox Academy and a co-author (with Greg Lukianoff) of The Coddling of the American Mind.

If the $3.5 trillion Democratic reconciliation bill becomes law in anything close to current form — including paid parental and sick leave, universal preschool, some free college, and an annual check to households with younger children — it would be a big step toward turning the United States into a European-style comprehensive welfare state. Many progressive Democrats speak highly of the Scandinavian social democracies, in particular. As Bernie Sanders has put it: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.”
But those loving glances toward Team Nordic often produce fuzzy vision. They typically miss something really important: how those countries pay for those massive welfare states. As Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip notes:
Yet if other countries’ welfare states are a template for American progressives, their taxes aren’t. In Germany, the typical worker pays 49% of her labor compensation in income and payroll taxes (including the employer’s contribution); in France, the proportion is 47%, in Sweden, 43%. In the U.S., it is just 30%. The U.S. alone, among major advanced economies, doesn’t impose a value added tax on consumers of goods and services.
On that last point: Denmark, Sweden and Norway all have VAT rates of 25 percent, according to the Tax Foundation, with each collecting close to 10 percent of GDP through the levy. Yet Democrats have made a big deal about not raising taxes on households earning less than $400,000 a year. (There are some exceptions as Ip notes: “Smokers, for example, will pay a higher cigarette tax, and middle-class stockholders will indirectly bear some of the higher corporate tax rate.”)

One could argue that there’s still plenty of room to fund more social spending through higher corporate taxes and higher top income-tax rates before talking about an economy-wide VAT. That, especially given higher income inequality in the US. But clearly creating Nordic America is going to require lots of additional revenue, whether through a VAT, carbon taxes, or a combination of both. Again the Tax Foundation: “In 2019, Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio was at 46.3 percent, Norway’s at 39.9 percent, and Sweden’s at 42.8 percent. This compares to a ratio of 24.5 percent in the United States.” And these WSJ charts highlight the current gap in social spending and spending commitments between the US and Europe:

It’s hard to avoid the reality — unless you’re a progressive politician, perhaps — of a fundamental mismatch between the left’s spending dreams and the economics of taxation. One caveat, which I point out in a recent The Week column:
Unless of course, Democrats adopt novel theories of macroeconomic policy that suggest significantly less need to pay for government spending. But there’s little evidence that anyone outside deeply left progressive politics or EconTwitter takes such ideas seriously. Certainly there’s no evidence that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell does, and he’s likely to be renominated for another term as boss of the central bank. If the far left really wants a transformational presidency — whether Biden’s or someone else’s — the lives of all Americans would need to fundamentally change.
Learn more: AOC reveals the economic truth that many Dems wish to avoid: Their spending dreams require tax hikes on everybody | Democrats should take what they can get | Democratic tax plan is a reckoning for the left
The post The real ‘tax gap’ is the one between progressive spending dreams and economic reality appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Over the course of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci has become a cultural obsession. You can, if you so desire, purchase Fauci-themed chocolates, T-shirts, luxury sweaters, yard signs, bobblehead dolls, and votive candles. Fauci, for his part, seems baffled by the attention: “Our society is really totally nuts,” he wrote in an April 2020 email, responding to an online article about “Fauci Fever.”But he is far from the first government official in recent years to receive this onslaught of adoration. Before Fauci, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was left-of-center America’s unlikely crush and magnet for T-shirt sales; before Mueller, it was fired FBI Director James Comey, whom liberals had reviled just months prior for his handling of the Clinton email investigation. The public servants describing President Donald Trump’s misconduct during his first impeachment had their moment too: Inspired viewers of those 2019 hearings formed a “Fiona Hill Fan Club” for the former National Security Council official.Politicians have always worked to cultivate devoted followings. Yet as these unexpected subjects of public obsession would be the first to tell you, they are not politicians. They are bureaucrats and functionaries—people who pride themselves on being apolitical, putting their head down, and getting the job done. Most of them were not looking for the limelight, nor are they particularly comfortable in it. But they were transformed into the nerdy heroes of the Trump era, cast as foils to the 45th president and his boorish disinterest in the workings of the government he ran.Now, under the Biden administration, the culture of idolizing public servants does not seem to be going away. The trouble is that this newfound fandom for the federal government among anti-Trump Americans sits awkwardly with the reforms that, as Trump’s presidency showed, America’s governing institutions so desperately need.The trend toward obsessive appreciation of political figures who are not actually politicians, especially on the left and the center-left, traces back to 2013, when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was transformed into the internet superstar “Notorious RBG” for her dissent in the voting-rights case Shelby County v. Holder. Since then, plenty of politicians, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Kamala Harris, have become memes to one degree or another. Writing in The New York Times, the culture critic Amanda Hess describes this as “democracy reimagined as fandom”—people engaging with some of the most powerful figures in American politics as they would with a pop singer or movie star.But if making a GIF out of a presidential candidate is one thing, buying a T-shirt with a former FBI director’s face on it is quite another. The chaos of the Trump administration—and the hopelessness felt by the many people who detested the president—expanded fan culture to focus on civil servants and bureaucrats as well. As Hess notes, Ginsburg became a liberal icon not for her victories but because of her dissents to rulings by a right-wing Supreme Court: “Cultural victories,” Hess argues in another Times essay, “act as Band-Aids for political wounds.”[Read: The Ruth Bader Ginsburg fandom was never frivolous]And in the early Trump years, there were a lot of wounds. The first public servant to find the klieg lights trained on him was Comey, who drew admiring attention after Trump fired him for his testimony on the president’s efforts to corrupt the FBI. The affection was immediate: “Comey should be the next Bachelor,” one Twitter user declared. A year later, the former FBI director’s memoir recounting his interactions with Trump turned into a best seller. By then, Robert Mueller had become an object of adoration too. The special counsel—a soft-spoken, brusque 72-year-old man with a habit of flicking the lights on and off to inform houseguests that it is time to leave his home—was now, as Vogue put it, “America’s New Crush.” One psychoanalyst, considering the sudden rise of New Yorkers pining for since-disgraced Governor Andrew Cuomo during his spring 2020 coronavirus briefings, described this phenomenon as “retrosexual.”“We’re not trying to be melodramatic here,” wrote one novelty store in the description for its Mueller action figure, “but the Special Counsel sure seems to be the last thing standing between us and utter chaos.” Today, that same store is advertising its Fauci action figure, complete with detachable mask. When the pandemic began, Fauci slotted into the same cultural role that Comey and Mueller had filled for Trump’s opponents. He was professional, careful, detail-oriented—all the things Trump was not. He believed in public service, rather than Trumpian self-interest. Men like Fauci and Comey devoted their life to systems of order and knowledge—science, the rule of law—that Trump’s hostility to facts threatened to uproot.And it hasn’t been just these men. The writer Michael Lewis captured the mood in his 2018 book The Fifth Risk—also a best seller—which the Washington Post called “a love letter to federal workers.” Studying some of the government’s least prominent agencies, Lewis wrote glowingly of the rigor and apolitical expertise of the civil servants whom the Trump administration had placed under attack, through both sheer sloppiness and a deliberate effort to bring about what the Trump adviser Steve Bannon called “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” In a 2020 interview, Lewis argued that the disastrous impact of Trump’s presidency had helped Americans “figure out just how critical government is.” A Fauci bobblehead or an It’s Mueller Time mug might seem like a strange way to express newfound appreciation for the importance of a government that runs on expertise rather than bullshit—but the Trump era made a lot of things strange. And in such dark days, a silly bobblehead can provide much-needed lightness.The pro-Trump right has its own heroes—including, most obviously, the former president himself. But in a reflection of the American right’s long-standing distaste for government, those heroes are usually not public servants. The exceptions tend to be members of law enforcement, such as the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump pardoned in 2017 after a judge convicted Arpaio of ignoring a court order to cease racially profiling Latinos. Arpaio was a government official, but his appeal as “America’s toughest sheriff” came from his willingness to go outside the rules, not abide by them. And Arpaio’s supporters often framed their enthusiasm less as something heartfelt and more as trolling. “Arpaio’s defiance of all the right people (leftists, Democrats, the media) made him a heroic figure,” argued a columnist on the pro-Trump site Breitbart News shortly after the pardon. This kind of fandom has a winking evasiveness, just like Trump himself: It’s impossible to know whether the fan really believes in Arpaio’s mission, or whether the goal is just to piss people off.It may be tempting to write off left-of-center fandom toward civil servants as equally shallow. Hess, of the Times, argues that “civic participation has been converted seamlessly into consumer practice.” But if you can get past the corny T-shirts, there is a sincerity and even innocence to it. Mueller, Fauci, the bureaucratic heroes of The Fifth Risk: They all believe in things, such as the value of civil service and the importance of upholding the rule of law. The 2019 impeachment hearings over Trump’s extortion of Ukraine doubled as a catalog of the witnesses’ idealism, as civil servant after civil servant testified about what drew them to government work and how their family stories of hardship and service instilled in them a love for America. This attitude is, amid doubts on both the right and the left about what American values are and whether they’re worth anything, deeply old-school. As a response to Trump’s attack on all principles outside self-interest, it’s an appealing alternative system for thinking about civic life.Lewis describes in The Fifth Risk how the Trump administration’s efforts to gut crucial federal programs—such as free access to weather forecasting—were aided by the fact that Americans generally don’t understand much about what services the government provides in the first place. Perhaps greater public appreciation of civil servants might help push back against future such efforts—an especially important consideration in an era when the American right has largely abandoned the idea of governance in favor of privatization and grievance politics. Fauci fans might express their appreciation through purchases, but they are also cheering for the effectiveness of big government.Likewise, a new cadre of civil servants inspired to join government by the idealism of figures like Fauci could help rebuild departments hollowed out by the exodus of experts driven away by the Trump administration. Several years ago, I watched a former official, who had left government after Trump upended his work, exhorting a group of young people to consider public service: It was still worth it, he argued, despite everything.And yet there is also a distinct conservatism to this new excitement over the sincerity of bureaucrats. It’s not a coincidence that the people who transformed into rock stars are almost all older white men, able to channel a certain vision of cultural authority. Both Fauci and William Taylor, a State Department official who became a runaway star of the Ukraine impeachment hearings, have drawn comparisons to Walter Cronkite—evoking a nostalgia for an imagined past when everyone could trust what the men in power were saying.[From the April 2020 issue: The president is winning his war on American institutions]This nostalgia ran aground again and again during the Trump administration, when Americans were frustrated to find that the authority figures in whom they had put their trust were unable to bring Trump’s presidency crashing down. Now, with a president in power who himself fits that model of plainspoken decency, the risk is that this new fan culture deflects the criticism that authority deserves in a democratic society. The current White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is not an apolitical civil servant like Fauci or Taylor, but she has developed a similar fandom and has even been given her own hashtag for when she shuts down questions from reporters: #PsakiBomb. But as Jessica M. Goldstein points out in Washingtonian, “it isn’t in the public’s best interest for the White House’s most prominent spokesperson to be good at deflecting queries.” The left-of-center adoration of Psaki, Goldstein argues, is “like a hangover from the Trump era we’re struggling to shake.”This “hangover” surfaces intellectual tensions that the Trump presidency helped, for a time, to submerge. Consider the sudden public adoration of the FBI and federal prosecutors, which was always at odds with increasing recognition of the brutality and unfairness of America’s criminal-justice system. In the past few years, Comey, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, and the former federal prosecutor Elie Honig all published books framing the values of the Justice Department and the rule of law as sources of civic virtue for all people to abide by. Yet none of those memoirs spend adequate time engaging with the manifest flaws and racial inequities of law as it’s put into practice. At the same time as Trump’s presidency cast Justice Department officials resisting corruption as newly heroic, the administration’s cruelty—its refusal to counter racist municipal police departments; its rush to execute federal inmates on death row, many of them Black—also made clear how much of the justice system is built on ugliness. If the takeaway from America’s sudden love of public servants is that government, when run by the “right” people, is beyond criticism, the risk is that the system will continue to rot.The challenge is to channel this new sincerity into a political project that looks forward, rather than backwards. Trump’s irony is politically deadening in its focus on “owning the libs”; if nothing matters, what’s the point of pushing for change? Sincerity, in contrast, insists that things do matter after all. The #Resistance movement, developed in opposition to Trump, appeals to the same white suburban women who might be moved to purchase a Mueller bobblehead or a Fauci candle. It is also, as the sociologist Theda Skocpol has shown in research with Lara Putnam, Leah Gose, and Caroline Tervo, a powerful force that is remaking American politics at the local level, pushing women who had previously been politically disengaged to express their frustration through grassroots organizing for Democratic and left-wing causes. These activists are extremely sincere and uncool. But if they can continue to harness their rage for making things better, they might be able to do exactly that.* Photo-illustration images courtesy of Ting Shen / Bloomberg / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Alex Kraus / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty; Santiago Felipe / Getty; The Atlantic

In the opening pages of The Genetic Lottery, Dr Kathryn Paige Harden sets out her mission: “What I am aiming to do in this book is re-envision the relationship between genetic science and equality. … I will argue that the science of individual differences is compatible with full-throated egalitarianism.” In this respect, Harden’s book bears a striking resemblance to last year’s The Cult of Smart, in which Freddie deBoer argued that “Hereditarianism [is] the best hope of a twenty-first century left” and proposed that recognising genetically based differences in academic ability was “simply taking left-wing thought to its logical conclusion.” The critical difference is that Harden is a tenured professor in the genetics of human behaviour and she is lending the full weight of her scientific credentials to this moral and political crusade. This makes The Genetic Lottery a dangerous book that threatens to make our genetic advantages and disadvantages a new front in the culture wars.Harden begins with an overview of the latest findings of behavioural genetics and explains how “genetic variation matters for understanding whether our children will succeed in school, will be financially secure, will commit a crime.” How much does genetic variation matter for these outcomes? The results are astonishing. Genetic differences between people account for around 40 percent of the variation we observe in the years of education they obtain and in their lifetime earnings. Differences in our DNA also account for around 50 percent of the variation in violent criminal behaviour. Equally sobering is the revelation that much of the remaining variation for these traits and outcomes is not explained by the family environment (“nurture” as we normally understand it) but from idiosyncratic environmental influences that make siblings in the same family different from each other. Results like these have been replicated repeatedly using different scientific methods and explode the blank slate narrative commonly peddled by activists and social scientists that the unequal outcomes we see around us are entirely the result of structural environmental advantages and disadvantages.How, then, does Harden reconcile these results with her egalitarian political agenda? Not, to be sure, by promoting meritocracy. “Equal opportunity,” she writes, “will necessarily reproduce inequalities that are rooted in the arbitrariness of nature.” She therefore follows deBoer in explicitly disavowing meritocracy, approvingly citing a passage in which he writes: “Equality of opportunity is … a ruse, a dodge. It’s a way for progressive people to give their blessing to inequality.” Instead, Harden argues that it is “our responsibility to arrange society so that it benefits all people, not just people with a certain set of genetic characteristics.” She invites us to radically expand our definition of “structural” sources of inequality to include social environments which allow “morally arbitrary” genetic differences to give rise to unequal socioeconomic outcomes. She even goes so far as to describe societies like ours that provide such social environments as “eugenic.”That Harden is prepared to brandish such a morally loaded term in such a broad and unusual way should encourage her readers to reserve judgement when she uses the same label to attack her contemporary intellectual opponents. But this is just one of several ways that Harden adopts the language and tactics of the contemporary social justice movement with which she makes common cause. Contemporary “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists” have defined themselves in such a way that previously respectable people are captured as “fascists” and “racists” under unrecognizably expanded definitions of those terms. Similarly, Harden describes her own political project as “anti-eugenic,” conveniently implying that anyone who disagrees with her is a eugenicist and a proto-Nazi.But Harden shares more with the social justice movement than these linguistic tropes; she shares a whole moral framework with them: the framework of equity. Equity, Harden explains, is about giving disadvantaged people tailored support that puts them on a similar footing to their more advantaged peers. It is explicitly a philosophy of positive discrimination that can be extended to every conceivable dimension of disadvantage—including genetic disadvantage. But the legitimacy of that ethical framework stands or falls on the basis of whether the inequalities between the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, and the winners and losers of the genetic lottery can rightly be considered unjust.To her credit, Harden valiantly attempts to support this central claim. She enlists the political philosopher John Rawls, who wrote: “The natural distribution [of genetic endowments] is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts … what is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts” [emphasis added]. But as several commentators have pointed out, Rawls’s conclusion in this famous passage is a non-sequitur. One cannot consider the redistribution of economic goods and opportunities as rectifying injustice if the unequal distribution of those goods and opportunities was not unjust in the first place. This is what philosophers call a category error.DeBoer leans into this category error in a blog post summarising his book: “The ethical logic is simple: if you did not earn your abilities but were born with them …you have less natural right to what you have earned, and if you did not deserve your disadvantages but were rather curse[d] with them at birth … you have greater moral claim to deserving help” [emphasis added]. This is incoherent. If no-one deserves the genetic or environmental advantages they were born with, it does not follow that the less advantaged deserve a share of the benefits accruing to the more advantaged. DeBoer argues that “we must leave the idea of ‘deserves’ behind” and Harden writes numerous passages to the same effect. Yet both seem all too ready to re-enlist the idea of desert when arguing that the disadvantaged have a moral claim to the fruits of other people’s labours.Harden and deBoer seem unable to entertain the prospect that people might seek to alleviate poverty, disability, and disease simply because they believe these things are bad rather than because they are unjust. Indeed, Harden’s conviction that all social ills should be seen through the lens of inequality leads to some amusing attempts to shoehorn the most straightforward compassionate interventions into this mould. For example, she describes eyeglasses as an “equity-promoting intervention,” and proposes elsewhere that we “equalize people with regard to their access to clean water.” But we don’t fluoridate drinking water, correct poor sight, or develop vaccines to narrow the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. We do so because we want to alleviate suffering and help people. Interventions like these will often weaken the link between genetics and social disparities by reducing the depths of disadvantage into which some people might otherwise fall if left unaided. But this is incidental to the principal goal, which is certainly not to break “the causal link between genetics and … inequality.”In a similar vein, both authors hold an unusual view of how economic rewards and social status accrue to people in a free society like our own. Both repeatedly exhibit a kind of social animism in which “society” or “the system” is seen to bestow money and social status on people based on a false hierarchy of human worth. DeBoer describes our current society as “a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability,” while Harden writes, “Just as those who harm others are punished by the state, those who ‘succeed’ in school are rewarded by society.” But, of course, the financial rewards that accrue to people in a market economy do so because the goods and services they provide are deemed valuable by their fellows, and such esteem as they enjoy in a liberal society is freely conferred by the individuals that admire them.We might question other people’s spending decisions and be mystified by the qualities they admire, but there is no Huxleyan World Controller sorting us into Alphas and Epsilons, no central authority decreeing which attributes deserve to be remunerated or applauded. If meritocracy is taken to mean a society in which a merit tsar enforces a particular hierarchy of human worth, then meritocracy should be resisted. But that’s not how most people define meritocracy and it’s not the kind of society we live in today. Our values are not imposed on us by a cabal of malevolent eugenicists or the apostles of some “Cult of Smart.” That both authors think society currently works this way should make us nervous about the alternatives they have in mind when, for instance, deBoer talks about “tear[ing] down the system we have inherited” or when Harden talks about “arranging society” along fundamentally different principles.Which policy prescriptions, then, follow from these plans to reshape society? DeBoer at least is forthright about the radical implications of his philosophy, openly calling for a socialist revolution and announcing that “to truly reconcile our egalitarian impulses with the reality of genetic predisposition, we will have to remake society from top to bottom.” By contrast, Harden’s policy prescriptions will appear rather anodyne to many readers (for example, a universal, taxpayer-funded healthcare system and a stronger social safety net). But, taken to its logical conclusion, Harden’s philosophy would lead us into far more radical territory than the tepid reforms that she lists would suggest. And by failing to acknowledge the more radical implications of her ideas, Harden also fails to grapple with the dystopian prospects inherent in an egalitarian project which views differences in socially valued traits as unjust.Despite mentioning Communism several times in passing, at no point does Harden acknowledge the obvious link between her own egalitarian ideology and the principles driving Communist regimes that slaughtered, impoverished, and immiserated millions of people over the course of the 20th century. She notes that those authoritarian regimes succeeded in weakening the link between genetics and success compared to liberal, free-market democracies. But unlike those regimes, which brought this about by stifling opportunities for talented individuals (“levelling down”), the equitable society she envisages would break the link by “levelling up” the disadvantaged. However, the Soviet central planners didn't intend to stifle opportunities and make their citizens less educated and less prosperous than their Western neighbours’. They, too, thought they were levelling up. But they lacked the omniscience required to see how all the possible counterfactuals would play out so they could determine the “right” limits to inequality that would still allow their citizens to flourish.And of course, if instead of viewing disease, poverty, and disability as social ills to be overcome we instead see inequalities in health, wealth and ability as the evils to be conquered, it will become irresistibly tempting to address those inequalities via the swiftest route: to intentionally level down, eat the rich, cut down the tall poppies. This is the danger the West’s canonical critics of egalitarianism have always warned against— as showcased by the Handicapper General in Kurt Vonnegut’s story Harrison Bergeron, THE MAJORITY’s totalitarian imposition of grey mediocrity in Jerome K Jerome’s The New Utopia, or the extirpation of elites proposed by the revolutionary socialists in Dostoyevsky’s The Devils: “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned.”But the most radical aspect of Harden’s philosophy is that it demands that we abandon our most cherished norms and values. Reconceiving justice purely in terms of social or redistributive justice, as she would have us do, requires that we abandon the traditional definition of justice we have used for millennia. For most people across most times, from ancient civilizations to contemporary secular democracies, justice has concerned the deliberate harmful treatment of some people by others: thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness. But in a curious moral inversion, the contemporary social justice movement has made justice about what society does to people. “People are not the problem to be fixed,” says Harden. “The problem to be fixed is society’s recalcitrant unwillingness to arrange itself in a way that allows them to participate.” In this strange reversal, the impersonal and spontaneous forces of society are imbued with moral agency, while the agency of individuals is radically diminished. Meanwhile, envy, previously a cardinal sin (thou shalt not covet), is transformed into the central principle of justice.DeBoer, to his credit, parts ways with Harden at this point, erecting a makeshift philosophical firewall between personal responsibility for one’s socioeconomic outcomes and personal responsibility for one’s criminal acts. But guided rigidly by an alien moral compass, Harden can assert that refraining from criminal behaviour is just another “socially valued” trait like educational attainment rather than anything “inherently valuable.” She can take the side of Cain in the Biblical story: “Only one generation from creation, brothers were rewarded unequally for their labor, and the seething resentment provoked by that inequality led to humanity’s first murder.” And she can do all this while refusing to condemn deaf parents who deliberately disable their unborn children: “The legal and ethical issues raised by the question of whether Deaf parents should be permitted to pursue the birth of a deaf child—through selection of a sperm or egg donor, through selective abortion, or through pre-implantation genetic testing—are myriad and thorny, and I will not attempt to resolve them here.” In this topsy-turvy world, fair is foul and foul is fair.* * *The ethical challenge that each new generation faces is how to deal with the ubiquitous discrepancy between earthly reward and moral desert. In all times and in all places, people have looked around them and seen others who receive material rewards and public esteem far in excess of what their personal attributes and efforts seem to merit. They have likewise encountered talented, virtuous, hard-working people who succumbed to poverty or disgrace despite their noblest efforts. The injustice of it rankles and cries out for redress.Our religious predecessors could meet this problem with stoic fatalism. On earth the rain may fall on the just and the unjust alike, but in heaven (or the other place) each will ultimately receive their reward. But in a secular age, this answer fails to satisfy us— and even the faithful, restless for worldly justice, long to see the kingdom of heaven built here on earth. Over the last three centuries of European thought, two answers to this timeless problem gained traction. The first is that we should try and align financial reward and social status better with true merit. The second is that no-one should be valued any more or less than anyone else. Meritocracy and egalitarianism were two radical modern solutions to the same problem. These two strands of idealistic thinking culminated in the two terrifying social experiments of the 20th century: the meritocratic experiment of eugenic National Socialism, which sought to elevate those with “superior” attributes while eradicating those with “inferior” characteristics; and the socialist experiments of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the rest, which sought to eliminate the undeserved differences between rich and poor. Both experiments culminated in totalitarian nightmares of mass coercion and mass murder. Yet both committed their crimes in the name of justice and utopia. Camus neatly captured this bizarre moral inversion, describing “slave camps under the flag of freedom” and “massacres justified by philanthropy.”The truth is we can never hope for a perfect alignment between moral desert and material reward because we each have competing definitions of what constitutes merit. Imposing any single conception of merit on the world amounts to tyranny as it means trampling on everyone else’s conception, and the Nazis’ hierarchy of human worth shows just how distorted that single reigning conception can be. Yet it is equally tyrannical to deny all conceptions of merit and forbid all hierarchies of value, as Communist dictatorships have repeatedly tried to do. The best we can hope for is a world in which each individual is free to use their own knowledge for their own purposes, where each can try to live according to their own conception of the good while respecting and navigating the values of others under the protection of the rule of law. This is the fragile settlement we have reached as a civilisation—one that we have defended at great cost and lovingly rebuilt each time revolutionaries thirsting for false utopias have tried to tear it down.Camus provided the central clue as to how we arrived at the moral paradox of totalitarian utopias: “Philosophy ... can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges.” When scientists write book-length philosophical treatises on the correct moral and political implications to draw from their findings, it is worth keeping Camus’s admonition in mind. Harden and deBoer believe their egalitarian philosophy paints a vision of a kinder, more prosperous future for us all. But when I picture their vision of the future what I see is a boot stamping on a human face—forever.

In September 1787, an onlooker is said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government he and the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall had given the United States. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.” Can we still keep it? That’s the question at the heart of Tom Nichols’ provocative new book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. Nichols, a professor at the United States Naval College, joins Geoff Kabaservice to discuss how responsibility for our eroding democracy ultimately rests with America’s citizens themselves. 
Nichols ticks off the factors that, in his view, have made American democracy increasingly unsustainable: citizens’ willingness to embrace illiberalism and conspiracy theories, the ingrained culture of complaint and its corresponding neglect of civic virtues and civic responsibilities, the degradation of public life and public service, and the social atomization that accompanies the spread of social media. At the same time, he cautions against the dangers of nostalgia for a bygone era of American greatness that never really existed, at least not as many Americans choose to selectively remember it. And while Nichols worries about the ways that the dystopic novels Brave New World and 1984 are coming to fruition in today’s America, he also offers hope that Americans can bridge a widening civil-military gap and shore up the foundations of democracy through collective action.  
Nichols quotes Abraham Lincoln’s warning that “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” The threat to American democracy over the next few years, in his view, comes not only from populist Republicans’ inclinations toward authoritarianism but from Democrats’ failure to respond seriously to the reality that “we are in an existential crisis of government that requires an emergency response from a broad coalition of pro-democracy voters.” His message comes as a rallying cry to both center-left and center-right to recognize the dangers that confront us and respond accordingly.

Tom Nichols: The real issue is, can you sustain a democracy on people who contribute almost nothing and yet complain endlessly and talk about how shafted they are by their own system of government? And my warning is you literally cannot sustain a republic on this.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Tom Nichols. For many of you, he will need no introduction. He is a stalwart presence on Twitter as well as a commentator on much of American media, but for the past quarter-century he has been a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island. He’s been a columnist for the USA Today newspaper, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and he also is a lecturer in Harvard’s Extension School. And more to the point, he is the author of the recent and fantastic book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. Tom, I’m so happy you’re here. Welcome.
Tom Nichols: Good to be with you, Geoff. Good to see you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Great. Now, I feel like I get to bathe a little bit in the reflected glory of this book, since I did read some of it in manuscript. And I thought it was tremendous then, and it only got better in the published version. I’m curious… The book has been out for a few weeks, is that right?
Tom Nichols: About a month? Yeah.
Tom Nichols: Almost a month.
Geoff Kabaservice: So, given that we don’t really quite have book tours in this strange re-pandemic era, what kind of response have you gotten from people who’ve read it — and reviewed it, for that matter?
Tom Nichols: Well, first I’m going to not let you be so modest. You read the book in draft form and I think much of what’s best in the book, including a lot of the autobiographical stuff, really was your inspiration and your very welcome advice. So if people are liking those parts of the book, they can thank you more than me in some ways.
Thanks for asking. Yeah, I’m surprised. I actually, as you well know because you were helping me kind of think through a lot of these issues, I was really kind of curious about how the book was going to land. I really was apprehensive about a book that basically turns to a lot of my fellow citizens and says, “You’re the problem. Stop blaming Facebook, stop blaming globalization, stop blaming the elite, stop blaming Critical Race Theory, stop blaming right-wing talk show hosts. Look inside you and think about your responsibilities as a member of a liberal democratic society.”
Of course, as you and I said many times, this was a throwback to the founders as well, who really believed that public virtue couldn’t exist without private virtue. Civic virtue was the underpinning of the entire constitutional theory of the United States. And the reaction, remarkably enough, is that… I’ve even been surprised by people who have said things like, “Well, of course, Tom,” when I thought there would actually be quite a lot more pushback about that. I’ve had some folks telling me that I should think more — I mean, there was one review I thought was interesting that said, “No, no, democracy is in trouble because people are mad about climate change” — which I thought was an interesting topspin on that, because there’s no evidence for that.
I think the thing that was most gratifying about it was that people intuitively grasped the thing that I thought they would intuitively reject, which is that… They intuitively grasped the idea that this really isn’t just a kind of raw Marxist explanation or a class-based or economic explanation, but that there’s something gone really wrong culturally with us — and not just here in the United States but in Britain, in Italy, in Poland, in Turkey and Brazil and India and other places.
We can talk more about that whole theory. But that was really gratifying to me, that there were people who instead of simply as a knee-jerk rejection said, “Yeah, there’s something about this that’s intuitively making sense to me that I hadn’t thought about before.”
Geoff Kabaservice: One of the things, of course, that makes your book so great is that although the subject is pretty dark in a lot of ways, you do manage to leaven it with a lot of humor, which I think makes it more endurable than it might have been otherwise. But some of this…
Tom Nichols: Well, I was a little worried. I thought… There’s a lot of pop-culture touchstones in the book, and I worried, because I have a tendency to be a little too precious when I write sometimes about stuff like that. Also, because I’m 60 and I’m nostalgic about… There’s a reference to “Lost in Space” that I thought was just kind of cute because I’m an old guy and I remember it when I was a kid. But I also put it in there because it is a dark subject. I wanted people to have some reference to it, some touchstones or reference points, that weren’t just raw data or polling numbers or unemployment figures or something. I wanted them to have some sense, some way to be able to relate to the argument in it without having to chew up a ton of data and facts and figures. So I tried my best to put a few smiles and a couple of laughs in there.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, and you succeeded. I was actually just reviewing George Will’s latest collection of columns for the Washington Post as I was rereading your manuscript. And there’s sort of a common theme between the two of you — who admittedly are both coming from somewhere on the center-right — which is that the public has become infantilized to some extent.
Tom Nichols: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s a great quote you had here toward the end of the book, which is that: “After decades of international stability and rising living standards, the public wants what it wants and they want it without any guff from their elected leaders about ‘costs’ or ‘risks’ or ‘trade-offs.’ Such a society is not a democracy, it is a troop of ill-tempered toddlers.” This is a funny quote, but again what’s missing here seems to be a sense of adult responsibility towards the maintenance of our democracy.
It’s probably been overdone, but Benjamin Franklin famously replied to a woman who asked him, after the Constitutional Convention, what kind of government have you given us? And he replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” And maybe the issue now is whether we can keep it or not.
Tom Nichols: Well, you’re right that Will and I are coming in that sense from the same place. I had the pleasure of meeting George and spending a little time with him a while back. One of the comments I remember that he said — and he’d written a column about it many years earlier that stuck in my head while I was writing this — was he was marveling at the fact that, based purely on how they dress and deport themselves, you cannot tell fathers from sons in modern America.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, George Will has a lot say about the scourge of denim, but he has a point.
Tom Nichols: Yeah. And shorts — that these are grown men wearing shorts and t-shirts and baseball caps. And they are, other than height and facial hair, they are indistinguishable in their dress and behavior from their nine- or ten-year-old sons. It really is a kind of a funny and sort of sneering observation that’s true. But there is a deeper problem behind that, which is… and we saw it with Afghanistan. I mean, I wrote a bit about Afghanistan a few weeks ago when we pulled out and the American public was absolutely enraged. And I was very critical of Biden. I was very critical about a too-quick, peremptory pullout. But I supported the policy because in the end, after twenty years, this is what the American public wants.
And yet they were enraged. They wanted a pullout where everything is okay. They wanted a pullout where the Taliban doesn’t come back and nobody gets hurt and everybody just sort of packs their stuff up neatly and comes home. And that was never an option. Whether it was Joe Biden or Donald Trump or anybody else, that version of a pullout was never on the table — and adults knew that. But the American public didn’t care. They want what they want, and as I said in the book, they want it without any backtalk.
Geoff Kabaservice: You made the same point in your book as you did in that Atlantic piece, which is that there’s a lot of talk about “forever wars.” And yet we’ve had none of the disruptions to society or the shouldering of responsibilities on a societal-wide basis that usually accompany actual wars of that kind.
Tom Nichols: Except for the whining. As you know, I still work at a military institution, which I will be retiring from or leaving federal service later this winter after, as you pointed out, twenty-five years of teaching military officers. And I’ve seen on whom that burden falls. It falls on military people and their families, the volunteers. The people that are walking around, college kids, talking about being war-weary or people that don’t even know a military family or have never seen any of this cost… Anybody who’s been in a military community or military family, they have every right to say they’re tired of these long wars, they’re tired of multiple deployments. But when a 60-year-old grandmother in Oregon or a 22-year-old college student in Syracuse says, “I’m war-weary” — that’s not only laughable, it’s slightly offensive. You’re not war-weary, what you’re weary of is hearing about it. And that’s different.
We were in Afghanistan for twenty years and we lost 2,600 people. We were in Vietnam for ten years and we lost 57,000 people — drafted people, people whose lives were interrupted by the mandate of government service, who had to leave and never came back. Whether you agree with Vietnam or Afghanistan or any of these deployments, the real issue is, can you sustain a democracy on people who contribute almost nothing and yet complain endlessly and talk about how shafted they are by their own system of government? In the book, my warning is you literally cannot sustain a republic on this. It’s not possible.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, I agree. This book, obviously, to some extent grows out of your previous book, The Death of Expertise. And to some extent you could be accused in your previous book of advocating technocracy, and to some extent in this book you could also be accused of issuing an elitist summons to your fellow citizens to live up to their adult responsibilities. But one of the reasons that I thought it was so important to include some of your personal and biographical perspective in this book was that you managed to achieve the difficult stunt of issuing a summons to elitism without coming across as an elitist. And for this reason, I would like to talk a bit about how you grew up, where you grew up, and how you came to your present perspective.
Tom Nichols: Yeah. And again, I have to thank you, Geoff, because I was reluctant to do that. I’m not really a fan of the confessional approach to opinion writing. But I think in an era where people immediately draw assumptions about your background, I think it’s important — you and others convinced me of this — it’s important to put your cards on the table and say, “Look, the assumptions you’re making about me — that I grew up in some tony suburb with a couple of left-wing college professor parents — is bullshit. And you need to know that it’s bullshit.”
You’re right about some of this coming out of The Death of Expertise. And interestingly enough, people thought I was advocating for technocracy when in fact I was warning about technocracy, where I was trying to issue — and I do this again in Our Own Worst Enemy — that you are going to get a mildly authoritarian technocracy by default if we don’t change our ways. And by “change our ways,” I don’t mean showing up and trying to lynch Mike Pence and smearing poop on the walls of the Capitol. That actually will lead to a carefully isolated technocracy even faster than everything else. Because in the end, the lights have to stay on, and the mail has to get delivered, and the Wi-Fi has to keep giving you five bars and all that stuff.
So my background — and this, as you know, this is why it was so painful for me to write — I grew up in a factory town. I say to people that I grew up in Massachusetts and, of course, most people who aren’t from Massachusetts, they say, “Oh, church steeples and college campuses.” But they forget that there’s a whole part of the Connecticut Valley, everything west of Worcester, that is much more like upstate New York or even parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania. That part of Massachusetts, you can even hear it in my voice. I mean, our linguistic map even sounds, when you get west of Worcester, we sound more like upstate New York and the Midwest than we do like Bawst’n and your cous’n from Bawst’n and The Cahs.
I really wrestled with this because I made the class transition, from working class to middle class to upper-middle class, through education. And to turn to the working class that raised me, that birthed me and raised me, and say, “Listen, you are part of the problem,” was very difficult. My parents were very intelligent people, but my mom had a ninth-grade education, my dad had a tenth-grade education. My growing up was full of all of the pathologies of the white working class: alcoholism, violence, good times, bad times, bankruptcy, all kinds of that movie-of-the-week stuff that makes people talk about the “forgotten towns.” My hometown, by the time I was in college, my hometown was already mutating away from the diner and the corner store and the barber shop to the abandoned storefronts, the Spanish churches, the liquor stores and bars.
So I felt that it was really important to say that, because I understood what I think people were trying to talk about as anger about change. But I also felt it was important to talk about that because of how much I thought that explanation didn’t explain anything. Most of the de-industrialization where I grew up was already complete by the 1980s. This was not… One of the things that made it so hard to write the book is that I felt like I was — you know that great line from Zoolander — I felt like I was taking crazy pills, where people would say, “Well, you know, these past five or six or seven years have been a response to globalization and forgotten towns and factories closing.” And I would look around and say, “Guys, that happened thirty-five years ago. For some of you that happened before you were born. It is not possible for you to remember those days because you were not born yet.” And I thought that that rejoinder could only come from somebody who had seen it firsthand.
Geoff Kabaservice: You grew up in Chicopee, Massachusetts. I grew up outside of Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell is, or was…
Tom Nichols: Another garden spot.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, a scary mill town. But what people don’t realize is that places like Lowell had their economy devastated in the 1920s…
Geoff Kabaservice: …when the mill owners began to move down to the South and their textile operations got set up in that non-union, low-salary terrain and all that went with that. So this has been going on for a long time.
Tom Nichols: That’s why I included… There was a really beautiful quote. It’s always intimidating when you’re writing about something and you run into somebody who’s a much better a writer than you are. But when I was trying to evoke that reality that you’re talking about in Lowell, I took a passage from the memoir by Andre Dubus, the writer. He talks about moving to Haverhill, another Massachusetts mill town that you and I both know. He talks about how Haverhill was already flat on its ass by 1972, because the shoe industry that had sustained it was already gone, as you point out, by the 1920s. He talks about moving into Haverhill with his mom. His class transition goes backwards. His dad is a writer and a veteran, and the family breaks up, and he ends up sliding down the socioeconomic ladder and living with his mom (as a single mom) in Haverhill. He points out, the stores are all boarded up. Their windows are full of dust and dead moths. The only real places that have any activity are bars that are always full. There’s drug abuse. There’s crime.
His memoir by the way, which I would recommend to people — after they buy my book, of course — it’s called Townie. That’s what we called people like us, the townies. I think it’s hard for people to understand that no matter what I do now, my early teen years could have ended as easily in jail as in college.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, you mentioned that, which I thought fascinating.
Tom Nichols: I think people just don’t… They think that’s new. They think that’s something that only happened a generation ago or ten or fifteen years ago. I think we have to get past that. We have to get past that idea that everything bad that’s ever happened, happened five years ago.
Geoff Kabaservice: I really did love that quote from Andre Dubus about Haverhill in the early 1970s: “It was a town of boarded-up buildings, the parking lots overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash. Most of the shops downtown were closed too, their window displays empty and layered with dust and dead flies.” Because I remember Lowell like that, too.
Tom Nichols: Yes. Well, and I saw it happen to the town I was born in, which is one town over from Chicopee: Holyoke, which used to have this thriving main street. Of course, when that main street died, the people in my town said, “Well, you know who did it? The Puerto Ricans.” That was the villain. That was the villain where I grew up, the Puerto Rican community. And then it was, “Well, the factories closed and that was the rich guys and globalization.” But they all ignored the clear culprit, which was the mall. In the early 1980s, they opened a gigantic mall a few miles away from that main street, and it instantly killed everything. And people just don’t want to remember that. Why? Because they were going to the mall.
When I go home I ask, “Well, did you go shopping on High Street after the mall opened?” “Well, that’s not the point.” No, it is the point. And I say this in the book over and over again, that we as Americans, we are totally unwilling to think about the second- and third-order effects of our own choices.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned the mall… The last book I wrote was actually a history of women in the town of Corning, New York, which is in the Southern Tier in upstate New York. And no sooner was the mall opened nearby than the Main Streets and the Market Streets of every single town in that area died — just dried up and died.
Tom Nichols: Yeah. The barbershop in my hometown… I was having an argument about this with a guy — now of blessed memory, I’m sad to say, rest in peace — but a guy I went to high school with. I said, “You just don’t like that Hervey’s” — this barbershop that was run by a French-Canadian guy named Hervey — “you just don’t like that it’s a Spanish church now. It just bothers you.” And he’s like, “Yeah. Things don’t have to change that way.” I said, “That barbershop… Where were you getting your hair cut? You were going to the mall. We all did. We didn’t go there anymore. The last hair cut I got from Hervey was when I was like eleven.”
We want to scapegoat somebody because the idea that we might’ve done it, that we might’ve killed our beloved main street, is simply beyond our reckoning. And we can’t accept it because that’s our nature as — a word we haven’t used yet but that figures prominently in the book —because we are narcissistic. We are narcissistic, a narcissistic consumer society, and we don’t want to hear about it. We don’t want to hear about what that does to our society.
Geoff Kabaservice: I remember hearing you talk about another conversation you had with a high school friend where he was remembering when the factory in town was vital and thriving and supporting this intact community. And you said, “Well, no.” Tell me about that.
Tom Nichols: My best friend growing up, I… Despite how dicey my childhood was at various points, I did have a best friend who literally lived so close that I used to be able to lean out of my window out of my bedroom window and yell to see if he was home — which of course our neighbors really loved, right? But my best buddy lived just a couple of houses away from me. And we were little vandals. We weren’t bad kids. We weren’t hurting anybody, we weren’t bullies, we weren’t taking anybody’s lunch money. But, you know, we were doing a whole bunch of things our parents wouldn’t have approved of. And he said to me, just a few years ago, he said, “Well, somebody’s gotta pay because there’s that… I remember when that place was booming.” And I said, “That’s literally not possible for you to remember that because you and I broke the windows over there in, like, 1972.”
And the building he was remembering, it had had companies move in and move out and kind of roost there temporarily. And then during a boom in the early ‘90s, they did some shift work, and then that was gone. But he was remembering this time where it was like a big, full, bustling, lit-up factory. And I said, “Dude, the memory you think you have literally could not have happened.” He nodded for a minute and he looked a little stunned, like that it didn’t occur to him that that was possible. He just kind of shook his head and he said, “Well, you know what I mean.”
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. When I was reading through some of your book, I was trying to think of who the quote was and who said it, and I think I finally came up with it. It was Robert Nisbet, the conservative sociologist, who said, “Nostalgia is the rust of memory.” And so much of what you’re talking about is memories that didn’t happen, or that got things so wrong. And this is relevant because the former guy who was in the White House ran on the campaign slogan of “Making America Great Again,” which is in itself an appeal to a kind of nostalgia that probably doesn’t even exist.
Tom Nichols: Yeah, I talk a lot about nostalgia in the book as a really corrosive influence on democracy, because liberal democracies cannot compete with nostalgia. When you say “Things were better in 1980,” no matter how wrong that is, no liberal democratic government can tell you that it’s wrong. And they can’t go back in time, because what you’re really remembering is when you were twenty-one. 
The same fellow I was talking to about the factories, we were having a talk about who he voted for. Of course, like most Americans — and we should definitely talk about this in a bit, Geoff — but like most Americans, his voting record was fairly incoherent, right? He votes for Reagan twice. He votes for Bush. He votes for Clinton twice. He votes for Bush again, another Bush. He votes for Obama twice and then he votes for Trump. And I said, “What are you doing? What do you want?” And he said, “Well, the economy’s better with Republicans.” And I said, “But you voted for multiple Democrats.” “Well, yeah, but those were not those rich Republicans that were trying to screw me over.” And finally, he said — and this was the nostalgia at work — he said, “Nothing’s been good since Reagan.”
And there’s two kinds of nostalgia at work here. One is the people like my middle-aged buddy. I think a lot of people around the world are having a midlife crisis. And particularly white men are having this terrible kind of midlife crisis where their mortality, their fading influence, their demographic relevance are all kind of slipping away from them and they’re losing their minds. And so they’re remembering what they think is a really good time in 1980 or 1985 or 1990, when in fact their fathers were bitching about everything and how much better the 1950s were.
But the other kind of nostalgia is almost more dangerous, and that is the nostalgia of young people remembering things that didn’t happen before they were born. There are a couple of social scientists that I mentioned in the book who said this is actually happening around the world, where people are being sold — literally being sold — false memories of times that didn’t exist. I’ve had this argument so many times with younger people who say, “Well, you know, people your age, Tom, you don’t really understand us. Because in the 1970, things were much easier” — which of course for anybody who’s lived through the 1970s is an instant belly laugh. I mean, the 1970s were horrifying. They were miserable.
Economically, they say, “Yeah, but college was cheaper.” And I’d say, “Well, because so few people went to college.” When I began college in 1979, 14% of American women went to college. It’s like, okay, college was a lot cheaper. That wouldn’t have been relevant to you because you would have had to stay home. Because what you were going to do at twenty-one — or, excuse me, at eighteen — you were going to graduate from high school, you were going to get married, you were going to have babies, and you were going to go to work in some unskilled job. You weren’t going to go to college. Congratulations, you don’t have to worry about college costs — because you weren’t going.
Healthcare was a lot cheaper because you died at fifty-seven. That first brush with breast cancer or a heart attack or prostate cancer just took you right off the board — and suddenly your healthcare costs when you’re seventy were no longer an issue. And they don’t want to hear that part. They’re like, “No, everything was great. Everybody could afford everything.” The idea that women didn’t have, were not fully empowered members of society, that minorities were only within a decade of the Civil Rights Act being passed and still treated like lesser citizens who weren’t allowed to compete in the job market…
The standard of living that’s involved… This is something… I have to bring this up and then I’ll get off this soapbox. But every time we start having this discussion about generational change and standards of living, people my age bring up air conditioning. We all bring up the same thing. I talk to my wife, who’s exactly my age, and I said — I was at a book thing and talking to a student — I said, “What do you remember about the 1960s?” She said, “Sweating.” And, you know, how miserable it was in schools and your home and offices, un-air-conditioned offices with people sitting in them and smoking? Things like that. And you try to explain this, that what you think you’re remembering about the 1970s or the 1980s is simply not true, and you are burdening yourself as a citizen by thinking that the government can do this for you.
Geoff Kabaservice: These sorts of things make you feel old, I hate to say. I remember in junior high where the designated smoking area was.
Geoff Kabaservice: I remember going to high school in Florida in classrooms that did not have air conditioning. This is Florida. It was hot. This would be considered child abuse nowadays.
Tom Nichols: In my high school, they called the teacher’s room… First of all, there was a men’s teacher’s room. There was a teacher’s lounge, but there was a men’s-only teacher’s room. So imagine that right off the bat. And it was informally known to students and faculty alike as “The Bunker.” You’d walk into it and it was a cloud of nothing but cigarette smoke and kind of guy stink. It was literally called “The Bunker” and there were guys in there smoking pipes and cigarettes all day long on their break. The idea of that now… First of all, to say, “I’m sorry, this is the men’s teacher’s lounge. You ladies will have to go down the hall.” Imagine trying that now. But this is the time that that younger people say, “Oh, that must’ve been a great time.” No, it was a terrible time.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, David Frum, among others, has pointed out that very few Americans, if they actually could go back to the 1950s, would do so. Because, as you say, the standard of living was so much lower then. Society was more violent. Class roles seemed to be much more fixed in so many ways. And life was just physically difficult. Part of the reason that America could actually afford even its vestigial beginnings of its Medicare program was that people who smoked dropped dead at age fifty-seven, as you say, and they didn’t burden the healthcare system in that sense.
Tom Nichols: Yeah, the going back in time… Kevin Williamson has made that point many times. He says, “Look, you can have the lifestyle that your parents had.” Because one of the complaints, one of the knocks about democracy — because this isn’t just about people bitching about life. The problem that I identify in the book is people bitching about life and then saying, “And this is why liberal democracy has failed as a system of government.” Kevin Williamson made the point. He said, “When you say, ‘Well, one of those failures is that I can’t live the way my parents lived at my age,'” he points out what an absurdly false thing that is to say. He said, “You can have a 1957 life quite cheaply if you want it.”
But as they say in entertainment, you’re going to really have to commit to the bit. If you want that 1957 life, it means throwing your phone away. It means having one television with three stations on it in black-and-white. It means not having a car and taking public transportation everywhere. It means living in square footage that is tiny. And if you’re married and have children, it means multiple kids in the room next to you in a two- or three-bedroom apartment with a common kitchen without a living area. I mean, it means all of those things. And when you talk to people about this, they say, “No, no, that’s not what I mean. I want the opportunity and the…” What they really want is a 2021 lifestyle at 1975 prices, and that’s just not on the menu. You can’t have that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I find myself nodding along with everything you’re saying, but then this produces in me the counteraction to want to say, “And yet.” So here’s where I add the “And yet.” I sure would like the Republican Party of 1957 back.
Tom Nichols: Oh yeah. Oh well.
Geoff Kabaservice: And this goes along with some other things too. Yours is the second-most depressing book that I read this year, Tom. The most depressing actually was a book by Robert Putnam, whose work Bowling Alone you quote a lot in your book. But his book The Upswing really should be called The Downswing. Because it’s a story about how Americans’ understanding of our need for community, our concern for each other, our trust in government and other social institutions, our shared prosperity and public institutions began from a very low level in the Gilded Age (which very much resembled the current age), and yet improved through the Progressive era, with obviously dips in the Depression, but then a real coming-together during World War II and on and on upward into the late ‘60s — at which point it’s pretty much been downhill ever since.
And I think young people do have kind of a point when they point out that more young people now are living at home with their parents than at any time since a hundred years ago, that young people have less sex than previous generations had as well as less marriage and obviously fewer children… that there weren’t these deaths of despair in the previous century that we now see. So some things actually have changed for the worse.
Tom Nichols: But I’m going to take issue with almost all of that. First, it really raises the question, the decline since the ‘60s. And I say that accelerates — I talk about it in the book — that really accelerates after the end of the Cold War. Democracy seemed to be really good at coping with scarcity and conflict. They don’t seem to be very good at dealing with peace and abundance. And in part, this is where you get this kind of weird, right-wing movement of the Catholic Integrationists and the sort of back-to-tradition roots evangelicals. And all that’s saying what we really need is some kind of old-timey religion, where we’re all sort of told what to do rather than let loose and able to pursue our decadent, leisure interests — which I think is nuts. But there’s a point under it which is that, left with nothing to do, idle hands are the devil’s plaything.
I think Eric Hoffer, who I actually lean on in the book… Hoffer called it in the 1950s when he said the biggest danger and the biggest risk of a mass movement arising is when people are bored. When you have a leisure society and a middle class that is bored out of its skull, they start looking for great causes and crusades to get on. 
But let me take issue with these arguments about, “Well, we’re living with our parents. We’re having less sex. We’re not having kids.” I didn’t live with my parents at 24 or… I’m trying to remember what year it was. Yeah, I was 23, 24, and I remember that I was within an inch of throwing in the towel and saying I needed to go and crash with my folks for a while — because I was broke. And the way I dealt with that was to share an apartment that was a two-bedroom apartment that had been turned into a three-bedroom apartment with no living room. We had basically created a dirt-cheap living situation with another student and a carpenter — my other roommate was a carpenter. I always thought that was kind of cool. We had roaches and broken tiles and a shower that didn’t quite work, and the super lived underneath us and smoked cigars all day. I mean, it was crap. But it was affordable. And I valued not moving back home so much that I was willing to do that.
And I think that part of the problem is that younger folks have experienced such a high standard of living that they are not capable of taking the hit to the standard of living that living alone requires when you first go out on your own. This was something I think generations before you understood. Living with mom and dad, that was pretty nice: home-cooked meals and your parents had a nice television. But it was just part of the deal that when you moved out, you were going to have a knife, a fork, a plate.
I can’t speak to the issue of them having less sex and less dating. But again, there’s this kind of weird self-isolation that has taken place because of the virtualization of everything. I don’t know how to reason with a society where people say, “We spend money on all the wrong things, and giant corporations tell us what to do, and we’ve destroyed our social life.” And yet we have entire generations who live their entire lives mediated by electronic devices in a country — and I point this out in the book — where the one corporation that can rival the online presence of Microsoft and Apple is Pornhub.
Once again, how much of this is because of our own choices? If you look at just what we spend on sports, gambling, and pornography in this country, you could fund the Green New Deal, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Marshall Plan probably all at once from what we spend. And I say this as, as you know, a recreational gambler. I’m not a big sports guy. I have a, shall we say, libertarian and morally neutral approach to pornography by consenting adults. But the idea that somehow all these terrible things are happening, and yet we throw up our hands as if it’s a mystery to say, “How is there a casino in every city and a multi-bazillion-dollar porn industry?” Well, I’m sorry, this is not because of aliens. This is because of us.
With that said, absolutely housing is too expensive. And NIMBY regulations that don’t allow multifamily housing — sure, that’s a local issue. If you’re that mad at San Francisco, go vote. Deal with it in New York or San Francisco. But that’s not because… If you’re a 25-year-old and you want to be a writer living in Brooklyn and you can’t afford it, it is not the fault of the Constitution of the United States that that life was not afforded to you.
Geoff Kabaservice: At some point, I want you to wade into the issue of meritocracy, because this obviously is a big subject of discussion nowadays. And chances are pretty good that those angry DSA socialists in Brooklyn who went to the fancy colleges will turn out just fine in the long run. But on the other hand, that’s not so true about the people in the working class and the sub-working class, let’s say. And here you raise the specter in the book of two dystopic novels coming to fruition at the same time, even though they seem to be in tension with one another, one of which is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which is a sort of vision of soma and the feelies and distracting ourselves to death. And you say we’re already there.
Tom Nichols: Right. That’s what we’re living in.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. And the other is, of course, George Orwell’s 1984, and specifically a little-noticed part of that book which is the fate of the proles. And these are people who, as you point out, are living under a dictatorship, an authoritarian society, and yet they pretty much live their lives unmolested by authorities — not because they’re above suspicion, but because they’re beneath suspicion; because they actually have nothing in mind, again, other than their appetites and cheap entertainment. And there are also no leaders among them who could actually put ideas in their heads about changing the way things are.
Tom Nichols: When I was first drafting out the chapters of the book, this was just before the pandemic and I was working out, I was listening to audio books. And I said, “I got to drop some pounds and I’m going to the gym.” And being on a treadmill’s boring, so I said, “I’m going to revisit the classics.” And the only part… I mean, when I was a kid during the Cold War… And of course my first academic and professional experience was as a Russian-speaking Soviet expert. So the parts of 1984 about the Inner Party and the torture and the political control, that spoke to me when I was younger. That seems less relevant to me now.
The part that stuck in my head and bothered me — and I still remember the night, I was just on a treadmill at night and I was listening to this book, and I had to go home and write down that section — was Orwell talking about the Party slogan, “Proles and animals are free.” Where the proles — the people that were not educated like the Outer Party, the bureaucratic/clerical class that inhabits the outer layer of the Party in 1984 — he’s talking about the people that are just factory workers and the bottom rung of society, but actually the most numerous. Again, a part of the book that, as you point out, people don’t concentrate on. The reason Winston Smith puts his hope in the proles is because he knows they outnumber the Party; that in sheer numbers they could control things in a flash if they were organized.
And he talks about how the life of the proles is beer and sports and lotteries and petty infighting, and the first blossom of sex that then turns into kids and miserable and early death in middle age. And that was the part I said, “We’re not going to need the Inner Party. We’re not going to need the boot stamping on a human face. The proles are going to be a self-creating part of society that will take themselves out of the political equation by default.”
And I felt like that’s where the intersection with Brave New World came. Because as you point out, in the meritocracy… I love that notion of the DSA kids who went to good schools. They’re smart enough to know that, “No, my life is not going to just be football and gambling and fighting and sports and drinking.” They make it out of that at some point because they think they should. They’re still mad because they can’t afford a house in Westchester or they can’t afford living in the Bay Area. But they make their way.
But I really worry about these glittering cities with favelas in every direction around them — and not because of globalization or because of corporate policy, but because we’ve just tended that way left to our own devices. And this is why I worry so much about a technocracy, because I think there will be very clever people who will say, “Hey, you know what? As long as those folks have warm houses and a Burger King and McDonald’s on every corner and 180 sports channels and a lot of internet porn and beer, they’ll be fine.” It’s cynical, but I think that’s not wrong either.
Geoff Kabaservice: The shadow of Charles Murray also falls a bit on your book, even though I don’t think you mentioned him. Part of his thesis, particularly in Coming Apart, was that meritocracy has precipitated out the natural leaders from the working class. And what you have left are really the proles. And the people like your parents who are intelligent but didn’t go to college — people like your mother who would have run for local office, people like your father who was smart and played a civic role — those people aren’t there anymore. And that’s part of why you have the societal decline.
Tom Nichols: You’re absolutely right that the shadow of Charles Murray, at least on that book, is there. And I didn’t feel the need to quote him or bring him into it because I feel like he has been — I don’t want to say intimidated, but I think when forced to pick sides between the populists and the elites, Murray, whose book was very much a plea for the elites, I think chickened out. I saw him give interviews shortly after Trump was elected where he had the opportunity to really hammer some of those themes from Coming Apart, and he backed off of them because I think he knew how they sounded. And I’m not impugning Murray here; I’ve never met him. To me, he came across as knowing how those themes sounded in the age of Trump, and he didn’t want to give aid and comfort to the class enemy.
But remember that Charles Murray is the guy who said something that people would have expected to hear from me. He literally said the white upper-middle class should preach what it practices. That line always stuck in my head. He said they need to go out to the white working class and say, “Hey, stop knocking up your girlfriends. Stop living off of unemployment. Stop getting high every day.” The things that conservatives once said to minority communities, right? “Pull up your pants. Stop taking drugs. Stop knocking up the girls in your neighborhood.” Murray was very clear that the white upper-middle class should be saying that to the white working class.
Trump got elected, and Murray just got quiet about that all of a sudden. Because of course Trump’s message — and this comes back to creating this kind of movement of the proles by default — Trump’s message was, “Hey, all those things they’re telling you about, the opioids and the kids out of wedlock, and the persistent unemployment? Not your fault. Not your fault. You were screwed over, bro.” And I’m like, what? I’m sorry, this is the Republican Party? These are the same people that were going to minority neighborhoods in the cities and saying, “Pull your pants up. Put down the pipe.” Suddenly Trump’s going around and saying, “Yeah, all those pills you’re taking — we’re going to get even with somebody for that.” Literally it was the same argument — that drugs are being pumped into your neighborhood by heartless people — that minority communities believed in the ’80s about crack, Trump was replicating about opioids.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, and unfortunately, this is still with us. Murray, I think, wanted it both ways. He understood that the elite model of living is the right model and they ought to be preaching that, and yet he can’t feel like he’s going against the “real Americans.” Trump is the same way. Trump knows, for example, that the vaccine, which he helped develop through Operation Warp Speed, works wonders. It’s a modern medical miracle. Everyone ought to take this vaccine so we can get beyond the pandemic. But he can’t preach that to the “real Americans” — because they would boo him, among other things.
Tom Nichols: Murray, who has been this dark, hated figure for the left because of what he said about IQ and race — a debate that I can’t stay far enough away from, because I hate the way that whole debate is phrased — but Murray has this little revival for a while of going out there and saying, “Listen, the problem with the white working class is the white working class.” And suddenly Trump gets elected, and as you say, it goes away. Because now it’s almost like you’re accidentally canoodling with the enemy, the class enemy, to point these things out. And I mean, I thought it was just great when Murray was saying things like, “If your neighbor’s kid is unemployed and living with you and thinks that mowing lawns to make money is beneath him, then you should be judgmental about that. You should look down on someone like that who does not want to take an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work.” After 2016, all that goes away.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah. I mean, it would be completely off-brand for Donald Trump to summon his followers to their best selves. I mean, really what he is… One looks at violence on airplanes right now. He’s like the Great Eye of Mordor. His damage calls to the damage in his followers to be their worst selves.
Tom Nichols: The thing about people fighting on airplanes… Again, what’s the buried lede about ordinary working-class folks who’ve “had enough” fighting on airplanes? The buried lede is ordinary working-class folks fly enough that they can be pissed off on airplanes. Before deregulation — and I’m talking to one of the godfathers of the studies on this stuff, you being at Niskanen and having written the things you’ve done… But for people listening, I think it’s almost like people can’t envision this, but before airline deregulation in the late ’70s, only about 15% of American adults had ever flown on a commercial flight anywhere in the United States or internationally.
Imagine that. Fewer than one in five Americans had ever flown on a commercial airliner. And now it’s like a bus. I was on a flight back from Ireland once, and the guy behind me was telling his seat-mate, “Yeah, I’m a grad student in Boston, and I’m a little hungover because a buddy called me from Berlin, and so I got a cheap flight and I went to Berlin and we went out drinking for the weekend.” I’m like, I just wanted to turn around and say, “I was a grad student once and I had trouble eating. I was eating boxes of pasta to get by. How the hell did you go to Berlin for a weekend?” And it’s just really common that people just get on airplanes: “Well, I’m going to go visit a friend. I’m going to take a flight.”
I’ve gotten off planes… I got off a flight in Austin once, I remember, where a couple of young guys, no luggage, and I was like, “Wow, you travel light.” And they go, “Yeah, we went to see a buddy in Chicago for a couple of days.” They didn’t pack, took a duffle bag or a backpack, hung out. And I thought, “Wow, that is a great…” And let me just say, this is a good thing. It’s a great thing that somebody can say, “Yeah, I’m going to fly up to Chicago and see a friend.” But you can’t then complain about how arduous and difficult it is that our rigged and horrible system of government made flying mildly inconvenient for you.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is also why people used to wear coats and ties on planes, because it was an elite experience and so much more expensive for it.
Tom Nichols: Yes. It was an elite experience because you were paying for it like it was an elite experience.
Geoff Kabaservice: On a slightly different subject, Tom, part of the reason why Congress worked better in the 1950s and ’60s is that so many of the members of Congress had served together in World War II. And we really have seen a declining percentage of members of Congress who have any kind of military experience, and this is part of the reason why it’s easy to say that they are some evil Other since you never served alongside of them. And your most recent piece in the Atlantic is about the Milley affair, of course, and this issue of Mark Milley reaching out to his opposite number in China before and after the 2020 election saying, “Calm yourself. Donald Trump is not in any immediate danger of declaring war on China.” And you’ve taken this discussion in some interesting directions.
But I guess what I’m more interested about is where does the military fall in this strange situation that we’re in right now? Because you actually conclude, at the end [of Our Own Worst Enemy], that part of the way forward is that more young people — particularly, I think, from those who are going to elite colleges — need to have some kind of closer contact with the military, so that it can’t be both this isolated and somewhat privileged caste.
Tom Nichols: Yeah, I’m very worried about the state of civil-military relations in the United States. And again, I wrote all of that before January 6th — although I literally had to pull the manuscript at the last minute to include January 6th. I mean, it was on its way to the publisher. But I wrote it all before the Milley business and a lot of the revelations that have since come out.
I think we have two separate problems. One is that the American public has almost no contact or understanding with the military. The late Charles Moskos, who was the dean of American sociologists of the military, he said the problem isn’t that people haven’t served in the military; it’s that they don’t even know anybody who served in the military. I mean, I didn’t serve in the military, but… You’re sitting here, and people can’t see this at home, but I have a flag on my bookcase. That flag was on my mother’s casket. She did a couple of years in the Air Force during the Korean conflict. In fact, I felt kind of left out… Everybody I knew had served in the military: all three of my brothers, my father, my mother. Although I should go clarify, my half-brothers, because I say in the book I’m an only child. I was raised as an only child, but I have half-brothers and half-siblings who are much older, and they served.
So that’s one problem is that you have people who have just never experienced or even walked through a barracks. They have never set foot… They have no idea when they say, “Well, the Navy should do X, Y, and Z.” They’ve never seen a submarine or the inside of a ship. They have no concept of what they’re talking about.
On the other hand, we have a Spartanism problem among the professional military now, because they are the volunteers in a self-selecting group who live separately from us, who have endured greater burdens than the rest of us, who have been deployed multiple times. We have a military, I think, that is getting up a head of steam in the way militaries always do, but which has become even more dangerous in America. They are the good and virtuous and patriotic Americans, and the rest of us are decadent and second-class citizens. We’re entering a kind of Starship Troopers danger here, that the people who serve think of themselves as the only real citizens, and that’s dangerous as well.
Now let me give a shout-out to the military, because one thing that I think is really admirable about the military is that a lot of them really are uncomfortable with this adulation that they get from the civilians. I can’t tell you how many times combat veterans and others have said to me, “I wish people would stop thanking me for my service. It was my honor to serve. It was my privilege to serve. It was my duty to serve. Stop thanking me as if I did you a favor, because I didn’t.” I think that there are veterans who are uncomfortable with the, “Oh, please, sir, to the head of the line” — that very Soviet, “Oh, you’re a veteran of the Great Patriotic War.” You and I both spent a lot of time in Russia. We know this. Like old guys still wearing their decorations…
Geoff Kabaservice: Да, конечно.
Tom Nichols: Yeah, really.  “Мест нет” — except for veterans. “No seats in this restaurant, unless you’re a veteran of the Great Patriotic War.” And I think that every time I see a license plate with somebody’s medals on it. And I know that’s unfair, but I think it’s unhealthy. I tell the story in the book that my father’s best friend growing up — I did not know until he died that he had won the Silver Star for this harrowing “Saving Private Ryan” moment where he literally wipes out a German machine gun nest by himself and saves his squad.
And I said to my dad, “This guy, he ran a janitorial business in Chicopee.” And my father said, “He just didn’t want to talk about it. He did his duty.” I think, like a lot of guys who have had to kill other people, he felt conflicted about some of the things that had happened. But he said, “Well, it’s war time. I did my job and I came home.” And the idea… If you had said to my dad or to his friend, “Put it on your license plate that you have a Silver Star,” they would have found that almost offensive. And I think we’ve got away from that.
Geoff Kabaservice: The idea that the people I knew who fought in World War II would have referred to themselves as “warriors” is absurd, laughable. They never would have done that. 
Tom Nichols: Or even Vietnam. I mean, I just didn’t know anybody who’d been in Vietnam who… Even the ones… And I don’t mean people who came back bitter or angry or damaged. I mean, just people who had done their time and served in Vietnam, been in combat, been in the shit, man… They didn’t come back and say, “I’m a warrior.” They’d just say, “Look, there was a thing. I had to do it. I went. It’s done, I’m back. That’s not who I am.”
And I think it’s very dangerous in a democracy when we develop a caste of warriors and a disengaged civilian class that live so separately and think of each other so differently. And in the book — just so people don’t think I’m advocating a draft, because I think a draft would be a bad idea. But I do think that four to six weeks of going and saying, “All right, here’s your National Service. You’re going to go live on a military base. This is your summer after high school. We’re going to teach you how to stand up straight and make your bed and eat crappy food. And by the way, here’s what a gun looks like” — I think it would be really great to demystify the culture of guns in America. “Here’s what a gun looks like. Here’s how to shoot it. It’s very dangerous. Now put it back, and now go to college or go to your first job or go get married or whatever you’re going to do. And if there’s ever a national emergency, we’ll call you. And if not, you’ll never hear from us again. And if you liked this, feel free to join and we’ll give you credit for the month or month and a half you spent doing this and you can continue on with a military career.”
I don’t think we should turn that national service into “Go pick up litter for internship wages.” That I think has always been a mistake. I think it encourages people to put that on their resume as a merit badge. Do something that isn’t about you, that you might not like, that you just have to do and get it over with at some point in your life.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. One of the other conclusions you reach is that, paradoxically, political parties need to be strengthened in America, not weakened. This seems like an idea that you share with Jonathan Rauch and some other commentators as well.
Tom Nichols: Yeah. That’s another place where I expected a lot more pushback from readers, because everybody hates the political parties, right? “The parties are the problem. We need to have real democracy, not party functionaries.” And my answer is: The parties are a hot mess because they are too democratic. Because they can be hijacked as flags of convenience by anybody who has enough activists who show up for a primary, and you get really strange outcomes. Now, the Republican Party — which is now I, think, dead, and isn’t coming back. I mean, I think anybody who held out that hope, sitting here in the fall of 2021, I think that that’s a non-starter.
But how did it happen? A guy who had voted… A New York oligarch, who had spent his life as a Democrat, decided he wanted to be president. And for anybody who doubts this, read the opening of Bob Woodward’s first book on Trump, where Steve Bannon walks in and says,  “But Donald, you can be president, but you’ve been pro-choice.” And Trump goes, “Okay, fine. I won’t be pro-choice.” “But Donald, you’ve donated to all these Democrats and you’re a registered Democrat.” “Fine. I’ll donate to right-wingers and I’ll become a Republican.” The Republican party should have had enough political antibodies in it to say, “You’re not a Republican. No, you can’t come to our debates. No, you can’t get access to the Republican National Committee…” But of course, Reince Priebus rolled over and said, “If that’s how we have to win, that’s how we’re going to win.”
And before Democrats start feeling too good about this, remember that the standard bearer in 2016, one of the things that contributed to her loss was a spirited challenge from her left by a senator who hadn’t even bothered to join the Democratic Party. Now, call me rigid and old-fashioned, but I think if you want the nomination of a party, you should, I don’t know, have to actually join the party.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is part of the reason that Rauch referred to both Trump and Bernie Sanders as political sociopaths.
Tom Nichols: Yeah. Rauch has a great line… I actually quote a line from Rauch in the book where he says they share a notion of anti-politics, which is that: “Just elect us and everything is okay.” Even though both of them… And I think Rauch is absolutely right that both Trump and Sanders knew there was absolutely not a prayer in hell that anything they wanted to do was actually going to get done. They didn’t care about that. They were like, “Look, I’m just a disruptor. I want to break the system. ‘I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.’” And they ran that way. And again… I’m not going to draw an equivalence between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. I mean, Trump was an actual sociopath and Sanders is just an opportunist and an offbeat goofball in politics. But they did run the same way, which is “The parties are just vehicles.” And I think parties need to stand for something.
I think parties need to tell their members, “Look, if you’re going to be a member of the Democratic Party, you should at least share some values with us that are distinguishable from other parties. If you’re going to be a Republican, there are core values that we actually believe in as Republicans. And if you don’t believe in them, you really shouldn’t be a Republican.” And this has happened. Remember when George Bush — you and I, us both coming in our misspent youths as Republicans — when George Bush said to David Duke, “You are not a Republican. This guy is not our party. He can call himself whatever he wants, but he’s not a Republican and he shouldn’t be elected.”
Those days are gone. We are so tribal and so desperate for the win, that our guy has to win, that we just don’t care who it is. And I think the other problem with this, Geoff — and I know you and I share this pain quite often — we live in a post-policy world. Nobody cares about policy. You and I and others with people that we know on the left and on the right, we have arguments about stuff that once upon a time would have been central to elections. And now it’s just a bunch of wonks like us talking about tax rates and national defense and things like that. People don’t care about that. They care about winning and they care about sticking it to the other guy. And to return this to the themes of the book, you can’t sustain a democracy on that. You literally cannot maintain a democracy based on that kind of voting and that kind of attitude.
Geoff Kabaservice: This echoes to some extent one of your more famous essays, which was again in the Atlantic: “Why I’m Leaving the Republican Party,” which you wrote back in October 2018. I take it you haven’t had a whole lot of reason to think, “Maybe I should’ve stayed with the Republican Party”?
Tom Nichols: The bigger mistake I made was that after the 2012 primaries, when Newt Gingrich won South Carolina, I said, “Maybe this whole being a Republican thing is just over.” I deregistered for a while as a Republican because I just thought maybe I should vote in Democratic primaries and maybe push their candidates to the center or something. But I couldn’t identify with a party that took Newt Gingrich seriously as a presidential candidate. And then I came back and I said, “You know, it was like a trial separation.” I think most people that have been married will tell you — I’m divorced and remarried — most people that have been through a divorce will tell you that a trial separation is really just a starter divorce. And it’s pretty rare that after a trial separation, people say, “Yeah, we should really be back together.” Usually a trial separation is how you know that it wasn’t working.
And I should have known that. But I came back and I said, “If you and I leave, and if others like us leave, then the Republican Party has no sensible center.” But I left finally in 2018 because of Susan Collins of all people, who convinced me that there was no sensible center left, that Collins would put up with any kind of right-wing chicanery if it meant that Susan Collins got to stay in the Senate and be a senator. And that was finally when I pulled the ripcord.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, I have somewhat similar feelings about Elise Stefanik. I sure wish I had back all that time I spent praising her as the future of the Republican Party.
Tom Nichols: Yeah, and there are similar people among the Democrats, but let’s not both-sides it. I mean, because of the education gap, the Democrats actually are now… I think roles have flipped over the past thirty years. It used to be the Democrats who had to live with a lot of cognitive dissonance, right? They were an educated elite leading a working-class and minority party that by and large they didn’t want to live near. The NIMBY liberal was a real thing: “I really care about the poor and the working class and communities of color, and that’s why I live in Scarsdale and they’re not going to live anywhere near me.” I think those roles have flipped now. The Democratic base and the Democratic Party are actually more aligned on more issues than they used to be, through growing education and communication and cultural demographic change. The Republicans, like Elise Stefanik, have now become this hideous group of charlatans who go to Ivy League schools and then pretend that they are morons.
J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, Elise Stefanik, Ted Cruz… Every time I see Elise Stefanik or Josh Hawley, I think what they’re really telling you is, “Look, I didn’t go to Harvard just to be on the city council up in Potsdam, New York. I was slated for greater things. And if I have to feed the rubes a bunch of prolefeed” — to go back to 1984 — “If I have to shovel a lot of crap at stupid people so they’ll keep voting for me, well, I belong in Washington.” You know, Josh Hawley: “I didn’t go to Yale and Stanford so that I could hang out a shingle in Sedalia, Missouri. I’m sorry, that’s for other people, that’s not for me. And if the way that I stay in Washington is by fist-pumping white supremacists, so be it.” And I think that probably one of the worst things that has happened in American politics over the past twenty years is the emergence of a bottomlessly cynical Republican elite that knows exactly what it’s doing.
Geoff Kabaservice: I mean, one of the terrible things about the Republican Party is that it is coming to be the party of the working class and yet virtually none of the members in Congress who are Republican actually come from that working class or have any real sympathy or understanding of it.
Tom Nichols: George Will, somebody we name-checked earlier… George Will has said multiple times, “We have an historically unprecedented situation, which is that a major American party” — the Republicans — “fear and hate their own voters.” George has pointed this out many times. He says Republicans are terrified of their own voters and they don’t like them. And so their goal is to stay far away from them and keep them placated and keep their rage focused on other people. And again, an unsustainable situation — a completely unsustainable major party in a democracy. And I think that’s how you end up with things like January 6th where… 
You know, it’s not even a working class party, Geoff. It pretends to represent the working class. What it really is is the party of a bored and disaffected middle-class who think that they’ve been screwed somehow. And a white middle-class — let’s stop dancing around race — it’s a white middle-class that thinks that somehow it’s not getting the cultural and political respect that is their due. And that’s how you end up with something like January 6th, where you have real estate agents on charter jets Instagramming themselves in the halls of the Capitol.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, these middle-aged, out-of-shape LARPers…
Tom Nichols: Yeah, right: the “Gravy SEALs.” And there were and there are dangerous people in that movement who are professionals, law enforcement, military…
Geoff Kabaservice: The Oath Keepers…
Tom Nichols: Yeah. But by and large, it was like a day-camp outing for bored middle-class professionals. There was a study, a couple of folks at the University of Chicago just kind of went through all the arrest records. These are accountants and dentists and real estate salesmen. And this was not like the army of the dispossessed and the out-of-work and the downtrodden. These were people who thought they were having a blast, and flying their flags and hanging out and camping out and wearing their stupid T-shirts.
And I guess what I would say in terms of this as a democracy to the people who are encouraging them — to the guys at National Review or other places that have said, “Well, we really have to understand the anger of these folks and it’s legit” — if that were your son or daughter, or if your son or daughter were marrying somebody in that crowd, would you be okay with that? And if the answer is no, then stop writing goddamn editorials about why it’s okay. Because it’s not okay. And that’s where we have to start. We have to start by turning to each other and saying, “This is not okay. This is not acceptable.”
Geoff Kabaservice: Tom, as a last summing up question… You paint some pretty dark scenarios for where the country could go. And of course, we’re all very nervous about what might happen in 2024. But do you have some, on your more optimistic days, any feeling that maybe things actually might turn out well? Are there things you’re looking for that might give you hope?
Tom Nichols: Oh, you’re not going to bait me into optimism at the end of all this, man. 
Geoff Kabaservice: You can’t fault me for trying. 
Tom Nichols: You think I’m not hip to your tricks, man? Well, all right, let me say something really depressing and then try and be optimistic. My worry about 2024 — and I’m going to lay this on the Democrats. I am going to now make all of the people listening who are to our left really pissed off. If the Republicans win and return to unified GOP government in 2024, which I think is at least — and people can’t see you, but I can see you nodding; I think we both agree that’s at least a 50/50 shot if not better for the Republicans — part of it is going to be because Democrats have refused to take this seriously. A lot of us voted for Democrats, and I will still vote for Democrats, based on the idea that we are in an existential crisis of government that requires an emergency response from a broad coalition of pro-democracy voters.
I wish the Democrats would act like that. Instead, they’re nickel-and-diming each other and doing hand-to-hand combat over the infrastructure bill. And then they go on recess. Sorry, but if you’re in a crisis and you’ve run for office and your party has come to power on the notion that we’ve just had a near-death experience for our democracy, you don’t get into pissing matches about the infrastructure bill and then go on recess. You just don’t. You don’t show up… I had a big fight with a bunch of my friends on Twitter who are to my left and who generally agree with me but think I was being really mean… You don’t show up at the Met Gala in a “Tax the Rich” gown. That’s like practically making an ad for the Republicans. And all of these little stupid cultural miscues and this general lack of seriousness by the Democrats is going to make it possible for the much better organized, much more fervently committed Republicans to come back to power. And if that happens and their nominee loses in 2024, we are going to have national violence again.
Okay. The good news is that none of this is demographically sustainable for the right. I think the kids are all right. I think that part of the reason that these middle-aged LARPers are fighting the way they’re fighting is because this is a last hurrah for a lot of them. The most illiberal forces in America — as well as in Italy, Great Britain, Poland, Turkey — it’s all people over 55. It’s your Uncle Bill who retired on a disability and spends all his days staring at Facebook and who’s sending you crazy memes all day. They’re not going to live forever. And they are already — and this is the most optimistic thing to tell people listening — they are the minority. Again, a Russian throwback here, these are like the Bolsheviks calling themselves Bolsheviks — which in Russia means “members of the majority,” right? But in fact, the Bolsheviks were always the minority within the Russian revolutionary movements. 
The same thing is happening here. These people are saying, “We’re the silent majority. We’re the great unspoken middle of America. Donald Trump represents the majority of America.” This is simply not the case. This is about 30% of the country. But because of the distribution of votes, the Electoral College, the way Senate districts tilt red and so on, they are mimicking the behavior of a majority. And it’s not going to last. The question is how much will they burn down and how much of that damage will be irreversible before this demographic bubble finally pops in fifteen or twenty years? And I think we’re in a period of maximum danger over the next five to ten years.
Geoff Kabaservice: If we make it through those five to ten years, Tom Nichols, you will be one of our most clear-sighted guides. So thank you so much for your latest book, Our Own Worst Enemy, and thank you for joining me on this podcast.
Tom Nichols: And thank you, Geoff, for all of your sage advice and for having me on. Appreciate it.
The post How to confront the growing threat to American democracy, with Tom Nichols appeared first on Niskanen Center.

Statue of Aristotle at the Athens Academy in Athens, Greece. (Photo: Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)The Urban Institute is one of America’s most storied think tanks. For half a century, it has produced high-quality research that has helped guide American policymakers as they tackle major domestic policy challenges. Part of what makes the organization’s work so valuable is that it’s produced in an environment that values rigor and objectivity. Regardless of whether you agree with their policy recommendations or political lean—they tend to argue in favor of progressive solutions—you can count on their research being thorough and reliable. That’s why it was so alarming to see a recent Urban Institute blog post by one of its policy analysts, Lauren Farrell, that argues that we should rethink the very concept of impartial research. She warned that the research practices of “objectivity” and “rigor” are “harmful” and “rooted in racism, ableism, and classism.”“Objectivity allows researchers, intentions aside, to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience,” she cautioned. “Objectivity also gives researchers grounds to claim they have no motives or biases in their work. Racism, sexism, classism, and ableism permeate US institutions and systems, which, in turn, allows for research that reproduces or creates racist stereotypes and reinforces societal power differences between who generates information (white cisgender people) and who is a subject (Black, Indigenous, and other people of color at the margins of class and gender).” Farrell acknowledges that “rigor measures whether research is reliable, accurate, and trustworthy. It’s a standard asked for by funders and research institutions alike.” The problem, in her view, is that “researchers often define rigor as following an established research protocol meticulously instead of ensuring data are contextualized and grounded in community experience.” Farrell’s blog post set off a bit of a firestorm on social media, which is perhaps why the president of the Urban Institute, Sarah Rosen Wartell, stepped in with her own statement assuring the public that posts on the blog “represent individual authors’ views and not Urban policy.” She also noted that “rigor is a hallmark of what we do” and that the institute tries to make sure its research is “inclusive and respectful.” The response from Wartell—who, full disclosure, was briefly my boss while I was a junior staffer at the Center for American Progress from 2009 to 2012—is emblematic of the struggle between truth and social justice that is taking place across many left-leaning institutions in the United States.Some years ago, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described that battle when it started to break out in higher education. “Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its telos—its purpose, end, or goal,” Haidt wrote. “What is the telos of university? The most obvious answer is ‘truth’—the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second or equal telos.” Then Haidt posed the key question: “What happens if they conflict?” While we all have our own ideological preferences, we should always want truth to win in any conflict with a political agenda. Understanding the facts is the first step to making social change, and we shouldn’t bend them to fit our beliefs. It shouldn’t take a social media uproar for an organization as prestigious as the Urban Institute to affirm its commitment to truth and to practices like objectivity and rigor.Farrell seems to be concerned that objective and rigorous research may produce findings that are unfriendly to a progressive social agenda. She wants us to infuse our research practices with left-wing ideology for the purpose of serving left-wing goals. But the point of research is not to promote a particular ideology or agenda. The point of research is to tell us what is true. Objectivity lets us see the world as it is, rather than what we might wish it were. It’s important to acknowledge reality and settle on a good set of facts before we do anything else. We can then use that knowledge as we see fit, based on our values—which is where ideology and argument about what should be done can come into the picture.Unfortunately, many institutions we would expect to embrace the telos of truth are now under pressure to instead adopt the telos of social justice. One of the unfortunate undercurrents of this rebellion against old-fashioned objectivity and truth-seeking is the misperception that these concepts are the lone purview of European-Americans, who have imposed them on all institutions. Farrell seems to be under the impression that objective research is all generated by, as she describes them, “white cisgender people” at the expense of, well, everybody else. Farrell is not alone in this view. Last summer, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture published a graphic on its website that depicted “objective, rational linear thinking” as a facet of “whiteness & white culture.” Facing criticism, the museum later removed the graphic, but the fact that one of America’s pre-eminent cultural and historical institutions allowed this to happen is a sign of how far the attack on the scientific method has gone.Yet objectivity and rigor, far from promoting racism, have often provided the data that serve as the antidote to racism. Look at the example of W. Montague Cobb, an African-American physician and professor of anatomy who used the scientific method to help debunk racial aspects of biodeterminism, which claims that different “races” of people had fundamentally distinct bodies that made some inferior or superior to others. Cobb—whose work features prominently in an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture—wrote powerfully about how the field of science, far from being the purview of one dominant racial group, could dismantle these racist ideas:It is my belief that physical anthropology can make a significant contribution to our national welfare if it would by giving the people by modern propaganda methods the scientific facts we have about race. In this way, a great blow could be struck at the dominant group’s entrenched belief in its racial superiority. Even if institutions manage to walk back their mistakes, this self-destructive behavior will have serious long-term consequences. If institutions continue to undermine their own credibility, people may start going to less reliable sources for information instead. When the Urban Institute publishes a blog post criticizing fundamental research practices, it undermines its legitimacy as an arbiter of the truth. The same is true when, for instance, Princeton University’s president writes a letter telling the world that “racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton” and that racism is “embedded in structures of the University itself.” Why would the public trust information coming from a racist institution, or one labeling itself as racist when it really isn’t? Not every piece of research will align itself with a person or institution’s particular social agenda. Neither will every reported piece from a news outlet. But if consumers of news and research are interested in what is true—and we very much should be—we should want to know the facts, whether they bolster arguments of the left or the right. Our knowledge-making institutions should reaffirm their commitment to the telos of truth and resist those who would sacrifice objectivity and rigor in service of an ideological agenda. Zaid Jilani is a frequent contributor to Persuasion. He maintains his own newsletter where he writes about current affairs at inquiremore.com.

(Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.)If you’ve spent any time in Washington, you’ve heard stories about Joe Biden’s loquaciousness. Asked to give brief remarks, he’d famously meander for 30, 40, or more minutes about whatever came into his mind.But his verbosity is a symptom of his larger problem: a lack of situational awareness. After all, this is the guy who once asked a man in a wheelchair to stand up and take a bow.My favorite example came just after the 9/11 attacks, when Biden met with his Senate committee staffers and went into a “stream-of-consciousness monologue” about how to respond. “I’m groping here,” he confessed after a while, and then had a eureka moment. To assure the Arab world the U.S. “wasn’t bent on its destruction,” Michael Crowley reported in the New Republic, Biden declared: “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.”According to Crowley, Biden “surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a How do ya like that? look on his face.” Staffers eventually broke the perplexed silence, offering a number of objections. It didn’t matter: “Joe Biden is barely listening anymore. He’s already moved on to something else.”Two decades later, his White House staff reportedly lives in a constant state of anxiety about the boss’s inability to police his own words, and White House press secretary Jen Psaki has admitted that they try to keep him from taking too many questions.Biden himself has acknowledged the problem, but he believes it gives him an air of authenticity. And he probably has a point.But it’s his inability to read the room, not his long-windedness, that is the source of his political problems. His explanations of his handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan were often poorly matched to the moment, sounding defensive or defiant when remorsefulness or humility were called for. Sometimes, it’s not his fault. He declared victory of sorts over the pandemic, right as the Delta variant threw everyone for a loop.The best example of his misreading of the moment, however, is his entire domestic agenda, or at least the chunk of it that falls under the rubric of infrastructure.Biden came into office with arguably the narrowest majority in Congress in history: a 50-50 Senate with very small margin in the House. And yet, he let people convince him that the moment was ripe for a “transformative” agenda, one that would rival the New Deal. He misinterpreted the passage of his $1.9-trillion COVID relief package—on the heels of trillions of additional spending under the Trump administration—as a green light for vastly more spending. Adjusted for inflation, New Deal spending was a little less than $1 trillion in today’s dollars. He’s proposing, at minimum, several New Deals in spending.Put aside the fact there is scant evidence the country is yearning for a new New Deal. Disregard that our national debt is about 125 percent of gross domestic product. Biden, with a half-century of political experience under his belt, can’t count votes. FDR and LBJ had huge majorities to work with for their major accomplishments. Even Obamacare would have been impossible in today’s Congress.Of course, a major driver of Biden’s predicament is that the base of the Democratic Party can’t read the room either. But they don’t care.Biden, however, is the president. He’s the one who insisted on the campaign trail that “to lead America, you have to understand America,” and he touted his mastery of how Washington works.Historically, presidents adjust to reality. They choose sides in intraparty debates. Bill Clinton had a miserable first two years, but that guy knew how to read a room. After the 1994 midterms, he tacked to the center, declared “the era of big government is over,” and cruised to reelection. Biden may still get something that passes for a victory, but even if he does, odds are Republicans will be well-positioned to take back Congress in 2022.In June, on the heels of his COVID relief package, Biden brokered a bipartisan infrastructure deal with the Senate, garnering support from 19 Republicans. It was the highwater mark of Biden’s presidency, fulfilling his vow to be a competent president who gets things done. But before the bipartisan backslapping subsided, he misread the room again, announcing that he wouldn’t sign that deal unless the Senate also passed another $3.5 trillion in “human infrastructure.” It’s no coincidence his approval ratings have been sliding ever since.

Studying sea slugs in the group Sacoglossa can mean being on the receiving end of some very imaginative emails. Sidney K. Pierce, of the University of South Florida, retired a few years ago. “But to this day,” he told me, “I get questions from little kids in their science classes” who have stumbled upon the marvelous mollusks—and want to know if they could help “end world hunger.”The answer, Pierce assured me, is no. But the proposal isn’t totally outlandish. Several sacoglossan sea slugs can harvest energy from the sun’s rays and, using only the contents of their cells, turn it into chemical packages of food. In other words, they photosynthesize—arguably the plantiest thing that earthly plants and algae do.Except sea slugs are, of course, not plants or algae. They’re standard-issue animals that have blurred the boundaries between biological kingdoms, thanks to a spectacular act of thievery: They steal photosynthesizing machinery—in-cell structures called chloroplasts—from the algae they eat, and store the green, light-converting blobs in their body for extended periods. Some species can reap the nutritional benefits of these self-replenishing snack packs for months, perhaps for longer than a year. One sea slug that Pierce has studied extensively, Elysia chlorotica, can go the rest of its life without eating—moseying, mating, vibing—after just one algae-rich binge in its youth. “We collect them in the field,” he told me, “and we never feed them again.”Humans do not do this; as far as we know, our bodies aren’t set up to carry out these grand heists. But oh, that we could. “What would it be like, if we just ate salad for a week, and then you don’t need to worry about where you’re getting your nutrients ever again?” Karen Pelletreau, of the University of Maine, told me. The slugs’ felonious feat, known as kleptoplasty, is so remarkable that it’s been held up by creationists as proof of intelligent design. (It is, to be clear, evolution.) And researchers still aren’t sure how the plant-pantomiming animals pull it all off.

A sea slug of the species Elysia timida. (Paulo Cartaxana)

Some of the nomming nitty-gritty differs a bit among species, but in general, the slugs, which run up to a couple of inches in length, will latch on to a straw-shaped stretch of algae, puncture it with a tooth, and slurp out its contents like a college student shotgunning a beer. The resultant sludge then floods the slug’s über-branched gut, where it’s captured by cells that hoard the chloroplasts intact, while breaking down or discarding everything else that’s algal. Solar-powered sea slugs tend to hatch translucent or whitish. But the chloroplasts swathe large portions of their flat, billowy bodies in a startling verdigris. In the 1970s, one pioneering biologist who espied E. chlorotica’s emerald hues dubbed them the “leaves that crawl.”
Most sacoglossan sea slugs aren’t of the solar-powered ilk; they digest the chloroplasts along with everything else. That certain species among them manage to keep the little structures operational for days, weeks, or months is, frankly, bonkers—and seems impossible at first, because of how dependent chloroplasts are on their native host cells. Chloroplasts were, millions of years ago, free-living bacteria that were ultimately engulfed by bigger cells; in exchange for room and board, the microbes pumped out energy for their hosts, forging what became a permanent codependency. Nowadays, plant and algae chloroplasts can’t get by without protein cargo that’s manufactured exclusively out of genes in the nucleus, which doesn’t survive the sea slug’s discerning digestion. Sticking a chloroplast into a sea-slug cell and expecting it to run is like asking a car to gun indefinitely down a highway with no gas or oil-change stations. (It’s also why we humans can’t just stick chloroplasts into test tubes and profit.) And yet, even stripped of their nuclear entourage, the chloroplasts persist—and work. “It seems like a biotechnological marvel,” Debashish Bhattacharya, of Rutgers University, told me. “How the hell do they keep the chloroplasts alive?”
[Read: A pesky insect took an evolutionary shortcut.]
Several potential explanations have been put forth over the years. In one, the sea slugs use their own in-house accoutrement to jerry-rig the chloroplasts, making them more durable. In another, the animals manage to ransack algal nuclei, co-opting chloroplast-fortifying genes, though most of the researchers I talked with characterized the evidence for this idea as scant or mixed. A few years ago, a group of scientists proposed another work-around: Perhaps the kidnapped chloroplasts are important to the slug less as photosynthetic factories, and more as self-contained food stores—mini, cell-intrinsic calorie caches that could be digested by the animal in times of nutritional need, like a camel’s fat-rich hump. In that scenario, chloroplast maintenance could fall to the wayside.
Pierce told me that idea doesn’t have much support. (It also doesn’t negate the possibility that the sea slugs are solar-powered: Some species, for instance, could be tapping into those reserves after milking the chloroplasts’ photosynthesizing chops for weeks.) And many experts are wholly convinced that, for Elysia chlorotica and several of its closest kin, the biggest benefit of harboring algal contraband centers totally on photosynthesis, especially because “it’s dangerous business to steal a chloroplast,” Paulo Cartaxana, who studies the slugs at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, told me. Chloroplasts are fragile and fussy; they emit toxic compounds while they work. The structures must be providing big perks, or they’d have been booted long ago. And proof of this has indeed racked up.
Several chloroplast-hoarding sea-slug species will live longer and grow larger when allowed to soak up sunlight. Pelletreau, of the University of Maine, collaborated on prior work showing that E. chlorotica slugs in particular seem to be totally dependent on chloroplasts; without them, the plant wannabes simply perish in their youth. One recent study proposed that the chloroplasts’ energetic oomph may even be powerful enough to sustain certain sea-slug species after they purposefully decapitate themselves and begin the arduous work of sprouting a new body from their severed head.
Further evidence that the animals pack a substantial photosynthetic punch comes from studies that have tracked chloroplast-produced chemical food packets on an atomic scale, as they migrate into a menagerie of sea-slug tissues, where they can presumably facilitate all sorts of sea-sluggy things. Cartaxana’s recent work showcases something new: In Elysia chlorotica’s close cousin Elysia timida, what comes out of gut-cell chloroplasts can end up in reproductive tissues and boost the number of eggs new sea-slug parents lay. (E. timida slugs, while greedy burglars at the dinner table, are very reciprocal lovers. All of them are hermaphrodites, and they mate by colliding head-to-head and mutually inseminating each other with penises that unspool from beneath their right eye.)

Sea slug of the species Elysia viridis, a close cousin of Elysia timida, locked in a mating embrace. (Paulo Cartaxana)
“Spawning is a huge reproductive investment,” Sónia Cruz, also of the University of Aveiro, and another author on the new E. timida study, told me. “It takes a lot of energy out of them.” Each slug has to manufacture hundreds of eggs, each packed with enough nutrients to sustain its offspring during early development. The chloroplasts appear to offer an energetic boon, in some cases doubling the slugs’ output.Anna Karnkowska, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Warsaw, in Poland, told me that lessons could be learned from the other members of the chloroplast-stealing club, most of which are single-celled creatures such as dinoflagellates (though at least a couple of marine worms seem to briefly hijack the structures too). These unicellular pirates are thought to have an especially intense relationship with their chloroplasts; for them, kleptoplasty might be an intermediate step toward fixing the structures permanently into their cells and making them heritable from generation to generation.Sea slugs, with their multicelled anatomy and complex lifestyle, would have a much harder time passing pilfered chloroplasts down. As far as scientists can tell, what the slugs accomplish is akin to black-market organ theft, but little more: When the animal dies, its chloroplast cargo dies with it. But even if the chloroplasts’ tenancy is a dead end, it’s a fascinating push to rethink the strange and category-defying ways in which organisms interact, Karnkowska said. The slugs offer the chloroplasts a home, and get to, for a while, masquerade as pseudo-plants; the chloroplasts, in turn, become the sole survivors of carnage, enduring where the rest of their algal comrades could not.

Are constitutionally committed Americans doing all they can to prevent a pro-Trump plot to pervert the 2024 election?Maybe not.But along with that question, here’s another: Are constitutionally committed Americans doing all they can to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 election fair and square?The Biden administration’s numbers are slumping in the fall of 2021, opening the way for Republican gains in 2022 and the return of the twice-impeached ex-president as a presidential nominee. The schemes and machinations of the pro-Trump movement are part of the story. But if we’re heading toward a crisis of the republic, the mistakes and misfortunes of the anti-Trump coalition deserve a mention as well.This is not a “both sides to blame” complaint. Only one side is “to blame” for the crisis: those willing to reelect a corrupt and authoritarian president, even by disenfranchising legal voters if that’s the only way to do it. But given that reality, it’s more than an everyday political imperative that the other side govern successfully. It’s a unique moral imperative.That success is proving elusive. The troubles of the Biden administration could empower Senate, House, and state Republicans to restore Donald Trump to office. These troubles are intimately interconnected, but for clarity I’ll separate them and discuss each in turn.COVID-19 HangoverThe United States now lags the rest of the developed world in vaccination uptake. Even the countries that somehow missed the opportunity to obtain vaccines early—Australia and Japan, for example—are now overtaking the United States, or soon will.The highest promise of the Biden administration was to overcome the pandemic rapidly and restore the country to normal by 2022. Right-wing disinformation and Republican obstruction have thwarted that mission through 2021. Even if a new wave of vaccine mandates overcomes those obstacles this fall and winter, they have lasted long enough to disrupt the economic recovery from the COVID shock.[Read: Why Biden bet it all on mandates]With day care and school in question, hundreds of thousands of women still have not returned to the labor force: almost 2 million as of midsummer. The enormous Baby Boom contingent accelerated its retirement during COVID. Extended unemployment benefits expired September 6. But economists are not yet noticing an uptick in job applicants.The result has been shortages of goods including gasoline and beef (as I described recently), of crucial industrial items such as glass, and of consumer products including apparel and shoes.PricesAt the same time that supply chains are squeezed, U.S. consumer demand is surging. President Joe Biden signed a $1.9 trillion COVID-relief bill in March 2021. Another huge spending bill will emerge from Congress soon. All this atop the big relief measures previously signed by President Trump—and, of course, the ultra-low interest rates engineered by the Federal Reserve.This assistance protected the U.S. economy in 2020 from the kind of collapse it suffered in 2008 and 2009. Now in 2021, consumers are eagerly buying houses, cars, air tickets, clothes, and groceries. They are accepting higher levels of household debt to finance their purchases. In August, household debt jumped by the highest single-quarter amount since 2007.Americans have money to spend. They are finding less to buy.Economists disagree on whether to describe the resulting rise in consumer prices as “inflation,” in the sense of a loss in the purchasing power of money relative to all goods and services. Let’s leave that technical question aside. The terminology does not matter to voters paying more to fuel their cars, heat their homes, and feed and clothe their families. Already, the cost of living has overtaken COVID as a top problem in some polls of voter attitudes and is beginning to contribute to voter pessimism. Polls reported that Americans were feeling better about the future in early summer 2021 than at any time since before COVID struck. That optimism has sunk this fall, with almost 60 percent now worrying that the country is on the “wrong track.”BordersAmazon has raised its starting pay for warehouse workers to $18 an hour. Other big employers have been offering more as well. Higher wages have not yet called all Americans back to the job. But the hiring message is being heard throughout the rest of the world.Poorer countries cannot afford to turbocharge demand the way the United States is doing. Brazil is now paying almost 11 percent to borrow money. It is being forced to balance its books, and that is driving the Brazilian unemployment rate above 14 percent. Those economic trends are one important reason tens of thousands of Haitians who found refuge in Brazil a decade ago are suddenly showing up at the U.S. southern border to file asylum claims.It’s not only Haitian residents in Brazil who are responding to signals from eager U.S. employers. In July, Border Patrol officers encountered more people trying to cross the southern border than they did during any other month in the past 20 years.The administration is reacting by splitting the difference: admitting some, refusing others. Of the 30,000 migrants who showed up at the Del Rio crossing in September, 12,400 have been admitted into the United States, and the cases of another 5,000 are still being adjudicated. Some 10,000 have been turned away.From a political point of view, this is the worst of all possible worlds for Biden: continuing images of chaos, deepening anger among immigration-friendly Democrats, intensifying feelings of loss of control in border communities and among immigration-skeptical swing voters—and all with no plan to resolve the crisis before Election Day 2022.The Biden administration is pushing a big infrastructure bill through Congress. If that becomes law, it could sharpen the contrast between a booming United States and stagnation (or worse) in poorer countries. That contrast could propel even more economic migration, and generate more images of border chaos to frighten and upset those who demand that the migrants be refused entry and those who urge that they be welcomed alike.[Caitlin Dickerson: Democrats’ free pass on immigration is over]Globalization Bites BackOne way to understand Trumpism is as a reaction against the globalization of the U.S. economy. A team of economists found a significant correlation between the impact of imports from China on a county’s economy and its swing to Trump in 2016. Trump promised to isolate the U.S. economy, to put America first.Five years later, the economies of the United States and China remain closely bound, presenting another hazard for the president’s party. One of China’s largest property developers hovers on the edge of default on its enormous debts. This is only the most recent in a sequence of crises that have buffeted China’s massively indebted real-estate sector since 2018.Real estate is a huge share of the Chinese economy, a major employer, kept aloft by easy lending from state-owned banks. Even if the Chinese government can afford to eat the lending losses, what happens to the jobs? And if Chinese workers lose their jobs, what happens to the other countries that export to the world’s second-largest economy? The United States ranks only fifth as an exporter to China. But it is the second-largest exporter to China’s top supplier, South Korea, as well as the second-largest exporter to China’s next top supplier, Japan. A shock to the Chinese economy will be felt not only in the Pacific, but in Peoria.Crime and CultureDespite the Democrats’ 8-million-vote advantage in the 2020 presidential race, Republicans performed strongly further down the ballot, especially in House races. Afterward, three Democratic advocacy organizations closely studied 19 House and Senate races to understand the disconnect between presidential voting and the kind of races that will be contested in 2022. They found an especially powerful link between voter anxieties about race and crime. In 2020, U.S. homicides rose 30 percent, the single biggest one-year jump ever recorded by the FBI. The three Democratic groups found:
Republican messaging on crime and policing hurt Democrats most when deployed “against candidates of color in swing districts with large white populations.”
“None of the candidates or campaigns included in this analysis supported defunding the police, but nearly all were targeted by paid advertising claiming they did.” Tellingly, that theme dominated the most effective ads as measured by digital impressions.
The study also suggested that Republican pro-police messaging worked especially well to move Latino and Asian-Pacific voters away from Democrat candidates toward Republicans in districts such as Florida’s Twenty-Sixth (from southern Miami to the bottom of the peninsula) and California’s Thirty-Ninth (extending north and east from Fullerton almost to Pomona).
Republican messaging on race and crime will resonate even more powerfully with the smaller and older electorate of 2022 than it did with the bigger and younger electorate of 2020. More ominously for Democrats, 2020 demonstrated how the crime issue can wedge apart “communities of color”—and unite some of those communities with white conservatives.Democrats have not yet found an exit from this conundrum. Maybe no exit exists. They can only hope that crime declines and the issue becomes less salient, as it did in the low-crime years from the late 1990s to the late 2010s. But the murder rate is not declining; it continues to rise in 2021, if at a slower pace than in 2020.Those aghast at Republican voter suppression should not fall for the mistaken idea that protecting voting rights will by itself guarantee Democratic wins. Down-ballot GOP candidates can thrive in high-turnout elections too, as they did in 2020. In 2022, Republicans’ job will be easier than two years before. They won’t be burdened by a Trump incumbency that alienated many historically Republican voters. Instead, they can try to prolong the pandemic—and then benefit from the dissatisfactions they helped cause.Democracy is genuinely on the ballot in 2022 and 2024, as it was in 2016, 2018, and 2020. But this time, so too are prices, borders, and crime. If the Biden administration cannot deliver better on those issues than it has so far done, Trump and his enablers will be just as happy to scoop power by default as to grab it by stealth or force.

By James Pethokoukis and Charles
Fishman
In
the summer of 1969, NASA succeeded in manning a mission to the Moon. But since
the end of the Apollo program in 1972, no one has returned. And when Americans
think of the legacy of Apollo, freeze-dried food and Velcro are the first
things in mind — not the space-faring extraplanetary civilization we were
promised. On a recent episode of “Political Economy,” Charles Fishman
explains the successes and failures of the NASA since the 1960s and looks ahead
to its role in the future of space.
Charles is a journalist and author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon as well as The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, among other works.
Below
is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full
discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.
Pethokoukis: You write in One Giant Leap, “Apollo was an unqualified success and it wasn’t — judged on its performance — a waste of money, nor was it a use of money that the United States simply couldn’t afford.” Is that a contrarian judgment among people who are disappointed that Apollo did not lead to further exploration?
Fishman:
We can say it was an unqualified success in that President John Kennedy charged
America and NASA with landing people on the Moon by the end of the decade. And
we did it.On May 25, 1961 when
Kennedy said, “Let’s go to the Moon,” it was literally impossible.
They didn’t have the rocket, the spaceship, the space food, the computer. It
was impossible when he said, “Let’s do it.” And literally 100 months
later, it was done.
Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot, is photographed during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity on the Moon. Via REUTERS.
But the real achievement was that NASA and Apollo really
ushered in the Digital Age that we all live in. NASA was the first organization
of any kind to use integrated circuits, to use computer chips. And so NASA
literally created the market and the understanding of computer chips in going
to the Moon, and then we stepped up and adopted those computer chips for every
function on Earth.
We stopped the Apollo program
and no one has gone beyond near-Earth orbit since. Have the last 50 years been
a failure?
In 1972, the last time we went to the Moon, we flew
240,000 miles to the Moon. And literally since 1972, no human being has been
further than about 240 miles from Earth. So if success means that Apollo opened
the solar system to exploration and settlement by human beings, then there is
no question that Apollo didn’t accomplish that.
We would not have gone to the Moon without the Cold War. But
the problem with geopolitics as a motivator is, in 1972 when Richard Nixon
looked out across the world, space wasn’t an important arena anymore. And the
economics weren’t there for companies and non-governmental organizations of all
kinds to jump into space at that moment.
I don’t think the leadership of NASA was clear on where we
should go next and how we should get there. I love the Space Shuttle. I love
the Space Station. I don’t think they have been good custodians of our space
money, to be honest. The robotic exploration missions have been brilliant and
pioneering compared to what we’ve gotten from the human space flight program.
But that’s not necessarily the fault of the frontline people at NASA. That’s a
leadership failure.
In the ‘60s, a common
criticism was, “How can the government fund a space program when we have big problems
on Earth?” Now it’s, “How can these billionaires be spending their money going
into the space?” Has nothing changed?
The United States is a big country. We’re capable of doing
even three or four things at once, not just one.And we’re very wealthy. And in the ‘60s, going to the Moon cost
about $20 billion. There are three individual years of the Vietnam War, each of
which cost more than the entire race to the Moon. So we could clearly afford to
go to the Moon. Whether it was the right use of money is a separate question to
whether we could afford it.
What’s happening now is completely different. Musk and
Bezos are in business to change the business of space, to create a space
economy. They want to take something that has historically cost $100 million
and bring the cost down to a $1 million. And I think 20 and 30 years from now,
this moment that we’re living in now will look like the beginning of this
remarkable transformation in which space becomes a much more tangible economy.
As private companies take a
larger role in space, what should NASA’s role be?
If you’re going to Mars, those people who go to Mars are
going to be 100 percent autonomous. The quickest radio exchange between here
and Mars is nine minutes in each direction. There’s no mission control for a
mission to Mars. Teaching astronauts to be autonomous, to make their own
decisions, take their own risks, have all their own information, 3D printers
for spare parts — all that stuff, and teaching NASA to let go: those are hard
problems. I want NASA working on those kind of breakthrough problems.
We need to figure out how to pick crews that are going to
get along. The number one complaint the astronauts have about life on the space
station is too much meddling from Houston. The number two complaint is about
their fellow crew members. So there’s a lot that NASA could be doing. And I
don’t need NASA to be developing the SLS launch system and the Orion capsule.
It’s pretty clear we have big problems, and I’d like them to tackle those.
Will we be on the Moon and Mars
in the coming decades?
I don’t think there’s any economic reason to go to the
Moon or go to Mars. Whatever resources those places have, those resources are
only good for going further out in space. It will always be easier to get all
kinds of valuable minerals right here on Earth than to go harness an asteroid
and tow it this way and mine it and send the stuff down.
I think if we go to Mars, we will learn things and we will develop tools that will be incredibly valuable back on Earth. I think these big missions remind us what we can do. And so I hope, I truly hope, that we will have a permanent presence on the Moon that we will use that to teach ourselves to go to Mars, just because I think the benefits of that will be surprising and well worth the relatively modest cost compared to other things we spend money on.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Charles Fishman is the author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon.
Learn more: 5 questions for John Roth, Rich Boling, Mike Gold, & Matthew Weinzierl on the future of commerce in space | 5 questions for Daniel Deudney on the geopolitics of space exploration | 5 questions for Tim Fernholz, Sara Seager, Stan Veuger, and Matt Weinzierl on US space exploration
The post 5 questions for Charles Fishman on the Apollo program appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Rationality is uncool. To describe someone with a slang word for the cerebral, like nerd, wonk, geek, or brainiac, is to imply they are terminally challenged in hipness. For decades, Hollywood screenplays and rock-song lyrics have equated joy and freedom with an escape from reason. “A man needs a little madness or else he never dares cut the rope and be free,” said Zorba the Greek. "Stop Making Sense," advised Talking Heads; “Let’s go crazy,” adjured the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups. These movements have an air of sophistication about them, implying that Western philosophy and science are provincial, old-fashioned, naïve to the diversity of ways of knowing found across periods and cultures. To be sure, not far from where I live in downtown Boston there is a splendid turquoise and gold mosaic that proclaims, “Follow reason.” But it is affixed to the Grand Lodge of the Masons, the fez- and apron-sporting fraternal organization that is the answer to the question “What’s the opposite of hip?”My own position on rationality is “I’m for it.” Though I cannot argue that reason is dope, phat, chill, fly, sick, or da bomb, and strictly speaking I cannot even justify or rationalize reason, I will defend the message on the mosaic: we ought to follow reason.To begin at the beginning: what is rationality? As with most words in common usage, no definition can stipulate its meaning exactly, and the dictionary just leads us in a circle: most define rational as “having reason,” but reason itself comes from the Latin ration-, often defined as “reason.”A definition that is more or less faithful to the way the word is used is “the ability to use knowledge to attain goals.” Knowledge in turn is standardly defined as “justified true belief.” We would not credit someone with being rational if they acted on beliefs that were known to be false, such as looking for their keys in a place they knew the keys could not be, or if those beliefs could not be justified—if they came, say, from a drug-induced vision or a hallucinated voice rather than observation of the world or inference from some other true belief.Emblem of Boston Masons' Grand LodgeThe beliefs, moreover, must be held in service of a goal. No one gets rationality credit for merely thinking true thoughts, like calculating the digits of pi, or cranking out the logical implications of a proposition (“Either 1 + 1 = 2 or the moon is made of cheese,” “If 1 + 1 = 3, then pigs can fly”). A rational agent must have a goal, whether it is to ascertain the truth of a noteworthy idea, called theoretical reason, or to bring about a noteworthy outcome in the world, called practical reason (“what is true” and “what to do”). Even the humdrum rationality of seeing rather than hallucinating is in the service of the ever-present goal built into our visual systems of knowing our surroundings.A rational agent, moreover, must attain that goal not by doing something that just happens to work there and then, but by using whatever knowledge is applicable to the circumstances. Here is how William James distinguished a rational entity from a nonrational one that would at first appear to be doing the same thing:Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves toward her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly. With the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which is fixed; the path may be modified indefinitely.With this definition the case for rationality seems all too obvious: do you want things or don’t you? If you do, rationality is what allows you to get them.Now, this case for rationality is open to an objection. It advises us to ground our beliefs in the truth, to ensure that our inference from one belief to another is justified, and to make plans that are likely to bring about a given end. But that only raises further questions. What is “truth”? What makes an inference “justified”? How do we know that means can be found that really do bring about a given end? But the quest to provide the ultimate, absolute, final reason for reason is a fool’s errand. Just as an inquisitive three-year-old will reply to every answer to a “why” question with another “Why?,” the quest to find the ultimate reason for reason can always be stymied by a demand to provide a reason for the reason for the reason. Just because I believe P implies Q, and I believe P, why should I believe Q? Is it because I also believe [(P implies Q) and P] implies Q? But why should I believe that? Is it because I have still another belief, {[(P implies Q) and P] implies Q} implies Q?This regress was the basis for Lewis Carroll’s 1895 story What the Tortoise Said to Achilles, which imagined the conversation that would unfold when the fleet-footed warrior caught up to (but could never overtake) the tortoise with the head start in Zeno’s second paradox. (In the time it took for Achilles to close the gap, the tortoise moved on, opening up a new gap for Achilles to close, ad infinitum.) Carroll was a logician as well as a children’s author, and in this article, published in the philosophy journal Mind, he imagines the warrior seated on the tortoise’s back and responding to the tortoise’s escalating demands to justify his arguments by filling up a notebook with thousands of rules for rules for rules. The moral is that reasoning with logical rules at some point must simply be executed by a mechanism that is hardwired into the machine or brain and runs because that’s how the circuitry works, not because it consults a rule telling it what to do. We program apps into a computer, but its CPU is not itself an app; it’s a piece of silicon in which elementary operations like comparing symbols and adding numbers have been burned. Those operations are designed (by an engineer, or in the case of the brain by natural selection) to implement laws of logic and mathematics that are inherent to the abstract realm of ideas.Now, Mr. Spock notwithstanding, logic is not the same thing as reasoning. But they are closely related, and the reasons the rules of logic can’t be executed by still more rules of logic (ad infinitum) also apply to the justification of reason by still more reason. In each case the ultimate rule has to be “Just do it.” At the end of the day the discussants have no choice but to commit to reason, because that’s what they committed themselves to at the beginning of the day, when they opened up a discussion of why we should follow reason. As long as people are arguing and persuading and then evaluating and accepting or rejecting the arguments—as opposed to, say, bribing or threatening each other into mouthing some words—it’s too late to ask about the value of reason. They’re already reasoning, and have tacitly accepted its value.When it comes to arguing against reason, as soon as you show up, you lose. Let’s say you argue that rationality is unnecessary. Is that statement rational? If you concede it isn’t, then there’s no reason for me to believe it—you just said so yourself. But if you insist I must believe it because the statement is rationally compelling, you’ve conceded that rationality is the measure by which we should accept beliefs, in which case that particular one must be false. In a similar way, if you were to claim that everything is subjective, I could ask, “Is that statement subjective?” If it is, then you are free to believe it, but I don’t have to. Or suppose you claim that everything is relative. Is that statement relative? If it is, then it may be true for you right here and now but not for anyone else or after you’ve stopped talking. This is also why the recent cliché that we’re living in a “post-truth era” cannot be true. If it were true, then it would not be true, because it would be asserting something true about the era in which we are living.This argument, laid out by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in The Last Word, is admittedly unconventional, as any argument about argument itself would have to be. Nagel compared it to Descartes’s argument that our own existence is the one thing we cannot doubt, because the very fact of wondering whether we exist presupposes the existence of a wonderer. The very fact of interrogating the concept of reason using reason presupposes the validity of reason. Because of this unconventionality, it’s not quite right to say that we should “believe in” reason or “have faith in” reason. As Nagel points out, that’s “one thought too many.” The masons (and the Masons) got it right: we should follow reason.Now, arguments for truth, objectivity, and reason may stick in the craw, because they seem dangerously arrogant: “Who the hell are you to claim to have the absolute truth?” But that’s not what the case for rationality is about. The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it’s not me (and it’s also not you). The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don’t know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained. But the conviction that they are out there licenses us to develop rules we can all abide by that allow us to approach the truth collectively in ways that are impossible for any of us individually.The rules are designed to sideline the biases that get in the way of rationality: the cognitive illusions built into human nature, and the bigotries, prejudices, phobias, and -isms that infect the members of a race, class, gender, sexuality, or civilization. These rules include principles of critical thinking and the normative systems of logic, probability, and empirical reasoning. They are implemented among flesh-and-blood people by social institutions that prevent people from imposing their egos or biases or delusions on everyone else. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” wrote James Madison about the checks and balances in a democratic government, and that is how other institutions steer communities of biased and ambition-addled people toward disinterested truth. Examples include the adversarial system in law, peer review in science, editing and fact-checking in journalism, academic freedom in universities, and freedom of speech in the public sphere. Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.Though we can never prove that reasoning is sound or the truth can be known (since we would need to assume the soundness of reason to do it), we can stoke our confidence that they are. When we apply reason to reason itself, we find that it is not just an inarticulate gut impulse, a mysterious oracle that whispers truths into our ear. We can expose the rules of reason and distill and purify them into normative models of logic and probability. We can even implement them in machines that duplicate and exceed our own rational powers. Computers are literally mechanized logic, their smallest circuits called logic gates.Another reassurance that reason is valid is that it works. Life is not a dream, in which we pop up in disconnected locations and bewildering things happen without rhyme or reason. By scaling the wall, Romeo really does get to touch Juliet’s lips. And by deploying reason in other ways, we reach the moon, invent smartphones, and extinguish smallpox. The cooperativeness of the world when we apply reason to it is a strong indication that rationality really does get at objective truths.And ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narratives of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child’s infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman. And though relativism is often adorned with a moral halo, the moral convictions of relativists depend on a commitment to objective truth. Was slavery a myth? Was the Holocaust just one of many possible narratives? Is climate change a social construction? Or are the suffering and danger that define these events really real—claims that we know are true because of logic and evidence and objective scholarship? Now relativists stop being so relative.For the same reason there can be no tradeoff between rationality and social justice or any other moral or political cause. The quest for social justice begins with the belief that certain groups are oppressed and others privileged. These are factual claims and may be mistaken (as advocates of social justice themselves insist in response to the claim that it’s straight white men who are oppressed). We affirm these beliefs because reason and evidence suggest they are true. And the quest in turn is guided by the belief that certain measures are necessary to rectify those injustices. Is leveling the playing field enough? Or have past injustices left some groups at a disadvantage that can only be set right by compensatory policies? Would particular measures merely be feel-good signaling that leaves the oppressed groups no better off? Would they make matters worse? Advocates of social justice need to know the answers to these questions, and reason is the only way we can know anything about anything.Admittedly, the peculiar nature of the argument for reason always leaves open a loophole. In introducing the case for reason, I wrote, “As long as people are arguing and persuading…,” but that’s a big “as long as.” Rationality rejecters can refuse to play the game. They can say, “I don’t have to justify my beliefs to you. Your demands for arguments and evidence show that you are part of the problem.” Instead of feeling any need to persuade, people who are certain they are correct can impose their beliefs by force. In theocracies and autocracies, authorities censor, imprison, exile, or burn those with the wrong opinions. In democracies the force is less brutish, but people still find means to impose a belief rather than argue for it. Modern universities—oddly enough, given that their mission is to evaluate ideas—have been at the forefront of finding ways to suppress opinions, including disinviting and drowning out speakers, removing controversial teachers from the classroom, revoking offers of jobs and support, expunging contentious articles from archives, and classifying differences of opinion as punishable harassment and discrimination. They respond as Ring Lardner recalled his father doing when the writer was a boy: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”If you know you are right, why should you try to persuade others through reason? Why not just strengthen solidarity within your coalition and mobilize it to fight for justice? One reason is that you would be inviting questions such as: Are you infallible? Are you certain that you’re right about everything? If so, what makes you different from your opponents, who also are certain they’re right? And from authorities throughout history who insisted they were right but who we now know were wrong? If you have to silence people who disagree with you, does that mean you have no good arguments for why they’re mistaken? The incriminating lack of answers to such questions could alienate those who have not taken sides, including the generations whose beliefs are not set in stone.And another reason not to blow off persuasion is that you will have left those who disagree with you no choice but to join the game you are playing and counter you with force rather than argument. They may be stronger than you, if not now then at some time in the future. At that point, when you are the one who is canceled, it will be too late to claim that your views should be taken seriously because of their merits.Excerpted, with permission, from Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, by Steven Pinker. Published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Steven Pinker.

I have a full tank of petrol. I’m reluctant to advertise the fact, in case gangs of Mad Max-style marauders turn up at my front door with machetes and a siphon, but we got lucky: we happened to fill up midweek. Still, though, we got caught up in huge traffic jams over the weekend, because people were queuing down the road from every petrol station we passed.
There’s been a lot of talk of “panic buying”, but that’s not what it is. It’s straightforward rational behaviour. If you know that you need petrol, and you know that petrol stations are likely to run out of petrol, then it is entirely rational to get to the petrol station as quickly as possible and buy as much as you can fit in your tank.

The trouble is that it’s also rational for everyone else to do the same thing. So you end up with everyone blaming everyone else for being selfish, while insisting that they have excellent reasons for needing the petrol right now. You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. It’s the exact situation we had with toilet rolls and Calpol in March 2020.
Over the long run, the market normally solves coordination problems like this, reasonably effectively. If lots of people want some resource, then the people selling that resource realise they can make more money if they raise the price. At the higher price, fewer people are willing to buy it, but the seller makes more money per unit sold. And, in theory, they can keep raising the price until the lost sales start to outweigh the gain per unit.
This is completely normal. Try going to Center Parcs in term-time, and you’ll find that you only need to sell one kidney for four nights. Try going in half term, and you’ll be harvesting organs from your entire street. More people want to go on the rubber-ring flumes during school holidays, so the company can charge more money for it. This is how the economy works, and normally we’re broadly OK with it apart from the occasional communist revolution.
But when companies try to raise their prices during an emergency, we call it “price gouging” and we’re really against it.
In some places, in fact, including many states in the US, it’s literally illegal. In Mississippi, for instance, there is a provision in the law that when an emergency is declared, you’re not allowed to put prices up: “the value received for all goods and services sold within the designated emergency impact area shall not exceed the prices ordinarily charged”.
This leads to some strange situations. In 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a Kentucky man named Jim Shepperson bought 19 generators, and drove them 600 miles to a part of Mississippi that had suffered power outages. He rightly thought that people would be eager to buy them at twice the price he had paid for them. Instead, though, the police confiscated his generators, and threw him in jail for four days. So no one got the generators and he didn’t get the money. It’s a nice example of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics: as soon as you do anything to help solve a problem, you can be blamed for not doing more.
In the UK, we don’t have price-gouging laws. But there is a strong resistance to the idea. Last year, when masks, hand sanitiser, toilet paper, paracetamol and so on were all in short supply, various retail groups put out a statement condemning price gouging: “Those who inflate prices to profit off the backs of their customers are adding to their distress at a time of particular vulnerability.”
The funny thing, though, is that most economists would tell you that price gouging is — on balance — a good thing. When asked whether “surge pricing”, increasing prices during periods of increased demand — as Uber does — increases the supply of those goods, most economists said yes. When asked whether Connecticut should ban price gouging in natural disasters, most economists said no.
That might sound strange. Jacking up prices in an emergency sounds immoral — you’re taking advantage of people’s desperation. Poor people won’t be able to afford the goods. Most people have a strong intuition that you shouldn’t be allowed to push prices up.
But look at the effects. First, if costs are artificially low — if a product is available at a cost much lower than customers are willing to pay — then it becomes rational for customers to stockpile those products. If I know that people are going to buy all the toilet paper at the store, and the toilet paper is still 50p a roll, then I can easily buy 100 rolls for £50 and stick them in the back of my people-carrier. If, however, the cost of a toilet roll had jumped to £5 a roll, I’d be much warier, and so there would probably still be toilet paper for the next person to buy. Instead, I’ve bought it all. If it was appropriately priced, it wouldn’t be so likely to run out.
Second, appropriate pricing tends to put goods where they’re most needed. People who really need that product — in the case of petrol, people who definitely need to get to work, or to visit a distant relative, or whatever — will be willing to pay more than people who are simply worried that they might have to drive next week some time. When pricing is artificially fixed, goods will tend to end up with whoever happens to get there first, rather than the people for whom they’ll do the most good.
Third, retailers respond to incentives too. If they know they can make a decent profit on some good, then they will bring it where it’s needed. John Shepperson, the guy with the generators, wouldn’t have bothered bringing those generators if he could only get what he paid for them. (Maybe he should have driven 1,200 miles to sell them at cost, but since no one else brought any generators at all, it still seems better that he brought them.) They might also stock up on goods when they’re cheap, against the possibility that there will be some time in the future when they can sell them at a higher price.
And some emergencies are foreseeable, to an extent. As Amihai Glazer, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, says, if a retailer knows a week in advance that there’s a snowstorm coming, they might order loads of snow shovels, because they know they’ll be able to sell them at a higher price. But if they expect price controls, they will have less reason to do so. So fewer people end up with snow shovels than would otherwise get them, and you get queues, rationing and shortages.
The obvious objection is that, if you raise prices, poor people are less able to afford the new higher prices than rich people. That is undoubtedly true. I said earlier that if prices go up, goods will tend to go to the people who need them most — and that’s true, all else being equal. But all else is not equal. Some people are simply much more able to pay.
More from this authorHow not to talk to a science denierBy Tom Chivers
But it’s not clear that poor people are any better off under the current system. In the case of toilet roll, for instance, I can afford to drive to the shop in my large car and pay £50 upfront for toilet roll, so I have loads. Someone who is poorer, who has to walk or take the bus, and only has £5 or so that they can spare, will not be able to stockpile. They might have much less spare time. In the case of queuing for goods, a rich person could pay someone to queue for them, as purportedly happened in the 1973 oil embargo (there were even reports of people offering sexual favours in return for petrol), or pay for childcare while they queue themselves.
What might work better would be allowing price gouging, but subsidising goods for poorer people — people who are on housing benefit or whose children qualify for free school meals, for instance, could be given vouchers. In general, it’s a reason to aim for a more equitable society, make it so there are fewer people who can’t afford a £5 toilet roll, rather than to try to patch the problem in the moment of crisis.
There are lots of other reasons why prices might not be easy to change at short notice — why they’re “sticky” — and laws against price-gouging certainly aren’t the whole story. In the UK, as I mentioned, we don’t have price-gouging laws. But the strong social norms against price gouging have much the same effect. I spoke to someone who works in supply chain logistics for major British retail firms, and they said that it’s a brand reputation issue.
That is: you spend years building up a reputation for value and fairness, and for encouraging people to shop with you rather than elsewhere, and that reputation is worth far more to you than the quick buck you could make by jacking prices up for short-term profit.
This sounds good — firms don’t want to make a short-term profit at the cost of customer reputation! — but it has the same effect as legislation. Prices that should go up don’t, so stores don’t stock extra, people stockpile, and goods don’t end up where they’re most needed.
It’s much harder to change public attitudes than it is to change legislation. But it’s not impossible. As Rob Wiblin, an economist and the director of research at the charity 80,000 Hours, told me, flight prices used to be fixed. Many countries deregulated their air industries in the 1970s and 1980, and now, we’re entirely used to rapidly fluctuating prices — even between two clicks on the same website. It doesn’t bother us all that much. Public attitudes are somewhat malleable.
But maybe they aren’t so malleable that we could come to accept someone charging £5 for a face mask during a pandemic — it feels immoral, at a time when we feel like we should all be coming together. Most people would probably find it disgusting, as they did when hotels increased their prices after the 7/7 bombings when thousands of people were stuck in London. But what we find disgusting is not always a good guide to what is moral, or for that matter what is effective. It might be worth changing our attitude.
Because if we can change our attitude, it would probably do us all good, especially if we combined it with sensible ways of subsidising the purchasing power of poorer people. Price-gouging has a bad name — literally — but it’s not always a bad thing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to start fighting off gangs of road warriors on the streets of Haringey, because the local petrol stations haven’t price-gouged enough.
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here. For some of us, booster shots have finally arrived. But they’ve charted quite a meandering course to get here. First, last month, President Joe Biden announced that most Americans would be able to nab third doses of mRNA vaccines eight months after their second shots. Then, last week the FDA narrowed the eligible population, before a CDC advisory committee suggested tightening the boundaries even further. Hours after that panel shared its recommendation, the agency’s director, Rochelle Walensky, reversed course and ballooned the guidance back out to more closely align with the FDA’s much broader guidelines—though she stopped short of urging the shots for everyone.It is all, frankly, a bit confusing. Millions of Americans are now in a sort of immunological limbo, wondering which expert advice to heed, and how soon to reroll up their sleeve, as the guidance coming from up top shifts seemingly by the day. Boosters are, at this point, offering more whiplash than protection. I spoke with Walensky today at The Atlantic Festival to see if we could make sense of some of the current situation—her unconventional move to break from the advisory committee’s guidance, and the tough choices millions of Americans face as they navigate the months ahead.“What I want to say is, this is a ‘Walk, don’t run’ situation to go get your boost,” she told me.Booster shots, when doled out at the right time, to the right people, are a boon. They jog the microbe-specific memories of immune cells, reinvigorating the body’s defenses against the pathogens that trouble us—a sometimes-essential shoring up, when immunity wanes, viruses shape-shift, or exposure rates soar.But in setting the CDC’s guidelines, at least one choice, Walensky said, was “a scientific close call.”The FDA, under advisement from an independent panel of experts, had green-lit a third shot, at least six months out from dose two, for Pfizer recipients who are over 65 or who are at high risk of getting severe COVID-19 because of health status or increased exposure to the virus. The CDC had a different job—to say who should get the shots. The agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices actively recommended them only for the 65-plus population, residents of long-term-care facilities, and those 50 and older with underlying health issues. The 18-to-49 crowd, the committee said, may opt to get shots as well if they had chronic medical issues; healthy people in high-risk occupations or living situations didn’t yet need the jabs at all.[Read: What we actually know about waning immunity]
In her decision, Walensky popped that last group back in, noting that people in exposure-heavy settings—among them health-care workers, teachers, incarcerated individuals, and people in homeless shelters—“may get a booster shot … based on their individual benefits and risks.” Again, that means that, at this point, all Pfizer recipients who are over 65, or at high risk of getting severe COVID-19, are authorized to get a booster. But only the 65-plus crowd, and those 50 and up with underlying health issues, are explicitly encouraged to—creating a befuddling tangle of advice.In our interview, Walensky said that endorsing boosters for the oldest among us, as well as people living with high-risk health conditions, was essentially a no-brainer, and in line with what other experts have been calling for; this, she said, was where the data supporting the potential benefits of boosters were the strongest.Putting people who are at higher risk because of their environments back into the guidance, against advice, was the tougher call, she said. That’s part of why younger people and high-risk workers within her recommendation fall under the category of “may get a booster,” rather than should. Translated practically, that means consulting an expert such as a physician or pharmacist, she said, “so you can identify whether you’re in a place that a booster is right for you.”This type of individualistic decision making has, as my colleague Ed Yong has written, dominated much of the pandemic discourse. In prior months, Walensky herself has told the public that masks, vaccines, and more come down to personal risk-benefit analyses. She herself does intend to get a booster at some point, she told me. As a health-care worker, she qualifies, under her own recommendation. But she didn’t specify a timeline, and said that she doesn’t see herself as particularly high-risk at the moment. “Much of the government is remote,” she told me. “I want to make sure that people who are in higher-risk categories than myself, I’m not crowding them out.”For any one person, though, gaming out who fits into that higher-risk-than-me category is tricky, precisely because risk isn’t just about the individual. Infectious diseases are, well, infectious; all danger is communal, and personal decisions affect those around us. That can be a difficult message to convey with vaccines, or most other public-health interventions, because it’s not a typical way for Americans to think. But Walensky points out that these societal metrics factored into her decision making over booster recommendations. Better defense for health-care workers and teachers, for instance, slashes the likelihood that they’ll have to be away from patients in need, or students who have already endured a year of remote learning.Right now, the government’s booster guidance applies only to people who have gotten the Pfizer shot, which has effectively created millions of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson orphans. Official guidance on Pfizer effectively sorted these populations into groups considered “high risk”—and yet, these individuals are without federally sanctioned options to bolster their immunological defenses. (To date, the CDC’s website still says that even moderately to severely immunocompromised people, many of whom didn’t respond well to their initial immunization, who got J&J aren’t technically eligible for a boost.)I asked Walensky how people in these seemingly forgotten groups should be taking the recent, Pfizer-specific news. Here, she backpedaled a bit. “The vaccine effectiveness is still working really quite well,” she told me. And that’s certainly true, especially if thresholds are drawn high: Across populations, the COVID-19 shots continue to stave off hospitalization and death to a spectacular degree, especially in people who are younger and healthy. But Walensky pointed to long COVID, which can unspool after initially mild infections, and noted that “even moderate disease can actually be pretty severe and debilitating.”After “due process,” she said, the Moderna and J&J booster authorizations are coming in a matter of weeks, and will be treated with urgency. “We have not forgotten about J&J and Moderna.” The agency is moving deliberately in part to buoy public confidence in the scientific process and the data that back it, she said. Once a new round of boosters is authorized, people can, apparently, choose to move at their own pace.

By Cheng LiThe digital revolution has transformed all lives in China, but it has affected most profoundly the post-1990s age cohort, which is made up of “digital natives” (hulianwang yuanzhumin). Like their counterparts elsewhere, China’s digital natives were born around the time that the commercial use of computers was becoming widespread, and they grew up alongside mobile phones and the internet.
As the prominent Chinese sociologist Li Chunling, the author of the new book “China’s Youth,” emphatically points out, the internet has become “enmeshed within every aspect of young people’s lives.” In turn, the massive generational cohort born in China in the 1990s, totaling about 175 million people, has fundamentally changed the country’s social structure, social space, and social connections.
The distinct characteristics of Chinese digital natives not only reflect these extraordinary changes but will also reshape the country’s future trajectory as this generation comes to the fore. For the outside world, better understanding this group is an urgent task, given the fact that the Middle Kingdom now has more influence on the global economy and regional security than at any other point in modern history.
Impact on social structure
China’s post-’90s age group (jiulinghou), alongside even younger age cohorts, comprises both the primary consumers of and contributors to social media platforms and new digital devices. For example, in 2017, about 85% of TikTok (Douyin) subscribers were young people under 24 years old. WeChat (Weixin), which was launched by Tencent in 2011, claimed approximately 938 million monthly active users in 2017. The use of WeChat among young people was extremely high, penetrating virtually 100% of urban professionals in their 20s and early 30s.
The prominent role of the post-’90s age cohort in the digital domain has altered Chinese social relationships, which were for over thousands of years based on strict kinship hierarchy and shared geographical origins. Under the Chinese traditional social structure, even during the more rebellious periods, such as the May 4th Movement and the Cultural Revolution in the 20th century, young people were usually guided by mature adults or seniors in their family and society at large.
But in the digital era, young people are “their own flagbearers,” and they have occupied the front seats to the telecommunication revolution. More often than not, the post-’90s age cohort have guided their parents and grandparents to keep abreast of the times. Immense changes in the distribution of information bear implications for the structure of both family and society. Members of the post-’90s generation tends to adjust and adapt their lifestyles, behaviors, and perceptions while keeping pace with a rapidly evolving digital world. Overall, they are likely to see themselves no longer as creatures of the country’s past but as creators of its future.
Expansion of social space and the virtual sphere 
Before the advent of the internet, there had always been two public opinion fields (yulun chang) in China: one was the official public opinion field and the other was the private public opinion field. But the former dominated the latter because of the ubiquitous nature of official media in the country.
With the overturn of traditional media by the internet and its apps, the expansion of the field of public communication and public opinion is accelerating. Webcasting, as a new medium that integrates multiple media, such as social networks, news and commentary, games and sports, film and television, and performing arts and broadcasting, has become particularly popular among young people in China. The total number of webcast stream viewers increased from 343 million in 2017 to 562 million in 2020.
According to a report published in China’s Youth Studies in April 2018, most webcasters come from the post-’90s age cohort (78%), and more than 80% of those who watch live broadcasts are also from the post-’90s generation. Webcasting, with its distinct features of personal expression and an interactive nature, its low barriers to entry and the absence of hierarchy, and the spontaneity and randomness of live broadcasts, has turned the post-’90s generation into a social force for change. In a way, the center of young people’s public life and social interactions has shifted from large public spaces within the system (such as squares, parks, and auditoriums) to small, private spaces, which can be entirely imaginary virtual spaces.
Younger Chinese netizen cohorts obtain their knowledge and understanding of the world more conveniently and quickly compared with prior generations. Despite government censorship and the difficulty of accessing information because of the Great Firewall, Chinese young people today often find ways to break through these restraints and expose themselves to information from all over the world. Some have had first-hand overseas experience through travels and foreign studies. According to a recent report by the Financial Times, Chinese millennials (within which the post-’90 group plays a significant part) presently constitute two-thirds of all Chinese passport holders.
Many Chinese students have attended online programs offered by American universities, and some have studied in the United States. In 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 34% (or more than 360,000) of international students on American college campuses hailed from the People’s Republic of China. In 2013, there were more than 30,000 Chinese students enrolled in high schools in the United States, accounting for 46% of the total number of foreign high school students in the country. Unlike ever before in the Chinese history, young people are more integrated, both online and offline, with the outside world.
New boundaries for social connections and public demands
As for social connections, the internet has reduced the distance between people and is having a deep impact on modes of interpersonal communication and engagement. The social circles of urban professionals are now 10 times larger than they were in the days before social media, according to a recent study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Meanwhile, social identity and group sentiment shared in the virtual space can also become a new way for networking or a triggering factor to incite mass incidents.
Various interest groups and vulnerable social groups have often enhanced their networking via digital means. In recent years, they have launched a series of large-scale online protests over controversial issues, including economic inequality, environmental degradation, food and drug safety, women’s rights, child protection, and animal rights.
A growing social acceptance of different lifestyles and sexual orientations has emerged among young people in the country. According to a 2016 report by the United Nations Development Programme, featuring survey research by Peking University Sociology Professor Wu Lijuan, less than 9% of respondents from the post-’90s generation said they would reject a gay child. In comparison, 13%, 28%, and 35% of the post-1980s, 1970s, and 1960s generations, respectively, held the same view. A good example of the impact of social connection facilitated by mobile internet and apps is Blued, currently the biggest gay dating app in the world, which was founded in China in 2000. With a reported user base of some 24 million people in China, Blued has created a digital ecosystem serving the LGBTQ community.
Young Chinese use social media to support sexual minorities and reach the broader public, effectively bargaining with the party-state. In spring 2018, a vast number of young Chinese netizens rallied against authorities after LGBTQ-related content was erased from Weibo, one of China’s most popular social media platforms. They denounced Weibo’s censorship as a remarginalization of homosexuals that undermined the legal decriminalization of homosexuality. Eventually, Weibo reposted these materials.
China’s digital natives’ intragenerational differences, intriguing relationships with Chinese authorities, anxieties and ambitions, and views of the country’s role in the world reflect an important evolution that should attract the attention of observers of this rapidly changing country.

Fishman
In
1961, John F. Kennedy charged the United States with going to the Moon by the
end of the decade. Against all odds, the US surpassed the Soviets and Neil Armstrong
became the first man to walk on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. The Apollo
missions continued until 1972, but since then no manned space mission has
ventured past near-Earth orbit. Far from ushering in an era of Moon
bases and manned missions to Mars, Apollo’s legacy has left space enthusiasts
disappointed. Fifty years after the Moon landing, what do we have to show for
it? To answer that question and more, I’m joined today by Charles Fishman.

What
follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download
the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.
Fishman:
I think it’s a contrarian conclusion that I am trying to shift into the
mainstream, and here’s why. Very briefly, of course, we can say it was an
unqualified success in that President John Kennedy charged America and NASA
with landing people on the Moon by the end of the decade, returning them safely
to home. And we did it.
We did it.

Often the incredible high-tech developments that the
engineers and scientists came up with — there was no way to manufacture them.
And so the interiors of the computers were woven by hand, by former textile
workers hired from textile plants in Massachusetts. The spacesuits were sewn by
hand on black Singer sewing machines. So the technology was advanced so far
that we didn’t actually have the ability to make it. That was a stunning
achievement. But the real achievement was that NASA and Apollo really ushered
in the Digital Age that we all live in. [Apollo] was a stunning success in that
it unleashed the world that we’ve become accustomed to and rely on every minute
of every day. You can trace the quality and innovation and speed and robustness
of your iPhone or your laptop computer, in terms of heritage, directly back to
the computers that flew to the Moon.
NASA was the first organization of any kind to use
integrated circuits, to use computer chips. NASA drove the price down 98
percent. And then having done that, it drove the price down 78 percent again.
NASA bought almost all the computer chips in the world three or four years in a
row for Apollo. And most important, those computer chips were so important to
going to the Moon that NASA had this really elaborate acceptance procedure.
When a batch of 1000 chips came in, there were 12 tests that every chip went
through. Vibration, heat, cold — they immersed them in liquid nitrogen to make
sure they were adequately sealed. If one of the 1000 chips failed one of the 12
tests, they stopped the test and sent the whole batch back to Fairchild or
Texas Instruments. And they said, “These chips are no good. Send us good chips.”
And until that moment, computer chips weren’t particularly
reliable. And the computer companies at that time said, “We had to set up
separate manufacturing lines for NASA. NASA taught us to make chips, that when
you press two plus two, you always get four. And when you ask for your phone
app, you get the phone app and not the weather app.” And so NASA literally
created the market and the understanding of computer chips in going to the Moon,
and then we stepped up and adopted those computer chips for every function on Earth.
I think that story is really
underappreciated, but space enthusiasts don’t see that as enough. We stopped
the Apollo program and no one has gone beyond near-Earth orbit since. They view
that as a failure of the last 50 years. Is that fair?
Right. So in 1972, the last time we went to the Moon, we
flew 240,000 miles to the Moon. And literally since 1972, which is 49 years
now, no human being has been further than about 240 miles from Earth. That’s
where the space station orbits and where the Chinese now orbit. So if success
means that Apollo opened the solar system to exploration and settlement by
human beings — if that’s what you mean by success — then there is no question
that Apollo didn’t accomplish that. You know the joke as well as I do, “What
did we get from going to the Moon? We got Tang and Velcro. Just pure silliness.”
No, we got the digital revolution that transformed the world.
We just have been looking in the wrong place. And when you
look at the evidence, that’s unequivocal. We did not get “Star Trek.” We did
not get “The Jetsons.” We did not get “Lost in Space.” We don’t all fly around
with our robots and go where we want to go. I think we’re about to get it. You
yourself are very interested in this and have explored it, and I think the key
is economics. We went to space funded and motivated by a kind of national and
global imperative. You can’t understand going to the Moon in the 1960s without
understanding the geopolitics.
We would not have gone to the Moon without the Cold War.
We were racing the Russians. And for five years, the Russians were beating the
crap out of us. They did everything first. They appeared to have mastery of
space in a way that we didn’t. They launched a person into orbit on their first
effort to launch a person into space. And literally three weeks later, we
launched a person in a pop fly. We couldn’t even match them coming later. We
often did less well, two or three or four months after they had done something.
And so the problem with geopolitics as a motivator is, in
1972 when Richard Nixon looked out across the world, when the leaders of the
Soviet Union looked out across the world, space wasn’t an important arena
anymore. And it is expensive to go to space, and you need a clear mission, and
you need a clear goal. And so if you’re a space person and you think Apollo
failed because it didn’t pull us along, I guess what I would say is the
This is my sense of it: I’ve been a space reporter since
1986, and I don’t think the leadership of NASA was clear on where we should go
next and how we should get there. And that muddle led to literally 30 or 40
years of compromises and poor missions — over promising and under delivering. I
love the Space Shuttle. I love the Space Station. I don’t think they have been
good custodians of our space money, to be honest. The robotic exploration
missions have been brilliant and pioneering compared to what we’ve gotten from
the human space flight program. But that’s not necessarily the fault of the
frontline people at NASA. That’s a leadership failure.
The Mars Sojourner rover vehicle explores the surface of the red planet.Via REUTERS
Well, one bit of evidence
that NASA and its leaders did not do a great job explaining the point of
sending people into space after they landed on the Moon, is that now — when we
seem to be in this new era of space exploration and thinking about a space
economy and we have the billionaire space race — the criticisms of the 1960s Space
Race are just being repeated today. These are 50-year-old critiques: How can we
go to the space when we have inequality on Earth? That this is just about some
vague sense of national prestige. Why are we really doing it? Those are the
exact same criticisms we hear today. Apparently a lot of people feel like NASA
never answered that. And it sounds like they really didn’t.
It was astonishing to read newspaper stories and journal
articles from 1964. It was like, wait a minute, these criticisms were there
then.
I don’t know if you saw the movie
First Man about Neil Armstrong?
Yes, I did.
In the movie they played the
song “Whitey on the Moon.” Again, very relevant today in the kind of criticisms
I hear: inequality and disparities in this country. Before it was, “How can the
government do it?” Now it’s, “How can these billionaires be spending their
money going into the space? Why aren’t they being taxed for spending money on
other things?”
Okay. So very briefly, the United States is a big country.
We’re capable of doing even three or four things at once, not just one.
We’re very wealthy.
And we’re very wealthy. And in the ‘60s, going to the Moon
cost about $20 billion. There are three individual years of the Vietnam War,
each of which cost more than the entire race to the Moon. So we could clearly
afford to go to the Moon. That’s not a question. Whether it was the right use
of money is a separate question to whether we could afford it. So in the ‘60s,
we tackled poverty, women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights — in dramatic
ways. Economic inequality and gender inequality fell dramatically. The number
of black Americans who voted for Lyndon Johnson compared to voting in the
election of Kennedy and Nixon, I believe it was two times the number because of
the passage of civil rights and voting rights. So we actually made progress on
all those things. We didn’t fix them, and those problems still dog us.
What’s happening now is completely different. I think it
is completely misleading to call what Elon Musk at SpaceX and Jeff Bezos at
Blue Origin and, to some degree, Richard Branson at Virgin Galactic are doing a
“billionaire space race.” Musk and Bezos are in business to change the business
of space, to create a space economy. Just the way that Bezos created Amazon, their
goal is very simple: They want to take something that has historically cost $100
million and bring the cost down to a $1 million. What used to cost $100 million
to launch to space will now cost $1 million. And when you do that, as you know,
you completely change what’s possible.
The International Space Station floats over the Earth’s horizon on April 29, 2001.Via REUTERS
A hundred million dollars is the kind of decision that
even big companies would hesitate to make. “Do we need to do this? Is it the
only way to do this? What if it blows up?” There are individual news
organizations to this day — the networks, The Wall Street Journal, The New York
Times, The Washington Post — that can spend $1 million a year to keep a
correspondent in a dangerous place. A million dollars to go to space completely
changes the landscape. Those people may be in an ego race. They may think of
each other as rivals in that way, but this isn’t philanthropy and it isn’t
indulgence. Bezos expects Blue Origin to become a going business. I’ve been to
Blue Origin, and I’ve interviewed Bezos a bunch of times on this topic. He
expects there to be a Thursday afternoon launch to orbit on a Blue Origin
rocket before too long. If you miss this Thursday, they’re going to launch
again next Thursday, just like the Southwest Airlines 3:00 flight from Dallas
to LaGuardia.
Elon Musk is five years ahead of Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk and
SpaceX and that crew are doing something as a company that only three nations
in the world have done: send human beings successfully to space, flawlessly fly
rockets to orbit, to the Space Station and back. So I think, and I sometimes
sound a little too enthusiastic, that we are absolutely creating a space
economy. We’re creating a new kind of economic platform. And we don’t know,
just like in 1998 it wasn’t clear what the internet was going to unleash. But
it has literally reached into everything from real estate to now we see these
rocket launches from the perspective of the rocket as they’re going up.
Everything is touched by it. I think 10 years from now, there will be dozens of
people living and working in space and they will be creating economic value.
Some will be paying their own bills. And I think 20 and 30 years from now, this
moment that we’re living in now will look like the beginning of this remarkable
transformation in which space becomes a much more tangible economy.
I had Sara Seager on the
podcast earlier this year and I expected her to say that as a scientist she
would prefer for NASA to take the lead. But she was thrilled at the advances
being made by the private sector. So even people who are doing pure research
are glad Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have decided to invest in space.
Absolutely! And I think NASA is doing the wrong thing
right now. The paperback of my book has a new chapter, and I make this argument
in that new concluding chapter. This is a most exciting moment in space, but
Musk and Bezos are showing that the private sector can handle the operational
aspects. It’s not simple or easy or low risk to fly a United 757 from JFK to
Heathrow. It’s demanding and complicated and dangerous, but the government
creates a structure to support that, and then the private companies do it every
day. And it’s very clear that the operational aspects of space can be done by
the private sector, and we’re just at the beginning of that. I think NASA
should be doing today, exactly what it was doing in the 1960s.
Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., lunar module pilot, is photographed during the Apollo 11 extravehicular activity on the Moon. Via REUTERS
We need spaceships that have artificial gravity. Every
space ship in a TV show or a movie has artificial gravity, right? But we could
have spaceships with artificial gravity. It’s “just” an engineering
problem. (Just in quotes.) That’s what I want NASA to be paying attention to.
Something no one talks about: If you’re going to Mars, those people who go to
Mars are going to be 100 percent autonomous. The quickest radio exchange
between here and Mars is nine minutes in each direction. There’s no mission
control for a mission to Mars. The mission control is in the spaceship. It’s
those six or eight or ten people solving their own problems and occasionally
consulting mission control for some guidance. But we’ve never had an autonomous
space mission.
I did a story on life on the International Space Station when they’d only been up there 18 years. I was curious what it was like to live and work in space. When those astronauts wake up every morning, there’s a spreadsheet on their laptop from Houston telling them what they’re going to spend the day doing in six-minute increments. Well, teaching astronauts to be autonomous, to make their own decisions, take their own risks, have all their own information, 3D printers for spare parts — all that stuff, and teaching NASA to let go: those are hard problems. I want NASA working on those kind of breakthrough problems.
get along. The astronauts keep diaries, and some of them that are mailed to an
industrial psychologist confidentially. The number one complaint the astronauts
have about life on the space station is too much meddling from Houston. “They
don’t know what our life is like.” The number two complaint is about their
fellow crew members. So there’s a lot that NASA could be doing. And I don’t
need NASA to be developing the SLS launch system and the Orion capsule. It’s
pretty clear we have big problems, and I’d like them to tackle those.
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edward “Buzz” Aldrin.Via REUTERS
Do you see that changing all
over the next five to 10 years?
It would take somebody bold, but I think a new leader for NASA could do that. We’re about to launch the James Webb Telescope finally. I think that’s going to be great. Right now there’s a company which I’m sure you’ve heard of called Planet Labs that photographs the entire surface of the planet every day. Every backyard, every shopping center, every desert, every coastline: the central courtyard of the Vatican, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Every part of the world is photographed every day to one square meter resolution using their satellites. And I think that company has only had $500 or $600 million in total funding. And they are using just what you said, these incredible technological developments, and they’re making money. They sell their understanding of the planet to people.
And so I think the companies, I hope, will show NASA how
unnecessary it is for NASA to do everything. We don’t have the government run
airlines. And so I hope that the dawn of this era of — we call it private, but
the corporate space economy, will prod NASA to say, “You know what? We need a
bigger reach.” Now, I think going back to the Moon and thinking about going to
Mars is helping NASA do that. But NASA needs a shakeup. There was a report a
month ago about NASA’s effort to design and fabricate new space suits. They
have spent $420 million in the last nine years, and they don’t have any space
suits. They don’t have a design. They don’t have a contractor, and they’re
expected to spend another $600+ million to get one test spacesuit and two
operational suits. They will have spent $1 billion to get two space suits.
That’s not even 1960s Apollo era. That’s sort of Space Shuttle-style thinking.
Elon Musk, when that report came out, simply tweeted at NASA, “Would you
like help with this problem?”
The example you just gave is
the kind of thing which will result in another 50 years of some of these dreams
not coming true — of not having colonies on Mars, colonies on the Moon. How do
we avoid that? And do you think that we will, and that over the coming decades
we will be on the Moon and we will be on Mars and have a substantive presence
in those places?
So let’s make a distinction. I think the space economy
that I imagined is literally driven by economics. People can do things in
space, get information, make products that can’t be made on Earth and send them
down. I think that will become a going enterprise in the next 10 to 20 years.
It won’t need government support beyond the kind of government support that the
railroads need or the airlines need or the highways need. There’ll be a
structure in which that’s done, but private companies will be doing that. That
may not seem that glamorous. If we’re making super fast optical fiber in orbit
and jetting it or parachuting it back to Earth, how sexy is that? If it
increases internet speeds 100 times, it’ll be nice. If it’s all done
robotically, it may be a burst of attention and then just do what it does.
The Apollo 11 lunar module “Eagle” returns to the command module following its historic landing on the moon’s surface. Via REUTERS.
and tow it this way and mine it and send the stuff down. The question of
whether we’re going to establish permanent bases on the Moon with an eye to
going to Mars, to me, is a question of exactly the kind of leadership and sort
of clarity of vision and mission that we haven’t had between 1972 and 2010.
Lots of presidents have announced lots of programs that didn’t happen. “We’re
going to go to the Moon. Here’s why.” “We’re going to go to Mars. Here’s why.
Here’s what we’re going to get from that.” And what I would say is I hope we do
it.
No one said in 1961, “If we go to the Moon, we will create
a kind of computer technology and an attitude toward computer technology that
you cannot imagine, but that will come along five or 10 years quicker than it
otherwise would have.” The economic benefit of that was huge. It was completely
unexpected. I think if we go to Mars, we will learn things and we will develop
tools that will be incredibly valuable back on Earth. I don’t think there’s
going to be an economically thrilling reason to go to Mars that will make that
self-sustaining. But I think that kind of aspirational mission is great for
human beings. It’s part of being alive and we, as a society, can afford it.
We spend more on the Pentagon budget every year, $750
billion, that we have spent total in space since the last Moon landing. So one
year’s Pentagon spending can buy you 20 or 30 years of dramatic space
exploration. So again, we can afford it. And you know what? We have big
problems: climate change, economic inequality, a sense of fading opportunity in
some parts of the United States, the sense of being American. I think these big
missions remind us what we can do. And I think when you look back at what it
took to go to the Moon, if we want to tackle those big problems, we can tackle
them. And so I hope, I truly hope, that we will have a permanent presence on
the Moon that we will use that to teach ourselves to go to Mars, just because I
think the benefits of that will be surprising and well worth the relatively
modest cost compared to other things we spend money on.
My guest today has been Charles Fishman, author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. Charles, thanks for coming on the podcast.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Charles Fishman is the author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon.
The post The legacy of the Moon landing: My long-read Q&A with Charles Fishman appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

It’s certainly tempting to explain this chart by pointing to the Great Recession/Global Financial Crisis:

But that answer, while necessary given the obvious timing, is not complete, according to “The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates Since the Great Recession” by Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke W. Pardue. “The Great Recession contributed to the decline in the early part of this period, but we are unable to identify any other economic, policy, or social factor that has changed since 2007 that is responsible for much of the decline beyond that,” the researchers conclude.
One possible explanation: “shifting priorities,” a phrase that “encompasses preferences for having children, life aspirations, and the nature of parenting, among other things.” It’s a broad explanation, but one particular aspect the researchers highlight is how young adults view the act of parenting versus their parents and grandparents. From the paper (bold by me):
Parenting has become more resource- and time-intensive, both in the United States, as well as in many other high-income countries (Bianchi 2011; Kornrich and Frank Furstenberg 2013; Doepke and Zilibotti 2019). Changing norms regarding the intensity of parenting might change people’s views toward how many children to have or whether to have them at all. Such changes are particularly relevant in an era where parents, including mothers, work longer hours outside the home, clashing with career aspirations or a desire for more leisure time. This idea incorporates choice in the context of a quality/quantity trade-off, but it also emphasizes external determinants or expectations of what is generally expected or required of parents.It is unlikely that career aspirations or parenting norms changed exactly in or around 2007. Note, though, that women who grew up in the 1990s were the daughters of the 1970s generation and women who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s were daughters of the 1950s and 1960s generation. It seems plausible that these more recent cohorts of women were likely to be raised with stronger expectations of having life pursuits outside their roles as wives and mothers. It also seems likely that the cohorts of young adults who grew up primarily in the 1990s or later — and reached prime childbearing years around and post 2007 — experienced more intensive parenting from their own parents than those who grew up primarily in the 1970s and 1980s. They would have a different idea about what parenting involves. We speculate that these differences in formed aspirations and childhood experiences could potentially explain why more recent cohorts of young women are having fewer children than previous cohorts.
But so what? Why should a declining birth rate matter to us? Preferences change. It is what it is. The researchers explore several reasons why we should care about declining birth rates: (a) a negative impact on productivity, (b) instability in financing of old-age programs, and (c) the potential for environmental gains by reducing human impact. And what if you want to increase birth rates? Well, it’s not a simple or inexpensive proposition:
“Pronatalist” policies generally make it easier or more affordable for families to have children. These include steps like subsidized childcare, parental leave policies, and child allowances or tax credits. Many countries are contemplating or implementing pronatalist policies: the United Nations reports that the number of countries with a policy goal of increasing fertility has risen from 19 to 55 between 1986 and 2015 (Sobotka et al. 2019).The evidence about pronatalist policies that have been implemented and evaluated in the United States and in other high-income countries suggests that these types of policies lead to modest increases in birth rates in the short-term, but are unlikely to lead to sustained higher birth rates (Brainerd 2014; Lopoo et al. 2018; Sobotka, et al. 2019). Stone (2020a) concluded that a pro-natalist policy would cost $200,000 or more per additional baby born; using such policies to close the gap between current fertility in the United States and the replacement level of fertility would cost somewhere between $250 billion and $1 trillion in new spending per year — a daunting sum.
Learn more: Let’s not have another lost decade of American entrepreneurship | Are childless Americans really uninvested in the future? | Scary US climate report reinforces the need to innovate our way to a clean and energy abundant future
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OnlySubs Episode 63: Reknitting the Social Fabric is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
Locals
Patreon
ThinkSpot
A useful metaphor I give for Critical Theories is that they are like searching a flag, representative of the social fabric of a society, for loose threads so it can pull them out and unknit the flag (society). Between the Critical Theories of Identity Marxism and the social hammer of Covid-19 (policy), the social fabric of Western countries has badly frayed. This is a major problem, but it has a simple solution: start talking to each other! I can’t tell you how many times I have encountered people in the last few months who feel afraid to speak up about all the things going on in the world that unsettle them who are then relieved to find out that there are others out there who are concerned too. In neighborly environments, once this trust is found and established, all of the usual functions that build up real communities start humming into action. Kids play with each other again once parents say they feel good about it, and then parents start having barbecues and hanging out and talking again. The next thing you know, parents’ organizations to challenge the ideological takeover of our schools begin to form and to take action. This is how the social fabric of our countries can be knit back together. This is already happening, and it needs to accelerate. Join me on this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, to explore this idea and phenomenon with me and to start thinking of ways in which you can become a part of the solution in the easiest, most normal and healthy way possible.
The post OnlySubs: Reknitting the Social Fabric appeared first on New Discourses.

President Joe Biden’s new vaccine mandate for large businesses is a strange one, in that it does not actually make vaccines mandatory for the roughly 80 million Americans it’s aimed at. Tucked plainly into the rule is a singular and obvious opt-out: Unlike federal employees and contractors, those in the private sector can test for the coronavirus on an at-least-weekly basis, a no-jab alternative that makes the White House’s decision quite a bit gentler than it could have been. “It’s a stick, but it’s sort of a soft stick,” Julia Raifman, a health-policy researcher at Boston University, told me.The two-pronged approach is certainly more flexible, and perhaps more politically palatable, than pushing shots alone. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans are on board with mandates, at least when they’re doled out as a double scoop. “People like choices,” Syra Madad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard and for the New York City Health System, told me. That’s long been true for public-health carrots as well: In places such as Israel, the European Union, and parts of Canada, negative test results are among the “passport” options that can green-light residents for entry into restaurants, bars, gyms, clubs, and travel hubs; a smattering of similar policies have been in place at certain American businesses for months.The details of Biden’s new mandate are still being worked out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the logistics will differ among states and individual companies. But it’s one of the most prominent iterations of the test-vax binary to date—and potentially one of the most troubling. The United States isn’t set up to handle a sharp rise in diagnostic demand, should a big fraction of affected workers go the testing route. What’s more, including the testing clause at all “does undermine, to some degree, the scientific and public-health purpose of the mandate,” Tom Bollyky, the director of the global-health program at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Vaccines and testing are simply not interchangeable. And the false equivalence that the mandate implies could push us to, once again, play either-or with pandemic mitigation measures, when the best move has always been to use them in combination.Vaccines and tests were designed for explicitly different purposes. COVID-19 shots are proactive, forward-looking measures: They offer viral anatomy lessons to immune cells in advance of an encounter, schooling them on how to fend off a pathogen without actually forcing them to fight it. Infections of all severities are uncommon among the vaccinated. When they do occur, they’re milder, briefer, and less likely to spread to others, and they almost never end in hospitalization or death. Vaccines are an investment in the long term, a sustainable preventive against disease; they bolster the body’s defenses, upping a person’s chances of coming away from a viral encounter unscathed.Tests, while powerful in their own right, don’t offer any of those perks. They’re measuring tools that home in on snippets of viral genetic material or hunks of viral proteins in someone’s airway, and can only identify infections that have already begun. That makes them reactive by default, Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at George Mason University, told me. Tests offer one result at a time, a snapshot—at the moment of sampling, you had a detectable smidge of virus in your nose or mouth, or you didn’t—with zero bearing on what’s to come. “You incur no protection from a test,” Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told me. “With a vaccine, you are protected, and you are protecting.”The Biden administration, of course, is not billing tests as functional vaccines. But as written into the mandate, tests are still being cast in an understudy role that they were never meant to play. “It’s an unacceptable alternative,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. Tests can’t be swapped in for vaccines for the same reasons a smoke detector can’t sub in for fireproofing, a car speedometer can’t replace a seat belt, and a weather report can’t take the place of an umbrella. Noticing the problem isn’t the same as blocking it. (The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)Realistically, the mandate probably needed a fail-safe like this to survive the political climate. “Policy makers have to operate in the realm of what’s possible,” which doesn’t always match up with what’s scientifically ideal, Bollyky said. Having a testing clause, he added, will help buffer the policy against legal challenges—which are already being lobbed its way—that might have otherwise driven it entirely into the ground. A squishy mandate is probably better than a doomed one.And of the available options, testing was, perhaps, the best alternative on a very short list—something tangible, implementable, with FDA-okayed products already in place. Plus, regular screens can truly make workplace settings safer, well in line with the mandate’s primary objective. Every infection that’s caught is one that can potentially be managed, treated if necessary, and contained before it spreads further, if the positive result is acted upon. Months of studies, many of them run at universities with large laboratories and funding pools that the average private business might not have access to, have shown that repeated testing of students, staff, and faculty has smoothed the transition back to in-person learning, and helped catch and corral outbreaks.But a glut of data has also proved that testing, even when mandated, can’t halt infections alone; the strategy’s been most successful when paired with masking, physical distancing, and, more recently, vaccines. Tests aren’t perfect. Some cases will inevitably slip by unnoticed, while some virus-free individuals will be mislabeled as infected. The reach of tests also hinges heavily on human behavior: People actually have to “take action to be protected,” Nuzzo said, isolating themselves after receiving a positive result and reporting their status, formally or informally, so that they can alert others who were potentially exposed. Vaccines juice up immune systems so that viral defense becomes a reflex; tests just flag the issue, then wait for users to make the next move.Dan Larremore, a mathematical modeler at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who’s crunched numbers on the contagion-curbing effects of frequent testing, told me that tests can absolutely “reduce cases by a substantial amount.” But given a choice, “transmission is reduced more effectively and more cost effectively by vaccination.”The bare minimum test frequency needed to meet the mandate standard—once a week—also isn’t terribly compatible with good mitigation. People tend to become contagious within about four to six days of getting infected, likely a shade sooner with the speedster Delta variant. And a big fraction of transmission happens before the infected show symptoms, if they ever do. A weekly screen could leapfrog that entire window and end up being “too little, too late,” Valerie Fitzhugh, a pathologist at Rutgers University, told me. (Even the EU health passports that accept negative test results expire after just two to three days.)The situation could get even murkier if employees need to wait several days for their results, as is often the case with test samples that must be routed through labs. Rapid tests could circumvent that delay, but they’re not very good at zeroing in on low-level infections, and have been shown to operate best, as Larremore and others have found, when used as near-daily screens—a quantity patch for their quality flaws.Employers could opt for testing more often than once a week to bridge some of these gaps. But frequently testing multiple employees stands to bleed time from the workday, incur heavy financial costs—which could potentially fall on the company, its employees, or both—and stress the nation’s already insufficient diagnostic supply. Demand for testing has skyrocketed since the start of the summer, thanks to Delta’s ongoing crush. Meanwhile, many of the community testing sites that closed in the winter or spring never reopened; at-home tests, now available over the counter, have grown difficult to find in stores and online.After grappling with nearly two years of SARS-CoV-2 testing, Butler-Wu, who runs a clinical laboratory that processes hospital samples, worries that a massive influx of workplace testing will deplete resources that could otherwise be used to diagnose very sick patients, especially as the nation barrels into the winter months, when many pathogens thrive. “How are people with symptoms going to get tested?” she said. Laboratory workers, she noted, have been stretched to the breaking point since the pandemic’s start. “There is not an infinite capacity to do this.”The Biden administration has made moves to increase the availability of rapid tests and lower their price points. But the experts I spoke with were skeptical that the supply surge would happen in time, or at a large enough scale. (At this point, it’s still unclear what types of tests will qualify as valid under the mandate, whether they’ll need to be done on-site, and whether their results will need to be reported to public-health officials.)There’s some hope, Nuzzo said, that the testing slice of the equation will be such a headache for everyone involved that vaccination will look more appealing in comparison and become the default. But even that scenario cloaks what would be the actual ideal: wielding vaccines and tests in combination, alongside masks and many of the other measures we’ve been talking about for months. Immunized people pose a lower transmission risk to others, but not zero. “If your goal is to minimize transmission in the workplace, you want to do both,” Nuzzo said.Still, if the comparison has to be made, vaccines “will always come out on top,” Madad, the New York epidemiologist, said. Putting them on the same tier as other measures, and blurring the differences among them, threatens to obscure our best shot at ending the pandemic. This is why, perhaps, we’re calling the not-vaccine mandate a vaccine mandate. It’s a wishful nickname, one that highlights, rather than cloaks, just how powerful immunizations can be when all of us buy in.

Helen Pluckrose is a former academic who became famous for pranking the academy. Three years ago Pluckrose, who previously researched medieval religious writing, joined with the scholars James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian to concoct some fake scientific studies on outlandish topics, such as rape culture among dogs. They loaded the papers with phrasing such as “because of my own situatedness as a human, rather than as a dog,” and submitted them to peer-reviewed journals. Seven of the papers were accepted for publication. The exercise had its critics, but to the hoaxers, the stunt suggested that journals in the humanities are so blinded by ideology that they’ll publish anything that confirms their worldview.In the years since, Pluckrose has become a kind of dark-web Sheryl Sandberg, helping people lean out of diversity training and pronoun sharing. She recently launched Counterweight, a support group for people who feel that they are being pressured to endorse what she calls “critical social justice.” Pluckrose told me that she hears from three or four people a day who have “been disciplined, or [are] being forced to affirm beliefs that they don’t have about race or about gender.” About two-thirds of Counterweight’s clients are Americans, and the rest are a mix of Brits, Canadians, and Australians.Mostly, Pluckrose said, Counterweight offers moral support and help with “strategic negotiation” with employers. The group might advise a client to, for example, affirm their opposition to racism and then proceed gingerly when asking to opt out of a process they disagree with. It took one client eight months of careful negotiation to get her company’s diversity training made voluntary, for example. Sometimes, Counterweight writes letters of support to the employers of people who feel they’ve been wronged by wokeness. The service is free and runs on donations, as well as revenue from forthcoming books. (Counterweight is creating a guide for workers tentatively titled So You’re About to Be Canceled.) Pluckrose told me that she doesn’t take a salary.Calls to Counterweight exploded in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests, which in one survey half of all U.S. workers said their company responded to in some way. Two weeks after Floyd’s murder, searches for diversity officer and implicit bias training reached a peak, according to PBS, and companies staffed up on equity-and-inclusion managers. In May, some anti-racism educators told reporters that they had done more corporate trainings in the past year than they had in decades. Some of these diversity-trained employees, it seems, did not like what they heard.The Counterweight clients I spoke with felt that everyone was against them. Even as workplaces and other institutions have become more equitable, they’ve largely failed to offer people a legitimate way to air their hurt feelings, to get help navigating tricky situations, or to understand the difference between persecution and feedback. In the absence of better avenues to discuss uncomfortable grievances, some will inevitably retreat to an underground network. Some will turn to Counterweight.[Read: Can Chloé Valdary sell skeptics on DEI?]Pluckrose’s hoaxer past might raise doubts about the earnestness of her new endeavors in anti-wokeness. In her methodical, polite way, she presented Counterweight as simply a place for people to go when, say, their bosses are forcing them to agree that all white people are inherently racist. But are its clients legitimate victims of workplace overreaction, or have they provoked their colleagues and faced predictable consequences? Are they getting needed guidance, or affirmation that they were right all along?One of the calls to Counterweight in the months after Floyd’s murder was from Jennifer Friend, a white social worker in Northern Virginia who said her employer, Fairfax County, was holding discussion groups and had created websites that implied that police “are the enemy.” According to Friend, the county’s new anti-racism website linked to articles and podcasts that called white women “Beckys” and “Karens” and said that “white women’s weapons are microaggressions and a direct line to the police murder hotline.” (I couldn’t find evidence of these articles on the county’s website. The Fairfax County government declined to comment.) “It was just article after article that, to me, were very divisive and degrading,” Friend told me.Friend approached Counterweight, which offered her some emotional support and a free legal consultation. When Counterweight realized that Friend was a therapist, the group enlisted her help with its other clients. Friend quit her job with Fairfax County, and she now splits her time between a traditional private practice and counseling people Counterweight sends her way. One recent client was a filmmaker, Travis Brown, who was suffering from anxiety because he worried that his documentary series critiquing “woke ideology” would cause someone to dox or attack him.Friend said she is now more satisfied with her career than ever before. “Counterweight clients are some of the nicest people I’ve met in my entire life,” she told me. “They are all so ethical and principled. And very much not racist.”Many Counterweight clients seem to feel like they’re back in middle school, exiled to a solitary lunch table. One client, a research analyst who requested anonymity, declined to share his pronouns with his colleagues, so he was banned from team meetings, he told me. Pluckrose “gave me some sample scripts to adhere to when communicating with my employer to make sure I remain diplomatic while also being heard,” he said via email. Elizabeth Spievak, a psychology professor at Bridgewater State University, in Massachusetts, reached out to Counterweight when her research sparked an uproar on campus. As part of a study meant to assess whether language could influence people’s response to perceived threats, she and her co-authors showed dozens of people a statement that compared Black Lives Matter to “an open wound” or a “wild beast.” Someone tweeted a screenshot of the question, prompting the university to apologize for it and promise to reform the Institutional Review Board, of which Spievak is the chair. (Karim Ismaili, Bridgewater’s provost, told me that there won’t be any changes to Spievak’s job as a result of the incident, but that the university wants to add more staff, advisers, and professional development to the IRB.) Counterweight connected Spievak with like-minded academics, she told me, as well as some people who were willing to “just listen.” Spievak added: “Counterweight has renewed my confidence and ability to defend my liberal values without constant fear.”Perhaps surprisingly, some of Counterweight’s clients aren’t white—they’re people of color who don’t think they’re marginalized. Colin Williams, a Black consultant engineer, felt he was being “forced to go on mandatory unconscious bias training, and that the training assumed that because of my race I was a certain way,” he told me. Counterweight helped him prepare for conversations about the training with his managers, and he was able to avoid the requirement. But shortly after he contacted me, he resigned from his job. (His company told me that it did indeed roll out mandatory unconscious-bias training to all managers, and that it has received “positive feedback from a vast majority” of them.) Another engineer, who is from the Middle East and asked to remain anonymous because he fears retaliation at his job, asked Counterweight for help formulating an answer to a diversity-and-inclusion question during a job interview.[Read: The New Puritans]The most obvious argument against Counterweight is that experiencing racism is worse than having to sit through a Robin DiAngelo seminar, and that, in general, work involves a lot of stuff that one may not particularly like but that one has to do anyway.That is like saying “Having cancer is worse than having bad treatments for cancer,” Pluckrose told me. In general, diversity training seems to have a weak impact on employees’ behavior. In some cases, it can elicit backlash, actually decreasing diversity and inclusion. Still, Counterweight does support some diversity trainings, such as the Theory of Enchantment and the OpenMind platform.To proponents of racial-justice education in the workplace, Counterweight fans are missing the point entirely. “I think there’s an assumption that the culture is neutral, and that you’re introducing a particular ideology,” Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility and a diversity consultant, told me. In other words, Counterweight is trying to keep things the same, but “the same” is already tilted toward white people. Grappling with how you might be complicit in racism is supposed to be uncomfortable, DiAngelo said. “It is really difficult to look at these issues and to connect ourselves to them.” She gets that some people might need support in thinking about anti-racism, but draws the line at a group that seems to help people dismiss it entirely.In addition to working with the clients who contact them, Counterweight runs a Discord server that now has about 1,000 members, and that Pluckrose and her team wouldn’t let me see. I started to worry: Chattering among themselves in a private forum, might these avowedly not-racist iconoclasts start to talk themselves into white supremacy?Pluckrose assured me that Counterweight opposes discrimination and turns away people who espouse openly racist views. For instance, she said, the group ignored a man who thought white people were literally superior to everyone else, a woman who wanted to kick a trans person out of her place of worship, and a woman who wanted a colleague to stop using her pronouns in her email signature.I asked Pluckrose if her organization would help someone who, say, touched a Black person’s hair without their consent. If someone did this and was fired with no warning and no past history of racism, Pluckrose said, “we might help them write a letter saying this was a disproportionate response and they now knew the behavior was inappropriate and would not do it again. If they simply received a warning, this would be an appropriate response and we’d ask them to accept it.”Of course, she added, “sometimes on looking into a situation where someone is being bullied at work, it turns out that there is not an ideological reason for this, but just an unpleasant individual.”Some of Counterweight’s clients do seem to have made their own situations worse—not by standing up to wokeness, but by being off-putting and angry. Their situations have less to do with ideological diversity and more to do with whether people who exhibit poor emotional regulation deserve to have jobs.In June 2020, the Black and Asian Network of the Suffolk County Council, on the east coast of England, sent out an email newsletter that said that the death of George Floyd was “the f​​inal straw where we say ‘enough is enough … being Black must not be a daily or deadly hazard.’” It also said that the Network would work with the “Corporate Leadership Team in addressing race inequalities.”The council is in charge of the local fire department, and Evan Heasley, a 50-year-old white firefighter, sent a series of emails asking for examples of the hazards of being Black and of racial inequalities embedded in the Suffolk County Council’s policies. Heasley told me he was trying to be polite, but his emails read as chippy and condescending. (“Could you please inform me of what your plans are to deal with these major issues.”) If it’s so bad, he seemed to be saying, prove it.The Network responded, sending a Guardian opinion article about racial inequality in the U.K. Heasley replied that he was “disappointed” by the response, and pressed further. Then he sent them two more emails.Why not just stop at one or two emails? It was too important, Heasley said. To him, the newsletter was another sign of the rise of critical race theory, which he defines as the notion that laws and institutions are biased against people of color. “We’ve got to draw back from this, because we’re sitting on a precipice,” he told me.He said the fire department investigated him and convicted him of, among other things, failing to adhere to the county council’s code of conduct and of behavior that could be considered harassment. (The county council declined to comment.) But where things really went awry is that in a meeting with his boss, Heasley said “I want to punch the little cunt,” referring to the person who led the internal investigation.“I’m a bit fiery,” he admitted sheepishly on our Zoom call. Though he said he’s no longer a party member, 11 years ago, Heasley ran for Parliament representing the anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party, and he once wrote a book called Immigration: A Study in Arrogance and Ignorance.After yet another meeting, Heasley told me, he head-butted a locker. He was suspended, and began to think that he would be fired. Heasley heard about Counterweight from another firefighter who was in a similar situation, and Counterweight sent a letter to the council on Heasley’s behalf.Pluckrose told me she chose to support Heasley because he said he had just been venting when he said he wanted to punch someone—akin to saying “I want to strangle my mother-in-law”—and that he later regretted it. Besides, he’s a firefighter, not a gender-studies professor. “The kind of psychology that lends itself to acting quickly and risking your life to save other people is often accompanied by plain and not particularly diplomatic speaking,” Pluckrose wrote to me in an email. She thinks he was unfairly maligned for his political views, which, though she doesn’t share them, she said he’s entitled to.As Heasley’s case demonstrates, Counterweight’s clients are a mixed bag. Some were mentally spiraling after being unfairly punished at work. Others could have just let something go, but instead made their co-workers feel uncomfortable. Counterweight’s embrace of both kinds of people reveals a central tension of the cancel-culture debate: Everyone interprets each of these episodes differently. Society has not established exactly which kinds of speech should cost a person their job. Even people who think Elizabeth Spievak’s psychology survey wasn’t a big deal might draw the line at actions like Heasley’s.Some commentators have suggested that governments should put stricter legal limits on companies’ abilities to fire people for unpopular speech. I asked Pluckrose whether she thinks that sort of solution would make sense, and she didn’t have a clear-cut answer. A janitor at a Jewish school who called Jews “Satanic termites” on social media could be fired, Pluckrose said; an accountant who tweeted that she doesn’t believe in “the concept of gender” shouldn’t get the ax. She seemed to be trying to assess whether the hypothetical employees’ views made them unfit for their job. Even that bright line quickly gets blurred, though: People will inevitably disagree on which views make someone unfit.Though Counterweight is unlikely to save his job, Heasley has enjoyed talking with Pluckrose. “It’s knowing you’ve got someone there,” he said. Pluckrose, who was an aide for the elderly before she became a writer, has exhibited remarkable compassion for him, Heasley said.Many Counterweight clients told me something similar: That more than the letters to their employers or the anti-woke talking points, they appreciated the chance to talk with people who heard them, who agreed with them, who assured them that they are not crazy and not racist. Everyone, it seems, needs a safe space sometimes.

If, for argument’s sake, you were a pan-European nationalist committed to the bloc’s consolidation as a sovereign, continental power, the tone of the Brexit debate within Britain would surely have been mystifying. While FBPE partisans relentlessly waved EU flags to signal their commitment to the project on Britain’s behalf, a broader view would have led them to the conclusion that Britain’s removal from the European Union would be a necessary sacrifice towards enabling true European integration.

For on the topic of Britain’s relationship with Europe, as with most things, we can now say that de Gaulle was right: Britain was always an awkward partner within the bloc, consistently applying the brakes to further integration. As he observed in his 1963 speech torpedoing Britain’s membership application to the European Community, “England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries.”
No doubt de Gaulle, as Julian Jackson’s excellent recent biography notes, was influenced by memories of “that primal scene of an incandescent Churchill shouting on 4 June 1944 that in a choice between ‘Europe and the open sea’ he would always choose the latter.” For after all, as he told Macmillan in a sweeping assessment of Britain’s national character and destiny, “the sense of being an island remains very strong with you. England looks to the sea, towards wider horizons. She remains very linked to the United States by language, by habits and by certain agreements. The natural course of your policy leads you to seek the agreement of the Americans because you are ‘mondiaux’ … Your entry will change everything.”
Imbued with a sense of France’s destiny and national glory, the general was pained by, in Jackson’s phrasing, “a bewilderment that Britain had allowed herself to lose a sense of national ambition and become, in his eyes, an American satellite”. As de Gaulle stated, once the United States entered the war, Churchill had “passed the flame on to the Americans and abased himself before them.”
Gently discouraging British hopes of EC membership at the 1962 Rambouillet summit, he told Macmillan that by the middle of the war “power had passed to the United States and Britain had very reasonably decided to align herself with the Americans in the belief that this was the best way she could influence United States policy. He quite saw that the United Kingdom had not entirely abandoned hope that this policy might still be successful.” Speaking frankly to his own advisers, de Gaulle put the matter more bluntly: “the English console themselves with their decline by claiming that they share in American hegemony.”
It is not hard to see the continued relevance of de Gaulle’s musings on Britain’s essential nature in France’s reactions to the Aukus announcement, as when France’s foreign minister Yves le Drian remarked of Britain, “the fifth wheel on the wagon”, that “we know their permanent opportunism”. As France’s Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, noted with haughty disregard, “Our British friends explained to us that they were leaving the E.U. to create ‘global Britain’, but “we can see that this is a return to the American fold and a form of accepted vassalisation.” Indeed, he added, “The UK is clearly trying to find its feet, perhaps there was a lack of thought about the strategic future… We see through this partnership, this strategic alliance and after the Kabul crisis, that Global Britain seems to be more about a US junior partner than working with different allies.”
For all the cattiness of Beaune’s phrasing, which casts London’s eager subordination as something closer to an English perversion than a coherent strategic vision, he is not wrong. The Aukus agreement locks both Britain and Australia into an objectively junior role in America’s developing strategic posture in the Pacific, whatever that might turn out to be. Yet by the time the first of the new Australian submarines are actually deployed, in 20 years time, the outcome of the looming contest in the region will likely already have been decided. After all, American planners expect a confrontation over Taiwan to take place within the next six years. By the time Australia’s full complement of 12 submarines is reached, in the mid-2060s, most of the people now furiously discussing their role in a Taiwan conflict will long be dead, and the geopolitical environment will look at least as different as the world of Reagan and Brezhnev does to us now.
The submarines are not, therefore, the central point of the agreement, which we can interpret as a smaller, tighter auxiliary alliance complementing the role played by Five Eyes in locking the Anglophone defence establishment into the defence of the American-led order, with the wavering Canadians and New Zealanders left to follow their own future paths. As the French defence analyst Mathieu Duchâtel notes, the broader context of the Aukus agreement is one in which, unlike the situation in the 1990s, the US has already lost strategic dominance in the Taiwan Strait and the broader first island chain flanking China, and therefore seeks to establish greater strategic depth through basing options in Australia. Aukus may or may not be a good strategic bet— Australia’s most eminent strategists seem markedly more sceptical of its wisdom than their British equivalents — but either way, it is now seemingly inevitable.
What alternative strategy were the French offering? As a neighbour to Australia, with nearly two million French citizens living in its Pacific possessions, France has its own strategic interests in the region, which are not necessarily the same as Australia’s. We see hints of Macron’s thinking in his recent overtures to India — a member of the Quad but with its own independent foreign policy — with its assurances of French “commitment to the strengthening of India’s strategic autonomy, including its industry and technology base,” which, with its emphasis on “regional stability and the rule of law, while ruling out any form of hegemony,” indicates an interest in carving out space in a future multipolar order rather than a commitment to defend a waning unipolar one.
The long-standing Anglo-Saxon anxiety over French ambitions manifested itself in the recent esoteric Macronism of the Telegraph and Spectator, the former of which claimed that Macron was willing to donate its UN Security Council seat to the EU in exchange for pushing forward with strategic autonomy (a claim swiftly denied by France as the fantasies of an “English tabloid”), and the latter pronouncing that Macron seeks a “new order” under “undisputed French leadership… which is to say, his own leadership”. Whether or not a united, consolidated Europe as a global power helmed by the continent’s most ambitious and openly civilisational thinker is a realistic prospect — or whether it is a desirable one — it is fair to say that the Aukus agreement, rather than acting as a check on French ambitions of strategic autonomy, has hastened their day in the sun.
As the American defence analyst and former State Department strategist Max Bergmann noted recently, the poorly-handled announcement of the Aukus deal strengthens Macron’s case for strategic autonomy, through undermining the Atlanticist faction within the French foreign policy establishment. “That the United States humiliated France in such a brazen way has discredited those views completely,” he says, “Instead, the episode will empower stakeholders in Paris who advocate for a much cooler relationship with Washington and — tapping into the Gaullist foreign policy tradition — wish to be allied with the United States, but not necessarily aligned on key issues related to Russia and China.”
As Bergmann points out, “the State Department has spent the last 23 years — ever since Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed reservations — vigorously opposing a greater defence role for the European Union. A generation of foreign service officers have thus spent their careers opposing the concept,” so that “the decrepit state of European militaries is a huge indictment of post-Cold War U.S. policy toward Europe… In that sense, U.S. policy has been successful, since Europe is as dependent as ever. But this is not a good situation for the United States or Europe.”
The logic of the case is unarguable — as the eminent Australian defence strategist Hugh White remarks, for America, China “is the most formidable rival the country has ever faced, and it will demand huge sacrifices to defeat”. Among those sacrifices may well be America’s longstanding policy of keeping Europe militarily dependent. As the Biden administration rebalances its military power towards the Pacific, jettisoning unaffordable distractions like its long entanglements in the Muslim world, a Europe capable of defending itself in its volatile near abroad lightens the burden on the Pentagon. While Poland and the Baltic states may prefer the American military umbrella to a French-led one, not least because of Macron’s occasional flirtations with Russia, the choice of how America deploys its vast but finite military assets is ultimately not theirs to make.
Bergmann therefore urges the Biden administration to support the French push for heightened EU defence integration, arguing that if it is not pursued with America’s blessing, it may take place anyway in a form more obstructive to American goals, and besides, he may be pushing at an open door. The carefully-worded statement with which Macron and Biden healed their recent rift implies that France may have won a concession with its national fit of pique: “the United States also recognises the importance of a stronger and more capable European defence, that contributes positively to transatlantic and global security and is complementary to NATO.” That is, Macron has seemingly won Biden’s cautious blessing for further European defence integration distinct from, though not in opposition to, NATO structures, a dramatic shift in American policy, and one partly enabled by Brexit.
After all, as Bergmann argues, America “used its influence to press E.U. members, such as the United Kingdom (before it withdrew from the European Union) and Poland, to oppose various E.U. defence proposals”, thereby justifying de Gaulle’s warning that by allowing the “Trojan horse” Britain’s membership of the EC “would take on the appearance of a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and direction.” As the EU parliament explained in its official 2019 report into the effects of Brexit on European integration, on security questions, Britain functioned as “the leading blocker, most often out of a fear of jeopardising NATO and frustrating links with the USA”, and in doing so for decades “limited the EU’s ability to independently develop strategic outlooks and capabilities.”
Suggested readingWhat's behind Macron's fury?By John Lichfield
Even after the Brexit vote, the then-defence minister Sir Michael Fallon promised to “continue to oppose any idea of an EU army, or an EU army headquarters which would simply undermine Nato,” insisting that “Nato must remain the cornerstone of our defence and the defence of Europe.” Within the EU, Britain eagerly fulfilled the role of America’s spoiler, watering down any efforts towards Europe-wide defence integration outside NATO structures, yet those days are now gone. For all the remaining dissent within the European Union over the idea, the Atlanticist pole has been weakened by Britain’s self-ejection from the bloc.
We can say then, that while Britain’s defence establishment congratulates itself over transferring its role as America’s junior partner to warmer Pacific waters, France’s loss of the submarine deal may paradoxically have strengthened its hand in pursuing its wider goal of strategic autonomy here in Europe, helped along by America’s rapidly accelerating anxiety over China.
The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles takeaway lesson from the Ausuk announcement is that Europeans have to have a stronger military capacity in order to share a more important part of the burden that represents the defence of the Western world…in the places where we cannot expect the U.S. intervene or the NATO intervene,” adding that “We have to share our part of responsibility, and we have to be able to act alone, if needed.” This is, simply, the logical direction of travel as Europe’s importance dwindles in Washington’s rear view mirror, and Europeans realise they will soon be forced to defend their own interests, whether or not they want to. As the European Commission’s Vice President, Maros Sefcovic noted, “I think that after Kabul, after Aukus, this was, I would say the natural conclusion, that we need to focus more on the strategic autonomy,” and future summits on the question loom.
Macron’s oft-stated ambivalence over NATO is matched by a generalised European indifference or even hostility to the very idea of a Cold War with distant China. Through no particular fault of either party, the transatlantic marriage between America and Europe is  growing cool as each partner pursues their own divergent interests; and as they drift apart, both Brexit and Aukus have played a minor but nevertheless real role in widening the gulf between them. As Britain commits itself to following America’s destiny on the high seas, no doubt de Gaulle would have welcomed these final parting gifts of Anglo-Saxon diplomacy.

For thirty years, the eminent linguist Steven Pinker has been writing a series of popular science books that alternate, title by title, between deep dives into abstruse aspects of cognition and broader ruminations on matters of grand social importance. 1999’s Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, is in the former category, while 2002’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is in the latter. Where Words and Rules had tightly-written chapters on irregular verbs, The Blank Slate reflected languidly upon broad matters of public policy, informed by a substrate of evolutionary psychology.
Now, in Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, Pinker synthesises both aspects of his oeuvre. On the one hand, Rationality briskly introduces you to essential concepts like Bayesian reasoning and technical terms like modus ponens. But the technical, learned aspects of the book are accompanied by a polemical drive. Rationality matters — every day, everywhere. Especially at present, in a world that many think has gone mad, whipsawed irrationally by social media mobs and online conspiracy theories. Pinker argues that methods of rationality represent not an esoteric corner of cognitive science or philosophy, but an essential set of tools for individual human flourishing, maintaining our sanity and perpetuating civilisation as a collective whole. To reason and think clearly is to be modern, and even requisite in order to be moral.
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the rational actor and “homo economicus” seemed to have failed us. Nature abhors a vacuum, so there was a vogue for the field of behavioural economics, a discipline that operates in the gray zone of economic frictions and psychological irrationalities powered by faulty intuition. A crop of authors harvested these ideas: Dan Ariely, Rom Brafman, Ori Brafman, Cass Sunstein, and Richard Thaler among them. More broadly, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s heuristics and biases research program, to which all these authors owe a debt, entered the mainstream — Kahneman also contributed a bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011. Barack Obama’s administration tried to ‘nudge’ America through policy. David Cameron’s government, and the British civil service, embraced nudging too.
Rationality is part of a tacit backlash against these authors, their books, and the atmosphere they generated in public policy circles in the 2010s.

Today, Dan Ariely faces accusations of fraud at worst and scientific malpractice at best. More broadly, behavioural economics has been hit by the replication crisis. Humans respond to incentives, and for scientists, sexy and vivid results are rewarded, while negative findings can stall a career. The scientific culture of the aughts was defined at its peril by “publish or perish,” as well as sloppy experimental practices, a mechanically unthinking application of statistics, and cognitive biases in the very fields dedicated to understanding how rationality fails us. Kahneman himself began having doubts in 2012, justifiably, about some of the results reported in his 2011 book.
Pinker’s good news in Rationality is that with deliberate effort, humans can think clearly and move beyond their biases. Where much of cognitive psychology focuses on illusions and mental misfires, Rationality instead argues that our faculties are up to the task, and that this is all a natural consequence of our evolution. Evolutionary psychology leans heavily on the idea that humans are only equipped with “stone-age minds” in a technologically advanced present. Pinker seems a bit chagrined at this angle being so overplayed, and in Rationality he attempts to redress the balance, making the case that humans are naturally equipped to reason and that reason is not a dark art or the province of philosophers and mathematicians alone.
Suggested readingNever trust a scientistBy Stuart Ritchie
If you are a consumer of anthropology and ethnography or even have simply watched The Gods Must Be Crazy, you are aware of the preternatural skills of the San hunters of the Kalahari desert. Pinker shows this is not due to inborn traits, but the ability of the San to take in the information around them, the time of the year, the season, the species of antelope, and make inferences in alignment with their overall goals. The San, like all humans, engage in a rough and ready form of syllogistic reasoning. They start with axioms, premises informed by their experiences, and deduce logical consequences from their assumptions. Things don’t just “happen” in the Kalahari, there is a rhythm and rhyme the hunters exploit, a pattern and sense of the world that allows them to survive and flourish. Steenbok antelope are hunted during the rainy season while eland are stalked during the dry season. You might think this is due to custom and tradition, but the San are aware that steenbok has stiff joints during the rainy season while eland hooves are ill-equipped to navigate sandy soil. They hunt animals in the season that loads the dice for a success hunt. The alternative, simply, is a higher risk of starvation. The San have goals, and they naturally use the tools of rationality to achieve them.
But what if the San did not rationally know the reasons for their actions?
More from this authorDo genes determine intelligence?By Razib Khan 
One of the essential points in Rationality is that reasoning and understanding the world are collective enterprises. We know that socially-generated knowledge and rationality can be embedded enduringly through rules and taboos. Yes, those executing a cultural script may not be aware of the ultimate reasons, but a deeper investigation by anthropologists can reveal that mindless traditions actually serve functional purposes.
Joe Henrich in 2015’s The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter reports how traditional societies across the world have a system of preparing cassava that prevents them from getting cyanide poisoning. Those following the methods do not know what cyanide is, nor do they even know that consuming unprepared cassava will lead to death, but their culture comes preloaded with the fruits of adaptive learning that are highly rational.
The deepest insight then is that our ability to reason through complex problems depends on our willingness to stand on the shoulders of giants. Though we can all reason, Pinker does not shy away from conventional pitfalls of human analysis such as the Monty Hall problem, the gambler’s fallacy and the base rate fallacy. He recounts that Paul Erdos, author of 1,500 mathematical papers, was as mystified by the Monty Hall problem as most people who encounter it. He refused to believe he was wrong, relying on his native intuitions, despite his prodigious ability to work through formal mathematics.
The point is that the most brilliant individual mind can fail at reasoning unless it approaches the enterprise with humility and the willingness to update beliefs and understanding. The scholarship reviewed in Rationality, from Aristotle to machine learning, is not just the product of singularly brilliant minds, but the collective efforts of whole scientific traditions. The replication crisis shows that groups of scholars can blunder into traps and dead ends en masse. But advances in fields like statistical decision theory would be impossible without the collective efforts of disparate research groups across numerous domains. Pinker’s treatment of deep learning neural networks also makes it clear that some of these tools for rationality are approaching the dark edge of Arthur C. Clarke’s formulation that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And, like magic, they often fail without the guiding hand of human reasoning faculties.
More from this authorHow the Irish became whiteBy Razib Khan 
Rationality, Pinker says, was partly in response to students at Harvard finding the world puzzling, especially with much of psychology focused on how human rationality fails. If Pinker makes the case for thinking clearly, with the most powerful tools we have, whether it be 21st-century computational methods in machine learning or sharper formal analysis that draws upon mid-20th-century economic game theory, he still remains fully aware that he lives in an empirical world of irrationality.
Pinker was not one of the ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. But he is, and long has been, a fellow traveller of the group (he is also personally close to Dawkins). In the early 2000’s he took equal-opportunity aim at the Right’s attachment to traditional religion in The Blank Slate while taking the Left to task for its denial of human nature. Twenty years later, he made an extended call for a revival of the cult of rationality in Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s enthusiasm for applying rationality and empiricism to the world reflects the intellectual culture of the mid-2000’s when Dawkins was riding high with his critiques of evangelical Christianity and public intellectuals were gathering to celebrate the Enlightenment in conferences like Beyond Belief. The familiar flame of this hopeful past burns bright throughout Rationality.
Suggested readingThe Left's science denialBy Tom Chivers
But ours today is a world of cancel culture and QAnon. Ideological polarisation that has turned the pandemic into the object of a culture war in the United States. Pinker does address the reality that the world today is not the world he might have imagined it would be a generation ago, as irrationalities and superstitions spread like ideological pandemics on social media.
The vision of the aughts was one of a reason-ruled future, but Rationality was written in the wake of Donald Trump, whose rise and popularity as an emotive demagogue triggered a reactionary flare-up of identity politics on the cultural Left. This is the world where David Hume observed that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. To a great extent, the project of making Bayesian reasoning, game theory and machine learning accessible and palatable to the public seems born of the disappointments of the past generation. If you are a deep reader of Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex, Rationality may not offer you much new food for thought. But if you are terrified by the insanities of the present, and wish to replenish your intellectual armoury in the fight for progress and reason in the 21st century, then Rationality is what you will want to bring to the battlefield.

In April, when I received my second Moderna shot, America was on a roll. Adjusted for population, the United States had distributed more COVID-19 vaccines per capita than any country but Israel, Chile, the United Kingdom, and a smattering of small nations and islands. With a surge of doses, we could have been No. 1 in the world.Five months later, the U.S. is no longer in the top five in national vaccine rates. We’re not in the top 10, or the top 20, or top 30. By one count, we’re 36th—countries as varied as Malta, Canada, Mongolia, and Ecuador have all surpassed us. If the European Union or the G7 were countries, they would be ahead of us too. With about 66 percent of Americans over 18 fully vaccinated, some might be impressed that it's possible to get two-thirds of the country to agree on anything. But America still seems to suffer from an internationally unique reluctance.How did this happen? The U.S. was arguably more responsible than any other country for the invention, manufacturing, and distribution of the mRNA vaccines. How did the pace-setting effort to vaccinate Americans peter out and leave us behind most of the developed world?I’ve tried to solve the mystery of the vaccine slowdown before, but I don’t think many of the old popular explanations hold up. This spring, it was briefly fashionable to blame the FDA’s mixed messaging around the side effects of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. But European countries, including the U.K., dealt with similar vaccine pauses with AstraZeneca, and they’re now miles ahead of us in vaccination rates. So that can’t explain everything.[Read: Vaccination in America might have only one tragic path forward]Some have argued that U.S. public-health officials downplayed the effectiveness of the vaccines, which hurt vaccine uptake. I agree that messaging from the CDC and other institutions has been overly neurotic and often confusing. But many leaders throughout Europe emphasized the vaccines’ side effects on their way to achieving higher total vaccination numbers. So trepidatious sci-comms might not be a major factor either.Instead, the data point to three key reasons the United States is 36th and falling: It is unusually uninsured, unusually contrarian, and unusually polarized. These are three familiar—even defining—attributes of American life.A sizable proportion of unvaccinated Americans aren’t unpersuaded and skeptical but rather uninsured and scared. Polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation indicates that no group is more likely to reject the vaccines than young Americans without insurance. Members of this group are disproportionately young and low-income and lack easy access to a doctor if something goes wrong. Many of them don’t know that the vaccine is free. Meanwhile, the fear of side effects is one of the most common reasons people give for avoiding the vaccines. This fear, compounded by a feeling of estrangement from the health system, is clearly keeping many Americans from getting vaccinatedBut something else is going on, according to Michael Bang Petersen, a Danish researcher who led the Hope Project, a large international survey of global attitudes about COVID-19. He told me that Americans aren’t radically different from Europeans on how much we trust public authorities or how readily we accept public-health restrictions to fight the pandemic.What makes the U.S. exceptional, he said, is our unusually low support for vaccines in general. The U.S. had significant levels of vaccine hesitancy before the pandemic, and Petersen’s research found low acceptance of the vaccines in 2020, before their authorization. While support for the vaccines exceeded 70 percent in countries like Denmark and the U.K. last year, only about half of Americans consistently expressed interest in being inoculated.America’s historical contrarianism about vaccines has many potential sources. Uninsured people who can’t afford to see doctors may be conditioned to trust in their body and hope for the best. A history of medical racism has coincided with lower trust for novel treatments among Black Americans. But not all American vaccine skeptics suffer from discrimination or a lack of resources. Perhaps a country whose laws and culture celebrate independence of thought might naturally yield a bimodal distribution of contrarians: lots of paradigm-breaking entrepreneurs and scientists on one side, and lots of conspiratorial cranks on the other.That leads to the second part of Petersen’s explanation: America’s vaccine attitudes are unusually politicized. “The level of polarization between Democratic and Republican elites seems unique to me,” Petersen said, “and it’s a leading factor in why American vaccination rates are relatively low.”The U.S. is distinctly unlucky in having a polarized two-party system, in which one party’s elites take up vaccine resistance as a prominent cause. While GOP governors and even former President Donald Trump have admitted to being vaccinated and occasionally recommended the shots, the party’s most significant media organs, including Fox News, have consistently questioned the benefits of the vaccines, amplified the side effects, celebrated evidence-free skepticism, and blasted attempts to promote vaccinations. Today, Florida Republicans aren’t just claiming that the vaccines are faulty. They’re reportedly looking to rescind measles- and mumps-vaccine requirements. Negative polarization has fully overtaken the right wing of the Republican Party, whose ethos is now something like “Whatever liberals say, I’m against” and whose members stand ready to embrace the most absurd conclusions of that logic.[Craig Spencer: No, vaccinated people are not ‘just as likely’ to spread the coronavirus as unvaccinated people]I asked Petersen how Democratic leaders such as President Joe Biden or public-health officials such as Anthony Fauci could help solve this problem. His answer was not comforting. “Many conservative Americans have simply lost trust in and tuned out public-health communicators, and that’s very hard to solve, because when a population loses trust in the messengers, the content of the message doesn’t matter,” he said.Petersen’s interpretation has subtle, and potentially depressing, lessons for liberal pandemic commentators, including me. I would love to think that my analysis of the pandemic can convert the unvaccinated, just as many journalists imagine themselves to be frontline soldiers in an information war. For months, journalists and the epidemiologists they follow on Twitter have been energetically discussing the best way to represent the benefits and risks of vaccines. But these debates were held among people who were almost entirely vaccinated and whose friends and families were almost entirely vaccinated. Meanwhile, the truly hesitant were elsewhere—watching Fox News, exchanging side-effect rumors on Facebook, or marinating in conspiracy theories in other pockets of the internet. Mainstream outlets can always improve their coverage, but they cannot change the mind of people who ignore them. If traditional media criticizing public-health messages in other traditional media isn’t quite preaching to the choir, it’s at least screeching among the choir.“Trust is a resource that you draw upon in a crisis,” Petersen told me. “It’s much harder to build trust as the crisis is ongoing.” The same could be said for institutions, policy, and culture. In a pandemic, you go to war with the country you’ve got, and you learn what kind of country you’ve got only after you go to war. Underinsured, paranoid, and polarized, the U.S. rolled into 2021 with a uniquely impenetrable bedrock of vaccine skepticism.Americans didn’t fall behind the developed world in vaccines so much as we started with major disadvantages that became more and more apparent as time passed. Today’s vaccination numbers are a lagging indicator of America’s many preexisting conditions.

(Photo by Giles Clarke/Getty Images.)Late last week I was talking with a good friend, and he asked an excellent question. “Are these times really as hard as they seem? Or have we lost historical perspective? Does every generation face the challenges we face?” It’s a great question, and it immediately brought to my mind an offhand comment the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg made in a podcast last spring. I’ve referred to it before, but what she said was something like this. 2020 started out like 1974 (impeachment), became 1918 (pandemic), which led to 1929 (a stock market crash), and then transformed into 1968 (with massive urban unrest). Since that podcast, things only got worse. We moved into 1876 (a viciously disputed election), followed it up with another 1974 (second impeachment), and then experienced 1975 (a lost war and a panicked evacuation). I haven’t even mentioned January 6, which was the closest we’ve come to 1861 in my lifetime.At the risk of further deepening the gloom, I’m going to add another date to the mix. Tomorrow the FBI is expected to release its Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for 2020. On Wednesday the New York Times published a preview. The 2020 murder rate is expected to have risen by a stunning 29 percent, the largest increase since 1968 (there’s that date again) and the largest one-year increase since the FBI has been keeping statistics. A picture is worth a thousand words. Look at the scale on this chart:None of this is really news. Media outlets have been tracking crime increases for months. Still, there’s something especially grim when the FBI makes it all “official” with the release of the UCR. By now some readers might be a bit confused. Isn’t the Sunday essay the “faith essay”? Why are we talking about murder rates? The answer is pretty simple—if people of faith are to be concerned about justice (and they are!), then justice is rarely more immediate and important than when confronting both the scourge of crime and the tragedy of excess enforcement and mass incarceration. Compounding the challenge, the class of Americans most engaged in politics (disproportionately white, educated, and well-off) are often the least impacted by crime. They’re less likely to feel either the effects of crime or the effects of stepped-up law enforcement. Thus we often find ourselves talking about communities rather than with communities and making mistakes accordingly. Here is my fundamental concern. If we fail to fully understand what justice is—and to distinguish between justice and vengeance—then fears of crime and fears of law enforcement may cause us to amplify and repeat the profound injustices of the recent past. It’s helpful to discern what justice is in part by describing what justice is not. Let’s start with three key concepts. Impunity is unjust. Vengeance is unjust. And justice, not vengeance, leads to deterrence.Impunity is unjust. There are two forms of impunity I’m concerned about—criminals committing violent crime with impunity and law enforcement officers violating civil rights with impunity. Crime is oppressive, and state inaction that permits it to flourish contributes to social decay. Last month, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf wrote an important essay arguing that “under-policing is a form of oppression too.” Combine criminal activity with absent or ineffective police, and you have a formula not just for death and destruction but for pervasive fear and economic decline. In one of his most telling paragraphs, Friedersdorf noted how easy it is get away with murder in the United States of America, especially if the victim is black:The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group that tracks unsolved murders, found in 2019 that “declining homicide clearance rates for African-American victims accounted for all of the nation’s alarming decline in law enforcement’s ability to clear murders through the arrest of criminal offenders.” In Chicago, the public-radio station WBEZ’s analysis of 19 months of murder-investigation records showed that “when the victim was white, 47% of the cases were solved … For Hispanics, the rate was about 33%. When the victim was African American, it was less than 22%.” Another study in Indianapolis found the same kind of disparities.These are stunning numbers. The failure to solve murders and hold murderers accountable not only breeds lawlessness, it creates a profound, independent moral injury. One of the first sins recorded in scripture is Cain’s murder of Abel, an act that caused God to say to Cain, “What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground.” And it’s not just murder that creates the cry for justice. Days ago we watched as America’s elite gymnasts cried out to Congress for justice in response to years of abuse and neglect—abuse at the hands of their team doctor, Larry Nassar, and neglect from the establishment, from USA Gymnastics to the FBI itself. But the recognition of the awful consequence of crime brings me to the second concern—a culture of impunity is unjust if it comes through police absence or through police excess. And historically fear of crime has caused Americans to empower police beyond the rightful bounds of the law. Previous crime waves brought forth the widespread use of militarized tactics (such as no-knock raids) and permissive doctrines (such as qualified immunity and other doctrines that protect police officers and police departments from liability even when they violate the civil rights of citizens) that often permit public officials to answer brutality and lawlessness with brutality and lawlessness all their own. Extremists on competing sides constantly create false choices. We don’t have to choose between the diminished police forces desired by those adjacent to the defund the police movement and the militarized police aggression that has created its own injustices. Better trained, more accountable police forces can help provide an answer to both problems of impunity. Last summer, when riots were sweeping American cities and the Defund the Police movement surged, I argued that we shouldn’t solve the problems of policing with fewer officers and diminished resources, but with better officers and improved tactics. Pay police more, train them better, and, crucially, expect more. Increased professionalism and increased accountability go hand-in-hand with increased competence and effectiveness. Vengeance is unjust. Proportionality is an absolutely indispensable element of justice. The punishment should fit, not exceed, the crime. Even the much-maligned concept of lex talionis (think of the Old Testament concept of an “eye-for-an-eye”) represented a limitation on the human temptation to exact overwhelming retribution—vengeance—on your enemies. It is here where the American response to crime can be most alarming. When we look at the sheer scale of American incarceration and the sheer scale of American executions, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in many ways we’ve created a vengeance system as much as a justice system. Indeed, the scope of American incarceration is difficult to comprehend. Courtesy of Statista, here are the top ten countries with the largest number of prisoners, per 100,000 people.Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that I don’t trust, say, North Korea’s statistics. It remains true that we far, far outpace any other peer nation in the world with our sheer numbers of prisoners. What’s another example of vengeance? Consider “three strikes” laws, which can hit habitual offenders with a life sentence after their third felony, even if that felony wouldn’t merit anything close to a similar sentence on its own. The hammer still falls, and the resulting injustices can sometimes boggle the mind. In 1980, for example, the Supreme Court upheld a lifetime prison sentence for a nonviolent felon whose three offenses involved a total of roughly $229. And we should not think that such incredible punishments and incredible rates of imprisonment are necessary for public safety. The precipitous crime declines of the 1990s and early 2000s are among the most-studied and complex phenomena in public life, and to say that “getting tough” made the difference is to dramatically oversimplify the debate. In fact, the smartest conclusions have determined that rapid increases in incarceration are not in fact principally or even significantly responsible for declines in American crime, and they have long passed the point of diminishing marginal returns. A 2012 Brennan Center for Justice paper found that “increased incarceration has been declining in its effectiveness as a crime control tactic for more than 30 years. Its effect on crime rates since 1990 has been limited, and has been non-existent since 2000.”I don’t want to oversell this point. It’s not that increased incarceration has no effect on American crime, just that that effect has been increasingly marginal. At the same time, however, it has an immense impact on the millions of Americans who are caught up in the system itself, either as prisoners or as their children, spouses, or parents. The effects on family formation and lifetime earning potential are catastrophic, for example, and can lead to enduring cycles of poverty and inequality.And that’s without even addressing the vast racial disparities in both incarceration and sentencing. There is no question that America has progressed past the worst days of an thoroughly and explicitly racialized justice system, but it is still true that not only are black and Hispanic men far more likely to be imprisoned than white men, there is a disturbing amount of evidence that they’re often charged with more severe crimes than similarly situated whites. Justice, not vengeance, leads to deterrence. This last point is crucial. There are many millions of Americans who look aghast at American crime and say, I’m not interested in vengeance, but I do want deterrence. Life in prison, for example, doesn’t just lock up the offender and keep him from offending again, it also presents an object lesson that crime doesn’t pay. In other words, it’s not that harsh punishments necessarily fit the crime, it’s that harsh punishments prevent crime. Criminals are “scared straight.”But the best evidence, summed up in this very handy and short National Institute for Justice publication is that neither the death penalty nor increasingly severe prison sentences deter crime. Criminals often don’t know the sanctions attached to crimes, and lengthy prison sentences don’t “chasten” prisoners and can in fact increase recidivism. Prison can often act like a crime academy, where prisoners make criminal contacts and learn criminal tactics.So what does work? It turns out that increasing the certainty of punishment rather than the severity of punishment has a far greater deterrent effect. In other words, remove the sense of impunity and replace it with a probability of justice, and deterrence rises. Critically, this deterrence can often be accomplished merely by police presence. As the National Institute for Justice states, “Strategies that use the police as ‘sentinels,’ such as hot spots policing, are particularly effective. A criminal’s behavior is more likely to be influenced by seeing a police officer with handcuffs and a radio than by a new law increasing penalties.”I think we can all agree that a police presence is infinitely preferable to prison as a guarantor of public safety—assuming, of course, the police officer is well-trained and accountable to the rule of law. I’ll be honest, I’ve got a bit of a personal connection to this conversation, a connection that I’d never had before. In 2019 my wife was blessed to work with Alice Johnson on her autobiography, After Life. Johnson, readers may remember, was a first-time drug offender who was sentenced to life in prison at the height of the war on drugs. Donald Trump granted her clemency (and later pardoned her) after Kim Kardashian pleaded her case in the White House. It was one of Trump’s best moments in office. Alice stayed at our house for a short time while she finished her book, and our conversations helped teach me that there is a tremendous need for an interfaith, cross-partisan coalition of Americans who can see that crime imposes real costs on communities, while also understanding that vengeance and mass incarceration is toxic to the culture and soul of a nation. A coalition has to stand in the gap between “defund the police” and “lock them up,” between criminal rule and police impunity, and articulate a vision of justice that preserves public order, human dignity, and individual liberty. And in fact, there are Americans who have been doing just that. They’ve set aside partisanship to create surprising coalitions. Trump was elected after one of the toughest law-and-order campaigns in modern memory, yet he also signed the First Step Act. The federal prison population declined on his watch. Texas, despite its long reputation for harsh law enforcement, has been a national leader in prison reform. Yet now we face a challenge. In a single extraordinary year, the terrible scourge of violent crime came roaring back, oppressing and terrifying the citizens of countless communities across the nation. It’s a challenge we can face, using the knowledge gained from bitter experience, combined with the courage and good will of citizens who seek justice, but we cannot—we must not—allow fear to drive us to repeat and compound the national injustices of the very recent past.One last thing …There’s not much to say to introduce this song. It’s just great. Enjoy:

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Catholic socialist who writes on topics as varied as capital punishment and mothering two children while in her twenties. Her work is uniquely marked by her ruby-red Texas upbringing, the elite professional world she now inhabits, and her deep sense of morality, which draws from both Christian theology and left-wing politics.In a wide-ranging conversation, Elizabeth Bruenig and Yascha Mounk debate the importance of dialogue across moral perspectives, whether wokeness bears any resemblance to theology, and how religious conviction can give rise to an authentically liberal defense of free speech.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You're in a really interesting political space in the United States. You're an outspoken leftist. You, if I'm remembering correctly, strongly advocated for the election of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries in 2020. And at the same time, you're one of the favorite targets of a lot of the online left, because you don't quite play by the book. How do you see yourself in this political moment?Elizabeth Bruenig: I am a Christian leftist, the type of person who's fairly recognizable in Europe, Latin America, and even parts of Asia as a fairly familiar political type. This is the sort of Christian democrat-type figure who builds coalitional governments with socialist parties. Christian, of course, but also welfarist. These are huge parties in the Nordic countries and in Germany. Historically, there have been parties of this kind, even in the UK and other Anglophone countries, that have been fairly successful. It's just that we don't have them in the United States: we only have this two-party monopoly that's been reigning for a while, though the commitments of the parties have shifted back and forth over time. But it's unusual in the United States for a lot of reasons. And so I think it winds up being sort of unintelligible, but that's where I locate myself: I'm just a fairly straightforward Christian social democrat.I often talk to my husband about this because he's similarly far left in such a way as to be essentially politically celibate. When you're a socialist in the United States, that's what it is: it's being politically celibate. You're fairly disempowered. And so it becomes sort of laughable, all of these arguments we have on the American left among this extremely tiny minority of people over who's a Leninist, who's a Trotskyist, who's actually operating in the vein of the honorable socialist tradition and who's a wrecker and so forth, because all of us are equally impotent in actual American politics.Mounk: Broadly speaking, if the United States were to move a little bit further towards the welfare state policies of Denmark or Sweden, that would be a good thing, and I'm on board. But then at times, [Sanders supporters] really are saying “no, we're socialists in the deepest sense.” There is a strategic ambiguity about what socialism really means in that context: on one side there’s a sort of, “We just want a generous welfare state” and on the other side, there’s “we want to end capitalism.” And to me, those are two very, very different propositions.Bruenig: I do think clarity is worthwhile, [but] it's difficult to get the momentum you need to achieve clarity in a movement when you're so far estranged from the levers of power. Because what momentum do you have to really force people to make these difficult choices? You can say, “it's harming the movement, it's making it difficult for us to gather ‘converts’ that we have this level of turmoil and unclarity.” But it's difficult for us to gather converts because the chances of us actually having an actionable impact on politics is so small. That's the issue. But in terms of clarity being worthwhile, I take your point. In this case, in politics, it's better to be clear than unclear. And I would say that, like my husband, there is in this household a market socialist impulse that's very strong, with at least a short-term agreement in favor of a generous welfare state with an underlying market structure and a significant portion of the country's wealth that is democratically controlled without destroying the underlying market mechanism. That's the short-term goal. My husband tends to talk about sovereign wealth funds, or ways of setting aside portions of the country's wealth that have democratic elements, as a way to accomplish that without bloody revolution or something along those lines. And I think that sounds doable, peaceable and beneficial.Mounk: So help listeners, who may be a little less familiar with you, understand why everything you have said so far, which it sounds like the left would be pretty happy with, nevertheless makes you a kind of controversial figure on the left in the United States?Bruenig: Yes. It isn't as though everyone must agree with my politics, and I try not to assume that all of my critics simply respond to the aesthetics of who I am or something, because it's true that a lot of my critics are simply further left than I am. And there are those on the American left, as you mentioned, who believe that workers should entirely own the means of production, and so on and so forth. And they are more traditional socialists, those who envision a much more revolutionary approach than operating through the typical democratic channels and preserving the peace. Peace is an enormous thing for me as a Christian. I cannot get on board with anything explicitly marketed as, or envisioned to be, a sort of bloody revolution.Mounk: I'm not a Christian, but I'm somebody who comes from a family that has been in the wrong place at the wrong time for many generations. And so, I think my most conservative instinct is the recognition that the best that politics has achieved in the history of the world is far less significant than the worst that it has inflicted. While we should always strive for improvement, we need to have an awareness of just how horrible things can get when they go wrong.Bruenig: Right? I just have a real problem getting on board with that sort of thing. So there are legitimate reasons to object to my politics, and I don't want to downplay that, but there are also issues with the cultural side of who I am. My husband and I are from Texas, in the southern part of the United States. It's the best state. We're from the northern part of Texas, we grew up around the block from each other. We went to the same gigantic public high school in North Texas where we met on our debate team. I was 16. He was 18. He was my debate team captain. And we sort of agreed right then and there that we were going to get married. This wasn't totally unusual in the culture where we were brought up. But we were smart kids; my husband won a full scholarship to the University of Oklahoma because he did so well on a standardized test. He was a National Merit Scholar. I went to Brandeis. And he went to Boston University Law School where he won another very large scholarship for public service because he wanted to do labor law. I won a Marshall Scholarship to go to Cambridge and study Christian theology and got my master's in philosophy.And so the fact of the matter is that we were two people who came out of North Texas, this culture that's traditionally conservative. It's a red state. It's a Republican state. It's a very Christian area. Actually, we come from Tarrant County in Texas, which is the most reliably red county in Texas. And then we wind up on the East Coast, which is very blue, very liberal, very highly educated, not necessarily especially religious, especially in the professional classes, and we just don't quite fit in. We got married as soon as we were done with our education. We dated the whole time. My husband's the only person I've ever dated. We married when I was 23. I got pregnant when I was 24. We had our first baby when I was 25. We had our next when I was 28. Now I'm 30. And we've been married for seven years.I think there's a style in the northeast of being kind of fashionably busy and frustrated with your home life. And this is actually the part of my life I'm happiest with.Mounk: It annoys you when people liken wokeness to a religion, and it annoys you as a religious person. Explain what the argument is for the parallel between wokeness and religion, and why you don't buy that.Bruenig: Yes, I do get requests to write about it, not infrequently. And there has been a huge amount of writing already on the proposed parallels between wokeness and religion. And it always strikes me as a little bit insulting when one comes to my inbox, because I guess there are three ways you can make this argument: One is that wokeness is like a religion because it's dogmatic and it's not subject to criticism, and you just blindly believe it like an idiot. As a religious person, I think, “No, thanks. That's not precisely how I conceive of being religious.” The other is that wokeness fulfills some kind of need that religion fulfills for other people. This is sort of the Durkheimian analysis of what religion is and what it's doing—again, as a religious person, that’s not precisely how I conceive of what the faith is, and also I’m not totally certain that that's unique to either religion or wokeness. And then the last is that wokeness is supplanting religion in society, or in the lives of people who are heavily invested in it. And this is an argument frequently made by other religious people about wokeness. And I'm not sure that I agree with any of those analyses, but I disagree with them in different ways, and to different degrees.[...] I would put it this way: Religion, such as it is—religion as a concept—is this epiphenomenon of liberalism, or an epiphenomenon of the Enlightenment. There needed to be this category of stuff that was sanded down if it was to be included in the public political sphere, because it was causing too many problems to be included fully in politics, with the Hundred Years' War, and so forth. And so in the case of metaphysical liberalism à la Rousseau, the idea was just to transform religion into something that can cooperate with liberal democracy. And so you essentially just abolish all the religious institutions and the specificity of Christianity, you take out all of the institutions and the organizations and you get to a functionally private and entirely individualized and personally-mediated spirituality. And that's really all that's left of it. This is the kind of moral therapeutic deism that people often complain about in Christian circles these days. And that's all that's left of the Christian tradition and the metaphysical liberal tradition. If you want to tell me that wokeness is similar to moral therapeutic deism—that's just a truism. That's just stating a fact.Mounk: The criticism seems to be that wokeness fulfills some of the needs fulfilled by religions—it gives people a pretense of meaning, and it allows them to believe in positions that actually aren't very well justified or logically coherent.Bruenig: I imagine that a lot of people—a lot of secular liberals—believe that I, a Catholic, simply believe what I believe because I have a fear of the unknown or something like that, and that it fulfills a lot of needs in me. Nevermind that I, a Catholic, agree to live with many more mysteries that I willingly identify as mysteries, and approach as mysteries, and worship as such. But never mind all that. With the woke stuff: whatever their reasons for having fallen into this kind of intellectual trap, they are making statements about what they want, and what should happen politically, which are considered beyond reproach. You're not really allowed to criticize them without enduring a bunch of acrimony and attacks, as though you're criticizing someone's very religion, their very concept of right and wrong. And they're doing this from a position of unimpeachable integrity despite the fact that they have not made adequate arguments about the priors, and about why the rest of society should agree with them. And so I do think it is similar in some way to almost imposing a kind of theocracy in that they're able to make claims about moral fact and the impacts that those moral facts should have on politics without justifying them in the way that we expect people to justify those things and be subject to public criticism in a liberal democracy.Mounk: The political philosopher John Rawls essentially said “You, as a Christian, should be speaking in such a way that people who don't share these deep moral priors can understand what you're talking about; put your reasons forward in a secular way.” His fear isn't really something like theocracy—it’s about facilitating a kind of overlapping consensus between viewpoints, facilitating a conversation.But I think when people criticize wokeness, it's more like they criticize what they regard, fairly or unfairly, as a kind of incipient theocracy. “I just have to defer because you’re the high priest, and I have no ability to contest what you're saying without serious risk to my total standing and my career.”Bruenig: Yes, and one of the weaknesses of political liberalism is that it thinks about a diverse array of things as one thing. Liberalism creates this category that is “religion,” and it's just things that are too radioactive for politics.The parts of liberalism that I have always been bullish on are freedom of expression and inquiry. I'm a Christian, and I have no problem with these things. Because I believe that God is the truth, and truth will set you free. I don't have any problem with free inquiry and free expression, because I believe that if you earnestly pursue the truth, you're only going to find God waiting for you. Just earnestly keep searching, and that's all you'll find. Maybe you don't identify it as such, but that's what you actually happen upon. This is Platonism. And I'm a Christian Neoplatonist. You're just going to find the forms, right? So I have no problem with that.But free speech is actually the half of liberalism that's taken the hit, and the private property, capitalism shit is stronger than ever. That part of liberalism is doing just fine, while the freedom of expression and free inquiry part of liberalism is sort of crumbling. So now I find myself in the weird position of Nathan Hale in “The Crucible”, who shows up initially gung ho in favor of witch-hunting, and then by the last act is like, “Wait, this has gone way off the rails.” People have decided to go nuts on completely the wrong part of liberalism. The part that does all the vicious exploitation and destruction of human life and the wanton immiseration of everyone—that part they let off scot-free. It's the part that actually has led to tremendous amounts of progress that they have decided to attack.Mounk: What is it that you find attractive about the free speech and free inquiry part of liberalism?Bruenig: I think that people are natural philosophers, meaning we're made to search for meaning in the universe, and that an epiphenomenon of that search is the creation of art and expression. I think we're naturally social, and the way that we express our sociality is largely by expression. And I just have a really hard time imagining a justification for using the power of the state, especially a concentrated super-powered state such as we have now, to punish expression. I certainly think there are limits there. I believe there are just fucking worthless forms of expression. And there are forms of expression that have costs that are too high for the value of the thing being expressed, and these are the very typical examples you probably already have in your head: shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater.Mounk: If you think about how you organize a society in which you can be a deep, devoted Christian, and I can be an agnostic, and somebody else can be a convinced atheist—and we can share polity and be compatriots in a meaningful way—I think you wind up with a liberal account of individual rights. For me, there's a version of liberalism that isn't anti-religious, that doesn't deny the primacy that religion plays in the lives of many people; it actually flows from the recognition of its importance, and I want to know whether you would accept that version of liberalism.Bruenig: I'm okay with that. We all get older. When I was younger, I had hotter opinions on everything. What I can say is that I've seen this integrist thing on the Catholic right, the view that Catholics should accept nothing less than the full integration of the Catholic Church and the state, and zero separation between church and state. I've also reported deeply on the Catholic sex abuse crisis. These people can't run a fucking railroad, man. They're not going to be able to run a country. Mixing the chocolate and the peanut butter here is not going to be good. I think a Christian’s job is to do the most amount of good they can with the dispensation they find themselves in. So I have begun to think, “What is the most good I can do in the dispensation I find myself in?” I find myself in a rapidly polarizing liberal democracy that's becoming somewhat dysfunctional, because of this brittleness, in this state of polarization. And so my interest has become trying to soften these chords that have become brittle between people and raising the tensile strength of the relationships between citizens, as a journalist and a member of the press—which is an important estate in this society—and trying to do what I can to act against a fairly stupid and self-perpetuating cycle of polarization that has to do with people losing face and trying to save face. And that's what I think the duty of Christians has to be at this point. The liberal democracy that we have is what we have. And liberal democracies are interesting. They are a little bit radioactive, in that when they're functional, they're safe. When they start to degrade, you don't know what you're going to get. I don't really know what's going to happen if our liberal democracy, under the forces of this polarization and brittleness that we are now encountering, starts to degrade too much. But I don't want to find out. I would like it to remain stable. I would like things to change politically. Like you said, I'm a Bernie Bro. I think that having a stronger welfare state would be great. I think having higher social trust would be fantastic. These are things that I deeply desire. And I want peace. And I think you know that if I tweeted out right now: “I want a generous welfare state. I want to abolish poverty. I want peace. I want forgiveness. I want high social trust. And I want strong relationships between the citizenry,” that would piss people off.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: http://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Donald Trump’s rise to power generated a flood of media coverage and academic research on authoritarianism—or at least the kind of authoritarianism that exists on the political right. Over the past several years, some researchers have theorized that Trump couldn’t have won in 2016 without support from Americans who deplore political compromise and want leaders to rule with a strong hand. Although right-wing authoritarianism is well documented, social psychologists do not all agree that a leftist version even exists. In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called “Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate.”  An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld—with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”Published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Costello team’s paper is persuasive, to the point that you have to wonder: How could past researchers have overlooked left-wing authoritarianism for so long? “For 70 years, the lore in the social sciences has been that authoritarianism was to be found exclusively on the political right,” the Rutgers University social psychologist Lee Jussim, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told me in an email. In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, an inquiry into the psychological makeup of people strongly drawn to autocratic rule and repressive politics, the German-born scholar Theodor W. Adorno and three other psychologists measured people along dimensions such as conformity to societal norms, rigid thinking, and sexual repression. And they concluded that “the authoritarian type of human”— the kind of person whose enthusiastic support allows someone like Hitler to exercise power—was found only among conservatives. In the mid-1990s, the influential Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer described left-wing authoritarianism as “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology—an occasional shadow, but no monster. ” Subsequently, other psychologists reached the same conclusion.[Zeynep Tufekci: America’s next authoritarian will be much more competent]The Trump era likely deepened psychology’s conventional wisdom that authoritarians are almost always conservatives; the insurrection at the Capitol earlier this year showed the urgency of understanding the phenomenon. And yet calls to de-platform controversial speakers and online campaigns to get people fired for heterodox views suggest that a commitment to open democratic norms is eroding, at least in some quarters, on the left. Much further along the authoritarian continuum, people purporting to be antiracist or antifascist protesters have set fires and committed other acts of violence since the summer of 2020. These acts stop short of, say, the 1970s bombing campaign by the far-left Weather Underground, but surely call the prevailing wisdom into doubt. (Supporters of revolutionary regimes overseas have demonstrated even more clearly that some people on the left try to get their way through intimidation and force.)But one reason left-wing authoritarianism barely shows up in social-psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole. Scholars who personally support the left’s social vision—such as redistributing income, countering racism, and more—may simply be slow to identify authoritarianism among people with similar goals.One doesn’t need to believe that left-wing authoritarians are as numerous or as threatening as their right-wing counterparts to grasp that both phenomena are a problem. While liberals—both inside and outside of academia—may derive some comfort from believing that left-wing authoritarianism doesn’t exist, that fiction ignores a significant source of instability and polarization in our politics and society.In the research that led to The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno and his colleagues developed an “F-scale” to measure fascist attitudes; Altemeyer later drew on that research to create a scale measuring right-wing authoritarianism by assessing certain personality traits—including feelings of aggression, willingness to submit to authority, and a quality that he called “conventionalism”—not strictly related to a subject’s political conservatism. Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarian (RWA) scale remains “the gold standard for conceptualizing and evaluating all kinds of authoritarianism,” Costello told me. But when Altemeyer later turned his attention to left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), he erroneously assumed it would be identical to the right-wing variety. His LWA scale barely identified any subjects. He either had set the threshold too high or was measuring the wrong attitudes.Costello and his colleagues started fresh. They developed what eventually became a list of 39 statements capturing sentiments such as “We need to replace the established order by any means necessary” and “I should have the right not to be exposed to offensive views.” Subjects were asked to score the statements on a scale of 1 to 7. They showed a trait that the researchers described as “anti-hierarchical aggression” by agreeing strongly that “If I could remake society, I would put people who currently have the most privilege at the bottom.” By agreeing with statements such as “Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called ‘right’ to free speech,” they showed an attitude called “top-down censorship.” And they showed what the research team called “anti-conventionalism” by endorsing statements such as “I cannot imagine myself becoming friends with a political conservative.”[Read: The world is experiencing a new form of autocracy]Costello and his colleagues administered their new LWA index and Altemeyer’s original RWA scale. Some differences emerged between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians; the former were more open to new experiences and more receptive to science than the latter, for example. Yet the new research documents a large overlap in authoritarian structure—a “shared psychological core,” as the authors put it—between high scorers on their new LWA index and Altemeyer’s original RWA scale, which they also administered. The authoritarian mentality, whether on the far left or far right, the authors conclude, exerts “powerful pressures to maintain discipline among members, advocate aggressive and censorious means of stifling opposition, [and] believe in top-down absolutist leadership.”Perhaps the most compelling insight emerged from trying to separate subjects’ political ideology from authoritarianism. They found that your ideology—whether you’re a progressive or a Trumpist—is a secondary matter. Whether your values and beliefs are authoritarian or not is more fundamental. “Psychologically speaking, authoritarianism comes first,” Costello told me.I asked Costello whether left-wing and right-wing authoritarians exist in equal proportions. “It is hard to know the ratio,” he said, making clear that a subject’s receptivity to authoritarianism falls on a continuum, like other personality characteristics or even height, so using hard-and-fast categories (authoritarian versus nonauthoritarian) can be tricky. “Still, some preliminary work shows the ratio is about the same if you average across the globe,” he said. In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada.That psychologists have been slow to acknowledge the existence of left-wing authoritarians at all is “puzzling,” Costello and his colleagues write. But here, I would argue, is where the pronounced leftward orientation of researchers in social psychology comes in. “Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years,” according to a comprehensive 2014 review. Universities have long tilted to the left, but that tendency has deepened as education has become ever more highly correlated with political ideology. Whatever its origin, this political imbalance makes truth-seeking harder. Studies have repeatedly shown that investigators’ sociopolitical views influence the questions they ask. What’s more, ideologically concordant reviewers are more likely to rate abstracts and papers highly if the findings comport with their own beliefs, all else being equal.Ideological blind spots can indeed affect researchers with a strongly conservative or merely right-of-center outlook, but there just aren’t enough of them to matter. If academic psychology had more viewpoint diversity, the political biases that distort researchers’ work would all counterbalance one another. In American universities today, those biases generally point in the same direction. In psychology, the belief that only conservatives can be authoritarians, and that therefore only conservative authoritarians warrant serious study, has proved self-reinforcing over the course of decades.As both left- and right-wing autocracies metastasize around the globe—a “pandemic of global authoritarianism” that has “persisted and deepened” over the past 15 years, in the words of the Stanford sociologist Larry Diamond—and as the speed of radicalization of recruits has hastened, the modest cadre of researchers interested in the subject will likely grow. By recasting left-wing authoritarianism in more specific terms—anti-hierarchical aggression, top-down censorship, and anti-conventionalism—Costello and his colleagues offer other researchers and the general public a new vocabulary for discussing antidemocratic attitudes on that side of the political spectrum.[Read: A study guide to the rise of authoritarianism]The other virtue of the Costello team’s work is its status as a sobering demonstration of how social psychology’s dominant ideological orientation has constrained the scope of inquiry. “The dominant view of RWA as the ‘gold standard’ of authoritarianism writ large is not merely an influential theoretical framework or a historical quirk,” the authors write. “It limits the questions we ask as scientists [and] the types of theories we use to interpret our results.” For many years, what was perfectly obvious to many outside the field—that extremist mindsets exist on both ends of the political spectrum—was at best downplayed by the majority of social psychologists. An ideological monoculture within the discipline has damaged our collective understanding of political psychology—and, by extension, American politics.

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.The latest piece of evidence came out this week in the form of a set of murkily sourced PDFs, with their images a bit askew. The main one purports to be an unfunded research grant proposal from Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases, that was allegedly submitted to DARPA in early 2018 (and subsequently rejected), for a $14.2 million project aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses.” Released earlier this week by a group of guerrilla lab-leak snoops called DRASTIC, the proposal includes a plan to study potentially dangerous pathogens by generating full-length, infectious bat coronaviruses in a lab and inserting genetic features that could make coronaviruses better able to infect human cells. (Daszak and EcoHealth did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)The document seems almost tailor-made to buttress one specific theory of a laboratory origin: that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t simply brought into a lab by scientists and then released by accident, but rather pieced together in a deliberate fashion. In fact, the work described in the proposal fits so well into that narrative of a “gain-of-function experiment gone wrong” that some wondered if it might be too good to be true. Central figures in the coronavirus-origins debate were involved: Among Daszak’s listed partners on the grant were Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an American virologist known for doing coronavirus gain-of-function studies in his lab, and Shi Zhengli, the renowned virus hunter from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Shi Zhengli has not responded to a request for comment. A UNC spokesperson responded on behalf of Baric, noting that “the grant applicant and DARPA are best positioned to explain the proposal.”)There is good reason to believe the document is genuine. The Atlantic has confirmed that a grant proposal with the same identifying number and co-investigators was submitted to DARPA in 2018. The proposal that circulated online includes an ambitious scheme to inoculate wild bats against coronaviruses, carried out in concert with the National Wildlife Health Center, a research lab in Wisconsin. A spokesperson for the U.S. Geological Survey, which oversees the center, acknowledged this connection and affirmed the identifying number and co-investigators, noting that the agency’s involvement in the project ended with DARPA’s rejection of the grant proposal. “This is the proposal that was not funded,” USGS Acting Public Affairs Chief Rachel Pawlitz said after reviewing the PDF. She could not, however, vouch for the document in its entirety.Jared Adams, DARPA’s chief of communications, said in an emailed statement that the agency was not at liberty to discuss proposals submitted as part of its emerging-pathogenic-threat program, which was launched in January 2018, and that DARPA has never funded “any activity or researcher associated with EcoHealth Alliance or Wuhan Institute of Virology.” An article about the proposal published yesterday in The Intercept points to a tweet by Daszak last weekend, before the PDF was widely shared, that refers obliquely to the release of unfunded grant proposals.For anyone looking for the great, final vindication of the lab-leak hypothesis, this document will leave you wanting. Does the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have an unnatural origin? The answer hasn’t changed: probably not. But we have learned something quite disturbing in the past few days, simply from how and when this information came to light.The pandemic-origins debate is a big, confusing mess—but it’s an important mess, so bear with us. The hottest news in the leaked proposal concerns the researcher’s plan to sift through a large trove of genomic-sequence data drawn from samples of bat blood, feces, and other fluids, in search of (among other things) new kinds of “furin cleavage sites.” When these are encoded into just the right spot on the spike protein of a coronavirus, they allow that spike to be opened up by an enzyme found in human cells. According to the proposal, “high-risk” versions of these sites, once identified, would then be introduced via genetic engineering into SARS-like coronaviruses.[Daniel Engber: Don’t fall for these lab-leak traps]Why does this matter? We’ve long known that the presence of such a site in SARS-CoV-2 increased its pathogenic power, and we also know that similar features have not been found in any other SARS-like coronavirus (though we may find them in the future). For lab-leak proponents, these facts—combined with certain details of the furin cleavage site’s structure—strongly hint at human intervention. As the science journalist Nicholas Wade argued in an influential lab-leak-theory brief last spring, this genetic insertion “lies at the heart of the puzzle of where the virus came from.” The virologist David Baltimore even told Wade that the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” (Baltimore later walked back his claim.)As many scientists have since pointed out, the mere presence of the furin cleavage site is not dispositive of a Frankenstein experiment gone wrong. For example, the same genetic feature has come about, quite naturally and independently, in plenty of other, more distantly related coronaviruses, including those that cause the common cold. According to a “critical review” co-authored by 21 experts on viruses and viral evolution that was posted as a preprint in July, “simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain” the site’s presence in SARS-CoV-2, and “there is no logical reason” why it would look the way it does if it had been engineered inside a lab. “Further,” the authors wrote, “there is no evidence of prior research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.”But the apparent DARPA grant proposal complicates these arguments, at the very least. The engineering work that it describes would indeed involve such an artificial insertion. We don’t know whether that work was ever carried out—remember, DARPA rejected this proposal. Even if it had been, several experts told us, the genetic engineering would have happened at Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill, about 8,000 miles away from where the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak started. Yet now we know that the idea of inserting these sites was very much of interest to these research groups in the lead-up to the pandemic. “This is the first time they reveal that they are looking for these sites,” said Alina Chan, a scientist in Boston and a co-author of the forthcoming book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah and one of the co-authors of the pandemic-origins critical review, considers it “unlikely” that any such work would have gone forward in Wuhan. It would be unusual—even unethical—for a lab in China to pursue experiments that were originally proposed by one of its collaborators in the United States, he told us. Another co-author of the critical review, the Johns Hopkins University microbiology postdoc Alex Crits-Christoph, notes that the proposal doesn’t specify the virus into which any novel cleavage sites would be inserted. Unless the Wuhan lab had already isolated a SARS-CoV-2-like virus that could carry this insertion—which Crits-Christoph doubts, given the wording of the proposal—researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would not have had enough time between early 2018 and the fall of 2019 to construct (and then mistakenly release) the virus at the root of the pandemic.Still, these scientists agree that the very fact that these experiments were even on the radar raises significant concerns. “I recognize this revelation opens up legitimate lines of questioning that are serious and need to be addressed by the people involved,” Goldstein told us via email. Crits-Christoph told us that it pushed the existing evidence “one step closer to the lab-engineering hypothesis”—but added that, given the improbable timeline, it moved things “one step further as well.”With discussions of the lab-leak hypothesis being how they are, other scientists took a different point of view—one less skeptical of the idea that the experiments could have been carried out in China. Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist and expert in viral evolution at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, in Seattle, calls the timeline “plausible … certainly possible.” Chan points to other recent reports that the team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already been sampling very close relatives to SARS-CoV-2, and that it was testing, in humanized mice, genetically engineered SARS-like coronaviruses that were more infectious than natural strains. “WIV was fully outfitted to run all these experiments themselves,” she says.Like we said before, this is all a big, confusing mess. Even if it is authentic, as it appears to be, the DARPA proposal does not prove the lab-leak hypothesis, nor does it come close to changing the consensus view that the pandemic started from a natural source. Instead, what this week’s news really points to is how things got so messy in the first place—and it reminds us that things didn’t need to be this way. Why did this proposal have to be leaked by an anonymous whistleblower, in the form of a wonky PDF, to a group of amateur sleuths?In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak ridiculed discussions of the furin cleavage site and whether it might be bioengineered as the ranting of conspiracy theorists. Six months later, Daszak was involved in two major, international investigations into the pandemic’s origins, organized by the World Health Organization and the British medical journal The Lancet. Now it appears that, just a few years earlier, he’d delivered a detailed grant proposal to the U.S. government, with himself as principal investigator, that described doing exactly that bioengineering work. “It’s just shocking,” Chan said.The pattern here is unmistakable: At every turn, what could be important information has been withheld. Two weeks ago, The Intercept published 528 pages of documents, obtained only after a litigated FOIA request to the National Institutes of Health and a 12-month delay, that describe experiments on hybrid coronaviruses that some experts consider risky, carried out in Wuhan with the support of EcoHealth and the U.S. government. (These experiments could not have led directly to the pandemic. A spokesperson for the NIH told The Intercept that the agency had reviewed data from the experiments and determined that they were not dangerous.) In June, Bloom, the Seattle computational biologist, discovered that several hundred genetic sequences drawn from very early COVID-19 patients had been mysteriously deleted from a public database. (They’ve since been restored.) Other facts that could be relevant to the origins debate have trickled out from obscure student work and other surprising sources.Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation, these discoveries taken as a whole demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that good-faith investigations of these matters have proceeded in the face of a toxic shroud of secrecy. Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.”“I find it disappointing and disturbing that something like this is coming out in the form of a leak,” Bloom said. “If there’s information that is relevant or informative to this discussion—anything that people could conceivably think is relevant—it needs to be made available.”Until that happens, or unless that happens, the mess will only spread.

(Photo by Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images)Dear Reader (Including the few left who still think jokes about Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s swollen testicles are still funny),I have a very nice note from George H.W. Bush somewhere in my “files.”I use scare quotes around “files” because to call the scattered piles of policy effluvia and literary litter strewn around my office “files” is a bit like calling the retrieved contents of a Sbarro dumpster a “tasting menu.”Anyway, it was a brief thank-you note for repeatedly sticking up for him over the once infamous, now largely forgotten, “supermarket scanner scandal.” For you young’ns, here’s what I wrote about it 21 years ago:In 1992, President Bush visited a grocers convention in Florida. He was shown a new kind of checkout scanner that could read torn labels on supermarket items. The president reacted politely, as if he were wowed by the contraption. Even though the New York Times did not cover the event, they used the pool story and photo of a[n] “amazed” Bush on the front page- and made it seem as if the Republican president had never seen a normal scanner before. For an incumbent during a recession, the story was devastating. It sent a clear message: Bush was an aristocrat, out of touch with real Americans. The media loved it, and so did a grateful Clinton-Gore camp. “Here is a man who sees 20-year-old technology at the supermarket checkout line and looks like an ape discovering fire,” railed Gore.For years in conservative circles, this was, rightly, a go-to example of liberal media bias—and the outsized influence of the New York Times. The paper didn’t even do a story on it. It just ran a picture of Bush being impressed—how shocking that a famously polite politician running for office might act impressed when his hosts are showing off something they’re proud of—with the caption “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed.” (To its credit, the Associated Press has always been good on the unfairness of this episode.)But I don’t want to write about liberal media bias because I think its existence is settled and I find the topic fairly tedious. Though I will say that my position on the issue annoys both liberals and conservatives alike. Some liberals think I’m trying to duck the topic because I can’t prove this outrageous falsehood to their liking (I don’t want to debate that basset hounds have droopy ears, either). And some conservatives think fighting media bias is one of the core missions of conservatism—it’s certainly a core mission of conservative fundraisers. Again, I think it’s a legitimate issue, but there are plenty of folks on the beat—as I was for decades—and there are more interesting things to talk about.That said, sometimes an example of liberal media bias has significance beyond the issue of liberal media bias.For instance, remember the firestorm that erupted from the incident with the Covington High School kids on the mall a few years ago? It showed how social media can not only be a medium for deliberate misinformation, but for accidental misinformation as well.It also illuminated how poisoned and poisonous America’s political climate was in 2019. A confrontation between some kids wearing MAGA hats and an eccentric Native American activist—the sort of weird event that has probably occurred at big protests on the Mall and elsewhere thousands of times over the years—became a national media obsession, a cultural Rashomon moment, a cause of enduring nationalist resentment, and the impetus for some massive lawsuits, all because people had camera phones and social media accounts. The Wikipedia entry for an event that would have been a triviality prior to these innovations is more than 8,000 words—if you include the 122(!) footnotes. Liberal media bias played a big role, but liberal media bias wasn’t the most interesting thing about it.Horse hockey.Which brings me to the bizarre and thoroughly ridiculous reaction to a picture of a Customs and Border Patrol agent riding a horse.I get that the picture looked bad: White guy chasing a black guy with what looked like a whip. But it wasn’t a whip and there was no whipping of any Haitian migrants. The whipping motion of the reins is a standard practice for maneuvering the horse, not rounding up humans.This was clear very early in the development of this story, but not early enough. Vice News still has this tweet up:VICE News @VICENewsBorder Patrol agents are whipping Haitian migrants at the US-Mexico border in Texas.
US Border Agents Are Removing Haitian Migrants With Horses and Whips“This is why your country’s shit,” one Border Patrol agent on horseback yelled at a group of Haitian migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas.bit.lySeptember 20th 2021174 Retweets201 Likes Various activists and Democratic representatives took the bit, as it were, and they weren’t going to let go.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOCIt doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is President, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants.
Immigration should not be a crime, and its criminalization is a relatively recent invention. This is a stain on our country. Sawyer Hackett @SawyerHackettBorder patrol is mounted on horseback rounding up Haitian refugees with whips.
This is unfathomable cruelty towards people fleeing disaster and political ruin. The administration must stop this. https://t.co/BSjT91NSj0September 20th 20215,138 Retweets25,679 LikesMaxine Waters went so far as to say that what happened at the border was “worse than what we witnessed in slavery.”Please.It’s worth noting that “we” didn’t witness anything during slavery because slavery ended more than 150 years ago—a fact some people are determined to downplay. But going by these things called “books,” I think I’m on fairly solid ground that even if one of these CPB guys was using his reins as whip, a bunch of worse things happened during slavery—including, you know, the existence of slavery. But, again, the whipping didn’t happen.I am offended that I even have to say this, but there are profound moral differences between law enforcement agents trying to stop black men risking their lives out of desperation to become Americans—or at least live in America—and white men trying to catch black slaves in a slaveholding America. You can denounce Biden’s harsh policies at the border—or lack thereof—while still understanding that this is a profound and ridiculous category error.Of course, Jen Psaki fanned the flames. She called the images “horrible” and “horrific” and vowed various investigations into something that didn’t happen.Townhall.com @townhallcomPSAKI: Horses will no longer be used in Del Rio, Texas September 23rd 2021216 Retweets427 LikesShe promised that border agents would no longer use … [checks notes] horses in Del Rio, Texas, as if the horses were the issue. I mean, there was no whipping, but even if there was, why not ban whipping rather than equine transportation?But even now, as the facts are known and established, the momentum is too great. The legend has been printed, as it were. Joe Biden said today(!), “I promise you those people will pay.” He went on: “There will be consequences. … It’s dangerous, it’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world, it sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.”And he’s half right: It simply isn’t who we are because it didn’t happen.The undertow of thirst.Now, I could go on about Biden’s strange tendency to amplify racial narratives when he should be tamping them down. Recall that, in 2012, he told a largely black audience that Mitt Romney—Mitt Romney!—would “put y’all back in chains” because of… (checks notes again) Romney’s financial and regulatory policies. Just a few months back he said that the Georgia election law was “Jim Crow on steroids.” Again, you can have problems with that law, but even if all the exaggerations and distortions heaped on that law were true (and they weren’t), it wouldn’t amount to Jim Crow, never mind Jim Crow on steroids.But I think what’s more interesting is that this is just the latest example of how people are thirsty for drama, specifically drama that reduces—or exaggerates—our political conflicts into stories of heroic defiance against tyranny, authoritarianism, or white supremacy.During the Bush years, big swaths of the left convinced itself that we were living under some kind of despot. Never mind that if George W. Bush was half the tyrant the Naomi Wolf or Cynthia McKinney types claimed, they wouldn’t be allowed to call Bush a tyrant. One of the hallmarks of tyranny is that it’s dangerous to criticize the tyrant. If there’s a Michael Moore in North Korea, he’s working in a labor camp by day and crapping in a bucket by night—if he’s lucky. He’s not getting rich off of movies mocking Kim Jong-un.  I used to enjoy mocking the left about this kind of thing. And to be honest, I still do. But this paranoid style is now a much more bipartisan affair. When Joe Biden suggested that local public health officials might need to go “door-to-door” to encourage vaccination, a lot of folks on the right lost their minds. Now, you can disagree with the policy—which was already being implemented without any major blows to liberty by the way—but through listening to the Madison Cawthorn and Charlie Kirk types, you’d think this was proof that Biden was a dictator. The thing is, if Biden were a dictator, whining about people going door-to-door with public health pamphlets wouldn’t scare him off. And if Biden believed he was an autocrat, he wouldn’t be using OSHA to implement his convoluted vaccine mandate.Now there’s an argument that this kind of hair-trigger paranoia is valuable. My friend Charlie Cooke has made this point many times. A country that treats small intrusions into liberty like outrages is less likely to invite major intrusions. I think that’s right—sometimes.But in practice the dynamic often works differently, because people get so addicted to a specific theoretical narrative about tyranny that they become blind to practical dangers. Today, the reigning paranoias of the left are about white supremacy, the patriarchy, and voter suppression. Never mind that if the Pale Penis People had anything like the power—and evil intent—attributed to them, whining about white supremacy and the patriarchy wouldn’t be a lucrative vocation.It seems axiomatic to me that if you have a Handmaid’s Tale costume or vagina chapeau in your go-bag, odds are good that you are unhealthily eager to use it, and you’ll look for an excuse to do so even if events don’t warrant it. And if you think the Deep State has an evil plan to … (checks notes one more time) save the lives of Trump voters from a deadly disease, you might jump the gun and claim that the government wants to put vaccines in your salad dressing.Consider the left’s obsession with voter suppression. Even though we had historic turnout in 2020, Democrats insist there was massive voter suppression in an election they won. Meanwhile, the real threat to democracy right now comes in the form of the Trumpian effort to hand elections to pliant partisan hacks who will overrule the will of voters. You don’t have to agree fully with Robert Kagan and Kevin Williamson—though I pretty much do—to at least see that they are directionally right. Risk assessment isn’t about certainty, it’s about best guesses based on the known facts. But the Democrats’ approach to our elections is mired in inertia about a voter suppression narrative that was already mostly false prior to Trump’s election.Meanwhile, big swaths of the right are too busy obsessing over the supposed evils of vaccines—vaccines!—and critical race theory to notice they’re aiding and abetting this effort. They’re so locked into a narrative that rests on Trump’s insecurity that they’re more outraged by Liz Cheney’s truth-telling than the fleet of clown car Republicans perpetually making fools of themselves. (And even many of my friends on the right who say—and believe—the right things about Trump and the “Big Lie” stuff when pressed, reserve their passion for attacking the left.).Here’s a great example of the psychological undertow that pulls people to focus on the problems they want to fight rather than problems they need to fight. Breitbart’s John Nolte recently wrote that the reason why Trump voters are reluctant to get vaccinated is that they don’t want to give the left the satisfaction:The organized left is deliberately putting unvaccinated Trump supporters in an impossible position where they can either NOT get a life-saving vaccine or CAN feel like cucks caving to the ugliest, smuggest bullies in the world.Now, he’s got half a point. The way the left demonizes vaccine hesitancy among Trump voters, but only Trump voters, is irresponsible, ugly, and counterproductive. Never mind that refusing the vaccine to own the libs is no less stupid than refusing a life preserver while drowning because the sailor throwing it is a Bernie bro.But Nolte can’t stop there. To his credit, he acknowledges the “Trump vaccine” is a life-saver. But he can’t fathom the possibility that there isn’t some grand plan behind all of this. “The left’s morality is guided only by that which furthers their fascist agenda, and so using reverse psychology to trick Trump supporters NOT to get a life-saving vaccine is, to them, a moral good. The more of us who die, the better.”This is as crazy as anything Maxine Waters could come up with. It reminds me structurally of some forms of antisemitism. Change the facts all you want; the dots can—must be!—connected to evil forces plotting our destruction. It can’t be that we’re wrong. It must be that we were manipulated by sinister string-pullers using clever words to deliver our undoing. Occam’s razor would tell you that glib disdain from liberals for conservatives and Trump voters doesn’t need to be part of a mass murder plot. It’s their default mode. I mean, Nolte’s position presupposes that but for the potential benefit of tens of thousands of Trump voters taken off the voter rolls at the same time they’re taken off the respirator, liberals wouldn’t mock these people. What evidence is there for that?But in a world where the narrative carts are put before the factual horses, dealing with the reality of the situation is a betrayal to the cause. Occam was a cuck—and horses are racist. Various & SundryCanine update: I may be projecting because I hate D.C. summers with the blinding but dry heat of a thousand suns, but the beasts seem extremely happy about the cooler weather. Still, Pippa’s sense of entitlement grows unabated. She’s long had a habit of demanding a belly rub before she’ll get off the bed for the morning walk. Indeed, when I walk up to her, it’s like I have a magnetic field that repels her onto her back for some belly love. But now, she demands it before she will get treats. I might not cave to this extortion, but she needs to eat food with her pills, so she has me over a barrel. Gracie, of course, has similar demands. But she is a queen and I am her servant. Zoë, meanwhile, is becoming a very sweet girl in her middle age. And Angus stands his post.ICYMILast Friday’s G-FileCalifornia dreamin’ on Talking Feds with Harry LitmanMahna MahnaThe Stirewalt letters Hmm… Events, dear JoeLetting the days go by… The Remnant’s 400th episode spectacularAnd now, the weird stuffAncient aliensBlack PhillipDivine interventionSchool daysThink of the inconvenience

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 49
Critical Theory evolved out of a pathological hatred. This hatred isn’t just what you expect. Yes, the Critical Theorists hated capitalism, like all Marxists, but they hated something new about capitalism compared against their predecessors. They hated that capitalism works. Critical Theory, the tool of neo-Marxism, therefore grew out of the pathological hatred of the fact that “advanced capitalism,” as they call it, which is protected against monopoly abuses, allows the working class to “build a better life.” Having a good life, you see, stabilizes them. It takes away their revolutionary will. It makes them love their society and want to maintain it. It, in their view, turns them conservative, and this is intolerable. Prosperous, functioning societies became the target of their bid for cultural revolution in the 1960s. To execute this revolution, though, they needed a new base for revolutionary energy, a new proletariat to awaken to Marxian revolutionary anger. Herbert Marcuse, architect of the New Left, found that new proletariat in identity politics, laying the ground in which the Woke Identity Marxism of today would eventually take root. Join James Lindsay in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast to hear it straight from the sources and to understand more about how we got to where we are today.

The post The Birth of Identity Marxism as Critical Theory’s New Proletariat appeared first on New Discourses.

So what does a lost decade for American entrepreneurship look like? Well, here you go:

And a few numbers from the new Economic Innovation Group (EIG) report (which also supplies the above chart):
The country’s startup rate, or the share of all firms in the economy that were formed within the past year, stood stable at 8.2 percent in 2019, essentially unchanged from 2018 and only slightly above the all-time low of 7.4 percent reached in 2010, after the Great Recession. The startup rate remains one of the few economic indicators that never recovered from the 2007-2008 global financial crisis.In absolute terms, 2019 saw the highest volume of new firm starts since 2008 (although nearly 100,000 fewer than in 2006, the year with the most on record), for a total of 438,000 new firms launched. However, an off-setting 459,000 firms failed in 2019, meaning the U.S. economy did not generate sufficient new firms to replace those it lost. In other words, while the firm death rate recovers towards historical norms, the startup rate has been languishing.
The explanation for this “lost decade” highlighted by EIG is one of demographic stagnation — specifically America’s continuing transformation into “an older, slower-growing nation with fewer births, fewer immigrants, and fewer prime-age workers.” It’s a trend that suggests a number of policy responses, including increased immigration and higher labor-force participation among women and older Americans.
But there is some good news coming out of the pandemic. EIG notes that “new applications to start businesses hint at a subsequent explosion in entrepreneurial activity shortly after the pandemic hit in 2020.” That surge and follow-up boomlet was one topic of my August podcast chat with University of Maryland economist John Haltiwanger, who specializes in researching entrepreneurship. From that conversation:
Pethokoukis: Overall, how have entrepreneurs been responding to the economic tumult of this pandemic?Haltiwanger: They responded in a surprising way. In the Great Recession, new business applications and startups plummeted. And while we saw evidence that the same thing was happening in the first six to eight weeks of the pandemic, there has been a surge in new business applications starting last June. The surge was especially high last summer and then tapered off a bit in the fall. But in 2021, it surged again. Overall, seven of the highest months ever in the data are between July 2020 and now.What do you think explains that?New businesses are forming to enable remote activity between workers, businesses, and consumers. A full third of the surge in applications is in the e-commerce industry, and other sectors that have also surged also support online retailers, such as trucking and warehousing. We’ve also seen a huge surge in professional, scientific, and technical services — lots of computer design and software programming. Those are places where you might expect there to be a surge because there are new market opportunities to do business differently.I also think the businesses that started up last summer may be different than the businesses that are starting up this spring. . . . Perhaps the businesses that started last summer were the “necessity”/”transitory” kind, while the businesses this spring are a little more forward-looking. But we don’t have any evidence to determine that at this point.How should policymakers boost startups and dynamism?There’s room for improvement in policy areas such as non-competes and occupational licensing. And immigration reform, particularly at the high-skill level, is really important. The United States is a magnet for the best and the brightest to come to get graduate educations — in particularly in STEM — and we ought to keep as many of those highly trained individuals in the United States by permitting them to stay and thrive, and to start businesses.More broadly, policy is often all about incumbents. We often think enough about the businesses that aren’t there, but could be. And so we need advocates for new and young businesses. I’ve often said that the Small Business Administration would be better if it was the Young Business Administration — if it was asking, “What are the barriers to entry? What are the obstacles in this particular environment? Where are the market failures that are going on?”
Learn more: Chinese communists have no choice but to veer away from free enterprise. But we do. | Are the deep fundamentals of the US economy actually pretty strong? | US economy is being undermined by supply-side struggles
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People in attend a talk at the American Atheists National Convention in 2014. Many Americans remain distrustful of atheists, surveys show. AP Photo/Rick BowmerAt the end of August 2021, Harvard University’s organization of chaplains unanimously elected Greg Epstein as president. Epstein – the atheist, humanist author of “Good Without God” – will be responsible for coordinating the school’s more than 40 chaplains, who represent a broad range of religious backgrounds. 
His election captured media attention, prompting articles in several outlets such as NPR, The New Yorker, the Daily Mail  and the Jewish Exponent . Some portrayed the idea of an atheist chaplain as one more battle in the culture wars. 
But the trends that Epstein’s position reflects are not new. Non-religious Americans, sometimes referred to as “nones,” have grown from 7% of the population in 1970 to more than 25% today. Fully 35% of millennials say they are not affiliated with any particular religion.
They are part of a diverse group that’s changing ideas about what it means to be nonreligious. 
As sociologists of religion, we have studied these transitions and their implications. A recent study with colleagues at the University of Minnesota shows that, while Americans are becoming more comfortable with alternative forms of spirituality, they are less comfortable with those they see as entirely secular.
We argue that Epstein’s election represents a shift that shows the increasing visibility and acceptance of nonreligious Americans. At the same time, the commotion around his position shows many Americans’ lingering moral unease about atheism.
Epstein seems to understand this cultural dilemma and emphasizes his commitments to social justice and humanism, a philosophy that rejects supernatural beliefs and seeks to promote the greater good. In doing so, he is becoming a spokesman for something new in the American context: an atheism that explicitly emphasizes its morality.
Joining ranks
Atheism has long generated contention in the United States, going back to colonial times. But the late 19th century’s “Golden Age” of freethought brought the first widespread public expressions of skepticism toward religion. Lawyer and public orator Robert Ingersoll drew religious leaders’ ire as he lectured on agnosticism in sold-out halls across the country.
In the 1920s, the Scopes “Monkey Trial” over the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools highlighted struggles over religious authority in America’s laws and institutions. Meanwhile, Black skeptics of religion, often overlooked by scholars, influenced artists like Zora Neal Hurston and, later, James Baldwin. Many Americans know of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who successfully challenged mandated Christian prayer and Bible readings in public schools in the 1960s and founded the organization that became American Atheists. 
More recently, a growing number of atheist and humanist organizations have promoted the separation of church and state, fought discrimination, supported pro-science policies and encouraged public figures to “come out” as atheist. 
Black atheists, not always feeling welcome in white-led organizations, have formed their own, often centered on social justice. 

Humanist chaplain Bart Campolo walks past the United University Church at the University of Southern California in 2015. A handful of campuses, including Harvard, now have humanist chaplains.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

No God, no trust?
Despite this increasing organization and visibility, a large percentage of Americans do not trust atheists to be good neighbors and citizens. A national survey in 2014 found that 42% of Americans said atheists did not share their “vision of American society,” and 44% would not want their child marrying an atheist. Those percentages were virtually unchanged in a 2019 follow-up. 
These attitudes affect young people like those to whom Epstein ministers. A third of atheists under age 25 report experiencing discrimination at school, and over 40% say they sometimes hide their nonreligious identity for fear of stigma. 
As a chaplain, Epstein’s job is to provide spiritual guidance and moral council to students, with a special focus on those who do not identify with a religious tradition. He himself identifies as an atheist, but also as a humanist.
In U.S. society, humanism is increasingly accepted as a positive, and moral, belief system, which some react to more favorably than to atheism, which is perceived as a rejection of religion. And a handful of America’s college campuses now have humanist chaplains.
But atheism remains more controversial in the United States, and an atheist chaplain is a harder sell. Efforts to include atheist chaplains in the military, for example, have not succeeded.
Shift in tone
Epstein, a vocal advocate for humanism, appears to be pushing back against Americans’ persistent moral concerns about atheism identified in the research from the University of Minnesota. 
His book openly challenges those views by arguing that atheism is a morally anchoring identity for people around the world. He talks at length about how humanism can motivate concern for racial justice and has called for political leaders on the left to embrace the nonreligious as an important, values-motivated constituency. 
This marks a different approach from more militant high-profile atheists, particularly the Brights movement and the so-called New Atheist intellectuals like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. Epstein does not position himself “against religion” but seeks to cooperate with religious leaders on matters of common moral concern.
It’s too soon to say whether Epstein’s strategy of linking atheism to humanism, justice and morality will be successful in changing attitudes toward atheists. It is, however, likely to keep him in the public eye, a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion. 
[3 media outlets, 1 religion newsletter. Get stories from The Conversation, AP and RNS.]
Penny Edgell receives funding from The National Science Foundation and the Edelstein Family Foundation. Wendy Cadge receives funding from the Henry Luce Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust.

The announcement that the Pfizer vaccine appears to work in children ages 5 to 11 is welcome news for many families across the United States. Parents who expect their children’s classrooms to soon be full of vaccinated students shouldn’t be overly optimistic, though. Many moms and dads will wait to get their kids immunized, if they do at all—and that includes those who are vaccinated themselves.Although about two-thirds of adults and 83 percent of elderly Americans are fully vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated adolescents is much lower. The Pfizer vaccine has been authorized for 12-to-17-year-olds since May, but only about half of kids ages 16 and 17 are fully vaccinated. Only 42 percent of those ages 12 to 15 are.[Perri Klass: I’m a pediatrician. Get your child vaccinated.]Parents tend to be skeptical of new vaccines. Whenever one is introduced, many of them are initially hesitant to adopt it. Take the varicella vaccine, for instance. Approved by the FDA in 1995, it protects against the virus that causes chickenpox, an extremely contagious, common, and unpleasant childhood infection. Even though the vaccine was highly effective and showed few side effects, uptake levels were initially low, with only 34 percent of eligible adolescents fully immunized by 2008. In my experience with my own patients, parents were concerned about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, and weren’t convinced that chickenpox was a serious enough illness to warrant a vaccination. Immunization rates did improve over time. By 2018, about 90 percent of children had been vaccinated. But if history repeats itself, people hoping for parents’ speedy uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines may need to reset their expectations.Most American parents of small children are between the ages of 25 and 39. Only 55 percent of them are fully vaccinated. We can expect that parents who have chosen not to vaccinate themselves are not likely to vaccinate their children quickly, if at all. We can even expect that some who did get vaccinated themselves will still be reluctant, at first, to immunize their children. This is supported by the current difference in the vaccination rates of parents and adolescents. Even parents who are enthusiastic about the vaccines may not want their children to be first in line.Research bears this out. The C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health found that across the United States, more than half of parents of children ages 3 to 11 said they were unlikely to have them vaccinated against COVID-19. A Kaiser Family Foundation national survey found that only 26 percent of parents would vaccinate their 5-to-11-year-olds right away.Colleagues of mine at the Indiana University Fairbanks School for Public Health went further. They surveyed more than 10,000 parents across Indiana to see whether they planned to vaccinate their children and how they were thinking about it. More than 40 percent of parents of elementary- and middle-school children said they definitely would not get their children vaccinated against COVID, or would do so only if it were required by their schools or for other activities.[Read: Why is it taking so long to get vaccines for kids?]Ironically, more parents (60 percent) said they would not vaccinate their children if someone else in their household had already been infected with COVID-19. This could be because they assume that their children would have developed some natural immunity from the exposure, even if they did not get sick. Or perhaps the parent themselves had only a mild case, and therefore believes that COVID-19 isn’t dangerous enough to warrant vaccines for their children. This same type of thinking happens with influenza. Because most people don’t die from the flu, some adults don’t take it seriously enough and choose not to immunize their children.The IU survey also found that roughly 15 percent of parents would “wait and see” how things went. This cohort is a good model for the “malleable middle” of parents, who might be nudged toward vaccination. Some of them said they might be motivated by more evidence of the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness as large numbers of other children get their shots. Others said they would be moved by recommendations from a trusted health-care provider, or by the vaccination of other children in their social circles.Generally, the main reason children are vaccinated against other diseases is that schools mandate vaccines. When vaccines are required for school—as is the case with the varicella vaccine, for instance—vaccination rates increase quickly. When they are not—as is the case with the HPV shots—overall immunization rates stall at lower numbers.I’ll be surprised if many public schools require the COVID vaccines in the near future. Given that many states are barely enforcing school mask mandates, vaccine mandates for students seem unlikely. A reasonable argument could also be made that although Pfizer’s studies have shown the vaccines to be safe so far, requiring them will be difficult until much more safety data are obtained, as was the case for adults before any mandates went into effect. Any available vaccines will also only be authorized for emergency use, not approved, which will further limit mandates in some areas.Still, children getting vaccinated as soon as possible is important for their health and that of those they care about. I asked one of the researchers involved in the survey, Nir Menachemi, a professor and the department chair of health policy and management at the IU Fairbanks School for Public Health, what we might do to bring more parents on board. He said, “Parents, especially those on the fence, need different information than parents who already vaccinated their older children. Parents need to hear from their child’s doctor or other experts and peers from within their community that vaccinating against COVID-19 is a good thing. Up until now, most of the messages have come from media outlets, and that is not enough.”[Read: Parents are lying to get their kids vaccinated]That’s one of the key takeaways Menachemi and his team discovered through their work. Parents are used to getting their children vaccinated at their doctor’s office. If we want to persuade them to get their children the COVID vaccines, we will need to use the tools they trust. We have failed to do this again and again throughout the pandemic.The news is full of stories about parents desperate to vaccinate their young children, some of whom have even resorted to trickery to get it done before they’re eligible. We need to be careful not to let such anecdotes convince us that it will be easier to vaccinate kids than adults. The opposite is likelier true. We need to communicate the value of vaccination to parents before the vaccines are authorized for their younger kids, because immunizing children benefits not just them, but everyone around them too.

Grocery prices are rising. Meat prices are rising more than most other grocery prices. Beef prices are rising more than most other meat prices.But on the ranch, these are not prosperous times. Even as ground chuck costs more than $5 a pound at Walmart, ranchers complain that they are receiving less for their animals than it costs to feed them.Rising food prices are likely depressing President Joe Biden’s softening approval numbers. The U.S. economy has added almost 5 million non-farm jobs since Inauguration Day. Yet Biden’s approval rating has dropped into the mid-40s. In a recent Fox News poll, 82 percent of respondents described themselves as “extremely” or “very” concerned about the cost of living. More than scenes of chaos in Afghanistan, the numbers at the supermarket checkout may be weighing Biden down.On September 8, the White House unveiled an analysis of the problem—and an ambitious plan for action: $500 million in loan guarantees to smaller and regional beef processors.[Annie Lowrey: The inflation gap]What’s going on here is bigger than beef. It’s a test of a theory about the U.S. economy—and about a philosophy of government. The theory, expressed most powerfully in a 2019 book by Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal, is that the U.S. economy is in thrall to a few dominant corporations. In industry after industry, Philippon argued, a few companies have gained the power to keep prices high, wages low, and competitors out. The philosophy of government that follows from this theory is that the government should vigorously police competition, not only by means of traditional antitrust enforcement but also through a broader program of market regulation and intervention.  Market regulation went out of style in the 1970s, a victim of its internal contradictions. As academic critics such as Robert Bork argued back then: If, say, a supermarket gains market share from its mom-and-pop competitors by offering a wider selection at lower prices, you can understand why Mom and Pop don’t like it. But how is it “pro-competition” if the government intervenes to protect Mom and Pop from competitors who are doing a better job of meeting customer needs?That argument prevailed for most of the past half century. The Biden administration is seeking to change course—and beef is where it’s starting.To understand the choices facing the Biden administration, here are the two warring explanations of what’s going on with beef.[Read: Bidenomics really is something new]The first explanation is a classic story of supply and demand. The beef industry has been hammered over the past two years by a series of supply shocks. COVID closed many processing plants. Then, when the plants reopened, they had to work less efficiently, with workers spaced farther apart from one another. Like many other employers, meatpackers have had difficulty hiring enough labor at pre-pandemic wages, so they have had to pay more, which raises their costs.Meanwhile, U.S. cattle herds have been ravaged by drought across the American West. The 2020 drought was bad; the 2021 drought has been worse. More than one-third of American cattle have grazed under drought conditions in 2021, sometimes—as in Montana and Washington State—extreme-drought conditions. The aggregate national herd has shrunk in numbers, and the animals that have come to market have weighed an average of 15 pounds less than animals weighed a year earlier, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.Drought has also pushed the price of cattle feed to dizzying heights, raising beef prices even higher. The feed crisis explains some of the woes of small ranchers. Many cattle spend their early months on a ranch eating grass, then are shipped to a feedlot where they are fattened with corn and other grains. If the feed costs more, the rancher earns less.Over the past year and a half, surging demand slammed into this constrained supply. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government has pumped enormous purchasing power into consumers’ wallets. This extra money—plus consumer cutbacks on other kinds of spending—has enabled consumers to increase their spending at the grocery store; they spent $84 billion more in 2020 relative to 2019.If this supply-and-demand explanation is correct, then the right policy for government is: Do nothing. Higher prices will encourage ranchers to raise more cattle. Higher prices will enable meatpackers to pay higher wages. Higher prices will induce consumers to substitute other foods for beef. Supply and demand will equilibrate, as they always do. And this time, the high prices can serve another function, too: warning consumers of the pocketbook impact of drought-causing climate change.[Read: How meat producers have influenced nutrition guidelines for decades]But there’s another story to tell, and it’s the story the Biden administration is telling. Meatpacking is becoming a more concentrated industry. Just four companies process more than 80 percent of America’s beef. Even as prices moved down in the early 2010s and up again in the early 2020s, the Big Four packers have been able first to increase, then to maintain, their level of profitability. In less concentrated food industries, notably eggs, prices did not rise nearly as much in 2020–21 as did prices of meat, and especially beef.Without denying the supply-and-demand explanation altogether, the Biden administration wants to act to multiply competition in the meatpacking industry. It proposes committing $500 million in loan guarantees and direct subsidies to support smaller players against the Big Four. It hopes that more competition will raise the prices that packers pay to ranchers and cut the prices consumers pay at the store.That’s maybe a forlorn hope. A single large-sized meatpacking plant can cost $200 million, and take many months to approve and build. So $500 million will not buy much additional capacity. Worse, from a Biden administration perspective, meatpackers faced by intensified competition have another option besides paying more to ranchers or charging consumers less: They can squeeze their own costs by, for example, automating workers out of jobs.The architects of the Biden plan are uneasily aware that it rests on a lot of hopes, guesses, and optimistic assumptions. When pressed on the unlikelihood that their plan will deliver any near-term relief to either ranchers or consumers, they reply that the more fundamental goal of their plan is to improve the resiliency of the U.S. food system. Because meatpacking in general—and beef packing most of all—is so concentrated in a few huge plants, small shocks can disrupt the nation’s supply of meat.In August 2019, a fire badly damaged one of the seven largest meatpacking plants in the United States, near Holcomb, Kansas. At a stroke, the U.S. lost the ability to process 30,000 head of cattle per week. In May 2021, a cyberattack temporarily closed all of the U.S. processing operations of JBS, the largest meatpacker in the world. That attack disrupted one-fourth of the U.S. beef supply.Multiplying the number of smaller if perhaps less efficient suppliers can provide some cushions against such shocks in future. That’s the hope anyway, and President Biden has talked a lot about it. But how would that hope work in the real world? The Big Four came to dominate beef packing as they do precisely because theirs is an industry where larger size translates into lower costs and greater efficiencies. The Biden administration is not talking about turning the Big Four into the Big Five. It’s talking about supporting a lot of smaller competitors. What’s to stop the Big Four from undercutting them and driving them out of business far in advance of a crisis in which the extra resiliency might prove useful? When I put this question to officials involved in the Biden plan, they admit that the question worried the president too.There is one way that the resiliency project can work: if the additional capacity can somehow persuade consumers to pay higher prices. Craft breweries do not compete with Anheuser-Busch on price; they compete on taste. Smaller meatpackers could likewise compete as alternatives that are more humane to animals—or that deliver organic or grass-fed meat. But that means entering the market at the top, not undercutting from below. And because the main obstacles to this kind of niche competition are regulatory, allowing the niche competitors to grow will demand a deregulatory agenda of a kind very different from what the Biden administration seems to have in mind for meatpacking.Instead, there’s a real risk that the initial commitment of $500 million in aid and loan guarantees to small packers will expand into continuing intervention in the marketplace to keep smaller competitors in business in the face of the higher efficiency and lower prices of the big packers.As the saying goes, there’s no taking the politics out of politics. Rage at the big meatpackers burns especially hot among ranchers in Montana and the Dakotas. These ranchers are located far away from the feedlots of the Corn Belt to the south, and they feel themselves especially disadvantaged by the industry’s present structure. They even have their own industry group, which broadly supports the Biden administration’s plans. Montana has a Democratic senator right now; North Dakota had one from 2013 to 2019. Unsurprisingly, a Democratic presidential administration listens more carefully to the views of ranchers in states that sometimes vote Democratic than to those from states that less often do.Yet it would be a mistake to interpret beef policy as merely an expression of regional politics. What’s being proposed for beef is as an experiment in stricter marketplace regulation. If it works—or at least seems to work—for beef, it can be tried elsewhere. But what if it doesn’t work? We’ll be back where we were before the 1970s, when “pro-competition” often turned out to mean “a helping hand to the least capable competitors.” “Resiliency” is an appealing slogan. But what if it translates into plainer English as higher taxes and higher prices?

Market capitalism has passed the market test. It’s a socioeconomic system that has propelled humanity to a standard of living unimaginable 200 years ago. Calling that transformation in human welfare a secular “miracle” is hardly an overstatement. Amazing things have happened in any place that’s allowed or enabled even a smidge of economic freedom.

And that includes China. But now China has a problem. The success of its private sector poses a challenge to the supremacy of the state — or, to be more precise, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). And once you understand that the CCP’s continued supremacy is a non-negotiable, you understand why Xi Jinping is “trying to roll back China’s decadeslong evolution toward Western-style capitalist and put the country on a different path entirely,” according to a deeply reported piece by Wall Street Journal reporter Lingling Wei.
These moves are about a lot more than just reining in China’s version of Big Tech for competition reasons. Again, from the piece: “In Mr. Xi’s opinion, private capital now has been allowed to run amok, menacing the party’s legitimacy, officials familiar with his priorities say.”
Back in January, Xi said China was shifting into a different stage of development, leaving state capitalism behind as it now moves toward becoming a “modern socialist power.” That means market forces would be steered more directly by the CCP-run state to meet the goals that Xi and the CCP set, such as being global dominant across a range of emerging technologies and high-end manufacturing sectors.
In that context, for example, China’s recent crackdown on online video gaming is about a lot more than helping Chinese parents worried that their kids are neglecting their schoolwork. As technology analyst Dan Wang told Bloomberg recently, “Video games, children really shouldn’t be playing too many of those. They should be working in clean rooms for semiconductors instead. I’m exaggerating a little bit there, but I think that is a little bit more of the theme that China wants to do. Regulate the market better, and then to prioritize the right sorts of technologies.”
A man walks past a huge banner commemorating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Photo by Thibaud Mougin / SOPA Images/Sipa USA
Pursuing “modern socialism” presents many risks for China. It could quash or at least erode the country’s entrepreneurial energy, which has helped make China an economic superpower. There’s also the long record of failure of central planners in trying to create an economy that exists on the technological frontier rather than just playing catch-up. As Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, writes in a recent column:
Or consider the US obsession with the Chinese government’s so-called “Made in China 2025” plan, which channels subsidies to private firms in “strategic” sectors such as semiconductors. The jury is still out on whether the billions of renminbi spent to support such industries will prove effective, but the evidence so far is not encouraging. The dominant global semiconductor manufacturer is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, not the Chinese champion Shanghai Semiconductor. And until now, the huge sums that China has plowed into this sector have resulted in spectacular failures such as the Hongxin Semiconductor, and the emergence of close to 60,000 new companies that have no technological expertise but are seeking to capitalize on the subsidies. Such outcomes are all too common when governments subsidize industrial sectors, perhaps owing simply to a lack of accountability. After all, who is held responsible when billions have been wasted and the officials who allocated the funds have moved on to other posts?
But what choice do the Chinese communists have? They cannot permit a socioeconomic system that challenges their authority. And the private sector has now grown large enough and powerful enough that such a situation is at hand. So they are responding in the only way they can given that self-imposed constraint — continued authoritarian control. Not that their response doesn’t fit into their ideological priors. Lingling Wei:
Underpinning Mr. Xi’s actions is an ideological preference rooted in Mao’s development theories, which call state capitalism a temporary phase that can help China’s economy catch up to the West before being replaced by socialism. An ardent follower of Mao, Mr. Xi has preached to party members that the hybrid model has passed its use-by date. A 2018 article in the party’s main theoretical journal, Qiushi, or Seeking Truth, laid bare his belief: “China’s practice shows that once the socialist transformation is completed, the basic socialist system with public ownership as the main body is established. . . [and] state capitalism, as a transitional economic form, will complete its historical mission and withdraw from the historical stage.”
Of course, America and its leaders do have a choice of what to do next. They could take inspiration from China and involve the government far more into the US economy. There’s little doubt that China’s effort to subsidize critical industries and technologies has encouraged some American policymakers to push for more federal R&D to go toward applied technologies rather than just basic research, as well as to create a new tax credit for domestic investment into semiconductor manufacturing facilities. But the best thing American policymakers can do is make sure they support the American way of free enterprise and entrepreneurial capitalism with government efficiently supplying public goods, such as basic research. Oh, and drawbridge down, not drawbridge up as regards trade and immigration.
Learn more: What driverless cars tell us about industrial policy | What America can learn from China’s tech sector crackdown | The 21st-century degrowth movement makes the same mistake about human nature as 20th-century socialists
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(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)It’s one of the strange ironies of American politics. Few things are as politically polarizing as foreign policy, and yet it’s on foreign policy where the differences between the parties are often narrowest. Indeed, viewed from abroad, our allies and adversaries often think that the biggest problem with any new administration is the continuity of U.S. policies, not the change in direction.Consider two opinion articles on Biden’s foreign policy published late last week. Fareed Zakaria, writing in the Washington Post, asked, “Is Biden normalizing Trump’s foreign policy?” Michael Rubin, writing in the Washington Examiner, asked, “Is Biden’s foreign policy really different from that of Bernie Sanders?”Both foreign policy experts make a good case. Zakaria notes that, despite his campaign rhetoric, Biden is largely retaining Trump’s trade policies. A Canadian politician, Zakaria points out, even gripes that Biden’s “Buy America” provisions are more protectionist than Trump’s. The Biden campaign had pummeled Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran deal, but the Biden administration hasn’t restored the deal, arguing instead to “lengthen and strengthen” it. Biden has kept Trump’s Cuba policy and has even tightened sanctions.Rubin sees Cuba as one of the only stark differences between Biden and Sanders on foreign policy (the other being Israel). The most obvious similarity is on trade. Sanders, like Trump, hated the Trans-Pacific Partnership championed by Barack Obama. As vice president, Biden praised it, but now he’s following the Sanders-Trump consensus.Evidence of continuity or consensus doesn’t end there. On Afghanistan, though Republicans and many Democrats rightly criticize Biden’s shambolic withdrawal, the underlying policy is consistent with the stated goals of not just Trump but Obama too.Last week, the Biden administration announced a defense and trade agreement with the United Kingdom and Australia, dubbed AUKUS, that has enraged the European Union, particularly France, in no small part because it will cost them billions in submarine sales to Australia. This trilateral security alliance is a smart move. But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that it could have been hatched in the Trump administration.And on Friday, the Biden administration appealed a federal court ruling that suspended a Trump administration policy of using a public health law, known as Title 42, to expel migrants seeking asylum.Now, I don’t think Biden starts from the same ideological assumptions of Trump or Sanders. The fact is that ideological commitments and rhetorical broadsides tend to obscure the reality that presidents do not have the free hand in foreign policy everyone pretends they do.For instance, Obama saw the world very differently from George W. Bush, but he held on to many of the Bush administration’s most controversial national security measures, including a heavy reliance on targeted drone strikes and keeping Guantanamo Bay open. He even launched a “war of choice” in pursuit of regime change in Libya.Jimmy Carter came into office seeking deep defense cuts and boasting that he lacked the “inordinate fear of communism” that justified Cold War hawkishness. He ended his presidency asking Congress for a big increase in defense spending to “contain Soviet aggression.”Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan purportedly was once asked what he thought the greatest challenge to his administration might be. “Events, dear boy, events,” he allegedly replied.The nice thing about the word “events” is that it doesn’t draw a distinction between domestic and foreign affairs or between left and right. It’s likely that Biden doesn’t like turning away asylum seekers at our border any more than Obama did. But events at the border drive a political and policy necessity to stanch the flow, and there is no “left-wing” way to do that.The downside of the word “events” is that it excludes the role of interests and inertia. It may have been easy for Biden to rejoin the Paris climate accord—just as it was easy for Trump to leave it—but that’s because it is a largely symbolic and toothless agreement. Rejoining TPP—which America should do—would require crossing special interests Biden relies upon, risking alienating voters Democrats need and turning around a vast bureaucratic enterprise.This can be frustrating, but it’s also somewhat reassuring. Robert Gates, Obama’s Republican secretary of defense, famously said that Joe Biden was wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the last four decades. I concur. Trump, of course, had a deep reservoir of bad opinions as well, from wanting to confiscate Middle Eastern oil to defenestrating NATO to banning all Muslims from the U.S.I understand why you’d want a president you agree with to have a free hand on foreign policy, but shackles have their upside.

In 1999, the United States government filed a truly enormous lawsuit. Their adversaries were nine tobacco companies. Citing a law normally invoked in cases involving the Mafia — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act — the government alleged that Big Tobacco had engaged in a giant criminal conspiracy over the entire latter part of the 20th Century. The companies knew, alleged the prosecutors, that smoking was harmful, causing lung cancer among many other diseases — indeed, they’d even proved it, in their own secret research, which dated back to the 1960s. But they had apparently gone to extreme lengths to keep that evidence under wraps, all the while using PR tactics to deliberately confuse the general public about the dangers of smoking.
Has the same thing just happened all over again? In what’s been portrayed as a shock revelation — with lots of accompanying outraged commentary — the Wall Street Journal last week informed its readers that “Facebook Knows that Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls”. The Journal’s reporters had gotten their hands on some internal research done by Facebook, which owns Instagram. The conclusions, which had been kept private, are pretty scary: being on Instagram is making the site’s younger users begin to worry about how attractive they are, making one fifth of them feel worse about themselves, and exacerbating mental health problems. In the Journal’s exposé, the US Senator Richard Blumenthal and the psychologist Jean Twenge are quoted drawing a direct analogy from Big Tech to Big Tobacco: both have covered up research that their product, aggressively marketed to young people, is causing harm.

But the parallel isn’t neat. The research mentioned in the judge’s decision from the Big Tobacco case — which the nine companies lost in 2006 — was impressively extensive. It included experiments where cigarette tar was painted onto the backs of mice, causing tumours; a study of the effects of smoking during pregnancy on birthweight; studies on rats and rabbits exposed to tobacco smoke who developed tumours, emphysema and a whole panoply of other lung diseases; and studies that varied the strength of cigarettes to see if different “doses” led to different symptoms in humans.
Compare that to what’s in the “Facebook Files” (which, by the way, include leaks about several other topics, like the effect of social media on political debate, democracy, and human trafficking). The only evidence we’ve seen thus far is from surveys — teens filling in questionnaires about the effects they thought Instagram had on their wellbeing and mental health. The Journal also mentions larger studies, which link measurements of time spent on Instagram with survey responses, but no details are provided.
Suggested readingAre Twitter trolls mentally ill?By Tom Chivers
So, it would be as if Big Tobacco had sent a questionnaire to smokers, asking whether or not they’d gotten lung cancer, and whether they thought it was down to their smoking habit. If that was all we had, it would hardly be worth writing home about (or, indeed, in the Wall Street Journal): surveys might be an interesting spark for further research, but they’re a million miles from conclusive evidence.
“Correlation is not causation” is simultaneously the most hackneyed phrase and overlooked rule in science: although everyone’s heard it, people writing about studies — journalists and even the scientists themselves — routinely portray purely correlational or observational research as if it was an experiment testing the effect of one thing on another. This is the source of exciting headlines about how being optimistic makes you live longer, or that being more materialistic makes you depressed, or that drinking diet fizzy drinks makes it harder to lose weight — but no useful insight into the causes of health issues. In the Instagram case, the fundamental problem is that we don’t know whether more time spent on Instagram made the teen’s mental health worse, or — an equally-plausible opposite hypothesis — whether teens with worsening mental health for other reasons tended to spend more time on Instagram.
Asking people to introspect on the causes of their own mental health is hardly a reliable way of getting to the truth, given how much is going on in any one person’s life that might positively or negatively affect their wellbeing. Those who identify Instagram as the source of their sorrow could simply be mistaken — as could the vast majority of survey respondents, who said that Instagram either made them happier or had no effect on their mental health. So the headline splash of “Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic For Teen Girls” should, at the very least, have been: “Facebook Thinks Instagram Is Toxic For Teen Girls” — with a subheading: “On the Basis of Asking Those Teen Girls For Their Opinion”.
Suggested readingThe dangers of TwitterBy Jenny McCartney
Perhaps the fury sparked by the Journal’s story would’ve been more justified if the research we do have in the public domain conclusively suggested Instagram — or social media in general — really is causing harm. This was certainly the case for tobacco: even without Big Tobacco’s covered-up internal research, there was plenty of convincing evidence available in the scientific literature to show the harms of smoking, even before the 1960s. A classic paper from 1959 (reprinted fifty years later) shows just how far researchers had gotten: they used different lines of converging evidence — population surveys, lab research, chemical studies — to demonstrate that smoking, beyond a shadow of a doubt, caused cancer.
But, in contrast, the research on the effects of social media on wellbeing is radically more uncertain. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the aforementioned Jean Twenge — both strong proponents of the social-media-causes-harm theory — have put together a useful document summarising the available evidence on the question. And that evidence is something of a mess: an array of correlational studies of widely-varying quality — but all suffering from the same shortcomings as Facebook’s survey research — sits alongside a set of experimental intervention studies, where researchers have, for example, had randomly-chosen participants limit their social media usage and observed the effect on their mental health.
That latter kind of research has mixed results: Haidt and Twenge note that eight of thirteen studies showed a statistically significant improvement in mental health after social media use was limited. But science isn’t democratic: we don’t count studies like votes, since not all studies are equal in their quality — or even necessarily comparable. In this case, some were in undergraduate students and some were in a wider adult age range (few, if any, included teens of the age that people are now concerned about); they used a variety of different methodologies; and looked at a variety of different social media sites.
Of course, the question of whether Instagram (or social media in general) makes teens unhappy is a lot harder to answer than whether smoking causes lung cancer. The effect of smoking is notoriously massive: smokers are by some estimates between 15 and 30 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers (all research is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the smoking-cancer researchers were looking for a needle the size of the one on top of the Empire State Building).
The effect of social media, for the average user at least, is likely to be far, far smaller. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it does mean it’s much harder for researchers to find. Those testing for subtle effects on mental health have the unenviable task of teasing apart an incredible amount of noise — people’s general mental health; the daily fluctuations in their mood; how we even reliably measure happiness in the first place — to find what might only be a modest signal.
But Big Tech ought to see the current furore — the backlash against them keeping their research secret — as an opportunity to do some better science. They’re in control of the platforms: they could run all sorts of useful randomised experiments on social media use, with huge samples of willing participants, who they could follow-up across months or years to assess their mental health. Given the potential conflicts of interest involved, such research would have to be ultra-transparent, and would preferably be done in collaboration with neutral, non-industry-linked academics. But of course, who’s to say that such research hasn’t already been done covertly by Facebook and others, and just hasn’t yet been leaked to the Wall Street Journal?
And that, of course, is the real issue: we are suspicious of Big Tech — and, in many ways, rightly so. It was the industry’s secrecy, not the quality of its evidence, that drove this particular story. The fact that Facebook have been hiding something from us has made commentators overlook the obvious limitations of the company’s research — Haidt and Twenge, for example, updated their document with the “Breaking news” that the Facebook survey had been leaked, despite knowing that survey studies are worth relatively little. Still, drawing comparisons to Big Tobacco’s conspiracies is ultimately facile, even if it gets the blood pumping.
Nobody, then, comes out of this story looking good: not the secretive social media giants, nor the journalists exaggerating harms for attention, nor the scientists who’ve generally failed to provide us with a good evidence base. If they could all work together, of course, we might get some answers; but given their radically divergent motives, we might be asking the same questions a while.

What’s on Richard Thaler’s mind these days, now that more than a dozen years have passed since he and Cass Sunstein published Nudge and forever altered how individuals and organizations approach the challenge of behavior change? We spoke with him to find out.
For Thaler and the field of applied behavioral science, the intervening years have been busy. Thaler, of course, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2017 for his research on behavioral economics. More than 600 behavioral science units have been established in governments, businesses, nonprofits, and research centers around the world, each drawing inspiration from his research, with Nudge serving as a common language and touchpoint for those aiming to integrate a more realistic view of human behavior into their policies, products, and designs. 
In the summer of 2020, Thaler and Sunstein began going over old copies of Nudge to see if, after all that’s happened and all that they and the field have learned, the book might benefit from an update. It would, they decided, and this summer they released a rewritten version, Nudge: The Final Edition (the subtitle a good-spirited commitment device to never attempt something like this again).
The release of new Nudge provided the occasion for our recent conversation, but our conversation went beyond the book. We corrected the record on organ donation, he revealed why he wished the original subtitle included the phrase “choice architecture,” his thoughts on replication in behavioral economics, and what advice he’d give organizations looking to apply behavioral science. 
We hosted the conversation as a live, virtual event. Over 775 people attended, contributing thoughtful questions and comments. If you didn’t have the chance to tune in, or want to revisit the discussion, below I’ve detailed five parts of our conversation that stood out and kept me thinking after the event was over. 
You can replay the event on YouTube or listen to it on SoundCloud. My recommendation: take a page out of Katy Milkman’s playbook and temptation bundle it with a walk or that chore you’ve been putting off for the last few weeks. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28blZAIAWs0

https://soundcloud.com/editor-behavioral-scientist/book-event-with-richard-thaler-nudge-the-final-edition

Setting the record straight on organ donation
“We have also rewritten the chapter on organ donation, because everyone thought we supported a policy we actually oppose,” Thaler and Sunstein write in the preface to the new edition. “In case this is as far as you get in the book, please take note: we do not support the policy called ‘presumed consent’ … We really do believe in freedom of choice.”
The organ donation example in the original was one of the most memorable, widely cited, and, apparently, misunderstood sections of the book. We kicked off our conversation with Thaler by giving him a chance to set the record straight on where he and Sunstein stand on the issue. 
Thaler [8:22]: “When we started to write the book, we were aware of the famous chart by our friends, Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein, showing that defaults had a huge effect on whether people chose, quote unquote, to be organ donors. The conclusion that many people reached from that is that defaults are the answer to this problem. Just make becoming a donor the default and your problems are over. And people concluded, without reading the chapter I assume, that that's what we advocate. 
“And, truthfully, when we started to write the book, we thought, okay, that’s going to be a natural chapter because we were aware of that graph. But once we decided to dig in and look at the research, we came to a different conclusion and advocated something that we call prompted choice, which means ask and keep asking and make it easy and make it as easy as possible to join. 
“Now, why don't we advocate presumed consent? There are two reasons. One is we don’t really think we should be presuming anyone’s consent about anything. A second is that we don’t think there’s much signal value to people failing to opt out, especially in circumstances where almost no one does. 
“But the proof is in the pudding. And our reading of the literature is that presumed consent doesn’t work; that organs donated are on the order of magnitude of 25 percent higher in jurisdictions that have opt-in rather than opt-out.”
“We try very hard to straighten out the message here. And one of the themes in the Final Edition is, we have to be careful about the way we think about defaults. They’re not the answer to every question, and in particular, on this one.”
Climate change: “Nudge is part of the solution to almost any problem, but is not the solution to any problem.”
Climate change is one of the topics that received more attention in the New Nudge. I asked Thaler how nudges, an approach some have criticized for playing at the margins, might contribute to fighting climate change.
Thaler [12:57] : “Nudges help on climate change, but it’s too big of a problem. One of the things we say in various ways and repeat throughout the book is nudge is part of the solution to almost any problem, but is not the solution to any problem. 
“I am with, I think, 100 percent of economists around the world in thinking that step one, if we want to deal with this crisis, must be to get the prices right. Economists are right about some things. If you make something free, people consume too much of it. We see that at all-you-can-eat restaurants or, even worse, open bars. Right now, emissions are free, and people are acting accordingly. So whether it’s a carbon tax or cap and trade, we’ve got to get the prices right (now, that’s easier to say than to do). 
"Nudge is part of the solution to almost any problem, but is not the solution to any problem."
“Then, nudges can and do work, and we have lots of examples. Going back to the famous O-Power study where you show people how much energy you’re using compared to your neighbors or especially your more efficient neighbors. That helps maybe two or three percent.
“Now, you can say, well, that’s a small effect size. But we quote President Obama in this context. In the White House, where Cass served in the Obama Administration, the president liked saying, “Better is good.” So every two or three percent matters. It’s wrong to sneer at things like that, that intervention costs essentially nothing, and if we can take advantage of free opportunities to reduce emissions by two or three percent, that’s going to add up into something meaningful.”
What counts as a nudge?
You don’t search the internet, you Google something. You don’t blow your nose in a hankie, you use a Kleenex. You don’t throw a plastic disc, you throw a Frisbee. 
You don’t change behavior, you nudge behavior. 
Nudge has become a catchall term for behavior change. What does Thaler think about how the term nudge is used? 
Thaler [17:40]: “When we define nudge in the original book, and we haven’t changed it, we say strictly speaking, a nudge is something that affects our behavior without requiring anyone to do anything and without changing economic incentives. One way to think about it is nudges work on Humans, but wouldn’t work on Econs—our term for homo economicus, the fictional creature that exists only in economics journals and textbooks. 
“Of course, monetary incentives are part of the choice architecture. And I should say, the idea for calling the book Nudge is an idea we owe to one of the many publishers who turned us down. He said ... ‘It makes me think of the word “nudge,” which is kind of a fun word. And maybe that would be a good title.’ And I'm sure that it helped; certainly better than Libertarian Paternalism Is Not an Oxymoron. Tens of copies might have been sold with that title.
“I fought originally and this time for a subtitle using the phrase “choice architecture.” The original subtitle, back in 2008, was Nudge: The Gentle Power of Choice Architecture. 
“The reason I worry about that is people think of the book and the enterprise as tweaks. It’s like the O-power thing, or like the famous tax study where you talk about the messaging to people who owe money. Yes, that’s in the repertoire. But the reason I’m passionate about the organ donation thing is that we need to have a bigger picture of the choice architecture. And the same with climate change. 
"We need to have a bigger picture of the choice architecture ... I don’t really mind if people use a more general version of nudge in their vocabulary, I don’t own the word ... But let's keep in mind that it’s really a book about choice architecture."
“I don’t really mind if people use a more general version of nudge in their vocabulary, I don’t own the word. (There’s now a dog food called Nudges that Cass buys for his two Labradors, and for which we get no money, thanks to my lawyer coauthor who failed to take out trademarks and so forth. So we don’t control the word.)
“But let's keep in mind that it’s really a book about choice architecture. And practitioners and people in the business world and governments need to be thinking from that perspective.”
Advice for organizations hoping to get started applying behavioral science?
I asked Thaler to imagine he was advising a firm looking to apply behavioral science. He focused on sludge. Here’s what he had to say about private sector sludge and how he might advise companies around building trust. 
Thaler [34:35]: “There’s a lot of private sector sludge. People who follow me on Twitter know that I’m always ranting about the difficulty of unsubscribing. I had an op-ed in The Washington Post about this. I published it there, because they are the major news outlet that does not require you to call or sing a jingle in order to unsubscribe from their newspaper. 
“In the class that I teach about managerial decision-making, the advice I give to companies is that you shouldn’t do anything that you wouldn’t want to appear on the front page of a newspaper. That’s not original to me, people have been saying that for a long time … There’s a reason all these publications are using this “Hotel California” subscription method that makes it easy to join and hard to leave, and that is it makes money. 
“I think you can make money by being trustworthy, advertising: ‘It’s safe to subscribe, because you can unsubscribe with one click.’"
“I think you can make money by being trustworthy, advertising: ‘It’s safe to subscribe, because you can unsubscribe with one click.’ I wish more people would try it. I spent some time with a major Australian bank talking about this recently, and said that the only way to succeed at being a good bank is for people to trust you. And you have to earn that. I wish more companies in the private sector would take that as their mantra.”
Behavioral economics is not dead
In the audience Q&A, a viewer asked what Thaler thought of the recent fraudulent data debacle, a recent op-ed criticizing behavioral economics as “oversold,” and a blog post titled “Behavioral Economics Is Dead” that was making the rounds. Thaler mentioned that he’s in the process of revising an earlier book, The Winner’s Curse, which is based on columns he wrote in the 1980s for The Journal of Economic Perspectives. In the process of revisiting the book, he said that “what we’ve found is there’s nothing that fails to replicate.”
Thaler [39:11]: “Self-control problems have not gone away. Loss aversion is very real. Preference reversals exist. The ultimatum game, you play it anywhere in the world, if you offer 1 percent of the pie, you’re going to get turned down. I won’t go through all of them, but they all replicate and the effect sizes are all huge. That’s why I picked them to write about 30 years ago, and nothing has changed. 
“Now there are questions in the level of psychology about what causes that behavior. That’s a question for psychologists. To an economist, I’m done. Buying and selling prices are different. That, I’m calling loss aversion. 
“As for [the fraudulent] study, we tried to replicate this sign-at-the-top [strategy], at the BIT in London eight years ago. It didn’t replicate. I wanted to believe that result, but it didn’t seem to work. But notice, that’s essentially a priming effect. And priming effects are pretty subtle and small and don’t replicate. The fact that the experiments in that paper failed to replicate was not a shock to me.”
Watch or listen to the full conversationIn our conversation, we also covered why he’d like to see choice architecture units in addition to nudge units, the potential for the unethical application of behavioral science, the trickiness of notifying people when they’re being nudged, and what he’d do to help us get through the vaccination final mile. Watch the full conversation, or take a listen to the audio version.

Disclosure: Richard Thaler is a member of the Behavioral Scientist‘s Advisory Board.
The post Five Takeaways from Our Conversation with Richard Thaler about the Past, Present, and Future of Nudge appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Boghuma Kabisen Titanji was just 8 years old when the hyper-contagious virus swept through her classroom. Days later, she started to feel feverish, and developed a sparse, rosy rash. Three years after being fully dosed with the measles vaccine, one of the most durably effective immunizations in our roster, Titanji fell ill with the very pathogen her shots were designed to prevent.Her parents rushed her to a pediatrician, worried that her first inoculations had failed to take. But the doctor allayed their fears: “It happens. She’ll be fine.” And she was. Her fever and rash cleared up in just a couple of days; she never sickened anyone else in her family. It was, says Titanji, now an infectious-disease physician and a researcher at Emory University, a textbook case of “modified” measles, a rare post-vaccination illness so mild and unthreatening that it doesn’t even deserve the full measles name.The measles virus is ultra-infectious, much more so than SARS-CoV-2, and kills many of the uninoculated children it afflicts. But for those who have gotten all their shots, it’s a less formidable foe, which we’ve learned to live with long-term. That’s the direction that many experts hope we’re headed in with SARS-CoV-2 as it becomes endemic, as my colleague Sarah Zhang has written.We’re not yet at the point where we can officially label post-vaccination COVID-19 cases as “modified”; maybe we never will be. Some immunized people are still getting dangerously sick. But the shots are softening COVID-19’s sharp edges: On average, breakthrough infections seem to be briefer, milder, and less contagious. Among the fully immunized, catching the coronavirus doesn’t mean the same thing it did last year. “It’s a very different kind of infection than in people who are immunologically naive,” Lindsey Baden, an infectious-disease physician and COVID-19 vaccine researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told me.If this virus becomes as inescapable as the culprits behind the colds and flus that trouble us most years, we could all have to grapple with one of these infections, and learn that lesson on a personal level. That’s the social tax of a forever virus: Nearly everyone may eventually know what it is to get COVID-19—but a tamer, more domesticated version of its pre-inoculation self.Since the start, COVID-19 has been tough to define.Part of the problem is that COVID-19 is the disease, not the virus. Actual microbes, compared with the problems they cause, are arguably neater conceptual packages. SARS-CoV-2 is a knowable pathogen, a tangle of genetic material swaddled in a protein coat; COVID-19 has fuzzier boundaries, dependent on both the virus and how our bodies react to it. To understand that interaction, researchers had to, unfortunately, wait for a decent number of people to get sick—to observe the virus screwing with us in real time.Next to other airway-loving viruses, such as the ones that cause the flu and common colds, SARS-CoV-2 can be a bit of an oddball. It lopes almost indiscriminately throughout the body, invading a plethora of tissues; it winds up certain immune responses, while dialing others down, sparking bouts of inflammation that can afflict everything from brain to toe. COVID symptom lists that at first focused on the virus’s ground zero—the respiratory tract—eventually ballooned to include nausea, vomiting, changes in mental status, and chest pain. Infection severity operates on a continuum, and SARS-CoV-2 occupies its spectrum fully. Many people never realize they’re infected; others might have a two-day tickle in their throat, while some weather the disability of long-haul COVID for months; a fraction end up ventilated in the ICU.The experience of having COVID is now poised to splinter further, along immunological boundaries largely defined by vaccines. Inoculated bodies are less hospitable to SARS-CoV-2, making it harder for the pathogen to infect them; when it still manages to, it seems to be purged much faster, affording it less time to cause symptoms—especially the bad ones—and fewer opportunities to hop into other hosts. “I think about it as defanging the virus,” Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory, told me.[Register now to join Katherine J. Wu alongside CDC Director Rochelle Walensky at the 2021 Atlantic Festival]A recent study from the United Kingdom illustrates this well. Researchers surveyed nearly 4.5 million people through a cellphone app, asking whether they’d tested positive for the virus, and if they were experiencing any of about two dozen symptoms. Roughly 1 million of them had received at least one vaccine dose. Among the fully immunized, nearly all the symptoms—including fever, nausea, and brain fog—were rarer. Many of the cases were totally asymptomatic. Even rates of long COVID, which can sprout from initially silent infections, seemed to be substantially slashed by shots.These qualitative shifts aren’t easy to capture, especially with the studies coming out now that measure vaccine effectiveness in the real world. Most of them gravitate toward metrics at two opposite ends of the SARS-CoV-2 spectrum—how well the vaccines protect against all infections, or against severe disease, hospitalizations, and death—with less precision around the murky hinterlands of mid-level symptoms that exist in between. (The most serious outcomes are, to be fair, what vaccines are intended to prevent, and what inoculated immune systems are best at staving off, making that metric a pretty good one to concentrate on.)Focusing on the extremes, though, blurs the texture in the middle. In studies of effectiveness against severe disease, anything too “mild” to be considered a serious illness—warranting hospitalization, for instance—ends up collapsed into a single category. At the other end of the spectrum, counting all infections equates every positive test to a case of concern, regardless of how gentle the viral encounter was. All of this makes it very difficult to characterize what post-vaccine COVID actually is—and to know whether immune responses are diluting the disease’s sting. “Just looking at the rate … loses that point,” Holly Janes, a biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told me. The experience of infection can be “considerably different for someone who was vaccinated.”[Read: We’re asking the impossible of vaccines]This isn’t an easy dilemma to solve. During the vaccine makers’ clinical trials, researchers were able to study participants closely enough to examine how well the shots were blocking any symptomatic cases of COVID-19. (Studying only the severest disease, which are relatively rare events, wouldn’t have been feasible without making the trials even larger, or stretching them out longer.) “Real-world studies are like the wild, wild West,” Dean told me. Researchers often have to wrestle evidence out of electronic medical records, which aren’t logged consistently, or they have to depend on people to seek out tests and accurately remember their symptoms. They might monitor only the worst infections, because they’re more likely to prompt people to seek clinical care and are easier to document and study. Milder cases, meanwhile, are squishier, more subjective; not everyone will interpret an ache or a pain in the same way, or follow up on it with a professional. The studies that have tackled the task of measuring real-world vaccine effectiveness against all symptomatic disease may not always count the same COVID-19 symptoms, experts told me, potentially inflating or deflating numbers. Thorniest of all may be the data investigating long COVID, which still lacks a universal case definition, after vaccination, Lekshmi Santhosh, a critical-care physician at UC San Francisco, told me. “Most studies aren’t even looking,” she said.Important variations exist, even at SARS-CoV-2’s extremes. Some hospitalized patients might be admitted for just a couple of days, while others need weeks of critical care or die. Early evidence hints that vaccines are batting away the worst blows here as well, another nuance lost when hospitalizations are lumped together. Positive test results, too, can be misleading. Tests, which hunt for precise pieces of the pathogen, can’t distinguish between viruses that are intact, or that have been blown to smithereens by a protective immune response; SARS-CoV-2 carnage, especially in a person who’s immunized and asymptomatic, doesn’t guarantee disease or transmission. “It doesn’t mean the same thing to test positive if you’re vaccinated,” Julie Downs, a health-communications expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told me.Still, some infections among immunized people will pose a low-but-not-nonexistent transmission risk, especially to the vulnerable among us, and we can’t yet afford to tune the milder cases out. A much larger fraction of the global population will need protection before COVID-19 can truly be considered mellower than before. But the fates of the inoculated and the uninoculated are clearly already forking, a potential preview of what’s to come, Baden, the Boston physician, told me. “If I were a betting man, I’d say, years from now, this will be another common cold.” Titanji, of Emory, has already confronted the likelihood that her childhood bout of modified measles might foreshadow her experience with the coronavirus. When she sees patients in her clinic in Georgia, she tells them, “We’re all very likely going to have COVID, including myself. But it is okay. I have a vaccine that will prevent me from landing in the hospital.”COVID-19’s march toward diminution won’t be linear or uniform. Immune cells forget; viruses shape-shift; our vaccines will need touch-ups or boosts. Behavioral slipups—vaccine refusals, spotty masking during outbreaks—will create cracks for the pathogen to wriggle through. But on a population level, our future could look quite good. Most people will end up getting COVID-19 in their lifetime. In most cases, it won’t be so bad. Eventually, silent or mild infections will feel less catastrophic, because many of us will have confidence that they are unlikely to progress. Outbreaks might be smaller and slower-spreading, and breakthroughs will no longer be headline-making news. Positive test results, in the absence of symptoms, could generally be shrugged off, and infection will no longer feel quite so synonymous with disease. Our bodies will come to see the virus as familiar—not necessarily a welcome guest, but not quite the intruder it was before.Data alone won’t define our experience here; our understanding of post-vaccination infection will need to come firsthand, too. For me, the pandemic anxiety that dominated much of 2020 is slow to fade, and the idea of getting COVID-19 still feels far worse than getting the flu, even if the symptoms were identical. “It takes time to get over that,” Downs told me.[Read: Your vaccinated immune system is ready for breakthroughs]A small number of post-vaccination infections are now trickling into my social circles, and it’s actually been sort of comforting to hear some of the stories. A few days ago, I talked with Jayne Spector, who just became mother-in-law to one of my best friends. Spector tested positive for the coronavirus a couple of weeks ago—shortly after attending her grandmother’s funeral, where she’d hugged and kissed dozens of family members. Among them was her daughter, who was, at the time Spector received her test result, about to have her wedding, just 11 days later.“I was really worried I had infected my soon-to-be-married daughter,” Spector told me. And had Spector not been vaccinated, “I think it would have been a disaster.” But Spector was vaccinated. So were almost all the family members she mingled with at the funeral—her daughter included—and not a single one of her contacts has tested positive. (They also kept a lot of the interactions outdoors, and wore masks inside.) Spector isolated at home, where she dealt with what she compares to a nasty but relatively fast-resolving cold—a paltry echo, she suspects, of the sickness she would have had, if not for her shots. “The fact that I’m vaccinated means that it’s tolerable,” she told me. “I took the precautions; I stayed away from others. Now I’m going back to my life.” Her daughter’s wedding was this past Saturday. All 18 people in attendance were fully vaccinated, and tested negative before the ceremony. Spector was one of them.

The other day, I ate a fake burger. It looked, felt and tasted like a burger, even quite a good burger. If you had simply handed it to me and not said “this is a new high-tech vegan burger”, I might not have noticed.
It was a Beyond burger, made from plant proteins. Back in 2017, when I tried an Impossible burger in California, they still were rare. Now you can buy them at Burger King; McDonald’s is making its own called (inevitably) the McPlant. About $7 billion dollars’ worth of vegan meat was sold in 2020 – the large majority of it replacing the traditional meat burger.
Making fake burgers takes a fraction of the energy and land that making a beef burger does and fewer cows end up dead. But, and this is crucial, I still get to eat a burger.

There was an alternative way around this, of course. Instead of developing a low-impact way of fulfilling my desire for a burger, we could have encouraged me not to want burgers any more, or (more likely) to suppress it. We could have run advert campaigns fronted by earnest celebrities telling me that burgers are bad. We could even have simply banned burgers. And maybe it would have worked.
But then I wouldn’t have got to eat a burger, and I wanted a burger.
On the whole, I think fulfilling human desires is a good thing. Not always, but most of the time, giving people things they want makes them happier. So why not?
But not everyone thinks this is a good thing. There’s a name for it: “solutionism”, the “foolhardy belief that technology can sidestep thorny social and political problems”. People who worry about solutionism say that, instead of finding technological quick fixes for society’s ills, we ought to concentrate on the root causes: to change our social structures, to change our behaviour, to change policy.
I strongly disagree. We should do both.
In the UK after the war, suicide rates went up. By the mid-Sixties, according to the national registry, they reached something like 14 per 100,000 men per year, and about 10 per 100,000 women1. But by 1971, they had dropped significantly, to about 10 for men and seven for women. What happened? Did we make progress in solving society’s underlying problems and make Britain a more tolerable place to live?
Suggested readingFactory farming will kill us allBy John Lewis-Stempel 
Well, maybe. But a more proximate explanation is that in the mid-Sixties — for reasons unrelated to suicide — the British energy supply largely switched from coal gas to natural gas.
At the time, many suicides in the UK involved carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning: putting one’s head in the oven. That became impossible with natural gas, which is essentially free of carbon monoxide. In 1962/3, about 40% of suicides used CO poisoning; by 1970/71, fewer than 10% of them did. Suicides by other means went up, a bit, but nowhere near enough to compensate; total suicide rates went down by about a third. Making it harder to kill oneself stopped a lot of people from doing it; it turned out the impulse to end their life was transient.
Suicide is a problem with many underlying causes. But a simple technological fix — changing from coal gas to natural gas — reduced the problem significantly.
How about other social ills? How about obesity? Somewhere around a quarter of British adults are classed as obese. A subset of people, about 3% of the population, are “morbidly” obese — that is, a BMI over 40, equivalent to a six-foot-tall person weighing more than 20 stone. This has serious health implications, and many of them would like to lose weight, but can’t — their brain fights them, making them feel as though they are starving. Asking them to stop eating is not that different from asking them to stop breathing.
Last week, the neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet wrote a piece about a promising pharmaceutical treatment for obesity: that is, an actually effective weight-loss pill. I thought it was exciting, but several people responding to me thought it was “dystopian” or “depressing”: people should diet and exercise. We should change society and behaviour, not rely on pills.
Suggested readingBeing fat isn't feministBy Sarah Ditum 
But again: I think that’s just wrong. Changing society can be good! We should make cities more walkable; we should make food healthier and exercise easier, and doing so would probably reduce obesity and improve health. But for some people that won’t be enough, because not everyone has the same levels of food craving or impulse control. A pill that makes their job easier, that levels the playing field, would also be good.
There are many examples like this. The human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted and causes cervical cancer. You can either try to encourage abstinence and safe sex (difficult) or you can vaccinate children before they reach the age of sexual activity (easy). It reduces cervical cancer by more than 90%. And people still get to have sex!
Society is really hard to change. It is made up of millions of people with their own desires and incentives, and there is limited scope for changing it – you can reduce smoking by banning it in pubs, you can reduce drink-driving through education and enforcement (drink-driving deaths are about 15% of what they were in 1979), but you’re battling against what people want.
And people getting what they want is a good thing. You could almost argue that it is the only good thing: what is the point of life, if not being happy and making others happy? If people want to smoke, and if they could do so without harming their health, what’s the problem?
So technological fixes are helpful. For example, vaping represents a way of giving people what they want – the fun of a nicotine high – at a hugely reduced health cost.
Suggested readingStop hating on vapingBy Tom Chivers
The most obvious place where this is relevant is climate change. People want to fly, they want to drive, they want to heat their homes and use electricity. We could try to transform human desires, and make us not want those things, or we could try to make us deny our own wants. For some of us that will be successful and for others it will not.  But we could let everyone have the things they wanted, it would be better.
That’s why things like carbon capture are actually pretty exciting, things like the enormous fall in the cost of solar energy, or zero-emission aircraft. This means people getting to travel, getting to live in comfortable homes with light and heating, being able to eat food they like, with fewer negative costs.
I don’t like the tendency to compare movements, such as environmentalism, to religions –it’s too easy and is often misleading. But I do think that for some people, there’s a tendency to confuse motive and means: they think that because many of the things we want and enjoy have harmful side-effects, so the things we want and enjoy are bad in themselves. Like Puritans opposed to hunting not because the animals suffer but because the hunters enjoyed it, we think that because we sometimes need to suffer for noble purposes, that suffering itself is noble.
It’s not. We may have to change our behaviour – eat less, smoke and drink less, fly less – to gain some other good, such as improved health or reduced environmental impact. But that is an unfortunate by-product, not the point in itself. If technological fixes exist, we should use them.
Plant-based burgers are one thing; soon, hopefully, we will see real meat that’s been grown in a lab at an affordable price (although it’s always a bit further away than its proponents claim). People could order steaks or lamb chops that have never been attached to a sentient being, that don’t require acres of land or horrible cruelty. For some people this is a bleak dystopia. But for me it’s a utopian vision: people getting what they want, at a fraction of the environmental and moral cost. Let me have my damn burger.

FOOTNOTES

Note: this is probably an undercount. The ONS suicide data only goes back to 1981, but it starts at 19.5 per 100,000 men per year. The trend, though, is real.

OnlySubs Episode 61: Be Faithful Over a Few Things is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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When I was in college, I had the good fortune to encounter a Bible verse that I took very seriously. I still think about it to this day. It is Matthew 25:23, which is part of the Parable of the Talents. It and the verse before it read: “(22) The servant who had received the two talents also came and said, ‘Master, you entrusted me with two talents. See, I have gained two more.’ (23) His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master!’” I think about this verse a lot, especially right now in a time when so many young people feel directionless and are needed to step up to build the next generation of American excellence. The question so many of them face is how? The answer is the same as it ever was: start small, build skill perhaps under mentorship, demonstrate it, and patiently grow to a place where more responsibility is something you can take. It’s the exact opposite of the entitlement mindset that plagues so many, and it works. Join me on this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, as I discuss the relevance of this verse to my life and to our present moment.
The post OnlySubs: Be Faithful Over a Few Things appeared first on New Discourses.

By Shadi HamidI hadn’t the slightest idea that my life would change. It was two weeks into my freshman year of college. I was living away from home for the first time. And then the September 11 attacks happened. It felt like a double tragedy to me—as an American, of course, but also as a Muslim. Not only did they do this; they did this in my name.
Before Osama bin Laden became a household name (a quaint thought in retrospect), it wouldn’t have occurred to me that my faith would soon become inextricably linked to terrorism in the public’s imagination.
In high school, there was that one time when a kid named Dan called me a “terrorist,” but I don’t recall it being a big deal. No one really cared that we were Muslim. Sure, we were brown. I was different, in an overwhelmingly white school. But we were more a curiosity and not quite a threat. In retrospect, I’m impressed that Dan was sufficiently aware of global affairs to have already perceived an association between Islam and terrorism. He was ahead of his time!
Going into college, I knew I wanted to do something vaguely international, but it hadn’t occurred to me to make the Middle East into my life’s work. I thought I could make money as an investment banker or something similarly soul-crushing. It’s odd to think that the actions of those 19 hijackers would alter my future so decisively. I ended up living in Jordan for a year and a half and, later, Qatar for four years. Meanwhile, Egypt became my home away from home. I wanted to spend as much time as possible in the Middle East, in the hope—probably misplaced—that I could make sense of that day, and all the days after it.
Twenty years later, I, like my country, haven’t been able to escape the legacy of September 11. All my presidents were defined by the attacks and what they wrought. George W. Bush will be remembered foremost for the Iraq war and other post-9/11 blunders, excesses, and abuses. Barack Obama came to prominence in large part because he opposed those abuses. His successor, Donald Trump, announced himself by attacking the post-9/11 foreign policy consensus while also drawing on a distinctly post-9/11 fear and paranoia. It is easy to forget it now, but Trump appeared oddly preoccupied with Muslims and Islam. His signature campaign issue, after all, was a pledge to ban Muslims from entering the United States. It was Trump who memorably, if somewhat inexplicably, said, “I think Islam hates us.” And now Joe Biden’s foreign policy legacy will be indelibly shaped by how Americans remember (or forget) the botched extrication out of a once permanent war.
It didn’t have to be this way, but it was. Despite only numbering around one percent of the U.S. population and anywhere from 0.2 to 8 percent in European countries like Hungary, Germany, and France, Muslims became key protagonists (and antagonists) in the stories of Western democracies. For better and worse, everyone seems to have an opinion about us now. As I write this, “Sharia Law” is trending, although it’s not entirely clear why.
I wonder how different my life would have looked had something gone awry in the plans of the 9/11 masterminds and hijackers. Certainly, the United States would have been better off, having avoided at least one war, and possibly two. The Middle East would have still been important, but not as important as it became, which would have been a boon for the people of the region. Despite occasionally having good intentions—briefly during George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda” in 2004 to 2005 and during Barack Obama’s early, if guarded, optimism around the Arab Spring in 2011—the United States ended up leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. And so I’m tempted to imagine a counterfactual history, in which the relative boredom of the 1990s might have continued. We wouldn’t have known better, and Muslims, at least in America, could have remained a relatively quiet, if idiosyncratic, minority.
Henry Kissinger once said that “the history of things that didn’t happen has never been written.” They didn’t happen for a reason. Now that Biden has ended our longest war, we can perhaps try to turn the page on a tragic chapter. I suspect it’s too late, however. It’s been too late for almost two decades. Because of that day, the Middle East has haunted this country for the near entirety of my adult life. We have been living with the consequences, and I worry that we will continue to live with them, despite our persistent hopes to the contrary.

Inequality has been an overriding theme of Democratic politics over the past decade, from Elizabeth Warren’s “middle-out economics” to Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong presidential campaigns to the political rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
So where’s this all going, exactly? Is America on its way to becoming a Nordic-style social democracy — or even something further to the left? Well, before speculating, let’s make one assumption: Stuff needs to be paid for, eventually. There is no “money tree,” although some novel new approaches to macroeconomics (taken seriously mostly on EconTwitter) suggest there might be. And if stuff — universal healthcare, generous paid leave and childcare, free tuition, maybe even a universal basic income — does need to be paid for, then the populists of the left have a problem.
And they know it, at least some do. AOC sure seems to know it. Here’s what she recently tweeted about efforts of some Democratic House lawmakers to restore the federal deduction for state and local taxes in legislation now moving through the House:

Bloomberg notes that if the SALT deduction were reinstated as part of the overall House plans to increase tax plan, “the top 1 percent of taxpayers — those earning earning at least $401,601 — would face a tax increase less than half as large as that if the current cap on the write-off were retained, according to data from the right-leaning Tax Foundation.”
And just how is that effort to raise taxes on rich people and companies going, even setting aside the battle of the SALT deduction? As I write in my new The Week column:
Although the plan [approved by the House Ways and Means committee] would increase the top personal income tax rate to 39.6 percent from the current 37 percent and add a 3 percent surtax to incomes over $5 million, it would raise the capital gains tax rate only to 25 percent from 20 percent. Biden would prefer labor and investment income taxed at the same nearly 40 percent rate. Nor does the plan call for the taxation of unrealized capital gains over $1 million at death, which the Biden White House supports. It also would also only limit the preferential tax treatment of “carried interest” — a major source of income for private equity fund managers — rather than eliminate it entirely. “Frankly this is a humiliating climbdown from the administration’s posture,” James Lucier, an analyst at Capital Alpha Partners in Washington, told The Financial Times. “This avoids most of the stuff that Wall Street is worried about.” And one wealth planner tweeted that the changes were “FANTASTIC for the uber-wealthy.”
So after years of Democrats bemoaning out of control inequality, the best they can do is maybe put top tax rates a bit above the levels of the Clinton era — which still might not happen — even as some fight to claw back previous tax hikes on the 1 percent. The phrase “humiliating climbdown” really is appropriate.
And consider this: With the original Biden tax plan, tax revenue would total 19.3 percent of GDP over the coming decade, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Although that represents a considerable step-up from the long-term average of 17.3 percent of GDP,  America would still look like a low-tax nation compared to Scandinavia, where tax-to-GDP ratios are twice as high. In other words, America is nowhere close to being ready to fund a massive welfare state expansion like the populist left desires. 
And while higher inequality in the US may help make the left make the case that the wealthy here could theoretically bear even more of the burden than in Scandinavia, the fiscal math still doesn’t work without the sort of value-added tax those nations have. Finland, Norway, and Sweden all have a 25 percent VAT, with Denmark collecting about 9.4 percent of GDP through the VAT, Norway 8.6 percent, and Sweden 9.2 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. But Democrats keep promising not to raise taxes on the middle class, or families who make less than $400,000 a year.
Of course, many populists keep ignoring this reality, which in itself is a key element of populism. In their classic 1991 paper “The Macroeconomics of Populism,” economists Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards identified how populists rise and what they do when in power. One key ingredient: “[Ignoring] the existence of any type of constraints on macroeconomic policy.” You know, like the need to pay for stuff. Populists love to imagine the existence of miraculous money trees. But the smarter ones don’t, and they understand their dream won’t come close to happening without everyone paying more in taxes.
Learn more: How the Biden White House thinks the Biden agenda would affect the US economy | Are the deep fundamentals of the US economy actually pretty strong? | US economy is being undermined by supply-side struggles
The post AOC reveals the economic truth that many Dems wish to avoid: Their spending dreams require tax hikes on everybody appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with SARS-CoV-2. We know it better than we once did. We know that it can set off both acute and chronic illness, that it spreads best indoors, that masks help block it, that our vaccines are powerful against it. We know that we can live with it—that we’re going to have to live with it—but that it can and will exact a heavy toll.Still, this virus has the capacity to surprise us, especially if we’re not paying attention. It is changing all the time, a tweak to the genetic code here and there; sometimes, those tweaks add up to new danger. In a matter of weeks, the Delta variant upended the relative peace of America’s early summer and ushered in a new set of calculations about risk, masking, and testing. The pandemic’s endgame shifted.Do vaccines work as well as they need to? Who is now most vulnerable? What new variants might emerge? Our lost summer has layered on new anxieties to pandemic life. But these questions do have some clear answers, which have come up time and again in our reporting and will continue to guide us through the coming months. Even after this latest surge crests and subsides, the new pandemic reality will linger, through fall and winter and into the spring, as vaccination rates rise and the virus continues to change. Here are six principles that are helping us make sense of the pandemic now:The role of vaccines has changed (again) The COVID-19 vaccines were originally meant to prevent severe infections. They do so very well. But for a few brief months, we thought they could do even better. Unexpectedly spectacular clinical-trial results from Pfizer and Moderna raised hopes that these vaccines could protect against almost all symptomatic infections and might even be as good as the vaccines against polio and measles, which eliminated transmission of those diseases in the United States.But, from the very beginning, vaccine experts warned that respiratory diseases are especially tricky to immunize against. The coronavirus first takes hold in the nose, and injections in the arm are just not very good at stimulating immunity in the nose. (They are still good, however, at raising immunity deep in the lungs to protect against severe disease.) Flu shots, for example, tend to be only 10 to 60 percent effective at keeping people out of the doctor’s office. If COVID-19 vaccines end up somewhere similar, they would prevent hospitalizations and death, but the coronavirus would still circulate. Given Delta’s ability to slightly evade vaccines, combined with its extreme transmissibility, this is again looking like the most likely scenario. So we need to adjust our expectations, again.[Register now to join Katherine J. Wu alongside CDC Director Rochelle Walensky at the 2021 Atlantic Festival]Vaccines work more like dimmer switches than on/off buttons, and as their protection fades out, there are three thresholds that we care about: protection against infection, against symptoms, and against severe disease. Protection against infection is always the first to erode—either because of new variants or because of waning immune responses over time. Protection against symptoms goes next, but protection against severe disease is the most durable. (One unknown is how much vaccines prevent long COVID, although a recent study found that full vaccination can decrease the risk of long-lasting symptoms.)We’ve seen this pattern play out: Breakthrough infections are happening with Delta, but they tend to be mild or even asymptomatic. And especially when case numbers get very high—as they are in many parts of the U.S. now—additional layers of protection, including improved ventilation and masks, are necessary to protect people, such as young children, who are still unvaccinated. Vaccinating as many people as possible as quickly as possible is still the most powerful way to control the virus. We can already see how well the vaccines are working.  The proportion of vaccinated people matters, but who they are and how they cluster also mattersDelta caused a new wave of cases in even the most vaccinated countries in the world, but the wave of hospitalizations that followed there have generally been much more modest. In the U.K., for example, where 66 percent of people are fully vaccinated, cases reached 80 percent of their winter peak this summer. But hospitalizations rose less than 25 percent. As U.K. health officials have declared, vaccines are “breaking the link” between infections and hospitalizations. Again, this means the vaccines are working.The United States seems to paint a different picture. Overwhelmed hospitals are turning patients away. They’re running out of oxygen. They’re once again cramming beds into conferences rooms and cafeterias. It feels like déjà vu—even though 54 percent of Americans are also fully vaccinated.The difference between the U.K. and the U.S. isn’t just that fewer Americans are vaccinated. It’s that fewer of the most vulnerable Americans are vaccinated, and they tend to cluster together.Risk of death and hospitalizations from COVID-19 rises sharply with age, and in the U.K. nearly everyone over 65 is vaccinated. A New York Times analysis found very few areas in the U.K. where more than 2 percent of residents are 65 and not fully vaccinated. In contrast, that number is above 10 percent in many counties in the American South and Mountain West. Even small differences in these rates can determine the level of crisis: A community where 10 percent of residents are unvaccinated seniors has essentially five times as many people who might need an ICU bed than a community where that number is only 2 percent.Vaccine coverage also varies dramatically from county to county in the U.S. The more unvaccinated people are concentrated, the more easily the virus can find its next victim. Imagine three out of four people in every household are vaccinated; the unvaccinated person is unlikely to spread the virus very much at home, says Graham Medley, an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Now imagine three out of every four households are completely vaccinated; the virus will spread through the unvaccinated households. The overall vaccination rate is the same, but the results are very different. This unevenness also means that …The people at greatest risk from the virus will keep changingSince the pandemic’s early days, vaccines have shifted the risk the virus poses to us, at a community level. Older people and health-care workers were among the first in line for the shots—a practical move to protect the people whose underlying conditions or jobs ranked them among the most vulnerable. But younger members of the community had to contend with a slower schedule, and vaccine makers are still figuring out the correct dosages for the youngest among us. That’s all shifted the virus’s burden down to uninoculated children. At the same time, the virus has been evolving into speedier and speedier forms; by the time Delta slammed the world this spring, many of its most viable hosts were at risk not because of their age or circumstances, but in spite of it.[Read: You might want to wait to get a booster shot]Kids still seem relatively resilient against SARS-CoV-2 compared with adults, as they always have been. But compared with the variants that came before it, Delta is a faster spreader, and therefore a larger threat to everyone who is unvaccinated—which means children are now at greater risk than they were before. Relative risk will keep shifting, even if the virus somehow stops mutating and becomes a static threat. (It won’t.) Our immune systems’ memories of the coronavirus, for instance, could wane—possibly over the course of years, if immunization against similar viruses is a guide. People who are currently fully vaccinated may eventually need boosters. Infants who have never encountered the coronavirus will be born into the population, while people with immunity die. Even the vaccinated won’t all look the same: Some, including people who are moderately or severely immunocompromised, might never respond to the shots as well as others. The assumptions we first had about whom the virus might hit hardest will keep changing, as will the population of people who fall ill at all.As vaccination increases, a higher proportion of cases will appear in vaccinated people—and that’s what should happenIn July, after a COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a Washington Post headline noted that three-quarters of the people infected were vaccinated. Throughout the summer, many stories have reported similar figures, always with the same alarming undercurrent: If vaccines are working, how could vaccinated people make up such a large proportion of an outbreak?The answer is simple: They can if they make up a large proportion of a population. Even though vaccinated people have much lower odds of getting sick than unvaccinated people, they’ll make up a sizable fraction of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths if there are more of them around.Let’s work through some numbers. Assume, first, that vaccines are 60 percent effective at preventing symptomatic infections. (There’s a lot of conflicting information about this, but the exact number doesn’t affect this exercise much.) Vaccinated people are still less likely to get infected, but as their proportion of the community rises, so does the percentage of infections occurring among them. If 20 percent of people are fully vaccinated, they’ll account for 9 percent of infections; meanwhile, the 80 percent of the population that’s unvaccinated will account for 91 percent. Now flip that. If only 20 percent of people are unvaccinated, there will be fewer infections overall. But vaccinated people, who are now in the majority, will account for most of those infections—62 percent.[Register now to join Ed Yong alongside Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci at the 2021 Atlantic Festival]That is why this particular statistic—the proportion of vaccinated people in a given outbreak—is so deeply misleading. “The better the vaccine uptake, the scarier this number will seem,” wrote Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, a statistician at Wake Forest University. By extension, the safer communities become, the more it will seem like the sky is falling—if we continue focusing on the wrong statistics.“If you’re trying to decide on getting vaccinated, you don’t want to look at the percentage of sick people who were vaccinated,” McGowan wrote. “You want to look at the percentage of people who were vaccinated and got sick.”Note percentage. In July, an NBC News article stated that “At Least 125,000 Fully Vaccinated Americans Have Tested Positive” for the coronavirus. In isolation, that’s an alarming number. But it represented just 0.08 percent of the 165 million people who were fully vaccinated at the time. More recently, Duke University reported that 364 students had tested positive in a single week—a figure that represents just 1.6 percent of the more than 15,000 students who were tested. The denominator matters.The denominators in these calculations also change, dragging the numerators higher along with them. As surges grow, so too will the number of infected people, which means the number of breakthrough infections will also grow. Even if the percentage of breakthroughs stays steady, though, vaccines will feel less effective if the pandemic is allowed to rage out of control, because …Rare events are common at scaleThroughout the past year and a half, commentators have downplayed a variety of pandemic-related risks because they were “rare”—deaths, long COVID (which isn’t actually rare), infections and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, and more. But infectious diseases spread, and if they do so widely enough, events that are relatively rare can rack up large numbers: A one-in-a-thousand event will still occur 40,000 times when 40 million people are infected. Such events can’t be written off, especially when they involve decades of lost health or life.As outbreaks spread, more types of rare events become noticeable as well. A wider pandemic is also a weirder pandemic. Many aspects of COVID-19’s mystique—the range of symptoms and affected organs, the possibility of persistent illness, reinfections—are common to other viral illnesses, but go unnoticed because most illnesses don’t sweep the world in a short span of time. Similarly, as this current post-vaccine surge continues, breakthrough infections will feel more common, newspapers will have more stories to run about them, and more people will know someone who had one.Our reaction to such events must account for both the denominator and the numerator—both how relatively common they are and how much they cost each affected individual. And that assessment will change as the pandemic waxes and wanes, and as the virus itself continues to mutate.There is no single “worst” version of the coronavirusAs in every game, who the most formidable opponent is depends on who else is playing, and the nature of the field. Right now Delta, a super-transmissible variant that hops into human airways, copies itself, and blazes back out, is especially well poised to rip through the world’s mostly unvaccinated, mostly immune-naive population—which is exactly what it’s doing. Laxness around masking, distancing, and other infection-prevention measures, in the United States especially, has given Delta plenty of opportunities to hop from human to human, further fueling its rise. The variant, for now, has about as good a home-field advantage as it can get.But the ideal strategy, from the perspective of the virus, might look drastically different for a population with a lot more immunity. Strong, speedy immune responses will keep the virus from getting by on swiftness alone. In these environments, a stealthy version of the virus that can slip by antibodies unnoticed might be the one that wins out. The virus’s goal will still be to spread, just through different means: Mutations that make the virus less visible will help it stick around in airways longer, and potentially transmit to more people in the process. As the world gradually acquires immunity, variants like Delta might eventually be succeeded by these wilier morphs. But these transitions will likely happen at different rates in different countries, depending on who gets access to vaccines. The definition of most threatening will splinter along borders. (There is, by the way, little incentive for the virus to get deadlier along the way. Viruses want to spread, not kill. Still, some pathogens can get symptomatically nastier as a by-product of transmissibility, or if those symptoms facilitate their spread.)All variants, though, will have some common weakness: They can be stopped through the combined measures of vaccines, masks, distancing, and other measures that cut the conduits they need to travel. When viruses spread faster, they can be tougher to control. But they can’t persist without us, and our behavior matters too.

Somewhere between Women’s Studies turning into Gender Studies and the university lawyers turning into risk managers, we seem to have lost the clitoris. As an historian, I consider this a rare case of history surprising us. Asked in 1970 to predict the likely trajectory of academic feminism from that moment forward, I doubt many would have expected that we would arrive at a place so devoid (or even ashamed) of open appreciation of female anatomy and physiology, and at a milieu so lacking in female sexual agency and pleasure.Yet academic feminism has largely been absorbed into Gender Studies, and now, anyone given to exuberant talk of feeling like a natural woman risks being maligned as at best a dinosaur—who still believes in sex?!—and at worst a TERF (a supposedly “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). Nowadays, you can’t love your innate trinkets without oppressing someone with your damned uterine privilege. Less surprising, I suppose, is that university risk managers would prefer that we all leave sex at home—out of the classroom, out of the lab, out of the break room, even out of the library, where it has been blossoming since at least Aristotle. Sixty years after the pill transformed women’s lives, sex on campus doesn’t lead to babies, it leads to lawyers in polyester suits.Bleh. This is a sad and sorry development. For a start, sex can be pretty delightful, and if you are a smart person (as many—though by no means all—academics are), you will likely find that sex with other smart people is much more satisfying than sex with the dumb. Smart people are most likely to meet when they work together. Yet to broach the idea of sex with someone at work today? Mais non! Academic life to such a great extent still valorizes the mind at the prideful expense of bodily pleasure. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could really break from the monasteries from which our universities emerged and get laid sometimes without quite so much fear and shame and paperwork?Then there are the kids to consider. Our fear of talking about sex—never mind teaching about it—has left the present generation of the young with no place to engage intellectually with the concept of eroticism. With so much monumentally bad sex ed (or near-total lack of sex ed) in our public schools, many of our undergraduates have been exposed to huge amounts of pornography but remarkably little information about their own bodies. We are willing to talk with them about gender, but not about the flesh that performs it.But they aren’t going to learn how orgasms work—physically, culturally, and linguistically—by talking about gender. Nothing stops discussion of the orgasm like a discussion of gender. And while gender-based oppression strikes me as a very important thing for young people to learn about and understand—feminism made my good life possible—true emancipation requires the sexual liberation that comes from women really knowing their own sex.I say this in part from personal experience. Like a lot of young women who grew up Roman Catholic, I found my clitoris in a book. The book was Our Bodies, Ourselves and the year was circa 1985. While I was also reading feminist texts about things like wage gaps, unequal social expectations of mothers versus fathers, and the justice system’s revictimization of rape survivors, reading sex-positive material by women about my anatomy and physiology was a critical component of being fully empowered. Sexual knowledge was and is sexual power.When, circa 1998, I decided to teach a class on sex and gender to my high-achieving science undergraduates at the Lyman Briggs School of Michigan State University, I was unsurprised to discover that my students wanted to know at least as much about biological sex and human sexuality as they did about gender. For many of them, there was no other place but my Science Studies class where someone could answer their questions about eroticism.As I was polishing up the syllabus for the first version of that class, the university sent us all a brochure about the latest sexual harassment policy. Reading it and deciding it was garbage—much more concerned with protecting the university’s administration than protecting women—I decided to annotate my syllabus to inform the Lyman Briggs School’s director of all the ways I intended to violate their policy. For example, I would be showing photos of genitals and discussing them with my undergraduate science students. We would have conversations that were likely to implicate our own sex lives, and I would let them write papers about their sex lives if they wanted; then, I would then shamelessly grade those papers. Finally, we would talk about sex during office hours.To his credit, our director—a mathematician—thanked me for the warning and then began voluntarily reading from the humanities literature about the ways in which talking about sex is a form of sex. One cannot teach about sex without at some level engaging our sexual cultures as well as the parts of our brains that respond to sexual cues. (We rather elegantly ignored the implications for our conversation. Tea was sipped.) On the first day of class, I went over the brochure and the syllabus with the students and explained to them where we would be violating the university’s policy. I suggested they drop the class if they didn’t feel comfortable with the topics we were going to engage. The next day, rather than having anyone drop, I had a waiting list of 20 students. The need felt greater and greater all the time.Nevertheless, I hear from colleagues all over the country that they have stripped their syllabi of all eroticism, chiefly out of fear of progressives hauling them before the Title IX tribunals on charges of insensitivity, victimization, and general wrong-thinking. Who could have guessed that in 2021, the chastity belts would be distributed not by the patriarchy, but by people earnestly bearing Rosie the Riveter t-shirts? No mention may be made of the fact that the sex-policing is often carried out by women my age who are happy to diffuse the sexual potential of younger women under the guise of sparing them harassment. What a genius move by some, to take these young women who might otherwise be in competition with us for resources and turn them into our prudish foot-soldiers, convinced all the while that we are protecting them.Of course, to some extent we are. There are some truly dreadful jerks on every campus, people (typically, though not always, men) who will distribute certain resources and limit access to others chiefly on the basis of who is willing to stroke their egos and other things. Being sex-positive doesn’t mean having to pretend sexual harassment doesn't exist and isn't pernicious. And we know it disproportionately harms women. I had colleagues driven out of their professions by serial harassers who were only effectively outed after #MeToo, years too late.Then there is the problem, if you are supportive of heterodoxy, of recognizing that sex-positivity is a value not embraced by a lot of conservatives. In our teaching and presentations, it can be difficult to think about how to engage the reality of human sex and sexuality without rattling people—including students and faculty—who think public sexual repression to be a virtue. While I don’t agree with their takes, as a sex-positive person I don’t want to be a killjoy to their lifestyle choices.Cross-campus efforts are being made to stop sexual predators and end quid-pro-quos, to level the playing fields, to make all students and faculty feel welcome, and to respect and support people of all genders. All these initiatives make me feel as if we’re getting somewhere. But can we also acknowledge that sex will always be with us, and that this is a good thing? Can we know our bodies on campus without losing our minds?

Is there a more accurate satirical creation in all English literature than Mrs Jellyby, the humanitarian imperialist of Dickens’s Bleak House? Mrs Jellyby’s “telescopic philanthropy”, mocked by Dickens, saw her neglect both her own family and the widespread poverty of Victorian London in pursuit of her utopian Borrioboola-Gha scheme for “the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives — and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population”. To which end, when she is introduced as a character in the novel, she hopes “by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.”
Writing in 1852, Dickens was satirising the dramatic failure of the 1841 Niger Expedition, the brainchild of the Quaker abolitionist Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Like other liberal abolitionists of the era, Buxton believed that the only way to stamp out the slave trade in West Africa was to penetrate the continent’s unexplored interior to establish model villages and trading settlements, where, under the influence of free trade and Protestant Christianity, African kingdoms whose economies had depended on slavery for centuries would be civilised into liberal modernity.

Yet like the fictional Borrioboola-Gha scheme, “which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody — who survived the climate — for Rum”, the expedition, which departed with high hopes, popular acclaim and the fundraising efforts of British dignitaries from Prince Albert to Lord Palmerston, was an abject failure, with the “staggering cost of £79,143… borne by taxpayers”, the historian Richard Huzzey notes, “largely because the Whig prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, wanted to associate his faltering ministry with a popular anti-slavery project”. A quarter of the participants died of fever shortly after setting out, yet, “commissioned in the final gasp of public anxiety over slave-holding in Britain’s own West Indian colonies and as a desperate attempt to revive the current ministers’ anti-slavery credentials,” the precedent it set established the pattern for Britain’s later conquest of most of the African continent, an irony of history that does not seem to have entered the public consciousness today.
There is a timely lesson for us about mission creep and the unintended consequences of moral crusades in distant lands that the Victorian campaign against slavery highlights. For all that the topics of slavery, colonialism and imperialism have been discussed endlessly in the culture wars of the past few years — usually by conflating the three very different processes — the archetypal British colonialist in the crucial mid-19th century period was not the sneering pith-helmeted figure of legend, but rather idealistic liberal and evangelical abolitionists, often Quakers, middle-class liberal women and free trade advocates, who genuinely saw British imperial might as a means to right the moral wrongs of distant societies of which they knew little.
As the recent outpouring of commentary demanding that the United States prolong its 20-year military intervention in Afghanistan for the continuance of liberal humanitarian ends reminds us, the Mrs Jellybys, endlessly demanding that something should be done, are still very much with us. In the conquest of much of Africa, liberal humanitarianism and imperialism strode hand in hand into the forested interior: an accurate understanding of how this happened is more timely than ever.
The process of Britain’s growing political entanglement with the African continent took place in three very different stages. In the first, a product of the early modern period, British traders enmeshing themselves in the new, globalising capitalist economy discovered that rich profits could be made buying slaves from African coastal rulers and transporting them to the New World as forced agricultural labourers, paying for them with the products of the new factories. It would be more accurate, then, to characterise the Atlantic slave trade as a product of capitalism or even of globalisation than of either colonialism or imperialism, yet our newly-woke global corporations seem curiously loath to make this connection.
It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19th century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.
By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony, initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill as one where  abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture, and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire ‘civilized’ consumption.”
As with the humanitarian interventions of our own era, ideals of free trade, globalised capitalism, military intervention and the conversion of downtrodden natives to liberal Western ways were intertwined from the start. For Sierra Leone’s governor, Charles MacCarthy, the division of the colony’s unexplored forests into parishes run by the Church Missionary Society was the beginning of a process that would make “Sierra Leone the base from whence future exertions may be extended, step by step to the very interior of Africa”. As Everill notes, “colonisation was a developing anti-slavery ideology,” which “disrupted local economies, power structures, ideologies, and religions in much the same way that settlers in Australia or North America overcame the aboriginal peoples.”
Yet the failure of the Niger expedition radically altered the process by which the British conquest of West Africa took place. Instead of leading through example, the British Foreign Office and Admiralty found themselves drawn into an ever-widening series of military interventions to eradicate slavery at its source, which would lead inexorably, though unintentionally, to direct colonial rule. Firstly, the anti-slavery campaign of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron turned out to be almost wholly ineffective: the trade in enslaved Africans boomed over the course of its deployment as American and Spanish merchantmen, backed by their governments, refused the Royal Navy’s authority to board their slaving vessels.
Instead, the Royal Navy settled on a policy of eradicating the slave trade on the ground, sailing into coastal towns and villages to pressure their kings and chieftains to sign agreements banning the sale of slaves, and bombarding them and replacing their rulers when they did not. Bit by bit, driven by the unintentional logic of humanitarian intervention, Britain found itself the master of much of the West African coastline.
Similarly, in the forested interior, Sierra Leone’s “Afro-Victorian” middle-class descended from freed American slaves pushed the boundaries of their settlement into unexplored regions, dragging London’s writ behind them. As historians such as Philip D. Morgan have noted, the freed African-Americans who became Sierra Leone’s elite had acquired a frontier mentality of rugged individualism and capitalist enterprise from their American sojourn, and applied the same logic to Africa’s interior. For all the misgivings of politicians and civil servants in London, the boundaries of the Sierra Leone colony expanded as its black elites — who had, in Morgan’s phrasing, “rediscovered in Africa their true American selves” — pursued their manifest destiny into the forests, bringing them into conflict with as yet-unconquered peoples, and dragging the British state into military intervention on their behalf.
Over the course of the 19th century, the modest humanitarian goals of the Sierra Leone colony for freed slaves had evolved into the conquest of much of Nigeria, from the naval bombardment of Lagos in 1851, followed by its annexation in 1861, to the conquest of the mighty slaving kingdom of Benin in 1891 (whose spectacular looted bronze sculptures, the fruit of the Atlantic slave trade, remain in contested British custody today), and then the defeat of the country’s Muslim, slave-trading north towards the end of the century. Driving these conquests was the desire not just to bring Christianity but also the creed of anti-slavery.
Many Africans were bewildered by the shift in British policy, and the destruction of their traditional ways of life. As late as 1897, the Nigerian historian Philip A. Igbafe observed, the deposed Oba or ruler of the Benin kingdom pleaded from his jail cell for permission “to catch some Urhobo slaves for sacrifice as the rains were falling too incessantly for the good of the people and their crops,” a request the new British rulers denied. In what is today Ghana, the Asante king or Asentehene asked of the British “‘But if they think it is bad now, why did they think it was good before?’” and continued the trade in humans that had for so many centuries underpinned the kingdom’s existence, little thinking that it would lead to its downfall.
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Yet the unwillingness of African rulers to go along with the newfound abolitionist crusade of the British middle classes had set the stage for a reinterpretation of Britain’s mission from one of education and negotiation to one of military conquest and direct enforcement of liberal mores. As Huzzey notes, “blunt bigotry and frustration at African slave-dealing led the Spectator, in 1853, to moan that ‘British lives are lavished on the African coasts to negotiate and treat with the Black babies who can’t keep from selling each other and cheating us.’ The paper concluded that it was impossible to educate West Africans as ‘moral observers of the Anti-Slavery faith.’” Instead, the perceived intransigence of African rulers “moved Britain to kindle freedom with force”, setting the stage for the expansionist, racialised imperialism of the later 19thcentury.
After a series of bloody Anglo-Ashanti wars, the historian Marika Sherwood notes, “The Asantehene was forced to sign a treaty, giving up any claims to the coastal forts and territories, and to his vassal states. The British thought this would be the end of Asante empire-building, but on his accession King Prempeh I slowly began to resuscitate his country and mobilise his troops. The British asked him to accept ‘Protectorate’ status. The King refused. The British invaded the kingdom, burnt down the capital city of Kumasi and looted it of all its treasures.” From Ghana to Nigeria, from its modest utopian Quaker roots in Sierra Leone, the logic of humanitarian intervention had led, step by unintended step, to the destruction and looting of native kingdoms and their replacement by direct British rule.
Yet by this point, whatever appeal direct humanitarian intervention on the African continent had held for Britain’s governing classes had long since evaporated. As the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, observed in 1861, “the ‘suppression of the Slave Trade’ is leading us into serious Territorial complications, on the whole W. Coast of Africa.” Prefiguring anti-interventionist voices today, the Times in 1863 demanded with exasperation,
“Who ever heard of a war in Gambia? What do we know of the King of Bedaboo, and why should we rejoice at having taught him a “severe lesson!” What harm has he done us and why should we be anxious to pay an additional income tax for the pleasure of killing . . . his sable subjects? As it stands it looks as much like a piratical inroad as any exploit we ever read about. . . . who ordered it? And who will pay for it? . . . Can it be possible after all the lessons we have received of the inflammatory character of little wars we can find ourselves in the thick of a ‘war upon Gambia’ without notice, and so far as we know, without reason?”
By 1865, the parliamentary select committee chaired by Charles Adderley was strongly advising against any further extension of direct control and urged British withdrawal from Africa, though only once the slave trade had been finally extinguished, an exit strategy whose conclusion seemed to stretch further and further out of reach. The financial benefits accruing to Britain were, contrary to modern perceptions, negligible: throughout the early and mid-19th century, trade with the entire African continent made up less than 2.6% of Britain’s trade balance.
As even James Stephen, described by the historian Seymour Drescher as “the Colonial office’s most influential abolitionist undersecretary” warned, “[If] we could acquire the dominion of the whole of that continent, it would be but a worthless possession.” As the Times complained in 1873, “why do we retain or even extend what we call a Protectorate over this pestiferous coast?” And yet, as Huzzey notes, “Anti-slavery policies locked an unwilling state into obligations toward African colonies.” And then as now, it was the moral crusading of journalists that drove Britain into its next wave of imperial expansion.
The British military conquest of West Africa had led to the extinction of the international trade in enslaved Africans — British governors, wary of enraging local populations, still turned a blind eye to the institution of domestic slavery — yet the pacification of the coast pushed the focus of the slave trade deeper into the interior. “Arab” slave traders from the Sultanate of Zanzibar — often in fact Islamised Swahili-speakers — penetrated deeper and deeper into the unexplored regions of Central Africa in pursuit of forced labour for the clove plantations of Zanzibar and the date groves of Basra and Arabia, focussing the attention of British liberal abolitionists on the continent’s east. Into this situation strode the crusading figure of David Livingstone, whose mission into the continent’s unexplored interior, and lurid and harrowing depictions of Arab slave raids, awoke a new wave of popular abolitionist fervour.
Just as the British government was losing its taste for humanitarian intervention in Africa, letters from the long-lost Livingstone republished by his “discoverer”, the Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley, demanded to a captivated audience that the successes of the West African campaigns be reproduced “on the opposite side of the continent”, so that “no reasonable expense, that preserves us from contamination, should be esteemed a sacrifice” in extirpating “the open sore in the world”.
Driven by popular pressure that something should be done, “the Liberal government under Gladstone — a longstanding skeptic of anti-slavery violence — reluctantly sanctioned a mission to Zanzibar”, Huzzey observes. “In August, his ministry declared war on the East African slave trade in Queen Victoria’s speech opening a new session of Parliament. The cabinet approved negotiations for concessions that would allow the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade effectually,” setting the scene for the conquest of East and Central Africa by first Britain and then the other European powers.
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The modern fixation on Rhodes’s more nakedly imperialist power grabs conceals the awkward truth that from Livingstone to Baker, Gordon to Lugard, Britain’s exploration and conquest of Africa took place under the banner of humanitarian intervention against slavery. From Zanzibar into Uganda, the Sudan and the depths of Central Africa, British abolitionist activism and rhetoric dragged British generals and administrators into wars against local rulers more or less against the government’s express orders, driven by popular fervour and the moralising exertions of what the British assistant secretary at Zanzibar termed “the period of cheap journalism”, wherein, as Huzzey notes, “complex political and economic struggles with African leaders could be easily reduced in reports home to stories of British officers fighting villains addicted to slave trading”; meanwhile the cruelties of the “Arab invasion,” and the conquest of nations could be chivalrically framed by its practitioners as “those of a gentleman defending a woman or child from an abusive ‘ruffian.’”
By the time of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, called by Bismarck, and now seen as the beginning of the Scramble for Africa and the highpoint of European imperialism in the continent, the popular clamour by liberal and evangelical activists for anti-slavery conquests had established the principle that military intervention against African states and their replacement with European governance was not just legally permissible, but an overriding moral duty.
Where before anti-slavery activism had driven colonial expansion, now the veneer of anti-slavery action was cynically applied to win popular support for nakedly imperialist power grabs. When even as sinister an actor as King Leopold of Belgium framed his conquest of the Congo as a mission to extirpate slavery from the Dark Continent’s darkest reaches, he was lauded as a hero by the liberal press and abolitionist activists in Britain. As late as the early 20th century, British anti-slavery activists were applauding the Italian conquest of Libya and Ethiopia, both ostensibly carried out to rid the countries of the stain of slavery. As Drescher notes, “antislavery became a major rationalisation for the legitimising and creation of European spheres of dominion” in Africa, whose effects have defined the continent’s subsequent history. As one anti-imperialist MP, Sir Wilfred Lawson, observed in opposing Lugard’s conquest of Uganda, “formerly we stole Africans from Africa, and now we stole Africa from Africans.”
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It is noteworthy that the recent historiographical reassessment of British and European colonial expansion in Africa in this crucial, mid-19th century period is a direct product of historians observing the exact same processes at work during the past 30 years of American military hegemony and humanitarian intervention. As Hegel famously declared, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and perhaps it is only now that this strange period is itself passing into history that we can reassess the humanitarian impulses of our forebears, who were driven by similar noble aims into ever-widening and counterproductive moral crusades. As historians have noted, liberal women activists like the fictional Mrs Jellyby were central figures in establishing the current of moral indignation at home that pressured the British government into reluctant colonial expansion, in India as well as Africa, a parallel that can be clearly seen today in the reshaping of America’s Afghan war as a feminist cause.
It is worth remembering then, when we are lectured via Instagram stories or the lobbying of activist groups about the evils of slavery, colonialism and imperialism for which we must all now make penance, that much of the interplay of these three quite separate historical processes was carried out at the moralising behest of their direct forebears.
Perhaps, instead of lecturing the British people as a whole, it is the Rowntree foundation and other such activist groups who should compensate the African nations of today for the fervid imperialism of their antecedents.
Unlike the moral clarity of propaganda, history is a series of ironies and ambiguities; in this case, the irony that, entirely contrary to the dominant popular narrative, the fervent moral certainties of today’s activists reflect precisely the same dynamics which led the British state, initially reluctantly, into the conquest of much of Africa for what seemed noble, humanitarian ends.
Like the poor, the Mrs Jellybys will always be with us: perhaps, now the second historical wave of humanitarian crusading is drawing to a close, we can limit the future unintended consequences of their activism, for our sakes as well as those of the unwitting objects of our imperial mercy.

We Canadians are inordinately concerned with what the rest of the world thinks about us. Perhaps this is because, as Mordecai Richler said, Canada is “not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples”. With so many of our ancestors having had to move away from wherever they came from, we are unusually keen to prove to the folks back in the old country that we’ve made it.
Of course, just as no one outside of Britain actually thinks that the NHS is “the envy of the world”, the truth is that most people don’t care much about Canada at all. It’s big, it’s there, but what happens in Canada tends to stay in Canada, unless it’s some self-parodic video about Canadian niceness. In fact, when it comes to Canadian politics, even Canadians tend to find Canada boring, which is why at one point only 8% of them could correctly name our head of state, which suggests a population not gripped by the country’s affairs (the answer, of course, is a familiar one).

Thus, Justin Trudeau’s accession to the premiership in 2015, and the short but fawning bout of international media coverage that it generated, was taken by many Canadians as welcome evidence that we still mattered to foreigners. As a then-recent expat, I have painful memories of earnest Canadian students explaining to their half-interested British friends how Trudeau would restore Canada’s international reputation which had been tarnished by his predecessor, then having to explain who this wicked predecessor was (go on, reader, can you name him?)
The day after his victory, Mr Trudeau, never one for using an under-statement where a hubristic over-statement would do, told the world that “On behalf of 35 million Canadians, we’re back.” And when Donald Trump was elected to the American presidency the following year, our prime minister was even floated briefly as the “new leader of the free world”, something not even his father managed, no matter how many times he hugged Fidel Castro.
Now, as Canada enters the final days of its third federal election in six years, there is no more of that. It’s hard to say when Mr Trudeau went from international golden boy to punch-line to an unfunny joke: was it the novelty socks? Was it his fancy dress-wearing and terrorist-hosting trip to India? Was it the blackface? Was it his groping of a woman? Was it him dressing down a woman who had said “mankind” instead of “peoplekind”?
And those are only the scandals the rest of the world cared about. For every instance of over-enthusiasm in the makeup and wardrobe department, there was a corresponding ethics scandal, or possible attempt to pervert the course of justice, or political prosecution of a senior military leader, or cover–up of sexual assault, or… you get the idea. Mr Trudeau might come across as a naïf on the international stage, but he is the heir to a Liberal Party whose ruthlessness and ability to distribute the right amount of patronage and pork barrel to the right provinces has made it into one of the Western world’s most successful political organisations.
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Still, there were moments during the campaign when one wondered if he had lost his political skills, honed since he was a little boy on his father’s knee. For one thing, he never managed to explain to voters why, after promising again and again that he would not call a snap election in the middle of a pandemic, he did exactly that. Confronted with the question, the best he could do was to say that this was Canada’s most important election since 1945, whatever that meant (students of history will remember that the 1945 election was in fact one of the less important in Canadian history, but there are very few of those people in Canada).
As it became apparent that voters remained unconvinced by this argument (or perhaps could not grasp the significance of 1945 as a date), he changed tack. Canadians had to return a Liberal majority to stop Erin O’Toole, the affable but unexciting leader of the Conservative Party, from banning abortion and enacting other unspecified nefarious plans. Given that the Conservatives did no such thing during their preceding nine years in government despite weekly Liberal predictions to the contrary, one could be forgiven for being somewhat sceptical.
In any case, given that the only thing which could make Mr O’Toole prime minister was wining an election, calling a snap one seemed like a very poor strategy to save Canada from those terrible Tories, who have nothing to recommend to them except the support of millions of Canadians: in the last election, they actually won more votes than the Liberals, who were saved only by the entrenched regional malapportionment which Trudeau Sr had written into the Constitution (Liberal-voting Prince Edward Island returns four MPs when it has fewer people than a single constituency in conservative Edmonton).
The lack of any justification for calling this vote does not mean, however, that it is an uninteresting one. For one thing, it must be one of the very few democratic elections conducted by a country which, by the admission of its own government (that would be Mr Trudeau’s), is committing a genocide at the same time.
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One might think that the logical thing to do for such a genocide-committing government is to surrender collectively to face trial at The Hague, or at the very least to resign in disgrace and shame. Not so with Mr Trudeau, who obviously doesn’t think that a mere genocide should stop him from winning a third term in office. In fact, even though almost all of Canada’s media and cultural elites have nominally endorsed the idea of an ongoing, state-led genocide in Canada, the subject has been almost entirely absent from this election campaign.
Ongoing genocide or not, it is true that Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous peoples has often been appalling. When he came to power, in a high-profile gesture of reconciliation, Trudeau appointed the newly elected MP Jody Wilson-Raybould as Minister of Justice, the most senior Cabinet post ever held by an Indigenous person. Three years later she was out, after refusing to bow to pressure from the Prime Minister’s office to drop a criminal case against SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec engineering firm which bankrolled the Gaddafi family and which is so corrupt it single-handedly put Canada at the top of the World Bank’s corruption blacklist ranking. The scandal bruised Trudeau, though he wiggled out of it by sacrificing his right-hand aide, an angry little man and semi-professional Twitter troll by the name of Gerald Butts.
Suggested readingWhy the Canadian Left is burning down churchesBy Meghan Murphy
Now Wilson-Raybould has written an unostentatious memoir about her time with Trudeau. Having once thought that he was an “honest and good person”, the scales fell from her eyes when she discovered that “he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it” — and what’s more, try to force her to take part in his lies, too, and to make a mockery of Canadian justice to boot. At one of her last meetings with Trudeau, she told him out loud “I wish that I had never met you”.
No doubt Trudeau, whose propensity to proclaim his feminist credentials as loudly as he can shout them is matched only by his disdain for women who dare to disobey him, feels the same way about her. But thanks to a craven political culture, a favourable electoral map and vote splitting among Right-wing parties, he still might well snatch a victory when the votes are counted, though Liberal hopes of a majority are mostly gone. Mr Trudeau has so far won the endorsements of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. Lined up against them is nothing except basic decency.

The Census Bureau released its annual report last Tuesday on “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020” with lots of updated data on household income and household demographics. Based on those new data, I present my annual post titled “Explaining US Income Inequality by Household Demographics.”
Most of the discussion on income inequality focuses on the relative differences over time between low-income and high-income American households. But it’s also informative to analyze the demographic differences among income groups at a given point in time to answer questions like:
How are high-income households different demographically from low-income households that would help us better understand income inequality?For low-income households today who aspire to become higher-income households in the future, what lifestyle and demographic changes might facilitate the path to a higher income?
The chart above (click to enlarge) shows some key demographic characteristics of US households by income quintiles (five equal groups of 25,986 US households) for 2020, using Census Bureau data available here and here. Below is a summary of some of the key demographic differences between American households in different income quintiles in 2020:
1. Mean Number of Earners per Household. On average, there are five times more income earners per household in the top income quintile households (2.0) than earners per household in the lowest-income households (0.40). Also note that the average number of earners per household increases for each higher income quintile, demonstrating that one of the main factors in explaining differences in income among US households is the number of earners per household. Also, the unadjusted ratio of average income for the highest to the lowest quintile of 17.4-to-1 ($253,484 to $14,589) falls to a ratio of only 3.5-to-1 when comparing “income per earner” between those two quintiles: $126,742 for the top quintile to $36,473 for the bottom quintile.
2. Share of Households with No Earners. More than six out of every ten American households (64.7%) in the bottom fifth of households by income had no earners in 2020. In contrast, only 4.5% of the households in the top fifth of households had no earners last year, providing more evidence of the strong relationship between average household income and income earners per household.
3. Marital Status of Householders. Married-couple households represent a much greater share of the top income quintile (77.3%) than for the bottom income quintile (16.7%), and single-parent or single households represented a much greater share of the bottom one-fifth of households (83.3%) than for the top one-fifth (22.7%). Consistent with the pattern for the average number of earners per household, the share of married-couple households also increases for each higher income quintile, from 16.7% (lowest quintile) to 34.3% (second-lowest quintile) to 46.7% (middle quintile) to 61.5% (second-highest quintile) to 77.3% (highest quintile).
4. Age of Householders. Nearly 7 out of every 10 US households (69.1%) in the top income quintile included Americans in their prime earning years between the ages of 35-64, compared to fewer than half (41.1%) of households in the bottom income quintile who had householders in that prime earning age group last year. The share of householders in the prime earning age group of 35-64 year-olds increases with each higher income quintile, from 41.1% (lowest quintile) to 42.9% to 50.2% (middle quintile) to 58.8% to 69.1% (highest quintile). 
Compared to members of the top income quintile of American households by income, household members in the bottom income quintile were more likely (17.3% for the lowest quintile vs. 14.9% for the highest quintile) to be in the youngest age group (under 35 years), and 2.6 times more likely (41.6% vs. 16.0%) to be in the oldest age group (65 years and over).
By average age, Americans in the highest three income groups are the youngest (about 50 years on average) and the lowest two income groups are slightly older at an average of 52-53 years. 
5. Work Status of Householders. More than four times (4.5X) as many top quintile households included at least one adult who was working full-time in 2020 (78.4%) compared to the bottom income quintile (only 17.6%), and more than five times as many households in the bottom quintile included adults who did not work at all (70.4%) compared to top quintile households whose family members did not work (13.4%). The share of households having one or more full-time workers increases at each higher income quintile (17.6% to 47.0% to 61.6% to 72.1% to 78.4%).
6. Education of householders. Family members of households in the top fifth of US households by income were four times more likely to have a college degree (69.3%) than members of households in the bottom income quintile (only 17.1%). In contrast, householders in the lowest income quintile were 13.7 times more likely than those in the top income quintile to have less than a high school degree in 2020 (19.2% vs. 1.4%). As expected, the Census data show that there is a significantly positive relationship between average educational attainment and average household income.
Summary: Household demographics, including the average number of earners per household and the marital status, age, and education of householders are all very highly correlated with Americans’ household income. Specifically, high-income US households have more income-earners on average than lower-income households, and individuals in high-income households are far more likely on average than individuals in low-income households to be well-educated, married, working full-time, and in their prime earning years. In contrast, individuals in lower-income US households are far more likely than Americans in higher-income households to be less-educated, working part-time, either very young (under 35 years) or very old (over 65 years), and living in single-parent or single-member households.
The good news about the Census Bureau is that the key demographic factors that explain differences in household income are not fixed over our lifetimes and are largely under our control (e.g., staying in school and graduating from high school and college, getting and staying married, working full-time, etc.), which means that individuals and households are not destined to remain in a single-member, low-income quintile forever. Fortunately, studies that track people over time find evidence of significant income mobility in America confirming that individuals and households move up and down the income quintiles over their lifetimes, as the key demographic variables highlighted above change, see related CD posts here, here and here. Those links highlight the research of social scientists Thomas Hirschl (Cornell) and Mark Rank (Washington University) showing that as a result of dynamic income mobility nearly 70% of Americans will be in the top income quintile for at least one year while almost one-third will be in the top quintile for ten years or more (see chart below).

As Thomas Sowell pointed out in his syndicated column in March 2013 titled “Economic Mobility”:
Most working Americans who were initially in the bottom 20% of income-earners [when they were young and unmarried], rise out of that bottom 20%. More of them end up in the top 20% [when older and married] than remain in the bottom 20%. People who were initially in the bottom 20% in income have had the highest rate of increase in their incomes, while those who were initially in the top 20% have had the lowest. This is the direct opposite of the pattern found when following income brackets over time, rather than following individual people.
MP: It’s highly certain that almost all of today’s high-income, college-educated, married Americans who are now in their peak earning years were in a lower-income quintile in their prior younger years when they were single and before they acquired education and job experience. It’s also likely that individuals and households in today’s top income quintiles will move back down to a lower-income quintile in the future during their retirement years, which is just part of the natural dynamic lifetime cycle of moving up and down the income quintiles for a large majority of Americans. So when the incessant chatter from the mainstream media and progressive politicians about an “income inequality crisis” in America, we should keep in mind that basic household demographics go a long way towards explaining the differences in household income in the United States. And because the key income-determining demographic variables are largely under our control and change dynamically over our lifetimes, income mobility and the American dream are still “alive and well” in the US. 

The post Explaining US income inequality by household demographics, 2020 update appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

(Photo by Scott McIntyre/For The Washington Post via Getty Images.)From the very beginning of the white Evangelical embrace of Donald Trump, there have been a series of raging debates about how that embrace would affect the church. Will the about-face on, say, the importance of character in politicians alienate people from the church? Will the policy gains from a Republican president be “worth” the partisan anger?But here’s a question that wasn’t asked quite enough. Will Evangelical devotion to Trump change the nature of Evangelicalism itself? Studying American religion is a complex exercise, one that requires sorting through vast amounts of data. It can sometimes be difficult to draw hard-and-fast conclusions, but here’s one that seems a bit surprising:Between 2016 and 2020, white Evangelicalism grew, and it likely grew because of Donald Trump. Before I tell you the rest of the story (and there is a rest of the story), let’s explain the basis for the statement above. On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center released the results of a study indicating that the percentage of white adults identifying as Evangelical or born-again grew between 2016 and 2020, and that growth was concentrated amongst Trump supporters:Contrary to what some may have expected, a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data finds that there has been no large-scale departure from evangelicalism among White Americans. In fact, there is solid evidence that White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.And no, the growth in Trump-supporting Evangelicals wasn’t offset by an exodus of Trump opponents:Additionally, the surveys do not clearly show that White evangelicals who opposed Trump were significantly more likely than Trump supporters to drop the evangelical label. The data also shows that Trump’s electoral performance among White evangelicals was even stronger in 2020 than in 2016, partially due to increased support among White voters who described themselves as evangelicals throughout this period.The bottom line is that the percentage of white Americans identifying as Evangelical grew from 25 to 29 percent between 2016 and 2020, powered mainly by the fact that 16 percent of Trump supporters who didn’t identify as Evangelical in 2016 started considering themselves Evangelical by 2020. (Nonwhite Evangelicals remained heavily opposed to Trump. According to Pew, he won only 30 percent of their vote in 2020.)Does this mean that the Trump movement actually drew people to Christianity? At the individual level, it does happen. As I’ve argued before, millions of Evangelicals are annoyed and legitimately mystified by the argument that supporting Trump hurts the credibility of the church. The reason is simple—Republicans tend to live around Republicans. Supporting Trump in those circumstances isn’t alienating to your friends and neighbors. It’s a social lubricant. It facilitates the formation of personal relationships, and evangelism often springs forth from friendship.At the same time, if you vocally oppose Trump in these communities, people will often throw up barriers. You’re an outsider, and they’ll keep you at arms length. Trust me, I know.But setting aside the instances of individual conversions, what seems to be happening at scale isn’t so much the growth of white Evangelicalism as a religious movement, but rather the near-culmination of the decades-long transformation of white Evangelicalism from a mainly religious movement into a Republican political cause. Why do I say the transformation is political and not religious? A key metric here is church attendance. An increasing number of self-described Evangelicals go to church rarely or not at all. The numbers are remarkable. Here is Ryan Burge with the data:Ryan Burge 📊 @ryanburgeEven more evidence here that "evangelical" is not a religious term anymore. Among self-identified evangelicals in 2008: 16.1% reported never or seldom attending.
58.6% reported weekly or more attendance. 2020: 26.7% never or seldom (+10 pts)
49.9% weekly or more (-11 pts) April 8th 2021145 Retweets398 LikesThis chart is equally interesting. It indicates that non church-attending Evangelicals are heavily weighted towards Republicans:Ryan Burge 📊 @ryanburgeAmong Protestant Republicans, about 2/3 of those who attend church once a year identify as evangelical.
Among Protestant Democrats, about 2/3 of those who attend church more than once a week identify as evangelical. September 17th 20214 Retweets20 LikesThere isn’t a meaningful branch of Evangelical orthodoxy that is truly church-optional. Disconnection from the church doesn’t just mean disconnection from Christian community, it also frequently means disconnection from biblical literacy and Christian ethics.I use these numbers not to say that there is a stark difference politically between church-attending white Evangelicals and those who never darken the doors. There’s not. Church-attending white Evangelicals turned out for Trump in huge numbers in 2020. Instead, it’s important to emphasize that Evangelicalism is now only partially a religious movement, and the religious component may now be smaller than the political. At this point, some of my Christian academic friends are throwing their pocket protectors across the room and yelling, “Definitions, David! Define your terms.” They’ll object to me using the term “Evangelical” to describe non church-attending nominal Christians. And they’ve got a point. There is more than one way to define an Evangelical, and those different ways directly influence the way we think of Evangelicalism itself. The methods used in the statistics above generally involve asking white Americans if they’re Evangelical or born-again. The person’s self-definition settles the question. If you say you’re Evangelical, then you’re Evangelical. There is no belief-based litmus test.But there are other ways, including asking people what church they belong to or asking people what they believe and then determining, based on their answers, whether they fit within Evangelical religious traditions. For example, one way to determine whether any person (self-described Evangelical or not) has Evangelical beliefs is to ask if their beliefs and actions conform to the “Bebbington Quadrilateral,” the four common Evangelical beliefs identified by British Historian David Bebbington:Biblicism: Devotion to the Bible as God's word;Crucicentrism: The centrality of the cross of Christ in evangelical teaching and preaching;Activism: Cooperating in the mission of God through evangelism and charitable works;Conversionism: The conviction that each person must turn from their sin, believe in the saving work of Christ, and commit themselves to a life of discipleship and service.The Barna Research Group famously performed its own test in 2006, first asking if respondents identified as Evangelicals. A full 38 percent said yes. It also asked respondents if they agreed with nine distinct theological assertions common to Evangelicalism. Only 8 percent concurred. In 2015, NPR reported that the number was 6 percent. Theological Evangelicals are thus but a small subset of the broader movement.At the risk of oversimplifying, let’s put Evangelicals in three buckets:First, there is the universe of self-described Evangelicals of any race or ethnicity. This group is racially diverse and also politically and religiously heterodox. They share a self-definition, but they don’t necessarily share either a political or a theological worldview.Next, there are self-identified white Evangelicals, who are the core constituency of the Republican Party. This group of Americans is religiously heterodox and ideologically uniform. This is the group of Evangelical Americans who receive the lion’s share of the nation’s attention, precisely because they represent the key to Republican power in the United States. Without white Evangelicals, the GOP would effectively cease to exist.Finally, there is the much smaller group of Americans who are theologically Evangelical. They’re part of the Bebbington Quadrilateral, or those who satisfy the Barna test. They’re racially diverse, more politically heterodox than white Evangelicals alone, and religiously orthodox. They’re also the smallest of the three groups, by far, and—as a practical matter—don’t exercise decisive political power. They’re a minority of a minority. It is vitally important to understand these distinctions, in part because it can explain why Evangelical political action can be so cruel and often so disconnected from biblical ethics. Why? One answer is found in the simple reality that not only are vast numbers of white self-described Evangelicals unmoored from scriptural truth, they don’t know biblical ethics at all. An amusing Twitter anecdote illustrates the point. On Thursday, Beth Moore tweeted this: Beth Moore @BethMooreLPMA guy memorizing Phil 1:1-18 with us told me he was getting so much from it, he read it to a group recently. Got called a liberal. Gonna tell you right now, a lot of folks putting a checkmark in the Christian square are completely out of touch with the actual Jesus of Scripture.September 16th 2021621 Retweets7,419 LikesShe clarified that she was referring Philippians 2:1-18, which famously begins like this:So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.Russell Moore replied to Beth:Russell Moore @drmoore@BethMooreLPM A pastor told me he cited “Turn the other cheek” and dealt with an outraged guy asking him why he was spouting liberal propaganda.September 16th 202131 Retweets879 LikesI know these are anecdotes, but it is still absolutely, 100 percent the truth that politicians and activists who seek to mobilize white Evangelicals are trying to mobilize millions of people who do not know or believe scripture and are thus not persuaded by appeals to scriptural principles. As political operators, those politicians and activists often feel they have to appeal to Fox News or talk radio talking points because the biblical argument simply will not resonate. It’s speaking to their audience in a foreign tongue. For example, I know there is large-scale churchgoing Christian resistance to vaccines, but why is there such profound religious resistance from white Evangelicals specifically when there is not one single significant denomination that theologically resists vaccines? Well, one reason, in addition to partisan politics, is that millions of self-described Evangelicals don’t have much clue about any of the teachings of the church. Combine the huge, unchurched “Evangelical” mass with a potent neo-fundamentalist movement that is steeped in angry Christian nationalism, and politics and religion can easily become a God-and-country branding exercise. And in that effort, the actual Bible can be an obstacle, not an asset. Why do I so often repeat verses like Micah 6:8 (“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God”)? Or Luke 6:28 (“bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you”)? Because I know there’s a very good chance that someone reading my work is hearing those verses and concepts for the very first time in their lives, even if they identify as Christian. The transformation of white Evangelicalism into a primarily political movement is a cause for deep and profound concern. It’s become a force that is helping fracture our nation and sicken its people, and its extreme elements have become instruments of cruelty and even violence.That’s the despair. Where’s the hope? There is hope that those who identify as Christians and don’t yet connect with a Christian community are at least open to learning what Christianity means, including that it is a faith not rooted in fear. It is not rooted in anger. And no matter what any activist or pastor or politician says, it is not rooted in any American politician or any American political party. One last thing…As I type this last paragraph, I’m sitting next to Jillian Edwards at The Gathering, a convening of Christian philanthropists. She’s a lovely person, and her music is a blessing. Enjoy:

Matthew Karp is a contributing editor for Jacobin magazine and associate professor of history at Princeton University. An expert on the Civil War era and slavery, his writing poses a challenge to a right too sanguine about the darkest corners of America’s past, and a left too eager to embrace despair about the arc of history.In this week’s conversation, Matthew Karp and Yascha Mounk discuss the "1619 Project,” the politics of history from Juneteenth to the Confederacy, and why an accurate conception of the past is key to shaping a better future.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: How have Americans traditionally thought about their history? Matthew Karp: There’s a Gore Vidal zinger about this, right? “We learn nothing, because we remember nothing.” That's a common theme in a certain kind of liberal discourse—self-flagellation about America's ignorance of the past. I feel like every country has its own version of that. Historians are certainly interested in telling everybody else that they don't know their history. That's a move that our profession likes to engage in and it sometimes seeps into the public sphere.I think there have been two broad transformations on the right and on the left in the way that the politics of history shows up today: on the right, there's been a shift from a traditionalist, patriarchal, or even filial pietistic worship of America's traditional leaders, which for a long time included the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, too. I think the dominant mood now is still nationalistic, but in the Trump era has turned away, in some ways, from the substance of history and towards a trolling, even nihilistic escape from history, which is a transformation worth noting: both the retreat from the Lost Cause [concept of the Confederacy] and this embrace of the MAGA theory, or non-theory, of history.Mounk: When you say it's gone into “trolling” mode today, I take it you mean things like Dinesh D'Souza pointing out that it was actually the Democrats in the 19th century who defended slavery and Republicans who attacked it. It is actually distancing itself, even if not very loudly or not in a very obvious way, from the negative parts of American history that 20 or 40 years ago some conservatives might have tried to downplay or defend.Karp: Right. I think what I'm most interested in is the more recent shift from—even as recently as the Bush administration—several cabinet members like John Ashcroft, and Gale Norton in the Interior Department, who basically openly praised the Confederacy and lamented the defeat of the South in the Civil War and what we'd lost in terms of states’ rights and so on. Obviously, there are other ways to measure this: when Martin Luther King Day came up for a vote for the first time in Congress in the late 70s, a majority of Republicans opposed it, and only gradually across the 80s did they relent. Whereas now you have a significant retreat from some of those specific symbols associated with the Lost Cause, Southern resistance, and states’ rights. The Juneteenth vote that just came up, another national holiday explicitly affirming and celebrating emancipation, was passed almost unanimously with co-sponsor John Cornyn of Texas. Clearly, an element of Confederate sympathy remains in the South and elsewhere. And you do see the Confederate flag, as on January 6th, but the Trump administration itself was not invested in Lost Cause memorabilia. They are, if anything, inclined to embrace the macho-nationalism of Lincoln and of the Union. It’s not that they've actually developed a new and persuasive formula for thinking about American history, but that in some ways, they've accepted the basic chronology developed by liberal and left-leaning historians, with slavery and emancipation at the heart of what 19th century US history is about, and just switching the colors on the jerseys and saying, “the good guys were Republicans and conservatives.” The new formulation isn't really invested in developing its own theory of history; it's accepting the one that's out there and taking opportunistic moments to dunk on the opposition.Mounk: There are interesting ways in which the Trump era has accepted a lot of social developments. One of the dogs that really hasn't barked for five or perhaps ten years is gay marriage, which is something that conservatives had opposed very passionately for a very long time. But there was no attempt whatsoever, while Republicans had unified control of government from 2016 to 2018, to roll that back, or to even make it part of a political debate. I think it's important when you're trying to understand the political moment to look at these things that are not very visible—precisely because both sides have actually accepted them—as the moments of real change.Karp: “Dogs that don't bark” are just as significant in trying to assess what historical change really is happening and what transformations have been established and which haven't. I do think that even in the post-George Floyd moment, when you did have a lot of people on the right getting hot and bothered about the tearing down of statues, it was notable that Tucker Carlson never once defended the Confederacy or any of the Confederate statues. It was clearly a conscious decision to cut the Confederacy loose, and that showed up in all of the various statue gardens and absurd nationalistic pageant ideas that Trump was shooting out at the end of his term. In his late arrival in the history wars, none of it involved celebrating the Confederacy. I think it's important to note, from the historian’s perspective, that this is very different from how a right-wing radio news host would have been talking in the 90s. Mounk: So today's right, at least in certain ways, has accepted the liberal narrative of American history that was prevalent in history departments until 10 or 20 years ago. But at the same time, it seems as though there's been a similar transformation on the left-liberal part of the political space, in which that old liberal narrative has itself been jettisoned for a really new narrative.Karp: I agree. There's been a realignment that is, in some ways, interlocking. There's been a shift away from the buoyant, often optimistic, occasionally complacent, liberal belief in American progress, and in progressive change as the root of American history.Every Democratic president, certainly from John F. Kennedy through to Obama, depicted US history as this long march of progress: the American Revolution, the struggle against slavery, the struggle for women's suffrage—sometimes the struggle for the labor movement, depending on the moment that we're talking about—the struggle for civil rights, the struggle for gay rights. In an Obama speech, all of these would often converge as this general narrative of progress. And sometimes this did lean towards a deep complacency: Bill Clinton's line about how there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America. Critics have often accused liberal history of celebrating this inevitable march of progress, almost as if we didn't need to do anything, because progress was sort of mechanically working itself out.Clearly, there's a new narrative that has challenged this sense of America as a vehicle for progress. I think “The 1619 Project” most dramatically develops a narrative of US history that is centered on the role of oppression, specifically racial oppression, in America's origins. Explicitly, the project is focused on refounding America not in 1776, but in 1619, and also on the continuity of that oppression through the long sweep of American history. Instead of highlighting moments of progressive change from the Civil War to the civil rights movement, the narrative that unfurls under the aegis of “1619” is both linear in the sense that it is a flat line from the antebellum plantation complex to the prison industrial complex today, etc., and also circular: it's clearly making an argument that is much more invested in continuity and these cyclical struggles, rather than marking progressive victories or noting the importance of change.Mounk: Obviously, Trump prompted the examination of everything that's worst about America; but why do you think that that seems like an appealing way to talk about American history, and why is that, in your mind, actually a mistake?Karp: I think part of the motivation for this new narrative of history comes from a sense that the old narrative was so deeply complacent, that it ignored the persistence of deep inequalities across all of these supposedly progressive changes. Under the leadership of liberal presidents like Clinton and Obama, I think there was a sense on the left, and maybe even among so-called liberals, that this Whiggish account of America's change was really failing to address these deep inequalities; that actually, the last 50 years since the civil rights movement have done very little to challenge the racial wealth gap (or, frankly, the class wealth gap, which encompasses most of the racial wealth gap, since the racial wealth gap owes itself largely to differences in the top 10%, and really the top 5% and 1%); and that these really persistent inequalities under capitalism were not even getting airtime under this liberal narrative. Now, where I think the mistake is—or where I'm much more critical of this movement—is its effort to replace that sense of inevitable progress, this sort of moral elevator of history, with the sense of paralyzed, doomed, endless continuity owing to original sin or a genetic code or some tragic arc that is inescapable. I think some of that comes from a sense of hopelessness about the possibility of political change in our current environment, but I don't think that the proper political or intellectual response to hopelessness is to instantiate it at the core of our historiography.Mounk: It's an odd thing that “white supremacy is the DNA of America” is supposed to be the preamble for radical political action. There seems to be a mismatch there, but I haven't quite put my finger on it.Karp: Yes. For me, that's legible through the big political [and] economic changes of the last 50 years. And this is where my own, if you want to say, leftism comes in. With Thomas Piketty and others, I think the dominant fact of world history since the 1970s—the history of the North Atlantic industrial and post-industrial world—is the devolution of the labor movement, the weakening of the institutional power of the working class, and the collapse of class politics itself. And I think in this moment—where labor and workers are weaker and less cognizant of any political power of any kind—you have, on the one hand, the increasing appeal of the right-populist temptation. On the other hand, I think you have what Piketty calls the “Brahmin left,” that has emerged largely in academia, media, and other professional class cadres that retain some sense of this commitment to egalitarianism, but is totally divorced from labor and from class politics itself. So, what ideas about the past or about political change it does have, are centered on a moral catharsis and a reckoning that—whether it's through diversity training or a new account of American history—can right various wrongs without actually being connected to political mass movements and grounded in material conditions. And I think that flight from materialism, if you will, does explain the impulse to locate these historical wrongs not in our present conditions, but in the past itself. Various Trotskyists online have made this critique very eloquently, but this new historical cosmology of “1619” does not threaten the powers that be, does not threaten Silicon Valley or JP Morgan or any of the new paladins of our economy because it is so idealistic and so grounded in this place of abstract reckoning that it does not present a material threat to the power of capital today. And I think it's therefore been much easier for it to be embraced by various establishment figures. I think the pure materialist, which I’m not, would say this demonstrates how unthreatening these ideas are.Mounk: What I find striking about the last 10 or 20 years is that history seems to have a much larger prominence among the general public than it did 20 years ago. But a lot of it does seem to take a genealogical form: “Hey, actually, the origins of current policing methods, of capitalism, of our discourse about human rights, are problematic, and therefore those things themselves are problematic.” What do you think about this genealogical mode of argument and the role it plays in our discourse today?Karp: I'm not totally unsympathetic to the importance of understanding lineages, history, and continuity in the relationship between past crimes and present-day realities. But in its reductive insistence on conceiving of all history as this closed chamber, this “mark of the beast” [thinking] almost precludes the reality of enormous changes. If you just look at the narrative of the past that it unspools, leaving aside the future for a minute, it's amazing how the Civil War itself is almost absent in that chronology. And I do understand that they, for specific, understandable reasons, didn't want to do a greatest hits album of, you know, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman and the heroes of the civil rights movement. They wanted to tell a different story. So I do understand that as a corrective; but to wipe out the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War, and radical Reconstruction as mass political struggles, as part of the center of both African American and US history, is to craft a narrative in which there isn't really a difference between 1850 and 1900.And I think even on those terms, it really is a huge misapprehension of what materially did change between a regime of chattel slavery, and the very different social and racial order under Jim Crow. There were huge gains made by that struggle that were not rolled back, if you look at, say, black literacy rates, or the autonomy provided over marriage and family life. Economists have calculated the share of earnings that black workers in the South got to own themselves under Jim Crow, as opposed to under slavery, and it goes up remarkably. The amount of hours that they spent working decreased—just a huge material change. Not to mention, the entire order of society is different under that sharecropping regime. I hope it's not pedantic to say these things are different. You don't have to have a particular political disposition to feel the importance of that.Mounk: You're a historian in the academy, also somebody who writes for a broader audience. How is it that we should think about the relationship between a true and accurate and unflinching understanding of the nature of American history, and a narrative about our own country that maybe does help us to draw on what's best about America, in order to fix the things that are evidently wrong with America?Karp: I wish I had a better answer for this, and actually, I'm going to start working on a book about how to understand the politics of history today. But I think I would begin where I ended the last answer, on the omnipresence of change in U.S. history, and how, in some ways, that more than any of these continuity or meta-narratives is something that I think would be useful for students both politically and pedagogically. I would use two key words: change and struggle. And I think the advocates of “1619” will say, “No, ‘1619’ is a story of struggle. It's all about black struggle against the oppressive forces of white supremacy, and that struggle is ongoing.” And they would claim that that's the narrative. But I do think that it's a very different conception of historical struggle and contestation than say, Frederick Douglass, who contained in his worldview the belief that struggle would lead to progress.But I don't think that adopting that negative image of American exceptionalism—America, the exceptional evil—is politically powerful or intellectually persuasive. I much prefer a narrative that centers both struggle and transformation on all sides, and that, as you said, leaves room for future struggles and future possibilities–because I think they are out there. And if we deny them, then we're not going to be in a position to influence them when they do happen.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: http://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

By James Pethokoukis and Azeem Azhar
Is technology progressing too quickly? The rapid pace of technological change in the digital era has transformed society in just a few decades. Some welcome the innovations that will usher in the future, while others fear their disruptive effects. Will technological progress continue to accelerate? And what should we do about it? To answer these questions and more, I’ve brought on Azeem Azhar.
Azeem is an entrepreneur and investor, and the founder of Exponential View, where his podcast and newsletter deliver in-depth tech analysis. This month, Azeem released The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review. 
Pethokoukis: In the preface of the book you quote a poll from last year: 60 percent of people who responded to this poll said they felt the pace of change was too fast. And the number of people said that was up considerably over five years ago.
On the surface I think that would seem to support the idea that we’re in a period of rapid change. And who knows, maybe it’s going to get even faster. But I thought of the book — and it’s a book I’m sure you’re familiar with — Future Shock from 1970, by Alvin Toffler. And the premise of that book was that we were in a period of rapid change. And in fact it was so rapid, it was driving us all crazy. And that book came out just as a period of rapid growth and technological progress downshifted. And we entered what some people called the “great stagnation.” Do you have any concern that people thinking it’s going so fast might actually be some sort of contrarian indicator, and we’re not entering an exponential age?
Azhar: Oh, I love that question. I love that question. I
mean, people have certainly for the last 150 years felt that things are going
too fast, and you can go back to the archives of the New York Times in the
1920s about elevators, and the turn of the 20th century about girls and boys
reading books at night using electric light and parents being worried about
that. I think what’s different this time, and what’s distinct to what happened
after Toffler made his very impressive remarks 50 years ago, is that we can
actually see and feel that shift in our real economies. In 2010, the world’s
largest companies were companies of the 20th century. It was Exxon Mobile and
oil companies and General Motors and General Electric. These were technologies
of the era of Rockefeller and Ford and Edison.
The logo of Exxon Mobil Corporation is shown on a monitor above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
And by 2015, all of the world’s largest companies were essentially
IT companies sitting on the top of semiconductor improvement rates. And so
there is a distinct shift and that’s been reflected by the market. It’s been
reflected by the fact that during the pandemic the companies that grew were the
companies that had invested most heavily in automation and AI. And it was
companies like Amazon, not traditional retailers. And so, what I think is
distinct today is that we can go back and say, “There is a moment, and there is
that sense of what the kind of consensual animal spirits of the market has gone
off. The world looks different now, and we don’t value an Exxon or a GM the way
that we value an Apple or a Facebook or a Salesforce.”

So markets
are sending a signal. And one way to look at your thesis of acceleration is that
it’s passing the market test. So I will now let you actually give your thesis. What
is driving and what will drive an exponential age?
The exponential age is really a discussion about human
affairs. It’s about the interaction of the economy with politics. We can call
it the political economy. We can call it society. And it’s predicated on the
argument that technologies shape the way that industries structure themselves,
the way that firms compete, the way that labor markets operate, and the way
that the political process then reflects those tensions.
And a simple example that many of us will understand given
where we are, is that the technology of the internal combustion engine that
required oil created an entire geopolitics around oil. Ultimately of course, it
created big great companies like the Oil Majors and the car companies, but it
also created a geopolitics. And my argument after a few years of research is
that there is a set of new general purpose technology platforms that have
different characteristics than the ones we were used to in the 20th century,
and they too will shape our political economy and our societies in very, very
distinct ways.
And the platform we’re most familiar with is computing and
that clock speed of Moore’s law, giving us more for less every couple of years.
And then there are perhaps more surprising areas: The field of biology, and how
we interact with the processes and the mechanisms of nature through genes and
through protein engineering; in the field of energy, where mighty wind turbines
and dense lithium-ion batteries are getting cheaper and better every year. And
even in the field of manufacturing where technologies like 3D printing — nascent
and slightly niche and weird they are today — are improving at such rapid,
compounding rates that we can see them changing the way that we actually build
our finished goods. And in all of that comes shifts in firm behavior, industry
structure, economic performance, and then things that get reflected in the
political process, or need to get reflected in the political process.
The key great technologies and great inventions of the past that had huge effects on our lives — not just on our commercial life or our standard of living, but geopolitics, governing — these are significant technologies. And some of the technologies you just mentioned seem significant. But when you add them all together, are they electrification? Are they the internal combustion engine? While they may make some people rich and they may make some companies very valuable, maybe they are not going to substantially change our way of life as these great technologies of the past did.
I mean, in a sense, it’s too early to tell. I think we can
agree that there’s a sort of a concordance around the fact that electricity was
a general purpose technology and that general purpose technologies with their
wide applicability across and up and down the economy have really, really
significant impacts. Then I suppose the second question is, to what extent do
we really think that something like computation is a general purpose
technology? And one of the arguments that I would make is that (despite this
period of acceleration within the technology) there is an adjustment time that
it takes for companies and managers to develop the know-how to actually make
use of these technologies in very, very useful ways.
And so, we’re 50 years from the Intel 4004 processor, and
still the bulk of commerce is actually done by people physically walking into
retail stores. It’s not done electronically. But I’m not sure we can be as
confident about that fact in 10 years time as we might have been 20 years ago.
Because it has taken time for the technology to drop in price, for the
companies to figure out how to do this, and then for consumer behavior to also
change. But one of the things that I observe in the book is that the period of
time it does take for consumers to latch onto novel products built on these
technologies has been compressing very, very quickly.
And I give one example in office automation — let’s call it what it is: it’s clever scripting of mundane tasks — of a company called UiPath. And when I wrote the proposal for the book, UiPath had a couple of hundred employees and a valuation below a billion dollars. By the time I submitted the final version to press a couple of years later, UiPath had gone public on the NASDAQ with a $35 billion valuation and thousands of employees and thousands of customers. And so you see that rate of diffusion within the economy just faster than anything we’ve seen before. Now the question is, will that show up in whatever economists choose to measure? I mean, it might not this year, but in five years time we can look back and see whether that hypothesis is really correct.
In this photo illustration the UiPath logo seen displayed on a smartphone.Photo by Rafael Henrique / SOPA Images/Sipa USA
That’s the
question. Even though we can have a debate about how well these kind of broad,
accurate statistics work and track productivity — and there’s a critique, and
we’ve covered that critique on this podcast — if we’re talking about these
kinds of radical technologies, you could say, “Well yeah, they’re already
showing up in the stock market. That is not an insignificant signal.” These
things are having big impacts on our welfare and on business. They should show
up. So at some point, though, if you’re correct, we should not have a 2 percent
economy. We should have something considerably better than that.
I mean, we should, theoretically. I think there are a couple of ways of looking at the observation that you make. One question is whether the gains that we are talking about are being appropriately measured. And there’s a famous chart that I’m sure you’ve seen, which shows that the price of televisions has declined hugely, but that the price of healthcare in the US has increased. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs say, “Everywhere where an entrepreneur has been able to get their teeth into an industry, the price has collapsed; and where they haven’t, like healthcare and education, the price has gone up.” And that’s often the story. But I think that those sorts of things belie the nature of the quality of the products that you’re getting within that price decline as well.
And so one question is, do we actually capture many of the
benefits? And that’s why you see economists like Diane Coyle in the UK, or Erik
Brynjolfsson out of the US saying, “Well, maybe we need measures other
than GDP,” which I think Erik has called GDP-B or something, “that might
capture some of the gains that we are not able to put our hands around.” And
that would certainly be the case in something like some of the biological
arenas where some of these advanced gene therapies might extend lifespans, but
they might not extend healthspans. And so does that really necessarily show up
as a GDP number in any meaningful way? So I think that that’s one argument,
which is that we’re not counting the right kind of things.
The other argument would be that there are many other
factors that we can’t control for in the economy. So for example, we can’t
necessarily control forecast birth rates and where birth rates end up, and that
often drives GDP. We don’t necessarily control for the nature and quality of
work that people are doing and the amount of leisure time that is embedded
within the economy. And that might also be valuable. So, I suppose I look at
your question and I say, I’m not confident that we’d necessarily see a return
to a 3 percent world in a kind of post-war excitement. But what I do see is
technologies upending industries in a very, very large degree. And that to me
is pretty interesting.
Well, let me
phrase that question differently. Between now and 1980 is roughly 40 years. And
if you ask people in 1980 who remembered 1940, they would say, “Wow,
things are a lot different in 1980 than 1940.” But some people would say,
“Well, maybe things really aren’t that different today than in 1980.”
If you’re right, our life should look a lot different in 25 years than today,
if we’re really going to be, as the subtitle says, transforming — that’s a
powerful word — business, politics and society.
Yeah, I think it will look dramatically different. I think
there’s a really distinct difference today to where we were in 1980. I mean,
just simply thinking about supply chains: thinking about the fact that you can
launch a physical product in five, six continents and have tens or hundreds of
millions of people buy it within a few months. That simply wasn’t possible back
in 1980. And of course that’s what happens now with the latest Samsung or Apple
smartphones.
People seen lining up at the Apple store in Taipei after the launch of the new iPhone.Via REUTERS
But of course, there’s also a continuum. I mean, a lot of
these trends are running for quite a long period of time. And even the trend of
greater integration of global supply chains is something that we can take back
decades and centuries. Although there’s definitely, I think, a shift starting
in the ’60s with the arrival of containerization, for example. And then in the
’70s and ’80s with automation and databases that allowed for more digital
supply chains.
So I think there are things that look distinctly different. And if we roll forward: In 20 or 25 years, we won’t have an oil and gas industry. We might have a de-carbonization industry. We will have these models that look awkward today of personal transportation. Today’s personal transportation choices are: Do I walk; do I jump in the car; or do I take public transport, which is more common in Europe than in the US?
And if you get in the car, you’re leasing it or you own it outright. And what will that actually look like in 20 years? I think it will be a much more fragmented, disaggregated market — a much more highly segmented market. So it will look and feel quite different to today’s commute. The one that I do at the age of 49 in September 2021, is very, very similar to the one that I did when with my parents at the age of nine, when they would drop me to school. They would drive me in a car, on a road with traffic lights and traffic jams and the occasional cyclist. And that’s what it looks like. And I think it’ll look different in 20 years.
How will that
exponential age be powered? To me, that is almost a fundamental question.
Because what you’re talking about is not a kind of old-fashioned
environmentalist scarcity model. You’re talking about abundance. Where’s that
energy coming from?
A large part of it will come from renewable sources. And I look at the renewables that are on an exponential price decline, so wind and solar and certain types of battery storage. And we’re already at a point in 2021 where, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which is an analyst of this stuff, new renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels in every part of the world. So we’ve got to that point where it’s economically attractive to do this. I mean, to get the full energy mix, of course, we’re going to need more than renewables. We’ll need things like geothermal, and we’ll need nuclear and (potentially given the breakthroughs in some of the scientific breakthroughs and engineering breakthroughs in fusion) we may even have fusion. So we will get to a point where we won’t be using fossil fuels as our prime mover.
Rather, we’ll have a mix of things that look big and lumpy — like fusion and geothermal — and things that can look very, very decentralized — like wind and community solar and rooftop solar — matched by storage systems that will range from big grids of lithium-ion batteries, to new technologies like that of Form Energy, which has an iron-based battery, through to things like hydrogen being used as storage. But critically that hydrogen will be what is known as “green hydrogen” produced by solar- or wind-powered electricity through an electrolysis process, rather than through a kind of cracking of natural gas or reduction of natural gas. And that will be a zero-carbon hydrogen that will be used for storage and for shipping and for certain types of other transit.
I would have
guessed 20 years ago that decoding of the human genome would have created a
general purpose biotechnology that by now would be a key element of medicine. It
doesn’t seem like that has happened. What is the case for that happening now
with genetic editing, like CRISPR or other technologies?
Yeah, it’s a really, really great point. We’re not where we thought we would be. When that first genome was sequenced, it cost between $300 million and $450 million. There are some arguments about it. And today in a market that is dominated by one firm, Illumina, that price is around a thousand bucks. So it’s really dropped a great deal. And there’s very little reason why it can’t continue to drop and drop further. And hopefully new competition will spur those price declines. I think a couple of the reasons why it hasn’t had quite the impact that we might’ve expected have been to do with a better understanding of the science — that this is just not about the expression of the genome; it’s also about the epigene, which is in a sense a kind of software that sits on top of the genome, and other parts of this arena called “omics”.
So it’s about being able to measure and quantify and express mathematically all of the different biological systems that we have. And those scientific breakthroughs have been made (really, are still being made) in the last 20 or 30 years. And it takes time for those to be realized. But what we are starting to see with the sub-thousand-dollar genomes screens is the more widespread availability of this technology. And I’ll give you one example that I had to cut from my book just for length: In the US there are certain providers of in vitro fertilization, test tube babies, who will do a genome sequence of the successfully fertilized eggs within a couple of days of that fertilization. And through that genome sequencing, they can look for extreme risk factors, health risk factors. So things like Down syndrome, but also extreme dwarfism or extreme cognitive impairment. And that information can be used by parents to say, “Which of these successful fertilized eggs do we actually want to proceed with?” And that technology is available. That service is available for less than a couple of thousand dollars now.
And so that’s becoming more and more commonplace. And of course, we had the case two or three years ago of the Chinese scientist who sort of broke every ethical protocol by using CRISPR to edit a pair of twins to sort of eliminate a chance of a particular condition for them. So the technology is now getting there. It’s getting cheap enough. Some of these use cases will become more commonplace because they’re being commercialized, and founders are taking them out to market. Some we will still need to think about because of the health risks and the medical risks and the ethical questions they raise.
I suppose I would like to live to be 120. That would be great. I want to be healthy and I want my mind to be in good shape. I don’t know if you could call that healthspan . . .
Healthspan, yeah.
Are these
technologies going to lengthen lifespan? Or just maybe not lifespan, but just
make us healthier longer?
I think we’ve come from the cultural backdrop that people
die and they die young. And you like me, probably grew up at a time when if
someone got cancer of any sort, that was really, really terrible news, and they
probably wouldn’t survive it. And we’re now at a point where medicine has
allowed us to survive many of the cancers, but not all. And the question of
longevity has largely been addressed by biomedical science. But to your point,
it’s really now about the question of the quality of the life.
And I think that longevity scientists, people like David
Sinclair and others are really trying to fundamentally use these exponential
technologies to validate their theories about what causes aging and how we
tackle it. I’m not sure it’ll necessarily, in its first instances, be things
like genetic knockouts, rather than changes in lifestyle. But I do think that
the science combined with the ability to run experiments and the ability to
apply these technologies to those experiments is telling us about that core
question of healthspan. So for example, I regularly fast intermittently. I also
take Trans-Resveratrol and I take a supplement called NMD. All of which tackle
the parts of the aging circuitry, which is science that’s probably 15 years old
in a sense, and sort of more robust only five or 10 years old. So that question
I think is being addressed, and I think it’s enabled by these core
technologies.
Do you think that societies and advanced economies, rich countries, can tolerate rapid change the way they used to? If one would look back over the past decade, maybe more, you could draw the conclusion that we’ve become more allergic to disruption — that somewhat maybe explains the rise of populism. If we’re talking about more change, do we have the kind of government we need to that? But do we also have the kind of society that will embrace that and continue to encourage that kind of change?
Facebook Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee. REUTERS/Erin Scott
If you’ve watched any of the congressional hearings in the United States, when they brought up these tech CEOs, you certainly get the sense that we have a government that doesn’t understand technology that’s 10 years old, much less dealing new things coming down the line.
Yeah. It’s terrifying in a sense, and it’s such a great,
great challenge. I spoke with a four star general, and he was number two in the
UK armed forces, as part of my research for the book. And he gave me this line
that stuck with me, which is he said, “People in the West exist as
strategic snowflakes.” And he’s alluding to what you’ve just described,
which is the sense that we’re allergic to change because we’ve got very, very
comfortable. And it is compounded by the fact that the political environment
isn’t peopled by people who understand what this change looks like.
I think the way that we might be able to tackle that — I
mean, I think it’s partly books like mine which try to be sort of balanced in
their sense of possibility and their sense of the risks — but it’s also this idea
that there is a generational shift and there is a much more of an adept
facility that younger people have with the environment in which they grow up.
As to the kind of political dimension, I can’t speak too much to the US because
I’m based in the UK and what I see and I read is from my mixed Twitter feeds
where I try to get a mix of the right and the left. There is Fox news and there
is CNN and so on. But I’m a flaneur of it. But within the UK, the thing that I
see that is interesting is that the political bureaucracy, the civil service,
the regulators seem to understand these issues. And they’re increasingly
getting people who have done their time in tech companies who now want to
provide some public service into these organizations.
And so the civil service, the government departments, the
regulators are often deeply, deeply thoughtful, and really understand the
issues and that’s a great positive. Where they get stymied is by the political
know-how and where the politicians are trying to take them. At least it’s not a
problem of intellectual capability within the bureaucracy that has to make this
happen. But it is a problem with the politicians. So it’s one big problem
rather than a big problem and a medium problem, which I guess is a better place
for us to start from.
When Alvin
Toffler wrote Future Shock, the United States was seeing rapid change and lots
of civil unrest. We adjusted to those changes, and we didn’t go crazy like he
had predicted. But since then we’ve created online bubbles where crazy ideas,
like the QAnon movement, can spread. Are you concerned that these changes could
make us crazy?
I am concerned. I can’t use the lens of the exponential gap to describe that. The gap between where we sit in our normal everyday habits and customs and behaviors and criticality, and the potentials of the technology. But one of the things that really fascinated me was that you see dominant companies emerge in the US in the tech space, whether it’s Apple, or Amazon, or Facebook. And the common argument, and I make this argument myself, is that the Borkian view of monopoly doesn’t work very well in this sort of intangible economy, and that the FTC was slightly asleep at the wheel when they thought about how they should create dynamic competitive markets.
But the thing that’s fascinating is that exactly the same
pattern emerged in Europe. And it also emerged in China, which has a really
distinctly different sort of political-economic model. I think that that’s a
commonality of this shift that we have towards these companies that are working
in this intangible economy that have these fast-changing technologies that are
driving them forward. But the thing that has struck me about things that China
has done in the last few weeks has been that that regime has spotted many of
the risks. And so in recent weeks, they have introduced an incredibly stringent
consumer data privacy law with respect to the big companies, not so much to the
state. They have introduced new regulations banning young kids from playing
video games. President Xi has announced a sort of common prosperity doctrine
where he wants technology companies essentially to contribute to common pools,
to allay some of the challenges of the changing nature of work. And Alibaba in
the last couple of days has contributed $15 billion or announced it’s going to
contribute to $15 billion to that.
Forget the political mechanisms. There’s all sorts of
complexities around China. What’s interesting is that group has identified some
of the common strains and pressures and tensions that emerge at this moment,
this sort of moment that Alvin Toffler predicted 50 years ago. And they’ve also
come up with particular policies that make sense within their cultural and
political context. And that makes me more confident that we sit at that sort of
precipice of chaos. And we have to actually stand up and make some adjustments
that suit the UK culture and the US culture in their own ways so that we can
take the benefits of all this enterprise and all of this innovation without
things kind of going to hell in a QAnon handcart.
I don’t know
if you call yourself a futurist. You write a newsletter about the future and
the book is about the future. But when I hear you talk, you remind me of those
1960s, very optimistic futurist people like Herman Kahn, Arthur C. Clarke,
Isaac Asimov. They wrote fiction, but they were also considered serious people
talking about the future. That profession became less optimistic in the ’70s,
and it became focused on scarcity and population running wild and concerns
about the environment. And then policy makers stopped taking them seriously — whether
it was wrong predictions, or they were too pessimistic. . . Has that changed?
Are people who think about the future mostly optimistic? Or is it too much
climate change? And we have too many people or not enough people, and it’s all
pessimists?
I think it’s polarized. Not quite as polarized as the US
Senate. But you have a group of utopians who really think that all one needs to
do is innovate: Throw some enterprise at it and we reach escape velocity. And
you have a group of people for whom AI is just embedding bias time and again.
It’s disempowering workers, and we sit on the precipice of climate change. And
I think where I sit is that it’s complicated and most of those things are true
most or all of the time.
And let’s accept the power of the entrepreneur and the
power of technology and the power of learning by doing and getting into the
market. And let’s also accept that there are real challenges that we can’t just
ignore, that won’t simply be solved by the market. And if we want to have harmonious
societies that improve welfare and eliminate risk and create wellbeing and
wealth, we have to recognize that the rough goes with the smooth — recognize
that this will be both hot and cold, and it’s a journey that we have to bring
together. So I don’t really consider myself an optimist, but I definitely don’t
consider myself a pessimist. Because in my experience, pessimists don’t get
things done.
If we look
back on this in 20 years, and it turns out that you should have been a
pessimist because that’s what happened, what went wrong? Is it that the
technologies didn’t work? Policymakers didn’t do what they were supposed to do?
Or didn’t do what they needed to do?
I think it went wrong because we didn’t recognize a sense
of common purpose where we could work together while recognizing differences.
That is at its heart a very, very difficult ongoing question of politics: of
politics between peoples, and politics between cultures, and politics between
nations. But if it goes wrong, it will be because we spent time arguing and
competing in unhealthy ways when we could have spent time recognizing that
technology, and that learning, and that man’s efforts and enterprise is a real
gift and we can do a lot with it. And I think that in the last 10 or 15 years the
language around strategic competition that has started to emerge is not
entirely helpful, but it’s not entirely unhealthy either. Because to move
forward we’re going to find some common interests in some areas of
disagreements, and that’s in the realm of the politicians. And we can pray that
the quality of our politicians improves with every generation.
My guest today has been Azeem Azhar, author of The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society. Azeem, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Jim, it was such a pleasure. Thank you.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Azeem Azhar is the author of  The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society.
The post Will accelerating technology end the great stagnation? My long-read Q&A with Azeem Azhar appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The dining room of the French ambassador’s residence is one of the most beautiful places in Washington, D.C., a confection of frothed plaster overlooking a garden in the poodle-clipped style the French so love. Before COVID-19, the room was known for the discussion sessions held there, hosted by a gracious series of ambassadors. It’s been a long time since anyone was able to enjoy an in-person event at the residence. So when invitations arrived to celebrate Constitution Day, September 17, at the residence in a lunchtime discussion with a former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and an equally distinguished French judge, well, the RSVPs returned quickly.The timing, however, was unfortunate, as it coincided with an angry upset in Franco-American relations. The United States had snatched a $90 billion submarine contract with Australia from French shipyards. To add (security policy) insult to the (lost jobs and revenues) injury, the redirected submarine contract would consolidate a new U.S.-U.K.-Australia naval defense agreement in the Indo-Pacific, an agreement into which France had not been invited.Worse still, the French received word only hours before the public found out, reportedly because the Americans and the Australians each insisted that the other deliver the bad news.The French administered a symbolic protest by canceling a gala event planned for Friday evening: a commemoration of the 240th anniversary of a naval battle that helped secure the American victory at Yorktown in 1781. But lunch? Attendees hastily confirmed: Lunch was safe. Or so it seemed.The first hour of the lunch event harkened back to pre-COVID days. There was champagne in the foyer and courteous welcomes by embassy senior staff, all as it used to be. Guests took their seats. Opening remarks were elegantly spoken, all off the record, but so guarded and careful that there would be no news in them even without an agreement not to quote them. Steve Clemons, an editor at large at The Hill and the whiskey-smooth master of ceremonies, set the conversation in motion. But about 15 minutes in, Clemons was obliged to make a regretful announcement: The ambassador had a very important meeting and would be leaving immediately.Somebody loudly asked, “Off to the State Department?”Only later did we learn where the ambassador was heading: not to the State Department, not to the Pentagon, not to the White House, but upstairs to pack before flying to Paris for “consultations.”Earlier in the meal, somebody had cracked a joke about U.S.-French relations—how they’d sunk so low that they were now underwater. The Americans laughed. The French did not.But on the plus side: They did not shove us out on the sidewalk. A powerful symbolic message was sent. France is mad, but not so mad that we will deprive our American friends of lunch and dessert. (Crème brûlée, in case you were wondering, under crackling crusts individually crafted by a sous-chef with a miniature flamethrower.)It’s like a scene from a marriage that endures despite the quarrels. The aggrieved partner walked out in a rage, but not before ensuring that the other had been properly fed.

(Photo by Mat Hayward/Getty Images for WeWork)Dear Reader (including my cousin’s friend who knew a guy who told him about a dude that said he heard it from a very reliable source that while you can’t get pregnant from a toilet seat, you can become immune to the coronavirus if you lick the underside of a toilet seat at any Waffle House in the Southeast and some truck-stop Taco Bells in the Midwest),Some news stories are important in their own right. Some stories aren’t very important on the merits, but they represent an important trend.For instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Met Gala dress stunt is not important on the merits at all. I mean, I get that AOC wants credit for having kicked “open the doors of the Met.” (Stop laughing.) But there was no bravery, no edgy transgressive rebellion, no sticking-it-to-the-man on display here. There was terrific marketing for her own line of swag, though! Not since Columbia Records rolled out its “The Man can’t bust our music” ad campaign have I seen such brilliant marketing of radical chic in the name of filthy lucre.I do think, however, that this stunt is significant for what it represents. But I’ve written so much about how Congress—and coverage of Congress—is dominated by social media trolls that I don’t think it’s worth spending a lot of time on that. I’m especially reluctant because by writing about this pseudo-event I would be doing exactly what she wants.Instead, let’s talk about something that got a lot less attention, but is at least tangentially related to the Met’s embrace of woke chic.Taste the wokeness.So let me ask you a question. Let’s say you love burritos and you love bulldogs (but not bulldog burritos). In your neighborhood there are two burrito stands. One uses incredibly fresh ingredients, makes its tortillas from scratch, doesn’t use canned beans, and slow roasts its pork, beef, and chicken to perfection. The other buys its burritos from a guy who gets a deal from a subsidiary of the RAMJAC Corporation’s vending machine supplier. He diverts a couple cases every month from a shipment intended for a minimum-security prison in Muncie, Indiana. Before the bad burrito guys throw their frozen bricks into the microwave, you can see on the packaging: “May contain meat product.”In other words, for the sake of this hypothetical, the former’s burritos are so good that if stoners had suicide bombers, they’d serve them in their promised paradisical afterlife. The latter’s taste like something you might be grateful to eat a full decade into the zombie apocalypse.But here’s the thing: The owner of Garbage Burritos (“Ya gotta eat something”®) does fantastic work for the local bulldog rescue charity, dedicating a portion of every sale to helping bulldogs. Meanwhile, the owner of Heavenly Burritos is a cat person.If you say, “Let’s eat at Garbage because I want to support its work with bulldogs,” that’s fine. But I’d have huge problems with anybody who says Garbage Burritos are objectively better because of what the owner does for bulldogs.Which brings me to the James Beard Awards. These are the Oscars of the food world. That’s not my description, it’s basically the group’s unofficial motto. From the Washington Post:The organization that doles out the prestigious annual awards has retooled its criteria and now will also base decisions on whether candidates have shown a “demonstrated commitment to racial and gender equity, community, environmental sustainability, and a culture where all can thrive.” The James Beard Foundation, which administers the awards, also announced a slate of other changes aimed at diversifying its judging committees—a move it ultimately hopes will lead to a more diverse group of winners—and screening for potentially problematic chefs taking the industry’s top honors.I think this is horrible. Oh, I have no problem with diversifying judging committees and all that stuff (though the devil is in the details). But the idea that food should be graded on the chef’s political commitments is gross. I say this regardless of what those political commitments are. When I was in college, Domino’s was very controversial because its owner gave to pro-life causes. Some people refused to order from Domino’s because they didn’t like his politics. Some people ordered from Domino’s because they liked his politics. But most people ordered—or didn’t order—pizza from Domino’s for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. What I can’t imagine is anyone saying, “You know Domino’s is the best pizza” because of their politics.I don’t know how to put this more plainly: You can’t taste social justice. It doesn’t have umami. It doesn’t provide that third kind of heat. No one ever sent back a plate of ravioli saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t taste any commitment to gender equity,” or, “I asked for extra intersectionality awareness.”I think this matters in part because I actually care about the James Beard Awards—though much less now than I did before this announcement. But it also matters because I think one of the things ruining the culture and our politics is the refusal of institutions, and the people who run them, to stay in their lanes.Merit is a dirty word these days, but merit matters. If I recommend a surgeon to you and he amputates your leg instead of removing your appendix, you might say, “I thought you told me he was the best surgeon in the area!” If I respond, “Well, as far as the actual medical stuff goes he’s pretty subpar, but I was including his commitment to environmental justice in my evaluation,” you might bludgeon me to death with your prosthetic leg. And rightly so.I know the Academy Awards have gone a long way toward being the James Beard Awards of the film industry. But at least they haven’t publicly changed the criteria for Best Actor to “Good enough acting plus an exceptional commitment to social justice.”If you want to start a social justice organization, great. I might have objections to your agenda, but go for it. Heck, if the James Beard Foundation wants to give out some special social justice award, more power to it. Jose Andres can probably find a little more room on his shelf. But not every institution needs to become a social justice organization. If you run a company that sells widgets, then sell excellent widgets and go into your own pocket to support the causes you care about. But whether its widgets, surgery, or awards for best cooking, diluting your commitment to excellence serves no one—especially you.In fact, I would argue that doing what you’re good at is better for society than trying to do good outside your own competency. Simone Biles is free to use her status as the best gymnast in the world to support any cause she wants (and she has, to great effect). But it would be insane to include “commitment to gender equity” as a criteria on the judge’s scorecard. Either she stuck the landing or she didn’t.This cultural grading on a curve is a symptom of the politicization of everything and the politicization of everything is why so many people think the system is corrupt—not just on the right. For the left, refusal to participate in the cause is morally equivalent to opposing the cause. And that is literally a form of totalitarian thinking. No, it’s not totalitarianism of the sort we associate with Stalinism or Nazism, but it is totalitarian in the way Mussolini—who coined the term—meant it. There’s no safe harbor. No right to exit from orthodoxy. No freedom to not care or simply have other priorities. No freedom to judge excellence on criteria outside ideologically warped and warping priorities. It’s gross.74 words, 74 million voters.Since I’m on the topic of warped and warping ideological priorities, let’s cast our gaze to the ongoing corruption of the GOP. Last night, Rep. Anthony Gonzales announced he won’t be running for re-election. He offered the almost obligatory “more time with my family” explanation. But he also made it clear that the decisive factor was that there is no room in the GOP—or at least the Ohio GOP—for someone who dissents from Trump worship and fidelity to his lies.  In today’s GOP you can get drunk on fever swamp water all day long, rant endlessly about conspiracy theories, or dabble in white nationalism and you’ll be fine. You’ll even prosper.  But refuse to say the election was stolen—when it wasn’t—or decline to treat the January 6 rioters as patriotic political prisoners and you’ll be hounded and harassed. There’s no safe harbor. No room for dissent.Now, I know a lot of people actually believe the BS they’re spewing about the election being stolen and how the rioters did nothing wrong. But what makes this even more troubling is that most of the “leaders” saying this stuff—or refusing to refute it—know the truth but are too cowardly, selfish, or power-hungry to admit it. I loved the video of Ron Johnson revealing that he’s secretly sane about the election. It was vaguely reminiscent of a Soviet Politburo member admitting in private that Stalin’s economic theories make no sense. Of course, the analogy has flaws given that under Stalin, such blasphemy would get you executed. But the scent is the same even if the stench isn’t as strong.What truly fascinates me is how stupid all of this is. It’s a cultural-political collective action problem. Everyone with any sense in them—which I know excludes a lot of people—knows that buying into the “big lie” is toxic for the Republican Party and the country. But the incentive structure is so warped that it’s in no individual’s political interest to do much about it. The same belling the cat problem that made Trump the GOP nominee has led to the GOP worshipping the intellectual bathtub residue he left behind.Last Saturday, George W. Bush delivered an excellent speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I think it was arguably the best presidential rhetoric we’ve heard in years.And I think a lot more people would agree with me were it not for half of one paragraph:As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.Those 74 (italicized) words caused a remarkable number of people to take offense, mostly on behalf of other people.Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiecBush is publicly comparing 9/11 to Jan 6 They want Trump supporters treated like jihadists Are you paying attention yet?
September 11th 20215,955 Retweets14,929 LikesLisa Boothe @LisaMarieBootheBush is a disgrace for this. Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiecBush is publicly comparing 9/11 to Jan 6 They want Trump supporters treated like jihadists Are you paying attention yet?
https://t.co/ByOi5hEoXtSeptember 12th 20212,344 Retweets11,735 LikesJesse Kelly @JesseKellyDCIt’s amazing people’s brains are so irreparably broken that they think what happened at the Capitol is an even remotely appropriate thing to bring up in comparison to 9/11. Y’all have seriously arrived at your own reality. Josh Jordan @NumbersMuncherIt's amazing to watch conservatives go after George W. Bush on 9/11 because he called out the Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol. https://t.co/tz6TPW9BHbSeptember 11th 2021858 Retweets4,327 LikesJulie Kelly 🇺🇸 @julie_kelly2George Bush uses his platform today to join Biden regime and media in pretending the greatest threat to the country are imaginary “domestic violent extremists,” code for Trump and his supporters.
Shame on him. Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcyGeorge W. Bush uses his speech to underscore the threat posed by domestic extremists: "They are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them..." https://t.co/dQyQthZrGHSeptember 11th 2021849 Retweets2,417 LikesAnd then, of course, there was Donald Trump himself:So interesting to watch former President Bush, who is responsible for getting us into the quicksand of the Middle East (and then not winning!), as he lectures us that terrorists on the “right” are a bigger problem than those from foreign countries that hate America, and that are pouring into our Country right now. If that is so, why was he willing to spend trillions of dollars and be responsible for the death of perhaps millions of people? He shouldn’t be lecturing us about anything. The World Trade Center came down during his watch. Bush led a failed and uninspiring presidency. He shouldn’t be lecturing anybody!I could take my red pen to nearly every sentence here, but I have other points to make.Imagine if the January 6 riot had not occurred at all, or if Bush had offered those 74 words last year. It would be obvious that he was talking, at least in part, about Antifa and the various Black Lives Matter rioters who spent much of 2020 determined “to defile national symbols”—not just of Confederates, but of abolitionists, too.He would have been right. And while some lefties would have stupidly been outraged on behalf of Antifa—posting pictures of the Normandy invasion with the caption “the original anti-fascists” or some other inanity—most elected Democrats probably wouldn’t take the bait. After all, Biden did condemn violence while running for the nomination.But here’s the thing: If he said, “How dare you attack my voters,” it would have been spectacularly idiotic. Because taking offense at criticism of rioters and vandals is a roundabout way of taking ownership of them.And that’s what much of the GOP is doing now. It’s amazing how rapidly the angry right adopted the ideological imperative of “love me, love my criminal whack jobs.” It’s like a fatwa went out, “You must believe that criticizing Trump or the rioters for the events of January 6—or the lies that motivated them—is an insult to 74 million Trump voters.”That’s insane.And I’m not even talking about the lunatics who not only believe the “big lie” but float the need to respond to that alleged conspiracy with mass executions for the “thousands” or “tens of thousands” who were in on it.Factually, it’s not true that 74 million Trump voters believe the election was stolen (though too many have bought the propaganda). It’s not even true that 74 million voted for Trump or even love him. I know lots of Trump voters. Most of them voted against Biden rather than for Trump. And while there are lots of people so enthralled by him that if he took a dump on their dinner table on November 25 they’d say, “Happy Thanksgiving!” there certainly isn’t anything close to 74 million of them.And politically, it’s just malpractice. There are two major political factions intent on claiming that all Trump voters supported the January 6 riot or are morally invested in it in some way: Trump haters and Trump lovers.It’s no shock that the MSNBC crowd interpreted Bush’s remarks as a direct rebuke of the January 6 rioters. It’s a standing order of American progressivism to link conventional Republicans and traditional American conservatism with violent extremism, racism, and all the other very bad things. This has been true since FDR was president; it’s a through-line of American politics. After JFK was assassinated by a communist, the American right was blamed. When Barry Goldwater ran for president, the media portrayed him as a crazy Nazi. After Oklahoma City, Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio.This guilt-by-association stuff isn’t new. What is new is how so many on the right today agree with it!If I write a “news”letter condemning cannibalistic pederasts and you reply, “How dare you insult 74 million Trump voters,” I’m not the one calling Trump voters cannibalistic pederasts.But when a former president condemns “violent extremists” and the response from Trumpy right-wingers is “How dare you?” I have to ask: What the actual fornication are these people doing?The correct answer when some asks, “Do you condemn violent extremism?” is, “Of course.” Not “It depends,” or, “Only for the other team,” or, “Why are you insulting 74 million Trump voters.”But that’s not the world we live in now. Everybody has to be all in on the lies and propaganda that fuel the angriest fringes of their parties. The tails are wagging the dogs.Various & SundryCanine update: So as I mentioned last week, Pippa needs surgery for her wrist, but the wait time to get it scheduled is like a month long. It’s as if she’s a poster pup for Canadian health care. Meanwhile, she now chews off her brace—even when it’s wrapped in duct tape before the car ride to the park is over. So we’re doing what we can. One additional problem is that I think she worries more about the ever- present menace of mean dogs because of her injury. It’s harder to get the morning close-ups of her because she’s constantly looking past me to see if there are any mean dogs in the vicinity, which is kind of sad. Zoë is way into her rubber frog again, I think because of the recent thunderstorms. I don’t want it to sound like they’re a couple of neurotics. They’re generally very happy girls. Gracie’s doing well, too. But she’s constantly monitoring me. ICYMIThe truth is out thereReflections on 9/11Disrespecting the classicsIn your face, FrenchAn actual forever warWednesday’s Dispatch Podcast potpourriEveryone loves rulesThoroughly lost to logicAnd now, the weird stuffHigh timesBiglyBased on a story by Matthew LewisI welcome our new cyborg overlordsOl’ LeatherheadRead another bookYou stole what from the whonow?Cry it outIt’s the computer’s fault

Dear Reader, Thank you for supporting Quillette with your subscription. By now you have probably noticed our new look—we have a cleaner and simpler website that is faster and easier to navigate (note the search function at the top of the home page). You may have also noticed that we have switched ads off. This has been a deliberate choice on my behalf, as I want to bring you the highest quality content and highest quality reader experience. So welcome to the new ad-free Quillette!Quillette is now entering its sixth year of operation. I am delighted by how many of you have become members of our community. We have a collegiate and politically diverse community of contributors and similarly, our discussion forum draws insights from highly knowledgeable and curious readers. I wish to thank each and every one of our contributors and forum members for making Quillette what it is today.In this short letter, I hope to clarify one issue of concern that has arisen over the past few months and has caused consternation among a minority of readers—particularly on social media—and that is our editorial position on COVID vaccines.Quillette has published a range of articles that have been pro-vaccination since the beginning of the pandemic. Some of these articles include “Looking for COVID-19 ‘Miracle Drugs’? We Already Have Them. They’re Called Vaccines,” “Vaccines and the Coronavirus Crank Crisis,” “Making the (Conservative) Case for Vaccine Passports,” and “Vexed by the Un-Vaxxed.”A number of readers have expressed outrage and disgust that we have taken a strong pro-vax editorial position. (Out of all the controversial editorial positions we have taken over the years, I am surprised that being pro-vax has turned out to be the most controversial.) I have received angry emails and indignant comments on social media alleging that I have been paid off by “Big Pharma,” or the Australian government—as if being pro-vax during a pandemic were not supported by the overwhelming majority of people in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US today.Being pro-vaccination is consistent with everything that Quillette stands for, and has always stood for. Supporting the mainstream science on vaccines is no different to supporting the mainstream science on psychological sex differences, or the mainstream science on intelligence (two controversial topics on which we've also taken a strong editorial position).Scientific consensus can—indeed must—be questioned in good faith. Yet there is a clear difference between questioning a scientific consensus within a young science such as psychology or climate science (disciplines which still have rather rudimentary methodologies) and an older science such as biomedicine, which has one of the most robust methodologies known to man—the double-blinded randomised controlled trial (RCT). Querying epidemiological models is one thing, but denying evidence that arises from RCTs with tens of thousands of participants is akin to arguing that the Earth is flat.Vaccine technologies have existed for longer than automobiles, antibiotics, X-rays, thermometers, the telephone, and the lightbulb. The technology underpinning mRNA vaccines is likewise older than many people think—and although some of our COVID vaccines use this newer technology, these particular vaccines have been tested more thoroughly than any others we've ever had before. This is not an opinion. It is simply a fact. In November last year, we published an editorial heralding the emergence of mRNA vaccines as a “triumph of science.” This remains our position today. For all of the destruction and misery brought about by the COVID pandemic, the rapid technological response to it has been a marvel, and one of the only rays of light in what has been a dark period in our recent history.On the Cusp of a Vaccine—and a Historic Scientific TriumphMore than a century separated the first wave of Spanish flu in 1918 from the emergence of COVID-19 in early 2020. Yet as Nicholas Christakis writes in his new book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, there are people who’veQuilletteQuilletteSome have expressed surprise that Quillette would adopt the “mainstream position” on this issue. Or that we have taken a position inconsistent with “conservative” or “libertarian” principles. We have, after all, run many articles that dispute the mainstream position on weighty topics like gender, race, academia, and education. The assumption seems to be that because we disagree a lot with the Left, we must be part of the Right. This is simply a misunderstanding. Quillette is not a contrarian or partisan publication and it never has been. And if we are partisan, it is in the preference of empiricism over intuition or revelation. In an uncertain world, sometimes the elite consensus will get it right and sometimes it won't. If a popular narrative is not supported by good evidence, or if good evidence supports another more plausible explanation for what is going on, what we publish will tend to counter that narrative. That is why you will find articles querying narratives underpinning activist movements such as Black Lives Matter and the modern transgender movement among these pages. The anti-vax movement is not dissimilar to the activist movements we have scrutinised over the years. Radicals of all kinds rest their claims on cherry-picked data, the imputation of sinister motives, unfalsifiable theories about government conspiracies, and emotional reasoning. It may be that the pro-vax message is just as unpopular to a right-wing audience as debunking the tabula rasa is for a left-wing audience. If this is the case, so be it. I have received more pushback for being pro-vaccine than for taking any other editorial position in the history of Quillette. Nevertheless, I can reassure you that it will not influence the essays and writers and views we decide to publish. In 2021, our mission remains unchanged, and that is to defend the Enlightenment project. If you would like to join us in our mission please consider subscribing to the Quillette Circle, contributing via essays which can be sent to pitch@quillette.com, and supporting us financially through a paid subscription.Warmly,Claire LehmannP.S. Please enjoy our weekly roundup of articles. Don't miss "George Floyd and the Rise of the Rival Constitution," by Craig Trainor, and Kenneth Whyte on Ralph Nader and the 'Sack of Detroit'. And—don't miss our weekly podcast with our indefatigable host, Jon Kay. —CGeorge Floyd and the Rise of the Rival ConstitutionOn May 25th, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer subdued a suspected forger by placing his knee on the suspect’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. The encounter was filmed and wildly disseminated. The suspect died as a result of several factors, including the officer’s use of excessiveQuilletteCraig TrainorHow Social-Justice Extremists Spawned a Generation of ‘Progressive’ AntisemitesIn 2019, the Counseling &amp; Psychological Services (CAPS) division of Stanford University’s Student Affairs department launched a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training program with a mandate to instruct students about institutional racism. Instead, the program provided a case study of ho…QuilletteDavid Bernstein, Nicole Levitt, and Daniel NewmanUnderstanding the Motivated Reasoning of Anti-Vax RefuseniksCOVID has hospitalized 6.2 million Americans, killed at least 640,000 (the true count may be 800,000), and caused permanent cardiovascular, neurological, and other health problems in many others. Thankfully, the available vaccines are highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death. And yet…QuilletteRichard ReddingThe Status Game: Male, Grandiose, HumiliatedElliot was 11 years old and playing happily at summer camp when he accidentally bumped into a pretty and popular girl. “She got very angry,” he recounted later. “She cursed at me and pushed me.” He froze, shocked, completely lost as to how to respond. Everybody was watching. “Are youQuilletteWill StorrThe Moral Panic about Eugenics Poses a Threat to Abortion RightsAmerican partisan politics has just been inflamed by implementation of a Texas ban on abortions once an embryo’s heartbeat is detected, usually after the sixth week of pregnancy. The new law gets around Roe v Wade by making it possible for anyone to charge a person who helps aQuilletteDiana FleischmanMale Underachievement and the Gender Turf WarsThe National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a non-profit education organization, published a report earlier this year that ought to have alarmed many Americans. Compared to the prior semester, the decline in male university enrollment was double that of women: Enrollment declines are steeper for men t…QuilletteAri David BlaffJudith Butler: Enough Already!If I were Judith Butler, I would desist from giving interviews to journalists. She has done a few lately (with Owen Jones on YouTube, with Slate magazine last year, with the Guardian a few days ago, etc.) and in each and every one of those interviews, she repeats the sameQuilletteLama Abu-OdehPodcast #165: Peter Boghossian on Why He Quit Portland State University“Grievance Studies” hoaxster and philosophy professor Peter Boghossian tells Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay why he could no longer continue waging his struggle for intellectual pluralism without first shaking off the ideological constraints of campus life.QuilletteQuilletteLessons for Big Tech from Ralph Nader’s ‘Sack of Detroit’Until recently, Silicon Valley enjoyed a relatively high degree of freedom from US government regulation. That was a deliberate policy choice. Responding to public enthusiasm for the possibilities of global interconnectedness and an endless stream of easily accessible information, Congress decreed e…QuilletteKenneth Whyte

Did the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, violate the Constitution? The answer, at least on the current available evidence, is no.In a new book, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa write that Milley contacted his opposite number in China just before and just after the 2020 election. Milley, according to Woodward and Costa, was reaching out to General Li Zuocheng to calm jangled nerves in Beijing about the stability of the United States. Milley also reportedly called together a group of senior U.S. officers and made them affirm, one by one, that they understood that the procedure for the release of nuclear weapons had to include him.A fusillade of hot takes greeted these revelations, almost all of them focusing on Milley’s contacts with Li. Many Republicans immediately interpreted Milley’s reassurances as betrayal and demanded that he resign or be fired. But it’s not just Republicans who are concerned: Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, whom no one would mistake for a Trump supporter, tweeted that Milley violated the core American precept of civilian control of the military and therefore must go.Milley’s conversations with Li are a concern not because they were unprecedented or a betrayal (as his critics claim) but because Milley felt the need to have them at all. Senior military-to-military contacts are normal and are an important part of building trust between nations, especially between adversaries. In the late 1990s, I had students from Russia in my Naval War College seminars. We valued their presence enough that when the Kremlin pulled them out after the war in Kosovo, I was sent to Moscow in hopes of creating more joint programs with the Russians that might include bringing those officers back. (I do not, of course, in any way represent the views of the Defense Department or the U.S. government.)The fact that Milley knew his Chinese counterpart personally is not only a good thing in itself; such relationships exist for moments exactly like the ones described in the Woodward and Costa book. If Milley had information, as Woodward and Costa say he did, that Chinese military leaders were “rattled” by the chaos in Washington, then by reaching out to his peer he did exactly what he should have done.One of the accusations against Milley is that somehow the chairman was going to betray American war plans to the Chinese. This is ludicrous, and even Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican China hawk, said that this accusation against Milley seemed far-fetched. Milley, invoking his personal relationship with his Chinese counterpart, told Li that he would hear about any military action from Milley himself. This is what reassurance and transparency looks like in a crisis.The far more serious question is whether Milley inserted himself into the nuclear chain of command. Woodward and Costa write that Milley knew he was “pulling a Schlesinger,” trying to interpose himself in a nuclear process that does not, in fact, have a role for the chairman, in the same way that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had done in 1974 when he instructed the military to check any nuclear orders with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.Even here, however, the situation is not as clear-cut as the Schlesinger example. Concerned that Richard Nixon was drinking heavily and under immense stress, Schlesinger functionally replaced the president as the ultimate authority for the release of nuclear weapons. Milley was somewhat more guarded; according to Woodward and Costa, the chairman “called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, and said: ‘No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure.’”The chairman, however, is not part of that procedure. He is the president’s adviser, with no operational authority. When the president orders military action, the secretary of defense relays those orders to military commands. In the case of nuclear-weapon deployment, the president must only verify his identity, a process that requires one other person to certify that the orders and the codes are in fact coming from the commander in chief.This is remarkably dangerous. Worse, it was designed that way. During the Cold War, the United States wanted the Soviets to understand that the president, even with only minutes of warning, could order nuclear strikes without a long and complicated procedure—especially if “the president” was whoever was left in the line of succession.So what was Milley doing? When he said “no matter what you are told,” it is hard to believe that he did not mean “including by the president,” and that alone is a breach of civil-military tradition and an overstepping of his military authority. Unlike Schlesinger, Milley did not displace the commander in chief, but he did redefine the chain of command to include a previously nonexistent requirement that he be informed no matter what the civilian leadership told any U.S. military officer.This doesn’t mean Milley should be relieved or fired. He made a judgment call in an unprecedented situation, and we should be glad for it. The Constitution of the United States has no provision for the control of planet-destroying weapons while a president is losing his mind and trying to overthrow the government itself. Even the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was meant to spackle the gaps in presidential succession in the case of death or disability. It does not countenance speedily removing the president from office against his will—especially while the vice president and the entire Congress are under armed guard from a violent mob carrying nooses and smearing feces on the walls of the Capitol.Milley was looking at a civilian leadership in complete disarray, with the executive branch in the hands of a coterie of cronies—including an acting secretary of defense who by his own admission had no idea what was going on most of the time—and a president whose understanding of “the nuclear,” as he called our strategic deterrent, was childlike at best.At the least, Milley was trying to insert a moment of pause into any possible escalation to disaster, and for that we should be grateful. His order was insurance against the chance that a raving Donald Trump, some hapless lieutenant commander, and the Acting-Temporary-Undersecretary for Advanced Defense Widgets could get together in the basement of the White House to transmit the codes to hell to the U.S. Strategic Command without anyone else knowing about it.Milley didn’t “pull a Schlesinger,” but he was close.What should we do about all this? As the defense expert Kori Schake and others have noted, the real problem here is that Milley was in this situation at all. As is almost always the case when civil-military relations become unstable, the civilians are the problem, and the civilians must provide the remedies. There are several possibilities, including passing a law to restrict the first use of nuclear arms, or in peacetime adding the requirement of a second confirmation to the president’s orders.In the end, however, the answer lies in electing better leaders. Trump is gone, but he still leads a seditious and unhinged party. The Constitution, as James Madison warned us, was meant for a virtuous people, and if there is no virtue among us, “we are in a wretched situation” and “no theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure.” It is incumbent upon us, the voters, to ensure that no military officer ever again faces even the possibility of a choice between obedience to the Constitution and the fate of human civilization itself.

Immune cells can learn the vagaries of a particular infectious disease in two main ways. The first is bona fide infection, and it’s a lot like being schooled in a war zone, where any lesson in protection might come at a terrible cost. Vaccines, by contrast, safely introduce immune cells to only the harmless mimic of a microbe, the immunological equivalent of training guards to recognize invaders before they ever show their face. The first option might be more instructive and immersive—it is, after all, the real thing. But the second has a major advantage: It provides crucial intel in the absence of risk.Some pathogens aren’t memorable to the body, no matter the form in which they’re introduced. But with SARS-CoV-2, we’ve been lucky: Both inoculation and infection can marshal stellar protection. Past tussles with the virus, in fact, seem so immunologically instructive that in many places, including several nations in the European Union, Israel, and the United Kingdom, they can grant access to restaurants, bars, and travel hubs galore, just as full vaccination does.In the United States, conversely, only fully vaccinated Americans can wield the social currency that immunity affords. The policy has repeatedly come into heated contention, especially as the country barrels forward with plans for boosters and vaccination mandates. No one, it seems, can agree on the immunological exchange rate—whether a past infection can sub in for one inoculation or two inoculations, or more, or none at all—or just how much immunity counts as “enough.” Even among the nation’s top health officials, a potential shift in the social status of the once-infected remains “under active discussion,” Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told me. For now, though, he reiterated, “it still is the policy that if you’ve been infected and recovered, that you should get vaccinated.” And in the United States, which is awash in supplies of shots, some version of that policy is likely to stick. Infections and vaccinations, down to a molecular level, are “fundamentally different” experiences, Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale, told me. Surviving a rendezvous with SARS-CoV-2 might mean gaining some protection, but it’s no guarantee.What the experts do converge on is this: Opting for an infection over vaccination is never the right move. An unprotected rendezvous with SARS-CoV-2 ultimately amounts to taking a double gamble—that the virus won’t ravage the body with debilitating disease or death, and that it will eventually be purged, leaving only immune protection behind. Questions linger, too, about how long such safeguards might last, and how they stack up against the carefully constructed armor of inoculation. Vaccines eliminate the guesswork—a fail-safe we’ll need to keep relying on as the coronavirus persists in the human population, threatening to invade our bodies again, and again, and again.There’s a reason many of our best vaccines—measles shots, smallpox shots—are near-perfect pantomimes of the pathogens they guard against. The whole point of immunization is to recapitulate infection in a safer, more palatable package, like a driver’s ed simulation, or a practice quiz handed out in advance of a final exam.That means there will usually be big overlaps in how infections and inoculations rouse the immune system into action. COVID-19 vaccines and SARS-CoV-2 infections each elicit gobs of virus-trouncing antibodies, along with a long-lasting supply of the plucky B cells that manufacture them; they each rouse lingering hordes of T cells, which blow up virus-infected cells and coordinate other immune responses. SARS-CoV-2 reinfections and breakthroughs do happen. But they’re uncommon and tend to be milder than the norm, even symptomless. Early evidence in several countries suggests that the two types of immunity are blocking illness at roughly similar rates. “The reality is, both are exceptionally good,” Rishi Goel, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. (One caveat: There’s a paucity of data on how the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine stacks up, though it’s definitely very good at staving off severe disease.)[Register now to join Katherine J. Wu alongside CDC Director Rochelle Walensky at the 2021 Atlantic Festival.]Infection arguably delivers a more comprehensive lesson on the virus, introducing the body to the entirety of its anatomy. Most COVID-19 vaccines, meanwhile, focus exclusively on the spike protein, the molecular lock pick the coronavirus uses to break into cells. And while SARS-CoV-2 first infiltrates the moist mucosal linings of the nose, mouth, and throat, where it can tickle out airway-specific immune defenses, typical COVID-19 shots are blitzed into the arm, mostly marshaling all-purpose antibodies that bop through the blood. That makes it tough for vaccinated bodies to waylay viruses at their point of entry, giving the invaders more time to establish themselves.Some of these differences might help explain the results of a recent, buzzy study out of Israel, in which researchers reported that previously infected individuals were better protected than people who had been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer shots, including against severe cases of COVID-19. “As soon as that paper came out,” Fauci told me, “we obviously discussed the inevitable issue”—whether infection should be enough to exempt someone from a shot.But Fauci, as well as most of the other experts I talked with, cautioned against overinterpreting the results of a single study, especially one documenting only a snapshot in time. Even taken at face value, the “better” defenses offered by post-infection immunity come at a massive potential cost, said Goel, of the University of Pennsylvania. Cells and molecules are scrambling to learn the traits and weaknesses of a foreign invader while their home is being attacked; any infection bears some risk of hospitalization, long-term disability, or death. The virus can also interfere with the immune response, muffling antiviral defenses, severing the ties among disparate branches of immune cells, and, in some cases, even duping the body into attacking its own tissues. And unlike the vaccines, infections are, well, infectious, turning each afflicted person into “a public-health threat,” Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of Boston University’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research, told me.Those who surface from these encounters seemingly unscathed might not have much immunity to show for it, either. Several studies have shown that a decent percentage of infected people might not produce detectable levels of antibodies, for the simple reason that “not all infections are the same,” Beatrice Hahn, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. The immune system tends to use its own threat assessment to calibrate its memory, dismissing many brief or low-symptom encounters. That could be an especial concern for people with long COVID, many of whose initial infections were asymptomatic or mild.At the other end of the spectrum, very severe disease can so traumatize the immune system that it fails to recollect the threat it’s fighting. Researchers have watched immune-cell training centers “completely collapse” beneath the blaze of inflammation, Eun-Hyung Lee, an immunologist at Emory University, told me. In some cases, the virus might find its prior hosts nearly as unguarded as before. “It would be dangerous to assume good immunity across all individuals in this group,” says Kimia Sobhani, who’s studying antibody responses to the virus at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles.Vaccines strip away some of the ambiguity. For a given brand, every injection contains the same ingredients, doled out at the same dose, to generally healthy people. The shots still won’t work the same way in everyone, especially people with compromised immune systems, or certain older individuals whose defenses have started to wane. But nearly every healthy recipient of a COVID-19 shot temporarily transforms into a coronavirus-antibody factory—including many of the people for whom infection wasn’t triggering enough. “What we know is that you get a much, much better response following infection if you vaccinate somebody,” Fauci told me. “I tend to go with what’s much, much better.”Neither immunity nor pathogenicity is static. Immune cells can experience amnesia; viruses can change their appearance and sneak by the body’s defenders. Stacking vaccinations atop prior infections, then, is an insurance policy. Post-infection shots can buoy whatever defenses are already there, likely boosting not just the quantity of protective cells and molecules, but their quality and longevity as well, John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. A similar rationale backs up the two-dose mRNA shots and other multi-dose vaccines, including the ones we use for HPV and hepatitis B.Growing evidence suggests that the combination of infection and inoculation might even be synergistically protective, outstripping the defenses offered by either alone—something the immunologist Shane Crotty calls hybrid immunity. Some reports have shown that “people who have previously been infected then get vaccinated have higher antibody levels” than people who have only one of those experiences, Jackson Turner, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. Antibody potency, too, seems to get souped up, potentially equipping the molecules to better grapple with a wide range of coronavirus variants, even ones they haven’t seen before. Accordingly, the hybrid-immune seem to be reinfected less often. “You basically supercharge your immune response,” Goel told me. This could all be good news for the durability of protection as well. Viruses and vaccines will inevitably prod different subsets of immune responses—a more comprehensive education than any single teacher can accomplish alone. The pairing is a good way, Wherry said, to goad immune cells into doubling down on their lessons, and acquiring more sophisticated attack plans over time.Where experts splinter in opinion is regarding the number of COVID-19 shots to give the once-infected, at least for multi-dose vaccines. In some countries, including France, healthy people who have had SARS-CoV-2 need to get only a single shot. The strategy can, potentially, free up doses for others who remain unimmunized, among whom first injections would save more lives. So far, not much evidence suggests that adding a second shot on schedule has “benefit, quantitatively or qualitatively,” for the recovered, Wherry said. But given the unpredictability of past infections, some experts think a two-dose vaccination course is still a safer policy to ensure that no one is left with suboptimal protection. “I tend to lean toward what is prescribed, and say people should get the full two doses,” Bhadelia told me. This more conservative tactic is also an easier logistical lift, because confirming a prior brush with the pathogen can be difficult. Some experts have suggested that potential vaccine recipients could be screened for antibodies as a rough proxy for a past protective infection, but even that’s a bit of a “nightmare,” Wherry told me, especially because researchers haven’t yet pinpointed a threshold that denotes even partial immunity.[Read: What we actually know about waning immunity.]If the perfect post-infection shot combo is elusive now, that equation becomes even more complicated as third shots go on offer to those who are currently fully vaccinated. Despite calls for additional injections from the White House, many researchers are skeptical that the young and healthy need these inoculations so soon, and some are wary of the potential for overboosting, which can exhaust immune cells or stir up side effects. Still, Fauci, who’s come out strongly in favor of delivering COVID-19 vaccines in three doses, thinks a duo of shots might be necessary to clinch the protective process for most previously infected people. “To me, if you have enough vaccine, it’s worth giving a second dose,” he said. That strategy could, in theory, work especially well if the doses are spaced several months apart, giving the immune system time to recuperate and mull over the intel it’s gathered. This grace period might even help explain the strong synergy with post-infection inoculation: Most recovered people are getting their shots well after the virus has vacated their body, which means the vaccine’s lessons are being imparted to refreshed and well-rested cells.Eventually, fewer and fewer of us will have the option of either vaccination or infection; soon, most of us will be dealing in scenarios of and. With the virus so thoroughly enmeshed in our population, the order of exposures is inevitably shifting: More and more vaccinated people are catching the coronavirus and sometimes falling ill. Arguably, all of these pathogen parleys are boosts—but whether they leave lasting impressions on our immune systems still isn’t clear. Immune responses have both ceilings and floors; it’s not always easy to know what we’re knocking up against.The long view, then, becomes about seeing infection and inoculation not as a dichotomy but as an inevitable interaction—which is actually the point of vaccines. We immunize as a hedge, one predicated on the assumption that we could all chance upon the pathogen in question. It’s a reality our bodies have spent an eternity preparing for: that certain threats take time to abate; that some battles have to be fought over and over; that, with the right defenses in place, some enemies become less dangerous over time.

George W. Bush, who once said that he wanted to be a uniter, not a divider, managed to unite the left and the right in seething disdain with his remarks at the Shanksville, PA memorial service for the victims of Flight 93, in which he called for unity and condemned political polarization but also had strong words for domestic violent extremism. In a way, the speech, widely praised by centrist liberals, was the culmination of W’s political “redemption”—that is, his embrace by bien pensant liberal society—since the start of the Donald Trump presidency. (Remember the appearance on Ellen? The cute friendship with Michelle Obama?) Leftists hate Bush’s redemption because they think he’s really far worse than Trump: the wars, the illegal detentions and torture, the domestic spying, etc. (They also believe the War on Terror, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, led directly to Trump.) It’s not just about Bush as a person; what irks the left is that liberals are still basically fine with the exercise of American power, including intervention abroad, and with the notion that America is a force for good in the world.Rightists hate Bush for (as they see it) pandering to the libs. Some are also rushing to use the occasion to disavow pre-Trump conservatism as weak and wimpy.It’s not always true that when both the left and the right hate you, that means you’re doing something right. But in this instance? Yes. Yes, it does.I’m not going to get into my view of the wars here. (I did, to some extent, in my 9/11 commemoration article.) But I will say that to lambaste Bush as the Worst President Evah because of the War on Terror disregards the fact that Bush was faced with an unprecedented crisis: a strike on American soil that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, carried out by an elusive, stateless, global enemy. A War on Terror in one form or another was inevitable. It’s worth reading Mona Charen’s excellent September 11 retrospective in The Bulwark pointing out that the attacks on that day followed a long line of other terror attacks (including the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993) and that no one knew where this war on America would end. Many of the things that get pinned on Bush, such as homeland security overreach in the determination to prevent future attacks, were overwhelmingly supported and even demanded by traumatized Americans.The war in Afghanistan was almost certainly inevitable, though the war in Iraq was not. Since we don’t get to play out alternative history scenarios, we don’t know how the War on Terror and its specific campaigns would have played out under, say, President Gore; but honestly, I don’t even want to imagine the Trump version. The Bush administration undoubtedly went too far in its “enhanced interrogations” that amounted to de facto torture, and it’s a blot on our record. But Trump, let’s not forget, is the guy who openly advocated not only torture (waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse”) but killing terrorists’ families as part of his anti-terror strategy. (He then grudgingly reversed himself and promised to respect international law, but we all know that these Trumpian reversals in deference to propriety generally get followed by another reversal and backsliding.)Bush also deserves praise for his strong condemnation of anti-Muslim bigotry in September 2001. Certain people on the right have always bristled at his statement at the time that we are not at war with Islam or the Muslim faith, only with the terrorists. I think the stance he took was a major reason the anti-Muslim backlash at the grassroots level was fairly small in scope. (One could argue that it shouldn’t have existed at all, but when such devastating attacks are committed by members of an “outsider” group, some backlash is nearly unavoidable.) Bush’s assertion in Shanksville that he “saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith” could be criticized as too rosy a scenario; attacks and harassment against Muslims certainly did happen. But it was mostly true, and in part thanks to Bush himself.I was, by the way, plenty critical of the Bush administration in the 2000s as a Boston Globe and Reason columnist. (Critical enough that Second Lady Lynne Cheney, whom I had met a couple of times in the 1990s, snubbed me at an American Enterprise Institute dinner circa 2006 or 2007: when I came up to introduce myself and said that I wasn’t sure if she remembered me, she gave me an icy stare and replied, “I certainly do. I read your columns.”) Clearly, Bush made many costly mistakes and was too slow to acknowledge them. “Mission Accomplished” was a hubristic moment that practically asked for bad karma. But again: context matters. To the extent that America’s descent from its post-Cold War triumph began after 2001, it was because of the successful attack on America, not the specifics of the response. Again, in a world in which hypotheticals remain exactly that, no one knows whether there was a response that could have ended well.Ultimately, the left’s demonization of Bush is as myopic and contextless as the absurd sneering (in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 and elsewhere) at the fact that, after being told about the attacks, Bush sat for several minutes with a stunned look and then went back to reading My Pet Goat to a group of schoolkids. Yeah, and? I’d ask you to imagine President Trump in such a situation, but that’s not funny.If anything, though, the right has been much more vocal than the left in its reaction to Bush’s Shanksville speech and the positive reception for it.Take Jesse Kelly, for example.Jesse Kelly @JesseKellyDCI remember when Bush declared war on Iraq and we went in and just a couple weeks into that conflict he passed down a rule that we had to take our American flags down off our Amtracs.
So yes, George Bush has been a skid mark on this nation for some time. And remains so. Disclose.tv @disclosetvNOW - George W. Bush compares "domestic extremists" to Islamist terrorists in his 9/11 speech: "They are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them..."
https://t.co/zOP9CzQmmhSeptember 11th 20211,232 Retweets4,841 LikesI asked David French, who served in Iraq, what in the world Kelly was referring to. Apparently, Bush ordered American vehicles not to fly the U.S. flag because he didn’t want our presence in Iraq to look like an occupation. (Which, French pointed out, didn’t keep it from being flown on many occasions, including after the statue of Saddam Hussein was taken down.)There was also this from Ben Shapiro:Ben Shapiro @benshapiroThere is great irony to watching Democrats who spent eight years labeling George W. Bush a war criminal, a fool, and a racist now cheering him on as he issues calls for unity. The fact that Bush never saw that is how we got Trump.September 13th 2021360 Retweets4,065 LikesBen Shapiro @benshapiroI voted for George W. Bush. I believe he is a good man. I also believe he is delusional about the political situation of the United States, and was during his tenure as president -- and that delusion probably cost him the success of his presidency.September 13th 2021292 Retweets3,681 LikesThis is, of course, the popular theory on the right that the nastiness and polarization in American politics comes only from Democrats. Because, you know, Ben Shapiro is totally innocent when it comes to that stuff. He totally didn’t, for instance, call Barack Obama’s Jewish chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel a “kapo” (i.e., a Jewish Nazi collaborator in the Holocaust) in a 2010 column, or recently defend that statement.Shapiro’s claim that Bush was sadly clueless about the evil of the left was echoed by others.Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ @InezFeltscherIf 9/11 happened today there would be no corresponding patriotic unity. If you don’t understand that basic reality, you don’t understand the first thing about the crisis before us. https://t.co/gLDPSOE2NYInez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ @InezFeltscherLeaving aside the Jan 6 dig that got too much play online for what an aside it was, W’s speech itself was a window into how hopelessly confusing he finds the reality of our moment. I will never hate Bush but people so out of touch cannot lead the GOP if we’re to survive. https://t.co/HG0hptLZhzSeptember 13th 202169 Retweets397 LikesStepman is right that there would probably be far less patriotic unity today. But if she’s suggesting the obstacle to that unity would come only from leftists and not from Trumpists who seem to dislike the Taliban a lot less than they do Joe Biden, she’s either out of touch or deliberately disingenuous.There is no question that some of the people currently welcoming Bush’s comments attacked him very nastily when he was president (see: Olbermann, Keith). There was, for sure, plenty of Bush Derangement Syndrome. A liberal friend of mine was sincerely convinced in 2004 that if it actually looked like John Kerry was going to win, the Bush White House would fake another big terror attack and cancel the election. After the election, a member of the forum where I was an admin at the time declared that she “hated everybody who voted for Bush” and refused to apologize, claiming it wasn’t personally directed at members who were Bush voters. And there was an actual website where Americans posted apologies for reelecting Bush. Derangement? Yes.(Of course, there was also Clinton Derangement Syndrome before that, and Obama Derangement Syndrome after that. In Trump’s case, the derangement went only a notch past the reality.) But the idea that liberal Democrats were generally calling Bush a war criminal and a racist is seriously out of touch with reality. At last initially, Bush got mostly positive media coverage after September 11. The much-denounced MoveOn.org ads that showed Bush morphing into Hitler—two out of some 1,500 30-second anti-Bush spots made and submitted by users during the 2004 campaign—were quickly removed from the organization’s website. (It was a pro-Bush campaign ad that later dusted them off for political mileage.)Yes, Bush was the target of some savage attacks from the left. (Those are mainly the people who currently decry his “redemption.”) From the vantage point of 2021, it seems fantastic that when Fahrenheit 911 came out in 2004, The New York Times gave it a mixed review, calling it “an authentic and indispensable document of its time” but noting that “parts of it seem rash, overstated, or muddled” and that it is by no means “a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies.” (The review concludes that the film “is worth seeing, debating, and thinking about, regardless of your political allegiances.”)It is even more jarring to realize that even in 2008, when Bush was long past the peak of his popularity, Saturday Night Live was mocking Olbermann in a skit where he was shown accusing Bush of a racist tirade based on an absurd interpretation of an innocuous comment. Toward the end of the Bush presidency, a number of people including Republicans such as former Reagan White House lawyer Robert Turner believed war crimes had been committed by at least some people within the administration. But no mainstream Democrats were urging prosecutions (the Obama Administration pointedly refused to engage in what could be seen as a “partisan witchhunt”), and I certainly cannot recall any Democrat of note calling Bush a war criminal. It’s also worth noting that Bush’s mainstream “redemption” did not begin with the Trump presidency. Oprah Winfrey interviewed him on her show in 2011 and defended him against charges of being a racist—made not by mainstream liberals, but by current right-wing icon Kanye West when he asserted at a Hurricane Katrina relief event “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” You don’t get more mainstream liberal than Oprah.Besides, if you think that Bush is a doormat (or, in current online-speak, a simp) because he calls for unity despite having been subjected to unfair partisan attacks, you missed the whole point.So: what did Bush actually say?To the right, the contrast he drew between “his” America and today’s America came across as a clear dig at Trump and Trumpism:In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I have seen.On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know.At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know.This is not mere nostalgia; it is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been—and what we can be again.The critique of nativism and anti-Muslim bigotry is certainly an anti-Trumpist jab. But Bush’s assertion that openness, tolerance, service, and rejection of bigotry are the real America is also a rebuke to the left-wing view of an America infested with racism, hate, and greed. And there is no evidence that Bush believes the “malign force” that turns disagreement into a “clash of cultures” comes solely from the right.Then, of course, there’s this:And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.Was Bush speaking solely about right-wing extremism? There is no evidence that he was. The reference to January 6 seems pretty clear in the reference to “defiling national symbols,” though you could also read it as referring to left-wing protesters who topple monuments. Personally, I think that Bush’s comparison between domestic extremists and the September 11 terrorists was a bit of a stretch: at least so far, no American domestic terrorists other than Timothy McVeigh have shown a level of disregard for human life comparable to al-Qaeda (or ISIS). But “not as bad as Al Qaeda” is a pretty low bar, and as McVeigh’s example shows domestic extremism certainly has the potential to lead to carnage. I do think that Bush’s criticism was more for the right than the left; he singled out nativism and anti-Muslim bigotry but not left-wing ideological shibboleths such as the tendency to see “white privilege” everywhere. But the way things work in a moment of cultural and political polarization is that the only effective way to counter bad ideas is for people to attack bad ideas in their own camp.So, for this particular speech, Bush should get an A-. As for his presidency, it exists in too complicated a context and too close in time to our own moment to be summed up in a final grade.

By James Pethokoukis and Ed Glaeser
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s major cities faced rising housing prices, congestion, and inequality. But since the outbreak of coronavirus, cities have been hit hard with an economic downturn and rise in violent crime – on top of the spread of a viral disease. Will cities survive? And how can we prepare for the next pandemic? Edward Glaeser appeared on a recent podcast episode to discuss these questions and more.
Ed is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University and co-author with David Cutler of Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation.
Pethokoukis: Could you walk us through the history of what happens to urban areas that are hit by plagues, going back to ancient Athens?
Glaeser: Athens is a place of unbelievable creativity where dense urban streets bring together people of unbelievable talent. There are these chains of collaborative creativity that can happen in cities, and I can’t think of any place that does that better than fifth century Athens.
Starting in 431BC, the Peloponnesian war begins. Pericles, the canny leader of Athens’ democracy, has a plan. He’s going to summon all the Athenians behind the city walls, which he’s going to trust to protect the city from the Spartan hoplites. The walls hold up well against the hoplites, but the walls can’t keep out the disease that comes in through the port of Piraeus, and the disease wreaks absolute havoc, perhaps killing a quarter of Athens’ population.
And this highlights two great weaknesses that cities have when it comes to disease, which is still true in 2020. Cities are the nodes on the global lattice of trade and travel. They’re always the ports of entry for goods, for people, for ideas, and for diseases. Secondly, diseases spread more quickly when people are close to one another.
The economy has become more dependent on face to face interactions. How has that played into the economic effects of this pandemic?
It’s reminds us of just how economically vulnerable we are to this kind of pandemic. If I take you back to the Black Deaths, 1350 in Europe, the human catastrophe was absolutely devastating. But the survivors ended up being richer because in an agricultural economy having a higher ratio of land relative to people means wages go up. The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was a short, sharp shock to the economy, but it wasn’t all that devastating. It didn’t last in part because the demand for the industrial products that were the heart of this economy wouldn’t disappear just because there was a plague.
Women wear goggles as they work in the welding department of Lincoln Motor Co., Detroit, Michigan, circa 1914-1918. REUTERS/Library of Congress/Handout via Reuters
A
hundred years later, however, those industrial jobs have disappeared and been
replaced by urban service sector jobs. And what happened was for millions and
millions of American workers, the ability to provide service with a smile
provided an employment safe haven when the factory jobs disappeared. And yet
that smile turns into a source of peril rather than pleasure in a time of
pandemic. And those jobs can disappear in a heartbeat, which is exactly what we
saw.
How do we make our cities and our society more resilient
to the next pandemic?
So
I think this is something that the city governments can’t do. In order to
pandemic-proof our world, we really need national and international action. And
the idea that my co-author David Cutler, who is a health economist, and I
pushed forward is something that we call “NATO for health,” with the idea that
this really requires global cooperation and global investments in things like
preemptive vaccines, global surveillance.
So
you’ve got to worry that the low level of sanitary infrastructure in many
developing world cities is making possible the rise of antibiotic-resistant
superbugs. Now, one way to deal with that is to invest more in pipes, to invest
more in sewers, to invest more in aqueducts. And the West can fund some of
that. It wouldn’t be a huge amount of spending. But there should be a quid pro
quo, which is that if they’re going to be part of this, then they need to agree
to surveillance. They need to make sure that new diseases that are popping up
are being dealt with. And on top of that, they have to agree to more sanitary rules,
separation between humans and animals for example, wild animals in particular.
Setting aside pandemics, urban areas are facing a host of challenges like rising housing costs. How should cities grapple with that?
I
think there is an easy policy fix for the high cost of housing and the
gentrification battles, which is just to allow more housing to be built, right?
If you go back to the 1960s, if you owned a plot of land, you were pretty much
allowed to put up anything reasonable on it. 50 years later, in lots of parts
of coastal America pretty much all your neighbors have veto rights over
anything you might want to do with that property.
New York stayed affordable in the 1920s because it built 100,000 units a year, because it was a city that still catered to outsiders. Now we have cities that cater only to insiders, which may mean rich homeowners. But this change in thinking, which is that we’re going to protect people from any harm, also means that if you’re in a neighborhood, you’re losing out because your rents are going up. And we really need to remember that cities are at their best when they are providing opportunity for outsiders, for people who are coming there without anything. Real affordability means that anyone can come to the city and rent an apartment at a reasonable price.
What do current trends suggest about the future of cities?
Well, there are two things that are going on right now that are important in cities, one of which is the increased mobility made possible by Zoom. That’s not going to replace the office, but perhaps for some of the most successful firms, it makes it easier to imagine moving away. On top of that, you have the threat of illness, and of course, the fact that some cities seem like they’re on the verge of being taken over by progressive leadership who think that policing is a thing of the past and totally unnecessary, who think that we should again be taxing the rich in order to deal with the problems of the poor. Now, I believe very strongly that cities can do a better job with their policing. I believe very strongly that cities can do a better job of making sure that they are places of opportunity and upward mobility. But if they decide that they’re going to ignore the ability of the talented to exit, none of that’s going to happen.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Ed Glaeser is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
Learn more: 5 questions for Ed Glaeser on the economics of the opioid crisis | 5 questions for John Haltiwanger on how the pandemic has changed US entrepreneurship | 5 questions for Michael Strain on COVID-19 and the US economy
The post 5 questions for Ed Glaeser on the survival of cities appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.Last month, a survey by the travel industry found that a majority of Americans changed their vacation plans this summer because of the continuing coronavirus pandemic. But not everyone canceled their vacations entirely; travel spending has been almost as high this summer as it was in the summer of 2019. Some would-be adventurers simply found ways to do the exotic things they’d planned to do overseas in less exotic places. One of my friends, for instance, went bungee jumping in North Carolina instead of Costa Rica.For my vacation, I did the opposite: I went with my family to a fairly exotic place to do a distinctly unexotic thing. I went to Spain and took a very quiet 100-mile walk.To be more precise, I walked the Camino de Santiago, an ancient network of routes that leads to Galicia in the North of Spain, which has attracted travelers from around the world for more than a thousand years. It was the second time I’d made the weeklong pilgrimage, navigating through rural villages and over Roman roads to the famous Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Saint James the Apostle are believed to be held.Many religious traditions involve pilgrimages, which are, according to the scholar Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj, “the physical traversing of some distance from home to the holy place,” motivated by sentiment or belief and undertaken as an act of devotion. In northern India, tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims (yatri in Sanskrit) walk from their homes to the holy city of Mathura each year. In Japan, people walk the 70-kilometer Kumano Kodō across the Kii Peninsula to three sacred Shinto temples.The Camino de Santiago is the most famous pilgrimage in my own Catholic tradition and has attracted millions since it was established in the ninth century. It largely fell into disuse in the 20th century before becoming popular again in the 21st, partly thanks to the 2010 movie The Way, in which Martin Sheen’s character walks the Camino in an attempt to come to terms with his son’s death. The number of pilgrims along the Camino de Santiago more than doubled from 2009 to 2019.[Join Arthur Brooks for a conversation on humor and happiness at the 2021 Atlantic Festival. Register here.]Why do they do it? For one thing, walking is one of the best exercises we can engage in for health and happiness. In 2008, one group of researchers asked sedentary people to walk regularly and found that the activity made their participants less depressed and gave them more vigor. A 2016 study showed that regular walking increases happiness and improves mental health among the elderly.[Read: Walking for a better brain]But this hardly justifies a trip halfway around the world—one can go for a walk nearly anywhere. Travel agencies aggressively market the Camino as an adventure, which perhaps convinces some far-flung wayfarers to make the journey. This perplexes me even more, however, because an adventure it is certainly not, unless your idea of thrill seeking involves a monotonous, repetitive act carried out for hours a day. There is no danger besides the occasional village dog, and no huge challenge beyond the sore muscles and blisters that come with walking 20 kilometers a day.The secret of the Camino is really its utter lack of thrills. The quiet monotony is initially hard to deal with. At the beginning of the journey, interior shouting torments the modern pilgrim, who is generally unaccustomed to being understimulated. A thousand thoughts about life’s exigencies bite at the ankles; one is tempted to stop at every roadside café offering Wi-Fi to check in on the outside world. But by about day three, these torments begin to subside as the walk begins to slow the mind to the speed of the body at a pace that is natural and unforced. The walk becomes a long piece of music—andante, of course—that neither lags nor hurries.[Read: How walking in nature prevents depression]If one surrenders to the music, the Camino becomes a form of extended walking meditation, a practice in many religious traditions. “Each mindful breath, each mindful step, reminds us that we are alive on this beautiful planet,” the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote of walking meditation. “We don’t need anything else. It is wonderful enough just to be alive, to breathe in, and to make one step.” In his book Three Mile an Hour God, the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama mixes Hanh’s Buddhist interpretation with his Christian faith, writing that the speed at which humans walk “is the speed the love of God walks.”For me, the most transcendent effects of pilgrimage appeared after a few days. The Camino is all about walking, not arriving, which forces one to live in the moment and (at least temporarily) to abandon the fruitless chase for lasting satisfaction through bigger accomplishments and better rewards. On the Camino, one realizes that fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is merely a struggle to bear in service of the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives. If we want to find true satisfaction, we must instead focus on the walk that is life, with its string of present moments.[Read: What 10,000 steps will really get you]Each present moment, in turn, provides small satisfactions we miss when the focus is only on bigger and better, as the author Greg McKeown writes in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. For example, one morning an hour outside the medieval city of Caldas de Reis, we spied the oddest flower we had ever seen, the blue passion flower, originally native to South America but now contentedly at home in Galicia. Alien-looking antennae sit atop threadlike tricolor petals, which bloom out of perfectly symmetrical leaves. We stared at it, transfixed, for 10 minutes. This would be an impossible dalliance on a typical day, which my family and I tend to spend running for worldly prizes that pale in comparison—literally—with the blue passion flower. If we had spent the Camino thinking about the weight we were losing by walking 100 miles, or about how the Camino pics might make people envious on social media, we would have missed the flower entirely.Such a forced separation from ordinary ambitions temporarily rightsizes one’s life. The Dalai Lama likes to say that each of us is “one of seven billion.” By this, he does not mean that you are insignificant or just like everyone else. Rather, he encourages all of us to zoom out from our narrow, earthbound perspective on my life, my work, my relationships, my money. This is difficult ordinarily; it is easy on the Camino. As I walked, I envisioned myself as one of 7 billion people existing briefly on a timeline lasting millions of years, from the past into the future. I considered the insignificance not of my life but of the worldly details with which I usually distract myself from metaphysical truths. I thought, for example, how truly trivial it would be in the broad scheme of things if I lost my smartphone or dented my car.[Read: The subtle mindset shift that could radically change the way you see the world]While the steps mark each present moment, an uninterrupted day of walking offers a different sort of rightsizing. One day is the perfect span of time to focus in prayer or meditation on the good of another. On one of my walking days, my focus was personal: my son, who is a deployed Marine; another day, it was global: the people of the world suffering from poverty and conflict. This focus created a sense of love and compassion for the objects of each of my intentions, and I finished with a concrete resolution to act accordingly.Meditation is far from the only transcendent purpose that walking can serve. Many have written about the so-called savoring walk, the practice of focusing on the positive events in your life while walking, which helps you savor happiness. I practiced this all throughout the coronavirus shutdowns in my city, circling my neighborhood nightly after dinner. Those walks are some of the sweetest memories I have of that period, and I have continued them since, inadvertently preparing for my Camino. Almost at the moment I began the journey, my gratitude began to bubble up—for my family, faith, friends, and work, but also for a cool drink of water, taking off my shoes, and a soft pillow at night.[Read: Does ‘counting your blessings’ work?]The Camino, despite my best efforts here to describe it, is fundamentally an ineffable experience, and a highly personal one as well. Life is “your road and yours alone,” the Sufi poet Rumi wrote. “Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.” Whether you are traditionally religious or not, and whether you travel to a famous place or just go to your favorite woods, an unhurried pilgrimage can change your understanding of your life. It shrinks your life down to dimensions you can apprehend, yet makes it feel strangely full—perhaps for the first time in a long time.When was the last time you remember being truly happy? Tell us in an audio clip, no longer than three minutes, and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com, or leave us a voicemail at 925-967-2091. Your story could be featured on Arthur Brooks’s upcoming podcast on how to build a meaningful life. Please include your name and location in the email and/or audio file. By submitting this clip, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity. 

Until recently, Silicon Valley enjoyed a relatively high degree of freedom from US government regulation. That was a deliberate policy choice. Responding to public enthusiasm for the possibilities of global interconnectedness and an endless stream of easily accessible information, Congress decreed early that online platforms would have no liability for third-party content flowing through their pipes. As a tool of progress, the Internet would be free.Tech companies harnessed the massive energy exerted by billions of people eager to gain a presence online, to share, to learn, to be entertained, to work, to shop. The web remade the United States physically, economically, and socially. Web culture became American culture and, increasingly, global culture.It was only when the wonders of the Internet grew familiar, and tech companies became huge and powerful, that the adverse consequences of connecting everyone without appropriate oversight became glaringly apparent. The Internet was used for pornography, sex trafficking, terrorist recruiting, an infinite variety of scams, the evasion of laws and regulations, the invasion of privacy, harassment and defamation, foreign propaganda, and fake news.Tech giants were slow to confront the regrettable purposes to which their platforms and systems were being put, preferring to single-mindedly pursue growth and profits. This was predictable. That capitalists will “esteem [their] immediate interests … to be the common Measure of Good and Evil” was a truism remarked by Restoration-era English economist Dudley North a century before the American Revolution.The government response, too, has been predictable. Never mind that massive subsidies from the defense establishment have been critical to tech’s progress. Never mind that Congress’s hands-off policy was instrumental in helping Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and other online giants scale up massively. Politicians are now tripping over one another in a race to investigate, indict, regulate, and dismember tech companies, as if they were solely responsible for the Internet’s ills.The Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and other agencies at the federal and state levels are pursing big tech for anti-competitive activity, abuse of dominance, promoting hate speech, ruining conventional media, labor abuses, invading the privacy of users, and generally poisoning the public sphere. President Joe Biden has “stacked his administration with trustbusters,” as the New York Times puts it. Other nations, including China, Australia, and members of the European Union, are also on the attack, and sometimes leading it. These governments, reports the Times, are moving “to limit the power of tech companies with an urgency and breadth that no single industry had experienced before.”Where does it end? Maybe these investigators and regulators will be reasonable, and even prudent. Certainly, it ought to be possible to balance the need to curb tech’s excesses with concern for the finances, reputations, and future prospects of the companies targeted, the welfare of their investors and employees, and the growth and competitiveness of the American economy. And it would be advisable to do so as well, given that what’s happened to the Internet does not solely implicate Silicon Valley, but rather is part of a general social problem for which companies, governments, and individual users all bear some responsibility.But don’t count on authorities taking the correct course of action. After all, we’ve been here before.The last great tsunami of corporate regulation struck America a half-century ago. In 1965, regulated industries in the United States represented seven percent of America’s GNP; by 1978, it was 30 percent. Twenty-five substantive consumer and environmental regulatory bills were passed in that time, and hundreds more were considered. The victimized consumer was all the rage. Activists and politicians faced American capitalism in an adversarial pose, armed with shocking facts and moral indignation. Said actor Betty Furness (of Swing Time fame), who’d become Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for consumer affairs:You gave us nylon but didn’t tell us it melts. You gave us insect spray, but you didn’t tell us it would kill the cat. You gave us plastic bags, but didn’t warn us that it could, and has, killed babies. You gave us detergents, but didn’t tell us they were polluting our rivers and streams. And you gave us the pill, but didn’t tell us we were guinea pigs.All of this activity, concluded Lizabeth Cohen, the leading historian of American consumer activism, can be traced to Ralph Nader’s two-year battle with General Motors in the mid-'60s over the issue of auto safety. Nader’s success was “just the spark needed” to produce “a major conflagration” for more regulation and government intervention in the commercial economy.There is a cloak of mythology around Nader, supposedly a lone author-activist who took on the giants of Detroit, demonstrated that their cars were death traps, and convinced Washington to regulate the automotive sector. Nader is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives with his auto-safety campaign. And there is some truth to the legend: He did embarrass GM and he did encourage the federal government to regulate Detroit. But that’s as far as it goes.Nader was a product of his times, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School in the 1950s, and influenced by an array of writers and thinkers who chafed at the economic orthodoxies of the Eisenhower years. Ike’s highest priority was economic growth, maintained by constant stoking of the consumer economy. The more people bought and sold, the stronger the economy, and the better America’s chances of out-pacing its global rival, the Soviet Union: that, in a nutshell, was the so-called Cold War Consensus, and not only Republicans but most Democrats embraced it. Every red-blooded American was said to owe it to his countrymen to double what he ate, double what he smoked, and wear three shoes.Sociologist C. Wright Mills was one opponent of that consensus. He considered it a self-serving invention of America’s “power elites” in government and business, who were enriching themselves by enslaving people to consumerism. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith shared Mills’s skepticism. Why, he asked, should economic growth be Washington’s highest priority when people were already rich enough? Americans enjoyed a material standard of living unexampled in history. If they actually needed more consumer goods, barrages of advertising would not be necessary to convince them.To Galbraith’s mind, America had solved the age-old problems of economic scarcity and insecurity. It was time to shift its attention from economic growth to better governance, from commercial production of alcohol, comic books, mouthwash, narcotics, pornography, and automobiles, to public goods such as schools, hospitals, urban redevelopment, sanitation, parks, and playgrounds.Automobiles, then the hottest commodities in the consumer economy, accounting for one in five retail dollars and the largest share of the nation’s advertising, provided critics with their best illustrations of America’s material excesses and social ills. It was not lost on Mills that three positions in Eisenhower’s cabinet were filled by former General Motors men. Galbraith thought it crazy for Washington to worry about private-sector growth when a company such as General Motors, the world’s largest and most admired industrial enterprise, enjoying record profits and funding enormous advertising budgets, was unassailable and in all probability immortal.Both saw an obsession with automobiles (there were 1.4 in every garage by this time, and consumers were always looking to trade up) as symptomatic of America’s backward priorities. Wrote Galbraith: “The family which takes its mauve and cerise, air-conditioned, power-steered and power-braked automobile out for a tour passes through cities that are badly paved, made hideous by litter, blighted buildings, billboards, and posts for wires that should long since have been put underground ... they may reflect vaguely on the curious unevenness of their blessings.”Nader had studied Mills at Princeton and was familiar with the works of Galbraith. He and many other young intellectuals and activists shared their rejection of the Cold War Consensus and their anti-corporate worldview. He also shared their intuition that any effort to reduce the influence of consumerism in American life, and forge a new American agenda concerned primarily with public welfare, would benefit from putting a big dent in Detroit. The issue of automobile safety was the instrument Nader would use to make that dent.The consensus around safety through most of automobile history had been that the car itself was harmless, and that the best way to keep drivers and their passengers from being maimed or killed was to engineer better roads, enforce the laws, and preach driver education—the so-called Three-E approach. Between the early 1920s, when mass-produced cars made their first appearance, and the late 1950s, this method had been sufficient to reduce annual American road fatalities per miles driven by 80 percent.But because America was growing, and people were driving more, the absolute number of traffic fatalities remained in the range of 34,000 to 39,000 throughout the 1950s, much to the frustration of the medical community, which dealt with a heavy flow of injured, crippled, paralyzed, brain-damaged, and dead victims of automobile crashes through its emergency rooms and operating theaters.It was American physicians who brought the first real challenge to the Triple-E approach in the mid-1950s. Following the example of pioneering safety researchers, they divided their analysis of every auto crash into two parts: an initial collision, when a vehicle hits a ditch or another vehicle or a moose, and a second collision, when the occupants of the crashing vehicle are thrown into its dashboard, windshield, steering wheel, or some other unforgiving part of its interior, or flung onto the road. From this perspective, it was not the driver’s initial mistake or misfortune that caused injury or death; it was the so-called second collision of human against steel, glass, or pavement. It followed that if vehicle interiors could be designed to better protect people in crashes, road carnage could be reduced.The appeal of this approach to doctors was obvious. When faced with a body on a stretcher, they usually had no idea what had happened on the road, and did not much care. Rather, they dealt entirely with the consequences of the second collision. They began demanding car manufacturers make the interiors of automobiles safer, or crashworthy. Among their recommendations: pad the dashboards, eliminate finely beveled metal edges, install collapsible steering wheel columns and safety glass, and improve door latches.With the medical community’s help, second-collision theory caught the attention of a handful of media outlets, the odd congressman, and a Chicago lawyer named Harold Katz. His specialty was torts, the branch of law dealing with personal injuries resulting from wrongful acts that do not necessarily amount to crimes. He read what physicians were saying about second collisions, and wrote a piece of his own on the subject for the Harvard Law Review in 1956, entitled "Liability of Automobile Manufacturers for Unsafe Design of Passenger Cars."It had occurred to Katz that the legal implications of second-collision theory were immense. If putting humans in cars was like shipping teacups loose in a barrel, as doctors maintained, weren’t automobile manufacturers negligent in failing to better protect occupants from unreasonable risk of injury and death? Surely auto engineers and designers, who had more safety expertise than anyone else, had a duty to build the safest practicable products for their consumers. It seemed clear to Katz that with almost 40,000 Americans dying on the roads every year, automakers were a sitting duck: lawyers should be suing them for the lethal designs of their vehicles.Katz’s article, implicating the largest, richest companies in America in tens of thousands of annual deaths, was catnip to the personal-injury bar and also to then-law student Ralph Nader. “I got a call from this fellow, I’d never heard of him, but he was quite ecstatic,” said Katz of Nader. “He told me that he was utterly astonished and absolutely delighted by my article. He didn’t have any prior notion of using tort law to reform the auto industry. The idea captivated him.”Soon after graduating from Harvard, Nader placed an article in the Nation building on Katz’s insights. He not only saw the Triple-E approach to auto safety as wrong-headed, but described it as a plot, led by Detroit, to detract attention from its negligently-designed product. He claimed that automakers had the knowledge and technological means to “make accidents safe,” but were too callous and cheap to do it—far easier to blame drivers for accidents.Nader outpaced Katz by suggesting that automobiles “are so designed as to be dangerous at any speed,” and suggested a conspiracy of silence around the fact that so many people were dying annually on the roads. Newspapers and broadcasters dared not discuss this “national health emergency” for fear of losing their car advertising. Universities were uninterested in researching the subject due to “widespread amorality among our scholarly elite.” Politicians were timid, and the people needed to be protected from the “indiscretion and vanity” that made them susceptible to Detroit’s sparkling, roaring “death-traps.”Nader was keen to see tort lawyers attack automakers with second-collision arguments, but he was even more interested in the political implications of Katz’s claims. He believed second-collision theory gave Washington permission to regulate Detroit.Within a couple of weeks of Nader’s article landing in the Nation, young Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an academic, placed a similar piece in the April 30th, 1959 edition of a magazine called the Reporter. Moynihan had learned about second-collision theory during his years as an aide to New York governor Averell Harriman. A PhD in history, he was more careful with data than Nader, but just as excited about the prospects for regulating Detroit:If the industry cannot rise to its responsibilities, the entire matter should be removed from its jurisdiction and be solved by methods employed in any other urgent public health problem … If any automobile magnate wonders what that can mean, he would do well to run over to Chicago to watch government officials in white coats giving their safety ratings to the sides of beef as they roll off packing-house production lines.Moynihan’s article caused more of a stir than Nader’s, and he signed a contract with Knopf to write a book about auto safety. His self-described goal was to write “descriptions of pain and loss so powerful as to not only advance vehicle safety, but also “impair if not in fact destroy the personal and social symbolism of the American automobile which is as precious to those who manufacture them as to those who buy them.”More ambitiously, Moynihan, like Galbraith and others before him, believed that cutting General Motors down to size would reduce corporate influence in American life, and shift the focus of government from encouraging consumption of private goods to encouraging the development of public goods. He dreamed of a time when “the central concerns of American society are no longer in the hands of free enterprise, and that free enterprise is no longer in the hands of men who expect to lead society.”Moynihan worked for John F. Kennedy in 1960, and upon his election to the presidency was rewarded with a job as aide to Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg. The demands of his career in Washington prevented him from delivering his book to Knopf. But Moynihan didn’t drop the issue of auto safety. He’d begun a friendly correspondence with Nader after their articles had been published. After JFK was assassinated and Lyndon Johnson began planning a more aggressively liberal agenda, Moynihan invited his friend to join him in the Labor department and work on a report about auto safety.Nader, with not much else happening in his life, jumped at the chance, and in his first nine months at Labor, using the full powers of his boss’s office to collect information and conduct interviews, produced a 234-page first draft of the book Moynihan hadn’t found time to write. Only a few copies of A Report on the Context, Condition, and Recommended Direction of Federal Activity in Highway Safety were printed, and Moynihan’s secretary expressed doubt that even he had read the whole document. It was not widely circulated inside government, and it may be that no one read it. Moynihan would later say he commissioned it primarily so that when advocating for federal regulation of automakers, he could say that he had a 234-page report with 99 pages of notes to back him up.While Nader was toiling on his report, Moynihan learned that second-collision theory was gaining traction in certain congressional offices. Abraham Ribicoff, a liberal Democratic Senator representing Connecticut, and a former governor of that state, had some experience with consumer issues. He’d received generous press as the main congressional champion of author and environmentalist Rachel Carson in 1963. Having won his office by a slim margin of votes, he was eager to build on that momentum.Abraham Ribicoff on campaign in 1962.Perusing the New York Times one morning in December 1964, Ribicoff came across an article on accident research and second-collision theory in which an anonymous researcher was quoted as saying that Detroit had the wherewithal to build a crashproof car, but couldn’t be bothered.“It was the first time I’d heard of the car as a factor in accidents,” he said. “I was intrigued by the theory of the second collision. This was a new concept to me.”Ribicoff telephoned an aide, Jerome Sonosky, and asked him to schedule hearings on the role of the vehicle in automobile crashes.“This means taking on Detroit,” said Sonosky.“Can you do it?” asked Ribicoff.Sonosky could. He and Moynihan quickly found each other, and Sonosky was introduced to Nader.“Nader walked in looking then as he looks now,” said Sonosky later. “Sallow faced. Wearing his long overcoat. Carrying a thousand pieces of paper under his arm. His message was that the auto industry has no right to produce unsafe cars. We talked for three hours about various aspects of the issue, and where we should go with it.”Said a journalist who knew Nader: “This town is full of guys who wander around with stacks of paper under their arms trying to see senators or bust into magazine offices. Ralph is one who got through the guards.”Sonosky left his meeting with Nader and immediately called Ribicoff.“We just struck gold,” he said.“What do you mean?”“I just met somebody who knows more about auto safety than anybody I’ve ever come across. I don’t have to run around town gathering up various experts. I just found him.”Nader, already on the Department of Labor payroll, was also hired as an unpaid advisor to Ribicoff’s subcommittee on the federal role in traffic safety, which would begin hearings early in 1965. In practice, that meant that Moynihan would keep Nader on the Labor payroll for a half year after his report was produced so he could volunteer for Ribicoff.“Nader was my prime resource, period,” said Sonosky. “I didn’t need anyone else. He had everything.” The pair would meet and talk for hours about the issues, what questions to ask witnesses, and how to handle technical material. “Sometimes I had to shut him up,” said Sonosky. “He was fixated.” Information and tactics they developed circulated among the offices of Ribicoff, Moynihan, and freshman senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was expected to participate in the proceedings.Several important things happened before Ribicoff’s hearings could get underway. One was that Washington’s General Services Administration (GSA), responsible for procurement of the federal fleet, had been authorized by Congress to require the hundreds of thousands of automobiles it purchased to include padded dashboards, stronger windshields, and other safety equipment. Another was that this application of federal purchasing power, the inspiration of a little-known but effective Alabama congressman named Kenneth Roberts, prompted Detroit, after some grumbling, to adopt for all its cars virtually the whole slate of changes to automobile interiors requested by the American medical community.This development did not slow Ribicoff in the least. He began his hearings on March 22nd, 1965, and made two important arguments off the top. He claimed there existed in America a “traffic safety establishment,” including police forces, state traffic commissions, and the National Safety Council, among other organizations. Under the influence of Detroit, which provided funding to these organizations and sometimes had representation on their boards, the establishment was misleading the nation by blaming drivers for road carnage when second-collision theory proved that the real problem was negligently designed American automobiles.Ribicoff’s second argument was that Detroit knew how to make cars crashproof but couldn’t be bothered, and that the public interest required Washington to step in and impose automobile safety standards.His first three days of hearings didn’t go as planned. The other eight senators who’d agreed to sit on Ribicoff’s panel were largely absent, as was the media. Witnesses from such federal departments as Commerce and Health, Education, and Welfare testified that they saw no need for further federal involvement in auto safety, and praised the automakers, and General Motors in particular, for their leadership on the issue.Daniel Patrick Moynihan, representing the department of Labor, was a notable exception. He expressed the view that America “had done almost nothing about the problem of traffic safety.” The Triple-E approach, he said, was nonsense. Instead of trying to reform 80 million Americans drivers who were incorrigibly reckless behind the wheel, better to concentrate on a handful of automobile executives in Detroit. In their “considerable obtuseness,” these executives believed safety didn’t sell cars, so they plied an unwitting public with bloated, overpowered, dangerous models rather than crashproof vehicles that would save lives. The federal hammer was required to force a change.An otherwise dispirited Ribicoff was overjoyed by this testimony: “You make a lot of sense in almost everything you do, Mr. Moynihan. I appreciate your coming here.”While there had been almost no one in the room to hear any of this testimony, that changed in the second round of Ribicoff’s hearings. He was joined on the rostrum by three Senate colleagues, and the room was abuzz with spectators, photographers, and reporters. The excitement was due to the scheduled appearances of two witnesses from Detroit, Frederic G. Donner, chairman of the board of General Motors, and James M. Roche, president of the company. These barely distinguishable eminences sat side by side at the witness table. When they put their gray heads together to whisper, news photographs made them appear conjoined.Some at GM thought it a mistake for the executives to dignify Ribicoff’s hearings with their presence. Better to send some engineers and lawyers who would draw no crowds and say nothing intelligible to the general public. But chairman Donner was anxious to put his best foot forward on auto safety. He and Roche prepared and rehearsed for their appearance, and GM made what was intended as a good-faith donation of $1 million to traffic safety research at MIT.In their opening statements, the GM men professed themselves concerned with the number of traffic deaths in America. They spoke of improvements made in safety glass, door latches, steel roofs, and other equipment; their use of crash sleds and crash dummies and high-speed photography to better understand the dynamics of collisions; and their participation in crash-injury research projects conducted with recognized experts at Cornell University, among other parties. They boasted that they would be meeting most of the GSA’s imposed safety requirements ahead of schedule.To pre-empt questions about why GM hadn’t rushed to install each new safety technology at the moment it became available, Donner explained that his company operated in “a climate of public acceptance.” People were only willing to pay for so much safety, and would balk if it was forced on them at increased cost. Thus, new safety features tended to be available first as options, and later, once they’d proved themselves, as standard equipment. They pointed out that no one had been willing to pay for turn signals when they were first introduced, but over time consumers were sold on their utility and they became standard equipment on cars even before states, which had primary responsibility for regulating commerce, began to mandate them.As for building crashproof vehicles, the GM honchos were skeptical. More improvements could be made, they said, but there were limits to technology. A crashproof vehicle was not within the realm of possibility. Driver education, law enforcement, and road engineering were also important.While the GM men laid down their case, Nader, the Ribicoff panel’s expert-in-chief, sat behind a door in the chamber passing slips of paper to the Senator’s aide inside, supplying information and ideas for lines of attack.The executives were having a rather easy time of it until New York Senator Robert Kennedy joined the proceedings late. It had been the better part of a decade since Kennedy, as a young Senate aide to Joseph McCarthy, had badgered suspected communists in hearing rooms, but he had not lost a step. He proceeded to steal Ribicoff’s show, describing GM’s gift to MIT as a publicity stunt, and asking chairman Donner how much the company spent annually on safety research.“Sir, I don’t believe it is a matter of what we have spent,” said Donner.“Well, I am interested in it. You might not be, but I am, and I am just asking you.”“We don’t know, Senator, how to add all these things up.”“You don’t?”“Because they are scattered all over …”“General Motors doesn’t know how to add them up?”Donner tried to explain that some money was spent in research, more through the Automobile Manufacturers Association, and in other directions. He asked if Kennedy wanted to know about pure research, or development and testing, or reliability, or other matters.“I will ask you some specifics about it,” said Kennedy, confident he had the witnesses on the run. “How much money have you spent to find out how many children … fell out of the back of an automobile because of a faulty latch or lock?”The executives had no answer.GM general counsel Aloysius Power, testifying to a Senate subcommittee in 1959.“How many children have fallen out of General Motors cars?” asked Kennedy. “Last year?”“I don’t quite know how you would find that out,” said Donner.Kennedy toyed with the executives, asking more questions he knew they would be unable to answer about their safety spending, and taunting them for their failure. When Roche finally coughed up a hard number, estimating that the company spent $1.25 million in the previous year on external safety research, Kennedy went for blood.“What was the profit of General Motors last year?”Roche answered, “I don’t think that has anything to do …”“I would like to have that answer if I may. I think I am entitled to know that figure ... You spent $1.25 million, as I understand it, on this aspect of safety. I would like to know what your profit is.”Donner tried to brush Kennedy back, saying that he was in attendance to discuss safety not finances.“What was the profit of General Motors last year?” repeated the Senator.“I will have to ask one of my associates,” said Donner.“Could you, please?”“$1,700 million,” replied Roche.“What?” asked Kennedy.“About $1.5 billion, I think.”“One billion?” asked Kennedy.“$1.7 billion,” said Donner.“About $1.5 billon?”“Yes.”“You made $1.7 billion last year?”“That is correct.”“And you spent $1 million on this?”The juxtaposition was fatal. Kennedy berated the executives for making so much and spending so little on safety when there were, by now, more than 40,000 Americans dying on the road every year. Donner and Roche tried to explain that the $1.25 million figure was for external safety spending, not the sum total of the company’s safety expenditures, but the fact that they could not specify the sum total negated their point and brought more abuse from Kennedy: “I cannot believe General Motors does not have this information.”Ribicoff and Kennedy brought the proceedings to a close by congratulating one another on their commitment to improving traffic safety when so many of the individuals and organizations nominally responsible for safety were sitting on their hands.Even GM insiders acknowledged that the executives were clobbered at their appearance. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 20th, 1965 that they were “astonishingly ill-prepared,” and declared their performance “dismal.” The newspaper quoted a congressman as saying, “I really wouldn’t have believed they could be so bad.” GM later tallied all of its spending on safety research, testing, engineering and driver training at $193 million annually, but by this time the damage was done.It was only after they’d been beaten up by RFK that it became clear to GM officials what they were up against. As one executive put it, automakers were now “targets of a disturbing, rapidly growing, and often fact-distorting campaign to indict motor vehicle design as the major contributor to traffic deaths and injuries.”This was new territory for GM. In 1953, the company’s former president Charles E Wilson, nominated as Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, told his confirmation hearing: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the nation is quite considerable.”A lot of interpretations have been offered for Wilson’s statement, but what he thought he was saying was that America and General Motors were on the same team, and should be looking out for each other’s interests. It was a single restatement of the Cold War consensus: a thriving commercial economy, centered around the automobile industry, would sustain America’s unsurpassed standards of living and geopolitical leadership. That commonality of interests no longer held.General Motors stepped up its safety efforts, and its publicity of them, in the months following the hearings, and waited for the nation’s attention to shift back from highway death tolls to the gleaming new automobiles rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines. They were disappointed. Senators Kennedy and Ribicoff spent the rest of 1965 making speeches and writing articles on traffic safety and the failure of Detroit to produce a crashproof car.The Senators’ criticisms were echoed by a growing chorus of tort lawyers. They’d filed over 100 suits alleging that the Chevrolet Corvair, General Motors’s innovative rear-engine compact, was so negligently designed that a gust of wind, a tight curve, or a bump in the road could cause a driver to lose control at speeds as low as 22 mph, resulting in severe injury or death. The lawyers were testifying at state legislatures that the Corvair was symptomatic of Detroit’s indifference to auto safety, and its willingness to sacrifice human life to pad its profits, and planting stories in tabloids about Chevrolet’s rear-engine “death trap.”Amidst all this came the first notices of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. The book opened with gory details of Corvair traffic road accidents, and repeated arguments against the car used by lawyers suing GM. Nader called the Corvair one of the century’s “greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility,” and claimed GM could easily have made the car safe with a few dollars’ worth of safety improvements but was too greedy to pay for them.The author went on to present Detroit’s executives as amoral and even sociopathic, determined to dazzle car buyers with expensive new paint colors and gadgets while installing weak brakes, fragile glass, unpadded dashboards, defective hood latches, sticky accelerators, inferior tires, and other faulty equipment. They got away with this, he maintained, because the auto industry operated outside the law, by which he meant free of federal regulation.Kennedy’s attack on GM executives over safety spending got lengthy treatment. Like Ribicoff, Nader excoriated the “closely knit traffic safety establishment” for its close ties to the automakers. He even suggested an alarming conspiracy among medical professionals, police chiefs, insurance agents, auto-repair shops, funeral homes, and others whose financial interest is dependent on a steady supply of highway injuries and fatalities. Thousands of jobs depend on the death toll, said Nader: “[This] is where the remuneration lies and this is where the talent and energies go.”Although much of Unsafe at Any Speed was generally tendentious, Nader did make valid points about Detroit’s methods and products. But in media appearances, and in his own star appearance before Ribicoff’s panel, Nader would occasionally go further than he had in the book, comparing American-built cars to sitting (as he told CBS, in 1966) “in a roomful of knives.” He would also present himself as a romantic figure, a lone wolf with few material possessions who lived in a cheap rooming house and did nothing but work. His ascetic lifestyle was accepted as proof of his devotion to the public good. His annual salary at Labor had been $15,000 (the national household income at the time was $6,590).Weeks after the release of Nader’s book, tort lawyers brought the safety crusade to a new pitch with their Stop Murder by Motor publicity campaign. Their use of the word “murder” echoed Nader’s oft-made suggestion that there had to be something deliberate about Detroit’s creation of such lethal vehicles. Ribicoff, Moynihan, Kennedy, and even President Johnson all endorsed the campaign.GM officials were bewildered at the animus now directed toward their company, and alarmed that Senators Ribicoff, Kennedy, and Moynihan, Nader, the Corvair plaintiffs, and the defense bar were apparently sharing information and arguments, and collaborating on tactics.Nader, who worked for Ribicoff and Moynihan, and who was known to share his research with tort lawyers, seemed to be at the center of the cabal, but no one knew much about him. He claimed to be a lone wolf but he was employed inside the government, and had better connections in many quarters than GM itself. He was trained as a lawyer but he’d apparently abandoned the practice. He’d written a book but did not present as a journalist. Was he a political actor? A consultant? Was he setting himself up as an expert witness?He was all around GM but the company couldn’t get a bead on him. “Who the hell is this guy?” one GM attorney asked his colleagues.No one individual at General Motors would ever claim credit for the idea, but by the end of 1965, the company had laid plans to hire an investigator. The brief was to discover Nader’s angle, and dig up any available dirt on him. It was a stupid move.GM’s investigators did some legitimate work, turning up solid information about Nader’s connection to the tort lawyers, his handsome salary at Labor, his purchase of Ford stock previous to GM’s appearance before Ribicoff, and that he was playing both sides of the table for the Senator, posing as an independent witness before the Senate subcommittee while also helping to direct the hearings. They also came close to learning that Nader had written his book on the public payroll, and that Moynihan and the Labor department were effectively paying him, long after his original report had been filed, to support the Senate subcommittee.But the investigators, pretending to be checking Nader out for a prospective employer, also asked friends and acquaintances about his personal life and habits. This and other missteps raised suspicions, causing the detectives to be outed. GM’s executives were called back before the Ribicoff panel. They issued a humiliating apology and lost whatever support remained for the company in Washington.The Johnson administration proposed to create a new department of transportation, and bring General Motors and the rest of Detroit under federal regulation to set standards for auto safety. Something had to be done, he said, echoing Nader’s arguments with the statement that “there is no single statistic of American life more shocking than the toll of dead and injured on our highways.”Senators and congressmen fought with one another to make Johnson’s two pieces of auto safety legislation as stringent as possible, and to pass them before the November 1966 midterm elections.Elizabeth Drew, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, was stunned by the “radical departure from the government’s traditional, respectful hands-off approach” to the auto industry. She attributed the change not to any deep concern with auto safety, but rather to the realization that “automobile safety was good politics.” People loved their cars but nobody really loved an automobile company and the result had been “a political car-safety derby, with politicians jockeying for the position out in front.”Congressmen interviewed by Dan Cordtz, who covered the story for Fortune, showed little interest in the complicated problem of traffic safety or the merits of second-collision theory. They voted not to address a public-policy problem but to punish GM for its poor performance before Ribicoff’s committee and spying on Nader. Wrote Cordtz, “Many strong supporters of auto safety legislation agree that G.M.’s conduct … was the most important single factor in establishing a congressional climate conducive to the passage of a tough safety bill.”None of what I write here is intended to whitewash or excuse GM’s behavior, or that of the corporate sector more generally. General Motors had a history of bullying and predatory behavior. Its definition of the public good, while broader than recognized at the time, was too narrow for its own good. And it deserved to get slapped around in the public sphere for using private investigators to seek personal dirt on Nader.But that is no alibi for Congress to approve hasty, sweeping, punitive and counterproductive regulations of America’s most important industry. Any decision on federal involvement in the auto industry should have been made on the merits of the proposed legislation. Yet the legislators displayed minimal curiosity about safety issues. They were primarily interested in taking down a corporate giant and the fight for legislative credit. They were as reckless in their treatment of Detroit as Nader and friends imagined automakers to be in their treatment of consumers.Johnson’s National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 was deliberately conceived so as to shift the focus of America’s concern for road safety from drivers to vehicles. As directed, the newly formed National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was primarily concerned with the crashworthiness of automobiles, and soon imposed more than 50 vehicle safety standards on automakers. It also won the ability to force recalls on automakers. The focus of the NHTSA became even narrower when President Jimmy Carter appointed Nader’s colleague Joan Claybrook as its head. Air bags, the holy grail of those bent on crashproof vehicles, became the overwhelming focus of the agency’s efforts, though the technology was still not ready and claims for their efficacy were still being exaggerated.Nader and the safety crusaders opened the floodgates for other enterprising congressmen to campaign against corporate recklessness. The 25 consumer and environmental regulatory bills passed in the wake of the traffic safety bills expanded the regulatory state into food, cosmetics, credit instruments, packaging and advertising, monopolies and pricing practices, and air and water pollution. The number of people staffing federal regulatory agencies tripled, and government spending on regulatory enforcement increased by a factor of nine over roughly the same period. Additionally, by 1975, all 50 states had created their own consumer-protection agencies and 39 had passed consumer protection statutes.These congressmen were joined in Washington by a new generation of activists. By 1977, 83 public interest groups were operating in the capital, more than half of them arriving after Nader’s triumph.Meanwhile, the courts curtailed legal defenses available to manufacturers while expanding liability standards to cover almost any product malfunction. They also allowed greater scope for recovery of non-economic damages such as pain and suffering, and permitted class-action procedures by which private law claims could be aggregated by the hundreds of thousands, effectively industrialized torts. All of these measures were a boon to entrepreneurial attorneys arguing harms on behalf of the victimized American consumer. From 1950 to 1990, direct tort costs grew at an astonishing average annual rate of 11.3 percent, from $1.8 billion a year to $130.2 billion, more than three times the rate of growth in the economy.Altogether, these congressmen, lawyers, and activists represented an enormous shift in America’s entrepreneurial energies, from economic growth to identifying and combatting growth’s negative consequences. Or, as author Robert Gordon put it, from creating goods to fighting bads. This was the end of American enterprise in the form it had taken for the first 200 years of the country’s history.It happened with breathtaking speed. In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter had written that “the existence and workings of the corporations are largely accepted, and in the main they are assumed to be fundamentally benign.” Public approval of business peaked in 1966, when 55 percent of surveyed Americans expressed “a great deal of confidence“ in the leaders of major corporations, and 96 percent agreed that free enterprise had made America great. By 1971, only 27 percent of Americans expressed a great deal of confidence in business leadership. And by 1974, the figure was just 16 percent.Sales of the Corvair collapsed by two-thirds, even before GM’s private eyes were discovered. It was out of production entirely within two years, despite the fact that the suits against the Corvair were either lost, dropped, or settled out of court for low amounts.Nader has never admitted that his characterization of the car was uniquely dangerous and negligently designed was wrong, even after a court case vindicated the car’s design. The NHTSA, under pressure from Nader, subjected the car to intensive testing and found “the handling and stability performance of the … Corvair does not result in an abnormal potential for loss of control or rollover and it is at least as good as the performance of some contemporary vehicles both foreign and domestic.”And while the fate of this single rear-engine compact car alone was insufficient to change the future of GM, the safety crusade did severe damage to the company’s overall brand. In 1965, GM was comfortably atop the Fortune 500 rankings, and its new model year had broken all records for sales volume, revenue, and profits. Independent consumer surveys showed that GM was considered by Americans the undisputed leader of the auto industry, and easily the most powerful, successful, and admired US corporation. Gallup found GM ahead of every other American firm in terms of products, corporate performance, and contributions to society. Safety was not a serious issue in the public mind. Americans blamed bad drivers for blood on the road and believed their cars were built with their protection in mind.All that changed with the confluence of Ribicoff’s hearings, the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, the Stop Murder by Motor campaign, and leaked news that the White House was preparing a bill to regulate automakers. In February 1966 (a month before GM’s detectives were discovered), GM sales dropped precipitously. Nearly every GM nameplate was affected, and the corporation’s reversal was enough to drag the whole industry into a net decline, the first significant break in a remarkable five-year run for Detroit. Despite widespread discounting of GM models, sales were off eight percent by the end of the year.The damage was reflected in GM’s share price, the most important metric so far as management was concerned. It hit a high of $105 in the first weeks of 1966, dropped to $101 on the release of early February sales data, and fell to $95 after GM’s detectives were exposed. By the end of 1966, it traded at $66, representing a 37 percent loss in shareholder value for the market’s most reliable performer.The familiar narrative of Detroit’s decline takes the 1973 oil crisis as a critical juncture. A sudden surge in oil prices that year prompted a large number of American car buyers to abandon Detroit’s massive and expensive cars for smaller, more fuel-efficient imports from Japan and Germany. American manufacturers were blind to the inferior quality of their vehicles, failed to meet the challenge, and imports took over the American market.A Seattle-area gas station, forced to close during the oil crisisBut imports had begun trending up sharply in 1966, right around the time when Ribicoff and Nader opened their campaign to convince Americans that Detroit was murdering them with unsafe vehicles. This happened despite these imports’ being generally less safe and of poorer quality than American-made cars. (The real advances in Japanese manufacturing, led by Honda, came in the late 1970s.)Why didn’t Detroit introduce hot new compacts to beat back the foreign invasion? That’s what they’d done in the late 1950s, when the Volkswagen Beetle led an import push that peaked at 12 percent of the US market. GM announced the compact Corvair, while Ford and Chrysler introduced compacts of their own. And imports trended downward in the early 1960s (though the stalwart Beetle did remain popular).Foreign-brand import share of U.S. passenger-car sales from 1955 to 1980In 1970, US car companies again tried to respond, this time with innovative four-cylinder vehicles, led by Chevrolet’s Vega. But the business environment had changed markedly during the preceding decade. GM, now dealing with slimmer profits and a lower share price, had become risk averse following the relentless attacks on its innovative rear-engine Corvair. Its finances were now so weak that new cars had be designed and built on the cheap, and it showed.After 1966, General Motors was like an automobile that had been returned to the road after a bad crash. It looked okay from the outside, but never ran properly again. The stability, confidence, and consistent growth it had enjoyed up until 1966 would never return. And because GM comprised half of the domestic auto industry, Detroit was never the same, either.In 1960, GM had begun investing vast sums of money in overseas expansion, with the underlying goal of dominating world auto markets. Its executives made a series of speeches on the changing nature of global commerce, and about how the United States needed to lift its head from the domestic scene if it was to hold its position of leadership in the markets of tomorrow. Donner, the company chair, wanted his government and international trade bodies to foster a global business environment that encouraged private investment and the free movement of capital, with a reduction in punitive taxation and trade barriers.Instead of executing this global plan, Donner’s company spent the next decade at war with Washington over safety and environmental standards. Instead of helping automakers with their ambitions, as governments in Japan and Germany were helping their own domestic manufacturers, President Johnson, anxious to reduce a US foreign trade deficit (largely of his own making), signed an executive order prohibiting US investors from acquiring more than 10 percent of foreign businesses. Thus was the world car market cleared for Japan and Germany.There is no arguing with Ralph Nader, and every other safety crusader, that the 49,163 fatalities on American roads in 1965, the last year before passage of Johnson’s traffic safety legislation, were a public-health catastrophe. Reducing the death toll was a perfectly legitimate goal of public policy. The question remains, did the safety crusaders solve the problem, or at least save more lives than would have been saved without their intervention?Nader and the NHTSA claim that the legislative and regulatory apparatus created in 1966 saved 3.5 million lives during the 50-year period that followed, with the NHTSA calling it “one of the most effective public health and safety efforts of the past century.” But the data does not support this claim. Statistically speaking, there was more safety progress in the half-century before the 1966 legislation than in the half-century that followed. Moreover, that 3.5-million figure includes fatality reductions that are unrelated to vehicle-safety technology, such as those associated with mandatory seatbelt usage and drunk-driving laws.Alcohol-related and non-alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the United States, 1982-2002Seatbelts alone are credited by contemporary researchers with saving more lives than all other vehicle safety technologies put together, between 1960 and 2021. These devices were installed pre-1966 by automakers under pressure from state legislatures (part of the maligned “traffic-safety establishment”). But few people used them. Congress could have made them mandatory, but lacked the courage to impose their use on the nation’s drivers.This was one of the more invidious effects of second-collision theory: The rush to blame Detroit for traffic deaths gave drivers a free pass. In fact, Nader himself vociferously opposed mandatory seatbelt usage on the grounds that people were incorrigible and behavior-control laws would never work. “We learned that in prohibition,” he told a government hearing in 1983. As for drunk driving, he told a journalist that he was skeptical of prohibiting that, too, because “the culture is deeply embedded. I thought it was too ingrained.”Of the many new safety standards applied by NHTSA to American cars, in fact, the most effective were instigated before 1966 by the unheralded regulators in the GSA who’d rather quietly used their purchasing power to nudge Detroit to hurry along its improvements. The energy-absorbing steering column (credited with saving 79,989 lives between 1960 and 2012, second only to seat belts on the list of life-saving technologies), upgrades to instrument panels (34,477 lives), modified windshield glass (9,853 lives), and improved door locks (42,135 lives) all predated the legislation.The NHTSA can legitimately take credit for airbags, which it championed relentlessly. They are estimated to have saved 76,114 lives between 1960 and 2012. That’s progress. But more than 90 percent of accidents are caused by human error of one kind or another. As recently as 1982, more than 60 percent of all US traffic fatalities were alcohol-related, as compared to less than half of that today. And so the beneficial effects of NHTSA regulations arguably have been offset by the number of lives lost thanks to the federal government’s emphasis on the crashworthiness of cars rather than the behavior of drivers.U.S. motor-vehicle deaths per billion VMT (vehicle miles traveled), per cpita, and absolute deathsAmerica once had the safest roads in the world. But in the wake of Unsafe at Any Speed and the passage of the 1966 legislation, countries that moved more quickly toward mandatory seatbelts and against drunk driving, including Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, each reduced their annual fatality counts more quickly. In a 2014 published study of traffic fatality rates in 25 countries between 1972 and 2011, the United States was found to be a “unique outlier,” with by far the lowest rate of traffic-fatality decline among the entire group. In 1972, the United States and the Netherlands both reached their peak traffic fatality rates. Over the next three decades, U.S. deaths declined by 41 percent. In the Netherlands, the corresponding figure was 81 percent.If, in 1966, Congress had told the driving public to sober up, buckle up, and drive right, rather than pursuing a largely political campaign against Detroit, regulators would have something to boast about. But in truth, Ralph Nader and the federal government actually seem to have harmed the cause of traffic safety.Regulation has its place, in the economy generally, and in the auto industry particularly. There was a legitimate role for Washington in the field of traffic safety in the 1960s. Manufacturers had done more to make vehicles safe than the likes of Nader would acknowledge, but there were limits to how much safety consumers were willing to buy. This was a market failure, and market failures are where regulators step in. The GSA did step in, with a light-touch and effective regulatory approach that should have been built upon.The National Safety Council made this point to Ribicoff’s committee, insisting that the federal government already had all the power it needed if its goal was to improve auto safety. With easily the most comprehensive and cogently argued presentation that Ribicoff heard—albeit one delivered to an empty hearing room—the council noted that the traffic-safety establishment had supported the GSA’s intervention on car interiors, while at the same time warning that second-collision theory was not a magic bullet. There was no such thing as a crashproof vehicle. The greatest strides in traffic safety, the council insisted, had been made through road-engineering and driver-behavior measures. The council wanted politicians to move on mandatory seatbelt usage and drunk-driving laws, another form of regulation. But that would have required Congress to impose their will on voters rather than on Detroit; and so Ribicoff wanted nothing to do with the idea.Quietly enforced, reasonable regulatory measures, were never going to satisfy the crusaders of 1966 because most of them had goals extending beyond the problem of saving lives in traffic. They wanted to stop Americans from caring so much about their damned automobiles and turn their attention to other purposes. They hoped to change minds about how far government should intervene in the economy, and sought to undermine the veneration of business leaders and the gigantic enterprises they’d built. If they could also further their own electoral prospects and the Great Society legislative record, all the better.What lessons does this have for tech in 2021? Perhaps you have noticed some similarities between the rise of the automobile and the rise of the Internet in American life.The automobile was largely a product of American commercial genius, wholeheartedly embraced by the American people as a tool for the advancement of personal, social, and economic welfare. Automobile culture quickly became American culture, and it remade the nation top to bottom without any involvement by the federal government beyond cheerleading and roadbuilding.The automobilization of America continued until the wonders of driving grew familiar, automakers became huge and powerful, and the adverse consequences of car culture and the larger commercial economy to which it was central became more apparent. Critics of the automobile grew in number and eventually focused their criticisms not on the driving public or the national government that had funded the highways (and early in its history refused the role of regulator), but the greedy corporate entities purportedly harming the populace in a profit-driven project.It echoes, no?And many of the fundamental elements remain unchanged since 1966. There are plenty of enterprising congressmen, lawyers, and activists anxious to bring big tech to heel, heaping upon it blame for every ill associated with the Internet. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has demonstrated during his visits to Congress, today’s tech executives are often as easily tripped up by grandstanding politicians as were their auto-executive forebears. And in time, the fate of their enterprises may well follow the same downward arc that Ralph Nader and Abraham Ribicoff helped inflict on Detroit.This essay is adapted in part from the author's newly published book, The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise

(Photograph by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)Dear Capitolisters,Unless you were too busy celebrating the one-year anniversary of Capitolism last week, you probably heard that the White House on Thursday announced a new plan to combat COVID-19 on several fronts. Undoubtedly the most controversial of the president’s proposals is a forthcoming federal rule—issued by the Department of Labor on an expedited, “emergency” basis—that major private U.S. employers require their employees to be vaccinated or to submit to weekly testing. Because the new mandate hasn’t actually been issued yet, coming to definitive conclusions about it is a bit tricky (to say the least). Nevertheless, given how significant—and in my view radical and problematic—the White House proposal appears to be, it’s well worth our time today to dig into what we do know about the order and all of the various concerns that it raises.What the Mandate DoesWe don’t have the actual text of the mandate just yet—and as we’ll discuss below, that matters a lot—but here’s what we know so far from the White House:The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is developing a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work. OSHA will issue an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) to implement this requirement. This requirement will impact over 80 million workers in private sector businesses with 100+ employees …To continue efforts to ensure that no worker loses a dollar of pay because they get vaccinated, OSHA is developing a rule that will require employers with more than 100 employees to provide paid time off for the time it takes for workers to get vaccinated or to recover if they are under the weather post-vaccination. This requirement will be implemented through the ETS.Goldman Sachs estimates that this broad mandate would affect approximately 25 million currently unvaccinated U.S. workers, eventually pushing about 12 million of those (4.6 percent of the adult population; 9.6 percent of the private sector workforce) to get vaccinated. We further know that violations of the proposed Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) would carry a fine of $14,000 per violation (i.e., an unvaccinated or untested worker).According to a great Congressional Research Service primer, OSHA has invoked its ETS powers only a few times since the 1970s, and only once since 1983—earlier this year when the agency required certain health care providers to implement various COVID-19 safety protocols (PPE, ventilation, etc.), but not mandatory vaccination, to protect health care workers in these settings from the virus.Thus, there’s a little precedent for the proposed OSHA action, though it still raises serious legal, practical, and other issues that, in my view, argue against implementation.Legal ConcernsMost of the initial criticism of the proposed mandate stems from its questionable legality under both the Constitution and relevant authorizing statute. My Cato colleague Ilya Shapiro finds three potential constitutional flaws, relying heavily on recent Supreme Court precedent on Obamacare’s insurance mandate:Separation‐of‐powers: “this sweeping new regulation is being imposed by presidential diktat, with related claims about the proper scope of OSHA’s statutory authority and whether Congress can even delegate such broad power to the executive branch.”Interstate Commerce Clause: “[E]ven if the executive branch is permissibly interpreting the relevant federal laws, these kinds of impositions are hardly a regulation of interstate commerce (or the use of any other constitutionally enumerated power): states have general police powers to regulate for public health and safety, but the feds don’t.”Necessary and Proper Clause: “[F]orcing private businesses to do the government’s dirty work isn’t a ‘proper’ means of effectuating the goal of limiting the pandemic. .… [and] the federal government can’t now commandeer businesses to impose mandates on individuals that it can’t impose directly.”The mandate’s statutory weakness may be even more significant. In particular, Cato’s Walter Olson, GMU’s Ilya Somin, and Case Western Reserve’s Jonathan Adler each find potential problems under the law authorizing OSHA to issue an ETS, and they note that—as shown in the CRS chart above—the courts have heavily scrutinized past ETS invocations (fully upholding only one of the six that were challenged in court). Somin and Adler disagree on some of the technicalities, but everyone seems to agree that the biggest hurdle is the law’s requirement that OSHA may issue an ETS only where doing so is “necessary” to protect employees from a "grave danger" in their workplaces. Even assuming one can consider COVID-19 to be a “grave danger” for most of the working age population, it’s questionable—at best—to claim that a nationwide vaccine mandate applied to all workers at all large firms is “necessary” to protect these same workers from a “grave danger” that almost all of them can mitigate themselves (primarily with a free and widely available vaccine, but also with a good mask, distancing, or in some cases remote work). It’s even more questionable when less onerous—not to mention more lawful and potentially more effective—policy alternatives still exist. As Adler points out, there are likely ways that the Biden administration could reduce the ETS’ potential vulnerabilities under the statute, for example by limiting it to only firms where there’s a serious risk of infection/spread and by exempting certain workers (e.g., those who have had COVID-19 or work remotely). However, doing so would significantly limit the order’s scope and impact, and it would directly contradict the White House’s own descriptions of the forthcoming ETS (i.e., that it would affect “over 80 million workers in private sector businesses with 100+ employees”). At this point, there’s really no reason to give the White House the benefit of the doubt here—especially because OSHA is intentionally bypassing the normal “notice and comment” rulemaking process that would give us some clarity.Design ConcernsThe proposed ETS also raises several concerns about the order’s design and ultimate efficacy. For starters, it appears to ignore the role of natural immunity, as Cato health scholar Dr. Jeff Singer noted last week:Several studies, including this recent one from Israel, show people with prior COVID-19 infections acquire immunity that is equal to or better than those with vaccine‐induced immunity. That’s why Israel, the U.K., and most European countries give entry passes to people who prove prior COVID-19 infection in lieu of vaccination. Many researchers believe people with natural immunity don’t need to get vaccinated or, at the most, just need one of the two mRNA vaccine doses. Alas, the presidential order doesn’t take any of this into account.The ETS also seems to be both over- and underinclusive. On the former, the order does not (yet) distinguish between businesses that, as noted above, are particularly risky environments or those that have a clear connection to public health or public accommodation (e.g., medical facilities, large venues, or customer-facing businesses like restaurants). Thus, for example, a large U.S. telemarketing company that has little to no medical or public interaction (save perhaps the occasional delivery man) is treated the same as a large slaughterhouse or pharmacy chain. Is there really a “grave danger” necessitating an onerous, emergency federal mandate at Dunder-Mifflin?On the other hand, the rule exempts tens of millions of private sector workers who are independent contractors or who work at companies with fewer than 100 employees. (Given that the private workforce includes about 125 million Americans, an order that affects 80 million private sector workers necessarily omits about 45 million others.) OSHA rules typically apply to any company with more than 10 workers (though even the under-10 companies have to comply with some). Are these millions of workers not in “grave danger” too? The arbitrary 100-worker cutoff thus appears to be more about optics and resources than it is about actual public health. (Indeed, the threshold is especially arbitrary, given all the various ways—outsourcing, contracting, franchising, etc.—that businesses can fudge their numbers to get above or below 100 employees on paper.)Other potential concerns—also to be determined once the ETS is issued—include whether the mandate will contain exceptions for workers claiming religious or other “personal beliefs” (as many state vaccine mandates do), working from home, or located in remote offices without much contact with fellow employees.Implementation ConcernsImplementation of the ETS raises further problems. For starters, the order isn’t expected to be published in the Federal Register for several weeks and implemented a few days after that. Until then, employers are in the dark about the rule’s coverage, compliance, and enforcement, and then will have mere days to get into compliance. Indeed, Politico reported Monday that “Management-side attorneys say they are fielding frenzied calls from companies with questions over what the rules requiring them to verify that their workers are vaccinated or tested weekly for Covid-19 will actually entail and whether the business or unvaccinated employees will have to pay for the testing.” By the time the ETS and any resulting vaccinations take effect, moreover, the pressing Delta variant “emergency” allegedly necessitating this move may be over. (Let’s hope so.)The mandate’s testing alternative presents another important implementation concern. As we discussed a few weeks ago, getting either a lab test or an at-home test remains difficult and costly in many parts of the country. The White House did announce efforts to improve this issue, including an agreement with Walmart, Kroger, and Amazon to discount self-tests, but as of my writing only Walmart appears to have these tests readily available (though for in-store pickup only). Kroger was out, and Amazon could deliver a $35 Ellume test in early October. Pharmacies near me are also running low, and I struggled to find a nearby lab test appointment. (Local news reports that these tests can run more than $200 a pop.) And this is all before a nationwide testing mandate goes into effect for millions of people. Thus, barring a major supply improvement, the ETS’ testing “alternative” will be more theoretical than practical (and its vaccine mandate more onerous). These issues are, however, just the tip of the implementation iceberg, as National Review’s Phil Klein lays out:[B]usinesses will now have to set up a system for monitoring who has been vaccinated and who has not. They will also have to facilitate weekly testing for those who choose not to be vaccinated, and keep track of the negative tests. Who pays for the tests? What happens in the time that workers are waiting test results? ….Also, what are businesses supposed to do with employees who refuse to get vaccinated and won’t submit to weekly testing? Can they fire those workers? Are they forced to fire those workers?To take things a step further, how does OSHA intend to enforce this law? Will businesses be forced to submit weekly reports showing that all their workers are vaccinated or have tested negative? Will OSHA officials do spot checks at offices to make sure that businesses can produce records demonstrating that they are in compliance? And what happens if the federal government comes around to the view that booster shots are required, either in response to new variants or because of waning immunity over time? Will somebody who was considered fully vaccinated at one point still be considered fully vaccinated?Apparently, the federal government is struggling with many of these same issues with its own vaccinate/test mandate, and it’s several weeks old. I guess we’ll just have to wait to find out how private businesses handle it—eventually.Unintended ConsequencesFinally, the ETS could have unintended negative consequences. Most notably, it might actually slow down vaccine uptake for at least three reasons: First, as Singer worries, the federal mandate could embolden vaccine skeptics and cause many of them to “to dig in harder and seek relief in the burgeoning black market in CDC vaccination cards.” Many of those folks were probably never going to get vaccinated anyway, but they can influence fence-sitters in the same social circles (which is important for vaccine uptake). And, as Reason’s Robby Soave notes, now hardcore antivaxxers have “proof” that “the vaccines have less to do with their health and more to do with social control.” Second, the mandate could turn some heretofore vaccine allies—especially in conservative or libertarian circles—into agnostic nonparticipants or even adversaries. Shortly after the news, for example, reasonable righty wonk Robert VerBruggen joked, “How do I unvaccinate myself as an act of civil disobedience.” To the extent that significant shares of holdouts are on the right, alienating conservative pro-vax allies (who, unlike Biden, might be able to reach conservative holdouts) seems like a bad idea. Third, the mandate might slow down private employer mandates, which were just ramping up in the wake of the Pfizer jab’s full FDA approval, because covered firms must await the new OSHA rules and costs. As one corporate lawyer told Politico, “What we have right now is chaos... because of the unintended consequences of making such an announcement where there is no clarity with respect to a gargantuan number of questions that have been left open.” Another lawyer with experience implementing a company-wide testing system said that getting one up and running will cost “millions of dollars a year to any size company” because “it's incredibly burdensome and time consuming and may not even guarantee health and safety in the way that mandating vaccines would.”Furthermore, while most assume that the OSHA mandate would boost the Delta-staggered U.S. economy, it could have some economic downsides too (beyond imposing major new costs on numerous U.S. employers). For example, the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey indicates that significant percentages (20 to 30 percent) of adults still out of the labor force are unvaccinated. While the ETS could encourage some workers to rejoin the workforce (as their virus fears abate), it could encourage others to stay home or encourage employers to try to avoid hiring them. Large employers might also struggle to retain some employees, especially in places where vaccination is stigmatized and labor markets are tight. According to that Goldman analysis, for example, survey responses indicated that millions of the unvaccinated workers affected by Biden’s mandate say they’d rather quit than get the vaccine. A lot of that is probably exaggerated bravado, but Goldman provides several examples of unvaccinated health care workers walking out of their jobs in protest:This risk is uncertain but shouldn’t be ignored given where the labor market is right now, how ingrained vaccine opposition (unfortunately) is in some places, and how many millions of eager-to-hire small business and other employment alternatives—exempt from the forthcoming OSHA mandate—exist.(As an aside, it’s kinda funny/sad that many of the same folks cheering Biden’s OSHA mandate have also been cheering the “labor shortage” that could undermine it.)Finally, there may be unintended social and cultural ramifications. Most obviously, a broad federal mandate risks further political polarization, especially as politicians and pundits in red states see political value in attacking Biden’s federal “overreach.” (Many pols are predictably fundraising off the announcement.) Of course, in many states these same folks have been the aggressor when it comes to pushing their own versions of hysteria and government overreach (e.g., trying to ban private vaccine mandates), but they now have even more cover—and they might be joined by others who had thus far toed a more moderate or non-interventionist line (e.g., South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who has taken flak for not backing a ban on private mandates). Furthermore, because vaccine holdouts in many states disproportionately are minorities or live in poor areas without good access to vaccines and testing, the OSHA mandate could ultimately discourage employers from hiring these workers or locating their businesses in those areas. (It’s not just going to punish your personal political enemies!)Not all of these and other “unseen” effects are certain to happen, of course, but they should be considered against the obvious “seen” benefits of additional vaccinations.Principled ConcernsFinally, there are principled reasons to question the proposed order for those of us who value liberty and limited government. In general, a commitment to freedom of association, property rights, and freedom of contract can (and in my personal view should) support private companies’ decision to condition employment or service on vaccination status, and the state shouldn’t therefore interfere in those transactions. Similar considerations tend to apply when the government acts as an employer or contractor. At the same time, however, libertarians have long debated government requirements that private individuals and businesses be vaccinated, and the issue raises complicated considerations regarding individuals’ rights and the role of government (see, for example, this Reason debate or this recent op-ed by Cato’s Robert Levy).In this particular case, however, the issue seems much easier, given (1) who’s doing the mandating and how it came about (defying, for example, both separation of powers and federalism, while arbitrarily compelling select private businesses/workers and potentially empowering an army of new OSHA “vax cops” or whatever); (2) the dangerous precedent that a broad, unilateral ETS power could set (emboldening future presidents to take similar “emergency” actions); and (3) the mandate’s potentiallypolitical, rather than substantive, motivations.In this regard, it’s important to note that the proposed ETS is not—as some have condescendingly claimed—par for the course in the United States. Sure, government vaccine mandates have existed here for centuries, but they have historically applied (1) to government workers (e.g., soldiers) or facilities (e.g., schools); (2) at the state or local level (where, as Shapiro notes above, there is a broader police/public health power); (3) to entities or individuals with a clear public health connection (e.g., hospitals) or who lack the agency or ability to mitigate the danger at issue (e.g., children); (4) as a condition to receive some sort of government benefit (e.g., a contract or visa); and/or (5) pursuant to formal legislation or (at least) rulemaking. Here, by contrast, we have an emergency, unilateral, federal mandate for every large U.S. business (regardless of its public health risk or connection to the government) to protect all workers (regardless of their health, location, or work status) from a “grave danger” that they can readily mitigate themselves. Throw in the continued availability of alternatives to federal coercion—including not just federal payments, which new research shows can be quite effective, but state and private actions too—and the proposed ETS would needlessly break new and troubling ground.Summing It All UpThe last two months of Delta Variant Drama and its related life-altering effects have been particularly rough for this eternal optimist, strong believer in personal responsibility, and massive covid vaccine fanboi. It’s totally reasonable, I think, to wish more people were vaccinated and to get upset or depressed at those folks unwilling to do so. But just because something should be done doesn’t mean a federal government of finite, enumerated powers can or should be the one to do it—and especially not by a messy, emergency, unilateral decree:Scott Greenfield @ScottGreenfield"This is good policy" does not make it lawful.
"This is bad policy" does not make it unlawful.
If the legality doesn't matter to you, then it's just a matter of "might makes right," a position you may come to deeply regret.September 10th 2021335 Retweets1,932 LikesI wish everyone would get vaccinated—really I do—and you’d blush if you heard some of the things I’ve yelled at my TV over the last couple months. But there must be limits to even the best intentions in even the worst times, and President Biden has in my view exceeded those limits significantly. Maybe that’s why even some Biden’s supporters are already claiming that he doesn’t really intend to implement the mandate. I hope they’re right.Chart(s) of the WeekThings are getting frothier … (but the longer-term outlook’s still not clear).The LinksThe Jones Act’s “Train to Nowhere”“The Struggle to Reverse a Shrinking Population Hits Some Nations Harder"New U.S. investigation of Chinese subsidies?Conservative alternative to Big Tech web hosting (related)Capex boomWood limits China exposure, except for companies “currying favor” with BeijingRemote workers want to keep their big city salariesBiden’s indefensible travel ban (more)China’s massive new semiconductor plant isn’t innovativeLab-grown woolly mammoth start-upHouse floats union-made electric vehicle subsidyBerlin housing messThe Housing Theory of EverythingNew Zealand’s ban on foreign-owned housing hasn’t worked“Walking with coffee is a little-understood feat of physics”Smart toilets

Some pessimists write off the rising American stock market — the S&P 500 is up 20 percent so far this year — as reflecting little more than easy money. Don’t fight the Fed! Now, I’m not going to give a definitive answer as to why the stock market does this or that. But what if Wall Street’s strong performance is suggesting the US economy has some deep strengths that too many overlook? If nothing else, this bull run gives us reason to examine some of those economic positives.
If you were going to fashion a critique of the US economy, the boilerplate bullet points would highlight supposed flaws such as too little dynamism, too much parochialism, and a continuing trend toward monopoly. A sharp analysis in The Economist offers a counterpoint to this thesis that “everybody” knows is true. But it might not be.
First, the economy seems to be getting more dynamic. More businesses are being started, more people are willing to quit their jobs, and more and more “unicorns” (startups with a valuation of $1 billion or more) are popping into existence.

(As an aside, here’s what University of Maryland economist John Haltiwanger, who’s quoted in The Economist piece, told me in July during a podcast chat: “So the question is whether the businesses that started last summer were the ‘necessity’/‘transitory’ kind that took advantage of the fact that there were lots of pandemic-related needs in the economy, and whether the businesses this spring are a little bit more forward-looking and will maybe even persist a little longer. We don’t have any evidence to determine the answer at this point.”)
Second, despite the protectionist swerve in American trade policy, lots in the business world has stayed steady. The piece notes that the ratio of total manufactured goods imported from key trading partners versus US manufacturing output hasn’t budged over the past three years. And while some US companies are serious about shifting operations from China, their next-choice destinations are countries near China, not America. What’s more, foreign consumers are still pretty important to Corporate America: “Overall, the median firm’s [non-financial firms in the Russell 3000] foreign sales as a share of its total sales has stayed roughly flat at 15 percent. So has the revenue-weighted average, which has oscillated around 35 percent. Two in five firms make more than half of their sales overseas, a proportion that has also remained more or less constant in the past four years.”
The Economist also offers a corrective to concerns about market concentration. Fun fact: “Although concentration edged up in around half of industries between 2012 and 2017, the weighted-average market share across all industries remained at 32 percent.” But let’s focus on Big Tech, since so much of Washington and the media do:
Big tech in particular has benefited from the pandemic shift to all things digital. America’s five technology titans — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook — notched up combined revenues of $1.3trn in the past 12 months, 43 percent higher than in 2019. They are America’s five most valuable firms, accounting for 16 percent of the country’s entire stockmarket value — considerably higher than the 10 percent attributable to the five biggest American firms in the past 50 years, according to calculations by Thomas Philippon of New York University’s Stern School of business. . . . [But] the tech giants, for example, are increasingly stomping on each others’ turf. Nearly two-fifths of the revenues of the big five now come from areas where their businesses overlap, up from a fifth in 2015. Facebook wants to become an e-merchant, Amazon is getting into online advertising, Google and Microsoft are challenging Amazon in the computing cloud, and Apple is reportedly building a search engine.
And if even Big Tech companies stay dominant in their core businesses, competition researcher Nicolas Petit argues that they are in “holistic competition” with each other across a variety of industries such as cloud computing, autonomous driving, and virtual reality devices. They also compete aggressively for talent. Then there’s all that R&D spending they do — spending driven not just to raise future profits but to avoid being disrupted or displaced by new technologies. They’re all looking for the next big market or transformational technology. Not the kind of behavior one would expect to see from sedate monopolists.
None of this means there isn’t plenty of public policy work to do to create a more productive economy that works for Americans. But maybe a bit less work than many might think.
Learn more: US economy is being undermined by supply-side struggles | Innovation is important, even more than you think | More reasons to use #NewRoaring20s unironically
The post Are the deep fundamentals of the US economy actually pretty strong? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

[Excerpt from Bonnie Snyder’s new book, Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools―and What We Can Do About It]Gabrielle Clark was worried about her children. Something was off, but she couldn’t put her finger on the problem. Gabrielle was temporarily disabled and unemployed, so her son William worked as a fast food shift manager to help make ends meet while taking his high school senior classes remotely. As a single mom—William’s father died before he was old enough to know him—she had to figure this out alone.One day, she decided to sit down and watch her son’s distance-learning classes from his magnet school. She tuned into a required course, “The Sociology of Change,” and what she saw on screen shocked her. Her son, unbeknownst to her, had been taught lessons that were completely antithetical to her family’s values...and common sense.William’s deceased father was white, which means William is biracial. However, his light skin, light hair, and green eyes mean that some people assume he is white. He’s sometimes described as “the only apparent white boy in his class.”Being “apparently white” was enough for his teacher to target him.For years, schools have had “anti-bullying campaigns” to stop kids from picking on each other. But what if the bullying is coming from the teacher and school administrators? According to the family’s recently filed lawsuit, William was singled out and subjected to derogatory name-calling and hurtful labeling, based on his physical appearance. His teacher delivered regular “privilege checks” for William, which his mother described as “deliberate and protracted harassment” and “emotional abuse.” The classroom materials even implied that William’s white father probably physically abused his black mother, because—according to his lessons—that’s what white men do.This is a far cry from Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Gabrielle claims her son, as well as the other students, were forced to profess their identities which were then subjected to open, official scrutiny that assigned negative character attributes and worldviews based on unchangeable personal characteristics, such as race and gender.When students, including William, attempted to object, discussions were terminated and their speech effectively chilled. However, William refused to complete certain “identity confession” assignments or to avow certain politicized statements he could not in good conscience affirm.That was enough to earn him threats of a failing grade.As a senior, that was bad news. He had planned to spend the year applying to colleges and dreaming about his freshman year in which he’d study music. But this bad grade would put all of that in jeopardy.Gabrielle had her attorney write a letter to the school, which prompted a meeting. But Gabrielle didn’t feel the school was taking her concerns seriously. “That’s when I withdrew my daughter and got the lawyers for my son,” she wrote. “I’m not playing with these people.” She filed a lawsuit against the school, claiming they violated the mother’s constitutional due process right to “family integrity and autonomy” by interfering with her “right and covenant to guide and direct the upbringing” of her children.This case may have some of you scratching your heads. Others of you—having experienced similar interactions at school—might be nodding at how sadly familiar that story feels.Our nation has a problem. Recently, in both urban and rural communities, young children are being indoctrinated, bullied, and harassed by their fellow students and teachers for not falling into line on various topics.In Arizona, Roberto Sandoval, the son of a Mexican immigrant who worked hard to achieve the American dream, was alarmed when his teen showed him her high school homework. “I have an assignment that’s asking me how I am privileged,” she told him. The homework included statements such as “My skin color gives me privileges I didn’t earn … Your skin color gives you struggles you didn’t deserve,” and “No one is asking you to apologize for being privileged; people want you to stop using your privilege in ways that require an apology.” In Seattle, meanwhile, teachers explain that “Western” mathematics has been used “to disenfranchise people and communities of color.” Then, they attempt to “rehumanize” math by incorporating curricular content such as explaining “how math dictates economic oppression” and asking, “How can we change mathematics from individualistic to collectivist thinking?”Third-grade students in Cupertino, California, were told to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, ranking themselves on the intersectional hierarchy from “oppressor” to “oppressed.” One scandalized parent objected, saying, “They were basically teaching racism to my eight-year-old.” When questioned, the principal acknowledged that the lesson was not part of the “formal curricula.”The specific topics of parents’ complaints in the examples above change from year to year, or even from week to week. Over the past few years, the following issues have waxed and waned in intensity: global warming, Occupy Wall Street, weapons of mass destruction, voter suppression, immigration reform, the border wall, DACA, Black Lives Matter, gun control, same-sex marriage, reproductive rights, abortion, patriotism, election integrity, and the MeToo movement.In all of these examples, well-intentioned people of good faith can agree on underlying problems, while disagreeing on what to actually do about them. Increasingly, however, children who are too young to have developed solid or informed opinions are being forced into premature ideological conformity with some teachers and administrators who seem intent on pushing their own particular worldviews in K–12 classrooms.These kinds of transgressions are not limited to the political Left.A Georgia teacher was yanked from class after telling the students that President Barack Obama was a closeted Muslim.In Wisconsin, a high school social studies teacher was placed on leave after instructing students to watch a one-sided video questioning the integrity of election results. In a shared screenshot of the assignment, he also apparently made sure to inform students that he would be protesting what he saw as unfair election results because it was “too important” not to do so, in a pretty clear attempt to influence them on this issue.In Alabama, a geometry teacher actually taught a math lesson by asking students to evaluate the best angles to assassinate Obama.No matter the specifics of the heavy-handed ideological teaching, we should all be against it. “Citizens of both parties should adopt a legal corollary to the Golden Rule—fight for the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself,” writes former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and Persuasion advisor David French. “And one of the most important and vital of those rights is the right to speak and act in accordance with your deepest beliefs.”In fact, I’ve noticed that liberal parents are—in some ways—even more alarmed over the rapid transformation of their children’s schools and surprised to find themselves opposed to it. If it ever was a partisan issue, the problem of school indoctrination has steadily worsened to the point that people across the political spectrum have found themselves allied against it.Many of you don’t want to think about this, and I understand. You’d rather send your kids to school and trust implicitly in the system, as your own parents probably did. After all, it worked out okay for you. However, this fight will come to you, whether or not you want it. It doesn’t matter if you live in a city or the rural South.As frustrating as it can be to hear from people who disagree with us, this is part of the temperament that productive citizens need to develop in order to take their places in our society. In order to achieve this goal, our schools must be populated with educators who model and practice appropriate intellectual forbearance worthy of emulation by the younger generation. Remember, it’s an imperfect world and we are all imperfect people: practice forgiveness and give others the benefit of the doubt whenever possible.All Americans, regardless of political persuasion or direct personal experience, should be alarmed at the path on which our nation is careening. We’re at a crossroads. It’s a good time—a necessary time—to see what is going on and to fight for the ideals our founders envisioned for us.Bonnie Snyder is director of high school outreach at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the author of Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools—And What We Can Do About It.

(Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.)Maybe President Biden should handle COVID-19 the way he’s handled Afghanistan.It’s a strange thought, given how badly he botched the U.S. withdrawal. But at least Afghanistan Joe had a clear idea about what we needed to do. COVID Joe has no such exit strategy. He’s making it up as he goes.“I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit,” Biden proclaimed on Aug. 31—and he meant it.However, he has no problem with a forever exit from the pandemic.In his address unveiling his COVID plan, Biden failed to offer anything like an exit strategy or even a description of what victory might look like.In fairness, one reason he didn’t is because he can’t. As with terrorism, permanent and total victory is impossible. As Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, explains: “SARS-CoV-2 will become an endemic virus settling alongside the other four strains of coronaviruses that circulate widely among us.” In February, 9 out of 10 leading immunologists, virologists and other experts surveyed by the British scientific journal Nature said it’s here to stay.Part of Biden’s problem is that he already had his “mission accomplished” moment in July. And while it’s not his fault that the Delta variant wrecked his victory lap—and his poll numbers on his handling of the pandemic—his response is clearly improvised, probably counterproductive, and very, very political.Last week, Biden issued a sweeping mandate that all private businesses with 100 or more employees require workers to get vaccinated or receive a weekly coronavirus test. The mere fact that the administration is using a nebulous and constitutionally problematic authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act suggests that it essentially rummaged around to find a power it didn’t think it had or would need. Such workarounds are its stock and trade. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is trying to overturn state bans on mask mandates, and Biden’s now-voided extension of the eviction moratorium was pushed through by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Biden’s mandate on private businesses will probably involve no end of legal and bureaucratic headaches. The president’s defenders are already calling it a testing mandate, not a vaccination mandate—as Justice Department lawyers will surely argue in future lawsuits. Technically, employees of large businesses will have to be tested weekly but can opt out if they’re vaccinated. But Biden didn’t frame it as a testing mandate, he framed it as a vaccine mandate.That raises constitutional concerns, as does his vow, “If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.”When Donald Trump declared he had “total” authority to fight COVID-19, Democrats rightly condemned his thumbless grasp of the Constitution. “We don’t have a king in this country. We didn’t want a king, so we have a Constitution and we elect a president. ... All other powers remain to the states,” said Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York and a liberal darling.Now, because a Democrat is promising to ride roughshod over governors, Democrats celebrate.This explains why Biden relishes this fight. He’s already achieved one of his goals—to change the subject from handing Afghanistan to the Taliban in time for the anniversary of 9/11. But the other political calculation is that he doesn’t need the support of people ideologically (and foolishly) opposed to getting vaccinated, but he does need the support of those who despise such people.“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” the president of vaccinated America declared. I sympathize with Biden’s impatience and frustration with Republican politicians—most of whom are vaccinated—who pander to the irrational anti-vax fringe of the GOP. And Lord knows the bulk of the media loves to focus on that story.What gets less attention is that there’s also an irrational constituency addicted to COVID panic, scapegoating and fearmongering. The most pro-vaccine voters and voices are often the most pro-mask, pro-school closure, and pro-shutdown. This is the only way to make sense of Biden’s rationale for the mandate: “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers.” By his own account, the vaccinated are generally safe from severe illness even with breakthrough infections — that’s why people should get vaccinated!By pandering on vaccination, Biden isn’t dialing down the culture war dynamic of the pandemic, he’s intensifying it. Once he was on the side of constitutional and democratic norms, now he’s waving those aside.Worse, he’s sending the signal to many of those most fed up with the pandemic that this will never end. That “never exit” message may seem smart politically, but it doesn’t encourage steadfastness or compliance. It fosters exhaustion and ever more polarization.

Canada and California might be more than 4,000km apart — but their respective electorates have been forced to endure strikingly similar political torments. In both cases, seemingly glamorous, progressive leaders now find themselves under assault from electorates who remain in a highly surly and volatile mood. Both Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (who opportunistically called a national election last month based solely, it seems, on a few good polls registered during the summer) and Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom (who is on track to survive yesterday’s extraordinary recall election) are experiencing significant, and unexpected, voter discontent.
Even if, as it now looks likely, Newsom is not recalled, or Trudeau wins re-election, that we’re either discussing their downfalls indicates that both the “Golden State” and Canada, a country long known as the Scandinavia of the Western Hemisphere, are no longer political exemplars for the rest of the world. Instead, their governments now represent more of the same kind of political disappointments that have characterised Western liberal democracies for the past 40 years.

In Canada, polls suggest the Conservatives and Liberals are locked in a tight race, as many voters turn to the opposition Conservative Party, whose “blue-collar” policies under leader Erin O’Toole closely resemble those of Boris Johnson’s British Tories. Meanwhile, California, long considered one of America’s most progressive Democratic states, was almost confronted with the spectacle of a Republican governor, in the form of black Right-wing libertarian radio host, Larry Elder. The very fact that the recall vote got this far indicates that the “Golden State” no longer glitters with opportunity for all.
This month’s elections in Canada and California — preceded by 18 months of rolling lockdowns, job losses and Covid-related chaos — can roughly be described as a collective “Howard Beale” moment. Echoing Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s classic satirical black comedy-drama film, voters in both places are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”.
More from this authorThe West can learn from ChinaBy Marshall Auerback
Even though vaccine mandates have been broadly accepted by the majority of Canadians and Californians, this compliance is increasingly transcended by contempt for their respective governments, which have failed to address a range of non-pandemic-related issues: from rising economic precarity (concurrent with the growth of the so-called “gig economy” and all of the attendant insecurities that come with it) to the fact that both places are being ruled by hypocritical, out-of-touch technocratic elites who are clueless about the everyday life for ordinary Californians and Canadians.
As far as Covid itself goes, despite some missteps, Canada and California have done relatively well in introducing measures to restrict the speed of the pandemic. Both have also secured relatively high rates of vaccinations; Canada now has a greater proportion of its population fully vaccinated than either the US or UK, while California ranks among the highest vaccinated among American states.
Despite their relative success stories, this month’s elections have unleashed longstanding grievances, spurred on by disgust with the perceived hypocrisy of the two administrations. In the case of California, Governor Newsom’s ill-timed visit to a Michelin-starred restaurant amid a Covid-19 surge last year sparked outrage, as did his admission that he was sending his own children to classes at a private school while most public schools remained closed.
But Newsom, despite his recall victory, has failed on a host of other issues — a number of which he shares with Trudeau. For instance, California is often heralded as a model US state in terms of decarbonising its economy. But the truth is that the governor’s push for renewables has degraded the reliability of the state’s electrical grid, resulting in multiple blackouts this year. These have occurred against a backdrop in which some of California’s Latino leaders have filed lawsuits to halt several climate-focused regulations due to their negative effect on low and middle-income Californians. Yet for many families it is too late: the ostensibly progressive state has the highest poverty rate in America and a level of income inequality that exceeds of all but five states.
Similar charges of sanctimony have had increasing resonance in Canada, home to a Liberal government that has consistently trumpeted its desire to move to net zero carbon emissions. Yet recently, this same administration has also taken the extraordinary step of promoting oil sands exports to global markets after it nationalised the Trans Mountain pipeline for CAD$4.5-billion — even though its former owner had cancelled the pipeline expansion because of fierce opposition from environmentalists, indigenous groups and the provincial British Columbian government.
More from this authorWhy the Canadian Left is burning down churchesBy Meghan Murphy
By the same token, Justin Trudeau, a leader who has long trumpeted his progressive credentials, has steadily seen that image erode, notably in the wake of the SNC-Lavalin scandal which provoked the resignation of two female cabinet ministers. Both ministers accused the Prime Minister of inappropriately interfering in a prosecution effort against the engineering company, which had been charged with fraud in connection with a series of Libyan business dealings. That one of the resigning ministers, Jody Wilson-Raybould, served as Canada’s first indigenous justice minister was a particular blow to the Prime Minister’s diversity agenda.
Yet Trudeau may have had plausible grounds for his actions: in the case of the controversial pipeline, Canada is still a heavily resource-based economy, and the fossil fuel industry continues to be a source of high-paying skilled jobs for the working and middle classes, especially in western Canada. And as far as SNC-Lavalin goes, it is a large, Quebec-based company employing thousands of Canadians in a province that is a key stronghold for the Liberals.
But while Trudeau at least has plausible grounds to explain his perceived hypocrisy, the same cannot be said for Newsom. The California governor may have survived his recall vote — but now there is no hiding from the very serious structural problems that have long afflicted his state. Indeed, as author Michael Shellenberger has persuasively argued, Newsom’s policies have actually made them worse: “Rather than put forest management on war-time footing, Newsom in 2019 actually cut the budget for forest fire prevention, which resulted in a full halving of the forest area treated for fire in 2020, all while accusing his political opponents of climate denial, and suggesting that the deployment of weather-dependent renewable energy will somehow address the state’s high-intensity forest fires.” Extensive fires have also played a significant role in the state’s rolling blackouts.
Likewise, California’s housing affordability ranks last among the 50 states with the result — as Shellenberger notes — that the number of homeless people in the Golden State “rose 31% over the last 10 years even as the number of homeless in the rest of the U.S. declined 18 percent. Where New York City shelters 95% of its homeless, California cities shelter one-third.” Meanwhile, Newsom acts like a helpless bystander, even though he has a Democratic super-majority in the State Assembly. Remarkably, new housing construction actually fell 10% last year, with just 100,550 new building permits issued, one-fifth of what Newsom promised when he was elected back in 2018.
That might explain why a solidly blue state started to contemplate a radical alternative to the incumbent governor. Larry Elder, a Black radio talk-show host in the state, a is pro-life cultural conservative who has explicitly opposed any minimum wage (let alone increase it). He has also come out against vaccine mandates, and has railed against critical race theory and transgender politics.
In Canada, however, conservative politics north of the border are somewhat more prosaic. The Conservative Party’s capable new leader, Erin O’Toole, has run a smart campaign and given voters a positive reason to vote Tory (in contrast to his hapless predecessor, Andrew Scheer). Evoking Boris Johnson’s successful 2019 election strategy, its manifesto features a new kind of pro-worker conservatism, at a time when most centre-left parties have increasingly abandoned working class interests in favour of launching progressive campaigns. Among its notable features are benefits for gig workers (who are largely exempt from adequate social coverage in the US), German-style worker representation on corporate boards and protections for pensions from corporate bankruptcy.
These are policies far more likely to engender support among middle and working-class Canadians than, say, proposals to support an LGBTQ agenda or linguistic “reforms” to abolish gendered pronouns. All of which has helped O’Toole’s Tories make headway in the election. While the most recent polls show an incremental movement back to the Liberals, they still point to a hung Parliament.
And so both Newsom and Trudeau have, in recent weeks, cast their political futures in increasingly melodramatic “life and death” terms. But such rhetoric — even if they win, as Newsom has — fails to address the central issue: namely, the shredding of a once sacrosanct social contract between the elites and the rest of us. No matter who wins these elections, the corresponding anger and social fallout that has resulted is unlikely to dissipate. From Canada to California, the people are “mad as hell” — and neither Trudeau nor Newsom seem capable of remedying that.

By Cheng LiU.S.-China relations have deteriorated in recent years at a speed and scope beyond what could have been predicted. This most consequential bilateral relationship in the world is heading toward an adversarial and dangerous state. Not only has each side accused the other of being a genocidal regime and speculated that the COVID-19 pandemic was spawned from a lab leak in the other country, but the risk for military confrontation and war between both superpowers is also on the rise.
As demonization of the other grows in both countries without significant pushback, it would be naïve to believe that there is any easy way to reverse or halt this troubling trend. Ongoing dialogue on climate change and calls for cooperation between Washington and Beijing regarding the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan are welcome developments, but strong zero-sum views of the bilateral relationship will significantly undermine these efforts. In this deteriorating environment, it has become even more critical to search for a new driving force for U.S.-China engagement.
Shared Domestic Objectives
When examining the priorities of the top leaders in both the United States and China, there is one area of stark common ground: middle-class development. “Foreign policy for the Middle Class” is a centerpiece of the Joe Biden presidency. Biden’s top aides — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff Director Salman Ahmed — have frequently promoted this overarching objective. The Biden administration’s top four priorities — combatting COVID-19, reviving the economy, improving racial relations, and addressing climate change — reflect this domestic-focused approach.
In fact, calls by Biden’s predecessor President Donald Trump to “make America great again” and put “America first” also emphasized tax cuts to the middle class. As distinguished American economist Nouriel Roubini has pointed out, when inequality in the United States “becomes excessive, politicians — of both right and left — become more populist,” especially in terms of adopting policies to please the middle class.
For China, the priority to reduce poverty and enlarge the middle class, or “the middle-income group,” has been a key national development strategy since the turn of the century. President Xi Jinping’s blueprint for fulfilling the “Chinese dream” — and, more recently, the development strategy for “common prosperity” — focuses on expanding the middle class.Can this parallel promotion of middle-class development in both the United States and China serve as common ground for cooperation or healthy competition rather than a source of zero-sum confrontation?
Contrasting Statuses of the Middle Class in Both Countries
For the foreign policy establishment in Washington, the rapid expansion of the Chinese middle class does not inspire hope for positive change toward peace in the world or mutual benefit for both countries, but rather evokes fear that this development benefits China alone and may even undermine American supremacy and security.
Such a simplistic view that blames external actors for America’s own economic structural and distributional problems, however, is only part of the story. It is important to understand that economic globalization has affected different countries (and especially different socioeconomic groups) in drastically disparate ways. The evolution of the global economic landscape in China’s favor, as one U.S. senior official characterizes, “represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.” In 1979, when China began its economic reform, the country’s GDP per capita was less than $300, accounting for about 3 percent of that of the United States. A distinct socioeconomic “middle class” was virtually nonexistent in China
But today, a growing number of Chinese citizens (currently estimated between 400 and 500 million) enjoy a middle-class lifestyle with private property, personal automobiles, improved health care, accumulation of financial assets, and the ability to afford overseas travel and foreign education for their children. By 2019, 40 years after China began its economic reforms, national GDP had grown 60 times larger, and per-capita income was 25 times higher. GDP per capita has increased from about $1,000 in 2001 to $10,000 in 2020 and is expected to reach $30,000 by 2035.
In contrast, the middle class in the United States has gradually been shrinking — from 70 percent of the American population in the post–World War II years to 61 percent in the early 1970s, to 55 percent in 2000, and to about 50 percent today. According to the statistics provided by the World Inequality Database,between 1980 and 2014, Chinese citizens at every income percentile benefited greatly from economic globalization, but in the United States only the incomes of the top 20 percent increased significantly, while all other income groups saw little to no improvement.
Some recent events reflect the growing anger and frustration of the American middle and working classes. Examples include the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, the popularity of American movies like “Joker” and “Nomadland,” and the growing public resentment of the super-rich elite (for example, 50,000 Americans signed an online petition stating that Jeff Bezos should not return to earth after his space journey) reflect the growing anger and frustration of the American middle and working classes.
Understandably, the divergent trajectory of the middle class in China and the United States has led some American leaders to demand that China play fair in business competition and not break WTO rules while the “American middle class breaks its back.” But it would be an overstatement to assume American discourse on middle class development has been mainly driven by rhetoric blaming China. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, has argued that the U.S. should focus on long overdue public investments in infrastructure rather than blaming China. Senator Bernie Sanders has asserted that the United States must address the crises the country faces “in health care, housing, education, criminal justice, immigration, and so many other areas.” In his view, “the growing bipartisan push for a confrontation with China will set back those goals.”
Reshaping U.S.-China Engagement through Shared Middle-Class Development
A shared imperative for middle class development can bring unconventional thinking to help thaw an icy bilateral relationship. The following four factors highlight the importance and feasibility of this approach.
1. Developing shared identity. Given the profound differences in history, culture, economic structure, and political system between the United States and China, the middle classes in both nations are not identical in composition, worldview, and behavior. Yet, constituent members of the Chinese middle class are quite similar to their American counterparts in their appreciation of the middle-class lifestyle; desire for private property right protections; interest in global financial and economic stability; and preference for policies focused on advancing public education, environment and ecology, food and medicine safety, and government accountability and transparency.
The overemphasis on mutual differences has contributed to an “us vs them” binary and enhanced mistrust and opposition. Some of the tensions and conflicts in U.S.-China relations are arguably a result of a focus on differences. Indeed, broadening the focus to this shared identity — and similarities — will help humanize the other side, fostering empathy and respect for shared interests.
2. Embracing people-to-people diplomacy. Far too often, U.S.-China relations are seen solely as state-to-state relations. But they are also people-to-people relations. An emphasis on public diplomacy can overcome monolithic thinking about the other country. Within educational exchange, for example, in 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 34 percent (or more than 360,000) of the international students on American college campuses hailed from the People’s Republic of China.
In the four months after U.S. consulates officially began accepting student visa applications in May 2021, these consulates issued about 85,000 student visas to Chinese nationals. The continuing interest of Chinese students in coming to study in the United States reflects the cosmopolitan values of the Chinese middle class and the enduring legacy of educational and cultural exchanges between the two countries, even during great challenges.
3. Directing attention to Main Street, not just Wall Street. There has been no shortage of areas in which Washington and Beijing can explore economic cooperation. But in the American public discourse in recent years, people have tended to see doing business with China as primarily serving the interests of corporate America, not so much the American middle and working classes. Thus, there is a strong and shared incentive for both Beijing and Washington to focus on reducing the anxieties on America’s Main streets, not just Wall Street.
More specifically, Washington should start to remove certain tariffs on Chinese imports, given that they harm the economic interests of American customers and small businesses, as several dozens of U.S. business associations have claimed and as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has argued. As for Biden’s ambitious infrastructure plan, it would be a misstep to emphasize only competition with China and miss the tremendous need for bilateral cooperation. At the same time, Beijing should reduce regulatory barriers to American agricultural exports to China. In terms of technology, intensive competition and restrictions in the name of security will likely continue. But this should not prevent the shared middle-class interest in both countries to address legitimate concerns about monopolies.
4. Establishing a force for stability and peace. Chinese philosopher Mencius’s famous line that “Those who have property are also inclined to preserve social stability” draws a correlation between property ownership and sociopolitical sta­bility in a given society. In the contemporary era, political scientists in both the West and China explore the implications of the middle class on war and peace. As the distinguished Chinese scholar Zheng Yongnian recently argued, the future of China and the world order depends to a large extent on the continuous growth of the Chinese middle class. In his view, in any country, the middle class is often the force for peace.
Interestingly, the 2020 report Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class, to which both Jake Sullivan and Salman Ahmed served as co-authors, stated that initiating a Cold War-like approach against China at the risk of confrontation does not benefit American public interest. The recent hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan has widely been interpreted to be part of a larger strategic shift aimed at refocusing on China, but the other incentive to reallocate resources for domestic economic development in the interest of the American middle class should not be overlooked. Presidents Trump and Biden both used this reorientation to domestic economic priorities to justify their push to end the war in Afghanistan.
Final Thoughts
A conventional view in the United States and elsewhere is that the remarkable growth of China’s middle class is at least partially attributable to their taking advantage of the openness of the American economy. This valid view can also be interpreted, as renown Singaporean scholar Kishore Mahbubani has insightfully pointed out, to mean that Chinese people “see American prosperity as an asset that has helped and will continue to help propel the Chinese economy to prosperity.”
A key question is whether, amid the increasingly contentious bilateral relationship, the world’s two largest middle-class nations can abandon a zero-sum mindset and work together to find common ground and attain shared aspirations. How this question is answered will have profound implications for the 1.7 billion people in both countries – as well as the international community at large.

In the latest issue of Works In Progress, we've brought together some of the best thinkers from across the internet to investigate a wide range of topics – from the future of weight loss, to what YouTube chefs can teach us about technological progress, why housing shortages make us fatter, and whether the risk of an asteroid hitting the Earth means there’s no point in worrying about any of this in the first place. You'll find it all here.We had the brilliant illustrator Kade Byrand sketch a city skyline as the cover for this issue of Works in Progress. Byrand is currently based in Providence, Rhode Island and has a particular interest in urbanism and Liberalism. You can find more of his work here.Our lead article, The housing theory of everything, written by our editors Ben Southwood and Sam Bowman, and joined by John Myers, argues that housing shortages aren’t just a problem because they cost us money. They have hidden costs too: they make us live in the wrong places, in smaller homes, needing cars to get around. These distortions mean we get less innovation, we have fewer kids, and that our cities sprawl, leading to faster climate change. Solving expensive housing, it says, won’t just mean more money in our pockets: it could reinvigorate Western civilization itself.When the future looks bleak, bringing more children into it can feel like an act of selfishness or worse. Covid reduced birth rates that were already low and falling in most developed countries, and the culture and politics of the emerging gerontocracy don’t look good. Jeremy Driver argues that a pro-baby mindset ought to be at the core of an optimistic progressivism in his piece Natalism for progressives, and that society should focus on giving people the resources and support they need to have the families they want. In The future of weight loss, neuroscientist and author of The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat, Stephan J. Guyenet explores the potential of a miracle cure for fatness. Canvassing experts in the fields of obesity and eating behaviour, Guyenet describes the history of diet pills, from high explosives used in World War One to the pill designed to cause a “reverse munchies”, and offers a tantalising discussion of one compound that may help make us leaner by working in surprising ways.Neil Hacker sketches out a new kind of market mechanism to support the development of fringe new technologies: Buyers of first resort, which create a market for products and technologies that cannot survive on their own merits at first, but that given time, could lead to important improvements in how we live. NASA once acted as a buyer of first resort to support the development of crucial advancements in rocketry, and today a similar method could help us to develop the technology we need to tackle climate change effectively.But we can’t feel or touch all technological improvements that matter. In Better eats, our editor Nick Whitaker describes how progress in home kitchens shifted from devices like the dishwasher and microwave to intangible improvements in recipe books, techniques for cooking in the home, and video distribution that allowed elusive skills to be taught to anyone who wanted. This, Whitaker argues, could be a microcosm for the rest of the economy too, where advancements in intangible capital have been less visible than their tangible equivalents, but are no less important.Illustration by Kade Byrand for Works in Progress.The crisis in experimental psychology, which has led some to question other fields like behavioural economics, points to a deeper problem with how science is regarded by the public, argues Sarah Perry in How trust undermines science. Hype around counterintuitive results in psychology and other fields has undermined people’s willingness to challenge improbable and, ultimately, false results, undermining the skeptical mechanism that makes science work in the first place.Finally, Tom Chivers asks if any of this matters at all, if we might all die tomorrow after an asteroid hits the planet. The chances of a harmful, if not apocalyptic, asteroid strike are low, but not zero. But there are things we can do to prevent one if we see one coming, he reports in his article Asteroid spotting. Unlike some other threats to the existence of humanity, we may have the asteroid threat as close to being under control as we ever will.New on the blog:If we value the humanities, why do we not make better arguments on their behalf? An anonymous writer, John Uskglass, rebuts a few of the most common arguments for the humanities for the blog, and encourages us to make more rigorous ones. When COVID first struck, it quickly became taboo to speculate about a lab leak origin. Now the tides have changed, but our author, an anonymous biologist, argues that we have overcorrected from the undue taboo and become much too credulous about lab leak arguments.  Even moreOutside of Works In Progress, Saloni wrote about the nature of depression and what makes the condition so complicated for Our World in Data, and for the New Statesman on what the evidence says about waning vaccine efficacy. Sam co-authored papers on the UK’s proposals to regulate the internet and on the risk of “killer acquisitions”, and wrote for the Financial Times about the effect of mergers on competition in tech. Here are some more things we’ve enjoyed from around the web:How mansard roofs can help to densify streets without upsetting the neighbours. (Samuel Hughes)What a carbon tax and rebate could actually look like in the UK, depending on your income. (Grantham Institute, LSE)Why foie gras isn’t cruel. (Kenji Lopez-Alt)Is the FTC driving away good economists by stopping them from speaking publicly? (Brian Albrecht)Roots of Progress by Jason Crawford is now incorporated as a non profit organisationHow come speedrunning gamers care more about fraud than scientists? (Stuart Ritchie)How much immigration has driven up house prices in the UK. (Anonymous Mugwump)How to render bioweapons obsolete (and cure the common cold at the same time). (Andy Weber, 80,000 Hours)Better infrastructure might strengthen workers’ hands in pay negotiations. (NBER)Essays on boosting science and innovation policy. (The Entrepreneurs Network)Why banning anonymity won’t solve abuse online, but voluntary digital ID could help. (Andrew Bennett and Max Beverton-Palmer)How international trade has weakened monopolies in America. (Federal Reserve Bank of New York)Works In Progress was featured as TypeWolf’s Site of the Day. (TypeWolf)That’s all for this time,– Sam, Ben, Nick, and Saloni

America’s cities have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling predictions of prolonged urban flight and decline. “Cities are over,” we are being told. But cities are hubs of productivity and opportunity that have endured plagues for thousands of years. Will America’s cities survive the pandemic? And what’s in store for cities in the decades to come? To answer these questions and more, Edward Glaeser joined the Political Economy podcast.

Pethokoukis: At the World’s Fairs in 1939 and 1964, both in New York, there was a ride called the Futurama ride, and it gave visitors a glimpse of what America would look like in the near future. And particularly the one at the 1964 World’s Fair, I think it was the most popular attraction, gave the visitors a ride through what they call a “city of tomorrow.” Let me just briefly read from the narration, because listeners love when I read, of what they said the city of tomorrow would look like:
Plazas of urban living rise over freeways. Vehicles, electronically-paced; travel routes are remarkably safe, swift and efficient. Towering terminals serve sections of the city, make public transportation more convenient, provide ample space for private cars. And from a lower level, covered moving sidewalks radiate to shopping areas that are truly marketplaces of the world. Its traditions and faiths preserved, there is a new beauty and new strengths in the city of tomorrow.
That was 1964. By 1975, Hollywood was making grimy movies
about the decline of New York. Gerald Ford didn’t say it, but there was the
headline in New York: “Drop Dead.” “We’re not going to bail you out of bankruptcy.”
And we’re I’m going, is this: I’m sure you’ve been asked a lot, and I’ve
perhaps even asked, are cities over because of the pandemic? And that’s really
the wrong question. Cities can go very badly and not be “over.” New
York wasn’t over, even though things were very rough in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and
they came back. Detroit may seem over, but there’s still a Detroit, and
hopefully it will also have a revival. I want to ask you: How can cities
survive this pandemic and flourish going forward?
I
think it’s great that you took us back to the great industrial designer, Norman
Bel Geddes, and the Robert Moses-led World’s Fair of 1964, because in some
sense, that was a high point of optimism for the American city. Also, for the
integration of the car into the American city. Now, what then happened in the
1970s was the collision of two things which have an eerie resemblance to today.
One of which was an increase in mobility of people who could take their cars
and go out to the suburbs, thanks to Robert Moses in part, and the cars would
be streamlined, which is thanks in part to the industrial design of Norman Bel
Geddes. And firms, of course, could relocate their factories to lower cost
areas aided by the interstate highway system. And so that mobility made it
easier than ever to exit.
At
the same time, a heightened awareness of urban inequities led city governments
to think that they could treat their firms and their residents as a piggy bank
that they could use to fund their progressive dreams. That combination of
political redistribution — catering not to the mobile and talented, but
catering towards the most disadvantaged, which has so much to like about it — but
when the talented are mobile, they can just run away. And that’s indeed what
they did.
And
so New York was hemorrhaging industrial jobs. I mean, the largest industrial
cluster in the United States in the 1950s was not automobile production in
Detroit. It was garment production in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of
those jobs disappeared overnight. And then on top of that, you had wealthier New
Yorkers who were leaving for the suburbs where they could get public schools
that they liked better, where the crime was lower. And so this combination turned
into a really difficult time for cities where it really seemed as if places
like New York and Boston and Detroit — and Seattle for goodness’ sake — were
headed for the trash heap of history. Let’s not forget: Two jokers put a billboard
on the highway leaving Seattle, asking the last person to leave the city to
please turn out the lights because no one could imagine a Seattle with a
smaller Boeing.
How
does that relate to today? Well, there are two things that are going on right now
that are important in cities, one of which is the increased mobility made
possible by telecommuting, made possible by Zoom. That’s not going to replace
the office, but perhaps for some of the most successful firms, it makes it
easier to imagine moving away. On top of that, you have the threat of illness,
and of course, the fact that some cities seem like they’re on the verge of
being taken over by progressive leadership who think that policing is a thing
of the past and totally unnecessary, who think that we should again be taxing
the rich in order to deal with the problems of the poor. Now, I believe very
strongly that cities can do a better job with their policing. I believe very
strongly that cities can do a better job of making sure that they are places of
opportunity and upward mobility. But if they decide that they’re going to
ignore the ability of the talented to exit, none of that’s going to happen.

I started off by taking us back to the 1960s. In the book,
you go back much further than that. Could you walk us through the history of
what happens to urban areas that are hit by plagues, going back to ancient
Athens?
Sure.
Why not go back to the plague of Athens, which is our first well-documented
urban plague? Thucydides, one of the two fathers of history, was actually there
and described the plague. So the backstory for this, of course, is that Athens
is doing all that you could possibly ask a city to be doing, right? It’s a
place of unbelievable creativity where dense urban streets bring together
people, of unbelievable talent, right? The creators of philosophy, the creators
of drama, the creators of architecture, the creators of sculpture, the people
who gave us democracy themselves, right? There are these chains of
collaborative creativity that can happen in cities, and I can’t think of any
place that does that better than fifth century Athens.
But
Athens’ very success occasions the envy of its more rural neighbors: Sparta.
And so starting in 431BC, the Peloponnesian war begins. Now Pericles, the canny
leader of Athens’ democracy, has a plan. He’s going to summon all the Athenians
behind the city walls, which he’s going to trust to protect the city from the
Spartan soldiers, from the Spartan hoplites. And then he will take advantage of
Athens’ superiority at naval warfare to send out his ships to harass the coast
of the Peloponnesian peninsula, where the Spartans live.
So
this strategy is perfectly sound militarily. The walls hold up well against the
hoplites, but the walls can’t keep out the disease that comes in through the
port of Piraeus, and the disease wreaks absolute havoc, perhaps killing a
quarter of Athens’ population. And this highlights two great weaknesses that
cities have when it comes to disease, which is still true in 2020. Cities are
the nodes on the global lattice of trade and travel. They’re always the ports
of entry for goods, for people, for ideas, and for diseases, right? And so it
was with Athens. Secondly, diseases spread more quickly when people are close
to one another, right?
That
doesn’t necessarily mean that density is itself dangerous, but certainly it’s
really important to be able to isolate yourself from other people to stop the
spread of disease. My own estimate suggests that for every 10 percent reduction
in trips in New York in 2020, there was a 20 percent reduction in COVID cases
during the months of April and May. And so this really derailed Athens’ success
as a city.
Athens didn’t disappear, but it was not this place where you
saw this flowering of creativity and connectivity.
That was really gone. And the Plague of Justinian, which hit Constantinople a
thousand years later, was if anything even more devastating. That was the first
appearance of the Black Death on European shores. But they were devastating in
part because they hit societies that were already in flux. They hit societies
that were already vulnerable. For the last 650 years, however, mostly our
cities have been pretty darn resilient.
And
one of the epics that we detailed in the book is the 19th century, which really
shows city government at its best. This is the moment, in some sense when governments
stop being killers. You know, if you think about what governments did in the
centuries before 1800, they pretty much fought wars. Sometimes they’re
defensive wars, which you can justify. Certainly sometimes they’re offensive
wars, but they’re pretty much in the death business. Over the course of the
19th century, city governments spent enormous sums on things like sewers and
aqueducts in order to fight pandemic. They built institutions. They created
incentives to induce people to connect to the network, and they turned
government into something that was far more benevolent.
It
wasn’t easy, but it was an enormous epic in the history of government and
change. It really happened in response to disease. And those investments made
cities, by 1920, almost as healthy as rural areas. In fact, over the last 30
years, New York has had a life expectancy that’s two to three years higher than
the rest of the country. And that of course happened because of these
investments. But that very much showed a pragmatic, urban commitment to
actually fighting these demons that come with density — and not a tendency to
fall into fractious disagreement, or pitting one against another.
In the past century a city like New York has developed
better sanitation, but its economy has become more about service. The economy
has become more dependent on face to face interactions. Is that something we
need to be thinking about going forward?
It’s
reminds us of just how economically vulnerable we are to this kind of pandemic.
You know, if I take you back to the Black Deaths, 1350 in Europe, the human
catastrophe was absolutely devastating, losing maybe a third of Europe’s
population. But for the survivors, they ended up being richer because in an
agricultural economy having a higher ratio of land relative to people means
wages go up. That means the amount of food available goes up. And so Europe
gets richer over the end of the 14th century because its population has shrunk.
And in some sense that extra wealth sets the stage for the urban Renaissance of
the 15th century. The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was a short, sharp
shock to the economy as Francois Velde of the Chicago Federal Reserve board has
illustrated, but it wasn’t all that devastating.
It
didn’t last in part because the demand for the industrial products that were
the heart of this economy wouldn’t disappear just because there was a plague. But,
I mean, no one thinks you’re going to get a disease from an ice box. A hundred
years later, however, those industrial jobs have disappeared and been replaced
by urban service sector jobs — the one fifth of the employed labor force in
2019 that worked in leisure hospitality and retail trade. And what happened was
for millions and millions of American workers (32 million of them, in fact),
the ability to provide service with a smile provided an employment safe haven
when the factory jobs disappeared. And yet that smile turns into a source of
peril rather than pleasure in a time of pandemic. And those jobs can disappear
in a heartbeat, which is exactly what we saw.
And
so we proved to be incredibly vulnerable to the pandemic. Now, of course, we
dealt with this with federal spending on an enormous scale. I mean, I remember
a time when spending a couple of trillion dollars to fight a recession seemed
like it was a pretty big deal. Apparently we’ve crossed that Rubicon, but it
doesn’t really dispel the fundamental weakness of our economy to this type of
pandemic, which I think is one of the reasons why our governments going forward
really need to spend almost whatever it takes to make sure that this doesn’t
happen again, to make sure that this pandemic is a one-time occurrence.
Even without mentioning pandemics, there’s a lot to say
about the problems facing American cities. And we don’t seem to be doing a lot
of problem solving when it comes to housing costs, inequality, and congestion,
do we?
No,
that’s right. And that makes us weaker in response to the pandemic. So I’ve got
two chapters that focus on this. One was focused specifically on the high cost
of housing and the gentrification battles. Now I think there is an easy policy
fix for this, which is just to allow more housing to be built, right? And the
narrative that I give is very much inspired by Mancur Olson, which is in the US
over the past 30, 40, 50 years, we have allowed insiders to become increasingly
empowered in lots of different ways, right? Whether it’s occupational licensing
or excess of business regulations. My favorite example is housing. If you go
back to the 1960s, if you owned a plot of land, you were pretty much allowed to
put up anything reasonable on it.
50
years later, in lots of parts of coastal America pretty much all your neighbors
have veto rights over anything you might want to do with that property. And
we’ve made this change in an incremental way, community by community. And we’ve
imposed a giant web of housing regulations on the coastal parts of the country
that radically restrict our ability to build new housing. I mean, New York stayed
affordable in the 1920s because it built 100,000 units a year, because it was a
city that still catered to outsiders. Now we have cities that cater only to
insiders, which may mean rich homeowners. But this change in thinking, which is
that we’re going to protect people from any harm, also means that if you’re in
a neighborhood, you’re losing out because your rents are going up.
Instead
of saying to yourself, “You know what really needs to happen? We need to build
more housing in Los Angeles as a whole, which will stop my rent from going up,”
you say, “Oh, I just don’t want any strangers coming into my neighborhood.”
Right? So it becomes even more insider oriented. And we really need to remember
that cities are at their best when they are providing opportunity for
outsiders, for people who are coming there without anything. And real
affordability does not mean some small number of special affordable units that
have been allocated to the lucky few, or a few people who have benefited by 30
years of rent control. Real affordability means that anyone can come to the
city and rent an apartment at a reasonable price. So I have one chapter about
the closing of the metropolitan frontier and this triumph of insiders over
outsiders and the battles over gentrification in Los Angeles. But then the
other two things we talk about specifically relate to limited upward mobility
in cities, which we think relate particularly to schools.
Let me jump back to housing for a second. You’ve described
a pretty simple solution, which is: build more. We have an obvious problem and
an econ 101 solution. Does the fact that we’re not building suggest that this
is a problem that just can’t be solved politically? If we can’t make our cities
denser with more housing, maybe we need to have more high productivity cities
across the country. What do you think?
Well,
I think competition among cities has a lot to recommend itself. I think
historically that’s how it’s worked in the US. Historically we’ve started new
cities, and in the Sunbelt they have been oriented around new technologies,
cars in particular, and have catered to outsiders. I think that’s part of what
happens, and there are still parts of America where you can still build. But
even there — even in Texas — the past 10 years have been very heady days for
Texas real estate, which doesn’t mean that you can’t still build on the edges
of Houston, but the areas that are close to the city center, whether or not
it’s in Austin or in Dallas-Fort Worth, those places have become much more
restricted. And when Texas starts to regulate, I start getting scared. So I’m
not willing to just accept that we’re going to go to new places. I think we do
need to fight this.
Maybe Des Moines. Forget Houston: Maybe Des Moines will be
the new tech hub.
You
know, it really does create costs when you have these incredibly productive
parts of America, like Silicon Valley, that have tiny amounts of new population
growth because they’ve decided to regulate out change. They’ve decided to
regulate away new construction and consequently people end up locating in areas
that are much less productive. You know, the work of Peter Ganong and Danny
Shoag shows that prior to 1960, Americans (especially lower income Americans)
typically moved to places with higher wages. That’s stopped over the last 50
years. And that’s a bad thing. We really should continue this thing that people
move to opportunity in America.
And I cut you off before when we were talking about
education and upward mobility.
So
education and crime are the other two that I want to say something about. I
think we need to start with the humility to learn here. I’ve been on the edges
of the education reform movement for the last 20-odd years. Lots of things have
been tried. Lots of money has been spent, and very little has moved in terms of
the dial. There are some charter schools that do amazing things, and that
movement should continue. But I think it’s likely that we’re going to need new
approaches. One of the things that we push in the book is doing more
experimental work with wraparound forms of education that essentially do an end
run around the teacher’s union by providing after school, weekend, summer
programs and vocational training. And the beautiful thing about vocational
training is because you know what you’re trying to teach, you can have real pay
for performance.
So
you can say basically, “If you don’t train a functional plumber, you’re not
getting paid.” And so you can competitively source it, and you have to worry
much less about micromanaging exactly what people are doing. And you’re trying
to create a product that is far less amorphous than trying to train an American
citizen, so we can leave high schools to go about their business. I mean,
ideally they’ll improve as well. But we can put a whole bunch of incremental money
into training people with usable skills for the real job market.
I liked how you described this. Let’s say we’re going to
spend vastly more in school. We’re going to spend 100 billion dollars, but we
really don’t know how to spend that 100 billion dollars in an effective way.
And that’s why you were calling for an Apollo program rather than a Marshall Plan.
A Marshall Plan suggests you know right where to put that money. When they
started the Apollo program, they didn’t know exactly how to get to the Moon. In
fact, in that original speech, Kennedy spoke about all the innovation that was
going to happen before we could get man on the Moon. And that’s why you were
calling your reform an Apollo program, which to me is about trial and error and
experimentation and discovery rather than just from the beginning saying, “Oh,
we know these are the programs we know need more funding.”
I mean, humility is where you start on this. I think that’s absolutely critical.
Now with cops, I think I am more hopeful in part because, unlike schools, the
functioning of police departments changed massively in our lifetimes. And if we
compare the 1980s, when American cities seemed like they were completely lost to
crime, with most of the last 20 years, it’s really been a huge difference. And
there’s really been a revolution in public safety now that wasn’t free,. It
both required more spending and it also only occurred with the accompaniment of
massive amounts of incarceration, often of relatively minor offenses. And in
some cases, police that have been far too brutal towards their citizens. Now
going forward, I think there’s no way of getting around a dual mandate. So the
view that you’re just going to defund the police and anything good is going to
happen from that seems like absolute madness to me.
We
want our police to do more, not less. We want them to stop crime just as much
tomorrow as we did yesterday, but we also want them to make sure that they
treat all the citizens with a reasonable modicum of respect, with a reasonable
amount of decency. So that requires two things. First of all, you need to give
police chiefs quantitative targets of what you’re asking for in terms of this
respect and decency. Now that means you probably need some form of regular
customer surveys about how people are feeling about their relationship with the
police. And you need to hold police chiefs accountable for delivering a
reasonable amount of customer satisfaction. But if there’s one thing I believe,
there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? And consequently, you’re not
going to get the cops to do more by giving them less. And police reform really
requires a dual mandate and the resources that will empower police chiefs to
get it done.
As we approach the end, I just want to circle back to the
pandemic. How do we make our cities and our society more resilient to the next
pandemic? And it seems the experts seem pretty confident there’s going to be
another one. So how will we be better prepared next time?
So
I think this is something that the city governments can’t do. Everything about
cops or even schools can be done at the state or even the local level. But in
order to pandemic-proof our world, we really need national and international
action. And the idea that my co-author David Cutler, who is a health economist,
and I pushed forward is something that we call “NATO for health,” with the idea
that this really requires global cooperation and global investments in things
like preemptive vaccines, global surveillance. And this means you need an
organization which is far less unwieldy than the WHO. Hence NATO: a small
number of committed countries, they’re actually ready to put dollars on the
table, it’s going to be run by people with scientific expertise, and it’s going
to be willing to make decisions that are not necessarily politically acceptable
to everyone.
And
we think that on top of that we’ve got to be open for something of a grand
bargain around foreign aid. So you’ve got to worry, or you should worry, that
the low level of sanitary infrastructure in many developing world cities is
making possible the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Now, one way to
deal with that is to invest more in pipes, to invest more in sewers, to invest
more in aqueducts. And the West can fund some of that. It wouldn’t be a huge
amount of spending, but we could fund some of that. But there should be a quid
pro quo, which is that if they’re going to be part of this, then they need to
agree to surveillance. They need to make sure that new diseases that are
popping up are being dealt with. And on top of that, they have to agree to more
sanitary rules, separation between humans and animals for example, wild animals
in particular.
And
so we think this giant health quid pro quo can be part of the glue that ties
NATO for health together. And of course, NATO for health, unlike the WHO needs
to be willing to shut borders when there’s a real risk of something spreading. So
much quicker than we currently saw for COVID-19. That’s one example of the kind
of international investment that we need, but, in some sense, the larger
message is: This was a really catastrophic thing for the world, but we had
warning signs. We had warning signs of mini outbreaks that occurred — SARS,
MERS, Ebola — in the past 20 years. Let’s not ignore this warning sign. Let’s
make sure that this is at the top of the national and global priority list
going forward.
Let me end with this: If New York on the 60th anniversary
of that 1964 World’s Fair were to have another one — America doesn’t do World’s
Fairs anymore, but if there was a 2024 World’s Fair —and they had another
Futurama exhibit, and you were asked to advise them on what their new future
exhibit would look like, what their new “city of tomorrow” exhibit look like? What
sort of insights or advice or foresight would you give them about what a city
can look like a generation from now?
In 1964 we were very focused on physical technology, particularly mobility, right? And mobility can get better in cities, but it’s not really what it’s about. What it’s about is a city that’s more open for outsiders. And that means less regulation of entrepreneurship. As I have often said, it’s an outrage that we regulate the entrepreneurship of the rich, which often takes place in cyberspace, so much more lightly than we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor, which takes place on the ground.
So my city of the future would be one in which any new entrepreneur can come and get themselves a permit within a week at a relatively low cost with the help of a centralized permitting office. My city of the future will be one in which people think that cities have educational programs that are the best in the world.
In
fact, far from fleeing from the city to get better schools, you would come to
the city and say, “Boy, look at this amazing computer programming thing that’s
going on here. Look how nimbly the city is able to provide lots of different
things to enable you to adapt to changing circumstances.” And it would be a
city that actually really does a great job of empowering people. It would be a
city that has lots of innovation in housing. So the physical landscape changes.
Although some many buildings may be kept as memories of the past, it changes in
a way that provides affordable space for ordinary people to come in. That might
mean mass-produced, high rise dwellings that are made somewhere else and then
plopped into space quickly. And they could be perfectly attractive.
And
finally, there are going to be cities in which we’ve figured out sensible
policies, whether or not it’s congestion pricing or NATO for health, to do with
the downsides of density. So we figured out how to make it so that people could
move through the cities quickly, not necessarily by building more highways, as
we imagined 1964, but by figuring out smart sets of incentives to get people to
use mobility in a wise way. And we’ve also built in a way that enables people
to use at least my favorite form of urban mobility to walk to work. And I guess
I’ll end on that, which is my favorite cities are archipelagos of different
neighborhoods, places where people have lots of different choices about where
they can live. And for me, at least my favorite neighborhoods are ones in which
walking is really paramount. So I would hope that would be part of our Futurama
looking forward.
My guest today has been Ed Glaeser. He and David Cutler are the authors of Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation, available now. Ed, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, James.
James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Ed Glaeser is the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University.
Learn more: Should government create more Silicon Valleys? My long-read Q&A with Nicholas Bloom | The economy of outer space: My long-read Q&A with John Roth, Rich Boling, Mike Gold, & Matthew Weinzierl | Understanding Jeff Bezos and Amazon: My long-read Q&A with Brad Stone
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(Photograph by Carol Coelho/Getty Images)There are a lot of problems with Joe Biden’s “kind of, sort of” vaccine mandate. There’s the backhandedness of an administration that said repeatedly it would not compel vaccination to be forcing 100 million Americans into a choice between that and expensive rapid tests (thanks FDA). There’s the risk that Biden’s mandate will be interpreted as saying “the vaccinated aren’t safe so long as anyone is unvaccinated,” leading to socially and economically damaging overcautiousness. There’s also the chance that the policy backfires, hardening mistrust among those who may otherwise have been coaxed into vaccination using a carrot, not a stick. And, of course, there’s the cruelty of a measure threatening a disproportionately low-income, poorly educated and non-white group (so much for “equity”) with economic hardship to force them into a medical decision, regardless of how easy most of us found that choice.For these reasons, we consider Biden’s vaccine’s mandate a mistake. But errors can nonetheless bring silver linings. The logic of one bad policy can render another utterly indefensible. And that may be what Biden’s heavy-handed treatment of unvaccinated Americans does to the administration’s unscientific and callous travel policy. (The Trump administration first instituted the travel ban in 2020 and planned to scrap it on January 26, 2021, but Biden undid that immediately upon taking office.) At present, entry into the United States is banned for almost anyone not an American citizen or permanent resident who has stepped foot in the U.K., Ireland, the EU’s Schengen area, Brazil, Iran, China, South Africa, or India in the previous 14 days. Aside from all the destructive consequences for families, that means even non-immigrant visa holders living and working legally in the United States are offered no certainty of return if they leave to visit these homelands. Even before Biden’s vaccine mandate, this was a patently nonsensical policy. Americans, who of course are just as likely to be carrying the virus, are allowed to travel freely to these countries, irrespective of their vaccination status. The president’s own granddaughter, for example, enjoyed a vacation in sunny Greece this summer—a country ensnared by the travel ban on EU countries. The country blacklist is not updated to reflect the ebbs and flows of the virus. Poland, for example, today has just 10.2 new daily cases per million people. In Costa Rica, the equivalent figure is 484. In Israel, it is 797—a level almost seven times higher than for the EU as a whole. But Costa Ricans and Israelis can come and go from the United States as they please, while Poles and other EU nationals continue to be barred from entering. Now that Biden is putting policy flesh on the bones of his claim that we are in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” basing travel restrictions on geography instead of vaccination status defies logic. An administration blocking unvaccinated Americans from their offices surely cannot just allow unvaccinated foreigners to flit in from COVID-19 hotspots; a government insisting vaccination proof is the key to a normal work life surely can’t close the border to all vaccinated foreigners, many of whom live and work here.Even if Biden thought a personal vaccination requirement for those entering the U.S. unworkable, the countries blacklisted by America must surely now be revised. Many of them have considerably higher vaccination take-up than the U.S.: 64 percent of the U.K.’s population is fully vaccinated, for example, as is 60 percent of the EU’s. The U.S. figure is 53 percent. How can a president preaching the vaccine mantra maintain these restrictions while preserving an open door to low-vaccination countries such as Jamaica (5 percent) or Mexico (28 percent)?Until now, for whatever reason, no country entering the blacklist has ever been removed. Even as COVID-19 cases have waxed and waned, high-efficacy vaccines have been rolled out, and other countries have changed their own border policies regularly, U.S. measures have been inert. Regardless of the logic behind the administration’s stubbornness, the vaccine shift at home provides natural political cover for a change of approach abroad. After last Thursday’s announcement, Americans working for companies with more than 100 people would face more stringent public health screening than foreigners entering the U.S. from the Caribbean, Latin America, or the Middle East. That is surely not sustainable. The repercussions of the administration’s travel bans include retaliatory quarantine requirements for Americans entering many European countries; angst for international families separated through an entry barrier to their jobs and loved ones; deterred investment in the U.S. economy; additional struggles for the beaten tourism industry; and the heartbreaking decision by many to abandon their dreams of a life here. The administration should seize the opportunity to repair the harm done by these stringent measures.In one sense, whether the president uses his recent COVID-19 pivot to address the travel ban is an acid test of the sincerity behind the stated rationale for his aggressive actions last week. If the administration is interested in nothing more than signaling “toughness,” it might keep the illogical travel bans in place. The co-existence of these restrictions and a vaccine mandate would suggest a president not so much interested in adapting to an ever-evolving threat as focused on buck-passing and politically convenient public shaming.If, however, the Biden administration is serious about accelerating vaccination rates and realizes some measures have outlived their usefulness, it would surely alter travel policy accordingly. Introducing a vaccine mandate while revising border measures to reflect vaccinations abroad would suggest, at least, that Biden has a coherent, if heavy-handed, plan for the next phase of the pandemic.At stake in this decision is not just the effects of a policy that has now become an unjustifiable impediment to normal life for millions of people, but whether Biden actually means what he says about COVID-19. 

The US isn’t a simple machine where government spending is the input and easily predictable economic growth is the output. If Washington policymakers doubted that reality, its truth is becoming all too clear during this pandemic. You can try to boost growth by increasing demand, but there’s also a supply side of the economy. And even if the former is holding up well during this Delta surge, it’s strength can be at least partially offset by troubles with the former. This from Capital Economics:
With authorities having shown no appetite to reimpose restrictions on activity and new virus cases now levelling off . . . [and] assuming new virus cases drop back over the coming weeks, this all suggests that the hit to demand from the Delta variant will be more modest than in previous waves. . . . [P]otentially more important is the disruption being caused by the Delta variant in other parts of the global economy, particularly in key manufacturing hubs in Asia. The worsening semiconductor shortage has already prompted Ford and GM to extend plant closures which will exacerbate the weakness in autos production and sales. At the same time, evidence suggests that renewed virus fears may be preventing some US workers from returning to the labour force, contributing to the “persistent and extensive” labor shortages noted in the Fed’s latest Beige Book. This suggests the hit to supply from the Delta variant could end up being as significant as its effects on demand, keeping upward pressure on prices and holding back the recovery in real activity.
And this from economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics on the supply side of the economy: 
Delta has further scrambled global supply chains, as factories have shut down in Southeast Asia when workers got sick, and China has intermittently locked down port activity in an effort to contain the virus. The vehicle industry has been especially disrupted as the severe shortage of semiconductors coming from Asia has forced vehicle plants to close. With few vehicles to sell — inventories are at record lows — sales have plunged and vehicle prices have gone parabolic. Homebuilders struggling with shortages and higher prices for everything from lumber and paint to fixtures and appliances, have had no choice but to pull back on construction, despite vacancy rates that are about as low as they have been since World War II and headed lower, and soaring house prices and rents.
Now none of this is suggesting to economists that a recession is on its way, although many Wall Street banks have pared back their growth forecasts. For this part, Zandi is looking for a return to full employment by spring 2023. But the economy’s supply side and supply chain problems are a reminder of how central the pandemic remains to the country’s economic prospects.
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The great financial historian, Charles Kindleberger, pointed out in the 1970s that over several centuries, history showed there was a financial crisis about once every ten years. His observation still holds. In every decade since his classic Manias, Panics and Crashes of 1978, such crises have indeed continued to erupt in their turn, in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and again in 2020. What could cause the next crisis in this long, recurring series? I suggest seven possibilities:
1. What Nobody Sees Coming
A notable headline from 2017 was “Yellen: I Don’t See a Financial Crisis Coming in Our Lifetimes.” The then-head of the Federal Reserve was right that she didn’t see it coming; nonetheless, well within her and our lifetimes, a new financial crisis arrived in 2020, from unexpected causes.
It has been well said that “The riskiest stuff is what you don’t see coming.” Especially risky is what you don’t think is possible, but happens anyway.
About the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09, a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve candidly observed: “Not only didn’t we see it coming,” but in the midst of it, “had trouble understanding what was happening.” Similarly, “Central banks and regulators failed to see the bust coming, just as they failed to anticipate its potential magnitude,” as another top central banking expert wrote.
The next financial crisis could be the same—we may take another blindside hit for a big financial sack.
In his memoir of the 2007-09 crisis, former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson wrote, “We had no choice but to fly by the seat of our pants, making it up as we went along.” If the next financial crisis is again triggered by what we don’t see coming, the government reactions will once again be flying by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along.
2. A Purely Malicious Macro-Hack of the Financial System
We keep learning about how vulnerable to hacking, especially by state-sponsored hackers, even the most “secure” systems are. Here I am not considering a hack to make money or collect blackmail, or a hack for spying, but a purely malicious hack with the sole goal of creating destruction and panic, to cripple the United States by bringing down our amazingly complex and totally computer-dependent financial information systems.
Imagine macro-hackers attacking with the same destructive motivation as the 9/11 terrorists. Suppose when they strike, trading and payments systems can’t clear, there are no market prices, no one can find out the balances in their accounts or the value of their risk positions, and no one knows who is broke or solvent. That is my second next crisis scenario.
3. All the Central Banks Get It Wrong Together
We know that the major central banks operate as a tight international club. Their decisions are subject to vast uncertainty, and as a result, they display significant cognitive and behavioral herding.
I read somewhere the colorful line, “Central banks have become slaves of the bubbles they blow.” Whether or not we think that, there is no question that the principal central banks have all together managed to create a gigantic global asset price inflation.
Suppose they have also managed to set off a disastrous, runaway general price inflation. Then ultimately interest rates must rise, and asset prices fall. This will be in a setting of stretched asset prices and high debt. As asset prices fall, speculative leverage will be punished. “Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected,” as Walter Bagehot said. The Everything Bubble of our time would then implode and the crisis would be upon us. Huge government bailouts would ensue.

We have discovered that to combat a pandemic, governments can close down economies and cause massive unemployment and economic disruption. Would they do that again—or something else?

4. A Housing Collapse Again
A particularly notable asset price inflation is, once again, that in the price of houses, which are the biggest investment most households have and are the mortgage collateral for the biggest loan market in the world. House prices are now rising in the U.S. at the unsustainable rate of more than 18% a year [1], but this is also global problem. Many countries, about 20 by one reckoning, face extreme house price inflation. Said one financial commentator [2], “This is now a global property bubble of epic proportions, never before seen by man or beast, and it has entrapped more central banks than just the Fed.”
House prices depend on high leverage and are, as is well known, very interest rate sensitive. What would an actual market-determined mortgage rate look like, instead of the Federal Reserve-manipulated 3% mortgage rate the U.S. has now? A reasonable estimate would begin with a 3% general inflation, and therefore a 4.5% 10-year Treasury note. The long-term mortgage rate would be 1.5% over that, or 6%. That would more or less double the monthly payment for the same-sized mortgage, house prices would fall steeply, and our world record house price bubble implode. Faced with that possibility, so far the Federal Reserve’s choice has been to keep pumping up the bubble.
Overpriced, leveraged real estate is a frequent culprit in financial crises. Maybe once again.
5. An Electricity System Failure
Imagine a failure, similar to our financial system macro-hack scenario, resulting from an attack maliciously carried out to bring down the national electricity system, or from a huge solar flare, bigger than the one that took down the electric system of Quebec in 1989.
Physically speaking, the financial system, including of course all forms of electronic payments, is an electronic system, utterly dependent upon the supply of electricity. Should that fail, it would certainly be good to have some paper currency in your wallet, or actual gold coins. Bank accounts and cryptocurrencies will not be working so well.
6. The Next Pandemic
It feels like we have survived the Covid pandemic and the crisis is passing. Even with the ongoing problem of the Delta variant, we are certainly more relaxed than at the peak of the intense fear and the lockdowns of 2020. Instead of financial markets being in free fall as they were, they are booming.
But what about the next pandemic? We have discovered that to combat a pandemic, governments can close down economies and cause massive unemployment and economic disruption. Would they do that again—or something else?
How soon could a new pandemic happen? We don’t know.
Might that new pandemic be much more deadly than Covid? Consider Professor Adam Tooze: “One thing 2020 forces us to come to terms with is that this wasn’t a black swan [an unknown possibility]. This kind of pandemic was widely and insistently and repeatedly predicted.” What wasn’t predicted was the political response and the financial panic. “In fact,” Tooze continues, “what people had predicted was worse than the coronavirus.”
If the prediction of an even worse and more deadly new pandemic becomes right, perhaps sooner than we might think, that might trigger our next financial crisis.
7. A Major War
By far the most important financial events of all are big wars.
A sobering talk I heard a few years ago described China as “Germany in 1913.”
This of course brings our mind to 1914. The incredible destruction then unleashed included a financial panic, and the war created huge, intractable financial problems which lasted up to the numerous sovereign defaults of the 1930s.
What if a big war happened again in the 21st century? If you think that is not possible, recall the once-famous book, Norman Angel’s The Great Illusion, which argued that a 20th-century war among European powers would be so economically costly that it would not happen. In the event, it was unimaginably costly, but nonetheless happened.
One distinguished scholar, Graham Allison of Harvard, has written [3]: “A disastrous war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than most of us are willing to allow.” A particular point of tension is the Chinese claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.  Might a Chinese decision to end Taiwan’s freedom by force be the equivalent of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914?
Would anyone be crazy enough to start a war between China and the United States? We all certainly hope not, but we should remember that such a war did already occur: most of the Korean War consisted of battles between the Chinese and American armies. In his history of the Korean War, David Halberstam wrote, “The Chinese viewed Korea as a great success,” and that Mao “had shrewdly understood the domestic benefits of having his county at war with the Americans.”
If it happened again it would be a terrific crisis, needless to say, with perhaps a global financial panic thrown in.
Overall, we can say there is plenty of risk and uncertainty to provide the possibility of the next financial crisis.
Endnotes“18% a year”: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-home-price-growth-rose-to-record-in-june-11630414873“Said one financial commentator”: https://heisenbergreport.com/2021/06/24/epic-property-bubble-stuns-man-and-beast-alike-albert-edwards-says/“has written”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/are-china-and-the-united-states-headed-for-warThe post Seven Possible Causes of the Next Financial Crisis appeared first on R Street.

Many of the conservatives and Republicans appalled by Donald Trump’s presidency clutched a hope through the bewildering years: Someday this would all be over and politics would return to normal.But normal has not returned. Those elected Republicans who stood for legality when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election found themselves party pariahs in 2021, on their way to being out of politics altogether in 2022.And it’s not just a few politicians who have been displaced by the Trump era. Millions of voters have been too. “Never Trump is not a political party. It is a dinner party”: That jibe was heard a lot in 2017 and 2018. It has not been heard much since. In 2018, Democratic candidates won districts that had loyally voted Republican for 30, 40, 50 years, including those once held by Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich, and George H. W. Bush.[Tom Nichols: At least Never Trumpers stood and fought]The anti-Trump Republicans did not return home in 2020. Now, in 2021, their former party seems much more eager to welcome anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers than to win them back.Years ago, the late Christopher Hitchens described to me the experience of losing his faith in socialism. He felt, he said, like a man tumbling down a hill, and every time he clutched a branch to stop his fall, the branch snapped in his hands. Many former conservatives and Republicans experienced a similar disillusionment during the Trump years. In 2017, the longtime conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted: “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”What’s happening is that as former Republicans and conservatives break from old groups, they turn newly suspicious eyes on old certainties.Once, Republicans and conservatives filled hours of cable-TV time and sold millions of books to argue the supreme importance of truthfulness, sexual fidelity, and financial integrity in a national leader. Then their party nominated and elected a president who gleefully transgressed every one of those human decencies. The minority of Republicans and conservatives who couldn’t execute the pivot were left to wonder how to reconcile what our old friends had said with what they now did.Once, Republicans and conservatives advertised themselves as strict upholders of constitutional principle. They brandished pocket copies of the Constitution as props. Then the leader of their party incited a violent attack on Congress in an effort to overturn an election result. The minority of Republicans and conservatives who upheld legality were forced to confront the fact that their old friends had minimized and condoned the attack, and even glorified the attackers as “political hostages” and “political prisoners.”Once, Republicans and conservatives defined themselves as the party of life. Human life was so precious that the law should require women unwillingly pregnant to give birth anyway. Then came a deadly pandemic, and suddenly “life” became less important than protecting the spring-break revenues of hotels and restaurants, or indulging the delusions and fantasies of people who got their scientific information from YouTube videos and Reddit threads. And again dissident Republicans and conservatives were left to wonder: What do we have in common with you? This process of estrangement builds on itself.I thought we believed X, says the dissident. You’re a bunch of hypocrites for now saying Y. You’re betraying everything I thought we believed. No, reply the majority. We always deep down believed that Y was more important than X. We never before had to choose. Now we do. And if you choose X over Y, it’s you who are betraying us. Economists call this “revealed preference”: a choice between two competing alternatives that forces the chooser to discover her highest values. Pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives have often each been mutually horrified to discover how radically their highest values differed from those of old allies and former comrades.[Read: Never Trump, forever]Not only differ—but diverge. Maybe the future pro-Trump Republican was always slightly more sympathetic to authoritarianism, maybe slightly more tolerant of corruption than the future anti-Trump Republican. Then Trump shoved authoritarianism and corruption into the political debate—and suddenly people who liked Trump were forced into positions they had never planned to take.On November 7, 2020, former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal headlined: “If he loses, Trump will concede gracefully.” That of course proved a historically false prediction. Mulvaney had worked with Trump; he knew Trump’s character. How could he get things so wrong? Partly, perhaps, the article was an attempt to influence Trump in the only way Trump could be influenced—by outrageous flattery. But I wonder if it was not also a coping device for Mulvaney himself. Mulvaney faced the question: What would he personally do if Trump turned traitor to the Constitution and attacked the election result? He did not want to think about a terrible possibility, and so he denied the reality of that possibility. On January 7, 2021, Mulvaney resigned from the mostly honorific position of U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland. “We didn’t sign up for what we saw last night,” he told a TV interviewer. And then he went silent. Speaking more would have put him on a path out of the Republican world, and that was a path he did not want to walk.But some people did walk it, and they too rapidly found themselves in places they had never expected to go. They found themselves political exiles, banished or self-banished from the political home of a lifetime. This was a metaphorical exile only, not the shattering disaster of physical exile. For most anti-Trump conservatives, the losses of political exile have been emotional, cultural, and spiritual rather than material. Yet these losses were unnerving enough in their own way. Human beings are group animals, and they are frightened and stressed when expelled from the groups to which they have belonged. Our political attachments often matter much more to us than our political ideas—which is why, when forced to choose, so many Republicans and conservatives discarded their former ideas in order to preserve their former attachments.Many Democrats and liberals may wonder at this point: So what? Who cares? Why is any of this our problem? But it is their problem, like it or not. President Joe Biden’s approval numbers sharply dipped in summer 2021, driven by a steep drop in nonaffiliated voters. It looks a lot as if the Republican-leaners who provided Biden his margin of victory in November cooled on him in August and September. Democratic loyalists may find it exasperating to be urged to worry about these fickle new supporters. Republican leaders pamper and flatter their base with scant regard for uneasy moderates. Why shouldn’t Democrats do the same?But Democrats know the answer. Democrats cannot do the same because their situation is not the same. The Democrats cannot win with a base-first strategy. Their base is not cohesive or big enough, and does not live in the places favored by the rules of U.S. politics.Yet this disparity is not ultimately a disadvantage. The comparative weakness of the Democratic base obliges Democrats to build broad national coalitions of a kind that Republicans have not achieved since the days of the Chrysler K-Car. And those broader coalitions in turn deliver better government than would or could be delivered by a narrower ideological faction.Thanks to Trump, Democrats find themselves leading a coalition more affluent and less progressive than the coalition many Democratic activists might desire. A Morning Consult poll after the 2020 election found that almost half of Biden voters were motivated primarily by their antipathy to Trump. (That contrasts very sharply with the Trump vote: 75 percent of those voters said they were primarily motivated by support for Trump, and less than a quarter by hostility to Biden.)  If Trump decides to run again, that one act will certainly fortify the new Democratic coalition. But it’s not enough to rely solely on Trumpian obnoxiousness. The Trump-era political traffic has not moved only one way. Former swing states such as Ohio and Missouri turned much more solidly Republican. Latino voters, too, shifted toward Trump and his party.It’s the former cultural core of the GOP—the college-educated, the professional, the suburban—that is exiting the party. It’s that core that will, if permitted, realign American politics. What do these recent arrivals bring with them to their new political destination? They’re often described as combining social liberalism with economic conservatism, but that is too broad and too imprecise a description. Here are five more specific ways that Never Trumpers may change the Democratic Party.DemocracyDonald Trump hoped to reverse the 2020 election by junking votes after they were cast. His successors more shrewdly hope to decide the next election by suppressing votes before they can be cast in the first place, or by gerrymandering voters in such a way that they don’t count equally.Many Democratic political professionals regret these maneuvers, but see little payoff in battling them. Based on their experience with the historic Democratic electorate, they believe that pocketbook issues are what matter most.For the Never Trump newcomers, however, democracy is issue one. January 6 was the true last straw for them—and preventing the next January 6 their top-of-mind issue. Democracy may not be the issue that motivates the most economically hard-pressed voters. But the less hard-pressed people who are painting the Sun Belt suburbs blue? Many of them live in places where their state governments are controlled by overrepresented rural voters. Their kids are exposed to COVID-19 in schools because overrepresented constituencies can overrule the majorities who want safety protocols. Democracy is not a “process issue” if you live in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, or Phoenix. It’s the precondition for any fair participation in the governance of your city, county, and state.ExpertiseThe U.S. and global scientific communities have delivered incredible advances at record speed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It took only a few days for scientists to crack the virus’s genetic code, only a few weeks for scientists to understand how the virus spread, less than a year to develop effective vaccines.And for their efforts, they were reviled by one of the country’s great parties as enemies of the people. The mild-mannered Anthony Fauci is now behind only critical race theory and Big Tech as a target of right-wing hate.When your political coalition attracts support from millions of professionals, its respect for professional expertise rises. That’s how Democrats have become the party that acknowledges climate science and encourages vaccination, while Republicans tend toward the opposite.[Peter Wehner: Trumpism has entered its final form]Yet Democrats have their blind spots too, where their own constituencies elevate ideology over expert knowledge. Teachers’ unions deny the well-attested fact that learning losses increase when schooling is interrupted. Democratic local governments deny that standardized tests measure anything important. Some try to suppress educational programs for gifted children. On all these issues, many Democrats are as far removed from “the science” as many Republicans are on vaccines or climate. This expertise gap obviously exacts severe real-world consequences. It also may inflict drastic potential political costs.GlobalismGlobalism is a label for the quickening pace of cross-border immigration, trade, investment, information, and organization. The economic relationship among these factors is complex. Theoretically, it’s possible to have some without others. But the psychological relationship among the different elements of globalism tends to be more straightforward. Like some of them, and you will probably like all of them; fear any of them, and you will probably fear all of them.Until recently, those who feared globalism formed a weakly partisan bloc that could swing back and forth between the two parties, or even to a third-party independent like Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. Trump, however, successfully consolidated the fearers into his Republican Party. Hostility to immigration, trade, and almost any form of international cooperation became a defining theme of his presidency.Trump held the support of those Americans most immediately harmed by his isolationism by lavishing them with direct cash payments. American farmers lost foreign markets—and got federal subsidies instead. In election year 2020, direct aid from the Trump administration provided one-third of all farm income. But other Americans who bought and sold on global markets got no such compensation for Trump’s economic sabotage.In 2020, Biden appealed to globally minded America by promising to welcome immigrants and to stop insulting allies. But he mimicked the trade skepticism of Donald Trump. If the ex-Republicans extruded by Trump make a more permanent home inside the Democratic Party, however, trade skepticism will come under pressure. It may be good politics in Flint, Michigan, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. But it isn’t as effective in Northern Virginia and South Florida, in Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Retaining Never Trumpers requires discarding not only the snarling aggression of “America First” but also the quivering apprehension of “Buy American.”ModerationDays after the 2020 vote, Representative Abigail Spanberger complained to Democratic colleagues about the harm done to House members by reckless ideological rhetoric. “We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again ... We lost good members because of that.” The slogan “Defund the police,” she said, had done even more damage.  The crime wave of 2020–21, and the unceasing surge of unauthorized people across the southern border, has created a sense of disorder and threat. Some lefty Democrats have either denied that these trends are happening or dismissed their significance. But they are happening, and they do matter. Among Republicans, immigration is ranked as the country’s second-most-important issue (after the economy), and crime ranks just behind. Traditional Republicans and Republican-leaners are swayed by those same influences.Fiscal and economic issues may not seem to matter in the abstract. But when economic over-stimulus feeds into rising prices at the store, when protectionist trade policy foments electronics shortages that prolong the waiting time for delivery of new cars, when and if middle-of-the-road voters get the impression that economic policy is being driven by interest-group agendas and extreme ideologies—all of that can matter a lot.Nobody ever won a vote by telling a voter that he or she is wrong. Votes are won by showing the voter that the voter is right, only in a different way than the voter imagined before. Republican excesses offered Democrats an opportunity to remake themselves as the party of the broad American center. That center can be moved, but only by people who demonstrate that they respect its values: security and continuity.NicenessDonald Trump lived by the old dictum that nice guys finish last. He proved it wrong. In 2020, Trump finished second in a two-person race—that is, last—in great part because Americans perceived him as nasty. On the eve of the 2020 vote, only one-third of Americans agreed that Trump could be described as “likable.”You’ll recall that Trump got considerably more than 33 percent of the vote. A large number of Americans voted for Trump despite—or possibly because of—his offensive behavior and intemperate language. For those former Republicans who broke ranks against Trump, however, the behavior and language mattered, and mattered a lot.In late August 2020, The Washington Post profiled an undecided voter. Mike Baker was a retired midwestern businessman in his 70s. He was conservative-leaning, but not an ideologue: As the Post noted, he has practiced social distancing during the pandemic. Normally Republican, Baker had voted against Trump in 2016 because of his “acerbic” personality. In 2020, he found himself torn: He liked the Trump economy and agreed with many Trump policies, but he appreciated Biden’s empathy and willingness to compromise. “The personality thing, it just weighs on me,” he told the paper. “Can I feel good about myself voting for this person that’s just not the kind of person I would look up to and respect?” The Post left Baker still weighing his decision. But we do know that Biden won in November in great part because he outperformed Hillary Clinton among older white men like Mike Baker.Here’s the warning for the future: The Democratic Party is also home to some abrasive loudmouths. And although none of those abrasive loudmouths has mounted a serious campaign for the presidency, some hold other high offices, and others occupy visible places in the media. Liberal communities tolerate and even approve of language about white men like Mike Baker that they would never tolerate or approve of about anybody else. That language exacts immense political costs.An absolute majority of white Americans believe that white people face adverse discrimination in the United States. They are not reacting to personal experiences of mistreatment; only one-fifth to one-tenth of white Americans report anything like that. They seem instead to be reacting to a more generalized drumbeat of derision and hostility.The influx of anti-Trump Republicans into the Biden coalition should highlight the importance of discouraging that kind of talk. Some advice from Franklin D. Roosevelt remains timely today. In 1936, the then-chair of the Democratic National Committee had publicly mocked Roosevelt’s likely opponent, Alf Landon, as nothing more than the governor of a “typical prairie state” (Kansas, as it happened). Republicans seized on these dismissive words. Roosevelt wrote to scold his chair. It was bad politics, he said, for New Yorkers like themselves to speak disrespectfully of other parts of the country. If there had to be any characterization, make it positive. Roosevelt suggested instead describing Kansas as “one of our splendid prairie states.” Roosevelt carried the Midwest in 1936, including Kansas.Again, the exchange will not be all one-way. A person who votes even once to protest against cruelty and in favor of empathy will be changed enduringly by that single action. We often act first and then develop the explanations for our actions later—and those new explanations may force us to reconsider previous prejudices.The pro-Trump Republicans and conservatives got one thing right about their anti-Trump former comrades: Never Trump was not fundamentally a political movement. It was a moral reflex. Will that reflex now be integrated into normal politics in the post-Trump era? If it can, it will transform American politics—and very possibly save the country from the forces of polarization, extremism, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

(Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images.)I’m going to tell you a true-life story, one of many virtually identical stories I’ve heard these past few weeks. Be honest with yourself as you consider how you feel.Brian (not his real name) was a kind Christian man. He and his wife were always there to help a friend in need, and in the local business community, he was known for his relentlessly cheerful disposition. He was Republican—like virtually everyone else in his church and community—but he wasn’t defined by his politics.Then the pandemic hit. Brian hated the lockdowns, and he also hated masks and especially mask mandates. He hated them so much that he boycotted services until the church allowed unmasked people to worship. Brian also refused the vaccine. It’s not that he thought that COVID was a hoax, but he didn’t view it as a meaningful risk. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t quite at retirement age either. His health was good. He was willing to risk the disease and unwilling to take a vaccine that felt rushed. You can guess the rest of the story. Brian caught COVID. Soon he was in the hospital. Days later he was in the ICU. Death came quickly. The disease he discounted had taken his life.Most readers know that I live in Tennessee, and the Delta variant is rampant. We’re experiencing a renewed surge of death that’s hitting us differently from the huge peaks in December and January. Then it felt more like a natural disaster. While there were people who were more careful than others (I know many quite careful folks who caught the disease), COVID washed over us like a tsunami, and who blames the victims of a tidal wave?Now it’s different. First by the dozens, now by the hundreds, we are burying neighbors who would almost certainly be alive today if they’d done one, simple thing—taken the vaccine. It’s breaking people’s hearts. A dear friend of mine posted this on Facebook a few days ago:Can you imagine the grief if a member of your family falls to COVID in this way? Can you imagine the realization that an imminent death was entirely, easily preventable? Can you imagine how that understanding would tear at your heart and soul?Yet I’m seeing trends that are deeply unsettling. I see schadenfreude. I sometimes see obscene references to “thinning the herd.” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote powerfully in The Atlantic to decry what she rightly called “death shaming.” There is a profound lack of empathy for these terrible losses, an unwillingness to “weep with those who weep,” and a stubborn refusal to even try to place oneself in the shoes of the grieving. Why?The answer is that America is experiencing an empathy crisis. But it’s not quite the crisis you might think. Our empathy can overflow for the people we love, for the people within our tribe—even when they make grave errors. But what about our empathy for “them,” the people we distrust? Then empathy is in short supply. Indeed, in some cases, the very concept of empathy is under fire. You may not know this, but empathy is under fire even within the church itself. Parts of American Christianity are in a fight over the idea of empathy, and the outcome of that dispute will resonate beyond the borders of Evangelical belief. To understand the context, on May 31, 2019, Joe Rigney, the influential pastor of Cities Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota and the president of Bethlehem College and Seminary wrote an essay called the “Enticing Sin of Empathy.” It was written in the style of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Screwtape Letters, as a letter from one demon to another, describing how to tempt Christians into sin. The problem of empathy, as he described it, is that it’s a satanic alternative to the virtue of compassion. In Rigney’s definition, compassion focuses on a sufferer’s good, whereas empathy focuses on a sufferer’s feelings. “We teach humans,” Rigney writes, “that unless they subordinate their feelings entirely to the misery, pain, sorrow, and even sin and unbelief of the afflicted, they are not loving them.”Rigney says compassion suffers “with” someone, while empathy suffers “in” them. That’s a hard distinction to grasp, but in a later conversation with controversial pastor and theologian Douglas Wilson, Rigney further defined what he meant. First, Wilson says that “empathy is the … conduit by which relativism is pouring into counseling.” Then Rigney describes the difference between empathy and compassion like this:Rigney: Empathy is the sort of thing that you’ve got someone drowning, or they’re in quicksand, and they’re sinking. And what empathy wants to do is jump into the quicksand with them, both feet, and-and it feels like that’s going to be more loving, because they’re going to feel like, I’m glad that you’re here with me in the quicksand. Problem is you’re both now sinking.Wilson: Right.Rigney: Right. Whereas, if you do, I’m going to keep one foot on the shore, and I’m actually gonna grab onto this big branch, and then I’ll step one foot in there with you and try to pull you out. That’s sympathy, and that’s—that’s actually helpful. But to the person who’s in there, it can feel like you’re judging me.Wilson: So sympathy’s clearly hierarchical.Rigney: Right. It implies that one person is the hurting, and one person is the helper.So why bring this up? After all, I’m referring to a years-old essay and discussions involving pastors and theologians many (most?) readers don’t know. Well, two reasons. First, the dispute is now breaking out into the American church in a more concrete and tangible way. And second, the dispute can help us understand America’s real empathy problem—not that it’s excessive, but rather that it’s far too selective.Last week, Kate Shellnut at Christianity Today published a long and comprehensively reported piece about profound differences at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis and Bethlehem College and Seminary. Pastors and professors have resigned from the church and the seminary. Dozens of members have left the church.Bethlehem Baptist is most prominent for being the home of John Piper, an extraordinarily influential reformed pastor and theologian. I’ve quoted him countless times in my Sunday essays.I can’t even begin to summarize all the complexities behind the controversy, but as Shellnut tells the story, a central factor involved disputes over so-called “untethered empathy.” Here’s Shellnut:More than 25 people spoke to CT at length about their experiences navigating conflict at Bethlehem for this article. Many brought up the “untethered empathy” concept as a factor that they believe shaped leaders’ responses when confronted with claims of bullying, institutional protection, and spiritual abuse.Here’s how a fight over empathy can play out. One of the departing pastors, Ming-Jinn Tong, “wore traditional Chinese attire” when he preached after the Atlanta massage parlor shootings, in which six of the eight victims were Asian women. He and another pastor were reportedly critiqued by a fellow leader for “bringing up race” as a “component” of the murders.In both Rigney’s commentary and in the real-world applications, those who critique empathy don’t want demands for empathy to prevent them from exercising judgment. In other words, they place a priority on retaining the ability to tell a suffering person that they’re wrong, for their own good. Or, perhaps put more gently, critics don't want empathy to be a barrier to inquiry. “I don’t want your feelings to stop me from thinking.” This is a Christianized version of the famous secular conservative statement that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”There are multiple problems with this approach, especially for Christians. First, as a practical matter, the prioritizing of our own judgments often implies wisdom and knowledge we don’t possess. Take, for example, the argument that “untethered empathy” is dangerous in the context of racism and abuse, that it prevents solid fact-finding and sound judgment.But what I’ve seen with my own eyes is that it is remarkable how often there is an inverse relationship between knowledge and certainty. We think we know more than we do. We think we’re more wise than we are. Or, to take Pastor Rigney’s analogy, we might think we’ve got one foot on solid ground and one foot in the quicksand, but we don’t. Our other foot is in a different pool of quicksand, and in our mistaken confidence we dig everyone deeper into the morass. This happens all the time in conversations about race and abuse. I’ve been guilty of it myself. But becoming empathetic does not mean that we forsake the search for truth. In fact, it can often empower us and motivate us to seek greater knowledge and insight. It means, however, that we shouldn’t prioritize our fallible and frequently-mistaken perception of the truth over the humanity and experience of the person before us.Even if we’re dealing with something as simple as “vaccines work,” or “a vaccine likely would have saved his life,” the person who lacks empathy is often stunningly ignorant of another person’s heart or motivations or the full context of their lives. There is so much they don’t know. Second, as I noted above, I’ve found that empathy is almost always warped by tribalism and partisanship. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that conversations around the “sin of empathy” have arisen from the more self-described “conservative” quarters of religious America, and the alarms have been raised about empathy in connection with causes that are often perceived as “progressive.”The instant the tables are turned, however, there is a great call for empathy. Walk a mile in our shoes. White Evangelicals, for example, are disproportionately likely to be anti-mask and anti-vaccine in the midst of a deadly pandemic. “But you have to understand us,” we cry. “There are reasons for these beliefs, and there is great goodness in the church.”I also see a tremendous hardness of heart in parts of the left as well. I began this essay with the example most likely to trigger rage and contempt from others, even in the face of great suffering. No one can deny the venom spilled out on the dead and dying. Entire lives are remembered only for their final, fatal mistake. Third, and most importantly, Christians of all people should understand the ultimate empathy of the incarnation itself. As the book of Hebrews declares, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.” In Philippians, Paul says, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!”The Son of God himself dove into the quicksand. He experienced it all. Birth and death. Hunger and temptation. Friendship and betrayal, and it culminated in oppression and torture. He can empathize with the worst human experience. Here’s the critical thing: He did not wait for any of us to be worthy of his empathy. He didn’t wait for us to change, to wave the white flag of surrender on our obstinance and defiance. Read Paul again, this time in Romans, “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Christ’s version of empathy doesn’t excuse our sin, but it certainly did not wait for our virtue. Our public discourse is full of religious zeal, but it’s spiritually impoverished. People who need grace receive condemnation. Genuine friendship is replaced by factional alliances. And too many of us withhold empathy so that we can be sure that you receive our judgment.Yet each of us has a desperate desire, a need, for people not just to understand us, but to know us, in full. You can see this when people are objects of hatred, even when they do things wrong. There is a cry from the heart that says, “There is more to me than the thing you hate.”Last week I went to Immanuel Nashville to watch a discussion between Russell Moore and Beth Moore (no relation), perhaps the two most prominent Southern Baptists to leave the denomination. They’d been subjected to an immense amount of cruelty as they dissented from the Christian embrace of Trump, battled white nationalism, and sought to expose sexual abuse in the church.The conversation, however, was free of rancor and bitterness. And there’s one part that stands out. It’s directly relevant to this essay today. A member of the audience asked a question on so many lips. “How,” they asked, “do we have difficult conversations with a person we believe has dangerous ideas?” Russell responded with a fascinating thought, one that requires empathy. Before the talk, he said, rehearse the conversation with a friend or a spouse, except play the role of the person you believe is wrong. Do your best to inhabit their perspective and advocate their idea. Nothing about this concept requires rationalizing or excusing acts that are truly wrong. Did Christ rationalize or excuse sin? But empathy ultimately doesn’t pontificate, it participates—it participates in your neighbor’s life, and it doesn’t condition your participation on your neighbor’s perfection. In short, don’t wait for a person to be right before you dive into their life with sacrificial love.One more thing …During the conversation about empathy, I was reminded of this famous short video about empathy by Brené Brown. I think it’s outstanding, but it’s also received Christian critiques. I’d love to hear your thoughts:One last thing …I’m going to exercise author’s privilege and just this once end with a sermon instead of a song. It’s Tim Keller’s sermon the first Sunday after 9/11, and it’s magnificent. If you have a few spare moments, I recommend listening. It will give you hope:

This pandemic will eventually be over, and the Delta surge—in which most of those not yet vaccinated against the coronavirus could become infected—may well be America’s last destructive wave. But just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us.In our large, open, and globally connected society, getting to zero COVID, the goal that Australia and New Zealand have pursued, is as politically unrealistic as it is biologically implausible. Americans are mostly done with the onerous shutdowns that such a goal would require. The virus has now spread so widely in the world that even tight, long-lasting limits on Americans’ movement—restrictions far beyond what we would tolerate—could not stamp it out entirely. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 will become an endemic virus, settling alongside the other four strains of coronaviruses that circulate widely among us.But while the other four coronaviruses typically cause little more than the common cold, SARS-CoV-2 is likely to remain a more serious threat even after this pandemic wanes, even after the virus becomes primarily a seasonal pathogen, even after drugs and vaccination limit the damage it does. The virus will become a persistent menace at least on par with the yearly flu—a threat that, though seemingly routine, strains health-care systems, businesses, and schools every winter. With SARS-CoV-2 mingling alongside influenza—and causing a comparable level of death and disease—the harm to public health and economic productivity will be too great for society to simply shrug off. The dual viral threat will compel better defenses. We won’t have a choice.[Read: The coronavirus is here forever. Here’s how we live with it.]The biggest challenge in confronting the coronavirus’s continual threat will be adapting our work and leisure activities to turn an omnipresent virus into a manageable risk—and seeing whether enough Americans can reach a political consensus on the practical and cultural changes that this will require.The current pandemic has become a source of political division, and decisions about how to handle it have been evaluated through that prism. State-by-state differences in pandemic policy, and in residents’ openness to vaccination, have produced regional variations in the scope of the epidemic. But the political coloring of disease-fighting precautions may fade as COVID-19 becomes a forever problem, and as the need for a sustainable long-term plan to address the continued threat becomes evident.The impact on productivity alone will demand that schools and businesses strengthen their defenses against respiratory viruses. A 2018 study in the journal Vaccine estimated that the economic cost of flu tops $11 billion a year, including the indirect costs from lost productivity. That figure may be conservative; other models have put the total burden as high as $87 billion. Past surveys have estimated the mean number of workdays lost from flu to be 3.7 to 5.9 days per diagnosed episode. Meanwhile, the cumulative annual impact from severe colds and other non-influenza viral respiratory infections stands at about $40 billion.Reducing these threats starts with more aggressive efforts to get people vaccinated for flu and COVID alike. Work-related vaccination mandates for both diseases will become more common. (By way of disclosure, I should note that I serve on Pfizer’s board of directors.) For people in industries where telecommuting is possible, the calculus around going to work in person could also change. During peak flu and COVID season, businesses could encourage telework to reduce density in their offices. Conferences may be shifted to months when respiratory pathogens are less prevalent. Businesses will make wider use of videoconferencing to avoid crowded conference rooms, even holding Zoom meetings inside the office while people stay at their own desk.In the past, responsible businesses have encouraged people to stay home if they’re not feeling well. That should be extended to include people with a sick family member and those awaiting a firm diagnosis. Discouraging people from toughing out a cold at work should make the office safer from large outbreaks of respiratory viruses. We need to have workplace policies that insulate people from the financial impact of these prudent health-care practices, as well.[Read: Expect the unexpected from the Delta variant]Buildings will also undergo renovations to improve airflow and filtration in order to reduce the spread of aerosols. Modern buildings are sealed tight, sometimes as part of an attempt to make them greener. Now they should go blue—improving airflow and air quality by adding hospital-grade air-handling and -filtration systems.Medical practice will also change. Past work with other viral diseases suggests that we can successfully make drugs to combat the basic features that SARS-CoV-2 uses to reproduce and spread. If these efforts are any guide, we’ll eventually have an antiviral drug that can be taken by mouth when people are first diagnosed with COVID, to reduce symptoms or prevent progression to severe disease. The same drug might be used to prevent infection if you’ve been in close contact with someone who is sick.As with Tamiflu, an antiviral drug for influenza, drugs for COVID will reduce but not eliminate its risk. A key to controlling spread, and seeking timely care, will be prompt diagnosis. Home screening with tests that can differentiate flu from COVID will be routine. Regulators, who for years discouraged home diagnosis of infectious diseases with self-administered tests, now support this approach. Patients will self-diagnose at home and consult doctors through virtual visits. Personal hygiene will also change. During the winter months, when the spread of respiratory pathogens peaks, voluntary mask use inside public spaces will become more common—and, in some parts of the country, a cultural norm.These tactics will only partially interrupt a virus like SARS-CoV-2, which spreads before people have symptoms and can disperse long distances in poorly ventilated spaces. But they could have a greater impact on the spread of a virus like influenza, reducing the impact of flu enough that the cumulative threat from these two pathogens becomes a burden more comparable to that of a bad flu season like the winter of 2018.We’re not going to annihilate COVID. Instead, our goal must be to weaken its punch so that it becomes a risk we can adapt to. The key measure should be the burden of serious disease. Eventually, many of us are likely to get infected with SARS-CoV-2. For most of us, the hope should be that we manifest nothing more than a mild infection and are protected through vaccines. Once a shot becomes available for children under the age of 12, it will reduce some of the understandable anxiety that parents harbor about bringing the infection into their home and to their young children. Many concerns about in-person activities in the workplace may ease as well.As we transition from the pandemic to the endemic phase of this virus, no bright line divides these two states. We’ll straddle the two phases through this coming winter. Our progress will feel uncertain and disorderly because people will arrive at different estimates about how much of a threat COVID poses to them personally, and will feel different levels of resolve about how aggressively our society should try to confront it. Yet more widespread adoption of vaccines will provide Americans with growing confidence to take risks, and lower disease prevalence once the Delta wave has passed will reduce many Americans’ sense of pervasive danger.During the shift from a pandemic emergency to an endemic hazard, fights over how forcefully we deal with COVID’s acute risk will morph into debates over how we adjust society to reduce the virus’s persistent perils. The twin burden of flu and COVID is going to compel more collective action. We’ve been far too complacent about the seasonal flu, allowing it to sicken and kill too many people each year. With a second serious disease in the picture, we’re going to be forced to take action.

Rachel Fraser is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and an expert in feminism and the philosophy of knowledge. In her work, she thinks through how our social identities might help to shape how we see the world—and how that diverges from popular notions according to which the oppressed have special political knowledge unavailable to everyone else. In this week’s conversation, Rachel Fraser and Yascha Mounk discuss how our identities shape our perception of the world, whether the oppressed have greater insight into the political world, and to what extent it is possible to communicate our experiences to members of other groups.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You do really important work in epistemology, and I have a set of questions about “standpoint epistemology.” As I understand it, there’s a way of thinking where one says, “Look, I have a set of experiences [as a man], you have a set of experiences as a woman that is different, somebody who's black may have a set of experiences that is different from those that I have, [and so on].” [But] in particular, there are some important pieces of knowledge about oppression and injustice that members of oppressed minority groups tend to have. And because they know something about the world that I don't, and because it is very hard—perhaps impossible—for them to communicate the nature of those experiences perfectly to somebody who hasn't experienced them, this means that they have a greater insight into what should be done. And if we aim to create a just society, we should, in certain contexts at least, defer [...] to how they think about the world. I have two questions. First of all, does that seem like a sensible description of part of the discourse today? [Second,] do you think that's a fair description of how some people are talking about politics now? Rachel Fraser: That's really helpful. [...] On your first question, [t]hat seems absolutely right. I think something like that picture is endorsed, broadly speaking, by a lot of people on the left. And on the second question, the question of which aspects of the picture seem right and which seem wrong, I suppose I'm going to give an irritating philosopher's answer.What you described is a kind of package or cluster of views, [...] almost all of [which] could be given an articulation where they're making a relatively weak [and] plausible claim. But they could also be processified slightly differently, so as to make a much stronger claim. I find [those claims] extremely plausible when they're processified in a relatively weak or careful way, and almost all of them I find implausible when they're given a much stronger articulation. And I think this is one of the problems in political discourse: very often there's a kind of slippage, whether in good faith or bad faith. It can [become] a sort of weaponized ambiguity between which of the various theses are being discussed. Mounk: One of the things that makes this plausible is that you can apply this to men versus women, but also [categories such as] New York residents versus London residents; clearly, people who live in New York have access to [different] knowledge than people who live in London.Fraser: Right. One sort of really interesting case, I think, is the difference between rural and non-rural residents. This is clearly a divide which does have political resonance, especially in the US context. But it’s a divide [that] people on the left are often inclined to overlook—the kind of distinctive experiences of poverty faced by rural populations.[...] [But] one might try to come up with some kind of experiential core of womanhood, some kind of experience that all women share, that no men share. You're going to be in a position where you're hunting around for some kind of shared core of womanhood, [...] something like motherhood, [or] maybe certain kinds of reproductive labor or housework, [or] fear of sexual assault. I think nobody takes these kinds of claims seriously anymore. Nobody takes seriously the idea that there's some kind of experiential core that all women have and no men have—largely, actually, because of pressures internal to feminism. People take very, very seriously the idea that black women are going to have very different experiences from white women, [and that] working-class women are going to have very different experiences from middle-class women. And so if you want to do any kind of justice at all [...] then you're going to have to abandon [the] simple idea that there's some kind of experiential core that all and only women have.Mounk: That's an interesting implication, in a way, of intersectionality. Because it basically means that you can keep dividing it further down. You might say, “Well, women don't have common experiences, but black women do.” But then within black women, you say, “Well, middle-class black women are going to have a very different experience than working-class black women and men, [and] queer, working-class, black women are going to have a different experience from straight, working-class, black women.”Fraser: I think that's right. I think it's also worth noting [that] if you actually look at the academic feminist literature, one thing that's very interesting is that people are vexed by this kind of intersectional insight [...], that we can't find this common experiential core. On the whole, the lesson that people draw from that is not [...] to keep subdividing the category, so that we can come up with some category like “middle class, disabled black women” who have a common experiential core. Rather, the lesson they tend to draw [...] is that we were hunting for something that was never actually an important thing to search for in the first place. [...] That wasn't a sensible project; it's not a politically valuable project. We need to locate the grounds of political solidarity elsewhere.Which I think, interestingly, is very much where you're coming from. I think you want to say [that] it's silly to think of political solidarity as requiring some common experiential core. [That’s] very interesting — that is broadly the consensus in the feminist literature that comes out of these attempts to reconcile certain kinds of standpoint epistemology with intersectional feminism. [...] But I don't think [that consensus] has really impacted [contemporary] political conversations.Mounk: [...] I think the second step in the political claim about standpoint epistemology has been to say [that] it's not just that the experiences of women are different from [those of] men, or black people’s different from [those of] white people. It's that, in general, people who are oppressed have a greater understanding of the world, and particularly a greater understanding of political injustices, and therefore, they are epistemically privileged.But of course, one of the hallmarks of being a member of an oppressed group is that there might be many groups [from] which you are excluded. [...] Do the oppressed have special knowledge, and in what ways are they actually excluded from relevant knowledge? Fraser: [...] I think epistemology is often taken up by people who want to adopt a kind of wholly vindicatory attitude. They want to say [that] the fruits of oppression are a kind of virtue, a kind of admirable illness. I think that's just not there in the intellectual tradition. There's a kind of naïveté to that perspective that is very difficult to actually find in the academic work. Removed parties to the debate are extremely—almost cripplingly, at times—conscious of the real epistemic injuries wrought by various forms of disadvantage.Mounk: That's interesting, because the academic consensus as you're presenting it is, on this point, nearly 180 degrees off from how this gets talked about. Even when you talk about the speeches of politicians so far as they touch on something like this topic, the natural assumption seems to be [that] obviously, the oppressed have deeper understanding and greater insight into the workings of injustice, whereas you're saying that the orthodoxy within the academic world [is to] say [that the] advantage, epistemologically, goes to the oppressor, not the oppressed.But perhaps there is a silver lining where there [are] a few forms of knowledge that [only] the oppressed themselves can have. Perhaps [...] it's actually possible to communicate those experiences in a way that makes it possible for us to form joint intentions and say, “Alright, we both think that an injustice is going on—you, because you've experienced it in some kind of first-person way; I, because I've listened to your account of those experiences—and we can sort of act together. [...] [So] is it communicable? Fraser: Philosophers draw this distinction between two different kinds of knowledge: propositional [versus] qualitative. [...] The philosopher Frank Jackson has this very famous [thought] experiment that's often called “Mary's Room.” There's this woman, Mary, who has been raised in an entirely black and white environment. She's been confined to this room in which everything is only black and white, but she's also a world expert on color. In her black and white room, she's read all the scientific literature on color. [She knows] the various wavelengths associated with different kinds of colors, how the eye functions—she knows all of these claims. But then Jackson asks us to imagine [that] one morning, Mary is freed from her room and shown a tomato for the first time. Jackson says, “Here's something that seems true: Mary learns something new about red when she leaves the room, but the idea is this new thing that she learns can't be any propositional knowledge about color, because she already knew all of that.” Rather, she acquires a new bit of experiential knowledge: she learns what it's like to see red. One thing that's very interesting, which is implicit in Jackson's presentation, is that nobody could have allowed Mary to know what it's like to see red until she had that experience for herself. That particular qualitative experience—Jackson is assuming tacitly—is not communicable, nobody could have written a book that would have allowed Mary to grasp what it's like to see red.Mounk: Presumably, the assumption is that propositional knowledge is the kind of knowledge [that] is communicable. Mary in her room, who's never seen color, can nevertheless acquire other propositional knowledge about color [through] scientific papers and so on. [...] I guess the implication of this to the topic at hand is, when you're thinking about something like political injustice and how to remedy it, how important is propositional knowledge versus that kind of qualitative, [experiential] knowledge?Fraser: I'm not really vexed politically by the question of whether experiential knowledge is communicable. I think the philosophical action is in the question of “To what extent does experiential knowledge really matter, and to what extent can we do the political work we want to do with propositional knowledge?” I think we can do a lot of work with propositional knowledge, and hence this whole [...] debate about the communicability of experiential knowledge is basically a sideshow and a red herring. Here's an example that I think makes this really vivid, [concerning] the politics of sex work: in particular, judgments about the adequacy of what's often called the “Nordic model” in sex work, where sex work is handled at the policy level by criminalizing the purchase, but not the selling, of sex. This is for many feminists, at least on the face of it, an appealing model. Lots of feminists are tempted by the idea that there's something objectionable about sex work, that it inflicts some kind of status-harm on women as a class, and thus, we should want to eradicate sex work. But on the other hand, most feminists—if they're any good as feminists at all—are committed to the idea that sex workers are an incredibly vulnerable population [and] frequently vilified and stigmatized, and that feminism should not be in the business of contributing to that stigmatization and vilification. And the Nordic model is supposed to be attractive because it suppresses sex work by suppressing demand, but it doesn't stigmatize or vilify sex workers, because the people it's criminalizing are the clients rather than the sellers.I think the Nordic model is an extremely bad model, and I've been persuaded of that by reading [work by] sex workers. There's this fantastic book, Revolting Prostitutes, written by two sex workers, and they talk about the Nordic model and its many failings. They say [that] this policy is going to raise the costs associated with the purchase of sex for men. It's going to suppress demand, and by suppressing demand, it's going to undermine sex workers’ negotiating power. When there is high demand, there are lots of potential clients, and so you can reasonably screen [them]. You can take a look at some clients and think, “Okay, this guy looks really shady. This [other] guy looks a bit more respectable, a bit more like I'm going to be less at risk if I work with this guy.” So you have more bargaining power [and] more choice. Whereas if demand is suppressed sex workers, because most sex workers are in sex work because they need money to survive, are going to be less able to be choosy about which clients they work with, and thus, they're going to be more vulnerable to violence. You're safer as a sex worker if you're working in an area where lots of people are around. [...] But the systematic fact of the Nordic model is that clients become very, very invested in accessing remote areas, and that makes sex workers more vulnerable to violence. [...] The reason that sex workers [Juno] Mac and [Molly] Smith, who wrote Revolting Prostitutes, are able to come up with these insights is because of their lived experience, which is very, very different from mine. They're using their lived experience to criticize a policy, but their critiques of that policy are completely graspable by someone without any of their lived experience. They're just some very general principles about supply and demand, about how bargaining power works, which underpin their excellent critiques of the Nordic model. These critiques of the Nordic model have systematically been missed by non-sex working feminists because they lack the relevant lived experience. [...] [But] the important thing is, here we have an example of a policy critique which is based on a very specific social experience, where it's very plausible that I'm never going to be able to grasp the experience of a vulnerable sex worker [...] but I didn't need to grasp that to know and understand, on the basis of sex workers’ testimony, that the Nordic model is a bad model. So, I think that's a really good example of why the role of experience in politics should not be overstated.Mounk: [...] I think it's true that black men in the United States have an experience of mistreatment by police or fear of police, that is on average superior to that of white people, in that it gives them politically relevant knowledge. I think that a lot of that knowledge can be communicated in propositional form; that actually, one of the great benefits of a lot of traditional forms of storytelling, and what I think of as liberal humanist cultural activity, is precisely to make it possible for us to put ourselves, at least to some extent, in the shoes of another. [...] It seems to me that when I hear, for example, about what it is like to live in a neighborhood that is over-policed, in which there is relentless stop and frisk, I can see from within my own set of values [...] why we should be fighting against that. And it seems to me that trying to build those commonalities of values [and] political intention is much more likely to succeed than the idea of “You're not gonna understand anyway. Just trust that I know more than you, and defer to me, and that's how we're somehow going to build a political coalition.” That doesn't seem nearly as realistic to me. How would you put the puzzle pieces together?Fraser: On this question of deference, the sense I'm getting is that you're broadly sympathetic towards standpoint-flavored claims, at least up until we get to this kind of deferential model of discourse, right? And that's where you [object]. I think [it’s] really interesting, the extent to which standpoint theorists agree with you. Patricia Hill Collins, for example, [is] one of the great standpoint theorists in the black feminist tradition. I'm just going to read [out] something she says, because I think it's very, very instructive when it comes to seeing the way in which standpoint epistemology in its vulgarized forms is [somewhat] regulative of actual political discourses, [and] how it diverges from the much more sophisticated and more attractive versions of the theory which permeate academic discourse: One implication of some uses of standpoint theory is that the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them. [...] Although it is tempting to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes, and effects of oppression, this is not the case. Instead, those ideas that are validated as true by African-American women, African-American men, Latina lesbians, Asian-American women, Puerto Rican men, and other groups with distinctive standpoints, with each group using the epistemological approaches growing from its unique standpoint, thus become the most "objective" truths. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished.The rough idea that Patricia Hill Collins is getting at here, [is that] there's this potential way of reading standpoint epistemology where we say, “Well, what we need to know is, first of all, how oppressed someone is, and then assign them a credibility score based on that, and then organize political discourse so that someone is deferred to, the higher their oppression score is.” Patricia Hill Collins is saying this is completely the wrong way to think about things. Rather, she wants to adopt a much more pluralist discursive model of political solidarity, where what you have is people with very different experiences, who with grace and compassion, rather than a kind of hostility, test each other's claims. And then they use that process of testing claims against each other to arrive at a consensus which is acceptable to all. One of the things that is incredibly striking about this is just how similar it is to things that John Stuart Mill says in his defense of free speech. The idea is that it is precisely by testing ideas against competing viewpoints that you will arrive at the most attractive and most epistemically respectable picture of things. Obviously, there are differences between what Patricia Hill Collins thinks and what John Stuart Mill thinks. But I do think it's a striking parallel and drawing that parallel is an extremely helpful corrective to certain ways of thinking about standpoint epistemology, where people assume we can draw a very straight line from the standpoint tradition to this kind of deferential epistemology that I think that you find, for good reason, unappealing.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: http://www.persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

In Joe Biden’s keynote speech following the bloody debacle at Kabul airport, the American president presented a sober vision of the country’s new foreign policy realities that both liberals and conservatives seem loath to accept: that the age of remoulding the world in America’s image is over; that bloody and failing land wars in the depths of Asia were a luxury America could no longer afford; and that all along, the creeping, ever-expanding and ever-costlier mission had been a gigantic trap.
As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.
Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.
In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:
“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”
Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”
But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”
More from this seriesWe need to talk about 9/11By Lionel Shriver
This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:
“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”
Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”
Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”
In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”
More from this seriesThe theatre of terrorBy Simon Cottee
This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”
Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.
As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.
Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”
No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.
All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.
More from this seriesA French lesson for Blair and BushBy Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.
Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”
But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”
But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.
Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.
For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”
More from this seriesHow the neocons got away with itBy Razib Khan
So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?
Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.
Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.
It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.
The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

(Photograph by Kent Nishimura /Los Angeles Times/Getty Images.)Dear Reader (including whichever of you released a dazzle of zebras in Maryland),Because one of the core purposes of the internet is to reveal that nobody actually said any of the things they’re famous for saying, I have no idea if Alice Roosevelt Longworth ever said, “If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me.”Still, if you don’t have anything nice to say about any of these people right now, come sit by me.Let’s start with President Biden’s speech yesterday.It wasn’t good. But I’m not sure whether it will matter that it wasn’t good—which doesn’t reflect well on a lot of Americans who really don’t much care about violations of constitutional or presidential norms as long as they like the results.  When I say his speech wasn’t good, I mean that firstly on the most basic level, although there are—like an overstuffed tuna and turkey sub from Subway left on your dashboard in the hot sun—many layers to its ungoodness.Biden isn’t a robotic politician in the way, say,  Al Gore was. (Yeah, yeah, I know Gore is still alive—his battery has a very long half-life—but he’s not a politician anymore.) But Biden has a robot-like malfunction. Sticking with this metaphor beyond all reason, every politician has a menu of subroutines or modes available to them. Caring, angry, lighthearted, fatherly—or motherly—etc. Bill Clinton had the most range of any politician in my lifetime. Recall how, at Ron Brown’s funeral, he was laughing until he realized he was on camera and immediately started crying. Biden never had that kind of range, although he was better than most. But he’s lost the ability to plug-and-play the right emotion—and sustain it—in the right moment. He can sound angry when he should be mournful, mournful when he should be stern, and stern when he should be compassionate, sometimes all in the same paragraph. You can see it best when his eyes lock back on the teleprompter because he’s gotten distracted. When he delivers a speech, he sometimes gets lost and, like someone missing a step on the stairs in the dark, he grabs hold of the text like it’s a railing. And while he gets a firmer hold on the text, he often loses the context and blurts out the wrong intonation or emphasis. It’s like an actor who’s given the wrong motivation by a director. The words on the script are, “I love you,” but the inflection is, “I’m gonna put my thumb in your eye!”Then there’s the politics and policy. Biden and his subalterns said they wouldn’t mandate vaccinations. The reasons covered the waterfront. “That's not the role of the federal government,” Jen Psaki said when asked about mandates. “That’s the role that institutions, private-sector entities, and others, may take.” When CDC Director Rochelle Walensky floated the idea that the administration was looking into federal mandates, the administration forced her to retract the comment and declare, “There will be no nationwide mandate.”Hard-hearted cynics might say that Biden reversed course to change the subject from the debacle in Afghanistan and his sagging poll numbers, particularly as we head into the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.Well, the hard-hearted cynics are right.I’m sure there are other motivations at play. Human beings rarely admit to themselves that cynical self-interest is their only reason for doing something. We like to gussy up our baser instincts with high-minded rationalizations. And there are plenty of such rationalizations available. More than 1,000 people are dying every day. The economy is sputtering in the face of the Delta variant. Getting people vaccinated is in the public interest.But I think I’m right in no small part because the plan Biden put forward is clearly a disjointed mess. Just as a matter of logic, if the administration had always been planning to do this, they wouldn’t have insisted otherwise. And if they had always been planning to do this, they would have had a better plan—and a better argument.Instead, we got a bizarre word salad—all the more bizarre because it was written out beforehand. After—correctly!—pointing out that the vaccines do a good job protecting people from COVID and a fantastic job preventing hospitalization and death, Biden said, “The bottom line: We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.”Huh? Which brings me to the mandate plan itself. Some of the stuff is fine by me, assuming it passes legal muster. Ensuring that health care workers are vaccinated is good policy—again, if lawfully executed.The mandate on private businesses, however,  is obviously much more problematic. Ilya Shapiro has a good explainer of some of the issues it raises. Andy McCarthy argues that it’s flatly unconstitutional:There is no general federal health-care power. The constitutional exhortation for Congress to “provide for ... the general Welfare of the United States” (art. I, sec. 8) is not an open-ended authorization. Ours is a federalist system, the states presumptively govern their internal affairs, and Congress’s power to provide for the general welfare is cabined by its enumerated powers.Andy’s one of my favorite law dudes—and people!—but I’m not entirely convinced this is true. In 1796, during the Washington administration, Congress passed a federal quarantine law in response to yellow fever. In 1824, the Supreme Court in Gibbons v. Ogden recognized the police powers of the state to compel isolation and quarantine “to provide for the health of its citizens.”I don’t see how federally mandated quarantines are meaningfully different from federally mandated vaccinations. There are two important caveats, though. First, the quarantine measures imposed by the feds back then were grounded in the Commerce Clause—a lot of it had to do with the role shipping played in spreading disease. Second, and more importantly, in 1796 Congress passed a law. Joe Biden is invoking his caesarian authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and its “Emergency Temporary Standard” (ETS).As Walter Olson—another great law dude—notes, ETS orders far less grandiose than this are frequently blocked by courts. For an ETS to pass, the OSHA website says “OSHA must determine that workers are in grave danger” and that an emergency standard “is needed to protect them.”But by Biden’s own words, vaccinated workers are not in danger—never mind grave danger—from the unvaccinated.More importantly, who in their right mind thinks OSHA should have this power?It kind of reminds me of the X-Files movie—which was a harbinger of a lot of the paranoia we see all around us today. In it, a sinister cabal aiming to pave the way for an alien takeover of the planet uses the pretext of a virus in Texas to suspend the Constitution via FEMA. The amazing thing is that using OSHA is even more ridiculous. I’ll get to right-wing paranoia in a second, but let’s cut to the chase with what Biden is doing. He’s playing on left-wing paranoia. I think John Podhoretz gets it right: “This speech was a Rube Goldberg message aimed at neurotic vaccinated people. Biden was saying that they shouldn’t worry ... but if they’re worried, their worries are justified.”This was the meat of the dog whistle in Biden’s condescending swipe: “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.” He likes to say this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”—and he’s right. But he’s sending the signal here that he is the president of the vaccinated. His promise to steamroll governors who don’t do his bidding—“If these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way”—didn’t mention Greg Abbott or Ron DeSantis. But you know this anti-constitutional boob bait was crafted entirely to troll them.  The bell trolls for thee.Let’s move on. I, too, am impatient. At this point, for the average person, there is no rational reason to refuse vaccination. Vaccines work. They’re safe. More Americans have died from COVID than in the Civil War. The economic, social, and psychological toll is now beyond incalculable and the pandemic isn’t close to being over globally. And a whole industry of asininity has sprung up around telling people it’s unpatriotic and idiotic to get vaccinated. Lecture me all you want about how ivermectin is a wonderful drug—stipulated counselor! But the only reason we’re even talking about it is because politicians and media personalities—most of whom are surely vaccinated themselves—want to monetize telling other people they’re right to refuse vaccination. That’s grotesque.There’s a bizarre tautology that’s ensorcelled people: Biden is a tyrant. Wanting people to get vaccinated is therefore tyrannical. Therefore I will not get vaccinated because vaccination is part of his tyrannical agenda. The only problem with this own-the-libs nonsense is that it’s, well, nonsense. Wanting people to get vaccinated isn’t tyranny. It’s not liberal fascism, contrary to what a thousand bandersnatches keep yipping at me. It’s basic civics and common sense. When anti-vaxxers were mostly left-wing, many of the same people replacing the boot with a syringe in the Gadsden flag had a jolly old time making fun of this sort of thing. It’s like if Biden gave an address saying, “We will do everything we can to keep people from eating Tide pods,” there’d be a run on Tide pods.And that’s what’s so infuriating about all of this. Biden is in a very bad place of his own making. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he has handed Afghanistan to the Taliban. Not some “new” Taliban, but literally the same Taliban we went to war with two decades ago. His agenda in Congress has stalled, perhaps fatally, because he foolishly listened to people who said he could be a new FDR. The problems with the economy and the pandemic aren’t all of his making, to be sure. But his failures to live up to his rhetoric are his own. Cornered, he is trying to turn the page. That’s why he’s not speaking tomorrow—the last thing he wants to do is shine a light on what he has done.And so he has maneuvered into a strategy that he thinks will be win-win. Much like his unconstitutional gambit on the eviction ban, he’s stretching the law on the assumption that he can buy himself time before the courts trim his sails. In the meantime, the vaccination rate will go up, and the vaccinated electorate—or a sizable chunk of it—will reward him in the polls. That’s the first prong, and it relies on the second: He needs to elicit a wave of outrage from the right. I’m not saying outrage is unreasonable, but he is counting on the media to shine a light on the most unreasonable actors to play to type. And you know they will. There is a Baptists-and-bootleggers codependency at work here. When he trolls the right, many—or at least enough—figures on it will react precisely the way he wants. It’s a strategy we’ve seen before. FDR was a master at it. Bill Clinton brilliantly—and cynically—used the Oklahoma City bombing as a way to demonize conservative talk radio, and conservative talk radio was only too happy to be demonized.You know who’s most ecstatic about Biden’s gambit? People like Marjorie Taylor Greene, J.D. Vance, and those who think Twitter is the real world.Even those who offer reasonable criticism—and there are many, including, I think, myself—are still doing what he wants: Changing the subject.Various & SundryCanine update: First, the sad news. Pippa’s wrist (ankle?) has gotten much worse. The vet told us that surgery would probably be necessary one day, and it looks like that day is upon us. She gets very limpy and it makes it hard to take her for a walk of any length. But because she’s still full of spanielly silliness, the lack of exercise causes her to eventually get spazzy and she makes the injury worse. We have a brace for her but she hates it, and will often remove it herself unless we duct tape it. Today we let her go on the big midday walk for the first time in a couple of days and she was downright giddy about it. Other than that, everything is good with the beasts. Gracie’s vet visit went well. She hasn’t lost weight, which appears to be a good thing because she has kidney trouble. Zoë is concerned about Pip, but she also likes getting a little quality one-on-one time with me. And Zoë is extremely excited about the news that zebras are on the loose in the area. Chasing a zebra has been on her bucket list for years. Also, I want to give a shout out to Tripp Whitbeck for this inspired idea. I’m going to get a poster of this.ICYMIOur age of distractionIt’s a hell of a townWhat’s the matter with Texas?Reflections on 9/11The Dispatch Podcast on 9/11 and Biden’s grim summerMeet the new boss… The worst is still yet to comeAnd now, the weird stuffBa dum tsh!It should’ve been Winnie the PoohHistory’s greatest monsterStart spreadin’ the news I guess you’d better go wake him up…Everything’s gone greenUm… 

My attitude toward vaccine reluctance has gone through something like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial (“They’ll come around”), bewilderment (“How could people believe so much nonsense?”), frustration (“Seriously, what are these people thinking?”), anger (“It’s an epidemic of idiocy!”), and finally, acceptance (“Calm down, take a breath, this is complicated”).Acceptance does not mean moral acceptance. Nothing in this column suggests that people who choose to endanger themselves, their families, and their communities are doing something admirable. In a sober, sane, science-minded, non-polarized, high-trust, data-driven country, everyone without a compelling medical or religious reason would be rushing to take the jab. In that country, herd immunity—when resistance is so prevalent that the virus can’t spread—would now be in view, or even reached already.But that is not the country we inhabit. The percentage of eligible Americans who are vaccinated, after the initial surge in the spring, is creeping upward painfully slowly, with only a bare majority of the total population fully protected. That puts the U.S. in the lower half of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and well short of ending the pandemic.Instead, the country we inhabit is a complicated place, where all kinds of people have all kinds of reasons to duck the jab. Yes, some are anti-vaxxers and MAGA ideologues, people who see vaccines as poisonous injections of political correctness. That group would include the man who, from his hospital bed in a COVID-19 ward, told a reporter that if he could do it over again and avoid severe pneumonia, he would still reject the vaccine to defend his freedom.Many others, though, are members of hard-to-reach communities. Or have trouble arranging time off work. Or have families or bosses who disapprove. Or remember how marginalized communities have been abused in the name of public health. Or believe they are too young to get seriously ill. Or still aren’t convinced of the vaccine’s safety. Or just haven’t gotten around to it. “Acceptance” means meeting these people where they are and figuring out what works.The FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine seems likely to help. A growing number of mandates by employers, universities, and government agencies will also help. Yet, unaccountably, one potent arrow remains in the quiver.Time to use it. Pay people to get vaccinated.Not half-heartedly, whimsically, or inanely, with a lottery ticket (in various places), or a $50 prepaid shopping card “while supplies last” (North Carolina), or $20 credit toward a hunting license (Arkansas), or—with no disrespect to Thin Mints—a box of Girl Scout cookies (Indiana). Do it generously, in a way that shows serious social appreciation and respect. Do it universally, including people who already got themselves vaccinated because it was the right thing to do. And do it smartly, incentivizing people to recruit friends and family to the cause.Last year, in August, my Brookings colleague Robert Litan, a distinguished economist and lawyer who served in the Clinton administration, proposed just such a plan. It was generous. It was universal. It was smart. It was unheeded.Litan proposed a plan with three interlocking elements. First, he suggested an attention-getting, head-turning amount: $1,000—an order of magnitude larger than the $100 that President Joe Biden suggested in July. That kind of money would break through any number of excuses and doubts. (But more about that in a moment.)Second, pay not just latecomers but everyone who has been vaccinated, regardless of when. That is self-evidently fairer than stiffing people who got the shot early for all the right reasons. It also avoids perverse incentives to delay getting vaccinated in future pandemics. Biden didn’t endorse universal payments. But creating resentment and perverse incentives is a false economy.Third, cleverly, Litan proposed withholding part of the payment until a certain percentage of other people have also been vaccinated. You might get half your payment up front and the rest when your state or community reaches, say, an eligible vaccination rate of 80 percent. That gives individuals a personal stake in recruiting others and reaching herd immunity. In economists’ jargon, it incentivizes the production of a social good.Litan guesstimated his plan’s cost at about $275 billion. A large amount, surely, but small compared to the cost of the continued pandemic, and well in line with other pandemic relief measures.So why not? Two kinds of objections come up.One is practical. In the public-health world, a worry is that an offer of compensation might backfire by implying that the vaccine might be dangerous, or by putting vaccination on the footing of a financial transaction rather than a civic duty. According to Jessica Fishman of the University of Pennsylvania’s Message Effects Lab, there have been no controlled trials using actual dollars. Recent research, however, suggests that paying people to get jabbed does have a meaningful effect on their intentions. In March, a study found that compensation increased self-reported vaccination intentions by about 8 percentage points, with the highest gains—16 percentage points—among blacks.New research by Fishman, Litan, and three other colleagues is even more impressive: When offered compensation, unvaccinated people’s self-reported intention to take the jab rose by 20 to 25 percentage points. Moreover, $200 was enough to produce that effect. “It looks like a lot of people who haven’t been vaccinated aren’t diehards; they’re just apathetic and aren’t strongly opposed and just haven’t gotten around to it,” Fishman said. “For them, the financial reward is appealing and can increase their motivation.” In fact, the positive effect was even more pronounced among younger people and people with less education and lower incomes: exactly the populations policymakers have had trouble reaching with civic appeals.Still, resistance persists, partly because of moral qualms. Isn’t getting vaccinated a civic duty, something people should do voluntarily for the community? Do we really want to transactionalize the obligations of citizenship? And isn’t it sad that, in America in 2021, we might even need to?I see the objection, but America is what it is, and what it is includes its prickly and sometimes irrational Jacksonian streak. Americans’ cultural libertarianism and suspicion of authority are deep in our national DNA. Although they are unhelpful in a pandemic, they can be advantages in other contexts, and in any case we cannot wish them away.Nor should we brush aside the concerns of those who believe that, as Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, put it, refusing medical treatment is a fundamental right. However misguidedly in current circumstances, many people experience being injected with a drug as a profound intrusion, something no one should be coerced to do. The harder they are pushed, the more indignant they will feel. The offer of a substantial payment alters that calculus. It is not merely a cash transaction but also a gesture of respect: a public acknowledgment of the social benefit individuals provide by receiving the vaccine.Payment will help vaccination mandates go down easier—and it has become clear that mandates are necessary to break the epidemic. It is true that mandates are nothing new. But it’s also true that using sticks without carrots—as President Biden did in yesterday’s exasperated announcement of new mandates (“Our patience is wearing thin”)—is bound to stimulate resentment and resistance. Incentivizing compliance can increase uptake and reduce friction as mandates come into force.Congress is about to move a giant reconciliation bill with perhaps $3.5 trillion in new spending. It ought to include federal money and incentives to pilot serious compensation programs—preferably starting with Litan’s version—and then rapidly expand the ones that work. The country should have done this over a year ago. But it’s not too late.Jonathan Rauch is a columnist at Persuasion and the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.

The Good Death—Cancel Culture and the Logic of TortureCancellation is a public execution, during which a person is pilloried and destroyed. But while we have become used to the cycle of manufactured outrage that preludes every cancellation, the desperate public apologies, and the devastating consequences for the people whose lives are ruined, we are of…QuilletteChristophe Van Eecke‘The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality’—A ReviewIs a left-wing author allowed to believe in genetics? The question is only partially sarcastic: Doctrinaire progressives are inclined to cringe (at least for public consumption) at the idea that one’s DNA might drive real differences that shape our lives. Indeed, the whole concept is seen as a meansQuilletteRobert VerBruggenQuillette’s Best on Gender IdentityWhen Sons Become Daughters | Angus Fox Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6“Parents have been complaining about their kids’ lifestyle choices and political convictions since the dawn of time, of course. But rarely have such choices involved committing oneself to the possibility of sterility and a li…QuilletteQuilletteJessie Tu and the Fashionably Regressive Approach to ReadingAny person who produces art or literature, or who offers up anything at all for public consumption, must have a thick skin. Harsh reviews are as much a part of the writing life as days in front of a blank screen. But Jessie Tu’s recent article in the SydneyQuilletteNeil TullyThe Truth about AutogynephiliaIt was an “aha” moment, says Ray Blanchard. In the mid-1980s, the clinical psychologist was working at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, trying to work out what motivated gender-dysphoric men who wanted cross-sex hormones and surgery. And now he had met “Philip,” a patient whose case hi…QuilletteHelen JoyceWhy Culture Matters for Racial DisparitiesIn the 1980s, the National Basketball Association (NBA) experienced a revival in fan interest sparked by a hyped team rivalry between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, and by the personal rivalry between their two respective superstars, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Bird is white, Johns…QuilletteJonathan ChurchThe War on Porn: Cancel Culture on SteroidsThe recent decision by OnlyFans—one of the world’s biggest adult industry brands—to stop selling sexually explicit content took everyone by surprise. Social media reacted with amusement, many people suggesting (quite accurately) that this would be akin to KFC giving up chicken. OnlyFans cited pressu…QuilletteJerry BarnettPodcast #164: Comedian and Podcaster Jamie Kilstein on His COVID-Era StrugglesQuillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with Jamie Kilstein about the challenges he’s faced since his excommunication from California’s progressive entertainment circles.QuilletteQuillette

In 1846, the Danish physician Peter Ludvig Panum traveled to the Faroe Islands in search of measles. The rocky archipelago, which sits some 200 miles north of Scotland, had been slammed with an outbreak, and Panum was dispatched by his government to investigate. The trip predated the formal discovery of viruses and antibodies by several decades, but Panum still stumbled upon a beguiling immunological trend: Dozens of the islands’ eldest residents, who had survived another measles epidemic in 1781—65 years earlier—weren’t getting sick this time around. “Not one, as far as I could find out by careful inquiry,” he wrote in a treatise, “was attacked the second time.”Panum probably didn’t realize it then, but his observations helped spark the inklings of a notion that would survive his century, into the next, and the next: the promise of perfect immunity, a protection so comprehensive and absolute that it might even stave off measles for a lifetime. After measles vaccines were licensed in the 1960s, that expectation ballooned even further. Experts eventually came to describe the shot’s defenses as so strong and swift that the virus could be immediately purged from the body in nearly everyone who received it—stomping out not only the symptoms of measles, but the very possibility of the pathogen’s proliferation at all. To modern immunologists, the phenomenon is known as sterilizing immunity, the ability to “totally prevent infection,” Taia Wang, an immunologist at Stanford University, told me. The measles vaccine is still often held up as its paragon.No infection means no disease, no death, and no transmission, the absolute immunological trifecta. It’s why sterilizing immunity has often been framed as a “holy grail,” what researchers aim for when they’re designing their shots, says David Martinez, a vaccinologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But sterilizing immunity also has been a source of trouble. Some people hoped the COVID-19 vaccines could achieve sterilizing immunity, especially after reports in the winter and spring trumpeted the jabs’ surprising power at preventing infections—enough that the CDC told vaccinated people they could shed their masks in May. Then sterilizing immunity came back to bite us, when breakthrough infections began to pop up among the immunized, prompting fear and confusion among those who’d been certain that the vaccines alone could quash the coronavirus’s spread.COVID-19 vaccines were never going to give us sterilizing immunity; it’s possible they never will. But the reason isn’t just their design, or the wily nature of the virus, or heavy and frequent exposures, though those factors all play a role. It’s that sterilizing immunity itself might be a biological myth.The classic tale of sterilizing immunity unfolds something like this: A pathogen attempts to infiltrate a body; antibodies, lurking in the vicinity thanks to vaccination or a previous infection, instantly zap it out of existence, so speedily that the microbe can’t even reproduce. No symptoms manifest, and most of the body’s immune cells never get involved, a bit like an intruder smacking up against an electric fence around a building, leaving the security guards inside none the wiser.This is a very neat story. And it is “almost impossible to prove,” Mark Slifka, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Oregon Health & Science University, told me. To show sterilizing immunity, researchers have to demonstrate that an infection never occurred—a big ask, considering that microbiologists can’t even agree on what an infection actually is. An onslaught of pathogens ravaging the airway or gut certainly counts. But according to some experts, so does a single viral particle commencing the process of copying itself inside a cell. This is further muddled by the fact that many pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, can set up shop inside their hosts without causing a single symptom. There is, and always has been, a disconnect between infection and disease.One way to check for infection is to look for the pathogen itself, by, say, trying to extract it from a human or animal sample and getting it to grow in a lab, or scouring swabs for its genetic material. But not all bugs are amenable to replicating in a dish, and the genetic approach has sensitivity limits. Scientists also have the option of using bodily reactions to a microbe as a readout—if a person’s immune cells, for example, produce more antibodies, secrete alarm molecules, or rush to the site of infection. But many types of immune responses exist, and a lot of them are transient or extremely difficult to measure without invasive procedures. Even the most precise methods could miss the mark if deployed at the wrong time or in the wrong place.That technical coarseness might help explain why several historical vaccines have been assumed to be sterilizing. With measles, for instance, scientists initially lacked the tests needed to show them otherwise, Diane Griffin, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. When virtually no one fell ill after an inoculation campaign, researchers figured that infections had evaporated as well. Now, however, techniques are far more powerful, giving researchers the ability to zero in on even tiny blips of infection. Post-vaccination measles infections, though still uncommon, are much more “regularly observed” than they were once believed to be, Griffin said.As detection tools improve, each data point further erodes the mythos of sterilization. With enough scrutiny, the experts I spoke with told me that similar illusions can probably be shattered against supposedly “sterilizing” shots that guard against other pathogens, including poxviruses such as smallpox, the bacteria that cause meningitis, and the parasites that cause malaria. “I think it’s literally chasing rainbows,” Slifka said. “The closer you get, the sooner you realize it’s not there.”To be clear, many pathogens do regularly get knocked out by the immune system. Some isolated incidents may even be “sterilizing”—for example, when just a couple viral particles bop into someone’s nose, and immediately get clobbered by a glut of antibodies, or even the fast-acting cells of the innate immune system, which are always on patrol. With the right ratio of pathogen to antibody, “it’s achievable,” Stephanie Langel, an immunologist at Duke University, told me. But that’s not the same thing as observing long-term immunity that consistently obliterates the same bug over and over, across populations of people—the way that the term sterilizing immunity is often leveraged.Perhaps it’s more useful, Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me, to understand the ideal of sterilizing immunity as just that—an ideal, rather than a practical goal, like the unattainable end of an asymptote. Some vaccines certainly sit very far along this curve, including the HPV vaccine, which prevents infectious cervical cancer “essentially 100 percent” of the time, Bryce Chackerian, a vaccinologist at the University of New Mexico, told me. John Schiller, who helped invent the HPV vaccine, points out that even very low antibody levels are enough to obliterate the virus past detection, and vaccinated people seem to maintain these defenses for years. But he and Chackerian still admit that confirming the strictest case of sterilization may not be possible. “Have we absolutely shown sterilizing immunity?” Chackerian said. “We haven’t.”Eventually, all discussions about sterilizing immunity become nerdy quibbles over semantics. Clearly, not every infection is clinically meaningful, or even logistically detectable, given the limits of our technology—nor do they need to be, if there’s no sickness or transmission. (A koan for pandemic times: If a microbe silently and inconsequentially copies itself in a tissue, and the body doesn’t notice, did it actually infect?) There is, for every pathogen, a threshold at which an infection becomes problematic; all the immune system has to do is suppress its rise below this line to keep someone safe.But that might be exactly the point. Say that sterilizing immunity is impossible, that our immune systems cannot, in fact, be trained to achieve perfection. Then it’s neither a surprise nor a shortcoming that COVID-19 vaccines, or other vaccines, don’t manage it: An inoculation that guards marvelously well against disease—offering as much protection as it can—can still end an outbreak. Life would certainly be easier if vaccines offered invincible armor, with pathogens simply ricocheting off. But they don’t, and assuming or expecting them to manage that can be dangerous. The dubiousness of sterilizing immunity is a reminder that just about any immune response can be overwhelmed, if exposures are heavy and frequent enough, Grad told me. The best we can all hope for is functional immunity, more like a flame retardant than a firewall, that still keeps bad burns at bay.That’s the effect our COVID-19 vaccines are delivering in spades. Yes, immunized people can get sick; a few of them might even end up in the hospital, or die from their viral encounter. But vaccines substantially slash those chances by making hosts inhospitable. Breakthroughs of any severity remain uncommon, and when they do happen, they tend to be milder and shorter; people carry less of the virus, and seem less likely to pass it on to others. Even silent infections seem to be rarer among the inoculated—a sign that immunized bodies are meeting the virus in near-full force. (Langel points out that there’s even a potential silver lining to non-sterilizing immunity: Low-level infections, suppressed by vaccination, might occasionally remind the immune system of an ongoing threat, like a crude booster.)For most of vaccination history, humans have been guided by stopping sickness, and that’s been enough. The smallpox vaccine wasn’t sterilizing; it still helped us eradicate a pathogen. Even measles, a virus that’s much more contagious than SARS-CoV-2, can offer an optimistic example. Some people do end up getting infected after vaccination. But the vaccine has, in the decades since its premiere, largely driven measles into the ground in the United States, apart from recent outbreaks largely linked to low immunization rates. And the few immunized people who do fall ill tend to get what’s called “modified” measles, which isn’t “as bad as usual,” Griffin told me.“Measles vaccine is not perfect,” Elena Conis, a measles historian at UC Berkeley, told me. No vaccine is. But that doesn’t make a shot “useless,” Conis said. “The truth is somewhere in between.”Our future with SARS-CoV-2, then, will be more about domesticating the virus than eliminating it. With widespread vaccination, many of us will still be exposed, maybe even temporarily colonized, but it won’t often be a big deal. Most of the time, we might not even notice. Positive tests, too, may be less alarming: In the absence of symptoms, detecting hunks of virus might simply indicate that immune cells have squashed the pathogen, leaving only debris behind. The virus will become less of a pathogen, and more of a passenger—one that keeps the defensive wheels turning, for the short time that it’s there.

There are many things we still do not know about the origins of this pandemic — including the central issue of whether it began with natural spillover from animals or some kind of laboratory incident. But we do know one thing now beyond debate: speculative “gain-of-function” experiments on mutant bat viruses were taking place in Wuhan laboratories.
This research, carried out in labs that did not have maximum level of biosafety, was increasing the infectivity of laboratory-created diseases by constructing chimeric coronaviruses — despite strong denial of such practices by the key Chinese scientists. And the bio-engineering was being funded by United States taxpayers — channelled through a charity run by a British scientist — despite similar denials from America’s most senior public health officials that they supported such science fiction activities in Chinese labs.
The details have been confirmed by the latest batch of documents emerging under US freedom of information rules — which unlike in Britain, actually assist attempts to break through walls of official obfuscation. The Intercept obtained 900 pages of documents detailing two research grants in 2014 and 2019 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance. This is the charity headed by Peter Daszak, the controversial Briton who led efforts to squash “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab incident after spending years hunting viruses with Shi Zhengli, the now-famous “Batwoman” expert at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Some of these grant details have emerged previously — but these documents include the original proposals along with project updates, so significantly flesh out what we did know. They highlight how US funding bodies outsourced risky gain-of-function research to China, even over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017 when it was banned in their own nation. They also show, with new clarity, the kind of work taking place in secretive Wuhan labs. These disclosures fuel the mystery over the pandemic origins, while also sparking fresh concerns over top scientists in both China and the West who sought to suppress inquiries into the lab leak hypothesis.
A $3.1m grant, according to the documents, was awarded to understand “the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” through screening thousands of samples collected from the nocturnal creatures. This included a chunk of funding worth $599,000 for WIV. Bear in mind that three months ago, Shi, director of its Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, angrily protested over the world “pouring filth on an innocent scientist” when emphatically refuting that they carried out gain-of-function work. “My lab has never conducted or co-operated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses” she told the New York Times.
Suggested readingDid the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?By Ashley Rindsberg
According to NIH “the term gain-of-function research describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent”. Analysis of these papers show US funds supported construction of new chimeric Sars-related coronaviruses, which combined a spike gene from one with genetic material from another — and then showed the resulting creation could infect human cells and mice engineered to display human-type receptors on their cells.
One new virus had increased pathogenicity over the original virus and three new viruses increased viral load in lung tissues up to ten thousandfold, which is most definitely “enhanced activity.” As scientists pointed out to me, these results demonstrated increased pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanised mouse models. And similar construction work was proposed to be done with another type of deadly pathogen — the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, which first flared up in Jordan nine years ago after spilling over from camels and has since cropped up in 27 countries, causing 858 deaths.
So yet again it seems Shi — probably under intense pressure from the Communist regime — has been manipulating not just bat viruses but the truth over her lab’s activities. Just like when she claimed a database containing 22,000 virus sequences and samples was taken offline due to hacking in the pandemic when it disappeared on September 12, 2019 — several weeks before infections emerged in Wuhan and months before global attention turned on her lab. Or when the name of the most closely-related virus to Sars-CoV-2 was changed in a key scientific paper, thus masking ties to three miners who died in 2012 from a strange respiratory condition while clearing out a copper mine in southern China.
Suggested readingDid scientists stifle the lab-leak theory?By Ian Birrell
Yet she is not the only key player in this drama telling porkies. Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser, insisted earlier this year that his country “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”. His stance led to a furious clash in Congress with Senator Rand Paul, who gleefully tweeted after The Intercept published its article on the papers: “Surprise surprise – Fauci lied again. And I was right about his agency funding novel coronavirus research at Wuhan.”
Paul was backed by Richard Ebright, the bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, who has long been a fierce critic of such work, for which he argues that the risks of creating new diseases in laboratories vastly outweigh any potential benefits. “The documents make it clear that assertions by Anthony Fauci and the NIH Director, Francis Collins that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” he said.
Buried in the documents are two more intriguing details. First, the experimental work creating mutant chimeric coronaviruses was carried out at WIV’s biosafety level 2 lab and then the work analysing them in humanised mice performed at the biosafety level 3 Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, not at the new maximum level 4 WIV lab built with French assistance. The cluster of labs there, incidentally, includes a breeding centre that created at least 1,000 types of genetically engineered animals from mice to monkeys. So this means the details in the papers accord with a previous statement by Shi that their coronavirus research is “conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories” — although a level 2 lab has, some say, barely higher safety standards than a dental clinic and certainly few safeguards against an lethal airborne virus.
Yet this is where the puzzle intensifies. For six months ago David Asher, who led State Department investigations into the origins, told a Washington seminar the first “known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be Covid’ were three people who fell sick at a BSL 3 lab within a week of each other.
Suggested readingWhy we should welcome the lab leak hypothesisBy Bret Weinstein
“There is a possibility it was influenza,” he said. “But I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in a hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything with the coronavirus. That’s highly hard to believe. From that point forward, it certainly seemed to have started to spread within their community.”
Second, while Daszak has been condemning supposed conspiracy theories and defending his friends in China with whom he has collected thousands of samples, his own charity was pointing out the major risk of accidental infection faced by researchers when collecting such specimens in a project he led. “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled. There is also some risk of exposure to pathogens …while handling bats, civets, rodents or other animals, their blood samples or their excreta.”
It is, at last, largely accepted that there are two plausible theories behind this public health catastrophe, so perhaps these revelations have more political than scientific consequence. Even Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish food scientist who led the dismal World Health Organisation study trip to Wuhan earlier this year, recently admitted the possibility that a field incident sparked the pandemic was “a likely hypothesis”.
He told a documentary there might have been “human error” somewhere but this could not be admitted inside China’s repressive autocracy. “The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect. Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?” The engima has not been cracked but these are small steps forward in the search for the pandemic origins.

Is a left-wing author allowed to believe in genetics? The question is only partially sarcastic: Doctrinaire progressives are inclined to cringe (at least for public consumption) at the idea that one’s DNA might drive real differences that shape our lives. Indeed, the whole concept is seen as a means of justifying social inequality, and perhaps even a step down the slippery slope to eugenics.But there’s been pushback among some progressives recently, based on the idea that anyone who cares about equity or social justice should care about genes. After all, the genes we get are purely a function of luck—an unfair and unequal system of advantages and disadvantages whose effects can be addressed through public policy. In this regard, at least, genes aren’t too different from other forms of “privilege” that progressives talk about all the time.Last year, the socialist writer Fredrik deBoer floated this sort of argument in The Cult of Smart, a book that was long on provocative ideas, but lacking in scientific explanation. In The Genetic Lottery: How DNA Matters for Social Equality, soon to be published by Princeton University Press, behavioral geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden expertly addresses that shortcoming.Kathryn Paige Harden, posing with her book in a recently posted social-media photoPart of Harden’s task is simply to distance genetic research from some of the policies and ideas with which it’s sometimes been historically associated. She acknowledges and condemns the role that genetic science has played in eugenics, for example, and reiterates her skepticism (prominently aired in a co-authored 2017 Vox article) of the idea that genetic differences are linked to a racial IQ gap. Most importantly, she expertly sets out the current state of genetic research, and argues the philosophical case that what we know about the subject is consistent with an egalitarian worldview. The book feels incomplete, however, when it comes to the question of how society should be restructured to address the inequities linked to the genetic lottery. * * * The scientific idea that one’s genes affect one’s life outcomes isn’t novel. During the early Cold War period, researchers already were conducting systematic “behavioral genetics” studies on different types of siblings, twins in particular. Identical twins share twice as much genetic material as fraternal twins; so if genes are important, then, other factors being equal, the life outcomes of identical-twin pairs should be more similar than those of fraternal-twin pairs. When you read that a given trait is estimated to be “X percent genetic,” with Y percent attributed to “shared environment,” and Z percent to “unshared environment,” someone is probably citing a twin study.This work generally has tended toward the conclusion that genes have a strong effect on most traits, though rarely an effect that is all-powerful. However, there are some skeptics, especially on the Left, who dismiss such findings; claiming, for instance, that identical twins’ similarity in life outcomes might originate in their being treated alike precisely because they present to their parents and others as identical, and not because they happen to have the same genes. In the past decade or so, however, behavioral geneticists have moved beyond these traditional experimental designs, and are now more focused on individuals’ actual DNA.One new technique allows researchers to compare siblings—not just twins, but all full siblings—by reference to the random genetic draw each received from their parents. By chance, some sibling pairs are more genetically similar than others, because their random DNA draws happened to pick up more of the same parental source. (Harden, for example, reports that she shares just 44.6 percent of her genes with her brother, well below the expected average of about 50 percent.)If sibling pairs that are more genetically similar also tend to have more similar life outcomes, we can be confident that the relationship is one of causation—not mere correlation—because the genetic similarities emerge from a random process. (It’s similar to any randomized scientific experiment, only nature is doing the randomization for us.) In general, this research shows us that the conclusions drawn by researchers in early twin studies were correct. However, the various methods do produce somewhat different estimates of the effect of genes—which Harden depicts in a useful chart summarizing research that’s been conducted in the areas of education, height, age at first birth, and body-mass index. (Heritability estimates for educational attainment, for instance, range from roughly 20 to 40 percent, depending on which research technique one applies.) But the bottom line is that genes really do matter greatly for a wide range of important outcomes. One analytical method, for instance, suggests that genes associated with educational attainment predict one’s adult income level about as well as does one’s parents’ income level. And someone with a high score on this genetic metric is several times as likely to graduate college as someone with a low score.But at this point, let’s back up for a moment. As some informed readers may already have noted, the idea that a gene may “cause” this or that trait isn’t as simple as my language might suggest. As Harden explains, genes don’t operate in a vacuum, but instead express themselves within human societies characterized by their own unique biases, technologies, cultural practices, economic structures, and educational systems. To the extent that genes can be said to cause anything, they do so in a way that’s influenced by environmental context.As sociologist Christopher Jencks once pointed out, in a society that refused to educate redheads, a gene for redheadedness would be seen as a “cause” of illiteracy: If you randomly assigned a child to possess that gene, the child would grow up unable to read. The resulting redhead/brunette gap would be nominally associated with a genetic marker, but the gap would hardly be intractable, because society could fix it by being more equitable to redheads. The wide availability of eyeglasses, a technology that addresses genetic disadvantages associated with bad eyesight, is a non-hypothetical example that shows how the effects of a genetic difference can vary widely based on the societal or technological environment in which that difference is expressed.So, in thinking through how genetic findings affect social policy, we can’t stop at the conclusion that genes cause some set percentage of outcomes: We need to flesh out how they cause those outcomes, and ask if these processes could reasonably be changed.As Harden notes, the genes that affect educational attainment are expressed in the brain, begin affecting development early in life, and seem to affect both intelligence and non-cognitive skills. It immediately occurs to the reader that it’s hard to imagine a modern world in which intelligence and non-cognitive skills don’t affect how far one goes in school—though of course we can make life better for people who are born with bad genetic luck in this area, including by improving their education.Jencks’s cautionary theoretical tale about red hair is instructive, too, because there are plenty of ways in which our genes set in motion positive or negative environmental feedback loops. Harden reports, for instance, that children with genes associated with academic success also tend to get more intellectual stimulation from their parents. Our genes also contribute to how we’re parented more generally, and how attractive we are perceived to be.Nonetheless, it’s clear that comprehensively addressing the unfairness caused by genes couldn’t be accomplished merely by making everyone less bigoted. In fact, as bigotries and other artificial limitations fall away—i.e., as we come closer to achieving the “equality of opportunity” associated with a free and tolerant society—genes can actually have a more pronounced effect on outcomes, because those with genetic gifts are held back less often. Harden discusses some fascinating studies in this regard. In Estonia, for instance, genes for educational attainment were shown to produce an increased advantage for those children who came of age after the Soviet withdrawal in 1994. The same is true of recent cohorts of American women, who’ve been less constrained by traditional gender roles than were their forebears.And so, to truly address the unfair social outcomes associated with genes, we’d need to go beyond the usual principles of free-market liberalism, and address the enormous economic dividends paid to those of us who possess highly remunerative skills that have genetic underpinnings. And this brings us to some of the shortcomings of Harden’s book. * * * Harden is correct that none of us did anything to “earn” our genes; nor, for that matter, the homes into which we were born. As she notes, when you combine the “shared environment” factors with the estimated genetic effects in twin studies, these (unearned) causes explain most of what there is to explain—with the leftover portion comprising a sort of “free will” residual, which serves to illustrate why even identical twins growing up together will end up on (at least somewhat) different paths. That residual figure tends to be around 20 percent or so for educational outcomes, and about twice that for income.Harden is also right that we can recognize the power of genes without invoking them to justify inequality as a “natural” phenomenon. Genes do explain, to some extent, why some people are more economically productive, and thus earn more than others, given the demands of a modern economy. But, again, genes are just luck. And the structure of the economy is something we can change.At the micro level, Harden has a lot of useful insights and suggestions. For example, she points out that our policies can either narrow or widen genetic inequalities. Some interventions seem to help people with a genetic predisposition toward obesity, for example; while cigarette taxes seem to help reduce smoking more among people who are not especially at risk genetically, leaving those with the most intractable addictions to pay the price every time they feed their habit. She also urges researchers not to ignore genetics when they study people’s traits and efforts to change them (an argument that many Quillette readers have been familiar with since 2017).But looking beyond such abstract considerations, a reader is left grappling with the enormous challenge to traditional concepts of “meritocracy” and free-market economics that Harden’s analysis implicitly presents. In this area, I found The Genetic Lottery a bit thin, perhaps because the author’s expertise is rooted in genetics rather than, say, modes of economic redistribution. She outlines the philosophical principles at play nicely, with the requisite hat-tips to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” but doesn’t quite succeed in showing us how a genetically-informed Rawlsian policymaking approach would work in practice.Harden writes that school curricula can be structured in a way that’s “equity-promoting” or “performance-maximizing.” But it isn’t clear what the best tradeoff between these two goals is. If you focus educational efforts on the lowest-ability students, you might bring everyone up to an important baseline of mathematical and verbal skill. But teaching to the highest-ability students might drive more achievement at the top of our economy, with more inventions and medical breakthroughs that help everyone (including people born in the future, whatever their genes). The tradeoff involves not only raw, utilitarian cost-benefit analysis, but also the question of how much we subjectively value equity for its own sake.Thinking about this kind of tradeoff leads a reader to larger questions that extend well beyond the classroom. Capitalism pushes us to use our talents for the good of others, if only to be compensated in return. This keeps us busy working, and produces a wellspring of goods, services, and discoveries—but also allows some of us get far richer than others. (Harden acknowledges this “instrumental” value of the market processes that create inequality.) On top of that, of course, many people (Americans in particular) see economic freedom as good in itself. And so modern welfare states seek to harness the productive efficiencies and freedoms associated with capitalism, while also addressing poverty and low social mobility through taxes, transfer payments, regulations, education incentives, and so on (which is why, in almost all developed countries, government spending tends to fall roughly between 40 and 60 percent of GDP). Most forms of policy disagreement in these countries are rooted, in one way or another, in questions relating to how big this social safety net should be and how it should be structured.Harden clearly thinks the US safety net should be stronger than it is, but her case for this barely rises beyond a sketch. There’s little engagement, for example, with longstanding and complicated academic debates over the roots of American poverty and inequality, including the question of whether generous social programs might create perverse incentives. And so while Harden cites the power of genes and family background as evidence that our understanding of “personal responsibility” is overblown, she doesn’t really get into the weeds of what kind of policy change should follow from this insight.To be fair to Harden, she set out to write a book that required her to speak as a geneticist, a philosopher, and a policy wonk, and she succeeded quite well on two of three counts. At the very least, she made a much-needed case for the proposition that progressives cannot continue to ignore the reality of human genetics.

I was a defiant little girl. One afternoon, I came home with my nails painted — a grave sin. My mother took one look and told me to get the filth off of my nails before she chopped off each finger.
My mother could be fierce and she punished me frequently, but even then I knew that her threat was bluster. She might smack me, but she wasn’t going to take off any digits.
Empty threats are used as leverage to entice certain behaviour. But what if the threats are real? For the girls living under Taliban control in Afghanistan, threats are not theatre: they are promises. Even for transgressions as small as painting their fingernails, they face real consequences.

Saturday marks 20 years since the fall of the World Trade Center, a day that brought unimaginable devastation, heartbreak and loss to America. But if there was one glimmer of hope that came from that tragic moment, it was for the women and girls of Afghanistan. After 9/11, and the conflict that followed, a level of freedom unknown to previous generations came to their country.
I remember watching the planes crash on television. I was at work in the Netherlands at the time, and sat, horrified, with my colleagues. As we watched, we wondered how the world’s superpower would respond to such an evil attack on the American homeland. They certainly had the power, resources and reason to go and obliterate their newfound enemy. Sitting there, we could never have guessed that this tragedy would end up bringing more rights and freedoms to women in Afghanistan.
More from this seriesHow 9/11 created the surveillance stateBy Jacob Siegel
The United States could have gone into Afghanistan, taken its revenge and left. President Biden’s continual defence over the past weeks has been that he was following the original plan. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on September 11th, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again.”
But this is not where the legacy of 9/11 ends. It was not all necessary revenge and retaliation. Instead, we offered to help rebuild and provide hope to those who had not had it before. Together with our Afghan allies, we built a more inclusive society for women and girls, in the belief that precisely this kind of modernisation would reduce the danger of a Taliban restoration.
As Adam Tooze explains in his brilliant Substack, from 2003 to 2018, the number of women enrolled in university rose from 7,200 to 49,000. Female life expectancy increased by almost 10 years from 2001-2019. “Whereas in 2000,” Tooze explains, “Afghan men lived longer than women, now Afghanistan has the normal pattern of women outliving their menfolk.” Rates of literacy among females more than doubled between 2000-2018.
A generation of girls was raised without knowing life under Taliban control. And they soared. In 2017, an all-girls robotics team was founded, known as the Afghan Dreamers, who went on to win the Entrepreneurial Challenge at the Robotex festival in Estonia. In 2008, Afghanistan saw its first female mayor, Azra Jafari, in the town of Nili. And she was just the first of many females to hold political positions, including Salima Mazari, Zarifa Ghanfari, and Fawzia Koofi. Women made up 40% of the most recent class of graduates from the American University of Afghanistan. They have their own all-female orchestra. Female entrepreneurs invested $77 million over 18 years, resulting in 77,000 jobs. Their rights were promoted by the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution in Article 44, stating that “the state shall devise and implement effective programs to create and foster balanced education for women”.
Their successes were awe-inspiring. They were also a source of pride for Americans. They were, in part, America’s girls — girls raised to know a certain level of freedom, with their rights secure and protected, thanks to the U.S.-led intervention prompted by 9/11.
In 2002, the United Nations Development Programme produced the Arab Human Development Report, aimed at providing a path for growth and opportunity in the Arab world. The report concluded that three factors contribute to the constraints of human development in the Arab world: “freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge”. Individuals needed to be educated beyond religious ideology, their human rights respected and women’s rights expanded. And for the last 20 years, the United States has supported women and these goals through the US Agency for International Development and State Department-funded programmes, as well as encouraging women’s participation in government and the private sector.
But now women’s rights are being ripped away. Biden’s betrayal reverberates sharply across the country. He offered a false dichotomy to the American people: either pull all troops out or go back to fighting an “endless war”. Pulling out the remaining US troops initiated the swift collapse of the Afghan government, will result in Afghanistan returning to a terrorist safe haven and removed the shield protecting women’s rights in the country. Surely this is not the legacy that Americans want to leave behind on the 20th anniversary of 9/11?
The effects of Taliban control are already being felt by women. The Taliban have announced that women must cover their faces to attend university and genders must segregate, both in class and while entering and exiting the building. They are banned from sports, considered by the Taliban’s cultural commission as “neither appropriate nor necessary” for women. Women can no longer hold ministerial positions. There are no women included in the new administration. Some are being told not to go to work, allegedly a temporary change while the Taliban draw up new “women related procedures”. They face real violence if they disobey. Those speaking out against the Taliban are being deemed “agents of America” and accused of “not being true Muslims”. They are being erased from the public square. And the Taliban haven’t been in control for a full month yet.
What will happen to America’s Afghan girls? The ones born and raised since 2001. The girls inspired by the allure of freedom, liberalism, and chasing their own dreams. Those who have, until now, not known the crushing burdens and barriers of life under the Taliban. What will become of the defiant girls, who speak up for their rights? The ones who question the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban?
Many will suffer severe punishments. Violence will be unleashed against them in a magnitude that those in the West do not comprehend. Body parts will be chopped off. Sexual harassment, rapes, honour violence and murders will become the norm.
But, unlike before, this time is different. The women of Afghanistan will fight back. They’ve already begun. Protests are erupting across the country. Women of all ages are standing firm against the Taliban. In Kabul, women attempted to march to the presidential palace, “demanding the right to work and to be included in government”. They were attacked for it, with videos and photos revealing the bloody violence they faced at the hands of the Taliban. At a subsequent protest in Kabul, one woman stated: “We don’t care if they beat us or even shoot us. We want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed.”
At another protest in Herat, calling for girls’ education, one of the organisers, Basira Taheri, explained: “The women of this land are informed and educated. We are not afraid, we are united.” Pashtana Durrani, the Executive Director of Learn Afghanistan, a bulwark for Afghan women’s rights, said; “We are going to make sure [girls] get to go to school, they get to go to work. If not on the terms that we want in public, we’re going to make it happen anyways.”
As the saying, often attributed to Thomas Carlyle, goes: “Once the mind has been expanded by a big idea, it will never go back to its original state.” The Taliban cannot undo the last 20 years. These women and girls are refusing to submit to a new Dark Age. That glimmer of hope, sparked after 9/11, has not been extinguished. Even with the Taliban in control, America’s girls aren’t going to give up.
And now the world is watching. Before 9/11, the atrocities committed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan received very little coverage in the West. Now, everyone knows names like Malala and Bibi Aisha. And we will come to know more names, like Basira Taheri’s, as we cheer them on. Two decades on, these women may be the most enduring achievement of the American intervention that followed 9/11.
They are defiant. And, as a former defiant girl, I can say with conviction that they can’t beat or cut that defiance out of you.

(Photograph by Bilal Guler/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)Hey,Maya Angelou was right about the Taliban. Okay, not about the Taliban specifically, but about people (and the B-2 bomber). “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”The new supreme leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada. It’s not quite the job change it sounds like because he was the emir of the Taliban already. Anyway, in 2017, he let his son blow himself up as a suicide bomber. In poker, if you scratch your nose every time you bluff, it’s called a tell. In life, when you’re in charge of a terrorist movement and you let your son be a suicide bomber, it’s a little more than a tell. You might even call it a shout.The State Department, which has been filling the air with talk about how the Taliban is our “partner,” expressed concern Tuesday about the new government. Specifically, it’s upset that the new government doesn’t contain any women. It noted in a statement that the new government “consists exclusively of individuals who are members of the Taliban or their close associates and no women.” “We have made clear our expectation that the Afghan people deserve an inclusive government,” a department spokesperson told The Hill. Let’s stop here for a moment. Shortly after Bill Clinton was elected, he vowed to have a Cabinet that “looked like America.” I used to joke at the time that this meant 17 left-wing lawyers who all thought the same way but looked like a Benetton ad. It was a kind of diversity, just not a particularly meaningful one in terms of policy.Now, I understand that it would be pretty significant for the Taliban to include a woman in its leadership, given its whole “keep ‘em barefoot, burqa’d, and pregnant” philosophy. But I was told that the departure from Afghanistan was necessitated by the fact the U.S. would only do what is in our core, vital national interest. No more nation building and social experimenting. Which raises a question: If the Biden administration doesn’t care whether Afghanistan is democratic, why should it care whether it practices gender inclusivity? If pushing democracy is a folly of social engineering, why isn’t affirmative action for women?Indeed, if the Taliban had decided to put a woman in charge of something, what are the odds that a bunch of terrorists and fanatics would pick someone who disagreed on the stuff that actually touches on our core, vital national interest? Just as the Clinton administration was never going to appoint a woman who meaningfully disagreed with the boss’s worldview, what are the odds that a woman whom Mullah Haibatullah signed off on would be some kind of ideological maverick within the government? I mean, they weren’t going to make Cher or Alyssa Milano minister of the interior, were they? And they weren’t going to make some native Afghan woman a minister for reproductive rights or democracy promotion.We’re in a weird place when we’re officially more concerned about the lack of gender diversity at the top of a terror state than we are about, you know, a terror state.This is just a small example of a larger problem. I’ve written a lot of “news”letters lately about the issue of mistaking words for things. I’ve also written a lot about how foreign policy “realism” is often just a concept that the losers in foreign policy debates invoke to criticize the winners. The people in charge who didn’t listen to me are “idealists” or “ideologues,” while I’m just a realist.Let’s start with the words. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said today that these new leaders of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan have “challenging track records.”Challenging.How many Americans does a roster of terrorists need to kill before it warrants a tougher adjective than “challenging”? I mean, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the al-Qaeda-aligned Haqqani Network, is the new interior minister. The FBI is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to his arrest. (Can I collect some of that shmundo by calling the Feds the next time I see him give a press conference? “I know exactly where he is! Pay me!”)Can we at least call that “troubling”? Or even—dare I say—“bad”?  Now let’s move on to Biden’s “realism.” The White House talks constantly about the wonder-working power of the “international community.” We pulled out our troops and gave the Taliban the fourth-largest military helicopter fleet in the world, but we have lots of leverage because we have the “international community” in our corner.A couple of weeks ago, George Stephanopoulos asked Biden if the Taliban had changed. He responded:“No. I think they’re going through sort of an existential crisis about: Do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government? I’m not sure they do.”Now, he’s right that the Taliban would like to be recognized by the international community as a legitimate government. But you know what? So would every government everywhere. That’s in the basic job description of all governments. The Iranians want that. The North Koreans want that.This should not be an interesting insight. Such recognition brings all sorts of benefits. Sanctions get lifted. You can park stolen money in more reliable banks. You get to send people to conferences in Switzerland and New York, and they can bring back better chocolates and bagels than you can get in Kabul. Being recognized as part of the Parliament of Man affords more opportunities to go to Hooters (“I go for the Buffalo wings.”—Sirajuddin Haqqani).The issue isn’t what the Taliban wants, it’s what price the Taliban is willing to pay for what it wants. For nearly 20 years now, Bill Roggio and Thomas Joscelyn have been figuratively running around like that guy in the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” who yelled “It’s a cookbook!” screaming, “They want an emirate!”This is why the Taliban exists. And the only existential crisis it faces is making good on that promise, not least because the first Taliban “moderate” who proposes a women’s empowerment program or gay rights initiative will get beheaded by his underlings.Forming an emirate was so important to the Taliban that it was willing to fight the U.S. in a bloody war for 20 years. But the Biden administration seems to think the group can be bought off with “inclusion” in the international community. And, yeah, sure, it can trade all sorts of things—including, no doubt, stranded Americans—in exchange for inclusion, recognition, and, eventually, pallets of cash. But it has demonstrated for 20 years that it’s not going to negotiate away the very reason for its existence. When faced with an existential crisis, the Taliban will choose existence, not access to swag at the U.N. gift shop. The reigning Brahmins of our foreign policy keep talking about how more than 100 nations “expect” the Taliban to do this or that. Does this mean that if only 97 or 64 nations “expected” the Taliban not to conduct mass executions it wouldn’t be that big a deal? Is some Taliban minister holding firm on his door-to-door death squad policy only until he gets the news that Burkina Faso has joined the Grand Coalition of Condemnation??How have the expectations of the international community changed North Korea’s behavior? Or Iran’s? Or Russia’s? Remember all of the jaw-jawing of Bashar Assad? If you slaughter your own people, your wife won’t get profiles in Vogue anymore! His answer: “Your terms are acceptable.”If you’re some Belgian nuncio or German cookie-pusher, not being part of the “international community” might pose an “existential crisis.” But no one in the Taliban leadership has been living in the mountains, crapping in caves without the benefit of first world toilet paper, and letting their sons vaporize themselves so they can get reserved tickets to hear Larry Summers’ presentation at Davos.In other words, the Biden administration is suffering from a profound case of ideological and psychological projection. The idea of being cut off from polite international society would indeed amount to an existential crisis for Biden, Blinken, Dasher, and Vixen. But 20 years of murder suggests that the good opinion of the Hague is less of a priority for the Taliban.In a really excellent conversation on The Remnant, The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood noted that when it was last in power, the Taliban really wanted to establish bilateral relations with the Chinese. But the Taliban, being the Taliban, couldn’t stop being the Taliban. So it blew up Afghanistan’s legendary Bamiyan Buddha statues. As Wood noted, that was pretty much the only thing the Taliban could do to really piss off the Chinese. The group did it anyway. The guy who pushed for that grotesque vandalism at the time? Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund—the new prime minister of Afghanistan! This isn’t the Taliban 2.0. It’s the Taliban 1.0, Chapter 2.But forget the Taliban for a second. Just this morning, I listened to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Morning Joe explain—as Biden has many times—that we can get China, India, and the whole world to adopt carbon neutral policies by the power of our example. If we do it first, everyone else will follow. This has been a central Democratic argument for decades. But what evidence is there for it? Sure, some countries might follow our lead. But the problem is that any country willing to follow our lead on climate change is already doing this stuff. In fact, you could argue that we’re following their lead. The countries that aren’t doing this stuff don’t care about our example. We’ve been leading by example on all sorts of things—democracy, human rights, gay rights, etc.—for a long time. Has China become more democratic? It’s still throwing Uyghurs in concentration camps. Hell, it just banned “effeminate men” from TV.The lazy formulation of “isolationism” versus “internationalism” that is so often foisted on us leaves out some other isms. The most relevant is “multilateralism.” For 20 years, the dominant foreign policy argument of the Democratic Party has been that it’s better to be wrong in a big group than to be right alone.Now, I’ve got no problem with multilateralism—I’m still a big booster of a “League of Democracies”—but multilateralism is a means, not an end. Large groups of countries can work together for bad things or good things. There’s strength in numbers, power in unity, blah blah blah. But cooperation isn’t what matters, it’s what you do with it. The Nazis had a coalition of the willing, too.Again, I get that people who love big conferences and working the phones and hotel lobbies for joint statements shudder at the thought of being on the outs with the international community. But letting our foreign policy be dictated by the FOMO of transnational progressives is not what foreign policy is for. And thinking that the leaders of other countries share our ideological priorities and will conduct themselves accordingly isn’t realism. It’s blinkered—Blinkened—folly.

When Sons Become Daughters | Angus FoxPart 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6“Parents have been complaining about their kids’ lifestyle choices and political convictions since the dawn of time, of course. But rarely have such choices involved committing oneself to the possibility of sterility and a lifetime of medical therapies.”Ignoring Differences Between Men and Women Is the Wrong Way to Address Gender Dysphoria | Kathleen Stock“We need a sensible collective approach that doesn’t leave us stuck, between a damaging tendency toward reality-denial on one side, and a brutal realism destructive of good social relations on the other.”How the Nonbinary Trend Hurts Those with Real Gender Dysphoria | Debra Soh“To create one group that includes people who do not actually have gender dysphoria—and to then call everyone ‘trans’—diminishes the suffering of those with gender dysphoria, a real condition recognized by medicine.”No One Is Born in ‘The Wrong Body’ | William J. Malone, Colin Wright, and Julia D. Robertson“Up until age seven, many children often believe that if a boy puts on a dress, he becomes a girl. To such extent as any such identity may exist, the concept relies on stereotypes that encourage the conflation of gender with sex.”Misunderstanding a New Kind of Gender Dysphoria | Lisa Marchiano “What will it take for this contagion to be seen for what it is, so that its most damaging effects can be prevented? Recently, one mom told me that I was her only hope. She surely deserves better than that.”Replacing One Kind of ‘Conversion Therapy’ With Another | James Esses“To my knowledge, gender dysphoria is the only such condition in which the officially sanctioned treatment is to encourage, in all cases, the distressing and anxiety-provoking thoughts inside one’s own head.”Gender’s Journey from Sex to Psychology: A Brief History | Tomas Bogardus“The Self-Identification View is appealing because it respects individual autonomy. But it also has, at its core, a serious definitional problem. It is circular: What is a woman? It’s someone who identifies as… a woman. We’ve used the word to be defined in the definition itself.”I May Have Gender Dysphoria. But I Still Prefer to Base My Life on Biology, Not Fantasy | Debbie Hayton“Yes, gender dysphoria is a real condition. I know, because I have it: the feeling that my male biology is at odds with my desire to have a female body. But I don’t have to invent some mystical spiritual force called gender identity to explain it.”Forget What Gender Activists Tell You. Here’s What Medical Transition Looks Like | Scott Newgent“We now have thousands of naïve parents walking their children into gender-treatment centers, often based on Internet-peddled narratives that present the transition experience through a gauzy rainbow lens.”Reflections on My Decision to Change Gender | Deirdre McCloskey“In that autumn of first realization in 1995 I left to my wife—stupidly, husband-style—the task of telling my children, my grown son and my college-freshman daughter.”

Paul Shafer is an assistant professor of Health Law, Policy, and Management at the Boston University School of Public Health (@shaferpr). Alex Hoagland is a PhD Candidate in Health Economics at Boston University (@Hoagland_Alex).
Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court left the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in place following its third major legal challenge in June 2021. This decision left widely supported policies in place, like ensuring coverage regardless of preexisting conditions, coverage for dependents up to age 26 on their parents’ plan and removal of annual and lifetime benefit limits.
But the hits keep coming. One of the most popular benefits offered by the ACA, free preventive care through many employer-based and marketplace insurance plans, is under attack by another legal domino, Kelley v. Becerra. As University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley sees it, “[t]his time, the law’s opponents stand a good chance of succeeding.”
We are public health and economics researchers at Boston University who have been studying how preventive care is covered by the ACA and what this means for patients. With this policy now in jeopardy, health care in the U.S. stands to take a big step backward.
What did the ACA do for preventive health?
The Affordable Care Act tried to achieve the twin ideals of making health care more accessible while reducing health care spending. It created marketplaces for individuals to purchase health insurance and expanded Medicaid to increase coverage for more low-income people.
One way it has tried to reach both goals is to prioritize preventive services that maximize patient health and minimize cost, like cancer screenings, vaccinations and access to contraception. Eliminating financial barriers to health screenings increases the likelihood that common but costly chronic conditions, such as heart disease, will be diagnosed early on.
Section 2713 of the ACA requires insurers to offer full coverage of preventive services that are endorsed by three federal groups: the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the Health Resources and Services Administration. This means that eligible preventive services ordered by your doctor won’t cost you anything out of pocket. For example, the CARES Act used this provision to ensure COVID-19 vaccines would be free for many Americans.
Removing the financial barrier has drastically reduced the average cost of a range of preventive services. Our study found that the costs of well-child visits and mammograms were reduced by 56% and 74%, respectively, from 2006 to 2018. We also found that the ACA reduced the share of children’s preventive checkups that included out-of-pocket costs from over 50% in 2010 to under 15% in 2018.
Residual costs for preventive services remain
Despite these reductions in costs, there are limitations to this benefit. For example, it doesn’t cover follow-up tests or treatments. This means that if a routine mammogram or colonoscopy reveals something that requires further care, patients may have to pay for the initial screening test, too. And some patients still receive unexpected bills for preventive care that should have been covered. This can happen, for example, when providers submit incorrect billing codes to insurers, which have specific and often idiosyncratic preventive care guidelines.
We also studied the residual out-of-pocket costs that privately insured Americans had after using eligible preventive services in 2018. We found that these patients paid between $75 million to $219 million per year combined for services that should have been free for them. Unexpected preventive care bills were most likely to hit patients living in rural areas or the South, as well as those seeking women’s services such as contraception and other reproductive health care. Among patients attempting to get a free wellness visit from their doctor, nearly 1 in 5 were later asked to pay for it.
Nevertheless, the preventive health provision of the ACA has resulted in significant reductions in patient costs for many essential and popular services. And removing financial barriers is a key way to encourage patients to use preventive services intended to protect their health.
The threat of Kelley v. Becerra
The plaintiffs who brought the latest legal challenge to the ACA, Kelley v. Becerra, object to covering contraception and preexposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV on religious and moral grounds. The case is currently awaiting decision in a district court in Texas, but seems to be headed to the Supreme Court.
The case rests on two legal issues: 1) violation of the nondelegation doctrine, and 2) the appointments clause of the Constitution. The nondelegation doctrine is a rarely used legal argument that requires Congress to specify how their powers should be used. It essentially argues that Congress was too vague by not specifying which preventive services would be included in Section 2713 up front. The appointments clause specifies that the people using government powers must be “officers of the United States.” In this case, it is unclear whether those in the federal groups that determine eligible preventive care services qualify.
Texas District Judge Reed O’Connor has indicated so far that he takes a kind view toward the plaintiff’s case. He could rule that this provision of the ACA is unconstitutional and put the case on a path to the Supreme Court.
Patients stand to lose more than just money
If Section 2713 were repealed, insurers would have the freedom to reimpose patient cost-sharing for preventive care. In the short run, this could increase the financial strain that patients face when seeking preventive care and discourage them from doing so. In the long run, this could result in increased rates of preventable and expensive-to-treat chronic conditions. And because Section 2713 is what allows free COVID-19 vaccines for those with private health insurance, some patients may have to pay for their vaccines and future boosters if the provision is axed.
The ACA has been instrumental in expanding access to preventive care for millions of Americans. While the ACA’s preventive health coverage provision isn’t perfect, a lot of progress that has been made toward lower-cost, higher-value care may be erased if Section 2713 is repealed.
Lower-income patients will stand to lose the most. And it could make ending the COVID-19 pandemic that much harder.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Research for this piece was supported by Arnold Ventures.The post The next attack on the Affordable Care Act may cost you free preventive health care first appeared on The Incidental Economist.

OnlySubs Episode 60: The Woke Won’t Let Go of Power is now available exclusively for New Discourses contributors on the following platforms:
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In trying to understand what the Woke movement is and why we all need to be willing to fight back against it, it’s helpful to observe how it behaves under certain circumstances. You’ve all probably heard, for example, that we should look to how someone treats those beneath them to understand their character, but there’s another test of a person’s mettle that can be quite revealing. How do they react when, for good reasons, they are asked to relinquish power? With the Woke, it’s pretty obvious: there’s nothing they hate more. They throw fits. They engage in illegal activity. They bully. They slander. They sue. They call everyone opposing them by horrible names. They cheat. They do literally everything they can to hold on to every shred of power that they’ve taken for themselves, even when they’re clearly abusing it. This tells you a lot about them. They’re bullies, and they’re obsessed with one thing above all else: obtaining and keeping power for themselves. Few facts could possibly tell us that they don’t deserve power and, in the very moment they abuse it, must be removed from it. In this episode of James Lindsay OnlySubs, my subscribers-only podcast, I discuss this phenomenon a little to give you some clearer sense of what we’re dealing with in the Woke movement and therefore also how we must approach pushing back against it.
The post OnlySubs: The Woke Won’t Let Go of Power appeared first on New Discourses.

 Lucky Raccoon/ShutterstockThe story has a lot to recommend it: psychologist Dan Ariely, the author of a bestselling book on the behavioural science of dishonesty, retracts his study because the data was faked. No wonder it’s been picked up by the world’s media. Buzzfeed declared this “the latest blow to the buzzy field of behavioural economics”. Psychologist Stuart Ritchie, himself a scientist, wrote about the case under the headline: “Never trust a scientist”. 

Dan Ariely accepted that the data on which his study relied had been faked and that he should have double checked it.
Yael Zur, CC BY

I worry about these interpretations. And not because I teach on a behavioural science master’s programme. I worry because headlines like this risk stoking anti-science sentiment at a time when faith in experts is low, when thoughtful people parrot that we live in a “post-truth world” and where mistrust of science is causing deaths. 
But most of all, I worry about these interpretations because I take the opposite conclusion from this story. In this case, the lesson is that the scientific process actually worked well. 
Casting doubt on the science
An important and overlooked detail is that the scientific process revealed years ago that the results of the paper didn’t hold. Using data provided by an insurance company, Ariely’s study claimed that people are more honest in their reports if they sign a declaration of truthfulness at the beginning of a document rather than at the end of it. The method was adopted by the IRS, the US tax collection agency, and at least one big insurance company.
While nobody expressed concerns of deliberate fraud, many research teams had reported their failed attempts to replicate the initial studies. Replication is important. Because science is rooted in probability, observing the same result on two independent occasions makes it far less likely that the result is a fluke. 
In 2020, Ariely and his co-authors published a paper in which they themselves attempted and failed to replicate the initial results. At that time it had not yet emerged that the initial data had been faked. The authors concluded that the initial results were a fluke and titled the follow up paper: “Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty.” 
Another striking feature is that the failed replications were published in one of the top general science journals. It’s a recent development that scientists would devote their time to replication studies – and that top journals would devote precious column inches to publishing them – and follows a series of statistical studies that cast doubt on the rigour of published science.
First was the provocative data simulation study that suggested more than half of published results of scientific research are false. This finding derives from the following three features:
1. Some results are flukes.
2. New results are being found all the time.
3. Unexpected and eye-catching results are more likely to be published.
Then there was the Many Labs replication project. It found that more than half the results published in top psychology journals couldn’t be replicated.
Exposing false results
Some insightful contributions come from behavioural science, which comprises several disciplines that look at human behaviour and interaction, and works at the intersection of statistics, economics and psychology. One of those insights was that scientists can publish false results even without knowing it. 
To get a sense of this, you first need to know that the scientific community deems that a result provides evidence if the result passes a threshold. That threshold is measured as a p-value, with p standing for probablity. Lower p-values indicate more reliable results. A result passes the threshold into reliable evidence or, in the language of science, is statistically significant, if its p-value is below some threshold, for example, p < 0.05. 

Intentionally or otherwise, researchers inflate the chances of attaining statistically significant results by engaging in questionable research practices. In a survey published in 2012, a majority of psychologists reported that they test their theory by measuring more than one outcome and then report the results only on the outcome which attains statistical significance. Presumably they admitted to this behaviour because they didn’t recognise that it inflates the chance of drawing an incorrect conclusion.
Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons, a trio of behavioural scientists who are routinely described as “data detectives”, devised a test to ascertain whether a conclusion is likely to have derived from questionable research practices. The test examines whether the evidence that supports a claim is suspiciously clustered just below the threshold of statistical significance.
It was this test that debunked the idea of “power posing” – the widely publicised claim that you can perform better in stressful situations if you adopt an assertive physical posture, such as hands on hips.
Now the three data detectives have done it again. It was on their blog that the stark and sensational facts of Ariely’s dishonesty study were exposed. Contrary to Buzzfeed’s claim that this case constitutes a blow to behavioural economics, it in fact demonstrates how behavioural science has led us to root out phoney results. Exposing that bad apple, and the fascinating techniques employed to do it, actually constitutes a victory for behavioural scientists.
David Comerford receives funding from UKRI. 

Jay Falk has some choice words for white-necked jacobins, the iridescent, blue-tinged hummingbirds he spent much of graduate school chasing through the Central American tropics. They’re “the show-off jerks of the hummingbird community,” he told me.Falk, a biologist at the University of Washington, is deeply fond of the birds, who are gorgeous and clever and sassy. Sometimes, they’re brave enough to flit right up to him and inspect what he’s holding in his hand. But jacobins are also bullies, especially when they spot one of the species’ more modestly colored females, which sport green backs and mottled gray chests. These dull-feathered gals can’t even seek out a meal without being catcalled, pecked, or body slammed by their kin—acts that are sometimes about sex, sometimes about rudeness, and perhaps quite often about both.But at some point in the birds’ evolution, it seems, a few of these females got fed up with being harassed. They jettisoned their traditional grayish-green garb, and instead donned the dazzling sapphire feathers that have long been linked to males—a costume change that can help some females skirt the jabs of their more brightly colored peers. The male masquerade cloaks the hummingbirds so well that they’re able to live out their days in relative peace, according to a new study by Falk and his colleagues.“If you think about it, it’s kind of a nice solution,” Dai Shizuka, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. The birds’ stealthy strategy revamps one of the oldest themes around—if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. But it’s also challenging some of the biases that human researchers may bring to their work, as they study the bodily traits and behaviors that make animals female or male.In most birds, males are the showier sex: They’re the ones flashing their feathers, tussling for territory, and belting out serenades for their mates to assess. Females prefer their mates with glitz, but they have little reason to adorn themselves; gaudy feathers can make them more conspicuous to predators. “Ornamentation comes with risk,” Sarah Khalil, an ornithologist at Tulane University, told me. That white-necked jacobins, along with several other hummingbirds, buck this trend is “really odd,” Falk said. Only about a fifth of adult females manage the feat, but those that do are nearly indistinguishable from males, from the tops of their cerulean heads to the tips of their brilliant white tails. (Experts like Falk can differentiate the birds up close by inspecting very subtle traits or taking blood samples.)[Read: This hummingbird’s tail whistles, and no one’s sure why]Starting in 2015, Falk, then a graduate student at Cornell, began taking regular trips to Panama to watch the birds interact. He set up nectar-spouting feeders to attract them, and cameras to document them flitting back and forth. He spied them pinwheeling through the air, cavorting around one another, and executing Olympic-caliber flips mid-flight. But most of all, he saw them aggressively and relentlessly chasing each other. Grayer jacobins, he noticed, were almost always the quarry, with bluer birds in pursuit.The pattern repeated when Falk stationed pairs of taxidermied jacobins at the feeders for live birds to inspect. Each day of the experiment, he offered the birds a choice. Sometimes, it was between a gray-green female and a blue male; other times, a gray-green female and a blue female; and still others, a blue female and a blue male. When both stuffed birds were vibrant, they received roughly equal amounts of attention. But whenever a modestly colored one was on display, it bore the brunt of the attacks. Some jacobins would strut up to the props and make obvious sexual advances—wiggling their butts, or diving at them while chirping—while others would batter them in an outright assault.Falk couldn’t always discern the sex of the assailant, but it didn’t seem to matter much. When given the opportunity, a lot of jacobins walloped the grayer mounts with abandon. Even birds of other species sometimes took part. Being drably colored clearly gets you “beat up by all of these hummingbirds,” Teresa Feo, an ornithologist and evolutionary biologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, told me.Some of the targeting of grayish-plumed birds probably stems from sexual attention—males eager to mate with as many females as they can. But Falk thinks their woes hinge on at least one other powerful driver as well: hunger. Hummingbirds, with their fast-beating hearts and sky-high metabolic rates, are constantly in search of food, and often need to jostle others out of the way to reach it. But they also know to pick their fights, and the rowdy reputations of the bluest birds might precede them. Most jacobins “have probably been chased by one of those male-colored birds,” Falk told me. “So if you’re going to be aggressive, maybe you go for one that’s less likely to retaliate.” Another one of Falk’s experiments seems to back up this idea. The researchers found that blue females, tracked with ID tags, lingered longer at feeders than gray-green ones—a hint that the ruse was working. Dressing flamboyantly, it turns out, can be an excellent way to avoid the spotlight.The findings mark the first in-depth investigation of male-mimicking females among wild hummingbirds, but the phenomenon isn’t all that rare. What’s happening with the jacobins has a distant parallel in damselflies, insects whose females pantomime the patterns of males to stave off excessive copulation. Many other classic examples run the opposite direction. Some male fairy wrens, for instance, will put off molting into their glammed-up adult forms so they can pass as females and avoid conflicts with their brethren, Tulane’s Khalil, who studies the birds, told me. The common thread in nearly all of these species “is male harassment, which is generally just a problem for everyone,” Shizuka, of the University of Nebraska, told me. Such torment is strong incentive to copy the sex that’s less likely to experience it.[Read: A courting peacock can shake its partner’s head from afar]Falk’s study is a reminder that, across species, males and females won’t necessarily have a signature, sex-specific look. “That’s the takeaway—you really can’t tell who is producing eggs or sperm,” Ambika Kamath, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. “I like that this [paper] takes weirdness seriously, which we should all do more often.” Maybe there’s also a better way to frame findings on avian color, Kamath said. The easiest term to describe certain females’ bright-blue plumage might be “malelike,” but even that could be a misnomer. Falk’s work showed that adolescent jacobins of both sexes are colorful, too, something unusual for a bird. “In a lot of cases, juvenile birds look similar to adult females,” until maturing males stray from the norm, Feo told me. Among jacobins, females are the ones striking out on their own.Perhaps the big question on jacobin feathers is less about why females would want to resemble males, and more about why drab females “bother to look different,” Feo said. Despite all the torment they endure, they likely have something to gain from their grayness. Maybe it’s camouflage or maybe it’s more sex—researchers aren’t quite sure. Either way, their lives aren’t as devoid of color as they might seem.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.As a child and young adult, I hated the drudgery of school. I don’t remember ever looking forward to a day of class, from kindergarten until I dropped out of college after my first year. Leaving felt like a pardon from the governor.Of course, I’m not so special; plenty of kids are unhappy at school. School is undoubtedly good for most kids, but unless your child is weirdly into social science, there’s no use telling her that “education stimulates subjective well-being outcomes in the long run.” What ruins the experience for so many—as it did for me—is that, right now, school is lonely and boring.A tour through the research on learning and happiness reveals that kids’ feelings about school have less to do with age, race, or socioeconomic background than two basic factors: friendship and interest. Fortunately, with a little knowledge about both, we can make life better for all the students out there who have just gloomily returned to school or are dreading the prospect in the coming days.When it comes to long-term well-being, few interventions raise happiness as much as education. In 2015, using data from adult populations across 85 countries, the Austrian researcher Erich Striessnig found that people who had completed secondary education were 10 percent more likely to say they were happy than those who hadn’t finished high school, after controlling for income differences. Meanwhile, a completed college education raised happiness by 30 percent.One possible explanation for these findings is that learning stimulates a powerful basic positive emotion: interest. Carroll Izard, an emotion researcher, defines interest as “the central motivation for engagement in creative and constructive endeavors and for the sense of well-being.” Simply put, exposing people to ideas and the means to acquire knowledge gives them the tools to produce ongoing happiness throughout their life. It’s no surprise, then, that reading—which adults try to cultivate a love of in children—has been found to increase life satisfaction.[Read: How to teach your kid to love reading]Yet children’s attitudes while they’re in school don’t reflect education’s enormous happiness benefits later in life. In a 2020 survey of more than 21,000 American high schoolers, the top two feelings students said they experienced at school were “stressed” (79.8 percent) and “bored” (69.5 percent). Some of them expressed positive emotions such as pride and cheerfulness, but overall, nearly 75 percent of their self-reported feelings related to school were negative.You could easily dismiss this mismatch as something of a grasshopper-and-ant problem, in which effort that’s a drag in the moment leads to great outcomes later on. But I think there’s more to it than that. For many children, school is not just hard work, but also intensely isolating. Research shows that 80 percent of children face loneliness at times in school; that emotion is linked to boredom, inactivity, a tendency to withdraw into fantasy, and a passive attitude toward social interactions. To say that loneliness can kill interest in school is not an exaggeration.[Read: Children are born scientists. What if schools encouraged that?]Conversely, friendship at school is by far the biggest predictor of enjoyment and positive behaviors. Gallup has found that having a best friend at school is the best predictor of student engagement in both fifth grade and 11th. Similarly, a study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick, and the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that students with “reciprocal friendships” (wherein both sides see the relationship the same way) are more likely to enjoy school and are more successful in the classroom.One common force that foments loneliness in school has been around forever. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 20.2 percent of American students ages 12 to 18 report being bullied at school. Many studies have clearly linked both traditional bullying and cyberbullying to social anxiety and depression. Bullying may also lead to problems with academic achievement, kids’ desire to do well in class, and absenteeism.[Read: My daughter doesn’t use social media—but she’s being cyberbullied]In recent months, students have had to contend with another driver of isolation: pandemic-related stoppages of in-person schooling, which have been catastrophic for students’ loneliness. A 2020 survey conducted on behalf of Common Sense Media found that 42 percent of teenagers felt “more lonely than usual.” The same survey found that “almost one in four teens (24%) say they’re connecting with their teachers less than once a week.” Like so many parents, I’ve seen this firsthand. My daughter spent her last year and a half of high school bored and “lonely as a cloud,” to borrow from Wordsworth, and she didn’t even have the heart to attend her graduation.If we are to help kids gain happiness from their education in the short and long term, we need to bring to bear more resources to facilitate friendship, which tends to solve both the loneliness and boredom problems. There is a great deal of research on this subject, and practical resources for making friendship easier for all students to achieve.Adults who want school to be a happier place can work meaningfully against cliques and bullying, which destroy children’s morale. Studies show that programs that work to prevent bullying in school can cut the problem by about 20 percent. Adults should not be passive, hoping that the problem will take care of itself. The effective interventions all involve acknowledging that there is a problem and dealing with it directly.Meanwhile, students need more opportunities to make in-person friends. Research shows that remote social interactions are a woefully inadequate substitute for in-person ones when it comes to loneliness and well-being; if adults don’t find ways to keep schools open as we continue to struggle with the pandemic, children’s suffering will compound. (As my colleague Joshua D. Coval shows in his research, in many cases political motivations—not health concerns—are what get in the way of reopening schools.) Even before the pandemic, however, students’ screens and smartphones—the use of which is negatively associated with an ability to make friends—were crowding out in-person interactions.[Randi Weingarten: Schools must open this fall. In person. Five days a week.]Making friends can be a challenge at any age. For kids (or adults) who crave concrete guidelines, some recent research using novel artificial-intelligence methods offers useful advice. The data indicate that social praise (noticing and remarking on what people do well) and mimicry (for example, laughing with others) are great ways to start making connections. But we hardly need computers to tell us this—you can find the same lesson repeated thousands of ways, in every culture. And plenty of resources put it into a handy form, including religious scriptures and practices as well as Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which teaches 37 commonsense lessons for treating other people with dignity, respect, and even love. Teaching these character lessons in school might help kids enjoy it more too.I’m not going to claim that I have unilaterally cracked the problem of kids grumbling about school here. As long as they (or you, if you are a student) have to get up early, sit still for hours at a time, and do homework, school is not going to be all strawberries and cream. Even those who love to learn will find things they dislike.[Read: The worsening homework problem]But these are small problems compared with what truly strips the delight out of school. With more friendship, students will find greater joy and interest, which can turn misery into minor annoyance. And that sets everyone up for education’s long-run happiness benefits.When was the last time you remember being truly happy? Tell us in an audio clip, no longer than three minutes, and send it to howtopodcast@theatlantic.com, or leave us a voicemail at 925-967-2091. Your story could be featured on Arthur Brooks’s upcoming podcast on how to build a meaningful life. Please include your name and location in the email and/or audio file. By submitting this clip, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity. 

Jordan Peterson is not known for being shy about his opinions. Yet “the most influential Biblical interpreter in the world today” is very coy about saying whether or not he believes in God.
“I don’t like the question” Peterson always replies when put on the spot, acknowledging that he is “obsessed with religious matters”. Several millions of people can attest to that, having watched his fascinating “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories” YouTube series, which focuses on the book of Genesis. But when it comes to God’s existence, Peterson doesn’t want to declare his hand. Why? “I don’t know, exactly” he replies. “I act as if God exists and I am terrified that He might.” Some think Peterson is being deliberately shifty.
As a result of the professor’s engagement with religion, a full-length study on the question of him and God has been published: Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity: The Search for a Meaningful Life. In it, Christopher Kaczor and Matthew R. Petrusek, a couple of American academics, generously acknowledge all that he has done to draw out the psychological insights of Biblical narratives, while seeking to encourage him over the line, into what they think of as full-blown belief. Both admire Peterson, but just can’t quite get over the fact that he is unwilling — publicly, at least — to make what they take to be the ultimate declaration of faith. His faith, they say, is the sort of thing you might have “in the parking lot, outside the church” – as if he is nearly there, but not quite. You can sense their frustration throughout: is “acting as if God exists” enough to be counted as a believing Christian? Close, they think. But not close enough.

“In the end, the difference between ‘acting as if God exists’, which Peterson says he does, and ‘believing in God and acting accordingly’, which Peterson says he is not ready to do, may seem inconsequential. Yet the difference between the two is as vast and relevant as the difference between reading a great love story and falling in love yourself.”
What is at stake here, though, is something more than wanting to sign Peterson up as a proper member of team Christianity. What is at stake is deciphering what we mean by really believing. And here, even as a priest, I am much more in the Peterson camp. Unlike the authors of this book, I am really not that bothered by Peterson’s apparently indeterminate status.
I remember a terrible moment on the first night at theological college in Oxford. I had unpacked my trunk ready for three years of training to be a priest. I lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and a terrible thought struck me: did I really believe in all this stuff? Was I now writing the cheques of religious commitment that I didn’t have the intellectual recourses to cash? In other words: was I a fraud?
After a quarter of a century as a priest, I still don’t have a satisfactory answer to this question. And after a great deal of soul-searching on the matter, I have come to a similar conclusion to Peterson: there’s something wrong with the question.
My conversion to Christianity was both instantaneous, and drawn out. As an atheist philosophy student, I discovered a surprising love of the Biblical literature, and of those existentialist philosophers who took it seriously. Writers such as Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard brought it to life for me — much as they did for Peterson. Friends would describe Christianity as my funny sort of hobby; I thought of it as a kind of secular moral philosophy. Then, all of a sudden, I came to the realisation that I wasn’t on the outside of this system of thought looking in. I was on the inside looking out. Something huge had changed, but I was unable to say precisely what it was.
I think Wittgenstein best describes the nature of my conversion. In his Philosophical Investigations he has a little illustration (below) of what is known as a duck-rabbit.

He notes how it is possible to see these lines as the drawing of a rabbit. But then, suddenly, you see them as the drawing of a duck. What were ears become the duck’s bill. The image is not looking right but looking left. Everything about the image looks different. And yet nothing has changed. The lines haven’t moved.
My conversion was remarkably similar: nothing changed about the world; I still thought it contained the same stuff. But the way I looked at it had been turned on its head. This was no longer a tree, but an expression of God’s creation. The people in my life were no longer fleshy units of individual consciousness, but made in the image and likeness of God. Nothing changed, yet everything changed. I suspect that being “obsessed with religious matters” makes this sort of change. And you can build your life around it, as I have.
But hang on, an observer might say. Surely the lines have changed. After all, you now believe in God, so there must be an additional element to the picture. But it doesn’t work like that. Thomas Aquinas observed that if you decided to embark upon a crazy impossible project of listing all the things that existed in the world — shoes, cars, clouds, stars, atoms, etc — then God wouldn’t be on the list because God is not a created object, He is the creator itself. Which is remarkably close to saying that God does not exist. However, existence is not the right sort of thing to say about God. To talk of His existence is to relegate God to just one more thing about the universe – big and powerful, admittedly, but fundamentally, ontologically, just one more thing among others. And what the great doctors of the church repeatedly say about God is that He just isn’t like that.
Suggested readingThe world needs Jordan Peterson more than everBy Douglas Murray
The authors of this new book contrast Peterson’s “acting as if God exists” faith with that of CS Lewis, for them a representative of the “really believing” kind of Christian. For them, Peterson’s “faith” is kind of second best.
What they don’t mention, however, is the fascinating exchange when the marsh-wiggle Puddleglum is captured by a witch in CS Lewis’s The Silver Chair and taken to her underground lair. Seeking to disabuse Puddleglum of the idea that he might survive imprisonment, she attempts to convince him that Narnia and Aslan do not exist. It is Lewis’s take on Plato’s parable of the cave.
Puddleglum doesn’t have half the intellectual resources of the nihilistic witch, but he makes a spirited defence that has her infuriated. Yes, he might be a dreamer. Yet his “made up” world feels a lot more important that her “real world”.
“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a great deal more important than the real ones…I am going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I am going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”
This might sound like Puddleglum doesn’t properly believe; something along the lines of: I will believe in God even if there isn’t any God. But in fact, as Rowan Williams put it, Puddleglum “isn’t saying it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. He’s saying I have no means of knowing whether this is or isn’t true…But I know there’s something here that I cannot let go of without letting go of myself.”
To be fair, its not as if the authors of the Peterson book think there is no value in this position — indeed, they include a nifty quote from Fr Richard John Neuhaus that makes another kind of defence of us Puddleglums: “If you would believe,” he said, “act as though you believe, leaving it to God to know whether you believe, for such leaving it to God is faith.” But whereas they think this is not quite up to scratch, I take it that this position is as authentic an expression of faith as one could hope to find.
Further readingWhat Peterson shares with PelagiusBy Giles Fraser
That’s why I think Peterson’s faith is not in any way lacking some extra element that turns it into the real thing. Aquinas described the authentic religious inquiry as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. In other words, it is not understanding that comes first. You don’t need to have a fully worked out philosophy of God before you can profess any sort of faith. The understanding bit is always a work in progress.
I am perfectly happy to say that I believe in God, not because I totally know what that means as a kind of intellectual assent (still less proof) to some proposition about the world, but rather because I say it as a kind of existential commitment. This is where I stand. This is how I see the world.
It seems to me perfectly obvious that Peterson is doing something very similar. When Jesus called the fishermen by the sea of Galilee he said “come follow me”. He didn’t offer proofs or even any sort of argument. He didn’t supply any sort of check-list of their metaphysical commitments. He just asked them to follow. In a more metaphysically sceptical world, they might well have explained their actions thus: “I act as if God exists and I am terrified that He might.”
This isn’t being shifty. This is precisely what faith looks like.

In 2002, a Harvard professor named Marc Hauser made an exciting discovery about monkeys. Cotton-top tamarins, to be specific. The monkeys, just like human infants, were able to generalise rules that they’d learned across different patterns. This was a big deal: if monkeys had this capacity, it would provide key insights into how human language evolved.
Except it was all fake: in the experiment, which relied on the monkeys looking in particular directions when shown certain patterns, Hauser had simply pretended that they were looking in the direction relevant to his language-evolution theory. They hadn’t been. When a research assistant questioned how Hauser himself kept finding the results he wanted when nobody else who looked at the data could, he turned into a browbeating bully: “I am getting a bit pissed here,” he wrote in an email. “There were no inconsistencies!”

It is just a tiny bit ironic, then, that Hauser had also written a book about morality. Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong came out in 15 years ago, and described Hauser’s theory that we have an in-built, evolved morality module in our brains. Perhaps his had gone somewhat awry: not only did he fake the data in that monkey-learning paper, but there were also allegations that he’d lifted many of his book’s ideas — most notably, the idea that morality has a “universal grammar”, like language — from another academic, John Mikhail, without crediting him at all.
You might have expected better from an Ivy League university professor. But the Hauser case was a classic reminder of how even the most high-powered intellectuals from the most august institutions should never be given our implicit trust.
Suggested readingHow the experts messed up on CovidBy Stuart Ritchie and Michael Story
Sadly, we now have yet another story that underlines this lesson; something similar might have happened again. Another Ivy League psychology professor; another pop-science book; another set of results that aren’t real and were never real to begin with; another set of credible (though, I hasten to add, at this time unproven) allegations of scientific fraud. And another irony, because the potentially dishonest results were in a study about: honesty.
Duke University’s Dan Ariely has written several books that made a big splash in the world of popular psychology and “behavioural economics”. His combination of humour and what appears to be deep psychological insight made them fly off the shelves. In 2008, Predictably Irrational provided an apparently “revolutionary” argument for why economists were wrong to assume rationality on the part of the average consumer. In 2012, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty used some of Ariely’s own research to explain what makes people break the rules. Ariely’s slick, charismatic TED talks have racked up millions of views. One of them, titled “Our Buggy Moral Code”, explains “why we think it’s okay to cheat or steal”.
Unfortunately, it seems someone involved with Ariely’s research thought it was okay to cheat. Last week, an in-depth statistical analysis showed that a dataset from one of his 2012 papers was, essentially beyond doubt, fraudulent. The study had apparently showed that people were more honest about how much mileage their car had done if you made them sign a “I promise this information is true” statement before they reported the mileage, rather than at the bottom of the page. But it hadn’t shown that. In fact, it seems no such study ever happened, and the data was just produced using a random number generator.
Ariely responded to the claims: he said that he’d had a car insurance company collect the data, so someone there must have faked it (impressively, the faker made the results of the study line up perfectly with Ariely’s theory). In other words, his crime was one of sloppiness rather than fraud, since he didn’t double-check the data. He won’t say which insurance company it was — his responses were described by BuzzFeed News’s investigative journalist Stephanie Lee as “vague and conflicting”— nor will Duke University reveal any of the details of the investigation they claim to have made into the matter. The study with the allegedly fraudulent data — which has been cited over 400 times by other scientists — is to be retracted.
Like Hauser’s paper on monkeys (which has been cited more than 175 times), that apparently faked paper on honesty has already done damage to the scientific literature: each of those 400 citations used it, to a greater or lesser extent, to buttress some scientific argument they were making. In every case, they seem to have been misled. This is part of the tragedy of fraud in a cumulative endeavour like science. The least Ariely could do now is provide every possible detail of the provenance of the fake dataset so the scientific community can get to the bottom of it.
But, in the case of Ariely, reticence is something of a pattern. In 2010 he told an interviewer a “fact” about the extent to which dentists agree on whether a tooth has a cavity (he said it was only 50% of the time). His apparent source, Delta Dental insurance, denied this. Ariely claimed someone at Delta Dental had given him the information — but he wouldn’t reveal anything about them, other than the fact they’d definitely not want to talk to anyone else about it.
And just a few months ago, another of his papers (from 2004) was given a special editorial “expression of concern” because of over a dozen statistical impossibilities in the reported numbers. These couldn’t be checked, Ariely said, because he’d lost the original data file.
Maybe it’s worth looking at Ariely’s own theory about cheating and dishonesty. In his TED talk, he described an experiment of his in which the participants had been more likely to cheat on a “dollar-per-correct-answer” maths test if they only had to self-report their number of correct answers, having shredded the answer sheet. That is, when nobody could check the details, dishonesty kicked in. (Someone should probably check the data in that study is legitimate, though.)
Science is supposed to be all about nullius in verba — take nobody’s word for it. Everything, down to the tiniest detail, is supposed to be readily verifiable. Even if a scientist has done everything completely above board, they shouldn’t have to rely on “the dog ate my homework” or “I do have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school so you wouldn’t know her” excuses. The whole idea of having a scientific record is to, well, record things; a literature that’s full not just of fraud but also unverifiable claims is a strange contradiction in terms.
Even if this is the end of the Ariely affair and no other issues with his research are found, it’s still a perfect illustration of so many of the problems with our scientific system. A patchy literature of unclear veracity. Researchers losing track of their data, allowing error, and sometimes fraud, to slip in. Scientists building lucrative careers on a foundation of dodgy research, while the people that clean up their mess — the fraud-busters and data sleuths — go largely unsung. Bestselling popular books spreading untrue and unverifiable claims to thousands of readers.
You need only look at previous massively-successful books on the topics of human biases and the importance of sleep to see how low-quality research and sloppy scientific arguments can reach enormous audiences. At best, the implications of this are that dinner-party conversations will contain even fewer solid facts than usual. At worst, patients (or their doctors) will make decisions about their health on the basis of some unproven, vaguely-reported fact they read in some famous professor’s popular book.
It’s easy to get distracted by the tangles of irony of these cases: the immoral morality expert; the dishonesty expert who (at best) got duped by dishonesty. As amusing as the stories are, they also have rather grim consequences. No matter the subject area, and no matter how impressive the credentials, our trust in the experts keeps being betrayed.
And in some sense, this is a good thing. Scandals like this remind us to take nothing at face value. Nullius in verba, after all. In response to the new fraud revelations, Ariely wrote that he “did not test the data for irregularities, which after this painful lesson, I will start doing regularly”. Whether or not you trust Ariely’s research or his books any more, it’s good advice.

Persuasion has now been continuously publishing content for over a year! Our team is proud of what we've achieved—and in need of a little breather. So, for the second half of August, we are republishing some of our favorite essays of the past 13 months. (We'll still release new episodes of the Good Fight podcast each Saturday.) From John McWhorter's seminal essay on a new religion sweeping America to Emily Yoffe's prescient "taxonomy of fear," and from Carlos Hernández's account of fleeing Venezuela to Andrew Stroehlein's overview of the brave dissidents fighting against dictators in relative obscurity, here is some of the content of which we are especially proud. I hope you enjoy discovering or rereading these texts, and I look forward to sharing a lot of exciting new material with you when we return at the end of the month.- YaschaWhen the opposition activist Alexei Navalny returned to Russia in January despite having been poisoned there, many asked, “Why?” He knew he would be arrested and was soon sentenced to more than two years in prison. Why would he put himself in that position?Navalny showed a rare kind of determination and bravery—rare, but not unique. If we look around the world, we see courageous people in other contexts taking similar risks. Such less globally known dissidents deserve our attention too.These “other Navalnys” each have distinct stories. Some have political ambitions. Others focus on helping victims of oppression or they push for human-rights reforms. Some may start in activism and end up seeking high office. But what all these dissidents share is a singular dedication to their causes—a devotion that leaves us in awe.• Ilham Tohti. China has many living heroes. Among them is Tohti, an ethnic Uyghur economist and critic of the government. In the face of the authorities’ abuses and discrimination against the Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region, Tohti has been a voice of reason and decency. He offered practical solutions to the economic discrimination against Uyghurs and spoke of the need for an independent legal system to tackle state abuses.Tohti urged peaceful debate among students, scholars and the wider population. He was the kind of peaceful reformer whom the authorities should have embraced, given their oft-stated fears of unrest by radicals in the region. But in 2014, they sentenced Tohti to life in prison on bogus charges of “separatism” after an absurdly unfair trial.Tohti turned out to be a canary in the coal mine for Xinjiang. In the years after his sentencing, the Chinese government intensified its repression in the region, arbitrarily detaining 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in “re-education camps” and expanding its automated mass surveillance systems there to dark extremes.The Chinese government wants the world to forget Tohti. That hasn’t happened. The European Parliament awarded him its prestigious Sakharov Prize in 2019, and the Uyghur diaspora has kept Tohti and China’s abuses in the global eye.• Ahmed Mansoor. A prominent human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, Mansoor was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2018 on charges entirely related to his statements on fundamental rights. Yes: a decade in prison for nothing more than telling the truth.As if even the UAE authorities realized how embarrassing it was, Mansoor’s trial and appeal were held behind closed doors. The government refused to make public the charge sheet and court rulings.The case recalls a line from Orwell’s 1984: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Insisting on simple facts takes courage in places when repressive authorities seem aware of Orwell’s next line: “If that is granted, all else follows.”As Khalid Ibrahim, executive director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights, has said, “Ahmed Mansoor knew he risked prison when he devoted himself to protesting human rights violations in his country and the wider region, yet he still did so with courage and dedication. That is why UAE authorities have punished him so harshly.”• Sônia Guajajara. The Brazilian activist has become a powerful force in the cause of indigenous and environmental rights, strongly opposing the government of the populist Jair Bolsonaro for its disastrous policies, which have contributed to rapid destruction of the Amazon.Some might not liken a dissident in Russia, China or the UAE to one in a more democratic country like Brazil. But environmental activism, including on indigenous land-rights issues, is incredibly dangerous there. More than 300 people have been killed in Brazil in the past decade in conflicts over the use of land and resources in Amazonian states, many of them murdered by those involved in illegal deforestation, according to the Pastoral Land Commission, a nonprofit organization that aids victims.Born in a rainforest village of the Guajajara people, she became the first indigenous person in Brazil to run for a federal executive office, seeking the position of vice president. She surely knows the grave risks she faces after the killings of activists from her own ethnic group. Yet she continues to speak out, specifically against the violent criminal networks behind such murders.• Bobi Wine. The Ugandan musician and opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, better known by his stage name Bobi Wine, had the audacity to challenge the five-term president, Yoweri Museveni, for the country’s top post—even though Museveni holds all the levers of state violence and his henchmen aren’t afraid to use them.Wine’s life story almost begs to be turned into a feature film. He came from a slum in Kampala and captured the frustrations of a new generation, first in his music and then in his politics. “I realized nobody’s going to save us,” he said in a magazine interview. “We have to do it on our own.” He became the voice of young Ugandans fed up with rampant corruption by the few, and the deep impoverishment of the many.He has been arrested countless times, and tortured, for exercising his fundamental right to free speech. The fact that Wine had to campaign wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet tells you much about Ugandan politics—and about Wine’s dedication.In the weeks leading up to the January elections, Human Rights Watch documented “killings by security forces, arrests and beatings of opposition supporters and journalists, disruption of opposition rallies, and a shutdown of the internet.” Museveni was declared the winner, and Wine was placed under house arrest. Wine will fight on, surely.What Uncommon People Have in CommonThese dissidents all come from different backgrounds and work in different contexts. Still, there is value in bringing together examples like these, to help us better understand what makes such exceptional leaders.Working on human rights and following dissidents like these—at times, even being lucky enough to work with them—I have found one trait keeps coming through: certainty of vision and focus.Two decades ago, I asked the Russian investigative journalist and human rights defender Anna Politkovskaya how she could keep doing what she did. For her reporting on abuses by Russian forces in the Second Chechen War, the military detained her, beat her, and subjected her to a mock execution.“How can you go on with your investigations?” I asked. “Surely you know the military’s intimidation is not just for show, and that they may actually kill you next time, no?”“Of course,” she replied. She saw no choice: The crimes had to be exposed, and she was in a position to do it. She knew the risks. Politkovskaya was poisoned on a plane in 2004, much as Navalny was last year. She survived the poisoning but was shot dead outside her apartment in 2006.I don’t believe that human rights defenders like Politkovskaya have any desire to become martyrs. They feel taken over by the gravity of the issue and become possessed by the historical importance of what they do.All such dissidents see what is fundamental in a way that those around them do not—or at least cannot put into words. Their societies are mired in corruption and power networks, but they cut through it with basic demands that resonate: the right to speak your mind; the right to a healthy environment; the right to protest peacefully; the right to vote for your leaders and have your vote counted. They’re not asking for the world, but for what hundreds of millions of people around the world already have—and often take for granted.It’s the simplicity of their message that makes these dissidents effective. That simplicity can be the catalyst for widespread support, and the politically minded among them know that. But what’s true of all of them is this: They can’t see it any other way.Most people look at Navalny returning to Russia, and consider it irrational. But a dissident sees the irrational as a calling. And if what’s “rational” means social consensus, then these paths do look “irrational.” But for the dissidents, it’s the authorities who are irrational. The dissidents remain hard-headed year after year until—with hard work and luck—more and more of society flips what it sees as rational and irrational. Then we witness a victory in a courtroom, or a pivotal election result, or maybe even something monumental like the end of an oppressive system.More often, sadly, the authorities crush them. The fact is that most dissidents don’t end up persuading their societies to change. Many dissidents face an awful fate that they could see coming. It’s not that they don’t care about their own life; it’s that they want to make their one life matter.Along with my colleagues, I was privileged to join in a long-distance interview last year of a jailed human rights defender in Kyrgyzstan, Azimjon Askarov, just months before he died in prison because the authorities denied him adequate medical care. Of the many profound things he said after 10 years of wrongful imprisonment, I’ll remember this most: “Even though I am in prison, I feel the freedom of my soul.”Many will think that sounds irrational. But within this worldview, which I am beginning to understand and share, it makes sense. Repressive authorities keep trying to gaslight us. But we hold on to what’s real, at least in the one place that we control and they can’t reach: the soul.We see dissidents’ bravery and vision as inspiring, but also incomprehensible. We struggle to understand what makes them choose such a dangerous path. But that’s just it: We see it as a brave choice. They don’t see any choice at all.Andrew Stroehlein is the European media director at Human Rights Watch.This piece was originally published by Persuasion on March 1, 2021.

On a muggy spring night in 2016, the chemist Bernd Schöllhorn was tromping alone through a forest in northern Vietnam. Into the inky darkness, he raised a black light—and saw an extraordinarily bright shape winking at him in eerie shades of yellowish green.“I thought it was somebody else,” Schöllhorn, a researcher at the University of Paris, told me. But when he cut his own light, the stranger’s torch instantly extinguished as well. Schöllhorn pushed his way through the vegetation until he reached the source of the glow: a geometric, open-combed nest of a paper-wasp colony.“It was just incredible,” Schöllhorn recalled. Bathed in ultraviolet rays from his flashlight, the nest looked as though it had been dipped in a vat of highlighter ink, so bright and Day-Glo green that the inches-wide structure was visible from some 60 feet away. The wasps’ home, Schöllhorn realized, was fluorescing, as though prepping for an entomological rave. And he had no idea why.Over the next several years, Schöllhorn and his colleagues searched for paper wasps in other parts of Vietnam, then in France and French Guiana, until they’d found nests from six different species in the genus Polistes. When fed a steady stream of ultraviolet rays, all of the nests glowed, each with a bit of regional flair: The four from Vietnam all pulsed in green, while the other two, from Europe and South America, were a more muted teal-ish blue. “Finding this in so many species, and across three different continents, is remarkable,” Swanne Gordon, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies insect signaling and wasn’t involved in the study, told me.The wasps themselves didn’t light up; neither did the topmost parts of the nests, constructed out of chewed-up wood (hence the “paper” moniker). The glow, the researchers found, came from a layer of silk stitched across the openings of the hexagonal cells at each nest’s base.Scientists hadn’t pinpointed this silk as fluorescent before. Its primary purpose is to cocoon young paper wasps during their metamorphosis, when larvae “dissolve their bodies” and reform themselves into adults, Sara Miller, a paper-wasp expert at Cornell University, told me. What’s inside the sealed cell is “really like a bag of mush,” Miller said. The larvae excrete silk out of a gland, and it shields the pupa from the ravages of reality—predators, pathogens, harsh weather conditions—much like a chrysalis protects a butterfly-to-be.In the light of the forest, when viewed with human eyes, paper-wasp silk appears whitish or yellowish and is decidedly matte. But when fed ultraviolet light in the lab, the string-like fibers convert those rays into a fluorescence funky enough for an ’80s aerobics ensemble.Especially staggering was the silk’s capacity for shine. In the lab, Schöllhorn’s team calculated each nest’s quantum yield, or its capacity to emit light when fed a certain number of photons. “Those kinds of measurements are tricky to get,” especially from flora and fauna, Carlos Taboada, who studies glowy amphibians at Duke University, told me. The few quantum yields that researchers have managed to glean from fluorescent animals tend to fall between 0.3 and 12.5 percent; a few years ago, Taboada uncovered frogs that shone near the top of that range. The brightest nest the researchers collected, a Polistes brunetus creation from Vietnam, registered a whopping 35 percent. “That is incredibly large for a biological tissue,” Taboada, who wasn’t involved in the new study, said.[Read: An inordinate fondness for wasps]The silk’s beguiling glow, the researchers confirmed, falls in the range of wavelengths that wasp eyes can see. “They’re very sensitive to green,” Schöllhorn told me. But it’s not yet clear what purpose the fluorescence serves for the insects, if any at all. Plenty of things will glow under black lights, if given the chance. That doesn’t guarantee that these glimmers are more than a coincidence of physics. “It’s still possible this is just an incidental by-product of how the silk is made,” Liz Tibbetts, a paper-wasp expert at the University of Michigan who wasn’t involved in the study, told me.Schöllhorn and his colleagues haven’t yet figured out whether the silk’s glow-stick effect is important to the wasps, or exactly how the larvae cook it up. The fluorescent molecules could be dietary, for instance, or entirely of the insects’ own making. Still, Schöllhorn thinks the glow probably has some role to play. One possibility is that it serves as a sort of psychedelic beacon for work-weary wasps staggering back home. Several of the insect experts I talked with were a little hesitant to embrace this idea, because paper wasps, which are famously detail-oriented, are already ace at navigation. The silk is also ablaze for only part of the nesting cycle, after eggs had been laid and hatched.A more intriguing hypothesis, experts told me, might hinge on the silk’s ability to safeguard pupae by waylaying harmful, DNA-damaging UV rays—a sort of DIY sunscreen for baby wasps. “To me, that’s the most appealing idea,” Floria Mora-Kepfer Uy, a wasp expert at the University of Rochester who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. That could come in handy, she said, for nests that hang at the edges of forests, where the vegetation is sparse and the structures are constantly flooded with sunlight. But Uy also told me that she hasn’t yet seen evidence of fluorescence in the nests she’s studied in the subtropics of North and Central America.Scientists have known for years about bony fish, sharks, worms, jellies, corals, and other marine creatures that light up to attract mates, lure prey, or discombobulate predators. The list of terrestrial examples is sparse, but is growing: Frogs, salamanders, birds, spiders, butterflies, and even flying squirrels all bat for Team Glow. Paper-wasp silk could provide yet more clues about fluorescence’s function on land.[Read: Why do corals glow in the dark? ]Humans perceive the world “in just one way,” Tibbetts told me. “We’re walking around with blinders on.” Terrestrial fluorescence might not be so rare at all; we just haven’t been searching for it.Schöllhorn is one of many researchers trying to course-correct—which is why he originally took that fateful black-light-wielding walk in Vietnam. Many of these excursions are solo trips, he told me. “No one wanted to go with me,” he said. “There is no light at all, and snakes, spiders, insects everywhere.” He’s gotten used to it, though, and the rewards are always worth the trek. The next great glower won’t be found unless someone is willing to look.

Last week, I attended my first film screening that required proof of vaccination against COVID-19 upon entry. I presented my Excelsior Pass and photo ID and swanned on in. The entire process took 15 seconds, and in return I received the invaluable assurance that my fellow cinemagoers had also been inoculated. My experience was in line with New York City policy, which mandates proof of vaccination for many indoor activities. It remains an open question whether movie theaters around the country will embrace the strategy, as fears of the Delta variant keep box-office totals from rebounding to full strength at a crucial moment for the industry. But in an uncertain time, vaccine mandates for eligible moviegoers might be the only way to salvage the long-term future of the cinema experience.Exhibitors seem to understand this. “Honestly, it’s a mixed bag for movie theaters. On the one hand, it will cost us some business, and we know that, because some unvaccinated people won’t be able to attend our cinemas,” National Association of Theatre Owners CEO John Fithian told The Wrap. “The upside, of course, is that we as an industry ... recognize that we need vaccination rates to climb to get back to a full recovery as we go into next year,” he said, adding that mandates spur people’s interest in getting vaccinated. (The recent FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine is helping to justify mandates in schools, hospitals, and other workplaces in some jurisdictions.)[Read: Your moviegoing experience is about to change]Although Fithian’s fears have some validity in the short term, a vaccine requirement would be a gift for an industry looking to distinguish itself on a national scale as a safe social experience. If large theater chains mandated vaccines nationwide—and they have so far not objected to announced ordinances such as the ones in New York City and Los Angeles—a hit to revenue would be expected. Fithian pointed out to The Wrap that in France and Italy, where proof of vaccination or a negative test is required at movie theaters, box-office totals reportedly dropped some 40 percent after implementation, although have since started to improve. As a long-term play, vaccine requirements for U.S. theaters could help head off the public’s fears at a moment when cinemas are still struggling to find their footing, and as studios prepare to roll out major fall films such as Dune, No Time to Die, and Top Gun: Maverick.After losing some $32 billion in ticket sales worldwide in 2020, Hollywood’s ability to further delay its biggest releases is limited. Following a promising summer, with blockbusters such as Black Widow and F9 posting huge opening weekends reminiscent of a pre-pandemic era, grosses have declined again and Hollywood has been mired in debate over releases that are available online and in theaters simultaneously. The Suicide Squad, a Warner Bros. film that was also made available on HBO Max, has only just cracked $49 million more than three weeks in; its predecessor grossed $325 million domestically even though it had far worse reviews. Despite a strong opening, Black Widow had no real longevity in cinemas, a failure attributed to its rentability on Disney+ (and which has spurred a lawsuit from its star, Scarlett Johansson).[Read: Disney’s Black Widow gamble didn’t pay off]However, some recent successes suggest that a demand for the cinematic experience still exists, and is just waiting to be tapped into. Ryan Reynolds’s Free Guy, a video-game spoof not based on any existing work, has shown surprising strength at the box office, helped by the fact that it’s not available on other platforms yet. Though many studios have sold their family movies to streaming services out of the fear that nobody wants to bring unvaccinated children to theaters, the debut of a Paw Patrol feature last week pulled in a respectable $13 million in ticket sales despite being available online. (Even so, risk calculations for families with kids under 12 are more complicated, with or without vaccine mandates.)  No business decision in 2021 is an easy one. A vaccine requirement would cause some political consternation along with the usual hue and cry that erupts over seemingly every COVID-19 policy in America. But mandates are supported by a majority of Americans, and 71 percent of eligible Americans have received at least one dose of a vaccine. As Juliette Kayyem argued for The Atlantic, “Employers and entertainment venues are realizing that they can operate more easily without the hassle of planning around unvaccinated employees and customers.” A mask-wearing policy alone offers limited protection against COVID-19 in theaters, given that they all sell popcorn, soda, candy, and sometimes full meals, concessions being the most crucial part of their bottom line. Most moviegoers crave safety in a large public space, and theaters can offer them more security with a quick check at the door. The arrival of vaccines was what brought theaters back in early 2021, and mandates would help cement that sense of sanctuary.

If evolution is a numbers game, the coronavirus is especially good at playing it. Over the past year and a half, it’s copied itself quickly and sloppily in hundreds of millions of hosts, and hit upon a glut of genetic jackpots that further facilitate its spread. Delta, the hyper-contagious variant that has swept the globe in recent months, is undoubtedly one of the virus’s most daring moves to date. This variant is the product of unfettered transmission, and will thrive further on it; if allowed to, Delta could morph into something even more formidable. “Delta is already a really strong competitor,” Michal Tal, an immunologist at Stanford University, told me. “It could get significantly worse.”We can’t precisely predict what worse will look like. There is no playbook for evolution. Delta could continue to ratchet up its rate of spread, or it could be ousted by another super-infectious variant. But the speed that has powered Delta’s transmission for months probably can’t sustain SARS-CoV-2 forever, at least not on its own. Humanity’s collective immunity to the virus is growing, which means the next variants we encounter might be better off taking a tack that relies a lot more on stealth. “There’s some sort of tipping point where immune evasion becomes a bigger fitness advantage than transmission,” Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, told me. No one yet knows exactly where that tipping point is—just that we will probably, eventually, collide with it.This transition will mark a new stage in our extended parlay with SARS-CoV-2. Viruses depend intimately on their hosts—and the global population no longer looks or acts as it did when this one was a fresh threat. A large fraction of us, especially in vaccine-wealthy countries such as the United States, now have some degree of immunity, simultaneously suppressing the pathogen’s ability to pass among us and pressuring it to circumvent those shields. Our defenses are upping the ante for the virus. And the virus will likely rise to meet it.The cyclical nature of this game might sound disheartening. But nothing will ever put us back at square one. Even as the virus evolves away from us, we can give chase. As immunity builds, our dalliances with the virus will trend milder, shorter, and less frequent. With vaccination on our side, we’re giving the virus fewer turns at the board, and slowing the pace at which the game is played. Although we can’t yet trounce SARS-CoV-2 for good, we can buy ourselves time to make our next decisive move.In broad strokes, the rules of evolutionary play are simple enough. Researchers still aren’t sure where, or in whom, most variants arise, but they’re clearly more likely to sprout when the coronavirus is allowed to stick around and make more and more of itself, whether in an individual person or in a whole population. Mutations happen like typos during a virus’s messy replication; the majority are inconsequential, even detrimental to the pathogen. But scattered among these genetic glitches will be the occasional windfall, a mistake that helps one version of the virus outcompete its kin. Those proportionally rare events become more absolutely common when given more opportunities to occur. “The longer the virus persists, the more opportunities it’ll have to sample what makes it more fit,” Oliver Fregoso, a virologist at UCLA, told me.SARS-CoV-2’s self-xeroxing process isn’t particularly error-prone compared with many of the respiratory viruses we regularly tussle with. All else equal, that’s great news: In the few short days most infected people need to marshal immune responses and purge the pathogen, the coronavirus has barely enough time to tweak its genome once, if at all. “The virus that comes out is going to be basically identical to the virus that goes in,” Goldstein told me. And any variants that do arise have little chance to accumulate in high enough numbers to matter. Most mutants “never make it past the person who’s infected,” Siobain Duffy, an evolutionary virologist at Rutgers University, told me. Many that do exit are doomed to extinguish before they can locate their next host.[Read: The coronavirus is here forever. This is how we live with it.]But all bets are off when the body’s barriers start to break down. Since the pandemic’s start, several independent research groups have uncovered evidence that variants may have an easier time arising in people with weak immune systems, including those taking immunosuppressive drugs—meaning that “immunocompromised people probably have a role to play” in SARS-CoV-2’s evolution, says Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge who has been studying this link. Some struggle to clear the virus for months, giving the pathogen time to spawn a menagerie of mutants. Most of the pathogen’s progeny will still be evolutionary duds. But the more of them that are made, the higher the chance that one will rise above the fray and tumble back out into the world. Though it’s tough to prove definitively, this may be the origin story of Alpha, Delta’s super-transmissible forerunner. Its genome is pockmarked with an unusual number of mutations, the telltale sign that a variant may have been stewing inside a single person.These prolonged infections can’t explain everything. Delta’s genome, for instance, is relatively clean. Its roots might lie in a different sort of numeric abundance—many brief infections in rapid succession.A variant’s success is also contingent on the specifics of the board it’s playing on, and which opponent it’s facing. Consider, for instance, the Beta and Gamma variants, which both carry mutations that make them much less recognizable to antibodies, a trait that likely helps them wriggle their way into well-defended hosts. They appear to have gained traction in South Africa and Brazil, respectively, where a somewhat large fraction of the population may have already been infected by an older version of the virus. Delta, however, seems to have sprouted first in India, which was slammed later in the pandemic, and where far fewer people had seen SARS-CoV-2 before. In that environment, Delta didn’t need much covertness to establish itself—just a penchant for seriously speedy spread. That strategy helped Delta rapidly outstrip several of its wilier but more sluggish competitors and hopscotch across the globe.A virus’s primary objective is to spread, through whatever means it can. So far, Delta has had little reason to switch up its tactics. Although the variant appears to carry at least a couple of mutations that help it evade certain antibodies—a probable perk when it infiltrates someone with immunity—most scientists have been much more concerned about Delta’s ability to hack its way quickly and efficiently into cells. The variant is so transmissibly supercharged that it can crest in the body, and probably hop into new hosts, before many of the most potent immune defenses kick into high gear. A virus doesn’t need to be invisible if it can get in and out before security has time to spot it.But the more people Delta and its comrades infect, the more they disadvantage themselves. “Delta is leaving behind it people with high antibody titers,” Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, told me. Those fast-acting immune fighters stick around and can rapidly purge the variant should it try its luck in the same person again. Humans are also steadily adding to the ranks of the protected with vaccines, which offer even stronger safeguards. To keep itself going, SARS-CoV-2 will need to dodge these defenses.This, then, is the inevitable push and pull of coexisting with a virus long-term. Immunity shortens and softens infections; virus evolution stretches them back out. Once a large proportion of the population can thwart the virus, SARS-CoV-2 will need to find new ways to “stick around a day or two more,” Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, told me. The goal is the same—to keep the coronavirus in circulation—but the virus must take a different route to achieve it. That appears to have driven some of the sneaky changes in flu viruses and common-cold coronaviruses that allow them to reinfect old hosts. The more pressure on a pathogen, the more incentive it has to escape.[Read: Will the next variant be more deadly?]In the worst-case scenario, a variant could arise that would “make it like the vaccines did not exist,” Hanage said. But at the moment, “there is no such variant like that.” And it would probably be extraordinarily difficult for one to manifest. Even the most evasive variants we know of—the ones that have stumped certain antibodies—aren’t fully duping vaccinated bodies, which harbor a slew of other immunological guards. Hanage also pointed out that many people’s immune systems have been trained on different triggers—distinct brands of vaccines, unique variants, or some combination thereof. A new version of SARS-CoV-2 would find skirting all of those blockades at once to be nearly impossible.Viruses aren’t infinitely mutable; sometimes, to keep themselves in contention, they must make sacrifices. Several experts told me they’re hopeful that the coronavirus might struggle to max out both transmission and immune evasion at once, requiring some sort of trade-off between the two. Some of the most powerful anti-coronavirus antibodies target SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, which the virus uses to unlock and enter our cells. If the virus altered the protein to sidestep those antibodies, it might make itself less recognizable to the immune system. But it could also hurt its ability to infect us at all. That might help explain why Beta has, so far, remained only a supporting character in the coronavirus’s ensemble cast. Another hint comes from Alpha, which didn’t seem to benefit all that much when it acquired an antibody-eluding mutation last spring, despite widespread fears. There is, in other words, probably a limit to just how bad SARS-CoV-2 can get: Even the most careful dog breeders cannot turn a bulldog into a bear.What lies ahead might, in some ways, feel never-ending, like a series of checks with no checkmate. Vaccine recipes can be tweaked to accommodate new variants, and boosters can refresh fading immune memories. But that doesn’t make extra shots enjoyable to take.Vaccines, however, aren’t just reactive. They are also proactive interventions that curb the number of times the virus gets to roll the evolutionary dice, cutting down on the number, intensity, and duration of infections, and the chance that they’ll pass to others. A more vaccinated world creates a more hostile global environment for SARS-CoV-2. Mutations will still occur, but fewer of them will be of consequence; lineages will still splinter, but they’ll do so less often. “The overriding effect of vaccination should be to reduce the rate of [virus] adaptation,” Cobey told me. Variants, after all, can’t adapt when they’re starved of hosts to infect.Glimmers of early evidence suggest that this slowdown has already begun. One recent study, not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal, found that SARS-CoV-2’s shape-shifting rate is lower in highly immunized countries, the expected outcome of a virus knocking up against new immune walls. Gupta, of the University of Cambridge, also hopes that we’ll someday cook up vaccines that can stamp out infection and transmission to an even greater degree—or ones that direct immune cells to hit the virus in spots that can’t mutate without hamstringing it. “That will force the virus into a corner,” he told me. We’d need those types of inoculations less often, too. “I don’t envision a constant cat-and-mouse game.”This is not yet our reality. Billions of people around the world have yet to receive a single inoculation; even the vaccine-rich U.S. is deep in a dire summer surge. Delta’s rampant spread is driving more disease, more death—and more opportunities for mutation in the virus. In the absence of vigilant masking and distancing, people are getting battered with gobs of virus, testing the protective limits of even recently inoculated bodies. New variants will continue to appear at unprecedented speeds “until we get to the point where the virus is not allowed to replicate this often, or this quickly,” Jennifer Dien Bard, a clinical virologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, told me. Unabated transmission also raises the risk that some people could become viral mixing vessels: Should two variants come to occupy the same cell, they could swap hunks of their genome with each other, birthing hybrids with the nastiness of both parents in tow. Where transmission occurs unabated, “that is definitely a risk,” Lisa Gralinski, a coronavirologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Viruses don’t want things. But if they did, it would be very close to this.A continued arms race with the virus is inevitable; hitting the immunological tipping point probably is too. How quickly we reach it, and how disadvantaged we are when we do, are not. Masking, distancing, ventilation, and other interventions can limit viral spread, but vaccines remain our most powerful tools: They put some of the controls back in our hands, allowing us to safely accelerate our acquisition of immunity. Anyone who isn’t inoculated will eventually become infected, likely within the next few years, creating many of the same immunological hurdles for the virus to clear—but with a devastating public-health cost. “There’s no scenario we choose where we don’t impose selective pressure on this virus,” Goldstein, of the University of Utah, told me. “But are we going to do it while we prevent people from dying, or not?”

After months of anticipation, Americans have a fully licensed COVID-19 vaccine. Today, the FDA announced the approval of Pfizer-BioNTech’s shot for people 16 and older—the first complete thumbs-up among the three vaccines available in the U.S.The pervasive mood has been: Finally. Pfizer’s shot was given its emergency use authorization—the vaccine’s training wheels—back in December, and the company submitted its application for full approval in May. While America’s emergency-use vaccination rollout has saved an untold number of lives, many institutions, including some universities and hospitals, have been waiting for formal approval to mandate vaccinations. Health officials have expressed hope that approval will help persuade people who are vaccine-hesitant to get a shot.Especially as COVID-19 cases skyrocket and hospitals strain under the Delta variant, the FDA has to stop “dragging its feet” on vaccine approvals, many people have argued. Lives are at stake. The urgency, the medical scientist Eric Topol recently wrote in The New York Times, “cannot be overstated.”Except this hasn’t been the only mood. While the approval timeline for Pfizer has felt like forever to many, less than four months from application to full FDA approval is much faster than usual for a completely new type of drug—even a priority vaccine ordinarily takes up to eight. The timeline has been so fast, in fact, that a group of scientists recently called for the agency to slow down in the name of safety. “If the FDA listens to us, they won’t give serious consideration to approving a covid-19 vaccine until 2022,” the group said.Some people want the FDA to speed up. Others want it to be more cautious. All of this can be head-spinning for anyone who just wants the agency to do whatever actually works to get us out of this horrendous pandemic. If one thing has defined America’s vaccination rollout, it’s exactly these competing pressures. There’s a fundamental tension between the right to get access to a drug people are desperate for and the right to protection from dangerous failures of quality. The first demands speed; the second requires time.Today’s Pfizer approval relieves some of this tension, but there’s far more pushing and pulling to come. Similar debates persist over the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and, even more pressing, over emergency use authorization for vaccinating young children, who are returning to schools amid outbreaks without any access to shots. For many people, the reflexive position remains: Get vaccines into arms. If the FDA doesn’t hurry up, it is killing Americans. But imagine the cost of the agency taking a controversial safety shortcut. For full FDA approval to bring all the benefits it could, people need to trust that such approval means something.The full FDA approval of America’s three available vaccines has long been a foregone conclusion. The shots are impressively powerful, the safety data after hundreds of millions of injections are colossal, and COVID-19 certainly hasn’t lost its teeth. So why wait? The recent push to fast-track full approval for these vaccines is based on two premises. First, the FDA has been taking unreasonably long. The agency has already reviewed the initial data for the vaccines as they rolled in, there have been massive global scientific scrutiny of and consensus about them, and signing off on the latest longer-term data shouldn’t take months, the argument goes. Second, the vaccines’ emergency-use status has been a dam wall holding back a flood of vaccination that could help turn the pandemic around.[Read: The coronavirus is here forever. This is how we live with it. ]We have good reason to be cautious about both assumptions. Let’s start with the FDA. The agency’s full approval is more than just a formality. Yes, the vaccines are a tremendous success. But although early, publicly available data have now been thoroughly scrutinized, the agency has access to enormous amounts of more recent information that needs to be combed over for any surprises or signs of possible undetected issues. On a press call about the approval announcement, Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said that the agency reviewed hundreds of thousands of pages of new data from Pfizer. Even for an agency as well resourced as the FDA, thorough analysis and consideration of so much information is a heavy lift, especially for multiple vaccines at once; Moderna’s application for full approval arrived hot on the heels of Pfizer’s, on June 1. (In response to questions on the call, Marks declined to comment on the timeline of a full approval for Moderna.)And it’s not just a lot of data from the clinical trials of the vaccine. The trials and other studies by the manufacturers established the vaccine’s efficacy and basic safety, along with common and not-so-common possible reactions. Now that it’s been rolled out, though, the regulators have to look for signals of very rare issues that wouldn’t show up even in trials of tens of thousands of people.We’ve already seen how crucial this effort can be. When Pfizer submitted its application for full approval, the link between the currently available mRNA vaccines and some cases of heart inflammation hadn’t been established. The CDC informed us about this potential risk in mid-May. A safety issue particularly affecting younger people was a serious development in the regulatory process of a vaccine approval that includes 16- and 17-year-olds. The small amount of early data for that age group had been a sticking point back at the emergency-use-authorization stage. Now investigating whether the incidence of this potential side effect might be higher for Moderna’s vaccine than for Pfizer’s is reportedly the reason Moderna still hasn’t received emergency use authorization for adolescents.Then there’s the quality-control side of the task. One of Pfizer’s drug specialists recently described the company’s earliest attempt at manufacturing a COVID-19 vaccine as an “absolute and utter failure.” By the end of this year, Pfizer will have produced an estimated 3 billion doses, the most of any company. That lightning-fast progress is awe-inspiring—and a little nerve-racking. You really want to be confident that regulators are on top of this. The FDA has to be thorough, especially with the first of a new type of drug with completely new production processes, like this mRNA vaccine. It’s not enough that the vaccine used in trials was safe: We must be assured that the shots we’ll get in the arm have the same quality. That quality is not simply baked in. Last winter, for example, the European Medicines Agency, the European Union’s equivalent of the FDA, reported that the contents of some batches of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine they had tested weren’t all the same, and the source of the discrepancies had to be resolved before the agency authorized it for rollout.It’s so easy to take the rigors of our current systems for granted. We are used to them preventing disasters. In the 1950s, a world without the FDA’s current level of caution, the manufacturing failure that derailed the 1950s polio-vaccine campaign led to the deaths of 11 people and sickened far more. Today, we worry about millions of vaccine doses being discarded because they might have been contaminated, but those shots don’t get as far as people’s arms. Ensuring that these kinds of issues are identified and smoothed out is the everyday business of drug regulation. It’s not always fast or predictable. No agency can always get everything right, of course, including the FDA. They can go too fast, and they can go too slow. But having a system in which pharmaceutical companies knew that scrutiny would be relatively superficial would be tempting fate: Lowering oversight can be a quick path to lowering standards.Both the European Medicines Agency and Health Canada are releasing the complete data packages that companies submit with their applications. All of that data plus what’s in publicly reported safety-monitoring systems will be combed over by many others down the line, including some who will be trying to discredit the vaccines. If there are problems, we need the FDA to spot them first and deal with them. Confidence in specific vaccines and in the system that regulates them is a very long game.Now for the second case for fast-tracking vaccine approvals. People arguing that full FDA approval will supercharge vaccination point to two factors: more vaccine mandates, and removing the reason for a substantial proportion of vaccine hesitancy.  The Pfizer approval is indeed a green light for significant vaccine mandates at a range of institutions. The Pentagon announced today that it would go forward with mandating vaccination for America’s 1.4 million active-duty service members. New York City will now require every employee of its Department of Education to be vaccinated. Major pushes like these could make a substantial difference for vaccination numbers. At the same time, we can’t predict all reactions to mandates, especially in parts of the country where they have been strongly resisted. Back in 2015, school vaccine mandates were strengthened after measles outbreaks linked to Disneyland hit California and surrounding states. Researchers have called the groundswell of opposition to the removal of nonmedical vaccine exemptions at the time a turning point in the U.S.—it led to the mainstreaming of anti-vaccine sentiment and a shift to a highly politicized civil-liberties focus for the movement. It’s a volatile issue.[Read: Vaccination in America might have only one tragic path forward]I wouldn’t rush to predict the impact of full approval on general vaccine hesitancy, either. People have been noting the results of a Kaiser Family Foundation poll suggesting that three out of 10 unvaccinated Americans say they are more likely to get vaccinated after full FDA approval. But as the poll’s authors point out, that might just be a stand-in for safety concerns—most of the respondents either thought the vaccines were already “approved” or weren’t sure what their status was. We don’t really know how common the concern is, or how much it would affect behavior.At the moment, arguing that the vaccines aren’t actually FDA-approved is an easy tactic used to try to convince people that the vaccines are still experimental or were never properly tested. Anti-vaccine arguments can shape-shift pretty quickly, though. The claim could indeed be retired after today, at least for Pfizer, but expect some to simply pivot to saying that the vaccines are still experimental because the trials aren’t over yet. (Although Pfizer’s trials have delivered the answers we needed to start using the vaccine, they technically won’t be complete until the last collection of follow-up data on the participants.) Indeed, that the trials are still following people well into 2022 is the foundation of the argument from some scientists that FDA approval shouldn’t be granted now at all.None of this is to advocate for the idea that approvals should be slow for the sake of it. Being slow, after all, isn’t a guarantee that corners aren’t cut. The FDA needs to be able to maintain its standards, uncompromised by political or other pressures, because community confidence in its approvals has to be solid. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be questioned or challenged. This process of emergency use authorization for vaccines for the general population was a first, and the system could surely be improved for the future.One of the areas that could be improved straightaway is greater transparency for the fraught issue of vaccinating young children. Unlike adults merely waiting by choice on full approval, kids under 12—one of the country’s largest unvaccinated populations—have no access to COVID-19 vaccines. Emergency authorization of Pfizer’s vaccine for this age group is expected, but the timeline for this still is unclear, even though America is experiencing  a pediatric outbreak of COVID-19 as children are returning to school. On top of this, we’re not getting the same detailed information from pharmaceutical companies that we got for the big Phase 3 trials. For those, the protocols were public, providing blueprints of how the trials would be run. The ones for the children’s trials aren’t.[Read: The school year is going to be a mess—again]Again, push and pull. The journalist Michelle Goldberg spoke to many people’s concerns when she wrote that she “can hardly overstate the frantic helplessness” she feels over the “bureaucratic caution” that’s stopping vaccines getting to kids under 12. Yet some scientists are arguing that we should completely forgo early emergency use authorization for them, and wait the extra months it will take to gather the longer-term safety data needed for full FDA approval.I don’t think there is a solid justification for denying young children access to vaccination on the same emergency-use basis as adults. But we can expect the arguments about EUAs and vaccination for children to get far more intense: Even for COVID-19, children are the prime focus of anti-vaccine activism. Pressure from parents in favor of vaccination is likely to increase too. Now that Pfizer’s vaccine is fully approved, the door is open for doctors to prescribe it “off label”—that is, using it outside the specific parameters that the FDA has approved. This could ratchet up the pressure to vaccinate children even before the data and the EUA are in—perhaps even before we know how low a dose is enough for the very young. (In the FDA’s press briefing, the acting commissioner, Janet Woodcock, said that preemptively vaccinating children “would be a great concern.”)We’ve gotten used to the emergency-use-authorization world. We can’t predict for sure what open season on marketing for the vaccines will be like. Some things may be simpler, but others may get more complicated. What is certain: We need widespread confidence on efficacy, safety, and the reliability of vaccine quality. The FDA’s job is to make sure that confidence is well placed and difficult to undermine. Even when it seems as though the agency is lumbering along, a perception that corners were cut under pressure would only make things worse.

For years, the idea of a “Great Replacement” — that white Americans and Europeans are purposefully being replaced through immigration — has obsessed many on the extreme Right. It’s a fringe belief, but concerns will doubtless have been exacerbated by a recent headline in the Washington Post: “Number of White people falls for first time”.
The article stated that the results of last year’s census marked “the first time the absolute number of people who identify as White alone has shrunk since a census started being taken in 1790”. Similar refrains rang out across numerous other news outlets: “America’s white population set to shrink”; “America’s White Population Shrank for the First Time”; “Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump”.

There was jubilation among the Left. Michael Moore called the announcement “the best day ever in US history”. For cultural radicals such as he, the census marked the end of “white supremacy” and the start of a millennium of progressive dominance and racial equity. Similarly, Neocon-turned-Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin gushed that “this is fabulous news — now we need to prevent minority White rule”.
Meanwhile, on the Right, Tucker Carlson, while condemning the Left’s gloating, went on to claim, without evidence, that the opioid crisis in white communities explained the decline. Likewise, the news will only confirm views held by the far-Right, whereby white nationalists have warned that white decline is being orchestrated by globalist elites and minorities, and which will lead to dire consequences for white people and their children.
However, despite the charged rhetoric doing the rounds, the number of people American society considers to be white has almost certainly increased since 2010. White America is not shrinking, and whites are not being racially supplanted. It’s a false narrative with serious political repercussions: study after study has found that reminding white Americans about their impending minority status shifts their policy attitudes in a conservative direction and increases support for Right-wing populism. So while this announcement may make the cultural Left feel good, it largely benefits the Trumpist Right.
But what do the actual findings indicate? Isn’t the census reporting the facts as they stand, that the number of white people in the country is declining? Well, it’s certainly true 5.1 million fewer non-Hispanic Americans ticked their race as “white alone” in 2020 compared to 2010. But to take this number out of context is to paint a misleading picture of social reality.
Any quantitative social science student knows that when you change the wording of a survey question, you can alter — often substantially — the pattern of responses. The 2010 census questionnaire offered single tick boxes for “white” and “black”. The 2020 version was changed so that people were not only asked to tick a box but also prompted to write their ethnic group in a text box below. Research from Pew shows that around 15% of black and white respondents did not write anything in the text box, or they wrote something that doesn’t make sense. Hispanic Americans were also told, for the first time, that Hispanic is not a race1 when asked to define theirs. It is likely this prompted people to question their choice of which box to mark, opting for a multiple race or “other race” category instead. This would depress the number ticking the “white alone” box.
In addition to the change in census wording, the politicisation of white identity in the Trump era may also have led liberals to distance themselves from the category. The 2010s bore witness to a sharp rise in cultural progressivism. During this decade, the share of liberal Democratic white citizens, saying they felt “cold” towards white people increased by roughly 10%.
More from this authorWhat liberals get wrong about raceBy Eric Kaufmann
There’s also the fact that many WASP Americans, such as Elizabeth Warren, have some Native American ancestry and some, such as Brad Pitt, believe they do even when such claims cannot be substantiated. Similarly, since 8 in 10 black Americans have white or other racial backgrounds in their family history, and 1 in 10 white southerners has African ancestry, the scope for expansion in the mixed or other race categories is potentially enormous.
So did these changes affect what people wrote on the 2020 census? Much of this depends on three things: whether their answers reflect a) their own identity, b) how they think others see them, or c) some judgement about the preponderance of pan-ethnic origins in their background.
Figure 1 (below) shows that the number of Americans ticking “white alone” as their race dropped by 19.3 million between 2010 and 2020, while the number ticking “white” alongside some other category increased by 23.6 million. Much of this shifting took place within the Hispanic population, but even among non-Hispanics, “white alone” declined by 5.1 million.

At the same time, the census recorded a rise of 24.8 million in the “two or more races” group and a jump of 28.1 million in “some other race”. The increase of 3.6 million in the population of those with mixed “American Indian and Alaska Native” and other racial background is also noteworthy given that this group numbered just 2.3 million in the 2010 census. Hardly any of this shift can be explained by aboriginal birth or death rates.
More from this authorIsrael's population time bombBy Eric Kaufmann
Indeed, it's striking that most biracial white and Native Indian Americans are effectively considered white and view themselves as such. Meanwhile, the assimilation process means that with each generation, fewer descendants of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, especially those of mixed background, identify with their origins. It is, therefore, difficult to conceive that the number of Americans considered white is in decline.
Yet none of this means there is nothing happening with the nation’s ethnic demography. The balance between white births and deaths, taking into account the small flow of some 200,000 white immigrants a year, is nearly equal. The non-Hispanic white population, using the old question, was essentially flatlining between 2010 and 2019. White Americans have maintained a North European fertility pattern, with a total fertility rate between 1.5 and 2, since the Seventies.
Though relatively high for the developed world, this is still below the magic 2.1 replacement level. The “unmixed” white American population, along with white ethnic majorities in the rest of the developed world, will start to gradually decline in the decades ahead. But the big demographic story of the 2010s wasn’t about White Americans, but the big drop in Hispanic fertility, which is rapidly converging with the more stable white rate. So even while the share of “unmixed” whites will probably dip below 50% by 2050, the share who are considered socially white is likely to be a majority into the foreseeable future.
Suggested readingWhy the rich are revoltingBy Ed West
Either way, to be more informative, the US census needs an update. Social scientists and pundits are interested in people’s subjective racial identity, but we also want to know about the balance of “objective” racial categories. The latter shapes people’s decisions about where to live, who to marry, who to vote for and can affect their life chances. One option might be to ask people how others perceive their race. In Northern Ireland, people’s growing tendency to state their religion as “none” or “not stated” led census takers in 2011 to add a question asking about the religion people were brought up in.
Ultimately, though, until the results of such a question show a real decline in those considered to be "white", the zeal to foreground the Great Replacement tells us more about ideological hopes and fears than any emerging social reality. One of the few seeking to dispel such illusions is leading American sociologist of ethnicity, Richard Alba. However, his important book The Great Demographic Illusion failed to garner reviews because it doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. Instead, the media are attracted to demographic stories which heighten white threat perceptions, gratifying progressives while increasing support for Trumpism.
So while the definition of white may be blurring at the edges, the white American majority isn’t going anywhere.

FOOTNOTES

 For this survey, Hispanic origins are not races", was the wording alongside the What is your race? question.

This morning, the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine for use in people 16 and older. Although “the vaccine approval was the fastest in the agency’s history,” as The Washington Post noted, serious side effects have proved extremely rare. Nevertheless, anti-vaccine activists—and the politicians and pundits pandering to them—have criticized the accelerated approval process as rushed. Yet the problem with the FDA is precisely the opposite: The agency too often fails to recognize the danger of being too cautious.The same tendency is evident in the FDA’s review of whether to authorize the COVID-19 vaccines for preteens. Late last month, the government asked Pfizer and Moderna to expand the number of children ages 5 to 11 in their clinical trials and to provide follow-up data for a longer period. The companies complied. In early August, the American Academy of Pediatrics sent a letter to the FDA expressing concern.“While we appreciate this prudent step to gather more safety data,” the pediatricians group wrote, “we urge FDA to carefully consider the impact of this decision on the timeline for authorizing a vaccine for this age group. In our view, the rise of the Delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis for authorizing vaccines in children. The FDA should strongly consider authorizing these vaccines for children ages 5–11 years based on data from the initial enrolled cohort, which are already available.”[Read: Why wait 8 months?]The group expressed additional worry about kids younger than 5. Noting that more than 340 million jabs had already been administered to Americans, the pediatricians argued that “there is no biological plausibility for serious adverse immunological or inflammatory events to occur” more than two months after getting vaccinated, and that demanding six months of follow-up data before approval for children under 5 “will significantly hinder the ability to reduce the spread of the hyper infectious COVID-19 Delta variant among this age group.” The subtext: Do you understand that the coronavirus is quickly spreading now?Each time a new weapon emerges in the fight against a deadly disease, the bureaucrats charged with judging its safety and efficacy face a trade-off: Proceed too quickly and a dangerous or useless drug or medical device might be granted approval; proceed too slowly and the sick and dying might be denied a lifesaving intervention. Like Odysseus and his crew, an effective bureaucracy must be as concerned about Scylla as Charybdis, knowing that death is the consequence of tacking too far in either direction.But public-health officials operate under incentives that distort their judgment. If they approve a drug or medical device that hurts even a tiny number of people, or that proves ineffective, the harms are clear, and those responsible may be pilloried in the press as negligent or corrupt. When the bureaucracy moves too slowly, the harms are harder to see. As the economist Alex Tabarrok put it in 2015, people still die, but “the bodies are buried in an invisible graveyard.”The coronavirus pandemic has illuminated the costs of a sclerotic public-health agency’s inaction like never before.“In my many years of writing about the FDA,” Tabarrok declared after seeing the AAP’s letter, “I can’t recall a single instance in which a major medical organization told the FDA to use a smaller trial and speed up the process because FDA delay was endangering the safety of their patients. Wow. The invisible graveyard is invisible no more.” The regulatory system urgently needs reforms. Among them: When judgment calls divide medical experts because they disagree on how to make thorny trade-offs, Americans should retain more freedom to make their own choices—and not just about vaccines.The FDA’s current approach to drug approval was shaped by a tragedy in Europe, where the drug thalidomide, meant to treat morning sickness, caused birth defects and deaths in perhaps tens of thousands of babies in the 1950s. Largely in response, Congress passed legislation in 1962 that raised barriers to bringing new drugs to market. Thereafter, the FDA was charged with ensuring not only that a new drug was safe, but also that it was effective. And Congress eliminated the time constraint that had forced the FDA to move expeditiously on new drugs. By about 1980, new drugs needed an average of 10 years to gain approval.In the 1980 manifesto Free to Choose, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose Friedman, showed how FDA regulation had done more to slow the introduction of valuable drugs than to prevent the distribution of harmful and ineffective ones. They wrote:
The effect on the rate of innovation of new drugs is dramatic: the number of “new chemical entities” introduced each year has fallen by more than 50 percent since 1962. Equally important, it now takes much longer for a new drug to be approved and, partly as a result, the cost of developing a new drug has been multiplied manyfold. According to one estimate for the 1950s and early 1960s, it then cost about half a million dollars and took about twenty-five months to develop a new drug and bring it to market. Allowing for inflation since then would raise the cost to a little over $1 million.
That cost had ballooned to $54 million by 1978—a hundredfold increase during a period when prices roughly doubled. Pharmaceutical development suffered in other ways too, the Friedmans noted:
As a result, drug companies can no longer afford to develop new drugs in the United States for patients with rare diseases. Increasingly, they must rely on drugs with high volume sales. The United States, long a leader in the development of new drugs, is rapidly taking a back seat. And we cannot even benefit fully from developments abroad because the FDA typically does not accept evidence from abroad as proof of effectiveness.
Of course, definitionally, the large majority of people don’t have a rare disease, and few relatively healthy people sit around thinking about the absence of new drugs that could improve their life.The AIDS epidemic made the problem far more visible. In the late 1980s, when HIV was ravaging the gay community and was fatal for nearly all of those infected, public-health bureaucrats initially resisted activists’ requests to try new experimental drugs. In response, members of the advocacy group ACT UP converged on the FDA headquarters and demanded a chance to save their own lives. “One group were wearing lab coats that were stained with bloody hands,” David Barr, an ACT UP founder, recounted in a 2019 NPR interview. “Other people brought tombstones that they made and lied down in front of the building and held up the tombstones: ‘Dead from FDA red tape.’”[Read: The LGBTQ health clinic that faced a dark truth about the AIDS crisis]That epidemic ultimately yielded reforms that eased some patients’ access to drugs still under review. Another change was spurred by the anthrax attacks that followed 9/11. The Project BioShield Act of 2004 was meant “to provide protections and countermeasures against chemical, radiological, or nuclear agents.” Among other things, the act “allowed FDA to authorize formally unapproved products for emergency use against a threat to public health and safety (subject to a declaration of emergency by [the Department of Health and Human Services]),” according to a Harvard Law School analysis. “The record indicates that Congress was focused on the threat of bioterror specifically, not on preparing for a naturally-occurring pandemic.”The “emergency-use authorization” created by that law is the legal basis on which Americans have been permitted to get the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines. Tabarrok estimates that the speed and flexibility it permitted likely saved 100,000 lives.Yet the federal government’s response to COVID-19 has been too slow in other ways. Early restrictions on which COVID-19 tests doctors could use were arguably the worst error. “The FDA’s guidance documents led to decreased availability of testing, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, which contributed to the catastrophic course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States,” a study published in The Yale Law Journal concluded. Its authors, the law professors Barbara J. Evans and Ellen Wright Clayton, said that the FDA had interfered in the oversight of tests that it lacked clear authority over—a move they described as “possibly the deadliest regulatory overreach in U.S. history.”Another significant failure was the lengthy delay in approving an over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 test. “The F.D.A. needs to catch up to the science,” the Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told Ezra Klein in a January interview, complaining about the restrictions. “They are inadvertently killing people by not following the science.”Those failures are noteworthy in part because, while ineffective tests could cause harm, the possible negative consequences of acting too quickly were not as dire as, say, potential birth defects. The danger of letting a new virus spread undetected was obvious. And still the FDA erred on the side of restriction.Of course, approving a vaccine for children is a thornier matter: Injecting a substance into one’s body carries risks that taking a test does not; COVID-19 appears to pose less immediate risk to the young than to adults; and children have more years of life ahead, raising the costs of any downside to mRNA technology that manifests only years later. The American Academy of Pediatrics considered all this and still urged the FDA to speed up its review:Based on scientific data currently available on COVID-19 vaccines, as well as on 70 years of vaccinology knowledge in the pediatric population, the Academy believes that clinical trials in these children can be safely conducted with a two-month safety follow-up for participants. Assuming that the two-month safety data does not raise any new safety concerns and that immunogenicity data are supportive of use, we believe that this is sufficient for authorization in this and any other age group.Waiting for an additional four months of data, the group pointed out, will give the virus more time to spread. The academy’s claim is not that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines carry no short- or long-term risks. The organization acknowledges that extremely rare cases of a heart inflammation called myocarditis have been reported among adolescents and young adults. But it also notes that such cases are most likely to occur within four weeks and not after six weeks. The pediatricians argue that six months of data are highly unlikely to tell us anything about those risks that we don’t know after two months. If your concern is that an mRNA vaccine could have an unforeseen downside that doesn’t manifest for 10 years, delaying the vaccine another four months isn’t going to catch that. Meanwhile, society would incur the cost of delay without the benefit of assurance that there is no long-term risk.A convincing rebuttal to the AAP would articulate why the FDA thinks that four more months of data may realistically yield something that alters the decision to approve mRNA vaccines for the young. Of course, the truth is that there is neither an objectively correct period of time to track safety data for a vaccine nor anything like a consensus among experts about the best process given our novel circumstances. That subjectivity strengthens the case for considering a value that is implicated in these matters but that the AAP neglects to mention: the value of personal liberty, in this case the freedom to make choices about risks to our own body.On crucial occasions during the pandemic, America would have fared better had regulators given Americans more individual agency over how to proceed. If allowed to use whichever COVID-19 tests they judged useful, medical professionals at the beginning of the pandemic could have greatly expanded their ability to track infections. If permitted to participate in human-challenge trials early on, potential volunteers such as the ones I interviewed in April 2020 could have accelerated vaccine approval in adults, moving up the point when jabs started going into arms. If permitted to purchase cheap COVID-19 tests without a prescription, consumers a bit later in the pandemic would have been able to check their own status more frequently, to voluntarily quarantine, and to avoid some spread. Had all that additional liberty been granted, many buried in “the invisible graveyard” would be alive today.[Read: The coronavirus is here forever. This is how we live with it.]On the matter of vaccine approval for children, there’s no certain way to know if the process that the FDA appears to be pursuing or the alternative that the AAP has urged would prove superior. But uncertainty only strengthens the case for allowing families to reach their own conclusions. A parent homeschooling a 10-year-old on a farm in rural Idaho might be content to wait for six months of safety data, or two years for that matter.But a single parent with a 9-year-old living in a crowded Florida motel full of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers might see a more urgent need for vaccination. A pediatrician might agree, as might the 9-year-old herself. Under the status quo, though, none of their opinions matters, no matter how anxious that makes them.If the FDA were merely in the business of studying safety and efficacy, and if its decisions were merely Good Housekeeping seals of approval for drugs and medical devices, instances when it proceeds too slowly would be less troubling. But because, under current law, the FDA is also in the prohibition business––because the public is effectively barred from using a new drug or medical device until the FDA signs off on it––every instance in which it proceeds too slowly transgresses against Americans’ rights to life, liberty, and making decisions about our own bodies, in consultation with doctors as we see fit.During this pandemic alone, those transgressions have almost certainly cost many more lives than the thalidomide debacle, delaying both testing and vaccinations for months amid widespread death. Going forward, as new variants emerge and spread, and in preparation for future pandemics, the FDA should be reformed, retaining its capacity to judge a drug’s safety and efficacy, to prevent the advertisement of drugs that have not yet met its standards, and perhaps even to forbid drugs and devices that no reasonable person would consider safe.But it should no longer have the power to deny medical professionals or the public access to drugs and tests that many experts believe would save lives by the thousands. The FDA will never have optimal incentives to move drugs through the review process quickly. But more liberty can provide a check on the agency’s failures.

By Shadi HamidThe United States never understood Afghanistan. American planners thought they knew what the country needed, which was not quite the same as what its people wanted. American policy was guided by fantasies; chief among them was the idea that the Taliban could be eliminated and that an entire culture could be transformed in the process.
In an ideal world, the Taliban wouldn’t exist. But it does exist, and it will exist. Western observers always struggle to understand how groups as ruthless as the Taliban gain legitimacy and popular support. Surely Afghans remember the terror of Taliban rule in the 1990s, when women were whipped if they ventured outside without a burka and adulterers were stoned to death in soccer stadiums. How could those dark days be forgotten?
America saw the Taliban as plainly evil. To deem a group evil is to cast it outside of time and history. But this is a privileged view. Living in a democracy with basic security allows citizens to set their sights higher. They will be disappointed with even a relatively good government precisely because they expect more from it. In failed states and in the midst of civil war, however, the fundamental questions are ones of order and disorder, and how to have more of the former and less of the latter.
The Taliban knew this. After its fall from power in 2001, the group was weak, reeling from devastating air strikes targeting its leaders. But in recent years, it has been gaining ground and establishing deeper roots in local communities. The Taliban was brutal. At the same time, it often provided better governance than the distant and corrupt Afghan central government. Doing a little went a long way.
Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government didn’t fail just because of the Taliban. It was hobbled from the start by America’s blind spots and biases. The United States saw a strong, centralized authority as the answer to Afghanistan’s problems and backed a constitution that invested the president with sweeping powers. That, along with a quirky and confusing electoral system, undermined the development of political parties and the Parliament. A strong state required formal legal institutions—and the United States dutifully supported courts, judges, and other such trappings. Meanwhile, it invited resentment by pushing programs that were meant to reengineer Afghan culture and gender norms.
All of these choices reflected the hubris of Western powers that saw Afghan traditions as an obstacle to be overcome when, it turns out, they were the lifeblood of the country’s political culture. In the end, few Afghans believed in a government that they never felt was theirs or wished to wade through its bureaucratic red tape. They kept turning to informal and community-driven dispute resolution, and local figures they trusted. And this left the door open for the slow return of the Taliban.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction oversaw how the U.S. disbursed reconstruction funds and assessed their effectiveness. Over the past year, two depressing SIGAR assessments were made available to the public.
One—grandiosely if obsoletely titled “What We Need to Learn: Lessons From Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction”—notes that the United States spent about $900 million helping Afghans develop a formal legal system. Unfortunately, Afghans do not seem to have been impressed.
One of the first things militant groups like the Taliban do when they enter new territory is provide “rough and ready” dispute resolution. Often, they outperform the local court system. As Vanda Felbab-Brown, Harold Trinkunas, and I noted in our 2017 book on rebel governance, “Afghans report a great degree of satisfaction with Taliban verdicts, unlike those from the official justice system, where petitioners for justice frequently have to pay considerable bribes.”
This is one major reason why religion—particularly Islam—matters. It provides an organizing framework for rough justice and a justification for its implementation, and is more likely to be perceived as legitimate by local communities. Secular groups and governments simply have a harder time providing this kind of justice. The Afghan government wasn’t necessarily secular, but it had received tens of billions of dollars from governments that certainly were. A Sharia-based, informal dispute system would almost certainly be frowned upon by those Western donors. How likely was it that an Afghan government headed by an Ivy League–educated technocrat could beat the Taliban at its own game?
As the SIGAR report noted archly, “The United States misjudged what would constitute an acceptable justice system from the perspective of many Afghans, which ultimately created an opportunity for the Taliban to exert influence.” Or, as a former USAID official put it, “We dismissed the traditional justice system because we thought it didn’t have any relevance for what we wanted to see in today’s Afghanistan.”
What, then, did the United States want to see in today’s Afghanistan?
When the Bush administration helped shape the post-Taliban Afghan government, it was still claiming that it had little interest in nation building. Pilfering from Afghanistan’s past constitutions was easier than proposing something more appropriate for what had become a very different country. The new constitution created a top-heavy system that gave the president “nearly the same powers that Afghan kings exercised,” as Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a prominent Afghanistan scholar, has written.
Strong presidential systems are appealing because they offer the prospect of determined action. But the concentration of power inevitably alienates other stakeholders, particularly on the local and regional levels.
From the beginning, the Afghan Parliament suffered from a legitimacy deficit. Afghanistan used an electoral system known as single nontransferable vote (SNTV), one of the rarest in the world. There are reasons SNTV is sometimes used in local elections but almost never nationally: Among other things, it allocates votes in a way that depresses the development of political parties. If there’s anything Afghanistan needed, it was political parties—and a parliament—that could check the dominance of the president.
The risks of a presidential system are heightened in divided societies, and Afghanistan is divided along ethnic, religious, tribal, linguistic, and ideological lines—in almost every way possible. This raises the stakes of political competition, because what matters most is who ends up at the very top.
Finally, the system works only if the president is competent. The now-exiled president, Ashraf Ghani, managed to be all-powerful in theory but resolutely feckless in practice. Despite having been the chair of the Institute for State Effectiveness, his ineffectiveness—reflected in his mercurial style and penchant for micromanagement—infected the entire political system, and little could be done to reverse the trend as long as he remained in office.
In addition to fashioning new political institutions, America believed that it could transform the culture of a country. Naturally, most American politicians, nongovernmental organizations, and donors thought that the things that worked in advanced democracies would work in fragile would-be democracies. Liberal values were universal. And because they were universal, they would be, if not embraced, at least appreciated.
Somewhere close to $1 billion was spent on promoting gender equality. But such a focus was too often tantamount to social and cultural engineering in a conservative country that was still struggling to establish basic security. USAID’s Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy stated as one of its rather ambitious goals “working with men and boys, women and girls to bring about changes in attitudes, behaviors, roles and responsibilities.” This is a worthy objective, but the American approach was heavy-handed and at times counterproductive.
As the second SIGAR report, titled “Support for Gender Equality: Lessons From the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” concluded, U.S. officials need “a more nuanced understanding of gender roles and relations in the Afghan cultural context” and of “how to support women and girls without provoking backlash that might endanger them or stall progress.”
These efforts were well-intentioned, but they drew on assumptions about the arc of progress, and the belief that the United States would make progress happen even if Afghans themselves were less sanguine.
If the United States had made other choices, would the outcome have been different? I don’t know. Americans believe in certain things. Suspending those beliefs in the name of understanding another society can easily devolve into moral and cultural relativism that many, if not most Americans, would reject. Would a Republican—or, for that matter, a liberal suspicious of religion’s role in public life—have felt comfortable supporting programs in Afghanistan that involved the implementation of a version of Sharia, even if that version wasn’t the Taliban’s?
But the order and sequence in a transition matter. It’s clear now that we got that sequence wrong in Afghanistan, especially considering that women’s rights had long been one of the country’s most divisive issues. As the experts Rina Amiri, Swanee Hunt, and Jennifer Sova warned in 2004, when the Taliban seemed a relic of the past, “While the situation has markedly improved since the Taliban regime, the stage is set for a struggle between traditionalists and modernists; and once again women’s roles and religion are central to the conflict.”
Was it America’s place to change a culture? Did anyone really expect that the U.S. government would be good at it? If there is any change that should come from within, presumably it’s cultural change. But if there’s anything that’s universal—transcending culture and religion—it is the desire to have a say in one’s own government. Instead of telling Afghans how to live, we could have given them the space to make their own decisions about who they wanted to be.
With the Parliament weak, in part because of that bizarre electoral system, all attention was diverted to presidential contests, which were invariably acrimonious. The result was a winner-takes-all system in a country where the winners had long subjugated the losers, or worse. It is little surprise, then, that “every Afghan presidential election has been brokered or mediated by U.S. diplomats,” as Jarrett Blanc, one of those diplomats, put it. This was the democracy that America and its allies tried, for years, to build.
Many of the political institutions that America helped create have now been washed away. It is almost as if they never existed. By insisting on the primacy of culture over politics, the United States thought it could improve both. Might Afghanistan have been doomed regardless? Perhaps. Now we will never know.

The notion of “an essentially contestable concept” means an issue which by its very nature can never be definitively settled, no matter how much brilliance is expended on it, and about which no logic or evidence can ever force disputing parties to agree. Thus, they are, in the words of Stuart Hampshire, “permanently and essentially subject to revision and question.” In short, the debate never ends. How many such essentially contestable propositions have we seen! Macroeconomics, like politics and philosophy, is full of them.
In macroeconomics, one essentially contestable issue is what the ideal nature and functions of a central bank should be. Given the immense financial and political importance of central banks in a world that runs entirely on the fiat currencies they create and inflate, these are critical questions. But no answer, though it may be in fashion for a time, turns out to be permanent. Crises occur, theories run up against surprising reality, the debates resume, and central bank evolution has no end, no ideal final state.
Harold James’ Making a Modern Central Bank [1] is a very instructive book in this respect. It relates in great and often exhausting detail the lengthy debates concerning the functions and organization of that iconic central bank, the Bank of England, in the midst of the financial events of the years 1979-2003, with a brief but essential update at the end on what has happened since then. “The Bank of England seemed to be engaged in a constant quest to determine what its real function might be,” James observes. The quest involved lots of brilliant minds and colorful personalities, and they remind us that it is easier to be brilliant than right when dealing with the economic and financial future.
In the longer historical background of these debates, and important to their psychology, is that “the Bank,” as the book usually refers to it, had had a great run as the dominant central bank in the world under the gold standard. It had impressive traditions going back to its founding in 1694. Then, in the wake of the financial destruction (as well as all the other destruction) of the First World War, the role of the world’s leading central bank was taken over by the Federal Reserve representing the newly dominant U.S. dollar.
Still, the Bank of England “punches internationally above its weight,” James writes, “not because of the strength of the British economy, but because [quoting Paul Krugman] of its ‘intellectual adventurousness.’” This intellectual flair is well displayed in the book. Moreover, in its institutional history, the Bank calls on long experience in the grand sweep of economic and financial evolution. In 1979, it was approaching its 300th anniversary, while the Fed was less than 70 years old.
At that point, the Bank of England was facing severe stress. “The 1970s were years of crisis everywhere, but especially in the U.K.” There was “in particular the collapse of the fixed exchange rate world of Bretton Woods,” which was the final disappearance of the gold standard over which the Bank had once presided. There were the two oil price shocks, generating “substantial instability.” The global Great Inflation was roaring. The British pound sterling kept getting weaker
According to James, “The policy discussions of the U.K. in 1976 were dramatic and humiliating. They turned into an indictment of a Britain that had failed. Because of the foreign exchange crisis, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor of the Exchequer could not make their scheduled journeys to the IMF [International Monetary Fund] Annual Meetings.” The prime humiliation was that Britain, once a vast imperial and financial power, had been forced to ask the IMF for a loan which imposed heavy cuts in the government budget. “’Goodbye Great Britain” said a 1975 Wall Street Journal headline.
Of course, there were different ideas about what to do: “There was a struggle between differing parts of the British economic establishment, a clash [between] Treasury and Bank.” The discussions, debates, and political dialectic between the Treasury and the Bank are a central theme of the entire book. Can a central bank be truly independent, or is it instead just a subsidiary and a servant of the Treasury, or is it something in between—perhaps “independent within the government,” as the Federal Reserve used to incoherently but diplomatically say? For James, “The relationship between Treasury and Bank remained permanently haunted by potential or actual controversy.”
Always in the background in the Bank of England case, James points out, is this provision of the Bank of England Act of 1946:
The Treasury may from time to time give such directions to the Bank as, after consultation with the Governor of the Bank, they think necessary in the public interest.
That’s pretty clear. There is certainly nothing in the Federal Reserve Act about giving directions in that fashion, although the U.S. Treasury Department and the White House always do want to give directions to the Fed and sometimes succeed. As Donald Kettl observed in Leadership at the Fed, “The Fed’s power continues to rest on its political support,” and James shows how true this is of the Bank of England.
The Bank of England Act of 1998 is more nuanced, but does not change who the senior partner is:
The objectives of the Bank of England shall be—(a) to maintain price stability, and (b) subject to that, to support the economic policy of Her Majesty’s Government.
It is the Treasury (Her Majesty’s Government) that gets to determine what “price stability”—that is, the inflation target— will be, not the Bank. The Bank thus has “operational” independence, but not target independence. In contrast, the Federal Reserve has had the remarkable hubris to assert it can set an inflation target (define “price stability”) by itself. In most other countries it is given by or negotiated with the government.

Throughout these challenging events, the roles of the Bank of England as promoter of systemic financial stability, provider of financing to combat the panics and financial instability, coordinator and regulator of the banking firms, and creator of moral hazard by bailouts, are prominent—all in addition to its key monetary, inflation-controlling role.

As the book proceeds, the Bank moves from 1970s humiliation to what appears to be a successful “modern central bank” by 2003, although that afterwards turns out to be ephemeral. Along the way were many crises, all interestingly related for those with a taste for financial history.
There was another foreign exchange crisis, involving more humiliation. On “Black Wednesday”—September 16, 1992—the pound sank in spite of very costly “and ultimately futile” support by the Bank of England, breaking the European Exchange Rate Mechanism of fixed parities and famously making giant profits for George Soros and other speculators. “The experiment in European cooperation had ended in failure,” bringing “a progressive distancing of the U.K. from Europe,” and was “an earlier version of Brexit,” James suggests.
There were multiple credit and banking crises and bailouts. These included a deep real estate bust, when house prices fell from 1989 to 1993 and many banks fell along with them. A larger one, National Home Loans, had “two-fifths of its loan book over two months in arrears.” There was the scandalous collapse of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “popularly dubbed the Bank of Crooks and Cocaine International.” In 1991, “it looked as if there might be a panic and a run on the Midland Bank,” one of the largest banks. The Bank of England considered Midland “indeed too big to fail.”
The famous firm of Barings, “London’s oldest merchant bank,” collapsed in 1995 from the notorious losses of a rogue trader in Asia. Barings had also failed in 1890 from Argentine entanglements, when it was rescued by the Bank of England; this time it got sold to a Dutch bank for one pound. The 1995 Barings crisis involved a particularly British problem: “the worry that the Queen had very nearly lost some of her funds.”
Throughout these challenging events, the roles of the Bank of England as promoter of systemic financial stability, provider of financing to combat the panics and financial instability, coordinator and regulator of the banking firms, and creator of moral hazard by bailouts, are prominent—all in addition to its key monetary, inflation-controlling role. How many functions should the Bank of England have? This kept being debated.
“In the 1990s, the Bank began to specify essential or core purposes, in particular initially three: currency or price stability, financial stability, and the promotion of the U.K. financial service sector,” James points out. However, the Bank still had “fourteen high-level strategic objectives, twenty-seven area strategic aims, forty-nine business objectives and fifty-five management objectives.”
And then came the big redesign. Complex, intensely political, intellectually provocative negotiations among strong personalities in the government and the Bank, related in enjoyable journalistic detail, led to the 1998 Bank of England Act. This act sharply focused the Bank on the core function of maintaining price stability, which as defined turned out to be an inflation target. The Bank would get to choose the methods to achieve this, though it would be given the target. The act also took financial supervision away from the Bank and moved it all to a new, consolidated regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
The result was an “independent,” “modern” central bank in line with the international central banking theories and fashion of the new 21st century. As James explains: “A modern central bank has a much narrower and more limited set of tasks or functions than the often historic institution from which it developed. The objective is the provision of monetary stability, nothing more and nothing less.” For the Bank of England, “By the early 2000s . . . that task looked like it had been achieved with stunning success.”
It takes the book 450 scholarly pages to reach this outcome. The remaining 11 pages relate how it didn’t work. The “modern” central bank turned out to be far from the end of central banking history or the end of the related debates:
“The monetary and financial governance . . . which appeared to have been functioning so smoothly and satisfactorily, was severely tested after 2007-2008.”
“The crisis . . . required central banks to multi-task feverishly.”
“A new wave of institutional upheaval set in.”
“The 2012 Financial Services Act abolished the FSA.”
“By 2017 . . . Something that looked rather more like the old Bank . . . was being recreated.”
“The old theme of the Bank as provider or guarantor of financial stability came back.”
And so in central banking, the great evolution and cycling of ideas and of fashions continues. The essentially contestable concepts keep being contested.
Endnotes“Making a Modern Central Bank”: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Modern-Central-Bank-Macroeconomic/dp/1108799493/?tag=lawliberty-20The post The Rise (and Fall) of the Modern Bank of England appeared first on R Street.

How can better data help parents make better decisions? That’s the question Emily Oster has made it her mission to answer. Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of three books about data-driven parenting. The first, Expecting Better, focused on how to make informed decisions during pregnancy. The second, Cribsheet, tackled the first early years of parenting. Now, her latest book, The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years, focuses on the notoriously tumultuous elementary years.

She recently joined Samuel Salzer and Aline Holzwarth on The Behavioral Design Podcast to discuss The Family Firm. Below is an excerpt of their conversion which covers why Oster feels it’s so important to bring data and decision-making strategies to parenting, the reasons the elementary age range is trickier than the younger years, and why a family Google Doc might feel off-putting but doesn’t have to be. A full recording of their conversation can be found here.
—Heather Graci, editorial team

Samuel Salzer: To start us off, it would be interesting to hear about why you wrote your books on parenting. What is it that you hoped they would bring to the discussion? What do you hope will be different with these books in the world?
Emily Oster: There are two things that I’m trying to add with the books that I think are missing from some of this discussion. One is a kind of translation. There’s an expert, scientific consensus around something, but when we express that to people, we very rarely try to translate why we think that. But for many people, they would like to understand why you came to that conclusion.
When we come out with results in science, we rarely frame it inside “How should you make decisions differently based on this?”
The other thing, and this is more salient in the Family Firm, is bringing in a piece of the idea that when we come out with results in science, we rarely frame it inside “How should you make decisions differently based on this?” A lot of the tools I’m trying to give people are how you can combine decision-making with some of these pieces of data to incorporate them in your life, rather than just be like, “Okay, I don’t know what to do with this.”
Samuel Salzer: One of the main premises [in Family Firm] is that we don’t really have a problem with taking an organized, systematic approach to decision-making at work, but we fail to do the same in the context of the home. You argue that, in some ways, we should treat our personal family decisions a little bit more like we treat business decisions. Why do you think these environments bring out such different decision-making behavior from us?
Emily Oster: I think there are a couple of things. One is that this isn’t the way we’re socialized into running our households. When you arrive at work, they tell you, here’s the way we’re doing it. But when you “arrive” in a household, we don’t have that to begin with. There’s something deeper, which is that when you are at your home with the people that you love, there is a temptation to think, “Well, because I love these people, it should just kind of work. I shouldn’t have to sit down and have a meeting with my spouse about how we’re going to organize our life because we love each other—we’re just going to make it work together.”
Some of these tools I talk about—you could have shared Google Docs and you could send each other follow up emails—people are like, “Who are you married to?”
Aline Holzwarth: Another economist?
Emily Oster: Yeah, another economist. But because of the feeling that this is so impersonal, people have been reluctant to adopt some of these tools. There’s a little bit of a shift that could be useful. To say, “Hey, I can have a happy, loving, emotionally rich relationship with these people and also use Google Forms, and that may not bring in as much conflict as we think. In fact, I may be able to have a nicer relationship with this person if I’m not always resentful about why they aren’t doing things the way that I said, even though I never told them that those things were important to me because we didn’t have enough Google Docs.”
There is a temptation to think, “Well, because I love these people, it should just kind of work. I shouldn’t have to sit down and have a meeting with my spouse.”
Samuel Salzer: I have two friends, one of them is a behavioral scientist as well. They got into conflict based on him sending a Calendly link for them to catch up. She’s like, “Who am I to you? It’s not supposed to be this way between friends.” Have you come across similar kinds of reactions?
Emily Oster: People do have this reaction. I think it’s one thing with your friends. It’s even a further step with your spouse. I will explain to people that when Jesse and I are trying to work through something, frequently, we will have a conversation about it, and then he will send a follow-up email. “In our conversation, we agreed on the following bullet points, let me know if I’m missing anything. Love, Jesse.”
I explain to other people and they’re at first like, “What is that?” But then you say, “Well, why is that valuable?” Later, if there’s something that I’ve missed in the conversation, I can be like, “Oh, hey, that isn’t how I remember that. I thought we said this.” Then, it’s not that I do something different and later you yell at me, or I yell at you. It generates a common efficiency, knowledge that lets us move forward in making better decisions in these spaces. Sometimes when I explain that to people, they reflect a little bit, like, “Actually, that doesn’t sound as terrible as I thought I did when you first said it.”
Aline Holzwarth: In the book, you present a framework of the Four F’s for helping with some of the medium-sized decisions. Could you give us the two-sentence version of the four F’s: framing the question, fact-finding, coming up with a final decision, and then following up?
Emily Oster: The idea is to give people a way to think about these medium-sized decisions and to structure their decision-making. Decisions like this—what school should we pick, or even smaller things, should we do this activity—tend to take over people’s brains. They take all the space, but you never find the moments to really focus on them. And that is not a good way to make decisions. The idea here is that for these decisions, you really do need some focus time. But you also don’t need all the time.
Samuel Salzer: I’m curious, which one of these [four steps] have you noticed that people find the least intuitive? Which one do people struggle with most?
Emily Oster: People have a very hard time saying what their alternatives are. It’s very easy for us to say, “Should I do this or not?” It’s much harder to say, “Should I do this or that.” After you have made a decision, you should schedule a time to think about whether it was the right decision. And no one ever does that. 
People have a very hard time saying what their alternatives are. It’s very easy for us to say, “Should I do this or not?” It’s much harder to say, “Should I do this or that.”
Aline Holzwarth: The fact-finding step incorporates other personal criteria that people bring to the table as well. Some of the things you cover are: What’s your budget? How much time do you have? What are the logistics involved? Do you have to drive to six different places, and you can’t be in more than one at the same time?
What are your thoughts on this combined approach in general, this sort of meshing together of data and preference? Do you think that pulling these two together will help people make better decisions?
Emily Oster: I think that this is the big challenge—this part of parenting. In Cribsheet, when I write about little kids, there’s framing around how to think about the effect sizes and the decisions, but a lot of it is really that the data tells you enough. Part of why I was initially very resistant to writing a book about older kids in this age range is that it’s almost never the case that the data is enough. There are so many logistics and family preferences and heterogeneity across kids.
The approach in the book is really to say, “Look, there is this data, and here’s a bunch of stuff in the book where I can tell you something about that data, and you can use it. But you’ll then need these other pieces.” But these other pieces aren’t something nebulous, like, “How do I feel about it?” A lot of them are also really practical facts, like, “What does my schedule look like? If my kids do these two activities two hours away from each other at the same time on Thursday, someone will need to drive each of them.” That’s it. And that’s going to be part of your logistics. So the insight in the book is to say, “It’s not just the data, it’s this other piece.” But this other piece isn’t something that we can’t wrangle. It’s something we can wrangle in the same way.
For the full conversation, including why Oster thinks optimism is underrated, spellcheck is overrated, and why there’s so much to love about every stage of parenting, check out the full conversation on The Behavioral Design Podcast.

Disclosure: Aline Holzwarth is a member of The Center for Advanced Hindsight which has provided financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational donor. Organizational donors do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
The post Data-Driven Parenting: A Conversation with Emily Oster appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

Wilfrid Laurier and the Creep of Critical Theory | Uri Harris“We’re moving away from the multidimensional, bottom-up approach to discourse that has characterised and helped shape Western societies, and towards a singular, top-down approach that more resembles how Western societies looked before the Enlightenment.”The Stifling Uniformity of Literary Theory | Neema Parvini“Either you are with the oppressed, and therefore on the side of the angels, or you are implicitly supporting the side of the oppressors, and a damnable and unrepentant sinner.”The Frankfurt School and Postmodern Philosophy | Matt McManus“While they were often reticent to simply accept full irrationalism in all its nihilistic connotations, postmodern philosophers were often willing to flirt with deep skepticism and even mysticism as a default philosophical outlook.”Postmodernism’s Dead End | Maximilian Werner“According to this culturally relative view of the world, then, truth is arbitrary and exclusive, rather than evidentiary and shared. The consequence is divisiveness.”A Closer Look at ‘White Fragility’ Theory | Valerie Tarico“White fragility theory simultaneously rejects racial essentialism and embraces it. Perhaps this paradox reflects where many Americans are in the long arc of struggle toward equity and justice.”The Problem with ‘White Fragility’ Theory | Jonathan Church“It appears that DiAngelo and her disciples have become so focused on white ‘illiteracy’ in the conversation about race that they are prepared to sacrifice the scientific method on the altar of fighting ‘institutional racism.’”White Privilege Is Real, but Well-Meaning White Liberals Are Helping to Perpetuate It | Eric Kaufmann“Rather than imagining a world of conflicting groups in which whites oppress non-whites, we should think of white privilege as a complex structure which all people of all races and ethnicities bear some responsibility for.”Unpacking Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack | William Ray“Every time identity politics has been used by any faction in human history for any reason violence eventually follows.”Why White Privilege Is Wrong—Part 1 | Vincent Harinam and Rob Henderson“Clearly, differences exist between ethnic groups in the U.S. But, as we’ve shown, white privilege does not explain them. In fact, white privilege condenses the complexities of group outcomes into a simple narrative that does not help anyone.”Why White Privilege is Wrong—Part 2 | Vincent Harinam and Rob Henderson“‘White privilege’ gives you a simple answer and a clear enemy. But if we truly want to understand and mitigate group differences, then taking a closer look at the data is a far better approach.”

Kmele Foster is a heterodox writer who hosts The Fifth Column podcast. He recently joined with David French and Thomas Chatterton Williams, members of Persuasion's Board of Advisors, to write in the New York Times opposing laws which seek to ban discussion of critical race theory from American schools.In this week’s conversation, which was recorded with a live Zoom audience as part of the Persuasion festival, Kmele Foster and Yascha Mounk discuss the fixation on race in current political discourse, why it obscures important truths, and how to form relations with one another that recognize both human individuality and our shared experiences.This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Yascha Mounk: You have a slightly unique position because you're a critic of critical race theory. And you are one of the coauthors of an op-ed in The New York Times, criticizing the banning of the teaching of critical race theory in many state legislatures. Tell me, first of all: how should we think about critical race theory and why is it something that concerns you?Kmele Foster: On this particular issue, I think [my co-authors from across the political spectrum and I] all had some concern about the approach that people are taking to address what has become a central issue in America’s ongoing, ever-evolving culture war. I do think there's one culture war that's been happening, and just a bunch of different issues that slot in for the major point of contention. For the past couple of months, it's been critical race theory, which I think is the first problem. [Some] might talk about critical race theory and say, “Oh, you know, that’s just something they talked about in law school.” But as it happens in the culture now, “critical race theory”—like “alt right”, or any number of other phrases—has come to mean a bunch of different things, a universe of different concepts. They're all loosely associated with racial essentialism. And in the current debate, there are questions about the degree to which these things ought to be involved in K-12 education and the ways in which they can be involved in K-12 education. Unfortunately, rather than just having a conversation publicly about how we ought to be approaching education, this has become a circumstance where some people, some activists, have been advancing critical race theory—again, whatever that basket of things is—in different ways in classrooms. Sometimes [these] ways have been disturbing and concerning to some parents. The response on the right, largely, but not exclusively, has been “We're going to ban critical race theory.” Once you get into the process of outright bans on ideas—not methodology, not pedagogy so much, but on ideas—this becomes a really thorny issue. On K-12, there's obviously a lot of autonomy that states have to make determinations about what can be included in curriculum, and what can't, from a legal standpoint. But the Times opinion piece that we authored together was really about the principle.We live in a society where we have very different values. And to the extent we have a project of public education that we are all corporately funding, then we have to have very serious conversations about what that institution is supposed to be doing, what its values are, and how we adjudicate actual disputes about what is true. What is the best way to talk about our history? What is the best way to deal with issues related to identity? And how do we address genuine concerns and actual abuses when it comes to racial discrimination, or any number of other things that may cause students discomfort, in an environment where they're necessarily going to be confronted with challenging topics? Mounk: [Let’s] focus on what's actually being taught in K-12 education. How is that changing? What about it is good? And what about it should we be worrying about?Foster: Race has become a center point for so many different conversations [...] and considerations: our sense of the country's place in history, our sense of our individual responsibility to one another. We're framing it all with respect to race, [so] it only makes sense that in the context of public education, the same thing is beginning to happen. And I think there's a sense in which it is good to scrutinize these concepts, these ideas, that are a part of our milieu and often a part of our relationships with one another in the world and our institutions.But I don't think that the conversations we've been having about race have become more sophisticated as a result. I think there's kind of this veneer of sophistication. We don't challenge the ideology of race; we assume it to be true. And there are a great many different essentialist threads that have been woven into the fabric of our conversations about these things: the inherent disadvantage of black people, the kind of “necessary” racist proclivities of white people, and a flattening of the world when it comes to outcomes. That is now pervasive in terms of beliefs about outcomes: [the belief that] when there are disparities in outcomes, all of those disparities are necessarily, by definition, racist. [It’s] essentially a changing of the definition of the word.What's important is that we've changed the way that we use [the word racism] in a practical way. But we haven't taken away any of the sting of “racist”. I think that's created no shortage of problems in virtually every context. And in the context of public education, it's certainly no different.Mounk: You mentioned the term “essentialism,” which I think is important in this context. How should we be thinking about the real way in which race structures our social relations, but without reifying a concept that can be very harmful?Foster: For me, I think it's about engaging with the genuine complexity of the world, and the genuine complexity of the historical circumstances that bring us into [our] present context. And I think, unfortunately, rather than engaging with that complexity, it's very convenient to allow ourselves to slip into thinking it's just about the primacy of race: “Race has been [...] the principal [factor] with respect to oppression and repression and disadvantage in this country. So we'll talk about things in that way, primarily, from now on, for the rest of time.”[But] the reality is that it's always “race, and…” [We must] engage with that complexity, rather than allowing ourselves to slip into a sensibility where all privilege is kind of derived in this fundamental hierarchical way. And if you are, in the intersectional sense, a woman, your sexuality is one thing, plus your race is another thing, then that gives us a sense of your “disadvantage score.” It's obviously fraught to go about trying to understand the world in that way. You necessarily lose a lot of the nuance that's really important for understanding things. I've been thinking about the notion of education more broadly. What is that project about? It seems to me that it's about helping young people to discover the world and make sense out of it, not merely transmitting our beliefs from one generation to another—giving them kind of an approved catalogue of things that we know to be true—but really allowing them to get particular tools about art, culture, [and] science, so that they can probe those different subjects. And I think race is another social concept that we ought to be probing and asking serious questions about. What does this mean to who we are? How does it work? How does it inform our understanding of different contexts and different circumstances? It's interesting that that's what a project like the 1619 Project is supposed to do. But unfortunately, it only gives you one lens.Mounk: It seems to me that there are broadly four positions, two that are on the very essentialist end: [the first is] the ethno-nationalist, white nationalist position that race is real and it will always be there, and societies will thrive insofar as the supposedly superior group manages to stay in charge. That's obviously something that neither of us has any sympathy for. There’s a second position that's actually in some ways, structurally, surprisingly similar, which is that race is so essential and so deeply baked in that it will always define communities and societies, and rather than having a liberal democracy in which we primarily are seen as individual citizens with the same rights and duties, we should primarily be seen as members of our racial or perhaps religious communities. That tends to have a more left-wing valence, but I think it shares some ontological commitments, as it were, [with the former]. I think neither of us has much sympathy for that position, either. I want to hear where you fall between the third and the fourth. The third position is something [to the effect of]: humans are deeply tribal creatures, and so questions like race or religion deeply structure society, and likely will for a long time. But the project of institutions is to push against that, to allow us to have solidarity with each other, to allow us to maintain a complicated project like the United States of America that is a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy. And so yes, we need to recognize these groups, and the fact that they will never go away, but we need our institutions, to some extent, to push against them precisely so we don't end up with one of the first two scenarios, neither of which is attractive. The fourth position is even more sanguine about the possibility of pushing back against groups in saying “No, actually, ideally, we should aim for an America 50 or 100 years from now, where people really don't, in any significant sense think of themselves as a member of an ethnic or racial group, or perhaps not even a religious group.” How do you feel about options three and four? Would you put it differently?Foster: No, I think that's a fabulous delineation. And I especially value the way that you talked about the first two categories together, which is essentially the racist and anti-racist paradigm. The unifying concept there is the primacy of race. [In those worldviews] that is the most important thing about our experience, or among the most important things about our experience. And yes, I reject it wholesale, because it's obviously false.I think the third one is interesting. And I think it does pay attention to the reality that people do have a natural proclivity to gravitate towards those differences, that we're innately tribal in some sense, that perhaps this will always be with us. The difficulty I have with that is that [it contains] a bit of the naturalistic fallacy: “it will always be there, so we can get used to it.” [...] I think we have to have aspirational values. And I think only the fourth one really contains that. The fourth one that you just laid out is about granting one another the dignity of our individuality. [It’s] an aspiration towards a world where we are regarding race in precisely the same sort of way that we regard height, or hair color, because you can change your eye color and hair color with some assistance, and no one comes to think, “Oh, no, now you're a totally different person, you’re blue. You’re blue today.” This is remarkable. And it's not colorblindness as an aspiration. I've always thought that colorblindness didn't quite go far enough. Also, [it] sounds like a defect, like we're trying to ignore something, which I think is very different from recognizing racecraft for what it is, which means appreciating the ways that it sort of altered us and altered the way that we thought about the world and had an impact on people's actions. The aspiration [is] to move towards a world where we recognize those phenotypic traits for what they are, and the degree to which they may correlate with certain outcomes and patterns and social realities that we have to exist alongside. But we understand that they can be completely meaningless. In many instances, when we add race to the conversation, we are obfuscating things that are actually true about the world. And various thinkers have a very difficult time actually getting to the point where they can make that recognition. It's what leads you to a world where Ibram Kendi becomes a leading thinker and intellectual by giving you all sorts of clumsy solipsisms and circular logic as bold insights. [...] The fourth is the only option for me, for sure.Mounk: You said something on Twitter recently that resonated with me. [You said that] many people [who] aren't driven by their own substantive beliefs don't look at a particular political controversy in light of their values and try to think how the value should inform a response to it. They simply look at what people they dislike say and try to say the opposite. Tell us how you, as somebody who's a committed libertarian, look to your guiding principles in a way that, hopefully, allows you [not] to fall into the trap of what I, at the suggestion of Emily Yoffe, have started to call “180-ism?”Foster: “180-ism” is a great term for that. I'll start by saying [that] after writing the Times editorial, I got some interesting, very intense feedback. In a couple of instances [I] received text messages from friends who felt deeply betrayed, and who were outraged that I would do this. And I've had to kind of tick through what the reasons are, because my perspectives haven't changed. But I've also noticed that there are things that happened beyond the occasions where I'm getting some sort of substantive, interesting, critical feedback, arguments that make me genuinely reconsider my position and wonder if there [aren’t] specific ways in which the other side of this might be right. Beyond that, it's guilt by association. It's folks misleadingly interpreting things in a way that I think is misguided. It's a misreading, and sometimes those things are kind of willful and deliberate misinterpretations that, I think, veer into being misrepresentations. And some of them seem pretty deliberate, maybe even strategic in kind of a Bannonite sort of way, where you're flooding the zone with shit, you're publishing a screed, a tirade, against [my] editorial, in the hopes of making sure certain people don't read it. [...] I think you and I both talked to Martin Gurri about this, and I'm very partial to his observations about the decline of our ability to trust in institutions. As a result, I think people’s ideological commitments, commitments to particular partisan factions, [have] been reinforced, and have replaced some of the other mechanisms that they might have used to determine what's true and not. As a result of that, policing the boundaries of your group, and enforcing loyalty has become really indispensable to people; that creates some real problems. And interestingly, for me, being someone who has heterodox politics (I describe myself as a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist in other contexts—a Spoonerite, for anyone who knows who Lysander Spooner is), that tribe is sufficiently small and diverse that I don't have the same tribal loyalties that [might] motivate me to rush to defend a position on behalf of my team.I have friendships and partnerships with people and associations across the political landscape, and we disagree vehemently on a ton of stuff. And as a result, I think that there's a necessary bit of pragmatism that comes to the forefront of [almost] all of my thinking about different political issues. I know that very good, smart people disagree with me forcefully on virtually everything. And as a result, naturally curious person that I am, I'm always trying to understand their point of view. And that commitment to trying to understand this very smart person's disagreement makes it very difficult to lurch into the kind of deliberate presumption that someone is operating in bad faith. Mounk: What do you think about the way in which, in the current discourse, that pressure is sometimes especially strong for black, Asian or Latino writers when there’s this idea that who you are in terms of identity should determine how you see the world?Describe what that sort of in-group pressure is like and how we can go against it, but also how we can disabuse, frankly, white liberal journalists at places like The New York Times from the notion that a black intellectual has to be somebody who agrees with Ibram Kendi rather than somebody who might agree with Kmele Foster or Thomas Chatterton Williams or any number of other writers and thinkers?Foster: We've seen this dynamic before, [with] What's the Matter with Kansas? In this particular case, it's “What's the Matter with Brooklyn? They're voting against their own interests.” I think there is a pair of problems there: one is the ideologically-driven presumption about what is imagined to be best for a collection of people in a particular area by some elites who [only] have their opinion. And then the second thing is what we've been talking about here: the essentialist aspect of it, and presumptions based on the [physical] characteristics of those individuals. There's the fact of people who self-identify as black voting in a particular way, over time, and then there's the reality of the many distinct reasons why they choose to vote in those ways, and the degree to which having a two-party system creates a false sense of cohesion, a sense [that] their beliefs and convictions are easily discernible. That's just wrong. It’s factually inaccurate.[...] I'm a first-generation American as well. My family is from Jamaica. I happened to be born in the country, and as a result, I've always had a tension between (I thought of myself as a black person for many, many years before reaching the epiphany that I reached, at some point, to disregard all that kind of racial nonsense) black-as-African American and black-as-Jamaican. And as time has gone on, I went even further to have this real tension between any kind of rigid identity that's imposed on me, versus an identity that's born out of things that are actually relevant, and that are necessarily true about my life and experience. I'm a father, and I'm a husband. These are things that are literally true. I'm an entrepreneur, literally true. I'm a libertarian. These are my actual beliefs. To say [that] I'm black... What on earth does that mean? Even to say [that] I'm Jamaican… Well, not nationality-wise, but yes, some of my ancestry comes from there. These are very crude concepts that we often treat in a very serious way. [It speaks to] the lack of serious scrutiny that we're actually attributing to these things that we've given them so much power and prominence in our society. We imagine we're being sophisticated when we talk about criminal justice and criminal justice reform and structural racism. We forget that race is just our instinct to categorize things. We've done absolutely nothing when we recast a reality that we discovered in the world, these racial disparities that may even be repeating patterns, as systemic racism, and imagine that we've arrived at some kind of eureka moment. “All your work is still ahead of you,” to quote Christopher Hitchens.Mounk: How should we balance the recognition that not every difference of outcome, by group, is in itself pernicious, with the awareness that in the American case, one of the reasons why a large portion of a black population of United States continues to be less well off and have less wealth is rooted in the history of slavery? And what does that mean for what kind of policies we should adopt?Foster: [...] I don't have any desire to prioritize suffering on the basis of how it was arrived at. To the extent you are a child who lives in an impoverished household, and you lack resources, and you have only access to a crappy school—it doesn't matter to me, if I'm describing a kid who lives in East New York or Appalachia. The concern is equivalent. These are fellow human beings who are suffering; this is a societal problem that needs to be addressed. And the fact is that a greater proportion of black young people find themselves in that circumstance than the proportion of white people that find themselves in that circumstance. I think there's something obscene about presuming that [it] is kind of more or less important to kind of address the disparity between the racial groups, and not regard those children as individuals and to think collectively about how we can address really hard social problems. And for that reason, my fixation is on the problems themselves and what we can do technically to address them. Of course it matters why a car accident happens. But obsessing over that to the detriment of our ability to actually address the injuries of the parties involved—where you're not even loading up the injured people onto gurneys and getting them into ambulances and getting them off to the hospital—just gets me a little worked up. [...] I think it is insane that in a country where we have so many underperforming schools. In cities like LA, New York, Atlanta, the greatest cities in America, we have school systems that are failing, in some instances, more than half of the students that go to them. They can't teach them to read or do mathematics. And instead of talking about that issue, that very hard problem, we are obsessing over whether or not we're talking about the Tulsa Race Massacre in school. I imagine most of these kids don't know anything about Bacon's Rebellion, either. Is that a function of us trying to hide the truth from them and obscure facts? Or is it a function of something else that is actually gravely wrong with our educational system? And are we able to marshal the resources and the will to address those fundamental difficult problems as opposed to engaging in this preposterous theater? [...] This is to the detriment of children, and it allows the teachers’ unions and other factions to try and impose [essentialism] through the schools, and the response from people angry about this is, for the most part, “We have to ban critical race theory and get our schools back.” They weren't working before! They were broken. This is an inadequate solution.Mounk: How optimistic or pessimistic are you about where America is going? Progress is not as fast as we might wish, but there's a lot more intercultural, interreligious, interracial friendships, marriages, there's a lot more people founding businesses together [and] being in each other's lives in a real way.  [...] Perhaps in 50 years, it will all look quite antiquated, and we'll have moved more towards what you call option four? Foster: I have to be optimistic, I think, for the reasons that you indicated. When I think about the enormous progress that we've made as a species, the fact that we've spent so much of our history collectively at war with ourselves, the profound disadvantage to ourselves, not collaborating, not innovating, not building things [...] When you think about the horrible conditions of Revolutionary America, the profound disadvantages that were placed on people who didn't own property, who had the wrong gender, who had the wrong skin color, who came from the wrong family backgrounds, who didn't have access to the profound, aspirational vision that is outlined in the founding documents of this country. There's a way to look at that and [think], “Oh, that's really sad. It's sad that this country didn't live up to its promise at that point in time and hasn't lived up to its promise throughout most of its history.” But look at that in the right light: it's profoundly inspiring that out of the millennia of subjugation and awfulness and superstition [that was] dominating our species and keeping us down, there was an ideal that took root, and that has constantly and steadily been improving outcomes for us and making our lives better. Mounk: There's a lot of cynicism at the moment about what kind of diverse democracies we can build. And a lot of that cynicism comes across as a kind of world wise-ness. It's [people saying]: “you want to move away from these groups being important, you want to have a society in which we emphasize the commonalities and the shared interests—but that's not how the world works. We're always going to be divided into these groups, these groups deeply structure society to such an extent, and that's just the world [to] which we have to resign ourselves.” But I've been doing a lot of work in history and comparative politics and social psychology. Most of those societies in which people's loyalty was more strongly to the ethnic or religious group than to the state or nation ended up in really violent forms of conflict over time. Is there a conflict between idealism and the best chance to create a fair, diverse democracy?Foster: [Few] can appreciate the degree to which [people’s] good intentions—when they segregate children by race and tell one group of kids, “You're privileged, and there's a problem with that, and you need to do something about it,’ [while] the other group of kids is encouraged to say, “I'm disadvantaged, and there's so much wrong, and everything is working against me,”—will breed resentment and a lack of self esteem and less empathy. [...] I have a very difficult time with that. And again, I have smart friends who disagree with me. I want to understand their perspective, and I try to. But I think that they're profoundly wrong about this. And I think that anyone who is concerned about racial issues and thinks that we need to place more emphasis on those things… what I would ask them to contemplate is: What does it look like when we're doing too much of that? What are the drawbacks of over-concern with respect to race in particular?There doesn't seem to be any appreciation whatsoever for the degree to which there could be some adverse unintended consequences related to this push. [Race essentialists] just need to think a bit more clearly about what their project is, and how best to help people. Perhaps it's appropriate to view people as people, and not to imagine that focusing on original sin in the garden can help to liberate us today from the challenges that we actually face.Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight.If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone.Email: podcast@persuasion.community Website: http://persuasion.communityPodcast production by John T. Williams and Brendan RuberryConnect with us!Spotify | Apple | GoogleTwitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @JoinPersuasionYoutube: Yascha MounkLinkedIn: Persuasion Community

Few observers of global discourse range as widely as Elnathan John, the novelist, satirist, and lawyer who frequently participates online and off in conversations about art, politics, and culture pertaining to at least three continents. His novel, Born on a Tuesday, is a coming-of-age story set in his native Nigeria. In Becoming Nigerian: A Guide, he tried his hand at satire.Today, John lives in Berlin, where, in addition to writing, he works with academic institutions to foster collaboration between scholars and writers. I first encountered him on Clubhouse, the live-audio social-media platform, where I’ve listened to him hold forth in conversations with members of the Nigerian diaspora, Americans across the political spectrum, and anyone else who’s awake when he is.Earlier this month, I invited him to lunch, hoping to better understand his perspective on the social-media era: We both use some of the same platforms, but I wondered whether we worry about the same threats to public discourse, and to what extent our experiences of the same spaces might differ.This is a condensed, edited version of our conversation.Conor Friedersdorf: You’re Nigerian. You live in Berlin. And you regularly talk on U.S.-based social-media platforms. We first encountered each other on Clubhouse during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. What value did you find in the live group-audio conversations that app offered?Elnathan John: I could find people from all across the world with whom to have conversations that I couldn’t have elsewhere––for example, to talk about Afrofuturism without having to plan some special event, or science fiction or history or philosophy with people from 10 different universities around the world that I would not otherwise meet, and who would not tweet. In the beginning, people treated Clubhouse like a safe space, and many people felt freer to talk about what ideas they actually had, unlike on Twitter, for example, where many were wary about sharing opinions.Friedersdorf: Because they feared professional consequences?John: Yes.Friedersdorf: Do you think such fears about what many now call “cancel culture” are justified or overwrought?[Read: How capitalism drives cancel culture]John: There have always been codes of silence. At every time in history, to have access to people's true thoughts, one needed to learn a community’s codes and go deeper than superficial conversation. But today many people feel disoriented because the code is changing very fast and few understand where the changes come from. It used to be that if I didn't offend the chief of the village or the gods of the village, I could have freedom in other aspects. Now the source of power is less clear. It is globalized. You can say something about someone thousands of miles away and have instant repercussions.And it is democratized: So many more people, especially young people, exercise power in controlling these public conversations. With their savvy and their numbers, they can demand consequences for certain kinds of speech. But their code is always changing, often very quickly and unpredictably, so many people feel that until they understand the new equilibrium, they must be circumspect observers and cannot talk freely.  Friedersdorf: Is this an American phenomenon, or do you see it in Germany and Nigeria too?John: I would say that it is globalizing––you know, it is in the process of doing that, because the biggest site of these contestations is the United States, and the United States is the greatest exporter of culture. So its conversations quickly become the standard for conversations elsewhere.[Read: The blue check mark's evil cousin]Friedersdorf: Is that because most of the big social-media platforms are American companies?John: It's not just the apps. It’s everything America has done to spread its influence, because America dominates the media. We all consume it. In some way, shape, or form, things trickle down.And it’s pervasive when you speak to Americans that they are unaware of their position in the world and this cultural hegemony––that their conversations very quickly dominate the public space because everybody is affected by these influences. You grew up watching American TV. You grew up listening to American music. And often you might have to remind people that maybe we want to step back from America being the center of this conversation.For example, say I want to talk about slavery in northern Nigeria. One of the books I'm writing now is set in a time when the so-called caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria was at its peak. At that time, at least one in four persons was an enslaved person or in indentured servitude. At one point, we had probably the highest number of slaves in the world. I’d like to talk about this without talking about slaves in the U.S. or white people. You know, why do I have to talk about white supremacy when writing about this period in Nigeria? But the conversation always goes there.This U.S. hegemony is true regardless of race. Even if you are oppressed in America, you still have this outsize influence globally, and the rest of us are choking on it. And we would like to have conversations in our local spaces that do not always devolve to American tribal wars.Friedersdorf: When members of the Nigerian diaspora connect online, what issues are of particular interest?John: I think more Nigerians abroad are becoming politically active because they are increasingly affected by the ineptitude of our government at home. We find this in things such as very poor consular and embassy services. For example, during the pandemic, Nigerians in many countries have been unable to get passports. The embassy in Germany has not issued passports in many months. If your passport expires, you are stuck. You can’t go anywhere. My passport expires in two days. So I’m stuck here for a few months, and work travel is part of how I pay my rent.Nigeria has many ways of extending its reach even to those of us who moved away, most dramatically with its increasing violence and spate of kidnappings, because if your brother is kidnapped, if they call you with a gun to his head, you have to send money no matter where in the world you are. We can no longer hide from Nigeria. Unless you have zero family, its tentacles reach wherever you are. You know that the hardship there is increasing, that inflation there is skyrocketing, so if you make remittances, you must increase those remittances. In these ways, Nigerians all over have an understanding of what happens in Nigeria. They support dozens of people back home. They hear the news reports, and they feel them in their pocket, too.Friedersdorf: How has all of this affected the political views of the Nigerian diaspora?John: I think that more people are questioning the idea of Nigeria. Especially abroad, I hear people questioning the reason why Nigeria is a single country. I don’t think I have ever heard as many young Nigerians question that as I have just in the past few months––they have a desire to break up the country or to restructure it. And, of course, we have all of these separatist leaders who are emerging. We see Nigeria fracturing and hemorrhaging from a million cuts, and everyone is starting to think maybe we should go our separate ways, or talk about whether we want Nigeria to be a country, because we are such different people, and we are not getting along.And now people are leaving without an end date. The idea is: When I leave, I will try to make it permanent. I don't know anyone who says, “I just want to spend two years abroad.” Everybody I know says, “I’m not going back.” When I talk to my friends in Nigeria, they tell me, “Don’t think of coming back. Things are bad.” They tell me, “Whatever you’re doing, make sure you can stay.” With such uncertainty and violence, middle-class Nigerians are leaving in droves.Friedersdorf: The United States is divided between people who believe our democracy is threatened and those who believe such fears are overwrought. There are concerns in Europe about the far right. How do Nigerians pondering whether and where to migrate view those questions?John: I had a conversation with a bunch of Nigerians on Clubhouse, many of us abroad, where we discussed “What is a safe place for a Black person in the world?” We kept saying, you know, a white person can just up and go to Europe—they mix in, and they’re fine—and we kept asking, “Where can a Black person go in the world and feel at home? And where can a Nigerian person go?”For a Nigerian, we can’t go to South Africa and feel at home, because we experience xenophobia. Whenever there’s a crisis, they attack us as Nigerians. We can’t even go to Ghana, which is one of the most stable places that you can go in Africa. We increasingly have anti-Nigerian sentiment there, too, because there’s a lot of us, and there’s this tendency for people to feel overwhelmed by our presence. We upset the balance of things in many places by our sheer numbers alone, but also by our sheer hustle, the way we show up and we are like, Okay, we’re not having fun; we’re here for business. So often we don’t feel at home elsewhere in Africa.But we also understand the instability in some European countries. We know that this kind of far-right rhetoric is affecting local politics. In much of Europe, countries are moving to the right, you know, which means that people who are immigrants will be at the receiving end. And we certainly don’t feel welcome in America, not just because of police violence or whatever, but because of the friction between Africans and African Americans, which is a very big problem.Nigerians go to America, and they don’t always support African American political movements, for, say, reparations, or progressive movements. While some queer Nigerians and women find escape by leaving Nigeria and joining progressive movements, many Nigerians are actually very conservative in their beliefs. And they are focused not on politics but on hustle. Nigerians go and say, What business is to be made? And many African Americans feel undermined when Black Nigerians get scholarships and achieve in universities and get benefits. That can grate on many African Americans, especially because some people on the right use Nigerian successes as a cudgel: “You see those Black people doing well. Why won’t you stop complaining about race?” In turn, African Americans think, These guys don’t understand our context. It annoys them that many Nigerians are oblivious to their long struggle against racism.Of course, that’s not going to stop Nigerians from coming to the U.S., because they know there’s opportunity in America. They know that if they put their head down and participate in the grind, it is likely that they can make something of their lives, because America is the kind of place that, you know, if you’re in the right place and you hustle right, you are likely to hit something.So this is something Nigerians worry about: Where in the world can we feel at home too?[Read: The migration driven by developed countries]Friedersdorf: You’re always blunt, even when discussing sensitive issues. Why?John: There is too much skirting around issues. Too many times, in academic writing and in communication in general, meaning hides in the folds of politeness, in the folds of doublespeak. It’s a waste of time. How about you just say what you actually mean? And then it’s easier to confront whatever feelings exist. If you know, from the outset, this is exactly what I think, then we can have a conversation, then we can get angry and perhaps move past the anger. Or then you can decide, Actually, I don’t want to engage with this. So it saves everybody time. I do try to not be unkind when I’m direct. I’m not fond of speaking without any understanding of the effect that one’s words have on others. But there is elegance and utility in clarity.And I’m against attempts to stop people from speaking clearly, or stifling or criminalizing thoughts or dissent, because the only way that we can improve our thoughts and ideas is if we know exactly what other people are thinking. So I worry about this collateral damage that I see.Friedersdorf: Do you mean that efforts to advance social justice are doing collateral damage to freedom of expression?John: At times, yes.I think that right now, centuries-old oppression and discrimination are being challenged, often by people who were not able to talk about themselves with human dignity before, because they weren’t present in the imagination of the people who shaped public discourse. Now they have the power to claim space for themselves and to say, “I have been here; I demand to be acknowledged.”The demolition of injustices is good and necessary. I think of it like a house being constructed. Construction usually begins with demolition, right? It’s not always elegant, and it’s not always painless. You know, there will be glass that will splinter, bricks that come down, that kind of thing. So sometimes we have this collateral damage that happens when things are being demolished.But there are ways of having controlled demolitions, where you think, How can we bring down this 20-story building, this mammoth of oppression, without destroying the buildings around it?Friedersdorf: What specifically would you recommend to people who want to demolish injustice, when they speak or converse, without destroying other important edifices in our society?John: I want to protect free speech, for example. And a multiplicity of ideas and views. And inclusivity––real inclusivity, which is not excluding others because you want to include some. I also want to hear outliers, people who challenge even my deeply held beliefs. I need those people because outliers usually are the ones that push us to find new ways of thinking in the world. The right way to do the discourse is not to lump people who have genuine questions or disagreements with what you see as a perfectly just world with people who are antagonistic to your very existence.There’s value in separating those groups.I distinguish people who might mean well, but who nevertheless run afoul of what constitutes justice to me, from people who are committed to reducing the space in which I can exist as a free human with dignity. With the former, I want to reach points of compromise. And not just compromise. I want avenues of open discourse and debate. That’s more important than any type of compromise. If you have free, open conversation, you show an awareness that you alone do not have all the answers. And that you’re working with other people who may have answers.Of course, there is no substitute for having a healthy political space. One way of defining that is a space where the most privileged are open to challenge and the least privileged are sure of protection—the most privileged are not above scrutiny, and the least privileged have, at least, safety. In between those points, the stakes are lowered in ways that open up space for conversation.Friedersdorf: In today’s political space, do you feel free, as a novelist and a satirist, to speak your own mind, or do you feel hemmed in by social pressure?John: I have great privilege because I’m able to say what I want to say, and I have a publisher that knows me, who will stand by me if I am simply expressing my thoughts. So I can talk about sex and the fact that people are so prudish, which many people are afraid to discuss, or about how people police language and don’t want you to talk about your body or your politics or the things you really hate or that you really love. But right from the start, I guarded my ability to speak my mind, by showing people what to expect, so that they would not treat me like a role model.Once you’re treated as a role model, everybody wants you to say the perfect thing. But no human being is like this in real life. You know, we all want to be able to falter. We all want to be able to figure things out. Yet we elevate these people and we say, “You cannot have inchoate thoughts. You cannot have thoughts in progress. You cannot have wrong thoughts. You have to always speak quickly and speak directly to every issue and also speak perfectly. You cannot say, ‘I’m thinking about this’ or stay silent.” Then, you are supposedly siding with the oppressor.You’re not allowed to be human anymore.Friedersdorf: Why do you guard and value your independence so assiduously?John: There’s a trade-off. Some people take love and adoration, and they sacrifice some part of themselves, some part of their humanity, and say, “Okay, I sacrificed the ability to say what I want to say—I will say nothing that upsets anyone—but give me love, admiration, and money,  and I’ll take it.” I’m not interested in that kind of trading. I cherish being able to say what I want to say, but not as an irresponsibly exercised freedom, like I just want to run my mouth. I try to think deeply about what I say. That’s why sometimes I don’t answer questions: I’m still thinking about this or that. And as a satirist, I have a responsibility to interrogate power, and there is power in what is popular.Friedersdorf: Do you mean the power of the masses?John: There are many kinds of power. It irritates me, simply saying a thing that many people want or expect to hear, and people say, “Oh, he called out that injustice; he’s so brave.” I'm like, this is not bravery! Bravery is when, in spite of all of the things I have to lose, I still say exactly what I think.  Satire can become complicit with any kind of power––the power of government, the power of a political faction, the power of what the masses like––and whenever it does, it is time to recalibrate. So we have these satirists who are super powerful, you know, they can call on Hillary Clinton, and she’ll show up and do an interview with them. They can call on whichever politician.They should admit: Look, I am power now. They can't say, “I'm calling out power.” No, you are power. Satirists must interrogate their own positionality. I try to say, “How am I implicated in this thing personally?” Because satire never used to be popular. You know, it was always unpopular because it rubbed people the wrong way, and people are mostly agreeable. They want to be around agreeable people. And real satire has no intention to pander to anybody’s desire for agreeability. So when my satire becomes popular, I must ask, What is the problem? Why are there so many people that are comfortable with my work? People mistakenly assume that there is just one group of powerful people, one level of power, government or old white men, blah, blah, blah. If you keep attacking them, everyone applauds, as if you are attacking power, but if everyone is applauding, then you have not properly interrogated all of the levels of power. To do so is not “punching down.” It is to recognize that there are many different levels of power.Friedersdorf: So how should a satirist decide where to “punch”?John: Satire is always more complicated than just punching in a certain direction, because you can possess and wield power even as others wield power over you. You can oppress even while being oppressed.If I am being praised for my satire, I keep asking myself, Why is the applause so loud? Who are these applauding people? And I often find you guys are too comfortable. Then I zero in there, and some people always say, “Oh, now you are attacking the wrong people.” But they are also holders of power! What is popular has power and can be oppressive, even if it is determined by people who do not perceive themselves as powerful. If you can spur a crowd, if there are people whom you can hurt, if there are communities that can be harmed by your activity, if there are systems you can help demolish, then no, whoever you are, you are not just the good guy.

As they do today, threats of destruction loomed in ancient Pompeii. Art Media/Print Collector via Getty ImagesIn a testament to its resiliency, happiness, according to this year’s World Happiness Report, remained remarkably stable around the world, despite a pandemic that upended the lives of billions of people.
As a classicist, I find such discussions of happiness in the midst of personal or societal crisis to be nothing new.
“Hic habitat felicitas” – “Here dwells happiness” – confidently proclaims an inscription found in a Pompeiian bakery nearly 2,000 years after its owner lived and possibly died in the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the city in A.D. 79.
What did happiness mean to this Pompeiian baker? And how does considering the Roman view of felicitas help our search for happiness today? 
Happiness for me but not for thee
The Romans saw both Felicitas and Fortuna – a related word that means “luck” – as goddesses. Each had temples in Rome, where those seeking the divinities’ favor could place offerings and make vows. Felicitas was also portrayed on Roman coins from the first century B.C. to the fourth century, suggesting its connection to financial prosperity of the state. Coins minted by emperors, furthermore, connect her to themselves. “Felicitas Augusti,” for example, was seen on the golden coin of the emperor Valerian, iconography that suggested he was the happiest man in the empire, favored by the gods. 
By claiming felicitas for his own abode and business, therefore, the Pompeiian baker could have been exercising a name-it-claim-it philosophy, hoping for such blessings of happiness for his business and life. 

‘Felicitas’ appears on the back of a Roman coin.
NumisAntica, CC BY-SA

But just beyond this view of money and power as a source of happiness, there was a cruel irony. 
Felicitas and Felix were commonly used names for female and male enslaved persons. For instance, Antonius Felix, the governor of Judaea in the first century, was an ex-slave – clearly, his luck turned around – while Felicitas was the name of the enslaved woman famously martyred with Perpetua in A.D. 203. 
Romans perceived enslaved people to be proof of their masters’ higher status and the embodiment of their happiness. Viewed in this light, happiness appears as a zero-sum game, intertwined with power, prosperity and domination. Felicitas in the Roman world had a price, and enslaved people paid it to confer happiness on their owners. 
Suffice it to say that for the enslaved, wherever happiness dwelled, it was not in the Roman Empire.
Where does happiness really dwell?
In today’s society, can happiness exist only at the expense of someone else? Where does happiness dwell, as rates of depression and other mental illness soar, and work days get longer? 
Over the past two decades, American workers have been working more and more hours. A 2020 Gallup poll found that 44% of full-time employees were working over 45 hours a week, while 17% of people were working 60 or more hours weekly. 
The result of this overworked culture is that happiness and success really do seem to be a zero-sum equation. There is a cost, often a human one, with work and family playing tug-of-war for time and attention, and with personal happiness the victim either way. This was true long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Studies of happiness seem to become more popular during periods of high societal stress. It is perhaps no coincidence that the longest-running study of happiness, administered by Harvard University, originated during the Great Depression. In 1938, researchers measured physical and mental health of 268 then-sophomores and, for 80 years, tracked these men and some of their descendants. 
Their main finding? “Close relationships, more than money or fame … keep people happy throughout their lives.” This includes both a happy marriage and family, and a close community of supportive friends. Importantly, the relationships highlighted in the study are those based on love, care and equality, rather than abuse and exploitation.
Just as the Great Depression motivated Harvard’s study, the current pandemic inspired social scientist Arthur Brooks to launch, in April 2020, a weekly column on happiness titled “How to Build a Life.” In his first article for the series, Brooks loops in research showing faith and meaningful work – in addition to close relationships – can enhance happiness.
Finding happiness in chaos and disorder
Brooks’ advice correlates with those findings in the World 2021 Happiness Report, which noted “a roughly 10% increase in the number of people who said they were worried or sad the previous day.” 
Faith, relationships and meaningful work all contribute to feelings of safety and stability. All of them were victims of the pandemic. The Pompeiian baker, who chose to place his plaque in his place of business, likely would have agreed about the significant connection among happiness, work and faith. And while he was not, as far as historians can tell, living through a pandemic, he was no stranger to societal stress.
It’s possible his choice of décor reflected an undercurrent of anxiety – understandable, given some of the political turmoil in Pompeii and in the empire at large in the last 20 years of the city’s existence. At the time of the final volcanic eruption of A.D. 79, we know that some Pompeiians were still rebuilding and restoring from the earthquake of A.D. 62. The baker’s life must have been filled with reminders of instability and looming disaster. Perhaps the plaque was an attempt to combat these fears. 
After all, would truly happy people feel the need to place a sign proclaiming the presence of happiness in their home?
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Or maybe I’m overanalyzing this object, and it was simply a mass-made trinket – a first century version of a “Home Sweet Home” or “Live, Laugh, Love” placard – that the baker or his wife picked up on a whim.
And yet the plaque reminds of an important truth: people in antiquity had dreams of and aspirations for happiness, much like people do today. Vesuvius may have put an end to our baker’s dreams, but the pandemic need not have such a permanent impact on ours. And while the stress of the past year-and-a-half feels may feel overwhelming, there has been no better time to re-evaluate priorities, and remember to put people and relationships first.
Nadejda Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The American public-education system exists at the intersection of E pluribus unum and “in loco parentis,” and is built on the understanding that an educated populace is integral to a functioning democracy. As teachers, we sacrifice bits of our freedom in service of this cause because we care, rhetorically and literally, for our students. We were fingerprinted and subjected to background checks and a tuberculosis test to get hired. We regularly give personal time to plan lessons, grade assignments, and meet with students and families; we come in early and stay late to support students with extra needs or packed schedules. We have counseled many students through fights with parents, breakups with significant (and not-so-significant) others, the college-application process, and job decisions.  Last August, we argued to move teaching online in New York City and even said we’d strike to make that happen. With rising cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; vaccines that had only begun large-scale trials; and little clarity regarding safety measures in our schools, we felt that the sacrifices leaders were asking us to make were too steep.This fall, however, presents a different situation. Although cases are on the rise once again and we firmly believe that continued mitigation measures like masking are necessary, we face this school year with a readily accessible, highly effective, and safe vaccine. It’s time to go back to school, and to offer students the safest possible return. Every teacher who is medically able should be immunized against COVID-19, and districts should implement mandates to ensure that they are.[Aaron E. Carroll: Go ahead. Vaccinate the kids.]What we are advocating for is neither novel nor revolutionary: Public schools have long served as the loci of initiatives intended to serve the needs of the collective. During the pandemic of the early 1900s, teachers and students pulled on their coats and wrapped themselves in heavy blankets to attend outdoor classes designed to limit transmission of the flu. In the 1950s, almost 2 million public-school students across the country became test subjects in the large-scale trial of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, administered in schools, with educators serving as logistical support.Schools today are deeply involved in children’s health. School nurses conduct vision and hearing screenings; teachers receive yearly training to support students who have medical needs such as diabetes and severe allergies. Some districts, including ours in New York City, have even established community schools that have medical professionals and facilities on-site, and partner with local organizations to ensure that students have the resources they need for their physical, mental, and emotional well-being.Today, immunization requirements are the rule, not the exception, for many students to even set foot in school buildings. New York public schools have required vaccines against such diseases as diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, poliomyelitis, hepatitis B, varicella, and meningococcal disease for student attendance for decades. None of these requirements has led to a backlash, so why would masks and COVID-19 vaccines cause, as one school leader said in Wisconsin, a “slippery slope”? Families are assured that their children will likely avoid exposure to measles. Why should they be asked to treat COVID-19 differently, given that we have easy access to a vaccine that is all but guaranteed to limit spread and prevent severe illness?Some educators are arguing that mandatory vaccination is a violation of freedom and bodily integrity. However, as anyone who had a good civics or constitutional-law teacher could tell you, even our most vital rights have limits. Many political theorists—egalitarians such as John Rawls, ardent libertarians such as Robert Nozick, Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—agree that the government has one essential function: to protect us from physical harm. Many students are too young to receive a vaccine. For the government to protect our children’s right to a public education, we are required to, at times, subjugate our liberty interests to the more important interests of our society.The most compelling case for a vaccine requirement for educators is a moral one: What do we owe our students? Like it or not, the work of a teacher is inextricable from caretaking. We are responsible for other people’s children for most of their waking hours every day, and we do many things in service of that obligation. Active-shooter and evacuation drills, mandated reporting of suspected child abuse, and even everyday tasks as simple as taking attendance help us ensure that students are safe. They are, among other reasons, why families trust us with their children. Widespread vaccination will protect students, particularly those who are too young to be vaccinated, with little risk of serious harm to anyone involved. How in good conscience can we refuse this opportunity?Personally, we have mixed feelings about returning to school. We know the joy of a busy classroom, and we know that many will benefit from the structure and socialization that come with learning in a shared space with their peers. At the same time, as cases rise, we sympathize with students and teachers who have experienced devastating loss in the past 20 months and feel anxious about returning. We have to implement commonsense safety measures, like mask and vaccine mandates, and clear, consistent protocols for dealing with COVID-19 cases in schools to help us ensure that students’ and families’ fears are abated. Our biggest concern is that wishful thinking, along with political pressure, will cloud leaders’ judgment, leaving us unprepared to reopen safely. In New York City, just weeks before our planned first day of school, we have few agreed-upon policies and a mayor who continues to insist that there will be no remote option, despite the demand from families and the obvious need for one when (not if) students are asked to quarantine.[Read: Parents are losing their minds over masks in schools]For teachers like us in New York City, as in countless other districts across the country, the school year looms large, and many still have more questions than answers about what lies ahead. With so much uncertainty, we have no choice but to rely on one part of the pandemic that is certain: The vaccines provide protection against the virus; for us, and our students, COVID-19 vaccinations are the least we can do to continue the care work to which we’ve committed our lives. Inoculation alone isn’t a guarantee that our children and families will have the safe public education that they deserve, but—without question—we owe it to them, and to one another, to try.

Persuasion has now been continuously publishing content for over a year! Our team is proud of what we’ve achieved—and in need of a little breather. So, for the second half of August, we are republishing some of our favorite essays of the past 13 months. (We’ll still release new episodes of the Good Fight podcast each Saturday.) From John McWhorter’s seminal essay on a new religion sweeping America to Emily Yoffe’s prescient “taxonomy of fear,” and from Carlos Hernández’s account of fleeing Venezuela to Andrew Stroehlein’s overview of the brave dissidents fighting against dictators in relative obscurity, here is some of the content of which we are especially proud. I hope you enjoy discovering or rereading these texts, and I look forward to sharing a lot of exciting new material with you when we return at the end of the month.- YaschaAcross the American political spectrum, nearly everyone agrees that racism is evil. Yet there remain deep disagreements not only about what counts as racism, but also over how to fight it. Because these disagreements are typically framed as a battle over means—that is, how best to fight racism—one can easily miss that there is a deeper question at stake: What is the end goal for American race relations?For fifty years, the American left has been torn between two different answers. The first was best encapsulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. King looked forward to a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”—a day when race would be seen as an insignificant attribute.The competing vision—let’s call it race-consciousness—was best encapsulated by the Black Power movement. The end goal of this movement was not, as King once put it, to bring about a “new kind of togetherness between blacks and whites.” Rather, it was to demand that black people, understood as a collective, receive more recognition, more respect, and more resources. Underlying this vision was the assumption that society is a zero-sum power struggle between oppressed groups and oppressor groups—and that a win for the former requires a loss for the latter.In the race-conscious vision, racial harmony is an afterthought. At times, it is actively shunned. Race-consciousness seeks to “problematize” relations between members of different ethnic groups in a variety of ways. In 2017, for instance, the New York Times ran an op-ed entitled “Can My Children Be Friends with White People?” written by a black father who planned on teaching his sons “to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible”—a near-perfect reversal of Dr. King’s message.For black people, race-consciousness seems to promise more status and more access to opportunity. For white people, it promises a way to act on, rather than simply brood over, feelings of guilt over their complicity (real or imagined) in America’s past sins. For the nation as a whole, it seems to promise solutions to ongoing problems like mass incarceration and police brutality.Yet race-consciousness cannot deliver on its promises because its foundational assumptions are flawed. For one thing, it does not reject the old rigid racial categories so much as it transforms them, sneaking them in through the back door. If someone said that black kids should not be encouraged to work hard a hundred years ago, it was probably because they were racist. If someone says the same thing today, it’s almost certainly because they are “anti-racist.” But any political program that insists that black people be held to a lower standard will never be able to bring black achievement up to those same rejected standards—and thus will struggle mightily to address racial disparity. More fundamentally, race-consciousness misdiagnoses the problems facing our society and therefore prescribes the wrong cures. The preoccupation with electing black politicians (or politicians “of color” more broadly) is one example. When Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015, nearly all of the public servants that might be held accountable—the police chief, the mayor, the state’s attorney, and the president—were black. Cities such as Atlanta and Detroit, which have had five or six consecutive black mayors, see all the same problems as cities with mostly white leadership. As Bernie Sanders pointed out not long ago, caring about the skin color of politicians, as opposed to their policy proposals and qualifications, is just as wrong-headed as it sounds.Here’s another example of race-consciousness leading to strange and unhelpful policy proposals: during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, three different candidates—Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg—proposed housing plans that would give special resources, such as assistance on down payments, to people living in formerly redlined neighborhoods. The idea was that the people currently living in these neighborhoods must have been trapped there by a cycle of intergenerational poverty that has its roots in the racist housing policies of the mid-20th century. Yet an analysis by Brookings discovered that, of the 11 million Americans living in formerly redlined neighborhoods, more are white than black. Because race-conscious anti-racism makes a ritual out of noticing how the present is similar to the past, it can end up being blind to the many ways in which the present differs from the past.Where will race-conscious anti-racism of this kind lead in the long run?We might get a clue from the work put forth by thought leaders within the movement. Consider Ibram X. Kendi, the bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, who has proposed a constitutional amendment that would enable actual authoritarianism. I do not use that word lightly: In Kendi’s ideal world, there would be a Department of Anti-Racism that would have the constitutional power to investigate private businesses, reject any local, state, or federal policy that is deemed to contribute to racial disparity, and discipline public officials “who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.” (What counts as a racist idea would, of course, be determined by a panel of experts like Kendi.)Thankfully, very few people would sign on to Kendi’s proposal right now. But it is still a useful document for one reason: it accurately summarizes what would be required in order to achieve the world that today’s race-conscious anti-racists want to see. A movement that defines any racially disparate outcome as white supremacy will inevitably tend toward policies that seek to erase such disparities by fiat—individual rights be damned. If, for instance, the fact that Asian-Americans are vastly over-represented in New York City’s elite high schools (which admit students on the basis of a single test) comes to be seen as a racist outcome, then Asian-American applicants may be discriminated against to eliminate that disparity. The rights of individual students not to suffer discrimination on account of their race will be ignored for what is perceived to be the greater good.The question is not whether a proposal like Kendi’s could gain enough support to be implemented wholesale today; it couldn’t. The question is this: if Kendi’s proposal enters the political mainstream in, say, fifty years, will there be a robust, liberal anti-racist movement to provide an alternative? Or will liberal principles—such as individual rights and freedom of speech—have been so thoroughly stigmatized that Kendi-like proposals seem to be the only viable option for those who care about fighting racism?Writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo have done an excellent job of owning the term “anti-racist.” Many people who are horrified by their illiberalism are thus tempted to give up on the label of anti-racism. That would be a mistake—for it is up to us whether anti-racism will continue to move in an illiberal direction.America has a long tradition of liberal anti-racism that reaches back to Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Frederick Douglass, and beyond. It is an anti-racism grounded in the idea that there is a single human race to which we all belong—and that all the ways of dividing us up, though they may be important to understand our present reality, should not be given moral weight. That is the principle that ultimately conquered slavery and Jim Crow—and it is the principle that ought to be revived today.Today, many feel that this principle represents the very status quo that we must depart from in order to begin making progress. The goal of getting past race, in this view, is precisely what has prevented us from implementing the race-conscious policies that would meaningfully address racial inequality.But this underplays how much progress we have already made. Back in the early 1970s, the NYPD killed 91 people in a single year. In 2018, they killed five. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18-29 has been cut by more than half. Most people don’t know this. As a result, they imagine that the system must be overturned in order for progress to occur. But though there are, of course, still a lot of injustices in today’s America, they are wrong.The current system, warts and all, has enabled huge progress for black people in recent decades. Overturning the liberal principles on which our institutions are based would not hasten progress towards racial equality; it would threaten the very stability that is required for incremental progress to occur.It is time to restore Martin Luther King’s dream for American race relations—a dream that, even as it refuses to flinch from the injustices we still need to overcome, defiantly holds onto the idea that what we have in common is ultimately more important than what divides us. We must defend that principle even when it is unpopular, even when it marks you as “tone-deaf,” and even when it elicits eyerolls from those who imagine they have found more worthy principles. Our ability to remedy racial injustice depends on it.Coleman Hughes is a contributing editor at City Journal and a fellow at the Manhattan InstituteThis piece was originally published by Persuasion on August 19, 2020.

HTML here.How did it all go wrong? Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, a leading scholar of Afghanistan, joins Damir and Shadi to dissect the Taliban's victory and discuss what it tells us about the failures of America's nation-building effort. Why did the Afghan government collapse so quickly? Have the technocrats and NGOs in the democracy promotion industry been completely discredited? And for the sake of the Afghan people, should we now help the Taliban succeed in governing the country? Things get heated.Murtazashvili is director of the Center for Governance and Markets and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan. She lived in Afghanistan for 3 years, conducting fieldwork in rural villages across the country, and previously worked at the US Agency for International Development and the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit.  Recommended reading:Jen Murtazashvili in the Washington Post"Afghanistan is not the Balkans," by Thomas Barfield (ResearchGate)Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, by Thomas Barfield (Amazon)Nassim Taleb on the Taliban's refusal to deadlift"When Terrorists and Criminals Govern Better Than Governments," by Shadi Hamid, Vanda Felbab-Brown, and Harold Trinkunas (The Atlantic)If you're not yet a paid member, now is a great time to subscribe, which you can do here for a few dollars a month.  You'll also get access to our paywalled Friday Essays, as well as to special member-only conversations with guests like Glenn Greenwald, Ross Douthat, and Sohrab Ahmari. 

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.In Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author describes a device he calls “the old South Indian Monkey Trap.” It consists of a hollowed-out coconut with some rice inside, chained to a stake. The coconut has a hole in the top just large enough for a monkey to insert its hand but not big enough to remove a fistful of rice. While villagers watched from a distance, Pirsig writes, a hungry monkey would reach in and become trapped, unable or unwilling to give up its handful in exchange for its freedom. The villagers could then walk right up and take the monkey away.Before you say anything untoward about the dumb monkey, ask yourself whether you are doing more or less the same thing when it comes to conflict in your life. Perhaps you would love to have a warmer marriage but are held back by unresolved anger. Or maybe you want to reconcile with an estranged friend but refuse to let go of an old dispute. If so, you are stuck in an emotional monkey trap.You’re not alone; we all face this situation from time to time, and not just in the obvious cases where we cling to bad feelings by flatly refusing to forgive. Sometimes we sabotage the freedom we crave even when we say we’ve forgiven others, whether because we still harbor resentment deep down or because we’re holding on to offenses to use later against the people who’ve wronged us. To achieve greater happiness and freedom, we all need to abandon these sorts of partial forgiveness. Doing so could even heal some of the deep divisions in our culture.One of the best ways to understand human conflict is through research on committed romantic couples, because they are unrelated humans who have generally promised to remain united even in the face of trouble. Data on how couples who are able to stay together deal differently with conflict than those who come apart tell us about all kinds of human conflict, not just those in romantic partnerships.In 2018, in the Western Journal of Communication, scholars identified four successful strategies that married and dating couples use to heal a relationship after a transgression or conflict has occurred: discussion, explicit forgiveness, nonverbal forgiveness (such as showing affection after a fight), and minimization (which involves classifying the transgression as unimportant and simply choosing to disregard it). In a 2005 study, researchers found that all four of these strategies can be effective, and the one chosen typically depends on the severity of the grievance. For example, discussion is most often used for the worst offenses, such as infidelity; minimization and nonverbal forgiveness are most often used for the least-problematic issues, such as showing up late for dinner. Explicit forgiveness is probably best for conflicts somewhere in the middle.[Read: America has forgotten how to forgive]The thing about talking through a problem or telling someone “I forgive you” is that it takes a lot of effort and bruises your pride, and might mean giving up something you want. So sometimes, people try shortcuts that seem like good ways to resolve a dispute but don’t work in the end.Researchers have written about conditional forgiveness, in which vindication is deferred and stipulations are made (“I will forgive you when you do X and Y”), and pseudo-forgiveness, which happens when partners decide to suppress or ignore an issue without actually forgiving (not to be confused with minimization, which is very different). Conditional forgiveness can provide what researchers call “emotional protection”—that is, a feeling of safety—to the damaged partner, but can also keep a wound open. Pseudo-forgiveness can prolong an unhappy relationship because no actual forgiveness takes place, which, the research shows, bodes ill for a relationship’s survival.Conditional and pseudo-forgiveness can look attractive to an aggrieved party for a number of reasons. Conditional forgiveness offers the victim power over the transgressor, a way to get a desired behavior by holding out the carrot of true forgiveness. Pseudo-forgiveness solves nothing, and can create a grudge that is exploited in moments of irritation. Partial forgiveness is a monkey trap—a handful of emotional rice chosen over freedom from anger and bitterness.Read: Miserable couples get more miserable by wallowing in their miseryThese lessons are instructive for non-romantic conflict too. Among friends and co-workers, conditional forgiveness and pseudo-forgiveness are probably even more destructive, given the generally lower level of emotional commitment than in a couple.Partial forgiveness also exists in communities in conflict. Perhaps one group promises that society will never see peace without conditions that it alone sets, or at key moments, such as election time, brings up past wrongs that were never truly settled. These strategies can deliver political power to those who proffer them but are unlikely to heal any wounds. In contrast, I have seen people heal major political rifts through discussion—not by aiming to agree but by trying to understand someone else and be heard. And when it comes to entire societies healing from political polarization, don’t rule out minimization. “America never solves its problems,” a colleague who studies American political history once told me. “We simply leave them behind.”In order to avoid the emotional monkey trap, you’ll need to deliberately choose not to fall into it. Releasing the rice takes patience and self-control. To that end, I suggest keeping three principles in mind as you strive for true forgiveness—and thus, freedom.First, remember that resolving a conflict is not charity—it primarily benefits you. The monkey-trap metaphor makes this clear, and so does the wisdom of the ages. The fifth-century Buddhist sage Buddhaghosa writes that by indulging anger and refusing to forgive, “you are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember … and so first burns himself.” Abundant modern research backs up this idea, showing that forgiveness benefits the forgiver mentally and physically.[Read: The forgiveness boost]Second, widen your conflict-resolution repertoire, especially when what you have tried before isn’t working. Perhaps you are a natural minimizer, quick to forgive others when you can easily dismiss their wrongs against you. The person with whom you have a conflict might believe the severity of the situation is too great to be resolved this way. If you’re the one who’s been wronged, escalate to explicit forgiveness. If the problem is mutual, try discussion, and talk it out.And third, don’t dismiss minimization too quickly. In many cases, abandoning a conflict rather than trying to solve it is the perfect solution. In my work on political reconciliation, I found this to be the case for many people with major ideological disagreements. The conflicts simply paled in importance when placed explicitly alongside family or friendship ties. Ask yourself whether your political argument is really important enough to, say, lose contact with a loved one, and act accordingly.Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance chronicles a 17-day trip from Minnesota to California on an old motorcycle. The book is full of rich metaphors like the monkey trap. But in truth, the whole story is a metaphor for life.In our brief journey through time, we might encounter every kind of problem. Some are mechanical issues, which require some knowledge of motorcycle maintenance to keep going. Many are unimportant. Others are unsolvable, but you still don’t want to let them ruin the trip for you and your passengers. In those cases, the solution is simple: Just drive away, and leave them behind.

“We want to provide optimal protection against Covid,” Dr. Penny Heaton, global therapeutic area head for vaccines at Johnson & Johnson, said at Friday’s meeting.

But F.D.A. staff have expressed doubts about the quality of the research. And a booster dose of one of the mRNA vaccines, either the Pfizer or Moderna shot, may offer even greater protection, preliminary data suggest.

Here are answers to some common questions.

Why didn’t officials recommend boosters for people who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine sooner?

All of the vaccines authorized in the United States provide strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19.

Over the summer, experts grew concerned that mRNA vaccines were losing some of their effectiveness against infection, although their effectiveness against hospitalization was largely unchanged. Last month, the F.D.A. authorized a booster of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for certain populations at high risk from Covid-19; an advisory recommended a booster shot of Moderna’s vaccine on Thursday for the same populations.

Unlike Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses a modified adenovirus to deliver its instructions to human cells, and that difference is reflected in how the vaccines are now performing. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine started out with a lower efficacy than the mRNA vaccines, but it has not shown much change in its effectiveness over time. Likewise, studies of antibody levels have found little change over eight months.

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.
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The United States government is all in on COVID-19 boosters. Most people will need one, and soon, officials said today, based on evidence that protection can start to falter within about six months.That’s sort of true and sort of not, depending on how protection is defined. New data show that some vaccinated people can get infected by the coronavirus, especially aggressive transmitters such as the Delta variant—but also that our current round of shots guards spectacularly against COVID-19 disease, especially in its worst forms.Here are three ways to think about whether the vaccines are doing their job.We’re still sailing past the shots’ original goalposts. It is quite possible for vaccine protection against all infections to mildly ebb, and also hold strong against symptomatic disease. Some defensive tasks are harder than others. An immunized body might fail to completely block a virus from infiltrating the airway, but still stop an established infection from triggering symptoms and spreading further.The vaccines “were originally assessed on their ability to limit COVID-19 disease progression, and when you look at the data, not much has changed,” Ryan McNamara, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me.Reports of post-vaccine infections might feel like a letdown after months of being told that they would be so rare that the vaccinated could strip off our masks. But vaccines don’t need to obliterate every last mote of virus to help end the pandemic, and they’re still cutting down on transmission.Context matters. Some of the new stats can look scary: Vaccinated people, reports now say, account for about 20 percent of COVID-related hospitalizations in certain parts of the country, where those numbers were once reliably in the single digits.But stats like these obscure another trend. As the percentage of vaccinated people increases, so will the percentage of hospitalized people who are vaccinated.In a fully vaccinated population, the only people in the hospital with COVID-19 will be vaccinated. But there might be only three of them, compared with hundreds in the absence of inoculations. Consider a rough analogy to car accidents: Most of the drivers involved have licenses … because they make up the majority of the people on the road.We can’t lose sight of the collective benefits that vaccines offer, either. Much of this week’s buzz has focused on how well vaccines perform in individuals—who’s getting infected? Who’s getting sick?But remember that vaccines protect both the people who receive them and those they interact with, by cutting down on (if not entirely eradicating) infection and transmission. That means the best way forward is collective investment in considering whom the shots should go to.Millions of people in the United States, and billions more abroad, haven’t yet gotten their shots. Although boosters build upon established protection, delivering first doses spreads the protection wider. A first shot will always up someone’s existing defenses more than a third.
Richard Pierrin / Getty
The news in three sentences: (1) In Afghanistan, Taliban soldiers fired into a crowd of protesters, and thousands of people crowded outside the Kabul airport, attempting to flee. (2) Rescue work continues in Haiti as the death toll from last weekend’s major earthquake rises to nearly 2,000. (3) T-Mobile says that a data breach exposed the personal information of more than 40 million people.What to read if … you’re looking for practical advice on how to manage your risk in light of the Delta variant:

If you’re vaccinated, your risk of a symptomatic breakthrough case remains very low—just .01 to .29 percent of fully vaccinated people will experience one, according to one estimate. And if you do get COVID-19, your immune system is better prepared to handle an infection than it would have been without the vaccine.

The CDC recommends that fully vaccinated people wear masks in public indoor settings in communities with “substantial or high transmission.” That’s most of the country right now.   

Katherine J. Wu recommends checking local virus conditions like you would the weather every day.

Have questions about the virus or this pandemic moment? Ask us.
Tonight’s Atlantic-approved activity:Pick your next book. Radiant Fugitives, a new novel set in San Francisco during the Obama era, renders late-2000s politics “anything but dull.”If you’re looking for something different, our summer reading guide is full of staff recommendations to carry you through August.A break from the news:Amazon killed the name Alexa.Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.

When he appeared on Channel 4’s After Dark to discuss “Do Men Have to Be Violent?” with radical feminist Kate Millett, actor Oliver Reed was drunk. “A woman will never, ever forgive a man if he fucks her,” he explained. “You are the receivers, you take our seed… Look after our babies and we’ll go do the hunting for you.”
It was 1991, the height of the Gulf War, and the debate on militarism, masculine stereotypes and violence towards women was punctuated with references to testosterone. At one point, after he had nipped to the loo and topped up his glass, Reed leant over to kiss Millett — much to her disgust — leading one male guest to pronounce: “A man can never have too much [testosterone].”
In her new book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven explores how the hormone is often presented as both a justification and excuse for male dominance over women. Women have far lower levels of testosterone, so it has often been argued that housework and childrearing come naturally to them. Men, on the other hand, are programmed to be hellbent on impregnating as many women as possible, fighting off male rivals and dragging a carcass home for dinner.
But as Hooven acknowledges in her fascinating book, despite the undeniable effect of the hormone on our behaviour, how we relate to others is based on evolving and complex external forces.
Both sexes produce testosterone, though men create up to twenty times more. Testosterone, then, is at the heart of the nature versus nurture debate. For feminists, it is our culture, rather than hormones, that most influences gendered behaviours. There are, for instance, enough studies which show that women enjoy plenty of sex and risk on par with the most testosterone-fuelled men.
It’s the same with male and female behaviour, neither of which can be reduced to binary Ken and Barbie stereotypes. As a lesbian and gender non-conforming feminist, I know this only too well. When I rejected traditional female toys and dress, I was frequently told I had too much testosterone and that was what made me a tomboy. Even into adult life, I have lost count of the times I have been told I’m a lesbian — or that I will grow a beard and never feel a desire to reproduce — because I have “too much testosterone”.
It’s a load of nonsense, but it raises an important question: how is it that the genetic and hormonal components of sex can create two distinctly different reproductive systems, and yet human male and female behaviour shows itself to be flexible, diverse and often surprisingly similar?
Hoover’s expertise is in natural sciences and biological anthropology — and the answer, she suggests, is that testosterone might strongly influence how we behave; too much of it can make males more aggressive, and those with raised levels often end up taking too many risks so they tend to crash and burn.
That may seem logical, but it does not explain violence against women or rape. As Cordelia Fine, author of the acclaimed Testosterone Rex (2017), points out most men are not violent, which leaves a hole in the theory that testosterone drives behaviour.
Nevertheless, if we are to properly understand sex differences, we still need to educate ourselves about testosterone. Crucially, the controversy around trans women in sport — namely that going through male puberty results not just in far higher levels of tesosterone but also greater bone and muscle mass — is tackled head-on by Hoover. “You may be wondering if natural variation in T [testosterone] levels has anything to do with being transgender in the first place,” she writes. “And given what we know about testosterone, that’s a logical question. The answer is, we don’t know.”
Indeed, Hooven found that there is not much relation between higher testosterone levels and performance among professional athletes when compared to others of the same sex. Between the two sexes, however, “the link is very much stronger”. And this is because “T levels are dramatically higher in males, and have a lot to do with the fact that they are stronger, faster and more aggressive than the vast majority of their female counterparts.” That is, of course, why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place.
If we accept that testosterone can cause aggression in males and change behaviour, which Hooven does, should it be used as an excuse in cases of male sexual assault? No, says Hooven, because even behaviour related to biology is not hardwired and unchangeable. Even if biology is a factor in social ill, it does not make it determined.
Yet it is disappointing that Hooven relies on questionable data to challenge the reality of male violence. For example, in picking apart the trope that male violence towards women is inevitable because it is hormone-driven, she looks to the violence perpetrated by women on male partners and concludes that, with caveats, women are as likely to be violent to male partners as vice-versa, but less likely to kill. I have campaigned to end violence towards women and girls for 40 years, and every bit of evidence from around the world concludes this is simply not the case.
But how much does testosterone affect the way men view women? One example Hooven relies on is that of trans man Griffin Hansbury and his reaction to T injections during the early days of his transition:
“I remember walking up Fifth Avenue, and there was a woman walking in front of me,” says Hansbury. “And she was wearing this little skirt and this little top. And I was looking at her ass. And I kept saying to myself, don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. And I kept looking at it. And I walked past her. And this voice in my head kept saying, turn around to look at her breasts …. It was like being in a pornographic movie house in my mind. And I couldn’t turn it off. I could not turn it off. Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.”
While even I, a hard-line social constructionist, concede that testosterone can cause strange behaviour and be as potent as oestrogen is for females, I strongly suspect there are other explanations for his behaviour. Surely, for example, we should put at least some of it down to the privilege and arrogance afforded to men, including trans men.
After all, Hansbury is still living in a world where male entitlement and lack of punishment can lead to the dehumanising and over-sexualisation of women. Hansbury’s testosterone-induced journey from his previous life as a self-described “butch dyke” who used to perform poetry about street harassment cannot be blamed on T alone.
As Hooven observes: “To bring about changes in male behaviour it is not necessary to depress testosterone. Changes in attitudes and culture can do that all by themselves.” She is right, even if the likes of Oliver Reed may suggest otherwise.

I hope “New Roaring Twenties” becomes a hashtag more like #GreatStagnation rather than #InfrastructureWeek. And by that I mean #NewRoaring20s becomes sincere shorthand for describing something real and important rather than something that could have been important — but turned into a joke. (Well, until recently, that is.)
Some evidence for that former scenario can be found in “The U.S. could be on the verge of a productivity boom, a game-changer for the economy” by ace Washington Post reporter Heather Long. After highlighting the recent upsurge in the productivity stats — labor productivity grew 4.3 percent in the first quarter and 2.3 percent in the second, versus an annual average of just 1.2 percent since the Global Financial Crisis — Long explains why some analysts think a level of acceleration might stick around: “The optimism this time derives partly from Congress and the White House taking steps to make significant investments in physical and digital infrastructure, and partly from the coronavirus pandemic forcing rapid and widespread adoption of the digital economy, robots and artificial intelligence.”

One of the many interesting bits of evidence in Long’s richly reported piece highlights how AI machine learning is diffusing more widely into the economy. She notes, for example, that California software company Cadence Design Systems recently unveiled a new software, dubbed Cerebrus, meant to make microchip engineers more productive. Long:
On a recent call with Wall Street analysts, Cadence executives said Cerebrus makes chip engineers 10 times more productive, the kind of gain that could ultimately lower chip costs, not to mention getting faster turnaround for new products. “I believe Cerebrus is a fundamental breakthrough,” said Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence Design Systems, on a recent earnings call.
Cerebrus is a good example of AI complementing workers and making them more productive rather than merely replacing workers. I would also point out that the phenomenon being described here by Long is a big reason why economist and productivity optimist Erik Brynjolfsson thinks productivity growth over the next decade will exceed consensus forecasts. As he recently explained in Long Bet with economist and productivity pessimist Robert Gordon:
AI is a general-purpose technology that is affecting almost every industry while accelerating the pace of discovery. Recent breakthroughs in machine learning will boost productivity in areas as diverse as biotech and medicine, energy technologies, retailing, finance, manufacturing and professional services. . . . The productivity benefits of general-purpose technologies typically take years to show up in the official statistics. In fact, productivity is initially suppressed as organizations invest time and effort creating intangible assets like new business processes, new skills, new goods and new services. However later, these investments are harvested, boosting productivity. The result is a productivity J-curve. Recent research indicates that are approaching the rising part of the productivity J-curve for the AI and related technologies.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, I urge policymakers to assume this is a productivity blip rather than a boom as they think about policies from immigration to environmental regulation to research investment.
 Learn more: Some reasons for faster 2020s productivity growth | A long bet on faster productivity growth and a New Roaring Twenties | Biden's budget predicts the Roaring Twenties will end in 2022. Uh oh. 
The post More reasons to use #NewRoaring20s unironically appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Countless books have been written on the “power of gratitude” and the importance of counting your blessings, but that sentiment may feel like cold comfort during the coronavirus pandemic, when blessings have often seemed scant. Refusing to look at life’s darkness and avoiding uncomfortable experiences can be detrimental to mental health. This “toxic positivity” is ultimately a denial of reality. Telling someone to “stay positive” in the middle of a global crisis is missing out on an opportunity for growth, not to mention likely to backfire and only make them feel worse. As the gratitude researcher Robert Emmons of UC Davis writes, “To deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable. Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.”The antidote to toxic positivity is “tragic optimism,” a phrase coined by the existential-humanistic psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Tragic optimism involves the search for meaning amid the inevitable tragedies of human existence, something far more practical and realistic during these trying times. Researchers who study “post-traumatic growth” have found that people can grow in many ways from difficult times—including having a greater appreciation of one’s life and relationships, as well as increased compassion, altruism, purpose, utilization of personal strengths, spiritual development, and creativity. Importantly, it’s not the traumatic event itself that leads to growth (no one is thankful for COVID-19), but rather how the event is processed, the changes in worldview that result from the event, and the active search for meaning that people undertake during and after it.[How to Build a Life: Sit with negative emotions, don’t push them away]In recent years, scientists have begun to recognize that the practice of gratitude can be a key driver of post-traumatic growth after an adverse event, and that gratitude can be a healing force. Indeed, a number of positive mental-health outcomes are linked to a regular gratitude practice, such as reduced lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse disorders.The human capacity for resiliency is quite remarkable and underrated. A recent study surveyed more than 500 people from March to May 2020. It found that even during those terrifying early months of the pandemic, more than 56 percent of people reported feeling grateful, which was 17 percent higher than any other positive emotion. Those who reported feeling more grateful also reported being happier. What’s more, even more people—69 percent of respondents—reported expecting to feel grateful two to three months in the future.I believe that an overlooked route to gratitude is exposure to difficult circumstances. There are many basic advantages of life itself that we too often take for granted. After all, humans have a natural tendency to adapt and become used to situations that are relatively stable. When individuals become aware that their advantages are not guaranteed, many then come to appreciate them more. As the writer G. K. Chesterton put it, “Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot realize that things are.”[Read: Does counting your blessings work?]Indeed, several studies have found that people who have confronted difficult circumstances report that their appreciation for life itself has increased, and some of the most grateful people have gone through some of the hardest experiences. Kristi Nelson, the executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, faced her own mortality at the age of 33, when she received a cancer diagnosis and had to undergo multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation. Nevertheless, she writes that she was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to cultivate gratefulness:
I was in the hospital, separated from all my friends and family and tethered to all kinds of IVs and dealing with pain. And yet, I had nurses and technicians and doctors and cleaners who came into my room every single day. I remember thinking, what if this is my whole world now, what if this is all I have? And then I thought, I can always love these people.
Nelson makes a distinction between gratitude—a momentary emotion—and gratefulness, an “overall orientation” that is “not contingent on something happening to us, but rather a way that we arrive to life.” Part of being human is that we will forget our past suffering and start to take our current life for granted. But as Nelson notes, “The work is to remember more often than we forget.”The gratitude researcher Lilian Jans-Beken and existential positive psychologist Paul Wong created an “Existential Gratitude Scale” to measure the tendency people have to feel grateful for all of human existence, not just the positive aspects. Their scale includes items such as:
I am grateful for my life even in times of suffering.
I am grateful that my inner resources have increased as a result of overcoming adversities.
I am grateful for the people in my life, even for those who have caused me much pain.
I am thankful that I have something to live for, even though life has been very hard for me.
I am grateful that every crisis represents an opportunity for me to grow.
I have learned the importance of gratitude through suffering.
The researchers found that existential gratitude was associated with higher “spiritual well-being” (the perception of an individual’s spiritual quality of life). This finding is important considering that gratitude and spirituality have been shown to be protective factors against both anxiety and depression.The spiritual core of gratefulness is essential if gratitude is to be more than a tool for narcissistic self-improvement. A common misconception is that gratitude is necessarily self-serving, that it’s all about appreciating my life and my blessings, in spite of the suffering of others. But as Emmons and the psychoanalyst Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence note, “True gratefulness rejoices in the other. Its ultimate goal is to reflect back the goodness that one has received by creatively seeking opportunities for giving.” Indeed, the researchers who did the pandemic gratitude study found that the more grateful people were, the more they reported that they were more likely to help others.Gratitude as a fleeting emotion can come and go, but gratefulness, or “existential gratitude,” can pervade your entire life, throughout its ups and downs. It asks for nothing but is on the lookout to find the hidden benefit and the opportunities for growth in everything—even during a global pandemic. As Emmons said at the recent International Meaning Conference, “Gratitude is not just a switch to turn on when things go well; it is also a light that shines in the darkness.”

“I’ve been clear,” President Joe Biden told the American people on Monday, “that human rights must be the centre of our foreign policy, not the periphery. But the way to do it is not through endless military deployments. It’s with our diplomacy, our economic tools, and rallying the world to join us.”
As I listened to those words, I found myself admiring the political skill of Biden’s speechwriters — and despising their utter callousness. I wanted to shout at the TV: But what about the 19 million women now sentenced by American foreign policy to a life of darkness under the Taliban? Surely they deserve human rights, too?
Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that American diplomacy will make the Taliban treat women fairly? Is “rallying the world” remotely likely to keep Afghan girls in schools, or allow women to walk down the streets of Kabul with their faces uncovered? Do you take us all for fools?

The Biden administration’s cool, calculated and yet incompetent abandonment of the Afghan people stems from two core problems.
The first is a failure of imagination. Biden claimed to have planned for every contingency. So did he not consider evacuating the Afghans who qualified for special immigrant visas and their families (an estimated 80,0000 individuals) before withdrawing all US special forces? Was the pandemonium at the airport so very hard to foresee?
On a larger scale, there was a massive failure to imagine what American interests in the region are, how to protect them and what the repercussions of ignoring them could be. To Biden, America’s “only vital national interest in Afghanistan … [is] preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland”. This is short-sighted.
Suggested readingCan the Taliban bring peace?By Aris Roussinos
In reality, this chaotic, humiliating withdrawal significantly increases the risk of a terror attack on the US homeland. Aside from revealing a dysfunctional American foreign policy apparatus, in intelligence terms Afghanistan is now a black hole. Even if we are able to extricate some of our Afghan intelligence assets, the US. has lost a key source of information on jihadist activity.
A little bit more imagination would also have revealed how China, Iran and other current adversaries will likely use the Afghan fiasco to their advantage. Did the President not consider how his actions in Afghanistan could embolden Xi Jinping’s dream of a “reunification” with Taiwan?  Is the US now in a stronger or weaker negotiating position with regard to the Iranian regime? Did the President project enough power this week to convince his Russian counterpart to crack down on the ransomware attacks that appear to emanate from his territory?
And what about our allies? Will India trust the US as the leading partner of the Quad (along with Australia and Japan) designed to check the growing power of China? How about our European partners and the transatlantic alliance?
The second problem informing Biden’s approach concerns the moral decay of Western civilisation. When a fish decays, the head rots first. The same can be said for the West. We’ve become so focused on microaggressions in America that we have lost sight of the macroaggressions happening to women around the world.
In my latest book, Prey, I argue that the modern-day feminist movement in the West does not take seriously the concerns of women in working-class communities, many of whom have immigrant backgrounds, and who face a steady rise of sexual harassment and assault on the streets of their own neighbourhoods.
In today’s perverse American culture, however, more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights — to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space — are either removed or under serious threat.
What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline. American culture today tells us not to be proud of our country; not to believe in the superiority of American values; not to promote the rights we are afforded by our Constitution so that they can be enjoyed by people around the world.
When rights are promoted, they tend to be “progressive” interpretations. We’ve reached a point where we proudly flew the LGBT flag from our embassy in Kabul when the going was good, but have now abandoned Afghanistan’s gay population to the Taliban. Meanwhile, the US Navy’s reading list now includes books such as Sexual Minorities and Politics and How to be an Antiracist, both of which paint a bleak picture of the United States, its history and its identity.
How, then, can we hope to defend the basic rights of women and minorities elsewhere? American self-confidence has morphed into nihilism; we’re all talk and no action beyond retreat. That is why women’s rights activists, interpreters and anyone who has worked with the American people have been forced to hide in Afghanistan while the Taliban go door-to-door looking for them.
What will now happen to the women of Afghanistan? When asked if women’s rights will be respected, the Taliban governor of the Andar district in Ghazni province, Mawlavey Kamiil, said: “We assure this to people all over the world, especially the people of Afghanistan: Islam has given rights to everyone equally. Women have their own rights. How much Islam has given rights to women, we will give them that much.” Similarly, a member of the Taliban’s cultural commission, Enamullah Samangani, has promised that women “should be in the government structure according to Sharia law”.
This caveat is important: women will only have the rights afforded to them by Islam. Under orthodox Sharia law, women can inherit property but not at the same level as men (generally half as much); women can testify in court but their testimony is not equal to a man’s word; women have a right to divorce under specific circumstances but not a unilateral right (as men have); a male guardian is essential for a woman; a woman can have one husband whereas a man can have up to four wives.
Yet the texts of Sharia law do not fully capture the brutal reality of daily life for women under a regime like the Taliban’s. In the last period of Taliban rule, which ended with the invasion of 2001, women were forced to wear the burka when outside, if they were allowed to leave the house at all. They were not educated in any meaningful sense (other than, in some cases, the most basic religious education). They were forced into marriages (often as young girls) with men who used them as chattels. Brutal punishments for small transgressions made women little better than slaves.
We must not forget Bibi Aisha, who was featured on the cover of TIME Magazine in 2010. As a young woman, she attempted to escape from her abusive husband (whom she had been forced to marry), but when the Taliban caught her, they had her ears and nose chopped off. Or Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in 2012 by a Taliban fighter because she dared to advocate for girl’s education.
Suggested readingAmerica's spiteful foreign policyBy Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Now, the Taliban are claiming that women and girls will be able to continue their education, as long as they wear full burkas. Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen explained that the “policy is that women can have access to education and to work”. However, the reality for Afghan women seems rather different; they are now, for example, barely to be seen on the streets of Afghan cities.
Yes, the “modernised” Taliban has done some media training, but we should not be fooled. The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will be governed by the same draconian Sharia law as the Taliban regime of the past. Reports are already emerging of girls being taken as child brides, with the Taliban “ordering local religious leaders to give them a list of girls over 15 years of age and widows under 45” to marry their fighters.
Women’s faces are being whitewashed from billboards throughout Kabul. Women in Kandahar have been told not to return to their jobs at Azizi Bank, and that instead “male relatives could take their place”. In a small village in the Faryan province, the Taliban knocked on doors and demanded to be fed. If women protested, they were beaten and even killed. This is just the beginning.
Over the last several days, I’ve wept bitter tears for the women and girls whose futures are now blighted through no fault of their own. I have felt an overwhelming sense of impotence, even as I have personally tried to help get vulnerable people out of Kabul. But this sense of impotence is now giving way to a feeling of anger and of renewed purpose.
We have to do better. We have to solve this disease of moral decay within our own society and improve our imaginative skills. American decline is not inevitable. It is a choice. Standing by our allies is a choice. Standing up for human rights is a choice.
Having blundered into this wholly predictable mess, Biden has no option but to fight until every American is safely out of Afghanistan. But he can’t stop there. He should throw his weight behind saving every Afghan who has risked life and limb for America. He needs to get women’s rights activists and leaders out of the country.
The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan may be the future for Afghanistan. But it will can’t be the future for the brave people who risked their lives to fight barbarity.

Cuttlefish, with their blimp-shaped bodies and eight squiggly arms, don’t age like people do. Sexual maturity tends to come late for them—about three-quarters of the way through their two-year lives, the rough equivalent of a human hitting puberty in their 60s. The geriatric cephalopods will then spend several weeks on an absolute bender, coupling up with as many partners as they can. Only after the close of these frenetic sexual bonanzas does true decrepitude come to claim them: Their feeding tentacles go limp; their appetite deserts them; their color-changing skin flickers like a television on the fritz. The animals pivot almost instantaneously from their sexual prime into the throes of infirmity, and within days, they are dead. “They really go out with a bang,” Alex Schnell, a cuttlefish biologist at the University of Cambridge and the Marine Biological Laboratory, in Massachusetts, told me.Before this rapid denouement, though, the animals stay relatively sound of body—and also of mind. Schnell and her colleagues have found that common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) can still form and retain crystal-clear memories of personal experiences just a month before their death. They can catalog the what, when, and where of recent events, and use that knowledge to inform their actions in the present. It’s an animal approximation of what’s called episodic memory in humans, an ability that’s often billed as a sort of mental time travel that allows creatures to relive past experiences. For us, episodic memory usually starts to fade around retirement age. But the cuttlefish version appears to persist deep into their golden months. “I’m not familiar with any other animal model that has shown episodic-like memory still intact” this late in life, Gabriel Nah, a neurobiologist who studies rat memory at Indiana University and wasn’t involved in Schnell’s work, told me.[Read: Do you have more self-control than a cuttlefish?]That cuttlefish can form episodic-like memories at any age is remarkable. Among humans, episodic memories are the source of subjective knowledge that can’t be found in textbooks or Google searches; they live in the world of personal storytelling, each unique to the individual who crafts them. Until the late 1990s, researchers had no evidence that nonhuman animals could manage even the basics of this kind of recall.That all changed when Nicky Clayton and Anthony Dickinson, researchers at the University of Cambridge, showed that western scrub jays could remember when and where they’d hidden particular caches of food, and knew to avoid retrieving nosh that had been hidden long enough to rot. What the birds accomplished wasn’t necessarily an exact echo of the emotive, self-conscious remembering that humans engage in when, say, waxing nostalgic about a first date. But all the mental ingredients, at least, seemed to be there.In the two decades since, the club of what-when-where rememberers has grown to include more birds, rodents, dogs, and others. Common cuttlefish, already famous for their big, sophisticated brains, became card-carrying members in 2013, when a team led by Clayton and Christelle Jozet-Alves showed that laboratory-raised cephalopods could keep track of what, when, and where they’d eaten after researchers offered them snacks in sequence, like a mental food journal. Schnell picked up the project a few years ago, and became curious about whether their abilities could withstand the ravages of time. Among humans, episodic memory “is one of the first types of memory that starts to deteriorate as an individual gets older,” she told me. But in a series of tricky trials designed by Schnell and her colleagues, both middle-aged cuttlefish, about 10 to 12 months old, and elderly, postpubescent cuttlefish, 22 to 24 months old and just weeks away from death, kept their wits about them.The researchers first had the cephalopods prove that they could memorize a feeding routine, tapping into a different form of memory, called semantic memory, that deals in general facts and concepts and stays intact in elderly humans. The cuttlefish successfully learned to swim to specific locations in their tank marked with identical black-and-white symbols to earn edible rewards at different times of day—the equivalent of chowing down in a breakfast nook in the morning, a kitchen counter at noon, and a formal dining room in the evening.Then came the tougher test. The researchers trained six new animals in each age group to link the same black-and-white symbol to two types of food: live grass shrimp, a luxury food item for cuttlefish, or a boring lump of prawn meat. In the morning, the cuttlefish would get a selection of both seafoods at once, each in its own location in the tank. They’d then get a second feeding, either an hour later, with only the less desirable menu item, or three hours later, with both options available.[Read: What scientists learned by putting 3-d glasses on cuttlefish]In the one-hour case, the cuttlefish had to swim up to the location where the breakfast prawn was offered to earn the second meal. If three hours had passed, they could hang out at the shrimp spot for a tastier reward. (Cuttlefish, apparently, can tell what time of day it is, and no one yet knows how.) In short, the cuttlefish had to match what they’d eaten for breakfast to where the grub had first appeared, all while calculating how much time had passed since their last feeding. Each day of the experiment, the prawn and shrimp feeding spots moved around. So the cuttlefish had to rely on their personal experiences of their morning meal, and adjust accordingly.Most elderly people, Schnell said, would have flunked a human version of the team’s experiments. But all of the cuttlefish passed, “an incredibly complex thing for an animal to do,” Robyn Crook, a neurobiologist and cephalopod expert at San Francisco State University who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. If anything, Schnell said, the older ones were faster at learning the rules and applying them in new contexts, which is “pretty mind-blowing.”Wild cuttlefish don’t hunt by sidling up to black-and-white symbols in laboratory tanks. But Schnell and Clayton think the skills the cephalopods showed off in these experiments might translate to hunting, or even their over-the-hill orgies. Replaying personal memories in their head could, for instance, help the animals keep track of which reefs crawl with crabs at dusk, or which males or females they’ve already boinked. And, of course, revisiting memories isn’t just about the past. Cuttlefish might be among the few animals that have enough cognitive ammunition to use those memories to plan ahead. Previous research by Schnell and others has shown that the cephalopods will pass over mediocre foods if they know better options are coming—a form of self-control that takes human children years to develop in full.Adapting human concepts and experiments to other animals is always a tricky business, not least because other species’ wants and needs, and the cleverness they need to navigate them, differ so much from ours. Some researchers remain skeptical that what-when-where memory, impressive though it may be, even counts as episodic-like. Jennifer Vonk, an animal-cognition expert at Oakland University, in Michigan, who wasn’t involved in the study, told me it’s possible that the task assigned to the cuttlefish “wasn’t challenging enough” to really push the limits of their personal recall. Under more natural circumstances, with more distractions, the cephalopods’ weak spots might have shown more clearly.[Read: Humans are destroying animals’ ancestral knowledge]Older cuttlefish, after all, aren’t totally impervious to aging. Though fit enough for repeated bouts of sex, they still show slight signs of wear and tear: slower reflexes, a blunted interest in food, a haggardness in their skin. Schnell sees this happening even in virgin cuttlefish, raised in the lab, which reach their final days without getting the chance to mate. Trevor Wardill, who studies cuttlefish vision at the University of Minnesota and was not involved in Schnell’s study, told me that he’s noticed that aged animals struggle to strike at faux prey in certain hunting simulations. Papers from the 1990s suggest that elderly cuttlefish might also have trouble holding on to memories long-term.In some ways, it’s hard to define what aging really is, in cuttlefish terms. Humans are used to “a long period of maturity and a slow decline into senescence,” Jennifer Mather, a cuttlefish biologist at the University of Lethbridge, in Canada, who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. Cephalopods take a more meandering path to adulthood, speed through their sexually active stint, then “swiftly decline.” (Crook also pointed out that sex, which these cuttlefish didn’t have, might hasten the aging process.) Had the team tested the cuttlefish in their last couple days of existence—something that would have been very difficult to do—they might have found very different results. Age and aging aren’t always the same: Perhaps the study’s elderly cuttlefish aren’t surprisingly sharp, but simply typical adults, acting exactly as old as they should.

In September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. And though experts looked anxiously to the fall, few predicted that the Delta variant would begin its ascent at the start of July. Now the fourth surge is under way and the U.S. is once again looping through the pandemic spiral. Arguably, it never stopped.This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded them off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. It stumbled into the normality trap, craving a return to the carefree days of 2019; in May, after the CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, President Joe Biden gave a speech that felt like a declaration of victory. Three months later, cases and hospitalizations are rising, indoor masking is back, and schools and universities are opening uneasily—again. “It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.” In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus had a basic reproduction number, or R0, of 2 to 3, meaning that each infected person spreads it to two or three people. Those are average figures: In practice, the virus spread in uneven bursts, with relatively few people infecting large clusters in super-spreading events. But the CDC estimates that Delta’s R0 lies between 5 and 9, which “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. At that level, “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said.In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.The U.S. now faces a dispiriting dilemma. Last year, many people were content to buy time for vaccines to be developed and deployed. But vaccines are now here, uptake has plateaued, and the first surge of the vaccine era is ongoing. What, now, is the point of masking, distancing, and other precautions?The answer, as before, is to buy time—for protecting hospitals, keeping schools open, reaching unvaccinated people, and more. Most people will meet the virus eventually; we want to ensure that as many people as possible do so with two doses of vaccine in them, and that everyone else does so over as much time as possible. The pandemic isn’t over, but it will be: The goal is still to reach the endgame with as little damage, death, and disability as possible. COVID-19 sent the world into freefall, and although vaccines have slowed our descent, we’d still be wise to steer around the trees standing between us and solid ground. “Everyone’s got pandemic fatigue—I get it,” Rivera told me. “But victory is not you as an individual getting a vaccine. It’s making sure that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t bring us to our knees again.”1. NowThe U.S. is not back to square one. The measures that stymied the original coronavirus still work against its souped-up variant; vaccines, in particular, mean that half of Americans are heavily protected in a way they weren’t nine months ago. Full vaccination (with the mRNA vaccines, at least) is about 88 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease caused by Delta. Breakthrough infections are possible but affect only 0.01 to 0.29 percent of fully vaccinated people, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Breakthroughs might seem common—0.29 percent of 166 million fully vaccinated Americans still means almost 500,000 breakthroughs—but they are relatively rare. And though they might feel miserable, they are much milder than equivalent infections in unvaccinated people: Full vaccination is 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations from Delta, and unvaccinated people make up more than 95 percent of COVID-19 patients in American hospital beds. The vaccines are working, and working well. Vaccinated people are indisputably safer than unvaccinated people.But although vaccinated individuals are well protected, highly vaccinated communities can still be vulnerable, for three reasons. First, unvaccinated people aren’t randomly distributed. Instead, they tend to be geographically clustered and socially connected, creating vulnerable pockets that Delta can assault. Even in places with high vaccination rates, such as Vermont and Iceland, the variant is still spreading.[Read: The 3 simple rules that underscore the danger of Delta]Second, Delta could potentially spread from vaccinated people too—a point of recent confusion. The CDC has estimated that Delta-infected people build up similar levels of virus in their nose regardless of vaccination status. But another study from Singapore showed that although viral loads are initially comparable, they fall more quickly in vaccinated people. That makes sense: The immune defenses induced by the vaccines circulate around the body and need time to recognize a virus intruding into the nose. Once that happens, “they can control it very quickly,” Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. “The same amount of virus might be there at the beginning, but it can’t replicate in the airways and lungs.” And because vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected in the first place, they are also much less likely to transmit Delta than unvaccinated people, contrary to what some media outlets have claimed.Still, several lines of evidence, including formal outbreak descriptions and more anecdotal reports, suggest that vaccinated people can transmit Delta onward, even if to a lesser degree than unvaccinated people. That’s why the CDC’s return to universal indoor masking made sense, and why vaccinated people can’t tap out of the pandemic’s collective problem. Their actions still influence Delta’s ability to reach their unvaccinated neighbors, including immunocompromised people and children. “If you’re vaccinated, you did the best thing you can do, and there’s no reason to feel pessimistic,” Inci Yildirim, a vaccinologist and pediatric infectious-disease expert at Yale, told me. “You’re safe. But you will need to think about how safe you want people around you to be.”Third, Delta’s extreme transmissibility negates some of the community-level protection that vaccines offer. If no other precautions are taken, Delta can spread through a half-vaccinated country more quickly than the original virus could in a completely unvaccinated country. It can even cause outbreaks in places with 90 percent vaccination rates but no other defenses. Delta has “really rewound the clock,” Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. “Communities that had reached safety are in danger again.” Vaccines can still reduce the size and impact of its surges, turning catastrophic boils into gentler simmers. But the math means that “there’s not really a way to solve the Delta problem through vaccination alone,” Murray said.Here, then, is the current pandemic dilemma: Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense. And for now, unvaccinated pockets are still large enough to sustain Delta surges, which can overwhelm hospitals, shut down schools, and create more chances for even worse variants to emerge. To prevent those outcomes, “we need to take advantage of every single tool we have at our disposal,” Bansal said. These should include better ventilation to reduce the spread of the virus, rapid tests to catch early infections, and forms of social support such as paid sick leave, eviction moratoriums, and free isolation sites that allow infected people to stay away from others. In states where cases are lower, such as Maine or Massachusetts, masks—the simplest, cheapest, and least disruptive of all the anti-COVID measures—might be enough.States such as Louisiana and Florida, where Delta is spreading rapidly, “really need to be talking about a powerful response like closing indoor dining and limiting capacity at events,” Murray said. Louisiana has now reinstituted an indoor mask policy, as have several counties and cities in other states. But several Republican governors, including Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, have preemptively blocked local governments or schools from imposing such mandates, even as Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas now seeks to reverse a similar law that he regrets passing.There are better ways to do this. On a federal level, Congress could make funding contingent on local leaders being able to make their own choices, Lindsay Wiley of American University, an expert in public-health law, told me. On a state level, leaders could pass mask mandates like Nevada’s, which is “ideal,” Julia Raifman, a health-policy expert at Boston University, told me. It automatically turns on in counties that surpass the CDC’s definition of high transmission and shuts down in counties that fall below it. An off-ramp is always in sight, the public can see why decisions have been made, and “policy makers don’t have to constantly navigate the changing science,” Raifman said.Vaccine mandates can help too. Emily Brunson, an anthropologist at Texas State, has studied vaccine attitudes and thinks that broad, top-down orders “wouldn’t play well, and the pushback could do more harm than good.” But strong mandates that tie employment to vaccination are easily justified in hospitals, long-term-care facilities, and prisons—“high-risk settings where vulnerable people don’t have a choice about being exposed,” Wiley told me. Mandates are also likely for university students, government employees, and the military, who already have to meet medical conditions for attendance or employment.The calculus around safety has shifted in another important way. In the first three surges, older people were among the most vulnerable to COVID-19; now 80 percent of Americans over 65 are fully vaccinated. But kids under 12 remain ineligible for vaccines—and the timeline for an emergency-use approval stretches months into the future. Children are less likely to become seriously ill with COVID-19, but more than 400 have already died in the U.S., while many others have developed long COVID or the inflammatory condition called MIS-C. Rare, severe events are more poignant when they affect children, and they can accumulate quickly in the Delta era. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu reports, pediatric COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing and hospitalizations have reached a pandemic high.  [Read: Delta is bad news for kids]Virtual learning took a huge toll on both children and parents, and every expert I asked agreed that kids should be back in classrooms—with protections. That means vaccinating adults to create a shield around children, masks for students and staff, better ventilation, and regular testing. “Schools must continue mitigation measures—I feel very strongly about this,” Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Otherwise, Delta outbreaks are likely. Such outbreaks have already forced nine Mississippi schools to go remote and put 800 people from a single Arkansas district in quarantine. And other respiratory illnesses, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), are already showing up alongside COVID-19. “Schools have no choice but to close once there’s a large outbreak,” Brunson said. “A whole generation of children’s education and well-being hangs in the balance.”The coming weeks will mark yet another pivotal moment in a crisis that has felt like one exhausting string of them. “I think people are right to be hurting, confused, and angry—things didn’t have to turn out this way,” Eleanor Murray, the epidemiologist, told me. But “piecemeal, half-assed responses” allowed for the uncontrolled spread that fostered the evolution of Delta and other variants. “People should be demanding that we don’t repeat those same mistakes from last year.”“I feel dispirited too, but when the virus moves, we have to move—and sometimes, that means going backwards,” Rivers told me. Daily caseloads are now 36 per 100,000 people; once they fall below 10, “and preferably below five, I’ll feel like we’re in a better place.”2. NextBut then what? Delta is transmissible enough that once precautions are lifted, most countries “will have a big exit wave,” Adam Kucharski, an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told me. As vaccination rates rise, those waves will become smaller and more manageable. But herd immunity—the point where enough people are immune that outbreaks automatically fizzle out—likely cannot be reached through vaccination alone. Even at the low end of the CDC’s estimated range for Delta’s R0, achieving herd immunity would require vaccinating more than 90 percent of people, which is highly implausible. At the high end, herd immunity is mathematically impossible with the vaccines we have now.This means that the “zero COVID” dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy. Instead, the pandemic ends when almost everyone has immunity, preferably because they were vaccinated or alternatively because they were infected and survived. When that happens, the cycle of surges will stop and the pandemic will peter out. The new coronavirus will become endemic—a recurring part of our lives like its four cousins that cause common colds. It will be less of a problem, not because it has changed but because it is no longer novel and people are no longer immunologically vulnerable. Endemicity was always the likely outcome—I wrote as much in March 2020. But likely is now unavoidable. “Before, it still felt possible that a really concerted effort could get us to a place where COVID-19 almost didn’t exist anymore,” Murray told me. “But Delta has changed the game.”[Read: Your vaccinated immune system is ready for breakthroughs]If SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay, then most people will encounter it at some point in their life, as my colleague James Hamblin predicted last February. That can be hard to accept, because many people spent the past year trying very hard to avoid the virus entirely. But “it’s not really the virus on its own that is terrifying,” Jennie Lavine, an infectious-disease researcher at Emory University, told me. “It’s the combination of the virus and a naive immune system. Once you don’t have the latter, the virus doesn’t have to be so scary.”Think of it this way: SARS-CoV-2, the virus, causes COVID-19, the disease—and it doesn’t have to. Vaccination can disconnect the two. Vaccinated people will eventually inhale the virus but need not become severely ill as a result. Some will have nasty symptoms but recover. Many will be blissfully unaware of their encounters. “There will be a time in the future when life is like it was two years ago: You run up to someone, give them a hug, get an infection, go through half a box of tissues, and move on with your life,” Lavine said. “That’s where we’re headed, but we’re not there yet.”None of the experts I talked with would predict when we would reach that point, especially because many feel humbled by Delta’s summer rise. Some think it’s plausible that the variant will reach most unvaccinated Americans quickly, making future surges unlikely. “When we come through, I think we’ll be pretty well protected against another wave, but I hesitate to say that, because I was wrong last time,” Rivers said. It’s also possible that there will still be plenty of unvaccinated people for Delta to infect in the fall, and that endemicity only kicks in next year. As my colleague Sarah Zhang wrote, the U.K. will provide clues about what to expect.If endemicity is the future, then masks, distancing, and other precautions merely delay exposure to the virus—and to what end? “There’s still so much for us to buy time for,” Bansal told me. Suppressing the virus gives schools the best chance of staying open. It reduces the risk that even worse variants will evolve. It gives researchers time to better understand the long-term consequences of breakthrough infections. And much like last year, it protects the health-care system. Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri all show that Delta is easily capable of inundating hospitals, especially in largely unvaccinated communities. This cannot keep happening, especially because health-care workers are already burning out and facing a mammoth backlog of sick patients whose care was deferred during previous surges. These workers need time to recover, as does the U.S. more generally. Its mental-health systems are already insufficient to address the coming waves of trauma and grief. COVID-19 long-haulers are already struggling to access medical support and disability benefits. The pandemic’s toll is cumulative, and the U.S. can ill-afford to accumulate more. Punting new infections as far into the future as possible will offer a chance to regroup.Curbing the coronavirus’s spread also protects millions of immunocompromised Americans, including organ-transplant recipients and people with autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and lupus. Because they have to take drugs that suppress their immune system, they won’t benefit from vaccines and have no choice in the matter. Even before the pandemic, they had to carefully manage their risk of infection, and “we’re not helping them by making surges longer,” Inci Yildirim, the Yale vaccinologist, said. She and others are testing ways of boosting their vaccine responses, including giving third doses, timing their doses around other medications, or using adjuvant substances that trigger stronger immune responses. But for any of that to work, “you need the luxury of some level of COVID-19 control,” Yildirim said.Finally, the U.S. simply needs more time to reach unvaccinated people. This group is often wrongly portrayed as a monolithic bunch of stubborn anti-vaxxers who have made their choice. But in addition to young children, it includes people with food insecurity, eviction risk, and low incomes. It includes people who still have concerns about safety and are waiting on the FDA’s full approval, people who come from marginalized communities and have reasonable skepticism about the medical establishment, and people who have neither the time to get their shots nor the leave to recover from side effects. Some holdouts are finally getting vaccinated because of the current Delta surge. Others are responding to efforts to bring vaccines into community settings like churches. It now takes more effort to raise vaccination rates, but “it’s not undoable,” Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public-health advocate, told me last month. Measures such as indoor masking will “give us the time to do the work.”3. Eventually   Pandemics end. But this one is not yet over, and especially not globally. Just 16 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated. Many countries, where barely 1 percent of people have received a single dose, are “in for a tough year of either lockdowns or catastrophic epidemics,” Adam Kucharski, the infectious-disease modeler, told me. The U.S. and the U.K. are further along the path to endemicity, “but they’re not there yet, and that last slog is often the toughest,” he added. “I have limited sympathy for people who are arguing over small measures in rich countries when we have uncontrolled epidemics in large parts of the world.”Eventually, humanity will enter into a tenuous peace with the coronavirus. COVID-19 outbreaks will be rarer and smaller, but could still occur once enough immunologically naive babies are born. Adults might need boosters once immunity wanes substantially, but based on current data, that won’t happen for at least two years. And even then, “I have a lot of faith in the immune system,” Marion Pepper, the immunologist, said. “People may get colds, but we’ll have enough redundancies that we’ll still be largely protected against severe disease.” The bigger concern is that new variants might evolve that can escape our current immune defenses—an event that becomes more likely the more the coronavirus is allowed to spread. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” Georgetown’s Shweta Bansal told me.To guard against that possibility, the world needs to stay alert. Regular testing of healthy people can tell us where the virus might be surging back. Sequencing its genes will reveal the presence of worrying mutations and new variants. Counterintuitively, these measures become more important nearer the pandemic endgame because a virus’s movements become harder to predict when transmission slows. Unfortunately, that’s exactly when “public-health systems tend to take their foot off the gas when it comes to surveillance,” Bansal told me.As of May, the CDC stopped monitoring all breakthrough infections and focused only on those that led to hospitalization and death. It also recommended that vaccinated people who were exposed to the virus didn’t need to get tested unless they were symptomatic. That policy has since been reversed, but it “allowed people to get lax,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, who was also a volunteer for the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. “We’ve never tested enough, and we’re still not testing enough.” With Floridians once again facing hours-long lines for tests, “it’s a recap of spring 2020,” Samuel Scarpino, the infectious-disease expert, told me. “We continue to operate in an information vacuum, which gives us a biased and arguably unusable understanding of COVID-19 in many parts of the U.S. That makes us susceptible to this kind of thing happening again.”  What we need, Scarpino argues, is a nimble, comprehensive system that might include regular testing, wastewater monitoring, genetic sequencing, Google-search analyses, and more. It could track outbreaks and epidemics in the same way that weather forecasts offer warnings about storms and hurricanes. Such a system could also monitor other respiratory illnesses, including whatever the next pandemic virus turns out to be. “My phone can tell me if I need to carry an umbrella, and I want it to tell me if I should put a mask on,” Scarpino said. “I’d like to have that for the rest of my life.”[Read: Vaccines are great. Masks make them even better.]Since last January, commentators have dismissed the threat of COVID-19 by comparing it to the flu or common colds. The latter two illnesses are still benchmarks against which our response is judged—well, we don’t do that for the flu. But “a bad flu year is pretty bad!” Lindsay Wiley, at American University, told me, and it doesn’t have to be. Last year, the flu practically vanished. Asthma attacks plummeted. Respiratory infections are among the top-10 causes of death in the U.S. and around the world, but they can often be prevented—and without lockdowns or permanent mask mandates.The ventilation in our buildings can be improved. Scientists should be able to create vaccines against the existing coronaviruses. Western people can wear masks when they’re sick, as many Asian societies already do. Workplaces can offer paid-sick-leave policies and schools can ditch attendance records “so that they’re not encouraging people to show up sick,” Wiley said. All of these measures could be as regular a part of our lives as seat belts, condoms, sunscreen, toothpaste, and all the other tools that we use to protect our health. The current pandemic surge and the inevitability of endemicity feel like defeats. They could, instead, be opportunities to rethink our attitudes about the viruses we allow ourselves to inhale.

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the latest effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act does not mark the end of lawsuits over the law’s constitutionality. The next big case has already been filed, and it involves a clash between an obscure constitutional provision and the law’s guarantee of zero-dollar coverage for preventive services.The stakes will be lower this time around—the whole law isn’t threatened. But they’re significant nonetheless. If the plaintiffs win, insurers could force their customers to pay out of pocket for contraception, breastfeeding equipment and support, and drugs to prevent HIV infection. They could even start charging people for COVID-19 vaccines, including any boosters.This time, the law’s opponents stand a good chance of succeeding.The case is called Kelley v. Becerra, and it is currently pending in Texas before Judge Reed O’Connor—the same judge who would have struck down the entire Affordable Care Act on the theory that the Supreme Court just rejected. The plaintiffs are individuals and small companies wanting to buy insurance that excludes coverage for contraception and pre-exposure prophylaxis, which they object to on religious and moral grounds. That kind of insurance is impossible to find—and they say the Affordable Care Act is to blame.Under Section 2713 of the law, insurers are required to offer coverage without cost-sharing for high-value preventive services, screenings, and vaccines. That means you don’t pay anything when your doctor tests you for cancer or helps you kick your cigarette habit. The costs of those services are instead folded into your premiums.This approach is backed by study after study showing that even modest financial barriers can discourage people from getting needed care. The Affordable Care Act sweeps away those barriers to encourage people to seek preventive care before they develop hard-to-treat problems.Section 2713’s protections have become especially important as health plans with high deductibles have proliferated—in 2020, the average deductible for an employer’s health plan was $1,644. You might think twice about getting that colonoscopy if you had to pay for much of it out of pocket.[Read: The real reason Republicans couldn’t kill Obamacare]What comes under Section 2713’s umbrella? Under the law, it’s those services, treatments, or vaccines that “have in effect a recommendation from,” or are “supported by,” one of three different entities. The first two—the Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF) and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—are advisory bodies that the federal government established decades ago to evaluate preventive services and vaccines, respectively. The third is the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which was tasked with developing new guidelines about preventive services for women and children.Before the Affordable Care Act’s adoption, in 2010, any recommendations from these entities didn’t have legal weight. They were just recommendations. Now their recommendations have binding force. They compel insurers to cover the identified services without imposing any cost-sharing.Therein lies the potential constitutional problem—or, rather, problems. The plaintiffs are making two arguments that are worth watching. The first, which has received all the attention so far, is that Section 2713 violates the “nondelegation doctrine.” The doctrine says that Congress can delegate power to government agencies only if it supplies adequate instructions for how that power is to be exercised. Otherwise, the theory goes, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to make the tough decisions.The doctrine is basically moribund, having been invoked to strike down a couple of laws during the New Deal but never since. But conservative justices on the Supreme Court have signaled an interest in reviving it in service of a broader campaign to curb the federal government’s regulatory power. At the same time, some language from an earlier opinion involving the contraception mandate suggests that at least some justices think Section 2713 is troublingly vague. Which preventive services ought to be covered? The statute doesn’t offer much guidance. Maybe Congress needed to say more.But the nondelegation argument is the weaker of the two main claims in the case. In part, that’s because the nondelegation doctrine is controversial: The federal courts would be accused of waging a partisan campaign if they used it to dismantle a portion of Obamacare. It’s also because courts prefer not to strike down laws unless strictly necessary, so they strain to read them to avoid constitutional problems. PSTF and ACIP have a long history of recommending preventive services and vaccines when the evidence indicates that they improve health outcomes and that their benefits outweigh the harms. Reading Section 2713 to adopt that as a condition for all three bodies makes a lot of sense.The second claim is more straightforward—and more worrisome. Though the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution doesn’t get a lot of attention, it’s a key structural provision. It says that “officers of the United States” must at a minimum be appointed either by the president or by the head of a major department. (That’s an oversimplification, but it’ll do for our purposes.) If those “officers of the United States” haven’t been appointed in the right way, they’re not really officers and they can’t wield government power.The clause prevents Congress from assigning government power to officers who don’t have to answer to the president or one of his principal subordinates. That gives the president some measure of control over the conduct of executive-branch officials and allows him to discharge his duty to “take care” that laws are faithfully executed. It also creates clear lines of accountability: If an officer of the United States screws up, it’s safe to blame the chief executive. Knowing whom to hold to account would be harder if Congress could assign government power to people who never had to answer to higher-ups within the executive branch.[Nicholas Bagley: A case that should have been laughed out of court may kill Obamacare]Which brings us back to the three entities that decide which preventive services and vaccines ought to be covered without cost-sharing. None of their members appears to have been appointed in a manner that accords with the finicky particulars of the appointments clause. So a lot turns on whether the members of PSTF, ACIP, and HRSA count as “officers of the United States.” If they do, they were never properly appointed and they can’t tell anyone to do anything.The appointments clause is unfortunately silent on who counts as an officer. Over the past two centuries, the courts have settled on the rule that someone is an officer if two conditions are satisfied. First, the individual must wield “significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States.” That condition seems to be met in this case. Even though PSTF and ACIP were once purely advisory bodies, their decisions, as well as HRSA’s, now bind private parties (specifically, insurers). That’s at the core of what it means to wield authority pursuant to the laws of the United States.Second, a federal officer must occupy a “continuing position,” not a temporary or transient one. For the administrator of HRSA, that condition is also satisfied: The position is a continuing, permanent one in the service of the United States. The rules governing preventive services for women and children—including the rule requiring contraception coverage—are thus in serious jeopardy. (The Biden administration’s fallback argument that the guidelines should remain in place because higher-level officials ratified them is not very persuasive.)The members of PSTF and ACIP present a more complicated situation. Colloquially, at least, referring to them as federal officers would be odd: They’re expert volunteers with full-time jobs elsewhere. Their federal responsibilities are so occasional and intermittent that they’re more akin to independent experts. Indeed, some case law, including from the circuit court with jurisdiction over Texas, suggests that an officer must have, “at a minimum, a continuing and formalized relationship of employment with the United States Government.” The Clinton-era Justice Department also concluded that an officer isn’t an officer without that employment relationship. By this logic, because PSTF and ACIP members aren’t employees, they’re also not officers.But there’s a solid argument on the other side. PSTF and ACIP are both permanent, federally established bodies whose members sit for fixed terms and offer regular advice to the federal government. That sounds like a “continuing” office, not a temporary or transient responsibility. If so, it might not matter that the members are not regular employees and serve without pay. In 2007, the Justice Department decided that it no longer believed an employment relationship was essential. That more expansive, Bush-era understanding of the appointments clause seems to align with a similarly expansive understanding of other structural constitutional safeguards we have seen from the Roberts Court.The upshot is that any recommendations that PSTF and ACIP have issued since 2010 might also be in jeopardy. Previous recommendations would still bind insurers: Congress adopted them when it adopted Obamacare. But some post-2010 recommendations are significant. They include one requiring insurers to cover medications without cost-sharing for people who are at high risk of HIV. Known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, the medications have been shown to offer “substantial benefit in decreasing the risk of HIV infection in persons at high risk of HIV acquisition.” If insurers drop coverage or start to impose cost-sharing, fewer people will take PrEP, and the number of people who get infected with HIV will likely increase.Scrapping HRSA guidelines would have similarly bad consequences. Compelling research shows that access to no-cost long-acting reversible contraception (such as IUDs or Nexplanon) sharply reduces pregnancy rates among young women and teenage girls. Yet insurers will no longer be required to cover contraception without charge, potentially driving women away from these highly effective birth-control measures. Guidelines requiring coverage of breastfeeding support—including access to lactation consultants and no-cost rentals of expensive breast pumps—would also go by the wayside.[Nicholas Bagley: Republicans don’t know what to do with their bad-faith ACA case]Most startling, coverage for COVID-19 vaccines would be threatened. In the 2020 CARES Act, Congress required insurers to cover any pandemic-related preventive services or immunizations recommended by PSTF or ACIP. Because ACIP has recommended the Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines, private insurers must cover them without cost-sharing. The same goes for any boosters that ACIP recommends. If the current lawsuit succeeds, however, private insurers could start billing for future vaccinations.In short, Kelley v. Becerra could create a mess. It’s not guaranteed to do so: The Biden administration has raised procedural objections that could derail the lawsuit. And these are still early days. Although Judge O’Connor has signaled his support for the plaintiffs in an interim decision, he won’t issue a final decision on the case until next year. Even then, any injunction might be paused to allow for the inevitable appeals, which could take another two or three years.In the meantime, one of the most popular and effective parts of the Affordable Care Act will remain vulnerable. A functional Congress could fix the problem tomorrow by offering more guidance about which preventive services and vaccines ought to be covered and by clarifying that the secretary of HHS must approve any recommendations before they take effect. But Republicans would probably threaten to filibuster any Democratic effort to bolster Obamacare, especially when contraception is involved.Which means we could be in for another Supreme Court nail-biter in a few years. The fate of the Affordable Care Act won’t hang in the balance. But the case could still do a lot to undermine public health.

No, but the party faces an uphill battlee

2024
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2028

The selfless billionaire is a rare creature indeed. Chuck Feeney, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of them. He is “my hero and Bill Gates’ hero,” Warren Buffett once remarked. “He should be everybody’s hero.” Indeed, Feeney was an inspiration for the Giving Pledge that Buffett and the Gateses launched […]

Most people don’t know who their state legislators are, much less what they are up to. So how do voters hold them accountable to public views? The post Can state politicians be held accountable to the public? first appeared on Niskanen Center. The post Can state politicians be held accountable to the public? appeared first on Niskanen Center.

The requisite for Republican leadership is serving delusion—that Trump won in 2020, that the Republicans did not lose in 2022. Fail at that and you’re out.

The Prime Minister has signalled that technocratic pragmatism has had its day. This is the return of politics.

His utilitarianism reflects the culture of Silicon Valley, which wields great power over how we relate to one another.

A new study published in the Annals of Family Medicine discusses transgender patients’ experiences with clinicians in the United States and Canada. Thirty transgender adults were interviewed. Their responses reflected themes of how medical professionals are frequently insensitive toward patients — asking questions deemed invasive, irrelevant, or stigmatizing, "misgendering" them (including calling patients "he" or "she" if they identify as "non-binary" or "agender"), and providing poor care.

In “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the document has doomed our politics. But it can also save them.

And a guide for how to productively push back against the identity trap.

     I am a pothole—an ordinary road hazard and a bane to all who drive. Messing with you and your vehicles is my vocation; it’s what I do. My genealogy is compelling enough. I come from a common road-built with dirt, six to twelve inches of #2 gravel and #57 gravel with lime dust—which is compacted at each stage. Then, add an inch or two of asphalt base, before a layer of finishing asphalt to complete the work. But over time, roads wear out. If the road is not well-constructed, trouble comes quicker. Without inspections, developers have an incentive to skimp on long-term road quality—and may succumb to this temptation. Even with the best roads, the ground can shift, especially if built on sand, and the weight of traffic inevitably takes a toll. But most of us potholes start with moisture, especially ice. Road salt is a mixed blessing: it’s tough on the roads, but it reduces the damage to roads from moisture and ice. One vulnerable area is the asphalt seam or “crown”—the peak of the road that allows water to drain off. Sometimes, the edge of a road lacks a solid foundation. And the driving lanes of a road receive the most weight. So, I can show up anywhere. Street departments try to prevent me through road maintenance—for example, “crack sealing” using hot rubberized asphalt and polymers. Those stripes may not look pretty, but they prevent me from showing up.   “Because I’m small and local, I seem simple to fix, but I’m not. Given this, imagine how difficult it is to fix large, national, complex problems.”   All that said, at the end of the day, I’m only a hole in the ground. The more fascinating story is about the efforts to fix me and my friends. It is more of a mystery than you might expect. Sadly, people overlook this—and then, miss the larger lesson: Because I’m small and local, I seem simple to fix, but I’m not. Given this, imagine how difficult it is to fix large, national, complex problems. Me and my story may seem mundane. But as the clever and wise G. K. Chesterton once observed, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” I, Pothole, simple as I may appear, merit your wonder and awe—a claim I will explain. In fact, if you can understand me and efforts to fix me—no, that’s too grand to ask—if you can become aware of the miracles that this represents, you will have less faith in the efficacy of government activism and be able to promote the freedom and prosperity that are under attack today. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than a pencil or a missile, an elementary school or antitrust enforcement, because fixing me is seemingly so simple. It may be simple, but no single person on earth knows how to do it. This sounds incredible, especially when you realize how many potholes are fixed every year. As you know from the popular parable of the now-prominent pencil, innumerable people are involved with fixing a pothole. Consider just one aspect of the remedy: my family tree includes asphalt—the production of which requires hundreds of people in an average company. Now contemplate what efforts went into making the places where they work, the clothes they wear, the coffee they drink, the tools, machines, and computers they use. Think of all the cars they drive to get there and of course—don’t overlook the avenues with their potholes. (They also use roads to receive the inputs they use and to transport their final product!) As with the pencil, it’s obvious that no single person knows how to do all the things required to fix a simple problem like me. But let’s take this discussion down a different road. How does a pothole get fixed? Imagine that you run the relevant department for the local government and are in charge of maintaining the city streets. The first problem is identifying the location of the potholes. How do you get this information? The most common method is for your workers—and other government workers in the public (e.g., sanitation workers)—to report what they find. You’d love to have more input from your friends and neighbors. But they probably figure that someone else will report a problem. You have a website and a phone number for citizens to report their concerns. (And it’s important for us to keep a good paper trail—to show that you’ve done your due diligence to prevent tort claims!) But the point is clear: finding all the potholes is easier said than done. Second, you need to prioritize which potholes to fix first. How many people are affected by the pothole? What is the severity of the damage and danger caused by each pothole? Your top priority is preventing car damage (and avoiding lawsuits). So, more severe potholes are highest on the list. But it’s also important to deal with higher traffic areas where potholes can get worse more quickly. For lower-priority jobs, it’s first come, first serve. Another complication is “pothole season.” In the late winter, you have many more potholes, making those decisions even more challenging. And ironically, potholes are more difficult to fix in the winter, since you need the ground to be above freezing. You can use a “cold patch,” which can be done even when it’s freezing or wet, but it’s a costlier option. You can also use a propane torch to dry out and warm up a pothole, but that’s costly too. When you’re not in pothole season, you can use more time and resources for road maintenance. And if there aren’t enough potholes to fix on a given day, it may not be cost-effective in terms of asphalt, machine usage, machine rental, and so on. It’s important that you achieve economies of scale to be relatively efficient. When should you fix them—with implications for disrupting traffic and imposing on workers: during the day or at night, on weekdays or weekends? For example, it’s not smart to fix potholes in front of the courthouse during the week. It’s better to do this at night or on the weekends. Third, to fix the potholes, which skills are required (or at least useful) in your employees? The skill level of workers may seem unimpressive, but you need them to be able to do many jobs, since your work varies throughout the year. Your workers may do three or four different types of jobs in a day and you cross-train them to be effective at a handful of tasks. So, you want them to be able to learn quickly and to be self-motivated. Beyond that, not just any worker will do. For safety reasons, they must be diligent and detail-oriented. Since some manual labor is involved, they must be willing to get their hands dirty—and ideally, they’re good with tools and machines. How many workers do you need? A small “cold patch” is a one-worker job—pouring the mix into the hole and smoothing it out. But most jobs are for two (or more) workers. At the least, you usually need one (or more) to fix me and one to deal with traffic. Larger jobs could still be done by one person, but safety concerns and greater accountability usually mean that it’s better to have two on the job. Fourth, what materials will you use to fix the potholes? What sort of machines and tools would be helpful? What is the rate of depreciation, maintenance, and breakage in those tools and machines? For tools, you need trucks and “hot boxes” (small trailers to keep the asphalt within a certain temperature range), tampers (hand and gas), asphalt rakes, shovels, heavy brooms, blowers, an air compressor (to dry out narrow fissures), Rosebud heating nozzles, propane torches, skid steers (e.g., Bobcats), rollers with a milling head attachment. For materials, you need asphalt and “binder” (which binds the new asphalt to the existing road materials). When temperature is an issue or you need a quick fix, you also have “hot patch” and “cold patch” options. (It’s perhaps surprising that it’s easier to have a more effective fix for deeper potholes, since there’s more surface area for the binder to attach.) All of this assumes a modest pothole. If there is a problem with the foundation of the road, you’ll need to remove the asphalt and the flawed foundation, cutting and replacing the section as necessary—to deal with the root causes. In this, you’re a lot like a dentist. (And don’t forget: if you’re going deeper, be careful not to hit a gas main, electrical wires, or a water pipe!) Fifth, what are the prices of the inputs to production: the labor of various skills, the capital of various types, and other inputs? How do you balance your budget, trying to maximize social well-being within the revenues you have been granted by the government? There are so many factors to weigh as you maximize road quality while watching costs. Sixth, how are the above answers changed by differences in climate? (Arizona is not the same as Vermont.) Not much, except for differences in temperature and precipitation, variance in the quality of road construction, and various state regulations. What about weather? Aside from cold patches and hot patches, potholes can’t be fixed when the ground is wet or freezing. Underlying road conditions are relevant. And as we’ve seen, there are some important trade-offs between short-run fixes, long-run fixes, and cost. Seventh, when can the private sector provide better quality and/or lower cost? Maybe you shouldn’t be fixing potholes at all—or maybe you should fix some types of potholes and outsource the others. You’re likely to privatize bigger jobs for paving, potholes, striping, engineering services. You simply cannot achieve the economies of scale to be as efficient. Sometimes, you can handle the job, but it doesn’t make sense for some smaller cities to own paving machines. Renting is smarter given that the work is seasonal and the machine is expensive and high maintenance. And finally, what role does technological advance and changing market conditions have in changing all of the above? Even if I understand the world of potholes perfectly today, my understanding will become increasingly obsolete, soon enough. Although millions of people have a hand in fixing me, none of them know more than a small bit of what is required. This “knowledge problem” is a key facet in the field of Austrian Economics. In the context of markets, we have innumerable, subjective, and diffuse bits of information embedded in the preferences of consumers (often modeled as demand curves). We have the wide array of variables that face producers—the prices of output and inputs, technology, incentivizing workers, etc. (often modeled as supply curves). And these two cooperate in markets through the challenges (and transaction costs) of communication and transport. To credit Leonard Read’s classic example, “I, Pencil,” it’s amazing that there are usually about the right number of yellow #2 pencils in boxes of ten on the shelf of the local box retailer in February and in August. Thankfully, the person running the Street Department can be successful because the pothole problem is relatively simple in terms of the knowledge required. While the list of questions above is daunting, it is manageable for someone who gains expertise in such things. It may not be done well, but it can be done well—with sufficient experience, managerial skill, wisdom, and knowledge. What about more complicated matters—for example, a national health care system. What do government bureaucrats need to know to effectively run everything from allergy shots to cancer, from routine check-ups to Medicare, from cheap prescriptions to innovative research, from the rural poverty of Appalachia to the elites on the coasts? Well, we don’t have nearly enough time to get into all of that. But the point is clear enough: the “knowledge problem” is staggering for more complex matters and as we extend from local to state to federal governance. Another concern is the question of motives and how they play out in different contexts. In the context of the market for asphalt, it’s astounding that few of those involved—the worker in the oil field and the person who produces the coffee he drinks, the salesperson and the clerical staff, the CEO and the janitor—perform their tasks to please people per se. Their motivations are mixed—from putting food on their table to buying a boat, from sleeping well at night to impressing their friends. A competitive market harnesses these motives to get people to serve customers (and society) effectively.    For more on these topics, see  Privatization, by Robert Poole, Jr. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Information and Prices, by Donald J. Boudreaux. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. “Don Lavoie on the Continuing Relevance of the Knowledge Problem,” by Cory Massimino. Library of Economics and Liberty, Aug. 7, 2023.     In political markets, these concerns are generally greater. It’s certainly possible that the primary aim of the bureaucrat is maximizing social well-being. Even if not, it’s possible that political pressures will curtail deviations from the ideal. But it’s also possible that we’ll see cronyism and graft, inefficiency and red tape, budget-maximization and over-spending. Of course, these worries are exacerbated by the high level of monopoly power in most government endeavors. The lesson I have to teach is this: Even when government is a constitutional, ethical, and practical means to some end—on paper—be wary of the knowledge problem and the motives question for politicians and bureaucrats. In contrast to the foibles of political markets, have more faith that free people will respond favorably to the Invisible Hand of economic markets. I, Pothole—though seemingly simple—offer the miracle of my maintenance as testimony that this is a practical faith—as practical as the sun, the rain, and the roads.       *D. Eric Schansberg is Professor of Economics at Indiana University Southeast and the author of Poor Policy: How Government Harms the Poor. Thanks are due to Kevin Morlan and Jeremy Neff for sharing their expertise.    (0 COMMENTS)

    James Buchanan     Sixty years ago, the Public Choice Society was founded by Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan, nearly coincident with the publication of their jointly authored book, The Calculus of Consent.1 A decade ago on the 50th occasion I was tasked with discussing the “Past, Present, and Future of Virginia Political Economy.” That paper (co-authored with Alain Marciano) was subsequently published in Public Choice.2 In it, Alain and I stressed the original impetus for the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy. We tell the story of Buchanan’s journey from the University of Virginia to Virginia Tech to George Mason University, his Nobel Prize and post-Nobel career. Buchanan’s efforts were met first with ideological resistance, then with methodological resistance, until finally finding a hospitable home. Buchanan and his colleagues between 1958-1968 are focused on contributing to the grand tradition of political economy as practiced in its finest hours from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, but with the sharpened intellectual tools of modern price theory as refined by the early neoclassical economists and culminating with Frank Knight.3 Still, critics outside of economics sought to discredit and delegitimize the work of the center as “ideological”.  Buchanan joined forces with Gordon Tullock at Virginia Tech, they narrowed their focus to the economics of politics—the persistent and consistent application of neoclassical economics to the analysis of political decision making. The public choice research program matured and was operationalized during the period from 1969-1982. But Buchanan also grew impatient with many aspects of that research program. If you carefully read his 1963 essay “What Should Economists Do?” he was already presenting his research program as distinct from a narrow rendering of neoclassical maximization and equilibrium theorizing. As Richard E. Wagner perceptively points out in Rethinking Public Choice (2022), neoclassical economic theory at this time came in two varieties: formal models of maximization and equilibrium (demonstrative reasoning), and an intuitive understanding of market theory and the functioning of the price system (plausible reasoning). Different public choice scholars followed either one or the other approach, with social choice theory the exemplar of the formal theory approach, and the Virginia School of Political Economy the exemplar of the price theoretic approach. The work of the Center for Study of Public Choice at Virginia Tech during the 1970s could be reasonably described as drawing out the implications of the economics of politics, rather than the more expansive program of political economy. Nevertheless, and despite the narrowed focus, the scholarly work of the Center for Study of Public Choice came under attack from within the economics department for methodological reasons. Buchanan, and his colleagues, were simply viewed as out of step with the modern science of economics; a criticism levelled by colleagues with much less impressive publication records than Buchanan. It clearly was the victory of mediocrity over excellence in academia, as Buchanan would note in a parting essay entitled “Dishwater of the Orthodoxy.”4 Thus, it was time to move again, and dare to be Different. In many ways what the move to George Mason University permitted Buchanan et al to return to the vision of the original Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social Philosophy, but with the hard-earned knowledge that the previous two decades of scientific struggle had taught. Alain and I conclude that the future of Virginia Political Economy will reside with those who continue to embrace this aspect of Buchanan’s project. What has happened in the decade since the paper I wrote with Alain Marciano? Outside of economics and political economy there has been the rise of critical works on neoliberalism that seek to engage in the sort of broad-brush indictment of the public choice program such as Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, or Naomi Orekes and Erik Conway’s The Big Myth. To counter these sorts of interpretations, I have done extensive work in Buchanan’s archives. In these efforts to recapture the true purpose of the initiative, I stress the methodological and analytical discomfort with the rise of Samuelsonian neoclassical synthesis (see Paul Samuelson), the Knightian concern with practicing social science from the inside-out versus from the outside-in, and the implications for a functioning modern democratic society. So many subtle points in the Buchanan effort are lost when critics focus exclusively on the ideological and social philosophic position that Buchanan himself articulated in his writings. For one, they too often fail to see his position is an outcome of his analysis, not a hard prior. For another, they too often fail to understand the terms; Buchanan’s commitment to a free society is not some code for a libertarian paradise, but an invoking of the ancient notion of a society of the choosing of its citizens. Many are keenly aware of this ongoing critical dialogue concerning neoliberalism and public choice, and many probably deem it a waste of time and energy. It is hard to persuade those who refuse to be persuaded by logic and evidence, because the narrative they paint is too convenient for their intellectual comfort. I personally think the crusade is worth the intellectual effort—though not to nudge those who view public choice as the work of an “evil genius” or part of a “neoliberal thought collective.” Rather, younger scholars in the social sciences and humanities should be able to judge us by how we reason, what arguments and evidence we marshal to our cause, and how we conduct ourselves in the wake of not just unfounded criticisms of public choice, but unfair character assassinations of the scholars who initiated the research program. But I will agree this is definitely not the most important development in the late decade.   “There are positive trends presenting opportunities for scholars in public choice if they stick to their knitting as found in those original meetings of sixty plus years ago.”   There are positive trends presenting opportunities for scholars in public choice if they stick to their knitting as found in those original meetings of sixty plus years ago. First, I want to stress the great opportunity that the focus on Institutional Analysis in the work of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson presents for public choice scholars. They have put at the center of modern political economy the puzzle of predation, and the countervailing powers required to both empower the productive and protective state while constraining the predatory state. Second, I want to stress the issue of “ideation” in historical political economy that Deirdre McCloskey and Joel Mokyr have put forward in their grand sweeping histories of modern economic growth. Public choice theory must come to a solid reckoning with the power of ideas and the role that ideology plays in the world. This is a topic that Robert Higgs raised in Crisis and Leviathan (1987), and Michael Munger developed in his book with Melvin Hinich, Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice (1996), and more recently in Dani Rodrik’s “When Ideas Trump Interests,” JEP (2014). Ideas in these presentations are not just a cover for interests, but a force in the world independent of interests and institutions, but which interacts with interests and institutions to shape the world we find ourselves occupying. It is, after all, ideas that inform us as to what it is that is in our interest to pursue. Third, it is this interaction of ideas, interests, and institutions that must be a focal point of our studies in political economy. Many years ago, Chris Coyne, Peter Leeson, and I sought to develop this idea about “institutional stickiness” and how it relates to the transplanting of institutions in the development process. (See Boettke, Coyne and Leeson 2008) More recently, Stefan Voigt and others have been studying the question of constitutional compliance. Compliance has an obvious incentive component when we focus on enforcement, but it also has an epistemic dimension when we focus on acceptance and legitimacy. Voigt himself very early in his career had identified the intimate connection between norms, beliefs, and the acceptability or non-acceptability of the formal institutions in the transition economies. (See Voigt 1993) Acemoglu and Robinson open the intellectual space for a focus on the constitutional project that follows from the paradox of government. They are not alone, I would point to Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast on constitutions, federalism, the violence trap and development, and liberty. As Weingast argues, serious research on this topic all but disappeared from economics and political science, yet it was a major theme in political economy as practiced in its finest hours. The “narrow corridor” in Acemoglu and Robinson is this pathway to the establishment of a functioning system of liberty and prosperity. The balance in their system is the tension between the state and society; these both must be empowered to check-mate the abuses of the other, but also empowered to provide the needed protection and basic public goods for human flourishing. We want a regime of liberty both for the protection of universal human rights and the mass flourishing that such regimes have historically been able to deliver for their citizens. The fundamental question remains, how do we detail the path from a state that discriminates and dominates its citizens, or the absence of a functioning state, to a social arrangement that exhibits neither relationships of domination nor engages in discriminatory politics? As Rosolino Candela and I point out in “Productive Specialization, Peaceful Cooperation, and the Problem of the Predatory State” (2019), in addressing this issue we must be careful not to confuse descriptions of initial conditions with explanations of the evolutionary path. Too much of Acemoglu and Robinson is baked into those initial conditions, and too little explanation is provided of the mechanisms that get you inside the narrow corridor in the first instance and how to progress inside that corridor to be able to achieve a constitutional order that shackles Leviathan. How does a Myanmar of today become a Denmark of tomorrow? We cannot be content with saying that Myanmar is Myanmar because it is Myanmar, any more than we can be content with saying Denmark is Denmark because it is Denmark. There is no explanation there, only description. The public choice and constitutional political economy tradition as developed by Buchanan and Tullock, but also by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom does postulate paths out of the Hobbesian jungle. Situations of conflict can be transformed into opportunities for peaceful social cooperation by changes in the structural rules under which we interact with one another. Buchanan’s Limits of Liberty (1975), Tullock’s Social Dilemma, Vincent Ostrom’s The Meaning of Democracy (1997), and Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) all postulate development paths in the political economy of rule-making. There is the possibility of freedom through constitutional contract. The Ostroms individually as well as jointly tackle the question of the construction of the common knowledge required to play cooperative social games in the first place. When we confuse descriptions for explanations in political economy, we end up doing what Elinor Ostrom identified as institution-free institutional analysis. Genuine institutional analysis, on the other hand, must recognize the devil is always in the institutional details and explicate the dynamics of the mechanism(s) set in motion by those details. We seek to explain the variation in the pattern of outcomes we see in the world by variation in the institutions that individuals find themselves operating within. “Theories” that postulate that differences in people determine the differences in outcomes we observe are not really theories.5 We don’t need elaborate theory, as F. A. Hayek pointed out in The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952) if the claim is good people do good things and bad people do bad things. What requires our theoretical skill is to tease out how “bad people”, i.e., self-interested agents, can produce publicly desirable outcomes, and how “good people”, i.e., other regarding agents, can produce publicly undesirable outcomes. We need theory to articulate the invisible hand of the market, as well as how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Only when outcomes diverge from preferences do we need an explanation of the mechanisms at work that either give us an outcome greater than the sum of its parts, or less than that sum.6 It is the machinations of politics (or law or society) that shapes and directs human behavior. We need the discipline of the rational actor model, because it prevents us from postulating that some actors are ignorant and others are enlightened, but we also need only a very thin model of the rational actor that recognizes that in our striving we stumble, we have cognitive limitations and face transactional difficulties, and must cope with our ignorance as we engage in decision making under deep uncertainty.    For more on these topics, see  A Conversation with James M. Buchanan, Parts I and II. Intellectual Portrait Series. Liberty Fund video interview of James Buchanan, recorded in 2001.  Don Boudreaux on Buchanan. EconTalk.  Don Boudreaux on Public Choice. EconTalk.     This research program on endogenous rules still has theoretical legs, as well as practical significance in the field of development economics, and in political economy more generally. I hope to see more work along the lines of the individuals I mentioned above populate the pages of Public Choice, Constitutional Political Economy, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and more. There are talented scholars prepared to carry this research forward and are doing so in the field of historical political economy. It is not, and must not, just be about state capacity. It can and should be about self-governance in its great diversity of manifestations across time and place.     Footnotes [1] See James Buchanan’s 2003 essay “Public Choice: The Origins and Development of a Research Program,” PDF file; or see the “History of the Public Choice Society,” by James Buchanan on the PCS About page [scroll to page bottom for the essay]. [2] For Peter J. Boettke and Alain Marciano’s paper, see “The past, present and future of Virginia Political Economy.” Public Choice, Vol. 163, No. 1/2, Special Issue: Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of the Public Choice Society (April 2015), pp. 53-65; published online February 2014. JSTOR. [3] On this subtle point about Buchanan and classical political economy see Richard Wagner’s James M. Buchanan and Liberal Political Economy (2017). [4] This essay, along with many other gems from the archives, has now been published in The Soul of Classical Political Economy, edited by Peter Boettke and Alain Marciano (2020). [5] I refer you to the Monty Python skit dealing with the ‘theory’ of the brontosaurus. A more serious discussion is provided if you look up Richard Feynman’s discussion of the difference between naming and describing and theorizing and explaining: see Richard Feynman–Names Don’t Constitute Knowledge. [6] Just a note of reminding that 60 year ago, the Public Choice Society was formed to bring together scholars who shared a desire to tackle a frustrating puzzle of 20th century democratic society. Namely, that simple majoritarian politics did not prove sufficient to discipline the behavior of elected officials to pursue public policies in the public interest and policies that reflected the preferences of the citizens.     *Peter J. Boettke is University Professor of Economics & Philosophy, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030. Adapted from an address Pete Boettke gave at the Public Choice Society’s annual meeting on March 17, 2023. For more articles by Peter J. Boettke, see the Archive.  As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases.     (0 COMMENTS)

     Improving standards of living are something that we have mostly taken for granted in modern America. In fact, failing to produce sufficient increases in national income is one of the surest ways for a President to lose reelection (even if they have little control over it in the short run). But how much are living standards and income improving? Has growth slowed down in recent decades? Are we worse off than a generation ago? Both regular Americans and economic researchers have been asking these questions a lot lately. The debate often slips into dueling anecdotes or—even worse—wonky discussions of income measures and inflation adjustments. What’s the best way to look at this data and answer those questions? I’ll try to give you a guide to the data, without getting too much into the weeds. Well, maybe a little bit. To give you a preview of the conclusion: while the prices of many categories of goods and services have risen rapidly, Americans have continued to see their standard of living rise in recent decades, properly measured. Now, let’s talk about measurement.   The Long-Run View There isn’t much disagreement that in the really long-run, say 200-300 years, standards of living have improved significantly. By almost any measure—income, health, education, freedom—people today are better off in 2023 than they were in 1823. I really like a summary of the global data for six measures that Max Roser wrote for Our World in Data.1 You could do a similar analysis of the United States over our entire history. For example, life expectancy at birth in the United States was around 40 years in the early nineteenth century. Today, it’s approaching 80 years (though the pandemic along with the surge in opioid overdoses have set us back a bit). Measuring the increase in income is more challenging than measuring life expectancy, but many economic historians have dug into the available data and given us some useful estimates. For example, Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson report that average compensation of production workers (non-supervisory manufacturing laborers) was about 4 cents per hour in 1800.2 Louis Johnston and Samuel H. Williamson also estimate that Gross Domestic Product per capita was about 90 dollars per year in 1800.3 GDP is a widely used, sometimes criticized, and sometimes misunderstood measure of average incomes, but it is one that we are able to approximately estimate for very long-past periods. But those numbers from 1800 are a bit unsatisfying. How do they compare to wages and incomes today? We know that a dollar doesn’t buy as much “stuff” today as it did in the past. But how much less “stuff” does the dollar buy? This is where the familiar, but also often misunderstood, concept of “inflation adjustment” comes in. If your income triples, but prices also double, you are better off, but you are not three times better off. Inflation adjusting is a way to answer the “how much?” question of improvements in income over time. Economic historians have developed long-run measures of consumer prices for purposes of inflation adjustment. The most common measure is a backwards extension of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index, which officially only goes back to 1913, but once again, Officer and Williamson have combined all the best historical estimates to extend it back to 1774. The CPI also has some adjustments for the improvement in quality of products, even if this is not perfectly captured—stay tuned for much more on quality improvements later on in this essay. For the latest data in 2022, we see that consumer prices are about 24 times higher, on average, than they were in 1800. That’s a lot of inflation! But when we look at average incomes, as measured by GDP, it is an astonishing 842 times higher than in 1800. Putting these two together, we can say that real, or inflation-adjusted, GDP per person in the United States is about 38 times higher in 2022 than it was in 1800. Economic historians still might debate the exact figure—is it actually 40 or 50 times, or maybe a little less than 38?—but no one debates the direction of improvement. It’s also useful to point out that the past 200-300 years have been unusual in human history. Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey likes to call this the “hockey stick” of human history, as a very long-run chart of economic growth looks a long stick with a sharp blade at the end.   The Medium-Run View of Income Growth While there is little dispute about the long-run, there has much debate about the prospects of Americans in recent decades. How has the last generation fared economically? It depends on what data you look at. And here’s where it gets interesting. Measures such as Gross Domestic Product show continued progress. Adjusted for inflation, GDP per capita roughly doubled between 1982 and 2022. That’s pretty good growth. Other measures of economic well-being have shown improvement as well, though not quite as much as GDP. For example, real median family income has grown by about 40 percent over the past 40 years. Not all of the data paints as rosy a picture. If we look at average hourly earnings for private sector, non-supervisory workers and adjust for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, we see the shocking fact that there has been essentially no net growth since 1973. That’s 50 years of stagnation! That’s not because nothing was happening. By this measure, real wages were falling from about 1973 until the mid-1990s, after which they rose again to roughly equal their 1973 levels recently. Here’s where things get a little technical and confusing. The Consumer Price Index is a good measure of prices over time, but it fails to take into account a number of important factors, such as that consumers will change their behavior when prices of particular goods rise by buying other, cheaper goods. Combined with some other biases, the Boskin Commission (established by the U.S. Senate to study this issue in the 1990s) found that the CPI tends to overstate inflation by about 1 percentage point per year. This may sound small, but when inflation is only about 2-3 percent per year, if 1 percentage point of that is an overstatement, it really adds up over time. How much does it add up? We can make the comparison by looking at an alternative price index, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index.4 The PCE corrects for some of the biases in the CPI. And it makes a big difference, as Michael Strain has explained in more detail.5 Here’s the cumulative effect: while CPI-adjusted wages are essentially flat (no increase!) since 1973, PCE-adjusted wages have increased about 30 percent. That’s not as much as GDP per capita or median incomes, but it’s very different from the pessimistic CPI-adjusted picture.   Beyond Inflation Adjustments: The Cost of Thriving Index A new analysis of incomes in recent decades has challenged these results on a number of fronts. In 2020, Oren Cass published the first edition of his “Cost of Thriving Index,” which was updated in 2023 and published by his American Compass think tank.6 Cass’s COTI is much more pessimistic about how American families are doing, suggesting that it is much harder for a family with one earner to purchase the necessities of life today than in 1985. How much harder? COTI tells us that in 1985, the median male earner could pay for five basic necessities for his family (groceries, a car, a home, health insurance, and a college education) with about 40 weeks of work. By 2022, COTI tells us that it would take about 62 weeks of work to pay for these same necessities. That’s not a typo; it’s not 52 weeks. According to COTI, it takes more than a full year of work for a man to purchase these goods and services. That means that men must take on second jobs, women must work outside the home, or a family must go without some of these goods and services or go into deep debt to buy them. None of these seems to be an ideal situation, especially if the family would prefer the wife to stay at home. How does Cass arrive at this conclusion? The first important step is that he says inflation adjustments are misleading. Yes, the quality of, say, minivans has improved. But the CPI treats these quality improvements in a curious way: it says the goods haven’t gotten more expensive. They have gotten more expensive, which is bad, but they are also nicer, which is good. But for a family struggling to make ends meet, perhaps they would prefer a lower quality minivan, but you can’t just say, “Hold the airbag and anti-lock brakes, please.” (Cars in 1984 didn’t have these features, nor air conditioning in many cases). In short, Cass looks at the actual costs of goods and services, rather than a quality-adjusted cost. But he also gets many of the costs wrong. In a recent report published by the American Enterprise Institute, Scott Winship and I analyze Cass’s COTI in detail and find many errors.7 Some of the errors and omissions are so significant as to almost completely eliminate the apparent increase of 22 weeks of work that Oren Cass claims are necessary to maintain a lifestyle like that of 1985. For example, while health insurance costs have surely risen significantly in recent years, Cass dramatically overstates the cost of health insurance to a family by including the employer share of health insurance. Workers are not paying this share out of their wages—it may indeed lower their wages, but Cass’s method is double counting (or double subtracting, if you will). Other errors show up for most of the five spending categories. A major omission is to consider the effect of income taxes, which definitely do come out of a worker’s wages. Cass includes no provision for income taxes. But while incomes taxes do reduce take-home pay, thus requiring even more hours work, what’s important for this analysis is the change in income-tax liability for a median-income family from 1985 to 2022. Due to a number of changes in tax law, the biggest being the Child Tax Credit, families today will pay a significantly smaller share of their income in federal income taxes, falling from about 16 percent to just 6 percent of their annual income. These tax changes significantly reduce the number of weeks per year needed to pay the bills. Winship and I make a few other improvements to the analysis. Importantly, we consider not just men over 25, but both women and men. We also include workers under the age of 25, so long as they are working full-time. Cass does have a separate analysis just for women, but we instead include all workers together in one version of our analysis.   “Families are 15 percent better off, rather than 36 percent worse off, as Cass’s analysis suggests. And keep in mind this doesn’t include quality improvements to goods and services, which have been substantial since 1985.”   Including the improvements to the costs of goods and services, the inclusion of federal taxes, and broadening the workers we consider (to all full-time workers 16 and older), we find dramatically different results than Cass. Families are 15 percent better off, rather than 36 percent worse off, as Cass’s analysis suggests. And keep in mind this doesn’t include quality improvements to goods and services, which have been substantial since 1985. Forget about air bags in minivans for a moment, and think about how much better healthcare is in 2023. Many of the procedures, drugs, and technologies that we use today weren’t even available in 1985—at any cost. By including these quality improvements, we finally conclude that the median family—even if they only chose to have one spouse working—is about 53 percent better off than 1985. This still falls short of the roughly doubling of GDP per capita during this time period, but it’s still a huge improvement in our standard of living.    For more on these topics, see  “Jeremy Horpedahl on The Real Cost of Thriving Index.” Podcast episode with host Juliette Sellgren. AdamSmithWorks, September 15, 2023. “What would Adam Smith think about ‘vocations’? Part 2,” by Janet Bufton and Christy Lynn. AdamSmithWorks, undated. Standards of Living and Modern Economic Growth, by John V.C. Nye. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.     The American family continues to thrive, despite many headwinds in recent years such as growing government, the rampant inflation of the past few years, and two major recessions in the past fifteen years.     Footnotes [1] Max Roser, “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it”. Available online at Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions [2] Available online at Measuring Worth: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/uswage/ [3] Available online at Measuring Worth: https://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/ [4] Available online from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCEPI [5] Michael R. Strain, “Have Wages Stagnated for Decades in the US?” Available online from the American Enterprise Institute at https://www.aei.org/articles/have-wages-stagnated-for-decades-in-the-us/ [6] The Cost of Thriving Index is available online from American Compass at https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/ [7] Scott Winship and Jeremy Horpedahl, “The Cost of Thriving Has Fallen: Correcting and Rejecting the American Compass Cost-of-Thriving Index.” Available online from the American Enterprise Institute at https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/the-cost-of-thriving-has-fallen-correcting-and-rejecting-the-american-compass-cost-of-thriving-index/     *Jeremy Horpedahl is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Central Arkansas. He blogs at Economist Writing Every Day. For more articles by Jeremy Horpedahl, see the Archive.    (0 COMMENTS)

The ambitions of the Free Press, her indie media outfit, were on full display at a debate about the sexual revolution.

It is difficult for people with heterodox opinions to survive in modern universities Source

After two decades, I have decided to relinquish my full professorship in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London for the University of Buckingham. Why leave such a cozy sinecure?

It took firms decades to adjust to electricity by redesigning factories, products, and workflows to take full advantage of the new possibilities. Similarly, the benefits of work from home start to come most profoundly when expensive offices can be shrunk, employers can draw from a much larger pool of workers and workers can adjust when […] The post Work From Home Works appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

For the last couple of decades, New Left Review (NLR) has been publishing articles diagnosing the capitalist system as suffering from long-term stagnation, chronic overcapacity, declining profitability, and sluggish growth. The emphasis began with a 1998 paper by the historian Robert Brenner, “The economics of global turbulence,” an article that impressed and influenced many. Brenner […]

The Olentangy Local School District in the Columbus, Ohio, area maintains three overlapping speech policies that punish students for expressing sincerely held beliefs about sex and gender and force them to affirm beliefs they do not hold. By the district’s own admission, the three policies require students to use classmates’ “preferred pronouns” and to otherwise […]

L.M. is a student at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, where school officials regularly engage in expression supporting the view that a person’s identity, not biology, determines whether the person is male, female, both, neither, or something else. Officials also encourage students to engage in their own expression on this subject by inviting them […]

The First Amendment rights to free speech and association are foundational to American freedom. Cases from the McCarthy and Civil Rights eras made it clear that compelled disclosure of speakers’ associations must survive exacting scrutiny. Just three years ago, in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the Supreme Court applied this standard and held that […]

Why are we seeing the craziness on college campuses, with speakers shouted down, professors afraid of students, and certain subjects off-limits from public discussion? Is there a generational change, with Gen Z just that much more radical even than millennials? Truth be told, what’s different now from when I was in college 25 years ago isn’t so much that […]

A group of parents challenged the Fairfax County, Virginia school board’s revamping of admissions policies at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) as racially discriminatory against Asian-American applicants. TJ specializes in advanced math and science education and for years has been ranked the number one public high school in the country. […]

Under Section 1052(c) of the Lanham Act, the federal trademark law, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) denies registration of marks containing the name of a living person without that person’s consent. That presents a First Amendment problem when the mark criticizes a politician or other public figure, because the government is, in effect, […]

The White House agenda diverts focus and money from federal programs and undermines traditional environmental goals New York, NY – This summer the Inflation Reduction Act celebrated its first anniversary. Along with boosting subsidies for green infrastructure, President Biden’s signature law put significant funding behind the administration’s commitment to the elusive concept of “environmental justice.” In a […]

From its first week in office, the Biden administration has described “environmental justice” as one its top priorities. The environmental justice (EJ) movement began in the 1980s as an effort to make sure environmental rules were fairly enforced in poor and minority communities. But Biden’s EJ agenda goes far beyond that reasonable approach. The administration […]

After major rulings on abortion and affirmative action, the Supreme Court doesn’t have anything quite so explosive on its docket for next term, which begins in a few weeks. As we turn from the phony war over judicial ethics to legal substance, social media regulation is about to take center stage. The Justices will hear argument this […]

Does Congress have the power to tax citizens on their ownership of corporate shares that appreciate without being sold? The Ninth Circuit said that the answer is yes, announcing that realization of income “is not a constitutional requirement” for Congress’s exercise of its power to tax “incomes” without apportionment among the states (which is the […]

Oakland, Calif., is plagued by crime—and by a district attorney, Pamela Price, determined to divide people by race. After “antiracist” consultant Karen Fleshman finished a training in Oakland, Calif., she took to Facebook to express pride in her work: “Great afternoon training Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s Victim Services team in ‘How to Serve White Victims.’ Madam DA Pamela […]

In the coming term, the U.S. Supreme Court is taking up the interesting question of whether a public official who blocks someone from the official’s personal social-media account violates the First Amendment when he uses that account to communicate about job-related matters with the public.  The case arose when two school board trustees blocked two […]

This report presents original findings from the most comprehensive study of the accuracy of public perception with respect to the prevalence and racial distribution of police use of force. The report is divided into four main parts: Recently, there has been a dramatic increase in media and public attention to police brutality and racial bias. […]

Part of what made Students for Fair Admissions’ case before the Supreme Court so compelling was the data. It was very hard to look at the numbers and not conclude that discrimination was involved in Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s admissions practices. This week on The Glenn Show, John and I are joined […]

From early on, humanity’s key inventions involved rotation: grindstones, potter’s wheels, treadmills, pumps. The wheel, though, has been overrated. More than a few authors have found success with books that look at a broad swath of history, ideas or science through the lens of a single topic. The trend might have begun with James Gleick’s […]

Simple acts like adding flowers to the break room or landscaping the area outside employees’ windows can foster a healthier work environment.

Family-run fishing businesses face a fraught and competitive environment even before the intrusion of burdensome regulations. In this case, the National Marine Fisheries Service promulgated a rule for herring boats that sweeps in most such businesses, as portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie “CODA.” If a vessel needs a monitor and hasn’t already been assigned one […]

Thinking elite schools are the only path to success for students is a form of intellectual snobbery. Justice Sonia Sotomayor had harsh words for her colleagues who voted last month to bar the use of race in college admissions. She alleged in her dissenting opinion that the six-justice majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had subverted the […]

Professor Roland Fryer, a Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, shared his ideas with the New York Times about how higher education should move forward after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down affirmative action. His contribution appears under the headline “Build Feeder Schools (and Make Yale and Harvard Fund Them).” In the months leading up to […]

Honestly, I feel a little bad for the folks at the Kounkuey Design Initiative. The international nonprofit says its mission is to “partner with under-resourced communities to advance equity and activate the unrealized potential in their neighborhoods and cities.” Recently, the design collective teamed up with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to address a […]

The result of the court’s decision will be more opportunity, not less Harvard may have a slightly more difficult time poaching black students from Boston College, Miami University of Ohio, or other less elite schools in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating Harvard’s racial admissions regime. Recruiters from BlackRock and Goldman Sachs may […]

NEW YORK, NY – This morning, the Supreme Court issued decisions in three cases, including 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis and Biden v. Nebraska. Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, offers the following reactions. Statement on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis: “As one of only three lawyers in the country to have filed briefs supporting […]

In Alabama, the government can seize and start forfeiture proceedings against vehicles that are used or are intended to be used to transport or facilitate the sale, receipt, possession, or concealment of certain property, including controlled substances. Those proceedings can take months, even years, to resolve. Hamila Culley and Lena Sutton both had their vehicles […]

What two groups — network producers and executives as well as rival Republican presidential candidates — can take away from the CNN town hall.

World of Women confronts the limits of selling cartoon avatars on the blockchain after the crypto bubble burst.

Defending Darwinism from both clerical and scientific opponents, T. H. Huxley and his grandson Julian shaped how we think about the past and future of our species.

Concerns about accusations of hype may have biased them toward conservative underestimates

No matter what becomes of Donald Trump, the forces of intolerance, racism, and belligerence he harnessed in American politics will persist.

        With few exceptions, liberal pressure groups have lost lawsuits in state after state, with courts tossing out their faux claims that ID laws are discriminatory, unconstitutional or suppress minority voting. (iStock)   It was a boring Election Day, and that’s good   Walter Olson  November 14, 02:29 PM November 14, 02:29 PM  How much went right with last Tuesday's midterm election? A lot.  Violence at the polls, much feared, didn’t happen. Nor did widespread intimidation. For all the talk of voter suppression, poll access was healthy and uneventful in the state of Georgia and pretty much everywhere else. Nearly all candidates who’d expressed distrust in the electoral process did in fact concede in a timely way on losing their races. (On this last, Benjy Sarlin offers one plausible explanation, which is that former President Donald Trump simply is unlike most persons in his willingness to commit with total intensity to a storm of lies: it all helps underscore “just how much Stop The Steal was a one‐man, top‐down phenomenon in 2020.”)  Each Election Day also features news stories that get some play, but in fact fall within the normal range for things that happen this time of year. Here are four stories for which we did not need to set our hair on fire.  1. Humans screwed up. Example: owing to human error a Georgia county failed to send out 1,000 or so absentee ballots. The error was discovered, the county moved to fix things, and the voters involved were given several options to adapt. It wasn’t a plot, and things are going to be okay.  2. Machines screwed up. During every big election, equipment breaks down somewhere. This time there were ballot tabulation failures that caused delays, some serious, for voters at 70 of 223 voting centers in Maricopa County, Ariz. Happily, as in the Georgia case, modern voting methods build in backup options that included use of temporary dropboxes for ballots not being accepted by tabulators, as well as the availability of other voting centers with no wait. (Under the Arizona system, you needn’t vote at a neighborhood precinct but can go to whichever voting center you please.) Again: it wasn’t a plot, despite some efforts to portray it as such.  3. Someone sued someone. Every big election includes litigation. When it’s groundless litigation, as with an attempt to shut down Detroit mail votes, the courts’ job is to shut it down, and we (and the voters) may draw negative inferences about those who filed it. Other times the issue is closer, as with a battle in Pennsylvania in which the state’s high court split 3–3 over whether or not to count mail ballots that arrive in undated or misdated envelopes.  Most of the legally close claims tend to involve relatively few actual votes. Some coverage has portrayed the recent Pennsylvania dispute on envelope dating as resulting in the rejection of more than 2,000 ballots in Philadelphia, but according to a Washington Post account, that’s the number rejected total, and ballots get rejected for plenty of reasons other than envelope misdating. Moreover, mail ballots once rejected can often still be rescued (“cured”) rather than resulting in the annihilation of a vote.  4. The feds sent monitors. The U.S. Department of Justice said Monday it was sending election monitors to 24 states, and Florida Gov. DeSantis said those monitors wouldn’t be allowed inside polling places in his state. Here the hair‐on‐fire reactions divided into opposing scorch salons, the “OMG things have gotten so bad the feds have to step in” versus “OMG Merrick Garland commits new outrage against the Constitution.”  The actual story is less exciting. Federal use of monitors regarding Voting Rights Act compliance has been going on for 50 years, and the practice has tended to decay, rather than accelerate, in the past decade. The Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County case much curtailed the feds’ discretion to place observers inside polling places in what were deemed suspect jurisdictions. The DOJ remains free to send monitors for tasks that do not require polling place access, such as fielding complaints or interviewing locals, but that’s relatively ho‐hum stuff. All sides seem to agree that aside from exceptional situations as when there is a court order, the feds have no right to hang out inside polling places unless state law allows them to. So the Florida showdown wasn’t much of a showdown.  I’ve written before about how the contending “voter suppression” and “voter integrity” schools on Left and Right encourage an alarmist picture of an electoral system in crisis, even though by and large the system we have tends to work pretty well. Things on Tuesday were mostly normal and boring, and in the world of election administration, normal and boring are good.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA  This article originally appeared in the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the Cato Institute.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Our twenty-first-century culture of performed remorse has become a sorry spectacle.

The Norwegian author has spent decades producing a strange, revered body of work. But he still doesn’t know where the writing comes from.

Even a bare-minimum majority preserves Democrats’ ability to confirm President Biden’s nominees and would allow them to stop Republican legislation in its tracks should the G.O.P. win the House.

What’s good for credit-card companies isn’t always good for customers.

Calcification, political parity and cultural backlash brought us where we are.

— Santiago Mayer (@santiagomayer_) November 8, 2022It has always been desirable to be young, and youth has often been interpreted as an identity. Today, though, youth is saddled with the expectation of moral authority and benevolence. Gen Zers are cheered by some progressives as righteously angry and so good-hearted that America doesn’t deserve them. But it would be surprising if an entire cohort was “just kinder” than all others that came before. (Scientifically surprising, even!) And though younger people are generally more progressive, they are not a monolith.[Read: ‘Gen Z’ only exists in your head]All of this weirdness isn’t the fault of young people. It is the fault of older people who talk about them, and who ask the question—in The New York Times and on Quora and everywhere in between—“Will Gen-Z save the world?” This is a question bolstered by internet-y tropes: In the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, the entire generation was conflated with activist K-pop fans and with TikTok users. In the past few years, some advocates of a blockchain-based Web3 have evoked the halo around Gen Z to market their vision for the future of the internet, tapping into the supposed Gen Z desire to “make the world a better place.”On Wednesday morning, Dirt’s Terry Nguyen published a report on the world of self-described Gen Z venture capitalists. Nguyen detailed a recent Gen Z–VC summit in Chicago that led Mayor Lori Lightfoot to declare October 7 “Gen Z VCs Day” and to “salute the Gen Z VC community.” The perspective that these Gen Z financiers have to offer is youth, which they position as synonymous with culture. “There’s a need for different kinds of culture to be funded,” Emily Herrera, a 23-year-old investor with the fund Night Ventures, told Nguyen. “It’s such an exciting thing to think about. The technology we’re investing in has the potential to meaningfully affect society.” Right, sure. But is this statement, in some notable way, different from the Silicon Valley–speak of generations prior? When I called Herrera to ask this question, she said that, unlike big tech companies, her fund is interested in “underserved consumers” and tries to work with “creators in very niche communities.”Gen Z branding appeals in business and in politics. On Tuesday night, the 25-year-old Joe Vogel tweeted that he had won his state-legislature race and was set to become “the first GenZ legislator” in Maryland. About an hour later, the 25-year-old Jeff Long—who had won in a nearby district—tweeted the same claim, with almost the exact same wording. (When I called them both to settle the matter, Vogel said that Long was “a few months” older than him. “I actually didn’t know he’s a Gen Zer,” Vogel said. He also sounded sort of annoyed. “Is this what your story is about?” Long, for his part, noted that both he and Vogel will turn 26 before the start of the legislative session.) I don’t know much about these men beyond what’s on their campaign sites. But that’s the point—knowing that they are both Gen Z doesn’t actually tell you anything, so why does it seem to? Millennials (hi, and sorry) were the subject of mass disdain because of their perceived petulance and excess of emotion. Gen Z, written about by media that are now made up in no small share by Millennials, has been awarded a totally different story. Generalization, whether positive or negative, is condescension. The youth of a cohort is not a barrier, nor does it guarantee the whole group a special perspective or capacity for insight. You don’t do the 20-year-old in your life any favors by treating her like the Second Coming. She might not even be voting as hard as you assume she is.Gen Z is just fine. Gen Zers are the millions of people born in 1997 or later. They are my fellow citizens and that’s all I know about them. I agree it’s good that they vote, if they do.

Person holding a phone showing Twitter homepage by Solen Feyissa (https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=twitter&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image) 

I spend a lot of time and effort at my law school promoting the free exchange of ideas and ensuring that unpopular speakers have a platform. I do not believe I have ever advocated censorship of anything or anyone. 
I was thus surprised (and, at first, amused) to read Jonathan Turley charging me with “call[ing] for Chinese-style censorship of the internet,” and claiming I was part of a group of “professors, writers, and editors” that was “against free speech” and “doing lasting damage not only to free speech but [to our] professions.” In support of this claim, Turley cited this sentence from a piece with Andrew Woods in the Atlantic in 2020: “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.” I normally would not respond to a misconstrual or misrepresentation of my work—it happens. But then I discovered that Turley had at least twenty times–in posts, op-eds, and an article–asserted that I “call[] for Chinese-style censorship.”  
If you read the Atlantic piece, which Turley does not link to, you will see that neither the sentence nor the article calls for Chinese-style censorship of the internet. But when some conservatives commentators nonetheless construed the article along the lines of Turley back in 2020, Woods and I quickly wrote a follow-up piece on Lawfare to underscore that we “do not remotely endorse China-style surveillance and censorship, or claim that the United States should adopt China’s practices.” (It seems absurd to have to repeat those words.)  
The Atlantic article was about the rise and rise of digital harms, and of private and public regulation of those harms, and it predicted that the general trend of increased regulation of those harms, especially by the government, would not soon abate. From the perspective of the 1990s, it argued, China was largely right, and the United States largely wrong, about the existence of such harms and the need to address them, either by public or private means, albeit in pursuit of very different values and ends in the two systems. (One window on the likelihood of more government involvement in the problem can be seen in the broad efforts by conservative Justices, Judges, commentators, and legislators—many of them libertarians—to regulate, or approve regulation of, social media platforms via antitrust, Section 230, common carrier theories, and the like, to ensure that they monitor speech in the “right” way.)
I am not going to relitigate what I said in the Atlantic or Lawfare—anyone interested can read those pieces to see if Turley has accurately represented my views. But I do want to correct the record concerning some of Turley’s campier claims–somehow connected to the Atlantic article–about my actions and beliefs. In addition to not “call[ing] for Chinese-style censorship of the internet,” I am not “against free speech”; I am not “panic[ked] over free speech breaking out” on Elon Musk’s Twitter; I have not “echoed the call” for European Digital Service Act censorship; I am not part of an “alliance of academics, writers and activists calling for everything from censorship to incarceration to blacklists”; I have not “cross[ed] the Rubicon from free speech to censorship models”; I am not “pushing for greater censorship and speech controls”; I am confident that the Biden administration was not “drawing upon” my work in its jawboning efforts, which I oppose; and I am not part of “a strong movement on the left to regulate and censor the Internet.”
With that out of the way, let me state the obvious: platform speech, as Elon Musk is learning, is a super-hard problem. The platforms have not done a great job of figuring out the right speech rules—assuming there is such a thing. And the federal government is very unlikely to do better, even assuming that it acts consistent with the First Amendment. Yet the current arrangement has produced an enormous variety of serious social harms, including harms to America’s free speech culture. I haven’t seen a workable solution to this foundational conundrum, and I do not have one. Woods and I will have much more to say on these hard topics in a book we are writing about the naivete and failure of the 1990s American Internet project, and the tragic tradeoffs that digital networks pose to foundational American values. More to come.
Topics: First AmendmentTags: First Amendment, Content Moderation

Jack Goldsmith is the Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School, co-founder of Lawfare, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel from 2003-2004, and Special Counsel to the Department of Defense from 2002-2003. 

@jacklgoldsmith

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Margin
State
Senate
Governor
D+9.6
R+15.7
25.3
Ohio
R+6.6
R+25.6
19.0
D+3.4
D+13.4
10.0
Georgia
D+0.9
R+7.6
8.5
Colorado
D+12.2
D+17.1
4.9
Wisconsin
R+1.0
D+3.4
4.4
Arizona
D+5.0
D+0.7
4.3
Florida
R+16.4
R+19.4
3.0
Nevada
R+2.7
R+4.8
2.1

State
538 PLI
Diff.
AZ
R+7.1
D+2.8
+9.9
NH
D+0.6
D+9.0
+8.4
GA
R+7.4
D+0.5
+7.9
CO
Joe O’Dea
D+6.7
D+14.0
+7.3
PA
Mehmet Oz
R+3.0
D+4.0
+7.0
OH
Tim Ryan
J.D. Vance
R+12.1
R+6.6
+5.5
NV
R+2.5
D+0.4
+2.9
WI
R+3.8
R+1.3
+2.5
NC
Ted Budd
R+4.8
R+3.7
+1.1
WA
D+14.2
D+11.0
-3.2
FL
R+7.4
R+16.0
-8.6

A New Left

It turns out that voters care about abortion and democracy after all.

Most grownups don’t believe in magic anymore. Sometimes, though, it can be helpful to imagine it. A powerful ring turns the wearer invisible in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. That power means the wearer can act with relative impunity. (For that device, Tolkien had Plato to thank.)

We can also imagine characters with superhuman abilities. These thought experiments sometimes help us put ourselves and our societies into perspective. In Tolkien’s world, we wrestle with questions on the nature of power. In our world, we can explore the nature of peace.
Let’s imagine that wizards exist in our world, and one supremely powerful wizard has cast a spell over the realm.

The Spell of Nonviolence
The wizard’s spell is of nonviolence. Call it “The Spell of Ahimsa.” Under this spell, no one can threaten or commit any act that injures another person or their property. When a brigand tries to attack a caravan on the road, his fingers weaken, and his dagger simply falls from his grasp. When a tax collector tries to arrest a merchant in the town, the handcuffs slip from his fingers. When a bully tries to push another girl, she discovers an invisible wall of protection. It doesn’t matter whether the perpetrator thinks he is using violence to serve good or evil. The fact is, the spell ensures a condition of complete nonviolence in society.
What should we make of this? Would the realm be better off under the wizard’s spell?
Answers will vary. Nearly every society has laws against theft, fraud, and physical injury, which means something is justifiable about the spell. So at least a fair number of people might agree intuitively that the world would be better without violence. As soon as we get into questions about the justification for authority’s threats of violence, though, answers start to diverge.
Differences are starkest when we think of the spell affecting government officials. Consider “The Spell of Nonviolence” as it relates to issues of government-issued welfare. In other words, if the wizard used magic such that officials had to abstain from violence, how would authorities implement redistribution schemes? Specifically, how would authorities tax the rich to give to the poor?

Redistribution as Rooted in Violence
The modern redistributive state is relatively recent in history. In fact, what made the welfare state affordable was the rapid advances of industry and enterprise. After about 1800, this advance—known as the “hockey stick” of prosperity—helped generate opportunities for people to create more value for each other. For maybe the first time in history, there were more people trading than raiding. People living in this Great Enrichment rocketed out of poverty.1
According to economic historian Dierdre McCloskey:,

Earlier prosperities had intermittently increased real income per head by double or even triple, 100 or 200 percent or so, only for it to fall back to the miserable $3 a day typical of humans since the caves. But the Great Enrichment increased real income per head, in the face of a rise in the number of heads, by a factor of seven—by anything from 2,500 to 5,000 percent.

A few entrepreneurs got amazingly wealthy in the Great Enrichment, but a massive middle class emerged, too, as people figured out how to organize themselves into productive firms. These firms weren’t perfect, but they were responsible for unprecedented improvements in living standards. With such gains, even the poorest improved their lot.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, governments began instituting welfare programs and other centralized forms of social welfare. The idea was to see that the least fortunate in society could meet their basic needs. But these systems brought along a set of perverse consequences. And as these systems began to predominate, existing voluntary systems of civil society disappeared. Essential features of voluntary systems, such as the practice of compassion and community, not to mention the development of personal responsibility, slowly disappeared along with them.
The Spell of Ahimsa helps us see a feature of the redistributive welfare state that is frequently overlooked: its very existence depends on state-sanctioned violence. In other words, how would the system operate if authorities couldn’t threaten to imprison those who refused to pay for it?
Most people don’t think about matters this way, accustomed to the idea of the welfare state as a permanent fixture of life. But as we will see, it hasn’t always been this way. Human beings naturally organize themselves.

Savings Clubs Around the World
Tanomoshi is a locally organized system of mutual aid. These community resource pools have existed in Japan at least since the middle Kamakura period of 1185 to 1333 BCE. Under this system, each member would contribute a small sum at regular intervals and would receive a single, lump payment whenever the member experienced a significant life event.
In medieval Japan, per capita GDP is estimated to have been between 500 and 800 dollars in 2011 dollars. (Compare this with today’s United States poverty level of $12,880 for a single person.) Every month, people would travel to the tanomoshiko to leave a little bit of money. A trusted party there would accept their contribution with a bow. Tanomoshiko is translated as “reliable group,” so the community selected a steward of integrity. Though most medieval Japanese earned very little, they were committed. One family might have arranged for a daughter to be married. Another might have found a parent has become gravely ill. Each would be able to go directly to the tanomoshiko for support.
In some of the poorest parts of the world, there is little capacity for government welfare, much less modern banking. So in places like sub-Saharan Africa, people contribute a modest monthly allotment to a su su (or sou-sou). Those who aren’t very good at saving money by themselves are encouraged to use a su su because club members hold one another accountable.
Here’s how it works, according to South African writer Lihle Z. Mtshali, describing the Afro-Caribbean variant in America:

The group elects a treasurer who will collect the members’ contributions. She will also create a payout roster, or members can request to receive their hand at any given date during the cycle. Everyone agrees on how much and how often they want to contribute. If ten members are contributing $100 a week, each week a member will receive a $1,000 hand or cash lump sum. The cycle begins again after ten weeks. Any member who can afford it, can also double their contribution and get paid two hands in one cycle.2

Because there is no interest to be collected, members always get out the exact amount they put in. The recipient changes each period in a rotating fashion such that every member of the group is eventually a recipient.
Curiously, this arrangement has sprung up in various forms worldwide throughout history.
A similar system called kye in Korea is still around today, even among Korean immigrants to the United States. Similar rotational systems include tandas (Latin America), cundinas (Mexico), partnerhand (Caribbean/United Kingdom), hui (Asia), Game’ya (Middle East), pandeiros (Brazil), and arisan (Indonesia). These systems facilitate personal savings, investment in property and enterprise, insurance, personal loans, and assistance to poorer people. In developed countries, people can use these systems to build credit.

Mutual Aid in America

Seal of the Souvereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows

Today, if you were to ask the average man or woman on the street to name a mutual aid society, you would be lucky if he or she could name a single one. But at one time in America these organizations were everywhere. They had funny names like the Oddfellows, the Free African Society, and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. At one time, they included health insurance and unemployment support. Because they were a mix of the communitarian and the charitable, surplus dues could go to growth and giving. As most organized into local chapters and lodges, they featured the undocumented acts of kindness and tough love we would scarcely recognize if we saw them today. They are the forgotten social safety net.
This vast empire of human good was built not by federal largesse but on the moral conviction of free people weaving their lives together as a community to guard against hardship. Once held together by tight neighborhoods, mutual support, and barn raisings, a communitarian society has been torn apart by redistribution. Beholden to banks or bureaucracies, most Americans are dependent on authorities’ plans thousands of miles away. The rest are compelled to foot the bill—or else. At one stage, this system was affordable. But in time, the system became corrosive and dependent on public and private debt.

“As we have fallen deeper into debt, we have forgotten how to take care of one another.”

As we have fallen deeper into debt, we have forgotten how to take care of one another. The rise of the administrative welfare state corresponds to civil society’s decline. Whether it’s correlation or causation, I cannot say. But the circumstantial evidence is pretty damning.

The Decline of Community
When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he saw something profound. Maybe you’ve read the following passage before. But as you read it again, ask yourself whether or to what degree this is an America you recognize:

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I suspect that if you see today’s America in the above, it’s been weakened and politicized.
Reading Tocqueville, one can imagine a time when the organs of civil association extended to spheres of life such as childhood and old age. But these are institutionalized and segregated today. Children are warehoused by the state so that parents can work to pay bills and taxes. The elderly are similarly warehoused and told more or less that their participation in productive society is optional after age 65. Beyond that point, many become liabilities to be managed by the Congressional Budget Office.
Consider then the lost array of mutual aid societies, lodges, and fraternal orders of which a third of Americans were once members. Historian David Beito painstakingly investigates3 a handful of these to offer a clearer picture:

century illustrates the many variants of this system. Each had a distinct membership base. Two of the societies, the Independent Order of Saint Luke and the United Order of True Reformers, were all-black. Both had been founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War and specialized initially in sickness and burial insurance. The other societies had entirely white memberships. The Loyal Order of Moose was an exclusively male society that emphasized sickness and burial benefits. It became best known during the 20th century for its orphanage, Mooseheart, near Aurora, Illinois. The Security Benefit Association (originally the Knights and Ladies of Security) followed in a similar tradition but broke from the mainstream by allowing men and women to join on equal terms.

Even as we shake our modern heads at segregation along racial lines, we can still appreciate the power of civil association that has all-but-disappeared in the twenty-first century.
There is no doubt that most human beings care for others. This care can extend to strangers. At some level, we all want to be assured that poor people can get help when they need it. Most of us want to know that those who seek our help really need it and that assistance doesn’t create dependency. Mutual aid societies served this function because members kept an eye on other members.
Government welfare views successful people as human ATMs and the poor as statistical plot points. There is no discernment. A mutual aid renaissance would discourage people from simply outsourcing their compassion. Instead, we would all have to learn to be compassionate again.

The Fundamental Questions
In an age of rapid technological advances and material abundance, we must ask penetrating questions about whether the current socio-political order is morally justifiable.
First, if you could choose non-violent means of achieving social goals such as poverty relief, wouldn’t you? After all, violence causes suffering. Causing unnecessary suffering against innocent people is wrong.
One might respond by arguing that non-violent forms of poverty relief are impossible, so the extent to which the relatively well-off suffer from taxation is a necessary evil. But isn’t this line of argument just a failure of imagination?
Remember that mutual aid was robust in the past without the benefits of modern technology. It’s easier to dispel skepticism about voluntary arrangements when we reflect on mutual aid in the era of digital ledgers. (Remember, we haven’t yet discussed improvements to the charity sector that the Internet has enabled.)
Now, if we can demonstrate that mutual aid and charity could be robust enough to help the least advantaged, wouldn’t that mean the violent redistributive state causes unnecessary suffering?
Advocates for the welfare state argue that wealthier members of society don’t suffer all that much when authorities compel them through redistributive taxation. But if we agree that the goal is to help the poor rather than punish the rich, then all such suffering is unnecessary. Moreover, the vast majority of the rich’s assets don’t go to consumption but rather to capital that fuels other poverty-fighting endeavors such as investments in companies and a thousand experiments in effective altruism.
Capital is rarely idle–passing over, for now, the perverse distortions created by central banks.
Finally, if it’s possible to help the poor (or the poor to help each other) without resorting to violence, isn’t this something we ought to do? If the answer is yes, we have a moral obligation to transition away from the violent welfare state to a nonviolent condition of community support, charity, and mutual aid. Sadly, moral suasion isn’t likely to work. But if governments around the world find they can no longer afford the bloat and unprecedented debt, it could be that mutual aid is the last remaining option.

Becoming the Social Safety Net
We have demonstrated that mutual aid is possible and probably more effective even among the poorest people. Even if a subset cannot afford to participate in mutual aid, the least advantaged would be able to rely more on families, churches, charities, and communities, all of which would likely receive greater comparative support. Again, the poor are more likely to find these options without a vast government welfare empire. In 1900, when U.S. per capita GDP was only $4,000, one-third of American men belonged to a mutual-aid society. Just think what this sector could look like with an average per capita GDP of $65,000—with only about 11 percent living below the federal poverty limit.
Mutual aid arrangements are not just superior because they are voluntary. These systems build in mechanisms of accountability and integrity for members—the practice of compassion. By contrast, government welfare is impersonal and treats everyone the same, reducing incentives to work and engendering an unhealthy sense of entitlement.
Again, the debt spending that is needed continuously to prop up the welfare system has created risks of a global contagion.

For more on these topics, see

Welfare, by Jeffrey M. Jones and Thomas MaCurdy. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
 Christy Ford Chapin on the Evolution of the American Health Care System. EconTalk.
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. English Edition. 2 vols. Online Library of Liberty.

The mutual aid sector is thus due for a renaissance. It might seem radical, but charity and mutual aid systems create more trust, engender more integrity, and offer greater responsibility. Suppose, though, that the compulsory redistribution system continues to grow. There will be fewer opportunities for experimentation in mutual aid, that is, until the economy drowns in a sea of red ink.

Casting the Spell
Of course, there is no Spell of Nonviolence. It is impossible to cast such a spell on everyone. But one thing is possible: You and I can cast this spell on ourselves.
We can form a moral community of people who refuse to support institutions that threaten violence to operate. I’d be willing to bet that where there is more peace, there is also more compassion. As more people cast this spell upon themselves, we will find we live in a world of increased dignity, flourishing, and love.

Footnotes
[1] Deirdre McCloskey, “The Great Enrichment Was Built on Ideas, Not Capital.” FEE, Nov. 22, 2017.
[2] Lihle Z. Mtshali, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Those Sou-Sou Savings Clubs African and Caribbean Women Love.” Essence, December 6, 2020.
[3] David T. Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

*Max Borders is executive editor at Free To Choose Network. As a 2011 Robert Novak fellow of the Phillips Foundation, Max will be writing a book on wealth creation. He lives in Austin, TX.
For more articles by Max Borders, see the Archive.

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As the head of General Electric, he fired people in vast numbers and turned the manufacturing behemoth into a financial house of cards. Why was he so revered?

It's in your hands, people. Pursue your legitimate interests and you will find Thomas Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" goal on its way as never before.

The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its content, “the personal,” “a […]

Tyler: I have more sympathies for the libertarian solution than most people would. But I think in this case, it’s not time consistent. So one issue is simply how do you deal with legal liability? Now the FDA process, for all of its flaws, does give manufacturers the ability to bring the thing to market in a way consistent with corporate law and their other fiduciary responsibilities. So no FDA means everything is fair game in the court system. That is much worse even than the FDA. It’s a bigger constraint. But also, government won’t let them keep the prices high.Governments confiscate resources ex post. We know that, so you need to reward them upfront, even if in principle you think the higher price would be a better incentive. I would also point out that when there’s an externality through contagion, you don’t want the price of a vaccine to be very high.

1. From one perspective, Tyler is actually showing the advantage of the libertarian approach to Covid.  It would be better if governments were not able to put price controls on vaccines.  It would be better if vaccine sellers could insist that customers sign contracts promising not to sue if there were bad side effects, and if those waivers were legally enforceable.
2.  Given that we do not live under that sort of libertarian regime, there may be a case for subsidizing vaccine development, or providing an FDA stamp of approval to reduce the risk of lawsuits.
Similar examples occur in many contexts.  In an unregulated free market banking system with NGDP targeting, it probably makes no sense to have minimum capital requirements for banks.  But in a regime where FDIC creates moral hazard and Fed policy creates cycles in NGDP growth, there may be an argument for regulations that make the banking system a bit safer.  (Whether those regulations work in practice is another question, but it’s at least possible that some regulations are beneficial in terms of offsetting the negative effects of other regulations.)
PS.  The interview also includes an interesting discussion of why Tyler believes that (at the margin) the developing world needs to become more woke.

Economist Roland Fryer worried about the fate of students in America’s inner-city schools, and he had a crazy idea- could monetary incentives affect student, teacher, and parent behavior? A natural enough question to be posed by an economist, but Fryer was shocked at how many people found financial incentives in education repulsive. What gives, he asked? Don’t middle class parents do this all the time??? 
Over the course of his research, Fryer has identified the five characteristics of successful schools- what he calls “the basic physics of education. These include 1) more time in school, 2) changed human capital strategy, 3) using data to inform instruction, 4) high dosage tutoring in small groups, and 5) a culture of high expectations. On of the most charming parts of the conversation is when Fryer describes his grandmother’s reaction to his findings. As she exclaimed, “Why aren’t they [all] doing it? Why is this revolutionary?” Do you think this is revolutionary? Can it be replicated? Why isn’t every school doing it? Let’s hear your thoughts. Use the prompts below to reply in the comments, or start your own conversation offline.
 
1- Fryer and his colleagues found that generally, paying students for output didn’t work, but paying for inputs did. What does this mean in practice? How were Fryer and his colleagues able to measure the price elasticity of the incentives they offered students? Again, what does this mean in practice? And perhaps most importantly, why did these results make Fryer less concerned about fostering “a love of learning” among these students? How do you feel about this claim?
 
2- Though Roberts reminds us all that implementing findings such as Fryer’s is never simple, why can’t we create a McDonalds-like template (or a “popcorn” button) for education reform? Or in other words, how would you answer Fryer’s Grandma?
 
4- Fryer notes the tremendous variance in charter school success, which makes them interesting research subjects. That is, while on average charter schools perform only marginally better than traditional public schools, some fare much better, and others much worse. Roberts askes Fryer, should charter schools be expanded? How would you evaluate Fryer’s answer? How would you answer?
 
Make the final stretch drive a luminous comparison of how the lives and livelihoods of most people, of most workers and children, would be better under the Democratic Party than under the chronically lying Republican Party.

To make affirmative action consistent with true meritocracy, universities should use machine-learning algorithms for admissions decisions.

The Pulitzer-winning science author on combining the history of cell biology with personal stories, the influence of Salman Rushdie and why he likes to write in bedSiddhartha Mukherjee is the author of four science books, including The Emperor of All Maladies, which won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction and the Guardian first book award. Born in Delhi in 1970 and educated at Stanford, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and Harvard, Mukherjee is now assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, as well as a cancer physician and researcher. He lives in New York City with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and their two daughters. His latest book, The Song of the Cell, will be published on 3 November.Why a book about cells?Cell biology had always been at the centre of my thinking – as an oncologist, I look at cells through cancer, which is their ultimate distortion. So much of our attention has been occupied by genetics over the past century, but a gene is lifeless without cells. There’s nothing you can read from a DNA molecule that tells you that your eyes are shaped like eyes or that your kidney is kidney-shaped. Only your cells in the right context and the right time can interpret that code. So it felt as if we were missing part of the equation.The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee is published by Bodley Head (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

Despite their hostility to most voters' economic interests—and to democracy itself—the Republicans are still favored to win.

The assault of the House speaker’s husband inside their home comes as threats against members of Congress have increased in recent years.

Xi’s accumulation of totalitarian power presents a heightened danger to his neighbors and the world.

FILE- In this Jan. 31, 2018, file photo, a Lyft logo is installed on a Lyft driver's car next to an Uber sticker in Pittsburgh. On Monday, Aug. 10, 2020, a California judge ordered ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees, not contractors. It's the first ruling in what is expected to be a drawn-out legal battle over implementation of a new state law relating to the gig economy. The companies will likely appeal the ruling, which would delay its implementation. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File) Gene J. Puskar/AP   Labor Department's independent contracting proposal endangers both freedom and prosperity   Walter Olson  October 24, 02:57 PM October 24, 02:57 PM  “Biden wants to let gig workers be employees,” reads the headline on a Washington Post story. The lead paragraph says the Biden Department of Labor intends to “make it easier” for independent contractors to be considered employees, “granting them access to benefits and federal labor protections.”  “Let” is truly a bizarre wording here, reinforced by words like “easier” and “granting.” The proposed Labor Department regulation doesn’t grant permission, it imposes a requirement. It would force employee status on many workers who actively wish to remain independent contractors. Unless you grasp that, you’re not going to grasp the mounting anger among many freelancers, independent truckers, and others whose livelihood is threatened by DOL’s proposal to sharply restrict independent contracting in the workplace.  We’ve seen this before with California’s disastrous AB 5, which was repeatedly revised to exclude lines of business in which it was causing havoc. While media coverage of the issue tends to focus on platform‐based gig‐workers, workers hurt by AB 5 included many tutors, performers in music and theater, plumbers, nurse practitioners, writers, photographers, contract software developers, and many others, notably owner‐operators and other independent truckers.  And we’ve also seen this at the federal level in its previous go‐round as the Obama administration’s 2015 initiative along the same lines (although this version would go even further). As we noted then, the intended restrictions on franchising and subcontracting would endanger the thriving white‐van culture of small skilled contractors by which so many tradespeople now find upward mobility, trading it instead for clock‐punching at some company division. And it would force tech, creative, and startup firms that currently outsource functions like cafeteria, janitorial, and landscape maintenance to take on much wider direct employment responsibilities they may not be particularly well equipped to handle.  Most of the jobs the new regulation would endanger aren’t “gig economy” jobs at all and have nothing to do with platform apps. Nonetheless, it’s worth emphasizing that, as Ike Brannon and others have shown, the platform/“gig” sector of the economy makes possible flexibility on time and hours that is highly valued by many current workers and would be threatened under an arrangement in which employers would have strong reason to terminate contractors who put in time sporadically or for only a few hours a week.  The public can file comments here through November 28.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA  This article originally appeared in the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the Cato Institute.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

He thought his success was just a matter of hard work and good luck. Other people had a different perspective.

Developing affordable housing projects shouldn’t make a miserable existence for those who’ve devoted their lives to it.

And, I think in the United States people tend to be kind of bashful about breaking the law, at least in my friend circles. In Argentina everybody breaks the law. Every single day. Because otherwise you get half the income, and like, you can’t pay your rent. And so people–everyone knows exactly what the black market rate is at all times. Politicians will even quote it. Like, it’s well understood that this is out there.
Long story short: Everyone tries to be in the black market as much as they can. There are certain transactions where that’s really difficult, but for the most part people will try to exchange their money in the black market.

Just to tie that up, at the beginning I joked that every dinner conversation in Argentina ends up on the topic of what to do about your money so it doesn’t lose value. And, it’s kind of funny, but it’s also, if you think about it, it’s really wasting the minds of generations of people. There’s all these really smart people who are spending half of their brain just trying to figure out how to store their money so that they don’t get wiped out tomorrow. It’s just really tragic. I see all these really smart people who I love who could be doing so much more, but they’re stuck in this cycle.

Here’s a very popular tweet: “she’s a 10 but she cries on her birthday every year.” Solid. Concise. I can see why people would relate to the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to think of themselves as hot? And further, who doesn’t already think of themselves as emotionally complicated enough to shed a tear on a day that is supposed to be happy? Nearly 246,000 accounts liked this tweet, and I have no problem with that.There’s a whole universe of big accounts that post content like this—little snippets of language with mass appeal. They often regurgitate the same messages. That “she’s a 10” tweet was posted by @itspureluv, an account with roughly 200,000 followers; an almost identical tweet was posted by @spicybabew, another account with nearly 200,000 followers, three months earlier, and by dozens of others at various times.

The columnist Christopher Caldwell discusses conservative admiration for the Russian leader, and whether election denialism is just politics.

Federal Reserve and White House officials spent last week quizzing investors and economists about the risks of a British-style meltdown at home.

Scientists have discovered several genetic variants that protect Europeans from the bubonic plague — but also increase the risk of immune disorders.

Ex cathedra statements on current events are just ... weird. By Blake Smith

For tens of millions of people, there is a huge amount of good news about the economy over the last year and a half.

Borders all over the world are in dispute, and they are not all geographical.

This gonzo economic theory continues to live on, notwithstanding its repeated failuresWithin weeks of taking office, Britain’s new prime minister, Liz Truss, and her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed a radical new set of economic measures that echoed the trickle-down policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan – heavy on tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.Last Monday, after a backlash from investors, economists and members of his own party, Mr Kwarteng reversed one of the proposals, deciding against abolishing the tax rate of 45% on the highest earners. But proposals for other tax cuts worth tens of billions of pounds remain intact, as the government insists it is on the right path.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

The US journalist and TV pundit has written an engaging and provocative study of the dangers of political purityIt is a mark of the problem that The Persuaders seeks to describe that I had to force myself to sit down and read it. Anand Giridharadas, well known in the US as a journalist and TV political pundit, has written a thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already – namely, the feedback loops, filter bubbles and interference of Russian bot farms that have led to extreme polarisation in the US and beyond. Giridharadas describes this state of affairs as “Americans’ growing culture of mutual dismissal”, leading to a mass “writing-off from a distance” and the inability of anyone to change their minds about anything. In overview, it looks like a book borne of Twitter discourse, and who needs that?As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read. Continue reading...

A lot of politicians would have vied with Trump to make the election about them.

There is no reason, [Fukuyama] explains, “why economic efficiency needs to trump all other social values,” a moot point when one understands that economic efficiency is simply a way in which voluntary exchange reconciles, without coercion, the preferences and values of all individuals.
As an example of desirable democratic choice, Fukuyama proposes the primacy of work over consumer welfare. The question is whether “human beings” are “consuming animals” or “producing animals.” “This is a choice that has not been offered to voters under the hegemony of neoliberal ideas.” The absurdity of putting such a choice before voters is easily shown by imagining a referendum that would ask “the people”: “What animal do you (or we) want to be, a consuming animal or a producing animal?” Ask yourself what would be the meaning of X% (< 100%) deciding one way or another. “We are all producing animals and now get back to work!” More realistically perhaps, we may imagine complex baskets of practical policy measures and electoral promises related to such a choice and proposed to the rationally ignorant voters, who would understand the consequences of the measures even less than their proponents. The only liberal solution, of course, is to let each individual decide for himself what sort of animal he wants to be, given the impersonal constraints generated by the equally free choices of all other individuals.

With their ample funds, the Democrats have to aggregate the case against the GOP's morbid opposition to humanity.

The liberal West is in trouble, but its rivals still aren’t ready to supplant it.

CHINA

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology, as well as the Defense Industrial Base working group, and is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He also serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense. O’Hanlon was a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. O’Hanlon is now writing a book provisionally entitled, “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861.”	

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In 2020, the Department of Justice sued the state for running prisons that were “riddled” with violence. Since then, things have got worse.

Near the end of Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries, there’s a sentence that made me stop for a moment in disbelief. Perhaps it was meant to. F.R. Leavis was by far the most dogmatic of the twentieth-century critics with whom the book is concerned, and Eagleton writes that the Cambridge don held that “literary criticism was […]

        The bridge leading from Fort Myers to Pine Island, Fla., is heavily damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. Due to the damage, the island can only be reached by boat or air. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Gerald Herbert/AP   New York Times makes up its own climate science to attack Florida   Zachary Faria  October 05, 04:23 PM October 05, 04:44 PM  Video Embed When a hurricane hits, good liberal partisans must unleash their mockery upon the rubes who did not follow their climate change doomsday prophecies. Even if said partisans have to fabricate the science to support their claim. A CHANGED FLORIDA: PHOTOS SHOW DEVASTATING AFTERMATH OF HURRICANE IAN Such is the case with the New York Times, which needed two writers, Christopher Flavelle and Jonathan Weisman, to cobble together an incoherent piece mocking Floridians for not listening to them and electing Democrats to fight climate change. “Florida Leaders Rejected Major Climate Laws,” the headline reads. “Now They’re Seeking Storm Aid.” Flavelle and Weisman claim that Florida’s Republican leaders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, “don’t want to discuss the underlying problem that is making hurricanes more powerful and destructive.” They also claim that rising sea levels and warmer temperatures made Hurricane Ian worse and that Republicans are to blame for not supporting the Democratic Party’s climate change bill. (You know, the one they pretended at the time was about reducing inflation.) In reality, hurricanes are not becoming “more powerful and destructive.” There is no evidence for that claim. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts.” NOAA’s page on global warming and hurricanes has an “overview of current research results.” In summary, it concludes that there is "no compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.” That's enough to drop the mic already. But on top of that, as Michael Shellenberger notes, these hurricanes are causing more damage because more people are living in and developing these areas. “Once you adjust for rising wealth, there is no trend of increasing damage,” Shellenberger writes. Is Hurricane Ian itself more dangerous as a direct result of climate change, as Flavelle and Weisman claim? No, there is no evidence of this. Acting NOAA Director Jamie Rhome specifically warned against tying climate change to any one natural disaster on CNN with Don Lemon, who was pathetically begging him to say otherwise. But Rhome insisted on sticking with the actual science. “I don’t think you can link climate change to any one event,” Rhome said. Those darn science deniers at President Joe Biden's NOAA strike again. Liberal activists (including the ones masquerading as journalists) preach about “following the science,” and yet they now claim to know more about hurricanes than NOAA. (Check Rhome’s credentials for yourself and ask how Flavelle and Weisman think they know more about hurricanes than he does.) They have been reduced to simply pointing at every natural disaster and crying climate change, then demanding everyone support whatever liberal boondoggle conveniently conforms to all of their prejudices on the topic. Climate change fearmongering has nothing to do with science, as the New York Times helpfully and unwittingly illustrated here. It is all about partisan politics, which is why the New York Times and others couldn’t wait to attack Florida for not submitting immediately to their destructive climate agenda. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Shilling for America’s adversaries is big business in Washington. Reform is long overdue.

Gross domestic product is not, and never has been, an attempt to measure the wellbeing of a society. …
Nevertheless, it is striking how countries with a high GDP also have flourishing citizens. Pick your issue, from life expectancy to child mortality, from opportunities for women to the protection of basic human rights, cleaner streets, lower crime, even better-quality art, from TV to opera. Somehow, people who live in richer countries are likely to be enjoying more of the good stuff.
Her rant about the “disgrace” of cheese imports suggests someone who hasn’t appreciated the importance of free trade in goods to a prosperous modern economy. …
Her vast and open-ended energy price cap is a kick in the teeth for market forces. By some measures the largest fiscal event in living memory, it feels closer to Mao than Thatcher. And it is unnecessary: a truly pro-growth government would have achieved the same social goal by letting prices rise, but giving an offsetting cash grant to each household.
If I observe someone with apples and somebody else with oranges, I don’t want to try to say a particular allocation of oranges and apples in a final position is better than in the other allocation. If I observe them trading without defrauding each other, whatever emerges, emerges, and that is the way I define what is efficient.
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Vulnerable Democrats in competitive districts have leaned into preserving abortion rights as a closing argument for their campaigns, buoyed by internal polls that show it has moved voters their way.

Reporter Maggie Haberman charts the city's social and cultural influences that fueled Donald Trump's personal and political rise.

Britain has endured 40 years of decline thanks to this faulty economic theory. Will Keir Starmer finally kill it off?If Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget survives the storm it triggered, a banker on a million-pound annual salary stands to receive £50,000 of income tax relief – on top of the extra bonuses the bank can throw in, now that the Liz Truss government has removed the cap on them. Meanwhile, a Deliveroo rider gets a pep talk on the emancipatory value of aspiring to be wealthy, presumably as an incentive to pedal harder. This is the gist of the government’s growth strategy or, according to former Brexit minister David Frost, its antidote to stagnation and defeatism.While it’s tempting to draw the obvious analogy between zombie ideas such as the trickle-down growth effect, and the classic Hollywood horror film Night of the Living Dead, a more appropriate response to the seriousness of the situation is to follow the banker’s extra cash. The government claims the banker will invest it, thus promoting growth. If it were not a blatant lie, it might have passed as a touching example of unfounded faith. But unlike Adam Smith’s bakers, butchers and brewers, who would invest any spare cash into better and more bread, ale and meat, the banker will buy into some fund that will, in turn, purchase shares, derivatives and bonds.Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 in Greece’s parliament, a former finance minister of Greece, and author of Another Now Continue reading...

A yearning for the 1980s meets a very 21st century kind of European crisis.

The country has chosen its most right-wing government since the Second World War. Will political dysfunction temper extremism?

Edward Snowden has said being granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin will give him "a little stability."

For Ulla Johnson’s show at the Brooklyn Museum, the florist Emily Thompson decapitated thousands of blooms to create pools of color that looked like lichen. Her motto: “Seduction-repulsion, always!”

How uncanny instincts turned a style maverick into the Björk of food.

If you want a recap of why land and zoning deregulation is one of the most important policy matters that no one cares about, read Bryan Caplan on this issue and watch this. As Caplan notes, “we’re talking trillions of dollars of annual gain, implying an astronomical present value” that would materialize from even just modest housing deregulation (and immigration liberalization). Housing deregulation would increase the supply of housing, which in turn would lower the cost of housing, and allow workers in low-productivity regions to move to higher-productivity regions.

The White House made a big splash in May 2022 when it announced that its Housing Supply Action plan would use competitive transportation grant programs to reward jurisdictions that remove regulatory barriers to new housing construction.
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, enacted in November 2021, also dramatically boosted funding for these grant programs—giving the feds a lot more carrots with which to reward governments for removing red tape on new development.

But as the grant awards from these retooled transportation grant programs trickle out, there’s little evidence the money is going to reformist jurisdictions.
Late last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced the recipients of $1.5 billion in grants from the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) program—one of five grant programs the administration said would be used to encourage zoning reforms.
Of the 26 INFRA grant awards this cycle, 19 are going to state transportation departments or port authorities that don’t set zoning regulations or issue residential building permits. These bureaucracies can’t be incentivized to change regulations they don’t have any power over in the first place.

He adds:

It was a similar story with $2.2 billion in RAISE grants awarded last month, another one of the programs the Biden administration said it would retool to encourage zoning reform. Few of the awards appeared to have much to do with zoning. One of the largest RAISE awards went to San Francisco, which is currently being investigated by California’s state government for shooting down new housing in violation of state law.

Sounds like a bargain but we have to act fast and with deep purpose.

Poof! Just like that, what was secret is now not secret, all through the power of your beautiful, enormous, manifesting mind.

It wouldn't take more than 1% of the U.S. population to rise up and get organized behind key popular demands to make them a reality and yet we continue to endlessly wait.

This congressional race in Washington State shows the November elections in microcosm.

Katherine Pompilio shared an order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon striking two provisions in her Sept. 5 order and modifying the original injunction to exclude the 100 documents labeled classified, pursuant to the order from the Eleventh Circuit that granted the Justice Department’s partial stay. 

Rozenshtein argued that the Fifth Circuit opinion—released last Friday—in NetChoice v. Paxton overreaches in upholding Texas’s social media moderation law and makes a hash of the First Amendment in the process. 

Howell shared an episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Rozenshtein sat down with Byman to discuss the ongoing debate about how much social media platforms should be doing to moderate extremist content, and how that debate often lacks nuance about the ways that platforms can moderate—especially in suggesting that moderation is an all-or-nothing proposition. 

Howell shared an episode of Rational Security in which Anderson, Jurecic, and Rozenshtein  sat down to discuss the week’s big national security news stories including: gang warfare and political instability in Haiti, a Fifth Circuit judge’s ruling in Net Choice v. Paxton, and more.

Howell also shared an episode of The Lawfare Podcast in which Orpett sat down with Alex Iftimie, partner at the law firm Morrison Foerster, and a former Department of Justice attorney specializing in national security matters, including the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They discussed the criminal trial of Thomas Barrack, who served as an informal advisor to the 2016 Trump campaign and then as chair of Trump's inaugural committee, and allegedly acted as a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates to influence U.S. policy. 

David Priess shared an episode of Chatter in which Shane Harris sat down with Damien Lewis, author of “Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy,” to discuss Josephine Baker’s remarkable and little-known espionage career as an agent for French counterintelligence during WWII. 

Affirmative action in admissions may be nearing its end. It’s about time.

"You can't balance between good and evil, light and darkness. You have to choose a side," Zelensky said.

Fiona Hill	

Fiona Hill is a senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She recently served as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council from 2017 to 2019. From 2006 to 2009, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at The National Intelligence Council. She is author of “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century” and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” (Brookings Institution Press, 2015).	

Angela Stent is senior adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and professor emerita of government and foreign service at Georgetown University. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004-06 she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. She is the author of “Putin%u2019s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest” and “The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century.” 	

Interview preparation: Lucy Seavey and Jonathan HoganEditorial: Alex Dimsdale	

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Democrats are letting the G.O.P. off easily by postponing a vote until after the midterms.

A lively new biography explores how the man once celebrated as “America’s mayor” fell into disgrace.

As American feminists came together in 2017 to protest Donald Trump, Russia’s disinformation machine set about deepening the divides among them.

A liberalism that is as ambitious about solving problems through invention as it is through redistribution would be powerful indeed.

'Zuckerbucks' didn’t throw the 2020 election   Walter Olson  September 12, 04:27 PM September 12, 04:31 PM  In the lead‐up to the 2020 election, philanthropies backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan provided grants to local election offices around the country to aid in administrative tasks, voter communication, and other work made more challenging by the COVID-19 pandemic — a program sometimes nicknamed Zuckerbucks. Some Republicans have charged that the grants were improperly meant to assist Democrats by differentially increasing turnout of their likely voters, especially in bigger cities. Many backers of former President Donald Trump took the episode to heart as part of what they imagine to have been the rigging of the 2020 election.  As I’ve noted in this space before, there is reason to doubt that the grants, to the extent that they raised turnout at all, made any difference in the election’s major outcomes. In Wisconsin, one of the closest states, a study by the right‐of‐center Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty estimated that any extra turnout, if measurable at all, would not have been enough to swing the election. (In addition, as a legal matter, courts will not throw out otherwise lawfully cast votes even if they were encouraged by a voter turnout effort that violated some rule.)  In due course various complaints were filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) characterizing the grants as improper donations meant to influence an election. This summer, however, the FEC voted to find no reason for the allegations and dismiss the complaint, and more recently it explained its reasoning in detail in a 20‐page analysis. In both cases its decision was by a unanimous 6–0 vote.  That’s significant because, as many readers know, the division of the six‐member FEC between three D and three R appointees regularly results in even splits on issues that divide experienced party lawyers. That’s more or less the way the commission is designed to operate. Yet not one of the three Republican commissioners found reason to support the allegations.  Some states have lately chosen to ban these sorts of private donations to public election agencies, and to repeat a point I’ve made before, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to have a debate about restricting them. (Shikha Dalmia has defended the grants here.) Even when the grants are offered to all comers, many localities will decline to participate, so at least in principle they might wind up stoking turnout in uneven ways. That their impact might have proved generally benign this time does not mean it will remain so in the future. They might, for example, afford ideologically committed donors an “in” to influence or at least scope out local elections policy. If you want to see many advocates on both sides do a fast switch, wait till some philanthropist offers to foot the bill for localities to prosecute, say, unlawful ballot harvesting. (Compare.)  But claims that the Zuckerberg grants were part of some vast scheme to rig the outcome? The evidence is simply not there. Another Stop the Steal theory is down for the count.  This article was originally published by the Cato Institute. It is republished here with Cato's kind permission.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Amid so much uncertainty, the Federal Reserve should pause interest-rate hikes until a more reliable assessment of macroeconomic conditions is possible.

A former debating champion offers advice for our polarized moment.

The royals were never above politics but drew great strength from Conservative supportFollowing the death of Elizabeth II, power is performing its truths, transforming princes into kings and dukes and children into princes. But as the British state becomes less legitimate, these processes are losing their potency. The late Queen is revered across the world but the monarchy itself has lost its magic. Charles is King, but the monarchy will not be what it was.Monarchy was never above politics. It rested on it and on the Conservative party in particular. This was the party of the monarchy, the union, the constitution, the established churches and the empire. In 1936, it disposed of a king emperor who offended its bourgeois sensibilities, thus redirecting the royal line of succession down to King Charles III. It was a Conservative government of the 1950s that redefined the monarchy as a national rather than imperial one. A then-imperialist Enoch Powell, in his tilting at the royal titles bill, was appalled, but to no effect. In time, he would become an ardent nationalist, dismissive of empire as a passing phase and the Commonwealth as a racial danger to the nation. Continue reading...

The president’s legacy — and our climate future — will turn on what actually gets built, and how fast,

The monarchy presents itself as a “mysterious and magical inheritor of an endless past.” Would Britain be better off without it?

The President’s shift in tone isn’t just about getting out the Democratic vote in November.

For 70 years Queen Elizabeth II brought dignity and grace to public life Source

President Joe Biden listens during a meeting with CEOs in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington on July 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)   Has Bidenomics been worth the risk?   James Pethokoukis  September 08, 01:23 PM September 08, 01:27 PM  [This piece has been published in Restoring America to consider whether Biden's economic policies have hurt American workers more than they have helped.] “Has Bidenomics Been Good for Workers?” is the question posed by economist Paul Krugman in his latest New York Times column. And perhaps not surprisingly, the Nobel laureate answers in the affirmative. “More Americans — a lot more Americans — got jobs, and while those who were already employed suffered a decline in real wages, that decline reflected events in global food and energy markets, not U.S. policy,” Krugman writes. To a large extent — so far at least — “Bidenomics” is the monster-scoop of fiscal stimulus known as the American Rescue Plan (ARP), passed in March 2021. At $1.9 trillion, it was four times as big as the new spending in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act passed in the summer of 2021, while other big Biden bills — namely the CHIPS and Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act — were passed only recently. Did the ARP contribute in a substantial way to America’s biggest inflation surge in four decades? (This inflation surge, by the way, means that even though average hourly earnings are up a whopping 5.2% from a year ago, consumer prices are up 8.2%.) Sure it did. Consider the output gap — the difference between what the U.S. economy could produce if firing on all cylinders and what it is actually producing — when the ARP was passed. The bill filled that gap many times over. Then consider the mid-range estimate of the fiscal multiplier, the effect of $1 of government spending on overall economic output. A simple model based on the output gap and fiscal multiplier — including reasonable estimates of their values — predicted that the ARP would “generate substantial inflationary pressure in 2021 and 2022,” noted AEI economist Michael Strain earlier this year. At the time, Strain estimated “around three percentage points of inflation in 2021 were due to the ARP.” In other words, the ARP-Bidenomics has been a substantial inflation driver and thus a substantial driver of the Federal Reserve’s monetary response. And if that response leads to a recession, then Bidenomics will have been a substantial cause. Even Krugman concedes that anything more than a brief downturn would undermine his case: “. . . controlling inflation ends up requiring a long period of high unemployment — I don’t think it will, but I could be wrong — workers could end up worse off, despite the current employment boom.” A bit about the history of shallow recessions: In a research note last July, Goldman Sachs observed that “even shallow recessions have been unpleasant” with the average unemployment rate rising about two and a half percentage points. Now we found out last Friday that the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 3.7%. So a typical shallow recession would nudge that number up to 5.2%. If the latter were the jobless rate today rather than the former — all else equal — there would be an additional 2.5 million American workers not working. That would be the equivalent of wiping out the past year of employment gains. Even a shallow recession would be a gut punch for many workers after the economic chaos since the start of the pandemic. Passing the supersize ARP was a historic economic gamble, especially coming just months after President Trump signed the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill in December 2020. Even if the Fed gets its Immaculate Disinflation and a soft landing, it will be far from clear that Bidenomics, adjusted for risk, has been good for workers. If you got a late start picking up a child from school, and you race down side streets to get there, you might well arrive on time. But was the risk worth it? This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Democrats and Republicans want the administration to do more to ensure that American military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates does not contribute to civilian casualties.

Philosopher William MacAskill of the University of Oxford and a founder of the effective altruism movement talks about his book What We Owe the Future with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. MacAskill advocates “longtermism,” giving great attention to the billions of people who will live on into the future long after we are gone. Topics discussed include the importance of moral entrepreneurs, why it’s moral to have children, and the importance of trying to steer the future for better outcomes.
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The image from video provided by the Department of Defense labelled Gimbal, from 2015, an unexplained object is seen at center as it is tracked as it soars high along the clouds, traveling against the wind. “There's a whole fleet of them,” one naval aviator tells another, though only one indistinct object is shown. “It's rotating." The U.S. government has been taking a hard look at unidentified flying objects, under orders from Congress, and a report summarizing what officials know is expected to come out in June 2021. (Department of Defense via AP)   Astronomer plans $1.5M expedition to recover possible alien technology in ocean   Luke Gentile  September 04, 07:00 AM September 04, 07:00 AM  Video Embed An astronomer with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is planning a $1.5 million expedition to recover what he believes could be alien technology resting on the ocean floor.  A meteor traveling at over 100,000 mph exploded and fell into the South Pacific eight years ago, and academics like professor Avi Loeb believe it was from another star system, according to a report.  By retrieving the debris of that meteor, Loeb said he hopes to discover its origins, going so far as to suggest it might be alien technology.  POLAND ORDERS GERMANY TO PAY $1.3 TRILLION IN WORLD WAR II REPARATIONS  The object is designated CNEOS 2014-01-08, and it was first detected by satellites in 2014, according to the report.  After receiving data from its detection, Loeb and Amir Siraj, who was at Harvard University at the time studying astrophysics, posited in 2019 that it was not from Earth's solar system.  "It moved very fast, roughly 40 kilometers per second, when it exploded in the lower atmosphere," Loeb said. "And from that, we can infer that it was moving much too fast to be bound to the sun."  The scientists' initial work was rejected due to incomplete data, but in April of this year, NASA released a statement that appeared to confirm the notion that the object was from another solar system.  With this new knowledge in hand, Loeb announced he would launch a privately funded expedition to recover the pieces of the object resting on the ocean floor, according to the report.  "It's just like mowing the lawn," according to Loeb. "We are planning to use a sled with a magnet that will scoop a very thin layer off the top of the muck."  When found, he hopes to study the object's composition.  "There is also the possibility that it will be made of some alloy that nature doesn't put together, and that would imply the object is technological," Loeb said. "If you ask what my wish is, if it's indeed of artificial origin, and there was some component of the object that survived, and if it has any buttons on it, I would love to press them."  The idea of the debris having extraterrestrial origins excites Loeb, but many other astronomers remain skeptical of the notion, the report noted.  They allege there are far more and far simpler "natural" explanations, the report noted, and that the data is incomplete and has been "sanitized."  "I think there's a case to be made that this could be interstellar in origin," Arizona State University planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa said.  "[But I would] add the caveat that none of the work so far on this is in the peer-reviewed literature. ... The science has not really been vetted to the extent that I would like to see it vetted."  Another critic appeared to have little faith in the idea of an expedition.  "If you want to invest in renting a submarine and going down to the bottom of the ocean on ... a wild-goose chase, you can do it," Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science communicator, said. "If you want to take all of your money and dump it into the middle of the ocean, you can do that too."  Loeb is undeterred by the criticism and called his expedition an effort in "interstellar archaeology."  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER  "My point is if a cave dweller were to find a cellphone, the cave dweller would argue the cellphone is a rock of a type that we've never seen before," he said. "And the only way to find out is to press some buttons on this cellphone and realize that it records your voice, it records your image. Then it will be clear that it is not rock."        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Biden gave a rare primetime address on the most important challenge facing America – and the media coverage was just more he-said/she-said reactionJoe Biden’s message Thursday evening was clear. American democracy is under attack.This was a rare primetime address on the most important challenge facing the nation.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

The District will take occupational licensing to extremes through these new education requirements.

Expert: "Biden never considered a phased withdrawal that would’ve given the U.S.-backed government in Kabul sufficient time to reorganize its defenses." 
The post Why Not A Phased Withdrawal From Afghanistan? appeared first on 19FortyFive.

As the new socialist left deepens its engagement with mass politics, it is beginning to grapple with many of the same problems and dilemmas our predecessors encountered many years ago. Chief among them is the question of how to hold socialist officeholders accountable to the principles and programs of the organizations they are part of […]

New protocols seeking to make US military operations more ethical and compassionate have the awkward effect of legitimizing them.

We shouldn’t be helping American investors to put money into risky Chinese companies

It would be tragic if Ukraine defeated Russian neo-imperialism only to yoke itself to Western neoliberalism. While being a Western economic colony is certainly better than being absorbed into a new Russian empire, neither outcome is worthy of the suffering Ukrainians are now enduring.

The European Union's power sector is a good example of what market fundamentalism has done to electricity networks the world over. With the end of cheap natural gas, retail consumers and businesses are paying the price for their governments' embrace of a shoddy theory.

The complicated ethical question of student loan forgiveness is only one part of the problem with higher education.

Robert Reich writes that the pricing power of corporations is pushing up inflation at the expense of those who are low incomeFriday at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Federal Reserve chairperson Jerome Powell said the Fed must continue to raise interest rates, even though it will “bring some pain to households and businesses”.This – with all due respect – is nuts. Continue reading...

Its failings and subservience to corporatism are historic in scope.

I have long thought the FTC has been too timid about exercising its authority to adopt regulations to specify unfair as well as deceptive practices in information privacy. Given the challenges of doing so and the contingencies of legislation, I believe the FTC is right to begin the process. As FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter explained her vote for the ANPRM: “The worst outcome … is not that we get started and then Congress passes a law; it is that we never get started and Congress never passes a law.” But if I had to put all my eggs in one basket, I’d stick with legislation. 

Figure 1. Depiction of “FTC Privacy Rulemaking: The Steps to Get There,” produced by IAPP and originally appearing in the IAPP resource center. 
And when and if the FTC reaches a final rule, it will face the near-certain prospect of judicial review. In June, the Supreme Court provided appellate judges with a neutron bomb against agency regulations with its decision in West Virginia v. EPA. The court articulated a “major questions” doctrine, constraining congressional delegation to administrative agencies in “extraordinary cases” without an unusually clear and precise grant of authority. The Magnuson-Moss Act is a more specific grant of authority than the Administrative Procedure Act rule at issue in the West Virginia case, but a court may read its numerous checks on the FTC authority through a similar lens. Most of the commentary on the ANPRM linked above sees a shadow of West Virginia over it. 
All of these hurdles and uncertainties loom large in light of the extraordinary sweep of the FTC’s ANPRM. It invites comment on virtually every issue that touches on information privacy and does so with emphasis on potential harms of digital data use, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making of all kinds. While the ANPRM is more sparse about potential benefits, it does invite comments on these, consistent with Magnuson-Moss requirements for the use of FTC unfairness authority. 
When FTC Acting Chair Rebecca Slaughter initiated groundwork for rulemaking early in 2021, Congress appeared deadlocked on privacy legislation. In turn, the FTC looked like an alternative path to strengthen information privacy protections. That initially appeared to be the direction the Biden administration was taking with its July 2021 executive order on promoting competition. This order seemed to task privacy regulation to the FTC, calling out the impact of data aggregation on the economic power of large platforms without mentioning privacy but requesting the FTC to consider rulemaking on “unfair data collection and surveillance practices that may damage competition, consumer autonomy, and consumer privacy[.]” 
With the ANPRM, the FTC is now moving ahead on this request. In the meantime, though, the landscape has shifted. Members of Congress have reached bipartisan agreement on several privacy bills, and the ADPPA has advanced. In the 2022 State of the Union address, President Biden said, “It’s time to strengthen privacy protections” and called on Congress to pass legislation to ban targeted advertising to children. The White House has been paying attention to the progress of negotiations on comprehensive privacy legislation. 
FTC commissioners are conscious that the ADPPA addresses many of the issues raised in their proceeding. In their statements on the ANPRM, each commissioner reaffirmed support for privacy legislation in general or supported the ADPPA specifically, and expressed cognizance of the legislation’s potential effect on the proceeding or of the proceeding on passage of the legislation: 

Commissioner Christine Wilson, a strong supporter of privacy legislation who previously indicated she might entertain rulemaking on privacy, also praised the ADPPA: “I am heartened that Congress is now considering a bipartisan, bicameral bill that employs a sound, comprehensive, and nuanced approach to consumer privacy and data security. … [A]nd I hope to see this become law.” Like Bedoya, she name-checked the bill’s sponsors for their work, and she called out legislation on children in addition. Wilson attributed her vote against the ANPRM primarily to this support out of “grave” concern “that opponents of the bill will use the ANPRM as an excuse to derail the ADPPA.”

Reconciling FTC Rulemaking and Federal Legislation 
Congress can “derail” the FTC rulemaking by enacting privacy legislation. This would obviate much of the rulemaking and give the agency a new set of tasks to provide required rules and guidance, carry out prescribed restructuring, and gear up for new enforcement responsibilities. These would certainly narrow its focus. 
Ultimately, if enacted in this Congress, legislation like the ADPPA could affect information privacy practices sooner and with greater stability than FTC regulations. Even more significantly, federal legislation could also preempt states’ comprehensive privacy laws and provide individuals a right to sue for violations, which even the broadest conceivable FTC regulations could not. 
While my Brookings colleague Mark MacCarthy and I have different assessments of the relative prospects for legislation and rulemaking, we agree that the agency should not wait. If Congress does enact legislation, the rulemaking process allows plenty of time and checkpoints to change course, as FTC Chair Khan stipulates. And, as Kirk Nahra and colleagues put it, the rulemaking would offer “at least a backstop” if legislation fails. Though rulemaking is a poor substitute for legislation, it can improve the current losing game in which neither individuals nor the law can keep up with the pace and scope of data collection. 

George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures  Last week my friend and colleague, Jacek Bartosiak, wrote a piece for GPF titled "The Scalable World War Ahead," in which he warned that the world is

A legal battle in Mississippi will test whether states can criminalize those who merely provide information.

The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.

With Trump, the line between the shambolic and the sinister is often blurred.

Researchers worry about being branded as partisan, but people want to hear from experts

The military strategy expert and author of a new book on conflict says the flawed thinking behind Russia’s invasion stems from the inability of those at the top to take responsibility for mistakesRussia-Ukraine war: latest updatesRussia’s war against Ukraine has been hampered by failings experienced by autocratic states during conflict, according to a far-reaching new study of command in war by one of the UK’s most prominent academics in the field. Command, a wide-ranging analysis of post-second world war conflicts by the leading strategic studies expert Lawrence Freedman, examines a series of well-known conflicts, from the Cuban missile crisis to the French defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, through to the Falklands war and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, up to the present war in Ukraine. Continue reading...

What’s to blame? The change in the balance of power between large corporations and the governmentThe Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution.The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law this past week, allocates more than $300bn to energy and climate reform, including $30bn in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and wind turbines.the Chips and Science Act (with $52bn of subsidies to semiconductor firms, plus another $24bn in manufacturing tax credits);the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550bn of new spending on railroads, broadband and the electric grid, among other things);and now the Inflation Reduction Act (including the subsidies I noted).Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

Outspoken author and neuroscientist Sam Harris made comments regarding Hunter Biden that have garnered plenty of attention from conservatives.

The Democrats have not been taking advantage of the one national holiday dedicated to working people.

Marshall says that I am right to insist that “it is dangerous for a President’s administration to pursue criminal charges against a predecessor.” But he adds that “[w]hat’s lacking in [my] discussion is any real grappling with the opposite side of the equation.” The opposite side of the equation is “the line past which a President’s lawlessness becomes so pervasive, persistent and dangerous that the risks of acting are outweighed by those of failing to do so.” 
There obviously must be a point where information is so sensitive, and Trump’s disregard for law so extreme, to justify legal process against Trump, even in the current milieu. Otherwise the law is entirely hostage to a former president’s (and his supporters’) self-serving veto—something no legal system can tolerate. 

A failure to indict Mr. Trump in these circumstances would imply that a president — who cannot be indicted while in office — is literally above the law, in defiance of the very notion of constitutional government. It would encourage lawlessness by future presidents, none more so than Mr. Trump should he win the next election. By contrast, the rule of law would be vindicated by a Trump conviction.

I agree with Marshall about the dangers of not prosecuting Trump for convictable crimes. They are extremely high.     
I also agree with Marshall that Trump’s criminal activity after office warrants less prosecutorial caution than those committed in office. I made this point in “After Trump,” where I “argue[d] for extreme caution in a criminal investigation of a prior president for acts done in office” (emphasis added), and added that for non-official acts outside the presidency, the calculus is very different. I also made the point implicitly in this post, which emphasized that “[o]nce Trump leaves office, his criminal exposure for selling secrets broadens.” 
 All that said, Marshall is right about my allocation of grappling: I have devoted more words to the dangers of the Biden administration using criminal process against Trump than to the dangers of it not doing so. In part that is because most of the commentary that I have read focuses on the dangers of not pursuing Trump. And in part it is because I still believe many people unduly discount the difficulties and possible costs of prosecuting Trump. I will not re-catalogue all of the difficulties and costs here. The narrow point I want to make is that the difficulties and costs should substantially inform the rule-of-law concerns that Marshall raises. I can make the point in two steps.
  1. Convictable Offenses 
And then there is what Marshall describes as “the multifaceted and multi-jurisdictional plot to corrupt and then overturn the 2020 election all culminating in the violent assault on the seat of government.” This was all atrocious, unpatriotic, impeachable, and unforgivable. But I am still not convinced, based on current public evidence, that it meets the standard for federal prosecution. 
The numerous criminal statutes that different people say Trump supposedly violated by his January 6 and related actions makes this claim hard to assess, and the breadth of the statutes invoked are some indication that none of them apply straightforwardly to Trump’s actions. The public hasn’t yet seen a smoking gun, and any prosecution here will face intent and Article II problems. I do not rule out that the Justice Department can make out a winnable case here—we do not know what Merrick Garland knows. I just have not yet seen a convincing analysis, based on the public evidence, that grapples with all of the difficulties.  
(To get a flavor of how hard the legal issues will be, independent of the intent and Article II problems, read this opinion by Judge Contreras in a criminal case against Kyle Fitzsimons, who allegedly breached the Capitol on January 6 and “engaged in physical violence” that injured police officers. The case involves one of the statutes most frequently invoked by commentators against Trump—corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding, 18 U.S. Code § 1512. Contreras denied Fitzsimons’ motion to dismiss the charges under Section 1512. But as the opinion makes clear, there are uncertainties about whether that statute applies even to someone who actually engaged in violence in the Capitol on January 6—all of which will be contested on appeal. The legal issues will be harder in a prosecution under this statute against a president who did not breach the Capitol or engage in violence.) 
Next is what Marshall says “appears to be a concerted and deliberate effort to maintain possession not only of government property but significant state secrets for reasons unknown.” I agree that post-presidency criminal actions face a lower bar, and I have outlined (in the context of the warrant) what I see as the legal issues here. Not enough information has yet surfaced on this one, in my opinion.  
2. The Danger in a Failed Prosecution
The second factor builds on the first. The absence of an obvious convictable crime (based on public evidence thus far) underscores the dangers of a failed prosecution.  ﻿
In calculating costs and benefits, in other words, one cannot assume that a prosecution will succeed. One must discount all of the dangers of not prosecuting (and the benefits of a prosecution) by the likelihood of the prosecution failing.  
***
This reasoning, ultimately, is why I continue to put myself in the caution category, and to emphasize dangers of prosecution. In my view, the appropriateness of prosecuting Trump goes up a lot if and when the Justice Department has clear evidence of a convictable crime. I have not seen it yet. Marshall thinks he has seen it, and that we have reached the point where the “risks of acting are outweighed by those of failing to do so.” That is the essence of our disagreement. I should note, in this regard, that both my argument and his rest on guesses about future consequences based on legal and practical reasoning grounded in very incomplete information. The right posture here is humility about how little we know, and prayer that Merrick Garland makes the right calls.    
 I want to close by addressing a theme that I think informs the pro-prosecution camp’s judgment. The theme is that Trump has done so many flagrant, awful, obviously bad things in and out of office that he must have committed a prosecutable crime. It seems unfathomable that any president or ex-president could act in such persistent defiance of law and legal process, in such blatant violation of the public trust, and not have committed crimes. As Marshall puts it, “the very brazenness of Trump’s indifference to the law has a way of rendering precious or quaint any serious and deliberate discussion of potential consequences.”
To frame the problem as Marshall does here is to neglect everything we have learned about the massive gaps in presidential and post-presidential accountability since January 2017. Time and time again, Trump has done outrageous things with indifference to law. And yet time and time again, what Trump did violated norms but not laws, or Trump operated with a mad-genius capacity to find and exploit legal loopholes, especially remedial loopholes, in legal constraints on the presidency. 
Bob Bauer and I wrote a book on this theme. “Trump has shown that the current array of laws and norms governing the presidency is inadequate to protect institutions vital to American constitutional democracy and to ensure that the president is, and appears to be, constrained by law,” we said, in a non-original judgment. We detailed the main accountability gaps that became apparent during Trump’s candidacy and presidency—on foreign interference in elections, conflicts of interest, tax disclosure, pardon abuse, obstruction of justice, politicized investigations, and much more; and we proposed reforms. Trump has continued to illuminate and exploit accountability gaps since we wrote the book—in his abuse of the transition process, in his actions on and related to January 6, and in his handling of sensitive documents during and since he left the presidency.  
But Article II is not a bar to holding a president much more accountable while in office and afterwards. Laws, regulations, and norms could go much further to impose constraints on a president and ex-president like Donald Trump. A future Justice Department would have an easier time holding a bad-actor president to account if laws, regulations, and norms were clarified to address the acts that we now understand a president can commit. It would also be and appear more legitimate in doing so. 
Legal reform cannot by itself save us from this situation—only elections can. But legal reform can help, maybe a lot, by eliminating the legal ambiguity and loopholes that Trump has dined on. It can help constrain a future president’s worst inclinations, and, perhaps more consequentially, constrain the subordinates through whom he or she must act.         
Topics: Donald Trump, Executive PowerTags: Department of Justice

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Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel discuss how the great retreat from office life could make work better for everyone.

Americans have long understood the species’ extinction as a warning. But is trying to “de-extinct” it really a good idea?

        A truck driver moves containers in east China&#39;s Shandong province. The world&#39;s second-largest economy added tariffs to U.S. imports last week, in a tit-for-tat retaliation to moves by the White House. Associated Press   Is the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act actually working?   Weifeng Zhong  August 13, 08:00 AM August 13, 08:00 AM  Video Embed The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a new United States law to ban imports tainted with forced labor in China, went into effect in June. According to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), a co-author of the legislation, “we can finally ensure that American consumers and businesses can buy goods without inadvertent complicity in China’s horrific human rights abuses.” Horrific human rights abuses are exactly what they are. But early signs suggest that the law may not have its intended effects, and policymakers still have a long way to go before they can meaningfully push back against Beijing’s atrocities. The letter and spirit of the Uyghur law are sweeping, and Customs and Border Protection intends to implement it as such. But U.S. industries just don’t seem convinced. The law states that goods made wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or produced by certain entities in or outside of China that source material from the Uyghur region, would, by default, be barred from entering the U.S. unless importers can demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that no forced labor was used. CBP seems to take it seriously, warning that an importer would need to trace its supply chains down to raw materials to prove that its merchandise isn’t made with forced labor and that it expects to grant very few exceptions. Yet, when the agency detained a shipment of quartzite — a key material for making polysilicon for solar panels and a major export of Xinjiang — it still caught the industry by surprise. Polysilicon importers reportedly believed that only a handful of suppliers would face enforcement action, and their vendors don’t have any quartzite documentation to show anyway. That’s by no means an isolated event. Nearly half of the world’s polysilicon supply comes from Xinjiang, but a solar industry group somehow believes that “most companies should be able to meet the requirements” of the Uyghur law. It’s amazing how optimists do their math. The solar industry is among the most closely watched sectors tainted with Uyghur forced labor, and it’s anyone’s guess how much more unrealistic similar optimism in other sectors will be. In fairness to importers, the confusion stems from a loophole since 1930 that allowed merchandise made with forced labor to enter the U.S. market as long as importers showed that the U.S. production of the good did not meet domestic demand — a bar Chinese products have often cleared with flying colors. While this loophole was closed in 2016, the reputational damage done to U.S. customs law has not yet subsided. Compared to 1930, today’s supply chains are orders of magnitude more complex. That means the private sector is best suited to clean up forced labor in its own supply chains, which requires policymakers to light an extra fire under companies. For this reason, my colleague Christine McDaniel and I have argued that the implementation of the Uyghur law needs to err on the side of being overly stringent to incentivize importers’ due diligence. Finally, while Americans should be proud that they’re the only Western power imposing an import ban on forced labor-tainted goods from China, that’s just a nicer way of saying that America’s allies are not yet on board. Reports suggest that this may be changing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, but unless the interest materializes in actions, U.S. allies may well become a stepping stone before forced labor-tainted goods make it to America’s shores. Talk is cheap, and the letter of the law won’t be much better without rigorous enforcement. Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda. He’s also the curator of the Wei To Think Again newsletter on U.S.-China competition.        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Derek Thompson on inflation, unemployment, and America’s confounding economic outlook

Prices have increased rapidly since last year, but barely budged in July — a positive development, though not yet enough for a victory lap.

Artem Maltsev/unsplashIn a new series, we look at books that have become cultural touchstones.

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Branko Milanovic's conversation with James Pethokoukis from the American Enterprise Institute.
1.  James: Russia is a nation with vast natural resources, a well-educated population, and a…

Psychologists have argued that affect is profoundly shaped by culture. They shouldn’t feel so confident.

Twenty-five thousand cases have been identified thus far—what does justice look like for the victims of Russia’s atrocities?

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s recent denunciation of “mixed race” countries indicates that far-right populists no longer feel they need to mask their true beliefs. After years of race-baiting through code words and winks, populist leaders have turned their dog whistles into foghorns.

U.S. leaders should stop deluding the American people into the false comfort that we have the luxury to choose to fight one evil and not the other.

I have seen how deadly stigma can be. Communication should be clear.

The move was expected to draw broad bipartisan support, as Republicans break from former President Donald J. Trump’s “America First” approach.

Within weeks, Texas death row inmate Ramiro Gonzales may face execution for a murder he committed in 2001. What makes his case notable is that someone else’s life hangs in the balance as well: the desperate person to whom he is hoping to give his kidney.For many months, Gonzales, 39, had been exchanging letters with Cantor Michael Zoosman, an ordained Jewish clergyman living in Maryland. As co-founder of an anti-death penalty advocacy group, Zoosman first wrote to Gonzales last year as part of outreach to inmates with scheduled execution dates.After a month of correspondence, Zoosman told Gonzales that a member of his congregation needed a kidney. Gonzales offered his, but eventually found that his blood type wasn’t a match. Rather than give up, Gonzales still wanted to be a “Good Samaritan” donor, giving to someone with whom he did not have a connection.But Gonzales’ initial request for a stay of execution so he could make the donation was denied. He did eventually receive a stay on different grounds—because of a concern about an expert witness over a decade ago at Gonzales’ murder trial, who has since admitted that his testimony was flawed. The resulting stay gave extra time for another potential recipient, Judy Frith, who matches Gonzales’ rare blood type, to send a letter to Governor Greg Abbott on July 10. “I cannot emphasize enough what a precious gift you would be giving someone if you allowed Mr. Gonzales the opportunity to donate his kidney,” she wrote. Were Frith to receive a new kidney, she would be freed from her own prison of dialysis. But even so, according to Gonzales’ lawyers, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice won’t permit him to go through with the donation, citing concerns that the surgery could “possibly [interfere] with the court-ordered execution date” and that the prison system might be unable to cover the costs of the procedure.The nation has a crying need for organs. About a dozen people die each day for want of a kidney, not to mention those removed from the list because they fell too ill to tolerate transplant surgery even if an organ would finally come along. With the crisis this acute, why are we depriving recipients of a chance at life—and donors a chance to do good?     In 2006, and again in 2016, I received a kidney transplant—both times from dear friends. After the first transplant, I became a vocal proponent of compensating kidney donors to help solve the dire organ shortage. (Currently, federal law prohibits compensation for donations, due to fears of both abuse and third-party profit-seeking.) For prisoners, becoming a donor can be additionally difficult. The federal prison system, for example, does not permit posthumous donations, and, like some states, limits living donations to immediate family members. While ethical and medical concerns may understandably motivate such policies, the continued barriers disregard pragmatic ways to make donation feasible—and, most importantly, often ignore the desires of inmates themselves. In 2011, shortly after writing an article on ways to facilitate donations by prisoners, I received a letter from the high-profile killer Christian Longo, who still awaits execution at Oregon State Penitentiary. For years, Longo had petitioned Oregon to let him donate. “There is no way to atone for my crimes, but I believe that a profound benefit to society can come from my circumstances,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. Even though Longo wished for his organs to be donated after his execution, Oregon authorities denied his request. That same year, I also heard from Shannon Ross, then 29, at the Stanley Correctional Institution in Wisconsin. He was eight years into a 17-year sentence for reckless homicide. “I am hoping you can give me some advice about my desire to get the state [of Wisconsin] to allow inmates to donate their organs—without compensation,” Ross wrote. “I am not simply looking to be humored as I try to make my time pass faster. I have been pursuing this objective for five years now.”Ross wanted to donate one of his kidneys to a stranger. The penal system proved to be a barrier. “As a rule, we are banned from live organ donation,” he told me. “After how much we have taken from society, it’s unacceptable that society is denied the opportunity to receive something so valuable from us in return.”Refusing Gonzales the opportunity to donate may make sense to those who believe that a person responsible for a monstrous crime should, on principle, be denied anything he desires.But if the Governor of Texas is committed to doing what is morally righteous, then he should allow Gonzales to save a precious human life.  Sally Satel is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.Follow Persuasion on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

Gerald Murnane’s new book, billed as his last, surveys the rest of his output.

Hey,Here’s a general rule of thumb (it’s not an iron law or anything, just a good practice when it comes to media consumption): If a headline counts as a bombshell, ask yourself whether it would still be a bombshell if the opposite were true.For instance, “Scientists Invent Faster Than Light Travel,” or “NASA Discovers Intelligent Life on Mars” would be big news. But “Scientists Still Can’t Crack Faster Than Light Travel” or “NASA Mission Reports Lifeless Rocks Found on Mars” wouldn’t be that big a deal.Now consider this headline that popped up pretty much everywhere:Axios: “Merrick Garland: DOJ won't rule out prosecuting Trump”National Review: “Merrick Garland Won’t Rule Out Prosecuting Trump over January 6”Fox News: “AG Garland refuses to rule out prosecuting Trump for Jan. 6”CNN: “Merrick Garland does not rule out charging Trump and others in January 6 probe”(Full disclosure: The Morning Dispatch didn’t use the “doesn’t rule out” formulation in a headline, but it does appear in a small item.)Ask yourself: What if it was the opposite headline? “Garland Rules Out Criminal Charges of Trump,” or, “AG Refuses to Consider Criminal Prosecution of Trump.”I would argue—heck, not only would I argue it, I’m literally arguing it right now—that this would be a much bigger story. In other words, if Garland said that he would not even consider pressing charges against Trump regardless of what his investigators found in a still-ongoing inquiry, that would be a huge deal. “Yes, yes, we found a video of him bludgeoning a nun with a frozen Trump steak and eating her pancreas, but we already ruled out pressing charges regardless of what evidence we turned up.”   In other words, Garland said exactly what he was supposed to say. In fact, he had no choice but to say it.

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His Senate candidacy is a clear example of the warping effect that Donald Trump has had on the Republican Party nationally.

Spread the word, because the midterms elections have become even more crucial.

Central bankers around the world have been picking up the pace of rate increases. Now the big question looms: When will they slow down?

In healthy democracies, the fringe bends toward the center. In our democracy, the center always seems to be lurching toward the fringe.

In a CNN interview, after another round of the US government’s sanctions on Russia, the following exchange took place between the show’s host and President Joe Biden’s economic adviser Brian Deese: CNN: What do you say to those families that say, “Listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months if not years, […]

China's draconian health measures have stifled U.S. diplomacy in the country.

Tax is a ‘no-brainer’ after companies’ huge profits during Covid but corporate influence makes it ‘politically difficult’, Stiglitz says. The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has called for a windfall profits tax, arguing the idea is a “no-brainer” that has been taken off the table due to the influence of big companies.Stiglitz made the comments to reporters during a tour of Australia after personally lobbying the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to introduce the tax and warning that excessive interest rate rises could push Europe, the US, and then Australia into recession. Continue reading...

“1. Will lead people to seek non resident status, result in a considerable outflow of funds in the form of dividends and interest. 

 Since it will apply to all wealth held world wide foreign employees in foreign companies resident here would be subject to tax. This would result in a big movement of banks, insurance and shipping business moving out of the UK. 
 Assets held here would be affected. This would reduce the level of business in UK.”

“The whole business thing is predicated a lot on the tax laws…It’s why we rehearse in Canada and not in the U.S. A lot of our astute moves have been basically keeping up with tax laws, where to go, where not to put it. Whether to sit on it or not. We left England because we’d be paying 98 cents on the dollar. We left, and they lost out. No taxes at all.”

Richard Fulmer worked as a mechanical engineer and a systems analyst in industry. He is now retired and does free-lance writing. He has published some fifty articles and book reviews in free market magazines and blogs. With Robert L. Bradley Jr., Richard wrote the book, Energy: The Master Resource.
(1 COMMENTS)

The Tories must pick a new leader, but the former Prime Minister may have stacked the deck against his own party.

point.
here?

Scrutinizing gender, history, and authority, the Mexican-born writer has found an unsettling yet playful way to write about desire.

But what if their big and fast moves, eviscerating some constitutional rights and inflating others, are bound for collision?

As the central bank sharply increases borrowing costs, it could lock would-be home buyers into rentals and keep a hot market under pressure.

1.  Criticism of a “Really outrageous attack on free speech” by law enforcement in Arizona.
2. Argued “Let’s make it easier to get permits to build houses”   An hour earlier he made the pitch more overtly political, “Own Ron DeSantis by making it easier to build houses in California.“
3.  Argued “Let’s make clean energy deployment easier“
4.  Argued “Let’s increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals” by weakening the AMA cartel.
5.  Five hours ago he suggested that “freedom” was the best way to sell the pro-choice argument:

As I’ve said many times, there’s no such thing as public opinion.  It depends how you frame the question.  I.e., the question creates the opinion.
6.  Six hours ago, he tweeted, “YIMBY is about freedom, not apartment buildings.”
7.  Twenty hours ago he tweeted on vaccines and nuclear power.  In both areas he has written more extensive essays, sometimes advocating the removal of regulatory barriers that slow the development of vaccines and prevent the construction of (low carbon) nuclear power plants.
Matt Yglesias is certainly not a libertarian.  But he’s also not a typical progressive.  Rather he advocates something called “popularism”, which is roughly the achievement of progressive goals via popular means (and in some cases compromises.)  This differs from “populism”, which often aims at non-progressive policy goals such as trade barriers, immigration barriers, and the weakening of criminal justice protections.  In Yglesias’s view, unpopular “woke” excesses actually end up hurting the progressive cause.
I find it interesting that Yglesias often sees the “freedom” message as a way of making public policies more palatable.  He spends part of the year in Texas, and seems to have a pretty good grasp of how middle Americans think, especially when compared to the typical coastal progressive.
PS.  If I were pro-life, I’d be infuriated by this misleading and manipulative video.  But as Yglesias correctly suggests, it is probably quite effective.
PPS. Warning:  If progressives keep using the freedom message because it works, they might eventually find themselves beginning to believe in freedom.  Handle with care!  🙂
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Have we made our lives too comfortable? Can we imagine living without the many services we pay for, the apps that assist us, or the algorithms that reduce our physical efforts while saving us precious time? Journalist Michael Easter argues in his book, The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, that moving out of our physical and mental comfort zones is not only good for us but might improve our health and mental well-being. 
In this episode, he and EconTalk host Russ Roberts discuss the merits of boredom, listening to our surroundings, death, and “this thing called misogi”. Dive in, and tell us about your past and anticipated novel experiences; we’d love to hear from you. 
 
 1- The theme of rites of passage is rich in ancient and modern literature and film. What do you think of the practicality of choosing a physically challenging, psychologically tough misogi (禊) experience that has only 50% odds for success?
 
The US employment report for June continues to show a strong labor market that is consistent with a strong economy with moderating inflationary pressures. Employment is growing robustly, unemployment is low and stable, and nominal wage growth continues to slow, which should ease inflationary...

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E.T. was jello in a T-shirt. The Mummy was scratchy potpourri. For Foley artists, deception is an essential part of the enterprise.

Picasso was a joke. Then he was a god. How did his art finally take off in America?

Privacy rights protect personal autonomy and shield survivors of abuse. They also conceal abuse and safeguard the powerful. Is the concept coherent?

“The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked.” The sentiment is old—it comes from Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated City—but it’s hard to think of a better epitaph for the economic vibes of 2022. From the oil markets to the baby-formula markets to the general sense of safety and disorder, the U.S. seems to suffer from chronic Nothing Works Syndrome.The latest victim of acute NWS is air travel. Around the world, security lines are getting brutally long and cancellations and delays are spiking. The major carriers JetBlue, American Airlines, and Delta canceled nearly 10 percent of their flights last weekend, creating mayhem at major airports.In an interview for my podcast Plain English, I spoke with Scott Keyes, the founder of the Scott’s Cheap Flights newsletter, about why air travel has been such a mess this summer. This transcript has been edited and condensed.Derek Thompson: Scott, what’s happening and why?Scott Keyes: The amount of turmoil in the airline industry over the past two years is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in travel. The 9/11 attacks caused a 7 percent drop in overall travel. But 2020 travel was down 70 percent. Airlines were worried about surviving. That meant laying off staff, shedding pilots, selling airplanes, and retiring aircraft. Now, as travel rebounds, we are paying the price.Delta shed 30 percent of their employees—almost 30,000 people cut from their staff. American Airlines laid off 30 percent of their staff, through buyouts, early retirements, or otherwise. Airlines were trying to become as lean as possible to reduce those operating expenses with the anticipation that they were not going to be making much money. They also retired older planes.Those decisions certainly helped improve the balance sheet throughout 2020. But would they have made the same call if they had known how quickly travel demand would rebound? Almost certainly not. They assumed that this was going to be a six-year recovery period, not an 18-month recovery period. So when travel demand started rebounding much quicker than they anticipated, the airlines were caught flat-footed.Thompson: Why is it taking so long to adjust? Why is it so hard to hire pilots or bring back more airplanes?Keyes: Being a pilot is not an entry-level job. It takes years of training. There are many regulatory requirements, like a mandatory retirement age for pilots: 65 years old. There are mandatory training requirements for U.S.-based pilots. They have to fly 1,500 hours before they’re allowed to pilot those commercial planes.Similarly, Boeing doesn’t have tons of 787s or 737s sitting in a warehouse waiting for airlines to come pick them up. There’s a years-long delay in a manufacturing process plagued with supply-chain disruptions, just like so many other parts of the economy.Thompson: The industry is so woefully understaffed that whenever there’s a storm, or a pilot who calls in sick, there’s no redundancy or resiliency in the system, and you get these cascading cancellations. But wasn’t it obvious 18 months ago that we’d have vaccines? Wasn’t it obvious six months ago that Americans wanted to get out of the house? Why is all this mayhem happening now?Keyes: There’s a labor-supply issue, not just for airlines but also the TSA. If you live in Milwaukee and you’re looking for an entry-level job, you could become a transportation security officer for $19.41 an hour, or you could go on Amazon’s website and see that there’s a job in the area for $19.50. Would you rather help load and unload bags outside in the dead of winter in Milwaukee, or work in a climate-controlled environment in a warehouse for Amazon? That’s the trade-off a lot of folks are making. Labor shortages cause delays and cancellations. In normal times, airlines might have a reserve crew of pilots or flight attendants that they can call in. But now there is not the reserve in place to bridge the gap. The result is a huge swath of delays and cancellations.Thompson: Laurie Garrow, a professor at Georgia Tech, directed me to FlightAware, a website that tracks airline-industry statistics. On any given day, it seems normal to have a cancellation rate of about 1 percent—or one cancellation for every 100 scheduled flights. Last Thursday, JetBlue canceled 14 percent of its flights. Last Thursday and Friday, American canceled 10 percent of its flights. On Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Delta canceled 8 percent of its flights. Meanwhile, Frontier and Spirit canceled just 1 percent of their flights in that time. Why are the major carriers having these major problems right now?Keyes: Today’s airline that gloats about not having cancellations is tomorrow’s airline that’s experiencing a meltdown. I don’t want to pretend that Spirit and Frontier don’t experience meltdowns. They absolutely do. That said, a few factors can explain why we’re seeing higher rates of cancellations among legacy full-service airlines. First, many of the budget airlines like Spirit already trimmed their summer schedules when they realized they didn’t have enough pilots and crew to operate the schedule they had planned. The legacy full-service airlines can suffer sometimes from hubris.Second, many of the legacy airlines have hubs in crowded corridors like New York, Chicago, and Boston, which can suffer from compounding cancellations when there’s a thunderstorm [which are more common in the summer]. Those cancellations beget more cancellations. A flight from JFK to Miami that gets canceled results in a further cancellation for that flight out of Miami.Thompson: Has anything changed about air travelers? Are we doing something different in 2022 that is contributing to these delays?Keyes: Leisure travel has fully rebounded, whereas business travel is still down 30 percent. Now, why does that matter? Because leisure travelers tend to be more inexperienced when it comes to travel. They need more support from the airlines handling their itinerary ahead of time. They might need more time going through security. They don’t remember to take their shoes off or to take their laptop out. When each person takes an extra 20 seconds, you multiply by 3,000 passengers, and these little micro events matter at scale.Relatedly, the two airports with the biggest growth since the summer of 2019 are Miami, up 17 percent, and Las Vegas, up 10 percent. San Francisco is down 26 percent. Detroit is down 25 percent. Chicago O’Hare is down 18 percent. The business-heavy destinations are down, and the leisure destinations are up.These changes have bigger knock-on effects for some airlines than others. Historically, the budget airlines have had the leisure traveler as their bread and butter. Spirit Airlines does not have a significant amount of business travel within its portfolio. Conversely, American Airlines and Delta make the most money from business travelers, who are up to seven times more profitable on a per-person basis. And they orient their entire operation around serving those business travelers and fly more to Chicago, San Francisco, and New York.Because a pandemic came along that crushed business travel, Delta and American and United are now playing away games. The budget airlines have home-field advantage. And budget airlines have basically eaten all the growth over the past three years. Allegiant [flights] are up 17 percent since 2019. Spirit is 7 percent. Frontier is up 6 percent. Whereas Delta, United, American are down.Thompson: To what extent do you think regulatory policy is making America’s airlines particularly fragile to the sort of problems we’re currently experiencing?Keyes: One of the front-and-center issues discussed in the airline industry right now is this question of pilot training. Is 1,500 hours the proper amount of air time we should be expecting from pilots before we certify them to fly commercial jets? On the one hand, it’s easy to say, “You can’t be too careful.” Just imagine the attack ads if somebody votes to decrease the training requirement, and then all of a sudden there’s a crash. The optics are horrendous. On the other hand, the U.S. is a bit of an outlier. Most other countries do not require anything near this level of training ahead of being certified. The U.S. historically has not required that level of training. And we let foreign pilots fly to JFK and SFO and LAX without this requirement. All that said, there’s still no quick overnight fix that will immediately get you more flights, more pilots, and a greater supply of air travel. Certainly not for this summer.Thompson: So when does this end? When can we expect traveling to feel more normal?Keyes: Cheap flights aren’t gone forever. They’re just gone for this summer. The rolling delays and cancellations you’re seeing are predominantly a side effect of the demand for travel right now. So many folks are making up for trips they haven’t been able to take over the past couple of years, and summer’s always the most popular time of year to travel. By mid-September and beyond, you have less people traveling. We’ll have more pilots and planes in reserve to be able to come in when there is a thunderstorm, or an IT meltdown. We’ll have more reserves to help prevent a catastrophic wave of cancellations and delays. So, bad news for the short term. Good news for the fall and beyond.

The crude reality of the political machinations involved in overruling Roe v. Wade makes it galling to read the Court’s self-portrayal as a picture of proper judicial restraint.

The Supreme Court's conservatives finally felt safe to do what they wanted to do.

The Court’s originalist justification for striking down a New York gun law is more than capricious—it relies on a fundamentally anti-democratic historical record that deliberately excludes women and people of color.

The depth of the U.S. securities market helps ensure dollar hegemony

Many prominent commentators argue that it will not, noting the ongoing attempts by Russia and her trading allies to circumvent the US-led imposed financial sanctions. Barry Eichengreen, for instance, observed that because of the Russian and other central banks’ increased diversification of their reserve holdings away from the dollar “we are seeing movement towards a more multipolar international monetary system."[1] James Galbraith sees a dual currency system in the making, as Russia and her trading allies “carve out… a significant non-dollar, non-euro” rival financial system.[2] In a wider context of innovations in technology and finance, the IMF also noted the possibility of a scenario where “the greenback could be felled not by the dollar’s main rivals but by a group of alternative currencies,” including crypto and digital currencies.[3]

"As recent crises make clear, up to now the dollar-based order has been supported mainly by instability elsewhere and the lack of a credible alternative or compelling reason to create one, or where such reasons are felt, the ability to do so... The system has been held up, in short, by confidence in itself, and not, so far as one can see, by much of anything else."[7]

This scenario is realistic only if one assumes that there has been no structural change in the relationship between the financial sector and the macroeconomy. Yet, citing Strange again, the addition of credit has altered the balance of power in the world economy. But not in the way that Galbraith and others envisage it. 
 
The expansion of financial markets, the explosion of debt and asset values, are typically associated with the phenomenon of financialization. Over the past few decades, financialization has evolved at an accelerated pace; the financial sector now completely dominates the real productive economic sector on which it rests. In 1980 the combined nominal value of the world’s equity and bond stocks stood at about $11 trillion, a figure on a par with that of nominal world GDP in that year. By 2020 the combined value of those securities stocks had grown over twenty-fold to $234 trillion, while world GDP had only registered an eight-fold increase to $84 trillion in that same period.[11] The growing scale disparity between the financial sector and the underlying real sector is what ultimately fuels narratives of an impending collapse, and the declinist school on the power of the dollar forms one of those narratives. 
 
Foreign investors currently have trust in the US and in its legal and governance infrastructure of tradability debt, or futurity. Far from there not being "much of anything else" underpinning this trust, there is, on the contrary, much of everything underpinning it. What the US offers, and what no other region can do at present, is a huge and varied abundance of securities (not only equities but also bonds, including corporate, financial, Treasury, agency, and municipal bonds) in which foreign investors can store large amounts of funds and across which they can also move these large amounts relatively easily according to any change in circumstances.

In sum, the Ukraine crisis will certainly lead to an increase in "non-dollar, non-euro" currency transactions, just as James Galbraith has argued. But the pre-crisis volume of these transactions was so vanishingly small as to invalidate any suggestion that this increase portends a multipolar currency system in the making.

the share of dollars in globally identified foreign exchange reserves has been trending down so that they now account for 59% of these reserves as opposed to the 70% figure of 20 years ago;the principal cause of this downward trend has been central banks’ diversification away from dollars towards the currencies of smaller economies such as Australia, Canada, Sweden, South Korea, and Singapore;this diversification into smaller currencies has been facilitated by the liquidity of these markets and hence the low costs of transacting in them, developments that have been made possible by the advent of electronic trading platforms and other financial innovations; andthe principal motivation for this reserve diversification has been the central banks’ attraction to the higher yields that the smaller currencies offer in contrast to those offered by the large currencies.

"the growth in the size, integration and agility of international financial markets has greatly increased the scale of pressure that can be exerted against an exchange rate when market sentiment shifts."[15]

If any EME-based central banks needed any reminder of this crucial fact, the events of early March 2020, provided it. By that time, the covid-19 pandemic’s negative impact on the global economy became clear to the world's institutional investors, and they quickly withdrew funds amounting to over $100 billion from the EMEs in the space of days. That withdrawal was catastrophic for many of these countries, but its impact would have been even more devastating had their central banks not quickly intervened in their domestic currency markets with huge sales of the US Treasuries kept in their reserves.

The story in 2021 appeared somewhat better, as nominal world GDP rose above its pre-pandemic level to $94.9 trillion, but the world’s combined equity and bond stocks again rose substantially, to reach over $241 trillion.[18] In both these Covid-impacted years, the US share of the world’s supplies of equities and bonds remained stable at around 40%. Thus, going by the observation that forex turnover volume is overwhelmingly driven by financial sector interests as distinct from those of the real sector, we can safely predict that the dollar’s share of the new 2022 figure for daily forex turnover will remain around 44%, while, at the other end of the spectrum, the combined percentage shares of all the EME currencies will stay around 13%, with China's yuan share at 2%. In other words, our prediction is that the Ukraine crisis that broke out just after the commencement of the latest BIS triennial survey of forex turnover will have had no discernible impact on the currency breakdown of that turnover.

This argument could not have been more wrong, because while the euro’s share of daily forex turnover hovered around an average of 19% between 2001 and 2010, it subsequently fell to an average of 16% between that year and 2019, the principal reason for this reverse movement being the eurozone's failure to supply the world's large institutional investors with sufficient amounts of euro-denominated securities in which to park their funds.

Galbraith, James, 2022, "A multipolar financial world is here", INET, May 5th 2022; https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-dollar-system-in-a-multi-polar-world 
 
Strange, Susan, 1994, “Wake Up, Krasner! The World Has Changed”, Review of International Political Economy, 1:1. 
 
https://unctad.org/webflyer/tr...

UNCTAD, 2022, “Tapering in a Time of Conflict”, TDR Update, March. https://unctad.org/webflyer/ta...

Notes
 
[2] Galbraith, James, 2022, "A multipolar financial world is here", INET, 5 May; https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-dollar-system-in-a-multi-polar-world

[6] Strange, Susan, 1994, “Wake Up, Krasner! The World Has Changed”, Review of International Political Economy, 1:1. 
[7] Galbraith, James, 2022, "A multipolar financial world is here", INET, May 5th 2022.

[16] IMF, 2017, Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves, March. IMF, 2021, Composition of Foreign Exchange Reserves, March. 
[17] UNCTAD, 2019, “Financing a Global Green New Deal”, Trade and Development Report. 

[20] UNCTAD, 2022, “Tapering in a Time of Conflict”, March. https://unctad.org/webflyer/ta...

The Republican majority on the Supreme Court is giving states the green light to invade everyone's privacy in ever more egregious ways.

A century-old New York law requiring individuals to prove “proper cause” to carry a handgun has been struck down. Are other gun-safety measures in peril?

A win in the Supreme Court for the American right to threaten one another in public

The administration faces a crucial test of its willingness to confront the atrocities in Xinjiang.

I am appalled, as so many Americans are, that Donald Trump and his team assaulted our elections, but today I’m thinking about how the assault on election officials across the nation is an even deeper wound that will take years to heal.But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.

Dear Capitolisters, I was never a very eager student in law school but did absorb a few enduring lessons in between all the video games and beer pong. One of them came during a corporate law class, in which the professor emphasized repeatedly that, while companies and investors surely care about a law’s substance (e.g., tax rates or whatever), they care more that the policies are crafted and applied in a consistent and predictable manner over time. In short, market actors—especially the big boys—can adjust to and plan for almost anything (and respond accordingly), as long as said thing is relatively sure to happen. High levels of economic and policy uncertainty, on the other hand, are simply a killer—invoking paralysis in a company and, by extension, the economy. I force you to endure this long windup because I’ve been thinking a lot about that law school lesson—and policy uncertainty more broadly—the recent political drama about U.S. gas prices, which in case you haven’t noticed are pretty high right now (though still off inflation-adjusted highs):Given gas prices’ political importance in the United States (for better or worse)—amplified today by broader inflationary pressures—the Biden administration has reportedly been scrambling to find a few policy levers it can pull to lower prices over the high-demand summer driving months. Just today, the president called on Congress and states to suspend gas taxes. He also just sent a sternly worded letter to major U.S. oil refiners, accusing them of profiteering during a global energy crisis and calling on the companies to produce more gasoline and diesel… or else. From the Associated Press:

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Q&A
 
The evolution of military power is one of the most important if underrated geopolitical changes happening in the world today. Throughout the 20th century, military power was the province of large nations. Machines dominated the battlefield, and the production of these machines, the materials that fueled them and the ordnance they used required access to complex factories and massive amounts of raw materials. This, in turn, required vast numbers of workers - and the housing and food the workers needed to function. An economy of this scale needed to produce large...

The least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do this we need a stronger NatoFor me, John Lennon’s mega-hit Imagine was always a song popular for the wrong reasons. Imagine that “the world will live as one” is the best way to end in hell.Those who cling to pacifism in the face of the Russian attack on Ukraine remain caught in their own version of “imagine”. Imagine a world in which tensions are no longer resolved through armed conflicts … Europe persisted in this world of “imagine”, ignoring the brutal reality outside its borders. Now it’s the time to awaken.Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London Continue reading...

I want friends whose minds are not tethered to mine in bonds of allegiance but spin freely of their own accord.

The attorney general will have to make three decisions, each more difficult than the previous, and none of which has an obvious answer.

The scientist and author Dr Adam Rutherford looks at how the study of genetics has been warped for political endsIt’s a quirk of history that the foundations of modern biology – and as a consequence, some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century – should rely so heavily on peas. Cast your mind back to school biology, and Gregor Mendel, whose 200th birthday we mark next month. Though Mendel is invariably described as a friar, his formidable legacy is not in Augustinian theology, but in the mainstream science of genetics.In the middle of the 19th century, Mendel (whose real name was Johann – Gregor was his Augustinian appellation) bred more than 28,000 pea plants, crossing tall with short, wrinkly seeds with smooth, and purple flowers with white. What he found in that forest of pea plants was that these traits segregated in the offspring, and did not blend, but re-emerged in predictable ratios. What Mendel had discovered were the rules of inheritance. Characteristics were inherited in discrete units – what we now call genes – and the way these units flowed through pedigrees followed neat mathematical patterns. Continue reading...

Inflation is expected to remain high later this year even as the economy slows and layoffs rise. Already, signs of financial stress are surfacing.

Contractions can be frowned upon. We’re gonna wanna rethink that.

To the Editors: Marcus Feldman and Jessica Riskin did not like my book. Or rather, they did not like a book called The Genetic Lottery by an author named “Kathryn Paige Harden,” but their review [NYR, April 21] so badly distorts my arguments that I have the curious impression that Feldman and Riskin somehow got […]

A Book Review of Time For Socialism, by Thomas Piketty.1

Time For Socialism author Thomas Piketty boasts a doctorate in economics, publishes papers regularly in top economics journals, teaches economics at the Paris School of Economics, and was once on the economics faculty at M.I.T. Yet not only are the 333 pages of his 2021 book utterly empty of economic reasoning, the reasoning that does infuse those pages is painful for an economist to encounter. Reading this book—which is a collection mostly of Piketty’s columns for Le Monde—literally hurt my head.
The aching caused by reading this book isn’t a result of my immense ideological distance from Piketty. Having read and reviewed2 his 2014 Capital In the Twenty-First Century, I—a Hayekian liberal—have long known that Piketty is a man of the far left, and I have no trouble dealing with even gaping ideological differences. What hurt my economist’s head was trying to make sense of a worldview that would approach plausibility only in an alternate universe in which the most basic principles of economics, as I understand them, don’t apply.
In Piketty’s universe, the tools, enterprises, and economic processes that are necessary for modern prosperity just materialize, as if out of thin air. About the formation and operation of capital goods and services the reader gets no information beyond the alleged fact that, above a certain level, wealth—that is, the value of capital—”tends to grow mechanically.”3 An implication of this mysterious reality is that, because the value of capital depends upon the value of what it produces, the total output generated by capital also tends to grow mechanically. In Piketty’s universe, then, capital goods and services are neither caused by—nor affected by—entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and individuals’ private investment choices. Economic and social institutions thus have almost no impact on wealth creation. Ditto for economic and fiscal policies. Adam Smith’s 1776 inquiry into how institutions and norms cause the wealth of nations4—Smith’s investigation into how different institutions and norms cause differences in the wealth of nations—must be for Piketty a project wholly sterile and inexplicable.
You might suspect that I exaggerate or miss important nuances in Piketty’s strange vision of economic reality. I don’t think that I do. Throughout Time for Socialism, Piketty describes cuts in taxes owed by wealthy people as “gifts to the rich”5 or as “tax gifts to the most wealthy.”6 For Piketty, this language isn’t hyperbole; it’s evidence of his sincere belief that human agency plays no role in creating capital and in ensuring that capital is employed productively. Doing nothing to earn their disproportionately large shares of society’s “mechanically” produced wealth, the rich are given “gifts” if and whenever the state reduces their tax burdens.

One such inconsistency arrives when Piketty asserts that “long-term economic performance is primarily determined by investment in training.”7 Well. Now that we’re told that improving the training of workers improves the performance of capital, it’s impossible to believe that the value of capital “tends to grow mechanically.” What’s left of the asserted non-role of capitalists in affecting the value of capital once we learn that economic growth is affected “primarily” by the choices humans make regarding how much, and presumably which sorts of, human training to demand and supply? After all, prominent among those who surely have incentives to provide at least some worker training are workers’ capitalist employers.
Whether or not the amount of human capital that exists is suboptimal, today’s high living standards imply that a great deal of such capital nevertheless does exist. This implication holds even if, contrary to fact, Piketty is correct to assert that nearly all of the fruits of economic growth over the past 40 years have been captured by the undertaxed superrich. Yet Piketty’s measure of capital ownership—and, hence, his asserted demonstration that ownership of capital is becoming dangerously more concentrated—loses most of its meaning as a result of its exclusion of human capital, the “primary” determinant of economic performance. As Deirdre McCloskey explained in her review of Capital In the Twenty-First Century,8

“Piketty Fever,” by Pedro Schwartz. Econlib, Jun. 5, 2014.
 Thomas Piketty on Inequality and Capital in the 21st Century. EconTalk.
Human Capital, by Gary Becker. Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

Footnotes
[1] Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021. Yale University Press, Oct. 26, 2021.
[2] Donald J. Boudreaux, “Piketty: A Wealth of Misconceptions.” Mercatus.org. Originally published in Barron’s, May 31, 2014.
[3] Piketty, p. 40.
[4] I refer, of course, to Adam Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, available online at the Library of Economics and Liberty
[5] Piketty, p. 247.
[6] Piketty, p. 147.
[7] Piketty, p. 76.
[8] Deirdre N. McCloskey, “How Piketty Misses the Point,” a CATO Policy Report, July/August 2015.

*For helpful comments on an earlier draft I thank Veronique de Rugy.
Donald J. Boudreaux is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Senior Fellow with the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at George Mason’s Mercatus Center. He blogs at Café Hayek (www.cafehayek.com).
For more articles by Donald J. Boudreaux, see the Archive.

But the burgeoning market is far from efficient. To put it bluntly, the zero-day market is extremely prone to market failure. There are great information asymmetries between the sellers and buyers on the market, and it is often hard to reveal the quality of the exploit before sale. This frequently impedes sales. Also, to have as much information and control as possible over the sold exploit, buyers are much more likely to buy local and go to only a select group of sellers than is often realized. 
The zero-day exploit market is a market with extreme information asymmetries. The seller has much more information about whether the exploit is actually working. The market is also flooded with lemons. Many of the exploits offered are a lot less reliable than sellers initially report. Also, the buyer of an exploit is not always able to test the exploit before purchasing it, as the economic value would be lost once given to the buyer for “testing.” This structural setup makes even beneficial zero-day transactions difficult. 
Michael Spence shared the Nobel Prize with Akerlof for his explanation that agents can use signaling to counteract the effects of the “lemon market” situation, otherwise known as “adverse selection.” In this asymmetric information context, signaling refers to observable actions taken by actors to convince the other party of the value of their products or services. A key insight developed by Spence is that signaling can succeed only if the signaling cost differs across “senders.” 
As an example, Spence supposes there are two types of workers, both looking for a job. One worker has a higher productivity than the other. The problem is that the employer cannot distinguish between two workers and will thus offer the average wage (like the market for used cars). The more productive worker, however, can do something to stand out. She can, for example, get an academic degree to signal her competence. But what would stop the less productive candidate from also acquiring the same education? Spence notes that the cost of getting a degree must be higher for the less productive worker for the signal to be believable. This might be the case, for instance, if the less productive worker takes much longer to finish his education. He would then find it unprofitable to get a degree just to convince the hiring firm that he is more capable than he really is. 
This is a behavior that occurs on the exploit sale market. 
For example, BuggiCorp included two videos to prove that the exploit it was selling worked. In an attempt to sell the supposedly powerful exploit, BuggiCorp also asked for the deal to go through the administrator of the website as the escrow. This means the website administrator acts as a third party and transfers the money to BuggiCorp only if the buyer is satisfied with the product. 
Yet the fact that the seller lowered the price from $95,000 to $90,000 after the exploit had been advertised for an extended period of time suggests that signaling was insufficient to convince other parties to buy the exploit. In fact, the price tag of $95,000 is already low for a reliable exploit that could affect all versions of Microsoft Windows. 
First, governments will tend to buy, if they do at all, from a highly select group of preferred sellers. The U.S. government, for example, tends to buy its exploits from major U.S.-based defense contractors. 
Second, these sellers are normally based within a government’s legal jurisdiction. Buying from sellers in the same legal jurisdiction also makes it easier to screen sellers (especially if they have a government background) and thus helps to overcome some of the information asymmetries. It also allows the buyer and the seller to communicate in their native language and provides opportunities to potentially sanction the seller in case of a fraudulent deal. There is little a government can do if it buys an unreliable exploit of an unknown entity in a faraway country. 
The [offensive cyber capabilities] marketplace is largely oriented along the broad geopolitical lines we see anyhow. Some groups deliver into China and Russia, some deliver into Middle Eastern and North African autocratic systems, some deliver only to NATO or NATO-friendly countries. However, the marketplace is unstable and unreliable. Contrary to common belief, nations are not hoarding vulnerabilities. On the contrary. Selling exploits is still difficult and frustrating, which in turn leads to violations and fluctuation of talent and loyalties. 

To understand why this is the case, one needs to consider the timing of exploit sales. If an exploit is relevant to a current need, the exploit is worth more money. Yet that knowledge is almost completely internal to the buyer. Only the buyer knows its own mission needs, who it is seeking to target and when. 
But buyers cannot easily advertise those needs. A buyer is going to reveal little information to an exploit broker about its planned cyber endeavors. For example, the U.S. Cyber Command is not going to announce, “We have an operation coming up that will need a certain Safari browser capability, partially with Farsi language support.” This is sensitive information that a government, or other buyer, is not keen to share. 
Topics: Cybersecurity and Deterrence, Cyber & Technology, CybersecurityTags: zero day, hacker, hacking

Max Smeets is a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich, director of the European Cyber Conflict Research Initiative, and author of “No Shortcuts: Why States Struggle to Develop a Military Cyber-Force”, published with Oxford University Press and Hurst in May 2022. 

@MaxWSmeets

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Ilya Shapiro, who tweeted that a “lesser Black woman” would get a Supreme Court nod, was cleared by a school investigation. He decided to leave anyway.

The strong job market may be about to take a turn for the worse. That could come to haunt those who made choices based on today’s conditions.

A hawkish policy has worked so far. A hawkish grand strategy is still unrealistic.

From your present perch, you could galvanize a small number of enlightened billionaires to accomplish significant needed changes quickly and sustainably, especially in this momentous year of 2022.

Columbia University's renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs talks about the lessons he has learned from consulting with governments around the world, about how global problems, such as the war in Ukraine, will only be solved via efforts to understand the other side, never through force.

Welcome to Economics & Beyond. I'm Rob Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here with Jeffrey Sachs. How would I say? I always smile, when every time we talk, I'm paying homage to the Rommel family, George a nephew of Rommel, where we both grew up in Detroit and our parents were good friends with the respective Rommel's, and perhaps that inspired my curiosity, even as an undergraduate at MIT, to learn more about Jeffrey Sachs. And it's been like a north star beacon for me in thinking about what's important through my entire career.

So, Jeff, thanks for being here. I'll describe just briefly, you've done a tremendous amount of work here at Columbia University. The highest ranking professor, you ran The Earth Institute for many years. Currently the president of the US Sustainable Development Solutions Network. And I would say just as a signature, I see you always have... There's a gift that I perceive and that I admire and I try to turn people onto about your career. You always seem to choose important questions. People can do all kinds of dances with technique, but how do they say they might be fiddling with [inaudible 00:01:49], and you seem to zoom in over and over on things that matter, not just to your country or not just to prestige, but to humankind. And I greatly admire that.

Well, I feel it way inside me. And I just want to refer, you've written many books. We've talked about The Age of Globalization, in one of our previous episodes together, but Sustainable Development, the two I underscored today, because the question is related to the Ukraine that I've seen you writing about in Project Syndicate and other places were you recently... To Move the World JFK's Quest for Peace in 2013 and A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism. What I see there, first book, 2013, second book, 2018 is a prescience. You're seeing ahead of the challenges that we're going to have to address. So I'm very excited today that you're with me and we can talk about what you see, what scares you and what's the way up.

Well, thanks so much. It's great to be with you. And thank you for focusing on those two books. The book about JFK, which I wrote in 2013 was to commemorate an incredible speech and initiative of President Kennedy in 1963, which was just months after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, here we are Rob, the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis with another showdown between the United States and Russia. And so I'm going back to that speech, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the lessons that I drew in that book just about every day in my thinking about what events are telling us right now. The 2019 book, A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, is also directly core to my thinking right now. I do think the United States doesn't get or accept it's a realistic constructive place in the world right now.

And that this is at least a part of our problem in a world that is increasingly destabilized. I think that both books focus on one fundamental idea, which is that, peace is better than war and peace comes through a constructive engagement with the other side. President Kennedy said in his remarkable speech, given at American University commencement on June 10th, 1963, that pieces into some magic solution. It's not an event. Peace is a process, a way of solving problems. It is a constructive engagement with the other side. It is what I've learned in 21 years of advising the UN leadership. It is diplomacy at its finest. It's not guessing what the other side will do. It's not playing a game theory where you take as given the other parties move, which can have disastrous consequences, but rather you engage. And I think that this has been by central theme, partly from my own life experience of working in cultures all over the world, very different communities, different religions, races, ethnicities, nationalities, geographies.

It taught me something about the common fate of humanity, I think. And it also taught me about the wonders of dialogue, communication and diplomacy. Well, here we are with war, with incredible tensions, with China, with the inability to solve major global problems like the increasing the arrangement of the Earth's climate system. And I believe that in all of these, what we're seeing is a failure of state craft, a failure of concepts of cooperation, a really an application of crude ideas that are like the game theoretical ideas that assume the worst of the other side, for example, and assume you know what's in Putin's mind assume you know what is in president Xi's mind. And when we behave that way, we get very bad outcomes. So I thank you for focusing on those works. And for me, they do reflect my underlying feeling that there's a different way for us to approach global problems, different from what we're doing right now. And it would be much safer, more prudent and more constructive to follow a different approach.

Well, I find it fascinating, just putting what I'll call pattern recognition. You're talking about what John Kennedy did. I remember the old, what I'll call the Bismarck playbook. I took a bunch of courses in arms control and disarmament, and they said the one of the big dangers is when you're failing at home, there's discord, the Bismarck playbook is a metaphor. Find an external enemy so everybody can agree and focus on that. But sitting behind the Bismarck playbook in the first appendix to that playbook, is the need to cooperate on climate change. So we're not in a place where... Forget mutual assured destruction for a moment, we got to cooperate. There's another way we can exterminate earth if we don't collaborate. And then the last thing I'll throw into this mix is a wonderful book by the scholar Orville Schell and his colleague, John Delury called Wealth and Power.

And what Orville, who was a good friend of mine said, this was years ago. He said, "Rob, we've got a situation where the Chinese went through centuries of humiliation, opium war, Japanese invasion, et cetera. America thinks it runs the world and wants everybody to fall in line behind it." To use the big Brzeziński's metaphor, we have tectonic plates crashing between two philosophical systems at the head table of the G20, that used to be the G7. We are in a situation where you can't even play game theory with different philosophical systems, because you're projecting things onto your counterpart that may never have been in their imagination or in their training.

So you've got this instability, what I'll call the Bismarck playbook, you've got the end game of climate and then you have this tension that centers on US, China, but we could bring... Why didn't Russia, after the deescalation, the end of the Soviet union, and I know you've worked a lot there, so I don't know the answer to this at all, but why didn't Russia get the equivalent of a aid program to integrate them into the EU, regain prosperity, dignity through that? And I'll ask you question, is the political economy of the military industrial complex, a little bit of the evil that hides inside this dilemma of danger?

So there's a lot of intertwined issues there. And let me start with the very specific issue of climate change and the energy transformation that we know we need. We need to move to a zero carbon energy system. And that requires actually a lot of long term thinking and a lot of international cooperation. So every day in the context of the Ukraine war, I'm asked by somebody and it happened again this morning, what's the implication of the war for climate change? In other words, you see Russia cutting off or threatening to cut off natural gas to Europe or Europe putting on sanctions on oil and gas imports from Russia. Will this accelerate the energy transition? And the answer is basically, no, because it may change the calculus in the very short term, it's actually opening up more coal mines again or pumping more gas and oil to make up for what has been lost from Russian supplies.

Maybe by raising the price of oil and gas on world markets, it's making some new solar projects more economical and financial, but all of that misses the main point, which is that the real changes we need are long term strategic changes in the energy system. And that requires a stable, peaceful, cooperative environment. Even renewable energy to be efficient and effective needs to cross borders. It needs to be regional, even globally connected in some ways, maybe in the new hydrogen economy, we can't do this if we're in conflict. We won't do this if we're in conflict. So this is the first point that almost everything of real value for development and what we now call and should call sustainable development, meaning economic development that is also socially, just and environmentally sustainable, requires a long perspective. If you have a short perspective because of huge uncertainties, because of war, because of conflict, then you can't accomplish anything real of the transformations that we need.

You can improvise. You can maybe keep your footing in the short term, perhaps, but the truth of the matter is, real development of any kind requires years, even decades of hard, continuous work. Educating children, building infrastructure, cooperating across river sheds, building power transmission grids that are again, transnational. And that is a long term cooperative effort that depends on peace. And we're not getting there right now, partly because our mindsets really are wrong. And unfortunately, what I have invade against in the US context is the idea which is very popular. It's in every speech of us leaders, that the world is safe when the United States leads the world. So primacy or what the political scientists call hegemony is really built into the American thinking. I think Henry Luce did an unfortunate thing to America when he, in 1941, christened this as the American century, is a great turn of phrase, by the way. So inspiring.

And so ennobling, but it actually basically went to the heads of the permanent state that they took it literally. This is our century. In the past it was Britain's century, in the industrial age of the 19th century, or it was the Mongol century, or it was the Roman centuries. Now it's our century. What a dangerous way to think about things because you get way overstretched, you act provocatively without even attempting to understand the other side. And that unfortunately, is so much of what happened in Europe after the 1990 remarkable transformation. And as you know, I was there. I was physically present in de Kremlin in December 1991. You couldn't even believe. I could not believe that. And especially you'd appreciated a kid from Detroit sitting in the Kremlin in this huge office and who works in the far door, Boris Yeltsin.

And he walks across the room, and he sat down right in front of me because I was leading the delegation. And he said, gentlemen, because it was all men. He said, "Gentlemen, in the next room is the leaders of the Soviet military. And I have just agreed with them to the disillusion of the Soviet union." I heard literally those words. Yeah. Wow. Is exactly right. It was weird. No. So I thought... And I had been working in the Soviet Union before that. I was told, I don't know if it's true, that I was the first person to brief the ghost plan leadership in its entirety, on the top floor of ghost plan, just outside of Red Square in 1990 to the politburo leader who headed ghost plan on the transformation to a market economy.

And they were taking notes of 50 Soviet leaders on the other side, all with notebooks open, taking copious notes about market economics. But the fact of the matter is Gorbachev and Yeltsin, wanted a common home. Gorbachev, who I regard as the greatest statesman of our age. And who's reviled in Russia for having lost the Soviet Union and for inflation and everything else, he's the greatest statesman of our age, because he understood that what we needed was peace rather than a cold or hot wars. And he was ready to even let the system fall rather than shoot people to "save the old system." But his idea, which I know was a common home from Rotterdam to Vladivostok, that we have a common European home. I believed it. I went to work for his team in 1991, promoting what we called the Grand Bargain working with Graham Allison, who was then head of the Kennedy School at Harvard and Stanley Fisher and others.

And we recommended a significant financial assistance program to the Soviet Union to support its economic and political reforms. What was the White House response? Complete and yet nothing. [inaudible 00:18:18] not anything we're not doing this. Okay. That was a disaster for... The failure of Western support definitely undermined Gorbachev. Yeltsin emerged after the attempted push against Gorbachev which was in the summer of August 1991. And then I was contacted by Yeltsin's economic leader, Yegor Gaidar and I came to Moscow, and Yeltsin said to me and said to others, "I wanted normal country. I want a democratic country with the market economy. And I want normal relations with the world." I said, absolutely wonderful. This is exactly what we want. And Gaidar, who was then the acting premier of Russia, which was about to become the sovereign country, was meeting with the G7 finance deputies in November 1991.

And Russia was running out of foreign exchange reserves. This was a fulminant financial crisis. So I knew a lot about financial crises and their history and their resolution, and worked with Poland a couple of years before. And I suggested to Gaidar, well look, tell the US and the other six deputy finance ministers, you need a stand still on the debt payments because you're running out of reserves and Russia is about to become an independent country and we can't have a financial collapse. And he came out of the meeting, just absolutely action faced. He said, they wouldn't even consider it. They said, you have to pay to the penny. We will not allow anything right now. We're not authorized to allow anything, we will not allow anything, you continue to pay. Russia ran out of reserves at the beginning of 1992, as Yeltsin came to power.

In other words, a fulminant financial crisis. I couldn't believe it. I spent two unbelievably frustrating years trying to get the US and the IMF to do something and they wouldn't do anything. And Larry Eagleburger who was acting secretary of state explained to me at one point said, Mr. Sachs, it's not even about what you're advising, even if I agreed with it, it's not going to happen. And he said, this is an election year, it's not going to happen. And the truth is, this didn't determine all the future, but God, did it show an attitude of obtuseness in the United States. And I didn't appreciate then that Cheney and Wolfowitz were working on their great NeoCon illusions that now were the sole superpower. Now we get to do what we want, and they really were working on the next wars because they were going to take away every Soviet ally or Russian ally in the middle east, knock out Libya, Syria, Iraq.

This was a plan already from the early 1990s, according to Wesley Smith. And I didn't know it at the time. I just couldn't believe, here we are this historic moment, a chance to cooperate and no, we're not going to cooperate. We're going to be the sole superpower. And I just found that obtuseness year after year from the US, and by the end of the 1990s, I basically had, had it because I had seen the US now from all sides, I had seen it from the Latin American perspective. I had seen it from the central European perspective. I had seen it from the Russian perspective. I had seen it from the Indonesian perspective in 1997. We just were not a cooperative country that aimed to work with other countries to solve problems. We were the unipolar, great power of the world. We were arrogant and we were not paying attention to what other countries said.

And this manifested itself in a number of financial debacles of these countries that had big effects on the world. It also manifested in what brings us to the war in Ukraine today, though, this is a very unpopular view. It's right. And that is NATO enlargement. What John Mearsheimer has said is right. Kissinger said it. And so many other wise people, George Kennan said it in 1997, don't do this NATO enlargement, it'll lead to a new cold war. Now we have a hot war. The secretary of defense under Clinton was deciding whether to resign or not. When he learned that Clinton indeed would go ahead with NATO enlargement because, Bill Perry, who was the secretary of defense said, look, we're starting to improve relations with Russia. Do we really need to risk that right now by peremptory moves of NATO enlargement, especially since unequivocally, both the Germans and the Americans had promised Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, no enlargement in return for German reunification.

Then we lied about it. Well, it's not in writing. We brought out all our lawyers, but good historians know that those commitments were made. And we just want to deny that. And given the predominance of US government in our media, you can tell any story you want. This is absolutely true, but the long and the short of it, Rob, is that NATO enlargement started. We weren't giving any financial help. We were plotting wars against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Assad, all the allies of the former Soviet Union. And then of Russia. Russia has military naval base in Syria. So Assad would be our target and so forth. No cooperation other than superficial. And in the 1990s, the NATO enlargement started. And then during George W. Bush... Well, actually Clinton did something that in retrospect, we didn't even see the significance of, but it was hugely significant and misguided.

And that was the war against Serbia in 1999, to force Serbia to give up Kosovo. So there was a rebellion of Kosovar Albanians or Albanian Kosovars, I should say, in Serbia. And the US took sides and said, let them break away. And when Serbia said, no, they're part of Serbia, which is the normal way that diplomacy works, the US bombed Belgrade for several weeks. And we set up the precedent that if you want a breakaway state or you want to weaken the other side, just go bomb them. And then when Russia says, well, when we do this, we're called the crime of humanity, but when NATO does it, that passes as defending freedom fighters. So isn't there no standard or a double standard, but just to carry on to the current day, in the early 2000s after the Belgrade bombing, and then after 9/11, of course, Bush pushed the enlargement of NATO to I think, seven countries under his watch. An extraordinary increase of the number of countries, the Baltic States to begin with the Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, if I remember correctly, all during Bush's watch.

And then to the shock of the Europeans in NATO in 2008, he said, Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. And just take a look at a map. And I encourage everybody to take a look at the map of the Black Sea. What was NATO's idea? What was the US strategic idea? The US strategic idea was basically to own the black sea for NATO, because you'd have Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and where's Georgia all the way over on the Eastern side of the Black Sea, suddenly is going to be a NATO country, whereas NATO was originally to defend against an invasion by a now defunct non-existent country in Western Europe.

So suddenly, it is an expansionary force moving straight across the Black Sea. It reminds me a lot of the Crimean War of the 19th century. Who controls the Black Sea? And well, one thing has led to another and we have the war in Ukraine. And if in our media you say, the United States played a provocative war. You're immediately targeted. Oh, you're just purveying Putin's propaganda. Well, this is really nonsense. We need a serious discussion, some context, some history, and we should not have pushed NATO right up against Russia's edge and right around the encirclement of the Black Sea. But we did so, and now we're also paying consequences for this, but especially Ukraine is paying consequences for this.

Yeah. I remember some of my teachers at MIT in that arms control disarmament. Once, this was years after I was a student, but I ran into Bill Kauffman and I said, this doesn't feel like game theory to me, it feels like the chain store paradox. Which is, you never should engage in each of these things, but you act like you got to do it to show your tough to the next three episodes, but with consequences being so dangerous, first with regard to nuclear war, and now with regard to climate, this is madness, and this is not leadership. Why are leaders so afraid of our population at this juncture that they have to put on this ritual of toughness, as opposed to doing what needs to be done?

Did you play the game of risk as the board game risk? Okay. So the board game risk really is a marvelous model of how Washington thinking is, you have the map of the world and the aim of the game is to have your piece on every space of the world. And as you move forward, if you're successful and your armies are advancing into new territory, every new territory you have has borders with the enemy. And suddenly, every new border becomes the conflict zone. Every new border becomes vital for your national security. And so you have to have every space on the board, or suddenly you're at risk. Now, American strategists behave this way. I think it's mind boggling because we shouldn't be playing a game of risk where you're trying to conquer the world, but this is the American strategist approach.

And a good example of it is the Solomon Islands, tiny islands, 3,200 kilometers off the coast of Australia that had the audacity to sign a security pact with China. And suddenly, the United States and Australia are in a tizzy. How dare they? This is a threat to security. And you hear the voices in the US Congress completely unacceptable that there's a security pact because you give China one inch, they'll take the world. But when the United States says, well, NATO should enlarge to Georgia and Ukraine and Russia says, no, that's a security concern. We laugh. We say, why is it a security concern? We're peace loving, we're wonderful. And that's their choice. That's not our choice. We didn't say, well, that's the Solomon Islands choice. We dispatched the deputy of the national security council to Asia on an urgent mission to express the US displeasure at the Solomon Islands decision to enter this pact with China.

So much, Rob, comes from the unwillingness to really have rules that apply to yourself as well as to others or to think empathetically, what is the other side thinking? And it comes back by the way to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I think we should talk about that because it's absolutely relevant. When Khrushchev put the nuclear or the atomic weapons in Cuba, all of Kennedy's advisors, except one, except Adlai Stevenson, said from the start, you must attack and take them out. We need a military operation. Many things can be said about that. But I think the bottom line is it would've started world war III, because the CIA had every fact wrong. It thought that the missiles were not yet operational. It completely underestimated roughly by a factor of seven, how many Soviet troops were actually in Cuba? How many would be killed in a military operation? And so forth.

Kennedy did a remarkable thing. He kept asking one question, what is in Khrushchev's mind? What is he thinking? In other words, Kennedy behaved empathetically. It didn't mean he sympathized with Khrushchev he was thinking, what is Khrushchev thinking? What is his point of view? Does he want war? What is he trying to prove? Kennedy had to learn actually the details that there were US missiles in Turkey. What are they? Why are they there? Who put them there? And so on. But by the second week of the crisis, Kennedy realized Khrushchev didn't want war, but he did want to put America's face in it because the US had its Turkish missiles. Its missiles in Turkey pointed right on the border of the Soviet Union. The US had invaded Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation and so forth. Kennedy realized, you know what? We got to get out of this by a compromise. You remove your missiles. We remove our missiles. We commit never to invade Cuba again.

And that's how the crisis was resolved. It wasn't, we demand victory because Khrushchev has done the most dastardly deed. So we must defeat that man, which is the rhetoric that we have today. Must defeat Putin with his 1,600 active nuclear warheads. We must defeat Putin. This is mind boggling that even on an anniversary like this 60 years anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we're not taking care to learn the real lessons of how you diffuse a crisis. And you start with empathy. You say, if we care about the Solomon Islands, maybe Russia cares about Ukraine and Georgia in the same way. Maybe we shouldn't be quite so provocative. Maybe we shouldn't be talking about humiliating, defeat and so forth. Or maybe we shouldn't be saying, this is the worst crime in modern history when the United States has engaged in so many wars of choice. And maybe we should find a way for both sides to stand down.

Yeah. Well, I see, I remember reading Daniel Ellsberg's book, The Doomsday Machine, about that there were many nuclear weapons inside of submarines off the coast of Cuba. And we started dropping depth charges on them, but for... I can't remember the gentleman's name, who overruled firing the missiles. They were terrified. They were underwater and the death charges were going off trying to essentially killed them all and drown them all.

And this guy wouldn't allow the missiles to be shut, but it's that close. It's that close to extermination.

So reading list for everybody listening, Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine and Martin Sherwin, Gambling With Armageddon, which is the finest book ever written about the Cuban Missile Crisis. And Martin Sherwin, tells this story that you're so importantly referring to Rob, and I think it has many lessons, but what happened is even after Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed on the way out, a disabled Soviet submarine in the Caribbean that was out of radio contact. So it had no news, was disabled, it was overheating. It needed to surface just to breathe. Sailors were fainting and it started to surface and a jackass in the US Air Force, instead of dropping depth charges, dropped live hand grenades on the submarine as a joke. And he's, we'll scare the hell out of them. So the commander of the vessel ordered a nuclear tipped submarine to be put into the... Nuclear tip torpedo to be put into the Torpedo Bay.

And called for its launch. And it happened by coincidence that a Soviet party official, a communist party official, was on that vessel named Antipoff. And he had the ability to override the order of the skipper of the submarine. And he said, no, we're going to surface. We're not going to fire this. And under US military doctrine, described by Ellsburg and by Sherwin, if the US was attacked by a nuclear weapon, even a nuclear tipped submarine, our military doctrine said we would unleash the full scale response of a complete attack on the Soviet Union, China and all of the other countries of the Soviet system.

And the estimate was 700 million dead. But what they didn't know was about nuclear winter, because the such an impact could have ended human life on the planet. We came within seconds of this. We're stupid. If we think that things can't get out of hand. Today, I read about a US general saying, well, we may need to break the Soviet blockade of the port of Odessa to let Ukrainian grain supplies. I'm sick of these generals telling us about things that are so unbelievably risky without a proper public debate and understanding because we could end up in nuclear war. And this is mind-boggling that we are having general opine on these kinds of military operations, which would be tantamount to direct US war with Russia in this kind of way.

And you're talking about the extermination of life on earth. These are not rumors. I've seen in nature and science magazine studies of what happens to the upper atmosphere, if there's a nuclear exchange. And I encourage many people now, I've been doing a little bit of work with a group called the Quincy Institute, Andrew Bacevich and hard tongue in this group and exploring some of the ramifications for how our military decisions are being made. And it's really quite haunting to try to understand this dynamic as having anything to do with representing the wellbeing of America or mankind.

I learned in thinking about American history and politics, which I've been doing pretty much nonstop for 50 years now, it turns out the president's main job in the world is to keep a foot on the brake of the US military machine, because it's like those old cars that are poorly tuned, that though they're a neutral, they're always revving forward and they're always jumping. You take your foot off the brake, the car jumps forward and good presidents, great presidents have been the ones to have the foot on the brake. Like Kennedy, had the foot on the brake in October 1962. Johnson, did not have the foot on the brake and we escalated in Vietnam. We know that Bush, I don't even know if he was in the driver's seat, much less having a foot on the brake, but we went to so many wars. Obama, was no good at this either. So this is a real question...

It's a systemic process. Yeah.

It is like the game risk. You're always looking, oh, we're in Romanian and Bulgaria, we're at risk unless we're also in Ukraine. So we better expand. Well, then there could be losses in the Eastern Black Sea and the Caucasus. So we better expand to Georgia, et cetera. Or the Solomon Islands or what we're doing in East Asia and just so much chit chat about war with Taiwan and US war with China and Biden piping off and so forth. All of it is provocative. All of it requires actually, our good luck that a president says, no, we're not going farther. Korean war again, had MacArthur had his way, he would've invaded China. We would've used nuclear weapons at the time, Truman, his right decision, no, stop. He had to fire his top general. This is really the job of the American president because the underlying revving machine doesn't have a natural stopping point.

I remember, the late Chalmers Johnson was a good friend of mine, and I was doing a lot of work in Japan at the time, but he was working on the books like Blowback. He wrote that trilogy about the dangers that foreshadowed the attack of 9/11. Saying if you're aggressive, you are going to have these consequences putting the American people at risk. But let me shift Jeff, as we're coming down the home stretch to the relation of all of this to budget and the wellbeing of America.

What concerns me is at the level of medical care, the OECD data shows that America per capita spends more than twice the average in the OECD to have some healthcare system that is ranked 38th in the world by the WHO. The second dimension is, we have a baby boom creating a demographic bulge where elder care is going to be a priority. We are going through technological transformation that requires transforming the education system towards knowledge intensive things. What was his name, Sir Ken Robinson, the most famous TED talker of all time, how schools kill creativity. We got to change that. That involves investment. Now, we've got this military urge and climate transformation.

I guess I worked on the Senate Budget Committee under Pete Domenici, and I'm thinking, how are we going to get all this stuff done if we keep playing these aggressive military games? And how are we going to harness the political economy? I always laughed, Domenici said to me one time, well, you're an economist, you know that thing called Say's law? I said, yeah. He said, how supply creates its own demand? I said, yes, Senator. He says, well, you watch every year when we put up the budget about the time that the military budgets come up, you're going to see all kinds of news about how dangerous the world is.

They're using fear to create their own demand. And Adam Curtis, the BBC documentary, he created a series, a three part series that you can watch for free on thoughtmaybe.com. And it's called The Power of Nightmares. And so Jeff, I'm loading you all up, but you can't sit there and be... How would I say, self righteous budget hawk, tolerate a military industrial complex and spending 22 times what any other country is. Neglecting older people, neglecting young people and letting our healthcare system cost twice what it should. And with all the discord of not reconciling those things, the Bismarck playbook comes back into center stage.

Well, one of the expressions of Joe Biden that I really like though, I haven't heard it from him recently, for an obvious reason. He said, don't talk to me about your values. Show me your budget. And I'll tell you your values. And what he means by that is where you put your money, that's what counts in the system. And the United States has really messed up the budget. It spends far too little on many areas like education, like wellbeing of children, it spends far too much on other areas like the so-called modernization of our nuclear fleet arsenal, when we should be negotiating long term nuclear disarmament. And in general, our budget is a mess. As you say, also, the way we organize key parts of the economy like healthcare, is to give private monopolies to a crucial sector, ending up overpaying roughly by a factor two for our healthcare, we spent almost 20% of GDP on healthcare compared to roughly 10% of GDP in our pure countries.

So I've written a number of books, The Price of Civilization being one of my favorites, about what a budget would look like for a civilized country and interestingly, and one of the better parts of a speech that secretary of state Antony Blinken just gave about US approaches to China. He said, the real approach is we need to invest in ourselves. We need to strengthen our capacities in science, education, our wellbeing at home, because that's what makes us the competitive model vis-a-vis, the rest of the world, including vis-a-vis, China. And that's true, but we're not doing it. And we have lost the budget debate and the budget narrative in the last two years. Biden came in with the idea of a package to build back better. It did not appear. What happens in the United States is essentially, key sectors are in the hands of powerful lobbies and Military Industrial Complex is one of them. Big Oil is another or Fossil Fuel Industry is another.

The healthcare sector is a third. Those are favored by the budget. They are favored by regulation and areas that don't have such powerful lobbies. Don't see the light of day. And in general, the United States under taxes even though we're told all the time that were being crushed by taxes, the total government revenues in the United States for federal state and local are about 30% of GDP of national income, but in Northern Europe, which ranks much better in healthcare and longevity in many quality of life indicators, about 45% of GDP. So the fact of the matter is the budget's a mess and what founded for Biden in the end, why didn't his package go through because nobody wanted to pay for it with taxation. And it all unraveled when Senator Sinema said, I don't want to have a rise of the corporate tax rate.

And Manchin said, I don't like that billionaire tax. And we ended up with nothing. Biden, ended up empty handed, ineffective politics, by the way. So I think a president ought to be able to keep a couple senators in the fold and he failed to do so. And that's part of his job also is to know how to twist arms or cajole or give whatever side payments for new projects in West Virginia, you get something done, you make a deal, but he could not make a deal. He failed on that. So we have nothing. So we have a budget mess.

And by the way, a budget mess also with a mountain of debt, now 100% of GDP, of public debt, that's actually consequential with interest rates going up, the burden of that debt is also going to be quite significant. We need to raise some taxes and we need to restructure what we spend, but we're a blocked political system. So we are not showing a way forward on this and I, not holding my breath. Nothing's going to happen. Probably, the Democrats are going to lose one or both houses of Congress in the fall. If that happens, I would guess there would be no significant budgetary reform or action until 2025.

Yeah. Well, Jeff, I mentioned at the outset that you and I grew up in Detroit, and I remember one of my father's friends said to me, Detroit is the place that America divorced because they wanted to believe in the American dream. And when we had our stresses in the 60s and 70s, things like Tom Sugrue book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis in Detroit, he said, they'd had the voting rights act and the civil rights act and all the Democrats in the south were afraid to vote, to support the transformation of a black majority, black government, meaning Coleman Young as mayor.

So we got divorced from... We were no longer America. We were a bad example and you and I have done work together in Detroit and been at numerous meetings. And I often think of the pressures that I remember in 1990, there was this headline in CNN, Detroit is the shadow that looms over the future of America. In other words, it's an indicator, it's an early warning, like the Canary in the coal mine of toxic political economy. And so when I thought about talking with you today, I often go back to my musical origins. There was a guy that actually played my senior prom named Bob Seger.

I followed you for many years as a younger person from Detroit, but with family, mutual friends who were guiding me to look at your example, Bob Seger wrote a song that made me think of you. It's called Travelin' Man, and at the end of the song, as he's reflected on all of this, he says, sometimes at night, I see their faces, I feel the traces they've left on my soul. Those are the memories that make me a wealthy soul. Jeff, you give me that kind of inspiration, curiosity. I follow your work. I have, since I was, I guess, a senior in high school. And I think it's amazing how you, after what might call the woundedness of Detroit, all the things you've described today in all your international involvement, remains so constructive. And I'm very grateful for that. Thank you.

Well, Rob, I'm grateful that we do it together and thank you for those lovely words, but we've been on a journey together. And your leadership of INET and constructive new approaches to these issues is essential. So I really thank you and how great to be together with you today.

Yeah. Thank you. And well, how would I say, pause now and wait for the next turn of events in the next chapter, but I look forward to working with you in the days ahead. And once again, I'm very grateful for the example you set for our young scholars and for our country.

To the Editors: James Oakes’s review of my book The Broken Constitution [NYR, May 12] is a case study in whitewashing the central role of race and slavery in the history of the US Constitution. Like other work by Oakes and his fellow hagiographers, the review systematically distorts or suppresses incontrovertible facts of law and […]

I’ve drifted away from Twitter. I’d like to tell you that it was a principled decision—that the format of the site did it, that it’s the vitriol, the shallowness. But it’s not that at all. I’d also like to tell you how I feel a lot better now that I spend less time on the site, but I can’t do that either. (If anything, I feel more out of step with the world now that I’m not getting less of my news through the Twitter firehose.) No, what’s caused me to drift away from Twitter is a sense of the futility of the place. Shadi and I talked about it a little on the most recent episode of the podcast, but I’d like to drill down into it some more. As I said on the episode, logging onto Twitter after the Uvalde massacre was off-putting not because the tone of the discussion was hostile and partisan. It’s that the experience of reading the discussion on Twitter in the tragedy’s aftermath crystallized for me the way in which the dominant mode of discussion on the site—a kind of affirmation-seeking piety—is a waste of time.Matt Yglesias tweeted what arguably was an ill-timed sentiment just as news of the tragedy was spreading:For all its very real problems, one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the contemporary United States of America is one of the best places to live in all of human history and there’s a reason tons of people of all kinds from all around the world clamor to move here.— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 24, 2022

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The Israeli writer and intellectual on ​the stage musical he’s seen four times, embracing a gay crown prince and what we can learn from the World CupHistorian, philosopher and author Yuval Noah Harari was born in Israel in 1976 and completed his PhD at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2002. In 2014 he published Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which went on to become an international bestseller. It was followed by Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016) and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). He lives in Israel with his husband and works as a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. On 2 June Harari will be attending HowTheLightGetsIn Hay, where you can catch him in conversation with Slavoj Žižek.  Continue reading...

To harness emotions into action like gun legislation after horrific mass shootings, we have to act fast.

What will the Supreme Court do after it overturns Roe v. Wade in the next few weeks? Jacky Eubanks, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Michigan’s state Senate, suggested one potential answer in an interview last week: ban birth control.“People believe that birth control—it’s better, like you said, oh, because then you won’t get pregnant and you won’t need to have an abortion,” she told Church Militant, an arch-conservative Catholic media outlet. “But I think it gives people the false sense of security that they can have consequence-free sex, and that’s not true, and that’s not correct. Sex ought to be between one man and one woman in the confines of marriage.” At least two or three Supreme Court rulings prevent her—at least for now—from enacting this vision of American sexual life into law.There is an ongoing debate in legal circles (and sometimes beyond them) over whether the court will overturn decisions on contraception, marriage equality, and other cornerstones of Americans’ sexual freedom after its upcoming ruling in the Mississippi abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Most conservative commentators (and a few nonconservatives) claim that there is no sign from Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that the court will target those precedents. Many on the other side are not persuaded by Alito’s professions of self-restraint.Here is my basic read of the situation: There is a subset of conservatives who would be fine if the court overturns Roe and goes no further than that on other rights. Those conservatives see Roe as a unique evil in the American constitutional firmament, both because they think it was responsible for the deaths of millions of human lives over the past half-century and because it is anathema to their preferred method of reading the Constitution. To them, same-sex marriage, if they still oppose it, does not present the existential life-or-death questions that abortion does and therefore doesn’t need to be overturned.You could read Alito’s draft opinion as taking this approach. After he lists all the various constitutional rights that the court pronounced before and after Roe and Casey, he says that Roe is different. “None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” Alito wrote. That critical moral question, he explained, was the destruction of “potential life” or an “unborn human being” as described by the state of Mississippi. “They are therefore inapposite,” Alito continued. “They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.”But there is also a subset of conservatives who are, for lack of a better term, more ambitious. They want to reverse not only Roe and Casey but all the parallel rulings that shield Americans’ sexual lives from state interference. They see no reason why Alito’s logic—that Roe isn’t “deeply rooted” in Anglo-American legal history and therefore must fall—couldn’t also be used to dismantle the legal scaffolding of the sexual revolution. And with five reliable conservative votes on the high court, they see no real downside to trying. To them, the worst that this Supreme Court could say is no.Let’s start with the basics. “Will the court overturn X?” is really two separate questions: Will someone try to overturn X, and will the court actually agree with them that X should be overturned? There are precedents that the court would happily overturn if it got the chance to do so, but is unlikely to get that chance. Unlike Congress, which can take up an issue whenever it likes, the Supreme Court has to wait for someone to bring a relevant case to it. Korematsu v. United States, which infamously upheld Japanese-American internment during World War II, wasn’t overturned for decades because the federal government didn’t try to intern an entire ethnic group again. The justices finally abrogated it in 2018 only after it came up during the litigation over Donald Trump’s Muslim ban.Loving v. Virginia, which struck down bans on interracial marriages in 1967, should be safe because it falls under the Equal Protection Clause instead of a general right to privacy. But it is also safe for two more practical reasons. First, it is almost impossible to imagine that any state legislature today would try to pass a new law banning interracial marriages or enforce one that might technically remain on the books. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is not a single sitting Supreme Court justice—let alone five of them—who would vote to uphold such a law. So not only would no one actually be able to challenge Loving, but it would never succeed anyway.Beyond that case, however, the prospect for other rights gets a little murkier. What about Griswold v. Connecticut, where the court ruled that denying access to contraceptives to married couples violated the right to privacy? (Eisenstadt v. Baird expanded it to unmarried couples a few years later.) The court relied upon Griswold’s reasoning when it handed down Roe. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru wrote earlier this month that he thinks a move to overturn Griswold would be unlikely and said those who thought otherwise were falling prey to the slippery-slope fallacy. “The campaign against Roe had some advantages going for it that the campaign against Griswold, for example, doesn’t,” he wrote. “Such as existing: There is no campaign against Griswold.”I don’t think that’s quite right. For one, to the extent that there isn’t a separate, well-structured, independent campaign against Griswold right now, that’s because it would by definition have to be a campaign against Roe as well. Any desire to overturn the former would have been subsumed by the higher-order fight against the latter for the last 50 years. There may be conservative legal thinkers out there who want Roe overturned but not Griswold, either for practical or for constitutional reasons. But if there is a single one who thinks Griswold should go but Roe should stay, I have never heard of them, and I would be fascinated to meet them.What’s more, there are also plenty of anti-abortion activists who oppose access to contraception, albeit often to varying degrees and in varying circumstances. They can often be read in the pages of National Review. In 2008, conservative writer Michael New argued that the anti-abortion community should oppose expanded access to contraceptives, even if that access would reduce the number of abortions, because it would damage the movement’s broader aspirations and moral stances.“If sexually active individuals used birth control more often, there would likely be fewer unwanted pregnancies,” he wrote. “However, easier access to contraceptives might encourage even more sexual activity among unmarried people. This is especially the case if contraceptives are made available to populations which include a high percentage of sexually inactive people, such as young teens. It would send powerful messages about the sort of sexual behavior that is both expected and acceptable.”Alexandra DeSanctis, writing for National Review in 2016, argued that many well-known types of contraception actually induce abortions. She distinguished between methods that prevent ovulation or fertilization—presumably condoms, the daily birth-control pill, and the like—and those that prevented an embryo’s implantation and development. IUDs, she noted, either prevent an embryo from implanting itself in the uterine wall or are generally toxic to it. And she argued that emergency contraceptives like Plan B often function like abortion-inducing drugs by destroying embryos, unless taken at specific times in the monthly cycle.Both of these writers were addressing specific claims and arguments during the Obama-era debates over access to contraceptives and religious liberty claims. But they drew upon philosophical positions that go beyond those specific debates. “Embryos are surely humans as much as you and I, who began as embryos just like everyone else,” DeSanctis concluded. “Their lives are surely ended by these methods of birth control; if murder is ever wrong, abortifacient drugs must be wrong, too.” Taken to its logical conclusion, this could point toward weakening Griswold if not outright overturning it.National Review, of course, does not pass laws. But a growing number of Republican lawmakers have either aired criticism of the 1965 ruling or supported legislative measures that could violate it. Some of the state abortion bans under consideration or already enacted could ban some forms of contraceptives like Plan B. And GOP legislators in states like Oklahoma and Texas are already taking steps to restrict abortion pills that could be obtained by mail to circumvent state-level bans. It’s possible that anti-abortion lawmakers and activists will take the jump from mifepristone to Plan B if they philosophically believe that both drugs cause abortions.The Wall Street Journal is also trying to tamp down concerns about Griswold. Its editorial board recently claimed that the court’s conservative justices have always declined to discuss Roe in their confirmation hearings but often expressed support or acceptance of Griswold. This is also not quite right. “My bottom line was that I felt that there was a right to privacy in the Constitution, and that the marital right to privacy, of course, is at the core of that,” the Journal quoted Thomas telling senators in his 1991 hearing. By 2003, when he dissented from the court’s ruling in Lawrence, Thomas stated outright that there was “no general right to privacy” by quoting from another justice’s dissent in—you guessed it—Griswold. I guess he changed his mind.What about gay rights decisions like Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges? The latter decision still comes under fire from right-wing lawmakers like Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Texas Senator John Cornyn. It’s also possible that a state like Texas could mount some sort of defiant stand against Obergefell after Dobbs is handed down, sensing weakness and a moment to strike. Lawrence is not invulnerable either. After the 2003 ruling, some states like Montana repealed their laws that had criminalized same-sex relationships. But more than a dozen states still technically have those laws on the books.When it comes to LGBT rights, the conservatives who believe the court won’t go further rely on political and legal realism. The Atlantic’s David French, a conservative writer and lawyer, noted earlier this month that while parts of Alito’s opinion can be read as hostile to Obergefell, other parts would counsel strongly against overturning it. When the Supreme Court considers whether to overturn one of its past decisions, one of the factors it typically looks at is what it calls reliance interests. If people built their lives around one of the Supreme Court’s rulings, in other words, how deeply would they be affected if it were overturned? Destabilizing the law too often, French noted, can undermine confidence in the rule of law in general.When it comes to abortion, Alito wrote that there were no “concrete reliance interests” for abortion because, paraphrasing Casey, getting one is generally an “unplanned activity” and “reproductive planning could take virtually immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions.” The same can’t be said for the more than 600,000 same-sex couples who are currently wedded in the United States, a not inconsiderable number of whom were able to do so because of Obergefell. “By contrast, there is no way to take ‘virtually immediate account’ of a sudden, state-ordered involuntary dissolution of a marriage,” French observed. “Such a ruling would instantly introduce personal and legal chaos into families across the nation.”I would like to think that the justices wouldn’t be depraved enough to hurl a wrecking ball at hundreds of thousands of lives. Alito’s writing in Dobbs must also be reconciled with his writings in other cases. When the court handed down Obergefell in 2015, Alito wrote a dissenting opinion where he complained that the majority did not care that “the right to same-sex marriage lacks deep roots or even that it is contrary to long-established tradition.” He denounced it again in a 2020 dissent by arguing that the right “is found nowhere in the text” of the Constitution and said the ruling had unfairly harmed Americans with anti-gay religious beliefs. “By choosing to privilege a novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests explicitly protected in the First Amendment, and by doing so undemocratically, the Court has created a problem that only it can fix,” he concluded.It’s notable that Alito framed Obergefell as an unfair deprivation of the American people’s democratic ability to decide major issues, just as he did to justify overturning Roe in his draft opinion in Dobbs. His claim that Obergefell burdened religious freedom is also a worrying one in a court that is hypersensitive to those claims. His odes to American self-government also fall a little flat after he used GOP voter-fraud myths to narrow the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in a major voting rights case last year. In short, Alito only sounds like a Supreme Court justice who will vote to uphold Obergefell if you set aside all but one thing he’s ever written on the subject.Marriage equality currently enjoys broad support in American society, with even a majority of Republicans now holding favorable views of it. But there are also alarming signs of regression on LGBT rights. Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, championed by Governor Ron DeSantis, initially sought to eliminate discussion of sexual identity in the state’s public schools before it was narrowed after public backlash. Multiple Florida teachers have already lost their jobs over their sexual orientation, even though the bill hasn’t gone into effect yet. In Texas and other GOP-led states, school boards and librarians are removing materials aimed at helping LGBT students, as part of a broader right-wing effort to ideologically tilt public education in their favor.My friends and family members know I often write about the Supreme Court, and some of them have asked me what the Supreme Court will do next. Three or four years ago, I would have said, No, these justices aren’t going to come for your birth control or your marriage license or your intimate relationship. I can’t really do that anymore. Maybe they won’t! Maybe Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett will drift toward the line-drawing faction of American legal conservatism. Satisfied with toppling Roe after a 49-year crusade against it, they might turn to other movement priorities like expanding the Second Amendment or strangling federal regulatory power.Or they might not. The court has shifted so far to the right and so quickly that it’s harder to predict what their outer bounds might be. They are certainly not afraid of big, unpopular changes. Dobbs will be a testament to that, and so was the decade-long effort to level the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was once seen as untouchable and sacrosanct in American political life. It’s always possible that, after Roe, the court will then decide to let Americans live their private lives as they see fit. It’s also possible that it’ll find the temptation to join the sexual counterrevolution impossible to resist. If the GOP’s actions over the last few months are any indication, conservatives plan to do a lot of tempting in the years ahead.

A question like ‘Did US intelligence-sharing with Ukraine cross a line?’ forgets the fact that it was Russia that crossed the line – by invading UkraineIn recent weeks, the western public has been obsessed with the question “What goes on in Putin’s mind?” Western pundits wonder: do the people around him tell him the whole truth? Is he ill or going insane? Are we pushing him into a corner where he will see no other way out to save face than to accelerate the conflict into a total war?We should stop this obsession with the red line, this endless search for the right balance between support for Ukraine and avoiding total war. The “red line” is not an objective fact: Putin himself is redrawing it all the time, and we contribute to his redrawing with our reactions to Russia’s activities. A question like “Did US intelligence-sharing with Ukraine cross a line?” makes us obliterate the basic fact: it was Russia itself which crossed the line, by attacking Ukraine. So instead of perceiving ourselves as a group which just reacts to Putin as an impenetrable evil genius, we should turn the gaze back at ourselves: what do we – the “free west” – want in this affair?Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London Continue reading...

From the velocipede to the ten-speed, biking innovations brought riders freedom. But in a world built for cars, life behind handlebars is both charmed and dangerous.

An expert on the white-power movement and the “great replacement” theory puts the act of terror in context.

If the young are taught the terrible falsehood that “racism is and always was the dominant ideology,” then the American experiment will hang by the thinnest thread, and we will have no Lincolns to save it.

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Counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 have limited the average number of Americans killed on U.S. soil from all types of terrorism to 23 people per year, but those efforts have been unable to quell Americans’ unrelenting fear of terrorist attacks. About two-thirds of Americans have consistently reported worrying “a fair amount” or more about a terrorist attack on the United States in polls over the past two decades, and at least one-third have worried that they or a family member will become a victim of terrorism. This outsized fear represents the terrorists’ greatest tool, making millions scared of a few and leading to tremendous attention to terrorists’ words and actions. This fear helped spur the United States to fight numerous costly, largely ineffective wars across the Middle East and North Africa, restrict civil liberties and immigration, massively increase government defense spending amid ballooning deficits, and cause widespread stress and anxiety among the public—sometimes leading to chronic posttraumatic stress disorder.

Nuclear energy may prove to be a case study for the notion that public opinion is often less a driver of public policy than policymaker leadership. A look at public opinion polls shows no great desire for the U.S. to generate more of its electricity from nuclear fission, though favorability has increased. As reporter Harry Stevens recently noted in The Washington Post:  In the United States, nuclear energy’s advocates for decades have been awaiting a renaissance that seems to never come. Public opinion remains mixed, but younger adults are less favorable to nuclear power plants than older people, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.  And a similar, but more recent poll from Gallup:    Yet I think it’s fair to say that the odds of nuclear becoming a greater share of US power production might be on the rise. For example: Los Angeles Times recently reported that California Gov. Gavin Newsom is open to the possibility of delaying the closure of the state’s last operational nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. Newsom’s thinking is related to a Biden administration effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing, “citing the need to continue nuclear energy as a carbon-free source of power that helps to combat climate change,” according to NBC News. And to the extent that what happens in Europe may influence politics here, there have been numerous stories about how meeting climate change goals and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are leading to politicians pushing a nuclear renaissance over there. I think emerging technologies, in particular, is an area where public attitudes — likely influenced by dystopian science fiction — may be a particularly poor guide for policymakers. Another Pew poll, this one from last March, suggests public caution, though also openness, across a range of emerging tech. “Cautious openness” seems like a public attitude politicians can work with as they consider how to both promote and regulate new tech. This article originally appeared in the AEIdeas blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the American Enterprise Institute.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

The topic of ballot harvesting is likely to be the topic of much shouting in coming weeks, so for now I’d just like to get one point on the table: even for those of us who reject former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous stolen‐election claims, there are genuine reasons to be skeptical about this practice. For those coming in late, ballot harvesting or ballot collection happens when one person gathers absentee/mail ballots from many voters — bundling, you might say — for submission at a mail or drop box. This obviously happens on an innocuous micro scale when someone offers to post the completed ballot of a spouse or disabled friend, so it’s usual to define the threshold by reference to quantity (you’re not a collector unless you accept more than, say, three or six ballots) or relationship (it’s okay to do it for family members or persons with a specified incapacity). Restrictions on ballot collection are common around the states. The best known exception is California, which legalized ballot collecting in 2016, upon which Democrats are said to have employed the method quite effectively to increase their vote. Even California, as the Washington Post notes, “has since made it illegal to get paid per ballot collected and for employers to ask employees to bring their ballots into their workplace.” That last point highlights one of the first problems with the practice: the person standing there asking you to hand over your ballot may be someone you have a hard time saying no to, owing to dependence, economic or otherwise. What if it’s a union steward at your workplace, or the political boss of your community, or a patriarchal family member? What if they’re pressing you for a faster decision than you’d prefer to make? There’s a requirement that the envelope be sealed before you hand it over, but that might work mostly as an honor system. If you yield to improper pressure, who’s going to complain to the authorities, or verify a complaint? Contrast all this with the idea behind the secret ballot, the idea of leaving you free to vote your conscience or maybe not vote at all, no matter what powerful people in your life or community may expect of you. As they used to say, it’s just you alone in the voting booth. Next consider the dangers of ballot tampering. Contrary to some imaginings, the abuse that is probably likeliest is not that the collector will switch the choice of party at the top of the ticket. Far harder to police is the practice of “helping” unsophisticated voters by filling in choices for down‐ballot races that they might have left blank on their own. Gaudier abuses, such as the collection of pseudo‐ballots from voters who are dead, never intended to vote, or never existed at all, are not unthinkable — politicos are capable of thinking of anything — but leave a trail that is in principle checkable, differing in this from some of the subtler abuses. All of which will not prevent conniptions in various quarters over a new movie by conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, entitled 2000 Mules, sensationally alleging widespread fraudulent use of ballot harvesting in the 2020 election. I’ll leave the critique of that movie to others — the Associated Press and the Bulwark’s Charles Sykes have already started the job, among others, and more is to come. AP quotes an academic I much respect: “There’s no evidence a massive ballot harvesting scheme dumped a large amount of votes for one candidate into drop boxes, and if there were, it would likely be caught quickly, according to [Iowa law professor] Derek Muller.” Underneath it all, election integrity is a genuine issue with many complications and trade‐offs that should not be written off or dismissed. What a shame it would be were it understood merely with reference to the personal interests of one losing presidential candidate. [This article originally appeared in the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with kind permission from the Cato Institute.        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Noam Chomsky said Ukraine's requests for heavy weapons is a narrative concocted by the "Western propaganda system."

The American economy isn’t looking great right now. U.S. GDP shrank last quarter, despite a hearty showing from American consumers. Inflation is high; markets are down; both wages and personal-savings rates show some troubling statistical signals. Is the U.S. destined to have a recession in 2022? I don’t know for sure. But here are nine signs that worry me.1. Everybody’s stock portfolio is disgusting right now. The Nasdaq is down 30 percent. Growth stocks and pandemic darlings such as Peloton and Zoom have crashed more than twice that amount. Hedge funds that backed these growth stocks, including Ark and Tiger Global, have been crushed. If you look at your 401(k), you’ll see that … no, scratch that, you should under no circumstances look at your 401(k).“The stock market is not the economy” is a thing that some people like to say. But it’s not a very useful mode of analysis. Health care isn’t the economy either, and neither is the gross metropolitan product of Los Angeles. But if either of those things crashed by 30 percent in a quarter, we would all agree that was important. Sharp declines in equity values can trickle down through the economy in all sorts of ways, discouraging investment and spending, or leading to a contagion of layoffs.2. The crypto bubble has popped. Crypto fans had a fun ride, powered by exuberant risk taking in an era of low interest rates. But now the car is coming down the other side of the roller coaster. As fear and interest rates spike, investors are selling off their positions and billions of dollars of value are being erased from the industry. By one estimate, more than $200 billion of stock-market wealth has been destroyed within crypto alone, in just a matter of days. The bursting of the crypto bubble seems quite reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when the Nasdaq crashed and the effects reverberated throughout the economy, wiping out retail investors and pulling down business investment until we ended up in a brief recession. If the crypto bubble popping were the only thing happening right now, I don’t think a recession would be likely. Except it’s not even close to the only (or even the most important) thing happening right now.3. Inflation is very high and broad-based, and that’s bad. This week’s inflation headlines were a bit confusing. The Wall Street Journal reported that inflation had “eased.” The New York Times reported that prices are “rising rapidly,” at a pace close to a 40-year record. Who’s right? They both are. The rate of price increases is declining, but the level of price increases is still extremely high and frustratingly broad-based. Several months ago, some economists offered succor to worried consumers by pointing out that inflation was overwhelmingly about a handful of weird categories, such as used cars. Well, that’s no longer true. Today used-car prices are actually declining as inflation has moved on to service industries, such as restaurants and tourism. This week, gas prices hit their highest average nominal price ever. Inflation is bad for all sorts of reasons. People really hate it: The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment is near its 60-year low.4. A lot of people feel poorer than they did one year ago. Unemployment is very low, and the labor market is tight, which means workers can easily quit jobs and take new positions to make more money. (This trend is sometimes confusingly referred to as the “Great Resignation.”) That’s a nice situation. But inflation is rising every month, and raises rarely come more than once a year. That means “real,” or inflation-adjusted, wages are actually declining. Worse, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve, wage growth is starting to level off, even as inflation continues to march on. This isn’t a tenable situation.5. Savings are falling, and debt is rising. From 2020 to 2021, the U.S. government sent most American households several thousand dollars in checks to get them through the pandemic. With much of the economy shut down, many Americans held on to that stimulus cash, and the personal-savings rate soared to a 60-year record. But now Americans have spent just about all that cash, and the personal-savings rate has fallen to below its 2010s average. During an unstable moment for the economy—with markets collapsing, and inflation rising, and the Federal Reserve slamming the brakes on the economy—the typical household doesn’t have much in the way of protection. Instead consumer debt is breaking new record highs.6. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes are already causing mayhem. One of the Federal Reserve’s mandates is to keep inflation around 2 percent. Well, so much for that one. Inflation has skyrocketed past 8 percent, leading the Fed to announce a spree of rate hikes designed to slow down economic activity. In theory, the plan works like this: The Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which makes it more expensive to borrow money for mortgages, cars, and business investments. As a result, investment in all those categories and more declines, and the economy cools off. But here’s the problem. Modern history has very few examples of unemployment this low and inflation this high where rate increases haven’t caused a recession. On the path to crushing inflation, the Fed may destroy trillions of dollars of wealth and economic activity.7. China is a mess. The world’s second-largest economy has had a strange 2022. China’s zero-COVID policies have led to shocking lockdowns in major cities such as Shanghai, freezing economic activity. China is also dealing with a real-estate-investment implosion, falling business confidence, and startling declines in economic activity. Why is this troubling for the U.S.? Because China was projected to account for about one-quarter of global economic growth in the next few years. When China sneezes—or, more apt, when Chinese officials forcibly quarantine anybody who sneezes—the world could catch a cold. The U.S. might have been in a strong position to deal with a Chinese slowdown if its other trading partners were all doing well. But they’re not.8. A recession is coming for Europe. The U.K. economy is shrinking, and the central bank says inflation will exceed 10 percent this year. War in Ukraine has sent energy prices skyrocketing throughout Europe, and most economists believe that the continent’s economy will contract this year. Europe seems very likely headed toward both stagnation and inflation—the dreaded combination that, 50 years ago, gave birth to the awful term stagflation. If Europe shrinks while Chinese growth decelerates, American exporters will have a hard time contributing to growing GDP.9. Oh yeah, it’s still a pandemic. Restaurant activity and airline travel are nearly back to their pre-pandemic highs as most Americans return to something like “normal.” But we don’t know what else the virus and its variants are going to throw at us. Could the next variant be more transmissible and more deadly, and also get around our immunity? I hope not. But these are the 2020s. Anything is possible.

Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard, believes that the eleven slave states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy in 1861 had a constitutional right to do so. That, he says, is what James Madison, sometimes referred to as “the Father of the Constitution,” would have believed. By contrast, […]

The United States still lacks a policy to address the problem of transnational repression.

In a recent speech, the head of the Anti-Defamation League unequivocally equated the two.

Today marks the publication of my new book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, which you will be hearing more about in the coming days.  It is published in North America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and available on Amazon; it was published in the United Kingdom by Profile Books in late March and has been available since then on the Amazon UK website.  Over the coming weeks and months it will be published in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, South Korea, and many other countries. This book is an expansion of an article of the same title that I wrote to launch American Purpose, an online journal dedicated to the defense of classical liberalism.  My UK publisher Andrew Franklin read the article and encouraged me to turn it into a short book, whose results you’re seeing now.I want to begin by defining the sense in which I am using the term “liberalism.”  There are many different uses of this word, several of which are different from my usage of it.I am not using liberalism in the American sense of left-of-center progressive politics.  In the hands progressives, classical liberalism has evolved into something that is often anti-liberal.I am not using liberalism in the European sense of a center-right politics that is pro-free market and socially progressive, exemplified by the Free Democratic Party in Germany.I am not using liberalism, or the term “classical liberalism,” as a synonym for libertarianism, that is, a peculiarly American viewpoint that is hostile to government as such, both in the economic realm and in social policy.  I believe that a true liberal society needs a capable state to enforce laws and deliver necessary services.My use of the term “classical liberalism” is best summed up by the political theorist John Gray, who describes it in the following terms:"Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and society … . It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements."I would further define classical liberalism in terms of the institutions with which it is closely associated, and without which it has no real effect.  The most important is a rule of law that imposes constraints on the exercise of state power and protects a sphere of individual autonomy.  Most successful liberal societies have constitutions that create checks on executive authority like separation of powers, federalism, and press freedoms.Classical liberalism is further associated with a certain mode of cognition, the scientific method, which postulates an objective world independent of subjective human consciousness, that can nonetheless be perceived and manipulated through the experimental method.  This cognitive mode makes possible the technological world that is the enabler of modern economic growth.Classical liberalism as I have defined it is different from democracy, yet closely related to it.  It is possible to have liberal autocracy, like Germany in the late 19th century or perhaps Singapore today.  These are or were countries with a strong rule of law, but that do not hold regular free and fair elections.It is also possible to have illiberal democracies that do hold regular elections, but do not observe liberal constraints on state power. This characterizes Viktor Orban's Hungary, and is the aspiration of populist politicians from Recep Tayyip Erodoĝan in Turkey to Narendra Modi in India to Donald Trump in the United States.That being said, liberalism and democracy are closely associated with one another historically in something we properly label “liberal democracy” that combines a strong rule of law with free and fair elections. Liberalism by itself often produces a high degree of economic inequality, and if unconstrained by a democratic state through regulation and effective social policy liberalism becomes hard to sustain.  I consider social democratic countries like Sweden and Denmark to be fundamentally liberal societies despite the fact that they have expansive welfare states, because they also have a strong rule of law and protect individual rights.Similarly, democracy without liberal rule-of-law constraints often becomes undemocratic, as legitimately elected leaders scheme over time to keep themselves in power regardless of popular will.  This has been going on in Hungary, where Orban’s Fidesz Party has been gerrymandering the electoral system to make it hard for the opposition to win power. Something similar is happening in the US as Republican state legislatures seek to manipulate the way that votes will be counted in future elections.Liberalism and Its Discontents is a defense of liberalism rather than democracy in the first instance because it is liberalism that has been most immediately challenged in the present-day world. Vladimir Putin in a well-publicized 2019 interview with the Financial Times asserted that liberalism had become an obsolete doctrine.  Democracy by contrast continues to be almost universally legitimated principle, even if not put into practice; both Russia and China claim that they are in fact more genuine democracies than countries that hold regular elections.If you want to read more about why liberalism has been attacked from both the right and left in recent years, please purchase and read Liberalism and Its Discontents.

A new study in the journal Pediatrics is being propelled by the media as evidence that few children change their minds after socially transitioning.  The study followed roughly 300 children who had socially transitioned to live as the opposite sex. (Nonbinary and third genders were not as popular five years ago, when study data were first being collected, so these children had transitioned to live as either female or male.) At enrollment, they were between the ages of 3 and 12 years old, and approximately 12% had begun puberty blockade prior to beginning the study.   About 7% of the children changed their gender identity at five years post-social transition. An example of a change would be returning to living as his or her birth sex or deciding to live as nonbinary. In some cases, children changed their minds more than once.  For example, after the initial social transition to live as the opposite sex, some children decided they were nonbinary, then decided they were, again, the opposite sex. Another child decided, after the initial social transition, that they wanted to live as their birth sex before changing their mind and identifying as nonbinary.  Of note, these children displayed significant cross-sex preferences and identification, but the study didn’t assess whether they met the criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria because many parents in the study didn’t believe such a diagnosis was "ethical or useful." Parents of these children also had "disproportionately higher income and went to college at higher rates than the general population." Take from that what you will about their politics.  The most pressing question in my mind is, why would a parent support a child’s gender transition if it hasn’t been deemed medically necessary?  Allowing children to partake in cross-sex interests doesn’t require them to live as the opposite sex. Young children also don’t have an accurate understanding of what it means to "become" the opposite sex. A nonbinary self-identification can stem from this confusion.  As a result, we can’t extrapolate these findings to children who are gender dysphoric, who are statistically likely to desist. We also can’t ascertain much about children presenting with rapid-onset gender dysphoria, as this is an epidemic primarily occurring among girls and young women, and most of the children in the current study were born male. State legislation pertaining to childhood transition should consider this when making determinations about policy.  Dr. Debra Soh is a sex neuroscientist, the host of The Dr. Debra Soh Podcast, and the author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society.  © 2022 Washington Examiner   

In the two years since she caught the coronavirus, 38-year-old Jessica McGovern has cycled through “well over 100 drugs, supplements, and therapies” to try to keep her long-COVID symptoms at bay. In almost all cases, she told me, the interventions were to no avail: Exhaustion, weakness, and aches still lashed her to the couch; she still felt suffocating chest pain that worsened when she inhaled; her upper body was still haunted by a sharp, staticky sensation that reminded her of running hot water over frozen hands. McGovern would fall asleep in agony, then dream of more agony.Then, around the start of April, she began a five-day course of Paxlovid, Pfizer’s antiviral pill. By her second day on the drug, McGovern “could feel the messaging in my body shifting.” Four weeks later, her fatigue, aches, and labored breathing remain. But the screaming, nerves-on-fire pain that gripped her body for two dozen months “is basically gone,” she told me. She’s recovered some mobility. She’s spending more time with her three young kids. A flutist for nearly three decades, she’s playing her instrument again after a two-year hiatus, “which feels incredible,” like reclaiming a shade of her former self.To date, no established treatments exist for long COVID. But in recent weeks, a smattering of long-haulers—McGovern among them—have been surprised to feel their sicknesses subside after taking Pfizer’s new drug. The case for treating long COVID with antivirals is far from open-and-shut. But should these anecdotal reports augur a flood of similar data, Paxlovid might offer a surprisingly straightforward fix to one of the pandemic’s biggest puzzles. Long COVID is so ranging, so diverse, so capable of wreaking havoc on a multitude of tissues that treatment, for many, will undoubtedly require the rehabilitation of many bodily systems at once. Maybe, though, for a subset of long-haulers, a few days of antiviral pills could be all it takes to rev the healing process into gear.[Read: The pandemic after the pandemic]That Paxlovid may quench anyone’s long-COVID symptoms is itself a bit mysterious: The drug works best when delivered fast and early, futzing with the virus’s ability to xerox itself inside human cells and making it easier for the immune system to jettison the bug. But long COVID can take weeks or months to manifest, and hasn’t been proven to have a persistent viral source. Experts still don’t know how common, or lasting, post-pill reprieves might be; they can’t say with confidence why the drug could have palliative effects, or—if said effects are substantiated—which long-haulers stand to benefit most.Even in the rosiest scenario, Paxlovid won’t be a panacea. But if it has a chance of doing something, even for just a fraction of long-haulers, “we have to at least try,” says Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, “because we have nothing else.” Millions of people in the United States alone are estimated to have developed long COVID’s harrowing symptoms since the pandemic’s start; their numbers grow with each additional wave. “This is an intervention that should [have been] under clinical trial yesterday,” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation specialist at Mount Sinai. And yet there are, to date, no well-designed studies investigating Paxlovid’s potential as a long-COVID drug, and none publicly poised to begin.The search for long-COVID therapies has been stymied, in part, by the nature of long COVID. The condition, like cancer, appears to be not a single disease but a category of related-but-distinct syndromes, each of which could manifest with its own set of symptoms, require its own treatments, and stem from a slightly different cause. In some proportion of long-haulers, maybe the majority, the virus is believed to have come and gone, leaving behind physiological devastation—battered tissues, raging inflammation, self-attacking antibodies, discombobulated nerves, a freckling of blood clots. In these cases, experts told me, Paxlovid probably won’t do diddly-squat. But perhaps the drug could help another group of long-haulers, who are thought to harbor hard-to-reach reservoirs of virus that regularly rile the body up.The snarl is that no one has yet provided slam-dunk evidence of these hidden viral caches. Many scientists, including Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki, one of the world’s top long-COVID researchers, argue that strong hints are there: SARS-CoV-2 certainly can stick around in certain people’s bodies for months, and can also mosey out of the airway to colonize other tissues, including ones that certain immune fighters can’t easily access. Researchers have seen traces of the virus’s genetic material and proteins in a mélange of organs, sometimes months after infections begin. But while those fragments could represent active virus, they could also be bits of stray microbial trash. To help clinch the case, researchers would have to recruit tons of long-haulers, guess where the virus might be lurking, and see if they could extract enough of the microbe from that tissue to infect new cells in the lab—studies that are invasive, “long and slow and painful” to get just right, and couldn’t even prove that the virus was causing the symptoms at hand, says Catherine Blish, an immunologist at Stanford.Still, Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch, believes long-term infection is probably “more common than we think,” he told me. People’s lived experiences support that too. Some long-haulers have reported feeling a massive, unexpected upswing in well-being after receiving COVID vaccines—a trend several experts attribute to the shots galvanizing immune cells into finally, finally kicking out remnant virus.The handful of post-Paxlovid improvement stories now emerging echo what other long-haulers felt with the vaccines. A group of Stanford researchers, led by the physician Linda Geng, recently reported that a 47-year-old woman’s long-COVID symptoms—among them, fatigue, insomnia, body aches, cognitive issues, and a racing heartbeat—evaporated after she took Paxlovid for a possible reinfection. “She was able to go back to work, and started exercising again,” Geng told me. A couple of long-haulers being treated at a clinic at UCSF may be on a similar trajectory. Lavanya Visvabharathy, a 37-year-old immunologist at Northwestern University, experienced a bounceback as well. After months of headaches, fatigue, and disturbed sleep, she nabbed Paxlovid at the end of March, and “all my symptoms went away,” she told me. Visvabharathy, who takes immunosuppressive drugs to manage her rheumatoid arthritis, had been repeatedly testing antigen-positive. But after she finished Pfizer’s pills, she saw a negative for the first time since she was infected, in December.Anecdotes and case studies alone won’t be enough. So far, the reports of post-Paxlovid improvements have been too inconsistent, too scant “to gauge what’s really happening,” Angela Meriquez Vázquez, who runs Body Politic, an advocacy group that offers support to people with long COVID, told me. Many long-haulers do not qualify to take Paxlovid, because they haven’t recently tested positive and are not considered at “high risk” of developing severe COVID. Long COVID’s symptoms can also naturally wax and wane, making it difficult to tie relief to a definitive cause. To show with any real clarity whether Paxlovid’s doing what many long-haulers hope, someone needs to test the theory with rigorous clinical trials, ideally with the help of the company that’s manufacturing the drug.Pfizer doesn’t seem actively opposed. The company is “considering how we would potentially study it,” Kit Longley, a spokesperson for Pfizer, wrote in an email, but declined to clarify why the company has no study under way. That frustrates Putrino, of Mount Sinai, who thinks Pfizer will need to spearhead many of these efforts; it’s Pfizer’s drug, after all, and the company has the best data on it, and the means to move it forward. The NIH, whose RECOVER initiative has a budget of more than $1 billion to study long COVID, recently sought proposals for clinical trials of new long-COVID therapies, including, potentially, antivirals—a promising step, Stanford’s Geng told me. But the agency has been sharply criticized for dillydallying in the year-plus since the program launched, and for de-emphasizing treatment-focused trials. And there’s no guarantee that Paxlovid will be among the treatments tested. When asked to elaborate on Paxlovid’s experimental status, the NIH said only that the agency “is very interested in long term viral activity as a potential cause of PASC (long COVID), and antivirals such as Paxlovid are in the class of treatments being considered for the clinical trials.”In all fairness, a Paxlovid–long-COVID trial would be tough. Researchers still haven’t reached a consensus on how to define or diagnose long COVID, or what it means for patients to markedly improve. Drugs against severe disease have an ultra-clear readout: “You count the number of people who end up in the hospital,” says Steven Deeks, a long-COVID researcher at UCSF. Long COVID’s sprawling scope, however, means no single ruler can measure the drug’s potential impact. Many of the experts I spoke with felt a bit daunted by the idea of trying to quantify the disease’s qualitative symptoms pre- and post-Paxlovid. That challenge, they said, could be a stumbling block for any research effort. But JD Davids, the co-founder of the Strategies for High Impact and its National Network for Long COVID Justice, who has long COVID, told me scientists don’t have to look far for inspiration. Researchers have already developed metrics for another chronic illness, ME/CFS (which Davids also has) to rate, for instance, the severity of fatigue, mobility limitations, and pain. “You just have to believe that people can tell you how they are feeling,” Davids said.[Read: Long-haulers are fighting for their future]Then there’s the question of whom to enroll, and how many of them. If only a small fraction of long-haulers are duking it out with persistent virus, “you might not see the benefit” in trials, unless they’re gargantuan in size, says Daniel Griffin, an infectious-disease physician at Columbia. Researchers could hedge their bets by selectively recruiting long-haulers who continually shed bits of virus genetic material in their feces, say, or who only recently developed long-COVID symptoms and might be more likely to have SARS-CoV-2 still inside them. But select the wrong subset, and a trial could tank. Iwasaki, of Yale, wants to explicitly study the drug’s effects in a wide range of people. “The goal is not to cure everyone but understand who benefits,” she told me—and when. In some people, long COVID could evolve from a viral problem into an autoimmune one, making early intervention essential.Paxlovid has baggage too. In recent weeks, some people taking the five-day pill course for new infections have reported a rebound in symptoms and test positivity—a likely indication, UTMB’s Menachery told me, that the pills aren’t sweeping all the SARS-CoV-2 out. It’s still unclear how common the relapses are, and the problem may be cropping up with long COVID too. Alisa Valdes, a 53-year-old writer who has battled more than 220 long-COVID symptoms, “felt normal for the first time in 25 months” after taking Paxlovid in April. “I was skipping, I was jumping,” she told me. “I thought, This is a miracle.” But within a day of the drugs running out, her body was once again aching, feverish, and inflamed; angry red rashes that had disappeared came roaring right back.Visvabharathy, the Northwestern immunologist, told me that a few weeks after taking Paxlovid, she felt some symptoms creeping back as well. A test she took at the end of April also came up positive. Perhaps Paxlovid’s five-day regimen for acute COVID will need to be lengthened in some newly infected patients; long-haulers may require something more extended still. Such a tweak could prompt a slew of safety questions. The original clinical trials turned up side effects—occasional bouts of diarrhea, a nasty sour tang in the mouth—that did not raise huge concerns, but after months of unabating illness, long-haulers’ bodies may not react in the same way to the drugs, especially when dosed on an extra-long course. Paxlovid also interferes with a hefty list of other medications, some of which can’t be paused for extended periods.[Read: Paxlovid mouth is real—and gross]Right now, long-haulers are gambling with all of those question marks as they seek the drug out—some of them through loopholes in the health-care system, with the help of providers sympathetic to their cause. With so few options on the table, people are “itching for any type of treatment,” Body Politic’s Vázquez told me, and some are willing to stomach a bit of risk. But in the absence of real data and rigorous research, and with so many unable to access the drug at all, others are hesitant and confused—and afraid of being once again let down.From the start of the pandemic, skepticism has dogged long COVID and the people who live with it. McGovern, the flutist, spent much of 2020 being repeatedly told that her symptoms were just anxiety, or that she was feeling off because she was allergic to her pet parrots. (She is not.) Attitudes have improved in the years since—but some doctors, once unsure of long COVID’s existence, now struggle to wrap their head around the prospect of out-of-the-box treatments. At one point, I asked McGovern which of the many therapies she’s tried actually helped. “Aside from my family and close friends, you’re the first person to ask me that,” she told me. “I’ve never had a physician ask me ‘What has worked for you?’”This skepticism can extend to research too. Benjamin tenOever, a virologist at NYU, told me that he recently had NIH funding pulled from a project that would have investigated whether antivirals could combat long-COVID symptoms in a hamster model. His contact at the agency said the study had “no merit,” tenOever told me. “They were like, This doesn’t make sense, because why would Paxlovid ever help long COVID? The virus is long gone.” (When I reached out to NIH, Clint Wright, the director of the Division of Clinical Research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, responded that “we can’t comment on research that is not funded.”) Others posited that the possible benefit of antivirals for long-haulers might not feel worth the effort required to prove it: Even if viral persistence plays a role, it may be quite uncommon. Yale’s Iwasaki dismisses this. “Say it’s only 10 percent of patients that respond positively,” she told me. That’s still potentially millions of people in the U.S. alone.America’s neglectful posture on long COVID is choreographed into just about every aspect of what’s left of the country’s pandemic response. Vaccines can’t totally block long COVID, but are being billed, via boosters, as one of the only interventions people need; the CDC’s newest guidelines on masks almost entirely elide the condition’s existence, as it’s not classically considered to be clinically “severe.” Researchers aren’t even sure if early-acting treatments such as antivirals slash people’s chances of getting long COVID, though Iwasaki is hopeful that they do. With so few protections against long COVID available or in use, its burden only stands to grow. Therapies, at least, could finally construct an exit ramp.

A fresh reminder of the dangers posed by a president who didn't understand foreign policy.

The big news in the US Labor Department's April jobs report was that average hourly earnings only increased by 0.3 percent, bringing the annualized rate of growth—once adjusted for compositional changes in the labor force—to 3.8 percent over the past three months. This pace is considerably slower...

If I had to put a name on this era of right-wing Christian politics, it would be “The Great Rationalization.” As the right has become more cruel, malicious, and dismissive of character, some Christian thinkers have been willing not just to excuse this transformation but to affirm it as deeply virtuous.Drill down into any of these rationalizations, and you’ll find the same theme repeated time and again: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Those who don’t understand the present crisis or the necessity of changed tactics are simply not men for the moment.A good example of the genre was published this week in First Things. The piece is called “How I Evolved on Tim Keller,” and its author, First Things associate editor James Wood, makes all the familiar arguments, though more civilly than most. Wood takes pains to compliment and note Keller’s immense and positive influence on him personally and on the church collectively (he calls him a “C.S. Lewis for the postmodern world”), but he goes on to inform us that he has “turned elsewhere for guidance in our contemporary political moment.” In short, it’s because my friend Tim shuns political tribalism (emphasizing a “third way” between red and blue) and strives, in Wood’s words, to be “‘winsome,’ missional, and ‘gospel-centered’” in his approach. Wood says that Tim recognizes “though the gospel is unavoidably offensive, we must work hard to make sure people are offended by the gospel itself rather than our personal, cultural, and political derivations.”Why is this a problem? You guessed it. Times have changed. And after 2016 Wood evolved:At that point, I began to observe that our politics and culture had changed. I began to feel differently about our surrounding secular culture, and noticed that its attitude toward Christianity was not what it once had been. Aaron Renn’s account represents well my thinking and the thinking of many: There was a “neutral world” roughly between 1994–2014 in which traditional Christianity was neither broadly supported nor opposed by the surrounding culture, but rather was viewed as an eccentric lifestyle option among many. However, that time is over. Now we live in the “negative world,” in which, according to Renn, Christian morality is expressly repudiated and traditional Christian views are perceived as undermining the social good. As I observed the attitude of our surrounding culture change, I was no longer so confident that the evangelistic framework I had gleaned from Keller would provide sufficient guidance for the cultural and political moment. A lot of former fanboys like me are coming to similar conclusions. The evangelistic desire to minimize offense to gain a hearing for the gospel can obscure what our political moment requires.Wood claims Keller’s approach was “perfectly suited” for the so-called “neutral world,” but the “‘negative world’ is a different place.” Wood says, “Tough choices are increasingly before us, offense is unavoidable, and sides will need to be taken on very important issues.”There are so many things to say in response to this argument, but let’s begin with the premise that we’ve transitioned from a “neutral world” to a “negative world.” As someone who attended law school in the early 1990s and lived in deep blue America for most of this alleged “neutral” period, the premise seems flawed. The world didn’t feel “neutral” to me when I was shouted down in class, or when I was told by classmates to “die” for my pro-life views. Nor was the world “neutral” for Tim. Last night he tweeted about his experience launching Redeemer church in New York: Timothy Keller @timkellernycRespectfully, when we began Redeemer in 1989 we experienced great hostility. We were thrown out of facilities for our faith. We were mocked in the press. Anyone who thinks Manhattan culture was then "neutral" toward evangelical Christianity is mistaken.May 7th 202269 Retweets1,476 LikesAnd if you want empirical evidence that New York City wasn’t “neutral” before 2014, there was almost 20 years of litigation over the city’s discriminatory policy denying the use of empty public school facilities for worship services. The policy existed until it was finally reversed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015.Even growing up in the rural south, I wasn’t surrounded by devout Christianity, but instead by drugs, alcohol, and a level of sexual promiscuity far beyond what we see among young people today. Where was this idealized past? There may have been less “woke capital,” but there was more crime, more divorce, and much, much more abortion. Moreover, this was happening at a time when Christians’ free speech and religious liberty rights were far less well-established. Speech codes reigned, and in the first 15 years of my legal practice hundreds of Christian student groups faced expulsion from campus. In response, Christians “took sides” on the very important issues of life and religious liberty and not only dramatically transformed First Amendment jurisprudence, the pro-life movement helped dramatically reduce abortion rates until the point where abortion is less common than before Roe.That’s not to say that the world was worse and is now getting better. It’s to say that the narrative of cultural decline is not nearly so simple. The First Amendment is more potent than it’s ever been, yet cancel culture on the right and left are evidence of a cultural retreat from free speech. Declines in divorce, abortion, teen sex, and single-parenting indicate a turn towards more traditional lifestyle choices (including in elite cultural spaces), yet the controversy over transgender athletes indicates that the definition of “man” and “woman” is now subject to furious debate.This complexity applies even to the documented, increasing hostility between America’s competing political tribes. After all, increasing partisan animosity is unquestionably mutual. “They” hate “us”? Well, “we” hate “them” just as much. When it comes to negative partisanship, neither side has clean hands. If we truly live in a “negative world,” then Christians helped make it negative. And because of the partisan press and social media, we’re much more cognizant of each and every outrage and offense than we ever were before. We’re constantly (and intentionally) “revved up” by voices who are invested in teaching us that the end is near and America is on the precipice of extinction. How do we know we’re being artificially “revved up”? The data indicates Americans are simply wrong about their political opponents. We tend to believe they’re more extreme than they really are.It’s important to be clear-eyed about the past because false narratives can present Christians with powerful temptations. The doom narrative is a poor fit for an Evangelical church that is among the most wealthy and powerful Christian communities (and among the most wealthy and powerful political movements) in the entire history of the world.Yet even if the desperate times narrative were true, the desperate measures rationalization suffers from profound moral defects. The biblical call to Christians to love your enemies, to bless those who curse you, and to exhibit the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—does not represent a set of tactics to be abandoned when times are tough but rather a set of eternal moral principles to be applied even in the face of extreme adversity.Moreover, Christ and the apostles issued their commands to Christians at a time when Christians faced the very definition of a “negative world.” We face tweetings. They faced beatings. As a notable piece of evidence of our “negative world,” Wood points to Princeton Theological Seminary rescinding its decision to award Tim its “Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Witness.” (The seminary rescinded the award, but Tim still delivered a lecture.)Imagine trying to even explain this to an apostle. “There’s this famous and influential Christian pastor, and . . .” Paul would stop you right there. That very idea would be novel to him, as would the idea that revoking a prize but delivering a lecture would be evidence of any kind of crisis requiring one to change a “winsome, missional, and gospel-centered” approach to the public square. Paul called Christians to exhibit the fruit of the spirit even when they were being nailed to crosses and clawed by lions. Peter called on Christians to give a defense of their faith with “gentleness and reverence” even when they “suffer for righteousness.”Sadly, this moral analysis is alien to all too many politically engaged Christians. They approach political contests differently from the way they approach their families or even their businesses. They apply an instrumentalist lens that they don’t apply to other areas of life. Is honesty an imperative in business only so long as it “works” to generate a profit or to maintain your employment? Is fidelity an imperative in marriage only so long as it “works” to provide the sense of happiness and sexual fulfillment you believe your entitled to?No, any decently discipled Christian knows that in these vital areas of life, the means are the ends. Even under financial duress or in struggling marriages, Christians maintain honesty and fidelity not because they “work,” but because they’re obeying and glorifying God.But in politics? If we reject lies and liars we might lose, and we believe we cannot lose. If we maintain basic commitments to Christian character we might lose, and we believe we cannot lose. Yet in all of life the command to act justly is inseparable from commands to love kindness or to walk humbly. And the spirit of fear that grips so much of the modern American church might be a reason why so many Christians have scorned civility and decency in the public square, but it is not a justification. It is also clear that Wood (and many others) simply misunderstand Keller’s “third way” approach to politics. Wood says that “it encourages in its adherents a pietistic impulse to keep one’s hands clean, stay above the fray, and at a distance from imperfect options for addressing complex social and political issues.” But this is wrong. Keller isn’t arguing for disengagement. He’s arguing for a commitment to biblical justice, and that both red and blue suffer from profound flaws:Another reason Christians these days cannot allow the church to be fully identified with any particular party is the problem of what the British ethicist James Mumford calls “package-deal ethics.” Increasingly, political parties insist that you cannot work on one issue with them if you don’t embrace all of their approved positions.This emphasis on package deals puts pressure on Christians in politics. For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.I have found this to be true. In the past week I’ve written strongly against Roe and in support of Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion in the pages of The Atlantic, and you should read my inbox. In the past month, I’ve urged Christians to reject the idea that the fight over critical race theory is a religious war—in part because it closes our minds to thoughtful Christian critiques of the church—and you should read my inbox. “Above the fray”? No, not even close. To be committed to biblical justice while also rejecting political partisanship doesn’t put you out of the fight. It instead subjects you to periodic gang-tackling, from both sides of the field. Finally, it’s important to recognize that the “third way” approach represents the humble recognition that Christians can in good conscience (and consistent with orthodox Christian theology) reach different positions on the political spectrum—in part because the answers to America’s social problems are not only hard, they’re extremely complicated. I’m going to show you three charts which demonstrate where members of different American faith groups place themselves relative to the political parties. They were asked to “place yourself, Democrats, and Republicans in ideological space.” As you can see, Black Protestants see themselves as slightly to the right of Democrats, nonwhite Evangelicals see themselves in the middle, and white Evangelicals see themselves as identical to Republicans:The fact that so many millions of believers—people who diligently study the scripture and have deep, orthodox Christian faith themselves—come to competing answers about hard questions isn’t a reason to refuse to take a position. The command to “act justly” remains. But it should reaffirm the necessity of “walking humbly.” Tim has been ministering in New York City for decades. That means he has much more up-close interaction with diverse Christian communities than, say, your typical suburban or rural Evangelical pastor. Prolonged exposure to differing Christian views on contentious issues is and should be a profoundly humbling experience. It constantly reminds you that we “see through a glass darkly” and that our confidence in our own reasoning and ideas is often misplaced. We live in an age of negative polarization, when the cardinal characteristic of partisanship is personal animosity. In these circumstances, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit should be a burst of cultural light, a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times. Instead, Christian voices ask that we yield to that fury, and that a “negative world” is now no place for the “winsome, missional, and gospel-centered approach.” But this isn’t an evolution from Tim Keller, it’s a devolution, and it’s one that’s enabling an enormous amount of Christian cruelty and Christian malice. Wood says “Keller was the right man for a moment,” but he also says, “it appears that moment has passed.” That’s fundamentally wrong. When fear and hatred dominates discourse, a commitment to justice and kindness and humility is precisely what the moment requires.One more thing …It strikes me that a number of readers may have hoped for an analysis of the draft Dobbs opinion today. Quite frankly, I talked about it so much this week, I have nothing left to say. But if you want analysis, I’ve got analysis:Here’s my initial FAQ French Press in response to the leak. Here’s a longer analysis of the Alito draft opinion in The Atlantic.Here I am again in The Atlantic explaining why I don’t think Dobbs threatens gay marriage.Here’s the emergency Advisory Opinions podcast the day after the leak.Here’s another Advisory Opinions podcast answering common questions about the opinion.Here’s this week’s Good Faith podcast focusing on abortion and integrity.That’s not all. There’s a Dispatch Live, a Dispatch Podcast, an Atlantic podcast, and an Economist podcast. I’m tired just linking all that work!One last thing …We’re continuing our walk through Kristene DiMarco’s outstanding new album (I promise we’ll move on soon), but this song is perfect for this week. Enjoy:

The social media platforms that hold and shape our attention need to be governed in the public interest.

A new book anatomizes the moral compromises of the Trump era. What can history do that daily newspapers can’t?

We do not know if Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health represents the current consensus of a majority of the Supreme Court. We certainly don’t know yet if it’s a preview of the Court’s actual ruling. Decisions are not final until opinions are issued, and dramatic history exists of a Supreme Court justice changing his mind on abortion during deliberations. In 1992, The Washington Post reported that Justice Anthony Kennedy initially voted to reverse Roe v. Wade when deciding Planned Parenthood v. Casey but later switched his vote to affirm Roe, “a flip attributed in court circles to liberal constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe’s pulling strings backstage.”Even so, Alito’s draft is consequential. It not only represents a potential preview of one of the most significant Court decisions in a generation, but also articulates a compelling understanding of the nature of liberty and the role of the judiciary in American constitutional law.[Adam Serwer: Alito’s plan to repeal the 20th century]First, it’s important to understand the question before the Supreme Court. It is not “Should American women possess a right to abortion?” but “Does the American Constitution protect abortion rights?” The distinction is of paramount importance. The Court’s job is not to determine which rights we should possess but rather the rights we do possess.A surface reading of the Constitution would indicate an easy answer to the question. Because the Constitution doesn’t even mention abortion, how can one argue that it protects a right to an abortion? Don’t we have to locate the right in the text itself?But the matter is not so simple, and the reason relates to the basic theory of American liberty. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex debate, the quick explanation is that many of the Founders viewed the Constitution as reserving “all rights and powers that were not positively granted to the federal government” to the people or the states. In plain English, this means that the Constitution did not need to spell out our individual rights. They existed unless a constitutional provision declared otherwise.Anti-federalists, however, insisted on the Bill of Rights as a belt-and-suspenders safeguard against federal encroachment. By spelling out (some) of our fundamental liberties, the citizens of the new republic could be assured that the federal government would be restrained. And how do we know that the Bill of Rights didn’t outline all of our liberties? Because the Ninth Amendment specifically states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”In Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court located the right to an abortion in the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment prohibits any state from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Prior courts have used this provision of the Constitution as the textual hook to protect not just procedural rights but unenumerated substantive rights, including rights to interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and contraceptives.In his draft opinion, Alito calls this approach “controversial” (after all, the due-process clause says nothing about substantive rights) but accepts the conceptual approach anyway. He notes that Court precedent has protected “two categories” of substantive rights.The first category is the list of liberties guaranteed by the first eight amendments in the Bill of Rights. That category doesn’t apply to abortion, which isn’t mentioned in the Bill of Rights. The second category refers to those rights “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition” and “essential to our Nation’s ‘scheme of ordered liberty.’”Alito’s opinion represents a thorough dismantling of the idea that—prior to Roe—abortion rights were rooted at all in American history and tradition, much less “deeply rooted.” In fact, the deep roots that exist are of state regulation and prohibition of abortion. The draft opinion concludes with a 31-page appendix listing statutes that criminalized abortion in “all states of pregnancy” when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868.[Rachel Rebouché and Mary Ziegler: There’s no knowing what will happen when Roe falls]The draft opinion also rejects the idea that the right to an abortion is an “integral part of a broader, entrenched right.” Alito distinguishes the long line of cases recognizing the rights to interracial marriage; to obtaining contraceptives; to engaging in private, consensual sexual acts; and to same-sex marriage by noting that abortion “destroys” what Roe and Casey call “potential life” and what the Mississippi law at issue in the current case “regards as the life of ‘an unborn human being.’”It’s the impact on the unborn child that sets apart Dobbs, the case on which Alito wrote his draft opinion, from, say, Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court’s ruling on same-sex unions. Gay marriage involves consenting adults. No unborn child consents to his or her own destruction.The inherent weaknesses of Roe’s approach have long been recognized even by the strongest defenders of abortion rights. In 1992, for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized Roe as a “breathtaking” precedent during a speech at New York University.Her lecture addressed “measured third-branch decision making,” and she spoke words that have proved remarkably prescient. “Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable,” she said. And what was a prime example of a too-swiftly shaped doctrinal limb? Roe v. Wade. “A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day … might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy.”If Alito’s draft opinion answers whether the Constitution does protect abortion, it does not answer whether states should protect abortion. Voices on the right argue that the Constitution should be read to prohibit abortion entirely—and at least one amicus brief made that very argument—but Alito does not go that far. His opinion would leave the ultimate legality of abortion to the democratic process, to state legislatures and to Congress.And that brings us to the final key element of Alito’s opinion. He calls abortion “a profound moral question,” but it’s one that he does not settle. He does not believe that it is the role of the judiciary to settle such questions.Here is where the differences between conservative and progressive jurists are perhaps starkest. Going back to Justice Ginsburg’s 1992 remarks, she argued (quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes) that “judges do and must legislate.” Even though Justice Ginsburg argued for a change slower and more interstitial than Roe, conservative justices such as Alito would still strenuously disagree.Instead, enacting legal change is precisely the role of the people’s elected representatives. Legislation is for the legislature, and if the people of the United States want to create a right to abortion, they have that power. They had that power before Roe, and if Alito’s opinion holds, they will still have that power.

It may have noble aims, but Biden’s new Disinformation Governance Board is just another form of propaganda.

As readers here surely know (and as we’ve covered here repeatedly), inflation is unquestionably the top economic issue in the country right now, and it has been for quite a while. In fact, we’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the first time I dug into the risk of the U.S. economy “overheating” in the months ahead (a piece that, in retrospect, holds up pretty well!). And it seems that not a day goes by that there isn’t some sort of breaking news about inflation in the U.S., whether it’s on new data, Federal Reserve stuff, legislative or executive branch actions, or the political ramifications. On the last two items, in particular, it’s become increasingly clear that rising prices are issue No. 1 for American voters and, therefore, Washington politicians—including the president—already eyeing the November midterms. So why, then, does the Biden administration keep doing things to boost, not mute, inflationary pressures?Inflation Update: Still Frothy Out ThereBefore we get to that, however, let’s briefly recap where things now stand. After several months of uncomfortably high inflation in 2021 deflated summertime hopes that price gains would be “transitory”, the Federal Reserve earlier this year began raising interest rates and just recently signaled that it will not only increase the magnitude of future rate increases (from a quarter point to half a point) but will also begin reducing its “mammoth” $9 trillion portfolio of Treasury and mortgage securities (acquired to implement “quantitative easing”). They’re meeting today to confirm these plans, the goal of which is to temper domestic demand while avoiding a “hard landing” that pushes the U.S. economy into a recession. The balancing act will not be easy.

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We are both intensely “politicized” and incapable of the behavior that was once considered the stuff of real politics.

The US Federal Reserve certainly bears its share of responsibility for the great inflation of the 2020s. But powerful political pressures from the left and overly-optimistic analyses of open-ended debt policy, not to mention genuine uncertainties about inflation and real interest rates, also played a very large role.

Neal Katyal discusses what the shocking leak means for the future of abortion rights in America—and for the Court.

To answer that question, the Lawfare Institute convened a working group of experts to articulate and justify a set of trustworthiness principles—concepts that, ex ante, would justify accepting a digital artifact as worthy of being trusted. Today, the group publishes its report on the subject, and we offer this short-form summary. The task force members included: Paul Rosenzweig, who served as the group’s chief rapporteur; Justin Sherman, who served as assistant rapporteur; Benjamin Wittes, who chaired the task force; Trey Herr, David Hoffman, Herb Lin, Bart Preneel, Samm Sacks, Fred B. Schneider and Daniel Weitzner. 

Maximize transparency—The single greatest engine of trust is transparency. Visibility into the production and the operation of any system (whether technical or not) increases the ability to test a system and verify its operation.
Ensure accountability—Transparency can help users make better decisions, but from a trustworthiness standpoint, it must be paired with accountability. Those who put ICT artifacts into the stream of commerce must be accountable for their trustworthiness. Mechanisms for accountability may vary depending on the artifact, regulatory environment, and context of use, but their absence is a sign of systemic untrustworthiness.
Allow for independence of evaluation—Often the transparency and accountability of a system are self-assessed by the manufacturer and/or designer of the digital artifact, both of whom have a conflict of interest in engaging in this analysis on their own. In general, independent (often outside) evaluation is superior.
Prefer provable analytic means of trust verification over axiomatic, nonverifiable means—As a general matter, trustworthiness assessments that are analytic in nature are superior to those that are axiomatic. We recognize that analytic means of establishing trust are significantly more costly and difficult to implement, but where feasible, they are preferable.

As I write this, the city of Rotterdam is considering a request to dismantle one of its historic bridges to grant Jeff Bezos’s super-yacht (too monstrous for normal ports) safe passage to the Atlantic. At the same time, Amazon workers around the world continue to fight to secure the living wages and safe working conditions they are currently denied. Such juxtapositions are fraught with appalling symbolism—the vulgar display of wealth, the mutilation of national monuments, the outsized influence the rich have over public policy, the gulf that exists between CEOs and their employees. Moreover, Bezos’s wealth doubled to $170 billion during the pandemic, when over 160 million people worldwide were threatened with poverty. This merely reaffirms what we already know: staggering inequality continues to thrive in advanced capitalist societies.This kind of inequality is not news, of course, but we need to be regularly reminded of it. The great chronicler of inequality in our time is the French economist, Thomas Piketty. The author of several tomes, Piketty’s works are not for the weak of wrist: Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) clocks in at 816 pages, while its follow up, Capital & Ideology (2020), breaches 1,000. Heavily graphed and annotated, reading them from front to back is a labor in itself. Volume aside, Piketty’s books are massively popular and widely praised, though one suspects, as with all big and difficult books, that most people have not read them in full, and much of their praise comes in under the pressure of consensus. Fortunately, Piketty’s new book is mercifully brief. Indeed, A Brief History of Equality (at less than 300 pages) is a nice distillation of the “rockstar” economist’s ideas and a good entry point for the uninitiated.Piketty’s research sits at the intersection of history and social science, and his great contribution has been to show that tax records are as important to understanding and learning from history as anything else. In tracking the distribution of wealth since the beginning of the modern era, Piketty’s thesis is elegantly intelligible and empirically obvious: if return on capital consistently outpaces growth, it will invariably lead to a concentration of wealth, thereby producing inequality. The stress here is on inequality of opportunity, as Piketty’s argument for a more robust welfare state is more a matter of degree. He is careful to remind us that a measure of inequality between social groups can be productive, and that there is no universal formula for eliminating it. But he also points out that an unequal concentration of wealth is bad for growth and corrosive to democracy, precisely because it limits social mobility and prevents people from accessing key institutions.This argument is not new. Aristotle made the same case in his Politics, positing that since all systems bend towards the concentration of power, and power tends to concentrate in the hands of those that have wealth, the interests of the governing will naturally diverge from those of the governed unless some correction takes place. The point at which this divergence becomes unmanageable, a decision has to be made—either reduce democracy, or increase people’s access to institutions. In defense of the latter, Aristotle proposed that property be distributed more widely among the middle class, allowing it to participate more fully in the democratic process and aligning its interests with that of the ruling class. Thus we see, in fourth century Athens, the conception of the first welfare state, and the reasoning behind it remains at the heart of progressivist politics to this day: a large and prosperous middle class encourages mobility, strengthens democracy, restrains oligarchy, and stabilizes society.Piketty points out that “Property is a historically situated notion,” largely dependent on “the way each society defines legitimate forms of ownership,” which has shifted over time. Rousseau, who argued that people are truly equal only in the state of nature, identified the hoarding of property as one of the origins of inequality: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Marx could only imagine the abolition of property as the way to social equality, but Piketty falls within the tradition of Thomas Paine and Henry George who called for the taxation of property as a means of redistributing wealth. Piketty echoes Paine specifically in the concept of “inheritance for all,” an idea that Paine advanced during the French Revolution in the form of a land tax. This could be used to finance social security not just for those at the end of their life, but for those at the beginning as well. This universal inheritance, which Piketty argues could be financed by a global wealth tax, would be accessible to everyone upon reaching the age of maturity. The goal is not simply to punish the rich for the comfort of the poor (a common mischaracterization of Piketty’s ideas), but to enhance the social mobility of young people by increasing their buying and bargaining power (impossible in a condition of insecurity), instead of saddling them with student debt equivalent to a mortgage before they reach the age of 25.The tradition into which Piketty-economics fits goes by various names, but Piketty calls it “Participatory Socialism”—participatory precisely because it eschews the movement towards the bureaucracy and centralization that characterized Soviet-style socialism. It focuses on giving people greater access to institutions, with the goal of “allow[ing] all citizens to participate more fully in social and economic life.”One participatory reform would be adopting a co-determinate structure for businesses, like the so-called Mitbestimmung model in Germany, where as many as one-third to half of the seats on boards of directors are given to worker representatives. This approach, Piketty reminds us, has certainly not weakened the productivity of the German economy since it was introduced nearly a century ago. In addition to being a more democratic compromise between management and workers, it would constitute a legitimate investment in the company by employees (who are already investors by virtue of their employment), and would give them a greater stake in its prosperity, while also increasing the transparency of bookkeeping.The central pillar of the Piketty model is a global system of progressive taxation, with high corporate and income tax rates aimed at the wealthiest one percent. Exactly how high these rates should be, Piketty (a mild prescriptivist) leaves open, though he makes it clear that it should be much higher than it is now in most countries. In the United States, one might propose a top marginal tax rate of 81 percent. If that sounds like communism, it is worth remembering that this was in fact the American tax code between 1932 and 1980. So, the popular objection that progressive taxation of this kind might work in Europe, but that it would never be acceptable in the United States (because it would be “un-American”) is simply ahistorical.A good deal of A Brief History of Equality consists of reminding readers that these policies, far from being unrealistic or utopian, either exist currently or have existed at some point in the past. In many ways, Piketty is asking us to return to the economic models that were put in place in Europe and North America between 1914–1980. Piketty calls this era “The Great Redistribution,” when income inequality decreased dramatically. To be sure, this redistribution would not have been possible without a series of catastrophes—disaster being the great leveler. Within the space of four decades, revolutions, two world wars, and an economic depression destroyed much of the inherited wealth of the European aristocracy (the gap was closed as much by the self-immolation of the rich as it was by raising up the poor). The Great Redistribution, however, was also (and in large part) due to the rise of the welfare state, which could not have happened without changing people’s view of the role that governments play in markets. And here it is important to recognize that many of these initiatives, like the New Deal, were not merely acts of noblesse oblige, but compromises aimed at alleviating pressure from socialist and labor movements, and implemented partly to quell radicalism and avert the threat of revolution.The movement towards greater equality among the classes accelerated tremendously during this period, and it is along this line that Piketty recommends we continue. He shows—with data readily accessible to all—that developing more progressive taxation and furthering the potential of the welfare state does not come at the expense of productive efficiency and growth. The US economy, which is perhaps the best example of this, grew at an unprecedented rate between 1945–1980, a time of high tax rates and generous social spending. This legacy, however, has largely been gutted in the last 40 years, with the rise of neoliberalism (inaugurated by the Powell Memo), the wave of conservatism that overtook the West in the 1980s, and the abandonment of class politics by labor and social-democratic parties after the end of the Cold War. Since then, we have seen growth rates slow, contrary to the predictions of Reaganites and Thatcherites who insisted that deregulation and low corporate tax would spur innovation, create jobs, and “trickle down” more wealth to the rest of society.The march toward equality, like the rest of history, is fraught with ironies. It is also not fixed and safe from reversal. The United States, for example, had a far more even distribution of wealth than most European societies in the 19th century. Today it has flipped. The French Revolution succeeded in establishing the principle of égalité, but failed to alter the distribution of wealth in France (Piketty shows that, in 1900, the wealthiest controlled roughly the same amount of property as they had a century before). These are good reasons not to be whiggish. There is a temptation to imagine our progress towards equality as a straight line, along which we will continue to travel, as the high tide of capital markets raises all boats. But there is no reason for us to believe that this will continue. The 21st century may well be one in which a surfeit of techno-billionaires reach new heights of obscene wealth, while a third of the population in post-industrial societies fall into poverty as their jobs are automated out of existence. That is, unless corrections are made.The cause of creating a more equal society depends heavily on the strength of its social democracy and its willingness to renew the question of inequality. It was largely due to the efforts of social movements that we have things like free public education, universal health care, maternity leave, social security, unemployment insurance, worker’s rights, fixed salaries, the eight-hour work day, etc. We have no right to take these things for granted, as many of them were fiercely opposed at the time they were advocated, and had to be fought for, sometimes violently.It is also important to remember that our sensibilities—and the institutions on which they are based—are not hardcoded. Regimes change, as does the prevailing sense of what is just and fair. The acceptability of these regimes largely depends on the ideas that hold them in place, and to that extent all economic policies are matters of “Ideology”—a word that Piketty doesn’t use as a pejorative. Indeed, there is little historical evidence to support the notion that a particular set of policies cannot be adopted on the basis that they are incompatible with some vague sense of “national character.” The French Revolution showed, albeit with much blood, that a country’s political organization and attitudes regarding equality can change radically in a very short time. Sweden, which is often held up in the West as a model of democratic socialism, did not begin moving towards egalitarian policies until socialist parties took power after WWI. Until 1911, Sweden had censitary suffrage, according to which only the richest 20 percent could vote in elections, and the number of votes given to each citizen was proportionate to their wealth (we can see echoes of this today in campaign finance laws and rulings like Citizens United in the United States). We’ve also seen astonishing transformations in countries like Japan and Germany between 1910–1960, which transitioned from military aristocracies to fascist dictatorships to democratized welfare states in just a few decades.The rapidity of these changes was sometimes a response to catastrophic events that demanded a radical restructuring of intuitions. But therein lies the lesson: societies that ignore inequality do so at their peril. Indeed, it was the abandonment of social democracy in Germany in the 1920s that weakened European socialism and created the vacuum that allowed parties like the Nazis to rise to power (a development predicted by Trotsky and confirmed by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism). More still, it was the abandonment of a truly internationalist movement that made people susceptible to nationalist and statist politics that more readily adapted themselves to the demands of the interwar years.If the politics of Europe and America during the last decade have taught us anything, it is that the failure to address inequality is highly corrosive to the social contract. It fosters distrust and resentment, and makes people vulnerable to demagogy, populism, xenophobia, and reactionary politics of all kinds. Politicians who refuse to address the real source of inequality naturally have to search for other reasons to explain it, which usually involves finding scapegoats for people’s grievances—immigrants, foreign labor, foreign countries, etc. And if the problem of inequality is not addressed, the only way for the ruling class to protect its interests is to gradually erode democratic institutions.This last point should be brought into sharper focus. Near the close of his argument, Piketty writes:...if no democratic post-national project is formulated, then authoritarian constructions will take its place in order to propose more or less convincing solutions to the feelings of injustice engendered by the unrestrained economic and state forces operating on a world-wide scale.One of the more honorable legacies of socialist movements in the 20th century was the recognition that the struggle for equality transcended all other identities (national, ethnic, religious) and that the project to improve the conditions of working people was essentially an international one. This, among other things, demanded an expansion of human solidarity. Sadly, we fail to see this same internationalism today, as societies across the West founder in nativist discourse, and tribalist thinking on the Left has displaced a debate once centered on a global critique of capital.Perhaps rekindling a bit of this old internationalism is in order if we wish to crawl out of this rather ugly phase in our politics, and avoid the irony and humiliation of an authoritarian populism spearheaded by elites posing as saviors of “the forgotten.” This will require a return to certain principles, and a hardier debate within the Left. To that end, the march towards greater equality in the coming century may result from a debate between competing visions of socialism rather than a war between socialism and capitalism.

Hi, I’m sorry to report that I’ve been felled by a nasty malady (of the non-COVID variety). I didn’t want to bail on today’s newsletter, but I also don’t feel well enough to churn out something that would be worth your valuable time. So instead I’m publishing an excerpt from my underrated second book, The Tyranny of Cliches. While it came out a few years ago, much of it is relevant today, including my chapter on the middle class and the cognitive dissonance of the American left. This is a trimmed down version. I hope to be recovered enough for the Friday G-File. If I’m not, I’ve got bigger problems.So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. —Maya Angelou, “On the Pulse of Morning” What do all of these folks say? I’m not too sure. But you can figure that out for yourself if you want to by reading Maya Angelou’s “Inaugural Poem,” delivered at Bill Clinton’s swearing-in as the 42nd president of the United States. This passage serves as a less than ideal example of the left’s obsession with identity politics—the idea that we are all locked into our status as gay, straight, black, white, etc. But there are three reasons why I’ve chosen it. First, it’s notable that at the inauguration of a president of the United States, the poem listed just about every flavor of humanity ever captured in a Benetton ad, but never once mentioned Americans. Second, it highlights the intense cognitive dissonance of the American lleft. And third: It rhymes, which is nice. Let’s circle back to number two. Bill Clinton won the Oval Office in large part because he refused to fall into the same trap as so many Democrats before him. Namely, the Democratic Party had become (and largely remains) the tail on the dog of special interests, particularly labor unions, racial grievance peddlers, feminists, limousine liberals, and the rest of the usual suspects. He cast himself as a different kind of Democrat, who wanted to “end welfare as we know it” and offer a “hand up not a hand out.” He attacked the brilliantly self-parodying rapper Sister Souljah, distanced himself from Jesse Jackson Jr., and, most importantly, talked relentlessly about the “middle class.”

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The emotion AI industry, courts and child educators are unknowingly relying on a misunderstanding of Darwin’s ideas

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For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no literary form was ever sufficiently capacious. Three gargantuan works dominated his creative life. The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, on which his reputation mainly rests, chronicles in three volumes the history of Soviet forced labor camps. It earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and forced exile […]

Robert Zubrin, Kyiv Post  The time has come for the US to intervene directly in Ukraine with air power. There are four reasons why we should do this:

To secure Ukrainian victory.
To minimize loss of life
To prevent further escalation by Putin
To deter China from engaging in military adventures of its own.

1. It is unfair to begin an essay on Elizabeth Hardwick with an instance of her cruelty; she was one of the fairest literary critics of her time, as well

In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that, if we could “replay the tape”, life on Earth would evolve to be fundamentally different each time. 

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Policymakers must now acknowledge that healthy markets require competition among different business models, as well as along traditional dimensions such as price, quality, and innovation. Achieving this will require either more active enforcement or regulatory intervention.

Neoliberalism has failed yet another test and must finally be replaced by a new economic vision based on new values.

Working Americans – many of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 – are being shafted. Biden needs to deliver for them now or risk losingAs America slouches toward the midterm elections, you need an economic message that celebrates your accomplishments to date – job creation and higher wages – yet also takes aim at the major abuses of economic power that remain in the system, fueling inflation and widening inequality.You should put these 10 indisputable facts center stage:Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com Continue reading...

To the Editors: In his review of Woody Holton’s Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution [NYR, January 13], Sean Wilentz presents an array of statistics about the slave trade that require correction. Professor Wilentz questions Holton’s claim that nearly a million Africans were transported to the Americas between 1783 and 1792. […]

A review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. Little, Brown and Company, 464 pages (May 2021)
Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds.” The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input from many individuals averages out the errors of each person and produces a more accurate answer. In contrast, the “madness of crowds” captures the idea that, relative to a single individual, large numbers of people are more likely to indulge their passions and get carried away by impulsive or destructive behaviors. So, which concept more accurately reflects reality?Noise: A Flaw in Human Nature by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein provides the answer. The authors share research indicating that “independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds.” That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.Relatedly, Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant has stated that “you get more and better ideas if people are working alone in separate rooms than if they are brainstorming in a group. When people generate ideas together, many of the best ones never get shared. Some members dominate the conversation, others hold back to avoid looking foolish, and the whole group tends to conform to the majority’s taste.” People converge on ideas they believe are held by the majority, when often they are simply acquiescing to the most assertive and strident members of the group. Grant suggests that the best way to sidestep this problem is to have people think up ideas on their own before the group evaluates them.In Noise, Kahneman and his colleagues report findings indicating that, in tasks involving estimation, such as the number of crimes in a city or geographic distances, crowds are wise as long as they registered their views independently. But if people learn what others estimated, then crowds do worse than individuals. The book states that, “while multiple independent opinions, properly aggregated, can be strikingly accurate, even a little social influence can produce a kind of herding that undermines the wisdom of the crowds.” There are many reasons why Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow became a groundbreaking hit, while Noise did not reach quite the same heights (Kahneman and his statistically savvy co-authors might cite regression toward the mean). One reason for the difference may be the years in which the books were published. In 2011, the educated class generally favored meritocratic and objective measures for judgment and decision-making. They found the message that we should challenge the role of bias in our everyday judgments appealing, and believed that we should rid ourselves of habits that lead us to judge other people or situations unfairly. Today, however, much of intellectual culture has changed. Now that luxury beliefs are ascendent, relying on objective measures is no longer fashionable.With the paperback version of Noise slated to come out in May 2022, it is worth delving into some of the key arguments contained within this book. It is filled with fascinating insights relevant to current social and political debates.The book begins by making a distinction between two kinds of error. The first—bias—is well-known, in no small part thanks to Kahneman’s influence. The second—noise—is less well understood. Bias refers to judgments that depart from rationality in consistent, predictable ways. If you ask people to estimate the likelihood of dying in a plane crash, you can predict their answers will generally be biased upward because airline accidents are so vividly covered in the media and readily come to mind (the availability bias). In contrast, noise means that judgments are unpredictable, or scattered. If you ask a group of people to guess the weight of a bull, their answers will not be biased. They will be noisy, meaning they all depart from the true weight of the bull in unforeseeable ways.  Bias is characterized by systematic deviation in a predictable manner. Noise refers to random scatter. Interestingly, you don’t need to know the true answer to a question in order to infer the presence of noise in people’s judgments. For instance, if you ask 10 different physicians to diagnose a patient and they each return a different answer, then you can conclude that their answers are noisy, even if the true diagnosis remains unknown. Noise is readily apparent in legal decisions. The authors point out that judges exercise a great deal of discretion when determining appropriate sentencing. Many consider this both just and humane, believing that criminal sentences should be tailored to the defendant’s characteristics and circumstances. And yet Kahneman and his colleagues report research from the 1970s and 1980s, indicating that sentencing depended less on the specific case or the individual defendant than on the individual judge. That is, the same defendant in the same case might get wildly different sentences depending on which judge is reviewing the case. One study found that a heroin dealer could be incarcerated for between one and 10 years, depending on the judge. In another study on burglary, the recommended sentences ranged from five years in prison to a mere 30 days. In a larger study involving 208 US federal judges who evaluated the same 16 hypothetical cases, in only three of the 16 cases was there unanimous agreement to impose a prison term. In 1984, the US Congress enacted the Sentencing Reform Act in order to reduce noise in the legal system by reducing what the book describes as “the unfettered discretion the law confers on those judges and parole authorities responsible for imposing and implementing the sentences.” And yet, although the difference in sentence length between similar cases fell dramatically after the introduction of the guidelines, critics argued that these new guidelines were unfair because they prohibited judges from taking adequate account of the particulars of the case. “The price of reducing noise,” the authors write, “was to make decisions unacceptably mechanical.” Some people are deeply uncomfortable with the elimination of noise, perhaps because they like the idea of appealing to subjective human discretion. Suppose you were a defendant and had to choose between two scenarios. In one, if you are found guilty you are guaranteed to serve three years. In the other, if you are found guilty you will serve either 30 days or 10 years (or something in between). Many would favor the latter. In another study on underwriters and insurance claims adjusters, the authors asked 828 CEOs and senior executives to guess how much variation they expected to find in judgments of insurance premiums. They guessed 10 percent or less. But the median difference in underwriter’s judgments was 55 percent. The book states that for insurance claims, “the price a customer is asked to pay depends to an uncomfortable extent on the lottery that picks the employee who will deal with that transaction.” Likewise, case officers in child protective services vary in how likely they are to place children in foster care. Of course, noise in some judgments is desirable, such as in matters of preference or taste. If 10 film critics watch the same movie, or 10 people read the same novel, you’d both expect and welcome a variety of opinions. But noise is both undesirable and unfair when it comes to medical diagnoses, criminal sentencing, insurance claims, employee selection, and college admissions, among other decision-making domains.What are the sources of noise? One worth highlighting—because it may be the most pernicious—is simply the discomfort of disagreement. Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. Indeed, the book points out that “The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”Relevant to current debates about college admissions, Noise contains a story from a university professor who was helping his admissions office review its decision process. He explained their process for selecting applicants. First, a person read an application file, rated it, and then handed it off with ratings to a second reader, who also rated it. As you can imagine, the first rater holds much more sway than the second, who might be reluctant to challenge the initial evaluation. The professor suggested masking the first reader’s ratings so as not to influence the second reader. In other words, he suggested they use the “wisdom of crowds” method rather than the “madness of crowds” approach. The school’s reply: “We used to do that, but it resulted in so many disagreements that we switched to the current system.” As Kahneman and his colleagues point out, many organizations consider conflict avoidance to be at least as important as optimal decision-making. As more and more top universities are electing to ditch standardized tests, they will be relying on noisier forms of evaluation. Removing information when making decisions is generally unwise. However, removing parts of an application that contain more objective information—test scores as opposed to softer metrics such as essays—will likely inflate the amount of noise to an even greater degree. In fact, recent research from Stanford found that family income is more highly correlated with admissions essay content than with SAT scores. Presumably, applicants from well-to-do backgrounds are especially adept at crafting their essays in ways that please admissions committees. On the topic of standardized testing, Kahneman and his colleagues report that “Intelligence is correlated with good performance in virtually all domains. All things being equal, it is associated not only with higher academic achievement but also with higher job performance” and it “remains by far the best single predictor of important outcomes.”In Noise, Kahneman and his co-authors take pains to note that good decision-making should not mix facts and values. Instead, good decision-making must be based on accurate predictive judgments that are not affected by preferences or values. The book presents persuasive evidence of “level noise,” or the variability in the judgments produced by different people. Level noise encompasses the idiosyncratic responses from each unique person making a decision. Perhaps more interesting, though, is what the book describes as occasion noise, or the variability in the judgments produced by the same person. In other words, occasion noise involves your own idiosyncratic judgments that might be affected by mood, weather, time, and so on. For example, how you rate the quality of an essay first thing in the morning after you’ve had your coffee might be different from how you rate it late at night after a stressful day at work. Consider recent research out of Cambridge University on credit loan applications. Tobias Baer and Simone Schnall examined the decisions of credit officers at a major bank. They found that the officers were significantly more likely to grant loan repayment terms to a customer in the morning compared with later in the day, when decision fatigue impaired their ability to carefully assess applications, and so they tended to default to “no.” The book reports research indicating that when the same software developers were asked on two separate days to estimate the completion time for the same task, their answers, on average, differed by 71 percent. It is also common to obtain significantly different diagnoses from the same physicians when they are presented with the same case twice. A study of nearly 700,000 primary care visits found that physicians are significantly more likely to prescribe opioids and antibiotics at the end of a long day. It seems that when doctors are tired and under time pressure, they are more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution. But occasion noise doesn’t just affect doctors. When wine experts at a prominent wine competition tasted the same wines twice, they only scored 18 percent of the wines identically—usually, the very worst ones. This suggests that while people tend to agree with themselves on which wines are bad, they often disagree with themselves on which ones are good. I have wondered about occasion noise in my own judgments. For instance, when asked to provide comments on another person’s writing, there are times when I question whether my feedback would have been different on a different day of the week, before or after lunch, and so on. For my own writing, I often send important drafts to a few different people, seeking what psychologists describe as “inter-rater reliability.” I will typically only implement large changes if two or more people make the same suggestion for improvement.  Kahneman and his co-authors are blunt in their conclusion: “We do not always produce identical judgments when faced with the same facts on two occasions … you are not the same person at all times.” That is, as your mood and external circumstances vary, some features of your cognitive machinery vary too. In short, you are a source of a lot of noise. While some degree of occasion noise is due to weather, stress, fatigue, and so on, much of it may simply be normal. The book describes studies in which researchers administered cognitive tests to participants at different periods. They found that various external factors including time of day, sleep, and so on accounted for only 11 percent of the variance in the performance of a given person. The authors interpret these findings as evidence that the moment-to-moment variability in brain functioning is driven not just by external influences, but is instead characteristic of the way the brain functions.Somewhat reassuringly, at least, occasion noise is smaller than level noise. In other words, you agree with your own judgments less often than you think. But you still tend to agree with yourself more often than with others. Noise can be amplified by groups. For example, researchers carried out an experiment on a website that allows viewers to comment on stories and vote on different comments. You might think that a single initial vote on a comment would not influence the long-term popularity of the comment, but you’d be wrong. When people see an initial up vote on a comment, they are 32 percent more likely to also give it an up vote. A slight boost in the initial popularity of a comment led to an artificially increased mean rating by 25 percent after five months. Initial starting points can influence political views too. The book reports findings indicating that when a group of Democrats saw that a particular view was gaining initial popularity among Democrats, they too would endorse that point of view, ultimately leading most Democrats in the group to support it. However, if they saw that a specific opinion was gaining popularity among Republicans, they rejected it. Republicans behaved similarly. In short, the acceptance of a viewpoint can depend on its initial popularity and the specific group that accepts it. This relates to another topic within the book: Group polarization. This is a special case of the “madness of crowds” phenomenon. Social psychologists have found that when individuals hold certain beliefs, they become more extreme in their beliefs when they interact with others who hold similar views. In a study on jury behavior, researchers gave jurors an eight-point scale to measure how severely they wanted to punish a law-breaker. They found that when individual jurists preferred severe punishment, the overall verdict ended up higher than that recommended by the median juror. Put differently, when individual jurors preferred a severe punishment, deliberation with other jurors sharing this view raised the overall severity of the punishment. One juror might say they want to impose a fine of $10,000, while another might say that anything less than $12,000 is unacceptable. By the end, the fine might increase to an amount far beyond anyone’s initial starting point. Conversely, groups comprised of lenient jurors produced even more lenient verdicts than the one recommended by the median juror in the group. When group members drift in a certain direction, individual members will double-down on that perspective. This drives the group towards extremism even though individual members are not extreme.So what is the best way to make decisions? The book distinguishes between clinical judgments and models. For clinical judgment, you consider the information at hand, perhaps engage in a quick mental computation, consult your intuition, and come up with a judgment. Suppose you are evaluating two candidates. You engage in some deliberate reasoning, compare their resumes, references, and interview performances. This process, plus your gut feeling, is what leads to your clinical judgment. In contrast, the book describes simple models. This comes from work by the mid-20th century psychologist Paul Meehl. He pitted clinical judgment against mechanical prediction for outcomes such as academic success and mental health prognoses. Meehl, a practicing psychoanalyst, was surprised to discover that simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment. Relatedly, in a separate line of research, Lewis Goldberg and colleagues built models of human judges. They had people make a variety of judgments, input their responses into a computer, then they built simple models intended to replicate these people’s judgments. The judgments of the models were highly correlated with the judgments of the humans they were intended to imitate (r =.80). Crucially, though, for real-world outcomes, the models were more accurate than the people. For instance, the models and the people had to predict the GPAs of 98 students using 10 simple inputs. For every one of the 98 students, the model did better than the actual humans. They found similar results for other kinds of judgments. A crude model of your judgments is likely to be more accurate than you are. The book’s authors conclude that “Complexity and richness do not generally lead to more accurate predictions.” In other words, using straightforward models with simple inputs is superior to “holistic” judgments for predicting real-world outcomes. But why is this the case? It seems that the very things we most cherish in humans may lead our judgments astray. Replacing you with a model of you eliminates your subtlety, and eliminates your noise. If I present you with the same candidate at two different periods, you may have very different judgments. But if I present a model of you with the same candidates, it will produce identical judgments both times. As Kahneman and his colleagues put it, “You may believe that you are subtler, more insightful, and more nuanced than a linear caricature of your thinking. But in fact, you are mostly noisier … it proved almost impossible in that study to generate a simple model that did worse than the experts did.” A human’s informed judgment, often guided by less-than-rational gut feelings, typically performs worse than simple statistical formulas. In another example, researchers used two variables to predict a defendant’s likelihood to jump bail: age (older people are lower flight risks) and number of past court dates missed (people who have failed to appear before are likelier to recidivate). This simple model outperformed predicted flight risk better than all human bail judges. Why do we often favor subjective human judgments over straightforward rules? Many experts ignore the clinical-versus-mechanical debate and prefer to trust their own judgment instead. The use of algorithms is not yet routine in medical diagnoses. Few businesses or universities use algorithms when selecting candidates. Hollywood executives green-light movies based on their judgment and experience rather than formulas, and book publishers do the same.When experts listen to their gut, they experience emotionally satisfying rewards, especially when they are proved “right” in the end (overlooking or dismissing all the times they were wrong). Giving up such rewards in favor of more accurate but less intuitively satisfying models is not easy. As Kahneman and his co-authors state, “Many decision makers will reject decision-making approaches that deprive them of the ability to exercise their intuition.”Interestingly, though, when given the choice, ordinary people often prefer advice from an algorithm rather than a human. They’ll give the algorithm a chance, but will stop trusting it as soon as they see it make a mistake. The book states that “As humans, we are keenly aware that we make mistakes, but that is a privilege we are not prepared to share. We expect machines to be perfect.”This explains why so many people do not trust self-driving cars. If a human driver causes a traffic collision, we are often forgiving, depending on the circumstances. But if an autonomous vehicle causes an accident, people respond with intense suspicion. To borrow a popular phrase from Charlotte Whitton, a robot must do twice as well as a human to be thought half as good.Relatedly, recent research led by NYU professor Andrea Bonezzi suggests that the reason people tend to trust humans more than algorithms is that while people see humans as discernible decision-makers, we typically view computers as a “black box.” We foster an illusion that we understand how others come to arrive at their decisions because we project our own intuitive understanding of decision-making onto them. However, we are often mistaken in how other people form their judgments, and we don’t project our decision-making process onto computers, which seem alien to us. The book does offer some solutions to the problem of noise. For example, when rating job candidates, a better predictor of future performance is to rank them from best to worst rather than evaluating each one individually. As the book puts it, “replacing absolute judgments with relative ones, when feasible, is likely to reduce noise.” Another helpful approach: If multiple examiners are called upon to assess a candidate or individual’s performance, they should provide their judgments privately—none of them should be aware of the others’ evaluations. This capitalizes on the wisdom of crowds rather than the madness of crowds.Furthermore, noise can be reduced by using standardized ratings in a forced ranking system. In this approach, raters must abide by a predetermined distribution, which prevents ratings inflation. For example, when I was in the US Air Force, annual performance was evaluated on a scale from one to five. For a time, the majority of members were given fives, and it was considered a career death-blow to get a four, which would impede promotion to the next rank. In 2015, the Air Force revamped their system so that only a small number of people in a given unit could obtain high scores, while the rest would fill out the rest of the distribution.Still, there are many reasons why raters might not want to be honest about a person’s true performance. They might assess people “strategically” in order to avoid a difficult discussion, to favor a person who they believe deserves a long-awaited promotion, or to get rid of an underperforming employee who needs a good evaluation to be transferred to another division. Such hidden motives can introduce noise into important decisions. And this, I suspect, is the reason why some people may not like the book. They want to retain noise (the ability to rely on intuition and individual judgment), and therefore they will dislike Noise (which argues that relying on intuition is harmful and unfair). Any organization that inhibits the noise attributable to human judgment reduces people’s ability to influence ratings in pursuit of their own goals.If you tell people they can no longer rely on their gut feelings and that they must follow a checklist or abide by an algorithm, they will respond with resistance because such policies inhibit their ability to pursue their own hidden agendas. Others may argue that guidelines designed to eliminate noise are rigid, dehumanizing, and unfair. Many people have had the experience of making a seemingly reasonable request to an organization only to receive the response that clear rules prevent the organization from making any exceptions. Many people who plead for exceptions really do believe they are exceptional. But for many decision-makers, they encounter people asking for such exceptional requests all the time. The rules, as the authors put it, “may seem stupid and even cruel, but they may have been adopted for good reason: to reduce noise (and perhaps bias as well).”When people believe an objective system favors them, they want to reduce bias and noise. And when people believe an objective system might disfavor them, they want to retain bias and noise. But Kahneman and his colleagues make a persuasive case that eliminating noise is crucial for a system to maintain legitimacy. Near the end of the book, they conclude that, “It is unfair for similarly situated people to be treated differently, and a system in which professional judgments are seen as inconsistent loses credibility.”  If they are right, then perhaps more people should carefully consider the policies they are supporting. Unfortunately, people who favor noise are often the noisiest. 

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<p>The IPCC has made clear that expanding oil and gas infrastructure is suicidal insanity. Why are U.S. progressive politicians contemplating agreeing to it? </p>

Ukraine’s refusal to bend the knee to Vladimir Putin has reminded the West that life under liberalism is worth fighting for.

FROM GIANNI VERSACE to Ron DeSantis, Floridians like making fashion statements. On the website for the governor’s re-election campaign, fans of Mr DeSantis can buy “Escape to Florida” T-shirts, featuring prominent Democrats who have visited recently. Those looking for a head-to-toe makeover can opt for “Freedom over Fauci” flip-flops, denigrating Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser. Accessories include “Let us alone” beverage coolers and two golf balls with the tagline “Florida’s governor has a pair”.

Although Senate, governors’ and presidential races are intensely competitive in Florida, the state’s government has been under firm Republican control for decades. A Democrat was last elected governor in 1994. Between 2002 and 2020, Republicans won 25 statewide elections and Democrats only six. With Republicans close to a super-majority in the state...

CENTURIES AGO, manatees were symbols of dreams. Early explorers mistook them for mermaids. Now the gentle mammals are symbols of nightmare. Last year 1,100 manatees—around a seventh of those in Florida—died, the worst year since record-keeping began in the 1970s. Pollution-fuelled algal blooms have killed the seagrass they eat, leaving many to starve to death. Concerned researchers on the east coast Indian River Lagoon have started to feed manatees lettuce to sustain them. The manatees’ deaths shocked Floridians, but they are an “even bigger event than people realise, because it means that the environment has reached a tipping point”, says Craig Pittman, author of “Oh, Florida!: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country”.
The environment is at once both Florida’s biggest asset and its greatest liability. Tourists visit and people move in because they are drawn to nature: the beaches, freshwater springs, reefs and national parks. Yet Florida is like an ecological O. Henry story, written with an ironic twist. Wittingly or not, people undermine what they love most through pollution, development and carbon emissions. Algal blooms that kill seagrass are fuelled by fertiliser run-off from gardens and farms, breached septic tanks and other pollution, in turn killing marine life and making beaches unattractive. The...

AS THE SOUTHERNMOST state in continental America, Florida is often pooh-poohed as peripheral. Headlines about crimes committed by Floridians, sometimes involving alligators, alcohol, or a combination of the two, have contributed to a wacky “Florida man” stereotype. Many associate Florida with retirement, rednecks and a world-famous rodent, Mickey Mouse.

Its economic and political heft is growing, too. Florida’s GDP has doubled since 2002. Were it a country, it would rank as the 15th-largest economy in the world, ahead of Mexico and Indonesia. Having recently gained a 30th electoral-college vote, it has more than a tenth of those required to win the presidency. The largest swing state, in the past 12 presidential...

“THIS IS NOT a fight of left against right,” Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s conservative populist president, told a rally in Brasília on March 27th. “It’s a fight between good and evil.” His opponents see the election on October 2nd, in which Mr Bolsonaro will seek a second term, in similarly apocalyptic terms. Many worry that Brazilian democracy would not survive another four years of Mr Bolsonaro, an avowed authoritarian who is contemptuous of the judiciary and the separation of powers. With the stakes so high, Brazil is on the threshold of a dirty and divisive campaign in which disinformation will be the norm and, some fear, violence a possibility.
Mr Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018 was a surprise. Long an obscure backbench congressman, he turned that contest into a referendum on the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), which had governed Brazil between 2003 and 2016, and its leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was barred from running by a prison sentence for corruption. Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain, also won votes by appealing to traditional values, by espousing a harsh line on crime and by exploiting social media. Chance helped, too: he was stabbed by a deranged individual a month before the vote, which brought him sympathy and kept him quiet when he had much to lose by talking.

Mr Bolsonaro ended “the kleptocratic state...

IN RESPONSE TO Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the West launched an economic war. America banned the sale of a wide range of goods to Russia; big companies pulled out by the dozen; and a number of countries together froze 60% of the central bank’s international reserves. The idea was to send Russia’s economy into free fall, punishing President Vladimir Putin for his aggression. In the week after the invasion the rouble fell by more than a third against the dollar, and the share prices of many Russian companies collapsed.

A battery of policies has helped stabilise the markets. Some are orthodox. The central bank has raised interest rates from 9.5% to 20%, encouraging people to hold interest-bearing Russian assets. Other policies are less conventional. The government has decreed that exporters must convert 80% of their foreign-...

ALEXIS MARAMBIO grew up in a tiny flat in La Pintana, a poor neighbourhood of Santiago, Chile’s capital. For most of his life he shared a room with his brother; his sister slept in her parents’ bed until she was 13. Leak stains still blotch the walls. Bars on the windows keep out thieves and most sunshine. “This is the raw side of Chile,” he says.

His story reflects the success of Chile’s education system. Since the country returned to democracy in 1990, the number of students enrolled...

“THE LAW IS a business,” says Juan, a 34-year-old who sells legal documents, including copies of the constitution, on a busy street opposite Guatemala’s highest court. “The laws I sell don’t apply; rather those with money get their way.” It is a common view in a country in which gun-toting men sometimes guard judicial offices, ostensibly to protect their inhabitants.

It is highly...

THE SRI LANKAN economy was in danger well before Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine. Burdened by foreign debts and squeezed by the effects of the pandemic on its tourist receipts, Sri Lanka’s government dithered over approaching the IMF for help as the year began. Now a devaluation of the currency and the impact of the war on commodity markets is sending consumer prices soaring. Troops have been deployed to calm the crowds queuing for fuel, and a debt default may be unavoidable. As the prices of everything from oil and gas to corn and wheat surge, other countries may fear a similar fate.

One consequence of this is a surge in poverty. The Centre for Global Development, a think-tank, estimates that 40m people worldwide will be pushed into extreme poverty as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (By...

Poor communication and vague pronouncements threaten to prolong the war in Ukraine.

The Food and Drug Administration ruled that transplant recipients and other similarly immune-compromised patients can get a third dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. But the decision, late Thursday night, Aug. 12, 2021, offers an extra dose only to those high-risk groups -- not the general public. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) Charles Krupa/AP   Biden administration panned for sidestepping advisory panel to allow fourth COVID shot   Haisten Willis  March 29, 05:11 PM March 29, 05:11 PM  The Biden administration's approval of a fourth mRNA COVID-19 shot for those 50 and older has raised eyebrows in political and medical circles.  The Food and Drug Administration authorized a second booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines for older adults and people as young as 12 with certain immune deficiencies but did so without convening a meeting of its panel of vaccine experts first, a move that angered healthcare experts skeptical of a fourth shot’s utility.  Video Embed FDA AUTHORIZES SECOND BOOSTERS OF MRNA COVID-19 VACCINES FOR ADULTS OVER 50  "When last asked about boosters, the FDA's advisory committee on vaccines voted 16-2 against authorizing a third COVID-19 shot for people under 65," Heritage Foundation senior fellow Doug Badger wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner. "The FDA hasn't sought their advice ever since."  Badger also questioned FDA's rationale for authorizing the shots, saying the agency doesn't cite any randomized controlled trials concluding that a fourth dose reduces the risk of severe illness, and pointed out that the shots were designed to fight the original strain of COVID-19, which has not been in circulation for nearly two years.  Some public health experts raised similar concerns. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said ignoring input from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee "led to distrust and confusion in the American public" when the third shot was authorized and could do so again this time.  FDA officials did not respond to questions about why it chose to sidestep the committee.  Gandhi noted that many European countries have only approved fourth shots for seniors at least 70 years old and is worried that additional boosters not only won't help younger people but that the decision to allow them for such a large group could lead to a supply crunch.  The authorization comes as the White House and congressional Democrats spar with Republicans over a new $15 billion round of COVID-19 funding. Democrats caution that the money is needed for testing, vaccines, treatments, and research and development, while Republicans counter the money can be redirected from other sources, including previously approved COVID-19 spending. The White House says it has enough money to provide fourth shots for those 50 and over but would need more funding if shots were approved for all age groups.  A final concern for Gandhi is that the FDA's criteria could lead to continual booster approvals that may not be warranted.  "All of these discussions seem to not incorporate cellular immunity in our decisions, only antibody levels, which last around four months after a booster," Gandhi said. "Without a knowledge of the immune system, this discussion of antibodies alone will lead us to want to boost every four months, which is not logistically feasible."  Not all public health experts questioned the move. University of California, Irvine, professor Andrew Noymer said he wasn't sure why the FDA may have bypassed the panel but added that it wasn't a "red flag" for him.  “I think it makes sense to authorize a fourth dose,” he said. “It means that anyone who wants to get one can get one without breaking the rules, and it means insurance companies can cover it.”  It's possible that the Biden administration will eventually authorize a fourth shot for everyone, Noymer said, noting that the virus is still relatively new and that efforts to combat it are evolving.  "We're getting an understanding from data that unfolds in real time," he said. "It's a thorny problem, and I think the FDA's decision makes sense."  The shots will be made available to those who want them, but the FDA is not updating its vaccination recommendation to include a second booster dose yet.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER  Cases are down sharply from January highs, but the latest variant of concern is an omicron offshoot, BA.2, which now represents nearly 86% of all sequenced cases globally, according to the World Health Organization.  In the United States, BA.2 has not overtaken its sister subvariant, BA.1, which drove the devastating omicron surge over the winter months. But it already accounts for more than 54% of sequenced cases nationally. In the Northeast, BA.2 has already overtaken BA.1 as the most dominant variant.        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

It is no exaggeration to say that the history of the United States has never seen an account of a president’s conduct quite so devastating as the first nine pages of Judge David Carter’s opinion of March 28 in Eastman v. Thompson. The opinion, legally speaking, concerns the Jan. 6 Committee’s efforts to secure emails from John Eastman, the law professor who provided President Trump with advice aimed at overturning the 2020 election. But that is not why it will be remembered. 
Certainly Watergate produced no document about Richard Nixon comparable to it in its combination of brevity, spare factual simplicity, and total evisceration of its subject’s honor and conduct. Nor did Teapot Dome or the Whisky Ring scandals produce such material concerning Warren Harding or Ulysses S. Grant. Nothing that Lawrence Walsh had to say about Ronald Reagan or that Kenneth Starr wrote about Bill Clinton, both after years of investigation and exposition at great length, remotely approaches it in power. 
Before explaining this point, I want to take a moment to appreciate a genuinely historic piece of judicial writing. The opinion’s first section—entitled “A. Facts”—begins on page three of Judge Carter’s opinion and runs through the middle of page 12. In a footnote attached to the word “Facts” in the subhead leading the section, Judge Carter notes in a fashion characteristic of the section’s understatement, “In this discussion, the Court relies solely on facts provided by Dr. Eastman and the Select Committee in their briefing and attached exhibits.” 
He is not exaggerating. The section contains no judgments, no legal interpretations, no conclusions. It contains virtually no rhetoric at all. What’s more, the section does not contain a whole lot of new facts. The story of Eastman and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the relationship between that effort and Trump’s concurrent plot to decapitate the Justice Department, and ultimately to the insurrectionary activity of January 6, 2021, has dribbled out bit by bit over the months already. And to the extent the current litigation has revealed new material, that mostly emerged in the committee’s briefing and the accompanying exhibits a few weeks ago.
What makes Judge Carter’s account so powerful is that it is linked tightly to record evidence, that it tells the story in an end-to-end fashion crisply and efficiently, and that it thus assembles the evidence into a coherent account of the big picture. I cannot do Judge Carter’s account justice; please do read it. For present purposes, let me just say that it leaves the fair-minded reader in no doubt that the events that took place between Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls and congressional certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 were an all-out effort by the lame duck president to seize and retain power in unapologetic defiance of the law using extra-constitutional means—up to and including violence directed against a coordinate branch of government. 
Such a story requires no denunciation from the judge. His account of it alone constitutes its own denunciation, at least it should to decent citizens of a functioning democracy. 
Judge Carter’s opinion is attracting attention less because of its opening section than because of its final one, in which he finds that Donald Trump likely committed crimes and that Eastman’s attorney work product, in one instance, is thus not privileged under the crime-fraud exception to the attorney work product doctrine. 
On its own terms, the opinion seems uncomplicatedly correct on this point. The question before Judge Carter is whether it is more likely than not that Eastman’s legal services were being used in furtherance of a crime. The standard of proof here is relatively low—the preponderance of the evidence—and the judge did not have before him the many arguments that would complicate, say, an attempt actually to prosecute Trump or Eastman for these crimes. 
In this context, the judge certainly appears to be correct that Trump was using Eastman’s legal services in conduct that, as a prima facie matter, violates both 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) and 18 U.S.C. § 371, the former of which forbids the corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding and the latter of which criminalizes conspiring to defraud the United States. In at least one important respect, Judge Carter goes significantly beyond holding that the evidence meets what he takes to be the relevant legal threshold in the 9th Circuit. He writes specifically that the evidence before him "exceed[s]" even the showing necessary to find that Trump acted corruptly, and he cites voluminous evidence that the former president and Eastman both knew full well that Eastman's legal arguments were nonsense and that his proposed course of action was unlawful. To have a judge write this, all tied rigorously to specific pieces of evidence, about a former president’s mental state and conscious awareness of criminality is no small matter.
In any event, it is difficult to disagree with Judge Carter that, “Based on the evidence . . . it is more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” And it is just as difficult to disagree with him that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session. . .”
So I know what you’re thinking: If the opinion is devastating and if it correctly concludes that the president probably committed crimes, doesn’t that require a criminal investigation on the part of the Justice Department? 
The answer to that question is complicated in a fashion I am sure will annoy many readers. First, an investigation may already be open. Second, Judge Carter’s opinion could well trigger one if one does not already exist—both of Trump and particularly of Eastman—by changing the Justice Department’s discretionary judgment about whether an investigation is wise at this time. After all, a federal judge saying that crimes have probably been committed in a high-profile matter doesn’t happen every day. That said, third, for reasons I will explain, the decision doesn’t require anything of the Justice Department. If the department has decided for legal reasons that a prosecution of Trump in this matter could not happen—and there are reasons to worry it may have done so, in my view—this opinion will not force it to shift gears. 
An important preliminary matter of background: the specific context of Judge Carter’s opinion matters a great deal. The point of this opinion was not to determine whether the former president committed crimes but whether privilege protects certain documents against production to the committee. As such, the judge was using a different standard of evidence and he was not focusing on certain questions the Justice Department will certainly consider. Judge Carter himself acknowledges this point clearly in the final paragraph of his opinion, the one place in the entire opinion where his rhetoric crosses the line into needless rhetorical grandstanding:
More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. This case cannot provide it. The Court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit. At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of “legal theories” gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself. (emphasis added) 

Remember also that the facts on the basis of which Judge Carter ruled on Monday have been available to the Justice Department for some time, and the department has long been capable of doing the same legal analysis as Judge Carter did on its own—as, indeed, the committee itself has done and outside analysts have done as well. So the first possibility, as a group of Lawfare writers acknowledged (myself included) back when the committee filed its brief in this case, is that the Justice Department already has opened a case based on these facts. It might be the case, we wrote then:
that the Justice Department or FBI is already quietly investigating these charges (or similar ones) and never needed any prodding from anyone. 
If that’s the case, then the department is certainly showing extraordinary—even admirable—stealth. At a minimum, we can say with confidence that an investigation, if it has been opened, has not taken the kind of overt investigative steps that make news. The press is aware of no witnesses or documents that have been subpoenaed nor of any search warrants that have been executed. If such an investigation exists, it remains at a relatively preliminary stage. 

A related possibility is that there is no specific investigation of this matter in isolation, just the larger investigation of possible crimes committed in connection with January 6, of which this fact pattern presents one among many. Investigations, after all, tend to center around crimes, not people, with the individuals and suspects coming into and going out of investigative scope at different times. In other words, it is possible that as part of the investigation of January 6, the department is considering whether obstruction and conspiracy were committed by Eastman, Trump, and others. 
What is completely clear, however, is that if the Justice Department has not opened a criminal investigation of Trump and Eastman or contemplated obstruction or conspiracy by them in the context of the larger Jan. 6 investigation, it is not because the evidence on which Judge Carter ruled Monday has been unavailable to the FBI and prosecutors. 
In the Lawfare discussion of the committee’s brief early this month, we posited that the likely explanation was discretionary, if the Justice Department were indeed not active on the matter. Perhaps the department is deferring to the committee’s investigation, letting the committee develop the facts on this matter of the president while the department focuses on seditious conspiracy cases against the Oath Keepers for example. 
We also described, “Another possibility” that we thought “more remote”: “that the department has studied the legal argument the committee is making and has, for some reason, concluded as a matter of law that it would or could never bring a such a case—and thus that it should not conduct a criminal investigation of a former president based on this theory.”
To understand this point, let’s go back to the time when the Mueller Report came out and much of American legal thought (myself certainly included) concluded that the report contained unambiguous evidence of obstruction of justice on Trump’s part. 
Writing on Lawfare at the time in this site’s proudest tradition of questioning accepted wisdom when doing so will enrage the most people, Jack Goldsmith raised an important problem: 
In a much-cited 1995 opinion by Walter Dellinger, OLC described the presidential clear statement rule as follows: “[G]eneral statutes must be read as not applying to the President if they do not expressly apply where application would arguably limit the President's constitutional role.” Please read this sentence carefully. It says that general statutes—i.e., ones like the obstruction statutes that do not specifically regulate the president—“must” (not may) be read as “not applying to the president” if they do not “expressly” apply, where (i.e., if) application of the statute would “arguably” (not definitely, arguably) “limit” the president’s constitutional role. Dellinger also says: “[S]tatutes that do not expressly apply to the President must be construed as not applying to the President if such application would involve a possible conflict with the President’s constitutional prerogatives” (emphasis added). Other OLC opinions contain similarly broad formulations of the clear statement rule.
OLC (or, in one case, the deputy attorney general) has relied on the clear statement rule in at least the four opinions listed below in the Appendix to this piece, though there are probably more. (OLC’s 1996 opus on separation of powers also expressed the rule in broad terms.) In every one of these four opinions, the Justice Department applied a version of the clear statement rule to conclude that a generally worded statute did not apply to the president. 

And let’s leave aside as well the question of whether OLC’s interpretation of the clear statement rule has merit—on which matter I am certain I disagree with the executive branch’s historical position, which seems to me extravagant. That question is also immaterial to the matter at hand today. 
In other words, while the question before Judge Carter was whether it is more likely than not that Trump violated these two statutes as best interpreted, the question before the Justice Department (unless Attorney General Merrick Garland is willing to reopen decades of OLC precedent) is whether Trump may have violated either of them given that both “must be read as not applying to the President if they do not expressly apply where application would arguably limit the President's constitutional role.” While this additional interpretive baggage does not constrain Judge Carter, the Supreme Court decisions that lie beneath it do. Without the benefit of briefing on those decisions which, in the Justice Department’s view, give rise to the clear statement rule, Judge Carter is working with the statutes in a somewhat simpler form than the Justice Department confronts them.
Note that § 1512(c) is the same obstruction statute that Mueller was dealing with, and that Goldsmith and I were arguing about, and that § 371 no more by its terms applies to presidential conduct than the obstruction statute does. 
Note also that it’s certainly possible to distinguish the clear statement rule analysis in this instance from its application to obstruction cases in the Mueller Report, so the need to consider it here does not fully answer the question of whether and to what degree it would impede a prosecution under either of these laws. It’s possible, after all, to argue that it’s one thing to apply the obstruction statute where, as in the firing of the FBI director or the attempt to fire the special counsel, you’re contemplating the president’s indictment based on a corrupt exercise of a core and exclusive presidential power—and quite a different matter to preclude application of federal criminal law to a blatant attempt to subvert an election, an activity that does not in any way further the president's constitutional role. The president, after all, has no role in certifying the election under the Constitution or the Electoral Count Act—the matter in which Eastman was encouraging Trump to interfere. 
Again, my point here is not that this view of the law is correct. My point is only that the Justice Department accepts some version of the clear statement rule, which thus creates a hurdle for the department in contemplating a prosecution of Trump based on the shameful fact pattern that Judge Carter’s opinion lays out. It’s a hurdle that Judge Carter himself did not confront. 
Yet we actually don’t know how far the Justice Department has gone on the question of the clear statement rule. The reason is that there was almost certainly OLC work product in the context of Attorney General Bill Barr’s consideration of 1512(c)(2) when Barr was responding to the Mueller Report. But we don’t know how far OLC went in this work in limiting that statute’s application to presidential behavior or how its opinions were reasoned. We also don’t know whether any of those opinions may have been withdrawn by the new administration, some of whose lawyers are known to be hostile to an expansive reading of the rule. 

If this question caused Mueller to write a lengthy legal analysis before proceeding to not conclude that Trump committed a prosecutable crime, expect Garland to spend some quality time with the question before concluding that Trump did. 
To be sure, a Supreme Court ruling contrary to OLC’s view of the clear statement rule would force OLC to rethink its opinions, and an appeals court decision might well prompt reconsideration. But a district court opinion that does not confront the issue of the clear statement rule at all will not change the Justice Department’s view. And this matter is not likely to generate appellate review, since Eastman has decided not to appeal the decision. So if the Justice Department does not already have an investigation open on this matter, Judge Carter’s opinion will not force it to open one—though the moral suasion of the story itself may well affect the department’s discretionary decisions. 
All of which, in my view, has a number of important implications: 
First and easiest, the discussion above applies to Donald Trump only. It does not apply to John Eastman. To the extent the Justice Department does not have an open investigation related to Eastman’s conduct in this area, that seems like an indefensibly cautious exercise of discretion. A federal judge has now identified Eastman’s likely criminal activity in what amounts to a presidentially-led insurrection—and has done so very publicly in a credibly detailed, significant opinion. It is unfathomable to me that the Justice Department would not now consider action of its own.
With respect to Trump, the department here is in a genuinely tough spot. A lot of commentators will try to make it sound easy. It isn’t easy. Perhaps the most important thing the Justice Department could do is release any OLC opinions from the Mueller Report period that might exist bearing on how broadly it has interpreted the clear statement rule with respect to these statutes. More generally, an indication that the department is considering the Eastman case would go a long way to making clear to the public that it is at least thinking about the criminal implications of Trump’s conduct in this period.
In the long run, the most important public policy implications are for Congress. After writing his critique of the Mueller obstruction memo, Goldsmith went on, writing with Bob Bauer in the book After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, to urge Congress to fix this problem by applying these statutes clearly to presidential conduct. “It is an intolerable state of affairs for the president, Congress, and the American people not to have a clearer sense of whether and under what conditions the president can obstruct justice,” they write. Their admonition rings even truer today than it did when Bauer and Goldsmith wrote it. If not for Trump than for future presidents of comparably low character, the problem that may be holding the Justice Department up really needs to be fixed.
The Jan. 6 Committee has made some important noises about clarifying that Trump’s conduct was illegal. This is the low-hanging fruit in that effort. It shouldn’t continue to escape Congress’s attention.

It’s always wiser to treat an adversary as a canny fox, not a crazy fool. 

...I would like to note that Will Smith has reminded everyone precisely why it is so dangerous to erode the critical post-enlightenment distinction between words and actions. This distinction was a social innovation that made violence less necessary and thus less common; woke liberals trying to reassert the equivalence between speech and violence are (perhaps inadvertently) harkening back to a more barbaric time.

Just the latest example of Congress refusing to confront the supremacy of out-of-control corporate behemoths.

The evidence in favor of a fourth dose of Covid vaccine is thin.

In a world shaped by the iron logic of markets and national interests, Vladimir Putin's atavistic war of conquest has mystified the "deep" strategists of realpolitik. Their mistake was to forget that under global capitalism, cultural, ethnic, and religious conflicts are the only forms of political struggle left.

The White House can provide clarity and empower those Western telecom companies by honing America’s entity regulations, which broadly ban unlicensed business transactions with blacklisted foreign entities. First, it should continue to vigorously enforce its entity lists. One of them, the list of “Communist Chinese military companies,” is under Section 1237 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999, a task assigned to the executive branch by Congress but not fulfilled until 2020. 
 
The economic historian explains how Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is affecting energy markets and what that means for geopolitics — and climate change.

America has become too accustomed to thinking of its side as stymied, ineffective, or incompetent.

From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories.

What is presented as a uniquely “Russian” type of warfare, with high civilian casualties, is not dissimilar from attacks by the U.S. and its allies. Let us examine the facts that challenge our narratives in addition to those that confirm them.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Despite his limited gains on the ground in Ukraine, he is facing strategic defeat in a war that no one (including me) would have expected him to lose. The vaunted Russian army has turned out to be a hollow force whose major skill sets seem to be bullying its own conscripts and killing foreign civilians. The Russian air force has underperformed even the lowest expectations; perhaps Russian pilots should have spent more time getting training and logging flying hours instead of doing fancy maneuvers at foreign air shows. At home, Putin distrusts his own security services and is apparently purging some of his top spies. The Russian people are going into the streets, prompting the regime to arrest thousands. The Russian economy is in a deep freeze and is likely to stay there for years.Only one military force in the world can save Putin from utter humiliation now: NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO intervention in Russia’s war on Ukraine could halt that country’s barbarous attacks. But it would mean war between Putin’s regime and the West, and this war would be such a gift to Putin that we should expect that he will soon do everything he can to provoke it.The U.S. and Europe should resist such provocations.First and foremost, NATO intervention would help Putin by allowing him to rally his nation and impose even harsher measures to suffocate dissent. Millions of Russians clearly want nothing to do with this fratricidal war, which is one reason Putin has been desperate to keep them from hearing anything about it other than weird Soviet-era cant about neo-Nazis and weapons of mass destruction. If NATO were to become involved, however, Putin’s regime would gladly play footage of Russian men being blasted to pieces by U.S., British, and other allied jets. (Americans who think that a “no-fly zone” would not require attacking land targets, perhaps even in Russia, are deluding themselves.) And even if the Germans were not participants, Russia would almost certainly fabricate videos of German jets attacking Russian military units to play on the obvious and reflexive nationalistic anger that many Russians will feel at such images.[Brian Klaas: Vladimir Putin has fallen into the dictator trap]Putin knows that the term NATO can still produce a visceral response in Russia. NATO is a traditional enemy—and one many Russians have blamed for their troubles in the past. NATO jets streaking over Ukrainian skies will silence at least some of the protests, and give Putin’s supporters a bigger cudgel when they widen the fascist beatdown of the last Russians who refuse to accept the war.Inside the Kremlin, meanwhile, Putin could likewise use NATO’s intervention to move against any possible dissent or hesitation. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the U.S. Congress yesterday morning, Putin was in Moscow raging away on Russian television against those rich Russians residing abroad “who cannot live without foie gras” and who have now become “traitors and bastards” because they are “mentally” against Russia.Many of those rich Russians living abroad are the children—and mistresses—of Putin’s inner circle. The Kremlin boss was thus firing a warning shot over the heads of his own sycophants as well as the oligarchs whose pursuit of wealth he has enabled: I expect your loyalty, and I know where you and your families live. A war with NATO would make such threats seem patriotic rather than paranoid. The odds of a palace coup against Putin are already low; the odds of such a move while Russia is at war with NATO are even lower.Putin could also use NATO’s participation in the war to override objections in the Kremlin or the Russian defense ministry regarding the use of nuclear weapons. Russian elites who might quail at the idea of deploying nuclear bombs against innocent Ukrainians will be harder pressed to explain their opposition to using such weapons against the NATO air bases from which jets are flying into combat, killing Russian soldiers and turning Russia’s mighty tanks into flaming wrecks.Although some observers may believe that Putin would fold before he approaches the nuclear threshold, and others worry that even the smallest NATO action will inevitably spark World War III, such arguments at both extremes ignore the role of chance and risk. A nuclear crisis is not an orderly duel or a game with rules, but rather a maelstrom of poor information, conflicting signals, and highly charged emotions. To make matters worse, Putin has always been a poor strategist, a risk-taker who foolishly sets in motion—as he has done in Ukraine—forces he cannot control.In any case, even if Putin is too deluded to think about such risks, the rest of us must consider the dangers of ordering the largest military coalition in human history into battle against a disorganized and battered army led by incompetent officers and commanded by an isolated and delusional president. Putting so many military assets in play, with combat breaking out all over Europe, could spark a catastrophe that neither we nor Putin intended. The danger is not that the Russian war on Ukraine becomes a replay of 1939, in which a coalition must stop a mad dictator at all costs, but that a Russia-NATO war becomes a nuclear version of 1914, in which all the combatants would find themselves moving from a crisis none of them expected into a cataclysm none of them wanted.[Anne Applebaum: America needs a better plan to fight autocracy]So what can the U.S. do? We can keep providing the Ukrainians with the weapons they need to defend themselves. We can keep strangling the Russian economy so that Putin cannot fund his war machine. We can continue beefing up NATO forces and defenses. We can make better investments in U.S. and allied defenses. Perhaps we can even open NATO membership to other nations, including Finland and Sweden, now that Putin himself has made a case for an expanded alliance that is more ironclad and convincing than even NATO’s most ardent advocates could have made decades ago.Putin is losing, and he knows it. Rather than finding a way out of his own mess, he is unwinding nearly 30 years of Russian diplomatic, economic, political, and even military development. Worse, his loss is at the hands of the Ukrainians, whose army he thought would collapse under the first barrage of Russian artillery, whose government he thought would flee in terror, and whose people he thought would greet him as a liberator.The Russia that will emerge from this war will be weaker and poorer than the Russia that opened fire on Ukrainian innocents, on brother and sister Slavs, last month—but only if we keep our heads and do not allow the conflict to engulf all of Europe. This is why the United States and NATO must resist Russian provocations, which already include war crimes and atrocities, and which soon could become even more extreme with “false flag” operations that might bring chemical weapons into play.The body count is going to grow. But a NATO intervention would solve almost all of Putin’s problems, and create dangers we cannot predict.

George Friedman, Geopolitical Futures  After a war, all parties turn to "lessons learned," a phrase that has become commonplace. A war is, in a hideous way, a learning opportunity, with the goal being that the successes and failures of one's own forces are identified and the process that led to either outcome is studied and integrated into planning and training for the next war. This is altogether reasonable and necessary. It is also obvious that the process is an occasion for finger-pointing: Taking credit for another's victories or shifting blame for defeats is an inevitable part of...

People should be skeptical of big claims based on only one study and dig a little deeper

Institutions meant to secure peace, from NATO to the U.N., date back to Truman’s Presidency. So do the conflicts threatening that peace.

Vladimir Putin’s insistence on Russian–Ukrainian unity conflates antiquity with authenticity.

Maine Sen. Angus King is one of many Kremlin-watchers unnerved by the Russian president’s increasingly mercurial behavior and nuclear saber-rattling. “Vladimir Putin today is the most dangerous man in the world,” says King, “perhaps the most dangerous man in the history of the world, because he has this blind ambition to reunite the greater Russia at the same time he's sitting on one of the world's great nuclear arsenals.” Since the days of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have successfully deterred a third world war between major powers via the principle of “mutually assured destruction” — the idea that any nuclear attack would trigger a devastating counterstrike and, potentially, an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration. Indeed in January, Russia joined fellow nuclear weapons states China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States in declaring “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But under Russia’s 2014 military doctrine, Putin sees a role in using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons, so-called battlefield nukes, to raise the stakes so high that the other side folds. “They actually have a doctrine called "escalate to de-escalate,” says King. “That means using tactical nuclear weapons if they're losing on the battlefield. And Vladimir Putin has made clear that this is something that he considers to be in his arsenal.” Putin’s not contemplating a full-blown nuclear exchange with the U.S. Rather, his doctrine envisions a one-time coup de grace intended to shock the U.S. into capitulation rather than risk an escalation that could imperil the planet. It’s a nuclear doctrine “different from anyone else in the world,” says King, “where they discuss openly the option of using tactical nuclear weapons in a conventional war setting.” “The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it,” says Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied Putin for decades. In an interview last month in Politico, Hill made headlines with her take on Putin: “Every time you think, ‘No, he wouldn’t, would he?’ Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.” “If anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again,” said Hill, who was a Russia expert on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump. “There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine,” Hill said, which is “unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin.” In a Feb. 24 speech, Putin warned that any interference with his military operations in Ukraine “from the outside” would be met with consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history” — widely seen as code for a limited nuclear strike, but which could also be interpreted as the threat of massive cyber warfare. And in case his veiled threat wasn’t clear enough, Putin ordered high-profile nuclear exercises and put his nuclear forces on “special alert status,” a term unfamiliar to U.S. intelligence. “They see nuclear weapons as a normal extension of a conventional conflict,” former Supreme NATO Commander retired Gen. Philip Breedlove told the CBS news program 60 Minutes in 2016. “To them, the use of nuclear weapons is not unthinkable.” To that end, Putin has developed a small arsenal of low-yield mini-nukes and other “non-strategic” weapons for which the U.S. has no counterpart. “We know that Russia is in development of Skyfall, which is a nuclear orbiting weapon; Poseidon, which is an undersea, unmanned nuclear weapon that is supposed to pop up on the shores of a nation like the United States and attack our cities; and Vanguard with its hypersonic missiles, which are already deployed,” said Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, at a March 8 hearing on “Worldwide Threats.” “Putin has invested very wisely in these niche weapons,” testified Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. “I believe that he thinks that gives him an asymmetric advantage, and he's also invested in tactical nuclear weapons.” “I also believe that when he says something, we should listen very, very carefully and maybe take him at his word.” If cornered, Putin is gambling that he could use a “mini-nuke” to, say, take out an airfield, an aircraft carrier, or an entire tank division, and the U.S., being the responsible nuclear power, would be unwilling to unleash Armageddon in response. That very scenario was the impetus during the Trump administration for equipping America’s ballistic submarine fleet with a “low-yield” version of the W-76 warhead that sits atop a Trident intercontinental ballistic missile. The result was not a new nuclear weapon, but a less powerful version of an old one — intended to signal Putin that the U.S. could retaliate to a tactical strike with a similar smaller-scale nuclear response. The Biden administration was putting the finishing touches on its new nuclear strategy when Russia invaded Ukraine and was reportedly considering eliminating the low-yield weapon and canceling a sea-launched cruise missile version. That would be a harder sell now that Putin has shown he can play his nuclear trump card without ever having to show his hand. In August 1990, when Saddam Hussein rolled his tanks into Kuwait and declared the Gulf state was historically Iraq’s “19th province,” U.S. President George H.W. Bush famously declared, “This will not stand.” And it didn’t. Now more than 30 years later, in 2022, President Joe Biden has been effectively deterred from making any military moves that might risk triggering Putin’s reckless side, in part because the longtime Russian leader is displaying just the right degree of crazy. Whether or not it’s a bluff, Putin’s “escalate to de-escalate” doctrine has been scary enough to keep the U.S. and NATO from going toe-to-toe with the Russians in a no-fly zone over Ukraine. A week into the invasion, the Pentagon scrubbed a long-scheduled test of a Minuteman-III intercontinental ballistic missile to avoid any chance that Russia could see it as somehow provocative. Republicans in Congress were quick to deride the move, arguing it plays into Putin’s perceived ability to engage in nuclear blackmail. “There's nothing escalatory about long-standing, long-scheduled, routine tests that Russia knows about in advance,” said Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton at a Senate hearing on U.S. nuclear policy. "It's just another example of how we have mistaken actions that would have de-escalated this situation rather than escalated it.” Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.        © 2022 Washington Examiner   

Hi,Quinnipiac released a much-discussed poll that has some troubling findings. Apparently, a lot of Americans, particularly younger ones, said that if America were invaded by Russia the way Ukraine is now, they wouldn’t stay and fight. From the summary:As the world witnesses what is happening to Ukraine, Americans were asked what they would do if they were in the same position as Ukrainians are now: stay and fight or leave the country? A majority (55 percent) say they would stay and fight, while 38 percent say they would leave the country. Republicans say 68—25 percent and independents say 57—36 percent they would stay and fight, while Democrats say 52—40 percent they would leave the country.Among 18-34 year olds, more people say they would leave (48 percent) than stay (45 percent). Now, I’m with Charlie Cooke and others who are fairly disgusted by this, and I agree with Charlie’s argument for why we should be disgusted by it.But I don’t believe any of it. If America were invaded, I’m sure that many of the people who say they’d “stay and fight” would be packing their bags for a refugee center in Mexico or Canada. And I’m sure many of the people who say they’d bug out would be sticking around to make Ivan pay. Yes, I’m saying that some tough-talking dudes with “these colors don’t run” bumper stickers would be high-tailing it out of here, and some snowflake soy boys would be ambushing Russian convoys in northern Michigan.I don’t say this because of any hidden admiration for the soy boys or animosity for the good ol’ ones. I’m just saying that humans respond to reality differently than they respond to hypotheticals. As renowned social-psychologist Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

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A conversation with the prominent philosopher about democracy, disagreement, and how to stay upright in a fallen world.

Long-term sexual boredom is common but not inevitable. Use these five focused strategies to rekindle your sex life together  - by Ian Kerner Read at Psyche

We talk incessantly these days about political polarisation. Americans are hunkered down in our camps, we say, in our tribes. We are blue versus red, urban versus rural, secular versus religious. But wherever there are tribes, there are individuals who leave their tribe: renegades